Hong Kong: CE condemns attack on police officer

Chief Executive Carrie Lam today strongly condemned an attack on a police officer causing serious injuries and she wished the officer a speedy recovery.

At 10.05pm yesterday, the police officer was attacked from behind outside 555 Hennessy Road in Wan Chai. The suspect then stabbed himself in the chest with the same knife which he used in the attack.

The officer was sent to hospital for treatment. Secretary for Security Tang Ping-keung went to the hospital to offer his support.

The suspected attacker was rushed to another hospital with a serious chest injury and he was later certified dead.

Mrs Lam and Chief Secretary John Lee strongly condemned violence and acts that undermine public order. They sent their regards to the injured officer and wished him a speedy recovery.

Both of them also expressed concern over various incidents in Hong Kong yesterday that were suspected to be illegal and undermined public order. They condemned such acts which breach the peace and challenge the authority of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The Chief Executive said that after going through months of riots in the second half of 2019, the people of Hong Kong abhor violence and treasure the stability of society since the implementation of the National Security Law last year.

Mrs Lam said she fully supports Police in taking resolute actions against violent and illegal acts to maintain law and order as well as to safeguard people's life and property.

This story has been published on: 2021-07-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
RTHK: Last US troops leave Bagram air base in Afghanistan

All US and NATO troops have left the biggest air base in Afghanistan, a US defence official told AFP Friday, signalling the complete withdrawal of foreign forces from the country after two decades of war was imminent.

Bagram Air Base served as the linchpin for US operations in the rugged country, where the long war against the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies was fought with air strikes and resupply missions from the airfield.

"All coalition forces are off Bagram," said the official  who asked not to be identified  without specifying when the last foreign troops left the base, 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Kabul.

He did not say when it will be officially handed over to Afghan forces.

"We still have not been informed of any official handover of the base to Afghan forces," a senior Afghan official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The US military and NATO are in the final stages of winding up involvement in Afghanistan, bringing home an unspecified number of remaining troops by a deadline of September 11.

The Taliban have launched relentless offensives across Afghanistan in the past two months, gobbling up dozens of districts as Afghan security forces have largely consolidated their power in the country's major urban areas.

The ability of Afghan forces to maintain control over the vital Bagram airfield will likely prove pivotal to maintaining security in the nearby capital Kabul and keeping pressure on the Taliban.

Over the years, the mini-city has been visited by hundreds of thousands of US and NATO service members and contractors.

It boasted swimming pools, cinemas and spas  and even a boardwalk featuring fast-food outlets such as Burger King and Pizza Hut.

The base also hosted a prison that held thousands of Taliban and jihadist inmates.

Bagram was built by the US for its Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s as a bulwark against the Soviet Union in the north.

Ironically, it became the staging point for the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, and the Red Army expanded it significantly during their near decade-long occupation.

When Moscow pulled out, it became central to the raging civil war -- it was reported that at one point the Taliban controlled one end of the three-kilometre runway and the opposition Northern Alliance the other.

In recent months, Bagram has come under rocket barrages claimed by the jihadist Islamic State, stirring fears that militants are already eyeing the base for future attacks.

The NATO-led non-combat mission aimed to train Afghan forces into ensuring their country's security after the departure of foreign forces.

As of February 2021, there were about 9,500 foreign troops in Afghanistan, of which the US made up the largest contingent of 2,500.

So far Germany and Italy have both confirmed the full withdrawal of their troops. (AFP)

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South Africa: SA committed to Global Acceleration Plan for Economic Justice and Rights

President Cyril Ramaphosa says South Africa is committed to both supporting and implementing the actions contained in the Global Acceleration Plan for Economic Justice and Rights.

Our interventions must dismantle the systemic barriers that marginalise women and girls and perpetuate inequality in the global economy, President Ramaphosa said.

Addressing the Generation Equality Forum Action Coalition Session virtually, he said South Africa is working to shift economic power into the hands of women through, among other things, earmarking 40 percent of all public procurement for women-owned businesses.

On the continent, we are working towards adopting a Protocol and Programme of Action on Women in Trade to promote the participation of women in the African Continental Free Trade Area. We are working to ensure access to productive resources through financial inclusion.

Lack of access to financial services and products disproportionately affects poorer women working in the informal sector, those without income and those who are illiterate.

It increases vulnerability to economic shocks and may, in some cases, even increase exposure to gender-based violence, President Ramaphosa said.

Innovation in digital financial services in Africa offers an opportunity for rapid scale-up of financial services and products.

Working in partnership with Queen Maxima, the UN Secretary-Generals Special Advocate on Financial Inclusion, we are committed to establishing the Advocacy Accelerator for Womens Digital Financial Inclusion in Africa, President Ramaphosa said.

The initiative will mobilise stakeholders to invest in new platforms and products to increase access to digital financial products and services for women in Africa.

Through these efforts, through this Global Acceleration Plan, we are moving ever closer to realising our goal of economic justice and rights for women, the President said.

The Generation Equality Forum (GEF) is a global gathering to accelerate gender equality actions and mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

It is convened by United Nations Women and co-hosted by the governments of Mexico and France, in partnership with co-leaders from the Global South and Global North, civil society and the private sector.

South Africa participated actively in the negotiations for the Global Acceleration Plan (GAP) of the Economic Justice and Rights Action Coalition, which presents a clear action plan of commitments and actions that stakeholders must take to advance economic justice and rights.  SAnews.gov.za

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South Africa: Creating a conducive business environment in metropolitan municipalities

As the country focuses on economic recovery and reconstruction, Deputy Minister of Finance, Dr David Masondo, has called on the metropolitan municipalities to create a conducive business environment to enable investments.

There are economic opportunities, which can be explored by private sector institutions within the area of your jurisdiction. However, these opportunities heavily rely on your capacity to provide bulk and connector infrastructure to enable such investments, Masondo said on Thursday.

Addressing the Metropolitan Municipalities Roadshow on the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan in Pretoria, Masondo said there are also a number of approval processes that are taking place at the metro level to enable private sector institutions to invest.

Thus, the metros need to create a conducive business environment through streamlining and ensuring more efficient internal business processes that interface with the private sector. Such business processes relate to supply chain management, issuing of business permits, responding to customer complaints, issuing of rates and services accounts, development approval processes, issuing of construction permits and rates clearance certificates and ensuring electricity connections, the Deputy Minister said.

Together with the World Bank, government has introduced the Ease of Doing Business project, which drives the reforms at national and subnational level to make the country more competitive and business friendly.

The Sub-National Doing Business reforms that we are rolling out in partnership with the metros are a core component of this broader programme. A major component of this reform process is the optimisation and automation of metro business processes in order to reduce time, cost and numbers of procedures that businesses have to experience, the Deputy Minister said.

He expressed concern on the failure of many metros to spend on their capital budgets, placing some of the local government conditional grants in jeopardy.

From our engagements with yourselves, we have identified two major constraints on metro performance in this regard. First, is the metro internal Supply Chain Management (SCM) processes, which are lengthy and tedious. Secondly, it is owing to the criminal elements which have mushroomed under the disguise of 30% requirements of the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act (PPPFA), the Deputy Minister said.

He acknowledged that part of the problem regarding the slow pace of capital spend, is a lack of a project pipeline in some metros.

To address this concern a project and programme preparation grant will be introduced effective from your new financial year. We urge you to maximize on the use of this grant on major infrastructure projects, which prepare them in a manner that will assist the city to accelerate the infrastructure built programme. Infrastructure investment that can unlock private investment in targeted spatial areas should be prioritised, the Deputy Minister said.

Masondo emphasised the importance for metropolitan municipalities to strengthen governance in the city.

A clear demonstration of this should be reflected in the capacity of the city to reduce the unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure (UIFW). It is discomforting that this has been increasing over the years and it does not look like there is an appetite to reduce it. We should be aware that the credit rating has started factoring this issue, which has resulted in a decrease in the credit rating, the Deputy Minister said.

He expressed concern that the Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC) does not look like there it has any form of consequence management.

The capacity of the city to borrow will soon reflect this poor credit rating leading to expensive debt and in some instances reluctance of the financial institutions to borrow you money that is critical for growth enhancing investments.

The institutional stability of the city is paramount for the successful implementation of the economic recovery. We are concerned about the high turnover at the executive level. This does not build confidence.

As political principals, it is your duty to ensure that there is a stability to enable the institution to focus on service delivery. Such stability is possible - eThekwini, for example, has retained the same Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for around 20 years, the Deputy Minister said.  SAnews.gov.za

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South Africa: President Ramaphosa to attend former Zambian President's state funeral

President Cyril Ramaphosa is today undertaking a working visit to the Republic of Zambia to attend the State Funeral Service of Dr Kenneth Kaunda, founding President of Zambia.

President Kaunda passed away last Thursday at the age of 97.

The 97-year-old was regarded as the countrys founding father after he became the nations first democratically elected President, after Zambia gained its independence in 1964.

President Ramaphosa will deliver a message of support to the Zambian people on behalf of the government and people of South Africa.

Kaunda stood alongside the people of South Africa at the time of their greatest need and was unwavering in his desire for the achievement of their freedom.

It was in honour of this remarkable contribution that the South African government bestowed on President Kaunda the Order of the Companions of OR Tambo in 2002.

Following the passing of Dr Kaunda, the South African Government declared a period of mourning for 10 days with the National Flag flying at half-mast at all flag stations.

President Ramaphosa is supported by the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Dr Naledi Pandor and Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, Gwede Mantashe.  SAnews.gov.za

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South Africa: President receives recommendations from the Presidential Climate Commission

President Cyril Ramaphosa yesterday received the first set of recommendations from the Presidential Climate Commission.

The commission was established on 15 December 2020 to advise government on pathways to transition to a low-carbon economy and climate resilient society. It is comprised of representatives from business, labour, NGOs, the science community and government and its recommendations are the product of engagement between the social partners.

The commissions first set of recommendations deals with South Africas Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) which is a statement by the country of its commitment to address climate change, made in terms of the Paris agreement and submitted to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The Paris Agreement was born out of the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action developed at COP17 under South Africas leadership.

South Africa continues to advocate for a just transition sensitive to the needs of developing countries, especially those on the African continent.

At COP26, South Africa will submit a credible NDC that reflects increased ambition.

The commission highlighted the risks South Africa faces from a rapidly decarbonising global economy.

Many of South Africas trading partners have adopted net-zero targets, and will be looking to lower their emissions and impose trade barriers on emissions-intensive products.

The commission also suggested that additional measures to lower emissions should be undertaken, such as decommissioning coal-fired power stations at the end of their commercial life, increasing renewable energy investment and rolling out green transport initiatives.

Setting more ambitious emissions targets will lower the transition risk, improve energy security and attract additional international finance.

Higher ambition is possible without negatively impacting the economy, and will set the stage for longer term competitiveness. Also, higher ambition will lead to a net jobs increase, Commission Deputy Chair Valli Moosa said.

However, the commission pointed out that international support will be needed to accelerate the transition, including for managing the decommissioning process and social adjustment costs in the coal sector.

President Ramaphosa welcomed the report and commended the commission on producing its first set of recommendations within such a short timeframe.

The countrys emissions targets are fundamental not only to our transition to a low carbon economy, they are also critical in influencing the pace and the nature of our countrys transformation.

A more ambitious approach to reducing our emissions must be accompanied by greater attention to the work we must do to protect communities, jobs and the broader economy from the effects of climate change, President Ramaphosa said.

The President will consider the recommendations made by the commission. These recommendations, together with other submissions received during the public consultation process, will form part of Cabinets deliberations as it finalises the updated and revised NDC.

President Ramaphosa encouraged the commission to continue with its work, which is crucial for successfully steering the country through the climate transition.

The commissions report can be downloaded from: www.climatecommission.org.za.  SAnews.gov.za

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South Africa: Motshekga appointed as acting President

President Cyril Ramaphosa has appointed Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga to serve as Acting President on Friday, 2 July 2021.

In a statement, the Presidency said the appointment has been made in view of the Presidents visit today to Lusaka, Zambia, to attend the State Funeral Service for the late President Kenneth Kaunda.

Deputy President David Mabuza is currently receiving medical treatment in the Russian Federation.  SAnews.gov.za

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Hong Kong: GD med consultation plan extended

The special support scheme for the Hospital Authoritys chronic disease patients living in Guangdong Province will be extended to November 9, the Government announced today.

Due to the compulsory quarantine measures implemented during the COVID-19 epidemic, some Hong Kong residents staying in Guangdong Province have been unable to travel back and forth between the two places for scheduled medical consultations at outpatient clinics.

To ensure that the patients health conditions can be effectively taken care of in a continued and co-ordinated manner, the Government launched a special support scheme on November 10 last year and appointed the University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital (HKU-SZH) to provide subsidised follow-up consultations for patients with scheduled appointments at the authoritys designated specialist or general outpatient clinics.

Given that the compulsory quarantine measures have not been relaxed completely, the Government decided to extend the special support scheme, under which eligible people may receive medical consultations at the HKU-SZH before November 9, or until the lapse of the quarantine requirement in both Hong Kong and the Mainland, whichever is earlier.

The schemes scope of service and subsidy will remain to cover anaesthesiology (pain clinic only); cardiothoracic surgery; clinical oncology; ear, nose and throat; eye; gynecology; medicine; neurosurgery; obstetrics; orthopaedics and traumatology; paediatrics, and surgery.

Episodic illnesses, inpatient or day inpatient, and accident and emergency department services are not included.

As of June 27, the HKU-SZH has scheduled about 22,800 medical appointments for eligible patients. About 19,100 attendances have received medical consultation.

For enquiries, call the authority at 2300 7070 or the HKU-SZH at (+86) 0755-86913101.

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Hong Kong: 11 COVID-19 cases found

(To watch the full press briefing with sign language interpretation, click here.)

The Centre for Health Protection said today it is investigating 11 additional COVID-19 cases, one of which is tentatively classified as a locally transmitted case with an unknown infection source involving the L452R mutant strain.

The case involves a 41-year-old woman who works as a part-time cleaner at Bridal Tea House Hotel, a designated quarantine hotel in Yau Ma Tei. She last went to work on July 1.

The centre's Communicable Disease Branch Head Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan said in a press briefing this afternoon that the patient preliminarily tested positive for the virus via the regular testing for hotel staff at a mobile specimen collection station on June 30.

However, she was tested twice after admission to hospital and the results were negative. She also tested negative for antibodies.

Dr Chuang added that the patient was assigned to clean the hotel rooms on June 30, and a COVID-19 imported case with the L452R mutant strain had stayed in one of them from June 20 to 27.

She said: "We found it a bit strange that the (COVID-19) patient tested positive and repeatedly negative with a negative serology (result).

"Of course, there may be an explanation such as she is at the very early stage after contracting the virus, so she is still incubating the virus. And after a few days, repeated testing may yield a positive result.

"But there may be other explanations. We wonder whether there is a possibility of, for example, environmental contamination.

"If the virus was not a live virus, she was not actually infected but carried the virus in her nasal passages, especially when she almost immediately took the swab (test) after she cleaned the room of a confirmed patient in Bridal Tea House Hotel. The virus she contracted may not be a live virus, but these are all postulations and possibilities that I cannot prove now.

"That is why we need some site visits and other investigations by Prof Yuen (Kwok-yung) and other colleagues to see whether there are any possibilities to explain (the case). Of course, we may need some time to observe the development."

The 10 imported cases arrived from the UK, Indonesia and Russia, of which nine carried the L452R mutant strain.

For information and health advice on COVID-19, visit the Government's dedicated webpage.

This story has been published on: 2021-07-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
South Africa: Freedom Park commemorates the late Kaunda

Living up to its mandate, to honour the heroes and heroines who sacrificed their lives for freedom and humanity, Freedom Park, a National Heritage Site, commemorates the late Dr Kenneth Kaunda through a virtual exhibition.

The temporal exhibition is a tribute to the role played by the late Dr Kaunda in the liberation struggle of Southern African countries.

The exhibition was curated by Freedom Parks curatorial team, launched on 29 June 2021. It will run until 30 September 2021.

Freedom Park commemorates national, continental and international freedom stalwarts.

Some of the heroes and heroines commemorated at Freedom Park include Oliver Tambo, Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko, Samora Machel, Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Fidel Castro and many more.

It is therefore not surprising that Freedom Park responded to the national call for mourning the death of Dr Kaunda, by putting up a temporary exhibition, about this iconic leader.

Dr Kaunda visited Freedom Park in 2006. Freedom Park, delegation led by CEO, Jane Mufamadi, reciprocated the visit in 2016.

The purpose of the visit was to capture his recollection about the liberation struggle of South Africa, since Zambia was the headquarters of the African National Congress.

The exhibition features Dr Kaundas early life, political life, his visit to Freedom Park in 2006, Freedom Parks visit to Dr Kaunda and his famous quotes.

Details: Freedom Park Website: www.freedompark.co.za  SAnews.gov.za

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South Africa: Committee sends condolence on passing of Mintek Board Chairperson

The Chairperson of Portfolio Committee on Mineral Resources and Energy, Sahlulele Luzipo, has extended his heartfelt condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Mintek Board Chairperson, Dr Vanguard Mkhosana, following his untimely death.

Dr Mkhosana was appointed to serve a three-year term as Mintek board chairperson by Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe, starting from 1 June 2020.

Luzipo said Mkhosana contributed to the entity his vast knowledge on matters related to corporate governance, including organisational performance, risk control and organisational sustainability.

He said Mkhosanas untimely passing has robbed the country of a man of great stature and sound leadership acumen.

Dr Mkhosana demonstrated a commitment to Minteks principles of integrity, accountability and openness each time he led the entity to appear before the committee. He was also passionate about transformation, and he was aiming for at least 46% women representation during his tenure as board chairperson, Luzipo said.

Throughout his career, Dr Mkhosana served as member and chairperson of boards in both public and private companies, including, among others, the Eastern Cape Rural Development Agency, Human Capital Group (Pty) Ltd, Mayibuye Transport Corporation (MTC), and Zizi-Consulting (Pty) Ltd.

He is also the former Director-General of the Department of Employment and Labour. - SAnews.gov.za

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Rudi GJ Westendorp to present at the 8th Aging Research & Drug Discovery Meeting 2021

Friday, July 2, 2021 -- Rudi Westendorp PhD, will present the latest research on the topic System dynamics thinking in the life sciences at the worlds' largest annual Aging Research and Drug Discovery conference (8th ARDD). Dr Rudi Westendorp is the Professor of Medicine at Old Age, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Rudi Westendorp is professor of Medicine at Old age at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at University of Copenhagen, Denmark (2015). He is principal investigator of an interdisciplinary research program supported by Novo Nordisk Fonden, using personal and registry data to better understand ageing and its associated diseases. Trained at Leiden University, Netherlands he became a consultant in internal medicine and epidemiology and later dedicated himself into geriatrics and gerontology. He was full professor at the Leiden University Medical Center, and chair of the department of old age medicine (2000-2014). He was founding director of the privately funded Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing (2007-2014) that conducts research, provides education and pursues societal innovations to improve the quality of life of older people. He acquainted ample national and European grants, published more than 600+ original articles with an h-index of 100+, and supervised over 50+ PhD students of which five of them have been appointed full professor. He published the bestseller 'Growing older without feeling old' that is translated in ten languages. He was endowed doctor honoris causa by the University of Newcastle, UK (2009), and received a knighthood in the order of the Dutch Lion (2014).

The conference proceedings of the ARDD are commonly published in peer-reviewed journals with the talks openly available at http://www. agingpharma. org . Please review the conference proceedings for 2019 and 2020.

"Aging is emerging as a druggable condition with multiple pharmaceuticals able to alter the pace of aging in model organisms. The ARDD brings together all levels of the field to discuss the most pressing obstacles in our attempt to find efficacious interventions and molecules to target aging. The 2021 conference is the best yet with top level speakers from around the globe. I'm extremely excited to be able to meet them in person at the University of Copenhagen in late summer.", said Morten Scheibye-Knudsen, MD, Ph.D., University of Copenhagen.

"Aging research is growing faster than ever on both academia and industry fronts. The ARDD meeting unites experts from different fields and backgrounds, sharing with us their latest groundbreaking research and developments. Our last ARDD meeting took place online and was a great success. This year's event will be a hybrid meeting with virtual and in-person attendees. I am particularly excited that being part of the ARDD 2021 meeting will provide an amazing opportunity for young scientists presenting their own work as well as meeting the experts in the field." said Daniela Bakula, Ph.D., University of Copenhagen

"Aging research is gaining traction in the biopharmaceutical industry. To my knowledge, 6 out of the top 30 pharmaceutical companies in the world prioritized aging research for early-stage discovery or therapeutic pipeline development and several companies employ artificial intelligence for this purpose. We organize the annual ARDD conference for eight years in a row and the level of interest in aging biomarkers and noticed exponential growth in registrations over the past two years", said Alex Zhavoronkov, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, and the founder of Deep Longevity.

Building on the success of the ARDD conferences, the organizers developed the "Longevity Medicine" course series with some of the courses offered free of charge at Longevity.Degree covered in the recent Lanced Healthy Longevity paper titled Longevity medicine: upskilling the physicians of tomorrow.

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About Aging Research for Drug Discovery Conference

At ARDD, leaders in the aging, longevity, and drug discovery field will describe the latest progress in the molecular, cellular and organismal basis of aging and the search for interventions. Furthermore, the meeting will include opinion leaders in AI to discuss the latest advances of this technology in the biopharmaceutical sector and how this can be applied to interventions. Notably, this year we are expanding with a workshop specifically for physicians where the leading-edge knowledge of clinical interventions for healthy longevity will be described. ARRD intends to bridge clinical, academic and commercial research and foster collaborations that will result in practical solutions to one of humanity's most challenging problems: aging. Our quest? To extend the healthy lifespan of everyone on the planet.

About Scheibye-Knudsen Lab

In the Scheibye-Knudsen lab we use in silico, in vitro and in vivo models to understand the cellular and organismal consequences of DNA damage with the aim of developing interventions. We have discovered that DNA damage leads to changes in certain metabolites and that replenishment of these molecules may alter the rate of aging in model organisms. These findings suggest that normal aging and age-associated diseases may be malleable to similar interventions. The hope is to develop interventions that will allow everyone to live healthier, happier and more productive lives.

About Deep Longevity

Deep Longevity has been acquired by Regent Pacific (SEHK:0575.HK), whose shares are listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Deep Longevity is developing explainable artificial intelligence systems to track the rate of aging at the molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, system, physiological, and psychological levels. It is also developing systems for the emerging field of longevity medicine enabling physicians to make better decisions on the interventions that may slow down, or reverse the aging processes. Deep Longevity developed Longevity as a Service (LaaS) solution to integrate multiple deep biomarkers of aging dubbed "deep aging clocks" to provide a universal multifactorial measure of human biological age. Originally incubated by Insilico Medicine, Deep Longevity started its independent journey in 2020 after securing a round of funding from the most credible venture capitalists specializing in biotechnology, longevity, and artificial intelligence. ETP Ventures, Human Longevity and Performance Impact Venture Fund, BOLD Capital Partners, Longevity Vision Fund, LongeVC, co-founder of Oculus, Michael Antonov, and other expert AI and biotechnology investors supported the company. Deep Longevity established a research partnership with one of the most prominent longevity organizations, Human Longevity, Inc. to provide a range of aging clocks to the network of advanced physicians and researchers. https:/ / deeplongevity. com/

About Endurance RP (SEHK:0575.HK)

Endurance RP is a diversified investment group based in Hong Kong currently holding various corporate and strategic investments focusing on the healthcare, wellness and life sciences sectors. The Group has a strong track record of investments and has returned approximately US$298 million to shareholders in the 21 years of financial reporting since its initial public offering. https:/ / www. endurancerp. com/

This story has been published on: 2021-07-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Hong Kong: Glorifying violence unacceptable

Police today strongly condemned blatant violence and those who attempted to romanticise or glorify the despicable act of the attempted murder of a police officer with seditious intent to incite hatred in society.

The force noticed messages circulating online that honoured and paid tribute to the attacker who attempted to murder a police officer and committed suicide last night.

Initial investigations indicated that the case was a lone wolf-style act of domestic terrorism in which the attacker was believed to be radicalised by a myriad of fake information. He committed suicide afterwards.

Police pointed out that the attack was a clear threat to society's safety and a disregard for the rule of law, adding that no violent behaviour will be tolerated and resolute enforcement action will continue to be taken to safeguard public safety and order.

The force is actively gathering intelligence and stepping up patrols across the city, including the crime scene. People are encouraged to report any crime information to Police immediately.

According to section 9 and 10 of the Crimes Ordinance, any person who does or attempts to do, or makes any preparation to do, or conspires with any person to do, any act with a seditious intention, shall be guilty of an offence and is liable to a fine of $5,000 and imprisonment for two years.

Taking part in an unlawful assembly may also breach relevant offences under the Public Order Ordinance and is liable to a maximum penalty of five years' imprisonment.

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Hong Kong: Consensus on tax reform welcomed

The Government today welcomed the consensus largely reached by the international community on the key principles of the international tax reform framework.

To address the base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) risks arising from economy digitalisation, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development announced on July 1 the framework for international tax reform (BEPS 2.0) to ensure a fairer distribution of taxing rights in respect of profits of large multinational enterprises (MNEs) and to set a global minimum tax rate.

A total of 130 jurisdictions globally, including Hong Kong, have indicated acceptance of the BEPS 2.0 package.

Financial Secretary Paul Chan noted that Hong Kong, as an international financial and commercial centre, has all along been supporting international efforts to enhance tax transparency and combat tax evasion and adopted corresponding measures.

He also stressed that small and medium-sized enterprises in Hong Kong would not be affected by the package.

For the large MNEs to be covered by the package, the Government will endeavour to maintain Hong Kong's simple, transparent and low tax regime and minimise their compliance burden.

The BEPS 2.0 package consists of two parts. The first one targets large MNE groups, including digital enterprises, with global turnover above 20 billion euros and profitability above 10%, and distributes the taxing rights in respect of a certain portion of their profits to the market jurisdictions.

The second part is the global minimum tax, which targets large MNE groups with global turnover above 750 million euros.

If the jurisdictional effective tax rate of an MNE group is below the global minimum tax rate, its parent or subsidiary companies will be required to pay top-up tax in the jurisdictions they are located in respect of the shortfall.

The organisation aims to finalise the package's technical details by October and implement it in 2023.

The Government said it set up an advisory panel in June last year to review the possible impact of the package on the competitiveness of Hong Kong's business environment and make recommendations on the response measures.

The Financial Secretary indicated in the 2021-22 Budget that Hong Kong would actively implement the BEPS 2.0 package according to international consensus while striving to maintain the key advantages of Hong Kong's tax regime in terms of simplicity, certainty and fairness, minimise the compliance burden on the affected enterprises, and continue to improve Hong Kong's business environment and competitiveness.

The advisory panel will submit a report to the Government as soon as possible after the organisation finalises the package's technical details.

The Government will carefully study the recommendations in the report and consult stakeholders on the specific response measures, with a view to rolling out relevant legislative exercise.

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Hong Kong: Voucher registration opens Jul 4

The Consumption Voucher Scheme will be open for registration from July 4 to August 14, the Government said today.

Hong Kong permanent residents and new arrivals aged 18 or above on or before June 18, 2021 are eligible for the scheme. They may make an electronic registration through the dedicated website from 6am on July 4. Those who prefer to register using paper forms may submit them together with a copy of their Hong Kong identity card into the designated drop boxes from July 5 during office hours.

The Government encourages the public to register electronically as it is faster and more convenient. In general, applicants who have completed electronic registration on or before July 17 will receive the first voucher on August 1, while those who have completed electronic registration on or after July 18 will receive the first voucher on September 1.

Applicants have to authenticate their identity during electronic registration.

If they have successfully registered and received payment or collected the cheque before June 18 under the Cash Payout Scheme announced last year, they may authenticate their identity by answering two security questions, and need not fill in the personal data already provided under the Cash Payout Scheme after identity authentication. To complete the registration, they only need to provide the stored value facility account number for collecting the vouchers and make a declaration regarding the residing in Hong Kong requirement.

Alternatively, people may authenticate their identity through the iAM Smart app or by uploading a copy of their Hong Kong identity card as notified after inputting their personal information to complete the registration procedure.

The Government noted that each eligible person can only register once. Each selected stored value facility account can also be registered once only and cannot be changed after submission of registration.

In general, people will receive an SMS notification about the registration result around one week after completing the electronic registration. For registrants submitting paper registration forms, the SMS notification will be sent in around two weeks.

The Government also reminded citizens to carefully protect their personal data. Call 18 5000 for enquiries.

This story has been published on: 2021-07-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
RTHK: Lukashenko claims 'terrorist sleeper cells' exposed

Belarus strongman Lukashenko on Friday claimed authorities had exposed "terrorist sleeper cells" that he alleged were linked to Germany, the United States, Ukraine and other countries.

The latest volley of eyebrow-raising claims came after the West targeted key sectors of the struggling Belarusian economy with sanctions to punish the Lukashenko regime for a crackdown on dissenters and intercepting a Ryanair plane in May.

"Today terrorist 'sleeper' cells have been exposed, so-called self-defence units," Lukashenko announced at a ceremony marking 30 years of independence in post-Soviet Belarus.

"The goal of these cells is forcible regime change on day X. They themselves so far do not know when this day X comes: it is necessary to lead our people to it," Lukashenko said in remarks released by his office.

He alleged that Germany, the US, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania were involved in their work.

"Today we completed a large-scale anti-terror operation," Lukashenko said, adding that Belarusian authorities would confront German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Lukashenko also claimed the "sleeper" cells tried to target a Russian naval communication centre near the Belarusian town of Vileyka located around 100 kilometres northwest of the capital Minsk and he discussed the incident with President Vladimir Putin.

"We've discussed this problem in the most serious manner," the Belarus leader said.

"You understand the result of this discussion. All participants of the terror act - including those who organised and carried it out - were found and arrested within two days."

Franak Viacorka, a senior advisor to Belarus opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, suggested that Lukashenko's latest outburst did not bode well for foreigners and he might be "looking for a pretext to crackdown on diplomats".

"Insane," he tweeted.

The 66-year-old leader also said he ordered officials to seal the country's border with pro-Western Ukraine to prevent "a huge amount of arms" coming into Belarus.

He also alleged that unidentified assailants sought to kill a state television personality, Grigory Azarenok, charging that "last night" they wanted to kidnap him and "cut off his tongue."

Since an election last August, Belarus has been in the grip of a political crisis that erupted after Lukashenko secured a sixth term as president.

The opposition says the election was rigged but authorities imposed an intense crackdown in which several people died and thousands were arrested.

Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, sparked international outrage by dispatching a fighter jet in May to intercept a Ryanair plane flying from Greece to Lithuania.

When the plane was forced to land in Minsk, Belarus arrested dissident journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend on board.

In June, the West imposed sanctions on key sectors of the Belarus economy, ratcheting up pressure on the regime.

In response to the latest round of Western sanctions, Minsk said it was suspending its participation in the Eastern Partnership, an initiative to boost ties between the EU and its ex-Soviet neighbours.

Since the outbreak of the crisis, Lukashenko and state TV have made a number of fanciful statements directed at the Belarusian opposition and even ally Russia.

Lukashenko made headlines when he claimed last year that his security forces had intercepted German calls showing that Putin foe Alexei Navalny's poisoning with a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent had been faked.

Belarusian television broadcast the "intercept" in which a Mike in Warsaw and Nick in Berlin discuss Navalny's materials and call Lukashenko a "tough nut to crack".

Lukashenko also raised eyebrows at the peak of demonstrations last year when he brandished an assault rifle and had his teenage son Nikolai appear next to him in a bulletproof vest while also wielding a weapon.

He accused modern Germany of Nazism on the 80th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the USSR last month. (AFP)

This story has been published on: 2021-07-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Insect-sized robot navigates mazes with the agility of a cheetah

Berkeley -- Many insects and spiders get their uncanny ability to scurry up walls and walk upside down on ceilings with the help of specialized sticky footpads that allow them to adhere to surfaces in places where no human would dare to go.

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have used the principle behind some of these footpads, called electrostatic adhesion, to create an insect-scale robot that can swerve and pivot with the agility of a cheetah, giving it the ability to traverse complex terrain and quickly avoid unexpected obstacles.

The robot is constructed from a thin, layered material that bends and contracts when an electric voltage is applied. In a 2019 paper, the research team demonstrated that this simple design can be used to create a cockroach-sized robot that can scurry across a flat surface at a rate of 20 body lengths per second, or about 1.5 miles per hour -- nearly the speed of living cockroaches themselves, and the fastest relative speed of any insect-sized robot.

In a new study, the research team added two electrostatic footpads to the robot. Applying a voltage to either of the footpads increases the electrostatic force between the footpad and a surface, making that footpad stick more firmly to the surface and forcing the rest of the robot to rotate around the foot.

The two footpads give operators full control over the trajectory of the robot, and allow the robot to make turns with a centripetal acceleration that exceeds that of most insects.

"Our original robot could move very, very fast, but we could not really control whether the robot went left or right, and a lot of the time it would move randomly, because if there was a slight difference in the manufacturing process -- if the robot was not symmetrical - it would veer to one side," said Liwei Lin, a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. "In this work, the major innovation was adding these footpads that allow it to make very, very fast turns."

To demonstrate the robot's agility, the research team filmed the robot navigating Lego mazes while carrying a small gas sensor and swerving to avoid falling debris. Because of its simple design, the robot can also survive being stepped on by a 120-pound human.

Small, robust robots like these could be ideal for conducting search and rescue operations or investigating other hazardous situations, such as scoping out potential gas leaks, Lin said. While the team demonstrated most of the robot's skills while it was "tethered," or powered and controlled through a small electrical wire, they also created an "untethered" version that can operate on battery power for up to 19 minutes and 31 meters while carrying a gas sensor.

"One of the biggest challenges today is making smaller scale robots that maintain the power and control of bigger robots," Lin said. "With larger-scale robots, you can include a big battery and a control system, no problem. But when you try to shrink everything down to a smaller and smaller scale, the weight of those elements become difficult for the robot to carry and the robot generally moves very slowly. Our robot is very fast, quite strong, and requires very little power, allowing it to carry sensors and electronics while also carrying a battery."

###

Lin is senior author of a paper describing the robot, which appeared online this week in the journal Science Robotics.

Co-authors of the paper include Jiaming Liang, Huimin Chen, Zicong Miao, Hanxiao Liu, Ying Liu, Yixin Liu, Dongkai Wang, Wenying Qiu, Min Zhang and Xiaohao Wang of the Tsinghua University in China; Yichuan Wu of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China; Justin Yim of Carnegie Mellon University; and Zhichun Shao and Junwen Zhong of UC Berkeley.

This work is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2020A1515010647), the Shenzhen Fundamental Research Funds (JCYJ20180508151910775), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 52005083) and a Start Research Grant from the University of Macau.

https:/ / news. berkeley. edu/ 2019/ 07/ 31/ you-cant-squash-this-roach-inspired-robot/

This story has been published on: 2021-07-02. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Mazda Motor's two Chinese joint ventures will soon announce merger of their businesses and combine sales channels in September, according to a local media outlet, citing a source at a Changan Mazda 4S shop.

Another source told the media channel that the merger of FAW-Mazda and Changan Mazda will be completed at the end of this year. Currently, FAW Mazda locates its production workers at FAW Group's Weishan plant in Changchun, and over 100 salespersons will be transferred to FAW Group.



Mazda3 Axela; photo credit: Changan Mazda



According to China Beijing Equity Exchange (CBEX), Changan Mazda is trying to raise money by soliciting an eligible investor. The funds raised will be used to help the company improve its management quality, perfect its industrial deployment, and enhance its competitiveness.

Upon completion of the capital increase, the new shareholder will hold no more than 5% of equity interests in Changan Mazda and the joint venture's registered capital would be increased by $5.84 million, according to CBEX.

Some industry insiders speculated that Changan Mazda may intend to pave the way for the merger with FAW Mazda's business through the capital increase.

In early April, another local media outlet reported that Mazda was in talks with partners China FAW Group and Chongqing Changan Automobile to make FAW Mazda Motor Sales Co.,Ltd. (FMSC)'s Mazda-related business merge into Changan Mazda, which is half owned by Changan Auto.

After being reached for comment, FMSC said it had not received any relevant information yet, while Changan Mazda said it had still been unaware of this matter.
Lao Cai authorities add vaccination certificates to entry requirements

Lao Cai authorities have set out requirements for vaccination certificates for those people wanting to visit the province from outbreak areas in Vietnam.



A checkpoint in Lao Cai





The regulation has been applied from July 1. This regulation will be applied to people from cities and provinces with Covid-19 outbreaks even if their neighbourhood and residential areas are not under lockdown.



People who want to go to Lao Cai must have had a first Covid-19 vaccine shot for at least 14 days or be fully vaccinated. They can also visit Lao Cai if they have tested negative for Covid-19 Coronavirus with a Real-Time PCR Kit at least five days before visiting.



People without such papers will be given a paid quick test at the province's checkpoints.



People who are not from outbreak areas will only have their body temperature taken and have to fill in medical declaration forms. Those who are from lockdown areas will be quarantined for 21 days at Lao Cai.
Germany presents 190,000 Covid-19 quick test kits for Vietnam

Vietnam has received around 190,000 Covid-19 quick test kits worth a total USD500,000 granted by some German states.



Today, July 2, Deputy Minister of Health Truong Quoc Cuong received the kits which were provided by the German states of Hamburg, Bremen, Mecklenburg  Vorpommern and Sachsen-Anhalt through the World University Service (WUS).





The kits were granted to the Vietnamese Ministry of Health on July 2
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin's Regular Press Conference on July 2, 2021

2021/07/02

State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will attend and deliver a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 9th World Peace Forum on July 3. The forum will be held from July 3 to 4 at Tsinghua University.

CCTV: It is learned that Grenada and Kyrgyzstan added their name to the list of supporters of a joint statement in support of China delivered at the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council. What's your comment?

Wang Wenbin: On June 22, at the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council, Belarus delivered a joint statement on behalf of 65 countries, stressing that issues relating to Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet are China's internal affairs, opposing politically motivated and groundless accusations against China based on disinformation, and opposing interference in China's internal affairs under the pretext of human rights. Later, more countries expressed their support to China's just position at the Council.

China appreciates and welcomes the endorsement of Grenada and Kyrgyzstan to joint statement, which brought the total number of countries supporting the statement to 67. Besides, more than 20 countries supported and echoed China's position by making statements in national capacity or co-signing a letter. More than 90 countries voiced their appeal for justice at the Human Rights Council, which not only constitutes support to China, but also is an effort to uphold basic norms governing international relations and international fairness and justice.

As a Chinese proverb goes, "A just cause rallies abundant support while an unjust one finds little." A few Western countries' attempts to interfere in China's internal affairs and suppress and contain China under the pretext of human rights are doomed to be futile. They have been and will continue to be firmly opposed by the international community. We urge these countries to stop interfering in other countries' internal affairs, take off the hypocritical mask of "human rights preachers", and solve their own serious human rights problems by making deep reflection and taking concrete measures. They should abide by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and the basic norms of international relations, and truly contribute their share to the sound development of the international human rights cause.

Beijing Daily: The Lower Kootenay Band confirmed on June 30 that there has been a discovery of remains of 182 human bodies in unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in southern British Columbia in Canada. According to reports, it is estimated that about 100 Lower Kootenay Band members were forced to attend the school where the band said many "received cruel and sometimes fatal treatment". Do you have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: This is the third discovery of unmarked graves and human remains at the site of former residential schools for indigenous children since May. It is shocking and heartbreaking to learn the news. We also noticed that Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Perry Bellegarde said the latest discovery is further confirmation of "what the survivors have been saying, that there are unmarked graves and that there has been death in these institutions". He went on to say each of the 139 former residential school sites across Canada needs to be investigated properly.

The crimes committed in the past are already too much to bear, yet the injustice and discrimination experienced by indigenous people in Canada at present is still going unchecked. In his article published by Globe and Mail last week, indigenous doctor James Makokis pointed out that indigenous patients face long-term neglect and racial discrimination, resulting in poor health and unnecessary deaths. This pattern of abuse is consistent with the long history of systemic oppression perpetuated by Canada.

For a long time, the Canadian side has been obfuscating the truth and shirking the responsibilities of persecuting its own indigenous people, while making irresponsible remarks about others. We urge Canada to take a hard look at itself in the mirror, and make greater efforts to conduct thorough investigation into the abuses and discrimination against indigenous people, hold perpetrators accountable and make compensations, so as to completely redress the injustice of suppression against the indigenous people.

Bloomberg: A question on the US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, which says that the Chinese government has engaged in a policy of widespread forced labor in Xinjiang and also in other regions of the country. Do you have any comment on this report?

Wang Wenbin: We firmly reject the groundless US accusation against China based on lies and rumors. This only further exposes the sinister intention of the US to use human rights as a pretext to attack and smear China and interfere in China's domestic affairs.

The US has no authority to wield human rights as a stick around the world. It needs to reflect upon and redress its own human rights crimes including genocide, racial discrimination and forced labor. The genocide committed by the US on American Indians is a publicly-recognized fact and stain. Even today, American Indians remain an "invisible" community and a disappearing minority. According to US media reports, the living space of Native Americans has been seriously squeezed. They also live in harsh conditions. Over 300 Indian reservations in the US are located in the barren mid-west region, where most live a life far removed from modern civilization. About a quarter of Navajo women and some infants had high levels of radioactive substance in their systems, as a result of mining for US weaponry on their reservation. The number of American Indians living below the poverty line is more than twice that of White Americans. After COVID-19 broke out, Native Americans' infection rate and fatality rate are both notably higher than the national average. The Navajo Nation even surpassed the state of New York for the highest per-capita coronavirus infection rate in the US. A report by the Indian Health Service shows that American Indians born today have a life expectancy that is 5.5 years less than the national average. Besides, American Indians are seriously deprived of their civil and political rights. Earlier this year, Deb Haaland, US Secretary of the Interior, acknowledged at her confirmation hearing that the US Department of the Interior was used as a tool of oppression against indigenous tribes in the past. More recent media reports say that up to 100,000 people are trafficked into the US for forced labor annually, of which fewer than 1,000 end up being rescued.

The cry of people like George Floyd still reverberates in the US. The tragic incident is only the tip of the iceberg of racism and systemic abuse of human rights in the US. In the US, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, refugees and migrants are constantly threatened by discrimination, hate speeches and xenophobia acts while white supremacy remains a tumor in the American society. The international community will be watching to see whether the US can seriously review and redress its deplorable human rights record.

AFP: French prosecutors are investigating four fashion companies including the owner of Zara and Uniqlo France over allegations that they benefited from the use of forced labor in Xinjiang. What's your comment? Secondly, why did China decide to join the OECD global tax agreement?

Wang Wenbin: We've stressed on multiple occasions that the so-called forced labor is a lie fabricated by very few anti-China elements of very small number of countries including the US, in an attempt to stir up trouble in Xinjiang and contain China. We firmly oppose any external forces to interfere in China's internal affairs under the pretext of Xinjiang-related issues. It is hoped that relevant parties will not be deceived by the lie of forced labor.

Ironically, the US itself is the country where forced labor is widespread. Relevant international labor organization assessed that systematic violation of labors' rights does exist in the US, a country with the worst performance among major developed countries. The victims include not only US citizens, but also foreign citizens from almost every region of the world, and even vulnerable groups such as women, children and the disabled. Up to 100,000 people are trafficked into the US for forced labor annually and half of them are sold to sweatshops or enslaved in households.

What the US should do is to reflect on its severe human rights problems in a practical and realist manner, and to shoulder its due responsibility. No matter how it is packaged, the attempt to use the false accusation of "forced labor" as an excuse to smear and slander other countries is bound to fail. I would also like to add that racking its brain to smear and suppress only makes the pure white and high quality Xinjiang Cotton more popular among the consumers, and even in higher demand. Xinjiang Cotton has thus become an important brand of Xinjiang agricultural products.

On your second question, China supports efforts toward reaching a consensus-based solution on global taxation cooperation that is comprehensive and more inclusive. We stand ready to work with other parties to uphold multilateralism and reinvigorate the global economy. We hope relevant negotiations will fully accommodate the interests of developing countries, follow the principle of consensus through consultation, and properly address all parties' concerns in a pragmatic and constructive manner.

CCTV: According to reports, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has finalized the names of ROK experts to be included in its working group to assess Japan's plan to discharge nuclear contaminated wastewater into the sea. Invitations have been sent out to the experts. Reports say there will also be Chinese experts in the working group. Can you confirm this and offer more information?

Wang Wenbin: After China, the ROK and other stakeholders called for it repeatedly, the IAEA is working actively to put together a technical working group on the disposal of contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear incident. Recently the IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has written to invite Chinese experts to join the working group. The Chinese side will do its best to support the future work of the group. We hope the IAEA will give full consideration to the views of stakeholders, make sure the working group plays its due role, and conduct technical assessment and supervision before, during and after the discharge of the Fukushima nuclear contaminated water.

How to dispose of the nuclear contaminated water is not a private matter for Japan. Too much is at stake here. China strongly urges the Japanese side to cooperate wherever necessary to make sure that the IAEA technical working group can conduct its work smoothly. Japan mustn't start the ocean discharge before reaching consensus through consultation with all stakeholders including neighboring countries and relevant international institutions.

Bloomberg: Just to go back to the tax agreement, can you perhaps elaborate a little bit more? What's China's overall view of the agreement? What exemptions has China received to agree to the tax plan? And what impact do you think the new tax program will have on China and on multinational corporations?

Wang Wenbin: I just stated China's principled position. You may ask the competent authorities for more specifics.

South China Morning Post: Can you confirm if China explicitly supports the G7 proposal for a 15 percent minimum tax rate?

Wang Wenbin: I just stated China's position.

CRI: China regards vaccines as a global public good, and has provided vaccine assistance and exports to many countries, and conducted joint development and production with other developing countries. Can you give us more details on the role of Chinese vaccines in promoting global anti-epidemic cooperation?

Wang Wenbin: Since the outbreak of the epidemic, China has insisted that vaccines are first and foremost a global public good. Despite the huge domestic demand and limited supply, China has done its best to supply more than 480 million doses of vaccines to the international community, making it the largest supplier of vaccines in the world. So far, China has provided vaccine assistance to nearly 100 countries from five continents. China has announced to provide an initial 10 million doses to COVAX.

The Chinese vaccines are the first doses available to many developing countries, which have dubbed them a "godsend". Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang said the Chinese vaccine has brought a ray of hope to the country's struggling fight against the epidemic. Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa said the vaccine donated by China was like the light at the end of the tunnel. Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said that Chinese vaccines are safe and effective, with which Chile is striving to lower the rate of COVID-19 infection and the number of hospital admissions and deaths. Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne said the Chinese vaccine has proven its effectiveness and safety, and will make positive contributions to the early realization of herd immunity in Antigua and Barbuda.

China has also carried out joint development and production with many developing countries, and supported relevant enterprises in carrying out phase III clinical trials in cooperation with foreign partners.

Chinese vaccines have won a good reputation in the international community, with their safety and effectiveness widely recognized. Up to now, more than 100 countries have approved Chinese vaccines for use. The WHO has added Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines to the Emergency Use Listing. More than 30 foreign leaders have taken the lead in receiving jabs of Chinese vaccines.

China will continue to contribute to the accessibility and affordability of vaccines in developing countries to the best of its capacity. We also hope that all countries in the world that are able to do so will act as soon as possible, honor their commitments, and make their due contributions to promoting equitable distribution and application of vaccines for better global anti-epidemic cooperation.

Bloomberg: This is a question about infrastructure projects in the Philippines that are backed by China. The Binondo-Intramuros bridge in Manila is set to be the first infrastructure project to be completed later this year among 14 planned such projects with Chinese backing. However, some Philippine politicians have criticized the pace of implementation of such projects as being too slow. Does the foreign ministry have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: China and the Philippines always work together to promote cooperation on the basis of mutual respect and mutual benefit. Relevant projects have also made positive contributions to the Philippines' economic and social development.

The Paper: Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President of the Schiller Institute, a US think tank, said recently that to accuse China of making the novel coronavirus is a malicious effort and an old trick by the West to smear China. She said if there was to be an investigation, then it should be carried out everywhere, not just in China. What is China's comment?

Wang Wenbin: China has stressed many times that origin-tracing is a scientific matter that should not be politicized. This position is supported by many scientists in the international community who uphold science, reason and objectivity. In addition to Ms. LaRouche, many other experts have also made their positions clear.

Dominic Dwyer, an Australian immunologist and infectious disease expert and a member of the WHO expert team, said there was no evidence to back up the lab escape theory. He said the "lab leak" theory plays into the political discourse of some countries, and is even supported by individual governments. The spread of this theory reeks of deliberate maneuver. Origin-tracing is extremely complicated work, and there is no evidence that China is concealing key information. Countries should stop fighting and start cooperating with each other. It's also important to carry out origin-tracing study in other parts of the world.

The Swedish Research Council recently held a webinar on how to discern false information and conspiracy related to COVID-19. At the event, Professor Andreas Onnerfors of Uppsala University said the allegations of "China virus" and "lab leak theory" are all conspiracy theories. By spreading such conspiracies, some aim to establish a narrative that China should be held accountable for the outbreak and transmission of the virus. Such practice distorts science, stokes racial discrimination, exacerbates division and poses threats to democracy at multiple levels.

Dr. Danielle Anderson, an Australian virologist who once worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said the WIV "was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab". She said there were strict protocols and requirements aimed at containing the pathogens being studied. She believes the virus most likely came from a natural source. She is convinced no virus was made intentionally to infect people and deliberately released. Anderson does think an investigation is needed to nail down the origin of the virus once and for all, but she's dumbfounded by the portrayal of the lab by some media outside China, and the toxic attacks on scientists that have ensued.

Massimo Galli, head of the Infectious Diseases Unit at the University of Milan-affiliated Luigi Sacco Hospital in Milan, Italy, said at a committee for social affairs of the Chamber of Deputies that the coronavirus is an unknown virus with no signs of genome engineering inside and the "lab-leak" theory has no scientific basis at all. Galli and three other Italian experts believe that the virus is 99% likely to be the result of natural spillover.

We hope that all parties can respect facts and science, and jointly reject political manipulation of vilification under the pretext of origin-tracing, so as to create a favorable environment for global cooperation in origin-tracing and solidarity in fighting the epidemic.
CPC offers significant governance experience, says PCI leader

Xinhua) 22:45, July 01, 2021

ROME, July 1 (Xinhua) -- Running a country as large as China, the Communist Party of China (CPC) is providing a significant amount of experience that can be drawn on in the field of governance, National Secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) Mauro Alboresi has said.

The success of the CPC lies in its capability to combine political theory and practice, which has set a great example across the globe, the PCI leader said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

"The facts say a lot," said Alboresi, taking China's campaign of poverty alleviation as an example.

"The challenge of lifting millions of people out of poverty, which many thought to be impossible, has proved to be a possibility. It became real, thanks to the governance of the CPC and the efforts made in this direction in such a short span of time," he added.

Alboresi said the CPC has not only helped its own people out of poverty, but also reached out to other developing countries in need with Chinese experience.

China's cooperation with African nations, for example, has supported "local infrastructure construction in order to allow them to improve their production capacity and exports, sustaining a strong idea of development," he said.

When it comes to the fight against COVID-19, the PCI leader said that under the guidance of the CPC, "China handled the pandemic in a resolute, effective way, so much so that, today, China has been able to respond (to the pandemic) while other countries are struggling."

"It should be highlighted that China faced the COVID-19 pandemic with a supportive approach of collaboration toward other countries," he added.

Alboresi pointed out that the entire humankind should reflect on this COVID-19 pandemic and the world is seeing historically unprecedented processes of interconnection and interdependence between different countries.

China's proposal of building a community with a shared future for mankind "is the necessary answer to address the big challenges that affect the planet," Alboresi said.

"This proposal confirms the profound belief that encourages the CPC ... about the centrality of multilateralism within relations with different countries," said Alboresi. "I really think we need to head toward this direction."

Noting this year marks the 100th anniversary of the CPC, Alboresi said that the centenary, "to which we pay great attention, is an opportunity for reflection for all the international communist movement."

"In this sense, we truly believe there are all the right conditions for this centenary to bring about further momentum to continue in this direction," he said.

"The PCI has always been highlighting the decisive role played by China in the history of the international communist movement," he said, adding that the CPC's experience accumulated in the past has been the most valuable part that is worth learning for the whole international communist movement.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Du Mingming)
China holds art performance to celebrate CPC centenary

Xinhua) 08:13, July 02, 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/Xing Guangli)

BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhua) -- "The Great Journey," an art performance marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC), was broadcasted by China Media Group on Thursday evening.

The art performance was held in Beijing on Monday evening.

The epic show, divided into four parts, depicted how the Chinese people, under the leadership of the CPC, have carried out revolution, construction and reform over the past 100 years.

After the performance, all the audience rose to chorus the song "Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China."

Important foreign friends, diplomatic envoys and representatives of international organizations in Beijing, and foreign experts were also invited to the event.

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/Yin Bogu)

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/Chen Yehua)

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/Chen Yehua)

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/Chen Yehua)

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/Ren Chao)

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/Xing Guangli)

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/Ren Chao)

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/Yin Bogu)

(Web editor: Meng Bin, Hongyu)
Hong Kong celebrates CPC centenary, 24th return anniversary with various events

Xinhua) 08:16, July 02, 2021

A flag-raising ceremony is held at the Golden Bauhinia Square by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government to celebrate the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland in Hong Kong, south China, July 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Lui Siu Wai)

Hong Kong's smooth return to the motherland is an important part of the CPC's great achievements over the last 100 years, Acting Chief Executive of the HKSAR John Lee said during the events held in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland.

HONG KONG, July 1 (Xinhua) -- Hong Kong on Thursday held various events to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland.

PROSPERITY SINCE RETURN

China's national flag and the flag of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) were hoisted and the national anthem was played at the Golden Bauhinia Square in a flag-raising ceremony held by the HKSAR government on Thursday morning.

Helicopters flew over Victoria Harbor and a fireboat sprayed a water salute.

Hong Kong's smooth return to the motherland is an important part of the CPC's great achievements over the last 100 years, Acting Chief Executive of the HKSAR John Lee said on Thursday morning during the events held in celebration at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center.

Lee vowed continued efforts to safeguard national security, improve the implementation of "one country, two systems" and forge ahead with a pragmatic approach and the spirit of rising to the challenge.

With the leadership of the CPC, the strong support of the nation and the success in implementing "one country, two systems," Hong Kong compatriots will be able to share the glory of a prosperous and strong nation, said Chen Dong, deputy director of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the HKSAR.

Chuang Tze-cheung with the Hong Kong Celebrations Association said Hong Kong will continue to give full play to its unique advantages under "one country, two systems" and make greater achievements with the effective administration of the HKSAR government and concerted efforts of the society.

Guests attend the opening ceremony of celebrating activities for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China and the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland, at Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center in Hong Kong, south China, July 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Lui Siu Wai)

GRAND CELEBRATIONS

A series of celebrations were organized across Hong Kong, including parades of buses and fishing vessels, and festive decorations could be found in many places from stores along the streets to landmark buildings.

In Victoria Harbor, fishing vessels sailed in a procession and were greeted by joyful Hong Kong residents on the bank.

A torch relay race was also held to mark the centenary of the CPC and the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong's return. A participant born in 1997 said this year's July 1 is a meaningful day and he felt the responsibility on him and also the young generation at large to carry on the success of Hong Kong.

A reception is held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government in celebration of the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland in Hong Kong, south China, July 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Lui Siu Wai)

Hongkong Post started on Thursday issuing commemorative stamps for the big day, its first release on the theme of the CPC. Long queues were spotted outside post offices in the morning even before the opening hour.

A commemorative movie named "1921" is on the big screens in multiple cinemas.

Fishing boats flying China's national flags and the flags of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) cruise at Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong, south China, July 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Lo Ping Fai)

It is particularly meaningful to watch this film on this special day, Chuang Tze-cheung said, adding that he hopes more young people will watch this movie.

(Web editor: Meng Bin, Du Mingming)
WHO warns Europe to be "Delta dominant" by August, calls for more vaccines take-up

Xinhua) 08:20, July 02, 2021

People queue up for check-in in the departure hall at the Brussels Airport in Zaventem, Belgium, July 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)

To counter the expected upsurge, Kluge again called upon the region to "remain disciplined" and for citizens to take up vaccines when offered.

"Vaccines are effective against the Delta variant. Not one dose but two doses. Delays in getting vaccinated cost lives and economies, and the slower we vaccinate, the more variants will emerge."

COPENHAGEN, July 1 (Xinhua) -- World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge on Thursday cited increased mixing, travel, gatherings, and easing of social restrictions as the main culprits ending a ten-week decline in the number of COVID-19 cases in Europe.

"Last week, the number of cases rose by 10 percent. This is taking place in the context of a rapidly evolving situation - a new variant of concern, the Delta variant - and in a region where despite tremendous efforts by the member states, millions remain unvaccinated," said Kluge at an online press conference in Copenhagen.

He noted that "Delta variant overtakes alpha very quickly through multiple and repeated introductions, and is already translating into increased hospitalizations and deaths."

The WHO European Region, according to Klug, is expected to be "Delta dominant" by August. He also warns that new variants, deficit in vaccine uptake and increased social mixing would cause a new wave of excess hospitalizations and deaths before the autumn in the region.

To counter the expected upsurge, Kluge again called upon the region to "remain disciplined" and for citizens to take up vaccines when offered.

"Vaccines are effective against the Delta variant. Not one dose but two doses. Delays in getting vaccinated cost lives and economies, and the slower we vaccinate, the more variants will emerge."

Again, Kluge lamented over the clear disparity in vaccine equality between rich and poor countries in Europe and noted that it was "unacceptable" that vaccine coverage was 24 percent throughout the entire region, "far from the recommended 80 percent coverage of the adult population."

"With these figures, nowhere is the pandemic over, and it would be very wrong for anyone - citizen and policymakers - to assume that it is."

Concerned about the current EURO 2020 tournament as a spreader event, as numbers of fans throughout the region had returned to their home countries infected with the virus, Kluge reiterated his message of caution and called upon all fans to wear masks "especially indoor and in crowds."

"The stakes are still high. COVID-19's trajectory in the coming weeks and months depends on the decisions and actions of us as individuals, communities, and as governments, we will take now and the weeks ahead, solidarity pays off!"

People wait after being vaccinated at a vaccination center in Brussels, Belgium, June 8, 2021. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)

(Web editor: Meng Bin, Du Mingming)
Trump Organization CFO surrenders to New York prosecutors

Xinhua) 09:50, July 02, 2021

U.S. President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn before departing from the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on Oct. 22, 2018. (Xinhua/Ting Shen)

It's reported that a Manhattan grand jury indicted the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg on Wednesday. U.S. former President Donald Trump isn't expected to be charged in the case.

NEW YORK, July 1 (Xinhua) -- Trump Organization's chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg surrendered to Manhattan District Attorney's Office on Thursday morning as the veteran accountant and the Trump Organization face criminal charges on alleged tax crimes, according to local media reports.

It's reported that a Manhattan grand jury indicted the Trump Organization and Weisselberg on Wednesday.

Weisselberg and the Trump Organization would be arraigned later Thursday at a lower Manhattan court.

U.S. former President Donald Trump isn't expected to be charged in the case.

The charges result from a multi-year investigation by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who doesn't run for re-election and would leave his office at the end of 2021.

Vance has been working on the investigation for around two years covering hush money paid to females on Trump's behalf, tax practices, property valuations and others.

A New York court recently suspended Rudolph Giuliani's law license after ruling that the former New York City mayor and Donald Trump's personal lawyer made demonstrably false and misleading statements on 2020 general election results.

Weisselberg is now being used by the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former U.S. president, according to a statement by the Trump Organization on Thursday.

"The District Attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution involving employee benefits that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would ever think of bringing. This is not justice; this is politics," added the statement.

At the end of May, prosecutors from New York City convened a special grand jury to look into evidence in a criminal investigation involving Trump.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Hongyu)
Air parade pays tribute to Party centenary

China Daily) 10:01, July 02, 2021

A fleet of Z-19 attack helicopters prepare to take part in an air parade in Beijing on Thursday. A group consisting of five Z-10 and 24 Z-19 helicopters formed the number 100 to pay tribute to the Party's centenary. [Photo/Xinhua]

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said on Thursday that China will build its military into a world-class force to better defend the country.

"We must accelerate the modernization of national defense and the armed forces. A strong country must have a strong military, as only then can it guarantee the security of the nation," Xi, who is also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, said at a grand gathering on Thursday in Beijing to celebrate the CPC's centenary.

"On the journey ahead, we must fully implement the Party's thinking on strengthening the military in the new era as well as our military strategy for the new era, maintain the Party's absolute leadership over the people's armed forces, and follow a Chinese path to military development," he said.

The Party will strive to make the People's Liberation Army a top military in the world so that it will have greater capability and more reliable means to protect China's national sovereignty, security and development interests, according to Xi.

He stressed that the Chinese military is a strong pillar for safeguarding the socialist country and preserving national dignity, and a powerful force for maintaining regional and world peace.

At the beginning of the ceremony, 71 aircraft from the PLA flew over Tian'anmen Square to pay tribute to the Party.

The air parade was the first time that the Chinese military's hardware took part in an event celebrating the Party's anniversary.

As many as 15 J-20 stealth fighter jets were in the parade, staging the largest-ever public display of fifth-generation combat aircraft.

All the aircraft involved in the event were developed and built by Aviation Industry Corp of China, the country's leading aircraft manufacturer.

The fleet was led by a Z-8L multirole helicopter, the latest in China's military helicopter family. Escorted by two Z-10 attack helicopters, the Z-8L carried a Party flag under its fuselage.

Another four Z-8Ls followed and carried banners with slogans saluting the Party, the People's Republic and the Chinese people.

The second group consisted of 29 Z-10 and Z-19 attack helicopters, forming the number 100 to pay tribute to the Party's centenary.

It was followed by another group of 10 J-10 lightweight multirole fighter jets that formed the number 71, a reference to July 1, the date on which the Party was founded.

Following the numeral-shaped groups, 15 J-20 fighter jets, divided into three spearhead-shaped teams, thundered over the square.

One of the world's most powerful fighter jets, the J-20 had its maiden flight in January 2011 in Chengdu.

The plane was officially declassified in November 2016 and commissioned to the PLA Air Force later that year, becoming the third stealth fighter jet in the world to enter service following the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II of the United States.

Currently, several elite units of the PLA Air Force use the aircraft.

The final aircraft to appear in the air performance were 10 JL-8 trainer planes, which also flew in a spearhead formation and made the world's longest colored-vapor trail.

Huge development

Fu Qianshao, a retired researcher of the PLA Air Force, said the fact that all of the aircraft in the air parade were domestically developed with world-class technology demonstrates the huge development of China's aviation industry over the past years.

He said the military aviators involved in the performance showed their outstanding skills and collaboration by expertly piloting so many aircraft in complex formations.

"It is never an easy job for a lot of fast aircraft to fly in perfect synchronization and formation," he said. "It requires special techniques, familiarity with their equipment and long-term training."

Referring to the appearance of the large group of J-20s, he said this means that the cutting-edge fighter jet has been extensively deployed and has become the pillar of the PLA Air Force's combat aircraft forces.

Wang Yanan, editor-in-chief of Aerospace Knowledge magazine, said Thursday's parade marked the public debut of the Z-8L helicopter.

The latest variant of the Z-8 family, the model features an improved aerodynamic design, a wider body and faster speed, as well as a stronger carrying capacity, he said, adding that it is likely to be designed for the PLA Ground Force's air assault units to transport their airborne assault vehicles.

Wu Peixin, an aviation industry observer in Beijing, said he and many of his friends who are also fans of Chinese military hardware were excited to see the advanced fighter jets and helicopters at the event.

"The PLA and the Chinese aviation industry were built by the Party, so sending our top aircraft to join the celebration was a perfect gift to the Party. They showed to the people and the world the strength and accomplishments of our air force and aviation industry," he said.

(Web editor: Meng Bin, Hongyu)
Interview: Extension of China-Russia treaty reflects closer bilateral ties -- expert

Xinhua) 10:22, July 02, 2021

Workers from China and Russia shake hands after the two ends of the Blagoveshchensk-Heihe highway bridge were joined together on May 31, 2019. (Xinhua/Wang Jian)

"Putin is reaffirming its ties to China" and the two countries are without doubt getting closer, said the expert.

GENEVA, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The extension of the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation reflects closer bilateral ties, a scholar has said.

The joint statement on the extension of the treaty, issued during Monday's talks between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin via video link, reflects the deepening of China-Russia relationship, Andre Liebich, honorary professor of international history and politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, said in an interview with Xinhua.

"Putin is reaffirming its ties to China" and the two countries are without doubt getting closer, said Liebich.

During the talks, Putin 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.

The first China-Europe freight train from Chengdu to St. Petersburg arrives at Shushary railway station in St. Petersburg, Russia, March 15, 2021. (Xinhua)

Liebich believes the China-Russia partnership is mutually beneficial to both economies thanks to their high degree of complementarity. "There is complementarity between Chinese and Russian interests, including complementarity in the economic sphere," he said.

"I think Russia has a lot to offer to China in terms of energy" and China can also help Russia solve its infrastructure problems, said Liebich.

"There is complementarity in agriculture. Russian agriculture is being eased out of the Western markets, and it's finding a market in China which needs agricultural products," Liebich said.

China and Russia can also play a critical role in maintaining world peace and regional security, said the scholar.

Visitors purchase products from Russia at the 8th China characteristic commodity expo fair in Sanmenxia, central China's Henan Province, May 20, 2021. (Xinhua/Hao Yuan)

On the international stage, the two countries are cooperating within rules-based multilateral institutions such as the United Nations Security Council and over regional security, he said.

Afghanistan is an example as both states are keen to realize peace in the war-torn country, Liebich said.

He underscored the role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in countering terrorism and boosting security cooperation in Central Asia, saying that "Russia and China have a common interest in confronting the extremist threat, which is endangering Russia as much as it is endangering China."

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Hongyu)
CPC leads greatest revolution in mankind, says former Singaporean FM

Xinhua) 13:03, July 02, 2021

A national flag-raising ceremony is held at Tian'anmen Square during a ceremony marking the centenary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Beijing, capital of China, July 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Liu Jinhai)

"Because China is huge and the journey of revolution is full of twists and turns, the CPC is always learning and finding the path," said former Singaporean Foreign Minister George Yong-boon Yeo.

SINGAPORE, July 2 (Xinhua) -- China's revolution was the greatest one in the history of mankind, and celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is a milestone in the journey of the People's Republic of China, former Singaporean Foreign Minister George Yong-boon Yeo has said.

Yeo made the remarks in an interview with Lianhe Zaobao on Tuesday, saying that the Western system cannot work in China or in many other places in Asia, and only the CPC can find the path for China.

A ceremony marking the centenary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is held at Tian'anmen Square in Beijing, capital of China, July 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Tian Dingyu)

"Because China is huge and the journey of revolution is full of twists and turns, the CPC is always learning and finding the path," he added.

In his view, the agrarian reform is a significant part of China's revolution, in which the CPC played a key role. Furthermore, China raised the status of women by establishing monogamy and equal rights for men and women. As a result, Chinese women probably have the highest status in Asia, he said.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Hongyu)
Cutting-edge technology to support Shenzhou-12 taikonauts' first spacewalk mission

Global Times) 13:45, July 02, 2021

Screen image captured at Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing, capital of China, June 17, 2021 shows three Chinese astronauts onboard the Shenzhou-12 spaceship saluting after entering the space station core module Tianhe. Photo: Xinhua

Photo: screenshot from CCTV

Having moved into and spent two weeks in their new space home, the Shenzhou-12 taikonauts are believed to soon carry out their first long-duration extravehicular activity (EVA), more commonly known as a spacewalk. Citing cutting edge technology applied in the training process, the new spacesuit and smart robotic arms system, observers said they are very optimistic over the success of the admittedly high-stakes feat.

Shenzhou-12 manned spaceflight mission participants revealed in a tribute to the Communist Party of China released by state broadcaster Central China Television on Thursday that now the whole system is busy preparing for the taikonauts' first long spacewalk.

Considering that Sun Jun, the mission chief of the space station project at the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center, said on June 23 following President Xi Jinping's space-ground call with the crew earlier the same day, that the first spacewalk is expected to take place in some 10 days, analysts said that it could take place on the upcoming weekend at the soonest.

The crewed spacecraft Shenzhou-12, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, is launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gobi Desert, June 17, 2021. (Xinhua/Li Gang)

Compared to China's first spacewalk executed by Zhai Zhigang during the Shenzhou-7 mission in 2008, which lasted for some 20 minutes, two of the three Shenzhou-12 crew are expected to remain outside for hours. They will carry out actual space station construction and appliance testing works while outside the cabin, rather than mere technology verification like during Zhai's spacewalk, which will be a highlight but challenging for the crew, Pang Zhihao, a Beijing-based senior space expert and retired researcher from the China Academy of Space Technology, told the Global Times.

Zhou Jianping, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the chief designer of China's manned space program, told CCTV earlier that huge improvements and adjustments have been made to the new spacesuits compared to the previous Shenzhou-7 ones, and they can support long-duration activities outside the cabin.

In the livestream footage of the ground-space call on June 23, taikonauts Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo were seen making adjustments to a spacesuit expected to be used for future extravehicular activities. This first view marked the new spacesuit's debut to the public.

Nie Haisheng, the crew leader, was operating the space station system at the working station in the main compartment.

Two pieces of 100-kg spacesuit for spacewalk were sent to the Tianhe space station core module prior to the arrival of the crew in a Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft.

Screen image captured at Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing, capital of China, June 17, 2021 shows China's Shenzhou-12 manned spaceship having successfully docked with the space station core module Tianhe. Photo: Xinhua

Mission insiders have previously told the Global Times that all three taikonauts have been well trained, meaning they all are capable and ready for outside-cabin operations. Many observers predicted that Liu, who participated in the Shenzhou-7 mission in 2008 and assisted Zhai to complete the country's first spacewalk, is likely to play a key role this time.

Liu had also previously told media that the new suit is more comfortable, and easier to move around in than old versions.

The Chinese space station has also been equipped with robotic arms that can be stretched to 15 meters long, and these are expected to play a vital role in building the space station in orbit, Zhou said.

Dubbed the most intelligent, most complicated orbital construction system, the robotic arms will provide solid support for taikonauts' movement along the spacecraft for long hours by saving their stamina and even helping them arrange future lab modules, according to the China Manned Space Agency in open materials.

Screen image captured at Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing, capital of China, June 17, 2021 shows three Chinese astronauts onboard the Shenzhou-12 spaceship entering the space station core module Tianhe. Photo: Xinhua

Commenting on joining a team for the first time with robotic arms system, Liu told the media in previous interviews that the arms will take the astronauts nearby to the working location in a big swing, which will test the system's reliability, safety and flexibility.

"I look forward to the moment of standing at the far end of the arm, looking into the vast universe and swinging with the armsit will be just like flying," Liu said.

Also, to ensure the spacewalk mission's smooth execution, all the taikonauts have carried out solid ground training and mission preparation under comprehensive training programs and plans, according to Ji Qiming, a CMSA spokesperson.

Astronauts Nie Haisheng (R), Liu Boming (C) and Tang Hongbo wave during a see-off ceremony for Chinese astronauts of the Shenzhou-12 manned space mission at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, June 17, 2021. (Xinhua/Li Gang)

Chief astronaut trainer Huang Weifen told the media that one of the most exhausting parts of the training is the underwater sessions, which try to simulate the weightless environment in space and enhance the taikonauts stamina and upper body strength. During such underwater training session, astronauts need to wear suits weighting some 200 kilograms for at least 6 hours per session.

Huang said that the underwater training standards were the same for male and female astronauts and in the end, each astronaut's upper body strength data became as good as that of professional gymnastic or canoeing athletes.

Pang also revealed that China also has Asia's largest astronaut underwater training tank, which is 23 meters in diameter and 10 meters in depth. The super-sized facility helps them train and supports larger size spacecraft training models.

Highlights of Shenzhou-12 taikounauts' outside cabin Infographic: Wu Tiantong/GT

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Hongyu)
Chinese firm succeeds in lifting, fitting iconic air corridor in Egypt's new capital

Xinhua) 16:18, July 02, 2021

CAIRO, July 1 (Xinhua) -- After 18 hours of hard work by the China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC), the iconic air corridor connecting two office buildings in the central business district (CBD) of Egypt's new administrative capital was successfully lifted and held in place on Wednesday.

The skyway made of steel, which has a span of 31.4 meters and weighs 161 tons, has been cordially described as the Corridor of China-Egypt Friendship or the Gateway to China-Egypt Cooperation.

This is the first time that the CSCEC, which has contracted to build the CBD of Egypt's new administrative capital, adopted in Egypt the efficient technique of assembling the air corridor on the ground before lifting and fitting it in mid-air, which saves both time and effort and lessens safety risks.

The air corridor was finally placed between the 29th and 30th floor, after being lifted about 141 meters above the ground.

Zhang Shanyou, the chief engineer of CSCEC Egypt, expressed his gratitude for the trust and support of the relevant partners as well as the hard work of all the Chinese and Egyptian staff.

"In face of the COVID-19 impact, we took active measures to cooperate with the Egyptian government in ensuring the livelihood, employment and production in the country. The cooperation and friendship between China and Egypt prove to have become deeper and stronger through the test of the pandemic," said Zhang.

Zhang Yiqing, the manager of the Package Four (P4) project that includes the air corridor, said the success in lifting and fitting the air corridor is an important achievement made by the Chinese and Egyptian employees through their joint hard work despite the COVID-19 epidemic.

All the P4 staff will exert their best effort to achieve the perfect performance of the project on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Egypt, he noted.

Being built some 50 km east of Egypt's capital Cairo, the CBD project in the country's new administrative capital covers an area of about 505,000 square meters and includes 20 new high-rise buildings and some municipal facilities.

(Web editor: Xia Peiyao, Hongyu)
Planting 'consultants,' blocking vaccine approval, threatening officials  Australia sabotages China-PNG cooperation by all means

(Global Times) 16:27, July 02, 2021

llustration: Chen Xia/GT

By planting Australian consultants in Papua New Guinea to manipulate local epidemic prevention policies targeting China, obstructing the authorizing of Chinese vaccines' emergency use, threatening senior officials from welcoming Chinese vaccines, Australia has been found sabotaging and disturbing Pacific Island nations' cooperation with China on vaccines and anti-virus measures, with experts criticizing Australia's actions as hurting people's interest in the Pacific Island countries out of a pure Cold War mentality.

The Global Times has learned exclusively from sources that Australia has been racking its brain to undermine China's vaccine cooperation with Pacific Island countries. For example, it has planted several "consultants" in the national epidemic prevention center in Papua New Guinea and manipulated the country's policies in the fight against COVID-19. Under Australia's colonial-style dominance, some of Papua New Guinea's new prevention policies target Chinese.

Despite that China has effectively controlled the epidemic domestically, PNG still lists China as "high risk" and requests foreigners arriving from in the country to wear electric location finders with high charges. But the fact is that currently, only Chinese travel to PNG to resume work in the country's projects.

As for China's supply of vaccines to Papua New Guinea, Australia has also proactively tried to set up hurdles to block the authorization for emergency use of Chinese vaccines. In February, China announced it would offer vaccines to Papua New Guinea and also provided the trails data on the vaccines, but with Australia working in the shadows, Papua New Guinea's epidemic prevention center did not approve the emergency use of Chinese vaccines until the end of May, when Australia provided vaccines had already arrived in the country.

Sources also told the Global Times that when the Chinese vaccines arrived in Papua New Guinea, the country's president had planned to welcome them at the airport, but he was blocked by Australia, which also threatened Papua New Guinea's officials by saying that if they would welcome the Chinese vaccines, they must bear the consequence of Australia ceasing investment in the country's road projects.

Australia has closely followed the US and a small group of Western countries to hype the issue of tracing virus origins, attacking and smearing China's vaccines and groundlessly accusing China of expanding its influence by donating vaccines to developing nations.

But the reality is that Australia is actually pushing for political influence in the name of anti-virus cooperation, with the purpose of spreading Australia's vaccines throughout Pacific Island countries and showcasing its influence in the area.

In March, Australia offered 8,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine sent via military helicopters, becoming the first foreign aid of vaccine to Papua New Guinea.

If Pacific Island states choose China's vaccines in the fight against the virus, it means the economic recovery of these countries in the post-COVID-19 era would be boosted with China's leadership, and would demean Australia's reputation and influence in the area, according to Australian think tank, Lowy Institute.

Regarding the South Pacific as its own backyard and sphere of influence, Australia has taken a hostile attitude against China for China's cooperation with countries in this area, although China has expressed its willingness to also work with Australia. Chen Hong, a professor and director of the Australian Studies Center at East China Normal University, criticized Australia for its "colonialism mentality."

Australia has a clear Cold War mentality and is sabotaging China's cooperation with Pacific Island countries at the cost of the people's health, said Chen, noting that weaponizing the anti-virus fight for political purposes is shameful.

Chen said that instead of increasing its influence in the area, Australia's moves would actually damage its reputation as its malicious purposes have been fully exposed and witnessed by the international community.

Chen also noted that the vaccines that Australia has offered to Papua New Guinea are restricted to be used only among citizens above 60 years old, with their safety for other groups being questioned by scientists. Under this scenario, Australia is "dumping" its stock-piled, unsafe vaccines to other counties in its pacific playground.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Hongyu)
Wang Lanhua: CPC member who has made neighborhood security her lifelong career

People's Daily Online) 17:27, July 02, 2021

Wang Lanhua, a CPC member who has made safeguarding the community residents' security her lifelong career and has devoted herself to volunteer services for more than 10 years, has recently been awarded the July 1 Medal, the Party's highest honor.

Photo shows Wang Lianhua (L2) being awarded a prize for her contribution in the neighborhood. (Photo credit to the fire rescue detachment in Wuzhong)

Wang, who was born in June 1950 and joined the party in November 1995, is a native of Wuzhong county, northwest China's Ningxia Hui autonomous region. In 2012, Wang set up a fire control publicity volunteer organization in her neigborhood, which became well known for its role in publicizing fire protection related knowledge.

Over the years, Wang's volunteer group has carried out 72 firefighting and evacuation drills in communities, brought fire control knowledge to more than 1,300 elderly people who live alone and nearly 18,000 residents in the community, and helped more than 30 communities to discover and rectify more than 680 fire hazards.

Photo shows members of Wang's volunteer group. (Photo credit to the fire rescue detachment in Wuzhong)

Furthermore, the group has raised nearly 980,000 yuan ($151,508) in charitable funds, participated in more than 9,000 public welfare activities, and solved more than 7,000 difficulties faced by community residents.

"I will continue to dedicate myself to offering public welfare services and popularizing fire control knowledge," Wang said, adding that she hopes more members of the post-90s and post-00s generations will join her volunteer group and together contribute more to community services.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Du Mingming)
On the afternoon of July 1, a special exhibition with the theme "The original aspiration shines on the land of Jianghuai -- Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China" kicked off at Anhui Museum as a celebration of the Party's centenary. The exhibition contains hundreds of exhibits that vividly illustrated the great changes and achievements Anhui made under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) from a comprehensive perspective. The exhibition consists of four parts: "creating a new world", "building a new home", "striving for a new age" and "strides in a new era", showcasing 216 pieces or sets of items, over 260 pictures, restoration of the historical scene of Xiaogang Village's renowned trial of the household responsibility system (Dabaogan), the miniature of Anhui's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (or EAST), and a variety of other objects. It seeks to help visitors to better understand the changes and developments that happened in Anhui ever since the founding of CPC. With a close look at the magnificent history of Anhui in the past 100 years, visitors will be able to feel the indomitable and courageous spirit of Anhui people. Visitors reading the materials about Xiaogang villagers' trial of thehousehold responsibility system in the 1970s. (Photo by Fu Xiuyun) A certificate of honor awarded to a boatman for his assistance during Yangtze River Crossing Campaign symbolizes the acknowledgement of the contributions of ordinary people in the victory of the People's Liberation Army. (Photo by Fu Xiuyun) Translated by Li Yuxin
People in East Chinas Anhui province watched the live broadcast of the Communist Party of China's grand centennial celebration on Tuesday morning. They gathered to listen to the important speech delivered by President Xi Jinping at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Party members of the Anhui Provincial Committee of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) watch the live broadcast of the Communist Party of China's grand centennial celebration in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province, on July 1, 2021. (Photo by Xu Mengyu)



Scientists with the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences watch the live broadcast of the Communist Party of China's grand centennial celebration in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province, on July 1, 2021.



Veterans watch the live broadcast of the Communist Party of China's grand centennial celebration in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province, on July 1, 2021. (Photo by Xu Mengyu)



Party members and villagers watch the live broadcast of the Communist Party of China's grand centennial celebration in Dawan village, Jinzhai county, Anhui Province, on July 1, 2021.



Teachers and students watch the live broadcast of the Communist Party of China's grand centennial celebration at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, capital of Anhui province, on July 1, 2021. (Photo by Wang Qiao & Zheng Qiangqiang)



Party members and villagers watch the live broadcast of the Communist Party of China's grand centennial celebration in Xiaogang village, Fengyang county, Anhui Province, on July 1, 2021.



Six Party members of China Tiesiju Civil Engineering Group watch the live broadcast of the Communist Party of China's grand centennial celebration in Mongolia's capital Ulaanbaatar on July 1, 2021. (Photo by Cao Haoran)

Medical workers watch the live broadcast of the Communist Party of China's grand centennial celebration at Hefei No.1 Peoples Hospital in Hefei, capital of Anhui province, on July 1, 2021. (Photo by Xu Huiyuan)



Traffic policemen watch the live broadcast of the Communist Party of China's grand centennial celebration in Funan county, Anhui province, on July 1, 2021. (Photo by Lv Naiming)


Korea's exports soared to a record-high US$300 billion in the first six months of this year powered by strong sales of semiconductors, petrochemical products and cars. Monthly exports have now increased for eight months in a row.

The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said Thursday that last month's exports surged 39.7 percent on-year to $54.8 billion, while outbound shipments in the first half jumped 26.1 percent to $303.2 billion.

Exports of Korea's 15 major export items including semiconductors and general machinery to nine key markets all rose for the first time in a decade in June.

Economic recoveries in major markets like the U.S., China and Europe plus a surge in demand for IT devices in lockdown translate into sharp export growth for Korea.

Shipments of 13 key products rose in the double digits -- petrochemicals 51.1 percent, cars 49.9 percent, and automotive components 43.6 percent. Korea exported $57.1 billion worth of microchips alone in the first half, the second-highest amount ever.

The Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency on Thursday forecast exports for the whole of this year to increase 17 to 19 percent to a record $600-610 billion.


China is dragging its heels over diplomatic and security talks with Korea that were scheduled for the first half of this year.

Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met in southern China in April, but nothing has so far come of the plans.

The last time the two countries held 2+2 talks was in 2015. It seems China is sulking because Korea agreed to offer limited support to the U.S.-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, an informal anti-China alliance.

Beijing has also told Seoul that Chinese President Xi Jinping would visit as soon as the coronavirus pandemic eases, but the two sides have been unable to set a date. The last time Xi visited Korea was in July 2014, during the Park Geun-hye administration.

Korea has newly exempted fully vaccinated visitors from China from quarantine if they visit for important reasons like family gatherings, but China has not reciprocated.

Meanwhile, in a belligerent hour-long televised address marking the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party on Thursday, President Xi Jinping warned that anyone who tries to "bully" China "will have their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people."


HIT OR MISS? - Salma Hayek, left, and Ryan Reynolds in a scene from "The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard", a Lionsgate release. The plot puts Reynolds, Samuel Jackson and Hayek speeding across Italy to stop a madman from crippling Europe.
Maine Pointe Takes Number One Spot in Consulting.us Ranking of Top Private Equity Consulting Firms in the US
The majority of the bills signed by Gov. Eric Holcomb after the most recent legislative session officially became law on July 1.

Many will directly impact criminal justice, the prosecutors office, and the local community. Prosecutor Mark A. McCann wanted to highlight some of these important measures before they go into effect.

Some of the highlights include:

HEA 1082- High Tech Crimes Unit: More and more evidence in criminal cases is virtual in nature. Cellphone data, computers, security cameras, technology plays a huge role in everyday life and in criminal investigations. But it takes a lot of time, knowledges, and resources to be able to comb through digital evidence. HEA 1082 will help with that by providing funding for 10 high tech crime units in prosecutor offices across the state. By the end of 2021, the 10 selected counties will be announced. These units will not only service the host county but also other counties in close proximity, ensuring that every prosecutor office has access to this technology that will help speed up the judicial process and result in better and quicker investigations.

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

SEA 167- Theft of Catalytic Converters: Seemingly every county in Indiana has seen this issue pop up more and more in recent years. Catalytic converters contain extremely valuable metals that are relatively simple to remove from the bottom of a car with the right knowledge and tools. Well organized rings can hit a parking lot and come away with several converters in one night. For the vehicle owners, the theft leaves the car inoperable and repairs can be extremely costly. In light of this, SEA 167 is a two-pronged approach, increasing the penalty for stealing a catalytic converter and also adding a penalty for purchasing stolen goods. This bill should hopefully discourage what has become an organized crime with thieves grabbing multiple converters and then selling them to metal dealers who usually aware of what they are paying for.

SEA 187- Protecting Monuments, Memorials, and Statues: This bill creates some new laws and punishments regarding rioting, something that became a little more common in 2020. The punishment for rioting can now be enhanced to a Level 6 felony or Level 5 felony depending on if there is injury and property damage that exceeds a certain amount. The bill also mandates that Indiana State Police prioritize investigations regarding damage to monuments.

SEA 133- Sentencing: This act finally closes a loophole prosecutors have been pushing for a while regarding drug dealers. The bill also mandates that sentences for Level 2 or 3 felony drug offenses cant be suspended by a judge if the offender has a prior, unrelated felony. This important legislation will ensure that drug dealers stay behind bars for an appropriate amount of time.

SEA 79- Protective Orders and Domestic Battery: Unfortunately, domestic violence cases are seen by the local prosecutors office far too often. SEA 79 was authored and signed as a way to increase penalties against offenders who commit domestic violence against someone that had a protective order against the offender. The new law also goes after repeat offenders, by increasing the penalty for domestic violence if the defendant has a previous conviction of battery or strangulation against that family member. Strangulation is becoming more and more prevalent in local charging data and is a dangerous precursor to more violent crimes.

These are just a few of hundreds of new laws that will come into effect on July 1. Howard County residents are encouraged to visit http://iga.in.gov/legislative/2021/bills/ for a complete list.
Chris Pratt wanted to do something "original" with 'The Tomorrow War' rather than going back to an existing fracnhise.

The 42-year-old actor stars in the sci-fi action film as science teacher Dan Forester and was excited to star in a fresh movie.

Chris  who serves as an executive producer on the flick  told The Hollywood Reporter: "I was looking to do something original  the trouble with doing something original is oftentimes they're smaller budgets because the studio doesn't want to take a risk on something that doesn't have reach like a Marvel movie or a 'Jurassic World' movie or something based on a toy  my bread and butter.

"But this script was so good, it had everything and it was also big. I read it, and I read tons of stuff that's about aliens and time travel and soldiers and most of it sucks, and then I read this and was like, 'Oh my god, this is freaking great, let's set it up.'

"And we set it up and got to make it. How lucky am I that I get something made that probably wouldn't have been made without me?"

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The 'Guardians of the Galaxy' actor explained that he dived "head-first" into his responsibilities as an executive producer.

Chris said: "It's been a while since I felt like I had so much to learn. On this one I sure did. I jumped in head-first. You've got to get in much earlier, stay much longer, be responsible for creative decisions outside of just your own performance; I loved it."

The film is being released on Amazon Prime as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and director Chris McKay feels privileged that the film will be seen across the globe.

He said: "We're in a world right now where (with) a big original sci-fi movie, there's a bunch of known properties that are coming in for a landing in theatres weekend after weekend.

"To be able to be a filmmaker who can have a dialogue with audiences in 240 countries at one time... that's also a very exciting proposition and I feel very lucky."
Press Release

July 1, 2021 Gordon comments on IATF's additional requirements During the press conference of the Philippine Red Cross (PRC) yesterday, June 30, 2021, PRC Chairman and CEO Sen. Richard Gordon commented on the "additional requirements set by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) for incoming fully vaccinated OFWs from "low risk" countries. Sen. Gordon read guideline number 3 from Resolution No. 123-C, series of 2021, which states that: 3. Fully vaccinated individuals shall carry the following as proof of their vaccination status: (i.) Those fully vaccinated in the Philippines must carry their vaccination card which should be verified prior to their departure by a certification issued through the Certificate of Vaccination Record Portal of the Department of Information and Communications Technology or the City Health Officer of the local government unit which administered the full vaccination; or (ii.) Those fully vaccinated in countries/jurisdictions outside the Philippines must carry their official documentation of full vaccination validated through the Philippine Overseas Labor Offices (POLO), or present their International Certificate of Vaccination, whichever is applicable. (iii.) The aforementioned documents must be presented to the dedicated Bureau of Quarantine (BOQ) representative for re-verification at the Department of Transportation One-Stop-Shop (OSS) upon arrival in the Philippines; "The vaccination card should suffice as proof. The pandemic situation is hard enough as it is, we should not make it harder for people especially if they are already fully vaccinated," Chairman Gordon commented. "Imagine having to go through two more agencies when the government is already burdened with too many records and processes in relation to COVID." The PRC Chair previously sent a letter addressed to the IATF Chief Implementer, Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr., last June 14 urging an ease of the quarantine protocols for all fully vaccinated overseas Filipinos returning to the country. This was acknowledged by the task force who issued a shorter 7-day quarantine starting July 1, 2021 for incoming OFWs from countries classified as low risk by the Department of Health (DoH) Chairman Gordon and the Red Cross have been working with the IATF since the beginning of the pandemic when the latter supported the task force in swab testing.
GORDON: PHILIPPINE RED CROSS VACCINES NOT FOR SALE

The Philippine Red Cross (PRC) launched the Bakuna Bus and discussed PRC's report about the vaccination efforts to fight COVID-19 during the press conference held at the National Headquarters in Mandaluyong City.

PRC Chairman and CEO Sen. Richard Gordon announced that PRC will not stop vaccinating people. Chairman Gordon also strongly reiterates that PRC vaccines are not for sale.

"We are not in the business of selling and making profit. We are not here for business. We are here to save lives," Chairman Gordon said. "The government included the PRC to procure Moderna vaccines, without any hesitation we bought what is available to ramp up our vaccination. We just need to recover our costs to continue our operations," Gordon added.

PRC vowed to continue its efforts in fighting COVID-19 through regular testing, isolation of the affected ones, and vaccinating the unvaccinated, especially the most vulnerable.

Chairman Gordon personally asked the government for vaccines to roll out as soon as possible, "There is no time for waiting, we need to vaccinate our people immediately. PRC is ready to test, isolate, treat, and vaccinate our fellow Filipinos," he added.
Press Release

July 2, 2021 Villanueva: Taal eruption could disrupt vaccine supply arrivals, economy The government should brace for any impact brought about by Taal Volcano's eruption as the unrest could trigger several events "from a NAIA closure that will delay vaccine shipments, to factories in the country's manufacturing belt suspending work," Senator Joel Villanueva said today. Villanueva suggested that the government put on standby the P6.37 billion Quick Reaction Fund component of the so-called Calamity Fund in the 2021 national budget. That amount is distributed among 8 agencies in the DPWH, DepED, DOH, DILG, DA and DND. "From a planning perspective, let's assume the worst-case scenario, and be proactive in anticipating the needs of affected residents. Paghandaan na po natin ang mga kakailanganin ng ating mga kababayan sa Batangas at Southern Tagalog region, lalo na po sa mga residenteng nasa paligid ng danger zones," said Villanueva, chair of the Senate labor committee. "Ihanda na po natin ang ayuda para sa mga posibleng madi-displace mula sa kanilang mga tahanan." He said the January 12, 2020 eruption of Taal Volcano was a preview on how "the world's smallest active volcano can cause big damage in places beyond its immediate danger zone." The ashfall during that eruption, he added, cancelled 643 flights at NAIA and Clark airport in Pampanga, affecting more than 100,000 passengers. "If that happens again, heaven forbid, what's our Plan B for flights carrying imported vaccines? And how will we dispatch vaccines to provinces because we're using Manila as a base," he said. He also warned of an economic fallout, "and it comes at a time when factories are restarting their operations." Within the 50-kilometer radius of the volcano lies the biggest concentration of factories, he said, referring to economic zones in the Batangas, Laguna and Cavite areas. Tourism and services will also be affected as Tagaytay and other areas in Cavite and Batangas are Metro Manila's "nearest rest and recreation place." "Yung ashfall ng Taal nakakapuwing talaga yan: sa ekonomiya, sa transportasyon, at sa negosyo ng mga lugar na medyo may kalayuan na," Villanueva said. But our immediate concern should be the people of Batangas and Cavite living near the volcano, in areas designated by the government as danger zones, the senator said. The last time Taal erupted, it displaced close to 550,000 people. He said local governments who are having a hard time making ends meet during the pandemic do not have the resources to confront "a double whammy, a double V - virus and volcano." _________________________________________ Villanueva: Pag-aalboroto ng Taal, makakaapekto sa flights, pagdating ng bakuna, ekonomiya Ibayong paghahanda ang inaasahan sa gobyerno sa pag-aalboroto ng Bulkang Taal na makakaapekto ito sa samu't saring bagay, mula sa pagsasara ng paliparan sa NAIA na makakaabala sa pagdating ng bakuna, sa pagsasara ng mga pabrika sa karatig lugar, ayon kay Senator Joel Villanueva. Iminungkahi ni Villanueva na gamitin ang P6.37 bilyon na Quick Reaction Fund sa ilalim ng Calamity Fund ngayong 2021 kung sakaling matuloy ang pagsabog ng aktibong bulkan. Ang naturang pondo ay nahahati sa walong ahensya: DPWH, DepED, DOH, DILG, DA at DND. "Worst-case scenario po ang pagplanuhan natin, at maging pro-active tayo sa pagtugon sa pangangailangan ng ating mamamayan. Paghandaan na po natin ang mga kakailanganin ng ating mga kababayan sa Batangas at Southern Tagalog region, lalo na po sa mga residenteng nasa paligid ng danger zones," ani Villanueva, chair of the Senate labor committee. "Ihanda na po natin ang ayuda para sa mga posibleng madi-displace mula sa kanilang mga tahanan." Dagdag pa ng senador, ang pagsabog ng Taal noong Enero 12 noong nakaraang taon ay nakapagdala ng sobrang pinsala na lagpas sa kanyang "danger zone." Ang ashfall nito ay nagdulot ng kanselasyon sa 643 flights sa paliparan ng NAIA at Clark sa Pampanga, at nakaapekto sa mahigit 100,000 pasahero. Mayroon din itong epekto sa ekonomiya dahil maaaring tumigil ang operasyon ng mga pabrika sa mga karatig lugar, sa panahong bumabawi na ang ekonomiya ng bansa mula sa bangungot ng pandemya. Nasa loob aniya ng 50-kilometrong radius ng Taal ang pinakamalaking bilang ng mga pabrika: ang economic zones sa mga lalawigan ng Batangas, Laguna, at Cavite. Apektado rin ang turismo, dahil ang Tagaytay at ibang lugar sa Cavite at Batangas ang dinadayo ng mga lokal na turista para magbakasyon. "Yung ashfall ng Taal nakakapuwing talaga yan: sa ekonomiya, sa transportasyon, at sa negosyo ng mga lugar na medyo may kalayuan na," ani Villanueva. "Pero ang unahin natin ay ang mga residenteng taga-Batangas at Cavite na lubhang napakalapit sa Taal, lalo na yung mga nakatira sa danger zone." Noong nakaraang taon, mahigit 550,000 katao ang inilikas dahil sa pagsabog ng Taal. Double whammy sa dobol V - virus at volcano - ang mararanasan ngayon ng mga tao pag sumabog muli ang taal, dagdag ni Villanueva.
Iranian leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei appointed former top prosecutor Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei as the new head of the countrys judiciary amid accusations of abuses targeting the new appointee.

Mohseni Ejei will replace outgoing Ebrahim Raeisi, who will become in August the countrys new President following his victory at June 18 elections.

Ejehi is however subject to US sanctions for role in a crackdown on a popular uprising when he served as intelligence minister during a disputed election.

Like Ejehi, Raeisi is also facing criticism abroad. This week, a UN expert called for a new investigation into Raisis alleged role in the deaths of thousands of political prisoners when he served as a judge in the 1980s, Middle East Monitor (MEMO) reports.

Rights groups namely Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticized Raeisis election and branded it a blow for human rights over his role in in the 1988 executions.

Iran has brushed aside the charges and stressed that its legal system is independent and not influenced by political interests.

Thursday, Khamenei stressed continued efforts in the Judiciary to promote justice, uphold peoples rights, ensure legal freedoms, oversee the implementation of laws, prevent crimes, and decisively fight corruption, Teheran Times reports.
Charles Mwenda, the man from Meru who grabbed national headlines after police officers denied him a chance to bury his wife has been awarded Ksh1.5 million in compensation.

On May, 27 last year, Mwenda was transporting his wifes body from Malindi to Meru for burial when his journey was cut short by police officers enforcing lockdown measures.

Despite having all the requisite documents to travel, officers manning Keeria roadblock at the border of Meru and Tharaka Nithi counties ordered the mourners who had accompanied Mwenda to return to Malindi.

They then bundled Mwenda and his wifes remains into a police van and transported him 60km from Keeria to Kianjai police station.

Mwenda, 32, would then spend the day and night in the cold; when it started raining he covered the casket with a piece of tarp and pulled it under a lorry that had been packed at the station.

The bereaved man would later sue the Meru County Coronavirus surveillance and the State for violating his rights and freedom.

The High Court in Meru ruled that his rights had indeed been violated and ordered the government to pay him Sh1.5 million.

Justice Edward Muriithi directed Inspector General of Police Hillary Mutyambai to bear the cost.

An order is hereby issued that the actions by the police under the national police service headed by the first responded violated the provisions of the Constitution under Articles 3,4,10, 19,25, 28 and 29 and thus infringed on the rights to dignity, protection against torture and cruel, inhuman degrading treatment of the petitioner under the Bill of rights of the constitution of Kenya 2010, said the Judge.

He added: The event of being dumped all alone by the roadside in a dark cold and rainy night with a casket bearing the corpse were not only psychologically traumatising and horrific but also exposed the petitioner to physical danger at his most vulnerable time of grieving.

The respondents actions do not reflect a just and democratic society governed by the rule of law. The petitioner has indeed set out a strong case for violation of his constitutional rights.
The government is looking for Kenyans who trickled to Naivasha to attend the 2021 Safari Rally, Tourism Cabinet Secretary Najib Balala has said.

In a public notice, CS Balala said the Tourism Research Institute(TRI) is inviting everyone who participated in or attended the event to offer feedback through a targeted survey.

The survey seeks to assess the attendees experiences and the economic impact of the WRC Safari Rally on the countrys tourism sector. According to media reports, the weekend-long event pumped approximately Sh4 billion into the Kenyan economy.

feel free to take part in the survey by @TRI_Kenya. The data will be useful in gauging visitor experience and the economic impact to the destination, Balala said in a tweet.

In the survey, Kenyans will be required to disclose details about their travel arrangements such as mode of transport used and accommodation.

The Tourism institute also wants how much money the participants and attendees spent during the event.

The survey also requires participants to disclose levels of satisfaction with the events planning and execution.

The feedback will help the government plan better for the 2022 WRC Safari Rally after President Uhuru Kenyatta announced that the Safari Rally will be annual event until 2026.

To take the survey, scan the QR code provided or log on to: tri.go.ke.
Crime busters in Nairobi believe they have made a major breakthrough in cracking down an organised crime syndicate that has been terrorizing Nairobi city dwellers.

Detectives on Thursday said they carried out a sting operation in Nairobis South B estate, where they arrested two suspects and recovered an assortment of stolen gadgets and other valuables.

The sleuths traced a mobile phone signal from a gadget that was stolen last weekend to the fifth floor of Itumo Apartment in South B.

The security agents seized more than 300 smartphones, three smart television sets, a car tracker, a laptop, several thumb drives, dozens of emptied wallets, bags, and an assortment of documents  including bank statements  belonging to different people.

Makadara Sub-county Police Commander Timon Odingo confirmed the sting operation and identified the suspects as 27-year-old Samuel Kahuro Wanjiku, popularly known as Timo and 37-year-old Margaret Maina.

The duo is believed to be part of a bigger gang that is behind a spate of phone-snatching, car-jackings, and burglary in the capital city.

The police commander said the sting operation followed a complaint filed at Central Police Station by Ms Mary Njihia on June 27.

The complainant, Ms Njihia, claimed to have been sprayed with an unknown chemical in her eyes on Luthuli Avenue and robbed of money, an Iphone XS and a Camon CX, all worth Sh167,000, by unknown people, Mr Odingo said.

One of her phones was linked to another phone belonging to her brother, which allowed police to track the stolen gadgets.

The signal from the phone was coming from Itumo Apartment, fifth floor, door number 3E in South B, the police boss said.

Police have since reached out to several victims through the contacts saved in the stolen gadgets, who all confirmed they were recently robbed.

Preliminary investigations show that high-end phones are usually sold in Tanzania, while the cheaper ones find a ready market in the slums.

After interrogating the suspects, we have also obtained a written record of what they intended to sell, which town they wanted to hit next, and the types of phones they intended to steal, Odingo said.
President Uhuru Kenyatta has decried the rising cases of Gender Based Violence (GBV) in Africa saying the situation had reached global emergency levels.

He said Covid-19 had exacerbated the already dire global GBV situation and called for urgent corrective action by the international community.

Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the situation and turned Gender-Based Violence into a global emergency. Emerging data indicates a surge of at least 25% in violence against women around the world, President Kenyatta said.

The Kenyan Head of State spoke on Wednesday evening during a panel discussion at the opening session of the Generation Equality Forum (GEF) in Paris, France. GEF is a global gender equality gathering convened by UN Women and co-hosted by Mexico and France.

President Kenyatta, who is accompanied by Cabinet Secretaries Raychelle Omamo (Foreign Affairs), James Macharia (Infrastructure), and Prof Margaret Kobia (Gender), is in Paris on a two-day Official visit during which he is scheduled to hold bilateral talks with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

President Kenyatta noted that GBV is a global challenge affecting over 36 percent of women aged between 15 and 49 years and pointed out that Africa had recorded a spike in gender-related violence in the last year.

He said Cameroon (35%), South Africa (37%), Central African Republic (50%), Liberia (50%), and Kenya (50%) had recorded some of the highest increases or GBVon the African continent in the last twelve months.

Once again, President Kenyatta reiterated Kenyas commitment to ending all forms of GBV by the year 2030 saying, the country will continue tightening its anti-GBV policies by adopting relevant international treaties including the ILO Convention 190.

Kenya has made significant progress in addressing Gender-Based Violence. I have made a personal commitment to end Female Genital Mutilation during my tenure and to end all forms of Gender-Based Violence by 2030 as envisioned in the Sustainable Development Goals, he said.

He said Kenya will invest over 23 million USD in GBV prevention programmes by 2022, and increase budgetary allocation to 50 million USD by 2026. The investment will include an annual 1 million USD research fund and a GBV survivors kitty.

Further, President Kenyatta announced Kenyas elaborate plans to introduce data-supported policies in its anti-GBV efforts including a specific module in next years annual demographic health survey, roll out of an electronic information management system, and integration of GBV in the countrys ambitious universal health coverage program.

On enforcement of GBV laws and policies, President Kenyatta said Kenya will implement an integrated national police service response mechanism dubbed policare as well as establish GBV recovery centres in all of its 47 counties.

At the session hosted by President Emmanuel Macron and attended by several global leaders among them UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and EU Council President Charles Michel, President Kenyatta rallied the international community to commit more financial resources to the global fight against GBV.

To meaningfully deliver on these commitments will require substantial funding. It is my hope that a key outcome of the GEF will be a significant increase in funding from international partners to boost domestic efforts to eliminate GBV, President Kenyatta said.

US Vice President Kamala Harris, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel also addressed the opening session of the three-day global conference.

Other notable speakers were Prime Minister of Finland Sanna Marin, President of Mexico Andres Obrador and his Argentina counterpart Alberto Fernandez as well as former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Melinda Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and President of the African Development Bank Akinwumi Adesina.

In their speeches, Prime Minister Marin and Mrs Gates announced financial commitments of 150 million Euros and 2.1 billion US Dollars in new funding for the global gender equality agenda.
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Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee writes to PM Narendra Modi, urges him to reduce taxes charged by Centre on petrol and diesel.him to reduce taxes charged by Centre on petrol and diesel.
Deccan Herald

Signs of BJP central leadership weakening

Up to early this year, PM Modi, who in effect is also the party high command, had seemed invincible but recent losses have emboldened the partys regional leaders

by Bharat Bhushan

July 1, 2021

The waning success of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah as vote-catchers may have contributed to a weakening of their leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This is suggested by the fratricidal rivalries surfacing in BJP-ruled states.

If they could brush off electoral defeats in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh (in 2018), those in West Bengal and Kerala proved to be their nemesis. The Modi-Shah duo bet their shirts on the West Bengal elections and lost. Their biggest catch, Mukul Roy, has already done ghar wapsi, and several legislators elected on the BJP ticket are apparently waiting to cross back to the Trinamool Congress (TMC). This to-an-fro between the BJP and TMC may also repeat itself in Tripura.

Perhaps the first admission of concern about Modis ability to swing an adverse election was expressed in the BJPs decision in March 2020 to replace Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat with Lok Sabha MP Tirath Singh Rawat. Now with six months before the Assembly polls, even Tirath Singh Rawat seems to be in trouble.

Nowhere is the weakening of the central leadership of the BJP more evident than in Uttar Pradesh. Prime Minister Modi could not effect changes in Yogi Adityanaths cabinet, which would not have been difficult earlier. Instead, Adityanaths denial of a cabinet position to Modi-loyalist Arvind Kumar Sharma pushed the central leadership to save face by appointing him as the seventeenth vice-president of the state BJP.

Two other developments reflect the intensity of the internecine party struggle in UP.

A local newspaper sent 30 reporters to uncover distress burials due to Covid-19 along a thousand km stretch of the Ganges banks across 27 districts of UP. Their explosive reports and photographs exposed Adityanaths mismanagement of the pandemic. Usually, regional newspapers avoid taking positions that might affect the flow of government advertisement. So while welcoming the news expose against Adityanath, sceptics may be forgiven for wondering whether powerful forces in the BJP establishment backed the reportage. Nor has the uncharacteristic expose invited retaliation from the normally testy Adityanath government.

Following Adityanaths recovery from a challenge to his leadership, details of a land scandal have surfaced. Land for constructing the Ram Temple at Ayodhya is said to have been purchased at more than twelve times its initial price. Accusations of financial mismanagement are directed at the Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra, a trust tasked by the Union Home Ministry to construct the Ram Temple. The relevant land registry papers could not have become so widely available to the media and Opposition politicians without a nod and wink from the state administration. How else would it have come into the public domain that part of the land was Construction Committee. Would it be far-fetched to see the unfolding of this land scandal involving people close to the top leadership of the BJP as a retaliatory shot at Adityanaths detractors?

New rallying points are emerging around the challengers in the BJP-ruled states, and this can only happen in a disciplined party like the BJP if the centre is perceived to be weak. The challenge to BS Yediyurappas chief ministership in Karnataka has been made to stand down for now. But the contenders were perhaps only able to mount a bid to unseat him because they thought the central leadership could be pushed. Rebel activity in Madhya Pradesh has seen Shivraj Singh Chauhan fighting off a challenge from his deputy, Narottam Mishra. He is ostensibly supported by Kailash Vijayvargiya, another ambitious BJP leader in the state.

In Rajasthan, the failure of "Operation Sachin Pilot" showcased the collapse of the Modi-Shah duo to cut Vasundhara Raje to size. In neighbouring Gujarat, the differences between Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and the state unit president CR Patil have been out in the open. In Himachal Pradesh, the central leadership had to step in to prevent the differences between Chief Minister Jairam Thakur and Minister of State for Finance Anurag Thakur from spiralling out of control. Even in Kerala, where the party failed to win a single seat in the recent assembly elections, BJP leaders are levelling charges at each other of political sabotage and misappropriation of election funds. Allegations include involvement in a highway heist of Rs 3.5 crore during the elections.

Up to early this year, Prime Minister Modi, who in effect is also the party high command, had seemed invincible. He appointed chief ministers of his choice from Haryana to Himachal Pradesh. He no longer seems to be able to rule the roost.

(The writer is a Delhi-based journalist)
Politicization of COVID-19 Should be Rejected

Press Release

2021/07/02

The past year and more have seen repeated resurgence of the coronavirus and the pandemic is still wreaking havoc. Since the very beginning, China has been joining hands with all other countries in an effort to pull through the tough time together. China has launched the largest emergency humanitarian operation since the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, and supported global economic recovery and post-pandemic reconstruction, contributing Chinas part to the building of a global community of health for all.

At the moment, staying united to fight the pandemic is still the pressing priority for the world. However, some countries have recently been renewing their efforts in politicizing on the COVID-19 origin tracing issue. Instead of upholding science, reason and objectivity in advancing the research of COVID-19 origins, they keep hyping up the "lab leak theory" and relentlessly attacking China.

China has made clear its serious and responsible attitude toward origin-tracing and has taken the lead in collaborating with WHO on global origin-tracing. Since last year, China has twice invited WHO experts (including those from the US, UK, Japan and Australia etc.) to China for joint study of origins. In March, 2021, the WHO released the origin-tracing study report of the China-WHO joint mission, drawing a clear conclusion that lab leak is extremely unlikely. The report was co-authored by more than 30 top global experts in various fields, which is widely representative and highly professional.

Its common understanding that the origin-tracing of COVID-19 must not be politicized and that it must be based on science, conducted through cooperation and proceeded with global collaboration. WHO experts also pointed out that future origin-tracing should be conducted in multiple countries and regions instead of bounding to one location.

Many scientists in the international community, including Dr. Danielle Anderson, a former Assistant Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School who once worked in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, have expressed unequivocal opposition to politicizing the origin-tracing by some in the US. Dr. Anderson said that she's dumbfounded by the portrayal of the lab by some media outside China, and the toxic attacks on scientists that have ensued. Dr. Anderson pointed out that there were strict protocols and requirements at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and entering and exiting the facility was a carefully choreographed endeavor. Responding to the Wall Street Journal report which claimed three researchers from the lab were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms in November 2019, she said no one she knew at the Wuhan institute was ill toward the end of 2019.

Besides, Massimo Galli, head of the Infectious Diseases Unit at the University of Milan-affiliated Luigi Sacco Hospital in Milan, Italy, said that the coronavirus is an unknown virus with no signs of genome engineering inside and the "lab-leak" theory has no scientific basis at all. Galli and three other Italian experts believe that the virus is 99% likely to be the result of natural spillover.

Facts have proved time and again that the accusation of "Wuhan laboratory leaking the novel coronavirus" has no factual basis. But some people in the US have been clamoring for intelligence-led investigation in disregard of science and facts. It is reported that the US experts on the coronavirus origins task force of the authoritative medical journal the Lancet are under "threat", and the chair of the task force is even "pressured" to ask the experts on the task force to renounce the "bat-spillover" theory, which is underpinned by ample scientific evidence, and turn to support the "lab leak" theory. Some experts may have to resign in order to uphold their scientific positions.

It violates the spirit of science, undermines global cooperation in origin tracing and defiles human justice for certain people and certain countries to sinisterly force scientists to bow to their hegemony, bullying and coercion. Relevant countries and people should immediately halt their politicization of origins study out of their hidden political agenda because such practices are immoral, unpopular and doomed to failure.

Origin-tracing is vital to the global fight against the pandemic, and concerns the well-being of the entire humanity. As a responsible major country, China will continue to, with a science-based, open and transparent attitude, actively support and participate in the global origin-tracing research, and steadily make new contributions to this endeavor.
As a beam of beryllium comes in from the left, the deuteron Trojan horse intercepts it at the target and delivers its neutron soldier. This allows the decay products of the beryllium and neutron reactions to be captured by a curved array of six detectors on the right. CREDIT 2021 Hayakawa et al.

There is a significant discrepancy between theoretical and observed amounts of lithium in our universe.

This is known as the cosmological lithium problem, and it has plagued cosmologists for decades. Now, researchers have reduced this discrepancy by around 10%, thanks to a new experiment on the nuclear processes responsible for the creation of lithium. This research could point the way to a more complete understanding of the early universe.

There is a famous saying that, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." This holds true in every academic domain, but it's especially common in cosmology, the study of the entire universe, where what we think we should see and what we really see doesn't always match up. This is largely because many cosmological phenomena are difficult to study due to inaccessibility. Cosmological phenomena are usually out of our reach because of the extreme distances involved, or often they have occurred before the human brain had even evolved to worry about them in the first place -- such is the case with the big bang.

Project Assistant Professor Seiya Hayakawa and Lecturer Hidetoshi Yamaguchi from the Center for Nuclear Study at the University of Tokyo, and their international team are especially interested in one area of cosmology where theory and observation are very misaligned, and that is the issue of the missing lithium, the cosmological lithium problem (CLP). In a nutshell, theory predicts that in the minutes following the big bang that created all matter in the cosmos, there should be an abundance of lithium around three times greater than what we actually observe. But Hayakawa and his team accounted for some of this discrepancy and have thus paved the way for research that may one day resolve it entirely.

"13.7 billion years ago, as matter coalesced from the energy of the big bang, common light elements we all recognize -- hydrogen, helium, lithium and beryllium -- formed in a process we call Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN)," said Hayakawa. "However, BBN is not a straightforward chain of events where one thing becomes another in sequence; it is actually a complex web of processes where a jumble of protons and neutrons builds up atomic nuclei, and some of these decay into other nuclei. For example, the abundance of one form of lithium, or isotope -- lithium-7 -- mostly results from the production and decay of beryllium-7. But it has either been overestimated in theory, underobserved in reality, or a combination of the two. This needs to be resolved in order to really understand what took place way back then."

Lithium-7 is the most common isotope of lithium, accounting for 92.5% of all observed. However, even though the accepted models of BBN predict the relative amounts of all elements involved in BBN with extreme accuracy, the expected amount of lithium-7 is around three times greater than what is actually observed. This means there is a gap in our knowledge about the formation of the early universe. There are several theoretical and observational approaches which aim to resolve this, but Hayakawa and his team simulated conditions during BBN using particle beams, detectors and an observational method known as the Trojan horse.

"We scrutinized more than ever before one of the BBN reactions, where beryllium-7 and a neutron decay into lithium-7 and a proton. The resulting levels of lithium-7 abundance were slightly lower than anticipated, about 10% lower," said Hayakawa. "This is a very difficult reaction to observe since beryllium-7 and neutrons are unstable. So we used deuteron, a hydrogen nucleus with an extra neutron, as a vessel to smuggle a neutron into a beryllium-7 beam without disturbing it. This is a unique technique, developed by an Italian group we collaborate with, in which the deuteron is like the Trojan horse in Greek myth, and the neutron is the soldier who sneaks into the impregnable city of Troy without tipping off the guards (destabilizing the sample). Thanks to the new experimental result, we can offer future theoretical researchers a slightly less daunting task when trying to resolve the CLP."

###

Journal article

S. Hayakawa, M. La Cognata, L. Lamia, H. Yamaguchi, D. Kahl, K. Abe, H. Shimizu, L. Yang, O. Beliuskina, S. M. Cha, K. Y. Chae, S. Cherubini, P. Figuera, Z. Ge, M. Gulino, J. Hu, A. Inoue, N. Iwasa, A. Kim, D. Kim, G. Kiss, S. Kubono, M. La Commara, M. Lattuada, E. J. Lee, J. Y. Moon, S. Palmerini, C. Parascandolo, S. Y. Park, V. H. Phong, D. Pierroutsakou, R. G. Pizzone, G. G. Rapisarda, S. Romano, C. Spitaleri, X. D. Tang, O. Trippella, A. Tumino, and N. T. Zhang, "Constraining the Primordial Lithium Abundance: New Cross-Section Measurement of the 7Be + n Reactions Updates the Total 7Be Destruction Rate" Astrophysical Journal Letters,

Funding

This works was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Nos. 15K17631, 18K13556 and 19K03883). K. Y. C. and S. M. C. were supported by National Research Foundation of Korea (Nos. 2020R1I1A1A01065120, 2020R1A2C1005981, 2019K2A9A2A10018827, and 2016R1A5A1013277). D. K. would like to thank the UK STFC for support. G. G. K. acknowledges the supports by NKFIH (NN128072) and from the Janos Bolyai research fellowship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and from UNKP-20-5-DE-2 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities of Hungary. The authors acknowledge Finanziamenti di Linea 2 and Starting Grant 2020 by University of Catania.



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An uncrewed Russian Progress 78 spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station's Poisk module on the space-facing side of the Russian segment at 8:59 p.m. EDT, two days after lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Sunday, Tuesday June 29 at 7:27 p.m. (4:27 a.m. Wednesday, June 30, Baikonur time).

The spacecraft were flying over southeast Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile at the time of docking.

Carrying more than 3,600 pounds of food, fuel, and supplies for the Expedition 65 crew, the Progress 78 resupply spacecraft will spend almost five months at the station. The cargo craft is scheduled to perform an automated undocking and relocation to the new "Nauka" Multipurpose Laboratory Module in late October. Named for the Russian word for "science," Nauka is planned to launch to the space station in July.

NASA Flight Engineers Megan McArthur, Shane Kimbrough and Mark Vande Hei joined Flight Engineer Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency) on Thursday and continued readying the Cargo Dragon for its undocking on July 6 at 11:05 a.m. EDT. The quartet is packing and organizing Dragon before final loading of critical research samples begins on Monday for analysis back on Earth.

Microgravity research has been proceeding apace as always with the astronauts exploring an array of space phenomena today. Commander Akihiko Hoshide worked on the Plant Habitat Facility throughout the day preparing for upcoming botany research. McArthur peered at protein crystals through a microscope before investigating how microgravity affects bacteria.

Kimbrough conducted operations inside the Microgravity Science Glovebox exploring ways to harness nanoparticles to fabricate and manufacture new materials. Vande Hei serviced the Cold Atom Lab, a research device that explores the physics of temperatures near absolute zero, preparing some components for return to Earth aboard Dragon next week.

On-Orbit Status Report

Payloads

Cold Atom Lab (CAL): The crew attached CAL science module 2 to a battery and packed it for return to the ground. The CAL produces clouds of atoms that are chilled to about one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero, much colder than the average temperature of deep space. At these low temperatures, atoms have almost no motion allowing scientists to study fundamental behaviors and quantum characteristics that are difficult or impossible to probe at higher temperatures. In microgravity, researchers may be able to achieve even colder temperatures than what is possible on the ground and observe these cold atom clouds for longer periods of time.

Dreams: Following the multi-night experiment data collection, the crew removed the hardware, transferred the data, and stowed the hardware. Sleep plays a major role in human health and well-being. Insufficient sleep, or sleep disorders can increase the risk of developing medical conditions, such as cardiovascular diseases, and can impair task performance. The Sleep Monitoring in Space with Dry- Electroencephalography (EEG) Headband (Dreams) is a technology demonstration investigation that utilizes the Dry-EEG Headband: an effective, affordable, and comfortable solution to monitor astronaut sleep quality during long-duration spaceflight aboard the ISS.

Investigating the Structure of Paramagnetic Aggregates from Colloidal Ellipsoids (InSPACE-4) Experiment Runs 4 & 5: The crew continued the science runs for InSPACE-4. Due to oscillation of the Field of View (FOV) in previous science runs, today the crew installed the backup sample vial. InSPACE-4 studies the assembly of tiny structures from colloids using magnetic fields. These structures change the properties of the assembled material, such as its mechanical response to or interaction with light and heat. Microgravity allows observation of these assembly processes free of confining sample walls and sedimentation and during timescales not possible using simulated microgravity. Results could provide insight into how to harness nanoparticles to fabricate and manufacture new materials.

Microbial Tracking-3 (MT-3): The crew continued with the week-long sampling operations for MT-3. The Quantifying Selection for Pathogenicity and Antibiotic Resistance in Bacteria and Fungi on the ISS, a Microbial Tracking Study (Microbial Tracking-3 or MT-3) investigation, continues a series of investigations focused on ongoing monitoring of pathogenicity (ability to cause disease) and antibiotic resistance in potentially disease-causing bacteria and fungi present on the ISS. The investigation aims to identify, analyze, and characterize pathogenicity, antibiotic resistance, and genomics to augment the NASA GeneLab with the statistical confidence to characterize microbes associated with closed habitation and predict those that may pose a threat to crew health.

NanoRacks Module-9: Continuing the science compliment of Nanoracks Module-9, the crew performed the 4th set of periodic operations. In these operations the crew removed two tubes from container 1052, opened the blue clamps to deactivate the experiments, and shook them to mix the contents. The experiments in these tubes look at the effects of microgravity on brewer's yeast and radish seeds. NanoRacks Module-9 consists of multiple student experiments housed within a NanoRacks Module container in individual Mixture Tubes. Some experiments require crew interaction to remove clamps in order to mix materials to activate and/or deactivate the experiments. The experiments within the module are returned to the ground for analysis.

Oral Biofilms in Space (OBiS) Day 3 for Session Packs 21-25: The crew performed day-3 of the experiment session by configuring the fluid flow control valves. Effect of Environmental Stressors on Oral Biofilm Growth and Treatment (Oral Biofilms in Space) 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.

Plant Habitat-04 Preparation: In preparation for upcoming plant growth experiment activities, the crew replaced CO2 bottles, filters, ethylene scrubbers, etc. Microgravity Growth of New Mexico Hatch Green Chile as a Technical Display of Advanced Plant Habitat's Capabilities (Plant Habitat-04) demonstrates using the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) by growing peppers in space for the first time. An excellent source of Vitamin C, peppers are more difficult to cultivate than many possible space crops because they take longer to germinate, grow, and develop fruit. The investigation includes microbial analysis to improve understanding of plant-microbe interactions in space and assessment of flavor and texture, which vary based on the growth environment and care such as amount of watering.

Phase II Real-time Protein Crystal Growth (RTPCG-2) Plate 2C1/7: The crew set up the appropriate microscope hardware, observed and took photos of the crystal growth screening plate S/N 2C1/7. Crystals were observed in 4 of the 7 wells and the ground team was happy with the results. RTPCG-2 demonstrates new methods for producing high-quality protein crystals in microgravity. Previous work has shown that microgravity can sometimes produce high-quality protein crystals that can be analyzed to identify possible targets for drugs to treat disease. RTPCG-2 tests high-quality proteins crystals for detailed analysis back on Earth.

Systems

Cargo Dragon Cargo Operations: Last night, the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) stowed the empty ISS Roll-Out Solar Array (IROSA) Flight Support Equipment (FSE) in the unpressurized Trunk of Cargo Dragon SpaceX-22 (SpX-22) for disposal. Today, the crew performed cargo transfer operations for SpX-22 and completed packing the Dragon basement. SpX-22 undock is scheduled for July 6th to return cargo and payloads to the ground.

Temperature and Humidity Control (THC) Intermodule Ventilation (IMV) Flow Measurement: As part of system health monitoring, the crew used a Velocicalc tool to measure the amount of airflow through selected ventilation inlets and outlets. Today's measurements were taken in Node 1, 2, and 3, Airlock, Cupola, LAB, International Docking Adapter (IDA) Forward, IDA Zenith, Bigelow Expandable Aerospace Module (BEAM), and the NanoRack Airlock (NRAL).

Completed Task List Activities:

None

Today's Ground Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

Attitude Control System (ACS) Optimized Propellant Maneuver (OPM) to -XVV

CMG Maneuver to -XVV Torque Equilibrium Attitude (TEA)

OPM Safing & Recovery Commanding

78P Docking Preparation Commanding

Look Ahead Plan

Friday, July 2 (GMT 183)

Payloads:

AC Stow, CIR/ACME Reconfigure to CFI-G Part 2

ELF

Food Acceptability

Food Physiology

GLACIER Sample Transfer

ICF

InSPACE-4

Microbial Tracking-3

POLAR CS Transfers

PWM 3 and 4 Preparation

RTPCG-2

Wanted Poster for W302 Cable

Systems:

SpX-22 Cargo Operations

Saturday, July 3 (GMT 184)

Payloads:

Food Physiology

Systems:

Crew Off-Duty

Sunday, July 4 (GMT 185)

Payloads:

Food Physiology

MERLIN Sample Pouch Transfer

NanoRacks Mod-9 Operations 5

Systems:

Crew Off-Duty

Today's Planned Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

Dreams Dry-EEG Headband doffing after recording

HRF Generic HRF Centrifuge Frozen Blood Collection

HRF Generic MELFI Sample Insertion

EXPRESS Rack 7 Laptop Computer Power Cycle

Cell Biology Experiment Facility Left (CBEF-L) Measurement Experiment Unit A Attachment

HRF Generic Urine Collection

Dreams Questionnaire Filling

Real-time Protein Crystal Growth Microscopy Plate S/N 2

Dragon Cargo Transfer

IMV Flow Measurement Survey

OBiS MERLIN OBiS Assemblies Removal

OBiS Flow Reconfiguration

OBiS MERLIN OBiS Assemblies Insertion

ISS Portable Glove Bag (IPGB) Setup

CBEF-L Measurement Experiment Unit A Detachment

USOS Window Shutter Close

OBiS Fluid Chamber Removal

OBiS MELFI OBiS Biofilms Session Pack Insertion

Nanoracks Module-9 Ops Session 4

Plant Habitat Dual MWA Preparation

Microbial Tracking-3 Environmental Sample Collection

Plant Habitat Facility Prep A

Waste and Hygiene Compartment (WHC) Manual Fill

PCS Laptop Relocate

Microbial Tracking-3 Sample Polar Insert

CAL Science Module 2 Pack

InSPACE-4 Runs

Experiment Run Ops

Dreams Dry-EEG Headband Doff and Stow

Plant Habitat Facility Prep B

HRF Generic MELFI Sample Retrieval and Insertion Operations

ISS HAM Kenwood Radio Power Down in Columbus

ISS HAM Radio Power Down in Service Module

Health Maintenance System (HMS) Automated External Defibrillator (AED) Inspection

HMS ISS Food Intake Tracker (ISS FIT)

APEX-07 Hardware Deactivation

HRF Generic Saliva Collection 10 Minutes

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PWM stands for Plant Water Management. A novel way to use hydroponics to grow plants in space - no earth (lower case ) required!

As demonstrated here by Mark (who has great pedagogical skills), and me (who was not very awake apparently ). Growing plants and food in space is important as fresh food has the most vitamins and is healthiest. We have made great progress growing crops in weightlessness where nothing is easy. How do you get food into the plant roots in an environment where their is no soil, no rain and even if there was it would float all around! Hydroponics is the answer in this experiment where everything a plant needs is "injected" straight to the roots, the red fluids you can see. Researchers compare results with control studies on Earth to prepare for longer voyages farther into our Solar System. www.nasa.gov/feature/glenn/2021/project-examines-how-to-w...

Plant Water Management - nom de code : PWM. C'est une nouvelle facon d'utiliser l'hydroponie pour faire pousser des plantes dans l'espace, avec le tres pedagogue Marc et moi-meme - qui apparemment manquais de sommeil [emoji blague]. Cette technique n'utilise pas de terre ; il faut donc apporter a la plante les sels mineraux, les elements essentiels a sa croissance et une bonne aeration pour que la plante germe et se developpe correctement. On utilise pour ca le phenomene de capillarite, qui fonctionne encore mieux en impesanteur que sur Terre. Pour s'en assurer, les chercheurs comparent avec des experiences similaires dans leurs laboratoires. A terme, ces systemes nous aideront a faire pousser nos aliments pour des voyages spatiaux au long cours.

Credits: ESA/NASA larger image

Space Biology, Astrobiology,

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A familiar face was back in action this past Saturday at the Miami Fair and made his presence well-known. Glenn Le Drew returned after a four-year layoff and it did not seem to give him any disadvantage as he won six races on a single card for the first time in his career.

Le Drew started off the day with a bang, winning in 1:58:4 aboard eight-year-old gelding Read The Proposal in the fastest mile on the card. That mile was a sign of things to come: in eight starts, Le Drew finished in the top three a total of seven times to place him atop the driver stats for the track.

Le Drew has teamed up with leading trainer Trevor Williams and the duo look unstoppable after the first day of racing in Manitoba. Now in his 18th year of driving, Le Drew has banked $481,859 in winnings in his career. Through seven years of training, Williams has won $269,077 in purses and the two horsemen have 483 wins combined.

When asked about the driver change to Le Drew this summer, Williams responded Honestly, my driver has always been Don Howlett, said Williams when asked about his partnership with Le Drew. [Don] has always handled my horses and done amazing, but this year he bought some Manitoba Breds (a colt and a filly) that left me without a driver in stakes for my colt and filly. Most drivers here already had one in there as well, so I thought outside of the box and went with someone whose driving style suits my horses and someone I know who has had a lot of success in the past. And because he is travelling so far, its only fair I offer him the whole barn. Even with four years off, I knew my horses were in very capable hands.

The Howlett and Williams tandem has been one of the top connections at the Manitoba Circuit for some time now and the split has created somewhat of a Brady-Belichick rivalry with Williams and his new partner Le Drew winning the first round. However, Howlett should not be counted out as he has 523 wins as a driver, netting him $549,540 in purse winnings.

Le Drew is also happy with the summer-long partnership and is more than happy to make the long commute from Regina, SK to Miami, MB  a round trip that clocks in at 1,060 kilometres and more than 10 hours of driving  every weekend. Trevor wanted a commitment from me, and I wanted a commitment from him. We got off to a great start and as long as there are horses for me to drive, I am glad to make the drive out there.

The news breaking regarding Saskatoon hosting harness racing again this fall gave the Saskatchewan-based Le Drewmore motivation to return this year. When the news broke, I thought it would be nice to come back driving this year. I would really like the chance to drive at Marquis downs one more time, Le Drew excitedly stated. The last time he drove in the Province of Saskatchewan was in July of 2014.

Although four years have passed since participating actively in August 2017, nothing has really changed for Le Drew. He proudly displayed the same silks he had on before his brief leave. Family is at the forefront of importance in harness racing and the Le Drew family is no different. His decision on wearing his same colours was an easy decision. Those were my dads colours...Its kind of a tradition to wear your dads colours and it was an easy decision for me. The family aspect is an important one to Le Drew by keeping the colours the same that his dad and his two brothers had worn.

Le Drew will be back in action on Saturday (July 3) and will be ready for The Lady Crocus Stakes. He will be driving the three-year-old filly named Filly for trainer Trevor Williams, and the connections will have to overcome post position eight.

The first stake race of the Miami Fair season, the Lady Crocus will take place at roughly 5:20 p.m. EDT and is open to three-year-old Manitoba bred fillies. The eight-horse field will fight for their share of the $12,670 purse and get an early chance to prove why they should be considered the provinces top three-year-old filly. Here's an overview of the field:

Baby Badger, PP1. Baby Badger will get the inside post and will look to bounce back from last weekends performance where she finished a distanced fourth in her lifetime debut after suffering interference early in the mile Sired by Andreoli Hanover, Baby Badgers dam is Honeybadger. Honeybadger made 77 lifetime starts , won three and earned a modest $20,679 in a career that concluded on the Manitoba circuit. Baby Badger is a homebred owned by Kevin Hildebrandt and Aurel Vodon. Hildebrandt is also the trainer and will be in the bike on Saturday.

Send Me A Tweet, PP2. Send Me A Tweet also is looking for a bounce back after last weekends fourth-place finish in 2:06.1. This filly is owned by Wanda Howlett and Dwayne Taylor with Marc Fillion as trainer. Another daughter of Andreoli Hanover bred by Hildebrandt & Vodon, Send Me A Tweet`s dam is Red Bird Of Buxton, who made 74 lifetime starts and made it to the winner`s circle 13 times. The mare won $95,653 lifetime and finished her racing career in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Don Howlett will take hold of the reins on Saturday.

Moonshine N Melody, PP3. Only two in this field saw any race action in 2020 and one of them is Moonshine N Melody. This filly made four starts in 2020 and made $2,230 in winnings. She never got a win, but she picked up two second and her fastest mile time was 2:05.3. Saturdays start will be Moonshine N Melodys first start in 2021. The filly was bred by Darryl and Sherri Mason and is currently owned by Cory Manning. Moonshine N Melody is a uniquely-bred daughter of Armbro Baylor from the trotting-bred mare Tequila Lullaby (Balanced Image - Perfect Ironstone - Nearly Perfect). Cory Manning trains the filly and will be in the driver seat on Saturday.

Love To Live, PP4. Love To Live will leave from post four in her second race of 2021. Last time out she finished third, timed in 2:04, but could have been second if it wasnt for an untimely break just before the wire. Currently owned by breeder and trainer Arthur Rey, this daughter of of Bolero Charles- Inquire will have Dean Rey driving.

State Your Case, PP5. Beside Love To Live is State Your Case, starting from post five.Owned and bred by Tara and Garett Isman, State Your Case is a daughter of State Treasurer from the Camluck mare Tilly Seelster. Campaigned predominantly in Ontario, Tilly Seelster had a four-year racing career and made $81,335 in 64 starts. State Your Case finished third in her only start this year, individually timed in 2:05.4 with George Isman in the bike. In the Lady Crocus, Tyler Grundy will be in the bike for this Tara Isman-trained filly.

Millies Millions, PP6. Millies Millions looks to continue the success she had in her two-year-old campaign by coming up with the win from the far outside position. Millies Million was the 2020 two-year-old of the year in Manitoba and has had a good start to 2021 to make the case she could deserve the three-year-old title this season. This will be the fillys second start of the year , coming in off f a win last weekend in 2:04.1 and she is by far the most successful horse in this field. Millies Million has had six lifetime starts and boasts four wins, one second and one third. It would be hard to keep this filly off your betting ticket this weekend as she could easily be the betting favourite. Millies Million (Armbro Baylor - Untold Millions) is currently owned and trained by Richard Rey and Michel Rey will continue to drive this filly.

Havinfuninthesun, PP7. The second Tara & Garrett Isman-bred and owned filly, Havinfuninthesun will get the inside post as a trailer. The filly made herfirst lifetime start last weekend and unfortunately finished a distanced sixth after interference late in the mile. Havinfuninthesun is sired by Sunshine Beach and the dam is Emmasphere, who made over 100 starts and banked more than $100,000 in earnings while getting to the winners circle 30 times. George Isman is tasked with driver duties for Havinfuninthesun on Saturday.

Filly, PP8. No, this is not a typo, the name of the eight horse is Filly. The 6-5 morning line favourite is bred, trained, and owned by Trevor Williams. A winner in her debut last week, Filly is by Blue Burner from the 17-time winner Miss Million Bud. Williams had nine trainer starts last week and got his horses into the winners circle six times. Glenn Le Drew continues his comeback tour and looks to add the 2021 Lady Crocus to his resume.

To view the entries for Saturday's card, click the following link: Saturday Entries - Miami Fair

(A Trot Insider Exclusive by Trey Colbeck)
Houston Women's Rehab Center Offers Addiction Treatment for Women

NEWS PROVIDED BYJuly 2, 2021ALVIN, Texas, July 2, 2021 / Standard Newswire / -- Adult and Teen Challenge of Texas, Houston Women's Rehab Center in Alvin, Texas announces their planned expansion to include a newly built 40-bed dorm.The Houston Women's Rehab Center serves women suffering from drug and alcohol addiction with a 12-month residential discipleship and vocational training program. On-campus, women receive room and board, group and individual biblical counseling, parenting classes, spiritual support, relapse prevention, anger management, drug and alcohol education, and social/recreational activities as well as vocational rehabilitation and sober living for program graduates.Director Dr. Dolly Thomas anticipates the new dorm being a place of refuge for recovering female addicts in the Houston area."Our new expanded bed capacity will allow more women to receive help and healing. More families will be restored, and more hope given to the hopeless. We are excited to reach the lost and brokenhearted and abused of this great city," Dr. Thomas says.Houston Women's Rehab Center accepts ladies after an interview and medical health screening. Many participants enrolled in the recovery program are at Teen Challenge as a condition of their probation or parole. Applicants need to take care of any warrants or legal proceedings before entry. Unlike a conventional rehab, this recovery program encompasses every aspect of life, guiding people to become mentally sound, emotionally balanced, socially adjusted, and physically well. It offers nonmedical recovery methods such as moral guidance, counseling, and biblical principles to life-controlling problems.Adult and Teen Challenge of Texas is able to provide affordable drug recovery by generous charitable donations from the community. Houston Women's Rehab Center is hosting a fundraiser called the Greater Things Gala on September 23, 2021, at 7:00 p.m. at LifePoint Church in Pearland. Please see the website for more information.Teen Challenge was founded in 1958 by Pastor David Wilkerson who began ministering to drug addicts and gang members on the streets of New York. A recovery home was started shortly thereafter. Teen Challenge came to Texas in 1968. There are now close to 200 centers in the United States, and over 1000 centers worldwide in over 90 different countries.For more information, go to houstonwomensrehab.org or call 281-836-4448 Alvin campus.Dr. Dolly Thomas/Julie Johnston,(281) 836-4448, dolly.thomas@tctexas.org 413 County Road 192, Alvin, Texas 77511SOURCE Adult and Teen Challenge of TexasCONTACT: Dr. Dolly Thomas or Julie Johnston, 281-836-4448, dolly.thomas@tctexas.org
The question of whether Senator Ashelle Morgan and Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions Kareem Nelson should have been suspended pending the outcome of their trials was addressed by Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves on radio, June 27.





Speaking in relation to Morgan, Gonsalves said the House of Assembly has no power to suspend Morgan.





He explained that she can only be suspended if she breaks the rules governing the House ..commits murder or is sentenced for a period of 12 months or more.





"There are circumstances where a person may feel that it may be politically advisable for them to resign, to ask for a leave of absence, or whatever the case may be, Gonsalves said.





He referred to Chapter 1 of the Constitution which relates to the Protection of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms to explain that under the constitution, there was the security of tenure and that the constitution provided for special rules for public servants based on that privilege.





Regarding Morgan, Gonsalves stated that she was not a civil servant, in that she held the office of Senator, but she did not hold an office of a public servant.





But Kay Bacchus-Baptiste, attorney for Cornelius who is at the centre of the charged brought against Morgan and Nelson, challenged the comments of the Prime Minister, saying that senators were paid by the people.





"I cannot fathom the Prime Ministers explanation; it is the most garbage that I have heard, Bacchus- Baptiste said while speaking on radio on June 28.





"He mentioned qualifications and disqualifications to be a senator, that has nothing to do with the person being charged with an offence and it becomes a moral duty, she continued.





Bacchus-Baptiste said that the Prime Minister tried to refer to the Fundamental rights and Freedoms, but the question that the public ought to be asking was: Why was the prime minister trying so hard to defend Morgan?
The Academy Charter School, New York, USA, an independent organization, operates two charter schools on Long Island, New York.





It currently employs over 400 staff on two campuses in Hempstead and Uniondale, New York. This includes two elementary, two middle and two high schools.





Founded in 2009, it is expected by September 2021 to enroll up to 2300, the majority being young people from low-income families.





It is now common knowledge that the high school seniors are admitted and attend Americas top universities - including Harvard, Columbia and Cornell University.





In the midst of this environment is Dr. Nicholas Stapleton who hails from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He serves as the Chief Academic Officer at the Academy and is among those pivotally responsible for the success of the Academy.





Dr. Stapleton, an alumnus of the St. Martins Secondary School, Kingstown, holds a doctorate in Education Administration from Columbia University, and his expertise bears directly on the operations of the Academy.





But his role and impact, according to the staff, go well beyond the chambers of administration and decision-making.





Merely being at the Academy was enough, for example, to directly influence the action of ten-year-old Alexander Barracks who, on learning that Dr. Stapleton was from St. Vincent and the Grenadines where a volcano was erupting and causing damage to houses and plant life and discomfort to many hundreds of persons, launched a drive to collect relief items to be shipped to the multi-island state.





Dr. Stapletons impact





According to Barrigton Goldson, a member of the faculty at the Academy, "Dr. Stapleton will never speak of himself.





In Goldsons words, "Dr. Stapleton has turned around the community, referencing the Academy and the wider community.





His positive impact on students is unquestionable, Goldson said, and pointed to the fact that one of the students of the Academy, a student with whom Dr. Stapleton engaged, was a recent valedictorian at Harvard University.





And with all the difference he has made at the Academy, something he is wont to ignore, Goldson described him as "not having forgotten who he is one grounded in his humanity  one who has built a career to lead.

His drive to make a difference in people has not gone unnoticed and without results.





The most impacting element of this drive, according to Goldson, is that that attitude has become contagious, so much so it has permeated the majority of the faculty.





"Dr. Stapletons heart is sold out to education, and his dedication to his immediate and extenuating responsibilities, has redounded in an eagerness among the student population to become all they can be, and to make the Academy Charter School a top performing school in New York, Goldson said.





Dr. Stapleton labours in a vineyard far removed from his homeland, but with a sense of dedication and preparedness to go the extra mile in service to humanity. He is on a path to making a difference.
Story by Sheron Garraway





Activist and calypsonian Robert "Patches Knights is adamant that protest will continue to counteract what he noted were the "wrong doings in society.





On Friday 24th June 2021, Knights and his Frontline group partnered with the newly formed Rise Hairouna and took their protest to the Headquarters of National Emergency Management Organisation (NEMO), Old Montrose.





And while the protest was intended to raise concern about NEMOs distribution of relief items, Knights told THE VINCENTIAN that the case surrounding the shooting of Cornelius John, was also an issue of concern among the protestors and Vincentians in general.





He touted, "I want to make it clear. Nobody is going to set the agenda for us. Nobody is going to set the narrative. We are intelligent and analytical enough to know why we are here. . We are now here to tell the people at NEMO that they should share the stuff that people sent from overseas equitably. The people need food to eat and mattresses to sleep on.





The protest continued on Tuesday in front of the Court House/Parliament Building.





A representative of the Rise Hairouna activist group which had called for the original protest, said they will remain focused and protest the issues affecting the country.





Speaking to the media on Tuesday, Rise Hairouna representative Nikisha Williams said her group was not going anywhere.





She noted that Vincentians were tired and they were not going to stay in their "little cozy corners and mumble.





Meanwhile, lawyers Zhinga Horne and Chelsea Alexander joined the picket line last Tuesday.
Sejilla Ms Dowall - Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP)  reminded citizens that in an ordered society, the Administration of Justice should take its free course, without prejudice .

After weeks of speculation, Sejilla Ms Dowall - Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) issued a release dated June 24, in which she indicated that charges had been laid against Senator Ashelle Morgan and Deputy DPP Kareem Nelson.





Morgan will answer to a charge of intent to commit wounding against Cornelius John, and Nelson to a charge of wounding and unlawful discharging a firearm, also against John.





The DPP also indicated that John was charged with using threatening language to his wife and to Morgan.





The process plays out





"What I have said from the beginning has been borne outI said each of these persons are entitled to an abundant number of rights and freedoms, Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves said, adding, "And there is the presumption of innocence and the procedural fairness.





The prime minister explained that his role as minister of legal affairs and national security is to ask the Commissioner of Police about matters as they relate to ongoing investigations.





And as for the length of time it took before the DPP directed that charges be brought against Morgan and Nelson, Dr. Gonsalves referenced that she sent the file back to the Commissioner of Police on at least four times, which is normal.





There was much talk of that the police and other sectors involved in investigating the matter were dragging its feet. The referrals of the files on four occasions should put spend to this talk, Dr. Gonsalves noted.

He reminded that under the Police Act, they can lay a charge, but the DPP was responsible for all prosecutions.





It is normal for the police and the DPP to exchange information, and the DPP is not subject to direction or control by anybody, Gonsalves said.





Bail granted





Meanwhile, when Morgan, Nelson and John appeared at the Serious Offence Court on June 25, John was slapped with a second charge of using threatening language to Nicole John, he was previously charged with one count against Nicole John and one against Morgan.





The three all pleaded not guilty to their charges and were granted bail as follows: John - $2,500.00 on his own recognizance; Morgan - $2,000.00 with one surety; Nelson  composite bail of $10,000.00 with one surety.

They are expected to appear at the Calliaqua Magistrates Court on July 5.
Alexander Barracks is ten years old. He might just be your ordinary 10-year-old American boy, growing up in some large city in the USA. Then again, he just might be that extraordinary 10-year-old that makes you stop and wonder: What makes him tick?





That this 10-year-old has founded an organization he calls "World Change is enough to tell you that Alex is different  different in how he views the world and how much he wants to make it better for everyone.





Alex, as he prefers to be called, is a Grade 4 student of the Uniondale Elementary School in Long Island, one of two elementary schools that are managed and operator by the Academy Charter School which operates two charter schools on Long Island New York, on two campuses in Hempstead and Uniondale, New York, that includes two elementary, two middle and two high schools.. (See accompanying article on this page.)

Alex is enrolled in the Uniondale Elementary School.





Many of the Academys graduates go on to attend Americas top universities including Harvard University, Columbia University, and Cornell University.





That is the environment in which Alex finds himself and where he finds encouragement and a drive to be different.





Focus on St. Vincent





Alex was recently moved to do something that was unprecedented at his Elementary school and at the Academy.





His Mom, he said in an interview with THE VINCENTIAN, had first drawn his attention to what was happening in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.





She told me about the La Soufriere volcano on the island; about the volcanic eruption; about how ash was all over persons houses; how it (the ash) would burn your eyes, how it had destroyed plants and people had to be removed from their homes which were destroyed, he related.





Alex had never been to St. Vincent but the stories of destruction hit him hard.





His one connection with St. Vincent and the Grenadines came through Dr. Nicholas Stapleton, the Academys Chief Academic Officer, a native of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.





Moreover, "My Mom works with Dr. Stapleton, he said.





And so it was that in April, 2021, as the La Soufriere volcano was erupting explosively, Alex, armed with the knowledge of the harsh reality confronting the people in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, convinced some of his classmates to join in a drive to gather items to help the displaced people in Dr. Stapletons homeland.





"We were hoping that our parents, teachers and the adults would donate items, the young man said.





The drive found an unexpected footing across the Academy. So much so, Alex was invited to make a full presentation on his drive to the entire faculty of the Academy.





He stood tall before the elders and delivered a 30-minutes power point supported presentation about his World Change organization that had since morphed out of his classroom drive. Its immediate aims and objectives, as Alex pointed out, focused on the plight of the people in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.





Needless to say, the 10-year-old lad impressed and received full support from the principal, and faculty, who also gave their wholesome support to the launch of a GoFundMe Page. The crusade took off!!





Not forgetting Ms. Workman





Alex does not forget the role of his classroom teacher  Alysa Workman - in advancing his World Change vision.





Alysa spoke glowingly about Alexs disposition to help others. She, said the school is committed to offering a wide ranging education. "The world, the environment, people are all important to the classes that are taught, she told THE VINCENTIAN.





She thinks a class discussion on leadership and the environment might have helped to drive Alex even further.





When Alex came to her with the idea of "helping the people in St. Vincent - Dr. Stapletons homeland - I immediately supported him and helped to open the opportunity for him to address the full faculty, Aylsa said.





Alysa is proud of Alexs drive and commits her full support to World Change.





Progress to date





To date, the GoFundMe page has raised US$1000.00, and a quantity of food items and other supplies have been collected.





The items and money raised will be presented to Dr. Stapleton who will arrange with the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Consulate in New York, for onward shipment and presentation.





Alexander Barracks probably knows one Vincentian but his heart, his soul feels for and reaches out to persons who have been adversely affected by the eruption of La Soufriere volcano people whom he does not know but whom he will "love to meet some day.





He is a beacon  standing out as a human and what it means to be humane, years beyond his tender age.
Saudi Arabia jumped up 11 places from 2018 to be ranked second in the world along with the UK (with 99.54 points) among countries committed to cybersecurity at a global level by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The Global Cybersecurity Index 2020, a trusted reference that measures the commitment of its 193 members to cybersecurity, released the rankings. The US topped the list with a perfect score of 100.

The numbers are based on the GCI 2020 report initiated by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The GCI score is given by evaluating each countries' commitment to legal, technical, organizational, capacity development, and cooperation indicators.

Cybersecurity practices are constantly evolving as new technologies emerge. Some countries that have more resources are prepared for cyber threats better than others.

According to recent Atlas VPN team findings, the US, UK and Saudi Arabia lead in commitment to cybersecurity. However, many countries still lack training and education programs for many professionals.

The US topped the global list getting all 20 points in each GCI indicator. However, while the US has the most cybersecurity resources, the latest cyberattacks on Americans have shown room for improvement.

For example, Russia-based hacker ransomware attacks on the supply chain and other industries exposed weaknesses from a technical standpoint.

The UK follows behind, scoring 99.54 points in GCI. Almost half of the point was taken out of the technical measures.

The score indicates that the UK has to employ more computer incident response teams, enabling a country to respond to incidents at the national level using a centralized contact point and promote quick and systematic action, stated Atlas VPN.

Saudi Arabia shares second place, getting the same score of 99.54 as the UK. While being one of the fastest developing countries, the kingdom has placed great importance on cybersecurity.

They have created a national cybersecurity strategy to reflect the strategic ambition of the Kingdom in a manner that is balanced between security, trust, and growth, it added.

Estonia took the fourth slot with a 99.48 points, losing just half a point in the capacity development indicator. It measures awareness campaigns, training, education, and incentives for cybersecurity development.

Despite that, Estonia has become one of the heavyweights in cybersecurity with a high-functioning central system for monitoring, reporting, and resolving incidents. Korea, Singapore and Spain all share fifth place, scoring 98.52 points.

Atlas VPN pointed out that one of the reasons for the spurt in cyberattacks is a lack of cybersecurity education and training. With more knowledge in this field, people could minimize the risks of cybercrime happening, it stated.

Just 46% of countries provided specific cybersecurity training for the public sector and government officials.

Employees in these fields usually work with a lot of sensitive or confidential information. That is why it is essential to provide training on how to create a cyber-safe work environment, it stated.

As per the latest Atlas VPN report, around 41% of countries provided cybersecurity training to small and medium enterprises or private companies.

This is a welcome and a timely move as businesses often become targets for hackers as the latter can easily profit off of stolen data or ransomware attacks.

While more prominent private companies can afford cybersecurity experts, smaller businesses do not have such luxury.

Law enforcement agents received educational cybersecurity programs in 37% of countries. Such training helps officers understand how hackers think and identify the tools that hackers use to commit attacks, said the report.

Lastly, 32% of countries provided instructional training to judicial and legal actors.

Beyond co-operating within countries, GCI Index leaders could help less developed countries address cybersecurity challenges. Creating a strategy or sharing good cyber practices can help reach more balanced and robust security against cyber threats, it added.
The UAE Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation has announced the start of issuing work permits for Golden Residency holders.

The step is an implementation of the Cabinet resolution, under which work permits for Golden Residency holders were created.

According to the ministry, such permits are required in three cases.

First are those who were unemployed when they received their Golden Residency, and wish to start working for a certain employer; second are Golden Residency holders who plan to start working for a new employer, and third, is when a current employer wishes to renew the work permit and contract of a Golden Residency holder.

The ministry said same rules and procedures related to the issuance of work permits and contracts apply to dependents registered on their parents' residency, if they are applying for work and are Golden Visa holders.

Work permits and contracts concluded between employers and workers who receive the Golden Residency will remain valid, and subject to all applicable UAE legislations, it stated.

According to the ministry, fees prescribed and applicable fees for work permits for those outside the country, as well as fees for renewing and amending work permits and contracts, will also be applicable to Golden Residency holders, it added.
Help India!



John Sifton, the Washington, DC-based Asia Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch said UAPA violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which India is a party, and which outlines the fundamental due process and fair trial protections that are applicable at all times in all countries that have signed that treaty even during the states of emergency. UN Security Council Resolution 1456 mentions that a countrys counter-terrorism measures must comply with their international obligations under human rights law. India has failed in those regards, he said.

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India is abusing its anti-terrorism law to imprison human rights defenders and civil activists for years on false charges, without bail or even a trial, legal experts from the US, the UK and India said on Friday.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modis government was abusing this law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), even more aggressively than did the previous governments, and so it should be repealed, the experts said at a Congressional Briefing in Washington, DC, on Wednesday.

The Government of India has been engaging in increasing and severe crackdowns on freedom of speech, routinely responding to peaceful critics with abuse of excessive penal actions, John Sifton, the Washington, DC-based Asia Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch, said. It was abusing the law more aggressively to criminalize dissent and press freedom, undermine rights, freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.

The UAPA defines terrorism in an entirely vague and overbroad manner, encompassing a wide range of activities, including nonviolent political protests, Mr Sifton, who holds a law degree from New York University, added. Mr Modis government was abusing the UAPA also to target members of the marginalized groups, including Dalits, tribal communities and religious minorities, in particular Muslims.

The UAPA violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which India is a party, and which outlines the fundamental due process and fair trial protections that are applicable at all times in all countries that have signed that treaty even during the states of emergency, Mr Sifton said. UN Security Council Resolution 1456 mentions that a countrys counter-terrorism measures must comply with their international obligations under human rights law. India has failed in those regards, he added.

Ban on organizations, making membership of groups a criminal offence, conducting warrant-less searches, seizures and arrests, compelling third parties to provide information without a court order, in-camera hearings, secret witnesses and evidences, and most troublingly of all detention without charge for up to 180 days [are] major procedural problems that create a presumption of guilt, Mr Sifton added.

Waris Hussain, Adjunct Law Professor at Howard University, Washington, DC, said denial of bail and incarceration without trial constituted the whole point of the UAPA, and the process was the punishment. While the Indian judiciary had in the past passed very brave decisions protecting human rights, it was now less independent to check the abuses of human rights that take place from the current administration.

The criminal justice apparatus that includes the police, the prosecution and the investigatory agencies is complying with the problematic strategy of the government to silence dissent and diminish the right of free speech and other civil and political rights, said Dr Hussain, who is also Senior Staff Attorney at the American Bar Association. The US Government and Congress, and the global community needed to apply countervailing pressure to tell [the judges] to step up to their reputational values.

Dr Mayur Suresh, Senior Lecturer in Law at SOAS University of London, said Indias police and prosecution attempt to use speech acts to bring charges of membership of terrorist organizations to ban those organizations, which is allowed under the UAPA. Police cite possession of literature as proof of terrorist activity to charge the accused under UAPA.

Apart from the fact that the charges [under UAPA] are not aimed at obtaining a conviction, and are used to detain people for as long as possible, the mere charges filed for speech and membership cases serves to justify the further ban on the organizations, Dr Suresh said, citing the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) whose banning in 2001 was followed by charges against individuals accused of being its members.

These charges  not convictions, since there were none  were used to argue for a subsequent ban on SIMI which in turn justified further membership charges creating a self-fulfilling circularity. It was abundantly clear that the UAPA and its power to ban organisations posed a fundamental threat to both the freedom of association and the freedom of speech and expression, Dr Suresh said.

Joining the Briefing from India, veteran lawyer Indira Jaising, a former Additional Solicitor General of India, said the UAPAs sweepingly defines terrorism as any action done with the intent to threaten or is likely to threaten the unity, integrity, security, sovereignty of India. But dozens had been charged under UAPA in two recent prominent cases  the sectarian violence in Delhi in February 2020 and the so-called Bhima Koregaon case from Maharashtra  when even the prosecution had not alleged any such threats.

In the Delhi riots case, the young people were protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which is highly discriminatory. There is no law that says you cannot protest against a law. In the Bhima-Koregaon case, the laughable objections against one accused is that he recited a poem by Bertolt Brecht at a public meeting organized by a former Supreme Court judge. The poem called for rebellion against oppression, which was a poetic way of saying we must all protest repression. It was taken to be an act of terrorism.

Ms Jaising said the UAPA denies pretrial bail unless an accused person shows that there is reason to believe that he or she is not guilty. That is like asking to prove that I am not guilty whereas we know that the burden of proof is on the prosecution and that we are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Policy staffers from various Members of Congress as well as officials from the US Department of State attended the virtual Briefing. It was organized by Amnesty International USA, Hindus for Human Rights, Indian American Muslim Council, International Christian Concern, Jubilee Campaign, Dalit Solidarity Forum, New York State Council of Churches, Federation of Indian American Christian Organizations of North America, India Civil Watch International, Justice for All, Center for Pluralism, American Muslim Institution, International Society for Peace and Justice and Association of Indian Muslims of America.

Safoora Zargar, a Muslim youth leader who was arrested last year for protesting against the CAA and was given bail months later only because she was in advanced pregnancy, recalled how the police came knocking at her door in the dead of the night. My in-laws and husband informed them that I was pregnant and needed rest but the police took her away after rousing her from sleep, she said.

I was not issued any notice for joining the investigation. I was not called for interrogation even once, simply arrested, without informing me that I was being arrested, without an arrest memo, she said. I was told at 10:30 pm in the night that I was being arrested, and my husband was made to sign an arrest memo that falsely showed my arrest at 5:30 pm. I was denied access to any lawyers. Per Indian law, the police cannot arrest a woman after sunset and must present her before a magistrate at the earliest. But all due process of law was bypassed. I was not even informed why I was being arrested and [of] the charges against me.

After three days of police custody given by a magistrate, Ms Zargar was charged under another case and her police custody was extended by two days. When she was to go to court, prison authorities deliberately misinformed her lawyers of the courts location. I cannot but stop myself from asking if the very same police force that is supposed to enforce law and order has such blatant disregard for legal procedure and does not hesitate to bypass all due process of law at every single step, what does it say about the integrity of the police? Eleven days after her arrest, she was charged under UAPA to deny her bail.

Ritesh Dhar Dubey, Ms Zargars attorney, said the Indian State had repeatedly refused to recognize speech and expression as a means of assertion of political sentience and painted it as a criminal activity by using tropes like national security, increasing terrorism, and more recently on the ground of embarrassment to the current Indian Prime Minister. He said while Ms Zargar had been arrested for making a seditious speech, till date the alleged speech has not been produced before any court.
by Melanie Manel Perera

Minister of Justice: we need an estimate of the damage caused by the ship's fire at sea. More than a month after the accident, still damage to marine flora and fauna. Serious problems for local fishermen.

Colombo (AsiaNews) - Minister of Justice Ali Sabry has asked for the help of international experts to estimate the compensation for the damage caused by the fire of the MV X-Press Pearl ship.

On May 20, the cargo ship caught fire off the Sri Lankan coast near the capital Colombo; the vessel was carrying nitric acid, sodium hydroxide and other hazardous chemicals.

Due to the accident, the marine ecosystem of the area has suffered enormous damage: a serious problem for local fishermen.

The head of the Sri Lankan Marine Environmental Protection Authority, Dharshani Lahandapura, called it the "worst environmental disaster in the history of the country".

The chemicals dispersed in the Indian Ocean have severely affected marine flora and fauna: On 30 June, more than a month after the accident, the carcasses of 20 dolphins, 4 whales and 176 turtles were found and dragged ashore.

So far the owners of the X-Press Pearl have agreed to pay compensation of 720 million rupees (more than 3 million euros) to fishermen affected by the environmental damage. It would be the first tranche - requested by the Attorney General - of a payment of 33.8 million euros which covers the period from May 20 to June 3.

On 29 June, Minister Sabry chaired a virtual meeting with representatives of international organizations in which he gave a detailed account of the actions taken by the local government to obtain compensation for damages and asked for the assistance of foreign experts to have a correct estimate. losses in environmental and economic terms.

The purpose of the videoconference was also to assess short, medium and long term damages. Sabry then explained that he is taking action to restore the living standards of the local fishing community. The need to establish - with international support - a marine disaster management centre that can deal with the restoration of the ecosystem was also stressed.
UNHRC chief Bachelet is urged to look into the former British colony, as well as Xinjiang. China claims there are more rights in Hong Kong now than under British rule. Yesterday Xi celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Communist Party of China. Hong Kong papers marked the event with front pages in red, with no Apple Daily on newsstands.

Hong Kong (AsiaNews)  Activists in self-imposed exile from the former British colony are urging the United Nations to investigate the situation in Hong Kong following the imposing of Chinas national security law.

Nathan Law, Glacier Kwong and Victoria Hui appeared via videoconference at an event organised by the UN Human Rights Council.

Hui asked UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to visit Chinas Hong Kong, not just Xinjiang, during her planned visit to China to verify allegations of abuse against Uyghurs, the Hong Kong Free Press reported.

According to the activist, in Hong Kong Bachelet should talk to political prisoners and question the territorys national security judges.

For all three activists, the former British colony is now a 'police state', a view shared by Amnesty International, a view rejected by local authorities who claim that the security measures are not used against the citys traditional freedoms.

According to the current Hong Kong government, local residents enjoy more rights now than during British colonial administration. However, an example of how the local and central government have undermined the rule of law is the closure of Apple Daily, the independent newspaper founded by pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai.

The tabloid last hit the newsstands on 24 June; before that, the police had arrested some of its executives and journalists, as well as froze HK$ 18 million (US$ 2.3 million) in assets owned by Next Digital, the company that published the newspaper. Lai has been in prison since December.

Yesterday the front page of many Hong Kong newspapers was in red to celebrate the anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 and the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China.

This is the first time that the transition from British to Chinese rule was celebrated without the presence of Apple Daily. Yesterday was also the first time since 2003 that the traditional 1 July pro-democracy march was not held.

As he marked the party's centenary yesterday, Chinese President Xi Jinping made it clear that the formula "one country, two systems"  the basis of Hong Kong's limited autonomy  must also ensure national security. For the Chinese leader, this leaves no room for the demands of pro-democracy groups.
The fighters hit a Hamas weapons factory. Balloons had left the Strip that had caused four fires - immediately extinguished - in southern Israel. The immediate military response to the launch marks a turning point between the Netanyahu government and the current one. In the past, Bennett had asked to equate balloons with missiles.

Jerusalem (AsiaNews / Agencies) - After two weeks of relative calm, this morning there were new air strikes by Israeli fighters on Gaza in response to the launch, yesterday afternoon, of incendiary balloons from the Strip towards the south of Israel.

The memory of the last lightning conflict in May, which caused hundreds of victims, including children, is still alive in the area and the fear is that the tension between the parties could trigger a new escalation.

In mid-June, a similar episode occurred in conjunction with the visit of the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Msgr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa to the Palestinian enclave, but these were targeted operations that had no further military follow-up.

Local sources report that in the early hours of the morning Israeli fighters hit an arms factory of Hamas, which governs the Strip; previously, balloons had left Gaza that had caused at least four different fires - without causing damage - in different areas in southern Israel, along the border.

According to the Israeli army, the target site of the raid was used by the extremist organization to build and develop weapons. The military, explains a statement, "will respond with determination against all attempts at terror from Gaza".

At the moment there are no official confirmations of victims or injured. Analysts and experts point out that the immediate operation in response to the balloon launch could already indicate a first change in the government led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, compared to his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu. Several times, in fact, the previous executive had chosen not to fight back, to avoid raising the tension along the southern border.

In the past three years, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, mostly linked to Hamas and other terrorist groups, have launched thousands of incendiary and explosive devices in southern Israel, causing extensive fires and significant damage to agricultural fields, nature reserves and property. private. Hamas uses this technique as a means of lobbying Israel to contribute to the reconstruction work in the Strip. Bennett, who replaced Netanyahu on June 13, had repeatedly called for a harsher and more decisive response to the launches, saying they should be treated in the same way as rockets.

In 2018, the current prime minister - then Minister of Education - had asked the army to kill those who launched balloons from Gaza, finding the opposition of the then head of the Israeli Armed Forces Gadi Eisenkot.
by Vladimir Rozanskij

Parent groups are organizing to protect their children. The police ignore the disappearance reports. The authorities do not want to give the country a negative image. The official numbers on the coronavirus never revealed. Obligation to wear a mask in public imposed only a few days ago.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Panic over the disappearance of children is growing in Turkmenistan, following a series of rather sensational cases of violence against minors. In the capital Ashabad, groups of parents have formed to guard the streets and walk areas between their homes and the school; other families have chosen instead to send their children to relatives in the countryside. The authorities and the press have so far avoided commenting on the affair.

The notices of disappearances, in addition to the alarms on social networks, can also be seen in the many signs hanging on the streets with photos of even very young children; they are often located next to police stations and even on public transport. This plague is not new in Turkmenistan, and has recently resurfaced in a very worrying way.

According to Radio Azatlyk, which cites various local sources, several cases of violence against children between 10 and 13 years of age, sometimes hospitalized in very serious conditions, also occur every day in the medical centers of the Turkmen capital.

In addition to the problem of street hildren, often in search of food in shops, markets or simply some compassion, the presence in Ashabad of one or more serial paedophiles is being hypothesized. According to local sources, some surveillance cameras have also filmed them. Many parents accuse the police of inertia.

A story reported from a few days ago in Azatlyk spoke of passers-by witnessing two children forced into a car as they screamed. The scene took place in broad daylight in Ashabad, near Oguzkhan Street. The witnesses were schoolmates of the sixth class (therefore around the age of ten) of the two boys.

The drama of the disappearance of the children is not limited to the capital Ashabad; several cases have also been reported in Mary, the fourth largest city in the country, where the police continue to ignore requests from parents for help. The authorities do not intend to disseminate information in this regard, in order not to feed panic and not to endorse a negative image of Turkmen society. The problem of missing children is very serious worldwide, even in the most advanced Western nations, and Turkmenistan does not intend to become part of these statistics.

Despite the worried visits of various World Health Organization delegations since summer 2020, the regime of Gurbangul Berdymuhamedov does not even want to reveal the numbers on the spread of Covid-19. After the last check at the end of June, the authorities introduced the obligation to wear a mask, with very severe restrictions in the velayat (province) of Mary.

Berdymuhamedov himself chaired a meeting of the Emergency Committee for the fight against the "ghost virus". The mask, however, was imposed on the grounds "of the increase in dust in the air", which would generally favor infections, without naming the coronavirus. A special team of policemen in civilian clothes has been set up in Mary to monitor the use of outdoor protection.

The controllers stop the cars to force drivers and passengers to keep the mask on even in the passenger seats, despite the scorching heat of these days and the absence of air conditioning. At first, the population was advised to fight the virus by smoking the local harmala, a variant of the Syrian rue. Unlike the disappearance of minors, now the authorities seem to be very concerened about Covid, so much so the immenent launch of the vaccination campaign seems likely.
by Steve Suwannarat

Some 229 illegal immigrants are found and arrested at a metal disposal company. For the authorities, the situation is "under control", but the US State Department, in its human trafficking report, downgraded Malaysia to the bottom tier.

Kuala Lumpur (AsiaNews)  Forced labour, especially among irregular migrants, is setting off alarm bells in Malaysia.

Recently, Malaysian police arrested 229 foreign workers employed by a metal disposal company in the capital.

Overall, forced labour is not out of control, the authorities claim, but for many, we have seen only the tip of the iceberg.

The US State Department's annual report on human trafficking in the world, released yesterday, downgraded Malaysia from second to third tier (the worst), noting that the practice is a major issue in the country.

According to Acting Director of the State Department's trafficking office Kari Johnstone, forced labour in Malaysia can be found in many sectors, including palm oil and other agriculture plantations, as well as the construction industry, and manufacturing.

The problem has received greater coverage in recent months because of increasing outbreaks of the coronavirus among foreign workers who are the least protected.

The situation has favoured the growth of the pandemic. Last month, Malaysia reported in fact the highest number of cases in Asia in relation to the population. However, the exploitation of foreign workers in the country is nothing new.

Malaysia has attracted foreign workers for a long time, especially from Muslim majority countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia (especially Indonesia and Bangladesh). Foreign migrants are generally employed in lower-paying jobs that are less attractive to Malaysians.

Some 212,000 people are said to work under forced labour conditions. The Malaysian government is opposed to the practice but so far it has little to show in terms of results.

According to Reuters, some1,600 investigations took place between 2014 and 2018 with only 140 convictions.

Foreign workers are needed to support the countrys economy because of a shortage of qualified personnel. However, many migrant women are used as domestic help or as prostitutes.

Often the exploitation takes place amid the indifference if not the complicity of the authorities, which apply rigidly, even arbitrarily the laws that regulate immigration and the employment of asylum seekers.

In this situation, migrants are at risk of becoming prey to human traffickers. Rohingya Muslims who fled persecution in Myanmar or an unbearable life in refugee camps in Bangladesh, are one example.
Francis released a video message about the World Meeting of Families scheduled for 22-26 June 2022, centred on Family love: a vocation and a path to holiness. I would like to invite diocesan communities to plan initiatives based on the theme of the meeting, and to use the symbols being prepared by the Diocese of Rome.

Vatican City (AsiaNews)  Pope Francis released a video message today, announcing the 10th World Meeting of Families, set to take place in Rome on 22-26 June 2022.

The event, which will have a multicentred and widespread format, will be held in Rome as well as in each diocese for local families and communities with Family love: a vocation and a path to holiness as its theme.

After being postponed for a year due to the pandemic, the desire to meet again is great, said the Pope in his message.

At past meetings, most families stayed at home. The meeting was perceived as being something remote, at most followed on television, and unknown to the majority of families.

By contrast, This time, it will have a special format. It will be an opportunity provided by Providence to create a worldwide event that can involve all the families that would like to feel part of the ecclesial community.

Indeed, The Meeting will have a multicentred and widespread format that will encourage the involvement of diocesan communities all over the world.

Rome will be the main venue, and there will be a number of delegates of family pastoral care participating in the Festival of Families, the Pastoral Congress and the Holy Mass. These will be broadcast all over the world.

During that same period, each diocese can be the focal point for a local meeting for its families and communities. For this reason, wherever it is possible, I would like to invite diocesan communities to plan initiatives based on the theme of the meeting, and to use the symbols being prepared by the Diocese of Rome.

I would like to invite diocesan communities to plan initiatives based on the theme of the meeting, and to use the symbols being prepared by the Diocese of Rome. I ask you to be dynamic, active and creative in organising this with the families in harmony with what will be taking place in Rome.

This is a wonderful opportunity to devote ourselves with enthusiasm to family ministry with spouses, families and pastors together.

Take courage, then, dear pastors and dear families, and help each other to organise meetings in the dioceses and parishes on every continent.

Have a good journey to the forthcoming World Meeting of Families!
by Sumon Corraya

So far the appeal to the Anti-Corruption Commission, which has reported the matter in court, has been in vain. In 2012 the land of a Protestant church and the cemetery forcibly expropriated to build a multi-storey building. Bishop of Rajshahi: rights trampled. An anonymous source: "The land is valuable", taken "with illegal documents" and the connivance of land registry employees.

Sylhet (AsiaNews) - A group of Muslims and Hindus forcibly "expropriated" a plot of land belonging to a church and a Christian cemetery to build a multi-storey building. The ecclesiastical authorities in the area presented a formal protest to the competent anti-corruption commission, at the local district section of Sylhet, a metropolitan city in north-eastern Bangladesh.

In response to the complaint, in recent days an official filed a lawsuit against three Muslims and a Hindu. So far, however, no further developments have taken place and the Christian community is still awaiting justice.

The beginning of the story dates back to 2012, when a Protestant church and the adjacent cemetery in Rikabibazar (Sylhet) fell into the hands of three Muslims and a Hindu through an illegal expropriation. In response, the Church authorities asked the anti-corruption commission for help, which proved the Christians right, confirming the validity of the complaint and starting the process for the restitution of land and property.

The defendants are Mujibor Rahman Patwary, the lawyer Sirajul Islam, MaloiKar, and Ashab Uddin. Among them, three are former state employees who managed the agricultural department, while the fourth is their legal representative. Deputy departmental director of the anti-corruption commission Ismail Hossian is representing the Christians in court.

In this period of time, the defendants have already completed part of the construction (pictured) that arose on the land at the centre of the dispute.

Msgr. Gervas Rozario, bishop of Rajshahi and vice-president of the Bishops' Conference of Bangladesh (CBCP), according to whom it shows "how Christians are subject to persecution" in the country and their rights often trampled on.

A member of the Church, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, told AsiaNews: "The land is very valuable, so greedy people have taken it with illegal documents relating to the land, thanks also to the connivance of personnel employed in the cadastral office".

"We ask for the immediate restitution of the land and that construction on the lots belonging to the Church stop".

Bangladesh is a nation with a very large Muslim majority. Due to matters relating to land ownership, the Christian minority is often the victim of persecution and attacks by radical Muslim groups or individuals. Christians are also attacked and persecuted for their campaigns to defend freedoms and rights, as recently happened to Catholic activist Angela Gomes.
The stragglers during a stop Thursday at M&T were a mix of newly eligible adolescents, those who had been hesitant until more people were vaccinated and those who had been infected with COVID and wanted to ensure they would be protected from reinfection. All were getting their second shots. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines each require two doses.
When lighting fireworks, adults should clear the range and make sure the pyrotechnic is not pointing at someone or being thrown in the direction of a person. Adults should also supervise children and not let them handle the fireworks, Anuszewski said.
Johnson filed falsely amended income tax returns in 2014 for three District of Columbia taxpayers that fraudulently claimed large refunds based upon fake refundable credits and withholdings that had never been paid to the IRS, according to a news release from the DOJ.
His testimony brought to a close the first week of Ramos sanity trial. Ramos, 41, was already convicted of the murders but his attorneys maintain he is not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder that prevented him from understanding his actions were illegal and being able to behave according to the law.
As someone who turned their life around to do the work of curing Cherry Hill of violence, Benny epitomized redemption, Jackson said. While he has transitioned physically, his light will never leave us and it guides us as we continue the critical work of interrupting violence in our neighborhoods.
In December, Kwiatkowski filed a motion asking to be released to home confinement because his medical problems, including hepatitis C and Crohns disease, put him at higher risk for contracting COVID-19 and for severe illness due to his immunocompromised state. At the time, 15% of the inmates at his Florida federal prison complex had been infected, but by the time a judge heard his case Thursday, there were no infections, according to Acting U.S. Attorney John Farley.
Police Use of Force evaluations are incredibly complicated and understandably time consuming. Each case undergoes an exhaustive and detailed investigation led by the Police Integrity Unit with consultation from SA Mosby and the executive team, Richardson said in a statement. Like all cases, each decision requires  a thorough legal analysis, where we consider the feedback and engagement from the victims family. In fatality cases, the victims family can be in shock, and have many questions, and deserve time and space to digest the rationale for our decisions, all of which we publish and present publicly.
Placing a fee on fossil fuel extraction and returning the money collected to the American people to spend as they wish is fair and costs the federal treasury nothing. And yet it is the single fastest, most effective way to cut carbon pollution and produce affordable clean energy because it will percolate through the entire economy, stimulating energy innovation and efficiency as it goes.
Under Cardins request, the Pennsylvania funding would come through the Natural Resources Conservation Service, part of the U.S. Agriculture Department. The money would be used for projects including the creation of buffers  for example, through trees and other vegetation  to hold soil in place so it is not washed away.
Travel & Outdoors



More Cruise Lines Announce Return to Puerto Vallarta



The gradual reactivation of cruise tourism in Puerto Vallarta is scheduled to begin in August 2021. Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico - In addition to Carnival, which has already formally announced its



In fact, five cruise lines have announced plans to resume operations on the Mexican Pacific - with strict health protocols in place, such as negative coronavirus tests, sanitary measures and other processes that guarantee the health safety of passengers and crew - including Carnival, Holland America, Princess, Norwegian and Ocean Victory.



The Carnival Panorama kicks the cruise season off with a 7-day cruise from Los Angeles on August 21, with stops in Los Cabos on the 23rd, Mazatlan on the 24th and Puerto Vallarta on the 25th, with a stay of 12 hours. These cruises will be offered on a regular basis through at least the end of October.



Holland America will also arrive in October with a new route operating with the Nieuw Amsterdam, the second largest ship in its fleet. This 21-day route from Seattle includes stops in San Diego, Puerto Vallarta, Fuerte Amador (Panama), Oranjestad (Aruba) and Half Moon Cay.



Other Holland America cruises that will be coming to Puerto Vallarta are Zuiderdam (which will operate 17 cruises from San Diego between September 18 and April 22) and the Koningsdam (which will operate 23 cruises from San Diego between October 10, 2021 and April 3, 2022 - fifteen of them with a stop in Mexico).



Up next is Princess Cruise Line's Majestic Princess, which departs for Los Angeles on October 16 with stops in Cabo San Lucas on the 18, Mazatlan on the 19th, and Puerto Vallarta on the 20th. These 7-night Mexican Riviera cruises will be offered on a regular basis through April 2022.



Norwegian is also announcing cruises on this route starting October 24, with the huge Norwegian Bliss, which is also based in Los Angeles and would arrive in Puerto Vallarta on Wednesday the 27th for a nine-hour stay. These 7-night cruises will be offered on a regular basis through April 2022.



For 2022, the incursion of the Ocean Victory company is expected between April and October. This new 17-day route is called 'Pacific Paradise' and it will sail between San Diego, California and San Jose, Costa Rica, but with stops in Cabo San Lucas, La Paz, Puerto Vallarta, Manzanillo, Huatulco and Puerto Chiapas.



It should be noted that in all cases last minute changes cannot be ruled out due to the issue of compliance with Covid-19 prevention protocols.



Sources: Cruise Dig, Contralinea - In addition to Carnival, which has already formally announced its return to Puerto Vallarta in August, other cruise lines have announced their return to the Mexican Riviera this Fall, with itineraries that include stops in Los Cabos, Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta.In fact, five cruise lines have announced plans to resume operations on the Mexican Pacific - with strict health protocols in place, such as negative coronavirus tests, sanitary measures and other processes that guarantee the health safety of passengers and crew - including Carnival, Holland America, Princess, Norwegian and Ocean Victory.The Carnival Panorama kicks the cruise season off with a 7-day cruise from Los Angeles on August 21, with stops in Los Cabos on the 23rd, Mazatlan on the 24th and Puerto Vallarta on the 25th, with a stay of 12 hours. These cruises will be offered on a regular basis through at least the end of October.Holland America will also arrive in October with a new route operating with the Nieuw Amsterdam, the second largest ship in its fleet. This 21-day route from Seattle includes stops in San Diego, Puerto Vallarta, Fuerte Amador (Panama), Oranjestad (Aruba) and Half Moon Cay.Other Holland America cruises that will be coming to Puerto Vallarta are Zuiderdam (which will operate 17 cruises from San Diego between September 18 and April 22) and the Koningsdam (which will operate 23 cruises from San Diego between October 10, 2021 and April 3, 2022 - fifteen of them with a stop in Mexico).Up next is Princess Cruise Line's Majestic Princess, which departs for Los Angeles on October 16 with stops in Cabo San Lucas on the 18, Mazatlan on the 19th, and Puerto Vallarta on the 20th. These 7-night Mexican Riviera cruises will be offered on a regular basis through April 2022.Norwegian is also announcing cruises on this route starting October 24, with the huge Norwegian Bliss, which is also based in Los Angeles and would arrive in Puerto Vallarta on Wednesday the 27th for a nine-hour stay. These 7-night cruises will be offered on a regular basis through April 2022.For 2022, the incursion of the Ocean Victory company is expected between April and October. This new 17-day route is called 'Pacific Paradise' and it will sail between San Diego, California and San Jose, Costa Rica, but with stops in Cabo San Lucas, La Paz, Puerto Vallarta, Manzanillo, Huatulco and Puerto Chiapas.It should be noted that in all cases last minute changes cannot be ruled out due to the issue of compliance with Covid-19 prevention protocols.



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Vietnam resolved to deepen frien

Vietnam resolved to deepen friendship, multifaceted cooperation with Cuba: PM

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh held phone talks with his Cuban counterpart Manuel Marrero Cruz on July 1 to discuss measures to continue enhancing the special traditional friendship and comprehensive and trustworthy cooperation between the two Parties, governments and people.

PM Pham Minh Chinh held phone talks with his Cuban counterpart Manuel Marrero Cruz on July 1. (Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

PM Chinh congratulated the Communist Party of Cuba on the success of its 8th National Congress and Manuel Marrero Cruz on his election as a Politburo member.

He affirmed that Vietnam treasures and is determined to further deepen the bilateral friendship and multifaceted cooperation between the two countries in the near future and spoke highly of efforts of both sides to increase consultations and launch bilateral cooperation mechanisms amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conveying thanks to the Cuban Government for sending medical experts and supplies to Vietnam to cope with the pandemic, PM Chinh congratulated Cuba on its positive results in research and development of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.

PM Marrero Cruz, for his part, affirmed that the Cuban Government and people always cherish the solidarity, precious support and sharing of practical experience Vietnam has given to Cuba.

He said Cuba wants to expand collaboration with Vietnam in trade, investment, agriculture, health care, pharmaceuticals, including COVID-19 vaccine production technology transfer.

Both leaders agreed to direct ministries and agencies concerned to share expertise and reach an agreement on the transfer of COVID-19 vaccine production technology from Cuba to Vietnam.

They expressed their belief that the fraternal ties between Vietnam and Cuba will enter a new development period, especially in economy, trade and investment, for the benefit of the two countries' people, and for the sake of peace, stability and development in the two regions.

The two PMs vowed to offer mutual support at international organisations and multilateral forums.

Despite geographical distance, Vietnam always stands side by side with and supports Cuba in any circumstance, PM Chinh said.

He also affirmed Vietnams consistent stance on strongly supporting the United Nations General Assemblys resolutions asking for an end to embargo against Cuba.

Source: NDO


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Dakota graduated from Bret Harte in 2013 and went to Davidson College, NC where she earned a bachelor's degree in Arab studies. After spending time studying in the Middle East and Europe, she is happy to be home, writing about the community she loves.

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.
Fuh Max Dang Facebook

Gunmen stormed the home of a government school teacher in Kumba, opened fire, and killed him point-blank in front of his children.

The attack occurred on Thursday night in Kumba, a town in Cameroon's restive South-West region, where separatist insurgents operate.

The victim, 52-year-old Fuh Max Dang alias grandpa was a physics teacher at Government Bilingual High School (GBHS) Kumba. He was also an examiner of physics for the Cameroon General Certificate of Education (GCE) Examination.

Kumba-based journalist, Divine Nyambot reports that the deceased physics teacher returned home shortly before armed men storm his residence and killed him.

He had just returned home and was in his bedroom before the gunmen arrived. They knocked on his door and his children said 'Daddy somebody is looking for you.' That is how he stepped out of his bedroom before meeting with the unfortunate situation. His corpse has been deposited at the Kumba District Hospital mortuary, said Nyambot.

William Ndiba Itoe, publisher of Cameroon Echoes writes that: Mr. Fuh was a very nice guy. I knew him for a long time. He was a GCE physics examiner and teacher of GBHS Kumba. He was a nice, and quiet gentleman. 

He adds that: They just got into his house at Station in Kumba yesterday night and knocked on the door. His kids opened the door and they told the kids to go and call for their father in the bedroom. When he came out they shot him without saying a word. 

Although competent state services have opened investigations to shed light on the incident, public opinion in Kumba suggests that Fuh Max was killed simply because he is a teacher and is taking part in GCE exams.

No group has claimed responsibility for the murder of the teacher though popular opinions have accused separatist fighters of targeting schools, teachers, and schoolchildren.

Cameroon's state forces have been battling to dislodge armed separatists who pitched their tents in the North West and South West Regions since Anglophone protests transformed into an armed conflict in 2017.

Corporate demands by Common Law Lawyers and Anglophone Teachers led to protests in November 2016. The street demonstrations later morphed into ongoing running gun battles between state forces and armed separatist fighters in the predominantly English-speaking regions, leading to untold destruction of human lives, their habitats, and livelihoods.

Tit-for-tat killings, kidnappings, arsons, maiming, and outright terror have become part of daily lives in some parts of the English-speaking regions. At least 4,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands of others displaced as a result of the conflict, human rights NGOs say.
Nalova Lyonga, Minister of Secondary Education Archives

Nalova Lyonga, Cameroons Minister of Secondary Education has published a list of 600 teachers who have abandoned teaching for greener pastures in Europe, America, and other destinations abroad but continue receiving salaries.

A 15-page document published on Wednesday, June 30, 2021 details the identities of the runaway teachers including their grade, matriculate number, duty station, and current destination.

The runaway teachers, Cameroon-Info.Net learned, receive their salaries every month with the complicity of school principals back home.

Of the 600 absentee teachers, the lions share, 264, are those posted to the North West Region where state forces have been battling to dislodge armed separatists who pitched their tents since Anglophone protests transformed into an armed conflict in 2017.

Corporate demands by Common Law Lawyers and Anglophone Teachers led to protests in November 2016. The street demonstrations later morphed into ongoing running gun battles between state forces and armed separatist fighters in the predominantly English-speaking regions, leading to untold destruction of human lives, their habitats, and livelihoods.

Tit-for-tat killings, kidnappings, arsons, maiming, and outright terror have become part of daily lives in some parts of the English-speaking regions with teachers and schoolchildren targeted.

The crisis, notwithstanding, the South-West Region records just 58 absentee teachers.

Strangely, the Center Region has 107 absentee teachers, although it is about the most peaceful region in the country.

The number of runaway teachers per region is as follows:

Adamawa Region: 35

Center Region: 107

East Region: 7

Far North Region: 21

Littoral Region: 43

North Region: 16

North West Region: 264

West Region: 29

South Region: 20

South West Region: 58

The Minister of Secondary Education invites the aforementioned personnel, who were declared absent and might be out of the national territory, to report to the Ministry of Secondary Education, Department of Human Resources, Room 507 bis (voucher office), within seven days from June 30, 2021.

They should come along with all supporting documents to justify their current administrative position. Failure to do so, disciplinary measures will be taken against them, says Minister Nalova Lyonga.

It is believed that these runaway teachers who have been collecting their salaries were fished out during the many headcounts of staff of the Ministry of Secondary Education.
Stonewall countered Thursday in Baltimore Circuit Court with a motion to dismiss the suit, arguing that the rail company lacks the authority to acquire private property for public use through eminent domain. The maglev builder also failed to pursue condemnation within four years after it said it won authorization to acquire the property, a deadline specified in state law, the filing says. And, the motion says, the maglev builders have offered no details on timing or funding for the project.
The new project will create space for legal offices, gun violence prevention work and community outreach programs targeted at engaging young people in West Baltimore. There will also be exhibits to honor Marshall as well as U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, who donated artifacts from his campaign to the project prior to his death in 2019.
About $250,000 of the $2 million federal grant for the project was spent on improvements to the Baltimore Water Taxi station in Fells Point, but the Inner Harbor project was not scaled back because of it, Rowsom said. The Charles T. Bauer Foundation also contributed $500,000 to the effort, he said.
Secretary: Samantha Wilt, Grantsville. Wilt is a member of the North Garrett FFA Chapter. Her supervised agricultural experience is also in diversified livestock production placement. Her career goal is to stay in the agricultural industry either in diversified livestock production or becoming an agricultural educator.
Green told the deputy the woman became angry with him for what he described as no reason and said he began to film the woman on his cellphone and that she lunged out and bit him on the right biceps, according to charging documents. Green advised that he pushed the woman off of him and to the ground, holding her in a leg lock to keep her from advancing. She then went upstairs and Green followed, and he said the woman punched him in the face.
We were pleased to invite those involved with the project as well as the greater community to sign a steel beam that will be part of permanent display that will mark a new chapter in health care delivery in Harford County.
Since she was charged in September 2019, Wright had trouble finding work, she said. Nasty comments on the internet followed her indictment. She lost friends  Wright ventured that she spoke to half as many people now as she did before the charges  and out in public, she was persona non grata.
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.
Perez has been among many critics of Republican Gov. Larry Hogans decision to end enhanced unemployment benefits offered during the coronavirus pandemic, such as payments to contract workers and those who exhausted regular benefits, two months before the federal funding runs out.
But after hearing arguments Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard D. Bennett agreed with lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case filed Wednesday by the Public Justice Center, who said the case belonged in state court. Their lawsuit claims that Hogan and Robinson have violated their obligations under state law and the Maryland Constitution.
A team of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) reached Patna on Friday along with two Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists who were arrested from Hyderabad in connection with the Darbhanga Station blast case.

The terrorists were taken to Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) office in Patna. They will be produced before a court later in the day.

On Wednesday, NIA had arrested two LeT terrorists in connection with the Darbhanga railway station blast that took place earlier this month in Bihar.

According to an official release, NIA arrested two key accused -- Imran Malik and Mohd Nasir Khan -- from Hyderabad after visiting the scene of the crime and noting the key inputs from the probe.

The case was originally registered as an FIR at Railway Police Station Darbhanga District Muzaffarpur Rail relating to an explosion in a parcel on Platform 1 of Darbhanga Railway station on June 17.

The said parcel was booked at Secunderabad and had arrived in the train Secunderabad- Darbhanga Express. NIA had re-registered the case and taken up the investigation.

After the visit to the scene of the crime and the development of key inputs by the investigation team of NIA, the aforementioned accused persons were arrested from Hyderabad on June 30.

The investigation agency had said the arrested accused, Mohd Nasir Khan, had visited Pakistan in 2012 and received training from handlers of LeT in the fabrication of IED from locally available chemicals.

He along with his brother Imran was in touch with Pakistan-based handlers of LeT over encrypted communication platforms, it said.

The arrested accused are being produced before the Special NIA Court, Patna after obtaining transit from the competent court. Detailed examination of the accused and investigation continues to unearth the larger conspiracy, the NIA said.

(ANI)

Also Read: J-K: Assam Rifles' female security personnel bridge gap with locals in Ganderbal
COVAX, the global alliance for vaccine distribution, on Thursday urged governments around the world to recognize as fully vaccinated all people who have received COVID-19 vaccines that have been deemed safe and effective by the World Health Organization (WHO).

COVAX in a statement said it was built on the principle of equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines to protect the health of people all across the globe and that means protecting their lives and livelihoods, including their ability to travel and conduct trade.

"As travel and other possibilities begin to open up in some parts of the world, COVAX urges all regional, national and local government authorities to recognise as fully vaccinated all people who have received Covid-19 vaccines that have been deemed safe and effective by the World Health Organisation and/or the 11 Stringent Regulatory Authorities (SRAs) approved for Covid-19 vaccines, when making decisions on who is able to travel or attend events," COVAX said.

Furthermore, it stressed that "any measure" that only allows people protected by a subset of WHO-approved vaccines to benefit from the re-opening of travel into and with that region would effectively create a two-tier system, further "exacerbating the inequities we have already seen in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines."

"Such moves are already undermining confidence in life-saving vaccines that have already been shown to be safe and effective, affecting uptake of vaccines and potentially putting billions of people at risk," the statement added.

COVAX commended countries that have already shown commitment to equity as well as safety by accepting travelers protected by all vaccines validated by WHO Emergency Use Listing (EUL) and/or the 11 Stringent Regulatory Authorities (SRAs) approved for COVID-19 vaccines. "We call on other nations and regions to do the same."

Previously, External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar, during the G20 summit, had taken up with the EU leaders to accept Covishield and Covaxin. Later on Thursday, Switzerland, Iceland and 7 EU nations allowed the Serum Institute-manufactured Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine.

According to sources, Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Estonia and Spain have confirmed accepting Covishield for travel entry. Switzerland has also allowed Covishield for the Schengen state. Estonia has confirmed that it will recognize all the vaccines authorized by the Government of India for the travel of Indians to Estonia, said sources.

Union minister Jaishankar had on Tuesday met Josep Borrell Fontelles, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and discussed vaccine production and access. He also took up 'Covishield' authorisation for travel to Europe.

Jaishankar, who is in Italy for G20 foreign ministers meeting, said he will be following up on the matter concerning authorisation for made in India COVID-19 vaccine.

(ANI)

Also Read: Delta variant predicted to become predominant mutation across US: CDC
The Tribal Council elections are coming up and Char-Koosta News has new election logos. We can't decide which is the best. That's where you come in. Check out the logo options below and then vote. Which logo do you prefer? Answer below!

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A Chicago native who grew up in a modest Southwest Side bungalow, Driehaus graduated from DePaul University and launched his career in 1968 at former Chicago investment bank A.G. Becker. A successful portfolio manager, he went on to work at several different brokerage firms before founding Driehaus Capital Management in 1982. He rose to prominence in Chicagos philanthropic circles, supporting a number of causes, including the preservation of historical architecture.
There are simply not enough specialty providers in our community to serve and treat the Medicaid population, the group said in its application for the grant. Swedish Hospital, for example, is the only provider of dermatology services in the area, meaning patients often face a six month wait to see a dermatologist, according to the groups grant application.
Because you humans, who we love so much, but also are very mad at, BUT ALSO LOVE MORE THAN WE CAN EVER EXPRESS, seem to not care about the fact that your patriotic celebrations cause us to pant heavily, cower, shake, run to the basement and refuse food, we are hereby withholding affection until you learn to celebrate in an appropriately quiet manner.
About 56% of Chicago residents aged 18 to 29 and about 65% of residents aged 30 to 39 have received at least one dose. This is compared with 70% of residents in their 40s, about 77% of residents in their 50s and about 72% of residents in their 70s; the percentage dips a bit for the oldest category of residents, those aged 80 and up, with about 63% at least partially vaccinated.
Robinson began waging his own fight against fascism much earlier. In 1935, he announced his eagerness to volunteer in Ethiopia, then under imminent threat of an Italian invasion, and drew the attention of Malaku Bayen, a relative of Ethiopias emperor. Robinson was granted an officers commission and the rank of colonel. He shortly took over as leader of the nations air force after the emperor kicked out its volatile commander. Italy invaded a few weeks later. Robinson fought Mussolinis fascists for a little over a year, suffering wounds in warfare and earning the nickname Brown Condor.
Ray Long

Ray Long is a Chicago Tribune investigative reporter, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist experienced at state Capitol, City Hall, courts and county beats. He covered two governors who went to prison and a state senator who went to the White House. 312-222-3448.
In March 2020, House was working at a salon in Hyde Park. She would start her day at 7 a.m. and would often stay until after midnight. In April, Marimarshe 2.0 Salon and Suits, where she worked, closed due to the COVID-19 lockdown. By May, while other hair salons and barber shops were still shut down, House began creating a plan to open her new wig shop by the end of the year.
Victor was a first grader at McCormick Elementary School, and Ochoa said his teacher gave her some of his last assignments. He wrote that he wanted to be a firefighter and one of his summer plans was to go swimming. Ochoa said he was a nice kid who would tap people on the shoulder and tell them that everything was going to be OK if they were sad.
Investigators discovered that on Feb. 2 Adamik was taken to a nearby hospital for a medical concern and returned around 3 p.m.. Mongreig failed to ensure that Adamik, who used a wheelchair, was off the bus before parking the bus in a lot for the night, according to the release.
Photos taken in January show Rittenhouse drinking inside a Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, bar and gesturing with what appeared to be a white power symbol. The motion states that prosecutors have since learned that the people with Rittenhouse at the bar included the leader of the Wisconsin Proud Boys chapter and several of its highest-ranking members.
To this day, authorities have not said exactly how Legghette got his hands on the gun. But the weapon was traced by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to a Madison, Wisconsin, man, Thomas Caldwell, who, authorities say, sold guns without a license, many of them over the popular website Armslist.com. The transaction of the Glock 26 was also facilitated by looser Wisconsin regulations that allow private sales with no background checks.
It is not clear what record-keeping deficiency of the city would have caused Coles repeated detention, since the database that caused the detention is a statewide database, and the entry in said database that led to his detention was not put there by the city of Chicago, the city wrote in a filing. Plaintiff alleges circumstances that are unfortunate, but that are not the fault of the defendant.
I think we all know that we must do exponentially better in this new year, and I am confident we will. My confidence is grounded in many things, but fundamentally it is grounded in my confidence in all of you. You now have many months under your belt as a senior leadership team at CPD. And your bond will only grow, Lightfoot wrote in the email.
Kelly has been in a tiny cell in the Special Housing Unit since his arrival in New York last month, and must make phone calls from the shower in a desperate effort to obtain privacy, his lawyers allege in a motion filed Thursday. COVID-19 protocols make it difficult to get face-to-face meetings with his attorneys. And since Kelly is functionally illiterate, he cannot effectively review evidence and paperwork on his own, his lawyers said.
I created the website myself, I created the social media, she said. I coordinate for photoshoots, the models, the looks for the photoshoots, I take care of any financial issues that need to be done here. Right now Im currently trying to open up a store and ... get funds for that ... Im a student and funds have been low. Its kind of been hard and its hard for him out there too.
The office also is working to put labels on the other sites, but they are popping up so quickly that one agency official said combating the websites is like a game of whack-a-mole. It is unclear who is behind them, Druker said.
Can we do both? I think we can, Hadden said. I think folks with maybe more legal experience and more legal practice are so used to finding loopholes or fine print or utilizing every particular legal tool in order to obfuscate whats really happening or have as small a liability as possible. That may be what theyre trained to do but  maybe its not the way we should act.
State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will attend and deliver a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 9th World Peace Forum on July 3. The forum will be held from July 3 to 4 at Tsinghua University.

CCTV: It is learned that Grenada and Kyrgyzstan added their name to the list of supporters of a joint statement in support of China delivered at the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council. What's your comment?

Wang Wenbin: On June 22, at the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council, Belarus delivered a joint statement on behalf of 65 countries, stressing that issues relating to Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet are China's internal affairs, opposing politically motivated and groundless accusations against China based on disinformation, and opposing interference in China's internal affairs under the pretext of human rights. Later, more countries expressed their support to China's just position at the Council.

China appreciates and welcomes the endorsement of Grenada and Kyrgyzstan to joint statement, which brought the total number of countries supporting the statement to 67. Besides, more than 20 countries supported and echoed China's position by making statements in national capacity or co-signing a letter. More than 90 countries voiced their appeal for justice at the Human Rights Council, which not only constitutes support to China, but also is an effort to uphold basic norms governing international relations and international fairness and justice.

As a Chinese proverb goes, "A just cause rallies abundant support while an unjust one finds little." A few Western countries' attempts to interfere in China's internal affairs and suppress and contain China under the pretext of human rights are doomed to be futile. They have been and will continue to be firmly opposed by the international community. We urge these countries to stop interfering in other countries' internal affairs, take off the hypocritical mask of "human rights preachers", and solve their own serious human rights problems by making deep reflection and taking concrete measures. They should abide by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and the basic norms of international relations, and truly contribute their share to the sound development of the international human rights cause.

Beijing Daily: The Lower Kootenay Band confirmed on June 30 that there has been a discovery of remains of 182 human bodies in unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in southern British Columbia in Canada. According to reports, it is estimated that about 100 Lower Kootenay Band members were forced to attend the school where the band said many "received cruel and sometimes fatal treatment". Do you have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: This is the third discovery of unmarked graves and human remains at the site of former residential schools for indigenous children since May. It is shocking and heartbreaking to learn the news. We also noticed that Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Perry Bellegarde said the latest discovery is further confirmation of "what the survivors have been saying, that there are unmarked graves and that there has been death in these institutions". He went on to say each of the 139 former residential school sites across Canada needs to be investigated properly.

The crimes committed in the past are already too much to bear, yet the injustice and discrimination experienced by indigenous people in Canada at present is still going unchecked. In his article published by Globe and Mail last week, indigenous doctor James Makokis pointed out that indigenous patients face long-term neglect and racial discrimination, resulting in poor health and unnecessary deaths. This pattern of abuse is consistent with the long history of systemic oppression perpetuated by Canada.

For a long time, the Canadian side has been obfuscating the truth and shirking the responsibilities of persecuting its own indigenous people, while making irresponsible remarks about others. We urge Canada to take a hard look at itself in the mirror, and make greater efforts to conduct thorough investigation into the abuses and discrimination against indigenous people, hold perpetrators accountable and make compensations, so as to completely redress the injustice of suppression against the indigenous people.

Bloomberg: A question on the US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, which says that the Chinese government has engaged in a policy of widespread forced labor in Xinjiang and also in other regions of the country. Do you have any comment on this report?

Wang Wenbin: We firmly reject the groundless US accusation against China based on lies and rumors. This only further exposes the sinister intention of the US to use human rights as a pretext to attack and smear China and interfere in China's domestic affairs.

The US has no authority to wield human rights as a stick around the world. It needs to reflect upon and redress its own human rights crimes including genocide, racial discrimination and forced labor. The genocide committed by the US on American Indians is a publicly-recognized fact and stain. Even today, American Indians remain an "invisible" community and a disappearing minority. According to US media reports, the living space of Native Americans has been seriously squeezed. They also live in harsh conditions. Over 300 Indian reservations in the US are located in the barren mid-west region, where most live a life far removed from modern civilization. About a quarter of Navajo women and some infants had high levels of radioactive substance in their systems, as a result of mining for US weaponry on their reservation. The number of American Indians living below the poverty line is more than twice that of White Americans. After COVID-19 broke out, Native Americans' infection rate and fatality rate are both notably higher than the national average. The Navajo Nation even surpassed the state of New York for the highest per-capita coronavirus infection rate in the US. A report by the Indian Health Service shows that American Indians born today have a life expectancy that is 5.5 years less than the national average. Besides, American Indians are seriously deprived of their civil and political rights. Earlier this year, Deb Haaland, US Secretary of the Interior, acknowledged at her confirmation hearing that the US Department of the Interior was used as a tool of oppression against indigenous tribes in the past. More recent media reports say that up to 100,000 people are trafficked into the US for forced labor annually, of which fewer than 1,000 end up being rescued.

The cry of people like George Floyd still reverberates in the US. The tragic incident is only the tip of the iceberg of racism and systemic abuse of human rights in the US. In the US, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, refugees and migrants are constantly threatened by discrimination, hate speeches and xenophobia acts while white supremacy remains a tumor in the American society. The international community will be watching to see whether the US can seriously review and redress its deplorable human rights record.

AFP: French prosecutors are investigating four fashion companies including the owner of Zara and Uniqlo France over allegations that they benefited from the use of forced labor in Xinjiang. What's your comment? Secondly, why did China decide to join the OECD global tax agreement?

Wang Wenbin: We've stressed on multiple occasions that the so-called forced labor is a lie fabricated by very few anti-China elements of very small number of countries including the US, in an attempt to stir up trouble in Xinjiang and contain China. We firmly oppose any external forces to interfere in China's internal affairs under the pretext of Xinjiang-related issues. It is hoped that relevant parties will not be deceived by the lie of forced labor.

Ironically, the US itself is the country where forced labor is widespread. Relevant international labor organization assessed that systematic violation of labors' rights does exist in the US, a country with the worst performance among major developed countries. The victims include not only US citizens, but also foreign citizens from almost every region of the world, and even vulnerable groups such as women, children and the disabled. Up to 100,000 people are trafficked into the US for forced labor annually and half of them are sold to sweatshops or enslaved in households.

What the US should do is to reflect on its severe human rights problems in a practical and realist manner, and to shoulder its due responsibility. No matter how it is packaged, the attempt to use the false accusation of "forced labor" as an excuse to smear and slander other countries is bound to fail. I would also like to add that racking its brain to smear and suppress only makes the pure white and high quality Xinjiang Cotton more popular among the consumers, and even in higher demand. Xinjiang Cotton has thus become an important brand of Xinjiang agricultural products.

On your second question, China supports efforts toward reaching a consensus-based solution on global taxation cooperation that is comprehensive and more inclusive. We stand ready to work with other parties to uphold multilateralism and reinvigorate the global economy. We hope relevant negotiations will fully accommodate the interests of developing countries, follow the principle of consensus through consultation, and properly address all parties' concerns in a pragmatic and constructive manner.

CCTV: According to reports, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has finalized the names of ROK experts to be included in its working group to assess Japan's plan to discharge nuclear contaminated wastewater into the sea. Invitations have been sent out to the experts. Reports say there will also be Chinese experts in the working group. Can you confirm this and offer more information?

Wang Wenbin: After China, the ROK and other stakeholders called for it repeatedly, the IAEA is working actively to put together a technical working group on the disposal of contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear incident. Recently the IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has written to invite Chinese experts to join the working group. The Chinese side will do its best to support the future work of the group. We hope the IAEA will give full consideration to the views of stakeholders, make sure the working group plays its due role, and conduct technical assessment and supervision before, during and after the discharge of the Fukushima nuclear contaminated water.

How to dispose of the nuclear contaminated water is not a private matter for Japan. Too much is at stake here. China strongly urges the Japanese side to cooperate wherever necessary to make sure that the IAEA technical working group can conduct its work smoothly. Japan mustn't start the ocean discharge before reaching consensus through consultation with all stakeholders including neighboring countries and relevant international institutions.

Bloomberg: Just to go back to the tax agreement, can you perhaps elaborate a little bit more? What's China's overall view of the agreement? What exemptions has China received to agree to the tax plan? And what impact do you think the new tax program will have on China and on multinational corporations?

Wang Wenbin: I just stated China's principled position. You may ask the competent authorities for more specifics.

South China Morning Post: Can you confirm if China explicitly supports the G7 proposal for a 15 percent minimum tax rate?

Wang Wenbin: I just stated China's position.

CRI: China regards vaccines as a global public good, and has provided vaccine assistance and exports to many countries, and conducted joint development and production with other developing countries. Can you give us more details on the role of Chinese vaccines in promoting global anti-epidemic cooperation?

Wang Wenbin: Since the outbreak of the epidemic, China has insisted that vaccines are first and foremost a global public good. Despite the huge domestic demand and limited supply, China has done its best to supply more than 480 million doses of vaccines to the international community, making it the largest supplier of vaccines in the world. So far, China has provided vaccine assistance to nearly 100 countries from five continents. China has announced to provide an initial 10 million doses to COVAX.

The Chinese vaccines are the first doses available to many developing countries, which have dubbed them a "godsend". Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang said the Chinese vaccine has brought a ray of hope to the country's struggling fight against the epidemic. Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa said the vaccine donated by China was like the light at the end of the tunnel. Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said that Chinese vaccines are safe and effective, with which Chile is striving to lower the rate of COVID-19 infection and the number of hospital admissions and deaths. Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne said the Chinese vaccine has proven its effectiveness and safety, and will make positive contributions to the early realization of herd immunity in Antigua and Barbuda.

China has also carried out joint development and production with many developing countries, and supported relevant enterprises in carrying out phase III clinical trials in cooperation with foreign partners.

Chinese vaccines have won a good reputation in the international community, with their safety and effectiveness widely recognized. Up to now, more than 100 countries have approved Chinese vaccines for use. The WHO has added Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines to the Emergency Use Listing. More than 30 foreign leaders have taken the lead in receiving jabs of Chinese vaccines.

China will continue to contribute to the accessibility and affordability of vaccines in developing countries to the best of its capacity. We also hope that all countries in the world that are able to do so will act as soon as possible, honor their commitments, and make their due contributions to promoting equitable distribution and application of vaccines for better global anti-epidemic cooperation.

Bloomberg: This is a question about infrastructure projects in the Philippines that are backed by China. The Binondo-Intramuros bridge in Manila is set to be the first infrastructure project to be completed later this year among 14 planned such projects with Chinese backing. However, some Philippine politicians have criticized the pace of implementation of such projects as being too slow. Does the foreign ministry have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: China and the Philippines always work together to promote cooperation on the basis of mutual respect and mutual benefit. Relevant projects have also made positive contributions to the Philippines' economic and social development.

The Paper: Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President of the Schiller Institute, a US think tank, said recently that to accuse China of making the novel coronavirus is a malicious effort and an old trick by the West to smear China. She said if there was to be an investigation, then it should be carried out everywhere, not just in China. What is China's comment?

Wang Wenbin: China has stressed many times that origin-tracing is a scientific matter that should not be politicized. This position is supported by many scientists in the international community who uphold science, reason and objectivity. In addition to Ms. LaRouche, many other experts have also made their positions clear.

Dominic Dwyer, an Australian immunologist and infectious disease expert and a member of the WHO expert team, said there was no evidence to back up the lab escape theory. He said the "lab leak" theory plays into the political discourse of some countries, and is even supported by individual governments. The spread of this theory reeks of deliberate maneuver. Origin-tracing is extremely complicated work, and there is no evidence that China is concealing key information. Countries should stop fighting and start cooperating with each other. It's also important to carry out origin-tracing study in other parts of the world.

The Swedish Research Council recently held a webinar on how to discern false information and conspiracy related to COVID-19. At the event, Professor Andreas Onnerfors of Uppsala University said the allegations of "China virus" and "lab leak theory" are all conspiracy theories. By spreading such conspiracies, some aim to establish a narrative that China should be held accountable for the outbreak and transmission of the virus. Such practice distorts science, stokes racial discrimination, exacerbates division and poses threats to democracy at multiple levels.

Dr. Danielle Anderson, an Australian virologist who once worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said the WIV "was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab". She said there were strict protocols and requirements aimed at containing the pathogens being studied. She believes the virus most likely came from a natural source. She is convinced no virus was made intentionally to infect people and deliberately released. Anderson does think an investigation is needed to nail down the origin of the virus once and for all, but she's dumbfounded by the portrayal of the lab by some media outside China, and the toxic attacks on scientists that have ensued.

Massimo Galli, head of the Infectious Diseases Unit at the University of Milan-affiliated Luigi Sacco Hospital in Milan, Italy, said at a committee for social affairs of the Chamber of Deputies that the coronavirus is an unknown virus with no signs of genome engineering inside and the "lab-leak" theory has no scientific basis at all. Galli and three other Italian experts believe that the virus is 99% likely to be the result of natural spillover.

We hope that all parties can respect facts and science, and jointly reject political manipulation of vilification under the pretext of origin-tracing, so as to create a favorable environment for global cooperation in origin-tracing and solidarity in fighting the epidemic.
A new international school at China-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City in South China's Guangdong province is progressing smoothly with enrollments ahead of its opening in September this year.

SingChin Academy, a cooperation project between China and Singapore, is affiliated to Hwa Chong Family of Schools.

SingChin Academy, which involves a total investment of 1 billion yuan ($154.76 million), will offer a 12-year international bilingual curriculum covering primary, junior middle and senior middle schools.

Covering 7 hectares, with a total floor area of 100,000 sq m, the academy will be able to accommodate 3,000 students.

The project is not only a new benchmark for cooperation in basic education between Singapore and Guangdong, but is also expected to offer education for the children of talents from across the world in China-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City.

China-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City, founded in 2010, was upgraded to a State-level bilateral cooperation project in November 2018.

Featuring city-industry integration, the knowledge city combines areas of industrial development with supporting facilities, residential areas and cultural attractions, to allow residents to conveniently live and work there.

Statistics show that by the end of 2020, the city had poured in a total investment in fixed assets exceeding 180.4 billion yuan, and lured 23,600 companies to settle, with total registered capital of 439.3 billion yuan.

"With the upgrading of its overall development plan, the Guangzhou knowledge city has entered the second phase of development and construction, which focuses on forward-looking fields such as intellectual property, digital economy, smart cities and scientific and technological innovation," said Xu Hui, deputy director at the development and construction office of China-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City.

As an important driver of the second phase of the Guangzhou knowledge city's development, the Sino-Singaporean demonstration zone for international scientific innovation cooperation is under construction.

With construction starting in September last year, the demonstration zone has a planning area of 2 sq km and is set to reap a total investment of 50 billion yuan. The zone will prioritize the development of industries including biomedicine, health, intelligent manufacturing, new-generation information technology, new materials, new energy and financial services.

The knowledge tower, another benchmark project between Singapore and Guangdong, the main part of which started construction in June last year, is scheduled for completion in 2024.

With a design height of 330 meters, the tower will be a super-high-rise office and sharing space, helping promote China-Singapore cooperation in scientific and technological innovation, urban construction, personnel exchanges and training and investment attraction.

Behind all the achievements made in the Guangzhou knowledge city is China-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City Investment& Development, which is responsible for the overall development of the city and the investment and construction of its infrastructure and supporting facilities.

"The company is an important platform for China-Singapore cooperation in Guangdong. In the future, the company will deeply integrate the resources of both sides to help build a global industrial ecosystem with smart technology industries as the core in the Guangzhou knowledge city," said Chen Changxin, CEO of China-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City Investment& Development.
The Communist Party of China (CPC), the world's largest governing party, celebrated its centenary on Thursday with a solemn ceremony and the grand accomplishment of "building a moderately prosperous society in all respects."

At 100, the CPC is loaded with vigor and all set for tests ahead as China continues the journey to "build a great modern socialist country in all respects."

Speaking at the ceremony on Tian'anmen Square at the heart of Beijing, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, said that over the past century, the CPC has secured extraordinary historical achievements on behalf of the people.

"Today, it is rallying and leading the Chinese people on a new journey toward realizing the second centenary goal," proclaimed Xi, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Over 70,000 people cheering with exhilaration thronged the public square, festooned with red flags and a large Party emblem installation. It was a celebratory aura -- golden figures of "1921" and "2021" represented the 100-year timeline, aircraft flew past in echelons overhead and a 100-gun salute roared through the sky.

The Chinese civilization has lasted five millennia, but the country plunged into a century of humiliation due to the corrupt feudal rule and invasion by Western powers. Many attempts were made to salvage the nation and all ended in failure.

In 1921, the CPC was founded, taking up the mission of "seeking happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation."

Through a century of endeavors, the CPC led the people to overthrow the "three big mountains" of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism, founded a new China, pioneered the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and built a poor state into the world's second-largest economy.

With merely over 50 members at the time of its founding, the CPC today is the world's largest governing party with more than 95 million members, leading a country of more than 1.4 billion people. It also enjoys tremendous international influence.

The Tian'anmen Rostrum, where Xi made his speech, stands witness to history. This was where Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of New China in 1949. It also saw people in festive parades paying respect to Deng Xiaoping, the architect of reform and opening-up in 1978 that has led China to moderate prosperity.

Martin Albrow, a renowned British sociologist, said the CPC's promoting the building of a human community with a shared future and the development of the Belt and Road Initiative through joint efforts are benefiting the world.

The Party's 100th anniversary is marked across China and congratulatory messages were also sent from space station core module Tianhe about 400 km away from Earth.

The profound changes that the CPC has brought to China and its deep impact on the world have led many to decode the formula to the Party's success.

The firm leadership of the Party, its people-centered philosophy of development and upholding socialism with Chinese characteristics are considered to be among the most important factors and hallmarks that distinguish it from other political parties.

In a joint congratulatory message, the non-CPC political parties, the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, and personages without party affiliation said they have kept in mind the original aspiration of cooperation, and will continue to stand and work together with the CPC.

Faced with changes unseen in a century, the journey ahead is bound to be challenging.

In his remarks, Xi called on the Party to continue its great founding spirit. It is comprised of the principles of upholding truth and ideals, staying true to the original aspiration and founding mission, fighting bravely without fear of sacrifice, and remaining loyal to the Party and faithful to the people.

"Looking back on the path we have traveled and forward to the journey that lies ahead, it is certain that with the firm leadership of the Party and the great unity of the Chinese people of all ethnic groups, we will achieve the goal of building a great modern socialist country in all respects and fulfill the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation," Xi said.
A clinical trial of the inactivated Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine on more than 500 healthy children and adolescents has shown encouraging results, according to a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal on June 28.



"Children and adolescents with COVID-19 usually have mild or asymptomatic infections compared to adults. Despite this, a small number may still be at risk of severe illness, and this population can still transmit the virus to others. Thus, it is vital to test the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccine candidates in younger age groups," said Gao Qiang, general manager of Sinovac Life Sciences Co., Ltd.

"We are encouraged by our findings that show CoronaVac is well tolerated and can induce a strong immune response. These results provide new information and suggest that further studies in other regions, involving larger, multi-ethnic populations, may provide additional data to help develop immunization strategies for children and adolescents," he added.

The randomized, double-blind, controlled phase 1/2 clinical trial evaluated the safety, tolerability and immunogenicity of the CoronaVac vaccine in pediatric populations. The findings indicate that the vaccine is safe, well tolerated and induces a strong antibody response in children and adolescents aged three to 17 years. This was the world's first published study on the use of a COVID-19 vaccine for children as young as three years old.

The study enrolled 552 participants, comprised of healthy children and adolescents. From Oct. 31 to Dec. 2, 2020, 72 were enrolled in the first phase of the clinical study. Between Dec. 12 and Dec. 30, 2020, 480 more were enrolled in the second phase of the study.

The combined safety results from phases 1 and 2 showed that most adverse reactions were mild to moderate in severity, recorded within seven days after each dose.

The results of immunogenic evaluation showed that more than 96% of children and adolescents who received two doses of the vaccine in the trial developed antibodies against the novel coronavirus, the study said.

In addition, the study found that children and adolescents had stronger immune responses compared to adults aged 18 to 59 and elderly people aged 60 and above, following two doses of the medium-dose vaccine. The study results indicate a decrease in vaccine response with increase in age.

The results support the use of the medium-dose vaccine with a two-dose schedule in further studies on children and adolescents and suggest the application of this vaccine for emergency use in children and adolescents aged three to17.

In June 2020, Sinovac's CoronaVac became the first vaccine to be approved for emergency use in China. On Feb. 5, 2021, the National Medical Products Administration approved CoronaVac for conditional marketing use. On June 1, CoronaVac was approved for emergency use by the World Health Organization (WHO). Later, China approved the emergency use of CoronaVac for cildern and adolescents on June 3.

On May 5, 2021, Canada became the first country in the world to approve a COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use in children aged 12 to 15 years. Later the same month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency also gave the green light to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to be used on adolescents. "Children younger than 12 years are the next population who need a safe and efficient COVID-19 vaccine," said Cao Bin, a doctor from China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing.
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Some Western media's allegations against the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines lack scientific basis and distort the facts, Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao reported on Tuesday, citing the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

In response to a question about a recent New York Times report which questioned the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines in Chile, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that such allegations were nothing but a distortion of facts and sensational accusations.

"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," Wang said.

Even Chilean netizens agree that the criticisms against the Chinese vaccine were motivated by bias, and that Sinovac's vaccine has worked well in Chile, he added.

China hopes that relevant media and politicians will respect the 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 newspaper cited Wang as saying.
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Two significant wildfires are burning across nearly 30,000 acres in Northern California, the United States, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

The Lava Fire in Siskiyou County, starting on June 24, has grown rapidly. The blaze has burned nearly 19,680 acres (80 square km) with 19 percent contained as of Thursday and more than 3,500 people were displaced.

The Tennant Fire broke out on the eastern side of the Klamath National Forest on Monday afternoon. The fire on Thursday was around 9,439 acres (38 square km) and 6 percent was contained, according to Cal Fire.

While wildfires are a natural part of California's landscape, the fire season in California and across the U.S. West is starting earlier and ending later each year. Climate change is considered a key driver of this trend, Cal Fire said.

Warmer spring and summer temperatures, reduced snowpack, and earlier spring snowmelt create longer and more intense dry seasons that increase moisture stress on vegetation and make forests more susceptible to severe wildfire, it noted.
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Four people including security personnel were injured when a blast went off in the capital city Quetta of Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province on Thursday, local reports said.

Some unknown militants targeted a security forces' convoy with an explosive device in the city on Thursday night, according to the reports.

Fire erupted in one of the vehicles following the explosion. The impact was so strong that window glasses of nearby houses were also destroyed.

The injured were shifted to a nearby military hospital while a state of emergency has also been declared in Civil Hospital, Quetta to meet any untoward situation, the reports added.
Evangelist Alveda C. King: Let Freedom Ring for Everyone "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.







NEWS PROVIDED BY

Alveda King Ministries

July 2, 2021



ATLANTA, July 2, 2021 /Christian Newswire/ -- The following is submitted by evangelist Alveda King, she is available for comment: On July 4th, as we celebrate Independence Day this year, I can't help believing that if we can finally see ourselves as the one blood hu(e)man race, many of our problems including abortion, racism, which lives matter, critical race theory, systemic racism, and all human injustices will be resolved.



"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."  Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776



Here in the 21st century, we the governed need to speak up to the government we entrusted with its power. We need to let them know that babies in the womb are among those "men" who were created equal, and that to kill them in the womb is to deny them their inalienable right to life.



Obviously not all men and women were equal in America when Thomas Jefferson penned those words that were adopted by the 2nd Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. Blacks were still being held as slaves; Jefferson himself owned slaves. Native Americans would spend the next 100 years being dispossessed of their land. Women couldn't vote and had virtually no rights independent of their fathers and husbands.



Even years later, when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the job was not complete. More progress was accomplished months later on Juneteenth, June 19, 1865.



Anyone who doubts that we've come a long way is just plain wrong. In America, one class of individuals is no better off than they were in 1776 and 1865. The unborn. They are the one group deprived of their birthright, and their birthday. Among those tiny, innocent victims, black babies are the worst off.



Some know that abortion disproportionately impacts the Black community. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control's Abortion Surveillance Report for 2018  the most recent available  335 Black babies were killed by abortion for every 1,000 who were born. By comparison, the numbers for white women, "other" women and Latinas were 110, 213 and 158, respectively.



It's also no secret that businesses selling abortion love to set up in minority communities. This year Planned Parenthood disingenuously separated itself from its founder, Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist who seemed intent on making sure Black babies never made it out of the womb, but the fact remains that the nation's biggest abortion seller gives lip service to the Black Lives Matter movement while snuffing out hundreds of Black lives every day.



What's to be done?



For starters, we can push for and support legislation in the states that protect babies from abortion based on race. Currently six states ban abortions sought because of the race of the baby but the laws are in effect in only three  Arizona, Mississippi and Tennessee. The rest have fallen to court challenges.



At Priests for Life we've initiated a new campaign: My Heart Beats Just Like Yours, giving voices to babies in the womb whose beating hearts tell us that life has clearly begun.



When we entrust our government to represent our wishes, we don't want late-term abortion or any legal abortion. God says: "Choose life." Yet, there's a bill in Congress right now, the Women's Health Protection Act, S. 1975/H.R. 3755, that would negate virtually every restriction on abortion at every level of government. Abortion on demand would be available at any stage in a pregnancy, including beyond viability. We cannot stand for this.



There is one critical race; the hu(e)man race; this includes the babies in the womb. It is wrong to discriminate against the critical human race for any reason; including skin color and gestational age. Further, we are not colorblind.



We must learn to see and love each other as the human race; the human family; from womb to tomb.



If we truly believe the right to life is unalienable and that the government serves with power we the people have given them, it's well past time that we right these unconscionable wrongs and let freedom ring for everyone. SOURCE Alveda King Ministries



CONTACT: Leslie Palma, 917-697-7039



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Richard Branson to join 'Unity 22' crew on Virgin Galactic test flight



July 1, 2021  Billionaire Richard Branson will become "Astronaut 001" aboard Virgin Galactic's first fully-crewed test flight of its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, set to lift off this month.



The space tourism company on Thursday (July 1) announced the long-expected news that Branson, who founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, would join the next flight of its SpaceShipTwo "Unity," flying with two pilots and three mission specialists. Branson's role leading up and through the flight test will be to evaluate the private astronaut experience.



"I am so proud to have this remarkable crew of mission specialists and pilots by my side as we fly into space," Branson said in a video accompanying the announcement. "I have always been a dreamer. My mum told me to never give up and to reach for the stars."



"This July, our dream will become a reality," he said.



Virgin Galactic's chief pilot Dave Mackay and lead trainer pilot Michael "Sooch" Masucci will be at Unity's controls for the test flight, which is scheduled for July 11, pending weather and technical checks. Former NASA astronaut Frederick "CJ" Sturckow and Kelly Latimer, a former NASA research pilot, will fly VMS Eve, the WhiteKnightTwo mothership that will carry Unity to about 44,000 feet (13,411 m) before it is released to fire its engine and begin its climb to the edge of space.



Joining Branson as mission specialists will be:

Beth Moses, chief astronaut instructor at Virgin Galactic, will serve as cabin lead and test director in space, overseeing the execution of the test flight's objectives.





Colin Bennett, lead operations engineer, whose job will be to evaluate the cabin's equipment, procedures and experience during both the boost phase and in the weightless environment.





Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic's vice president of government affairs and research operations, who will evaluate the human-tended research experience using an experiment from the University of Florida that requires several handheld fixation tubes to be activated at various flight phases. Branson will undergo the same training, preparation and flight experience as will Virgin Galactic's paying passengers. The company plans to use his observations and feedback to enhance the journey for its customers.



"I'd like to extend a special thank you to our pilots and mission specialists, each of whom will be performing important work," Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic CEO, said in a statement. "Tapping into Sir Richard's expertise and long history of creating amazing customer experiences will be invaluable as we work to open the wonder of space travel and create awe-inspiring journeys for our customers."





Introducing the Unity 22 crew. Click to view video in a new pop-up window. (Virgin Galactic) In June, a month after Virgin Galactic completed its third test flight into space, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) updated the company's commercial space transportation operator license to allow it to fly customers to space. Following this flight with Branson, Virgin Galactic plans two additional tests before commencing its commercial service in 2022.



The "Unity 22" mission will be the twenty-second flight test for VSS Unity and second spaceflight based out of Spaceport America in New Mexico. It will be the third flight into space for Mackay, second for Masucci and Moses and the first spaceflight by Bandla, Bennett and Branson.



The Unity 22 flight will also mark the first time that Virgin Galactic livestreams a spaceflight, with the video available on the company's website and social media channels.



"Audiences around the world are invited to participate virtually in the Unity 22 test flight and see first-hand the extraordinary experience Virgin Galactic is creating for future astronauts," the company said.



Beyond just watching, though, Branson said that after he and his crew lands, he will announce a way for more people to fly into space like him.



"When we return, I will announce something very exciting to give more people a chance to become astronauts because space does belong to us all. So, watch this space!" he said.



Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson will be "Astronaut 001" on the company's first fully-crewed test flight of its SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity, scheduled for launch on July 11, 2021. (Virgin Galactic)







"Unity 22" crew: chief pilot Dave Mackay (at left), pilot Michael Masucci (at right) and mission specialists Colin Bennett, Beth Moses, Richard Branson and Sirisha Bandla. (Virgin Galactic)







Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo "Unity" and WhiteKnightTwo VMS Eve in front of Spaceport America in New Mexico. (Virgin Galactic)







Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo "Unity" flies in space over the state of Mexico on Saturday, May 22, 2021. (Virgin Galactic)



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Market Research Future Published a Half Cooked Research Report on Global Waterborne Coating Additives Research Report.

Market Scenario

Waterborne coating additives are added to improve the rheological properties of water-based coatings. They serve various functions such as wetting & dispersion, defoaming, surfactant, deaeration, hydrophobic agent, and rheological improver among other. The stringent regulation by E.P.A and REACH against the use of solvent based coatings, is expected to be the major driver to the growth of waterborne coating additives market during the forecast period.

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Competitive Analysis

Some of the key players of global waterborne coating additives market are Akzo Nobel NV (Netherlands), Allnex group (China), BASF SE (Germany), BELAMI FINE CHEMICALS PVT. LTD.(India), ALTANA (Germany), Evonik Industries AG (Germany), Dow Corning Corporation (U.S.), Falcon Technologies Inc. (U.S.), Harmony Additive Pvt. Ltd. (India), and UL LLC (U.S).

Market Segmentation

The Global Waterborne Coating Additives Market is segmented based on product type, end-use industry, and region.

On the basis of the product type, the global waterborne coating additives market is segmented into wetting agent & dispersing agent, defoamers, surface control additives, deaerators, rheology modifier, hydrophobic agents, and others. Wetting & dispersion agents market is estimated to be the largest market due to high requirement for dispersing and wetting of resins and pigments in paints & coating industry and is expected to continue dominance over the forecast period. Other product types are also expected to show significant demand due to varied application in construction, automotive, and, the packaging industry.

On the basis of the end-use industry, the global waterborne coating additives market is segmented into building & construction, automotive, packaging, and others. Building and construction industry is expected to have the major market share of waterborne coating additives due to high consumption of paints & coatings. Automotive industry is also expected to show rising demand over the forecast period due to strong automotive industry particularly in Europe and China of Asia Pacific region.

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Regional Analysis

The global waterborne coating additives market is spanned across five regions namely Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific is expected to have the major market share of waterborne coating additives in terms of market size. North America and Europe markets are relatively mature and expected to show steady demand in the forecast period. Middle East and Africa is expected to show rising demand during the forecast period from growing construction industry of Middle East. Latin America is also expected to join hand with other regions and is expected to show rising demand from construction industry.
Market Research Future has published a half-cooked research report on Global Flock Adhesive Market.

The global flock adhesive market was valued at USD 2303.5 million in 2017 and is expected to rise to USD 3275 million by 2027 at a CAGR of 6.04% from 2018 to 2027 (forecast period). The growing demand for flock adhesives in the automotive industry is likely to be the major driver for the global flock adhesive market over the forecast period. The market volume is predicted to expand at 5.22% CAGR over the forecast period.

Flock adhesives are used to produce a smooth, faultless finish in a substrate. Flock is a term used for a mass of short fibers cut from the substance that has to be pasted onto a substrate. The flock is electrostatically attached to the substrate with the help of flock adhesives. Millions of small strands are fired at the substrate, which results in an almost vertical alignment of the fibers due to the electric charge, producing a uniform and aesthetically pleasing arrangement. The flock adhesive technique produces a highly homogenous finish that can even be customized according to the specific requirements. Using longer, thinner fabrics produces a softer surface, whereas using shorter and thicker fibers results in a brush-like surface. They can also be easily painted and offer a fissure-free surface, which gives flock adhesives an advantage over existing adhesive and joining technologies.

The widespread applicability and customizability of flock adhesives has led to their widespread use in the industrial sector. It is highly useful in creating a smooth and uniform plain print over a wide range of substrates. This is the major driver for the global flock adhesives market. The market is likely to expect massive demand from the automotive sector owing to the need for aesthetically pleasing surfaces. This factor can play a major role in augmenting market growth thanks to increased purchasing power of consumers.

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Segmentation:

By source, the global flock adhesive market is segmented into waterborne and solvent-borne adhesives. The waterborne segment accounted for 73.2% market share in 2017 thanks to the substrate being resistant to water. It is predicted to touch a valuation of USD 2,412.2 million by 2027. It can accumulate a demand of 823.7 thousand tons by 2027. Solvent-borne adhesives are likely to be the major contributor to the global flock adhesive market over the forecast period accounting significant revenue at 5.63% CAGR over the forecast period.

By application, the global flock adhesive market is segmented into automotive, textile, paper and packaging, printing, and others. The automotive industry, followed by the textiles industry, is likely to be the major application segment of the global flock adhesives market. This can be attributed to increasing use of these chemicals in bonding of various parts.

By type, the flock adhesives market is segmented into polyurethane, acrylic, epoxy, and others. Polyurethane is likely to be the major type of flock adhesives by 2027. It was valued at USD 1,178 million in 2017. It is predicted to exhibit a CAGR of 5.94% over the assessment period to touch USD 1,366.8 million by 2027. Acrylic can contribute to market volume of 411.2 thousand tons at a CAGR of 5.77% during the forecast period.

Regional Segmentation:

By region, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), the Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Latin America.

Asia Pacific dominated the global flock adhesive market in 2017 with a majority share and is likely to remain dominant throughout the forecast period. The growing automotive industry in Asia Pacific is likely to be a major driver for the global flock adhesive market over the forecast period. The textile industry growth in countries such as India and China can be a major driver for the flock adhesive market. Both of these factors are expected to thrust the APAC market volume to 610.3 thousand tons by 2027.

Europe is likely to be a major market for flock adhesives over the forecast period, mainly due to the steady demand from the prosperous automotive industry in the region. This region can generate USD 765.7 million in value by 2027.

Competitive Analysis:

Leading players in the global flock adhesive market include Henkel AG & Co. KGaA (Germany), H.B. Fuller (U.S.), Sika AG (Switzerland), DowDuPont Inc. (U.S.), Bostik SA (U.S.), Lord Corporation (U.S.), KISSEL + WOLF GmbH (Germany), Stahl Holdings BV (The Netherlands), International Coatings Company (U.S.), and Union Ink (U.S.).
Market Research Future Published a Half Cooked Research Global Sulfuric Acid Market Research Report - Forecast to 2022 - Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast up to 2022.

Sulfuric Acid Market  Market Overview

Sulfuric acid is a mineral acid and is one of the largest volume industrial chemical produced across the globe. Fertilizer production, especially phosphate fertilizer from wet-process sulphuric acid, is the major end use market fort sulfuric acid. The major application area of sulphuric acid covers fertilizers, chemical manufacturing, refinery, textile, pulp & paper manufacturing, metal processing and others.

Agricultural economies holds the greater importance in this market, as fertilizer production considered as a key focused area for the consumption of sulpfuric acid. Increasing demand for fertilizer to attain the higher agriculture yield had a significant impact on this market over the past few years and set its uplifted usage in the coming years. China, alone acquired almost half of the global market in terms of sulphuric acid production resulting into domination of Asia Pacific over the global market. In addition to this, fertilizer consumption of India represents massive number on account of presence of large agriculture base and is driving the demand for sulphuric acid. Apart from the, automotive industry expected to provide higher gains to key industry players in this market during the forecast period. This is due to use of sulfuric acid in the automotive batteries which has triggered automotive application of sulfuric acid. However, volatility in the raw material prices and growing consumption of phosphate based fertilizer limited the growth scope of this market.

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Sulfuric Acid Market- Competitive Landscape

Global Sulfuric Acid market is highly concentrated as well fairly competitive in nature. The key industry participants operating in this market are Agrium, Akzo Nobel, Bayer, BP, Chevron, Cytec Industries, Dupont, Evonik Industries, Honeywell and Solvay. The major companies in this market are seen adopting collective market strategies to such as mergers, acquisition and joint-ventures in order to consolidate their product portfolio and to strengthen their market presence. Several production capacity expansion has also witnessed across the various developed markets to strengthen market penetration into emerging markets and exploit untapped markets. The overall effect of market competition observed in global sulphuric acid market is observed as high and is expected to get even higher due consistent increase in the production activities.

Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:

May 18, 2017- Yidu Xingfa Chemical and DuPont tied in an agreement for an engineering and technology license for a 3,600 Mtpd MECS MAX3 sulfuric acid plant. The collective effort has taken to build one of the largest sulfuric acid plant in China in order to cater the ongoing demand. Xingfa is expanding its existing site, located in the Hubei province near Yichang city, with the aim of roughly doubling the phosphate fertilizer capacity. The new MECS MAX3 sulfuric acid plant will process 1.2 MMtpy of sulfuric acid, as well as support the production of an additional 400,000 tonnes/yr of phosphoric acid, 400,000 tonnes/yr DAP and 35,000 tonnes/yr of potassium phosphate monobasic. The overall expansion activity expected gain market effectiveness while bridging the demand supply gap of sulfuric acid.

October 10, 2017- Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Ltd and Jordanian Phosphate Mines Company has formed joint venture to build largest sulfuric acid plant in India. The agreement has undertaken by investing overall amount of USD 860 million. The plant will come as a huge relief to Indias agricultural sector requirements in view of meagre availability of phosphates in India. Phosphoric acid produced at the plant will be exported to the Kandla port in Gujarat from Jordans Aqaba port, which is close to the location of the plant.

November, 2017- Leading chemical industry player BASF has launched new sulfuric acid catalyst. BASF has introduced the new sulphuric acid catalyst O4115 Quattro into the market. The new, cesium-based catalyst is unique due to its geometrical shape  a combination of four strands  leading to a 30 percent greater catalytic surface area compared to conventional sulphuric acid catalysts. The newly launched catalyst has 30 % greater catalytic surface area and helps to improve performance during the sulfuric acid production.

August 31, 2016- Jacobs Engineering Group Inc, Acquires BAYQIK Sulfuric Acid Converter Technology from Bayer AG. The company has acquired patented technology from Bayer AG, under the term of agreement the overall technology shift includes transfer of relevant Bayer technical, commercial and market information to Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. BAYQIK technology enables more efficient conversion of process gas with high sulphur dioxide concentrations. Therefore, it altogether expected to provide growth offerings in the Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. growth offering.

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Market Research Future Published a Half-Cooked Research Report on Refractories Market Research Report.

Market Insights

Market Research Future has recently made public its report on the global refractories market which divulges various crucial market figures. The global refractories market is due to grow at a CAGR of 4.02%during the forecast period 2016 to 2022. Used extensively for linings in furnaces, reactors and other processing units due to its heat-resistant composition, the market is expected to move forward with steady and moderate growth.

The demand for refractories material is consistent due to its ability to resist extremely high temperatures without resulting in physical or chemical changes. Refractories have been witnessing rising applications in emerging markets due to its extensive use in manufacturing and in the construction industry. These emerging markets are key in the progress of the market and are also among the largest produces of refractories. Additionally, the growing demand for infrastructure has resulted in high demand for glass, metals, and cement in the construction sector.

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Market Segmentation

MRFR's analysis of the market divides it into various segments in an effort to magnify every relevant market factor. Segmentation has been performed on the basis of type, form, application, and region. By type, the market is segmented into high alumina, magnesite, silica brick, fireclay, and others. Based on form, the market is divided into unshaped and shaped.

By application, the market is categorized into steel, cement, glass, non-ferrous, and others. The steel sector is the largest consumer of refractories. Globally used due to its lightweight, and heat resistant nature, refractories are highly suitable for use in the steel industry.

The global refractories market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Rest of the World.

Key Players

The competitive landscape of the global market is covered expensively in MRFRs report, and includes key market players such as Shinagawa Refractories Co. Ltd, Saint-Gobain S.A, RHI AG, Magnesita Refratarios S.A., Harbisonwalker International (HWI) Inc, Coorstek Incorporated, Krosaki Harima Corporation, Corning Incorporated, Vesuvius PLC, and Morgan Advanced Materials PLC

Latest Industry News

RHI Magnesita has announced its decision to merge its Indian operations under Orient Refractories The move comes in recognition of the potential the region represents.

HarbisonWalker International has opened its refractories plant in Ohio, U.S.A after its announcement of the project in 2017. The UD 30 Mn investment has resulted in a technologically advanced refractories plant which will provide the latest in refractories.

Regional Analysis

The Asia Pacific region accounts for the most significant market share and is followed by Europe and North America. The presence of a massive, ever-growing population in the region has driven the construction sector considerably with an increased demand for housing, and infrastructure in rapidly urbanizing countries. The region is one of the largest producers of refractories which is likely to assist in the APAC remaining in its leading position beyond the forecast period.

Led by the US, North America is another significant region in the global refractories market. The U.S is the largest consumer of refractories and the demand for steel and cement in construction activities drive the market in the region.

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Monosodium Glutamate Market Analysis

The global monosodium glutamate market is predicted to touch USD 6,200 million at a 4.9% CAGR between 2016- 2022, reveals the new Market Research Future (MRFR) report. Monosodium glutamate or MSG is an amino acid that is naturally occurring in various foods. Its use as flavor enhancers and food additives has gained immense recognition over the years. Besides, it is also used in bakery and dairy products globally. In addition, monosodium glutamate is widely used in instant noodles, seasonal blends, cheeses, meat and milk products, and sauces. Apart from the food industry, MSG is also used in pharmaceutical/medical applications. These include hypertension neuroregulators and parenteral nutrition for congenital metabolic disease. It is also used in negligible amounts in animal feeds.

Various factors are adding to the global monosodium glutamate market share. These factors, as per the new MRFR report, include extensive applications including preservatives, acidity regulators, flavor enhancers, additives, and others, growing demand in the food industry, rapidly growing animal feed industry, preference for fast food & processed food due to hectic lifestyle, and increasing use in different medical applications.

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On the contrary, health concerns related to monosodium glutamate consumption such as nausea, chest pain, sweating, headache, and skin rash, coupled with its regulation by regional Food & Drug Administration (FDA) authorities, are factors that may limit the monosodium glutamate market growth over the forecast period.

Key Players

Key players profiled in the global monosodium glutamate market report include Jianyang Wuyi MSG Co. Ltd. (China), Shandong Shenghua Group (China), Shandong Qilu Biotechnology Group (China), Shandong Linghua MSG Co., Ltd (China), KYOWA HAKKO BIO CO.LTD. (Japan), Ningxia Eppen Biotech Co. (China), Vedan International (Holdings) Limited (Hong Kong), AJINOMOTO Co.Inc. (Japan), and Fufeng Group (China), among others.

Monosodium Glutamate Market Segmentation

The Market Research Future Report provides an inclusive segmental analysis of the global monosodium glutamate market based on end use industries and applications.

By application, the monosodium glutamate market is segmented into preservatives, acidity regulators, flavor enhancers, additives, and others. Of these, flavor enhancers and additives will lead the market over the forecast period. This will be followed by acidity regulators and preservatives.

By end use industries, the monosodium glutamate market is segmented into animal feed, pharmaceutical industry, cosmetic industry, food processing industry, and others. Of these, the cosmetic and food processing industry will dominate the market over the forecast period for its burgeoning demand from Chinas growing economies. Besides, the increasing demand of monosodium glutamate from different end use industries is also adding market growth.

Monosodium Glutamate Market Regional Analysis

Based on the region, the global monosodium glutamate market report covers the recent trends and growth opportunities across Europe, the Americas, the Asia Pacific (APAC), Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). Of these, the APAC region will spearhead the market over the forecast period. Factors propelling the global monosodium glutamate market growth in the region include use in different applications like flavor enhancers and additives in China and Japan, and burgeoning demand for fast food in South Korea, Taiwan, and India.

The global monosodium glutamate market in North America is predicted to have the second-largest share over the forecast period. The US is the chief contributor in the region for the growing demand for the product from the food manufacturing industry coupled with the rising demand for Asian food.

The global monosodium glutamate market in Europe is predicted to have a healthy growth over the forecast period for the rapidly growing food manufacturing sector.

The global monosodium glutamate market in Latin America and the Middle East & Africa is predicted to have sound growth over the forecast period for the increasing use of monosodium glutamate in different applications like preservatives, acidity regulators, flavor enhancers, additives, to name a few.

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Global Photovoltaic materials Industry: Set to Witness Huge Growth by 2028





According to a new report published by Polaris Market Research the worldwide Photovoltaic Materials Market is anticipated to reach around USD 44,073 million by 2026. In 2017, the Polycrystalline Silicon segment dominated the global market, in terms of revenue. In 2017, Asia-Pacific accounted for the majority share in the global Photovoltaic Materials market.

The increase in the adoption of renewable energy sources drives the growth of this market. Growing concerns regarding environmental pollution caused by fossil fuels and their limited availability support the market growth. There has been an increasing demand of solar technology owing to low operating costs and less maintenance. Governments are increasingly investing in the development of solar technology to accelerate the adoption of renewable sources, thereby supporting market growth. However, high installation costs of solar systems limit the growth of the market. New emerging markets, and declining costs of photovoltaic materials would provide growth opportunities in the coming years.

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Asia-pacific dominated the global Photovoltaic Materials Market during the forecast period. A significant rise in the initiatives taken by governments of China, India, and Japan to promote the use of solar technology to reduce carbon footprint supports the growth of the market in the region. Incentives provided by the governments to the commercial sector industries using solar technology has resulted in high demand of photovoltaic materials in the region. China leads the Asia-Pacific Photovoltaic Materials market during the forecast period. Regions such as North America and Europe export solar cells from Asia-Pacific, thereby supporting market growth in the region. Increasing awareness regarding use of renewable sources and green technologies augments the market growth in the region. Leading global players are expanding their presence in developing nations of India, Indonesia, and Malaysia to tap the growth opportunities offered by these countries.

The various types of photovoltaic materials include Monocrystalline Silicon, Polycrystalline Silicon, Cadmium Telluride, and Copper Indium Gallium Selenide among. The Polycrystalline Silicon segment is expected to lead the market during the forecast period owing to affordable manufacturing process and use in varied applications. The Copper Indium Gallium Selenide segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

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The well-known companies profiled in the report include DuPont, Targray Technology International, Inc, Shin-Etsu Chemicals Co., Ltd., Mitsubishi Material Corporation, Hemlock Semiconductor Corporation LLC, Atecom Technology Co., Ltd., American Elements, Ferrotec Corporation, Topray Solar, Hangzhou First Applied Material Co. Ltd., 1366 Technologies Inc., NovoPolymers NV among others. These companies launch new products and collaborate with other market leaders to innovate and launch new products to meet the increasing needs and requirements of consumers.
Rise in the prevalence of infectious diseases, increase in immunization programs across the globe, and surge in R&D activities to develop new vaccine drive the growth of the global vaccine market.

According to the report, the global vaccine industry generated $ 32.46 billion in 2019, and is expected to reach $54.15 billion by 2027, witnessing a CAGR of 6.6% from 2020 to 2027.

Covid-19 Scenario-

Covid-19 outbreak led to increase in investments and R&D activities in the industry for vaccines as well as drugs against the novel corona virus.

The government organizations all across the globe along with world health organizations (WHO) are initiating to increase the potential for vaccine generation and global supply.

The pediatric vaccine segment to maintain its lead position during the forecast period

Based on end-user, the pediatric vaccines segment accounted for the highest market share in 2019, contributing to nearly half of the global vaccine market, and is estimated to maintain its lead position during the forecast period. This is due to rise in demand for pediatric medicine owing to its ability to protect against multiple diseases. However, the traveler vaccines segment is projected to witness the fastest CAGR of 7.3% from 2020 to 2027, owing to its crucial role in minimizing the risk of exposure to different diseases associated with people traveling to various regions.

North America to dominate the market throughout the forecast period-

Based on region, North America held the highest market share in 2019, contributing to around two-fifths of the global vaccine market in 2019. Surge in prevalence of infectious diseases such as influenza, MMR, DTP and others and surge in awareness related immunization and development of new vaccines drive the growth of the market in this province. On the other hand, the Asia-Pacific region is expected to register the largest CAGR of 8.1% during the forecast period. This is owing to presence of large untapped opportunities such as expanding healthcare budgets and increase in disposable income. In addition, rise in demand for vaccine, owing to growth in number of geriatric population further fuels the market growth.

Leading market players

Serum Institute of India Pvt. Ltd.

Pfizer

Johnson & Johnson

AstraZenecea plc

GlaxoSmithKline plc

Sanofi Aventis

Merck & Co., Inc.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc.

CSL Limited

Novavax, Inc.

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Key Findings Of The Study
The Car T Cell Therapy Market Share, at a CAGR of 18 between 2019 to 2026, is bound to reach US$ US$ XX Million. With technology scaling new heights, its inevitable for health systems to integrate with the existing technology platforms. Also, geographical barriers are done away with telehealth to add. The care delivery solutions are not expected to be the same going forward. EHR will continue to expand with the addition of NLP, voice, and digital assistance. As such, it could be inferred that hi-tech healthcare solutions would be the future of the healthcare arm.

A considerable dip in the development of effective chemotherapy agents is expected to account for increasing preference for CAR T-cell therapy as an effective immunotherapy.

In cases where patients do not seem responsive to these therapies, especially in case of relapsed or refractory B-cell lymphoma, CAR T-cell therapy has been proven to be highly effective.

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Company Profile

Novartis AG

Gilead Sciences Inc.

Celgene Corporation

bluebird bio, Inc.

A new research study of Persistence Market Research (PMR) suggests that the increase in product availability in developed regional markets such as North America, Europe, and Japan, with high incidence of relapsed cancer will accelerate CAR T-cell therapy market in the near future.

CAR T-cell therapy is based on a personalized approach and thus, ensures improved patient compliance that tends to changing the perception towards its adoption. Prominently driven by this, global CAR T-cell therapy market is expected to reach the revenues worth US$ 800 Mn by the end of 2019 and would exhibit spectacular growth through 2026, at an estimated CAGR of 18%.

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Key Takeaways - CAR T-cell Therapy Market Study

Increasing product availability, improving reimbursement scenarios, and expanding patient pool of relapsed cancer will remain the key factors shaping CAR T-cell therapy market landscape in Europe.

High price point of CAR T-cell therapy continues to hamper its adoption for relapsed cancer treatment. To tackle this issue, Novartis AG, the pioneering CAR T-cell therapy manufacturer agreed for discounted pricing of its products in the U.K. after striking the deal with National Health Service (NHS). In October 2018, NHS also signed a deal with CAR T-cell therapy Yescarta manufacturer, Gilead Sceinces Inc.

CAR T-cell therapy agent, bb2121, is in the late stage of clinical development for treatment of multiple myeloma. It would be the first CAR T-cell therapy agent approved for multiple myeloma treatment.

Axicabtagene ciloleucel is projected to be a high selling product owing to its comparatively easier and glitch-free manufacturing procedure, compared to tisagenlecleucel.

In terms of indication, owing to large patient pool of relapsed large B-cell lymphoma, coupled with higher adoption rate of CAR T-cell therapy for its treatment, it is expected to garner higher revenue share as compared to acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Association (FDA) has granted orphan drug designation to clinical stage CAR T-cell therapies. This development is crucial and will further complement the growth prospects of global CAR T-cell therapy market over the period of next few years.

Strategic Expansion by Dominant Players Benefiting Market

CAR T-cell therapy market is expected to witness significant growth, majorly attributed to new product launches that are lined up in the near future and multiple developments in CAR T-cell therapy targeting other cancer types. North America and Europe are expected to hold a major share in global CAR T-cell therapy market, with active production sites only in the U.S.

Manufacturers thus need to send across sample of T-cells from Europe to the U.S. and then return final products to Europe post manufacturing.

This process would increase the overall production costs, average treatment waiting time for patients, and ultimately limits the potential CAR T-cell therapy market growth. To overcome such challenges, Novartis AG and Gilead Sciences Inc., dominant companies in the CAR T-cell therapy market, are strategizing on expansion to meet the growing CAR T-cell therapy demand in other regions.

Novartis AG, a manufacturer of CAR T-cell therapy product KyMRIah is expanding its production facility with investment of over US$ 91.5 million through 2021 in Stein, Switzerland. Similarly, Gilead Sciences Inc. manufacturer of Yescarta, is focusing on expanding production facility in the Netherlands, with operations expected to commence by end of 2020.

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Know More About CAR T-cell Therapy Market Report

Persistence Market Research offers a unique perspective and actionable insights on CAR T-cell therapy in its latest study, presenting historical demand assessment from 2017  2018 and projections from 2019  2026 on the basis of product type (axicabtagene ciloleucel, tisagenlecleucel, lisocabtagene maraleucel and bb2121), indication (relapsed large B-cell lymphoma, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, multiple myeloma), end user (hospitals, cancer treatment centers) in three prominent regions.

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The Proteomics Market Share is all set to reach US$ 5X Revenue between 2019 to 2029 at a CAGR of 17. With technological advancements engulfing the healthcare vertical, VR (virtual reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) are being incorporated to train the medical interns and also for surgery simulation and patient treatment. As of now, virtual impairments, cancer, depression, autism are being treated with VR. The others are expected to follow suit soon.

Over the years, the proteomics market has created new opportunities in life science industries due to increasing usage of the technology in cancer drug development and personalised medicine. As per findings of Persistence Market Research (PMR), the global market for proteomics will witness stupendous expansion at a CAGR of 17% over the forecast period (2019-2029).

With growth projected to showcase over 5X expansion in revenues, the global proteomics market remains buoyed by advancements in high-throughput technologies that are constantly being used to investigate proteomes. As proteomics are widely used in diagnostics, prognostics, and various other healthcare applications, there has been increasing demand for proteomic techniques in disease diagnostics and drug development.

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Companies covered in Proteomics Market Report Agilent Technologies, Inc.

Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. (US)

GE Healthcare (US)

Danaher Corporation (US)

PerkinElmer, Inc. (US)

Merck KGaA (Germany)

Caprion Proteomics Inc.

Bio-Rad Laboratories

Luminex Corporation (US)

Waters Corporation

Promega Corporation

Bruker Corporation

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Key Takeaways of Proteomics Market Study

The reagents and kits segment under component is expected to contribute more than 30% of revenue share in the proteomics market.

of revenue share in the proteomics market. In terms of technology, the protein fractionation systems segment is expected to grow twice its size by the end of 2029 .

. Leading proteomics service provider companies are collaborating with local proteomics service providers as well as research institutes to strengthen their market position.

North America is dominating the global proteomics market, while East Asia is expected to offer lucrative opportunities, owing to rapid increasing healthcare programs and industrialization in the region.

Technological advancements in proteomic techniques and growing demand for proteomics research for drug development focussing on large-scale manufacturing of personalized medicine are bringing in new avenues for market development, says a PMR analyst.

Potential Impact of COVID-19 on the Proteomics Market

The global outbreak of COVID-19 is indirectly affecting the proteomics market, as applications in pharmaceutical companies witness a downtrend. This is mainly due to hampered drug production and the preference of pharmaceutical companies toward the production of vital drugs that are needed now.

On the other hand, the proteomics market will gain traction, as numerous proteomic labs across the U.S. and Europe are taking up the research of therapeutic methods for fighting the coronavirus, thus providing insights about the inclusion of proteomics in the vaccine for COVID-19. This factor is expected to partially subdue the shortcomings that the market will face in the foreseeable future, due to the pandemic.

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Acquisitions and Partnerships - Key Strategies of Market Players

Key players in the proteomics market are focussed on improving their product portfolios though the launch of new products. For instance, in June 2019, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc launched New-Generation Benchtop Mass Spectrometer Advances Quantitative Proteomics and Translational Research. Manufacturers are also working toward getting new products approved by regulatory bodies and launching them at the earliest.

Various players in the proteomics market are focusing on growth strategies such as acquisitions and partnerships. For example, in June 2019, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc announced a collaboration with Biognosys for Advance Plasma Quantitation Methods in Proteomics.

What Does the Report Cover?

Persistence Market Research offers a unique perspective and actionable insights on the proteomics market in its latest study, presenting historical demand assessment of 20142018 and projections for 20192029, on the basis of component (instruments, reagents and kits, core proteomics services, bioinformatics services, and quantitation services), technology (microarrays, X-Ray crystallography, spectroscopy, chromatography, protein fractionation systems, electrophoresis, and surface plasma resonance systems), application (drug discovery, clinical diagnosis, and cancer research), and end user (contract research organizations (CROs), research & academic institutions, and pharma & biotech companies), across seven key regions.

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The Nitrile Gloves Market Share is on the verge of reaching US$ US$ 26.7 Billion at the rate of 24 CAGR from 2020 to 2030. Healthcare vertical being subject to sensitive, personal data, is at a higher risk of cyber-attacks (with the majority opting for EHR). This calls for semantic interoperability, which lets the information management systems interpret as well as derive insights through shared data. This would help in proper tracking of patients records in a coordinated way to out-of-network as well as in-network providers.

The growing pandemic of community infections owing to the emergence of new pathogens is expected to increase the demand for nitrile gloves across the world. The need to quell community and hospital-acquired infections is expected to drive the growth of the global nitrile gloves market.

Key product manufacturers operating in the market offer a wide range of products, such as disposable and reusable nitrile gloves. Owing to the non-availability of treatment for new pathogen infections and significant lag phase between the emergence of new pathogens and development of effective treatment and vaccines, there has been increasing need for nitrile gloves as a preventive measure.

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Companies covered in Nitrile Gloves Market Report

Cardinal Health

Kimberly Clark Corporation

Top Glove Corporation Berhad

Dynarex Corporation

Ansell Limited

Adventa Berhad

Rubberex Corporation

3M Company

Kossan Rubber Industry Ltd.

Hartalega Holdings Berhad

Supermax Corporation Berhad

Medline Industries, Inc.

B. Braun Melsungen AG

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Persistence Market Research predicts that the global nitrile gloves market will exhibit an impressive CAGR of 24% during the forecast period (2020-2030), to be valued at US$ 26.7 Bn by 2030-end.

Key Takeaways from Nitrile Gloves Market Study

By product type, powder-free gloves are expected to gain traction in the global nitrile gloves market during the forecast period.

Owing to the use of powder-free gloves for the prevention of primary infections and allergic side-effects, and to perform surgical procedures, the powder-free segment is the most dominating product type in North America and Europe nitrile gloves markets.

In terms of usage, disposable gloves are expected to gain more than 1/3 share in the nitrile gloves market share by 2030 .

. By sterility, sterile gloves are expected to hold more than 1/3 revenue share in the global nitrile gloves market by 2030 , owing to high standard regulatory compliance requirements for medical nitrile gloves.

, owing to high standard regulatory compliance requirements for medical nitrile gloves. Under the end user segmentation, hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers segments are expected to collectively gain more than 2/3 market share in the nitrile gloves market by 2030 .

. North America is the highest revenue generating market by region, due to the high rate of COVID-19 pathogenic infections and 10X increase in the average selling prices of nitrile gloves. Europe is expected to offer lucrative opportunities, owing to higher incidence of hospital-acquired infections and increasing volume of innovative surgical procedures.

Keeping A Tab On Key Players In The Nitrile Gloves Market? Go To Purchase Now To Decipher The Competitive Analysis In Our Nitrile Gloves Market Report! https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/checkout/31892

Disruptive unmet demand for medical gloves with 10X rise of average selling price, and WHO pushing for effective COVID-19 prevention, are expected to propel the growth of the global nitrile gloves market, says a PMR analyst.

Accelerated Expansion & Acquisition by Leading Industry Players to Meet Unmet Demand in Nitrile Gloves Market

Leading manufacturers in the global nitrile gloves market are extensively focusing on the expansion of their manufacturing capabilities due to current disruptive demand. Governments are actively encouraging local manufacturers to prioritize emergency demand, specifically for public hospitals and healthcare setups.

What Does the Report Cover?

Persistence Market Research offers a unique perspective and actionable insights on the nitrile gloves market, in its latest study, presenting historical demand assessment of 2015  2019 and projections for 2020  2030, on the basis of product type (powder-free gloves and powdered gloves), usage (disposable gloves and reusable gloves), sterility (sterile gloves and non-sterile gloves), and end user (hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, clinics, diagnostic centers, and others) across seven key regions.

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Rise in prevalence of cancer & genetic disorders, advancements in genetic testing techniques, and surge in awareness about personalized medicines drive the growth of the global genetic testing market. The market across North America held the largest share in 2019, contributing to nearly two-fifths of the market. Due to prolonged lockdown across various countries, genetic counselors are unable to see their patients in person.

The global epigenetics market was valued at $772 million in 2019, and is projected to reach $2,168 million by 2027, registering a CAGR of 13.6% from 2020 to 2027.

Growth in R&D activities and technological advancements majorly drive the market growth. Furthermore, increase in awareness of epigenetics in emerging countries, rise in incidences of cancer, and increase in partnership between academic, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology companies across the globe further contributes toward growth of the epigenetics market.

Covid-19 impact:

Due to prolonged lockdown across various countries, genetic counselors are unable to see their patients in person. Moreover, there is lack of skilled professionals and laboratories to run the tests.

Government bodies such as Centers for Medicaid Services (CMS) do not consider genetic counselors as healthcare providers, and are not exempting them from practicing during the lockdown.

Clinics and healthcare providers are using telehealth to conduct genetic counseling.

Key Findings Of The Study

By product type, the kits segment held nearly one third share in the global market in 2019.

By application, the non-oncology segment exhibits fastest growth, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.2% from 2020 to 2027.

By end user, the pharmaceutical & biotechnology companies segment held the largest market share in 2019, and is expected to remain dominant throughout the forecast period.

By region, Asia-Pacific is expected to experience growth at the highest rate, registering a CAGR of 14.7% during the forecast period.

The global genetic testing market report includes an in-depth analysis of the major market players such as Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (RainDance Technologies, Inc.), Abbott Laboratories, Myriad Genetics, Inc. (Myriad RBM, Inc.), Danaher Corporation (Cepheid), F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Eurofins Scientific, Illumina, Inc., Qiagen N.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., and CSL Ltd.

Read More:

https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/press-release/epigenetics-market.html
Acknowledging the exponential traction, the market perceives currently, Market Research Future (MRFR) in its recently published study report asserts that the global pedicle screw system market will reach USD 506.65 MN by 2023, registering approximately 6.3% CAGR throughout the forecast period (2018 2023).

Additional factors helping the market to boost further, include the increasing number of geriatric populaces and growing preference of minimally invasive surgeries. Moreover, accident and trauma cases along with hyper-obesity disorders drive the demand for pedicle screw systems, causing severe spinal injuries.

With the vast technological advancements that happened over the last decade, pedicle screw systems have undergone several bettering transformations, and with each innovation and bettering efforts, pedicle screw system market has garnered prominence & value, globally. Simultaneously, the increasing prevalence of conditions and disorders such as arthritis of the spine, scoliosis and other deformities of the spine has fostered the market growth.

On the other hand, factors such as the high cost associated with pedicle screw systems, delayed processes of product approval and stringent regulatory frameworks are expected to impede the growth of the market during the assessment period.

Global Pedicle Screw Systems Market - Regional Analysis

The North American region, heading with the increasing number of populaces suffering from lumbar spine accounts for the leading market in the global pedicle screw systems. Countries like the US and Canada, backed by substantial technological innovation and advancement in manufacturing processes, play a vital role in the growth of the regional market.

The Asia Pacific pedicle screw systems market is emerging as a profitable market, globally. Rising cases of obesity disorders, increasing healthcare expenditure, increasing government funding, and the presence of a large number of patient population, along with the growing awareness about novel spine treatment techniques in the region are some of the key driving forces behind the growth of the regional market. Moreover, factors such as the rising number of orthopedic surgeries, rising investments in healthcare and expansions by market players, impact the market growth in the region, positively.

Major Players:

Key players leading the global pedicle screw systems market include Amedica Corporation, Alphatec Spine, Inc., B. Braun Melsungen AG, Globus Medical, Inc., Depuy Synthes, K2M Group Holdings, Inc., Nvision Biomedical Technologies, LLC., Medtronic PLC. , Orthofix International NV, SeaSpine, RTI Surgical, Inc., Stryker Corporation, and Zimmer Biomet Holdings, Inc. among others.
WASHINGTON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --A Fairtrade has unveiled a new global campaign, Bitter Sweet, featuring a stop-motion animation, "Unwrap a Fairer Future," that literally unwraps the bitter truth behind unethical cocoa sourcing practices by some major chocolate manufacturers. From July 1-7, 2021, this global campaign will reach people in 22 countries leading up to the film's global debut across Fairtrade's owned social channels on World Chocolate Day, July 7, 2021. ''Unwrap a Fairer Future" is a specially commissioned campaign film designed to show how choosing Fairtrade chocolate can change the lives of cocoa farmers. Produced by Fairtrade in collaboration with Niels Hoebers, the stop-motion animationA tells the story of two bespoke bars of chocolate. At first glance, both look good enough to eat, but once unwrapped, the bars tell two vastly different stories. The bitter bar shows the cocoa lands of West Africa, where uncertified cocoa farmers who are unable to grow their crop on Fairtrade terms face injustice and low prices, leading to poverty and deforestation that holds farming communities back. The film also depicts a sweeter side: Fairtrade-certified cocoa farmers benefit from rigorous independent standards receive support to adapt their farming practices to meet those standards, earning fair prices for their cocoa.A "We're making the bitter cost of each non-certified chocolate bar instantly apparent," said Nilufar Verjee, Fairtrade's director of public engagement and global cocoa campaign lead. "This is a captivating and shareable way to discover why cocoa farmers who grow the cocoa in our favourite chocolate bars deserve better incomes." Fairtrade advocate and "Bridgerton" actress Adjoa Andoh shared: "Every Fairtrade bar of chocolate that you buy, every cocoa bean, means decent healthcare, education, and a collective voice all the way through the supply chain. Make the choice for hope, a future and joy, through the delicious medium of chocolate. Happy Fairtrade World Chocolate Day!" Bitter Sweet launched with cocoa farmers sharing their own personal experiences. In the days following, 22 Fairtrade global regions are sharing information on social media about Fairtrade's impact, where to buy Fairtrade chocolate and how consumers can help by sharing with a friend. The campaign will culminate with the debut of the "Unwrap a Fairer Future" animation on World Chocolate Day, July 7, 2021. Download press assets at: https://bit.ly/2SLXfrB Media contact:A martine.parry@fairtrade.org.ukA | +44 (0)7886 301486. Video - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1555442/Unwrap_a_Fairer_Future.mp4
With "Phuket Sandbox" due to launch on 1 July 2021, nine SHA Plus-certified Marriott Bonvoy properties prepare to welcome back guests with "Summer Dreaming" promotion BANGKOK, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Marriott Bonvoy, Marriott International's extraordinary portfolio of 30 hotel brands, award-winning loyalty program, and endless experiences, today introduces the "Summer Dreaming" offer. The offer is available across a choice of nine hotels and resorts[1] in Phuket, covering eight world-renowned brands to celebrate the return of cherished international guests from 1 July 2021. A International guests who have been dreaming of visiting Phuket for the last 15 months will soon be able to return to the "Pearl of the Andaman" following the launch of the "Phuket Sandbox" program. Under this important initiative by the Government, overseas travelers can fly direct to Phuket, stay quarantine-free in world-class hotels and resorts, and soak up the blissful ambiance. Under the "Summer Dreaming" offer, travelers who book at any participating Marriott Bonvoy property in Phuket will enjoy preferential rates, complimentary breakfast for two, and THB 1,000 (approximately USD 32) of hotel credit per room per night, which can be redeemed for memorable meals at the resorts' restaurants, sunset drinks at the bars, soothing spa treatments and more. So the longer you stay, the more rewarding your stay becomes! To offer extra flexibility to guests, all bookings can be cancelled without charge up to 24 hours before the check-in date, and Marriott Bonvoy members will receive 5,000 bonus points. Signing up as a Marriott Bonvoy member is complimentary. For truly blissful beachfront breaks, guests who book seven nights or longer under the Summer Dreaming promotion will be treated to a complimentary room upgrade and late 4pm check-out[2], ensuring that every couple or family can maximize their time in paradise. From activity-packed resorts to exclusive island retreats, every guest can discover their own tropical idyll across the nine Marriott Bonvoy properties. The brand-new Courtyard by Marriott Phuket Town, which opens in August 2021, will allow guests to immerse themselves in Phuket's cultural heritage, surrounded by classical architecture, museums and markets. Under the Tourism Authority of Thailand's (TAT) newly-introduced Amazing Thailand Safety & Health Administration (SHA) Plus[3] certification system, inbound visitors to Phuket will be required to stay at a hotel in which at least 70% of staff members have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Guests can rest assured that all of Marriott Bonvoy's properties in Phuket have achieved SHA Plus certificates. Marriott Bonvoy properties across the world upholds the highest standards of health and safety under the company's "Commitment to Clean". The Marriott Cleanliness Council is redefining cleaning and safety standards, including enhanced cleaning technologies, adhering to social distancing protocols, food safety and more. To learn about how Marriott is keeping its guests safe, please visit clean.marriott.com. The Thai government's "Phuket Sandbox" program, which comes into effect on 1 July 2021, allows international travelers who have received two COVID-19 vaccinations to fly directly to Phuket without the need to quarantine upon arrival, as long as they show proof of booking at an SHA Plus-certified hotel and when applying for their Certificate of Entry (CoE). For more information, please click here. As one of the largest hospitality companies in Thailand, Marriott International is fully supportive of this initiative and can't wait to welcome overseas visitors back to Phuket. The Summer Dreaming promotion is valid for bookings made between 1 June and 31 August 2021, for stays taken between 1 July 2021 and 31 March 2022. Reservations must be made direct via https://hotel-deals.marriott.com/summer-dreaming-thailand-en/phuket/A using the promotional code A1764. [1]A Marriott Bonvoy Portfolio taking part in the "Summer Dreaming" promotion include Four Points by Sheraton Phuket Patong Beach Resort; Renaissance Phuket Resort & Spa; The Westin Siray Bay Resort & Spa, Phuket; Le MAridien Phuket Beach Resort; Phuket Marriott Resort & Spa, Merlin Beach; Phuket Marriott Resort and Spa, Nai Yang Beach; JW Marriott Phuket Resort & Spa; The Naka Island, a Luxury Collection Resort & Spa, Phuket; and Courtyard by Marriott Phuket Town (opening in August 2021)

[2] Upon availability, terms and conditions apply

[3]A Reference: https://www.tatnews.org/2021/06/phuket-introduces-amazing-thailand-sha-plus-certification/A About Marriott Bonvoy Marriott Bonvoy is the award-winning travel program for Marriott International's portfolio of 30 hotel brands, vacation home rental offering, all-inclusive resorts and hundreds of thousands of experiences. Members can earn and redeem points for stays and more, accelerating the points they earn with co-branded credit cards. When members book direct on Marriott.com they receive perks including free and enhanced Wi-Fi and exclusive member-only rates, and on the Marriott app mobile check-in and checkout, Mobile Requests and, wherever available, Mobile Key. To enroll for free or for more information about Marriott Bonvoy, visitA MarriottBonvoy.com. To download the Marriott app, goA here. Travelers can also connect with Marriott Bonvoy onA Fac! ebook ,A Twitter, andA Instagram. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1538729/Naka_Island_Luxury_Collection__2.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1538730/Relaxing_on_the_hammock.jpg
Litchfield (06759)

Today

Cloudy skies this morning will become partly cloudy this afternoon. High around 75F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

A few passing clouds, otherwise generally clear. Low around 65F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
Litchfield (06759)

Today

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy this afternoon. High around 75F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

A few passing clouds. Low 66F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
Mobile Crisis indicated that they were attempting to evaluate two males who have a history of aggression, police said. Approximately one hour later, area residents were evacuated after the males threatened to burn down the condominium.
Its been a tough start to the nesting season. Storms and high tides have unfortunately wiped out many nests. Luckily, our birds have time to try again, but this makes it even more important that we give them a fair shot by giving them at least 100 feet of space, following local rules for dogs on beaches, and carrying out all trash, Corrie Folsom-OKeefe, director of bird conservation for Audubon Connecticut, said.
Republican lawmakers say they have offered solutions to the wave of juvenile crime, but the Democrat-dominated General Assembly has failed to act. GOP leaders cited proposed legislation that would eliminate the statutory six-hour limit that a juvenile can be held without a court order; broadening criteria for a court to deem a juvenile a risk to public safety on a second offense instead of a third; amending policy to allow police officers to pursue car theft suspects in certain circumstances; and requiring that a child charged with car theft for a second time wear a GPS monitoring device.
Some drivers in southern Farmington might save time by using New Britain Avenue instead, but officials expect most of the commuter traffic from Canton, Burlington, Torrington and other towns to the west will keep using Route 4 even with the detour.
That depends on when the person was convicted, as well as the specific charge. Those charged with simple possession of 4 ounces or less before Jan. 1, 2000, or from Oct. 1, 2015 through June 30, 2021 will be eligible to petition the Superior Court to have their criminal records erased  starting on July 1, 2022. Those charged with the same crimes between the period from Jan. 1, 2000 to Sept. 30, 2015 will have their records automatically erased starting on Jan. 1, 2023.
Just like most anything else these days, stacks of the money are available to buy on Amazon. Advertised as play money and a way to prank family and friends, the bills are no way meant to be used as payment for goods or services.
Thats not the only contradiction in Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning. Writing about his time as the Hazard, Kentucky, correspondent for the Louisville Courier Journal, Maimon, who grew up in Philadelphia, acknowledges the disdain Appalachians have for outsiders traipsing in to define them and then offers his own assessment. He recounts the flood of journalists descending to explain Trump country, then expounds at length on former President Donald Trumps appeal there.
The states law allows for a recall trial of certain officials, except for those whose removal the Constitution of Virginia specifically provides, the law says. And the constitution does provide such a process: Members of the General Assembly can be expelled from office with a two-thirds vote of the elected membership, the judge wrote in his final order.
We have a scoop about Galla Ashoks debut film Hero, which was in news for its premise recently. Apparently an action episode of the film was shot on a famous vintage train at the Wadi Rum Valley in Jordan. And whats more, it is reportedly the first Indian film to be shot on a vintage train. Director Sriram Adittya says he had wanted to shoot the episode on a vintage train ever since he envisioned the action sequence while penning the script.

We were looking for a vintage-like train and searched several countries, before we finally found what we wanted in Jordon. Surprisingly, the train was exactly as I had imagined, shares the director.

The 100 year old vintage train at the Wadi Rum Valley

Apparently, the team went to Jordan during March, when the second wave of the pandemic was at its peak, and shot a cowboy action episode there.

Having identified the train, the unit focussed on getting the required shooting permissions. From Dubai, the crew went to Amman and from there drove four hours to Wadi Rum Valley.

The vintage train, which dates back over 100 years, is now being used for tourism purposes, and the makers were lucky to get permission to shoot during a pandemic. The 32-member team had to undergo Covid-19 tests at various places, and this and the exhaustive paperwork required were time-consuming, says the director, but feels it was all worth the effort.

We shot a high-octane cowboy action episode for three days near the train at the Wadi Rum Valley. In fact, Ashok also shot on the moving train without a body double, the director says. This is a unique cowboy action episode. The fact that the train is a heritage one with a unique look makes the episode even more worthwhile, he explains, adding, We were shooting a cowboy episode after several years, and the crew was naturally excited.

Ashok Galla shooting an action episode atop the vintage train

Although Wadi Rum is a tourist hotspot, due to the pandemic the visitor footfalls were on the lower side. But adjusting to the weather was difficult for the crew.

Since it is a valley surrounded by sandstone and granite, we thought it would be hot and humid, but much to our surprise, it was freezing, says Sriram.

One of the challenges was getting used to temperature fluctuations. Most of the time it was chilly  even two degrees  so all crew members had to wear three layers of protective clothes. While it was cold till the afternoon, it got very hot during the evenings, Sriram shares, adding that on the last day of the shoot there was a sandstorm too. We couldnt shoot in the desert storm and there was a delay of one hour, he says. The episode will be one of the highlights of the film, reveals the director, who was full of praise for Ashok for his dedication.
Bengaluru: Karnataka Social Welfare Minister B Sriramulu on Friday distanced himself from his alleged close aide Rajanna, a day after his arrest on a complaint by Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa's son and BJP state vice-president B Y Vijayendra that he had misused his name and cheated people.

Rajanna (40) was arrested from a hotel here by the Central Crime Branch sleuths on Thursday for allegedly cheating some people after convincing them he was close to Vijayendra, police said.

"Raju (Rajanna) is known to me but he is not my personal assistant. I will speak to the Chief Minister and Vijayendra," Sriramulu told reporters here.

He insisted that he is not aware of "anything" related to Rajanna and his dealings.

"Since the matter is under investigation, it will be inappropriate for me to speak on this issue but no one should misuse anyone's name," Sriramulu said.

The Minister said he got to know about Rajanna's arrest from the media and added that he would comment after the investigation is completed.

"I am not the person who protects culprits. Let the investigation be over," Sriramulu said.

When asked what was Rajanna's job in his office, Rajanna said he was never assigned any official work and he was only known to him.

Meanwhile, Vijayendra tweeted on Friday asking people to be careful with those who misused his and the minister's name.

"While in public life, we cannot doubt those seeking aid. But we cannot afford to be careless. Trouble is often compounded by fraudsters who misuse the name. It is also used by the opponents as a tool to defame," Vijayendra said.

He also said the police have taken action on a complaint made with an intention to prevent people from getting cheated and to protect his dignity.

"I appeal to the people to be aware of those who misuse and defame the names of leaders in the public sphere, including myself," Vijayendra said.

Meanwhile, police sources said Rajanna had "good contacts" with some contractors and officers.
Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic hit the state, life of most private school teachers has been turned upside down. (DC file photo)

HYDERABAD: The suicide by a physical training teacher in Jayashankar-Bhupalpalli district on Wednesday has brought to the fore, yet again, the difficulties being faced by teachers in private schools amid the Covid pandemic. Bonagiri Rajus suicide on Wednesday took to 41 the number of teachers from private schools ending their life in the past 15 months.

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic hit the state, life of most private school teachers has been turned upside down. The iterations of Covid-19 lockdowns made matters worse. Some schools, though they were collecting fees from students, refused to pay salaries to the teachers, citing the lockdown-related financial strains.

Several schools, after the resuming their online classes for this academic year, engaged fewer teachers and paid them only half of the salary, said the Telangana Private Schools Teachers Forum. Though the government issued an order - GO 45  which mandated that private schools should not deprive teachers of their salaries, this is being flouted by school managements, according to the Forum.

It complained that that though the government promised in April this year to provide Rs 2,000 a month as special aid to private school teachers, along with a monthly ration of 25 kg of rice till the schools reopen, the ration was given only for April and May. Even for those months, the Rs 2,000 aid was not credited to the teachers accounts so far. They were given the 25 kg of rice for the third month in June.

There are nearly 2,50,000 teaching staff and 50,000 non-teaching staff in the private schools across Telangana state.

Gajula Subbalaxmi, member of the Telangana Private Schools Teachers Forum, said, The teachers are going through a rough patch. Those who are not able to bear the pain further are taking the extreme steps of committing suicide.

Most of the teachers working in private schools are facing a financial crisis for the past 15 months. The managements are receiving full fees from students but they are not ready to pay the staff their salaries. The government is being lenient with such schools, she said.

Premalalatha Gaddhe, a resident of Nacharam who works at a private school, said, We did not get salary for the past 15 months. Only a few are being engaged for taking online classes. Even they have been paid half the salary. We hoped that this academic year will have physical classes and we will be engaged in teaching again, but this did not happen. She added, I was the unlucky one. I did not even get the benefits extended by the government. Like me, there are around 50,000 more who did not receive any benefit from the government.
Chennai: Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin on Friday handed over a cheque for Rs five lakh, a one-time financial assistance, to the great grandson of M K Thyagaraja Bhagavatar, yesteryear superstar of Tamil cinema.

Also, Stalin gave an order allotting a Tamil Nadu Housing Board apartment here on lower rent to Sairam and his family, the beneficiaries.

Sairam, along with his family members received the financial assistance and the order at the Secretariat.

Bhagavatar is the first superstar of Tamil cinema and the colossus of Tamil tinsel world during the pre-independence days. 'Haridas' was among his most successful films and is known for its non-stop run for three years from 1944 to 1946 in two cinemas here.
Hyderabad: The state government on Friday issued orders allotting five acres of land each to the Velama and Kamma communities in Serilingampally mandal for construction of their community bhavans. The market value of these land parcels is said to be up to Rs 50 crore per acre.

The plot adjacent to HiTec City road and abutting the National Academy of Construction (NAC) road in Khanamet village was allotted to the All India Velama Association while another site, abutting the road to Ayyappa Society was allotted to the Kamma Vari Seva Sanghala Samakya.

These allotments are part of the TRS government's policy to allot land parcels to caste organisations in and around Hyderabad to build community halls, Atma Gaurava Bhavanalu (self respect bhavans) and create other facilities for the welfare of the respective communities.

The government has so far allotted 82.3 acres of land for 25 BC castes in Uppal Bagayat layout, and for another 40 sub-castes in Bata Singaram in addition to land given to 13 BC castes in Kokapet.

Besides allotting the land, the government has sanctioned Rs 95.25 crore towards the construction of BC Atma Gaurava buildings.
VIJAYAWADA: High tension prevailed at Nagarjunasagar Dam as the Telangana police did not allow officials from AP to meet their Telangana counterparts and the latter also refused to meet officials from AP following the water dispute between both AP and Telangana on Thursday.

As Telangana authorities started hydroelectric power generation from Srisailam, Nagarjunasagar and Pulichintala projects in the last few days in violation of norms of the Krishna river management board and draining out Krishna water into the sea, AP water resources department officials went to Nagarjunasagar Dam intending to meet TS Genco chief engineer and irrigation department superintending engineer to explain about how drawing of water would affect the interests of AP. However, the TS police did not allow the AP officials and when the latter wanted to meet the TS officials, they refused to meet them and instead asked them to send messages on social media platforms like WhatsApp.

Nagarjunasagar right main canal superintendent engineer Ch. Purushottama Ganga Raju said, When we were stopped by the Telangana police as we were proceeding to meet TS Genco CE and irrigation SE near the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam, I requested TS Genco CE to allow us to meet him to submit a representation and also explain how APs interests will be affected due to drawing of water by TS at three projects for power generation. The official refused to meet me and instead asked me to send messages on social media platforms. So was the case with irrigation SE from TS as he also refused to meet me and asked for sending messages when I spoke to them over phone. I have informed our senior officials on the issue.

Our concern is that the Telangana government is drawing water from three projects - Srisailam, Nagarjunasagar and Pulichinthala - for power generation and a huge amount of water is getting drained into the sea. At present, water level at Nagarjunasagar dam is 534 ft with storage of 174.05 tmc ft of water in the reservoir against the dead storage of 131.66 tmc ft of water. If there is any forecast of floods to the Krishna resulting in huge inflow of water into projects, the TS government can draw water. But at present, there is no such situation, he said.

Under Nagarjunasagar RMC, there is nearly 12 lakh acres of command area located in parts of Krishna, Guntur and Prakasam districts and farmers are getting ready to raise paddy, chillies, cotton and other crops for the ensuing kharif season. People living in parts of these three districts also get drinking water from RMC. If the TS government drains out water, the interests of our farmers and the general public will be severely affected with no availability of water. The intention and motive of the Telangana government in drawing water unauthorisedly are very unfair, the official said.

AP water resources authorities say that the TS government started power generation from Srisailam project some four days ago and from Nagarjunasagar project, it was doing so for the last two days and it also started at Pulichintala project from Wednesday onwards. They raised objections for roping in the Pulichintala project also as it is resulting in draining out water into the sea. The AP officials were asked to meet the TS police initially at Nagarjunasagar Dam when they wanted to meet the officials. However, though AP officials informed them that they were not going to create any law and order issue, they refused to meet even to submit a representation.

They say that as per norms, water from the projects are to be used firstly to meet drinking needs of the people followed by irrigation needs and the last priority is to use water for generation of power. They have turned critical against the TS government for according priority for power generation at the cost of affecting the interests of AP.
HYDERABAD: Notwithstanding the stiff resistance and complaints by the Andhra Pradesh government, TS Genco (Generation Corporation) continues to generate hydel power at irrigation projects over river Krishna at the rate of almost 30 MW per day since June 29 with the security cover provided by the Ts government by deploying a large police force at the dams.

The total installed capacity of hydel power in Telangana state is 2,441 MW. Of this, over 90 per cent is from projects on the Krishna. Nagarjunasagar, Srisailam, Pulichintala and Jurala projects comprise 2,369 MW of the installed capacity.

The TS Genco has produced over 100 MW power for the last four days since June 29, when the tussle erupted over generation of hydel power with the Andhra Pradesh government complaining to the Centre against Telangana state.

TS Genco is utilising hydel power to operate the Kaleshwaram lift irrigation pumps, which require a large amount of power. The government is incurring heavy expenditure on account of using thermal power. To overcome this, the state government has decided to utilise cheaper hydel power to the maximum extent during monsoon, which is suitable for hydel power generation when inflows will be huge in projects.

The TS government has started lifting Godavari water from the Kaleshwaram project to fill reservoirs starting from Medigadda, Annaram, Sundilla to Mid-Manair project and Mallannasagar, using what are called Bahubali motors for their size. The Srisailam Left Bank Canal has the highest installed capacity of 900 MW followed by Nagarjunasagar (815 MW), Lower Jurala (240 MW), Jurala (234 MW), Pulichintala (120MW) and Nagarjunasagar left canal (60MW).

At Srisailam, the TS Genco produced 9.72 MW power on June 29, 12.97 MW on June 30 and 13.79 MW on July 1. At Nagarjunasagar, it generated 6.76 MW on June 29, 16.12 MW on June 30 and 15.95 MW on July 1. At Pulichintala, it has produced 0.06 MW on June 29, 0.55 on June 30 and 0.80 on July 1.

These figures indicate that TS Genco has been increasing generation at all projects day after day while AP government is stepping up opposition. The hydel generation is not being taken up at a single project on river Godavari due to poor water levels in Singur which has installed capacity of 15 MW, Nizamsagar (10 MW), Pochampad (36 MW), Peddapalli mini-hydro (9.2 MW) and Palair mini-hydro (2 MW). There is zero production in these projects at present.
It is not something really unexpected. Whenever a serious initiative is taken by the establishment in India towards normalisation of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir or a fillip is given to a process which is otherwise languishing, there invariably comes a dampener in the form of an unexpected high-profile event. Such events become trendsetters or an element of transformation in the conflict situation, both in the military and political fields. Former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayees famous Lahore Yatra ended with the Kargil intrusion in 1999. Narendra Modis effort to give India-Pakistan relations a touch of informality with his surprise visit to Nawaz Sharifs family home outside Lahore in December 2015 was met a week later by the Pathankot attack on the first day of 2016. The successful campaign Operation All Out launched by the Indian security forces through 2017-18 triggered the Pulwama attack in early 2019; the aim was to send home a message on the relevance of the proxies. Given this backdrop, as soon as the top Indian leadership invited 14 leaders of J&Ks mainstream political parties for talks and consultations to break the ice after the two-year disquiet, an initiative dampener designed to take away attention from the positives was expected. In the context of our current times, such an expectation should also have been because of the relative frustration among those who are opposed to the Indian narratives over J&K. In the two years since the constitutional decisions, the Indian government broke the stranglehold that separatists, terrorists and Pakistans Deep State had established in J&K. By its relentless actions against inimical elements and a successful programme of cultivation of international opinion, the government made all these supposed stakeholders irrelevant to the people of J&K.

Was the drone attack serious enough to be classified as a spectacular event which could prospectively have an effect on the J&K situation? We have had mass casualty events earlier which acted as trendsetters and had the potential of being gamechangers. The 2016 Uri attack and 2019s Pulwama were two such events. Both acted as sparks with the message of extant proxy capability and to convey that the battle was still on. So, unlike conventional operations, this is a typical characteristic of hybrid conflict; it rises and falls in intensity and manifestation. After the successful run of counter-terror operations through the 1990s, the proxies adopted the so called fidayeen tactics of suicide attacks on Indian forces camps and government installations. This forced the deployment of an out-of-proportion ratio of troops to secure billets, camps and facilities. For some time, it did create fair consternation in the forces ranks. The run of such attacks lasted for about five years, by when the forces found solutions to reduce their impact. But making suicide attacks impossible could never be achieved.

There is another interesting analogy which deserves recall. We were hit hard by the improvised explosive devices used by the LTTE in Sri Lanka. That threat came back to hit us in Kashmir too in the 1990s. It was supposed to be crude technology which should have been countered by sophisticated neutralisation through the electronic spectrum, especially when the trigger system moved on to the remote mobile type. For a long time, the Army tried a plethora of neutralisers, but the IED has continued to remain a threat till as late as Pulwama. The United States was hit by car bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq; no credible counter to that has yet been developed. What I am alluding to is the fact that counters to an emerging technology or even a crude antiquated one may not always be found. One has just to learn to minimise the impact if the device gets past all security and manages to strike. This is exactly what the threat from drones may end up as. We are just witnessing the advent of drone tactics in the field, in the terrorist domain in our environment and there is unnecessary finger pointing alleging tardiness by the military. In the armed forces, a lot of effort has been going on in the past decade to study the threat from drones, but more in the domain of conventional warfare employing armed fixed-wing drones. The use of the quad and hexa helicopters of a smaller variety have also been under the scanner ever since logistics drops from across the border were seen in Punjab and parts of Jammu division. The feasibility of the use of these to drop lethal payloads or be employed as rammers from the sky was anticipated. Now that the nature of threat becomes more focused, the specific measures to counter them will be refined progressively. Besides technology, which is the obvious answer, there will have to be awareness training and specific reporting procedures developed for the civilian population too as the threat is of a nature that can proliferate rapidly. It will not be restricted to military targets alone, but also to a wider variety which will have an effect on society at large; recalling the basics of the terrorist mantra.

Did the Jammu incident and the subsequent sightings of drones have a specific purpose? I call these relevance operations, desperate efforts at the revival of relevance. The Lashkar-e-Tayyaba is under pressure with Hafiz Saeed serving a jail sentence due to his involvement in terror financing. Recently, blasts have occurred outside his house in Pakistan with reported casualties. The LeTs capability to be of significance in Kashmir has taken a beating and it is desperate to get back to business, especially since the Deep State in Pakistan will want it to keep the resistance alive even as they worry about Afghanistan. That task may manifest itself in different ways; perhaps a drone threat is one way, the innovative one.

Lastly, a question that is being frequently asked in several quarters if whether a drone attack on an Air Force base is an act of war? It is best to parry that question for now, more due to the regional geopolitical environment and the developing internal dynamics in J&K. Specific answers to this question will not be available as the issue remains rooted in the grey zone. Its not as if we are giving Pakistan any leeway. Its just that we are recognising the world has moved far beyond the either/or labelling of events which might require specific responses. Our response too may be in the realm of pragmatic realism, which is awaiting the right opportunity.
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The Xperia 1 III, Sony's next flagship Android phone, is now open for pre-order, just two months after its reveal announcement last April 14th, alongside the Xperia 5 III and the Xperia 10 III.

The new photography-focused phone, according to The Verge, was designed as a complement to Sony's Alpha camera range with its variable periscope-style telephoto lens that can switch between two focal lengths. It also has 5G support and a first-of-its-kind 4K high refresh-rate display.

Sony Xperia 1 III Specs

The Sony Xperia 1 III, according to XDA, has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) microprocessor, which contains a Kryo 680 Prime Core running at 2.84 GHz, three Kryo 680 Performance Cores running at 2.4 GHz, and four Kryo 680 Efficiency Cores running at 1.8 GHz.

I love a phone that's ambitious enough to make me want to rise to its level.



The Sony Xperia 1iii is one such phone  but where its cameras are concerned, don't conflate complexity with competence.



Review tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/F2N8S95LFM  Michael Fisher (@theMrMobile) July 1, 2021

The smartphone also run by a Qualcomm Adreno 660 smartphone graphics card, which are used mainly in high-end Android devices, and was integrated within the Snapdragon 888.

READ ALSO: Sony Xperia XA Ultra Reviews, Specs, Features, News & Update: Device Pros & Cons Detailed; Could Be the Next Best Thing? [ROUNDUP]

It has 12GB of random access memory (RAM), a 256GB internal storage, and a MicroSD card support.

It also has 4,500mAh battery, which it has an up to 3W fast wired charging and a Wireless charging support.

The smartphone's rear camera setup, which is its main feature, consists of a 12MP OIS Primary Camera, a 12MP ultra-wide Secondary camera, the aforementioned 12MP periscope OIS Tertiary Camera, and a 3D iToF sensor Quaternary camera.

The said rear camera setup has features such as the ZEISS optics, a 20fps AF/AE tracking burst with image noise reduction, a 60 fps continuous AF/AE calculations, a Real-time Eye AF, an AI super resolution zoom, the Optical SteadyShot with FlawlessEye technology, and the Cinema Pro 4K 120fps video recording.

On the front side, the Sony Xperia 1 III has a 6.5-inch 4K OLED HDR screen with a 21:9 aspect ratio and a 120Hz refresh rate and a 240Hz touch sampling rate, coupled with a 100% DCI-P3 and HDR BT.2020, making those images appeared on the screen even more richer and vivid,

The screen itself is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass Victus.

Sony Xperia 1 III can connect up to 5G (Sub-6Hz) mobile data, has Bluetooth 5.x, a 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac dual-band WiFi, and can do GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo.

It also has a full range front-firing stereo speaker that can output Hi-Res 260 Reality Audio, and output a 360 Spatial Sound over headphones.

Release Date, Price, and Pre-Order Bonuses

The Sony Xperia 1 III will be sold in United States on August 19th for a price of $1,299.99, however, according to The Verge, it is now available today for preorder, which can be done through Sony's own online store.

According to GSMArena.com, bonuses for pre-order include a free pair of WF-1000XM3 true wireless earbuds and a total of 43,200 Call of Duty Mobile CP Points, which it can be retrieved and used in game.

READ ALSO: Sony Accidentally Reveals Xperia E5
Commodities rose collectively.

It can be seen that although the prices of chemical products have fallen in the second quarter, overall, there is still a large increase in chemical products this year.

With domestic efforts to cool down, international giants are still adding fire to price increases. Giants such as BASF, Dow, and DuPont frequently issued force majeure notices, delayed delivery notices, and product price hike notices to stimulate the continued rise of chemical products.

Hundreds of price increase letters flooded the chemical market, with one price a day, one single negotiation, and volume inquiries. Various cost pressures caused downstream companies to complain again and again. Increases in prices, closings, queuing, suspension of sales, bidding, and purchase restrictions have made it too difficult for chemical companies to call directly!

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The price of Boron Nitride continues to be affected by factors such as market growth momentum,various opportunities and challenges.However,during the forecast period from 2020 to 2026,the global Boron Nitride sales market is expected to continue to be above average.The growth rate will continue to increase.It is expected that from today to next week,the price of Boron Nitride will increase to a certain extent.

Due to changes in consumer demand,import and export conditions,and various investigations on the development of Boron Nitride,the cost of Boron Nitride is constantly changing.Taking into account the current market macroeconomic parameters, value chain analysis,channel partners,demand and supply,the cost of Boron Nitride will also be affected to a certain extent.It is estimated that the cost of Boron Nitride will increase slightly from today to next week.

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East Tawas, MI (48730)

Today

Mostly sunny early then increasing clouds with some scattered thunderstorms this afternoon. High near 90F. Winds SW at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Isolated thunderstorms early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Low 67F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
Wharton, TX (77488)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the morning becoming more widespread this afternoon. High 84F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms this evening becoming more widespread overnight. Low 73F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.




By Lee Gyu-lee







Disaster comedy film "Sinkhole" has been invited to this year's Locarno Film Festival, set to be held in Switzerland from Aug. 4 to 14.







The film's distributor, Showbox, announced Friday that the blockbuster flick will be presented at one of the festival's sections, Piazza Grande, which holds an open screening of selected films with about 8,000 viewers. The films screened at the section will be evaluated by a panel of American film critics for the Variety Piazza Grande Award.







This is the second time for a Korean film to be invited to the Piazza Grande section, since director Kim Seong-Hun's disaster thriller, "Tunnel," starring Ha Jung-woo, in 2016. In 2019, "Parasite" star Song Kang-ho became the first Asian actor to receive the Excellence Award at the festival.







Founded in 1946, the Locarno Film Festival, which welcomes the 74th edition this year, is one of the longest-running film festivals in the world.







Directed by Kim Ji-hoon, who helmed another disaster film, "Tower" (2012), "Sinkhole" revolves around hardworking patriarch, Dong-won (Kim Sung-kyun), who finally fulfills his dream of owning a house after 10 years.







On the day he invites his coworkers, including Kim Seung-hyun (Lee Kwang-Soo), to his new house, the whole building falls into a sinkhole. Along with nosy, annoying next-door neighbor Jung Man-soo (Cha Seung-won), the group tries to find ways to survive from about 500 meters underground.







The film is set to hit theaters on Aug. 11.






Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki, right, and Bank of Korea Governor Lee Ju-yeol shake hands at a breakfast meeting at the Seoul Press Center, Seoul, Friday. Yonhap
View of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini at the Venice Biennale / Courtesy of the Venice Biennale





By Park Han-sol







The selection of the curator of the Korean pavilion at the 59th Venice Art Biennale next year has been embroiled in a cronyism controversy, prompting the Arts Council Korea (ARKO) to make an unprecedented move to nullify its earlier decision and reevaluate all 12 applicants.







Last month, the council selected four candidates in the first round of the screening process, who then went through a second round of interviews. The four applicants were competing for the position to curate the Korean pavilion at the Biennale's International Art Exhibition next April.







As ARKO considered the finalists to select the winner, it was discovered that two of the interviewees had connections to one of the judges. They were found to have been working in the same organization, sparking controversy over conflicts of interest. There is a rule in state-run institutions that such incidents should prompt the involved selection committee member to be excluded from the screening process.







After belatedly learning about the procedural flaw, the council has decided to exclude the judge from the selection committee and start over the entire review process for 12 candidates.







A total of six members will form the review panel: Busan Museum of Art Director Ki Hye-kyung, Seoul Museum of Art Director Baek Ji-sook, Seoul National University Art Professor Shin Chung-hoon, Independent Curator Hyun See-won, Yoon Shung-chun of the culture ministry's arts policy bureau and Park Doo-hyun of ARKO. The selected candidate is scheduled to be announced in the fourth week of July.







Dubbed the "Olympics of the Art World," the Venice Biennale has been one of the most prestigious cultural institutions since it was founded in 1895. More than 60 national pavilions, represented by each country's curator, showcase to the international audience a wide range of works fitting the Biennale's theme.







Typically, the Biennale's International Art Exhibition has been held in odd-numbered years, while the Architecture Exhibition has taken place in even-numbered years. However, after the 17th Architecture Biennale in 2020 was pushed back a year due to the spread of COVID-19, the 59th Art Biennale has also been delayed, and will take place from April 23 to Nov. 27, 2022. Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator of High Line Art, a public art program for New York City's Highline Park, will be the curator of next year's event.


Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaks in front of a satellite map of the Korean Peninsula at night during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, Oct. 11, 2006. Rumsfeld died on Tuesday at age 88. Reuters-Yonhap





By Nam Hyun-woo







Chung Mong-joon, honorary chairman of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, leaves the funeral hall of the late former KCC Honorary Chairman Chung Sang-young at Asan Hospital in Songpa District, Seoul, Jan. 31. Yonhap





Chung Mong-joon, honorary chairman of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, commemorated the late former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who died on Tuesday at age 88.







In an English-language letter released by the institute, Chung described him having "an insight that had accurately predicted the present situation" surrounding South Korea 10 years ago, and "a friend who has been most helpful" to the country.







"I was planning to visit the United States and meet him after the pandemic subsided," Chung wrote. "When I heard the news of his passing, I felt I lost a friend who has been most helpful to my country."







Rumsfeld served as secretary of defense for two U.S. presidents  Gerald Ford from 1975 to 1977 and George W. Bush from 2001 to 2007. He is known as the architect of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and a hawk who stressed the importance of power to keep peace.







Chung recalled his 2011 meeting with Rumsfeld in Washington, D.C., during which they had a long conversation on the political circumstances in Northeast Asia. At the time, Chung was a lawmaker of the Saenuri Party, which is now the People Power Party of Korea.







"In an interview at the time, he said, 'I do not think the North Korean regime will give up its nuclear weapons' and emphasized that 'We need power to keep the peace,'" Chung wrote in his letter. "And then he argued, 'If I were a South Korean, to have the power to persuade or deter North Korea, I would want the government to become stronger by investing more in defense spending.'"







Chung wrote that Rumsfeld 10 years ago already had a precise vision of the current relations between the U.S. and China. He quoted Rumsfeld saying "China will not pose a military threat to the United States, but it will pose a potential threat to the world" and "the majority of democratic countries located around China must work together to ensure that China does not act coercively."







Recalling the conversation, Chung wrote Rumsfeld was "by nature a calm person" and had a "good sense of humor."







"As someone who had served as the U.S. Secretary of Defense twice and had been concerned with conflicts large and small around the world, he seemed to be at ease," Chung wrote. "It was impressive that he was not trapped by the circumstances while looking at the reality calmly."





According to Chung, the conversation he had with Rumsfeld is in Chung's book titled, "Communications with Leaders of the World," which is always on his desk.







Chung is a businessman and politician, who is the controlling shareholder of Hyundai Heavy Industries Group and a former seven-term lawmaker.


Incoming commander, Gen. Paul J. LaCamera speaks during a change-of-command ceremony for the United Nations Command, Combined Forces Command, and United States Forces Korea at Barker Field in Pyeongtaek, July 2. AP-Yonhap



Gen. Paul LaCamera took office as the new commander of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) on Friday amid daunting security challenges on the Korean Peninsula and beyond.



LaCamera, who most recently served as Army Pacific commander, replaced Gen. Robert Abrams to lead the 28,500-strong American troops in South Korea, as well as the Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC) and the United Nations Command.



The change-of-command ceremony took place at Camp Humphreys, where the USFK headquarters is located, in Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometers south of Seoul, attended by top officials from the two countries, including South Korean Defense Minister Suh Wook and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command chief Adm. John Aquilino.



"I am aware that the most sacred trust given to me is to prepare our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, guardians, civilians to fight and win on the most dangerous piece of ground," LaCamera said. "Being ready to fight tonight means maintaining combat capability, creating time and space to enable the diplomatic process, thus preserving options for leaders."



Calling the U.S.' "greatest asymmetric advantage" allies and partners, the new commander vowed efforts to propel the Korea-U.S. alliance "to even greater heights" so as to mitigate threats to regional stability.



Abrams said his 31-month service in South Korea since November 2018 has been "the profound honor of a lifetime," during which the two nations reinvigorated their combined training program and put a "laser focus" on preparedness to fight tonight if called upon.



"Our presence in the Republic of Korea is as important as ever. And our adversaries, they know it too. That's why we stand ready with our Korean allies to defend and protect the Republic of Korea," Abrams said.





From right to left, incoming commander, Gen. Paul J. LaCamera, outgoing commander, Gen. Robert B. Abrams, Adm. John C. Aquilino, Commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, and South Korean Defense Minister Suh Wook salute during a change-of-command ceremony for the United Nations Command, Combined Forces Command, and United States Forces Korea at Barker Field in Pyeongtaek, July 2. AP-Yonhap




Gen. Park In-ho vowed utmost efforts to make the Air Force an "upright and strong" organization, as he was to take office as its chief of staff Friday amid a probe into the suicide death of a sexually harassed noncommissioned officer.







An inauguration ceremony for him was scheduled to take place later in the day, about a month after former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Lee Seong-yong stepped down, taking responsibility over the death of the late master sergeant, surnamed Lee.







The master sergeant was found dead on May 22, three months after she was groped and suffered other abuse by a colleague of the same rank.







Military investigators have been looking into allegations that the Air Force officials had tried to cover up the incident without giving proper support to the victim.







"I feel great responsibility over the current situation," Park told reporters at the defense ministry building, expressing condolences over the officer's death and apologizing for disappointing the public.







"I will put utmost efforts to build the Air Force into an upright and strong organization again," he said. (Yonhap)


The mother-in-law of former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl, a leading presidential hopeful, gets out of a vehicle to attend her trial at the Uijeongbu District Court in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi Province, July 2. Yonhap



The mother-in-law of former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl, a leading presidential hopeful, was sentenced to three years in prison Friday, kicking off a political firestorm ahead of the 2022 election.



The local district court in Uijeongbu, 23 kilometers north of Seoul, convicted the 74-year-old, surnamed Choi, of collaborating with three business partners to establish a medical foundation and open a long-term care hospital for senior citizens in February 2013, despite having no medical qualifications.



Choi was also convicted of fraud for accepting 2.29 billion won ($2.02 million) in state benefits from the National Health Insurance Service until 2015 to run the hospital.



The defendant was immediately taken into custody.



"All of the charges are acknowledged," the court said. "(The defendant) has a heavy responsibility for harming the National Health Insurance Service's finances and thus harming the entire nation."



The ruling is in line with the prosecution's demand for a three-year prison term and comes only three days after Yoon announced his bid for the presidency.



In a statement released by his spokesman, Yoon said, "As I have stressed repeatedly, it is my conviction that no one is above the application of the law."



Choi had pleaded innocent, saying she had no part in opening the hospital and listed herself as a member of the foundation's board of directors to ensure she got back the money she gave on loan to one of the three partners.



Prosecutors dismissed the claim, saying she got a different son-in-law hired by the hospital and ran its operations, including by trying to get a bank loan to expand its facilities.



An investigation into the case began in 2015 and initially implicated only the three partners, leading to a four-year prison sentence for one and suspended prison sentences for the other two.



Choi escaped punishment because she had obtained a form exonerating her of all responsibility in the hospital's operation before stepping down as co-chair of the board in 2014.



The case was reopened, however, after a group of plaintiffs, including Rep. Choe Kang-wook of the minor Open Democratic Party, filed a complaint in April 2020 over various allegations involving the then top prosecutor, his wife and his mother-in-law.



Choi's defense team slammed the complaint as a politically motivated attempt to force Yoon's resignation.



On Friday, her attorney, Son Gyeong-sik, expressed regret at the court's decision and vowed to immediately appeal.



"I have no idea how a (74-year-old) elderly person can pose a flight risk or a risk of destroying evidence," he told reporters outside the court.



Choi is also standing a separate trial on charges of fabricating a bank document in the process of buying land. (Yonhap)
President Moon Jae-in hits a gavel during a Cabinet meeting at Cheong Wa Dae, June 22. Courtesy of Cheong Wa Dae



Presidential office under fire for overlooking public sentiment on real estate, fairness



By Nam Hyun-woo



Cheong Wa Dae is being subject to unrelenting criticism over its system of vetting candidates to serve as President Moon Jae-in's aides, as a series of controversies has continued over the true qualifications of many of those selected.



Causing greater problems is Cheong Wa Dae's insensitivity to public sentiment, as it persists in appointing secretaries and other top ranking officials despite knowing that their questionable backgrounds and real estate trading deals may trigger a public uproar.





Kim Gi-pyo, former presidential secretary for anti-corruption / Korea Times file

So far, five presidential aides have resigned over controversies related to their real estate deals. Marking the latest was Kim Gi-pyo, the presidential secretary for anti-corruption, who resigned June 27 as criticisms mounted over his real estate purchases, which were mostly financed with loans.



Kim, who was named as the anti-corruption secretary in March, reported that he owns 9.12 billion won ($8 million) worth of properties including an apartment, commercial stores and forest land. He has 5.36 billion won worth of debt, suggesting that he purchased a large portion of this real estate through loans.



While borrowing money to purchase property is clearly not illegal, it has raised public uproar because the Moon government has been imposing stringent regulations and taxation to curb such practices  with the view that extensive issuing of loans and mortgages is contributing to the country's pumped-up home prices and is destabilizing the housing market.



Before Kim, four presidential aides dropped out following controversies involving real estate: Former chief of staff for policy Kim Sang-jo left Cheong Wa Dae in March; former senior secretary for civil affairs Kim Jo-won was replaced in August last year; former spokesperson Kim Eui-kyum resigned in March 2019; and former chief of staff Noh Young-min, who stepped down in December last year, was also dogged by his controversial property sales for months.



The former anti-corruption secretary's resignation raised greater questions on Cheong Wa Dae's vetting system, because the presidential office has already learned that the Korean public reacts sensitively to high-ranking public officials' speculative real estate trading through the disgraceful exits of the aforementioned aides.



Kim's real estate trading history and mortgage records were something the presidential office could have known of in advance, as they were available under ranking government officials' mandatory asset reporting and publicly available information on the real estate registry. So Cheong Wa Dae, which purports to run the toughest of background checks on presidential aides, was aware that Kim was increasing his wealth in a way that the government guides its people not to do.



"When vetting Kim for appointment, the presidential office checked how he obtained those properties, but it did not find any suspicions that he purchased the properties for the purpose of real estate speculation," a senior official at Cheong Wa Dae said.





Kim Han-kyu, left, presidential secretary for political affairs, listens to President Moon Jae-in's remark during a Cabinet meeting at Cheong Wa Dae, June 22. Korea Times photo by Wang Tae-seog



Insensitivity to public sentiment



The former anti-corruption secretary is not the only one whose appointment raised questions over the presidential office's ability to check candidates for government positions.



Kim Han-kyu, who was appointed as the new secretary for political affairs June 21, is also mired in real estate speculation allegations over farming land which his wife, surnamed Chang, received from her father.



The country's law allows non-farmers to own land designated as "farmland" smaller than 1,000 square meters for the purpose of establishing "a weekend farm" which city dwellers usually visit on weekends and grow vegetables and plants for personal consumption and enjoyment. Local broadcaster SBS reported that only a small amount of plants were growing on Chang's land, indicating the family was not using it as a weekend farm, while the price of the land has risen more than 40 percent in the past five years.





Park Seong-min, presidential secretary for youth affairs, sits in session during a meeting of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea's Supreme Council at the National Assembly, Seoul, Jan. 27. Korea Times photo by Oh Dae-keun



The appointment of 25-year-old presidential secretary for youth affairs Park Seong-min is also raising fairness issues. Park was one of the liberal ruling Democratic Party of Korea's (DPK) spokespeople representing young members and then became a member of the party's Supreme Council. Except for the career period of more than one year at the DPK, however, she does not have any record of employment and is still registered as a student at Korea University.



Her appointment was widely interpreted as Cheong Wa Dae's effort to gain young people's support, but this rather promoted anger form young jobseekers, as she will get a salary and other perks equivalent to those of Grade 1 government officials in the nine-tier public servant system, in which the first-level is the top level, without any supporting evidence of her capabilities as a presidential aide.





Kim Oe-sook, right, senior presidential secretary for personnel affairs, listens to Lee Cheol-hee, senior presidential secretary for political affairs, during a Cabinet meeting at Cheong Wa Dae, May 11. Yonhap
China should be more inclusive in global issues



The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) marked its centenary Thursday in a grand ceremony at Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. First of all, we congratulate it on its anniversary with regard to the party's leadership in lifting China from a "century of humiliation" to the world's second-largest economy.



The CCP, which was inaugurated in Shanghai in July 1921 led by 13 representatives, is now the world's largest political party with 92 million members. It is unprecedented globally for a single party to stay alive and take a leading role in state administration without changing its name for 100 years.



Despite this remarkable achievement, the international community is concerned over the CCP's recent undemocratic moves. During an address at the rostrum of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized China's rejuvenation is finally within grasp and any forces attempting to bully China will face a steely response.



"China does not carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes. We have never bullied, oppressed or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will," Xi said, adding China will not allow other nations to bully or subjugate it any longer. However, Xi's remark is disproven by its aggressions into the Korean Peninsula by its past dynasties like Han, Sui, Tang, Wong and Qing. His statement is a sheer distortion of historical facts.



The CCP also dispatched over a million troops during the Korean War, resulting in countless victims and damage. The CCP cannot deflect criticism for honoring three veterans who participated in the war instead of expressing remorse or apologizing for its ill-conceived intervention. Xi also boasted that the Chinese are the world's greatest people who have made remarkable contributions to the development of human civilization.



Xi's egocentric perception is deplorable. In fact, China is now emitting the largest amount of carbon dioxide and fine dust. China has been facing increasing criticism for its oppression of human rights in the Xinjiang region and Hong Kong. Recently, China triggered global anger by shutting down Apple Daily, an anti-China newspaper in Hong Kong. It also jailed opposition figures with the enforcement of a national security law.



While stepping up its expansionism, China has been adopting "wolf warrior diplomacy" to press for its national interests with bullying measures, inviting repercussion from many countries. It has been pressing Korea to refrain from entering the quadrilateral security dialogue, also known as Quad, consisting of the United States, Australia, Japan and India. It has taken economic retaliatory measures against Korea for its deployment of a U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.



China should attentively listen to the growing calls for it to adopt an inclusive and embracing attitude in dealing with international issues on the occasion of the centenary of the CCP. China will be able to achieve the "China Dream" envisioned by Xi only when it shifts its attitude to become a responsible and decent member of the international community.




Coupang's headquarters in Jamsil, Seoul / Korea times file



E-commerce firm aims to replicate Amazon's success with similar models in Asia



By Kim Yoo-chul



Coupang is set to begin operations in Singapore, as the NYSE-listed entity is said to have completed the hiring of senior executives in the Southeast Asian country, sources and officials said Friday.



"Coupang completed the hiring of senior roles such as heads of retail, logistics and operations in Singapore. It also hired below C-suite executives in roles such as logistics, marketing and IT," a company official said. These openings had been posted earlier on the Coupang Rocket Your Career website.



The hiring is interpreted by market observers as Coupang's intention to use the Singaporean market as a "litmus test" for its detailed Southeast Asia-focused growth strategy. In Southeast Asia, Alibaba is leading the e-commerce market.



When it comes to total market size, Singapore isn't considered as attractive, as its total population is below a meager 6 million. But in terms of testing its service, given the higher technology literacy of the Singaporean public, the city state could be the "right fit" to gauge the marketability of any advanced tech-driven services for companies that hope to succeed the larger Southeast Asian market with a total population of 650 million.



Coupang's signature Rocket Delivery service offering same-day delivery is considered ideal for densely populated areas, as the system requires an advanced digital logistics system and fulfillment or distribution centers close to metropolitan areas.



A source familiar with the issue said one of Coupang's local investors in Singapore  Singapore Press Holdings (SPH)  may increase its investment in the company as a financial backer. SPH invested some $3.9 million "indirectly" in Coupang back in 2014 through a special purpose vehicle.



The total annual volume of transactions in Southeast Asia's e-commerce market, according to the e-Conomy SEA 2020 report co-published by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, reached $62 billion last year, up 63 percent from 2019. The report added the market will expand to $172 billion by 2025.



Investors are paying attention to whether its expansion plans will ease their concerns over Coupang financials.



As well as in Japan and Singapore, Coupang is trying to unlock additional opportunities for growth in Malaysia. Its Southeast Asia-focused expansion plans do make sense in terms of investors' viewpoint as its value proposition mostly relies on its operating in large, densely populated urban centers like its hometown Seoul.



It has already built an end-to-end logistics network with its own warehouses, delivery drivers and tech systems. This company-owned network within these urban centers makes it possible for Coupang to add services on top of its core e-commerce offerings, like food and grocery delivery.



"Coupang is trying to replicate this model when it launches services in these new target markets. But the point is it will face competition from already-strong players in Southeast Asia such as Shopee and Lazada as they already have large market caps and a lot of money to invest," an industry official said on condition of anonymity.



"Coupang is intending to replicate Amazon's success by adopting a similar model in different Asian countries. If it is successful with these scheduled expansions into Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, Coupang could be on its growth trajectory and address investors' concerns over its stocks' current high valuation."






An appeals court on Friday upheld a lower court's decision to nullify the bulk of financial penalties imposed in 2017 by the South Korean government on the local unit of German automaker BMW for falsifying documents on gas emissions required for domestic sales.







The Seoul High Court approved the Seoul Administrative Court's order issued in December 2019 that 58.3 billion won ($51.32 million) of a penalty surcharge of 62.7 billion won levied by the Ministry of Environment on BMW Korea two years earlier be canceled.







Complying with the lower court's verdict, the appeals court said BMW Korea is liable to pay only 4.4 billion won in penalty surcharge for failing to receive and report emissions certifications for three types of vehicles.







In November 2017, BMW Korea was slapped with the penalty surcharge of 58.3 billion won for submitting forged emissions documents to authorities here for the importation of 28 types of vehicles between 2012 and 2017 and a separate penalty surcharge of 4.4 billion won for its failure to report emissions certifications for three types of vehicles.







But BMW Korea effectively won its lawsuit against the Seoul government in December 2019, when the Seoul Administrative Court ruled that the government incorrectly applied a law in the imposition of the penalty.







The Seoul High Court said, "In light of the relevant laws, it has been determined that the judgment of the lower court is acceptable."







In connection with the false emissions document case, meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Korea confirmed a fine of 14.5 billion won for BMW Korea in September 2019. (Yonhap)


Military band members rehearse before the event marking the 100th founding anniversary of the Communist Party of China, on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, July 1. Reuters-Yonhap





A Chinese magazine marked the ruling Communist Party's centenary by publishing a detailed outline of a three-stage surprise attack which could pave the way for an assault landing on Taiwan.



An accompanying video was also posted on social media platform Weibo by the publication Naval and Merchant Ships, with the message "we must solemnly warn some people that the road of Taiwan independence only leads to a dead end".



Beijing regards the self-ruled island as a renegade province, to be returned to mainland control, by force if necessary.



The magazine did not go into possible counter-attacks or responses from other key players such as the US and Japan in its scenario.



According to the article, the first round would consist mainly of ballistic missile attacks aimed at destroying information gathering and decision-making assets including airports, early warning radar, anti-air missile bases, and command centers across the island.



Weapons used at this stage could include the DF-16  a short-range ballistic missile which the magazine said the island's missile shield system would find difficult to intercept  and ammunition dispensers, which would cause more damage per strike. "The attacks against Taiwan's airports would continue until [Chinese] surface troops had accomplished an assault landing," it said.



Naval ports could be attacked with air strikes by China's H-6 bombers and J-16 fighter jets, the article said, adding that they should only be "temporarily suspended" rather than "completely destroyed" so the PLA could use them for a landing.



The second stage of the magazine's three-pronged strategy would be several rounds of intensive cruise missile attacks, such as the YJ-91 and CJ-10, launched from land, ships and submarines and targeting military bases, ammunition depots, communications infrastructure and key road junctions. The article suggested that PLA surface ships could then use drones to assess the damage.



Finally, the article said artillery strikes from surface ships and land-based rocket forces would remove any remaining obstacles for the PLA's marine corps and amphibious landing troops.





Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, drinks from an anniversary mug as he looks over toward Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Chinese Communist Party at Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, July
gettyimagesbank





A research team in Shanghai has achieved a technological breakthrough to allow them to build the most powerful laser on the planet.



The leap means they could fire a 100-petawatt shot in about two years, a scientist involved in the project told the South China Morning Post on Tuesday.



That single pulse would be 10,000 times more powerful than all the electricity grids in the world combined.



In the incredibly brief but intensive flash of light, humans would witness materials coming from nothing for the first time.



Liu Jun, a member of the Station of Extreme Light (SEL) project with the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, said increasing the power of a laser beam was not easy.



A very high energy input could damage optical components such as crystals, lenses and mirrors.



To sidestep the burn issue, scientists would diffract the input beam to a broad spectrum of colours and pump into each colourful beam a relatively small amount of energy that the hardware could tolerate. Then they would compress them back into a single beam, now with its power dramatically amplified.



This compression has been an obstacle for scientists around the world for decades.



"The compressor will burn with so much energy coming in," Liu said.



In a 19-page paper published in the journal Optics Express in May, Liu and his colleagues proposed a high-powered laser design that broke the compression procedure into steps, which they said would cut energy intensity to a level safe for the compressor while radically increasing the laser device power output.



This breakthrough has given the SEL facility, which is under construction in Shanghai, a boost, according to Liu.



The $100 million project originally planned to employ four independent laser beams to reach the target power output. But with the new technology, one beam would be enough.



This would reduce the number of some large, critical components, such as diffraction gratings, and cut the cost of the project, said Liu.



"The fewer the beams, the simpler the device. The simpler the device, the more easily it can be built and run. The quality and stability of laser pulses will improve as well," he added.



When completed in 2023, the SEL facility could open a portal to a new world of physical discoveries, many physicists believe.



Though the laser beam eventually would be fired up in extremely short pulses  with no risk of a blackout on Earth  experts believe it would tear apart space-time for a brief moment to allow scientists to glimpse new physical phenomena that for now only exist in theories.



Einstein's famous equation E=mc2, for instance, explains that a small amount of matter can be converted to an enormous amount of energy. The atomic bomb proved it. But no one has shown how  or whether  it works the other way round.



The extremely powerful laser beam, when focused on an extremely small spot in a vacuum, can make a subatomic particle pop out of the blue, according to the prediction of physical theory. The SEL was designed to make this happen.



But the use of the facility will not be limited to satisfying physicists' curiosity. It could aid research in a wide range of areas, from new materials and drugs to nuclear fusion energy.



A laser scientist with the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, said the new Shanghai laser facility would strengthen China's leading position in the high-power laser race.





Chinese flags are waved during a rehearsal for a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Chinese Communist Party at Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, July 1. AP-Yonhap




By Neil Jayson Servallos



It was the year 2010. National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) agent Bernard Dela Cruz remembered watching dozens of children move in and out of an internet cafe in Cebu City in central Philippines, wondering if they were the young boys and girls they needed to rescue.



The NBI had information that the children were being livestreamed naked to paying customers abroad. It's one of the first cases of online sexual exploitation of children or OSEC that Dela Cruz handled as an agent, when it was still the "dark ages" for law enforcement on the internet. Because technology had limitations, they couldn't locate the scene of the crime and had to rely on old methods of surveillance.



"The houses were shanties set up close to each other. During that time, we haven't been able to trace IP addresses. We relied on conventional ways of surveillance," Dela Cruz told the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), referring to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses or numbers assigned to a device connected to the Internet.



After several days of tedious work, the NBI finally swooped in. Dela Cruz's hunch was right. Inside the internet cafe, where many children spent hours playing computer games, was a private room where the unspeakable happened.



"The kids were naked. [The facilitator] was using shampoo to make it appear that that was his (fluids on the kids)," Dela Cruz said.



Abby, who was 10 at the time, was among the children who frequented the private room to perform for paying customers. She had been abused for about a year when the internet cafe was raided.



She remembered how she was offered P150 or $3 to do the show. Now 21, she told PCIJ she didn't realize the psychological harm of what the traffickers did to her, and was only happy to slip money into the pockets of her grandparents who took care of her.



The man who facilitated the trafficking  Archie Abala  was known to the children and their families. He was convicted in 2013 for violating Republic Act 9208, or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003. He was meted an eight-year sentence and a fine of P50,000.



Dela Cruz said he believes Abala could have served more time had he been put on trial by prosecutors under the Anti-Child Pornography Law of 2009, a new law at the time that dealt more comprehensively with OSEC as a digital crime. The only provision in the old law that applied to the internet was a prohibition against online advertising of human trafficking.



IP address, filtering mechanisms



A decade later, the Philippines has become the global epicenter of online sexual exploitation of children despite the efforts of law enforcement. By Neil Jayson ServallosIt was the year 2010. National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) agent Bernard Dela Cruz remembered watching dozens of children move in and out of an internet cafe in Cebu City in central Philippines, wondering if they were the young boys and girls they needed to rescue.The NBI had information that the children were being livestreamed naked to paying customers abroad. It's one of the first cases of online sexual exploitation of children or OSEC that Dela Cruz handled as an agent, when it was still the "dark ages" for law enforcement on the internet. Because technology had limitations, they couldn't locate the scene of the crime and had to rely on old methods of surveillance."The houses were shanties set up close to each other. During that time, we haven't been able to trace IP addresses. We relied on conventional ways of surveillance," Dela Cruz told the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), referring to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses or numbers assigned to a device connected to the Internet.After several days of tedious work, the NBI finally swooped in. Dela Cruz's hunch was right. Inside the internet cafe, where many children spent hours playing computer games, was a private room where the unspeakable happened."The kids were naked. [The facilitator] was using shampoo to make it appear that that was his (fluids on the kids)," Dela Cruz said.Abby, who was 10 at the time, was among the children who frequented the private room to perform for paying customers. She had been abused for about a year when the internet cafe was raided.She remembered how she was offered P150 or $3 to do the show. Now 21, she told PCIJ she didn't realize the psychological harm of what the traffickers did to her, and was only happy to slip money into the pockets of her grandparents who took care of her.The man who facilitated the trafficking  Archie Abala  was known to the children and their families. He was convicted in 2013 for violating Republic Act 9208, or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003. He was meted an eight-year sentence and a fine of P50,000.Dela Cruz said he believes Abala could have served more time had he been put on trial by prosecutors under the Anti-Child Pornography Law of 2009, a new law at the time that dealt more comprehensively with OSEC as a digital crime. The only provision in the old law that applied to the internet was a prohibition against online advertising of human trafficking.A decade later, the Philippines has become the global epicenter of online sexual exploitation of children despite the efforts of law enforcement.

The big reason: internet service providers are still largely unable to provide the IP addresses of computers used by perpetrators as they have yet to upgrade to better technology. Getting more information on the users of IP addresses is even more difficult as law enforcers need to secure court warrants and comply with data privacy rules.



In 2017, a study conducted by the Washington-based International Justice Mission (IJM) showed that 149 in every 10,000 IP addresses linked to child sexual exploitation originated from the Philippines.



It was three times higher than the rate of 43 in every 10,000 from three years earlier. "Internet-based CSE (child sexual exploitation), in general, and OSEC, specifically, appear to be rapidly growing crimes in the Philippines," the IJM study concluded.



The situation worsened even with technological advancements that should allow law enforcement agents to easily track where livestreaming is conducted. Philippine law enforcement agencies also get tips from counterparts in other countries when they are able to arrest pedophiles preying on Filipino children.



Computer data and other evidence are sent to either the Philippine National Police or the NBI, which uses them to track down the OSEC facilitators.



"Even now, getting information from ISPs like IP addresses is difficult. But they give them if you file properly in court," said Angela de Gracia, a lawyer at the Office of Cybercrime under the Department of Justice (DOJ).



The problem is most of the Philippines is still under the IPV4 system  an internet protocol that hosts thousands of users in one IP address. Even when foreign law enforcers provide the IP addresses of OSEC facilitators, it could be just one of a multitude of users hosted in one IP address for a certain area.



"What they (ISPs) keep telling us is that because of their technology that allows thousands of users in one IP address, they can't certainly tell which of the users is the perpetrator," he said.



The DOJ has been pushing the National Telecommunications Commission to require internet companies to use the IPV6 system, which can designate one IP address for every device.



Globe Telecom, one of the country's biggest internet broadband providers, said it had yet to upgrade. "It's currently a work in progress as it requires a significant amount of investment and technical revisions, compatibility on our part," Globe said in a statement sent to the PCIJ. (Editor's note: The attribution of the quote was corrected.)



Section 9 of the Anti-Child Pornography Act of 2009 requires internet companies to "install available technology, program or software to ensure that access to or transmittal of any form of child pornography will be blocked or filtered."



Globe said it implemented a DNS (Domain Name System) filtering mechanism in 2017 to prevent subscribers from accessing such sites.



PLDT and its mobile unit Smart also said they have complied with the law's mandate, even partnering with the Internet Watch Foundation to deal with thousands of weblinks said to be containing child abuse materials.



Law enforcement and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) said the ISPs' efforts had not been enough to comply with the law, however. Effective technology has not been installed almost 12 years since the law's passing, De Gracia said.



"We tried dialogues, peaceful talks (with ISPs). We haven't gotten their commitment," lamented De Gracia.



The DOJ is trying another way to make ISPs commit to their duties under the law, she said.



Data Privacy Act



Requiring Internet companies to adopt the IPV6 system would not necessarily make the job of law enforcement easier, however.





ISPs are wary of cases that could be filed against them under Section 9 of the law. It reads: "nothing in this Section may be construed to require an ISP to engage in the monitoring of any user, subscriber or customer, or the content of any communication of any such person."



The Philippine Chamber of Telecom Operators sent a position paper to the DOJ saying the Data Privacy Act of 2012, which requires strict privacy on personal information of customers, clashed with their duties under the Anti-Child Pornography Act. The PCTO is the lobby group of telecommunication entities and ISPs, including PLDT, Smart, and Globe.



In an opinion piece on OSEC published on Rappler, law professor Tony La Vina wrote that there was a need to rethink interpretations of the Data Privacy Act that have allowed it to protect criminals.



"[I]t must be noted that the Act shall not apply to information necessary for law enforcement and regulatory agencies to carry out their constitutionally and statutorily mandated functions," he wrote.



De Gracia also noted that ISPs should not read the provisions of the Anti-Child Pornography Act and the Data Privacy Act as contrary to each other.



"The same paragraph (Section 9 of the Data Privacy Act) provides that the duty to notify does not constitute monitoring of contents and even provides protection to ISPs against civil liability for any notice given to law enforcement in good faith," she explained. "Instead of reading it as contrary to each other, the aforesaid provision is more of complementary."



Globe also argued that content monitoring falls in the hands of internet content hosts or electronic service providers (ESPs), as well as websites and platform moderators.



"Internet hosts are among the largest cloud providers. Majority of the child porn content is being hosted in these large cloud or media platforms, which are encrypted or hidden via VPN (virtual private networks). Thus, we cannot selectively block the illegal content unless we block the entire platform itself," the company explained.



Globe said it was difficult to track down perpetrators on social media and encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, Telegram, where they look for customers.



WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, Messenger and other messaging platforms all say they do not allow the proliferation of child sex abuse imagery. WhatsApp said it has been using automated technology to scan group names, group descriptions and possible suspicious activity. Facebook, meanwhile, said the Messenger app has employed an artificial intelligence (AI) to detect content.



"I will have to understand better that position (Section 9 of the Data Privacy Act) because from the perspective of where we are coming from as a telco operator, that's very sophisticated," said Angel Redoble, PLDT's chief information security officer. "But I don't think that's doable because (1) we are not inspecting every photo and every video that is being accessed by our subscribers; (2) that is in violation of our privacy laws; (3) we are just a pass-through -- we are a telco. If you are familiar with the seven OSI layers -- application, session, transport, network, IP -- we do not operate on the layer seven, six and five. We only operate on the network layer, which is the IP and that is why we are only able to provide information about IPs, IP headers."



A priest's campaign



Irish priest Shay Cullen, who founded the Olongapo-based child rights organization Preda Foundation, is one of the few advocates who have been challenging ISPs over their failures in protecting children. Globe cited restrictions under the Data Privacy Act of 2012 , which may also hinder the company from divulging the information of internet users.ISPs are wary of cases that could be filed against them under Section 9 of the law. It reads: "nothing in this Section may be construed to require an ISP to engage in the monitoring of any user, subscriber or customer, or the content of any communication of any such person."The Philippine Chamber of Telecom Operators sent a position paper to the DOJ saying the Data Privacy Act of 2012, which requires strict privacy on personal information of customers, clashed with their duties under the Anti-Child Pornography Act. The PCTO is the lobby group of telecommunication entities and ISPs, including PLDT, Smart, and Globe.In an opinion piece on OSEC published on Rappler, law professor Tony La Vina wrote that there was a need to rethink interpretations of the Data Privacy Act that have allowed it to protect criminals."[I]t must be noted that the Act shall not apply to information necessary for law enforcement and regulatory agencies to carry out their constitutionally and statutorily mandated functions," he wrote.De Gracia also noted that ISPs should not read the provisions of the Anti-Child Pornography Act and the Data Privacy Act as contrary to each other."The same paragraph (Section 9 of the Data Privacy Act) provides that the duty to notify does not constitute monitoring of contents and even provides protection to ISPs against civil liability for any notice given to law enforcement in good faith," she explained. "Instead of reading it as contrary to each other, the aforesaid provision is more of complementary."Globe also argued that content monitoring falls in the hands of internet content hosts or electronic service providers (ESPs), as well as websites and platform moderators."Internet hosts are among the largest cloud providers. Majority of the child porn content is being hosted in these large cloud or media platforms, which are encrypted or hidden via VPN (virtual private networks). Thus, we cannot selectively block the illegal content unless we block the entire platform itself," the company explained.Globe said it was difficult to track down perpetrators on social media and encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, Telegram, where they look for customers.WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, Messenger and other messaging platforms all say they do not allow the proliferation of child sex abuse imagery. WhatsApp said it has been using automated technology to scan group names, group descriptions and possible suspicious activity. Facebook, meanwhile, said the Messenger app has employed an artificial intelligence (AI) to detect content."I will have to understand better that position (Section 9 of the Data Privacy Act) because from the perspective of where we are coming from as a telco operator, that's very sophisticated," said Angel Redoble, PLDT's chief information security officer. "But I don't think that's doable because (1) we are not inspecting every photo and every video that is being accessed by our subscribers; (2) that is in violation of our privacy laws; (3) we are just a pass-through -- we are a telco. If you are familiar with the seven OSI layers -- application, session, transport, network, IP -- we do not operate on the layer seven, six and five. We only operate on the network layer, which is the IP and that is why we are only able to provide information about IPs, IP headers."Irish priest Shay Cullen, who founded the Olongapo-based child rights organization Preda Foundation, is one of the few advocates who have been challenging ISPs over their failures in protecting children.
In this image from video provided by Blue Origin on July 1, Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk, right, meets with Jeff Bezos. AP-Yonhap



Barrier-breaking woman aviator Wally Funk, 82, will join Jeff Bezos this month on the first crewed spaceflight for the billionaire's company Blue Origin, the firm announced Thursday.



The trip is 60 years overdue for Funk, who was one of the Mercury 13  the first women trained to fly to space from 1960-1961, but excluded because of their gender.



On July 20, she will become the oldest person ever to go to space when she takes part in the journey aboard the New Shepard launch vehicle along with Bezos, his brother Mark and one other traveler who paid $28 million at auction for the seat.



"I can hardly wait," Funk says in a video posted on Bezos's Instagram account.



The video shows Bezos describing the trip to Funk, and then asking her what would be the first thing she said after landing.



"I would say, 'Honey, that was the best thing that ever happened to me!'" replies an exuberant Funk, throwing her arms around the laughing tech mogul.



Funk recalled her time in the Mercury 13 program  an unofficial, privately funded program which put women through the same training and tests as the male astronauts undergoing the official NASA program.



"They told me that I had done better and completed the work faster than any of the guys," Funk, the youngest woman to pass the program, says in the video.



"So I got ahold of NASA, four times. I said I want to become an astronaut, but nobody would take me. I didn't think that I would ever get to go up."



She said people told her "Wally, you're a girl, you can't do that."



"I said guess what, doesn't matter what you are, you can still do it if you want to do it."



"It's time," Bezos wrote on the Instagram post. "Welcome to the crew, Wally."





This handout photo provided by Blue Origin on July 1, shows pilot Wally Funk. AFP-Yonhap
Among numerous K-pop releases this year, TIME selected the 10 "Best K-pop Songs of 2021 So Far." Aside from EXO Baekhyun and IU, the list will surprise you as it consists of several rookie groups like aespa, STAYC, Weeekly, and more!

On July 1, the reputable American news magazine and website, TIME, curated the top 10 K-pop songs that they think are the best releases this 2021. And on the long list of K-pop artists that dropped their own music amid pandemic, TIME highlighted that they chose the groups and soloists from those that debuted in 2003 to 2020, who had released songs this year.

The songs were selected regardless its genre as well, may it be pop-rock, R & B, and synth-pop, etc.

EXO Baekhyun's "Bambi," IU's "Lilac," Epik High's "Rosario": Icons Who Released the "Best K-pop Songs of 2021 So Far"

Among the artists with a wide spectrum of experience, IU who released her new song "Lilac" in March, entered the list.

Aside from its catchy lyrics such as "Love me only till this spring/Like a warm breeze," the song title also carries a significant meaning.

IU explained that "Lilac" is the reminiscence of her youth.

Contrary to IU's track, EXO Baekhyun's "Bambi" is definitely not for the younger audience. The R&B song is indeed a "bedtime" song, but sexier and more mature.

K-hip-hop icon Epik High's, who collaborated with CL and Zico for the song, "Rosario" also entered the list.

This time, the song is neither about youth nor love but it is a diss song. The start of the lyrics of the song depicts the people who always attack verbally.

Later on, it transitioned with the protagonist who turned the hate they are getting into fuel to success.

Former iKON turned solo artist B.I also proved individual power with "illa illa." TIME commended the songwriter who is also a storyteller through his music.

aespa's "NEXT Level," STAYC's "ASAP," Weeekly's "After School": Rookie Groups Who Released the "Best K-pop Songs of 2021"

The news website also selected songs released by newly launched groups, proving their titles as "Fourth-Generation Representatives."

In the list, Weeekly graced the list with their track, "After School." TIME also mentioned the group as the rising icons of "cheery pop."

Another rising fourth-gen group on the list is STAYC, who stunned with their song "ASAP." The song is not only an earworm with a strong chorus and speedy tempo, but it is also inspirational.

STAYC, with their lyrics, reminds listeners to say to themselves, "I think I'm really cool."

To complete the "rookie monster" girl groups, aespa's "Next Level" joined the list, too!

The song that sounded like two songs combined is a refreshing sound to those K-pop fans who want to listen to a song with a dynamic genre and concept.

In addition to the girl groups, "Love So Sweet" by Cherry Bullet was also selected for their perfect description of the range of sensory feelings that one is feeling when in love through the song.

TXT's 0X1=LOVESONG (I Know I Love You) didn't only perform well on the charts but showed a different level of the angst of the five-member group.

Another boy group on the list is ONF, with their track, "Beautiful Beautiful" which has an iconic introduction, chorus, and lyrics.

For more K-Pop news and updates, keep your tabs open here at KpopStarz.

KpopStarz owns this article.

Written by Eunice Dawson
Server - FT/PT - $1000 SIGN ON BONUS

Job Category: Food and Beverage

Requisition Number: SERVE02553

Posting Details

Posted: June 29, 2021

Full-Time

LocationsShowing 1 location

Park City-Stein Eriksen Lodge, UT, USA

Job Details

Description

Provide prompt, efficient & friendly service to our guests at our Forbes rated resort. Professionalism and reflecting the image of Stein Erikson Lodge Management Corporation values is a must. Servers must be friendly, courteous in manner and helpful to all of our guests and co-workers. Strong knowledge of liquor, wine and beer preferred. Able to keep composure in fast paced environment. Must be able to be on feet for up to 10 hours.

BENEFITS

Stein Eriksen Lodge Management Corporation offers a variety of benefits to meet the needs of our team members and their families. These benefits are a major part of the team member compensation. Recognizing this, it is our goal to offer a benefits package that is comprehensive in design and cost-effective for team members.



ELIGIBILITY FOR BENEFITS VARIES DEPENDING ON POSITION CLASSIFICATION.

You may apply for a position online or in person Monday through Friday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. For more information, please contact our Human Resources Department at (435) 645-6463.

Our benefit package may include the following:

Health insurance

Dental plan

Basic life insurance / accidental death and dismemberment employer paid

Additional voluntary life insurance

Short- and long-term disability

Flexible spending accounts for dependent care and health care costs

Supplemental accident, cancer, disability insurance immediately upon hire

401k with employer match

Profit sharing at management discretion

Employee assistance program

Paid time off

Seasonal ski benefits

Holidays

Dry cleaning benefits

Hotel, dining, and spa discounts

Direct deposit

Pre-paid legal and identity theft protection



Qualifications

Experience

Required

2 years: Fine dining service experience

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IS&T HelpLine Analyst Sacramento , California , United States Software and Services Summary

Posted: Jul 1, 2021 Role Number: 200262883 Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish. The people here at Apple don't just craft products - they build the kind of wonder that's revolutionized entire industries. It's the diversity of those people and their ideas that inspires the innovation that runs through everything we do, from amazing technology to industry-leading environmental efforts. Join Apple, and help us leave the world better than we found it. The Information Systems & Technology (IS&T) team manages key business and technical infrastructure at Apple -- how we take an order online, the experience with technology in our retail stores, how much network capacity we need around the world, the processing of every credit card an iTunes customer uses, and closing the books. IS&T does it all. We are looking for HelpLine Analyst to join our team. The IS&T HelpLine provides technical support to Apple's employees, contractors, and vendors throughout the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We support Apple's products and services from hardware to software as well as Apple's elite information technology infrastructure from the data and voice networks to each user's Mac or iOS device and everything in between. This is a very fast-paced and highly demanding internal help desk environment. If you have a strong passion to work in a growing environment of innovation while exuding deep collaboration skills, this position is for you. We're committed to helping employees explore their potential. Key Qualifications Motivation and ability to work as part of a distributed team

Good interpersonal communications and customer service skills

Excellent English-language oral and written communications skills

Excellent telephone and email etiquette

Excellent time management and multi-tasking skills

Flexibility and adaptability to thrive in a dynamic, highly-demanding, constantly changing environment

Ability to maintain composure and customer-service focus in stressful situations

Strong troubleshooting and problem resolution skills

Conceptual understanding of IP networking and basic network troubleshooting skills

Conceptual understanding of multi-tiered and web-based information systems architecture

Experience providing hardware and software technical support for Macs, iOS devices, Apple Watch, and Apple TV

Experience using an IT service management or CRM system for tracking technical support cases

Experience using a knowledge base system

Familiarity with Retail POS and other retail IT systems

PREFERRED SKILLS

Cisco CCNA certification or working towards certification Description As an IS&T Analyst, you will provide technical support via telephone, chat, email, and ticketing system for Apple employees and contractors. You''ll perform impact assessment and troubleshooting according to established procedures, while documenting problems, troubleshooting steps, and resolutions. You'll manage support cases and advocate for the caller by "owning" the issue and facilitating technical support from the initial contact to resolution. You will handle hierarchical and functional critical issues, while communicating with the HelpLine, Infrastructure Services, and IS&T management teams via email, chat, telephone, and in person. Education & Experience Additional Requirements

Work hours are variable. This is a 24/7, 365 days per year environment



Weekend and holiday work required at times








Application Lead (Global Business Intelligence) Santa Clara Valley (Cupertino) , California , United States Software and Services Summary

Posted: Jun 17, 2021 Role Number: 200258207 At Apple, phenomenal ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products, services, and customer experiences. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish. Would you like to work in an energizing environment where your abilities will be challenged on a day-to-day basis? If you are passionate about innovating to deliver insights through large-scale data solutions, then Apple's Global Business Intelligence Application Lead role is for you. Work with a team of committed Data Analytics professionals, applying your standout combination of intuition for business and technical knowledge. We lead enterprise data stores with petabytes of data, process billions of rows of data in batch and real-time to provide solutions to our users helping them gain insight and to make informed business decisions. The Global Business Intelligence team provides data services, analytics, reporting and data science solutions to Apple's business groups including Retail, iTunes, Marketing, AppleCare, Operations, Finance and Sales. We use diverse technology stacks such as Teradata, HANA, Hadoop, Spark, Cassandra and beyond. Crafting, developing and scaling these Big Data technologies is a core part of our daily job. Key Qualifications Extensive understanding of global corporate business processes and their relationship to technology

Excellent problem solving abilities

Able to communicate and influence across disparate groups and levels in the organization

Strong written, verbal, and presentation skills

Thrive in a dynamic environment, maintaining composure and a positive attitude

Demonstrable understanding of development processes and agile methodologies

Successful track record managing solutions from requirements analysis, to feature definition to deployment and throughout out its usable life

Proactively initiates, develops, and maintains effective working relationships with team members

The successful interaction with teams in an on/off shore model is important

Knowledge of one or more database technologies (Teradata, Oracle, Hadoop) and experienced in Cloud Technologies

Experience with business analytics products like Tableau

Proficiency in writing Advanced SQLs, experience with data science and machine learning tools and technologies is a plus Description You will be responsible for ownership of one or more applications. You will work with business partners to understand their goals and requirements and will define application features and strategic roadmaps to meet those needs, in addition, you will be encouraged to keep abreast of, and plan for, technology changes as applicable to your solution landscape and industry standard methodologies. You will have overall ownership of application features and will drive engineering teams in building them. Apple is looking for an Application Lead to join our team. You will engage directly with key business partners to build positive relationships and understand their business strategies and solution needs. You will build and own solution roadmaps, and design and deliver high quality, scalable and resilient business solutions. You will need to translate complex business requirements into scalable technical solutions that meet these needs and are in line with the solution's strategic roadmap. The BI Application Lead will lead a strong engineering team in building to the roadmap and delivering to quality focused development standards. You should have application delivery experience, and be equally relaxed working with the business and driving technical design discussions. You should be passionate about data and its nuances. Education & Experience Bachelor's Degree, experience in Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence space




Market Data Insights Analyst, US/Canada - Apple Music Seattle , Washington , United States Software and Services Summary

Posted: Jun 15, 2021 Weekly Hours: 40 Role Number: 200228245 Do you love music? Movies? Are you passionate about analyzing data? We do! As part of the Evaluation & A/B team, you will be a market expert for our Apple Music and Apple TV service. We represent the user's perspective as they vet new features being introduced to Apple Music and Apple TV. Our day-to-day responsibilities will include reviewing data, analyzing data, and creating innovative ideas to help improve Apple search features, and reporting systematic issues to statisticians and engineers. We are looking for someone who is just as passionate about movies and tv as we are! This individual must have Native or fluency in a regional language - preferred languages in addition to English: French (Canadian) or Spanish Key Qualifications Demonstrated experience analyzing large data sets and generating reports that identify patterns for Apple Music

Works well with cross-functional teams, Engineers/Data Scientists who build complex algorithms

Ability to work effectively in a team environment with exceptional interpersonal skills

Technical - strong quantitative skills, including analytical abilities and math proficiency

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

Solid verbal and written communication skills

Ability to work successfully with teams on multiple projects under tight deadlines

High attention to detail

Willingness to be proactive in bringing new, innovative ideas to the table

Required: Native or fluent in a regional language: Italian and English

Experience with data, financial, or business analysis using SQL, macros, etc.

Experience with search and recommendations engines

Experience working in the music or movies/tv space Description This person will be accountable for the day-to-day analysis for their market, and ensuring timely completion of projects. Supervise the quality of ratings for external vendors, collaborate and provide feedback to vendor PMs Create high quality reports analyzing the issues and patterns for your market and provide feedback to managers, statisticians, and engineers Train and lead fellow Analysts, help improve overall team growth Collaborate with Statisticians and Engineers to evaluate and analyze Apple's search algorithms and data, and identify opportunities for improvement Vet new relevance algorithms and features by rating pages and providing feedback to the engineers for improvement Use metrics and query logs to uncover relevance and data issues and suggest changes to algorithms Work cross-functionally to help resolve search and recommendations issues Education & Experience BA/BS or equivalent industry experience




Salary $63,128.00 - $109,740.80 Annually Location Arlington *METRO-accessible*, VA Job Type Full-Time Department County Manager's Office Job Number 1151-21A-CMO-HQ Closing 7/15/2021 11:59 PM Eastern Position Information Arlington County seeks a result-oriented, self-starter to join the County Manager's Human Rights Office (OHR) as an OHR/EEO Investigator. This position will conduct investigations into sensitive Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints of discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, gender identity/expression religion, national origin, marital status, disability familial status and age in the areas of public and/or private sector employment, housing, education, public accommodation and credit.



Specific duties include: Conducting investigations into OHR/EEO complaints of discrimination, harassment, and other workplace complaints in an efficient, neutral, prompt, thorough, and professional manner;

Developing investigative plans, interviewing complainants and witnesses;

Negotiating to resolve complaints;

Analyzing evidence and determining relevancy, materiality and veracity;

Preparing clear, thorough, well-reasoned reports;

Interpreting OHR/EEO policies, regulations, laws;

Researching best practices and staying abreast of EEOC guidelines;

Developing and conducting trainings on EEO topics including preparation and delivery of virtual presentations;

Providing support for special programs and commission meetings; and

Using tact, effective communication and political acumen to support and communicate with Commissioners, patrons, management and personnel. The ideal candidate for this position will have the following: Ability to comprehend and assess complex EEO and human rights issues;

Ability to produce clear, concise, analytical written investigative reports;

Ability to interpret and apply relevant EEO policies, regulations and/or laws;

Ability to conduct thorough interviews and interact professionally with staff of all levels; and

Ability to multi-task within timelines.

Selection Criteria Minimum: Bachelor's degree in Business or Public Administration, Personnel Administration, Sociology, Psychology, Law Enforcement or related field plus considerable experience in the investigation of OHR/EEO complaints.



Substitution: Additional qualifying experience may substitute for the education requirement on a year for year basis.



Desirables: Preference will be given to applicants with one or more of the following: Experience developing educational resources on EEO policies, regulations and/or laws;

Strong knowledge/comprehension of complex EEO policies, regulations and/or laws;

Spanish language skills;

Experience conducting training; and/or

Advanced knowledge & experience with MSOffice, MSWord/Excel, PowerPoint, Windows software and Google applications.

Special Requirements A letter of application is required. Please use the space in the Supplemental Questionnaire or attach a cover letter to your application that addresses how your education, training and experience meet the Selection Criteria as stated in the job announcement Minimum Qualifications as well as the statements in the Desirable section of the job announcement.

Additional Information Hours of work: 40 hours per week, Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with a flexible schedule.



Your responses to the supplemental questionnaire are considered part of the selection process and are required for this position. Please do not give "see resume" as a response to the questions. Incomplete applications will not be considered. In order to receive full credit for your experience, please ensure that you have included details of all relevant work experience on your application and have completed the Supplemental Questionnaire in its entirety. Arlington County Government employee benefits depend on whether a position is permanent, the number of hours worked, and the number of months the position is scheduled.



Specific information on benefits and conditions of employment can be found on the Arlington County Human Resources Department website: (see application details)



Permanent, Full-Time Appointments

All jobs are permanent, full-time appointments unless otherwise stated in the announcement. The following benefits are available:



Paid Leave : Vacation leave is earned at the rate of four hours biweekly. Leave accrual increases every three years until eight hours of leave are earned biweekly for twelve or more years of service. Sick leave is earned at the rate of four hours biweekly. There are eleven paid holidays each year.



Health and Dental Insurance : Three group health insurance plans are offered - a network open access plan, a point-of-service plan, and a health maintenance organization. A group dental insurance plan is also offered. The County pays a significant portion of the premium for these plans for employees and their dependents. A discount vision plan is provided for eye care needs.



Life Insurance : A group term policy of basic life insurance is provided at no cost to employees. The benefit is one times annual salary. Additional life insurance is available with rates based on the employee's age and smoker/non-smoker status.



Retirement : The County offers three vehicles to help you prepare for retirement: a defined benefit plan, a defined contribution plan (401(a)), and a deferred compensation plan (457). The defined benefit plan provides a monthly retirement benefit based on your final average salary and years of service with the County. You contribute a portion of your salary on a pre-tax basis to this plan. General employees contribute 4% of pay; uniformed public safety employees contribute 7.5% of pay. Employees become vested in the plan at five years of service. The County also contributes to this plan.



For general employees, the County also contributes 4.2% of pay to a defined contribution plan (401(a)) . The County also matches your 457 contribution, up to $20 per pay period, in this plan. The 457 deferred compensation plan allows you to set aside money on either a pre-tax (457b) or post-tax (457 Roth) basis up to the IRS annual limit. New employees are automatically enrolled with a pre-tax contribution equal to 2% of your base pay.



Other Benefits: The County also offers health, dependent care, and parking flexible spending accounts; long-term care insurance; tuition assistance; transit and walk/bike to work subsidies; a college savings plan; wellness programs; training opportunities; and a variety of other employee benefits.



Permanent, Part-Time Appointments:

Part time employees who work ten or more hours per week receive paid leave and benefits in proportion to the number of hours worked per week.



Limited Term Appointments:

Benefits are the same as permanent appointments except that the employees do not achieve permanent status.



Temporary Regular Appointments:

Temporary regular employees who work 30 hours or more per week are eligible for health, dental, and basic life insurance as described above. They are also eligible for vacation, sick leave, and paid holidays.



Temporary Seasonal and Occasional Appointments:

Temporary employees who work on a seasonal basis or variable hours receive sick leave, but do not normally receive other paid leave or benefits. Exceptions are noted in individual announcements.




Project Management Specialist Democracy, Rights & Governance Office - Solicitation Number: 72027821R10015 - Open to: All Interested Jordanian Candidates - Issuance Date: July 01, 2021 - Closing Date: July 14, 2021 - Position Title: Project Management Specialist, Democracy, Rights and Governance Office, 40 hours work week, full time. - Grade: FSN-11 Issuing Country Jordan Date Wednesday, June 30, 2021 - 4:45am



Job Attachment

U.S. Agency for International Development American Embassy P.O. Box 354 Amman 11118, Jordan Tel: +962 (6) 5906000 Fax +962 (6) 5920143 www.usaid.gov/jordan USAID, Unit 70206 APO AE 09892-0206 SOLICITATION NUMBER: 72027821R10015 ISSUANCE DATE: July 01, 2021 CLOSING DATE/TIME: July 14, 2021 11:59 p.m. Amman local time SUBJECT: Solicitation for a Cooperating Country National Personal Service Contractor (CCN PSC - Local Compensation Plan) Dear Prospective Applicants: The United States Government, represented by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Amman Jordan, is seeking applications from qualified individuals to provide personal services under contract as described in this solicitation. Applications must be in accordance with Sections I through VIII of this solicitation. Incomplete or unsigned applications will not be considered. Applicants should retain copies of all application materials for their records. This solicitation in no way obligates USAID/Jordan to award a Personal Services Contact (PSC) nor does it commit USAID/Jordan to pay any cost incurred in the preparation and submission of the applications. Any questions must be directed in writing to the Point of Contact specified in point 10 Section I General Information. Sincerely, Jennifer Scott Contracting Officer Jennifer Scott Digitally signed by Jennifer Scott Date: 2021.06.30 09:21:30 +03'00' 2 I. GENERAL INFORMATION 1. SOLICITATION NUMBER: 72027821R10015 2. OPEN TO: All Interested Jordanian Citizens 3. ISSUANCE DATE: July 01, 2021 4. CLOSING DATE/TIME: July 14, 2021 - 11:59 p.m. Amman Local Time 5. POSITION TITLE: Project Management Specialist Democracy, Rights & Governance Office 6. PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE: Employment under this contract is of a continuing nature. Its Duration is expected to be part of a series of sequential contracts; all contract clauses, provisions, and regulatory requirements concerning availability of funds and the specific duration of this contract shall apply. The contract will be for a base period (between one to three years) and based on the Agency needs, the Contracting Officer may exercise (an) additional option period(s). If the U.S. Government exercises this option, the total duration of this contract, including the exercise of any options, shall not exceed five (5) years. 7. MARKET VALUE (SALARY PER ANNUM): JOD29,426 - JOD48,549 Equivalent to Grade FSN-11 In accordance with AIDAR Appendix J and the Local Compensation Plan of USAID/Jordan. Final compensation will be negotiated within the listed market value (Salary). 8. PLACE OF PERFORMANCE: Amman, Jordan 9. SECURITY LEVEL REQUIRED: Facilities Access/Employment Authorization 10. POINT OF CONTACT: All questions should be directed to: (see application details) 11. STATEMENT OF DUTIES USAID/Jordan has an immediate vacancy for a Project Management Specialist at the Democracy, Rights and Governance (DRG) Office in USAID/Jordan. The work schedule is 40 hours per week and the workweek is Sunday-Thursday. The Specialist serves as a Project Management Specialist within the Democracy, Rights, and Governance Office. The Democracy, Rights, and Governance Office leads strategy, planning, design, and implementation of USAID/Jordan's democracy, human rights, and governance portfolio to support the Mission's Country Development Cooperation Strategy. The position manages all aspects of the design and management of a variety of programs potentially covering public sector reform and capacity building, political and electoral processes, civic engagement, and/or civil society and media strengthening. This includes leading all aspects of activity management and monitoring and evaluation of progress towards 3 results in accordance with project documents and USAID policy requirements and procedures. S/he provides expert advice to Office and Mission Leadership on critical developments in relevant sectors. S/he will monitor and analyze political, economic, and social trends, data and key obstacles to development in Jordan and articulate ways the Mission can adapt to challenges across the portfolio. The Specialist provides potential solutions for increasing the accountability and effectiveness of public institutions, expanding civic engagement, increasing citizens' trust and accountability, and advancing the rights of women and marginalized groups, thus ensuring more equitable and democratic governance in Jordan. Together with the other members of the teams, s/he will be responsible for meeting USAID/Jordan's objective of Strengthened Democratic Accountability. The job holder may be expected to perform work-related domestic and international travel. Major Duties and Responsibilities: Project and Activity Management The Specialist will manage and/or be an alternate manager of a portfolio of activities potentially spanning several activities within the DRG Development Objectives (DOs) with an estimated total life of project value of $50-100 million. The activities may include supporting public sector strengthening at the municipal and national levels, facilitating civic engagement across multiple sectors, and/or political processes and participation. S/he will serve as a Contracting/Agreement Officer Technical Representative (COR/AOR) for a large DRG initiative and as Activity Manager and Alternative COR/AOR for several activities within the DRG portfolio. In this capacity, the Specialist will prepare project implementation documents, coordinate project activities with relevant ministries and Jordanian organizations and manage USAID inputs for successful implementation of project(s). S/he will provide oversight for implementation of activities in the sector(s) assigned to her/him, including management of contract team(s), project consultants, and NGO grants to ensure that project activities are implemented according to USAID approved work plans. The Specialist will conduct site visits, facilitate regular meetings with the project implementers, review reports and perform assessments to monitor program progress, as well as contractor and NGO performance in the implementation of activities. In her/his capacity as a program manager, the Specialist is responsible for reviewing, analyzing and approving sub-project proposals; inspecting and reporting on USAID projects; conducting periodic field inspection trips to monitor contractor and grantee adherence to contract and grant terms, progress of projects, quality of work, and source and origin of equipment on site; meeting with contractor, grantee, and other stakeholders to discuss and resolve issues; explaining USAID regulations and requirements to implementing partners; and providing technical advice to contractors, grantees and other stakeholders including advice on Jordanian laws and regulations. The Specialist reviews periodic reports submitted by contractors and grantees on all assigned projects and comments on completeness, accuracy, problems and recommendations. S/he also reviews periodic billings for reasonableness and advises appropriate USAID offices regarding certification of these billings. In his/her capacity as a program manager, the Specialist will contribute to the completion of required monitoring and evaluation efforts relevant to the USAID/Jordan DRG Office. This includes design and monitoring of performance monitoring plans; completion of data quality assessments and portfolio reviews; and the provision of information needed to complete relevant sections of annual agency performance plans and reports; and supervision and implementation of internal evaluations or mid-term project/program reviews. 4 The Specialist works in close coordination with the Government of Jordan (GOJ), donors, other USG partners, local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other stakeholders to accomplish USG goals and objectives in the above-described technical areas. S/he represents the USG at high-level functions related to her/his areas of technical expertise. Given DRG's cross-cutting nature within the Mission, the Specialist will be responsible for engaging with other DO Teams to ensure the integration of DRG principles and best practices into ongoing and new projects at both a strategic and technical level. Design and Policy Guidance The Specialist will provide high quality leadership and guidance in specific DRG technical areas and will lead efforts to design and implement high quality projects to strengthen democracy, human rights, and governance in Jordan. The Specialist is responsible for the design of new programs in the DRG Development Objective. In designing programs, s/he coordinates and consults with civil society, senior and mid-level government officials, other donors, the U.S. interagency, and private sector leaders to ascertain host government and civil society priorities and objectives. To inform the design and development of USAID projects, the Specialist identifies issues and sectoral constraints, which may affect the projects' implementation. The Specialist oversees project design efforts; prepares concept papers, project approval documents, scopes of work, and other procurement-related documentation; leads and/or participates on technical evaluation committees; and provides written recommendations regarding contractor/grantee selection. S/he works with the contractor/grantee to develop and approve work plans, process modifications, waivers and other paperwork to ensure smooth start-up and day-to-day functioning. S/he will prepare statements of work, comprehensive sector assessments and other required technical materials for any solicitation for assistance and/or acquisition regarding specified programs. The Specialist continually assesses and advises on developments and trends in the area of democracy and governance - including tracking any changes in policies, programs, or other related sectors such as economic development or regional dynamics that affect development in Jordan. Professional Liaison and Research The Specialist will develop and maintain a broad range of contacts, including with ministers, commissioners, secretaries general, and directors of NGOs, chambers of commerce, business associations, corporate leaders, and key technical staff of other donor agencies. The Specialist uses these contacts to maintain regular communication on policy and project management issues. These contacts will also be used to promote USAID development strategy and obtain information about existing or planned policies and/or projects relevant to USAID's development program. In addition to more general responsibilities, the Specialist will represent USAID/Jordan at donor coordination meetings led by Jordanian government ministries or other donors. In this capacity, the Specialist contributes to the development and review of joint strategies, group discussions about best practices, and planning and coordination in support of sector development. S/he is expected to respond flexibly and capably to a wide range of work-related requirements. This includes, but is not limited to, responding to congressional inquiries, Washington policy and operational requests, supporting VIP visits and carrying out ad-hoc assignments as dictated by unforeseen operational requirements at the discretion of USAID/Jordan Senior Management in Amman. The Specialist will actively participate in the development of required reports for internal USAID purposes (Annual Report, portfolio reviews, and briefing/talking points for high-level visits). S/he will regularly 5 liaise with DRG specialists in Washington to ensure that the Mission is on the cutting edge of DRG programming, design for the Middle East Region, and will ensure Mission compliance will all applicable rules and guidelines pertaining to DRG programming. Supervisory Relationship The Project Management Specialist is directly supervised by a designated DRG Officer and\or a Senior Democracy and Governance Specialist (as assigned by the DRG Office Director) and is expected to perform complex work assignments independently and with minimal supervision. Supervisory Controls The direct supervision of other staff is not contemplated. Other significant Factors The contractor is eligible for temporary duty (TDY) travel to the U.S., or to other Missions abroad, to participate in the "Foreign Service National" Fellowship Program, in accordance with USAID policy. 12. PHYSICAL DEMANDS The work requested does not involve undue physical demands. 13. AREA OF CONSIDERATION To meet basic eligibility requirements, the applicant must be a Jordanian Citizen and must submit a complete application as outlined in the section titled APPLYING. The selected applicant is required to undergo and successfully pass a medical and security clearances. This process takes, on average, up to nine months. The selected applicant must be able to begin working within a reasonable period (60 days). II. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED FOR THIS POSITION Applications will be initially screened for eligibility in accordance with the qualification criteria below. Applicants must address each criterion in their application in order to meet the below minimum qualifications for this position. a. Education: A Bachelor's degree or the host-country equivalent in international development, international relations, political science, public policy and administration, or social sciences is required. Supporting documentation (i.e. copy of bachelor's degree must be included in the application for eligibility purposes). b. Prior Work Experience: A minimum of five years of progressively responsible professional experience in any of the following fields: democracy, human rights, governance sectors, including civic education, civil society, media, municipal governance, local economic development, anti- corruption, rule of law, or related fields is required. Also required is demonstrated leadership and field experience in one or more of the following areas: project management and implementation, monitoring and evaluation, assessments and research, and policy and strategic planning. c. Language Proficiency: Level IV (fluent) English and Arabic proficiency for both oral and written communication is required. At Level IV, an employee is required to possess a high degree of proficiency in both written and spoken English, including the ability to translate the host country language into precise and correct English, and English into the applicable foreign language. On 6 occasion, an employee at this level might be expected to act as an interpreter in situations where considerable importance attaches to proper word meaning. English proficiency will be tested. A minimum score of 785 on the TOEIC exam (Listening & Reading components only) or 590 is for the TOEFL ITP exam or 96 for the TOEFL iBT are acceptable. Examination scores must have been recorded within the last six months; or else, the candidate will be tested again. d. Skills and abilities: Demonstrated ability to collect and organize information, analyze data, use technical reference material, and write coherent project documents and reports is required. Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to work within a team and negotiate with others is required. The candidate must be able to establish and maintain an extensive range of contacts with GOJ officials, civil society stakeholders, and representatives of donor organizations. Strategic oral and written communication, including the ability to dialogue with USAID and host country decision-makers and make clear and persuasive oral presentations is required. The candidate must have demonstrated computer skills in specialized software including Windows and Microsoft Office suite, and ability to navigate the Internet with ease are required. III. EVALUATION AND SELECTION FACTORS The Government may award a contract without discussions with applicants in accordance with FAR 52.215-1. The CO reserves the right at any point in the evaluation process to establish a competitive range of applicants with whom negotiations will be conducted pursuant to FAR 15.306(c). In accordance with FAR 52.215-1, if the CO determines that the number of applications that would otherwise be in the competitive range exceeds the number at which an efficient competition can be conducted, the CO may limit the number of applicants in the competitive range to the greatest number that will permit an efficient competition among the most highly rated applications. The FAR provisions referenced above are available at https://www.acquisition.gov/browse/index/far. Applicants who do not meet the minimum education and experience requirement will not be contacted. Applicants who meet the minimum education and experience requirement will be further evaluated based on the evaluation criteria mentioned below: a. Prior work experience: 50% b. Language Proficiency: 25% c. Skills and Abilities: 25% At each step of the process, the Contracting Officer may establish a competitive range. Only top-ranked applicants will be given an English test (TOEIC). Applicants with passing TOEIC scores may be further assessed and only top-ranked applicants may be given a written skills technical test, to further assess the candidates qualifications of any of the evaluation criteria listed above as well as written English skills. Testing will be conducted in Amman, Jordan. Only the top-ranked applicants from the written skills test will be invited for an interview. USAID/Jordan Human Resources Office will conduct reference checks on top-ranked applicants. USAID/Jordan may use reference information obtained from other than the sources identified by the applicant and solicit additional information from references provided if the Contracting Officer finds the existing information to be insufficient for evaluating an applicant's performance. USAID will screen for nepotism/conflict of interest in determining successful candidacy. Internal employees must have completed 52 weeks of employment in their current position before being eligible to apply. If an internal employee's Human Resources Officer approved a waiver, the waiver must be included in the application package for eligibility purposes. 7 IV. SUBMITTING AN APPLICATION (APPLYING) To ensure consideration of application for the intended position, applicants must prominently reference the solicitation number in the application submission. Eligible applicants are required to complete and submit the following as a complete application package: a. A current curriculum vitae that includes the National Jordanian ID number. * b. Copy of the Jordanian National ID.* c. Copies of educational certification for eligibility purposes. * d. Filled and signed Universal Application for Employment (DS-0174). *Copies of educational certification must be submitted either in English or Arabic. Failure to submit copies of certification together with a comprehensive curriculum vitae and a copy the Jordanian National ID will mark your package incomplete and will eliminate your application from the recruitment process even if you were qualified. Applications must be received by the closing date and time specified in Section I, item 4, and submitted to the (see application details). Application forms can be accessed from the Embassy website: https://jo.usembassy.gov/embassy/jobs/ V. LIST OF REQUIRED FORMS PRIOR TO AWARD Once the Contracting Officer (CO) or his/her designee informs the successful applicant about being selected for a contract award, the CO or his/her designee will provide the successful applicant with instructions on how to complete and submit the required documents related to mandatory medical and security clearances. Failure of the selected applicant to accurately complete and submit required documents in a timely manner may be grounds for the CO to rescind any conditional pre-contract salary offer letter and begin negotiations with the next most qualified/highest ranked applicant. VI. BENEFITS AND ALLOWANCES As a matter of policy, and as appropriate, a CCNPSC is normally authorized the following benefits and allowances: - Basic Salary within the advertised market value - Transportation & Miscellaneous Allowances - 13th & 14th Month Bonuses - Subscription to the Jordanian Social Security - Subscription to the Mission's Provident Fund Program - Medical Insurance (Employee & Family) - Life Insurance (Employee only) Funds for Social Security, retirement, pension, vacation or other cooperating country programs as required by local law shall be deducted and withheld in accordance with laws and regulations and rulings of the cooperating country or any agreement concerning such withholding entered into between the cooperating government and the United States Government. 8 VII. Taxes Based on Department of State policies and regulations, the U.S. Mission cannot withhold income tax deductions for Jordanian Locally Employed Staff. LE Staff employees are obliged to observe the laws and regulations of the Jordanian Government. Employees are encouraged to file their income tax in a timely manner. VIII. USAID REGULATIONS, POLICIES AND CONTRACT CLAUSES PERTAINING TO PSCs USAID regulations and policies governing CCN and TCN PSC awards are available at these sources: 1. USAID Acquisition Regulation (AIDAR), Appendix J, "Direct USAID Contracts with a Cooperating Country National and with a Third Country National for Personal Services Abroad," including contract clause "General Provisions," available at https://www.usaid.gov/ads/policy/300/aidar 2. Contract Cover Page form AID 309-1 available at https://www.usaid.gov/forms. 3. Acquisition & Assistance Policy Directives/Contract Information Bulletins (AAPDs/CIBs) for Cooperating Country National Personal Services Contracts (CCNPSC) available at http://www.usaid.gov/work-usaid/aapds-cibs. 4. Ethical Conduct. By the acceptance of a USAID personal services contract as an individual, the contractor will be acknowledging receipt of the "Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch," available from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, in accordance with General Provision 2 and 5 CFR 2635. See https://www.oge.gov/web/oge.nsf/OGE%20Regulations. 5. PSC Ombudsman The PSC Ombudsman serves as a resource for any Personal Services Contractor who has entered into a contract with the United States Agency for International Development and is available to provide clarity on their specific contract with the agency. Please visit our page for additional information: https://www.usaid.gov/work-usaid/personal-service-contracts-ombudsman. The PSC Ombudsman may be contacted via: (see application details)




Finance Director

Are you a skilled Finance Director with proven knowledge and successful experience in the principles and practices of general, fund, and governmental accounting?

The Health District is seeking a team-oriented individual with superior communication and critical thinking skills to be our Finance Director. As the Finance Director, you will be leading a dynamic team of accountants and will be responsible for planning, directing, and overseeing all of the operations of the Finance Department, including but not limited to accounting; payroll, budget preparation and oversight; regulation compliance; bonded debt management; cash and investment management; internal control design and compliance; risk management; benefits administration; and financial planning functions. You will be a key member of the leadership team for our fast paced organization, which provides diverse health services to improve the health of our community. Requirements: A Masters degree in finance, accounting, or related field, a minimum of five years of increasingly responsible experience with complex accounting and fiscal management (preferably in a government or non-profit setting), three years of supervisory experience, and a minimum of three years of experience in risk management. For a complete position profile/full job description with all qualifications and requirements, click the apply button. Starting annual salary range: $100,000 - $114,000 Benefits: The Health District covers 100% of the cost for the group health insurance plan, dental, long term disability, and life insurance for the employee. We also provide 5% to a 401(a) plan (with a 3% required employee contribution), an optional 457(b) retirement plan, paid holidays, generous flexible paid time off, and employee wellness and recognition activities. The Health District is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. First review of applications: July 21, 2021 (open until filled)

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ABOUT US For over 70 years, Friends of Youth has been driven by a belief that all youth should have every opportunity to succeed, and partners with youth and families to provide the relationships, resources, and skills they need to attain personal growth and success. With 24 program sites serving 18 cities in the Puget Sound Region, Friends of Youth provides safe places and emotional support for youth facing challenging circumstances including homelessness, foster care, and behavioral health challenges. By joining our team, you will make a difference in the community with youth taking their next steps toward safety, stability, and success. PURPOSE The Bilingual Individual Treatment Aide (ITA) assists the Case Management Team in providing support to youth in Foster Care. The Bilingual Individual Treatment Aide will perform various case management responsibilities, including working with foster parents and children related to life skills and educational needs, in addition to completing administrative and clerical duties for the Foster Care program. RESPONSIBILITIES & DUTIES Support foster parents in delivering life skills education to the youth, including independent living skills, job readiness and training, and consumer skills.

Provide support services for youth in foster care and individually assess youth's life skills educational needs in collaboration with Case Managers.

Assist in various case management responsibilities, including alternative/respite placement, meeting with school officials, identifying community resources, crisis intervention, and arranging medical and counseling appointments.

Meet with Lead Bilingual Case Manager on weekly basis to discuss policy, review program operations and direction, identify solutions for problem areas, and report the status of youth, youth's families, and foster families.

Maintain files for agency and state forms, policies and procedures, and resource literature; maintain and update case records and foster home files. REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS Bilingual in Spanish and English.

Must be 21 years of age or older. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS Bachelor's degree in social work or related field.

Experience working with adolescent youth. LOCATION & SCHEDULE Full-time, non-exempt; schedule is Monday-Friday from 8:30 am to 5 pm. May be required to work evenings as job duties demand. Work is performed in-person/onsite in Renton, WA. COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS $18.18 per hour. Friends of Youth cares for their full-time employees by offering a competitive benefits package, including medical, dental and vision coverage, 24/7 access to telehealth, 403(b) retirement plan and matching, long-term disability insurance, life insurance, 15 vacation days per year with annual accrual interests, sick leave, 10 paid holidays, and two paid floating personal holidays per year. We're invested in our employees' growth, so professional development opportunities are available 24/7 on our online learning platform. Additionally, all employees and their immediate family members can receive free counseling and mental health support through our Employee Assistance Program. CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT Must satisfactorily pass criminal background check. Must satisfactorily pass tuberculosis (TB) test. Must have a reliable vehicle and a valid Washington State driver's license.

Must have a safe driving record and carry auto liability insurance that meets coverage requirements as defined by Friends of Youth. EQUITY STATEMENT Friends of Youth welcomes, honors, and celebrates our clients, colleagues and communities' diverse identities, histories, knowledges, languages, and cultures. Our organizational values shape the way we work individually and collectively, as we prioritize young people's belonging and achievement. We work to challenge, alter, and ultimately dismantle interconnected systems of structural and historic oppression. We collaborate with community stakeholders and partners to develop policy and decision-making frameworks that advance racial equity. EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY Friends of Youth is an equal opportunity employer. Employment decisions are based on merit and business needs, and not on the basis of race, sex/gender, religion/creed, pregnancy, age, physical or mental disability, marital status, national origin, genetic markers, military or veterans status, sexual orientation or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local law. People of Color and Members of the LGBTQ+ community are strongly encouraged to apply.



Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to apply for this position or to perform the essential functions of this position. To request accommodation, please email (see application details) . For a copy of the full job description, please email (see application details) . Apply for This Job




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 Develop and implement lesson plans that fulfill requirements of the district's 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 students 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

Performs all other tasks and duties as assigned

Regular and punctual attendance at the worksite is required for this position 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.

Present subject matter according to guidelines established by Texas Education Agency, Board of Trustee policies, and administrative regulations.

Establish efficient classroom management procedures.

Demonstrated flexibility to cope with the challenges of a rapidly changing world

Demonstrated willingness to remain current with the latest developments in the profession




Top Dog Express Car Wash is rapidly expanding and looking for energetic and responsible new members to join our team. We have several positions available throughout Orlando at our 7 sites, and several more to come as we expand in the next year. If you like working outside, engaging with customers and love being part of a team that likes to have fun on the job, wed love to hear from you. The role comes with flexible hours, training and development, that ability to rise in the organizations, as well as bonus/commission opportunities and great benefits for full-timers. Key responsibilities: Create excellent customer service at all points of customer interaction

Present our products and membership benefits to customers

Politely and safely direct customers into the car wash tunnel

Maintain cleanliness in all areas of the site https://topdogexpresscarwash.com/ About Top Dog Express Car Wash Top Dog Express is a car wash operator in the greater Orlando area, offering express washes, detailing and oil change services. Top Dog express currently operates 7 locations in Orlando, Altamonte Springs, Oviedo, Poinciana and Lake Nona. Proudly serving Central Florida since 1997. Top Dog is part of Clean Streak Ventures, who acquired Top Dog Express in November 2019.

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Detailing all of the pop-up restaurants, pop-up bars, pop-up shops, pop-up galleries, and pop-up gigs in London, complete with maps. Please send any tips to dan.calladine@londonpopups.com or via twitter - I'm @LondonPopups
Magnolia's MuleKick will lease former Griffin Restaurant in El Dorado as second location
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US Labor Shortage May Be Permanent

According to some business owners and Wall Street pundits, US employers cant hire enough people because unemployment benefits are too high. Were paying people not to work, they say.



Certainly, some people who could work are milking the system. Thats sad, but is it the only reason all those jobs are unfilled? Probably not.



Nonetheless, several governors have decided to end the federally funded enhanced benefits. Instead of the planned September expiration, they will now disappear as soon as next week in some states.



If, in fact, benefits are whats keeping people from working, labor shortages should ease in the states that end them. I think theres more to the story, though. This problem was already there before those extra benefits. Its more the result of larger trends that arent stopping. If anything, they are getting worse.



The U.S. Chamber of Commerce just launched a new America Works initiative. In their wordsThe U.S. Chamber is advocating forand rallying the business community to push forfederal and state policy changes that will help train more Americans for in-demand jobs, remove barriers to work, and double the number of visas available for legal immigrants. And the U.S. Chamber Foundation is expanding its most impactful employer-led workforce and job training programs and launching new efforts to connect employers to undiscovered talent.All good ideas, as far as they go. But the Chamber assumes there is a large pool of unused labor, ready to fill all these job openings once some barriers fall. Thats not necessarily so.Consider this chart from the U.S. Chambers own report Source: US Chamber of CommerceComparing Labor Department data on the number of available workers with the number of job openings, there are now 1.4 available workers per job. This, according to the Chamber, is insufficient. But notice a couple of things.First, the ratio was even lower before the pandemicaround 1.0 in 20182019. Worker availability is actually higher now.Second, the ratio has been falling for years. Whats different now is it has reached a point where workers and jobs are roughly in balance. No more worker surplus means employers dont get the luxury of picking from multiple candidates. Thats new to them and, naturally, some find it difficult.Heres the US working age (1564) population since 1977. It has stopped growing and is starting to shrink.Source: St. Louis Federal ReserveOf course people can, and increasingly do, work past traditional retirement age. Few 15-year-olds are working full-time, either. But this gives us a rough idea of how many Americans could potentially work.Heres another look, showing annual percentage change in the 2064 age group.Source: The New York Times This is a big reason employers cant fill jobs. In many cases, the workers they want simply dont exist.Businesses are automating more tasks but that has limits, too. This is from a recent Wired story about a New Jersey restaurants experience with a robotic waiter named Peanut. Robots also lack the kind of intelligence, manual dexterity, and people skills that any good cook, host, or server relies on to keep their diners happy. Can Peanut talk down a customer whos irate because their eggs were fried instead of scrambled? Can it deftly plate a tuna tartare and avocado tower, and do a nice little sauce flourish around the edges? Can a robot hold back a chef whos about to rampage because someone called their creations low-grade dog food? No way.Even employing a simple robot like Peanut requires a sort of negotiation between machine and human coworkers. Basically: Stay in your lane, robot. They don't come in and blend well with us, says Julie Carpenter, a research fellow in the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. We're negotiating how to work around themthey're not smart enough to work around us. They're not cooperative. They're not collaborative. They just follow orders.Because of this interpersonal awkwardness, you can make a strong case that there are some jobs that we just don't want robots to take on.No doubt the technology will improve. Thats happening slowly, though, and businesses need help now.Those years of worker surplus may be backfiring. Managers who could take their pick of the crop simply dont know how to handle being on the other side. That may explain why some of the worst shortages are in industries like restaurants and construction known for uncertain pay, harsh conditions, and low job security.This isnt just a U.S. problem. The Chinese government, facing its own demographic decline, recently said couples could have three children instead of two. Other countries are also trying to encourage more births. None are having much success.Falling birth rates may not be entirely voluntary. Some scientists are warning of a global decline in sperm counts due to chemicals in the environment. Others dispute that idea. But whatever the reason, weve stopped making as many workers as the economy needs.The law of supply and demand says this scarcity makes existing workers more valuable, letting them insist on higher pay and better conditions.In other words, the long-term outlook may point to an economy composed of better-paid workers, with the higher wages possibly coming from lower business profit margins.What would that economy look like? A lot different than the one we have now.

The Great Reset: The Collapse of the Biggest Bubble in History

New York Times best-seller and renowned financial expert John Mauldin predicts an unprecedented financial crisis that could trigger in the next five years. Most investors seem completely unaware of the relentless pressure thats building right now. Learn more here.

By Patrick Watson

The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.






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Please note that the date and venue for those who had their 1st dose of SINOPHARM Vaccine from 09 to 16 June 2021 and the scheduled dates, venues and time (in alphabetical order) for their 2nd dose .



NOTE:

1) As from Monday 28th June 2021, vaccination sessions will be shifted from Lycee Polytechnique Vaccination Centre, Central Flacq to Riche Mare Community Centre, Flacq.

EXCEPTION:

2) Participants who received their 1st dose Sinopharm at Lycee Polytechnique, Central Flacq on the 9th June 2021 and 10th June 2021 will receive their 2nd dose at Central Flacq Multipurpose Hall on Saturday 3rd July and Monday 5th July 2021 respectively.

All persons attending the respective vaccination sites are kindly requested to bring their National Identity Card and COVID-19 Vaccination Card on the date of appointment.

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Les membres du Cabinet ont pris note de la participation du Premier Ministre au SIDS Summit sur la Sante, du protocole pour le retour des touristes dans le pays

1. Cabinet has taken note of the recent participation of the Prime Minister in the official virtual opening of the SIDS Summit for Health. The theme of the first SIDS Leaders Dialogue was The Vision for a Health Resilient Future. The Summit was opened by the Director-General WHO. There was also a video statement by the UN Deputy Secretary General. All the speakers, including the Prime Minister referred to the challenges faced by Member States due to the COVID-19 pandemic and which exacerbated the already significant health issues related to the Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs), Climate Change, Vector Borne and Food Vector Borne Diseases.

In his intervention, the Prime Minister highlighted that the pandemic has laid bare the fragility and frailty of the health systems. There was need to reinforce the health systems of the Small Islands Developing States (SIDS) if they want to walk towards a Healthy Resilient Future. He added that there was a need for continuous training of the health care professionals and to incorporate health-related issues in the education curriculum at an early stage. Massive mobilisation of funds would be required. There was need for assistance of bilateral and multilateral donors. As the world was battling the COVID-19 pandemic, developing countries were facing the brunt of vaccines nationalism and export restrictions in therapeutics. Vaccines should be made a global good that is easily accessible and affordable to all.

The key points and actions agreed upon at the Summit were, among others:

(a) SIDS face acute and existential health and development threats, including climate change and related natural disasters, the burden of NCDs and malnutrition, and the ongoing unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic and its profound social and economic impacts;

(b) SIDS have confronted unprecedented challenges, given the curtailment of trade, travel and tourism, combined with the relatively small size of their economies, their remoteness, and other vulnerabilities;

(c) SIDS are committed to common values of solidarity, collaboration and partnership; and

(d) SIDS have been innovators in the field of health and have been a rising and resonant collective voice.

The President of Kiribati, the Prime Minister of Fiji, the Secretary General of the Organisation of African, Carribean and Pacific States and the Executive Director, Green Climate Fund also intervened during the Summit.

2. Cabinet has taken note of the measures being put in place in regard to incoming travellers during the first phase of the reopening of the borders of Mauritius, i.e., from 15 July to 30 September 2021, and the implications thereof.

The Ministry of Health and Wellness and the Tourism Authority would carry out regular monitoring at the Resort Hotels, as well as at the Airport to ensure that relevant sanitary protocols were being properly adhered to. The room occupancy in Resort Hotels and Quarantine Facilities would be closely monitored by the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Health and Wellness and the situation would be reviewed in due course.

3. Cabinet has taken note that, as announced in Budget Speech 2021/2022, an Amnesty Scheme for Planters, Breeders and Fishers facing difficulties in repaying their long overdue loans at the Development Bank of Mauritius Ltd (DBM), would apply to Planters, Breeders and Fishers who have availed of loan facilities of up to Rs200,000 and which are more than ten years old. The details of these loans are as follows:

(a) for loans up to Rs100,000, DBM would waive full amount of capital, interests and penalties;

(b) for loans above Rs100,000 and up to Rs200,000, DBM would waive all interests and penalties;

(c) for beneficiaries who have availed of loans in the range of Rs100,001 up to Rs200,000 and who have passed away, DBM would write off all their liabilities on a case to case basis; and

(d) for loans granted to individual fishers in Rodrigues, through the Nassola and United Cooperative Credit Unions, DBM would write off the total liabilities.

The Scheme would be effective as from 02 July 2021.

4. Cabinet has taken note that the Minister of Finance, Economic Planning and Development would promulgate the Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (Republic of Estonia) Regulations 2021. The Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement with the Republic of Estonia which was signed on 19 February 2021 would:

(a) provide tax certainty to investors of both countries in their dealings with Mauritius or Estonia, as the case may be;

(b) provide mechanisms to:

(i) combat tax evasion and other malpractices through the collaboration between the two authorities in terms of exchange of information and lending assistance to each other for tax due to the concerned tax authorities; and

(ii) resolve tax disputes that may arise, through a mutual agreement procedure; and

(c) create a conducive environment for greater cross-border investment flows between the two countries.

The promulgation of the said Regulations forms part of the internal procedure to ratify the Agreement.

5. Cabinet has taken note of the performance of the Export-Oriented Enterprises (EOE) Sector over the period January to April 2021. The value of exports of the EOE Sector, which stood at Rs10.2 billion during the period January to April 2020, has surged by 24.4% to attain Rs12.72 billion over the corresponding period in 2021. Exports of textiles and wearing apparel increased by 24.7%, to reach Rs6.2 billion over the period January to April 2021, compared to Rs4.97 billion over the corresponding period in 2020. Exports of textile yarn and fabrics increased by 47.0%, in terms of value, during the first four months of 2021, compared to the corresponding period in 2020. Export performance in the non-textile sub-sectors was as follows:

(a) exports of the fish and fish preparations sub-sector have witnessed an increase of 15.9%;

(b) exports of medical devices observed an increase of 58.4% on account of increasing orders being accomplished; and

(c) exports of watches and clocks witnessed an increase of 91.1% due to increase in orders.

Increase in exports has been recorded for United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain and South Africa. The medical devices sub-sector was proving to be a promising line of activity.

6. Cabinet has taken note that the Attorney General, Minister of Agro-Industry and Food Security would promulgate the Mauritius Cane Industry Authority (Sale Price of Cane Juice or any other intermediate Product for Production of Products other than Sugar by a Miller) Regulations 2021 and the Mauritius Cane Industry Authority (Sale Price of Molasses) Regulations 2021, under the Mauritius Cane Industry Authority Act, with a view to fixing the sale price of cane juice and molasses at Rs15,000 per equivalent tonne of sugar and Rs4,000 per tonne, respectively.

7. Cabinet has agreed to the signing of a Memorandum of Mutual Understanding between the Ministry of Blue Economy, Marine Resources, Fisheries and Shipping and the Federal Agency for Fisheries of the Russian Federation. The purpose of the Memorandum would be to develop cooperation in the field of fisheries and aquaculture on a mutually beneficial and equitable basis in accordance with the national legislation of each party.

The Memorandum would allow mutual cooperation in the development of the following areas:

(a) conservation, management and rational use of living marine resources;

(b) prevention, warning and elimination of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing;

(c) exchange of information and data on fisheries and aquaculture, presenting mutual interest;

(d) promotion and strengthening of contacts between research organisations in the fields of fisheries and aquaculture of both parties;

(e) training and professional development of personnel for the fishing industry, holding bilateral seminars, consultations, sending specialist to exchange experience; and

(f) cooperation in the field of fisheries within the framework of international organisations.

The Memorandum would also provide for the exploration of avenues of cooperation in relation to sustainable fishing in the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Republic of Mauritius.

8. Cabinet has taken note of the Cleaning Campaign at coastal areas and other sites which would comprise the following:

(a) the cleaning activities would kick-start in the northern part of the island on 10 July 2021. The launching of the Cleaning Campaign has been scheduled at Pointe aux Piments public beach in the presence of the Prime Minister. Ten sites along the Balaclava to Grand Baie stretch have been identified for the cleaning activities;

(b) a Cleaning Campaign in the vicinity of hotels all around the island and at specific beaches, mainly of those not serviced by the Authorities, would start on 31 July 2021;

(c) undertaking cleaning activities at islets frequently visited by tourists and locals on 18 September 2021; and

(d) repeating the cleaning activities around the island and at specific tourist attractions by end of October 2021.

A sensitisation of the general public on the Cleaning Campaign would be carried out through, inter alia, radio, social media, video clips, signage and renowned influencers.

9. Cabinet has taken note that the opening of the newly constructed Interchange at Hillcrest across Motorway M1, with traffic lights operational at the junction of Hillcrest Avenue and Tulipes Avenue would be effected by mid-July 2021.

10. Cabinet has taken note that on 06 April 2018, in the case of Dawood Rawat v/s the Republic of Mauritius (UNCITRAL case CPA 2016-23), the Arbitral Tribunal set aside the claim of Mr Rawat, of one billion US dollars, for damages. Mr Rawat had, on 03 July 2018, seized the Tribunal de Premiere Instance Francophone de Bruxelles, (the Brussels Court) to enter an action in annulment of the award. On 30 June 2021, the Brussels Court handed over its judgment dismissing the action for annulment of the award, reiterating that the action of Mr Rawat was misconceived in that 

(a) Mr Rawat could not seek protection of the France-Mauritius Bilateral Investment Treaty as it was established that he was a dual national; and

(b) the concept of ressortissant could not be of help to Mr Rawat as the Brussels Court confirmed the interpretation of the Arbitral Tribunal that the plain ordinary meaning is to be given to the term.

11. Cabinet has taken note of the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic prevailing across the world. Some 183.4 million cases have been reported globally, of which 167.9 million persons have been successfully treated. Around 23 percent of the global population has been vaccinated to date. With regard to Mauritius, as from March 2020 to 02 July 2021, 1,983 cases (including imported cases) of COVID-19 had been registered. There were 319 active cases of COVID-19 in Mauritius, out of which 289 were local cases and 30 imported cases. Contact tracing exercises and random testing are being carried out in accordance with the established protocol.

Cabinet has also taken note of progress in the implementation of the national COVID-19 vaccination programme. Some 60,000 doses of Sputnik V (Component I) vaccine have been received from Russia on 30 June 2021.

Cabinet has further taken note that following the detection of several COVID-19 positive cases in the region of Morcellement Foondun, Terre Rouge, the area has been declared as a Red Zone as from 01 July 2021 up to 22 July 2021.

12. Cabinet has agreed to the bank fishing vessels being allowed to carry gasoline for use by dories for a final period of one year with effect from 05 July 2021. In the Budget 2021-2022, incentives have been provided for companies willing to acquire semi-industrial vessels. Companies could avail of the incentives and acquire new vessels that would not require dories. Bank fishing vessels would be allowed to carry gasoline for a further and final period of one year with the following conditions:

(a) the company should take every additional precaution for the prevention of danger resulting from the use of gasoline;

(b) ship owners should take an insurance policy to cover the particular risk; and

(c) the company should assume full liability for any accident that may occur on account of the use of gasoline.

13. Cabinet has agreed to the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage submitting the First National Report (2017-2020) on the implementation of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its two (1954 and 1999) protocols. As signatory to the Convention, Mauritius as State Party has the obligation to take appropriate measures to implement the Convention by way of peacetime safeguarding measures, demonstrate respect for cultural property, monumental centres and other immovable cultural property, marking of certain important buildings and monuments with a distinctive emblem of the Convention, establishment of special units within the military forces for the protection of cultural property and wide promotion of the Convention within the general public and target groups.

Periodic reporting is an important mechanism allowing the States Parties to the 1954 Hague Convention and its two (1954 and 1999) Protocols to disseminate information on measures taken, prepared or contemplated by their respective authorities in the fulfillment of the above-mentioned treaties.

14. Cabinet has taken note of the activities that the Ministry of Health and Wellness would organise to mark the World Population Day 2021, celebrated on 11 July. The global theme for this years World Population Day is  Rights and Choices are the answer: Whether baby boom or bust, the solution lies in prioritizing the reproductive health and rights of all people .

The following activities would be organised:

(a) a one-day refresher training on 12 July 2021 for 35 Midwives to build capacity to improve antenatal and postnatal care;

(b) radio and TV programmes to sensitise the community on sexual and reproductive health services including vaccination;

(c) sensitisation through electronic display and email on the theme of the World Population Day 2021; and

(d) collaboration with the Mauritius Family Planning and Welfare Association, and Action Familiale in their sensitisation programmes.

15. Cabinet has taken note that Ambassador Hans Hoogeveen from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, was elected as Independent Chairperson of the Council of the Food and Agriculture Organisation for the term 2021-2023. Some 16 members of the Council were also elected.

16. Cabinet has taken note of the outcome of the election of 40 members of the Executive Council of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO held during the 31st Session of the Assembly of States Parties.

17. Cabinet has taken note of the outcome of the SADC Council of Ministers held recently in a hybrid mode and which was attended by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Regional Integration and International Trade. The main issues discussed were, inter alia, as follows:

(a) an update on COVID-19 pandemic;

(b) the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (2020-2030) Implementation Plan;

(c) operationalisation of SADC Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency;

(d) recruitment of the Executive Secretary and the Deputy Executive Secretary for Regional Integration;

(e) Concept Note on SADC Programme on Culture;

(f) review of Terms of Reference of the Committee of SADC Ambassadors and High Commissioners Accredited to SADC; and

(g) information and communication technology matters.

18. Cabinet has taken note that the Board of the Trust Fund for Specialised Medical Care has renewed the contract of Dr Rajendra Kumar Mungur as Executive Director, for the period of 01 July 2021 to 30 June 2022.

19. Cabinet has taken note of the constitution of the Allied Health Professionals Council for the period July 2021 to June 2024.

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The states vaccination data, which excludes shots given to residents outside the state or by federal entities inside the state, show that the number of jabs continues to fall, averaging 17,169 per day as of June 26. Vaccinators have several days in which to report their numbers to the state. The average had topped 115,000 per day in mid-April.
Like a fish market, were going to put all of the seafood in a refrigerated display for show, Zhang said. There will be fresh seafood right in front of the customer that they can pick and we will cook it fresh for them. They can pick fresh fish, crab, lobster, whatever they want on-the-spot, and well make it fresh.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) released a study last year that examined THC concentrations of weed products sold in legal dispensaries. The report was requested by the Colorado General Assembly. Longitudinal reports like this that are focused on markets in Colorado and Washington provide great insight into the state of legal weed and its effects on consumers, as the two states were the first to legalize recreational cannabis.
It gave me the time to not have to perform any social norms that I was used to, and I could just sit with myself and think about who I was, Spece said. And finally let all those feelings catch up to me of, Im not just this gender that I was assigned at birth. Im all these complex things, and its OK to be those things, and its OK to be outward about those things.
The Main and Railroad intersection is one of the busiest in Palmyra and is equipped with traffic cameras; however, Skishalley said police told her none were at the right position to capture the crash. The driver was a white man who appeared to be in his 60s, according to police. Officers interviewed three witnesses at the scene but none got the mans license plate number. Winters said each of the witnesses told police they watched Lane leave the scene after the driver asked the young child if he was OK. The witnesses also said Lane entered the crosswalk when he was wasnt supposed to, Winters said, even though Lane said the driver with the green light waved him across. Its unclear if the witnesses would have been close enough to see that exchange.
One of the things Id like everybody to know is that were in this together with you guys, Roca said in the video filmed at J. Birney Crum Stadium at 2027 Linden St., where a fireworks show is scheduled for 5-10 p.m. Sunday. Its key and vital for people to come out and let us know exactly whats happening.
The trooper, whom Houck declined to identify, was placed on modified duty after the shooting and will be able to return to full duty. Houck said he decided not to name the trooper because the shooting was justified, and for Shadders widow out of respect for her privacy. Houck also said he would not release the 911 and video recordings out of privacy.
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During the previous few weeks, a hungry moth larva has been devouring tree leaves throughout southern Ontario and Quebec, as well as from Michigan to Vermont.

The Lymantria dispar also known as gypsy moth or in some sources, it is also referred to as the "LDD moth." They're all members of the same species that has caused huge outbreaks that have lasted for years since the 1980s.

The caterpillar has destroyed over 17,000 square kilometers of Canadian trees. Both Canada and the United States have spent billions of dollars to combat the virus. The outbreak can be linked back to a failed commercial endeavor, in this example, an attempt to establish a North American silk industry more than a century ago.

Although it is now restricted to a few provinces and states in Canada and the United States, the invasive caterpillar may spread further as a result of global warming.

The Invasive Caterpillar





L. dispar is a caterpillar that may eat a square metre of leaves each day. Since the 1980s, three L. dispar outbreaks have occurred in Ontario, impacting over 350,000 hectares of forest. The largest, which occurred in the 1990s, impacted about 350,00 hectares and lasted until 2020. To eradicate the pests some towns spray trees with a biological pesticide called BtK, which particularly targets caterpillars.

Another method is to tie a ring of burlap around the tree's trunk to capture the caterpillar as it moves up and down. L. dispar is an invasive species that may trigger insect pandemics, resulting in the death of vast numbers of caterpillars.

Also read: Monarch Caterpillars Fight Each Other for Scarce Milkweed

A Failed Business Endeavor that Resulted to Large Outbreak





A French artist, astronomer and entomologist Etienne Leopold Trouvelot began breeding native North American moths on trees near his home in order to establish a silkworm colony. He failed because his caterpillars developed viral infections when housed in big numbers.

By 1879, Medford locals were complaining about enormous numbers of strange caterpillars infesting their trees, One neighbor wrote: "The caterpillars were over everything in our yard and stripped all our fruit trees, taking the apple trees first and then the pears. There was a beautiful maple on the street in front of the next house, and all its leaves were eaten by the caterpillars. They got from the ground upon the house and blackened the front of it. ... The caterpillars would get into the house in spite of every precaution, and we would even find them upon the clothing hanging in the closets."

Since Trouvelot's L. dispar got away from him, the early attempts to manage L. dispar were labor demanding, with workers dispatched into the trees to remove the insects. However, this did not stop the growth of the infestation, and L. parasites continued to move westward over the following few years, finally making their way into southern Quebec and Ontario in the 1960s.

When will the Invasive Caterpillar Outbreak End?

L. dispar outbreaks often last three to five years and resolve on their own. As carbon dioxide levels rise and temperatures rise, it may be spread throughout much of the country by 2050. By not transporting firewood from one location to another, people can help prevent the introduction and spread of new species.

Also read: As Western Drought Worsens, Massive Swarm of Grasshopper Outbreak is Threatening Crops
911 calls have been relentless over the past few days in Portland, Oregon as a historic heat wave takes its toll in the Pacific Northwest and kills hundreds of people.

The State Medical Examiner's office had reported at least 63 deaths in the state of Oregon since Friday. 45 of the deaths were from Multnomah County ranging from 44 to 97 years old with underlying health conditions. Authorities are in alert as weather patterns suggests that more frequent and intense heat waves are coming.

"I know many county residents were looking out for each other and am deeply saddened by this initial death toll. As our summers continue to get warmer, I suspect we will face this kind of event again," said Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Jennifer Vines.

Heat Deaths as Health Crisis

In the state of Washington, dozens of sudden deaths were suspected to have caused by the extreme heat. Without air-conditioning in most households in the area including Seattle, with lowest rate of air-conditioned homes. People mostly in old age with existing health problems had suffered from heat stroke and eventually died in the area.

The King County medical examiner's office reported at least 13 deaths in Seattle and three men in the neighboring Snohomish County.

Meanwhile, the Spokane Fire Department found two dead people in an apartment located in western Washington with the cause mainly linked to heat-related stress.

With the current loaded capacity of hospitals due to COVID-19, the wave of patients dying from heat wave and drought season has overwhelmed health centers and medical institutions. Dr. Steve Mitchell, medical director of the emergency department at Harborview Medical Center described the event similar to the initial days of the coronavirus outbreak.

"We got to the point where facilities were struggling with basic equipment, like ventilators," he added.

Also read: Wildfire Season 2021: California in State of Fire as it Burns More Frequently Than Ever

Extreme Heat Breaks the Record

"We have never seen anything like this," said Vince Hlavaty, Bremerton's medical officer, while describing the event as truly 'unprecedented'.

In the far north of British Columbia, around 486 deaths were recorded from Friday to Wednesday afternoon, and 98 of those deaths were from Vancouver, with two-thirds of the victims at the age of 70 or older. Vancouver Police said that while investigations are ongoing, the heat was definitely played a record-breaking role, setting the record earlier this week.

According to data from World Meteorological Organization, a record of 104 degrees was felt in Seattle as of Sunday and broke the record on Monday with 107 degrees. Meanwhile, Portland set the record twice with 108 on Saturday and 112 on Sunday.

The highest temperature ever recorded was set by Lytton, British Columbia being 121 degrees on Monday.

According to Dr. Caroline King-Widdall, the more the temperature rises, the higher the risks heat exhaustion. When this happens, the human body eventually becomes unable to regulate its own temperature, which can lead to heatstroke.

"This can happen when you're working out rigorously or when you're doing yard work outside on a hot day," she added.

Also read: The Earth's Heat Has Doubled over the Past 14 Years, NASA Warned
Anyone who has gone on a safari knows that you never know what you'll see since wild creatures are entirely unpredictable. You could see a lion murder its victim, or you might be pursued by an elephant, or you might be entertained by the antics of some adorable animals. However, what Toelie Bernard and her sister, Des Begeman, captured on their safari, have never been seen before.

Visiting the Safari

The two were part of a group exploring the Kruger National Park in South Africa when they came upon three massive lions. Toelie tried to video the creatures, but she pressed too many buttons on her phone in her enthusiasm, which caused it to freeze.

Des, who was sitting next to her in the car, was a bit more elegant and managed to snap some images of the lion, but when she examined the photos, she was surprised to discover that the lion had a leopard's face.

Optical Illusion

Of course, she didn't merely happen across a new kind of large cat. Instead, the optical illusion of a lion-leopard monster was created when the reflection of her leopard print blouse in the car window precisely lined up with the lion's face as she shot her picture.

Toelie posted the photo on Facebook, explaining that as they continued driving, they came across two mother lions and their four cubs all eating on a new kill that the males they had met had previously devoured. A hyena stood close, as did a jackal and some vultures in a neighboring tree, waiting for leftovers.

Related Article: Gym Owner Does Pull-Ups on an Elephant's Tusks Gets Viral



African Lion

The African Lion is presently categorized as Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List assessment. About 23,000-39,000 adult animals are expected to exist in the wild, and three-quarters of populations in decline.

Although not in immediate danger of extinction, the African Lion's range and population will significantly shrink. It is extremely likely to become Endangered if conservation efforts do not succeed in reversing present trends shortly.

Continuous evaluation of changes in the condition and distribution of lion populations across Africa is required for effective conservation planning.

The Endangered Wildlife Trust assists in establishing a lion database with funding from the Lion Recovery Fund and under the auspices of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group.

This database will be updated regularly with new information on the abundance and distribution of lion populations, enabling collaboration among stakeholders and guiding conservation planning in the future.

Safaris

The best places to observe African lions are on safaris in Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

The Serengeti-Mara habitat has the highest lion population density. If lion populations are determined by food and space, a year-round rolling migration of over a million wildebeest is rather appealing.

When you add tens of thousands of zebra and gazelles to the wildebeest, the backdrop for Africa's big migration is unrivaled in terms of abundance. The Serengeti plains are a great place to see African lions because of the wide savannah terrain. Tanzania and Kenya are both parts of the big wildebeest migration.

Also Read: Eight-Armed Brittle Star with Thousands of Thorny Teeth Amazes Marine Biologists

For more news about the animal world, don't forget to follow Nature World News
A "gigantic" asteroid the size of the Empire State Building sped "towards Earth" in early January 2020.

At least, that's how Sputnik, the Russian government-funded news outlet, described it. The fact was that asteroid 2019 UO will pass us safely on January 10 at a distance of 2,808,194 miles, as reported in the article following the frightening title (4,519,351 kilometers). That's about 12 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Every night, people hardly imagine the Moon racing toward their house, let alone something 12 times farther away.

However, this is the kind of phrase you'll see a lot in places that adore frightening asteroid stories. The deceptive headlines and stories make use of the terms scientists use to describe space objects and the meanings some of those terms have in ordinary English.

Near Earth Objects

The words "near-earth object" (NEO) and "potentially hazardous asteroid" (PHA), for example, are astronomical terminology that is used to describe asteroids that have extremely specific meanings. For example, if an asteroid approaches Earth at a distance of 4.6 million miles and has a particular brightness, it is classified as a PHA. This is essentially simply astronomers' method of compiling a massive list of things to keep an eye on. There is no additional assessment of each asteroid to establish how "possibly dangerous" it is before it is labeled as such.

NEOs are a subset of a larger group. So, for example, everything between that point and the sun might potentially be deemed a NEO if you were to leave Earth and go in the direction of Mars' orbit around the sun, then halt when you're approximately 85 percent of the way there.

Related Article: Giant "Mega-Comet", First Observed in 2014, Will Finally Be Passing by the Solar System



Clarification

It may seem odd to non-scientists to refer to an asteroid as "close" when it is farther away from us than any person has ever traveled. However, when dealing with the mind-boggling vastness of the cosmos, as astronomers do, it makes perfect sense. The same may be said for those PHAs. Although most PHAs are not truly potential threats in our lifetimes, it makes it reasonable to term them such in light of the vastness of space.

So the next time you read a headline warning about a "behemoth space asteroid threatening Earth," you may need to find other sources to figure out how concerned you should be.

Unnecessary Alarms

Many media sites began raising the alarm in the second part of 2019 about the arrival of asteroid 2006 SF6, which made a near-Earth encounter on November 21. Some of the stories made it sound like a dangerous rock was coming our way, so many checked the European Space Agency's Risk Page about a week before it was to fly by.

"All objects for which a non-zero impact probability has been detected," according to the ESA.

Nothing showed up when they searched the page for 2006 SF6 and its catalog number, 481394, to acquire the complete risk list. This possible planet-killer does not feature on the list of the 991 most dangerous space objects.

Then they examined the Center for Near-Earth Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's public database of near encounters. A quick search turned up 2006 SF6. With an estimated diameter of 919 feet to 2,690 feet, it is certainly a giant (280 meters and 820 meters).

On impact, this skyscraper-sized space rock may do significant damage. Its close-approach distance, on the other hand, was stated as 11.23 lunar distances. So it's exactly as it sounds: more than 11 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, or roughly 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers). Sorry, but this colossus poses no threat to the planet.

Should we be Worried?

The argument isn't that you shouldn't be concerned about asteroids. On the contrary, the threat of an object from space colliding with Earth is genuine, as countless dinosaur remains and the rest of the geologic record show. But it's the goods that aren't yet in our catalogs that pose the greatest threat.

The most major impact of the previous century occurred in 2013, when a meteor collided with the atmosphere above Russia, causing a shock wave that broke hundreds of windows in Chelyabinsk. Before it burst in the sky, the space rock had never been seen before.

Astronomers' technology and procedures have advanced to the point that new NEOs are found daily. This includes some things that are extremely close to Earth. However, they are usually so small that they would most likely burn up in the atmosphere if they hit us, as one did in 2018.

Also Read: Potential Faster-Than-Light-Space Travel Facts: Alcubierre's Warp, the Key To Interstellar Travels?

For more Space news, don't forget to follow Nature World News!
Recently, a family in South Africa found a huge black mamba making its way into their home through the front door of their house, and this gave them the shock of their life. The reptile soon got into their bedroom and made it difficult for local snake catchers, but it was eventually caught.

The Incident

Nick Evans, a Snake catcher took to Facebook Monday to explain the incident from a building in Reservoir Hills, Durban. The family was in the kitchen when they noticed a disorderly outburst by the front door ahead of them, Evans described this in his post, together with footage of the rescue.

He added, saying they looked up and beheld this huge Black Mamba making its way to their home! "I think at this point many people would have fainted."

Evans wrote that the snake slithered in their direction, maybe not knowing they were there. The snake catcher said he thinks something outside had scared the animal in. When it got nearer, the gentleman carried a chair to make it go away. When it noticed this, the mamba slightly raised its head up, in fear, and curved left, going down the passageway.

The snake then entered the bedroom. The owner was fast enough to shut the door, confining the animal in the room, the snake catcher described in the post.

Also Read: Watch: Deadly Black Mambas Rapidly Coil Each Other in A Duel Captured in Rare Video

The Footage

The owner of the house then called the attention of Evans, who immediately went to the scene to rescue the snake.

The footage shows Evans opening the door of the bedroom to discover the snake crawling on the floor. Upon noticing some activity, this reptile is seen crawling underneath the bed. However, Evans tries to get hold of it with the use of his snake tongs. He then holds the reptile with his bare hands and he let the house owner know the reptile "is just frightened."

Evans further wrote in his post: "As you can see, when I opened the bedroom, I was taken aback by the moving sight before of me! The family was shaken up, and so was the snake. He didn't like the experience too!".

Opinions About the Black Mamba

The footage has since gone viral with more than 23,000 views in two days. Some people went to the comments section to call the snake "huge" and "beautiful."

One of the commenters wrote: "What a beauty. The snake was so anxious."

Another Facebook user wrote that the mamba is "Absolutely beautiful," but would not be saying this if the animal came to his house.

Black mambas are deadly venomous snakes, usually seen in the rocky hills of eastern and southern Africa. They can develop up to 14 feet in length. These reptiles are one of the world's fastest snakes.

Related Article: Black Mamba: 8 Fascinating Facts About the World's Deadliest Snake

For more news, updates about black mambas and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!
Asteroid strike was responsible for dinosaurs' extinction 66 million years ago. But how were their lives before this asteroid stuck? Whether they were flourishing or already shaking on the brink has been a subject of debate for paleontologists for a long time.

New Study

A new study gives a suggestion that dinosaurs were reducing for as many as 10 million years prior to the city-sized asteroid that struck off the coast of what is presently Mexico dealt the last death effect and that this decline acts as a hindrance to their ability to heal from the aftermath of the asteroid.

The strike brought about the 125-mile-wide Chicxulub crater, releasing climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, eventually wiping out three quarters of life in the world.

The scientists took a look at a sum of 1,600 dinosaur fossils, these fossils represent 247 dinosaur species to assess species diversity and rates of extinction for six dinosaur families.

Fabien Condamine, study lead author and also a researcher from the Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier in France said in a news release that they examined the six most profuse dinosaur families through the entire Cretaceous period - a period from 150 to 66 million years ago, and discovered that all of them were evolving and expanding and obviously being fortunate.

Then, suddenly, they show a decline about 76 million years ago. The rates of their extinction increased and in some cases, there was also a decline in the rate of new species' origin.

Also Read: Scientists Identified the Cause of the Biggest Mass Extinction on Earth

Decline of Non-avian Dinosaurs

The authors of the study that was released Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications revealed that what may have added to the decrease of non-avian dinosaurs was the global climate cooling during the Late Cretaceous period which is about 100 to 66 million years ago. Avian or bird-like dinosaurs pulled through the asteroid strike and developed into the birds presently seen.

They also revealed that particularly fortunate families of dinosaurs such as hadrosaurs may have defeated other herbivores, bringing about a decrease in these dinosaurs' diversity.

The researchers made use of computer modeling techniques that were responsible for unsureness including partially fossil records to emerge on the most likely outcome.

Potential Causes of this Decline

Another co-author of the study and also a professor from the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, Mike Benton, said different kinds of potential causes of dinosaur decline was explored in the analyses.

Then it became obvious that there were two main factors, firstly that general climates were becoming cooler, making life difficult for the dinosaurs that possibly depended on warm temperatures. Secondly, the loss of herbivores led to the instability of the ecosystems and also made the ecosystems susceptible to extinction cascade.

Benton said in a news release that they also discovered that the dinosaur species that have lived for a longer time were more prone to extinction, probably reflecting that they could not adapt to Earth's new conditions.

Related Article: New Discovery: The Largest Dinosaur, 'The Spinosaurus' Was Not Well-Adapted To Aquatic Life

For more news, updates about dinosaurs and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!
On Thursday the United Nations acknowledged a new record high temperature for the Antarctic continent, verifying a reading of 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3 degrees) made in the year 2020.

Maximum Temperature Record

The UN's World Meteorological Organization said on the 6th of February 2020, the record heat was attained at Argentina's Esperanza research station on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Petteri Taalas, WMO secretary-general said confirmation of this highest temperature record is crucial. This is because it serves as an assistant to build up a picture of the weather and climate in one of the final frontiers on Earth. He also said the Antarctic Peninsula is also a fastest-warming region of the planet - close to 3 C over the last 50 years.

Adding that this new temperature record is therefore constant with the climate change that is been observed.

The World Meteorological Organization did not recognize an even higher temperature reading of 69.4 F (20.75 C), reported on the 9th of February 2020 at a Brazilian automated permafrost monitoring station on the neighboring Seymour Island, off the peninsula which extends north in the direction South America.

Also Read: Strange Creatures Discovered While Drilling Through Antarctic Ice - Scientists

Previous Confirmed Record For the Antarctic Continent

The former confirmed record for the Antarctic continent - the mainland and its nearby islands - was about 63.5 F (17.5 C) recorded on March 24 last year at Esperanza. The record for the larger Antarctic region - every place south of 60 degrees latitude - is 67.6 F (19.8 C), collected on the 30th of January 1982 on Signy Island.

While going through the two reported new temperature records, a WMO committee evaluated the situation of the weather on the peninsula during that time. It discovered that a large high-pressure system made downslope winds generating remarkable local surface warming.

The WMO said previous examinations have disclosed that kind of conditions are helpful for producing record temperatures. Scientists observed the instrumental arrangements and the data, and no concerns were found at Esperanza.

Earth's Lowest Temperature Ever Recorded

In the Brazilian station on Seymour Island, an improvised radiation shield there prompted a demonstrable thermal bias mistake for the air temperature sensor of the permafrost monitor, making its reading unqualified to be signed off as a formal WMO weather observation.

The new record at Esperanza will be included in the World Meteorological Organization's archive of weather and climate extremes. The archive comprises the heaviest hailstone, the highest and lowest temperatures in the world, heaviest rainfall, longest dry period, longest lightning flash, greatest gust of wind, and deaths that are weather-related.

Earth's lowest temperature ever recorded was minus 128.6 F (minus 89.2 C) recorded on the 21st of July 1983 at Vostok station in Antarctica. Antarctica's average annual temperature ranges from about minus 10 C (14 F) on the coast to minus 60 C (minus 76 F) at the highest parts of the interior.

Related Article: Scientists Are Baffled After Massive Antarctic Lake Has Suddenly Vanished Without Trace

For more news, updates about Antarctic continent and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!
GOVERNMENT says it will unleash the army to ensure strict enforcement of COVID-19 regulations as infections continue to rise.

Zimbabwe is in the grip of the third wave, driven by the Delta and Beta variants and has recorded new cases daily of 1 249; 1 331 and 1 357 on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.

The number of deaths over the same days were 12, 28 and 19 in that order. Health experts warned that compliance with the lockdown measures was poor and that about half of the countrys 15 million population was at risk.

Announcing new COVID-19 measures at a Press conference yesterday, Home Affairs minister Kazembe Kazembe said the police was enforcing the lockdown measures, but government could release the army to enforce compliance.

He was flanked by Defence minister Oppah Muchinguri and State Security minister Owen Ncube.The ministers had just come from a Joint Operations Command meeting at Chaminuka House, the Central Intelligence Organisation headquarters.

In accordance with the emergency status we may find ourselves in, the government can call upon any security institution to implement the measures should there be that necessity, he said.

The law allows the government when the requirement to call any security institutions if the need arises but as for now, the police will be enforcing. But if the need arises, the government will call any security institution to assist in enforcement.

Government deployed soldiers to enforce the first lockdown in April last year, which led to an outcry over human rights abuses during the period.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa, since he went into power through a military coup in November 2017, has deployed the soldiers several times, including to quell protests over the delay in releasing the results of the presidential elections on August 1, 2018 and brutally clamp down on fuel price hike protests in January 2019.

Six civilians were killed in the first instance, while 23 people were killed in the 2019 protests clampdown by the soldiers, with thousands left nursing bullet wounds, while women were raped and tortured.

Under the new measures, bars will be banned from opening, Kazembe said. In response to the spike in COVID-19 cases and fatalities across the country amid the third wave as well as the spread of the deadly variants such as the Delta variant, the security forces will ensure strict adherence to the level four COVID-19 lockdown in line with World Health Organisation protocols, he said.

All citizens are mandated to wear masks properly and strictly practise social distancing. Failure to wear face masks is a punishable offence, given the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Security officers will enforce strict compliance of the COVID-19 regulations without fear or favour.

Added Kazembe: In an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19, security forces will ensure that pirate taxis known as mushikashika are decisively dealt with as part of the COVID-19 measures. Those found violating the measures will be dealt with decisively.

In June, police arrested 51 018 people for failing to wear masks properly. Health experts have expressed concern over non-compliance of the lockdown measures, which they said was likely to trigger a surge of new infections.

Health experts have warned that half the population could contract the virus in the next two weeks if strict enforcement measures are not implemented. Newsday
Police have launched a men hunt for five suspects linked to a vehicle robbery along Samora Machel Avenue on Monday night.

According to a police report, the five intercepted Vimbai Mandiringa who was driving her Toyota Quantum when she made a traffic light stop at the intersection of Leopold Takawira and Samora Machel around 8:30 pm.

It is alleged that one of the suspects used a back window to gain entry into the vehicle before directing Mandiringa to a Total garage along Samora where his other accomplices were picked.

The suspects, holding Mandiringa hostage, ordered her to drive towards Kuwadzana and upon arrival at Kuwadzana Extension turnoff, the complainant was asked to stop the vehicle whilst one of the accused person disembarked before his accomplice grabbed Mandiringa by the neck.

Mandiringa was then pulled to the back of the vehicle with the one of the suspects taking the wheel, she was then forced to lie down between the seats with the five assaulting her all over her body.

Mandiringa lost visual of where the suspects took her but after a long drive she was forced out of her vehicle near a bushy area where her hands and legs were tied using her head cloth and shoe laces.

The suspects went on to take her black handbag, an Itel P36 pro cellphone and a brown satchel which had the complainants blue pair of work suit.

She was later dumped at site near Tiger Quarries, in Reinham farm where the robbers covered her head with a piece of cloth (Zambia).

After a while, Mandiringa managed to untie herself and sought help at a nearby house where she received help to contact her husband who came to her rescue leading to filing a police report at around 0145hrs.

The total value of stolen property is US$ 30 165-00. Investigations are in progress. The Zimbabwe Republic Police has warned members of the public against night robberies.

The ZRP would like to urge motorists to always lock doors and close all windows while driving.

It is disturbing to note that robbery cases are becoming a menace hence Police will continue to work flat out to flash out these criminals.

In the same manner we implore members of the public to give us information on the whereabouts of the criminals or any information that may assist us in our investigations, reads a police warning. H Metro
A US$150 million solar power plant deal is facing collapse after prolonged bureaucratic delays frustrated the investor, who top government officials say is now considering pulling out and suing for losses, it has emerged.

Top government officials told the Zimbabwe Independent this week that the deal was under threat due to dithering by the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (Zera) to grant a licence to the investor, Boustead Solar (Boustead).

This has put under sharp scrutiny President Emmerson Mnangagwas Zimbabwe Is Open for Business mantra.

The multi-million-dollar project, on the verge of suffering a stillbirth, is meant to generate 180 megawatts (MW) of power. This comes at a time Zimbabwe is battling a fresh power crisis with prolonged load-shedding.

It also comes as the globe is moving to renewable sources of energy, of which solar is central, and shedding off polluting fossil energy sources and hydropower plants which are now unsustainable due to climate change-induced warmer conditions.

Although Zimbabwe entered a new dispensation following the military coup that ousted long-time ruler Robert Mugabe in 2017, the country is still struggling to unlock fresh investment capital.

With Mugabes exit, after a near-four-decade rule marked by stagnating Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and a deteriorating economic environment, Mnangagwa commenced his tenure pledging to roll out business friendly policies.

His government also promised to improve Zimbabwes standing on the Ease of Doing Business Index.

Setting up a reliable energy infrastructure, coupled with uprooting hurdles associated with registering new businesses into the sector, have been identified as essential building blocks towards reviving the economy.

In the latest investment project, Zera has taken more than 18 months to process a licence for Boustead Solar, after the entity submitted its application last year in January.

Subsequently, sources told the Independent this week the investor is now on the verge of withdrawing the application while contemplating instituting legal action to recover US$200 000 paid in application fees.

Zera has issued 120 licences for various projects which are yet to be implemented. The 120 licensed projects are generating in total less than 30MW.

It is ridiculous that Boustead Solar has not been issued a licence by Zera for a US$150 million investment as they are still considering its application despite issuing 120 licences, which are yet to yield 30 MW in Zimbabwe. Each time the investor makes inquiries, he is told the application is still being processed, an official source said this week.

Boustead Solar has instructed its lawyers to withdraw their application and demand a refund of US$200 000 paid in application costs, the source said.

Under terms of the project, set to be rolled out in phases, an initial 32MW was to be installed in Bulawayo at a cost of over US$830 000 per MW.

Boustead Solar representatives could not be reached for comment at the time of going to print.

Zera chief executive Eddington Mazambani told the Zimbabwe Independent this week that Bousteads application was under consideration.

The application is going through an assessment and a due diligence process. An update pertaining to this project was duly communicated to the project owners, Mazambani said.

He said if all required conditions are satisfied, a licence is normally issued within six months.

Mazambani said: According to the Electricity Act (Chap 13:19), a power generation licence may be issued within six months subject to the applicant having submitted all the licencing requirements.

However, Zera pledges, through its Stakeholder Service Charter, to issue the power generation licence within 90 days if all the relevant documents are submitted on time. In respect of the application, the project promoter was responded to accordingly.

A cursory look at Zimbabwes investment climate in 2017 when Mnangagwa took over shows that the country has struggled to attract FDI, amid calls by multilateral lenders and the West for government to roll out sweeping economic reforms seen as key towards setting the countrys battered economy on a firm recovery and growth trajectory.

As part of efforts to lure investment, the government has also established the Zimbabwe Investment and Development Authority (Zida), whose other core function involves addressing bottlenecks impeding investment.

Mnangagwa has also been studying the Rwandan economic model, which has earned global acclaim, in a bid to attract foreign investors. Rwanda is one of the continents fastest growing economies whose friendly investor policies have been applauded globally.

FDI in 2017 stood at US$250 million, sharply rising to US$740 million in 2018 before plunging to US$280 million in 2019.

Boustead Solar is a subsidiary of Boustead Beef, the company which entered an agreement with the government to inject US$600 million towards reviving defunct Cold Storage Company (CSC) in 2018.

With the world moving towards embracing environmentally friendly energy sources, implementing the solar project would be integral for the beef processing concern to penetrate lucrative markets which are particular about carbon emissions.

Our problem is to sell the beef in lucrative markets. We have to be sustainable and carbon neutral. Controlling carbon emissions is all part of the process of raising investment which we have to go through, an industry expert said.

We have been worried about this issue for the past 22 weeks when Boustead paid Zera. Zesa has already done the grid impact assessment. The same applies for processing the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). Now Zera is delaying everything, the source added.

Sources said Zera was now asking for a water extraction permit and soil samples from Boustead, requirements which do not apply to setting up a solar power plant.

This is not the first time huge investment deal has been scuppered by bureaucratic red tape. In 2015 Aliko Dangote, Africas wealthiest man, was dissuaded from investing in Zimbabwe after a former minister solicited for a US$5 million bribe.

Dangote was on a visit to scout for business opportunities in Zimbabwe in 2015 during which trip he expressed commitment to set up a cement manufacturing plant in the country.

Rampant corruption, policy inconsistencies and bureaucratic red tape, among other factors have been identified as scuttling capital in Zimbabwe.

Though the government introduced the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange (VFX) which exclusively trades in foreign currency, investors have shied away from the bourse. Only two counters namely Seed Co and Portland Cement are trading on the bourse.

Market watchers have opined that implementing far reaching economic and political reforms would inject life into Zimbabwes economy.

The much-hyped US$400 million National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) revival deal by the Diaspora Infrastructure Development Group (DIDG) was terminated after a lengthy and convoluted process. The consortium has since instructed lawyers to slap NRZ with a US$215 million lawsuit following termination of the deal to recoup costs and related losses.

DIDG, mostly constituted by Zimbabwean entrepreneurs, are now setting up a US$350 million titanium dioxide plant in neighbouring South Africa through their Nyanza Light Metals investment vehicle. Once complete, the plant will be the first of its kind in Africa.In 2015, the government also terminated the US$750 million Ziscosteel revival deal by Indian conglom

erate Essar Holdings. Five years on, the government is yet to identify a suitable investment partner to inject fresh investment capital into the moribund state enterprise. Zimbabwe Independent
We have been working tirelessly to deliver the results that the survivors of sexual abuse in Boy Scouts are entitled to, and we will continue to do so. This is an important step but the work continues, said Adam Slater, a lawyer on the Coalition of Abused Scouts for Justice, which is involved in the litigation.
Mr. Markuss comments to the media  most egregiously, the Op-Ed  were clearly in violation of Local Rule 23.1. Not only did his statements directly comment on the merits of this case, but they did so in a manner designed to appeal directly to the pool of potential jurors in this case: the Op-Ed was published in a local newspaper, and it contained an express overture to jurors, discussing the verdict defense counsel wishes jurors to reach in this case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Alison Moe wrote.
The student and his girlfriend had already ridden the ride once and were warned about their dangling legs but got in line to ride again, the victims uncle told the Daily News. When the same thing happened, a second security guard approached them and said they had to leave the park.
She put the kid in the car and then he got in the car, said the source  adding that the thief knew the child was inside when he got behind the wheel and drove off.
The Babiiez  so dubbed because all are young, between the ages of 15 and 21  committed 11 shootings, injuring eight people. Two of their victims had no gang involvement, prosecutors said.
My brother, hes doing better, improving a lot, but he dont remember nothing from that day, Yaniris Marte said. Hes got to take therapy and stuff. Hes got to catch his balance. ... Right now hes not in a wheelchair, but I think hes going to need one.
I commend the NYPD for making an arrest for this brutal assault, and I continue to pray for the complete recovery of our volunteer. Every New Yorker has the right to walk our streets without fear  and job number one must be ending this pandemic of violence infecting New York City, Adams tweeted on Friday.
As soon as my client learned he was a person of interest in this matter, he agreed to meet with detectives, attorney Robert Brown said. Because my client was the only person arrested, he was charged with attempted gang assault  as if he were the actual assailant.
During the course of the robbery Mr. Rubin was shot and killed. I was aware beforehand a firearm would be used to commit the robbery, Mazur said.
I saw the truck about 20 feet up in the air. The crane had fallen back almost half the block into the construction pit, witness Melissa Trott told the Daily News. I heard an enormous boom and as soon as I walked up to the corner I saw a bunch of construction workers staring in complete silence.
Superior Court Judge Cortland Corsones ruled last week in a 10-page decision that despite Forte contending with serious health issues, the medical evidence demonstrates that the defendant is not at substantial risk to his health or life, if he is required to travel to VT and to attend jury trial, the Bennington Banner reports.
She was in a mess, the landlord told the Las Vegas-Review Journal. Her hair was all a mess, the whole house was a mess, and she was packing. Thats when I said, You know, I think it is not good you are all by yourself with two kids. You should get in touch with your family, and she said, I have no one.
In 2008, the Jackson County Sheriffs Office exhumed his body from Hillcrest Memorial Park cemetery to collect a DNA sample. The following year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children created a composite image while The University of North Texas-Center for Human Identification uploaded the boys DNA profile to the law enforcement database CODIS. Neither of the efforts turned up any new information or tips, police said.
According to a 400-page report from the Ventura County Sheriffs Office, obtained by NBC News on Thursday, Long was likely inspired to carry out the attack by his strong disdain for civilians, or individuals not associated with any branch of the U.S. military.
We heard what sounded like a couple of gunshots up at the end of the road, so we turned and we were looking and it looked like the roof of the house kind of lifted for a second and a huge plume of smoke shot out the right side of the house, Lisa Price told ABC 11.
The pilots had reported engine trouble and were attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to land the aircraft in the water, the FAA said in a statement, noting that the information was preliminary.
The storm was expected to produce up to 10 inches of rain across the Windward and southern Leeward Islands, including Barbados, and may lead to isolated flash flooding and mudslides, according to the hurricane center. Puerto Rico could also be affected, with heavy rainfall and flash flooding possible.
Now awaiting the autopsy of his uncle  who had previously fared fine while working in the heat  Lucas, who spent Perezs birthday with him, said he liked to be in the United States.
A 10-year-old Houston girl reportedly played dead, grabbed her toddler brother, locked a door and called for help after she was shot and injured during a triple homicide that claimed the lives of her parents and younger sister.
Terri Lynn Taylor, who had long worked with different animal organizations, was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals following a lengthy investigation into the alleged abuse, according to the Bacon County Sheriffs Office. The agency recently teamed up with one of those groups, New York-based Guardians of Rescue, to investigate the woman.
In his own words, the $74 billion state budget, which was signed late on Wednesday, speaks to what pulls us together and it reminds us that we have so much more in common than the things that pull us apart, he said, according to News 5 Cleveland.
Recently, a man named Cameron Stringer, who pleaded guilty for a charge of improperly handling firearms in a motor vehicle, was sentenced to two years probation. As part of his probation, Stringer must give a sample during random drug screenings, remain out of legal trouble, return the gun in question to its owner, and get a COVID-19 vaccine within 30 days of his sentencing, according to court documents.
The childs guardian, who has not been charged, told investigators the boy was mistakenly left inside her SUV after she drove away from his daycare Wednesday morning, according to police. The woman said she didnt realize that he did not follow the other children when they went into the facility in Spartanburg, about 30 miles east of Greenville.
Bezos plans to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of the moon landing by blasting off under the aegis of his new company Blue Origin with his brother Mark, an unnamed auction winner who spent $28 million for the opportunity and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old woman who trained with NASAs Mercury program in the 1960s but was not selected to go to space.
We are one step closer to making history and transforming the district attorneys office to deliver safety and justice for all, Bragg said. One that ends racial disparities and mass incarceration. One that delivers justice for sexual assault survivors and holds police accountable. One that prosecutes landlords who harass tenants, employers who cheat their workers, and stands up to hate crimes. And one that stops the flow of guns onto our streets.
Biden  who has ordered a complete troop drawdown in Afghanistan by Sept. 11  told reporters at the White House that the U.S. pullout is proceeding at a rational pace. He spoke just as word came from the Pentagon that American soldiers have vacated the Bagram Air Base, the main U.S. military outpost in Afghanistan, for the first time since war broke out in the country 20 years ago.
Well bring the information back to the Senate leadership, well back-brief them on the way ahead and then hopefully we can come up with an approach here to make sure every person in Pennsylvania can rest assured they have one vote and it counts, Mastriano told a radio host from WEEO-FM in Chambersburg last month.
After collecting genetic material from 243 animals, researchers found that 16% of the wild boar were hybrids  and that 75% of those were found within the inner exclusion zone, which suggests that they didnt travel far.
Family is blood ties or a stamp in a passport. Lets rethink this. In the 21st century, its primarily people who love us, those who will always shield us, people with whom we go through life together, the piece says.
First, the majority  which goes to great lengths to claim to care deeply about the precise text of laws passed by Congress  woefully and willfully misinterpreted the Voting Rights Act to uphold two Arizona ballot-casting restrictions. One invalidates otherwise legitimate votes cast out of ones precinct, even when some of the votes on a citizens ballot are for president, senator, governor and other officials on all ballots regardless of precinct. The other restricts who is allowed to transport early ballots to drop-boxes, election offices or polling places.
The grand jury charges suggests yes and yes, for it asserts that Trump Org., far from sidestepping taxes on a few fringe benefits here and there, systematically cheated city and state taxpayers on tons of revenue by doling out employee pay to Weisselberg in the form of rent and utilities ($1,174,018), private-school tuition for grandkids ($359,058), car payments ($196,245) and more.
I never met Jensen, but in following news stories on his death, I noticed various things we had in common. He was a devotee of our local farmers market and nearby city pool, as am I. Before I became a journalist, I too taught children. He was a cat lover, as evidenced by a photo that circulated widely after his passing. About one hour before he was killed, and blocks away from the site, I too crossed McGuinness  on a last-minute run for cat food.
With the hosts assistance, authorities in October of 2020 launched an on-camera sting operation, which ended with the arrest of three people  all of whom were allegedly attempting to meet up with underage girls at an Owosso hotel.
They are both ecstatic that it can finally happen. They are getting married this summer. Gwens boys will be very involved, the insider said. Blake is a great extra dad and very close with the boys.
I remember at the time having a question mark in my own mind, and being attendant to the public response to the idea that a Scottish woman will be playing this character, and being aware that there was no resistance at all  there was widespread welcome  which shifted at a certain point, for very good reasons with which I had an enormous amount of sympathy, she said.
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Need help applying for rental assistance? Heres where Central Floridians can go

Facing eviction? These Central Florida COVID relief programs can help
According to OPD policies, reserve officers are unpaid, part-time volunteers who previously served with the agency for at least 20 years. They have the same authority as full-time officers and commit at least 12 hours a month to the agency on first-responder or specialized assignments and are obligated to attend the same trainings as full-time sworn officers. They do not qualify for additional retirement benefits, the policies show.
We wanted to show them that we know what they have done, and were not stopping, said Jessica Tillman, a Longwood mother of two, who took part in the protest Wednesday and walked out as Beamon was called to the front of the room. Its not okay. The entire community needs to know what happened.
Biden said family members are very realistic about the chances any of the people still missing will be found alive. They know that the chance are, as each day goes by, diminished slightly, the president said. At a minimum, they want to recover the bodies, he said. Family members who wanted to go to the site of the collapse, saw for themselves the pancaked floors.
And again, thats emphasizing the magnitude of what were going through, he said. The effort that all our fire rescue personnel, anyone thats here on scene, trying to do the best we can in these heroic efforts. And, unfortunately, we didnt have success in that.
Carlos Noriega and his son, Mike Noriega, rushed to the site when they heard of the building collapse. Among the flying debris, they stumbled across mementos that bore witness to her life on the sixth floor of the building shed called home for more than 20 years. They found an old picture of her with her late husband and their infant son, and a birthday card that friends from her prayer group sent two weeks earlier with the acronym ESM, Spanish for hand-delivered, scrawled across the yellow envelope with a butterfly etching.
The DEA started its investigation in October 2019 after receiving a tip he was prescribing strong opioids to people who had no need for the medication.
But it was while later serving in the Army in 1968 as a first lieutenant that he heard an assassin killed Martin Luther King Jr. He was the only Black student in his class at Officer Candidate School in the Army, he said.
Like it or not, you dont have a First Amendment right to post whatever you wish on Twitter or Facebook. It might seem unfair, but the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from abridging the freedom of speech. It says nothing about Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey abridging speech.
USF St. Pete would have run the program along with the Florida YMCAs Youth in Government initiative, which has been around since 1957. The C in YMCA stands for Christian, not Communist. If the YMCA is radically socialist, as Kurtz suggests, why do Republicans like House Speaker Chris Sprowls promote it, as he did last week on Twitter?
Did Bill Cosby because of his fame, receive special treatment? If so, it was not by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Any possibility of special treatment would lay in a better understanding of why a prosecutor would agree to hold Bill Cosby immune from prosecution in exchange for his participation in a civil process to which the state was not even a party. I am not able to resolve that question. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania was left the task of dealing with the consequences of that action. The action of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is not special justice for Bill Cosby but a reaffirmation of long-standing constitutional doctrine.
Oswego, NY (13126)

Today

Mostly sunny. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 87F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Low 71F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Exxon Mobil's boss, Dan Woods, professed to be shocked by the lobbyists' assertions. Many other observers would have been totally unsurprised by them

US oil giant s ( ) support for a carbon tax has been dismissed as nothing but a public relations ploy by Greenpeace, the environmental pressure group.

Greenpeaces investigative journalism branch, Unearthed, posted a video interview with Keith McCoy, a senior director in Exxons Washington government affairs team, in which he essentially said the company could score a few brownie points by expressing support for a carbon tax as Republicans in the US Congress will never introduce it.

Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans, and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that  but it gives us a talking point that we can say, well, what is ExxonMobil for? Well, were for a carbon tax, McCoy said in the interview.

Unearthed reporters posed as recruitment consultants looking to hire a Washington lobbyist for a major client and interviewed McCoy on Zoom.

During the interview, McCoy revealed that Exxon has funded shadow groups whose aims are to muddy the waters over climate change issues.

McCoy said the support was not illegal and the purpose was to look out for the interests of Exxon shareholders.

Unearthed also interviewed Exxons former White House lobbyist, Dan Easley, who said the oil and gas industry was also lobbying against other environmental issues, such as the requirement for the federal government to purchase green energy and retrofit federal buildings.

Easley said the worry was that a future Republican administration would be unable to reverse such developments once they became law.

As one might expect, Exxons chairman and chief executive officer, Dan Woods, quickly distanced the company from the lobbyists comments.

Comments made by the individuals in no way represent the companys position on a variety of issues, including climate policy and our firm commitment that carbon pricing is important to addressing climate change. The individuals interviewed were never involved in developing the companys policy positions on the issues discussed, Woods said in a written statement to the Guardian newspaper.

We condemn the statements and are deeply apologetic for them, including comments regarding interactions with elected officials. They are entirely inconsistent with the way we expect our people to conduct themselves. We were shocked by these interviews and stand by our commitments to working on finding solutions to climate change, Woods said.
The Cayman Islands Monetary Authority said while the crypto exchange is currently not subject to its oversight, it is conducting an investigation to determine if any activities fall within its jusrisdiction

Binance, the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange, is facing more regulatory troubles after the Cayman Islands financial watchdog said the company is not licenced to operate a crypto exchange in the British Overseas Territory.

In a news release on Thursday, the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority (CIMA) said Binance is not registered, licensed, regulated or otherwise authorised by the Authority to operate a cryptocurrency exchange from or within the territory, adding that it is currently investigating whether the company or its affiliates has any activities operating in or from within the Cayman Islands which may fall within the scope of the Authoritys regulatory oversight.

While Binance is domiciled in the Cayman Islands, its activities are currently not subject to CIMA oversight, however, if the investigation concludes the business falls within regulatory jurisdiction the exchange will require a licence to provide virtual asset services.

CIMAs intervention is the latest in a series of moves by regulators around the world to bring Binance to heel.

Earlier this week, UK customers using Binance were blocked from making cash withdrawals through cards and into bank accounts from the exchange after the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) banned the platform amid concerns over rising levels of crime.

Other countries, including Japan, Germany and the US, have also voiced concerns about Binances operations, while the firm has also pulled out of Ontario, Canada, after failing to with regulations there.
The key benefit of using SOEC technology to generate this hydrogen is its efficiency"

Ceres Power PLC ( ) unveiled its new solid-oxide electrolysis (SOEC) at a capital markets event yesterday and broker Berenberg was impressed.

The broker has a share price target is 1,560p and said it is an "opportune time to revisit what we believe is a long-term winner of the clean energy".

The technology is the same core as it uses already, but addresses a whole new market, it added.

A solid-oxide electrolyser operates in reverse to a fuel cell, so Ceres is able to use the same core stack technology across both products.

This is important as it gives Ceres an extremely mature point of departure for the new business.

It can leverage 20 years of stack development, the same IP portfolio, the same supply chain, the same manufacturing process and potentially the same partners (eg Bosch, Doosan) to provide scale.

Management said it does not see the need for any technology breakthrough to exploit SOEC commercially, Berenberg reported.

Green hydrogen is expected to play a key role in reducing carbon footprints for industries such as steel, high-value chemicals and transportation.

The key benefit of using SOEC technology to generate this hydrogen is its efficiency, particularly when coupled with industrial processes in those hard-to-abate sectors.

By utilising the high-temperature steam from these applications, the system can generate efficiency of up to 95%.

No other electrolyser technology  eg alkaline and proton-exchange-membrane  can reach this level. 

Berenberg notes that a 1MW-class SOEC system demonstrator is due to be operational in the second half of 2022 with this pilot site allowing potential licensees and partners to validate the technology at a meaningful scale.

The broker estimates SOEC could generate 150-200mln in royalty sales by 2035, with the company having more than enough cash at 230mln to grab the opportunity.
( ) is set for a very busy six months ahead with news flow expected from its Veyonda immune-oncology drug that works with the bodys defence mechanisms to fight cancer cells.

The clinical-stage drug development company is targeting Veyonda to become a standard go-to drug to boost the effectiveness of a range of anti-cancer therapies such as radiation treatment and chemotherapy.

It has an exciting pipeline of drugs under development and believes that its novel technology platform is one of the most exciting and valuable platforms in the pharmaceutical industry.

News flow ahead

Noxopharm chief executive officer Graham Kelly said the company was into some of the latest and most active areas of interest by the pharmaceutical industry - areas spanning cancer, chronic inflammatory diseases and autoimmune disorders.

The result is an exciting pipeline of drugs now under development within Noxopharm that you will be hearing more about over coming months.

Currently, Noxopharm remains focused on its 4-pillars oncology program.

In the next six months, the company is looking forward to the start of patient recruitment for its IONIC-1 (checkpoint inhibitor therapy), DARRT-2 (radiotherapy) and CEP-2 (chemotherapy) programs for its Veyonda anti-cancer drug candidate.

Describing the drug as a cancer treatment enhancement, Veyonda has multiple mechanisms of action that boost the effectiveness of other standard anti-cancer therapies.

It is also targeting the completion of the COVID-19 clinical trial and progressing its novel drug pipeline in the coming six months.

Pharmorage, a wholly-owned subsidiary in partnership with the Hudson Institute of Medical Research and in collaboration with The Australian National University, is also progressing novel drug development for chronic inflammation and autoimmunity.

Significantly de-risked

The company highlighted how it is significantly de-risked as it is targeting areas of major medical need and industry interest.

It has multiple shots at the goal-post and is not limited to a single therapeutic field.

Noxopharms aim is to assist in existing therapies and not rely on the test drug carrying the full load.

4-pillars oncology program

The 4-pillars oncology program is Noxopharms signature clinical program, aiming to prove that Veyonda can make other common forms of anti-cancer therapy work better.

It is testing Veyonda in the following combinations:

Noxopharm has said this was a completely new concept in cancer therapy, made possible only because of a unique collection of anti-cancer functions possessed by idronoxil, the active ingredient in Veyonda.

Where almost all other anti-cancer drugs operate through a single or very limited specific mechanisms, idronoxil targets a range of tricks employed by cancer cells to resist treatments ranging from the old standards, chemotherapy to radiotherapy, to the new checkpoint inhibitor drug therapies.

From stopping cancer cells dividing, to blocking cellular repair mechanisms, to increasing immune cell trafficking, to killing cancer cells outright, idronoxil is a unique multi-purpose, cancer-fighting molecule.

Key European patent allowance

In late June 2021, the company secured a crucial European patent allowance for Veyonda.

The European Patent Office issued a formal Notice of Allowance of claims for patent application number 17778482.4, indicating an intention to move to the patent grant stage.

Noxopharm believes the patent allowance bodes well for related Veyonda patent applications in Europe and other important territories such as the US.

CEO Graham Kelly said: This allowance is very pleasing validation of our strategy of building a strong IP position around Veyonda based on a series of inter-connected patents.

The interconnection is between method of administration and clinical use and removes the reliance on the strength of any single patent.

A granted patent also will help underpin our commercial aim of Veyonda becoming a standard of care drug in combination with other major forms of cancer therapy.

The patent will run through to April 2037.

It is also not limited to a particular cancer type, should cover the treatment of any cancer and can be administered to patients who have received or are receiving chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Phase 2 trial for DARRT-2 study

The company is also moving ahead for the Phase Two trial of Veyonda for its upcoming DARRT-2 study.

This week NOX secured Investigational New Drug (IND) approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its DARRT-2 multi-national clinical study, paving the way for the trial to kick off in the United States.

The green light marks the second IND classification granted to cover the administration of Noxopharms anti-cancer drug candidate, Veyonda, in US cancer patients.

So far, two prominent US cancer centres have volunteered to participate in the DARRT-2 study, which will take place over as many as 15 trial sites across Australia, France, Hungary and the United States and involve around 100 patients.

Specifically, the US largest and top-ranked comprehensive oncology institution, the Texas-based MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Los Angeles Beverly Hills Cancer Center sought to participate in the clinical trial and will serve as the studys US sites.

DARRT-2 will involve around 100 patients with progressive, metastatic prostate, breast or lung cancers that have failed standard treatment options and are eligible for low-dose, palliative external beam radiotherapy (RT) to a single lesion.

The clinical-stage drug development company will utilise a higher dose of its Veyonda drug candidate to generate the phenomenon of the abscopal response in cancer patients.

Building on the successful results of DARRT-1, DARRT-2 will be a much bigger study and will explore a more intensive treatment with Veyonda.

Noxopharm chief medical officer Dr Gisela Mautner To increase the value of the study, we have added a second trial arm to include a small number of breast and lung cancer patients.

This will ensure that, apart from the main focus of the study in prostate cancer, we also will generate results in two additional cancer types.

COVID-19 beneficiary

Noxopharm has produced not only a drug capable of restoring cancer-fighting immune function in a cancer patient, but the same drug could also potentially block an inappropriately excessive immune system in a patient infected with SARS-C0V-2 virus.

The STING signalling pathway is a forward scout that detects the presence of damage in the body and triggers an immune response.

COVID-19 patients who fall into septic shock mostly do so because their STING response has gone into overdrive.

Veyonda blocks the STING response and Noxopharm is now testing the ability of Veyonda to prevent the acute consequences of septic shock in COVID-19.

LuPIN program

The LuPIN program is the first of the 4-pillars program to reach Phase-2 level.

Noxopharm is set to benefit from Novartis VISION study featuring its experimental drug, 177Lutetium-PSMA-617 (Lu-PSMA-617), which looks set to become an important new treatment for late-stage prostate cancer, based on the Phase 3 clinical trial data.

The study reported a median overall survival (mOS) of 15.3 months for Lu-PSMA-617 + standard of care versus 11.3 months for standard of care alone.

This compares with 19.7 months from the LuPIN trial that tested the combination of Lu-PSMA-617 and Veyonda in men with end-stage mCRPC, who had progressed on at least three previous lines of therapy.

This is strong encouragement for Noxopharm, given its recent LuPIN trial data showing even stronger survival outcome when the experimental radioligand Lu-PSMA-617 is combined with Veyonda.

Dr Kelly said the news confirms that Veyonda in combination with Lu-PSMA-617 provides a considerable survival advantage over Lu-PSMA-617 alone.

The LuPIN mOS outcome of 19.7 months still remains the best survival outcome of any drug approved for use in men with end-stage prostate cancer including enzalutamide, abiraterone, docetaxel, cabazitaxel and now Lu-PSMA-617.

He said having Lu-PSMA-617 likely to come to market as a third-line therapy provides a clear development pathway now for Veyonda to come to market itself, with a distinct opportunity to make the Veyonda/Lu-PSMA-617 combination a new standard of care for end-stage prostate cancer.

Commercial end-point for Veyonda

Noxopharm prepared to take Veyonda all the way to market but given that it is a general booster of most forms of cancer therapy, a partnership is potentially more likely.

A commercial transaction is seen as potentially likely in the current Phase 2 trialling.
Geologist Asha Rao has been appointed full-time exploration manager and is returning to the company to extend the exploration model she helped build for predicting mineralisation within the Yanrey Uranium Project.

The new appointee has wide-ranging experience across gold and uranium systems on three continents.

( ) has appointed Asha Rao, an experienced geologist with key gold and uranium experience, as fulltime exploration manager.

Rao has broad experience in gold and uranium mineralisation across Canada, Australia and Africa and specific experience in relation to in-situ recovery (ISR) of uranium.

She has 16 years of experience, ranging from early-stage, grass-roots exploration through to brownfields pre-production work.

With her experience also encompassing a wide range of geological terranes, countries and resource companies, she is ideally suited to advance Cauldrons Blackwood Gold Project and Yanrey Uranium Project.

Good fit of experience

Cauldron director Jess Oram said: Cauldron is very fortunate to regain the services of an experienced motivated geologist with such a good fit of experience to Cauldrons projects.

No doubt the style and quality of the Bennet Well Uranium deposit and the exceptional opportunity at the Blackwood Gold Project in Victoria helped bring Asha back.

Experience and qualifications

According to the company, Rao has proven technical ability in identifying new exploration targets, with a passion for geology, challenging concepts and ideas, and employing innovation to unravel the intricacies of mineral deposits.

In the gold sector, she has worked in the central Murchison Goldfields for Westgold Resources Ltd (later as part of ) and was involved in the exploration, resource extension and upgrade towards operational readiness of multiple high-grade gold mines and prospects including the Great Fingal, Golden Crown, Cuddingwarra and Big Bell gold mines.

As for the uranium sector, she has worked across multiple styles of uranium mineralisation including those amenable to in-situ recovery mining at various stages of development throughout Australia, Africa and Canada.

Her contribution in the development of the Bennet Well mineralisation led to Cauldrons advanced understanding of this highly mineral-rich area of Western Australia and its extensive potential.

She has a Master of Earth Science (MESci Hons) Geology degree from the University of Liverpool, UK, and is a member of the Australasian Institute for Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM) and the Australian Institute of Geoscientists (AIG).

ISR uranium

ISR uranium mining is extremely energy efficient and has the lowest mining cost with the lowest carbon footprint.

Uranium as an energy commodity is increasingly being recognised as a solution to the energy issues facing the globe.

Blackwood Project

The Blackwood Gold Project in Victorias highly productive Golden Triangle represents an opportunity for Cauldron to extend the ore shoots abandoned by past miners.

Moreover, the company also believes that there is potential to discover new ore shoots lying proximal to the underground tunnel system left by historical mining activity.

Cauldron holds key exploration intellectual property for uncovering more uranium mineralisation at Yanrey and developing the gold system at Blackwood.
Securities will remain halted until Tuesday, July 6, 2021, or when an announcement is released to the market.

The company was previously advised that Spanish mining authorities are satisfied with documentation.

( ) (FRA:23H) has been granted a trading halt by ASX with an announcement pending on the status of the Mining Concession for the Muga Potash Project in Spain.

The halt will remain in place until the start of regular trading on Tuesday, July 6, or until an announcement is released to the market, whichever occurs earliest.

Shares last traded at A$0.745 while the companys market cap is approximately A$245.6 million.

Permitting progress

In its most recent update to the market in May, the company said it was continuing to make progress with the permitting process.

The company had been advised that mining authorities of Madrid, Aragon and Navarra were satisfied with the Mining Concession documentation submitted for the project.

Accordingly, the company was advised that the final Mining Concession text had been sent to the governments lawyer for a final legal review.

Final permitting step

With engineering and design work ready, Highfield understands that this is the final step before the potential granting of the Mining Concession which will enable construction of the low-cost, low-capex project to begin.
The total US$12 million companion equity required to access the US$20 million project loan funding from CRDB Bank has been secured and construction of the Lindi Jumbo Project is fully funded to production.

This is a very exciting time for Walkabout Resources, says CEO Andrew Cunningham.

( ) non-executive director Michael Elliot has shown faith in the companys energy minerals strategy with an on-market purchase of shares.

On June 30, Elliot acquired 100,000 shares with a value of $20,000 in an indirect interest, boosting his holding in that interest to 5.9 million shares.

He also holds a further 8.5 million shares split between one direct and two indirect interests.

Final stage-3 companion equity funding

The company recently finalised the third of its three-stage companion equity fundraising process with Battery Metals Capital Group LLC (BMCG) for the Lindi Jumbo Graphite Project in Tanzania.

The total US$12 million companion equity required to access the US$20 million project loan funding from CRDB Bank in Tanzania has been secured and construction of the Lindi Jumbo Graphite Project is fully funded to production.

The emerging graphite producer has agreed to a placement of ordinary shares of up to US$10 million with the US-based institutional investor, which provides risk cover for the start-up of Lindi Jumbo mine.

Chief executive officer Andrew Cunningham said: The confidence demonstrated by BMCG in the Lindi Jumbo Graphite Project and in management reflects the underlying quality of the project.

Sufficient subscriptions have been received under the current Entitlement Offer for the Stage 2 US$4 million payment to be made to Tanzania next month.

This is a very exciting time for Walkabout Resources.
The drilling campaign in EP 161, operated by Santos, in which Tamboran has a 25% interest, began on May 11 with the spudding of the Tanumbirini #2H horizontal well.

Drilling of this well is expected to be completed this month.

(ASX:TBN) has started trading on ASX following a successful initial public offer which raised about $61 million at 40 cents a pop.

The company intends to support Australia and Asia-Pacifics transition to net-zero CO2 by developing low CO2 unconventional gas resources in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Tamboran holds premium acreage in the highly prospective Beetaloo/McArthur basin and intends to use proceeds from the IPO to fund its 25% interest in the Santos-operated EP 161 Tanumbirini #2H and Tanumbirini #3H horizontal wells.

The new funds will also underpin the drilling of the Maverick #1H horizontal well on Tamborans adjacent 100%-owned EP 136 licence in the first half of 2022.

Beetaloo Sub-basins commercial development

Tamboran is well funded for the drilling of two horizontal wells on EP 161 and one horizontal well on EP 136 in the core of the Beetaloo Sub-basin and, subject to drilling success, the company will be well-positioned to deliver the first commercial development from the Beetaloo Sub-basin by 2025.

As well as funding of up to three horizontal wells, proceeds will be used for 2-D seismic acquisition and other working capital.

EP 161 drilling campaign

The drilling campaign in EP 161, operated by Santos, in which Tamboran has a 25% interest, began on May 11 with the spudding of the Tanumbirini #2H horizontal well.

Drilling of this well is expected to be completed in July 2021.

The rig will then drill Tanumbirini #3H and both wells will be flow tested in the second half of this year.

2-D seismic acquisition is anticipated to occur over Tamborans 100% EP 136 licence in the second half of 2021 and the Maverick #1H horizontal well is anticipated to be drilled in the first half of 2022.
This exclusive agreement targets minimum sales of $3.215 million over an initial two-year term, with Winhealth Pharma purchasing, storing, distributing and marketing the FUNCH range of products.

There is growing consumer demand for nutritious and natural baby food in China.

( ) has entered an exclusive cross-border e-commerce distribution agreement with Hangzhou and Hong Kong-based Winhealth Pharma to distribute its infant and toddler, health and nutrition brand FUNCH with leading Chinese e-commerce retailers including Koala and JD.com.

The company has received its first purchase order from Winhealth for more than $90,000 of FUNCH products that will be shipped to China, confirming the growing consumer demand for nutritious and natural baby food in the region.

This exclusive agreement targets minimum sales of $3.215 million over an initial two-year term, with Winhealth Pharma purchasing, storing, distributing and marketing the FUNCH range of products.

Following this agreement, the FUNCH range of baby foods will also be accessible on T-mall Global and Little Red Book platforms.

Consequently, Forbidden now has its presence on four e-commerce platforms that capture 62.2% of the cross-border e-commerce sales in China.

Great track record

Forbidden Foods Co-founder and COO, Jarrod Milani said: We are excited to announce a new strategic partnership with Winhealth Pharma for Kaola and JD.com.

Winhealth has strong capabilities and working with a reputable list of health & pharmaceutical multinationals in Asian markets.

They have mapped out a clear path for reaching the sales target in this exclusive distribution agreement which gives us confidence in their ability to exclusively represent FUNCH on these platforms.

Strong partnerships and networks

Milani added: Growth in China forms a key part of Forbidden Foods overall strategy, and whilst there are some current macro challenges, the current and longer-term commercial opportunities for our business remain compelling.

Setting ourselves up for a sustainable business in China starts with our strong partnerships and networks which we are developing and supporting.

Presence on leading platforms

This exclusive agreement with Winhealth has facilitated Forbidden to have its presence in JD and Koala.com.

JD.com is Chinas largest online retailer and its biggest overall retailer with net revenues of US$114.3 billion in 2020. JD.com boasts 471 million annual active customers being serviced from over 900 warehouses.

Kaola, acquired by Alibaba in 2019, is the second-largest cross-border e-commerce platform in China and provides a strong offering in beauty, personal care, and mothers and babies products.

Furthermore, Forbidden is planning an expansion into other platforms both online and offline.

Milani added: Our marketing and sales efforts on our flagship FUNCH T-mall global store continues to serve us well with a large number of incoming inquiries from parties wanting to represent and distribute FUNCH online and offline.

Expanding onto other leading platforms such as those announced today will only further enhance FUNCHs credibility in Asia and allow us to grow our e-commerce revenue.

- Ephrems Joseph
Imugene managing director and chief executive officer Leslie Chong called the approval a major milestone for the company as it prepares to commence a phase one trial into metastatic, triple-negative breast cancer with its CHECKvacc drug candidate.

Imugene is a step closer to trialling its oncolytic virotherapy candidate in a phase one study on patients with triple-negative breast cancer.

Imugene Limiteds (ASX:IMU) (OTCMKTS:IUGNF) has achieved a major milestone with US collaborator City of Hope securing Investigational New Drug (IND) approval for an upcoming phase one trial of the ASX-listers oncolytic virotherapy candidate.

The clinical-stage immuno-oncology company has partnered with the City of Hope, a world-renowned independent cancer research and treatment centre near Los Angeles, to conduct the study.

Together, the companies hope to investigate the safety and efficacy of Imugenes CHECKvacc drug candidate  formally known as CF33-hNIS-antiPDL1  against metastatic, triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).

Now, with US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in tow, Imugene and City of Hope can start patient recruitment and dosing a phase one clinical trial for TNCB patients.

Crucial step forward for Imugene

In an ASX announcement this morning, Imugene managing director and chief executive officer Leslie Chong said: City of Hope and Dr Yuan Yuan receiving their IND approval for CHECKVacc from the FDA is a crucial step forward for Imugene.

The start of our CF33 OV study is a significant milestone for clinicians treating patients faced with the challenge of triple-negative breast cancer.

Accomplishing this goal speaks to the perseverance and dedication of Imugenes and City of Hopes clinical and research teams as we continue to build on our clinical and commercial potential.

The phase one trial

Imugene and City of Hopes clinical trial is titled 'A Phase I Study of Intratumoral Administration of CF33-hNIS-antiPDL1 in Patients with Advanced or Metastatic Triple Negative Breast Cancer'.

The proposed trial will involve a dose escalation, followed by an expansion to 12 patients at the final dose  the recommended phase two dose.

The trials principal investigator, Dr Yuan Yuan MD, PhD, said: Our team is excited to be part of this important study and the search for effective new treatments for triple-negative breast cancer as there are limited options for patients.

CHECKvacc, Imugenes oncolytic virotherapy treatment candidate, is designed to both selectively kill tumour cells and activate the immune system against cancer cells, with the potential to improve clinical response and survival.

Scientifically known as CF33-hNIS-antiPDL1, the candidate is an immune checkpoint inhibitor armed chimeric vaccinia poxvirus from the lab of CF33 inventor Professor Yuman Fong.

Professor Fong is the Chair of Sangiacomo Family Chair in Surgical Oncology at City of Hope and a noted expert in the oncolytic virus field.

Yuman Fong, MD, said: The CF33-hNIS-antiPDL1 (CHECKvacc) oncolytic virus is a promising therapy for many cancers. We are particularly interested to trial CHECKvacc first in triple-negative breast cancer because it is a huge unmet need.
The Parent Company said it will consider future partnership opportunities as Glass House purchases and completes the retrofit of its greenhouse cultivation facility in southern California

The Parent Company said it remains well-positioned with sufficient access to both high-quality, low-cost indoor and outdoor-grown cannabis

TPCO Holding Co - known as - (NEO:GRAM) ( ) said its previously-announced conditional agreement to complete a $50 million strategic investment in GH Group, Inc (Glass House), through a private placement offering by Mercer Park Brand Acquisition Corp, has been terminated by all parties involved and the strategic investment will not be completed at this time.

noted it will consider future partnership opportunities as Glass House purchases and completes the retrofit of its greenhouse cultivation facility in southern California.

In addition to our supply of award-winning, in-house cannabis, we remain well-positioned with sufficient access to both high-quality, low-cost indoor and outdoor-grown cannabis for use in our portfolio of branded products that are sold through our wholesale and direct-to-consumer channels, The Parent Company CEO Steve Allan said in a statement.

Glass House is building a robust cultivation footprint in California, and we look forward to working with their team in the future on potential collaborations as we broaden our reach across the state, Allan added.

Looking ahead, we will continue to strategically deploy our capital on high-growth investment opportunities that will solidify our leadership position and offer strong value for our shareholders.

Mercer Park Brand Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company, recently merged with Glass House.

The Parent Companys portfolio includes eight owned and licensed brands in form-factors like flower, pre-rolls, vaporizer cartridges, concentrates, gummies, chocolate, beverages, capsules, tinctures, lozenges, topicals and body care products. A couple of standouts include Monogram, JAY-Zs luxury cannabis brand, and , a San Jose-based brand that grows, manufactures and sells its own branded products in more than 250 dispensaries across California.

Contact Sean at sean@proactiveinvestors.com
The Connecticut company intends to use the net proceeds for the continuation of full commercialization activities related to its biomedical signal processing platform PURE EP

The company could gain roughly an additional $1.5 million in gross proceeds if the underwriter buys an additional 15% in shares

BioSig Technologies Inc ( ) has announced the pricing of its underwritten public offering to raise about $10 million.

In a statement, the company said it could gain roughly an additional $1.5 million in gross proceeds if the underwriter buys an additional 15% in shares.

Under the financing scheme, BioSig is offering 2.5 million shares of its common stock, with a $0.001 par value per share, at $4 apiece.

BioSig said it intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for the continuation of full commercialization activities related to the companys biomedical signal processing platform PURE EP, which is designed to improve signal fidelity and uncover the full range of electrocardiogram (ECG) and intracardiac signals.

Also, the money will go towards additional support for organizational development, the continuation of the companys ongoing research and development activities for new products, and general corporate purposes and other capital expenditures.

The Westport, Connecticut-based company said Laidlaw & Company (UK) Ltd is acting as sole book-running manager for the offering and has a 30-day option to purchase an additional 15% of the number of shares offered in full, before deducting the underwriting discounts and commissions and estimated offering expenses payable by BioSig.

The offering is expected to close on July 7, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Contact the author: patrick@proactiveinvestors.com

Follow him on Twitter @PatrickMGraham
Altaley Mining Corp (CVE: ATLY- OTC: SOHFF) CEO Ralph Shearing joined Steve Darling from Proactive to share news the company has put itself in a much better financial position by restructuring 26 million in debt with Trafigura Mexico and Nyrstar Canada.

Shearing telling Proactive, the debt restructuring allows Altaley to move over 20 million of the restructured amount from short term debt to long term debt. These restructuring agreements are subject to Altaley closing its 12 million Accendo Banco Mid Term Loan Facility which is anticipated to close within the next two weeks.
"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
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Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter face fines for refusing to localize Russians' data

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

10:08 02/07/2021

MOSCOW, July 2 (RAPSI)  Russias communications watchdog Roskomnadzor has summoned representatives of U.S. Internet services Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter to draw up administrative protocols for violating the requirements of the Russian legislation in the field of personal data, specifically, as concerns localizing databases of Russian users in Russia.

Earlier, Roskomnadzor has demanded that a number of foreign companies provide documents confirming that the storage and processing of personal data of Russian users is carried out on the territory of the Russian Federation. Services Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter failed to provide such data in a timely manner.

In 2020, Facebook and Twitter were already fined 4 million rubles (about $55,000 at the current exchange rate) each by Russian courts. Facebook paid the fine, Twitter failed to pay. The question concerning localization of databases of Russian users in the national territory has been discussed with foreign companies since 2015. Roskomnadzor reminded that according to the Russian legislation, personal databases operators are obliged to ensure the recording, systematization, accumulation, storage, correction (update, change), extraction of personal data of citizens of the Russian Federation using databases located on its territory. Localization of databases on the territory of the Russian Federation allows ensuring the required level of protection of personal data of Russian users.

Failure to confirm the fact of localization of databases of Russian citizens on the territory of the Russian Federation entails the imposition of administrative fines on legal entities in the amount of 1 million to 6 million rubles ($13,500 to $80,000). In cases of repeated violations of this requirement the fines are to range from 6 million to 18 million rubles ($80,000 to $245,000).
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.


Bollywoods beauty Urvashi Rautela recently was awarded the Stree Shakti National Award for her achievement in the field of 'Hindi Silver Screen' by the hands of Hon'ble Governor Of Maharashtra and Goa Bhagat Singh Koshyari at the Rajbhavan followed by a small celebration for the ones presented with the award. Urvashi Rautela is filled with gratitude and feels more motivated than ever, she says, Since I'm the youngest person to ever achieve this honour from the film fraternity / our industry to receive the Stree Shakti National award, I feel blessed. Furthermore, she elaborates and says, I believe Shakti is the divine feminine force of creativity and the Mother Goddess. Shakti is most active through womanhood, and also the one that creates all change. It is worshipped as one of the Supreme Being. As a believer in women empowerment, Urvashi Rautela says, "The recognition that this award provides also helps to inspire others to strive for greatness in whatever field they choose. An award such as the Stree Shakti National Award represents the next step in the empowerment of women. In order to empower women, and make them self-reliant, the concept is essential. The actress has been inspired by this award to do even better in her career and personal life. On the work front, Urvashi Rautela will be making her Tamil debut with a big-budget sci-fi Tamil film in which she will be playing the role of a microbiologist and an IITian, and later she is going to appear in a bilingual thriller Black Rose along with the Hindi remake of Thirutu Payale 2. The actress recently got a blockbuster response for her song "Doob Gaye" opposite Guru Randhawa and "Versace Baby" opposite Mohamed Ramadan. Urvashi is starring in a lead role in Jio studio's web series Inspector Avinash opposite Randeep Hooda, which is a biopic based on the true story of super cop Avinash Mishra and Poonam Mishra.






SS Rajamouli Telugu filmmaker SS Rajamouli, who is currently shooting for his multi-lingual film "RRR", tweeted complaint about the state of affairs at Delhi airport.




A four-day crucial meeting of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh will be held in Chitrakoot from July 9.

Though the meeting of the Sangh is an annual event, it is being considered significant in the wake of upcoming assembly elections and need for course correction by the BJP government in the state.

Senior functionaries believe that crucial decisions regarding the responsibilities of top functionaries can be taken at the meeting, regarding coordination with BJP on the election eve.

"Till now Krishna Gopal ji has been coordinating between Sangh and the BJP. At the meeting we will decide if more people are required for coordination at various levels," said a functionary.

The four-day meet is likely to discuss the situation in Uttar Pradesh and also draft a roadmap for the next year.
Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit has said that his government's hands are clean with regard to the 'mysterious' arrival of fugitive Indian businessman Mehul Choksi, who is wanted in the Rs 13,500 crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case, to the Caribbean island nationon, local media reported.

According to Dominica News Online, Skerrit has labelled the claims of hatching a plot with the governments of Antigua and India as "total nonsense".

"To say that the government of Dominica and the government of Antigua along with India colluded in any way, give me a break, that's total nonsense. We don't get ourselves involved in those kinds of activities, those practices, not at all. I mean, that is absurd and we reject it and it is unfortunate that anybody would want to propagate this unsubstantiated claim by a gentleman who is before the courts," he contended.

Skerrit further vowed that his government will evenly apply the law irrespective of who is accused of committing crime.

He said that such was the case with the Iranian born, Dominican citizenship holder and diplomat, Alireza Zibahalat Monfared, who was wanted by the Iranian government for allegedly embezzling billions of dollars while the country evaded international oil sanctions.

Monfared was arrested in the Dominican Republic in 2017 following a lengthy international manhunt.

"You saw all this talk about Monfared. Had he stayed in Dominica at the time that the Iranian government had asked for him, we would have apprehended him," Skerrit stated, adding "There was a discussion and a decision to apprehend him so that the Iranian authorities could present to us the charges. Mr Monfared was a Dominican citizen but we hold a brief to the international law, our responsibilities and our obligations."

Earlier, opposition leader from the United Workers Party (UWP), Lennox Linton, had alleged that the Dominican government was involved in a cover-up on behalf of the Iranian national and ex-Dominican diplomat, who was arrested on allegations of being involved in his country's biggest-ever corruption scandal.

He had claimed that the government of Dominica had refused to cooperate with the government of Iran on the extradition of Monfared to face trial.

Linton had alleged that the Iranian authorities had made their interest in Monfared known to the government of Dominica prior to January 20, 2016. He maintained that Monfared lived in Dominica until September 2016, months after January 20, 2016 on which date the government had said his diplomatic passport was revoked.

After the news of Monfared's arrest broke, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had released a statement on his status, saying that he became a citizen of Dominica, and eventually a diplomat, following a comprehensive due diligence investigation.

Skerrit went on to urge his political opponents, mainly the UWP supporters and its leader, to not be selective in matters they support, especially when it's of a similar nature.

"I'm hearing Dominicans, especially the opposition, talking about Mr Choksi. There's a young boy from Grand Bay facing extradition to the US, but we heard nothing from the opposition in that matter. So we cannot want to be treating different people differently depending on who they are or how much money they may have. All of us are subject to the law, irrespective of our position or how much money we have or we don't have," Skerrit argued.

The Prime Minister said that his government will allow the court to carry out its process with regard to Choksi and gave the assurance that his rights and obligations will be respected by Dominica.

Skerrit also expressed support for the government of Antigua in its move to revoke Choksi's citizenship.

Choksi, who is wanted in India by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED), had gone missing from Antigua on May 23, sparking a massive manhunt. He was later captured in Dominica.

His lawyers have contended that he was abducted forcibly, and was subjected to physical torture. Choksi is facing charges of entering Dominica illegally.

On June 25, during the hearing at the Magistrate's Court, Choksi was denied a 'doctor of his choice' as was requested by his legal team in Dominica.

Choksi had acquired Antiguan citizenship in 2017 through the investment programme. He had left India on January 4, 2018, days before the CBI registered a case into the PNB fraud case. He along with his nephew Nirav Modi is wanted in the case.
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat is likely to resign as he is unable to get himself elected to the state Assembly within the stipulated six month period, sources said on Friday.

Sources said that Rawat, who was in Delhi where he had met BJP chief J.P. Nadda twice in three days, on Friday left for Dehra Dun and will submit his resignation to the Governor.

A BJP insider said that due to the constitutional crisis, the party has decided to replace Rawat with a sitting MLA and a legislature party meeting will be held soon for the election of the next Chief Minister after he submits his resignation to the Governor.

Rawat, who had met Nadda and Union Home Minister Amit Shah late on Wednesday night, is currently the MP from the Garhwal Lok Sabha seat, and as per the rules, needs to be sworn in as an elected MLA within six months of taking over as the Chief Minister.

Earlier in the day, Rawat met the BJP chief again to discuss the political situation and the need of his election to the state Assembly before September 10 to remain in office.

Before leaving for Uttarakhand capital, Rawat said that holding of bypolls will be decided by the Election Commission and he will follow whatever the Central leadership of the party decides.

BJP national General Secretary and Uttarakhand in-charge, Dushyant Gautam told IANS that there was no discussion of Uttarakhand by-polls held at the party level.

A party leader explained that after the meeting with the Central leadership, the indications are that it will be difficult for the Chief Minister to continue in the office.

Sources said that Nadda had explained to Rawat that Section 151 of Representation of the People Act, 1951 has created hindrance in his election to the Assembly.

"In an hour-long meeting on Wednesday night at Home Minister Amit Shah's residence, all the possibilities were discussed and Rawat was explained about exception provided under Section 151 of Act for not holding by-elections -- if the remainder of the term in relation to the vacancy is less than a year or if the Election Commission, in consultation with the Centre, certifies that it is difficult to hold the by-election within the said period," a party insider said.
Three Trinamool Congress MPs on Friday questioned the alleged meeting of Solicitor General Tushar Mehta with Leader of Opposition in West Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, who is facing probe in Narada case and Saradha chit fund scam, and asked Prime Minister to take necessary action to remove him from the post.

Mehta, however, denied having any meeting with Adhikari, but admitted that the Bengal lawmaker had come to his office-cum-residence unannounced at 3 p.m. on Thursday.

"Since I was already in a pre-scheduled meeting in my chamber, my staff requested him to sit in the waiting room of my office. When my meeting was over, my PPS informed me about his arrival. I requested my PPS to convey to Mr Adhikari my inability to meet him and apologise as he had to wait," he said.

Mehta added that Adhikari then left without insisting on meeting with him. "Question of my meeting with Adhikari therefore did not arise," he said.

In a joint letter, Trinamool MPs Derek O' Brien, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy and Mahua Moitra said Adhikari is an accused in various offences being investigated by the CBI and the ED and "such meeting between an accused in grave offences and with the Solicitor General who is advising such investigating agencies by whom the accused is investigated, is in direct conflict of interest with the statutory duties of Solicitor General of India".

The MPs alleged that Mehta providing an opportunity of audience to Adhikari "not only reeks of impropriety but also raises the question of integrity and taints the post occupied by the Solicitor General".

Source: IANS
Legal threats have moved closer to former US President Donald Trump with the prosecution of his companies and a top official in his inner circle currently face charges of tax fraud.

The case filed in a local court by a city prosecutor on Thursday alleges that the Trump Organization hid payments of perks worth $1.7 million over a 15-year period to the company's Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg who evaded taxes on them.

Trump is himself not personally charged but the chargesheet said that an "unindicted co-conspirator" was also involved.

An unindicted co-conspirator is usually someone prosecutors believe is guilty but do not have enough information to charge the person who could later be named and added to the case if they can build the case.

Weisselberg is accused of evading taxes on $1.7 million he received in perks that included school fees for his grandchildren and car payments and flat rent, as well as furniture and TV sets for his home.

"This was a sweeping and audacious illegal payments scheme," Carey Dunne, who appeared for the prosecution, told the court.

After two years of investigations into the businesses of Trump, state and city officials built their case with the help of Weisselberg's former daughter-in-law, Jennifer, who had financial records allegedly showing the perks that he had not reported.

She is involved in a court battle with her former husband over the custody of their children following their divorce.

Weisselberg, who surrendered to authorities, was brought into court in handcuffs to face 15 charges including tax fraud and grand larceny (property theft) for which he could face prison terms of at least 15 years if convicted.

Trump's companies could be hit with huge fines if found guilty and their hotel and hospitality could suffer a blow by losing their liquor licences.

A common tactic used by US prosecutors is to prosecute a person who may be able to provide evidence against their principal quarry in hopes that person would turn approver or agree to help the prosecution in return for leniency.

Weisselberg has so far stood firm unlike Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen who has cooperated with prosecutors after being prosecuted in connection with hush money paid to a porn star and a former adult film star who said they had affairs with Trump.

Cohen was convicted of tax fraud and election finance law violations and sentenced to three years.

The charges against the Trump Organization and its official came a week after the defeated President began holding public appearances, a visit to the border with Mexico to highlight the illegal immigration problem and a rally in Ohio.

Prosecutors in New York State are elected and Cyrus Vance, the prosecutor for Manhattan in New York City, won the election as a Democrat.

During Trump's presidency, his opposition looked to Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James, another elected Democrat, to investigate and prosecute him.

Federal prosecutors are appointed by the President.

Reacting to Weisselberg's prosecution, Trump said in a statement: "Do people see the Radical Left prosecutors, and what they are trying to do to 75 million plus Voters and Patriots, for what it is?"

"If the name of the company was something else, I don't think these charges would have been brought," Trump Organization lawyer Alan Futerfas said.

James said that the New York State investigations into Trump and his organisation would continue.

State prosecutors were reportedly investigating whether Trump and his organisation had illegally inflated the value of some of the properties to get loans.
It is in our greater interest to work with all countries to ensure that the Indian Ocean remains a zone of peace and stability while taking the maximum advantage of our position to create wealth and prosperity for our next generations

by Mangala Samaraweera

Reflect continually on the fact that all things as happen now, also happened before, and on the fact that they will happen again. The whole dramas and the comparable scenes from history of the past All these were similar only the actors were different  Marcus Aurelius

The Sunday Times of 27 June says that the Central Bank of Sri Lanka has taken the unprecedented step of issuing a commemorative coin for the centenary of the Communist Party of China. This news followed hot on the heels of the Colombo Port City bill which the Government tried to rush through Parliament until the Supreme Court shot down a few of the clauses which could have violated our sovereignty and posed a serious threat to our countrys independence in the years to come.

Adding to the paranoia of many Sri Lankans was the shocking expose by Sirasa, one of the leading broadcasters in Sri Lanka and perhaps the only truly independent TV station in this country today ( I too have been at the receiving end of its criticisms during the various periods I served as a Cabinet Minister, during the last three decades) where we saw Chinese personnel in Chinese military uniform dredging a historic lake in the deep south (where youth unemployment is at its highest) under the patronage of a senior Cabinet Minister of the ruling family.

These are a few examples which makes one wonder whether the principle of extraterritoriality being applied liberally in our statecraft today is seen as the continuation of diplomatic relations with a friendly country or as a major infringement of Sri Lankan sovereignty. Will the historians of the future call this point in time as the beginning of Sri Lankas century of humiliation?

Dynastic China and Western powers

China is one of worlds greatest and most ancient countries; more a civilisation than a country! The Celestial dynasties which ruled for millennia sincerely believed that they were the heavenly representatives sent to rule a vast kingdom  Honguo/the middle kingdom, refined and civilised in a world of barbarians. The Emperor was perceived as mankinds supreme sovereign, often referred to as the Emperor of humanity and his diplomats were called Heavenly Envoys from the Celestial Court.

As Honguo was considered the centre of the universe, all interactions with the barbarians of the outside world were controlled and limited; learning/translating the languages of the barbarians were banned without special permission, entering and traveling within the kingdom was also not allowed and only the Port of Guangzhou (Canton) was open to foreigners to conduct their trade. Even the envoy from the Queen-Empress Victoria had to hang around the port for weeks until it was decided to grant an audience with the Emperor in Beijing on the basis that the English diplomat will kowtow(to prostrate oneself and to touch the ground with ones forehead thrice) before the Emperor when received in the Royal court.

With the advent of high imperialism in the 17th century, Western powers tried repeatedly to penetrate this vast kingdom for trade/commercial purposes but China remained one of the few Asian countries which could not be colonised by the British to become a part of the Empire where the sun never sets.

The East India Company was founded in 1600 with the objective of promoting trade and commerce in the Indian Ocean and China. By 1800, the company accounted for more than half the worlds trading and laid the groundwork for the British Empire and the Indian Raj; East India company rule was established in large parts of India in 1757 exercising military power and even assuming local administrative functions until 1858 when the British crown assumed direct control of India  the jewel in the Crown where opium was grown to be sold to the natives in all corners of the Empire.

In 1839, the opium war started against China in the face of determined and stiff resistance by the Qing dynasty to open up its vast market to British opium traders. Consequently, the British ordered the blockade of principal ports in China and were poised to attack the ancient capital of Nanjing, when the Chinese sued for peace. The treaty of Nanjing of 1842 imposed on China the cession of Hong Kong to the British, a payment of $ 6 million in indemnity, and the opening of five ports in which trade would be allowed and westerners would be permitted to reside.

Although China was not formally colonised, the treaty of Nanjing made it a de facto colony of the British Empire and the Qing court lost much of its independence in commercial and foreign policy. The principle of extraterritoriality enshrined in this treaty was to become a major infringement of Chinese sovereignty and the opium traders residing in the treaty ports would only be subject to their own countries laws and not that of China.

Thus began, what is known in China today as its century of humiliation.

Chinas Belt and Road Initiative

Nearly 200 years later, as the first quarter of the 21st century is drawing to a close, China is now poised to become one of the worlds leading economies with ambitions of becoming a military super power as well.

Like the East India Company in earlier centuries, the investment, trading and commercial arm of China is now the Belt and Road Initiative. (BRI) started in 2013 and incorporated into the constitution of China in 2017. According to the BRI, the initiative is a bid to enhance regional connectivity and embrace a bright future.

In fact we know that the East India Company colonised the better part of the world with similar noble objective of civilising savages and natives promising all a brighter future. The imperial powers of the west carved out a very bright future for themselves and their countries over the last 500 years but at what cost to the countries and the peoples they colonised? Isnt the BRI the same old concept wrapped up in brand new gift paper?

Sri Lanka and China

What was challenged in the Supreme Court recently  the Colombo Port City Act  could well end up being a modern-day Trojan horse or a Nanjing Treaty for Sri Lankans in the years ahead. The Port City without any checks and balances and Parliamentary oversight will create a city which is more or less a law unto itself; it will be a centre for international money laundering for the local and international mafia.

The likelihood of this piece of extraterritorial real estate turning into a centre for international espionage for the super powers to protect/subjugate the peace and stability of the Indian Ocean should also not be dismissed as mere fantasy.

Sri Lanka needs FDIs and trade opportunities badly and desperately. Having an international Financial Centre on reclaimed land is a very good idea if its based on international law and participation, not merely serving the interests of a single country or two. In fact the first proposal for such a venture came from one of our very own Sri Lankan conglomerates in 2000.

However, such proposals need not come at the cost of our sovereignty; it cannot be at the cost of our friends who provide 60% of our trade; it cannot be at the cost of diminishing our friendship with our friend and neighbour, India, 20 odd kilometres away.

Sri Lanka has not been blessed with oil, diamonds, gold or copper; we have been blessed with a beautiful island and a most propitious geographical location on one of the busiest shipping routes in the world.

Therefore it is also in our greater interest to work with all countries to ensure that the Indian Ocean remains a zone of peace and stability while taking the maximum advantage of our position to create wealth and prosperity for our next generations.

Pawn in power play

In the great power play between superpowers, Sri Lanka cannot afford to be a pawn of one group or another like Cuba in the early 1960s when not ideological but financial considerations compelled the Cuban Government to allow USSR to install nuclear missiles 65km from the USA nearly triggering off a nuclear war in the Bay of Pigs.

Sri Lanka cannot afford to follow a confrontational and isolationist policy with the international community. Especially in this age of pandemics and international trade, multilateralism is the way forward. Westphalian concept of sovereignty is no longer valid and we must abide by our international obligations for the betterment of our own people.

Sri Lanka must revert to the foreign policy almost all governments have followed since independence; despite our relative insignificance in the International order, Sri Lanka was a much-loved and esteemed member; from Washington to Beijing, from New Delhi to the Kremlin, from Downing Street to Tokyo, from Brussels to Ghana our leaders were welcomed with open arms.

Alas, no more! Today, like somnambulists walking towards the precipice while tumbling over one humiliation after another, we are pushing our sons and daughters, towards a future of unimaginable horrors.

Stop. Think. Take stock. Democracy and freedom, justice and the rule of law, unity in diversity, multilateralism and international cooperation is the only way forward.

The writer is a former minister in the government of Sri Lanka
Appointing Basil Rajapaksa into Parliament from the National List is contrary to the law

by Victor Ivan

The lack of adherence to the law can be considered as an inherent and prominent characteristic of our society and the rulers.

In Sri Lanka it is typical that many important things take place contrary to the law, and outside the constitutional framework. In this context, Sri Lanka can be considered as a country which has lost civility in politics and respect for the rule of law.

Our inability to conduct ourselves towards a law-abiding nation which respects the Constitution, the supreme law of the country, can be considered as the prime cause of deterioration, failure and the prevailing crisis facing the nation.

Disregard of the law is not an occasional issue; it is a perennial occurrence. The proposed entry of Basil Rajapaksa into Parliament as a National List MP can be considered as the latest issue of constitutionality due to be raised.

Nagananda Kodithuwakku, a political activist, has already inquired from Nimal Punchihewa, the Chairman of the Election Commission about this, and it can be said that the matter is likely to emerge as a serious legal contention.

Basils issue

The Editor of the Island newspaper has inquired from the Chairman of the Election Commission about the widespread speculation of Ranjith Bandaras resignation to accommodate Basil Rajapaksa to enter into the Parliament as a National List MP, and the Chairman of the Election Commission has expressed that there is no legal obstacle for such replacement.

In the meantime Nagananda Kodithuwakku, quoting Article 99 (a) of the Constitution, has pointed out that only a person whose name was included in the National List for the 2020 Parliamentary Elections or one who has contested the election in any other way could be elected to Parliament from the National List. Under the circumstances, appointing Basil Rajapaksa into Parliament from the National List is contrary to the law, as he does not fall into either of these two categories.

According to an interpretation made by the Supreme Court on a similar issue in respect of the case SC 26/27/2002: Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu and Rohan Edirisinha Vs Dayananda Dissanayake and Samaraweera Weerawanni, it would not be possible for a person whose name was not included in the National List or who has not contested the election to be elected to Parliament from the National List. This landmark Supreme Court judgment was delivered by a panel of three judges consisting of Justices Mark Fernando, D.P.S. Gunasekara and C.V. Wigneswaran.

It was a case filed before the Supreme Court, seeking an interpretation of Article 65 of the Provincial Councils Ordinance, in connection with the appointment of Samaraweera Weerawanni, former Chief Minister of the Uva Province, a non-candidate, someone not necessarily subjected to the scrutiny of the voters of the Province and was parachuted into the Uva Provincial Council ahead of other candidates who have received preferential votes from the voters of the Province.

The interpretation made therein equally applies to Parliament as well. The petitioners maintained that the Article 65 of the Provincial Councils Ordinance has granted the Party Secretary the authority to use his discretionary power in filling a vacancy when it occurs, and in such cases the party secretary could appoint any person of his choice to that post, which they indicated was an obscure and ambiguous method which is not consistent with democratic values and contrary to basic principles of representative democracy, and therefore requested the Supreme Court to provide a clear interpretation in keeping with Article 25 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights which recognises that every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity to take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives, and clear the ambiguity of the Article 65.

The Court accepted the petitioners request and decided that when a vacancy occurs in the National List, the Party Secretary should fill it only by a person whose name was on the National List or by one who had already contested the election but had not been elected.

If the Government is keen on appointing Basil Rajapaksa as a National List Member, it will necessitate a Constitutional Amendment; otherwise, the Government will be compelled to act in complete disregard of the law. In such an eventuality, a critical situation will arise, in which both the judiciary and the Election Commission will be subjected to an acid test.

The Government and legal responsibilities

A modern government is compelled to work in accordance with international covenants it has entered into, in addition to acting within the local constitutional framework. First of all, we must act in accordance with the Constitution of the country. At the same time, we must abide by the covenants reached at international level.

The Government is constantly being monitored internationally to ensure whether it is acting in accordance with the countrys Constitution as well as the standards specified in international agreements which it has entered into. In this process, there is a system in operation which rewards the country with special privileges when it performs well and good, and also incurs punishments when its performances are not up to the desired levels.

The EU Parliamentary resolution submitted on 10 June to consider whether the GSP+ concessions to Sri Lanka should be continued or not was passed by a large majority. The 705-member EU parliament adopted the resolution with 628 votes in favour, 15 against and 40 abstaining from voting.

The current human rights violations in Sri Lanka, the misuse of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), deterioration of democratic environment, arbitrary detention of persons such as Shani Abeysekera, a leading criminal investigator, Ahnaf Jazeem, young Muslim poet, and Hejaaz Hizbullah, a prominent lawyer, have come under strong protest from the European Parliament. The protest of the European Union is just and reasonable, and it can be considered as a policy that has been put into action for the benefit of the people of this country.

The benefits Sri Lanka has reaped from the GSP+ concession have been immense. As a result, 66% of goods exported to EU countries enjoy duty free concessions. It is a great relief that we have received and Sri Lanka should not lose it. The only way to protect the GSP+ from the EU is to move the country to a point where the rights of all citizens, including minorities, are protected and honoured.

International responsibilities

All civilised nations are bound to uphold human rights. The fundamental rights which are essential to ensure the decent and wholesome existence and dignity of human beings are considered as Human rights. The United Nations is the main body of international governance with a membership of 193 countries.

Of the countries in the world, only the Vatican City State and Palestine have not received membership in the United Nations, and they remain as observers only. Among the member states are 172 countries that have signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and its Protocol.Sri Lanka signed the International Covenant on March 23, 1980 and ratified its Optional Protocol on 3 October 1997.

Accordingly, the UN Human Rights Council has the authority to inquire into the human rights situation in Sri Lanka; and Sri Lankan citizens too, enjoy the right to appeal to the Geneva Human Rights Commission against the decisions of the Highest Court of Sri Lanka in the event when justice is not meted out in human rights violations. I was the first citizen of Sri Lanka to exercise this right effectively.

Sarath Nanda Silva, Chief Justice, realising that the precedence I had created was a major challenge for him, based on the Nallaratnam Singharasa case, delivered an unlawful judgment ruling out that Sri Lanka was not bound to accept the decisions of the UNHRC against the Sri Lankan Government. It was consequent to that illegal Court decision that a situation arose where Sri Lanka was considered an uncivilised country in the political sense.

This ruling has been severely admonished by the international community posing a severe blow to the international stature of the country. Yet, so far, none of the governments that followed have considered it necessary to rectify the error and remove the stigma.
We should honour our freedom fighters, our millions killed intentionally and with premeditation. Remember the sacrifices they made in duty towards Bangladesh.

by Anwar A. Khan

Dhaka University or DU is the oldest university in Bangladesh. Its centenary celebration ison 1 July, 2021.

When I recall my Dhaka University days after about 45 years, a deep hankering engrosses me - like a few words of a sweet song of HemantaMukherji, Muchejaoadinguloamaipichuphiredake(the blotting out days call in me to recapture the past and indulge in memories)!

As a college student, I along with my friends actively fought against the barbarian Pakistans army and their equally tyke local mango-twigs, especially Jamaat-e-Islami, the mass-murderers in 1971 to establish Bangladesh at the clarion call of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Founding Father of Bangladesh ((though I have always been apolitical till today; nor do I have any connection with any socio-cultural or human rights organisations as yet. And I shall not do so unto my death).

Coming back from the war field, I devoted to my studies and after passing my H.S.C. Examination (Humanities Group) in 1972, I got admitted into B.A. (Hons.) class with English Literature and Economic as Subsidiary subjects leading to M.A. in Contemporary History with Dhaka University during the period of 1972-76. I was a resident student of Sergeant Zohurul Haque Hall (SZHH) and lived there till my completion of M.A. degree.

Bangladesh was then gravely the 1971 war battered country. Let me look back. Our DU days were turbulent times all the while.

In 1974, 7 murders fell out at Mohsin Hall TV room of DU when I was a student of 2nd year B.A. (Hons.) class. From SZHH, I along with some of my class-mates and friends saw that ghastly scene there in the wee hour on that day after the beastly incident bechanced. It still reminds me or us about the unspeakable horrors and brutalities of 1971.

AL's student affiliation  Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) had then intra-party battles. The killers belonged to one faction led by BCLs Secretary General ShafiulAlam Pradhan. They were heavily armed anddangerous.Pradhan was arrested as the prime accused of thatgrave murder incident and he was finally sentenced to jail lawfully for a life term. But the-thenself-proclaimed President of Bangladesh and vitiated military ruler Gen Ziaur Rahman pardoned Pradhan at his own volition and in a deliberately unhurried mannerreleased him from the jail.

We had to always remain into a state of intense fear or desperation during those reckless days, because oftentimes, gun shots befell in different DU Halls by a certain quarter of armed gangsters of so-called students. The university was closed-down sine dieofttimes. We had to leave the Halls within a very short notice period.

BangabandhuMujib, Bangladsehs Founding Father and the countrys first President, would visit the University of Dhaka on 15 August 1975 from where he was once expelled for a life time in an illegal manner by the Pakistans depraved rulers. In August 1975, I was a senior student of Dhaka University and stayed at Sergeant Zohurul Haque Hall. Although I have always been apolitical, I felt very excited along with so many friends of mine on his profoundly honoured would-be visitable.

On the day before that grand visit, the University of Dhaka was adornedfetchingly. The whole area adjacent to it took a festal look. To me, it seemed that youth was like spring, an over-praised season greatly pleasing or entertaining if it happened to be a favoured one, but in practice it didnt happen as a general rule, for biting vile winds of northern area of Dhaka military cantonment of Metropolitan City of Dhaka than genial breezes.

At the very pre-dawn hour on that day, my room-mate and close friend AbdusSobhan Khan Arif burst into terrified voice and woke me up from sleeping and gave the horrendous and heart-breaking news about Bangabandus brutal murder. He almost dragged me out to a room nearby to ours where a one-band Radio was tuned on and with our frightening heart; we got a line about the voice marked by deep ill will; deliberately harmful of Major Dalim was sounding out, Sheikh Mujib is killed. The army has captured power. The martial law is imposed on throughout the country We were tremendously shocked, appalled and at the same time, we were very rancorous to have heard of this cowardly and horrific act.

Before 5.00 O-clock in the morning on 16 August 1975, suddenly SZH Hall where we resided was heavily stormed by a large Lancer Unit of Bangladesh Army mostly wearing black attires equipped with heavy guns. A large group of Lancer forces cordoned-off the entire area of our Hall taking positions in its different locations; some lying on the nearby play-ground and some standing in different strategic places with guns pointed blank towards us.

A group of soldiers went inside the Hall and pounded in our rooms. They angrily shouted to come out from our rooms in hands-up position. They forced us to vacate all rooms and then we were made stood up in hands-up position nearby the Halls play-ground; lined us up; and then they used vulgar words against us mostly in Urdu and English languages. For a moment, we called back that they were the Urdu-speaking Pakistans people who we defeated during our great Liberation War in 1971 to establish Bangladesh.

They imperiled us in a very harsh language, We shall take you all to an unknown location; and we are not sure whether someone of you may come back to this dormitory or not. Two of our friends were mercilessly beaten by them to create an unwanted panic among us and those two friends of us got wounded and they were then bleeding. We were then feeling affrighted. Suddenly we found a senior most and brilliant scholar teacher Prof Dr. Khosh Mohammed, Chairman of DUs Mathematics Department and our Halls Provost was escorted by some rogue junior army officers at hands-up position and forced him to pass walking in front of us to the Halls TV Room. Provost Sir was thrown into a state of intense fear or desperation because his face then looked very depressed and dispirited.

Some students were forced foregather at the TV Room along with our Provost Sir. On the podium of this room, a few army officers climbed up and used plebeian and unwashed language against everybody present there and in a vehement outcry, they hollered, All students, deposit to us in no time whatever arms and ammunitions you have in your possession. Otherwise no one will be spared. A pall of gloom descended upon the TV Room.

Prof Dr. Khosh Mohammed paused momentarily and said in a very cool voice, I know for sure; my students do not have any arms and ammunitions in their possession. The unpleasant army persons then angrily shouted to obey their orders. Provost Sir requested them to give his students for a time up to 10.00 O-clock on 17 August 1975 and he said, If my students have any arms and ammunitions in their self-possession, they will keep them at this TV Room within that time-frame. They then reluctantly agreed to this proposal and then these poseur military-men pulled-out their troops exasperatedly from the SZH Hall and left the place foul-mouthed along with their army convoys. They didnt turn up again. This was the solitary Hall only of DU that these savage wildcats rampaged during that time.

But one thing is very striking and unforgettable that we found so many outstanding scholar teachers with high morality, disciplined, captivating in delivering lectures in the class-rooms of almost all Departments, in many seminars at DU campus.

But educational institutions are nowhere in the world meant for busines purpose like private trading houses as it has now been happening in Bangladesh! Eminent journalist, celebrated columnist and an alumnus of Dhaka University - Syed Badrul Ahsan (SBA or our Badrulbhai) showed clearly the outline, profile or boundary of a university like DU, once upon a time canonised as an Oxford of the East, in his well-written column at The Asian Age on 5 July 2020.

The Bangladesh flag is a symbol of what Bangladeshs people treasure; and it represents the values we cherish beyond measure. Our flag flies high for freedom, bravery, and the courage to fight, and sacrifice of ones life for a just cause. The Bangladesh flag is an icon representing the Bangladeshs way. Our hearts swell with emotion when we see it ripple and sway.

We should honour our freedom fighters, our millions killed intentionally and with premeditation. Remember the sacrifices they made in duty towards Bangladesh. The Greek philosopher Thucydides once said, The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it. And we followed this spirit in 1971 to attain Bangladesh.

This also holds true to the cause of deep love and patriotism of our people for creating our motherland. In writing this piece, I bear the year 1971 clearly in my mind with distinct mental discernment. My heart aches and tears well up in my eyes. During our Independence War of 1971, being a college student, I witnessed many barbaric incidents committed by the Pakistans Army, Jamaat-e-Islami, its student wing IslamiChhatra Sangha (ICS), and their death squads Al-Badr and Al-Shams (auxiliary forces of the barbarous Pakistans Army).

I chose to stay at SZHH, because it was the light-house of all glorious struggles and movements to establish an independent and sovereign homeland for us i.e. Bangladesh.

However, we propose a novel approach to reputation development at higher education institutions like DU. Global reputation development at higher education institutions is largely driven by research excellence, is predominantly measured by research output, and is predominantly reflected in hierarchical university rankings. The ranking becomes equated with brand equity.

We argue that the current approach to reputation development in higher education institutions is modernist and linear. This is strangely out-of-kilter with the complexities of a transforming society in flux, the demands of a diversity of stakeholders, and the drive towards trans-disciplinarily, laterality, reflexivity and relevance in science and arts.

Good research clearly remains an important ingredient of a university's brand value. However, a case can be made for brand relevance, co-created in collaboration with stakeholders, as an alternative and non-linear way of differentiation.

This approach is appropriate in light of challenges in strategic science globally as well as trends and shifts in the emerging paradigm of strategic communication. In applying strategic communication principles to current trends and issues in strategic science and the communication thereof, an alternative model for strategic reputation building at higher education institutions is developed.

The approach is structured is clearly characterised or delimited: to consider key challenges and trends emerging in strategic research that affect the relationship between science and society, including the communication of science to society; to compare these trends with key trends and shifts in the emerging paradigm of strategic communication, and to reflect on how challenges in science communication can be addressed by strategic communication; to consider the implications of strategic communication for strategic branding and brand relevance, from a multi-stakeholder perspective; to examine research excellence as a global reputation builder at research-intensive higher education institutions; to build a case for changing the discourse from 'brand excellence' to 'brand relevance'; and to propose an alternative model for reputation building at higher education institutions like DU, and for building a purposeful higher education brand.

Of course, decades of neglect will not be remedied in a year. There are competing demands for government funds, such as, in areas from transport infrastructure to health. But there must be a strong political will to improve universities year on year, and make education a long-term priority, not as private trading houses.

The Dhaka University played a significant role in the Bengali Language Movement, when Bengalis joined together to fight against Urdu being the official language in the-then East Pakistan. Dhaka University was the main place where the movement started with the students joining together and protesting against the Pakistan government. Later countless students were massacred in where the Shaheed Minar stands today. After the incident, Bengali was restored as official language.

The 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh against Pakistan continues shaping the mindset of Bangladeshs people until present day. This bloodstained historical event has constructed Bangladeshs sense of nationalism and has forged our contemporary Constitution in 1972. The Bangladesh, we see today is essentially the fruit of the liberation war of 1971.

In order to understand ongoing Bangladeshs politics and the socio-economic sphere, it is required to analyse the history of Pakistans colonialism and the events surrounding the 1971 liberation war that turned Bangladesh into an independent and sovereign State. And DU teachers and students played majorly in shaping the construct of Bengali nationalism and the concept of an independent and sovereign state  Bangladesh!

Since the very formation of Pakistan, the Western part by choice branded the Eastern as inferior, because it intentionally considered the Muslims in the Eastern Wing subordinate due to their social and cultural affiliation with the Hindu population, which were powerful, rich and dominating in East-Pakistan before the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.

The desire for an independent Bangladesh (literally meaning "land of the Bengali people") effloresced in March 1971. Previously, free and fair elections were held in December 1970 in which the Awami League had won a majority of seats in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan under a new system of proportional representation under the dynamic and able leadership of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Fearing a political takeover by East Pakistan, President Yahya Khan of West Pakistan postponed the convening of the new Assembly in March 1971 to allow time for West Pakistans military forces to occupy East Pakistans territory. After hundreds of the-then East Pakistan protesters were killed in army firing and Awami League Leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was arrested, but immediate before that, Bengali nationalist supreme leader BangabandhuMujib declared our new nation-state of Bangladesh independent on March 26, 1971.

Professor Dr. FakrulAlam wrote, DU history and its part in Bangladeshi national identity formation. He further added, Dhaka University started playing a decisive role in Bangladeshi national identity formation almost as soon as the Islamic state of Pakistan was born. If the role the university had played in the evolution of the Bangladeshi identity before the partition of India was indirect, it now became the centre of the movement that would lead to the creation of the country born out of the ashes of East Pakistan in 1971.

The mission of the University of Dhaka is to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence

The distinctive spirit of a culture or an era of Dhaka University in the Bengali ethos is cardinal for us and we want to see DU to that weightage.

The ethos that Badrulbhai has recorded in his column is that DU is always the power-house for all movements leading to the bloody war of the Bengalis in 1971 against the rapscallion military rulers of Pakistan to establish Bangladesh in 1971 as an independent and sovereign state.

Bangladesh is the only country in the world that was created on the basis of language and ethnicity and DU played a very significant role for it.

An alumna of the University of Dhaka in the years of 1972-76, I now feel dispirited to have seen or to see in such a sorry state of it that one cant ideate! Moreover, I am feeling discouraged and downhearted!! Most of the teachers keeping their jobs with DU intact and taking salary and other benefits from it, they teach in private universities at very lucrative emoluments! Morality has gone down to the lowest ebb! This saddens me like anything!!

Let us hope the government has a vision for Bangladeshs education  a vision that will give a youthful, vibrant Bangladesh, the universities it deserves!

Even during my DU days, Dhaka University was aptly extolled as the Oxford of the East. Still, DU is my love, despite it has lost its past charm and magical spell.

I want to conclude with the salient words of Badrulbhai, As it enters its hundredth year, Dhaka University must catch up with the times.I hope Dhaka University, despite all its flaws, will change the outlook of its pupils and pull back its glorious image in full.

-The End 

The writer is an independent political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs.
Earlier this year, it was reported that the Sri Lankan Air Force was in talks with Israel to overhaul five Kfir fighters. Now Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has confirmed external link that a deal worth $50 million was signed recently with Sri Lanka. The Israeli defense company says the Kfirs will be getting new advanced radars, sensors, communication systems, and new helmets to bring them to advanced 4+ generation. The upgrade process will also include transfer of knowledge and skills for refurbishment to Sri Lankan Air Force personnel.

Here is the statement issued by IAI

The deal, valued at USD $50 million, includes upgrades to the Kfir aircraft and enhancement of operational capabilities

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) recently signed a contract, worth USD $50 million with Sri Lanka's Ministry of Defense to upgrade Kfir aircraft for the Sri Lankan Air Force. The deal includes replacing the aircraft's basic avionics with the advanced 4+ generation fighter aircraft avionics in order to one day integrate advanced radar, sensors, communication systems, and new helmets. The upgrade process will also include transfer of knowledge and skills for refurbishment to Sri Lankan Air Force personnel. The upgrades will be completed in cooperation with Sri Lanka's Air Force and in their local facilities.

The Kfir, when first developed, was a game-changer on the battlefield with its ability to carry heavy ammunition and reach enemy targets in a precise manner. The decision to upgrade the aircraft now, was based in part, on the successful completion of this process in the Colombian Air Force. In 2012 and 2018, the Colombian Air Force's Kfir fleet participated in the United States Red Flag exercise, alongside the U.S. Air Force and other air forces. The Kfir displayed exceptional capabilities throughout the exercise, far better than the F15, F16 and other participating aircraft.

IAI Executive VP and GM of IAIs Aviation Group, Yossi Melamed, said, I am proud that IAI's Kfir has been chosen by customers around the world, including in the United States and as the Columbian Air Force's primary fighter jet. I am grateful to Sri Lanka's Air Force for choosing to renew their Kfir selection and continue using the Kfir as their Multi-Role Combat Aircraft. I believe this deal is an early step in preparing for future upgrades to the advanced model KNG (Kfir New Generation)."

IAIs Aviation Group has many years of experience upgrading military and commercial aircraft. The group is responsible for all manned aircraft, including executive jets, avionics, structural assemblies, MRO, conversion of passenger airplanes to freighter configuration, etc. The Aviation Groups customers include air forces, airlines, and major defense companies, including the Israel Air Force, U. S. Air Force, Sri Lanka Air Force, Colombia Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and more.
The System Isnt There To Protect Us From Criminals, Its To Protect Criminals From Us

by Caitlin Johnstone

Iraq war architect Donald Rumsfeld has died. Not in a prison cell in The Hague, not murdered by bombs or bullets, but peacefully in his home, surrounded by loved ones, a week and a half shy of his 89th birthday.

The imperial media are giving their fallen master a kings tribute, with headlines describing the psychopathic war criminal as a cunning leader, a man of honor and conviction, or simply as Former defense secretary at helm of Iraq, Afghanistan wars.

The cancerous Washington Post, who just the other day mocked the life of the late antiwar hero Mike Gravel with an obituary branding him the gadfly senator from Alaska with flair for the theatrical, describes the child killer Rumsfeld as the influential but controversial Bush defense secretary in its headline about his death.

The New York Times wasnt much better. Take the headline Mike Gravel, Unconventional Two-Term Alaska Senator, Dies at 91  He made headlines by fighting for an oil pipeline and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud. After 25 years of obscurity, he re-emerged with a quixotic presidential campaign. Compare this to the headline Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary During Iraq War, Is Dead at 88  Mr. Rumsfeld, who served four presidents, oversaw a war that many said should never have been fought. But he said the removal of Saddam Hussein had created a more stable and secure world.

Theres been criticism as well, of course; online sentiments about Rumsfelds death have not been nearly as worshipful and hagiographic as theyve been toward other disgusting war whores like John McCain. But in the end all that matters is that he lived a long, full life, without ever having faced even the slightest single consequence for the horrors he unleashed upon our world; without even so much as sustaining any meaningful damage to his reputation.

This despite the fact that its been public knowledge for years that Rumsfeld began orchestrating the unforgivable invasion of Iraq within hours of the 9/11 attacks and told numerous lies in order to set that invasion in motion. He also oversaw the intervention in Afghanistan which he and his Bush administration cohorts had been planning before 9/11, beginning a decades-long occupation about which the public has been pervasively lied to from the very beginning by US officials in general and by Rumsfeld in particular. (But remember kids, only crazy conspiracy theorists question the official narrative about 9/11.)

When we are little, we are taught that we live in a nation of laws, where bad guys are thrown in prison by the good guys who are in charge of things. Because our mental programming continues for the rest of our lives in the form of mass-scale propaganda designed to manufacture consent for the status quo, most of us tend to hold onto this childish model of the world to some extent throughout adulthood.

In reality, exactly zero percent of the worlds worst people are in prison, but some of the best people are. The fact that Donald Rumsfeld lived a long life of freedom while Julian Assange wastes away in Belmarsh Prison proves the world doesnt work the way we were taught in school. The very worst bad guys are not put in prison by the good guys who run things, because the very worst bad guys are the ones who run things.

The system isnt designed to protect us from societys worst, its designed to protect societys worst from us. Its designed to keep us turning the gears of industry without looking around and noticing that were all getting fucked in the ass by an alliance of plutocrats and security state insiders who only care about power and money. Its designed to keep us too busy and propagandized to use the power of our numbers to take back what the bastards have stolen from us, and to make sure theres enough guns on their side to kill us all dead if we try.

Donald Rumsfeld was all the worst things about our world. He perfectly embodied the corrupt, bloodthirsty, ecocidal, omnicidal, oppressive, exploitative, deceitful status quo that is driving humanity toward extinction. The US-centralized empire is Donald Rumsfeld. It might as well have his face and his name.

Dont let his passing fool you: Donald Rumsfeld is dead, but he is also as alive as ever. He lives on in the continued violence he helped initiate in the Middle East. In the death and destruction rained down by the US and its allies in the name of preserving a unipolar world order that none of us ever asked for. In the dying gasps of starving children under imperial blockades in Yemen and Venezuela. In the thousands of US military bases encircling our planet like a noose. In the war ships and missiles pivoting toward China in preparation for a long-anticipated confrontation which should terrify us all.

Unless we can purge from our cells everything within us that resembles Donald Rumsfeld, there is no future for Homo sapiens on this planet. We must evolve beyond everything he stood for, as individuals, as a society, and as a species, and move into a peaceful and collaborative relationship with each other and with our ecosystem.

Caitlin's articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast, throwing some money into her hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. https://caitlinjohnstone.com
Was He a Missing Member of Cambridge Spy Ring?

by Punsara Amarasinghe *

The memory of Peter Keuneman still echoes in the Sri Lankan political space as a stalwart of Communism, whose contribution made monumental impacts in the post-colonial political trajectories in the island nation. Keunemans political career was a distinguished one as his presence in Sri Lankan parliament remained uninterrupted from 1947 to 1977 and he held a cabinet ministerial position inMrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaikes government in the early 1970s. His political romance with Communist ideology was paradoxical with his affluent upbringing, which reflected the colonial bourgeois standards of pre-independent Sri Lanka under British rule. Peter Keuneman was born to a family of Dutch descendants and his father Justice A.E Keuneman, who happened to be a puisne judge of the Supreme Court provided him with a chance of studying at Cambridge.

Cambridge university between the two world wars embodied the array of radical intellectual transformation in Britain that fervently challenged the arcane ethos that prevailed in the British intelligentsia. The awful circumstance that arose from the Great Depression in 1929 began to make a stir in British society and its rigour had penetrated elite universities like Cambridge. This was the epoch that young Keuneman spent his undergraduate years at Cambridge and it is no wonder how Leftwing ideology had instilled into Peter in the same way as it aspired many other British undergrads came from English public schools. This atmosphere paved the path for the infiltration of Soviet agents on British soil to recruit promising British students as informants. The famous Cambridge spy network, which consisted of Kim Philby, Guy Burges, Donald Mclean and Anthony Blunt was born in this period, in which all the members hailed from privileged social backgrounds. But contrary to this social depiction their beliefs were radical, but simple: the rich had exploited the poor for too long; the only bulwark against this injustice was Soviet Communism, the inner fortress of the world movement.

( Picture of Peter Keuneman meeting a Soviet official in Moscow in 1974 )

Keuneman reached the zenith of his fame at Cambridge by proving his stentorian oratory at the prestigious Cambridge Union where he secured the presidency in 1939 for Michaelmas term. He was the Second Sri Lankan who became the president of the Cambridge Union after Sir James Pieris in 1877. But unlike Pieris era, the majority of the Union in the 30s filled with Communist flamboyance, which echoed the changing political sentiments in Europe that stood between the rise of Fascism and economic crisis. Both successors to Keuneman at Cambridge Union, Mohan Kumaramangalam (India) and Michael Straight (USA ) were staunch Communists, wherein the later spied for the KGB. There was no direct evidence proving Keunemans links to the Soviets till the British National Archives issued some declassified documents in 2019 as a part of a project of Prof. Christopher Andrew, who was the official historian of the British domestic intelligence service MI 5. The historic information revealed from the report suggests that Keuneman may have maintained contacts with some of the Soviet recruiters in prewar Britain. The document released by the National Archives of Britain has unveiled the decisive role played by Soviet agent Arnold Deutch who was known as Otto at Cambridge and his involvement in running the infamous Cambridge spy ring. Yet, it is unclear that Deutch had any particular interest in young Keuneman as a potential informant as the report provided no clear references. But, according to MI 5 document, British Intelligence kept a hawk-eye on Keuneman with his widely recognized fame as the first Communist president of Cambridge. The file numbered KV6/147 was devoted to tracing Keunemans whereabouts, which gives a vivid description of how British intelligence followed his routine during his entire period in Britain. Moreover, the memoirs of famous British leftist historian Eric Hobsbawm provide several remarks on the intellectual charm of Keuneman at Cambridge as he recalled him as dashing, witty and remarkably handsome. These phrases did not come out of the blue as Hobsbawm first fell in love with Keunemans fiance Hedi Stadlen, but she in turn fell in love with Keuneman and the couple tied the knot in 1939. Released MI 5 documents have unfolded how British intelligence cops were suspicious about Hedi as a Soviet spy. Hedi was a Jewish woman, who escaped from the rise of Fascism in Austria and she excelled herself as a brilliant student at Cambridge. Notwithstanding her academic brilliance, Heid and Kenumn were watched by British intelligence. However, throughout his stay in Cambridge, British authorities could not find a direct trace of Keunemans involvement in espionage. Yet, the report released by the British State Archives has indicated some of the links that existed between Peter Keuneman and Guy Burges, who was one of the main faces of Cambridge spies. Thus, it is not a mere conjecture to assume Kenumn was a part of a big spy network planted by the Soviets in pre-world war Britain. In particular, the Soviets were well aware of the anti-imperial sentiments hidden among the students who came from the British colonies and it favoured their purpose of manipulating them under the pretext of word revolution.

Keuneman joined the socialist forces in the Spanish civil war in the same manner as Kim Philby did, but the success of the socialists in Spain was short-lived before the ruthlessness of General Franco. Just after the outbreak of the Second World War, Keuneman returned to Sri Lanka and became the first general secretary of the Ceylon Communist Party in 1943. From 1947 to 1977, Keuneman played a crucial role in Sri Lankas leftist politics, which reached its pinnacle when he became the cabinet minister of housing and construction in Sirimavo Bandaranaikes government in 1970.

Its been now nearly 25 years since Keuneman passed away after an illustrious political career. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union certainly took a keen interest in him as their Communist acolyte in Sri Lanka and this was closely monitored by the Western intelligence agents based in Colombo. The interview given by former American diplomat George G.B Griffin, who served as the Second Secretary in the US embassy in Colombo in 1962 to Charles Stuart Kennedy in 2002 provides an interesting set of information on KGB activities in Sri Lanka.Griffins reminiscences on the Soviet diplomatic community in Colombo affirms the grip they maintained among the local politicians in Sri Lanka and Griffin has mentioned Peter Keunemans name as a zealous Communist leader, who maintained a closer relationship with Moscow.

None of the above-stated sources provides an explicit reference to brand Peter Keuneman as a Soviet mole. Even if he chose the path of serving the interests of the Soviets, it should be evaluated based on the depth of his ideological conviction in a different era. Those who chose the path of betraying their country for Soviet interests like notorious Kim Philby committed their treason in good faith under their deep idealistic position, which showed the Soviet Union as the last resort of the commoners in their battle against capitalism. Therefore, today's interpretation toward characters like Peter Keuneman should be lenient as they were products of their own ideological integrity.

(Punsara Amarasinghe is a visiting scholar at Science Po, Paris and reading for his PhD at Scuola Superiore Sant Anna, Pisa, Italy. He previously held two research fellowships at Center for Global Legal Studies, University of Wisconsin Madison and Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Punsara can be reached at punsaraprint10@gmail.com)
In recent weeks, vaccines have become a hard sell in Florida. The drop-off is an indication Florida providers and health officials will need to work harder to use up the more than 8.4 million doses allocated but not used.
My fault has been that I was trying to make the employees responsible, hold them accountable and ameliorate their performance, especially those whose work has been over-rated but fall well short of their positions, Verma wrote. Because I exhumed deception, incompetency and millions of dollars of wasteful spending, my efforts, understandably, were met with resistance. And the disgruntled employees found a sympathetic ear in you. You trusted them more than me. This encouraged them to behave in an insubordinate manner, undermine my authority and set a bad example for the others to follow.
My mother loved this town. She had this store here for a long time. ... when she first got the place here, she said, hey, I got the store in the WTC! You know what that is? I said, the World Trade Center!? and then she clarified that it was the Weston Town Center.
1:38 a.m.: Rescue workers are told to keep a safe distance by the incident commander, who reports that the remaining standing portion of the building is at risk of further collapse. Units on the scene report seeing people on the balconies of the remaining portion of the building with no way to escape. Stand your ground, keep in a safe spot. We will get to those individuals. Notify them as best as you can at this time, a commander calls out over the radio.
For several days, Burkett shared Elishevas story far and wide. After Bidens visit was announced, the girls mother, Soriya Cohen, bought her a new blue and white dress for the occasion. Her teenage brother was the first one in the family chosen to meet Biden. He had rushed home from a kibbutz in Israel as soon as he heard about the collapse.
The Malaga Carmen Thyssen Museum (Museo Carmen Thyssen Malaga) is home to a painting entitled Returning to the Monastery. This is a work by the Spanish painter Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala who was born on 2 July 1841. Other sources however claim his birthdate as 12 July 1841 and others even 2 July 1842.

Eduardo grew up in Bilbao, into an enlightened and large family. His father was a founder and director of the Santiago de Vizcaya school of humanities. Eduardo had twenty-two brothers and sisters, and, it appears many of them excelled in various branches of the arts and sciences as well.

When Eduardo was 15, his family moved to Madrid where he was enrolled at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Later, he went to Paris to study but his application to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was denied. After his returning to Madrid, he started his painting career.

At the age of 20, Eduardo was commissioned to create decorative paintings in the quarters of the future king, Alfonso XII at the Royal Palace of Madrid (Palacio Real de Madrid). In 1862 and 1864, the painter was awarded medals at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts. In 1870, Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala conquered even the French capital where he won the gold medal at the Paris Salon for his painting The Education of a Prince.

The Spanish painter was also applauded in England. After a showing in London, one of his paintings was purchased by Charles Dickens. Another work by Zamacois y Zabala was sold in London at the end of the last century. In 1999, The Caf of the Swallows was bought for GBP 10,350 at Christie's. The painter died in the peak of his career in 1871, after a sudden disease, aged 29.

In the Malaga Carmen Thyssen Museum you can see his 1868 painting - oil on canvas - Returning to the Monastery, also popularly named Taming the Donkey.

This is another version of the painting on copper with the same title. Return to the Monastery is indeed a comical depiction of a group of Franciscans returning to the monastery after a visit to the market in the village. The focus of the composition is the anecdotal plight of the bald monk in the foreground who is unable to control the donkey. After this work was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1866, art critics wrote that the painter's picturesque and grotesque pictures had the attraction of the bizarre and the perfect.
The number of plans being submitted for photovoltaic plants across Malaga province has sparked concern in several towns that are worried about the environmental impact the schemes, and their power distribution networks, will have on their local areas.

The towns of Casares, Jimena de la Frontera, Gaucin, San Martin del Tesorillo and Castellar de la Frontera are the latest to unite to fight the plans and they are calling on the Junta de Andalucia for a moratorium on applications for the solar panel farms.

The towns mayors met on Thursday, 1 July, to demand that the projects to install photovoltaic plants in the local area be put on hold until regulations are drawn up to guarantee that the implementation of the renewable energy installations is done in a sustainable" way with minimum environmental and economic impact.

According to Jose Carrasco, from Casares, Our objective is that the installation of photovoltaic plants is carried out in a sustainable and planned way, so that they do not have a great impact on the landscape or the environment, and nor do they harm the development of economic sectors such as agriculture or tourism.

Each of the town councils is working, within its powers, to try regulate the implementation of these types of facilities at the local level, although the Spanish government or the Junta de Andalucia are the bodies who will process them, and therefore they are also the ones who will have the last word," said Carrasco yesterday.

At present, there are plans for 75 photovoltaic projects in Malaga and the provincial government is calling for a working party to be set up, involving town councils, the Diputacion, the Junta de Andalucia and the national government to find solutions to manage the growth of the number schemes.
The beneficial effects of the Covid-19 vaccination programme has seen the number of coronavirus deaths and patients admitted to hospital fall, but the element that characterises the final part of the fourth wave of the pandemic is that the number of infections among young people has soared.

On Thursday, 1 July, the Junta de Andalucias Ministry of Health reported 419 new Covid-19 cases in Malaga province, some 102 more than on Wednesday, no deaths (in fact, no deaths were recorded in any Andalusian province) and 220 people who have recovered from the disease.

The consequence of the increase in cases is that the cumulative incidence rate stands at 181.1 infections per 100,000 inhabitants in 14 days, which represents an increase of 7.4 points compared to the previous day. The Andalusian rate rose by 3.3 points to 166.3. Only Cordoba (247.6) and Granada (218.6) have a higher incidence rate than Malaga.

If the seven-day rate is analysed, there has been an increase of 10 points going from 84 to 94. In Andalucia as a whole the rate is 78.6, a rise of 3.9 points.

The increase in new cases has occurred mainly in the younger population, aged 15 to 29, and an age group which, in addition to not being vaccinated, stands out for being more mobile and for its social relationships, which have increased after the end of the academic year.

The difference between this wave and the previous ones is that the higher number of infections does not, generally, lead to an increase in hospital admissions and deaths from Covid.

Another area that has seen a substantial improvement is the number of patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19. In Malaga hospitals there are 90 patients with Covid admitted (11 more than on Wednesday), of which 13 are in intensive care units (one fewer than the day before). In Andalucia there are 512 hospitalised patients with the virus (nine fewer than Wednesday); of which 119 are still in an intensive care unit (six fewer than the previous day).

Despite the fact that deaths and hospital admissions from coronavirus are in decline as there is an increasing population vaccinated, the Juntas Minister of Health, Jesus Aguirre, expressed concern about the increase in infections among young people. For this reason, he sent a message to young people and their parents in which he said we must be very careful and maintain preventive measures. "I understand that they want to travel, but we cannot relax," said Aguirre, who admitted that the message that the outdoor mask can be dispensed with, if social distancing cannot be maintained, has not helped.
Some people hung on to them through nostalgia and others still had them lying around the house, meaning to change them for euros one day. But it's too late now. The Bank of Spain had set Wednesday 30 June 2021 as the final day that pesetas could be changed, and a lot of people left it to the very last minute, judging by the queues that built up at the bank's headquarters in Madrid and its 15 branches around the country, including Malaga.

It is 18 years since the euro came into circulation, which is more than enough time to get rid of the old pesetas, which had been the Spanish currency since 19 October 1868, by decree of the provisional government after Isabel II was overthrown. But the Spanish tendency to leave everything to the last minute meant that dozens of people in Malaga had congregated outside the doors of the Bank of Spain in the Paseo del Parque on Monday this week.

Outside the Bankof Spain in Madrid. / SUR

The sun was blazing and the temperature was high: the 'terral' wind had raised the thermometers to nearly 35C, but even so about 30 people waited outside for well over an hour to change the pesetas that some in the country had kept as a "treasure", although on average they were only swapping about 100 euros' worth.

According to the latest data from the Bank of Spain, in May this year people in this country were in possession of 132.94 billion pesetas in banknotes (799 million euros) and 130.61 billion pesetas in coins (785 million euros).

Pesetas in circulation

The bank estimates that 45 per cent of the peseta coins which were in circulation after the euro was introduced would never be exchanged, because they would remain in the hands of collectors, or they were damaged, had been lost or had left the country at some point in the pockets of international tourists.

As a general rule, all the peseta banknotes and coins which people wanted to exchange had been issued after 1939. Those produced between 1936 and 1939 (during the Spanish Civil War) could also be changed, but only after being analysed for authenticity by experts at the Bank of Spain.

For those who were waiting in the sun outside the bank in Malaga on Monday, there were signs to explain the process of exchanging the pesetas for euros. In the case of coins, the Bank of Spain was using an express system whereby they could be handed over to be counted later and the euro equivalent credited to the holder's bank account if they so wished.
Energy provider Iberdrola, Spain's second largest company, is one of several massive corporations set to receive a chunk of the EU's post-Covid funds. But this week, in a case of spectacularly bad timing, the Spanish high court placed its CEO Ignacio Galan under investigation in connection with allegations of bribery, fraud and spying that date as far back as 2004.

Details emerged of Gallan's alleged subterfuge in late 2019, when two online Spanish papers claimed that he had employed former police chief Jose Villarejo in 2009. Allegedly, Villarejo was tasked with obtaining incriminating information on Florentino Perez - president of Real Madrid and construction giant ACS - in an attempt to block a hostile takeover. Earlier in 2019, an internal investigation had found that, between 2004 and 2017, Iberdrola used a firm run by Villarejo on seventeen occasions, but supposedly just for market analysis. Another company-wide inquiry into the matter last month found no evidence of wrongdoing, (surprising, that), but conceded that the allegations were causing "significant reputational damage".

You're probably already familiar with shape-shifter Villarejo, whose lethal tape recorder has embarrassed dozens of Spain's leading business figures and politicians over the decades. He also appeared in the Juan Carlos scandal last year, having apparently taped the former king's one-time lover, Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, talking about the emeritus monarch's alleged money laundering activities. Villarejo is currently implicated in over twenty investigations, and was held in custody from late 2017 to March this year in connection with a separate bribery case.

Alleged association with this shady spymaster isn't the only scandal to have sullied Iberdrola's reputation, though. In May 2017, the High Court - the same tribunal that's just placed Galan under official investigation - received a complaint from an anti-corruption prosecutor claiming that the energy provider had made an "illicit profit of 20 million eiros" during winter 2013.

Iberdrola was adamant that no fraudulent activity had occurred, even though it was fined 25 million euros in 2015, after competition watchdog CNMC found it guilty of price-rigging in the wholesale electricity market. CNMC discovered that the company had withheld electricity from several of its plants throughout the winter of 2013, thus forcing more expensive providers to enter the market and drive up prices - meaning, of course, that Iberdrola could charge more per unit as well.

The recently-launched high court investigation doesn't in itself signify that Galan is guilty, nor will it necessarily result in formal charges - but it adds to the reputational damage Iberdrola has sustained over the last few years. And given that the multi-billion dollar company is also - bafflingly - a potential recipient of EU handouts, the timing couldn't be worse. If any cash does go Iberdrola's way, Brussels better keep an eye on it!
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Is this the price we have to pay just to get people to sit down and talk?

The events of the past few days are deeply regrettable. Destroying what we have is not the way to develop a country; neither is killing the citizens. Was it too much to ask to make a meaningful and sincere effort to engage the petitioners? Did it have to cost peoples lives, leave businesses destroyed, traumatise our children and create hooligans of others? Did we have to shut down social media communication? Are we at a point of no return and is this how we will resolve conflict henceforth?

Questions

These and many other questions emerge from the ruins we see all around us today, not least the loss of lives for some families as security officers set out to restore normality in a situation that had spiralled totally out of control. The change MPs cannot say for sure that this is the outcome they desired when motivating their call for an amendment of the Constitution. They were evidently overwhelmed by the chaotic developments that unfolded and it is safe to say they too underestimated the extent to which peoples anger and frustration could go. At this point, the one thing we all want answers to is; then what? Where do we go from here?

What do we do to make sure we never have to endure a similar revolt in future? It would be very unfortunate if government would continue to be oblivious to the anger demonstrated by the people who had always been regarded as respectful and peaceful.

Dialogue

A press conference had been called for 2pm at Ludzidzini yesterday and it was anticipated that a national dialogue would be put on the table. Sadly not. However, are all parties ready to engage if the Acting Prime Minister, Themba Masuku, remains adamant that denying people their right to peacefully present grievances to their elected representatives was the right thing to do  despite this stance having ignited the chaos? The acting PM put a further dent on the widely held belief that tinkhundla centres serve as forums for political debates by issuing an email to where people can send the petitions then shut down the internet. Failure by the Speaker of Parliament to allow this national matter to be debated until a logical resolution was found proved to be another disappointment in leadership that has caused irreparable harm to peoples lives and livelihoods. How do you close a debate without a way forward on a matter as divisive as this one?

I could not agree more with Business Eswatini (BE) which has said engaging in talks is not an admission of weakness. Much to the contrary though, it is a demonstration of sound leadership when it counts the most! This is a call to do away with our egos, arrogance, perceptions and hardened positions each may have about the other. These are the impediments to our peaceful development that have played a huge role in creating a divided society when the views and opinions of those deemed critical of the Tinkhundla System of Government are not worthy of an ear. Unless this is addressed, any political engagement would remain a talk shop. The gravity of the matter is attested to by the attention it has drawn from the international community. Several countries have expressed deep concern at the prevailing situation in the country, with some urging all political actors and civil society to engage in meaningful dialogue in order to resolve the current political challenges facing the country. They are basically telling us the obvious.

Hope

There was, perhaps a glimmer of hope following the responsibility taken by Minister of ICT Princess Sikhanyiso, who apologised on behalf of the countrys leadership for not acting soon enough to heed the concerns of the public. We appreciate the effort, but the countrys political and traditional hierarchy places this important matter above her level. For a battered and bruised country, the ball was now in the Kings court. The King has spoken through the acting governor of Ludzidzini and called for calm to save what remains of our country. Despite this, it would appear government is yet to define a concrete way forward. Masuku has said no dialogue can take place just yet, but wont say when. BE has summed it up adequately; If this is a test, it is one we cannot afford to fail as future generations and our history books will judge us harshly. Its time for a ceasefire. Let us all sit down and engage in genuine dialogue.
Saudi Arabia is planning to target international transit passenger traffic with its new national airline, going head-to-head with other regional carriers Dubai's Emirates and Qatar Airways and revving up regional competition, said a report.

The new airline would boost international routes and echo existing Gulf carriers by carrying people from one country to another via connections in the kingdom, known in the industry as sixth-freedom traffic, reported Reuters citing two people familiar with the matter.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had on Tuesday announced plans to launch a second national airline as part of a broader strategy to turn the kingdom into a global logistics hub as it seeks to diversify from oil.

The strategy marks a shift for Saudi Arabia whose other airlines, like state-owned Saudia and its low cost subsidiary flyadeal, mostly operate domestic services and point-to-point flights to and from the oil-rich country of 35 million people, it stated.

The creation of another flag carrier would catapult Saudi Arabia into the 5th rank globally in terms of air transit traffic, official state media SPA reported, without giving details on when and how the airline would be created.

Prince Mohammad has been spearheading a push for Saudi Arabia, the biggest Arab economy and the largest country in the Gulf geographically, to boost non-oil revenues to about SR45 billion ($12 billion) by 2030.

Making the kingdom a global logistics hub, which includes the development of ports, rail and road networks, would increase the transport and logistics sector's contribution to gross domestic product to 10% from 6%, state news agency said.

With current flag bearer Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia), the kingdom has one of the smallest airline networks in the region relative to its size. Saudia has struggled with losses for years and like global peers, has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.

"The comprehensive strategy aims to position Saudi Arabia as a global logistics hub connecting the three continents," Prince Mohammed was quoted as saying in the SPA report.

"This will help other sectors like tourism, Hajj and Umrah to achieve their national targets," he added.
Alliance, OH (44601)

Today

Sunshine and clouds mixed. High near 90F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly clear. Low 71F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.
AP-Telangana states at loggerheads on generating hydropower

Vijayawada, Jul 1 (UNI) The Telangana governments decision to generate hydropower at three projects, located across the river Krishna, snowballed into a major controversy as Andhra Pradesh government is strongly objecting the wasting of Krishna water for hydroelectric power generation.

The Telangana government has deployed a large number of police personnel at the Pulichintala project, located across the river Krishna, upstream of the Prakasam barrage.

The Telangana government started generating hydropower on June 29 without consulting the AP government. The Pulichintala project is located between Guntur district in Andhra Pradesh and Nalgonda district in Telangana state.
Safety audits mandated at all stages of road development to reduce accidents: Gadkari 05 Jul 2021 | 4:48 PM New Delhi, Jul 5 (UNI) Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari on Monday said that safety audits have been mandated at all stages of road development to reduce accidents. see more..

SC expresses shock over scrapped Sec 66A of IT Act still being used to book people 05 Jul 2021 | 4:14 PM New Delhi, Jul 5 (UNI) The Supreme Court on Monday said it was amazing and shocking to learn that individuals are still being booked and tried under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, even six years after the apex court scrapped the provision as unconstitutional and a violation of free speech. see more..

ED arrests Shakti Bhog Foods Ltd CMD Kewal Krishan Kumar 05 Jul 2021 | 3:37 PM New Delhi, Jul 5 (UNI) Enforcement Directorate (ED) has arrested Chief Managing Director Kewal Krishan Kumar of Shakti Bhog Foods Limited under the Prevention of Money-laundering Act, officials said. see more..

UNI NEWS DIGEST AT 1500 HRS FOR JULY 5, 2021 05 Jul 2021 | 2:56 PM New Delhi:India records lowest single-day rise in Covid '+'ve cases since March (DI1)

Srinagar:Hold J&K Assembly polls after restoration of statehood: PAGD (DR6)

New Delhi:PM Modi to address CoWIN Global Conclave (DI5)

:Documentary on Delhi's air pollution only Indian film in official selection at 74th Cannes festival (DI2)

Chennai:Life back to full normal in TN as uniform relaxations comes into force (MS1)

Guwahati:Assam: Two-child policy finds support from indigenous Muslims (CA3)

Manila:Death toll in Philippine military plane crash up to 50 - Reports (DF3)

Mumbai:Mah Assly extends Shakti Bill report deadline (BY4)

:Sensex up over 300 pts (DC3)

Bhubaneswar: Three athletes from KIIT university selected for Tokyo Olympic (SPD1)

UNI AVK PS1456. see more..
Kolkata, Jul 2 (UNI) The noisy scene was witnessed on the opening day of the West Bengal Assembly budget as the BJP legislators jumped into the well and shouted slogans while governor Jagdeep Dhankar began his formal inaugural speech, which was cut to about four minutes only due to ruckus.

As the session began around 2 pm, the governor began to address the written speech, the opposition BJP legislators jumped into the well and shouted slogans together creating a ruckus in which the speech of the governor was hardly audible.

However, the governor's address came to an end in about four minutes and then he left the assembly.

Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari later in a media conference alleged that the writ had no mention regarding the violence post the counting scenario in West Bengal.

At the beginning of the session, the BJP MLAs started protesting in the assembly hall. The governor tried to read the budget speech during the protest.

But Governor Jagdeep Dhankar finished his speech in just four minutes.

This was the first day of the budget session after TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee led her party to return and formed the third consecutive government since 2011.

In the 294-seat assembly for which the poll was fought for 292 seats in which the Trinamool Congress won a record 213 seats and BJP gained 77. The CPI(M) led Left Front and Congress drew a blank for the first time.

While TMC's 209 MLAs attended, the BJP had 74 members. BJP's two MLAs quit the seats as they opted to hold their Parliament membership.

BJP MLA from Krishnanagar Uttar Mukul Roy, who returned to TMC, was seen sitting at the opposition bench with BJP MLAs. BJP leader Mr Adhikari has already written to West Bengal Assembly Speaker Biman Banerjee to suspend Mukul Roy under anti-defection law.

Earlier, the Governor laid a wreath at the statue of Ambedkar in the Assembly premises.

Then Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Speaker of the Legislative Assembly Biman Banerjee came forward to receive him.

They handed over the wreath to the governor.

UNI PC RN


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Sheriff Seeks Help With Stolen Farm Equipment

By West Kentucky Star Staff

MCCRACKEN COUNTY - The McCracken County Sheriffs Department is seeking the public's help in locating stolen farm equipment.The Sheriff's Department says that a 1990 Green and Yellow John Deere 950 tractor and King Cutter Yellow Tiller were stolen from a farm on Woodville Rd in West Paducah sometime between June 26 and June 29. They say the suspects left the scene going westbound on Woodville Rd.Anyone with information is asked to contact the McCracken County Sheriffs Department at 270-444-4719, mccrackencountysheriff.com, or your local law enforcement agency. Information also may be provided anonymously through West Kentucky Crime Stoppers by texting WKY and your tip to 847411 (tip411). You may also contact WKY Crime Stoppers at 270-444-TELL.
KY 1124 Reopens After Culvert Replacement

By West Kentucky Star Staff

GRAVES COUNTY - The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet has reopened a section of KY 1124 in Graves County.KY 1124 had been closed between Samuel Drive and Patterson Lane since June 7 to allow for the Minnow Creek Culvert to be replaced.Due to weather delays, the replacement took a week longer than anticipated.The site currently has a temporary driving surface. The culvert area will have to settle for several months before crews can add a more permanent asphalt cap.The culvert was replaced with a pre-fabricated aluminum arch culvert. The pre-fabricated structures can be installed in weeks instead of months and are less expensive than a traditional concrete culvert.
Alternate Route Avoids I-24 Holiday Bottleneck

By West Kentucky Star Staff

WESTERN KENTUCKY - With the potential for massive traffic backups during the busy July 4th holiday weekend, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet is suggesting an alternate route to avoid the extended work zone along Interstate 24 in Caldwell and Trigg counties.That work zone includes ten miles of 2-way traffic running on the eastbound lanes with a centerline barrier wall.Transportation officials urge motorists to consider detouring onto I-69 at Exit 25 near Calvert City and taking US 68 through Land Between the Lakes to rejoin I-24 at Cadiz Exit 65.The suggested detour adds about 10 minutes of driving time, but avoids the potential for backups on I-24.It is the same alternate route that was promoted during the 2020 construction season.
Local Counties Get State Funds For Road Work

By West Kentucky Star Staff

WESTERN KENTUCKY - Ballard County, Graves County and Hickman County will receive a share of transportation funding allocated by the state for 177 Kentucky road projects.Ballard County will receive $168,377. Graves County will receive $212,000, while Hickman County will receive $307,980.A total of $11.8 million from the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet will support 177 projects across the state that include resurfacing, patching and sealing, storm drain work, slip repair and in one case a connector road for economic development.In each case, the county fiscal court or city council approved for funding is responsible for administering the work and will be reimbursed by KYTC.
Local Schools Get Grants for Resource Centers

By West Kentucky Star Staff

WESTERN KENTUCKY - The Commonwealth of Kentucky has awarded $15 million in grants to family resource and youth services centers in several area school districts.On Thursday, the Governor's office announced grants to 150 local Family Resource and Youth Services Centers from the second round of the Governors Emergency Education Relief Fund 2. They will fund educational support services needed due to COVID-19s impact on schools, youth and families, with a focus on early childhood education and child care, as well as family crisis and mental health counseling.The grants will be managed by the Division of Family Resource and Youth Services Centers in the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services.School districts in our area receiving grants include:Laker Cove FRC, Laker Lighthouse FRC, Laker Anchor YSC, Harbour YSCThe Family ConnectionFulton Co Family Ties CenterGraves Central FRC, Fancy Farm FRC, Sedalia FRC, SAFE FRC, Wingo FRC, Family Ties YSC, Summit YSCCardinal Connection YSC, Family First FRCRoots to Wings YSCF.A.C.E FRC, Mayfield YSCKids First FRC, Lone Oak FRYSC, Flash FRYSC, Reidland FRYSC, Mustangs YSC, Greyhound FRYSC, Reidland FRCMurray FRYSCKids Co Too FRC, Morgan FRC, Kids Co 1 FR, Tornado S.T.A.R YSCHorizon Youth Services Center
Wickliffe Drug Charges For Missouri Couple

By West Kentucky Star Staff

WICKLIFFE - A Missouri couple was arrested on several drug charges following a traffic stop in Wickliffe.Ballard County Sheriff's Office said James Cook and Lacinda Morgan of Sikeston were stopped on Green Street on Sunday night. During the stop deputies discovered that Cook had an outstanding arrest warrant in Ballard County from 2020 for failing to appear in court.Deputies also used a K9 unit to help search the vehicle and allegedly found methamphetamine, marijuana and other items associated with illegal drug use.Cook and Morgan taken to the Ballard County Jail. Both were charged with trafficking controlled substance 1st degree, 1st offense (>2 grams Methamphetamine), possession of a controlled substance 1st degree, 1st offense (Methamphetamine), possession of marijuana, and possession of drug paraphernalia.
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-01 22:57:11|Editor: huaxia

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NEW DELHI, July 1 (Xinhua) -- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi Thursday paid tributes to services and sacrifices made by doctors during the COVID-19 pandemic on the National Doctor's Day.

Modi was addressing the doctors virtually during an event organized by Indian Medical Association (IMA).

He thanked doctors on behalf of 1.3 billion Indians for their services during the difficult times in the last one and a half year of the pandemic.

According to IMA, over 1,500 doctors lost their lives during the ongoing pandemic in India.

"Acknowledging the doctor's contribution, the Prime Minister recalled their heroic efforts during the pandemic and paid homage to those who laid down their lives in the service of humanity," a statement issued by Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said.

"The Prime Minister said that our scientists and doctors have found solutions for all the challenges thrown by COVID-19. Our doctors are facing this new and fast mutating virus on the basis of their experience and expertise," said the statement. "Credit goes to hard-working doctors, healthcare workers, frontline workers for saving many lives."

Modi underlined the focus of the government on strengthening healthcare and said finances were allocated to tackle the pandemic during the first and second wave of the pandemic.

He reiterated his government's commitment for the safety of doctors. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-01 23:20:23|Editor: huaxia

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People queue up for check-in in the departure hall at the Brussels Airport in Zaventem, Belgium, July 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)

To counter the expected upsurge, Kluge again called upon the region to "remain disciplined" and for citizens to take up vaccines when offered.

"Vaccines are effective against the Delta variant. Not one dose but two doses. Delays in getting vaccinated cost lives and economies, and the slower we vaccinate, the more variants will emerge."

COPENHAGEN, July 1 (Xinhua) -- World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge on Thursday cited increased mixing, travel, gatherings, and easing of social restrictions as the main culprits ending a ten-week decline in the number of COVID-19 cases in Europe.

"Last week, the number of cases rose by 10 percent. This is taking place in the context of a rapidly evolving situation - a new variant of concern, the Delta variant - and in a region where despite tremendous efforts by the member states, millions remain unvaccinated," said Kluge at an online press conference in Copenhagen.

He noted that "Delta variant overtakes alpha very quickly through multiple and repeated introductions, and is already translating into increased hospitalizations and deaths."

The WHO European Region, according to Klug, is expected to be "Delta dominant" by August. He also warns that new variants, deficit in vaccine uptake and increased social mixing would cause a new wave of excess hospitalizations and deaths before the autumn in the region.

To counter the expected upsurge, Kluge again called upon the region to "remain disciplined" and for citizens to take up vaccines when offered.

"Vaccines are effective against the Delta variant. Not one dose but two doses. Delays in getting vaccinated cost lives and economies, and the slower we vaccinate, the more variants will emerge."

Again, Kluge lamented over the clear disparity in vaccine equality between rich and poor countries in Europe and noted that it was "unacceptable" that vaccine coverage was 24 percent throughout the entire region, "far from the recommended 80 percent coverage of the adult population."

"With these figures, nowhere is the pandemic over, and it would be very wrong for anyone - citizen and policymakers - to assume that it is."

Concerned about the current EURO 2020 tournament as a spreader event, as numbers of fans throughout the region had returned to their home countries infected with the virus, Kluge reiterated his message of caution and called upon all fans to wear masks "especially indoor and in crowds."

"The stakes are still high. COVID-19's trajectory in the coming weeks and months depends on the decisions and actions of us as individuals, communities, and as governments, we will take now and the weeks ahead, solidarity pays off!"

People wait after being vaccinated at a vaccination center in Brussels, Belgium, June 8, 2021. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 01:36:17|Editor: huaxia

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A ceremony is held to celebrate the successful installation of a steel "air corridor," or link bridge, between the twin towers being built at the central business district (CBD) in Egypt's new administrative capital, on June 30, 2021. (Xinhua/Sui Xiankai)

The China-built steel "air corridor," with a span of 31.4 meters and a weight of 161 tons, has been described as the Corridor of China-Egypt Friendship or the Gateway to China-Egypt Cooperation.

CAIRO, July 1 (Xinhua) -- After 18 hours of hard work by the China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC), the iconic air corridor connecting two office buildings in the central business district (CBD) of Egypt's new administrative capital was successfully lifted and installed on Wednesday.

The skyway made of steel, which has a span of 31.4 meters and weighs 161 tons, has been cordially described as the Corridor of China-Egypt Friendship or the Gateway to China-Egypt Cooperation.

This is the first time that the CSCEC, which has contracted to build the CBD of Egypt's new administrative capital, adopted in Egypt the efficient technique of assembling the air corridor on the ground before lifting and fitting it in mid-air, which saves both time and effort and lessens safety risks.

Photo taken on June 30, 2021 shows the steel "air corridor", or link bridge, installed between the twin towers being built at the central business district (CBD) of Egypt's new administrative capital. (Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

The air corridor was finally placed between the 29th and 30th floor, after being lifted about 141 meters above the ground.

Zhang Shanyou, the chief engineer of CSCEC Egypt, expressed his gratitude for the trust and support of the relevant partners as well as the hard work of all the Chinese and Egyptian staff.

"In face of the COVID-19 impact, we took active measures to cooperate with the Egyptian government in ensuring the livelihood, employment and production in the country. The cooperation and friendship between China and Egypt prove to have become deeper and stronger through the test of the pandemic," said Zhang.

Photo taken on June 30, 2021 shows the close-up view of the steel "air corridor," or link bridge, installed between the twin towers being built at the central business district (CBD) in Egypt's new administrative capital. (Xinhua/Sui Xiankai)

Zhang Yiqing, the manager of the Package Four (P4) project that includes the air corridor, said the success in lifting and fitting the air corridor is an important achievement made by the Chinese and Egyptian employees through their joint hard work despite the COVID-19 epidemic.

All the P4 staff will exert their best effort to achieve the perfect performance of the project on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Egypt, he noted.

Being built some 50 km east of Egypt's capital Cairo, the CBD project in the country's new administrative capital covers an area of about 505,000 square meters and includes 20 new high-rise buildings and some municipal facilities. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 03:33:24|Editor: huaxia

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U.S. President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn before departing from the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on Oct. 22, 2018. (Xinhua/Ting Shen)

It's reported that a Manhattan grand jury indicted the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg on Wednesday. U.S. former President Donald Trump isn't expected to be charged in the case.



NEW YORK, July 1 (Xinhua) -- Trump Organization's chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg surrendered to Manhattan District Attorney's Office on Thursday morning as the veteran accountant and the Trump Organization face criminal charges on alleged tax crimes, according to local media reports.

It's reported that a Manhattan grand jury indicted the Trump Organization and Weisselberg on Wednesday.

Weisselberg and the Trump Organization would be arraigned later Thursday at a lower Manhattan court.

U.S. former President Donald Trump isn't expected to be charged in the case.

The charges result from a multi-year investigation by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who doesn't run for re-election and would leave his office at the end of 2021.

Vance has been working on the investigation for around two years covering hush money paid to females on Trump's behalf, tax practices, property valuations and others.

A New York court recently suspended Rudolph Giuliani's law license after ruling that the former New York City mayor and Donald Trump's personal lawyer made demonstrably false and misleading statements on 2020 general election results.

Weisselberg is now being used by the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former U.S. president, according to a statement by the Trump Organization on Thursday.

"The District Attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution involving employee benefits that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would ever think of bringing. This is not justice; this is politics," added the statement.

At the end of May, prosecutors from New York City convened a special grand jury to look into evidence in a criminal investigation involving Trump. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 12:21:58|Editor: huaxia

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by Marwa Yahya

CAIRO, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The Communist Party of China (CPC) is the main factor behind the "Chinese miracle of progress," former Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview.

Upholding the basic principles of prioritizing the interests of the people and the country's development, the party has accomplished unprecedented achievements in political, economic, cultural, environmental, and security fields since its foundation in 1921, said Sharaf.

"The people are the center of the country, this is the CPC's principle," he said, adding that the party's great goal is not only to improve the people's living conditions but also to achieve social development.

Speaking of CPC members who he met and worked with during his dozens of visits to China, he described them as serious, sincere, and full of passion to build a strong country.

The CPC has guided the Chinese people to cast off extreme poverty, he said, noting that more than 700 million people have been lifted out of poverty, accounting for more than 70 percent of the global total poor population, which is one of the greatest achievements in the world's history.

The CPC is also willing to share its successful experience with parties in other countries, Sharaf said, hailing the relations between the CPC and multiple political parties in Egypt as "very strong."

The building of a community with a share future for mankind and the Belt and Road Initiative, he said, are solid pillars for cooperation between the CPC and parties around the world.

"When meeting with the CPC members, it's really important to get inspiration from their policies rather than only talking about joint projects," observed the former prime minister. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 17:36:46|Editor: huaxia

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HOHHOT, July 2(Xinhua) -- A herder has been awarded the highest honor in the Communist Party of China (CPC), the July 1 Medal, for his decades of efforts to improve environment and the lives of herders in border areas in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.



Ting Bater's father Ting Mao was a general who made contribution to the founding of New China. In 1974, 19-year-old Ting, as an educated youth, left the city for Sarultuya Village to learn from peasants.

On northern edge of Hunshandake Sandland, grassland was in danger of desertification in 1980s.

As the Party chief of Sarultuya Village Committee, Ting found the reason behind desertification in 1993 -- Sheep overgrazing.

Ting found sheep dig and eat the roots of grass, while cows only eat the shoots.

In 1998, he proposed substitution of cattle for sheep to curb desertification.

Ting has lived on grassland for 47 years, during which he has brought improvement to both herders income and ecology system.





Produced by Xinhua Global Service
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 18:39:57|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on July 2, 2021 shows the Bagram Airfield after all U.S. and NATO forces evacuated in Parwan province, eastern Afghanistan. All U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan have evacuated the Bagram Airfield near the Afghan capital Kabul, handing over the largest coalition base to the Afghan government troops, a spokesperson of the Afghan Defense Ministry confirmed on Friday. (Photo by Sayed Mominzadah/Xinhua)

KABUL, July 2 (Xinhua) -- All U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan have evacuated the Bagram Airfield near the Afghan capital Kabul, handing over the largest coalition base to the Afghan government troops, a spokesperson of the Afghan Defense Ministry confirmed on Friday.

"All coalition and American troops departed from Bagram Air Base last (Thursday) night. The base was handed over to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). The ANDSF will protect base and use it to combat terrorism," spokesperson Fawad Aman wrote on Twitter.

The Bagram Airfield, some 50 km north of Kabul, served as a main U.S. and NATO military base in Afghanistan over the past two decades.

The transfer of the military base came as security situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated drastically since May 1 when U.S. and NATO troops started to withdraw from the conflict-torn country.

About 3,500 U.S. forces and 7,000 NATO troops will be withdrawn before Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that drew the United States into war in Afghanistan.

The Taliban group welcomed the U.S. withdrawal from the Bagram Airfield. Purported Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid called it a "positive step" in a tweet, urging for the "withdrawal of foreign forces from all parts of the country."

The coalition forces have reportedly handed over most of the nine military bases across Afghanistan to the Afghan side in recent months.

An unknown number of U.S. and NATO forces reportedly remain in a base in central Kabul before all foreign forces leave the country. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 19:42:50|Editor: huaxia

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HONG KONG, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) reported 11 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, taking the total tally to 11,938.

Of the 11 new cases, 10 were imported, involving patients from Britain, Indonesia and Russia. The remaining one, involving a part-time female cleaner working in a quarantine hotel, was untraceable and temporarily classified as a local infection, according to a CHP press briefing.

The cleaner was tested positive for COVID-19 at a mobile testing center, but tested negative for the virus and antibodies after being admitted to the hospital, the CHP said.

Hong Kong launched a COVID-19 vaccination drive on Feb. 26 and more than 3.77 million doses have been administered so far. Some 2.28 million people, or about 33.5 percent of the eligible population, have taken at least one shot of the vaccine, and more than 1.49 million people have been fully vaccinated. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 19:46:15|Editor: huaxia

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YINCHUAN, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Every parent wants the best for their child, and the opportunity to attend a high-quality preschool is no exception.

Shen Ziqi, the mother of a three-year-old boy in Yinchuan, capital of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, thought she was very lucky.

"A friend of mine recommended a private kindergarten and we were all very satisfied with it. The only problem was that the cost was too high," she said. "But this year, we were surprised to find that it had become a public-interest kindergarten, and the price was just one-third of the original."

Public-interest kindergartens are public or private kindergartens that provide quality preschool education at affordable prices.

Preschool education matters as it shapes a child's lifelong habits. It is thought to help children learn social norms and creates an environment in which children can explore, gain a sense of self, play with their peers and build self-confidence.

In the past, the Chinese government put more effort into the popularization of nine-year compulsory education, and many parents were often frustrated to find they faced fierce competition when attempting to send their children to a public kindergarten, or they had to choose a private one at a high cost.

In November 2018, a policy aiming to deepen the reform of preschool education was rolled out by the State Council, kick-starting a three-year campaign to reduce the burden of preschool expenses.

Efforts included expanding existing kindergartens, building new ones -- particularly in rural and poverty-stricken areas -- and absorbing more private kindergartens into the public-interest kindergarten system.

The kindergarten that Shen's son now attends was previously private, charging 3,000 yuan (about 460 U.S. dollars) of various fees per month. Now a public-interest kindergarten, the total monthly fees are less than 1,000 yuan.

Her son has now been attending the kindergarten for nearly a year, and Shen is very content. "My son was relatively young for his class. The food at the school is nutritionally balanced and my son is strong and growing fast," she said.

Data from the Yinchuan Education Bureau shows that now about 84.9 percent of kindergarten children in Yinchuan are enrolled in public-interest kindergartens, up from 22.11 percent in 2018.

Nationally, the gross preschool education enrollment rate reached 85.2 percent last year.

China last year had a total of 291,700 kindergartens in which more than 48 million children were enrolled, with nearly 85 percent of the children attending public-interest kindergartens, according to statistics from the Ministry of Education.

"Subsidies provided by the government greatly eased our financial pressure after we became a public-interest kindergarten," said Sun Huimin, the director of a kindergarten in Yinchuan's Xingqing District.

But kindergarten admission is still no easy feat in many places, and authorities this year vowed to build more kindergartens to further raise the preschool enrollment rate.

In May, the central government earmarked a budget of 19.84 billion yuan for the development of preschool education in 2021, an increase of 1 billion yuan, or 5.31 percent, over the previous year. The funds will be mainly used to improve infrastructure and the teaching quality in early childhood education.

An Yinchuan resident surnamed Min said his son will soon be turning three years old, the minimum age to enter kindergarten. "There are public kindergartens, public-interest kindergartens and private kindergartens near our home, which allow parents to choose freely," said Min. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 19:59:36|Editor: huaxia

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JERUSALEM, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Israel will issue a special edition of coins in appreciation of the role played by medical workers in fighting COVID-19 in the country, Israel's central bank said in a statement on Friday.

These are millions of newly designed 5-new-shekel coins that will be available in the markets.

The issue, approved by the Israeli government following the Bank of Israel's suggestion, will be dedicated to medical teams for their contribution and struggle for the lives and health of the citizens during the pandemic period, the statement said.

The design of the coin was chosen in a competition that included 15 graphic designers, and features a doctor examining a patient.

Such commemorative coins have already been issued in other countries, including Egypt, Italy and France.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said that "Israeli medical teams are at the forefront of the fight against the coronavirus and are doing holy work around the clock from the moment the crisis began."

Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron added that "the successful response to the virus by the Israeli healthcare system is one of the main pillars that helped the Israeli economy overcome the effects of the crisis." Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 20:01:49|Editor: huaxia

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TEHRAN, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Iran on Friday reported 13,836 new COVID-19 cases, taking the country's total infections to 3,232,696.

The pandemic has so far claimed 84,516 lives in Iran, up by 127 in the past 24 hours, the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education reported.

A total of 2,902,140 people have recovered from the disease or been discharged from hospitals across the country, while 3,196 remain in intensive care units, according to the ministry.

By Friday, 4,447,028 people have received first dose of coronavirus vaccines in the country, with 1,754,545 taking both doses.

Iranian health authorities have warned against a new surge of COVID-19 in the country as the number of infections have been rising steadily in southern and central Iran over the past days.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called for strict observance of health protocols and relevant restrictions to avert a fifth wave of the pandemic in the country, according to Tasnim news agency. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 20:59:47|Editor: huaxia

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LANZHOU, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The 27th China Lanzhou Investment and Trade Fair is scheduled to kick off on July 8 in Lanzhou, capital of northwest China's Gansu Province, local authorities said.

The five-day event will focus on deepening economic and trade cooperation and jointly building a green Silk Road, with exhibitions and conferences held online and offline, said Zhang Yinghua, head of the provincial commerce department, during a press conference held Friday afternoon.

The fair plans to set up a virtual pavilion, where promotion and negotiation activities and the release of information can be realized online, according to Zhang.

Nepal and Uruguay have been invited as the guests of honor at this year's fair, said Zhang Baojun, director of the provincial foreign affairs office, during the press conference.

Officials of embassies and consulates in China and representatives of business associations from 14 countries, and representatives from international organizations including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and ASEAN-China Centre are expected to attend the event.

The fair will also feature more than 30 economic and trade negotiation and promotion activities.

First held in 1993, the fair serves as a window for the opening of northwestern China and has become a major event for Belt and Road economic and trade cooperation. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 22:16:42|Editor: huaxia

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China's senior political advisors meet to study an important speech by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, at the ceremony marking the centenary of the CPC on Thursday, in Beijing, capital of China, July 2, 2021. The study session held by the leading Party members group of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was presided over by Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, chairman of the CPPCC National Committee and secretary of its leading Party members group. (Xinhua/Zhai Jianlan)

BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhua) -- China's senior political advisors on Friday met to study an important speech by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, at the ceremony marking the centenary of the CPC on Thursday.

The study session held by the leading Party members group of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was presided over by Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, chairman of the CPPCC National Committee and secretary of its leading Party members group.

The session stressed unswerving adherence to overall Party leadership, urging efforts to give full play to the important role of the political advisory bodies in upholding and strengthening the Party's leadership over all work.

It called on CPPCC to turn the Party's propositions into the consensus of the general public through democratic procedures and effective work, and better employ the united front.

The meeting decided that the CPPCC National Committee carry out the second-stage Party history learning and education campaign. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 22:45:05|Editor: huaxia

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HONG KONG, July 2 (Xinhua) -- People from various sectors of Hong Kong have spoken highly of the speech by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, at the CPC centenary ceremony on Thursday, stressing that Hong Kong will embrace a brighter future under the leadership of the CPC.

"The speech bears profound significance and is inspiring and encouraging," Albert Wu, executive councillor of the Hong Kong Legal Exchange Foundation said, adding that it also set the right direction for the practice of "one country, two systems" in Hong Kong and Macao.

Paul Chan, financial secretary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government, attended the ceremony in Beijing and said the event is of "extraordinary significance."

The CPC has always had people's well-being at heart and sought happiness for the people of China and rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, Chan said.

Patrick Nip, secretary for the civil service of the HKSAR government, said the CPC has always maintained its governing philosophy of putting people first.

Hong Kong's civil servants should bear in mind and carry forward the spirit of serving the people, fully and accurately implement "patriots administering Hong Kong" and ensure the steady and sustained implementation of "one country, two systems," Nip said.

Michael Woo Kim-kong, life honorary president of the Hong Kong Chiu Chow Chamber of Commerce, said the speech demonstrated the CPC is people-centered and Hong Kong will surely have a bright future as it integrates further into the nation's development.

So Wing-on, president of the Cross-Strait Peaceful Development Federation, said he felt the nation's great care for Hong Kong and Macao.

Swift actions have been taken by the central authorities to bring stability back to Hong Kong, he said, adding that with peace and order restored, the Hong Kong society will be able to work together to make the place more prosperous.

Looking ahead, Starry Lee Wai-king, chairwoman of Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, said she is fully confident in Hong Kong's prospects under "one country, two systems."

Hong Kong should seize opportunities in national development and make better use of its advantages as an international metropolis, said Joe Chau, honorable life president of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Small and Medium Business. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 22:48:00|Editor: huaxia

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GENEVA, July 2 (Xinhua) -- On behalf of a group of countries, a senior Chinese diplomat on Friday expressed grave concern over the fabrication and spread of disinformation on multilateral human rights work at the on-going 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Delivering a joint statement to the Council, Jiang Duan, minister of the Chinese mission to the United Nations in Geneva, said that some countries fabricate and spread disinformation out of political purposes, and smear others under the pretext of human rights, in an attempt to make excuses for interfering in other countries' internal affairs, imposing unilateral coercive measures and setting up country-specific mechanisms at the Human Rights Council.

"These acts severely violate the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, run counter to the principles of universality, impartiality and objectivity of the work of the Human Rights Council, and will only misdirect the work of international human rights mechanisms and undermine their reputation," the joint statement said.

"We are also gravely concerned that a few special procedure mandate holders indiscriminately take unauthenticated information from western media and political groups to make groundless accusations against sovereign States," the joint statement continued.

The joint statement urged countries concerned to immediately stop fabricating and spreading disinformation and refrain from using human rights as a political tool.

The statement also expressed hope that relevant special procedure mandate holders will perform their duties in a fair and objective manner, and respect the authoritative information provided by the governments of States so as to avoid being used by those with ulterior motives. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 23:51:12|Editor: huaxia

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Xi Jinping delivers an important speech at a key meeting to launch a campaign on Party history learning and education among all Party members in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 20, 2021. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhua) -- An article by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, on learning the CPC history has been published.

The article by Xi, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, was published Thursday in this year's 13th issue of the Qiushi Journal, a flagship magazine of the CPC Central Committee.

In his article, Xi said learning the history of the Party, including its remarkable achievements, arduous journey, historical experience and fine traditions, would help better understand the capability of the Party and the strengths of socialism with Chinese characteristics, as well as the reason why Marxism works.

The article called on Party members to gain a profound understanding of the historical inevitability of upholding the Party's leadership, strengthen their confidence in the Party's leadership, and unswervingly follow the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The article stressed strengthening faith in Marxism and Communism, belief in socialism with Chinese characteristics, and confidence in realizing the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

The article also called on Party members to develop strong moral character, stay loyal to the Party, and unite and lead the people in better implementing the new development philosophy and fostering a new pattern of development, so as to pool strengths for the national rejuvenation. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 23:55:59|Editor: huaxia

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RABAT, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The COVID-19 epidemiological situation in Morocco is a source of concern as the number of new infections and active cases have been increasing during the past two weeks, Moroccan Head of Government Saad Dine El Otmani said on Friday.

El Otmani, speaking to the official television "Al oula," called on citizens and institutions to increase efforts and remain vigilant to contain the virus spread.

Morocco's COVID-19 tally rose to 532,994 on Friday as 844 new cases were registered during the past 24 hours.

The death toll rose to 9,307 with nine new fatalities during the last 24 hours, while 247 people are in intensive care units, according to a statement by the Ministry of Health.

The total number of recoveries from COVID-19 in Morocco increased to 518,641 after 540 new ones were added, the statement said.

The COVID-19 fatality rate in Morocco stands at 1.7 percent while the recovery rate is 97.3 percent.

Meanwhile, 10,059,937 people have received so far the first vaccine shot against COVID-19 in the country, and 9,159,495 people have received the second dose.

The North African country launched a nationwide vaccination campaign on Jan. 28 after the arrival of the first shipment of China's Sinopharm vaccines. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 23:59:15|Editor: huaxia

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NANCHANG, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Severe floods in east China's Jiangxi Province that started on Monday had affected nearly 1.08 million people in 55 county-level areas by 4 p.m. Friday, according to provincial flood-relief headquarters.

Floods affected a total of 70,300 hectares of crops and left 156 houses collapsed and 219 damaged, resulting in direct economic losses of 1.04 billion yuan (about 160.68 million U.S. dollars), said the headquarters.

The province has relocated 63,000 people to protect them from rain-triggered floods.

To cope with the flooding, Jiangxi has allocated 6 million yuan of funds for emergency management.

According to the provincial weather authority, Jiangxi's precipitation will weaken on Saturday, with the hot and sunny weather gradually returning. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-03 00:14:51|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Leaders of foreign political parties and governments have been extending warm congratulations on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

In messages addressed to General Secretary Xi Jinping of the CPC Central Committee or to the CPC Central Committee, they spoke highly of the great achievements and important contributions to global peace and development the CPC has made in the past century, especially since the 18th CPC National Congress.

They also conveyed their wishes to further boost exchanges and cooperation with the CPC.

The following is an edited summary of some of these messages.

Samdech Techo Hun Sen, president of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP), said that over the past 100 years, the CPC has braved trials and hardships and kept forging ahead, uniting and leading the Chinese people to achieve unprecedented progress and prosperity.

It has profoundly changed the future and destiny of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation, and made important contributions to safeguarding world peace and promoting common development, he added.

Under the wise leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Xi at the core, China, the most populous multi-ethnic country in the world, has successfully realized national unity, social harmony and economic prosperity, he noted.

He said he is ready to make concerted efforts with Xi to consolidate and deepen the friendly and cooperative relations in various fields between the CPP and the CPC.

Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani noted that over the past 100 years, the great CPC has gained extensive support.

Under the strong leadership of Xi and the CPC, he added, China has attained unprecedented stability and development achievements, and made important contributions to maintaining global peace and development, which fully demonstrates the CPC's original aspiration and mission to seek happiness for the people.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev, president of Uzbekistan, said that Xi is truly the leader of a major country and the core of the CPC, who has united and led the party and the Chinese people to implement effective reform and development strategies, achieve continuous improvement of the wellbeing of the people, and greatly enhance China's international prestige.

Macky Sall, president of the Alliance for the Republic-Yakaar and president of Senegal, said that under the leadership of the CPC, especially under the wise leadership of Xi, China has made world-renowned development achievements.

He also expressed the willingness to continue to develop the exemplary and outstanding friendly ties with the CPC.

Paul Kagame, chairman of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and president of Rwanda, said that throughout its 100-year-old history, the CPC has been striving unremittingly for the freedom, liberation and happiness of the people, demonstrating an unprecedentedly outstanding leadership.

The success of the CPC in leading China's development is also reflected in China's important contributions to addressing such global challenges as poverty, terrorism, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, he added.

Salva Kiir, chairman of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and president of South Sudan, said that Xi has been committed to upholding and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics, which has set the development direction for the CPC and China.

He also conveyed the willingness to continue to learn from the CPC's governance experience. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-03 03:27:33|Editor: huaxia

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ADEN, Yemen, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Forces loyal to the Yemeni government on Friday launched a military operation against the Houthi rebels in the country's central province of al-Bayda, leaving 15 from both sides killed, a government official told Xinhua.

The Houthi rebels lost control over a number of military sites following hours of intense armed confrontations with the government forces in al-Bayda, the official said on condition of anonymity.

The military operation aimed at liberating al-Bayda from the Houthi militia, according to Yemeni Minister of Information Muammar Al-Iryani.

Yemen has been locked into a civil war in 2014 since the Iran-backed Shiite Houthi militia overran much of the country and seized all northern provinces, including the capital Sanaa.

Saudi Arabia has been leading an Arab military coalition that intervened in Yemen in 2015 to support the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi after Houthis forced him into exile. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 23:56:30|Editor: huaxia

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MOGADISHU, July 2 (Xinhua) -- At least two people were killed and an unknown number injured in the latest explosion in Mogadishu on Friday evening.

The state-owned television reported that a suicide bomber blew himself up at a restaurant near Jubba junction in Shibis district of the capital Mogadishu.

"There was a blast at the Jubba intersection which was carried out by a man in a suicide vest. More details will be released later," said a police officer who declined to be identified.

The scene has since been sealed off by security forces who said investigation is underway to establish the cause of the blast. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 11:24:46|Editor: huaxia

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WELLINGTON, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The New Zealand government will celebrate Matariki - Maori New Year as a public holiday beginning on June 24, 2022, showing its attention on recognizing Maori culture.

The government announced the Matariki public holiday date for the next 30 years "to give communities and businesses certainty," Acting Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Peeni Henare said in a statement.

The calendar date for the Matariki public holiday will shift each year to align with the Maramataka (Maori lunar calendar) and will always be on a Friday, Henare said.

"Matariki will be our first public holiday that recognizes Te Ao Maori (Maori world) and will be one that is uniquely New Zealand," he said.

Matariki is more than just a public holiday. The celebration of the new public holiday will be informed by key values such as unity, sharing, feasting, coming together, and environmental awareness, the minister said.

Matariki is the Maori name for the Pleiades, and refers to a cluster of stars that rises in mid-winter, marking the start of the Maori New Year. Some Maori tribes name this time of year Puanga, after a bright star that is above and to the right of the Matariki constellation.

Workplace Relations and Safety Michael Wood said the Matariki public holiday will always fall on a Friday, which will help more Kiwis take mid-winter getaways and support the tourism sector's economic recovery.

A stand-alone bill to formally establish the Matariki public holiday will be introduced to Parliament later this year, and people will have the opportunity to provide their feedback during the select committee process, Wood said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 11:30:24|Editor: huaxia

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SEOUL, July 2 (Xinhua) -- South Korea reported 826 more cases of COVID-19 as of midnight Thursday compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 158,549.

The daily caseload was up from 762 in the previous day, marking the highest since Jan. 7. The daily average caseload for the past week was 680.

The continued triple-digit growth was attributable to cluster infections in Seoul and its surrounding Gyeonggi province as well as imported cases.

Of the new cases, 337 were Seoul residents and 260 were people residing in Gyeonggi province.

Sixty-one cases were imported from overseas, lifting the combined figure to 10,028.

Three more deaths were confirmed, leaving the death toll at 2,024. The total fatality rate stood at 1.28 percent.

A total of 295 more patients were discharged from quarantine after making full recovery, pulling up the combined number to 148,319. The total recovery rate was 93.55 percent.

The country has tested over 10.64 million people, among whom 10,352,388 tested negative and 130,666 are being checked.

Since the mass vaccination was launched on Feb. 26, the country has administered COVID-19 vaccines to a total of 15,340,827 people with 5,156,549 fully vaccinated. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 13:22:59|Editor: huaxia

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ULAN BATOR, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia registered 2,376 new COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours, bringing the national tally to 120,339, the country's health ministry said Friday.

The ministry said that 14 people aged 56-83 died from the virus, taking the death toll to 611.

Over 77 percent of confirmed cases nationwide were detected in Ulan Bator, it said.

Under the motto "For COVID-free summer, let's get vaccinated," Mongolia launched a national vaccination campaign in late February, aiming to vaccinate at least 60 percent of its population of 3.3 million.

So far, more than 2,038,100 Mongolians have received first dose, and over 1,750,200 have been fully vaccinated. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 15:40:12|Editor: huaxia

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KABUL, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Four police and 10 local pro-government militiamen were killed in two separate Taliban-led attacks in northern Afghanistan during Thursday night, a local independent monitoring group reported on Friday.

In Kunduz province, four policemen, including a police officer, were killed and five others captured in a Taliban attack on a security checkpoint in Tapa-e-Nasiri, an area in Police District 4 in the provincial capital Kunduz city, Reduction in Violence (RiV) said on social media.

In the neighboring Badakhshan province, 10 Public Uprising Forces, including two of the group divisional commanders, were killed when Taliban militants stormed their position in Yaftal district, according to the agency.

The Public Uprising Forces, who are receiving support from Afghan security agencies, provide security and protect remote villages and districts around the country where the army and police have limited presence.

The northern Afghan provinces have been the scene of heavy clashes and battles in recent weeks as Taliban militants continued the fighting against government forces and captured dozens of suburban districts, mostly in the northern region.

The fall of districts to the Taliban militants has sparked waves of criticism among locals, prompting thousands of people elsewhere to take arms against the Taliban and vow to fight alongside the security forces. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 16:41:07|Editor: huaxia

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PHNOM PENH, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia exported 132,174 tons of dry rubber in the first half of this year, up 7 percent over the same period of last year, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Veng Sakhon said on Friday.

Cambodia earned 221 million U.S. dollars in gross revenue from rubber export during the January-June period, up 38 percent from a year earlier, he wrote on his Facebook page.

"A ton of dry rubber averagely cost 1,677 U.S. dollars during the first six months of this year, about 374 dollars higher than that of the same period last year," the minister said.

The Southeast Asian country exported the commodity mainly to Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and China.

Meanwhile, the kingdom saw a 29-percent drop in rice export, Sakhon said, adding that it exported 280,450 tons of milled rice to 47 countries and regions during the first half of this year.

China remained the top buyer of the Cambodian rice, accounting for 51 percent of the kingdom's total rice export, he said, adding that Cambodia shipped 143,293 tons of rice to China, down 3 percent year-on-year.

The European Union (EU) was the second biggest importer, accounting for 24 percent of the overall market destinations, the minister said, adding that Cambodia exported 67,136 tons of rice to the European market, or a decrease of 50 percent. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 17:16:59|Editor: huaxia

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TOKYO, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Jail sentences of almost three years are being sought by Japanese prosecutors for a U.S. Army Special Forces veteran and his son who have admitted helping former Nissan Motor Co Ltd. chairman Carlos Ghosn flee Japan, local media and wire services reported Friday.

According to the accounts, a Tokyo court heard from the prosecutors they are seeking sentences of two years and 10 months for ex-special forces veteran Michael Taylor, and two years and six months for his son Peter.

The prosecutors' announcement followed the father-and-son pair on Tuesday telling the court they regretted helping Ghosn jump bail and flee Japan where the once-revered auto-tycoon was due to face charges of alleged financial misconduct.

The duo pleaded guilty in June to illegally aiding Ghosn's escape from Japan to Lebanon concealed in a large box aboard a private jet, which took off from an airport in western Japan.

One of the prosecutors on Friday described the Taylors' crime as "unprecedented" and "bold," according to local accounts, although the prison term sought was less than the maximum three years in jail that could have been appealed for.

Describing Ghosn's escape in December 2019 as a "sophisticated and bold crime," one of the prosecutors maintained that Michael Taylor played "a leading role" and that his responsibility is "extremely grave."

"The case considerably infringed upon our country's criminal justice," the prosecutor was also quoted as saying.

At their first hearing on June 14, the two Americans pleaded guilty to helping Ghosn flee Japan while he was on bail pending his trial.

The Taylors had already admitted to the charges associated with Ghosn's audacious escape from Japan to avoid trial for charges of financial misconduct.

The prosecutors said the pair were paid 1.3 million U.S. dollars to help Ghosn escape, which involved providing Ghosn illegal passage to Lebanon, one of three countries he is a national of, by smuggling him out of his residence in Tokyo and to Kansai International Airport via two hotels in late December 2019.

The father and son team, in full knowledge that Ghosn was prohibited from leaving Japan as part of his bail terms, hid Ghosn in a large box, which cleared Kansai airport security. Thereafter, the illicit cargo was flown to Turkey on a private jet.

At the request of Japanese prosecutors, the Taylors were arrested in Massachusetts in 2020 by U.S. authorities.

They had fought extradition to Japan in U.S. courts but ultimately lost their battle when their appeal was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in February.

Once extradited, they were arrested and charged in Japan in March and have since been detained at the same jail in Tokyo where Ghosn was once held.

Ghosn, who holds Brazilian, French and Lebanese nationality, is accused of under-reporting his remuneration for years and for embezzling company funds.

He has denied all the charges, claiming company insiders conspired against him.

His lengthy detention in Tokyo, after being initially arrested in November 2018, had been the center of controversy in a scandal that rocked Japan and saw the international community criticize Japan's justice system, with those close to his case likening his detention to a form of "hostage justice."

Japan, embarrassed by Ghosn's brazen escape, has since been trying to detain him with the help of Interpol as Lebanon does not have an extradition treaty with Japan.

This means that Ghosn cannot be legally handed over to Japan without Lebanon first agreeing to it. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 18:10:55|Editor: huaxia

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BANGKOK, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Thailand exported a record 934.9 million U.S. dollars' worth of fresh durian in May, surging 95.3 percent from a year earlier, according to data from the Kasikorn Research Center, a Thai think tank.

In the first five months of the year, Thailand saw its fresh durian exports total 1.84 billion dollars, up 45.2 percent year-on-year, enabling the Southeast Asian country to remain the world's largest fresh durian exporter, according to a report released by the research center.

"The king of fruits" has become Thailand's new cash crop, ranking the second after natural rubber in terms of export value, the report said.

The robust export growth was boosted by strong demand from the Chinese market, the top target for the world's durian export countries, it said.

The research center said it expects Thailand's fresh durian exports to expand by up to 40 percent to reach 2.9 billion dollars in 2021. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 19:10:11|Editor: huaxia

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JAKARTA, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The Indonesian National Police said Friday that its counterterrorism squad has arrested a suspected terrorist, who is believed to be a member of the outlawed Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), in North Sumatra province.

The National Police's spokesperson Senior Commissioner Ahmad Ramadhan said this suspect under the name of BA was one of the participants of the JI shooting training in 2015.

A further investigation is still underway.

This week, the counterterrorism squad, known as Densus 88, also detained three suspected terrorists who are members of another banned organization Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) in the capital Jakarta and Bangka Belitung Islands. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 21:09:10|Editor: huaxia

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ISLAMABAD, July 2 (Xinhua) -- A toy bomb blast in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province left three children dead on Friday, said police.

A group of children found a toy-like explosive device near their house in the Mehsud Keruna area of Tank district of the province and were playing with the toy when it exploded, police sources in the area told Xinhua.

As a result, three children, aging from five to 12 years, were killed on the spot, said the sources.

Following the incident, security forces and rescue teams rushed to the scene and shifted the bodies to a nearby hospital, and cordoned off the area.

Police have registered a case against the unknown miscreants and kicked off an investigation into the incident.

According to government officials, a number of toy bomb attacks have occurred in the country's KP and southwestern Balochistan provinces over the last several years.

Last month, a toy bomb blast left three children dead and another injured in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-03 00:51:36|Editor: huaxia

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Ho Kham, a 101-year-old Cambodian woman, receives her second dose of Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine at an inoculation site in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on July 2, 2021. Ho Kham has become one of the oldest persons in Cambodia to be fully vaccinated with two doses of China's Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine. (Photo by Phearum/Xinhua)

PHNOM PENH, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Ho Kham, a 101-year-old Cambodian woman, has become one of the oldest persons in Cambodia to be fully vaccinated with two doses of China's Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine.

Riding in a wheelchair assisted by her son, the lady went to an inoculation site in capital Phnom Penh on Friday for her second shot of the jab.

Kham, who also holds a French citizenship, has volunteered to get vaccinated with the Sinovac vaccine after her French doctor decided that she was safe to receive the vaccine, according to her 65-year-old son, Seng Sarin.

"She's keen to get the jab by herself because she wants to stay safe during the pandemic," he told reporters on behalf of his mother, who can only speak a little Khmer language because she had been living in France since 1980 and just returned to Cambodia four years ago.

"The vaccine is quite safe, I see no any side effect since she has gotten her first dose," Sarin added.

Cambodian health ministry's secretary of state and spokeswoman Or Vandine said Kham's vaccination would inspire others to follow suit in order to protect themselves from COVID-19.

"This clearly shows that vaccine is very important to protect lives," she told reporters. "Either Sinovac or other vaccines approved by the World Health Organization are safe, effective and save lives."

She said that so far, eight persons aged between 100 and 103 years old in the country have received the vaccine.

Minister Counselor Chang Jian from the Chinese Embassy in Cambodia presented the lady a bunch of flower and conveyed best wishes to her.

Chang said that under the leadership of Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen and with the close cooperation between China and Cambodia, Cambodia will win the battle against the pandemic.

Cambodia has been accelerating its COVID-19 vaccinations, targeting at least 10 million of its 16 million population by November as new infection rates continue to rise.

The Southeast Asian nation reported 966 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, pushing the national caseload to 52,350, the health ministry said, adding that 32 new fatalities were registered, bringing the overall death toll to 660.

The kingdom launched a vaccination drive on Feb. 10, starting from capital Phnom Penh and Kandal province before expanding it to other provinces recently.

As of July 1, some 7.4 million vaccine doses have been administered in the kingdom, with 4.3 million people receiving their first dose and 3.1 million having completed the two-dose inoculation, Vandine said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 19:33:57|Editor: huaxia

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ATHENS, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Christos Pappas, former deputy leader of the far-right Golden Dawn (GD) party, was arrested here on Thursday evening, the Greek national news agency AMNA reported.

Pappas, 59, had been on the run and wanted after an Athens court reached a verdict in October 2020. He was sentenced to 11 years and 9 months along with other party leaders for forming and running a criminal organization, according to an e-mailed Greek police press release. He had also been the last former GD leader remaining at large.

Pappas was arrested during a raid by a counter-terrorism squad in a 52-year-old woman's residence and both of them were scheduled to appear before prosecutors on Friday, according to the press statement.

More than a dozen former MPs among a total of 57 party members are serving sentences for their crimes committed during the period of 2008-2013, ranging from murder to extortion and possession of illegal weapons. The GD's leadership and members were linked to dozens of assaults against migrants and political opponents.

The fatal stabbing of Pavlos Fyssas, a 34-year-old Greek anti-fascist activist musician, by a GD supporter, at a Piraeus port suburb in autumn 2013, sent shockwaves across the country and triggered a judicial crackdown on GD.

The party, represented in parliament in the period 2012-2019, was de facto dismantled after the verdict.

"With the arrest of Christos Pappas, the final chapter of the criminal organization has closed," Greek government spokeswoman Aristotelia Peloni said in an e-mailed statement in a first reaction to the arrest. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 21:20:16|Editor: huaxia

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Smoke from an explosion at Petromidia Refinery is seen through an airplane window in Navodari, southeastern Romania, July 2, 2021. One person was confirmed dead in an explosion that occurred here on Friday, followed by a fire that has not yet been extinguished. (Photo by Cristian Cristel/Xinhua)

BUCHAREST, July 2 (Xinhua) -- One person was confirmed dead in an explosion that occurred Friday at the Petromidia Refinery in Navodari, southeastern Romania, followed by a fire that has not yet been extinguished.

An employee was found dead after the explosion at the Petromidia Refinery, announced Silviu Cosa, prefect of Constanta County, where the refinery is located.

At least five people were injured in the accident. One of them, who has burns on 45 percent of his body surface, was sent to hospital by helicopter.

About 50 firefighters are fighting the flames, and special vehicles are still coming from neighboring counties.

The perimeter has been delimited and there would be no risk of a new explosion, but the situation is dynamic and unpredictable, Anamaria Stoica, spokesperson of regional inspectorate for emergency situations, was quoted as saying by local Pro-TV television station.

"From the information we have, it seems that it was an explosion at the oil gas transmission installation, and the cause will be established at the end of the intervention," said Stoica.

People in the neighborhood have been alerted to stay in their homes and not to open the windows. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 08:21:12|Editor: huaxia

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A woman holds a placard during a rally in Toronto, Canada, on July 1, 2021. Hundreds of people gathered here on Thursday to pay tribute to indigenous children whose bodies were found in mass graves near former indigenous residential schools in Canada. (Photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 23:32:51|Editor: huaxia

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Pedestrians walk past a broadway theater in New York, the United States, July 2, 2021. U.S. employers added 850,000 jobs in June, with unemployment rate unexpectedly edging up to 5.9 percent, the U.S. Labor Department reported Friday. The latest data followed downwardly revised job growth of 269,000 in April and upwardly revised increase of 583,000 in May, indicating a bumpy road in labor market recovery. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

WASHINGTON, July 2 (Xinhua) -- U.S. employers added 850,000 jobs in June, with unemployment rate unexpectedly edging up to 5.9 percent, the U.S. Labor Department reported Friday.

The latest data followed downwardly revised job growth of 269,000 in April and upwardly revised increase of 583,000 in May, indicating a bumpy road in labor market recovery.

In June, job gains were notable in leisure and hospitality, public and private education, professional and business services, retail trade, and other services, according to the report released by the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Employment in leisure and hospitality increased by 343,000, with over half of the job gain in food services and drinking places, the report showed, while noting that employment in leisure and hospitality is still down by 2.2 million, or 12.9 percent, since February 2020.

Employment in local government education, state government education and private education increased by 155,000, 75,000 and 39,000 respectively, but is still lower than the pre-pandemic level.

"In both public and private education, staffing fluctuations due to the pandemic, in part reflecting the return to in-person learning and other school-related activities, have distorted the normal seasonal buildup and layoff patterns, likely contributing to the job gains in June," the report said.

The unemployment rate unexpectedly rose by 0.1 percentage point to 5.9 percent. The measure was down considerably from its recent high in April 2020, but remained well above the pre-pandemic level of 3.5 percent.

Among the unemployed, the number of "job leavers" -- unemployed persons who quit or voluntarily left their previous job and began looking for new employment -- increased by 164,000 to 942,000 in June, the report showed.

U.S. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell recently cited four factors that seem likely to be holding back labor supply, one of which is finding a new job, a process that takes longer as workers match their skills to what the employer wants.

Other factors are fear of returning to work, which should "diminish" as vaccinations move ahead, lingering childcare needs, and federal supplements to unemployment insurance.

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) increased by 233,000 to 4.0 million in June, following a decline of 431,000 in May, according to the Labor Department report. This measure, which accounted for 42.1 percent of the total unemployed in June, is 2.9 million higher as compared with that of February 2020.

Among major ethnic groups, the unemployment rates for Whites (5.2 percent), African Americans (9.2 percent), Asians (5.8 percent), and Hispanics (7.4 percent) showed little or no change in June, indicating an uneven recovery among different groups.

Despite the improvement in the pandemic-ravaged labor market, some 9.5 million people remained unemployed in June, well above the pre-pandemic level of 5.7 million, according to the report. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-03 01:48:11|Editor: huaxia

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LOS ANGELES, July 2 (Xinhua) -- A Boeing 737 cargo plane, with two people on board, made an emergency landing in the ocean off the coast of Honolulu, Hawaii, early Friday morning, U.S. authorities said.

The incident happened around 2:30 a.m. local time, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The pilots of the Transair Flight 810 "had reported engine trouble and were attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to land the aircraft in the water," said the FAA in a statement, adding that the U.S. Coast Guard rescued both crew members.

The aircraft, which departed from the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, also known as Honolulu International Airport, was heading to Maui, the second largest Hawaiian island, local news outlet Hawaii News Now reported.

According to the report, the pilots were forced to make an emergency landing in the water after both engines failed. A U.S. Coast Guard MH-65 helicopter located the debris field and spotted the two pilots in the water. The news outlet said that the incident left one pilot in critical condition and another in serious condition.

Operating since 1982, Transair is one of Hawaii's largest and locally owned air-cargo providers. It operates daily flights to all major Hawaiian island destinations, plus cargo charters available to all points within the state of Hawaii, according to the company's website.

The company operates a fleet of five Boeing 737 and five Bombardier SD3-60-300 aircraft.

The FAA and U.S. National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the incident.

"We are aware of the reports out of Honolulu, Hawaii and are closely monitoring the situation. We are in contact with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and are working to gather more information," said Boeing in a statement. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-03 02:47:51|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, July 2 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Joe Biden said on Friday that the drawdown in Afghanistan is "on track", but troops will not leave the country in the next few days.

When asked by reporters at the White House whether the United States will complete withdrawal in the next few days, Biden replied, "No, we're on track exactly as to where we expect it to be."

"I wanted to make sure there was enough running room that we ... wouldn't be able to do it all till September," he added. "There'll still be some forces left, but it's a rational drawdown with our allies ... there is nothing unusual about it."

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki later told reporters during a daily briefing that the withdrawal is expected to be completed by the end of August.

Biden in April ordered all U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan before Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that drew the United States into its longest war.

Security situation in the war-torn country has deteriorated as Taliban militants continue heavy fighting against government forces and gain ground since the drawdown of U.S. troops on May 1.

The Taliban advances have prompted the U.S. intelligence community to conclude that the government of Afghanistan could collapse as soon as six months after the complete withdrawal of the U.S. military from the country, according to a report of The Wall Street Journal.

"I think they have the capacity to be able to sustain the government," Biden said on Friday. "But I am concerned that they deal with the internal issues that they have to be able to generate the kind of support they need nationwide to maintain the government."

He also noted that the Afghan military needs to depend on its own capabilities to ensure the security of the capital Kabul.

Biden's words came as U.S. troops had left a major military base in Afghanistan. A spokesperson for the Afghan Defense Ministry confirmed earlier in the day that all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan had evacuated the Bagram Airfield near Kabul, handing over the largest coalition base to Afghan government troops. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-01 16:35:26|Editor: huaxia

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China, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), has made remarkable achievements such as the eradication of absolute poverty, said Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.

In an interview with Chinese media at the Prime Minister House on Tuesday, Khan lauded the CPC's efforts to score a complete victory in China's fight against poverty.

Extending his congratulations on the 100th anniversary of the CPC, the Pakistani prime minister described the party's governance of China as a unique model.

On Pakistan-China relations, Khan said that since the establishment of diplomatic ties seven decades ago, the two countries have been walking shoulder to shoulder through difficulties, and have forged a very deep, strong and unique relationship which is not limited between the two governments, but also exists between the two peoples.

Produced by Xinhua Global services
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-01 23:21:25|Editor: huaxia

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Why did Xi Jinping have to apply 10 times before he was finally admitted to the Communist Party of China 47 years ago?

Learn about his story in a small village as the CPC celebrates its centenary, July 1. #CPC100Years
Source: Xinhua| 2021-07-02 13:18:03|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhua) -- China's achievements in reducing poverty and building a moderately prosperous society in all respects have manifested the outstanding leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), foreign experts and scholars have said.

On Thursday, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, announced that China has realized its first centenary goal -- building a moderately prosperous society in all respects.

"This means that we have brought about a historic resolution to the problem of absolute poverty in China, and we are now marching in confident strides towards the second centenary goal of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects," Xi, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, said at a ceremony marking the CPC centenary.

China's confidence-boosting stories have pepped up the world, especially developing countries, in their cause of poverty reduction, and its experience is worth learning from, according to the experts, who also expressed their full confidence that China will undoubtedly realize its second centenary goal.

Hamed Vafaei, head of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Tehran, said that China has realized the goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, which has demonstrated the wisdom of the CPC as the country's ruling party.

The expert said China's extraordinary progress led by the CPC deserves in-depth study by international scholars, and is especially worth learning for some developing countries.

Carla Oliva, an international relations expert at the National University of Rosario in Argentina, said that during the 100 years since its founding, the CPC has attained unparalleled achievements, led the Chinese people to score a victory against poverty and accomplished the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, which are the result of the whole party's hard work and tenacity.

Oliva said she believes under the strong leadership of the CPC, China will for sure accomplish its second centenary goal.

Tursunali Kuziev, a professor at Uzbek University of Journalism and Mass Communications, said that the CPC has fulfilled its solemn promises to the Chinese people by building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, historically casting off absolute poverty.

This is an unprecedented great leap in the Chinese history, injecting confidence and momentum of development into the world shrouded in the COVID-19 pandemic, said Kuziev, who firmly believes that under the CPC's leadership, China's second centenary goal will definitely be fulfilled. Enditem
Photo by Susan Lowry Hare OK, right off the bat, this is an inside baseball post, so no need for the ineluctable comment stating the obvio...
Illegal mining activities, also known as galamseyare allegedly still being done in some communities in the Central Region despite the government's directive for a halt of such activities.

It is further alleged that the illegal miners move to the sites at night to mine to prevent arrest by law enforcement agencies.

This came to light when the Central Regional Minister, Mrs Justina Marigold Assan, toured some of the illegal mining sites in the AssinFoso Municipality and the Assin South district to ascertain the extent of havoc caused by galamsey activities.

The Minister also paid a courtesy call on chiefs and people of AssinEfutuakwa and AssinApimanin Traditional Council at separate ceremonies.

Some of the illegal miners at AssinAsamman took to their heels when the saw the regional minister and his entourage.

MrsAssan, in her remarks at the two traditional council meetings, appealed to the chiefs to support the government in the fight against galamsey.

She underscored the important role of traditional authorities in the development of the region.

The Regional Minister indicated the need for the various assemblies to liaise with traditional authorities on contents of the medium term development plan.

The current generation, she noted, was doing a disservice to the next generation due to greed and other self-centred acts which had the potential to negatively impact on development for centuries.

She noted that it was disheartening to witness the wanton destruction of the forest cover and water bodies in the country.

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The Regional Minister expressed the determination of the Regional Co-ordinating Council to collaborate with traditional authorities to address the issue of galamsey and other illegal activities in the region.

At AssinBreku, Nana Frimpong Baah I, Tufuhen of the Traditional Area, expressed worry about the devastating effect of galamsey in the country.

He commended the government for taking such a bold step to stop such activities.

Nana Baah underscored the need for the government to create more employment opportunities for the youth.

He alsoappealed to the government to show concern about stalled development projects in the area and to facilitate the construction of two bridges in the area to link adjoining communities.

That, he said, would help open the area and also promote economic activities.

Nana Baah further stated the commitment of traditional authorities to release

47 acres of land for the construction of a hospital.

He mentioned the incidence of internet fraud in the area and appealed for the creation of employment opportunities for the teeming unemployed youth.

At Efutuakwa Traditional Council, Nana Afransie IV, Acting President ofEfutuakwa Traditional Council and Queen mother of Efutuakwa, appealed to the government to swiftly address deplorable road network in the area.

She expressed concern about the way the youth in the town were engaged in fraudulent activities in the area.

June 11, 2021
Leaders of the Niger-Delta, last night, counseled militants who threatened to resume hostilities in the region over failed promises by the Federal Government to stop their plans and follow the path of peace, saying violence was no longer fashionable in conflict resolution.

The leaders spoke through the Pan Niger-Delta Forum, the mouthpiece of monarchs, leaders and stakeholders of the coastal states of Niger-Delta, against the backdrop of the threat by Niger-Delta Avengers, NDA, to attack targeted oil installations and political actors perceived to have colluded with the Federal Government to undermine the people of the oil-rich region.

Meanwhile, a body of youth groups in the region, Niger Delta Youth Movement, NDYM, threw its weight behind the decision of the militant group to resume attacks on oil installations, saying violence was the language the Federal Government listens to.

National Publicity Secretary, PANDEF, Hon Ken Robinson, who spoke to Sunday Vanguard, also said the regional group was making efforts to authenticate the genuineness of the militant group that issued the threat.

A group claiming to be NDA, the feared militant group that practically crippled the nation's economy about four years ago, had, in a post on its website, titled, 'We are back with Operation Humble', at the weekend, stated: "This operation shall be coded Operation Humble aimed at bringing down targeted oil installations in the Niger Delta region capable of humbling the economy into permanent recession."

Rejecting a restart of violence in the region, PANDEF said: "But, our general thought to our young people is that we cannot take the path of violence any longer. Otherwise we expose our communities, our people, even our young people themselves to unnecessary harm.

"Communities will be destroyed in the name of looking for supposed militants. And innocent persons, our young people will be killed in a way that they don't act against the bandits and the terrorists in the North-East and the North-West. We see what they are doing in the South-East.

"So, as leaders of the region, we are appealing to the young people. In the face of all these provocations, let us still look for non-violent ways to express our dissatisfaction and our disaffection.

"That is the right way and what we will continue to do while we continue to call on government, federal and even the states to begin to also take aspirations of the people more seriously."

Authenticity

On the authenticity of the group, Robinson stated: "I can categorically state that, in 2016, we intervened and the aggrieved youths listened to us under Niger Delta Avengers (NDA).

"We will try to confirm the authenticity of this release, whether it is an authentic group or some persons who are just making claims. We have people in the Niger Delta now who have become laptop militants. We are aware of that.

"So, we will ascertain authenticity of this group, but the fact remains that, after four years, nothing much has been done by the Federal Government (FG) (in the Niger Delta). We visited Mr. President on November 1, 2016 and presented to a 16-point demand that cuts across critical issues across the Niger Delta.

"Of course you are also aware that following our visit and presentation of demands, the Vice President, Prof Yemi Osibanjo, then as Acting President, undertook a visit to all states in the region and interacted with the people during which the demands were reemphasized.

"The Acting President, at that time, made very far-reaching pronouncements, including relocation of International Oil Companies (IOCs) headquarters to the Niger Delta.

"Out of the 16 demands, as we speak, over four years after, we have the Ffederal Government attending only, as it were, to one and a half. That is Ogoni clean-up and the Maritime University, Okerenkoko.

"The Nigeria Maritime University was a joint item involving the establishment of the Maritime University, Okerenkoko and upgrade of the Maritime Academy in Oron to a university.

"That has been the situation and, of course, we acknowledge that people are angry, people dissatisfied. There's disaffection in the region and people are worried."

Panic had gripped the oil industry, yesterday morning, as the NDA said it had exhausted the last iota of patience with the Federal Government and the high command decided, last Friday night, to wake up the government that had been sleeping on its responsibilities.

The frightening post read in part: "This mission is also targeted at political actors who are collaborating with the Nigerian Government to undermine the interest of the Niger Delta people."

"Conclusively, we wish to state unequivocally and in simple terms that we are back with Operation Humble; with the aim of humbling the economy into permanent recession and political players from the Niger Delta extraction to political retirement.

"Our Strike Teams 01 - 09 and all other formations are to regroup and remain on red alert awaiting further command.

"There will no going back until the Nigerian economy is humbled into recession never to rise again," it added.

The group announced it had "lost total confidence on all socio-cultural groups like PANDEF, elders of Niger Delta and the bunch of so called ex-agitators frolicking with the government at our detriment."

Deaf ears

It went on: "There is no doubt that the Nigerian government has continued to pay deaf ears to our demands and the rising challenges in the country because the pipelines that crisscrosses our lands her left untouched, allowing dollars to flow into the federal treasury on a daily basis for mismanagement.

"We shall spare no single oil installation within our range of strategic targets marked for destruction in the coming days and we bet the Nigerian government will be humbled to return to the drawing board and chart an all-inclusive course by the time we are done with our action plan.

"Members of our strike teams across the Niger Delta are commanded to be on red alert awaiting precise strike plans as mapped by the high command of the NDA.

"The high command of the NDA has promoted and appointed one of our finest operatives, Field Commander Tu-ere aka Queen of the Creeks to the rank of Brigadier General.

"She is an experienced field agent who before now was the head of the counterintelligence unit of the NDA, using her connections with top government and security officials to deliver on her assignment.

"She was part of the our elite Strike Teams that attacked and took down the Chevron Valve platform on the 4th of May, 2016; the Shell Forcados 48-inch Export line on the 3rd of June, 2016; and the Exxon Mobil Qua Iboe 48 Crude Oil Pipeline on the 11th of July, 2016.

"Brig. Gen. Tu-ere is the first female to ever attain this level and it is solely out of merit, and is placed in charge by the High Command of the NDA to execute operation humble to the later.

"As a gender friendly organization, we are using this avenue to encourage other female operatives within the rank and file of the NDA to be inspired by the rising profile of the Queen of the Creeks and never to deter in delivering on our mission of liberate our people and God given resources from the shackles of the oppressive Nigerian government. We advise other female operatives to emulate her and be dedicated to our mission at all times.

"There is no gainsaying that the failed country called Nigeria which has fed fat on our God- given wealth is at the brink of total disintegration owing to the security and related challenges across the country.

"Ranging from terrorism and banditry in the North to the secessionist gongs of the Oduduwa people of the Southwest and IPOB of the Southeast it is obvious that peace in the Niger Delta and by extension the South-South geopolitical region is the very thin piece still binding this country together.

"It is disheartening that despite being the economic backbone and having resolved to maintain the peaceful environment for the smooth operations of the oil multinationals whose proceeds the country cling unto for economic survival the Niger Delta and the South -South remain the most under developed with our needs and interests undermined by the failed Nigerian State.

"We decided to suspend our famous Operation Red Economy' which bled the Nigerian economy into recession about four years ago not because we are lazy but for the love we have for our people and out of respect for the voice of the elders of the Niger Delta region, who beckoned on us to give peace a chance and avail the government time to act on our demands at the time."

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Language

Speaking with Sunday Vanguard also on the threat, National President of NDYM, Comrade Joe Jackson, said it was unfortunate that agitation and violence had remained the only language the Federal Government of Nigeria understands, especially when it concerns issues affecting oil producing areas of the country.

"We will want to align with the Niger Delta Avengers, the only language the Federal government understands is violence and agitation. Those issues are like recurring decimal. We have protested against gas flaring in our communities, because of environmental and health hazards,"Jackson stated.

"Also look at the Ogoni clean-up which the federal government initiated, but till date nothing serious has been done about that, but you hear of billions of naira being earmarked. When will the federal government be sincere to the plight of the Niger Delta people?

"For us, it is a disappointment that our representatives at the National Assembly as well as the Ministers have remained mute over the plight of the region. For instance on the demand for the upward review from 2.5 per cent to 10 per cent appropriated to host oil communities in the Petroleum Industry Bill.

"They know that 2.5 per cent is not adequate, it is not enough to take care of the environmental and health hazards, pollution suffered by oil communities, but they will not say it. Why can't they say let us review these laws for the benefit of our people.

"It is sad and unpatriotic that it is only when there is an attack(s) on oil installations that the Federal Government will now listen or react. Since that is the only language that they understand we will support, urge the Avengers to go ahead."

Jackson alleged that lack of attention from the Federal Government to the plight of the Niger Delta people was a deliberate attempt to subdue the people and their area.

Vanguard News Nigeria
opinion

Lagos  The Nigerian government launched a National Financial Inclusion Strategy in 2012 with the goal of reducing the percentage of financially excluded citizens by 20 percent by 2020. Following the launch of the Strategy, the rate of financial inclusion inched forward, albeit slowly, before plummeting in 2015, only to pick up again in subsequent years.

According to Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), exclusion has decreased by 10.2 percent as of 2019. Furthermore, Head of Financial Inclusion Strategy, CBN, Mr. Joseph Attah, assured the nation that the ambitious goal of achieving a 20 per cent decrease was still achievable. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, pre-planned financial inclusion initiatives had to be halted, as did the possibility of achieving the desired reduction.

Also the pandemic and resulting global lockdown greatly affected CBN's other inclusion targets of 80 per cent by 2020 and 95 per cent by 2024. As a result of the pandemic's disruption, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access (EFInA), Ashley Immanuel, stated that the goal set for 2020 (80 per cent inclusion) would most likely be met by 2030.In addition to this, the CBN's official figures on inclusion in 2019 revealed that, without intervention, meeting the 2024 target is not entirely feasible.

Given the economic benefits that financial inclusion brings to the nation and its citizenry, it is critical that the journey to making Nigeria an inclusive country does not rely solely on government-led initiatives. If Nigeria is to meet the CBN's target of 95 per cent financial inclusion by 2024, the government will require assistance.

Some institutions have recognised this and have begun to work aggressively to improve Nigeria's financial inclusion. Banks and other financial institutions, predictably, are at the forefront of these nation-building initiatives.

Nigerian banking institutions have leveraged technology and service design to bank the unbanked in recent years. However, with only 29 per cent of adults having accounts, three per cent having mobile money accounts, and three per cent having non-bank financial accounts, the gap still remains enormous.

Perhaps this is why some institutions have expanded their financial inclusion initiatives. These financial institutions have begun to offer customers the opportunity to win millions of naira for either opening a new account and maintaining a certain account balance or maintaining a required account balance in an existing account.

Initiatives like these help to reduce the alarming rate of dormant accounts, which undermines the goal of meeting set targets. Existing accounts were dormant in 48.9 million (32 per cent) of cases as of April 2020.

This negates the purpose of financial inclusion initiatives. To address this anomaly, some financial institutions have implemented reward systems that reward customers for every interaction they have with their platform. All of these initiatives are things that the government, as represented by the CBN, cannot undertake because it does not have direct financial interactions with customers.

Adding to the urgency for increased financial inclusion is the effect it has on the economic empowerment of citizens. People who are financially vulnerable can improve their lives through financial inclusion. Financial inclusion enables these people to save and invest, thereby improving their living conditions. As a result, it is a critical tool in the fight against poverty.

Given that financial inclusion also helps in combating income inequality, Fidelity Bank, a leading Nigerian institution at the forefront of the financial inclusion drive, has organisedits Get Alert in Millions (GAIM) Savings Campaign for three consecutive seasons, with the fourth currently ongoing.

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The campaign has set out to enrich the lives of several Nigerians through a savings promo that requires new and existing customers to save and maintain a specified balance. Beyond enriching the lives of these Nigerians through the benefits that come from saving, the scheme has also empowered them with much-needed cash prizes and gadgets.

Fidelity Bank and other visionary institutions have taken on the responsibility of improving Nigerians' and the nation's economic conditions. More institutions must join the already existing ecosystem actors who are accelerating the rate of financial inclusion and reducing economic strains if Nigeria is to meet and exceed all set financial inclusion targets.

Okoye, wrote from Lagos
The Nigerian Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest professional bodies in the engineering field in the country, has recognised the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and others in appreciation for their support of the activities of the academy towards enhancing economic growth and development.

The NAE is a not-for-profit and non-governmental organisation established for the purpose of promoting excellence in technological and engineering training and practice to ensure the technological growth and economic development in Nigeria.

The Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Prof. Umar Garba Danbatta, received the recognition award at the 2021 Academy Technology Dinner/Lecture organised by NAE in Lagos recently, which had the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, as special guest of honour.

Speaking on the theme: 'Water, The Peculiar Features Earth's Most Abundant Compound', Ogbonnaya assured the academy of his support in order to promote its activities. According to him, federal government would continue to provide the enabling environment for a paradigm shift from commodity-based to knowledge-based economy for a sustainable national development. "Government has raised the number of registered intellectual property (IP) from six in 2015 to 184 in 2019, which is an instrument in increasing innovation and economic empowerment," Ogbonnaya said.

Danbatta, who is a Fellow of the Academy, had since 2015, remarkably stepped up NCC's engagements with the academia and other professional institutions in science and technology towards advancing the socio-economic development of Nigeria.

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He said NCC was delighted to have been recognised for the modest contribution to the activities of the academy and to the advancement of the nation's economic development.

"On behalf of the board, management and the entire staff of the NCC, I wish to express our appreciation to the Nigerian Academy of Engineering. We see this gesture as an acknowledgement of the little efforts we are making towards the progress of the NAE," Danbatta said.

The EVC also spoke about the various interventions the commission has been making through its concerted initiatives such as the Digital Awareness Programme (DAP) for secondary schools and Advanced Digital Appreciation Programme for Tertiary Institutions (ADAPTI) for tertiary education across Nigeria.

President of NAE, Alex Ogedengbe, further appreciated the commission for its consistency in supporting the academy, especially since the coming on board of Prof. Danbatta as the country's chief telecoms regulator.

He thanked the NCC management for supporting the objectives of the NAE, which he said, are "To promote excellence in and the advancement of science, engineering, technology and innovation for the development of the economy
The World Bank has approved Additional Financing to the Liberia COVID-19 Emergency Preparedness and Response Project to enable affordable and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. The financing, in the total amount of $8 million grant ($7 million International Development Association-IDA and $1 million Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Multi-Donor Trust), will support the purchase of vaccines and their deployment, reaching approximately 386,000 people. The resources will also help strengthen systems of vaccination programs more broadly and support other COVID-19 response activities.

"In the wake of a third Covid-19 wave that is more devastating than the first two, we believe that ramping up the vaccination program in Liberia, as in other countries, will be a game changer," said Dr. Khwima Nthara, World Bank Country Manager in Liberia. "Hope people will take full advantage of this opportunity and get vaccinated to protect themselves and their loved ones," He added.

Under the original project that was approved on April 9, 2020, the World Bank has supported Liberia purchase 10 ambulances, 20 ventilators, 120 motorcycles, diagnostic laboratory equipment, and also supported counties in implementing COVID-19 preventive measures. This Additional Financing has become necessary given the evidence from the west on impact of vaccines on disease transmission and bringing the COVID-19 situation back to normal.

The Bank financed vaccines will contribute to increasing the number of Liberians covered by vaccines. The project will also support roll out of the vaccines to the last mile and including support to intervention started under the parent project, Liberia COVID-19 Emergency Preparedness and Response Project.

"The financing for Liberia comes at a time when there is a rise in new cases and full blown third wave making the need for vaccines as an added intervention more critical," said Co-Task Team Leaders Noel Chisaka, Anthony Theophilus Seddoh and Opope Oyaka Tshivuila Matala.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Bank Group has committed over $125 billion to fight the health, economic, and social impacts of the pandemic, the fastest and largest crisis response in its history. The financing is helping more than 100 countries strengthen pandemic preparedness, protect the poor and jobs, and jump start a climate-friendly recovery. The Bank is also providing $12 billion to help low- and middle-income countries purchase and distribute COVID-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments.
Higher learning institutions say they are ready to carry on with studies, shifting from face-to-face learning to online, following the new measures to control the further spread of Covid-19.

The new measures, which were announced on Tuesday and went into force on Thursday, July 1, include the closure of all schools in affected areas including the City of Kigali and some eight districts.

The Ministry of Education announced yesterday that students in Higher Learning who reside on campus (hostels) will remain at their respective campuses and continue to study remotely, while students residing off-campus will stay at home and continue to study remotely as well.

A lesson learned

Some of the university officials who talked to The New Times said that they will bank on previous experience from which they said they have drawn enough lessons to offer flawless services online to their learners.

"This is not the first time we are going to use online learning, even during the first experience we had started offering online lectures. Now we are ready to fully migrate online without any hindrance," said Ezechiel Sekibibi, the Vice-Chancellor of Kigali Independent University (ULK).

"We have been using blended learning ever since we resumed studies, wherefore this decision won't affect us so much because students are used to studying online, and we are accredited by the Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) to give some courses online and others face-to-face."

Sekibibi said that ULK has a digital library which is accessible by the students wherever they would be, and it has equipped smart classrooms used by lecturers to deliver online lectures.

He added that looking at the situation of the pandemic which has for the past one and half years remained unpredictable, they used the opportunity they had of teaching face-to-face and covered as much content as possible.

Gustave Masereri Tombola, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kigali, said that the university has an online platform which is popular among the students because they used it when sending their assignments even when studying face-to-face.

"They are going to continue learning online and there won't be any gap, because we are accredited by MINEDUC to use blended mode, allowing us to teach some courses online and others face-to-face," he added.

As for Rwanda Polytechnic, which has different campuses in the districts under particular measures, officials said that students will be given different assignments to do remotely, as they will stay on campus even though there will be no face-to-face classes, according to Sylvie Mucyo, Deputy Vice-Chancellor in Charge of Training in Rwanda Polytechnic.

"We can't allow them to move like these high school students, because for them they are going on long holidays. That is why after we consulted the Ministry of Health and MINEDUC, we decided that students stay where they are (on campus or at their homes) to avoid the risk of contaminating or spreading the virus," she added.

She said that since other campuses in other districts are continuing their routine mode of studying, there will be a catch-up plan for the students in the districts under particular measures, once the measures are eased.

Ignatius Kabagambe, Head of Corporate Communication at the University of Rwanda, said that the university is also planning to pursue studies online where they are affected.

"Whenever the University of Rwanda faces this disruption, it always pushes us towards boosting our online teaching arrangements. We're going to continue uploading modules that were being taught physically, so that we can start teaching them online," he added.

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Ready despite minor challenges: students

Some students told The New Times that they are always expecting changes due to the unpredictability occasioned by Covid-19 outbreak.

They said there won't be any big disruption as they will be studying online, unless some challenges they always face when studying online.

"We are used to the system, because it is not the first time for this to happen, we had lockdown before and we managed to study online, and we currently were using online platform by sending assignments and reading notes," said Alice Niyigena, year one computer science student at ULK.

She added that they sometimes face the challenge of the high cost of the internet, which hinders some from attending online classes.

She wishes that students may be facilitated so that they can easily study.
analysis

In many parts of the African continent borders are porous. People cross them to visit their kin and for economic reasons such as herding, farming, fishing, hunting and trading. They are also spaces in which human smuggling, human trafficking, gun-running, terrorism and money laundering take place.

In our paper we set out to understand whether this state of affairs contributed to worsening insecurity. Our focus was on West Africa, where there are a host of ungoverned border spaces and where migration is largely untracked. Ungoverned spaces are areas where there's a political vacuum and no state governance structures. Examples abound in Nigeria, Niger, Ghana and Mali.

These ungoverned borders have made it possible for undocumented migrants to cross between countries. And in some cases, large expanses of these borderlands are contested by various terrorist and militant groups. Some are even under the control of trans-border criminal networks and international or transnational terrorist groups. These include Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram, Movement for Unity Jihad in West Africa, Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, Ansar Al-Din, Ansaru, the Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad and the Islamic State in West African Province.

Ungoverned spaces

We found that the insurgency along the Malian borderlands and Sahara Desert was worsened by the fact that most of the border is ungoverned. This has resulted in an increasing number of undocumented migrants. We also found an increase in terrorist incidents.

There is also a high rate of irregular migration along the ungoverned borders of Niger and Nigeria.

In addition, we found a proliferation of small arms and light weapons. These are easily moved across the borders without restriction and are sold cheaply. This poses a major security challenge and increasingly undermines peace and security in the region.

It's estimated that there are about 8 million small arms circulating in West Africa. Of these, Nigeria has approximately 70%.

This means that militant and criminal groups have easy access to them. This contributes to higher incidents of armed robbery, banditry, maritime piracy, natural resource smuggling, kidnapping, terrorism, militancy and communal conflicts.

Terrorism, economics and insecurity

We concluded from our research that ungoverned spaces in the border regions of West Africa might be facilitating the cross-border spread of terrorist activities and the accompanying insecurity.

Terrorism is the most fundamental cause of insecurity in Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. The 2020 Global Terrorism Index provides a comprehensive summary of the key global trends and patterns in terrorism. It ranked Nigeria 3rd, Mali 11th, Burkina Faso 12th and Niger 24th. These countries also feature prominently in the 50 worst terrorist attacks in 2019.

Terrorist groups that were previously considered domestic groups have successfully launched transnational attacks. These include Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb and militant Fulani herdsmen. They have struck at international targets in Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and its affiliated sleeper cells are behind several cases of kidnapping and the murder of western tourists, aid workers and soldiers. They have also launched attacks on government targets, security posts and foreign diplomatic missions.

The Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa remains a security threat with a number of bomb explosions in Mali and Niger.

The Boko Haram insurgency was responsible for the loss of more than 1,000 lives in northern Nigeria between 2009 and 2012. By 2013, Boko Haram insurgency had resulted in more than 13,000 deaths, displacement of many and the destruction of hundreds of schools and churches in Nigeria. A study published in 2021 by the United Nations Development Programme finds that the death toll caused by the conflict in northeast Nigeria is 10 times higher than previously estimated. Some 350,000 people have died as a direct or indirect consequence of the 12-year-old conflict, according to the study.

As a result Nigeria has been by far the most affected by terrorism. Boko Haram and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have been reported to be responsible for half of the deaths attributed to terrorism worldwide in 2014. The group has taken advantage of weak state control of the borders between Niger and Nigeria to move fighters and weapons.

Other factors are also in play. The rapidly increasing irregular migration is due to the fact that migratory patterns have changed over time in the wake of high levels of youth unemployment, population growth, climate change, natural resource depletion, land scarcity, declining real incomes, and public sector cutbacks in response to structural adjustment programmes (in Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo, for example).

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The majority of migrants in West Africa tend to work in the informal sector. They usually work as traders, artisans and farmers. Besides students, another category of migrants commonly found in the region are unemployed and unemployable youths who tend to be beggars and destitute. They can't afford the documents required for travel or to register businesses.

Others are categorised as criminals because they are drug pushers, foreign exchange racketeers, armed robbers and smugglers who deliberately avoid documentation.

This suggests that borders need to be properly governed. But this can only be effective if it's done co-operatively, and with development and security that is centred on people in mind.

Ernest Toochi Aniche, Lecturer ,Political Science, Federal University,Utouke; Chris Changwe Nshimbi, Director & Research Fellow, University of Pretoria, and Inocent Moyo, Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Zululand
analysis

Although President Hassan has overseen a welcome change of tone, a political vision capable of tackling Tanzania's deep-rooted challenges is not yet emerging.

As the first 100 days pass since Samia Suluhu Hassan was unexpectedly propelled to Tanzania's presidency, her less combative style of leadership compared to predecessor John Magufuli is raising expectations of policy change and a reopening of civic space - but how much she is prepared to truly transform the country remains in doubt.

Magufuli's sudden death left an unfinished legacy and a deeply polarized nation as he wielded the considerable power of Tanzania's executive to shut down critical voices, and Hassan has been reluctant to distance herself from him so far, asserting the two of them are 'essentially the same person'.

This pragmatic approach is understandable as she navigates the initial stages of an uncertain political transition and resistance within the dominant ruling party, but it is a stance which invites questions over the potential for transformative change, notably a much-needed new constitution.

Cautious optimism emerging

Hassan's cleanest break with the past is reversing a COVID-19 policy shaped by Magufuli's rejection of vaccines and outright denial that the disease was spreading in Tanzania. Hassan has largely deferred to an independent scientific panel, gradually endorsed limited preventative measures, signalled she will order vaccines, and released the first update on case numbers since April 2020.

Most of Tanzania's challenges run deeper than anything which can be tackled simply by changes of leadership style or immediate policy

Visits to Kenya, Mozambique and twice to Uganda have also demonstrated the new president's willingness to reset foreign relations strained under Magufuli - an insular figure who made just ten trips abroad during six years in office. And her new foreign minister's claim Tanzania will soon ratify the African Continental Free Trade Agreement points to favourable prospects for regional integration.

There are also indications of a change in the business environment, with the president urging her government not to 'flex our muscles against investors'. Although easily forgotten that the previous administration made similar overtures early in its second term, Hassan does have a relatively clean slate and is being endorsed by prominent businesspeople and multinationals who flitted in and out of favour with her predecessor.

A new director of public prosecutions (DPP) has also softened the government stance on outstanding cases of 'economic sabotage' - a legal instrument intended to crack down on corruption which Magufuli increasingly used to discipline the private sector.

Among those now bailed after years in prison without trial are businesspeople arrested under the globally acclaimed anti-corruption drive of Magufuli's own first 100 days as president - providing a timely reminder that early promise is no guarantee of lasting change.

Uncertain prospects for lasting change

Certainly most of Tanzania's challenges run deeper than anything which can be tackled simply by changes of leadership style or immediate policy. The parliament effectively remains an extension of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party caucus, with the retention of the Magufuli-era ban on political gatherings further restricting alternative sources of government scrutiny. And although Hassan made early promises to meet with opposition leaders, this has not yet materialized.

President Hassan may have halted Tanzania's slide away from democracy but she is yet to fully embrace measures needed to reverse it

Political prisoners remain in custody, including multiple opposition candidates and supporters arrested in the course of the 2020 general elections, and fresh reports of abductions of civil society activists have sparked concern with Hassan remaining silent on reforms to Tanzania's security services or investigations into past transgressions.

And her call for a blanket reopening of banned media outlets has ultimately applied only to online television, but would in any case have left untouched the restrictive legal framework underpinning Tanzania's steep decline in freedom of expression.

Hassan's government appointments also fit this uncertain pattern, with glimpses of change from the impunity of the Magufuli era - suspending a notorious district commissioner and replacing the head of the civil service after just 33 days - tempered by the retention of COVID-denying health minister Dorothy Gwajima and the appointment as a High Court judge of former DPP Biswalo Mganga, the orchestrator of an infamous campaign of unbailable legal charges selectively applied to punish dissenting voices.

In addition, the expectations Tanzania's first female president would adopt a groundbreaking approach to gender equality in key government positions have not yet been met with the status quo largely preserved so far. President Hassan may have halted Tanzania's slide away from democracy but she is yet to fully embrace measures needed to reverse it.

The constitution test

The need for a new constitution is the ultimate test of Hassan's resolve and could define her legacy, as opposition and civil society activists argue the Magufuli era amply demonstrated Tanzania's vulnerability to authoritarianism.

Hassan's next 100 days must demonstrate a greater will to define and take ownership of her own vision for Tanzania, offering concrete policy

But this does not sit well with the ruling party because the CCM worries that a new constitution would strip its powers and topple it from the summit of Tanzania's politics - a position it has occupied since independence. This belief was evident during the last constitutional review in 2014 and is still the belief now.

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Hassan's words suggest she intends to side with her party on this. Asking for time to strengthen Tanzania's economy before addressing the constitution and the ban on political rallies is the clearest validation of her claim that she and her predecessor are one and the same - Magufuli asked citizens to 'let me straighten up the country first' before dealing with the constitution.

Although unclear if, or when, Hassan's undefined threshold for economic success will be met, a change in stance is increasingly unlikely while she keeps one eye on the party nomination for the 2025 elections which could see her elected as president in her own right.

Movement on the constitutional question may be blocked for now, but Hassan's next 100 days must demonstrate a greater will to define and take ownership of her own vision for Tanzania, offering concrete policy to match the changes in approach seen so far. But in granting her further patience, Tanzanians should continue to question not only what has changed under their new president but how much is likely to stay that way.

Fergus Kell

Young Adviser, Projects Coordinator and Research Analyst, Africa Programme

Sammy Awami

Freelance Journalist and Researcher
analysis

The public has been overwhelmed by a surge in misleading and false information during the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organisation has decried this "infodemic", which can lead to mistrust in health authorities and undermine the public health response. People often do not know which information to trust, making them vulnerable to disinformation.

New research suggests that South Africans are more likely to trust scientific sources, such as doctors and the World Health Organisation, than their own government. Most disapprove of the government's handling of the pandemic.

These are the findings of an online survey we conducted to find out where people were getting their information about COVID-19 from and which sources they trusted most. We also conducted a small experiment to test people's views on vaccinations. Both were done online, which means that the views represent only those South Africans with access to the web.

Our study, conducted with support from the World Health Organisation's (WHO's) Africa Infodemic Response Alliance, showed that when it came to getting information about the pandemic, South Africans appeared to rely mostly on "traditional" media sources. On average, 74% said they got information about COVID-19 via media such as television, radio and newspapers.

The results also showed that approval of the South African government's response to the pandemic had declined from a year ago, when we conducted a similar study.

The current survey showed a high level of disapproval: 61% of respondents said they "strongly" or "somewhat" disapproved of the way the government was handling the pandemic, while only 21.1% said they "strongly approved". This has an impact on the effectiveness of messages promoting vaccination. If receivers of pro-vaccination messages disapprove of the sender of the message, they are less likely to trust the content of the message or share such messages with others.

The deteriorating level of trust in the government may be related to the stuttering vaccine rollout in the country, which was high on the news agenda at the time of the study. The rollout plan suffered several setbacks and the government was widely criticised for not meeting its targets. The survey was also fielded at the time when the country's health minister, Zweli Mkhize, was put on special leave while an investigation against allegations of corruption was under way.

The research

Our study consisted of two parts.

First, we conducted an online survey in which we asked 1,585 South African social media users what media they consumed, which sources of information they trusted most, and their attitudes towards COVID-19. We also asked them how they would evaluate the government's response to the pandemic.

The second part of the study involved an online experiment with 1,180 social media users. We sought to determine how effective social media messaging strategies were in promoting vaccination, and what role the sender of the message played in how users responded to it.

The online survey showed that, overall, medical doctors and the World Health Organisation were the most trusted sources of information, followed by radio and television. News websites, family and the South African government were less trusted. But they were still more trusted than social media, friends, community leaders, celebrities and faith leaders.

Respondents who intended voting for the governing African National Congress (ANC) or opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) tended to trust the government's communication more than supporters of other parties, such as the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA).

Overall, most said they consulted established news media sources like television (85.6%), radio (79.2%) and newspapers (online 58.3%, print 73.4%) more than they did social media. The exception was Facebook, which had a high usage (85.1%), followed by WhatsApp (67.5%).

Google was also a popular platform to obtain information from (85.3%), but other social media platforms like TikTok (19.6%), Twitter (29.2%), Instagram (26.6%) and YouTube (45.6%) were much less popular sources of information.

In the Facebook experiment, participants saw one of four versions of a Facebook post that included a video encouraging citizens to get vaccinated. Each of the four versions was made to look like it had been posted from a different account. Two of these accounts were from political parties in South Africa (the ANC and DA), and two were institutional accounts (WHO and the National Department of Health).

All four posts included the same video, which was designed to look like a #ViralFact message such as the ones distributed by the WHO's Africa Infodemic Response Alliance. The video combined two common health communication messaging strategies, "humour" and "fear".

We were interested in comparing how users would react to the same information coming from different messengers. Specifically, we looked at whether different messengers would result in people being more or less likely to get vaccinated. We also looked at whether users would be more or less likely to share the social media posts depending on where they came from.

We found that media users' intentions to get vaccinated weren't particularly swayed by which political party did the posting. In all cases, after seeing the Facebook ad, their intention to get the COVID-19 shot remained very high, confirming findings by other researchers.

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But when it came to sharing social media posts, users were less likely to say they would share the Facebook post when they thought it came from an ANC account. Users who were told the post came from the WHO, the National Department of Health or the DA were significantly more likely to share the post.

The study supports others showing a relatively high rate of vaccine acceptance among South Africans. It also suggests that the content of pro-vaccination messages is important for promoting vaccine acceptance. So is the sender.

Implications

The strong disapproval of the government's handling of the pandemic, as well as the overall low levels of trust in the ANC, should be a warning to government communicators that crafting persuasive pro-vaccine messages is not enough. The trust deficit in the messenger also has a negative impact on people's trust in the message itself, and people's likelihood to share those messages.

Herman Wasserman, Professor of Media Studies in the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town and Dani Madrid-Morales, Assistant Professor in Journalism at the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication, University of Houston
Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), lived like a star before he was arrested, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information, has said.

Kanu was arrested outside the country on Saturday and flown to Nigeria the next day.

He was arraigned before a Federal High Court in Abuja while Justice Binta Nyako ordered that he should be remanded in custody of the Department of State Services (DSS) till July 26.

At a briefing on Thursday, Mohammed said security operatives were on the trail of Kanu for two years.

"It will interest Nigerians to know that for over two years, our security and intelligence agencies were on the trail of the proscribed IPOB leader as he lived a five-star life across several countries, travelling on chartered private jets, living in luxury apartments and turning out in designing clothes and shoes. Of course, as we all saw, he was wearing an attire made by Fendi, a luxury Italian fashion brand, when he was arrested."

"We can tell you that the forensic investigation carried out so far has revealed a treasure trove of information on the proscribed IPOB leader and his collaborators. While the investigation continues, we assure you that none of the collaborators, irrespective of their standing in the society, will be spared," he said.

Mohammed vowed that Kanu will be made to face the full wrath of the law.

"They will all face the full wrath of the law for their activities that challenge our nation's sovereignty and threaten its unity. No one, no matter how highly placed, is bigger than the country.

"It is interesting that many are suddenly calling for a fair trial for Kanu as if he didn't get one before he decided to jump bail and flee.

"However, I can assure you that the fair deal that Kanu denied many of the victims of the violence which he willfully instigated through his broadcasts and tweets will not be denied him," he said.
The federal government has appealed to Nigerians not to leave firefighting in the hands of professional firefighters alone, calling on all to contribute their quota towards guaranteeing fire safety and avert the spate of fire incidents across the country.

The Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Interior, Dr. Shuaib Belgore, made the call in Jos at the ongoing 11th Technical Session of Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Interior and Permanent Secretaries Supervising State Fire Services with the theme: "Fire Safety Management: An imparative for National Security."

A statement on Thursday by the Director of Press in the Ministry of Interior, Mrs. Blessing Lere-Adams, quoted the permanent secretary as saying: "Fire safety management is and ought to be our collective responsibility as a people and not to be left to professional firefighters alone. The role of all and sundry is to observe basic precautionary rules that will prevent and protect against preventable fire outbreak."

He added that the best approach of fire safety management would eventually lead to protection of lives and property by averting the outbreak of preventable fire incidents, while warning against aggravating the already challenging security situation in the country by careless fire safety management.

He noted that: "The security challenges being currently experienced in our land are myriad -- terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, armed robbery and other violent crimes -- which are being addressed by government at all levels."

Belgore reiterated the need for inclusion and installation of active and passive fire safety features in buildings and structures, to serve as security check against arsonists and secure valuables from complete destruction.

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The permanent secretary further called on members of the Technical Session to deliberate extensively on the memos presented with a view to recommending to the Federal Executive Council, through the Chairman of Council, recommendations to further strengthen the Fire Service and provide security against unnecessary loss of lives and property in the country."

He said: "The Federal Fire Service requires a very strong and robust legislation to enable it perform its statutory responsibility of protection of lives and property from wanton destruction by fire."

Earlier, the Controller General, Federal Fire Service, Dr. Liman Ibrahim noted that security was paramount to the corporate and individual existence of the nation, hence, the theme of the Conference, "Fire Safety Management as an Imperative to National Security," seeks to explore how fire safety management contributes to the security of lives and property of Nigerians.

The Controller General while appreciating the huge and transformational commitments of President Muhammadu Buhari and the Minister of Interior, Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, to fire safety management in Nigeria, commended the Governor of Plateau State, Mr. Simon Lalong, and the good people of the state for providing a conducive environment for the event.

He advised the Technical Session of Permanent Secretaries to deliberate on various resolutions of earlier report presentation and analysis session of the Controller General and state Directors of Fire, so as to provide guidance and interventions suitable for each state's adoption and administration of fire safety in the country.
Older people often an invisible casualty in conflict with Boko Haram.

Abuja  The Nigerian government's efforts to reintegrate former Boko Haram militants has seen hundreds of fighters go through rehabilitation. But it also gets pushback from the conflict's victims, who want the militants to be held accountable. At a conference in the capital, women from the conflict-affected areas are getting support to head up reconciliation between the former terrorists and their communities.

Some 45 women from Nigeria's northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe file in for a two-day conference in Abuja.

They're here to discuss a sensitive subject - the reconciliation and reintegration of ex-Boko Haram fighters into their communities.

The conference is a joint initiative by the non-profit Center for Humanitarian Dialogue in Switzerland, U.N. Women and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). It's designed to promote women-led community peacekeeping in the northeast, said Millicent Lewis-Ojumu, director at Center for Humanitarian Dialogue.

"We know and from experience have seen that when the women are involved in the conversations, peace building, in helping to resolve issues relating to how to reintegrate and rehabilitate former combatants or person's associated with Boko Haram, that they are very effective," said Lewis-Ojumu.

Since launching the safe exit program, "Operation Safe Corridor" for repentant fighters in 2016, authorities say the program has met with resistance from host communities.

The scheme was launched as part of a growing awareness for the use of amnesty to persuade terrorists to lay down their guns. Nearly 1,000 ex-fighters have been rehabilitated under the government's program.

But very few are successfully living in communities. Most of them eventually rejoin Boko Haram due to rejection.

Hamzatu Alamin is one of the participants at the conference. She started talking about reconciliation 10 years ago when her community was hit hard and young men were coerced into joining Boko Haram.

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But she said her efforts attracted some unwanted attention.

"You can be arrested by state actors and accused of being an accomplice. And secondly, the boys (Boko Haram), if you make a mistake, you can be their target," she said.

Women like Alamin here said they hope to improve their community's acceptance of former jihadists after the conference.

But attending the conference along with other women also lifts the burden of being negatively labeled with terrorists.

"I have been communicating with them. I am now able to say it freely because I know that even the government is communicating with them. The government and security forces are using many of the boys I communicate with as outlets to get the people they're rehabilitating," she said.

Maria Quintero, program manager at IOM Nigeria, said women also need socioeconomic stability if the program is to succeed.

"The Nigerian women are very strong. What we have found as well is that they're very influential in the decision of the males. Women have a role to play especially when it comes to males coming back to the communities," said Quintero.

More than 35,000 people have been killed and millions displaced since the start of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009. Boko Haram, which opposes Western education, has frequently targeted schools.
VICE President Yemi Osinbajo, Thursday lamented that resources that should be used to tackle unemployment in the country were buried in the ground in different parts of the country.

Professor Osinbajo said unless the country gets the management of its solid mineral resources right, it would continue living in the terrible paradox of suffering in the midst of plenty.

The Vice President stated that during the maiden edition of the strategic engagement on sustainable mining with the theme: "Resurrecting Our Buried Prosperity".

According to him, "So buried in the ground in various parts of Nigeria are riches that could ensure that no Nigerian is unemployed, underfed, or neglected.

"And this is not mere speculation because, before the discovery of oil, Nigeria developed its infrastructure, roads, rail, dams, provided free education in the western region for example, from the proceeds of minerals, agriculture and taxes.

"But with the discovery of oil, these incredible riches have remained buried in the ground for decades. In many parts of the country, you find illegal miners with poor equipment essentially scraping the surface of these deposits.

"Some better-equipped operators are able to do more, but they largely exploit cheap labour, and pay next to nothing in taxes or royalties, and cause environmental damage that is never remedied.

" It is clear that unless we get the management of our solid mineral resources right, we would continue living in the terrible paradox of suffering in the midst of plenty. The problems are numerous but solvable.

" The principal issue is that of the challenges of implementing the regulatory framework. While the Ministry of Mines and Steel has the legislative mandate to regulate mining in the country, many states and local governments have embarked on the imposition of their own rules and regulations on miners in their States, including issuance of Registration, Permits, Community Development Agreements (CDA) and Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on miners.

"Some State Governments, in a bid to shore up their revenues, impose illegal fees, taxes, and levies on foreign and local licensed mining companies and operators."

Professor Osinbajo said the federal government required the cooperation of states, council areas and mining communities, for the mining sector to become adequately beneficial to Nigeria.

He also noted that Nigeria must put an end to the culture of exporting its raw materials, start maximising the advantages of refining raw products and exporting products with value added as this has more to offer in terms of job creation and others.

He submitted that the federal government would not be able to effectively regulate mining activities in the country without the active participation of the state and local council structures, explaining further that the centre must also ensure that appropriate incentives go back to the sources.

He emphasized the need for the federal government to ensure that mining communities receive adequate attention, both for residents and for the environment around the communities.

He said, "Mining revenues go to the Federation Account and is shared between the Federal Government, States and Local Governments. States where resources come from get 13% derivation in addition to their share.

"The Federal Government cannot effectively regulate mining without actively, and deliberately working with States, Local Governments and mineral-producing communities.

"The Federal Government, States and Local Government have to jointly develop working arrangements to ensure that mining is attractive to investors, profitable for States and Local Governments, not just from proceeds but also from personal income tax paid to States by mine workers and staff of mining companies.

"The communities where mines are located must also have some direct benefits aside from jobs for their residents. We must find a formula for compensating the communities for environmental degradation and erosion.

"There must also be a framework for ensuring that environmental degradation is remedied.

"We must discourage the export of raw minerals. Refining, processing, or beneficiation is the only real way to maximize our mineral wealth and create good-paying jobs and opportunities for our people."

He noted that Nigeria was already globally a leading producer of Tin, Columbite and Coal as of 1940. He noted that potential coal reserves in the country are currently estimated to be as high as three billion tonnes, adding that "much of our coal is high-grade clean and bituminous with a low sulphur and ash content.

"Even farther back in 1913, gold in commercial quantities had already been found in parts of Northern Nigeria and what is now Osun State. Bitumen was discovered as far back as 1900 mostly in the Southwest Zone, the bitumen belt covering what are now Ondo, Ogun, Lagos, and Edo States and today with deposits in excess of 42 billion tons we have the second-largest bitumen deposit in the world and almost twice our oil reserves.

"How about iron ore? We have the 12th largest iron ore deposit in the world, more than three billion tons. Besides, the Nigerian Geological Survey Agency (NGSA) confirms that Nigeria has over 44 mineral deposits in commercial quantities in over 500 locations across the 36 States and Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria. These minerals range from industrial and energy minerals, such as iron ore and coal, to gemstones, including sapphires, rubies, and emeralds."

He, however regretted that with the discovery of oil, these incredible riches have remained buried in the ground for decades.

"In many parts of the country, you find illegal miners with poor equipment essentially scraping the surface of these deposits. Some better-equipped operators are able to do more, but they largely exploit cheap labour, and pay next to nothing in taxes or royalties, and cause environmental damage that is never remedied."

The Vice President also regretted frequent arrests and harassment of licensed miners and their workers, and closures of mining sites as a result of taxes enforcement by states only disincentive prospective investors in the sector and invariably jeopardize the efforts of the Government to deepen the mining industry in Nigeria.

"There is no way this will ever benefit the majority of our people. Then there are the huge security concerns that always develop in the struggle for control of mineral resources in poorly regulated, unregulated, or ungoverned spaces. Almost invariably, these situations lead to criminal activities and particularly, the proliferation of weapons and armed groups. This is true historically and more evident now.

"On the African continent, we have ample examples of how resource extraction can trigger an increase in criminality. Here in Nigeria, armed banditry hiring and equipping of armed groups by illegal but powerful mining concerns in many resources-rich areas is clearly fuelled by the chaotic regulatory environment.

"It is for these reasons that this strategic engagement with the leadership of the 774 local governments is critical. It is apt and timely especially as the Federal government through the Ministry of Mines and Steel seeks to fully implement its robust and wide-ranging remit in policy and legislation.

"This engagement will certainly help in explaining the regulatory framework to the governments at the community level where most of the mining activities take place. It will enable the ministry and other stakeholders to get direct feedback from the local government authorities and those who have to deal with these issues daily.

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"But where are we today? In 2016, the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development in collaboration with industry stakeholders formulated The Roadmap for the Growth and Development of the Nigerian Mining Sector Industry. The road map addresses some of the tensions between the Federal Government and subnational entities in relation to mining.

"The Roadmap which identifies partnership with mining communities as one of the "critical levers of success" states that "success in Nigerian mining requires partnership across multiple communities, stakeholders and institutions" and also stresses that "the role of state governments as both co-investors and sector champions is critical." It further asserts that "a sustainable growth model" for the sector can be found "only through government innovations and partner action e.g. community engagement mechanisms, shared investment and co-creation of opportunities.

"Section 19 of the Nigerian Mines and Minerals Act establishes the Minerals Resources and Environmental Management Committee (MIREMCO). In each state which is composed of representatives of the Federal, State, and Local Governments and is designed to serve as a platform for fostering synergy in mining operations across all tiers of government.

"Consequently, the Act accords communities of the status of co-investors in the development of mineral assets. The Minerals Resources and Environmental Management Committees are important in bringing order, fairness, inclusion, and equity to mining and its value chains.

"Mr. President has also mandated the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development (MMSD) to prioritize the orderly and efficient development of 7 strategic minerals in the Mining Roadmap namely Coal, Bitumen, Limestone, Iron Ore, Barites, Gold, and Lead/Zinc ore to support local industries and for export of processed mineral products", he explained.

Vanguard News Nigeria
Dealing with cases like this, only information verified by authorities like Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), the World Health Organization(WHO), National Primary Health Care Development Agency, etc. are to be trusted.

Since Nigeria recorded its index case of coronavirus in February, 2020, there have been several claims of home remedies that can cure the virus.

These claims are unverified as COVID-19 is a new strain of virus that has not been experienced before, but then, people eagerly embraced them as they were desperate for remedy and would embrace any that comes their way.

The reaction of most is similar to how many Nigerians embraced untested remedies for the Ebola virus some years ago. One of those is the prescription by a monarch, Attah of Igala, Idakwo Michael Ameh Oboni, who recommended salt solution as a magical vaccine against the virus.

The prescription quickly went viral on social media and an other text messaging platforms. This resulted in the death of two Nigerians and, at least, 20 were hospitalised for excessive salt intake.

Although social media has a tremendous impact on the Nigerian public's collective perception, knowledge, and attitude about issues like this, sometimes, it does harm by triggering unjustified alarms, spreading fears, offering unscientific cures, and dismissal of medical advice.

Dealing with cases like this, only information verified by authorities like Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), the World Health Organization(WHO), National Primary Health Care Development Agency, etc. are to be trusted.

Margaret Bolarinwa, a septuagenarian woman, said she suffered the harsh side effects of garlic in the heat of coronavirus spread.

She had gotten a forwarded message on WhatsApp that garlic cures and prevents one from contracting the virus during the lockdown in April 2020.

"I take garlic normally because I am a BP patient, but then, I increased the intake since it is said that it cures the deadly virus.

"I take it first thing in the morning, during the day, and also at night.

"I started noticing that I get weak quickly, I urinate frequently and feel nauseous. If you know me very well, I am not one that just sits down, I am very agile.

"One of the times, I went to urinate in the bathroom and I almost passed out, it was then I checked my BP and noticed it was low! I then realised I had taken things too far with garlic."

Part of the precautions people took against contracting the virus was taking different supplements to strengthen their immune system.

Felicia Waziri and her sister Keziah narrated their ordeal with Vitamin C.

Ms Waziri said there has been a history of ulcer ailment in their family and her sister has been managing her own, even though she (Felicia) has never felt it before.

"But during the lockdown, my uncle sent us a message on WhatsApp advising a number of immunity drugs and vitamins to protect against COVID, part of it was Vitamin C.

"Everyone in the house started using it, it was my sister that first complained of this serious stomach ache, we didn't take her seriously until I got my attack. I was too reluctant to go to the hospital then for fear of getting infected but when the pain increased I went.

"I was then diagnosed and it was confirmed to be an ulcer, the doctor asked for the drugs I have been taking and advised that I drop the vitamin C immediately," she said.

Ms Keziah said even though she had been managing her ulcer before then, the pain from the stomach cramps became intense

"I have been able to manage my ulcer to the point where I don't need to feel pain frequently but during that period, I cry like a baby. I have stopped using all the supplements we bought then, and the pain has reduced unlike before" she said.

Also, Adamu Mahmud narrated how he experienced constant heartburn with the use of lemon, ginger, and garlic.

This combination is part of the "home remedy" being rumored on social media for COVID -19.

"My heartburn no get part two," Mr Mahmud said lightly in Pidgin English.

"It was so discomforting that sometimes I could not sleep. It was until I traced back the genesis that I then stopped taking the mixture.

"Since then I have been okay. All these self-medications can kill," he said.

Misinformation as tool of health problems

In trying to prevent or cure the virus, several claims could be considered dangerous because it has to do with ingestion. It ranges from taking natural herbs like garlic and ginger to taking alcohol and even ethanol.

Yes, some of these may be safe to take, especially the natural herbs, but in the event of overdose, there have been documented long-term health issues associated with it.

Claim 1: Eating garlic will cure COVID 19

Sylvie Briand, the director in the Department of Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness, said this to be false.

Her verification can be relied upon because she and her team in WHO track several dangerous and infectious pathogens around the globe including COVID -19.

She said the abuse of garlic intake is not good for the health while expecting it to cure the disease.

"Garlic is a healthy food that may have some antimicrobial properties. However, no evidence from the current outbreak eating garlic has protected people from the new coronavirus," she said.

Claim 2: Taking Alcohol to kill the virus

Verification: Ms Briand said drinking alcohol does not cure or prevent COVID-19 infection

"The virus is not sensitive to the alcohol we drink but maybe people are confused because they see that we use hydroalcoholic gel to wash our hands but in reality, the alcohol that is in the hydroalcoholic gel is much more concentrated and this is certainly not something you can drink, otherwise you will have a serious side effect

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Claim 3: Taking lemon, ginger, and honey

Verification: WHO has clarified that these may make one feel better during the common cold or the flu which are part of the symptoms of the virus, but are not a cure for COVID- 19.

At a press conference in Geneva, Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, advised that people can take lemon, ginger, and honey if it works as a remedy for flu or cold.

"But please, let us avoid making assumptions without evidence that certain things can cure COVID-19. At the moment there is no proven therapy for COVID-19".

Claim 4: COVID-19 can be treated with antibiotics

Verification: Antibiotics work only against bacteria, not viruses.

COVID-19 is caused by a virus, and therefore antibiotics should not be used for prevention or treatment.

However, if you are hospitalised for COVID-19, you may receive antibiotics because bacterial co-infection is possible.

Claim 5: Drinking methanol, ethanol, or bleach

Methanol, ethanol, and bleach are poisons. Drinking them can lead to disability and death. Methanol, ethanol, and bleach are sometimes used in cleaning products to kill the virus on surfaces - however, you should never drink them. They will not kill the virus in your body and they will harm your internal organs.

Between February 20 and April 7, Aljazeera reported that 728 Iranians died after ingesting toxic methanol, erroneously thinking it can cure the new coronavirus.
A Kaduna High Court will rule on the defence counsel's No-Case-Submission in the 'secret trial' of the leader of Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), Ibrahim Zakzaky, and his wife Zeenat on July 28.

Presiding Judge, Justice Gideon Kurada, at the resumed hearing yesterday adjourned the trial to July after the prosecution and counsel to the defendants addressed the court on the no-case submission prayer.

Lead counsel to Zakzaky, Mr Femi Falana, SAN, who spoke to journalists after the adjournment, prayed the court to rule in favour of his clients, saying, "The prosecution and the defence addressed the court on the no-case-submission prayer.

"We indicate at the last hearing that even though the prosecution called 15 witnesses, we felt that no case had been established to warrant our clients being in court, in other words, we addressed the court that there is nothing to defend."

He noted that the court took counsel's addresses and adjourned the matter to July 28 for ruling on the No-Case-Submission.

It could be recalled that the lead counsel to the Kaduna State Government, Mr. Dari Bayero, had at the close of their submission on March 31, prayed the court to sentence the defendants.

He then asked the court to overrule the defence and sentence Zakzaky and his wife, Zeenat, as provided by the law.

"We are satisfied with the way the case has gone so far, we have presented 15 witnesses, including Army generals, who are key actors and players that led to the filing of the case against the IMN leader.

"One of our prayers is that the court should overrule the No-Case-Submission, overrule the defence, convict the defendants accordingly and pass the necessary sentence as provided for in the law," Bayero said during the last sitting.

El-Zakzaky and his wife Zeenat are being charged by the Kaduna State Government on eight counts, bordering on culpable homicide, unlawful assembly and disruption of public peace, among other charges.
Popular radio presenter Kudzai Violet Gwara also known as KVG is now a proud homeowner in the leafy suburb of Borrowdale.

Sharing the news on social media, KVG could not hide her joy expressing how much the development still felt like a dream.

Wrote KVG in a brief letter to herself.

KVG / Mrs Ellis 

I was not ready to post these pictures on Tuesday because it felt unreal... A girl like me being asked to stand in front of people as the Guest of Honour, a girl like me becoming a Homeowner in Borrowdale!!! This is what KVG has done for Vhai for Kudzi... @westpropzimbabwe What more can I say thank you for putting value on my Brand @kensharpezim I am truly humbled Sir thank you so much Chief.

And thank you yes you, my number 1 cheerleader when I'm on and off Air.Keep pushing unosvika chete

This comes a few days after another female public figure, Tamy Moyo, inked a deal with vehicle distributing company, ZIMOCO, as its brand ambassador.

Ironically, speaking during the unveiling ceremony where the award-winning Afropop star was also handed car keys to a brand new Haval Jolion, Tamy had hoped for her partnership with ZIMOCO to motivate industry titans toward arts.

KVG
The United Nations has stated that despite efforts made to address violent extremism and root causes of conflicts in the Lake Chad region, the problem has continued to persist, blocking progress in the region

The Director of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Regional Office for Central Africa, Salah Khaled, lamented that the consequences of the violent extremism largely perpetrated by the Boko Haram terrorists are alarming with over nearly two and a half million people displaced, ecosystems degraded and livelihood of communities threatened.

He said this on Thursday in Abuja at a high-level launch of the civil society organisation (CSO), Network for Inclusive Rehabilitation and Reintegration, Lake Chad Basin Chapter co-hosted by Neem Foundation and the Elman Peace Centre as a leading African peace building organisation with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Khaled noted that the Lake Chad Basin is the front line in the fight against climate change, insecurity and poverty, insisting that collaboration between governments and CSOs is key in addressing the problems.

He said: "Through our joint efforts, we have the potential to be a laboratory of ideas and chain of hope to address these problems.

"The UN 2030 agenda is a call for collaborative efforts to eradicate poverty, combat climate change and promote peace."

On the reintegration of Boko Haram ex-combatants to the society,Khaled pointed out that it is crucial to move from the classic standard and basic training sessions to bring technical vocational training; to give people a new alternative to immunise them from the manipulations of the violent extremists.

The UNDP Resident Representative in Nigeria, Mohamed Yahya, on his part, said that though some parts of Lake Chad has been liberated from Boko Haram, the terrorist group remains active in the region and there is still much more to be done.

He noted that there is a direct relationship between marginalisation, poverty and why people join violent extremism, and these need to be addressed to find lasting solution to the crisis, stressing that a collaborative effort is needed to tackle these root causes.

He said: "Boko Haram do not control as much territories as they used to, things have improved, but we are not where we want to be.

"In my conversations with the military, they can only do so much in terms of fighting violent extremism, and the solution to violent extremism is some of the work that CSOs and governments have to do."

He however noted that it is possible to carry out reintegration and rehabilitation why conflicts are ongoing.

Yahya said any reintegration and rehabilitation should engage root causes, such as the lack of opportunity and livelihood.

He said: "We need to do reintegration differently. We have to think theoretically to finding solutions and it's in the hands of CSOs."

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Maryam Uwais, the Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on Social Investments, also speaking at the event, said the presidency acknowledges the role of CSOs in building resilient and social responses to insecurity; to provide alternatives to perpetrators and potential perpetrators of violence in the Lake Chad Basin; and strengthen protection systems.

She however expressed the readiness of the presidency to work with CSOs in achieving these goals, noting that

CSOs are key to understanding the communities and gather early warning signals relevant to countering violent extremism.

The Executive Director of Neem Foundation, Dr. Fatima Akilu, in her welcome remark, explained the essence of the event, while Ilwad Elman, Chief Operating Officer, Elman Peace Centre, and Mustapha Alhassan, Programme Manager of Neem Foundation, provided more details.

The launch brought together over 30 participants selected on the basis of knowledge and experience in supporting reintegration through their work in governments, international organisations, civil society and private sector to also outline the ambitions and milestones achieved to date by the LCB Inclusive CSO Network.
The population of Nigeria will double to 400 million by 2050, according to the Rotary Action Group for Reproductive Maternal and Child Health (RMCH).

Prof. Emmanuel Lufadeju, National Coordinator of the initiative, stated this during the launch of the nationwide family planning media campaign.

He said the country's population is also projected to reach 260 million by 2030.

He said, "The population of Nigeria today is 200 million. In nine years' time, we are going to add about 60 million to the population. So we are going to a population of 260 million people by 2030.

"By 2050 our population will double to 400 million, you can imagine what is going to happen if 400 million people occupy the same space in this country with resources , water, electricity, and all good things of life like hospital facilities not expanding."

He said despite the fact that 90% of women of child-bearing age in the country have knowledge about contraceptives, only 15% of them use them .

Prof Lufadeju said the campaign tagged 'Hold On' is aimed at enlightening women about the available choices of preventing unintended and risky pregnancies, spacing their births to enjoy better quality of life, or stopping childbirth when they have had enough.

Launching the campaign, Minister of State for Health, Senator Adeleke Olorunnimbe Mamora, said family planning has the potential of reducing maternal and child mortality and morbidity by 30 per cent.

He said it's successful implementation is key to achieving the health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The minister said the challenges to Nigeria's target of achieving Modern Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (mCPR) of 27% by 2024 include inadequate financing for family planning, and delayed release of budgets, among others.

He enjoined the media to be deeply involved in getting the right information about family planning to the populace.
The UK government is seeking clarification on circumstances under which the Nigerian government extradited Nnamdi Kanu, a dual national of both countries, over crimes related to his secessionist movement.

Mr Kanu, who the Nigerian government labelled as a fugitive for being the leader of the proscribed organisation Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), was brought to Court in Nigeria on Wednesday after officials claimed they had arrested him in London, UK.

However, the British government has denied that the 53-year-old Kanu was arrested or extradited from the UK.

Seeking explanation

Mr Dean Hurlock, the Head of Communications of the British High Commission in Nigeria, said on Wednesday that the UK will seek clarification from Nigeria on the circumstances surrounding Kanu's arrest and extradition.

"We can reaffirm that Nnamdi Kanu was not arrested in the UK nor was he extradited from the UK.

"With regards to any questions about the possible legality of his arrest, the British High Commission in Abuja is currently in the process of seeking clarification from the Nigerian government about the circumstances of the arrest."

The IPOB is a proscribed organisation in Nigeria but has since 2014 been fighting for the actualisation of the sovereign state of Biafra, whose dream in the 1960s had caused a deadly civil war in the country.

The IPOB agitation has brought back memories of when Nigeria's South East was first declared a Biafra republic and led to a three-year civil war, 1967-1970, in which three million people died.

Kanu, who also founded a militia group, Eastern Security Network (ESN), fled to London in 2017 after jumping bail while standing trial for treason and was re-arrested and brought back to Nigeria on June 26, 2021 and arraigned before the Federal High Court in Abuja on June 29, 2021.

The British Government said its Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was ready to provide consular assistance to Kanu as it expected the trial of the Biafran separatist to follow due process.

His lawyer, Ifeanyi Ejiofor, has formally applied to the usually secretive police squad, Department of State Service (DSS), to allow them access to their client.

Justice Binta Nyako of the Federal High Court, Abuja, on June 29 ordered that Kanu be remanded in the custody of the Department of State Services until July 26 when the case would he heard.

Kenya accused

Amidst speculations that Kanu was arrested in UK, Ethiopia, and Brazil, his younger brother, Mr Kingsley Kanu, on Wednesday night claimed that his brother was arrested in Kenya.

"My brother has been subject to extraordinary rendition by Kenya and Nigeria. They have violated the most basic principles of the rule of law.

"Extraordinary rendition is one of the most serious crimes states can commit. Both Nigeria and Kenya must be held to account. I demand justice for my brother, Nnamdi Kanu.

"The British High Commission in Nigeria must insist upon my brother's immediate release. They must guarantee his safety and security.

"Nnamdi Kanu must be returned home to the UK to his wife and his sons who live here. The Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, must make clear to the Nigerian authorities that they will not tolerate the unlawful detention of British citizens and that the UK Government condemns the Nigerians and Kenyans for undermining the rule of law.

"Foreign Secretary, Raab, must be clear. There will be consequences for those who resort to extraordinary rendition. The British Government must insist upon justice for Nnamdi Kanu," he said.

Kenya's High Commission in Abuja did not immediately comment but an official at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Nairobi said the government will check whether he travelled to Kenya using different passport and names.

A spokesperson from the British High Commission in Nairobi too said the government was seeking information from Nigeria.

"We are seeking clarification about the circumstances of the arrest from the Nigerian government," the spokesperson told The EastAfrican.

Nigeria's Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Mr Abubakar Malami, told Nigerians that Kanu's arrest was planned and executed by the Nigerian Security and Intelligence agencies. It was coordinated by the Nigeria Intelligence Agency (NIA).

Charges

Kanu was first arrested on October 14, 2015 and taken to court to answer to, among others, charges of terrorism, treasonable felony, managing an unlawful society, publication of defamatory matter, illegal possession of firearms and improper importation of goods.

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A judge at the Federal High Court, Abuja, revoked Kanu's bail that was granted him on health ground and issued a bench warrant for his arrest on the same date, 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 against Nigeria and Nigerian State and institutions using television, radio and online broadcasts.

Kanu was also accused of instigating violence, especially in Southeastern Nigeria, that resulted in the loss of lives and property of civilians, military, paramilitary and police forces, and the destruction of civil institutions and symbols of authorities.

Kanu's arrest is similar to that of high profile politician, the late Umaru Dikko.

In 1984, Mr Dikko was abducted in London and put in a crate for repatriation to Nigeria before an intelligence report prompted British police to detect the crate at the luggage compartment in a Nigerian Airways plane in Heathrow airport.

The politician was Minister of Transport in the Second Republic and had fled to the UK when then Gen Muhammadu Buhari overthrew civilian President Shehu Shagari.
The federal government is planning to sell the assets of the NDPHC to fund budget deficit.

The House of Representatives has asked the Federal Government to suspend the planned privatisation of the Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC).

The lawmakers noted that the asset does not belong to the federal government solely, hence, the planned sale should be put on hold till ownership of the asset is resolved.

This resolution was sequel to a motion of urgent public importance moved by Kayode Musbau (APC, Lagos) on Thursday.

In his motion, Mr Musbau said the "funding for procuring the asset" was sourced from the federation account, noting that the asset belongs to federal, states and local governments in Nigeria.

"Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) is incorporated under the Companies and Allied Matters Act as a private limited liability company with shareholding fully subscribed to by the Federal, State and Local Governments with a mandate to manage the National Integrated Power Projects (NIPP).

"In 2005, the National Council of State and the National Assembly approved an initial funding of US$2.5 billion for NIPP from the Excess Crude Oil Account (ECOA) which statutorily belongs to the Federal, State and Local governments," he said.

He said the government had in 2013, decided to sell the asset, with proceeds to be invested in renewable energy but the process was truncated.

Mr Musbau informed his colleagues that some assets of the company are part of the those listed by the Bureau for Public Enterprise (BPE) to be sold with the aim of using the proceeds to fund the federal government budget deficit.

Resolutions

The House, therefore, mandated the

committees on power and privatisation and commercialisation to investigate the planned sale of the NIPP power plants of the NDPHC and report back within four (4) weeks for further legislative action.

When the motion was put to question by the Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila, the "ayes" had it.
The federal government suspended Twitter from operating in Nigeria on June 4.

The House of Representatives has resolved to give the federal government time to negotiate with Twitter over the suspension of the microblogging site from operating in Nigeria.

The lower chamber made the resolution, following the adoption of the report of the Committee on Information, National Orientation, Ethics and Value, Telecommunication, Information Technology, Justice, and National Security and Intelligence, on the ban.

Segun Odebunmi (APC, Osun), the chairman of the committee on information, national orientation, ethics and value, presented the report, which was adopted by the Committee of the Whole.

The consideration of the report was not without drama, as the Chairman of the Committee of the Whole, Deputy Speaker Idris Wase, condemned the report presented by Mr Odebunmi.

At first, Mr Wase said the committee failed to invite the National Security Adviser, Babangana Monguno, adding that the report was not properly done.

"Did you engage the national security adviser so that we don't rush this? It is your recommendation that is making me somehow," Mr Wase said.

The Deputy Minority Leader, Toby Okechukwu, said the report failed to address the issues raised by the House on the ban. He therefore called for the report to be discarded.

At this point, the Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila, who was on the floor to participate in the debate, intervened.

He said the report addressed the legal implication and the committees invited the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed.

The House rules says the deputy speaker is the chairman of the committee of the whole. The speaker is allowed to step down and participate in debate if he/she wishes.

Mr Wase insisted that the committee should have invited the NSA, since the ban was for security reasons.

"We don't want a situation where you (Gbajabiamila) will give him cover today so that tomorrow he will not do the same thing. The decision was made based on security. It has affected the work."

Responding to the comment by his deputy, Mr Gbajabiamila said the assignment was time bound, hence, the committee was unable to exhaust the investigation.

Mr Okechukwu again faulted the report that it was not thorough, and moved an amendment that the government should lift the ban. The amendment was rejected by the House.

The adopted recommendations are as follows:

-That time be allowed for the Federal Government of Nigeria and Twitter to enter into the dialogue process that is already ongoing, so as to create room for amicable settlement on the matter.

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-That relevant Government Institutions such as National Broadcasting Commission, Nigeria Communication Satellite, etc. should be alive to their mandate by doing the proper thing to avoid future occurrence of this nature.

-That the Federal Government should take into cognisance the negative effect of the Twitter's suspension on Nigerians who depend on the platform for their livelihood

-That Federal Government should be proactive in their interface with Twitter so as to come up with a timely resolution on the matter

-That Freedom of expression is not absolute anywhere in the world. This is because security and freedom of expression sometimes present contending interests. Therefore, national security must be guaranteed at all times as much as the right to free speech must be protected. That Government should always have communicated better with Nigerians when critical decisions are to be made.

Background

The government announced the ban on the microblogging site on June 4. According to the government, the ban was due to threats to national security.

Following the outcry, the House on June 8 mandated the joint committee to investigate the ban. Mr Mohammed appeared before the committee and gave the position of the government.

The government recently announced the composition of a team that will meet with Twitter on the ban.
President Buhari has also approved the payment of backlog of death benefits.

The federal government has ordered the payment of outstanding pension liabilities under the Contributory Pension Scheme(CPS), the National Pension Commission (PenCom) has said.

Established in Pension Reform Act 2014, the CPS is a mandatory scheme that compels both employees and employers in the public and private sectors to collectively save a minimum of 18 per cent of an employee's monthly earnings into a Retirement Savings Account (RSA).

In a release by the Head of Corporate Communication of the commission, Peter Aghahowa, PenCom told retirees of Treasury-funded Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) that President Muhammadu Buhari has approved PenCom's submission on the payment of some critical aspects of the outstanding pension liabilities of the Federal Government under the Contributory Pension Scheme.

"Specifically, the President has approved: Payment of outstanding accrued pension rights for verified and enrolled retirees of treasury-funded MDAs that retired but are yet to be paid their retirement benefits, as well as the backlog of death benefits claims due to beneficiaries of deceased employees of treasury funded MDAs," the statement said.

"Payment of 2.5% differential in the rate of employer pension contribution for FGN retirees and employees which resulted from the increase in the minimum pension contribution for employers from 7.5% to 10% in line with Section 4(1) of the PRA 2014. Payments for retirees and existing employees would take effect from July 2014."

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The commission assured that the federal government as expected in the Pension Reform Act 2014 will continue with the payment of the 10 per cent rate of employer pension contribution for its employees, thus ensuring remittance of at least 18 per cent monthly (employer 10 per cent and employee eight per cent).

It also said that funds had already been made available for the settlement of pension liabilities and remittances into the various retirement savings accounts (RSAs) of the affected retirees and employees are currently being processed.

According to the commission, the affected retirees would be notified in due course by their respective pension fund administrators (PFAs).

It said the development is significant giving that it has been a challenge since 2014.

"The settlement of the outstanding accrued pension rights of verified and enrolled FGN retirees and compliance with the reviewed rate of pension contributions are significant developments that have resolved the challenges in these aspects that have lingered since 2014".
The lawmakers also proposed that the Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education (AOCOED) and the Michael Otedola College of Education be upgraded to a university.

The Lagos House of Assembly on Thursday debated two bills proposing the establishment of two tertiary institutions, a University of Education and a University of Science and Technology, in the state.

The bills, which scaled second reading on the floor of the House presided over by the Speaker, Mudashiru Obasa (Agege 1), were committed to the House Committee on Education (Tertiary) to report back in two weeks.

Currently, there are four state-owned universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education namely the Lagos State University (LASU), Lagos State Polytechnic (LASPOTECH), Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education (AOCOED), and Michael Otedola College of Education.

Bisi Yusuff (Alimosho 1) argued that the bill for a law to provide for the establishment of the university of Education, Lagos (UNEDLAG), was important as he suggested that it should also have provision for pre-degree programmes.

Mr Yusuff also noted a provision in the bill that would make graduates independent rather than "search for jobs."

"The inclusion of vocational training will also make the students to be self-employed," he said.

Sanni Okanlawon (Kosofe 1), said it had become important for the Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education (AOCOED) and the Michael Otedola College of Education to be upgraded to a university.

"The society now rejects NCE (holders) and what is the benefit of going to a school that your certificate will not be recognised?

"Admission into this school is the lowest as only 18 applicants chose (AOCOED) as first choice in the last Universal Tertiary Matriculations Examinations (UTME).

"With the creation of this varsity, it will reduce the number of applicants seeking admission to LASU," he said.

Also contributing, Gbolahan Yishawu (Eti-Osa 2), who agreed with his colleagues on the need to upgrade the two colleges of education in the state to a university, said the NCE is "no longer popular".

According to him, the establishment of the university is timely, but "there is need to have a template to form the institution in order to avoid overlap."

David Setonji (Badagry 2), chairman of the House committee on Information, supported the bill.

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He added that the state has a high number of primary and secondary schools with less teachers and that the university would help resolve the challenge.

The Leader of the House, Sanai Agunbiade (Ikorodu 1), who said he was excited about the planned upgrade, told his colleagues that he is a product of AOCOED and that he taught for five years with the certificate he got from the institution.

"The creation of a new varsity is a good thing. This bill takes care of the welfare of both lecturers and students," he added.

Abiodun Tobun (Epe 2), said he was optimistic the proposed University of Education would produce good teachers if passed into law.

Concerning the proposed University of Science and Technology, the lawmakers expressed optimism that it would help provide manpower for the development of the state and the country.

In his contributions, Rauf Age-Sulaimon (Amuwo Odofin 2) suggested that courses in the humanities and legal studies should not be included in the institution's curriculum as a University of Science and Technology.

While Femi Saheed (Kosofe 2) said science and technology play vital roles in development, Mr Yusuff urged that the studies to be offered should take into cognisance "the culture of the people".

Mr Yusuff also advised that the university "should be made to go into researches on agriculture to reduce the high cost of food in the state and the country".
Blog

The sun is dressed in her best attire on Tuesday morning, after the heavy rains at night, to welcome resilient traders and businesspersons who are about their duties despite the weather changes. Hooting horns from motorcycles are the most familiar sounds anyone will hear in Nkwo Nnewi ultramodern market, the largest vehicle spare parts market in West Africa, popularly referred to as Nkwo.

As early as 7:30 am, as traders open their shops, a young food vendor at the electrical parts section is seen surrounded by people, mostly men. Not long after, they start to leave, one after another, with food in plates, bowls and warmers of different sizes. The rest take turns on a bench to relish their plates of rice with pepper soup or palm kernel sauce (Ofe Akwu). Simply known as Mama Chimezie, the food vendor, in her late thirties, has been in business with her mother for about 15 years, and recently took over. With her experience and popularity in the market, one would expect her to know more about basic food safety and hygiene. A conversation with her and other food vendors sheds light on the extent of epidemic preparedness in South East Nigeria.

"I wash my hands regularly inside a bowl. When my customers come, they fetch water from us and wash their hands with our bowl," Mama Chimezie says, when asked about hand hygiene habits. She also affirms that she is aware of some food-borne diseases like typhoid, but not pathogens. "I don't know about Salmonella, but I know about typhoid. Is there anyone in Nigeria who has not suffered from Typhoid disease before?" Another topic was how she preserves any food remaining from the day. "If I am unable to sell all my rice in a day, I soak it in water and leave overnight, then sieve out the next morning and warm it. I believe it is the best because sometimes there is no electricity to refrigerate it.

Although some food vendors did not want to engage for fear they may be speaking with someone from the health task force, one common insight drawn from the conversations with Mama Chimezie and other food vendors was that though electricity supply had improved a little in Nnewi town, the lack of running water within the market was a concern. They purchased water in 20-litre gallons from a seller near the market for washing and cleaning during and after the day's trade.

Also, the health seeking behaviours of these vendors tell a different story. "I often suffer from ordinary malaria. When I do, I go into the farm, fetch some herbs, boil them, drink and use them to bathe. Leaves of mango, pawpaw, or Dogon Yaro, work well. If I am really sick, I go to the hospital. Otherwise, Jesus heals me. " says 51- year-old Mrs. Anazodo, who has been in the food business for 22 years. Fifty-seven-year-old Mrs. Okeke, popularly known as Mama Doctor, who sells roasted foods like yam and plantain, only undergoes regular health checks because her son insists she does.

Economic and Public Health Burdens of Food-Borne Diseases

Globally, one in ten people fall ill after eating contaminated food. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that unsafe food contains harmful pathogens and/or chemical substances that cause over 200 diseases, ranging from diarrhoea to cancer. These result in an estimated 600 million cases annually, and 420,000 deaths globally. Children account for 40% of these deaths.

In Nigeria, recent reports by joint external evaluators show a 40% level of compliance towards food safety. The World Bank estimates that Nigeria and other countries, altogether lose $110 billion yearly to food-borne diseases, thus impeding socio-economic development by straining healthcare systems and harming national economies, tourism and trade. These funds are lost through lost productivity and medical expenses annually. Although these diseases are under-reported, it has been reported that 200,000 Nigerians die of food poisoning annually, due to food contamination by improper processing, preservation, and service.

Poor Hygiene and Food-handling: Who is at risk?

Like all businesses, food vending is an essential service set up to make profits. Since all Nigerians need food, proper food handling is key for all to have access to safe and nutritious food to sustain life, reproduction and promote good health. Unsafe raw food, poor storage conditions, inadequate cooking, poor personal hygiene, and improper handling methods are sources of contamination that give room for food-borne outbreaks. Food-handlers with poor personal hygiene could be potential sources of infections by food-borne pathogens (Hepatitis A, Salmonella species, E.Coli, Vibrio species, and Listeria) transmitted through food, water, nails, fingers and fecal contamination. Compared to other parts of the hand, the Journal of Food Protection reports that the area beneath fingernails harbours the most microorganisms and is most difficult to clean.

Poor hygiene habits create risks for food vendors' clientele: attendees at events, traders, customers, passers-by to the office, and bank workers who buy at least one meal from them daily. The 2019 report on Consumption Expenditure Pattern in Nigeria published by the National Bureau of Statistics show that about 57% of total household expenditure of Nigerians was spent on food, with food consumed outside the home responsible for the largest proportion (20%) of these food expenses. These expenses and consumption patterns also vary from one zone to another, as well as the levels of urbanization, with urban areas spending more on food (43%) than those in rural areas (38%). Hypothetically, in urban areas, the working class Nigerians are more at risk of food-borne diseases, as most regularly eat outside their homes to meet a schedule that keeps them up early and brings them home late. These urban adults depend on food from street vendors like Mama Chimezie because they are easily available, affordable and served fresh (hot). In an analysis of street food samples in Nigeria, over 26% contained Bacillus cereus, while 16% contained Staphylococcus aureus. In rural Nigeria, the 2018 Nigeria Demographic Health Survey (NDHS) highlights that food storage challenges may affect food quality, as only 10% of rural-dwellers own refrigerators, out of the 39% of households who have access to electricity.

How Can Nigeria Prevent A Food-Borne Disease Outbreak?

An investigation into a food poisoning case at a burial ceremony identified that major constraints to an effective outbreak investigation in our environment are inadequate preparedness and lack of public health laboratories. Although Nigeria's epidemic preparedness level has undergone a positive shift from 39% to 46%, our efforts with food safety have room for improvement.

At a national level, Nigeria's National Action Plan on Health Security, developed by the Nigerian Centre For Disease Control and partners, requires sustained funding: an estimated 5-year cost of $2,622,819 (799,173,050) to strengthen food safety systems and food laboratories, surveillance of food-borne diseases, to build human capacity to conduct and lead food outbreak investigations and leverage partnerships with the national legislators, organisations, agencies and stakeholders related to food security, are strengthened. Also, the National Food Drug Administration and Control Agency needs to partner with stakeholders at the state and local levels. "We need a massive awareness and sensitisation campaign that involves community, social, veterinary, and environmental health workers, rural health task force teams, market, church and traditional leaders, farmers, food vendors and suppliers. All food vendors and hotels must be registered, tested, trained and certified," opines Mr. Adamu Yusuf Degri, Medical Laboratory Scientist at Federal Teaching Hospital, Gombe.

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For Nigeria to achieve food safety, Mrs Funmilola Ijiwola, a Lagos-based clinical nutritionist suggests that all mediums that fuel food-borne epidemics must be addressed. "At all times we need to ensure a clean environment, access to clean water and sanitary facilities, safe hygienic food chain processes and protocols for processing meat, storing fresh food, and packaging them. There should also be proper education for food marts, production, processing and distribution companies."

Basic hygiene and sanitation will take Nigerian food vendors and consumers further than a million doctors would. Food vendors can do better to keep all Nigerians safe. One sure thing, to begin with, are the words of Olabimpe Ajibola, CEO of Ivie's Kitchen and a food business consultant certified in food safety: "All food vendors need to prepare, package and deliver their services as though the customers were watching, every step of the way."
Nairobi  Kenya and the United States are planning to set up a joint operation team to scrutinize the safety of COVID-19 vaccines to be imported.

The announcement was made Thursday by the United States Department coordinator for global COVID-19 response Gayle Smith.

Kenya is among the countries listed to receive doses of the Pfizer vaccine from the United States, which is part of President Joe Biden's commitment to resolving the inequalities in the distribution of vaccines globally.

Gayle, who was speaking during a press briefing drawing journalists across Africa, said after the necessary approvals are authorized this will pave way for the shipping of vaccines from US to Kenya.

"In order to share the vaccine, we have to go through several legal and regulatory steps to make sure that the vaccine is authorized in Kenya. Our teams will work together jointly in confirming the safety of the vaccines before they are shipped," she stated.

The Biden-Harris Administration in June announced the distribution list for 55 million of the 80 million doses of America's own vaccine supply in service of ending the pandemic globally.

Gayle said the US intend to carry out the approval processes within the shortest time possible, so that the vaccine shipment can be dispatched.

"Hopefully you will be seeing those vaccines arrive very soon and with the President's support and encouragement we are going to move them as quickly as we can," she added.

A statement from White House explained that "approximately 14 million - or 25% of these 55 million vaccines - will be shared with regional priorities and other recipients, such as: Colombia, Argentina, Haiti, other CARICOM countries, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Cabo Verde, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, Oman, West Bank and Gaza, Ukraine, Kosovo, Georgia, Moldova, and Bosnia."

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It stressed the importance of the vaccine strategy as a vital component of America's overall global effort to lead the world in the fight to defeat COVID-19 and to achieve global health security.

In addition to sharing teh vaccine doses, the Biden-Harris Administration said it is also committed to working with the manufacturers to produce more vaccines to share with the world.

Kenya had administered 1,378,585 vaccines by June 30, 2021 having acquired more than 1.02 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine through the COVAX facility.
Nairobi  The Third-way Alliance Party contends that President Uhuru Kenyatta ought to have stepped aside if he wanted to initiate the proposed changes to the Constitution through the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI).

Lawyer Elias Mutuma, told the Appeals Court that the President had already set a precedent for such an action in 2014 when he temporarily appointed his Deputy William Ruto as acting President so that he can travel to The Hague to respond to the International Criminal Court as an individual but not the country's president to attend the status conference in his Crimes Against Humanity case which was later terminated for lack of evidence.

"In 2014, our President did the right thing... So if the President wants to initiate such a process as a citizen he must do exactly the same thing. He must come out in the open and announce to us that, this is not the President doing this, it is me as a citizen," he told the seven-judge Court of Appeal bench hearing the challenge to a High Court ruling that scuttled the constitutional amendment.

Mutuma maintained that President Kenyatta cannot spearhead the amendment of the Constitution while he is still a state officer who has taken an oath to protect and preserve the national document.

He noted that former MP Dennis Waweru and Suna East MP Junet Mohammed were sued in their capacity as officials of BBI's National Secretariat and they never signed a single notice of protest to that description, hereby confirming that they are not the promoters.

"If we are to go with the assertions of the appellants, this was drafted by Dennis Waweru and Junet Mohammed so it shouldn't be a problem for the people to enact a law. Subsequently, we will show that the Executive was involved all along," he said.

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In his submissions before the Appeals Court, Mutuma further claimed the assertion by Junet and Waweru that they were the promoters of the BBI contradicted their position before the High Court.

The Third-way Alliance Party lawyer ran into headwinds after Justices Daniel Musinga, Rose Nambuye and Patrick Kiage questioned him on the legislation-making procedure after he claimed that the enactment of a proposal comes first and not at the tail-end.

Mutuma dismissed claims by the appellants that they jumped the gun in rushing to the High Court to challenge the Building Bridges Initiative process when the proposal was still being handled by the County Assemblies.

"We brought a real issue touching on a dispute or a threat to the Constitution and you 'My Lord/My Lady' (s) have authority to defend the Constitution unlike us who only have an obligation," Mutuma explained.

He asserted that the action by the BBI team was aimed at repealing the 2010 Constitution and not amending it.

"If the nature of the changes being brought bring about in-concealable conflict between what we have and what we are bringing in then we are repealing and not amending. Our Constitution does not provide for a repeal," he explained.
Paris  President Uhuru Kenyatta on Thursday morning met his French host Emmanuel Macron at Elysee Palace in Paris during which the leaders discussed several bilateral and multilateral subjects of mutual interest to Kenya and France.

President Kenyatta and his French host discussed the progress of key France-supported infrastructure projects in Kenya including the expansion of the 233-kilometer Rironi-Nakuru-Mau Summit Road whose construction is set to kick-off in September this year.

The public-private partnership (PPP) agreement to expand the Northern Corridor road into a four-lane dual carriageway and reduce congestion at a cost of Shs 160 billion was reached during President Kenyatta's visit to Paris in October last year.

Besides infrastructure, Presidents Kenyatta and Macron discussed enhanced cooperation in the health sector particularly in building Kenya's capacity to manufacture vaccines locally.

On the multilateral front, the two leaders spoke about the forthcoming Global Partnership for Education (GPE) Summit in London to be co-hosted by President Kenyatta and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The Summit is set for 28th and 29th this month, and aims at raising 5 billion USD in five years for investment in the education of 175 million children in low income countries across the world.

President Kenyatta was accompanied to Elysee Palace by Foreign Affairs CS Raychelle Omamo, his Infrastructure counterpart James Macharia and Kenya's envoy to France Prof Judi Wakhungu.
Nairobi  Members of Parliament allied to Deputy President William Ruto have said the fight against corruption must not be politicised.

They argued that government agencies were increasingly using the anti-corruption calls to stifle independent voices.

They cited the police department as key actors in the intimidation to leaders associated with Dr Ruto.

The leaders were Kiambu Woman Representative Gathoni wa Muchomba, Kikuyu MP Kimani Ichungwa, Kandara MP Alice Wahome, Kabete MP Githua Wamacukuru, Nakuru Senator Susan Kihika, Nakuru Woman Rep. Lizah Chelule, Malindi MP Aisha Jumwa and Taita Taveta Woman Rep. Lydia Haika.

Wahome said selective justice was killing the fight against corruption in the country.

"The laws must be defined independently of the circumstances of those to whom the rules are intended to apply," she said.

She asked the Kiambu Woman Rep. who recently defected to the Dr Ruto's political wing to prepare for harassment from the DCI, EACC, KRA, among others.

"The politically-instigated cases will come up against you, but stay firm in your political stand," said the Kandara MP.

Kihika asked the DCI to stop being used to meet political ends.

"You cannot be coming up with imaginary cases against those allied to Dr Ruto. The time of mischief is running out," she argued.

She said they will not be intimidated but intensify their efforts towards the empowerment of ordinary Kenyans.

Her sentiments were supported by her Kikuyu counterpart who said State agencies were being used to persecute some leaders.

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"DCI and other state agencies must stop these political persecutions," said Mr Kimani. "DCI should focus on unearthing those behind the theft if COVID-19 funds."

"We support the fight against corruption but it must be done independently without political biases".

Dr Ruto said politics and political lenses must be detached from the fight against corruption.

"You cannot assist those who do not have ideas on how to move Kenya forward by using criminal justice system," he said.

He said it was time leaders competed on the platform of issues and ideas rather than force, blackmail and fears.

"Do not use the criminal justice system to fight your opponents. Look for agenda to market yourselves to the electorate," he said.

Meanwhile, the Kiambu Woman Rep said the political shift she made recently was as a product of the "pressure from the ground".

"We are at home in the Hustler nation. Kiambu people are not happy with the way Jubilee affairs are being run without consultation," she explained.

Jumwa said more defections were on the way as leaders position themselves with an outfit that addresses the issues of those at the lower end of the wealth pyramid.
Nairobi  Five activists opposed to the push to amend the Constitution through the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) process on Thursday mounted a spirited fight before a seven-judge bench of the Court of Appeal on why the cases lodged before it should be dismissed.

The activists led by Economist David Ndii and four others pleaded with the Daniel Musinga-led bench to have the High Court ruling that shot down the BBI process upheld in totality.

Through their lawyer Nelson Havi, the activists implored the court to safeguard the Constitution maintaining that any alteration of it would amount to its violation of the basic structure doctrine.

"A Constitution is supposed to be a permanent charter which is to endure for ages to come and not to be likely altered to meet the temporary expedience of political parties," he said.

Havi maintained that five chapters of the Constitution that form the basic structure of the Constitution including the Legislature, Executive, Judiciary and the Bills of Rights ought not to be amended either by Parliament or Kenyans through a popular initiative.

"This is what the BBI Bill has done, to destroy, to dismember the basic structure of the Kenyan system. It has created an impure hybrid and presidential and parliamentary system," he said.

Havi pointed out that it is a fallacy that the BBI intends to bring the aspect of separation of powers noting that the current 2010 Constitution has clearly stipulated and provided mechanisms that preserve the outlook of separation of powers in the three arms of government.

The Law Society President further poked holes into the BBI proposal that advocates for the creation of an ombudsman office in the Judiciary noting that the provision is at best archaic and that the installation of the "executive prefect" would interfere with the independence of the Judiciary.

"Parliament itself acknowledged this fault," he said.

Whereas the BBI Secretariat submitted before the court that Suna East MP Junet Mohammed and David Waweru were the promoters of the BBI Bill and not President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, Havi said a state officer or a legislator cannot be a Wanjiku.

"The moment you become a President you cease being a person you become a state officer," he said while submitting on the subject of the topic of the President of the Constituent power.

Havi was categorical that if the Head of State wanted to be part of the BBI he ought to have resigned from office.

"If the President wants to engage in the affairs of other lesser mortals he must abdicate," he said.

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Lawyer Esther Gawa who also represented the activists argued that the electoral body as currently constituted with three commissioners violated the Constitution by engaging in the activities of the BBI when it verified the signatures which were collected in support of the cause.

"The Commission cannot say that the provision requiring a quorum of five does not exist," she said.

She argued that the electoral commission had no mandate to carry out the verification exercise of the signatures which were collected in support of the BBI process on grounds that they were overstretching their mandate.

"There is no legislation that allows IEBC to move with the business of voter registration," she said.

The respondents in the appeal started giving their submissions Thursday until Friday.

The appealants who include the BBI Secretariat, IEBC and the President himself have already given their submissions through their lawyers.
Rabat  The Government Council, chaired Thursday by the Head of Government Saad Dine El Otmani, adopted the draft decree no. 2.20.369 on allowances granted to the members of the National Human Rights Council (CNDH), its bodies and its regional committees.

Presented by Minister Delegate to the Head of Government in charge of National Defense Administration, on behalf of the Minister of Economy, Finance and Administration Reform, the draft decree was adopted following observations made on this matter, said a statement released following the Council.

The review and adoption of the draft law No. 58.21 amending and supplementing Dahir October 4, 1977, of law No. 1.77.216 on the creation of a collective pension scheme and law 05.89 setting the retirement age of employees affiliated to this scheme have been postponed to a forthcoming Council of Government, the source added.
The UN and human rights groups have warned seven months of fighting has hampered food security in Tigray with a real risk of famine.

A bridge over Tekeze River, which has been a crucial gateway to supplying food aid to many parts of Tigray region, has been destroyed.

Mr Roger Sandberg from the Medical Teams International, who was at the bridge three hours after it was blown on Thursday morning, said aid workers were struggling to deliver basic items to displaced people in Tigray

"[I] Tried driving from Shire Tigray, Ethiopia, to Gondar (not my first attempt). This bridge was blown three hours before I arrived. Humanitarian access along with key supply routes are all being destroyed. I hate war! Civilians only at the bridge" he said in a social media post.

"They [civilians] are cut off from family, livestock, agriculture and we cannot get meds, food and fuel. Cease fire was not real. Civilians lose, suffer, die," he added.

Food aid

Earlier, the International Rescue Committee IRC) also confirmed the destruction of the bridge. It said that delivery of food aid would be "even more severely hampered than before"

IRC said it was "deeply saddened" by the destruction adding that it would continue to call on the Ethiopian government for unlimited humanitarian assistance to the Tigray region.

The World Food Programme Spokesperson Peter Smerdon told the media: "The bridge's destruction will have an impact, but we are currently assessing how much of an impact and whether there is an alternative route we could use to bring in urgently needed food stocks from Gondar to our warehouses in Shire."

Nation.Africa couldn't independently verify who might have carried out the attack.

However, sources from Mekelle said the destruction of the key bridge came as Tigray Defence Forces advanced towards the river area to chase combatant forces who had not yet pulled out of Tigray.

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A local aid agency head who refused to be named told Nation.Africa that the destruction of the bridge will halt their relief operations to western Tigray which were occupied by Amhara and Eritrean forces.

"The people in western and central Tigray are the most affected by the conflict and the destruction of the bridge will put tens of thousands of people at imminent risk of starvation" he added.

Mr Girmay Assefa, a Tigrayan politician said: "Destruction of the bridge was a desperate attempt ENDF and mainly by Amhara forces to slow down Tigray forces who are advancing over them"

The Amhara regional spokesman, Gizachew Muluneh, told the AP an investigation would be carried out into the bridge's destruction.

Ethiopian military spokesman Col. Getinet Adane said: "We have the information about it but it will be disclosed in a press conference."

Read: Ethiopia ceasefire: Peace or calm before a storm?

The spokesman for the Tigray forces this week told The AP that they would "liberate" every territory of the region from "enemies" including the Ethiopian forces, Amhara forces and soldiers from neighbouring Eritrea.

Amhara authorities have warned the Tigray forces against trying to enter the region to retake western Tigray areas which remain occupied by Amhara forces following the eruption of Tigray conflict.

The bridge incident comes one day after Mr Redwan Hussien said that the unilateral ceasefire means the government will be responsible for any problems that occur in Tigray.

He said the TPLF, which has been branded as a terrorist entity, will take full responsibility for any peace disruption including attacks on aid workers or blockade to aid supply.
Sudan on Wednesday started testing its ability to provide security and other services to regions initially engulfed in war, after the peacekeeping forces from the AU and the UN officially left the country.

June 30 was the last day for the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (Unamid) to complete the phase-out in accordance with the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2559 (2020) which terminated the mandate of the Mission in December 2020.

Deployed in 2007, Unamid was charged with bringing peace to a region where conflict had broken out a few years earlier after local armed groups rose against the government of Omar al-Bashir whom it accused of oppression.

Bashir has since been ousted and is in jail for corruption, but the conflict in Darfur is said to have left 300,000 dead and another three million displaced, according to UN estimates.

Departure

Unamid's departure means Khartoum, which has worked to reconcile with various armed groups, will now be in charge of overall security for the country, for the first time in 15 years.

Mr Babacar Cisse, the UN Assistant Secretary-General in charge of Unamid, will now be tasked with overseeing the phase-out period. But that will include finalising with staff departure, repatriating assets, transferring team sites to local authorities and liaising with the government on related issues.

Unamid in its term had seen over 100,000 military and police peacekeepers deployed to Darfur. Its highest contingent was 23,000 troops in 2011 but by the time the mandate was terminated, it had just about 7,000 forces and civilian personnel, most of whom have left for their countries.

Unamid said it has already handed over 14 team sites to the government, which has committed to using them for civilian purposes and in line with the framework agreement signed on March 4, 2021.

These facilities will be used for healthcare, education and other social services, including vocational training and community centres as identified by members of local communities, officials said.

While the responsibility for ensuring the safety and protection of sites rests with the central government, the Darfur states governments remain responsible for ensuring that the facilities are used as intended.

The Government of Sudan has established a Joint Task Force and State Delivery Committees as key interlocutors for Unamid during the phase-out which officials say will not involve the military aspect.

Instead, officials will consider the specific needs of each community and provide services such as water and sanitation trucks, water treatment equipment, generators and vehicles, among other needs, which Unamid had been providing.

To date, Unamid had provided Darfuri communities with 193 vehicles, including 27 water and sanitation trucks and 196 generators, and donated their clinic in Zalingei and medical facilities in Nyala and Kabkabiya for use by the local communities.

"Good coordination and cooperation with the Government of Sudan has been crucial in meeting the tight timetable and criteria set by the Security Council for the phase-out period," Cisse told reporters in Khartoum on Wednesday.

"Likewise, it will be important for the government to ensure the protection of the logistics base and the repatriation of the remaining staff to facilitate a smooth liquidation phase."

There were challenges, including looting by communities, as well as the general geographical locale of Sudan's war-scarred Darfur which largely has no paved roads or other facilities. Cisse admitted there had been a misunderstanding with locals at some point as the forces prepared to depart. Some, he said, demanded all the assets be handed to local communities.

As one of the largest peacekeeping operations in the history of the United Nations, Unamid has provided a security environment in Darfur for more than a decade.

Liquidation phase

The departure now leaves duty of protecting civilians in the hands of the Transitional Government of Sudan, now under Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.

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Cisse argued that the Mission will leave the country better prepared and that it had conducted beneficial programmes such as resettling displaced civilians, economic support as well as women empowerment, including addressing sexual and gender-based violence.

From Thursday, the Unamid now enters the 'liquidation phase' which will mostly focus on transferring the remaining property the Mission owned either to Sudan, or to other places deemed useful.

A staff size of 363 policing unit will remain behind to protect UN personnel, facilities and assets within the El Fasher Logistics Base where the Mission was based.

In turn, the joint Sudanese forces will continue to deploy outside the base under the command of the Government of Sudan, in close coordination with the Unamid elimination team, Cisse explained.

These forces will have a joint responsibility to secure the perimeter of the base, provide safety and security for United Nations personnel, and ensure that incoming convoys of contingent-owned assets and equipment arrive without incident.
Rwanda has signed a Rwf3.6 billion ($3.6 million) partnership with the European Union to help upgrade the country's laboratory capacity to help it attract investors to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines.

The funds will be used to strengthen the Foods and Drugs Authority's quality control for medical products, to enable the regulator acquire necessary certification from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

"What we signed is a step to revamp and also strengthen the Rwanda Foods and Drugs Authority. The money we will receive from the EU will support the acquisition of laboratory equipment to make it a modern facility that will enable Rwanda to get a WHO certification," Clare Akamanzi, Chief Executive Officer, Rwanda Development Board told CNBC Africa on Thursday.

"The WHO certification we need for this will also build the confidence of investors who want to produce vaccines. They (investors) will be able to trust the regulatory capacity we want to strengthen with this funding."

Rwanda plans to start manufacturing coronavirus vaccines using mRNA technology after it secured international backing to build local capacity in the coming months.

Last week, Rwandan President Paul Kagame told the Qatar Economic Forum that the negotiations with partners to manufacture vaccines locally have advanced and the process will start "in a few months."

He was speaking shortly after Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa were announced as potential candidates for hosting Africa's regional Covid-19 vaccines production hubs.

"For Rwanda, in particular, we have partnered with some industries that are specialising in mRNA technology. So, we have already discussed that technology with people who will help with financing and I think in a few months we should hear a different story," President Kagame said.

Africa, President Kagame added, has to be an equal partner with the rest of the world and manufacture vaccines as the continent continues to grapple with a blockage on supplies.
opinion

Reports that Southern Africa has decided to intervene militarily on the side of Mozambique to thwart the incursions of Islamist forces that have been wreaking havoc in that country may come as relieving for many of us who have been following the tribulations there with mounting concern.

People who have been working in those areas have been sharing their horror stories coming from the field, including killings, arson and rape, mounting death tolls, and increasing numbers of displaced civilians. The situation has been untenable for a number of months, and it does not seem like there is going to be an amelioration any time soon.

The chaos sown by the terror groups has made life for the native people more untenable, and the exploitation of the country's huge natural resources in north-east Mozambique has been rendered impossible, with a number of operators packing their bags and leaving.

So, it comes as good news that the neighbours are coming to the rescue of one of theirs, and, after all, a friend in need has to be a friend indeed. Back in the colonial days, when Kaulza de Arriaga was setting up his desperate 'Gordian Knot' in northern Mozambique, with road transportation networks designed to stop the descent of Frelimo's fighters southward advance, neighbours in the form of Tanzania and Zambia intensified their support for Frelimo, and soon Arriaga's plans crumbled, and in short order the Lisbon regime was overthrown by progressive military officers who hastened the advent of independence for Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau, among others.

That was then, and now is now. The circumstances have changed. The erstwhile liberation fighters that we used to admire have turned to be a most corrupted lot with no thought for the suffering their people have been through, and everywhere in the former Portuguese colonies, with the possible exception of the tiny islands of Cabo Verde, have become, literally, dens of thieves.

There is no place that provides as good as a haven for terror groups to thrive as a country that is ruled over by people who steal from their own people, where there is no economic justice, and where the people are made to see no difference between the people ruling over them and the colonialists who they replaced.

In the 1990s the group that wrought terror in the north was a renegade group of former Frelimo fighters disaffected by Frelimo's policies after independence. A brutal war was fought for many years, causing terrible economic devastation until a peace treaty was signed between Frelimo and Renmo and an election was held in 1994, which Frelimo won.

This time round, it seems, a more virulent variant of terror has made its appearance, with echoes of the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and perhaps West Africa and the Sahel. A new and more widespread terror, with ramifications of a pandemic, has found its way to the southern African shores, and the whole subregion stands threatened.

It will not end with Mozambique alone, because that country has no monopoly of cluelessness when it comes to managing our people's expectations and frustrations.

The areas affected by these armed groups are inhabited by people who are, nominally Muslim, though their creed of Islam may be very different than Al Qaeda's and al-Shabaab and Boko Haram, and more akin to a melange of the Hadith and juju of the mutimen from the savannas of Mueda.

The only thing that will motivate them to join the insurrectionists is the feeling that they do not enjoy full citizenship rights, and that they are discriminated against in their own country, their rights are trampled on and the resources of their country are being plundered by a parasitic elite.

So, now the SADC countries are giving succour to a neighbour. What could be better than being one's brother's keeper. Indeed, for an economic bloc that has defence and security protocols, how can the others just stand by and watch the unravelling of a struggling neighbour who does not seem to know what to do in the face of an enemy conjugated with formidable foreign insurrectionists.

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The gesture is as noble as it may seem inevitable. Indeed, if Mozambique is left to its fate and allowed to crumble, who will be safe in the neighbourhood? So, better to confront the terror groups in Mozambique before they come to your front porch.

But great care needs to be taken in the taking of these interventionist measures. We have been here before. In the 1980s, Tanzania threw in its lot with the government of Samora Machel, lost many soldiers and eventually encouraged negotiations between the warring factions.

There is no comparable situation today, because al-Shabaab or IS cannot be credible counterparts. What you have are foreign groups militating for an impossible international order whose only realisation is death and hopelessness, not groups of Mozambicans fighting for any discernible policy change that is capable of negotiating around.

For those forces sent to help the Mozambicans, there will be difficulties around the knowledge of the terrain, command unification, integration and interforce adaptability.

The writer is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv.
Kenya has rolled out the risk-based insurance premium model for commercial banks after a one-year suspension due to the Covid-19 crisis.

The Kenya Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC) in collaboration with the industry stakeholders have agreed that the model, which requires 'high risk' lenders to pay more premiums to the Corporation, goes live from July 1 2021.

Under the new model, banks rated low risk will pay the normal flat rate of 0.15 percent of their annual deposits to the Corporation while those rated high risk will pay 0.206 percent, an additional 0.056 percent.

The banks' risk status will be assessed based on their liquidity positions, capital adequacy, and asset quality and governance structures.

KDIC Chief Executive Mohamud Ahmed Mohamud said Wednesday that the highly anticipated model ensures equity in premium assessment process, with the primary objective of providing incentives for banks to avoid excessive risk taking.

"Cognizant of the country's state of the economy, this new dispensation in Kenya's banking sector is a culmination of three straight years of intense discussions and reviews with the KDIC membership on both the design of the model and its efficacy as well as public participation," Mr Mohamud told reporters in Nairobi on Wednesday.

"All commercial and Microfinance Banks who are members of the deposit insurance have, at individual levels, been sensitised on the assessment process of determining risk categories, the premium rates for each category and how a bank could improve its risk profile."

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The new risk-based premium model was scheduled to go live on July 1 last year but was suspended to give small and weaker banks a breathing space due to the impact of Covid-19.

The deposit insurance fund, which is run by KDIC, was created to compensate depositors of collapsed institutions and to boost confidence in the banking industry that had been rocked by a series of bank failures in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Prior to the new mode, the fund was being funded by member banks at a flat rate of 0.15 percent of the total deposits per annum.

In Uganda, the Deposit Protection Fund (DPF) has implemented the risk-based premium payment model where all institutions licensed and regulated by the Bank of Uganda (BoU) pay a normal premium of 0.2 percent of their average weighted deposit liabilities in the previous financial year.

However, institutions rated high 'risk' pay an additional charge of 0.2 percent of the average weighted deposit liabilities in addition to the annual premium, while institutions which are comparatively less risky pay 0.1 percent of the average weighted deposit liabilities in addition to the normal premium.

Risk adjusted premiums are based on quarterly ratings from BoU.
A businessman has shocked a court by disclosing that he was served with demand letters asking him to start paying rent on his own house after divorcing his wife of 10 years.

Joel Kibunja said he could not believe his eyes when the letter, which also divulged that the property had changed hands, was served on him.

"The letter indicated that my property had been sold and that I should start depositing rent to an account that was provided in the document," he said.

Mr Kibunja said he was surprised because he had never participated in any sale or transfer of the property.

He told Senior Resident Magistrate Rita Amwayi that the shocking news led him to the land registry to confirm the status of his property.

The search confirmed his fears. It turned out that his wife, Ms Margaret Wathoya had, with another woman named Sarah Wanjiru, changed the ownership of the property.

"The search indicated that the property had been transferred to Ms Wanjiru. She was unknown to me. I had never met her before," he said.

Mr Kibunja was testifying in a case in which Ms Wathoya, Ms Wanjiru and Samuel Karimi are charged with forgery and uttering false documents to defraud the man.

They are accused of forging Mr Kibunja's signature and transferring the property.

Mr Kibunja and Ms Wathoya married in 2000 but divorced in 2014.

Family property

During their marriage, the couple purchased a plot in Mombasa and built a family home for themselves and rental houses.

The rent from the storied building consisting of 14 units was deposited in a joint account.

Court documents filed by Mr Kibunja show that the couple developed the properties with loans.

He told the court that he took out a loan and used the money to set up a clearing and forwarding business for Ms Wathoya, which trades under Jewel Trading Company.

"The business was doing well. We used the proceeds from the business to construct the house and also bought other properties. It was a family business and not personal," he said

Mr Kibunja said he never bothered to take a leadership post in the business because the money generated took care of the family.

However, in 2010, they started having disagreements and he now took charge of rent collection.

The same year, he received a letter from a lawyer indicating that the property had changed hands and he was therefore required to start paying rent.

He conducted an inquiry at the land registry and then reported the matter to the police.

Forged documents

At the registry, Mr Kibunja found documents indicating that he had signed the sale agreement and transfer of the lease to Ms Wanjiru.

"I did not appear before any advocate regarding the sale transaction. The photo appearing on the forged documents is a distorted image of me," he said

He stated that his signature on the alleged sale agreement dated October 27, 2010 is a forgery.

"My passport photo on the transfer is a scanned photograph from a family portrait taken earlier. I was not living with Ms Wathoya at the time the agreement was drawn and we would only communicate through our advocates," he said

As of October 2010, he said, the valuer placed the property's worth at Sh15 million.

"I could not understand how the consideration was reduced to Sh1 million on the transfer form or Sh12.5 million on the sale agreement," he said

Documents tabled by Ms Wanjiru and Ms Wathoya, he said, had been tempered with and wondered if money had changed hands between them.

He, however, admitted that a cheque and Sh350,000 in cash to buy the land upon which the properties are built originated from Ms Wathoya's account.

But Ms Wathoya says in court documents that she acquired the property by herself.

She said she only added Mr Kibunja's name in the agreement because she had a child with him.

Transfer of lease

She said she borrowed Sh10 million from Ms Wanjiru to build the houses and that Mr Kibunja contributed nothing for the construction.

"The only thing he helped with was to supervise the construction. I used Sh15 million to develop the property," she said.

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She said the transfer came about after they could not refund the Sh10 million she had borrowed from Ms Wanjiru.

"I informed Mr Kibunja of the demand made from Ms Wanjiru," she said.

She said that Mr Kibunja was party to and aware of the agreement that led to the transfer of the property to Ms Wanjiru.

"The transfer price was Sh12.5 million, Ms Wanjiru gave us Sh2.3 million. Mr Kibunja was present and signed the agreement and the transfer of lease," she said

She said her ex-husband was only bitter because he never got a share of the Sh2.3 million, and that it was the reason he reported her to the police three days after the sale.

Ms Wanjiru, for her part, said she got to know Ms Wathoya when they were selling second-hand clothes. It was then that she loaned her Sh10 million, which she was to refund with10 percent interest.

But when she demanded the money back, Ms Wathoya and Mr Kibunja agreed to transfer the property because they did not have money to repay her.

Mr Kibunja has wrested back the property after successfully suing the women in the Environment and Land Court. He is now a witness in the criminal case against the three suspects.
Sudan has obtained the much-needed debt relief from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which will see most of its $60 billion owed to creditors settled and Khartoum allowed back into borrowing eligibility.

The move announced by IMF under the 'decision point' step means Sudan has become the 38th country in the world to obtain debt relief under a scheme known as Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) by the IMF and the World Bank.

Khartoum initially qualified for $23.5 billion debt relief, which could rise if it follows all the conditions the IMF has set.

The scheme is often granted to poor countries to enable them sustain debt while providing crucial services to the public.

Protests erupt in Sudan after the IMF approved a 2.5 billion dollars loan and debt relief deal.

The Sudanese protesters say some of the International Monetary fund Fund-backed economic reforms are too harsh.#NewNormal @Victor Kiprop_ pic.twitter.com/dVZshuH3WX

- NTV Kenya (@ntvkenya) July 1, 2021

Run-down sectors

External debt, for Sudan, had been a major obstacle to reviving the economy. The transitional government led by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok had inherited run-down sectors from the regime of Omar al-Bashir who was ousted in April 2019.

Under sanctions from the US as a state sponsor of terrorism, the debt had piled and Sudan was unable to borrow or attract any investors as many were fearful of running into trouble with the US. In December, Washington lifted those sanctions. But debt became the next hurdle.

Dr Hamdok, in a speech on Wednesday, told the country that the achievement on debt relief was a big step for Khartoum.

"Allow me in this speech to show that what this government inherited is a structural defect in the macro economy, represented in a large budget deficit which forced borrowing from banks at least 200 billion [Sudanese] pounds [$444 million] per year," he told the country in a televised speech.

Hamdok said a "a fundamental imbalance in the exchange rate and its diversity," had made trade balances worse, and a mounting, unserviced debt did not help.

Reforms

"The government worked to completely remove these distortions with legislative and legal reforms, which helped remove Sudan from the list of countries sponsoring terrorism, the integration of Sudan into the international community and our relations became normal with the countries of the world after we were isolated," the prime minister said.

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Sudan worked hard to make changes demanded by IMF in six months. These included regulations that will shield the Sudanese pound from black market rates, a uniform exchange rate and controversial rules that would gradually remove subsidies.

The IMF had earlier approved a $2.5 billion loan for Sudan. But the joyful news was not shared by ordinary citizens. As reports trickled in, some cities saw public protests against plans to remove subsidies on bread and fuel.

Basic commodities' prices

For years, Sudan footed the bill of the actual cost of basic commodities to shield the public from fluctuating exchange rates. It was meant to keep prices low. But Sudanese government officials themselves admitted the subsidies were benefiting bulk importers more than consumers. When the IMF came in, it demanded that Sudan sets up policies that will stabilise revenue collection, fight corruption and remove freebies.

"This first reflects the seriousness of the government, which has developed an integrated reform programme that includes a strategy to reduce poverty," Hamdok said.

After the Decision Point, Sudan should expect most of its debt forgiven within a year. In return, Sudan will immediately receive funding worth $100 million towards Covid-19 fight.

But it must now work towards the Completion Point, which the IMF will use to determine if Khartoum has done everything to qualify for total relief. After that, Sudan will qualify for as much as $50 billion in debt relief.
Residents in Kisii County and human rights groups are demanding that police account for the death of four people in their custody under unclear circumstances.

Three deaths have been reported at the Rioma Police Station, two of them last week and one late last year.

Another death was reported on Monday at the Kisii Central Police Station.

Justus Nyangeso, 45, died while in police custody, with security bosses saying he was sick.

He was arrested on Thursday when security officers raided his home where he sold local brews.

He died at the police station on Monday after failing to raise a Sh10,000 fine to secure his release.

County Police Commander Francis Kooli said the man had complained of stomach and head pain.

Dead on arrival

"He was arrested on Friday but started complaining of pain 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."

Mr Nyangeso had been arraigned at the Kisii Law Courts on Friday and charged with dealing in alcoholic drinks without a licence. He pleaded guilty and ended up in custody after he failed to raise the fine.

Because of rising cases of Covid-19 in the county, convicts are being quarantined in police cells for 14 days before being taken to prison.

While police say Mr Nyangeso fell ill, his widow Jackline Osiemo claimed her husband was tortured by police and that led to his death.

"My husband was in good health when he was arrested on Thursday. I never saw him again until I was called Monday to verify whether an unknown body that was lying at KTRH was that of my husband," she recounted.

Nyangeso's family claimed they were barred from checking on him while he was in custody, with police at the station citing the escalating cases of the virus.

Internal bleeding

"When I was told on Friday that he had been fined Sh10,000, I tried to reach out to my friends for assistance but nobody was ready to intervene," she added.

This meant that Mr Nyangeso would remain in custody until Monday as his family sought funds to have him released.

Ms Osiemo told the Nation yesterday that one of their drinking clients had decided to bail him out but on reaching the station he was not there.

The station commander told them that Mr Nyangeso had fallen sick and had been taken him to hospital.

"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.

His body had scars all over it, with the medical report indicating that he died from internal bleeding.

She argued that Mr Nyangeso was the breadwinner and urged authorities at the Kisii Central Police Station to explain what exactly led to his death.

Police shooting

He has left behind four children, aged 17, 6, 3 and 1.

Locals flock their home in Nyachenge village, Nyaribari Chache Constituency in Kisii County in the early morning every day seeking alcohol.

Mr Nyangeso started selling the illicit brews in the 1990s when he was a teenager.

In yet another incident, protests erupted in Kisii County on Sunday over the alleged police shooting of a 16-year-old girl the previous night.

Reports indicated that police shot the teenager as they tried to disperse protesters who wanted to torch the Rioma Police Station in Marani sub-county.

The Standard Six pupil at Marani Primary School died at Kisii Teaching and Referral Hospital.

It is said she was walking home when she was hit by a stray bullet. Her death sparked day-long protests on Sunday, with residents engaging police in running battles.

Beaten to death

They demanded the suspension of Marani police bosses, saying they have remained in the area for too long.

"We will only rest after they are suspended. The police officers here have become notorious and kill us at will," said resident Margaret Nyaboke.

The county security team was locked in a meeting the whole day.

On Saturday night, Rioma residents protested following the death of a convict identified as Erick Achando.

While residents claim Mr Achando, a boda boda operator, was beaten to death by security officers for flouting the 7pm curfew, police say the 25-year-old man was sick.

His family said he succumbed to injuries he suffered after officers from the station assaulted him during the arrest.

His wife Linet Achando narrated how she received the sad news, attributing the death of her husband to police brutality.

Death of convict

"I was in the house preparing for dinner when I heard people screaming while mentioning the name of my husband. He had died while under their watch," she said.

"When we visited him on Thursday, he told us that police had assaulted him and he had developed stomach pains".

Shedding tears, Mrs Achando, a peasant farmer, said her husband was their breadwinner and she will not manage to raise their four children aged 14, 9, 7 and 4.

The family now wants the officers involved in the accident to be charged with murder.

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According to witnesses, the officers who were enforcing the curfew at 7:30pm roughed up the victim using clubs after his colleagues escaped.

Mr Kooli confirmed the death of the convict, but attributed it to illness.

"The three convicts were rushed to Marani Sub-County Hospital for treatment where one of them died," Mr Kooli said.

Shot and killed

The victim had been charged with a traffic offence and was sentenced to three months' imprisonment or a fine of Sh8,000.

The two bodies were moved to the Kisii Teaching and Referral Hospital mortuary.

In July last year, a police officer shot and killed a trader at Rioma market for allegedly selling substandard hand sanitisers.

The killing of the 40-year-old man sparked violent demonstrations by locals, who vandalised sections of the police station.

An attempt by locals to torch the station failed but they broke windows and doors.

Rioma Police Station in Marani Sub-County was started in the late 1990s to curb crime in Rioma, a town on the border of Homa Bay and Kisii counties. The station has turned out to be a source of tragedy for the residents.

Members of the Luo and Kisii communities who reside in the region say instead of helping to curb crime, officers at the station have become the greatest violators of law and order.
Mansukh Patel, who died on Monday night, was a renowned farmer and industrialist.

The business magnate, with interests in various sectors, was the owner of Solai Coffee Estate, where the Solai Dam tragedy occurred and left 48 people dead and thousands displaced.

Patel owned the Solai Group of companies, which include the biggest and oldest table salt company, Kensalt Ltd, and Solai Coffee Estates, which grows flowers, macadamia, coffee and other horticultural products for export.

Patel grew flowers on his Solai farm for export under the brand Solai Roses.

His son, Perry Mansukh, the managing director of Solai Group, was among nine people arrested and charged with causing the 48 deaths before he was set free by the High Court in Naivasha for lack of evidence.

Patel's other businesses are Thika's 65- hectare Enkasiri Flowers, Nairobi Ceramics and a company known as Supplies and Services Ltd.

The Patel family also owns Malindi-based Kensalt, which was once known as Salt Manufacturers Kenya Ltd, at that time a partnership between the government through the Industrial Commercial Development Corporation (ICDC) and Saltec International, an Italian firm.

Today, Kensalt is Africa's second largest producer of salt with an estimated annual output of one million tonnes. The company controls 75 percent of the salt market in Kenya and 50 per cent in Uganda.

Patel had maintained a low profile until May 9, 2018, when the mega dam on his 3,000-acre farm in Solai burst its banks, washing away the surrounding villages of Energy, Nyakinyua, Endao, Milmet and Arutani and leaving 48 people dead.

The floodwaters and tumbling debris hit Energy village at high speed, washing away homes, cars and huge rocks towards the other villages downstream in darkness.

Besides the deaths, the tragedy left at least 5,000 people displaced when its water flattened the sleepy Energy and Nyankinyua villages.
Members of the Kilifi County Assembly have expressed their disappointment in the Senate, saying it had failed to protect devolution.

Led by Budget and Appropriations Committee chairman Albert Kiraga, they said senators did not seem bothered even as the national government deprives counties of their allocations.

Speaking outside the assembly after approving a Sh14.8 billion budget for the 2021/2022 financial year, Mr Kiraga said senators had failed to ensure that counties get funding from the National Treasury as scheduled.

"The Senate has failed. One of their mandates is to ensure that counties work without any hindrances," he said.

Senators, he said, had relaxed after passing the new revenue allocation formula.

"Most of the legal minds are in the Senate, including our own Mr Steward Madzayo, but late disbursement of funds is the main challenge we are facing," he said.

"Every month, some officers from Kilifi County must travel to Nairobi to beg for money to be released. Instead of serving the public, these officers use much-needed funds to travel back and forth to get our allocation."

The national government, he said, had come up with a scheme to deny counties their rightful share while using the same money to clear their debts.

The Treasury is yet to remit Sh1.5 billion to Kilifi County. The county government was yet to receive its April, May, and June allocations, Mr Kiraga said.

An increase in the budget for the 2021/2022 financial year to Sh14.8 billion from Sh14.6 billion in 2020/2021, he said, does not mean that there are additional funds.

He said the national government had consolidated grants that it always disbursed to counties and the money has been disbursed as equitable shares.

"This money used to come as conditional grants but now they have been consolidated and they formed part of the equitable share Kilifi County is getting," he said.

Mwanamwinga MCA Pascal Mkanga, a member of the budget committee, said that when money is allocated to projects it must be available for the projects to be implemented.

"When there are no funds, it means that all development projects for the community will not be implemented," he said.

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Poor implementation of development projects, he said, means MCAs are blamed by voters for underperformance.

"It is the law and the right of every Kenyan to benefit from their county's allocation. I'm not happy to see projects that would have changed the livelihoods of people of Kilifi stalled due to delays in the disbursement of funds from the National Treasury," he added.

The national government, Jilore MCA Daniel Chai said, was intentionally working to kill devolution.

"Senators have failed to deliver their mandate and this is one way the national government is trying to frustrate devolution," he said.

Kilifi was cited by the Office of the Controller of Budget for poor absorption of development funds but he said it is not possible to utilise funds whose disbursement is always delayed.

"There are timelines in the usage of funds, but how will we use all the money when it is not disbursed in time?" he said.

"It means there will be no implementation of the development project and this will negatively impact the public who are supposed to benefit from what they had proposed."
New York  Ethiopian authorities must thoroughly investigate the recent attack on journalist Abebe Bayu, hold those responsible to account, and ensure that all members of the press can work without fear, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

On June 21, a group of four unidentified men surrounded Abebe, a reporter and analyst at the YouTube-based news outlet Ethio Forum, outside a restaurant in Addis Ababa, the capital, and forced him into a car, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

The men handcuffed Abebe, threatened him with a pistol, covered his eyes, and punched him all over his body while they drove to the city's outskirts, he said. They also warned him not to criticize the government, he told CPJ.

When the car arrived at the base of a cliff in Tulu Dimtu, outside Addis Ababa in Oromia state, the men stole both of Abebe's cellphones and about 8,000 birr (US $183) he had with him, forced him to lay face down on the ground covered with a jacket, and threatened to shoot him if he moved, he said.

The men then left the scene and Abebe took a cab back to Addis Ababa, where he was treated at a local hospital for cuts to his knee, pain in his back, and swelling on his face where he had been hit, he told CPJ.

"The people who abducted and assaulted Ethiopian journalist Abebe Bayu cannot be allowed to escape responsibility; authorities must thoroughly investigate this incident, identify the attackers, and hold them to account," said Angela Quintal, CPJ's Africa program coordinator. "Impunity for attacks on the press must not be allowed to fester in Ethiopia, and all journalists must feel safe to report freely."

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Videos on Ethio Forum's YouTube page have received more than 86 million views, and the outlet frequently posts reporting critical of Ethiopian authorities. Its recent coverage includes a report on the country's elections that was critical of federal authorities' detentions of opposition candidates, commentary comparing the ongoing conflict in the Tigray region to 1990s Yugoslavia, and a report questioning whether NATO could intervene in Ethiopia.

Abede told CPJ that he did not know what specific coverage prompted the attack.

Abebe and one of his colleagues who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal told CPJ that Abede had appeared on camera in Ethio Forum's reporting in the past, but had stopped doing so out of concerns for his safety.

Last year, authorities detained Ethio Forum administrator Yayesew Shimelis, as CPJ documented at the time. Ethio Forum has not aired new content since June 21, and on June 24 posted an announcement on its Facebook page stating that the station was forced to temporarily cease broadcasting but could not explain why.

In a phone interview, federal police spokesperson Jeylan Abdi said he has no information about Abebe's assault and said he would look into the incident. Oromia State Police Commissioner Ararsa Merdasa told CPJ in a phone interview that he was not aware of the attack.
Ethiopian refugees fleeing clashes in the country's northern Tigray region, rest and cook meals near UNHCR's Hamdayet reception centre after crossing into Sudan.

Geneva  Aid agencies are racing against time to provide temporary shelter for more than 16,000 Ethiopian refugees in Sudan whose tents were swept away during violent storm surges over the past few weeks.

The storms, which began in late May and gathered intensity in June, have demolished nearly 4,000 out of 10,000 individual family tents in Sudan's eastern refugee settlements of Um Rakuba and Tunaydbah.

Strong winds, heavy rains, and hailstorms have destroyed much of the camps' infrastructure, emergency latrines and other facilities. U.N. refugee agency spokesman, Boris Cheshirkov says the personal belongings of thousands of Ethiopian refugees have been swept away.

He says the refugees who fled to Sudan to escape the conflict in northern Ethiopia's Tigray province require emergency assistance.

"What we expect over the coming two or three months, because the rainy season will continue until October, is that these rains will intensify, that the flooding may worsen. And that is why it is essential that we take measures now including to rehabilitate some of the roads and build new ones," he said.

Cheshirkov says the roads are becoming flooded and soon might become impassible, making it difficult to get humanitarian aid to people in need.

Consequently, he says the UNHCR, and partners are rapidly constructing and rehabilitating some 60 kilometers of roads to the two refugee camps and local host communities. He says they also are digging drainage systems to mitigate the risks of further flooding.

"Partners are constructing semi-permanent schools, as well as permanent latrines and showers... More permanent shelters are also planned but the building can only start once the rainy season stops... A total of 10,000 emergency shelter kits are planned for distribution with an additional 5,000 in reserve," he said.

The UNHCR along with 31 U.N. and private aid agencies are revising an earlier appeal upwards to reflect the current emergency. They are calling for $182 million, an increase of $33 million.

The additional money will allow the agencies to improve the camps' infrastructure and meet the protection and basic needs of the Ethiopian refugees until the end of the year.
A small child eats a nutritious high-energy biscuit at a school that has been converted into a shelter in the Tigray region where the UN humanitarian agency OCHA estimates that 91 per cent of the population is in dire need of food assistance.

The US Federal Aviation Authority has directed aircraft flying over Ethiopia to either avoid Tigray region or maintain a high altitude.

A notice to airlines issued on Thursday directs flights over Tigray to fly above 29,000 feet, in what could indicate the threat level posed by local fighters under the Tigray Defence Forces.

The Ethiopian government on Monday issued a unilateral ceasefire, citing the cost of war and the humanitarian crisis that has seen more than 400,000 people face famine, and millions of others displaced.

But the TDF, a grouping of fighters loyal to the erstwhile ruling party Tigray People's Liberation Front [TPLF], have continued to retake towns initially controlled by the Ethiopian and Eritrean Forces. It is believed the TDF still has capability to bring down aircraft flying at lower altitude.

Last week, TPLF Spokesman Getachew Reda claimed his group had shot down an Ethiopian military transport aircraft, claims which Ethiopia denied. Officials in Addis Ababa said the plane came down after a mechanical problem.

On Thursday, the Amhara militia fighters who have been allied with the Ethiopian National Defence Forces claimed they had destroyed a major bridge connecting the two federal regions in what could hamper further aid delivery.
The East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) has expressed concerns over the dwindling resource envelope of the East African Community (EAC).

These concerns emerged on Wednesday as the lawmakers approved the Community's $91.7 million budget for the fiscal year 2021/22, which represents a 6 per cent drop compared to $5.8 million in the previous year.

The House approved the budget after debating it for about eight hours on just hours before the new financial year started on July 1.

The reduction, according to lawmakers, reflects a remarkable fall in contributions from EAC member states.

"The Committee finds it ironic that while the Community continues to grow geographically and institutionally, the Council of Ministers has continued to clamour for a reduction in Partner States contribution towards the EAC budget," Dennis Namara, the chairperson of the EALA's Committee on General Purpose

The expected contribution from member countries towards the EAC budget in 2021/22 will be slightly over $44 million compared to $46.8 million in the previous year.

Support from development partners dropped by 10 per cent from $41.9 million to $37.6 million during the period under review

MP Nakawuki Susan Nsambu said that she finds the EAC budget for this financial year to be unrealistic considering that the community had a budget of $126 million in 2014/2015.

"This budget is being read at a time when the momentum of the integration process is increasing. People have a lot of expectations. When you look at the budget speech, we have to implement the customs union, the common market protocol, there are institutions that should be established to foster the monetary union; we are working on the constitution of the political federation, but the budget keeps going down! So, I find a contradiction in these two," she said.

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MP Paul Mwasa Musamali said that the EAC Partner States are contributing far less than one per cent of their estimated $68 billion combined national budget to fund the Community, indicating that if they made it at least one per cent, the EAC activity financing would be strengthened.

Citing some cases, he said that the East African Kiswahili Commission funding to operationalize Kiswahili as one of the official languages of EAC got over $115,000 reduction [to $1.28 million], while the East African Health Research Commission suffer funding shortage for research development to tackle diseases.

"Claiming that the issue of sustainable funding and the reduction of the Community budget has been affected by the [Covid-19] pandemic is a lie," he said, indicating that the national budgets of EAC Partner States have increased.

He urged the Council of Ministers to take the issue of sustainable funding for the Community seriously, with the EAC Secretary-General, and "ensure that we have an authentic funding mechanism."

This she stated could help achieve the building of a sustainable Community.
Gaspard Musonera: We had a meeting with different institutions including RISA and MTN Rwanda, to ensure that they will facilitate people working from home with enough internet and ICT tools.

The Ministry of Public Service and Labour (MIFOTRA) has assured the general public that services will remain accessible despite the latest measures imposed to curtail the spread of Covid-19 in the country.

The new measures that will be implemented in Kigali City and eight districts, went into force on Thursday, July 1, and requires all offices - public and private - in affected areas closed, and people work from home.

Most public services in the country are concentrated in the City of Kigali.

According to the ministry, contingency measures have been put in place to ensure the services continue to be delivered with no significant challenges.

In other parts of the country, services will continue in accordance with the measures that were in force before July 1.

During an interview with The New Times, Gaspard Musonera, the permanent secretary at MIFOTRA, said that they made sure that every employee working from home is facilitated.

"Working from home is not something new. The government made sure that everyone was facilitated. We had a meeting with different institutions including RISA and MTN Rwanda, to ensure that they will facilitate people working from home with enough internet and ICT tools," he said.

RISA is Rwanda Information Society Authority, a body that is charged with planning and coordinating the country's ICT development agenda.

Musonera added that they agreed with internet service providers to subsidise internet costs and ensure efficient internet services and that fiber-optic connection has been installed in every accessible place.

"Employees should know that they are not going on a holiday. Work must continue as has been in office," he said.

The Ministry of Local Government (MINALOC) is one of the departments that will be working from home and a publicist from the ministry assured that they will continue to offer services with no problem.

"We already had many among us working from home, and every affiliate institution has been provided with modems and fiber-optics to help our work efficiently," said Joseph Curio Havugimana MINALOC's spokesperson.

Prior to the latest directive that was announced on Tuesday by Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente, public service offices were operating at 15 per cent capacity.

Regarding coordination of local government services, Havugimana said that even prior to the pandemic, the ministry had started coming up with remote working strategies to minimize unnecessary travel to Kigali for meetings.

He added that to supplement this, the meeting app Webex has been extended in all local government entities to ease online meetings.

"And for citizens who need different services from us, we have telephone numbers, email, and a toll-free number, they can also approach their local leaders for assistance if they have no means to reach us," Havugimana said.

Private sector also ready

Not just the public sector is ready and well equipped to comply with the new guidelines but also a section of players in the private sector who were interviewed confirmed to have no problems and pledged to continue offering services satisfactorily.

Christine Gakuba, a business development manager in Alpha Mead Group, a real estate firm, said: "Our employees are facilitated with everything, they have modems and laptops so this is not going to be a challenge working from home, and if other materials are needed like printers there is an exception to move them from work to home."

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However, she said that there will be a few challenges because some of the clients may find it difficult to reach them, especially for walk-in clients.

She said that to mitigate this, they have an open office telephone line on which they can be reached.

According to the Private Sector Federation, the professional body dedicated to promoting and presenting Rwandan businesses in the country, they expect minimal interruptions, adding that the sacrifices had to be made to safeguard health.

"We expect daily activities to continue; our health is a priority, therefore we will keep on putting effort and encourage our members to comply with the directives," said Deus Kayitakirwa the director of advocacy at PSF.

He said that some of the smaller operations may however find it difficult to operate remotely, but added that the greater good is health, and urged members to be understanding.
As students begin their holidays, they are being urged to be vigilant and protect themselves and their communities against coronavirus that has been rampant in the country over the past few weeks.

This call was made on Thursday, July 1, by different officials as the students began their phased repatriation to home districts, an exercise that will take four days and will be carried out in accordance with Covid-19 safety measures.

The exercise is being jointly carried out by the education ministry through the National Examination and School Inspection Authority (NESA), Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA), Rwanda National Police, the Ministry of Local Government and commuter transport companies, among others.

Students from different districts that are headed to or transiting through Kigali were being received at Kigali Stadium in Nyamirambo from where they were put on homebound buses, while others were picked from there by their families.

"We are advising the students who are going to their families not to flout Covid-19 preventive measures. That is why no effort was spared to ensure their safe return to their families. We are also using the opportunity to urge them to observe these measures when they get home," said Anthony Kulamba, the general manager in charge of transport regulation at RURA.

He added: "The students who are going home today (Thursday) are from all districts of Kigali City, then Huye, Gisagara, Nyamagabe and Nyaruguru in Southern Province, Rutsiro, Karongi and Rusizi in Western Province and Bugesera in Eastern Province. The rest will go home from tomorrow until Sunday."

As students arrived at the stadium, each had their temperature taken and had to wash their hands before being directed to the buses to their respective home districts.

Guides were on hand to ensure social distance is maintained within the vicinity of the stadium and each student had to keep his or her mask properly on. Buses were lined up according to their designated routes.

We mobilized as many buses as possible to ensure students are transported in proper condition, Kuramba said.

"We have also urged drivers to remind students to maintain all preventive measures during the journey. As they return home for holidays, it's not time to meet with their friends. Buses will get them to their home districts from where the directors of education will coordinate their safe return to their families," Kuramba says.

All students will return home for their end-of-year holidays other than those in candidate classes who will remain at school until their exams are done. According to the timetable, the exams will take place from July 12 starting with Primary Leaving Examinations.

Bernard Bahati, Director General of NESA says "This activity of dispatching students to their families is not being done for the first time, but we are now more stringent to ensure they return in safety of the rampant virus."

"The students who remained at school preparing for their national exams are also being mobilized to maintain measures against Covid-19 as they revise. Fortunately, those staying at school are few and so social distance will be adequately observed."

No student missed exams

He added that no students missed their third term exams due to the new Covid-19 guidelines, adding that all non-candidates students have completed their exams, except those with special cases in different schools.

A directive was issued by the Prime Minister on Tuesday, June 29 ordering non-candidate students to return home starting July 1 owing to the spike in Covid-19 cases mainly in the City of Kigali.

However, NESA officials say that all students have since completed exams and only waiting for their report cards, which they can get at a later stage.

Meanwhile, parents and students who spoke to The New Times made the assurance that they will ensure the holidays pass in relative safety of the pandemic.

Joselyne Uwimbabazi, a parent who had come to pick her child who studies at the College Immaculee Conception Save in Gisagara District told The New Times that; "We came here to pick our children. We miss them but the preventive measures must be observed as well; no hugging. We will continue to protect them and urge them to avoid unnecessary movements."

Similar sentiments were echoed by students who promised to take the lead in maintaining Covid-19 measures.

"The term was good, apart from this pandemic, we concluded all exams and we will wait for the results at home and we shall continue playing our role in preventing the spreading of Covid-19," said Edmond Ndikumana, who studies at APADE in Kicukiro District.

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He was headed to Kayonza District, where his family lives.

Alice Umumararungu, a student at ETO Nyamata in Bugesera District told The New Times that; "we have kept ourselves safe from the virus while at school; we are masked up, we have been washing our hands and maintained social distance. We will continue to do this at home in order to protect ourselves and our families."

According to the calendar by the Ministry of Education, the students from Nyanza in Southern Province, Rubavu and Nyabihu in Western Province, Rwamagana, and Kayonza in Eastern Province and Gicumbi and Rulindo in Northern Province will depart on Friday, July 2.

On Saturday, July 3, the students from Nyagatare, Gatsibo, Kirehe, and Ngoma in Eastern, Ruhango in Southern, Musanze and Gakenke in Northern Province will go home too.

The last day of departing students to their families is on Sunday, July 4, when the students from Muhanga and Kamonyi in Southern, Burera in Northern and Ngororero in Western will be getting home too.
Nyarugenge District on Thursday, July 1, granted a decent burial to 83 remains of victims of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi at Nyanza Genocide Memorial located in Kicukiro District.

The remains were discovered in different sectors of the district during the last 100 days of the commemoration of the Genocide in which over a million people were killed.

According to officials, 75 of these bodies were found in the same mass grave that was discovered in the parking lot of the current Nyarugenge District Police Unit (DPU) offices located in Rwezamenyo Sector.

The remains were detected as a result of community reconciliation programme and subsequent testimonies of some of the Genocide convicts, according to Emmy Ngabonziza, the District Executive Administrator in Nyarugenge.

Nyanza Genocide Memorial is currently the final resting place of more than 100,000 victims, many of them killed from different parts of Kigali.

Addressing mourners, Naphthali Ahishakiye, the Executive Secretary of IBUKA, the umbrella organization of Genocide survivors, urged the survivors to stay hopeful and strive for a better life ahead.

Ngabonziza also shared a word of comfort with the survivors, promising them a safe and united nation under the prevailing good leadership.

"So, despite all this, we need have a peace of mind that army that stopped the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi is still there, protecting us; and we are optimistic that we will move forward as a united nation," he said.

Venantie Kankindi whose family members were among those that were accorded a decent burial, expressed relief after burying her loved ones, 27 years later.

"Now, we feel relieved, it is depressing to know that your loved one is buried under a building or any other place you do not know. But we are now glad they are in a better place, where we know, and can come and honour them," she said.
Following a surge in daily Covid-19 cases and the emergence of new variants, Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente on Tuesday hosted a news conference where he announced new Covid-19 restrictions.

The restrictions which went into effect on Thursday, July 1, include the closure of all schools; primary secondary and higher institutions in the City of Kigali and some eight districts across the country.

However, through their Twitter page, the Ministry of Education shed more light on the issue of students who will sit for National Examinations.

Candidates who will sit for National Examinations and are in boarding schools will stay at their respective schools while those studying as day scholars will stay at home and prepare for their national exams.

According to the calendar earlier released, Primary Leaving Examinations will start on July 12 and end on July 14 while O-Level candidates will begin their exams on July 20 and end on July 27.

Then A-Level and TVET theoretical examinations will start on July 20 and end on July 27, and finally A-Level science practical examinations will start on July 28 and end on July 30.

TVET practical exams started on June 14 and will end on July 3.

In addition, the ministry announced that teachers will remain at their respective workstations to finalize other school activities including marking exams, preparation of learners' reports.

Meanwhile for students in higher learning institutions whose schools fall within the Kigali and the affected districts, those who reside on campus (hostels) will remain at their respective campuses and continue to study remotely, while students in off-campus residents will stay at home and continue to study remotely.

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For high school students from non-candidate classes, they started their phased return home on Thursday, July 1 and will go on until Sunday.

The first batch that left on Thursday were students from the City of Kigali, and the districts of Huye, Gisagara, Nyaruguru, Nyamagabe, Nyamasheke, Rusizi, Karongi, Rutsiro and Bugesera.

The second batch will leave on Friday, July 2 from Nyanza, Rubavu, Nyabihu, Rwamagana, Kayonza, Gicumbi, and Rulindo, followed by the third group of students from Nyagatare, Gatsibo, Kirehe, Ngoma, Ruhango, Musanze and Musanze to go home on Saturday, July 3.

The final students to leave their respective schools on Sunday, July 4 will be from Muhanga, Kamonyi, Burera and Ngororero.

The Ministry of Education urged students, parents, teachers, and school administrators to respect all the new Covid rules and make sure they respect the schedule for students to reach safely at their homes and fully dressed in school uniforms.
The Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) board has appointed a diplomat to head the agency in an acting capacity.

The KPA board of directors on Thursday announced the appointment of Amb. John Mwangemi as the new acting MD to replace Eng. Rashid Salim who has retired. The appointment of a new KPA managing director has stalled for more than thirteen months now.

"The KPA board wishes to announce the appointment of the new MD which takes effect from July 1, 2021 as Eng. Rashid Salim proceeds on retirement. The new acting MD will hold the position until a substantive managing director is appointed," the statement by the KPA board reads.

Amb. Mwangemi is the immediate former Kenya's envoy to the Republic of Djibouti and Intergovernmental Authority on Development. He left office last month.

He previously served as Kenya's High Commissioner to Rwanda and he has also held executive leadership positions in the corporate world locally and internationally.

The position of KPA MD fell vacant in March last year after then MD Daniel Manduku resigned, after battling graft allegations for months. Mr Salim was appointed on an interim basis.

Interviews

Since then, the government has conducted three interviews to get a replacement in vain. Political interference has been blamed in the first two exercises.

In May, Mr Yatani said the delay of appointing new MD was as the result of the ongoing restructuring of Kenyan ports. Three main ports in the country will be headed by each managing director to make them autonomous.

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The CS said the ongoing restructuring has affected the appointment of the MD after the hiring deadline expired about a month ago. He, however, promised that the government was at final stages in making decisions on how each port in the country will have its own boss.

"We are at the final stage and soon we shall announce how each port will have independent management. The delay in naming the new KPA MD is as a result of the ongoing planned restructuring where we want Mombasa Port and Lamu to have independent management," said the CS in May.

If the new structure is adopted, Mombasa Port will have its own boss whereas the Lamu Port, which came into operation in May and Kisumu Port will have their own management teams.

Political interference has been blamed for the lack of appointment of a new KPA MD after the hiring deadline expired about a month ago.

Senior government officials have been lobbying to have their preferred candidates appointed to head the authority.

On March 2, CS Yatani rejected three names the board had forwarded to him, saying the candidates did not attain the mandatory 70 marks and above in the interviews on March 2.

According to sources privy to the hiring process, already three names have been submitted to the CS for appointment.

Senior government officials

"The names we submitted on by April 13, the last day which was set by the CS when he revoked the whole process forcing the board to do it for the third time. We understand there is push and pull from senior government officials who want their own to head KPA," said the source.

The board was expected to forward three names to the CS to appoint the MD to replace Mr Manduku.
Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente has reiterated Rwanda's commitment to restore ties with Burundi, six years after a rift between the two countries emerged.

The leader of government made the remarks on Thursday, July 1, in Bujumbura, Burundi where he had travelled for the country's 59th Independence Day celebrations.

During his address, the premier expressed Rwanda's political will to restore relations with its southern neighbor.

"I am convinced that we are ready to work for the consolidation and promotion of our existing relations of friendship and cooperation for the mutual benefit of our people," he said, reiterating his gratitude for the invitation by President Evariste Ndayishimiye.

Ngirente said that time is ripe for the two sister nations to uphold the shared foundations and aim for the sustainable development of their peoples.

"This is the right time for Burundi and Rwanda to build on our existing strong foundation of historical and cultural linkages in order to achieve prosperity and development," he noted.

New historic page

Echoing the voice of Ngirente on the need to work on restoring ties, Ndayishimiye emphasized that it is time for the two countries to open up a new historic page in their relations.

"There is a chapter that we (Rwanda and Burundi) have been writing, but I hope it is time for us to open up a fresh page," he commented after Ngirente's address.

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"Let us leave the past behind, and open a new chapter," he added.

The Burundian head of state also described the historic visit by the premier as a symbol of political will on the part of Rwanda to restore the relations.

Rwanda and Burundi, which were both under Belgian colony got independence on the same day.

The sister nations' affairs deteriorated in 2015 when the late President Pierre Nkurunziza sought a third controversial term that plunged his country into violence.

At that time, the government of Rwanda expressed concerns about increasing reports of unrest and violence targeting unarmed Rwandan civilians residing in Burundi.

The diplomatic relations also worsened when Burundi expelled Rwanda's envoy Desire Nyaruhirira.

Since Ndayishimiye's ascension to power, there have been a couple of bilateral talks - including a meeting of foreign ministers - held between both sides as part of the process to normalize ties.
Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente on Thursday, July 1, issued a notice announcing the dismissal of Alfred Dusenge Byigero, the CEO of Water and Sanitation Corporation (WASAC).

No reason was given for his dismissal.

"Today 1st July 2021, Mr. Alfred Dusenge Byigero has been dismissed from the position of Chief Executive Officer of Water and Sanitation Corporation with immediate effect," the notice reads.

He will temporarily be replaced by Gisele Umuhumuza, who has been serving as the Deputy CEO.

Byigero has headed the utility body since December last year when he was appointed by the cabinet, as part of the changes made in the top leadership of different parastatals including Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA), WASAC and the Business Development Fund (BDF).

He had replaced Aime Muzola in the position.

Byigero had previously worked as a Deputy CEO at the same institution, prior to which he worked in different capacities in the energy sector.
Thursday's robbery came barely two years after armed robbers stormed a bank in Oye-Ekiti, in a daylight operation, carting away money from the vault and also robbing customers.

Armed robbers raided a commercial bank in <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moba,_Nigeria">Otun Ekiti</a>, Moba local government area of Ekiti State, on Thursday killing a police officer and injuring others.

Witnesses said the robbers arrived at the bank, situated in the heart of the town, at about 5 p.m. and shot in the air to scare away people.

"The robbers forced their way into the banking hall with dynamite and carted away huge amount of money in 'Ghana must go bag,'" said a witness who requested not to be named.

The bank officials and customers reportedly managed to find safety before the police reinforced and chased the robbers away.

Confirming the incident, the Police Public Relations Officer, Ekiti Command, Sunday Abutu, confirmed that the robbers attacked the bank with dynamite, but said they were unable to gain entry into the bank.

Mr Abutu said the men of the command and military men attached to the area engaged the robbers in a gun duel, which resulted in the death of one of the mobile police officers.

"There was a bank robbery incident today in Otun-Ekiti at about 5:00 pm, and in the process of shoot out between our men and armed robbers. We, unfortunately, lost one of our men," he said.

"The commissioner of police has ordered a discreet investigation into the incident in ensuring the armed robbers are arrested and brought to book."

Thursday's robbery came barely two years after armed robbers <a target="_blank" href="https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/364432-breaking-two-killed-in-ekiti-bank-robbery.html">stormed a bank in Oye-Ekiti</a>, in a daylight operation, carting away <a target="_blank" href="https://www.premiumtimesng.com/regional/nwest/471016-jigawa-governor-inaugurates-newly-elected-local-council-chairpersons.html">money</a> from the vault and also robbing customers.
The lawyer wants the British government to declare Mr Kanu, whom he said was seized in Kenya, "a high profile political prisoner".

Nnamdi Kanu's lawyer has requested British government's assistance for the separatist leader who was recently "intercepted" abroad and brought back to Nigeria to face trial.

Mr Kanu, who is currently detained by Nigeria's secret police, the SSS, on the order of the court, is accused by the Nigerian authorities of 'orchestrating' the killings of about 60 people, including security officials in the country's South-east region.

IPOB, the pro-Biafra group which he leads, had been proscribed by the Nigerian government.

His lawyer, Aloy Ejimakor, in a letter to the British High Commissioner in Nigeria, Catriona Laing, requested that Mr Kanu, whom he said was seized in Kenya, "be granted every possible Consular assistance to which he is entitled as a British citizen".

The letter is dated June 30.

Mr Ejimakor also wants the British government to demand that his lawyers and doctors be allowed to have access to him while in detention, as well as his unconditional release.

The IPOB leader holds dual citizenship in Nigeria and the UK.

He is known to have been residing in the UK after he jumped bail and fled Nigeria in 2017 during his trial for treasonable felony.

Mr Kanu "was intercepted in Kenya by Nigeria's foreign security agents and brought to Nigeria against his will on or about June 27," his lawyer said.

"Mr Kanu is a British citizen who was traveling on a valid British passport when he was seized in a third country and forcibly brought to Nigeria. Such act constitutes an unlawful rendition of a bonafide British citizen.

"He was not traveling on Nigerian passport or the passport of any other country, including that of Kenya.

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"There is no extant Order of extradition by any British Court or any other foreign Court (including Kenya) and we are informed that there is no pending extradition proceedings standing against him in Britain or Kenya.

"There is no deportation Order by any Kenyan Court or other authority that made him subject to deportation.

"But if there was, the country of his deportation should have been Britain on which passport he was travelling. Deporting him to Nigeria just because he was born in Nigeria, but not traveling on her passport, is unlawful under international law," Mr Ejimakor said in the letter to the British High Commissioner.

The lawyer said Mr Kanu's agitation for the independent state of Biafra "through a referendum" is considered a "protected political opinion" under British and Nigerian laws.

"Mr Kanu (should) be categorised as a high profile political prisoner or a prisoner of conscience and be thus rendered the highest diplomatic protection under municipal and international laws," he said.

The British High Commissioner, Ms Laing, on Thursday held talks with Nigeria's Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, on a number of issues, including the ban on Twitter by the Nigerian government.

Mr Kanu's arrest and detention was not on the agenda of the meeting, it appeared.
Bir Lehlu (Sahrawi Republic)  The Prime Minister of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), Mr. Bucharaya Hamudi Beyun, congratulated his Algerian counterpart, Mr. Aiman Bin Abderrahman, for his recent appointment as head of his country's government.

"I am very pleased to convey to you, on my behalf and on behalf of the Saharawi government and people, my warmest congratulations and best wishes on the occasion of your appointment by President Tebboune as Prime Minister of the sister Democratic and People's Republic of Algeria, asking the May Almighty guide your steps in this noble mission of working for the good, security, honor and prosperity of our beloved Algeria ", highlights the letter from the Prime Minister of the SADR.

Prime Minister Beyun also expressed "our sincere will and firm determination to make all possible efforts to strengthen and support the relations of brotherhood and alliance existing between the two countries and the Algerian and Saharawi peoples, at the service of the values, principles, interests and a common destiny that unites our two States ".

According to a statement made public by the Algerian presidency, Mr. Aiman Bin Abderrahman was appointed yesterday by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune as Prime Minister of Algeria, entrusting him with "the mission of continuing consultations with political parties and civil society to form a government as soon as possible". SPS
Asmara, 01 July 2021 - In their fifth round of contribution, nationals residing in the Republic of South Sudan contributed 90 thousand 975 USD and 16 million 753 thousand South Sudanese Pounds to augment the National Fund to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to a report from the Embassy of Eritrea in South Sudan, employees of various businesses contributed 71 thousand 825 USD as well as 16 million and 753 thousand South Sudan Pounds, owners of 'Emiha' General Construction and Trading Company 3 thousand USD, owners of small hotels, garages, clinics, pharmacies, and other businesses contributed 16 thousand 150 USD.

It is to be recalled that, nationals residing in the Republic of South Sudan have contributed 589 thousand 990 USD and 6 million 525 thousand 800 South Sudan Pounds in the last four rounds of contribution.

In related news, at a commemorative event conducted in connection with 20 June, Martyrs Day, nationals residing in Qatar have contributed 1 thousand 996 Riyals to augment the Martyrs Trust Fund, the Embassy of Eritrea in Doha reported.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan's first 100 days in office have sent Tanzania into political ecstasy. To many people the feeling has been like the windows have been kicked open to bring in light and fresh air, and Tanzania started to feel like Tanzania again. As a result, the not-so-outspoken leader has become wildly popular, and it is all thanks to the regressive politics of the late President John Pombe Joseph Magufuli.

It has been like kumsukuma mlevi: the leadership bar had been set so low that any conceivable path had to take people upwards. And no one can blame President Hassan for rushing to pick those low-hanging fruits.

As a new African president, one does not expect to find government coffers full, but you can be as sure as hell to find the nation seriously messed up. What can be said at this point is that President Hassan has handled herself remarkably well. She is not only likable but also highly sensible. Set against a background where politicians were falling over themselves to be as idiotic as they possibly could, she is a revelation.

Leaders can be analysed through many different lenses. One may consider their influence and power; their styles and personalities; their philosophies and ethics, or even their visions and priorities. For all of that, readers may have to wait for complete biographies to be written. However, apart from undoing previous misdeeds, what sort of a leader is President Hassan shaping up to be? Specifically, how transformative can she be? Moreover, how does she measure up against Tanzania's biggest leadership challenges, namely producing faster economic growth and restructuring Tanzania's broken political system?

With respect to the economy, the past five years have been a horror show in economic management. All economic wisdoms were cast aside in favour of dead-end economics. The adages do not eat the goose that lays the golden eggs, do not bite the hand that feeds you, or only fools doubt proof, were all brushed off. So, after economic data had been massaged to the point that the reality could no longer be hidden, Tanzania would have reached a dead end.

However, President Hassan has taken steps which are very promising economic-wise. On the one hand, she has painted a noticeably clear vision - that she wants to open up the economy to foreign investments and build a thriving private sector. On the other hand, her rhetoric has been matched with solid action. For example, negotiations for several strategic projects have been restarted, including the Bagamoyo Special Economic Zone (SEZ), Liganga Iron Ore and Mchuchuma Coal Mining. Moreover, all bank accounts that had been frozen by TRA have been reopened. Furthermore, she has made considerable efforts to reposition Tanzania well internationally - by joining AfCFTA, visiting Kenya and Uganda, and taking sensible Covid-19 control measures.

And the response has been dramatic. A CGTN report shows that the government has recorded 92 large investment projects with a value of $3.5 billion in the period between March and June 2021, compared to 62 projects with a value of $331 million in the same period in 2020. That is a whopping 725 percent increase! What this shows is that President Hassan's confidence-building approach works. And, based on this evidence, President Hassan demonstrates that she understands the economics of growth, and if she will choose to be ambitious, then she is most likely capable of significantly propelling Tanzania's economy forward.

It is on the management of politics that President Hassan is likely to stumble. When you talk to some of CCM's insiders, one of the main takeaways is this - President Hassan is a CCM's cadre who has grown through the party ranks to reach where she is. This means she has been trained to think and live for CCM. This raises the question whether President Hassan will transcend CCM, and choose to do what is good for Tanzania.

For example, while many of her most senior appointments tended to observe the logic of meritocracy, a good number of her appointments of district commissioners departed from that logic. That's why you see popularity becoming more of a factor. While that may be designed to not only consolidate her power but also ensure implementation of CCM's agenda, one wonders whether that serves the nation's interests. When people who have shown limited inclination or interest in government systems or community transformation become political masters of those who have spent decades in the bureaucratic ranks, that is a system full of internal contradictions. A transformative leader will seek to correct those contradictions, not only by adhering to strict meritocracy, but also by reviewing the system itself, ultimately asking whether the nation needs RCs and DCs at all.

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What the Magufuli era has revealed is that what is good for CCM is not necessarily good for Tanzania. So, it will be interesting to observe the direction that President Hassan will take. Will she choose to remain a CCM chairperson in the President's office, or a Tanzanian President who is also CCM chairperson?
Question: Polish entrepreneurs invest in mechanisation of agriculture and food security in Tanzania under the 2015 Poland-Tanzania tied aid credit agreement. What are some of the major benefits of this partnership in the highlighted areas, and what are the new areas of investment in Tanzania?

Answer: This is part of my visit to Tanzania. We aim to discuss all the conditions (pertaining to the 2015 agreement) and resolve any outstanding issues, because there are some when it comes to big contracts like this, sometimes we have to create a deeper understanding of various elements involved.

But most of all we see that this is a step in further strengthening our relations and getting our business communities to work together in managing development aid/cooperation because we believe this is more sustainable.

Polish companies will be able to work with their Tanzanian counterparts and create an added value to the Tanzanian economy and to themselves as the main drivers of the action.

On agriculture, this is what we identified on one side as pivotal to Tanzanian people. On the other side, Poland has for many decades been an agricultural country. With time we started to develop into a modern agricultural economy and managed to create solutions in agriculture using technology.

We now provide solutions for food processing, introduction of management storage, and food security not just for our consumers but worldwide.

When it comes to Tanzania, the value of our support is more than $110 million with no set timeline because we want to have sustainable cooperation. We would like to determine new areas of cooperation with the Tanzanian government that would allow to define our future projects.

The bilateral relations between Poland and Tanzania are dependent on a robust private sector; how does the Polish Embassy engage with local private partners to drive its wider agenda with the Tanzanian government?

We bring our private companies and facilitate their Tanzanian contacts with their Tanzanian counterparts. This is due to the fact that the government plays a role of a facilitator of contacts aimed at strengthening relations and bringing people together so that they are able to work out ways towards a common objective.

We have several companies right now operating in the private sector in Tanzania in areas such as the education sector - universities, working on water treatment, we also have those focusing on providing academic equipment aimed at fostering academic change.

Does the Polish government through its embassy in Tanzania conduct any business climate survey in the country and provide a feedback to Polish companies looking to invest in Tanzania? If yes, what are some of the highlighted challenges and opportunities?

The core role of every embassy in the world is to get diplomatic, political and business relations to the highest possible level. This includes monitoring the trend of developing countries like Tanzania that has posed prospective markets from our business community.

We see Tanzania as a big opportunity business-wise for many Polish companies and also Tanzanian companies to work together.

Our embassy monitors the business sector in its entirety (both private and government), the regulatory environment, legal changes, and other business initiatives. We note very positive developments when it comes to Tanzania's approach towards attracting foreign investment and businesses. We thus want to take advantage of the government's good gestures bearing in mind that among all countries in Central Europe, Poland is the only country that has an embassy in Dar es Salaam.

In the business environment, when certain issues arise we always tend to explore the solution directly with the Tanzanian government. For example, one such issue is the element of tax returns as indicated by certain companies present here.

We want to ensure that we come up with solutions to such issues because it would yet again prove to all potential investors that Tanzania is a stable market with a safe operating environment.

What are some of the key political strengths that continue to seal the bond between Tanzania and Poland more than 60 years after establishing ties?

Our relations date back to before Tanzania's independence. During the Second World War our refugees found a temporary home in some parts of this country such as Arusha. This was in fact the moment when the relationship between our nations started and is still a vibrant memory to this present day. Obviously, in the decades that followed there were different situations. I can say that Tanzania is currently where Poland was two to three decades ago. Poland's development was not easy, but came as a result of our country's robust investment in advanced technology.

After just three decades and the efforts to modernize our economy with the most advanced technology, we managed to record success. Our economy is still not fully grown, but it's much better as of now. I believe the current situation with the big changes that are happening in the world as a result of technological advancement, with Tanzania showing the readiness to embrace it and to be a leader in this part of the region, when we meet again 10 to 15 years to come I wouldn't be surprised if the changes being undertaken are actually faster and more effective than the ones we took.

What prompted the Polish government to include Tanzania among recipients of the Polish Official Development Aid (ODA) in 2016, considering the fact that the two countries had already cemented relations more than 50 years prior?

Our venture in Tanzania started in 2016 due to internal political issues. In 2008, we had political turmoil further exacerbated by the global financial crisis, and as a result the Polish government decided to close all its embassies including the one in Dar es Salaam.

It is only after the new government took office in 2015 that we decided to re-open our embassy in Dar es Salaam and further enhance our cooperation with Tanzania.

We decided to cooperate with Tanzania because of its stability which makes it a potential leader of this region. It is for these reasons and more that we want to keep Tanzania as a sustainable destination for our future aid.

How has the Polish government welcomed Tanzania's first ever female President? Are there any shifts in bilateral strategies between the two countries following the sudden change of leadership in Tanzania?

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When we received the news of the sudden passing of President John Magufuli, it came as a shock as we obviously had very good cooperation with him and the government of Tanzania. We valued his efforts to modernize Tanzania, especially in terms of infrastructure.

However, we also acknowledge the positive transition of power which shows the stability of the political systems in this country. This further adds to our belief that Tanzania is a stable country that has policies based on its principles that guarantee the existence of development. When we see Her Excellency (President Samia Suluhu Hassan) determined to continue with the modernization and transformation of the economy, with stronger foreign cooperation to further the achievement of Tanzanian interests, we believe that the best is still ahead of us.

What are some of the biggest projects currently being implemented in Tanzania by the Polish government? What's their sustainability level and how will they benefit citizens?

Aside from the current agreement of modernizing grain storage capacity of Tanzania, the other venture that we focus very intensively on is in the urban water sector in Dodoma and Dar es Salaam including water supply, wastewater treatment as well as modern water management systems. We are actually here to close certain stages of negotiations towards implementation.

I believe that once we start implementing this project using the Polish modern technologies, we will be able to seriously contribute to a more efficient management of this valuable resource in Tanzanian cities.
opinion

Lanre Arogundade pays tribute to Tunji Bello, journalist, lawyer and administrator.

Robust framed, fine-skinned and afro-haired while oozing handsomeness in his parliamentary gown, he somewhat stood out among the students' union leaders that had thronged Great Ife campus on that occasion in the 1982/83 session.

Back at the students' union office soon after the event, a group of us whispered and joked that the guy from the University of Ibadan (UI), must be an 'e dey happen chap' - the other moniker in those days for those categorised as 'ome aje butter' - students or young guys whose mien pointed at privileged background.

The guy was Tunji Bello. He was the students' union leader - the Vice President - who had come to represent the University of Ibadan students' union at the second memorial anniversary for four students from the University of Ife who were cut down in their prime by the Police during a funeral procession in Ile-Ife town on June 7, 1981. The irony was that the march was to protest the beheading of another student - Bukola Arogundade.

The brutal killing of Bukola Ojewoye, Fatimah Adebimpe, Paul Alonge, and Wemimo Akinbolu after the Police had fired live ammunition and tear gas at thousands of students lined up behind the then students' union president, Femi Kuku, in front of Mayfair Hotel in the Lagere area of the town shook the campus to its foundation. It shocked a nation to whom humanity then mattered.

Indeed, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), under the leadership of Dr. Biodun Jeyifo had to set up an administrative panel of inquiry comprising Chief Gani Fawehinmi (the head) and Labanji Bolaji, veteran journalist and member, to unravel the mystery behind the death of the students. It was the panel that found conclusively that their death was a direct outcome of the police assault on the peacefully marching students.

The Fajemifo Christopher executive on which I served as the Secretary-General came into office two sessions after the massacre and one of our early resolutions was to organise a befitting commemorative activity including the erection of a June 7 statue in front of the students' union building, to serve as a permanent memorial for the June 7 four.

It was thus the unveiling of the statue, the memorial march by students' union leaders from Ife and nearby campuses and other related activities that marked the first crossing of paths with Tunji Bello.

Beyond the specific symbolism of immortalising the June 7 four, the commemorative events organised by our Exco were reflective of the ideology driven, purposeful and focused nature of students unionism in that era. The elements of the mission that shaped unionism included defence of independent students' unionism; protection of students welfare; promotion of a culture of enlightened and robust debate of national and international issues; holding the civilian governments accountable for their deeds or misdeeds; and doing same to the military governments that succeeded them in the aftermath of the military putsch of 1983, which marked the demise of the second republic.

The early to mid-80s was also a period when the privileges being enjoyed by the students such as subsidised feeding system, subsidised accommodation and affordable tuition fees were already being threatened. At first, the attack on the educational system was a product of the profligacy of the Shehu Shagari led National Party of Nigeria's (NPN) federal government. It was that corruption ridden government that started the establishment of more universities for political considerations without giving deep thought to how they would be funded. Later, the attack became bye-products of the shift in the direction of neo-liberalism by the military governments.

By the late 80s, it had become clear that the attempt to commercialise education was in part fulfilment of the conditionalities imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to which the country had turned for loans. The most notorious of the initiative in this direction was the Ibrahim Babangida military junta's Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), which he claimed had no alternative but which was duly resisted by students, youths and Nigerians in what became famously known as the anti-SAP riots of 1989.

Tunji Bello deserves to be acknowledged as a player and leader in the student movement of that era, which to a significant number of Nigerians constitutes a golden generation.

Sections of that generation believe their radical and or revolutionary vision of Nigeria should not die with campus activism but should be taken into the arena of their professional callings and the larger society. This was especially so with those who had been active as campus journalists, students' unionists and leaders; and members of socialist, black nationalist, anti-apartheid, etc., movements, some of whom would later become professional journalists.

One of the earliest indications of that commitment was the convergence of a group of erstwhile campus activists and unionists now working as journalists in Lagos at the then secretariat of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) in Yaba, Lagos, to form the Progressives Journalists Associations (PJA) in the period between 1988 and 1989. Adopting the ideology of socialism, the main aim of PJA was to use the instrumentality of journalism to transform Nigeria through the pursuit of journalism with social relevance. In the course of time the platform expanded to accommodate like-minded elements especially those who didn't have campus activism background and it got transformed into the New Trend movement of the NUJ.

As I attested in my recent tribute to another active participant in that movement, Femi Ojudu, who also recently turned 60, Tunji Bello was a prominent player in that movement and would emerge from the forum to be one of the leaders of the NUJ in Lagos State. I wrote: "The New Trend platform took the Lagos Council of NUJ by storm when in 1989 it elected the dynamic leadership of Ladi Lawal, Tunji Bello, Richard Akinnola, Kayode Komolafe, Bong Ita, Niyi Bankole, Dagogo Jack, etc. It later extended its foray to the national level with the subsequent election of Sani Zoro as the National President of NUJ".

Tunji Bello was the Treasurer in that famous Ladi Lawal executive, which embarked on educational and welfare empowerment of journalists. The exco put up a robust defence of press freedom for which it established the Press Freedom Defence Committee and was active in decrying human rights abuses that was characteristic of the military government of that era so much so that by the time of the June 12 crisis of 1993 following the annulment of the presidential mandate freely given by Nigerians to Bashorun MKO Abiola, the council teamed up with other pro-democracy forces to be part of the Joint Action Committee on Nigeria (JACON) led by late Gani Fawehinmi.

On the above account, Tunji Bello, also deserves to be acknowledged and commended as a key player and leader in that radicalisation of the NUJ via the new trend platform.

History, as far as my relationship with Tunji Bello is concerned, ran full cycle when I joined the National Concord where he was already established on the features and political desks, and would soon become the Political Editor. Though I also became the Features Editor we related more as former student unionists and NUJ combatants than as line editors. We became friends and on occasions embarked on joint rendezvous the full details of which can only be preserved as unwritten memoirs.

Well read, well connected, urbane, focused, amiable and intellectually endowed, it was not hard to guess that Tunji would rapidly climb the journalism professional ladder and one the earliest indications was when he was offered the Alfred Friendly fellowship in the United States. The development so much excited Bashorun MKO Abiola that he organised a farewell reception for Tunji at his Ikeja residence with some of us present to devour the meals and savour the banters of the occasion. I was the one that dropped Tunji off at the airport for his departure and was equally on hand to pick and drop him at home upon his return.

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With such other cerebral journalists like Victor Ifijeh, Sam Omatseye, etc., forming part of his formidable team, it could not have been otherwise that the political desk would be part of the success story of the National Concord in the 1990s. And here again, the contribution of Tunji to media professionalism and development as someone who transverse the vast field of political reporting should be duly acknowledged.

Tunji's charismatic attributes, the journalism front at which he operated and close relationship with MKO obviously recommended him for the inner circle role he played in the National Concord Publisher's bid for the presidency on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1993. The annulment and the nationwide anger it provoked also meant that he would become a core participant in the struggle for the restoration of the June 12 mandate for which MKO ultimately paid the supreme price. Tunji, in my reckoning, is one of the top 10 Nigerians who could write authoritatively on the intrigues, the backstabbing, the horse trading, the betrayals, the somersaults and the sharp twists and turns of the June 12 struggle. He owes present and future generation the historical obligation of telling his June story. While we wait for the epic, we have to equally acknowledge the sense of commitment to a Nigeria free from the shackles of military oppression with which he participated in the pro-democracy movement despite the obvious risks.

My conclusion therefore is simple. On this special occasion of his 60th birthday, Tunji should be saluted as a hero of purposeful journalism and a hero of Nigeria's democracy. Especially encouraging is the fact that Tunji has remained Tunji - humble, level headed, compassionate and humane - his long sojourn on the corridors of government and power notwithstanding. For he is a jolly good fellow? You can say that again and again.

..Excerpts from 'In Pursuit of Public Purpose - Essays In Honour of Tunji Bello at 60' published to mark his birthday
Balaka District Council has been commended for establishing a website that will allow the public to access information easily about the council.

Deputy Minister of Local Government, Halima Daudi, graced the launch of the website on Wednesday and asked the council to always update information on the website for smooth flow of information to the public.

"Today I am here to launch this Balaka District Council website. With this website, people in Balaka and any other Malawian will have access to information on what Balaka District Council is doing regarding the health sector, natural resources, agriculture, education. They can access all that information while seated in their homes," explained Daudi.

Balaka District Commissioner, Maclloyd Kadam'manja, said the council regarded the innovation as part of the reform areas of extending the access to information to those sections of the society that regard the use of modern technology as a way of sharing and accessing the needed information.

"As a council, the first thing that we noted was that some stakeholders needed information but we could not be available to provide the information. We also looked at how we fared last time in terms of performance assessment. One area that we did not do well was to do with access to information," said Kadam'manja.

The Performance Assessment Report for 2019/2020 named Balaka District Council as the best performing council in the country at 67%. The report also indicated that the council had done better in its procurement and contract management systems, internal audit systems, public sector reforms and mobilisation of locally generated resources.

Vice President, Saulos Chilima, also named Balaka District Council as an outstanding performer recently during the public sector reforms interface meetings with Eastern Region district councils.
As COVID-19 case numbers in Africa climb faster than all earlier peaks, the World Health Organisation, WHO, has said that new and faster spreading variants are fuelling the continent's surging third wave.

The WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti, said on Thursday, that the Delta variant is in three of the five African countries reporting the highest caseloads for the week ending 27 June, and it is dominant in South Africa, which accounted for more than half of Africa's cases in the same period.

Speaking during a virtual press conference, Moeti said with case numbers doubling every three weeks, the Delta variant had spread to 16 African countries, including nine with surging cases.

"The Alpha and Beta variants have been reported in 32 and 27 countries respectively. The Alpha variant has been detected in most countries in north, west and central Africa. The Beta variant is more widespread in southern Africa. Both of these variants are more transmissible than the original virus.

"The speed and scale of Africa's third wave is like nothing we've seen before. The rampant spread of more contagious variants pushes the threat to Africa up to a whole new level.

"More transmission means more serious illness and more deaths, so everyone must act now and boost prevention measures to stop an emergency becoming a tragedy," Moeti remarked.

Quoting WHO data, Moeti said the number of COVID-19 cases have increased in Africa for six weeks running and rose by 25 percent week-on-week to almost 202,000 in the week ending on June 27th, reaching nine tenths of the continent's previous record of 224,000 new cases, even as the number of deaths rose by 15 percent across 38 African countries to nearly 3,000 in the same period.

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With rising case numbers and hospitalisations across the continent, she said WHO estimates that oxygen demand in Africa is now 50 percent greater than for the first wave peak one year ago.

"While supply challenges grind on, dose sharing can help plug the gap. We are grateful for the pledges made by our international partners, but we need urgent action on allocations. Africa must not be left languishing in the throes of its worst wave yet," Moeti avowed.

As WHO is supporting genomic surveillance to track the spread of variants in Africa with the aim of boosting sampling for sequencing, Moeti said that better understanding of the molecular evolution of the variants will also aid countries in making quick decisions around which vaccines to use.

This week, African Immunization experts met to tackle a range of pressing issues, including COVID-19 vaccines, the status of the malaria vaccine implementation programme, polio eradication and routine immunisation progress, at the biannual Regional Immunization Technical Advisory Group (RITAG).

They also addressed the implementation of the regional framework for Immunization Agenda 2030, a roadmap to achieve crucial immunization goals, and offered recommendations to African governments to address key challenges and strengthen immunisation systems.

Vanguard News Nigeria
editorial

IT has long been public knowledge that most occupants of political offices in Nigeria send their children to schools abroad due to the virtual collapse of quality education in Nigeria.

A non-resident scholar of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Matthew Page (who is described as "a Nigerian"), in a study titled: "West African Elites' Spending on UK Schools and Universities: A Closer Look", has accused Nigeria's politically-exposed persons, PEPs, of perpetrating money laundering by using the education of their children and wards abroad as a conduit pipe.

The report, which was commissioned by the United Kingdom government, according to its High Commissioner in Nigeria, Catriona Laing, was meant "to better understand the risk to the UK from illicit finance in West Africa.

We will now consider the report's finding and take a view on what if any further action is required".

Page's report also accused the UK government of reluctance to acknowledge the shortcomings of its anti-money laundering policies or learn lessons from recent anti-corruption failures, especially as many UK schools are clearly complicit in matriculating students linked to known or even convicted "kleptocrats".

We are waiting to see exactly what the UK government is going to do about this unwholesome finding which hurts both the UK and the victim countries. Nigeria bears the main brunt of public treasury fleecing to educate the children of PEPs abroad while virtually abandoning public-funded education.

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We suggest they start by monitoring the sources of funds being used to pay for the children and wards of these Nigerian PEPs and consider rusticating/deporting any student being sponsored with stolen or illicit public funds.

The UK has an obligation to show its sincerity in commissioning the inquiry by the resolve with which it deals with the proven cases of money laundering.

In spite of the much-vaunted "anti-corruption wars" in Nigeria, the country has almost lost its capacity to bring culprits to book because of the nature of the system we run.

Without the assistance of developed countries and international bodies, corruption in the topmost political circles in Nigeria virtually has no deterrence.

The deterioration in the quality of education in Nigerian schools is greatly responsible for the poverty, underdevelopment and growing instability in Nigeria.

It also affects advanced countries like the UK by way of the quantum of unwanted emigrants seeking better life.

It is in the UK's interest that Nigerian leaders are encouraged to educate the bulk of their children in well-funded and run domestic schools.
Rabat  The National Commission for the Supervision of Personal Data Protection (CNDP) and the Commission of Informatics and Liberties (CIL) of Burkina Faso signed, on Monday in Rabat, a cooperation protocol on the establishment of a bilateral mechanism of collaboration.

Under this protocol, inked by CNDP president Omar Seghrouchni and CIL head Marguerite Ouedraogo Bonane, both parties are jointly committed to ensuring the best possible protection of personal data.

The agreement aims to provide an effective framework for cross-border processing between Morocco and Burkina Faso, with both authorities also committed to promoting digital trust in Africa, through the DATA TIKA-Poupeleem program.

"Poupeleem" means "trust" in Mossi language, the most spoken in Burkina Faso, said Seghrouchni, noting that the ambition is to deploy the program DATA TIKA, launched in July 2020 by the CNDP, in all African languages and ensure that Africa is a continent of data exchange, to boost economic exchanges.

In addition to aspects related to cooperation and exchange of information and expertise, the protocol provides for forward-looking clauses because the field of data protection is "constantly evolving and requires us to project into the future issues," said CNDP president in a statement to MAP TV channel "M24".

For her part, Marguerite Ouedraogo Bonane stressed that the agreement provides for the usual actions that the two authorities carry out in the field, including those related to information, awareness and management of complaints from victims of cybercrime.
The Bawku Naba, who is also President of the Kusaug Traditional Council, Asigir Abugrago Azoka II, says the Chiefs and People of the Kusaug Traditional Area, and, indeed, all Ghanaians appreciate the policies of the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, evident in his re-election on 7th December 2020.

Congratulating President Akufo-Addo on his electoral victory, "which has put the destiny of Ghana firmly in your hands for the next four (4) years", the Bawku Naba told the President that "you have worked hard to earn that enviable position. I wish you God's continued blessing in wisdom as well as good health to execute your policies."

Asigir Abugrago Azoka II made this known on Monday, 21st June 2021, when the President paid a courtesy call on him at his palace in Bawku, at the commencement of his tour of the Upper East Region.

"Mr. President, let me express my gratitude to you in respect of development in the traditional area. So far so good, especially in terms of the following Free Senior High School Policy, Continuation of the school feeding programme, Youth Employment Programme, One-Village-One-Dam, One-District-One-Factory, Planting for Food and Jobs, NABCO, construction of major bridges at Kulgungu and Tamne, and the Bolga-Bawku Road," he said.

Thanking the President for the significant number of appointees he has chosen from the Kusaug Traditional Area, which include Alhaji Sule Yiremia as Member of the Council of State; Hon. Abdulai Abanga as Deputy Minister for Works and Housing; Hon Fatimatu Abubakar as Deputy Minister for Information; and Mr. Abdul-Wahab Hanan Aludiba as Chief Executive Officer for the National Buffer

Stock, the Bawku Naba was hopeful that other more appointments from the Traditional Area would be made.

Touching on the insecurity situation in and around Burkina Faso, Asigir Abugrago Azoka II, stated that "this gives us a cause to worry because of our proximity to that country. Recent information indicates that some terrorists have infiltrated our borders."

He continued, "we appeal to your office to use all means possible to prevent a spillage of the conflict into my traditional area. So far, our security services have proved equal to the task and deserve to be encouraged to do more by being highly alert."
Ouagadougou  The apostolic nuncio to Burkina Faso and Niger, Archbishop Michael Francis Crotty has acknowledged the mayor and the municipality of Ouagadougou for honoring Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI with a street.

The street which connects the apostolic nunciature in the Ouaga 2000 district was named Pope Benedict XVI street to pay homage to the Pope Emeritus who erected this apostolic nunciature in Ouagadougou on June 12, 2007 and who appointed the first apostolic nuncio resident in Burkina Faso.

"Having a diplomatic mission is both a declaration and a commitment to deepen and strengthen bilateral relations, and there is no better way to do this than to be physically present," said Archbishop Crotty who took the opportunity to express his joy at representing the Pope in this country.

"Indeed, the greatest joy for me to be the representative of Pope Francis is to make him present wherever I go. A presence made possible by Pope Benedict XVI who established this diplomatic mission of the Holy See in Burkina Faso and Niger here in Ouagadougou," the nuncio said on June 11.

He also paid homage to his predecessors to the nunciature of Burkina Faso and Niger, but also to the government which made available to the Holy See the land on which the nunciature is built.

According to archbishop Crotty the nunciature "is a truly lasting legacy which has required the efforts of many people, and I would also like to thank the architect, the builders and all those who participated in the construction of this magnificent apostolic nunciature."
President Uhuru Kenyatta on Thursday morning met his French host Emmanuel Macron at Elysee Palace in Paris.

The two leaders discussed several bilateral and multilateral subjects of mutual interest to Kenya and France, according to a dispatch from State House.

President Kenyatta and his French counterpart discussed the progress of key France-supported infrastructure projects in Kenya including the expansion of the 233-kilometer Rironi-Nakuru-Mau Summit Road whose construction is set to kick-off in September this year.

The public-private partnership (PPP) agreement to expand the Northern Corridor road into a four-lane dual carriageway and reduce congestion at a cost of Shs 160 billion was reached during President Kenyatta's visit to Paris in October last year.

Besides infrastructure, Presidents Kenyatta and Macron discussed enhanced cooperation in the health sector particularly in building Kenya's capacity to manufacture vaccines locally.

On the multilateral front, the two leaders spoke about the forthcoming Global Partnership for Education (GPE) Summit in London to be co-hosted by President Kenyatta and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The Summit is set for July 28 and 29, and aims at raising $5 billion in five years for investment in the education of 175 million children in low-income countries across the world.

President Kenyatta was accompanied to Elysee Palace by Foreign Affairs CS Raychelle Omamo, her Infrastructure counterpart James Macharia and Kenya's envoy to France Prof Judi Wakhungu.
The Meru County Assembly has called for a thorough audit of the Meru North Cooperative Union, which has been making losses for years.

The coffee union, comprising 13 societies, has been a source of concern over its management and financial status.

A report by the county assembly's committee on trade, cooperatives and enterprise development indicates that the union generated revenues of more than Sh79.9 million between 2015 and 2018 but made losses of over Sh9.2 million.

According to the report, the union's biggest source of revenue is rental income, largely from Nyambene House, in Nairobi's city centre. The union raised Sh65.8 million from rental income between 2015 and 2018.

The committee, led by Akithii MCA David Kaithia, warned that the union may be suffering from poor financial management.

"The Meru North Cooperative Union should have a clear business plan to assist the union to establish where it aims to reach over the next few years," the committee said.

"The union should keep up to date accounting records to avoid the risk of loss of funds and also ensure proper tracking of expenses, debts and creditors."

The assembly also wants the union to streamline its operations and control its operating expenses to tame the loss-making record.

The property-rich union has been under scrutiny by leaders and residents for several years, with many calling for accountability in how it spends its money.

Kiguchwa MCA Linus Athinya, who sought a statement on the status of the cooperative, faulted the union's expenditure and called for further investigations.

"We need to know who earns the salaries at the union yet the union is dormant. The expenditures indicated in the financial statements are suspect. The union has been turned into a private enterprise," he said.

Last year, an enquiry by the Nation established that among the properties owned by the union are Nyambene House, four acres of land in Ruaraka (which is now disputed after a controversial sale), about four acres of land in Meru town and a godown each in Nanyuki and Meru.

The disputed Ruaraka land was valued at Sh1.1 billion and is the subject of a court case in Nairobi.

Last year, the union collected more than Sh1.5 million in monthly rent from Nyambene House and over Sh200,000 from other properties in Meru.

The bone of contention has been how about Sh2 million in monthly income was spent for the last 22 years when the coffee sector collapsed in Meru North.

Non-existent services rendered

According to the Meru County Assembly report, the union's biggest spending between 2015 and 2018 went into housing, taking up more than sh46.2 million, while administrative costs top up Sh38.7 million.

Josphat Thiaine, the union's chairman, last year told Nation.Africa that most of the income goes to clearing debts, legal fees for the Ruaraka land suit and renovation of the ageing Nyambene House.

Mr Thiaine said the union had debts amounting to about Sh10 million as of last year.

However, the union's financial statement tabled in the assembly does not show any substantial payment of debts while renovations took about Sh5.3 million between 2015 and 2018.

The union's affairs have in the past attracted a group of Njuri Ncheke elders living in Nairobi who called in the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) to look into the management of the union's finances.

"The property owned by the union was bought with money contributed by our parents in the 1960s and 1970s. We suspect the income earned by the union is going into individuals' pockets. The same people have been in the management for decades. This is why we called for investigations," Mwenda Thiribi said.

Erastus Linguli, a former Meru North Cooperative Union official, has on several occasions called for an inquiry, citing mismanagement of the union's resources.

"The union has paid heavily for non-existent services rendered, including salaries and allowances to non-performing persons from 1997," he said.

"The woes of the union started when the managers and management committee selfishly decided to go it alone - closed all stores and distanced the institution from the societies who are the owners and members of the union," says the letter from Mr Linguli and a group of farmers to the ministry of cooperatives in 2004.

Mr Linguli claims the union's management committee has been operating as a secret organisation for more than 20 years.

"The questions coffee farmers want to be answered are how much money is flowing into the union and how it is spent. The union should be using the income to provide technical and training services to surviving coffee societies," he says.

But Mr Thiaine, the union chairman, argued that not a single cent has been misappropriated since he took over in 2006.

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He says the union was heavily indebted to banks, the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), Kenya Railways, the county council and former employees to the tune of more than Sh85 million.

"In 2006, I found a union that was on its death bed. The Nyambene House lease had expired in 1994 and the union was about to lose it.The building had been condemned and rent income had shrunk to Sh350,000. We had to renovate it extensively to raise the income to over Sh1.4 million," Mr Thiaine said.

He added, "We have paid Sh2.7 million in pending land rates, Sh8 million to KRA, Sh670,00 to Kenya Railways for the Nanyuki godown and cleared most of the pending employee benefits. We have reduced our debts to about Sh10 million."

The union's Nanyuki godown earns Sh15,000 in rent per month while another Sh192,000 is earned from two plots in Meru town.

Mr Thiaine argued that under his watch, the union has acquired two plots in Maua and Mikinduri towns and intends to acquire another plot in Nchiru market.

"We are now expanding our rental properties by expanding Nyambene House and (building) several houses in Meru town," he said.

Mr Thiane said the union is likely to return to profitability this year after paying its decades-old debts.
A man and his son who were sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of hosting slain Al-Qaeda terrorist Fazul Abdullah, who was linked to the 1998 Nairobi US embassy bombing, have been set free.

Mahfudh Ashur Hemed and his son Ibrahim Mahfudh Ashur were set free by the High Court in Mombasa, after it allowed their appeal and set aside their conviction and sentences.

In allowing the appeal, Justice Anne Ong'injo ruled that prosecution evidence left "a lot of loose ends" that cannot sustain a conviction.

Justice Ong'injo said prosecutors failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Abdullah was held in the appellant's house.

"Claims that Fazul Abdullah was in the house of the appellants fall short of beyond reasonable doubt," he said.

The court noted that two prosecution witness testified how they got information that the most wanted terrorist was being hosted in Malindi and that their informer identified one of the appellants.

However, the court noted that the informer ought to have testified or sworn an affidavit (to give the evidence credibility).

Justice Ong'injo also wondered why a shaver - from which prosecutors said DNA was generated to match Abdullah's - allegedly found in the appellants' house was not recovered when a contingent of police officers raided it.

In their appeal petitions, they argued the trial magistrate erred in law in proceeding with the case to conviction on a charge that was defective.

"The magistrate erred in law in convicting the appellant as an accessory after the fact to murder despite the prosecution failure to prove beyond reasonable doubt, the essential ingredients of an accessory after the fact," their appeal stated in part.

The appellants also argued that the magistrate erred by holding that Abdullah was ever in Mr Hemed's house.

"The magistrate erred in law by shifting the burden of proof to the appellant (Mr Hemed) to allegedly explain how the alleged suspect materials were recovered," the petition said.

The appellants also argued that the magistrate erred in law by convicting and sentencing Mr Ibrahim entirely based on belief and not evidence on record for a trial that proceeded for over 11 years.

Former Mombasa chief magistrate Maxwell Gicheru (now a judge) found Mr Hemed and his son guilty of being accessories after the fact to murder by harbouring and maintaining Abdullah in order to enable him to escape punishment after the 1998 and 2002 terrorist attacks in Nairobi and Kikambala.

Mr Gicheru also convicted them of harbouring Abdullah, who was unlawfully present in the country on unknown dates between December 2007 and August 2, 2008 at Silversand Estate, Malindi.

Mr Gicheru said he did not believe that the accused did not know Abdullah or that he was a terrorist wanted for the US Embassy and Paradise hotel bombings when they had 'Friday Bulletins' with his picture and stories on the suicide bombers at the hotel.

"The bulletins are a clear proof that the accused were closely monitoring terrorism issues in the world and Kenya in particular," said Mr Gicheru in his judgment.

The magistrate noted that DNA sampling conducted was lawful and in accordance with the Penal Code.

"As for the DNA in Ethiopia in respect of the children of [Abdullah] and his remains, I find that it was lawful because it was authorised by the governments of the two countries," he said.

The magistrate said he believed prosecution witnesses that a flash disc, shaver, Friday Bulletins and a passport were found in the house of the accused.

"The police officers who were involved in the recovery of the items did not know the accused before August 8, 2008, they arrested the second accused at 9pm and the first accused shortly thereafter," he said.

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The magistrate said there was no time for police officers to plant any of the items seized, many (officers) were involved, they acted spontaneously and there was no time to plan anything.

Mr Gicheru said no reason existed as to why all Anti-Terrorism Police Unit officers from Malindi and Mombasa would descend on the home of an ordinary family and accuse them of hiding the most wanted terrorist in the region.

"I am convinced that the police officers acted on intelligence information which led them to the discovery and that they had no malice or reason to implicate innocent people," he said.

He further said that the material recovered from Friday Bulletins, 912 pages in the flash disc, the shaver and passport proved conclusively that Abdullah was at the home of the accused.

"The DNA generated from the shaver while compared to the one recovered in Ethiopia and Somalia proves beyond doubt that [Abdullah] had been to the home of the accused," he said.
The body of industrialist cum farmer Mansukh Patel was on Thursday cremated, in an emotional send-off at his expansive farm in Solai, Nakuru County.

The funeral, held under strict Covid-19 protocols, was a private family function, with the public and the media kept away.

Apart from close family members, only a few friends and leaders were invited to the funeral of the tycoon.

Baringo Senator Gideon Moi and Nakuru Governor Lee Kinyanjui were among politicians who attended the private funeral.

Leaders who attended the funeral described Mr Patel as a great farmer and industrialist, who had an eye for opportunities.

"The cruel hand of death has robbed Nakuru and our nation of a patriot, whose entrepreneurial spirit, hard work and determination saw him create some of the country's largest enterprises, which offer employment to thousands of our people," said Mr Kinyanjui.

The governor further eulogised the business mogul as a devoted farmer, whose flower business employed thousands of people in Nakuru.

"When I last visited his farm in March this year, I could not help but admire his work ethic and the resultant model farm that employed over 1,500 people. He was always willing to share his knowledge, Mansukh was a father and mentor to many," added Mr Kinyanjui.

Mr Moi described the late Patel, as an entrepreneur par excellence and who left a mark in the business world.

"We have lost a hard-working businessman who was a philanthropist and greatly helped to uplift the lives of Solai people. He has left a huge gap in the business world that will take time to fill. May he rest in peace. Patel was always strategic in his endeavors which included running industries, serving the public or farming-as he was hands-on," mourned Mr Moi.

Friends and relatives painted the picture of a man with the selfless conviction of spending money to help residents of Solai find opportunities and empowerment.

"Mansukh was like our father in Solai. He has been in Solai for more than four decades as a farmer and philanthropist. His coffee, cut flower and dairy farming ventures employ more than 2,000 residents. He has also helped establish several projects, including at least three schools and a hospital," said a resident Mr Evanson Kamwana.

Mr Kamwana had very fond memories of the late Patel.

"He was a man of the people. He leaves behind a very illustrious legacy and will be missed a lot by the people of Solai. Were it not for Patel, Solai would not have existed. His farm offers employment for thousands of residents. He contributed to various development projects, including construction of roads, schools and also contributed to the preservation of the environment through planting of trees," stated a tearful Mr Kamwana.

Some of the schools Patel built include; Arutani Secondary, Jamhuri Primary and Mansukh Primary.

The principal of Arutani secondary, Ms Matildah Monterosso, described Mr Patel as a man with a big heart, who has left a rich legacy in the education sector.

"Patel helped many children from poor families to access education. He helped build Arutani secondary and ensured it has a well-equipped laboratory. He also bought us a brand new school bus. We have lost a man with a big heart," said Ms Monterosso.

A stickler for the rules, his final send-off, with the 72-hour limit set by the government, followed the Covid-19 burial protocols to the letter.

Despite being a wealthy millionaire, Mr Patel had kept a low profile, avoiding the limelight. He managed to avoid the media so well that no photo of him was in the public domain. And even in death, the family chose a low key send-off. His body was ferried to Nakuru by road, with only about five vehicles escorting the hearse.

The hearse arrived at his Solai farm at 11am. And before the funeral ceremony started, the hearse was driven on the Nakuru Solai road to Kamkunji centre to allow residents to pay their last respects.

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Emotional pupils and teachers of Mansukh Primary School sang songs in praise of Mr Patel, as they bid him goodbye.

All along, about five police officers were at the Milmet farm gate, ensuring only about 100 mourners -- mainly family members -- attended the funeral. The body was cremated at 1:30pm.

The billionaire owned the 3,000-acre farm that houses the Solai Coffee Estates, which grows flowers, macadamia, coffee and other horticultural produce for export.

However, May 9, 2018, remains a blot on his impeccable record. At least 48 people died and thousands of families were displaced after a dam owned by the family collapsed, washing away the surrounding villages of Energy, Nyakinyua, Endao, Milmet and Arutani. The dam was located at the Milmet Flower Farm in Solai.

The case against the businessman's family is still in court.

The Patel family patriarch died on the night of Monday, June 28, at the Aga Khan Hospital, in Nairobi. He suffered a cardiac arrest.
Last Sunday a gang of about 40 men drove into Kieru Coffee Factory, about three kilometres from Nkubu town and loaded 240 bags of grade one coffee onto their lorry.

During the three-hour ordeal, the three security guards were tied up in the store and covered with gunny bags after being warned against resisting.

One of the watchmen, Mr Andrew Muthuri, said the leader of the gang told them that they had been instructed by the farmers' society's chairman to collect the coffee, now valued at more than Sh3.1 million.

"They came around 2am and threatened to kill us. They tied us up, locked us in the store and carted away the coffee bags to a waiting lorry," Mr Muthuri said.

In a similar fashion, three other factories in Meru County have lost their coffee to organised gangs since January this year. The coffee has disappeared without trace.

Last week, factory managers had agreed with farmers to sort out the beans this week before taking it to a miller in Thika.

Meru County Commissioner Ngumo Karuku said four factories have lost more than 360 bags of coffee valued at Sh5.8 million over the past six months.

Police now suspect insiders could be colluding with criminals to have the coffee stolen. Most of the incidents are said to happen immediately after members meet and decide on when to deliver the coffee for milling. Mr Karuku agreed with this theory, saying, the manner in which the theft is executed is suspect, pointing to collusion.

"How do factories keep grade one coffee in their stores for long without any security measures? This is why we are suspicious that some members of the management might be colluding with thieves. Despite having agreed that local police be informed when there is coffee in the factory, none has cared to do so," Mr Karuku said.

To curb theft, Mr Karuku suggested vetting of all coffee societies staff and management committee members as well as enhancement of security in factories. The factory manager will also be required to inform police of coffee stocks held in the stores, install CCTV cameras and boost security at the facility.

"Every factory must have the required layers of security when they know they have coffee in the store. These are some of the things we will look into to ensure we tame the coffee theft," Mr Karuku said. County Police Commander Nyaga Muchunguh said the Critical Infrastructure Police Unit was available to enhance security in factories.

"We have to vet all coffee society workers because thieves must be accessing information from within. This must be an inside job," Mr Muchunguh said.

County Director of Cooperatives Mugambi Sandi warned factory managers against keeping coffee in their stores for long and told them to ensure they have insurance for produce during storage to avert losses.

"We now have two millers in the county and there is no need for factories to store coffee. You can deliver as little as 10 bags to New KPCU or Meru County Millers," Mr Sandi said.

Meru Central Coffee Cooperative Union chairman Ephantus Majau said factory managers who fail to establish extra security measures will be held accountable in case of theft.

On June 10, 200 bags of coffee estimated to be worth Sh8 million were stolen after thieves armed with crude weapons raided Baragu Coffee Factory in Tharaka Nithi County.

During the 2am raid, two watchmen were seriously injured and are recuperating at Chogoria PCEA Hospital. Kithare assistant chief Elizabeth Kaunda said the attackers tied the guards and warned them not to raise the alarm.

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A local farmer, Mr Martin Miriti, urged the government to apprehend the criminals and help them recover their coffee.

"Apart from the fact that we rely entirely on coffee for a living including paying fees for our children, most of us had borrowed loans and will now have to sell other property to repay," said Mr Miriti.

He said cases of coffee theft in factories are rampant in the region and that the incidences are similar, suggesting that it could be one well-coordinated team.

Mr Albert Mugambi, another farmer, called on the society's management to insure the factory so that, whenever the coffee is stolen, farmers can be compensated instead of shouldering the whole loss.
press release

Burkina Faso has been experiencing a humanitarian crisis since armed conflict broke out in 2016. As in the rest of the Sahel region, a prolonged drought has only made things worse.

Wendgouda Priva Kabre, head of the ICRC's water and habitat activities in Burkina Faso, explains why the situation has become unbearable for many communities, who have found themselves caught between armed violence and a deadly water shortage.

Q: How has climate change impacted the people there?

Wendgouda Priva Kabre: The challenges faced by these communities may not be directly due to climate change per se, but people do talk about how much the environment has changed. Temperatures have risen over the past 20 years, and drought has become a major problem.

There is less and less water to be found in wells and natural reservoirs. Farmland that used to stay moist for six months now dries up after three. The rains have become unpredictable: they come too early or too late, which creates a lot of uncertainty for farmers.

The farther north you go in the country, the harder it is to find water. Unfortunately, the areas with the worst drought are also dealing with armed violence. Water is an issue nearly everywhere we work. It's at the heart of our concerns and our humanitarian response.

Q: How has the ongoing conflict contributed to water scarcity?

Wendgouda Priva Kabre: Conflict in rural areas has caused a massive wave of displacement in the northern, eastern and central parts of the country. People have fled to villages and cities, doubling or even tripling their populations.

New neighbourhoods have sprung up, which has put additional pressure on basic infrastructure. Underground reservoirs are drying up fast. Meanwhile, government services have more or less stopped doing maintenance work because of the security situation.

These days, people often have to travel several kilometres and spend hours queuing for water. The trip can be dangerous. Women and girls are usually the ones sent to collect water, which forces them to abandon their own income-generating activities and cuts into time they would normally spend with their families.

The atmosphere at water collection points can be tense. Some people pay bribes to avoid standing in the queue. The whole situation is bad for social cohesion. New arrivals - the people who have fled their homes - are served last, which only adds to their troubles.

Q: Is water scarcity hampering the response to COVID-19?

Wendgouda Priva Kabre: Because water is so scarce, people have had to drastically reduce how much they use. What little water they do have, they ration carefully.

Hygiene and sanitation are secondary concerns. When we held awareness-raising sessions on sanitary measures for preventing the spread of COVID-19, people told us in no uncertain terms that for them, handwashing is a luxury. Their priorities are a matter of survival: water is for drinking, cooking and watering their animals.

In some places, humanitarian organizations are delivering water by truck so that the recommendations for combatting the pandemic can be applied. But it's far from enough.

Q: What is the healthcare situation in rural areas?

Wendgouda Priva Kabre: At the health centres where we provide support, diarrhoeal diseases are the main reason people come in to consult and the leading cause of death.

In the last six years, the conflict has intensified and led to an increased demand for medical services. But many health facilities have been damaged or destroyed, and a large portion of the health workforce have fled rural areas, where violence is rampant. Today, OCHA estimates that the violence is preventing 800,000 people from accessing health care.

Our teams are standing ready to renovate health centres. But 80 per cent of the time, we have to address water supply issues before we can begin. Take for example the commune of Barsalogho, in central Burkina Faso, which has taken in nearly 100,000 displaced people fleeing the violence. The population doubled in just one year. In 2019, we were providing support to Barsalogho's health centre, where the number of consultations had risen sharply.

The first thing we did was restore access to water, as the centre's well had dried up. We sunk a new well in a different location, but the flow is still not good. The centre is currently sharing its water supply with the displaced people living nearby.

Six months ago, they reported several cases of hepatitis E. The situation has since stabilized, but an investigation showed that the outbreak was due to contaminated water. Health and sanitation remain a serious challenge.

Today, OCHA estimates that the violence is preventing 800,000 people from accessing health care.

Q: How has water scarcity affected traditional ways of life?

Wendgouda Priva Kabre: Water scarcity has implications not only for health care but also for farming. Roughly 80 per cent of Burkina Faso's population depends on agriculture. But even before the conflict broke out, young people were already abandoning rural areas and moving to cities.

No one believes it's possible to earn a decent living from traditional agriculture anymore. The younger generation sees no future in scraping what little they can from the ground.

Land sales have only made the problem worse over the last decade. Real estate companies have been buying up land for housing projects, land that used to be leased to farmers for food production. The farmers are left with nothing.

With farming no longer an option, women have turned to collecting gravel or breaking up granite slabs in quarries for construction companies. It's back-breaking work that takes a serious toll on their health. Young people prefer to find odd jobs in cities, where they live in cramped, overpopulated slums with no basic infrastructure.

Those who remain in the countryside have one of two options. If they have the means, they sink their own wells. But they often have to dig very deep, and the results are increasingly inadequate. That option is only available to a few. Others buy synthetic fertilizers to increase their yields. The excessive use of pesticides is another environmental concern.

Another option is to dig holes in the fields to try to improve water retention and ground moisture, or to build makeshift dams out of stones to capture running water.

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This kind of work is done manually with the materials at hand, and it reduces the amount of water available for cooking. Some families are only able to eat once a day, and it's common to see malnourished children at the health centres.

In addition to meeting people's urgent need for water, we must help them to become more resilient by supporting income-generating activities, among other measures.

How are we helping?

We are working to understand the effects of climate change and climate-related risk in areas affected by violence. Every year we seek to improve our response, which includes:

Providing water to displaced people and host communities;

Training young people to repair hand-powered pumps so that the community never loses access to water;

Building new water-collection sites at health centres (in Djibo, Fada, Kaya and Ouahigouya) and in neighbourhoods inhabited by displaced people;

Creating small-scale water networks by identifying underground reservoirs and installing solar-powered pumps to increase access and decrease waiting times;

Sinking wells in pastureland to reduce competition for water between humans and livestock (for security reasons, many herders bring their animals with them when collecting water);

Conserving farmland by installing water-storage infrastructure and innovative technologies, such as drip irrigation.
A section of Migori MCAs on Wednesday stormed out of a plenary session to discuss the Sh8.8 billion 2021/22 budget claiming that it was inflated.

This will be the biggest budget for Migori County since the onset of devolution.

Ntimaru East MCA Augustine Mwise and his Central Kanyamkago counterpart Alex Akugo led some disgruntled MCAs out of the plenary after their efforts to have the budget scaled down were thwarted by the presiding Speaker.

The MCAs, however, unanimously endorsed the budget that was tabled by the Budget and Appropriation Committee Chairperson and Kaler Ward Representative Thomas Akungo.

In the budget, Sh2.9 billion has been set aside for development while Sh5.8 billion will be spent on recurrent expenditure. An additional Sh2.8 billion has been allocated for county government operations.

Departments of Health, Roads, Transport and Public Works as well as the County Assembly are the biggest beneficiaries, with the three getting an allocation of Sh2.2 billion, Sh1.3 billion and Sh1.1 billion respectively.

Environment, Natural Resources and Disaster Management, Trade and Tourism department and County Attorney's office are some of the departments that received lower allocations after they were allocated Sh2.3 million, Sh1.6 million and Sh90.5 million respectively.

The Sh90 million earlier set aside for the county attorney's office sparked protest from a section of the MCAs.

"It beats logic to set such a huge allocation for an office whose mandate is not clearly defined. This sums up to misuse of public funds at a time the electorate are grappling with tough economic times," noted Mr Akugo.

He claimed that previous allocations for house committees were underutilised yet the balance could not be accounted for.

The presiding Speaker George Omamba said all the budgetary allocations had been "thoroughly scrutinised" before the budget was passed.

"All the allocations we have passed today are justified. The committee even scaled down the budget further and was convinced that all that was presented before MCAs were deemed necessary," Mr Omamba noted.
The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has reported that more than 5.5 million taxpayers filed their tax returns by the midnight June 30 deadline, reflecting a 19 per cent growth from last year.

Some 4.4 million filed returns in 2020. Taxpayers file returns for the previous year, with the filing period running from January 1 to June 30.

The number of taxpayers using iTax has been growing over the past few years, rising from 3.6 million in 2019 to 4.4 million in 2020 and 2021's 5.5 million.

But KRA still reports that some 600,000 of the 6.1 million taxpayers registered on iTax failed to file, even as it added the number of last-minute filers was down this year.

"The growth in the numbers show positive progress in tax compliance, a move that is anticipated to further drive the country towards economic growth. As has been the case in the previous years, Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) Tax Service Offices did not experience long queues during the last days of filing," the agency said in a statement yesterday.

"This is attributed to efficiency of the iTax platform, effective taxpayer sensitisation on filing of returns and efficient taxpayer support services through the KRA Contact Centre and Tax Service Offices across the country as well as extension of working staff hours."

KRA data shows that some 1.7 million Kenyans filed their returns in the last 10 days, as the agency had by June 20 announced that only 3.8 million taxpayers had filed their returns by that point.

The authority said it projects to increase the number of active taxpayers by two million to 8.2 million by end of June 2023.

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KRA said improvements on iTax, including enriching it to include an auto-populated return for taxpayers with employment income as the only source of income, had eased users' experience and made it easier for taxpayers to file returns.

"Taxpayers in this category, whose annual tax returns constitute the bulk of all annual tax returns, are only required to fill in annual pension and tax relief details in the respective fields provided to complete the return process," the statement by KRA Commissioner General Githii Mburu said.

The authority urged Kenyans to form a habit of filing returns early, as the six-month filing season begins in January.

"Just like tax payment, filing of tax returns is an important tax compliance tenet, which is put in place to ascertain tax compliance," it stated.

Late filing of tax returns is penalised with a Sh2,000 fine or 5 per cent of tax due, whichever is higher, while non-individuals are fined Sh20,000 or 5 per cent of the tax due.
University Education Principal Secretary Simon Nabukwesi has warned public and private universities over the expected fraudulent mass acquisition of degrees as education provisions of the Elections Act come into force in the August 2022 General Election.

Section 22 (1) (b) of the Elections Act of 2011, as amended by the 11th Parliament, provides for minimum academic qualifications for senators, members of the National Assembly and ward representatives.

It stipulates that candidates may be nominated for an election only if they are holders of a university degree recognised in Kenya.

This provision was to take effect ahead of the 2017 General Election but a further amendment was passed to postpone its adoption until the 2022 elections.

As people seeking elective seats rush to acquire the vital document, Mr Nabukwesi, while decrying the quality of education offered at some local institutions of higher learning, said the era of people acquiring degrees they had not earned has ended.

"The issue of individuals presenting fake degrees is a matter that concerns a lot," he told the watchdog Public Accounts Committee (PAC) when he appeared before it over audit queries raised about his department for the 2018/19 financial year.

"We will take precautionary measures. We will write to the universities cautioning them against giving out fake degrees. In fact, this morning we were discussing a university professor with a fake PhD degree," the PS told MPs, adding that "right now we are establishing our capacity to crack down on this vice".

Mr Nabukwesi's comments came after Gatanga MP Joseph Ngugi, a member of PAC, claimed some people are in a mad rush to acquire degrees of dubious standards so they can vie in the 2022 elections.

"There is a haste from MCAs to acquire the degrees from now and just before the election date. You need to be firm and establish the kind of courses offered in these universities so that we don't get swamped with funny, funny degrees," Mr Ngugi said.

Mr Nabukwesi also told the committee, which is chaired by Ugunja MP Opiyo Wandayi, that he had directed the Kenya National Qualification Authority and the Commission for University Education to work together to ensure that people with dubious academic documents are locked out of the elections.

Several committee members, including Aden Duale (Garissa Township), Eseli Simiyu (Tongaren), Wilberforce Oundo (Funyula), Mr Wandayi and Joseph Nduati, wanted to know how prepared the government is in implementing the provisions of the Elections Act.

"Do you have the capacity to certify and authenticate certificates claimed to have been issued by universities? The elections are around the corner and if there is no capacity then Parliament must raise the red flag," Mr Wandayi said.

"It is important to implement this noble idea of the academic requirement."

Mr Duale told Mr Nabukwesi to prepare for the challenging period ahead in implementing the law, including the possibility that individuals will try to bribe "your officers on the ground" to get cleared.

"Do not listen to those people making noise outside there. The law is there for you to assist in implementing it. Otherwise you have a difficult task to correct this mess," Mr Duale said.

Many individuals including governors, he noted, presented fake academic papers in previous elections and were cleared by the electoral commission.

"I know of a county governor who has an MBA from the University of Nairobi yet the university says it never awarded the person the degree!" Mr Duale said.

Dr Simiyu warned that acquiring fake academic papers does not improve the competence of an individual.

"I have said before that a degree is not a vaccination against the idiocy and stupidity of an individual. This has come to pass. You need to clean the system," Dr Simiyu challenged the PS.

But the law has its critics. Some of them have sponsored court cases or filed petitions in Parliament to block its adoption or have it amended on the grounds that it is unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the government has formulated a Cabinet memo to discuss the quality of education offered at universities.

Mr Nabukwesi, during his appearance before PAC yesterday, said the document will be sent to Parliament for debate in the coming days.

"There are some universities that are very local. They admit students from their localities and do things that no one understands," he said.

"We want universities that offer education that is of the right standards and must reflect the country positively, both locally and abroad."

The hiring of lecturers who have degrees not recognised in Kenya has worsened education standards, he said.

Dr Simiyu had questioned the quality of education offered at local public and private universities.

He told Mr Nabukwesi that Presbyterian University, a local private entity, is among institutions whose education quality is doubtful.

"Are you satisfied that the students are getting quality education at the universities or it's just a case of sitting and waiting to be awarded degrees? What is the ministry doing to stop the churning out of degrees that mean nothing?" he posed.

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Mr Nabukwesi agreed with Dr Simiyu, acknowledging that the government is "seriously" concerned about the quality of education.

Dr Simiyu told the committee that three students from his constituency who were in their second year at Presbyterian University had approached him and complained about the quality of education at the institution.

The students, he said, told him that they were ready to drop their university courses and seek admission to the Kenya Medical Training College (KMTC), a request that Dr Simiyu acceded to.

"The students told me that they hardly go to class and if they do, the lecturers don't appear," he said.

Dr Simiyu also cited a graduate student from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) whom he had helped secure a job but who ended up blowing up a machine.

"When I followed up the matter, I established that the student had actually graduated from JKUAT. I was told that what he did was so basic that not even a diploma or certificate student under the programme could do that," he said, adding that "we have really diluted our standards of education".
The British government is seeking clarification on the circumstances under which Nigeria extradited Nnamdi Kanu, a dual citizen of both countries, over crimes related to his secessionist movement, even as his family insists Kenya played a role in his capture.

Mr Kanu, who the Nigerian government labelled a fugitive, was brought to court in Nigeria on Wednesday after officials claimed they had arrested him in London.

But the British government now says that the 53-year-old leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) was not captured from UK soil.

"He was not arrested in or extradited from the UK. We are seeking clarification about the circumstances of the arrest from the Nigerian Government," a spokesman told the Nation.Africa on Thursday.

Nigeria's Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Mr Abubakar Malami, told Nigerians that Kanu's arrest was planned and executed by the Nigerian Security and Intelligence agencies. It was coordinated by the Nigeria Intelligence Agency (NIA).

Meanwhile, his younger brother, Mr Kingsley Kanu, broke the family's silence on Wednesday night by alleging that his brother was arrested in Kenya.

"My brother has been subject to extraordinary rendition by Kenya and Nigeria. They have violated the most basic principles of the rule of law. Extraordinary rendition is one of the most serious crimes states can commit. Both Nigeria and Kenya must be held to account. I demand justice for my brother, Nnamdi Kanu," he said, but did not share evidence to back up his claim.

Kenya has not officially commented on the claim, but an official at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Nairobi suggested the government will check whether he travelled to Kenya using a different passport and name.

Biafra

The IPOB is a proscribed organisation in Nigeria but has since 2014 been fighting for the actualisation of the sovereign state of Biafra, whose dream in the 1960s had caused a deadly civil war in the country.

The IPOB agitation has brought back memories of when South East Nigeria was first declared the Biafra republic and led to a three-year civil war, between 1967 and 1970, in which three million people died.

Kanu, who also founded a militia group, Eastern Security Network (ESN), fled to London in 2017 after jumping bail while standing trial for treason and was re-arrested and brought back to Nigeria on June 26, 2021 and arraigned before the Federal High Court in Abuja on June 29, 2021.

The British government said its Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was ready to provide consular assistance to Kanu as it expected the trial of the Biafran separatist to follow due process.

His lawyer Mr Ifeanyi Ejiofor, has formally applied to Nigeria's secretive police squad, the Department of State Service (DSS), to allow him access to his client.

"The British High Commission in Nigeria must insist upon my brother's immediate release. They must guarantee his safety and security. Nnamdi Kanu must be returned home to the UK to his wife and his sons who live here. The Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, must make clear to the Nigerian authorities that they will not tolerate the unlawful detention of British citizens and that the UK Government condemns the Nigerians and Kenyans for undermining the rule of law," his brother said.

Justice Binta Nyako of the Federal High Court, Abuja, on June 29, 2021 ordered that Kanu be remanded in the custody of the Department of State Services until July 26, 2021 when the case would he heard.

Kanu was first arrested on 14th October, 2015 and arraigned on 11 count charge on terrorism, treasonable felony, managing an unlawful society, publication of defamatory matter, illegal possession of firearms and improper importation of goods, among others.

A judge at the Federal High Court, Abuja revoked Kanu's bail that was granted him on health ground and issued a bench warrant for his arrest on the same date, over his failure to appear in court for hearing.

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He has, upon jumping bail, been accused of engaging in subversive activities that include inciting violence through television, radio and online broadcasts against Nigeria and Nigerian State and institutions.

Kanu was also accused of instigating violence especially in the Southeastern Nigeria that resulted in the loss of lives and property of civilians, military, paramilitary, police forces and destruction of civil institutions and symbols of authorities.

The arrest of Kanu is similar to that of high profile politician, late Mr Umaru Dikko, who was abducted in London and put in a crate for repatriation to Nigeria in 1984 before intelligence report prompted British police to detect the crate at the luggage compartment in Nigerian Airways plane in Heathrow airport.

The politician was Minister of Transport in the Second Republic and fled to UK when then Gen Muhammadu Buhari overthrew civilian President Shehu Shagari.
The High Court has ordered a privately owned hospital to pay a former employee Sh2 million as damages for testing her HIV status without her consent and disclosing the results to third parties.

Justice Hellen Ong'undi directed Mediheal Group of Hospitals and Mediheal Hospital Eastleigh to pay the woman, code-named Rao, money for emotional and psychological distress as a result of the stigma she suffered as a result.

The judge increased the Sh900,000 award given to the woman by the HIV and Aids Tribunal in November last year. Justice Ong'undi said the tribunal's amount was too low and it had failed to consider that Ms Rao also lost her job.

The judge said he took into account the negative impact of the disclosure of the HIV status on her life without her consent, among other factors.

The court dismissed a counterclaim by the hospital seeking damages from Ms Rao for bad publicity it claimed it suffered and an outstanding hospital bill of Sh33,067.

Award inordinately low

Ms Rao had sued, arguing that the tribunal's award was inordinately low considering the circumstances of the case. The tribunal had applied the wrong principles in assessing the damages, she said.

Ms Rao worked for Mediheal Group at its Eastleigh branch and was a waitress at its restaurant.

On May 25, 2019 she fell ill and was admitted to the facility. She said Dr Sadiqi Parvez Ahmed conducted a series of medical tests after a blood sample was drawn from her.

Among them was the HIV test, which was done without her consent and with no pre-test nor post-test counselling.

She said the doctor disclosed the results of the tests to her in the presence of other patients in the ward. He also notified the human resources department without her consent and as a result of the actions she suffered physically, emotionally and psychologically.

One afternoon, she testified, the doctor came into the ward with a nurse's aide following closely behind. He walked over to the window and loudly declared that Ms Rao should be on antiretroviral treatment. Other patients in the ward overheard the comment.

Reassigned duty

She testified that her supervisor was also informed, which resulted in her being reassigned to laundry duty. Word also got round about her status and soon even her colleagues found out.

Allowing the appeal, Justice Ong'undi said evidence showed that third parties learnt about Ms Rao's HIV test results before it was officially communicated to her.

The judge said the woman was clearly told by her work colleagues that they were being tested to confirm whether she had a fake food handling certificate or whether hers was an isolated case.

She found that other workers received the information about her HIV status from their bosses, an experience that left her emotionally and psychologically distressed.

The judge said the HIV and AIDs Prevention and Control Act, 2006 requires that informed consent be obtained before an HIV/Aids test is done.

"One does not first take the test and then come to explain. Secondly, such a test cannot be lumped with other tests and be assumed to have been consented to. There must be counselling and preparation before this test is taken. None of these was undertaken," the judge said.

At the tribunal trial she had asked for Sh10 million as damages.

In their response to the claim, the hospital denied that Dr Ahmed conducted tests on Ms Rao, including the HIV test, without her knowledge or consent.

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It said she had consented by appending her signature on the admission/consent form.

Denied speaking loudly

At the tribunal, the doctor also denied speaking loudly about the patient's results while in the ward. He said he read the test results in her file but did not inform her of the results. He testified that it was the matron and the medical director who informed her of her status.

He did, however, admit that he informed the matron of the Ms Rao's HIV status. The matron is a counsellor and a counsellor is required in cases of HIV testing. He denied disclosing the status to the HR department.

When Ms Rao applied for the job at Mediheal Group, she presented her CV and an updated food handling certificate. Her position as a waitress hinged on her being HIV-negative. The HIV test was compulsory for staff handling food.
A Kajiado hunter who was allegedly found with a dikdik in his home in Saikeri village has made a u-turn and denied charges of possessing an animal carcass.

Joshua Ladapash had pleaded guilty to the charge before Kibera law courts on Monday.

Before changing his mind, Ladapash was awaiting the presentation by the prosecution of facts before sentencing.

On Monday, he had told the court that it was true he was found by Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) officers with the dead animal weighing 5kg but claimed that it had been killed by his dogs.

Ladapash was arrested at his home allegedly while slaughtering the animal.

The court heard that KWS officers in Nairobi had received a tip-off about Ladapash and his accomplices' hunting mission and they proceeded to his village.

They surrounded his home after they heard the animal making a noise supposedly during slaughtering.

The officers told the court that they found the suspect had already killed the animal.

The carcass has been photographed before disposal and only the photos will be presented in court in the future.

On Thursday, Ladapash was released on a Sh100,000 bond and an alternative cash bail of the same amount.

The case will be mentioned on July 15 for pre-trials and setting hearing dates.
Addis Abeba  Four opposition parties (Afar People's Party, Afar National Democratic Unity Party, Afar People Justice and Democracy Party and Afar Liberation Front Party) operating in Afar Regional State, voiced their complaints on the election process, the challenges they faced during election day and demanded re-election as a primary solution in a joint statement released on Tuesday June 29, 2021.

The statement read, "While other regions of Ethiopia are eagerly waiting for the result of the sixth national election, the people of Afar are not lucky enough to elect their leaders," it continued, "Excruciating theft and cheating are crimes that were committed during the election against our people."

The opposition parties in their joint statement claimed that unauthorized and unidentified individuals were in the possession of voter ID cards which were later distributed to selected voters on election day. In the statement the parties also complained that their observers were arrested, beaten and removed from different polling stations.

The statement added, disclosing further complaints, "Minors were casting votes, there were no appeal committees where we could have filed our complaints, and because polling station executives were not non-partisan, they were intimidating people to force them into electing the ruling party."

The statement further criticized Afar regional government and its leaders saying, "Despite the federal government allocating a big budget for the sixth national election, the regional leadership wasted these resources and recklessly endangered the integrity of the election."

At the end of the two page statement, opposition parties layed out their demands, demanding either a re-election or alternatives to what they described as an "unfair and undemocratic" process. The statement read, "The Council of Afar opposition parties demand either a re-election or an alternative solution due to the unfair and undemocratic election day practices."

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Concluding the two pages, the council of Afar opposition parties stressed on the need for swift action and stressed on the need for re-election explaining, "Because the process was unfair, the council demands a re-election."

Addis Standard spoke to Esmail Salih, Chief Secretary of Afar People's Party about the process of the election. He said "Hassen Dawed, who was the head of the council of the opposition parties, told Afar Mass Media Agency that the election was fair and democratic. This statement is his opinion, not the council's and we the council members denounced it."

While answering a question by Addis Standard on whether or not the council registered their complaints with the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE), Esmail disclosed that he was not sure if all the parties appealed their objections but his party did and was still waiting for the response from the electoral board.

Addis Standard's repeated attempts to reach out the NEBE and Afar Regional State Communication Bureau for comments on the matter were unsuccessful. AS
Members of the county assembly in Kisii on Wednesday united for a purpose and approved a Sh12.5bn budget for the 2021/2022 financial year.

Leadership wrangles have rocked the assembly since last year with two factions fighting each other, with one supporting a bid to oust the Speaker.

Members of the assembly approved the financial estimates after intense scrutiny and deliberations.

The faction supporting the bid to oust Speaker David Kombo had threatened to snub the sitting in a move to compel him to step down.

They are accusing him of abuse of office, corruption and gross misconduct as well as failing to procure a group life insurance and group accident cover for them.

However, sources indicated that top county officials had met the MCAs before the session and they agreed to pass the budget.

The session was chaired by the deputy speaker Devins Onuso.

Finalise stalled projects

Health, agriculture, roads and education which are Governor James Ongwae's legacy departments will take the lion's share of the budget.

Governor Ongwae who is on his second and final term will be banking on the budget to finalise stalled projects in the region.

Some of the incomplete projects are the Sh170m banana factory and the Sh150m avocado processing factory.

According to the estimates, the department of health will receive Sh4.7bn while roads and urban development was allocated Sh1.2bn.

Agriculture and education are set to receive Sh1.1bn and Sh766m respectively.

The county executive for finance Mr Moses Onderi lauded the MCAs for expediting the process within the set deadlines saying all regulations and guidelines set by the Controller of Budget and Treasury had been followed.

"This budget came at a time when the economy is in a dwindling state. In this regard we prioritised health, agriculture, roads and education which are key in service delivery to the people," he said.

"We have agreed with the County Assembly that most of the projects we shall implement in the new financial year will be labour based. This will allow us actualize the aspirations of our people within a short time while spending minimal resources," he added.

Chaos

Assembly Deputy Speaker Mr Devins Onuso who chaired the session said Kisii was among the few counties that had passed their budget without hitches.

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His sentiments were echoed by Majority Leader Timothy Ogugu and the chairperson of the assembly committee for finance Mr Dennis Ombachi.

Last Wednesday, week chaos rocked the assembly premises for the better part of the day after a section of MCAs blocked him from accessing the chambers, forcing a contingent of police officers to disperse them.

This nearly degenerated into fist fights between the MCAs and the police officers.

However, with heavy police presence, the embattled Speaker forced his way into the chambers and chaired a session, with nine members after 60 walked away in protest.

This was the first sitting he chaired since wrangles ensued in the assembly about a year ago.

"He should not be forced on us. We hired him and now we have fired him, nobody holds the fate of the assembly in his hand hence we should be left to make our decisions and within the ambit of powers given to us by the people," said one of the MCAs Mr Ibrahim Ombuya.

In his previous statement, Mr Kombo had told off his critics saying he wouldn't be intimidated.

"Let's forget the past. As a speaker I want to work with all my might. We can't go on fighting, chasing air when we should be assisting our people," he said.
The Defence Headquarters says troops of Operation Hadin Kai have neutralized no fewer than 73 Boko Haram/Islamic States West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorists within two weeks in the North East.

The acting Director, Defence Media Operation, Brig.-Gen. Bernard Onyeuko, disclosed this while briefing newsmen on operations of the armed forces between June 18 and 30 on Thursday in Abuja

Onyeuko said that the troops also recovered large cache of arms and equipment from the terrorists in different encounters during the period.

He added that the troops had on June 27, received a total of 55 escapees from terrorists' camps comprising 15 adult males, 12 adult females and 27 children who surrendered to them at Darajemel in Borno.

He noted that 73 terrorists were killed, while 44 AK 47 rifles, two PKT, seven Anti-Aircraft guns, seven gun trucks, several ammunition of different calibre, as well as weapon cleaning materials were recovered.

Other items recovered were blankets, foodstuff, vehicles, generators, IED materials, religious scripts and other items, he said.

The acting director said that another feat was achieved same day when the Air Component of Operation Hadin Kai, in coordinated

multiple airstrikes, destroyed some terrorists' commander's strongholds at the Lake Chad axis of Borno.

He added that "the air strikes were targeted at various terrorists' camps in Sabon Tumbu, Jibularam and Kwalaram towns in the state.

"During the air operations, the spiritual base and training camps of the terrorists in the North East part of Borno State and the fringes of Lake Chad were destroyed by air bombardments.

"These came on the heels of credible intelligence report which revealed that, some top ISWAP/BHT commanders were holding a meeting at the said locations.

"Consequently, the Air Component mobilized with force packages of NAF platforms and launched attacks on the locations."

In the North West, Onyeuko said, troops of operation Hadarin Daji and other security agencies executed series of land and air operations concurrently in different locations during the period.

He explained that the operations led to the repelling and arrest of kidnappers and drug peddlers who confessed to supplying illicit drugs to miners as well as other criminal elements.

The spokesman said the operations also led to the killing of scores of bandits; peaceful resolution of farmers/herders' clashes; recovery of arms and ammunition as well as recovery of rustled livestock.

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"The operations also resulted in the rescue of kidnap victims in various locations including a teacher and some students kidnapped at the Federal Government College in Birnin Yauri, Kebbi.

"Some gunrunners and bandits logistics suppliers, including one Lawali Na Habu was also intercepted with trucks loaded with large quantities of AGO at Tangaza LGA of Sokoto State and one Mallam Ibrahim Aliyu, a wanted notorious bandit was also arrested.

"The Air component also conducted series of air operations, provided Close Air Support for ground troops and dominated the air space within the period.

"On the whole, troops have continued to dominate the theatre of operations with aggressive fighting and confidence building patrols to reassure citizens of the commitment of the military to end all of form criminality in the zone," he said.

Vanguard News Nigeria
The passage into law of the controversial Petroleum Industry Bill, PIB, has not gone down well with the Niger Delta host communities, as the Senate gave host communities only three percent equity holding in Host Communities Trust Fund, as against the 10 percent people of the oil-producing areas demand.

The House of Representatives, on its part, yesterday, passed the age-long awaited PIB, granting host communities' five per cent equity stake for host communities in the Host Communities Trust Fund, as against the agitation for 10 per cent by host communities.

Meanwhile, National President, Host Communities of Nigeria Producing Oil and Gas, HOST ON, Chief Benjamin Tamanarebi said it was insulting for the Senate and House of Representatives to cede only three and five per cent equity shareholding respectively to the oil and gas producing communities in the PIB, passed, yesterday.

Another controversial area passed was the fund exploration of frontier basins, which the Senate left at 30 percent, while stakeholders in the Niger Delta had demanded that it should be reduced to 10 percent.

Both the Senate and Reps agreed that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, should become a limited liability company.

This came as Presidency described the passage of the complete version of the PIB, which had defied passage in previous assemblies over the last 20 years by the Senate as a jinx that had indeed been broken.

Meanwhile, at the Senate, after a very heated argument, debate and plea on the percentage for the host communities, the lawmakers approved three percent of the actual annual operating expenses of the preceding financial year in the upstream petroleum operations affecting the host communities for funding of the Host Communities Trust Fund.

The original bill brought to the Senate by the Executive was 2.5 percent for funding of the Host Communities Trust Fund, but the Senate committee moved it to five percent, but the Senate at the end of the day approved only three percent.

The Senate report read, "This chapter highlights the effective and efficient administration of the Host Community Trust Fund which is to be anchored by the settlor, i.e. the oil and gas companies operating in the host communities.

"The various recommended provisions when passed into law will ensure a peaceful operating environment that will have a positive direct impact on the cost of oil and gas production which has been the bane of the Nigerian oil and gas industry."

Earlier, the senators had a closed-door meeting with the Minister of State, Petroleum, Timipre Sylva and Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Mele Kyari, who briefed them for over one hour on the technical and financial details of the Bill before the consideration of the report.

After the consideration of Report of the Joint Committee on Petroleum (Downstream) Petroleum (Upstream) and Gas Resources Petroleum Industry Bill, 2021 ( SB. 510) laid by the Chairman, Senator Sabo Mohammed (APC, Jigawa - West), the Senate approved funding mechanism of 30 percent of NNPC Limited's profit in oil and profit gas in the production sharing, profit sharing, and risk service contracts to fund exploration of frontier basins.

With this development, 30 per cent of profits accruing from oil and gas operations by the NNPC, is now to be set aside for exploration of oil in the frontier basin.

It means that all exploration of frontier basins shall fall under the purview of the Upstream Regulatory Commission.

The Senate also passed that as part of moves to strengthen the accountability and transparency of NNPC Limited, it will now be a full-fledged CAMA company under statutory/regulatory oversight with better returns to its shareholders, the Nigerian people.

On Petroleum Industry Fiscal Framework, the Senate passed the Bill as part of moves to attract and unlock the long-awaited capital investment inflows to the country's oil and gas industry since it contains enhanced incentives in the land, swamp, shallow and deep waters terrains. Provisions have also been made for better and attractive tax incentives to achieve this goal.

Before the passage of the PIB, Senator Ahmad Kaita( APC, Katsina North) stirred controversy, when he called for an amendment to the recommendation by the Senate Committee from five percent to three percent in line with the explanation of the GMD, NNPC during the closed-door session.

When the President of the Senate, Senator Ahmad Lawan, put the question for a voice vote and despite resounding nays, passed in favour of the ayes, however, generated noise in the chamber as some senators, majorly the South South senators were uneasy with the ruling.

At that point, Senator James Manager (PDP, Delta South) called for another vote opposing the initial vote as he proposed an amendment to retain the provision of five percent in the report but he was defeated.

Senator Goerge Sekibo (PDP, Rivers East) raised a Point of Order 73 of the Senate Standing Rules as amended, calling for a division of the Senate.

According to Sekibo, the order challenged the ruling of the chairman (Lawan) and requires that he put the question to vote a second time. If his opinion was again challenged, he shall call each Senator's name to vote.

Lawan who was apparently afraid of the consequences of embarking on a division, swiftly resorted to pleading with Sekibo to withdraw his motion.

This time, the Senate Leader, Senator Yahaya Abdullahi (APC, Kebbi North) appealed to Sekibo to withdraw the order.

At this point, the President of the Senate who also pleaded with Sekibo to drop his division point of Order said, "We are representatives of the people before anything. I just want to remind us of what we know that we represent, we legislate and oversight."

After listening to them, Senator Sekibo who withdrew the point of Order said, "Mr President, you know naturally we have known ourselves in this chamber from 2007, and I also know that it is the privilege of all parliamentarians all over the world to call for division when he feels the need.

"As the Senate President, if you appeal to me on something that is personal and I did not take it, you will not be delighted but no I will say something.

"For I'm asking for is not for me as a person but it is in the interest of the nation because when we pass a good law, we must also have a good environment to implement the law.

"If the environment is not conducive for implementation, we will all come back to redress it. My appeal to you that you increase the number a little bit. I have withdrawn while appealing to you."

In his concluding remarks after the passage, Lawan who noted that the passage of the PIB was an indication that the "demon" behind its non-passage in the past had been finally defeated, said, "The 9th Senate and indeed the 9th National Assembly has achieved one of its fundamental items on the legislative agenda."

Before the consideration of clause by clause of the report and passage, the Deputy President of the Senate, Senator Ovie Omo- Agege who spoke in his capacity as the Senator representing Delta Central had pleaded that the host communities fund should be above five percent as earlier recommended by the committee.

Reps pass 5% equity holding

At the House of Reps, the five per cent equity granted to the host communities was, however, an improvement on the 2.5 per cent earlier proposed for the communities in the bill.

The clauses and sections of the bill are 318 in all, and following consideration of the bill, it will be passed into law any time from now.

The piece of legislation from the Executive is about 20 years old in the National Assembly.

Previous attempts to pass the bill into law by the former Assemblies hit the brick wall due to variegated interests from high and mighty.

Section 240, subsection 2 of the bill that prescribes 2.5 percent equity for the host communities was amended to provide for 5 percent.

Moving the motion earlier for the consideration of the report, the Chairman of the Ad-hoc Committee on PIB, Mohammed Mongunu, said bypassing the bill into law, the House would have written its name in gold.

Speaking after the consideration of the report in the Committee of the Whole chaired by the Deputy Speaker, Ahmed Wase, the Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila, hailed the House for achieving the feat.

"I want to commend the 24 wise men and the 360 members in producing this 318 sections law. In the coming week, the Electoral Amendment bill will follow suit.

"By the time we are done, irrespective of which side of the divide you are, this 9th House would have done us proud," he said.

Host communities reject 3-5% equity shareholding

Tamanarebi, who spoke to Vanguard, said: "Imagine for over 63 years of neglect, deprivation and marginalization of the aborigines who have suffered untold hardship amid wealth, for the first time after many years of agitation, asking for only 10 per cent equity shareholding and the leadership of NASS is considering five per cent and three per cent viewing it that they have done us a favour.

"This is unacceptable and we reject the offer. It is our sole right as the aborigines, it is our land, it is our waterways, is Nigeria claiming it because we are from Nigeria state.

"Then why denying our rights to benefit, the right to have a clean environment, the right to have potable water to drink, good hospital, electricity, good roads but leaving us in abject poverty, in a desecrated environment without considering the UNFCCC/ CDM criteria.

"We will still study other areas in the Bill to address it in due course, for example, section 104 (2) on gas flaring where funds on penalty should be paid to the government, we reserve to study all sections, but is a fruitless exercise as usual," he said.

Passage of PIB: Jinx indeed broken-- Presidency

In a statement, yesterday, by the Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on National Assembly Matters( Senate), Senator Babajide Omoworare, congratulated President Muhammadu Buhari, Senator Ahmed Lawan, Senate President and Speaker House Representatives Femi Gbajabiamila on the passage of the PIB by the National Assembly.

Omoworare said: "It should be noted that the efforts by the Executive and Legislature in Nigeria to put in place contemporary legislative and legal framework in the oil and gas sector has proved abortive since the year 2000; also, the non-amendment of the extant framework being the Petroleum Act of 1967, has affected the inflow of Foreign Direct Investment as well as growth in Local Content.

"Breaking this jinx and achieving this feat is a testament that the Executive and the Legislature can really work together and truly engage each other, without compromising party position and individual perspective, in the most positive manner with a view to actualizing the common goal and communal good for Nigerians.

"I would like to thank the entire Leadership and Members of the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as the Minister of State for Petroleum, Timipre Sylvia, and the Group Managing Director of NNPC, Mele Kolo Kyari for their focused and tenacious attitude to achieving this milestone."

Oil, gas industry leaders react

Commenting on the passage of the PIB, Lead promoter, EnergyHub Nigeria, Dr Felix Amieyeofori, said: "This is a welcome development for the oil and gas industry, and the country at large as it will provide the long-expected business and investment environment for operators, and other stakeholders.

"This is coming at the time when oil and gas-dependent economies are grappling with the reality of the energy transition to cleaner renewable energy sources, targeted at tackling the global climate problems.

"While oil will still play a significant role in the global energy mix beyond 2050, the "Proverbial Net Zero Date," Nigeria must ensure that we utilize the opportunities created by this Law to fully harness the total hydrocarbon value chain to generate the capital that will propel our transition into the renewable world.

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"I would, therefore, advise that government and all the stakeholders to work toward ensuring the immediate implementation of the critical and pivotal clauses without the traditional politicking.

"The 2014 National Conference is still very fresh, as Nigerians are known for putting together very pragmatic policies and laws, but, we have always failed to walk the talk, and that has been the albatross of our development as a nation."

Similarly, a Port Harcourt-based energy analyst, said: "The PIB is dead on arrival, apparently because it is belated.

"This administration could have passed the PIB much earlier, but it wasted time trying to break it down into segments, including the Petroleum Industry Governance Bill, PIGB, before returning to the original plan of passing it as a single document.

"Consequently, the oil and gas industry and the entire nation's economy have suffered. Many investments and companies had over the years gone to other nations in Africa, especially Angola, Ghana, and even the emerging East African countries."

NEITI applauds NASS courage in passing PIB

Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, NEITI, has hailed the National Assembly for passing the PIB, describing the move as bold, courageous and progressive.

Executive Secretary of NEITI, Dr Orji Ogbonnaya Orji in a statement said: "NEITI as an agency set up to enthrone transparency and accountability in the management of extractive industries in Nigeria has demonstrated genuine and legitimate interest in the PIB from the onset.

"NEITI's interest is in view of the urgency and strategic importance of a new law to replace the existing archaic legislations that have aided huge revenue losses, impeded transparency, accountability and investment opportunities in the nation's oil and gas industry."

He recalled that as an anti-corruption agency in the sector, NEITI boldly alerted the nation through a special Policy Brief "The urgency of a new petroleum sector law" that the current stagnation of investment opportunities in the Petroleum Industry was as a result of the absence of a new law for the sector.

"This has led to huge revenue losses to the tune of over $200 billion. In that publication which was widely circulated, NEITI argued that the "revenue losses were as a result of investments withheld or diverted by investors to other (more predictable) jurisdictions.

"The hedging by investors stems from the expectation that the old rules would no longer apply, but not knowing when the new ones would materialise."

He added that NEITI Reports on the sector had also disclosed that over $10.4 billion and N378.7 billion were lost through under-remittances, inefficiencies, theft or absence of a clear governance framework for the oil and gas industry.

Vanguard News Nigeria
Foreign policy refers to a set of principles and guidelines that inform a nation's attitude towards certain aspects of international relations.

These principles overlap such aspects as politics, economics/trade and inter-state and organisational relations.

Historical perspective

After independence, in the period between 1980-2013, Zimbabwe's Foreign Policy was largely influenced by ground realities which compelled the country to work towards balancing relations between the capitalist West and the then Communist Eastern block of nations.

The post-war foreign policy was therefore driven by the conscious need to safeguard national as well as regional peace and security.

Security was an indispensable necessity for a country and region that was seeking to entrench stability as a pillar for economic growth.

Security formed a non-negotiable fundamental for socio-political and economic stability and development.

Thus the Zimbabwean foreign policy then had to strike a fine balance between security (siding with China and the Eastern countries) and economic prosperity which was evidenced by the reconciliation policy towards the erstwhile colonial West.

In the formative years of the Zimbabwean democracy, the policy had its challenges as South Africa was still the vanguard of capitalism on the continent. This meant that survival was never going to be easy for a newly independent, predominantly pro-Socialist Zimbabwe.

This reality prompted Zimbabwe to craft and influence policy strategies, for both Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to counter the threat posed by Apartheid South Africa to itself, other vulnerable neighbouring states, and the African continent at large.

However, despite the Western world beginning to view Zimbabwe with suspicion due to its pro-socialist policies, the country's influence continued to grow as a leader in regional, continental and world geo-politics.

The country continued to be a leader, a voice and a model among third world and progressive nations.

Regrettably, it is this stance that earned the Southern African country the unenviable title of "pariah State" from the same Western countries that used to applaud its policies.

The political economy of the country then had an influential bearing on its foreign policy. About 10 years after independence, Zimbabwe adopted an Afrocentric approach to foreign relations.

As may be remembered, after independence, due to its geopolitical position, Harare became Southern African diplomatic hub, and a key player in frontline states' endeavours to dismantle Apartheid and colonialism in South Africa and Namibia.

Zimbabwe then adopted a policy of non-alignment in international relations. So its policy then was influenced by the respect for self-determination, defence of national sovereignty, anti-imperialism, sanctity of life, equality of sovereign states and non-interference in affairs of sovereign states.

In essence, Zimbabwe influenced, informed and adhered to policy positions of SADC, the then Organisation of African Unity (now African Union), Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Commonwealth. That's how far the influence of the country spanned, and probably still span today.

If one listens carefully to the foregoing account of the historical structure of Zimbabwe's Foreign Policy, it will be clear why every superpower in the world would want to impose their influence on the country's foreign policy, either voluntarily or through use of soft power, as exemplified by the elaborate Look East policy, or forcibly or by use of hard power, as evidenced by unilateral economic sanctions by the imperial capitalist West, which continue to subsist today.

When Zimbabwe assumed a non-permanent seat at the UN Security Council between 1984-92, as well as the Chair of NAM in 1986, she acquired unparalleled international relations stamina on the African continent.

As chair of the frontline states, Zimbabwe strongly led and advocated for the dismantling of apartheid system of governance in South Africa and imposition of sanctions on the regime South of the Limpopo. Now at this stage, it can be understandable why the attitude across the Limpopo shifts with the direction of the wind, depending on who is in control.

Each time the White monopoly capital get their hands on or closer to the levers, the attitude either becomes indignant or just completely indifferent towards Zimbabwe.

Perhaps it's agreeable that the white capitalist powers down South have still got a bone to chew with the revolutionary government North of the Limpopo.

These are the historical realities that the nation has to face as a result of the Afrocentric Foreign Policy that is at the core of its engagement with the world.

Zimbabwe then became leader in the effort to liberate South Africa, Namibia and to ensure and secure other vulnerable Southern African States such as Mozambique, which were still under threat from the destabilisation policy of Apartheid South Africa.

In other words, Zimbabwe assumed the inevitable task of guarantor of Security, Peace and stability of the Southern African region. A position that continues to earn it enemies to date.

In fulfilment of virtues of its policy of non-interference, respect of the sanctity of life, self-determination and sovereignty of States, Zimbabwean security forces took part in up to fifty-eight UN-mandated peacekeeping missions in countries such as Kosovo, Somalia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998 among others.

They also helped dispatch the RENAMO menace in Mozambique which had been orphaned by the Rhodesian security forces and had since been adopted at Independence by Apartheid South Africa.

Now it can be traced why Samora Machel had to die a painful death at the hands of the South African Apartheid regime. Maybe a story for another day.

These determined operations indeed earned Zimbabwe enemies far and wide as the peace missions directly and indirectly clashed with and crushed the interests of powerful capitalist nations who in most cases were involved in funding rebel activities in those war ravaged nations.

Zimbabwe's Foreign Policy has largely been very participatory, especially where the ideals of sanctity of life, self-determination, the sovereignty of States and non-interference, respect for rule of law and Constitutionalism were under threat. Between 1986-88 Zimbabwe clashed with the US policy of positive engagement with the apartheid South African regime. This led to the US and Britain freezing Aid to Zimbabwe in protest. The then US president, Ronald Reagan, had sounded alarm over Zimbabwe's pro-socialist inclinations.

This is when Western planners began juggling with the idea of sponsoring an alternative political party in Zimbabwe whose foreign policy choices would be favourable. This culminated in the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change exactly 10 years later. The MDC was formed specifically to scuttle Harare's perceived iron-fisted foreign policy ideals. Therefore, it is and must be placed on record out there that the MDC opposition formations, in all their colours, are a foreign policy extension of the imperial Western powers.

The party was formed to neutralise what was perceived as too radical foreign policy thrust by Zimbabwe.

This assertion is well supported and corroborated by United States' ZIDERA sanctions bill of 2001, which is unambiguously designed to support the MDC through various channels while attempting to suffocate ZANU PF.

Results of the formation of MDC are all over the place for those who care to look. It's a whole topic we shall cover elsewhere. Today we are dealing with Zimbabwe's Foreign Policy and its implications.

Zimbabwe's foreign policy has dealt successive blows to capitalist adventures on the African continent which in most cases are directly linked to destabilisation efforts through the funding of civil wars and military coups.

Fast forward to 2017

This could be termed as the year of a turnaround in as far as Zimbabwe's foreign policy is concerned.

When President Mnangagwa took over, the country had to trudge along on a very delicate line. The country needed to balance its foreign policy evolution from a predominantly political to a more economic one.

So, without seeking to undo policy victories of the past, President Mnangagwa declared Zimbabwe's Open for Business. He personally undertook numerous business trips around the world whose mission was to engage with and assure both political and business leaders and partners that Zimbabwe is indeed turning a new page, which is purely dedicated to business.

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He declared that his term in office will be dedicated to forging strong open business alliances with nations, corporations, and individuals alike, who display honest zeal to invest in Zimbabwe, with no political strings attached.

He has lived up to his pledge to date.

Zimbabwe is Open for business is a mantra cleverly coined to dispel any fears and suspicions of the past.

This policy was to say, while we celebrate and preserve policy victories of the past, we now want to chart a new path that is characterised by very little politics and more economics, that is trade and investment. It emphasises more on the security of investment, ease of doing business, and structured incentives for investors.

It means that the nation feels more secure now and would want to consolidate its political gains and top it all up with a cherry of economic boom and bloom. The current policy is geared towards reintegration of the country into the family of nations while welcoming international investors.

Engagement and re-engagement with all countries of the world form the core of the Second Republic's Foreign Policy thrust. It focuses on maximising economic value for the country in any encounters, engagement or exchanges with nations of the world.

It encourages the country's diplomats to initiate overtures geared towards normalising relations even with the most volatile and hostile nations such as those that still maintain economic embargoes on the country. This current policy position has seen a re-orientation of diplomats and customisation of all consulates and embassies worldwide to cater for the needs of investors and tourists who may want to visit and invest in Zimbabwe.

Each consulate is challenged and empowered to prioritise and to make decisions that bear economic gain for the nation. This has been re-christened "Economic Diplomacy."

Under this foreign policy trajectory, every citizen is challenged and empowered to be a worthy economic ambassador in all spheres of life so that the greater economic benefits.
Pakistan business tycoon, Ali Mohammad, believed to be part of a syndicate that wanted to smuggle gold out of the country in October last year, has been freed after the court upheld his application for revocation of placement on remand on smuggling and unlawful possession of gold.

Harare regional magistrate Mr Stanford Mambanje upheld his application on the basis that his co-accused, Henrietta Rushwaya, had exonerated him through an affidavit tendered during his application.

In the affidavit, Rushwaya took sole ownership of the 6kg gold saying Mohammed had nothing to do with it.

Rushwaya also refuted claims that Mohammed was linked to the gold or the alleged attempt to smuggle the gold.

"I hereby confirm that I know Mr Ali Mohammad as a business investor and as a Zimbabwe Miners Federation business partner. I hereby further confirm and swear under oath that I am the owner of the 6kg of gold and it has nothing to do with Mr Ali Mohammad.

"The gold was sorely mine and still remains mine and has nothing to do with Mr Ali Mohammad," said Rushwaya in the affidavit tender by Mohammad in his application challenging his placement on remand.

Mr Mambanje, in his ruling, noted that the State did not dispute the contents of Rushwaya's affidavit leaving all his links to the case shattered.

"The applicant was not at the airport. The gold was in possession of Rushwaya at Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport on October 26, 2020," he said.

The court also noted its ruling that Mohammed's link to the smuggling case was based on common purpose.

"It is this association that linked the accused to the case. There is no other link besides the said documents that the State said linked accused to the case.

"The State has no other link besides the said documents. There is no other evidence or witness linking him to the gold.

"The affidavit has not been controverted by the State. The significant of the affidavit was to demolish the link between the accused and link to the said gold and Rushwaya, which left the State's allegations shattered and destroyed.

"The court was left with no justification for further remanding the accused," he said.
Roselyne Sachiti  Features, Health and Society Editor

Covid-19 changed the way people socialise and put plugs on international, regional and local travel when it was declared a pandemic early last year.

With many airlines being grounded as scientists tried to understand the novel virus that caused Covid-19, only a few continued to spread their wings, delivering essentials like face masks, sanitisers, personal protective equipment to various countries across the globe.

For months, boarders were closed, only allowing essential service providers like haulage trucks through.

In some countries, returning residents were only permitted as airlines also tried to find out how they could keep passengers and crew safe.

As research on Covid-19 continued, with scientists across the globe getting a better understanding, and vaccines found in record time; travel started opening up again, with airlines taking off and landing at various airports.

This meant stricter measures for travel, as those intending to do so have to go through rigorous checks that include PCR tests within 72 hours of travel, filling out health forms prior to travel, among others.

Why the permit to Travel

Certificate/QR Code?

Because of an increase in the number of people presenting fake negative Covid-19 results, many countries now require a permit to travel certificate with a Quick Response (QR) Code.

QR codes go directly to a specific page that one would have to spend 10 minutes trying to find by typing manually.

This means a reduction in time spent on each passenger and helps decongest airports.

Many countries have joined the list of countries that have introduced additional entry requirements to protect public health.

For example, all travellers who wish to enter Nigeria must register via an online travel portal, complete the online "Health Declaration/Self-Reporting Form" located on the portal and upload their negative Covid-19 PCR test result.

A permit to travel certificate with a QR code is then generated.

This is generated from the Nigeria International Travel Portal on completion of a health questionnaire, uploading of a negative Covid-19 PCR result and schedule of PCR test at day-7 of arrival in Nigeria.

Passengers failing to show a Permit to Travel Certificate/QR Code will not be allowed to board on all airlines.

According to Nigeria's presidential taskforce on Covid-19 revised quarantine protocol (Pre-departure from country of exit), airlines that board passengers without any of the two documents (a negative Covid-19 PCR test done not more than 72 hours prior to boarding and a permit to travel certificate/QR code), shall be sanctioned as follows:

"Passengers, who are non-Nigerians, will be refused entry and returned to the point of embarkation at cost to the airline;

"Passengers who are Nigerians or holders of permanent resident permit will be allowed entry, but subjected to the procedure outlined in Section D. In addition, passengers arriving with forged (fake) Covid-19 PCR results shall be referred for prosecution."

In Ethiopia, travellers must have the right kind of coronavirus test for Ethiopia.

There are several different Covid-19 tests available, and the Ethiopian authorities accept only specific types.

"The Ethiopian government has stipulated that a Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test is required," the country outlines. "The RT-PCR is a molecular diagnostic test that detects whether the individual is currently infected with coronavirus disease."

Many countries have now started coronavirus vaccination programmes.

As a result, travellers who have already received the jabs may be wondering whether they need a Covid-19 test to visit Ethiopia.

At the moment, vaccinated and unvaccinated passengers are subject to the same entry requirements: everyone needs to present the negative test result certificate to enter the country.

When I recently travelled to Nigeria, all the above became a reality.

Having not travelled outside the country for a whole year, the journey was both exciting, interesting and a learning process to new travel regulations.

Transiting through Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, overnight, I also had to fulfil that country's travel health requirements.

This meant I needed to fill out two different online health forms, one for Nigeria and the other for Ethiopia to get my QR codes.

Going through the process, it became clear that despite having a valid passport and visa to enter Nigeria, the QR codes also mattered.

Testing positive for Covid-19 would mean no travel even if I had both visa and travel.

At Lancet Laboratories in Harare, a day before my travel, I quietly sat in a tent outside waiting for my turn to be called in.

Because of Covid-19 regulations, only two clients were allowed inside at a time.

When it was my turn, I went inside and paid US$60 for the test. I was told to go outside and wait to be called for the test.

Moments later, I was called back in and sat on a chair at the reception area.

Learning my head backwards, the PCR test was done. The tingle in my right nostril left me a bit uncomfortable, yet this was a necessary process one can never get used to. Being told my results would be ready in six hours, and that an SMS would be sent to notify me of their availability, I was a bit anxious.

Medical tests always make me anxious and this day was no different.

After six hours, around 5pm the SMS from Lancet finally came through and I dashed to collect the results.

I had to fill out the health forms required by both Nigerian and Ethiopian port health officials before embarking on my journey the next day.

I now appreciated the importance of the QR code.

On the forms, I had to fill in information that included my PCR test result, travel history, health history, including if I had experienced symptoms like coughing, fever, sore throat, general tiredness etc.

They also required information on whether I had come into contact with a person who had tested Covid-19 or had symptoms of the viral disease.

Doing this online was flawless. In a few minutes I had uploaded my test result on both the Nigerian and Ethiopian health forms.

After getting my QR code, I sighed. It was like crossing the finishing line for a race.

On travelling day, I was at Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport two hours before my departure.

Passing through a sanitising booth, I immediately came face to face with port health officials who immediately asked for my permit to travel certificate.

I immediately handed it over to them, they scanned it and got my first passage.

At the check in desk, I also presented the permit alongside my passport and other documents.

Luggage check in done, I went through other formalities that included document security checks, customs immigration, and finally security.

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Arriving in Addis Ababa, the process was smooth as the QR code revealed all my health information seconds after scanning.

The following day, on my flight from Addis Ababa to Abuja, the QR Code was once again required.

Upon arrival in Abuja, visitors and returning residents stood in a queue, two meters apart as port health officials reminded everyone to social distance.

They also asked if any of the travellers was coming from a high risk country like India, Turkey etc.

One by one, we presented our permits which were also scanned giving passage to proceed for immigration formalities.

The ritual was the same.

I had to be tested again in Nigeria, present the negative Covid-19 PCR test and permit to travel certificate at their point of departure to be allowed to board flights.

I realised how the QR code had become so important in travel. No negative test, no travel, as countries try to minimise imported cases.

Enter vaccine certificates

Vaccine certificates are now being discussed by countries across the world, however, it is not yet clear whether African countries will benefit given the different vaccines that are being used.

The European Union's vaccine passport -- the Digital Covid Certificate -- is being rolled out across all 27 member nations.

The Digital Covid Certificate is a way for citizens across the EU to prove they have been vaccinated against Covid-19, recently had a negative PCR test for the virus or recently recovered from Covid-19.

However, there are fears that the Digital Covid Certificate may discriminate against travellers from countries that use vaccines not approved by the EU.
The Tana River County administration has allocated Sh100 million in its 2021/22 budget for the completion of a ghost county headquarters.

The budget tabled in the assembly on Monday shows that the Dhado Godhana led county government is building offices in Garsen and Madogo towns.

But there is an ongoing Sh200 million project to build official county headquarters in Dayate, Galole constituency, funded by the national government and the county.

The national government is funding 70 percent of the construction, while the county is expected to cover the rest. A Sh33 million contribution has been captured in the 2021/2022 budget.

The allocation to the claimed office projects in Garsen and Madogo has raised questions from civil society groups, who want county officials to shed more light on the projects.

The county government, said Tana River Civil Association secretary-general James Onchaga, has only one official headquarters, in Galole.

"There is nothing like a headquarters in Garsen and Madogo, and there is no evidence of ongoing construction that requires finishing," he said.

This is not the only mysterious project captured in the budget. The county government has also allocated Sh110 million for upgrading existing roads to bitumen and cabro standards.

But the roads have not been specified in the budget, which are only described as "various", suggesting a scheme to challenge any efforts to monitor and evaluate such projects.

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Another Sh8 million has been allocated for maintaining streetlights in Kipini, Lenda, Handampia, and Tarasaa.

However, the towns mentioned do not have streetlights but a single floodlight post each.

Also, whereas the administration plans to build an ICT resource centre, the project has not been captured in the sector budget.

The budget is marred by numerous mismatches in narratives in the County Physical Strategic Paper (CFSP) and allocations for the programmes and sub-programmes.

For instance, according to the CFSP, while the county government intends to carry out maintenance of county housing development and urbanisation, the allocation has been slashed from Sh87.3 million in 2020/2021 to Sh17.8 million in the 2021/2022 financial year.

Officials also plan to do maintenance work on existing roads and upgrade rural roads.

However, the budget for the work has been slashed from Sh633.5 million to Sh285.9 million

Residents have demanded that officials explain the narratives that appear to contradict their agenda.

"It seems they are doing things for formality or there is a plan to defraud the public of money ahead of the elections," said Mumina Rashid.
Again, with 49 cases, Lagos has more than half of the 74 new infections recorded on Thursday.

Nigeria recorded another death from the coronavirus complications on Thursday as 74 new cases of the disease were reported in nine states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), authorities said.

The <a target="_blank" href="https://ncdc.gov.ng/">Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC)</a> disclosed this in an update on its official Facebook handle Thursday morning, noting that the fatality toll from the disease is now 2,121.

The agency said the 74 new cases raised the total infections in the country to 167,692.

Specifics

Again, with 49 cases, Lagos has more than half of the 74 new infections recorded on Thursday while Ondo State reported 13, even as Oyo and Rivers States reported three each.

Kaduna State recorded two cases as Ekiti, Gombe, Jigawa, Ogun and the FCT reported one infection each.

According to the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/top-news/467836-covid-19-infections-reach-167078-in-nigeria-ncdc.html">NCDC</a> data, a total of 164,273 people have been discharged in hospitals across Nigeria after treatment.

The NCDC data showed that over 1,300 active COVID-19 cases are still in the country.

Nigeria has tested a total of over 2.3 million samples from its roughly 200 million population.
The two chambers of the National Assembly yesterday passed the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), after about 13 years of legislative fireworks.

Although the House of Representatives apparently skipped certain parliamentary procedures to pass the bill as witnessed by journalists at plenary, the Chairman of the House Ad-hoc Committee on the PIB, Hon. Mohammed Monguno, later told reporters that what transpired at the plenary did not actually mean that they passed it as widely reported.

The President of the Senate, Dr. Ahmad Lawan, said the demons behind the non-passage of the bill for many years had been defeated.

Also, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly (Senate), Senator Babajide Omoworare said the federal lawmakers had broken the jinx.

However, there was uproar at the Senate as the senators disagreed on the profit share percentage to be allocated to the host communities in the PIB, before finally settling for three per cent.

The Senate passed the much-awaited PIB after a clause-by-clause consideration of all the 318 clauses of the bill.

The bill was first sent to the National Assembly in 2008 by President Umaru Yar'Adua, now deceased, without translating into an Act.

Chairman of the Senate Joint Committee on Petroleum Upstream/Downstream and Gas, Senator Sabo Nakudu, had earlier while presenting its committee's report before the Senate went into a closed-door session with the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Mr. Timipre Sylva, and the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Malam Mele Kyari.

The bill had proposed five per cent of the annual profit share of the oil companies for the host communities.

Shortly after the Senate resumed plenary after its executive session with Sylva and Kyari, Lawan commenced the clause-by-clause consideration of the bill.

By the time he got to clause 240, which made provision for five per cent trust fund for host communities, the plenary became rowdy.

Explaining why the five per cent was reduced to three per cent shortly after the plenary, Nakudu said the earlier percentage, which was 2.5 was increased to five per cent.

He added that it was reduced after Kyari explained that five per cent is a huge amount of money.

According to him, the three per cent amounts to half a billion dollars, adding that enabling environment needs to be created to attract investors as fossil oil is fast going out of fashion.

Majority of senators later voted for three per cent contribution to the host communities, following a motion by Senator Ahmad Kaita, seconded by Senator Ibrahim Gobir, for an amendment to clause 240(2) of the bill.

Efforts by the Deputy Senate President, Senator Ovie Omo-Agege, Senators James Manager, George Sekibo and Albert Akpan for an upward review were rejected.

Sekibo, in a move to sustain his agitation for an increase in contributions to host communities, relied on Order 73 of the Senate Rule and called for a division.

But the Senate Leader, Senator Yahaya Abdullahi, prevailed on him to withdraw his call for division and reminded him of the commitment of senators to fostering unity while keeping in mind their obligation at all times to protect the national interest.

Lawan also told Sekibo of the overwhelming support of the lawmakers who had earlier approved that host communities should receive remediation and relief from monies accruing from gas flaring in the PIB.

Sekibo then withdrew his earlier call for division. During a clause-by-clause consideration of the bill, the Senate also approved the funding mechanism of 30 per cent of NNPC Limited's oil and gas profit in the production sharing, profit sharing, and risk service contracts to fund exploration of frontier basins.

It approved clause 4 of the bill, which seeks the establishment of the Nigerian Upstream Regulatory Commission to provide technical regulatory functions to enforce, administer and implement laws, regulations and policies relating to upstream petroleum operations. The commission will, among others, ensure compliance with applicable national and international petroleum industry policies, standards and practices for upstream petroleum operations; and establish, monitor, regulate and enforce health, safety and environmental measures and standards relating to upstream petroleum operations.

In addition, the Senate also adopted the committee's recommendation to retain provisions in Clause 29 of the bill, approved the establishment of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority.

Clause 29(3) empowers the agency to be responsible for the technical and commercial regulation of midstream and downstream petroleum operations in the petroleum industry in Nigeria.

Its function include implementing government's policies for midstream and downstream petroleum operations as directed by the minister; and to promote, establish and develop a positive environment for international and domestic investment in midstream and downstream petroleum operations.

Others are to ensure strict environmental implementation of policies, laws and regulations for midstream and downstream petroleum operations; and to develop and enforce a framework on tariff and pricing for natural gas and petroleum products. The recommendation of the joint committee was amended in clause 52(7d) to ensure that all monies received from gas flaring be channelled for the purpose of environmental remediation and relief of the host communities as against the development of infrastructure in midstream gas operations. The Senate, however, retained the recommendation of the joint committee in Clause 53, which empowers the Minister of Petroleum Resources to incorporate Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation as a limited liability company, to be known as NNPC Limited, six months after the commencement of the Act.

It adopted clause 53 that mandates the minister, at the incorporation of NNPC Limited, to consult with the Minister of Finance to determine the number and nominal value of the shares to be allotted, which would form the initial paid-up share capital of NNPC Limited.

The Senate also approved the ownership of all shares in NNPC Limited to be vested in the government at incorporation and held by the Ministry of Finance Incorporated on behalf of the government.

Lawan, after the passage of the PIB congratulated the National Assembly and the Joint Committee on Downstream Petroleum Sector; Petroleum Resources (Upstream); and Gas for the "tremendous and historical achievement of passing the long-awaited Petroleum Industry Bill."

He said the passage of the PIB was an indication that the "demon" behind its non-passage in the past had been finally defeated.

Lawan appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to give expeditious assent to the bill when it is eventually forwarded to him.

Addressing journalists on PIB after plenary, the Senate spokesman, Senator Ajibola Bashiru, said: "On the three per cent that was approved for the upstream operating expenditure, from the projection made by the NNPC GMD, who briefed us, it will amount to $502.8million for the host community development fund.

Meanwhile, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly (Senate), Omoworare, has congratulated Buhari, Lawan, and the Speaker of the House Representatives, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, on the passage of the PIB by the National Assembly.

He said: "It should be noted that the efforts by the executive and legislature in Nigeria to put in place contemporary legislative and legal framework in the oil and gas sector has proved abortive since the year 2000; also, the non-amendment of the extant framework being the Petroleum Act of 1967, has affected the inflow of foreign direct investment as well as growth in local content.

"Breaking this jinx and achieving this feat is a testament that the executive and the legislature can really work together and truly engage each other, without compromising party position and individual perspective, in the most positive manner with a view to actualizing the common goal and communal good for Nigerians."

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Also yesterday, the House of Representatives y passed the PIB.

It considered and adopted the report on the PIB for passage during its committee of the whole session.

The adoption, followed the consideration of all the 318 clauses of the bill, presented by Chairman of the Ad-hoc Committee on the PIB, Hon. Mohammed Monguno.

Moving the motion for the consideration, Monguno said by passing the bill into law, the House would have written its name in gold.

The 318 clauses of the bill were put to a voice vote by the Deputy Speaker, Hon. Idris Wase and they were unanimously adopted by the lawmakers.

Speaking after the consideration of the report, the Speaker, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, hailed the House for achieving the feat.

He said: "I want to commend the 24 wise men and the 360 members in producing this 318 sections law. In the coming week, the electoral amendment will follow suit. By the time we are done, irrespective of which side of the divide you are on, this 9th House would have done us proud and recorded on the right side of the law."

But Monguno later told reporters that contrary to what has already been reported by the media, the bill had not been passed but was considered and adopted by the committee of the whole.

But his clarification confirmed that the lawmakers may have skipped the third reading stage to pass the bill

He said: "The Petroleum Industry Bill has suffered over the years in previous assemblies. But this time around, the 9th House of Representatives decided to take the bull by the horn and passed the bill. We decided to pass it with the speed of light because of the urgency it demands. Nigeria has lost a lot in terms of direct foreign investment in our oil and gas industry, as a result of obsolete laws affecting the oil and gas industry. In abroad their oil and gas laws is in tandem with international best practices."

He added that the bill will now be scheduled for third reading and final passage and then referred to the Buhari for assent.
Abuja  Cross River State Governor, Ben Ayade, has engaged the federal government over the construction of the super highway and the country's first agro industrial port-the Bakassi Deep Sea Port-in the state.

He held the talks yesterday on the two critical projects with the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Mr. Boss Mustapha.

Ayade described the super highway as a policy thrust that would take the Atlantic Ocean closer to northern Nigeria that has large deposits of solid minerals.

According to him, "Crude oil is a thing of the past because in 2030, fossil oil driven cars will come to an end. The world is shifting towards solar energy and by extension, towards solid minerals. The North is so blessed but they must have access to the Atlantic Ocean to enable them the opportunity to do export. That is why the iron ore, the tantalite, the gold and diamond deposits need an access to the export corridor, a maritime domain to have a full benefit of the sea port."

He said the super highway, which starts from the Bakassi Deep Sea Port and terminates in the North, would enhance the exploration of the iron ore and coal deposits in the North-central zone, which is required in large quantity in South Africa to fire their power plants that are based on coal.

Ayade said: "The super highway and the Bakassi Deep Seaport, which I discussed intimately with the SGF, is the way to go to open a vista of opportunity with the northern Nigeria. These resources are so huge but they lie waste because the travel time from North to Lagos, which is the closest port, is over 1,700 km. Nobody will want to go through all that because there is a shortcut using the super highway through the Atlantic Ocean."

In his response, Mustapha lauded the governor for taking Cross River State to a greater height through his progressive policy.

He said he paid a visit to Calabar two years ago to assess the rice seedling plant in addition to the poultry plant and the hub of the industrial estate in the city.

Mustapha stressed the need to facilitate the development of small and medium scale enterprises for job creation and generation of employment that will set the people on a trajectory of sustainability in the industries.
Katsina  The federal government last Monday announced that Katsina State is the second highest in the ranking of out-of-school children in Nigeria, describing the situation as a worrisome development that needs an urgent intervention.

The Minister of State for Education, Hon. Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, stated this in his address delivered at the formal launching of Better Education Service Delivery for All (BESDA) programme in Katsina, the state capital.

According to the minister, the Nigerian educational system is characterised by high level of illiteracy, infrastructural decay, inadequate number of unqualified teachers and inadequate instructional facilities hence the launching of BESDA programme.

He said for the challenges to be tackled, the country must strengthen the quality of education by confronting head-on all the factors that denied "our children access to education, the quality of education we delivered and the outcomes of that education.

"It is in the light of this that we launched BESDA in Katsina. It is a programme that would result in better life for all of our children. Its cardinal objectives are to increase the equitable access, improve literacy and strengthen accountability for results at the basic education level.

"The 17 states that are the focus of this programme are drawn from seven in the Northwest, six in the Northeast and one from each of the other zones. Katsina State is the second highest in the ranking of out-of-school children in Nigeria, and this worries us, but we have heard that a lot of efforts have already gone into this, and there is massive improvement in the last six years."

The minister, however, added that the BESDA programme has enrolled about one million children "therefore, we can authoritatively state that the number of out-of-school has reduced."

In his remarks, the state Governor, Aminu Bello Masari, said a total of 361,525 out-of-school children representing 36 per cent of the set target has so far enrolled in schools across the state under the BESDA programme.

"The programme started in the state in September 2019 following the receipt of $3 million as advance funds with additional $3 million as prior result funds in August 2020," Masari added.
The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) has said everything is set for international flight operations to resume at the Akanu Ibiam Airport, Enugu, even as it awaits the federal government's approval to reopen the airport.

THISDAY learnt that the Airport Council International (ACI) Africa has given health certificate to the airport for meeting Covid-19 protocols requirements.

The agency said other logistics and safety issues have been completed, so the airport can now receive international flights.

The Managing Director of FAAN, Captain Rabiu Yadudu told THISDAY that international flight service was supposed to have resumed four weeks ago, but there were minor hitches that must be corrected. These he said the agency had corrected and awaiting report of work from the airport, adding that issues concerning security had been completed.

"Flight operation was supposed to resume just about three or four weeks ago, but have some minor hitches but they are very critical hitches. And we are expecting a report this week. If we get the report within a day or within 48 hours we can work on it.

"The hitches are not on security but on the facility. We have our standards. There are some things you can look at the airport and think they are working fine or you don't need to improve but based on our own regulations and standards, we know we have to take them up to that standard, but the passengers might not really understand. We have to make sure those critical facilities are top standard," he said.

The FAAN boss also explained that earlier in June the agency had completed issues relating to Covid-19 protocols and had gone far in completing the requirement for fire cover for international operations.

According to him, there was a need to close the airport in order to work on safety-critical facilities and put them to standard before reopening it.

"We have done with protocol issues; fire cover issue is the one we are dealing with and we have already gone very far in resolving it. That is why I said we are just waiting for a report.

"We don't want to say that despite the pressure on us we are just going to commence operation, it is a technical reason which has to do with safety of operations. Those were what caused the delay in reopening the airport," he said.

Yadudu also noted that the airport has to be put in good standard, including regards to safety, which was the major reason for the delay.

"We have the responsibility to ensure that we expedite work to ensure that safety parameters are met before opening. Closing the airport till now is not something we are happy about, but we have to do so in the interest of all stakeholders, all Nigerians, and FAAN itself," Yadudu said.

However, THISDAY learnt on Wednesday that every work at the airport has been completed, but awaiting the Minister of Aviation, Senator Hadi Sirika, to give a go ahead for resumption of international flight operations at the airport.

"I am sure the airport will be re-opened. All necessary things are in place now. We have received ACI health certification for the airport. But are airlines ready to start going there?"a senior official in FAAN asked.

THISDAY also learnt that Ethiopian Airlines, which is the only international carrier that operates to Enugu, is ready to resume flights to the airport, once government orders for the reopening of flights.

"Airlines are waiting for opportunities to start operation and Ethiopian Airlines is ready. Once the airport is reopened the airline will resume flights. Let them declare the airport open," official close to the airline told THISDAY.

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In August last year, the Akanu Ibiam International Airport, Enugu was reopened after rehabilitation work on the runway was completed, but the international operations to the airport was closed along with that of the airports in Kano, Port Harcourt due to Covid-19 pandemic, but in May the other airports resumed international services, but that of Enugu was delayed for the aforementioned upgrade of critical facilities.

Air travellers who use the airport have expressed worry that it remained the only international airport that was yet to be reopened but now that FAAN had acknowledged that work has been completed, it is hoped that the Minister would approve resumption of international flights from the airport.
Stephen Muriithi Mwangi, a former deputy director of intelligence during President Daniel Moi's era who was buried at his Karatina home in Nyeri on Wednesday, started his illustrious career as a police officer in a curious manner.

He arrived at Kiganjo Police College in 1958 as a "prisoner" in handcuffs, said a paragraph in his eulogy that amused mourners.

Soon after completing his studies at the prestigious Alliance High School in 1957, the young Mr Muriithi applied to be conscripted into the Kenya police force amid resistance from the principal at the time, Carey Francis.

Francis wanted Mr Muriithi to proceed with his studies while his father Mwangi Wanjama wanted him to pursue a career in teaching.

His application to join the police was successful but when the time came to join Kiganjo College, he had one challenge to surmount - obtaining a "kipande".

This was a mandatory document issued by colonialists to allow "natives" to travel from one place another.

But owing to his age, Mr Muriithi was not eligible to get the all-important document and he faced the prospect of failing to travel from his Karatina home to Kiganjo.

He therefore had to devise a way to circumvent this challenge.

"Not one to be deterred, he suggested to his local station commander that he allow him to travel as a handcuffed prisoner as prisoners did not require kipande and impressed and amused by the ingenuity of his plan, the commandant accepted and thus Mr Muriithi arrived in Kiganjo in handcuffs," the eulogy said.

The mourners heard that the spy boss, who died aged 84, was inspired to join the police force by his experiences and encounters with the injustices of colonial rule.

His skills as an investigator were identified at an early age even before he joined high school by the Karatina police station commander when Mr Muriithi, on behalf of his father, penned a letter to him complaining against the police who had mistreated his fellow villagers.

"It was the follow-up of this complaint that saw the police dispatch a detective to interview Mr Muriithi and the detective was so impressed by his recollection and reporting of events that he suggested afterwards to the young pupil that he should upon completion of his studies consider a career in the police."

Mr Muriithi worked as an officer in the defunct Special Branch of the police before it became the Directorate of Security Intelligence, where he was the deputy director until 1981, when President Moi relieved him of his job.

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During the Kibaki administration he was appointed chairman of the Kenya Airports Authority, where worked until retirement.

He is survived by a wife and three children.

Mr Muriithi sued Mr Moi personally, accusing him of abusing his presidential powers and unlawfully detaining him with the intention of depriving him of his properties.

He won in 2011, when Justice Jeanne Gacheche directed Mr Moi to pay him for the loss of business and detention without trial. The compensation included damages for loss of property and for illegal detention.

Mr Moi appealed against the decision and three years later, a bench of three judges of the Court of Appeal overturned the decision, saying Mr Muriithi had failed to table evidence to prove the claims that he held a majority stake in the three companies he claimed to jointly own with Mr Moi and former spy chief James Kanyotu.

After losing the case, Mr Muriithi wanted to move to the Supreme Court but his appeal was rejected by the Court of Appeal on the basis that there was nothing of great public importance in the matter. But the ex-spy chief went to the Supreme Court directly and the judges agreed to hear his plea.

A date was set but Mr Moi died on the hearing day, forcing the matter to be adjourned. Mr Muriithi substituted Mr Moi with senior counsel Zehrabanu Janmohamed, an executor of Mr Moi's estate, in the appeal.

Last week, his lawyer Paul Mwangi received a notification that the hearing of the case will be on July 22.
Dar es Salaam  Parliament yesterday passed the The Written Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 3) Bill, 2021 to, among other issues, tighten road safety regulations on 'bodaboda' operators.

Moving a motion for the amendments of 14 laws, the Attorney General (AG), Prof Adelardus Kilangi, said the government has approved changes in the Road Traffic Act (Cap 10) by increasing the licensed ownership age for an operator from 16 to 18 years.

No operator below the age of 18 years will be allowed to operate a bodaboda taxi for pillion riders. At the same time, the government has directed that licences be issued only to motorbike riders who have undergone certified driving school training.

These changes are viewed as a 'push and pull' scenario since the government only recently reduced minor bodaboda offence fines from Sh30,000 to Sh10,000.

Before the passing of this Bill, the country did not have specific procedures for bodabodas.

Other changes passed in the Road Traffic Act include the mandatory seat belt rule for all vehicle passengers, helmets for motorbike and pillion riders, and the reduction of the duration which a broken-down vehicle can be left by a road side.

This has now been reduced from three days to only 24 hours.

The amendments have also provided answers to a long time concern whereby vehicles registered in Zanzibar would be used on Tanzania Mainland after payment of a certain fee.

Speaking in Parliament, Prof Kilangi said the government is also amending the law guiding issuance of foreign workers' permits whereby the expiry period was now being extended from five to eights years.

"The law would also increase the number of foreign workers in a company or institution from five to 10 while softening some of the permit terms at the same time," he said.

In the list, the parliament has also passed other The Written Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) for the purpose of facilitating the implementation of the state's strategic projects such as the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).

According to Prof Kilangi, the amendments in these laws were influenced by the conditions that were specified during the signing of same by Uganda and Tanzania, which required both countries to make statutory changes to allow smooth implementation.

He said that, "Considering the current Tanzanian status and especially the possibility for future projects like this one, the government has seen fit to do the amendments to the various laws to facilitate the implementations of this project and other coming projects." Prof Kilangi also said that the amendments are also for the purpose of preventing the government from conflicts arising from violation of contracts entered with the strategic investors.

The passed laws include the Natural Wealth and Resources (Permanent Sovereignty) Act, (Cap. 449), the New Natural Wealth and Resources Contracts (Review and Re-Negotiation of Unconscionable Terms) Act, Cap 450, and the Public Private Partnership Act, Cap. 103.

Prof Kilangi said: "In these laws, the changes were made in the provisions relating to the scope of their application, and the amendments suggested some of the terms should not be used for projects that use resources which don't belong to Tanzania - such as in the case of the EACOP project,"

"Others are in the Petroleum Act (Cap. 392) which is to enable Energy and Water Utilities Regulatory Authority (Ewura) to exercise regulatory authority without affecting implementation of the project," he said.

The Chairperson of the Constitution and Legal Affairs Committee, Ms Najma Murtaza Giga, recommended that - although the committee had passed the Bill, the government should enact a specific law that would oversee effective implementation of projects related to the crude oil pipeline.

"The law would deal with management, control, inspection, monitoring and other matters related to the project," she said.

Other amendments to facilitate strategic projects include those to the Fair Competition Act (Cap 285), and the Insurance Act, (Cap. 394).

Changes to the Fair Competition Act were passed regarding the unfair market power and acquisitions laws that would give power to the Fair Competition Commission (FCC) to extend the grace period for up to five years for projects with special contract terms.

Projects will also be allowed to seek insurance cover from foreign companies if the local insurers lack the capacity under the new amendments to the Insurance Act (Cap. 394), the AG said.

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He also stated that the amendment was passed on the Government Prosecuting Act (Cap 5), which would allow the execution of court judgments by seizing property relating to projects whose companies had invested in accordance with special agreements entered into with the government.

Amendments to the Local Government (District Authorities) Act. (Cap. 287), and the Local Government Finance Act (Cap. 290) were also passed.

These require local authorities during the performance of their duties - such as control, inspection and issuance of licences - not to affect contractual terms of strategic projects.

Issuance of communication licensing which would guide the respective authority not to interfere with the terms of a project's contract were stated in the amendment to the Electronic and Postal Communications Act (Cap. 306).

Last are the amendments to the Environmental Management Act (Cap. 191), and Tanzania Railways Corporation Act (Cap 170) which would enable the relevant authorities to carry out their responsibilities without affecting the implementation of projects.
Mogadishu  Somalia's opposition politicians and the public have welcomed a deal to hold delayed indirect presidential elections in October, with lawmakers chosen in July and August. But analysts note unrest and terrorist attacks are still a risk.

Somalia's opposition politicians welcomed the new election schedule reached Tuesday in Mogadishu after a meeting of federal and state leaders.

Lawmaker Mohamed Hassan Idris said the opposition was looking forward to a quick implementation to avoid further delays and unrest.

"So far, we have no concerns," Hassan said. "It is on a very welcoming stage; the schedule has been agreed by the leaders and the electoral committees, both from the federal and member states levels." He said leaders would need to continue discussions, "and we hope they continue to solve any likely obstacles."

Process stalled

Somalia's indirect elections were to take place in February, but the process was stalled over opposition concerns about free elections.

The opposition accused President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, known as Farmajo, of stacking poll committees with his allies.

Farmajo denied the allegation but raised international eyebrows in April when he signed into law a two-year extension of terms in office, including his.

The move sparked days of street clashes in April in Mogadishu between split loyalty security forces, renewing fears of a return to clan violence.

Under international pressure, Farmajo nullified the extension and returned to talks with the opposition for holding elections.

The deal reached Tuesday was largely applauded by Mogadishu residents like university student Hassan Ahmed, 27.

He said he was happy and excited about the new election schedule. Some worried about the previous timeline, he said, and the disagreements between the leadership of the federal government and the regional states.

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Election schedule

The indirect elections will begin in July with delegates chosen by clans selecting members of the lower house of parliament.

State governments will select senators beginning in August. The chosen lawmakers will then vote for the next president on October 10.

Despite the breakthrough, there is still a threat from al-Shabab militants, said independent security analyst Dahir Korow.

"Al-Shabab is trying to disrupt the Somali election process through suicide bombings and IED [improvised explosive device] attacks, mainly the venues of the process across the regions," Korow said. "However, it is also very significant to note that the democratic process will attract high-security alert both from Somali security agencies and their international peacekeeping partners such as AMISOM. Remember, the training and capacity building for Somali security agencies have been improving in recent years while al-Shabab's have been decreasing."

The U.S. Embassy in Somalia urged continued constructive dialogue among Somali leaders to achieve peaceful and transparent elections.

Somalia originally planned to hold direct, one-person-one-vote elections, which would have been the first in decades. But the plan was scrapped in September because of a lack of infrastructure and concerns about security.
The three were part of the eight activists that were arrested on the 12th of March 2021. They first appeared in court on the 15th March 2021. They were part of the community group protesting against the operations of Ikwezi Coal Mine in Dannhauser, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

The initial two-day protest was sparked by the coal mining impacts in the community of Mbabane in Dannhauser, where Ikwezi operates a coal mine. The prosecution failed to present before the court visual CCV footage that was mentioned as evidence implicating the three on a charge of public violence directed at the police.

The case has been dragging since March this year with four appearances and postponements. This resulted in financial, mental, and emotional implications for the three young women and their families. What is clear is that the violence of the system was used against the three and fellow activists as a form of intimidation. On the 12th March, the second day of a peaceful protest police fired rubber bullets at protesters two were injured and eight were taken into custody.

At the heart of the matter is the continuous violation and destruction of people's homes that crack due to mine blasting, loss of livestock due to contaminated grazing land and water, and the impacts on people's health as coal dust invades their homes daily. This reality motivated the community of Mbabane to demand justice. And for this, they were shot, arrested, imprisoned and charged.

"I'm happy about the case being withdrawn, this means a lot to me and my family. I can now focus on my studies as I was at a point where I was even thinking about quitting my studies," says Buhle Kunene

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"There was no case against us from the beginning. The past few months have been really bad for me and my family. But this experience will not stop us from fighting for our rights. Now we can finally move on with our lives," says Sindi Kubheka

This is a victory for the community as the police were tardy in their approach and even possibly constructively trying to intimidate community people by not acting speedily and diligently with the charges. Of course withdrawal of charges does not mean acquittal, so there is still an element of intimidation present", says Simon Delaney, the groundWork supported attorney acting for the women activist.

"Targeting women highlights the gender injustice and patriarchy of South African society and the State. The President's commitments to gender must be in the state's action to promote gender justice and the active dismantling of patriarchy, which there is no evidence of, especially when one views this case" laments Bobby Peek, Director of groundWork, Friends of the Earth South Africa.

Background information:

groundWork - Three activists to make their third appearance in court.

groundWork - Community Activists Protesting Impacts of Coal Mine Shot at and Arrested

groundWork - Communities in Newcastle Protest Ikwezi Coal Mine.

IOL - Ikwezi Protesters Court Case Postponed.

Contacts:

Robby Mokgalaka

+27 73 774 3362

robs@groundwork.org.za

Tsepang Molefe

+27 74 405 1257

media@groundwork.org.za
MINISTER for Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, Dr Dorothy Gwajima has called on the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) to expand its coverage following the government's plan to table the Bill for Universal Health Coverage for nationals in September, this year.

Launching the NHIF new board of directors and the fund's 20th anniversary, Dr Gwajima challenged NHIF officials and the ministry to first invest in public education to enlighten them on the importance of health insurance.

She said the procedures for establishing the universal health insurance are already on the ground and it is only waiting to be tabled in the House in the next sitting.

"Let's educate the public so that everyone could be accommodated in the new system, our focus must be on how to include everyone in this system," she noted.

She used the platform to acknowledge achievements made by the outgoing board of directors under the leadership of former Speaker of the National Assembly, Anne Makinda.

She said the new board needs to work hard to ensure all Tanzanians get quality health services through affordable health insurance. Elaborating, she told the meeting that the government has set a side 149bn/- to support the universal health insurance.

"This money will help our fellow Tanzanians who cannot afford health costs to get health services easily," she noted.

Equally, the minister said different health insurance packages introduced during the outgoing board's tenure have helped many people in non- formal sector to get health insurance and quality health services. Out of nearly 60 million Tanzanians, only 14 per cent have access to health insurance and only 8 percent are members of NHIF.

"It was not easy to bring changes in running NHIF, but the outgoing board played a big role in ensuring positive changes," she pointed out. In a tip, the minister urged NHIF to work closely with the Ministry of Communication, Science and Technology to in educating the public, especially through forms like mobile phones.

Dr Gwajima maintained that the 6th phase government is committed to improving provision of health services and it is on that background that President Samia Suluhu Hassan increased the age bracket of NHIF members' dependants from 18-21 years old.

However, Dr Gwajima directed the new board and the management to address fraud, corruption and negligence among workers. She explained that through negligence, NHIF lost some 6.1bn/- as a result of system failure within 18 months and 2.1bn/- in wrong deductions, adding that 9.1bn/- was lost in 28 hospitals in the same period.

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Earlier the Permanent Secretary in the ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, Prof Abel Makubi applauded the outgoing board of directors, saying a lot of transformation was realized during their tenure.

"It is our hope that the new board shall steer forward the fund and improve on what has been realized" he noted.

The outgoing chairperson, Ms Makinda thanked the government for the trust on the board and cooperation. The Universal Health for all was among the items that dominated the discussion, when the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children tabled its budget for 2021/2022 fiscal year.

Deputy Minister Dr Godwin Mollel said the establishment of the Universal Health Coverage will also help to extend the scope of packages.

He told MPs that the government was working on the best modalities to see how they will increase the number of pharmacies, which have contract with National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) to cover the rural and remote areas
PEOPLE with disabilities in Kibaha district, Coast Region have been urged to form groups that will enable them access loans provided by the government through district councils.

Kibaha District Commissioner, Ms Sarah Msafiri made the remark during a one-day seminar held at Kibaha this week to introduce a project which aims at improving health services to women and youth with hearing disability in Coast Region being implemented by the Tanzania Association of the Deaf (TAD) popularly known as (CHAVITA).

"Each year, our councils release 2 per cent of their total budgets as loans to special groups, including people with disabilities. These loans aim at enabling the groups launch their own businesses, earn income and contribute to the nation's income", she noted.

The DC who was accompanied by Kibaha Town District Executive Director (DED) Ms. Jennifer Omollo and District Administrative Secretary (DAS) Ms Sozi Ngate also congratulated CHAVITA for the initiative and working closely with the government in the project by involving health cadres and social welfare officials, which she says promises good results at the end.

CHAVITA"s Coast Regional Chairman, Mr. Adam Shabani said the project which is being funded by Abilis Foundation of Finland at a cost of 16 million shillings aims at building communities and health service providers with awareness on health issues and challenges facing deaf women and youth in all districts of the region.

"We have the evidence that these two groups face a lot of challenges while accessing health services, since most health facilities do not have sign language interpreters, which makes the situation even more difficult. By involving social welfare officials and health cadres in this project, we will surely be solving the problem to a great extent," he said.

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He pointed out that as part of the project, they will also conduct awareness sessions to deaf secondary school students and their parents. The project will end in December this year.

According to the Project Manager, Ms. Anna Gugu, the project will be conducted in four districts of Kibaha Town, Kibaha rural, Bagamoyo and Chalinze in the first phase before proceeding with Rufiji, Mkuranga, Kibiti and Kisarawe districts in the second phase. The third and last phase of the project will be implemented in Mafia district.

The seminar brought together government leaders, health cadres, social welfare officials and people with disabilities from different parts of the region.
PRESIDENT Samia Suluhu Hassan yesterday received a report from the Controller and Auditor General (CAG), which says all transactions issued by the Bank of Tanzania (BoT) between January and March, this year, observed procedures.

On March 28, President Samia ordered the CAG to conduct a special audit on all the monies withdrawn from the Bank of Tanzania (BoT) in the first three months of the current year.

The Head of State issued the directive upon receiving the CAG and the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) reports for the year 2019/2020.

A statement released yesterday by the Directorate of Presidential Communications said the CAG established that all the transactions done by the BoT were in line with the state procedures. But the report unearthed financial irregularities within the Tanzania National Roads Agency (Tanroads) and Tanzania Ports Authority (TPA) whereby the two institutions reportedly made double payments to some of their clients.

"There were some irregularities on financial transactions in some of public institutions as they were reported to have made double payments as well as delay to spend the money that was already approved," reads part of the statement.

Presenting the report to President Samia at the Chamwino State House yesterday, CAG Kichere saipayment for contractors and service providers has generated huge interests that have to be incurred by the government.

"The CAG also established that there was some expenditure that was contrary to the approved government budget," read further the statement.

President Samia yesterday also received a report on the preparation of the Population and Housing Census to be conducted in August 2022. The report was presented by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Chief Statisticians, Dr Albina Chuwa, saying the next year's count will be done using tablets at all stages, with the aim of reducing costs as well as expediting the exercise.

Dr Chuwa said the pilot census is expected to kick off in August this year in seven regions from both Mainland and Zanzibar.

"Preparations for the census are conducted in accordance with the Statistics Act chapter 351," said Dr Chuwa.

In another development, President Samia also received a report on the preparation of the Population and Housing Census to be conducted in August 2022.

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The report was presented by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Chief Statisticians, Dr Albina Chuwa, saying the next year's count will be done using tablets at all stages, with the aim of reducing costs as well as expediting the exercise. Dr Chuwa said the pilot census is expected to kick off in August this year in seven regions from both Mainland and Zanzibar.

"Preparations for the census are conducted in accordance with the Statistics Act chapter 351," said Dr Chuwa.

In May, this year, Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa launched the country's roadmap towards its sixth population census that will provide latest demographics and living condition data. At least 328.2bn/- will be spent for the exercise that is set to be conducted on August 28, 2022.

The Prime Minister announced, Tanzania will digitally collect data using tablets, instead of papers that were used in previous exercises. According to the Prime Minister 95 per cent of the cost will be footed by the republic and the remaining 5 per cent will come from developing partners.

The cost for conducting population census appears to have slightly dropped from 2.76 US dollars in the 2012 nationwide exercise to 2.16 UD dollar or (3472.2/-) per head in 2022. The average cost for conducting population census in Africa is between 2.1 and 5.1 US dollars.

Tanzania spent roughly 1.16 US dollars during its 2002 exercise. Since 1961, the country has held a census once every 10 years.
TANZANIA has been rated second with reliable cyber security systems in Africa and 37th in the World, the Minister for Communication and Information Technology Dr Faustine Ndugulile (pictured) said yesterday. Dr Ndugulile disclosed this while launching the ministry's five-year strategic plan and website yesterday in the country's capital city Dodoma.

"This is a good achievement which Tanzania should brag about but we think, it's not enough... the country still needs to do more to strengthen our systems and build the capacity of experts in achieving the ambitious goal of becoming a digital economy," said Dr Ndugulile.

In line with this, the minister urged people to verify their numbers using mobile phones, in curbing cybercrime acts carried out by a few unscrupulous individuals. He noted that people should refrain from giving their details to any unknown individuals or carry out phone registration using another person's identification card.

Minister Ndugulile warned that such acts might subject the individuals to serious crimes, urging members of the public to use the internet on things which are beneficial.

"The ministry will continue to raise awareness to people regarding cybercrime and encourage proper use of the internet," elaborated the Minister.

Dr Ndugulile said the ministry targets to establish a digital economy blueprint, which will embark on major transformation in the improvement of the communication sector. In fulfilling the goal, the ministry has secured a sum of 150 million US dollars, which is equivalent to over 300bn/- from the World Bank to support a digital Tanzania.

The minister observed that the move is envisaged to enhance the country's digital communication, which will promote digital marketing among other things.

"We want to see the communication sector contributing enormously in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country from the current 1.5 per cent to 3 per cent in the coming years," he said.

He pointed out that the communication sector plays a critical role in driving the operations of the many other sectors to effectively meet their intended goals. The ministry aims to ensure 80 per cent of Tanzanians are being reached and the government operates digitally via e-government systems.

Equally, the ministry has secured over 10bn/- for improving the fiber optic cable, noting that currently, installation has been rolled out in regions but goal is to extend the service in the districts. He disclosed that the Parliament has in this financial year approved funds which will implement the roll out of 1880 kilometres in extending communication in the districts.

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Among other areas outlined by the Minister is strengthening the ICT sector through the enactment of legislation on privacy, as well as the amendment and review of some of the laws. According to Dr Ndugulile, the ministry has successfully strengthened communication by 98 per cent across the country, while the goal is to reach 100 per cent in the shortest period of time.

As for the internet aspect, he said at least 48 per cent of the country's population can access the service and the intention is to reach 80 per cent of Tanzanians. He welcomed interested parties to invest in 5G technology for more enhanced communication.

On his part, the Chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee on Infrastructure, Mr Selemani Kakoso, urged the government to set up an enabling environment for users to have knowledge of using communication systems in trade and other activities.

Mr Kakokoso also called upon the ministry to support the Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL) to execute its functions in generating more profit, which can boost the income of the country.
PRESIDENT Hussein Mwinyi has welcomed efforts to strengthen cooperation between the Zanzibar Investment Promotion Authority (ZIPA) and the Tanzania Investment Center (TIC), saying it is the best way to improve investments in the country.

Dr Mwinyi (pictured) made the remarks yesterday when he met leaders from ZIPA led by its Executive Director Shariff Ali Shariff and TIC Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dr Maduhu Kazi at the Vuga-based State House in Unguja.

"Promote and strengthen your relations as it will help share experience and resolve challenges investors face in the country," President Mwinyi said.

He said there is a need to further strengthen the existing Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) by updating it with issues that are important to share or work together to attract more investors.

President Mwinyi said that the issue of exchanging experiences between the two institutions is very important, saying it will help provide training for the executives of the institutions in order to strengthen the investment sector in the country.

In addition, Dr Mwinyi expressed his dream of seeing ZIPA have a single Service Delivery Center (One Stop Centre), to minimise bureaucracy in processing investors' applications.

Earlier, the Executive Director of ZIPA Mr Shariff explained that the relations between the two institutions remain crucial in strengthening the existing political Union, especially considering that the two institutions are interdependent. He said that TIC top brass are in Zanzibar for a three-day visit, to share experience.

The TIC officials are expected to travel to Egypt to woo investors to invest in the country. Mr Shariff promised and assured President Mwinyi that ZIPA is striving to bring about changes, which include issuing work permits within a short time if all the necessary requirements are available.

On his part, the TIC boss Mr Kazi informed the president that his institution is committed to cooperate with Zanzibar to attract investments.

He said that there are plans to form a joint committee that will consist of members of ZIPA and TIC, to have frequent discussions about investment development for Zanzibar and Mainland Tanzania.
THE Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) has appealed for concerted efforts to end violence against children. Kagera Regional PCCB Chief, Mr John Joseph told reporters that the ongoing campaign aimed at ensuring that violence against children is brought to an end.

"It is encouraging that people are now reporting cases of violence against children... such development should be sustained in order to fight the vice which sometimes is done by close relatives," he said.

Mr Joseph noted that a recent study revealed that divorce and some issues arising in families are among the causes leading to the increased number of street children.

Meanwhile, about 5,866 children in Ngara district are living in difficult circumstances and most of them are victims of gender violence.

Ngara District Social Welfare Development Officer, Musa Bagondoza revealed this during celebrations to mark the International African Child Day, noting that some of the children were exposed to incidents of gender violence.

"Some of the children have been abandoned, as a result they are forced to live in the streets begging while others are not attending school and some of them end up being raped by either relatives or neighbors," he said.

He appealed to family members to take necessary steps to safeguard the welfare of children and ensure that they get proper upbringing from the grassroots level and enroll them in school.

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He urged residents in Kagera Region to avoid stigmatizing street children, and instead they should regard them as their own children. According to statistics, nearly 3 in 10 girls and approximately 1 in 7 boys in Tanzania have experienced violence prior to the age of 18 in school settings.

Every June 16, nations commemorate the children who were killed during the Soweto uprisings in South Africa in 1976, when thousands of black students marched for their right to a fairer education. The International Day of the African Child allows nations to reflect on the condition of children in Africa and to examine strategies to continue to improve their education.

It is estimated that about 34 million children of primary school age in Sub Saharan Africa are currently out of school. This dynamic creates an urgent need for innovative, sustainable interventions that address barriers to children's and youth's empowerment in Africa.

Article 19 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 6: states.....parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse.
The National Police Service will deploy more patrol officers in Nairobi following a public outcry over a spike in muggings and thefts.

Nairobi Regional Commander Augustine Nthumbi said the officers will include GSU, regular police and plainclothes officers.

"Do not be scared if you come across many officers in uniform and plain clothes. They are deployed to protect you from muggers, robbers and other petty criminals that you have been complaining about on social media," he said.

A series of tweets shared by concerned Kenyans on social media in the past few weeks urged the public to avoid locations in the city said to be notorious hideouts for gangs robbing pedestrians and motorists.

The gang is said to be working in cahoots with street children who beg on streets and wreak havoc on uncooperative targets.

KBC presenter Shiksha Arora said last week she was mugged by unknown assailants while in traffic at the Globe Roundabout.

Speaking to Nation.Africa by phone, Ms Arora said the incident took place at around 5pm as she was heading to Serena Hotel for a KBC relaunch event.

Another Kenyan said he had an encounter with criminals in the city centre.

Fallen victim to the gangs

"Avoid the general 680 hotel, Bruce House area of Standard street all the way to Jubilee Insurance and City Hall and Supreme court especially past 7:30pm. There is a gang of about four to six guys who are mugging people. One walks with a dagger," tweeted Chris Mwenda.

"If you somehow make it and head up to Kencom, avoid Aga Khan walk or the Reinsurance plaza side. Too many gangs operate in that area plus they are in (cahoots) with street kids in the area. Lucky to be home in one peace but eh, Nairobi city can finish someone," he added.

The tweets prompted DCI George Kinoti to urge people who have fallen victim to the gangs to make formal complaints at the Nairobi Central DCI offices.

"While many victims take to social media to narrate their ordeals in the hands of the mugger gangs (which is good sensitisation), we further urge them to formalise those complaints as guided, to facilitate the prosecution process once arrests are effected," the DCI tweeted.

The increase in muggings has prompted the US Embassy in Nairobi to caution Americans living or travelling in Nairobi to be aware of their surroundings and avoid crowds.
The arrest of two suspects in Nairobi's South B estate could be the breakthrough police have been looking for to crack an organised crime syndicate that has been troubling residents amid runaway insecurity in the capital city, detectives said on Thursday.

Crime busters traced a mobile phone signal from a gadget stolen last weekend to an apartment building in the middle-class neighbourhood.

This led them to a man and a woman they suspect are part of a bigger gang that is behind a series of crimes ranging from phone-snatching to muggings, car-jackings, and burglary.

The sting operation also nabbed more than 300 smartphones, a laptop, a car tracker, three smart television sets, several thumb drives, dozens of emptied wallets, bags and an assortment of documents -- including bank statements -- belonging to different people police believe are victims of the gang.

Confirming the incident, Makadara Sub-county Police Commander Timon Odingo told the Nation that a Mr Samuel Kahuro Wanjiku, popularly known as "Timo" and aged 27 years old, and 37-year-old Margaret Maina were apprehended during the raid.

Mr Odingo revealed that the operation was sparked by a complaint filed at Central Police Station on Harry Thuku Road by a Ms Mary Njihia on June 27.

The victim claimed she had been robbed of her two mobile phones in the city centre.

"The complainant, Ms Njihia, claimed to have been sprayed with an unknown chemical in her eyes on Luthuli Avenue and robbed of money, an Iphone XS and a Camon CX, all worth Sh167,000, by unknown people," Mr Odingo said.

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One of the victim's phones had been linked to another phone belonging to her brother, allowing police to track the stolen gadgets.

"The signal from the phone was coming from Itumo Apartment, fifth floor, door number 3E in South B," Mr Odingo said.

During a raid on the house, detectives discovered a laptop that the criminals used to flush out important information from stolen phones.

Police reached out to several victims through the contacts saved in the stolen gadgets, who all confirmed to have recently been robbed of their phones.

"Preliminary investigations show that high-end phones are usually sold in Tanzania, while the cheaper ones find a ready market in the slums."

"After interrogating the suspects, we have also obtained a written record of what they intended to sell, which town they wanted to hit next and the types of phones they intended to steal,"Mr Odingo said.

Police have urged victims to visit Industrial Area Police Station to identify their phones. A manhunt has been launched for other members of the gang.
The most peddled and used drugs in Lamu County are cocaine and heroin, both locally known as unga (flour), and bhang.

The Lamu security department has also revealed other drugs such as miraa (muguka), illicit brews, over the counter medicine and other subscription drugs as rampantly abused drugs in the region.

The abused hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and bhang are ferried in from far-flung areas of the Kenyan coastline such as Shimoni in Kwale and Mombasa counties and upcountry.

They find their way to Lamu on vehicles and boats, hidden inside boxes with clothing, onions, perfumes, packets of flour and other household items that make it hard for security agencies to spot them.

Speaking to the Nation on Saturday, Lamu County Commissioner Irungu Macharia said the biggest challenge was the fact that the local community is unwilling to speak or cooperate on the war on drugs.

Instead, the community shields drug peddlers, providing an environment for the illicit trade to thrive.

Mr Macharia noted that the fact that the community was also a ready market for the drugs was part of the reason the war on drugs was being frustrated.

The county commissioner feels if there is no demand for drugs, there will be no place for drug dealers and peddlers to survive in the region.

He appealed to locals to feel free to expose drug dealers so they can face the law.

"As a fact, abuse of drugs and substance that include bhang, unga, miraa, muguka, illicit brews, over the counter medicine and other subscription drugs is rampant in the county. We are very concerned as law enforcement agencies. However, the community is failing us by refusing to name those involved in the business. They won't tell us who the drug dealers are, plus they protect them. This needs to change if we have to save Lamu and the generations to come," said Mr Macharia.

He added, "As security, we are alert and committed to ridding Lamu of drugs but we need to work with the community to win this. That's why we won't despair in appealing for cooperation from locals," he said.

The commissioner, however, said a crackdown on drug peddlers and smugglers will continue indefinitely in Lamu until all those involved are caught and prosecuted.

Chiefs and their assistants have been directed to take charge of the war on drugs in their areas.

"We need to unite and say no to drugs. Report these dealers so that we can put them behind bars and make the society a better place for our youth and children," said Mr Macharia.

Places that are notorious for drug peddling in Lamu are Langoni, Jua Kali, Gadeni, Wiyoni, Kashmir and Kandahar in Lamu town, as well as Pate, Faza, Kizingitini, Tchundwa, Myabogi and Mbwajumwali in Lamu East.

Now, elders in these areas have formed special committees that have tried to address drug use in the region.

"We have tried our best to address the menace through community meetings but still, the problem exists. Unfortunately, our youths of between 15 and 25 years have been greatly affected by the drugs, mostly heroin and bhang," said Mr Mohamed Yusuf of Tchundwa.

Lamu County Deputy Governor Abdulhakim Aboud said through The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime-UNODC, together with Mewa hospital, the county has established a special unit at the Lamu King Fahad Hospital to rehabilitate drug addicts.

Mr Aboud said the Medical Assistant Therapy unit has already registered more than 300 drug addicts who report to the clinic daily to receive methadone to help them in their journey to reform.

"We have listed several willing drug users who are undergoing rehabilitation at our methadone clinic at King Fahad Hospital. All these efforts are done to tame the drug menace destroying our youth in Lamu," said Mr Aboud.

In April 2019, former Chief Justice David Maraga together with former Kenya Red Cross Society Secretary General Abbas Gullet commissioned the first drug rehabilitation centre in Lamu county, providing hope for addicts in the region who have often expressed their desire to turn a new leaf and live sober and more productive lives.

The Sh98 million facility, which is fully sponsored by the Kenya Red Cross Society, is situated at the Hindi Showground in Lamu West.

It has a capacity of 100 persons at a go.

Treatment services include detoxification, substitution or maintenance therapy and or psychosocial therapies and counselling while the duration depends on patient problems and needs.

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Normally, the entire process takes 90 days.

Questions are, however, arising over the relevance and effectiveness of the rehab centre amidst the high levels of poverty in the county.

Drug addicts and affected families who were interviewed decried the high cost of the rehabilitation as a key reason behind failure to access the much-needed help at the facility, three years since its launch.

A three-month rehab session at the facility that includes taking care of the patients in terms of food, clothing, guidance and counselling, medication, family therapy sessions and training on special skills so that the reformed addicts can use to better their lives once they move out of the centre cost not less than Sh90,000.

"Where are we going to get the Sh90,000 for our drug addicts to undergo rehabilitation? The facility is extremely expensive. We're worried our patients might never get to receive the much-needed rehab services to enable them to deal with the negative effects of drugs. Let these services be made free of charge," said Mrs Sada Mudathir.
analysis

So what exactly will the ceasefire in Tigray mean or achieve? Depending on who you ask, the battle may just be starting.

On Monday, Ethiopia announced a unilateral ceasefire in Tigray, ostensibly to help deal with a humanitarian situation and allow farmers to till their land for the planting season, the prime minister's office said.

"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, referring to the Tigray People's Liberation Front [TPLF], once a ruling party in the country but now considered a terrorist group by Addis Ababa.

"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.

The real reasons, however, may be a tactical retreat to strategise, especially after the eight-month war cost the country some $2.3 billion worth of infrastructure damage, according to Redwan Hussein, spokesman for the Tigray Emergency Taskforce.

Tigray Defence Forces

Redwan was quick to warn, however, that Ethiopia could still return to Mekelle if the Tigray Defence Forces, the militia that includes former TPLF and other loyal fighters, violates the ceasefire.

Analysts were quick to point out that the move by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government was more a tactical manoeuvre than a gesture of peace.

Mehari Taddele Maru, a policy researcher, argued the Ethiopian government must ensure foreign fighters are removed from Tigray if the ceasefire is to last.

Since November when Ethiopia launched an operation against TPLF, Eritrean forces and militia from neighbouring Amhara state have fought alongside Ethiopian troops. But their presence has been associated with atrocities, according to reports by various rights watchdogs including Amnesty International.

"Security and well-being of the population including from famine [is important]," Prof Maru argued on Tuesday, saying Ethiopia must guarantee no more atrocities.

"Respect for the will of the people, right to self-determination... Hold criminals accountable... Effective remedies and satisfaction," he said on Twitter.

As the ceasefire was unilateral, some say the Tigray forces may as well ignore it, or Eritreans who have an old axe to grind against the TPLF to launch ambushes. Dr Rashid Abdi, a Kenyan political analyst on the Horn of Africa, says the alliance formed between Eritrean leader Isaias Afwerki and Dr Aby against Tigray may also fray in the ceasefire, as well as what he calls "Amhara backlash against Abiy" escalating, which could destablise the regime.

Military operation

Indeed, on Tuesday evening, the Tigray forces announced they had taken full control of Shire, a city near the Eritrean border. The city, has been under the control of Eritrean forces since November, when Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF) supported by Eritrean forces launched a military operation in Tigray to oust former Tigray ruling party TPLF, which previously dominated Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades.

Sources told Nation.Africa that Eritrean forces had finally withdrawn from Tigray territories. In a new development, Tigray forces also announced they had taken control of the historic and major tourist destination city of Axum. They seized the holy city in the central Tigray without any resistance from the Eritrean and Ethiopian defence forces, sources told Nation.Africa.

This is the city where hundreds of unarmed civilians had been systematically massacred by Eritrean troops mainly over two days during the early days of the conflict, according to an Amnesty International report.

The ceasefire, however, may give Ethiopia some respite, following international pressure to tame rising atrocities by both the military and TPLF fighters. Ethiopia had refused the ceasefire calls, until one incident last week forced their hand.

Maria Hernandez, a Spaniard, was barely a year on her Ethiopian assignment as emergency coordinator for medical charity group MSF when she met her end on Thursday. Aged only 35, she was found murdered alongside her Ethiopian colleagues Yohannes Halefom Reda, 31, a coordination assistant, and Tedros Gebremariam Gebremichael, 31, who worked for MSF as a driver.

The Ethiopian staffers had only joined the group this year. Their death has elicited a confusing narrative on who exactly was responsible. But at least it shows just how information flow from Tigray has been difficult to verify.

MSF, which provided emergency medical care to refugees in Tigray, said the killings had been a "devastating blow" especially as Hernandez had worked in more dangerous zones, including Yemen, before she arrived in Ethiopia.

"We condemn this attack on our colleagues in the strongest possible terms and will be relentless in understanding what happened," MSF said on Friday evening.

"Maria, Yohannes and Tedros were in Tigray providing assistance to people and it is unthinkable that they paid for this work with their lives."

In the aftermath of the incident, both the Ethiopian government and TPLF accused one another of being responsible.

Addis Ababa suggested the aid workers endangered their lives by not getting a military escort, saying the area they were travelling to was a base for TPLF.

"The Ethiopian government would like to express condolences on the death of three MSF staffers, a Spaniard and two Ethiopians, in Abi Adi, Tigray, where TPLF actively operates," the Ethiopian foreign affairs ministry said in a statement.

"The government's call for military escort in such areas was to avoid such tragic killings by the irresponsible group."

Last week, Ethiopia rejected a move by the African Union to launch an investigation into atrocities, and has gone back on its word on when Eritrean troops will leave. Ethiopia said it prefers a joint investigation with the local human rights commission.

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Denied targeting civilians

As the country held elections last week, heavy fighting was reported in Tigray, negating the possibility of the polls to unify the country. On Tuesday an air raid on a market in Togogo town killed over 50 people, but the government denied targeting civilians.

"We haven't carried out air strikes on a market place. How can this be? The army has the capability to hit the target with precision," Col Getnet Adane, a spokesman for the Ethiopian Defence Forces, told reporters on Friday.

He admitted that there were air strikes carried out but they only targeted rebels operating near Togogo. "Therefore, the allegations of market attacks are completely false," he added.

For much of the eight months of the war, Ethiopia has refused to have the world peek in and help resolve it. Addis Ababa argues TPLF must surrender or be annihilated.

"This act and the terrible massacre at Togoga highlight the urgent need for a ceasefire and political dialogue. The international community must impose costs NOW on those who reject peace," the US Senate foreign relations committee chaired by Senator Bob Menendez tweeted after reports about the slain MSF workers emerged.

On Thursday, the European Union said it will place Ethiopia on the July agenda of the bloc's Foreign Council, which usually discusses individual member's responses to particular countries. The bloc fell short of threatening sanctions but said Ethiopian authorities had violated wartime laws.
Tanzania and Kenya remain the region's significant transit points for illicit drugs, facilitating the movement of the multimillion-dollar drug trade to Uganda and Europe because of porous borders and poor policing.

A report released by the United States (US) Department of State says Tanzania-based trafficking organisations and courier networks operate globally and play a prominent role in the southwest Asian heroin trade, using Dar as the launchpad to control the trade in East Africa.

The 2021 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs shows that the countries' location, porous borders and persistent corruption present challenges to drug interdiction.

Inadequate port security

"International drug trafficking organisations and courier networks transit through Tanzania to smuggle heroin from southwest Asia. Traffickers transport heroin via small vessels to Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania and over Tanzania's land borders with Kenya and Mozambique to destinations in Europe and North America," the report said, adding that porous borders and inadequate port security present considerable challenges to drug interdiction efforts.

In April 2020, Tanzania's Drug Control and Enforcement Authority (DCEA) seized 300kg of heroin in Dar es Salaam and arrested a Nigerian and two Tanzanian nationals. The seizure represented one of the largest in Tanzania's history and underscored the government's commitment to the operation.

The report says that drug traffickers use financial incentives to influence politicians, law enforcement and others in positions of power.

In August 2020, the DCEA seized more than five metric tonnes of marijuana because of multiple ongoing drug investigations. In September, Tanzanian police seized 51kg of heroin and arrested eight suspects.

Washington, in the report, also says that there are indications that domestic drug use is on the rise in Tanzania.

"In June 2020, Tanzania opened a methadone clinic in Tanga Region, on the border with Kenya. Contacts suggest the clinic will serve a growing number of persons suffering from substance use disorders, likely resulting from traffickers who pay employees in narcotics instead of cash," it said.

In February 2019, Tanzania's DCEA arrested prominent businessman Abdul Nsebo and his wife Shamim Mwasha for alleged heroin trafficking. In October, DCEA destroyed a total 120.9kg of seized heroin and cocaine, the highest in the East African region.

In August 2019, a US federal court sentenced 10 Tanzanian citizens for their part in a transnational heroin trafficking ring, including Ali Khatib Haji Hassan, an international drug kingpin under US Department of the Treasury sanctions who was extradited to the US with two associates in 2017.

Illicit drugs in Kenya

The report has also fingered Kenya in the drug trade, noting that its geographic position on the Indian Ocean and major international air transit location make it an attractive target for narcotics traffickers moving drugs from Asia and Latin America to Europe and the Arabian Peninsula.

"The growth of illegal drug abuse within the country, especially in coastal areas, is a concern. The Government of Kenya and civil society emphasize vigilance against the drug threat, publicly reject the illicit narcotics trade, and support demand reduction and mental health efforts, but official corruption is a major factor in the effectiveness of all Kenyan government endeavors," the report says.

Washington says that Kenya remains a transit country for a variety of illicit drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and domestic drug consumption is growing. Precursor chemicals used to produce methamphetamine and other illicit drugs also transit Kenya.

"Heroin originating from Southwest Asia enters Kenya both from direct shipping across the Indian Ocean via south Asia and, increasingly, from countries to the south, such as Tanzania and Mozambique. Most of the heroin entering Kenya is destined for international markets, principally Europe. Cocaine enters Kenya primarily via transshipment through Ethiopia from South America," it said, adding that domestic heroin abuse is a growing concern in Kenya, especially along the coast and in the main port city of Mombasa.

However, Washington says that Kenya recognises the threat the illegal drug trade represents and is taking steps to increase control of its territorial waters with regional neighbours. This includes focusing on capacity building and professionalising the Kenya Coast Guard Service (KCGS), increased cooperation with regional maritime security bodies including the Djibouti Code of Conduct and drafting a Maritime Security Strategy.

"Increased enforcement and preventive measures in Kenya have in recent years pushed maritime drug transport to the south, toward Tanzania, Mozambique, and beyond," the report said.

Kenya continues to successfully target traffickers operating within its territory. In July 2020, in cooperation with US authorities, Kenyan law enforcement arrested an international trafficker of wildlife and heroin currently under indictment in New York.

During the first nine months of 2020, the Anti-Narcotics Unit seized about 18kg of heroin and two metric tonnes of cannabis, along with trace amounts of cocaine, methamphetamine, ketamine, and rohypnol. Authorities also seized about $255,000 (Sh27 million) in property (vehicles) and cash linked to suspected drug trafficking.

"The Kenyan government is expanding its liaison and communication with drug and border enforcement authorities in East Africa and undertaking assessments of its border security capacity and capability to combat trafficking of illegal drugs and other goods," the report said.

This assertion now confirms a September 2018 Interpol report on the narcotics trade in the region, which said that drug traffickers were using the eastern African coast as their open transit route for illicit drug trafficking from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India, Brazil, Bolivia and Peru with destinations including South Africa, Europe, the United States and Asia.

"Eastern African ports remain strategic points for drug trafficking, with other Eastern African countries continue to be major transit points for drug trafficking from Latin America and the Middle East to Europe and the United States," the Interpol report said, adding that Tanzania forms part of a major transshipment route for heroin entering the region, but is not a major end market for consumption of this drug.

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Last Friday, a new report by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime cited Kenya as a transit country for most of the drugs leaving the continent.

According to the report, most drug shipments appear to have departed from South Africa, followed by Morocco and Kenya. The report shows that in 2019, about four tonnes of heroin and morphine was seized in the continent in 2019, accounting for about three per cent of the global quantities of heroin and morphine seized.

"The largest quantity of heroin seized in East Africa (1 per cent of the regional total) was reported by Kenya. Over the period 2009-2019, the largest quantities of heroin and morphine seized in Africa were seized in North Africa (52 per cent of the total, most notably in Egypt), followed by East Africa (37 per cent of the total), most notably in Kenya, followed by Tanzania," the report says.

Despite the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, trafficking continued in 2020, and large quantities of heroin were reported seized by Tanzania, including a seizure of 270kg of the drug from traffickers from Nigeria and Tanzania in Dar es Salaam in April 2020, and 342kg of heroin from a truck that had travelled from Mozambique to South Africa in September 2020.

Some "263 seizures of smaller amounts were reported by other countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda) and in North Africa (Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia)," the report says.
The Kisumu County government has rolled out a Sh24 million revolving fund to support small and micro enterprises (SMEs) for women, youth and people living with disabilities.

The kitty to be launched by Kisumu Governor Peter Anyang' Nyong'o, will attract an interest of three per cent for the people living with disabilities and a five per cent interest for women and youth.

"The fund to be fairly distributed to over 70 small businesses are set to benefit from the 24 million funds currently available to be shared among 13 groups in each of the 35 wards," said Education, ICT and Human Capacity Development Chief Executive John Awiti.

The fund offers financial relief for the community with limited or no access to loans from the formal financial institutions.

To ensure the growth and sustainability of the fund, Mr Awiti said that they will train the beneficiaries to ensure accountability. The beneficiaries are expected to repay their loans to qualify for additional loans from the fund.

Ms Esther Akeyo of Got Akello Women Group in Muhoroni said the fund will boost their development projects and improve their livelihoods.

The revolving fund is established under the Public Management Act of the county government of Kisumu and regulated by the county's Finance department.

The Women Youth and Social Services department is supported by Plan International, while Kenya Female Advisory Organization will provide training needs for the beneficiaries.

The directorate is mandated by law to supervise and assist in the financial management of the fund and its beneficiaries through the committee members with the support of the gender and social officers.
The Employment and Labour Relations Court in Nyeri has dismissed a former prosecutor's case seeking reinstatement after he was fired over corruption claims.

Justice Njagi Marete found that the court lacked the competency to handle the suit by James Makura because it was previously determined by the same court before a different judge.

He said that his predecessor, Justice Nzioka wa Makau, in a ruling on July 13, 2020, struck out the suit because Mr Makura did not specify the rights that had been infringed in his dismissal.

Justice Marete also said the petition was not necessary as there is a similar ongoing case before the Court of Appeal in Nyeri.

"The petitioner cannot have it both ways. He can either choose to withdraw the appeal before the superior court or decide not to pursue this petition," he said.

Eight years

In the case, Mr Makura had sued the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP). He said he had worked as a senior prosecutor at the ODPP's Nyeri office for eight years until June 22, 2011 when he was arrested by Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission officers.

In a case before the Chief Magistrate's Court in Embu, he was accused of receiving Sh25,000 as a bribe in relation to a case he was handling.

Following his arrest and arraignment, his employer suspended him from work and only paid him half his salary. But on November 22, 2017, a magistrate acquitted him of the charges.

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Mr Makura says that in March last year, he was summoned to appear before the ODPP advisory board, which fired him for gross misconduct.

The dismissal, he argues, was unfair because the court had declared him innocent of the corruption charges. He requested Justice Marete to order the ODPP to resume payment of his salary and reinstate him to his job.

Advisory board

But in a replying affidavit from senior state counsel Duncan Ondimu, the ODPP's office showed that before his dismissal, Mr Makura was given a fair hearing before the advisory board.

Mr Ondimu said the dismissal process followed the ODPP's human resources manual and the Public Service Commission's HR policies and procedures manual.

"The petitioner has not shown how his employer acted in excess of his powers by removing him from office," Mr Ondimu said.

Mr Makura had since been hired by a Nyeri-based law firm, Mr Ondimu said.

He asked Justice Marete to dismiss the petition, citing the other case at the Court of Appeal.

"The suit before that court is identical to the one that is currently before the Employment court therefore there is no need of having similar suits placed in different courts," he said.
Ever since Uganda confirmed its first case of the Covid-19 in March 2020, more than 3,000 health workers have been infected with the virus, according to Uganda Medical Association (UMA).

Many of these were infected during the second wave which started in May.

Dr Richard Idro, the president of UMA, said the country is experiencing a lot of community transmissions and some of the patients in general wards have undiagnosed Covid-19, which leaves health workers at a high risk of exposure.

"When patients come to health facilities, health workers spend some time with them at a very close distance assessing them. The patient may come with a fever or other conditions when underlying they have Covid while some are asymptomatic," Dr Idro said yesterday.

He added: "The kind of protection that you have in the Covid treatment unit is not the same protection used in the other general wards. In the Covid treatment unit, people are covered from head to toe. In the other wards, health workers are only using masks so the risk of infection is much higher."

Dr Mukuzi Muhereza, the secretary general of UMA, said the biggest problem faced by health workers is a shortage of PPEs which leaves them exposed.

He added that the health workers are also not well motivated.

"More mistakes are made when one is not properly motivated. Pay health workers and compensate the families of those who passed away. Those who died since the pandemic started have not been compensated," Dr Muhereza said.

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Dr Richard Isabirye, the secretary of the Covid-19 taskforce in Mayuge District, said the PPEs available are few.

He said a number of health workers end up with Covid-19 while in line of duty which has scared their colleagues.

Mayuge District has registered 259 Covid cases of which 17 are health workers.

"We would have identified more cases but we have few testing kits. In May and June, the district registered 83 cases," Dr Isabirye said.

Scientists say health workers are three times more likely to get Covid-19 compared to the general population.

In a period of two weeks the country has lost 14 doctors to the pandemic.

Some health workers have blamed the increase of Covid infections among their colleagues to fatigue.

Govt reaction

Mr Emmauel Ainebyoona, the Ministry of Health spokesperson, said they attend to all orders and National Medical Stores(NMS) has all available PPEs required are available. Ms Sheila Nduhukire, the principal public relations officer of NMS, said all Covid-19 supplies have been dispatched to all districts.
President Abdel Fattah El Sisi said that Egypt and China are seeking to further promote bilateral startegic ties, pointing out that the crisis of the coranvirus pandemic has proved that cooperation and integration between countries on the various levels are vital to gurantee all societies' safety and stability.

In a televised speech Thursday 1 July 2021, on the occasion marking the Chinese Communist Party's 100th anniversary, President Sisi lauded the Chinese government's continued role in support of Egyptian efforts to face up to the Covid-19 repercussions.

President Sisi said that the Chinese Communist Party has successfully led China throughout the years, thus securing he country's full independence and restructuring the modern Chinese State in 1949.

The Chinese Communist Party proceeded ahead under a wise policy, creating The China miracle that placed the country at the head of developed states, added the president.

The Chinese experiment constitutes a model all countries seek to pursue and benefit from.

In his televised speech, President Sisi congratulated Chinese President and Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping and the Chinese people on the occasion of the party's 100's anniversary as it succeeded in realizing important achievements in China's history, which highly reflected sincere efforts on the part of the Chinese leadership, as well as the strong will of the Chinese people.

President Sisi underscored the importance of exerting strenuous efforts on the part of the international community, with a view to exchanging expertise to counter any challenges. He said that the memory of the first national conference for the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 coincides with the anniversary of the 1952 July 23rd Revolution that laid the foundation for a modern Egyptian State.

On May 30, Egypt and China celebrated the 65th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties. President Sisi wished China and the friendly Chinese people further progress and prosperity.
Transport Minister Kamel el Wazir inspected on Thursday 1/7/2021 development works of the Ring Road that will be expanded from eight lanes to 14.

EGP 8 billion was allocated to develop and expand the 106-kilometre highway. The tour began by checking a 12-kilometer-long stretch of the road between the autostrad and Marioutiya.

The minister said that 98% of development works of this stretch was finalized and all encroachments were removed.

Then, the Transport Minister inspected El Moneeb Bridge expansion project, which is part of the Ring Road development project. It includes setting up a whole new bridge next to the old one on both the north and south sides. The bridge will include eight lanes in each direction.

Then, he went to examine a 24 kilometer-long stretch from Saad El-Shazly Tunnel to the intersection of the Cairo-Alexandria Agricultural Road. Wazir also checked on development works of mustorud bridge as a whole new bridge will be set up next to the existing one to ease traffic flow.
press release

Greetings to the honourable Mayor, MMC's and Officials present here today.

We are meeting during difficult times working our way out of the uncharted terrain of the COVID-19 pandemic. When this pandemic hit our shores, none of us had the experience or knowledge necessary to respond to it. As the national government, we followed the global trends and advise of the World Health Organization (WHO). As with most countries our response was to introduce a hard lockdown in order to "flatten the curve" an attempt to save lives. Whilst we achieved what we set out to, the socio and economic cost of this decision was harsh, with many jobs being lost and many families pushed deeper into poverty.

The dire social and economic consequences of the decision, had a negative knock on effect into our city finances with both revenue and expenditure-side challenges. Since our first national Lockdown we have experienced subsequent waves and have managed to weather the storm with less severe and perverse outcomes. It is only now that we are once again forced to go into Level 4 Lockdown owing to the intensity of the third wave we are experiencing driven by the more contagious Delta variant.

Though we are still under threat, we can see some-light at the end of the tunnel with a systematic vaccination roll-out gaining momentum in the country. As has been demonstrated in other countries around the world, it is only through the vaccination of our society that we will be able to return to normal.

As a country we now have to focus on our economic recovery and reconstruction. We were in a precarious economic state prior to the pandemic and all our structural weaknesses and inequalities have been brought to the fore. Metros will play a critical lead role in our national economic recovery. Increasing investment in infrastructure, and providing public services that enable private investment in productive capacity and residential uses is paramount. This infrastructure investment needs to be of an adequate scale, appropriately located and effectively executed if it is to contribute to improved national economic performance and poverty reduction. The infrastructure provision in metros also provide opportunities for the private sector to contribute meaningfully while indirectly assisting in the provision of service delivery.

There are economic opportunities which can be explored by private sector institutions within the area of your jurisdiction. However, these opportunities heavily rely on your capacity to provide bulk and connector infrastructure to enable such investments. In addition, there are a number of approval processes that are taking place at the metro level to enable private sector institutions to invest in your space. Thus, the metro need to create a conducive business environment through streamlining and ensuring more efficient internal business processes that interface with the private sector. Such business processes relate to supply chain management, issuing of business permits, responding to customer complaints, issuing of rates and services accounts, development approval processes, issuing of construction permits and rates clearance certificates and ensuring electricity connections.

Together with the World Bank, we have introduced Ease of Doing Business project which drives the reforms in this space at national and subnational level to make the country more competitive and business friendly. The Sub-National Doing Business reforms that we are rolling out in partnership with the metros are a core component of this broader programme. A major component of this reform process is the optimisation and automation of metro businesses processes in order to reduce time, cost and numbers of procedures that businesses have to experience. The COVID-19 pandemic has fast tracked digitisation processes globally and has clearly demonstrated that automation has contributed hugely to metro business continuity throughout this period.

A major concern is the failure of many metros to spend on their capital budgets, placing some of the local government conditional grants in jeopardy. From our engagements with yourselves, we have identified two major constraints on metro performance in this regard. First, is the metro internal Supply Chain Management (SCM )processes, which are lengthy and tedious. Secondly, it is owing to the criminal elements which have mushroomed under the disguise of 30% requirements of the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act (PPPFA).

We need to be engaging together on finding a solution to these challenges. On the latter point, we wish to hear your views and understand how to address this issue. We need to understand the route cause of the problem and how much it is a policy or criminal issue. It is only through listening that we will be able to develop solutions that are befitting to the problem.

Part of the problem regarding the slow pace of capital spend, is a lack of a project pipeline in some metros. To address this concern a project and programme preparation grant will be introduced effective from your new financial year. We urge you to maximize on the use of this grant on major infrastructure projects which prepare them in a manner that will assist the city to accelerate the infrastructure built programme. Infrastructure investment that can unlock private investment in targeted spatial areas should be prioritised.

As we drive the economic reconstruction and recovery there is a need to strengthen governance in the city. A clear demonstration of this should be reflected in the capacity of the city to reduce the unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure (UIFW). It is discomforting that this has been increasing over the years and it does not look like there is an appetite to reduce it. We should be aware that the credit rating has started factoring this issue which has resulted in a decrease in the credit rating. Of concern is that you have the Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC) in your jurisdiction, but it does not look like there is any form of consequence management. The capacity of the city to borrow will soon reflect this poor credit rating leading to epensive debt and in some instances reluctance of the financial institutions to borrow you money that is critical for growth enhancing investments.

The institutional stability of the city is paramount for the successful implementation of the economic recovery. We are concerned about the high turnover at the executive level. This does not build confidence. As political principals, it is your duty to ensure that there is a stability to enable the institution to focus on service delivery. Such stability is possible - eThekwini, for example, has retained the same Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for around 20 years.

The governance and institutional challenges have started to negatively impact on the city. This is due to a number of factors which are within your control, this include

The rapid decrease in the liquidity position over the past fifteen months;

the repeat findings in the management audit report. Of concern is that this is mainly due to lack of consequence management an action which is in your control;

Council's missteps of awarding salary increases to a certain category of workers leading to increase in the wage bill as Salary Benchmarking place severe strains to the finances of the City;

the City is far behind with implementation and not at the stage of using a core financial system that is the Municipal Standard Chart of Accounts (mSCOA) Compliant.

If this issues are not arrested the long term consequence will be dire for the city and its citizens.

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The future of this country depends on you. As the political and administrative leadership of metros, you carry the responsibility for leading the recovery and development of the country. You do not do this alone and national government has to commit to driving the necessary structural, policy, regulatory and financial reforms that will enable you to perform this role. But, nevertheless, you as the city leadership are the ones that need to drive the vision for national recovery at sub-national level and use all your levers to contribute to this. Visionary and committed leadership that is willing to partner with other spheres of government, the private sector and civil society is what is needed now more than ever before.

As you reflect on the last five years can you confidently say that I have done my best? I have moved the city from point A to point B on key indicators such as spatial transformation, economic inclusion, city resilience and financial sustainability? Can you be confident of your collective track record in employment creation and positioning the metro to lead in economic development in the country?

As we move towards the local government elections, we wish to urge you to give your best and focus not simply on the short term and the election result, but on the longer- term economic recovery and growth of this nation. We need you to demonstrate true leadership at this point, realising that our country cannot afford anymore shocks and that the decisions you make will have lasting consequences - either for better or for the metro shortly after the elections to assess how you have moved during this period and also discuss how best you wish to contribute to accelerate economic recovery initiatives in the metro which is the only meaningful instrument that will address unemployment, poverty and inequality.

I thank you.
press release

Honourable Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women,

Excellencies,

Heads of Organisations,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We are brought together in this forum by a shared determination that no woman should be denied the rights, opportunities and resources required for a secure, just and prosperous life.

South Africa is committed to both supporting and implementing the actions contained in the Global Acceleration Plan for Economic Justice and Rights.

Our interventions must dismantle the systemic barriers that marginalise women and girls and perpetuate inequality in the global economy.

In South Africa, we are working to shift economic power into the hands of women through, among other things, earmarking 40 per cent of all public procurement for women-owned businesses.

On the continent, we are working towards adopting a Protocol and Programme of Action on Women in Trade to promote the participation of women in the African Continental Free Trade Area.

We are working to ensure access to productive resources through financial inclusion.

Lack of access to financial services and products disproportionately affects poorer women working in the informal sector, those without income and those who are illiterate.

It increases vulnerability to economic shocks and may, in some cases, even increase exposure to gender-based violence.

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Innovation in digital financial services in Africa offers an opportunity for rapid scale- up of financial services and products.

Working in partnership with Queen Maxima, the UN Secretary-General's Special Advocate on Financial Inclusion, we are committed to establishing the Advocacy Accelerator for Women's Digital Financial Inclusion in Africa.

This initiative will mobilise stakeholders to invest in new platforms and products to increase access to digital financial products and services for women in Africa.

Inspired by one of the pioneers of women's empowerment in South Africa, we are launching the Charlotte Maxeke Women's Initiative on Economic Justice and Rights.

This will involve collaborative projects to increase opportunities for women and girls in the areas of entrepreneurship, leadership and diplomacy.

Through these efforts, through this Global Acceleration Plan, we are moving ever closer to realising our goal of economic justice and rights for women.

I thank you.
The director of Finance and Accounting at The Gambia Revenue Authority (GRA), Alhaji Saihou Denton, has been confirmed as new chairman of the Finance Committee of World Customs Organisation (WCO). He is also the elected chairman of the World Customs' West and Central African region.

The two appointments were confirmed on 15 June 2021 after WCO's Council Virtual Meeting held in Brussel.

These are positions that have never been occupied by Africans before.

A Gambian having now occupied these positions is expected to provide rightful direction and sound financial management system for the WCO.

Reacting to the news, Mr. Denton confirmed the two appointments, while expressing appreciation. "I was very elated after receiving confirmation," he said. "It was an honour to be a Gambian and flag bearer of The Gambia and Gambia Revenue Authority for my inputs to be recognised at that international level to occupy that position of chairmanship at WCO, which is unprecedented."

According to him, as a Gambian, getting that position is a big achievement and trust and confidence bestowed on him.

He also assured that he would live up to expectations in ensuring that he provides the right direction and sound advice to WCO during his tenure.

According to Mr. Denton, getting the position required hard work and determination. He described his appointments as a big achievement not only for GRA but the whole country and West and Central Africa.

Mr. Denton was quick to commend the leadership of the Gambia Revenue Authority under the watchful eye of the Commissioner General Yankuba Darboe for sending the senior staff to the right forum to represent the GRA.

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Commenting on Saihou Denton's appointment, Mr. Darboe said: "I am very happy for the appointment of Mr. Alhaji Saihou Denton as chairman of both the West and Central Africa Finance Committee of WCO in Brussels.

He said Mr. Denton deserves those positions as he is competent, trustworthy, conscientious and professional. He added: "Undoubtedly, he will make Gambians proud and will do the job to the best of his ability."

"As a CG, I always give opportunities to my staff both local and international positions and all of them make me proud at all times."

He finally expressed appreciation with the level of commitment of his senior directors and assured to continue to encourage them to be hard working and professional in their work.

Dr. Gibba debunks UTG's claims as lack of integrity, merit
Assan Camara was on the 29th June 2021 brought before Magistrate F.B. Jallow of the Kanifing Magistrates' Court, charged with possession of firearm without authority, contrary section 8 and punishable under section 25 (2) of the Arms and Ammunition Act Cap 21:01 Volume IV laws of The Gambia 2009.

According to the particulars of offence, Assan Camara on the 20th June, 2021 at Gunjur Madina was found in possession of one Rohm RG revolver pistol, single barrel hunting gun and six (6) live rounds without proper authority or without valid licence thereby committed an offence.

The accused contended the guns are not real, saying the bullets were live bullets. He added that he was not aware that he should get a licence.

The accused was sentenced to a fine of 100,000 thousand dalasis by magistrate F.B. Jallow in default to serve 1 year in prison.
analysis

Foodborne diseases are thought to impose a health burden on society comparable to the "big three": malaria, HIV/AIDs and tuberculosis.

Common foodborne diseases affect tens of millions of people every year. They include salmonellosis, which causes stomach upsets, norovirus, which can cause severe vomiting and diarrhoea, and listeriosis, which can cause severe infections of the bloodstream and brain. Children and people with weak immune systems are affected most.

Foodborne diseases can enter the food supply chain - from the farm to our tables - at many stages. For instance, most low-income consumers source their foods from informal markets. For food to get to these markets, there are many actors involved and this makes it difficult to regulate activities. Infrastructure that supports good hygienic handling of food in these markets, such as potable water and refrigeration, is normally lacking.

Meat, fish, seafood and fresh vegetables are the most risky from a food safety perspective. This is because they act as a reservoir for many pathogens and provide an excellent medium for pathogens to survive and grow. Cereals are less of a food safety risk as they are not handled multiple times, and present a less attractive medium for pathogens to survive.

We wanted to know whether the COVID-19 pandemic's restriction measures were having an effect on food safety. To understand the extent of the problem in East Africa we surveyed experts on food safety in the region. The countries included in this study were all those in the East African Community (except Rwanda) along with Ethiopia. Data were collected in November and December 2020 through telephone and online interviews with 25 food safety experts.

We began by piecing together what happened to the supply chains as a result of the pandemic and then went on to consider the implications for foodborne diseases.

We found that the lockdowns to curb the spread of the new coronavirus had various effects on food as it went from farms to plates.

Curfews and other measures, meant to limit public exposure to the disease, closed markets and popular outdoor eateries. These measures, on top of travel restrictions and a sharp reduction in purchasing power due to job and income loss, resulted in a reduction in demand.

For instance, the number of animals slaughtered declined. One example of this was in Juba, South Sudan, where the number of cattle slaughtered decreased from between 20 and 25 animals a day to just five. Although there's no direct link to food safety, the reduction has implications for livelihoods, which would affect the quality of food people bought.

Livestock and cereal farmers faced a drastic loss of demand, as people had little money, local hotels were closed, and movement restrictions limited customers' access to the farms.

All of these factors affected the food supply chain and resulted in potentially dangerous situations for consumers who could be exposed to foodborne diseases. These need to be properly investigated and addressed.

Four areas of concern

Our survey found four areas of special concern regarding food safety: overstocking; exploitative retailers; transport delays; and key food stakeholders working from home and in shifts.

Overstocking

Panic bulk purchasing by consumers, early in the pandemic, often led to poor storage. This is a particular concern for cereals which can easily be contaminated with aflatoxins, produced by fungi which colonise cereals and groundnuts.

Consumers were left with the option of either eating the spoiled food or throwing it away - neither is a good option.

Exploitative retailers

Panic purchases also created opportunities for untrustworthy retailers to sell poor quality and unsafe products.

In these situations, food control systems meant to protect consumers from unwholesome products are often ineffective. The priority of preventing the spread of COVID-19 meant that few government resources were left to undertake food safety work inspections. And in any case, most livestock products and fresh produce are sold in traditional markets, which even before the pandemic received little attention from food safety inspectors.

Transport delays

An increase in the time it takes to transport food and livestock feed, and delays at border points, invariably increased the risks of produce getting contaminated. Delays were due to requirements that drivers take COVID-19 tests and the long time it took for results to be returned. Fresh produce, including animal-source foods, can spoil quickly when they're not stored at the right temperatures, raising the risk of serious foodborne diseases.

Working from home

Our respondents repeatedly mentioned that everyone was scared of being exposed to the virus. This meant that all workers in the supply chain, save those providing essential services, worked from home. Some food businesses worked in shifts, with limited staff. This meant that they were less able to perform routine inspection work (process checks, final product quality, market quality), leaving consumers exposed to risk.

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On a positive note, restricted entry to food processing places (such as slaughterhouses) and the installation of numerous hand washing stations led to modest improvements in food safety.

Food security has been a major concern during the pandemic, but food safety has been largely neglected. Yet food safety is a major health and economic problem and if we are to build back better, food safety must be addressed.

Our findings demonstrate that there is need to sensitise all value chain actors about food safety, from production to consumption, even during periods of emergency such as this one.

Florence Mutua, Scientist, International Livestock Research Institute ; Delia Grace, Professor Food Safety Systems at the Natural Resources Institute (UK) and contributing scientist ILRI, International Livestock Research Institute , and Erastus Kang'ethe, Professor, University of Nairobi
Luanda  The President of the Republic, Joao Lourenco, on Thursday swore in the new governor of the province of Luanda, Ana Paula Chantre Luna de Carvalho.

In a ceremony held at the Main Hall of the Presidential Palace, the Head of State also swore in Manuel Jose da Costa Molares D'Abril as Secretary of State for Territory Planning.

Helio Delize Neto de Almeida also took office as deputy governor of Huila province for the Technical Sector and Infrastructures. All three officials were appointed on Wednesday.

In his brief statements, President Joao Lourenco wished the newly sworn-in government officials success in their new roles.

At the end of the ceremony, the new governor of Luanda, who replaced Joana Lina Ramos Baptista, said that her priority was to draw up programmes, with the collaboration of municipal administrators, for the short, medium and long term to resolve the situation of solid waste and macro-drainage in the capital.

"We will work with municipalities to, in a specific and planned way, mitigate some problems that affect the city of Luanda," the governor, who until the date of her appointment was secretary of state for Regional Planning, told the press.

According to population projections for 2018, drawn up by the National Statistics Institute, Luanda has an estimated population of 7.7 million inhabitants and a land area of 18,826 square kilometres, making it the most populous province in the country.

It comprises the municipalities of Luanda, Cacuaco, Viana, Kilamba-kiaxi, Talatona, Belas, Cazenga, Icolo and Bengo and Quicama.
Luanda  The members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC) and non-OPEC meet Thursday to analyse the market in June and forecast production levels for August.

The organisation made the last adjustments to the table in April of this year for each member country.

In Angola's case, production of one 1.283 million barrels per day was allowed in May, one 1.298 million in June and 1.319 million now for this July.

Three meetings will be held at separate times today, after the JMMC (Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee) meeting, which was scheduled for Wednesday, 30 June, was postponed at the request of Russian co-chairman Alexander Novak.

The JMMC Meeting will analyse the current oil market and propose production levels for the month of August.

This time, from midday, the 181st OPEC Conference Meeting will take place, followed by the 31st JMMC and the 18th OPEC+ Ministerial.

By videoconference, the 181st OPEC Meeting will be chaired by the Angolan Minister of Mineral Oil and Gas Resources, Diamantino Pedro Azevedo, who is also the president of that organization.

The meeting will review and approve the Minutes of the 180th Meeting of the Conference, the financial and auditor's reports for 2020 and of the chairman of the JMMC (Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee), besides the appointment of new External Auditors for 2021
Luanda  The President of the Republic, Joao Lourenco, received on Thursday the leader of the opposition coalition CASA-CE, Manuel Fernandes, with whom he discussed issues related to the current social and economic situation of the country.

Speaking to the press at the end of the meeting of about an hour, Manuel Fernandes said that the occasion served to analyse issues related to social factors, with particular emphasis on health and the drought affecting the populations of some regions of the country.

"The Head of State took good note of the issues under analysis, which in our view should contribute to mitigating some of the problems faced by citizens," he said.

Founded in 2012, coalition CASA-CE is made up of six political parties, namely the National Party for the Salvation of Angola (PNSA), Angolan Majority Free Alliance Party (PALMA), Angolan Pacific Party (PPA), Party of Support for Democracy and Development of Angola - Patriotic Alliance (PADDA-AP), Democratic Party for Progress and National Alliance of Angola (PDP-ANA) and the Democratic Bloc (BD).

CASA-CE is one of the current political forces with parliamentary seat, as in the last general elections (2017) it obtained 16 deputies, of which eight (8) disintegrated the political organization in 2019.
PRESIDENT Hage Geingob says that expert projections and simulation tools indicate that the rising incidence curve of the Covid-19 third wave in Namibia is expected to peak around mid-August and may continue well until mid-September 2021.

"The darkest hour of the night comes just before daybreak. It is expected to get worse, before it becomes better. We must therefore do everything in our power to suppress the rate of transmission. Only you and I can stop the further spread of this virus from ravaging our homes and communities," Geingob said during yesterday Covid-19 public briefing at State House.

He said new Covid infections are rising exponentially and the country continues to record an increasingly high number of hospitalisations and deaths.

"The number of new cases per day has more than tripled since the first week of June, from an average 507 cases per day to the current average of 1 798 cases per day.

"Over the past two weeks, a total of 59 015) tests have been conducted, with a positivity rate of 41%. This means four out of every 10 people you interact with in your day-to-day dealings are likely to be Covid-19 positive. This rising level of exposure is of great concern, because of the highly transmissible nature of the virus," Geingob said.

He added that Namibia has reached a critical moment in the fight against Covid-19 "and we must wage this war with the determined resolve to overcome - as a united front against a common enemy".

Geingob also said yesterday that although not confirmed yet, all indications are that the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus, first detected in India, has reached Namibia.

Meanwhile, the government has moved to extend the country's partial travel ban to all of its regions, while travel within regions is still allowed.

Geingob said the presence of the Delta variant would be confirmed by scientists by Friday.

"Investments are being intensified to strengthen the health sector across the country to respond to the rising demand for beds and medical care for those who need it most," the president said.

Physician specialist Ismael Katjitae reiterated Geingob's statement on Namibia experiencing its third wave of infections as a result of the Delta variant.

"We have not recorded any Delta variant in the country, but clearly the way this pandemic is behaving has got all the signs of a Delta variant," he said.

Katjitae said the fact that the variant is present in Namibia's neighbouring countries could be evidence that it is present locally.

"It is tentatively here, and it is most probably the one causing this rapid rise in numbers," he said.

Dr Kaveto Sikuvi, emergency medicine specialist in the Ministry of Health and Social Services, who also addressed the public at the briefing, said the country is expected to reach the third wave's peak within the next week or two.

He could not indicate whether a fourth wave is in sight.

Minister of finance Iipumbu Shiimi said the government's approach with regards to regulations is to strike a balance between lives and livelihoods.

"The restrictions are limiting the movement of people and keeping and allowing most economic activities to continue," he said.

IVERMECTIN

Katjitae said some patients who have used ivermectin as a treatment against Covid-19 have ended up in worse condition and some have ultimately died as a result.

According to the WHO, ivermectin is a broad-spectrum antiparasitic agent.

"We do see patients who have been taking ivermectin who have ended up in hospital with severe disease, and also people who end up losing their lives," he said.

Katjitae said the perception that ivermectin cures or treats Covid-19 is misleading and needs to end, because people can lose their lives.

"They take this ivermectin thinking it will cure them. I have been treating people who have developed severe side effects - most probably from ivermectin. I have seen people with liver and kidney failure, so one should take it with caution," he said.

Minister of health and social services Kalumbi Shangula has previously said local doctors have not heeded the call of the Namibia Medicines Regulatory Council to participate in a clinical trial for the use of ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of Covid-19.

Sikuvi added some patients who have taken ivermectin die at home, or on arrival at the hospital.

COVID-19 IN CHILDREN

Sikuvi said children are more affected by the current strain.

"Initially we did not see many children being infected, and if they are, they are playing around. We are now starting to see that children who are infected are being admitted [to hospital]. So we have to be cautious about that," he said.

REGULATIONS

Apart from the travel ban, the Covid-19 curfew is now from 21h00 to 04H00, the sale of alcohol will only be allowed from Monday to Thursday from 09h00 to 18h00, and nightclubs, gambling houses and gyms are closed.

Covid-19 burials must strictly take place within 10 days after death, with only 10 people in attendance.

All food establishments are to serve food on a takeaway basis only.

This includes restaurants, food vendors and kapana traders.

All public and private schools (pre-primary up to Grade 9), including early childhood development centres, are currently on a special winter holiday until 26 July.

Face-to-face classes for Grades 10, 11 and 12 will be suspended countrywide from today until 16 July.

Moreover, face-to-face classes for institutions of higher education, including vocational education training providers, are also suspended for the same period.

All examinations for tertiary students will be undertaken online.

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Hairdressers, tailors, and beauty salons will remain open, subject to strict adherence to regulations, with not more than 10 people at a time.

All contact sport as defined in the regulations remain prohibited.

For non-contact sport no spectators are permitted at live events.

Road and air public transport operators will not be permitted to travel between regions, including long-haul operators and aircraft between and within regions.

Motorists may only transport passengers to half the capacity of their vehicles.

A special dispensation for tourists will be put in place.

Further details will follow.

The adjustments will be in force from today until 15 July.

Shangula said in recent weeks, health facilities, both public and private, have recorded the highest number of patients admitted in the country's history.

He said this has exerted tremendous pressure on the healthcare system, and mortuaries have reached their maximum capacity.

Shangula said funerals take place in different communities on a daily basis.

"As I always say, we do not want one funeral to breed more funerals," he said.

"Our healthcare workers are working long hours taking care of patients. This is true for all frontline workers in the national effort to combat Covid-19. I salute them for their commitment to duty and their selfless patriotic service," the minister said.
Tunis/Tunisia  "The government will work to gradually provide vaccines for 150 thousand citizens in the region of Beja, to get out of the difficult pandemic situation," said Minister of Trade and Export Development Mohamed Boussaid.

Boussaid said in a statement to TAP, during his visit to the governorate of Beja, that the current objective is to preserve the health system while waiting to develop the vaccination campaign.

He called on citizens to respect the health protocol, to register to the vaccination platform "Evax", and to respect the decisions taken by the Government.

The Minister said that there is continuous monitoring of health problems in the region, affirming that the health crisis will be alleviated after the completion of the COVID-19 centre at the Regional Hospital of Beja, and the installation of a field hospital, with a capacity of 80 beds, pending structural reforms to be introduced in the region.

For his part, Regional Director of Health in the region of Beja, Elyes Ammar explained the existence of a case of infection by the Delta variant of the coronavirus (Indian), by the dangerous pandemic indicators in the region of Beja.

The Minister of Trade and members of the regional commission for prevention and fight against disasters and the organisation of relief, visited the Regional Hospital of Beja to take note of the construction project of the COVID-19 department, whose cost amounts to 670 thousand dinars, as well as the room dedicated to the development of a field hospital.

He chaired the meeting of the Regional Commission for the Prevention and Fight against Disasters and the Organisation of Relief, and visited the two vaccination centres in the cities of Beja and Testour. The number of people who have been administered vaccinations in the region has reached 35 thousand citizens.
Tunis/Tunisia  MP Mabrouk Korchid, member of the parliamentary group "Watania" said Thursday he submitted his resignation from the Bureau of the House of People's Representatives (ARP) for "impossibility to perform my duty.

He called on parliament speaker Rached Ghannouchi to resign from his office to spare Tunisians "more misfortune and misery.

Korchid said he submitted, on Thursday morning, his resignation from the Bureau of the ARP after the adoption of the agreement on the opening of an office of the Qatari Fund for Development in Tunis "in a climate of violence and gross violation of law and national sovereignty. And "without any concern to defend the national interests," he regretted

The MP said in his letter of resignation he was unable to work in the Parliament's bureau after "the total breakdown of dialogue and despite numerous attempts to prioritise reason."

The parliament, on Wednesday evening, adopted the organic law on the approval of the seat agreement for hosting an office for the Qatar Fund for Development in Tunisia with 122 votes for, 12 against and one abstention.

The agreement between the Tunisian government and the Qatar Fund for development

was signed in June 2019.
The Gam House of Fashion on Saturday briefed journalists ahead of its forthcoming fashion night slated for 9th July 2021 at the Penchami hall.

The night will showcase new and creative materials as well as latest styles in the showbiz world.

Pa Momodou Sarr, programme coordinator of GAM House of Fashion, revealed that they will be donating a percentage of what is generated from the event to various hospitals.

Due to the complicated nature of maternal mortality in the country, Sarr explained the need for more investment in maternal health. This, he said, is the reason they intend to invest the proceeds gained from the fashion night towards supporting and saving mothers dying at childbirth.

"We feel that it is definitely incumbent upon us to also render our support to people. We also feel that when women deliver, their christening clothes is designed by tailors or designers." he added.

The CEO of MNJ Creation, Morr Ngeran said that the problem facing the country is lack of confidence in 'our people', indicating that Gambians tend to patronise foreign products than locally made ones.

Ngeran disclosed that it is high time 'we support our own', saying this has to be stopped even though the number has gone down.

Amat Sarr, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Amat's Creation called on Gambian media to beam more light on designers in the country to expose their talent to the wider world.

"We created this fashion night for the people engaged in fashion business especially the youth to showcase their talents. We didn't create this for competition, but till Gambians realise that, Gambians can also do it." he said

Talla Willam, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Ideal Mode.., one of the sponsors of the event, called on potentials sponsors to come on board and support the worthy cause.
opinion

Fellow Gambians,

It is high time that together we all loudly say enough is enough and Never Again to the chronically poor public utility services that have been plaguing our lives for decades now, and that like so many broken things in our society, seem to defy fixing by our governments. We must say Never Again to an electricity and water supply system that has remained dysfunctional and unstable for 49 years now, since 1972 when the Gambia Utilities Corporation Act created the GUC to supply electricity and water to the Gambian public. If Gambia was a child in 1972, we are a fully matured nation now, and we deserve power and water supply services befitting a mature and intelligent nation!

Year in year out, and especially these days, we have been tormented by lights suddenly and frequently going off in the middle of a hot day or night, in the middle of an important task that needs doing, or in the middle of a relaxing session that is suddenly replaced by mind-numbing darkness and heat that totally baffles our senses and induces a sense of frustration that can only be felt to be understood. We say Never Again to these persistent and frequent power cuts and blackouts that demoralize our spirits and stifle our determination to improve conditions in of our lives and our country. We must have stable electricity supply in this country and we must have it because we can have it with proper management of our resources and with absolute honesty in the use of public resources that, on paper, are routinely allocated to the production of this vital service!

We say Never Again to the tired excuse that lack of resources is the obstacle to the stabilization of our country's electricity and water supply system. How many millions if not billions of dollars have our governments acquired through loans and grants and tax payers monies and allocated to our public utility sector over the past forty-nine years? The figures would be baffling if we had them! And what do we have to show for such a massive allocation of public funds into this vitally important yet chronically dysfunctional sector of our national life? We must confront the fact that much of the funds allocated to this sector, like many other public sectors, have found their way into the personal accounts of public officials who have come to see public office as a means of fattening their personal accounts and who therefore have no compunction in doing the very least they could do with the funds to improve our public utility services and who would rather have us living in an unending era of blackouts and water shortages! We say Never Again to shying away from the ugly truths of why our institutions are not working in this country! We must consciously and practically take measured and intelligent action to put an end to those greedy habits and practices that cause us to fatten our own personal accounts at the expense of the national wellbeing! Such greedy habits pose an existential threat to our identity as a nation of dignified human beings and must be deliberately confronted, addressed, and neutralized for the betterment of our nation!

We say Never Again to the willful failure to explore other available options to end the very frustrating and depressing phenomenon of ever so frequent blackouts and the havoc they wreck on people's properties and on the minds and the morale of the Gambian people. Surely, there must be some other arrangements, some other ways of managing our power supply system to make sure that power cuts are as infrequent as they possibly could be? How about decentralizing the power grids, and having each area or couple of areas have their own supply point, rather than try to supply thousands of households and businesses from a few "power stations" with generators that were made decades ago? How about the solar option? How about privatization or partial privatization of the public utility sector if that's what it must take to solve the problem? If options have been on the table of the authorities, may the Gambian public know what these are and may we be able to consider one or a combination of them to solve this problem? Certainly, this problem does not defy ALL solutions! And if there is one solution available, it must be adopted and it must be made to work! Never Again to the defeatist and often self-interested attitudes that cause us to choose convenience over efficiency when it comes to doing the right thing by the Gambian people!

We say Never Again to the fact that during the rainy season, whenever rain is imminent, all lights are switched off! Anytime dark rain clouds gather, our power supply service decides to have us compete with the darkness of the clouds by plunging us all into darkness! We demand an explanation as to why this is the case in The Gambia. We know that rain and power supply are not necessarily incompatible and we have lived in or visited countries where the lights remain on during thunderstorms. So why do they always go off in this country as soon as the first thunder claps or the first lightning flashes? Is our system too weak to handle rain storms? Well if so, we must fix it! Or is it a case of saving some fuel for the banker? Or to avoid the inconvenience of having to go fix a broken pole or engine somewhere? Whatever the cause for these enervating blackouts during rain storms must be explained to the Gambian people and it must be resolved as a matter of national urgency! Never Again to keeping us both physically and mentally in the dark about why things happen the way they do! If frequent regimes of darkness and heat must be imposed on the people, the people must be told why it is necessary to do that! Never Again to unexplained issues of national concern, from thunderstorm blackouts to impromptu foreign service transfers!

We also say Never Again to chronic water shortages in the urban areas where ever so often, we hear residents of certain areas saying they had no water supply for days on end! There is no water for drinking and those who can afford it have to buy bottled water! What happens to those who can't afford to buy bottled drinking water in these areas? And there is no water for washing up, bathing or flushing their toilets for days on end! Never Again to the infliction of such indignities on the people of this country! And Never Again to the endless suffering of rural communities where hundreds of thousands of families live in perpetual heat and darkness and are forced to consume unhealthy water from wells or from the River Gambia. Access to clean drinking water is a right all Gambians must enjoy. And if we have to harvest and purify our abundant rain water to make this a reality, we must!

Our dismally poor public utility services aside, Gambians say Never Again to the increasingly frustrating traffic conditions on our roads and Never Again to the shameful conditions of our neighborhood streets all year round, but especially in the rainy seasons! It is mindboggling that a simple problem of supply and demand of cars and roads in the Greater Banjul Area defies solution by the Government of The Gambia. It should take even less than a lay economist to understand that we face these frustrating traffic conditions on our roads simply because more cars are being imported into this country while more roads to accommodate them are not being built! Development is nothing other than the capacity to adapt to the changes and challenges in our environment in ways that would allow the effective functioning of society. But as in many other areas of public service, our governments do not even seem to know what to do about the growing traffic frustrations afflicting our society!

We say Never Again to the fact that from day to day, it becomes more and more frustrating to drive from Point A to Point B on our roads, and from day to day, we see no action on the part of the relevant authorities to seriously address this problem! A drive that should take 10 to 15 minutes could now take up to an hour or more, while undisciplined motorists zoom at breakneck speeds on the sidewalks, where they shouldn't drive at all, illegally passing long queues of slow moving traffic, raising the public's blood pressure and often hitting cyclists and pedestrians! And the authorities watch as if they have no idea what to do! We must, as a matter of urgency, build more roads and pave our many feeder road networks in the Greater Banjul Area to reduce the stress-inducing traffic jams and rude driving habits that generate social hostility and are getting worse by the day. We know that the resources are available - both human and financial - to improve our road network in the Greater Banjul Area. What we lack is an innovative government with the honesty to do the needful and tap into our available resources to ease our agony and frustration over our road and street conditions!

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We are also saying Never Again to having to wade in dirty pools of muddy water on our streets every rainy season, year-in, year-out, and we are saying Never Again to the indignity of walking, riding and driving in the dusty craters and hills into which our streets are transformed during every dry season, year-in, year-out. As at the time of writing, we have had only two rainstorms so far, and our streets are already transformed into large pools of mud and dirty water in which we are forced to drive and ride and walk! This dignity-sapping mess must be corrected by the urgent paving of all major streets in the Greater Banjul Area! Surely if we can afford to invest in fleets of expensive vehicles for purposes of political campaigning or to embark on very expensive trips with large delegations to distant destinations for purposes of seeking aid, we can afford to build roads and streets befitting the human dignity of the Gambian people! Never Again to roads and streets that are inaccessible to persons with disability, dangerous for the elderly and demoralizing for the rest of the Gambian people!

We are saying Never Again to governments that cannot solve our basic traffic problems and will not build clean and paved streets in our towns and cities to enhance communication and safeguard the pride and dignity of the Gambian people. We must establish a government that will explore all possible options to make sure that our road network is widened and that every main street in our urban neighborhoods is paved within the shortest possible time. Here again, a rethinking of our budgetary priorities will yield the required funds, and we can use the abundant manpower of those of our unemployed youths who might be interested in such work to build our roads and streets. Surely, segments of the youthful population of this country may be willing to be recruited, trained, and provided with the resources they need to build their own neighborhood streets and help turn this country into the beautiful city state it deserves to be! Never Again to the politics of inaction, misaction and failure!

History Corner 1975: The year Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara brokered peace between Senegal and Guinea Conakry
The European Union (EU) through World Food Programme (WFP) on Wednesday presented automated weather stations worth about six million and six hundred thousand dalasis to The Gambia government.

The automated weather stations were presented to the government through the Ministry of Fisheries and Water Resources. The items will be installed at the Upper River, Central River, North Bank and Lower River regions. The items will improve weather services and weather critical operations in The Gambia as well ensure twenty-four monitoring, access and control of all sites.

The WFP was assigned to hand over the materials due to its continuous efforts on nationwide food distributions or the school feeding programmes.

Presenting the items at WFP head office in Kanifing, Yasuhiro Tsumura, WFP representative and country director, acknowledged that The Gambia is vulnerable to seasonal shocks and natural disasters exacerbated by the climate changes such as floods, windstorm, droughts irregular rainfall patterns and wildfires among others.

These disasters and shocks, he said, affect people's lives and livelihoods damaging their assets and farmlands, deteriorating food insecurity as well increasing malnutrition in the short and long term.

"Managing these disasters and shocks and building the resilience of households, communities and the country is the key in our efforts to achieve zero hunger. These automatic weather stations will further enhance the weather forecast capacities of the government." he said.

Mr. Tsumura said every country should invest in disaster risk management, especially on monitoring disaster risks and disseminating early warning signs to ensure effective and timely response to disasters.

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"An early action and flood response based on a seasonal forecast in West and Central Africa cost 30% less than a flood response alone. A 2015 joint UN study on return of investment suggested that increased investment in early preparedness could reduce the costs of humanitarian response by more than 50 percent," he noted.

He, however, outlined that 'if authorities are prepared and intervene earlier,' it costs much less and obviously saves more lives.

For his part, James F. P. Gomez, Minister of Fisheries, Water Resources and National Assembly matters expressed gratitude to EU for funding the project, and WFP and UN systems for supporting the implementation of the project.

"The automated weather stations will surely, in no measurable amount, increase the capacity of my staff in monitoring and forecasting weather and climate," he said.

The provision of these items, he added, would enable his Ministry to increase accuracy of forecasts and monitoring of weather issues to make sure Gambians are safer and better informed.

Gam House of Fashion briefs media / Gam House of Fashion night slated
Tunis/Tunisia  CEO of the Export Promotion Centre (CEPEX) Chiheb Ben Ahmed met on Thursday morning European Union Ambassador in Tunis Marcus Cornaro.

The meeting fits into the efforts made by both institutions to give a new boost to the Tunisian-European partnership, especially after Covid reshaped business practices, particularly at the international level, the CEPEX said.

Ben Ahmed discussed with his host areas of cooperation with the European Union delegation in Tunisia. These areas concern joint projects aimed at closely supporting the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and upgrading them in the entire value chain, to better meet the new requirements of international markets in terms of adoption of the provisions of the green economy, the circular economy, the excessive digitalisation and finally to better prepare to seize the opportunities offered by European countries which will now favour nearshoring and short supply circuits.

To this end, the two sides discussed the Insadder programme, implemented by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which aims, in particular, to support a pool of 100 Tunisian exporting companies both upstream - operational support and financing of certifications - and downstream, by prospecting for markets and developing products through marketing and promotion.

The two parties agreed to draw up a joint action plan which stipulates collaborative axes for more effective and relevant support for the private sector in its quest for export markets.
Tunis/Tunisia  The "CREATIVE HUB", a professional group of the Tunisian Confederation of Citizen Enterprises (CONECT), which hosts Tunisian creative and digital technology entrepreneurs, announced on Thursday that two of its members, "DESIGN LAB" and "MORBIKET", are the winners of the first African Challenge for cultural and creative industries.

This programme was initiated as part of the Africa 2020 Season in France, by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux (CMN) with the support of the French Development Agency (AFD ), the French Institute and Africa in Colours.

These African start-ups will benefit from unique support during one year, thanks to which they will be able to test their projects in the monuments of the CMN and take advantage of this world-renowned expertise.

They will also have the opportunity to develop their offer on the French cultural market.

The CREATIVE HUB affirms that "the Tunisian triumph is total since another Tunisian startup, EDUC'ART, is among the winners", underlining that "this award and this international recognition honour the daily work of the Tunisian digital creative startups and of the CREATIVE HUB, which make our country one of the most creative and innovative on the African continent, in one of the key sectors of the industry of the future".

There were initially 362 startups, and the final four included 9 startups from Tunisia, 1 from Senegal, 1 from Mali, 2 from Ivory Coast, 1 from South Africa, 1 from Togo, and 1 from DRC. In addition, among the 16 finalists, there were 12 women, CONECT said.

The winners are:

DESIGN LAB highlights monuments, using new digital techniques, including video mapping.

EDUC'ART, which develops eco-responsible construction games enriched with educational and fun content in augmented reality.

MORBIKET, which produces digital content to animate, in augmented reality, paper media for young audiences.
Tunis/Tunisia  The Tunisian League of Human Rights (LTDH) called on the Public Prosecutor and the Minister of Women, Family and Seniors to take the necessary legal measures following the physical assault on MP Abir Moussi (bloc of the Free Destourian Party) by MP Sahbi Smara (unaffiliated).

The league also denounces "inappropriate gestures" and "that undermine her dignity" from Seifeddine Makhlouf (Al Karama coalition bloc).

After viewing the incident, the league said Thursday in a statement the assault on Abir Moussi reflects the prevalence of the sexist mentality linked to the extremist Salafist currents that permanently transgress human values.

The LTDH, in this context, condemned violence in all its forms and especially violence against women, saying the acts of Smara and Makhlouf "constitute an assault on all Tunisian women and a violation of the principles of human rights in their entirety.

The LTDH called on civil society to come up with a common position aimed at preserving human rights and to take all legal measures against any violation of women's rights in general.

Abir Moussi was violently assaulted by MPs Sahbi Smara and Seifeddine Makhlouf at a plenary session dedicated to the review of a number of bills. She was protesting with members of her bloc the review of the draft law on the seat agreement between the Tunisian government and the Qatar Fund for Development.
The President of the Republic, H.E. Dr. George Manneh Weah has expressed profound gratitude to the government and people of France for the country's continued support to Liberia's development drive, especially in the areas of capacity building, infrastructure development and sports.

The Liberian Leader made the remarks during a special bilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris on Thursday, July 1, 2021.

President Weah also expressed appreciation for President Macron's "gracious support" towards Liberia's engagements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which he said has greatly contributed to the improved fiscal and monetary policy implementation and efficiency the country now experiences.

He informed his French counterpart that his Administration continues to work in close collaboration with these international financial institutions, "which sometimes require the formulation of difficult policies, such as the Salary Harmonization Policy". But he said the policies have been required to make the "necessary corrective measures and structural adjustments" for the good of the Liberian economy.

President Weah called for the continuation of the Franco-Liberia relationship, including the strengthening of collaboration between the French Military and the Armed Forces of Liberia on the Malian peacekeeping mission. "In this regard", he said, "it is important to note that the Liberian contingent has now been tasked with providing Base Security for the Timbuktu outpost and, as such, more modern equipment and logistics are urgently needed."

The Liberian Leader enumerated the many other support the French government has rendered to Liberia in recent months, including funding for capacity development, sports, the resumption of flight by Air France, the construction of a new building for Alliance Francaise Institute, and the increase in activities by French businesses and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs).

Regarding ongoing efforts by the Liberian government to curb further spread of COVID, President Weah thanked President Macron and the Government and People of France for "generously providing" a number of ventilators and several thousands of testing kits. He told his counterpart that Liberia would need millions of additional doses of COVID-19 vaccines to help fight the spread of the virus.

For his part, President Emmanuel Macron assured President Weah of his unflinching support towards the Liberian government's efforts to improving the lives of its people.

During the hour-long meeting, Macron said his country's support to Liberia will be tangible so that it is felt by the citizens directly.

Macron said in addition to his country's efforts at capacity building and youth development, additional urban projects will be undertaken by the Agency for French Development totaling an initial amount of 23 million euros.

He assured the Liberia Leader that this assistance will be immediate.

President Macron also informed President Weah that his country will make an immediate donation of some 40, 000 test kits and several respirators. He said France will increase its quota to the COVAX structure, while ensuring that "Liberia directly benefits and have its population vaccinated".

He highlighted the strong historical ties between both nations, saying that both leaders ought to work harder in order to ensure the relationship yield tangible mutual benefits.

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The talks covered a wide range of issues, including French support to the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) in order to enhance its ability to perform its service in Mali. The French President also promised more logistical support and training for the AFL and further cooperation in the area of information exchange.

The discussions also covered the issue of Piracy in the Gulf Guinea and the need for both nations to cooperate in order to halt the menace. The French government promised more equipment and training for the Liberian Coast Guards. The French Navy will study the option of having its Frigates participate in the fight against piracy in order to ensure that vital maritime commerce is carried out unhindered.

Foreign Minister Dee-Maxwell Kemayah, Defense Minister Daniel Ziankahn and Maritime Commissioner Lenn Eugene Nagbe formed part of the discussions which were followed by a closed door tete a tete between the two leaders.
THE High Court, Kigoma District Registry has endorsed the government's decision to unseat Mr Ezekiel Mshingo as councillor for Kagera-Nkanda Ward in Kasuru District, Kigoma Region through CCM ticket for allegedly being a Rwandan.

Judge Athumani Matuma ruled against Mr Mshingo, the applicant, after dismissing his application for prerogative orders of certiorari (to quash a decision given by an authority) and prohibition against five respondents, including the National Election Commission (NEC).

"In that respect my previous order dated April 28, 2021 restraining the respondents from continuing with the by-election process has come to an end today and they can justifiably continue as such," he said in his ruling dated June 28, 2021.

Other respondents in the matter were the Minister Responsible for Regional Administration and Local Government, the Permanent Secretary Ministry Responsible for Regional Administration and Local Government, the District Executive Director (DED) for Kasulu District and the Attorney General (AG).

The judge pointed out that the applicant's citizenship was dealt with by the immigration authority which finally concluded that he was a non-citizen, a Rwandan.

"It was the immigration who inquired for the citizenship of the applicant and he himself has not disputed to have been examined on his citizenship except that he alleges to have been so inquired at the District level only," he said.

Under the circumstances, it was the position of the court that the Permanent Secretary acted on the advice of the relevant authority responsible for citizenship affairs to direct the DED to inform the applicant of his political status and call for the NEC to fill in the vacant seat.

He said that since the immigration authority and the Ministry for Home Affairs who worked on the applicant's nationality status and finally declared him a noncitizen are not parties to the application, their findings in relation to the citizenship status of the applicant could not be disturbed nor challenged.

According to him, the applicant was aware that his citizenship was queried and admitted so through his counsel to have been summoned by the immigration authority at the District level.

"When he was informed by DED that his councilor seat was vacant by reason of nationality, he ought to have made a follow up of the decision and challenge such nationality findings before protesting for his councillorship as nationality is the primary qualification for a political position," the judge said.

"(This is) for obvious reason that under section 39(2) (a) of the Local Government (Elections) Act, one is not qualified for election in the local authority unless satisfies that he is a citizen of the United Republic of Tanzania," the judge added.

He pointed out that being a councilor or having been at one time a councilor or having held any political position in the United Republic and the fact that the applicant is a holder of the certificate of birth and Citizenship National Identification Card were all irrelevant in the instant matter.

This is because, the judge said, before him there was not a citizenship or immigration dispute but an application relating to cancellation of Councillorship and an election process for fulfilling the stated vacant seat. That is why, he said, the relevant authorities relating to citizenship affairs have not been made parties to contest against the applicant's citizenship, nor the relevant law relating to the immigration disputes were cited to that effect.

"I am therefore not better positioned to declare the applicant a citizen or national of Tanzania so that I can rule out that he is still a valid councilor. Likewise, I am not better positioned to declare him an non-citizen because the relevant parties are not before me," the judge said.

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He pointed out that the applicant's citizen status remained as decided administratively by the relevant authorities unless properly challenged and determined and he was at liberty to challenge such decision in accordance with the law and not through the application in question.

Facts show that the applicant was a councilor elected for Kagera-Nkanda Ward within Kasuru District in Kigoma Region during the 2020 general election. He was however on April 14, 2021 informed by the DED that his councilor seat was declared vacant by reason of citizenship as declared by the Permanent Secretary after having been informed that the applicant was a non-citizen.

In that respect the NEC was also informed as such and started the election process to fill in the vacant seat, an act which aggrieved the applicant and decided to file the application in question.
The East African Community (EAC) will this financial year prioritise harmonisation of air charges and taxes in a bid to reduce the cost of intra-EAC air travel, according to Mr Adan Mohamed, the Council of Ministers chairperson.

While reading the EAC 2021/22 budget, Mr Mohamed, who is also Kenya's Minister for EAC, said the civil aviation and airports sub-sector, although there has been some delays, will focus on implementation of the EAC Upper Airspace Seamless Operations earmarked under the 2017-22 project.

During this financial year, he said, the region will implement strategies that seek to reduce the cost of intra-EAC air tickets and air operations.

This, Mr Mohamed noted, will be achieved through harmonisation of air travel related charges and tax regimes, which feed into the price of air travel.

EAC has one of the most expensive flight routes, with Entebbe-Nairobi taking the lead.

However, despite the high cost, air travel within East Africa has been growing, rising by 3.4 per cent in the past decade against a global rate of 5.5 per cent.

It is estimated that 43 per cent of air ticket prices in EAC comprise of regulatory charges and taxes, with regulatory fees accounting for up to 24 per cent.

According to a research commissioned by the East African Business Council about air liberalisation, it was found that harmonisation could lead to a reduction in air fares by 9 per cent.

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The reduction, the report noted, would lead to a 41 per cent increase in frequencies, which in turn will stimulate passenger demand.

Mr Mohamed said to achieve this, EAC states must commit to implement the Yamoussoukro Decision as part of the Common Market Protocol, which is in line with efforts by the African Union Commission and the African Civil Aviation Commission to operationalise the Single African Air Transport Market.

Responding to the planned harmonisation, Captain Francis Babu, a renowned aviation expert, said regional flights should be considered as domestic, with an opportunity to be given particular subsidies.

Captain Babu also noted that all countries within the region institute different taxes on air ticket, noting there was need to standardise all these into one tax payable at a single port.

Expensive

According to Captain Babu, between Entebbe and Nairobi a ticket goes for an average of $380 (Shs1.3m) while between Entebbe and Dar es Salaam a flight costs between $400 and $500 (Shs1.4m and Shs1.7m) for economy class, which is slightly expensive for an ordinary traveler.
Finance Minister Matia Kasaija has started getting concerned due to the rapid surge in debt levels which has now surpassed the 50 per cent threshold to gross domestic product.

Uganda has heavily borrowed in the just concluded financial year to shore up budget shortages and Covid-19 related expenses, pushing debt levels above the 50 per cent safety valve.

Public debt to gross domestic product, according to Ministry of Finance, will in the 2021/22 financial year rise to 51.9 per cent.

Speaking during a press briefing in Kampala early this week, Mr Kasaija said he was particularly uncomfortable with the current public debt levels, noting that government would, going forward, be extremely cautious on acquiring new debt.

"We are at a level which makes me uncomfortable. Once you see you have gone beyond 50 per cent, it requires one to be concerned. So we are conscious and extremely concerned about our public debt," he said, noting money to handle crises such as Covid-19 would be mobilised through budget cuts, especially to non-essential services such as travel, conferences and accommodation, among others.

In his report to Parliament recently about Uganda's debt stock, Mr Kasaija said as of December 2020, total debt stock was $17.96b (equivalent to Shs65.83 trillion), indicating an increase from $13.3b (equivalent to Shs49.0 trillion) as of December 2019.

Out of the $17.96b, external debt constituted a share of 64.98 per cent or $11.67b (Shs42.6 trillion) while domestic debt constituted 35.02 per cent or $6.29b (Shs22.9 trillion).

The increase, Mr Kasaija said, was on account of increased external and domestic borrowing to mitigate the socio-economic impact of Covid-19.

Debt levels have been rising since 2019 increasing from 38 per cent to 41 per cent as of June 2020, before shooting to 47.2 per cent as of December 2020.

Experts have previously warned of rising public debt even as government has continuously insisted that the levels were within a manageable limit.

However, an increase in a number of vulnerabilities key among them reduction in domestic revenue collections, falling export receipts and the ongoing Covid-19 crisis have exposed Uganda to massive borrowing thus threatening debt sustainability.

During the 2020/21 financial year domestic debt stood at $6.29b (Shs22.96 trillion), an increase from $4.74b (Shs17.38 trillion) in December 2019.

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This was mainly comprised of short term and long term borrowing and direct commercial bank borrowing from the domestic market.

As of December 2020 external debt stood at $11.67b (Shs42.79 trillion), an increase from $8.59b (Shs31.49 trillion) in December 2019, which represents an increase of $3.08b.

However, according to Mr Kasaija debt, despite the current surge, is projected to reduce on account of increased domestic revenue as government implements the Domestic Revenue Mobilisation Strategy, which targets to increase domestic revenue by 0.5 percentage points per annum.

Creditor type and stock

Major Multilaterals- $5.73b

Other Multilaterals- $1.61b

Bilaterals- $3.44b

Commercial banks- $0.89b

Total- $11.67b
President Adama Barrow has inaugurated a new Embassy and Ambassador's Residence complex on June 28th 2021, at the Diplomatic Quarters (DQ) in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Speaking at the inauguration, President Barrow said he is proud that the Government of The Gambia undertook to fully fund the construction of the beautiful edifice, to provide a conducive and secure office and residence for the Embassy and Ambassador.

"Even though it took seven years to accomplish the project, it is a more sustainable arrangement and a model that could save the country annual rent payments of up to one hundred thousand US Dollars ($100,000). Indeed, it was worth investing over four million US Dollars to own this magnificent building and its furniture," he revealed.

President Barrow expressed his deep appreciation and thanks "to the custodian of the two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, and His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud (May Allah preserve them), for the kind invitation for me and my delegation to visit The Holy Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."

He said bearing in mind that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to claim lives, disrupt social life and devastate economies throughout the world, extending an invitation to an open event of this nature in any part of the world, is certainly not an easy decision to make; that this is no doubt a testimony of a very solid and close fraternal relation between the Governments and peoples of 'our' two countries.

"The Custodian of the two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, will be pleased to learn that in compliance with the Kingdom's directives for all Diplomatic Missions to relocate to a more secure and conducive environment, the plot of land he allocated to The Republic of The Gambia in 1989 for this project when he was Governor of Riyadh, has been gainfully utilised and developed successfully during his leadership as King of this noble and friendly nation," he said.

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Barrow said the structures are impressively beautiful and solid and aptly reflect and symbolise the excellent bilateral relations and cordial bonds that exist between the Governments and Peoples of The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and The Republic of The Gambia.

"I congratulate the Ambassador and staff most heartily on this laudable achievement. In May 2017, I visited the project when it was at the initial stages, and have since been requesting for updates periodically from the Ambassador," he said.

Barrow advised that good care be taken for the upkeep and maintenance of the buildings and all the equipment and facilities therein to safeguard and preserve the value of these precious Government assets.

"The structures can certainly serve as a model for replication in other Diplomatic Missions abroad. I will encourage the Ministry of Finance to emulate this positive example to construct other embassy offices and residences in countries where we have landed property, such as Senegal, Sierra Leone and Nigeria," he said.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has organized two days of training on trafficking in persons for Officers of the Tourism Security Unit, with a view to support national efforts to combat this phenomenon in the country.

The training which is funded by the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (J/TIP) of the Government of the United States, aims to advance counter-trafficking efforts especially in areas with high tourism.

The ongoing training which is held at a local Hotel at Senegambia from the 28th to 29th June 2021, is in partnership with the Gambia Tourism Board (GT Board), coordinated by the National Agency Against Trafficking in Person (NAATIP).

Stepen Matete, IOM's Program Officer said trafficking in persons is a serious crime and a grave violation of human rights.

"Every year, thousands of men, women and children fall into the hands of traffickers in their own countries and across borders," he remarked; that almost every country in the world with the Gambia included, is affected by trafficking whether as a country of origin, transit, or destination; that the Gambia exhibits three enlisted elements as a source, transit point and destination for victims of trafficking.

Mr. Matete noted that inter-connectedness that brings people closer and of which tourism and travel are integrally part of, is also extremely vulnerable to the predations of organized criminal syndicates who want to benefit from the clandestine criminal business of human trafficking.

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Ousman G.A. Kebbeh, Manager, Public Relations and Communication at the GT Board, said the training will help them as officers, to bring traffickers to justice.

"Working with NAATIP, Gambia Police Force and the prosecution Unit and with all the evidence available, will help in convicting offenders. We will continue to work with NAATIP, IOM and all stakeholders to fight against criminals who are engaged in trafficking in persons," he said.

Tulai Jawara, the Executive Director for NAATIP, said trafficking in persons is a difficult task which demands for law enforcement officers especially the tourism security unit, to properly identify the problem and punish offenders. She said trafficking in persons comes in different forms such as forced labour, child labour, domestic servitude, sexual slavery, amongst other; that the most two common forms of trafficking in persons in the Gambia is Gambians going to Middle East to work as domestic servants, and reported cases of Nigerian nationals coming into the Gambia to work as sex workers after being deceived by the traffickers.

While urging for concerted efforts to fight and eradicate the menace of modern-day slavery, Ms. Jawara called on the tourism security unit to properly identify the problem, be vigilant and help the victims particularly children.
The Nation Council for Civic Education (NCCE) has organized a national dialogue among security forces, youth, media and other stakeholders, to discuss peace and security challenges relating to elections. The objective of the engagement is to enhance mutual understanding and foster collaboration among the security services, youth, political actors and the media fraternity.

During the dialogue, the NCCE considered the possible challenges and threats to peace and security before, during and after the December 4th 2021 elections in the country, in a bid to combat these challenges.

Themed on "Building Cordial Relation Among Stakeholders to Preserve National Security in the 2021 Presidential Elections and Beyond", the event aims to promote the fundamentals of democracy, good governance, respect for the rule of law, fundamental rights and freedoms and the maintenance of peace and stability.

Alhagie Sering Fye, Chairperson of the NCCE, said every citizen has a role to play in the maintenance of peace and promoting the country's democratic credentials.

Mr. Fye said stakeholders need to step up to tackle the use of abusive language, provocative actions, intimidation and confrontations during public discourse and in the media. He said the dialogue will create a platform for stakeholders to freely discuss peace and security challenges relating to elections.

"I would like to express our commitment as NCCE to continue facilitating dialogues of this nature to build harmony among all relevant stakeholders," he said.

Halifa Sallah, Co-Chairperson of the Inter-Party Committee (IPC) said the education that the people should receive is to know that they are the only majority constituent of the country. He said the engagement is to interrogate the past and present in order to shape the future. Sallah said in the 2016 elections, it was the Gambian people who saved themselves and should be proud of themselves for this.

"The 2016 election cannot be compared to the one in 2021. Those who are afraid to face their past, future or present cannot be the architects of their own destiny. This country cannot afford Gambians fighting each other because we will lose our country in doing so," he said.

The renowned politician outlined that political parties are the custodians of the political process and the IEC is the guardian of political parties and the NCCE is the interlocutor that should enable the nation to ensure electoral and constitutional legitimacy.

Alieu Momarr Njai, Chairperson of the IEC, said the Commission is committed to conducting an all-inclusive and peaceful electoral activity for the 2021 election.

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"It is incumbent on all to nurture, preach and practice peace at all times, in the build up to the 2021 elections and beyond," he said.

Alagie Jarju, Executive Director of the National Youth Council, said young people cannot be left behind in such discussions as they constitute the majority of the population. He said young people are victims and perpetrators of any violence in the country.

"Young people's vision of peace and security should be recognized and this can be in such forums as they will be part and parcel of the discussion," he said.

Jarju urged for youth participation in the resolution of peace and security.

Other speakers at the meeting were Musa Balajo, a representative from ECOWAS and Kunle Adeniyi, UNFPA country representative, both of whom talked about the participation of women and young people in peace building, security and in election matters. The dialogue was supported by the United Nations Fund for Population Affairs (UNFPA).
Miamuna Sidibeh, the Principal Program Officer of UNESCO-NATCOM, has disclosed that limited awareness and low literacy rate among women and youth, continues to impede climate change awareness and resilience in the Gambia.

According to Ms. Sidibeh, these shortfalls coupled with other factors such as limited information sharing, continues to worsen people's response to climate change in the Gambia Ms. Sidibeh made these and other assertions during a two-day sensitization workshop on climate change legislation dubbed: "UNESCO Participation Program 2020-2021", project.

The project targets women and youth since they constitute the most active part of the population which can impact efforts on climate change adaptation and mitigation. Sidibeh said women in particular are the most interactive group of Gambia's productive sector and the environment.

"The Covid-19 pandemic which has spread across the planet in 2020, is not only a global health crisis, but one that has affected every aspect of our lives, and one that has revealed the fragility of our interdependence with nature," she remarked; that as forests are destroyed, not only are wild animals endangered and ecosystems weakened, but humans become exposed to unknown infectious agents that can threaten their lives.

"The current climate emergency and other environmental sustainability crises are the product of human behavior. The collective activities of human beings have altered the earth's ecosystem to the extent that our very survival is threatened," she said; that the change is becoming more rapid, dramatic, visible and difficult to reverse every day.

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"Two-thirds of the 1 degree Celsius global temperature increase in the past 100 years has occurred since 1975, while the amount of renewable and non-renewable resources yearly extracted globally, has doubled," she said.

This she said is clearly evident that unprecedented and dramatic changes are taking place and that humankind is directly responsible.

Dr. Dawda Badjie, Deputy Executive Director from the National Environment Agency (NEA), said whatever is done to address the issue of climate change in the country, cannot be overemphasized.

"Climate change is a global challenge of which the Gambia is no exception. The impact of climate change is felt all over the world and the Gambia is no exception," he said.

Badjie said it is important to know that the issue of climate change is a challenge for humankind and most of the problems associated with it are done by people.

Accordingly, they said the project will focus on sensitizing women and youth on the reality of climate change by using scientific evidence backed by the presence of the current physical environment in comparison to the past in relation to agriculture productivity and other factors that have direct effect on climate change.
The European Union together with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), on Tuesday 29th June 2021 donated life-saving equipment to the Ministry of Health.

Isabell Blochl, Charge d'Affaires of the German Embassy in the Gambia, said since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, both the European Union and the German Government have made extra funds available for regional and national responses, as contribution to the ECOWAS/WAHO emergency fund.

She said the Regional Program Support to Pandemic Prevention in the ECOWAS Region (RPPP) has been provided with EUR 10 million as support to response activities.

"As the recent Ebola outbreak in Guinea showed, effectively managing outbreaks of infectious disease is one of the great challenges of our time. These can only be solved collectively across nations, sectors and disciplines because infectious diseases know no borders. In the ECOWAS region, the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), has been active in supporting pandemic prevention measures since 2016, with the establishment of the Regional Program Support to Pandemic Prevention in the ECOWAS Region (RPPP). These support is aimed to build capacity for infectious disease outbreak prevention and response with the regional public health institutions and the corresponding entities in the 15 member states, by focusing on integrating the best health approaches in all support measures," she said.

"When the German Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development Dr. Gerd Muller visited the Gambia two weeks ago, he announced that the German Government will deploy further support to ECOWAS efforts to combat COVID-19 in the country," she said; that Dr. Gerd Muller pledged an additional 10 million EUR for technical assistance activities and support for the procurement of goods, especially laboratory equipment and training of health workers; that Germany supports African partner countries in mitigating the effects of the CoVID-19 pandemic, but is already focusing on pandemic prevention (preventing and combating new pandemics), saying it is important to act now to prevent new pandemics and crises.

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"There will be a second mission of the German Pandemic Preparedness Team (SEEG) later this year that will focus on laboratory and epidemiological capacity building as a follow-up to the first mission this month. We are convinced that with this support of our technical experts and our contributions through ECOWAS and the West African Health Organization, The Gambia will not only be better prepared for the continued fight against COVID-19, but will be better prepared for other outbreaks of infectious diseases in the future," she noted.

Dr. Ahmad Lamin Samateh, the Minister of Health who received the donated items on behalf of Government said the materials donated will help strengthen his Ministry.

"Looking at the items donated, they are not only life-saving equipment, but will also help health workers in their strife to provide health care services to patients," he said.

Dr. Samateh said since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the Gambia Government has received lots of assistance from outside which helps the Government in its strife to better the health sector.
The Gambia Revenue Authority (GRA) on Tuesday awarded four of its retired staff with certificates, cash and gifts, in honor of their services to the institution and the nation.

The retired staff who had served the institution for years, are Musa Touray, Customs Cadet Guard, Modou KF Ceesay, Assistant Senior Driver, Fansu Dibba, Senior Guard, and Yahya MK Joof, Deputy Driver.

GRA's Commissioner General (CG) Yankuba Darboe, expressed appreciation for working with the said retired staff over years with less difficulty and described them as hard working, dedicated and focused in their work.

"You are retired in active services but you are still part of the GRA family, your retirement is not the end of our relationship, GRA is always open for you. Anytime you need anything contact us because GRA is your home," he told the staff during the award ceremony held at GRA conference hall in Banjul.

Darboe said every worker is praying to witness such a day because people die before their retirement period. Thus, he thanked the outgoing staff for their achievements for serving the Authority and the entire Nation.

Speaking on behalf of the retirees, Fansu Dibba returned gratitude to management of GRA for honoring their retirement by giving them certificates and other gifts in recognition of their services to the call of duties.

He said during their tenure in office, the staff were supportive, cooperative and had good relationships. Dibba promised to continue the cordial relationship that existed between them.

Other speakers at the event included Joseph Njie, Commissioner of Customs at GRA, and Alhaji Saihou, Denton Director of Finance GRA. Both thanked the retirees for the services they rendered to the authority over the years and assured them that GRA's doors are always open for them and pray for their long lives.
Members of the National Assembly on Tuesday 29th June 2021, considered the persons with disability bill 2021. The bill inter alia seeks to safeguard persons with disability against stigma and discrimination and seeks to safeguard persons with disability against exploitation and as well as provide access to physical environment, training and employment, and access to services provided by the public body.

The bill in Clause 37 indicates that any person who denies a person with disability in respect to right to care services has committed an offence. The bill in Clause 30 advocates for the prevention of persons with disability against matters such as road safety and in Clause 31, it provides measures of rehabilitation of persons with disability.

It also advocates in Clause 32 for vocational rehabilitation and employment of persons with disability, and in Clause 33, it provides for education, especially the provision of assistive services during exams by the Government and their training as well.

Clause 34 prohibits discrimination in learning institutions and services against person with disabilities, while Clause 36 aims to provide employment for person with disability and that the position of the Executive Secretary be changed to Director and Clause 37 provides to safeguard continuation of employment for person with disabilities at work place.

In Clause 38, the bill provides for the prohibition of termination of employment of person with disability, and that any employer who discriminates against a person with disability, in relation to his or her disability, unless the employer can provide proofs, or otherwise would amount to an offence on conviction to fine of D100, 000.

Clause 38 (A) seeks to give persons with disability recognition in bidding for the advertisement in public and private sector jobs.

Clause 39 provides for access to work places and environment, as well as mandates every employer to provide effective general and technical guidance and continuing career development and advancement for persons with disability.

The bill also prohibits against discriminatory medical examinations against persons with disability in Clause 40, and an employer shall not discriminate against general employees in Clause 41.

In Clause 44, persons with disability shall be entitled to barrier free and shall be entitled to access to the physical environment, access to services provided by the public body in Clause 45, access to information in Clause 46, and access to public transport facilities in Clause 47.

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Clause 60 guarantees access to justice and Clause 61 guarantees the enjoyment of freedoms and human rights by persons with disability.

Clause 67 of the bill makes it mandatory for the government to prohibit and criminalize all forms of abuse and harmful practices targeted at persons with disability.

The bill also aims to complement Section 31 of the 1997 constitution which reads:

1) The right of the disabled and handicapped to respect and human dignity shall be recognized by the state and society;

2) Disabled persons shall be entitled to protection against exploitation and protection discrimination, in particular as regards access to health services, education and employment, and

3) In any judicial proceedings in which a disabled person is a party, the procedure shall take his or her condition into account.

Meanwhile, the Persons with Disability Bill 2021 has successfully gone through the first and second reading as well as consideration stages of the Assembly, and it now awaits a third reading scheduled as part of the current session, for legislative adoption.
THE Windhoek municipality last week approved a proposal to provide land for the construction of a new power substation which will address the city's electricity needs beyond 2024.

The planned substation, to cost the municipality more than N$208 million, will be an addition to the Van Eck substation located at the Northern Industrial Area, managed by the Namibia Power Corporation (NamPower).

Documents submitted to last week's Windhoek monthly council meeting state the municipality anticipates its demand for electricity will exceed the Van Eck substation's capacity by 2024, which can no longer be upgraded as it has reached its full potential.

According to the documents, the proposed substation, to be known as the Khomas Intake substation, will have a capacity of 90 megavolt ampere (MVA).

It will therefore be added to the existing power line to support the anticipated demand for electricity.

Land - a portion of Farm 508, Havana - has already been identified for the proposed project, and NamPower will develop the new substation.

Windhoek will contribute a total of N$208 million to the development of this project.

Council documents show that the municipality has already paid N$72 million to NamPower in 2017 to start with the project.

An additional N$135 million is yet to be secured from financial institutions to fund the project, the document states.

The amount NamPower will contribute to the proposed project is not revealed in council documents.

At last week's council meeting, the municipality approved a proposal to sign a lease agreement with NamPower for the land on which the proposed project would be developed.

"In order for NamPower to take occupation of the identified site and start with the construction of the substation, they will pay the city a lease amount of N$1,00 per month until all legalities around the transfer of the site are concluded. Ownership of the site will eventually transfer to NamPower at no cost," the document states.
Samuel Stryker Funeral Parlor, a renowned funeral home in Liberia has been shut down failing to follow health protocol.

The actions was perfected on Thursday, July 1, 2021 by the joint Security, in continuation of its zero tolerance enforcement of COVID-19 measures announced by the Ministry of Health.

A release from Police Inspector General, Patrick Sudue said; "while routine patrol was ongoing by members of the Joint Security, it was observed that the funeral home was conducting a funeral service with over fifty (50) persons in attendance which violates government's 20 persons mandate for those converging in public places including funeral homes."

The release further quotes the IG Sudue as saying that the funeral home will remain closed to the public until a fine of Two Hundred United States Dollars (US$200) is paid in government's revenue as per the health protocol.

The health protocols of Liberia state that a person should be fined two hundred united states dollars and or served a prison term of not later than thirty days.

At the same time, Col. Sudue warned that the LNP will leave no stone unturned in ensuring the full implementation of the COVID-19 restrictions as announced by the Ministry of Health are followed.

He urged school administrators, religious leaders, motorists, passengers, and pedestrians to take serious the measures announced by the Ministry of Health, adding that the Joint Security will remain very robust in ensuring compliance of the health protocols.

The parlor is one of many the areas that government takes people who expired. Moreover, it provides services to many people both at home and abroad. It is not known how many corpses are there.
-Says Defeated Rep. Candidate Harris

Tuesday, June 29, 2021 was another scene of action at the Liberian Legislature when some citizens gathered to ask their lawmakers to restitute the sum US$15,000 each they received recently.

The citizens went at the Capitol Building under a banner, "Return the 15k."

The group of Liberians carried placards with the names and numbers of Sen. Saah Joseph, Sen. Darius Dillon, Rep. Thomas Fallah, Rep. Dixson Sebo, Rep. Edward Flomo and all other lawmakers who have a share of the "controversial amount" calling on them to have the money returned.

Defected Mont. County District #9 Representative Candidate Fubbi Henries said, "We will give their numbers and emails addresses to the public. They will receive calls and emails from the public."

According to him, they will consistently embarrass their lawmakers to ensure that the issue of the money does not die like other issues in Liberia.

He said, "We will not rest until every lawmaker returns the US$15K to the Liberian people."

Reasons for which the group of Liberians are demanding for the money in question according to them currently is that Liberia is undergoing serious economic and health threats. At such, they said, it is unfair for lawmakers to reward themselves with this huge amount.

While gathering at the grounds of the Capitol, they were heard saying, "Legislators must return the Liberian peoples' money."

They went on chanting, "The Lawmakers must return the Liberian peoples' US$15,000".

According to the protesters, the amount each collected in the name of Legislative Engagements could be directed to improving the health sector of the country."

Liberian lawmakers each received the sum of US$15,000 as part payment of a total of US$30,000 to each lawmaker under a line they themselves placed in the National Budget titled," Legislative Engagement."

But since the lawmakers started receiving the money early June, there has been public outcry that the people they elected as their direct representatives, do not have feelings for the ordinary Liberians.

Many Liberian see their lawmakers' action "broad day witch" being performed by the lawmakers.

Some who called on radio, expressed regrets for voting for some of those lawmakers who they felt would have liberated them of what has been happening at the Liberian Legislature.

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AB.Dillon Factor

When the money was received, few lawmakers including Bong County Senators Prince K Moye, Henrique Togbah and Montserrado County Senator Abraham Darius Dillon took to their facebook pages informing Liberians that they received said amount for Legislative Engagement/ Project.

He wrote, "FULL DISCLOSURE IN THE SPIRIT OF TRANSPARENCY & ACCOUNTABILITY!!

Our office has received $15,000.00USD from the Senate via the Ministry of Finance for "Legislative Engagements/Projects." We will ensure the amount is utilized for the intended purposes."

This information from the lawmakers went wide thus causing senator Dillon to pronounce that he was turning his share of the money over to Liberia Agency for Community Empowerment (LACE) to construct a public library for the people of Montserrado County. But his request to LACE was turned down. He later presented some of the money to the Ministry of Health to get anti-covid -19 materials . That was also rejected by the Health authorities.
Former head of the National Public Health Institute, Dr. Mosoka Fallah is encouraging Liberians to talk the vaccine being administered by the County's health team adding it is surest way of combating the Covid 19 pandemic.

Speaking when he was interviewed from abroad, Dr. Fallah who is a Scientist, said the vaccine is intended to build the immune system against the virus.

During the live talk show, some Liberians who called expressed concern about the safety of the vaccine asking if it was safe for those who have complications.

When he was asked about the risk of those who have complications such as hypertension, diabetic, he said, "those who have complications should take it because their system is even weak and needs the vaccines to protect themselves and build up their systems."

He said he as a person, who has hypertension and diabetes, made a decision to take the vaccine because he wants to increase his chances of living with the presence of the vaccine in his system.

According to Dr. Fallah, the vaccine is safe, adding that the one way the virus will be eliminated is by the taking of the vaccines.

Liberia was recently pronounced by the US government as one of the dangerous places to travel this period due to the rise in the new variant of the virus, which has placed Liberia at level-4.

Explaining the term level 4, Dr. Fallah said it means that the transmission has reached a highest risk of the virus or has reached a point that it is now difficult to have it controlled.

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But giving hope to Liberians, Dr. Fallah projected two major concepts he said that should be used.

He said the concepts are: find the sources, have it removed and protect those who have not gotten virus.

He said institutions like drugs stores, clinics, hospitals; religious gathering should report any case they see as suspected case of the virus.

He pointed out that every Liberian should have sensitive attitude in identifying the sick people as one of the means of fighting the killer virus from the country.

He also wants the Liberian heath authorities to build up testing centers to encourage people to go for their test.

He said, once a person receives his or her test result is realistic, people will be encouraged to go for it; but when it takes forever, it gives rise to speedy spread of the virus.

He also advised the Ministry of Health to divide the hotspots into zones to administer the vaccine by this, he said it will be easy to know who has and who has not taken it.

He added, "Wear your mask and follow all the protocols as means of protection."

Dr. Fallah said they are working with partners and seeking other means to ensure that Liberia gets support from other parts of the world to have the fight against Covid 19 won.

He said, government is trying her best, but there are limited amount of vaccines coming to Africa.

According to him, over the past 7 months, he has been working with scientist to ensure that Africa gets the vaccine because he knows that the virus would have reached African badly and knowing that the continent does not have good health system.
The Secretary of the Liberians Senate, J. Nanborlor Singbeh woe is now deepening as he is facing another crisis for alleged involvement in over US$30,000.00 dollars case.

Singbeh who is currently serving as Secretary of the Liberian Senate, was among several individuals investigated by the Liberia Anti- Corruption Commission (LACC) for Economic Sabotage, Theft of Property, Criminal Conspiracy and Criminal Facilitation after which they were jointly indicted by the Government of Liberia for Prosecution.

As the result, the Government of Liberia through the Ministry of Justice is seeking for his recusal as Secretary of that august body until the matter is completed.

In a communication to the Liberian Senate dated Monday, June 28, 2021, Antorny General Frank Musah Dean is appealing to Albert T. Chie, Senate Pro-Temporary to discharged J. Nanborlor Singbeh of his official functions and duties as Secretary pending the full disposition of his Criminal proceedings.

The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) request is intended to prevent Singbeh from influencing the trail while serving the Government and people of Liberia.

"Our request is made in good faith as anything short of this may dilute the essence of free and impartial criminal trial which is not to convict but to ensure that Justice is held; and also anything to the contrary may be considered smokescreen and deem under the subterfuge of rendering a free and impartial trial," Cllr. Dean explained.

This case is now before Criminal Court "C" for Montserrado County and has been scheduled to be tried during this May 2021 term of Court after the conclusion of pretrial disposition, therefore prosecution has requested the court for an assignment in this cause of action.

The communication further reminded the Liberian Senate that he-Frank Musah Dean and Cllr. Sayma S. Cephus have distanced themselves as Attorney General and Solicitor General of Liberia respectively due to what they called conflict of interest.

According to them, both represented the private prosecutors in these criminal proceedings while they were not in government, as such the responsibility to prosecute the aforesaid case has been passed over.
Gbarnga-Bong County Legislative Caucus Chairman Representative Joseph Papa Kolleh has debunked Representative Robert Flomo Womba statement that members of the Caucus signed a resolution to disburse twenty-five thousand United States Dollars from the County's coffer to Superintendent Esther Walker to purchase her official vehicle in the County.

Representative Robert Flomo Womba of electoral district # four recently told citizens of the County through a radio talk show that members of the Bong County Legislative Caucus signed a resolution to take twenty-five thousand United States Dollars from the County coffers to give to Superintendent, Esther Walker to purchase her vehicle.

Representative Robert Flomo Womba has been assuring citizens of exposing corrupt leaders in the County.

The Lawmaker's clarification comes as a result of accusation by the Assistant Superintendent for Fiscal Affairs, Paul Sulunteh that the Superintendent unilaterally withdrew US $25,000 from the county's account to purchase her car.

Even though, he acknowledged that the purchasing of car for Sup Walker is not in the 2018 county sitting resolution, Rep Womba admitted that the caucus members violated the resolution to empower the superintendent to do inspection of ongoing projects across the county; since she did not have an operational vehicle.

The Lawmaker did not tell Journalists when the superintendent will pay the money, but said that they violated the budget law by giving the superintendent the money outside of the resolution.

However, the Bong County electoral District # seven Representative said at no time did the Caucus sign a resolution to disburse twenty-five thousand United States Dollars to purchase a car for Superintendent, Esther Walker as being erroneously speculated by Representative Robert Flomo Womba.

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The Bong County Legislative Caucus Chairman has challenged the Unity Party Lawmaker (Robert Flomo Womba) to provide proof for what he termed as his baseless, mendacity and spurious twenty-five thousand United States Dollars disbursement statement in the County.

Rep. Kolleh further called on Bongese to challenge or caution the lawmakers.

The Bong County Legislative Caucus Chairman and Representative of Electoral District#7 is cautioning Representative Robert Flomo Womba to desist from making baseless and erroneous statement, because it has the propensity to derail the reputation of the Caucus in the County.

Rep. Kolleh said it's unthinkable for Rep. Womba to say they (Lawmakers) violated the budget law by giving the superintendent the money outside of the November 12, 2018 resolution.

He made the clarification on June 29, 2021 via mobile phone from Monrovia on Radio Gbarnga in the County.
U.S. Team Signs

A Liberian with many years of service in the field of diplomacy has been awarded the Hero of US State Department Diplomacy award for his outstanding role played of the years in advancing US State department's mission.

The global award is given to individuals who have performed exceedingly well over the years. Candidates are selected from all over the world for such award.

Every year, the State Department recognizes the Heros of diplomacy of the year. This year, he was selected among several individuals and given the prestigious award on June 29 in the USA.

Jenkins Vanghen is the first black to have won such award.

Speaking to this paper from the USA on Thursday, he said: "I see it as a very positive award and I want for this award to inspire my compatriots. I want them know that if you tell yourself you can do it, you can do it. You cannot doubt about yourself.

Doubts will only affect your initiative. Always believe in yourself."

Vangehn joined the embassy team in 2001 as the sole Locally Employed Staff (LES) member in the Pol/Econ section. He covered political issues and followed current Liberian political trends. He went to work without thinking that he would win such award. But he said, he worked with dedication, commitment and honesty. "I went with my full commitment to do my all. When I got there, I later started to discover my potential," he said.

According to him, he has won several awards such as the state Department award, Foreign Service National award and superior award; but this global award tops it all.

He said it was due to his level of dedication. All is attribute to dedication, commitment, hard work and courage.

"Asked what this award means for him and his country. "With this award, I love to see Liberia improve, Liberia shift in getting some improvement.

During the civil war, Jenkins fled to Ghana where he benefited from a United Nations scholarship at the University of Ghana and earned a bachelor's degree in history. He returned to Liberia in 1999 and taught history at a local high school. Jenkins enrolled at the University of Liberia Law School in 2007 for one semester. He also attended political trainings at FSI in 2002 and 2009, and labor training in Johannesburg in 2004.

He is currently a student at the Howard Kennedy School pursing master in public administration.

Challenges:

On his challenges, he said, when he started work, he was single and had option to move to the states and settle. "But I decided to stay here. And when I looked at the situations in Bosnia, Rwanda and other African countries and saw very powerful armed rebel groups moving on Monrovia, I smelt atrocities."

"So, I took the courage and went to my boss, former US Ambassador John Bliny. I told him I am hearing talks about ceasefire. I was the only Liberian in that meeting. By that time, the US defense was bent on pulling out of Liberia. Colin Powell said the US should give a trial and not to pull out. There, we had to make a case to convince them to remain engage with Liberia. It was difficult. If they had pulled out, many people were going to die. I did not want that to happen," he said.

So, he and others had to work on a ceasefire paper: "We worked on ceasefire documents. I was happy to write it. It brought joy to me so it prevented my country being torn apart by warlords. I was excited to see that we put a stop to it."

On what he wants to see his country look like. Jenkins said this: "when I see people walk down the streets of Monrovia, a woman selling in a happy mood and see students going to school, and to see them with joy, It keeps my country going, it makes me happy. That alone brings me happiness and joy. I want to see a Liberia prosper and Liberians deserve the best. That is my wish."

He expressed his appreciation to the American people. "I am grateful to the American people. I do not want them to give up on Liberia. The USA should stand with the people and Liberia should work with them."

Please read about Jenkins details:

JENKINS VANGEHN

Jenkins Vangehn started his career with the State Department as a political and economic assistant in January 2001 at the height of Liberia's second civil war, which lasted from April 1999 through August 2003. In 2010, Jenkins was promoted to the POL/ECON section's senior political specialist. During his 19-year career with the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia, Jenkins has provided critical, constant and indeed heroic service. He has supported not only the POL/ECON section, but also successive Ambassadors and Deputy Chiefs of Mission, the Defense Attache Office, the Regional Security Office, and the Public Affairs Office, and in doing so, advanced U.S. foreign policy and goals in Liberia and West Africa.

Throughout the Liberian civil war, the Embassy faced severe staffing gaps; Jenkins often served as the de facto political officer during long gaps without an American in the section. It fell on Jenkins to conduct the political and economic reporting, facilitate travel for visitors, maintain lines of communication with warring factions and negotiators, and even assist in the eventual evacuation of the Embassy. Known for his modesty, many in the Embassy today are unaware of the crucial role Jenkins played in sustaining Embassy operations, providing information to the then U.S. Ambassador John Blaney, and also helping American citizens during the heaviest periods of conflict. At a recent public affairs program, journalist Sebastian Junger, who reported from Liberia during the civil war, recalled the dark days of 2003 and expressed his gratitude for the Embassy's efforts, to include Jenkins's behind-the-scenes work, to ensure Junger could safely depart Liberia when threats were made on his life.

Foreign Service Officer Dante Paradiso, who was a junior officer at the Embassy Monrovia at the time chronicled some of Jenkins' experiences as a locally engaged staff member at the Embassy during the final months of the civil war in his 2016 nonfiction work The Embassy: A Story of War and Diplomacy. Paradiso observes that local staff who serve "the interests of the United States with distinction over many years do so out of concern for their colleagues and passion for principle." Paradiso writes of Jenkins's extraordinary dedication during the period from May to August 2003 when rebel troops shelled the city and killed at least 1,000 civilians:

It was why, during the attack on the capital, Jenkins slept on the floor of his office and washed his clothes in the sink while day and night he worked his contacts to keep the Ambassador briefed on news from the front, or from upcountry. It was why he did not look first to his own safety, quit his job, and pack up.

Jenkins once vividly recounted standing outside Gate 1--one of the most frequently used entrances to the Embassy compound--listening to the BBC with a group of bystanders, only to walk into the Controlled Access door right before a mortar fell on the group listening to the radio. Within the Embassy, supplies were scarce and those who remained after the Ordered Departure had to ration food and drinking water, using non-potable water for bathing. Living and working at the Embassy brought a measure of safety, but also carried risks. He worried constantly about his family. Troops from the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL), Charles Taylor's force that controlled most of Monrovia, grew suspicious of Jenkins, and began surveilling his home. Angered by Jenkins's work with the Embassy, which was putting pressure on Taylor to give up power, the AFL troops went to his residence and shot his beloved dogs.

During this precarious time, when he could, Jenkins would leave the compound to gauge the political situation around town. He was often accosted by military forces loyal to Charles Taylor and accused of spying for the United States. In one such episode, at a roadblock manned by members of Taylor's feared Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU) near the Embassy, Jenkins was accosted by ATU personnel, accused of being a spy, and threatened with disappearance and notified he would "go missing."

Luckily, he escaped without serious harm. Though Jenkins feared for his life, and the safety of his home and family, he continued to come to work, despite the checkpoints and mortars, and continued to meet with Embassy contacts, despite the suspicion it raised with Charles Taylor's forces. Ambassador Blaney asked Jenkins to take part in the daily country team meetings, normally only attended by cleared Americans, because of the value of the information he provided from his many well-placed sources in government agencies, security forces, the human rights and journalism communities, local neighborhoods and upcountry cities and towns. His vast array of contacts provided invaluable information to the Ambassador and the small American team remaining on the Embassy compound; Jenkins insights and up-to-the-minute fact gathering shaped the Embassy's reporting to Washington and its decision making on the Mission's policy steps and security posture.

Ambassador Blaney recounted, "Jenkins would walk up to gunmen, stone killers, to get the information that I needed. It is no exaggeration to say that Jenkins provided vital information that allowed me to better frame my options. I think without the knowledge Jenkins provided me, I might well have succumbed to heavy pressure to close the Embassy. In that case, the war would have continued and gone into downtown Monrovia amidst hundreds of thousands of displaced running away from war and others, totaling about a million people. Liberia would have collapsed as failed state, and likely become the epicenter for regional violence, and probably an incubator for terrorism. America should recognize Jenkins."

In June 2003 while performing his duty as political assistant--drafting spot reports and cables, arranging meetings for the Ambassador, and liaising with local journalists, civil society representatives, humanitarian workers, and UN contacts--Jenkins also assisted in the evacuation of hundreds of U.S. citizens, European nationals, and other foreigners who were evacuated via military helicopters from the Embassy compound. At that time, American citizens frequently called or wrote letters to the Embassy requesting help evacuating their homes and traversing the dangerous streets to reach the Embassy. Jenkins helped identify American citizens who were trapped throughout the city due to the fighting. At great risk to himself, Jenkins traveled under the cover of darkness to physically collect American citizens and bring them to the Embassy.

He also helped process unaccompanied minors and contacted their parents in the United States to arrange travel for the children. Jenkins regularly spent several nights with frightened unaccompanied minor American citizens until seats were secured on the military helicopters for their evacuation. The evacuation process had feeding, lodging, and medical components on the Embassy compound that Jenkins helped coordinate. He also assisted in the monitoring of people allowed on the military helicopters evacuating U.S. citizens and other nationalities to ensure the flights were not overcrowded.

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When a prominent human rights activist was being held by President Charles Taylor on suspicion of being a Liberia United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel collaborator, and charged with treason, Jenkins visited his wife and son, and made the arrangements for them to leave the country by pretending they were his own family. Jenkins also quietly shuttled messages between the detainee's relatives and the Embassy and visited several human rights activists in prison. In June 2003, Jenkins worked closely with political officer Paradiso to help negotiate and draft a unilateral ceasefire and withdrawal statement for LURD rebel forces that convinced LURD forces to depart Monrovia.

Ambassador Blaney noted that "the document was crucial because it was the real vehicle that ended the war; that is, right on the battlefield." It unstuck the negotiations in Ghana of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, allowing negotiations to conclude successfully in approximately ten days. The agreement that was ultimately struck likely saved thousands of lives. In August 2003, Jenkins supported the U.S. military task force that was sent to Liberia t pressure former warlord Charles Taylor to leave Liberia. He provided key political insight into Taylor's intentions and directly liaised with Taylor's closest advisors notifying them that Taylor must leave Liberia in order to achieve peace.

Following the end of fighting, Jenkins threw himself into U.S. initiatives to support Liberia's recovery. During the administration of the National Transitional Government of Liberia (NTGL) from October 2003 until January 2006, Jenkins worked with the U.S. Treasury Department to deploy personnel from the Office of Technical Assistance (OTA) to revive Liberia's economy, destroyed by over 20 years of civil war. Jenkins worked with the NTGL and the U.S. Embassy to deploy OTA personnel to the key entities including the Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank of Liberia, and the Ministry of Commerce. Jenkins also represented the Embassy on the Governance Economic Management Program (GEMAP) to put the Liberian economic back on track. U.S. sponsored GEMAP personnel were deployed at various Government of Liberia institutions to instill fiscal and management discipline including the Freeport of Monrovia, the Liberia Petroleum Refining Company, and Roberts International Airport.

The selflessness and courage that Jenkins demonstrated during the war years - and the all-out effort he made to aid his country and support the U.S. Mission - prompt this nomination of Jenkins as one of the State Department's Heroes of Diplomacy. In the 16 years since the civil war ended, Jenkins has continued to tirelessly support U.S. efforts to advance Liberia's peace and security, its democracy and development. So many U.S. diplomats have benefited from Jenkins's wise advice and counsel, his knowledge of Liberia and analysis of its politics, economy and culture, and his belief in the importance to both countries of a strong U.S.-Liberian relationship.
editorial

IN every country, the health of its citizens matter most. This is so because without a healthy population, it affects the growth sector indirectly.

SO, one can say that development that health plays a Signiant part in every nation.

According to the 2021 budget in summary by economic classification, the health sector has about US$89,303,492. Besides that, it receives support from international partners.

IT has been said by many scholars that economic development's most important indicator is the human factor. This is also known as the human capital. Investments in human capital include the investments in human factor. So, the health sector is very crucial. It is very critical and important for that matter for the health of people to be taken seriously.

IN this line, the human capital and economic development are two concepts identified with each other. There is no way you can leave one out from the other.

THE main factors of human capital are seen as health and education. These are placed on the top in the development of every country; and Liberia is no exception.

MANY people did not know that we had a bad health system until the early Ebola various hit the country in 2014. It really exposed our vulnerability. Many people may not know that the health sector is one area that is well funded in the country. It is one sector that has Significant findings from international partners. When it comes to logistic, it has. For salaries, they pay nurses "chicken change". Many of these vehicles, for instance, are only given to city dwellers, many of whom only attend small workshops to sign for siting fees or other fees. When one takes visit to some of the health facilities around the country, you will feel sad.

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FOR example, the Tappita hospital, one of the key referral hospitals, does not have adequate drugs. We want to state here that the investments in health and education fields can greatly accelerate the economic development.

NOW, the COVId-19 pandemic has come and affecting dozens of citizens today. The level at which the Minister of Health is taking the fight against this virus, is not encouraging at all.

FIRST, when the virus entered Liberia, the level of robustness expected from the ministry headed by the minister was not strong. This pandemic is nothing for one to play with.

WE are calling on the minister to be more robust in dealing with this situation. Giving daily update while the number of infected people keep increasing, is not sufficient. For example, equip all health sectors in the country to be able to fight this disease, even increasing the salary of health workers and contractors and other people will help.

THIS is not time to do wait and see thing. Act now madam minister.
Members of the House of Representatives are said to be restless over illicit drugs claims levied against a member of that body by a senior officer of the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency (LDEA).

The Director for Press and Public Affairs at the House of Representatives Atty. Nelson Garr speaking to this paper Thursday, July 01, 2021 at the Capitol Building in Monrovia, said it is unfortunate that a senior officer of the LDEA would make such grave allegations and that the House of Representatives s deeply concerned, and that there should be further investigation of the matter.

Tuesday, this week was a day full of tension and drama on Capitol Hill when LDEA Commander Martha Massaley was whisked out of the Chambers of the House of Representatives while being grilled by the Plenary for linking an unnamed member of the 54th Legislature to illicit drug trafficking.

Commander Massaley, who had appeared stronger and highly spirited, was rushed to an unnamed hospital when she suddenly turned frail and unable to stand and sit after she had endured more than three hours of questioning by members of the House on the allegation.

The House of Representatives presided over by Speaker Bhofal Chambers has been probing deeply into statements the DEA officer that some members of that august body are running a drug cartel.

Massaley told a group of students in Paynesville at a forum in observance of International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking that she and some other agents intercepted a lawmaker along the Somalia Drive, trafficking illicit drugs.

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She said the unidentified lawmaker told her the matter would go nowhere and that he (lawmaker) was going to support the team or the agency with a vehicle to fast-track its operations in an effort to appease them from making an arrest.

Her statement since went viral with a call for her to name the specific lawmaker or lawmakers allegedly involved so they may be name, shame, and possibly prosecuted.

Atty. Garr says the LDEA commander by now should be able to identify the lawmaker with who she reportedly found illicit drugs or face arrest for bringing the first branch of government to public ridicule.

According to him, the failure of the LDEA officer to have arrested the suspect on the scene or impounded the illicit drugs makes it unbelievable.

He notes that the officer's failure to have taken security action against the lawmaker makes her be an accomplice to the crime if such existed.https://thenewdawnliberia.com/ldea-nafaa-asked-to-coordinate-fight-against-drugs-trafficking/
-As army chief opts capital punishment for rape

Armed Forces of Liberia or AFL commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Nyankun E. Williams faces a police probe in relation to allegations of rape.

Liberia's Army Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Prince Charles Johnson, III, says Col. Williams has been turned over to the Justice Ministry for investigation in relation to the allegation.

"If any of my personnel are called and when investigated and go through that process, if I'm called by the president and advice I will definitely stand by that - capital punishment. Yes!" Gen. Johnson said Thursday, 1 July during a live talk show on OK FM in Monrovia.

Col. Williams was in April this year relieved of his post as Commandant of the Armed Forces Training Command (AFTC) on the allegation of rape and forwarded to the Military Police to face investigation.

But the Military Police Unit which is the investigative arm of the Armed Forces of Liberia on 17 May informed the public that it had concluded the investigation and submitted its findings to the AFL High Command for further actions.

Subsequently, in May this year, the High Command of the Armed Forces of Liberia said it had submitted to the Minister of National Defense Maj. Gen. Daniel Ziankahn (Rtd), for his review and subsequent actions, the findings of the alleged rape case brought against Col. Williams.

According to Gen. Johnson, about a week ago, Col. Williams was contacted by his lawyer, adding that the Women and Children Protection Section of the Liberian National Police is conducting the investigation and has spoken to the survivor, her father, and the accused.

Gen. Johnson explained that he still stands by his decision on rape that if anybody is caught in the act of rape, they should face capital punishment.

"Look, if anybody is caught in the act, I think they have cases of almost ten that led to the death of young girls, those people should definitely face capital punishment. And I still stand by that, I support that and I stand by that," the Army Chief emphasized.

Gen. Johnson said AFL is about to come up with a release to update the public about where they are so as to avoid speculation, saying the armed forces are zero tolerant when it comes to rape.

The Army Chief contended that armed robbery and rape have been trending here, leading to suggestions that rape be considered a national emergency.

He recalled that during the interim government of the late Chairman Charles Gyude Bryant, Liberia signed a law to respect the human rights of people and do away with capital punishment.

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However, he explained that in 2008, former President Ellen Johnson - Sirleaf brought back the issue of capital punishment against armed robbery, terrorism, and rape when the commission of such crimes led to another person's death.

He argued that at the time the Sirleaf administration reintroduced capital punishment, there was a lot of international presence in the country including the United Nations Mission in Liberia and the U.S. Military which was conducting training for the Liberian army, among others.

On 26 April 2021, Sergeant Obento Roberts, personnel of the Armed Forces of Liberia serving on the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in Mali, formally complained to a service member for alleged sexual intercourse with his (Roberts') 16 years old daughter.

Based on the allegation, the victim underwent medical examination based on Sgt. Obent Roberts' instructions and the medical examinations were conducted by a nurse at the sexual gender-based violence (SGBV) One Stop Center at Duport Road.

A copy of the report was submitted to the AFL Military Police investigators, and it was interpreted for the AFL investigators by the Chief Medical Officer Dr. Zoe Parwon.
-Pro Tempore Chie tells NIC

Senate President Pro-Tempore Albert T. Chie has challenged the National Investment Commission and its partners to be economic transformers here by aggressively promoting investment opportunities, and supporting the growth of foreign direct investments.

Speaking Wednesday, June 30, 2021, at the second Liberia Business and Investment Forum (LIBIF), a virtual event in Washington D.C, USA, Pro-Temp Chie noted that the NIC should advocate for and strengthen the domestic private sector, well as ensure that the economic and social development objectives of the people of Liberia are achieved by and through favorable investment environment that guarantees security.

Chief recalled that he had the privilege of attending a similar investment forum in Washington, D.C. over a decade ago, then as Assistant Minister for Energy at the Ministry of Mines and Energy, adding that the energy sector was one of the key investment areas highlighted at the forum.

Since that he averred that the sector has attracted attention due to policy and regulatory reforms that were suggested at that forum and subsequently implemented by the Government of Liberia.

Pro-Temp Chie: "At this forum, our Country anticipates numerous dividends as we look forward to working along with investment partners from the United States and other Countries and commit the Liberia Senate in the creation of an enabling environment through the enactment of appropriate legislation and diligent discharge of oversight for the growth of the private sector".

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Senator Chie at the same time joined other participants of the forum to underscore the importance of investment in agriculture, health, and tourism sectors.

He added that these are crucial areas that every country needs to invest in, if she much achieves economic prosperity, agriculture being the leading sector of the economy.

He at the same time mentioned that until 1979, the country's economy was among the more developed and fastest-growing in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Pro-Temp also pointed to the Liberia Sugar Corporation, LIBSUCO in Maryland County, the plywood business in Sinoe County, the fishing business of the Mesurado Group of companies, and so forth.

Senator Chie indicated that following the 1980 coup d'etat, the economy experienced a drastic decline which even became worse by the civil war that caused a brain drain and loss of capital.

He added that investment in the soil has the capacity to yield huge returns and health benefits that will culminate in National Food Security, noting that there are opportunities for rice concession, food preservation and packaging, and other agro-business opportunities.

"There are opportunities also for the health sector. We should now progressively strengthen our health sector that faces challenges of diverse proportions. If we must create a vibrant economy, there must be healthy people".

He disclosed that in coming years, the Liberia Senate will look keenly at the budgetary allocation to the tourism sector to put it on its feet so that it can reach out to private sector interest, adding that Health and Agriculture continue to receive priority in the national budget, and that there is opportunity for increment to respond aggrievedly to the needs of both sectors
-The Yaounde Declaration aims to tackle the continent's affordable housing crisis

African Ministers and Heads of Delegation of Ministries in charge of Housing and Urban Development, African Finance Ministers, the Directors and Management of Shelter Afrique, and representatives of international, regional, and national institutions, the private sector, and civil society, have agreed to enhance mechanisms for the mass production of decent and affordable housing in the continent to achieve social and economic development.

In a communique termed 'Yaounde Declaration' issued at the 40th Annual General Assembly of Shelter Afrique held in Yaounde Cameroon from 21 to 24 June 2021, the participants resolved to address the challenges that have hindered the efforts to provide decent and affordable housing in Africa.

In reference to the declaration, Shelter Afrique Group Managing Director and CEO Andrew Chimphondah lauded the participants for making the 'bold step adding that the Yaounde Declaration had turned a new page in Africa's quest for housing-for-all.

"According to a research by Shelter Afrique's Centre of Excellence (CoE), the overall shortage of housing in Africa is estimated at 56 million housing units. Out of this, more than 90 percent are in the affordable housing bracket. The solution to resolving this shortage lies in a well-coordinated and collaborative effort among all stakeholders, including governments, multilateral institutions, non-profit organizations, and the private sector. I'm happy that the Yaounde Declaration has highlighted some of these challenges and all stakeholders, including governments, are willing to address the shortage as a matter of urgency," Mr. Chimphondah said.

https://www.shelterafrique.org/en/

Housing Crisis

Most African countries are currently facing a housing crisis driven by high population growth, increased urbanization, poor urban planning, dysfunctional land markets, rising construction costs, the proliferation of informal settlements, and underdeveloped financial systems.

The declaration addresses in detail the issues of leadership and governance, policies and legislation, coordination, land systems, finance and taxation, capacity building, and adoption of new building technologies.

"Effective policy and legislation are critical in addressing all these challenges as this will tackle issues around quality control in the delivery of decent and affordable housing, provision of housing to the vulnerable groups, the land tenure system, adoption of construction technologies, and even financing. That is why we settled on Four Decades of Housing Policies in Africa as the theme for our 40th Annual General Assembly as we look forward to the next 40 years of affordable housing," Mr. Chimphondah said.

To ensure the implementation of the resolutions contained in the declaration, the delegates appointed a six-member team headed by Shelter Afrique Head of Legal Services Ms. Houda Boudlali and UN-Habitat Regional Advisor Dr. Claude Albert Meutchehe Ngomsi as facilitators.

The duo will be assisted by Shelter Afrique Head of Policy, Research and Partnership Dr. Muhammad Gambo and Shelter Afrique Regional Business Manager Edmond Adjikpe as rapporteurs, and Shelter Afrique Ag. Company Secretary Natasha Koli, and Shelter Afrique Head of Communication & External Affairs Babatunde Oyateru as members.

Each Member State will be required to designate an interlocutor to report the implementation of the recommendations to the members of the monitoring group who will report on the status of implementation of the resolutions at the next session of the 41st General Assembly of Shelter Afrique in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.

Member countries in attendance who passed the resolution adopting the declaration include Algeria, Benin, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, The Gambia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Lesotho, Mali, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Togo, Senegal, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

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About: Shelter-Afrique is a pan African housing finance and development institution established by African governments to address the need for a sustainable housing delivery system and related infrastructure projects in Africa. Shareholders include 44 African countries, the African Development Bank, and the African Re-Insurance Corporation.

The company's mandate is to provide financing through debt, quasi-equity, and equity to both public and private institutions for housing and urban infrastructure projects in its member countries. Shelter Afrique builds strategic partnerships and offers a host of products and related services to support the efficient delivery of affordable housing and commercial real estate. These include project finance, institutional lending, equity investments & joint ventures, trade finance, and social housing.
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Dear Father,

Hmm, we are really joking in this village ehn. No wonder the people in this village are not taking this sickness seriously.

With all the noise they are making all over the various town criers in this village about guidelines here and there, the place we suppose to prove that we are serious is where we sit and play fund.

We have none of the so-called guidelines we hear about when we are outside the village-nothing, the only thing they focus on is collecting 50 dollars and 75 dollars of Uncle Sam's money from strangers and villagers coming here.

Tell me something!

Da fire, or da benny-seed popping in my mouth. I say, no safety measure nothing, no social distancing. The only thing they care about is the money they are collecting from passengers! And what they are doing with the money, only God one knows.

The other day when my wife and I came back it was not easy. We were all jammed up together sardine fish in a can-yet they say they were doing our test to make sure none of us were bringing the sickness to our village.

But to tell you the truth Father, the people who are supposed to help stop the big sickness from spreading in our village are rather the ones helping to spread it. Anyway, at least they are helping one way or the other-whether to spread or to stop.

Um, so do they expect the other villages around to take you people serious?

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Where Father? Already Uncle Sam has sounded an alarm telling our cousins not to come to this village because of the way the sickness is spreading all over the place.

As if that was not enough, we are even hearing that some of the planes flying bringing people to our village are deciding on stopping from coming here.

Can you imagine this?

Oh, Father, this is what I am trying to tell you. The village people already struggling-to food sef it hard; no job all over the place, even the one them like us that get the job can't even take pay so it's serious.

Instead of them being serious, they are all over the place playing fund. SO how the village people will not be in denial na. You tell the people they should not gather in large groups, they should not do this and that. But you are the one gathering them in large groups all in the name of making sure they pay you the money for the test and don't care even if they are spreading it right in front of you-nonsense!

And you want people to take you serious? We are jokers. We really need to put ourselves together in this village.

And the ones I can't stand are the people who think because they get food in their homes they are shouting all over the place lockdown, lockdown!

You think to sit in your comfort zone and be shouting, lockdown, lockdown that it there? What are you doing to help your people?

Your people sitting at the Traditional Council collecting Uncle Sam Money 15K each in this kina that and you can't even say fewn, but the whole day you writing all over the place lockdown, lockdown.
The mortal remains of the former Prime Minister, were removed at the Mortuary of the Yaounde General Hospital on July 1, 2021.

Thousands thronged the Mortuary of the Yaounde General Hospital on July 1, 2021 to witness the corpse removal of the former Prime Minister, former Vice President of the Senate and the political icon, Simon Achidi Achu who died in the United States of America on May 4, 2021 due to an illness. He will be buried in his native Santa in the North West Region tomorrow, Saturday, July 3, 2021.

Among the mourners at the mortuary was the Prime Minister, Head of Government, Chief Dr Joseph Dion Ngute who is the representative of the Head of State, President Paul Biya. The Head of State had earlier in Decree No. 2021/386 of 28 June 2021 decided the organisation of an official funeral in honour of Mr Simon Achidi Achu. As such, the Prime Minister watched elements of the Police march with the corpse into the hall of the mortuary, led officials present in paying their respects to the fallen administrative and political icon, expressed words of compassion and comfort to the family members and saw the corpse leave the premises before he left. Conspicuously visible was the bouquet of flowers from the President of the Republic and Madam. Also present at the mortuary were a cross-section of cabinet ministers, Grand Chancellor of National Orders who also doubles as the former Prime Minister, Philemon Yang, the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the ruling Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (CPDM), Jean Nkuete, members of the Circle of Friends of Cameroon (CERAC), close family members and mourners.
The Kenya government has dismissed claims that it is linked to the arrest and eventual extradition of separatist leader Nnamdi Kanu back to Nigeria, saying it could not ascertain whether the act took place in Kenya.

Kenya's denial deepens the diplomatic crisis, given that Nigerian authorities had indicated they seized the activist in London before extraditing him to Nigeria, a claim the British government has since denied.

Mr Dean Hurlock, the head of communications at the British High Commission in Nigeria has denied the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) was arrested or extradited from the UK and revealed that the British government was in the process of seeking clarification from Nigeria on the circumstances surrounding the arrest and extradition.

"We can reaffirm that Nnamdi Kanu was not arrested in the UK nor was he extradited from the UK," Mr Hurlock said.

But yesterday, Mr Kanu's family roped Kenya into the conflict when it sensationally claimed that the secessionist leader had been arrested in Kenya from where he was extradited to Nigeria.

Yesterday, the Director General of Immigration Services Alexander Muteshi dismissed the claims of Kenya's complicity, arguing that it was not possible to tell whether Mr Kanu had entered Kenyan territory.

"I can't know that," Mr Muteshi told the Nation when asked whether the claims made by the family were true.

Sneaked into Kenya

"I am not in the picture of his presence in the country. I am only able to tell if somebody entered the country legally," he added, leaving room for speculation as to whether Mr Kanu has sneaked into Kenya through either illegal routes or under a false name.

Government Spokesman Cyrus Oguna refused to discuss the matter and instead referred the Nation to Mr Muteshi, even as the family assailed the Kenyan government, accusing it of having committed the most serious violation of international law.

"The Mazi Nnamdi Kanu's family has learnt that he was unlawfully arrested in Kenya, detained and subsequently subjected to extraordinary rendition from Kenya to Nigeria where he is now detained," the family said, through Mr Kingsley Kanu, his brother.

Mr Kanu was arrested last Sunday by what sources say was a combined operation of Nigerian and foreign security officers. But the exact location of his arrest remains contentious.

The family's claims, if true, casts Kenya once again in the eye of international focus so soon after similar claims were made over the abduction and eventual deportation of Selahaddin Gulen to Turkey. He is the nephew of US-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, who is accused of organising a coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016.

Kenya has a negative history of alleged complicity in similar incidents of abduction and deportation of asylum seekers that have taken place previously.

Detained in Kenya

Mr Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), was captured in Nairobi in February 1999 and promptly sent to Turkey to face trial in an operation that the Kenya government is accused of having facilitated.

The arrest and subsequent deportation of Mr Gulen, who was a registered asylum seeker in Kenya and also a permanent US resident, was in tandem with Kenya's conduct in the past.

Turkey accuses Mr Gulen of being a member of an outlawed organisation headed by his exiled uncle.

Mr Gulen was detained in Kenya for a month before he was handed over to the Turkish authorities on May 31, 2021 despite a court case and orders that had been issued against his detention.

The Kenyan government is yet to comment on the incident.

Mr Kanu, who has been labeled a fugitive by the Nigerian authorities, was taken to a Nigerian Court on Wednesday, where government officials claimed they had arrested him in London, UK.

Nigeria's Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Mr Abubakar Malami, said Mr Kanu's arrest was planned and executed by Nigerian security and intelligence agencies and coordinated by the Nigeria Intelligence Agency (NIA).

Instigating violence

In their statement, the family claimed that Mr Kanu was on a visit to Kenya when he was arrested, detained and handed over to the Nigerian authorities who then flew him to Nigeria.

"My brother has been subjected to extraordinary rendition by Kenya and Nigeria. They two governments have violated the most basic principles of the rule of law," Mr Kingsley said in remarks widely quoted in the Nigerian media.

"Extraordinary rendition is one of the most serious crimes states can commit. Both Nigeria and Kenya must be held to account. I demand justice for my brother, Nnamdi Kanu."

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Mr Kanu is accused of engaging in subversive activities that include inciting violence through television, radio and online broadcasts against Nigeria and Nigerian State and institutions.

Kanu was also accused of instigating violence especially in the Southeastern Nigeria that resulted in the loss of lives and property of civilians, military, paramilitary, police forces and destruction of civil institutions and symbols of authority.

In a statement released yesterday, Human Rights Watch said Mr Gulen's abduction and deportation is only the most recent example of the Kenyan authorities' failure to safeguard asylum seekers on Kenyan soil, instead allowing their deportation to potentially life-threatening situations.

"Kenyan authorities have a responsibility for what happens within their borders, and should investigate the possibility of complicity of its officials in this flagrant disregard for due process," said Mr Otsieno Namwaya, the East Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

"This is even more urgent given the negative history of alleged complicity of Kenyan authorities in previous incidents of abduction and deportation of asylum seekers."
A truck heading to the Port of Douala in Cameroon is seen leaving a forest in Ngoyla in the East.

press release

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns logging company FIPCAM's judicial harassment of Cameroonian journalist Nestor Nga Etoga for the past five years after he investigated some of its practices. RSF calls on the company and Cameroon's justice system to put a stop to the use of legal proceedings to try to silence this journalist.

Etoga, who is the editor of the weekly Le Renard, senior editor at the Les Scoops d'Afrique website and a reporter for other news sites, has had to travel more than 10,000 km and spend around 30,000 euros in legal and travel costs since 2016 as a result of the lawsuits by FIPCAM, which specialises in felling Cameroon's tropical forests.

When he appeared in court for the 94th time yesterday, the hearing in the case was postponed yet again. Since 24 November 2016, the date of the first lawsuit, he has had to keep travelling the 270 km between the cities of Douala and Mfou to attend hearings in three suits brought against him.

The conflict dates back to September 2015, when Etoga confronted FIPCAM executives with documents he had obtained suggesting that the company had been guilty of forestry offences, corruption and violating employee rights.

Etoga told RSF that a FIPCAM executive tried without success to dissuade him from continuing his investigation and even offered him money and the possibility for doing PR work for the company. Etoga pressed on with his research and wrote several stories criticising FIPCAM practices, with the result that FIPCAM filed several suits accusing him of waging "a smear campaign" against the company and its CEO.

Etoga was even arrested and held for several hours in October 2016 as a result of these accusations. He was acquitted on 3 February 2017 in an initial criminal libel case that has been referred to a Douala appeal court. Two other cases were meanwhile brought against him, one for defamation and the other for "blackmail and complicity in blackmail."

When RSF tried to question FIPCAM about these accusation, the company replied that it would provide the information to the judicial authorities "at the appropriate moment" and that the reason for all the many hearings was a question "to put to the courts."

"All these judicial proceedings in various cities for more than five years are clearly meant to exhaust this journalist psychologically and financially, said Arnaud Froger, the head of RSF's Africa desk. "We firmly condemn the use of systematic lawsuits with the aim of deterring journalists from investigating. The Cameroonian justice system is also partly to blame. Ordinary lawsuits should not give rise to interminable legal debates and countless hearings. This judicial treatment facilitates the strategy of using lawsuits to intimidate and gag journalists."

Several former FIPCAM employees contacted by RSF criticised work conditions within the company, corroborating Etoga's reporting. In an open letter to Cameroonian President Paul Biya in April 2019, their spokesperson called for an investigation into FIPCAM's activities and said they had provided Biya aides with evidence of "illegal forestry," "tax fraud" and "corruption."

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Investigative reporting is extremely difficult in Cameroon, where the media censor themselves to a significant degree, especially on sensitive subjects. Gag suits, judicial harassment, and proceedings before special courts and military courts are also part of the arsenal used to reduce journalists to silence.

The victims include Amadou Vamoulke, the former director-general of the Cameroonian state radio and TV broadcaster CRTV, who has been detained provisionally for nearly five years. In what is a record for a Cameroonian journalist, Vamoulke is due to make his 73rd appearance before a special criminal court in Yaounde today.

Cameroon is ranked 135th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2021 World Press Freedom Index.
Motorists will pay between Sh1,050 and Sh6,300 to drive on the Sh160 billion Rironi-Mau Summit dual carriageway, whose construction is expected to start in September.

For every kilometre on the highway, a motorist will part with Sh6 on any section of the road.

This translates to Sh1,050 for saloon cars and Sh6,300 for big trucks.

Digital toll stations will be built along the 175-kilometre stretch between Rironi and Mau Summit, and motorists will be charged depending on the size of the vehicle.

Motorists will have the option of paying electronically or manually at the end of their journey.

There will also be another 58 kilometres built as part of the 30-year project that will open up the highway that is a key link to western Kenya and Uganda.

The road will be built by the Rift Valley Highway Company.

Nairobi Expressway

This is a consortium comprising Meridian Infrastructure Africa Fund, Vinci Highways and Vinci Concessions, a French concessions and construction company.

The project will see the road expanded into a four-lane dual carriageway through a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model and have users pay for its costs, as government turns to tolling as an alternative development financing model.

Already, the Nairobi Expressway is at an advanced stage and will see Kenyans pay to use it. The build-operate-transfer model is becoming popular for governments that do not want to borrow to finance infrastructure projects, but would rather transfer the risks to the private sector.

In the new project, Kenya will take on the demand and political risks, which means that the National Treasury will have to make provisions in case the country is not able to repay the money within the maximum allowable 30-year project life cycle.

Kenya National Highways Authority (Kenha) in a presentation to journalists on Wednesday revealed that smaller sized vehicles, which include saloon cars and personal vehicles, will be classified as one-passenger car unit (PCU), which means that they will only pay Sh6 for every kilometre travelled.

For the larger trucks, the PCUs will be as many as six which means that they will pay up to Sh36 per kilometre travelled.

National toll fund

But motorists who do not wish to pay will have alternative routes to use and there will also be discounts for frequent users.

Military vehicles and ambulances will be spared from the toll fees.

Kenha said construction will take about 3.5 years and the company building it will operate it for another 26.5 years before handing it over to the government, having repaid themselves through the toll fees.

All the money collected from the road will go to the national toll fund, from where the contractors will be paid what is known as availability payments.

This will see the operators evaluated on their ability to fix potholes and clear the road in case of accidents to make it available for users.

The road is one of the issues discussed by President Uhuru Kenyatta and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in Paris yesterday.

Enhanced cooperation

The morning meeting at Elysee Palace saw the two leaders discuss the Sh160 billion Rironi Mau Summit dual carriageway amongst several bilateral and multilateral subjects of mutual interest to Kenya and France.

"The two leaders discussed the progress of key France supported infrastructure projects in Kenya including the expansion of the 233-kilometer Rironi-Nakuru-Mau Summit Road," a statement from the PSCU said.

The public-private partnership (PPP) agreement to expand the Northern Corridor road into a four-lane dual carriageway and reduce congestion was reached during President Kenyatta's visit to Paris in October last year.

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Besides infrastructure, Presidents Kenyatta and Macron discussed enhanced cooperation in the health sector particularly in building Kenya's capacity to manufacture vaccines locally.

On the multilateral front, the two leaders spoke about the forthcoming Global Partnership for Education (GPE) Summit in London to be co-hosted by President Kenyatta and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

"The summit is set for 28th and 29th this month, and aims at raising 5 billion USD in five years for investment in the education of 175 million children in low-income countries across the world," a statement from the Presidential Strategic Communications Unit (PSCU) said.

President Kenyatta was accompanied to Elysee Palace by Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Raychelle Omamo, her Infrastructure counterpart James Macharia and Kenya's envoy to France Prof Judi Wakhungu.
Monrovia  As the COVID-19 is on the increase in Liberia, the Cummings Africa Foundation has joined the by announcing his foundation's commitment of US$150,000 to aid in the fight of the killer disease.

"I am pleased to announce that the Foundation is committing US$150,000 which is $25 million Liberian Dollars as our initial contribution to this fight. My fellow Liberians, I cannot ask you to do your part, and don't do mine. At the Cummings Africa Foundation, we are doing all we can to do our part," said Mr. Alexander Cummings, Founder and CEO of the Cummings Africa Foundation.

He said the US$150k commitment doubles the US$75,000 the Cummings Foundation provided during the lockdown last year in food and household materials across the country.

He said the Cummings Foundation will continue to do what it can to help the people of Liberia during these difficult times, and will assist as best as they (Foundation) can to help the government in its response.

He noted that the Foundation is moving quickly to purchase, and hurriedly provide to hospitals, much-needed medical supplies like oxygen, drugs, masks, gloves, gowns, oximeters, cleaning supplies and hand-washing buckets among others to help fight virus.

He disclosed that at the Cummings Africa Foundation, the approach is in three-fold, saying; "First, we are providing support to some public and private hospitals as best as we can. The needs are many, and I know we cannot do it all, or alone. Our hands can only reach so far. But we are trying as best as we can to increase the current capacities of hospitals to respond to the increasing numbers of sick and infected people," he noted.

He also noted that, "Secondly, we will work with community leaders, civil society organizations, and the media to increase public awareness and messaging especially around prevention. We have already released a jingle, flyers with simple messages and working on a skit for our community radio stations. As these are life-saving messages and public awareness campaigns, I am asking the media, which has been very helpful, to please continue to do their part".

Cummings said he is of the conviction that the government bears the primary responsibility to lead this fight against the virus.

"We are however trying to help the government succeed in this effort. And so, working with a broader team of experts, we will regularly update the government on what we are doing, and recommend additional steps, as required, to be taken by the government to seriously fight the virus, stop the spread, and end the infections in the country," he noted.

Alexander Cummings who is also the political leader of the one of Liberia's leading opposition political party, Alternative National Congress (ANC) calls on Liberians not to politicize the fight of the virus.

He said the Cummings Africa Foundation has provided oxygen for 50 tanks to Catholic Hospital and procured 20 tanks and 20 regulators for CH Rennie hospital to be delivered this weekend.

He told Liberians that the Foundation and its employees are grateful to all health workers in Liberia on the frontline fight this dradly disease.

"All of us at the Cummings Africa Foundation, including my wife Teresa, who chairs the Foundation, Dr. Wede Brownell, the Country Director, and members of the team, are deeply thankful to our doctors, nurses, and medical support staff all across the country, who continue to do their best, in these times and under very difficult, if not impossible circumstances, to save lives. We pray for their safety, and for the continued safety and protection of their families," he said.

The ANC Political leader said the Liberian society is very low on trust and does not trust each other. He said too many Liberians do not trust the government, and some people do not trust the opposition.

He said many people do not trust the vaccines as well, even as people are dying today, some people still do not believe that the virus is real.

"I also admit that some of the public actions we have seen can only make one doubtful, but doubting the existence of the virus will not make it disappear, Doubts will not protect you from the virus. No more Liberians need to die for anyone to believe that the virus is real. Too many have died already. Too many families are mourning and grieving already. And if we do not act quickly, I am afraid that many will continue to die," he noted.

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He disclosed that he has seen and spoken to those at the frontlines fighting and doing their best to save people's lives.

"In Montserrado, the hospitals are full. I am getting stories of people dying in cars because there were really no available beds in the hospitals. People are sitting in chairs in hospital hallways to receive oxygen".

He said funeral homes are overcrowded some are turning grieving families bearing the dead bodies of loved ones away. Right now, people are being advised not to come to our country as our COVID situation has been elevated from Level 1 to Level 4. In the last 8 days, we have had over 700 confirmed cases.

This, Cummings said is no joke. It is real, and it is serious. It is so serious that if we don't act to respond seriously and quickly, we risk locking ourselves out from the rest of the world.
SINCE it emerged in early March 2021 that the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine may be the cause of a very rare blood-clotting disorder, which could be fatal in some people, the vaccine has featured as the poster child of all the toxic suspicions surrounding the new vaccines.

Disinformation peddlers, conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers have pointed to the diagnosis of the rare blood-clotting condition in some as proof that the vaccine is 'experimental', that it is 'poisonous', that it is meant to kill people and depopulate the world - even making up large numbers of deaths to make their point - and have used the issue to attempt to discredit all Covid-19 vaccines for months now.

Some of the disinformation has caused enough confusion and stoked enough fear to harden vaccine skepticism and hesitancy in people the world over, and has undoubtedly led to vaccine rejection by some.

In Namibia too, as the falsehoods around the potential side effects of vaccines continue to swirl on social media and through messaging apps, people are still asking in disturbed and fearful tones about the blood-clotting disorder associated with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine (Vaxzevria/Covishield).

Many here are also parroting the imported lies about vaccines being poisonous and deadly, citing and forwarding falsehoods as they spam their friends, families and associates on WhatsApp groups with anti-vaxxer propaganda.

WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY

To date, the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine remains the most widely used Covid-19 vaccine in the world - 115 countries have approved the Oxford/AstraZeneca version, and 43 countries the Serum Institute of India version (Covishield).

Even with some countries now no longer using or restricting the use of the vaccine, out of an overabundance of caution, it is still being administered in many places, including Namibia, around the continent and world on a daily basis.

That is because the diagnosis of a blood-clotting condition after vaccination is so extremely rare.

How rare, you may ask.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), data from the UK suggest "the risk is approximately four cases per million adults (1 case per 250 000) who receive the vaccine, while the rate is estimated to be approximately 1 per 100 000 in the European Union (EU)".

According to reports, in Australia by the end of May, with 2,1 million doses of the vaccine having been administered by that point, 24 people, or 1 in 88 000 had developed the blood-clotting disorder, and one had died as a result.

By 17 June, Australian health authorities had updated their estimate of the frequency of the blood-clotting disorder being diagnosed to about 1 in 200 000.

The rareness of this disorder prompted the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to express its continued support and approval of the vaccine in a statement on 7 April 2021, also stating: "The EMA's safety committee has concluded today that unusual blood clots with low blood platelets should be listed as very rare side effects of Vaxzevria (formerly Covid-19 vaccine AstraZeneca)."

On 16 April, the WHO also expressed continued approval of the vaccine, and advised countries to continue using it, stating: "Based on the latest available data, the risk of TTS (thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome) with Vaxzevria and Covishield vaccines appears to be very low."

And on 3 May 2021, the Namibian Ministry of Health and Social Services stated: "The current guidance is that health workers should counsel people about the very rare risk of vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT), especially in those 30 years and below (1 in 250 000). For persons who have had previous thrombo-embolic events, individual risk-benefit assessment by a healthcare provider is advised."

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It has to be noted here that European and British researchers have since identified the cause of the blood-clotting condition, and adjustments to the vaccine can be made to make it safer.

And remember, with almost 70 000 Namibians, as of 23 June, having received either one or both doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, not a single blood-clotting case has been officially reported by health authorities so far.

In other words, right now around the world a handful of blood-clotting cases have been identified, but the widespread disinformation around the rare occurrence of the disorder has caused damage to the reputation of the vaccine that probably far outweighs the cause.

- Frederico Links is the editor of Namibia Fact Check, which is a project of the Institute for Public Policy Research. Namibia Fact Check can be viewed at www.namibiafactcheck.org.na.
THE company Namibian Marine Phosphate's controversial plan to carry out seabed mining off the Namibian coast has received another setback, with a High Court judge finding that the company did not correctly apply for an environmental clearance certificate which it needed to commence test mining and mining.

In a judgement delivered in the Windhoek High Court yesterday, judge Harald Geier also found that Namibian Marine Phosphate (NMP) was in breach of the 20-year mining licence issued to it in July 2011 when it carried out what it termed "trial mining" and "bulk sampling" without a valid environmental clearance certificate.

At the end of a 131-page judgement, Geier declared that NMP is not entitled to undertake any "listed activity" under the Environmental Management Act of 2007 until it has obtained a valid environmental clearance certificate for such activity.

The judgement was delivered in a case in which three organisations representing the Namibian fishing industry were asking the High Court to review and set aside a decision to grant an environmental clearance certificate to NMP, and also to declare that a mining licence issued to the company is invalid.

The Confederation of Namibian Fishing Associations, the Namibian Hake Association, the Midwater Trawling Association of Namibia and the company Omualu Fishing claimed the process leading to the granting of the environmental clearance certificate to NMP was "fundamentally flawed", as various provisions of the Environmental Management Act were not complied with.

Namibian Marine Phosphate (NMP) is owned by Omani billionaire Mohammed Al Barwani through his company Mawarid Mining LLC, which has a shareholding of 85% in NMP, while businessman Knowledge Katti's company Havana Investments has a shareholding of 15% in NMP.

The company's plan to start a marine phosphate seabed mining project in Namibian waters about 120 kilometres south-west of Walvis Bay has drawn fierce opposition from environmentalists and the Namibian fishing industry, who fear that mining activities could cause serious and long-term harm to the country's marine resources and endanger fishing activities.

The pressure group Swakopmund Matters, which is opposed to the marine phosphate mining plan, commented yesterday that the significance of the judgement lies in the fact that documents presented by NMP in its application for an environmental clearance certificate "have been measured and found wanting".

The organisation remarked that the company would have to apply anew for an environmental clearance certificate. "Judicial sanity prevailed," it commented.

NMP did not respond to a request for comment yesterday.

Geier noted that the mining licence issued to NMP was subject to a condition that the company had to undertake an environmental impact assessment over the area covered by its exclusive prospecting licence, and that it had to forward an environmental management plan to the Ministry of Mines and Energy within six months after the licence had been issued.

NMP submitted a draft environmental impact assessment (EIA) report to the ministry in January 2012, but submitted a final EIA report only in April 2012, the judge also noted.

Geier found that the company failed to adhere to the condition to provide an environmental management plan within six months after it received the mining licence. He also concluded that NMP did not apply in the prescribed manner for the environmental clearance certificate which the environmental commissioner in the Ministry of Environment, Tourism and Forestry granted to it in September 2016.

He further noted that the Environmental Management Act states that "listed activities" may not be undertaken without an environmental clearance certificate.

"Listed activities" are defined broadly, and include "extraction of any natural resources" and also "resource extraction, manipulation, conservation and related activities", the judge remarked. The "trial mining" and "bulk sampling" which NMP stated it had carried out after it received its mining licence fell under a "listed activity" as defined in the act, Geier concluded.

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NMP received a first setback when environment minister Pohamba Shifeta, after a public outcry, in November 2016 set aside the environmental clearance certificate which had been granted to the company.

However, NMP scored a victory against that decision of Shifeta in May 2018, when a High Court judge set aside Shifeta's decision after finding that he had not given the company a proper hearing.

Shifeta then again set aside the environmental clearance certificate in June 2018, and directed that a consultation process on NMP's application for a certificate should again take place.

Senior counsel Jean Marais, assisted by Natasha Bassingthwaighte and Yoleta Campbell, represented the fishing industry applicants in the case before Geier.

Senior counsel Reinhard Totemeyer, assisted by Deon Obbes, represented NMP.
BETWEEN January 2020 and February this year, 815 registered companies and close corporations have voluntarily deregistered.

This rather sad closure is on the back of Namibia's economy only managing to record positive growth among 33% of its sectors since 2016.

With the Covid-19 pandemic amplifying an already difficult operating environment in 2020 and beyond, the numbers are expected to increase.

And to avoid more entities succumbing to pandemic-induced financial distress, a business rescue task force of 11 members, comprising lawyers and bankers, has been set up by the president as announced on Tuesday.

Its primary purpose is to review business and insolvency legislation, laws, regulations and policies.

The 11 members of the task force include Thinus Prinsloo as chairperson, Vivienne Katjiuongua, Puye Haufiku, Sarel van Zyl, Leonie Dunn, Jason Hailonga, Hans Gerdes, Erna Irene Simeon-Kurtz, Rose-Mary Sihova, Amalia Schmidt and Maria Gertze.

The task force will make recommendations for amendments to laws and regulations to rescue struggling businesses.

More importantly, the team will consider alternative funding instruments related to business rescue.

A key objective will be to limit the number of jobs lost as a result of retrenchments, and to safeguard a stronger entrepreneurial culture in Namibia.

The task force is part of the recently launched second Harambee Prosperity Plan (HPPII), which outlined a business rescue legislative framework as part of its economic advancement pillar, and would aim to combat economic scarring.

Economic scarring refers to the medium to long-term damage done to the economy of one or more countries following a severe economic shock leading to a recession.

"This declaration has resulted in significant financial distress for business entities of all shapes and sizes," the HPPII reads.

Statistics from the Business Intellectual Property Authority (Bipa) indicate more companies are voluntarily deregistering, while few dissolutions have been completed.

Dissolution is the liquidation of an entity published in the Government Gazette, however, the data shows only one company has been wound up since last year.

But Bipa said businesses, such as Air Namibia and others, may currently be in the process of liquidation.

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More companies deregistered in July last year (125), followed by 117 in November last year, and 99 in February this year.

The Namibian asked the Development Bank of Namibia (DBN) and Agribank whether they have forced an entity into liquidation as a way of recovering their investments.

The DBN explained that calling on pledged collateral and initiating legal processes remain a last resort.

However, it is the bank's duty to preserve its capital to the best of its ability.

"If its loans are not repaid, the bank is unable to lend onwards to other borrowers," the DBN said.

It has, however, "no knowledge of an application for bankruptcy resulting from its duty to recover capital," the bank said.

Agribank said it has not forced an entity into liquidation.

It said it is not aware of individual farmers who have applied for bankruptcy because they could not settle their debts with the bank.

Only competent courts of law can declare a person or company bankrupt, Agribank said.

Bankruptcy differs from a default judgement against debt.

The former usually refers to a situation where a person or company no longer has enough assets to cover their liabilities.

According to the HPPII, Namibia's legislation and regulations pertaining to businesses in financial distress can play a vital role in reducing economic scarring.

"In looking to support a thriving entrepreneurial culture, a forward-looking and positive legislative regulatory framework is necessary," the HPPII document reads.

Email: [email protected]
The face on the cover of Ndiilokelwa Nthengwe first book is one that is familiar from the social justice frontlines.

A prominent voice in the intersectional ShutItAllDown and pro-choice movements as well as in the fight to recognise LGBTQ+ rights, young Nthengwe has funneled their activist fire into a nonfiction and memoir hybrid titled 'The Chronicles of A Non-Binary Black Lesbian Namibian - In Love' (2021).

Intentional in the title's bold type succession of intersecting identities, Nthengwe's is a coming of age story defined by the legal, sociopolitical and gender issues that shape and affect the lives of queer people in Namibia.

"It was important to insert these key identities as they are part of the key themes that summarise the writing in the book. They are also meant to reintroduce me, firmly, and purport so much more on what I aim to achieve in the next few years," says Nthengwe, who began writing the book on their late mother's birthday as a tool to both enhance LGBTQ+ visibility and heal.

"I needed to heal from so much, especially from Shannon Wasserfall's death, who was my cousin. Compounded by the whirlwind of gender justice issues in the country, this was the right time to start creating room for my thoughts to live outside of my head," says Nthengwe, who will be self-publishing the book.

An avid reader and writer who would compose short stories and biographies for friends in high school, Nthengwe sees this debut as a dream come true and a continuation of their activism.

"There's no difference between myself as the author and activist. Part of my writing, particularly for this book, aims to challenge so many of the sociopolitical issues I constantly advocate for on the ground," says Nthengwe. Not to be overlooked in the titular declaration of their identities are the words "...in love".

"The concurrent theme throughout the book is love in its different variations and degrees. It comes in with my romantic same-sex relationships. It was important to highlight them as they address so many social enigmas within the queer community," Nthengwe says.

"I am teasing out the most overlooked aspects within these dynamics, like emotional [abuse], legal protections, etc."

Narratively, the book explores significant moments in Nthengwe's childhood and gradually catches up to the present day fraught with the governmental issues and challenges which continue to hamper the fight for equality on the ground.

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"This book is primarily dedicated to Eerike Kahambundu, a fierce activist of his time and amazing friend; and because of this, the dedication extends to queer black marginalised people who might resonate deeply with my work and find their journey within the texts," says Nthengwe, who also posits new approaches for addressing Namibia's gender issues.

As the book's recent cover reveal continues to earn kudos on Twitter, 'The Chronicles of A Non-Binary Black Lesbian Namibian - In Love' (2021) is currently available for pre-order via Nthengwe's social media platforms.

Musician ML, one of more than 300 Twitter users who retweeted Nthengwe's reveal, said: "We must also support offline, not only retweets. Let's translate all retweets into orders. Congratulations sweetheart, this is big and inspiration to us all. Keep making the impact you want."

A bold introduction to the life behind the loudspeaker and a contemporary view of the state of civil rights and social justice in independent Namibia, Nthengwe's first book aims to "transform and influence" and hits shelves next month.

- [email protected]; Martha Mukaiwa on Instagram/Twitter; marthamukaiwa.com
THE Ministry of Health and Social Services is experiencing a shortage of healthcare workers nationwide as staff at healthcare facilities continue to be overwhelmed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to an advertisement for a vacant post at a healthcare facility, the ministry needs to fill various positions, from medical officers to enrolled nurses.

Posts in more more than 10 job categories have been advertised.

Minister of health and social services Kalumbi Shangula this week said the vacancies are a result of the country running short of healthcare workers.

Deputy executive director in the ministry Petronella Masabane said the ministry is looking for the professionals listed, and will select suitable candidates from the applicants.

Healthcare workers countrywide are complaining they are overworked and drained.

Shangula could not immediately provide a figure indicating how big the budget for these posts is.

The ministry earlier this year revealed that more than half of the health professionals in the country are employed in the private sector, which serves less than 20% of the population.

The Namibian in February last year reported there were 17 500 registered healthcare professionals in the country.

Of those, 63% served the private health sector, and only 37% the public sector.

Executive director of health Ben Nangombe at the time said the ministry granted approval to fill more than 4 000 critical positions.

'WE ARE STRESSED'

Meanwhile, Katutura Intermediate Hospital workers in Windhoek say their pleas are falling on deaf ears.

Some nurses at the hospital's casualty department anonymously tells The Namibian they are mentally drained and the situation keeps getting worse.

"It is very tough in the casualty department, and we are so stressed. The department, which is meant for emergencies only, now looks like a ward," a nurse says.

She says sometimes more than 10 patients are brought in at the same time - all in need of oxygen.

She said the area is not big enough to accommodate all the patients, and "we are forced to attend to patients on the floor".

"We as nurses are really trying our level best to help save lives, but at times we are blamed for a patient's death," she says.

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"We never send patients back due to a lack of space, but what if there are no other alternatives? It is an everyday struggle," she says.

On the same day that president Hage Geingob visited the facility last week eight dead bodies were lying in the casualty department.

"Our management failed to bring him [Geingob] to the casualty department to see [the situation] for himself. I am not sure if the president knows, because they are hiding it from him," the nurse says.

She expressed her disappointment in the nurses' union, which has up to date not stood up for them, she says.

Another nurse says they are affected emotionally due to seeing virus victims' bodies daily.

She says at times, the city's morgue takes a whilel before collecting the bodies, because they are inundated with calls from different wards.

Another nurse says they were all hoping for the president to visit the casualty department to see the situation on the ground.

"They will keep saying everything is under control, because they have not been at the department during the time of the pandemic," the minister says.

Shangula said he has requested the hospital's management to give him information on the pictures circulating of patients being treated on the floor as well as to confirm whether it is authentic.
The two vaccines used in South Africa's vaccination programme, those from Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and Pfizer/BioNTech, have both been shown to be highly effective against COVID-19, particularly in preventing hospitalisation and death. But with renewed concerns about new variants of SARS-CoV-2, largely driven by the rapid spread of the delta variant, it might well be that people who have received these vaccines may in time require booster shots. Given that it is a single-shot vaccine to start with, it seems more likely that a booster shot will be required for the J&J vaccine, although the science is far from settled and it might equally be that no booster shots will be required.

The J&J vaccine was rolled out to 500 000 healthcare workers during the Phase 3b Sisonke trial and hundreds of breakthrough infections have been reported, although the majority of these have led to only mild symptoms. The J&J vaccine is currently being rolled out to teachers and will also soon be provided as part of the age-based vaccine rollout to the general public.

All the COVID-19 vaccines registered so far with stringent regulatory authorities, except for J&J's one-and-done jab, require two doses. The first dose primes the immune system and the second dose boosts or strengthens the response.

A highly effective vaccine

The results of the J&J Phase 3 Ensemble study showed excellent protection against multiple variants and the manufacturer says it will continue to test the effectiveness of the vaccine against new and emerging variants. Mmakafela Mojapelo, a company spokesperson says, "We are monitoring the Delta (B.1.617) variant and are testing whether the immune response elicited by our COVID-19 vaccine is also targeting this strain and capable of neutralising it in a laboratory setting."

According to Professor Linda-Gail Bekker, co-lead investigator of the Sisonke trial and Director of the Desmond Tutu HIV centre, lab data supports better immunogenicity of the J&J vaccine against the delta variant (thought to be driving South Africa's third wave) than against the beta variant (dominant in South Africa's second wave). There is as yet no reliable data on how the J&J vaccine's efficacy against the two variants differs in the real world.

New variants are not the only thing that might require people to get booster doses, it might also be that immunity could wane over time. Bekker says the clinical trial data on the durability of immunity after a single dose of the J&J vaccine will be made available in the next month or two but indications are that immunity lasts for more than 200 days (over six months).

She acknowledged that "several hundred" frontline health care workers who had been vaccinated reported breakthrough infections, however, "more than 90 percent of these resulted in mild symptoms". Breakthrough infections are not unexpected since none of the vaccines provide 100% protection against infection.

Will people need boosters?

The short answer is that we simply don't know yet.

In addition to the single-dose regimen ENSEMBLE study, Janssen, the manufacturer of the J&J shot, began a two-dose trial in November last year. Interim clinical data from this ongoing, large-scale, multi-country Phase 3 trial looking at the safety and efficacy of a two-dose regimen will only be available later this year. Up to 30 000 participants enrolled for the study.

Meanwhile, scientists on Monday reported that the two-dose mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are likely to produce lasting immunity. The study published in Nature adds to growing evidence that people immunised with these shots may not need boosters providing the virus and its variants do not evolve significantly beyond their current forms - which is not a certainty.

Massive logistical challenges in the rollout of vaccines globally have led scientists to consider alternative dosing strategies - specifically using a mix and match approach. They hope mixing vaccines doses - using different vaccines for first and second doses - will offer a chance to bolster vaccine rollouts, potentially boost the immunity provided, and better protect people from emerging variants.

NIH mix-and-match trial

Encouragingly, the J&J vaccine is being investigated in an early stage, mix and match trial launched by the US National Institutes of Health last month. The trial hopes to determine the safety and immunogenicity (immune response) of mixed boosted regimens.

The NIH's Phase 1/2 trial includes 150 volunteers who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 with either the one-dose J&J or the two-dose Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines. Participants will receive one booster dose of Moderna's shot 12 to 20 weeks later, irrespective of what shot they first received.

At the time of the trial launch Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said "... we need to prepare for the possibility of needing booster shots to counter waning immunity and to keep pace with an evolving virus. The results of this trial are intended to inform public health policy decisions on the potential use of mixed vaccine schedules should booster doses be indicated," he said.

Promising findings in pre-print

Supporters of a vaccine mixing approach will be encouraged by results published as a preprint (still to be peer-reviewed) in The Lancet of the UK's Com-Cov study which shows the strategy offers good protection with some vaccines.

The study looked at the efficacy of either two doses of Pfizer/BioNTech, two of AstraZeneca or one of each followed by the other, four weeks apart in 850 volunteers, aged 50 and older.

Results showed that AstraZeneca followed by a dose of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine produced antibody levels nine to 10 times higher than in those receiving two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. When the vaccines were switched (Pfizer first then AstraZeneca) antibody levels were five times higher than in those who got two doses of AstraZeneca.

Two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine produced the highest antibody levels and the T-cell response was higher in people who got AstraZeneca followed by a dose of Pfizer vaccine.

Further results from the study evaluating a 12-week interval between the doses are expected next month.

Potential risks

Bekker agrees that a mix and match strategy could alleviate slow and inconsistent delivery of vaccines due to shortages, unequal access and safety concerns, but cautions that there could be an increased risk of vaccine-related adverse events.

Different vaccine's target different parts of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to which the immune system responds. So exposure to different parts of the spike protein means different components of the immune system can be stirred up producing a broader immune response, she says. The downside of a mixing strategy, Bekker says, is that there may be additional adverse events as you would have two different biologicals (vaccines) working in the body.

"We are seeing that there is a particular profile of adverse events with the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) and a different profile with the viral vector vaccines (such as J&J and Sputnik). Giving both to a person may increase the chance of getting adverse events for both or doubling the risk. This needs to be weighed up and more data is needed."

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Consideration, she says, also has to be given to the interval between doses whether you boost an initial dose with the same vaccine or with a different one. "We have seen the vacillation around when to use a second dose of Pfizer and Moderna."

The CoV-Boost study

The J&J vaccine is also part of the UK's CoV-Boost study which is investigating seven vaccines to provide data on the impact of a third booster dose. The other six vaccines to be tested as booster doses are Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Novavax, Valneva and CureVac.

The trial is being conducted by the UK's National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the University of Southampton.

Launched in May, it is aiming to provide data on the use of different vaccines as a booster to further protect against COVID-19 and variants of concern. About 2 900 volunteers from age 30 and older are being recruited across 18 sites in the UK. Initial results are expected in September.

The study aims to establish the safety and immunogenicity of different vaccine candidates used as a seasonal boosting vaccination among people who have received two doses of the AstraZeneca or two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine as part of the UK's vaccination rollout programme.

For people in South Africa who have received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, this study should give a good indication of whether any further booster shots may be needed.

*Adele Baleta is an independent science writer and a member of the Vaccine Hesitancy Working Group for the National Advisory Group on Immunisation.
Tunis/Tunisia  President of the Republic Kais Saied met Thursday evening at the Interior Ministry seat, with the department's directors and officers.

The meeting was devoted to assessing the security situation in the country in light of the outbreak of coronavirus infections, said a Presidency of the Republic press release.

On this occasion, the Head of State underlined the need to take all necessary measures, especially in the regions where the number of infections is very high.

However, he recommended taking into consideration the economic and social situation of citizens.

In a video posted on the Presidency's Facebook page, the Head of State stressed that the current health situation is the result of "ill-conceived choices."

He pointed to violations of the rules in the measures taken by the authorities to combat the spread of the pandemic.

"It is unlawful to declare a curfew at a press conference, it is a prerogative of the head of state or the governors who have regulatory power in their regions," he said, referring to the press conference held on June 25 by the spokesperson for the government.

He added: "The curfew decreed throughout the country has not brought any concrete results."

At this stage," he insisted, "we must take courageous and safe decisions without taking into account the sides that do nothing but plunder Tunisia."

President Said pointed out that the security leaders must incite the political class to make "realistic decisions."

Before visiting the Interior Ministry seat, Saied inaugurated a new intensive care unit at the Tunis military hospital.
El Geneina  About 1,500 women and girls access five UN Population Fund (UNFPA) temporary safe spaces in El Geneina, capital of West Darfur, each month, to tackle the trauma of violence and displacement, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says in its latest Sudan Situation Report.

Sawakin, 35, fled armed clashes that erupted in the Al Jebel neighbourhood of El Geneina, capital of West Darfur earlier in April. Sawakin's house was torched and pillaged. Her family lost all their belongings, including food, livestock, and clothes. Together with her husband and seven children, Sawakin fled the fighting and sought refuge at the Moheria Girls School IDP gathering point in town.

"During our first nights here, I was very scared and had difficulty sleeping - afraid of being attacked again. Fearing the unknown future and what I might face left me anxious and depressed. I still get painful flashbacks of my house burning. The sound of shooting still rings in my head," Sawakin told aid workers when they visited the site on 24 June.

Similar to other IDP gathering sites in El Geneina, the Moheria Girls School is overcrowded with a lack of privacy and basic services such as water, sanitation, and medical services, which put even more stress on displaced women and girls.

To provide some basics for her family, Sawakin found casual work at the local market, then switched to washing clothes and was receiving some humanitarian assistance to complement the family's income. Her husband managed to find only some odd jobs that paid little.

Sawakin, along with many other women at the gathering sites, suffered from anxiety and depression exacerbated by a sense of detachment from her community and normal life. To seek treatment and help, she met with social workers deployed by the State Ministry of Social Development and the Child Development Fund who referred her to the women and girls space set up at the school by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). There, she received psychosocial support (PSS) services in the form of group sessions, orientation sessions and recreational activities.

The women and girls' space created the opportunity to express herself and discuss her issues and concerns with other displaced women who had been through similar experiences. This newfound sense of community and comradery helped Sawakin to take on a proactive role at the women and girls' space, volunteering her time to lead handcraft workshops on knitting and embroidery as well as raising awareness among her peers on gender-based violence (GBV) issues.

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The women and girls spaces provide PSS, GBV referrals, dignity kits, awareness-raising and recreational activities. Women are referred to these spaces by social workers and volunteers that make up community-based protection networks.

To mitigate GBV risks associated with collecting firewood and charcoal outside the gathering sites, UNFPA offers workshops on making fuel-efficient stoves, thereby reducing the number of times women need to venture outside.

These temporary spaces are part of UNFPA's integrated sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and GBV response, where social workers coordinate with midwives deployed by the State Ministry of Health for timely referrals to services including GBV, medical response, PSS, maternity care, and family planning.

Sawakin is one of 1,500 women and girls who access the five UNFPA temporary safe spaces in El Geneina each month. Given the high number of IDPs and gathering sites in West Darfur, additional mobile SRH clinics and temporary women and girls spaces need to be set up; more trained social workers, psychologists and health care providers need to be deployed; community protection networks need to be expanded and strengthened; and dignity kits need to be distributed on a wider scale combined with awareness-raising activities to ensure access to quality SRH-GBV life-saving services and community support for all.

(Source: UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Sudan Situation Report, 30 Jun 2021)
CHILDREN at Kuisebmond at Walvis Bay flock to Barbra Kavita's house, dubbed the 'Pap Mansion' by locals, each Saturday for the meal they have been looking forward to the whole week.

The children, some as young as two years old, are from households which cannot provide them with food every day.

Kavita, Kuisebmond Secondary School's secretary, started feeding about 10 children in 2004, but this number has grown rapidly since.

She says she is happy to see the children going home after a good meal, but can no longer afford to feed them all.

"Feeding depends on what we get from good Samaritans. Some young people donate here and there, and that is what my friends and I prepare for the children. It is hard though, to see them at my doorstep on Saturdays when there is nothing, asking me why I don't have anything for them," she says.

Kavita, who also takes care of her son and three foster children, believes it is her duty to make sure no child goes hungry, but appeals to young, working adults to help her feed their community.

Apart from providing meals on Saturdays, Kavita also collects clothes and stationery from friends for the children she feeds, as well as their parents.

"Adults have also started knocking on my door, and unfortunately you cannot turn them away if they don't have children. If someone is hungry, it gives you sleepless nights, whether they are young or old," she says.

Meanwhile, two young people at the town have decided to support the Pap Mansion.

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"She has been helping everyone since I was in high school in 2005. Although our parents took care of us, there were gaps to fill, and she was there. She always helped us with textbooks, food and a place to study. Her house was open to all of us," says Matthew Sambiliye, who owns a transport company.

Salaz Iilonga says: "I have been going to that same soup kitchen since 2008. I am giving back to the community through taking care of the house. It touches my heart to see she managed to go on for years after we left.

"Do not just raise your standard of living when you start earning money, but also raise your standard of giving, and see how God will bless you too."

Sambiliye and Iilonga are appealing to other young people in the community to support the Pap Mansion.
Major General (Retired) Clever Shadreck Chiramba, who succumbed to Covid-19 complications on Sunday, was yesterday declared a national hero.

The announcement was made by President Mnangagwa at the national hero's Hatfield home in Harare.

Maj-Gen (Rtd) Chiramba, who was aged 66, died at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals.

President Mnangagwa was accompanied by Vice President Constantino Chiwenga, Zanu PF Second Secretary Kembo Mohadi, Defence and War Veterans Affairs Minister Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri and service chiefs.

President Mnangagwa described Maj-Gen (Rtd) Chiramba as a cheerful and intelligent cadre who dedicated his life to the liberation and development of the country.

"The late Major General was a strong revolutionary cadre who served his country before and after independence with utmost loyalty, dedication and commitment," he said.

"I knew him personally, even though he joined the liberation war via Botswana and Zapu."

President Mnangagwa said Maj-Gen Chiramba was bestowed with the national hero status due to his unwavering commitment to Zanu PF.

He consoled the Chiramba family, saying the nation was mourning with them in their bereavement.

Vice President Chiwenga said he worked together with Maj-Gen (Rtd) Chiramba after independence in the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), when the Maj-Gen was his deputy at Five Brigade in Gweru from 1985 to 1988.

"I knew him at a personal level, we wanted to see him get old, but unfortunately due to the pandemic he left us early," he said.

Vice President Chiwenga said at the time of his death, Maj-Gen (Rtd) Chiramba was part of veterans of the struggle who were writing a book on the liberation war.

Cde Mohadi consoled the family, saying the nation shared in their loss.

He said Maj-Gen (Rtd) Chiramba contributed immensely to the country's independence and maintenance of peace.

Father to Maj-Gen (Rtd) Chiramba, Mr Shadreck Chiramba, thanked President Mnangagwa and Government for honouring his son and family.

Mr Chiramba said the honour bestowed on his son was a consolation to his family in their time of mourning.

Maj-Gen Chiramba's younger brother, Alfred, also thanked the President for the honour, saying even after retirement, his brother remained loyal to Government and the ruling party, Zanu PF.

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Born on February 2, 1955, in Chivi district in Gude Village, Maj-Gen (Rtd) 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 and would 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 he retired from active service in 2004.

Maj-Gen (Rtd) Chiramba led Two Infantry Brigade during the DRC campaign under the auspices of the SADC Allied Forces.

The military intervention, which was code-named "Operation Sovereign Legitimacy", was meant to ward off rebels, secure the DRC territory, and to protect civilians.

Maj-Gen (Rtd) Chiramba is survived by his wife, Beatrice Chiramba nee Pawandiwa, eight children and 16 grandchildren.
The Zimbabwe National Road Administration (Zinara) has given a reprieve to motorists with arrears through a 30-day vehicle licensing promotion this month where all penalties will be suspended.

In an interview, Zinara public relations and marketing manager Mr Tendai Mugabe, said this was part of their Zimbabwe International Trade Fair exhibition promotion.

Although the ZITF has been postponed to August, Mr Mugabe said they were going ahead with the promotion as scheduled.

He said it had become a tradition for Zinara to run the promotion but this year they chose to run it for the entire ZITF month which was initially pencilled for July.

Mr Mugabe urged motorists with arrears to take advantage of this window period to regularise their vehicle license discs.

"Yes, we are running a month-long promotion where we are suspending penalties on motorists with arrears," said Mr Mugabe.

"This is part of the ZITF exhibition promotion which we normally do every year but this time we resolved to do it differently. We considered several issues largely brought about by Covid-19 where most people may fail to visit our stand during the ZITF. So, to give everyone an opportunity to benefit from this promotion, we resolved that it should run for the whole month."

Said Mr Mugabe: "We are also cognisant of the travel restrictions imposed by Government to control the spread of Covid-19, so we have decentralised the promotion to all our offices countrywide and automated licensing machines found in selected supermarkets, refuelling stations and selected tollgates. As we approached the ZITF month, we have been inundated with calls from members of the public inquiring about this promotion, so we think that this is the opportune time for them to regularise their cars and comply with the provisions of the law."

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Mr Mugabe paid tribute to all compliant motorists saying their payments were contributing positively towards the refurbishment of the country's road network.

"We have the Emergency Road Rehabilitation Programme2 launched by President, Mnangagwa that we are funding together with Treasury," said Mr Mugabe.

"As Zinara, we salute all motorists who are paying their vehicle licenses because this has enabled us to make timely disbursements to road authorities. We are also appealing to road authorities to expedite their acquittal processes to accelerate the refurbishment of our road network. Most of our roads are in bad shape following the heavy rains that we received during the last cropping season, and they require urgent attention."

Under ERRP2, Zinara as the road fund manager was tasked to raise US$400 million together with Treasury to refurbish the country's road network.

Since the beginning of this year, Zinara has so far disbursed more than $2 billion to various road authorities for road refurbishment and this year

Government is targeting to rehabilitate and reconstruct 840km and to re-gravel 8 340km.

About 17 093km of road network are set to re-graded while 1 290km will be resealed.
The continued strong performance by TelOne, which has seen it post an operating profit of $523 million and growing its broadband subscriber base, is critical as it dovetails with Government's thrust of promoting ICTs for economic growth.

This was said by Information Communication Technology, Postal and Courier Services Minister Dr Jenfan Muswere while addressing TelOne's virtual annual general meeting yesterday.

"I have noted that TelOne has posted an operating profit of $523 million, which is an improvement from the operating profit of $449 million in 2019," he said.

"Further, I note that TelOne has managed to contain staff costs to income ratio to 30 percent, which is within stipulated thresholds.

"The growth in revenue is commendable and I have noted that the growth is due to the 14 percent increase in home broadband subscribers to 128 545 at the end of 2020 financial year."

Dr Muswere said the trading update by TelOne managing director Mrs Chipo Mtasa, indicates that the profitability trend was continuing to gain momentum, and broadband subscribers have risen to 129 590.

Said Dr Muswere: "This development is key in that it resonates with the drive by Government to increase access and utilisation of broadband especially as a key driver for economic development.

However, Dr Muswere expressed concern over the decline in TelOne's voice utilisation in terms of minutes by 19 percent.

He added that it was "even more concerning" that there has been a four percent decline in voice subscribers.

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To address the challenge, TelOne management was encouraged to ensure strategies are put in place to counter the loss of voice subscribers due to the fixed mobile migration.

Turning to the impact of the Posts and Telecommunications (PTC) legacy loans on TelOne's performance, Dr Muswere said they had "been noted", adding that the $34,7 billion legacy loan expenses have overshadowed the positive performance achieved at operating profit level.

"On behalf of the Ministry of ICT, Postal and Courier Services, I wish to reiterate our commitment to clean up the company's balance sheet by warehousing the legacy loans in line with resolutions passed by the Cabinet in March 2019.

"It is encouraging to note that Ministry of Finance and Economic Development has already expressed willingness by the shareholder to warehouse TelOne's legacy debt.

"I am very confident that the Government will resolve this issue by end of 2021 financial year. With a stronger balance sheet, TelOne is expected to be able to finally declare a dividend," he said.

TelOne board chairman, Dr Douglas Zimbango, told the virtual meeting that they "remain confident of our ability to deliver our vision through the dynamic strategies that are coming through as well as the support of the shareholder, as has become custom."
The late Major General (Rtd) Clever Shadreck Chiramba whose Chimurenga name was "Simangaliso Gumede," passed on in the morning of 27 June 2021 at Parirenyatwa Hospital. He was born on 02 February 1955 in Chivi District, Masvingo Province to Shadreck Chiramba and Sophia (nee Mudzingwa) Chiramba.

He was the third born in a family of eight (08) children comprising six (06) boys and two (02) girls. His siblings were Rhoda, Margret, Gerald who are still alive and the others include Sydney, Sam, Shacky and Takaedzwa who have since passed on.

The late General hails from the "Wamambo Chirasha" totem of the Zimuto fame. He did his primary education at Jenya Primary School in Chivi as from 1961 to 1968 before proceeding for his secondary education at Mashaba Mine (Temeraire) School from 1970 to 1971.

He could not complete his secondary education since his parents could not afford to pay school fees due to the racially discriminative system that marginalised black Zimbabweans who happened to make up the majority of the people.

Having dropped out of school, the late General Officer was forced to seek employment at a very tender age and worked in Gweru as a general hand to raise the much needed school fees. This enabled him to pursue his education through correspondence when he enrolled for the part of his studies with the Central African Correspondence College in Gweru period 1973 to June 1974.

It was during his working days in Gweru that he experienced first hand brutality of the colonial regime which was manifested in the inhuman treatment of workers at the work place and the squalid conditions under which they lived.

While still working as general hand in Gweru, the youthful Clever Shadreck Chiramba was among a group of young men who were motivated to join and participate in the Liberation Struggle. On 3 June 1974, he left Gweru at the age of 19 to cross the border into Botswana through Plumtree and joined the liberation struggle as a ZIPRA Cadre.

Other comrades who accompanied him include Paul Hamadziripi and Steven Nyamande. Their group was subsequently conveyed to Zambia and during the same month the late decorated General Officer commenced training at Morogoro Training Camp in Tanzania. It was at Morogoro during training that he met the current Commander Defence Forces General Philip Valerio Sibanda and they trained together from June 1974 to November 1974.

Having distinguished himself during the initial training General Chiramba was among the few selected to undergo Cadet Light Artillery Weapons Training in Ukraine between November 1974 and October 1975. His area of specialty was in Artillery weapons which he had mastered in the then USSR. Upon completion of his training in Ukraine, the late Comrade returned to Morogoro Camp for deployment. It was during that time that the revolution underwent some changes as a result of efforts by the Frontline States to unite the two military wings ZANLA and ZIPRA.

In late November 1975, he left Morogoro for Mugagao, Tanzania, and was among the cadres earmarked for the integration of ZANLA and ZIPRA forces. In December 1975, he left Mugagao Camp for Beira in Mozambique (Dondo) to be deployed at the front. He was among a group of 1000 trained cadres in a ship called "Mapinduzi".

By the end of 1975 he had deployed in Mt Darwin in the Nehanda Sector, Nyombwe Detachment and initially deployed as a 60mm Mortar operator. It was not long before he got injured in action along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border area in Mt Darwin and had to be repatriated to the rear in Tete Province where he received treatment at Tembuwe Camp.

The late General Officer did not take time to fully recover and had to be re-deployed at the Battalion Administration Operation Camp as a Logistics Officer responsible for armaments, food stuffs and clothing for comrades deployed in the frontline under Tete Province.

It was during his deployment at the Administration Camp that he distinguished himself as a capable logistician leading up to 1978 when he was promoted to a post in the General Staff responsible for operational logistics at the rear a position he held until the end of the war in 1979. In 1979, the late General Officer remained at the rear looking after strategic armaments.

During the Integration period following the attainment of Independence in 1980, the late general was responsible for integrating ZANLA forces into the Zimbabwe Army Service Corps. He was attested into the Zimbabwe National Army in 1980 and was commissioned as Colonel on 16 April 1981. The late General Officer was appointed Commanding Officer Mashonaland Services Corps in Mid 1981 up to December 1983. In 1984, he was appointed Commander Bulawayo District up to 1985 when he was then appointed Deputy Commander 5 Infantry Brigade.

He remained at 5 Infantry Brigade until January 1988 when he was appointed Acting Commander 3 Infantry Brigade. In December 1988, the late General Officer was appointed Commander Engineers Corps, a post he held until March 1990 when he was again re-appointed Commander 3 Infantry Brigade. In 1993, General Chiramba was appointed Commander 5 Infantry Brigade and subsequently got promoted to the rank of Brigadier General in 1994.

He remained as Commander 5 Infantry Brigade until the end of 1996 when he was then posted as Commander 2 Infantry Brigade.

He commanded 2 Infantry Brigade up to the beginning of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo when he was seconded as deputy managing Director Senga Senga Mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a post he held until 2004 when he retired from the Zimbabwe National Army. In recognition of his illustrious career as a Senior Officer and General in the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, General Chiramba was promoted to the rank of Major General in 2004 upon his retirement.

During his service in the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, the late General Officer attended the following military courses:

Basic Military Training, Tanzania in 1974.

Light Artillery Weapons Cadet Training Course in Ukraine period November 1974 to October 1975.

Standardisation Course at the Zimbabwe Staff College in 1983.

Senior Officers' Signals Course 3/49 at the School of Signals from July to September 1984.

National Defence Studies course in India from January to December 1989.

Command and Staff Course Number 6 at the Zimbabwe Staff College period January to December 1992.

The late freedom fighter was awarded the following medals for his continued dedication, selfless and exemplary service to the nation:

Liberation Medal -- for his gallantry and selfless dedication to the Liberation of Zimbabwe.

Independence Medal -- for his contribution towards the Independence of Zimbabwe.

Ten Years' Service Medal -- for his immense contribution to the integration, formation and development of the Zimbabwe National Army during the first ten years of its existence.

Long and Exemplary Service Medal -- for his exemplary service for continuous fifteen years.

Mozambique Campaign Medal -- for his contribution towards the restoration of peace and stability in Mozambique.

Grand officer of the Zimbabwe Order of Merit Award -- for his eminent achievement and distinguished service to Zimbabwe or to humanity at large.

Having diligently served in the military and retiring as Major General, General Chiramba was purposefully seconded to the mining venture in the DRC until his resignation in 2007. He then returned to Zimbabwe to pursue his farming business in Karoi having benefited from the Land Reform Programme. He was into soya beans and maize production on his 300 hectare farm in Karoi until his untimely death.

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It should be very clear to us all that the late Major General was no ordinary man, but a true revolutionary and Comrade. He gave up his youthful days to fight for the freedom we enjoy today. He committed his whole life to serving Zimbabwe and fought to defend her interests. He made valuable contributions to the liberation of Zimbabwe and played a pivotal role in nation building during the post-Independence period. Above all, he remained focused and steadfast in the face of neo-colonial machinations by our detractors.

As we pay our last respects to the late gallant Son of the Soil, we must not forget the sacrifices he and other heroes and heroines made for the freedom of our motherland, Zimbabwe. We must defend what they stood and fought for, we must defend Zimbabwe's independence and sovereignty at all costs. We must uphold the principles and values that the late General has left us.

Major General Clever Shadreck Chiramba (Rtd) will be remembered for his immense contribution to the Liberation Struggle. Indeed, he was a selfless team player and a true Revolutionary Cadre.

To Major General Chiramba, we say we surely know what it means not to have you now as the standards you set may be unassailable especially to those who lack the strength, spirit and resilience.

You raised the bar of patriotism and all that matters to us now is obedience to our great nation, Zimbabwe. Your professional conduct whose qualities are based on honesty, integrity, humility, stability, loyalty, enthusiasm and leadership speaks well into your legacy.

General Chiramba is survived by his wife Beatrice, eight children and fourteen grand children.

May his soul rest in eternal peace.

Lala Ngokuthula qawe lama qawe.

Zorora Murugare gamba remagamba.

Rest in peace Son of the Soil.

Compiled by Army Public Relations
THE Ministry of Health and Child Welfare expects to immunise 190 000 children in Mashonaland West province against polio in August and September this year, a senior health education officer has said.

Mrs Monica Mandiki said in Chinhoyi yesterday that the massive immunisation programme was aimed at the under-fives with the hope of eradicating polio so as to have the country declared polio-free by the World Health Organisation.

The provincial programme will run along the national immunisation to be conducted from August 5 to 9 and from September 9 to 13.

"This exercise will bring us closer to certification as a country free of the wild polio virus transmission, which causes disabilities in children.

"The massive campaign has been prompted by findings of a recent survey which indicated that despite normal immunisation, cases of acute flaccid paralysis (polio) still existed," she said.

Mrs Mandiki said, in addition to existing clinics and health centres, ministry was creating new vaccination centres.

LESSONS FOR TODAY

There are three types of the polio virus. While type 2 has been almost entirely eradicated since mass vaccinations began in 1988, type 1 and 3 remain a global health threat.

In 2008 WHO country medical officer Dr Nasir Yusuf, said Zimbabwe was among many countries in Africa that had eradicated the virus.

Awareness must be advocated for mothers to take their children for vaccination during campaigns.

There is need to educate people on the effects of the acute and highly infectious viral disease.
The Centre for Democracy and Economic Development Initiatives (CDEDI) has questioned the decision by President Dr. Lazarus Chakwera and his Tonse Alliance administration to appoint members of the Judiciary to serve in diplomatic missions.

CDEDI executive director Sylvester Namiwa said the recent appointments from the Judiciary raise suspicions and speculations, especially the one that involves a judges.

President Chakwera has recently appointed High Court Judges Esme Chombo and Agnes Patemba to serve in foreign missions.

Chombo had her contract recently extended to allow for smooth conclusion of one of the country's high-profile murder cases that has dragged for over 10 years.

On the other hand, Patemba had recently been promoted to the post of a judge, but Chakwera has now appointed her to serve as the Deputy High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.

"Malawians are now left wondering as to what becomes of the case of the murder case against Misonzi Chanthunya with Justice Esmie Chombo going away to the Embassy. This is the same judge whose contract was also extended solely to conclude the case of Paul Mphwiyo connected to the Cashgate case.

"This, to say the least, is smelly and unjustifiable. Her contract was extended on grounds that the case is complex and no any other judge would be able to take it unless the trial begins again. Now we have this development, what message is the Tonse administration sending?" asked Namiwa.

He claimed that the development confirms their fear that there is a "big political invisible hand" behind the dragging of this case.

Namiwa said it is unjustifiable for the Tonse Administration to assign Patemba to a diplomatic mission at a time the country needed her services most in fighting sexual and gender based violence.

'Here is a judge who, in a space of months, has sent the right message to perpetrators of rape and defilement that their days are numbered, but is dubiously being asked to serve the country as an envoy!

"Truth be told, Judge Patemba brought hope that Malawi was on the right path in fighting rape and defilement; hence, only the Tonse Alliance administration knows why and how this appointment is in the interest of the country.

"Without mincing words, the development casts a ray of doubt on the Tonse Alliance administration's commitment to the promotion of the Rule of Law and access to timely justice," he said.

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The CDEDI boss asked Chakwera to seriously consider reversing his decision, fearing the appointments would cripple the already understaffed Judiciary.

Namiwa reminded the Tonse Alliance administration that the Judiciary is already saddled with a backlog of cases, with some citizens waiting for justice for as long as over 21 years. As they say, justice delayed is justice denied.

"We at CDEDI, would like to ask President Chakwera to reverse such unsound appointments and, instead, consider appointing more judges to the bench. Otherwise, we can safely construe that sending the judicial staff to the foreign missions is a ploy by the current administration to achieve its sinister motives by dangling carrots to people Malawians need more for the creation of a safer country," he said.

Meanwhile, CDEDI has appealed to the Malawi Law Society (MLS) to critically look at this development, and where necessary, take an action.
Parliament Speaker Hanafi el Gebali asserted that the June 30 revolution marked the birth of the "new republic," saying that President Abdel Fattah El Sisi's achievements are clear in all fields.

"What Egypt has seen over the recent years looks like a miracle," Gebali told Al-Ahram daily in an interview, noting the government should cope up with the reform steps taken by the president.

"The reforms led by President Sisi have covered all fields, and the infrastructure and relevant utilities were at the core of his interest as well as the road network that has covered the whole country," the speaker said.

"All of these achievements have become a reality on the ground in a record time," he said, adding that some of them used to take many years to be achieved before President Sisi came to power.

"The president's efforts were not limited to direction and monitoring, but it is familiar now that the citizens see the president take to the streets to check on the progress made at work and production sites where he would give advice, open discussion with the workers and listen to their visions," he added.

He noted that "Nation's Future" Party has the majority in the parliament, and it, according to its platform, represents the centrist party with the opposition present inside it.

"Besides the majority party, there is a strong partisan representation that includes the right and left parties and parties that can be described as right-centrist and left-centrist, as well as the independent members," he added.

As for the opposition at the parliament, Gebali said that dissent is indispensable in all legislatures and its presence is inevitable.

"The opposing views are welcome under the dome of the parliament based on the freedom of expression, which is one of the most important constitutional principles," he added.

Gebali stressed that the parliamentary immunity is not a privilege for the lawmakers themselves, but it was rather created to protect them from any act that could obstruct their legislative role.

"We will not give up our legislative and supervisory role ... we have translated the pulse of the people into laws that achieve their hopes and aspirations," Gebali stressed.

Gebali went on saying that the majority had supported his decision to nominate for the post of speaker despite the fact that he kept his status as independent.

On the performance of women in parliament, the speaker said that the constitution has responded to the popular demand of raising the representation of women at the parliament to reach at least the quarter.

Parliament Speaker Hanafi El Gebali said the laws that are required to be enacted, amended or even abolished are determined by the political, economic and social circumstances. "The current parliament has passed multiple laws and performed its role of supervising the work of the government as required," he added.

On the parliament's role in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) crisis, Gebali said President Sisi has asserted in many occasions that the Nile water is an "existential" issue for Egyptians.

"The efforts of the Egyptian state are going on successfully, which include contacting all relevant international parties and putting all the available alternatives on the discussion table," he stressed

"The Egyptian parliament is doing its best to reach out to all world parliaments and representatives of diplomatic missions in Cairo as well as the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the regional parliamentary unions to explain Egypt's just position in this crisis and the existential importance of the Nile water for the Egyptians," Gebali added.

"The talks in the Nile water issue have stalled due to Ethiopia's intransigent position against reaching a legally binding agreement," he stressed.

He expected the crisis to eventually see a fair solution, amid Egypt's fair position, the strength of alternatives Egypt possesses, its good relations with all international parties who are convinced of the soundness of the Egyptian stance and the wise and balanced style the Egyptian leadership takes.

Gebali said there is no conflict between the role of the House of Representatives (parliament) and the Senate, as the constitution and its amendments has decisively set their jurisdictions and the domains of their work.

He noted that he witnessed the siege of the Supreme Constitutional Court, which proved "the Muslim brotherhood were neither brothers nor Muslims."

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"Egypt has come back a strong country at all levels after years of suffering and isolation," he said. President Sisi, the people, the army and the police, exerted utmost efforts to restore Egypt and salvage it from the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, he added.

"Egypt has also returned to Africa and restored its good relations with all the African countries in a way that achieves their interests," he said.

At the Arab level, the speaker said brotherly ties with all the Arab nations and peoples have been boosted after Egypt has played its historical role for the progress and prosperity of the Arab nation over the ages.

The political leadership has exerted great efforts to stop the Israeli aggression on Gaza and uphold a truce, he said. "This pivotal role is not new to Egypt."

He pointed out to Egypt's pledge to provide 500 million dollars for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip and the return of life to normal.

MENA
Officials distributing the items are allegedly diverting them to the black market, with the connivance of some politicians.

Farmers in Taraba State are accusing politicians and officials of the state ministry of agriculture and natural resources of diversion of farm inputs provided by the state government for distribution to farmers.

But the state The government has said it was monitoring the process and has not noticed any malpractice.

As part of the state government's efforts to boost production in the sector, Governor Darius Ishaku approved the release of N200 million for the procurement of farm inputs, including seeds and chemicals.

However, the officials distributing the items are allegedly diverting them to the black market with the connivance of some politicians.

The governor had directed that the items be distributed to the farmers free, with special consideration to areas affected by ethnic crises.

But despite the directive, officials of the ministry of agriculture and natural resources and the politicians have diverted the commodity to the black market where a kit is sold at between N12,000 and N13,000.

According to an insider, the initiative is "a complete failure as those targeted end up buying the products instead.

"The pattern of distribution is faulty. No individual farmer accessed the items directly. Representatives of the state Assembly, state executive council and religious bodies collected them on behalf of the farmers."

The source, who declined to be named for fear of victimisation, said the items were given to the politicians and religious leaders to deliver them to farmers in their constituencies but they ended up diverting them.

"Some politicians, religious leaders and staff of the ministry, who are vested with the responsibility of ensuring effective and transparent distribution of the commodities to real farmers, have hijacked the benefits. They either resell or give them to their close allies who in turn sell to the farmers at high rates.

"And since there is no data to track the records as to how many farmers accessed the items, it is very easy to divert them."

However, when contacted for his comment, the state commissioner of agriculture and natural resources, David Kassa, described the allegation as "untrue".

"So far, we have not received any report of diversion and if you are aware of any case, please let me know," he said to our reporter.

Mr Kassa said the government awarded the contract for the procurement of farm inputs, which include Soya beans, maize, rice and herbicides, to a contractor at the sum of N220 million.

He said the items, which came in a kit of four-in-one, were delivered to the ministry by the contractor and distributed, based on the governor's directive.

He said the governor had directed that the items be distributed to farmers across the state through divisional agricultural officers and be monitored by stakeholders, with special priority to areas affected by crises like Sekondi, Bandawa, Takum and Gassol.

He said so far all these areas and all the local government areas in the Southern part of the state have received the kits.

"Though we are already behind schedule, we have already distributed the seeds to Karim Lamido, Wukari, Ibi, Takum, Gassol and many other places. You can confirm from those areas."

He, however, acknowledged that institutions like members of the state executive council, state assembly and religious groups like the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and the Muslim council were also considered.

Asked about the the mechanism put in place to ensure the items reach the target beneficiaries, the commissioner said, "We asked them to give us lists and phone numbers of all those that benefited. That is the basic information."

Mr Kassa said apart from requesting the information, traditional rulers and officials of the local government areas under the direct supervision of the chairpersons are also involved in the distribution process.

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Asked about the delay in the distribution of fertiliser for this year's farming season in the state, the commissioner said the removal of fertilizer subsidy and the high cost of the foreign exchange resulted in scarcity and price hike of the commodity.

He said out of the 100 trucks ordered by the state government, fewer than five trucks were received.

"We ordered for 100 trucks since last year, around this period, but till now we have not gotten up to five trucks.

"When there was subsidy, it cost us N5500 per bag. With the removal of the subsidy and high cost of exchange rate, it is now between N9000 and N10,000 at company rate."

He said the government was waiting for the delivery of the fertiliser before reviewing how to give subsidy.

"We cannot subsidise when the commodity is yet to be delivered," he concluded.
The Taraba State Government had awarded the company a contract for the satellite survey and analysis of hydrocarbon feedstock deposit of Benue valley territory of the state.

A company has seized 15 vehicles of the Taraba State government following a court order over a debt owed the company.

The company, Waterwells N.A International, obtained the order at the Federal High Court in Jalingo, the state capital.

The court also issued a writ of attachment and sale of goods order against the Attorney-General of the state to implement a judgment given by the court on June 10, 2020 over a N550 million debt.

The debt is with respect to a contract the government awarded the company for the satellite survey and analysis of the territory of hydrocarbon feed stock deposit of Benue valley territory of the state.

In the event of the government defaulting to pay the debt, the court allowed the company "to take control by sale of goods and chattels of the defendant, wheresoever they may be found within the federal high court's jurisdiction."

A copy of the court order was made available to <a target="_blank" href="http://premiumtimesng.com">PREMIUM TIMES</a> by the company.

A writ of order is a document issued by a court for the purpose of effecting court judgment on a debtor's property. It is also the legal instrument by which the asset of a judgment debtor may be seized.

<a target="_blank" href="https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/more-news/460644-premium-times-creates-developmental-journalism-focused-desk.html">PREMIUM TIMES</a> gathered that it was in compliance with the judgment that some vehicles belonging to the state government were seized and kept in the custody of the court.

When PREMIUM TIMES' reporter visited the court, he saw a Toyota Coaster bus, a Toyota bus ambulance, 5 Toyota Hilux and a Land Cruiser SUV, all belonging to the state Government House and a Toyota Sienna belonging to the state television service.

Our correspondent gathered that there are also about 10 other vehicles kept in an undisclosed location due to lack of space in the court premises.
An attempt by Namibia's chief magistrate and the minister of urban and rural development to have the election of the //Kharas Regional Council's management committee and the //Kharas region's representatives in the National Council declared invalid has failed.

The attempt failed when acting judge Collins Parker ruled in the Windhoek High Court on Wednesday that an application by chief magistrate Philanda Christiaan and minister of urban and rural development Erastus Uutoni did not meet the requirements to be heard urgently.

Christiaan and Uutoni were asking the court to declare the management committee and National Council (NC) elections of the //Kharas Regional Council held on 2 December last year as null and void.

They also asked the court to restrain the //Kharas region's three current NC members - Landless People's Movement (LPM) members Gerrit Witbooi, Anseline Beukes and Jeremias Goeieman - from carrying out any mandate in the NC, and to stop the regional council's management committee from implementing any decisions.

LPM candidates were elected as regional councillors in four of the //Kharas region's seven constituencies during the regional elections in November last year, while Swapo candidates were elected in three of the region's constituencies.

The newly elected members of the //Kharas Regional Council were sworn in on 2 December last year, and LPM member Joseph Isaacks was then elected as chairperson of the council. With no nominations made for the two remaining positions on the council's management committee to be filled, the presiding magistrate, Unchen Konjore, declared the remaining positions vacant and left the meeting, Christiaan recounted in an affidavit filed at the court.

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Witbooi, Beukes and Goeieman - all of them LPM members - were then chosen as the region's new NC members.

Christiaan said in her affidavit that she discovered on 9 April that there had been irregularities with the election of the region's leadership.

She said in terms of the Regional Councils Act, the council's management committee members had to be elected before the council could proceed to any other business. With no management committee chosen at the meeting on 2 December, the subsequent election of the region's NC members amounted to a nullity, she said.

She also informed the court that the regional council during a meeting on 9 April, which was not attended by the three Swapo councillors, elected Witbooi and Beukes as members of the management committee as well.

This was also an irregularity, Christiaan said, because the Regional Councils Act prohibits a management committee member from also serving in the NC.

In his judgement, Parker noted that while Christiaan said she discovered irregularities in the election of the regional council's leadership in April, it took until 11 June for her and Uutoni's application to be filed at the court.

Since ongoing illegalities on the part of public authorities are complained of in the case, it could be said that made the matter urgent, Parker remarked. However, he added, Christiaan and the minister did not clearly spell out why they would not be able to get the help they want from the court at a hearing in due course.
The newly established Conservancy Relief, Recovery and Resilience Fund has so far attracted more than N$123 million from different donors and contributors, the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism (Meft) has said.

Environment minister Pohamba Shifeta recently said of the N$123 million, about N$99 million has been committed to various initiatives until December this year.

The fund was set up by the Environmental Investment Fund (EIF) - which is Namibia's accredited entity to the Green Climate Fund.

Collaborating entities - some that are donors; some that provide technical support to beneficiaries of the funds - include the Namibia Association of CBNRM Support Organisations (NACSO), Community Conservancy Fund of Namibia, World Wildlife Fund Namibia, United Nations Development Programme, Nedbank Namibia, Namibia Nature Foundation, B2Gold, Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation, Namibia Chamber of the Environment, TNC, GIZ, the German Development Bank (KfW) and the Tourism Supporting Conservation Trust.

"Approximately N$40 million has already been disbursed to all 86 gazzetted communal conservancies.

In line with the facility's guideline, the balance will be released quarterly upon receiving the necessary accountability reports from intended beneficiaries," he said.

The objective is to ensure the continuation of the anti-poaching activities, mitigation of human-wildlife conflict, preservation of natural resources and the management of wildlife.

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The underlying goal of the fund is to ensure that the CBNRM entities are able to weather the storm and to be in a position to recover as quickly as possible in the post- Covid-19 era.

When the pandemic struck, a number of communal conservancies started struggling financially as tourist numbers went down due to travel restrictions imposed by the pandemic.

Efforts have been made by the environment ministry to maintain attraction to the conservancies during this time.

One such effort was the donation of wild animals to the conservancy through the environment ministry to attract visitors. Some conservancies also set up accommodation facilities and craft shops.

Last week, the tourism sector said the recent Covid-19 restrictions on mobility to and from the central parts of the country, as well as the classification of Namibia as a high risk country by international institutions, has put further pressures on tourism.
The proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, has described the invasion of the country home of Yoruba rights activist, Sunday Adeyemo popularly known as 'Igboho', by the Department of State Service (DSS), as "barbaric" and "unacceptable".

Recall the DSS raided Sunday Igboho's residence at Soka area of Ibadan in the early hours of Thursday, July 1, where they paraded some people with arms and ammunition.

Reacting, the IPOB media and publicity secretary, Emma Powerful on Friday, condemned the attack, describing it as an "act of impunity".

"We the global family of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) ably led by Mazi Nnamdi Kanu condemn the recent attack and massacre of peaceful and unarmed citizens of Odua people in the House of Sunday Ighoho in his country home in Ibadan Oyo state. Sunday Igboho has not killed anybody. Nigeria government and her security operatives invaded his home and kidnapped his innocent women in the house for the proposed rally in Lagos on Saturday 4th of July 2021.

"Fulani and their collaborators are trying to bring catastrophe in Nigeria. They are trying to plunge Nigeria into serious crisis that will consume everybody. They should stop taking the indigenous nations in Nigeria for granted. Enough of this impunity!

"IPOB worldwide is solidly behind Sunday Igboho and Odua Nation Movement. The attack on Igboho is akin to the attack they unleashed on the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra Mazi Nnamdi on September 14, 2017 when the military Python danced in his country home.

"It's very appalling that the Nigeria security agencies are aiding and abating criminal Fulani herdsmen and Boko Haram, ISWAP, and other terror groups to kill innocent citizens in Nigeria, while suppressing those genuinely defending their people.

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"Nigeria will soon regret their actions towards the Southern Nigeria and Middle Belt region. The whole southerners in the army, police, DSS and the security outfit in Nigeria must understand that this fight was brought to their homes by Fulani Jihadists. Nobody should think that things are still normal. Very soon all Christians will be forced to convert to Islam. It's part of their agenda.

"But IPOB is working tirelessly to stop this evil agenda. And we must do it for the betterment of unborn children in this land. Now is the time for the entire Southern Nigeria and middle Belt to unite and defend their ancestral land otherwise we become slaves to the jihadists. But God forbid!" he said.

Vanguard News Nigeria
The US Ambassador to Namibia, HE Lisa Johnson has finished her Namibian tour, and will soon return to Washington. In the meantime, while waiting for the new ambassador, the embassy will be lead by the Charge d'Affaires, Jessica Long, currently the Deputy Chief of Mission.

On her departure, Ambassador Johnson expressed her condolences to all those who have lost loved ones to Covid-19, saying "This time is so hard for all of us. When I think about the lives that have been lost here in Namibia and across the world, my heart breaks."

In the same breath, she issued a strong appeal, urging all Namibians to get vaccinated. "When we work together, our democracies deliver - and we will again in the face of Covid-19. Namibia will get through this, and the United States will continue to help."

Reflecting on recent achievements in the United States' relationship with Namibia, Ambassador Johnson referred to new markets for Namibian goods, notably beef, beer and charcoal.

On investment for the future, she referred to the millions of dollars invested in local talent and potential through extensive youth development and entrepreneurship training.

"It has been an honour and a blessing to serve as US Ambassador to Namibia. The relationships I have made here have been incredibly meaningful. And Namibia is a beautiful land like no other. Thank you to everyone whose friendship has always made me feel at home, and whose efforts have made the United States and Namibia stronger, together," she said.

Deputy Head of Mission, Jessica Lang will be in charge of the US Embassy until the new ambassador arrives.
Kenneth Kaunda, First President of the Republic of Zambia, at a ceremony marking the fortieth anniversary of Africa Day in New York in 2003.

President Hage Geingob this morning departed for Lusaka for the state funeral of former Zambia head of state Kenneth David Kaunda.

"President Geingob will on behalf of the people of Namibia, the government and the Swapo Party deliver a tribute to the memorable legacy of Dr Kenneth Kaunda, one of the founding fathers of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

"KK, as he is affectionately known, will be laid to rest on 7 July. He passed away on Thursday, 17 June 2021 at the age of 97," the presidency said on social media a short while ago.

Geingob is accompanied by international relations minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah and will return to Namibia later this afternoon.
A Windhoek dentist has been released on bail after being charged with unlawfully selling animal medicine claimed to be a treatment for the novel coronavirus disease.

Dentist Moses Aluteni and a co-accused, Bruce Semba, are accused of having contravened the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act of 2003 by selling ten 50-millilitre containers of the veterinary medication ivermax, valued at N$7 000, in Windhoek on Tuesday.

In the charge they are facing in the Windhoek Magistrate's Court in Katutura, it is stated that if convicted they can in terms of the act be sentenced to a fine of up to N$40 000 or up to 10 years' imprisonment.

Aluteni was not present in court for a first appearance before a magistrate yesterday.

Defence lawyer Ashley Brendell informed magistrate Atutala Shikalepo that Aluteni was absent from court because he is in isolation while awaiting the result of a coronavirus test.

The court was also told that Aluteni (52) and Semba (45) have both been released on bail.

The case was postponed to 28 September for further investigations to be carried out.

Ivermax is a veterinary medicine containing ivermectin and is used to treat animals against parasites.

Ivermectin has been claimed to be effective in treating people with Covid-19, but is not licensed as a medication for human use in Namibia.

A group of Namibian medical doctors requested the Ministry of Health and Social Services and the Namibia Medicines Regulatory Council (NMRC) four weeks ago to grant emergency use approval for ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 patients.

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The NMRC stated in January, and again in June, that from current data no clear conclusion could be drawn about the effectiveness and safety of ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a statement at the end of March that current evidence on the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19 patients was "inconclusive", and that until more data is available, the WHO is recommending that ivermectin should only be used in clinical trials, according to Namibia Fact Check.

In South Africa, ivermectin has been approved "for controlled human use", and a court in April ordered that registered pharmacists and medical doctors should be allowed to prepare and sell medication containing ivermectin.

However, the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority in a report published in June also noted that current evidence on the use of ivermectin for the treatment of Covid-19 "does not suggest any clear benefits with respect to mortality, clinical improvement, or viral clearance", Namibia Fact Check noted on its website yesterday.
The International Rescue Committee said Thursday that a bridge that provides one of the main supply routes into Ethiopia's Tigray region has been destroyed.

"Tekeze Bridge -- one of the main supply routes into Tigray, Ethiopia -- has been destroyed," the IRC said in a tweet. "This means aid efforts will be even more severely hampered amid the ongoing conflict. The IRC continues to call for unfettered humanitarian access to the region."

We are devastated to hear the Tekeze Bridge--one of the main supply routes into Tigray, Ethiopia--has been destroyed. This means aid efforts will be even more severely hampered amid the ongoing conflict. The IRC continues to call for unfettered humanitarian access to the region.

-- IRC - International Rescue Committee (@RESCUEorg) July 1, 2021

USAID administrator Samantha Power said of the four routes into Tigray, only one may now be usable.

There are only 4 main roads into #Tigray:

 1 might be passable.

 1 is blocked by Amharan forces.

 1 is impassable because of active fighting.

 1 is this bridge, now destroyed.

Disastrous with up to 900,000 people in famine conditions. Full humanitarian access is vital. https://t.co/aLaQiAlvFI

-- Samantha Power (@PowerUSAID) July 1, 2021

A U.N. spokesperson said the organization was aware of the report about Tekeze Bridge, but did not have any firsthand information on its status.

"We're trying to get our people in [to Tigray], we're trying to get other agencies in to help the people," U.N. spokesperson Eri Kaneko said in response to reporters' questions. "And if the reports are confirmed of this bridge being severely damaged, that would be yet another setback to our efforts to help the people of the region."

About 6 million people live in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region. The United Nations says more than 5 million of them are in need of emergency food assistance. Another 350,000 are coping with faminelike conditions because of eight months of fighting.

On Tuesday, USAID official Sarah Charles told U.S. lawmakers that the number of people in faminelike conditions is closer to 1 million, and warned that without scaled-up aid deliveries, "we will likely see widespread famine in Ethiopia this year."

Ethiopia suffered a devastating famine in the early 1980s that affected millions and killed more than a million people.

Tenuous calm

The U.N. spokesperson said the situation Thursday in Tigray "remains volatile and unpredictable," just days after the Ethiopian federal government declared it was pausing its military operation there.

The spokesperson said major towns, including Mekelle, Adigrat, Adwa, Axum and Shire, were calm, but that there are unconfirmed reports of clashes in the southern and northwestern zones.

"Electricity and telecommunications are still cut off throughout the region," said Kaneko, the U.N. spokesperson. "There are no flights or road transportation in or out of the region." She said the U.N. and its partners are assessing access along main roads so they can resume aid deliveries.

But despite the continuing challenges, some limited assistance has gotten through.

On Wednesday, humanitarians were able to transport fuel for water pumps, firewood for cooking, and water to sites assisting displaced persons in the regional capital, Mekelle. Water was also distributed to the displaced in Shire, and medical services were provided in Samre town.

The Ethiopian government announced the unilateral cease-fire on state media late Monday, saying it would take effect immediately, after nearly eight months of conflict.

Analysts said the timing was likely because of a combination of successes by the rebels on the battlefield and Western pressure to halt the fighting to avoid a famine.

Since the Ethiopia National Defense Force withdrew from Mekelle, the city remains under the full control of the Tigray Defense Forces. The U.N. said that is also the case in Adigrat, Adwa, Axum and Shire.

But it is not certain the calm will hold.

Marina Ottaway, a political scientist with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars based in Washington, said this week she did not think the unilateral cease-fire would be the end of the fighting.

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"I think the Ethiopians will try to maintain the cease-fire, but the Tigrayans are not interested at this point," she said.

The U.N. Security Council is likely to discuss developments in Tigray on Friday afternoon after receiving a request from several council members.

"I'm pretty confident it will take place," said France's U.N. Ambassador Nicolas de Riviere, who took over the council presidency for July on Thursday.

He told reporters that the council would receive political and humanitarian briefings and he had encouraged the Ethiopian ambassador to address the meeting, which he expects to be public.

Fighting between the Ethiopian federal government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) broke out in November, leaving thousands of civilians dead and forcing more than 2 million people from their homes. Troops from Eritrea, Ethiopia's neighbor to the north, and Amhara, a neighboring region to the south of Tigray, also entered the conflict in support of the Ethiopian government.
Speakers at the memorial service of the late former chief of defence, lieutenant general (retired) John Sinvula Mutwa, on Wednesday lauded him for his contribution to Namibia's liberation struggle.

Mutwa died on 17 June.

President Hage Geingob granted Mutwa, who served in the Namibian Army from 1990 to 2020, the honour of national hero.

He was laid to rest yesterday at his home village, Mahundu, in the Katima Rural constituency of the Zambezi region.

Geingob, in a speech read on his behalf by minister of defence and veterans affairs Frans Kapofi at the memorial service, expressed gratitude towards Mutwa for the role he played in the armed struggle for Namibia's independence.

Mutwa joined the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (Plan) in 1975.

"Thanks to valiant individuals like Mutwa we now live in a Namibia that is free and peaceful. It was the love for the country and desire for freedom that inspired comrade Mutwa to pursue a career to become a soldier. Choosing to be a soldier is always an honourable decision, but choosing to be a soldier in wartime is a sign of absolute bravery and patriotism," he said.

Geingob said Mutwa's character had all the qualities essential for a leader of fighters: visionary leadership, steadfast courage, tireless energy, unwavering loyalty and exemplary patriotism.

"To the children, although the pain is overwhelming, take courage. Emulate your father and rise from the pain to uphold his legacy and the legacy of the Mutwa family. Your father sought justice from the tyrannical apartheid government - not with a hat in his hands, but with a rifle in his fist," he said.

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The Masubia Traditional Authority, in a message of condolences read by Bennet Kangumu, said they are in deep mourning and are grief-stricken, because "a giant has fallen, a person who had forfeited his youth and dedicated his life to the liberation struggle".

"He selflessly served the country and its people with enviable distinction in pursuit of equality, social justice, human dignity, independence and a better life for all," Kangumu said.

Kangumu said the traditional authority and its subjects were looking forward to Mutwa being able to concentrate on the affairs of the royal council after retirement, but "a dark moment" has befallen them.

"However, we find solace as a traditional authority in the fact that he fought a good fight and never wavered. Indeed, as they say, heroes don't die, they rest.

"Indeed we will keep him alive through cherishing and relishing his legacy, which will continue to be an inspiration to us all, especially the young generations to come, as we will continue celebrating his life as part of our cultural heritage and history," he said.

Mutwa is survived by his wife, mother, three children, three brothers and two sisters.
The Real Estate Development Association of Nigeria (REDAN) has initiated a National Housing Development Programne seeking to build at least 77,400 housing units across the country.

Tagged Rural-Urban Housing Initiative (RUHI-774), the scheme will reduce the country's housing deficit, REDAN top official said.

President and Chairman of the council of REDAN, Aliyu Wamakko, disclosed this in Abuja Thursday while briefing journalists on the development at the just concluded 40th Shelter Afrique Annual General Meeting held in Yaounde, Cameroon.

Wamakko said the aim of the programme was to develop at least 100 standard housing units in each of the 774 Local Government Areas of the Federation including the FCT.

According to him, Shelter Afrique has agreed to finance 12,000 housing units out of which the first phase of 6,000 housing units will be done in August, 2021.

He stated that Shelter Afrique had already floated a bond worth N191 billion in order to finance housing delivery in Nigeria.
Sunday Igboho, self-acclaimed Yoruba activist, has vowed to go on with the "Yoruba Nation" rally that his group scheduled for Saturday.

Igboho had announced the cancellation of the rally after the Department of State Services (DSS) raided his residence in Ibadan on Wednesday.

But in a Facebook live broadcast on Thursday, Igboho said the rally will hold as scheduled.

He spoke through Olayomi Koiki, his media aide.

"I can still confirm officially that the Lagos rally in as much as whatever news or rumours you've been listening to from different outlets, will go as planned."

"The 3rd of July Mega rally will go as planned. All arrangements for the rally has been planned and nothing has changed.

"I have spoken to the organisers, nothing has changed so far. 3rd of July from exactly 9:00am in the morning. The whole arrangement and planning is going on.

"Come out in numbers to support the freedom of Yoruba Self Determination. 1999 constitution is a fraud! 1914 Amalgamation has expired. Yoruba Nation No going back," he posted on his Facebook page.

But Daily Trust reports that the Commissioner of Police in Lagos, Hakeem Odumosu during a press conference on Wednesday warned against any rally under any pretext in the state.

"The Lagos State Police Command hereby warns that no rally will be allowed, under whatever guise, in any part of the state," Odumosu said, saying it cannot afford the kind of security lapses experienced during the #EndSARS protest in October, last year," he said.

While confirming a raid on Igboho's residence, Peter Afunanya, DSS spokesman, asked him to turn himself in to the nearest police station.

He said Igboho was on the run but he would definitely be tracked.
Director-General of Kenyan Immigration Services, Alexander Muteshi, has denied knowledge of the arrest and extradition of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).

Kanu, who was arrested over the weekend, was flown into Abuja on Sunday.

He was rearraigned before Justice Binta Nyako of a Federal High Court in Abuja, on Tuesday.

The judge had ordered that he should be remanded in custody of the Department of State Services (DSS) till July, 26, 2021.

The Federal Government has been silent on the location of Kanu's arrest.

But in a statement on Wednesday, Kingsley Kalu, a sibling of the IPOB leader, said he was arrested in Kenya.

"Whilst visiting Kenya, Nnamdi Kanu was detained and handed over to the Nigerian authorities who then flew him to Nigeria," he said.

"My brother has been subject to extraordinary rendition by Kenya and Nigeria. They have violated the most basic principles of the rule of law. Extraordinary rendition is one of the most serious crimes states can commit."

But in an interview with Nation, a Kenyan newspaper on Thursday, Muteshi said he could not tell if Kanu was arrested in Kenya.

"I can't know that," Muteshi told Nation in response to a question on Kanu's arrest.

"I am not in the picture of his presence in the country. I am only able to tell if somebody entered the country legally."

It is unclear if Kanu entered the country illegally.

The IPOB leader was standing trial for treason before he fled the country after he was granted bail on health grounds.

From his base abroad, Kanu kept on inciting his followers through his broadcast on Radio Biafra and social media posts.

IPOB also floated the Eastern Security Network (ESN), which orchestrated mass killing and destruction in the South East, according to the police.
Abuja  In its determination to contain security challenges confronting the country and strengthen the capacity of the armed forces to deliver, the federal government yesterday sought the collaboration of Canada and Pakistan in the production of tanks, small arms and ammunition.

Speaking while receiving the acting High Commissioner of Canada to Nigeria, Mr. Nicolas Simad, in his office, the Minister of Defence, Maj. Gen. Bashir Magashi (rtd), called for the assistance of the North American country in driving national aspirations and request for transfer of technology from Canada to boost the capabilities of the Defence Industrial Corporation of Nigeria (DICON) towards the production of more sophisticated military weapons and hardware.

This is coming on a day the Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Lucky Irabor, called for collaboration with the Pakistani Government in the area of defence production capabilities, which include manufacturing of tanks, small arms and ammunition, and communication equipment among others.

A statement issued by the minister's office said the minister, in seeking collaboration with Canada in arms manufacturing, restated the commitment of the Nigerian armed forces to the national territorial defence against the forces fueling insecurity in the country.

He listed the areas of common concerns to end violent extremism in the country and the support of Canada to entrench stable, peaceful and prosperous Nigeria as parts of diplomatic gains.

According to the statement, "Moving forward, the defence minister told the Canadian High Commissioner to assist in driving national aspirations and request for transfer of technology from Canada to boost the capabilities of the Defence Industrial Corporation of Nigeria (DICON) towards looking inward for the productions of more sophisticated military weapons and hardware."

While lauding the decades of military bilateral cooperation between Nigeria and Canada, he said the ties progressively and sustainably culminated in the formation of the Bi- National Commission in April 2012.

Magashi said both countries were reaping the dividends of symbiotic diplomatic ties on win-win basis.

The acting High Commissioner of Canada to Nigeria, Nicholas Simard, who assumed duty six months ago, described Nigeria as a strategic partner with Canada, especially in thematic areas of combating insecurity, joint military training and advocacy for protection of human rights.

Meanwhile, the Armed Forces of Nigeria (AFN) has indicated interest to collaborate with the Pakistani Armed Forces (PAF) in the area of defence production capabilities to further boost its operations.

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The Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Irabor, stated this when he hosted the Pakistan Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (PCJCSC), General Nadeem Raza, in Abuja.

The duo spoke on the imperative of embarking on defence production capabilities which include manufacturing of tanks, small arms and ammunition, and communication equipment among others.

A statement issued by Defence Headquarters (DHQ) said the CDS affirmed that the AFN under his watch would further strengthen the long-existing strategic partnership with its Pakistani counterpart on human capacity building, acquisition of military platform and modern communication gadgets.

The CDS reiterated the commitment of the AFN towards partnering both foreign and regional allies to build capacity of its personnel towards meeting the various security threats.

However, the Pakistani defence chief said he was in Nigeria to seek ways on how to further deepen the scope of the defence cooperation between Pakistani Armed Forces and its Nigerian counterparts.

General Raza added that AFN and PAF could also "collaborate in the area of defence production capabilities which include manufacturing of tanks, small arms and ammunition, and communication equipment among others."
Abuja  The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), yesterday hailed the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), but stressed that over $200 billion was lost to a clear framework for the sector.

In a statement in Abuja last night, Executive Secretary of NEITI, Dr. Ogbonnaya Orji described the decision of the Senate and the House of Representatives to consider the bill as priority resulting in its eventual passage as bold, courageous and progressive.

NEITI stated that it had boldly alerted the nation through a special policy brief, "The urgency of a new petroleum sector law" that the stagnation of investment opportunities in the petroleum industry was as a result of the absence of a new law for the sector.

"This has led to huge revenue losses to the tune of over $200billion. In that publication, NEITI argued that the "revenue losses were as a result of investments withheld or diverted by investors to other (more predictable) jurisdictions," Orji stated.

In addition, the executive secretary noted that NEITI reports in the sector had also disclosed that over $10.4 billion and N378.7 billion were lost through under-remittances, inefficiencies, theft or absence of a clear governance framework for the oil and gas industry.

"The NEITI executive secretary is optimistic that with the new governance law for the industry, these huge revenue losses to the nation as a result of process lapses and outright stealing will be strictly checked if not eliminated.

"The implementation of the global Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) which Nigeria is a key signatory, have over the years been frustrated by the absence of a dynamic law that suits modern business modules and trends in the ever evolving oil and gas industry," NEITI stressed

Orji expressed the hope that the PIB when assented to by the president will provide a dynamic governance framework required to reposition the industry to fully embrace competition, openness, accountability, professionalism and better profit returns on investments to both companies and government

Colours and Flavours Exhibition to Hold in Lagos

Sylverscreenarts is set to hold a photo exhibition, themed 'Colours and Flavours of Lagos' in Lagos.

A statement from the organisers revealed that the event which will be hosted by Dayo Akinbode, would be begin on July 9, and end by July 11.

The event which is targeted at art lovers, and still-life image lovers, "would be held at Museum hall, Freedom Park, Lagos, from 10a.m. to 8p.m. daily.

Fashion trailblazers storm Glo-sponsored African Voices

Two trailblazers who are re-designing the African fashion landscape will this week be on African Voices Changemakers, the CNN magazine programme sponsored by telecommunications service provider, Globacom.

They are Nkwo Onwuka, Creative Director of Abuja, Nigeria-based Nkwo Design Studios, and Rich Mnisi, Creative Director, Rich Mnisi, an exclusive label domiciled in South Africa.

Operating under the label, Dakala Cloth, Onwuka desires to reduce textile waste. She has, to this end, focused on creating limited edition fashion styles from left-over pieces of denim, made in Nigeria cotton, end-of-line fabrics and cutting table waste.

The label aims to harness the capabilities of past and contemporary technology to promote a sustainable preservation of traditional crafts. The fashion enthusiast transforms traditional methods of hand craft like weaving, beading, hand dyeing and embroidery to give newness to fabrics and make them suitable for conventional use.

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His South African contemporary, Mnisi, is a young designer who has special interest in pop-culture fashion. A graduate of Fashion Design and Business Management of the South African School of Fashion, he founded his own brand OATH Studio in 2014, the year he won the African Fashion International Young designer award at the Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Africa.

The 30-minute programme will be on CNN on DSTV channel 401 on Saturday at 9.30 a.m., while repeats of the interesting edition will be broadcast on Sunday at 4.30 a.m., 7.30 a.m., 12.30 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. Another repeat comes up at 4.00 a.m. on Monday, while a two-part, fifteen-minute repeat will be shown on Tuesday and Wednesday at 6.45 p.m
Executive director of finance Ericah Shafudah has opted for early retirement, ending her 22 years of service at the country's treasury.

The 58-year-old's last day at the ministry will be 31 July.

She will join the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP) in August as consultant specialist for resource mobilisation and strategic partnerships.

Shafudah announced her departure during a senior management meeting yesterday morning.

She confirmed her exit to The Namibian yesterday, adding the move is part of her "personal development plan".

"As part of my leadership skills, communication with the ministry's officials has been at the centre of my operations.

"As such, I have informed the team that I shall be leaving the public service at the end of July, as per my personal development plan," Shafudah said.

Her resignation comes two weeks after the resignation of the executive director of justice, Gladice Pickering.

Shafudah joined the Ministry of Finance in 2002 as the under secretary for the treasury.

After two years in that position, she was appointed as the deputy permanent secretary for the ministry from 2004 until 2010.

That year, she was appointed as the permanent secretary, a position she occupied for over 10 years.

"My departure is for a new career and to apply the experience I have gained over years of my professional life in the public sector.

"My transition is part of the contribution of Namibia to the UN, as well as a representation of the mutual trust and cooperation that exists between the Namibian government and the WFP.

Shafudah said although her career was faced with challenges, she served the ministry diligently.

"Part of the challenges I had to encounter are the adverse developments in the economy impacting negatively on spending and fiscal sustainability parameters, such as public debt and budget deficits," she said.

A mathematics teacher by profession, Shafudah holds a master's degree in biostatistics from Limburg University, as well as another in education from ISP Enrique Jose Varona University.

She also has a diploma in accounting and finance from the then Polytechnic of Namibia.
Over twenty children of the late rally race driver Lucas Hipondoka will not attend their father's funeral on Saturday at Walvis Bay.

Hipondoka died on Monday morning at Walvis Bay. He had over 35 children.

His Windhoek-based son Norman Tjombe is among those who will not attend the funeral.

"I am not going to the funeral. Those who are in Walvis Bay will bury him on our behalf," he said yesterday.

His other son, Ivory Uirab, acknowledged that many people would have loved to be there, but they will not even attempt to divide people up into groups to attend the funeral.

This, according to Uirab, is to avoid the potential spread of Covid-19 among the siblings who are from different towns.

"We are from different houses and will need to be there for each other beyond my father's funeral. We agreed that only seven of us in Walvis Bay, with our two aunts, will attend the funeral," said Uirab.

Uirab added that the family plans to celebrate Hipondoka's legacy once life returns to normal.
Ethiopian National Defence Forces peacekeepers marching in Hudur, the capital city of Bakol in Somalia on March 19, 2014.

analysis

The United Nations (UN) and African Union (AU) are quickly reaching a crossroads on how to collectively support multilateral peace operations. The issue is coming to a head because of rising levels of political violence across Africa, fragile peace agreements, a precarious macroeconomic environment, and a growing reliance on counter-terrorism efforts. Unless rectified, these differences could jeopardise the mainstay of the UN-AU partnership since 2002 and undo years of steady progress.

Cooperation between the UN and AU is a pillar of Africa's peace and security landscape. Despite notable growth in many areas of their partnership, divides on how they should respond to the continent's security have deepened.

Strategic alignment between the UN Security Council (UNSC) and the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) is essential. Both spearhead collective responses to security problems, but the two councils have a difficult relationship, and many areas are contested. In particular, there are mutual misperceptions regarding their respective roles and responsibilities.

In recent months, the difficulties in mustering unified responses to the situations in Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia and Mozambique stand out. Neither the UN nor AU have mandated operational responses that can match their relatively limited pronouncements on these conflicts.

The African Union PSC and UNSC have a difficult relationship and many areas are contested

The lack of unity and common strategic direction has also spilt over into situations where multilateral peace operations are deployed. Growing UN and AU differences on political approaches to the Central African Republic, Mali and the Sahel, and Somalia are examples.

Political divides are seeping into other aspects of their peace operations partnership, with the deadlock on sustainable and predictable financing an obvious sore point. The political fallout from the failed 2018 and 2019 negotiations over a UNSC resolution is still felt today. Even though diplomats in New York tread carefully when raising the subject, these sensitivities spilt into the open during recent Security Council discussions on the AU Mission in Somalia and the G5 Sahel Joint Force.

Efforts to resolve these issues could emerge over the coming months. The AU PSC recently asked the AU Commission to 'develop a common African position paper' on the subject. Some of the technical foundations on which any agreement would need to be built have already been laid.

The financing debate is perhaps the most publicised source of tension. A new sense of urgency can be linked to the slow but steady capitalisation of the AU Peace Fund (now estimated at approximately US$204 million) combined with the implications of the new European Peace Facility.

Growing UN and AU divides are evident with regard to responses in CAR, Mali and the Sahel, and Somalia

Other fracture lines are also pushing the boundaries of current multilateral peace operations. For instance, the shift towards regional ad hoc counter-terrorism initiatives is significant, as it directly impacts the UN-AU partnership.

Ad hoc coalitions such as the G5 Sahel Joint Force and the Lake Chad Basin Multinational Joint Task Force require both UNSC mandates and AU PSC authorisation. But they are not implemented by the UN or the AU and therefore aren't subject to these bodies' human rights, financial or operational requirements. While they fill gaps that UN peace operations don't address, these ad hoc initiatives often lack broader strategies to deal with underlying political drivers of violence.

As seen across the Sahel, the result is a patchwork of multilateral responses shaped by sub-regional and external actors and interests, which are not always coherent or complementary. Ad hoc initiatives fall outside the AU's African Peace and Security Architecture framework, which is rooted in the principles of subsidiarity and complementarity between the AU and Africa's regional economic communities.

How ad hoc security initiatives fit into this landscape is problematic. Host countries, neighbouring states and powerful allies are increasingly drawn to the option of shopping around between different operations. Short-term security priorities are often favoured over broader commitments to improving governance, human rights and socio-economic equality.

The shift towards regional ad hoc counter-terrorism initiatives directly impacts the UN-AU partnership

There's also the risk of further blurring the distinctions between multilateral peace operations and counter-terrorism initiatives, especially in the eyes of the people they are meant to serve.

How the UN and AU navigate these divides will impact the partnership's evolution, but the challenges aren't unique or insurmountable. The past four years have seen the growing institutionalisation of the UN-AU partnership. In 2017 the Joint UN-AU Framework for Enhanced Partnership in Peace and Security was finalised, and the UN Secretary-General and AU Commissioner have made joint efforts to boost relations.

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To navigate the conflicts over peace operations, the continued leadership from the AU Commission and UN heads will be crucial. Member states will need to back this up by renewing their commitment to work in partnership and find common ground on complex political and security issues.

The UN-AU partnership cannot afford to relapse as Africa faces growing security and socio-economic challenges. Practical cooperation on peace operations will not only sustain the relationship but future-proof it for a new era of multilateralism.

Daniel Forti, Senior Policy Analyst, International Peace Institute and Priyal Singh, Researcher, Peace Operations and Peacebuilding, ISS Pretoria

This article is published as part of the Training for Peace Programme (TfP), funded by the government of Norway. It is part of a series on the UN-AU partnership for a joint project between the Institute for Security Studies and the International Peace Institute. A version of this article will be published on IPI's Global Observatory.
The business community, church representatives, farmers unions and political office bearers of Okahandja are pulling together all their resources to alleviate the burden of Covid-19 at the town.

Additional consulting rooms and beds at private and state facilities have been made available, mortuary space has been extended, and home patients are provided oxygen and meals.

Hardus Maritz, a coordinator of this effort, last week said they have erected additional consulting and screening rooms in the parking area of the Okahandja Medical Centre, and have increased the facility's number of beds to 15.

Maritz said the team has set up a shaded area in front of the Okahandja State Hospital to provide residents who are tested for Covid-19 or vaccinated more privacy.

Additional toilets with wash basins to the value of about N$20 000 have been set up outisde the state hospital.

"We live on farms, and my friend got sick with Covid-19. Then another friend of ours also got sick and died. That's when we realised we are dealing with something bigger than we thought. So we approached the Okahandja Town Council and asked them where we could help so that we can hold hands as a community," Maritz said.

The state mortuary is now able to accommodate 35 bodies thanks to a cooling container that was sourced from Walvis Bay.

The town council facilitated the container's transport.

Electricity distributor ErongoRED is sponsoring the cost of electricity for the duration the container will be used.

The state mortuary at Okahandja can only accommodate eight bodies and has been under pressure due to Covid-19 deaths.

Pastor Johannes Maritz from the NG Church said another pressing need is the provision of oxygen at the town for which the business community and churches have sourced about 25 mobile oxygen machines.

These machines are being used on a rotating basis for Covid-19 home patients.

Maritz said the community has also taken it upon itself to provide lunch to 18 doctors and nurses at the state hospital on a daily basis, as well as 12 nursing staff members at a private practice who work late.

Furthermore the community has provided about 35 households in the Veddersdal suburb with meals for home patients.

"We as believers want to be the feet and hands of Jesus at this time. We cannot stand on the sidelines and watch. And everything that is happening, the community is doing. They are receiving sponsors and help from within Okahandja and from outside. I am telling you, this community will never be the same again," Maritz said.

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The town's churches have received a list of all residents who have tested positive for Covid-19, and the families who have lost loved ones to pray for them.

However, state resources still remain under pressure at places like Otjiwarongo, Okakarara, Grootfontein and Tsumeb.

The Grootfontein, Tsumeb and Otavi farmers' unions are also sourcing oxygen proximeters from Germany.

Chairperson of the Otjozondjupa regional council Marlyn Mbakera says the fridges at state mortuaries of Okakarara, and Otjiwarongo are damaged and need to be repaired.

"We are running short of mortuary space, while other mortuaries are not functional, and we need assistance to fix them," he says.

Gebhardo Timotheus, the director of health in the Otjozondjupa region, says Covid-19 has brought the unprecedented challenges of oxygen supply, hospital space, transport availability, mortuary space and sufficient healthcare staff.

He is thanking all stakeholders who have contributed to alleviating the town's resource needs.
Karimojong women have appealed to the government to ban widow inheritance, a common practice in the sub-region.

The women say they are being bound by their culture to marry their late spouses' brothers as a way of compensating for the bride price paid to their families.

While attending a review meeting for women from Napak and Moroto districts supported by the Karamoja Women Umbrella Organisation (KAWUO) on Tuesday, the women said culture has infringed on the rights and denied them a chance to choose men or stay single after losing their husbands.

Ms Magdalene Nakiru, one of the women and a resident of Kalokengel village in Lotome Sub-county, Napak District, said government should ban the archaic inheritance of spouses just like it did with the Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

"This practice needs to be fought because women are not given the opportunity to mourn their loved ones. Besides, the families make choices of a spouse for widows without being consulted," Ms Nakiru said.

Ms Glades Tebakol, a resident of Lotiri parish in Nadunget Sub-county in Moroto, said the culture was fuelling rise of sexually transmitted diseases.

"The women usually turn down requests to go for blood tests to establish their status before marrying them. On the other hand the men are so impatient to the inherit," she said.

Ms Marry Losia, a resident of Loputuk village in Nadunget Sub-county, said a lot needs to be done to fight ill practices such as inheriting women by force, leaving women to fend for families while men just relax and wait for food, among others.
A plan by the government to extend relief cash handouts to selected vulnerable Ugandans hit by the second Covid-19 induced lockdown has elicited mixed reactions from targeted beneficiaries and local leaders across the country.

Early this week, government announced that it had put aside Shs54.7 billion to be shared among 16 vulnerable groups including bus, taxi drivers and conductors, touts, boda boda riders, salon operators, slum dwellers, orphans, and vulnerable children.

Others earmarked to benefit from the relief package include baggage carriers, wheelbarrow pushers and touts in taxi and bus terminals, bar attendants, deejays, gym workers and bouncers, waiters, waitresses and cooks, food vendors, teachers at private schools and those not on government payroll, car washers, street vendors and shoe shiners.

Other categories slated to benefit from the cash are special hire drivers, artistes (musicians, producers, comedians and promoters). Each of the targeted 501,197 households is expected to receive Shs100,000.

According to the breakdown, beneficiaries are supposed to use Shs80,000 to buy 20 kilogrammes of maize flour, 10 kilogrammes of beans, one bar of soap and three litres of cooking oil. The balance of Shs20, 000 would be spent on other essential items.

They would get the money next month.

However, a section of Ugandans, including the targeted vulnerable groups , have expressed reservations with the government plan, with some describing it as a mockery aimed at hoodwinking people who have suffered two successive lockdowns since the pandemic broke out.

Ms Mariam Namwanje, a teacher at Mustard Seed Primary in Kalungu District, doubted the criteria local government leaders are using to select the beneficiaries.

"In our case, it could work better if they channeled the money through various teachers' associations," she said.

Mr Abdul Katende, a boda-boda cyclist at Muto Complex Stage in Masaka City, hailed the government for the timely intervention but fears it could be marred by irregularities.

"No one knows how the lists of beneficiaries were generated, I have not been registered and we don't know where they are registering from. I doubt whether I will be among the beneficiaries," he said.

This is because their leaders at the various stages and associations have been left out of the exercise.

Mr Pascal Mukasa, a salon operator in Kimaanya, a Masaka City suburb, said: "Government's plan to help citizens with cash handouts is a well-thought-out idea. But the money is too little given the high cost of living. At least they could have given each household Shs200,000."

Ms Annet Animo, 25, who runs a ladies' salon in Bukaya Trading Centre, Buikwe District, with five employees, said it would be good if the money is given to each worker in the salon.

However, Mr Wilson Kalenzi, a boda boda rider in Nyenga Central Division in Buikwe District, casted doubt on whether the promise will be fulfilled.

"You remember the money for the elderly persons, up to now some of them have not received their share, when they [government] promised facemasks last year, very few people benefited," he said.

Ms Lucy Kabahinda, a street vendor in Fort Portal City, said: "If I get that money, I will thank God. I heard through radio that some of us will receive money on our phones, I have not been registered and I don't know who is responsible."

Mr Ivan Mwesige, a stage master at Mpanga boda boda Stage in Fort Portal City, said the relief cash is little because the period of lockdown is long.

Mr Aloysius Katurebe, a private teacher in Kamwenge District, said it's unfortunate to see the government borrow huge sums of money for Covid-19 interventions, but is considering sending peanuts to vulnerable people.

"The relief fund for each household could have been Shs500,000 because many vulnerable people have extended families, giving them Shs100,000 will be like a drop in the ocean ," he said.

In Mbale City, Ms Aisha Nagudi, a street vendor, said they are waiting for the money. "We are starving, but the government is dilly-dallying on the issue of cash handouts," she said.

Mr Mike Opolot, a shoe shiner in Tororo Municipality, said : "They [government] promise, but they never deliver on anything. Whether they send us the money or not, we no longer care."

Mr Akim Watenyeri, the Uganda People's Congress chairperson for eastern region, said: "It's unfortunate that some of the loans government gets to fight Covid-19 end up in people's pockets."

Mr Khalid Muyingo, the chairperson of Jinja Taxi Park Operators Association, said sending money on mobile phones is good, but some vulnerable people don't own phones. "Various categories of people have associations in their areas. It would be better if they channel that money through such groups," he said.

Mr Eria Musobya, the chairperson Jinja Boda- Boda Riders Association Ltd, said the arrangement could work if they had involved the village chairpersons.

Cabinet on Monday resolved that the registration of beneficiaries will be conducted by officials of Uganda Bureau of Statistics and town clerks, an unexplained departure from previous official proclamations that Local Council (LC) chairpersons would supervise the exercise.

It was deemed that LC officials had better knowledge about their village residents, unlike the technocrats.

"The process the government is using is likely to lock out the rightful beneficiaries because those in charge, including the town clerks don't know us. At least they would have involved the village chairpersons, the RDCs and the leaders of the vulnerable groups. The money is likely to be taken by those who are well off," he said.

Mr Ibrahim Mutegule, a shoe shiner on Biashara Building, Main Street in Jinja City, described the move as a good gesture. With Shs100,000, he said he would buy 20 kilogrammes of maize flour, 10 kilogrammes of beans, soap and cooking oil.

In Busia Town, Mr Bernard Ojambo, a boda boda rider, who operates on Tororo Road, said: "Last year, we waited for maize flour and beans during the first lockdown, but we did not receive them, I also hear that someone has to be with a National ID, which I don't have."

Mr Bashir Isabirye, a mechanic in Busia Town, said he fears officials might only target those who support the government.

Mr Stephen Mugeni Wasike, the Busia District chairperson, said many people in rural areas are equally affected by the lockdown.

"As a district chairperson, I am under pressure from people because they do not have food," Mr Mugeni said.

The director of Kabale Universal Primary School, Mr Drake Kisheija said: "The promise to give Shs100,000 to teachers as Covid-19 relief fund is welcome, though small, but it's better than nothing,"

Mr Katabazi Muhwezi, the chairperson of Kabale Taxi Owners and Drivers Association, said: "The money should be increased to Shs300,000."

Mr Stuart Nimusima, a teacher at Kisoro Vision High School, said: "When the second lockdown was announced, I started a chapati business to raise some money for my family. It is my prayer that this money is loaded on my phone ."

Mr Wilber Nsabimana, a conductor at Nzovu Bus Company, said if he gets the cash, he will use it to set up a small income generating business.

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In Soroti, the registration exercise for beneficiaries is pending as authorities wait for guidance from the government.

The Resident City Commissioner (RCC) of Soroti, Mr Robert Adiama, said once the government sends the money, all the targeted beneficiaries will get it.

In Arua City, a boda boda cyclist, Mr George Adomati, said: "I believe this is just a government's way to account for the money that was given by donors. People donated during the first lockdown and we did not even receive the food."

The Moyo District community development officer, Mr David Anyama, said they have not received any communication from the government about registration of vulnerable people.

In Mbarara, Isingiro, Rwampara and Kiruhura, leaders believe government is not fair in the distribution of the cash because every Ugandan has been affected by the lockdown.

Rwampara District chairperson Richard Owomugasho said the Cabinet ministers who proposed the relief support in cities and municipalities do not know the meaning of the term vulnerability.

"Vulnerability does not depend on where you stay, but how you survive. The LCs know which family or individuals are vulnerable. I have town councils which are bigger than cities, they have saloons, taxi operators and they are not operating," he said.

The Mbarara chairperson, Mr Didas Tabaro, said the government should amend the procedure.

Compiled by Al-Mahdi Ssenkabirwa, Philip Wafula, Tausi Nakato, Abubaker Kirunda, Fred Wambede, Alex Ashaba, Denis Edema, Ismail Bategeka, David Awori, Robert Muhereza, Leonard Mbishinzimana, Ronald K ,Simon Emwamu, Rajab Mukombozi ,Joseph Omollo, Felix Warom, Rajab Mukombozi & Scovin Iceta
Telecoms have said they will, for now, absorb the 12 per cent tax on data until when they have reached a proper assessment of the impact of the new tax on data prices.

Government early this year made a decision to scrap the Shs200 Over The Top (OTT) tax and replace it with 12 per cent Excise Duty that would be charged directly on data.

Government had reasoned that OTT had failed to perform to expected levels with a number of internet users finding channels through which they could overlap the tax.

Yesterday, Mr Amit Kapur, the Airtel chief commercial officer, said the telecom will maintain its pre-paid data prices despite the 12 per cent level, which took effect yesterday.

"We shall institutionalise the 12 per Excise Duty as mandated by government," he said, adding: "However, Airtel will absorb the Duty for all pre-paid packs, thus maintaining our pre-paid data prices untill further notice."

Ms Rhona Arinaitwe, the MTN senior manager communications, said they were still assessing the impact of the tax, and will have to wait for an informed decision.

Related

"As of today OTT has been removed, which means we have also removed our OTT bundles and therefore customers can access social media platforms without paying OTT, but bundles are still being bought at a standard price," she said without giving more details.

The new tax is expected to impact data prices, which have already been high compared to other East African member states.

Mobile internet access, which is the main target in the new tax, has become increasingly popular due to growth in the number of internet-enabled mobile phones.

According to Uganda Communications Commission, as of December 2020, there were about seven million smartphones, majority of which are internet-enabled.

Ms Juliet Najjinda, a tax manager at PwC, yesterday said data tax will have an overall impact on individuals and businesses depending on how much data one consumes within or over a month.

"For, instance, if an individual or company has been using data of Shs10,000 per month. Before was one would load OTT to access social networking sites and this meant a payment of Shs6,000 of OTT per month making a sum of Shs16,000," she said, noting that in the new scenario corporate data users of above Shs100,000 will have to pay at least Shs12,000 to cater for the new tax.

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"You're faced with a higher cost as a corporate user visa-vis what you were paying before," she said adding that unlike OTT, the 12 per cent levy is mandatory.

"Every time you load data, you will have to pay 12 per cent tax, yet with the OTT regime, it was voluntary to decide when to or not to pay," she said.

No way around

According to Ms Najjinda, internet users won't have "a way around it" like previously when most would circumvent OTT through VPNs.

"One of the things government has been complaining about is that; more people have been circumventing OTT by using VPNs but with 12 per cent, the moment you click a purchase button, the telecom will have already deducted the 12 per cent, so we no longer have a way around it," she says.
Somalia's President Mohamed Farmaajo has called for national unity as the country marked 61 years of independence on Thursday.

The ceremony usually marks the date that Somalia's northern regions under British colonial control and the southern regions under Italian control merged to form the Somali Republic then led by Aden Abdulle.

Political leaders and diplomats gathered at Villa Somalia, the official residence of the President, as the national sky-blue flag was hoisted again, mimicking the events on the midnight of July 1, 1960.

A guard of honour saluted President Farmaajo as the national hymn was played.

Farmaajo, facing an election in three months, used the occasion to rally the country for national unity, saying defending independence and freedom as envisioned by the country's forefathers is the harder part.

"I urge my fellow Somalis to solemnly acknowledge and commemorate the efforts of our forefathers, but also to preserve our independence and unity," he told the gathering, significantly reduced due to Covid-19 restrictions.

On Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble, the man charged with organising the upcoming indirect elections, sent his wishes on "the glorious day" for Somalia, saying the celebrations mark the unity of its people.

Roble and regional leaders united under the National Consultative Forum (NCF) on June 29 signed a new agreement indicating a timeline for the envisaged elections, including the presidential election set for October 10.

But Somalia's unity has routinely come under question.

The northern region of Somaliland has since 1991 declared independence although no country recognises it.

Somalia also faces the perennial problem of al-Shabaab, a militant group that has attacked citizens and raided public places for years, killing thousands of people. It routinely forbids celebrations that are not based on Islamic commemorations and there were fears the group could attack as Somalis made merry.

On the eve of July 1, hundreds of youth paraded along the main avenues, draped in attire decorated with the Somali flag.

Most of the youngsters converged at Daljirka Daahsoon (the Unknown Soldier) monument in down town Mogadishu. The youth were later joined by the Mayor of Mogadishu Omar Mohamed Filish.
Some employers, including the renowned audit firm Deloitte, have said they would allow staff flexibility regarding their post-pandemic working spaces. Meaning they could work from home forever.

The global pandemic and lockdown restrictions have forced many global businesses to move employees to remote working, practically overnight.

This has been done mainly to ensure that work continues, despite the restrictions.

Employees have also responded to this, stating they prefer alternating between working remotely and working at the office.

According to a City Am report, staff at one of the four big firms would not be obligated to work from the office for a minimum number of days per week, as has been a typical response of Deloitte's competitors.

Deloitte senior partner and chief executive officer Richard Houston was quoted as saying the impact of the pandemic has profoundly changed the way people work.

"The last year has really shown that one size does not fit all when it comes to balancing work and personal lives. It has also shown that we can trust our people to make the right choice about when, how and where they work."

Deloitte said when restrictions are eased, its offices would principally be used for team collaboration, training and client meetings.

Many companies have announced plans to adopt a hybrid structure post-pandemic, with staff asked to spend some time in the office each week.

While this is a reality for Western companies, Namibian employers appear to be following suit.

It has also been submitted that not all workers want to do without the office - even at digitally savvy companies.

According to Chris Bloomquist, the co-founder of the Talent Mine, a tech recruiting start-up, there has been a complete overhaul in the job market.

"I think the job market has changed forever," said Bloomquist.

Working from home has been seen by many as a good move, however, some employees have complained about Zoom meetings fatiguewhich tends to creep in.

Countries like Namibia have a high unemployment rate making it difficult for job seekers to find placement.

*Additional report CityAM.
The minister of defence, Franz Kapofi, has assured residents of Impalila island that there is nothing sinister about Botswana planes flying over the island.

His remarks came after the community complained that Botswana Defence Force (BDF) fighter jets flew above Impalila Island, on Friday 25 June at about 15h00.

A similar fighter jet was seen on Saturday 26 June at about 13h00.

"There must be no worry, the community should go about their business," said Kapofi.

The minister told The Namibian earlier this week that the planes the community saw were landing and taking off from Kasane in Botswana.

According to Kapofi, the soldiers stationed at the borders confirmed that there was a plane that flew over from Kasane going somewhere else. But there was no plane hovering over the island, he said.

"I have all the reason to believe what the troops are saying. Soldiers are trained to interpret the intention of anyone. So far they have not indicated that the aircraft were doing what the community is complaining about," said Kapofi.

George Sikanda, who lives along the Chobe River believes the BDF is intimidating the community and that their aggression continues unabated.

"Our families are terrified of these acts of war by the BDF. From being unable to fetch water from the Chobe, now our people live in constant fear, because BDF continues to fly above Namibia at will. We are calling on the government to protect our territorial space and our people against BDF aggression," he said.

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Namibians living along the border with Botswana claim they have been living in fear since four fishermen were shot dead by the BDF in November 2020.

The Namibian Lives Matter movement (NLM) and the United Democratic Party (UDP) and other pressure groups and political parties have been demanding that the government suspends the Border Treaty signed between Namibian and Botswana in 2018.

They blame the death of many people along the river on the treaty.

Last week, the (NLM) leadership met deputy minister of international relations and cooperation Jenelly Matundu to get feedback on the continued intimidation of people along the Chobe River.

The movement's national leader, Simvula Mudabedi, said they want the government to stop its ignorant approach to this sensitive and volatile matter that can lead to 'untold consequences'.

"We demand protection for our people. We warned the government that we will urge our people to use democratic and constitutional means to voice our displeasure against the government's stance that stands with a foreign country to oppress our people," he said.

UDP leader Dasken Mulisa demanded that the government suspends the treaty with immediate effect, until such a time that the Caprivi issue has been resolved through a referendum.

"UDP is extremely antagonistic to the treaty, hence it undermines the former Caprivi's claim for self-determination. The Caprivi issue is older than any ambition to draw boundaries with our neighbouring countries," said Mulisa.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania is the true embodiment of the quote made by the former First Lady of the US Eleanor Roosevelt: "A woman is like a tea bag. You may never know how strong she is until you put her in hot water."

Since taking over the leadership of Tanzania following the death of President John Pombe Joseph Magufuli, President Suluhu has proven to doubters that she is strong. Breaking the record as the first woman to ever become the president of an East African state, she has set the bar quite high.

As we mark the first 100 days in office for the new President, her biggest achievement was the successful transfer of power, with many firsts that came with it -- first woman, first Zanzibar-born and even first hijab wearing woman to become a President of a country in Africa.

Most Tanzanians think that she has achieved more than they expected her to. For starters, she has completely debunked the belief that the Covid-19 pandemic is does not exist and rallied Tanzanians to observe measures to curb the spread of the disease.

Investment destination

She has formed an advisory task force to advise the government on the pandemic and its effects on the nation. The President is due to release data on the situation of the coronavirus pandemic in Tanzania.

This is one of the conditions that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has given before it gives Dodoma its much-needed $571 million loan to help it tackle the challenges it is facing that have been caused by the pandemic.

President Suluhu has also pushed for Tanzania to join the Covax vaccine-sharing scheme. Under its new President, Tanzania has not been exposed to the political unrest in neighbouring states such as Mozambique, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This has drawn more large-scale investors to turn their eye to Tanzania.

President Suluhu has received praise from influential personalities, including Africa's richest man, Aliko Dangote who lauded her for transforming Tanzania into an investment destination of choice.

Joshua Muoki, 12, is Grade Six pupil and a member of the journalism club at Mudzini School, Kilifi.

Are you aged 10-20 and would like to be Nation's young reporter? Email your 400-600-word article to diversity@ke.nationmedia.com
The High Court has ordered the Directorate of Criminal Investigations to return a car seized from a lawyer linked to the disappearance and murder of a wealthy Belgian woman.

Justice Daniel Ogembo directed the case investigating officer to release the Toyota Prado (KBP 298E) to lawyer John Hari Gakinya pending the determination of the murder case.

Detectives had seized the vehicle in January last year, saying it belonged to the estate of the late millionaire Dysseleer Mireille Lesoipa, alias Wa Samburu.

The lawyer is being tried alongside Ms Lesoipa's friend Lucy Waithera Njuguna over her disappearance and murder. They are said to have committed the offence between December 11, 2018 and July 15, 2019.

Justice Ogembo ordered the lawyer never to sell or dispose of the vehicle until the murder case is determined. The vehicle was seized when Mr Gakinya was arrested on March 10, 2020.

Pleading for the release of the vehicle, Mr Gakinya had told the court it was in danger of being vandalised at the police station.

Executor of the will

Mr Gakinya, who has denied the murder charge and is out on bail, said he is the executor of the will of the late Belgian millionaire, whose estate is reported to be worth Sh100 million.

The court also heard that the High Court in Nakuru had on January 16, 2020 given police 21 days to complete investigations and release the vehicle, and those days have long lapsed.

The public prosecutor's office had opposed the release of the vehicle. Investigators said the vehicle's documents might have been fraudulently obtained.

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The court was also told that in an existing succession case regarding the estate of Ms Lesoipa at the High Court in Nakuru, the motor vehicle has been under investigation as being associated with her.

Prosecutors said Ms Lesoipa, who came to Kenya 30 years ago to marry her Samburu lover, went missing from her home in Milimani, Nakuru County, in June 2019.

She captured headlines when she fell in love with a Samburu man and they solemnised their marriage in 1995. The union later collapsed and the couple divorced in 2004.

Plotting the murder

Following the divorce, the two engaged in court battles involving the ownership of a property in Maralal.

When Ms Njuguna was arrested, she was found with a copy of Ms Lesoipa's death certificate and her assorted bank cards.

She was also found in possession of Ms Lesoipa's original passport with immigration stamps indicating that she had travelled to India on December 12, 2018, and returned to Kenya on June 30, 2019.

Ms Njuguna is said to have been a close friend to Ms Lesoipa's before her disappearance.

She is suspected of plotting her murder, faking a death certificate and initiating a succession process for Ms Lesoipa's estate.

She allegedly forged a death certificate and claimed Ms Lesoipa died of HIV/Aids. The certificate was used in the filing of estate succession proceedings at the High Court in Nakuru.
Ibadan  The Chairman of TITAN Farms Limited, Gbenga Olatubosun Eyiolawi, has estimated that the price of rice will soon come down in the country following the commissioning of the Lagos/Ibadan railway transport service by President Muhammadu Buhari.

According to him, the development will reduce cost of logistics in processing the product.

He made the disclosure in Ibadan while delivering a keynote address titled, "Food Security : The Challenges of Rice Farming and Milling in Nigeria", at a media interactive session organised by the Freelance and Independent Broadcasters Association of Nigeria (FIBAN), Oyo State Chapter.

The event chaired by the Oyo State deputy governor, Mr. Raufu Olaniyan, was witnessed by other stakeholders which included the President of Market Men and Women Association of Oyo State, Alh. Sunmaila Jimoh who doubles as the President of Rice Sellers Association of Oyo State; Alhaja Saratu Konibaje, the Iyaloja of Oyo State and Iyaloja Genaral of Ibadanland, Alhaja Sariat Ojikutu Olorunero, and the Public Relations Officer (PRO) of Bodija Market, Sulaiman Ileomo.

The TITAN Farms boss said with the railway terminus located in Moniya, Ibadan, just five minutes' drive away from the factory, there could be drop in logistics cost, security and insurance, expressing optimism that the price of rice will soon drop.

While explaining how insecurity was affecting farming business, he noted that this was the reason most investors now resort to protecting their businesses through insurance covers.

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According to him, "We spend so much on transporting our materials from the northern part of the country down here by the way of securing wares through insurance due to the insecurity in the country, and that is why we are commending the federal government in the area of transportation with the restoration of rail system.

"There will be drop in price because we would not be paying more, what we need to do is to get our raw materials down here through railway."

He added that the sole aim of his firm was to make quality food affordable for people and that is why it is making a lot of sacrifices to come up with premium quality products that can match with the so-called imported ones.

"If you want to make something happen, especially in this country, you must be ready to do the unusual, so we did the unusual by making sure we took over the public space.

"We take our publicity seriously and beyond just putting adverts out there, we match it with premium quality, because it is one thing to advertise, and it is another thing to have the products of comparative quality", he said.
ZIMBABWE is among the world's 10 worst countries protecting the rights of employees, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)'s 2021 global rights index has revealed.

The southern Africa nation has been grouped in the same category with Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Honduras, Myanmar, The Philippines, and Turkey.

The ITUC index shows that 87% of the worst countries violated the right for workers to strike, 79% violated the right to collective bargaining, 74% excluded workers from the right to establish and join a trade union, and 65% restricted workers to have access to justice.

"Zimbabwe remained one of the most hostile countries in the world for trade unionists as Zanu PF - the ruling party - called the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) - the main trade union organisation in the country - a "terrorist organization," ITUC general secretary, Sharan Burrow said in the report.

The ITUC noted that following the violent attacks against employees during the general strikes organised in October 2018 and January 2019, the ZCTU leadership remained under constant harassment and surveillance by the police.

The labour body's president, Peter Mutasa, was placed on the most wanted persons list by the police.

The index noted on July 6, 2020, the Zimbabwean Nurses' Association (ZINA) organised strikes in Harare and Bulawayo demanding a salary review and their outstanding Covid-19 allowances as well as the adequate provision of personal protective equipment (PPEs).

However, before the protests, the ITUC said, the government ordered the arrest of 13 nurses.

"Instead of opening dialogue, the government ordered the arrest of 13 nurses. They have since been released on bail, but all have been dismissed. Strikes continued for 33 days without a return to negotiations," the global union federation said.

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In classifying Zimbabwe's rogue status, the ITUC based their decision on the utterances made by then acting Zanu PF spokesperson Patrick Chinamasa who attacked and labelled the ZCTU as a; "Trojan Horse of the MDC Alliance and a terrorist organisation together with the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition".

Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition is a grouping of civil society organisations.

"On the same day, the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) issued a statement that they were hunting down ZCTU president Peter Mutasa, as well as Obert Masaraure and Robson Chere, leaders of the Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union (ARTUZ), with regard to the 31 July 2019 strike.

"The day after, police began a manhunt for ZCTU member Godfrey Tsenengamu, Peter Mutasa and 11 other political and union members, requesting members of the public to supply information on the location of the activists. No statement was released on the reasons behind this manhunt," the ITUC said.
document

His Excellency Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and President of the People's Republic of China, BEIJING.

Your Excellency and Dear Brother,

On behalf of the Central Committee, of the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), the entire membership of the Party and indeed on my own behalf, I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Your Excellency President Xi Jinping on the occasion of the 1OOth Anniversary.

The Communist Party of China continues to provide a sustainable alternative development path and governance model to advance the prosperity of diverse communities of the world, in the context of today's realities.

The CPC's Ideology of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics has tremendously transformed the socio-economic fabric and lifted millions within your country out of poverty.

Comprehensive and multi-level Chinese diplomacy makes it possible for us in the developing world to believe in a brighter, future mutual cooperation and win-win outcomes anchored on the doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.

As my country journeys towards an Upper Middle Income Economy by 2030, ZANU PF remains committed to work, consolidate, deepen and broaden relations with the Communist Party of China to advance the establishment of a global system which is free from poverty and socio-economic exploitation.

In this regard, Zimbabwe welcomes increased Chinese investments and partnerships in every sector of our economy.

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In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, China's leadership and its unwavering stance in promoting multi-lateralism in the global health sector is applauded.

Resultantly, the developing world and other smaller nations have got access to COVID-19 vaccines.

It is through China 's generosity and access to Chinese vaccines that Zimbabwe is successfully rolling out its National COVID-19 Vaccination Programme.

ZANU PF is confident that under the tested leadership of the Communist Party of China, the Chinese people will achieve the two centenary goals of building a prosperous society and turning China into a great modem socialist country by 2049.

The Party, ZANU PF and the people of Zimbabwe as a whole wish the Communist Party of China and great people of China happiness, prosperity and continuous development as you celebrate 100 years of the CPC.

Happy centenary celebrations!

Please accept, Your Excellency and Dear Brother, the assurances of my highest consideration.

Yours sincerely,

Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa

PRESIDENT AND FIRST SECRETARY OF ZANU P.F
They survived the harsh battle ground that was Operation Linda Nchi in Somalia, only to be killed in a military training exercise at home on June 24 when their helicopter crashed in Ol Tepesi, Kajiado county.

This is the sad story of nine of the 11 soldiers that were killed in the 9am military chopper crash during a routine training exercise.

The nine fallen heroes namely; Joshua Obare Odera (Warrant Officer 2), Tarcisio Wandera Namboka (Warrant Officer 2), Senior Sergeants Noah Wanyonyi Munialo, Bob Kipkemoi Aruasa and Anthony Simon Kamuti, Sergeants Steve Ombuka Angwenyi, Stephen Omarian Omale, Corporal Boniface Ogati Mocheche and Superintendent Thomas Shekeine will be remembered for the roles they played during Operation Linda Nchi -- the country's first incursion into Somalia in 2011. The move was aimed at neutralising terror group al-Shabaab's operations.

According to a KDF tribute to the fallen soldiers, the nine had, before their demise, been decorated with Operation Linda Nchi and constitution medals for the roles they played during the incursion.

Additionally, they were praised for having worked with distinction for the duration that they got to work at the Kenya Air Force (KAF).

Odera had been working as a technician at the KAF since May 4, 1990 when he joined the service.

Four years later, his colleague Wandera joined the force and until his demise, had been working as a nurse attached to the Moi Air Base Medical Centre.

Wanyonyi joined the Kenya Air Force in 1994, where he worked as a technician alongside Kipkemoi who joined the force on August 3, 2002. Kamuti joined the force a year later, on September 23, 2003; Ombuka on October 29, 2007 and Omarian on October 29, 2007.

Ogati joined the air force on October 25, 2010 and has been working as an air loadmaster squadron, while Shekeine joined the air force on December 7, 2014 and has been working as a flight attendant until his untimely demise.

The other two soldiers who died alongside them -- Senior Sergeant Irene Wanjiku Githinji, a flight attendant attached to the VIP wing and Sergeant Josphat Muriuki Maingi, a load master squadron, were not in Operation Linda Nchi but they were also praised for having worked with distinction and winning United Nations and Constitution medals.

A load master is responsible for securing the cargo and passengers aboard an aircraft for a particular mission. They communicate with the pilots in the flight deck to achieve their mission's success.

A private requiem mass attended by their close friends, family and colleagues led by Kenya Air Force Commander Major General Francis Ogolla was held yesterday at the Moi Airbase gymnasium.

In his tribute, the Major General hailed the soldiers as hard working and dedicated Service members who had earned respect from their seniors, peers and juniors.

He said the cruel hand of death has robbed the KAF of dedicated, loyal and hardworking service members whose future was bright.

Ill-fated helicopter

"It is with deep sorrow that, on behalf of Kenya Air Force - Moi Air Base fraternity, I send our heartfelt condolences and sympathy to the families at this moment of grief, following the demise of your loved ones and our colleagues. The service members worked at the Kenya Air Force until they met their death. They were devoted, obedient and promising, cheerful and pleasant to work with," partly read the tribute.

The ill-fated helicopter crossed from Kisamis town over Olorogai hill on its way to Oltinka, a dense thicket where temperatures get extremely high during the day, when the accident occurred. On board were the 23 soldiers, including two pilots and their squad leader.

Kajiado West Deputy County Commissioner Muranga Morakwa on the same day confirmed that 10 soldiers had lost their lives in the accident.

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"Sadly, we have lost 10 soldiers while 13 have been taken to hospital," he said.

Preliminary findings of the early morning crash are yet to be made public.

KDF, in a statement released on the same day, said the crash was being investigated by aircraft accident investigators.

"Aircraft accident investigators are also at the crash site to establish the cause of the accident. The entire KDF thanks the locals and all the first responders for their assistance during the rescue efforts," read the statement signed by KDF Spokesperson Zipporah Kioko.

The survivors of the crash are recuperating at the Defence Forces Memorial Hospital in Nairobi, where they last week received in person goodwill messages from their senior commanders, Defence CS Monica Juma and President Uhuru Kenyatta.
French President Emmanuel Macron has assured Liberian President George Manneh Weah of his unflinching support towards the Liberian government's efforts to improve the lives of its people.

During an hour-long special bilateral meeting with French President Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris on Thursday, 1 July 2021, the French President told President Weah that his country's support to Liberia will be tangible so that it is felt by the citizens directly.

Macron said in addition to his country's efforts at capacity building and youth development, additional urban projects will be undertaken by the Agency for French Development totaling an initial amount of 23 million euros.

He assured Mr. Weah that this assistance will be immediate.

President Macron also informed President Weah that his country will make an immediate donation of some 40,000 test kits and several respirators, adding that France will increase its quota to the COVAX structure.

Mr. Macron also said France will ensure that "Liberia directly benefits and have its population vaccinated."

He highlighted the strong historical ties between both nations, saying that both leaders ought to work harder in order to ensure the relationship yields tangible mutual benefits.

The talks covered a wide range of issues, including French support to the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) in order to enhance its ability to perform its service in Mali.

The French President also promised more logistical support and training for the AFL and further cooperation in the area of information exchange.

The discussions also covered the issue of piracy in the Gulf Guinea and the need for both nations to cooperate in order to halt the menace.

The French government further promised more equipment and training for the Liberian Coast Guards, adding that the French Navy will study the option of having its Frigates participate in the fight against piracy in order to ensure that vital maritime commerce is carried out unhindered.

In response, Liberian President George Manneh Weah expressed profound gratitude to the government and people of France for the country's continued support of Liberia's development drive, especially in the areas of capacity building, infrastructure development, and sports.

President Weah also expressed appreciation for President Macron's "gracious support" towards Liberia's engagements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which he said has greatly contributed to the improved fiscal and monetary policy implementation and efficiency of the country now experiences.

Mr. Weah informed his French counterpart that his administration continues to work in close collaboration with these international financial institutions, "which sometimes require the formulation of difficult policies, such as the Salary Harmonization Policy."

But he said the policies have been required to make the "necessary corrective measures and structural adjustments" for the good of the Liberian economy.

President Weah called for the continuation of the Franco-Liberia relationship, including the strengthening of collaboration between the French Military and the Armed Forces of Liberia on the Malian peacekeeping mission.

"In this regard", he said, "it is important to note that the Liberian contingent has now been tasked with providing Base Security for the Timbuktu outpost and, as such, more modern equipment and logistics are urgently needed."

Additionally, President Weah enumerated the many other support the French government has rendered to Liberia in recent months, including funding for capacity development, sports, the resumption of flight by Air France, the construction of a new building for Alliance Francaise Institute, and the increase in activities by French businesses and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs).

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Regarding ongoing efforts by the Liberian government to curb the further spread of COVID, President Weah thanked President Macron and the Government and People of France for "generously providing" a number of ventilators and several thousands of testing kits.

He told his counterpart that Liberia would need millions of additional doses of COVID-19 vaccines to help fight the spread of the virus.

Foreign Minister Dee-Maxwell Kemayah, Defense Minister Daniel Ziankahn, and Maritime Commissioner Lenn Eugene Nagbe formed part of the discussions which were followed by a closed-door tete a tete between the two leaders.
The Cummings Africa Foundation has committed US$150,000, as its initial contribution to the ongoing fight against the resurgence of the coronavirus in Liberia.

The head of the Foundation, Mr. Alexander B. Cummings, who is also the leader of the opposition Alternative National Congress announced the commitment Thursday, July 1, 2021, in a statement released in Monrovia.

He says the amount doubles the US$75,000 the Foundation provided in food and household materials across the country during the lockdown last year, pledging that the Cummings Foundation will continue to do what it can in helping the citizenry during these difficult times, and will assist as best as possible the government in its current response to the pandemic.

"As I speak, the Foundation is moving quickly to purchase, and hurriedly provide to hospitals, much-needed medical supplies like oxygen, drugs, masks, gloves, gowns, oximeters, cleaning supplies, and hand-washing buckets. So far, we have provided oxygen for 50 tanks to Catholic Hospital and procured 20 tanks and 20 regulators for CH Rennie hospital to be delivered this weekend. These are immediate needs we decided to address while the procurement of other materials takes time", Mr. Cummings says.

He discloses the Foundation has a three-fold approach in the current fight, firstly; it is providing support to some public and private hospitals, secondly, working with community leaders, civil society organizations, and the media to increase public awareness and messaging especially around prevention. "We have already released a jingle, flyers with simple messages, and working on a skit for our community radio stations. As these are life-saving messages and public awareness campaigns, I am asking the media, which has been very helpful, to please continue to do their part."

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Thirdly, and most importantly, he says the Foundation is trying to help the government succeed in this effort by regularly updating the authorities on what it is doing, and recommend additional steps, as required, to be taken by the government to seriously fight the virus, stop the spread, and end the infections in the country.

Meanwhile, Mr. Cummings reveals that in the next few weeks and months, he will be heard often along with others about the virus and what needs to be done in helping each other survive, treat the sick and infected, and end the spread across the country.

"I will be calling on friends and business partners for help. I will be calling on Liberians in the diaspora to rally around because we have to give ourselves the best chance to succeed and save each other lives by seriously committing to do our part - to do the things we need to do for ourselves, and for each other. I am sure people will help us, but we have to first help ourselves", he emphasizes.

He encourages citizens to not forget to wear masks at all times, wash hands regularly, avoid crowded places or observe social distancing, go to the hospital if they feel sick, take the COVID test and vaccine.

While visiting the United States of America recently, Mr. Cummings offered his services to the Weah administration in fighting the new wave of COVID-19 cases in the country; something, President Weah has welcomed immediately.
Health Minister revealed

The Minister of Health and head of the government's Incident Management System Dr. Wilehmina Jallah, has revealed that 13 of the 15 counties of Liberia are battling the third wave of the deadly COVID-19 attack.

Addressing the regular press briefing at the Ministry of Information Thursday, July 1, 2021, she said from the inception of the third wave of the virus in March, Montserrado county, now considered the high zone, was among few counties that were in response, but as of June 30th the number has increased to 13 with the exception of River Gee and Grand Kru counties.

"The number of counties that are now in respond clearly indicates that we should continue our mask-wearing, social distancing and follow all of the health protocols, and abide by the measures that were provided by the government; with this, we can defeat this virus", the Minister said.

Doctor Jallah emphasizes that the entire COVID-19 fight rests in the hands of every citizen, noting that no one should wait on the government.

However, critics say the government should do more and take leadership by improving scrutiny at the Roberts International Airport, particularly on travelers entering the country.

Citizens also criticize President George Weah for traveling out of the country amid the current peak of the virus. Many think he should stay home and give hope to the population.

But the Minister of Health warns that if Liberians take the fight for granted, the entire country would lose the battle.

She says there is no immediate plan to shut down the country, explaining "We can't at this time close down markets; our people need to eat, and we don't want citizens to die from starvation, but what we can do is to appeal to your conscience to abide by every measure."

She puts total confirmed cases in the country as of June 30th to 4,251 with 40 percent occurring in the same month and 1,619 active cases across Liberia.

She says of the figure above, 2,346 recoveries were recorded in the same period, adding that due to the seriousness of the Delta variant that is making more people get sick, the recovery period takes a longer time.

At the same time, Dr. Jallah reveals that from June 1st to the 30th Liberia recorded a total of 55 deaths, noting that this is something that should scare people.

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"I'm terribly hurt that we had to lose a huge number of our citizens to COVID-19", she laments and explains that total deaths from the third wave are 141 with 1,715 contacts being followed in Montserrado county, described as the epic center.

"There are more people here in Montserrado county that are affected, and it will take lots of teamwork, commitment to getting rid of the virus within this epic center."

The Minister adds that about 103 persons are in treatment facilities, 57 of them at Star Base with 47 placed on oxygen.

Liberia received its first consignment of 96,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccines brought in the country in early April. A total of 84,808 persons have taken the first dose, while 5,463 persons received the second dose.

Dr. Jallah appeals to citizens especially, those waiting to take their second dose of the vaccine to be patient, saying, "Don't panic, we are doing everything possible for you to have your second dose of the vaccine."https://thenewdawnliberia.com/liberias-covid-19-deaths-hit-110/
Nine-year-old Nathan L. David, Jr. has written President George Manneh Weah, appealing for assistance to get back in school.

Nathan is a 4th-grade drop out because his father is jobless and does not have money to pay his tuition, which is stifling his educational sojourn.

Led by his father into the offices of the New Dawn on Wednesday, June 20, 2021, he read the verbatim content of his letter, asking the President to come to his rescue.

"Tears come down my cheeks when I see my schoolmates in school. I now consider myself as a child who is existing and not living because I eat by coincidence and go to bed at 10:pm every day just to escape the lashes from the landlord because my daddy is jobless and not able to pay rent", Nathan's letter read.

He laments that since his father lost his job, "things have turned the other way for me. All I could dream is to become the best Mathematician of Liberia at age 14 and has dropped out of school."

The lad reminds President Weah of his promise to make education one of his focus points. "But why is it that all I hear on the radio is politics, chaos, etc?", he asks.

Nathan also appeals to lawmakers and humanitarians to help him return to school and help his father get a job to support him.
Funmi Branco commends the steps taken by Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State to ensure the emergence of popular All Progressives Congress candidates for local government election in the state.

In a few days time, the people of Ogun State will be heading to the polls to freely elect councillorship and council chairmanship candidates of their choice. The local government, as everyone knows, is the closest level of government to the people, and any fissure at this level promises to upset the country's march to democratic development and hence the sustenance of life. This is why the people must approach the coming elections with all the seriousness that it deserves. Indeed, there is a massive cause for cheer going by the actions and pronouncements of the Dapo Abiodun-led administration in the state which offer hope that the coming elections will be truly democratic, reflecting the wishes of the Ogun electorate.

In the first instance, quite unlike some governors who would merely dictate the names of candidates for the various local governments in the comfort of their offices and thereafter impose such candidates on the people, the Iperu-born prince and business mogul chose to invite major stakeholders in the three senatorial districts in the state to his office and interface with them, with a view to ensuring sterling representation across the wards in the state. He told the stakeholders that the party needed to come up with candidates that would be acceptable to the people, urging them to go back to their various places, hold meetings with the aspirants for the various positions, and come up with a consensus list where necessary. Where such an arrangement is not possible, they were to prune down the list of aspirants so that those who would participate in primaries would be known. This, it has to be acknowledged, would reduce cost and, what is more, reduce acrimony within the fold.

In places where people intended to use their financial purse to overwhelm the system, the governor also invited stakeholders and urged them to conduct a fair process. He harped on the fact those who had served the party faithfully ought to be recognized even if they did not have a huge purse. This was partly in response to protests by some aspirants who alleged that candidates were being imposed on them. Thus, in pushing for strict screening and free, fair and transparent primaries, Prince Abiodun aims to see a situation where the party leadership would put only the best of the best forward. This is as it should be. According to the Electoral Knowledge Network (EKN), if a political party would like the democratic principles of electoral politics to be applied within the party, it may consider practices like internal information and consultation processes, internal (formal or informal) rules and structures for the organisation and decision-making within the party, and transparency in the party's functioning at all levels.

The claim cannot be doubted that in Nigeria, imposition of candidates on the party by some influential leaders has spelt doom for many political parties and even their candidates whose political ambitions had been truncated undemocratically in preference for some sacred cows. Indeed, as Yigal Mersel, a researcher, Hauser Global Program and Emile Noel Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center, New York University has argued, "the very interdependence between political parties and democracies should promote the parties' adherence not only to democratic goals and activities but also to democratic internal structures." Such internal democracy, she argues, must be mandatory, and "in rare cases, there is valid justification for banning political parties that lack internal democracy."

To be sure, the level of interaction so far demonstrates the fact that the governor wants a fair process. He wants to build the party and deepen democracy. He is, without doubt, a governor who believes in grass roots mobilization and development, and party supremacy. To him, "you must initiate and communicate ideas with the grass roots; you must not behave like an island on your own; you must not embrace autocracy just because you are governor." That is not mere rhetoric: Governor Abiodun has allowed the various constituencies to bring out their preferred candidates and fortunately, the candidates that have emerged so far are accomplished individuals freely chosen by the people, which is why there has been no rancour or voice of dissent since their emergence. This is a very good development for our body politic. In any case, naysayers can now realize that being a technocrat does not preclude one from being a good politician. With Governor Abiodun's distribution of goodwill, peace and stability are assured in the state.

Instructively, even as the All Progressives Congress (APC) seems well positioned to win the election, a level playing field has been created for all political parties in the state. In some other states, the ruling party ceaselessly harasses opposition candidates. That is not the case in Ogun, although it continues to be a problem not only in the country but around the world.

In January 2020, Joyce Fegan of the Irish Times reported that political parties were being asked to play fair online in the General Election and to avoid using the "toxic tactics" employed in the UK and US. According to the report, "All parties are being asked to sign up to the Fair Play Pledge, which has four commitments. Parties are being asked to campaign honestly and openly, respect the dignity of others, participate in financial fair play and once elected - champion election integrity in the new Dail.

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The Fair Play Pledge has been endorsed by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICLL), Transparency International Ireland and DCU's FuJo (Future of Journalism)." Happily, with Governor Abiodun's push for transparency within the Ogun APC and the larger local government electoral process in general, the good people of Ogun State can expect better days ahead, particularly if purpose-driven candidates are put forward across board.

QUOTE

Unlike some governors who would merely dictate the names of candidates for the various local governments in the comfort of their offices and thereafter impose such candidates on the people, the Iperu-born prince and business mogul chose to invite major stakeholders in the three senatorial districts in the state to his office and interface with them, with a view to ensuring sterling representation across the wards in the state. He told the stakeholders that the party needed to come up with candidates that would be acceptable to the people, urging them to go back to their various places, hold meetings with the aspirants for the various positions, and come up with a consensus list where necessary. Where such an arrangement is not possible, they were to prune down the list of aspirants so that those who would participate in primaries would be known. This, it has to be acknowledged, would reduce cost and, what is more, reduce acrimony within the fold
Air Peace has announced the resumption of Warri and Freetown flight operations from July 9 and 21, 2021, respectively.

Spokesman of the airline, Stanley Olisa, explained in a statement that Warri service from Lagos and Abuja, would operate daily while the Freetown flights would operate on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

According to him, "Air Peace is happy to announce to its teeming customers the resumption of its Warri and Freetown flight services to broaden connectivity. We shall resume more routes and increase frequencies to specific destinations as we take delivery of more brand new E195-E2s and other aircraft on maintenance overseas."

Olisa, who said customers can now book the resumed Warri and Freetown flights on the airline's website- flyairpeace.com or its mobile app, reiterated Air Peace's commitment to providing best-in-class flight services while observing the highest standards of safety.

Air Peace currently services 16 domestic routes, five regional routes and two international destinations, including Johannesburg while it boasts of a varied fleet of 28 aircraft, the latest being three brand new 124-seat capacity E195-E2 jets.
Eromosele Abiodun writes that after two separate Senate motions and the intervention of 17 governors from Southern Nigeria Apapa gridlock has become worse.

On May 12 this year, Southern governors and senators expressed concern over the intractable gridlock along the Oshodi-Apapa Expressway and Apapa ports environ, calling on President Muhammadu Buhari to put the issue on priority list and address the situation head-on.

The governors, under the platform of Southern Nigeria Governors Forum, made the call at a crucial security meeting, held at the Government House, Asaba, capital of Delta State, which had 17 of them from the South-West, South-South, and South-East geo-political zones in attendance.

The need for Buhari-led federal government's holistic intervention in Apapa chaotic perennial gridlock was one of the resolutions contained in the communique issued at the end of the meeting.

The roll call at the meeting included: host Governor, Senator Ifeanyi Okowa, Delta; Chairman of the Nigeria Governors Forum, NGF, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, Ekiti; Chairman, South-West Governors Forum, Mr. Rotimi Akeredolu, Ondo; Chairman, South-East Governors Forum, Dave Umahi, Ebonyi; Babajide Sanwo-Olu, Lagos; Seyi Makinde, Oyo; Nyesom Wike, Rivers; Okezie Ikpeazu, Abia and Dapo Abiodun, Ogun.

Others were: Douye Diri, Bayelsa; Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, Enugu; Willie Obiano, Anambra; Godwin Obaseki, Edo, and Benedict Ayade, Cross River. Akwa Ibom and Imo governors were represented by their deputies, Moses Ekpo and Placid Njoku respectively. Since the announcement however, no effort has been made to see through the effort to resolve the problem. Rather, the Apapa conundrum has assumed a different dimension.

This is not the first time the Apapa tragedy has received attention from high quarters.

On September 15, 2014, the Senate Committee on Privatisation and Commercialisation had pledged to ensure that the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA) and the Lagos State Government collaborate to ease the traffic gridlock on the access roads to Apapa and Tin Can Ports, Lagos for the benefit of ports operators and other users.

Chairman of the Committee, Senator Olugbenga Obadara, made the pledge in Lagos, when he led other Senators on the first leg of their oversight visit to the Port Terminals in Lagos.

Obadara was responding to complaints by the Managing Director of Greenview Development Nigeria Limited (GDNL), Operators of Terminal E, Apapa Port, Mr. Abba Isa Bukar, that the port access roads were in deplorable condition.

He said: "Containers are continually falling off trucks while in transit, damaging vehicles daily while commuters face untold hardship thus, requiring prompt government attention."

The senator said FERMA and the Lagos State Government would meet to iron out the grey areas to enable them tackle the gridlock.

He noted that as the nation's commercial hub, the Apapa and Tin Can Island Ports would not be allowed to deteriorate.

He said the committee embarked on the visit to know how much revenue the terminal operators were generating for the federal government and also to know their challenges with a view to getting legislative intervention to restore them.

Earlier, the MD had informed the senators that since GDNL commenced operation in 2006, the company had embarked on massive infrastructural development and have ensured prompt payment of revenues accruable to government.

He listed insecurity, poor access roads, lack of an enabling law, litigation and lack of basic facilities as the challenges facing the company and ports operations in general.

On insecurity, he lamented the frequent attacks on the Terminal from a neighboring village, Sapokoji and called for increased security patrol by security agencies along the water front.

He appealed to the legislature for the urgent enactment of the Ports and Harbour Bill to attract more investments in the maritime sector.

At the ENL Consottium Limited, Operators of Terminals C & D, the General Manager, Mr. Mark Walsh, had also emphasised that the entire workforce was 100 percent Nigerians adding that their capacity in cargo handling and other related activities had been developed to world class standards.

In his response, Obadara commended the giant strides made by the company. He urged the Bureau of public Enterprises (BPE) to review the concession agreements with the Terminal Operators to ensure that more revenues go to the Federal government.

At AP Moller Terminal, the MD, Andrew Dawes informed the lawmakers that since takeover, the company had paid about $621,236,468 million to government as taxes.The Committee members also visited Lilypond Container Terminal Ijora-also managed by AP Moller and Apapa Bulk Terminal Limited (ABTL).

Another Senate Motion

Also, on October 21, 2015, one year after Obadara's motion, the Lagos State government applauded the Nigerian Senate for its approval to table a motion moved by Oluremi Tinubu, a senator representing Lagos Central District, on the nerve-wracking gridlock in Apapa, Lagos, and its consequential economic and social implications for Nigeria's commercial hub.

The then Lagos State Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Steve Ayorinde, who gave the commendation, had expressed happiness that the development was heart-warming as it had shown that the state government's efforts at providing solution to the notorious traffic congestion in the axis has finally caught the attention of the National Assembly.

Ayorinde then lauded Tinubu for her bold step in moving the motion and galvanising her colleagues to address the gridlock and expressed the hope that the Senate would give it priority attention when it is tabled in view of the socio-economic hardships it had continued to cause residents of the state.

The commissioner expressed the optimism that the intervention from the senate would go a long way to also complement other moves by the state government in finding lasting solution to the gridlock and lessen the hardship on the people.

Before the Tinubu motion, the then Governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, had visited Apapa and its environs to have an on-the-spot assessment of the situation and gave directives that would ease traffic in the area.

Ambode during his maiden town hall meeting also declared that the traffic gridlock on Apapa-Oshodi Expressway had been a major challenge to traffic management in the state. And as part of measures to find solution to the gridlock, the state government has appealed to the federal government to expedite action on the rehabilitation of the Tin Can Island Bridge, while on its part, has put in place a joint task force that operates round the clock to ensure that traffic situation improves along the axis.

The government said it was also working on the plan to expand the capacity of the existing trailer Park at Orile to accommodate 1000 trucks from its current capacity of 350.

Worsening Gridlock

Despite the two separate senate motions over the last eight years and the recent governors' intervention, the problem has become even worse with opportunists making it a multi-billion-naira extortion industry.

For instance, on June 7, 2021, the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) lamented that over 30 toll points manned by security personnel, where bribes are allegedly being collected before trucks are allowed into the Port, had sprung up around the Apapa and Tin Can Ports.

This is as the NPA has met with the Lagos State Government on strategies to tackle the persistent gridlock around that axis and measures to curb corrupt practices and alleged extortion of truck drivers by traffic and security operatives along the Lagos Ports corridor.

In a statement issued by the General Manager, Strategic and Corporate Communications, NPA, Olaseni Alakija, who quoted the Acting Managing Director of NPA, Muhammed Bello-Koko, as harping on the need to strengthen enforcement of traffic laws along the Apapa and Tin Can Ports roads.

The statement had said that Bello-Koko told the Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, NPA had been receiving several complaints of extortions, especially by security operatives, and described the menace as a hindrance to the smooth implementation of the truck call-up system.

Bello-Koko, in his chat with the press, said the focus was on the alleged extortion by security operatives, adding that NPA solicited the government's intervention to check the menace.

He said: "At the NPA, we resolved to take the right punitive measures against any of our staff involved in this; we have moved some of them out of port locations. We will do further reviews, whoever is found involved, will be appropriately sanctioned.

"Because of the involvement of several security units, many checkpoints have been created; we believe there are over 30 checkpoints within the Apapa and Tin Can Port axis. We believe that this is a major issue causing delays and a whole lot of problems, so this was one of the concerns we raised at the meetings."

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He said he had issued a directive to the "ETO" Project Consultant and operator of the Lilypond Truck Transit Park(TTP) to redouble their efforts, especially on the deployment of necessary physical and IT infrastructure as well as adequate human resources, to address the gaps and complaints of a delay from Port users.

He disclosed that NPA had ordered the TTP Company to immediately deploy infrastructure, so as to reduce the waiting time of trucks in and out of the Port.

The acting NPA boss further said that the meeting discussed poor access roads, especially around Sunrise Bus-stop leading to the Tin Can Port.

He said: "Trucks going to Tin Can now use the Apapa Port road, so no matter how much you control the traffic in Apapa, it will not be noticed.NPA has reached out to the Federal Ministry of Works, we have been speaking with the Director of Works in the State, and we have asked that they should provide some palliatives around Sunrise Bus-stop.

"We were made to understand that the contract for that section of the road has just been awarded, but because of the rains, work has been delayed. There is a need for that part of the road to be graded so that the Tin-Can Port corridor will begin to enjoy some measure of free flow of traffic.

"We have stakeholders like Dangote and others who have factories within the Port and each of them may need to bring in about 300 trucks daily, but it has to be done in such a way that their operations do not affect the need of other Port users."

Bello-Koko was optimistic that the renewed collaboration with the Lagos State Government would bring an end to the perennial gridlock within and around the Apapa metropolis, adding that trucks not registered would not have access to the Port.

On his part, Governor Sanwo-Olu, according to the statement, was quoted as saying that the Lagos State Government would work closely with the NPA toward the success of the truck call-up system while calling on all port users to be alert to their responsibilities toward ending the gridlock in Apapa.
A female officer who recently went viral after sharing a video in which she complaining of sexual harassment and discrimination by senior officers has now gone a step further and released a song.

The move comes weeks after the Office of the Inspector General of Police prohibited police officers from sharing any information on the Service operations with the public.

Police Constable (PC) Viviana Williams, who is based in Mombasa, has released a song titled Kilio Changu, which reportedly features an unidentified male Administration Police (AP) officer.

In the song, the officer reiterates the earlier sentiments she made in her viral video, saying she is tired of the police service and wants to be relieved from her duties.

"Sina hamu tena, na kazi ya polisi. Naambia wakubwa tena, hii ni kilio changu. Nimetuma barua mara mingi sana kwa ofisi lakini hazifiki... Mimi nimechoka na kazi ya kupenda hongo... Sitaki tena (I have no interest in being a police officer. I am telling my seniors, hear my cries. I have sent letters to the office but they are not received. I am tired of loving the jobs where bribes are the order of the day. I am not interested)," she sings.

Amewatolea ngoma sasa

Watakoma kunyanyasa wadogo wao

Video courtesy pic.twitter.com/68SN8hpp33

- MvitaOne (@FauzKhalid) July 1, 2021

Her new song comes weeks after the Police IG ordered the Internal Affairs Unit (IAU) of the National Police Service to probe the matter while at the same time warning banning them from using social media as a platform for airing their grievances or speaking about the challenges that they undergo in the course of their duties.

Police officers have also been gagged from talking to the press without permission.

In a signal circulated to all officers last month, the IG warned any officer found sharing information with either the press or social media will face disciplinary action.

"The Inspector-General has noted with a lot of concern that officers have developed a habit of using social media to advance their grievances without exhausting the laid down channels which include quality assurance/ complaint and gender offices at the service headquarters or the Internal Affairs Unit," says a memo sent by Mwangi Wanderi on behalf of the Director of Criminal Investigations.

This comes on the backdrop of an increase in cases by officers taking to social media after being frustrated by their bosses.

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With communication lines within the National Police Service continuing to be constrained, a number of officers have in the recent past opted to air their grievances in the open, often catching their superiors by surprise.

According to Police Standing Orders, only gazetted officers are allowed to speak to the press. Under the current regime, however, even these gazetted officers are finding it difficult to communicate with the public as communication is increasingly being centralised at Vigilance House.

The new orders by the IG came just three days after a female police officer based at Langata Police Station publicly asked the IGP to intervene and save her from her bosses who were frustrating her at work.

Police Constable Swaleh Rehema said on her Instagram account that Langata Sub County Commander Benjamin Mwanthi and OCS William Matu not only denied her maternal leave but also accused her of deserting duty, meaning her salary will be deducted.

The officer claimed that she had been made to work non-stop until her delivery date. And even after giving birth she was ordered to report back to work and was transferred to West Park Police Post. On arrival there, she was informed that she had been reported as being absent from work and that her station was actually Lang'ata Police Station.

"The duty roster was changed and I was reposted back to Lang'ata without being informed," complained Constable Rehema.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) has been accused of failing to recover an Sh8.36 million government-owned sport utility vehicle allegedly stolen in August 2019.

The silver metallic Toyota Fortuner (GKB 193V) belonging to the State Department for University Education, was stolen in an alleged carjacking incident in Nairobi's Buruburu estate, just days after it was bought.

The vehicle had been assigned to the ACE II project in Naivasha under the Director of University Education.

The loss was flagged by Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu in her audit of the accounts of the State Department for University Education for the 2018/19 financial year.

Appearing before the National Assembly's Public Accounts Committee, which is considering the audit report, University Education Principal Secretary Simon Nabukwesi blamed the failure to recover the vehicle on the slow pace of investigations by DCI officers.

"The investigating officers have taken too long to conclude the matter," Mr Nabukwesi told PAC, a watchdog committee of the House chaired by Ugunja MP Opiyo Wandayi.

Mr Nabukwesi also told the committee that the man who was driving the vehicle when it was stolen at 8pm on August 22, 2019, Vincent Abwao Mukobe, has since been dismissed from government employment.

But Mr Wandayi and committee member Wilberforce Oundo (Funyula), faulting the ministry for targeting the driver, wondered how a GK vehicle would just disappear into thin air even with the elaborate investigative machinery at the government's disposal.

"The only issue we have is that you have chosen to go for the small fish and leave out the big fish. A driver will hardly drive away outside the official hours. Where was he going? Who authorised him?" Mr Wandayi posed.

Lawmakers were told that Mr Mukobe was driving the vehicle after 5pm, beyond official working hours, without authority, "which is contrary to the set rules and regulations governing GK vehicles".

The committee was also told that government vehicles do not carry insurance stickers and are not fitted with tracking gadgets.

Failure to recover the vehicle means that taxpayers will have to foot the cost of the loss.

Dr Oundo claimed the disappearance of the vehicle was shrouded in secrecy.

"It looks funny that a government vehicle with a GK registration number plate can just disappear like that! So what happens to the public funds spent to acquire the vehicle?" he said.

A ministry human resources management panel meeting on December 18, 2019 and chaired by the University Education PS at the time, Prof Collette Suda, recommended the summary dismissal of Mr Mukobe.

The grounds for his sacking included driving the vehicle without authority, which the ministry said violated rules on operating government vehicles.

He is also accused of giving police the wrong registration number for the missing vehicle - GKB 173V instead of GKB 193V.

Documents before the committee show that at the time of the alleged carjacking in Buruburu, Mr Mukobe claimed he was taking the vehicle to the Buruburu Police Station for parking.

The ministry established that he lived in Jerusalem Estate in Nairobi and wondered why he planned to park the vehicle in Buruburu when there are two other police stations in Jerusalem - the Jogoo Road and Makadara stations.

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When questioned, Mr Mukobe said he preferred parking at Buruburu station because it was not crowded, was vast and organised and that public transport from the station to his home was cheaper.

Mr Mukobe later clarified that he lived in Jericho and not Jerusalem as claimed.

Explaining why he gave police the wrong vehicle registration number, he said he had panicked because of the alleged carjacking incident.

In an August 26, 2019 letter, the Director of University Education indicates that on the day the vehicle was stolen, Mr Mukobe and a Mr Atambo, the office administrator, had used the vehicle last at 4pm.

The driver dropped off Mr Tambo at Jogoo House "B" a few minutes after 5pm, the letter says, and he expected the driver to park the vehicle at the building as he didn't have any other assignment that day.
Namibia on Thursday evening will receive a donation of urgently-needed personal protection equipment to aid in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Following the rapid surge of COVID-19 cases the government through the Ministry of International Relations and Cooperation submitted an official request for support to the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, which was approved, hence the support.

According to a joint press statement, the donation will arrive on a special cargo flight on Thursday and will be received by Hon. Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister and H.E. Sinikka Antila, Ambassador of the EU Delegation at the Hosea Kutako International Airport.

Based on the emergency assistance requested by the Namibian authorities from the European Union Member States, Finland donated a total 2.36 million masks, 200,000 protective visors, 30,000 medical gowns, 100,000 syringes and 189,000 swabs.

"It has been disheartening to see how Namibia's health system is under severe strain, and that the hospitals are overwhelmed with coping with the high number of COVID 19 patients. Finland wants to stand in solidarity with the People of Namibia, in this hour of need", said Matti Karvanen, Deputy Head of the Finnish Mission to Namibia and Charge dAffaires, a.i.

The material assistance is delivered through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism as part of the European Union's joint efforts in fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic. The European Commission is coordinating the pooling of assistance and supports Member States in the arrangement of logistics and in transport costs.

"The EU is responding to an urgent appeal from the people of Namibia" states EU Ambassador to Namibia, H.E. Sinikka Antila. "Through the EU's Civil Protection Mechanism, we can coordinate and expedite the delivery of life-saving assistance to countries such as Namibia, demonstrating the solidarity of the people of the EU with those countries facing massive challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic."
Uganda President Yoweri Museveni's son Muhoozi Kainerugaba has made his first public appearance since amid rumours he was seriously ill.

Muhoozi who was on June 25, 2021, promoted to the Commander of Land Forces in the Uganda Army, on Thursday formally assumed the role after a handover that was attended by his predecessor Lt Peter Elwelu.

He also outlined his targets at the new workstation.

"The commander in chief (President Museveni) has guided this new team to focus on enhancing combat capabilities, addressing the welfare deficit of the troops by improving accommodation and living standards, ensuring the health of our officers especially in these challenging times and above all intensify political education," he said.

"I want to thank our great leader for the honour of leading our forces. I want to thank our many predecessors who built the land forces into what it is today. As we take on this task we remember all those great commanders and officers who were here before us. We will always look to our predecessors for inspiration and guidance," Gen Muhoozi said.

A graduate of the famed Sandhurst college and at times considered a successor to his father, Muhoozi, 48, was last week forced to publicly respond to reports he was unwell and had been flown to Nairobi for treatment.

"Some friends of mine like Alan Kasujja told me that some enemies were declaring me dead, or very ill from Covid-19. I'm very well. This is the third time in my military career that enemies are claiming I'm dead. The funny thing is every time they do that Almighty God blesses me more," Muhoozi said in a tweet.

Despite taking more than a week to appear in public since the rumours surfaced, Muhoozi looked okay and healthy.
For President Kenyatta to initiate an amendment of the constitution through a popular initiative, he should have surrendered his authority to his deputy William Ruto, the Court of Appeal heard yesterday.

A team of more than 10 lawyers assembled by private citizens and civil society groups to defend a High Court ruling that blocked the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) campaign to change the constitution, told judges President Kenyatta had an option of vacating power temporarily.

This would have allowed him to pursue the constitutional amendments as a private citizen, which, in their view, would not have conflicted with the law.

The court heard that, since the President is a state officer and cannot use the popular initiative route to promote constitutional amendments, he should have taken the unexpected move, like he did in October 2014 when he signed a decree transferring presidential powers to his deputy, so that he could appear at the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a private citizen.

"The President should have downed the tools of power because the popular initiative is not available for him. [It] is reserved for private citizens and civil societies. There were other avenues to initiate whatever amendments he desired but he used the wrong avenue," argued Prof Kithure Kindiki.

Prof Kindiki, who was among President Kenyatta's defence lawyers during his ICC trial that was later terminated, urged the seven judges to uphold the declaration that the President's decision to establish the BBI task force to spearhead statutory and constitutional changes is null and void.

Push for amendments

Prof Kindiki also argued that President Kenyatta cannot dissociate himself from the Constitutional Amendment Bill because its origin is the BBI task force whose members he appointed.

The task force later became a steering committee and they were answering to the President, he added.

Prof Kindiki led the respondents' lawyers in arguing that the President also had the option of using the office of the Attorney General and Majority Leader in the National Assembly and Senate to push for the amendments through parliament.

"There is no evidence the President had attempted to use the two avenues and failed. In the Constitution of Kenya (Amendment) Bill 2020, his fingers and footprints are splattered everywhere," said Prof Kindiki, once President Kenyatta's vocal supporter, but now turned critic.

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"The attempts to rope in Junet Mohammed (Suna East MP) and Dennis Waweru (former Dagoretti South MP) was to sanitise the unconstitutional process venture and it should flop," said the lawyer, who is also the Tharaka Nithi Senator.

He urged the seven-judge bench to uphold the High Court's verdict that the President does not have legal standing to initiate changes to the constitution through a popular initiative.

Rubbishing claims by the BBI secretariat and Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) party leader Raila Odinga that the President was not the promoter of the Bill, Prof Kindiki cited as evidence gazette notices that appointed the 14 members of the task force and the steering committee.

Collection of signatures

He said both the task force and the steering committee were answering to the President.

He added President Kenyatta also attended the launch of collection of signatures for endorsement of the Bill. Government officials were involved in the collection of signatures, said Prof Kindiki.

The lawyers also questioned how the promoters of the BBI identified the 74 proposed amendments of the Constitution.

Ms Caroline Cherono told court that there was no evidence that the promoters of the Bill approached Kenyans and collected their views on the changes in accordance with public participation laws under Articles 10 and 33 of the constitution.

Mr Morara Omoke said the proposed referendum was illegal because a section of the country's population which has attained the majority age are yet to be registered as voters and would have been excluded from voting.

Mr Omoke argued that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has not carried out voter registration since December 2019.
A man who insulted her mother and slamming her door has been fined Sh10,000.

In default, David Maloba Omar, who was found guilty of causing a disturbance in a manner likely to cause a breach of peace, will spend three months in jail.

Court heard that Oduor caused chaos at Gaudensia Oduor's home in Langata estate between June 18 and 18.

He was handed the penalties by senior resident magistrate Charles Mwaniki of Kibera law courts after he pleaded guilty to the charges.

The court heard Oduor banged his mother's door and threatened to beat her.

This forced her to take cover inside her bedroom.

He repeated the same thing the following day and went into the kitchen to cook after his mother locked herself in her bedroom. She reported him to the police.

Oduor left food cooking in the kitchen causing a burn-dry that made his mother's house and neighbours' soot filled. Her mother sneaked from her hiding to switch off the gas.

On June 20, he brought his drinking buddies to his mother's house and they started making noise but she kept quiet in fear.

Police investigations established that she had made similar complaints against her son last year.

Through an advocate, he told the court that he had settled the matter and reconciled with his mother, and was remorseful.
Harare Magistrate Winfilda Tiyatara has ordered Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) Commissioner-General Godwin Matanga and Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage Minister Hon. Kazembe Kazembe to pay more than US$10 000 to a couple that was roughed up by some law enforcement agents while claiming to be suppressing an anti-government protest in 2019.

Magistrate Tiyatara on Friday 25 June 2021 ordered Matanga and Hon. Kazembe to pay US$5 000 each or its equivalent of RTGS$450 000 each to Canaan Machando and his wife Sipetangani Machando as compensation for violation of their fundamental rights and their property.

In addition, Magistrate Tiyatara ordered Matanga and Hon. Kazembe to pay RTGS$56 800 to Canaan and RTGS$24 000 to Sipetangani as compensation for damages to their mobile phone handsets.

During trial, Canaan and Sipetangani, who were assisted by Fiona Iliff of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights to sue Matanga and Hon. Kazembe, told Magistrate Tiyatara that on 14 January 2019 some ZRP officers together with some soldiers who had been deployed to quell anti-government protests held over a unilateral fuel price hike slapped Sipetangani several times and kicked her in the presence of her two minor children. The police officers and soldiers ordered Canaan to lie flat on his stomach, stepped on him before assaulting him and also directed him to sit in a bucket full of cold water.

The soldiers and police officers also took Canaan to Mharapara Road, the main road in Unit F high-density suburb in Chitungwiza, where the protests had been taking place and directed him to remove burning tyres from the streets and in the process he sustained some burns on his hands.

As a result of the assault and ill-treatment, Canaan sustained injuries to his back, thighs, eardrum and had to seek medical attention and he was unable to work as a result of his medical condition and suffered loss of income.

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The ZRP officers broke Sipetangani's Samsung mobile phone handset valued at RTGS$24 000 while one of the police officers threw teargas canisters inside their house in Unit F high-density suburb in Chitungwiza and damaged a window pane and the floor valued at the cost of RTGS$56 800.

The persecution by ZRP officers forced Sipetengani and her minor children including a visitor out of the house as it was inhabitable for three days because of the teargas and this meant Sipetengani and Canaan were unable to work for several days.

In her ruling, Magistrate Tiyatara said Sipetengani and Canaan and their children suffered emotional pain and suffering, trauma and shock from the incident and the couple was humiliated and embarrassed by the indignity of being forced out of their home owing to misconduct by police officers.

Magistrate Tiyatara said the conduct of ZRP officers complained of by Canaan and Sipetengani was unlawful and there was no legal justification whatsoever for them to have conducted themselves in such a wayward manner.

The Magistrate also ruled that the actions of the ZRP officers was so indiscriminate, unwarranted and unnecessary and their conduct falls short of the duty of care that the police service has towards civilians.
The Centre for Democracy and Economic Development Initiatives (CDEDI), has demanded that President Dr. Lazarus Chakwera should fire the Minister of Information Gospel Kazako and Deputy Minister of Transport and Public Works, Nancy Chaola-Mdooko, for alleged failure to exercise due diligence and apply austerity measures when approving the obscene allowances and foreign trips.

The demand by the firebrand human rights watchdog follows revelations that seven board members of the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) blew K 46 million on a learning trip to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

MACRA is under the Ministry of Information.

As if they did not want to be outdone, members of the board of the Roads Authority (RA), which is under the Ministry of Transport and Public Works, spent K39 million on a trip to Pretoria.

And in its wisdom, CDEDI thinks this is an early Christmas party for the top Tonse Alliance government officials to enjoy and enrich themselves, families and cronies.

CDEDI executive director Sylvester Namiwa, in a statement issued today, has challenged President Chakwera to decisively act on the reported looting and plunder of public funds through the two ministries.

Namiwa said it is sad to note that parastatal boards are outclassing each other in spending obscene sums of public finances on board meetings outside the country when the poor taxpayers are struggling to make ends meet.

"CDEDI and indeed Malawians of good will are shocked with the sharp increase in the number of Tonse Alliance top government officials implicated in the willy-nilly siphoning of the scarce and hard-earned resources. It beats everyone's imagination to read such reports bearing in mind that this current administration was ushered in on the cards of correcting the mistakes of the past regime. The impression and tone the President Chakwera administration is sending out there is that of 'it's our turn to eat, who cares," he says in the letter.

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Namiwa is further demanding that on top of dissolving MACRA board, Chakwera should also dissolve boards for the Roads Authority, NOMCA, Malawi Housing Corporation (MHC) and EGENO.

"Malawians cannot entertain selective application of justice. Malawi Housing Corporation (MHC) and the rest of the boards should be investigated. The Secretary to the President and Cabinet (SPC) Mr. Zangazanga Chikhosi should be fired for his participation in the looting and plunder of public funds. The SPC should immediately stop doubling as board chair for NOCMA and EGENCO for fear of conflict of interest," he demands.

Namiwa threatens that failure by President Chakwera to act within reasonable space of time will force Malawians to protests this free for all plunder of public funds.
Over the last year, the University of Cape Town's (UCT) Communication and Marketing Department (CMD) has had ample reason to celebrate, having received numerous national and international industry awards.

News of the department's most recent awards arrived at the end of June from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). CMD's head of video production, Roxanne Harris, received an IABC Gold Quill 2021 Best of the Best Award in the Audio/Visual category for Thuma Mina. The award-winning video featured the UCT Choir's rendition of the isiZulu hymn, and pays homage to members of the university community who have been working tirelessly on the frontline of the pandemic.

UCT News senior writer, Helen Swingler, was also recognised in the recent IABC Gold Quill awards. Her piece The dead teach in a universal language received international industry recognition with an IABC Gold Quill 2021 Merit Award.

The director of CMD, Kylie Hatton, said: "These awards are important for benchmarking the department against our peers, across competitor universities in the world but also corporates and non-governmental organisations.

"The IABC makes visible the best examples of creativity and expertise in communication marketing across the world."

"The IABC makes visible the best examples of creativity and expertise in communication marketing across the world," said Hatton.

Aniqah Deers, CMD's head of branding and campaigns, agreed: "Entries into national and international awards programmes is a benchmarking exercise that assists UCT to develop and maintain its brand reputation and positioning in the communications and marketing sector / sphere.

"It compares our work outputs to that of other higher education institutions as well corporate organisations and provides the opportunity to reflect and improve on our innovation and creativity. The platform also presents an opportunity to showcase our individual and integrated team outputs in a way that brings value to the identified segmented market in a measured and tangible way."

'Incredible, important confirmation'

During 2020, and over the last six months, CMD also received a further 15 international and national industry awards. The award-winning projects and the recipients are as follows:

Writer Carla Bernardo's UCT's hijab-wearing rugby player talks inclusivity won a Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Circle of Excellence Silver Award in the Writing category. She also received two IABC Silver Quill Merit Awards for Ben Kies: The Cape radical and S-s-some things to know about snakes in the Writing category.

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CMD's Newsroom and Video Production's (NVP) Transformation Report 2019 won a CASE Circle of Excellence Gold Award in the Publications category and a Silver Quill Excellence Award.

Writer Niemah Davids won two IABC Silver Quill Merit Awards for Centre has 'Africanised' neuroscience and Touch down for SA's banking Siri in the Writing category.

Swingler won two IABC Silver Quill Merit Awards for Body of work: reflections of an anatomist and Women take top spots in civil engineering at UCT in the Writing category. She won an Excellence Award in the Writing category for "The dead teach in a universal language", which made the award eligible for the international Gold Quill Awards.

NVP's Web Content won two IABC Silver Quill Merit Awards in the Communication for the Web category for the UCT December 2019 Graduation feature page and the Sutherland Reburial feature page.

Jolene Steenkamp from CMD's Marketing and Stakeholder Relations unit won an IABC Silver Quill Merit Award for the Vice-Chancellor's Inaugural Lecture Series, in the Special and Experiential Events category.

NVP's Video Production won an IABC Silver Quill Merit Award for An honorary encore for renowned South African ballet master and a Silver Quill Excellence Award for "Thuma Mina", making it eligible for the Gold Quill Awards.

On the multiple awards, CMD's executive director, Gerda Kruger, said: "It is an incredible and important confirmation that the work in CMD is up there and competing with the best in the world.

"It is wonderful to have such creative and excellent colleagues in the CMD team!"
Local life insurance companies are beginning to feel the pressure of an escalation of Covid-19 related deaths which has increased death benefit claims.

The country recorded 650 Covid-19 related deaths in the past month including a staggering 281 Covid-19 deaths from 20 to 27 June. While the life insurers say that no death benefit claims have been declined for any reason, the long-term impact of the pandemic has not been ruled out in terms of benefits as well as pricing.

Two of Namibia's biggest life insurance companies, Sanlam and Old Mutual, also moved quickly to reassure clients that they will continue to be covered without any specific vaccine exclusions.

"We have experienced an increase in death claims over and above the normal baseline, largely attributable to Covid-19 related claims since the beginning of the pandemic. However, the increase we are experiencing in 2021 is much more material than what we experienced in 2020," explained Sanlam Namibia spokesperson, Hilaria Graig.

Responding to New Era questions, Graig revealed that the claims Sanlam has experienced in 2021 are much higher than anticipated and as such, it is normal to expect an impact and decrease in profits.

"However, at Sanlam we early on implemented an exceptional risk management process which allows us to be well reinsured and capitalised, to remain in a financially viable position and a position that allows us to continue to honour our commitments to

our clients," Graig stated.

She added that the Covid-19 situation is still relatively new to the world but that Sanlam Namibia is doing its best to plan for it as far as possible. She continued that Sanlam continues to closely monitor the situation but emphasised that no changes have been made to existing policies without ruling out that the long-term impact of the pandemic may still rear its head in the future of the industry in terms of benefits as well as pricing.

Said Graig: "No changes in individual premiums have been effected in response to Covid-19. A growing concern from clients has been fear of exclusion as a result of the Covid vaccine, however, at Sanlam we know that it is exactly for times like these that our clients have insurance, and our goal is and always has been to serve our clients in their time of need. We reassure our clients that they will continue to enjoy cover without any specific vaccine exclusions. We will continue to provide our clients with the cover they need during these difficult times and

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our requirements for claimable events, therefore, remain unchanged." Meanwhile, Old Mutual Namibia also confirmed a considerable increase in the number of death benefit claims processed on a weekly basis. Company spokesperson, Ndangi Katoma noted that Old Mutual is well capitalised and that it anticipated the severe impact of Covid-19, which is precisely why it made provision for the increase in claims. Said Katoma: "Yes, the number of death claims since the outbreak of Covid-19 has significantly increased compared to pre-Covid-19." He continued that Old Mutual will continue to pay all valid claims and thus, honours commitments to all its customers.

"Old Mutual has not adjusted policy premiums. Premiums are adjusted on an annual basis and a number of factors play a role in the adjustments. Last year, following the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic, Old Mutual provided premium relief support to severely affected customers in the form

of additional and automatic premium holidays to customers with specific risk products that have premium holiday features," Katoma stated. Katoma concluded that "Old Mutual has gone through good and rough seasons over the last 101 years and we have remained anchored as a financially strong, well capitalised and well governed business with capabilities that position us well to meet the changing needs of our customers."
The government has decided to tighten Covid-19 regulations as the country continues to battle with the current 3rd COVID wave. The new measures came into effect from 1 July.

Speaking at the 30th Covid-19 briefing on Wednesday, the President HE Dr. Hage Geingob said data confirms that the entire country is now characterized by "Widespread Community Transmission".

"In order to suppress further transmission of the virus, we are taking the difficult but necessary measure to extend the restriction in travel, to all regions. No travel will be permitted between regions, however travel within regions, will be permitted," Geingob said.

According to Geingob, returning residents, essential service providers, emergency medical cases and transportation of human remains for burial purposes, will be permitted entry and exit into restricted regions, with the relevant permit.

The president said under the current circumstances facing the country, this difficult step must be taken.

"While a full social and economic lockdown is proven to be effective in slowing transmission rates, it mus be used sparingly, as it also spurs adverse effects to economy, business jobs and livelihoods," he said.

The new regulation now will see the nationwide curfew start from between 21:00 to 04:00, daily; Face-to-Face classes for Grades 10, 11 and 12 will be suspended countrywide, as part of the Winter Holiday, from 1 until 16 July, while face-to-face classes for Higher Education Institutions including vocational education training providers have been suspended for the period.

Geingob said the sale of liquor is restricted from 09:00 to 18:00 Mondays to Thursdays, on take-away basis only while no alcohol outlet will be permitted to operate on Fridays to Sundays.

Meanwhile Geingob said expert projections and simulation tools indicate that the rising incidence curve, during the 3rd wave the country is experiencing, is expected to peak around mid-August and may continue well until mid-September 2021.
Physician specialist Dr Ismael Katjitae believes the highly contagious Delta coronavirus variant is likely responsible for the resurgence of Covid-19 cases and rising deaths in the country.

Namibia will only know on Friday whether the prevailing third wave is attributed to the Delta variant, which has been detected in over 85 countries worldwide, including neighbouring South Africa.

The University of Namibia is currently processing the genomic sequencing analysis to determine if the variant is present in the country. However, Katjitae reckons the sharply rising cases have all the hallmarks of a Delta variant.

"So far, we have not recorded or documented any Delta variant. But clearly, the way this pandemic is behaving, it has all the signs of a Delta variant. It is most probably causing this rapid wave of new infections. During the first wave, we used to record 315 cases a day, but now we are talking about 1 800 cases a day," said Katjitae, who was responding to media enquiries at State House yesterday. The Delta variant, which was first identified in India, has spread exponentially across the world and is particularly surging across Africa.

The continent has administered the least vaccines, compared to developed countries that have millions of fully vaccinated populations.

Namibia, which has less than 30 000 people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, is battling a rapid rise of new infections, which has chocked both private and public hospitals. The 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. Katjitae yesterday also warned against the use of Ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19 because there is no evidence supporting its use.

"We do see patients who have taken Ivermectin and end up severely hospitalised and some have lost their lives. We should be very cautious about this. One should take that with caution, especially when it is not an internationally recognised remedy.

If it was so fantastic, the whole media would be talking about it," Katjitae said. Emergency medicine specialist Dr Kaveto Sikuvi also warned against the use of Ivermectin.

"There is no evidence that Ivermectin has any impact in terms of treating Covid-19. That notion of not allowing Ivermectin not to be used in the treatment of Covid-19 is actually based on evidence that does not support its use," said Sikuvi, who also heads the Covid-19 case management task force.

Snapped up

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.

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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 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.

Meanwhile, the Namibia Medicines Regulatory Council recently 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.
Luanda  The Vice President of the Republic, Bornito de Sousa, travels this Thursday to Lusaka, Zambia, where he participates in the funeral ceremonies of former president Kenneth David Kaunda.

Bornito de Sousa is representing the President of the Republic, Joao Lourenco, and has planned official meetings with different entities, with emphasis on the Head of State of Zambia, Edgar Lungu, to whom he should deliver a message from the Angolan President.

Kenneth Kaunda, founding father and first president of the Zambian Republic, deemed a hero of the liberation fight, died at the age of 97, on the 17th of this month, in a military hospital in Lusaka, where he was being treated for pneumonia.

Kenneth Kaunda ruled Zambia from 1964, when it proclaimed its independence from Britain, until 1991, and has become one of the most committed African activists in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Maputo  According to the latest figures from the Mozambican health authorities, over 25 per cent of all those tested on Thursday for the coronavirus that causes the Covid-19 respiratory disease provided to be infected.

Since the start of the pandemic, 600,704 people have been tested for the coronavirus, 2,871 of them in the previous 24 hours,

According to a Ministry of Health Thursday press release, a majority of the tests were carried out in the Covid-19 hotspots of Maputo and Tete - 1,075 in Maputo city, 168 in Maputo province, and 471 in Tete. These three provinces accounted for 59.7 per cent of all of Thursday's tests.

There were also 285 tests in Cabo Delgado, 228 in Sofala, 182 in Nampula, 175 in Gaza, 128 in Inhambane, 109 in Manica, 27 in Zambezia and 23 in Niassa.

2,070 of the tests yielded negative results, and 801 people tested positive for the coronavirus. This is the largest number of new cases in a single 24 hour period since 18 February, when 898 people were diagnosed with the coronavirus. The worst day so far was 29 January, when 1,275 new cases were reported.

The number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Mozambique now stands at 77,205.

Most of the new cases reported on Thursday come from Maputo and Tete - 371 from Maputo city, 192 from Tete, and 60 from Maputo province. Between them Maputo and Tete accounted for 77.8 per cent of the positive cases.

There were also 79 cases in Sofala, 42 in Gaza, 31 in Manica, 14 in Inhambane, seven in Nampula, four in Zambezia and one in Niassa. Of the 285 people tested in Cabo Delgado, not one was positive for the coronavirus.

The national positivity rate (the proportion of people tested who are carrying the virus) on Thursday was 27.9 per cent, slightly higher than Wednesday's rate of 24.4 per cent. The pattern of infection was also much the same - with much higher positivity rates in Maputo, Tete, Manica and Sofala, than in the northern provinces.

The highest positivity rate on Thursday was in Tete (40.7 per cent), followed by Maputo province (35.7 per cent), Maputo city (34.5 per cent), Sofala (34.6 per cent) and Manica (28.4 per cent).

But further north positivity rates drop off sharply to 14.8 per cent in Zambezia and 3.8 per cent in Nampula, while no positivity rate at all can be calculated for Cabo Delgado, since there were no positive cases in that province on Thursday.

The Ministry also reported a further six deaths from Covid-19 - four men and two women, all Mozambican nationals and aged between 38 and 71. This brings the total Covid-19 death toll in Mozambique to 884. Two of the deaths occurred in Maputo city, two in Maputo province, one in Manica and one in Inhambane.

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In the same 24 hour period, 18 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital (ten in Maputo, four in Tete, two in Matola, one in Niassa and one in Sofala). But 37 new cases were admitted (22 in Maputo, five in Tete, four in Sofala, three in Inhambane, two in Manica, and one in Niassa).

The number of people under medical care in the Covid-19 treatment centres rose from 186 on Wednesday to 199 on Thursday. The great majority of these patients - 133 (66.8 per cent) were in Maputo. There were also 25 patients in Tete, 19 in Sofala, nine in Matola, three in Niassa, three in Inhambane, three in Manica, two in Nampula and two in Zambezia. The Covid-19 wards in Gaza and Cabo Delgado remain empty.

The Ministry also reported that on Thursday 286 people were declared fully recovered from Covid-19 (229 in Tete, 33 in Inhambane and 24 in Sofala). This brings the total number of recoveries to 71,491, or 92.6 per cent of all those ever diagnosed with Covid-19 in Mozambique.

The number of active Covid-19 cases in the country rose from 4,317 on Wednesday to 4,826 on Thursday. The geographical breakdown of these cases was as follows: Maputo city, 2,276 (47.2 per cent of the total); Tete, 855; Maputo province, 814; Sofala, 335; Manica, 165; Inhambane, 120; Gaza, 94; Sofala, 73; Zambezia, 39; Cabo Delgado, 32; and Nampula, 23.
London  The European Union has created an air bridge to Pemba, capital of the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado, to deliver life saving aid to victims of islamist terrorism.

The first EU Humanitarian Air Bridge flight, co-organised with Italy and Portugal, will arrive in Pemba on Saturday, carrying 15 tonnes of life-saving cargo.

According to Janez Lenarcic, the EU Commissioner for Crisis Management, "the humanitarian situation in Cabo Delgado continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate. We are sending a new EU funded Humanitarian Air Bridge flight to get vital aid to this hard to reach part of the country".

He added, "I thank Italy and Portugal for providing the medical equipment and humanitarian cargo of the flight".

Two more flights carrying additional humanitarian aid are expected to depart from Brindisi in southern Italy in the coming days.

So far this year the EU has donated over 17 million Euros (about 20 million US dollars) in humanitarian aid for Mozambique, mainly to assist those who have been displaced from their homes by terrorism.

A statement from the EU noted that its "aid helps to ease the suffering of the affected population including those internally displaced and the host communities, and to provide education for children, while also better preparing communities to deal with natural disasters".

The EU warns that the fragile humanitarian situation in Cabo Delgado "continues to worsen. An escalation of violence has internally displaced more than 700,000 people. At least 1.3 million people are estimated to require immediate humanitarian assistance and protection in Cabo Delgado and in neighbouring provinces of Niassa and Nampula".

In 2020, when many countries restricted traffic or closed their borders due to the coronavirus pandemic, the EU Humanitarian Air Bridge facilitated 67 flights to 20 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. More than 1,150 tonnes of vital medical and humanitarian equipment and nearly 1,700 medical and humanitarian staff and other passengers were transported.

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Maputo  The Bank of Mozambique and the French Embassy on Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding, under which France will donate 500,000 euros (about 592,000 US dollars) to support the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism, according to a report on the independent television station STV.

At the signing ceremony, the governor of the Bank of Mozambique, Rogerio Zandamela, said he believed that, with the signing of this memorandum, the conditions had been established to identify and mitigate activities related with the illicit circulation of capital in the country.

"We are aware that our financial system is exposed to the risks of money laundering and of financing terrorism, which makes it imperative that we increasingly strengthen the mechanisms to identify and combat this evil", he declared.

Zandamela wanted the central bank to adopt a regulatory framework in line with the current challenges, and with the strategic orientation to implement a more effective and comprehensive monitoring system.

"As the central bank, we shall continue to mobilise our cooperation partners in order to improve the necessary technological capacities, in order to respond better to the challenges imposed by money laundering and terrorism", he added.

Speaking to reporters, French ambassador David Izzo said he hopes that, with this support, the Mozambican banking system will become more robust and prepared to control illicit flows of capital intended for terrorist groups.

"This cooperation with the Bank of Mozambique is at the heart of our support against terrorism", he said. "We know that there is no terrorism without finance and that there are links between trafficking of all kinds in which transfers of money are not screened".

"Our desire is that this collaboration should bring innovative elements, which make it possible to strengthen the surveillance systems and control resources of the Bank of Mozambique, while strengthening the development of technical skills concerning the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism", said the ambassador.
The government will commission two field hospitals in Windhoek and Oshakati, with the capacity of 70 and 40 beds, respectively in the next few days, an official said Wednesday.

The Minister of Health and Social services, Dr. Kalumbi Shangula on Wednesday announced this during a national COVID-19 address in Windhoek.

Shangula also announced that another building at the Katutura State Hospital Complex, with a capacity of 46 beds, and the Katutura Hospital Nurses Hall have been re-purposed and will also be opened for use in the coming days.

According to Shangula in total there are 1732 isolation beds countrywide, in the public and private sectors of which 143 are ICU beds.

"Another 100-bed unit will be constructed at Katutura Intermediate Hospital soon. The site works have commenced. This will increase the number of isolation beds to 2024 countrywide and enhance access to medical care for those who will need it most," he added.

Meanwhile, Shangula said getting vaccinated is still and remains the most effective way to protect the country against the onslaught of the dangerous pandemic.
The defence team of commissioner of refugees, Likius Valombola, who is accused of shooting student leader Helao Ndjaba in 2018, this week argued the evidence against him consisted of a cocktail of inconsistencies, innuendos and cover-ups.

Sisa Namandje, instructed by Nambili Mhata, on behalf of Valombola, claimed all eyewitnesses to the shooting incident contradicted each other in their testimony in so many material aspects that they just as well could have testified for the defence.

Equally, he said, the testimonies of the expert witnesses the State called were of no use, as they did not assist the court in coming to a just and fair conclusion at all. He said evidence of Dr Simasiku Kabandje, who conducted the post-mortem, is so unreliable that any reasonable person could not accept it. According to Namandje, the post-mortem report contains glaring omissions and in Kabandje's own words, the mistakes could have been copy and paste.

Similarly, he said, the report of ballistics scientist, Kallipus Sem of the Namibia Forensic Science Institute, was also not clear as to whether the bullet fragments that was removed from the deceased's skull was indeed fired by Valombola's firearm.

The closest he could say was that Valombola's firearm could not be excluded, Namandje argued. This, he said, is a dangerous combination, which could send an innocent man to jail. He further said that the trial was a failed one because of many shortcomings, but mostly, by the material discrepancies by the State's star witnesses who did more damage to each other than to the defence's case.

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He asked that the 57-year-old Valombola be acquitted on all charges. The State argued that Valombola must be convicted as it proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he intentionally shot and killed the deceased by firing two shots in quick succession in his general direction. Ethel Ndlovu, for the prosecution, said that the evidence presented by the State is not so bad that it cannot sustain a verdict of guilty and that the contradictions in the witnesses testimonies is not so material that it can be classified as unreliable.

She hopes for a conviction on both counts. Valombola is facing one count of murder and one of discharging a firearm in a public place. It is alleged by the State that Valombola shot Ndjaba (25) in the head in cold blood in King Kauluma Street, Oshitenda, Ombili in Windhoek on 18 May 2018.

Windhoek High Court Judge Claudia Claasen reserved her judgment until 8 October.
A 19-year-old girl from Zambezi region is about to drop out of the University of Namibia where she is pursuing a degree in education, due to lack of funds.

Speaking to New Era, the father of Melody Mikiti, Reagan Mikiti explained that his daughter has been denied a loan by the Namibia Student Financial Assistance Fund (NSFAF) because she doesn't have an identity document (ID).

Mikiti further stated that his daughter applied for an ID in 2019 but up to now she hasn't received it from home affairs.

"We have been knocking on the doors of the home affairs ministry, but they keep on telling us that the ID is still being processed. I have run out of ideas, and I don't know what to do. I am unemployed and her mother is also not working. So where are we going to get the money to pay for our daughter's studies?" lamented Mikiti.

He further stated that he tried to ask the home affairs officials if his daughter could apply for a new ID if the one she applied for cannot be found, but he was informed that it is not possible, because the ID is still being processed.

"I don't know what to do anymore. I just appeal to any good Samaritans to assist me pay for my daughter's school fees," he said.

According to Melody who is studying at the university's Katima Mulilo campus, the thought of dropping out of university is not sitting well with her. "I feel very bad, when I think that my friends are going to leave me behind," she said.

Contacted for comment, Zambezi home affairs deputy director Dorothy Mubiana stated that she could not remember that particular case. She, however, explained that the ID can only be delayed if there are some errors that need to be rectified.
Luanda  The minister of Territory Administration, Marcy Lopes, said this Wednesday, in Luanda, that the unofficial electoral registration, for all citizens over 18, starts in September, 2021.

Marcy Lopes who was speaking to the press at the end of the sixth ordinary session of the Cabinet Council, which analyzed, for subsequent submission to the National Assembly, the Daft-Law of Amendments to the Unofficial Electoral Registration, a legislative initiative that arises from the need to adjust the current Law, due to the constitutional revision held recently.

"We are doing the entire organizational process so that the voter registration process starts in September this year," he said.

Minister Marcy Lopes also said that t the unofficial electoral registration is, in fact, the process of connecting the Identity Card database with the database of citizens aged over 18 (created for electoral purposes).

Registration abroad

As for citizens residing abroad, the minister explained that the electoral registration will be updated for all citizens who are in the Identity Card database.

"All citizens who have an identity card should go to the diplomatic and consular services to update their electoral registration and, in this way, will be able to exercise their right to vote in the 2022 general elections", he said.
Sakunda Holdings has embarked on a massive retrenchment exercise, a move which has seen the company laying off most of its workers and leaving a skeleton staff of 16 employees.

Things went wrong for the company when it was placed under the US sanctions list.

Sakunda Holdings is owned by Kudakwashe Tagwirei who has also been slapped with economic embargo last year.

According to sources close to the diversified firm, Chief Operating Officer Mr Mberikwazvo Chitambo and Head Special Projects Mr Clement Kahiya have been affected by the retrechment exercise.

"Sakunda is finding the going tough, people have been arguing about the effects of economic sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe and Sakunda is a good example on the effects of sanctions. The company has retrenched its senior executives in Chitambo (Mberikwazvo) and Kahiya (Clement). The company is only left with 16 employees," said the source.

United States of America placed businessman Kuda Tagwirei and his firm Sakunda Holdings under sanctions over his support for the Zimbabwe government.

The step had long been expected after Tagwirei received repeated public criticism from American diplomats, leading to his long-time partners Trafigura buying him out in 2020.

In imposing sanctions on Tagwirei and Sakunda Holdings, the US Treasury Department said Tagwirei has been sanctioned "for providing support to the leadership of the Government of Zimbabwe".

Efforts to get a comment on new developments from Sakunda Chief Executive officer Mr Kudakwashe Tagwirei drew blanks as he did not respond to questions sent to his mobile number.

The US also believes Sakunda was involved in what it says is an unaccounted for US$3 billion allocated under the Command Agriculture program.

It was proved that Sakunda did not receive USD 3 billion but USD1 billion which was fully accounted for according to the Parliamentary enquiry.
press release

Mr Fayemi assures ambassadors in Nigeria of Nigerian governments' support and cooperation.

The Chairman of the Nigeria Governors' Forum, and Governor of Ekiti State, Kayode Fayemi, has called on Nigerians to rise to the defence of democracy in Nigeria with a view to advancing the development of the country.

Mr Fayemi made the call Tuesday in Abuja when he visited the Canadian Ambassador to Nigeria, Nicolas Simard, at his residence.

The visit by the NGF Chairman was part of the Chairman's shuttle diplomacy to representatives of the diplomatic corps in Nigeria, which is one of the initiatives of the Nigeria Governors' Forum's secretariat towards engendering inter-governmental synergy between global governments at the subnational level.

Mr Fayemi's visits on Monday took him to the residence of the Canadian ambassador to Nigeria, and the embassy of the People's Republic of China and ended at the embassy of the Republic of South Africa.

At all the three meetings, Governor Fayemi discussed issues of bilateral importance between the countries and their governments at the subnational level, including citizens engagements, economic progress of the federating states, youth mobilization and organisation, and women's empowerment.

Other issues discussed include revenue generation, the economy, education, infrastructure development among many others.

Both the NGF Chairman and the Canadian ambassador agreed that organisations like the NGF are the best platforms for healthy debates with the central governments on issues like restructuring, citizens engagement and internal and external security.

Mr Fayemi said to advance development, it is always better to engage countries of interest and their diplomatic representatives to share their understanding of events in their host countries and learn from the experiences of their past.

Specifically, the NGF Chairman told the Canadian ambassador that Nigeria has made "remarkable strides in gender equality with the Nigeria Governors' Wives in the forefront and their husbands, the Governors, as cheer-leaders."

Mr Fayemi disclosed that 27 states including those that were hitherto considered conservative, have signed the VAP Act, as evidence of their commitment to mitigating violence against women in our societies.

Mr Simard, who told Mr Fayemi that he has only been in Nigeria for six months, said there are 12000 Nigerians in Canada, 5000 0f whom are students adding that there is a $12m trade relations between the two countries.

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Mr Simard disclosed that there are remarkable similarities between Canada and Nigeria and that Canada also experienced calls by secessionists that Nigeria is currently experiencing, and expressed willingness to help Nigeria in understanding how to find solutions to them.

At the embassy of the People's Republic of China, where he spoke with the ambassador, Cui Jian Chun, the NGF chairman criticised the death-trap diplomacy that has been wrapped around the conversation in most African countries when it comes to their relationship with China.

He assured the ambassador of the full cooperation of Nigerian governments at the subnational level.

Mr Fayemi also praised the vaccine diplomacy of the Chinese government while welcoming any support that will help Nigeria to develop its own vaccines to help raise the ratio of vaccinated people for Nigeria to achieve herd immunity.

When he visited the South African embassy, the conversation revolved around the ENDSARS movement and the help the South African people could give Nigerian youths to be able to articulate their grievances in a non-violent manner towards achieving results.

Both leaders advised Nigerian youths to "organise and not agonise".

The ambassador of the Republic of South Africa to Nigeria, Thamsanqa Dennis Mseleku, discussed three key issues including xenophobia, trade and youth dialogue.

Ambassador Dennis Mseleku argued that the NGF is strategic to such conversations.
The Inspector General (IG) of the Malawi Police Service (MPS), Dr George Kainja, has taken a swipe at his own men and women in uniform for their heavy-handedness when handling motorcycle taxi operators.

Kainja has warned the law enforcers against what he has termed as "harassment of the operators, locally known as Kabaza.

Malawi has lately registered an increase in cases of running battles between the police and motorcycle operators, resulting in the arrest of scores of the operators and confiscation of their motorcycles in an ongoing operation MPS says is aimed at purging the operators from the streets for 'perpetrating road accidents'.

Hordes of police officers, mostly low ranked ones, are seen roaming the streets daily to ensure that motorcycle operators are never seen around.

The officers, in some cases, are allegedly being brutal to the motorcycle operators.

Their operation is reportedly aimed at restricting the motorcycle operators to locations to ply their business there while adhering to all traffic and road safety measures, a move, which is being resented by the motorcycle operators themselves and many other people, saying 'it is impinging on their livelihood'.

Apparently, these motorcycle operators have, on many occasions, threatened to take to the streets to demonstrate in anger if they continue to be treated in this manner by the officers.

In his wireless message dated 30 June, 2021, the police chief expressed displeasure at the manner in which some police officers are conducting themselves during the operation and warned them to desist from acts of unprofessionalism.

"This headquarters has noted with concern that some officers are harassing Kabaza motorcycle riders during enforcement of laws and by-laws governing the use of motorcycles on public roads. Some officers have been heard telling kabaza riders munavotera nkhanza zimenezi (you voted into power such cruelty). This kind of unprofessionalism will not be tolerated. You are advised to enforce the law firmly politely and professionally without attaching any politics to it," said Kainja in the message that has been copied to all police stations and units.

Kainja has further warned police officers to refrain from what he described as irresponsible utterances, which can incite public anger and violence.

"You are further warned that once you are heard uttering bad words to kabaza riders or harassing them in any way, straight, disciplinary measures will be applied against you. Treat this as important," he said.

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MPS has always come up with a justification to purge thousands of motorcycle operators who are evidently making a livelihood from their business, saying they are "contributing to the escalation of road accidents" and, therefore, "need to ply in designated places with all valid traffic and road wealthy and safety documents".

Data from the Ministry of Homeland Security show that, for instance, from January to December 2020 alone, motorcycle taxis, had killed 860 people in accidents.

The Minister of Homeland Security, Richard Chimwendo Banda, told journalists in December that his ministry is concerned with the rising number of these traffic accidents and disclosed that they are engaging motorcycle taxi operators to acquire formal driving training and also help them follow road safety regulations.

But a motorcyclist based in Chilinde in the capital Lilongwe, Jonathan Mapuntha, told Nyasa Times that kabaza operators must be allowed to ply their trade freely and commended police IG Kainja for rebuking some of his police officers for harassing them.

Motorcyclists like Mapuntha operate the motorcycles either as their personal business or employed by established motorcycle owners.

An operator makes at least MK10, 000 a day. If they own the motorcycle, all that money is theirs. If employed, the money goes to their boss who pays them a salary.

"Look, most of us were loafers before these motorcycle taxis came on the scene. We now have a livelihood. We are able to provide for our families. Life is better now and then they want to disturb that? It is not fair," lamented Mapuntha.
Omuthiya  The Ondonga Traditional Authority (OTA) has set up a committee to look into issues of sand mining that have been a burning issue in Oshikoto, especially in the Oniipa area.

This move comes following the environment ministry's decision to suspend OTA's mining licence at Ondando C burrow at Oniipa after it observed some irregularities, which led to a violation of the environmental clearance certificate.

"We have taken note of the suspension of the licence due to a number of reasons, as cited by the ministry. Ondonga King Fillemon Shuumbwa Nangolo has acted and taken a decision to set up a committee that is tasked to investigate and address whatever issues that surround the matter," OTA secretary Frans

Enkali said when contacted for comment.

The licence was suspended last week by environmental commissioner Timoteus Mufeti until 31 August. He also ordered that no mining activities

be undertaken for the time being. Mufeti stated in the letter that the licence was revoked for non-compliance after it was observed that the activities interfered with underground water, as well as the construction of a gravel road to the site without authorisation.

The ministry's finding comes after numerous complaints from the community, who have objected to sand mining activities, stressing that it was an environmental hazard and also leading to land degradation. Due to the delayed reaction from various stakeholders to the issue, the community two weeks ago blocked the road leading to the mining site as a form of protest.

The protest later turned ugly when the headman of the Okadhimeti village, Petrus Shambo Martin, who serves as the middleman between the traditional

authority and businesspeople conducting the mining, turned up at the site and was engaged in a quarrel and scuffle with one of the village activists, Jesaya Nambundunga. After the fight, Nambundunga opened a case of assault with the Onayena police, and case number CR 47/06/21 was registered.

Martin refused to answer anything pertaining to the mining, and referred all questions to OTA. "I have only seen the letter on social media, nothing official to my office that is directly responsible, so I have nothing to respond on whether activities ceased or not," he said. Enkali, however, believes the aggrieved community should first have approached the traditional authority.

"The traditional authority was fully authorised to operate, and the OTA, as the custodian of the land, has the right to allocate or allow anyone to settle or operate on its land for as long as it is done legally. So what happened in this regard was not really necessary, as the community was supposed to approach the traditional authority instead of approaching the businesspeople operating," he stressed.

"Those people never went illegally, but we permitted them. Therefore, the aggrieved community should have consulted us. We could have sat and deliberated on an amicable solution", Enkali said, adding that the committee will in the meantime tirelessly work towards the matter before the set deadline of 31 August so that a solution can be found.

'Ban sand mining'

Meanwhile, one of the champions of the objection to sand mining activities, Oscar Shikongo, said they do not want any such activities to be undertaken within their community. "We don't care whatever deliberation is to be undertaken, for as long as it is not a resolution. Such activities must be banned in Ondando. We will not rest until such is realised. They should take the mining to a different area because we have seen the effects of it," he charged.

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Shikongo emphasised that the community has made that collective decision. Nambundunga this week told New Era that he was recovering from the injuries he sustained, although he complained that his throat still hurts.

"I am waiting for the outcome of the investigation. I was assaulted for nothing while I am trying to stand for the wellbeing of the community. The scratches have healed, but I still feel pain on my neck and throat where he was trying to strangle me," stated the activist, who refuses to relent. On the other hand, Martin claimed he only acted in self-defence. "I was also beaten and pulled out of the car as I went to observe what was happening. Imagine, a headman being treated as such. So as a man, I needed to defend myself," he said.
Oil firm, Sakunda Holdings (Sakunda) has embarked on a massive retrenchment exercise, a move which has seen the company laying off most of its workers and leaving a skeleton staff of only 16 employees at its Harare head office.

Sources close to the developments say the company is facing serious operational challenges after it was slapped with sanctions by the United States government last year.

Sakunda is owned by tycoon Kudakwashe Tagwirei, who was also indicically placed under US sanctions for his apparent cozy relations with Zanu PF.

According to sources close to the diversified firm, Chief Operating Officer Mberikwazvo Chitambo and Head Special Projects Clement Kahiya have been affected by the retrenchment exercise.

"Sakunda is finding the going tough. The company has been hit hard by the sanctions. Many have been retrenched, including its senior executives in Chitambo and Kahiya. The company is only left with 16 employees," one of the sources said.

The US placed businessman Tagwirei and his firm Sakunda Holdings under sanctions over his support for the Emmerson Mnangagwa administration that it accuses of perpetrating gross human rights violations.

The step had long been expected after Tagwirei received repeated public criticism from American diplomats, leading to his long-time partners Trafigura buying him out in 2020.

In imposing sanctions on Tagwirei and Sakunda Holdings, the US Treasury Department said Tagwirei has been sanctioned "for providing support to the leadership of the Government of Zimbabwe".

Efforts by NewZimbabwe.com to get a comment on latest developments from Tagwirei drew blanks as he did not respond to questions sent to his mobile number.

Sakunda was allegedly involved in the handling of about US$3 billion allocated under the Command Agriculture programme which cannot be accounted for.

However, a parliamentary inquiry later established that Sakunda actually received US$1 billion.
The Zimbabwe Coalition On Debt and Development (ZIMCODD) has called for political will and commitment in dealing with corruption in the country.

In its May 2021 situational report on public resource management across 54 districts in the country's ten provinces, ZIMCODD said political will guarantees the independence of responsible oversight institutions.

"Zimbabwe needs a strong political will and commitment to decisively deal with corruption in all its multi-layered dimensions. There is need for the government to demonstrate political will to arrest and prosecute perpetrators and guarantee the independence of the responsible oversight institutions.

"The Government should monitor, evaluate and learn from the failures of the policy trajectory it has pursued overtime. There is an urgent need for policy reforms that put people of Zimbabwe at the center of economic governance and in particular, public resource management in order to realize meaningful development at local and national levels," noted ZIMCODD.

The coalition called on civic society organisations to promote their knowledge in public resources management and demand transparency from public office bearers.

"Civil society actors and communities should deepen their knowledge in public resources governance and strategies to demand transparency and accountability from duty bearers in the mobilisation, allocation, distribution and reporting on public resource use. This includes the feasibility, selection, tendering and management of natural resources."

ZIMCODD says the purpose of the report was driven by rampant corruption and mismanagement of resources in the country.

"Driven by the growing corruption, resource leakages, abuses and mismanagement of public resources, let alone COVID-19 earmarked resources and flouting of procurement procedures by public officials, ZIMCODD engaged on this intervention to influence and promote efficient deployment and use of public resources starting from the district level. The motivation also stem from the lack of transparency and accountability in COVID-19 resource mobilisation, allocation and expenditure." the report said.
analysis

The insurgency in northern Mozambique should have taught Southern Africa the obvious lesson that it's safer, cheaper and more effective to resolve conflicts before they explode. Having largely neglected Cabo Delgado crisis for several years, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) has now decided to send a military force into the province.

Early warning systems are designed to avoid taking such drastic and precarious action - and SADC has such a system. But does it heed early warnings? In eSwatini, for example?

Low-level protests have been simmering there for weeks. They escalated on Saturday into serious rioting that has continued since then. Scores of government buildings, shops and banks - including several South African-owned businesses - and vehicles have been looted or torched. According to opposition activists, the security forces clamped down harshly, killing at least 40 protesters and injuring about 150 by 1 July.

eSwatini is rife with rumour, in large part because the government shut down the internet. On 28 June, King Mswati was widely reported to have fled the country. This was denied by acting Prime Minister Themba Masuku, who insisted the king was still on his throne, governing the country.

Nevertheless, the crisis shows signs of spiralling out of control. eSwatini's periodic episodes of protests against autocratic rule have in the past eventually burnt themselves out. But this one looks more serious and many are calling it an uprising.

eSwatini security forces clamped down harshly, killing at least 40 protesters and injuring about 150

The fundamental problem and the common denominator in these disturbances is the country's democracy deficit. eSwatini likes to present itself as a democracy and even has a constitution that says as much. But the constitution is ambiguous - and probably deliberately so.

Instead of the conventional multi-party variety of democracy, eSwatini has the tinkhundla system. Fifty-nine tinkhundla or administrative subdivisions across the country each elect one representative - chosen on merit not party affiliation, as parties are forbidden - to the House of Assembly. This is the lower chamber of the bicameral Parliament. In theory, power is thereby devolved from the centre to the tinkhundla.

In practice, however, Mswati remains an absolute monarchy, not a constitutional one, so the rest is all essentially window-dressing or democratic opera.

In a country where democracy is meagre, such democracy as is on offer arguably becomes more important. The current explosion of protests appears to have been detonated by the government denying even this partial democracy.

Three dissident Members of Parliament (MPs) had called for the prime minister to be elected instead of appointed by the king. Many ordinary citizens began delivering petitions to their MPs supporting the call. In response, Masuku banned the in-person presentation of petitions by citizens to their MPs at their various tinkhundla (the equivalent of conventional constituency offices).

Unlike previous episodes of protest, this one looks more serious and many are calling it an uprising

On Saturday, protests erupted in the rural town of Siphofaneni, about 50 km south-east of the capital Mbabane, over this repressive measure. The demonstrations rapidly descended into looting and burning and destruction of shops, government offices and vehicles. And then spread to other towns.

Masuku blamed the local MP, Mduduzi 'Gawuzela' Simelane, a vocal reformist, for stoking the flames by agreeing to receive his constituents' petitions, despite the ban. Masuku insisted the government had heard the grievances of the people and would respond.

He insinuated that the ban on physical delivery of petitions was more about COVID-19 than anything else and gave an email address for delivering grievances. This elicited some wry commentary on Twitter, including by one wag who noted that the government had shut down the internet to smother the protests - so how were they to email their grievances?

COVID-19 does seem to have been a background factor in the unrest. Mswati may not have physically fled the country, but he's been noticeably absent from the public space to protect himself from infection. That has apparently loosened his hold on power. And the pandemic killed the capable prime minister Ambrose Dlamini in December last year.

Local journalists say Masuku has been a poor substitute, and this has further weakened Mswati's grip on the country, including in Parliament where the dissenters have become increasingly vocal. And COVID-19 and its lockdown measures have also aggravated the plight of the ordinary people, thereby fuelling the protests.

SADC, not the troubled member state, should decide on whether to heed early warning of serious conflict

The political opposition has called on the region, particularly South Africa, to intervene but Pretoria hasn't responded. On 1 July it issued a mildly critical statement calling on all sides to exercise restraint. The ruling African National Congress was sterner, saying Mswati's government should desist from 'autocracy, strong-handed crisis management and brutal repression of legitimate civilian concerns.'

It also called on SADC to intervene, as did Simelane. The disturbances are surely early warning signs of more serious conflict and instability in eSwatini. SADC should be sitting up and paying attention, officially, one would think.

The SADC Protocol on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation empowers it to 'seek to resolve any significant intra-state conflict' and says SADC's early warning system is intended 'to facilitate timeous action to prevent the outbreak and escalation of conflict.' This may include preventive diplomacy, negotiation, conciliation, mediation, good offices, arbitration or adjudication.

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ISS Today asked Habib Kambanga, head of SADC's Regional Early Warning Centre (REWC) in Gaborone, whether the centre was monitoring the disturbances and if it might alert SADC member states of possibly deeper conflict. It also asked whether eSwatini would be placed on the agenda of the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation.

'SADC REWC is monitoring political and security threats in all member states including eSwatini,' he replied. 'According to the officials in eSwatini, the situation is not out of hand, so if that is the case, it cannot be an agenda item for SADC meetings for now.'

But surely it shouldn't be the sole or even the main prerogative of the country where early warning signs are flashing, to judge whether serious conflict is in the offing? Regional early warning must provide an objective assessment of threats - and so it should be the region, not the troubled member state in question, that makes that call.

Peter Fabricius, ISS Consultant

In South Africa, Daily Maverick has exclusive rights to re-publish ISS Today articles. For media based outside South Africa and queries about our re-publishing policy, email us.
opinion

Last week, friends and associates of the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Amina Mohammed, gave her a befitting celebration as she turned sixty. The timing was perfect as her boss had just won a second term in office and has offered her the opportunity to continue the journey with him of carrying out the onerous job of the UN in keeping international peace and security while promoting social progress, which is today encapsulated in advancing the agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Clearly, Antonio Guterres, the ninth Secretary-General of the UN believes they are a winning team, which is why he rushed to reappoint her although the second term will only start in January next year.

All the Presidents of the Forth Nigerian Republic had worked with her and were well pleased with her output, but above all, the great results revealed with the massive results of the positive outcomes she produced in the critical field of addressing poverty, inequality and social provisioning for the down trodden. She was the Senior Special Assistant to the President on MDGS to President Olusegun Obasanjo and worked with Presidents Yar'Adua and Jonathan in the same capacity. She was appointed by President Buhari as Minister of Environment of the Federal Republic of Nigeria where she steered the country's efforts on climate action and efforts to protect the natural environment at the critical period of agenda setting for the Paris Summit.

Her performance on the MDGs was so spectacular that when the then United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, was looking for someone to transition the world from MDGs to SDGs, he appointed her as Special Adviser in 2012 with the responsibility for post-2015 development planning. She led the process that resulted in global agreement around the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Hajia Amina Mohammed began her career working on the design of schools and clinics in Nigeria. For most of her life, she had been an advocate focused on increasing access to education, health and other social services, before moving into the public sector, where she rose to the position of adviser to four successive Nigerian Presidents.

The theme of the Amina @ 60 Celebration Symposium was "Overcoming the Challenges of Africa's Transformation." The keynote speaker was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former Liberian President. She gave a very thoughtful presentation of the challenges of keeping focus on serving the needs of the people in a context in which power tends to alienate people who exercise it from the grassroots. She had the grace of posing the question whether she herself had done all she could for the people when she was in power and urged all those currently in power to continuously ask themselves the question. She had worked closely with Amina Mohammed in developing the SDGs and described the celebrant, as many others did, as a force of nature with the uncanny ability to always stay focused in achieving the objectives set out.

During the symposium, there was a lot of friendly banter between Inuwa Yahaya, Governor of Gombe State and Nasir El Rufai, Governor of Kaduna State, each claiming Amina as their own - by blood or by residency and President Sirleaf had a direct question for them. Rather than fight to be associated with the glory that Amina Mohammed has become, should they not pose the question why none of Nigeria's great women had ever succeeded in becoming a State governor, not to talk of President of the country. More importantly, she added, what are they currently doing to support Nigeria's large pool of competent women in accessing political power as 2023 approaches. I feel this is a great question as Amina Mohammed has already created her own pathway to success and the important issue for Nigeria is to create pathways for other women, and indeed men also, with zeal and competence to get opportunities to make their own contributions in advancing the development potential of our country.

I worked closely with Amina Mohammed when she was appointed the Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on MDGs in 2005. It was a completely unscripted job. She was charged with the coordination of Nigeria's debt relief funds toward the achievement of the MDGs. Her mandate included designing a Virtual Poverty Fund with innovative approaches to poverty reduction, budget coordination and monitoring, as well as providing advice on pertinent issues regarding poverty, public sector reform and sustainable development. There was no precedent for the job description in Nigeria's public service. It would be recalled that Nigeria had signed up to the MDGs in 2000 and no mechanism for implementation was set in place until the debt relief issue came up and development partners were asking questions of what will happen to the gains of debt relief, which was 1 billion dollars annually. It was this amount that Amina was charged with using to advance the fight against poverty and the provision of social services in the country. That was the promise that cleared the hurdle for lifting Nigeria's crushing debt burden of about $35.9 billion with over 85 percent owed to the Paris Club. President Olusegun Obasanjo and his Finance Minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala negotiated with the Paris club and just before the G8 meeting in 2005, the Paris Club granted a debt relief to Nigeria canceling $18 billion from the debt but requiring Nigeria to pay $12 billion in six months and comply with the agreement on the Virtual Poverty Fund.

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What Amina Mohammed did was to set up a team of competent civil society organisations to work with private sector consultants to ensure that every kobo was properly spent on projects that were useful to people's lives. She basically reinvented monitoring and evaluation in Nigeria's public sector - letting public officials and political appointees know that the eyes of the Nation were on them and projects must be completed in conformity with design and conditions and above all, that the projects must serve communities that were targeted. I led the civil society component of the work and what I found most satisfying was engaging with communities to know what was being built, by whom and according to what time frame. Success, Amina always told us, is when the communities themselves realise these projects were for their benefit and they themselves become active as beneficiaries keen on monitoring and evaluating that these projects were indeed for their benefit so they had a stake as citizens. Keep the flag flying dear Amina.

A professor of Political Science and development consultant/expert, Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Democracy and Development, and Chair of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.
Minna  Many teachers and desk officers in charge of the federal government Home Grown School Feeding programme have been arrested by operatives of the Directorate of State Security Service (DSS) for allegedly sabotaging the programme.

Ten food vendors were also arrested for allegedly conniving with the teachers and the desk officers to shortchange the process.

It was learnt that majority of those nabbed were from the Central Primary school in Minna, Niger State, while arrests were also made from schools in Katcha in Katcha Local Government Area, and in Gwada in the Shiroro LGA of the state.

Apart from allegedly diverting raw food meant for pupils in the schools, it was learnt that those arrested in Gwada allegedly took away 30 crates of eggs meant for the breakfast of some of the pupils, which they allegedly sold to local food sellers in the town.

As a result of the under-the-table dealing, it was gathered that four pupils were being made to share just one egg during their meals.

The state Focal Person of the School Feeding Programme, Mrs. Amina Guar, when contacted, confirmed the story, saying security operatives have been informed about the development.

She said the organisation was able to trace the crates of eggs diverted by those concerned to tea sellers in Gwada town, adding that: "We were able to retrieve the eggs and return them to the school concerned.

"It is true that some of our teachers at the Central Primary School are currently with the DSS, in fact some of them fainted on getting there.

"We have zero tolerance for corruption of any sort; feeding fat at the expense of innocent children is unacceptable to any rational thinking person," Guar said, adding that she was rushing to the DSS office to know the situation of things.

When contacted, the state Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT) Principal Assistant Secretary, Labaran Garba, said the union was not aware of the development but "we will investigate it."

Meanwhile, Guar has disclosed that the state government has received over N27 billion for various federal government Social Intervention Programmes (SIP) from 2016 till date out of which N11.4 billion was for the Conditional Cash Transfer; N3.8 billion for the Home Grown School Feeding scheme and N12,2billion for the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme.
Hundreds of informal traders in Glen View Harare lost goods worth thousands of U.S. dollars after Harare City Council workers backed by heavily armed police officers demolished market stalls.

Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) has slammed what is said was confusion being exhibited by the government over the ongoing demolitions in Harare.

According to the labour body, senior government officials, including ministers, have since the start of the demolitions last June, been issuing out contradictory statements, raising concerns there was serious policy discord in state corridors.

However, according to the ZCTU secretary-general Japhet Moyo, the government once allowed informal traders to operate freely as it encouraged the growth of the sector.

However, it was quick to condemn the the current demolitions taking place mainly in Harare adding they were reminiscent of the infamous 2005 Murambatsvina thousands of people lost their homes and businesses.

"The current destruction of the informal sector is reminiscent of the 'Operation Restore Order' of 2005/6 that left, over 700 000 people stranded. 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 by-laws," the top ZCTU official said in a statement.

Moyo questioned the rationale behind the destruction of structures that houses thousands of vendors without providing them with any alternative operating sites.

Most Zimbabweans are surviving on vending after the closure of a large number of companies in recent years.

Moyo also blamed the government for its mismanagement of the economy in its pursuit for political power as a factor behind the emergence of the informal sector.

However, he warned that destroying the informal sector would have serious detrimental economic effects at a time the country's economy is already in a "parlous state."

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"The timing and magnitude of the 'clean-up' operation have led to much speculation as to whether there are in actuality other reasons than those officially proclaimed. For instance, some have argued that the campaign is to punish urban people for voting for the opposition.

"Others say that it is a pre-emptive strike against the urban poor to prevent unrest in the towns by driving people away into the countryside. There are problems with each of these speculations," said Moyo.

He also said the demolitions, the government would like to turn around and be seen as a messiah pretending to be caring authorities the same victims with shelter.

However, Moyo reminded the government that the destruction of people's markets violated a whole range of international human rights norms and conventions, including fundamental rights provisions enshrined in the country's Constitution.

He urged the government to instead formulate public-led policies.

"The continuous heinous act of destroying people's livelihoods should be condemned by all right-minded citizens. As labour, we stand firm in solidarity with the displaced informal economy traders," added Moyo.
Luanda  Ambassador Maria de Fatima Jardim assumed this Tuesday the vice-presidency of the 167th session of the Council of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), representing Africa.

At the event, which took place at the 167th session of the FAO Council, in Rome, the diplomat reaffirmed Angola's commitment to the necessary cooperation to transform food and nutrition systems into the most important challenge for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals for future generations.

On the occasion, the Permanent Representative of Angola to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other International Agencies headquartered in Rome, called for continuous dialogue, collaboration and cooperation for the implementation and integration of agriculture in the pillar of nutrition and growth.

"It is important that we transform food systems into a solid base, where we are all allies and promoters of the new era that we want to strengthen and build", underlined the Angolan ambassador, quoted in a note from the Press Services of the Angolan Embassy in Italy.

Maria de Fatima Jardim assumes the vice chair of the Council session, as Angola's permanent representative to the FAO. She is also permanent representative to the World Food Program (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

The FAO Council is led by an independent president, appointed by the Conference, for a term of two years, renewable for an equal period, and assisted by three vice presidents, ambassadors and permanent representatives of the countries member of the Council, appointed by their respective regional groups.

The FAO Council, within the limits of the attributions delegated to it by the Conference, is the executive organ and carries out functions dealing with the world situation on food and agriculture and related matters.
Millions of students in secondary schools across Nigeria do not have access to leadership education.

For the past four years, the non-profit Fashioned and Made for Excellence Foundation, led by founder Raphael Stephen, has been working hard to improve those numbers.

So far, they've been able to provide access to quality leadership education to over 13 thousand students.

It is amazing how a vision that started as a random idea in the heart of a passionate corp member, has evolved into a source of massive transformation to the next generation of leaders.

The leading non-profit organisation based in Ibadan, Nigeria teaches leadership, transferable skills, and basic digital skills to students in secondary schools.

They have an enviable team of competent volunteers who come to classrooms, facilitate and teach about the importance of leadership and good values.

"We've gone from reaching 21 students here in Ibadan, Nigeria when we started and we've reached over 13,000 by the end of the first quarter this year," Daniel Akinyemi, Programs Manager.

Raphael Stephen, Executive Director, Fashioned and Made for Excellence Foundation, reaffirmed during a press briefing to mark the organisation's 4th anniversary that "its programs would continuously be accessible to students in public secondary schools at no cost."

He pledged during a press briefing to inform the public about the program lineup for the 2021 year.

While expressing confidence that the leading non-profit organisation would achieve its objective of reaching 1,000,000 youths by 2030.

He called on key players in the private and public sectors to partner with FAME. To improve the delivery of practical education, and particularly leadership education, to address Nigeria's leadership crisis.

In a similar development, the Fashioned and Made for Excellence Foundation have a lineup of programs to effectively develop our students, in 2021.

Some of these programs include Fame Global Leadership Program which would impact 5,000 Students selected from 100 public secondary schools in Ibadan and Oyo State.

The Fame Lead Day program for Public Secondary School Prefects will impact 1,500 prefects in 50 public schools in Ibadan.

FAME Board Chair, Dr Sina Adegunle in his remarks, appreciated all partners and donors of the organisation for their relentless support to the organisation, he also charged the beneficiaries to continuously live out the values instilled in them, look for opportunities to pay it forward and continuously influence their peers positively.

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FAME believes that through deliberate investments in students in secondary schools, we can contribute to the end of our leadership crisis in our lifetime.

We are grateful to all our selfless Humans of Fame, for their unwavering commitment. Our exceptional Board Members, donors, partners and the Oyo State Ministry of Education for working with us to educate and grow more value-driven and effective leaders for Nigeria.

FAME has built a record of accomplishment over the past four years by delivering high-quality leadership programs to secondary school students across Nigeria and recently hit a major milestone of 13,000 students reach at the end of the first quarter of 2021.

Fashioned and Made for Excellence Foundation is a leading non-profit leadership education organisation operating in Ibadan, Nigeria. FAME is dedicated to providing access to quality leadership education for students in secondary schools.

FAME started operations in Nigeria in the 2nd quarter of 2017, and since then has reached over 12,000 students in over seventy schools in Ibadan, through over 1,000 volunteers.

FAME offers FREE leadership education programs tailored to add value to young people between the ages of 13 - 19 in Nigeria.

FAME is seeking to reach 1,000,000 young people in Nigeria by the end of year 2030. For more information visit: https://thefameinitiatve.org.
The trial date for State law officer Arthur Bosha, accused of consenting to bail for a suspected armed robber, Musafare Mupanhanga, without consulting his bosses has been set for next Tuesday at the Harare Magistrates Court.

Bosha is being charged with criminal abuse of office.

Detectives from the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) Homicide who are also witnesses in the case have since been notified.

The State alleged that sometime in September last year, Bosha was allocated a bail application case involving Mupanhanga by his superior and acting head of appeals Mr Edmore Makoto.

It is alleged that Bosha unilaterally consented to granting of bail to Mupanhanga without consulting his superiors. In consenting to bail, Bosha is said to have disregarded standard operating procedures of the Attorney General's Office (Criminal Division), which dictate that applications and bail alterations should be done through the Area Public Prosecutor or the Public Prosecutor in Charge in consultation with the Chief Law Officer.

According to basic procedures laid down on November 16, 2020, all consents to bail by prosecutors are to be approved by their superiors.

The State alleged that Bosha showed favour to Mupanhanga, who was part of a notorious gang of armed robbers led by Musa Taj Abdul.

Early this month, Mupamhanga was nursing wounds at Sally Mugabe Central Hospital in Harare after being shot on the left leg by police while attempting to flee following a shootout in Harare.

Mupamhanga, who was on bail, was arrested along with other suspected armed robbers Spicer Takawira, Leo Mandaza, Chamunorwa Takawira, Joseph Chinhema, Newman Watsikwa and James Nyakutsikwa.

The gang has since appeared at the Harare Magistrates Court charged with robbery, unlawful entry into premises in aggravated circumstances and unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition and were remanded in custody.

They were recently released from jail on bail pending appeal at the High Court, but went into hiding and it is suspected they committed more crimes.

Mupamhanga, together with Conwell Kasambarare, are alleged to be part of the gang that raided Mashwede Holdings last year and got away with over US$100 000, R42 000, $14 000 worth of fuel coupons, firearms and 20 live rounds of ammunition.
Luanda  The introduction of the Contractual Regime in the Private Investment Law (LIP) will allow the negotiation of tax incentives between state and potential investors.

The referred contract regime will also bring about the Tax Benefits Code, to be approved by the National Assembly.

With the Tax Benefits Code, it is expected to give flexibility to the process of private investment, allowing incentives to be granted, taking into account the specificities, characteristics and sectors, always considering the interests of investors and the state itself.

The proposal was analyzed this Wednesday, at the first meeting of the Supervisory Board of the Private Investment and Export Promotion Agency (Aipex), under the guidance of the Minister of State for Economic Coordination, Manuel Nunes Junior, with the participation of ministers of the Commission on the Real Economy.

According to the administrator of Aipex, Lello Francisco, the proposal includes prerequisites for the Contractual Regime, but particularly for projects considered to be structuring for the national economy.

"The incentives provided for in this legal instrument are contained in the Code of Tax Benefits approved on Tuesday at the meeting of the Economic Commission of the Council of Ministers", said the official.

The tax incentives provided will be applied as soon as the Tax Benefits Code is approved by the National Assembly.

During the meeting, the participants also analyzed the implementation of the Single Investment Window (JUI), a mechanism that will force an organic restructuring of Aipex, within the framework of the amendment to the Private Investment Law.

With the SIW, according to Lello Francisco, a mechanism for facilitating the implementation of investments is created, reformulating the Agency's functional model, with the emergence of adjusted departments that now have adequate services.

"Investors who have projects approved by Aipex no longer go to other public administration services to obtain the necessary services for the implementation of their projects", said the official, sustaining that this service now has only a single point of contact.

The first meeting of Aipex's Supervisory Board also reviewed the 2021 strategic plan, which is aimed at attracting foreign direct investment.
Asaba  Delta State Governor, Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa, has assured the state of better female representation in his administration, as five women were among the 18 new commissioners and members of the State Executive Council sworn in by the governor yesterday.

Okowa said the resolve for more female visibility (and participation) in politics and governance was a deliberate move at enhancing women participation in decision-making process in government.

In apparent response to criticism about the poor representation of women in his government, especially in his second term, the governor had ensured that 17 out of the 25 local government councils in the state had women as vice-chairmen, who were subsequently sworn in on March 17, 2021, after the March 6, 2021 local election.

However, he urged the new and returning commissioners to commit themselves to their responsibilities with a greater sense of urgency in the remaining period of his tenure, adding that his administration is proud of its achievements in the last six years.

Okowa said: "I am especially proud that we have five women in the cabinet-the first in the history of the state. This demonstrates our commitment to enhancing women participation in the decision-making process of governance.

"We intend to keep working and delivering the dividends of democracy to our people until the end of our tenure. It is our desire to complete all the projects we have started, and by the grace of God, we shall do our best to make that a reality.

"You must be innovative and strategic in your thinking; encourage and welcome new ideas, and be ready to take bold action.

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"This administration has barely two years to go, but it is also sufficient time to touch the lives of many more people through innovative policies and programmes targeted at their needs and aspirations.

"Be a role model both in your public and personal lives. I urge each of you to be an embodiment of integrity, humility, excellence, loyalty and accountability.

"Role models exemplify honesty and demonstrate high ethical conduct. There is nothing more confusing and uninspiring than a leader whose personal life is at variance with his public posturing.

"This is the reason why there is so much disconnect between the political leadership and the followership. I trust that you will commit to leading by example as you begin your tenures today."

Those sworn in are former Information Commissioner before the dissolution of the Exco in May, Mr. Charles Aniagwu; former House of Representatives member, Evelyn Oboro; Shola Ogbemi-Daibo, Mrs. Rose Ezewu, Mrs. Flora Alanta, Mrs. Kate Onianwa, Chief Festus Ochonogor, Chief Arthur Akpowowo, and Dr. Barry Gbe.

Others are Mr. Julius Egbedi, Mr. Christian Onogba, Mr. Lawrence Ejiofor, Mr. Ifeanyi Egwunyenga, Mr. Noel Omodon, Mr. Churchill Amagada, Mr. Jonathan Ukodhiko, Mr. Johnbull Edema, and former Finance Commissioner, Sir Fidelis Tilije.

Responding on behalf of the new commissioners, Tilije thanked the governor for finding them worthy to be appointed, saying they felt honoured to be part of the last lap of the administration.
Civic Society Organisations (CSOs) are consulting on a plan of action following recent remarks by Harare Provincial Development Coordinator Tafadzwa Muguti directed Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and churches, among other organisations, to seek operational clearance through his office.

The Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition (CiZC) said they were consulting with stakeholders to map the way forward.

"Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition is consulting its membership on a plan of action following threats by the government to further shrink the democratic space by setting up reporting structures for non-governmental organisations. In 2019, the same directive was issued to non-governmental organisations in Masvingo. The directive was however reversed following High Court order." said CiZC

According to Crisis in the Coalition, the demands from the office of the Provincial Development Coordinator for Harare, Muguti are meant to criminalise operations of non-governmental organisations critical to the authoritarian nature of the Zimbabwean government.

Some civil society leaders in Masvingo declared that the same demands from the office of the PDC in the province must be resisted using all available channels.

Civic contacts in Manicaland argued that the clamping down on non-governmental organisations is meant to entrench dictatorship and we called upon pro-democracy forces to resist this.

In Bulawayo, a humanitarian lawyer said it is quite evident that the government is seeking to restrict and or cripple operations of non-governmental organisations ahead of the 2023 elections adding that the machinations should never be allowed to prevail.

United Kingdom-based Zimbabwean academic Alex Magaisa has criticized Muguti for purportedly exercising powers that he doesn't possess.

"This chap, one Tafadzwa Muguti* has a disproportionately elevated opinion of himself. If he's not demolishing homes, he's trying to control civil society organisations.

"Conspicuously missing in this extravagant demand is the law under which he's exercising his phantom power. He just refers to an MoU. An MoU is not a law. It is trite that the conduct of governmental and administrative affairs must be based on the law." said Magaisa
Former First Lady Grace Mugabe's sister, Rosemary Chidhakwa has dragged to court Lands Minister Anxious Masuka, and his counterpart, Mashonaland Central Provincial Minister Monica Mavhunga on charges they unlawfully grabbed her farm in Mazowe.

Chidhakwa accuses Mavhunga, and her workers of invading her farm and disrupting winter wheat cropping currently underway.

This is despite an earlier a court order issued this year interdicting Mavhunga against illegally occupying the farm - Subdivision 1 Farm 25 of Glendale, Mazowe.

According to High Court papers, Masuka has allegedly shown favour to Mavhunga, who has since taken occupation of the farm.

She has also in with her workers who have occupied the main farmhouse after evicting Chidhakwa's manager who lived there.

Masuka is cited as the first respondent while Mavhunga is the second respondent. The other respondent is officer-in-charge of Glendale Police Station.

In her court papers, Chidhakwa said Masuka gave orders last week to officials from the Lands Ministry to order Chidhakwa's manager to vacate the farm within three days.

"Mavhunga's employees against a court order HC2019/21 returned to occupy the farm and took occupation of a farmhouse used by Chidhakwa's manager and declared to share the lodgings," read the court papers.

Chidhakwa said if Mavhunga is not removed immediately from the farm she is set to lose out financially.

Full hearing of the matter is pending.

Last month, Grace and late former President Robert Mugabe's daughter, Bona and her husband Simbarashe Mutsahuni also approached the High Court challenging Statutory Instrument SI 41 2020, which resulted in them losing part of their farm.

The farm is also in Mazowe.

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The SI was published in February last year by the Lands Minister announcing new maximum farm sizes allowed by the law in Zimbabwe.

Mutsahuni is the first applicant while Bona is the second applicant.

The couple have an offer letter under Model A2 Phase II, in respect of Subdivision Consolidation measuring 1 804, 9719 hectares of Sigaro Farm in Mazowe district, Mashonaland Central.

Mugabe's son-in-law said the Lands Minister, purportedly acting in terms of SI 41 of 2020, proceeded to withdraw the aforesaid offer letter with an express intention to reduce the extent of the land which Bona and him held.

Mutsahuni said it was unfair because it is common cause the new SI came into effect when the old SI 419 of 1999, was still in full effect.

He said the minister did not adhere to the provisions of the regulations and proceeded to allocate individuals land sizes beyond the prescribed sizes under SI 419 of 1999.

"Pursuant to the promulgation of SI 41 of 2020, the minister has sought to pursue a rigid adherence to the new farm sizes stated therein. The SI has a negative retrospective effect of practically reducing land sizes for farms already vested rights in terms of already issued offer letters," said Mutsahuni.
Abuja  The Nigerian Army has arrested a member of the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) in Ogun State.

The Defence Headquarters (DHQ) also said yesterday that no fewer than 73 Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists were killed by troops of Operations Hadin Kai in the past two weeks in the North-east.

The terrorist identified as Mr. Ibrahim Musa was arrested at No. 31 Abartura Street in Sango-Ota, Ogun State.

The ISWAP member was on a mission to Lagos to acquire certain items for his group's operations in Maiduguri, Borno State.

This is according to a statement issued yesterday and signed by the Acting Director, Defence Media Operation, Brigadier General Benard Onyeuko

Onyeuko said troops "sustained routine patrols to forestall activities of vandals on NNPC pipelines at Gaun, Akute, Wawa 1 and 2 and Mabgero areas. Additionally, troops carried out standing patrols and raid operations at strategic areas in the Zone including Majidun Area, during which one Mr. Ibrahim Musa, an ISWAP member was arrested at No 31 Abartura Street in Sango-Ota, Ogun State.

"Intelligence report revealed that Ibrahim was on a mission to Lagos to acquire certain items for ISWAP's operations in Maiduguri.

In another development, the DHQ said yesterday that no fewer than 73 Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists were killed by troops of Operations Hadin Kai in the past two weeks in the North-east.

It said 55 captives comprising 15 adult males, 12 adult females and 27 children escaped from terrorist enclaves within the period following its coordinated land and air bombardment in the area.

At a media briefing in Abuja, Acting Director Defence Media Operations(DDMO), Brigadier General Onyeuko, said the spiritual base and training camps of the terrorists in the parts of Borno State and the fringes of Lake Chad were destroyed by air bombardments

"Between 18 and 30 June 2021, troops of Operation Hadin Kai in the North-east zone simultaneously conducted several land and air operations.

"These were clearance operations and aggressive fighting patrols to deny terrorists freedom of movement at different locations.

"Similarly, troops conducted ambush operations as well as responded to distress calls, repelled BHT elements attacks on troops' locations and dominated the theatre of operations", he said.

He stated that the air component of Operation Hadin Kai conducted series of intelligence surveillance reconnaissance and air interdiction missions to reveal and destroy terrorists' enclaves as well as their logistic supplies and equipment.

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Within the period, he said, troops consistently struck BHT/ISWAP strongholds throughout the theatre of operation.

He said some of the feats were achieved at Bula Village in Yobe State and Banki Town in Borno State on 27 and 28 June 2021 when troops repelled terrorists' attacks.

Onyeuko said troops also conducted offensive deep penetration operations into villages of the Timbuktu Triangle within the period, while stating that during the offensives, several terrorists were killed and many equipment and weapons were captured.

"A total of 73 BHT were killed with 44 AK 47 rifles, 2 PKT, 7 Anti -aircraft guns, seven gun trucks, several ammunition of different calibre as well as weapon cleaning materials, clothing, blankets, foodstuffs, vehicles, generators, IED materials, religious scripts and other items were recovered in the process.

"In another development on 27 June, a total of 55 escapees from terrorists' camps comprising 15 adult males, 12 adult females and 27 children surrendered to own troops at Darajemel in Borno State. Another feat was achieved when on 27 June 2021, the Air Component of Operation Hadin Kai in coordinated multiple airstrikes, destroyed some terrorists' commander's strongholds at the Lake Chad axis of Borno State", he said.
A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Zamfara State, Senator Kabiru Marafa has rejected the naming of the state governor, Mr. Bello Matawalle as the leader of the party in the state.

He also described the crisis in the APC in the state as self-inflicted, stressing that the naming of Matawalle as the leader of the party in the state by the leadership of the APC is not in the party's constitution.

He said his group will also challenge the legality of Governor Buni's chairmanship of the APC.

Speaking last night on ARISE NEWS Channel, the broadcast arm of THISDAY, the APC chieftain said "the people of Zamfara are aggrieved and justifiably so and now coming to rob salt on injury amounts to asking for too much. We nuture this party from inception to date, we have internal crisis in the APC for almost two years that cost us all our positions in the last election."

"Now somebody comes and said he wants to be a member of our party. Fine, even at that we accepted it and said let's sit down and talk. We asked for not too much from the party - just allow us to consult with our people and allow us to go on with our own; you said no. We said, 'go and do your ceremony and come back and let's talk, we want our people on one side and the governor on the other side, then the leadership of the party at the middle. Let us hear what the governor wants by coming to APC.

"They promised us that is what they are going to do following the intervention of Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai. We agreed, only for the party chairman to go to Gusau to announce the governor as our leader," he explained.

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He said there are fifth columnists in the state who wanted to destroy the party, alleging that they will go any length to see the party destroyed.

He said his group did not attend the defection ceremony in Gusau because they felt having nurtured the party, the ordinary party members in the state were not carried along as promised by the leadership of the party.

He stated that the party's caretaker committee does not have the powers under the APC constitution to make such pronouncements.

"We are going to challenge even the legality of Buni being the chairman of APC. "When you look at the APC constitution, Section 14, Sub., 4 forbids him from being the chairman of the party. I have alerted the president that we should be very weary these banana peels; we are going to ask these fundamental questions when the need arises," he added.
press release

Today, I had the pleasure of meeting with Lieutenant General Thembisile Patekile who has been appointed as the Provincial Commissioner to the Western Cape.

We were further joined by the Deputy Police Commissioner, Lieutenant General Sindile Mfazi, and the Provincial Minister of Community Safety, Albert Fritz.

Lt. Gen. has undergone a rigorous recruitment process and has come out as the strongest candidate to serve our province. I look forward to working closely with him.

It was very reassuring to hear from Lt. Gen. Patekile on his detailed plans to address crime in the province, which include a focus on gangsterism and extortion.

Safety remains an important pillar within the Western Cape Recovery Plan. We cannot uphold the dignity of residents and provide them with adequate economic opportunities if their environment is not safe.

This is why we have established the Western Cape Safety Plan, which jointly aims to increase the number of boots on the ground through the deployment of Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP) officers and implement a range of violence prevention interventions.

I want to thank SAPS in the Western Cape for the support that they have provided to the Safety Plan since its inception, nearly two years ago. Our LEAP officers would not be able to make a difference in the communities they serve without the support and buy-in of their local SAPS.

I also want to echo Lt Gen Patekile's call to members of the community to assist SAPS in their crime fighting efforts and to do so by coming forward and reporting any perpetrators of crime. We all have in important role to play in ridding our province of crime.

Going forward, the Western Cape Government, through the Department of Community Safety, will work closely with the Provincial Commissioner and his office to make the Western Cape a safer province for all.
While Gauteng remains the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic, acting Health Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane has warned that many provinces in the country are almost at red alert as infections continue to increase.

"The trends are clearly showing that other provinces which are currently lagging are going to experience the trend we are seeing in Gauteng, most notably in the Western and the Eastern Cape. What worries us as well, is the positivity rate. If you look at Limpopo, it has almost 42% of positivity rate, which is leading in terms of positivity rates," Kubayi-Ngubane said.

Briefing the media on government's efforts in the fight against COVID-19 and the rollout of vaccines on Friday, Kubayi-Ngubane said the COVID-19 situation in the country remains of great concern, as the numbers continue to increase at a very rapid rate.

"In the last 24 hours, there are 21 584 new cases, which is higher than the average number of new cases per day over the seven preceding days measured at 16 916 cases. The positivity testing rate has also increased from 27.6% the previous day to 28.4%."

Gauteng continues to be the epicentre of new infections with the number of new cases having risen to 12 806 which represents 60% of the total new infections.

"We remain very worried about the rise in hospitalisations, which is putting a lot of strain on the health facilities in Gauteng. The private health hospitals are currently operating at more than 100% capacity and public health hospitals are edging closer to full capacity," Kubayi-Ngubane said.

She said nationally the third wave numbers have surpassed the first wave peak and are likely to surpass the second wave peak.

The new variant, called the Delta variant, is quickly becoming the dominant variant in the country, replacing both the Alpha variant experienced in the first wave and Beta variant experienced in the second wave.

However, the Minister reminded the public that the Beta variant is still prevalent and spreading.

"An important characteristic of the Delta variant is ... those who were previously infected by Beta were immune from reinfection by both the Alpha and Beta variant - it is not the case with the Delta variant.

"This means that those who have had COVID-19 are at a risk of reinfection by the Delta variant," Kubayi-Ngubane said.

Over 120 000 people vaccinated in last 24 hours

Over 120 000 people were vaccinated in the last 24 hours, with KwaZulu-Natal leading the pack, followed by Gauteng, then the Eastern Cape and Western Cape.

"The vaccination of educators is progressing well and we have so far vaccinated just over 300 000 educators. We had more educators registering in KwaZulu-Natal and followed by Gauteng," Kubayi-Ngubane said.

A total of 354 504 people aged between 50 and 59 registered for their vaccination when the system opened on Thursday. The group will start receiving their jabs on 15 July 2021.

"In parallel to this process, we are also finalising the details for the commencement of vaccinations of other frontline sectors such as the police, defence, the security cluster and we will provide more details soon," she said.

Two million Pfizer doses expected in July

The Minister said almost 2.1 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine are expected to arrive in July.

She said Pfizer has delivered nearly 4.5 million doses in quarter two and they have committed just over 15.5 million doses in quarter three, of which "we are expecting nearly 2.1 million doses in July".

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"Johnson and Johnson have so far delivered 500 000 early access doses used for Sisonke, 300 000 market doses two weeks ago and 1.2 million doses landed last week. These doses all need to be used by 11 August.

"We are awaiting confirmation for delivery of 500 000 doses (these expire later than the previous doses mentioned), and this makes up the two million to replace those that were lost to the contamination incident.

"We make a clarion call to all those who qualify, to register and vaccinate," Kubayi-Ngubane said.

The Minister used the opportunity to thank scientists who continue to make world class scientific findings that are helping to fight the pandemic.

She also thanked the healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses and all supporting stuff in health care centres for continuing to be in the forefront of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
analysis

This week, Gauteng remained the epicentre of new infections as numbers continued to rise in the other provinces. Thousands of people over 50 have registered for the vaccine and science has shown that the vaccines South Africa is using are effective against the currently dominant variants of Covid-19. In addition, Aspen's Gqeberha plant has received a financial boost to make more vaccines.

Covid-19 numbers go up, and up, and up

During a briefing on Friday 2 July, acting health minister Mmamoloko Kubayi reiterated that the country's Covid-19 numbers are increasing "at a very rapid rate".

In the previous 24 hours, another 21,584 new cases were reported -- higher than the seven-day moving average of 16,916 new cases. The test positivity rate rose from 27.6% to 28.4%.

Gauteng remains the epicentre of new cases -- it accounted for 60% of the new cases in the previous 24 hours. "We remain very worried about the rise in the hospitalisations which is putting a lot of strain on the health facilities in Gauteng. The private health hospitals are currently operating at more than 100% capacity and the public health hospitals are edging closer to full capacity," she said.

"The trends are clearly showing...
analysis

The City of Cape Town has struggled to attend to affected communities in the midst of tighter lockdown measures.

Since 27 June, Cape Town has endured another severe winter cold front, coupled with flood warnings from the South African Weather Service. Informal settlements have been lashed with heavy rains, resulting in waterlogged streets and homes. The City of Cape Town has said, owing to Covid-19 health and safety measures, that it has been unable to provide shelter for affected communities.

In a statement released on 29 June, Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security JP Smith said that the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) -- an entity of the Department of Social Development which assists with humanitarian relief during floods -- insisted that affected residents be sheltered in community facilities. Smith said the City was unable to do this "due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the health and safety precautions that apply to prevent the spread of disease".

A woman and her baby at the flooded Covid-19 informal settlement in Bloekombos , Kraaifontein on 1 July 2021 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images/Brenton Geach)

To assist those affected by the heavy rain and high winds, the...
analysis

Despite reports that Jacob Zuma is seeking a way to challenge a ruling made by the Constitutional Court, little had changed outside his Nkandla homestead by Friday afternoon. Amid trepidation surrounding the former president ahead of him starting his 15-month jail, term, it was also confirmed that the ANC's weekend NEC meeting had been abruptly postponed.

The odd police van was patrolling, locals were ambling, and a few so-called Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA) members were on their beat outside the former president's residence. Some supporters, dressed in ANC regalia, were sitting in their cars, ostensibly waiting for their peers.

Just before 2pm, a small contingent of supporters from Mpumalanga arrived. Others are expected throughout the afternoon.

The spokesperson for Zuma's eponymous foundation, Mzwanele Manyi, confirmed earlier in the day that Zuma would be "addressing the nation" over the weekend. The (disbanded) MKMVA also announced that it would be holding a press briefing outside the homestead at 4pm.

The provincial ANC has been circumspect on the apex court's ruling, saying that it would be discussed at this weekend's national executive committee (NEC) meeting. However, on Friday afternoon, ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte released a...
President Cyril Ramaphosa says South Africa is committed to both supporting and implementing the actions contained in the Global Acceleration Plan for Economic Justice and Rights.

"Our interventions must dismantle the systemic barriers that marginalise women and girls and perpetuate inequality in the global economy," President Ramaphosa said.

Addressing the Generation Equality Forum Action Coalition Session virtually, he said South Africa is working to shift economic power into the hands of women through, among other things, earmarking 40 percent of all public procurement for women-owned businesses.

"On the continent, we are working towards adopting a Protocol and Programme of Action on Women in Trade to promote the participation of women in the African Continental Free Trade Area. We are working to ensure access to productive resources through financial inclusion.

"Lack of access to financial services and products disproportionately affects poorer women working in the informal sector, those without income and those who are illiterate.

"It increases vulnerability to economic shocks and may, in some cases, even increase exposure to gender-based violence," President Ramaphosa said.

Innovation in digital financial services in Africa offers an opportunity for rapid scale-up of financial services and products.

"Working in partnership with Queen Maxima, the UN Secretary-General's Special Advocate on Financial Inclusion, we are committed to establishing the Advocacy Accelerator for Women's Digital Financial Inclusion in Africa," President Ramaphosa said.

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The initiative will mobilise stakeholders to invest in new platforms and products to increase access to digital financial products and services for women in Africa.

"Through these efforts, through this Global Acceleration Plan, we are moving ever closer to realising our goal of economic justice and rights for women," the President said.

The Generation Equality Forum (GEF) is a global gathering to accelerate gender equality actions and mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

It is convened by United Nations Women and co-hosted by the governments of Mexico and France, in partnership with co-leaders from the Global South and Global North, civil society and the private sector.

South Africa participated actively in the negotiations for the Global Acceleration Plan (GAP) of the Economic Justice and Rights Action Coalition, which presents a clear action plan of commitments and actions that stakeholders must take to advance economic justice and rights.
President Cyril Ramaphosa is today undertaking a working visit to the Republic of Zambia to attend the State Funeral Service of Dr Kenneth Kaunda, founding President of Zambia.

President Kaunda passed away last Thursday at the age of 97.

The 97-year-old was regarded as the country's founding father after he became the nation's first democratically elected President, after Zambia gained its independence in 1964.

President Ramaphosa will deliver a message of support to the Zambian people on behalf of the government and people of South Africa.

Kaunda stood alongside the people of South Africa at the time of their greatest need and was unwavering in his desire for the achievement of their freedom.

It was in honour of this remarkable contribution that the South African government bestowed on President Kaunda the Order of the Companions of OR Tambo in 2002.

Following the passing of Dr Kaunda, the South African Government declared a period of mourning for 10 days with the National Flag flying at half-mast at all flag stations.

President Ramaphosa is supported by the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Dr Naledi Pandor and Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, Gwede Mantashe.
analysis

The law has no absolute character and always reflects the balance of social forces at the time it was written. It is a terrain of struggle, not a replacement for struggle.

Three forms of oppressive authority, all intensely patriarchal, have met significant challenges in recent weeks.

The judgment that the high court in Pietermaritzburg handed down on 11 June struck a major blow at the Ingonyama Trust, an oppressive relic of the dying days of apartheid, and its merciless exploitation of some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

The police attacked pro-democracy protesters in Mbabane, eSwatini, on 25 June. It is said that a father rushing to the aid of his child, who had collapsed after breathing in tear gas, was shot in the back. This ignited an uprising across the country against the tyranny of King Mswati III, which was met with deadly violence from the dictatorship's military. At the time of writing, it is being reported that Mswati's soldiers have murdered around 40 people.

And on 29 June the Constitutional Court sentenced Jacob Zuma, who led an often criminal and violently repressive kleptocracy, to prison for his refusal to accept the authority of the judicial system.

Two of these blows were struck by the law, the other by popular defiance on the streets. Each of them is welcome.

Law and struggle

The law was not given to us by a bearded patriarch descending from a sacred mountain with stone tablets inscribed with fire by divine power. It is written by fallible people, as an expression of the balance of social forces at particular moments in history. Globally, many - if not most - of the advances in law have been won by struggle, including the sort of insurrectionary struggle that is playing out in eSwatini. Demands that arrive on a national stage animated by real material power via the messiness of the riot can, in time, be affirmed in the formal language of the law, sometimes in elegant soaring prose. Nonetheless, there is no system of law that does not have limits and contradictions.

Moreover, for as long as access to the law remains commodified, it will always be a terrain on which the rich and powerful are given massive advantages over the majority. It can be a terrain of struggle, but that terrain is not democratic. However, although the advantages a commodified legal system provides to the powerful are systemic, and often insurmountable for most people, they are not absolute. There are, around the world, occasions on which the oppressed score significant victories against their oppressors.

In South Africa, our Constitution emerges from a political compromise and it is always necessary to be clear-eyed about its limits. Nonetheless, it marks a moment in which an incoming tide of social hope, and commitment to concrete social aspirations and guarantees, reached far higher than the low tide engendered by the cynicism, weariness and rot of the present - a degeneration of social hope in which Zuma played a significant role.

The affirmation of the universal - a universal right to dignity, equality and access to a circumscribed set of freedoms - written into the Constitution is often little more than elegant prose functioning as ideological cover for a filthy political and social system in which the idea that each person should count as a person, and no more or less than others, is wildly fantastical. But the moments, rare as they are, in which that promise is realised in cases brought by oppressed people that result in judgments that mark material improvements in the situation of the oppressed can take on a transcendent dimension. They can remind both the oppressed and their oppressors that, somewhere in the everyday hypocrisy, corruption, sadism and violence of our society, the usually hidden seed of commitment to real equality endures.

Alliances between lawyers and activists

There was a period shortly after the turn of the last century in which Ashraf Cassiem of the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town conceived of tactics, sometimes described as guerrilla law, to make autonomous interventions on the legal terrain. He did this via forms of self-representation and disruption that did not require access to the law to be mediated through the often, although not always, liberal politics of pro bono law firms.

But today, outside of the crudely trumped-up criminal cases that activists must regularly confront and the legal strategies of relatively well-resourced trade unions, it is usually pro bono law firms that represent popular interests in the courts. Some of these firms, such as the Socio-Economic Rights Institute in Johannesburg, which takes on the more immediately contextual work of what has been called "movement lawyering" rather than a single-minded search for better jurisprudence, have won deep respect from grassroots activists.

The victories won by alliances between progressive lawyers and activists are usually defensive. They can sometimes stop illegal state action and buy time for people to organise or undertake direct action. Astute activists recognise this and simultaneously use the law to stop evictions, and collective organisation and land occupations to seize and hold land. Law is used to enable rather than substitute for struggle.

The state

The state uses the law in very different ways. It jails people for infractions of petty laws, often resulting from impoverishment rather than deviance. It protects private property. It sends out armed men to dispossess people from occupied land. It crushes autonomously organised strikes.

But the state has a complex character. The same person who appreciates and welcomes the state when it provides vaccinations, or acts against an employer whose exploitation exceeds the bounds of the law, receives it as a cruel and violent imposition when it sends armed men to destroy their home, leaving a child's school books scattered in the mud and a family facing a cold winter night in the open.

In South Africa, as in the United States, Brazil or Australia, the criminal justice system overwhelmingly targets people who are impoverished and Black. It is a largely illegitimate mechanism of oppression. But those occasions on which the rich and powerful are subject to the same rules, processes and consequences as everyone else often affirm a certain kind of equality and that there is a barrier to the desire for absolute impunity on the part of the powerful.

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Struggle is always undertaken on the existing terrain of social life. As a result, just as the defeat of the Ingonyama Trust is widely experienced as a victory, so too is the sentence handed down to Zuma. It could even be said, without exaggeration, that both judgments are redemptive moments, rare redemptive movements in a long succession of hard years.

But we must not forget that when the law does offer possibilities for the affirmation of equality - limits to the oppressive power of the state and other forces such as capital, xenophobes, violently patriarchal men and so on - it does so as a result of an accumulation of struggle, some of which reaches back hundreds of years and frequently includes the kinds of resistance under way in eSwatini.

If the struggle against King Mswati III's dictatorship - which like the power of late King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu was enthusiastically backed by the apartheid state - succeeds and a constituent assembly is elected, the dialectic between struggle and law would again be concretised before our eyes. It would be another occasion on which history takes on the dizzying velocity of moments of great change.
The World Food Programme (WFP) resumed its operations in the Tigray region of Ethiopia after fighting had halted its emergency response.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has resumed operations in Ethiopia's Tigray region, after fighting halted the emergency response last week, although the agency warned on Friday that "serious challenges" continue to threaten the entire humanitarian response.

WFP on Thursday reached 10,000 people displaced by conflict with emergency food assistance and gave nutritionally fortified food to 3,000 women and children, many suffering from malnutrition. The agency hopes to reach 30,000 people in Northwest Tigray by the weekend.

"We have the teams on the ground, trucks loaded and ready to go to meet the catastrophic food needs in the region, said Tommy Thompson, WFP's Emergency Coordinator based in regional capital Mekelle.

'Dramatic' changes on the ground

Following a ceasefire declaration by the Ethiopian Government earlier this week, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a flash update on Friday that the political dynamics in the Tigray Region have changed "dramatically".

Since Monday's unilateral ceasefire, the Tigray Defense Forces have reportedly taken control, as Ethiopian and Eritrean forces withdrew from the capital, Mekelle, and other parts of the region.

At the same time, humanitarian operations in Tigray remain fluid.

Key bridges, including one over the Tekeze River, crucial to delivering life-saving food, have been destroyed - hampering assistance to a region in which 91 per cent of the population are in dire need, said OCHA.

Amidst obstacles, relief forthcoming

WFP is warning of serious challenges threatening the entire humanitarian response in the region.

As some of the last of WFP's food stocks are now being delivered to families, the UN agency warned that lives would be lost if supply routes do not fully open, and combatants continue to disrupt or endanger the free movement of its humanitarian cargo.

"What we need now is free, unfettered access and secure passage guaranteed by all parties to the conflict so we can deliver food safely", said WFP's Mr. Thompson.

Hunger at a peak

While WFP is adjusting its supply lines and exploring alternative routes into Tigray, the destruction of bridges is further hampering the distribution of food into the region from Gondar, in the northwest.

"WFP requires safety and security for our staff, our partners, the people we serve and the assistance we provide, to reach millions of people in need of emergency food and nutrition support when hunger peaks in the coming months", added the local emergency coordinator.

Region unravelling

Banks have closed in Tigray and fuel and electricity are in short supply. Electricity and mobile networks have been cut, leaving communications possible only via satellite phones and ground stations with a dish antenna, available in only a few agency compounds, according to OCHA.

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And shortages of cash and fuel in the region not only exacerbate the already dire humanitarian situation but also threaten to compromise aid workers on the ground.

At the same time, since 22 June, no WFP flights for UN and non-governmental organization (NGOs) humanitarian staff have been authorized and the Ethiopian aviation authority has halted civilian flights into the region.

This means that humanitarian staff cannot be rotated in and out of Tigray by air.

Despite the dynamic and uncertain situation, UN partners have reported over the past few days, that the general security situation has been calm, albeit with limited humanitarian activities around Mekelle and the town of Shire.
New York  Angolan authorities should drop criminal defamation charges against journalists Coque Mukuta and Escrivao Jose, stop pursuing such cases against the press, and ensure that journalism is not criminalized, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

On June 17, Angolan judicial authorities charged Coque Mukuta, editor of privately owned news website O Decreto and a correspondent for the U.S. Congress-funded Voice of America, and Escrivao Jose, editor of privately owned newspaper Hora H, with criminal defamation after two ruling party officials filed separate complaints about their journalism, according to the journalists, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app. Mukuta said he was charged for an article he wrote in O Decreto.

According to the Angolan penal code, the charge of criminal defamation carries a sentence of up to 18 months in prison or a variable fine at the discretion of the judge.

Since March 2021, CPJ has documented at least six other cases of criminal defamation complaints against journalists in Angola. The country is scheduled to hold a national election in 2022, though a date has not been set, according to Angola's state news agency.

"The latest criminal defamation investigations into journalists in Angola demonstrate a renewed push by politicians to silence those in the media who are exposing corruption ahead of next year's election," said Angela Quintal, CPJ's Africa program coordinator. "The criminal defamation charges against Coque Mukuta, Escrivao Jose, and other journalists must be dropped immediately, and prosecutors should guard against the criminal justice system being abused for political ends."

In addition to the criminal defamation charges, both Mukuta and Jose were placed under "term of identity and residence" orders that prevent them from traveling outside of Luanda for an undetermined length of time depending on how their cases progress, the journalists told CPJ. Mukuta's order includes a provision that prevents him from leaving his house for more than five days without notifying the attorney general's office, he said.

Mukuta told CPJ that he was charged with criminal defamation after the deputy governor of the northern Cuanza-Norte province, Leonor Garibaldi, filed a complaint against him over an August 3, 2020, article he wrote for O Decreto criticizing Angolan President Joao Lourenco for alleged inaction on corruption in the province. He believes that the criticism of the president is the main reason for the complaint.

In a phone call with CPJ, Garibaldi said she felt she was falsely accused of corruption in the story and that the journalist did not seek comment from her before publishing, and now should be forced to provide proof of his allegations.

Mukuta told CPJ that he sought comment from the government of the province.

Jose told CPJ that prosecutors charged him after Cuanza-Norte Governor Adriano de Carvalho filed a complaint against him for an article Hora H republished that originally appeared on TV N'Zinga, a news website published on Facebook, in June 2020 about the alleged beating and torturing of a man who had criticized the Carvalho government on social media.

CPJ was unable to locate a link to the report as it appeared on either outlet, but TV N'Zinga editor Capita Inga, the author of the piece, republished it on his personal Facebook page.

Inga told CPJ via messaging app that he had been twice summoned for questioning last year by the office of the attorney general in Cuanza-Norte after Carvalho filed a similar defamation complaint against him over the same article. Inga's defense lawyer requested that the case be transferred to Luanda, where Inga resides, and Inga has not yet been questioned in the case, the journalist said.

Coque Mukuta, editor of O Decreto and a correspondent for Voice of America (left), was charged with criminal defamation over his journalism while Capita Inga, editor of TV N'Zinga (right), was summoned for questioning over a criminal defamation complaint due to his journalism. (Photo at left by by Coque Mukuta; photo at right by Adelino Punga)

In a call with CPJ, Carvalho said that his family was bullied due to the reports in Hora H and TV N'Zinga, with people saying awful things to his daughter, though he did not elaborate. Carvalho said he wrote to the Angolan media regulatory body with his complaints about the reporting but did not receive a reply. He said that he wanted the journalists to provide proof of the claims in their reporting.

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CPJ called Angola's media regulatory body, the Entity for Regulation of Angolan Social Communication (ERCA) but no one picked up. CPJ also sent emails and a message through the body's website but did not receive a reply.

Alvaro Joao, a spokesperson for the attorney general's office, told CPJ in a call that authorities "have to open investigations and follow up on complaints made by anyone who feels aggrieved and that the various investigations into journalists are not a choice or persecution but merely legal procedure."

Jose said that he has been investigated for 12 other criminal defamation charges since 2011. "With so many crimes to investigate in Angola, authorities chase journalists, and the intimidation is only going to get worse until [the 2022] elections as politicians in government scramble to keep a good image," he told CPJ.
With cases now doubling in Africa every three weeks, the Delta variant of COVID-19 has spread to 16 countries and it is present in three of the five nations reporting the highest caseloads. The variant is the most contagious yet - up to 60% more transmissible than other variants.

Along with Alpha and Beta, Delta is fuelling an aggressive third wave across Africa, with case numbers climbing faster than all earlier peaks, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

WHO experts warned on Thursday that the numbers have increased for six consecutive weeks, up by 25% last week, reaching 202,000 positive cases. Deaths also rose by 15% across 38 African countries, to nearly 3,000.

Young adults hit

The Delta variant, initially identified in India, is now dominant in South Africa, which accounted for more than half of Africas cases last week. Moreover, the variant was detected in 97% of the samples sequenced in Uganda and 79% of those sequenced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The variant also seems to be fueling illness among young adults. According to WHO experts. In Uganda for example, 66% of severe illness in people younger than 45, is attributed to Delta.

"The speed and scale of Africa's third wave is like nothing we've seen before. The rampant spread of more contagious variants pushes the threat to Africa up to a whole new level. More transmission means more serious illness and more deaths, so everyone must act now and boost prevention measures to stop an emergency becoming a tragedy," said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHOs regional director for Africa.

Alpha and Beta

The Alpha and Beta variants have been also reported in 32 and 27 countries respectively. Alpha has been detected in most countries in north, west and central Africa, while Beta is more widespread in the south. Both are considerably more transmissible than the original virus.

With rising case numbers and hospitalizations across the continent, WHO estimates that oxygen demand in Africa is now 50% greater than for the first wave peak, one year ago.

Lack of shots

Eight vaccines have been approved for the WHO emergency use listing, however, shipments to Africa have, in effect, dried up.

"While supply challenges grind on, dose sharing can help plug the gap. We are grateful for the pledges made by our international partners, but we need urgent action on allocations. Africa must not be left languishing in the throes of its worst wave yet," added Dr. Moeti.

Only 15 million people - a mere 1.2% of the African population - are fully vaccinated.

Delta dominant in Europe 'by August'

Meanwhile in Europe, a ten-week decline in the number of COVID-19 cases in the 53 countries that the WHO analyses, has come to an end.

The regional director for the UN health agency, Hans Kluge, informed on Thursday that last week the number of cases rose by 10%, driven by increased mixing, travel, gatherings, and easing of social restrictions.

"This is taking place in the context of a rapidly evolving situation - a new variant of concern, the Delta variant - and in a region where despite tremendous efforts by Member States, millions remain unvaccinated", he explained.

Mr. Kluge said that the Delta variant overtakes alpha very quickly through multiple and repeated introductions and is already translating into increased hospitalizations and deaths.

"By August, the WHO European Region will be Delta dominant", the expert underscored.

New wave of deaths

However, by August, Europe will not be sufficiently immunized, with 63% of people currently still waiting for their first jab, and the region will still be mostly loosening restrictions, with increasing travel and gatherings, Dr. Kluge warned.

"The three conditions for a new wave of excess hospitalizations and deaths before the autumn are therefore in place: new variants, (a) deficit in vaccine uptake, increased social mixing; and there will be a new wave in the WHO European Region unless we remained disciplined", he said.

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Vaccines are effective

Mr. Kluge reminded that vaccines are effective against the Delta variant: "not one dose but two doses",

He added that delays in getting vaccinated cost lives and the economies, and the slower vaccination programmes are, the more variants will emerge.

"We see many countries doing well, but the truth is that the average vaccine coverage in the region is 24% only, and more serious, half of our elders and 40% of our health care workers are still unprotected. That's unacceptable", the expert said, explaining that with these figures, the pandemic is nowhere over.

"And it would be very wrong for anyone - citizens and policymakers - to assume that it is".
A small child eats a nutritious high-energy biscuit at a school that has been converted into a shelter in the Tigray region where the UN humanitarian agency OCHA estimates that 91 per cent of the population is in dire need of food assistance.

press release

Secretary-General Should Press for a Sustained Crisis Response

The United Nations Security Council should urgently act to address the dire human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ethiopias northern Tigray region, Human Rights Watch said today. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres should press the Security Council to meet regularly and publicly on the situation, which has triggered a man-made humanitarian crisis and been characterized by widespread atrocities, including massacres and horrific sexual violence.

At the request of Ireland, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and with the support of France, Estonia, and Norway, the Security Council is expected to hold its first open meeting on Tigray on July 2, 2021. However, the meeting will be held under the agenda item, peace and security in Africa, which does not ensure any sustained attention to Tigray afterward.

For eight months, the Security Council has failed to even meet publicly on Tigray, let alone act to prevent further atrocities, said Akshaya Kumar, crisis advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. Convening an open briefing is a start but given the councils abdication of its responsibilities, diplomats need to move from making statements to taking action.

Since the start of the conflict in November 2020, the Security Council has issued a single media statement on Tigrays human rights and humanitarian crisis. The council has kept its deliberations and diplomacy behind closed doors despite abuses that the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Rights groups have documented large-scale massacres, summary executions, widespread sexual violence, indiscriminate shelling, pillage, destruction of crops and refugee camps, attacks on civilian infrastructure, such as factories, schools, and hospitals, and obstruction of humanitarian assistance, leaving millions at risk of famine.

Previous attempts to schedule a public session on Tigray were reported to have been blocked by Russia and China. India, Kenya, Niger, Tunisia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have also been reluctant to support public engagement on the issue. The July 2 open session could be a turning point in international engagement for preventing further atrocities in Tigray, Human Rights Watch said.

The request for the session came after nearly two weeks of heavy fighting in Tigray, during which three aid workers were killed, airstrikes hit a marketplace, and the Tigrayan armed group, known as the Tigrayan Defense Forces, took over key towns and areas, including Tigrays regional capital, Mekelle.

On June 28, the Ethiopian government announced a unilateral ceasefire, citing humanitarian reasons. But the government again cut off communications and basic services and is limiting access within and to the region. On July 1, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that a key access bridge on the Tekeze River was destroyed and that a convoy of 29 trucks carrying food aid was denied access to Tigray and forced to turn back.

The humanitarian needs in Tigray have reached a dire point. The Security Council should immediately add Ethiopia to its formal agenda and request regular briefings from the secretary-general on the situation. If the council is unable to reach agreement on the need to address the issue, the secretary-general should step in to urge sustained attention to the crisis.

Given the scale of the crisis, scrutiny at the UN needs to go hand-in-hand with swift, concrete actions by UN member countries aimed at promoting accountability for grave violations and preventing further atrocities, including individual sanctions on those responsible for violating international human rights and humanitarian law, prosecutions of those responsible for serious international crimes, and an arms embargo, Human Rights Watch said.

Its a travesty that the Security Council still doesnt consider Ethiopia among the dozens of issues and countries that are formally on its agenda, Kumar said. If council members wont take that step, then the secretary-general would be justified to bang down the door. Not only is the UNs credibility on the line, but millions of lives are at stake as well.

Five Pathways for Sustained UN Scrutiny on Tigray

The crisis in Tigray warrants sustained public scrutiny by the UN Security Council, the main UN body tasked with monitoring and acting on threats to international peace and security. If the council fails to add the Tigray crisis to its agenda, there are five pathways for Secretary-General Guterres to use his authority to ring the alarm bell and push for sustained Security Council attention:

Attacks on and Obstruction of Medical Assistance

UN Security Council resolution 2286 condemns attacks on medical facilities and health workers in conflicts and calls on all parties to armed conflicts to respect international law, to prevent attacks, and to hold those responsible to account. It also asks the secretary-general to bring to the attention of the Security Council situations in which the delivery of medical assistance to populations in need is being obstructed by parties to the armed conflict. Attacks on healthcare workers and facilities have been a constant theme of the ongoing conflict in Tigray.

Human Rights Watch documented the looting and pillage of health facilities in the town of Axum in November 2020. In March, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) described these attacks as deliberate and widespread attack on health care after finding that 70 percent of the health facilities it surveyed in the region had either been intentionally destroyed or opportunistically looted. More recently, OCHA reported that Eritrean government forces stopped and assaulted a vaccination team in Asgede Woreda, North-Western Zone on June 17.

On June 22, Ethiopian government forces blocked ambulances from responding to an airstrike at a market in Togoga, and on June 25, MSF confirmed the murder of three of its staff near Abi Addi. Guterres issued a statement that he was deeply shocked by the murder of MSF staff, which he described as an unacceptable and appalling violation of international humanitarian law.

Conflict-Induced Famine

The Security Council has asked the secretary-general to alert it swiftly when the risk of conflict-induced famine and widespread food insecurity in armed conflict contexts occurs. UN Security Council resolution 2417 expresses its intention to give its full attention to such information provided by the secretary-general when those situations are brought to its attention. On May 25, OCHA provided council members with a white paper referring to Security Council resolution 2417 and outlining food security risks in Tigray.

In early June, the UN and other aid agencies found that over 350,000 people in Tigray were starving. UNICEF said that at least 33,000 children in inaccessible parts of Tigray were severely malnourished and face imminent death without immediate help. UNICEF also projects that almost six times as many children will need support to treat acute malnutrition as compared to their average annual caseload for the region.

On June 15, the Security Council held an informal interactive dialogue on the situation, but did not meet publicly. In the past, the Security Council has received white papers that referred to resolution 2417 regarding South Sudan in July 2018, Yemen in October 2018, the Democratic Republic of Congo, northeast Nigeria, South Sudan, and Yemen in September 2020. All of those previous white papers resulted in open and public Security Council discussions of conflict-induced food insecurity.

Conflict-Related Sexual Violence

Reports of widespread rape and other sexual violence of women and girls have characterized the conflict in Tigray. However, the Security Council has not adequately engaged its various mechanisms, including its Informal Working Group on Women Peace and Security, to address the situation. UN Security Council resolution 1888 calls upon the secretary-general take the appropriate measures to deploy rapidly a team of experts to situations of particular concern with respect to sexual violence in armed conflict. He should do so in Tigray.

In resolution 2467, the Security Council further asked the secretary-general to ensure arrangements to monitor and report on sexual violence in conflicts, specifically to address sexual violence used as a tactic of war. In its resolution 1960, the Security Council "encouraged the secretary-general to enhance data collection and analysis of incidents, trends, and patterns of rape and other forms of sexual violence to assist the Councils consideration of appropriate actions.

In April 2021, the secretary-general's special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Pramila Patten, sounded the alarm, telling the Security Council that in Tigray women and girls are being subjected to sexual violence with a level of cruelty beyond comprehension. She said that healthcare workers were documenting new cases of rape and gang rape daily. OCHA reported at least 504 cases of gender-based violence, including rape, in May 2021, including 69 cases against girls under 18, and 129 cases during the first week of June 2021 alone. Survivors and service providers have also reported their fear of reprisals and attacks on the limited shelters and clinics still in operation.

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Regional and Cross-Border Dimensions

Article 99 of the UN Charter empowers the secretary-general with an explicit political responsibility to formally bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security. The fighting in Tigray has also involved Eritrean forces that have been accused of serious atrocities.

Preliminary findings by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found grave violations committed by Eritrean forces in Axum and Dengelet. In March, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed acknowledged that Eritrean troops had crossed into border areas. He said that Eritrea had agreed to withdraw its troops, but Eritrean troops have remained in Ethiopia.

Available information indicates that the armed conflict continues.

The conflict in Tigray has forced at least 70,000 people to flee into Sudan, led to the destruction of two refugee camps that hosted around 20,000 Eritrean refugees, and also exacerbated cross-border clashes with the Sudanese Armed Forces in eastern Sudan.

Communications Disruption and Internet Shutdowns

At the outbreak of conflict in November, phone and internet communications were swiftly cut to the Tigray region. After months, services and network coverage resumed, but communication blockades have continued to be imposed on the Tigray region, particularly in phases when fighting has escalated. Currently, neither phone nor internet services are functional in the entire region.

On June 28, United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Henrietta Fore publicly condemned the Ethiopian National Defense Force for entering UN offices in Tigray and dismantling communications equipment. On June 29, the Security Council held an open debate on cybersecurity, with council members, including Estonia and the United States, discussing the importance of an open, free, and stable cyberspace. Internet shutdowns deny people access to critical information, the ability to express themselves, work, learn, and access social services, Human Rights Watch said.
document

United Nations 

Thank you, Mr. President. And let me start by thanking our esteemed colleague from Estonia for chairing us last month in such an extraordinarily successful way. Id also like to thank all the briefers for your comprehensive briefing on the ongoing crisis in Tigray. The United States deeply appreciates the work you and your teams have done and that you continue to do. I also want to thank my colleagues on the Council for participating in todays open briefing.

In recent months, the Council has been briefed and discussed the situation in Tigray privately a half dozen times. Weve heard from NGOs and UN agencies about vast displacements, countless human rights abuses, hundreds of thousands of people facing famine, the bombing of civilians, the killing and intimidation of humanitarian workers, the systematic rape of women and girls and unspeakable acts of sexual violence, the purposeful obstruction of humanitarian aid, the deliberate destruction of UN communications equipment. Tragically, these stories remain pervasive.

As OCHA told us recently, tragedies of historic proportions are taking place in Tigray, and thats why we called for this meeting today. Its important for the people of the region to hear our voices and to know they havent been forgotten and for the parties to the conflict to know that we are watching. We know that millions of civilians in the region are desperately suffering, and we called for todays briefing because the conflict needs to end. We need to marshal more funding and scale up the UN response, we need to ensure respect for international humanitarian law and humanitarian access, and we need public accountability for the atrocities that have been committed.

This week, the government unilaterally announced a ceasefire, stating it was doing so for humanitarian purposes. The government must now demonstrate that it truly intends to use the ceasefire to address the humanitarian catastrophe in Tigray. In fact, Ethiopian forces looted the offices of humanitarian aid organizations and destroyed communications equipment as they retreated from Mekelle. And this is beyond acceptable. All equipment looted must be returned.

We have also since learned that one or two  one or more  bridges were destroyed along critical access routes to Tigray. Access by road and by air, which along with electricity, telecoms, banking activity, and fuel supplies are essential to enable aid delivery  these are being denied, and we heard that today from OCHA. Humanitarian workers are reporting that it is more difficult to reach desperate people in Tigray now than it was just a week ago. Such acts, if verified, are not an indication of a humanitarian ceasefire, but of a siege. The Ethiopian government can and should prove this analysis wrong by providing unhindered movement of humanitarian supplies, commodities, and personnel into and throughout Tigray. If they do not, we believe hundreds of thousands of people could starve to death.

Once again: We need access. We need aid. And we need to end the conflict. Instead of further escalation, we need all parties to negotiate a true ceasefire  and then to honor that ceasefire. To be clear, this includes the Tigrayan forces  the TDF  which must also demonstrate that they will abide by international humanitarian law and work peacefully and within legal frameworks toward a peaceful solution. And there is more we need to know about the actions of other forces in the region. For the time being, with the governments ceasefire declaration in place, we have a precious opportunity. Now is the time to secure peace. Right now.

The members of this Council can help translate this ceasefire declaration  first into a sustainable peace, and then into dialogue, reconciliation, and healing. If the parties to the conflict fail to seize this moment, the consequences for the people of Ethiopia will be devastating. More fighting. More famine. More abuses. More suffering by ordinary Ethiopians. And a far more destabilized Horn of Africa. Further fighting poses a risk to the integrity of the Ethiopian state, and to the stability of the entire region.

A meaningful ceasefire deal would affirm the redeployment of forces and the complete withdrawal of Eritrean troops and Amhara regional forces. It would facilitate unhindered humanitarian access. It would affirm neither the internal nor external borders of Ethiopia will be changed by force and in contravention of the constitution. And it should lay the groundwork for discussions toward political solutions to the crisis.

We must also recognize the wider political context in which this crisis has unfolded  both last months national election and the extraordinary transition that began several years ago, but which remains very much unfinished. The United States commends those Ethiopians who exercised their right to vote last month. Elections alone, however, cannot revoke the escalating polarization that has plagued the country. The next step is to move toward genuine political reform. Ethiopians must come together to confront the countrys growing divisions and preserve the future of their rich and dynamic society. And if this dialogue is to succeed  either in the short term or in breaking long-term cycles of violence  all Ethiopians must be able to call it their own.

Equally important will be credible and independent mechanisms for justice and accountability for the atrocities that have been committed. And to that end, we welcome the ongoing investigation by the OHCHR and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission. And we strongly support the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights Commission of Inquiry as it fully and independently investigates violations, abuses, and atrocities taking place in Ethiopia.

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This includes last weeks senseless killing of three Doctors Without Borders workers, which we condemn in the strongest terms. In recent days, Ive been deeply disturbed to hear from NGOs on the ground about other ways their personnel are being deliberately targeted for harassment and violence. This must stop. And accountability of the perpetrators must be done.

The United States stands ready to assist Ethiopia in solidifying and implementing a ceasefire, providing life-saving humanitarian aid, and resolving this devastating conflict. Were also standing ready to support the wider, necessary dialogue across Ethiopia, and toward democratic renewal, national unity, and peace. The Security Council should step up to these tasks as well.

We must use this opportunity to protect and save the lives of the people in Tigray as they continue to face famine, displacement, and violence. And we must do everything in our power to bring all Ethiopians together for the future security, stability, prosperity of their country.

Thank you very much.
Nigerian Women Part of Reintegration of Ex-Boko Haram Militants

The government's efforts to reintegrate former Boko Haram militants have seen hundreds go through rehabilitation. The UN Women International Organisation for Migration, as well as the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, have called for the inclusion of women in the reintegration, reconciliation, and rehabilitation process in the northeast. They have stressed the need for women's participation in the states ravaged by the Boko Haram insurgency, to achieve better results.

The organisers noted that projects on disengagement, disassociation, reintegration, and reconciliation are already underway in the northeast region despite the challenges of ongoing hostilities. But they decried that these peace-making processes are often led and dominated by men, hence the need for a dialogue on inclusion. Thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced since the start of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009.
Kenyan Farmers Tap Into Apps to Work Smarter

DigiFarm, a free service from telecoms giant Safaricom, was launched in 2017 - but the bulk of its current 1.4 million users signed up after the pandemic hit, said Elizabeth Mudogo, customer experience lead at DigiFarm. After ordering through the app, farmers receive SMS notifications when their goods are ready for collection at a local depot - the company has nearly 30 in Bomet alone - and they can obtain store credit and be eligible for discounts.

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Kenyan company Twiga Foods has seen a jump in the number of farmers using its digital platform Soko Yetu (Our Market) to reach customers without going through expensive brokers. According to the firm's Chief Technology Officer, Caine Wanjau, Twiga, which launched in 2014, "harvests and buys produce from its member farms, then takes the goods to collection centres for processing and packaging."

A report by consultancy McKinsey indicates that farmers across sub-Saharan Africa are using more than 400 apps and digital platforms for everything from accessing financial services and planting advice to supply-chain management.

According to Kenya government figures, there are about 4.5 million small-scale farmers in Kenya and their collective output accounts for more than 60% of the country's food, writes Wesley Langat for Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Rwandan Drone Venture Raises U.S.$250 Million for Expansion

Zipline, arguably the world's largest drone delivery service for medical supplies which was founded in Rwanda has raised U.S.$250 million in new equity financing, bringing the company's valuation to U.S.$2.75 billion, writes Collins Mwai for The New Times.

The new financing will enable Zipline to continue advancing its integrated service, including its autonomy platform, aircraft, fulfilment systems, and operations. The funding will also fuel continued expansion into new industries and geographies, transforming systems like healthcare and commerce with instant logistics.
#Comunicado | El MINJUSDH, @MinamPeru y @MininterPeru lamentan el sensible fallecimiento del senor Mario Marco Lopez Huanca de la comunidad nativa Shirarine del distrito de Puerto Bermudez, provincia de Oxapampa, departamento de Pasco. https://t.co/HTUni8KXQ6
Lamento profundamente el fallecimiento del defensor ambiental Mario Lopez Huanca. Mis sentidas condolencias a sus familiares y entorno cercano. https://t.co/ODNhz8S380
The warning is given because many people are overconfident after receiving the first jab, as they think it provides adequate protection against the coronavirus and its variants.

In this sense, the study titled " SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England " proved the need to administer both doses of the vaccine, three weeks apart.

According to this publication, it has been shown that when a single dose is applied, protection against the Delta variant stands at merely 38% . However, when both jabs are administered, the percentage rises to 80%.
"() and that is valid not only for the Peruvian case, but for any observation that is conducted; it (the OAS) publishes its final report when the process is completed and, as we know, the process in Peru has not finished because, according to the Constitution and Peruvian laws, it ends when the JNE proclaims the winning formula," he said in remarks to RPP radio and TV station.





The diplomat explained that, for this reason, the OAS Electoral Observation Mission awaits the official results of the June 6 presidential runoff election between candidates Pedro Castillo and Keiko Fujimori to finish preparing the aforementioned report, which will be presented "a few days later."

De Zela confirmed that he had not made representations to OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro regarding the electoral process in the South American country and discarded the versions that said otherwise.





Likewise, he indicated that in his capacity as permanent representative of Peru to the OAS he has a fluid working relationship with Almagro, being that they meet periodically to discuss issues of the same hemispheric organization.





"It was a private conversation. What I can assure you is that I did not do anything about the electoral process in Peru, and I have not done it because I did not receive instructions to do so. The Foreign Affairs Ministry is professional, decisions are made in Lima, and they give us the right instructions to execute them. Given that there was no instruction in the sense of influencing the OAS, I did not carry out any action on this issue," he added.





The ambassador also pointed out that the OAS is an organization of States, and they are the ones that activate the tasks carried out by this body.





In the Peruvian case, to activate any action, the request "would have to have come from the Executive Branch or the JNE , and that has not happened," he noted.





Lastly, De Zela specified that the Diplomatic Service Law provides that retirement is when the age of 70 is reached, something that will happen, in his case, on August 4.




13:32 | Castilla (Arequipa region), Jul. 2.

In southern Arequipa region , nursing licentiate Maria del Carmen Abarca and nursing technician Nilton Quispe did not hesitate to travel via breeches buoy so as to vaccinate older adults suffering from mobility difficulties.









This way, the Regional Health Management (Geresa) of Arequipa through the Castilla Condesuyos La Union Health Network and the Huancarqui Micro Health Network continues its daily fight against COVID-19 administering doses sent by Minsa  to protect the most vulnerable population in the area.









"I had to go find a lady in Huatiapa, who recently had hip injury and was not going to be able to come to us, also my grandparents who, due to health problems, cannot move; thus, we went to look for them," Abarca recalled.





This situation occurs very often in remote areas of this region, so health personnel have to seek different strategies to reach out to the population.





This is the case of this team of professionals who in order to reach out to the elderly had to cross the Majes River via a mechanism that consists of a table or basket stretched between the two banks of a river or channel to move from one end to the other.





"This time, we protected eight grandparents from Huatiapa population center; we feel calmer knowing that they received their second dose of the vaccine against coronavirus," Quispe said.





After completing their tasks, the greatest satisfaction of health personnel is the gratitude and affection received from patients, as it gives them the energy to continue with this task.
Suiza????sigue apoyando al Peru???? en lucha contra #COVID19. Hoy @MininterPeru recibio donacion de 250000 mascaras medicas para @PoliciaPeru de empresa????MJStepsGMBH. Min @PePeElice agradecio el gesto de solidaridad. @CancilleriaPeru @SwissMFA @SwissHumAidUnit @SwissDevCoop pic.twitter.com/LIThPq72lz
The crisis era in ancient Egypt led to a change in the sources of copper





Scientists have studied the composition of copper alloys from which ancient Egyptian funerary objects (mainly ushabti statuettes) were made after the end of the New Kingdom period at the turn of the 2nd-1st millennia BC. Results of the analysis showed that at this time the number of sources of copper available in Egypt had significantly decreased. Not only does this indicate a weakened economy that lost access to many metal resources, but it also helps to reconstruct the pattern of trade and exchange in the Middle East during the Early Iron Age. The study is reported in an article in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.





Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021

In the twelfth century BC, during the reign of the kings of the twentieth dynasty, Egypt entered a period of protracted crisis of the central government. Under Ramses XI (approximately 1105-1078 B.C.), the last pharaoh of the New Kingdom, it turned into a civil war, which ended in the division of the country. In Upper Egypt, in Thebes, power was seized by the higher priesthood (Herihor, who stood at its head, even assumed the official royal title), in the north, where the power of the pharaoh was formally retained, the noble courtier Nesubanebjed, known from the work of Manetho under the name of Smendes, ascended. After the death of Ramses XI he became the founder of the new XXI dynasty.





Internal turmoil also led to the fall of the international status of Egypt. It is vividly illustrated in the famous literary source of the 11th century BC- the papyrus 'Travels of Unu-Amon' - which describes the misadventures of a priest sent under Ramses XI to the Phoenician Byblos to procure cedar. Unu-Amon faced disdain from the rulers of several cities, even though the cultural influence that Egypt had over the Levant for centuries persisted during this time of crisis. In the archaeology of the Near East, it is defined as the early Iron Age, but the traditions of cultural continuity from the previous Bronze Age were still quite strong.





Lower Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula showing the most important cities at the turn of the

2nd-1st millennia BC and the copper mines in Wadi Faynan and the Timna Valley

[Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]

Egypt could no longer regain its former greatness, achieving only episodic successes, such as the military expedition of the founding pharaoh of the XXII dynasty Sheshonk l to Judea. Losing its influence over neighbouring countries, Egypt also lost access to sources of metal, primarily copper. During the period of the New Kingdom Egypt received copper from numerous mines located in different regions: in Sinai, in Nubia, in South-West Asia, in Cyprus.





Meanwhile, among the artefacts that have come down from the era of the crisis (in Egyptology, it is called the Third Transitional Period), there are finds of bronze items. These include objects of funerary ritual. This means that the pharaohs still managed to get copper from some sources, although their numbers must have been noticeably reduced.





Ushabti of Pharaoh Psusennes I (XXI dynasty, second half of 9th century BC)

[Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]





Ushabti of Queen Mutnejemet, wife of Pharaoh Psusennes I

[Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]





X-ray of the Ushabti of Queen Mutnejemet

[Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]

Israeli researchers led by archaeologist Shirley Ben-Dor Evian from Tel Aviv University have analyzed the composition of copper alloys from which artefacts found in tombs from the 11th to 8th centuries BC were cast. Scientists were interested in the content of lead, tin, arsenic, antimony and other impurities by which it is possible to establish from which deposit the copper originates.





Samples were taken from six exhibits in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. These are four ushabti figurines from the tombs of Tanis (the capital of the XXI dynasty) and two objects of the eighth century: a figurine (possibly also ushabti) of Pharaoh Bakenraneph (Bokhoris) of the XXIV dynasty from Sais and a scarab bearing the name of Pharaoh Shabaki of the XXV (the so-called Kushite) Dynasty.





Ushabti of the Warlord Wendjebenjedet during the reign of Psusennes I

[Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]





Ushabti of the Warlord Wendjebenjedet during the reign of Psusennes I

[Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]





In order to identify places where there is no later contamination distorting the result, all the objects were examined under a stereomicroscope and subjected to X-rays. Scientists then determined the composition of the samples (30-70 milligrams each) using mass spectrometry and atomic emission spectral analysis. All measurements for each sample were made twice to exclude laboratory contamination.





It turned out that the ushabti of the XXI dynasty, made in the XI-X centuries BC, have a much lower lead content (from 0.21 to 0.79 percent) than the later objects (the scarab contains 3.87 and the Bakenraneph figurine contains 10.82 per cent). In terms of isotopic composition, the Tanis artifacts are close to copper from mines in the Wadi Fainan region and in the Timna valley, located on the border of the Sinai and the Arabian desert.





Figurine (possibly Ushabti) of Pharaoh Bakenraneph (Bokhoris), 8th century BC,

XXIV dynasty [Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]

Scarab with Pharaoh Shabaki's throne name, 8th century BC, XXV dynasty

[Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]

X-ray of a scarab bearing the name of King Shabaki

[Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]

Apparently the supply of metal from that area was quite stable, but the pharaohs did not receive copper from other sources at that time. Tin impurities - from 0.35 to 1.54 percent - most likely appeared in the metal from which the ushabti are cast, due to contamination of the crucibles. A similar phenomenon is familiar to archaeologists from studies of an earlier foundry of the New Kingdom era in Per-Ramses.





With regard to objects dating from the 8th century BC, the increased lead content in them can be interpreted as the result of deliberate alloying of copper with this metal, especially in the case of the figurine. Assuming that the lead content in the copper ore does not exceed two to five percent, the researchers tried to determine from the isotope ratio where the lead additive comes from. The most likely sources were deposits in Sardinia, in the Aegean region and on the southern Arabian Peninsula, while the least likely sources were in Egypt and Anatolia.





Lead isotope ratios in the examined artefacts and in copper from various deposits

(1-4 are Ushabti of the 11th century BC; 5,6 are objects of the 8th century BC)

[Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]

Lead isotope ratios in eighth-century BC objects and in lead ores from

various deposits [Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]

Lead isotope ratios in the examined artefacts and in previously

studied ancient Egyptian metal objects from different eras

[Credit: Shirly Ben-Dor Evian et al. 2021]

Consequently, at this time lead was delivered to Egypt from afar. Tin (which may have come from the crucible), arsenic and antimony were also found in the alloy of the figurine. The copper deposits of Wadi Faynan and the Timna Valley contain almost no such impurities, so it is likely that the copper comes from elsewhere. The composition of the alloy used to cast the scarab makes it impossible to judge the origin of its constituents with any certainty. Scientists nevertheless believe they also originate from different regions.





The results obtained show that the geography of the sources from which Egypt received such a sought-after resource as copper has changed over the two centuries of the crisis era. Apparently, the pharaohs during this time lost the use of the mines in the Timna Valley and in Wadi Faynan, but managed to find other ways to obtain the valuable commodity, not connected with the control of any particular deposit.





Author: Viner Andreeva | Source: N+1 [trsl. TANN; June 14, 2021]





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YEREVAN, JULY 2, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian visited the US Embassy in Yerevan ahead of the US Independence Day, the Presidential Office told Armenpress.

President Sarkissian congratulated Ambassador Lynne Tracy, the Embassy staff and the whole US people on the national day.

The Armenian President and the US Ambassador exchanged views on the agenda of the bilateral relations and the development prospects of the bilateral cooperation.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, JULY 2, ARMENPRESS. Human Rights Defender of Armenia Arman Tatoyan met with Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe Dunja Mijatovic in Strasbourg, the Ombudsmans Office told Armenpress.

The Ombudsman presented the CoE Human Rights Commissioner the urgency of the immediate return of Armenian prisoners of war from Azerbaijan, giving facts according to which the Azerbaijani side is holding the captives with gross violations of international humanitarian law.

Tatoyan also presented the gross violations of the rights of Armenias border residents by the Azerbaijani servicemen, the results of the fact-finding activities in Syunik and Gegharkunik provinces.

At the meeting the sides also discussed the situation of human rights in correctional facilities, detention places, as well as the protection of rights children, women and disabled persons.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, JULY 2, ARMENPRESS. Ambassador of China to Armenia Fan Yong denied the Azerbaijani media reports according to which Chinese Ambassador to Azerbaijan Guo Min has talked about the introduction of the Zangezur corridor in the Belt and Road initiative.

The Ambassador told reporters in Yerevan that they have discussed these reports with the Chinese Ambassador to Azerbaijan and have found out that no such remark has been made.

China has friendly ties with both Armenia and Azerbaijan. We hope this conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan can be solved through negotiations, which is better than war. We will take all necessary actions within our capacities for peacefully solving the issue. Thus, we will try to ensure a border security in the region, the Chinese Ambassador to Armenia said.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, JULY 2, ARMENPRESS. Artashes Toumanian, Ambassador of the Republic of Armenia to the Islamic Republic of Iran had a meeting with Homayoun Haeri, Deputy Minister of Energy of Iran, the Armenian Embassy in Iran reports.

The issues concerning the construction of the Armenia-Iran 3rd power transmission line project and arrangement for supplying power for both sides were discussed.

Meanwhile, the officials agreed to fix dates for bilateral visits in the relevant fields.
YEREVAN, JULY 2, ARMENPRESS. Ambassador of China to Armenia Fan Yong assures that they are also concerned about the Armenian captives who are being illegally held in Azerbaijan.

We follow the media reports. We can do everything what depends on us to solve the problem. But this problem emerged between the two countries, and we look forward to the return of captives, he told reporters in Yerevan.

The Chinese Ambassador noted that one of their main activity goals is to prevent such incidents.

He expressed hope that there will be no cases of capture anymore.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, JULY 2, ARMENPRESS. The Chinese government is discussing closer cooperation steps with Armenia, Ambassador of China to Armenia Fan Yong told reporters in Yerevan.

We work on attracting Chinese investors to Armenia. At the moment we are discussing the cooperation in different directions, work on increasing the tourism flow from China to Armenia. We hope that the Armenian business would activate in the Chinese market. Chinese people like Armenian-made goods a lot, including the alcoholic drinks. Our country likes the Armenian brandy and wine a lot, as well as we are interested in the copper and much more produced here, the foreign diplomat said.

He stated that many initiatives between Armenia and China were not implemented because of the coronavirus pandemic and the recent war in Artsakh.

Fan Yong informed that next year Armenia and China will mark the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the diplomatic relations, adding that at that period the two countries will assist and help one another.

Armenia and China have established friendly relations, there is a high level of cooperation. At the beginning of the establishment of the diplomatic ties the trade turnover has been 200,000 dollars, but last year it approached 1 billion dollars. For us, the purpose of the cooperation with a friendly country is to contribute to raising and developing the living standards of that countrys population. We are ready to share our development experience with Armenia, he said.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, JULY 2, ARMENPRESS. Caretaker Deputy Prime Minister of Armenia Tigran Avinyan visited today several construction sites in Yerevan to get acquainted with the urban development projects and their ongoing works, his Office reports.

Avinyan visited Art Company, ML Mining and Ord Development companies construction sites. The companies are engaged in constructing multi-apartment buildings.

The caretaker deputy PM watched the construction process, toured the residential buildings and apartments which have already been completed.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, JULY 2, ARMENPRESS. At the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron and United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian participated in the session of the leading countries of "Technologies-Innovation" coalition of "Generation of Equality" forum dedicated to gender equality and womens rights taking place in Paris from June 30 to July 2.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Presidents Office, Sarkissian particularly referred to the opportunities of the development of innovations and technologies in Armenia, noting that the involvement of women in the technological faculties of higher educational institutions, as well as in companies of technological sphere is quite high.

We carry out numerous programs liked with high technologies. One of the is called TUMO, which is an initiative in IT sphere and gives the younger generation basic knowledge of programming and high technologies. There are TUMO centers not only in Armenia, but also in Paris and Berlin, opportunities for opening in other cities are observed.

President Sarkissian also referred to the presidential ATOM (Advanced Tomorrow) initiative aimed at the development of science and technology in Armenia. The world is changing, changing very drastically and very fast. Taking all this into account, we have initiated the ATOM program," the President said, adding that the initiative is aimed at bringing high-class companies in the field of artificial intelligence to Armenia to set up joint venture enterprises.

President Sarkissian also informed that in October of this year Armenia will host for the third time the famous international "Summit of Thoughts", one of the main topics of which is also dedicated to the issues of technological development. He invited the participants of the "Generation of Equality" forum to participate in the "Summit of Thoughts".
YEREVAN, JULY 2, ARMENPRESS. Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, Oliver Varhelyi, will travel to the South Caucasus from 6 to 9 July, visiting Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. This will be Commissioner's first mission to countries of the region. It follows today's adoption of the Economic and Investment Plan, underpinning a renewed agenda for recovery, resilience and reform for the Eastern Partnership countries. During his meetings with political authorities, business and civil society actors, Commissioner Varhelyi will present the Economic and Investment Plan for the region and its flagship initiatives per country. He will also discuss key issues of bilateral relations with each of the three countries. The Commissioner will confirm the EU's solidarity with partner countries in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, ARMENPRESS was informed from the Office of the EU Delegation in Armenia.

In Armenia, Commissioner Varhelyi will meet with President Armen Sarkissian, Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Acting Deputy Prime Minister Grigoryan, and Patriarch Karekin II among others.

In Georgia, Commissioner Varhelyi will meet with Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, Foreign Minister David Zakaliani, Chairman of the Parliament Kakhaber Kuchava and representatives of political parties as well as with Patriarch Ilia II among others.

In Azerbaijan, he will have meetings with Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov, Head of the Presidential Administration Samir Nuriyev, Minister of Economy Mikayil Jabbarov and Minister of Energy Parviz Shahbazov among others.
Former Sydney teacher Chris Dawson who's accused of murdering his wife almost four decades ago is set to face a jury trial in May.

His case was listed for arraignment in the NSW Supreme Court on Friday when internet problems meant all parties had to dial in by phone.

His solicitor Greg Walsh said at this stage his instructions were for a jury trial, but he referred to difficulties in consulting his client about the prospect of applying for a judge-alone trial.

"The accused in recent times has had two serious falls and suffered some serious physical injuries and also is suffering from depression," Mr Walsh said.

Dawson, 72, has pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife, Lynette Dawson, at Bayview in Sydney's north on or about January 8, 1982.

Justice Robert Allan Hulme set the trial down for May 9, noting the estimated length was from six to eight weeks.

The situation would be re-assessed if Mr Walsh received instructions to apply for a judge-alone trial.

In June, the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his bid to permanently stop the criminal proceedings due to pre-trial publicity concerns.

He had argued his chances for a fair trial were irreparably damaged by extensive pre-trial publicity including a podcast.

The passage of time between his wife's alleged murder in January 1982 and his trial also rendered any trial necessarily unfair, he argued.

The NSW Supreme Court in September 2020 granted a nine-month stay but denied Dawson's bid to permanently halt proceedings.

Dawson appealed that decision to the Court of Criminal Appeal, which said permanent stays should be reserved for the "most extreme cases".

That occurred where a trial judge could do nothing during the trial to relieve the unfairness, the appeal court said in a written summary.
"We do not comment directly on personnel matters, however, when the Chief Judge and Chief Administrative Judge were made aware of the photo, immediate action was taken," Chalfen wrote in an email.

Doran was told by DiFiore and Marks that he needed to step down from his administrative role, Chalfen said.

State Supreme Court Justice William Taylor will serve as acting administrative judge in the district, Marks announced. A search for a permanent replacement will begin soon.

The Seventh Judicial District covers Cayuga, Livingston, Monroe, Ontario, Seneca, Steuben, Wayne and Yates counties. Doran was first appointed to the administrative position in 2011. That made him the chief supervisory judge for all courts in the eight-county region.

Doran selected which judges oversaw treatment courts and judges who must be brought in for cases involving potential conflicts of interest, like the pending campaign finance fraud case involving Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren.

Doran, who also reached the title of deputy chief administrative judge for New York state, was most recently tasked with managing the shutdown and reopening of trial courts during the coronavirus pandemic.
MacBain will also be eligible to receive retiree health insurance for the rest of his life, with the district "paying 100% of the premium cost, single or family."

The settlement came after the district put MacBain on administrative leave in March. Moravia Superintendent John Birmingham at the time said he could not provide further information, citing personnel privacy concerns.

MacBain, who had served as a principal in the district since 2000, declined to speak about the situation in March, but he addressed it the following month via a public post on his Facebook page. He said at the time he was placed on leave due to multiple allegations were against him, but said the district wouldn't tell him what the claims entailed until they were investigated.

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He added that while he didn't know why he was being investigated, "I can assure you I have done nothing immoral." He also said he was eager to return to work and had never previously been subject to any disciplinary actions.
SPRING VALLEY  A father and son charged in a deadly fire at a suburban New York assisted living facility had been performing a pre-Passover cleaning ritual that involves heating kitchen utensils to burn off traces of forbidden food, the Journal News reported.

It remains unclear what specific role Rabbi Nathaniel Sommer of Monsey and his son, Aaron Sommer, allegedly played in the March 23 fire at Evergreen Court Home for Adults in Spring Valley that killed a resident and a firefighter, the newspaper reported.

The Sommers were arraigned Tuesday on charges of manslaughter, assault and arson in connection with the fire and are due back in court Friday. Information on their attorneys wasn't available.

Volunteer firefighter Jared Lloyd and a 79-year-old resident of the facility were killed in the fire, which caused a partial collapse of the building.

Records show that the Evergreen Court fire was reported about 90 minutes after the Nathaniel and Aaron Sommer had left the facility after preparing the kitchen for Passover, the Journal News reported.
"We've had several challenges from weather, sorrow, pain. And I think that the president coming will bring some unity here for our community, support, like our governor, our mayor, all of us together," he said.

Concerns remained that the still standing portion of the complex could also collapse and work at the site appeared to have paused early Thursday. During a meeting with families Wednesday, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Assistant Chief Raide Jadallah said officials are concerned about the stability of that portion of the building.

"What we know is that the columns on the east side of the building are kind of, of concern, not compromised, but just right now of concern," Jadallah said. "Hypothetically, worst-case scenario: If these columns are truly really bad, we are worried they could collapse right back into the parking garage."

Families were asking if they could add tensions rods but he said structural engineers say that is not possible.
But there was also relief. Closer inspection of missing persons list reduced the number from 145 to 126 after duplicate names were eliminated and some residents reported missing turned up safe, officials said.

So this is very, very good news, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said. She said the numbers were expected to keep changing because detectives are continually reviewing the list and verifying reports.

In some cases, when detectives were able to contact people who had been reported as potentially missing, they found that not only were they safe, but other members of their families were safe too. That pushed the list of people who have been accounted for up to 188 and cut the number of missing, she said.

Detectives have worked around the clock to contact relatives and others. In some cases, English and Hebrew names have been offered for the same missing relative, officials have said.

The 7-year-old who perished in the collapse was "a member of our fire family, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said.

The discovery of the girl's remains was especially hard on rescuers, Levine Cava said.
COLUMBUS, Ohio  Lions Den is welcoming VUSH brands to its nationwide network of adult superstores and online retail shop with the exclusive launch of The Myth sex toy.

Myth is VUSH brand's new G-Spot vibrator, and consumers can only get it at Lions Den first.

"For far too long the G-spot has been considered just a tale but The Myth is the perfect partner to discover the truth behind the legend," the company said.

With 25 vibe combinations, a pleasure point texture, and a body-happy curve this G-spot vibrator will stimulate both the G-Spot or the P-Spot to orgasm.

Lions Den said it decided to partner with VUSH for the exclusive launch of The Myth because of how they are challenging the way people think and talk about self-love, and championing pleasure as the next big thing in self-care.

"Every body is a good body, and VUSH is always exploring new ways to help you celebrate that," the company added.

As the official store for pleasure, passion and romance since 1971, Lions Den is also committed to exploring self-love and providing the best of the best products in sexual wellness. Lions Den also carries VUSHs The Majesty 2, the infamous sex toy featured in Cardi Bs music video, UP.

Shop The Myth exclusively at Lions Den in-store and online starting in June 2021. For a limited time, get a fre gift with any VUSH purchase at Lions Den.
The coronavirus may have canceled in-person festivities for more than a year, but colorful Fourth of July celebrations are back on for 2021 (even without the fireworks).

To many, the upcoming weekend will mark the return to large community events in northern Arizona. From the annual float parade in downtown Flagstaff to live music at Fort Tuthill County Park, here a few ways to celebrate Americas Independence Day:

Downtown Mile

Before the parade will be the annual Downtown Mile presented by the Chamber of Commerce and Team Run Flagstaff. Runners will begin the race at 7 a.m. on Saturday and compete in staggered waves divided by gender and skill level.

The 1-mile race takes place on the historic streets of downtown Flagstaff and offers awards for both overall and age group top finishers. Unlike previous years, the awards ceremony at Heritage Square has been canceled as a safety precaution and prizes will be mailed to the winners.

Organizers are encouraging runners to dress up in their best red white and blue Fourth of July costume to be eligible for this years costume contest. There will be prizes awarded to the best-dressed participants.
On this date in 1874, an executive order set aside the San Xavier Reservation for the use of the Papago tribe.

On this date in 1876, the Territorial Prison in Yuma opened with seven prisoners in residence.

On this date in 1877, John P. Clum resigned his long position as Indian Agent at San Carlos after a long and stormy battle with the military over Indian policy.

On this date in 1898, William Bucky ONeill, captain of Troop A of the Arizona Rough Riders, was killed in the Spanish American War.

On this date in 1924, the first parcel post package was sent by airmail from Tucson to New York.

On this date in 1927, Apache Lake filled and the water first flowed over Horse Mesa Dam.

Friday, July 2

On this date in 1833, the final title for the Arivaca Land Grant was awarded to Tomas and Ignacio Ortiz.

On this date in 1864, Congress made the Arizona Territory a part of the Surveying District of New Mexico, thus providing for surveying operations within Arizona. Surveys were begun at Initial Point, a stone monument placed on a hill on the south side of the Gila River opposite the mouth of the Salt River.
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.
PHOENIX (AP)  Jill Biden on Wednesday appealed to Arizona residents to get vaccinated against COVID-19, aiming to counter skepticism by declaring that the vaccines are safe and have been vigorously tested.

Im here to ask all the viewers on these TV stations to please make the choice to get vaccinated because its safe, she said in a speech before an invited audience and TV cameras after touring a vaccine clinic at Isaac Middle School in Phoenix.

Just 40% of eligible Arizonans have been fully vaccinated.

Biden was accompanied by Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden noted that they usually divide and conquer by making separate visits to clinics, but said, Today our message is so important that we wanted to come to Phoenix together.

She said that Phoenix is the administrations last stop on a monthlong tour to promote vaccinations, but that efforts to promote inoculations will continue.

Its going to keep going and going until we win, Emhoff added.

Emhoff appealed to the parents in the room, saying he sleeps better knowing that his son and daughter have both been vaccinated.
I am overwhelmed with happiness and pride while writing this article that I have been preparing for a while to be published in conjunction with the Egyptian National Day for Eliminating Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), which falls on June 14.

After writing all its drafts to be revolved around the pain and suffering of girls and women from that harmful practice, and between appeals and demands for a harsher punishment, It ended up with me writing these lines in joy and celebration of achieving the dream.

Yes, the political will of Egyptian women and girls triumphed again, on April 30, 2021, when President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi signed law no 10 of 2021 to introduce amendments to several provisions of the Penal Code to toughen the penalty for FGM.

The amendment stipulates that whoever performs FGM involving the partial or total removal of external female genitalia or causing injury to female genital organs for non-medical reasons shall be punished by imprisonment for a period of no less than five years. In case the crime led to a permanent handicap, the punishment shall be imprisonment for a period of no less than 7 years with hard labour. If the act led to death, the imprisonment shall be for a period of no less than 10 years.

As per the new amendments also, if the perpetrator of the crime is a doctor or nurse, he or she shall receive the penalty of rigorous imprisonment from 3 to 15 years in jail. If the crime resulted in a permanent disability, the penalty shall be imprisonment for no less than 10 years with hard work. If the act leads to death, the punishment shall be no less than 15 years and will not exceed 20 years.

In addition to this, the court shall rule to dismiss the offender from his position for a period not exceeding 5 years if the crime was committed for a reason associated with his/her job. The establishment where the crime is committed shall be shut down for the same number of years of the penalty handed to the doctor or nurse implicated. That is if the owner knows that the place was used for that purpose.

Imprisonment shall be the penalty inflicted on whoever asks for FGM and has succeeded in persuading someone to circumcise the victim.

In this context, it is important to emphasise that this law is the third generation of previous laws that were issued to criminalise FGM; in June of 2008, an amendment to the penal code was issued to criminalise FGM in legal texts, as article 242 stipulated that: While showing due regard for Article 61 of the penal code and without prejudice to any harsher penalty prescribed in another law, a prison term of no less than five years and no more than seven years shall be levied against anyone who circumcises a female, namely, by partial or total removal of the external genitalia or causing injury to the genitalia without medical justification. The penalty shall be hard imprisonment if the act results in a permanent disability or if it leads to death.

Therefore, in 2016, they amended article 242 by aggravating the penalties of the penal code and introducing a new Article under law 78/2016. The amendments of 2016 redefined FGM as a felony rather than a misdemeanor and increased the penalty for performing FGM from five to seven years of imprisonment and up to 15 years imprisonment if the act of FGM leads to the death of the victim or a permanent disability. Also, the articles provided punishment between one to three years imprisonment of any individual who requests and abets the performance of FGM.

Although the month of June comes yearly to remind us of a very painful memory, the death of the 11-year-old schoolgirl, Budour Shaker, who passed away after being subjected to FGM in a private clinic in the Upper Egyptian city of Minya in June 2017. Her death came hours after her success in the final exams of Grade 6. This tragedy was the reason behind launching the National Day for the Elimination of FGM.

Four years later, and after the death of many girls because of FGM, we celebrate that 2021 is the year of achieving the dream, as it included many strong leaps in the issues of criminalising FGM.

The beginning of this year witnessed the cabinets approval of the draft law submitted by the National Committee for the Elimination of FGM on disallowing those medical professionals convicted of performing genital mutilation from practicing their job, in addition to applying the rest of the penalties stipulated in the draft law to amend the penal code; legal measures were taken to study this draft in the Ministry of Justice.

Also, last March, the Egyptian House of Representatives approved the anti FGM draft law presented by the government after holding constructive discussions and a very rich dialogue. What made me most happy is knowing about the support of male parliamentarians of this draft, in addition to the female parliamentarians who proved their success in supporting one of the most important issues for Egyptian girls and women.

In this regard, I would also like to refer to the initiative of parliament representatives of the Coordination Committee of Partys Youth Leaders and Politicians (CPYP) to support, on their social media pages, the efforts of the National Committee for the Elimination of FGM and the amendments of the law that criminalise FGM during the celebration of the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM in February.

All these steps encouraged us to be optimistic that there are parliamentarians who have are enlightened thinkers willing to reject backward ideas and fight them with full force in addition to supporting the government in progressing more and more in women and human rights issues.

And to emphasise the continued rejection of the religions of this harmful practice and inhuman crime (Its alleged that theres Islamic religious roots of FGM), the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed El-Tayeb, wrote in a letter he sent to the Public Prosecution in February of last year that It has become clear to Al-Azhar, through what was decided by the people of jurisprudence and trusted medical professionals, that circumcision causes great damage to a girls personality in general and affects her family life after marriage in particular, with a negative impact on society as a whole.

He continued, Accordingly, the Islamic Research Academy in Al-Azhar decided, after studying the issue of circumcision from all its correct jurisprudential aspects and with the unanimity of its members in the session held in February 28, 2008, that no unequivocal text is found in the Quran or the Sunna that call for circumcision, and that it only dates back to inherited traditions and customs within the framework of an incorrect understanding of religion; its negative impact on physical and mental well-being has been proven.

As female circumcision was agreed to be one of the harmful traditions according to legal and medical opinions, and its legitimacy is not assured by valid evidence, thus it is prohibited, and the infliction of punishment on the one who do it is permissible according to Sharia law, he concluded.

This letter came as a response to an inquiry from the public prosecution about the legitimate opinion on female circumcision, after the death of a girl as a result of her circumcision.

Many fatwas were issued over the course of several years by the Egyptian Dar Al-Iftaa prohibiting female circumcision and ensuring that it is a matter of customs and contrary to Sharia and law.

Last April, the Coptic Orthodox Church issued a document on its stance against female circumcision, signed by Pope Tawadros II, the Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St Mark. The document assured that the church is totally against FGM and considers it a crime and a grave sin. Also, there is no basis for FGM in Christianity, not a single verse calling for it in the holy book. The document assured that FGM represents a danger and a violation of human rights.

All these strong and serious steps confirm that all state institutions, religious institutions, and legislative institutions have united to renounce this harmful practice.

I return once again to the latest and most important step in this issue, which is the ratification by the president of law No. 10 of 2021, which I consider a great victory, and a new dream come true after long years of suffering and pain experienced by millions of women due to FGM, causing constant anxiety and a lack of confidence in themselves and in their closest relatives.

Yes, this important step came to reaffirm the keenness of the political will to protect women and girls from all forms of violence directed against them, confront this criminal act locally and internationally, and to stand as a deterrent for anyone who thinks to commit or participate in this harmful practice against any female.

This step is considered a culmination of the efforts of women who devoted their lives to fighting this crime, such as Aziza Hussein, Mary Assad, and others, may their souls rest in peace.

This step also comes as a culmination of the efforts of the National Committee for the Elimination of FGM, co-chaired by the National Council for Women and the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, which was formed in May of 2019, and is honoured by the membership of representatives of all concerned ministries, competent judicial authorities, Al-Azhar, the three Egyptian churches and community organisations, in addition to development partners.

The National Committee has taken it upon itself since the first day to work with all diligence and sincerity to eliminate this harmful practice, and to fight against reactionary thought and misconceptions about FGM through many activities.

In the framework of its mission, the committee formed a board to study the legislative aspects related to the criminalisation of FGM, which included members from the National Council for Women, the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, the Public Prosecution, the Ministry of Interior, the Doctors Syndicate, and the Ministry of Health and Population, and with the participation of forensic medicine. This board suggested tightening the penalty for FGM and expanding the scope of criminalisation of the draft law approved by the government and parliament and ratified by the president.

After two years of the committees efforts, it managed to achieve 76 million awareness contacts in many villages throughout the country, in various forms, such as organising medical and educational convoys, launching awareness media campaigns, raising the efficiency of institutional building, in addition to organising door-knocking campaigns under the slogan Protect her from circumcision.

This anti FGM law was praised by many international institutions and figures, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, and a member of the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Nicole Ameline.

Moreover, Egypts effort in this law was hailed by the European Union, United Nations Women, the United Nations Population Fund, the United Nations Development Programme, UNICEF, and the United States Agency for International Development.

Following these carefully studied steps taken by the Egyptian government, I extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to Egypts Prime Minister, Mostafa Madbouly for his approval on the draft law submitted by the committee and to the Egyptian House of Representatives.

I want also to thank the Ministry of Justice for its fruitful cooperation to come up with the amendments to the articles of the FGM law, and the public prosecutor, who presented an exceptional model in the implementation of prompt justice.

Also, my great thanks to the Ministry of Interior for its unremitting efforts in confronting all those who try to break the law in cases of violence against women.

This confirms the consensus of all state institutions on the need to eliminate this harmful practice, in implementation of Article 11 of the Egyptian Constitution, which stipulates that the state will protect women against all forms of violence, and the National Strategy for the Empowerment of Egyptian Women 2030, which comes in line with Egypts Vision 2030 to achieve sustainable development goals.

Finally, on behalf of the National Committee for the Elimination of FGM and on behalf of all Egyptian girls and women, I extend my deepest thanks, appreciation, and gratitude to the first supporter of Egyptian women, President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, for the ratification of the law that guarantees a safe life for girls.

Many thanks President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.

#Long live Egypt
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LOS ANGELES (AP)  Amber Heard says she has become a mom and did it on my own terms, as a single parent.

In an Instagram post, the actor said she welcomed daughter Oonagh Paige Heard on April 8. A photo of Heard with the baby nestled against her accompanied Thursday's announcement.

I now appreciate how radical it is for us as women to think about one of the most fundamental parts of our destinies in this way, Heard said in the post. I hope we arrive at a point in which its normalized to not want a ring in order to have a crib.

She wrote that a part of me wants to uphold that my private life is none of anyones business, but added the nature of her job compels me to take control of this by revealing the birth.

Shes the beginning of the rest of my life, Heard said.

The actor has faced a tumultuous period of her life, with her 2015 to 2017 marriage to Johnny Depp involving a spate of legal actions.
Local patrons are showing Colossal Pride and proving United we Stand by buying fireworks at the Knights of Columbus Council 1723 stand at the St. Joseph Catholic School parking lot in Beatrice this week.

According to city ordinance, the sale, possession and discharge of permissible fireworks within the city is allowed from July 1-4 each year until 10p.m. each night, when loud and excessive noises such as fireworks are not allowed.

Rob Ostdiek, program director for the Knights of Columbus stand, said their gross sale revenue is over $100,000 each year. He said roughly $17,500 of profit is donated to local organizations, including the Pregnancy Resource Center, Mosaic in Beatrice, American Red Cross Blood Drive Canteen, the Community Food Pantry, the YMCA and Beatrice Community Hospital.

We have what they call cakes, which are large finales for displays, Ostdiek said. We have a lot of smaller novelties, parachutes and stuff for the kids. Daytime stuff just to keep the kids happy. Big artilleries, those that make the big booms and cracks. Fire crackers, Roman candles, all those little things. We do usually have quite a few assortments now, and a lot of them are attractively priced and theyre pretty easy, so people just come in and buy one and out they go. So weve got a little bit of something for everybody.

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WILBER, Neb. (AP)  A three-judge panel began hearing evidence Wednesday to decide whether a woman should become the first female sentenced to death in Nebraska for her role in the killing and dismemberment of a woman she met through a dating app.

Bailey Boswell was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder last year for the slaying of Sydney Loofe. Boswell's boyfriend during the murder, 54-year-old Aubrey Trail, was sentenced to death last month for fatally strangling Loofe and dismembering her body.

Authorities say Boswell lured Loofe, a 24-year-old clerk at a Menards hardware store, to her death through the dating app Tinder. Loofes body parts were found in garbage bags, cut into 14 pieces and left in ditches along country roads in southeastern Nebraska.

Prosecutors on Wednesday presented graphic autopsy photos to bolster their case that Boswell, 27, deserves to die for the crime.

Prosecutor Doug Warner of the Nebraska attorney general's office argued that Boswell set up three Tinder accounts to arrange dates with women and bought tools that could be used to dismember a body shortly before her last date with Boswell.
A Helena man accused of fatally shooting another man in 2019 over a drug deal was sentenced Thursday to 70 years in prison on a charge of deliberate homicide.

First Judicial District Lewis and Clark County Judge Michael Menahan had earlier denied Thomas Ralph Bristows motion to withdraw an Alford plea for the killing of 31-year-old Cory Leo Housel of Helena on June 30, 2019. An Alford plea indicates the defendant maintains innocence of the charges but acknowledges the prosecution has enough evidence to gain a conviction.

Bristow, 54, was also charged with tampering with evidence and possession of dangerous drugs, charges that were dismissed as part of a plea agreement.

The plea agreement had recommended a sentence between 10-100 years, with no restriction on parole eligibility.

This means, according to state law, Bristow must serve at least one-quarter of his sentence in order to be parole eligible, Menahan said. He may then apply to the Montana Parole Board but it not guaranteed the board will grant it.

According to a June 14 sentencing memorandum, one of the states two primary witnesses had approached Bristows ex-wife, changed his original story and indicated the shooting was an accident. But the court denied a request to withdraw the Alford plea.
What we want to do is split the baby down the middle, explained Zabawa, adding that the intent was for Soares to own 100% of half the current business and Zabawa to do the same with the other half. He said the two had reached age 63 and wanted to divide the businesses to organize their trusts. So, were trying to divide the business up and part of that process is selling off the Mercedes-Benz store.

Under new ownership, Womack anticipates elevating the stores potential through investments. On Thursday, crews moved through the dealership to survey areas for improvement. Womack said that as business increases he anticipates moving the dealership to a larger location.

He also hopes to increase incentives for employees to work hard at the dealership and attract long-lasting capable talent.

We expect a lot from our employees, he said. They work hard  we all work hard  but theyre well compensated and well rewarded.

Womack said hell be travelling to Billings occasionally as part of his role in running the company, but the daily operation will be handled by the stores management. You also wont see Womack driving a Mercedes. Unlike MacNeil, Womack planted his roots in the car industry selling BMWs, and he owns a few of those. But, the vehicle he enjoys driving most is his Ford F-150 pickup truck. Laughing about it, he added, So, Ill fit in out here.

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These people were dressed in neither sheriff nor peace officer uniforms. They yelled commands and did not announce themselves as law enforcement of any kind, the attorneys said. While yelling commands for them to put their hands up, multiple armed people targeted their weapons upon her and Mr. Smith.

Askar's attorneys said that she was scared for her life and complied, and that Smith had a mobile phone and began to record for Facebook Live.

As he raised the phone all she could hear was gunfire and saw Winston Smith slump over, the attorneys said. When asked if they were suggesting that law enforcement mistook the phone for a gun, Nguyen said: I think that's a logical inference.

When asked whether task force officers are supposed to identify themselves as law enforcement, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service said he could not comment due to the ongoing investigation. A spokeswoman with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension also had no additional comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

The attorneys said Askar was pulled out of the SUV, handcuffed and put in the back of an unmarked car. She stayed in handcuffs until paramedics gave her medical attention. The attorneys said an officer later asked her how her date was.
Publication of the documents opened a 60-day public comment period. In addition, the BLM scheduled a virtual meeting on July 21. All grazing decisions are subject to a 15-day protest and 30-day appeal period.

This simply does not constitute an adequate opportunity for public comment and participation, Gianforte wrote to BLM officials.

He said the virtual meeting would also come when many landowners with an interest in the issue are haying or harvesting and therefore unavailable to attend. Gianforte also noted that many of the landowners are far from reliable internet service.

I ask that the BLM recognize these compounding factors and take action to facilitate comment and public participation in a comprehensive and meaningful manner, Gianforte wrote.

Gianforte is the first Republican governor in Montana in 16 years. His party has proposed a variety of state legislation over the years in an attempt to block the American Prairie Reserves goals.
Despite Zinkes presence in Trumps cabinet, the press release announcing Olszewskis congressional bid touts him as the best fit to be seated next to fellow Trump conservative, Matt Rosendale, the incumbent Republican representing the states at-large district. In an interview Thursday, Olszewski argued that his policy priorities more closely mirrored those of the former president, noting that he has a higher lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union than his primary opponent.

"I look at myself more as a Montana conservative, that falls in line with the 'America first' principles that President Trump espoused," Olszewski said. "Running against a Trump agency director, in Montana things are very local, and people in Western Montana, that I'm trying to represent, they live and breathe the right to self-determination and they want someone to represent them that's similar."

Olszewski spent six years in the Legislature, serving a single term in the House beginning in 2015 and then one term in the Senate, from 2017 to 2020. He sponsored several bills that sought to restrict access to abortions and was one of the leading opponents of the states expansion of Medicaid.
As former members of the Districting and Apportionment Commission, we know whats at stake drawing legislative districts and now a new congressional district. We commend Commission Chair Maylinn Smith for her commitment to an open, public and transparent process.

We are proud of our work on the 2000 and 2010 commissions. These commissions drew landmark plans based on the input of thousands of everyday Montanans, creating legislative maps reflecting the rich diversity of our communities across the state. Montana Democrats have a proven history of our commitment to an open process and maps that represent all Montanans at the Legislature.

In 1972 voters approved the new Montana Constitution establishing our independent citizen redistricting commission, due to the Montana Legislatures repeated failure to draw maps guaranteeing our most basic constitutional rights. The will of the people was clear. Now the Legislatures role in redistricting is the same as every other Montanan. They can offer suggestions on how the maps should be drawn, but they have absolutely no power to pass unconstitutional laws dictating how the commission draws the maps.
So you see his family was never dirt poor when he was a kid, and he rode in a nice warm bus to school.

Then one day he got a letter in the mail from Uncle Sam and next thing he knew he was government property for four years during the second big war and got to travel to England, France, Belgium and Germany. It was then that he got to see a mixture of scenery both bad and good, like so many young men his age, and came back to never talk about it.

With his GI cash he bought a Standard Oil bulk business from a cousin and a small plane, which he put skis on and flew around the countryside delivering food and things to stranded farmers/ranchers during the winter.

Then he married the cute girl working in the local candy shop, had some kids and they all lived happily ever after; that is until, in a five-year span, his brother died young, his dad died of cancer and he himself was burned badly in an explosion that he wasnt supposed to survive but somehow did.

And yet all of that is only part of the story. Because more recently he has somehow outlived most everyone he ever knew, survived a major bladder infection, surgery to remove a big tumor from his face and hip surgery.
A Burleigh County jury has found a Bismarck man guilty on one of three attempted murder charges filed in connection with an April 2020 shooting tied to gang activity.

Mason Schuh, 25, will remain in custody without bond until a presentence investigation is completed. He faces the possibility of a 20-year prison term.

Schuh was accused of firing multiple shots from one vehicle into another at the intersection of Tyler Parkway and Burnt Boat Drive. Schuh leaned over the driver, Albert Crews, to fire at the other vehicle, police alleged. One of the three juveniles in the second vehicle returned fire. Police say the incident was a dispute between two rival gangs. No one was injured.

The jury of nine women and three men returned the verdicts Friday afternoon after more than seven hours of deliberations over two days. The trial began Wednesday.

States Attorney Julie Lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did defense attorney James Wiese.
Biologists began conducting aerial surveys of the nesting grounds in 1972. They scan photographs of the refuge into a computer program to estimate the number of breeding birds.

The pelicans winter mainly in the Gulf Coast states but some fly to North Dakota beginning in April from as far as Florida and California to nest. The birds normally stay in North Dakota through September, caring for their hatchlings and feasting on crawfish, small fish and salamanders from small prairie ponds within a 100-mile radius of the refuge.

The refuge near Medina normally draws thousands of tourists annually to see the birds that weigh up to 20 pounds, have a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, and measure 6 feet from bill to tail. The white pelican lives about 25 years, and breeds only once a year. Males and females take turns caring for their young. Typically, two eggs are laid in each nest, but only one chick survives.

Pelicans have been monitored at Chase Lake since 1905, when the birds numbered about 50. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt designated the site as a bird refuge in 1908, after many of the birds were being killed for their feathers or shot for target practice.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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"In essence what this is going to kind of turn out to be, I suspect, is a new tourism route from Mexico to Canada."

-- Darrell Dorgan, chair of a project to mark the historic route in North Dakota of the Great Western Cattle Trail using concrete posts and plaques.

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We just want to take that barrier away from kids being successful in school, and if its as simple as providing some food for the weekend, why wouldnt you do that?

-- Jeannette Myhre Elementary School social worker Chris Hall, on the Backpacks for Kids efforts run by Community Action Program Bismarck Region and Missouri Slope Areawide United Way.

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"Not only does it hinge upon a ridiculous reading into the bill of what is clearly not there, it betrays a bullying policy to attempt to impose the views of Californias governing elites on other states."
Jeff Bezos on his 4-step method for building trust and reputation: Its really that simpleand research backs it up

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/02/jeff-bezos-says-this-is-how-you-earn-trust-and-build-reputation-it-really-is-that-simple.html

The way you earn trust, the way you develop a reputation, Bezos said, is by doing hard things well over and over again.

Bezos, who plans to step down as Amazon CEO on July 5, used the U.S. military as an example. Although the American publics trust and confidence in the military has fallen since 2018, it still remains one of the most trusted institutions in the country by a large margin, according to the Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute.

The reason that the military has such high credibility and reputation is because, over and over again, decade after decade, it has done hard things well.
Meet the Buffalo Food Otaku: attorney and food writer Joe Leta and his partner, the charmingly humble and enthusiastic Sadako, or Sadie, are self-described food nerds and local restaurant-insiders insiders. As Buffalo Food Otaku, the pair blogs on Facebook and Instagramthey have about 1,500 followers on each platform, many of whom are industry professionals.

From chef-driven restaurants to their own adventurous, creative home-cooking and entertaining, theyre not snobs. Theyve touted hot dogs, strip-mall Chinese joints and pub food, and featured a tutorial on cleaning fresh sea urchin. She takes pics, he writes; using an impishly imperious I, he peppers his prose with sometimes-obscure literary and historical references.

How did you two know youd be a food fit?

Sadie: When I worked at a magazine in Japan, we went to many restaurants and bars every night. On our first date, we discovered that we both like to do thatsometimes one restaurant has one good dish, the next one a great cocktail, and so on.

Who are your cooking influences?

Sadie: Im from a large Korean family, and I grew up in Japan, where people eat a lot of prepackaged foods at home. In the Korean tradition, everything is made from scratch.
+4 India Walton's win could inspire more outsiders to challenge incumbents Observers saw Walton's win as yet another signal that a dynamic candidate can knock off a complacent incumbent anytime, anywhere.

Other top Democrats who supported Brown in the primary quickly shifted into neutral gear  a far cry from past days of posing together for countless grip and grin photos. They included Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul.

"The Lieutenant Governor has spoken to both candidates," spokeswoman Elizabeth Grams said in a statement. "She knows this is part of the democratic process, and its now up to the people of Buffalo to decide."

Ditto for Assembly Majority Leader Crystal D. Peoples-Stokes, a longtime Brown ally dating from their days in the Grassroots political club on Buffalo's East Side. She will now remain neutral.

"I'm not doing anything with either of the races," she said of the two contestants. "I think the results pretty much speak for themselves. I'm not so sure it's as much that she won as it is that he lost."

And Common Council President Darius G. Pridgen says only that he will "support the process."

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.

"I'm prepared to work with whoever wins," he said. "I'm a legislator more than a campaigner."

It's all new for so many old allies to no longer stand with Brown. He considers it part of the deal.
"We have a lot of dollars coming in, so it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to make some fundamental changes. We need to get children back up to the level where they need to be, and that's also going to be a challenge for the district," Petrucci said.

He said that four meetings that were held by the School Board allowing community stakeholders to give their opinions on how to spend $200 million in American Rescue Plan funding and $89 million in Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Account money were reasonably well attended.

"We've asked both board members and the community to come up with ideas on how to spend some of these dollars. They can be transformational. They are important. They will be a vital part of our budget and educational process as we go forward to try and raise children up to where they need to be," Petrucci said.

Buffalo Public Schools Superintendent Kriner Cash did not discuss how those funds might be spent at Thursday's meeting, but said he would likely hold a news conference on the issue after the School Board discusses the matter Tuesday.

Petrucci said he planned to bring a new leadership style to the board.
Cremen is accused of pushing and threatening one demonstrator, as well as using racial slurs during the incident, according to the District Attorney's Office.

Second-degree menacing is a misdemeanor, but it became a felony because it was charged as a hate crime.

Prosecutors did not seek to indict Cremen on the weapons charge because the menacing charge incorporates the weapons charge, Joseph Spino, spokesman for the District Attorney's Office, said in an email. The weapons charge was a Class A misdemeanor "that didn't add anything to the indictment," Spino said.

Cremen's attorney told Boller on Friday there was some "confusion" about when Cremen was supposed to appear in court last fall.

Prosecutors sent a letter to an address at which they knew Cremen did not reside, Tarantino said.

"That's not what happened," Cremen said in court in response.

Tarantino then described the circumstances as a "miscommunication" and Cremen failing to show up for court "was not a deliberate act."

His next court appearance is scheduled for July 19, but his attorney indicated Cremen would waive his right to appear.
. . .

Weiss is best known for his strawberries, which sold rapidly. His quaint farm stand and U-Pick fields in Eden were just the start. The strawberry satisfaction extended to thousands in Buffalo, where Weiss' annual harvest could be found at the Lexington Cooperative Market daily and on Saturdays at the Elmwood-Bidwell Farmers Market, among other outlets.

"The quality of his stuff was incredible," said Tim Bartlett, general manager of the Lexington Co-op. "His strawberries, when we were smaller, [at times] accounted for 10% of a day's sales  for one product to be 10% of your sales, it's phenomenal."

The appeal of his strawberries is best illustrated by an early memory Bartlett has of his daughter Rachel. "I bought two quarts when my daughter was 3. I put a quart next to her, drove a mile home and by the time we got home, one quart of the strawberries was gone. She had strawberries all over her face."

Weiss Farms was one of the first local farms to establish credit with the co-op, originally a not-for-profit that evolved. The relationship between Weiss and the co-op endured roughly 40 years, dating back to before the market moved from Lexington to 807 Elmwood Ave.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed legislation Friday that would have ended additional federal benefits created during the pandemic for North Carolinas unemployed before the program expires nationwide. His action counters trends by Republican governors to no longer accept the supplemental payments.

Cooper said he blocked the measure originating from the GOP-controlled legislature because rejecting these federal funds now hurts the state.

Unemployment is declining with more people getting vaccinated and into the workforce as North Carolina has strengthened work search requirements for those receiving benefits, Cooper said in a statement. The federal help that this bill cuts off will only last a few more weeks and it supplements North Carolinas state benefits, which are among the stingiest in the country. Prematurely stopping these benefits hurts our state by sending back money that could be injected into our economy with people using it for things like food and rent.

Cooper said he supports efforts to make more quality childcare available and give businesses funds for hiring bonuses and the bill fell short on both of those.
Some states, like New Jersey, offer subsidies at 350% of the federal poverty line but only when relatives are providing care.

New Mexico also will be the first state to increase payments to child care providers by using a reimbursement formula that focuses on the local cost of running child care businesses, instead of the market rate of what parents can pay.

Early Childhood Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky called the announcement an important landmark on our journey towards creating a true cradle-to-career education system that helps all New Mexicans thrive.

Groginsky was pivotal for winning federal approval of the new formula in Washington, D.C., where she served as assistant superintendent of early learning for the District of Columbia before taking the job in New Mexico. While the formulas are not identical, the experience there provides an idea of how much child care providers will benefit.

Child care providers in Washington got a 24% to 57% increase in reimbursement during the transition in 2019, according to officials there. No providers saw a decrease.
President Joe Biden praised sports' ability to heal and bring a nation together in a time of crisis as he hosted the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers at the White House on Friday.
As the holiday approaches, fire departments statewide are confiscating tens of thousands of pounds of illegal fireworks and warning users that setting them off could lead to devastating wildfires. Los Angeles police on Thursday announced that they seized another ton of illegal fireworks from a shipping container and the bomb squad trucked it to a storage facility.

In LA, Moore said on Wednesday that three box trucks and a 53-foot (16-meter) trailer were brought in to load up the fireworks at the South Los Angeles home and move them to a safe location. However, the improvised explosives that were also found were too dangerous to move, the chief said.

There was a 300-foot (91-meter) boundary around the vessel  a typical safety range  and police had knocked on doors before the blast to evacuate homes on both sides of the street where the truck was parked. But firefighters later found people in some of the homes, officials said.

It's not unusual for bomb squads to not know exactly what comprises the homemade explosives they are detonating, Diaczuk said.

You dont know what youre dealing with. You dont know what this character made, he said. It doesnt come with ingredients in it like when you go to the grocery store.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
What was of specific concern was that over the last six days we had not seen that type of significant movement, or in some locations any movement in those elements of the structure, Nacheman said Thursday during a briefing for family members.

Rescuers also use laser devices that can detect shifts of a few millimeters, Cominsky said.

We are constantly monitoring the building, he said.

Heavy equipment in the rubble pile caused vibrations, according to Nacheman. Rain has also been entering exposed parts of the building, saturating items and adding weight to the floors.

Covering parts of the structure to prevent further water damage or tearing down the building risks additional loss of life because those steps would require sending people back inside, Nacheman said. Demolition would also add debris on top of areas that have already been cleared of rubble.

Peter Milian is a cousin of Marcus Guara, who died along with his wife, Anaely Rodriguez, and their two children, 10-year-old Lucia Guara and 4-year-old Emma Guara. Milian said he understands why the rescue work had to be temporarily halted and is confident search efforts will continue.
Ill love every second of it. Whoooo! Ha-ha. I can hardly wait, Funk said in an Instagram video posted by Bezos.

Nothing has ever gotten in my way," she added. "They said, Well, youre a girl, you cant do that. I said, Guess what, doesnt matter what you are. You can still do it if you want to do it and I like to do things that nobody has ever done.

She'll beat the late John Glenn, who set a record at age 77 when flying aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998. Glenn pooh-poohed the idea of women flying in space, shortly after he became the first American to orbit the world in 1962.

No one has waited longer, Bezos said via Instagram. Its time. Welcome to the crew, Wally."

Bezos is stepping down as Amazon's CEO on Monday.

Blue Origin has yet to announce ticket prices or when the public might strap into the spacious six-seat capsule. Its New Shepard rocket is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

Virgin Galactic has more than 600 reservations in the pipeline. These original tickets went for $250,000. The company will start accepting more following the upcoming flight with Branson. Keen to get to space, Funk reserved a seat years ago.
WASHINGTON (AP)  As the last U.S. combat troops prepare to leave Afghanistan, the question arises: When is the war really over?

For Afghans the answer is clear but grim: no time soon. An emboldened Taliban insurgency is making battlefield gains, and prospective peace talks are stalled. Some fear that once foreign forces are gone, Afghanistan will dive deeper into civil war. Though degraded, an Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State extremist network also lurks.

For the United States and its coalition partners, the endgame is murky. Although all combat troops and 20 years of accumulated war materiel will soon be gone, the head of U.S Central Command, Gen. Frank McKenzie, will have authority until September to defend Afghan forces against the Taliban. He can do so by ordering strikes with U.S. warplanes based outside of Afghanistan, according to defense officials who discussed details of military planning on condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials said Friday that the U.S. military has left Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years. The facility was the epicenter of the war, but its transfer to the Afghan government did not mark the U.S. military's final withdrawal from the country. Two officials say the airfield was handed over in its entirety. They spoke on condition they not be identified because they were not authorized to disclose the handover to the media.
The payment plan calls for people participating to pay 2% of their net monthly income or $25  whichever is higher  without any extra fees or interest charges. The law applies both going forward and to anyone who currently has a suspended license due to non-payment of fines.

The measure was approved a year ago and signed into law in December by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, though his approval came contingent with an amendment lawmakers needed to pass before the law could become effective. The changes included boosting the July 2020 versions $10 per month payment to $25 and restoring authorization for the state Department of Motor Vehicles to suspend a license for people who fail to answer a summons or appear in court. Such individuals will now be sent 2 notices for failing to appear or answer a summons  asking them to enroll in the payment plan  before their license is suspended.

Lawmakers okayed those amendments in March, and the laws effective date became June 29.
Great Lakes Cheese, an Ohio-based company with billions of dollars in annual sales, deserves praise for its determination to remain in the Southern Tier. The company is showing unfailing loyalty to its workers in Cuba and to the local dairy farms that supply its milk.

Its a turnabout from the usual complaint that employers dont value their workers. In this case, the company is devoted to them and to its suppliers. For that, the Western New York region is grateful. But figuring out where to build a $505 million cheese factory once the company closes its Empire Cheese plant in Cuba hasnt been easy.

The project might be headed to Cattaraugus County after efforts to expand into Allegany County recently came to an end. The prospect deserves a full-court press from the community.

The Allegany County Industrial Development Agency had approved a package of tax incentives, worth $200 million over 20 years. But there was a hurdle: The local development agency also wanted to take control of more than 220 acres of Charlie Bares land through eminent domain for the communitys interest.
July 4-25  Lake Ontario Counties Summer Trout/Salmon/Walleye Derby continues. loc.org.

July 4  Open Trap Shoot at Allied Sportsmens Club, 12846 Clinton St., Alden, from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Open to the public through October. Instruction available. For more info call Joe Truty at 867-1458.

July 6  Open Trap Shoot at Allied Sportsmens Club, 12846 Clinton St., Alden, from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Open to the public through October. Instruction available. For more info call Joe Truty at 867-1458.

July 6  Lake Ontario Charter Boat Association monthly meeting at Irondequoit Bay Fish and Game Club, 658 Bayfront South, Rochester, starting at 7 p.m.

July 7  Sun Life Marina Bass Open from 6 to 9 p.m. Best three fish. $40 per boat, 1 or 2 person.
(AFP via Getty Images)

Terrifying footage captured the moment a crocodile spooked Indian villagers.

The 14-foot reptile stunned the onlookers as the creature took a casual stroll around their houses

Villagers walked nervously in a line behind the beast and local dogs were going haywire in Kogilabana village in Karnataka, Southern India.

The croc was reported to have been wandering through the town for 30 minutes.

According to a Forest Department official, the animal was later captured and released back into the river it emerged from.

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They said: The incident took place in Kogilabana village in Dandeli. We have captured the animal after which it was released to the Kali River which flows nearby.

The jaw-dropping footage sent Twitter wild when it was shared on social media on Thursday.

It came after a British backpacker who was attacked by a crocodile while swimming in Mexico tot she thought she was going to die.

Twins Melissa and Georgia Laurie, 28, were swimming in a lagoon near Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca state with a tour group when Melissa was dragged underwater and the reptile attacked.

She told The Sun: I screamed: S***! Its a crocodile, we need to turn back immediately.

I saw its eyes and the shape of its head just above the water and in that moment, I thought, we are in trouble.

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By Daniel Ramos

LA PAZ (Reuters) - Bolivia's government is looking to stabilize the country's economy, which plunged the most in over half a century last year, with a mix of fiscal spending, vaccines and gold.

Economy Minister Marcelo Montenegro told Reuters in an interview that the Andean country was looking to buy up to 4 tonnes of gold each year to help rebuild foreign reserves that have sunk to the lowest level since 2006.

"The aim is to buy between 2-4 tonnes of gold annually, in such a way that this can be refined and become monetary gold," Montenegro said this week at the ministry in the center of the highland administrative capital, La Paz.

"Gold has an erratic, volatile fluctuation, but it is a global security asset."

Montenegro said this would help increase net international reserves, with the Central Bank of Bolivia (BCB) purchasing the gold from local producers.

The country's net reserves had fallen to some $4.9 billion as of June of this year, down from a peak of over $15 billion in 2014. Montenegro, however, played down liquidity concerns.

"At the moment there is no alarm or problems in the matter of liquidity," he said. The bank currently has some 43 tonnes of gold, he added, which made up 53% of its international reserves.

Graphic: Bolivia economy - https://graphics.reuters.com/BOLIVIA-MINISTER/INTERVIEW/nmopaxqwgva/chart.png

'RETURN TO NORMALITY'

Bolivia has been through a turbulent few years with a series of political, economic and health crises.

In late 2019, then leftist President Evo Morales resigned and fled the country amid widespread protests over a disputed election in which he had sought a fourth term. His party returned to power last year after a period of interim government.

The country has also been hurt badly by the COVID-19 pandemic, with some 440,000 cases and almost 17,000 deaths, while its vaccination program lags far behind countries starting to open up in the developed world.

Story continues

Montenegro, however, struck a cautiously optimistic tone, saying that a revival of mining, gas production, construction and manufacturing was helping drive a nascent revival that he estimated would boost growth to 5% in the first half of the year.

"Growth this year will reach 4.4%. We hope it will be more," he said. The more than 8% contraction in 2020 had been the worst since 1953, during the "first great Bolivian crisis" when the economy shrank about 9.4%, official data shows.

Montenegro said the revival would be driven by public investment of more than $4 billion to carry out infrastructure projects that generate sources of employment and service contracts, along with cheap loans for small businesses.

The government has also launched payouts to alleviate poverty and hunger and looks to raise taxes on the rich.

Gonzalo Chavez, a Bolivia economic analyst, said the economy was being helped by strong global commodities prices for gas, minerals and soy, though it remained fragile.

"Our economy is extremely sensitive to the volatility of the world economy," he said.

Montenegro also said revving up the vaccination program would be "vital." Bolivia has so far administered over 2.5 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, a Reuters tracker https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/bolivia shows, enough to give 2 doses to around 11% of the country's 11.7 million people.

President Luis Arce on Wednesday announced inoculations would be open to anyone over 18, saying the economy was starting to recover after being paralyzed last year, but needed "people to be protected from the disease."

He added that there would be a "massive" vaccine push in July and August with the arrival of 1 million doses every 10 days from July 10, including Russia's Sputnik V, and deals with China's Sinopharm and J&J's Janssen.

"This allows people to return to normality," said Montenegro. "And to keep carrying out economic activities in the most normal way possible."

Graphic: Reserves dwindle - https://graphics.reuters.com/BOLIVIA-MINISTER/INTERVIEW/qzjvqxyampx/chart.png

(Reporting by Daniel Ramos in La Paz; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Dan Grebler)
Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party Chairman Harsh Dev Singh speaking to ANI.

Udhampur (Jammu and Kashmir) [India], July 2 (ANI): Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party Chairman and former minister Harsh Dev Singh on Thursday condemned the attack on Jammu Airbase that occurred on Sunday and said an attempt is being made to target Jammu.

"Jammu has been peaceful till date and considered a symbol of brotherhood, unity and peace. The panic that is being tried is very condemnable. The Panthers Party demands inquiry in this regard and action should be taken against those who are guilty," Singh told ANI.

"Days before, terrorists have been caught in Jammu and a huge amount of explosives were recovered. Cognizance has to be taken and only condemning Pakistan will not work. The Centre will also have to do a little self-reflection. It is very important to curb Pakistan and restrictions must be imposed on it," he added.

On Sunday, two low-intensity explosions were reported in 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.

After the incident, sources had said that while investigating airbase attacks that it was emerging as if the drones which were used to carry out the hit dropped the explosives and were moved out from the area by their handlers. However, any parts of the drones were not found in the area.

Multiple agencies including the National Investigation Agency (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 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. (ANI)
A version of the AZ jab produced by Covishield at the Serum Institute of India is currently not recognised by the European Medicines Agency (Getty Images)

As many as five million British travellers who were given India-made versions of the AstraZeneca Covid Jab could face a possible ban from Europe, according to reports.

A version of the AZ jab produced by Covishield at the Serum Institute of India (SII) is currently not recognised by The European Medicines Agency (EMA), even though it is no less effective than jabs made elsewhere.

As a result, reports say UK holidaymakers given this vaccine could be denied entry at EU border crossings when batch numbers are checked on digital Covid passports.

However, Professor Adam Finn, from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said people should not be concerned about receiving doses of AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured in India, and that the issue with the EU was "an administrative hurdle".

The EU Digital Covid Certificate, which launched on Thursday, enables those who are fully vaccinated to travel through Europe without having to quarantine or undergo further testing.

However, it only accepts vaccines currently approved by the EMA, which are: Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine made in Europe.

Britons can check whether they had the SII jab by looking at their batch number, which appears on vaccination record cards.

According to the Telegraph, those who were administered the Covishield jab will have the numbers 4120Z001, 4120Z002 or 4120Z003.

The newspaper said the Department of Health has not given a number of how many SII manufactured AstraZeneca jabs have been distributed in the UK but said it believed up to five million doses had been imported earlier in the year.

As we continue to cautiously reopen international travel, NHS Covid Pass will be a key service that allows people to demonstrate their Covid-19 vaccination status, a spokesperson for the Department of Health told the Telegraph.

They added that all AstraZeneca doses used in the UK appeared under the name Vaxzevria in medical records and on the NHS app, even if they had come from India.

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It comes as Prof Finn told BBCs Today Programme that people should be reassured that they have received "the same stuff as people who have received other batches made elsewhere.

"This is an administrative hurdle that needs to be straightened out but people should not be concerned that they are in some way less well protected, he said.

"We're in the early days of this new world of needed vaccine passports and there are lots of aspects of this that are still being sorted out for the first time.

"But it's clearly, ultimately not in anyone's interest, including the European Union, to create hurdles that don't need to be there."

He added: "I would anticipate that this will get straightened out in due course."

The EUs coronavirus passport scheme allows citizens living within the bloc, as well as Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Lichtenstein, to show they have been inoculated, have tested negative for Covid or recently recovered, in order to travel freely between different countries without having to quarantine or undergo more tests.

It will be phased in over the next six weeks, allowing travellers to visit green list EU countries.

The Department of Health has been approached for comment.

Read More

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Row over AstraZeneca travel ban threat for five million Britons

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OneWeb confirms successful launch and contact with all 36 satellites launched earlier today, bringing total in-orbit constellation to 254 satellites

High-speed connectivity to be available from the North Pole to the 50 th parallel  includes the United Kingdom, Canada, Alaska and Arctic Region

On track for full global coverage by June 2022 with a LEO constellation of 648 satellites

LONDON, July 1, 2021 /CNW/ -- OneWeb, the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications company, today announced the successful launch of another 36 satellites to mark the completion of its 'Five to 50' mission. With this major milestone, the Company is ready to deliver connectivity across the United Kingdom, Canada, Alaska, Northern Europe, Greenland, and the Arctic Region.

OneWeb Launch #8 brings OneWeb's satellite constellation to 254 satellites to provide connectivity to UK, Canada, Alaska, and the Arctic Region.

OneWeb Completes its 'Five to 50' Mission to Cover North of 50 degrees Latitude including UK, Canada, Alaska, Arctic

The latest launch takes OneWeb's in-orbit constellation to 254 satellites, or 40% of OneWeb's planned fleet of 648 LEO satellites that will deliver high-speed, low-latency global connectivity. OneWeb intends to make global service available in 2022.

Service demonstrations will begin this summer in several key locations  including Alaska and Canada  as OneWeb prepares for commercial service in the next six months. Offering enterprise-grade connectivity services, the Company has already announced distribution partnerships across several industries and businesses including with BT, ROCK Network, AST Group, PDI, Alaska Communications and others, as OneWeb expands its global capabilities. The Company continues to engage with telecommunications providers, ISPs, and governments worldwide to offer its low-latency, high-speed connectivity services and sees growing demand for new solutions to connect the hardest to reach places.

The launch of the latest 36 satellites was conducted by Arianespace from the Vostochny Cosmodrom. Liftoff occurred on 1 July at 13:48 BST. OneWeb's satellites separated from the rocket and were dispensed in 9 batches over a period of 3 hours 52 minutes with signal acquisition on all 36 satellites confirmed.

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The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the Rt. Hon. Boris Johnson, MP, said: "This latest launch of OneWeb satellites will put high-speed broadband within reach of the whole Northern Hemisphere later this year, including improving connectivity in the remotest parts of the UK.

"Backed by the British Government, OneWeb proves what is possible when public and private investment come together, putting the UK at the forefront of the latest technologies, opening up new markets, and ultimately transforming the lives of people around the world."

Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder and Chairman of Bharti Enterprises, Executive Chairman of OneWeb, said: "Today's momentous milestone demonstrates that OneWeb is now a leader in LEO broadband connectivity, serving a wide range of stakeholders across the Northern Hemisphere. This fifth launch amid the unprecedented global pandemic is truly remarkable and I congratulate the management team and fellow shareholders on the success.

"Bharti's doubling of its investment earlier this week is testament to the commitment to OneWeb's mission. We now look forward to the next chapter in OneWeb's story, preparing the company for commercial service in the less than six months to deliver our global connectivity solutions to communities around the world."

The Rt. Hon. Kwasi Kwarteng, MP, Secretary of State, BEIS, added: "Today's launch is an exciting milestone in providing some of the world's most remote locations with fast, UK-backed broadband less than a year since British government investment made this possible. With yet another successful mission, the people of the UK can be proud that this country is at the heart of the latest advances in small satellite technology.

"OneWeb's coverage across the Northern Hemisphere now puts the United Kingdom at the forefront of the latest developments in Low Earth Orbit technology, and we will capitalise on the company's unique position within this growing market to build a strong domestic space industry and cement our status as a global science and technology superpower."

Neil Masterson, OneWeb CEO, said: "This is a truly historic moment for OneWeb, the culmination of months of positive momentum in our 'Five to 50' programme, increased investment from our global partners and the rapid onboarding of new customers. We are incredibly excited to start delivering high-speed, low-latency connectivity first to the UK and the Arctic region and to see our network scale over the coming months as we continue building to global service. Thanks to all our incredible partners who have been with us on this journey and are instrumental to making OneWeb's mission a success."

Webcast playback

Launch highlights available

View on OneWeb YouTube

Launch Imagery

Launch #8 Media Kit

Launch Partner

Arianespace and Glavkosmos

Launch Facility

Soyuz Launch Complex, Vostochny Cosmodrome

About OneWeb

OneWeb is a global communications network powered from space, headquartered in London, enabling connectivity for governments, businesses, and communities. It is implementing a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites with a network of global gateway stations and a range of user terminals to provide an affordable, fast, high-bandwidth and low-latency communications service, connected to the IoT future and a pathway to 5G for everyone, everywhere. Find out more at http://www.oneweb.world

Cision

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oneweb-completes-its-five-to-50-mission-to-cover-regions-north-of-50-degrees-latitude-including-uk-canada-alaska-and-arctic-region-301324692.html

SOURCE OneWeb

Cision

View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/July2021/01/c9542.html
Representative image

Jammu (Jammu and Kashmir) [India], July 2 (ANI): A drone from Pakistan entered the Indian territory at the International Border (IB) in the Arnia area of Jammu district on Friday morning, said the Border Security Force (BSF).

After BSF jawans opened fire, they flew back into Pakistani territory, officials said.

According to the BSF, the alert personnel fired at a small Hexa-copter belonging to Pakistan today morning at about 04: 25 am as it was trying to cross IB in the Arnia sector.

"Due to the firing, it returned immediately. It was meant for carrying out surveillance of the area," said BSF officials.

Since the last week, at least five drone activities have been reported in Jammu.

On the intervening night of June 27 to 28, alert troops successfully thwarted two drone activities near Ratnuchak-Kaluchak Military Station along the Jammu-Pathankot national highway, an Army official informed.

On Sunday morning, two blasts were carried out by drones 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, the Indian Air Force (IAF) informed.

No damage to any equipment was reported. However, two personnel suffered minor injuries.

The Defence Minister has been monitoring the situation on the ground. Earlier, he was briefed by the Vice Chief of Air Staff on the matter and has been constantly updated by the Air Force on the issue. (ANI)
Advocate Kamlesh

Muzaffarpur (Bihar) [India], July 2 (ANI): A petition has been filed in a court in Bihar's Muzaffarpur praying to book Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chief Mehbooba Mufti following her statement urging the Government of India to resume dialogue with Pakistan.

"The plea seeks a case against Mehbooba Mufti under Sections 323, 504, 109, 110, 111, 120B and 124 of Indian Penal Code (IPC) over her recent remarks. Matter to be heard on July 7," said Advocate Kamlesh on Thursday.

Mehbooba Mufti had recently said that Pakistan should also be involved in talks to resolve the Kashmir issue.

She made the remark ahead of a meeting of Kashmiri leaders with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the national capital.

PM Modi had on June 24 called the first all-party meeting with leaders from Jammu and Kashmir after the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5, 2019.

It was the first high-level interaction between the Centre and political leadership mainly from Kashmir since August 5, 2019, when the Centre revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and the state was bifurcated into two union territories. (ANI)
BANGKOK, Thailand, July 01, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Recently, RobinHoodSwap announces that it will take stronger steps to expand its impact in the charity field. RobinhoodSwap is Thailand's First Charitable DeFi platform which aims to recruit charitable projects from any source that generate positive impacts for the society without borders. The platform is welcoming philanthropical initiations regardless of nationality, colors, genders, or where it takes place.



RobinhoodSwap is where Prosperity meets Charity

"When you make money for yourself, that makes you human. But when you make money for someone else, that makes you a hero" - RobinHoodSwap

RobinHoodSwap is a liquidity mining platform running on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). It aims to bring together a global community of crypto investors with an eagerness to give back. Its philosophy is simple; to provide a safe and easy to use platform where people can earn interest for holding their crypto while committing to the little act of selflessness through global charities.

As with other DeFi platforms, users can leverage their investment on RobinHoodSwap in return for RBH tokens. What makes RobinHoodSwap unique is that 5% of the allocation from the block rewards is donated directly to charity. Charitable organizations are selected by the RobinHoodSwap community with a monthly vote taken by all RBH token holders.

Why is Robinhood recruiting?

As its mission is to be a global charitable defi platform, RobinhoodSwap is seeking to support organizations and projects not only from its motherland, but also from far-reaching areas around the globe. Currently, the platform has been working with a number of organizations and projects in various areas listed from mental health and wellness, education, children and women protection, marginalized people, stateless people, human rights, animals and environment reservation, including pandemic and disaster relief programs. These are all in the platform's pipeline; however, the defi platform still would like to expand its territory in terms of charity. It truly hopes to create an impact on the world. We and the next generations should live in a better world if we are reaching out to people who are in need more.

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Who is already under its umbrella?

Currently, RobinhoodSwap is working with Socialgiver which is a lifestyle platform that allows you to give back to society while enjoying your life with varieties of voucher deals and donations for the Spread the Love project which helps alleviate the unfortunate consequences. In addition, RobinhoodSwap has just reached an agreement with Devcurate, a leading career innovation and social impact ecosystem as its "Impact Curation'' partner. Devcurate helps purpose-driven organizations connect with talent with its new-age hiring solutions globally. Under this partnership, two leading social-impact organizations were welcome as beneficiaries. Amnesty International Thailand, a global movement of more than 10 million people who take injustice personally and campaign for the world where human rights are enjoyed by all, and 'CARE International Thailand (Raks Thai Foundation), which promotes strong communities and assists the disadvantaged in society in order to strengthen the capacity of grassroots and disadvantaged communities.

About RobinhoodSwap

RobinHoodSwap is a yield-farming platform, built with the purpose of letting investors put their crypto assets to good use. Instead of leaving it sitting in your wallet, your leverage liquidity mining on RobinHoodSwap for RBH can bring about change to people's lives through the charitable structure of the platform. There are no pre-mined developer allocations on RobinhoodSwap with 100% of initial LPs are locked for 12 months and the maximum Supply of 32,000,000 RBH throughout its lifetime. The platform also takes sustainability into account with the emission Rates of 0.2 RBH / BSC block while the core of its tokenomics is Charity Allocation of 5% of block rewards for donation purposes. Simultaneously, Developer Allocation of 9% of block rewards will be used for further development of the platform as well as upkeep, including Warchest Allocation of 6% of block rewards used to acquire and further partnerships as well as for marketing efforts. RobinhoodSwap is on its milestone to be certified by Smart Contract audits (AntiHack and CertiK) and build up upcoming member tiers for providing special benefits to its holders that you shouldn't miss, this is the first time in national defi-platform's history.

To learn more about RobinhoodSwap, please visit https://robinhoodswap.gitbook.io/

To be a part of Robinhooder community or propose your project, please contact:

Telegram (Global): https://t.me/RobinHoodSwap

Telegram (Thai): https://t.me/rbhth

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RobinhoodSwap

Or start farming now: https://bit.ly/3gecQrC

Media Contact

Company: RobinHoodSwap Finance

Contact: Dave

Telephone: +66859199209

Email: dave@robinhoodswap.finance

Website: https://www.robinhoodswap.finance

Address: 89,91 Sukhumvit 55 Bangkok 10110

SOURCE: RobinHoodSwap Finance




Luxembourg  2 July 2021 - Subsea 7 S.A. (Oslo Brs: SUBC, ADR: SUBCY) today announced the award of a sizeable(1) contract by OKEA to Subsea Integration Alliance(2) for the Hasselmus project, seven kilometres north west of the Draugen platform in the southern Norwegian Sea.

The project work scope covers the engineering, procurement, construction, and installation (EPCI) of the subsea production systems (SPS) and subsea pipelines (SURF) for a single subsea well with direct tie-back to the Draugen production platform. The SURF scope comprises approximately nine kilometres of pipe-in-pipe flowline and associated structures in water depths of approximately 250 metres.

Project management and engineering will commence immediately at Subsea 7s offices in Stavanger, Norway. Fabrication of the pipelines will take place at Subsea 7s spoolbase at Vigra, Norway and offshore operations will be executed in 2022 and 2023.

Monica Bjrkmann, VP Subsea 7 Norway said: We are delighted to be awarded this contract by OKEA. It acknowledges the value potential of Subsea Integration Alliances seamlessly integrated and optimised offering, and extends our relationship with OKEA that began with conceptual studies. We look forward to continuing the journey on the Hasselmus field development with safety, reliability and quality at the forefront throughout.

Stuart Fitzgerald, CEO Subsea Integration Alliance LLC said: This award to Subsea Integration Alliance supports our strategy for early engagement, full subsea system delivery, and our track record with OKEA. Working in partnership with OKEA has supported optimised solutions, early decision making and shortened delivery time, ultimately improving cost efficiency throughout the entire field lifecycle. We look forward to continuing to support this objective for the Hasselmus project.

(1) Subsea 7 defines a sizeable contract as being between USD 50 million and USD 150 million.

(2) Subsea Integration Alliance is a strategic global alliance between Subsea 7 and OneSubsea, the subsea technologies, production and processing systems division of Schlumberger, bringing together field development planning, project delivery and total lifecycle solutions under an extensive technology and services portfolio. As one team, Subsea Integration Alliance amplifies subsea performance by helping customers to define, select, install and operate the smartest subsea projects, that eliminate costly revisions, delays and reduces risk across the life of field.

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Subsea 7 is a global leader in the delivery of offshore projects and services for the evolving energy industry, creating sustainable value by being the industrys partner and employer of choice in delivering the efficient offshore solutions the world needs.

Subsea 7 is listed on the Oslo Brs (SUBC), ISIN LU0075646355, LEI 222100AIF0CBCY80AH62.

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Contact for investment community enquiries:

Katherine Tonks

Investor Relations Director

Tel +44 (0)20 8210 5568

katherine.tonks@subsea7.com

Contact for media enquiries:

Jan Roger Moksnes

Communications Manager, Norway

Tel +47 415 15 777

janroger.moksnes@subsea7.com

www.subsea7.com

Forward-Looking Statements: This announcement may contain forward-looking statements (within the meaning of the safe harbour provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995). These statements relate to our current expectations, beliefs, intentions, assumptions or strategies regarding the future and are subject to known and unknown risks that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of words such as anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, future, goal, intend, likely may, plan, project, seek, should, strategy will, and similar expressions. The principal risks which could affect future operations of the Group are described in the Risk Management section of the Groups Annual Report and Consolidated Financial Statements for the year ended 31 December 2020. Factors that may cause actual and future results and trends to differ materially from our forward-looking statements include (but are not limited to): (i) our ability to deliver fixed price projects in accordance with client expectations and within the parameters of our bids, and to avoid cost overruns; (ii) our ability to collect receivables, negotiate variation orders and collect the related revenue; (iii) our ability to recover costs on significant projects; (iv) capital expenditure by oil and gas companies, which is affected by fluctuations in the price of, and demand for, crude oil and natural gas; (v) unanticipated delays or cancellation of projects included in our backlog; (vi) competition and price fluctuations in the markets and businesses in which we operate; (vii) the loss of, or deterioration in our relationship with, any significant clients; (viii) the outcome of legal proceedings or governmental inquiries; (ix) uncertainties inherent in operating internationally, including economic, political and social instability, boycotts or embargoes, labour unrest, changes in foreign governmental regulations, corruption and currency fluctuations; (x) the effects of a pandemic or epidemic or a natural disaster; (xi) liability to third parties for the failure of our joint venture partners to fulfil their obligations; (xii) changes in, or our failure to comply with, applicable laws and regulations (including regulatory measures addressing climate change); (xiii) operating hazards, including spills, environmental damage, personal or property damage and business interruptions caused by adverse weather; (xiv) equipment or mechanical failures, which could increase costs, impair revenue and result in penalties for failure to meet project completion requirements; (xv) the timely delivery of vessels on order and the timely completion of ship conversion programmes; (xvi) our ability to keep pace with technological changes and the impact of potential information technology, cyber security or data security breaches; and (xvii) the effectiveness of our disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting;. Many of these factors are beyond our ability to control or predict. Given these uncertainties, you should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements. Each forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date of this announcement. We undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Attachment




Thursday, July 1 marked a day of transition at Chippewa Valley Technical College, as Dr. Sunem Beaton-Garcia officially took the reins as the 11th president while Bruce Barker eased into retirement after 22 years at CVTC, the last 12 as president.

Of course, the transition involves more than one single day. The CVTC District Board named Beaton-Garcia as Barkers successor on May 6 and succession plans for the change in leadership began immediately.

Ive been to CVTC about four times since the announcement, but thanks to technology, I feel like I have been here quite a bit, Beaton-Garcia said on her first official day as president, sitting in the Presidents Conference Room with Barker. Its been a whirlwind over the past two months. I was fortunate to be able to attend the District Board meeting in May virtually and the June meeting in person at the Neillsville Campus.

Those board meetings have been important, as thats when we finalized and passed the budget, Barker said.

Beaton-Garcia and Barker said they talked often over the past two months, mostly with virtual meetings.
(CNN)  Gap will close all 81 of its stores in the United Kingdom and Ireland by the end of September and go fully online, as the brand adjusts to changes in shopping habits following the pandemic.

The American apparel retailer, which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic, said in a statement on Thursday that the closures will affect company-operated stores. It added that plans were also underway to sell its outlets in France and Italy.

The retreat follows a strategic review of its European business that began last year "with the goal of finding new, more cost-effective ways" to serve customers in the region, the company said.

Gap announced a three-year plan in October to close hundreds of stores in North America, amounting to almost a third of its retail footprint. Like rivals, the company has had to adapt to the shift to e-commerce accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, which has challenged brick-and-mortar retailers and contributed to the bankruptcy of established brands such as Brooks Brothers.

On Thursday, Gap blamed "market dynamics" for its decision to close stores in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which it said will take place in a "phased manner" through the end of September. It declined to comment on how many jobs would be affected.

"We are thoughtfully moving through the consultation process with our European team, and we will provide support and transition assistance for our colleagues as we look to wind down stores," the company added.

It said it is in discussions with a "potential partner" in Italy and negotiating with Hermione People and Brands, the retail branch of property developer FIB Group, to take over Gap stores in France.

Gap opened in London in 1987, marking its first expansion outside the United States. It has been present in Ireland since 2006.

"Gap was decades ahead in offering the athleisure styles which have become so popular during the pandemic," said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

But the brand has struggled to compete with a growing number of rivals in the "casual space," particularly given "languishing footfall" in shopping centers and on main streets where many of its stores are based, she added in a research note on Thursday.

The brand's physical exit will deal a fresh blow to Britain's main streets, which are already reeling from the closure of Debenhams, the country's biggest department store chain.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Gap to close all stores in UK and Ireland."
Early this year, perfumer Barnabe Fillion lost his nose.

Though air travel has been mostly halted throughout the world due to the pandemic, he was able to catch a flight to Ethiopia to fulfill one of his dreams: to find some of the best frankincense in the world. This was in January, during the Epiphany, also known as Three Kings Day, when three men followed a star that led them to the Baby Jesus, and presented him with gold, myrrh, and frankincense. Fillion ended up in one of the oldest excavated shops in the world isolated from the city center, one of 200 people in line to buy from a person he described as a very interesting old monk.

Without that commute I would have never been able to achieve such a dream in such conditions, Fillion says. He caught a flight to India post-his Ethiopian pilgrimage, and eventually tested positive for COVID-19. Among his symptoms, he almost lost part of his olfactory senses.

Three days I didn't have it, so I went absolutely cuckoo as you can imagine, Fillion recalls.

Perfumer Barnabe Fillion is the artisan behind some of cruelty-free skincare brand Aesops most celebrated fragrances: the woody Hwyl, the floral Rozu, and the spicy Marrakech. Photo courtesy of AESOP

For anyone else, to lose their sense of smell even briefly, is an inconvenience at best. But for the perfumer, to lose his sense of smell is to lose an intrinsic part of his profession. He is the artisan behind some of cruelty-free skincare brand Aesops most celebrated fragrances: the woody Hwyl, the floral Rozu, and the spicy Marrakech. Though trained in photography, Fillion became a sought-after perfumer; he has also lent his nose in creating scents for brands like Le Labo and Paul Smith.

Miraceti, Karst, and Eremia take inspiration from the boat, the shore, and the wasteland. Photo courtesy of AESOP

This year, Fillion once again collaborated with Aesop in the release of a compact collection of scents called Othertopias. According to Aesop, the three eaux de parfum  Miraceti, Karst, and Eremia  take inspiration from the boat, the shore, and the wasteland. The collection hopes to inspire the wearer to challenge our perceptions of the natural world, and perhaps form a dialogue with the images each scent produces. Each bottle is 50mL at 9,300, and is packaged in a carton box with an artwork unique to each fragrance, designed by Belfast-based painter Jack Coulter.

In an interview with CNN Philippines Life, Fillion talks about how his sense of smell informs his perception of imagery, the unstoppable passion of humans to win over nature, and why he tends to keep poetry books at the breakfast table.

Interview has been edited for brevity.

Hello, Barnabe. Ive read previous interviews youve had where you talk about being synesthetic. I wonder now how you begin building a scent in your head.

It wasn't a confined fact, when I started perfumery, that I was a synesthete. It's something that I have actually learned through the process. But it's interesting to go back to the roots of what invited me to do perfume  I was actually educated in visual art photography. And I noticed little by little that actually, the what I'm developing in the perfumes is a sort of image. I don't want to say the word vision because it's too ambiguous, but it still is not a very defined image, and little by little I get to develop with textures.

So basically, what I have that is very synesthetic, it's color and texture in a visual way when I'm thinking about a smell. And when I smell, I also have the same effect of adding flashes of images and texture, and sometimes blurs of different images together. And that became in a certain way a sort of palette for me.

For this particular project, the inspiration is the poetic space or the poetry of space. Developed by several philosophers, but mostly by Gaston Bachelard. And we are here, actually exploring this idea of those interstitial spaces called the other spaces, which are conceptual, philosophical, political, abstract, geographical, geological, etimologic, at the same time. And the whole collection is about questioning how perfume can be part of those interstitial spaces. And as a synesthete, it's very important for me because like, when you create a color, what you have in between the blue and the green, and the tension that could be those two colors together.

The base note of Eremia contains galbanum while Karst's contains sandalwood. Photos courtesy of AESOP

And it was very interesting to question, you know, this. But it's also this collection [is a] tool to measure the relationship or to interrogate and measure the relationship between many natures. And when I say nature is with the big N, I'm not only talking about the vegetal world, I'm talking about including us as human beings too.

I wanted to ask about how you decided on these themes specifically.

So it's very interesting to think that for example, Miraceti is about the unstoppable desire for obscure desires, kind of. [Its like] Captain [Ahab] of "Moby Dick," you know, not being able to stop his desire to chase something that he knows he will never get. But it's like this energy that you cannot stop trying to [win] over nature.

Eremia is much more about nature itself getting back its right and its space against the city. And Karst is much more [about] the elements of dichotomy. I think that in oriental philosophy it's very present in that culture, maybe less in Europe. But it's this idea of inhaling, exhaling, of departure and return from the cliff, which is one of the interstitial spaces of Karst. So you see, it's very visual. I'm not creating mood boards to do my work. It's just in my mind when I'm talking perfume, when imagining it. It reflects inside as images.

For the Miraceti perfume, the image "The Boat" pays tribute to "to the serenity and savagery of the sea." Photo courtesy of AESOP

It's interesting that you mentioned a lot of literary inspiration in creating scents. I'm actually curious now, what kind of books do you enjoy reading?

I love to read [about] Alain Corbin's world, but I had read it a really long time ago. I also like to dive into classic philosophy, modern philosophy, but again, not really, reading full books. It's more related to my research, but I love biography in general. I love art, artists biographies of different times.

Poetry is always there, next to the bed and, and close to the breakfast table or dinner table, you know, this idea of, of getting infused at some point of the day with poetry, which for me, is a part of other topia. For me, poetry plays a lot with the idea of special resonance of [a piece of] text, not only telling a story. The image that comes in for me is another topia.

I love the idea of poetry for breakfast. Part of your past work includes Hwyl and Rozu. How is this current new collection different from these? And what similarities do they share?

Well, I will say that, first of all, we worked on it as a collection. And again, it was infused by philosophical and literary research. Hwyl is related to my relation to some special places in Japan. And Rozu is more related to a relation that I had with [modernist designer] Charlotte Perriand and the love of Aesop for design, of their relationship with architecture. But also it was about paying respect, between the relationship of east and west in design. And how this pioneer woman is incarnating this balance, you know. She [was] influenced [by the] Japanese in her work and she brought back so much of the knowledge and tradition and style of the east. You know, not only in Japan, but she was in Vietnam before then traveled all over the world. So, this is more about the admiration for someone. Hwyl is more of a journal.

On Othertopias, Fillion says: "The inspiration is the poetic space or the poetry of space... the whole collection is about questioning how perfume can be part of those interstitial spaces." Photos from AESOP

Though theyre in one collection, Karst, Miraceti, and Eremia each have very distinct fragrance notes. Do you recommend combining or layering them in any way? Is that something that you thought of when you were creating them?

No, it's not the intention, but it's definitely something that I will invite anybody to try. You know with perfume, you have to try. Some of the greatest perfumes happen with some kind of accident like this. So why not?

But to be honest, that's not the intention of the collection, the intention is the juxtaposition, meaning you could wear them together in different places of the body. That could be interesting. But the idea is more like wear these one day, wear the other one, one day see how you go deeper in one of the imaginary spaces, you know. They are here to stimulate our imagery. Maybe you'll [become] more sensitive, for instance, not only because of the smell itself, but like the profound value more connected to Karst's territory, or do you need to be for a moment more in Karsts territory than the tremendous sea, which is more Miraceti. If you want to have a bit of whiskey, maybe Miraceti could satisfy you. (Laughs) Karst will be too soft. If you want some gin, maybe Karst will make it very well.

Davide Quayola's "The Wasteland" for Eremia is a "locale that resists control and cultivation; humans may exert their influence but the natural order always prevails." Photo courtesy of AESOP

I have one last question before we go. What would you say are your favorite non-perfume smells?

It's used in perfume, transforming perfume, but I'm very sensitive to the end of the winter. [The] mimosa blossom, you know, that arrives in Europe like January, February and allows us to finally see some yellow in the sky. I'm very sensitive to frankincense because they remind me of rituals in general. Rituals of the church, or rituals of the kodo ceremony in Japan rituals of so many places that I don't know. I'm also very fascinated by the smell of trees, and of wood.

***

The fragrances from the Othertopias collection will be available on July 5 at Aesop Greenbelt and on July 7 through the website.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 1)  Tons of debris were removed from the Tullahan River as part of a cleanup project headed by San Miguel Corporation (SMC).

A statement from one of the country's largest and most diversified conglomerates released on Thursday said as of June 28, a total of 301,695 metric tons of silt and solid waste have been removed from the first 11.5-kilometer section of the river from Manila Bay in Navotas to Potrero in Malabon and Valenzuela cities. For this section, the target dredging output is 1 million metric tons.

In February, the company said it would extend the project to further support current flood mitigation measures.

It has also deployed more equipment for the cleanup efforts.

According to SMC, following completion of sections that include Barangay Bangkulasi and Tanong in Navotas City, the cleanup team is currently operating in Barangay Longos in Malabon City.

SMC president Ramon S. Ang said despite the restrictions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, they have not paused the clean up operations and are now working on deepening and widening parts of the river to complement government's flood mitigation measures.

"Even during the rainy season, our dredging teams will continue their operations to ensure that the Tullahan river will have greater capacity to receive flood waters from adjacent areas, particularly during typhoon season," Ang added.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 2)  The Department of Health on Friday said vaccinators who commit "human errors" when giving COVID-19 shots will not be penalized.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire, however, said punishments will be enforced if the healthcare worker carried out the lapses intentionally.

"Halimbawa ito ay intentional na ginawa, diyan talaga, we will penalize. We can see that these were all, itong nakikita nating lapse in the processes, wala namang masamang intention," she said in a media briefing. "These are really just human errors na gusto natin maimprove in the coming days kaya we are orienting them."

[Translation: For example, if it was intentional, we will penalize them. We see that the lapses in the process were not done with bad intentions. These are really just human errors that we want to improve so we are orienting them.]

It was exposed this week that a volunteer nurse in Makati who injected the needle into the arm of a recipient forgot to press the syringe to release the vaccine. There were reports of similar incidents in other vaccination sites across Metro Manila.

These incidents have worried some of those vaccinated, questioning if they received the proper dosage.

Vergeire said the vaccinator may show the syringe and its contents to the recipient before and after the shots to help avoid improper inoculation.

"Kung ito ay gagawin ng ating mga vaccination sites para sa ikakapanatag ng loob ng ating kababayan, we can do that," the official said.

[Translation: If vaccination sites want to do this to build the trust and confidence of the public, it's an option.

The DOH underscored the importance of limiting the shifts of vaccinators to eight hours to minimize fatigue and ensure quality of service. It also suggested adding an aide to assist and lessen the work of the vaccinator.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 2) Using funds meant for its own maintenance and other operating expenses, the Office of the Vice President (OVP) spent over 113 million for COVID-19 response in 2020, according to the Commission on Audit (COA).

In its annual report, COA said the expenses  a total of 113,606,806  were done as part of the OVP's Social Service Program following the declaration of a state of public health emergency in March last year.

The OVP bought personal protective equipment, testing kits, and food for community pantries. It also leased dormitories for medical frontliners.

State auditors noted that the OVP was not a recipient of the national government's COVID-19 fund.

But they observed gaps in the monitoring of the receipt and distribution of donations in-kind received by the OVP.

"Particularly with regard to some incomplete and varying information in the summary/list of donations received, distribution and balances, and distribution list," COA said.

The commission flagged the missing description, cost, and quantity of some items.

COA recommended a review of the deficiencies and for the OVP to submit a revised report.

In its response to auditors, the OVP explained discrepancies in the report were mostly due to differences in the unit of measurement of donated items.

It added that donated pre-packed hygiene kits and relief packs with varying items were no longer repacked but distributed as is.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 2)  There should be a steady decline in the volcanic activities for two weeks before the government seismology agency downgrades the alert level of the Taal Volcano, an official said Friday.

"If there is a downward trend and we see it really continues, we look at two weeks window when we lower the alert level. Thats the procedure that we follow," Phivolcs chief Renato Solidum told CNN Philippines' The Source.

This means it remains unclear when Taal evacuees could return to their homes. The evacuees cannot return home in the next two weeks, at least.

A phreatomagmatic eruption on Thursday afternoon -- when Taal ejected a dark grayish plume that rose 1,000 meters -- prompted Phivolcs to raise the status of Taal to Alert Level 3, and recommend the evacuation of residents from high-risk areas in Batangas.

Authorities in the towns of Agoncillo and Laurel started evacuating residents from the affected villages following Taal's unrest. The high-risk areas are Bilibinwang and Banyaga in Agoncillo and Boso-Boso, Gulod, and eastern Bugaan East in Laurel, Solidum said.

Around 317 families or 1,282 residents from high-risk areas were evacuated due to the threat of another explosion, Lito Castro, head of the Batangas Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management, told CNN Philippines' New Day earlier on Friday.

The Calabarzon office of the Department of Social Welfare and Development is on heightened alert and has kept stockpiles of relief goods amounting to P1.4 million and non-food items worth P11 million, Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said Friday in a statement.

He added government forces are also ready to assist in evacuation and relief efforts.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 2) Vice President Leni Robredo asked the Supreme Court sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) to junk with finality the election protest of former Senator Bongbong Marcos.

In her comment, Robredo said Marcos appeal must be denied since his issues were rehashed.

Since this is just a repetition of the same arguments, then we look forward to the resolution of the decision of the PET that the case be dismissed again for utter lack of merit, Robredos lawyer Romulo Macalintal told reporters on Friday.

Marcos insisted that the tribunal should proceed with his third cause of action: to annul election results in Basilan, Maguindanao, and Lanao del Sur due to alleged fraud and terrorism.

But in its unanimous ruling, PET said Marcos failed to prove his claims and that his allegations appeared bare, laden with generic and repetitious allegations and lacked critical information.

The losing vice presidential candidate argued the dismissal of the entire protest under Rule 65 of PET rules will only apply if the cause of action is limited to recount and revision of ballots.

Justice Marvic Leonen, who penned the decision, said the tribunal was explicit in imposing the mandatory ceiling in pilot provinces to serve as litmus test that when no substantial recovery of votes in the pilot provinces is shown the election protest must be dismissed.

If, indeed, protestant was convinced of his claims in Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao, and Basilan then he should have indicated those three as his pilot provinces. But he did not, to no fault of this Tribunal, Leonen wrote.

Robredos lawyers also pointed out nobody dictated Marcos to choose Camarines Sur, Iloilo, and Negros Oriental as his pilot provinces.

Now that he was proven wrong, protestant Marcos now wants to change the Rules so he can keep fanning the flames on his unsubstantiated allegations. Protestant Marcos has no one to blame but himself for the dismissal of his Election Protest, the camp said.

After the revision and appreciation of votes in the pilot provinces, PET said Marcos total number of votes only increased by 204,513 while Robredos votes increased by 1,510,178.

By this alone, Marcos failed to show reasonable recovery of his votes in his designated pilot provinces, the PET said.

Robredos counsels pointed that Marcos election protest proved that Robredo won not just once but thrice against Marcos.

This might be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is one that protestant Marcos must accept with grace, they said.
(CNN)  A hate speech debate turned heated in New Zealand's Parliament on Wednesday when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern suggested the country's opposition leader was a "Karen."

The insult, popularized last year by an internet meme, broadly refers to an entitled White woman who is unafraid to use her privilege to make unreasonable demands.

Parliament had been debating New Zealand's hate speech laws, with Ardern's government proposing harsher penalties for inciting discrimination and violence. The proposal comes in response to the deadly 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks. A Royal Commission inquiry afterward concluded the law did not adequately deal with hate speech and hate crime, and recommended stronger measures.

But the proposed changes have been sharply criticized by opposition parties, who argue it would infringe on freedom of speech and that existing laws are sufficient.

"Will calling a middle-aged white woman a 'Karen' now be a crime under Jacinda Ardern's law?" tweeted Judith Collins, opposition leader and head of the center-right National Party, on Tuesday.

Collins reiterated her opposition to the law in parliament Wednesday, arguing it would "shut down debate on hate speech."

"I disagree with that statement," Ardern replied. "I also, as it happens, disagree with (Collins') statement on Twitter, that somehow it will become illegal to call someone a 'Karen.' That is absolutely incorrect, and I apologize, that means these laws will not protect that member from such a claim."

The statement was met with laughter and scattered applause from other members of parliament, and a tight-lipped smile from Collins.

The term, which several groups and dictionaries named "word of the year" in 2020, has people divided. Some think it's sexist, while others say it's a placeholder for speaking about the casual racism and privilege exhibited by some White women.

The use of "Karen" to signify a certain stereotype of Whiteness isn't new, or even singular  there was also "BBQ Becky," the nickname given to a White woman who called police over a group of Black people barbecuing in a public park in 2018.

But "Karen" became widely used in 2020 thanks to the cultural force of Black Twitter, and the frustrations over racial injustice that boiled over during the Black Lives Matter protests. A number of incidents that went viral online  including a White woman who called the police on a Black birdwatcher for asking she leash her dog in Central Park  further thrust the term, and the problems it connotes, into the spotlight.

This story was first published on CNN.com "Jacinda Arden appears to call New Zealand opposition leader a 'Karen' during hate speech debate"
(CNN)  Elon Musk is applauding China on a momentous day for the country's ruling political party.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO lavished praise on the country as it marked a special occasion Thursday: the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

In a Twitter post, Musk wrote that "the economic prosperity that China has achieved is truly amazing, especially in infrastructure! I encourage people to visit and see for themselves."

Musk was responding to a post from Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua, which referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping's campaign to end "absolute poverty in China."

Musk also posted the same message on Weibo, China's Twitter-like platform, where he has nearly 1.8 million followers. The Weibo post has attracted some 500 comments, where his remarks raised eyebrows among some users.

"Elon Musk, an old CCP member," wrote one user, who added a laughing emoji.

Reaction was also mixed on Twitter. Some users seconded Musk's remarks, while others pointed to China's record on human rights.

Musk's charm offensive in China

The billionaire businessman recently embarked on a charm offensive in China, where his electric automaker Tesla has faced a series of issues this year.

Just last weekend, nearly all of the vehicles Tesla had built and sold in China were recalled by regulators over concerns about the cruise control system.

The company was also targeted in April by protesting Tesla owners at the country's largest auto show in Shanghai, where they complained about problems with their cars. Regulators have questioned the quality of Tesla's Shanghai-made Model 3s, too, and there have been reports of heightened scrutiny of the company from China's military.

Tesla has tried to assuage officials in China by addressing criticisms.

In March, Musk appeared for a rare interview with state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), heaping praise on the Chinese government and saying that it would "become the biggest economy in the world." Musk has also predicted that the world's biggest car market would eventually become Tesla's most important.

Last month, Tesla announced it had set up a new data center in mainland China to keep any data it collects from locally sold cars within the country's borders  a step that came as the company faced questions about whether its cars could ever be used for spying.

Musk has previously expressed his admiration for Chinese infrastructure, particularly over how quickly and cheaply Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory was able to come together.

The company famously beat its own deadline to start making cars there, and the facility was about 65% cheaper to build than its Model 3 production plant in the United States. Musk himself has called the factory a "template for future growth."

Munger commends China, too

Another big name in business chimed in ahead of China's big day.

In an interview with CNBC that aired Tuesday, Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger praised the Chinese government for silencing Alibaba's Jack Ma, adding that he wishes US financial regulators were more like those in China.

"Communists did the right thing," Munger, the 97-year-old longtime friend of Warren Buffett, said about the handling of Ma, who criticized officials in Beijing last year for stifling innovation.

Ma has been largely out of the public eye since making those critiques.

The Berkshire executive also said that although he would not want "all of the Chinese system" in the United States, "I certainly would like to have the financial part of it in my own country."

Berkshire Hathaway was not immediately available for further comment from CNN Business.

Munger also praised China's approach to the coronavirus crisis, which he described as shutting down "the country for six weeks." (While major lockdowns were imposed in cities across the nation, some parts of the country were not subject to such strict measures.)

"They did it exactly right," said Munger. "When it was all over, they kind of went back to work."

 Laura He and Paul R. La Monica contributed to this report

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Elon Musk praises China's 'economic prosperity' on 100th anniversary of Chinese Communist Party."
(CNN) -- The United States has won international backing for its plan to overhaul the global system for taxing companies, a huge step toward simplifying a complex web of rules long exploited by big corporations.

Countries including India, China and Switzerland have agreed to a broad framework for reform set out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Paris-based group said Thursday that 130 countries and jurisdictions were on board, representing more than 90% of global economic output.

In a statement, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called the agreement a "historic day for economic diplomacy." Yellen secured the support of the Group of Seven nations, including Canada, France, Japan, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, last month.

"For decades, the United States has participated in a self-defeating international tax competition, lowering our corporate tax rates only to watch other nations lower theirs in response," Yellen said. That "race to the bottom" is now "one step closer to coming to an end," she continued.

The OECD's framework includes a global minimum tax of at least 15% on multinational companies. The plan also holds that the biggest companies should pay tax where they generate sales and earn profits, and not just where they have a physical presence  a move that could have major ramifications for top tech companies like Google and Amazon.

Establishing a global minimum tax has been a top priority for President Joe Biden, who wants to boost government revenue to help offset the costs of his proposed infrastructure package.

The hard work isn't over yet. Negotiations remain ongoing, with technical details set to be hashed out between now and October. And countries would still need to pass reforms at home to transform any deal into law.

But the agreement removes significant uncertainty ahead of a meeting of Group of 20 nations later this month and clears the way for a final accord.

Not everyone is on board, however. Notably absent from the list of signatories is Ireland, whose low-tax regime has been essential to drawing in top tech firms. Barbados also did not sign on to the deal.

This story was first published on CNN.com "President Biden wins global support for massive tax overhaul".
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 2)  The Philippine Stock Exchange is tying up some loose ends in the wake of a multimillion-peso stock market scandal that involved at least two brokerage firms.

In a virtual press briefing on Friday, PSE President and CEO Ramon Monzon said he wants to prune the number of stock brokerages to boost internal controls by increasing the minimum capital requirement.

The PSE has yet to decide on the size, but there are 125 brokerage firms currently facilitating trades, while more sophisticated financial markets like Singapore has less than 30.

"There are too many brokers for such a small market," Monzon told journalists.

The proposal is to more than triple the current minimum unimpaired capital level for existing trading participants from 30 million to 100 million.

"That's to make sure a broker will have the sufficient resources to having a complete organization with strong internal controls," the PSE official said.

The plan comes after regulators revoked the licenses of Ventures Securities and another brokerage firm - R&L Investment - after a rogue settlement clerk was found to have fraudulently transferred 700 million worth of shares from one brokerage to the other.

The stock exchange is also delisting dormant companies whose shares are not being actively traded. Being unable to fix the capital deficiency within three years or perennially have not been filing annual reports are among the grounds for delisting.

The local bourse has seen a revival in market confidence and capital-raising activities in the first half of the year, with companies raising a total of 122.5 billion in capital via initial public offerings or IPOs, stock rights offer and follow-on offerings in the six months ending June.

The target is to convince more companies to raise at least 219 billion collectively by yearend, matching the record-high capital raised during the late President Noynoy Aquino's time.

"There's a silver lining in every drought," Monzon said.

"Because of the pandemic, I think debt financing - while very, very cheap - became very difficult because banks have to tighten their lending standards. Plus, because of the economic difficulties, a lot of companies have to borrow and I guess they were reaching their loan or credit limits. But their need for capital continues so they had to go to the capital or equities market."
(CNN)  British billionaire Richard Branson plans to beat fellow billionaire and rival Jeff Bezos to space. Branson's company, Virgin Galactic, made a surprise announcement Thursday that he will attempt to fly in Virgin's rocket-powered plane on July 11  nine days before Bezos's planned July 20th launch.

The announcement puts Branson, rather than Bezos, in position to become the first billionaire to travel to space aboard a spacecraft he helped fund.

Virgin Galactic had planned to start flying customers years ago, but its development program was set back by several mishaps, including a 2014 test fight accident that resulted in the death of a co-pilot.

Since the early 2000s, Branson and Bezos have been vying to develop, test and launch suborbital rockets that can take wealthy thrillseekers on brief, 2,300-mile-per-hour rides a few dozen miles above Earth. And their efforts have long been framed as a "billionaire space race."

But in interviews, Branson has frequently said he's not interested in "racing" to space.

"People have turned it into a race," he told CNN Business' Rachel Crane during a recent interview. "It would be very dangerous to say turn it into a race. And the moment we have every boxed ticked, I will go up and then we will invite some of the people who have signed up to go with us  but we honestly don't see it as a race."

Blue Origin announced earlier in June that Bezos would fly alongside his brother, Mark Bezos. Later it said they would be joined by Wally Funk  an 82-year-old woman who underwent similar training to NASA's Mercury program, but like all American women at the time, was denied the opportunity to go to space  and the winner of an auction who forked over $28 million for the opportunity. (The auction winner's name has yet to be announced.)

After weeks of silence, Virgin Galactic interrupted Blue Origin's string of announcements to reveal that Branson would be on Virgin Galactic's next test flight out of New Mexico, a seeming departure from earlier plans to fly four "mission specialists" on its fourth powered test flight before allowing Branson on board. Virgin Galactic said in a press release Thursday that Branson will be joined on his flight by Beth Moses, the company's head of training who has flown on a previous test flight, and fellow Virgin Galactic employees Colin Bennett and Sirisha Bandla.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's name is also often thrown around in the "space race" game, but the rockets SpaceX builds are far more powerful than the suborbital tourism rockets built by Branson and Bezos, and Musk has said little about his personal space ambitions beyond that he'd "like to die on Mars  just not on impact."
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 2)  Overseas Filipino workers sending money back home may face more scrutiny after the Philippines slipped back to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)'s gray list, an organization warned Friday.

"Because of the gray list thing, whenever they go to a remittance company outside the Philippines, they will be tagged as a high-risk customer," Association of Remittance Company Compliance Officers president Guadalupe Vergel De Dios told CNN Philippines' The Exchange.

"Instead of just capturing five data points from that customer and requiring the presentation of one ID, that customer would be now required to submit additional data points and perhaps documents to prove financial capacity," she added.

De Dios said these could lead to higher operational costs for remittance companies, and make sending money home more expensive. The additional requirements could also cause delays in remittances, according to Indonesia-based fintech company Xendit.

"When you're thinking about a family that's relying on receiving their remittances right away, even a five-day delay, a ten-day delay is really quite disastrous for the families' cash flow in general," Xendit president and chief executive officer Yang Yang Zhang said.

Last week, the FATF - a global watchdog protecting against ill-gotten money and criminal proceeds - released its list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring, which included the Philippines.

'One nation' approach necessary

With its return to the FATF watchlist, the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) said all hands need to be on deck to pull the Philippines out of the gray list.

"It's not only from the AMLC or from the supervisors but the entire bureaucracy. It has to deliver prosecutions; it has to implement our [Anti-]Terrorism Law, anti-terrorism financing laws, supervisory framework of supervisors," AMLC executive director Mel Georgie Racela said.

"It's an entire nation approach, a one-nation approach. We can only achieve this if we cooperate fully," he added.

Bankers Association of the Philippines (BAP) president Wick Veloso supported this, saying a good monitoring and tracking system is key to weeding out dubious monetary movements.

Veloso assured the BAP's commitment to working with the government on implementing measures to combat money laundering.

He also urged the public to always be "curious" and keep an eye out on suspicious transactions, and report them immediately so they can be addressed promptly.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Benjamin Diokno earlier said the country is expected to exit the gray list upon the completion of all action plans "hopefully on or before" January 2023.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 2)  The country administered one million coronavirus shots in just four days this week, its fastest yet since the vaccine rollout began in March, the National Task Force against COVID-19 said Friday.

In a virtual briefing Friday, NTF Deputy Chief Implementer Vince Dizon said the government was able to give one million COVID-19 doses from June 28 to July 1.

This brought the total number of vaccines administered to 11 million, the official added.

"Umaarangkada na ang ating pagbabakuna. Kung magkakaroon nang mas maraming supply, mas madami pa ang maja-jab sa mga susunod na linggo," Dizon said.

[Translation: Our vaccinations are now in full swing. If we receive more supply, more people will receive their shots in the coming weeks.]

According to Dizon, the country is now averaging 250,000 shots per day. The target, he noted, is to achieve a 500,000 vaccination rate a day.

"Kapag dumating pa ang maraming doses ngayong July, makukuha natin ang ating target," he said.

[Translation: When more doses arrive this July, we will hit our target.]

For this month, the government expects to receive 3 million Sinovac doses, 4 million Sputnik V doses, 1 million Moderna doses, 2 million Novavax doses, 1.5 million Johnson & Johnson doses, and 2 million AstraZeneca doses.

READ: TIMELINE: COVID-19 vaccine deliveries and rollout in the Philippines
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 2)  The U.S. Department of State once again assigned the Philippines the highest classification in the efforts to combat human trafficking this year.

In the American agency's 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report which assesses 188 nations, the Philippines got a Tier 1 ranking, marking Manila's sixth straight year to receive such a classification.

Countries found to have met minimum standards under Washington's Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 are placed under the Tier 1 classification. However, a Tier 1 ranking does not mean a country has human trafficking problem nor it is doing enough to address it, said the US State Department.

"To maintain a Tier 1 ranking, governments need to demonstrate appreciable progress each year in combating trafficking. Tier 1 represents a responsibility rather than a reprieve," read the report.

The report acknowledged that the Philippines kept "serious and sustained" efforts for the reporting period even with the impact of the COVID-19 health crisis. These include the prosecution of more traffickers than the previous reporting period, inclusion of "significantly" more defendants charged with using child soldiers, and sentencing majority of convicted traffickers to "significant" prison terms.

The report also recognized the increase in the number of prosecutors dedicated to anti-trafficking task forces, and staff of the Philippines' anti-trafficking coordination body. Also cited was the government's efforts to set up a specialized shelter and one-stop service center in Manila, providing assistance to over a thousand trafficking victims.

PH's failure to convict 'complicit' officials flagged

However, the US State Department flagged the shortcomings of Philippine authorities in the fight against human trafficking.

"Although the government meets the minimum standards, it did not convict any officials for complicity in trafficking crimes and did not vigorously investigate labor trafficking crimes that occurred within the Philippines or provide training to labor inspectors on the indicators of trafficking," stated the report.

The report also pointed out the smaller number of victims identified compared to the last reporting period. There were also fewer resources for law enforcement while specialized services for human trafficking victims stayed "inadequate," it added.

Among the recommendations of the US State Department for the Philippine government is adding more efforts to probe, prosecute, and imprison complicit officials and labor traffickers. This should also apply to anti-trafficking task forces and law enforcement units.

Philippine authorities are also enjoined to strengthen local governments' capability to provide survivors with reintegration services, and increase support for state and non-government organization programs providing victims specialized care.

The American department also recommended to "consistently" implement the country's coordinated inter-agency response providing services for returning Filipinos who experienced these crimes, along with the creation of a central database of information on illegal recruiters.

Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra, who chairs the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking, assured that they will keep improving the government's anti-human trafficking responses and "recalibrate" efforts to address the report's recommendations.

Guevarra said this will begin with the "promising amendments to legislation" to address present gaps, adding the council will be strengthened further through the addition of more personnel.

Meanwhile, Justice Undersecretary and IACAT Usec-in-Charge Emmeline Aglipay-Villar said they will continue enhancing "mutual coordination, collaboration and cross-border" ties with other jurisdictions in fighting the crime.

Aglipay-Villar likewise emphasized the importance of educating the public on issues related to human trafficking and mobilizing resources to address its forms, particularly child trafficking and online sexual exploitation of children.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 2)  More than 1,200 residents of areas near Taal Volcano are taking shelter in evacuation centers a day after it recorded its latest phreatomagmatic eruption, a local disaster official said Friday.

Lito Castro, head of the Batangas Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management told CNN Philippines' New Day that as of 5 a.m., around 317 families or 1,282 residents from high-risk areas have fled to evacuation centers as a preemptive evacuation.

At least 28 families or 110 residents also sought refuge in the homes of nearby relatives, he added.

Castro said most of the evacuees were from barangays Gulod, Buso-Buso, and Bugaan East in the municipality of Laurel, and barangays Bangin and Poblacion in Agoncillo.

Some residents of Batangas City also temporarily evacuated to nearby towns and cities like Nasugbu, Calaca, Calatagan, and San Jose, Castro said.

"Actually, kung ito ay ma-consider natin, ito'y preemptive sapagka't yung nasabing barangays yun ay malalapit at nakastipulate sa ating contingency plan na for the worst case secenario na sakaling mag-escalate meron po tayong mga plan for evacuation," Castro said.

[Translation: Actually, if we will consider this situation, this is preemptive because the mentioned barangays are just near (the danger zone) and it is stipulated in our contingency plan that when the situation escalates during the worst case scenario, we have a plan for evacuation.]

"May mga bayan na mag-aaccommodate ng ating (There are towns that are ready to accommodate our) evacuees from the affected areas," Castro said, in a bid to lessen crowding in evacuation centers.

National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council spokesman Mark Timbal reported a lower number at about 7:45 a.m., with "around 172 individuals staying in evacuation centers in Batangas City," and "87 individuals staying with their relatives in safer places." But he said they will wait for further updates from the regional DRRMC of Calabarzon for clearer figures.

Phivolcs placed Taal under Alert 3 on Thursday afternoon, which means that there is an ongoing magmatic extrusion at the main crater "that may further drive succeeding explosions."

Phivolcs said residents from Taal Volcano Island and high-risk barangays of Bilibinwang and Banyaga in Agoncillo; Boso-Boso, Gulod and Bugaan East in Laurel, Batangas must evacuate due to hazards of pyroclastic density currents and volcanic tsunami should stronger eruptions occur.

The public is reminded that the entire Taal Volcano island is a permanent danger zone, and entry into Agoncillo and Laurel must be prohibited.

Castro said Social Welfare Secretary Rolando Bautista is expected to arrive in Batangas in the morning to assess the situation.

This is a developing story.
(CNN)  The Delta variant of the coronavirus is worrying officials around the world. Four major Australian cities went into a four-day "circuit-breaker" lockdown this week to try and stop it from spreading. Australia's Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, announced looser vaccination policies to try to get more people immunized before the variant could spread. Ireland delayed plans to resume indoor service in bars and restaurants and US officials urged Americans to get vaccinated to stop its spread.

The World Health Organization says the Delta variant, also known as B.1.617.2, has spread to at least 85 countries since it was first identified in India last fall.

Here's what is known about the variant so far:

It's spreading fast

By mid-June, the Delta variant accounted for 99% of COVID-19 cases in the UK, according to Public Health England, and it is set to account for 90% of cases in Europe by the end of August, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimates the variant accounts for 26% of new COVID-19 cases -- or at least, that it did as of June 19. It's been reported in all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C.

It accounted for 10% of lineages as of June 5, meaning its prevalence more than doubled in just two weeks.

Genetic testing company Helix tells CNN it estimates Delta accounts for 40% of cases in the US at present.

"Every two weeks for the last month or two this has been doubling," Dr. Mark Mulligan, director of the NYU Langone Vaccine Center, told an International Antiviral Society--USA briefing Tuesday.

"The data from England has shown that it outcompeted the Alpha variant in that population. That is strong head to head evidence that it is a better transmitter," Andrew Pekosz, a professor of immunology and molecular microbiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CNN.

"Here in the US it is doing very similar things. It seems to be on its way to becoming the dominant lineage in the US."

Testing for any variant is imperfect. Standard tests to diagnose COVID-19 cannot tell which variant someone is infected with. Samples must be shipped to special labs for genomic testing, so the CDC and companies such as Helix extrapolate from the actual test results they get back.

It's more transmissible

"Delta is the most transmissible of the variants identified so far," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said Friday.

The virus carries a cluster of mutations, including one known as L452R, that helps it infect human cells more easily.

"We learned this virus, a variant of Covid, is highly transmissible -- the most transmissible we've seen to date," US Surgeon-General Dr. Vivek Murthy told CNN Wednesday.

"This is, again, a serious threat and we are seeing it spread among unvaccinated people."

The ECDC estimates its about 40% to 60% more transmissible than the Alpha variant -- making it about half again as contagious.

Vaccines protect against it - but not perfectly

Real life and laboratory evidence both suggest that fully vaccinated people are protected against the Delta variant.

"The good news is if you are vaccinated -- and fully vaccinated means two weeks after your last shot -- then there is good evidence that you have a high degree of protection against this virus," Murthy told CNN's Erica Hill Wednesday. "But if you are not vaccinated, then you are in trouble."

Vaccine maker Moderna released results Tuesday showing that blood taken from vaccinated people could neutralize Delta, as well as other variants including Alpha, the Beta or B.1.351 variant first seen in South African, and Gamma, or P.1, which has swept Brazil.

"Vaccines can handle it," Mulligan said. "In most cases, we have a cushion of magnitude in circulating antibody and other cellular responses. The vaccines are able to handle this."

And in US states with lower vaccination rates, the Delta variant is more prevalent than in states where the majority of the populations are immunized.

In Missouri, for example, data from Johns Hopkins University shows the infection rate is about 3.5 times the national average. And CDC data shows Delta accounts for about 57.5% of cases in the region that includes Missouri, where under 40% of the population is fully vaccinated, compared to 47% of the US population overall.

But none of the coronavirus vaccines are 100% effective, so there can be infections even in fully vaccinated people.

"It is possible that you will see people who are infected get breakthrough infections," Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN's Don Lemon Tuesday.

"We haven't formally proven yet how much diminution there is in the likelihood of transmitting it to someone else -- including children -- and that's one of the reasons why you've got to be careful when you're dealing with something like the Delta variant," said Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"With millions of people getting vaccinated against COVID-19, some people who are fully vaccinated will still get sick if they are exposed," CDC spokesperson Jade Fulce told CNN in an email Friday.

"However, people with breakthrough infections may get less severely ill or have a shorter illness than they would have if they had not been vaccinated."

Everyday measures prevent transmission

There's nothing about the Delta variant that makes it different in terms of how it transmits. Coronaviruses are passed in the air and, to a smaller degree, on surfaces that people may touch.

Masks, physical distancing and good ventilation all work to prevent transmission, as does handwashing and keeping surfaces clean.

It's not clear whether it it's more dangerous

While some public officials have said they believe the Delta variant is more dangerous that other lineages of the virus, there's no hard evidence showing this.

The cluster of defining mutations on Delta indicate it is more transmissible and can hide to a small degree from the body's immune response, but none suggest it is more virulent or more pathogenic -- that is causes more severe disease.

It does not carry two other worrying mutations known as E484K and N501Y -- which are seen in the B.1.1.7 or Alpha variant first seen in Britain, which swept many countries at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, and also in the B.1.351 variant of Beta variant first seen in South Africa, and well as the P.1 or Gamma variant.

"It has a few unique mutations, particularly in the spike protein, that would suggest it is able to bind to human cells better and perhaps evade antibody responses that target the spike protein," Pekosz said.

That could mean people who were infected with earlier lineages of coronavirus and recovered could more easily get infected with Delta. It also suggests antibody-based treatments might be slightly less effective.

But as shown in laboratory tests, the vaccines cause an overwhelming immune response, stronger and broader than natural infection, that should protect most vaccinated people against serious illness and even mild infection.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Here's what is known about the Delta variant of coronavirus"
(CNN)  New York prosecutors on Thursday charged the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, with a 15-year alleged tax scheme that marked the first criminal case against the former President's namesake company.

An indictment unsealed Thursday by the Manhattan district attorney's office charged the company and an entity called Trump Payroll Corporation with 10 counts and Weisselberg with 15 felony counts in connection with an alleged scheme stretching back to 2005 "to compensate Weisselberg and other Trump Organization executives in a manner that was 'off the books.'"

They were charged with a scheme to defraud, conspiracy, criminal tax fraud, and falsifying business records. Weisselberg was also charged with grand larceny and offering a false instrument for filing.

Prosecutors said Thursday their investigation is ongoing. The probe has delved into whether the Trump Organization misled lenders, insurers and tax authorities about the value of certain properties, the treatment of tax deductions as well as hush money payments to silence an alleged affair with Trump.

Thursday's indictment, which focused largely on Weisselberg, described an array of luxury perks he received from the company allegedly in lieu of compensation, including a Upper West Side apartment, a pair of Mercedes-Benz cars for him and his wife, and private school tuition for two family members whom CNN has reported are his grandchildren.

All told, the indictment alleged, Weisselberg evaded taxes on $1.76 million in income over a period beginning in 2005 and concealed for years that he was a resident of New York City, thereby avoiding paying city income taxes. Prosecutors alleged he evaded a total of more than $900,000 in federal, state and city taxes during this period, and received a total of $133,124 in state tax refunds "to which he was not entitled."

"The scheme was intended to allow certain employees to substantially understate their compensation from the Trump Organization, so that they could and did pay federal, state and local taxes in amounts that were significantly less than the amounts that should have been paid," the indictment said.

After entering a courtroom in New York Supreme Court Thursday afternoon in handcuffs, Weisselberg pleaded not guilty, and Justice Juan Merchan released him on his own recognizance, ordering him to turn in his passport.

Former President Donald Trump himself was not charged. Following the unsealing of the indictment, he blasted the charges in a statement, criticizing the investigation as led by two Democrats: Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, and Letitia James, the New York state attorney general.

"The political Witch Hunt by the Radical Left Democrats, with New York now taking over the assignment, continues. It is dividing our Country like never before!" Trump said.

In statements, the Trump Organization also characterized the prosecution as a political act and said Weisselberg was being used as a "pawn in a scorched-earth attempt to harm the former president."

The indictment of the Trump Organization is the product of more than two years of investigation by Vance, a probe that began with questions about accounting practices tied to hush-money payments made by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and eventually led to a Supreme Court fight over a subpoena for Trump's tax documents.

It is rare, according to lawyers who specialize in tax evasion cases, for prosecutors to bring charges solely related to fringe benefits provided by a company, and in recent weeks, lawyers for the Trump Organization met with prosecutors in Vance's office, hoping to persuade them not to bring the case.

Those efforts failed, and on Thursday, prosecutor Carey Dunne faulted the company for its behavior during the investigation, saying it had refused to comply with subpoenas and or allowed employees to speak to prosecutors outside of the grand jury.

"Contrary to defense assertions, there's no clearer example of a company that should be held to account," he told the judge.

Prosecutors said they have digital drives with grand jury testimony, bookkeeping records, tax records, and statements of potential witnesses.

Details of the indictment

The indictment described a detailed scheme to avoid paying taxes, with the company allegedly evading payroll taxes and Weisselberg sidestepping income taxes.

Weisselberg attempted to conceal his participation in the scheme with the knowledge of the company, prosecutors said.

According to the indictment, the company paid for rent, utilities and garage expenses on a Riverside Blvd. apartment Weisselberg and his wife occupy.

The indictment says the company maintained internal spreadsheets tracking the amounts it paid for Weisselberg's rent, utilities and garage expenses, and that it accordingly reduced the amount of direct compensation to account for the expenses it was paying for him. The company didn't withhold income taxes on the indirect compensation, and Weisselberg reported only his direct compensation on his tax returns, according to the indictment.

Though Weisselberg began living in the apartment rented by the company for him in 2005, he didn't say he was a New York City resident on his tax returns until 2013, when he sold his home in Wantagh, New York, thereby avoiding paying city income taxes, according to the indictment.

Between 2005 and 2017, the company gave Weisselberg approximately $1.17 million in untaxed income connected to rent and related expenses, prosecutors said.

Perks received by Weisselberg also allegedly included $359,058 in tuition expenses at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School for two of his grandchildren, paid for by checks from Trump's account signed by Trump himself, and later from the Donald J. Trump revocable trust.

According to the indictment, the payments for Weisselberg's grandchildren were "indirect compensation" and were not included on Weisselberg's W-2 forms, and no income taxes were withheld by the Trump Organization or Trump Payroll Corp. in connection with the tuition payments.

Focus on Weisselberg

Over the course of the probe, prosecutors have examined a wide array of possible violations, including whether the real-estate company misled lenders and insurers or committed tax fraud, even adding a special prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, to aid in the expansive inquiry. But in recent months, the focus has narrowed to taxes on benefits.

In particular, it came to center on Trump's longtime lieutenant Weisselberg, a top company executive who has worked for him since 1973.

Beginning late last year, prosecutors gathered evidence on Weisselberg with the cooperation of his former daughter-in-law, Jennifer Weisselberg. In the months since she began speaking to authorities, she has turned over boxes of financial records and has met with investigators multiple times, her lawyer told CNN.

Documents from Jennifer Weisselberg's divorce from Allen Weisselberg's son Barry show thousands of dollars in payments for cars, rent, tuition, medical bills and more going from Allen Weisselberg to his son's family.

The indictment of Weisselberg could intensify the pressure for him to cooperate with prosecutors in their wide-ranging investigation of Trump, the company and its executives, an outcome prosecutors had been seeking for months but which he rejected.

And the indictment of the company is a watershed moment after years of criminal, civil and congressional probes that circled Trump, his company, and his inner circle of family members, advisers and lawyers.

Trump's critics cheered the indictment, saying it represents a modicum of accountability for a man who survived the special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller as well as two impeachments. But many were left wondering if further charges are in the works.

Rebecca Ricigliano, a former New York federal prosecutor, said the indictment "reads a lot like classic, old-school fraud" and appeared designed to put enormous pressure on Weisselberg to turn on his longtime boss.

"This is clearly an assault against Weisselberg," she said. "The message is: Allen, this is about you. That then begs the broader question, what does this mean in terms of what he does next?"

CNN's Dan Berman and Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.

This story was first published on CNN.com "Prosecutors charge Trump Organization with a 15-year tax scheme"
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Things have been good for a couple of months at least, Hansen said.  Were not seeing any significant number of new cases. Hospitalizations across the state of Nebraska have gone down.

He added the hospital staff believes after the Fourth of July weekend is a good time to have the main entryway open again.

Ricketts said during his press conference on June 28 the current low number of hospitalization numbers and cases of COVID-19 are a few reasons why to end the emergency.

But, Ricketts warned even if COVID-19 numbers are dwindling, the virus will still be around forever.

You cannot stop it. Its a virus, he said. Thats one of the things the folks at UNMC (University of Nebraska Medical Center) told us. This is a virus. The only thing you can do is slow it down.

Ricketts also encouraged Nebraskans to get vaccinated, as well as follow other procedures like coughing into their elbow, washing their hands regularly and staying home if they are sick.

Those are all good things to do, not just for the coronavirus but for everything like spreading the flu or the common cold, the governor said.
Source: Instagram, Binance

The list of countries investigating the crypto exchange giant Binance is growing as regulators in Singapore, Thailand and the Cayman Islands have begun investigating the trading platform.

The past few weeks have seen the exchange come under fire from regulators in the UK, the USA, Japan, and Germany, while earlier this week, British users complained they were having issues using debit cards and fiat on/off ramps in conjunction with the Binance platform, that later confirmed that the problem was solved. Also, the company has stopped offering its services to Ontario-based users.

But the firms woes appear to have deepened now after authorities in Singapore indicated they were taking note of developments elsewhere and wanted to follow suit.

Bloomberg quoted the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the nations central bank and financial regulator, as stating:

We are aware of the actions taken by other regulatory authorities against Binance and will follow up as appropriate.

The MAS also confirmed that Binance Asia Services, a firm based in the country, is one of a group of exchanges that are operating as usual with its blessing during a grace period. The regulator will allow firms in this group to conduct business as usual while it looks into applications for operating permits.

Per a MAS document, Binance Asia Services has registered its interest in providing digital payment token service, along with exchange rivals like Gemini and Bitstamp.

Binance confirmed to the media outlet, however, that Binance Asia Services is a separate legal entity and does not offer any products or services via the Binance.com website or Binance Markets. Instead, the Singapore-based company, Binance stated, focuses on growing the local blockchain ecosystem and servicing users in Singapore.

The exchange stated:

It is important to note that we take a collaborative approach in working with regulators and we take our compliance obligations very seriously. We are actively keeping abreast of changing policies, rules and laws in this new space.

The MAS, meanwhile, claimed it was using robust standards in its reviewing process, and promised exchanges would be subject to close scrutiny in the licensing process and ongoing supervision.

Meanwhile, today, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of Thailand, said it has filed a criminal complaint against Binance with the Economic Crime Suppression Division of the Royal Thai Police for operating digital asset business without a license.

The SEC said that, in April, it issued a warning letter requiring the exchange to submit a written response "but Binance failed to submit a response within the specified time."

"In any case, filing the criminal complaint is merely the commencement of the criminal procedure whereby the inquiry official will perform an investigation before recommending the case to the public attorney who has authority for prosecution," the Commission added.

Also, in the Caymans, the regulatory Cayman Islands Monetary Authority (CIMA) has issued Binance with a public warning. Apparently upset that a number of media outlets have stated that Binance is Caymans-based, the CIMA wrote:

[We] wish to inform the public that Binance, the Binance Group and Binance Holdings Limited are not registered, licensed, regulated or otherwise authorized by the authority to operate a cryptocurrency exchange from or within the Cayman Islands.

Crypto exchange operators must register with the CIMA under legislation that promulgated last year.

[CIMA] is currently investigating whether Binance, the Binance Group, Binance Holdings Limited or any other company affiliated with this group of companies has any activities operating in or from within the Cayman Islands which may fall within the scope of [our] regulatory oversight, the Authority said.

"Binance.com does not run a cryptocurrency exchange out of the Cayman Islands, as reported incorrectly in some media articles. We do, however, have entities incorporated under the laws of the Cayman Islands performing activities that are permitted by law and not related to operating crypto-exchange trading activities," a spokesperson for Binance told Cryptonews.com, adding that "Binance.com has always operated in a decentralized manner" and the the company "will work with regulators to address any questions they may have."

Regulators in the Caymans have come under pressure from economic powers to shed their tax haven status. The country was removed from the EUs blacklist in October last year  and appears keen to ensure it does not make a swift return.

In the US, Binance is reportedly under investigation by the US Justice Department, Internal Revenue Service, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Officially, the federal agencies havent accused Binance of wrongdoing.

At 14:53 UTC, binance coin (BNB) is trading at USD 284 and is almost unchanged in a day and down by 8% in a week.

____

Learn more:

- Crypto Industry's Lobbying Power Grows As Former Officials Change Sides

- Prepare Your Crypto Startups as Binance is Shopping

- Binance Rolls out Crypto Pay Service for Bitcoin, Ether, Fiat and More

__

(Updated at 07:51 UTC with the price of BNB. Updated at 08:55 UTC with a statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission of Thailand and the latest market data. Updated 14:74 UTC with a comment from Binance and the latest market data.)
I dont know the ins and outs. I dont know whos going to pay for an audit. I dont know how extensive it might be, Bartolotta said. I do know that there are millions of Pennsylvanians who have questions and concerns and there is a lack of trust.

She said she was not sure what the next step might be. But, she said, she wanted to ensure the cost is not borne by state taxpayers.

I want to be absolutely certain that anything were doing  if anything gets done  is done in a legal way and is constitutional, Bartolotta said.

Critics say an election audit is duplicative, given the legal requirements for each county and the state to review election results for accuracy and investigate any discrepancies. Democrats, meanwhile, blame Trump and Republicans for spreading lies about the election that have sown distrust among voters.

The official rules of Pennsylvanias Senate grants its committees broad authority to issue subpoenas to any public agency in the state.
Given the high rate of divorce, the jointly owned property may even be the subject of a divorce proceeding when marital property interests are divided. When the parent named the child as a co-owner of property, the childs problems became the parents problems. A well-drafted trust can achieve the convenience sought by the parent while insulating the parents property from creditors.

Estate planning

Joint ownership may also throw a monkey wrench into the parents plan to distribute property at the end of the parents life. Lets say the parent has three children and intends to leave all of his or her property in three equal shares to the children. If the only asset that the parent owns at the time of death is a financial account with $100,000, and that account is jointly owned with one of the children, then the account will not be considered probate property and will not be subject to the terms of the parents will.

The child listed as joint owner will simply own that account when the parent dies. Nothing will legally transfer to the remaining two children. It is possible that the child who is listed as joint owner could distribute the funds in the financial account according to the parents will. However, this child is not legally obligated to do so.

Quick and convenient may be the way to go for the occasional meal, but that is no way to make legally binding plans for everything you own. A small investment in a well drafted estate plan will achieve the result you want while avoiding disastrous pitfalls. Be sure to follow Keystone Elder Law P.C. on Facebook and YouTube for more information about how fast food estate planning could lead to outcomes you will want to avoid.

Learn more about the articles author, and other community education opportunities, at www.keystoneelderlaw.com. Check out the book, Long Term Care Guide: Essential Tools for Solving the Elder Care Puzzle, at the Whistlestop Bookshop or Amazon, and see Keystones free directory of services for older adults at www.mypeaceguide.com. Keystone Elder Law has offices in Mechanicsburg and Carlisle. Call 717-697-3223 for a free telephone consultation.

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Cumberland, Perry and Dauphin counties are among those where residents have reported seeing sick or dying songbirds, the Pennsylvania Game Commission reported Thursday.

The commission said it, along with wildlife experts at the University of Pennsylvanias School of Veterinary Medicine, are investigating more than 70 public reports of dying songbirds in what they call an emerging health condition that is not yet known.

There have been numerous reports across the United States, including the Mid-Atlantic region, and were first reported in and around Washington, D.C. As of Thursday, the commission said there were 19 reports in the Midstate, which includes Cumberland, Dauphin, Perry, Franklin, York, Lancaster, Lebanon and Schuylkill counties. There have also been 15 reports in Philadelphia, Bucks, Montgomery and Chester counties.

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The commission said reports have shown both adult and young birds exhibiting signs of this unknown condition. The most common symptoms include discharge and/or crusting around the eyes, eye lesions and/or neurological signs, such as falling over or head tremors. Affected birds are being tested for several toxins, parasites, bacterial diseases and viral infections, though no test results have been conclusive, according to the commission.
And yet, the principle is the same: Children do not lose their rights to free speech every and any time an adult or an administration is offended by that speech.

Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority, noted that while a school may very well have an interest in student speech (as the court in Tinker acknowledged) it cant suppress pure speech with which it disagrees except in very specific, narrowly drawn situations. The fact that Brandi Levys language would have gotten a bar of soap stuffed in her mouth in most decent families was irrelevant to whether that speech was entitled to constitutional (if not grammatical or pedagogical) respect.

The majority also held that if speech could be considered threatening, bullying or otherwise dangerous and disruptive, it could be subject to punishment even if uttered off campus. The point that Breyer made was that parents are the ones who should be monitoring their childrens behavior, and the fact that the Levy parents were so obviously unsuccessful in raising a dignified and respectful child did not mean that it was the schools place to do so in loco parentis.
Broadband has been Americas greatest infrastructure success story  modern, reliable, and passed the stress-test of soaring demand from COVID lockdown with flying colors.

Its success stands in stark contrast to government-run infrastructure  water, sewer, transportation  which in many places is in a state of disrepair. It also stands in contrast to broadband in Europe, where regulators opted for government-managed pseudo-competition, as networks struggled and strained and had to be throttled when demand surged.

As the University of Pennsylvanias Christopher Yoo reported: Between 2010 and 2016, American providers invested on average annually 2.35 times as much per household as their European counterparts. This allowed the average U.S. household to consume more than three times as much data as the average European household in 2017, according to Cisco. This is a significant jump over the 44% difference between U.S. and Europe that existed a decade ago.

Even Obamas FCC chief Tom Wheeler admitted at the height of lockdown: Credit is due to the nations broadband providers. The fact we can work from home is the result of hundreds of billions of investment dollars and construction and operational skill.
In 1811, a group of men from Ste. Genevieve went across the Mississippi to the abandoned Fort de Chartres, dug up a cannon, and brought it back to Ste. Genevieve for use at an Independence Day celebration. On July 4th, they held this celebration on a hill overlooking the town. The July 25th, 1811, Louisiana Gazette, the first newspaper in Missouri, recounted the day.

Pursuant to previous arrangement, a large number of mechanics and respectable citizens of the town of Ste. Genevieve, met at 12 oclock on a high eminence back of Dr. Elliot's, where an arbor had been prepared for their accommodations. At 2 oclock, the company set down to an elegant repast provided for the occasion, after which, the following toasts were drunk, accompanied by the firing of a nine powder, one gun to each toast."

The toasts:

"1st. To the day we celebrate, from the earliest period of history, certain days of festivities and celebration have been observed, but none so glorious and beneficial to mankind as the 4th of July.

2nd. The Heroes of 76. May their descendants imitate their spirit in resisting the arm of oppression, and may they be not less profuse in the use of blood and treasure in the support of liberty, than their father, were in obtaining it.
In Stoddard County, 28% of the population had initiated vaccination and 25% had completed it, according to state data. That rate was below the state as whole, which had fully vaccinated 39% of the population. Missouri lagged behind the country as a whole, which had vaccinated 47% of the population.

There are currently 9 residents and 5 staff whove tested positive for the Covid-19 virus, the Stoddard County Health Center said. For those of you wondering, most of these positives have been vaccinated within the last 6 months.

Ben Godwin, administrator of the Stoddard County Public Health Center, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It was unclear whether any of the vaccinated people infected were immunocompromised.

Regardless, the center urged vaccinations, mask wearing, physical distancing, hand-washing, disinfecting surfaces and monitoring symptoms as the virus spreads there.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in interim clinical considerations for the vaccine that people should be counseled about the unknown vaccine safety profile and effectiveness in immunocompromised populations, the potential for reduced immune responses, and the need to continue to follow current guidance to protect themselves against COVID-19.
While McAuliffes ties to big donors and lobbyists are well-established, Youngkin has only begun to confront difficult questions about his business background. His team declined to address any of Carlyle's specific deals.

As a young man, Glenn joined a small company and over the next 25 years worked his way up to the top of the company, helping to grow it into a hugely successful enterprise that turned good businesses into great businesses, created tens of thousands of jobs, and funded the retirement pensions of police officers, firefighters, and teachers," said Youngkin spokesman Macaulay Porter. Under Glenns leadership, The Carlyle Group employed nearly 2,000 people and managed assets totaling nearly four times the size of Virginias yearly budget.

Youngkin has made his business experience and status as a political outsider central to his pitch to voters. But more often than not, he discusses his career in broad strokes, without mentioning his lofty position or even the name of his former firm.

He leans on the phrase building business and creating jobs when talking about his career, typically without specific description of the types of deals he oversaw.
When Pabon Ramos arrived at the high school, according to Consolvo, a female deputy was there posing as Kate and Pabon Ramos was arrested.

(Pabon Ramos) recognizes the strength of the evidence against (himself) is substantial, said Juan Vega, Pabon Ramos attorney.

Vega presented two letters to the court asking for some leniency from the judgeone from Pabon Ramos mother and one from his brother.

While this case was not an actual 13-year-old girl on the other end of the computer, the danger is it could have been, Consolvo said. Believing it was a 13-year-old girl, he drove across the mountain and stopped to get condoms. Because it wasnt a 13-year-old girl doesnt matter.

Consolvo said a longer sentence would send a message that this type of behavior would not be acceptable in society.

Vega told the court that Pabon Ramos suffers from depression and other mental illness.

Yes, he needs to pay his debt to society, Vega said. Yes, the commonwealth needs to send that message to society, but I ask for help  and a mental health evaluation. Hes served 11 months already and we ask for no additional time.
He was 25 and playing with some of the great European orchestras, Froemke said. He would study and study and he would be full of nerves before he would go before these orchestras. Theres a moment in Rotterdam, Yannick is waiting outside the stage door to go into the first rehearsal and you see the fear in his face.

Froemke said he told her that when he rewatched the video of that moment recently, The fear came back to him in a profound way.

To help him through that period, his parents, Claudine Nezet and Serge Seguin, and his life partner, violist Pierre Tourville, spent most of a decade traveling with him from city to city.

The documentary is bookended by scenes of Nezet-Seguin preparing two productions he conducted during the Mets 2018-19 season, his first as music director and the last full season before the house shut down because of the pandemic.

Hes shown working with soprano Diana Damrau on Verdis La Traviata, in which she portrays Violetta, a courtesan who is dying of tuberculosis.

In the opening scene, Violetta is throwing a late-night party, and the music on the surface is festive and carefree. But the conductor asks his star to dig deeper.
Crediting the hard work of her family, Pather said she could not have achieved this recognition without them.

My grandfather was involved in the anti-apartheid movement and my mother was a trailblazer as the first woman oral pathologist in South Africa, she said. Receiving this award is thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of my family who made this possible.

After moving to the United States, Pather received her bachelors degree from the University of Virginia before attending law school at UVa.

In her first year of law school, Pather worked as an intern in the Charlottesville Public Defenders Office and realized it was what she wanted to pursue after school. After graduating, Pather spent six and a half years as a public defender in Richmond before eventually returning to Charlottesville to work under then-Commonwealths Attorney Dave Chapman.

Pathers work as a prosecutor often sees her handling domestic violence and sexual assault cases, which her colleague and friend Nina-Alice Antony, senior-assistant commonwealths attorney for Charlottesville, characterizes as some of the most difficult cases.
According to Bostics narrative, last Halloween she parked on University Avenue in front of Bodos Bagels and accidentally bumped Picketts sign with her elbow.

He immediately ran after me, grabbed my left arm, and yelled, You touched my sign! Bostic wrote. I struggled to get away from him while yelling, Get off me!

Per the report, Bostic then said Pickett said something along the lines of, Im gonna hit you in the head with my sign before proceeding to do exactly that, repeatedly. Two witnesses pulled Pickett off of her, one of whom Bostic wrote she later found out was Tim Longo, chief of the University of Virginia Police Department.

Embarrassed, fearful and shaken, Bostic walked away from the scene, according to the report, before being approached by a witness who was a doctor. After making sure that Bostic was not injured, the doctor and her husband waited with her until city police arrived, Bostic wrote.

According to Bostics narrative, Longo approached her and agreed to give a statement to the city police because he did not have jurisdiction at the location of the incident. Bostic later agreed to press charges against Pickett.
Haynes told them he was not comfortable talking about whether he played a role in the events of Jan. 6 in Washington, but did say he was deeply upset about how the insurrection was being handled by authorities.

He said he believed that the rioters were being treated unfairly, and that those involved in the rioting and vandalism related to the BLM [Black Lives Matter] movement were not being held accountable, the affidavit states.

As the conversation summarized in court documents continued, Haynes told authorities that if the country continues to go in its current direction, what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 would not be an isolated event.

Asked if he was a member of the Proud Boys, a militant group suspected of helping to plan the uprising, Hayes replied that he was not.

Haynes said that he did attend a meeting of the group in Fredericksburg late last year and had dinner with several of its members. Haynes would have joined the chapter, but it was too far away and there were no members of the Proud Boys in his local area, the affidavit stated.

A search of Haynes cellphone and his home that day produced no incriminating evidence, but what was obtained earlier by search warrants led authorities to file charges against him.
The decision preserved a buffer for many tenants still seeking to get caught up on balances that have accrued since the pandemic hit and jobs vanished. At the same time, Virginia let lapse several key state protections geared toward helping tenants get caught up.

Under a state of emergency order that expired Wednesday, Virginia had required landlords to notify tenants about how to apply for rent relief through the states program or apply or seek the money to cover delinquent balances tenants owe. The state had also barred landlords from proceeding with an eviction for 45 days while waiting for a relief application to be approved.

With the federal moratorium soon to expire, ensuring tenants know about, and can access, the states $1 billion pot of rent relief is crucial, said Marty Wegbreit, director of litigation for the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society.

Its remarkable how much of a lack of knowledge there is about both the CDC eviction protections and the rent relief program, Wegbreit said.

As of mid-June, the state has paid $263.7 million in federal and state relief funds for about 41,400 renter households, according to data provided by the Department of Housing and Community Development. Thousands of other applications remained incomplete or pending in the states pipeline.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP)  A Libyan military commander who previously lived for decades in Virginia cannot claim head-of-state immunity as a defense in lawsuits accusing him of atrocities in his country's civil war, a judge ruled Thursday.

Khalifa Hifter leads the self-styled Libyan National Army, a faction in a civil war that has raged in the country for years. Once a lieutenant to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, Hifter defected to the U.S. during the 1980s and spent many years living in northern Virginia. He is widely believed to have worked with the CIA during his time in exile.

He is also a defendant in three separate federal lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. Plaintiffs allege their loved ones were killed or tortured by Hifters forces.

The lawsuits seek millions of dollars in damages that could be recovered from property that Hifter, a dual U.S. and Libyan citizen, and his family still own throughout northern Virginia.

In court papers, Hifter asserted that he is immune to lawsuits because he is head of state. He also said the judge should dismiss the cases because a lawsuit that seeks to assert blame in the country's civil war is a political question that requires deference to the executive branch.
Amy Popovich, nurse manager and community engagement lead at Richmond and Henricos health district, warned in a media briefing Thursday that people under the age of 30, while more likely to not be at high risk, can still be carriers.

Its really important that were vaccinating ourselves to protect ourselves but also the ones that we love, particularly as were unsure of what effect the variant will have as we head into the fall, Popovich said.

A major ongoing concern among 87% of unvaccinated Black residents in the VCU poll was side effects, though paid time off or cash rewards were not influential enough to change their minds. Latinos were three times more likely than whites to say cash rewards would increase their willingness to get a shot.

About 56% of Black respondents cited medical mistreatment in my community as a major reason  more than five times the percentage of white adults.

Still, at over 60%, Black parents are the most likely to say theyd vaccinate their children when a vaccine becomes available. The average among all respondents was 59% for parents with kids between the ages of 12 and 15 and 53% for those with children 11 and under.
The change will better support highly specialized care and bring more opportunities for patients to benefit from the latest technology and participate in clinical trials of what could be breakthrough treatments, the system said.

As our academic health system expands throughout Virginia, we are able to provide the full range of primary and subspecialty care for patients throughout the commonwealth, Kent said in a statement. UVa Health will be able to provide greater access to cutting-edge therapies and clinical trials that can lead to better treatments for all in the years to come.

Expanding the systems footprint will fuel UVa Healths teaching mission and train the next generation of health care providers, Kent said.

The expansion of UVa Health aligns with our mission to serve residents throughout the commonwealth with outstanding patient care, said Jim Ryan, president of UVa. My thanks go to Dr. Kent and his team for their leadership and all those at UVa Health who work every day to keep our community healthy and vibrant.

The new scale of UVa Health will streamline access to comprehensive care, including the No. 1 hospital in Virginia as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, the company said.

UVa is recognized for excellence by Best Doctors in America, Americas Top Doctors and U.S. News & World Report.
TOKYO (AP)  The trial in Tokyo of two Americans charged with helping Nissans former chairman, Carlos Ghosn, flee Japan wrapped up Friday with prosecutors seeking prison terms of more than two years for each of them.

The Americans, former Green Beret Michael Taylor and his son Peter Taylor, were arrested in Massachusetts last year and extradited in March. They acknowledged guilt when their trial opened last month and have apologized for their alleged roles in Ghosns escape.

Ghosn was arrested in November 2018 and fled in December 2019 to Lebanon while out on bail awaiting trial.

The maximum penalty in Japan for helping a criminal is three years in prison. Prosecutors demanded a sentence of of two years and 10 months for Michael Taylor and two years and six months for his son.

The Taylors defense argued for suspended sentences for the two, who spent 10 months in custody before their extradition.

Chief Judge Hideo Nirei said sentencing was set for July 19. The Taylors case has sped along compared to most Japanese trials, which tend to drag on for many months, if not years.

When asked for comment, Michael Taylor, audibly sobbing, asked for forgiveness.
Maharashtra: State to restore mangroves and coral reefs with UNDP aid

by Sanjay Jog

July 02,2021 | Source: Free Press Journal

The Maharashtra Government will implement a coastal area management project funded by the United Nations Development Programme-Global Environment Facility (UNDP-GCF). This will be implemented through innovative co-management techniques and will include cross-sectoral planning. The project will be implemented in 11 talukas of four coastal districts of the state  Sindhudurg (Devgad, Malvan, Vengurla), Ratnagiri (Dapoli, Guhagar, Rajapur and Ratnagiri), Raigad (Shrivardhan and Alibag) and Palghar (Palghar, Dahanu). It will include mangrove restoration and maintenance of restored mangroves for three years (3,100 hectares; ha), coral restoration and their maintenance for three years (35 ha) and degraded watershed restoration and its maintenance, also for three years (600 ha). The duration of the project will be till December 31, 2025. Livelihood activities included in the project are crab farming in mangroves, mussel farming, oyster farming, crab hatchery, ornamental fish farming / hatchery, seaweed farming, SRI (System of Rice Intensification) for paddy cultivation, fish value-added products, fish food production unit, fish drying / smoking unit and apiculture.



According to the government resolution issued on Thursday by forest department principal secretary, BC Gopal Reddy, the total approved plan for the project is $130.26 million, of which GCFs share will be $43.41 million. The state government will receive a total grant of $11.43 million from GCF, out of which $2.11 million will be the project management cost and $9.32 million will be for ecosystem restoration and livelihood initiatives. The co-finance commitment of the state government was expected to be $26.85 million. However, it has limited it to $19 million (Rs 140.90 crore), as it will not be receiving grants from GCF as per the original outline of the project. In case of change in US dollar-rupee conversion rate during the period of the externally assisted project, the forest department shall be bound for taking approval of the finance department, if the amount of co-finance exceeds the sanctioned amount of Rs 140.90 crore.
Nepal: Six dead, three missing as floods and landslides wreak havoc in various districts

by Ramesh Kumar Paudel & Samjhana Rasaili

July 02,2021 | Source: Kathmandu Post

Floods and landslides caused by heavy rainfall inflicted loss of lives and property in several places of the country on Thursday. In Chitwan, at least two persons died while three others went missing in separate incidents of floods and landslides. A woman died after being struck by lightning, said police. According to Deputy Superintendent of Police Surya Thapa, a landslide at Rapti Municipality-12 swept away two houses and an animal shed. A body was recovered while three persons have gone missing in the landslide, said Thapa. A 52-year-old man died after being buried in a landslide at Kalika Municipality-11 in Chitwan district. According to the District Police Office in Chitwan, transportation along the Narayangadh-Muglin road section was disrupted for hours as landslides blocked the road at Panchkilo area and Kerabari. Transportation services resumed after the debris was cleared late in the afternoon. Floods in various streams, including Kayar Khola, Ladari Khola and Pampa Khola, inundated settlements and farmlands in the eastern part of the district. The flooded Kayar Khola entered the premises of Baba LPG plant at Belsi in Khairahani Municipality-1 and caused damage. Many gas cylinders were swept away and the flood damaged machines as well, said Bimal Kalakheti, the director at the plant. Floods in the Ladari Khola swept away a motorable bridge at Khairahani-3. According to Mayor Lalmani Chaudhary, the 30-metre long bridge connecting the rural areas was swept away while several houses were inundated. In Sindhuli, two persons died in floods and landslides in the past two days. A man went missing after being swept away by a flooded Labdaha stream on Wednesday evening. His body was recovered near Sisneri on Thursday, said police.



A landslide buried a house in the Ashram of Ram Bahadur Bamjan at Paire of Kamalamai-8 on Thursday, killing one person. The victim was taking shelter in the Ashram. Floods and landslide related incidents have also greatly affected the Gandaki Province on Thursday. Two individuals lost their lives, eight sustained injuries and dozens of households were displaced by the disasters that occurred in the last 24 hours, according to the Gandaki Provincial Police Office. In Tanahun, two persons died in a landslide at Tamung, Ward 3 of Bandipur on Thursday. According to the District Police Office, the landslide, which cascaded down a hill above the settlement, swept away a house where they were sleeping at around 3am on Thursday. Three individuals, who were buried in the landslide, were rescued, said Khadka Bahadur Thapa, a ward member. On Wednesday, a team led by Karuna Gurung, the vice-chairperson of the rural municipality, visited Tamung for inspection. We had informed the local people to move to a safer location citing the threat of a landslide. The landslide fell from a freshly constructed rural road above the settlement, said Gurung. The floodwaters of Chundi stream inundated many houses on Thursday. A permanent bridge in Byas was swept away by Chhabdi stream and has also posed floods and landslide risk to the settlements near the stream, said Khar Singh Darai, ward chairman of Byas Municipality Ward No. 1. Multiple landslides in Shukla Gandaki Municipality Ward No. 9 also killed 19 goats and two buffaloes, police said. Yuvaraj Timilsina, deputy superintendent of police in Tanahun, said, Various road sections of the Prithvi Highway in Tanahun witnessed landslides on Thursday. However, the highway has been opened for one-way traffic from Thursday evening.



In Gorkha, multiple landslides and floods at Palungtar Municipality swept away five houses and displaced a dozen households. According to Prakash Dahal, Deputy Superintendent of Police in Gorkha, eight individuals of Palungtar Ward 9, who were trapped amid the flood in Khar stream, were rescued with the help of local residents and personnel from the Nepal Army and Nepal Police. Seven houses at Rautepani, Ward 3 of Palungtar are at risk due to a landslide, said Pampha Basel, deputy mayor of the municipality, adding that the displaced families are taking shelter at Sagarmatha Basic Schools building in the ward. The floodwaters of Bhusunde stream damaged 200 ropanies of land in Palungtar Ward 1, said Anup Kadariya, a local man. Khar and Chutti streams also breached their banks in Palungtar Ward 9, said Rudra Prasad Upreti, a local resident in the ward. In Lamjung, four families of Garambesi in Rainas Municipality Ward 7 have been displaced by Thursdays landslide. Jagadish Regmi, police inspector in Lamjung, said, The displaced families have been shifted to a safer location. In Madhyanepal Municipality, the rain-swollen Chardi stream posed flood risk to the bazaar area. The flooded stream swept away the drinking water pipelines, according to the police. A dozen households in various wards have also been affected due to the landslides and floods at Madhyanepal on Thursday.



In Nawalparasi (East), at least 45 houses have been waterlogged as theres no way out to channelise waters from the Mahendra Highway area in Ward No. 4 of Gaindakot Municipality. Ekadev Rimal, a local man, said Excavators are being used to release the floodwaters throughout the day. Theres no outlet for the floodwaters collected from the northern part of the highway area. Every year, our settlement gets inundated. Similarly, the water level in the Bagmati and Kamala rivers increased on Thursday, leaving several settlements in Sarlahi, Rautahat, Siraha and Dhanusha districts of Province 2 at risk of flooding. The district administration in the respective districts has urged people to stay on high alert. Water level in the Bagmati river has increased due to continuous rainfall in the area. We have asked people to remain alert, said Chief District Officer of Rautahat Indradev Yadav.

 2021 www.kathmandupost.com
Wed be remiss if we didnt mention Jim Willis in this space. He died June 14 at the age of 78, and hell long be remembered locally for his role in creating the Edward C. Allworth Veterans Home in Lebanon.

Willis stressed in a 2013 interview that he stayed neutral on where the facility was located and left the choice up to a committee.

Were just thankful the veterans home ended up here because it's a huge boost for our area and a source of pride.

Willis grew up in Albany and was a 1961 graduate of Albany Union High School. He went on to serve in the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam and then serve the public in a long law enforcement career.

He planned to retire when he was asked by Gov. Ted Kulongoski to lead the Oregon Department of Veteran Affairs in 2003. Hed been volunteering for veterans for 20 years at the time.

He held the ODVAs top job for a decade.

The position, Willis said in a 2013 interview, allowed him to provide real help to veterans and their families who didnt know how to access the benefits they needed and to which they were entitled. It truly can change the quality of their life for the rest of their life.
Scott Keller, who was for several years Texas' top Supreme Court lawyer, put it differently. I think the big takeaway from this term is the Roberts court is not swinging for the fences. You could see that in many decisions. The chief justice is trying to get consensus and one method of getting consensus is having narrower rulings, Keller said.

The chief justice is also leading a court with three relatively new justices: Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett.

Barrett replaced the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joining the court a little more than a month after the death of the liberal icon and just ahead of the presidential election.

In her Senate confirmation hearings, Barrett was impassive in the face of Democratic questioning suggesting that she would be a rubber stamp for Trump, voting his way in any eventual election dispute and casting a crucial vote to strike down Obamacare, as the ACA is familiarly known. That was not the case.

One area where Barrett made her presence felt, and Roberts was outflanked by his more conservative colleagues, concerned restrictions on religious gatherings put in place because of the pandemic.
Two of them were alerted based on that temperature alarm. That would be a signal that it was based on age, that it wasnt able to meet the run at the capacity it was rated for, Rosentrater said.

One of the substations impacted was in the midst of a rebuild process that takes several years, said Avista spokeswoman Casey Fielder.

Heat is suspected as the cause of death for three people in Spokane, though details of the deaths have not been made public. Officials have said that heat is probably to blame for the deaths of hundreds more in the Canadian province of British Columbia, elsewhere in Washington state and in Oregon.

The heat wave that enveloped the regions last weekend 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.

Seattle, Portland and many other cities shattered all-time heat records, with temperatures in some places reaching above 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 Celsius).
Theres been much fuss and much progress over the past several years  particularly since the start of 2020  of diversity and inclusion based on race, sex, sexual orientation and identity, religion and similar factors.

This has produced results that, on the whole, are great progress for America.

But little has been made of neurodiversity. I doubt that most readers even know what the word means: inclusion and acceptance of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Its a very real issue.

I wish I had space to enumerate the 15 autistic Americans over the past 18 months who were assaulted, crippled or, most often, killed by police or family members  people they relied on and trusted. Linden Cameron, Isaias Cervantes and Preston Wolf are the most notable.

As an autistic almost-senior, nearly all of my interactions with Corvallis police have been positive. But I do become fearful when walking in other cities.

I wish I had space to explain why the average lifespan of a person on the spectrum is 36, and how the prejudice we face happens at home as well as outside.
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A Denver City Council working group formed to examine policing reform ideas took an inaugural step this week, holding its first public meeting to review a citizen-led task force report with 112 recommendations.

I agree that to increase public safety in Denver extends far past just policing. The more we invest in housing, mental health, drug treatment, et cetera, I believe we can create a reality where we can spend less on policing, said District 6 Councilmember Paul Kashmann, the working group's chair. That said, I believe that policing is a critical element of public safety, as we look at ways to increase the equitable nature of policing throughout our neighborhoods.

Mondays working group meeting had a free-flowing structure, with council members in attendance having a chance to ask the questions they would like answered as the working group continues to examine and discuss the task force report.

Councilmember Pro Tem Jamie Torres serves as vice chair of the group, which is open to all council members and will decide which recommendations the city will pursue and steps the council will take towards implementation.

Councilmembers Candi CdeBaca, Amanda Sawyer, Kevin Flynn and President Stacie Gilmore also attended Monday's meeting.

The Reimagining Policing and Public Safety task force led by Pastor Robert Davis convened in June 2020 in response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody and the Denver police response to the resulting protests in the city.

In late May the task force released a wide-sweeping set of recommendations that include directing more resources at programs that can help reduce peoples involvement with the criminal justice system, decriminalizing offenses that dont pose a public safety threat, rethinking the types of situations that require a police response, changing policing practices that disproportionately harm marginalized groups, and increasing power of the Office of the Independent Monitor.

The report divides its recommendations into categories based on several overarching goals, such as minimizing contacts between civilians and the criminal legal system and improving independent oversight of public safety agencies. It also divides the recommendations by the agency best suited to implement the changes, such as the judicial system, human services, City Council and community organizations.

Davis recognized Denver has already implemented or is in process for some of the changes the task forces report suggests, such as expanding the Support Team Assisted Response program, which sends mental health professionals and paramedics instead of police officers to low-level, non-violent incidents. He said a goal of still including those types of recommendations in the report is to encourage institutionalizing changes as much as possible so programs and policies arent dependent on who the mayor is or who sits on City Council.

At-large Councilmember Robin Kniech said she wants to break down perceptions people may have of walls between the city and community that hinder working together. Efforts already in progress or laws that may already address recommendations tend to trace back to community conversations and partnerships, she said.

I just want to break down any kind of false walls that might exist between the city or the community, because I think that circle of feedback has informed many of the predecessors of these recommendations, Kniech said. To the extent we have anything that's an alternative happening, it started there.
Norways Telenor Group is considering an attempt to sell its Myanmar unit, reports Reuters.

Telenor wrote off the unit in May this year after it registered an impairment loss of NOK6.5 billion (USD753.9 million), reports CommsUpdate. At the time, Telenor said that the Myanmar military juntas February coup had resulted in the worsening of economic and business environment outlook and a deteriorating security and human rights situation.

For Telenor Myanmars operations, the group stated bluntly that it saw limited prospects of improvement going forward. This has been borne out by the juntas actions; the military has repeatedly blocked internet access nationwide, with mobile data services having been unavailable for nearly two months.

Many social media sites and messaging services have been banned, with the junta now considering the creation of a whitelist that would grant access to certain approved sites and services.

TMT Finance reports that Telenor has invited selected Chinese firms to bid on its Myanmar unit under the expectation that the international sanctions imposed on other firms would not apply to them. Additionally, rival operator Ooredoo Myanmars Qatar-based parent is reportedly interested in an acquisition.
Netherlands-headquartered VEON Group has exercised its put option to divest its entire 45.57% holding in its Algerian unit Omnium Telecom Algerie.

Omnium owns the Algerian mobile provider branded as Djezzy. The Algerian National Investment Fund (Fonds National dInvestissement, FNI) will acquire VEONs stake.

In a statement, VEON said: This important step will further streamline VEONs operations, allowing for an improved focus on our core markets.

TeleGeography reports that the groups decision to exercise the option will now set in motion a valuation process conducted by a third party which seeks to identify a fair market value for the transfer.
Another region has made roaming easier; this time its the Western Balkans. In fact, the Roam Like at Home regime in the Western Balkans has just entered into force.

Since 1 July, all roaming costs within the region have been eliminated. That means no roaming charges for end users travelling between or in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.

This is described as a historic achievement of cooperation among the telecom ministries and independent regulators of the region, supported by the European Commission. It is also, according to the European Neighbourhood Policy And Enlargement Negotiations website of the EU, a stepping stone in the digital transformation of the region.

Its been a fairly long time coming, it seems. In 2019, the Western Balkan leaders signed the Regional Roaming Agreement in Belgrade and committed to eliminating roaming charges within the region. The aim was to improve connectivity and bring the tangible benefits of the regional agenda to citizens and businesses alike.

The first phase of the implementation, introduced on 1 July 2019, gradually reduced roaming charges by over 80 percent, and has already led to a significant increase in data traffic in the entire Western Balkan region. The next step is the preparation of a roadmap for the reduction of roaming charges between the EU and the Western Balkans.

The European Commission has fully supported this process, which was facilitated by the Regional Cooperation Council, with the assistance of the Body of European Regulators, BEREC. Setting up a roaming free zone is also a significant step for the Western Balkans in aligning with EU Digital Single Market principles and practices.

According to TeleGeography's CommsUpdate, this Roam Like at Home system features appropriate or fair use conditions; consumers may not be entitled to use their full data allowance while roaming. In fact they will have to consult their tariffs to see how much data they are allowed to use in other countries in the Western Balkans.

As we noted earlier, this is a continuing trend. Earlier this year we reported that Azerbaijan had joined an initiative to create a single roaming space between the countries of the Eastern Partnership. Similar agreements have either been mooted or put in place in recent years in areas as diverse as Andean community member states, the Central African Economic and Monetary Community and the Economic Community of West African States.
Indian mobile provider Vodafone Idea (Vi) posted a loss of INR 6,985.1 crore (USD939.5 million) for the three months to end-March 2021 and raised concerns over its ability to service debt and pay adjusted gross revenue (AGR) and spectrum dues.

The companys gross revenue declined 11.8 percent compared to December 2020 quarter.

Vi attributed the revenue decline in part to the abolition of the interconnection usage charge (IUC) from 1 January 2021, which it said accounted for the majority of the decline, with turnover dipping by just 3.3% when this factor is excluded.

Vodafone Ideas net debt stood at INR 1.8 lakh crore ($24 billion) at the end of FY21. The company said that its inability to raise funds and the present financial condition has put a question mark on their ability to service debt and pay AGR and spectrum dues.

The company said, The Companys financial performance has impacted its ability to generate the cash flow that it needs to settle/ refinance its liabilities and guarantees as they fall due, which along with its financial condition is resulting in material uncertainty that casts significant doubt on the Companys ability to make the payments mentioned therein and continue as a going concern.

The financial services giant JP Morgan said Vodafone Idea remains challenged with the need for CAPEX acceleration for closing network gaps and a highly levered balance sheet.

Meanwhile, the cellco counted a total of 267.8 million wireless customers as of 31 March 2021, down from 269.8 million at end-December 2020 and 291.1 million at end-March 2020.

At the end of the quarter, the 4G subscriber base was 113.9 million (vs 109.7 million in Q3), an increase of 4.2 million in the quarter. The data volumes witnessed a healthy growth of 8.2% QoQ, driven by higher 4G additions.

Ravinder Takkar, MD & CEO, Vodafone Idea Limited, said FY21 has been a transformational year for Vodafone Idea with several important milestones achieved including the launch of our unified brand Vi. In the year of the pandemic, when people and businesses were hugely dependent on telecom connectivity, we delivered superior network experience and improvement in several operating metrics supported by Vi GIGAnet, which remains the fastest 4G network in India, as per Ookla, as well as the network with highest rated voice quality as per TRAI. We enter FY22 with a renewed focus on executing our strategy to keep our customers ahead, and our cost optimization plan remains on track to deliver the targeted savings. We are in active discussion with potential investors for fundraising, to achieve our strategic intent.
TIM Brasil activated 5G DSS networks in three cities of the Northeast, namely Fortaleza (Ceara), Recife (Pernambuco), and Salvador (Bahia).

5G DSS is a "lite" version of the fifth generation of mobile networks that uses current 4G frequencies to deliver higher connection speeds.

For pure 5G to be a reality, Anatel's frequency auction must be carried out. The Ministry of Communications initially expected that the tender would take place in the first half of 2021, but this did not happen.

According to company sources quoted by local media, the technology was installed in certain points of the cities, prioritizing those that are relevant regional landmarks in each location.

In Recife, for example, TIM's 5G DSS is available on the premises and on the streets around Parque Dona Lindu, Avenida Boa Viagem, Pina, and Marco Zero. In Fortaleza, connectivity is available in the Aldeota and Meireles neighborhoods. In Salvador, it is possible to access the new network on the Barra-Ondina circuit.

"To use TIM's 5G DSS, you just need a compatible smartphone and be within the coverage area. It is not necessary to contract a specific plan or request technology activation," said the sources.

Currently, 19 locations in 15 Brazilian states are already experimenting with TIM's 5G DSS network, and by the end of 2021, the company intends to activate in more cities such as Belem, Belo Horizonte, and Florianopolis.

TIM also announced that it has launched two pilot projects with the 5G StandAlone (5GSA) network, one to be used in public safety, and the other for agribusiness.
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?
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is set to speak at the Republican Women of Coffee County meeting on Wednesday, July 21.

Steve Marshall was sworn in as the 48th attorney general of the State of Alabama on February 10, 2017.

Marshall is a native of Atmore who received his undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his legal education at the University of Alabama School of Law. He graduated from both with academic honors.

Prior to taking office as Attorney General, Marshall was the district attorney for Marshall County, a post he held for 16 years. When he was sworn in at age 36, he became the second-youngest District Attorney in Alabama.

During his time as District Attorney, he established a reputation for being tough on crime. He founded the Marshall County Major Crimes Unit, the Marshall County Computer Forensics Lab and the Marshall County Crystal Meth Task Force. He was also instrumental in passing legislation that required a drivers license for Alabama residents to purchase ingredients for making crystal meth. In addition, the legislation created a database for such purchases and led to a 90 percent reduction in the number of crystal meth labs in the state over the past five years.
Aglow Internationals monthly meeting will be held on Saturday, July 17 at 10 a.m. at PoFolks Restaurant. The guest speaker will be Margaret Gibbs from Wicksburg. The community is invited to attend and bring a friend!

July 19The annual meeting of the Coffee County Farmers Federation will be held on Monday, July 19 6:30 p.m. in the community room at the Extension Office Complex in New Brockton. Only one registration per membership for door prizes is permitted, and all members are encouraged to attend.

July 21The Republican Women of Coffee County will meet on Wednesday, July 21 at 11 a.m. at the Enterprise Country Club. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall will be the guest speaker. Social time begins at 11 a.m. and an optional $12 lunch buffet opens at 11:30. The program begins at approximately noon. Everyone is invited, but reservations are required. To RSVP, call 334-494-3763 or email rwccreservations@gmail.com by July 18.
Heat SafetyDrink more non-alcoholic fluids. Dont wait until youre thirsty to drink, regardless of your activity level.

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Limit the amount of time spent outside during the middle of the day. The sun is strongest between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Apply sunscreen. At least 20 minutes before going outside, apply sunscreen with an SPF of 15 or higher.

Wear lightweight, light-colored, loose-fitting clothing. Flowing garments allow air circulation and light-colored fabrics reflect light and heat.

Boating SafetyCheck your boat. Many people put their boats in the water without first checking motor belts and fluids, and end up having to be towed. Make sure your boat is in good working order before taking it out. Also make sure all required safety equipment is on the boat and in good working order.

Be courteous on the water. From the time you start to take the boat to the launching ramp until the time you take it out, courtesy plays a big part in the boating adventure. Be careful of your wake, both around homes and other boaters.
ATLANTA (AP)  State law officers on Thursday identified the man who they say opened fire on two Atlanta police officers, hitting one of them in the face and shoulder, when their elevator opened in an apartment building where they were responding to a previous shooting.

Joseph Lee Humbles, 29, of Atlanta was killed when the officers returned fire Wednesday afternoon in the citys Midtown area in an attack the city's mayor described as an ambush on the officers.

The wounded officer, Khuong Thai, remained in stable condition at a hospital, Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant said at a Thursday briefing.

He's in better spirits even today," Bryant said Thursday.

When the chief visited with Thai a few hours after the shooting, he was sedated but able to speak with him and others. Thai has been on the force for about two years, Bryant said.

On Thursday, Bryant said Thai was shot twice  once in the face and also in the shoulder.
Vietnam will receive about eight million Covid-19 vaccine doses this July, the Ministry of Health said Friday.

Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long said the vaccines would be provided either through contracts or global vaccine access mechanism Covax.

"Around 19,000 vaccination stations would be deployed nationwide, while the entire medical workforce would be mobilized to maintain the vaccination rate towards the end of the year," he said.

Most incoming vaccine batches would arrive around September and October, Long added.

So far, Vietnam has been promised 105 million Covid-19 vaccine doses from multiple sources. The health ministry is stepping up negotiations to secure another 45 million doses to reach 150 million, enough to cover 70 percent of the population.

Over 3.6 million people have been vaccinated, with more than 204,000 having already received two shots.

Over two months into its fourth wave, the most challenging that Vietnam has encountered, the country has recorded 14,505 cases in 51 of its 63 cities and provinces.

The northern province of Bac Giang leads the case count with 5,709 infections, followed by Ho Chi Minh City with 4,573.
Cuba would supply Covid-19 vaccines and transfer related production technologies to Vietnam, its prime minister told his Vietnamese counterpart Thursday.

In a telephonic conference, PM Pham Minh Chinh and Cuban PM Manuel Marrero Cruz shared the two countries' experience in fighting the coronavirus pandemic and discussed cooperation regarding vaccine production and supply, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The two agreed to instruct relevant authorities to exchange information and cooperate to reach vaccine supply agreements and transfer Covid-19 vaccine production technologies from Cuba to Vietnam.

Chinh thanked the Cuban government for sending medical experts to Vietnam to help with the Covid-19 fight, as well as for supplying Vietnam with Covid-19 drugs.

Manuel affirmed Cuba always appreciates the valuable experience Vietnam's Doi Moi period provided to Cuba. The latter plans to cooperate with Vietnam in several fields, including supplying Covid-19 vaccines and transferring vaccine production technologies to the nation.

Vietnam would cooperate with Cuba to produce a Cuban Covid-19 vaccine called Abdala after the Institute of Vaccines and Medical Biologicals (IVAC) receives the necessary production tech.

The Abdala vaccine, which has passed all three phases of human trials, has yet to undergo clinical trials in any other country, Cuban Minister of Public Health Jose Angel Portal Miranda said last month. The vaccine requires three shots, spaced 14 days apart. It could be stored at between 2-8 degrees Celsius, he added.

Initial trial results showed the vaccine is effective against certain coronavirus variants (Beta and Gamma), safe to use, and immunogenic.

Cuba is willing to cooperate with Vietnam on vaccine supply and tech transfer to produce it, said Miranda, adding it could even open two production facilities in Vietnam in case of high demand.

Vietnam is looking to secure 150 million doses this year to cover 70 percent of its population.

Over 3.6 million people have been vaccinated in the country so far, with more than 204,000 having already received two shots.
The papers needed to prove that someone has been truly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic economic impacts have prevented many from accessing the financial support package.

According to the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, as of May this year, only VND13.1 trillion of a VND62-trillion ($2.6-billion) support package that Vietnam had announced in April last year to help the poor as well as businesses hit by the pandemic had been disbursed to help 13.2 million people.

The package aims to support six categories of individuals and businesses.

Those having lost their jobs due to the Covid-19 crisis for 14 days or more would get a monthly allowance of VND1.8 million.

Part-time workers who were unemployed but have not received related benefits would get a monthly allowance of VND1 million.

Poor and near-poor households would receive VND250,000 per month while those with a record of meritorious services to the nation would get VND500,000 per month.

Household businesses with revenues below VND100 million a year and have had to suspend operations due to the Covid-19 pandemic would be supported with VND1 million per month.

Businesses that suffered financial difficulties as a result of Covid-19 would be allowed to borrow money from the Vietnam Bank for Social Policies at zero percent interest to pay their employee salaries for three months. The loans would cover a maximum of 50 percent of the local minimum wage, with businesses responsible for paying the remainder.

Local authorities would be in charge of building lists of those in need and disbursing the funds to them.

The ministry said the authorities have "encountered difficulties" in placing informal workers on the list of those suffering financial impacts by the pandemic.

Many people who lost their jobs had yet to sign a contract with their employers and would not be eligible for relief.

On the other hand, "many localities have been way too careful and spent more time than needed to review the list of those eligible for the aid," the ministry said.

In some cases, some have asked for the completion of far too complicated administrative procedures, creating obstacles for many people in accessing the package, it said.

Besides, when the package was studied in March last year, Covid-19 had not been controlled in Vietnam and it was forecast that the pandemic could last until June 2020 and the number of people affected would be around 20 million.

However, Vietnam managed to bring the pandemic under control by the end of May 2020, and therefore all measures to curb infections, including social distancing orders, had been removed, putting businesses back on track. This further complicated the issue of disbursing the packages funds.

Many workers and businesses were only allowed to get the support fund for April. However, since the procedures were very difficult and the amount was low, many decided not to apply for it.

As for the zero-interest loan package of VND16 trillion, only 245 businesses have borrowed VND42 billion, while many others have complained that the loan conditions are too tight and the principal amount too low.

The ministry said the support package was unprecedented and the support group is wide, spread over all economic sectors, but it only had had less than three weeks to study and issue the policy and did not have enough time to collect feedback and conduct reviews.

Dang Thi Kim Chi, chairwoman of the labor union at the Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park in Binh Duong Province that borders HCMC, said many companies at the park had stopped operations and really desired the support, but the complicated procedures have prevented them from seeking help.

Only five companies applied for relief under the package and none of them was chosen. They were asked to fulfill some additional terms and conditions, including paperwork to prove their financial abilities, forcing them to spend more time and effort on completing the procedures. In the end, they gave up and not a penny was obtained from the support package.

Le Duy Binh, CEO of Economica Vietnam, said some requirements set for businesses to get support were "strict and unreasonable."

For example, he said, in order to borrow from the zero-interest package, businesses have to prove that they had made more than 20 percent of their employees stop work for over a month, and those employees must have already signed contracts and paid social insurance.

Vietnam is about to release another support package worth VND26 trillion, and both Binh and Chi suggested that authorities learn from shortcomings of the first package to make the second one more accessible to people and businesses in need.
The U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has promised to help Vietnam acquire Covid-19 vaccines.

He made the commitment during discussions over telephone Thursday with Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh on bilateral relations and international and regional issues, according to a statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Minh thanked and deeply appreciated the U.S. for helping other countries access vaccines, saying he hoped Vietnam could soon get the vaccines promised by the U.S.

He called on the country to work closely with Vietnam to foster bilateral economic, trade and investment relations.

Sullivan said the U.S. attaches importance to its "comprehensive partnership" with Vietnam, and hailed the latters increasingly important role in the region and world.

He also assured Minh that the U.S. would continue its support so that Vietnam and other countries could soon receive vaccines to fight the pandemic and work closely with Vietnam to strengthen their economic and trade relations.

The U.S. last week announced the destinations of 55 million doses of vaccines, with Vietnam being one of them.

Of the doses, around 41 million will be shared through the global vaccine access mechanism Covax, and Vietnam is among the Asian beneficiaries. The rest are meant for "regional priorities and other recipients," which also include Vietnam.
People gather at a kindergarten in HCMC's District 8 to have their samples taken for the new coronavirus test, June 29, 2021. Photo by VnExpress/Ha An.

The Health Ministry announced another 147 Covid-19 patients Friday morning, with 118 recorded in Ho Chi Minh City.

Of the cases in the southern metropolis, 94 are those who had contact with Covid-19 patients and have already been isolated prior to their test results while the sources of transmission of 24 other cases are still unclear.

The remaining cases reported Friday morning are in nine localities in the south and central Vietnam.

Central Phu Yen Province got 10 cases that are all people having contact with existing coronavirus cases.

Dong Nai Province that borders HCMC registered five cases linked to a cluster at Hoc Mon wholesale market in the city's Hoc Mon District.

Mekong Delta's An Giang and Long An provinces recorded four and three cases each, and they are all associated with previously confirmed patients.

Two cases in the delta's Dong Thap Province are also related to HCMC's Hoc Mon market cluster.

The north central Nghe An Province reported two cases who had also come into contact with Covid-19 patients.

Central Ha Tinh and Khanh Hoa provinces reported one case each. They are two boys, aged seven and six, who are linked to existing patients in the provinces.

Binh Phuoc Province in the south reported one case as a 31-year-old man from in Mekong Delta's Tra Vinh Province who had contact with a patient in Binh Phuoc.
Lang Co Bay in Hue near lines of resorts is seen from above. Photo by VnExpress/Vo Thanh.

A top gear motorbike tour from Hue to Hoi An and a Saigon street food tour have been named among the world's 25 best travel experiences by Tripadvisor readers.

The top gear motorbike tour from Hue to Hoi An ranked ninth while the private street food tour by motorbike in Ho Chi Minh City came in 14th on the list of 25 best travel experiences, according to Tripadvisors 2021 Travelers Choice of the Best Things to Do.

The selection comes from more than 400,000 bookable activities on its website and is curated by a combination of user ratings and reviews.

The eight-hour motorbike tour from former imperial capital Hue to the ancient town of Hoi An costs $74.77 per person and allows visitors to explore famous tourist attractions in central Vietnam like Lang Co Beach, Hai Van Pass, Da Nang, the Marble Mountains and Hoi An itself.

"Amazing from start to finish! So friendly, great fun. The views were epic! Such good value! It's a must if you're in Vietnam," a Tripadvisor reader said.

Organized by HCMC-based tour operator Saigon Back Alley Tours, the food tour by motorbike would take visitors around four hours to delve into the street food scene in Vietnam's southern metropolis. The tour costs from $40 per adult, including beverages, food tasting, dinner, snacks and hotel pickup and drop-off.

"Theres no better way to get into the swing of Saigon than riding a motorbike. On this private guided foodie adventure you'll sample eight separate tastings at a range of street eateries," said a Tripadvisor reader.

A jet flight tour in Dubai was ranked the best travel experience in the world by Tripadvisor readers, followed by white water rafting along Kaituna River in New Zealand.
ELKO -- Gates open at 6 p.m. Sunday for Elkos Independence Day celebration at the Elko County Fairgrounds. The patriotic program starts at 8 p.m. with fireworks going off at around 9:35 p.m.

Assemblyman John Ellison said Sundays fireworks would be Elkos biggest show yet, with more than 18,000 rounds to be set off for the ground show and aerial displays.

A salute to the troops starts at 8 p.m. July 4 with a posting of the colors and the National Anthem sung by Gabi Taravella, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance led by Josalynne Mosely and a reading of The Ragged Old Flag by Michelle Mosely.

The program also includes a prayer by Pastor Joshua Kraintz, guest speakers, remembering those we lost over the past year, recognizing past, present and future troops, and a candlelight vigil.

There is no charge to attend the show, but donations are accepted at the gate that will go toward this years fireworks costs and next years show.

Ellison emphasized the show is and always has been free to the public.

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Some people say, We cant afford to go in. No, its a donation only. If you cant afford it, you still go in, he said.
Today, it is clear that Joe Biden is obsessed with erasing every last vestige of Donald Trumps presidency. He wants to return to the status quo antethe way things were B.T. (before Trump) when Barack Obama was president. With Biden reversing Trump-era policies and reinstating Obama-era policies, is it any wonder that the outlook is for a return to Obama-era slow growth? That is what I meant when I wrote above that you dont need to be an economist to figure this out. Ideas and policies have consequences, and policies that caused sluggish growth in the past will cause sluggish growth in the future.

The challenge for team Biden going forward will be how to convince Americans that prolonged slow growth is the best they could hope for and the right course for our country to follow. Accompanying the announcement of years of projected slow growth after the sugar-high of massive government cash handouts wears off, the Biden economists offered a lame excuse: They said the U.S. economy is caught in the grip of secular stagnation. That is only half correct. Yes, stagnation was and will be the problem, but it isnt secularthat is, sluggish growth doesnt have to happen.
In 2021, Chief Justice John Roberts majority chose to follow Smith, basing its analysis of Fulton upon the legal framework of that case. Consequently, only two questions were pertinent to the outcome: Were the anti-discrimination policies of Philadelphia, which clearly burdened the religious convictions of CSS: 1.) neutral toward religion; and 2.) generally applicable to persons and organizations?

The court determined that the requirement of general applicability would resolve the case, and therefore did not consider the question of neutrality. It found that though Philadelphia claimed to have language against sexual discrimination in its foster-parent contract with CSS, it, in fact, allowed for various exceptions to that policy. Therefore, the court ruled that anti-discrimination policy, with the possibility of exceptions, was not generally applicable because some persons might be excused from its reach. The city failed to meet the requirements of Smith. End of storyor so it would seem. In fact, the majority opinion continued.

The final paragraphs took an ironic and confusing turn. After spending the entire opinion relying on Smith, the unanimous opinion invoked the language of the abandoned Sherbert strict scrutiny test. It departed from Smith and embraced Sherbert.
Stephen Perry, Chairman of Britain's 48 Group Club and recipient of China Reform Friendship Medal (File photo)

By Zhang Zhou

BEIJING, July 2 (Guangming Online) -- The success of the Communist Party of China (CPC) relies closely on the Chinese people, a recipient of China Reform Friendship Medal has said.

The success of the CPC is due to hearing the people, Stephen Perry, Chairman of Britain's 48 Group Club told Guangming Online in a recent interview.

Perry said that it is a great moment of history when China has achieved its first centenary goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, adding that the world will be reflecting on the incredible transformations of the last 100 years and the last 43 years (since the reform and opening-up in 1978) in China.

Looking back at the development history of the CPC, Perry noted that the Party has gone through many tough periods since its founding in 1921, but it has managed to overcome the difficulties.

Referring to the key to Chinas achievements over the past 100 years, Perry mentioned people many times.

He said the Chinese people give their backing to the CPC to lead the enormous transition from being the sick man of Asia to being the dynamo of Asia.

Perry also expressed confidence in China achieving the second centenary goal of building a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious by 2049.

For those who gainsay that, they need only to look at the achievements of the last 43 years, and the determination of a Party which has grown from 13 delegates in 1921 to over 95 million today, he said.

[ Editor: Liu Jiaming ]
Vicki Cann is seen receiving her first dose of the Sinovac vaccine on April 1st.(photo provided to Guangming Online)

When reports started surfacing that some sort of pneumonia like virus had popped up, it was of little concern to me, instead I wondered what they would call this one. We now have bird flu, swine flu, or simply the flu, so I thought it was going to be just another of these. Then, as the end of January 2020 approached things started getting a bit tense here in Beijing. However, anything short of a massive gas explosion outside of my window would not really get my attention. Then by the beginning of February, we slowly started noticing a series of concerning but effective changes.

For most, 2020 now seems like a vague haze that was spent primarily indoors. At this point, much of the rest of the world was eyeing China with an indifferent curiosity, confident that their own national borders would protect them from this new peculiar illness. Those concerned were usually relatives or friends of foreigners residing and working in China. I remember attempts by a very worried and caring friend, who made a very compelling case encouraging me to leave China before things worsened. Having been brought up in a pragmatic family environment, supported by equally rational friends, the advice I received from home echoed the sentiment of stay put. Call it reason or call it tough lovethey were right. When different embassies were busy arranging chartered flights for their nationals, some with minimal costs and others at astronomical prices, I asked myself, 1.4 billion people cannot simply relocate, what are they going to do? So, I made the decision to stay and weather the storm.

Authorities across the entire country were swift in implementing safety precautions in a timely and constructive manner. These measures were executed across the retail industry, residential areas and university campuses alike. Chinas success in managing and containing the spread of Covid-19 greatly stems from its technological prowess exhibited in a plethora of ways, including the use of its prosperous e-commerce platforms and the launch of a QR code system which serves as a sort of health certificate. These QR codes are color-coded with green indicating that an individual is healthy; yellow illustrates that the person has to be quarantined for 7 days and red signals the need for a 14 day quarantine period.

Each province created its own health kit and utilized geolocation data supplied by telecom carriers. Ones recent travel history is recorded to better identify if the person has visited any high risk areas within the last two weeks. This digital health certificate also illustrates a persons vaccination status and recent Covid test results. Most public venues in China requires visitors to have a green health code before being permitted entry. These mini-apps are particularly advantageous for contact tracing purposes and are also used on university campuses especially when students return to the property. This system is arguably one of the most thorough and efficacious in the world, one that has played an instrumental role in reducing the spread of the virus in China. Countries like Singapore and Australia have adopted a similar approach, however, many nations have had the opportunity to learn from Chinas experience and adapt these lessons to their own local contexts.

Life on most university campuses in Beijing were quite strict in their anti-epidemic efforts. During the pandemic, many foreigners had the opportunity to become better acquainted with online apps such as Meituan, Eleme, Jingdong Maicai, Dingdong Maicai and the like. Those who have not had the opportunity of living in China are unaware of the seamless efficiency of these kinds of apps. In less than half an hour one can have a variety of goods delivered to ones doorsteps ranging from basic groceries to other daily household items such as cooking pots and even clothing items. Having spoken to a few friends in the U.K., most are in disbelief when I share my experience with these apps, as they usually have to wait days for even basic goods like bread or milk. Needless to say, these services were vital not only to those on college campuses, but to the entire country especially during the height of the pandemic.

Lets fast forward to March of 2021, all foreigners on most college campuses and those living in China, have had free access to the vaccine. The country has embarked on a massive vaccination campaign with over one billion vaccine doses administered to date. The government intends to vaccinate 80% of the target population by the end of 2021. This ambitious undertaking is one that has been increasingly gathering momentum as the countrys leadership is committed to fulfilling its goal. According to the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who presided over the press conference held on June 16th, China has donated over 350 million doses globally, while the U.S. for example, has only pledged to donate 80 million doses by the end of June. These numbers speak volumes as the U.S. the U.K. and the European Union have all been accused of hoarding vaccines. According to a report compiled by an organization called the International Rescue Committee (IRC), these countries had pre-purchased sufficient Covid-19 vaccines to vaccinate their respective populations more than twice, while still having an excess that could vaccinate approximately 20 other countries that are currently in crises. Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, is reported to have said that the race to vaccinate the globes population, represents the greatest moral test of our times. However, China has responded in a completely different manner with its active assistance to developing countries which further illustrates its dedication to fostering and building a community with a shared future for all mankind.

Many western nations have been quick to criticize China without acknowledging the pioneering role the country has adopted on the international stage. Chinas secret to combating Covid stems from the self-discipline of its people and those charged with the responsibility of implementing the regulations. Irrespective of the cause, nowhere in China did we see mass rallies, protests or movements, instead we saw the pursuit of a true social commitment between a government and its people. In addition to its successful containment of the virus, China has much to celebrate this year, as July 1st marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

If I had to sum up my Covid experience in China in two words, it would be: thankful and grateful.

Thankful  I am thankful to be one of the fortunate foreigners to have been able to remain in China, while others had to leave either voluntarily or involuntarily. This opportunity was available only to a few and I am thankful that I am one of them.

Grateful  I am grateful to have been lucky enough to have received the vaccine in this country as the government acted quickly and decisively to combat Covid and minimize the outbreaks. I am also grateful for the sense of community that the pandemic created amongst people who were once strangers.

One of the greatest challenges in life is to adopt an attitude of gratitude. This is not easy to attain and also not easy to maintain, but it is one that we should all strive for, even as the pandemic continues to rage on in other parts of the world.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the position of GMW.cn.

[ Editor: WXL ]
Motor Sich (Zaporizhia) will supply four D-436-148FM aircraft engines to Antonov state-owned enterprise and 14 helicopter engines to Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAS,), the corresponding contracts were signed in June.

According to a report in the ProZorro system, the amount of the contract concluded on June 15 with Antonov State Enterprise is UAH 414.99 million (UAH 86.46 million per engine), while two engines, subject to timely advance payment, must be delivered on DDP terms until the end this year and two more - until the end of October next year.

According to the agreement signed with TUSAS on June 26, Motor Sich will supply engines for attacking heavy-class helicopters, the Turkish side said in a statement. According to the report, the delivery of the first two engines is expected in September 2022, and the first flight of these helicopters is scheduled for 2023. The entire contract is valid until 2025.

There is no information about the cost of the Turkish contract yet.

PJSC Motor Sich is one of the world's largest manufacturers of engines for aviation equipment, as well as industrial gas turbine units. It supplies products to more than 100 countries around the world.
The Ministry of Finance of Ukraine has confirmed that Ukraine has received a $350 million loan from the World Bank (WB) for the systemic project "First Economic Recovery Development Policy Loan," the ministry's press service told Interfax-Ukraine.

"The funds have arrived in Ukraine," the press service said in response to an inquiry from Interfax-Ukraine.

As reported, Ukraine and the World Bank signed an agreement on providing Ukraine from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) a loan in the amount of $350 million, which should be used to develop the economy during a pandemic, provide social support to vulnerable groups of the population and strengthen public institutions.
Ukraine and the United States have discussed the development of a system for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases, Ukraine's Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova said.

"We discussed with Vice President for International Relations of Medtronic Trevor Gunn the largest medical equipment manufacturer in the world, to expand cooperation, in particular, in the development of a system for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases in Ukraine," Markarova said on Facebook on Friday night.

According to her, it is also planned in Ukraine to conduct joint research and development with the United States for the production of medical equipment.
Boris Lozhkin Charitable Foundation has doubled the million raised by the supporters of Tabletochki for the treatment of children with cancer

It took philanthropists of the Tabletochki Foundation only one month to raise one million Hryvnias, which will be used to treat children with cancer. Another million to this amount has been added by the Boris Lozhkin Charitable Foundation. The President of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine wrote about this on his Facebook page.

As promised at the start of the Holidays without illness campaign, our charitable foundation with Nadiia Shalomova has doubled each contribution. There are two million now, which means that twice as many children will be able to come closer to recovery, says Lozhkins publication.

The Holidays without illness campaign started in early June and was timed to coincide with the Childrens Day. This is not the first such joint project of the two foundations. Last year, Boris Lozhkin Charitable Foundation also made a donation of one million Hryvnias for the Tabletchki Foundation, founded by Olya Kudinenko.

This million has already become the fourth for us during our cooperation with Tabletochki, and we know exactly what each charitable Hryvnia will be used for. 500 children and 21 oncology departments under the permanent care of the foundation need this money every day, added Lozhkin.

According to Tabletochki, more than 1,000 children are diagnosed with cancer in Ukraine every year. At the same time, childhood cancer is curable, but its treatment must be systemic, permanent and, most importantly, timely. Donations from philanthropists allow hundreds of children to return to life without illness.

There is no place for cancer at a childrens party. Thanks to your generosity, children will return home from hospitals quicker and will celebrate their birthdays healthy, the Tabletochki Foundation thanked all those who have taken part in the campaign.
The decisions of Kyiv Court of Appeal returned the appeals filed by the representative of the property owner against the decisions of the investigating judge of Pechersky District Court of Kyiv on September 3, 2014, due to the missed appeal deadline.

"The contested decisions of the court of first instance sustained the petition of the investigator of the General Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine and seized 19.42455% of the charter capital (corporate rights) in the amount of UAH 9.125 million Artemivsk Winery and 99.999% of the charter capital (corporate rights) of the Complex Druzhba, which belongs to MAKO-Holding that is owned by the suspect, citizens of Y.," the court's press service said.

The court said that a citizen is suspected of committing criminal offenses under Part 3 of Article 27, Part 3 of Article 212 (evasion of taxes, fees (mandatory payments), Part 3 of Article 27, Part 2 of Article 366 (official forgery) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba calls on world leaders to join the work to de-occupy Crimea, as it can help them defend their own national interests.

"The Crimean Platform is multifaceted. We invite all countries to work on those aspects that concern them the most. Do you want to focus on human rights? Welcome. Freedom of navigation? Come in. International security, freedom of religion, environment, international humanitarian law? Welcome everyone," Kuleba tweeted on Friday.

As reported, the Crimean Platform is an international platform designed to unite efforts for the reintegration and de-occupation of the Crimean peninsula. The founding summit of the platform will be held on August 23 in Kyiv. A number of countries have already openly expressed their desire to join the work of the platform, in particular, Slovakia, Turkey, Poland, etc.
The Ukrainian-U.S. military exercise Sea Breeze 2021 continues in the Black Sea region, at the moment a coordination phase is underway at sea, which is one of the preparatory stages for an active stage of training, the press service of the National Guard of Ukraine reported on Friday.

"Participants of the dive teams from the United States, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, Georgia and Canada are jointly working out tasks at sea. The National Guard of Ukraine is represented by a dive team of a separate special-purpose detachment of the Southern Odesa Territorial Department," the report said.

It clarifies that members of the international dive team communicate underwater using only a special sign language.

"This is an international language, but it has many nuances. That is why, before each general dive, a mandatory briefing is held with divers to clarify some issues, including a sign language," the National Guard said.

They emphasize that one of the tasks of the dive time of the exercise is to detect and identify explosive objects using the latest equipment that can clear objects, detect mines and search for sunken objects.

"During the coordination of actions, divers of the National Guard of Ukraine, together with foreign colleagues, worked out diving in a closed breathing system of the Aqua-Lung type [made in the United States], walking underwater on signals using a control and localization system  the SHARK MARINE sonar, which was provided by American partners. Also, the diving guards, together with American and Canadian doctors, took a practical course on providing first pre-medical aid using an altitude chamber," the National Guard said.

Sea Breeze is a multinational military exercise that has been held in Ukraine since 1997 in accordance with the 1993 Memorandum of Understanding and Cooperation on Defense and Military Relations between the U.S. Department of Defense and the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. The organizers of the exercise are Ukraine and the United States.
Russia is ready to escalate some local tensions in the Black Sea region, but will not run the risk of a full-scale confrontation with NATO, clearly realizing they have no chances to succeed, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said.

"I do believe Russia is ready to escalate some local tensions in the Black Sea region, but I do not see them being suicidal. They may pinch and provoke here and there. But Russia will not risk a full-scale confrontation with NATO, clearly realizing they have no chances to succeed in it," Kuleba said in an interview with Newsweek, published on Friday.

The minister said that if the Alliance does not take action, the Russian Federation can significantly strengthen its control over the Black Sea and further expand its influence in the region.

"In our conversations with NATO we are very frank on this: if things continue as they are, there is a risk that Russia may significantly increase its control over the Black Sea and further expand its influence in the region. Which means elevated threats for the security and stability of Ukraine and NATO allies there," he said.

Kuleba pointed to Moscow's attempts to disrupt trade routes and restrict freedom of navigation.

In addition, the Foreign Minister drew attention to the fact that the Black Sea featured heavily in his discussions with NATO members.

"I am raising this topic in all of my meetings with both the NATO allies of the Black Sea region, Romania, Turkey and Bulgaria, and in the NATO headquarters in Brussels. Gradually, I see them hearing Ukraine when we ring alarm bells. Many things were done too little too late in 2014, and I hope now we don't repeat those mistakes, acting differently with the full understanding of Russia's intentions," he said.

The Ukrainian minister admitted that now Russia does have a strategically advantageous position in the temporarily occupied Crimea.

"Therefore, it is very important for us that the Black Sea does not repeat the fate of the Azov Sea region. We need to enhance cooperation between the Ukrainian navy and navies of the NATO allies in the Black Sea," Kuleba said.

Kuleba also expressed confidence that nothing can interfere with the Sea Breeze training.

"What Russia tries to do now is play a muscle game showing that no matter how much others train, it's only them who is ready to act in the region," he said.
Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Arsen Avakov discussed with Minister of the Economy, Finance and Recovery of France Bruno Le Maire the ratification by the Ukrainian parliament of four investment projects between the two states, as well as a project to modernize the drinking water supply system in Kharkiv region.

"Had a telephone conversation with the Minister of the Economy and Finance of France, Bruno Le Maire, who thanked the Verkhovna Rada for the unprecedented support of joint projects! We discussed further Ukrainian-French plans, in particular, the renovation of the drinking water supply system in Kharkiv," Avakov wrote on Twitter on Friday.

Regarding investment projects, according to the Communications Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, it is about the renewal of Ukrzaliznytsia's freight electric locomotive fleet, the production and supply of rescue equipment for the needs of the State Emergency Service, as well as two projects to modernize supplies and improve the quality of drinking water in Luhansk region and Kyiv.

The ministers also discussed joint projects and their implementation with the involvement of French companies and with the support of the French government.

Le Maire highly appreciated the effective work of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, noting that the achievements are a good result on the eve of the visit of French President Emmanuel Macron to Ukraine, which is to take place soon. Le Maire invited Avakov to pay a working visit to Paris.
On Thursday, July 8, at 12.00, the press center of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency will host a press conference entitled "Results of Intl European University's first year of work in Ukraine. Tasks, plans for next year." Participants include Ukrainian statesman, politician and scientist, civil servant of the first rank, PhD in Philosophy, academician of the Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine, Chairman of the Development Assistance Council of the International European University Anatoliy Tolstoukhov; descendant of Emperor Franz Joseph, President of the International European University Franz-Volodymyr von Habsburg-Lothringen; founder and vice-rector for scientific and pedagogical work and international relations of the International European University Alla Navolokina; Chief Rabbi of the World Forum of Russian-Speaking Jewry, Chief Rabbi of the Brodsky Synagogue in Kyiv Moshe Reuven Azman. By Skype: partners of the university from Austria, Uzbekistan, Hungary, Pakistan and other countries (8/5a Reitarska Street). The press conference will be available on the YouTube channel of Interfax-Ukraine. Admission of journalists requires registration on the spot.
KYIV. July 2 (Interfax-Ukraine)  From the beginning of 2021, confectionery products in Ukraine has risen in price by 15% to 20% due to the rise in sugar prices caused by the cartel agreement of its producers and the lack of supply of this product on the domestic market, Head of the Association of producers of confectionery, food concentrates, starch products and coffee in Ukraine (Ukrkondprom) Oleksandr Baldyniuk said during press conferences at Interfax-Ukraine on Thursday.

"In our industry, the rise in sugar prices has led to quite severe economic consequences, which forced us from the beginning of the year to increase the cost of our products by 15% to 20%. We got a situation when the industry reduced production by 25,000 to 26,000 tonnes, or UAH 1.3 billion in monetary terms," he said.

Baldyniuk said the consequence of the reduction in production was an increase in imports of confectionery products to Ukraine by 20%. The industry also loses out in export positions in the EU, CIS and Central Asia markets. The high price of sugar has led to a situation where the production of caramel in some EU countries is more profitable than in Ukraine.

According to him, over the past 11 months, Ukrainian processing enterprises receive sugar at prices 30% to 40% higher than in Europe, in particular, on the London Stock Exchange over the past month, sugar fell from $459 per tonne to $432 per tonne, while in Ukraine it rose in price from $660 per tonne to $781 per tonne.

The head of Ukrkondprom said that too expensive sugar in Ukraine leads to the fact that Ukrainian producers lose their competitiveness in the domestic and export markets, forcing the industry's enterprises to cut production and lay off employees.

Baldyniuk said that the crisis situation in the confectionery industry has developed due to the cartel conspiracy of sugar producers and the shortage of its supply on the domestic market.

"Since today the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine has initiated a case and is investigating a cartel agreement, we can conclude that it has reason to assume a cartel agreement," the head of the association said.

According to him, the supply of sugar in Ukraine after the sugar-making season, together with the transition residues from last year, is 1.2 million tonnes with its internal consumption at the level of 1.5 million tonnes. Even taking into account the import of 40,000 tonnes of white sugar from Europe within the existing quota, as well as the import of raw sugar, the deficit of this product is still 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes.

Baldyniuk said the way out of this situation is the adoption by the MPs of bill No. 5673 on the establishment of a tariff quota for the import of white sugar into Ukraine. According to him, a temporary permit for duty-free import of 60,000 tonnes of sugar from the EU will balance supply and demand for it in the country, while not creating losses for the sugar industry.
67% of Ukrainians define themselves as believers, but only 10% of them are members of religious communities  study

KYIV. June 2 (Interfax-Ukraine)  Only 10% of Ukrainians, who define themselves as believers, regularly visit religious houses. These are the data of a sociological study conducted by the Active Group social research company and the Expert Club analytical center and presented during a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine.

"Compared to the indicators of 2020, the number of people, who consider themselves rather non-believers, has grown in Ukraine. This figure has increased from 8 to 13% over the year. This may be due to the reverse transition from religious practices to secular ones due to the end of the critical phase of the pandemic in our country," the co-founder of the Expert Club, political scientist Daniel Bogatyrev said.

"Among people who consider themselves believers, 86% identify themselves as Orthodox Christians, 9% are Catholics, 1.2% are Islam believers, 0.7% Protestantism believers, 0.3% pagans, and 0.2% Judaism believers," Head of Active Group Oleksandr Pozniy said, summing up the results of the study.

In addition, Pozniy noted the correlation between adherence to Orthodox Christianity and the age of citizens. The study revealed an increase in the number of Orthodox believers among middle-aged and elder people.

According to Editor-in-Chief of the Ukraine in Arabic news portal Mohammad Farajallah, faith should meet the traditions and life of the nation in which it prevails.

"Ukraine has always been a multinational and poly-confessional state, but Orthodoxy has been and will remain the main religion in Ukraine. As for Islam here, the percentage of Muslims has remained generally unchanged thanks to the indigenous people, primarily the Crimean Tatars... Over the 30 years of independence, the number of immigrants professing Islam in Ukraine has not exceeded 50,000-100,000 people, which is not a significant figure," Farajallah said.

Many people select a particular confession based primarily on political considerations, political scientist and Head of the UP Foundation, Kost Bondarenko, said.

"If one looks at the realities, political engagement does not make it possible to talk about the churching of parishioners of certain confessions. It is one thing to declare the faith, but another thing is churching. This can be observed every year, when at the end of July religious processions are organized in honor of the feast of the Baptism of Rus. At the same time, the processions of the two confessions (UOC and OCU) are different. The number of parishioners of the UOC is usually 200,000-300,000 people who walk with crosses and banners, showing their adherence to Orthodoxy. At the same time, during the processions of the OCU, parishioners mostly go with national flags and portraits of the heroes of the Ukrainian pantheon. This really indicates to two approaches to religiosity in these confessions," Bondarenko said.

Watch the full video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HazeCIxjfVo

Subscribe to the Expert Club channel here.
International European University held an international scientific conference: 25th Anniversary of the Constitution of Ukraine: National Tradition and European Standards of Constitutionalism, involving honored guests, public officials, students, Ph.D. students, young scientists, lawyers and political strategists.

Due to the global epidemiological situation, International European University developed the plan of actions and took care of all participants. At the entrance of the university, our partners, medical professionals from New diagnostics laboratory, carried out PCR testing and provided participants with face masks.

The conference was opened by Alla Navolokina, a co-founder and vice-rector for educational and scientific work and international relations of International European University. Mrs. Alla stressed the importance of the event, as the Constitution of Ukraine secured the right to education. According to the Constitution, the social and cultural right to education provides everyone in Ukraine with the possibility to acquire knowledge, abilities, skills and professional training based on mutual cooperation of various entities of the education sector.

International European University respects the Constitution Day of Ukraine and complies with the Fundamental Law of Ukraine to secure the rights and freedoms of each citizen in this state.

Honored guests of the conference included:

Anatolii Tolstoukhov

Ukrainian public official, policymaker and scientist, first rank civil servant, Ph.D., academician at the National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine. Chair of the Council for International European University Development.

Franz-Volodymyr von Habsburg-Lothringen

Descendant of Emperor Franz Joseph. President of International European University.

Mokhammad Faradzhallakh

Editor-in-chief of Ukraine in Arabic

Kateryna Odarchenko

Head of National Platform political party, President of the Institute for Democracy and Development PolitA, partner of SIC Group Ukraine.

Tamara Marusyk

Vice-rector for research, education and instruction of Chernivtsi National University.

Sam Noshadha

Vice-rector for international relations, responsible for prevention and detection of corruption, of Academy of Labour, Social Relations and Tourism. Judge of the International Commercial Arbitration Court. He is recognized by the best lawyers in Ukrainian commercial law.

Bohdan Kushnir

Attorney, director of Argument Law Firm, founder of International Human Rights Association National Lawyer.

Sadaqat Hussain

Representative of foreign students at International European University.

Natalia Kozaeva

Head of the Notary Chamber of Ukraine in Kyiv, member of the Council of National Pedagogical Dragomanov University.

Volodymyr Omelchenko

Director of energy and infrastructure programs at Razumkov Centre.

The conference continued in the format of panel sessions where participants, students and invited guests discussed relevant issues of the development of Ukrainian legal science and practice.

Quite symbolic is the fact that this year, Ukrainians celebrate two significant dates: 25th Anniversary of the Constitution of Ukraine and 30th Anniversary of the declaration of Ukrainian independence.

It is symbolic for International European University because, on the eve of these dates, one has founded the university and started its operations as an institution developing each citizen of the new world order.

To sum up, the conference showed the significance of the dialogue, scientific comprehension and educational issues for both the university community and public officials and society.

Thus, in regard to this great Ukrainian holiday, we wish us to live in the constitutional state that respects the rights and fulfils its obligations, as well as features mutual respect and equality. The state respected and appreciated on the global stage. In the state called Ukraine!

Live broadcasting of the conference is available here.
Television news photographers prepare to cover the final opinions of the current courts term at the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, U.S. (Photo : REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday backed two conservative nonprofit groups that challenged California's requirement that tax-exempt charities provide the state the identities of top financial donors - a decision that could imperil some political donor disclosure laws and buttress "dark money" donations.



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The justices, in a 6-3 ruling, sided with the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Center in finding that the California attorney general's policy, in place for the past decade, violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and association.



The court's conservatives were in the majority, with its liberal members dissenting, just as they were in the other decision on their final day of rulings for their current nine-month term. In the other case, the court upheld Republican-backed ballot curbs in Arizona in a ruling that makes it earlier for states to enact voting restrictions.



Democratic-governed California, the most populous U.S. state, had said the donor information is required as part of the state attorney general's duty to prevent charitable fraud.



"We are left to conclude that the Attorney General's disclosure requirement imposes a widespread burden on donors' associational rights," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the ruling.



The state's interest in "amassing sensitive information for its own convenience is weak," Roberts added.



The Thomas More Law Center is a conservative Catholic legal group. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which funds education and training on conservative issues, is the sister organization of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group - both founded by conservative billionaire businessman Charles Koch and his late brother David.



"Stripping our office of confidential access to donor information - the same information about major donors that charities already provide to the federal government - will make it harder for the state to fight fraud and prevent the misuse of charitable contributions," California's Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta said.



Americans for Prosperity Foundation CEO Emily Seidel said the ruling "protects Americans from being forced to choose between staying safe or speaking up," alluding to her group's concerns that donors could face threats if their identities become public.



'A BULL'S-EYE'



The decision could make it easier for groups to withhold donor identities in other contexts, allowing for the entrenchment of untraceable "dark money" political donations that shield the identity of the donor.



The Supreme Court in the past has been hostile to political campaign finance restrictions - it ruled in 2010 that corporations and other outside groups could spend unlimited funds in elections - but had upheld disclosure requirements.



Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion that the court has reversed this previous approach.



"Today's analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull's-eye. Regulated entities who wish to avoid their obligations can do so by vaguely waving toward First Amendment 'privacy concerns,'" Sotomayor wrote.



Sotomayor said the court struck down the requirement without any evidence that donors would face negative consequences if their identities become public.



University of California, Irvine School of Law election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his blog that the ruling will make it "much harder to sustain campaign finance disclosure laws going forward."



Democratic congressional leaders fumed. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the decision "jaw-dropping" and said it will make it "much harder to expose the evils of dark money in our political system."



California required charities to provide a copy of the tax form they file with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service listing donors who contribute big amounts of money. Larger groups had to disclose donors who contributed $200,000 or more in any year. That information was not posted online and was kept confidential but some had become public.



The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018 reversed a judge's ruling in favor of the groups, prompting the appeal to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-weighs-conservative-groups-bid-conceal-donors-2021-04-26 in March.



Some congressional Democrats had urged conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was part of the majority in the ruling, not to participate in the case because Americans for Prosperity spent money last year to support her Senate confirmation to the court.



The two groups that challenged California's mandate were backed by nonprofit organizations spanning the ideological spectrum. Liberal groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, had urged a narrower ruling against California.


In a first, U.S. warns of dangers of systemic racism in human trafficking report

Young Nigerian women, rescued from human traffickers, gather in a shelter on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia (Photo : REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov)

An annual U.S. State Department report released on Thursday said discriminatory policies perpetuated human trafficking, drawing a link with systemic racism in the United States and abroad for the first time.



U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in the Trafficking in Persons report that inequities undercut Washington's battle against human trafficking.



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"If we're serious about ending trafficking in persons, we must also work to combat systemic racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination," Blinken said.



A State Department official said it was the first time the report drew a connection to systemic racism.



"We know that talking about these issues in the report is just the beginning and are committed to working with our partners to create and implement plans for how to ground our anti-trafficking response in equity going forward," a senior State Department official said.



The United States has been re-examining its treatment of African Americans since nationwide protests last year sparked by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer.



U.S. authorities have also warned of increased threats from white supremacist groups.



The report also cited the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on human trafficking, as traffickers capitalized on the pandemic and governments diverted resources to fight the health crisis.



The report looked at countries and territories and ranked them into four tiers, downgrading countries such as Ethiopia but upgrading others.



ETHIOPIA



The United States faulted Ethiopia for not demonstrating increased efforts to eliminate trafficking.



The report highlighted the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region that has killed thousands of people, displaced more than 2 million people and pushed hundreds of thousands to the brink of famine.



The report said that since the conflict began in November, international organizations increasingly reported armed actors were responsible for committing human rights abuses and gender-based violence, including potential trafficking crimes.



Ethiopians seeking asylum in Sudan were increasingly vulnerable to trafficking and unaccompanied children in the conflict areas may be vulnerable to recruitment by non-state armed groups, the report also warned.



BELARUS



Belarus was cited for "key achievements" even if, as the report said, resident Alexander Lukashenko's government did not "fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking."



The report made no mention of Lukashenko's brutal crackdown on ongoing protests over his claim of victory in a 2020 presidential election widely seen as being rigged.



SAUDI ARABIA



Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, was cited for "making significant efforts" toward eliminating human trafficking, the report said.



However, the government failed to meet minimum standards in a number of areas, including fining, jailing and deporting foreign workers for prostitution or immigration violations even though many may have been trafficking victims, the report said.



ISRAEL



The report said Israel, Washington's closest Middle Eastern ally, had worked to eliminate human trafficking, but its efforts "were not serious and sustained" compared to the previous reporting period even accounting for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.



Victim identification policies "sometimes re-traumatized" victims and delayed their access to necessary care, sometimes for years, while the government reduced its overall efforts to investigate, prosecute and convict traffickers, it said.



CHINA



The report repeated past charges that China has "a government policy or pattern of widespread forced labor," including through the continued mass arbitrary detention of more than one million ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang, where the United States has accused Beijing of committing genocide against the minorities.



TURKEY



The United States added Turkey to the list of countries implicated in the use of child soldiers over the past year, placing a NATO ally for the first time in such a list, in a move likely to further complicate fraught ties between Ankara and Washington.



MALAYSIA

The State Department downgraded Malaysia to the worst ranking after a string of complaints by rights groups and U.S. authorities over the alleged exploitation of migrant workers in plantations and factories.


Factbox: How do ride-hailing giants Didi and Uber compare?

The app logo of Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi is seen on a mobile phone in this illustration picture taken (Photo : REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration)

Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global is set to make its trading debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday after an initial public offering that sources said raised $4.4 billion, valuing it at $67.5 billion in the biggest share sale by a Chinese company in the U.S. in seven years.



Didi absorbed Uber's China business in 2016 - Uber retains a 12.8% stake in the firm - and averaged 25 million rides a day in the first three months of the year in China, where it is the dominant operator.



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Here are some key facts of the company and its global rival, U.S.-based industry pioneer Uber Technologies Inc, which has a market capitalisation of $95 billion:



FOUNDING



- Didi was founded by Chief Executive Will Cheng, formerly at Alibaba, in Beijing in 2012. Co-founder and President Jean Liu joined in 2014.



- Uber was founded in 2009 by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick. It went public in May 2019.



BUSINESS PROFILE



- Didi's main business is ride-hailing in China. It operates in 15 international markets including South America, Japan, Australia, Russia and South Africa. It also provides services including food delivery, community group buying and logistics.



- Uber's core business includes ride-hailing, which operates in about 70 countries, and restaurant food delivery under its Uber Eats brand in 34 countries.



The company generates the bulk of its revenue in the United States and Canada.



DRIVERS



- Didi has 15 million annual active drivers globally for the twelve months ended March, 2021.



- Uber in February 2020 said it had some 5 million drivers worldwide.



PROFITABILITY



- Didi was loss-making from 2018 through 2020 but made a $30 million profit in the first quarter this year.



- Uber keeps losing money but has promised investors to be profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis by the end of this year.



CARS



- Many Didi drivers rent cars from fleet companies. Didi has fleet management partnerships with carmakers including Toyota, BYD and Nissan.



- Uber drivers in most of the company's markets are independent contractors who use their own vehicles. Uber disbanded its own vehicle rental program in 2018, but drivers can still sign up for short-term rentals with other companies.



TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT



- Didi is testing autonomous driving with a fleet of more than 100 cars.



- Uber in December sold its autonomous driving unit, Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), to self-driving car startup Aurora.



- Didi rolled out a purpose-built vehicle for ride-hailing with China's BYD and is working on a future model with autonomous driving functions with GAC, a Chinese carmaker.



- Uber announced it was working with British electric van and bus maker Arrival to develop a purpose-built model for ride-hailing that will go into production in 2023.


State Counsellor of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi attends the 22nd ASEAN Plus Three Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, (Photo : REUTERS/Chalinee Thirasupa)

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged Myanmar's military on Thursday to release Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint now, a U.N. spokesperson said on Thursday, a day after thousands of other detainees were freed.



Myanmar has been in turmoil since the army took power on Feb. 1 and ousted Suu Kyi's elected government.



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"We reiterate our call for the immediate release of all of those who are arbitrarily detained, and that includes President Win Myint and State councilor Aung San Suu Kyi," said Eri Kaneko, associate spokesperson for Guterres.



Myanmar freed more than 2,000 detainees on Wednesday, among them journalists and others who the ruling military said had been held on incitement charges for taking part in protests, local media reported.



Many of the military's opponents have been held, some convicted, under a law that criminalises comments that could cause fear or spread false news. Suu Kyi is on trial for a similar offence, among others, and remains in detention.



"We remain deeply concerned at the continuation of violence and intimidation, including arbitrary arrests, by the security forces," said Kaneko.


Didi Chuxing's CEO Will Cheng and President Jean Liu attend a launch event for D1 electric van by Didi and electric vehicle maker BYD, in Beijing, China (Photo : REUTERS/Yilei Sun)

From working at a foot massage company to setting up China's biggest ride-hailing firm, Will Wei Cheng has navigated several hurdles on the path to taking Didi Global Inc public in a $4.4-billion New York float.



As Cheng rose to the upper echelons of Chinese technology entrepreneurs, he faced challenges including tough competition, intense criticism for Didi after rape and murder cases linked to its drivers in 2018, and a COVID-19 induced slowdown at home.



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While the biggest share sale by a Chinese company in the United States in seven years, which values Didi at $67.5 billion, is a big win for Cheng and co-founder Jean Qing Liu, experts say the challenges are unlikely to go away soon.



The duo will now be tested on their ability to stem losses that widened last year due to the pandemic and tackle regulatory scrutiny amid an antitrust crackdown at home as they set about expanding Didi globally.



Cheng has a strategic eye, is quietly confident and hard working, Didi employees and investors said. Some added Cheng is a micro-manager and his management style could be cut-throat.



"When there is a Will, there is a way," said Neil Shen, founder and managing partner of Sequoia Capital China, a Didi investor.



"Together with Didi and its hundreds of millions of users, we look forward to creating a better world of future mobility."



Cheng, 38, who favours polo shirts and Chinese history and military books, was initially eyeing a valuation of up to $100 billion for Didi, Reuters has reported.



That target was a result of Cheng focusing on his standing in his generation of entrepreneurs, said a senior Didi source. He is not giving up his aggressive stance yet, the source added.



"He is very keen to build Didi into a global company with a market value of $200 billion," said the source, who did not want to be named as he was not allowed to talk to media.



Didi founders trimmed their valuation target for the IPO as investors baulked at the $100 billion target amid concerns that greater regulation of the ride-sharing sector in the future could curb the company's growth prospects.



There was also uncertainty over how an antitrust probe into Didi, revealed by Reuters, would impact the company.



Didi and its founders did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.



Launched in Beijing in 2012, Didi aspires to become a global technology company, Cheng and Liu wrote in the IPO prospectus, saying the business model was relevant in markets including Latin America, Russia and South Africa.



It already dominates the ride-hailing industry at home since successfully pushing Uber out after the U.S. company lost a price war and ended up selling its China operations to Didi for a stake in 2016.



Didi competes with ride-hailing services by automakers such as Geely and SAIC Motor in China.



In Europe and South America, where it is expanding, Uber has a presence.That target was a result of Cheng focusing on his standing in his generation of entrepreneurs, said a senior Didi source. He is not giving up his aggressive stance yet, the source added.



"He is very keen to build Didi into a global company with a market value of $200 billion," said the source, who did not want to be named as he was not allowed to talk to media.



Didi founders trimmed their valuation target for the IPO as investors baulked at the $100 billion target amid concerns that greater regulation of the ride-sharing sector in the future could curb the company's growth prospects.



There was also uncertainty over how an antitrust probe into Didi, revealed by Reuters, would impact the company.



Didi and its founders did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.



Launched in Beijing in 2012, Didi aspires to become a global technology company, Cheng and Liu wrote in the IPO prospectus, saying the business model was relevant in markets including Latin America, Russia and South Africa.



It already dominates the ride-hailing industry at home since successfully pushing Uber out after the U.S. company lost a price war and ended up selling its China operations to Didi for a stake in 2016.



Didi competes with ride-hailing services by automakers such as Geely and SAIC Motor in China.



In Europe and South America, where it is expanding, Uber has a presence.



Didi, backed by SoftBank Group Corp, Tencent Holdings Ltd and Alibaba Group, is due to debut on Wednesday morning New York time.



CHENG AND LIU



Cheng was born in 1983 in a small town in the southeastern Chinese province of Jiangxi.



After graduating from Beijing University of Chemical Technology with a bachelor's degree in administration, he worked as an assistant to the chairman of a foot massage company.



He joined Alibaba as a sales person in 2005 and later became a senior manager at the firm before starting Didi.



Cheng, currently CEO of Didi, says he got the idea for a ride-hailing platform on a freezing winter night in Beijing when he had trouble getting a taxi.



In 2014, Cheng was joined by Liu, a former Goldman Sachs banker and the current president of Didi.



Liu, a Harvard alumna, has been deeply involved in Didi's key financial decisions including its merger with Alibaba-backed Kuaidi in 2015, takeover of Uber's China business and fundraising from investors including Apple Inc.



Liu, 43, represents the company in external communications, especially during crises.



She was the face of Didi after two murder and rape cases related to its Hitch carpooling service drivers in 2018, which the founders described as their "darkest days".



She also works on Didi's redesign of safety process.


U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is flanked by House Democratic leaders as she discusses the formation of a select committee to investigate the January 6 (Photo : REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

Some of former President Donald Trump's most prominent critics, including Republican Representative Liz Cheney and the Democrats who led the two impeachments against him, were named on Thursday to serve on a special congressional panel probing the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.



House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced eight members of the committee investigating the events leading up to and on Jan. 6, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop Democrat Joe Biden from being certified the winner of last November's presidential election against Republican Trump.



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Five people died as a result of the violence, including a Capitol Police officer. Other law enforcement officers suffered severe injuries as they battled the angry mob.



Just before the attack, Trump delivered fiery remarks at the White House and then encouraged his supporters to march to Capitol Hill.



Accepting the assignment, Cheney said she considered her duty to the U.S. Constitution to be above politics.



"We have an obligation to have a thorough, sober investigation of what happened leading up to January 6, and the attack on the Capitol on that day," she told reporters after attending a first meeting with the other seven committee members, all Democrats, in Pelosi's office.



Addressing reports that House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy threatened to strip any Republican member of their regular committee assignments if they accepted an offer from Pelosi, Cheney said she had not been told this.



McCarthy denied issuing such threats, but said Cheney's fellow Republicans would make decisions about committee memberships.



"I was shocked that she would accept something from Speaker Pelosi," he said. He did not say whether he will name any of the members to the remaining five seats on the panel.



Cheney was removed from her House Republican leadership position in May after voting in January to impeach Trump and continuing to repudiate his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him by massive voter fraud.



"A BLACK EYE ON OUR DEMOCRACY'



Chairing the panel is Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson, who also heads the House Homeland Security Committee that has been looking into the Jan. 6 events.



He sidestepped a question about whether the panel might call Trump or other former administration officials to testify. The committee will have the power to subpoena witnesses.



Thompson said the committee would look at unanswered questions and systems that had failed. "January 6 was a devastating black eye on our democracy, and we have to make sure that it never happens again," he said.



He said the panel hoped to start with a hearing at which Capitol Police officers would testify.



Other members of the new panel include Representative Adam Schiff, who took the lead in the December 2019 impeachment of Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and Representative Jamie Raskin, the lead prosecutor in last January's second impeachment of Trump on a charge of inciting an insurrection.



In both cases, the Senate did not convict Trump.



On Wednesday the House voted to establish the special committee after Senate Republicans blocked the creation of an independent commission Pelosi originally sought.



Republican leaders have resisted any special panel to investigate the Jan. 6 riot, noting existing congressional committees have been doing their own probes and that separately more than 500 people already have been charged with crimes.



A new, high-profile congressional investigation likely would keep questions alive on Trump's activities on that day and possibly complicate Republicans' efforts to win majority control of the House in the 2022 congressional elections.


A pro-democracy protester with a Union flag mask is taken by police at Causeway Bay after police denied permission for a protest rally (Photo : REUTERS/Tyrone Siu)

Police deployed in the streets of Hong Kong in large numbers on Thursday to prevent protests on the anniversary of its return to Chinese rule as its acting leader said last year's national security law had restored order after a period of chaos.



Police vans, water cannon trucks, armoured vehicles and police units patrolled the streets. Passers-by were stopped and searched, with at least 20 people arrested.



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One man died after stabbing a police officer with a knife. Police and hospital spokespersons were unable to give details on how he died.



The policeman was taken to hospital with a serious injury, police said. The assailant's motive was not immediately clear.



Around a dozen people were also arrested for allegedly distributing "seditious" leaflets.



Parts of Victoria Park on Hong Kong Island - where an annual civil society and pro-democracy march normally begins - were shut down to prevent processions or meetings, and all other public assemblies were banned by police, citing COVID-19 restrictions.



Hong Kong's acting leader John Lee said in a speech the authorities would continue to take a "steady stance" to protect national security, and that the city had returned to order after a period of chaos.



"Hong Kong absolutely has the conditions to rebound," he said.



Beijing imposed the security law on June 30 last year to punish anything China deems as subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces with up to life in prison.



The law was Beijing's first major step to put the global financial hub onto an authoritarian path, kick-starting a campaign dubbed "patriots rule Hong Kong," which included moves to reduce democratic representation in the city's legislature and various screening mechanisms for politicians.



Lee was speaking at a flag-raising ceremony marking the 24th anniversary of the former British colony's return to Chinese rule in 1997, which coincides with the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party.



Chief Executive Carrie Lam and other senior officials were invited to Beijing for the party celebrations. Lee was appointed as her No. 2 last week after playing a key role in the crackdown over the past year as security secretary.



Critics of the government say it has used the security law to crush dissent. Officials in Beijing and Hong Kong say it has plugged national security "loopholes" exposed by anti-government demonstrations in 2019.



So far under the law, authorities have arrested 117 people, mostly democratic politicians, activists, journalists and students.



"On the day of July 1, I am nothing more than one of tens of thousands of Hong Kongers who want their voices heard," tweeted pro-democracy campaigner and barrister Chow Hang-tung, who was rearrested on the eve of the sensitive anniversary.



"They want to kill the monkey to scare the chicken, then we must let them know Hong Kongers won't give up."



Beijing said the law was necessary after mass pro-democracy and anti-China protests in 2019 that it described as endangering national security. Many protesters, however, say they were demanding Beijing respect constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms.



Usually on July 1, tens of thousands of people take to the streets in Hong Kong to protest against anything from Beijing's manoeuvres in the city to unaffordable housing.



"It is crystal clear that under the NSL (national security law), over a year, it does have a chilling effect on Hong Kong people ... less people would have the confidence to go on the street to speak out," said Raphael Wong, an activist with the League of Social Democrats.



The group held a protest with three others in the morning that was hemmed in by dozens of police. They held up a yellow banner calling on authorities to "Free all political prisoners".



In an online discussion on the law that included officials from the United States, Britain, Japan, the European Union and the United Nations, there were calls for China to allow independent observers to come to Hong Kong to assess the situation on the ground, with a view to seek ways for China to improve the law.



"We want to come," said Clement Voule, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly.


The United Nations Security Council will likely meet next week to discuss a dispute between Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt over a giant dam built by Ethiopia on the Blue Nile, French U.N. Ambassador Nicolas de Riviere said on Thursday.

Arab states last month called on the 15-member council to meet to discuss the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and Ethiopia's plans fill the dam for a second time this summer without an agreement with Sudan and Egypt.

Ethiopia is not keen on Security Council involvement and instead asked the body to defer the issue to the African Union. Ethiopia previously rejected calls from Egypt and Sudan to involve mediators outside the African Union.

De Riviere, council president for July, pointed out that there was little the Security Council could do other than bring the parties together to express their concerns and then encourage them to return to negotiations to reach a solution.

"I don't think the council can do much more than that," he told reporters.

Ethiopia is pinning its hopes of economic development and power generation on the dam, while the two downstream countries - Egypt and Sudan - are concerned about it and seeking a binding agreement on the filling and operation of the dam.

Egypt relies on the Nile River for as much as 90% of its fresh water and sees the dam as an existential threat. Sudan is concerned about the operation of its own Nile dams and water stations.

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Egypt does not oppose the Ethiopian Nile dam per se, but it rejects Ethiopia's attempt to force fait accompli policy by filling and operating the dam unilaterally, Egyptian Irrigation Minister Mohamed Abdel-Ati said at a high-level ministerial conference in Berlin on Friday.

"Egypt wants to achieve cooperation by a legally binding and fair deal for filling and operation rules of the Ethiopian dam, in a way that fulfills the interest for all, a matter that Ethiopia refuses and [instead] seeks to impose a fait accompli and take unilateral measures without reference for downstream countries," Abdel-Ati told the conference, which tackled water issues worldwide.

Ethiopias giant dam, which is known officially as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and has been under construction since 2011 on the Blue Nile River, a crucial source of water to Egypt and Sudan, has been a source of tension with downstream countries for a decade now.

While Ethiopia hopes the multi-billion dollar hydropower dam will support its economic development goals, Egypt, which depends on the Nile for over 95 percent of its freshwater, fears the dam will affect its water share if a legally binding deal is not reached.

Sudan, the other downstream country, fears the GERD will put the operation of its Roseires dam, and the lives of 20 million Sudanese citizens at a very high risk in the absence of a binding deal.

Cairo, Abdel-Ati added, is not against development in Nile basin countries; on the contrary, it supports by all possible means development efforts in all African countries.

"Egypt is open to cooperate with all African countries, especially Nile basin ones, provided that the concerns of downstream countries are to be considered," the Egyptian minister assured during the Berlin-hosted conference.

The latest rounds of negotiations between the three nations, which were held under the aegis of the African Union (AU), stalled in April as Egypt and Sudan sought a legal deal on the rules for filling and operating the dam as well as a mechanism to settle any dispute may arise in the future, the only way the two deem they can secure their water rights, but Ethiopia only wanted to sign a package of non-binding guidelines.

Minister Abdel-Ati said Egypt is keen on continuing negotiations to reach a legally binding and fair deal that meets the objectives of all parties involved, including preserving Egypt's water rights.

The negotiations, however, must be characterised by "efficiency and seriousness to maximise their success opportunities after the previous rounds negotiations deadlocked as a result of Ethiopia's intransigence, he pointed out.

"Egypt's flexibility in negotiations has been met by intransigence from Ethiopia to avoid the commitment to what has been agreed upon. But Egypt will never accept the unilateral action to fill and operate the Ethiopian dam," he stressed.

Both downstream countries lay blame on Ethiopia for the collapse of the latest round of the AU-sponsored negotiations as it refused the involvement of international mediators to help solve the outstanding points.

Egypt and Sudan demanded the formation of an international quartet led by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the current president of the AU, with the participation of the United States, the European Union and the United Nations to mediate between the three countries.

The proposal was brushed aside by Ethiopia, which insists on continuing negotiations only under the brokerage of the AU, despite lack of any tangible progress during the negotiations, which started more than a year ago.

Tensions have escalated further recently over the GERD as Addis Ababa plans to fill its controversial dam for the second time this summer with 13.5 billion cubic metres of water without agreement with Cairo and Khartoum.

The three countries have resorted to international diplomacy in the past weeks, briefing regional and international counterparts, including the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), on their stances and developments in the latest deadlock in negotiations.

The UNSC will likely meet next week to discuss the tripartite dispute, according to French UN Ambassador Nicolas de Riviere.

This session is not the first about the crisis, as the 15-member body held a session in June 2020 at Egypt's request due to what it described as Ethiopia's "intransigence" in negotiations.

During the session, the council urged the three countries to reach a consensus and warned against unilateral actions.

The three countries agreed to continue negotiations under the aegis of the AU, but Ethiopia held 4.9 billion cubic metres of water behind its dam a month later without coordinating with Egypt and Sudan.

Water shortage and illegal immigration

Egypt, one of the most water-scarce countries in the world, needs 114 billion cubic metres (bcm) annually, but it receives an average of 60 bcm only, mainly from the Nile River in light of the very limited amounts of rainwater and groundwater in the desert. Egypt fills the gap by reusing agricultural drainage water.

Minister Abdel-Ati stressed any shortage in the country's water resources would cause "severe" damage to Egypt, since at least 40 million citizens work in the agricultural sector.

"The shortage of 1 billion cubic metres of water will cause 200 thousand families to lose their main source of livelihood in agriculture," the minister said.

The loss of job opportunities, minister Abdel-Ati noted, could lead to "a state of societal instability," he told Friday's conference. "This will lead to a large wave of illegal immigration to the European countries or youth's joining terrorist groups," he went on saying.

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Parliament Speaker Hanafi el Gebali asserted that the June 30 revolution marked the birth of the "New Republic", in Egypt, saying that President Abdel Fattah El Sisis achievements are clear in all fields.

What Egypt has seen over the past few years looks like a miracle, Gebali told, Alaa Thabet; Chief- Editor of Al-Ahram daily in an interview, noting the government should cope with the reform steps taken by the president.

"The reforms led by President Sisi have covered all fields, and the infrastructure and relevant services were at the core of his interest as well as the road network that has covered the whole country," the speaker said.

"All of these achievements have become a reality on the ground in a record time, he said, adding that some of them used to take many years to be achieved before President Sisi came to power.

The presidents efforts were not limited to direction and monitoring, but now the people has become familiar seeing the president checking on the progress made at some projects and at production sites where he would give advice, open discussion with workers and listen to their views, he added.

He noted that the "Nation Future" Party has the majority in the parliament, and according to its platform, represents the centrist party with the opposition present inside it.

Besides the majority party, there is a strong partisan representation that includes the right and left parties and parties that can be described as right-centrist and left-centrist, as well as the independent members, he added.

As for the opposition at the parliament, Gebali said that opposition is indispensable in all legislatures and its presence is inevitable.

The opposing views are always welcomed under the dome of the parliament based on the freedom of expression, which is one of the most important constitutional principles, he added.

Gebali stressed that the parliamentary immunity is not a privilege for lawmakers but rather created to protect them from any act that could obstruct their legislative role.

We will not give up our legislative and supervisory role ... We have translated the pulse of the people into laws that echo their hopes and aspirations, Gebali stressed.

Gebali went on saying that the majority had supported the decision for him to be nominated as the parliament speaker despite the fact that he kept his status as independent.

On the performance of women in parliament, the speaker said that the constitution has responded to the popular demand of raising the representation of women at the parliament to reach at least the quarter.

As far as the legislative role of the parliamtment, El Gebali said that laws that are required to be enacted, amended or even abolished are determined by the political, economic and social circumstances. "The current parliament has passed multiple laws and performed its role of supervising the work of the government as required," he added.

On the parliaments role in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) crisis, Gebali said President Sisi has asserted in many occasions that the Nile water is an "existential" issue for Egyptians.

The efforts of the Egyptian state are going on successfully, which include contacting all relevant international parties and putting all the available alternatives on the discussion table, he stressed.

The Egyptian parliament is doing its best to reach out to all world parliaments and representatives of diplomatic missions in Cairo as well as the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the regional parliamentary unions to explain Egypts just position in this crisis and the existential importance of the Nile water for the Egyptians, Gebali added.

"The talks in the Nile water issue have stalled due to Ethiopias intransigent position against reaching a legally binding agreement," he stressed.

He expected the crisis to eventually see a fair solution, amid Egypt's fair position, the strength of the options offered by Egypt, and its good relations with all international parties who are convinced of the soundness of the Egyptian stance and the wise and balanced style the Egyptian leadership takes.

Gebali said there is no conflict between the role of the House of Representatives (parliament) and the Senate, as the constitution and its amendments has decisively set their jurisdictions and the domains of their work.

He noted that he witnessed the siege of the Supreme Constitutional Court, which proved "the Muslim brotherhood were neither brothers nor Muslims."

Egypt has come back a strong country at all levels after years of suffering and isolation, he said. President Sisi, the people, the army and the police, exerted their utmost efforts to restore Egypt and salvage it from the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, he added.

"Egypt has also returned to Africa and restored its good relations with all the African countries in a way that achieves their interests," he said.

At the Arab level, the speaker said brotherly ties with all the Arab nations and peoples have been boosted after Egypt has played its historical role for the progress and prosperity of the Arab nation for years.

The political leadership has exerted great efforts to stop the Israeli aggression on Gaza and uphold a truce, he said. This pivotal role is not new to Egypt.

He pointed out to Egypts pledge to provide 500 million dollars for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip and the return of life to normal.

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South Africa's national health products regulator is reviewing the data relating to Chinese and Russian COVID-19 vaccines including Sinovac, Sinopharm and Sputnik for registration, a necessary procedure before they can be procured, a health official has said.

Deputy Director General for National Department of Health, Anban Pillay, also told the parliament's Portfolio Committee on Health that the Delta variant first detected in India has become the dominant variant in many countries around the world, including South Africa, the parliament said in a statement released here on Thursday.

He also said the health ministry aims to flatten the curve of transmission of the virus, reduce hospitalization and reduce the rate of mortality through the current lockdown.

As of June 30, South Africa has administered 3,026,636 vaccines in total, including 120,172 administered in the past 24 hours.

Following the first phase for healthcare workers only, the current second phase inoculations started with persons aged 60 years and above and are opening up to the over 50-year-old people and people in the active economy.

Registration for those aged 50 and above, who were excluded in the second phase initially, will open from Thursday and they will get the chance to receive vaccines from July 15, acting Health Minister, Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane announced last Friday.

The nation that has the highest national tally of 1,973,972 cases in Africa expects to immunize over 40 million people through the three phases of vaccination.

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A peacekeeping force this week completed its withdrawal from Sudan's war-ravaged Darfur region, but security fears have been stoked after looters vandalised or destroyed many of its outposts.

The vast, arid and impoverished western region awash with guns is still reeling from a bitter conflict that broke out under Sudan's former strongman Omar al-Bashir in 2003, leaving hundreds of thousands dead.

"Looters descended on the site from all sides," said local resident Ahmed Awad, who said he witnessed in March the pillaging of a base in the village of Menwashie, 65 kilometres (40 miles) north of Nyala, state capital of South Darfur.

"Everything was stolen within hours."

The joint United Nations-African Union mission in Darfur (UNAMID) in January embarked on a phased withdrawal -- at a time when Sudan is in the midst of a political transition and a dire economic crisis.

To many, UNAMID -- once one of the world's largest missions with some 16,000 peacekeepers at its peak -- had served as a deterrent force, despite consistently having failed to prevent scores of attacks.

The mission was set up in a bid to end a war that erupted after ethnic minority rebels complaining of discrimination rose up against Bashir's Arab-dominated government.

The war resulted in some 300,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced, the UN says.

But with Bashir ousted in April 2019, a transitional government in place in Khartoum, and after a landmark peace deal struck in October with key rebel groups, UNAMID's mandate ended on December 31, closing 13 years of operations.

- 'Reduced to rubble' -

Shortly after UNAMID's mandate ended, hundreds were killed in clashes between rival groups in several parts of Darfur, a fractured society riven by bitter rivalries over land and water.

Looters from across Darfur have repeatedly broken into the sites to make off with pickings worth millions of dollars -- everything from television sets to power generators.

On Wednesday, the force announced its withdrawal was completed.

UNAMID had hoped the 14 locations it handed over to the Sudanese government would be utilised for the long-term benefit of local communities.

Instead, eight sites were subjected to "vandalism" and "looting", with the perpetrators largely unidentified, the UN said.

Darfuris say the interim government failed to live up to promises.

In North Darfur, UNAMID officials visited a former base in Shangil Tobaya.

"The camp structures have for the most part been reduced to rubble, and all usable items have been removed," a UN official told AFP.

While the UNAMID force has withdrawn, UN humanitarian agencies remain, as well its Khartoum-based political mission, the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS).

- 'Completely levelled' -

Radwan Abdalla, a resident of Attash camp for the displaced in South Darfur, said the vandalism was a continuation of attacks on UNAMID sites handed over in recent years.

"I have seen this happen before, in December 2019," he said. "The area was completely levelled."

*This story was edited by Ahram Online.

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The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Thursday that more than 30 percent of children in Lebanon went to bed hungry and skipped meals in the past month.

"With no improvement in sight, more children than ever before are going to bed hungry in Lebanon. Children's health, education and their very futures are affected as prices are skyrocketing and unemployment continues to increase," said Yukie Mokuo, UNICEF representative in Lebanon.

In Lebanon, one in 10 children have been sent to work, 40 percent of children are from families where no one has work and 77 percent of them are from families that do not receive any social assistance, according to the UNICEF's survey.

The survey also found that 15 percent of the Lebanese families stopped their children's education, while 80 percent of caregivers said their children had difficulties concentrating on their studies at home, which might mean hunger or mental distress.

Lebanon's economic and financial collapse, along with the absence of social support, has plunged its families and children into a dire situation that affects every aspect of their lives.

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Syria's Kurds Friday urged international help to set up rehabilitation centres for minors linked to the Islamic State group, after charges they were holding "hundreds of children" in adult prisons.

Acknowledging that some jihadist-linked minors were being held in adult prisons, separate to the many more in camps, senior Kurdish foreign affairs official Abdelkarim Omar told AFP around 30 teenagers have lately been transferred out of one overcrowded camp.

He spoke just days after the International Committee of the Red Cross said "hundreds of children -- mostly boys, some as young as 12 -- are detained in adult prisons" in northeast Syria.

Kurdish authorities hold thousands of suspected jihadist fighters in their jails, as well as tens of thousands of their relatives in camps for the displaced, after spearheading a US-backed battle against IS that formally ended in victory in early 2019.

Omar told AFP an unspecified number of IS-linked minors who are held in jails are kept in separate quarters to the adults.

He said the region desperately needed more rehabilitation centres for teenagers, on top of a single one already housing some 120 near the city of Qamishli.

"We think children do not belong in either camps or prisons," he told AFP.

As a start, he said, "between 30 to 35 children aged 12 and older have been taken out of the Al-Hol camp."

The Kurds were preparing a new rehabilitation centre in the city of Hasakeh, which "will be ready in the coming days", Omar added.

Since Kurdish-led fighters expelled IS from the last scrap of their territorial "caliphate" in March 2019, Al-Hol has swelled to a tent city of some 62,000 people -- civilians but also alleged IS relatives.

The United Nations says it has documented "radicalisation" in the camp, where the number of guards is limited and around 10,000 foreign IS-linked women and children lived in a separate annex.

Fabrizio Carboni, head of ICRC's Middle East and Near East operations, on Wednesday described a "pervasive sense of hopelessness" in Al-Hol.

Boys lived "in a state of constant fear", as "once they reach a certain age, many are separated from their families and transferred to adult places of detention," he said in a statement.

He called for children in detention to be "either reunited with their families in camps, repatriated alongside them or have alternative care arrangements made for them".

Omar, the Kurdish official, urged the international community to help it "set up 15 or 16 centres to bring the children out of the jails, until a solution is found".

Keeping them in their current "environment will only lead to the emergence of a new generation of terrorists," he warned.

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The UN chief on Friday urged Morocco and the Polisario Front to accept his next candidate for the post of UN special envoy for the disputed region of Western Sahara, after they rejected all the previous candidates.

The Polisario Front has for decades fought Morocco for the independence of Western Sahara, a desert region bigger than Britain which was a Spanish colony until 1975.

"It is absolutely essential to have an envoy to relaunch the political dialogue on Western Sahara," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at a joint press conference in Madrid with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

"The difficulty is that we already put forward 13 names, and until now, we haven't got the parties' agreement, which is very important... because the envoy has to work with them to launch the political dialogue."

Relaunching dialogue over the long-running conflict was also critical "for facing up to existing frustrations because of a crisis which still has no way out," he said.

Although Guterres did not identify the latest candidate, it was, according to diplomatic sources at the UN, former UN special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura. The same sources said his name was accepted by the Polisario, but turned down by Morocco.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had in March urged Guterres to speed up the process of appointing a new special envoy for Western Sahara to fill what was then a nearly two-year vacancy.

The position has been vacant since May 2019, when former German president Horst Kohler stepped down, officially for health reasons.

Morocco controls 80 percent of Western Sahara, while the rest -- an area bordering Mauritania that is almost totally landlocked -- is run by the Polisario Front and known as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

Rabat has offered the vast territory autonomy but maintains it is part of the Moroccan kingdom.

After 16 years of war, Rabat and the Polisario signed a ceasefire in 1991, but a UN-backed referendum on self-determination has been constantly postponed.

Western Sahara is designated by the UN as a "non-self-governing territory" whose people "have not yet attained a full measure of self-government".

Hostilities resumed in November when the Polisario, which is backed by Algeria, declared the ceasefire over after Morocco sent troops into a UN-patrolled buffer zone to reopen a key road.

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Egypt and 129 other countries worldwide have reached an unprecedented deal on the distribution of the taxes, particularly as they relate to multinational companies working in the digital economy through online platforms, Minister of Finance Mohamed Maait announced on Friday.

Maait made his comments during the 12th conference of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on measuring tax regulatory performance.

The final deal will be announced by October.

The deal focuses on companies that lack a legal framework to work in these countries, according to Maait.

The 130 countries have agreed on setting new tax measures, which are expected to help push these companies towards paying their fair share of taxes by applying a minimum 15% percent tax limit, according to the minister.

That deal will preserve Egypts tax receipts from the multinational companies activity in the Egyptian market, and it is expected to enhance Egypts tax revenues from companies working in the digital area in the domestic market, Maait explained.

Advisor to the Finance Minister for Tax Policy Ramy Yousef said that Egypt has contributed to drafting this deal over the past several years, adding that Egypt will work with the members of of the OECDs programme on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) to settle the technical details of the agreement.

Tax BEPS particularly affect developing countries, which disproportionately rely on corporate income tax, according to OECD.

Governments must act together to tackle BEPS and restore trust in domestic and international tax systems, according to the OECD.

BEPS practices cost countries up to $240 billion in lost revenue per year, representing up to 10 percent of the global corporate income tax revenue, according to the OECD.

Under that OECD/G20 inclusive framework on BEPS, 139 countries and jurisdictions  including Egypt  are implementing 15 actions to tackle tax avoidance, improve the coherence of international tax rules, ensure a more transparent tax environment and address the tax challenges arising from the digitalisation of the economy.

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The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is expected to embark on consultation talks with Egyptian authorities in September regarding its new strategy for the country over the coming four years, which emphasises continuous support for the private sector, particularly in the green field, according to the President of the EBRD Odile Renaud-Basso.

Renaud-Basso made her comments while answering Ahram Onlines questions on the EBRDs future actions in Egypt and the share of green investments the bank intends to direct to the Egyptian market.

This came during a press conference Renaud-Basso held, virtually, on Friday on the conclusion of the EBRDs 30th annual meeting that kicked off on Monday.

The EBRD raised its share of green investments from 30 percent to 50 percent in response to the COVID-19 crisis, which will benefit Egypt as it has some of the biggest share of EBRD operations in the Mediterranean region, she noted.

Moreover, Renaud-Basso revealed that 80 percent of the EBRD portfolio in Egypt concentrates on the private sector.

Egypts economic response to the pandemic has been remarkable, which has positioned the country among the top four economies in the region to maintain positive growth despite the harsh impacts of the crisis, she added.

During the five-day annual meeting, The EBRD pledged to align all its activities with the goals of the Paris Agreement by end of 2022, aiming to accelerate decarbonisation across its regions, supporting them to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century. By way of its multilateral shareholding and private sector focus, the EBRD will help its countries of operations manage the political and economic challenges related to the unprecedented transition to the green economy. I truly welcome the push from all our shareholders to accelerate on this shared agenda, said Renaud-Basso.

The EBRD regions are well positioned to benefit from the fast-growing transition to renewables, thereby reducing their reliance on fossil fuels, with excellent resources and growing capacity in wind, solar and hydropower, she added.

The Bank will therefore increase financing for renewable energy and associated energy systems, the EBRDs president stressed.

Renaud-Basso also asserted the EBRDs continuous support for the privates sector in its operation regions, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as backing governments through the banks finances.

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Speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly, historian Assem El-Dessouki discussed the definition of a revolution as opposed to other forms of social change, identifying the main features of Egypts 1919, 1952, and 2011 revolutions.



From the viewpoint of history, what determines whether an event is called a revolution, an uprising, or a rebellion?

A revolution is a radical political, economic, and social change in society. It is a change that does not take place quietly or in a simple manner but involves violent acts or measures because it means the overthrow of one regime and its replacement with a new one.

Changing the head of a regime alone does not constitute a revolution, as is clear from the 1789 French Revolution. Not only in France, but also across the whole of Europe, a semi-feudal system was in place before 1789 based upon the kings ownership of most of the land. However, a new class was emerging, the bourgeoisie, a class of city-dwellers who did not belong to the aristocracy or landed gentry but owned industrial capital and wanted to protect their interests.

They were determined to overthrow the previous rule. Thus, when you mount a revolution, you are really uprooting a whole tree. When you just trim its leaves, you are carrying out reform but not revolution.



In Egypt, we often talk about the Orabi Revolution in the late 19th century and the 1919 Revolution, but these events did not overthrow the respective regimes. Would it be better to call them uprisings?

Yes, they were uprisings because the Orabi Revolution did not dethrone the then khedive Tawfik and put Orabi in his place, and the 1919 Revolution did not result either in the evacuation of British troops from Egypt or a change of the regime. The British deceived the Egyptian people after 1919 and said that Egypt was a sovereign constitutional kingdom, while in reality the country remained a British protectorate until 1936.

However, we can label the changes that took place in July 1952 a revolution because a group of officers overthrew the then ruler of the country and they did not stop there. Had they done so, they would have simply carried out a coup. Instead, the countrys political, economic, and social situation began to change, its foreign policies changed, and the monarchy was abolished and a republic declared. Egypt started a new era in 1952.

In 1919, the slogan was used that Religion is for God and the Homeland is for All. In 2013, 94 years later, the people went out into the streets and once again asserted this slogan.

Why do we have to have a revolution and why do martyrs have to fall again just to assert simple, clear ideas that people should live together in peace?

There was a predominance of Islamist discourse in the country after former president Anwar Al-Sadat made a famous speech saying that I am the Muslim president of a Muslim country. From this point onwards, sectarian strife began. People started to defend themselves. Generations of Christians chose Christian names for their offspring. They wanted to confront the religious speech of Al-Sadat and say that they were Christians.

In Egypts modern history, both Ali Pasha Mubarak in the late 19th century and Mustafa Kamel, founder of the Nationalist Party at the beginning of the 20th century, were against such strife. During the rule of former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser, sectarian strife did not occur. But the religious discourse that Sadat instigated was responsible for such strife. Thus, we were in need of renewing this slogan from 1919.



Perhaps the credibility of the Muslim Brotherhood among the general public has collapsed, but within the group itself this credibility persists. Are you concerned about the existence of the groups organisational remnants?

On the organisational level, the group is still working and has branches abroad. There are fugitives in Turkey and Germany. However, within Egyptian society itself, there is no longer any mention of the group because people know that they are bigots and use religion in order to rule. Egypts experiences with the group, particularly under Mohamed Morsis rule, made it unacceptable for the Muslim Brotherhood to rule ever again. But there is a concern that the Muslim Brotherhood continues to spread antagonistic propaganda against the current regime.



Both the 25 January and the 30 June revolutions took place fewer than 10 years ago. Should they be included in the school curriculum?

When I was invited by the Ministry of Education in 2014 to participate in writing a history textbook for the final year of secondary school, I said that the book must stop in 2011. The school history syllabus cannot continue up until the present day. This is important, as judgements are still being made.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Kuwaitis vote Saturday in the Gulf emirate's second parliamentary election in eight months, with opposition groups boycotting polls that are not expected to end years of bitter political dispute.

The election -- the oil-rich state's sixth in as many years -- comes after a dull campaign that failed to jolt apathetic voters into action.

Most opposition groups are boycotting the election for the second time since the last vote in December, in protest against an amended electoral law even though the constitutional court upheld it in June.

They charge that it allows the government to manipulate election results and subsequent legislation.

In previous elections, a Kuwaiti voter was able to vote for a maximum of four candidates for the country's 50-seat parliament, but under the amended law voters can choose only one.

The opposition has failed to organise mass rallies as it did ahead of the December polls, but has remained adamant that it will not take part in a "corrupted" political system.

The National Democratic Alliance, a liberal grouping, and most bedouin tribes which boycotted the previous polls, are taking part this time. A handful of opposition members are also standing for election.

Analysts see little hope the election will bring political stability to this wealthy Gulf state, which has been rocked by lingering disputes since mid-2006, stalling development despite an abundance of petrodollars.

Just days before polling day, the authorities arrested at least four candidates and dozens of their election workers on the accusation of vote-buying amid allegations of rampant corruption.

Only a few opposition members are among the 300 hopefuls contesting the 50 seats.

They include eight women, the lowest number of female candidates since women won political rights in 2005.

Four Kuwaiti women made history in 2009 when they won seats in parliament for the first time. No woman was elected in February while three won seats in December.

Voting will take place at 100 polling stations set up in schools, with separate centres for men and women.

The interior ministry has mobilised 11,000 police for the election and the government has allowed international monitors.

Kuwait has a population of 3.9 million, but 69 percent of those are foreigners and only 440,000 people are eligible to vote from among Kuwaitis who number 1.23 million.

The voting age is 21 and servicemen in the police and army are banned from casting ballots. Women voters make up 53.2 percent of the electorate.

Polling opens at 8:00 am (0500 GMT) and closes 12 hours later, with the first results expected after midnight (2100 GMT) as ballot papers in Kuwait are still counted manually.

OPEC member Kuwait says it sits on 10 percent of global crude reserves and pumps around 3.0 million barrels of oil a day. Thanks to high prices, the emirate has amassed around $400 billion in assets over the past decade.

Short link:


KYODO NEWS - Jul 2, 2021 - 08:50 | All, Japan

A passbook that has been kept as a World War II relic for years by a group promoting U.S.-Japan ties in Washington will be returned to the family of a Japanese soldier who died in the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific more than 75 years ago.

The postal savings book was brought along with other items to the Japan-America Society of Washington DC some 10 years ago by an American man following the death of his father who had served in World War II, according to the group.

But the item was only recently confirmed to have been owned by Chojiro Hibi, who lived in Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo. Hibi, in his early 20s, died in the battle on what is now called Iwoto Island, the site of one of the most grueling battles of World War II.

"I had thought that everything had turned to ashes," Hibi's younger brother Kimijiro, 93, who lives in Chiba Prefecture, told Kyodo News. "War denies human dignity and brings harm to many people."

The fighting on the Pacific island continued for around a month after U.S. forces landed in February 1945. About 22,000 Japanese soldiers and 7,000 U.S. soldiers died in the battle.

The United States returned Iwoto to Japanese sovereignty in 1968 and efforts to retrieve the remains of the Japanese war dead are still under way. Chojiro's remains are among those yet to be found.

Word of the passbook reached the Hibi family amid renewed efforts to identify the owner. One of Kimijiro's sons recently found out about the bankbook through a Kyodo News article published more than a year ago about wartime relics kept by the society.

The passbook had a name written in Japanese kanji characters that would likely read "Chojiro Hibi" as well as an address where the family used to live.

Although one of the three kanji in his first name was different from his actual name, Chojiro used the same kanji as in the passbook when signing a postcard to Kimijiro and may have commonly penned his name in this way, his relatives said.

On the postcard, Chojiro also wrote his savings account number, which matched the bankbook.

Ryan Shaffer, the head of the society, said he noticed wartime relics left in one of his office drawers after he became the group's president in February 2019 and welcomed the latest development.

He said the meaning of such items has evolved along with the relationship between the United States and Japan -- former wartime foes and now close allies.

"The items were taken as a trophy of war. They are returned as the personal effects of a human being -- somebody's son, somebody's brother," he said.

"The American man that brought these to us did so out of basic human empathy and compassion for the fallen Japanese soldier and his family. I believe it is important that we are able to extend that sentiment to the loved ones of the fallen Japanese soldier, and I hope it brings them some comfort and perhaps joy," he added.

The society is still looking to confirm the ownership of about 20 items, including photos and letters.
KYODO NEWS - Jul 2, 2021 - 20:48 | All, Japan

Japanese prosecutors asked the Tokyo District Court on Friday to give two Americans accused of helping former Nissan Motor Co. Chairman Carlos Ghosn escape from Japan in 2019 prison sentences of at least two years.

Michael Taylor, a 60-year-old former Green Beret, and his son Peter, 28, pleaded guilty at their first court hearing in June, and the prosecutors are pushing for jail terms of two years and 10 months for the former and two years and six months for the latter.

In seeking the prison terms, the prosecutors said the criminal liability of the two was "grave," as they took part in insulting and diminishing the Japanese judiciary. Ghosn's trial was put on hold due to his escape.

The Taylors apologized in their closing remarks, while their defense team called for suspended sentences, taking into account their lengthy detention, including in the United States.

They were arrested in Massachusetts last year by U.S. authorities at Japanese prosecutors' request and had fought extradition in the U.S. courts, but the U.S. Supreme Court turned down their appeal in February. They were arrested when extradited to Japan from the United States in March and indicted the same month.

The court is scheduled to hand down its rulings on July 19.

According to the indictment, the two helped Ghosn, 67, flee from his residence in Tokyo's Minato Ward to a hotel in the capital and then another in Osaka Prefecture on Dec. 29, 2019, before making their way to Kansai International Airport.

They then hid Ghosn in a box, passed through airport security and flew him aboard a private jet to Turkey despite knowing that the former auto titan was prohibited from traveling abroad under his bail conditions.

Ghosn then flew to Lebanon, one of three countries of which he is a national and which does not have an extradition treaty with Japan.

The prosecutors said the Taylors were motivated by monetary gain as after covering escape-related costs, such as preparing the private jet, they were able to use the remainder of the funds supplied by Ghosn for company expenses.

The two received around $860,000 prior to the escape and $500,000 worth of cryptocurrency after Ghosn successfully fled Japan, according to the prosecutors.

The former Nissan chairman, who was arrested in 2018, faces charges of underreporting his remuneration by millions of yen for years and misusing the automaker's funds. He has denied all charges, insisting he is the victim of a coup staged by Nissan executives.

Related coverage:

2 Americans plead guilty to helping Ghosn flee Japan in 1st hearing

Americans suspected of helping Ghosn flee to face trial from June 14

American father, son indicted on charges of aiding Ghosn escape
KYODO NEWS - Jul 2, 2021 - 14:10 | World, All

The mother-in-law of South Korea's former top prosecutor Yoon Suk Yeol, a leading candidate for next March's presidential election, was given a three-year prison sentence Friday for violating a health care law, local media reported.

The local district court in Uijeongbu near Seoul convicted the 74-year-old, referred to only by her surname Choi in the media reports, of illegally opening a medical facility and accepting state benefits for its operation.

The prison sentence for Choi was seen as a blow to Yoon, who announced his presidential bid Tuesday.

He resigned as prosecutor general in March after opposing President Moon Jae In's administration over prosecution reform and other issues.

While Yoon announced his candidacy as an independent, he is expected to run in the election for the main opposition People Power Party.
KYODO NEWS - Jul 2, 2021 - 22:10 | All, Japan, Coronavirus

The Japanese government is arranging to end the full-fledged operation of state-run mass vaccination centers in Tokyo and Osaka in late August as planned, deeming it will not hinder the country's COVID-19 vaccination drive, government sources said Friday.

The winding down of the centers operated by the Self-Defense Forces comes as access to vaccinations has broadened with inoculations also available at workplaces and universities as well as under local government-led campaigns.

But with the central government halting company applications for inoculations indefinitely due to concerns it will be unable to distribute doses quickly enough, it remains unclear if the rollout will continue to proceed smoothly.

Taro Kono, the minister in charge of the inoculation effort, told a press conference Friday that vaccinations at workplaces whose applications are still being processed are unlikely to start before Aug. 9.

The number of people covered in workplace applications pending approval is believed to be around eight million, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The government had initially sought to extend the operation of the Tokyo center, but reversed its stance to avoid putting a strain on the SDF, which needs to prepare for relief activities during potential disasters as Japan's typhoon season approaches, according to the sources.

Since the government wants to ensure that all those who received their initial shots of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by U.S. pharmaceutical company Moderna Inc. at the centers can also get their second shot there, the sites may continue partial operation beyond late August, they said.

The two centers, which opened on May 24, have offered up to 15,000 jabs a day in total as the government sought to speed up the vaccination drive in the country, which has lagged far behind other developed nations.

The Defense Ministry said that as of Monday the Tokyo center has offered 328,736 shots, while the Osaka center has given 161,341 shots.

The Tokyo metropolitan government reported 660 new daily coronavirus cases Friday, following 673 reported the previous day.

Its seven-day rolling average of infections per day came to 537.1, topping the 500 mark for the third straight day and hitting Stage 4, the worst level on the government's four-point pandemic alert scale.

The recent rebound in infections has spread worries amid public concerns over whether the Tokyo Olympics starting later this month can be held with spectators.
New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on a one day visit to poll-bound Northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura on Thursday.

At a function in Itanagar, he will inaugurate the Dorjee Khandu State Convention Centre. This Convention Centre has an auditorium, conference halls, and an exhibition hall. It is expected to become a significant landmark of Itanagar. The PM is also expected to relaunch Doordarshan for the north-east.

The Prime Minister will also dedicate the State Civil Secretariat Building to the nation, and lay the Foundation Stone of the Academic Block of the Tomo Riba Institute of Health and Medical Science.

From Arunachal Pradesh, the Prime Minister will proceed to Tripura on a non-official visit.

Here are the live updates from PM Modi's visit to the North East -

- Morarji Desai was the last PM to attend the North East Council meeting, no PM got the time to attend it after that. They became very busy. But I have come because of you. That's why I went to attend the North East Council meeting: PM Narendra Modi in Itanagar



- I want to compliment CM @PemaKhanduBJP for the wonderful work he is doing. He has prepared a top quality roadmap on how Arunachal Pradesh should be in 2027. And, he did not only ask officials for inputs but also asked people from all walks of life: PM



-Ayushman Bharat scheme will take the lead in providing quality and affordable healthcare: PM

- There is so much work to do in the health sector. One aspect is human resource development, other is infra and there is also the need to use modern technology in the sector: PM



- I can tell you with great pride that ministers and officials from the Centre are visiting the Northeast very regularly: PM

- My visit to Arunachal Pradesh is related to three key projects in the state. The secretariat is already functional and this was a good step taken by the state government: PM

- I am delighted to visit Arunachal Pradesh and be among the wonderful people of this state: PM

-PM Modi inaugurates Dorjee Khandu State Convention Centre in Itanagar

PM Narendra Modi at IG Park in Itanagar (Arunachal Pradesh). He will address a public meeting shortly. pic.twitter.com/x9nswYVEzw  ANI (@ANI) February 15, 2018

-PM Modi tweets about his Tripura visit. Prime Minister Narendra Modi also tweeted about his visit to Tripura, where elections are set to begin on February 18.



Looking forward to campaigning in Tripura today. I would be addressing rallies in Santirbazar and Agartala. You can watch the rallies live here. https://t.co/0ElF2AX661 @BJP4Tripura  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 15, 2018

- Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju gave us a glimpse of the Arunachal Civil Secretariat at Itanagar that PM Modi will inaugurate today. He posted the picture on his Twitter handle on Wednesday.

The magnificent Arunachal Civil Secretariat at Itanagar. Tomorrow our beloved PM @narendramodi ji will dedicate it to the people of Arunachal Pradesh. pic.twitter.com/cVY21MDODP  Kiren Rijiju (@KirenRijiju) February 14, 2018

-Prime Minister Narendra Modi expected to arrive at 1040 hrs in Itanagar.



Schedule of PM's public meetings in Tripura

-1415 hrs - Shantirbazaar

-1615 hrs - Agartala

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Chennai:

Tamil Nadu Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam on Wednesday told the Madras High Court that the AIADMK has issued a whip for the trust vote sought by Chief Minister K Palaniswami last year only to the 122 MLAs who were staying in a resort and not to his erstwhile group.

Senior counsel C S Vaidyanathan made the submission before the first bench of Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice Abdul Quoddhose during the hearing of DMK's petition seeking disqualification of Panneerselvam, then a rebel leader, and 10 other MLAs for voting against Palaniswami.

Besides DMK, four disqualified MLAs loyal to rebel leader T T V Dhinakaran have also moved the court aggrieved over the speaker not acting on their plea filed earlier for action against Panneerselvam and others.

The four had earlier filed the petition before the speaker before he disqualified 18 pro-Dhinakaran MLAs, including them.

Vaidyanathan was countering the submission by DMKs senior counsel yesterday that Panneerselvam and AIADMK had committed contempt of court by saying no whip was issued during the vote of confidence while an affidavit contrary to this had been filed before the Election Commission by the then rebel group.

We are not denying the fact that there was a whip. But the whip was issued to the 122 MLAs who were in Koovathur. We were not in Koovathur and directions were not issued to 11 of us by the party whip, he argued.

Also Read: Jayalalithaa's portrait unveiled in Tamil Nadu Assembly, DMK says black day; moves to HC for removal

At the height of the rebellion by Panneerselvam, the AIADMK had kept its 122 MLAs at the resort near here and they were brought to the Assembly on February 18 for the trust vote which was eventually won by Palaniswami by a margin of 122-11.

The DMK on Tuesday furnished a copy of the affidavit filed by Panneerselvam group during the pendency of the dispute between two factions of the party.

The groups led by Panneerselvam and Palaniswami later merged and the EC allotted the party symbol to them, ignoring the claim of the faction led by Dhinakaran.

Vaidyanathan claimed the petitions were not maintainable either on facts or on the law since the Assembly speaker was yet to take a decision on the plea made by then MLAs.

"In such circumstances, the relief sought for in the petition is not maintainable," he argued.

Also, Palaniswami was elected as the leader of the AIADMK legislative party at a meeting held on February 14, 2017, in a resort at Koovathur. Panneerselvam and the 10 other MLAs were not present at the meeting, he submitted.

Palaniswami sought to form the government with the support of 122 MLAs only.

In fact, even while a whip was allegedly issued to each MLA independently, there was no direction or whip that was received by the 11 MLAs, he said.

Countering the arguments, Senior counsel P S Raman, appearing for the disqualified four MLAs, said the present submission by Panneerselvam was "a clear afterthought" as the affidavit filed before the Election Commission was brought to light.

Also Read: Generalised remarks not acceptable: AIADMK hits out at Rajinikanths jibe

"In the counter affidavit to DMKs petition, they claimed that they have not deified whip. But now they claim that the whip was issued only to 122 MLAs of AIADMK and not to them. The present submission is a clear afterthought after the affidavit filed with the ECI was brought to light," he argued.

Besides, when a chief minister was facing a floor test, it becomes mandatory for the party MLAs to vote in favour of his confidence motion. A whip under party seal was not required in such circumstance, he added.

Recording the submissions, the bench adjourned the hearing to February 22.

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New Delhi:

A federal court in Florida has sentenced two Indians to nearly two years in jail on charges of conspiring to smuggle counterfeit cigarettes into the United States.

Besides Abhishek Shukla and Harish Shabhai Panchal, the two Indians, Jubilee Tobacco Industries Corp - an India-based company - was found guilty in the case. The company has been ordered to forfeit USD 300,000 to the US, the Department of Justice said today. The three have pleaded guilty to the charges.

According to the guilty plea, they conspired to import about 68,000 cartons of counterfeit cigarettes with the trade names and marks of popular American brand Newport cigarettes.

Through internet negotiations, an agreement was reached for a 20-foot container filled with counterfeit Newport brand cigarettes to be shipped from India to Miami.

Payment for the shipment was made in installments through international wire transfers to bank accounts in India and in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

On November 1, 2016, the container arrived and was seized at the Port of Miami with the assistance of US Customs and Border Protection Officers. If distributed in the State of Florida, the untaxed importation would have an approximate value of USD 1.2 million, the Department of Justice said.

Analysis conducted by FDA's Forensic Chemistry Centre determined that the cartons, packs, and cigarettes were all counterfeit.

Within two weeks of the arrival, the co-conspirators sought out undercover agents offering another shipment, twice as large. By April 2017, deposits totaling USD 55,000 had been made for more counterfeit Newport cigarettes.

On June 9 last, the container arrived at the Port of Miami and was again seized with the assistance of Customs and Border Protection Officers, and turned over to FDA-OCI Special Agents. If distributed in the State of Florida, the untaxed importation would have had an approximate value of USD 3.2 million.

Shukla and Panchal traveled to Miami in August 2017 to meet with the undercover agents to promote further business dealings. During the recorded meeting, they advised the agents that they had been partners for 12 years and personally oversaw the production of all the products being offered.

They also assured the agents that they could counterfeit any American-made menthol cigarette without any problem, as well as other trademarked brands and that they could produce tobacco blends, which would closely match the legitimate product, federal prosecutors said.

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New Delhi:

Billionaire jewellery designer Nirav Modi and other members of his family, who fled the country last month, allegedly made fraudulent transactions of over Rs 11,400 crore through 150 letters of understanding issued by the Punjab National Bank, officials said.

Nirav Modi, who holds an Indian passport, left India on January 1, while his brother Nishal, a Belgian citizen, also left the country on same day. However, whether they travelled together has to be probed, they said.

Nirav Modi's wife Ami, a US citizen, left on January 6 and his uncle and business partner Mehul Choksi, the promoter of Gitanjali jewellery chain, left on January 4, the officials said.

The bank became suspicious only on January 16 when the accused companies --Diamond R US, Solar Exports and Stellar Diamonds (all accused in the CBI FIR) -- approached it with import documents and a request to issue Letters of Understanding (LoUs) for raising buyers' credit for making payments to the overseas suppliers.

The bank, however, could not find any past entries in the system, the FIR has alleged.

It approached the CBI on January 29 with a complaint of Rs 280 crore fraud, officials said.

Nirav Modi, who is believed to be in Switzerland, was also present in a group photograph of Indian CEOs with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, issued by the Press Information Bureau, during the World Economic Forum on January 23, six days before the bank sent its first complaint against him to the CBI, according to the officials.

The agency immediately swung into action registering an FIR on January 31 followed by searches at 20 locations in Mumbai and Surat and issued a look out circular on February 4 against Nirav Modi and three absconding accused, they said.

A look out circular is issued by enforcement agencies to all exit and entry ports to inform them about the movement of an accused.

Nirav Modi, a regular on the lists of rich and famous Indians since 2013, was booked by the CBI, along with wife, brother and business partner Choksi on January 31, for allegedly cheating the state-run Punjab National Bank to the tune of Rs 280 crore.

The bank again approached the CBI within a fortnight of the first complaint giving details of more transactions which were over Rs 11,400 crore.

The question why the PNB did not send a complaint to the CBI and decided to give it in tranches is also under the scanner of the agency, they said.

Also read | Bangalore businessman warned, requested PMO for investigation on Gitanjali's huge loans against meager assets in 2016



An LoU is a letter of comfort issued by one bank to branches of other banks, based on which foreign branches offer credit to buyers.

The bank has claimed in three complaints to the CBI that so far it has detected 150 LoUs which were fraudulently issued by its officials in connivance with Nirav Modi and the other accused in the case, officials said.

The agency is analysing the fresh complaints and will take a call whether to register fresh FIRs or expand the ambit of the existing FIR related to fraudulent transactions of worth Rs 280 crore, they said.

In these cases, the bank has alleged that the LOUs were issued to Hong Kong based branches of Allahabad and Axis bank, they said.

The PNB has claimed in the complaint that overseas branch of banks used the funds to clear their own liabilities, the officials said.

During searches conducted by the agency which included the residences of Nirav Modi and the other accused along with companies, the CBI recovered 95 crucial documents related to import bills, they said.

The agency has also seized computers and other digital devices and has completed mirror imaging of computers seized during the searches, the officials said.

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New Delhi:

In what could be the biggest banking fraud in India, state-owned Punjab National Bank on Wedensday said it has detected a USD 1.77 billion scam in which billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi allegedly acquired fraudulent letters of undertaking from one of its branches for overseas credit from other Indian lenders.



PNB has suspended 10 officers over the USD 1.77 billion (about Rs 11,400 crore) scam and referred the matter to CBI for investigation.



Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar said this seems to be an isolated case and is not going to impact other lenders.



"The finance ministry has taken proactive steps by asking the lender to report the matter to CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) so that action can be taken quickly," he told PTI.



"The Bank has detected some fraudulent and unauthorised transactions in one of its branch in Mumbai for the benefit of a few select account holders with their apparent connivance," India's second-biggest state-run bank said in a regulatory filing. "Based on these transactions other banks appear to have advanced money to these customers abroad."



While PNB did not name the other lenders, Union Bank of India, Allahabad Bank and Axis Bank are said to have offered credit based on letters of undertaking (LOUs) issued by PNB.



An LOU is a letter of comfort issued by one bank to branches of other banks, based on which foreign branches offer credit to buyers.



Foreign bank branches too are under investigation.



Three other jewellers, Gitanjali, Ginni and Nakshatra are under the scanner with the CBI and ED looking at their arrangements with various banks and end use of money, a senior official of a public sector bank told PTI.



No immediate comments were available from these companies.



Last week, PNB had lodged an FIR with the CBI stating that fraudulent LoUs worth Rs 280.7 crore were first issued on January 16. At the time, PNB had said it was digging into records to examine the magnitude of the fraud.



In the complaint, PNB had named three diamond firms -- Diamonds R Us, Solar Exports and Stellar Diamonds -- saying they had approached it on January 16 with a request for buyers' credit for making payment to overseas suppliers.



The bank sought 100 per cent cash margins for issuing LoUs for raising buyers' credit, which was contested by the firms, saying they had availed of the facility from as early as 2010.



Nirav Modi, his wife Ami, brother Nishal and Mehul Choksi are partners in Diamonds R US, Solar Exports and Stellar Diamonds, which has shops in foreign locations such as Hong Kong, Dubai, and New York.



Among those named is a deputy manager, Gokulnath Shetty, who was posted at PNB's foreign exchange department in Mumbai since March 31, 2010. He had allegedly along with another official Manoj Kharat fraudulently issued LoUs to these firms without following prescribed procedure or making entries in the banking system, avoiding detection of transactions.



"This (investigation) is a part of the clean up drive that started with AQR (Asset Quality Review) in 2015. Post clean up, this is going to make banks clean forever, healthy, responsive and enable them to provide hassle-free banking to all honest borrowers," Kumar said.



A senior official of a public sector bank said there is strict instruction from the finance ministry to all banks that no big fish should go scot-free and no honest borrower is harassed.



Banks are now looking at their systems and processes so that such frauds are not repeated, he said, adding all banks have been asked to present a status report as soon as possible.



This could be the biggest banking fraud in India as its quantum was bigger than an estimated 9,000 crore scam at erstwhile Satyam computers.



In 2015, Bank of Baroda -- another public sector bank -- had brought to light a scam in which two Delhi-based businessmen cheated it of Rs 6,000 crore (slightly less than USD 1 billion at that time).



Investigations revealed major irregularities, as the forex transactions were done mainly via advance remittances for import, through newly-opened current accounts. Heavy cash transactions -- sometimes four or five times a day -- were also noticed.



The Enforcement Directorate, under the revenue department of the finance ministry, had arrested the businessman duo under money laundering provisions.



PNB said in a statement that fraudulent transactions took place in one of its branches in Mumbai for the benefit of a few select account holders with their apparent connivance.



Based on these transactions, done by his brother Nishal, wife Ami and Mehul Chinubhai Choksi, other banks appear to have advanced money to these customers abroad.



The CBI has received two complaints from the PNB against billionaire diamantaire Nirav Modi and a jewellery company alleging fraudulent transactions.



Modi, whose jewellery creations are popular among global celebrities, may face a fresh CBI probe as the agency is looking at suitable legal action to be taken in the case.



He is already being investigated by the CBI for alleged cheating and fraud involving Rs 280 crore at a PNB branch.

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New Delhi:

The Enforcement Directorate on Thursday registered a Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) case against Nirav Modi and others in connection with cheating of Rs 280 crores in Punjab National Bank (PNB).

The case has been registered on the basis of the FIR registered by Central Bureau of Investigation. The agency, they said, would probe if the allegedly defrauded bank funds were laundered and these proceeds of crime were subsequently used by the accused to create illegal assets and black money.

The CBI had booked diamond merchant Nirav Modi, his brother, wife and a business partner for allegedly cheating PNB of over Rs 280.70 crore in 2017.

State-owned Punjab National Bank on Wednesday said it has detected a USD 1.77 billion scam in which billionaire jeweler Nirav Modi allegedly acquired fraudulent letters of undertaking from one of its branches for overseas credit from other Indian lenders.

PNB has suspended 10 officers over the USD 1.77 billion (about Rs 11,400 crore) scam and referred the matter to CBI for investigation.

Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar said this seems to be an isolated case and is not going to impact other lenders.

"The finance ministry has taken proactive steps by asking the lender to report the matter to CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) so that action can be taken quickly," he told PTI.

"The Bank has detected some fraudulent and unauthorised transactions in one of its branch in Mumbai for the benefit of a few select account holders with their apparent connivance," India's second-biggest state-run bank said in a regulatory filing. "Based on these transactions other banks appear to have advanced money to these customers abroad."

Three other jewellers, Gitanjali, Ginni and Nakshatra are under the scanner with the CBI and ED looking at their arrangements with various banks and end use of money, a senior official of a public sector bank told PTI.

No immediate comments were available from these companies.

Last week, PNB had lodged an FIR with the CBI stating that fraudulent LoUs worth Rs 280.7 crore were first issued on January 16. At the time, PNB had said it was digging into records to examine the magnitude of the fraud.

In the complaint, PNB had named three diamond firms -- Diamonds R Us, Solar Exports and Stellar Diamonds -- saying they had approached it on January 16 with a request for buyers' credit for making payment to overseas suppliers.

The bank sought 100 per cent cash margins for issuing LoUs for raising buyers' credit, which was contested by the firms, saying they had availed of the facility from as early as 2010.

(With Inputs from PTI)

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Jerusalem:

The name of Ratan Tata figures in the Israeli police recommendations seeking to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on graft charges, according to an Israeli media report, which was today dismissed by the Indian industrialists office as grossly incorrect in its references about him.

In the so-called Case 1000, in which Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, are suspected of receiving illicit gifts from billionaire benefactors, Israeli-born Hollywood producer Milchan and Australian resort owner James Packer, the Indian Industrialist is also said to be a part of a project that Netanyahu tried to push forward to help Milchan.

According to the police, the most glaring example of Netanyahu working against Israels interests to benefit Milchan was his efforts (to) promote a free trade zone on the Israel-Jordan border, a project the Hollywood producer sought to promote as part of his partnership with Indian Industrialist Ratan Naval Tata, Ynetnews reported.

The project, which police noted went against the recommendations of the defence establishment, would have generated Milchan and Tata a huge profit, but ended up being scrapped because it wouldve cost the state an unreasonable amount in security expenses, the news portal said.

Commenting on the news report, the Indian industrialists office today told PTI that its grossly incorrect in its references about Mr. Ratan N. Tata.

Last year, the Israeli media reported that Tata testified before the Israeli police in connection to these allegation during his trip to Tel Aviv in the end of October-November on the sidelines of a business event.

A statement emailed to PTI by Tatas office did not deny the meeting between him and the Israeli officials. But it said the reports in Israeli media on the contents of the meeting are factually incorrect and appear to have been motivated.

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Panaji:

Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar was on Thursday admitted in a private hospital in Mumbai after he complained of stomachache and underwent a check-up at Goa Medical College and Hospital (GMCH). He was admitted to Leelavati Hospital in Mumbai today.

"His treatment is being overseen by senior oncologist P Jagannath," said an official at the hospital.

The official said, "Primary symptoms in Parrikar's case appears to be of an ailment similar to what actor Amitabh Bachchan had been diagnosed with in 2005."

"Jagannath is the same doctor who successfully performed a surgery on Amitabh Bachchan for diverticulitis, a condition where balloon-like pouches develop in the large intestine.

"Primary symptoms of the Goa chief minister look similar. We need to wait for results of tests that may be carried out (before reaching a conclusion)," he said.

Parrikar was brought to Mumbai by a flight after initial examination at the GMCH for apparent food poisoning, an official in the chief minister's office had said earlier.

He visited the GMCG last night for check-up, complaining of stomach pain, the official said.

"He went home after initial check-up and again came to the hospital this morning for a second round of check-up. His health is better now, but he has been referred to a hospital in Mumbai for further check-up," the official had said.

The budget session of the Goa Assembly will begin on Monday. Parrikar, who also holds finance portfolio, would be presenting the Budget during the session.

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New Delhi:

Jacob Zuma has relented to the intense pressure from the ruling party African National Congress (ANC) and resigned as South Africas President.

The embattled President Jacob Zuma, in a televised statement on wednesday said he was resigning with immediate effect. However, he added that he disagreed with the ruling partys decision.

Earlier, the ruling party ANC had asked Zuma to resign as President or face a confidence vote in the Parliament.

Zuma said ANCs decision to formally ask him to step down was influenced by the internal violence and division of the party.

"No life should be lost in my name and also the ANC should never be divided in my name. I have therefore come to the decision to resign as president of the republic with immediate effect," he said.

Also Read | Political crisis in South Africa, ruling party ANC decides President Jacob Zuma must go

"Even though I disagree with the decision of the leadership of my organisation, I have always been a disciplined member of the ANC.

Zuma, who is in power since 2009, is facing corruption allegations and was replaced by Cyril Ramaphosa as ANC leader in December last year.

Jacob Zumas tenure as South Africas President has been marred with controversies and allegations of corruption.

Recently, Zumas popularity took a nosedive after reports of his links with wealthy India-origin Gupta family, who have allegedly influenced the government.

Earlier last year, the Supreme Court of Appeal directed him to face several charges including corruption, fraud, racketeering and money laundering in connection with a 1999 arms deal.

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New Delhi:

Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, who made headlines recently for his remarks on girls consuming liquor, claimed on Wednesday that the media twisted his whole statement, while he had only referred to school and college students.

He indirectly pointed a finger at his cabinet colleague, Vijai Sardesai, saying that politicians needed to be careful while making any comments. Sardesai, earlier, dubbed a section of the domestic tourists visiting Goa as the scum of the Earth.

But Parrikar later said that Sardesai was not wrong in highlighting the issue but that he made the statement in an incorrect way.

Parrikar said while addressing the State Youth Parliament organised by the State Legislature department, I have begun to fear now, because even girls have started drinking beer. The tolerance limit is being crossed. I am not talking about everyone. I am not talking about those sitting here.

He also said, If someone wants to purposely twist the statement, we cannot help it. It was twisted in such a way that finally the interviewer (the person who had taken the public interview of Parrikar at the event) had to intervene and tweet that I was referring to school and college students.

Parrikar also said that his comments were not of fear but of worry. I had said it was my worry, not even fear. Worry is different from fear," he told, adding that "worry is fundamental to every person.

Also Read: Manohar Parrikar trolled mercilessly over Girls who drink beer statement

On a question about Sardesais domestic tourists comment, the Chief Minister said, Sometimes, politician has to be careful while making a statement. But sometimes, if a report is filed by a journalist who was not present at the event, there is a possibility of dilution or modification of the statement.

He said Sardesai was referring to an incident of a tourist urinating from a bus window, the video of which went viral on the social media.

He said, He (Sardesai) should not have used very harsh words. I have spoken to him about it. He was not wrong in what he was highlighting. But he interpreted it in a wrong way or rather, he was not able to express it correctly, adding that the minister later corrected his statements.

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New Delhi:

United flight 1175 from San Francisco to Honolulu made an emergency landing on Tuesday afternoon after a part plane's engine fell apart in midair somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, far from land.

Passengers on a Hawaii-bond United Airlines flight got the most dangerous and deadliest experience for a lifetime. The plane, a Boeing 777, 373 people landed safely and no injuries were reported.

According to a United Airlines statement:

"United flight 1175 traveling to Honolulu from San Francisco landed safely after the pilots called for an emergency landing because of a loss of the engine cowling (the covering of the engine). Our pilots followed all necessary protocols to safely land the aircraft. The aircraft taxied to the gate and passengers deplaned normally."

"The flight landed safely and all passengers deplaned normally at the gate," it added in separate statement.

United did not say exactly when cowling came off, but it said there was no debris on the runway or taxiways.

Horrified passengers shared images from inside the plane, showing what appeared to be the planes bare engine, exposed in midair.

Here are the reactions:

# that looks bad, plane and simple  #ua1175 pic.twitter.com/EKXUxDBw9q

 Erik Haddad (@erikhaddad) February 13, 2018

#

One of the passengers said he heard a big metallic bang which was followed by about 40 minutes of shaking until the plane finally landed. Today I learned that if the #2 engine explodes on your United flight, it sounds a lot like being inside an unbalanced washing machine, the passenger wrote in an Instagram post.

I don't see anything about this in the manual #ua1175 pic.twitter.com/yTECg9fxZw  Erik Haddad (@erikhaddad) February 13, 2018

for those fellow flight enthusiasts wanting to see more detail #ua1175 pic.twitter.com/SvADgjWgIK  Erik Haddad (@erikhaddad) February 14, 2018

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New Delhi:

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat will address representatives of various wings affiliated with the organisation during its Sangh-Samagam here on February 18.

On Friday, the RSS chief arrived on a five-day tour during which he will hold regular interaction with Swayamsevaks from February 15 to 20 at the Trade Facilitation Centre at Bada Lalpur.

Senior RSS leaders Dattatreya Hosabale, Indresh Kumar, Suresh

Soni, Krishna Gopal, Bhaiyyaji Joshi among others will also be present during the session.

Meanwhile, the Congress party on Friday lodged its protest against the RSS chief alleging that the RSS was misusing government institution.

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New Delhi:

A woman in Kozhikode in Kerala was forced an abortion after allegedly kicked in the stomach by CPM leader. The six people were arrested for assaulting Josna Sibi, 28, at a village in the district on January 28, they said.

According to media reports, the woman was seven months pregnant and her husband were attacked by the CPM activists in connection with a land dispute on January 28.

A profusely bleeding Sibi was rushed to the Kozhikode Medical College Hospital where she had to undergo an abortion, they added. A complaint was lodged by her in this connection on February 2.

While one person was arrested on February 8, the others were apprehended on Thursday following an investigation. The accused were arrested on charges of unlawful assembly, rioting, voluntarily causing hurt, criminal trespass and wrongful restraint.



The main accused is still absconding. The victim's family has held protests outside a police station to pressurize the cops to arrest the main culprit.

"The local party workers are coming here daily, asking me to withdraw the complaint against Thamby," woman's husband said referring to the CPM leader. "My decision is to fight the case till the end. I have decided to sit in front of the police station demanding justice," he was quoted as saying by Times Now.

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New Delhi:

Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday slammed the government over the recent terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir. He accused the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti running opportunistic alliance over the death of soldiers.

Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday from his official Twitter handhel @OfficeofRG tweeted, "1. PDP says talks with Pakistan. 2. BJP Defence Minister says "Pakistan will pay the price". While our soldiers pay with their blood for BJP/PDPs opportunistic alliance and non-existent Kashmir policy; Modi Ji dithers," Rahul Gandhi tweeted today from his official handle, @OfficeOfRG.

The Jammu and Kashmir chief minister soon after the Sunjuwan attack had called for talks between India and Pakistan to stop bleeding shedding in the state.

1. PDP says talks with Pakistan.



2. BJP Defence Minister says "Pakistan will pay the price".



While our soldiers pay with their blood for BJP/ PDPs opportunistic alliance and non-existent Kashmir policy; Modi Ji dithers.  Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) February 13, 2018

While, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday said "Pakistan will have to pay for this misadventure."

Also read: Indian aggression shall be met with equal response, says Pakistan minister after Sitharamans warning



At least three militants on Saturday stormed into Indian Army Camp in Sunjuwan. Seven soldiers were killed in the attack and at least 10 persons including civilians were seriously injured in the attack.

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New Delhi:

The sleuths of Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday continued to search the Mumbai boutique of Nirav Modi, the prime accused in Indias biggest banking scam for the second consecutive day.

Nirav Modi, a Billionaire jewellery designer and other members of his family allegedly made fraudulent transactions of over Rs 11,300 crore through 150 letters of understanding issued by the Punjab National Bank.

The raids were being conducted at Nirav Modis boutique in Mumbais Kala Ghoda area.

Earlier on Thursday, the law enforcement agency had seized diamond and gold jewellery worth Rs 5,100 crore in nationwide searches.

The agency conducted raids at as many as 17 locations belonging to Modi in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Surat and Jaipur after filing a Rs 280-crore money laundering case against him.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the ED also moved separate applications to the External Affairs Ministry seeking the revocation of passports of Modi and his maternal uncle Mehul Choksi, the promoter of Gitanjali jewellery chain.

Also Read | PNB Scam: Businessman alerted PMO office about Gitanjali's illegal loans in 2016

Here are the live updates on Punjab National Bank scam:

# The fraud was done in matter of issuance of unauthorised & fraudulent Letters of Undertaking in favor of foreign branches of Indian based banks & purported Foreign Letters of Credits in favor of foreign suppliers of accused companies

# FIR registered against 2 PNB officials Gokulnath Shetty & Manoj Hemant Karat in Mumbai stating that they, in connivance with accused companies defrauded PNB to the tune of USD 754.92 Millions

# It's case of operational risk arising on account of delinquent behaviour by one or more employees of the bank & failure of internal controls. RBI has already undertaken supervisory assessment of control systems in PNB & will take appropriate supervisory action.

# There have been reports that in wake of fraud involving the sum of USD 1.77 billion that has surfaced in Punjab National Bank, RBI has directed PNB to meet its commitments under Letter of Undertaking to other banks. RBI denies having given any such instructions.

There have been reports that in wake of fraud involving the sum of USD 1.77 billion that has surfaced in Punjab National Bank, RBI has directed PNB to meet its commitments under Letter of Undertaking to other banks. RBI denies having given any such instructions: RBI #PNBFraudCase  ANI (@ANI) February 16, 2018

# Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi have been summoned by Enforcement Directorate to appear before its Mumbai Office on 23rd February: ED sources

# ED directed Nirav Modi's head office that no sale/purchase should happen in showrooms in New York, London, Macau and Beijing: ED Sources



# ED registered another case on Friday against Nirav Modi. 35 new locations were raided. Searches covering 11 states. Diamond and gold worth 549 crore seized today. Total 5649 crore.(Including Thursday's recovery) 29 immovable properties identified: ED Sources



# IT officials paste notice outside Nirav Modi's boutique in Mumbai's Kala Ghoda

# I can say with confidence that this gentleman is not in touch with any of our officials & frankly at this stage we are not aware about his location: Raveesh Kumar on Nirav Modi

I can say with confidence that this gentleman is not in touch with any of our officials & frankly at this stage we are not aware about his location: Raveesh Kumar, MEA #NiravModi #PNBFraudCase pic.twitter.com/1fMUamd1pg  ANI (@ANI) February 16, 2018

# After suspension of his passport Nirav Modi have to stay in the country only, he cannot go anywhere else, says MEA Raveesh Kumar

# This is a banking fraud, which is being investigated. We are making sure that the money is recovered, says Javadekar

# Finance Secretary during UPA's regime, instead of taking action, forced Dinesh Dubey to resign. We are asking who pressurised the Foreign Secretary to pressurise Dinesh Dubey: Union Minister Prakash Javadekar

# It is the alertness of the NDA govt which has brought this scam into light. All the NPAs, the wrongful distribution of loans, amongst others were all passed down to us by the UPA Govt. This is a scam by the bank & not the govt, says Prakash Javadekar

# 3 main companies named in the FIR have 36 subsidiary companies. Out of those 36 companies, 17 are in Mumbai, 1 in Hyderabad and rest of the companies are located out of India. Companies in India are being investigated by CBI on Friday.

# The scam which has come into light is a scam of the UPA Govt. This started during UPA's reign in 2011, says Union Minister Prakash Javadekar

The scam which has come into light is a scam of the UPA Govt. This started during UPA's reign in 2011: Union Minister Prakash Javadekar #PNBFraudCase pic.twitter.com/Xy1BLur8wB  ANI (@ANI) February 16, 2018

# 4 officials of Punjab National Bank are being examined by CBI.

# PM Modi calls PNB scam accused Mehul Choksi as Mehul Bhai': Congress

# Nirav Modi & Mehul Choksi have been asked to respond within one week as to why their passports should not be impounded or revoked. If they fail to respond within the stipulated time, MEA will go ahead with the revocation.

# On the advice of the Enforcement Directorate, the Passport issuing authority in the Ministry of External Affairs has suspended the validity of passports of Nirav Modi & Mehul Choksi with immediate effect for a period of four weeks.

# Prabhavi karyawahi ho rahi hai. Jitni shigra karyavahi ho skati hai, utni hui hai: Home Minister Rajnath Singh on oppositions' allegations against BJP in

Prabhavi karyawahi ho rahi hai. Jitni shigra karyavahi ho skati hai, utni hui hai: Home Minister Rajnath Singh on oppositions' allegations against BJP in #PNBScam pic.twitter.com/Cgn7ewt4Nq  ANI (@ANI) February 16, 2018

# CBI searches being conducted in Maharashtra's Mumbai and Pune, Gujarat's Surat, Rajasthan's Jaipur, Telangana's Hyderabad & Tamil Nadu's Coimbatore in connection with Mehul Choksi's Gitanjali Group & other directors of accused companies.

# CBI is conducting searches at 20 premises in 6 cities across 5 states, belonging to Mehul Choksi's Gitanjali Group & other directors of accused companies.

# Meanwhile, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has also registered an FIR against Mehul Choksi's Gitanjali Group of companies on the complaint of Punjab National Bank (PNB) dated 13 February 2018.

# Recapitalisation of PNB will not be impacted by fraud case, the bank will get its recapitalisation share of Rs 5000 crore, as allocated earlier: Finance Ministry Sources

# Eight more employees of Punjab National Bank suspended, the number of suspended employees now stands at 18, which also includes General Manager level officers. An internal investigation of the bank is still underway.

# PNB Fraud Case: INTERPOL's diffusion Notice issued against Nirav Modi, his wife Ami Modi, brother Nishal Modi &Mehul Choksi

Also Read: PNB fraud case: MEA suspends passports of Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi for four weeks

# State-owned Union Bank of India has said it has an exposure of USD 300 million (around Rs 1,915 crore) to the Rs 11,400-crore PNB fraud case but stressed its money is safe and it will recover that.

# Meanwhile, the shares of Punjab National Bank continued to reel under pressure for the third consecutive day after the detection of  11,400-crore fraud, slipping over 3 % in morning trade on bourses. The stock hit its 52-week low on both BSE and NSE on Friday after it opened on a bearish note and fell 3.27 % to 124.15 on BSE, reports PTI.

# Earlier Thursday, Congress, and BJP had traded allegations and blamed each other for over Rs 11,300 crore PNB scam case.

# Some media reports are suggesting that Nirav Modi could be in New York and not in Davos.

# The CBI and the ED has asked the external ministry to block the passport of Nirav Modi.

# Mumbai: After almost 24 hours, raids continue at Nirav Modi's boutique in Kala Ghoda.

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Jammu:

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) defines a journalist as a professional who covers developmental activity of any government department, inauguration of a hospital or school or write statement of the National Investigation Agency (NIA).

The central investigative agency defined a journalist as part of the chargesheet filed on January 18 against 12 persons including a freelance photojournalist, Kamran Yusuf into the terror funding and stone pelting case in the valley.

The NIA in its chargesheet stated that Yusuf was not a journalist during his bail hearing.

The investigative agency argued that he is not a journalist as he had never covered any development activity of any government department.

The NIA under the title  Moral Duty of a Journalist said, Head he been a real journalist by profession, he may have performed one of the moral duty of a journalist, which is to cover activities (good or bad) in his jurisdiction.

The NIA chargesheet states that he had never covered any developmental activity of any government agency, any inauguration of hospital, school, building, road, bridge or statement of political party.

No social work by the Army and paramilitary forces in the Valley such as free medical check-up, blood donation camps,Iftar party and skill development programme, terms NIA in its chargesheet.

The agency in its chargesheet further mentioned that the NIA examinesd 1735 videos recorded by Kamran Yusuf.

Also read: 81 journalists killed; violence and harassment against media staff shot up in 2017



Almost every video has been taken with a particular intention to cover anti-national activities and then provide the same to local media for publication or telecast, mentions NIA in its chargesheet.

According to NIA Yusuf is not a professional because he did not receive any training from any institute.

According to the photojournalist's lawyer Warisha Farishat, Yusuf was detained without charge in September last year, and was booked as a stone-pelter in a chargesheet filed on January 18.

She added that the chargesheet accuses him of conspiring to wage war against Government of India.

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Itanagar:

Visiting Arunachal Pradesh under the shadow of protests by China, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday hailed the patriotic nature of the people of the border state, saying they greet each other with 'Jai Hind' and announced naming the New Delhi-Naharlagun Express as "Arunachal Express".

Modi's second visit to Arunachal Pradesh was vehemently opposed by China which urged India to refrain from taking any action that may "complicate" the boundary question. It is his first visit to the frontier state after the Armys standoff with Chinese soldiers in Doklam plateau last year.

Modi, who earlier visited Arunachal Pradesh in February 2015, told a public rally here that he "cannot stay without meeting you all". China claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet.

Clad in traditional tribal headgear, Modi dedicated the state civil secretariat building to the people, laid the foundation stone for the Academic Block of the Tomo Riba Institute of Health and Medical Science and inaugurated the Dorjee Khandu state convention center.

"My visit to Arunachal Pradesh is related to three key projects in the state. The secretariat is already functional and this was a good step taken by the state government," he said at the rally at the Indira Gandhi Park here before leaving for Tripura to address election rallies.

The prime minister hailed the patriotic nature of the people of Arunachal, saying they greet each other with 'Jai Hind'.

Modi also announced that the New Delhi-Naharlagun Express would now be called "Arunachal Express". The train, he said, will connect the "people of the state with mainland India".

The frequency of the train, connecting the national capital to the state, would also be increased from one to two days a week.

Modi complimented Chief Minister Pema Khandu for the "wonderful work he is doing".

"He has prepared a top quality roadmap on how Arunachal Pradesh should be in 2027. And, he did not only ask officials for inputs but also people from all walks of life," he added.

Also Read: Live, PM Modi in Arunachal Pradesh: Govt's Ayushman Bharat scheme to lead in providing quality, affordable healthcare

On other issues, Modi accused the previous UPA regime of neglecting the North East and said his government has given priority to the region with ministers and senior officials regularly visiting it.

Seeking to highlight the significance of the region, he said important meetings should not only be held in the national capital but "we must go to all states. And that is why I came to Shillong for a Northeastern Council meeting. An important meeting related to agriculture was held in Sikkim."

Without naming Manmohan Singh, Modi said, the former prime minister could not visit the state on the pretext of workload, "But I am such a PM who cannot stay without meeting you all".

The prime minister said he would personally tell people to go to Arunachal Pradesh to hold important meetings at the convention center.

"This is more than a building, it is a vibrant centre that will further the aspirations of Arunachal Pradesh. There will be conferences and cultural activities that will draw government officials and private companies," he said.

Modi said he has directed the state government not to wait for the inauguration of any project but start utilising it after its completion.

Modi said the Centre is taking up the Ayushman Bharat Yojana on the mission mode to provide quality and affordable health care to nearly 50 crore people across the country.

He said the scheme, billed as the world's largest government-funded health care programme, is a path-breaking initiative and would bring a "paradigm shift" in the health sector.

"The scale of this scheme is un-parallelled and it will bring a paradigm shift in our health sector. It is time to give India a health care system that makes quality treatment affordable within a limit of Rs 5 lakh per family," he said.

Modi asked the state government to frame a new health policy and work to attract private investments in the sector.

Referring to the BJP-led NDA government's crusade against corruption, Modi said the government has been able to curb corruption through the direct bank transfer (DBT) scheme.

"The Centre has saved Rs 54,000 crore through Aadhaar-enabled direct benefit transfer of about 400 government schemes," he added.

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New Delhi:

The BJP and the Congress on Thursday blamed each other for the Rs 11,400 crore fraud case involving the Punjab National Bank even as the latter called the scam's main accused Nirav Modi as "chhota Modi" sparking condemnation from the ruling party.

The rival parties also traded allegations over a picture of Nirav Modi with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a business delegation accompanying him to Davos at the World Economic Forum meet last month.

The Congress targeted the government over the scam allegedly involving billionaire jewellery designer Nirav Modi and accused it of doing nothing to stop "independent India's biggest bank fraud" despite being informed of it in July, 2016.

"Loot and escape" had become the hallmark of the government, the party said, equating the celebrity designer with liquor baron Vijay Mallya, former IPL chief Lalit Modi and other businessmen such as Rishi Agarwal who had fled the country after allegedly committing frauds worth crores of rupees.

Party president Rahul Gandhi led the charge, alleging that the NDA government looked the other way when Nirav Modi used his "clout" with the prime minister to slip out of the country.

"Guide to looting India by Nirav Modi--1. Hug PM Modi 2. Be seen with him in DAVOS. Use that clout to: A. Steal 12,000 crore B. Slip out of the country like Mallya, while the government looks the other way," Gandhi said on Twitter.

The Congress also released a picture of Nirav Modi with the business delegation accompanying the prime minister to Davos at the World Economic Forum meet last month.

Dubbing Nirav Modi "Chhota Modi two" and Lalit Modi "Chhota Modi one", Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala asked if the billionaire jewellery designer had a tip-off that prompted him to leave the country.

"Billionaire Nirav Modi steals Rs 12,000 crore right under the nose of the Modi Government and flees the country. Ironically, Nirav Modi was later spotted with PM Modi in Davos," Surjewala said, adding, "Has it become the norm for letting people run away with public money? Who is responsible?"

Lashing out at the prime minister, he said, "This is the biggest bank loot scam of independent India and who permitted this scam to happen? Why did the prime minister not take any action despite knowing about it on July 26, 2016?"

The BJP while declaring that no one irrespective of stature will be spared by the probe agencies, condemned the Congress' attack on the prime minister as "baseless".

The party fielded Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to counter allegations against the Modi government and he dubbed the Congress' reference of "chhota Modi" for Nirav Modi, as "derogatory, demeaning, shameful, utterly irresponsible and scandalous".

Official sources also pointed out that Nirav Modi was not part of prime minister's official delegation to Davos as being claimed by the Congress.

Asked at the press conference about the action taken by the Prime Minister's Office after Bengaluru resident Hari Prasad warned it in a letter in July 2016 against Nirav Modi and other accused, Prasad said it was acknowledged and what action different departments took will be conveyed later.

Also read: PNB hands over to CBI list of 150 fraudulent LoUs issued to Nirav Modi

Seeking to turn the heat on the Congress, Prasad pointed out that the alleged fraud had started in 2011 when it was in power and questioned whose "blessings" were with Mehul Choksi, Nirav's business partner, as the income of Choksi's firm Gitanjali Gems doubled between 2011-13.

The fraud has been unearthed under our government and action is being taken, he said.

Prasad also said that Nirav was not part of the prime minister's delegation to Davos and had come to the Swiss town on his own. He joined a CII delegation for a group photograph with him, he said.

"I wish to deny this with full authority. No personal meeting (of Nirav) with the prime minister took place."

"Those living in glass houses, which are already broken, should not throw stones at us as the Modi government is working with full honesty..."

Attacking Rahul Gandhi, Prasad referred to a tweet by a disgruntled Congress leader and claimed that the Congress president had gone to attend an event organised by Choksi in 2013.

He claimed that the Congress' attack on the government was borne out of its "pain" over its electoral losses and it will lose to the BJP in Tripura as well.

Also read | PNB fraud case: ED, CBI recover jewelry worth Rs 5100 crore from Nirav Modi, Gitanjali's premises

He asked the Congress not to do photo politics- a reference to Nirav's presence in a group picture with the prime minister- and said his party also has "cozy" photos of its leaders with Choksi but it will not stoop to this low.

The Left and the Trinamool Congress attacked the government on the PNB fraud case and asked it to clarify how Nirav Modi was present in a group photo of Indian CEOs with the prime minister in Davos.

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury questioned how Nirav Modi was allowed to escape the country.

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New Delhi:

Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of letting Nirav Modi, the prime accused in USD 1.77 billion (Rs 11,300 crore) PNB fraud case, slip out of the country like Vijay Mallya.

Rahul Gandhi also questioned Prime Minister Modis relationship with Nirav Modi, who was part of the delegation of Indian businessmen at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.

In a tweet, Rahul Gandhi said, Guide to Looting India by Nirav MODI: 1. Hug PM Modi 2. Be seen with him in DAVOS, Use that clout to: A Steal 12,000Cr B Slip out of the country like Mallya, while the Govt looks the other way. #From1MODI2another.

Guide to Looting India

by Nirav MODI



1. Hug PM Modi

2. Be seen with him in DAVOS



Use that clout to:



A. Steal 12,000Cr

B. Slip out of the country like Mallya, while the Govt looks the other way.



#From1MODI2another  Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) February 15, 2018

"On 26 July 2016, PM was handed with all papers regarding Nirav Modi & one of his relative. It was said that complaint had 42 FIRs. PMO acknowledged the complaint, they also sent registrar of companies to take some action. But in the end the govt couldn't do anything," Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said.

In what could be Indias biggest scam in banking sector, Punjab National Bank, the country's second-largest public-sector lender on Wednesday informed the Bombay Stock Exchange about the fraudulent transactions worth over Rs 11,000 crore.

Also Read | PNB fraud case LIVE Updates: Capable of tackling situation, committed to clean banking, says PNB bank

The bank named billionaire diamantaire Nirav Modi in its complaint to the CBI and based on CBIs FIR, the Enforcement Directorate has also registered a case against him in Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

According to the CBI sources in Mumbai, Nirav Modi, the prime accused in USD 1.77 billion PNB fraud case has already fled India and unconfirmed reports said he is hiding in Switzerland.

Aam Aadmi Chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also questioned BJP governments role in allowing Nirav Modi to leave the country.

Is it possible to believe that he or vijay mallya left the country without active connivance of BJP govt?, Kejriwal said.

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New Delhi:

US Ambassador Nikki Haley on Friday said that it was "time for the Security Council to act" following the release of a report by UN experts concluding that Iran had violated the arms embargo on Yemen.

The report found that Tehran had failed to block supplies to Yemen's Huthi rebels of ballistic missiles that were fired at Saudi Arabia. "This report highlights what we've been saying for months: Iran has been illegally transferring weapons in violation of multiple Security Council resolutions," Haley said in a statement.

The ambassador added that "the world cannot continue to allow these blatant violations to go unanswered" and that Tehran must face "consequences."

"It's time for the Security Council to act." Iran has strongly denied arming the Huthis and has accused Haley of presenting "fabricated" evidence that a November 4 missile fired at Riyadh airport was Iranian-made.

Diplomats said the Iranian violations are likely to be addressed in a draft resolution renewing sanctions on Yemen that the council is set to adopt later this month.

It remains unclear however if Russia will back any move that punishes Iran. Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia last month cast doubt over the report's findings, which AFP first reported on in January when the document was confidentially sent to the Security Council.

While the report found that Iran had violated the 2015 embargo, the panel of UN experts said they were not able to identify the supplier. Russia has the power to block sanctions by using its veto power it enjoys as one of the five permanent Security Council members, along with Britain, China, France and the United States.

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A day after external affairs minister S Jaishankar said he has taken up with European Union to accept Covid-19 vaccines, such as Covishield and Covaxin, for Indian nationals traveling to Europe, Switzerland, Iceland and seven European Union countries on Thursday allowed the Serum Institute-manufactured Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine.

The list of European Union Member States that have recognized Covishield as a valid vaccine includes Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Spain. That apart, Estonia has confirmed that it will recognize all the vaccines authorized by the Government of India for travel of Indians to Estonia, said an informed source.

Union minister Jaishankar had on Tuesday met Josep Borrell Fontelles, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and discussed vaccine production and access. He also took up 'Covishield' authorization for travel to Europe. India has requested EU member states to individually consider extending the exemption to those persons who have taken Covishield and Covaxin and said it will institute a reciprocal policy for recognition of the EU Digital Covid Certificate, according to sources.

Odisha's Patient Detected with COVID's Delta Plus Variant, in Home Isolation

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New Delhi: The drone attack at Jammu Air Force Station has revealed that the terror outfit Lashkar had planned the entire plan in association with Jaish and the Pakistani army. It first met in Kotli, Pakistan. It was fully taken over by the 505 UAV Operational and Training School of the Pakistani Army, which is in Mangala, Pakistan. Today, General Qamar Bajwa, head of the Pakistani Army himself, also arrived at the school.

Bajwa was reportedly accompanied by Major General Asim Malik and Lt Gen Mazhar Shaheen. According to sources, the issue is quite clear: preparing drone launching pads and blasting at different places and getting them all done by Lashkar, and that too under isolation tasking. This means that only those who are going to explode should be informed about the UAV IED. It has also been reported that the blast inside the Air Force Base used a shaped charge and the impact was so severe that the roof was blown away.

Behind this was a conspiracy by the terror group Lashkar and ISI, which was supported by the Pak Army. Security agencies are establishing the same and searching for evidence. Omar Sophia is in charge of Jammu, Lashkar, while Yusuf Mujammil of Kashmir. The two are plotting to send terrorists to Jammu and Kashmir at the behest of Ghaznavi and Zaki Ur Rehman Lakhvi.

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Islamabad: Ever since the news of atrocities against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, China, the question has been raised as to why Pakistan does not respond to it as a supporter of Muslims from Palestine to Kashmir. Now, after a long time, there has been a response from Pakistan on the issue, in which PM Imran Khan has "accepted China's lies" by turning a blind eye to all China's atrocities on Uighur Muslims.

Imran Khan says his government supports China's statements on allegations of treatment of Uighur Muslims. Imran Khan said this citing Islamabad's close ties with Beijing. Imran says the Western media is raising the issue completely differently. It is hypocrisy. There are heinous violations of human rights in different parts of the world, but the Western media does not comment on them. Imran has also criticised the Western media for reporting on the Uighur Muslims and the Hong Kong issue. Several media reports have revealed that China has imprisoned nearly 1 million Uighur Muslims at the detention centre. Where they are tortured in various ways. At the same time, they are prevented from following their religion and rape of women, abortion is common there.

He left no stone unturned to build a curse on China. Imran said China has supported Pakistan whenever it comes into trouble politically or internationally. The relationship between Pakistan and China has nothing to do with India. The relationship between the two countries is bilateral and very strong. Khan has given his opinion while talking to Chinese journalists on the occasion of the completion of 100 years of the ruling Communist Party in China.

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When you close your eyes and dream of your Greek Island getaway do you imagine being perched on a cliff, looking out over the dazzling blue ocean, cool wine in hand, with blindingly white-washed houses behind you? Santorini is the one for you.

Sure, you get this on the other islands that make up the Cyclades, but Santorini is the cream of the crop. When the ever-brilliant sunsets light up the cliffs and the buildings you may just think youve died and gone to heaven.

These islands revolve around providing the best ever holiday experience for everyone who sets foot on them. They all have great nightlife, and Santorini is no exception. But Santorini is also the best option for those looking for something a little more sophisticated.

Its all about the delicious dining, wineries, micro-breweries, and relaxing sundowners on balconies. Thats what a holiday in Santorini is about.

For a bit of culture and history head to the traditional village of Oia. Make sure you climb down the 300 steps to the little port of Ammoudi. The views are absolutely worth it.

The recently excavated and well preserved ancient city of Ancient Akrotiri is a must-visit for an insighful glimpse into ancient Greek life.

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The Nepali caste system, historically, functioned as the basis of the feudalistic economic structure. Caste was largely codified by Manusmriti that divided four varnas: the dominant Brahmins (priests and scholars), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants and traders), Shudras (labourers), and the outcast Dalits (untouchables). Although castes were based on various professions, untouchability evolved later. Even after a decade-long civil war, the fall of the monarchy and, the caste system may no longer technically exist in a fledgling democracy, but the practice is still alive in Nepal.

A recent video of Rupa Sunar, a Dalit journalist, went viral on the internet, in which she claimed that Saraswati Pradhan (a house owner) refused to rent her a flat citing her so-called lower caste. So, she filed a complaint against Pradhan as per the Caste-based Discrimination and Untouchability Act, 2011. Pradhan, however, was released. This event gives us an occasion to understand that the caste system is still intact today. More strongly, arguments on social media that followed reflect society will need a long time before existing casteism will change.

Dignity and denial

Photo: wallpaperflare.com

As a matter of fact, there is a commitment to fighting casteism on paper. The Nepali constitution outlaws caste-based discrimination. Article 1 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. These rights cannot be taken away as all human beings are designated to rights, without any form of discrimination. But, this incident depicted how so-called lower-caste people are still fighting for their basic human rights, life in dignity and equality.

However, there is a big misconception and skewed narrative in coverage by some of the media. Some commentators and social media users got defensive labelling it either as left or liberal propaganda and argued that there was no caste-based discrimination as the landlord was simply exercising her right over private property. Online media platforms continued to provoke controversy and disseminated news accusing Sunar had received Rs 15 million from the European Union.

Another discussion about the reservation system spread relating it to the current case, opening door to interesting analogies. Reservation is an unpopular word in Nepal and is blamed for reverse discrimination. Vague narratives like non-Dalit students are not being able to prosper economically in Nepal because the lower castes have monopolised the governments welfare schemes flow around netizens. However, these complexities cannot be used to avoid addressing caste-based discrimination and brush the actual issue under the carpet. This backlash illuminates a curious case of selective outrage and casteism denial.

Reservation for Dalits and derivation

Roughly, 260 million people in South Asia are Dalits, or members of so-called lower castes, and are therefore treated as untouchable by their social superiors. According to the Human Development Index, the Dalits who constitute 20 per cent of the total population are the poorest community in Nepal. Over half of Dalits live below the poverty line and also have a life expectancy and literacy rates below the national average. So, the caste reservation policy was adopted in Nepal. The weaker section connotes a section of the society that is deprived of basic rights and schemes provided by the law.

File: A participant of a demonstration that demands justice for Dalits

Reservation in the Nepali context is used as the tool to uplift the living standards of such section of the society by promoting their social, educational and economic interest. But, the notion of caste reservation currently is getting fabricated with sub-standard arguments that hit on the identity and dignity of the class who are provided with governmental schemes as a reservation. According to arguments made by comparatively dominant sections of the society, people provided with reservation use their inferiority and backwardness with pride, but when it comes to being addressed by such tags which are synonymous to their inferiority, the inferior section gets offended. It is only a deliberate attempt to scandalise the whole system of reservation and deviate from the actual issue.

At the root, the gravity of the act of denial rests with its effect upon the victim group. Caste-based discrimination was not discussed until a couple of years ago. Despite the instituted legal provisions, cases of caste-based discrimination rarely make it to court; much less result in a conviction. Discussions about minority experiences are becoming increasingly prevalent. Yet at every step, the dominant castes have refused them empathy and there is widespread denial of casteism as if it is outdated. But, just because there is denial, it does not mean that the problem does not exist.

The point of hypocrisy is when Nabaraj BK, Tikaram Sunar and Ganesh Budha were murdered because of their caste triggered a nationwide anti-caste movement, but in the case of Saraswoti Pradhan vs Rupa Sunar, people are taking the practice of untouchability easily. Does one have to lose his/her life to get proper treatment for caste-based violence? Is not the denial of a victims right to humanity and dignity because of the surname enough to name it caste-based discrimination?

The dominant class of Nepali society makes up a huge political and administrative force in todays context. They are more or less in power and it is a nature of power that it does not tolerate criticism. When this class is asked complex questions of caste-based discrimination, they try to flee away by chanting the same old and outdated songs of discriminatory values and customs. This is why Nepal is considered a country imprisoned by its past. With an attitude and beliefs like this, the incident will be interpreted and dissected in several ways in the coming few weeks and perhaps forgotten in the long run, but the general denial of caste discrimination in Nepal might continue.
Kathmandu, July 2

The European Union Delegation to Nepal has denied some media reports that claimed it paid journalist Rupa Sunar to incite ethnic tensions in Nepal.

Our mandate in Nepal focusses on a development partnership aiming at having a common understanding on issues of mutual concern and thereby working together to help Nepal achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and graduate from LDC status by 2026, EU Ambassador to Nepal Nona Deprez said in a statement on Friday.

The EU Delegation to Nepal stands ready to provide further information on the EUs activities and its partnership with Nepal, the statement reads.

A few days back, Sunar had complained she was denied a flat by a house owner in Kathmandu for being a Dalit. Following her complaint, the police had arrested the house owner, Saraswati Pradhan, but she was released later.

The incident had apparently divided the Nepali society as some supporting Sunar claiming it was a case of caste-based discrimination whereas others supported Pradhan, claiming she just practised her right to property.

During that time, some reports had claimed Sunar intentionally asked for a flat from Pradhan and reported she was denied it on the basis of her caste so as to instigate tension between Dalits and Newars. She was accused of receiving aid from the EU to do so.

But, the EU Delegation to Nepal says today, The EU strictly provides financial support to Nepal through government treasury, multilateral agencies and civil society organisations operational in Nepal through a competitive and transparent process.
Kathmandu, July 2

The Ministry of Health and Population has informed that the countrys Covid-19 tally has reached 678,808 as of Friday afternoon.

The ministry says 2,299 new cases were confirmed in the country in the past 24 hours.

In this period, 6,566 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 1,391 returned positive. Likewise, 4,030 people underwent antigen tests for the virus, of which an additional 908 tested positive.

Of total tests, 21.18 per cent of the PCR and 22.5 per cent of antigen samples returned positive, keeping the overall per-day positivity rate at 21.69 per cent.

As of today, there are 29,274 active cases across the country. Of them, 2,938 are hospitalised, 632 in intensive care units and 181 on ventilators.

In the past 24 hours, 3,451 people have achieved recovery whereas 34 deaths have been reported.

Of the total cases so far, 603,600 people have achieved recovery. Likewise, 9,179 died, according to the ministry. Nepals current recovery rate is 94 per cent and the death rate 1.5 per cent.

So far, only 757,635 people have received both their doses of either Covishield or Verocell.
(Corrects typographical error in 11th paragraph to make identity of speaker "she," not "he")

GENEVA, July 2 (Reuters) - U.N.-backed talks aimed at paving the way for elections in Libya in December missed a deadline and extended into a fifth day on Friday with delegates struggling to agree.

The meeting of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum near Geneva was due to establish the constitutional basis for presidential and parliamentary elections by July 1.

But delegates and U.N. officials said they could not agree among themselves on several proposals circulating, prompting organisers to extend the talks originally planned to last four days.

The elections would be a key part of international efforts to bring stability to Libya, which has been in turmoil since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

A U.N.-led peace process brought a ceasefire last summer after fighting between rival factions paused and then a unity government was formed.

The talks in Switzerland follow on from an international conference in Berlin last week.

The United Nations envoy for Libya, Jan Kubis, said on Monday that leaving Switzerland without a decision this week was "not an option" given the timeframe.

"He's really pushing for consensus to be achieved on the way forward to find that Constitutional basis that will allow the country to hold the scheduled elections on 24 December," U.N. spokesman Rheal LeBlanc told a briefing on Friday.

On Thursday, Kubis described that day's session as "difficult" and urged delegates to refrain from "disrespectful behaviour and personal attacks", without elaborating.

A U.N. live feed of the talks streamed the discussions of the 75 delegates earlier in the week has since halted.

However, one delegate, Lamees Bensaad, said she still thought agreement could be reached.

"I'm optimistic and look forward to consensus," she said.

Moves towards a political solution in Libya accelerated after eastern commander Khalifa Haftar's 14-month assault on Tripoli collapsed last summer.

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A formal ceasefire was agreed in October and the next month the participants in the U.N. peace dialogue set a date for elections and agreed to create a new interim government.

However, major risks persist with myriad armed groups holding power on the ground.

Haftar was backed by the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Egypt in his Tripoli offensive. The internationally-recognised Tripoli government was supported by Turkey, which ultimately helped it repel the assault. (Reporting by Emma Farge, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Ahmed Elumami in Tripoli, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
NEW YORK, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Automatic Power Factor Controller Market by Product, End-user, and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2021-2025

The automatic power factor controller market is poised to grow by USD 672.30 million during 2021-2025, progressing at a CAGR of over 4% during the forecast period.

Request a free sample report for more insights

Read the 120-page report with TOC on "Automatic Power Factor Controller Market Analysis Report by Product (Active power factor controller and Passive power factor controller), End-user (Process industries and Discrete industries), Geography (APAC, North America, Europe, South America, and MEA), and the Segment Forecasts, 2021-2025".

The market is driven by government regulations on energy consumption. In addition, the use of software to analyze suitable power factor requirements is anticipated to boost the growth of the automatic power factor controller market.

Governments across the world are introducing various regulations to reduce emissions and minimize energy consumption. This is driving investments in alternative energy projects to meet the growing demand from the industrial sector and reduce the dependence on non-renewable sources. Besides, manufacturing industries are upgrading their existing facilities to reduce power consumption and comply with regulatory norms. All these developments are creating significant demand for automatic power factor controllers, thereby driving the market growth.

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Major Five Automatic Power Factor Controller Companies:

Eaton Corporation Plc

The company offers MV AutoVAR power factor controller.

General Electric Co.

The company offers GEMATIC Series and GEM Series power factor controllers.

Havells India Ltd.

The company offers power factor controllers such as IPFC CS 1003 and IPFC CS 1001.

Hitachi ABB Power Grids

The company offers power factor controller RVC and RVT.

Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

The company offers VAR 6A VAR 12A power factor controllers.

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Automatic Power Factor Controller Market Product Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2020-2025)

Active power factor controller - size and forecast 2020-2025

Passive power factor controller - size and forecast 2020-2025

Automatic Power Factor Controller Market End-user Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2020-2025)

Process industries - size and forecast 2020-2025

Discrete industries - size and forecast 2020-2025

Automatic Power Factor Controller Market Geography Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2020-2025)

APAC - size and forecast 2020-2025

North America - size and forecast 2020-2025

Europe - size and forecast 2020-2025

South America - size and forecast 2020-2025

MEA - size and forecast 2020-2025

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Global Micro Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) Market  Global micro programmable logic controller market is segmented by product (hardware, software, and services), end-user (automotive industry, oil and gas industry, power industry, food and beverage industry, and others), and geography (APAC, North America, Europe, South America, and MEA).

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Global Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) Market  Global programmable logic controller market is segmented by product (unitary, modular, and rackmount), end-user (process industry, discrete industry, and building automation), and geography (APAC, North America, Europe, MEA, and South America).

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LONDON, June 30 (Reuters) - Britain' Barclays will move its staff from across Canary Wharf into its headquarters in the London financial district, the bank said on Wednesday.

The lender will move its corporate and investment bank from the nearby 5 North Colonnade building into its main headquarters building, it said.

The move is part of a long-term review of its real estate footprint, Barclays added. (Reporting By Lawrence White; Editing by Dhara Ranasinghe)
SINGAPORE / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw, founder of GCG Asia has been awarded the Innovative Asian Fintech Companies Business Award for 2021.

"GCG Asia is rewriting the history of humanity right now, with an entrepreneurial journey at the speed of light and a high degree of creativity. They are pushing the limits of what we believed was possible, and they represent a success model that improves the world," said Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw, founder and CEO of GCG Asia.

Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw of GCG Asia accepted the award yesterday evening and stated, "We are celebrating our 5th anniversary this year. Over the years, we have experienced innumerable highs, found innovative solutions to various difficulties, and have always stayed loyal to our goal." GCG Asia's Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw also added, "This award not only feeds our entrepreneurial spirit, but it also encourages future generations to take chances and pursue their own dreams."

The Innovative Asian Fintech Companies Business Award is awarded to entrepreneurs who have demonstrated a strong entrepreneurial spirit and whose activities have contributed significantly to the development and expansion of fintech businesses in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia. The Innovative Asian Fintech Companies Committee selected Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw of GCG Asia for this prestigious award.

Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw started GCG Asia in 2016. Since then GCG Asia has been publishing its highly regarded financial technology magazines across South East Asia. The GCG Asia titles, both online and in print, are targeted towards financial technology entrepreneurs and business owners in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand. The weekly publications were picked up quickly and received reception from e-commerce industries in Asia for its informative and transparent nature.

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Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw added: "GCG Asia magazine is the world's most influential independent voice in Financial Technology. I'm proud that GCG Asia has diversified and currently spreads our distinctive voice throughout all of its digital media, maintaining and engaging a growing community of fintech enthusiasts in Asia and around the world, covering all elements of financial technology in print and digital publications."

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GCG Asia is a leading provider of Financial Technology digital publications, and latest news and updates. Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw's GCG Asia is now a diversified group encompassing media publishing, a start-up incubator and a fintech fund, GCG 2020. "GCG Asia is dedicated to helping Asian communities create a better, more inventive future. As we expand we will always be focussed on this mission, " said Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw.

"We've always pushed ourselves to be a digital pioneer in our industry as a tiny independent publisher. We also provide our readers with the option to attend live and virtual events, as well as listen to podcasts with some of the greatest names in Financial Technology," said GCG Asia founder Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw.

GCG Founder Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw also added: "Financial Technology is becoming increasingly popular. We are on track to accumulate 100 million monthly views across our online platforms."

In Asia, the Innovative Asian Fintech Companies has been awarding the IAFC Business Award since 2010. The prize was first given out in Singapore in 2010. The award has been known as the IAFC Business Award since 2010, and it is given in the South East Asian region. IAFC had the honor of meeting and working with some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs during the year. This has provided a thorough understanding of this dynamic population, which is characterized by similar behavior patterns and attitudes regardless of sector or background.

Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw is now eligible for consideration for the Entrepreneur of The Year 2021 ASEAN program. At the Entrepreneur of The Year 2021 ASEAN Awards ceremony in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, originally scheduled to take place in January, 2022, award winners in many categories, as well as the winner of the Entrepreneur of The Year 2021 ASEAN Award, will be revealed.

Company Information

GCG Asia is a leading provider of Financial Technology training resources, digital publications, and news.

For more information

Visit cgexperience

Address: Wan Chai, Hong Kong, SAR

Email: cgexperience@emailme.cloud

SOURCE: GCG Asia





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OTTAWA, ON, July 2, 2021 /CNW/ - The global COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on the air sector in Canada. Airports have experienced major decreases in traffic over the past 15 months, resulting in significant loss of income. Despite these challenges, airports have continued to play a crucial role by providing essential air services for regional communities by ensuring they maintain their connection with the rest of Canada.

Today, the Minister of Transport, the Honourable Omar Alghabra, and the President of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, the Honourable Dominic LeBlanc, announced that the Greater Moncton Romeo LeBlanc International Airport will receive over $1.8 million from Transport Canada's Airport Relief Fund to help the airport recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to support continued essential air services for residents and workers in Moncton and its surrounding communities.

In addition, the Minister highlighted that the Government of Canada is also providing the airport with just over $5 million from Transport Canada's Airports Capital Assistance Program for the purchase of an aircraft rescue firefighting vehicle, the rehabilitation of Runway 11-23, and the replacement of taxiway signs.

The Government of Canada is committed to supporting Canadians and ensuring they continue to have affordable and efficient air transportation options for years to come. As we move forward with the safe, gradual return of activity in the aviation sector, both in Canada and internationally, it is imperative that we continue to ensure a vibrant and competitive Canadian air sector.

Quotes

"Our airports are major contributors to Canada's economy, and play a crucial role in sustaining the social and economic well-being of our communities. This financial support will ensure that, as Canada works towards recovery and travel restart post pandemic, the Greater Moncton Romeo LeBlanc International Airport will be able to provide regional accessibility, and safe, reliable and efficient air services for residents and workers in Moncton and its surrounding communities."

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The Honourable Omar Alghabra

Minister of Transport

"The Greater Moncton Romeo LeBlanc International Airport is a key transportation hub not just for the Greater Moncton Area, but for much of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. It connects us with relatives, helps us discover new destinations, and is a pivotal trade corridor for many Maritime exporters of seafood and other commodities. As New Brunswick is once again welcoming tourists from all over Canada, this funding will be an important part of ensuring the Greater Moncton Romeo LeBlanc International Airport can fully participate in the post-pandemic economic recovery."

The Honourable Dominic LeBlanc

President of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs

Quick Facts

On May 11, 2021, the Government of Canada launched the Airport Relief Fund which will provide $64.8 million for airports whose 2019 revenues were less than $250 million.

The amount of funding to each eligible recipient was calculated using a tiered formula-based approach, based on 2019 revenues.

Funding provided from the Airport Relief Fund must be used to cover activities that are directly related to the airport's operations to ensure that the airport remains open to travellers and surrounding communities.

The Airports Capital Assistance Program is an existing contribution funding program which provides financial assistance to regional airports for safety-related capital infrastructure projects and equipment to ensure the continued safe operation of the airports for passengers, air crews and airport employees.

On May 11, 2021, the Minister announced that Transport Canada's Airports Capital Assistance Program was receiving a funding top-up of $186 million over two years and expanding its eligibility to larger airports like the Greater Moncton Romeo LeBlanc International Airport.

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SOURCE Transport Canada

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A one-stop, programmatic ad platform to amplify brand messaging across Huawei's mobile ecosystem

BANGKOK, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei's mobile advertising division, HUAWEI Ads, is expanding its business in Thailand by introducing more partner support and diverse ad solutions, aiming to encourage local advertisers to onboard the platform and amplify their brand messages across the Huawei ecosystem.

HUAWEI Ads is a one-stop, programmatic advertising marketplace by Huawei Mobile Services. The platform provides diverse ad solutions and end-to-end support for advertisers to achieve joint business growth in the digital ad environment. Interested advertisers can visit https://bit.ly/HuaweiAdsAPACT to download the HUAWEI Ads media kit and book a demo session to learn more about the platform.

Launched in 2020 in the Asia-Pacific region, HUAWEI Ads is a one-stop, programmatic advertising marketplace tailored for Huawei devices. The service integrates with the underlying algorithms and architecture of Huawei devices, making it the most effective platform to reach Huawei's over 730 million global users across devices such as smartphones, PCs and tablets.

Through HUAWEI Ads, advertisers can choose from diverse ad options for placements within Huawei's native and third-party apps, according to their campaign objectives. Currently, HUAWEI Ads is integrated into more than 10,000 high-traffic third-party apps in APAC. Besides standard display ads, HUAWEI Ads also comes with innovative formats such as custom placements on AppGallery, Huawei's official app store, and new search ads on Petal Search.

The HUAWEI Ads platform supports real-time and programmatic biddings, and precise targeting features such as lookalike audiences and retargeting. This ensures that the advertiser's messages and placements are directed to the ideal users who fit their consumer demographics. Additionally, HUAWEI Ads provides tools such as Smart Bidding and Smart Banners, along with one-click installation links, to give advertisers more control over the ad settings.



In addition, all HUAWEI Ads inventories have integrated with the international standard Open Measure Software Development Kit (OM SDK). This is a set of software tools designed by IAB Tech Lab for facilitating third-party viewability of measurement data. OM SKD-enabled media helps generate uniform ad viewability reports for each ad placed in the app environment, providing HUAWEI Ads advertisers with accurate and consistent third-party independent data to better evaluate their ad performance and ensure fairness and transparency in the programmatic ad marketplace.

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All-round support to nurture business growth

HUAWEI Ads also provides end-to-end support from the onboarding process to ad optimisation for Thai advertisers in a commitment to build a sustainable digital ad environment. Qualified advertisers and certified agencies in Thailand will be able to enjoy the following benefits:

Free advertising credit for direct advertisers that qualify for the trial programme

Rebates on media spend for eligible and certified agencies

Dedicated support from the local team to guide through the onboarding process

Expert training on ad campaign setup and optimisation

New product beta testing opportunities for certified partners

Advertisers interested in the HUAWEI Ads service can visit https://bit.ly/HuaweiAdsAPACT to download the HUAWEI Ads media kit and book a demo session to learn more about the platform.

SOURCE Huawei Mobile Services
Insurance4Dallas, a Arlington health insurance agency, says President Bidens decision to engineer a series of expansions will undoubtedly boost Medicaid enrollment in the coming months.

Arlington, Texas, United States , July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Health insurance in Arlington is sure to see increased protections for millions of low-income Americans as the current administration continues its deliberate and fast-acting push to expand Medicaid through a series of policy changes and safety nets to protect more Americans than ever before. These changes, as many have stated, are a slap in the face to the former administrations attempts to scale back safety nets, comments Insurance4Dallass representative, Rick Thornton.

For more information, go to http://insurance4dallas.com/arlington-health-insurance

According to a report by Fierce Healthcare the COVID-19 relief bill pushed Medicaid enrollment to a record 80.5 million in January  a ruse of 70 million pre-COVID. With more people looking for opportunities to enroll, these safety nets will allow new mothers, inmates, and undocumented immigrants to the list of those who could gain coverage, per the report. At the same time, the current administration is instituting new Medicaid-funded services such as food and housing that hasnt been offered in the past. Many believe this is great news, especially for those with an Arlington health insurance policy.

Rick Thornton, an Arlington health insurance agent said this is a very bold action to reverse limited options available from the previous administration, and that these are some of the more substantial shifts in federal healthcare policy that we have ever seen. Medicaid was created to provide medical care to low-income Americans, but it has always had limitations riddled throughout the law. Thornton added that while there are always risks with any undertaking of this size and scope, we should all see it as a huge win considering that boosting the programs reach will positively affect millions of Americans who are either uninsured or underinsured. The benefits, including home-based Medicaid being expanded will keep enrollees out of nursing home facilities moving forward, are way too good to pass up.

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Insurance4Dallas, (I4D), helps insure all of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Arizona, Louisiana, New Mexico, Alabama, Virginia and Florida. Insurance4Dallas provides consumers with detailed information on health insurance with the ability to purchase health insurance online. Insurance4Dallas provides a full spectrum of health, dental, vision, life and ancillary insurance products, providing a diverse selection of price and benefit options complemented by personal customer service. Available via phone, email or fax, Insurance4Dallas answers consumer questions throughout the purchasing process and during the utilization of its health insurance policies.



Website: https://insurance4dallas.com/arlington-health-insurance-agent/

CONTACT: Name: Rick Thornton Organization: Insurance4Dallas Address: 2131 North Collins Street Suite 433-517, Arlington, Texas 76011, United States Phone: +1-817-607-3321




LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / The Schall Law Firm, a national shareholder rights litigation firm, reminds investors of a class action lawsuit against Rekor Systems, Inc. f/k/a Novume Solutions, Inc. ('Rekor' or 'the Company') (NASDAQ:REKR) (NVMM) for violations of 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Investors who purchased the Company's securities between April 12, 2019 and May 25, 2021, inclusive (the ''Class Period''), are encouraged to contact the firm before August 30, 2021.

If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate.

We also encourage you to contact Brian Schall of the Schall Law Firm, 2049 Century Park East, Suite 2460, Los Angeles, CA 90067, at 310-301-3335, to discuss your rights free of charge. You can also reach us through the firm's website at www.schallfirm.com, or by email at brian@schallfirm.com.

The class, in this case, has not yet been certified, and until certification occurs, you are not represented by an attorney. If you choose to take no action, you can remain an absent class member.

According to the Complaint, the Company made false and misleading statements to the market. Rekor's business in automatic license plate recognition ('ALPR') technology and uninsured vehicle enforcement diversion ('UVED') was not competitive with competitors that already held a dominant market share. It was unlikely that other states would approve legislation allowing deals with the Company similar to its partnership in Oklahoma due to privacy concerns. The Company's UVED partnership had not attained the level of profitability that it had touted to the market. Based on these facts, the Company's public statements were false and materially misleading throughout the class period. When the market learned the truth about Rekor, investors suffered damages.

Story continues

Join the case to recover your losses.

The Schall Law Firm represents investors around the world and specializes in securities class action lawsuits and shareholder rights litigation.

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and rules of ethics.

Contacts

The Schall Law Firm

Brian Schall, Esq.,

www.schallfirm.com

Office: 310-301-3335

info@schallfirm.com

SOURCE: The Schall Law Firm





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(Bloomberg) -- London moved back ahead of Amsterdam as Europes largest share trading center in June, reclaiming the top spot for the first time this year after Brexit pushed much of the citys volumes to the continent.

An average 8.92 billion euros ($10.6 billion) of shares a day were traded on various London venues in June, compared with 8.8 billion euros for various Dutch venues, according to data from Cboe Europe.

This compares with about 9.4 billion euros average daily trading value for Amsterdam in May and around 8.7 billion euros in London. Paris, the third largest venue, saw its daily trading decline from almost 6.1 billion euros in May to 5.8 billion euros in June.

While Londons return to the top spot is a welcome boost for a U.K. finance industry buffeted by Brexit, the citys lead over Amsterdam is a fraction of what it was before the end of the transition period. In December, Londons share trading volumes stood at 14.3 billion euros compared to 2.2 billion euros for Amsterdam, according to Cboe data.

Britain lost its rights to access the European Unions single market on Dec. 31 and the bloc has not permitted investors inside its borders to trade shares in companies such as Airbus SE and BNP Paribas SA from the U.K. The EU could eventually reopen access by recognizing the U.K. markets as equivalent to its own, though there is little sign of movement in this process.

London has gained some volumes this year from Swiss equity trading, which resumed after the U.K. dropped out of an EU-wide ban that has been in place since 2019.

The shifts in trading volume between cities is unlikely to have much of an impact on the bottom line for brokers and trading platforms. The regions biggest players, including the London Stock Exchange Group Plc and Cboe, operate venues in both London and the EU, enabling them to grab a share of the business no matter the location.

But the change is a symbolic fillip for the City and comes the same week that Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak outlined plans to maintain Londons status as a top financial center.

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The return of Swiss share trading has helped overturn what has been just a temporary phase, said Alberto Tocchio, a portfolio manager at Kairos Partners. London will soon regain the status of European and global trading hub and it could easily benefit from being away from the restrictive EU rules.

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Top U.N. officials warned the Security Council on Friday (July 2) that more than 400,000 people in Ethiopia's Tigray region were now in famine, and that there was a risk of more clashes in the region despite a unilateral ceasefire by the federal government. Acting U.N. aid chief Ramesh Rajasingham told the council that the humanitarian situation in Tigray had "worsened dramatically" in recent weeks "One of the most distressing trends is an alarming rise in food insecurity and hunger due to conflict. More than 400,000 people are estimated to have crossed the threshold into famine and another 1.8 million people are on the brink of famine. Some are suggesting that the numbers are even higher. Thirty-three thousand children are severely malnourished." The Security Council held its first public meeting since fighting broke out in November between government forces, backed by troops from neighboring Eritrea, and Tigray Peoples Liberation Front fighters with the northern regions former ruling party. Food aid destined for Tigray was held for four days at a checkpoint controlled by government-allied Amhara regional forces last weekend. Ethiopia on Friday (July 2) denied blocking the humanitarian aid, amid accusations it is using hunger as a weapon. Images obtained by Reuters on Friday also show a bridge used to deliver supplies into Tigray region destroyed. The pictures, taken by Planet Labs, visually confirm UN ground reporting, of the Amba Bridge over Tezeke River being damaged. The World Food Program raised the alarm at the destruction of two major bridges leading into Tigray from Gondar on Thursday (July 1). The Ethiopian government declared a unilateral ceasefire on Monday, which the TPLF dismissed as a joke.
There has been a definite impact of the coronavirus outbreak on the overall foodservice business, with various segments being affected in varying degrees in Saudi Arabia. Foodservice operators and caterers are on the front line of rising inflation, as the Catering Price Index (that is affected by the price and sales of food products) rose by 2.

New York, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Saudi Arabia Foodservice Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact and Forecasts (2021 - 2026)" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06101213/?utm_source=GNW

0% from the previous year i.e. 2019, boosted by food price hikes.



In-restaurant dining is the worst-hit segment, largely due to the travel curbs and a general avoidance of people getting into larger gatherings and social distancing regulations, thereby closing the increasing number of restaurants in the country and reducing their profits subsequently. For instance, HerfyFood Services Company, a Saudi food service company, reported a 16.40% drop in its revenue from the year 2019 to 2020, due to the impact of COVID-19 in the country (as per the annual report of Savola Group).



However, the increasing demand for home delivery and foodservice providers is expected to drive the markets growth. Increasing health consciousness and growing rate of obesity among the Saudi Arabian population are challenging the market.



The full-service restaurant segment accounted for the major share in the market, owing to the strong presence of the millennial population, the growing tourism industry, and acceptance of western culture across the country. Consequently, the United States casual dining restaurants, such as Chilis, Fuddruckers, TGI Fridays, Applebees, Sizzler, and On The Border, are very popular and located in all the major cities of Saudi Arabia.



Key Market Trends

Increasing Internet Connectivity and Consumer Spending



The growth of the Saudi Arabian online food delivery market is driven by a young futuristic population, rising purchasing power, internet connectivity, and modern and changing lifestyles. As per the data published by ITU, Saudi Arabia ranks third in terms of smartphone penetration, globally, and it is ahead of countries, such as the United States, Britain, France, and Germany.



Moreover, in the country, the share of mobile payments is expected to increase shortly, due to increased consumer confidence, mainly posed by the increasing safety measures taken by the Saudi Arabian government toward the security of online payments. Additionally, other key market indicators, such as consumer spending, are recording robust growth in the country, thereby providing widespread opportunities for the online food delivery market.



Thus, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia represents a unique opportunity for unmatched growth in the online-food-ordering platform. The online food ordering industry is expected to continue to witness rapid growth, and it is expected to emerge as the fastest growing industry in the e-commerce arena.?



Full-service Restaurants Led the National Market Growth



The full-service restaurant segment is highly competitive in Saudi Arabia, owing to the presence of a large number of small and major players. The countrys consumers, including the high number of expats and tourists, are tilted toward western-style casual dining, especially the European and American cuisines.



Consequently, the United States casual dining restaurants, such as Chilis, Fuddruckers, TGI Fridays, Applebees, Sizzler, and On The Boarder, are very popular and located in all the major cities of Saudi Arabia.? Independent foodservice channels maintain a dominant position in the full-service restaurant segment, as they provide dine-in restaurant services with an extensive menu.? During Ramadan, to attract consumers, full-service restaurants, including Hyatt Regency Tent and The Ritz-Carlton Residences, are trying to compete with local restaurants to provide a better culinary experience, which is driving the market further.



Competitive Landscape

The Saudi Arabia foodservice market is a competitive market with numerous players existing in the market. The United States-based fast-food chains continue to dominate the fast-food restaurant sector in this region, with food chains like McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Starbucks, and Dominos Pizza accounting for a significant presence. The leading players in the foodservice market enjoy a dominant presence in this region. There is stiff competition among the foodservice providers based on pricing, quality of food service, calorie intake per meal, and healthier menu options.



Reasons to Purchase this report:

- The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format

- 3 months of analyst support

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06101213/?utm_source=GNW



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



__________________________

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CONTACT: Clare: clare@reportlinker.com US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001




NEW YORK, July 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Washington Prime Group, Inc. ("WPG" or the "Company") (NYSE: WPG). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at newaction@pomlaw.com or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980.

Fighting for victims of securities fraud for more than 85 years (PRNewsfoto/Pomerantz LLP)

The investigation concerns whether WPG and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

On February 16, 2021, WPG disclosed that its operating partnership, WPG L.P., had "elected to withhold an interest payment of $23.2 million due on February 15, 2021 with respect to WPG L.P.'s outstanding Senior Notes due 2024," and that "WPG L.P. has a 30-day grace period to make the interest payment before such non-payment constitutes an 'event of default.'" The Company further advised that, in an event of default, certain counterparties to the senior notes "could accelerate the outstanding indebtedness due . . . making such indebtedness due and payable, which would result in a cross-default with respect to some of WPG L.P.'s or the Company's other indebtedness."

On this news, WPG's stock price fell $4.59 per share, or 38%, to close at $7.49 per share on February 16, 2021.

Then, on March 4, 2021, Bloomberg reported that WPG "is preparing a potential bankruptcy filing as time runs out to avert default after it skipped an interest payment on its debt, according to people with knowledge of the plans." On this news, WPG's stock price fell $3.77 per share, or 60%, to close at $2.51 per share on March 4, 2021. Then, on March 16, 2021, WPG disclosed that it had entered into a forbearance agreement with respect to the Senior Notes due in 2024 and stated there was substantial doubt as the Company's ability to continue as a going concern. The Company confirmed that it had engaged in discussions for a financial restructuring.

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The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com.

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

rswilloughby@pomlaw.com

888-476-6529 ext. 7980

Cision

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SOURCE Pomerantz LLP
Binance logo and stock graph are displayed in this illustration taken

By Noor Zainab Hussain and Tom Wilson

(Reuters) - Thailand's financial watchdog filed a criminal complaint against cryptocurrency exchange Binance on Friday for operating a digital asset business without a licence, the latest in a string of crackdowns on the platform by regulators globally.

Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said in a statement that Binance had been operating a digital asset business "in the category of a digital asset exchange" without a licence.

In Thailand, only licensed firms are allowed to provide services related to digital asset trading, the SEC said.

The Commission had warned Binance over its activities in a letter in April but received no response, it said, leading it to then file a criminal complaint with the Thai police.

A Binance spokesperson declined to comment specifically on the Thai complaint, saying it takes a collaborative approach to working with regulators and takes its compliance obligations seriously.

Britain's financial watchdog last week barred the company, one of the world's biggest exchanges, from carrying out regulated activities in the country.

Japan's regulator said last week Binance was operating in the country illegally, while Germany's watchdog said in April it risked being fined for offering tokens connected to stocks.

In May, Bloomberg reported Binance was under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service.

The complaint filed in Thailand by the SEC is the start of a criminal procedure, with a police investigation possibly leading to a recommendation to a public attorney who has authority for prosecution, the Commission said.

The offence carries a penalty of two to five years imprisonment, a fine of 200,000-500,000 baht ($6,200-15,500), and a further daily fine of up to 10,000 baht for every day the contravention continues, it added.

Trading volumes at the exchange in June were $662 billion, up almost ten-fold from July 2020, according to data from CryptoCompare.

(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru and Tom Wilson in London; Editing by Arun Koyyur and Jan Harvey)
Verizon Frontline technology has been delivered to 14 locations in Arizona by the Verizon Response Team (VRT) to help enable mission-critical communications in remote areas as first responders battle wildfires throughout the state.



The VRT is supporting, or has supported, interagency fire management teams in their efforts to combat 11 wildfires in Arizona.

Verizon Frontline is the advanced network and technology built for first responders, developed over three decades of partnership with the public safety community.



PHOENIX, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Verizon Frontline recently deployed its advanced public safety platforms and technology, via the Verizon Response Team (VRT) , to support first responders battling wildfires throughout Arizona.

Collaborating with interagency officials, the VRT delivered Verizon Frontline technology, including a Satellite Pico-cell on a Trailer (SPOT) to the site of the Backbone fire and another to the site of the Horton fire, to provide mission-critical voice and data service to public safety professionals as they combated fires throughout the state. Verizon Frontline technology was also distributed to interagency command posts across Arizona, to help enable coordination efforts as first responders battled 11 wildfires. This technology included repeaters, routers, mobile hotspots and smartphones.

This VRT support, provided at the request of the local public safety officials, is a continuation of Verizon Public Sectors commitment to working alongside our partners in public safety and government.

Verizon Frontline is the advanced network and technology built for first responders  developed over nearly three decades of partnership with public safety officials and agencies  to meet their unique needs. From network priority and preemption and a commitment to real interoperability, to developing and delivering the most innovative product roadmap, Verizon Frontline is built on Americas most reliable network1, and will be able to harness the transformative power of 5G1.

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The VRT provides on-demand, emergency assistance during crisis situations to government agencies, emergency responders, nonprofits and communities on a 24/7/365 basis. VRT members set up portable cell sites, WiFi hotspots, free charging stations and other devices and solutions that enable communications and/or boost network performance.

1 RootMetrics US RootScore Report: 2H 2020. Tested natl operators on all available all network types. Experience may vary. Award is not endorsement. 5G Nationwide available in 2700+ cities. 5G Ultra Wideband available only in part of select cities.

Media contact:

Eric Durie

eric.durie@verizon.com

(516) 382-8219




VANCOUVER, BC, July 2, 2021 /CNW/ - As more and more communities in British Columbia are being threatened by wildfire, Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) is reaching out with information and advice.

"The priority right now is the safety of those affected and their loved ones. Our thoughts are with those whose lives have been disrupted and whose homes have been destroyed," said Aaron Sutherland, Vice-President, Western & Pacific, IBC. "The insurance industry is here to help. Anyone with questions about their home or business insurance can call their insurance representative or call IBC's Consumer Information Centre at 18442askIBC."

What insurance covers

Standard home and business insurance policies cover fire damage and additional living expenses  for things like food, shelter, and clothing  if residents have to leave their homes because of a mandatory evacuation order issued by civil authorities.

Mass evacuation or state of emergency

If you've been ordered to leave your home, keep the receipts for your living expenses. Most homeowner's and tenant's insurance policies cover any reasonable additional living expenses for a specified period of time.

Ask your insurance representative about the amount of living expenses you're entitled to claim.

How to start the claims process

Once the evacuation order is lifted and it is safe to return to your home, if your property has been damaged by wildfire, take the following steps before contacting your insurance representative:

Assess and document the damage. Take photos and make a list of all damaged or destroyed items as best you can.

Keep damaged items unless they pose a health hazard.

If possible, assemble proofs of purchase, photos, receipts, owners' manuals or warranties for damaged items.

Keep all of the receipts related to cleanup and for your living expenses while you were evacuated.

Next steps  what to expect

Once you have reported a loss, you will be assigned a claims adjuster. It may take some time, given the number of people affected by the wildfires, but you will be contacted.

The claims adjuster will investigate the circumstances of your loss, examine the documents you provide and explain the process. Take notes during the conversations and don't be afraid to ask questions.

Your insurance company will ask you to complete a Proof of Loss form to list the property and/or items that have been damaged or destroyed.

You must sign and swear that the statements you make in the Proof of Loss form are true.

Ask your insurance representative or claims adjuster to clarify anything you are unsure about.

Resources

Anyone with questions should contact their insurance representative or IBC's Consumer Information Centre at 1-844-2ask-IBC.

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For additional information, consumers can also visit BC Wildfires or email askibcwest@ibc.ca.

Wildfires - we're here to help. Tips from Insurance Bureau of Canada (CNW Group/Insurance Bureau of Canada)

About Insurance Bureau of Canada

Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) is the national industry association representing Canada's private home, auto and business insurers. Its member companies make up 90% of the property and casualty (P&C) insurance market in Canada. For more than 50 years, IBC has worked with governments across the country to help make affordable home, auto and business insurance available for all Canadians. IBC supports the vision of consumers and governments trusting, valuing and supporting the private P&C insurance industry. It champions key issues and helps educate consumers on how best to protect their homes, cars, businesses and properties.

For media releases and more information, visit IBC's Media Centre at www.ibc.ca . Follow us on Twitter @IBC_Pacific or like us on Facebook. If you have a question about home, auto or business insurance, contact IBC's Consumer Information Centre at 1-844-2ask-IBC.

Insurance Bureau of Canada Logo (CNW Group/Insurance Bureau of Canada)

SOURCE Insurance Bureau of Canada

Cision

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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 hopefulnessand 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. Thats 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 wont be attending.
Behrns said emergency preparedness is a major component of Field Day. Ham radio operators played key roles in major disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and several California earthquakes. The relatively simple means of communication  some devices can be powered with five watts of energy  allows operators to relay information in a fast and effective way.

You hope that it never happens, but there could be emergencies where all of the major means of communication are stopped, Behrns said. In cases where cellphone infrastructure or broadcast towers are taken offline by a tornado or hurricane or something of that nature, this might be the last resort of communication. Thats why its important to practice our skills and keep them as current as possible.

This years Field Day took place under sunny weather with average temperatures, but group members have been able to practice their skills in less-than-ideal conditions before. This has given them the chance to figure out how to operate their radio gear in windy, rainy or very hot weather.

Group members began the event on Saturday after hooking up their radio equipment in the Young Park shelterhouse. They then spent the next 24 hours checking different radio frequencies to locate people in as many states as possible.
As a senator, Walz said its important for her to listen to both sides of an issue so she can learn more about the topic.

One of the things that I love about being in the Legislature is the opportunity I have to represent my constituents and the opportunity I have to learn the issues about the people who live in Nebraska, she said. One of my favorite things to do is to be able to actually make a difference in somebodys life.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, Walz said the Legislature was negatively impacted, as visitors like lobbyists and fourth-graders werent allowed to enter the building.

One of my favorite things about being in the Legislature is being on a committee and listening to the public come in and talk about the issues that are important to them regarding a bill, she said. And so COVID made that really difficult.

Although she served on the Natural Resources Committee for two years and has been on the Health and Human Services Committee for three, Walzs presentation focused on her work on the Education Committee.

Having been on the Education Committee for the four years shes been in the Legislature, Walz was elected as its chair last year, which she called a really big honor.
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Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Sunshine this morning. Scattered thunderstorms developing this afternoon. High around 85F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 61F. S winds shifting to NNW at 10 to 15 mph.
Firefighters contained a small fire that broke out in the attic of a home in northeast Colorado Springs Thursday afternoon.

At around 4:20 p.m., the Colorado Springs Fire Department responded to the scene of a working fire in the house at 2930 Del Rey Plaza. They had the fire contained about 13 minutes later.

"It was about an eight-minute response time, and five minutes to get the fire out once we arrived," public information officer Mike Smaldino said.

Six firetrucks and around 28 firefighters were on scene at around 5 p.m., Smaldino said, in part to determine if there were still hot spots where the fire was burning.

Fire now out on Del Rey. Fire contained to the attic. Crews will remain on scene looking for hotspots pic.twitter.com/0ZUJX28afG  CSFD PIO (@CSFDPIO) July 1, 2021

Public information officer Mike Smaldino said that no one was injured in the fire, and that fire investigators were speaking with neighbors in order to determine what started it.
Pooling societys collective intelligence helped fight COVID  it must help fight future crises too

A Global Pandemic Radar is to be created to detect new COVID variants and other emerging diseases. Led by the WHO, the project aims to build an international network of surveillance hubs, set up to share data thatll help us monitor vaccine resistance, track diseases and identify new ones as they emerge.

This is undeniably a good thing. Perhaps more than any event in recent memory, the COVID pandemic has brought home the importance of pooling societys collective intelligence and finding new ways to share that combined knowledge as quickly as possible.

At its simplest, collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity thats created when diverse groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilize more information, ideas and knowledge to solve a problem. Digital technologies have transformed what can be achieved through collective intelligence in recent years  connecting more of us, augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence, and helping us to generate new insights from novel sources of data.

So what have we learned over the last 18 months of collective intelligence pooling that can inform the Global Pandemic Radar? Building from the COVID crisis, what lessons will help us perfect disease surveillance and respond better to future crises?

People want to help scientists

Responding to new and emerging threats requires new methods for filling data and evidence gaps fast. Collective intelligence methods like citizen science have been widely used in the environmental sector for years, but savvy scientists quickly saw the opportunity to deploy these and other approaches to tap into the publics appetite to contribute to the COVID-19 response.

Before doctors had access to mass community testing or accurate forecasting, for instance, data provided by the public was a valuable early source of information. For example, researchers at Kings College London quickly developed the COVID Zoe symptom tracker app, to which over 4.6 million people have contributed their symptoms since March 2020. This data played a critical role in helping us understand how the virus affects different groups of people, exposing the variety of COVID-19 symptoms people have experienced.

Even gamers have played their part behind the scenes. Project Discovery is described as a citizen science mini-game, in which gamers explore outer space while drawing polygons around clusters of cells. The cell populations they trace around are from flow cytometry data that would ordinarily be painstakingly pored over by scientists to see how a COVID infection affects different types of cell. Over 327,000 gamers have taken part since June 2020, saving scientists an estimated 330 years of research.

Perhaps more visibly, vaccine development efforts have also been fueled by volunteers. Over 500,000 people signed up to the UKs COVID vaccine studies volunteer service.

Scientific training and research funding is not usually geared towards public participation and collaboration. That means, despite the potential, the public is typically excluded from participation in scientific research. Changing this might help us shift the dial on preventing the next pandemic and tackling a whole host of our other complex challenges, such as climate change.

Making sense of too much data

Alongside this rise in citizen science, 2020 was also a bumper year for scientific research, seeing a 15% increase in paper submissions. Over 475,000 COVID-related papers and pre-prints have been shared online as of June 2021.

This feverish scientific reporting, especially intense in the field of health and medicine, has raised concerns about quality control. Traditional processes of peer review have come under strain, with papers increasingly released as pre-prints, before theyve been peer reviewed. Meanwhile, decision-makers face the challenge of finding the most relevant resources in the face of information overload.

The collaborative health evidence database, Epistemonikos, offers some relief to these challenges. It uses a combination of machine learning algorithms and crowd validation to identify all of the clinical systematic reviews related to the search query entered by the user.
INDUSTRY INSIGHT

Why quantum and data protection should go hand in hand

If the May 7 ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline was a wakeup call, you have been taking a surprisingly good sleeping pill!

Critical infrastructure has long been a popular target for adversaries and sophisticated criminal organizations. The hacking gang and ransomware extortionists known as DarkSide infiltrated Colonials systems through a compromised password on an old, disused VPN account, leveraging it not only to deploy ransomware but also to steal more than 100 GB of data.

How cybercriminals can use that information in the future depends on the data itself, but its clear that the vast tranches of data can have a life far beyond their immediate resale in some sketchy Dark Web forum. Stolen data can contain sensitive corporate intellectual property, personally identifiable information and protected health information such as fingerprints and DNA sequencing. More than 37 billion data records were stolen in 2020, up 141% from the year before even as the volume of publicly disclosed data breaches fell by 48%, according to Risk Based Security. Much of this encrypted data is stockpiled, waiting for the day when a quantum computer is available to easy break its encryption -- an attack vector known as harvesting.

The devastating series of attacks on federal agencies and partners  SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange Server and now the Colonial Pipeline  has prompted government to take action. On May 12, 2021, the Biden administration announced an Executive Order on improving the nations cybersecurity and strengthening federal network defenses.

The EO pushes the federal government and private industry to work together to modernize cybersecurity practices, secure software development, strengthen incident response, improve threat detection and information sharing and accelerate investigation and remediation.

Before agencies rush to check the EO boxes, they should first perform a cybersecurity risk assessment to identify gaps, define a risk profile and align mitigation priorities and strategies with their overall risk appetite. A sound enterprise risk management profile should consider modern-day vulnerabilities and present risk scenarios but also those in the foreseeable future.

The era of quantum computing is fast approaching, and with it the greatest threat to cryptography at a scale never seen before. A quantum computer will be able to break RSA-2048, considered the gold standard for Public Key Encryption (PKE), the system that has for years protected our digital universe. While the National Institute for Standards and Technology has been working to down-select post-quantum cryptographic algorithm candidates, the standards body warns another five to 15 years may be needed before full transition is completed. Quantum risk assessment  or the steps needed to identify and safeguard infrastructure and critical data in the post-quantum world  should be part of an agencys overall cybersecurity risk management program, current data security practices and EO compliancy efforts.

Because government data security requirements have a much longer shelf-life than other industries -- up to 50 years in the case of official intelligence -- it is reasonable to assume this data may be vulnerable to quantum attack if not protected properly today. Any country that attains a quantum computing system of sufficient power will be able to decrypt stored data with ease  and odds are an adversary is unlikely to divulge this intelligence advantage. These facts, and the continued use of outdated security models and unencrypted data by critical infrastructure operators, require organizations to make bold, future-proof changes to their cybersecurity practices.

Federal agencies and their partners looking to update their encryption infrastructure to comply with the EO and better protect long-duration data should conduct a quantum risk assessment and deploy quantum-safe solutions for protecting their data today and in the quantum-enabled future. Failing to do so, could cause premature obsolescence of any upgraded system or architecture -- a costly and risk-intense scenario best avoided.

To expedite EO mandates and initiate cybersecurity and quantum risk assessment, agencies should begin with the following two-step process:

Step 1 . Perform a cybersecurity risk analysis using the existing baseline derived from a qualitative approach, such as NISTs Cybersecurity Framework, then build to a quantitative approach (e.g., Sim Segals value-based enterprise risk management process) to measure the impact on the organization. Using these findings, agencies leaders can prioritize cybersecurity next steps and budget allocation.

. Perform a cybersecurity risk analysis using the existing baseline derived from a qualitative approach, such as NISTs Cybersecurity Framework, then build to a quantitative approach (e.g., Sim Segals value-based enterprise risk management process) to measure the impact on the organization. Using these findings, agencies leaders can prioritize cybersecurity next steps and budget allocation. Step 2 . Determine the value of data focusing on persistent data (time to value) to incorporate zero-trust and layered security architectures and solutions. Then, secure existing network communications links by preventing the theft of the encryption keys. Next-generation key distribution systems are turning PKE on its head, by leveraging out-of-band key delivery that separates the encryption key from the data path, sent over a separate quantum-safe network. This architectural approach to encrypting data in motion, where two keys are in play, does not impact network performance or reliability, meets many of the mandates outlined in Section 3 of the EO and extends the life of existing encryption infrastructures into the quantum era with minimal lift or outlay.

The White House Executive Order on Improving the Nations Cybersecurity is a good step forward in advancing efforts by the nation and industry to identify, deter and protect against malicious actions and actors. We must now each do our part to ensure this matter of national security and trust is a success by implementing controls to manage and mitigate not only the cyberattacks of today but also the potential threats of tomorrow.
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Property containing Cato Fashions and JOANN Fabrics in Mason City currently involved in tax sale

When the office of Cerro Gordo County Treasurer Pat Wright put out the most-recent delinquent tax list earlier this month, two parcels alone accounted for 20% of the total $835,544 owed by 504 parcels.

Westside Holdings, which does business as Westside Manor Apartments on 2401 S. Taft Ave., had $104,002 listed while Willow Creek Center Outlot II, which does business as Cato Fashions and JOANN Fabrics and Crafts, had $65,977 listed as being owed.

Lisa Grouette / LISA GROUETTE, Globe Gazette The parcel of land that JOANN Fabrics and Cato Fashions sit upon is listed as part of a tax sale according to the Cerro Gordo County treasurer's office.

According to Wright, both were sold at a tax sale by the county on June 21. She said that the former went to Pearwood Management with Union Bank out of Lincoln, Nebraska, as the secured bank, while Willow Creek Center Outlot II went to Hawkeye Lien Services, also with Union Bank out of Lincoln, Nebraska, as the secured bank.

In the time since, she said that the Westside Holdings parcel was "redeemed," which means it's off the books and there's no longer a lien in the treasurer's office. But, per Wright, the Willow Creek Center Outlot II parcel is still outstanding.

"I havent seen that that is done yet," she said.

See who's on Cerro Gordo County's delinquent tax list View Cerro Gordo's delinquent tax list here:

On the Beacon.SchneiderCorp.com website, which tracks property information, the deed holder address for that outlot, where Cato Fashions and JOANN Fabrics and Crafts are, is listed as: 8410 Gross Point Road in Skokie, Illinois, which is about 15 miles north of the city of Chicago. Wright also confirmed the Skokie, Illinois address.

A search for that location on Google turns up "Sierra Realty & Management, LLC" which lists that address on its website and says that it's been in business since 2006 and oversees properties in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin. That includes apartment complexes in Ames and Des Moines. "We understand how to negotiate for the best prices and how to solve problems with ingenuity, rather than spending more than necessary," the last sentence in the welcome on the front page reads.

Over the phone, an employee for the company said that they were not aware of any tax sale involving a Willow Creek Center Outlot II and that they would have to contact their accounting department. They then declined to give their full name. When asked why, they said: "Theres no story."

In a follow-up call after that, Wright again confirmed that the owner of the parcel is out of Skokie, Illinois and that it was purchased at a tax sale.

"The tax sale is outstanding. The taxes are paid in a tax sale but they have to be paid back from Willow Creek Center so that we can pay Hawkeye Lien Services back," Wright said.

A search for Hawkeye Lien yields an address of 405 N. 115th Street in Omaha, Nebraska. Looking that address up brings up Adair Asset Management. Their listed phone number was called for this story but they have not responded. Iowa Code lays out that one year and nine months from a regular (one year) tax sale, a tax sale buyer can contact an attorney to start proceedings to obtain a tax sale deed. At that point, a 90-day redemption period often begins.

Mason City Council makes Southbridge Mall transformation official The date for closing is on or around August 28. The former Sears building could also soon see a total redevelopment.

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After the missing 1-year-old North Carolina child was found safe in Danville on Friday afternoon, the suspect in the incident that triggered an Amber Alert faces charges.

However, it looks like Gregory Newman, the boys father, will not be charged with kidnapping since he was the childs legal guardian, said Person County (N.C.) Sheriff Dewey Jones.

He was the legal guardian at the time, Jones said Friday. Kidnapping is not a likely charge.

Gregory Newman, who was on probation at the time of the incident, will be charged with assault on a female and larceny of a vehicle in connection with the incident, Jones said.

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Newman is suspected of assaulting Gabriels mother and taking the child, Jones said. Gabriel was safe and in good condition and his mother was on her way to pick him up from Danville on Friday afternoon, he said.

The U.S. Marshals Service took the lead in the investigation to find the father and son, with help from the Person County Sheriffs Office, Jones said.

Messages left at the U.S. Marshals Service Western District Office in Roanoke were not returned Friday afternoon.
12:15 P.M. UPDATE: A missing 1-year-old from North Carolina has been located in Danville and is safe, and his father was taken into custody, The (Roxboro, N.C.) Courier-Times reported early Friday afternoon.

The Person County Sheriff's Office told the newspaper that Gabriel Newman was safe.

Danville Police Department Capt. Richard Chivvis declined to confirm if the child and suspect were found in Danville, instead referring the Register & Bee to the Person County Sheriff's Office.

This story will be updated.

PREVIOUS STORY: Danville police helped in a search for a missing North Carolina 1-year-old after an Amber Alert was issued for the child and suspect last seen heading toward the city on Thursday.

The Person County (N.C.) Sheriff's Office is still searching for Gabriel Newman, a Black child with black hair and brown eyes, the Amber Alert stated.

He was last seen wearing a black-and-white Nike outfit and shorts with a black-and-white Nike logo.
PENHOOK  Patrols are ramping up in anticipation of another busy Fourth of July weekend at Smith Mountain Lake.

Conservation police officers with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources are encouraging boaters to be safe and sober this weekend with heavy traffic expected on the water.

Friday marks the start of the departments Operation Dry Water, a national awareness and enforcement campaign focused on reducing the number of alcohol and drug related fatalities on the water. It will continue into the Fourth of July weekend.

In addition to increasing awareness, a greater presence of conservation officers is expected this weekend to deter any bad behavior by boaters. Sgt. James Slaughter said between three and five boat patrols are expected to be on the water at any time during the weekend  especially at peak times in the afternoon and during lakes two scheduled fireworks shows on the water.

We anticipate this being a really busy weekend, Slaughter said.

The department has charged four people on Smith Mountain Lake with operating a boat under the influence of drugs or alcohol so far this year. Slaughter said it is not as much as in previous years, but the number is still concerning. It is up from where we would like to see it, he said.
WASHINGTON (AP)  U.S. and British agencies disclosed on Thursday details of brute force methods they say have been used by Russian intelligence to try to break into the cloud services of hundreds of government agencies, energy companies and other organizations.

An advisory released by the U.S. National Security Agency describes attacks by operatives linked to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, which has been previously tied to major cyberattacks abroad and efforts to disrupt the 2016 and 2020 American elections.

In a statement, NSA Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce said the campaign was likely ongoing, on a global scale.

Brute force attacks involve the automated spraying of sites with potential passwords until hackers gain access. The advisory urges companies to adopt methods long urged by experts as common-sense cyber hygiene, including the use of multi-factor authentication and mandating strong passwords.

Issued during a devastating wave of ransomware attacks on governments and key infrastructure, the advisory does not disclose specific targets of the campaign or its presumed purpose, saying only that hackers have targeted hundreds of organizations worldwide.
Seaborn says the marijuana laws, and their impacts on colleges and businesses, are getting more complicated as more states legalize it.

Its gotten more complicated because every state is taking its own unique approach, he said. Its not just a simple state issue versus federal issue because every state has its own flavor of legalization.

For Virginians, that flavor is a bit vanilla. As of Thursday, state law allows people 21 and older to possess up to an ounce for personal use and to consume it on private property. Consuming it in public is illegal. Adults also may grow up to four plants on their own property. They cannot grow their plants on someone elses property, even with permission. Neither can they let someone grow plants on their property.

No sales are allowed, although gifts are permissible. Prohibited are schemes in which marijuana is given to one person at the same time as an exchange of another item or cash.

Where were at now is that were taking a step to legalize it, but were not taking the step of having a commercial industry, yet, Seaborn said. As a consumer, its not legal to buy, so were in a complicated legal position for the next while.
That night, Dr. Cohen was proud. His youngest daughter was growing up and reaffirming her Jewish identity. Her father instilled a love for the teaching in both Elisheva and her teenage brother.

Before Dr. Cohen completed his medical residency and internships, he had spent weekends staying at the home of his mentor Rabbi Yakov Saachs, always desperate to learn more about his faith.

On his long commutes, he played cassette tapes, hungry to learn the teachings.

Even though he was dog tired, it was a priority for him to try and glean as much information as he could, Saachs told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

At Brad Cohens urging, the entire family became more observant, the rabbi said, following customs about not driving or doing business on the Sabbath.

The night before the collapse, her mother sent a message to Cohen with a selfie taken by Elisheva in front of a mirror. She wore a pink T-shirt with a high ponytail. They were staying in separate homes.

Look how pretty, the message read.

She was wearing the same outfit the next morning, when her mother frantically woke her up to tell her about the collapse.
RALEIGH  As North Carolina approaches a marijuana milestone  potentially legalizing the drug for medical use  nearby states are split in their approach.

The Southeast is coming late to the marijuana scene. The region is home to several of the 14 states that do not have comprehensive medical marijuana programs or full marijuana legalization, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

With nearly 80% of voters approving the use of medical marijuana in North Carolina, support is also building in the state legislature where a Senate committee approved a medical marijuana bill Wednesday.

Heres a look at the condition of marijuana laws in some other Southeastern states.

South Carolina

South Carolina has not legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use.

A bill legalizing marijuana for medical use passed a Senate committee in a 9-5 vote in May but did not advance further.

Tennessee

Tennessee is another Southern state that does not allow for the use of marijuana for medical or recreational purposes.
RALEIGH  A streamlined permitting process for hog farmers who also want to convert methane from waste ponds into energy will begin after Gov. Roy Cooper signed the legislatures annual agriculture bill into law Friday.

The Democratic governor decided the measure will be enacted, despite dozens of environmental, civil rights and community groups urging him to veto the bill. Cooper had until July 11 to act on the measure or it would become law without him.

The farm measure was one of 11 that Cooper signed into law Friday, but he provided no statement on the measure with that announcement.

The farm measure directs the Environmental Management Commission, a part of 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.

Until now, digester operators had to seek an individual permit, which can be time-consuming for the farmer and usually gives the public the chance to comment on the request at a hearing. The new law says environmental regulators must decide on a farm and biogas general permit application  expected to last five years  within 90 days or its otherwise considered approved.
Gender, race, and disability are protected classes in most other contexts, House speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, said in a statement. Why should we allow the unborn to be discriminated against for these same traits?

The message sent by this veto is that some human life is more valuable than others based on immutable characteristics.

Senate Bill 359

HB453 could follow a similar path to another abortion-focused Born Alive bill, Senate Bill 359, that cleared the legislature in 2019.

That bill also was vetoed by Cooper. The Senate overrode Coopers veto by a 30-20 vote on April 30.

Moore approved placing, and then removing, SB359 on the House floor calendar for 10 sessions  covering all of May 2019  before a vote was held on June 5, 2019, in which the override vote failed by a 67-53 margin.

Placing a veto override vote on the floor agenda indefinitely is known in legislative terms as a veto garage.

If legislative leaders dont have the numbers, but think they can change some minds, they might employ the veto garage, Kokai said.

Otherwise, they are more likely to go ahead and vote and see where the chips fall.
If youve got video of sex trafficking occurring in a motel and you call the police, theyre not going to waive any letter from the attorney general.

Who is living in hotels?

People living in motels describe a landscape thats difficult to neatly separate long-term and short-term motel dwellers. While people may consistently live in motels for months  even years  they may bounce from room to room or location to location because they run out of money or briefly stay with friends or family.

Barrier, 33, said hes frustrated he cant get out of the motel cycle, where he often pays more monthly than the average rent in Charlotte. Its difficult to save for a security deposit, he said, and apply for places where earning three times the rent is often required.

Months spent paying for motel rooms meant he wasnt building a rental history that can be used to show hed be a consistent tenant. He and his girlfriend made the difficult decision to send their kids to live with family because they want a more stable environment for them than motels offer.

People living in hotels often struggle to find more stable housing and are on the cusp of homelessness, experts say.
Catherine Nyce of The Atlantic writes, The GOP has found a new cultural boogeyman, and its critical race theory.

The texts under fire by Take Back Our Schools are not the academic theory of the late Harvard professor Derrick Bell, father of critical race theory. Those lumping anything from diversity to anti-racism into their new catchphrase should read his work.

Guilford County Schools excellent Diversity and Inclusion office works with teachers to help them understand the meaning of race. It does not label white children oppressors but does acknowledge the reality of oppression. Outcomes for children of color in Guilford County are concerning and understanding race and its impact is imperative so that a childs success is not based on the color of his or her skin.
The states of North Carolina and Virginia claim joint custody of the Dan River, which dances along their border like Gods gerrymandered district.

From Patrick County, Va., it flows into Stokes County, N.C. From there it snakes into Rockingham County, back into Virginia and then back into North Carolina near the county lines between Caswell and Rockingham.

Before ending at the Kerr Reservoir on the Roanoke River, the Dan flows for 214 miles in all, with serene, leafy banks and (mostly) calm waters along the way.

Small wonder its an attraction for kayakers, hikers, tubers and rafters.

But there are hidden dangers in all that natural beauty.

Two weeks ago, during a family outing that went horribly wrong, the river claimed four lives in a tubing accident.

Those victims drowned after they toppled over an 8-foot-high low-head dam, a structure whose modest size can be deceiving.

New precautions now are in place near that dam in time for the holiday weekend, and should make that stretch of the river safer. Whether its as safe as it could or should be, well, thats another question.
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Joe is the K-12 education reporter for CalMatters. His stories use data to highlight inequities in Californias public schools.
We encourage all Montanans, and especially non-Veterans, to be conscientious and thoughtful of our neighbors who helped earn the freedom we celebrate on the Fourth of July, said MTVAHCS Executive Director Dr. Judy Hayman. Every Montanan can and should help Veterans with PTSD avoid surprise fireworks. If you plan to light fireworks on non-Fourth of July days, be considerate and have a conversation with your neighbors and let them know that you would like to set off fireworks. Fireworks are expected on the Fourth of July, but not at 2 a.m. or 2 p.m. in the days before and after July 4.
The communitys safety is at stake.

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After a one-year hiatus due to COVID-19, Helenas free outdoor summer concert series is returning next week.

Rebranded as Revive at Five, the series will kick off at 5 p.m. Wednesday at Pioneer Park with Montana Battle of the Bands winner SunsAh406, and it will continue at the same time each week in July and August in downtown Helena.

This years series will highlight local talent, as all of the bands are from Montana.

After a year marred by event cancellations and social distancing, it will be great to see the community having fun together again.

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The high temperatures weve been experiencing in Helena and around the region are not just exhausting, but they are potentially dangerous as well.

The Associated Press reported that in nearby Canada, Washington state and Oregon, authorities are investigating dozens of deaths likely caused by temperatures well into the triple digits. While Helena isnt quite that bad, the National Weather Service issued a heat advisory in the area this week as temperatures hovered around 100 degrees.
CHARLESTON  Eastern Illinois University announced on Thursday it will be expecting all eligible students, staff, and faculty members returning to in-person classes to be fully vaccinated.

"Beyond the increased safety vaccines provide, vaccinated EIU students will enjoy a much more traditional semester," university President David Glassman wrote in an email to the EIU community. "Vaccinated students wont be required to wear masks in most indoor and all outdoor locations or observe social distancing protocols. Vaccinated students also will enjoy the benefit of meeting in person with their vaccinated peers in gatherings of any size for all campus extracurricular activities  RSO meetings, working out in the Rec Center, dining with friends, social events, pick-up sport games  the list goes on."

Unvaccinated individuals will be required to wear a mask when in public unless in their own designated office for room. The university will be verifying the vaccination status of all individuals, but has not yet released their methods for authentication.

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The email went on to say: "We do recognize some students and employees with health or other factors may not be candidates for the COVID-19 vaccine. This makes it all the more important that everyone in the EIU Family who can get vaccinated does so."

In the email, Glassman encouraged visiting websites like that of the Centers for Disease Control for information on the available vaccines and vaccines.gov to find where to get one.

The university will continue to hold SHIELD testing this fall to diagnose possible COVID-19 cases.

"Because we cant know everyones personal situation or circumstance, we continue to strongly encourage members of our campus community to treat each other with empathy and understanding," Glassman said. "Individual students and employees may choose to mask and/or social distance even if vaccinated, and such safe practices should be respected and honored."
DECATUR  High-needs students thrive under routine and procedures, so the year of remote learning was difficult for some of them.

When students returned to class in Decatur schools in late March, they attended only two days a week. For kids in Life Skills and Essential Skills, that wasn't enough, so Macon-Piatt Special Education District offered a summer school program in June to fill the gap.

We haven't offered this level of summer programming since 2012, and this year the reason was due to the length of time the kids were exclusively taught at home due to the shutdowns, said Executive Director Kathy Horath. We will not know the extent of the impact of remote learning until well into the school year. Some students did great in remote learning and already show good progress, others thrived in their personal appointments with teachers, and others, we didn't see at all, and may expect some regression. The upcoming school year will help us really understand the impact the shutdown had on each student.

You don't even know how happy I was seeing Kennedy on stage with her classmates, dancing and singing, said Marianne Stenger, mother of the ninth-grader. After the past year, I was thrilled to see her interacting with her peers. To hear her speak during the program made my eyes tear up. I still remember how anxious we were for Kennedy to talk. She didn't say her first words until she was around 3 years old. She has come so far.

Teachers tried to make every day fun, said special education Assistant Director Travis Friedrich, along with academics and routine. They took field trips and had visitors from the Scovill Zoo, Wildflour, PawPrint Ministries, Papa Murphy's and others, and visited the zoo, the Children's Museum of Illinois, and learned yoga and mindfulness.

We had a lot of excitement from all the kids, Friedrich said. They looked forward to coming daily and they missed out on having school. This felt like having school every day. There was more disconnection (from school during remote learning) with kids with higher needs, and if (the program) wasn't with the teachers they had through the school year, it was teachers that had the skills and knowledge to provide this program.

Even if the students won't have programming all summer, he said, having a gap of a little more than a month between the summer program and the start of the school year is better than almost three months, as it would have been without the program. The adjustment to regular schedules in August when school begins will be easier for them.

In normal years, Horath said, students' families send them to area camps or have caregivers or just spend time together as a family, but this wasn't a normal year, and the boost of having a summer program was important.

Part of the need has to do with social interaction with peers and adults, general social experiences, and social skills, Friedrich said. There was a gap in the functional academics and activities, which would normally have been done during in-person learning.

Contact Valerie Wells at (217) 421-7982. Follow her on Twitter: @modgirlreporter

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You cannot on the one hand constantly harp about decades of Illinois credit rating downgrades and then blithely dismiss the first bit of good Illinois rating news since George Ryan was governor.

Its OK to step away from the Illinois is awful screaming for a moment in the wake of last weeks upgrade of Illinois bond rating by Moodys Investors Service. While not the end of our problems by any means, this signals yet another important fiscal turning point.

Illinois long credit ratings slide began in May of 2003, when both Moodys and Fitch dinged the states grade. The last upgrade the state was granted before last weeks action was 21 years ago, in June of 2000. The last time Moodys upgraded Illinois rating was June of 1998. House Speaker Chris Welch had just barely graduated law school at the time.

The states credit rating was downgraded a total of 24 times starting in 2003. Eight of those downgrades, a third, came during just 20 months of former Gov. Bruce Rauners fiscally catastrophic administration. To say he had an outsized impact would be putting it mildly.

The climb back began in 2017, when some Republicans joined Democrats to pass an income tax hike over Rauners veto. It was a turning point. The downgrades all but stopped.

Just remember those above two paragraphs when Rauners impasse cheerleaders try to dismiss this Moodys upgrade. Wed be in a far worse spot right now had they and Rauner won.

And, yes, of course the federal government has played a huge role in Illinois fiscal rebound over the past year or so. It has repeatedly pumped up the economy, which unexpectedly boosted Illinois coffers to the point where it didnt need to use federal funds to patch its budget holes or tap federal aid to pay back federal borrowing.

The state did so well that it ended the fiscal year, which concluded on June 30th, with an expected $2 billion surplus. That surplus will allow it to pay off $2 billion in pandemic-related borrowing this fiscal year.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Congress has committed $126 billion to Illinois, mostly to the private sector, with about a third of the total in loans.

The airline industry in Illinois alone will receive almost $16 billion, about twice what the state government received this spring from the American Rescue Plan Act.

But its not like Illinois got a special deal out of Uncle Sam. The aid has been distributed fairly evenly among the states. California ended its fiscal year with an $80 billion surplus.

Prudently, most of that $8.127 billion in federal money for Illinois government hasnt been appropriated. $1 billion was spent on one-time capital appropriations and $1.8 billion was spent on mostly one-time grants or temporary aid allowed by the federal government.

That leaves more than $5.3 billion in reserve. The hope in many states is that the federal government will wipe out their huge unemployment insurance trust fund debts. If not, some of that $5.3 billion might be used here to cover some of Illinois hole, sparing employers a gigantic tax hike.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Elgie Sims has been telling me for weeks that he was confident the new state budget would result in a credit rating upgrade.

Sims is not only a budget expert (joining the Senates budget staff after graduating from college in 1993), but hes also a bond lawyer. He knows what the industry is looking for, and he and many others did what they could to deliberately produce a well-received budget.

Illinois has been one step away from junk bond territory since the Rauner days, so, no matter what you think of the New York rating agencies, the urgent importance of upgrades cannot be overstated.

We stayed the course, we did not do anything irresponsible with that federal money, we paid down all that debt, which Sims said is exactly what the ratings agencies wanted to see.

Rating agencies also prefer sustainable state revenues. The new budget permanently closes $655 million in corporate tax loopholes, as the governor calls them. Gov. JB Pritzker noted last week the move helps permanently pare down the states still-large structural deficit, which passing the progressive income tax last year couldve all but eliminated.

Obviously, this federal boost wont last. And Moodys warned that pension and other state obligations could exert growing pressure as the impact of federal support dissipates, barring significant revenue increases or other fiscal changes.

But now they have some time to tackle the problems.

Rich Miller publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.

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The VSP asks those planning to drink to think ahead, arrange a designated driver, use a ride-share service or taxi or use public transportation.

It is also important to note that July Fourth celebrations may be a bit different this year than those of the past due to the legalization of simple possession of cannabis for adults 21 years and over, said Settle, noting the legalization of marijuana in Virginia beginning July 1. Whether you are trying marijuana for the first time or are a previous cannabis consumer, remember driving under the influence is still illegal in Virginia. If we all do our small part, we increase everyones chances of having a safer holiday weekend.

Adults 21 years and older will be allowed to possess not more than one ounce of cannabis for personal use, according to the VSP. The use of marijuana while driving a motor vehicle or while a passenger will continue to be illegal.

Law enforcement will also be on the lookout on the water. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency will participate in Operation Dry Water, a weekend of education and enforcement about the dangers of impaired boating throughout the state, including on local lakes.
A Meadowview, Virginia, man and a man from New Mexico have been indicted in connection with an unlicensed money transmitting business, according to federal prosecutors.

Jerry Shrock, 46, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, resident David Wellington, 62, were indicted by a federal grand jury in New Mexico on June 23. They've been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Wellington faces an additional count of operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business.

Since at least 2005, Wellington and his business partner operated National Business Services, which promoted, sold and created limited liability companies, also known simply as LLCs, under New Mexico law, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office. For many clients, prosecutors said National Business Services opened bank accounts under the names and IRS employer identification numbers of the LLCs, and the clients had access to the funds in those accounts. The names of those clients were not associated with bank accounts, prosecutors said.
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While both are expected to create job opportunities and tax revenue, city leaders continue wrangling with a number of challenges, including both financial and environmental concerns about its solid waste landfill, its aging, overcrowded jail and its substantial long-term debt.

For months, residents on both sides of the state line have been confronted with significant odor issues, believed to be at least partially caused by the quarry landfill. The city funded a series of improvements, and other work is ongoing, but the odors and complaints continue.

Weve got a lot of work still to do. I think what we need to do is trust the experts  the engineers. Theyre down there in the landfill analyzing, studying and making recommendations. We need to do everything we can for the most immediate issue  the smell  while continuing to wrap our heads around the financial part of it as well, Farnum said.

As to the jail, the council recently directed Eads to meet with the Southwest Regional Jail Authority to determine if it would be viable to join the authority, shift all the citys inmates there and ultimately close the jail, which operates well above its licensed capacity.
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After thanking Mitchell for his service, Northup unfolded a quilt made of red, white and blue stripes and compass stars, one she said she made herself. With Mitchells wife, Laura, she held it up for the crowd, which included some of Mitchells fellow 278th veterans. She then draped it over Mitchells shoulders.

Mitchell said he requested the award himself.

The VA [Hospital] has one up on their wall when you go into the entrance ... and its just absolutely beautiful, he said. And I saw who it was from, got on their website and started reading what it was about, and saw the request one button down at the bottom. Thats what made me do it.

Mitchell told the group that while he was the one who received the quilt, it represents all of us that went to combat together, he said, pointing to his fellow veterans in the audience.

Does Mitchell plan to use it or display it?

A little of both, he said: Hell keep it draped over the back of his couch, where he can see it often.
Pete Daniel, in his book Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, documents how Black farmers lost their operations at a disproportionate rate when compared to their white counterparts. They were systematically denied loans or not provided adequate information on how they could benefit from New Deal-era programs.

A 1999 federal court ruling, Pigford v. Glickman, sent about $1 billion to individual farmers who had experienced racial discrimination by the USDA. Similar victories were won by Latinx farmers in Garcia v. Vilsack and Native American farmers in Keepseagle v. Vilsack.

Other groups, including veterans and women, have also received special attention, but these did not lead to lawsuits on behalf of excluded whites, who are now falsely being portrayed as victims by political conservatives.

Moreover, as Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has noted, When you look at the COVID relief plans that had been passed and distributed by USDA [in 2020], and you look at who disproportionately received the benefits of those COVID payments, its pretty clear that white farmers did pretty well. One analysis found that white farmers received 97% of the money dispersed in the first of two pandemic relief programs last year.
The problem with some companies is they cant think past the next quarterly report.

The problem with some politicians is they cant think past the next election.

And that brings us to the recent report that said the birth rate in the United States last year fell by its sharpest rate since 1973. So much for all those predictions that the pandemic lockdowns would inevitably lead to a baby boom. Instead, it led to just the opposite. Nor is this is an isolated event, skewed by the pandemic. The precise numbers are, indeed, skewed by the pandemic, but the larger fact is that the birth rate in the United States has generally been falling for a long time.

Heres another stat keyed to 1973: That was the last year the fertility rate in the U.S. was above what demographics call the replacement rate by which one generation can fully replace another. (Demographers are kind of morbid). That replacement rate is 2.1 births per woman (2.1 and not 2.0 because, well, some kids die. Again, demographers are morbid but so is reality sometimes). There have been some years where that fertility rate topped 2.0 but fell short of the magic 2.1. The last year that happened was 2009. Ever since then, its been less than 2.0. Now its pegged at 1.78.
The new wrinkle in this is really this new variant. It just sort of rips very quickly through people who are susceptible to being infected, which overwhelmingly is people who are not vaccinated, said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. We just opened up two weeks ago, everything was hunky dory.

Gov. Gavin Newsom lifted a series of pandemic-related restrictions on June 15 after a final push to get more people vaccinated. Everyone 12 and older is eligible for shots and among that population 59% is fully vaccinated and another 10% has received a first dose.

In Contra Costa County, where 72% of eligible residents are fully vaccinated, officials recently began publishing virus case rates by vaccination status. Since the county has a high inoculation rate, the number of new coronavirus cases is generally low but unvaccinated residents remain at risk, said Dr. Chris Farnitano, the county's health officer.

For example, the seven-day average of new virus cases per 100,000 people in the county was recently 7.0 for those who are unvaccinated, and 0.4 for those who are vaccinated.
President Trump established Operation Warp Speed to fast track a vaccine for the virus. The experts said it would take 2 or more years to develop a vaccine. President Trumps feelings that a vaccine could be developed much faster turned out to be correct.

In 1918 we experienced a pandemic called the Spanish Flu. So, following historical precedent, President Trump referred to COVID-19 as the China Flu. He probably should have called it the CCP Flu since that would be a more accurate description. President Trump raised the issue of the virus possibly coming from the Wuhan virology lab in early 2020. The media accused him of spreading a conspiracy theory. Well, the latest information points to the virus coming from the Wuhan lab. And, the expert Dr. Fauci was apparently aware of this possibility and denied it. It now appears that Dr. Fauci approved funding that very likely led to the creation of the virus.

Mr. Dreyer tries to link President Trumps use of China Flu to the rise in violence against Asian-Americans. I suggest Mr. Dreyer examine the details of the attacks against Asian-Americans. He will find that these attacks are not being made by people who are Trump supporters.

I found it amusing that in his list of countries with populist leaders, Mr. Dreyer included Russia.
The border relationship between the United States and Canada is generally a healthy one, but its become more obvious, particularly in the last year, that dairy is a contentious trade issue between the two neighbors. That was most clear in the negotiations around the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and now in the trade dispute case brought forward by the Office of the United States Trade Representative centered around the implementation of that agreement.

The dispute case stems from how the U.S. believes Canada is allocating its tariff-rate quotas (TRQs) to processors who may not be filling those agreed upon dairy exports. To get to the deeper reason why this is an issue, though, we have to look at dairy demand and supply, said Mark Stephenson on the June 30 Hoards Dairyman DairyLivestream.

In 2014, the medical community declared a truce on animal fats, Stephenson said tongue-in-cheek. Time magazine said on their cover, Eat Butter. U.S. and Canadian consumers responded to that evidence, and the dairy industries in both countries experienced a steep rise in the demand for milkfat. To meet that need, dairy farmers could do two things: produce more milk or import more milk.



American dairy producers chose the former option, while Canadian ones, carrying milk quotas, initially chose the latter, Stepheson continued. After quotas were expanded over the course of a few years, though, production north of the border also climbed. However, producing more milkfat also meant more of the less valuable nonfat solids.

Stephenson noted that the U.S. had to, and did, find world markets to move that product. Were now one of the largest skim milk exporters in the world to balance the components, he said. Around 15% of American milk production is exported, and much of those exports are skim milk powders.

At the same time, Canada was also dealing with an influx of nonfat solids to meet their butterfat demand. Neither country had a need for what the other was trying to sell.

That, I think, gets down to some of the crux of what were disputing, Stephenson said. You have to think of these things on the whole. They become complicated.



Gregg Doud was on the front lines of negotiating USMCA, serving as the Chief Agricultural Negotiator for the U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer during the Trump administration. He pointed out that dairy had been largely left out of the previous North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the change in butterfat demand meant that could not be the case in the new agreement.

This was a very important topic of conversation that needed to be held, and I think the biggest reason for that was the changes in demand for components around the world. There was huge demand for fat and butter in the U.S. and in Canada and around the world. Thats a big change from years ago, Doud explained. As a result of that, it has caused some difficulty for Canadas supply management and some frustration in the U.S. Thats what we tried to tackle in our negotiations between the U.S. and Canada this time around.

As for how well that worked, it will take time to see, Doud admitted.

To watch the recording of the June 30 DairyLivestream, go to the link above. The program recording is also available as an audio-only podcast on Spotify, Google Podcasts, and downloadable off of the Hoards Dairyman website.



An ongoing series of events

The next broadcast of DairyLivestream will be on Wednesday, July 7 at 11 a.m. CDT. Each episode is designed for panelists to answer over 30 minutes of audience questions. If you havent joined a DairyLivestream broadcast yet, register here. Registering once registers you for all future events.

To comment, email your remarks to intel@hoards.com.

(c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2021

July 1, 2021
Insurance4Dallas, a Fort Worth health insurance agency, says that despite the Affordable Care Act requiring hospitals to post prices for their services, many are not doing so and causing continued confusion.

Fort Worth, Texas, United States, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Fort Worth health insurance and the people who have it might have to wait a little while longer until hospitals locally and across the country fall in line with federal price transparency rules outlined in the Affordable Care Act. The law requires hospitals to post prices for their services, but many arent doing so  leaving patients and health insurers in the dark, says Rick Thornton, a health insurance agent with Insurance4Dallas.

For more information, go to http://insurance4dallas.com/health-insurance-fort-worth

The news comes on the heel of a report in Yahoo News. Per the article, in November 2019, the previous administration issued regulations under the law that require hospitals to post the prices of the 300 common services in a file that can be downloaded from their websites as of January 1. This includes the gross charge for service, prices for cash-paying patients, and negotiated rates with insurers the hospital accept. Needless to say, we are halfway through the year, and many hospitals, including those that accept health insurance in Fort Worth, arent acquiescing to the regulation. Research has proven that over half of hospitals were not providing downloadable files or were noncompliant in other ways. In other industries, consumers can see prices ahead of time. That gives them choice and the ability to compare. But hospitals are resistant to showing their pricing because they do not want to be in that kind of competitive environment, said Keith Smith, an anesthesiologist and co-founder of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma who was quoted by Yahoo!

Rick Thornton, a Fort Worth health insurance agent echoed the articles sentiments that price transparency is an important piece to healthcare as everyone moves forward post-COVID. A YouGov poll from 2020 found that 91% of respondents said hospitals should be required to post their prices publicly. Furthermore, 66%, per the Yahoo! Article, believe price transparency would improve healthcare as a whole. Thornton said that while he agrees that hospitals have many reasons to keep their prices private, its also the right thing to do in making them public.

Story continues

Insurance4Dallas, (I4D), helps insure all of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Arizona, Louisiana, New Mexico, Alabama, Virginia and Florida. Insurance4Dallas provides consumers with detailed information on health insurance with the ability to purchase health insurance online. Insurance4Dallas provides a full spectrum of health, dental, vision, life and ancillary insurance products, providing a diverse selection of price and benefit options complemented by personal customer service. Available via phone, email or fax, Insurance4Dallas answers consumer questions throughout the purchasing process and during the utilization of its health insurance policies.

Website: http://insurance4dallas.com/group-health-insurance-fort-worth

CONTACT: Name: Rick Thornton Organization: Insurance4Dallas Address: 3000 South Hulen Street Suite 124-912, Fort Worth, Texas 76109, United States Phone: +1-817-710-3783




External Affair Minister S Jaishankar

Matera [Italy] July 1 (ANI): External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that during the 3-day G20 foreign ministers meeting, several issues were addressed including multilateralism and governance, Africa, food security, humanitarian logistics.

The External Affairs Minister had held bilateral meetings with 14 Ministers and five heads of International organisations.

"3 days at the G20 Foreign and Development Ministers Meeting. Addressed the sessions on: Multilateralism & Governance, Africa, Food security, Humanitarian Logistics. Bilateral meetings with 14 Ministers and 5 Heads of International Organisations," Jaishankar tweeted.

"In these difficult times, the world recognises India's relevance to economic recovery, food security, climate action, vaccine production and digital delivery," he said further in the tweet.

Jaishankar, who is in Italy for the G20 ministerial meetings also met his counterparts from Britain, Japan, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Mexico and the EU.

The G20 is an inter-governmental forum comprising 19 countries and the European Union.

Italy holds the Presidency of the G20 at present. The Foreign Affairs Ministers' Meeting is one of the ministerial meetings organized as part of the G20 Leaders Summit 2021. (ANI)
Representative image

Takhar [Afghanistan], July 2 (ANI): Taliban has reportedly issued news rules and regulations in the recently captured districts of Afghan Takhar province, including forbiding women from leaving home without a male relative and forcing men to grow beards.

The terror group has intensified attacks on district centres in a number of provinces in the past few weeks. On Thursday the group seized Tagab district in Kapisa province, The News International reported citing sources.

Civil society activists in Afghanistan's northeastern province of Takhar said the Taliban has ordered men to grow their beards, banned women from leaving home alone, and has set dowry regulations for girls.

"They urged women in a statement to not leave home without a male relative," said Merajuddin Sharifi, a civil society activist in Takhar. Sharifi added that the "Taliban insist on trials without evidence."

Members of the Takhar provincial council said food prices have increased substantially in areas that have fallen to the Taliban. "People are facing problems there; services are nonexistent, clinics, and schools are closed," said Mohammad Azam Afzali, a member of the Takhar provincial council.

Takhar governor meanwhile said that government buildings have been destroyed by the Taliban and services have been stopped in areas controlled by the Taliban.

"They (Taliban) looted everything, and no services exist," said Abdullah Qarluq, governor of Takhar.

Afghanistan is witnessing a surge in violence as the Taliban has intensified its offensive against civilians and Afghan defence and security forces. This comes as foreign forces are withdrawing from the war-torn country.

As the Taliban have taken control of several districts across the country, US intelligence assessments have suggested the country's civilian government could fall to the terror group within months of US forces withdrawing. (ANI)
People scuffle with police during a protest against Turkey's withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, in Istanbul (Photo credit: REUTERS)

Istanbul [Turkey], July 2 (ANI): Thousands of people took to the street on Thursday to denounce Turkey's withdrawal from an international treaty designated to combat violence against women.

Large scale demonstration was witnessed after Turkey formally pulled out from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, also known as Istanbul Convention, Al Jazeera reported.

Demonstrators clashed with police who fired tear gas in the country's biggest city Istanbul. Women protesters gathered on the Istiklal Avenue, carrying banners and chanting slogans against the government. The police fired tear gas to disperse the protesters, preventing them from proceeding toward the iconic Taksim square.

In March, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a decree annulling the country's ratification of the Council of Europe's Istanbul Convention, which states that men and women have equal rights and obliges state authorities to take steps to prevent gender-based violence against women, protect victims and prosecute perpetrators.

The convention seeks to prevent violence against women, including domestic violence, and bring an end to legal impunity for perpetrators.

"The Istanbul Convention withdrawal will empower the perpetrators of violence while making the victims more powerless. So we have to take on the protection work that the authorities should do," Gulsum Kav, Turkish feminist activist, told Al Jazeera.

Turkey's shameful withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention will put millions of women and girls at greater risk of violence, Amnesty International said.

"President Erdogan's announcement of the decision to quit the landmark treaty on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence will go down in history as the first time a Council of Europe member has withdrawn from an international human rights convention," it added.

Erdogan said his country's domestic regulations are sufficient to combat violence against women, Xinhua reported. Turkish President Erdogan on Thursday announced a new action plan for combating violence against women. "Just like our fight against violence toward women did not start with the Istanbul Convention, it will not end by withdrawing from this convention," he said. (ANI)
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports more Americans quit their jobs in April than in any month since they started keeping records. Five out of every 100 employees in hotels, restaurants, bars and retail reportedly quit. And its not just low-paying jobs. More than 700,000 workers in the bureaus mostly white-collar category of professional and business services left their jobs  the highest monthly number ever. Across all sectors and occupations, four in 10 employees now say theyve considered peacing out of their current place of work, says Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. Listen closely. Im hearing the old 1977 Johnny Paycheck song, Take this job and shove it. I aint workin here no more.

Is this a real worker revolution or just a post-pandemic anomaly? COVID changed things. Many of us lost family members, friends or co-workers to COVID, realize how fragile life is and want more balance in our lives. We got a taste of life without the stresses and pressures, without unreasonable bosses and abusive customers, uncomfortable work environments, daily commutes and childcare costs. Folks loved working in their pajamas, meeting on Zoom and a recent survey revealed 57 percent of workers in Raleigh-Durham want to continue having control over how, when and where their work gets done. They want to work from home. And theyve got money: from March 2020 to April 2021 Americans put away 18.7 percent of their income into savings, the highest rate for so long a period since World War II. Workers in low, medium and even high pay scales are joining the chorus of those wanting better than pre-COVID conditions. Theyre optimistic they can live better.
MATTOON  The funeral procession route on Saturday for volunteer firefighter Mehdi Mourad has been announced and community members are invited to line this route to help honor him.

Funeral services will be held at noon Saturday at New Hope Church in Effingham for Wabash Fire Protection District firefighter Mehdi Mourad, 21, who died from injuries he sustained in a collision Sunday while he was responding in his car to a crash scene on Interstate 57.

The funeral will be streamed live on the Facebook page for Johnson Funeral Home in Effingham. The services will be preceded by a visitation from 10 a.m. to noon at the church, 2210 N. Raney St.

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Wabash safety officer Gary Kepley said after the funeral, a procession including several fire trucks will travel from New Hope Church to Neoga Memorial Cemetery for the burial. He said the procession will go west on Ford Street to Raney, north on Raney to Rickleman Avenue, east on Rickleman to U.S. Route 45, and then north on Route 45 to the cemetery.

Kepley said community members are invited to line the route at pedestrian-safe spots to honor Mourad. He said they also can memorialize the firefighter, who was an automotive technology major at Lake Land College, by sending donations marked for a Mehdi Mourad Scholarship Fund to the Lake Land College Foundation, 5001 Lakeland Blvd., Mattoon, IL 61938.

Mourad, who was from Morocco, had joined the Wabash fire department five days before the crash and he had been responding to only his second call for service at the time. Mourad began an internship at KC Summers Auto Group in Mattoon in June. He also raced at the Coles County Dragway, both as a representative for Lake Land and in his own vehicle.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)  In a 1970 Beetle Bailey comic strip, the character known as Sarge berates his uniform-wearing dog, Otto, for a paperwork mistake.

Think, Otto, think!! Sarge says.

We can't all be Snoopy, a dejected Otto replies.

This confluence of two iconic comic strip dogs is on exhibit along with dozens of other images at the world's largest cartoon museum as part of a new presentation of the history of canines in the world of cartooning.

The Dog Show: Two Centuries of Canine Cartoons at Ohio State Universitys Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is running through October.

The genesis for the exhibit came when the late Brad Anderson, the creator of Marmaduke, donated his collection in 2018, including 16,000 original Marmaduke cartoons from 1954 to 2010, other original art, business correspondence, fan mail and books. That began a conversation about plumbing the depths of the museum's extensive collection for dog-related images, according to museum coordinator Anne Drozd.

There were so many comic strips and magazine cartoons and comic books, and so many different examples that have dogs in them, Drozd said. It seemed like a no brainer to bring everything together in one theme that so many people can relate to and love.

There are plenty of scene-stealing cats in cartoons, including Jim Davis' Garfield and the stuffed tiger that comes to life in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes.

But dogs' personalities make them a perfect fit for the comic strip form, said exhibit curator Brian Walker.

Dogs have that eagerness, they aim to please, so they actually make really good cartoon characters, said Walker, a cartoonist and cartoon historian and the son of Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey.

Though Otto first appeared in Beetle Bailey in 1956, he was a regular four-legged dog until around 1970 when Mort Walker anthropomorphized him, providing Otto his own uniform and desk, likely thanks to the influence of Snoopy in Charles Schutz' Peanuts strip, Brian Walker said.

The oldest image in the exhibit is a reprint of British artist George Cruikshank's illustration of weather so bad it's raining cats and dogs.

Moving through the years, the exhibit includes well-known dogs like Sandy from Little Orphan Annie, Daisy from Blondie and Dogbert from Scott Adams' Dilbert strip. George Booth's scraggly New Yorker magazine cartoon dogs show up, as well as images by alternative newspaper cartoonist Lynda Barry, and Shary Flenniken's Trots and Bonnie, about a girl and her talking dog that appeared in National Lampoon from 1972 to 1990.

There are well-known characters like Dog Man from the book series by cartoonist Dave Pilkey, but also lesser known mutts, including six strips from a 1940s Dick Tracy series featuring the appearance of a Boxer named Mugg that the famous detective temporarily takes ownership of.

The exhibit also includes a video highlighting animated dogs such as Scooby-Doo, Huckleberry Hound, Underdog, Disney's Pluto and Goofy, Slinky the Dog from the Toy Story movies, and even Santa's Little Helper from The Simpsons.

Brian Walker said his favorite image in the exhibit comes from the classic Disney movie Lady and the Tramp, showing the scene where the dogs eat at an Italian restaurant.

Theyre both eating the same piece of spaghetti and their lips kind of come together and they fall in love, Walker said. It doesnt get much better than that.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Staff is currently in the process of selecting a consultant to perform surveying, geotechnical, permitting and design services for the repair.

This said, it can be a year or more before we can complete the design and make the repairs to get the road open. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Q: Why dont police enforce traffic blocking intersections? It is unlawful for traffic to block intersections, yet this occurs on a daily basis at many intersections such as Hanes Mall at Stratford Road and Stratford Road at the Interstate-40 West onramp, causing traffic with green left turn arrows being unable to move. Apparently, some drivers are more interested in getting through the intersection than obeying traffic regulation and causing backups. Why dont police ticket these offenders so traffic moves quickly according to the traffic signals?

V.M.

Answer: In some cases its not illegal. Kira Boyd, a spokeswoman for the Winston-Salem Police Department, explains how this works.
Search warrants said Tuttle refused to turn the gun over. According to search warrants, Tuttle clutched the gun and told Woods to walk outside. Nykeon Woods attempted to give the marijuana back to Tuttle and Tuttle snatched the drugs and pulled the gun from his waistband, the search warrants alleged.

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Tuttle then began shooting at Nykeon Woods. Malaka Knight was standing in the doorway when she was shot in the head, according to the search warrants.

She has since recovered and lives in South Carolina with her mother and her child, Foster said in court. Foster said Knight still suffers some memory loss.

Tuttle is also accused of discharging a weapon into the house on Caledonia Drive in May and several other homes in February 2020, according to court records.

On Tuesday morning, Alexander Stubbs, Tuttles attorney, informed Craig that Tuttle did not want to take the plea offer. Tuttle said in court that he wanted to go to trial and was going to make a self-defense claim.
Hyde wrote two reports on Ramos, one in September 2019 and another on May 1.

Hyde also testified that Ramos suffers from depression and anxiety, as well as "persecutory delusional beliefs. Those beliefs relate to an article the newspaper wrote about him regarding a harassment case he pleaded guilty to in 2011 involving a former high school classmate.

He has a fixed belief that there is a formed conspiracy between the prosecutor and the staff at the Capital Gazette to exert judicial punishment on him," Hyde said, because he didnt receive jail time over the harassment case.

In his May report, Hyde said Ramos told him he was a victim of vigilante justice.'"

When alternative perspectives and explanations for the reporting by the Capital Gazette were offered to him by this examiner, he firmly rejected them," Hyde wrote.

The report also notes that other than paranoid delusions related to the Capital Gazette, Mr. Ramos denied other psychotic symptoms.

Under cross-examination, prosecutors said Hyde's first report on Ramos was only three pages long. Prosecutor David Russell also noted that the report said Ramos spent 18 months hiking the Appalachian Trail, when he only hiked it for nine months.
GOP Sen. Michelle Benson, of Ham Lake, wouldn't name the commissioners who might be in danger when pressed by Democratic senators. But she said Republicans plan to remain vigilant and attentive to the governor's appointments" when the Senate reconvenes Tuesday. She didn't say how long the Senate might remain in special session.

Is there some vendettas here against the governor's commissioners that you want to fire some of them, at this point? When we've just passed the budget, and people have a lot of work to do to implement what the Legislature has asked them to do? And now you're going to fire some who are at the helm, who have worked hard during COVID to do the job that they were hired to do? Democratic Sen. Sandy Pappas, of St. Paul, asked Benson. Who is it that you're upset with, and what do you plan do? I think you should just put your cards on the table.
The former Soviet Union marched into Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979, claiming it was invited by the new Afghan communist leader, Babrak Karmal, and setting the country on a path of 40 years of seemingly endless wars and conflict.

After the Soviets left in humiliation, America was the next great power to wade in. Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. invaded to oust the Taliban regime, which had harbored al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

After nearly 20 years, the U.S. is ending its war in Afghanistan, withdrawing the last American troops.

Left behind is the U.S.-allied government, riven by corruption and divisions, which must fend off advancing Taliban insurgents amid stalled peace talks. Many Afghans fear the next chapter will see their country plunge into chaos and inter-factional fighting among warlords.

Here is a timeline of some key dates in Afghanistans 40 years of wars:

Dec. 25, 1979  Soviet Red Army crosses the Oxus River into Afghanistan. In neighboring Pakistan, Afghan mujahedeen, or Islamic holy warriors, are assembling, armed and financed by the U.S. for an anti-communist war. More than 8 million Afghans flee to Pakistan and Iran, the first of multiple waves of refugees over the decades.
After nearly 20 years, the U.S. military left Bagram Airfield, the epicenter of its war to oust the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"Unfortunately the Americans left without any coordination with Bagram district officials or the governor's office," Raufi said. "Right now our Afghan security forces are in control both inside and outside of the base."

The deputy spokesman for the defense minister, Fawad Aman, said nothing of the early morning looting. He said only the base has been handed over and the "ANDSF will protect the base and use it to combat terrorism."

The withdrawal from Bagram Airfield is the clearest indication that the last of the 2,500-3,500 U.S. troops have left Afghanistan or are nearing a departure, months ahead of President Joe Biden's promise that they would be gone by Sept. 11.

It was clear soon after the mid-April announcement that the U.S. was ending its "forever war," that the departure of U.S. soldiers and their estimated 7,000 NATO allies would be nearer to July 4, when America celebrates its Independence Day.

Most NATO soldiers have already quietly exited as of this week. Announcements from several countries analyzed by The Associated Press show that a majority of European troops has now left with little ceremony  a stark contrast to the dramatic and public show of force and unity when NATO allies lined up to back the U.S. invasion in 2001.
That seemingly neutral approach, in fact, eliminated activists on issues from Black Lives Matter and policing to housing discrimination and voting rights from serious consideration, unavoidably tilting the balance of the commission toward maintaining the status quo.

The final criticism isnt of the individuals who were selected.

Three of the 14 appointees are immigrants -- coming from Kenya, Nigeria and Togo -- who adopted Nebraska as their home. However, despite their backgrounds in Africa, they cannot share the experience of growing up Black in America or have as deep-rooted of connections in the broader African American community.

The appointments wont be rescinded and redone to better represent the community. Nor can the appointees change the fact that many are not strongly connected to Nebraska's African American community, which is largely concentrated in Omaha.

So, the commissioners and yet-to-be-hired staff must reach out and develop connections with the community, especially groups that advocate for, to choose a few examples, empowerment of African American women and girls, economic and social justice and police reform.

The commission must then actually represent those constituencies rather than sitting silent on the critical issues facing Nebraskas African Americans or, for the next year, tacitly or actively pushing the Ricketts agenda that, on most issues, is widely opposed within the African American community for which the commission is intended to advocate.

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Alzheimers disease is devastating  not only for the more than 5 million Americans living with the disease, but also for the 16 million family and friends serving as caregivers.

Here in Nebraska, there are more than 61,000 family caregivers. A recent tragedy in Lincoln highlights the overwhelming challenges many caregivers face. The caregiving needs for someone living with Alzheimers are extensive and increase over time  on average from four to eight years following a diagnosis.

Many family caregivers juggle competing priorities including work and other family responsibilities. Nebraska caregivers are stretched thin. Most could use help. As the director of programs for the Alzheimers Association in Nebraska, I hear the challenges and want everyone to know they are not alone. The association is here to help families through their journey.

The first place to start is the helpline: 800-272-3900. Master-level clinicians help provide next-step action, planning with families. They are available to help anytime and provide service in more than 200 languages.
Gov. Pete Ricketts should not be sending state troopers to the Mexican border on a whim. States and governors shouldn't be helping one another on federal problems. If Texas needs help, it needs to get it from federal officials.

Our state troopers are hired to keep our state safer, particularly our highways. And the patrol does a great job. Troopers are paid by Nebraska taxpayers. It would be crazy to think Texas will be footing the bill for Nebraska's help.

Ricketts appears to have his own political agenda. And it may include federal ambitions because he appear to want to dabble in federal issues.

Problems at the southern border started long before the Biden administration.

Nebraska state troopers should stay here and protect Nebraskans. Ricketts and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott need to get off their soapboxes and learn that they work for their states, not the political parties.

Mike Nickell, Lincoln

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RACINE  A Racine woman allegedly stabbed a man in the leg with a sword Wednesday at Belle City Food Market & Laundromat, 522 16th St.

Ambrra J. Day, 31, of the 1600 block of Grand Avenue, was charged with misdemeanor counts of battery and disorderly conduct with the use of a dangerous weapon.

According to a criminal complaint:

At 8:56 p.m. on Wednesday, an officer was sent to Belle City Food Market & Laundromat at 522 16th St. for a woman attacking the caller with a knife.

Upon arrival, the officer saw the woman, identified as Day, holding a sword. A man was with Day and told the officer to check the stores cameras because employees threatened them with the sword.

An employee told an officer that the man and Day came inside, and were being loud and causing a scene. One of them said something along the lines of (Expletive) your dead grandpa.

The employee told them to leave multiple times but they refused. The man with Day then punched the employee in the face. A fight broke out.
A Wisconsin Supreme Court decision Friday has still not provided a firm conclusion on whether the City of Racines closure of school buildings within its borders to combat the COVID-19 pandemic last winter was legal.

Take advantage of this great offer! Just $1 gives you full access for 6 months to exclusive content from The Journal Times and journaltimes.com.

The high courts decision concluded that Racines public health official under his/her own authority cannot order schools to be closed even if there is a pandemic, under the Wisconsin statute defining duties of local health officers. That statute states: Local health officers may do what is reasonable and necessary for the prevention and suppression of disease; may forbid public gatherings when deemed necessary to control outbreaks or epidemics and shall advise the department of measures taken.

Fridays ruling follows a 4-3 Supreme Court decision issued last month regarding closures of Dane County and Madison schools, in which the court similarly ruled that health departments cannot unilaterally close schools.

While local rules involving COVID-19 restrictions are practically non-existent now as the pandemic slows, court decisions could have impacts down the road, should other outbreaks of illnesses occur, including resurgences in coronavirus strains.

Recap

On Nov. 12, Racine Public Health Administrator Dottie-Kay Bowersox, fearing a spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths, announced an order requiring all schools within the citys boundaries to be closed to students and teachers from Nov. 27 to Jan. 15.

That order was quickly contested by a coalition of parents and private schools represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty law firm. While that contest was going on, the citys Safer Racine ordinance was amended on Nov. 23 by the City Council to include language reinforcing the school closure order.

So, when the courts in November issued an injunction to halt Bowersoxs order, the city argued that the contents of the order were still essentially in effect, because they had been codified in law and were not solely under the authority of the public health officer.

Similar but distinct

In an opinion filed with Fridays decision, Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote that under Wisconsin law, the authority to close schools resides with state health officials, not local health officers.

The Court determined, once again, that a local public health officer violated the law when it ordered all schools in her jurisdiction closed. This marks another important case reminding public officials that emergencies do not override the rule of law, Rick Esenberg, WILLs president and general counsel, said in a statement Friday.

However, the two cases have a distinct difference that could give the City of Racines actions an advantage going forward as legal proceedings continue.

The Dane County Board and Madison City Council did not have an ordinance that afforded extra powers to the local health officer amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Racine Common Council, however, passed the Safer Racine ordinance that aimed to give the citys public health officer  Dottie-Kay Bowersox  extra emergency powers.

As Fridays court decision noted: A distinguishing feature of this (Racine) case  an ordinance-based school closure  was not present in (the Madison case).

The legality of the Safer Racine ordinance is still up for debate, too.

The courts are in the process of considering it in a case known as Yandel v. City of Racine et. al., filed by David Yandel, a Racine gym owner fighting the city over the now-expired order to close gyms and other facilities amid the pandemic.

Shannon Powell, spokesman for the City of Racine, said in an email following Fridays Supreme Court decision: We believe our legislative body followed the law and passed an ordinance to help mitigate the pandemic. Nothing about todays decisions contradicts our understanding of the law or the councils action.

When Racines original school closure order was temporarily blocked by the injunction in late November, the city still enforced it because aldermen had codified it in law.

Although no decision has yet been made on the Yandel case, in a partially dissenting opinion Friday, Bradley wrote, Bowersox circumvented this courts prior order by proclaiming a new source of authority to enter the exact same order this court declared she had no authority to make or enforce.

Justices Annette Kingsland Ziegler and Bradley both argued that Bowersoxs actions should have led to her being held in contempt of court, but the majority of the Supreme Court did not voice agreement on that point.

The people of Wisconsin, Bradley wrote, deserve to have these monumental issues of statewide significance heard and decided by the states highest court. Instead, the majoritys order denying petitioners motion disregards the Constitution altogether. The petitioners motion Bradley is referring to likely would have led to a contempt of court hearing.

Bradley chastised the majoritys decision to not allow contempt hearings to move forward. She called the majority of her fellow justices feckless and wrote that the majoritys apathy caused petitioners to suffer the very irreparable harm the courts injunction was entered to prevent, and more broadly signals to litigants that they may defy this courts orders with no reaction whatsoever from the court.

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Drownings are rare in Racine County. They are even rarer in public waters like Lake Michigan without a compounding factor, such as an unrelated medical event preceding a drowning.

Never in the past four years prior to last month has a drowning in Racine County been attributed to a rip current. But rip currents were a factor in all three deaths in June, according to the Racine County Medical Examiners Office.

Thats part of what made the three youths who died in unrelated drowning events last month so shocking.

Officials have said its practically impossible to be prepared for a rip current since they can seemingly come out of nowhere.

Riptides are very unpredictable, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said during a press conference June 22.

Its especially true in Lake Michigan, which consistently has been involved in more deaths than any of the other four Great Lakes.

In 2015, the Grand Rapids Press published a story with the headline Why Lake Michigan is the most dangerous Great Lake, linking the dangers of the lake to swift currents. Lake Michigans distinctive configuration  as a 307-mile long lake with twin, uninterrupted shorelines running north to south  make it especially vulnerable to two dangerous types of currents, called rip and longshore.

High winds often strengthen those currents. As the Grand Rapids Press report noted: Most of the water rescues and drownings fall under a category called classic rip. As an increasing amount of water is forced ashore by high winds, it has to eventually escape. A rip current forms when water begins surging away from the beach and out to mid-lake.

Data

From July 2017 through June 2021, there have been 14 drowning deaths in Racine County, according to a report of accidental drownings provided to The Journal Times by the Racine County Medical Examiners Office. Michael Payne, medical examiner, said records dating back prior to July 2017 are tougher to access, since they are not recorded digitally.

Last months three deaths were the only three out of those 14 that were in Lake Michigan.

All three were also attributed to rip currents. None of the other 11 drowning deaths in the past four years have been attributed to rip currents.

The death of Eisha Nahomy Figuereo-Colon, a 10-year-old who died after being pulled from Lake Michigan on June 19, was attributed to her not being able to swim, in addition to the rip current. Only two other drowning deaths in Racine County the past 48 months have been attributed to the deceased not being able to swim: Daryle Neal Jr., a 14-year-old who on Independence Day 2017 drowned in the Root River near Washington Park, and 4-year-old Tyrice Creed who died on Aug. 21, 2017, in Browns Lake at Fischer Park in Burlington.

There was also 16-year-old Amari Donell Griffin-Brewer, who died at Zoo Beach on July 30, 2017, after he stepped into drop-off, according to a report from the Medical Examiners Office.

Racine Countys other accidental drowning deaths since July 1, 2017, according to the Medical Examiners Office, include:

July 19, 2017: Female, 52, died in residence with contributing factor of alcohol intoxication.

Sept. 20, 2017:

, fell into a pond near his Kansasville home after huffing Difluoroethane, which is used in some aerosol sprays

.

Dec. 11, 2017:

, 46, crashed his truck into a pond near Highway 31 after suffering a seizure and died in the water.

June 2, 2018: Male, 30, suffered a seizure during a hydrotherapy bath at the Southern Wisconsin Center in the Town of Dover.

July 29, 2018:

, died in the Root River near Fifth Street Yacht Club with contributing factors of alcohol and cocaine intoxication.

Sept. 21, 2018: Male, 30, suffered seizure while bathing at home.

May 5, 2019: Tony Taylor, a 52-year-old man from Zion, Illinois,

after suffering a medical emergency as he was fishing.

June 27, 2020:

, 61, wasnt wearing life jacket while drinking and kayaking on Wind Lake.

Not included in that report was the Oct. 6, 2018 death of Thomas S. Lattomus, 80, of Janesville, who is believed to have died of hypothermia in Lake Michigan near the Racine Yacht Club.

Great Lakes

Dating back to 2010, according to data from the Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project and the City of Racine, there have been 10 total deaths in Lake Michigan near Racine since 2010. However, that number does include suicides and other non-accidental drownings.

There was one Racine drowning in Lake Michigan in 2010, two in 2011, one in 2013, two to 2017, two in 2018 and one in 2020.

Those deaths make up a small percentage of drowning deaths in Lake Michigan and across the Great Lakes.

Since 2010, 437 people have died in Lake Michigan and 509 have died in the other four Great Lakes, according to the Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project.

The numbers of deaths per year also vary widely, from 54 total deaths in the Great Lakes in 2014 up to 117 total in 2018.

Total deaths by year in Lake Michigan, all Great Lakes (including Lake Michigan) 2010: 38, 74 2011: 44, 88 2012: 49, 99 2013: 24, 67 2014: 24, 54 2015: 25, 55 2016: 46, 99 2017: 40, 88 2018: 43, 117 2019: 48, 97 2020: 56, 108

Diana Panuncial contributed to this report.

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MOUNT PLEASANT  Learning how to swim can save your life or someone elses. But its not just how to swim; it can also be the ways you prepare yourself before getting into the water.

For example, instructors at the Racine Family YMCA count to three before letting younger kids hop into the water during swim classes. Its so parents, who are often swimming with their kids, can be ready to help them as soon as theyre in the water  but also so kids know when the right time is to jump into the pool instead of doing so out of excitement.

Years ago, we had a parent tell us that (the counting technique) actually saved a child from jumping into the pool. They were on vacation and he took off and ran to the pool, and the mom yelled, One! and the kid stopped because he knew mom wasnt at three yet, said Jill Otahal, an aquatic supervisor at the Sealed Air Family YMCA, 8501 Campus Drive.

Cues like counting to three teach young children how to be safe around water, Otahal said. It serves as a mental check to make sure someone is around them at the pool, at the lake, wherever they may be.

In an effort to encourage water education in the county after recent drowning incidents at North and Zoo beaches, Racine County Sheriffs Office Captain Bradley Friend suggested taking swim lessons at the YMCA.

What they learn

Quote "You can see everything in a family pool, right? But in Lake Michigan, you just don't know what's going on. A big wave can come along." Andrea Baumgart, mother

A survey conducted by the American Red Cross in 2014 showed 54% of Americans either cant swim or dont have all of the basic swimming skills.

Katie Rognsvoog, YMCA director of aquatics, estimated the YMCA gets anywhere from 350-400 youth students a session, with each session lasting seven weeks. Adult attendance in swim programs are a lot lower, however. Swimming is offered year-round.

Swim lessons at the YMCA can start as early as six months old, where infants learn with instructors about the water environment in general by getting them into the zero-depth pool area, and move up to stages like advanced learning of different stroke techniques.

Free aquatic center passes Racine County is giving away 800 individual youth passes (ages 3-17) and 150 individual adult passes (ages 18-61) to the SC Johnson Community Aquatic Center, 2800 Ohio St., operated by the Racine Family YMCA. County staff members are distributing the passes at businesses, community groups, summer school programs and other organizations serving youth. Passes are also available for pick-up on a first-come, first-serve basis at the Dennis Kornwolf Racine County Center, 1717 Taylor Ave. Those interested should enter at the north entrance and ask for passes at the front desk, according to a release. For more information on how to take swimming lessons or be a lifeguard at the YMCA, as well as other information about the programs offered in general, visit ymcaracine.org.

Andrea Baumgart has taken her 7-year-old daughter, Gemma, to swim classes since she was a baby.

We love going to the beach and being by the lake, Baumgart said, adding she wanted Gemma to take swimming classes to increase their confidence, especially with how much time their family spends in the water.

You can see everything in a family pool, right? But in Lake Michigan, you just dont know whats going on. A big wave can come along, Baumgart said. On Thursday, July 1, and Friday, July 2, Racines beaches are closed due to expected weather conditions being able to create large, life-threatening waves.

Swim students are also taught how to save themselves, and others, when they need help.

Its 110% important that children, adults, anyone learns the basics on what to do when someone needs help. Everybody should know the basics of CPR, of swim, what a rip current is, even its just the theory, Rognsvoog said.

Otahal said she also teaches students about water movements like undertows, a type of ocean current caused by waves breaking on the shore. A broken wave can push water up the beach, and gravity pulls the water back down the beach in whats known as a backwash. That backwash can knock people, kids in particular, off their feet.

Parents should be involved, too

Instructors also teach students they shouldnt be in the water without an adult around. For the adults, I tell them, If your children are in the water, you should be as well, Otahal said.

A lot of parents want their children to learn how to swim so they can be independent, Rognsvoog said, but parents should still be attentive to their kids.

Just because your kids can swim doesnt mean you shouldnt always be there, Rognsvoog said. There are never enough eyes on a child in a pool.

The Red Cross survey also showed 46% of Americans reported they have had an experience in the water where they were afraid they might drown.

To ease the anxiety or fear of water in new swimmers, Otahal said she teaches them how to relax and play in the water using different equipment.

For children, I play with them. I will take them over to our zero-depth area, I will have them on their tummy and kicking  I use rubber duckies and we chase the ducks around, Otahal said. For adults, I will sometimes bring them into the lazy river.

Accessing swim lessons

Swim lessons at the YMCA are either private or semi-private and are discounted for club members. Six private lessons for the general public cost about $140.

According to a study by the USA Swimming Foundation, 64% of black youth cant swim while 40% of white youth cant swim. The study says kids of color are at a higher risk of drowning because of an increased lack of access to swim lessons, stereotypes/lack of representation and an inherited fear of drowning.

Rognsvoog said families may not be able to afford swimming lessons, but she also pointed to the YMCAs ability to provide financial assistance  learn more about that at ymcaracine.org/financial-assistance. She said she has enough grant money to provide at least 100 students with free swimming lessons, but not enough families reach out.

I have kids who want to learn, but it may not be their familys first priority, Rognsvoog said.

For example, kids may have their swimming funded, but transportation might not be availble. It has a lot to do with where parents priorities are, Rognsvoog said.

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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.

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Copperas Cove, TX (76522)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms this morning, then mainly cloudy during the afternoon with thunderstorms likely. High 83F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Variable clouds with scattered thunderstorms. Low 71F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
Killeen, TX (76540)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms this morning, then mainly cloudy during the afternoon with thunderstorms likely. High 83F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Scattered showers and thunderstorms. Low 72F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
Killeen, TX (76540)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms this morning, then mainly cloudy during the afternoon with thunderstorms likely. High 84F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms. Low 72F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
Citizens in general and local school board members need to contact the state Board of Education to say that they do not like the proposed standards. I know there will be a revision in the fall, but I think its good to be proactive. Its good for us to be proactive because we are so strongly opposed to the standards, Murman said.

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Work will begin this summer on the second draft and will be made available to the public this fall. The public will have a chance to voice their opinion in a survey that will have a more simplified design.

Earlier this month, Kearney Public Schools issued a news release stating a team of KPS officials will be formed to evaluate the districts current health standards and see if any amendments are necessary.

At this juncture we are going to move forward with our own process, said KPS Associate Superintendent Jason Mundorf. We are going to bring together our own team of local experts, teachers and administrators. We are going to do that in the fall.
As communities continue to feel the impact of the pandemic and economic uncertainty, these organizations are supporting basic needs, education and training, economic self-sufficiency, and other programs directed at helping the recovery, said Brian Lipschultz, Co-CEO and Trustee, Otto Bremer Trust.

The Otto Bremer Trust is a bank holding company and a private charitable trust based in Saint Paul, Minn., that works at the intersection of finance and philanthropy. Created in 1944 by Otto Bremer, it is today one of the nations largest philanthropic organizations and is committed to supporting a better quality of life for residents of Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. OBT is the majority owner of Bremer Financial Corporation, a regional financial services company; manages a diversified investment portfolio; and operates Community Benefit Financial Company, a financial resources subsidiary. Since its founding, OBT has invested more than $841 million in people, places, and opportunities in the Upper Midwest. Visit ottobremer.org.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources reminds hunters and wildlife observers in Monroe County that deer baiting and feeding are prohibited.

I recently investigated several complaints regarding feeding deer in Monroe County. Please remember, it is illegal to place, use or hunt over bait or feed material in certain counties. A deer feeding and baiting ban, which includes corn as well as salt and mineral licks, has been in effect for Monroe County since Dec. 1, 2017.

The ban is a tool to limit the spread of the fatal and highly contagious deer disease known as chronic wasting disease. Bans on baiting and feeding are established within a geographic range of any confirmed CWD case.

Chronic Wasting Disease may be spread by animal-to-animal contact. It also may be transmitted by contact with saliva, urine, feces, blood, carcass parts of an infected animal or soil and especially via live deer.

To protect our states natural resources  in this case, our white-tail deer population  it is important to know and to follow the baiting and feeding bans in Monroe County. Baiting and feeding encourages deer to congregate and have direct contact, thereby increasing the chances of spreading this fatal disease within the herd.
Aggregate approachAlthough the immediate cause of the study was the two breached dams in the West Fork and the three in Coon Creek, NRCS says the dams were built to work together as an aggregate to achieve flood control in the watersheds. For the breached dams, their proposed solution is to notch them to create an opening big enough to pass a 100-year flood  that is 7.5 inches in 24 hours. The area of the notch would also be shaped and re-vegetated. The sediment behind the dams would not be removed because it would make the cost of the project too high.

The initial focus for decommissioning will be on the breached dams, and other high hazard dams (dams with people and structures in the hydraulic shadow) like Ostrem and Pilot Kinkner in the West Fork. In Coon Creek, it would be the Melby, Baltz-Amundson, Korn Coulee and Dahlen dams.

The focus to start would be on those dams that have not breached but whose failure has the possibility to endanger human life. Another option would be to remove the homes and businesses in the hydraulic shadow causing the dam to be classified as high hazard.

Decommissioning of other dams in the two watersheds would be recommended when the cost of operation and repair exceeds the economic value of the structure. The federal economic interest in the dams is considered complete after 50 years.
Offered the option to undergo her IV treatments at home, Janisch accepted.

I was glad because it was a lot easier because I could come home and be in my own bed and make my own food, Janisch says. If I was in the hospital you know you never get any rest so actually it was really pleasant.

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For four days, Janisch received three visits a day from nurses, trained in medical surgical care, who administered her IV antibiotics. Janisch was given a remote patient monitoring kit, including a blood pressure monitor and pulse oximeter, in addition to a tablet for daily virtual visits with a clinician.

After her treatment course was completed, Janisch continued to receive calls from a nurse for several additional days to check in.

Were eager to get our eligible patients in so were excited she was a part of this, says Andrea Hauser, DNP, RN, CNL, and vice president of nursing and patient experience at Gundersen. Im really proud to have this program be a part of our community. We know patients tend to heal better in their own homes, their own surroundings when theyre on their normal sleep schedule, when they can have as many family member come and go (as they want). The opportunity to bring this care to our patients is such a big one for us.
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has sent letters to Moderna and Pfizer to request information and data on adverse events and the steps their companies have taken to assist individuals who have reported experiencing serious adverse events following receipt of the COVID-19 vaccines.

The Wisconsin Republican asked for this information no later than July 15.

We all want the pandemic to be over, Johnson wrote. Operation Warp Speed and your companys success in producing a generally safe and effective vaccine have played a key role in ending it. But just because a vaccine is generally safe, does not mean it is 100 percent safe. The small percentage of people experiencing serious adverse events deserve to be taken seriously and their health issues thoroughly researched and addressed.

The senator detailed specific examples from stories hes heard, including those from a press conference in Milwaukee on Monday. Since the press conference Twitter has labeled videos of personal testimony as misleading, and Facebook has censored private groups and individual posts.
"I am confident that Governor Evers will use his line-item veto to approve a budget that's good for Wisconsin. I also trust that he will invest our state's federal COVID relief dollars wisely to fill the gaps," he said.
The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, 866-366-3723, uses a risk-based inspection reporting process for restaurants and other food handlers.

Awash Ethiopian Cuisine LLC, 1027 Dillersville Road, follow-up, June 25. Pass. No violations.

Barrs Farms, Central Market, June 25. Pass. No violations.

Boas Fundraising, 1500 Wilson Ave., June 25. Pass. No violations.

Castenada Mexican Restaurant, 323 Main St., Denver, opening, June 25. Pass. Front bain-marie cutting board is scored and stained and needs to be replaced or resurfaced. Quat test strips are discolored and expired and need to be replaced. Third well of steam table does not fit under hood preventing condensate from being properly vented.

Central Market Juice Co. LLC, 2 W. Grant St., June 25. Pass. No violations.

Character Coffee Co., 2060 Miller Road, East Petersburg, opening, June 25. Front service window is open, unscreened and does not protect against the entry of insects, rodents and other animals. Food facility has an employee that has taken food safety training program; however, the food safety program was not an ANSI/CFP accredited certified food manager program. The facility has 90 days to enroll an employee in a state-recognized food safety class.

Courtside Lounge, 37 E. Orange St., June 25. Pass. No violations.

Giant Food Store No. 6485, 789 E. Main St., Mount Joy, June 25. Pass. Deli: Wrap damaged with metal hanging out, no longer smooth and easily cleanable. An insect control device (fly strips) located in bakery and kitchen area with potential to contaminate food, equipment, and/or utensils. Door gasket of reach-in produce cooler soiled.

Lancaster Country Club, 1466 New Holland Ave., June 25. Pass. Peeling paint on the ceiling over the food preparation area near the walk-in cooler. Single-service, single-use articles stored in the food preparation area directly on the floor, and not 6 inches above the floor.

Little Dippers Ice Cream, 432 W. Main St., Mount Joy, June 25. Pass. Exterior of milk shake machine with old, dried-on food debris. Door gaskets of small reach-in cooler soiled. Food employee in dipping area, wearing bracelet/watch on arms. Lids to the ice cream wells duct taped together, which is not approved method of a fix.

Marion Court Room, 7 Marion Court, June 25. Pass. No violations.

Nano Grill, 129 Greenland Drive, June 25. Pass. No violations.

Pizza Hut Delivery, 777 Manor St., type 2 follow-up, June 25. Pass. No violations.

Reunion-Community Action Partnership, 120 N. Duke St., June 25. Pass. No violations.

Savoy Truffle Cakes TFS2, 955 N.State St., Ephrata, opening, June 25. Pass. Cake cards do not contain any labeling, i.e., name of business with address, ingredient statement (including subingredients) allergens and weight.

Sendero Hot Dogs MFF3, 548 S. Ann St., June 25. Pass. No violations.

Souvlaki Boys the Greek Food Truck, 120 N. Duke St., June 25. Pass. No violations.

Splits and Giggles, 500 W. Lemon St., June 25. Pass. No violations.

Turkey Hill Mini Market No. 017, 325 W. Main St., Mount Joy, June 25. Pass. Apples for sale not wrapped, with no sign stating to wash prior to consumption. Hot dogs, a refrigerated, ready-to-eat, time/temperature-control-for-safety food in the walk-in cooler area, were date-marked by the facility but were beyond the seven-day use or sell by date and require discarding; date marked on bin was June 16. An ingredient statement or placard is not available for all items in the self-service baked items case. Ice cream novelty case with an excessive buildup of ice in need of defrosting. Floor under BIB area with excessive build up of old syrup. Underside of chili and cheese machine with old food residue.

Uncle Leroys Candy Kitchen, 2 W. Grant St., June 25. Pass. No violations.

Union Mill Acres, LLC, 955 N. State St., Ephrata, complaint, June 25. Pass. No violations.

Burger King No. 3760, 2850 W. Main St., Morgantown, follow-up, June 24. Pass. Clean Cambro pans stored wet in a manner that does not allow for draining and/or air-drying (wet-nesting). Several stored pans contained either food residue or grease and were not clean to sight or touch.

China King, 1621 Manheim Pike, June 24. Pass. Food utensils in the food preparation area stored in a container of water which is not maintained at 135 F. In-use cleavers stored between table edges, an area not easily cleanable and sanitized. Food facility does not have available sanitizer test strips or test kit to determine appropriate sanitizer concentration. Food facility is using bleach sanitizer at an extremely high concentration of 400 ppm, not approved in the Code of Federal Regulations for food contact sanitizing at this level. Raw shrimp stored above cooked pork in the walk-in cooler. Employee food items commingled with food for the business in the walk-in cooler, rather than being stored separately.

Divine Swine In & Out BBQ, 2684 Lebanon Road, Manheim, June 24. Pass. Mechanical warewashing equipment had a buildup inside. Can opener store in clean dish area with old food residue. Plastic containers stored cleaned with old sticker residue. Clean food equipment and/or utensils in clean dish area, stored uncovered or not inverted. Facility has an employee who has a certificate of achievement but not a managers food handlers certificate. Facility doesnt have a mop sink or floor drain to empty waste water. Walls and floor under and around dishwasher with soil buildup.

Feather Pizza Co., 785 Stehman Church Road, Washington Boro, June 24. Pass. No violations.

McDonalds No. 12963, 711 Lancaster Road, Manheim, complaint, June 24. Pass. No violations.

Meals on Wheels of Lancaster, 1411 Columbia Ave., opening, June 24. Pass. No violations.

Refton Community Fire Company Auxiliary, 99 Church St., Refton, June 24. Pass. No violations.

Strasburg Bakery, 11 1/2 W. Main St., Strasburg, June 24. Pass. No violations.

The Friendly Horsemans Club, 260 Kline Road, Stevens, June 24. Pass. Refrigeration temperature measured 44 F rather than 41 F or less as required. Hot dogs inside unit were voluntarily discarded. Thermometer in refrigerator was inaccurate by 10 F.

The Restaurant Store, 2209 Old Philadelphia Pike, June 24. Pass. No violations.

Castle Roller Skating Inc., 1400 Elm Ave., June 23. Pass. No violations.

E & A Candies, 3614 Old Philadelphia Pike, Intercourse, June 23. Pass. No violations.

Fruitville Beef Shack, 780 Fruitville Pike, Manheim, June 23. Pass. No violations.

Guss Keystone Family Restaurant, 1050 Main St., Mount Joy, complaint, June 23. Pass. Interior or reach-in coolers and freezers on the cook-line with excessive old food debris buildup. Refrigerated, ready-to-eat, time/temperature-control-for-safety food prepared in the food facility and held for more than 24 hours, located in the walk-in cooler and reach-in coolers, is not being date-marked. Fly strips hanging in food prep areas.

Muddy Run Park Food Store, 172 Bethesda Church Road West, Holtwood, June 23. Pass. No violations.

Muddy Run Snack Bar, 172 Bethesda Church Road, West, Holtwood, June 23. Pass. No violations.

Time 2 Eat, 89 E. Main St., Mount Joy, opening, June 23. Pass. No violations.

Beilers Donut Trailer-MFF3, 314 Millcreek Road, Bird-in-Hand, June 22. Pass. No violations.

Catalinas on Orange, 38 W. Orange St., June 22. Pass. No violations.

Glenwood Foods LLC, 1614 Division Highway, Ephrata, June 22. Pass. A hole on bottom of wall in ladies room and a couple in walk-in cooler storage room on back, right side. A fly strip hanging from ceiling over stored food in back storage room.

Hilltop Acres Farm Market, 347 Rife Run Road, Manheim, change of owner, June 22. Pass. Five gallons of 1% milk with expiration date of June 21. Cheese spreads with no ingredient labels, and prepackaged fruit with more than one fruit not identifying each fruit.

Idas Cafe, 507 Rohrerstown Road, June 22. Pass. Commercially processed, refrigerated, ready-to-eat, time/temperature-control-for-safety food (pork roll, ham, turkey), located in the walk-in cooler, and held more than 24 hours, is not being marked with the date it was opened. Deeply scored cutting board on large cooling unit, across from cookline, not resurfaced or discarded as required. An accumulation of grease and food debris behind the flat grill, on the floor under the cook line, inside the fryer cabinet, and on the wall behind the cook line; scheduled to be cleaned. Boxes of potatoes stored directly on the floor in the walk-in cooler, rather than 6 inches off of the floor as required. An employees open beverage container (twist-cap variety) was on the food preparation table. Old food residue on the slicer blade and inner rim of the meat slicer.

Issei Noodle, 44 N. Queen St., June 22. Pass. No violations.

Kendig Square Movies 6, 2600 Willow Street Pike, Willow Street, June 22. Pass. No violations.

Lancaster Asian Center, 2060 Bennett Ave., complaint, June 22. Pass. No violations.

Mill Bridge Village, 101 S. Ronks Road, Ronks, June 22. Pass. No violations.

Olde Heritage Root Beer, 3217B Old Philadelphia Pike, Ronks, June 22. Pass. No violations.

Sarah Maes Soft Pretzels at Busy Bee Farm Market, 3378 Old Philadelphia Pike, Ronks, June 22. Pass. No violations.

Soulcialize LLC, 2 W. Grant St., June 22. Pass. No violations.

Stone Gables Estate, 1 Hollinger Lane, Elizabethtown, June 22. Pass. Iron Stone  Interior of ice machine on deflector shield with pink and black matter build-up. Star Barn  Small flies in the dish machine area. A temperature measuring device for measuring manual warewashing wash and sanitizing water temperatures is not available in both kitchens.

Turkey Hill Minit Market No. 281, 1010 Sharp Ave., Ephrata, complaint, June 22. Pass. No violations.

Welders Steak Shack MFF3, 76 S. Vintage Road, Paradise, June 22. Pass. No violations.

Welders Steak Shack at Salisbury Park, 750 White Horse Road, Gap, June 22. Pass. No violations.

Wendys No. 6442, 1117 Harrisburg Pike, complaint, June 22. Pass. No violations.

Worship Center. 2384 New Holland Pike, June 22. Pass. A working container of sanitizer was stored on the same shelf with food and equipment in the front food preparation area. Working containers in front food preparation area, used for storing cleaners taken from bulk supplies, were not marked with the common name of the chemical.

Eldora Farm Market, 1920 Lancaster Pike, Peach Bottom, June 21. Pass. No violations.

Sunshine Mini Mart, 568 Manor St., emergency response, June 21. Fail. Due to a fire in adjoining apartment, electric has been shut off to facility. All cold hold food items to be disposed of and shelf goods to be inspected and discarded if suspected of contamination. Loss of electric power due to fire in adjacent apartment, all cold hold items are out of time and temperature controls. All food contact surfaces are required to be cleaned and sanitized in response to smoke damage.

Yorgos, 66 N. Queen St., June 21. Pass. No violations.
A new app with the singular mission of saving lives could soon be available to Lancaster County residents.

Lancaster County Government and the Lancaster County EMS Council are hoping to partner with the PulsePoint Foundation, a California based non-profit that uses 911 call data to send real-time alerts on cardiac arrests directly to the phones of app users in the area.

What we know is that for every minute that CPR is not being done, we lose about 10% chance of survival, Darrell Fisher, a member of New Holland EMS and president of Lancaster County EMS Council, told the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday. If you do the math and youre a few blocks from the EMS station on a perfect day, thats still about a 60 to 80% chance (lost).

According to the American Heart Association, cardiac arrest  or the abrupt stopping of the heart  occurs outside of a hospital more than 356,000 times a year, and death can occur quickly if the condition is not reversed by CPR or with a defibrillator.

The PulsePoint Foundation, which says its singular mission is saving lives, operates a mobile app which through pairing with a countys 911 call system can send real-time alerts of cardiac arrest to app users in the immediate area and inform them where the closest defibrillator is, cutting down on response time for a condition where minutes are critical.

A news segment promoted by the company from an ABC affiliate in Maryland explains how a woman using the app was able to save a mans life in 2017 when he suffered cardiac arrest and she received an alert on her phone.

Its just amazing that Im actually standing here, all because of the PulsePoint System, Sean McGuire told ABC 7.

Kathleen Morrison, assistant county solicitor, said on Tuesday that a partnership with PulsePoint is something the county and local medical providers have been looking at for years, but has not moved forward due to concerns about liability and privacy.

Commissioner Craig Lehman explained that there was concern over who would verify defibrillator locations and be liable if the county lists a defibrillator in a location and it is not in fact there or does not work.

To address that, Fisher said that when a user wants to list a defibrillator on the app, EMS council members will go to that location to ensure it is actually there before it is listed on the app. However, maintaining the defibrillator will be the responsibility of the defibrillators owner.

As for privacy, the app would also send different alerts to users depending on their level of medical expertise. Verified first responders would be able to receive alerts for cardiac arrests that occur in public areas as well as in homes, where Fisher said most events occur, while general users would only receive alerts about events occurring in public.

So theres no longer that concern that someone of the street would be barging into someones house to perform CPR, Morrison explained.

After an initial $10,000 implementation fee, the cost for the system would be $18,000 a year. The EMS council has obtained a $100,000 to cover the first five years of the program.

Morrison said that the next step will be presenting the commissioners with an agreement between PulsePoint and the county for their approval. She said she expects that to occur in the next three months.
Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health workers have until July 9 to apply for a COVID-19 vaccine exemption ahead of the Sept. 1 deadline for all employees to be fully vaccinated, according to an attorney advising workers opposed to the new mandate.

Staff who are unable or unwilling to be vaccinated for medical or religious reasons may apply for an exemption.

Roughly two-thirds of LG Healths more than 9,700 employees are vaccinated.

Eric Winter, a Berks County attorney advising LG Health employees, estimated a couple hundred workers could seek the exemption, likely for medical reasons. Religious exemptions, he said, are fairly uncommon.

Im not dealing with people who are conspiracy theorists here, said Winter, noting the employees opposed to the mandate represent a broad spectrum of hospital staff.

Winter added, Theyre scared about losing their jobs.

A petition that garnered more than 11,000 signatures submitted last month sought a policy reversal, but so far has received no response from management, Winter said.

A reversal would not be unprecedented. Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology recently did an about-face on its student vaccination mandate, citing a bill that would bar state and local governments as well as Pennsylvania colleges and universities from requiring proof of a COVID-19 vaccine. Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed the bill Thursday.

But it is unlikely.

LG Health officials have showed no signs of rolling back the mandate and instead have continued to defend it, saying the vaccine policy is designed to protect patients, staff and the community.

Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health continues to focus our efforts on educating our employees on the safety and efficacy of the vaccine with our goal to ensure that all employees are fully vaccinated by September 1, 2021, an LG Health spokesperson said in an email.

Theres not a bad guy here

LG Health officials did not respond to questions about an exemption form Winter said staff are required to submit, the process nor who will be reviewing the submissions.

Winter said it he intended to attend with employees, upon request, exemption interviews with the review board. But he also said it was unclear how that process will play out.

Anticipating a legal challenge, employees are raising money for attorney fees. As of July 1, a GoFundMe campaign had raised more than $9,000 of its $50,000 goal.

To meet the Sept. 1 deadline  depending on the vaccine  staff has less than three weeks to start a two-dose regimen.

Given the comparison to the hospitals flu vaccine requirement for staff, LNP | LancasterOnline also inquired about the number of employee requests and granted exemptions for the most recent flu season, which officials also declined to answer.

Health systems routinely require flu vaccinations for staff, but have been slow to do so for COVID-19 vaccine with only a handful nationally announcing  with employee pushback  similar policies.

Theres not a bad guy here, Winter said. I believe LGH is well-meaning in this. We just think the whole thing is misguided.

The University of Pennsylvania health system is the only one in the state to require staff vaccinations.

Officials at UPMC and WellSpan Health have not adopted a vaccine mandate, but said they continue to evaluate vaccine data and encourage staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Phil Colvin, Lancaster County Government's emergency management director, is in Miami to assist with search and rescue efforts after a condominium building collapsed last week.

Colvin, who also volunteer's with Mount Joy Fire Department, is there with his dog Lucy, who is one of the nation's few "live find" search and rescue dogs.

Colvin is in Florida as a member of Pennsylvania Task Force One, A FEMA disaster response task force comprised of police, fire and EMS agencies from around the state. The task force arrived at the site on Thursday and is currently operating in a relief capacity, waiting on assignment.

"As needed they'll start to stitch us in and get us into the work site," he said.

Last Thursday, a condominium building in Miami collapse. The death toll currently stands at 20, with another 128 missing.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Whats been billed as an innovation in clean energy looked a lot more like a sophisticated piece of plumbing -- a collection of shiny, metal tubes and cylinders that all fit on a single pushcart.

But according to Lancaster entrepreneur and self-taught scientist Eric Schraud, it's what happens inside his companys invention that is most exciting -- a chemical reaction that he says is a more efficient way of producing an increasingly sought-after, carbon-free fuel called green hydrogen.

Schraud, who showed off his invention last month, said the process he and his partners at GenHydro created also has the added benefit of producing enough heat and pressure to create electricity that can be sold to both public and private buyers, including municipal utilities.

To get to this point, it was a long time and hard work, said Schraud. It still is hard work.

That work, conducted by Schraud and a team of about a half dozen employees, takes place at GenHydros headquarters at Burle Business Park at the northeastern edge of Lancaster City.

The machine theyve built, called a reactor (not the radioactive kind), is used to produce hydrogen by separating it from water and is the focus of GenHydros entire operation.

Attached to a rolling cart, the reactor is only a little taller and wider than Schraud himself. In fact, it was easy to miss, tucked away in the corner of the companys 6,800-square-foot space at Burle.

There, Schraud and his employees are working to develop a second, slightly larger generation of the reactor with a greater capacity to produce hydrogen.

Inside of the reactor, both water and a combination of nontoxic chemical compounds interact to create a reaction. The reaction, Schraud said, separates water molecules made up of hydrogen and oxygen. Its that hydrogen that can then be marketed as clean fuel.

GenHydros method differs from a more common method of hydrogen production called electrolysis in which electric charges are used to break water molecules into their elemental parts.

Its a method that's been criticized as inefficient, including by Schraud, due to its reliance on and consumption of large amounts of electricity. Sometimes, that electricity is generated by nonrenewable sources like natural gas and other fossil fuels, which emit pollution and produce carbon dioxide, a key driver of climate change.

The end product can be called green hydrogen only if its created through a renewable process and not if it relies on any power generated by fossil fuels.

GenHydros reactive process relies on chemical compounds that can be reclaimed from landfills and avoids the need for electricity, making it more efficient and affordable, Schraud said.

The reaction inside the companys machine also generates heat and pressure that can be used to generate clean electricity as a marketable byproduct, he said.

As clean-power generators, GenHydros reactors could be sited near electricity customers, much like solar panels or windmills, though theyll take up a much smaller footprint, Schraud said.

All of that, he said, hopefully, will allow his company to sell hydrogen to customers at a significantly lower cost than its competitors.

Once development is complete, a GenHydro commercial unit should be able to generate about 400 kilograms of hydrogen per day, Schraud said. One kilogram of hydrogen contains energy equal to what is used to power an average U.S. home for a day, he said.

Numerous potential customers

Matthew Schraud, GenHydros marketing chief, guessed customers will be plentiful given hydrogens numerous end uses. Matthew Schraud is Eric's brother.

In specialized fuel cells, hydrogen could become a widely used, emissions-free fuel to power on-road vehicles, warehouse forklifts and even ships.

It also can be marketed to traditional energy producers as a way to help them transition away from fossil fuels. Natural gas companies, for example, can blend hydrogen with gas inside existing pipelines, Matthew Schraud said.

We are not trying to displace them, he said. We are looking to help them transition over to green energy.

Customers may even exist within the agricultural community, where hydrogen can be combined with nitrogen to create ammonia, which is widely used as fertilizer, Matthew Schraud said.

Another byproduct of the process, created when oxygen separated from water binds with reactants, can be sold and used for multiple purposes, including hardening concrete, GenHydro officials said.

Hydrogens potential has been known for decades, but its gained traction in the United States as growing output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind give hydrogen producers greater access to carbon-free energy to power existing production processes like electrolysis.

Thats according to Bruce , director of the Hydrogen Energy Center at Penn State University, where hes a professor of environmental engineering.

Logan said he expects hydrogens popularity will only continue to grow.

If we are going to avoid climate change, it is absolutely central, he said.

Logan said he cant speak to GenHydros claims about the novelty, efficiency or affordability of its process because he hasnt studied the company's model and is unaware of exactly which chemicals will be used to cause the reaction.

All of that is information that Eric Schraud said hes unwilling to disclose because hes worried about competitors who could mimic his process before GenHydro sees commercial success.

Citing the same concerns, Eric Schraud declined to share documents related to a provisional patent application, which GenHydros lawyers at K&L Gates LLP said has been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Officials with the Patent and Trademark Office said they cannot confirm nor deny the existence or status of provisional patent applications, which are not otherwise public.

First deal likely before years end

GenHydro already is courting multiple customers, Eric Schraud said. Some are interested in the companys hydrogen; others, including a potential municipal partner, are eyeing its electricity, he said.

He declined to identify prospective customers because they have not yet signed contracts. He said the first deal is likely before the end of the year.

He also declined to disclose financial details about the company, including its revenue projections. However, in an earlier email, a company stakeholder revealed that a first round of investment funding was expected to total $750,000.

Though he wouldnt reveal any names, Eric Schraud said a majority of his investors are local, with a few others based in the western United States.

One investor who agreed to be identified is Dr. Chris Kager, a local neurosurgeon and chief of Lancaster General Healths neurosurgery division.

I met Eric Schraud almost six months ago and was immediately drawn to his vision, Kager said, celebrating GenHydros zero-emissions model. There is a massive and growing market for clean, renewable energy, and green hydrogen ... has the largest potential.

Kager also has signed on to assist the company in an advisory role as its vice president of strategy.

There wasnt anybody doing anything like this, which seemed like a very unique and novel way to produce this at a significantly lower cost, he said.

Eric Schraud, 33, also serves as GenHydros chief engineer  a title he holds despite the fact that his educational background is in business. All of the technical knowledge he used to develop GenHydros reactive hydrogen production model was self-taught, he said.

I bought textbooks and I taught myself physics and chemistry, Schraud said, explaining he first began tinkering with traditional electrolysis in a garage, hoping to use hydrogen to power personal vehicles.

Finding that method inefficient, Schraud said he then began to explore the reactive method, and he brought that interest with him to Lancaster County when he moved to the area from New York City just a few years ago to be closer to family.

It started as more of a hobby and it quickly became a vocation, he said, adding that hes now an industry expert with enough knowledge to present his ideas to stakeholders, energy regulators and state lawmakers.

Its been quite a journey, he said.
Pequea Township residents and officials are mourning the death of township supervisor Anthony Cazillo.

Cazillo, 26, died suddenly Wednesday of natural causes in his home, county coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni said. He had served on the Pequea Township Board of Supervisors since January 2019 -- most recently as vice-chair -- and received a majority of the Republican vote in the May primary to serve another term.

Theres a real shock, said Harry Lehman, the chair of the Pequea Township board of supervisors. Anthony was a man beyond his age. He was very mature, caring, civic-minded, wanted to do for others. He was dependable. He was our vice chair, and it was for a reason.

A GoFundMe has been organized to raise money for funeral expenses to help his wife and family. The fund has raised $9,300 of its $12,000 goal as of Friday afternoon.

Lehman said the board is devastated by Cazillos death.

We loved him, Lehman added, saying he talked to Cazillo every day of the week except Sundays. It was just great having a young guy on our board. You dont see that: A young man who knew what he was doing.

According to the wedding registry website The Knot, Cazillo wed Katelyn Fox on May 21 in Manheim.

In a post to Facebook on Wednesday, she wrote: Words cannot describe how heartbroken and devastated I am today. My sweet, sweet Anthony passed away this morning so unexpectedly. One can only ask, why?, cry, be upset, but ultimately trust Gods plan, even though it makes you hurt, confused and unbelievably sad.

While on the Pequea Township board, Cazillo served as the liaison to the townships two fire departments, West Willow Fire Department and New Danville Fire Department. Both departments and its police department praised Cazillo in public social media postings.

He was such a wonderful young man who at only 26 years of age did so much for our community, Pequea Township Police Department posted on its Facebook page Wednesday. Anthony, we will miss you greatly, thank you for everything youve done for Pequea Township. Your hard work and dedication will not be forgotten.

When former Pequea Township supervisor chairman Don Purdum abruptly resigned in February 2020 following months of outrage from township residents over his effort to cut back its local police force, Cazillo briefly stepped in as chairman, telling LNP | LancasterOnline it was his goal to Make Pequea Township boring again.

Local government should be boring and uninteresting, Cazillo said.

Prior to his election to the board, Cazillo joined the townships planning commission, Lehman said. He also led Millersville Universitys College Republicans prior to his graduation in 2017, according to his LinkedIn page.

The board now has 45 days to appoint a new member to serve out the rest of Cazillos term, Lehman said.

Cazillo was employed by LNP Media Group, Inc. for two years as an advertising department employee. He most recently worked as a marketing director for a finance firm, according to his LinkedIn.

Cazillo was an active member of the Republican Committee of Lancaster County, most recently serving as the Penn Manor area committeeman and member of the Lancaster Young Republicans.

Anthony was an exemplary member and young professional. His dedication to serving and improving his community are a shining example to us all, the Lancaster Young Republicans posted on Facebook.

Lehman had hoped Cazillo would take over as chairman of the board after he left, he said.

I wanted him to take my place, Lehman said. Im 69 years old. You got to have somebody in line. He was part of the succession plan. For [Cazillo to die], its backwards. Its all upside down.

Information about memorial services for Cazillo were not available as of Thursday afternoon.
When: Supervisors meeting, June 28.

What happened: A half-dozen impassioned residents from the Sweetbriar Creek neighborhood engaged the board for more than 45 minutes during public comments, seeking to stop plans for a walking path behind their backyards. The residents, many with young children, claim a walkway will lead to trouble and decrease property values. Township officials were receptive to the request and offered information and suggestions.

Background: Sweetbriar Creek was one of four neighborhoods the township approved in the early 2000s. Conditional use was granted in 2003, which gave every lot an easement on all properties. Township officials explained that Keystone Custom Homes wants to complete the contract in order to have streets dedicated. Residents claim Keystone has ignored requests to attend homeowners association meetings to hear their concerns and discuss altering the contract.

Why its important: Township Manager Mark Hiester said neighborhoods of a certain size are expected to have paths and bike trails, and that part of the original plans was to have trails connecting neighborhoods. In order to change those plans, every lot owner may have to sign off. Its a matter of following legal procedures, Hiester said.

Public comments: Resident Leighan Melnick said she has collected 50 signatures on a petition opposing the walkway. In a prepared statement, Melnick said the path will escalate current problems in the neighborhood, including car and home break-ins, litter, drug dealing and sexual affairs occurring in the park parking lots. Township resident Charlie Melhorn, a police officer in another jurisdiction, said he understands the opposition even though he is not directly impacted by the proposed path.

Quotable: Pathways into areas of darkness and behind houses are a breeding ground for criminal activity, Melhorn said.

Whats next: Supervisor Richard Landis suggested residents get together and be creative when considering what would also benefit Keystone. Construction of the path was slated for later this summer, although it may be delayed for unrelated reasons.

Other happenings: Resident Randy Sweitzer complained about a property on Fruitville Pike with a F*** Biden flag. Although the five board members acknowledged its presence, no one offered any suggestions to have it removed.
Guatemala President Alejandro Giammattei recently told Vice President Kamala Harris and the media that he believes that confusing messages by President Joe Biden led people to believe that everyone was welcome to come to the United States and that no one would be turned away. Giammattei further said that the messaging led cartels and coyotes to round up Guatemalans and take them on the dangerous journey to the U.S. border.

Harris responded that she is going help to plant trees in Central America and even used the relatively new term ecopreneurs in efforts to help the Guatemalan people choose to stay at home.

And if that does not work, theres also the U.S. pledge of a significant amount of money to the Guatemalan government for humanitarian aid.

In the meantime, women and children are being thrown into the Rio Grande  some screaming that theyre drowning  by coyotes and cartels. This has been happening since Biden became president.

This is a humanitarian crisis. Innocent people are dying.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government is talking about global warming and throwing money at the problem in what I view as reckless abandon.

I believe Harris must start taking action that saves lives.

Susy Mahalick

Ephrata
I was 8 when my parents insisted that we listen to the United Nations radio broadcast that announced the creation of the state of Israel. I also heard the new prime minister implore the Arabic people to remain in their homes, help the Holocaust survivors adjust to the climate and learn agrarian skills, and in turn achieve full citizenship.

The surrounding Arabic countries, certain that they would drive the Jewish people into the sea, launched their attack, warning that Arabic people who remained in Israel would be considered traitors and would be killed as they invaded.

We know what followed the 1948 Arab-Israeli War: refugee camps where for generations Arabic people have remained, seeming political pawns for leaders who I believe care more about publicity than about saving lives of ordinary citizens.

In Israel, homes have well-stocked safe rooms and community bomb shelters. Arent those who are living in Gaza entitled to the same from their government?

My very deep sympathy lies with generations of Arabic people who continue to be pawns in life and death. Reminder: Every war except one was launched by an Arabic country; often several simultaneously.

I believe that peace will result only when a new, genuine Arabic peacenik emerges  surely at great risk to his or her life\!q  or when the populace overthrows its Iran-backed terrorist government. Sadly, Im not betting on either in my lifetime  as citizens of Gaza continue to pay a steep price.

Naomi Storm

Lancaster
This article appears in the July 2, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

[Print version of this article]

IN MEMORIAM

Mike Gravel

1930-2021

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Courtesy of Nizar Abboud Senator Mike Gravel

June 28 Hamlet said, Take him for all in all, he was a man; I shall not look upon his like again. Senator Mike Gravel was a man who stuck firmly to the truth, in public life, for 50 years. When shall we in America look upon that like again? The construction worker, army counterintelligence officer, real estate businessman, Democratic U.S. Senator from Alaska (1969-1981), feisty Presidential candidate, devoted husband to his wife Whitney and father to two children and four grandchildren, died at home in California at age 91 on June 26.

Mike Gravel is of course best known to millions over half a century, for having the couragewhen Daniel Ellsberg took the risk and sought to release the Pentagon Papers, some truth about the Vietnam Warto read those Papers into the Congressional Record during the tense 1971 standoff when any other form of publication for them was blocked. But Senator Gravel undertook many risks and stubborn political interventions in national life besides that one. In fact, he made reading the Pentagon Papers part of his then ongoing campaign to take the military draft away from the Vietnam War planners. He said of his Senate career, in the preface to his autobiography, A Political Odyssey, written with journalist Joe Lauria:

My fight against militarism turned into a personal battle with Scoop Jackson, the senator who personified the military-industrial power even more than I personified its opposition.

In the 2007-08 campaign for the Democratic nomination for President, Gravel took on Biden, Obama, Clinton and others in seven debates and reportedly won two of them, he wrote in the autobiography. Blind polls taken on the issues, without mention of any candidate, repeatedly identified the issues I was raising. And that was what was important, especially one issue: the danger of another, nuclear world war. This video clip from one of those debates shows the fearless force, and humor, with which Mike drove that home.

At the Sunday morning, June 27, 2021 session of the Schiller Institutes conference, moderator Dennis Speed told the audience,

We join the world in recalling and recognizing the importance of United States Senator Mike Gravel, who passed away yesterday. Gravel immortalized himself as a man of courage with his release of the Pentagon Papers back in 1971. He also appeared in several conferences with our organization. On September 12, 2015, he joined Helga Zepp-LaRouche, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and Lyndon LaRouche in a forum in New York City. Ramsey Clark also passed away this year. The three war veteransClark, Gravel, and LaRoucheenjoyed each others company, and they enjoyed discussing the marked differences and remarkable convergences in their respective views of the world.

In a short video from that 2015 event, Senator Gravel described to his two fellow senior, truthful leaders of the last generation, the dangers of the present day, his earlier life, and how he faced the truth.

So, its the total human insanity we have that we can deal and manipulate and control the bomb. We cant; not at all. Were victims of circumstance. So, when I take your viewstheyre as valid as minebut my view is optimistic; Im not old enough yet to be totally pessimistic. But my view is that what China is doing, what China is doing with the help of Russia, and with the BRICS, is really where the future of mankind lies in terms of solutions. Not our leadership; its going to be what theyre doing and how theyre handling it. As I pointed out to you earlier, Putin has run things very well. After the provocation of Ukraineand most Americans have forgotten that were the ones that did this, but you dont hear that anymore in the press. I dont know if anybodys seen the recent Frontline piece on Putins Way; it was horrible.

I have an intelligence background: When I was 23 years old, I was a top-secret control officer. At 23, mind you, I was in Germany as an adjutant for a communications intelligence service, and our cover was the CIC [Consolidated Intelligence Center ed.]. And what did we do at this? Theres only two military officersmyself, 23, as a second lieutenant, and a lieutenant colonel who was in the sauce a good part of the time. The rest of it was run by Germans. What we did was, wed open peoples mail wantonly, and wiretap people in Europe wantonly. Thats when I was 23 years old. So, you can figure when we had the Pentagon Papers come up in the Senate, and a Senator could not go in and read the papers, except being under guard, couldnt take any notes. All I could think of was: When I was 23, I was acting with more power than any Senator can act right now in viewing the Pentagon Papers. So, little wonder that when Ellsberg approached me, and said, would I read the Pentagon Papers as part of my filibuster against the draft? I said instantaneously, Of course, yes, I would.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, before beginning her presentation, added,

[I] could not start my talk without addressing the incredible loss of Mike Gravel. If all people in the United States would live up to his standards, the world would be a beautiful and peaceful place.

Mike Billington and Anita Gallagher
This transcript appears in the July 2, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

[Print version of this transcript]

Col. Richard H. Black

U.S.-China Relations: A Pathway for War Avoidance and Cooperation

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Schiller Institute Col. Richard H. Black

Col. Richard H. Black (USA ret.) is a former Virginia State Senator, and a former head of the U.S. Armys Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon. This is an edited transcript of remarks he delivered via pre-recorded video to the first panel, Whom the Gods Would Destroy: War with Russia and China Is Worse than MAD! of the June 26-27, 2021 Schiller Institute conference, For the Common Good of All People, Not Rules Benefitting the Few! Subheads have been added.

Im Senator Dick Black. Let me just say to begin with, I have a military background. I fought in heavy ground combat [in Vietnam] with the 1st Marine Division and I was wounded. Both of my radio men were killed beside me. I also flew in combat 269 helicopter missions. And my helicopter was hit by ground fire on four occasions and had to crash land in one case. So, I just mention that by way of saying that Im a patriot, Ive shed a bucket of blood for this country. And so I come at this from a very conservative viewpoint, but one that I think is well-informed.

Today, Im going to be talking about our relations with China. And Id like to start with our involvement with Taiwan, first of all. Let me say that I am concerned by the growing Sino-American tension. And I certainly disagree with those who feel that the United States must exercise hegemony in Asia. And I hope that we can diminish the tensions.

Taiwan and the One-China, Two-Systems Agreement

Let me let me start by reviewing the situation with Taiwan. If you look at things in terms of the historical development over the past 50 years, the relations between China and Taiwan are internal affairs of the nation of China. And just as we would expect that China would refrain from interference in American foreign policy, or rather [our] domestic policy, we should also refrain from over-involvement in Chinas domestic affairs.

Going back a little bit, President Nixon made a visit to China in 1971, which was perhaps the most consequential diplomatic visit ever made by an American President. As a result of it, the United States and China benefitted enormously from improved trade and national security. These historic developments were founded on the Shanghai Communique, which remains the basis for bilateral relations today.

President Richard Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai found it necessary to resolve the Taiwan issue. There certainly were significant divisions in the views of the two nations, but they bridged those differences by recognizing a one-China, two-systems policy. And as a practical result of their agreement, we have had peace and harmony between our nations for half a century since. As long as the United States has approached the Taiwan issue with sensitivity and respect, the interests of both parties have flourished, and peace has been maintained across the Straits of Taiwan.

In 1971, something very significant was done. There are five members of the UN Security Council which have a veto power. These are the five very powerful nations, one of them being China. And the United Nations General Assembly enacted Resolution 2758 with the tacit approval of the United States, and it transferred the control of that very powerful seat from the Republic of China [Taiwan]Chiang Kai-sheks old governmentto the PRC, the Peoples Republic of China. And as a result, the government in Beijing was recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate government of China.

All of the diplomatic relations shifted over from the bulk of nations. And Taiwan had this situation where they were viewed a little bit like Hong Kong was previously. Taiwan did remain strong and independent, but in 1979, the U.S. formally recognized the PRCPeoples Republic of Chinaas the sole legitimate government of China. And so, its rather strange to see us today talking as though perhaps theyre not the sole legitimate government of China.

We went through this period where we had this explosive growth of trade between the two nations. It was very beneficial in many ways to us. In some ways it had some downsides. But in any event, the tremendous trade eventually caused some trade tensions, inevitably. And President Donald Trump raised some very legitimate issues with the Chinese about their infringement on intellectual property, our patents, our copyrights. I think he was very justified in doing that. He was also very justified in highlighting the lopsided balance of trade, and negotiations were undertaken to resolve these issues.

Unfortunately, it was a presidential year when all of this was taking place. And before long, you had Republicans and Democrats both accusing one another of being soft on China. And eventually, their rhetoric just degenerated into a shrill cacophony of hostile, unreasoning voices. There were exaggerated claims about Chinese military intentions towards Taiwan, and those were responded to by provocative naval exercises by the United States. And in turn, China has made somewhat provocative overflights of aircraft in the waters off of Taiwan. Neither of those [actions] was necessary. They simply were a stick in the eye to one another. I think the growing Sino-American tensions have benefitted no one, and I believe that U.S. leaders would be wise to rekindle President Nixons most enduring legacy, which was the normalization of relations between the two countries.

Chinas Treatment of the Uighurs

Now, let me shift just a minute. I want to talk about the about Chinas dealing with the Uighurs in Xinjiang province. Xinjiang province is a huge northwestern region of China. Its very arid. Its sparsely populated. Theres a considerable amount of poverty there just because of the situation. And again, its important to understand the context of these things when you hear, well, these poor Uighurs are being set upon. In 2014, there were knife-wielding terrorists who seized the Kunming train station and they attacked the Han Chinese in a very famous attack. Over 170 people were killed or wounded by knife-slashing terrorists. These were Uighur separatists. They were carrying a hand-painted East Turkistan flag, and they just slaughtered dozens and dozens of people who were totally helpless. This was not the first such attack; there had been dozens of similar terrorist attacks carried out across Xinjiang province.

The militant Uighurs intend to form a radical Islamic state using Wahhabi fundamentalist ideas imported from Saudi Arabia and countries like that. And they want this kind of 7th Century, very, very brutal type of governance to take place. And they want to exclude all of the Han Chinese who presently live in Xinjiang province. So, the Chinese government was really compelled to react. There are reports that large numbers of Uighurs have been placed under internment in various camps there.

U.S. Internment of Japanese-Americans

I think its important that we put this in perspective a bit. Go back to the Second World War, which is not that long ago, one when the Japanese nation attacked us militarily. There was not some sort of a subversive movement of Japanese Americans within the United States; there were no acts of violence committed by them. And yet, we decided to place all people of Japanese heritage in internment camps, internment in remote places.

Now, today, people look back and they said what a terrible thing to do. But at the time, it was rather uncontroversial; to the point where China, Mexico, many South American countries followed suit, and they also snatched up all of the people that they had with Japanese heritage, and they sent many of them to the United States for internment.

So, I think we need to be a little less critical of China because theres a difference. The Japanese-Americans had never done anything to us, but the Uighur militants have been extremely militant, disruptive, and violent. And so, its very necessary for the Chinese government to take some reasonable actions.

Now, Chinas approach to the Uighur situation is complex and its multifaceted. Theyre taking steps to alleviate the historic poverty in this vast area, and they have a very comprehensive, extremely well-funded economic program. And the idea is to eliminate the root causes of the jihadist radicalization. They have vocational job training, increased literacy, job placement, modernization of agriculture, which is very important there, and construction of modern housing for the people.

So, we need to put it in perspective and recognize that there is no higher obligation of a nation than to protect its citizens from serious violence. And just as the United States, when we declared the reasons for our breakaway from [England] and for establishing a new government, we said that one of the four reasons for establishing the government was to ensure domestic tranquility. And the Chinese have that obligation to their people no less than we do.

The Western propaganda about genocide, I believe, is unfair, inaccurate, and irresponsible. Whereas the United States interned all Japanese, by any estimate whatsoever, the Chinese have put in internment camps a small percentage of the 12 million Uighurs who occupy this area. And so it is somewhat targetted; people dont just remain there indefinitely. And I think we need to be a little bit more understanding of this situation.

Turkey Facilitates Movement of Uighur Militants to Syria

Now, I think its important to understand today what is happening in Xinjiang province. The Turkish government is facilitating the movement of Uighur militants from China through Turkey into Idlib province of Syria. And there is a 4,000-man brigade of ultra-militant Uighurs who are fighting against the legitimate government of Syria. Theyre a part of the al-Qaeda forces, and they serve under Abu Mohammed al-Julani. They operate out of al-Shughur, a very key defensive point there. And they are a part of the most bloodthirsty terrorists on Earthmen who were made famous for beheadings, mass rapes, crucifixions, and slavery. And this is the mentality that they carry with them as they filter back and forth between China and between Syria. So its very dangerous for them.

And I think its unfortunate. The CIA has supported the terrorists in Idlib province, Syria, with just unwavering support. And we routinely employ terrorists in various hotspots around the world, utterly disregarding the very profound collateral risk that this poses both to the United States and to Europe.

Theres been discussion of Chinas suppression of extremism as genocide, and its nothing of the sort. I think it makes a mockery of the very term genocide. Even the State Department, the office of legal advisor, has said that there is no evidence to support the notion of genocide with the Uighurs. So thats coming from the U.S. State Department. I think the world is besieged by dangerous jihadists, and nations should be cooperating to suppress them and refrain from making them pawns in a dangerous game between the countries.

Work Together to Resolve Frictions in the World

Id just like to touch on one other thing as I begin to close.

The U.S. and China really should begin to work together to try to resolve some of the points of friction within the world. And I think Syria would be a good place to start. Syria has been war torn for the past 10 yearsthe people on both sides. Ninety percent of the country is under the Syrian government [control], but the other 10% is controlled by the terrorists. But on both sides, theres a great weariness with the war. And the only thing that really keeps the war going is that we have such an effective naval blockade on Syria. And also, we have these Caesar sanctions, which are quite brutal; they cause famine in many instances. And if we would simply drop the blockade and drop the sanctions, we could begin rebuilding.

And once we rebuild, the young men of Syria [will] have no interest in being soldiers, but they dont have any other option. If youre going to feed your family, youve got to be a soldier on one side or the other. And its time, really, that they begin to pound their rifles into plowshares and rebuild the country. Now, its particularly important that China do everything conceivable to help to rebuild Syria, because, remember, there are those 4,000 Uighur extremists in al-Shughur. If by some means, the terrorists of al-Qaeda were able to overthrow the nation of Syria, this would vastly empower the Uighur militants and they would simply explode back into Xinjiang province and they would spread the revolution there with enormous quantities of weapons funneled in, and so forth. And it really would be an existential threat to the existence of China.

Its unfortunate. The Central Intelligence Agency and MI6 are keenly aware of this. We used Operation Cyclone against the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, and we fielded a 300,000-man army of terrorists who were trained by Saudi clerics in Wahhabi philosophy, trained to kill Christians and other non-Muslims. There are some within the CIA, Im quite certain, who look at Xinjiang province and they see an opportunity for a new Operation Cyclone, which is what we called the operation that drove the Soviets from Afghanistan.

I think this would have terrible implications for the entire world, that it would destabilize all of the world if we were to start this up in China. And so, I hope that the United States will take a more reasoned approach towards China.

At the same time, I am concerned that some of the old Chinese diplomats are now leaving the scene and are being replaced by more aggressive diplomats. I think what we need are diplomats who will look for common ground, and who will diminish the level of tension so that we can live in peace.

We need to always remember that if we end up in combat with China, either we fight a land war in Asiaand we know the results of thator we engage in a nuclear war. Those are the two options. A nuclear war means the destruction of much of mankind. And so, my hope is that we resolve things diplomatically and that cooler heads will prevail.

So, thank you very much and I appreciate being with you today.
Putin: Even Sinking the HMS Defender Would Not Have Triggered a War

July 1, 2021 (EIRNS)During his nationally broadcast Direct Line with Vladimir Putin annual question & answer session with the Russian public yesterday, President Putin argued, in response to one question, that even if the Russian military had sunk the HMS Defender, on June 23, it would not have triggered a World War III. You said that this put the world on the brink of a global war. No, of course, not. Even if we had sunk that ship, it is nevertheless difficult to imagine that this would have put the world on the brink of a third world war because those who did this know they could not win a war like that. This is very important, he said. (Putin would do well to recall the advice of Lyndon LaRouche, who frequently said that one should never discount the possibility that ones interlocutors on the other side of the table might actually be insane.) The President further stressed:

I do not think that we would have been happy at the turn of events you mentioned, but we at least know what we are fighting for: We are fighting for ourselves and our future on our own territory. It was not we who covered thousands of kilometers by air and sea towards them; it was they who approached our borders and entered our territorial sea....

Putin continued:

The second thing is the political component. Recently, a few days ago, a meeting was held in Geneva. The question was: why was there such a provocation? What was all of that for? For the sake of emphasizing that these people do not respect the Crimeans choice to join the Russian Federation? ... Fine, keep not accepting it. But why a provocation of this kind?

the President asked.

President Putin explained his answer:

I am not concerned about this or that somebody does not respect the choice of the people in Crimea to join Russia. I have a different concern. Look now, they raised a clamor over the fact that we were conducting exercises on our own territory near the Ukrainian border. I instructed the Defense Ministry to quietly end the drills and withdraw the troops, if this is such a great concern for them. We did so. But instead of responding positively and saying OK, we understand your reaction to our indignation, what did they do? They approached our borders.

Putin stressed that there is more involved, related to the militarization of Ukraine.

I am worried about another, more fundamental thing, namely, the beginning of military development in Ukrainian territory. Under the Ukrainian Constitution, no foreign bases can be established in the country. Training centers and other facilities and formats are possible. But the military development of a territory that directly borders on our country creates a considerable security problem for us. This has to do with the vital interests of the Russian Federation and the Russian people. Of course, this is alarming, and we must think about it,

President Putin cautioned.

The Presidents nearly three-hour dialogue, responding to 70 questions, is posted to the Kremlin website.Renewables Policy Doubling Electricity Prices in Germany
EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY, JULY 2, 2021

America at 245; Communist Party of China at 100

July 1, 2021 (EIRNS)Heading into the July Fourth weekend in the United States, it is useful to think about the founding of the United States together with the celebration in China today of the centennial of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The U.S. has survived as a republic for 245 years, although often failing to live up to that Platonic concept, while the CPC has survived as a party for a century, and as the ruling party of China for over 70 years, with some very dark moments and some great advances. The history is important, but more important is the directionality. How do you perceive the future development of the United States, and its role in the world going forward? How do you perceive the future development of China, and its role in the world going forward? If you have not thought this through, it is past time you do so.

Lyndon LaRouche never failed to insist that what makes us humans, rather than animals, is that we can look at the world today from fifty years in the future, or even thousands of years in the future, which no animal can do. We can then determine what needs to be discovered about the laws of the universe, and how to apply those discoveries to the development of new technologies required to make the world a better place for far more people living at a higher standard of living, economically and culturally. This requires a rising rate of the rate of increase of what he called potential relative population density. How does that measure apply today to the United States, and to China?

Over the past fifty years, since approximately the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the rate of potential relative population density in the U.S. has slowed dramatically, and went into decline sometime over the past three decades. Kennedys plan for fusion power by the end of the 20th century was scrapped, and even the building of nuclear power plants was sabotaged, and now the insane Green New Deal is shutting down fossil fuel plants and building wasteful, unreliable wind and solar parks. The American System of Hamiltonian economics, with the government directing credit into the infrastructure required for private entrepreneurs to have access to clean water, cheap power, adequate transportation, and a healthy and well-educated workforce, has been systematically replaced by the British System demand for the independence of the Fedi.e., no government interference in the financial direction of the economy imposed by the banks, which have turned to speculation rather than production. The result is: The destruction of American industry through globalization; the collapse of American infrastructure; the failure to provide water resources to the Western states, causing their desertification today; the privatization and deconstruction of health care, leading to the abject failure to counter a virus and the deaths of hundreds of thousands; a virtual disappearance of Classical education and Classical culture in favor of the libertarian proliferation of drugs, sexual perversity, and the glorification of ugliness; the conduct of perpetual, genocidal warfare against weaker nations which were no threat to the U.S. And now, preparation for military confrontation with nuclear powers Russia and China. Virtually no one thinks about the nation fifty years from today.

In China, there is more application of the Hamiltonian American System of directed credit to provide for the general welfare, as called for in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, than has been seen in the U.S. for decades. President Xi Jinping, addressing the nation from the balcony of the Forbidden City facing Tiananmen Square, spoke today to a proud people about the struggle to survive the century of humiliation under British colonial control and the Japanese invasion. Xi said: We Chinese are a people who uphold justice and are not intimidated by threats of force. As a nation, we have a strong sense of pride and confidence. We have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will. By the same token, we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us. Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people. [http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/special/CPCcentenary/index.htm]

Americans hearing daily harangues about Chinas aggression and genocide and slave labor had best consider that China has eliminated abject poverty throughout the nation, built a space program comparable to that of the U.S., built a scientific and industrial infrastructure which is the envy of the world, has taken that scientific and industrial infrastructure to 140 other nations through the Belt and Road Initiative, and educates more scientists, engineers, and Classical musicians per capita than the U.S., by far. President Xi also proudly reported that the nation had reached its first centenary goal of becoming a moderately prosperous society, and called on the youth to make their mission to contribute to national rejuvenation. Chinas long-term goal is to achieve the status of a great modern socialist country by 2049the centennial of the founding of the Peoples Republicwhich is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.

Imagine what could be achieved if the U.S. and China were jointly dedicated to achieving these goals, together, for every nation on Earth. This was the theme of the Schiller Institute Conference last weekend, with Helga Zepp-LaRouches call for building a modern health system in every country as the necessary start to that process. Such thinking may be considered utopian by some, but it was the common thinking of the founders of our nation, as it was of Franklin Roosevelt, and as it is of the leaders of China and Russia today. America has fallen far, but is not hopeless. The spark of optimism and commitment in the great Americans of the past, of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, of the Chinese leaders today, can be restored, if our citizens make that choice.
Renowned economist Julianne Malveaux set to head new College of Ethnic Studies at Cal State LA

Nationally renowned economist, scholar and columnist Julianne Malveaux has been appointed dean of the new College of Ethnic Studies at Cal State LAthe first such college to be established in the U.S. in 50 years.

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Malveaux will take the helm of this unique college, which focuses on an interdisciplinary analysis of the histories, cultures and social experiences of people of color, as debates over racial injustices and pedagogy make headlines.

Learning about people of color, learning about marginalized people, learning the whole of American history is as important as learning quantum physics or English literature, said Malveaux, who is president emerita of Bennett College in North Carolina.

As a feminist and labor economist, Malveaux has focused on issues such as women in the workforce, the impact of racial wealth inequities on economic productivity and the implications of government policies on workers health on the job.

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Cal State LA President William A. Covino said Malveauxs long and accomplished record in academia and her history of advocacy will serve her well in her new role as dean of the college.

I look forward to the work that the college will do and the collaborations that will emerge under Dr. Malveauxs leadership, Covino said. This is a significant appointment for the college, but also for the city and the nation.

The College of Ethnic Studies is home to the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, the Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies and the Department of Pan-African Studies. The colleges inaugural year coincided with a global pandemic that shone a light on racial disparities; the murder of George Floyd, which pushed the nations history of racial injustices to the forefront; police shootings of Black people; violence against members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community; and the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The college aims to develop leaders who will engage in rigorous, self-reflexive study that motivates critical engagement, self-determination and decolonial understandings of the world.

Like my ethnic studies colleagues, I feel that we are really fortunate to have recruited such a distinguished leader as our inaugural dean, said Professor Jun Xing, who serves as chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies. Dr. Malveauxs rich experience, national stature and leadership vision will for sure help raise the new colleges profile and make it into a local, national and international center of excellence in the field of ethnic studies.

Malveaux brings a wealth of knowledge and skills honed during decades in academia and as a columnist, author and activist.

She has taught at several colleges and universities, including Meharry Medical College, Michigan State, UC Davis, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State. From 2007 to 2012, Malveaux served as president of Bennett College, which is a historically Black liberal arts college for women.

For many years, Malveaux wrote a nationally syndicated column that explored economics, policy and race. She also served as a television and radio commentator and was a contributing columnist for the publication that is now known as Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, and is a contributing writer for Essence magazine.

Malveaux is president of PUSH Excel, the independent education policy and scholarship arm of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and masters and bachelors degrees in economics from Boston College. She holds four honorary degrees.

Malveaux will begin as dean on July 1, 2021.
CNN reports that conservative YouTuber who participated in the January 6 violence in Washington D.C. accompanied Republican members of Congress on a trip to the border this week and at times served as a translator.

Anthony Aguero, who CNN characterizes as "a close ally of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene," can be seen in videos and photos with Republican members of Congress who traveled to a route along the border frequented by migrants on Tuesday night . CNN's KFile previously reported that Aguero went into the Capitol during the January 6 riot and cheered and justified the break-in.




President Joe Biden met with families and emergency workers affected by the collapse of a building last week near Miami, Florida.

The partial collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South condominium building killed at least 18 people. And 145 people are missing. Hundreds of emergency and rescue workers have been searching the debris for signs of life. No one has been rescued since the first hours after the collapse.

Biden met privately on Thursday with friends and family members of those affected by the collapse. He spoke in very personal terms.

Biden said he knew about loss. His first wife Neilia and baby daughter Naomi died in a car accident in 1972. In 2015, his adult son Beau died of brain cancer.

I just wish there was something I could do to ease the pain, he said in a video posted on Instagram. The video was posted by Jacqueline Patoka, a woman who was close friends with a man and a woman and their daughter who are still missing.

"The people you may have lost  theyre gonna be with you your whole life, he told the families. A part of your soul, a part of who you are.

Thursday morning the president spoke with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. Biden said that he believed the federal government has the power to pick up 100 percent of the cost of the search and cleanup. He urged local officials to look to the federal government for help.

Theres gonna be a lot of pain and anxiety and suffering and even the need for psychological help in the days and months that follow, Biden said. And so, were not going anywhere.

The president and first lady Jill Bidens visit came as rescue efforts at the collapse area were halted Thursday. Officials said there was concern about damage to the remaining structure.

Rescue workers noticed several cracks in the building that had gotten larger. Alan Cominsky is the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Chief. He said a large support hanging from the wreckage moved at least 15 centimeters and could fall and cause damage to the support structure in the underground parking area.

Officials also saw movement in pieces of the floor that could cause additional failure of the building, he said.

Biden also met with emergency workers. They have been working all day and night on a rescue effort that has now lasted a week.

What youre doing here is incredible, having to deal with the uncertainty," Biden said.

Biden talked about the car crash that killed his first wife and daughter as a moment when he and his family needed emergency workers.

Until we need you, no one fully appreciates what you do, he said. But I promise you  we know. We know.

Biden has supported an investigation into the cause of the collapse. In 2018, an engineering report said it had found major structural damage in the building. The report also found cracking of concrete supports and walls in the lower level of the building.

While speaking with reporters Thursday, Biden said the families he met were committed to knowing what happened to their loved ones and what caused the collapse.

I walked away impressed by their strength, he said.

Im Dan Novak.

Terry Spencer reported this story for the Associated Press. Dan Novak adapted it with additional AP material. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor. __________________________________________________

Words in This Story

condominium  n. a room or set of rooms that is owned by the people who live there and that is part of a larger building containing other similar sets of rooms

debris n. the pieces that are left after something has been destroyed

anxiety  n. fear or nervousness about what might happen

psychological  adj. of or relating to the mind

crack --n. a thin line on the surface of a material that shows it is breaking

incredible  adj. extremely good, great, or large

appreciate  v. to understand the worth or importance of (something or someone) : to admire and value (something or someone)

committed  adj. willing to give your time, energy, etc., to something

impressed  v. willing to give your time, energy, etc., to something
SEATTLE  While it's Yusei Kikuchi heading to the All-Star Game, no member of the Seattle Mariners' starting rotation has provided a bigger boost this season than Chris Flexen.
A Santa Maria man wanted in connection to the shooting death of a 19-year-old Guadalupe man near the intersection of Lincoln and Mill streets last month was arrested in Las Vegas on Wednesday, according to police officials.

Alfredo Alaniz Jr., 21, was tracked to Las Vegas, with the assistance of local police, and taken into custody without incident, according to Santa Maria Police Sgt. Andy Magallon, who added a search warrant was conducted after the arrest.

Alaniz was booked into Clark County Jail in Nevada on suspicion of murder and now is awaiting extradition to California, Magallon said.

Through an investigation, Santa Maria Police detectives identified Alaniz as the suspect in the shooting death of Mario Angel Merino Gonzalez on May 16.

Suspect identified in May 16 shooting death near Lincoln and Mill streets A Santa Maria man was identified Thursday as the suspect wanted in connection to the shooting death of a Guadalupe man last month near the intersection of Lincoln and Mill streets.

Upon responding to reports of a shooting, officers discovered Gonzalez near Lincoln and Mill streets shortly after 2 a.m. Gonzales had sustained gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene, according to Santa Maria Police Lt. Terry Flaa.

An initial investigation revealed that Alaniz produced a firearm and shot Gonzalez following a verbal altercation with a group of people, Flaa said.

Anyone with information about the shooting is urged to call the Santa Maria Police Department at 805-928-3781, ext. 2277, or the tip line at 805-928-3781, ext. 2766.
Dennis Beaver Practices law in Bakersfield and welcomes comments and questions from readers, which may be faxed to (661) 323-7993, or e-mailed to Lagombeaver1@gmail.com. And be sure to visit dennisbeaver.com.
Clearly there is both widespread agreement that racism is a problem alongside significant gaps in understanding. By teaching about racism as a system of advantage based on our racial history, we can help our Wisconsin students make sense of the current moment. Students can see that while progress has been made, systemic racism persists.

By providing our students with a more comprehensive understanding, we can actually help everyone to feel more confident about where the problem lies and how we bring about change. Rather than focusing on some people as bad or good we are placing the responsibility on all of us to make the system more equitable.

Our students deserve to know the truth about racism. If we simply ban any discussion of racism out of a fear that individuals may feel uncomfortable, we ensure that these problems continue, but with an even more impoverished understanding on the part of the next generation.

Moira Lynch is assistant professor of politics, geography and international studies at UW-River Falls and is the author of "Human Rights Prosecutions in Democracies at War." Cyndi Kernahan is a professor of psychological sciences and director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at UW-River Falls. She is the author of "Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Notes from a White Professor."

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.
It's hard to believe this decision is mired in politics and controversy. Over half of all law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin equip their officers with body cameras. Madison is the second largest city in the state. More than 65% of police departments our size (mid-to-large) equip their officers with body cameras, and it's growing by the day. Soon the state of Wisconsin will likely mandate body cameras, and then we'll have missed out on our opportunity to learn from our own pilot. The Madison Police Department welcomes body cameras as a 21st century policing tool; they have nothing to hide. It is way past time to make this investment in our community. Body-worn cameras have overwhelming public support nationwide, around 90%, depending on the study. Black Americans favor body cameras over white Americans by a factor of over 20%.
A Wisconsin judge on Thursday ordered the release of a woman who has spent 3 1/2 years in a state mental health facility after being convicted of stabbing her classmate to please the Slender Man character.

Anissa Weier, 19, was sentenced to 25 years at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute in December 2017. She argued in a petition for conditional release that she's no longer a threat to anyone.

She won't be allowed to go free immediately, however. Waukesha County Judge Michael Bohren gave state officials 60 days to draw up a conditional release plan and sent Weier back to the mental hospital pending another hearing on Sept. 10.

In addition to the conditions of release, Weier will be assigned state Department of Health Services case managers to track her progress until she's 37 years old, the length of her commitment.

The May 2014 stabbing happened after Weier and friend Morgan Geyser lured classmate Payton Leutner into the woods at a Waukesha park following a sleepover. Geyser stabbed Leutner multiple times as Weier encouraged Geyser to inflict the injuries. All three girls were 12 years old at the time.

Weier and Geyser left Leutner for dead, but she crawled out of the woods and was found by a passing bicyclist. She suffered 19 stab wounds and barely survived.
Dane County Executive Joe Parisi says surging construction costs are causing the jail project to go over budget again  likely by at least $10 million, if not more. "Thats frankly just too much," he said.
Absolutely this increases the pressure to take a very hard look at whether the Senate is an institution that will allow itself to be rendered powerless and dysfunctional, said Rep. John Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat who sponsored a voting bill that passed the House in March.

Change won't be easy. A group of moderate Democratic senators, including Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have ruled out revisions to the filibuster. In an evenly divided Senate, their rejection denies the votes needed to move forward with a procedural change.

Thursday's ruling was on a case in Sinemas home state. In an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the court reversed an appellate ruling in deciding that Arizonas regulations  on who can return early ballots for another person and on refusing to count ballots cast in the wrong precinct  are not racially discriminatory.

Sinema assailed the decision in a statement, saying it would hurt Arizonans ability to make their voices heard at the ballot box." She reiterated her support for the bill yet said nothing about her opposition to the filibuster changes. That opposition stands in the way of the bill passing.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) 

The U.S. Supreme Court decided on Friday that it will hear a case brought by families from Maine who want to use a state tuition program to send their children to religious schools.

At the heart of the case is a Maine Department of Education rule that allows families who live in towns that dont have public schools to receive public tuition dollars to send their children to the public or private school of their choosing. That program excludes religious schools.

Families who want to send their children to Christian schools in Bangor and Waterville sued to try to change that, but have been denied in lower federal courts. They appealed to the high court, and the Supreme Court's order list said on Friday that it's taking up the case.

The libertarian public interest firm Institute For Justice, which is representing the families, described the case as a potentially landmark case in a statement on Friday. Michael Bindas, the lead attorney in the case, said by singling out religion  and only religion  for exclusion from its tuition assistance program," Maine has limited the rights of the families.
The private event space was used for late-night parties and Haker found the dance floor difficult to staff and maintain. Its use damaged the reputation of the restaurant, he said.

"Every time we wanted to push our food program, it seemed like we were still just kind of perceived as a late night party club destination," said Haker, who bought the 22-year-old Madison's with Tommy Gohsman in 2005.

"That always bothered me and I wanted to work away from that. The dance floor was really fun 15 years ago and even 10 years ago," he said, "but over time, it just became more trouble than it was worth."

As he ran through uses for the space, he landed on ice cream and had the space remodeled.

"It was pretty easy for me to transition the space into something that I thought would better serve our neighborhood, community, business revenue," Haker said.

"I wanted to do a little bit more artisanal, chef-driven, real flavors than types of candy and syrup," he said.

He also wanted to sell coffee. He expects to offer a light food menu with grab-and-go lunch choices in the next month.
Brown also disclosed that Johll had recently provided an alibi for the day he was alleged to have participated in the rape. Specifically, a person told prosecutors of being with Johll for much of that day and Johlls credit card statements also put him at a different location.

Brown said during a hearing Thursday he brought in other prosecutors to review the case and they agreed his office could not proceed.

This is probably one of the hardest decisions Ive ever come to as a prosecutor, he said before Circuit Judge Ellen Berz dismissed the case.

Brown also disclosed in his motion that when McFarland police switched over to a new body camera service provider, a technical glitch resulted in the loss of an April 17, 2019, recording of a police interview with the boy in which the boy denied any inappropriate behavior with Meeks.

Meeks attorney, Corey Chirafisi, said his client was not likely to speak publicly about the case but he said Brown made a tough decision but the right decision, and said Johlls alibi was particularly strong.

Johlls attorney, Adam Welch, was not as forgiving.

Mr. Johll is just clearly innocent of this, he said. He should have never been charged.
A year and a day after 18-year-old Dembo Jammeh was found dead in a Far East Side parking lot, the now-20-year-old Madison man who shot him to death pleaded guilty and will likely spend at least 20 years in prison.

Jalyn L. Cain-Roberson pleaded guilty Thursday to first-degree reckless homicide in Dane County Circuit Court as part of an agreement between him and the state that dismisses first-degree intentional homicide and bail-jumping charges.

Deputy District Attorney William Brown said the state will recommend a sentence including no more than 20 years behind bars, although the court will still have the option of ordering up to 60 when Cain-Roberson is sentenced on Sept. 17.

Cain-Roberson shot and killed Jammeh at the Red Roof Inn, 4830 Hayes Road, on June 30, 2020, after the two were involved in a dispute at a nearby gas station on East Washington Avenue, according to a criminal complaint filed last year.

Surveillance video showed Cain-Roberson following Jammeh to the hotel, where he was shot three times, including once in the heart. His body was found around 8:30 p.m. at the bottom of an exterior set of stairs.
But Downtown Ald. Mike Verveer, 4th District, said he and others were assured the routing was an initial concept to help with a federal funding application and that it would be revisited, which led to a unanimous council vote with no discussion. Also, he said he was under the impression that stations would be similar in scale to those now on the Square and State Street.

BID members are concerned about an eastbound station on the 200 block of State Street and a westbound station on the 300 block. The scale and station locations may interfere with views of storefronts, create safety hazards in emergencies, attract negative behaviors and require trees, planters and other street amenities to be moved, they say.

Downtown also hosts hundreds of community events each year, and buses will need to be rerouted for the events to survive, the BIDs letter says.

A BRT that has to be rerouted more than 70-plus times a year is not a good plan, the letter says. Why not choose an alternative, close-by route that does not require riders to find another bus stop when events are held.
Its my responsibility to upkeep these organs, as well as my body, to the best of my ability, Milburn said.

Only 36 heart-lung transplants were performed annually in the U.S. on average the past five years, according to the federal Organ Procurement and Transplant Network. UW Hospital did 14 until 2008. The operation is challenging and can sometimes be avoided through other heart treatments, DeCamp said.

Milburn is going to rehab at UW Hospital twice a week and exercising on a treadmill most days. Though he is breathing well today, DeCamp said Milburns outlook is complicated by the need to be on blood thinners to prevent clots as well as the immunosuppression drugs all transplant recipients take.

To stay close to his UW doctors, Milburn has decided to move to Madison. He and Miller, who lives in Louisiana and was working in California when her sons medical emergency arose, have been temporarily staying at Home2Suites on Rimrock Road.

I made a choice to come to Wisconsin to work and get way from the area I was in, Milburn said. I think it was almost destiny that I was here at the right time.

[Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Daniel Milburn's last name.]

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At the time, Castor said that unless Cosby confessed, he did not think he could prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt, and he told Cosby he would not be prosecuted.

Castors decision not to proceed with a criminal case was calculated to give at least some measure of justice to Constand, because it removed Cosbys ability to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and thus meant he had to answer questions under oath in her civil lawsuit against him.

Constand won $3.38 million, most of which, the Supreme Court noted, went to her attorneys.

Castors decision not to prosecute, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided, amounted to a promise that Cosbys testimony in his civil deposition would never be used against him in criminal court.

But the prosecutor who succeeded Castor did not see it that way and filed criminal charges against him in 2015, just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired.

As it happened, Cosby did incriminate himself during the course of four sworn depositions in Constands civil lawsuit.
Franklin, a hip-hop artist better known as Rob Dz, said Wednesday he loves the idea of a pedestrian mall on State Street, especially if it helps bring more local and diverse businesses into vacant spaces.

Mad Lit will fill the 100 block of State Street with people. City buses will be rerouted to the closest cross street to State Street. That will create a lot more room to hang out, have fun, check out vendors, duck into stores and dine al fresco while enjoying the sounds of rhythm and blues, soul, salsa, rock, hip-hop and reggae.

Just as city buses are being moved off State Street for Mad Lit, they could be rerouted to Wisconsin Avenue and Johnson and Gorham streets if State Street becomes a permanent walking mall without buses. State Street already is off-limits to most vehicle traffic. Another option for eastbound buses to stay near but not on State Street would be to travel along Henry and Mifflin streets, as Gary Werner of Madison recently suggested in a letter to the editor.
Theres a way to protest, theres a way to voice your displeasure with your government, Manweiler said.

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Bundy was offered the opportunity to address the court by Manweiler, but he declined.

The prosecution asked for a more severe punishment for Bundy, recommending that he be sentenced to 25 days in jail.

Mr. Bundy is a leader, deputy prosecuting attorney Whitney Welsh told the court. People who follow leaders look to what happens when they take action ... No one is trying to silence Mr. Bundy, but in Idaho right now the laws apply and the laws are enforced.

Less than two weeks ago, Bundy officially announced his candidacy for governor of Idaho at a rally in Meridian. His campaign platform includes eliminating most state taxes, which he calls immoral, as well as bringing federal lands, which make up nearly two-thirds of the states land, under local control.

Bundy and members of his family are known for militant and brazen resistance to federal authority. In 2016, Bundy led an armed band of anti-government protesters who took over a wildlife refuge in Malheur, Oregon. The standoff with police lasted for six weeks, and one occupier was killed.

Bundy was eventually acquitted on federal charges.
The state will put out an updated forecast in August, and state agency budget requests will come together on Sept. 1.

But it wont be until Littles State of the State address in January and the 2022 legislative session where the bulk of the proposals will come together and be debated, Adams said.

Littles budget office, which Adams heads, has told state agencies that Little will continue to keep spending lean to make investments in education and maintain a structurally balanced budget.

Little is likely to treat a portion of the surplus as a one-time funding source (instead of ongoing) and propose directing some of it to one-time capital and infrastructure projects.

It means we are in a good position; it means we have the ability to do some substantial investments we wouldnt do otherwise, Adams said. But we have to be pretty careful about not outdriving our headlights with the ongoing portion and not make bad long-term decisions with good short-term news.

One additional factor this year: The state has more than $1 billion in federal American Recovery Plan Act stimulus money that can go toward infrastructure like water and broadband projects. That could take some pressure off the states general fund, Adams said.
BOISE  Five Idaho State Police troopers will go to Arizona for 21 days to help with border security, Gov. Brad Little said Thursday.

The Republican governor said the troopers will will start a 21-day mission on Tuesday to help Arizona law enforcement officials with intelligence gathering and investigative work to prevent illicit drugs from crossing the border.

The crisis at the United States-Mexico border and the alarming bump in illegal drug activity are direct results of failed policies of the Biden-Harris administration that harm the people of Idaho, Little said in a statement.

Republican Govs. Doug Ducey of Arizona and Greg Abbott of Texas sent a letter to fellow governors last month asking for law-enforcement help.

On behalf of Texas and Arizona, we respectfully but urgently request that you send all available law-enforcement resources to the border in defense of our sovereignty and territorial integrity, the two governors wrote.

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Little, who faces reelection next year and is being challenged by far-right Republican Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, said it will cost Idaho just over $53,000 to send the troopers to Arizona. He said Idaho State Police leadership assured him that the troopers duties in Idaho will be covered while theyre in Arizona.
Most of the treatys provisions dont have an expiration date, but half a century after its signing, changing conditions spurred an effort to modernize it. The Bonneville Power Administration and the Army Corps of Engineers  which together form the U.S. entity responsible for the agreement  began a review of the deal in 2011 and recommended a series of changes to the State Department in 2013.

The recommendations included letting more water flow through the dams in spring and summer to improve fish passage, decreasing the treatys impact on tribal resources and updating flood management plans. The BPA and Army Corps of Engineers also recommended changing a provision known as the Canadian Entitlement, which requires the U.S. to send cash and half of power generated downstream to Canada in exchange for the water resources.

The BPA and Army Corps of Engineers have estimated the value of the Canadian Entitlement to be between $229 million and $335 million a year, contending the current treaty gives the U.S. a raw deal. Canadian negotiators have argued the current entitlement is fair. Either country can terminate the treaty with 10 years notice, but neither has done so.

The letter was signed by lawmakers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.
TWIN FALLS  After 96 stops on a 13,000-mile journey, native Salmon People stopped Thursday at Shoshone Falls to share their message.

It is up to all of us to protect sacred sites, Freddie Lane of the Lummi Nation told a large crowd that had gathered to take part in a blessing of the falls.

When we speak, we dont speak for us, Lane said. We speak for our children.

Every year for the past 20 years, House of Tears Carvers in northwestern Washington have created totem poles containing deep symbolism representing American Indians most urgent concerns. Jewell James is the lead carver for the group; it took him two months to carve the 5,000-pound totem pole from a 400-year-old Western red cedar.

It has meaning from the hearts of our people, Shoshone-Paiute Chairman Brian Thomas of Duck Valley, Nevada, told the crowd.

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The cedar represents the Tree of Life. Red handprints represent the thousands of murdered or missing indigenous women whose final moments have escaped national attention. The raindrops carved into the tree bring attention to the state of the rivers. The salmon represents the survival of the Salmon People.

Its not a tribal issue, Thomas said. Its a human being issue.
This is a money-grubbing story, said his attorney, Patrick McShane.

McShane said the suit is among 11 that Taylor has filed in attempts to get $432 million out of a federal escrow account set up to stop the leaks if engineers ever figure out how to do that.

Taylor plugged some of the wells but says further attempts would endanger workers and create a much greater environmental danger than currently exists.

In 2019, a federal judge in Washingon, D.C., dismissed a suit saying the U.S. Interior Department should be made to return the money.

The underwater mudslide that overturned Taylors platform also dragged it nearly 560 feet (170 meters) and buried the pipe casings for its cluster of 28 oil wells under up to 165 feet (50 meters) of sediment.

The well bores for the 28 wells ... rest in a tangled web, U.S. District Judge Gerard Guidry noted in his August 2020 summary judgment dismissing Taylors claims against Couvillion.

The 5th Circuit upheld his ruling that Couvillions contract with the Coast Guard was valid and correctly supervised, and makes the company immune to trespass claims.
KINGS MOUNTAIN, N.C. (AP)  The South Carolina-based Catawba Indian Nation has opened a preliminary, temporary version of its proposed casino just across the border in North Carolina.

Tribal leaders were joined by local and state government officials Thursday for a ribbon-cutting at the modular facility containing 500 slot machines just off Interstate 85 in Kings Mountain, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) west of Charlotte. It's a key step in ultimately creating the $273 million Catawba Two Kings Casino with plans for 2,600 permanent jobs and revenues for the tribe.

Spurned by South Carolina in previous efforts to offer gambling other than bingo in their home state, Catawba members sought to build a casino in North Carolina, citing what they call its historical and ancestral ties to land in the state. The U.S. Interior Department agreed in early 2020 to put 17 acres in Cleveland County into trust for the project.

Catawba Two Kings Casino represents the righting of a historical wrong for the Catawba Nation, tribal Chief Bill Harris said in a news release. But it is also so much more. It represents a prosperous future and renewed kinship between the Catawba Nation and the many communities that now occupy Catawba ancestral lands.
Says Biden: This year is different than the Fourth of July of last year and its going to be better next year.

But the president says hes worried about those who havent yet gotten a shot.

I am concerned that people who have not gotten vaccinated have the capacity to catch the variant and spread the variant to other people who have not been vaccinated. But I am concerned. Lives will be lost.



JOHANNESBURG  Driven by the delta variant, a new wave of coronavirus is sweeping across the African continent where cases, hospital admissions and deaths are increasing.

Case numbers are doubling every three weeks in Africa, according to the World Health Organization. South Africa is leading the surge, with more than 20,000 new cases reported Friday.

That has increased South Africas total to 1.9 million confirmed cases and 66,323 confirmed deaths. It represents more than 30% of the 5.5 million cases reported by Africas 54 countries, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  Mexicans living abroad sent home a record amount of money in May, topping $4.5 billion in a month for the first time, Mexicos central bank said Thursday.

Just a year ago, it was considered a record when migrants' money, known as remittances, broke the $4 billion per month mark in March 2020.

They now regularly send more than $4 billion. Only January and February, traditionally slow months for remittances, fell below that mark this year, with March, April and May setting new records. May is a traditionally high month because of Mothers Day.

The $19.2 billion sent home in the first five months of 2021 is 21.7% more than during the same period of 2020.

If the pace keeps up, Mexico could be on track to top $45 billion in remittances for the full year in 2021.

As a source of foreign income, remittances earn Mexico more money than oil exports or tourism and are exceeded only by manufacturing exports.

BBVA bank said in an analysis report that the rapid U.S. economic recovery and shortages of workers in some sectors may have helped migrants send more money home. Most Mexican migrants live and work in the United States, where employment opportunities have surged as the coronavirus pandemic eases.
All veterans and their family members may join the American Legion Family. Although many of our members saw conflict or were wounded, many of us only were able to sacrifice our lives if called upon. For me, called to duty during Desert Storm and in tech school during Vietnam, it felt as though I had given too little. Joining an organization dedicated to continuing the fight for our country by taking care of our children and youth, paying attention to national security, promoting Americanism, and promoting the care of our veterans, active duty members, and their families was a fit purpose for civilian life.

Whether by joining a service organization like the Legion or engaging in other civic activities, I leave you with the words of Abraham Lincoln to think about as we celebrate this Fourth of July. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us  that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion  that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain  that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom  and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has sounded similar alarms. On September 2, 2020, the CBO estimated the trust fund could run out of money in 2024, two years earlier than the Medicare Trustees forecasted. This year, the CBO extended its insolvency prediction to 2026.

However, there is substantial uncertainty the trust fund could hold out that long. Extraordinarily low HI trust fund reserve amounts do not seem enough to sustain historic Medicare spending until 2026. Additionally, the 2020 Medicare Trustees report did not include analysis of the potential effects of the pandemic on the Medicare program. The significant, but necessary, Medicare funding Congress made available to hospitals and other health care providers in response to the pandemic may have inadvertently accelerated the insolvency of the HI trust fund. Unemployment caused by the pandemic likely resulted in less revenue flowing into the HI Trust Fund.
A group of American patriots met in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, to sign a document declaring independence from the British Crown. The signers ended the Declaration of Independence, saying we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. They knew that formation of a new nation was dangerous and could only succeed if everyone worked together in common purpose. As Ben Franklin aptly put it, We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

Years later, George Washington reiterated the theme of unity and common purpose in his Farewell Address. He said, To the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a Government for the whole is indispensable. He issued a strong warning against political partisanship, saying it agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. What a prescient warning from Americas Founding Father.

At this 245th anniversary of declaring independence, the nation is mired in political warfare, false conspiracy theories and, worst of all, an attempted insurrection. America achieved greatness by its people working together to forge a more perfect union. There have been many bumps along the way but we have always been able to right the ship of state and move forward in unity.
Laurel Park Middle School Principal Jo Ellen Hylton will be the next principal of Magna Vista High School.

Her appointment was made official during Thursdays Henry County Public Schools board meeting.

The board went into closed session to talk about staffing issues as well as policies regarding non-resident special placement students and a pending legal matter. After closed session, the board set a meeting for 9 a.m. July 15. The topic of the meeting was not disclosed.

Hylton has been with HCPS since 2007 in roles as teacher and as administrator. She replaces longtime principal Charles Byrd who took a position in North Carolina.

I am honored and humbled to join the Warrior community. It has been my privilege to serve the students, staff, and families of Laurel Park Middle School for the last six years, and I am excited about this new opportunity and journey, she stated in a release. I look forward to continuing Magna Vistas tradition of excellence as I work alongside this incredible faculty and staff to build life ready students.

Together, we will provide a safe and supportive learning environment for all students and ensure that all students are provided with an engaging and positive educational experience.
A defense attorney for Madera-Rodriguez had argued that he played a minor role in the hazing and should not be found guilty of murder and other crimes.

The attorney said Madera-Rodriguez never touched Melgar until he tried to help revive him. He said the Marine's role was only to break down Melgar's door with a sledge hammer, play some music and bring in Malian guards who were part of the joke.

Madera-Rodriguez's attorneys also said military prosecutors misapplied the law when it came to the murder charge. They said he can only be found guilty of felony murder if hes found guilty of burglary, a charge related to the accusation that the men broke into Melgars room. They said the burglary charge depends on the alleged crime happening at night, which they said it no longer was by the time of the hazing.

You dont have night time, you dont have burglary, Marine Lt. Col. Timothy Kuhn argued on behalf of Madera-Rodriguez. You dont have burglary, you dont have felony murder.

Prosecutors argued that Madera-Rodriguez was culpable because he chose to partake in the hazing, despite the known risks of placing someone in a chokehold.
Wake Forest University political science professor John Dinan said that rarely, if ever, in the last few years have we seen Democratic legislators reject the governors plea of support and join Republicans in voting to override a veto.

People eligible to draw up to 13 weeks of regular state UI benefits are getting on average about $235 a week along with the $300 federal benefit.

For most claimants who have exhausted their regular state UI benefits, the federal benefit may be their only source of income.

Before the bill compromise was reached, the Senate version of SB116 proposed offering a $1,500 bonus as an incentive to unemployed claimants going back to work.

That bonus would have been made available within 30 days of its version becoming law. Theres also would have been a bonus of $800 for unemployed claimants returning to work between 31 days and 60 days of HB128 becoming law.

The elimination of the incentives prompted Rep. Wesley Harris, D-Mecklenburg, to say on June 23 that the compromise represents the bad portion of the House and Senate return-to-work legislation.

SB116 sweetener
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Northern Nevada's Washoe County has confirmed its first death related to the COVID-19 Delta variant, which was the most common variant among samples collected at the state public health lab last month and is accounting for one in four new cases reported nationally, the health district said Thursday.

"The Delta variant has become the most common COVID-19 variant in Washoe County over the last two weeks and is extremely contagious," Washoe County Health District Officer Kevin Dick said.

The woman in her 40s who died from the Delta variant first identified in India had not received the COVID-19 vaccination, had no underlying conditions and had been hospitalized in the Reno-Sparks area, the county health district said Thursday.

It wasn't immediately clear if the variant has been tied to any other Nevada deaths, but a health official confirmed Thursday there have been none in the Las Vegas area.

It's the first in Washoe County blamed on the variant among 685 overall COVID-19 deaths reported in the county that includes Reno and Sparks since March 2020, the district said.

The county on Thursday reported 34 additional cases of the Delta variant, for a total of 51. Nevada's first case of the variant was confirmed in the county June 15.

Most of the 51 cases involved people who had not been vaccinated. Nine were fully vaccinated. None of the fully vaccinated who contracted the variant has been hospitalized, the district said.

The Nevada State Public Health Laboratory reported earlier this week that only 10 of the 81 statewide samples they have confirmed as the Delta variant through sequencing have been outside Washoe or Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.

The Southern Nevada Health District for Las Vegas and surrounding areas hasn't reported any deaths related to the Delta variant, district public information officer Jennifer Sizemore told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The Nevada State Public Health Laboratory reported June 28 that it has identified a total of 81 cases of the Delta variant during sequencing of samples41 in Clark County, 30 in Washoe County, four in Mineral County and three each in Carson and Elko counties.

Among samples collected and sequenced from June 1-25, the lab said 39% were the B.1.617.2 Delta variant and 34% were the B.1.1.7 variant believed to have originated in the United Kingdom.

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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While autistic individuals are less likely to use substances, those who do so are more likely to self-medicate for their mental health symptoms, according to new research from the University of Cambridge and published today in The Lancet Psychiatry.

There is significant debate about substance use of autistic adolescents and adults. Some studies indicate that autistic individuals are less likely to use substances, whereas others suggest that autistic individuals are at greater risk of substance misuse or abuse. The team at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge used a 'mixed methods' design to consider both the frequency of substance use among autistic individuals, as well as their self-reported experiences of substance use.

Overall, 1,183 autistic and 1,203 non-autistic adolescents and adults (aged 16-90 years) provided information about the frequency of their substance use via an anonymous, online survey; of this group, 919 individuals also gave more in-depth responses about their experiences of substance use.

Autistic adults were less likely than non-autistic peers to use substances. Only 16% of autistic adults, compared to 22% of non-autistic adults, reported drinking on three or more days per week on average. Similarly, only 4% of autistic adults reported binge-drinking compared to 8% of non-autistic adults.

There were also some sex differences in patterns of substance use: autistic males were less likely than non-autistic males to report ever having smoked or used drugs. In contrast, the team did not find differences in the patterns of frequency of smoking or drug use between autistic and non-autistic females.

However, despite lower rates of substance use overall, the qualitative findings of the study provide a much less hopeful picture: autistic adults were nearly nine times more likely than non-autistic peers to report using recreational drugs (such as marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines) to manage unwanted symptoms, including autism-related symptoms.

Drugs were used to reduce sensory overload, help with mental focus, and provide routine, among other reasons. Several autistic participants also indirectly referenced using substances to mask their autism. Past research has shown that this behavioural management (also known as 'camouflaging' or 'compensating') has been linked to emotional exhaustion, worse mental health, and even increased risk of suicide among autistic adults.

Autistic adolescents and adults were also over three times more likely than others to report using substances to manage mental health symptoms, including anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Several participants specifically noted that they used drugs for self-medication. However, this self-medication was not always viewed as negative by participants, and several noted that using recreational drugs allowed them to reduce the doses of prescribed medications for mental health conditions, which was a welcome change due to the sometimes significant side effects from their prescribed medications.

Another area of concern was the strong association between vulnerability and substance use among autistic teenagers and adults. Previous work from the Cambridge team suggests that autistic adults may be much more likely to have adverse life experiences and be at greater risk of suicide than others. The findings of the new study indicate that autistic individuals are over four times more likely to report vulnerability associated with substance use compared to their non-autistic peers, including dependence/addiction, using drugs to deal with past trauma, and substance use associated with suicide.

In addition, the study identified two new areas of vulnerability not been previously reported: being forced, tricked, or accidentally taking drugs; and childhood use of substances (at the age of 12 years or younger).

Elizabeth Weir, a Ph.D. student at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, and the lead researcher of the study, said: "Whether or not the substances currently classed as 'recreational' could be used medically remains an open question. It is evident that the current systems of health and social care support are not meeting the needs of many autistic teenagers and adults.

"No one should feel that they need to self-medicate for these issues without guidance from a healthcare professional. Identifying new forms of effective support is urgent considering the complex associations between substance use, mental health, and behaviour managementparticularly as camouflaging and compensating behaviours are associated with suicide risk among autistic individuals."

Dr. Carrie Allison, Director of Research Strategy at the Autism Research Centre and a member of the research team, said: "While some of our results suggest lower likelihood of substance use overall, physicians should not assume that their autistic patients aren't using drugs. Drug use can be harmful so healthcare providers should aim to establish trusting relationships with autistic and non-autistic patients alike to foster frank and honest conversations about substance use."

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre and a member of the team, said: "We continue to see new areas in which autistic adults experience vulnerability: mental health, physical health, suicide risk, lifestyle patterns, the criminal justice system, and so on. Substance use is now another area that we need to consider when developing new forms of support for autistic individuals. It is essential that we ensure that autistic people have equal access to high quality social and healthcare that can appropriately support their specific needs; and, unfortunately, it seems clear that our current systems are still not meeting this mark."

Explore further Diet, exercise and sleep linked to high risk of cardiovascular disease in autistic people

More information: Weir, E., Allison, C., & Baron-Cohen, S. Understanding the substance use of autistic adults: a mixed methods approach. The Lancet Psychiatry (2021). Journal information: The Lancet Psychiatry Weir, E., Allison, C., & Baron-Cohen, S. Understanding the substance use of autistic adults: a mixed methods approach.(2021).
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Doctors and patients are being advised to reduce unnecessary antibiotic use following new data suggesting that these medicines may increase the risk of cancer of the large intestine (colon), especially in people under 50 years. The results, presented at the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer (30 June-3 July) raise fresh concerns about the impact of the estimated 65% increase in global antibiotic consumption reported between 2000 and 2015, despite not showing a direct cause and effect.

"To our knowledge, this is the first study to link antibiotic use with the growing risk of early onset colon cancera disease which has been increasing at a rate of at least 3% per year over the last two decades. Junk food, sugary drinks, obesity and alcohol are likely to have played a part in that rise, but our data stress the importance of avoiding unnecessary antibiotics, especially in children and young adults," said Ms Sarah Perrott, from the University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK, presenting the data.

Using a large Scottish primary care database of up to 2 million people, the study looked at nearly 8000 people with bowel cancer (colon and rectum) matched with people without bowel cancer. It found antibiotic use was associated with an increased risk of colon cancer across all ages, but the risk was increased by almost 50% in the under-50s compared to 9% in the over-50s. In the younger age group, antibiotic use was linked to cancers in the first part of the colon (the right side). Quinolones and sulfonamides/trimethoprim, which are used to treat a wide range of infections, were associated with these right-side cancers.

Dr. Leslie Samuel, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, UK, senior author of the study, explained that the contents of the right side of the colon are more liquid and that the natural bacteria living there, called the microbiome, may be different from further along the colon.

"We now want to find out if there is a link between antibiotic use and changes in the microbiome which can make the colon more susceptible to cancer especially in younger people. It's a complex situation as we know that the microbiome can quickly revert to its previous state even when the bowel has been cleared out for a diagnostic procedure such as an endoscopy. We don't yet know if antibiotics can induce any effects on the microbiome that could directly or indirectly contribute to development of colon cancer," said Samuel.

Commenting on the new research, Professor Alberto Sobrero, Ospedale San Martino, Genoa, Italy, explained that, of the 2 million people diagnosed with colon cancer worldwide each year, younger people aged 20-40 with colon cancer generally have a worse prognosis than older people because they are often diagnosed later.

"Physicians are less likely to investigate a patient with abdominal discomfort for colon cancer if they are in their 30s than if they are in their 70s, and younger patients are not eligible for bowel cancer screening. As a result, their cancer is usually diagnosed at a later stage, when it is more difficult to treat," he said.

Like Perrott and Samuel, he believes that physicians should now think of bowel cancer in younger patients with abdominal symptoms, and he supports more research into the multiple possible causes of the rising incidence of colon cancer in this age group.

"It is too early to say if excessive use of antibiotics could be a causative factor, and we need to understand more about the possible role of the microbiome in bowel cancer before we consider the impact of antibiotics on the intestinal flora. However, the new research does remind us that antibiotics should not be given unless they are really needed, and we cannot exclude the possibility that unnecessary use of antibiotics may be exposing people to an increased risk of cancer," Sobrero concluded.

Explore further These common antibiotics could increase colon cancer risk

More information: Abstract SO-25 'Global rise in early-onset colorectal cancer: an association with antibiotic consumption?' will be presented by Dr Sarah Perrott during Session VII: Presentation of Selected Colorectal Cancer Abstracts on Friday, 2 July, 08:00-12:00 CEST. Annals of Oncology, Volume 32, Supplement 3, July 2021 Abstract SO-25 'Global rise in early-onset colorectal cancer: an association with antibiotic consumption?' will be presented by Dr Sarah Perrott during Session VII: Presentation of Selected Colorectal Cancer Abstracts on Friday, 2 July, 08:00-12:00 CEST. Annals of Oncology, Volume 32, Supplement 3, July 2021 www.worldgicancer.com/
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

For more than a decade, Joel Moskowitz, a researcher in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley and director of Berkeley's Center for Family and Community Health, has been on a quest to prove that radiation from cellphones is unsafe. But, he said, most people don't want to hear it.

"People are addicted to their smartphones," said Moskowitz. "We use them for everything now, and, in many ways, we need them to function in our daily lives. I think the idea that they're potentially harming our health is too much for some people."

Since cellphones first came onto the market in 1984, they have gone from clunky devices with bad reception to today's sleek, multifunction smartphones. And although cellphones are now used by nearly all American adults, considerable research suggests that long-term use poses health risks from the radiation they emit, said Moskowitz.

"Cellphones, cell towers and other wireless devices are regulated by most governments," said Moskowitz. "Our government, however, stopped funding research on the health effects of radiofrequency radiation in the 1990s."

Since then, he said, research has shown significant adverse biologic and health effectsincluding brain cancerassociated with the use of cellphones and other wireless devices. And now, he said, with the fifth generation of cellular technology, known as 5G, there is an even bigger reason for concern.

Berkeley News spoke with Moskowitz about the health risks of cellphone radiation, why the topic is so controversial and what we can expect with the rollout of 5G.

Berkeley News: I first heard you speak about the health risks of cellphone radiation at Berkeley in 2019, but you've been doing this research since 2009. What led you to pursue this research?

Joel Moskowitz: I got into this field by accident, actually. During the past 40 years, the bulk of my research has been focused on tobacco-related disease prevention. I first became interested in cellphone radiation in 2008, when Dr. Seung-Kwon Myung, a physician scientist with the National Cancer Center of South Korea, came to spend a year at the Center for Family and Community Health. He was involved in our smoking cessation projects, and we worked with him and his colleagues on two reviews of the literature, one of which addressed the tumor risk from cellphone use.

At that time, I was skeptical that cellphone radiation could be harmful. However, since I was dubious that cellphone radiation could cause cancer, I immersed myself in the literature regarding the biological effects of low-intensity microwave radiation, emitted by cellphones and other wireless devices.

After reading many animal toxicology studies that found that this radiation could increase oxidative stressfree radicals, stress proteins and DNA damageI became increasingly convinced that what we were observing in our review of human studies was indeed a real risk.

While Myung and his colleagues were visiting the Center for Family and Community Health, you reviewed case-control studies examining the association between mobile phone use and tumor risk. What did you find?

Our 2009 review, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that heavy cellphone use was associated with increased brain cancer incidence, especially in studies that used higher quality methods and studies that had no telecommunications industry funding.

Last year, we updated our review, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, based on a meta-analysis of 46 case-control studiestwice as many studies as we used for our 2009 reviewand obtained similar findings. Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.

One thing I think we should address upfront is how controversial this research is. Some scientists have said that these findings are without basis and that there isn't enough evidence that cellphone radiation is harmful to our health. How do you respond to that?

Well, first of all, few scientists in this country can speak knowledgeably about the health effects of wireless technology. So, I'm not surprised that people are skeptical, but that doesn't mean the findings aren't valid.

A big reason there isn't more research about the health risks of radiofrequency radiation exposure is because the U.S. government stopped funding this research in the 1990s, with the exception of a $30 million rodent study published in 2018 by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' National Toxicology Program, which found "clear evidence" of carcinogenicity from cellphone radiation.

In 1996, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, adopted exposure guidelines that limited the intensity of exposure to radiofrequency radiation. These guidelines were designed to prevent significant heating of tissue from short-term exposure to radiofrequency radiation, not to protect us from the effects of long-term exposure to low levels of modulated, or pulsed, radiofrequency radiation, which is produced by cellphones, cordless phones and other wireless devices, including Wi-Fi. Yet, the preponderance of research published since 1990 finds adverse biologic and health effects from long-term exposure to radiofrequency radiation, including DNA damage.

More than 250 scientists, who have published over 2,000 papers and letters in professional journals on the biologic and health effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields produced by wireless devices, including cellphones, have signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for health warnings and stronger exposure limits. So, there are many scientists who agree that this radiation is harmful to our health.

Why did the government stop funding this kind of research?

The telecommunications industry has almost complete control of the FCC, according to Captured Agency, a monograph written by journalist Norm Alster during his 2014-15 fellowship at Harvard University's Center for Ethics. There's a revolving door between the membership of the FCC and high-level people within the telecom industry that's been going on for a couple of decades now.

The industry spends about $100 million a year lobbying Congress. The CTIA, which is the major telecom lobbying group, spends $12.5 million per year on 70 lobbyists. According to one of their spokespersons, lobbyists meet roughly 500 times a year with the FCC to lobby on various issues. The industry as a whole spends $132 million a year on lobbying and provides $18 million in political contributions to members of Congress and others at the federal level.

It reminds me of when the U.S. Surgeon General released a landmark report in 1964 that linked cigarettes with dangerous health effects, including cancer and heart disease. Even though the 10-person committee consulted more than 7,000 articles already available in biomedical literature, the report's findings were very controversial when they came out.

Yes, there are strong parallels between what the telecom industry has done and what the tobacco industry has done, in terms of marketing and controlling messaging to the public. In the 1940s, tobacco companies hired doctors and dentists to endorse their products to reduce public health concerns about smoking risks. The CTIA currently uses a nuclear physicist from academia to assure policymakers that microwave radiation is safe. The telecom industry not only uses the tobacco industry playbook, it is more economically and politically powerful than Big Tobacco ever was. This year, the telecom industry will spend over $18 billion advertising cellular technology worldwide.

You mentioned that cellphones and other wireless devices use modulated, or pulsed, radiofrequency radiation. Can you explain how cellphones and other wireless devices work, and how the radiation they emit is different from radiation from other household appliances, like a microwave?

Basically, when you make a call, you've got a radio and a transmitter. It transmits a signal to the nearest cell tower. Each cell tower has a geographic cell, so to speak, in which it can communicate with cellphones within that geographic region or cell.

Then, that cell tower communicates with a switching station, which then searches for whom you're trying to call, and it connects through a copper cable or fiber optics or, in many cases, a wireless connection through microwave radiation with the wireless access point. Then, that access point either communicates directly through copper wires through a landline or, if you're calling another cellphone, it will send a signal to a cell tower within the cell of the receiver and so forth.

The difference is the kind of microwave radiation each device emits. With regard to cellphones and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, there is an information-gathering component. The waves are modulated and pulsed in a very different manner than your microwave oven.

What, specifically, are some of the health effects associated with long-term exposure to low-level modulated radiofrequency radiation emitted from wireless devices?

Many biologists and electromagnetic field scientists believe the modulation of wireless devices makes the energy more biologically active, which interferes with our cellular mechanisms, opening up calcium channels, for example, and allowing calcium to flow into the cell and into the mitochondria within the cell, interfering with our natural cellular processes and leading to the creation of stress proteins and free radicals and, possibly, DNA damage. And, in other cases, it may lead to cell death.

In 2001, based upon the biologic and human epidemiologic research, low-frequency fields were classified as "possibly carcinogenic" by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization. In 2011, the IARC classified radiofrequency radiation as "possibly carcinogenic to humans," based upon studies of cellphone radiation and brain tumor risk in humans. Currently, we have considerably more evidence that would warrant a stronger classification.

Most recently, on March 1, 2021, a report was released by the former director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which concluded that there is a "high probability" that radiofrequency radiation emitted by cellphones causes gliomas and acoustic neuromas, two types of brain tumors.

Let's talk about the fifth generation of cellphone technology, known as 5G, which is already available in limited areas across the U.S. What does this mean for cellphone users and what changes will come with it?

For the first time, in addition to microwaves, this technology will employ millimeter waves, which are much higher frequency than the microwaves used by 3G and 4G. Millimeter waves can't travel very far, and they're blocked by fog or rain, trees and building materials, so the industry estimates that it'll need 800,000 new cell antenna sites.

Each of these sites may have cell antennas from various cellphone providers, and each of these antennas may have microarrays consisting of dozens or even perhaps hundreds of little antennas. In the next few years in the U.S., we will see deployed roughly 2.5 times more antenna sites than in current use unless wireless safety advocates and their representatives in Congress or the judicial system put a halt to this.

How are millimeter waves different from microwaves, in terms of how they affect our bodies and the environment?

Millimeter wave radiation is largely absorbed in the skin, the sweat glands, the peripheral nerves, the eyes and the testes, based upon the body of research that's been done on millimeter waves. In addition, this radiation may cause hypersensitivity and biochemical alterations in the immune and circulatory systemsthe heart, the liver, kidneys and brain.

Millimeter waves can also harm insects and promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens, so it's likely to have some widespread environmental effects for the microenvironments around these cell antenna sites.

What are some simple things that each of us can do to reduce the risk of harm from radiation from cellphones and other wireless devices?

First, minimize your use of cellphones or cordless phonesuse a landline whenever possible. If you do use a cellphone, turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you're not using them. However, when near a Wi-Fi router, you would be better off using your cellphone on Wi-Fi and turning off the cellular because this will likely result in less radiation exposure than using the cellular network.

Second, distance is your friend. Keeping your cellphone 10 inches away from your body, as compared to one-tenth of an inch, results in a 10,000-fold reduction in exposure. So, keep your phone away from your head and body. Store your phone in a purse or backpack. If you have to put it in your pocket, put it on airplane mode. Text, use wired headphones or speakerphone for calls. Don't sleep with it next to your headturn it off or put it in another room.

Third, use your phone only when the signal is strong. Cellphones are programmed to increase radiation when the signal is poor, that is when one or two bars are displayed on your phone. For example, don't use your phone in an elevator or in a car, as metal structures interfere with the signal.

Also, I encourage people to learn more about the 150-plus local groups affiliated with Americans for Responsible Technology, which are working to educate policymakers, urging them to adopt cell tower regulations and exposure limits that fully protect us and the environment from the harm caused by wireless radiation.

Explore further Study suggests clear connection between wireless devices and cancer
A woman breaks down as she prays before the cremation of a relative who died of COVID-19 in Gauhati, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting. Credit: AP Photo/Anupam Nath

India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting.

More than half of India's reported coronavirus deathsthe third most of any countryhave occurred over the past two months as the delta variant of the virus tore through the country and overwhelmed the already strained health system.

New cases are on the decline after exceeding 400,000 a day in May, but authorities are preparing for another possible wave and are trying to ramp up vaccination.

The Health Ministry said that 853 people died in the past 24 hours, raising total fatalities to 400,312. It also reported 46,617 new cases, taking the country's pandemic total past 30.4 million.

India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, is the third to cross 400,000 deaths, after the United States and Brazil.

Experts believe India's reported deaths and infections are massive undercounts. They say an untold number of people died during the April and May surge outside of hospitals and before they could be tested for the virus.

A model from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates there have been more than 1.1 million COVID-19 deaths in India.

A woman prays before the cremation of relative who died of COVID-19 in Gauhati, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting. Credit: AP Photo/Anupam Nath

India's federal ministers from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have dismissed reports of undercounting as exaggerated and misleading.

Even as cases are on the decline, experts worry India could be at risk of another surge of the virus because less than 5% of the population has been fully vaccinated.

Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said Wednesday that vaccination speed has picked up after a new policy announced last month ended a complex system of buying and distributing vaccines that overburdened states and led to inequities in how the shots were handed out.

Under the new policy, the federal government will buy 75% of all vaccines in use in India and give them to states for free. Private hospitals can buy the remaining 25% at prices that have been capped and can charge for them.

Vardhan also said 120 million doses will be made available by the government in July.

Women stand in a queue to get tested for COVID-19 in New Delhi, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India crosses a grim mark of 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, half of them in the past two months during which the virulent delta variant was detected in the country. India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, is the third to cross 400,000 deaths, behind the United States and Brazil. Credit: AP Photo/Manish Swarup

A health worker takes a sample to test for COVID-19 in New Delhi, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India crosses a grim mark of 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, half of them in the past two months during which the virulent delta variant was detected in the country. India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, is the third to cross 400,000 deaths, behind the United States and Brazil. Credit: AP Photo/Manish Swarup

Women wait to receive the vaccine for COVID-19 in New Delhi, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India crosses a grim mark of 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, half of them in the past two months during which the virulent delta variant was detected in the country. India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, is the third to cross 400,000 deaths, behind the United States and Brazil. Credit: AP Photo/Manish Swarup

People stand in queues outside a health centre to get vaccinated for COVID-19 in Ahmedabad, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting. Credit: AP Photo/Ajit Solanki

A health worker prepares to administer the vaccine for COVID-19 in New Delhi, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India crosses a grim mark of 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, half of them in the past two months during which the virulent delta variant was detected in the country. India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, is the third to cross 400,000 deaths, behind the United States and Brazil. Credit: AP Photo/Manish Swarup

A health worker administers the vaccine for COVID-19 at an urban health centre in Ahmedabad, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting. Credit: AP Photo/Ajit Solanki

A health workers takes a nasal swab sample to test for COVID-19 in New Delhi, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India crosses a grim mark of 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, half of them in the past two months during which the virulent delta variant was detected in the country. India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, is the third to cross 400,000 deaths, behind the United States and Brazil. Credit: AP Photo/Manish Swarup

A relative lights the funeral pyre of a COVID-19 victim in Gauhati, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting. Credit: AP Photo/Anupam Nath

A health worker administers the vaccine for COVID-19 at Gujarat University in Ahmedabad, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting. Credit: AP Photo/Ajit Solanki

A relative performs last rites before the cremation of a COVID-19 victim in Gauhati, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting. Credit: AP Photo/Anupam Nath

Relatives perform final rituals before the cremation of a COVID-19 victim in Gauhati, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting. Credit: AP Photo/Anupam Nath

In this May 11, 2021, file photo, family members and volunteers carry the body of a COVID-19 victim for cremation in New Delhi, India. The latest alarming coronavirus variantthe delta variant, first identified in Indiais exploiting low global vaccination rates and a rush to ease pandemic restrictions, adding new urgency to the drive to get more shots in arms and slow its supercharged spread. Credit: AP Photo/Amit Sharma, File

The hope is that India will achieve a rapid increase in inoculations in the coming months. Last month, the head of India's COVID-19 task force told reporters that about 2 billion doses could be available by December under a roadmap that depends on India's two main suppliersSerum Institute of India and Bharat Biotechramping up production and five other potential vaccines being made available in the coming months.

But some have raised questions over whether this is a realistic estimate as both of the country's main suppliers have struggled to boost manufacturing.

On Tuesday, it was announced that the Moderna shot will soon be the fourth vaccine to be administered in India after the AstraZeneca shot, Bharat Biotech's Covaxin and Russia's Sputnik.

India's Zydus Cadilla has also applied to the government drug controller for emergency use authorization of its DNA vaccine. The vaccine can be used for both adults and young people in the 12-18 age group, the company said on Wednesday.

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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Would you be more willing to get vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus if you could participate in a lottery for cash and prizes? The answer was surprisingly no, according to Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) researchers who found that Ohio's "Vax-a-Million" lottery-based incentive system, intended to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates, was not associated with an increase in COVD-19 vaccinations.

Prior reports in the media had suggested that the Ohio lottery increased COVID-19 vaccinations, leading other states to use COVID-19 vaccine incentive lotteries in an attempt to increase slowing vaccination rates. "However, prior evaluations of the Ohio vaccine incentive lottery did not account for other changes in COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States, such as those that may have been due to expansion of vaccination to ages 12-15," explained corresponding author Allan J. Walkey, MD, MSc, professor of medicine at BUSM.

Using data from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control to evaluate trends in vaccination rates among adults 18 and older, the researchers compared vaccination rates before and after the Ohio lottery versus other states in the U.S. that did not yet have vaccine incentive lottery programs. Vaccination rates in other states served as a "control" for vaccination trends measured in Ohio, allowing the researchers to account for factors besides the Ohio lottery (such expanding vaccine eligibility to adolescents) throughout the country.

"Our results suggest that state-based lotteries are of limited value in increasing vaccine uptake. Therefore, the resources devoted to vaccine lotteries may be more successfully invested in programs that target underlying reasons for vaccine hesitancy and low vaccine uptake," said Walkey, a physician at Boston Medical Center.

The researchers believe identifying interventions that can successfully increase COVID-19 vaccination rates is a critical public health issue necessary to curb the pandemic. "It is important to rigorously evaluate strategies designed to increase vaccine uptake, rapidly deploy successful strategies, and phase out those that do not work," Walkey said.

Although Walkey and his colleagues were sorry to see that state lottery incentives were not associated with an increase COVID-19 vaccinations, they hope their findings will lead to a shift in focus away from ineffective and expensive lotteries, and on to further study of other programs that may more successfully increase vaccine uptake.

Explore further Almost all U.S. physicians have gotten a COVID vaccine
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Nearly half of Portugal's population will be placed under night-time curfews again from Friday as the government seeks to rein in a resurgence in coronavirus infections, primarily due to the more contagious Delta variant.

Nearly four million people living in 45 municipalities including Lisbon and the Algarve, as well as major northern cities such as Porto and Braga, will not be allowed to leave their homes between 11:00 pm and 5:00 am under the new rules.

The move marks a reversal from the gradual reopening that Portugal had embarked upon in mid-March after suffering a severe wave of infections at the beginning of the year.

"The situation isn't comparable to the more difficult moments our country has faced during the past year and a half, but it's deteriorating," said government spokeswoman Mariana Vieira da Silva, announcing the measures on Thursday.

In areas designated "high risk" or "very high risk", restaurants, cafes, businesses and cultural venues must cut back their opening hours and the number of visitors and clients.

Weekend travel between Lisbon and the rest of the country has already been banned for the past two weeks as authorities ramp up testing and vaccinations.

For the first time since mid-February, the number of daily new cases in Portugal topped the 2,000-mark, compared with around 500 during the spring.

Prime Minister Antonio Costa's government came under fire for being the only EU country to admit British holidaymakers during three weeks starting from mid-May when the highly contagious Delta variant was widely circulating in Britain.

"It's a repetition of what happened between December and January with the Alpha variant," said Ricardo Mexia, head of the association of doctors working in the public health system, referring to another highly transmissible variant first detected in Britain.

The Delta variant, the most contagious of any COVID-19 strain yet identified, was first detected in India and has now spread to dozens of countries around the world.

The number of hospitalisations due to COVID-19 in Portugal has more than doubled since the end of May and currently stands at 500, but that is far below the record of nearly 7,000 last winter.

Portugal's health authorities have recently ramped up their vaccination programme with around a third of the population now fully inoculated.

Explore further Portugal in reverse as delta variant grips Lisbon, cases up

 2021 AFP
Dr Katrina Pollock. Credit: Imperial College London

Results from the first trial of a new COVID-19 vaccine technology show no short-term safety concerns.

The data, from scientists at Imperial College London, suggests the technology can generate immune responses against COVID-19 in up to 87 percent of people, even at extremely low dose levelsthe lowest of any COVID-19 vaccine candidate worldwide.

The technology uses genetic code called self-amplifying RNA (saRNA). This genetic information holds instructions to make a protein found on the outside of the coronavirus, called the spike protein.

Once injected into the muscle of the arm, the cells make this spike protein, enabling the immune system to generate defenses against the virus.

The team, who published their data on a pre-print server, are now refining the technology to produce future vaccines and boosters against COVID-19, and emerging variants.

The team are modifying the technology to produce a more consistent and strong response, even at very low dose levels, and will pursue trials with updated vaccine candidates.

COVID-19 boosters

Professor Robin Shattock, who leads Imperial's COVID-19 vaccine project, said: "Global demand for COVID-19 vaccines will remain high in the coming decade, given the emergence of lethal SARS-CoV-2 escape-variants, and expected requirement for booster vaccination. We have shown the saRNA technology is safe and can generate an immune response. We are now refining the Imperial saRNA platform to develop vaccines for a variety of other infectious diseases."

The ultra-low dose saRNA technology has potential to protect against a variety of other infectious diseases, such as rabies and Ebola. The researchers also believe it could be developed to treat other conditions, such as cancer.

Professor Shattock said: "The approach is emerging as one of the great scientific advances of the pandemic, with the ultra-low dose offering three key advantages. The first is the potential to manufacture a huge amountone liter of reaction material can produce up to one million doses.

"The second advantage of a lower dose is the reduced likelihood of side effects. Finally, a low dose vaccine opens up the possibility of combining the COVID-19 vaccine with other vaccines. We may now need annual vaccines against COVID-19, and a lower dose makes combination with other vaccines, such as the flu vaccine, more feasible."

New trials begin as vaccine candidate updated

In the trial, 192 participants aged 18-45 years received a variety of doses of the saRNA vaccine, at either four or 14 weeks apart. The results showed participants produced mixed responses. Some achieved good levels of neutralizing antibodies, while others had very limited immune responses.

The doses ranged from 0.1 micrograms to 10 micrograms of saRNA , with 87 percent of people generating antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. For comparison, the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines have dosages of 100 and 30 micrograms, respectively.

Side effects experienced by the participants were low, with the most common being chills and muscle ache, and there were no allergic reactions.

The research team, who have submitted their trial data to a peer-reviewed journal, are now working on modifying the technology to produce a more consistent and strong response, even at very low dose levels. They have recently started a new trial with an updated vaccine candidate designed to increase responses by enhancing the level of RNA expression.

Explore further One vaccine dose enough for COVID-19 survivors

More information: Katrina M. Pollock et al, Safety and Immunogenicity of a Self-Amplifying RNA Vaccine Against COVID-19: COVAC1, a Phase I, Dose-Ranging Trial, SSRN Electronic Journal (2021). Katrina M. Pollock et al, Safety and Immunogenicity of a Self-Amplifying RNA Vaccine Against COVID-19: COVAC1, a Phase I, Dose-Ranging Trial,(2021). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3859294
Video conference meeting between Ambassador of Belarus N.Ovsyanko and the Minister of Education of Ecuador

On July 1, 2021, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Belarus to the Republic of Colombia and the Republic of Ecuador concurrently Nikolai Ovsyanko had a video conference meeting with Minister of Education of Ecuador Maria Brown Perez.

During the conversation, the sides discussed possible areas of cooperation between Belarus and Ecuador in the educational sphere, including student exchange, professional development of teachers, working out of joint projects in the field of preschool and secondary education. Prospects for expanding the legal framework were considered.

M.Brown Perez expressed interest in strengthening cooperation with Belarus in all areas of mutual interest.

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  An Army soldier who shot and killed an armed protester after driving into a crowd demonstrating against police violence in the Texas capital last summer has been indicted on a murder charge, authorities said Thursday.

Sgt. Daniel Perry, who was stationed at Fort Hood, was booked and released on $300,000 bail, said Kristen Dark, a spokeswoman for the Travis County Sheriff's Office.

Perrys attorney, Clint Broden, has said the soldier was working for a ride-sharing company and acted in self-defense after Foster pointed a gun at him. Broden issued a statement Thursday expressing disappointment in the indictment and confidence that Perry would be acquitted.

It is important to note that the standard of proof required for an indictment is significantly less than the standard of proof required for a conviction, the statement said.
BUCHAREST (AP)  An explosion at Romania's largest oil refinery outside the port city of Constanta on Friday killed one person and injured at least four, authorities said.

Plumes of black smoke could be seen rising from the Navodari Petromidia plant next to the Black Sea, as emergency services airlifted the injured people away for treatment, according to officials.

The refinery operator, Rompetrol Rafinare, said the blaze was later isolated and stabilized.

"Internal and external teams are making efforts to put it out in the shortest time, the company said in a social media post.

The cause of the blast was not immediately clear, but Rompetrol Rafinares general manager Felix Crudu Tesloveanu told media that early investigations suggest a cracked pipe may have caused the blast.

An Interior Ministry statement urged residents at the nearby town of Navodari and other areas in the vicinity to close their windows because of the billowing smoke.

Environment Minister Barna Tanczos wrote online that The explosion can have extremely serious environmental consequences, and that he has cancelled a working trip in order to assist authorities deal with the blast.
The county reported 19 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday.

And the North Carolina Department of Public Safety reported 18 active cases at Foothills Correctional Institution in Morganton.

The Burke County Health Department reported a total of 10,438 cases on Friday, up from 10,419 cases on Monday.

On Thursday, Carolinas HealthCare System Blue Ridge reported on its COVID-19 dashboard 145 active cases of the virus, with two people hospitalized. It also reported 14 patients in its virtual hospital.

The county has previously reported a total of 169 deaths due to the virus.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services reported 374 new cases on Friday, with a 2.5% positive rate and 400 people currently hospitalized across the state. It also reported a total of 13,434 deaths due to the virus.

NCDHHS also reported 53% of the states adult population is fully vaccinated, while 56% of the population has received at least one dose of a vaccine against the virus.

In Burke County, 35% of the population (31, 721 people) are fully vaccinated, while 37% (33,600 people) are partially vaccinated, according to NCDHHS.
"Perhaps early on, they had adequate and proper motivation. But it's telling that both of them after years of foster parenting became absolute monsters," he said.

Larson and Harper could not be reached for comment Thursday either by phone numbers or email addresses linked to them in public records.

The 2013 incident drew headlines across the country. A 2019 lawsuit filed on behalf of the boy, identified in court documents as "J.G.," alleged years of physical and potentially sexual abuse, neglect and even bouts of torture against the children under the care of Larson and Harper.

Harper, according to the complaint, squeezed children's fingers with pliers, burned them with hot wires and stabbed them with hypodermic needles. He also tortured J.G. to get false confessions for things he had not done.

He pleaded guilty in March 2015 to felony child abuse in connection with the dead-chicken incident and was released from prison in February 2020.

"His crimes are so many and there are so many instances of abuse and torture  and I mean torture, sadistic torture  that he can't do enough time as far as I'm concerned," Trehy said.
CASPER, Wyo.  A judge sentenced a Maine man to serve 15 days in jail for running onto Old Faithful geyser as part of what authorities say was a stunt to gain attention.

Aaron E. Merritt, 37, pleaded guilty Thursday to trespassing on a Yellowstone National Park thermal area, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for Wyoming. He has already spent four days in jail, meaning he will still have 11 days to serve behind bars.

Magistrate Judge Mark Carmen also banned Merritt from Yellowstone and fined him $200.

On July 7, 2020, Merritt ran up to Old Faithful multiple times while wearing a raccoon skin hat and waiving an American flag, according to the U.S. Attorney's office. He also failed to appear for a court hearing a few weeks later.

Yellowstone National Park has rules and regulations in place to protect park resources and help keep visitors safe, Acting United States Attorney Bob Murray said in a statement. This case ended with federal charges and time in prison, but it could have been much worse. If Mr. Merrick had fallen through the thermal feature, he would have most likely lost his life.
Some shops, like Big River Guns, have already seen an increase in sales, despite it being a day since the bill went into effect.

I did have probably a few more people come in (on Thursday) than normal, Scott Lucas, Owner of Big River Guns, said.

Lucas added that he fully supported the bill. In general, Im all for anything to further the 2nd Amendment rights, he said.

Although he didnt see the same small boost in sales for his own shop, Nick Lewis, co-owner of Lewis Firearm Co., also voiced his support for the bill.

Im sure theres probably people out there who are concerned about (the bill) and maybe it's justified, but it seems good to me in terms of freedom, Lewis said, I also believe that, as crazy as it sounds, it seems like the Old West idea of everyone having a gun kept things a little more safe.

While permits may be optional now, they arent necessarily unneeded. Lewis said he assumes most people will still decide to buy them. Permits streamline the purchasing process and allow the possibility of carrying firearms in other states.
More than half of all U.S. states have enacted police reforms in the 13 months since George Floyd's death, but critics contend a Missouri measure would go the other way by reducing police accountability while increasing criminal penalties for some protest activities.

Senate Bill 26, sometimes referred to as the police bill of rights," was approved by Missouri lawmakers in May and is awaiting the signature of Republican Gov. Mike Parson, a former sheriff. His spokeswoman said Parson is still reviewing the bill. If signed, it would become law Aug. 28.

George Floyds death in May 2020 prompted soul-searching in many states. Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced last week to 22 1/2 years in prison after being convicted of murder in Floyd's death.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, around 30 states have passed police reform legislation since Floyd was killed. Among the new laws: Nine states and the District of Columbia banned chokeholds, while 12 states and the District of Columbia updated or changed their use of force policies.
Children have been disproportionately affected. Nearly one in every three patients treated at the two hospitals since 2017 was under the age of 18, up from one in five before legalization.

Statewide, the injury rate for children between the ages of 5 and 14 rose 140% in the first three years of legalization.

Injuries to the hands and burns are the most common, followed by injuries to the eyes and face. Not surprisingly, injuries are concentrated around the July 4 holiday weekend.

I think people believe that since theyve been legalized they must be safe, said Michael Takacs, professor of emergency medicine at UI Carver College of Medicine and one of the reports authors. You see other people buying them, or youre at a park or family gathering and other people are setting off fireworks so you want to be part of the celebration. It gives people a false sense of security.

Researchers recommended new safety campaigns that target high-risk populations and highlight emerging trends, additional steps to stop children and intoxicated people from using fireworks, and more statewide research and reporting on injuries.
The rollout of Covid-19 vaccines in South Africa has been plagued by inefficiency, misfortune, and a series of unrealistic aims, resulting in deadlines being repeatedly missed.

South Africas initial target was to vaccinate 1.2 million people by the end of March, and 40 million people by the end of 2021.

According to the government update on 1 July, 3,026,636 people have received a vaccine.

While there has been a substantial improvement in the number of South Africans being vaccinated since March, if things progress as they are now, it is likely that government will miss its goal to vaccinate 67% of South Africas population by year-end.

According to the Media Hack Collective vaccine calculator, South Africa has administered an average of 22,757 vaccines per day since 17 February.

This number has steadily increased but the calculator shows that, assuming the two-shot Pfizer vaccine is going to be used to inoculate most of South Africa, the number of vaccines administered per day on average has to be over 422,000 assuming a two-shot vaccination  and this number is only increasing with each passing day.

In his address to the nation this past Sunday, President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged that South Africa has a shortage of vaccines and added that we are not the only country in the world waiting for its vaccines to arrive.

I get calls every day from leaders on the continent about the availability of vaccines, [also] from as far afield as the Caribbean, Ramaphosa said.

The entire world is crying out for vaccines and we are doing everything we can to make sure the vaccines are here.

On 24 November 2020, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni confirmed in a Bloomberg webinar that government would invest in the Covax vaccine initiative for R500 million rand. The goal was to see South Africa at the front of the queue for the acquisition of vaccines.

This announcement was made after the government had already missed the initial October 9 payment deadline to join Covax.

President Ramaphosa stated that this initial investment was aimed at securing enough vaccinations from Covax to cover at least 10% of the population (around 6 million) within the first half of 2021.

Another payment, this time of R327 million was due for payment to Covax on December 15. This deadline was also missed. The Solidarity Fund, which was responsible for the payment, reportedly did not receive the green light from government to initiate the transaction due to an administrative lapse.

Before January there had been no sign of government attempts to procure vaccines or vaccine production besides the Covax initiative.

On 7 January, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize presented the official plan for the South African vaccine rollout strategy

It stipulated a three-stage programme that the government believed would see 67-70% of the population vaccinated by the end of 2021.

This was followed by an announcement that the government had secured 1.5 million AstraZeneca vaccinations and that these would be delivered by February, enabling 750,000 health workers to be vaccinated by the end of February.

Shortly thereafter, on 12 January, President Ramaphosa announced that the government had secured 20 million vaccines. He stated that these would be delivered mainly in the first half of the year, though deals were yet to be finalised.

The confirmation of bilateral agreements relieved earlier frustrations relating to South Africas total dependence on Covax, which had by February not provided a single vaccine.

The goalposts for Covax were moved from providing vaccinations for 10% of the population within the first half of the year, to 10% by the end of the year.

On 22 January, a further 9 million vaccines were said to be secured in an agreement with Johnson & Johnson and, by the end of the month, Mkhize announced that another 20 million were secured through an agreement with Pfizer.

These reported agreements saw the government move beyond its goal of securing 40 million vaccines, albeit on paper.

The AstraZeneca vaccines were set to arrive on 1 February, and Zweli Mkhize stated that distribution would begin between 10 to 14 days later.

Then came the reports that AstraZeneca  the only vaccine in South Africa at the time  only had a 22% efficacy against mild and moderate cases of the 501.V2 variant that had emerged in the second wave of infections.

The vaccine rollout was halted on 8 February, before it had even begun, though Mkhize said that doses from Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer would start arriving within four weeks.

Mkhize announced a substitute for South Africas first phase of vaccine rollouts on 16 February dubbed the Sisonke study.

According to the Minister, the rollout would begin that same week with the arrival of 80,000 Johnson & Johnson doses and another 500,000 doses could be expected within the subsequent four weeks.

He also said that 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine were expected to arrive by the end of March.

The circumstances surrounding the AstraZeneca vaccine did not cause a significant delay in the rollout, as the Sisonke study commenced on 17 February  2 days after the AstraZeneca rollout would have begun.

By 11 March, 128,887 healthcare workers had been vaccinated, and Mkhize announced that the initial target of vaccinating 1.2 million healthcare workers by the end of March was unattainable due to vaccine shortages.

The government stated that it anticipated 500,000 doses of Johnson & Johnson and 600,000 doses from Pfizer by 31 March, falling far short of the 20 million doses of Pfizer that, in February, Mkhize said could be expected by the same date.

The Minister of Health maintained that the initial target of vaccinating 40 million South Africans had not been adjusted.

Mkhizes assertion on 16 February that 500,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine could be expected within four weeks was not achieved, with around 160,000 received at the time.

On 24 March, Medical Research Council president Professor Glenda Gray stated that the Sisonke trial aimed at 500,000 vaccinations by the end of April, as opposed to the initial phase one target of 1.2 million by end March.

President Ramaphosa announced on 25 March that the second phase of South Africas vaccine rollouts would begin in May.

On the same day of the presidents announcement, Acting Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni stated that the target for the end of April was still 1.2 million and that the rollout was on its way to reaching it, contradicting Grays statement from the previous day.

With just over 200,000 healthcare workers being vaccinated at the time of Ntshavhenis announcement, this implied that around a million vaccines would have to be administered to healthcare workers in 36 days.

To achieve this would require 27,778 vaccinations a day, as opposed to the 5,700 daily doses the country was administering at the time.

President Ramaphosa said in a media briefing on March 29 that the end goal of 40 million vaccinated South Africans by the end of the year remained set.

Misfortune struck again on 16 April as South Africas vaccine rollout was halted due to concerns over blood clotting caused by the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Despite the delay caused by the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the goal of vaccinating 1.2 million healthcare workers by 16 May was affirmed by the government, and vaccinations once again resumed on April 28.

The aim was to start the second phase of South Africas vaccine rollout on 17 May, allowing those over the age of 60 to get their shots.

The first batch of 325,000 Pfizer vaccine doses was received on 3 May and the target of 1.2 million vaccinations by 16 May was readjusted to 500,000 vaccinations. This new goal was also missed.

Phase two of the vaccine rollout commenced on 17 May as per the governments schedule.

Mkhize stated that 4 million Pfizer doses were expected by June, as well as 2.2 million Johnson & Johnson doses.

Government aims to have 16.6 million South Africans vaccinated by 3 October, which is 94 days from now.

President Ramaphosa stated in his address this past Sunday that the vaccines are now starting to arrive at an adequate rate, admitting that there has been a shortage until now. He also said that he aims to have the daily vaccinations reach 300,000.

This is in line with the 288,000 daily vaccinations required to reach the 16.6 million goal by 3 October, assuming the goal is to fully vaccinate people using the two-shot Pfizer vaccine.

Yesterday, 30 June, over 120,000 people received their vaccinations, which is a positive indicator of the rollout expansion.

At the moment the education sector is at the centre of the program, with 238,315 staff being vaccinated so far, with the goal being set at 582,000 vaccinations by 8 July 2021

Vaccinations for people over 50 are set to begin on 15 July, with over 50% of people over 60 already vaccinated.

Registrations for people aged 50 and over are now open on the EVDS portal.

The table below summarises South Africas vaccine deadlines since October last year and shows how many were met.
With continued constraints on power on South African citizens, businesses, and industry, many are looking for alternative power solutions with solar becoming the most popular of these.

The demand for solar infrastructure has further increased with governments announcement to increase the private capacity generation limit.

South African specialist end-to-end infrastructure business Dartcom, has signed an agreement with International solar technology giant, LONGi Solar for the distribution of its solar panels in South Africa.

As one of the most sought-after solar technologies globally, this partnership allows Dartcom to provide world-class solar products for residential, commercial and industrial through to utility scale projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. It also dovetails perfectly with the establishment of our own renewable energy division, Oragen Energy, which will provide bespoke alternative energy solutions to businesses and consumers alike, says Dartcom CEO, Brett Nash.

The deal will see Dartcom import, warehouse and distribute various product ranges of LONGi Solar panels in bulk.

A little-known fact is that Dartcom, a level 1 B-BBEE contributor, has grown to become one of the largest and trusted suppliers of Li-Ion Batteries in South Africa. The scale of Dartcoms logistic and distribution footprint across South Africa enables it to purchase, warehouse and transport large quantities of stock at competitive pricing. Our intention is to leverage all of our strengths to achieve similar results with LONGi Solar panels, providing world-class solutions to our customers, says Nash.

LONGi is the world largest solar company with a production capacity of over 50GW.

Breaking the global shipment record by shipping over 24GW of modules globally last year, LONGi is dedicated to maintaining its leadership in the manufacturing of mono-crystalline silicon products, delivering higher efficiency to its partners.

With its partnership with Dartcom, LONGi will continue to grow its footprint in Sub-Saharan Africa to ensure top quality products are delivered to the region.

Dartcom is well-placed to market these panels to South African installers, EPCs and large corporates looking to source directly through its marketplace. Oragen Energy can further assist with project development, solar design and engineering, installation and construction, operation and maintenance, as well as providing funding solutions for projects ranging from rooftop, small land based and utility projects, says Oragen Energys Managing Director, Johan Cilliers.

Installers, EPCs and customers across Sub-Saharan Africa can pre-order their panels online at https://shop.dartcom.co.za/ from 5 July 2021.
South Africas acting Minister of Health, Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane, confirmed in a media briefing today that the Delta variant of the coronavirus has become dominant in Gauteng.

The Delta variant was first detected in India and quickly overwhelmed the countrys healthcare system.

It was therefore concerning when South African scientists discovered that the Delta variant had swept South Africa.

This is because the Delta variant is more transmissible than the Beta variant, meaning it is more infectious and spreads faster.

Initial indications are also that the Delta variant may be more virulent, causing more severe symptoms in those who are infected.

Together, increased transmissibility and virulence makes the Delta variant deadlier than the Beta mutation, which was first detected in South Africa and was the dominant variant in the country until now.

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) stated that it has been performing genomic surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 and summarised the following key points about the variant.

Beta was 25% more transmissible than the original coronavirus; Delta is 97% more transmissible than the original lineage.

Vaccines are still highly effective in preventing severe illness, with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine displaying 96% effectiveness against hospitalisation with Delta variant after two doses.

Reinfection with Delta is possible following a Beta infection because the individuals antibody levels may have waned.

Current PCR tests can detect the Delta variant.

Limited data is currently available on whether different symptoms result following Delta infection.

Preliminary data from the UK suggests that the Delta variant may cause more severe illness.

This morning, the good news from South Africas scientists was that the vaccines currently in use in the country  Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer-BioNTech  are effective against the Delta variant.

Professor Penny Moore (pictured in the title image), research chair of virus-host dynamics at the University of the Witwatersrand, said that the data currently shows that the vaccines provide a stronger immune response to the Delta variant than the Beta variant.

During the same media briefing, Professor Glenda Gray, president and CEO of the SA Medical Research Council (SAMRC), presented data from South Africas Sisonke study.

This showed that the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine performed better against the Delta variant than the Beta variant.

Furthermore, the immune response generated by the Johnson & Johnson vaccine matures over time, giving better protection against the Beta and Delta variants several weeks after the shot was administered.

Gray said that based on the data from the studies and lab tests, the SAMRC recommends that it is not yet necessary for healthcare professionals to boost the Johnson & Johnson shot.

The data also shows that the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine works just as well as the two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine even eight months after being administered.

Gray said that they need to keep following up with participants to see when the immune response from the vaccine starts to fade.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine works well in South Africa with the difficult Beta variant, Gray stated.

It also provides good, immediate, and sustained immune response against Delta and surprising durability against the Delta variant right up until eight months.
Local

Pandemic relief

The making of a Napa Valley cookbook: Effort to help restaurant workers led to an epic journey

Alexander Rubin Photography Author Jess Lander with Bounty Hunter's beer-can chicken. Jess Lander Author Jess Lander, right, with the team from Southside Cafe. Submitted photo The Essential Napa Valley Cookbook by Jess Lander Alexander Rubin Photography Beer Can Chicken from Bounty Hunter. Jess Lander Cook St. Helena's cheese mushroom risotto. Alexander Rubin Photography Bistro Don Giovani's seared salmon. Alexander Rubin Photography Goose & Gander's hamburger Jess Lander Photographer Alexander Rubin shooting Farmstead's lamb shanks. Jess Lander Press's beet salad Alexander Rubin Photography Press's beet salad Jess Lander Photographer Alexander Rubin shoots Southside Cafe's cauliflower tacos.

I dont think Im alone in that for much of the past year, I felt utterly helpless. It seemed like everyone was struggling to some degree; struggling with work and finances, their health, their mental health, family and childcare, the list goes on.

While my family wasnt unaffected, I generally felt like we were some of the luckier ones and I desperately wanted to do something, to help some people in some way. But what? Signing petitions, attending protests, making donations, and ordering takeout as often as possible just didnt feel like enough.

Finally, an idea came last November when I saw a friend post about a cookbook published in Boulder, Colorado in support of the local restaurant community. We could do something like that in Napa Valley, I thought, and after some Googling, couldnt find another collection of recipes from Napa Valley restaurants in existence (a friend of mine did later send me a copy she had of one, but it was from 1986). Sure, many of our local chefs have their own cookbooks, but they dont have their recipes published alongside dishes from their Napa neighbors.

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Shortly after, I discovered another cookbook project out of New York City called Serving New York, which went on to raise over $200,000 for New York restaurant workers. And while Napa Valley isnt The Big Apple, it is one of the most iconic culinary destinations in the world. Surely, people would want this book at home on their shelves  right? Thats how The Essential Napa Valley Cookbook was born.

Finding a charity partner

Before I did anything, I needed to find a legitimate charity that could legally and efficiently handle and distribute the money we planned to raise. This was a bigger challenge than I expected, for there wasnt an existing Napa Valley restaurant relief fund and I wasnt about to start a non-profit on top of publishing the book.

After many emails and phone calls, a friend pointed me in the direction of Chuck Meyer, the owner of Napa Palisades Saloon and First & Franklin Marketplace. Meyer had started a group in the early days of the pandemic called Feed Napa Now. Their goal was to feed families in need during tough times, like COVID and the fires, and in turn, the restaurants also got some much-needed business by providing these meals. Chuck loved the cookbook idea and agreed to join forces. Feed Napa Now isnt an official non-profit either, but they have a silent partner in the Girls & Boys Club Napa Valley, who agreed to help with this project too.

Seventy-five percent of the proceeds of The Essential Napa Valley Cookbook go directly to the restaurant workers of participating restaurants and 25 percent goes to further supporting the efforts of Feed Napa Now.

Building a team

While I was never big on group projects (sorry, Im a Taurus), I knew I couldnt do this myself and that Id need to build a creative team that could fill the gaps around my own skill set. The two most essential pieces of this was finding a photographer and a design team. The only problem? I was asking them to volunteer their time, since I was set on donating 100 percent of the proceeds.

I immediately knew that I wanted to work with my amazing friend and mentor Kim Shaeffer, the proprietor of designthis!, a Napa-based branding and design studio thats been around for 30 years. They do incredible work, which is now on full display in the cookbook and our website.

There are a lot of incredible photographers in Napa Valley that I know, respect, and consider friends, so this decision wasnt as much of a no-brainer. My main goal was to find someone that was extremely passionate about our restaurant community  they had to be in order to do this out of the goodness of their own heart  and when I found out that Alexander Rubin was already partnering with restaurants to help drum up business during the pandemic, I sent him a very long email pleading my case.

In no less than three minutes I received the enthusiastic reply I was hoping for: Yes I am so in! Keep me posted. I am all about it! Fantastic idea.

One of my most pivotal teammates came by way of introduction from Shaeffer. Deirdre Bourdet specializes in culinary consulting and writing and helped me edit, scale, and perfect each recipe. I didnt know it until I started it, but I was way in over my head with these recipes. Ive learned that recipe editing is a very niche skill and if you dont have some sort of professional culinary experience (which I dont), theres a lot of things that will literally never occur to you; Id give examples, but I dont want to embarrass myself. With no exaggeration whatsoever, Deirdre was a life saver.

To complete my team, I wanted a sommelier to help me select wine pairings for the book, as I didnt think a Napa Valley cookbook would be complete without them. Desmond Echavarrie, local Master Somm and founder of Scale Wine Group, volunteered to help put together this complicated puzzle of matching a great wine with each dish.

I also called upon a few friends and marketing pros to help me promote the book to the media and recruited roughly two dozen people to assist with recipe testing (we tested every single dish, even the cocktails!). Looking back, I cant believe that many people volunteered their valuable time and rock star skills to make this project a reality. As they say, it takes a vineyard (and it did; I drank a lot of wine throughout).

Getting the recipes

I was pre-warned about the challenges of getting recipes from chefs. I was told that theyre incredibly difficult to get in touch with, that Id receive recipes in a myriad of formats  even handwritten  that Id often have to scale them down to just a few servings, and that there may be any number of missing ingredients and instructions. I love chefs, but all of this was true to some degree.

Making things even more challenging was that I had some of the worst timing ever. This idea really took off during the holiday season, which is not an ideal time of year for getting in touch with people, and at the same time, we were in the midst of a second shutdown that had restaurants in a frenzy, fighting for their lives. Then a few weeks after that, restrictions started to lift and they were all scrambling to reopen and restaff.

Thats all to say that this took time and we didnt have much of it. I wanted to launch the cookbook as quickly as possible so that we could get money to workers sooner than later, and so that we got it out there before people really moved on from the pandemic. Did I end up getting a recipe from every restaurant I reached out to? Far from it. But I did end up with 31 fantastic and iconic Napa Valley eateries that provided a total of 37 delicious recipes, so Im calling it a success.

The photoshoot

I wanted a photo of every single recipe. Its a pet peeve of mine when I land on a recipe I want to make in a cookbook and theres no photo. Im a very visual person.

But I knew rounding up 30 chefs wasnt going to be easy and I didnt want my poor volunteer photographer running from one restaurant to the next, up and down the whole valley. So, we chose two days for photoshoots and scheduled as many restaurants as we could. One day was the Napa day and Katie Hamilton Shaffer of Feast it Forward generously donated her studio for it. The next day was the Upvalley day and Chef Nash Cognetti (Pizzeria Tra Vigne) donated his St. Helena catering and event space, Tre Posti.

This was probably the most fun I had during the whole process and it went surprisingly smoothly. It was great to finally (and safely) meet everyone in person, see the dishes in real life, and yes, we got to sample a lot of them, too. I had leftovers for the whole week. Bounty Hunter even generously sent us each home with a whole beer can chicken.

There were just a handful of dishes that we shot separately in the following weeks and Im pleased to say that every single recipe has a photo.

Everything else

I joked a lot during this process that I felt like I was planning another wedding. There were so many emails to send every day, so many logistics to plan, and so, so many spreadsheets. I was also still working full time for my own business.

These are just a few of the other things I was doing during these months: reaching out to wineries to confirm wine pairings, writing the front, back, and section pages, writing the website, finding someone to write the forward (thanks Janet Trefethen), working with designthis! on book and website design, finding a printer, finding a fulfillment partner for shipping, creating a press kit, and perhaps the most difficult task, attempting to fundraise during a pandemic.

In order to donate 100 percent of the proceeds and print 5,000 copies, I had to raise a lot of money. I wanted the donations we made to be significant and actually impactful to workers, but understandably, it was very difficult receiving donations when every business out there has been hit in the last year and is working with slashed budgets. That said, we did manage to cover our costs in the end and if we sell a lot of books, we stand to donate over $100,000.

After four long months of hard work, we launched the book as a pre-release on April 21. Its a relief to have made it to this point, but the work is not over. Now we have to actually sell this thing (thats where you come in, reader). Im also busy working with local retailers (holler if youd like to carry it in your store), planning some launch parties and events, and managing all the logistics of orders and shipping.

Hopefully, things will calm down soon enough and I can actually get into my kitchen and cook up all of these fabulous recipes.

Editor's Note: Jess reports that the first boxes of books are expected July 2 and she will be shipping to those who preordered, almost 1,200 people. She's planning a release party at Southside Cafe's Century Location on July 29 and another at the Napa Valley Welcome Center on Aug. 5.

The book will also be available for purchase soon at the Napa Valley Welcome Center and Napa Bookmine, among other local retailers.

Photos of the month: A look at Napa Valley news in pictures, June 2021
May home sales dipped 2.7% on a monthly basis from 458,170 in April and up 86.7% from a year ago, when 238,740 homes were sold on an annualized basis.

The sharp yearly sales jump was expected as the housing market was hit hard by the pandemic shut down last year when home sales dropped to the lowest level since the Great Recession.

The overheated housing market is showing signs of a much-needed cooling and could be a sign of waning buyer interest as the torrid pace of home price increases and buyer fatigue adversely affected demand, said CAR President Dave Walsh.

Were seeing many would-be buyers taking a break and hoping to see more listings as the economy reopens and prospective sellers list their homes for sale.

Californias median home price set another new record high in May as the statewide median price inched up 0.5% on a month-to-month basis to $818,260 in May, up from Aprils revised $814,010 and up 39.1% from the $588,070 recorded last May.

The year-over-year price gain was the highest ever recorded, and it was the second straight month that the state recorded an annual increase of over 30%.

Robust demand of higher-priced properties contributed to the record-setting statewide median price.
The Napa public school networks post-pandemic financial forecast for the next three years begins with larger budget reserves than in years past. But officials also warn that a long-running decline in student numbers will continue deep into the decade as birth rates fall and housing costs swell, thus threatening to erode state funding that is based on attendance levels.

Nearly 12.1% of the Napa Valley Unified School Districts 2021-22 budget will be held in reserve, more than four times the 3% minimum required to avoid the risk of insolvency and a state financial takeover. However, that reserve is expected to shrink to 8.1% the following year and to 4.24% in 2023-24, according to the three-year budget NVUSDs board approved Thursday night.

NVUSD, which operates public schools in Napa and American Canyon, forecasts $174.2 million in revenue in the next fiscal year, which begins Thursday, against expenses of $171.8 million. However, the district is then expected to run two years of deficits as revenues drop to $170.8 million in 2022-23 and $172.4 million in 2023-24, while expenditures in those years are predicted to reach $178.5 million and $180.6 million.
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.
"What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten  in order to weaken  a statute that stands as a monument to Americas greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about the end of discrimination in voting. I respectfully dissent, Kagan wrote, joined by the other two liberal justices.

Native Americans who have to travel long distances to put their ballots in the mail were most likely to be affected by Arizona's ballot collection law. Votes cast by Black and Hispanic voters were most likely to be tossed out because they were cast in a wrong precinct, the appeals court found.

Election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his blog that the decision severely weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He noted that this decision along with others over the past 15 years have taken away all the major available tools for going after voting restrictions.

This is not a death blow for Section 2 claims, but it will make it much, much harder for such challenges to succeed, Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, Law School, wrote.
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP)  The body of a longtime Northern California university professor was found last week in Yosemite National Park, and park officials are asking anyone who may have seen him at the park to call investigators.

James Youngblom, 64, had been hiking alone. His body was found on June 25, the National Park Service said in a statement Wednesday.

The statement did not disclose details on how Youngblom died. Tuolumne County Sheriffs Office spokesman Deputy Nico Sandelin said an autopsy has not yet been completed. Park spokesman Scott Gediman provided no other information, citing an ongoing investigation.

Anyone who may have seen Youngblom in the area of White Wolf, Pate Valley or the Grand Canyon of The Tuolumne between June 22 and June 25 should contact the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch, the statement said.

Youngblom taught biological sciences at California State University Stanislaus for 31 years. He was an avid outdoorsman and experienced backpacker who took at least one solo backpacking trip each year, said David Evans, the university's dean of the College of Science.
The GOP field is expected to continue to grow: Candidates have until 59 days before election to file papers to declare their candidacy, or roughly about two weeks away.

In a recall election, voters would be asked two questions: First, should Newsom be removed, yes or no? The second question would be a list of replacement candidates to choose from, if a majority of voters cast ballots to remove Newsom.

Tom Del Beccaro, a former head of the state Republican Party who chairs Rescue California, one of the groups promoting the recall, said Elder would help drive up support for the critical first question in his home Los Angeles area, the most populous in the state.

Statewide races in California are often won or lost in L.A. county, said Del Beccaro, who is not aligned with any candidate. Elder is going to bring a constituency that is going to help us get a yes on the question No. 1.

Steve Frank, a longtime conservative activist serving as Elder's spokesman, said his entry into the race would become a major game-changer. People across the political spectrum know him, and many listen to his show.

Elder, a Black man, also would bring more diversity to the Republican ranks.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  A man convicted along with three others in the racially motivated killing spree that terrorized San Francisco in the 1970s died in a prison cell while on hospice care, officials announced Thursday.

Jessie Lee Cooks, 76, was found dead Wednesday in his bed at the California Medical Facility, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said. The cause of death will be determined by the Solano County Coroner, officials said.

Cooks was sentenced in San Francisco County on March 29, 1976, to serve life with the possibility of parole for first-degree murder, kidnapping and first-degree robbery.

Cooks, Manuel More, J.C.X. Simon and Larry C. Green were convicted of targeting white victims between October 1973 and April 1974 in a rampage that terrorized San Francisco and left 14 people dead.

The murder victims included a woman who was beheaded with a machete, an 81-year-old man and a 19-year-old college student carrying a teddy bear as a Christmas present.

The attacks were known as the Zebra murders because investigators communicated their information in the case over the police broadcast band Z. The wounded included Art Agnos, who would go on to serve as San Franciscos mayor.
New Zealanders will be farewelling their plastics as the government attempts to match the countrys reality to its clean green reputation, The Guardian reported.

Currently one of the top 10 per-capita producers of landfill waste in the world, New Zealand has announced it will ban a swathe of single-use plastics, including cotton buds, bags, cutlery, plates and bowls, straws and fruit labels.

Every day, New Zealanders throw away an estimated 159g of plastic waste per person, making us some of the highest waste generators in the world, the environment minister, David Parker, said.

The bans, which will be phased in between 2022 and 2025, would ensure we live up to our clean, green reputation, he said. Officials estimate that the new policy will remove more than 2bn single-use plastic items from the countrys landfills and environment each year.

New Zealand had already banned most single-use plastic bags in 2019, but the changes will include packaging for produce, as well as a range of other items. These steps follow similar bans overseas: outlawing plastic bags is now common around the world, and the UK introduced a ban on plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds in 2020. The EU has voted for a similar ban to be introduced this year. In some countries, Covid-19 has stalled progress on plasticsa number of US states rolled back their bans on plastic bags and halted new legislation to limit plastic products as the pandemic reached its height. Environmental groups have also reported enormous quantities of Covid wasteincluding plastic gloves, hand sanitizer bottles and surgical masks  are clogging oceans.

The new bans were an important step, but still missed many of the largest producers of plastic waste in New Zealand, said Assoc Prof Terri-Ann Berry, the director of Environmental Solutions Research Centre at Unitec. She said that while drawing public attention to household waste was vital, its very easy to forget that some of our more commercial sectors are also big plastic users. Construction and demolition, for example, accounted for up to 50% of landfill waste in New Zealand.

The New Zealand government also has coffee cups and wet wipes in its sights, but Parker said work needed to be done to devise alternatives, and the government would announce the next steps for those items next year. The government also announced a fund for businesses to research alternatives to single-use plastics.
Armenia Parliament Speaker congratulates Armenians on occasion of Constitution Day

Armenia Constitutional Court to consider Friday the petitions challenging snap parliamentary election results

Ukrainian figure highlights work of Union of Armenians of Ukraine in popularizing Armenia's culture

Stepanakert: Azerbaijan tries to make Queen Elizabeth an accomplice to its "victory" in Karabakh

Analyst: Life of Armenian teen stabbed in Georgia not at risk

Australia senator pledges to recognize Armenian, Greek, Assyrian Genocides

Armenia 1st ombudsperson: Azerbaijan continues grossly violating norms of international humanitarian law

Armenia security service chief is bestowed Major General military rank

Dead body of person, 30, who drowned in Armenia waterfall, is found

Armenia ex-President Kocharyan congratulates on Constitution Day

Analyst: Armenia, Azerbaijan leaders have committed criminally punishable crimes

Judicial farce against Armenian captives continues in Azerbaijan

53 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Azerbaijan emergency ministry launches inquiry into Caspian Sea explosion

Armenia marks Constitution Day

Armenia President: Certain provisions of current Constitution do not provide best solutions

Armenia acting PM: There have been profound changes in our constitutional awareness

Armenia embassy in Moscow comments on statements of Russia public figure

Major road accident in Armenias Kotayk, rescuers remove victim out of vehicle

China astronauts spend nearly 7 hours in open space

Clashes occur between transgender opponents, supporters in Los Angeles

Black Sea Trade and Development Bank invites expression of interest for open tender for its headquarters

Azerbaijan state oil company denies rumors of accident on its offshore platforms

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
The remote meetings of the 2021 summer session are being held at the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (PA).

Ani Samsonyan, an outgoing member of the Armenian delegation to the OSCE PA and a member of the outgoing parliament of Armenia, spoke at the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly's Committee on Democracy, Human Rights and Humanitarian Questions, and talked about making the Armenian prisoners of war (POWs) in Azerbaijan a subject of trade, and the illegal presence of Azerbaijani troops in the sovereign territory of Armenia. Below we present Samsonyan's speech, which has been posted on her Facebook page.

Ms. Henriksen,

First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to you for preparing a report on human rights in these difficult conditions of the worlds pandemic situation and presenting it to the OSCE PA.

I expected to see mentions in this report about Armenian prisoners war and captives, because this an issue of fundamental human rights.

Unfortunately, I have to speak out once again about the fact that Azerbaijan continues to violate this principle, does not return Armenian prisoners of war, civilian captives including women.

These days, trials have begun in Azerbaijan against Armenian captives, which completely violates the principles of international law, the rights of captives and their families.

The issue of humanitarian law is politicized by Azerbaijan. I will post a link in the conversation chat and show video where the presidents of Azerbaijan and Turkey were talking about Armenian prisoners of war as a subject of trade, planning to return them in exchange for maps of the mined areas in Nagorno Karabakh [(Artsakh)].

This is an undeniable evidence that Azerbaijan is engaged in human trafficking, and the Armenian prisoners of war are the subject of political bargaining for Azerbaijan. They are being illegally held for exchange of mined maps.

Therefore, all the trials against the Armenian prisoners of war are fake processes, their purpose is to throw dust in your eyes.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that since May 12 the Azerbaijani troops have violated the territorial integrity of Armenia; they are in our sovereign territory illegally until today.

We call on our European partners to impose sanctions on Azerbaijan for violating Article 2 of the UN Charter.

I once said and want to repeat it again that such gross violations of international law by Azerbaijan should be a cause of concern not only for Armenia, but also for the entire international community, because Azerbaijan's behavior and confidence in impunity are a threat for the international legal system, for not only regional but also world security and peace.

Dear colleagues, Azerbaijan must leave the sovereign territory of Armenia and return all illegally held prisoners of war. You have a significant role in this issue, because with joint effort we can protect international legal order and reach security and peace in the world.
YEREVAN.  The Chinese side did not speak about "Zangezur corridor." The Ambassador of China to Armenia, Fan Yong, told this to reporters Friday.

On Thursday, the Azerbaijani media had reported that during a meeting with the Azerbaijani minister of economy, Chinese Ambassador to Azerbaijan Guo Min had allegedly said: "Zangezur corridor will contribute to the Belt and Road transport project."

To the question of Armenian News-NEWS.am as to whether he shares this position and agrees with that wording, Fan Yong said: "The Chinese side has not expressed such an opinion."

"In connection with the issue you raised, I can say that we have already discussed it with our Azerbaijani counterparts," the Chinese envoy to Armenia added.

Also, he expressed hope that the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan will be settled through negotiations.
Talks on a proposal by Turkey to operate and secure a key international airport in Afghanistan are ongoing, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar noted, adding that Ankara is discussing the plan with several countries.

According to him, there must be some political decisions in the United Nations and NATO, and an agreement must be reached with the Afghan government, Reuters reported.

Turkey is counting on political, financial, and logistical support from various countries, he added.

He said that the final decision has not yet been made, but negotiations with the United States continue, and the plan will be implemented after the approval of the Turkish President.

Earlier, Turkey offered to ensure the security of the Kabul international airport named after Hamid Karzai after the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

Turkey has over 500 troops in Afghanistan. Akar earlier said that Turkey has no plans to introduce additional troops.

Without a separate airport agreement, ongoing operations must be supported through the NATO Resolute Support mission. Until an agreement is reached, it is not clear whether the US and NATO will be able to declare their military mission in Afghanistan completed.
YEREVAN.  We are working to draw Chinese investors in Armenia. The Ambassador of China to Armenia, Fan Yong, told this to reporters Friday.

"Currently, we are discussing cooperation in various domains. We are working to increase the flow of tourists from China to Armenia, we hope for the activeness of Armenian businesses in the Chinese market. Chinese people like Armenian products very much," he added.

In the envoys words, many initiatives were planned between the two countries, but due to the developments in the last two years [i.e., the coronavirus pandemic and military aggression of Azerbaijan], these initiatives could not be fully implemented.

"The Prime Minister [i.e., Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan], President, and other high-ranking officials of Armenia have expressed readiness to continue cooperation with us," the Chinese said.

Fan recalled that the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Armenia and China will be marked next year, and during these years, the two countries have supported and helped each other.

"Friendly relations have been established between Armenia and China, the level of cooperation is high. The $200,000 trade at the beginning of the establishment of diplomatic relations approached $1 billion last year. For us [China], the goal of cooperation with a friendly country is to raise the living standards and promote the development of the country's population. We are ready to share our development track-record with Armenia. We know that the people of Armenia are in a difficult situation at the moment. We hope that ways will be found to get out of this situation," the Chinese ambassador concluded.
Armenia needs to understand what it can offer China within the framework of the One Belt One Road project. This is what Director of the China-Eurasia Council for Political and Strategic Studies Mher Sahakyan said during todays conference dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of the Peoples Republic of China in Yerevan.

Taking into account the fact that China has become the second superpower, Armenia also needs to understand what political and economic goals Beijing is pursuing. When the West and Russia talk about a turn in the East, Armenia also needs to think about the development of its relations with China. Armenia has expressed willingness to participate in the One Belt One Road project, but there are still no programs that can help engage investments. Amid this, hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in Georgia and Azerbaijan, $7,000,000,000 has been invested in Turkey, and several billions h have been invested in Iran. Armenia needs to understand what it can offer, and it has real potential for that, the analyst stated, adding that the country can consider the establishment of an Armenian-Chinese technology university.
Armenian News - NEWS.am presents the daily digest of Armenia-related top news as of 02.07.21:

Oliver Varhelyi, the European Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, will tour the countries of the South Caucasus from 6 to 9 July.

This will be the Commissioner's first mission to the countries of the region.

During meetings with political leaders, business and civil society representatives, European Commissioner will present an economic and investment plan for the region and its initiatives for each country.

He will also discuss key issues in bilateral relations with each of the three countries.

In Armenia, Commissioner will meet with President Armen Sarkissian, Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Acting Deputy Prime Minister Grigoryan, and Patriarch Karekin II.

YouTube has deleted the video about hate speech against Armenians that President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogans spokesperson Fahrettin Altun had posted.

As reported by BirGun, Altun delivered his speech on April 24th, the day of remembrance of the victims of the Armenian Genocide.

Altun blamed YouTube for hypocrisy.

A case of huge drug smuggling has been exposed in Armenia as a result of the work carried out by the State Revenue Committee (SRC).

A trailer truck, which had arrived in Armenia from Iran and was being driven by a Turkish citizen, was subjected to customs control.

As a result, 119 packages containing 97 kg of heroin were found in this trailer truck.

The market value of this discovery is $ 10 to 11 million.

A criminal case has been opened into this incident, in the framework of which the Turkish national was detained.

The "trials" against the Armenian captives continue Friday at the courts of Baku, the Azerbaijani capital.

According to Azerbaijani media, the trial of 14 Armenian captives has resumed at the Baku Court on Grave Crimes.

And the trial of another 13 Armenian captives is in progress at the Baku Court of Appeal.

The petition of the 'Armenia' bloc - led by ex-President Robert Kocharyan - with a request to declare the election results invalid was registered Friday at the Constitutional Court.

As of 10:40 am Friday, no other petitions related to the election results have been submitted to the Constitutional Court.

To note, the deadline for the political forces that ran in the election to apply to the Constitutional Court and challenge the election results ends today.

China's envoy to Armenia Fan Yong has refuted the Azerbaijani media reports on the Zangezur corridor.

The Azerbaijani media reported Thursday that during a meeting with the Azerbaijani minister of economy, the Chinese Ambassador to Azerbaijan had said that the Zangezur corridor would contribute to the Belt and Road transport project.

Asked by Armenian News-NEWS.am as to whether Fan Yong shares this position, he said: "The Chinese side has not expressed such an opinion."

"We have already discussed it with our Azerbaijani counterparts," the Chinese envoy to Armenia added.

As of Friday morning, 118 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Armenia, and the total number of these cases has reached 225,339 in the country.

Also, one more death from COVID-19 was registered, making the respective total 4,518 cases.

Meanwhile, Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh] has reported four new COVID-19 cases.

A total of 2,905 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed, and 26,978 COVID-19 tests have been conducted so far in Artsakh.
When Judge Armine Meliksetyan partially granted the motion for the arrest of Armen Charchyan for one month instead of 2 months, she stated two grounds  Charchyan is the director of Izmirlian Medical Center and there are still people who have yet to be interviewed and they are employees of the medical center. This is what Aram Vardevanyan, one of the attorneys of doctor Armen Charchyan (included in Armenia bloc), told reporters today.

At this moment, there is no other person who has to be interviewed since the end of the preliminary investigation implies the end of interviews. I have also transmitted to the prosecutor and the court and investigator a datum stating that Charchyan isnt the director of Izmirlian Medical Center starting from June 30. This means that both grounds exist. In any case, we came to the court with the hope that there will be a judicial act arising from the law. In that case, there wont be an alternative to release from custody, he said.

Vardevanyan also informed that Charchyan is still in the hospital and cant be discharged, even if the court abolishes arrest.
In his article published in Washington Times, Head of the Foreign Policy Department of the Staff of the President of Azerbaijan Hikmet Hajiyev sounded covert blackmail against Armenia in a tone that is characteristic of the Azerbaijanis.

The reopening of the Zangazur Corridor  a rail and road linking Azerbaijan to Armenia  will open an economic opportunity for both our countries and the wider region, Trend reported.

The isolation of Azerbaijans exclave Nakhchivan  accessible through Armenia  will end. Armenias capital Yerevan can be connected via Azerbaijan by land with Moscow and other capitals. In this regionwide transformational process we hope the Minsk Group  the mediation body established in 1992 under the co-chairmanship of France, Russia, and the United States  should not be of the past, but part of the future, Hajiyev said.

The Azerbaijani official restated the provisions of the trilateral statement concerning the opening of all links in the region in a distorted way. It seems as though a high-ranking official like Hajiyev knows the difference between communication and corridor. Nevertheless, Hajiyev is trying to be clever by saying the Zangezur corridor is opposite to the Azerbaijani links and by presenting the commitments stipulated in the statement as a wide and extravagant gesture of Baku. If we speak with Hajiyevs terminology, Azerbaijan has to give Armenia, say, the Tovuz corridor in the direction of Russia. Unquestionably, such a corridor will serve for the development of ties in the region.
The Court of Appeal left examination of the appeal against the decision on arrest of member of Armenia bloc (the bloc won seats in parliament following the snap parliamentary elections held on June 20), doctor Armen Charchyan incomplete and will resume on July 6 at 2 pm. This is what Charchyans attorneys told reporters after the court hearing.

The defense filed an appeal with the court, which held a very fruitful discussion in the format that we had proposed. We reaffirmed our position according to which there is substantiated doubt that Armen Charchyan is linked to the commission of the crime that is ascribed to him. As far as the grounds are concerned, the court of first instance recorded the ground for obstruction of investigation, and we presented our arguments. The court stated that Armen Charchyan would have an influence on witnesses, if he stayed in liberty. We say there is an audio recording in which all the remarks of Charchyan are reflected, attorney Erik Aleksanyan said.

Aleksanyan added that an agreement was reached to continue working after 6 p.m. and end case examination today.

Charchyan is charged with giving, receiving a bribe to and from voters, violating the ban on charity during elections or obstructing exercise of the free will of voters.

Charchyan doesnt accept the charge brought against him.

According to an investigator of the Special Investigation Service, if Charchyan stays in liberty, he will hide from the body implementing proceedings and will obstruct investigation into the case.

The court had declared Charchyans detention as unlawful. After he was released, he touched upon the criminal case and insisted that it is a phony case.
Several police officers from Yerevan also voted in Shurnukh and other villages of Syunik Province. This is what representative of Armenia bloc (the bloc ran in the June 20 snap parliamentary elections and won seats in parliament) Aram Vardevanyan told reporters today.

Why was it decided that a large number of police officers had to travel from Yerevan to Syunik Province and vote? This is a question that the Police of Armenia need to answer. It would be very interesting to hear what the Police have to say about this, he said.

Vardevanyan also stated that in December 2020, a statement was issued stating that there are 90,000 Armenians of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) living in Armenia. How many of the 90,000 were allowed to participate in the elections? I know many werent allowed, but I also have reports stating that some people were allowed. How was this decided? Perhaps there were certain mechanisms for specification, Vardevanyan added.
Although visions of shorts, tank tops, and flip-flops may come to mind when one thinks of fashion in South Florida, the University of Miami Libraries Deep Dives series will show otherwise. Cristina Favretto, head of special collections, is hosting a webinar that will give an inside look at fashion-related rare books and other items in the archives.

People don't necessarily associate fashion with Miami, but the city has a thriving fashion industry, explained Favretto. Miami isnt seen as a fashion capital. Its viewed as a place that absorbs mainstream fashion, but I think there's a flavor of our own that we project out into the world.

During the series, participants will learn about local style starsincluding pin-up photographer Bunny Yeager and South Beach legend Gianni Versaceand thrill at the beauty of Art Deco-era fashion illustrations.

Bunny Yeager started out as a model and she ended up going behind the camera and evolving into an influential swimsuit photographer who had a special way of making women feel comfortable. We have a large collection of her materials. She lived in Miami. And after she passed away, we acquired her collection, said Favretto.

We are also going to talk about Gianni Versace, because his work is very much a part of our Miami history, she said. Gianni was a top figure worldwide in fashion, and he could have lived anywhere. But he loved Miami because he was so inspired by the citys colorfulness, which was reflected in his vibrant designs.

The series will also comb through over-the-top hairstyles, take a look at aviation-related fashion, and examine examples of 19th-century lace making and embroidery.

Favretto is most excited to share the library's extensive collection of The Facea British music, fashion, and culture magazine. Its a really interesting magazine that ran from the 80s until the 2000s, and it shows the history of avant-garde and street fashion from those years. It's full of interesting writing, and youll see early images in one of the earliest issues of a young Boy George before he was famous, noted Favretto. The magazine was very hard to get hold of and were one of the few places in the world that has a complete run of this magazine.

The Zoom event will take place on July 8 at 1 p.m. Register here.
A few times a year, professor Ira Sheskin gets a call from a journalist reporting on Jewish people in the United States.

But in the past week, Sheskin has been overwhelmed by a number of phone calls and e-mails. Reporters from The Washington Post, The Times of Israel, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The Jerusalem Post, and other outlets have relied on his insight and expertise to describe the close-knit Jewish community of Surfside, Florida, which is reeling after the collapse of a condo building that was home to many Jews.

He is an obvious choice. As one of the nations preeminent scholars of U.S. Jewish life and migration, Sheskin is uniquely qualified to describe the South Florida Jewish community. As director of the University of Miamis Jewish Demography Project, he has been collecting data on Jews in the area for nearly four decades. And despite the tragic circumstances, he feels it is important to share his research on Miamis Jewish community, which is the third largest in the country after New York and Los Angeles.

I collected data and analyzed it and now that data is of significant interest and it is being put to a variety of uses, said Sheskin, who is a past chair of the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development in the College of Arts and Sciences. That is gratifying because part of my job at the University is community service, and I like producing research that leads to the betterment of society.

Sheskins most recent survey research indicates that the zip code containing Surfside, along with Bal Harbor and Bay Harbor Islands, is one-third Jewish. This is about four times the percentage of Jews in all of South Florida (Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties). About 120,000 Jews live in Miami-Dade, 144,000 live in Broward, and 218,000 in Palm Beach County.

Among Surfsides Jewish households, about 34 percent are Orthodox, or very observant Jews, while 24 percent practice Conservative Judaism and 18 percent are Reform Judaists. And by checking a database of phone numbers for Champlain Towers South, Sheskin predicts that at least 30 percent of the 136 units in the condo were occupied by Jews.

Everyone is just devastated about whats happened there, he said.

While the Jewish population today in the Miami Beach area is not as concentrated as it was in the 1980swhen Jews made up 70 percent of its residentsSheskin said that Surfside has a few unique qualities he has learned from research. First of all, 30 percent of its Jewish population is Hispanic, most often from Venezuela, Argentina, and Colombia. Second, the phenomenon of people telling family and friends about Surfside in their home countries has attracted a steady stream of Hispanic Jews to the area. And most of Surfside is walking distance from one of the most successful orthodox synagogues in the country, The Shul of Bal Harbor. The community is also home to kosher markets and restaurants.

Surfside has built up a reputation in the Conservative and Orthodox Jewish community, he said, adding that Surfside is also attractive to Orthodox Jews because it has an eruv, or barrier, that allows them to carry things between their homes and their synagogue on the Sabbathwhen they are not supposed to perform any form of labor.

Although he was raised Jewish in Long Island, New York, Sheskin didnt initially plan on studying the population. He went to college and graduate school to study geography and started his career at the University in 1977, teaching classes in statistics, research methods, and survey research (which he still does today), while also conducting transportation studies to examine the need for roads and public transportation.

But in 1982, the Greater Miami Jewish Federation wanted a Jewish demographic study completed, and Sheskin won the bid.

While I am not all that religious, I am very devoted to my Jewish identity and to Jewish culture. So, here was an opportunity for me to combine my personal interest in seeing a strong Jewish community in the U.S. as well as my interest in survey research and geography, he said.

Since then, he has completed a similar survey for the Greater Miami Jewish Federation each decade and centered much of his research on the migration patterns, characteristics, and voting preferences of U.S. Jews. Although they make up just 2.4 percent of the national population, as Sheskin said, Jewish people have a much larger impact than their numbers indicate.

Also the co-editor of the American Jewish Year Book, Sheskin was involved in national studies by the Jewish Federations of North America, as well as the 2013 and 2020 Pew Research Centers studies of American Jewry. Therefore, Sheskin can easily rattle off statistics and facts about Jews contributions to society.

Jews are really only 0.2 percent of the worlds population, yet they have won at least 20 percent of Nobel Prizes, he said, noting that Jewish principles stress education, critical thinking, and charity, which may lead to these accomplishments.

His enthusiasm for the field is still palpable. Sheskin is regularly contacted by Jewish groups from across the countryfederations, community centers, day schools, camps, genetic testing organizations, and even cemeteriesto survey their local Jewish populations. These reports help the entities decide where to devote resources, build new facilities, or even to locate bone marrow matches, Sheskin said.

I love doing this type of research because you can find and create new information, he said. And in doing so, I find out things that no one knew existed.
Norway's Warholm breaks 400m hurdles world record

Norway's Karsten Warholm celebrates in front of the scoreboard after running 46.70 seconds to set a new men's 400m hurdles world record at the Diamond League meeting in Oslo. Photo: AP

Two-time world champion Karsten Warholm broke a 29-year-old world record in the 400-metres hurdles Thursday in the Diamond League meet.



The 25-year-old Norwegian finished in 46.70 seconds to break the mark of 46.78 set by American Kevin Young in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics final.



This was just the perfect moment, Warholm said in an interview posted by World Athletics. Everybodys talking about this world record thats been standing for many, many years - its older than me, actually,



Warholm said he was excited to have broken the record in front of home fans, including family members, at Bislett Stadium.



I knew I had it in me, but of course its very special to be able to do it, he said. Im just really happy and really proud. Its a nice moment.



Warholms previous best was 46.87 in Stockholm last August. (AFP)
Lukashenko claims 'terrorist sleeper cells' exposed

Alexander Lukashenko sparked international outrage by dispatching a fighter jet in May to intercept a Ryanair plane flying from Greece to Lithuania. Photo: AP

Belarus strongman Lukashenko on Friday claimed authorities had exposed "terrorist sleeper cells" that he alleged were linked to Germany, the United States, Ukraine and other countries.



The latest volley of eyebrow-raising claims came after the West targeted key sectors of the struggling Belarusian economy with sanctions to punish the Lukashenko regime for a crackdown on dissenters and intercepting a Ryanair plane in May.



"Today terrorist 'sleeper' cells have been exposed, so-called self-defence units," Lukashenko announced at a ceremony marking 30 years of independence in post-Soviet Belarus.



"The goal of these cells is forcible regime change on day X. They themselves so far do not know when this day X comes: it is necessary to lead our people to it," Lukashenko said in remarks released by his office.



He alleged that Germany, the US, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania were involved in their work.



"Today we completed a large-scale anti-terror operation," Lukashenko said, adding that Belarusian authorities would confront German Chancellor Angela Merkel.



Lukashenko also claimed the "sleeper" cells tried to target a Russian naval communication centre near the Belarusian town of Vileyka located around 100 kilometres northwest of the capital Minsk and he discussed the incident with President Vladimir Putin.



"We've discussed this problem in the most serious manner," the Belarus leader said.



"You understand the result of this discussion. All participants of the terror act - including those who organised and carried it out - were found and arrested within two days."



Franak Viacorka, a senior advisor to Belarus opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, suggested that Lukashenko's latest outburst did not bode well for foreigners and he might be "looking for a pretext to crackdown on diplomats".



"Insane," he tweeted.



The 66-year-old leader also said he ordered officials to seal the country's border with pro-Western Ukraine to prevent "a huge amount of arms" coming into Belarus.



He also alleged that unidentified assailants sought to kill a state television personality, Grigory Azarenok, charging that "last night" they wanted to kidnap him and "cut off his tongue."



Since an election last August, Belarus has been in the grip of a political crisis that erupted after Lukashenko secured a sixth term as president.



The opposition says the election was rigged but authorities imposed an intense crackdown in which several people died and thousands were arrested.



Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, sparked international outrage by dispatching a fighter jet in May to intercept a Ryanair plane flying from Greece to Lithuania.



When the plane was forced to land in Minsk, Belarus arrested dissident journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend on board.



In June, the West imposed sanctions on key sectors of the Belarus economy, ratcheting up pressure on the regime.



In response to the latest round of Western sanctions, Minsk said it was suspending its participation in the Eastern Partnership, an initiative to boost ties between the EU and its ex-Soviet neighbours.



Since the outbreak of the crisis, Lukashenko and state TV have made a number of fanciful statements directed at the Belarusian opposition and even ally Russia.



Lukashenko made headlines when he claimed last year that his security forces had intercepted German calls showing that Putin foe Alexei Navalny's poisoning with a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent had been faked.



Belarusian television broadcast the "intercept" in which a Mike in Warsaw and Nick in Berlin discuss Navalny's materials and call Lukashenko a "tough nut to crack".



Lukashenko also raised eyebrows at the peak of demonstrations last year when he brandished an assault rifle and had his teenage son Nikolai appear next to him in a bulletproof vest while also wielding a weapon.



He accused modern Germany of Nazism on the 80th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the USSR last month. (AFP)
A woman reads a notice sign about "overwhelming response" for the Sinovac vaccine at a clinic, during the coronavirus disease outbreak in Singapore on 18 June, 2021. (PHOTO: Reuters)

SINGAPORE  Seven more clinics have been selected to provide the China-made Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine, said the Ministry of Health (MOH) on Friday (2 July) night.

This means a total of 31 private healthcare institutions in Singapore are allowed to offer the vaccine, named CoronaVac, under the special access route.

However, the MOH added that the seven additional clinics may not take in new appointments from those opting to take the Sinovac vaccine, but rather assist in clearing the appointment lists from the 24 existing clinics.

Since 18 June, the 24 clinics have been administering the vaccine from the governments existing stock to Singaporeans, permanent residents, and long-term pass holders who wish to do so.

"Some of the group clinics in the current list of providers are now ready to ramp up their services to help improve the wait times for individuals on the clinics appointment lists," the MOH said. "The MOH has thus activated another seven clinics to provide the Sinovac vaccine."

To avoid queues, those interested to get the vaccine are urged to call the clinic or visit their website to book an appointment prior to heading down to the clinic for vaccination.

"Those who walk into the clinics without prior appointment will be turned away. Individuals are also reminded not to crowd outside the clinics and that safe distancing measures should be adhered to at all times," said the MOH.

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The ministry also stressed that the Sinovac vaccine remains unregistered in Singapore as it has not undergone a full evaluation for its safety and efficacy.

This means that CoronaVac will not be covered under the Vaccine Injury Financial Assistance Programme (VIFAP) meant for vaccines under the national vaccination programme. Only those developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are used in Singapore's national vaccination drive.

"Individuals who wish to receive the Sinovac vaccine should discuss its risks and benefits with their doctors at these selected private healthcare institutions, and jointly make an informed decision," said the MOH.

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The ministry on Wednesday said that recipients of the Sinovac vaccine will also still have to undergo pre-event testing, unlike those who have already been fully inoculated by either Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

This is because there is insufficient international data thus far on the effectiveness of the Sinovac vaccine against the Delta variant, it added.

"As the Delta variant becomes more dominant around the world and more data becomes available, we will make an objective assessment and review whether individuals who have received SAR (special access route) vaccines can also be exempted from PET (pre-event testing)," said the MOH.

Health Minister Ong Ye Kung late last month announced that Singapore had signed an advance purchase agreement for the Novavax vaccine, which works differently from the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Novavax, and potentially other such non-mRNA vaccines, is expected to arrive before the end of the year, as part of the national vaccination programme, subject to supply and regulatory approval.

More details will be provided at a later date. "If approved under our national programme, those inoculated with these vaccines will similarly be exempted from PET," said the MOH.

CoronaVac is one of two Chinese-made vaccines, alongside the one by Sinopharm, that have been authorised by the World Health Organization (WHO) for emergency use. Those made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson have also been given the green light by the WHO.

All vaccines on the list should be recognised by countries as they open up their borders to inoculated travellers, said the organisation on Thursday.

Stay in the know on-the-go: Join Yahoo Singapore's Telegram channel at http://t.me/YahooSingapore

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A large shark was found stranded on a popular Cape Cod beach  just days before the busy July Fourth weekend.

The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy reported the find Thursday in a Facebook post, noting the shark mysteriously appeared at First Encounter Beach in Eastham, Massachusetts. Thats near Cape Cod National Seashore Salt Pond.

Unfortunately, the 8 (foot) porbeagle shark was not alive when responders arrived, the conservancy wrote.

The AWSC team moved the shark above the high water mark so that scientists from the NOAA Fisheries Service Apex Predator Program can retrieve it to conduct a necropsy.

Whats clawing up these great white sharks? Probably an unwilling entree, experts say

Conservancy officials did not speculate on a cause of death, and a photo with the post did not show prominent wounds.

Shark researcher James Sulikowski told McClatchy News a porbeagle shark that big would likely be more than 15 years old. Its very odd, he said of the discovery.

Porbeagles are a moderately large shark, that can grow to 11.5 feet and 300 pounds, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The species is prone to linger on the continental shelf, near the coastline, the service reports.

Because of their size, porbeagle sharks do not have any known natural predators, OCEANA.org says.

Mako shark just freed off Outer Banks returns for bite of research boat, video shows

Cape Cod is expecting huge crowds this Fourth of July weekend, especially now that COVID protocols have been relaxed.

There have been multiple reports of dead sharks washing up on Cape Cod beaches in recent years. In 2019, a 6-foot porbeagle was found a half mile north of Marconi Beach on Cape Cod. And in 2018, a 9-foot great white shark appeared along the Pamet River in the Truro area, the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy reported.

An examination of that sharks stomach contents revealed 3 lead weights inside, though that was not cited as a cause of death.

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The shark research agency OCEARCH is currently tracking three great white sharks in waters south of Cape Cod, including one that is 11 feet long and weighs nearly 900 pounds.

Huge chunk bitten out of dolphins back is likely from shark attack along SC coast
LUSAKA, Zambia (AP)  African leaders have gathered with ordinary Zambians to attend a memorial service Friday for Kenneth Kaunda, the nation's founding president and champion of African nationalism.

The presidents of Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe flew into Lusaka, the capital, to honor Kaunda, who died last month at 97.

Kaunda is remembered for leading Zambia to independence from British colonial rule in 1964 and backing nationalist movements that fought to bring majority rule to the southern African states of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Zambian President Edgar Lungu presided over the service at the National Heroes' Stadium where Kaunda's casket, draped in Zambia's flag, was brought in by a military guard.

As Zambia is battling a surge of COVID-19, those attending wore masks and kept a distance apart, preventing the stadium from filling to its capacity of 60,000.

Zambia, with a population of 18 million, has reported a cumulative total of 157,832 cases of COVID-19, including 2,271 deaths. Zambia's 7-day rolling average of daily deaths has doubled over the past two weeks from 0.15 deaths per 100,000 people on June 17 to 0.32 deaths per 100,000 people on July 1.

Since Kaunda's death on June 17 of pneumonia, Zambias military has flown his body to the country's 10 provinces so that people from all areas of the country could pay their respects.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Friday signed the official condolence book for Kaunda.

Kaunda is to be buried on July 7.
Alabama state Senator Vivian Davis Figures whose home was shot 23 times in what police believe to be a targeted attack (screengrab)

Police in Mobile, Alabama, are searching for someone who shot up the house of Alabama state Senator Vivian Davis Figures.

Law enforcement, speaking with Fox10 News, said that the lawmaker's house was shot at 23 times. There were no injuries, as no one was home at the time of the incident.

Ms Figures' neighbors reported hearing at least five or six shots around 5am on Wednesday morning.

At five oclock that morning, I heard shots ring out and I laid there for a few seconds but I didnt know whether if I jumped up quick, that a bullet or something may come through the window. I looked out of all the windows to see if I could see anybody walking around or driving but I didnt see nothing. Just heard the shots, one of Figures neighbours told Fox10 News.

The neighbour said Ms Figures' is a "good neighbour" and said the whole thing was "terrifying."

Mobile police spokesman Lt. Christopher Levy said the incident did not appear to be "random" but said it was too early in the investigation to determine if the shooter was motivated by politics.

Ms Figures is a Democrat.

Earlier this year, she introduced legislation aimed at separating the days celebrating Martin Luther King Jr Day and Confederate general Robert E Lee.

Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert E. Lee were two men with totally different agendas, beliefs and goals, Ms Figures told AL.com in an email To separate them as individual holidays is the right thing to do.

Her bill would move Robert E Lee's celebration day to the same day as Columbus Day to avoid having to create a new state holiday.

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Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey raises $1.2 million for reelection
LOS ANGELES (AP)  Amber Heard says she has become a mom and did it on my own terms, as a single parent.

In an Instagram post, the actor said she welcomed daughter Oonagh Paige Heard on April 8. A photo of Heard with the baby nestled against her accompanied Thursday's announcement.

I now appreciate how radical it is for us as women to think about one of the most fundamental parts of our destinies in this way, Heard said in the post. I hope we arrive at a point in which its normalized to not want a ring in order to have a crib.

She wrote that a part of me wants to uphold that my private life is none of anyones business, but added the nature of her job compels me to take control of this by revealing the birth.

Shes the beginning of the rest of my life, Heard said.

The actor has faced a tumultuous period of her life, with her 2015 to 2017 marriage to Johnny Depp involving a spate of legal actions.

Last year, Depp lost a libel case against a British newspaper that accused him of domestic violence, with a judge ruling the allegations were substantially correct. In March, a British court refused Depp permission to appeal the ruling that he assaulted Heard, saying his attempt to overturn the decision had no real prospect of success.

Depp also is suing Heard for $50 million in Virginia over a Washington Post op-ed essay that she wrote about domestic violence. The trial in that case was recently delayed until April 2022.
By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Justice Amy Coney Barrett blazed her own path during her rookie term on the U.S. Supreme Court, helping a conservative majority prevail in major cases while at times defying expectations after critics last year tried to paint her as a right-wing zealot.

Her record suggests she has joined the center of a court with a 6-3 conservative majority rather than its right flank, often associated with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. As such, she seemed to be on the same ideological wavelength as two other fellow conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Republican former President Donald Trump named Barrett to replace liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September. After tense confirmation hearings, Barrett was confirmed by the Senate in October, with no Democrats supporting her. Democrats even boycotted the Judiciary Committee's vote on sending her nomination to the full Senate.

"During her confirmation hearings, Justice Barrett said that she would be her own justice," said Allyson Ho, a Dallas-based attorney who has argued cases before the Supreme Court.

"And so far," Ho added, "that's exactly what she's done."

Barrett experienced a unique first term as the justices heard oral arguments by teleconference with the courthouse closed to the public amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Barrett was a sharp but polite questioner during those arguments.

She solidified the court's rightward tilt, as shown in major cases decided along ideological lines.

Those included two 6-3 rulings on Thursday in which the conservative majority in an Arizona case gave states https://www.reuters.com/world/us/voting-rights-breyers-future-spotlight-us-supreme-court-2021-07-01 more leeway to enact voting restrictions while striking down https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-backs-conservatives-against-california-donor-disclosure-2021-07-01 a California charity donor disclosure requirement in a move that could erode campaign finance disclosure laws.

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Barrett was part of another 6-3 ruling https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-curbs-union-power-farm-access-dispute-2021-06-23 along ideological lines on June 23 limiting the ability of union organizers to enter agricultural businesses in California, another setback for organized labor.

NEXT TERM LOOMS

Major cases await Barrett in the court's next term beginning in October. Her vote could be crucial in cases that could curb abortion rights and expand the right to carry a gun outside the home.

Based on her first term, some court observers have suggested that it now has something of a 3-3-3 split between liberals, conservatives willing to compromise and the more hardline conservatives. Voting statistics appear to bear that out. Barrett, Kavanaugh and Roberts were the three justices most often in the majority in the rulings during the term, according to statistics maintained by SCOTUSblog https://www.scotusblog.com/statistics.

Pratik Shah, a Washington lawyer who also has argued cases before the justices, said there is evidence that Barrett and Kavanaugh have sought compromises but questioned whether that would hold true in the long term.

"To me, the jury is still very much out on Justice Barrett," Shah added, noting that the conservative majority is likely to remain for years and has no need to act quickly.

During her confirmation fight, some critics on the left cited Barrett's devout Catholic beliefs and conservative scholarly writings to forecast that she would readily overturn court precedent and endanger recognized personal rights such as abortion. Instead, Barrett in some key cases chose a different path than her most conservative colleagues.

On June 17, the justices unanimously ruled against Philadelphia for barring a Catholic agency from participating in the city's foster care program because it refused to consider same-sex couples as foster parents. The ruling could open the door to discrimination against LGBT people by religiously based social service agencies.

But six justices including Barrett rejected a call to go further and overturn a 1990 Supreme Court precedent, known as Employment Division v. Smith, that upholds laws that are neutral and generally applicable even if they happen to place a burden on religion. Barrett, in a separate opinion, wrote that she sees "no reason to decide in this case whether Smith should be overruled, much less what should replace it."

Mark Rienzi, a lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty https://www.becketlaw.org legal group, said Barrett's writings on religious issues have shown "she is a careful thinker who takes the job seriously."

In one of several decisions in favor of religious challenges to pandemic-related restrictions, Barrett wrote a separate opinion in February rejecting a California church's bid to lift a state prohibition on singing and chanting during services. The church, Barrett wrote, did not demonstrate that it was entitled to such relief. Gorsuch, Thomas and Alito disagreed with her on that point.

Barrett was in the majority in a 7-2 ruling https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-supreme-court-rejects-republican-challenge-obamacare-law-2021-06-17 on June 17 against a Republican-led bid to strike down the Obamacare healthcare law. During her Senate confirmation hearings, some Democrats warned that she would vote to strike down the law if confirmed.

She wrote four rulings in cases argued during the term and three dissents. In another example of the court ruling not along ideological lines, Barrett authored a 6-3 decision https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-supreme-court-limits-reach-federal-computer-fraud-law-2021-06-03 on June 3 limiting the scope of a computer-fraud law, joined by the court's three liberals as well as Trump's two other appointees, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
By Anthony Boadle

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro is in a tight spot, caught between the rock of impeachment threats and the hard place of dwindling public support, as corruption scandals over COVID-19 vaccine deals encircle his administration.

On the one hand, if he denounces allies in Congress linked to alleged attempts to profit on vaccine orders, Bolsonaro risks losing the backing of the fickle cluster of center parties with which he has allied in order to ensure bids to impeach him go nowhere.

But, if he chooses to protect the scandal-hit politicians and their parties, Bolsonaro could be stained by graft charges ahead of next year's election. He is already down in the polls.

The Covaxin scandal, in which allies are accused of putting undue pressure on health ministry officials to hasten a purchase for the Indian vaccine Covaxin, has become a nightmare for Bolsonaro in part because it allegedly involves the government's chief whip in the lower house of Congress: Ricardo Barros.

Bolsonaro and Barros have denied all wrongdoing.

The accusations have given Bolsonaro's opponents ample ammunition to attack him, with the president's dependence on centrist parties, many of whose leaders face graft investigations, belying his campaign vow to clean up Brazilian politics that got him elected in 2018.

"Bolsonaro faces a continuous process of weakening. It's hard to say it will lead to an impeachment, but it does hurt his chances of re-election," said Claudio Couto, political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation think tank in Sao Paulo.

More than half a million Brazilians have died from COVID-19, yet Brazil lags many other countries in vaccinations. Only 11.8% of its population are fully vaccinated. This has made allegations of graft surrounding vaccine orders particularly damaging for the president.

A Senate inquiry into the government's handling of the pandemic has dug up alleged corruption involving health ministry insiders and pro-Bolsonaro lawmakers accused of seeking to overpay the Indian maker of Covaxin, Bharat Biotech.

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It is unlikely that the probe will bring down Bolsonaro, but it has produced daily headlines that increase public perceptions of incompetence and suspicions of corruption in his government.

On Tuesday, at the request of three senators on the inquiry commission, a Supreme Court justice asked Brazil's top prosecutor to investigate the president for dereliction of duty.

On Wednesday, Bolsonaro fired a health ministry official who was a political protege of his chief whip Barros after he reportedly took a bribe in another vaccine deal.

Hours later, lawmakers from across the political spectrum, social groups and lawyers filed a collective impeachment request, combining dozens of previous filings that the speaker of the house, a Bolsonaro ally, has declined to act upon.

Some politicians have begun to quit the coalition known as the Centrao, or big Center, that is shielding Bolsonaro.

Gilberto Kassab, a former Sao Paulo mayor and leader of the center-right Social Democratic Party, did so last month, angling to field an independent presidential candidate next year.

A survey published last week by pollster IPEC showed that disapproval of Bolsonaro's government has risen to 49%, more than double the approval rate of 24%. IPEC confirmed other polls showing that former leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would defeat Bolsonaro handily if the election was held now.

"With falling popularity and less budget resources available, the Centrao could abandon Bolsonaro, because it has done so with past presidents," said Carlos Melo, politics professor at the Insper business school in Sao Paulo.

Previous cases were Fernando Collor de Mello, who resigned facing impeachment in 1992, and Dilma Rousseff of Lula's Workers Party, who was impeached in 2016.

"Their alliance with Bolsonaro is based on self-interest. As long a he has something to give them, government positions or funds, they will continue with him," Melo said. "But as soon as he appears to be in trouble, they will abandon ship."

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Stephen Eisenhammer and Alistair Bell)
Women's Health

It's no secret that the royals love tea, but Prince Charles likes his done in a very particular way. Dumfries Housess hospitality manager Evan Samson told the Sunday Times that Charles likes his made with loose tea leaves in a teapot, with the ratio being one teaspoon of leaves per each cup of tea, plus one for the pot, according to Express. For green tea, the water should be heated to 70C degrees Celsius and it should be 100 degrees Celsius for Earl Grey.
By Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) - Nvidia Corp's proposed $40 billion acquisition of Arm Ltd would better support the creation of UK technology jobs than the SoftBank Group Corp unit becoming a standalone public company once again, Arm's chief executive said on Friday.

"We contemplated an IPO but determined that the pressure to deliver short-term revenue growth and profitability would suffocate our ability to invest, expand, move fast and innovate," Arm CEO Simon Segars wrote in a blog post https://www.arm.com/blogs/blueprint/arm-nvidia.

"Combining with Nvidia will give us the scale, resources and agility needed to maximize the opportunities ahead," Segars wrote.

Last week, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told The Telegraph newspaper https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/06/13/qualcomm-ready-invest-arm-40bn-nvidia-sales-collapses and other media outlets that Qualcomm was open to investing in an initial public offering by Arm if the Nvidia deal falls apart. Amon has told media outlets that joint ownership of Arm by industry peers would keep the firm independent.

Qualcomm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia last year announced its plan to acquire Cambridge, England-based Arm, long a neutral supplier of chip design technology, from the Japanese conglomerate, which does not own any other chip companies.

Critics like Qualcomm Inc have argued that allowing Arm to be owned by one chip company could cause it to focus on technologies that benefit its owner rather than the broader industry.

The deal is under regulatory scrutiny in the United States, United Kingdom and European Union.

SoftBank bought Arm for $32 billion in 2016, betting on a surge in what are called internet-of-things (IoT) chips. Arm invested heavily in hiring to purse the technology. But the IoT market failed to produce a revenue boom for Arm, and the company later raised prices https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-group-arm-exclusive/exclusive-arm-raises-prices-on-chip-technology-for-some-customers-sources-say-idUSKCN24G1RM for some of its technologies, angering some customers.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Richard Chang)
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
The Army upgraded heroism awards Thursday for 60 operators who took part in Operation Gothic Serpent, better known as "Black Hawk Down," in the 1990s in Mogadishu, Somalia.

Fifty-eight awards were upgraded to Silver Stars, the third-highest military combat medal, and two were enhanced to Distinguished Flying Crosses after an October 2020 directive from former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, who commanded the Senior Army Decorations Board to reconsider the distinctions, the branch announced.

The Silver Star is awarded for a courageous act under fire, while the Distinguished Flying Cross is given to service members who display "extraordinary achievement" in an aerial operation.

The medals will be presented later in 2021.

BLACK HAWK DOWN VETERANS BLAST ILHAN OMAR FOR 'SMEARING' US TROOPS WHO DIED 'TO HELP HER PEOPLE'

In 1993, U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force, a special operations unit, attempted to snatch two lieutenants under the command of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who killed United Nations peacekeepers in the region during a civil war and humanitarian crisis. The mission, which was supposed to end swiftly, was drawn out after militants shot down two Black Hawk helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades.

Somalis look at the wreckage of a US helicopter, in a Mogadishu street, 04 October 1993, after it was shot down. Twelve soldiers were killed, 76 wounded and six others reported missing, during a battle with followers of warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, 03 October 1993. (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/GettyImages) AFP/AFP via Getty Images

For 18 hours, about 90 soldiers engaged in gunfire with a wave of insurgents as teams tried to extract wounded pilots from the aircraft. By the shootout's end, 18 U.S. service members had died, 73 were wounded, and hundreds of Somalians were killed.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Delta operators Sgt. 1st Class Randall Shughart and Master Sgt. Gary Gordon were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for their efforts to protect downed pilot Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant. Images of dead soldiers circulated throughout the world, and a year later, the United States withdrew.

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The battle was memorialized in the film Black Hawk Down, released in 2001.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Army, Somalia, Foreign Policy, National Security, Medal of Honor

Original Author: Jake Dima

Original Location: Army upgrades heroism awards for special forces soldiers in 'Black Hawk Down' battle
Attorney General Garland says Georgia's new election laws purposefully deny "the rights of Black Georgians to vote."

Attorney General Merrick Garland Thursday ordered a moratorium on federal executions to allow for a Justice Department review of death penalty policy.

The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely, Garland said in a memorandum. That obligation has special force in capital cases.

Garland's action comes after the Justice Department in 2019 ordered a revival of federal executions by lethal injection, using a powerful one-drug protocol.

The change paved the way for 13 executions between July 2020 and January 2021.

"In the last two years, the department made a series of changes to capital case policies and procedures and carried out the first federal executions in nearly two decades between July 2020 and January 2021," according to the department. "That included adopting a new protocol for administering lethal injections at the federal Bureau of Prisons, using the drug pentobarbital."

Garland has directed Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco to lead the review.

During his confirmation hearing, Garland said continuing exonerations of the wrongly convicted have given him pause, and he cited President Joe Bidens strong opposition to capital punishment.

A most terrible thing happens when someone is executed for a crime that they did not commit, Garland said.

At that time, Garland said he harbored great concern about the application of the death penalty by the federal government, which dramatically resumed executions during the Trump administration.

Read Merrick Garland's memo: Moratorium on Federal Executions Pending Review of Policies and Procedures

Previously: Merrick Garland says he has 'great' concern about federal use of the death penalty, which surged under Trump

Federal executions resumed in 2019

Former Attorney General William Barr resumed federal executions in 2019 after a 17-year hiatus. Barr ordered the government to adopt a new method using the single drug, pentobarbital.

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The 13 people executed during the Trump administration outnumbered any presidency since Franklin D. Roosevelt's. Before last year, the federal government had executed only three people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1988.

The execution spree was criticized by death penalty experts and advocates who say it highlights longstanding inequalities in a criminal justice system that continues to disproportionately treat Black prisoners as the worst of the worst criminals.

"Serious concerns have been raised about the continued use of the death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases," Garland wrote in the Thursday memorandum.

More: Dustin Higgs becomes 13th inmate put to death by Trump administration

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Federal executions: AG Merrick Garland orders halt, policy review
Afghan soldiers guarded Bagram on Friday

The last US and Nato forces have left Afghanistan's Bagram airbase, the centre of the war against militants for some 20 years, US officials say.

The pull-out could signal that the complete withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan is imminent.

President Joe Biden has said US forces will be gone by 11 September.

But the withdrawal from the sprawling base, north of Kabul, comes as the main jihadist group, the Taliban, advances in many parts of Afghanistan.

The 11 September deadline is the anniversary of the attacks on America in 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

The attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda, an international jihadist group then based in Afghanistan with the support of the Taliban, who had been in control of the country since the 1990s. A US-led coalition invaded Afghanistan later that year to defeat both groups.

America now wants to end its longest war with its huge cost in human lives and vast expense, and is leaving security to the Afghan government.

Some 2,500-3,500 US troops were thought to be still in Afghanistan until recently and when they depart, fewer than 1,000 American soldiers will remain. As of May there were about 7,000 other coalition troops in Afghanistan but it is believed that most have now left, with Germany and Italy declaring their missions over on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a resurgent Taliban, buoyed by the expectation of the foreign withdrawal, has overrun dozens of districts, amid fears that a new civil war could erupt after the departure of foreign forces.

A top target for the Taliban

Analysis box by Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent

Bagram is a bellwether of what's to come. This symbol of American military might was once a stronghold of Soviet forces. Now Afghan security forces will soon confront the challenge of securing this sprawling city within a city.

Bagram is vital - in symbolic and strategic ways. Taliban fighters, advancing in districts across the country, have this prize in their sights. Even last October, residents of the town which has swelled all around it told us the Taliban were already in their midst.

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On a recent visit to the base, as the US packed up, we heard how Afghan security forces saw it as a mixed blessing. There's a wealth of military assets within its walls; but that treasure is a top target for Taliban, not to mention corrupt commanders and others eying this fortune.

For the countless Afghans whose lives and livelihoods have long banked on this base - and who now feel abandoned - Bagram's new chapter is deeply worrying.

At the White House on Friday, Mr Biden defended the withdrawal as "a rational drawdown with our allies, so there is nothing unusual about it".

But as reporters pressed him, he told them: "I'm not going to answer any more questions about Afghanistan."

Glancing down at his lectern, he said he wanted to celebrate the 4 July holiday weekend, adding that "all across America people are going to ball games and doing good things", and he would instead answer the "negative questions" of media next week.

Asked by another journalist about Afghanistan, he said: "I want to talk about happy things, man."

His spokeswoman Jen Psaki said at a daily press briefing: "We expect it [the withdrawal] to be completed by the end of August."

Why is Bagram so important?

The airfield lies around 40km (25 miles) north of Kabul and is named after a nearby village.

It was built up by Moscow when the former Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s.

US-led coalition forces moved in during December 2001, and it was developed into a huge base capable of holding up to 10,000 troops.

New York City firefighters and police were flown in to bury a piece of rubble from the World Trade Center, destroyed in the 9/11 attacks, on the territory of the base.

A piece of World Trade Center rubble was buried in the frozen ground of the base in December 2001

It is served by two runways, the most recent of which is 3.6km long, where large cargo and bomber aircraft can land.

It has 110 parking spots for aircraft, which are protected by blast walls, and had a 50-bed hospital with a trauma bay, three operating theatres and a modern dental clinic, the Associated Press reports.

Its hangars and buildings included the main prison facility for people detained by US forces at the height of the conflict, which became known as Afghanistan's Guantanamo - after the infamous US military prison in Cuba.

Bagram was one of the sites identified in a US Senate report on the CIA's interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects, including the use of torture, carried out in detention facilities.

What happens next?

The top US commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Scott Miller, met President Ashraf Ghani to discuss "continued US assistance and co-operation", the president's office said in a tweet on Friday.

About 650 US troops are expected to remain in the country, the Associated Press reports, to provide protection for diplomats and help guard Kabul's international airport, a vital transport hub for the landlocked country.

They are guarding the airport alongside troops from America's Nato ally Turkey, while a new agreement for its security is negotiated with the Afghan government.

BBC map

The airport's US protection includes a counter-rocket, artillery, mortar system and the troops to operate it, as well as helicopter support.

Other American troops will guard the US Embassy in Kabul.

Military analysts say the ability of the Afghan government to maintain control over Bagram will be vital to its efforts to defend Kabul and push back the Taliban.

"Henceforth the Afghan army forces will protect it and use it to combat terrorism," Afghan defence ministry spokesman Fawad Aman tweeted on Friday.

The Taliban stopped attacks on coalition forces after signing an agreement with the US in February of last year, when they also promised to end co-operation with international jihadist groups.

But the militants have continued fighting government forces. Every morning brings fresh reports of overnight fighting, the BBC's South Asia editor, Jill McGivering, says. Battles between the Taliban and government forces in Herat, Badakhshan, Baghlan and Paktia are all making news.

Some reports suggest June saw some of the worst violence since the arrival of the coalition, with hundreds of lives lost. And hard-won development is under threat too with many schools, government buildings and power pylons now damaged or destroyed.

These wounded Afghan soldiers were rescued by helicopter north of Kandahar last month

A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, welcomed the US withdrawal from Bagram, telling AFP news agency it would "pave the way for Afghans to decide about their future between themselves".

The war is thought to have taken the lives of more than 47,000 Afghan civilians and nearly 70,000 Afghan troops, as well as the lives of 2,442 US soldiers and more than 3,800 US private security contractors, and 1,144 soldiers from other coalition countries.

The Costs of War project at Brown University, which analyses America's wars this century, estimates that the war has cost America a total of $2.26tn (1.64tn).

Click here to see the BBC interactive
By Maha El Dahan and Laila Bassam

BEIRUT (Reuters) -The judge in charge of the investigation into the Beirut port blast will seek to question top politicians and security officials, Lebanon's national news agency said on Friday, almost a year after the explosion that devastated the capital.

The blast in August, blamed on a huge quantity of chemicals left for years in poor storage conditions, deepened a political and economic crisis in the heavily indebted country.

Ordinary Lebanese have grown increasingly angry that no senior officials have been held to account for the explosion that killed hundreds of people, injured thousands and ruined whole neighbourhoods in the centre of Beirut.

Judge Tarek Bitar, who became the lead investigator into the blast after his predecessor was removed in February, will call in caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab and others, the agency said, although it said no dates had yet been set.

He has also written to parliament asking to lift immunity from former Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil, former Public Works Minister Ghazi Zeaiter and former Interior Minister Nohad Machnouk as a first step towards charging them.

Zeaiter, a parliamentary deputy from speaker Nabih Berri's bloc, and Khalil issued a statement later on Friday saying they would cooperate with the investigator to help determine those responsible for the blast, even before permission was issued. Machnouk declined to comment when contactd by Reuters.

The caretaker prime minister and others listed as targets for questioning by the judge could not immediately be reached for comment.

Diab and the same ex-officials were charged last year by judge Fadi Sawan, who previously led the probe, but they refused to be questioned as suspects, accusing him of overstepping his powers.

Judge Bitar also asked for permission from caretaker Interior Minister Mohamed Fahmy to question Lebanon's security chief Abbas Ibrahim, the agency said.

Fahmy told Reuters he had not been notified yet about the process but would take all legal steps required once he was.

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Bitar's list included another former public works minister, Youssef Finianos, and Tony Saliba, the head of state security.

Sawan was removed from the investigation in February by the court of cassation after a request by Khalil and Zeaiter, a major setback for the families of victims seeking justice.

Sawan accused the three ex-ministers and caretaker prime minister of negligence. The court of cassation cited "legitimate suspicion" over Sawan's neutrality, partly because his house was damaged in the blast.

(Reporting By Maha El Dahan and Laila Bassam; Editing by Edmund Blair and Cynthia Osterman)
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Belarus' leader Alexander Lukashenko on Friday ordered the closure of the border with Ukraine, seeking to block what he called an inflow of weapons to coup-plotters detected by his security services, BelTA state news agency reported.

The move appears to deepen a standoff between Belarus and outside powers angered by his government's forcing down of a Ryanair flight in May and arrest of a government critic who was on the aircraft.

Western countries imposed sanctions on Belarus to punish it for the action, and the European Union and Ukraine have also banned Belarus-registered flights from entering their airspace.

Lukashenko, who has repeatedly accused Western ill-wishers of trying to oust him from power, said he had ordered a purge across the country, and rebel groups that were planning to carry out a coup had been uncovered in Belarus.

"They have crossed the line. We cannot forgive them," he said.

Speaking at a gathering marking the country's Independence Day, the veteran leader said Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and the United States were behind the alleged rebel activity, BelTA reported.

"A huge amount of weapons is coming from Ukraine to Belarus. That's why I ordered border-security forces to fully close the border with Ukraine," Lukashenko said.

Ukraine's foreign ministry spokesperson, Oleh Nikolaenko, said Ukraine had neither interfered in Belarus' domestic affairs nor was it planning to do so in the future.

"The Ukrainian side has not received an official notification from Belarus on the border closure. It would be primarily the Belarus people to suffer from such a step," Nikolaenko said.

Belarus shares a border with Ukraine in the south. It borders Poland and Lithuania in the west, Latvia in the north, and Russia in the east.

The move to shut borders with Ukraine comes days after Belarus recalled its permanent representative to the European Union for consultations after Brussels imposed economic sanctions.

But Lukashenko, who was also sanctioned by the West for a sweeping political crackdown, is seen largely unscathed by the penalties and able to continue financing the economy and his security forces, rating agencies and analysts have said.

(Reporting by Andrey Ostroukh in Moscow; additional reporting by Natalia Zinets in Kyiv; Editing by Toby Chopra and William Maclean)
One request stands out among dozens made by Maryland lawmakers seeking millions in federal dollars for projects benefiting the state.

Thats because the project isnt actually in Maryland.

In an unusual approach to a long-standing problem, Democratic U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland told The Baltimore Sun this week that he wants to direct money to Pennsylvania farmers to help them curb damaging runoff that flows from the Susquehanna River into the Chesapeake Bay.

Cardins $2.2 million request to the Senate Appropriations Committee follows years of frustration by environmentalists that Pennsylvania isnt doing enough to lessen the flow of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment into the bay. Last year, Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation separately sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in federal court, alleging it isnt adequately enforcing cleanup targets for Pennsylvania and New York through the U.S. Clean Water Act.

With the suits still pending, Cardin is trying something different  a cooperative approach using the appropriations process to seek money for a project in a state other than his own.

I cant think of another example where Ive done that. Its kind of unique, said Cardin, who has been in Congress for more than 30 years.

Pennsylvania has clearly been the weak link in this. In recent years, it has not been as strong as it needs to be, in particular with the farmers, as it relates to the Susquehanna River.

Cardin said he didnt act unilaterally. He consulted the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and other bay advocates, and found an ally in Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania.

Sen. Casey has long worked to provide resources for farmers so they can implement conservation practices on their operations, said Natalie C. Adams, Caseys press secretary.

The appropriations committee is to make Cardins request public Friday. The panel is inviting senators to submit funding requests for what used to be known as earmarks and are now called congressionally directed spending.

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In 2011, the Republican leadership in Congress announced it was placing a moratorium on earmarks, which had become associated with waste and abuse. Congressional Democrats revived the funding tool this year, but require the requests to be made public and ask sponsors to certify the projects have community value.

Marylands U.S. House members have submitted dozens of requests that are being vetted by the House Appropriations Committee.

Under Cardins request, the Pennsylvania funding would come through the Natural Resources Conservation Service, part of the U.S. Agriculture Department. The money would be used for projects including the creation of buffers  for example, through trees and other vegetation  to hold soil in place so it is not washed away.

If the committee approves the request, the funding would likely end up in a large spending package to be voted on later this year.

We are delighted to see Sen. Cardin taking a look at the watershed holistically, said Denise Stranko, federal executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

The foundation is monitoring a 2025 deadline for a federal plan called the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint to reduce pollution in the bay.

Were honing in on that date and how were going to get there. Reduction from agriculture practices is the top thing, Stranko said.

Aides to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, said in a written statement that he is working with his states legislature on approving new resources and is making progress in reducing pollution in the streams and rivers that feed the Chesapeake Bay. In May, Wolf joined with Maryland and other states in the region in a plea to U.S. House and Senate leaders for additional bay restoration funding.

Bay advocates say the goal is not only to improve its health but to boost the regions resiliency to climate change. Strategies such as rotating grazing patterns can mitigate greenhouse gas emissions by helping keep soil healthy.

The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, a membership and advocacy organization, said it hadnt yet seen Cardins earmark request. But the bureau said farmers would welcome additional public money for projects to improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Farmers really dont have the financial capability on their own to implement all of the needed conservation measures on their farms, the bureau said in response to questions from The Baltimore Sun. The bottom line is that we believe additional investments are needed at the state and federal level to help pay for on-farm best management practices.
APTOPIX Justice Voting Rights (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a temporary halt to federal executions as the Department of Justice launches a review of death penalty procedures.

In a memo obtained by NBC News, Mr Garland said there were serious concerns about the troubling number of exonerations in cases where prisoners are sentenced to death.

"The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States but is also treated fairly and humanly," he wrote to senior officials.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden on Friday put his stamp of approval on a long-debated change to the military justice system that would remove decisions on prosecuting sexual assault cases from military commanders.

Biden, however, stopped short of backing a congressional effort to strip commanders of oversight of all major crimes.

The president formally approved more than two dozen recommendations made by an independent review commission on sexual assault in the military. The changes include shifting decisions on prosecuting sexual assault cases to special victims prosecutors outside the chain of command to remove any appearance of conflicts of interest.

The militarys sexual assault response coordinators and victims advocates also would be removed from the command structure system.

Reports of sexual assaults in the military have steadily gone up since 2006, according to Defense Department reports, including a 13% jump in 2018 and a 3% increase in 2019.

I look forward to working with Congress to implement these necessary reforms and promote a work environment that is free from sexual assault and harassment for every one of our brave service members," Biden said in a statement endorsing the recommendations.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has the support of 66 senators for a bill that would have independent prosecutors handle all felony cases that call for more than a year in prison. But other key lawmakers and leaders of the military services have balked at including all major crimes. There are concerns that stripping control of all crimes from commanders could hurt military readiness, erode command authority and require far more time and resources.

Biden hailed Gillibrands work on the issue. But he asked the commission to focus only on addressing the problems of sexual assault and harassment in the military, said a senior administration official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

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Asked about the Gillibrand legislation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden looks forward to working with Congress to implement these necessary reforms," but she sidestepped whether he would be supportive of the proposed legislation.

Gillibrand in her own statement said the commission's recommendations  and the administration's embrace of them  would add momentum to efforts to reform the military justice system. Still, she urged a broader overhaul.

We must resist the urge to create a separate but unequal system of justice within the military and must guarantee a professional, unbiased system for all service members, said Gillibrand, adding she would push for debate and a vote on a broader military justice reform bill when Congress returns.

Last month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for the first time, voiced support for taking sexual assault and related crimes away from the chain of command and letting independent military lawyers handle them.

He issued a memo to Pentagon leadership Friday directing that they immediately move on the commission recommendation including adding sexual harassment as an offense under military law.

Austin's support came even as military service secretaries and chiefs, in memos to Austin and letters to Capitol Hill, said they were wary about the sexual assault change, and laid out greater reservations on more broadly revamping the military justice system.

Gillibrand has argued against limiting the change to sexual assault, saying it would be discriminatory and set up what some call a pink court to deal with crimes usually involving female victims.

Im deeply concerned that if they limit it to just sexual assault, it will really harm female service members. It will further marginalize them, further undermine them, and theyll be seen as getting special treatment, she previously told the AP.

The Armys handling of sexual assaults and other violence has come under significant scrutiny in the aftermath of a series of crimes, including murders and suicides last year at Fort Hood, Texas. A review panel found that military leaders at the post were not adequately dealing with high rates of sexual assault and harassment and were utterly neglecting the sexual assault prevention program.

These special victims require and deserve all critical decisions about their case to be made by a highly trained special victim prosecutor who is independent from the chain of command, the report says. A commanders position within the unit leads to an inherent appearance of a conflict of interest.

Biden said during an International Women's Day speech in March that there would be an all-hands-on-deck effort under my administration to end the scourge of sexual assault in the military." He underscored on Friday that reform was essential for the health of the military.

This will be among the most significant reforms to our military undertaken in recent history, and Im committed to delivering results,"" Biden said.

The commission made 28 recommendations and 54 sub-recommendations in its report to Biden, including specific changes to improve accountability of leadership, climate and culture and victim care and support.

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Biden and Austin's embrace of the commission's recommendations demonstrated the administration is treating this issue with the urgency it deserves."

As I have said, the scourge of sexual assault in our military must come to an end, and after years of trying and failing to address the problem the time has come to remove the prosecution of sexual assault crimes from the chain of command," Smith said.
US soldiers walk to an oil production facility to meet with its management team, in Syria, October 27, 2020. US Army/Spc. Jensen Guillory

The Biden administration says its latest airstrikes in Iraq and Syria were defensive, meant to keep US troops safe.

Those US forces are at risk precisely because they're still in the region, and, in the case of Syria, there illegally.

Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

The Biden administration launched airstrikes against Iran-linked militias in Iraq and Syria, the Pentagon confirmed Sunday, reportedly killing five militia members and, if Syrian state-run media accounts are correct, one child.

The administration cast the strikes as a defensive measure to keep US troops in the region safe from the militias' drone attacks, proof that "President Biden  will act to protect US personnel."

This characterization is consistent with the Biden team's broader messaging on Iraq and Syria, which is that Iraq wants our military to stick around indefinitely, that ongoing occupation of both nations is right and needful to defend against Iran and the last remnants of ISIS, and that these wars aren't analogous to the "forever war" in Afghanistan Biden promised to end.

That messaging is misleading at best. The notion that Iraq wants US forces to stay put is particularly easily dispelled.

Joe Biden, then-vice president, with soldiers at Camp Victory on the outskirts of Baghdad, July 4, 2009. REUTERS/Khalid Mohammed

Baghdad promptly and vehemently condemned the June strikes on its soil as "a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security" in a statement from the prime minister's office. A foreign ministry representative went further, castigating Biden for prolonging the failures of his predecessor.

"The US still continues the wrong path in the region," he said. "What we see today is not only the sanctions but also following the wrong policies of the previous administration with actions they carry out in the region."

This censure is but the latest in a growing list of efforts by the Iraqi government to dislodge the 18-year US military intervention in its country. Last year, the Iraqi parliament voted to expel all US troops, a decision then-President Donald Trump ignored.

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A US Army crew chief looks over the Tigris River in Iraq from a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, March 3, 2021. US Army/Capt. Travis Mueller

This spring, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi expressed hope that new US-Iraq dialogues would focus on "the redeployment of [US] forces outside of Iraq." And Iraqi military officials in May indicated to the Post that they're unhappy with US-Iraq relations, "feel[ing] like a junior partner in a relationship largely centered on reducing Iranian influence in the region."

Baghdad is saying with ever more clarity that it wants the US intervention to end.

The legitimacy and necessity of further American military meddling is also a myth. The Obama, Trump, and now Biden administrations have all operated illegally in Syria, where Congress never authorized war.

This strike, like the Syrian interventions of the past two presidents, was unconstitutional. Like the two presidents before him, Biden has no business bombing Syria.

A US soldier gives candy to children in Syria, February 5, 2020. BaderKhan Ahmad/Getty Images

Bizarrely, Biden has also endorsed a bipartisan congressional effort to repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq, which has passed the House but not yet the Senate. That means he soon may be without legal authority for the strikes in Iraq as well.

Even now, however, while the AUMF remains intact, it's worth recalling this is a war begun under false pretenses, one which never had significant import for US national security and does not to this day. (Operations against terror threats in either country which could affect vital US interests do not require a permanent ground presence.)

Though the Pentagon claimed these recent strikes were defensive (the same rationale deployed for Biden's first strike on Syrian soil earlier this year), this is twisted logic.

The reason US forces are at risk of violence by Iran-linked militias, the remnants of ISIS, or any other malicious group in the region is precisely because US forces are in the region. If we end these interventions, we end that risk.

US forces are in harm's way from the militias' drones because they are fighting in Iraq and Syria - bring them home, and this will be a non-issue. The drones cannot cross the Atlantic. There would be no need for the "defensive" strikes in Iraq and Syria were Biden not extending US military action in Iraq and Syria.

US Marines fire 81 mm mortars in Syria, September 18, 2018. US Marine Corps/Cpl. Gabino Perez

But he is, and he's doing so on the grounds - as CENTCOM commander Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie said in April - that we shouldn't compare the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

That's a strange claim, because the many excellent reasons Biden has supplied to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan apply equally well to withdrawing US forces from Iraq (and Syria).

In those countries, too, as Biden said of Afghanistan when he announced his September plan for departure, we "cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence  hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal, and expecting a different result."

These too are no-win forever wars, one already unauthorized and one soon to be. Instead of more airstrikes, Biden should approve more troop transports home.

Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, contributing editor at The Week, and columnist at Christianity Today. Her writing has also appeared at CNN, NBC, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and Defense One, among other outlets.

Read the original article on Business Insider
MUMBAI (Reuters) - Plans by Big Tech to foray further into India's financial sector pose risks for traditional banks as the tech firms have the potential to become dominant players in financial services, the central bank said.

The plans will also create governance-related challenges for regulators, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) wrote in its bi-annual financial stability report on Thursday.

Major technology firms "straddle many different lines of business with sometimes opaque overarching governance structures," it said.

The RBI said concerns included operational risks, too-big-to fail issues, challenges for antitrust rules, cybersecurity and data privacy. But it added that positive outcomes could include efficiency gains and more access to financial services.

Amazon.com Inc and Google currently provide basic payment services in India. Both companies as well Facebook and others have applied for licences to operate broader retail payment and settlement systems in partnership with Indian companies such as Reliance and lenders.

The central bank's warnings come at a time of much tension between the Indian government and U.S. tech giants over issues that range from e-commerce rules to data privacy and content posted on their platforms. Amazon, Facebook, Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Twitter have all been caught up in disputes with New Delhi.

India's largest state-run bank and UNI Global Union which represents about 20 million workers globally last month also raised concerns about the entry of large tech companies into the country's payments sector.

(Reporting by Nupur Anand; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
(Bloomberg) -- Binance Holdings Ltd. is facing increasing attention from regulators, with Thailand and the Cayman Islands becoming the latest nations to weigh in on the dealings of the largest cryptocurrency exchange.

Thailands Securities and Exchange Commission filed a criminal complaint Friday against Binance with a division of the Royal Thai Police for operating a digital-asset business in the country without a license. The Cayman Islands financial regulator said Binance wasnt authorized to operate in the territory.

On Thursday, the Monetary Authority of Singapore said it would follow up as required with the local unit of Binance because of scrutiny from authorities elsewhere. Binance is being probed by several regulatory agencies in the U.S., including the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Japans Financial Services Agency warned that it offered crypto services without registration. Financial Conduct Authority recent warned consumers that Binance isnt allowed to offer services in the U.K.

The key point to keep in mind is all these squabbles concern how the crypto economy will interface with the traditional economy, said Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion.

Binance has long said its a decentralized entity, operating via a slew of regional licenses, and that business units comply with local regulations. The company, which was founded by CEO Changpeng CZ Zhao, said it doesnt have a headquarters.

As you can understand, we do not comment, as a matter of policy, on specific matters related to any regulators, Binance said in a statement. What we can say is that we take a collaborative approach in working with regulators and we take our compliance obligations very seriously. We are actively keeping abreast of changing policies, rules and laws in this new space.

Trading volume going into the July 4 holiday weekend on Binance is down about 18% in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com, which is owned by Binance. The price of Binance Coin, tied to the exchange, declined about 2%, while Bitcoin was little changed Friday.

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Binance was started in 2017, and quickly became the worlds top crypto spot exchange thanks to its incentives, such as Binance Coin, and lower fees. More recently, it also became the worlds top crypto derivatives exchange, and developed a new digital ledger that competes directly with Ethereum for decentralized-finance applications, cryptos hottest area.

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By Diane Bartz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers expert in antitrust urged the Federal Trade Commission Friday to press on with its lawsuit against Facebook Inc, according to a statement from Senator Amy Klobuchar.

In a letter to new FTC Chair Lina Khan, Klobuchar, Senator Mike Lee and Representatives David Cicilline and Ken Buck urged the FTC to "pursue enforcement action against Facebook and to consider all available options under the law for ensuring that the commissions claims receive a full and fair hearing."

Klobuchar and Cicilline, both Democrats, and Lee and Buck, both Republicans, hold the top positions on congressional antitrust panels.

The FTC is expected to file a new complaint against Facebook after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of District of Columbia dismissed one filed in December, experts said.

That complaint, which asked him to require Facebook to sell photo sharing app Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp, fell short, Boasberg said, because the FTC failed to show the company had monopoly power and instances of alleged anticompetitive behavior were too old.

Several veteran FTC officials said it was implausible that the agency did not have data to back up its assertion that Facebook had "in excess of 60%" of the social media market.

"What he told them was 'I'm not going to read the newspaper and believe that Facebook is a monopoly'," said Andy Gavil, an FTC veteran who teaches at the Howard University School of Law.

Facebook declined to comment for this story. In earlier comment, it noted that Instagram and WhatsApp grew mightily under Facebook stewardship. It said it would vigorously fight the FTC in court.

GO BIG AND GO HOME?

The FTC, under new leadership, might write a considerably broader complaint and could file it before an FTC administrative law judge, essentially taking the case in-house.

William Kovacic, a former FTC chair now at George Washington University Law School, said that a new complaint could add allegations, including potentially unfair method of competition.

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"That is a topic that she (Khan) has talked about and written about on many occasions," he said.

Experts also predicted the dismissal would build support for bills to ramp up antitrust enforcement.

"If these dismissals tip the scales, it will be toward doing something. If the government could win even modestly on these cases, it's an argument to do nothing," said Herb Hovenkamp of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by David Gregorio and Jonathan Oatis)
Associated Press

Demolition crews set off explosives late Sunday to bring down the damaged remaining portion of a collapsed South Florida condo building, a key step to resuming the search for victims as rescuers possibly gain access to new areas of the rubble. Crews were to begin clearing some of the new debris so rescuers could start making their way into parts of the underground garage that is of particular interest. Once there, rescuers are hoping that they will gain access for the first time to parts of the garage area that are a focus of interest, Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah has said.
The Boy Scouts of America struck a $850 million settlement Thursday evening with tens of thousands of survivors of sexual abuse, Reuters reports.

Why it matters: This is the biggest settlement in a child sexual abuse case in U.S. history, according to NBC News.

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Catch up quick: The Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy in February 2020 after facing mounting legal costs amid multiple sexual abuse lawsuits. Last November, ahead of the deadline for the organization's bankruptcy case, 90,000 sexual abuse claims were submitted against the organization.

The big picture: As part of the settlement the Boy Scouts will dispense "$850 million in cash and other assets to survivors," and place insurance rights into a trust that will "administer claims and distribute payments," per the Wall Street Journal.

The Boy Scouts said in a statement Thursday that the settlement will help them emerge from bankruptcy, according to NBC News.

What they're saying: I am pleased that both the BSA and their local councils have stepped up to be the first to compensate the survivors, said Ken Rothweiler, an attorney with the law firm representing one of the groups of claimants, per NBC News.

We will now negotiate with the insurers and sponsoring and chartering organizations who have billions of dollars in legal exposure, of which a substantial portion is necessary to fairly compensate the survivors," he added.

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RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said on Thursday he would hand over power to whoever wins next year's presidential election cleanly - but not if there is any fraud.

His comments will do little to dispel the concerns of his critics, who fear that the far-right former army captain will not accept any election loss in next year's vote. Bolsonaro is almost certain to face his political nemesis, former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Polls show Lula ahead.

"I'll hand over the presidential sash to whoever wins the election cleanly," Bolsonaro said in a weekly address via social media. "Not with fraud."

Since his 2018 election victory, Bolsonaro has made baseless allegations of voter fraud in Brazil, which critics say could lay the groundwork to challenge upcoming elections in the same vein as his political idol, former U.S. President Donald Trump.

Bolsonaro backed Trump's claims of a stolen election last year, which culminated in a deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol building in Washington by Trump supporters.

In recent months, Bolsonaro has been touting a bill for printed ballots rather than Brazil's modern computer voting. He has said the printed ballots will be easier to audit, and are thus more likely to avoid fraud. Few experts agree, and the bill has yet to gain much traction in Congress.

On Thursday, Bolsonaro said he was "alerting" people about the possibility of problems if the current electronic system remains in place.

"The people won't accept it," he said.

Bolsonaro also said his government was in talks about extending an emergency coronavirus aid package for two or three more months.

(Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Leslie Adler and Rosalba O'Brien)
The green card is an internationally recognised document demonstrating to law enforcement agencies that travellers have valid motor insurance. They typically last for up to 90 days. Photo: Denis Charlet/ AFP via Getty Images

British drivers will no longer need to have a green card from their insurance company to visit Europe after the European Commission (EC) agreed to waive the requirement.

Under a post-Brexit agreement, people travelling from the UK into Europe by car had to obtain extra paperwork ahead of holidays and family visits to show that the car is fully insured. This included journeys to the Republic of Ireland.

The green card is an internationally recognised document demonstrating to law enforcement agencies that travellers have valid motor insurance. They typically last for up to 90 days.

The move, which applies throughout the European Union, forms part of a package of measures to diffuse tension over the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Before the pandemic, UK residents made an estimated 12.6 million visits a year to EU countries via seaports and the Channel tunnel.

The EC said on Thursday that the rule will come into effect 20 days after the ruling is published in the EUs official journal. This is expected to take place over the next few days.

Read more: Time 'starting to run out' on Northern Ireland protocol Brexit talks

The Association of British Insurers (ABI) hailed the decision as excellent news for drivers.

Huw Evans, ABIs director general, told the Guardian that the EC had taken a pragmatic approach on the matter.

UK drivers will no longer need to apply for a green card through their insurer which will help reduce bureaucracy for drivers and road hauliers travelling between the UK and EU, he said. It will be especially welcomed by motorists in Northern Ireland driving across the border.

The Motor Insurers Bureau of Ireland (MIBI) had also lobbied hard against the cards, pointing to the 43 million cross-border trips that took place each year on the island.

MIBIs chief executive, David Fitzgerald, said it had been in regular talks with EU officials to highlight the problem caused by the cards.

This wasnt a sustainable situation when you consider there are an estimated 43 million cross border vehicle trips per annum and there are approximately 25,000 people who live on one side of the border and who regularly commute to the other jurisdiction.

Watch: EU must back up words with actions on Northern Ireland Protocol, says Brandon Lewis
Jul. 2Butler County attorney Robert Qucsai III, known to most as "Bob," is described as friendly, down to earth and a free spirit.

Qucsai visited a Tennessee park Feb. 3 and was never seen again.

The 42-year-old arrived at Cummins Falls State Park at about 1:30 p.m., parked in the visitors' lot and hiked in to see one of his favorite outdoor sights  a frozen waterfall. Despite searches that are ongoing by rangers, according to his brother Carl, there has been no sign of Qucsai.

"The rangers are certain it wasn't suicide," Carl Qucsai said. "He made a big deposit the day of in the bank for his trip. This was just a stop off."

In the car were Qucsai's wallet, identification and credit cards.

"The only thing he had on him was a car key, a cellphone and a hiking bag. He was an avid hiker and loved taking pictures of waterfalls," Qucsai said.

Carl Qucsai said he and their father talked to Robert about 4:30 p.m. the day he went missing.

"He was already in the middle of the park. He had just sent us a beautiful picture before we talked to him. He was upbeat," Carl said.

Rangers called about 6:30 p.m. because they had closed the park and they had found Qucsai's car.

"We didn't think anything at the time, we had just talked to him two hours prior. We told them he's probably wandering the woods, doing his thing. I told them he'll be back soon and that was it, Carl said.

Carl traveled to the park in Blackburn Fork State Scenic River near Cookeville, Tennessee, to pick up his brother's car and belongings, and said he hiked the rugged trail to the 75-foot waterfall

"There are crevices in a lot of the sheer rock. I think he had made it to the bottom of the waterfall and he tried to get to the top of the waterfall to get another picture and fell into a crevice or into the waterfall," Qucsai said.

But he said the waterfall has been searched numerous times. Because of the time of the year, there were only seven or eight visitors to the park that day. Qucsai said it is unlike his brother to leave with someone he might have met hiking. Rangers and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation found no evidence of foul play.

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Qucsai is a graduate of Fairfield High School and lives in Trenton. He was admitted to the Ohio Bar in 2004 and worked as a public defender in Butler County Common Pleas and Juvenile Courts.

Authorities manned an exhaustive search for three days in February looking for Qucsai using technology, dogs and horses, but found nothing.

"I truly believe he is still there in the park," Carl said. "At this point we just want some kind of closure."

On Wednesday, Kim Schofinski, deputy communications director for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, said there were no updates.

"We do not have any new information. We are continuing to work with TBI to follow up on any leads that may come in," she said.

Qucsai, 5 feet, 10 inches and 160 pounds, was last known to be wearing dark pants and a gray hoodie, according to a missing persons alert.

Anyone with tips or who would like to spread the word about Quscai's case can send info to helpfindbq@gmail.com.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP)  Officials on Friday hunted for any missing residents of a British Columbia town destroyed by wildfire as the Canadian province's chief coroner said reports suggest two people have died as a result of blaze.

Lisa Lapointe told a news conference Friday that a team is standing by to conduct an investigation in order to confirm the deaths, but its not yet safe to enter the area.

The roughly 1,000 residents of Lytton had to abandon their homes with just a few minutes notice Wednesday evening after suffering the previous day under a record high of 121.2 Fahrenheit (49.6 Celsius).

Officials said it was unclear whether anyone remained in the village 95 miles (150 kilometers) northeast of Vancouver due to a lack of cell service and because it wasnt safe to enter most of the area.

We do know there are some people who are unaccounted for, said Mike Farnworth, the provinces public safety minister, though he said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Red Cross were working to locate people.

Those who escaped the fire scattered to evacuation centers across the province.

Tony Sam said it was chaotic driving through thick smoke to Meritt, B.C., about 36 miles (58 kilometers) southeast of Lytton.

You could barely see driving through the smoke, he told Global TV.

Both his house and his mother's home were destroyed.

Its gone, he said. Nothing left of it.

Noeleen McQuary-Budde didnt even have time to grab her shoes before piling into a truck with her husband an 11 other people to escape the flames.

The whole village of Lytton went up in I would say 10 minutes," she said. We were watching it burn and just thanking Creator that we got out.

In Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged that the federal government will help rebuild and help people come through this.

Trudeau said he had spoken with British Columbia Premier John Horgan and John Haugen, acting chief of the of Lytton First Nation and planned to convene an emergency response group.

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Another wildfire threat at Kamloops, 220 miles (355 kilometers) northeast of Vancouver, forced an evacuation of about 200 people Thursday night, but officials said they could return Friday.

Kamloops also recorded a record his temperature this week of 117 Fahrenheit, (47.3 Celsius) but it had cooled down to around 90 (32) on Friday.

I cant imagine what the firefighters are going through working in these conditions, said Noelle Kekula, a fire information officer for the British Columbia Wildfire Service. We are up for a real battle.

The Wildfire Service said at least 106 fires were burning across the province, including dozens that started within just the past two days.
Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau receives his second dose of the Moderna coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine at a pharmacy in Ottawa, Ontario, July 2, 2021. REUTERS/Blair Gable

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau got his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

He got a shot of the Moderna vaccine to follow his first AstraZeneca shot.

Mixing vaccine doses is currently allowed in Canada, but not approved in the US.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau got his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine this morning. He joins a growing number of people who have mixed and matched their doses.

Trudeau received his first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine in April, and previously said he planned to get a second shot from the same manufacturer when it's available. But today, he followed up his AstraZeneca shot with a dose of Moderna.

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Canada's National Advisory Committee on Immunization updated its guidance at the beginning of June to recommend that people who got one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine follow up with a second dose of either Moderna or Pfizer. Canadians are also allowed to mix and match Pfizer and Moderna.

The agency noted that, due to the risk of people developing rare blood clots from the AstraZeneca vaccine, offering alternative vaccines was "ethically justifiable."

Still, the US Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stood firmly against mixing vaccines.

Early research suggests mixing vaccines triggers a robust immune response

Studies have shown that combining different vaccines may trigger a stronger reaction than sticking to a single kind.

One study, led by the University of Oxford, found that people who received a dose of AstraZeneca and a dose of Pfizer were more likely to have mild to moderate side effects compared to other vaccine recipients. Side effects tend to indicate a robust immune response, but the researchers have not yet released immunogenecity data for the mixed group.

Preliminary results from another study in Spain found that mixing doses successfully produced a boosted immune response. However, the study has not yet been peer-reviewed, and those initial results were announced in an online presentation.

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"It appears that the Pfizer vaccine boosted antibody responses remarkably in one-dose AstraZeneca vaccinees. This is all around wonderful news," Zhou Xing, an immunologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who was not affiliated with either study, said in a press release.

Those promising results, along with Trudeau's second vaccination, may mark a shift towards allowing mix-and-match vaccines, which could accelerate the global vaccine rollout.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Police body camera footage of Capitol rioter Clayton Mullins dragging a police officer into the crowd of insurrectionists (Department of Justice)

A Capitol rioter has rallied his friends and family to back up his claims that video footage of him dragging a Capitol police officer into the violent crowd of insurrectionists actually shows him trying to save the officer.

Clayton Mullins, of Kentucky, was at the Capitol riot and was later arrested and charged with eight crimes.

Footage of him at the Capitol shows Mr Mullins dragging a Capitol police officer into the crowd of Trump supporters fighting with law enforcement. Mr Mullins can also be seen shoving another officer who attempts to save their colleague.

Mr Mullins has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and his lawyers and supporters have claimed he was trying to rescue the officer despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Since his arrest, Mr Mullins has tried to negotiate less severe conditions on his current house arrest. He currently must stay at home and is subject to monitoring by law enforcement pending his trial.

Carroll Graham, a friend of Mr Mullins and a police officer in the Illinois State Police, joined other supporters to send letters to the Department of Justice suggesting Mr Mullins was simply trying to help.

"I have reviewed the video ... from my knowledge and knowing Clayton personally, it appears to me that he is trying to keep the 'MOB' from dragging the officer out of view. I believe if Clayton hadn't held on to the Officer's leg that Officer may not be with us today," she wrote.

Another friend, Linda King, also wrote a letter to support Mr Mullins.

"I searched out the video and watched it over and over, of Clayton trying to HELP someone. There was a mob scene there, BUT like I said, I KNOW this man, and he would NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER do what he is being accused of doing," Ms King wrote.

Chief Judge Beryl Howell reviewed the footage earlier this year and determined Mullin's was an aggressor in the situation.

"The other police officer  oh my goodness  who was flat on his back being beaten, and [Mullins] was holding his leg so he couldn't get up and couldn't get back to the police line. I mean, it is frightening footage," Judge Howell said during a March court hearing.

Judge Emmet Sullivan, who received the letters, has not yet issued a decision regarding Mr Mullin's release conditions, but the Justice Department has stated it opposes any loosening of his restrictions.
CHICAGO  In the days after a TV station aired disturbing video of police barging into Anjanette Youngs home and handcuffing her while she was naked, Mayor Lori Lightfoot emailed Law Department staff urging them to show more empathy to victims.

Damage has been done, confidence shattered and the disclosures over the week have caused anger, confusion, and hurt. This goes way beyond any single case because important trust has been lost. People are hurting, Lightfoot wrote in the Dec. 17 email obtained through an open records request.

The challenges have been exacerbated by the Law Departments handling of this matter over the last few days. I know you all work hard, but I fear some important values have been lost. We can never lose sight of the people who are alleging being victimized by city actors.

But while Lightfoot personally apologized to Young for the errant raid and has vowed to resolve her lawsuit against the city, records and interviews suggest her administration has continued to play hardball in defending the Police Departments actions.

Its a pattern that began with the Lightfoot administrations decision to deny Youngs request for access to police footage from the wrongful 2019 raid on her Near West Side home and continued last month with the mayors lawyers moving to dismiss Youngs case.

Legal documents filed by the city in June show Lightfoot officials have downplayed one of the more horrifying elements of the bungled raid, how long Young was left exposed as officers swarmed her home while acting on a bad tip about a felon with a gun.

In handling Youngs case, Lightfoot faces a challenging political and legal dynamic. She wants to show empathy toward Young while also overseeing a Law Department charged with mounting a defense in a case that could cost the city millions of dollars.

But some wonder why the administration isnt doing more to live up to the mayors promises.

Whats morally and (ethically) right or appropriate shouldnt be at odds with any actions our city is taking in order to protect itself, said Far North Side Alderwoman Maria Hadden, 49th, who has pushed an ordinance to impose tighter restrictions on search warrants that is opposed by Lightfoot.

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Can we do both? I think we can, Hadden said. I think folks with maybe more legal experience and more legal practice are so used to finding loopholes or fine print or utilizing every particular legal tool in order to obfuscate whats really happening or have as small a liability as possible. That may be what theyre trained to do but ... maybe its not the way we should act.

For her part, Lightfoot recently said she wasnt responsible for the failure to reach a settlement agreement with Young and instead cast blame on the other side.

You cant settle with someone who doesnt want to settle, she said after a heated City Council meeting in late June.

In response to questions about how it handled the case, Lightfoots Law Department released a statement this week saying the administration is dedicated to bringing the litigation in this matter to an equitable and expeditious resolution so that Ms. Young can continue her process of healing and move forward.

However, the city also said that Youngs attorney walked away from a mediation that would have fairly addressed Ms. Youngs traumatic experience, but also (been) fair to the taxpayers.

Lightfoot administration lawyers have repeatedly minimized the harm Young experienced during the raid, even as Lightfoot publicly condemned the incident.

The citys recently filed motion to dismiss the fact Young was handcuffed while naked and said she was escorted to her bedroom to get fully dressed about 10 minutes after officers determined their target wasnt present.

Though (police) attempted to cover her with a nearby blanket seconds after handcuffing her, the blanket did not stay fully closed in front, city lawyers noted.

City lawyers also said in the motion that Youngs lawsuit failed to establish a legal wrong.

Lightfoot lawyers argued in December that they withheld the video from Young because they believed it was an attempt to provide the media with the body worn camera to paint an inaccurate picture of what happened during the subject search warrant.

Lightfoots former corporation counsel, Mark Flessner, shrugged off the incident during a staff call with Lightfoot the morning after Chicago's WBBM-TV first aired disturbing footage from the raid last December, sources told the Chicago Tribune.

After a staffer asked about the case, Flessner said it wasnt a big deal and noted officers let Young get dressed after she was handcuffed without any clothes on, sources said.

Lightfoot kept Flessner on board for days after the remark, which has not been previously reported, but accepted his resignation the following weekend as the scandal snowballed. Flessner this week declined to comment.

Youngs video became national news in large part because Lightfoot officials sought an order to prevent the TV station from airing the footage and requested sanctions against the plaintiff, Young, for sharing video of the raid with media. Lightfoot lawyers later said they only wanted sanctions against Youngs lawyer but dropped the request altogether as the scandal spiraled.

Previously unreported emails obtained by the Tribune through open records requests show Lightfoot was deeply involved in the citys public response to the botched police raid, urging her staff to come up with a social media plan, drafting statements and asking to be booked on a Black radio station to mitigate the fallout.

A day after Lightfoots lawyers filed the motion, a producer from the station emailed Lightfoots then-deputy press secretary, Pat Mullane, to request an interview with Lightfoot. In the email, the producer said the station planned to ask questions about this last minute court action to keep the video concealed and the city denying Youngs FOIA for her video.

These actions raise serious questions about transparency, the producer wrote.

Mullane also said in the emails to staff that he would tell the producer they cant accommodate an interview since this is ongoing litigation.

Former Law Department spokeswoman Kathleen Fieweger responded by copying two other city lawyers, Caryn Jacobs and Victoria Benson, for their views on talking to them even (off the record).

Mullane sent an email to fellow staff members saying Heres what I think the mayor should say. The rest of that email is redacted. Former Law Department spokeswoman Kathleen Fieweger responded by copying two other city lawyers, Caryn Jacobs and Victoria Benson, for their views on talking to them even (off the record).

As the day unfolded, Lightfoots press team worked to understand and contain the situation. Former Lightfoot communications director Michael Crowley emailed colleagues, Were working with Law on a detailed ticktock to make sure were all on the same page about the actual details here.

By early afternoon, Fieweger and a city lawyer had assembled a timeline and a litigation history, though the city redacted those emails.

At an unrelated news conference, Lightfoot said she couldnt comment on her administrations request for sanctions over the release of the video by Youngs team.

A federal judge put rules in place, Lightfoot said. Its for that judge to determine whether or not that was appropriate.

The mayor also noted the raid took place weeks before she was elected, though it was her administration that tried to keep the video from being made public. Later, Lightfoot released a statement saying she had no knowledge of the matter involving Young before CBS aired video of the errant raid.

That statement wasnt true, however. Lightfoot later acknowledged that she had been informed about the botched raid in 2019, though she downplayed what she was told.

The next morning, Lightfoot circled back to ask if the statements went out and added, We need to put together a social media response as well.

But as the story continued to unfold that week, Lightfoot worked to stem the public relations hit by emailing top staffers a long statement she wanted them to distribute.

If anyone has any questions or revisions then we should do a call, Lightfoot wrote.

The next morning, Lightfoot circled back to ask if the statements went out and added, We need to put together a social media response as well.

Before her customary post-City Council news conference, Lightfoot emailed her then-chief of staff, top city lawyers and communications staffers, political strategist Joanna Klonsky and her pollster, Jason McGrath, with a statement she planned to give.

Here is the statement that I intend to give at the 2:00 presser, Lightfoot said. Sorry for the short turn around, but I want only red flags.

Classen, her chief of staff, responded, No flags. Looks good. The pollster, McGrath, said he wouldnt change a word.

At the news conference, Lightfoot apologized to Young and said she couldve been a victim of the same mistreatment by police. But the news conference turned into a disaster after she falsely denied that her administration withheld the video from Young, setting off another round of negative media coverage.

Lightfoot emailed Flessner and other staffers to request half an hour the next morning to address all of the law department lawyers who handle any cases involving the police department.

Just before 10:30 p.m., Lightfoot emailed Flessner and other staffers to request half an hour the next morning to address all of the law department lawyers who handle any cases involving the police department.

That evening, Lightfoot emailed staffers to ask for time on WVONs morning show and asked a staffer to set up a call with the black faith community so that they can hear from me tomorrow.

By the time Lightfoot next addressed a news conference, she was completely apologetic  even apologizing to a Tribune reporter for attacking his credibility.

Lightfoot also made waves internally when she didnt endorse Flessner after she was asked about potential resignations in the Law Department. A reporter tweeted her noncommittal answer, which Flessner sent to Lightfoot in an email with a question mark in the subject line, records show.

That Sunday, Flessner submitted his resignation to Lightfoot in an email signed Your friend.

Days later, the immediate crisis began to pass as Lightfoot apologized to Young during a face-to-face meeting. Afterward, the mayor and Young released a joint statement pledging to work together on bringing change to the Police Department.

But even as Lightfoot continued her public relations effort, her pick to replace Flessner, Celia Meza, revised the joint statement with Young to say problematic issues led to the errant raid, rather than systemic problems, as Youngs attorney proposed.


(Corrects typo in "accommodation" in headline)

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's home rental prices rose by their fastest for at least 2-1/2 years, according to a private survey, as record numbers of college graduates flocked to big cities in search of jobs as the economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic.

Average prices in 40 cities rose 2.1% in June from a month earlier, compared with May's 0.78% increase, statistics from Zhuge House Hunter, one of China's largest independent real estate research firms, showed on Thursday. It was the biggest monthly increase since Zhuge started compiling the data in January 2019.

Rents rose fastest in top-tier cities, with the southern tech hub of Shenzhen up 2.56% compared with May's 1.3% growth. Such cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, are the top locations for young job seekers, Zhuge House Hunter said.

Compared with a year earlier, rents in June were up 1.51%, the first gain since April 2020.

Growing numbers of college leavers has fuelled demand, and China has vowed to expand rental markets to make housing more affordable in big cities, where home prices and rents have surged in recent years.

The education ministry has estimated that more than 9 million college students would graduate this year, beating the record of 8.73 million set last year. The ministry expects graduates to exceed 10 million in 2022.

Major cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen began implementing measures this year to boost the supply of rental properties.

Kaylee Jian, 22, a postgraduate student from southwestern Chengdu city, arrived in Beijing in June to intern at a firm while exploring job opportunities in the capital ahead of her graduation in December.

"My rent takes up 150% of my intern salary, so I still have to spend my family's money," she said.

Jian shares an apartment with one other person in the north of Beijing, and pays about 3,000 yuan ($463) a month in rent.

"My parents told me that in Chengdu you could rent an entire well-renovated home for 2,000 yuan a month. I've finally realised how expensive it is to live in cities like our capital."

($1 = 6.4838 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Liangping Gao and Ryan Woo; Additional reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China will provide funding to build new institutions and infrastructure to fight infectious diseases and improve healthcare, the state planning body said in a "five-year plan" for the sector.

The central government will subsidise the construction of new "prevention bases" for infectious disease and new grassroots medical facilities across the country, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said in the plan, published on Thursday.

It said China was facing difficult healthcare challenges, including new emerging infectious diseases, the increasingly heavy burden of chronic illnesses as well as the growing need for mental health services.

"The public health system is in urgent need of improvement, and the ability to prevent, control and treat major epidemics is not strong," it warned.

High-quality medical resources are also insufficient and not evenly distributed, and there are also gaps when it comes to treating women and children, it added.

China acknowledged last year that the spread of COVID-19, first detected in the city of Wuhan at the end of 2019, had exposed "shortcomings and systemic problems" in the way it handled health crises.

Though medical facilities are obliged to report outbreaks as soon as they are identified, Wuhan authorities were accused of trying to cover up early cases and silencing whistleblowers.

The NDRC said new "major infectious disease prevention bases" would be built in all major cities, and would be equipped to treat large numbers of patients and deploy rapid-response teams to affected regions.

The central government would provide subsidies of up to 300 million yuan ($46.32 million) for each prevention base. It will also provide as much as 500 million yuan to help local governments set up comprehensive new regional medical centres.

More funding will also be available to help local governments set up new projects designed to integrate traditional Chinese and western medicine, and to build new maternal and child health facilities, it said.

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It did not give a figure for total spending on the plans.

($1 = 6.4769 yuan)

(Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Kim Coghill)
The Chula Vista Police Department served another search warrant Thursday at the home of Maya Millete, the missing California mother of three who disappeared nearly six months ago.

That makes the third warrant authorities have served at the home after previously searching the house on Jan. 23 and May 7.

It's unclear what exactly police are looking for, but a neighbor who wishes to remain anonymous told Fox News that Maya's black Jeep was towed away by police. A white lab van could also be seen outside the Milletes' home.

MISSING CALIFORNIA WOMAN'S HUSBAND CONTESTS GUN VIOLENCE RESTRAINING ORDER, CLAIMS HE WAS DETAINED ILLEGALLY

"The Chula Vista Police Department continued our efforts into finding the reason behind Mays disappearance by serving a search warrant at her residence on Paseo Los Gatos in Chula Vista," CVPD said Thursday. "The goal of the warrant was to obtain additional evidence and clues to her current whereabouts."

Maya Millete disappeared from her home on Jan. 7 around 5 p.m. and was reported missing two days later. Her black Jeep was still in the driveway and her cell phone was turned off, according to her family.

Police have now served 51 search warrants in the case, including seven in just the last two weeks for "residences, vehicles, cellular and electronic devices, call detail records, financial records, social media and cloud data."

Authorities have also interviewed 68 individuals, reviewed nearly 100 tips in the case, and served a gun violence restraining order against Larry Millete, Maya's husband, that sought to seize more than a dozen of his guns, some of which police said were "illegal assault weapons and unregistered firearms."

Larry contested that order earlier this month, saying CVPD seized 17 of his guns and that he was "detained illegally" by police during the May 7 search of his home, according to a court filing obtained by CBS8.

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CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"Chula Vista police pulled me over on the 5 freeway in San Diego jurisdiction," Millete wrote in the court filing.

He continued, "The Chula Vista police held me for six hours while my home was being searched and they threatened me with being arrested or detained even longer if I insist on going home to my children, my parents and my house."
By Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi

ZURICH (Reuters) - Credit Suisse is paying out a further $750 million to investors in its Greensill-linked supply chain finance funds, its asset management arm told investors on Friday.

It has recovered some $6.1 billion of the $10 billion in funds backed by insolvent supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital, it said on Friday, a slight increase over the $5.9 billion through late May.

The collapse of the funds in March kicked off a tumultuous period for the bank, culminating with a multi-billion dollar loss related to family office Archegos in a raft of executive oustings and an impending overhaul as top management fight to keep the bank intact.

The new repayments, planned for the week of July 5, will bring the total it has paid out to investors in the liquidation proceeds to $5.6 billion.

"Further liquidation proceeds are expected to be paid out to investors as soon as practicable in future installments," Credit Suisse said in the note. "Concrete timing on the next cash payouts cannot be provided at this moment."

Credit Suisse is focusing on some $2.3 billion in loans provided by Greensill to three single counterparties, the biggest of them Sanjeev Gupta's GFG Alliance, which are experiencing repayment issues.

On Friday, it said roughly $2.3 billion in late payments had accumulated as of June 29, approximately $1.8 billion of which were related to so-called "focus areas" comprised of these three groups, while a further $500 million was related to single-counterparty exposures.

The group is in deep discussions with mining magnate Gupta over the $1.2 billion exposure its funds hold to his wholly-owned GFG Alliance, representing the fund's single biggest pool of at-risk assets.

In late June, the two groups reached a six-week standstill agreement on GFG'S Australian steel and coal mining assets, which they hope will allow GFG to refinance the operations.

Credit Suisse has also held discussion with Softbank-backed construction startup Katerra over a $440 million exposure, and with West Virginia governor Jim Justice's coal company Bluestone Resources over a $690 million exposure.

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Katerra in June filed for insolvency, estimating liabilities of $1 billion to $10 billion and assets of $500 million to $1 billion.

On some of these exposures, Credit Suisse expects insurance to kick in if repayments are not made, and the bank is looking to related insurance, primarily from Japanese group Tokio Marine.

Bond and Credit Company (BCC), a Tokio Marine unit, had provided $4.6 billion of coverage to Greensill credit notes, indirectly covering some of the Credit Suisse funds as a so-called "loss payee".

(Reporting by Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi, editing by John Revill)
Jul. 1Unruly pedestrians and crowded sidewalks have created a "dangerous and untenable" situation on Pittsburgh's South Side, according to police, and officers will step up patrols and start issuing citations Friday night.

Pittsburgh police officials said Thursday the increased volume of people headed to East Carson Street has meant "nearly impassable sidewalks, pedestrians flowing into the road amid traffic and parked vehicles blocking safety lanes."

Authorities said there have also been fistfights, pedestrians struck by cars, and gunfire.

The crush of patrons along the popular strip of bars, restaurants and clubs comes after year-long capacity restrictions put in place to slow the spread of covid-19. Those measures expired at midnight on May 31.

"While we are glad that Pittsburgh is returning to some semblance of normalcy since the height of the pandemic, the situation on the South Side has become dangerous and untenable," said Public Safety Director Wendell Hissrich.

The issues have forced the police bureau's hand, officials said, and officers will start issuing warning and citations to those who block sidewalks and roads. People will first receive a warning and, if they fail to move along, "there may be physical arrests," police said. Citations could cost up to $300.

Motorcycle and bicycle officers will monitor parking, and those who park illegally will be towed.

"First responder vehicles must have access to East Carson in case of an emergency and overcrowded sidewalks pose hazards to pedestrians who then spill onto the streets and into vehicle traffic," Hissrich said. "Without changes, someone is going to get seriously hurt or killed."

Megan Guza is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Megan at 412-380-8519, mguza@triblive.com or via Twitter .
Good morning, Chicago.

Yesterday, the citys minimum wage officially became $15 per hour  a bump that some groups have lobbied for for years and a handful of large companies in the area had already adopted. Still, Chicago officials estimate that more than 400,000 people will get a raise due to the minimum wage increase. Heres what you need to know about the changes.

Meanwhile, as the fire in Morris continues to burn and thousands of residents are still unable to return to their homes, the Illinois EPA is recommending that the state attorney generals office pursue legal action against Superior Battery, the unlicensed business that was storing the 200,000 pounds of lithium batteries that caught fire.

And as we head into the holiday weekend, forecasters say todays dangerous beach conditions are expected to be followed by sunny skies and warm temperatures over the Fourth. Heres the latest.

 Nicole Stock, audience editor

Here are the top stories you need to know to start your day.

COVID-19 tracker | For your smart speaker | More newsletters | Puzzles & Games | Daily horoscope | Ask Amy | Todays eNewspaper edition

When the Chicago Bears recently announced a bid to buy land for a possible new stadium in Arlington Heights, Mayor Lori Lightfoot cast doubt on the team skipping town by holding up its lease with the city.

A Tribune review of the teams 120-page lease with the city, however, shows that it would not be difficult for the Bears to break the agreement early  and the payment to do so would be relatively small compared with the cost of building a new state-of-the-art stadium.

Under a cloud for two years since her ward office was raided by federal agents, 34th Ward Ald. Carrie Austin was indicted on bribery charges Thursday along with her chief of staff, federal authorities said, accusing both of receiving free home improvements from contractors doing business in Austins ward.

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Allegations of misconduct on an overnight boys basketball trip sparked multiple investigations, firings and unrest at Lincoln Park High School. Chicago Public Schools investigators concluded that a player and a female student had sex on the trip, and that he recorded the act and shared it on Snapchat without her knowledge or consent. While the community rallied around the team, the girl said she was blamed for the loss of their season.

Camerino Gonzalez Valle, who founded the Los Comales taqueria chain nearly 50 years ago, died last week at age 81. He leaves behind a legacy of family-owned Mexican restaurants dotting the Chicago area, known for a warm welcome, hearty plates and an experience he hoped was akin to dining at a cafe in Mexico.

A hot dog eating contest, with soggy hot dog buns being shoved into mouths, might not be the most romantic setting. But for Sarah and Juan Rodriguez, it helped spur their first kiss.

The Naperville spouses will be competing in this weekends Nathans Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, a nationally televised event that will welcome 28 competitors to Coney Island on Sunday.
By Andrius Sytas

VILNIUS (Reuters) - The girlfriend of a Belarusian dissident, detained with him after the plane they were travelling on was forced to land in Belarus, graduated in absentia at a ceremony in Vilnius on Friday.

Sofia Sapega, 23, a Russian citizen raised in Belarus, was returning home from a two-week vacation in Greece with her boyfriend, dissident journalist Roman Protasevich, when their flight was forced to land in Minsk on June 29.

Their arrest sparked international outrage. The EU last week imposed economic sanctions on Belarus.

On Friday, dressed in gowns and graduation hats, students of the Belarussian university which operates in exile in Vilnius watched as Sapega's mother and stepfather tearfully accepted the diploma on her behalf via video link from Belarus.

"We all feel resentful because this is so unjust and unfair," said a student at Sapega's law studies class who identified herself as Aliaksandra.

"We all support her endlessly, and we are very glad that we have achieved that she was issued the diploma. She is not alone."

Sapega has been accused of causing unrest and faces up to 12 years in jail if convicted. Protasevich, accused of organising riots, could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.

Both were moved to home arrest in separate flats last week.

Sapega, whose family said she steered clear of politics and was arrested after being in the wrong place at the wrong time, was on her way to defend her master's thesis, the final step before graduating, the university said on June 30.

"We decided to give her the diploma as an appeal to all people in the world to support our students", Sergei Ignatov, rector of the university, told Reuters.

A total of five students at the university are political prisoners in Belarus, he added.

"Graduating and receiving the diploma was the dream of our daughter, and it is sad that we are doing this on behalf of all the work she put into it", Sapega's mother, Anna Dudich, told the ceremony.

She passed on a message from her daughter: "Everything is still in the future".

(Reporting by Andrius Sytas in Vilnius; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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.
LAPD and ATF investigators are trying to determine how an LAPD detonation during a seizure of fireworks caused a massive explosion in South L.A. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)

When Los Angeles police discovered a few thousand pounds of illegal fireworks in a South L.A. yard Wednesday morning, some of the explosives were particularly troubling to members of the bomb squad.

The department's explosives experts were content to haul off nearly all of the illegal stash to a secured location for destruction. It was a run-of-the-mill operation in the lead-up to the Fourth of July in a city obsessed with fireworks.

But about 40 soda can-sized items and 200 smaller items, each with a short fuse and unknown firepower, gave them pause. They were uncertain the devices were stable enough to transport.

Instead, they tried to safely detonate the devices in a specialized container right there on the street  and caused a massive explosion that left the residential block in tatters and 17 people injured. It was a disaster captured by television choppers and crews on the ground who'd gathered in the neighborhood to record the fireworks seizure and detonation.

By Thursday, a massive investigation was underway into how what was meant to be a carefully controlled explosion went so badly out of control  casting debris for blocks, blasting out windows, smashing nearby parked cars, damaging homes and sending elderly residents and officers to the hospital.

The LAPD was also coming under growing scrutiny in the neighborhood and beyond, especially over whether there was more the department could have done to protect residents and get the explosives out of the densely populated area before they were detonated.

"Why didn't they do this somewhere else?" asked Louis Price, a local resident who said he didn't know why police hadn't warned residents on his block to leave. After all, they had essentially "made a bomb themselves" by choosing to detonate the explosives in his neighborhood, he said  sending out a burst of wind that shattered windows.

While local U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents were at the scene at the time of the blast  one was injured  the ATF's national response team was en route to South L.A. on Thursday, officials said. Agents and other public safety personnel scoured the neighborhood for any explosives that may have been left undetonated.

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ATF investigators will also delve into a slew of questions about how a man arrested for possessing the fireworks obtained such a large, volatile stash, and whether human error, an equipment failure or some combination of the two led to the explosion.

Michael Knight, an ATF spokesman, said the probe will be broad and include an examination of the explosives themselves, including "what type of product was in there, the weight of the product, and the explosive yield of the product."

Windows of a South L.A. business were blown out by the force of the explosion. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)

The agency will also consider "the integrity of the equipment used" by the LAPD. Specifically it will look at the massive black containment vehicle that was driven onto the block and inside of which members of the bomb squad attempted to safely detonate the explosives. They will try to answer whether the vehicle was somehow compromised or police miscalculated its ability to withstand the blast.

In search of answers, the ATF will conduct "forensic mapping" of the entire site and the spray of debris, Knight said.

"They'll put that into a computer-generated rendering, and that will show which direction the majority of the product or container went, the trajectory, the distance," he said.

The federal agency will also retrace the events leading up to the explosion, not only to track down the origins of the explosives but also to learn what happened from the perspective of bomb squad members and other witnesses, Knight said.

A car was flipped on its side by the force of the explosion. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)

At the heart of the inquiry will be questions about the fateful decision to detonate the homemade devices in the middle of a quiet street lined with homes.

So far, it's a question the LAPD has only partially answered.

According to Moore, the bomb squad appeared to have "followed established protocols" to assess the unknown devices.

They used X-ray technology to look for any fragment materials, which weren't seen, and used a robot to cut into one of the devices and draw out a sample, Moore said.

"They cut robotically to determine the content, and it was believed to be explosive in nature," Moore said Wednesday night. "Im not a bomb tech so I cant get more technical than that, but they believe they knew what they had."

Moore said police knocked on doors to tell residents to evacuate as a precaution. Officers then placed in the containment truck an amount of explosives that they believed it could handle.

"Fire in the hole!" officers yelled.

Moore said it remained unclear why the result was an explosion that wreaked havoc.

In response to a list of questions Thursday, including about the contents of the devices as determined by the initial LAPD assessment, Capt. Stacy Spell, an LAPD spokesman, said the department is fully cooperating with the ATF and "will rely on their assessment of this incident."

"Out of respect for the investigative process and our investigating partners, we cannot provide the specifics of the investigation at this time," Spell said.

Spell also said the information Moore provided Wednesday night "was preliminary and based upon our best understanding at the time," and the information is "subject to change as we learn more."

Officials and other experts in the field of explosives said that according to best practices, the decision to detonate the material onsite in South L.A. would have been calculated by bomb squad personnel based on the perceived threat of the devices and the explosive powder likely contained therein.

"Any time you have powder, it's very sensitive to heat, shock and friction," Knight said. "What they're doing is trying to get as much information as they can to make a decision, a qualified decision, on what the best way is to destroy these items or render them safe."

Any decision to detonate a device in a residential area would be a "last resort," Knight said, and one judged against the threat of moving the devices  which could threaten an explosion "in transit, where you can endanger the public safety officials but also additional members of the public."

If officers felt their containment vehicle could handle the devices safely, then detonating them would have been deemed safer than transporting them on local roads.

Joseph Mann, a retired ATF explosives expert and former member of the U.S. National Response Team  which deploys to disasters of national significance  said the "sensitivity level" of homemade devices is the "key determination" for how to handle them.

If they were deemed volatile, a short trip into a containment vessel would seem an attractive solution, he said. "I have never heard of a containment vessel failing," he said.

At the same time, a detonation in such a residential area is unusual, he said, and should have come only after substantial efforts to clear the area.

In coming days, officials and experts said, the ATF and other investigators will work swiftly on multiple fronts  to try to determine the exact composition of the devices, and to track down their origin, interview whoever made them, and try to find out if similar devices are in other communities.

They will also consider whether the LAPD's efforts to clear the area  they said they knocked on doors on the block to get people to leave  were adequate in the face of such unknown explosive power.

Less than 24 hours after the explosion rocked the 700 block of East 27th Street, the LAPD said it had set up a joint command post alongside the Los Angeles Fire Department and the ATF. Mayor Eric Garcetti said he was monitoring the investigation.

A portion of San Pedro Street remained closed, filled with dozens of law enforcement vehicles that also blocked off connecting alleyways. On nearby 27th Street, tree branches lay atop parked cars.

Marta Elba, 61, who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years, walked from her home at the corner of 28th Street and Griffith Avenue to ask police how she could be reimbursed for a broken window caused by the blast. When they told her to call her insurance company, she scoffed.

"The damage was caused by them," she said, referring to the police.

Juan Pena, who lives in the same home as Elba, said the explosion felt as if a large bomb had gone off. On Thursday, he said he still needed to check the rest of the house for any other damage. He knows who to blame.

"The city needs to take responsibility for all this," he said.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
The Singapore State Courts. (PHOTO: Dhany Osman / Yahoo News Singapore)

SINGAPORE  A 49-year-old driver who sped and killed a cyclist was on Friday (2 July) jailed for 26 weeks and banned from driving for eight years.

Johnson Yap pleaded guilty to one charge of driving without reasonable consideration for other road users, by failing to keep a proper lookout ahead.

On 21 November 2019, Yap drove his car along Tampines Avenue 3 towards Tampines Ave 4. He sped on the second lane of the two-lane road.

After the junction of Tampines Avenue 3 and Tampines Street 83, he steered his car slightly to the right and continued speeding in between the first and second lanes.

The 64-year-old victim Shaukatullah Rahamathullah cycled across the road using the signalised pedestrian crossing at 8.13am, but the traffic light was not in his favour.

Yap noticed the victim about two car lengths before the crossing. He stepped on the brakes and sounded his horn, but it was too late. He was speeding in excess of the 50kmh limit for the road, according to court documents, which did not state his actual driving speed.

The victim was flung onto the windscreen and landed on the first lane of the road. The accident was captured on Yap's in-car camera.

The victim was sent to hospital with extensive skull fracture and exposed brain matter and bleeding. He was pronounced dead at 9.27am at Changi General Hospital.

Amarjit Singh Sidhu, the lawyer who represented Yap, had asked for a jail term of three months while the prosecution asked for seven to eight months.

For causing death by his manner of driving without reasonable consideration for other road users, Yap could have been jailed for up to three years and also fined up to $10,000.

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Driver jailed 5 days over collision with 2 maids and 2 dogs
By Stephanie van den Berg

ROTTERDAM (Reuters) -A Dutch court on Friday approved an Australian request to hand over the alleged leader of an Asian drug syndicate who has been compared to Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Tse Chi Lop, a Chinese-born Canadian national, was arrested in January at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport at the request of Australian police while in transit from Taiwan to Canada.

The defence said it would appeal, and the matter will be decided by the Dutch Supreme Court. A final decision on extradition will be taken by the Dutch government.

Tse, who is alleged to have led a drug syndicate dominant in the Asia-Pacific crystal methamphetamine trade, says he is not a drug kingpin.

He has denied wrongdoing and contested his arrest, saying Australian authorities in effect engineered his expulsion from Taiwan to Canada on a flight with a stopover in Amsterdam so that he could be detained in the Netherlands, which has a more favourable extradition treaty with Australia.

Tse did not appear in court. He remains in a high-security prison while the appeal is pending.

"The court ruled today that if there is a problem with this extradition it will be taken care of in Australia itself," Tse's lawyer, Andre Seebregts, told Reuters. "We will now be going to the supreme court in the Netherlands to take our case there."

It is not clear when the supreme court will hear the appeal. Any handover would be expected to take months.

Judges urged the justice minister, who will have the final say if the Supreme Court approves extradition, to seek assurances from Australia that Tse would not be given a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia and Pacific representative for the U.N. drugs agency UNODC, told Reuters in 2019 that Tse Chi Lop is in the league of (Latin American drug lords) El Chapo or maybe Pablo Escobar.

(Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg; Writing by Anthony Deutsch; Editing by Jon Boyle and Timothy Heritage)
Empty storefronts in New York City. Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images

Barbara Anderson found a way to showcase New York City artists while also preventing blight.

A middle school teacher, Anderson lives in Manhattan's Upper West Side, and she told The Christian Science Monitor that seeing stores in her neighborhood shutting down because of the pandemic was disheartening. "Every day, seeing more and more empty storefronts, it was kind of just like, well, what do I tell my students?" Anderson said. "If you see a problem you can sit and complain or you can try to do something about it."

Last June, she launched an initiative called Art on the Ave, which turns empty storefronts into art exhibits. The first show was called "Healing," and featured 55 works of art by 41 artists across 12 storefronts in the Upper West Side. In order to participate, the artists all had to be based in New York, and their pieces could not be priced above $5,000.

People walking by scanned QR codes in the windows, and could listen to artist talks or buy a piece that caught their eye. By the end of the exhibit, more than a dozen works of art were sold, bringing in $60,000 for the creators. No rent was paid to the landlords of the participating storefronts, but the QR codes linked to their websites, and several said they received rental inquiries from people who saw the art in their windows.

"Healing" was a success, and so was a second exhibit, "Awakening," held in the West Village. A third exhibit, "Resiliency," is slated for later this year in lower Manhattan. Artist Paola Bermudez participated in the showcases, and called the opportunity "a blessing." She told the Monitor that she has not only sold some of her work that was on display, but has also secured commissions. "My artistic career just got launched in an amazing way," she said.

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Over 400,000 people have "crossed the threshold into famine" in Ethiopia's war-torn Tigray region, a senior UN official said Friday, appealing for urgent humanitarian action to help the millions affected by the brutal eight-month long conflict.

Fighting between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) was reignited last month when the rebels launched a major counter-offensive that saw them retake their regional capital of Mekele.

This week two key bridges allowing desperately-needed aid into the region were destroyed, prompting fears the federal government was seeking to choke off humanitarian assistance -- a charge Addis Ababa denied.

Friday saw the UN Security Council hold its first public meeting on a conflict that has left thousands of dead and plunged hundreds of thousands into hunger.

Ramesh Rajasingham, Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told that meeting that the situation had "worsened dramatically" as the conflict had reignited in recent weeks.

"More than 400,000 people are estimated to have crossed the threshold into famine and another 1.8 million people are on the brink of famine," he said. "Some are suggesting that the numbers are even higher. 33,000 children are severely malnourished."

"The lives of many of these people (in Tigray) depend on our ability to reach them with food, medicine, nutrition supplies and other humanitarian assistance," he added. "We need to reach them now. Not next week. Now."

Ethiopia has rejected charges that it planned to choke off aid to the region.

"The insinuation that we are planning to suffocate the Tigrayan people by denying humanitarian access and using hunger as a weapon of war is beyond the pale," Deputy Prime Minister Demeke Mekonnen told diplomats gathered at a hotel in the capital Addis Ababa.

Officials are "using every ounce of our strength to extricate" Tigrayan civilians "from the dire situation they find themselves in", he added.

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- Ceasefire 'a joke' -

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, sent troops into Tigray last November to detain and disarm leaders of the regional ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

He said the move was in response to TPLF attacks on federal army camps, and declared victory within weeks after federal forces took the regional capital Mekele.

But after the rebels -- having rebranded themselves the Tigray Defence Forces (TDF) -- retook Mekele and asserted control over most of the region, the government announced a unilateral ceasefire that the TDF has dismissed as "a joke."

Senior UN official Rosemary DiCarlo urged the group Friday to "immediately and completely" endorse the ceasefire.

"A ceasefire observed by all parties would not only facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid but would also be a starting point for the necessary political efforts to chart a way out of the crisis," DiCarlo said.

- 'Lives will be lost' -

The war has already exerted a staggering humanitarian toll, with the United States estimating 900,000 civilians are "likely already experiencing famine conditions".

The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says 5.2 million people, or 91 percent of Tigray's population, need emergency food assistance.

On Friday, the WFP said it had resumed aid operations after a two-day pause but added that lives were still in the balance after the two major bridges leading into Tigray were destroyed.

"Lives will be lost if supply routes into Tigray do not fully open and parties to the conflict continue to disrupt or endanger free movement of cargo for WFP and other emergency responders."

The UN has said one of the bridges was "reportedly" blown up by security forces from the Amhara region, south of Tigray, but the government on Friday blamed Tigrayan forces.

In his comments to diplomats Friday, Demeke reiterated the government's position that the ceasefire was motivated by humanitarian concerns and to facilitate farming.

But with electricity and telecommunications cut off, flights suspended and most roads into the region now impassable, UN officials and diplomats fear the situation could deteriorate further.

"A credible ceasefire means doing everything possible so that aid reaches the millions of children, women and men who urgently need it," EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Twitter.

- Path to dialogue? -

Demeke also said that, following national elections last month that are expected to give Abiy a new term, the government was preparing for an "inclusive dialogue" to resolve the crisis. The polls were postponed in Tigray.

Such a dialogue has long been sought by diplomats lobbying for a political resolution of the war.

But in a closed question-and-answer session with diplomats, officials indicated that dialogue with the TPLF leadership remained off the table.

In May lawmakers designated the TPLF a terrorist organisation.

When pressed by diplomats on how that might affect whatever dialogue takes place, Demeke said some TPLF members were "innocent" and could be included, according to three attendees.

But both Demeke and Redwan Hussein, spokesman for a government task force on the Tigray conflict, told diplomats that Addis Ababa was committed to "accountability" for TPLF leaders, the diplomats said.

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Denmark are riding into Saturday's Euro 2020 quarter-final with the Czech Republic on a wave of euphoria, with upbeat fans convinced of their passage into the last four and a potential repeat of the fairytale win of 1992.

On the streets of Copenhagen positivity reigns supreme among supporters, who after a traumatic start to their country's campaign at the European Championship are more upbeat than ever before.

Traumatised by watching playmaker Christian Eriksen almost die on the pitch following sudden cardiac arrest in their opening group match, the Danes have recovered to march into the last eight in impressive fashion.

A 4-1 thumping of Russia in their last Group B match saw them through to the knockout stage despite losing their first two games in the aftermath of Eriksen's collapse, and Kasper Hjulmand's side showed they were serious with a comfortable 4-0 win against Wales in the last 16.

Ricky Thomsen, a 34-year-old supporter, told AFP that Denmark are "riding on a wave that can't be stopped right now", backed by vociferous support at all four of their matches, three of them in the Danish capital.

"The support we see now is overwhelming... everyone is cheering, that's fantastic," said Christian Kokholm Rothmann, president of the Denmark supporters' association.

He said the manner of the team's response to Eriksen's collapse had galvanised supporters.

"The way the team and especially (captain) Simon Kjaer reacted made many Danes realise how the team cares about each other, how human they actually are."

- 'State of happiness' -

Denmark's colours of red and white dominate in the country's capital, with flags on display in shop windows and people proudly wearing the replica jersey -- which is out of stock due to a rush of sales -- whether or not a match is on.

The popularity of a talented team many had tipped as dark horses before the tournament has shot through the roof as people connected with the players following the Eriksen incident.

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"The whole country is in a state of happiness and joy over the team at the moment," says Poul Ferdinand, who follows the national team for tabloid daily Ekstra Bladet.

"The last two matches have been really excellent performances."

Such performances have fans dreaming of Denmark recreating their shock win of 1992, when they triumphed in Sweden after only being invited to the tournament following the break-up of Yugoslavia.

David Andersen, owner of a coffee shop in central Copenhagen, believes "there is a fair chance that we can do something historical" and win Denmark's second major honour.

"They are the best team we've had in my time," said the 33-year-old, who has developed a coffee in honour of the national team called 'Damsinho', the nickname of rising Danish star Mikkel Damsgaard.

- Roligans ready for Wembley -

According to the label, the coffee beans are collected in "seventh heaven", or the current mental state of Denmark fans, and Andersen is confident that the team will be walking out at Wembley for a semi-final clash with England, who face Ukraine in Rome on Saturday.

"We have the chance for sure, and I look forward to the game at Wembley. I predict a very close game against England," he says.

But before Andersen's prediction can become reality the Danes have to get past the Czechs in Baku where very few supporters will be travelling, mostly due to the Covid-19 quarantine rules that would stop anyone who has not been fully vaccinated from then travelling to London for the semi-final.

However should they make it to London, the Danish supporters nicknamed 'Roligans' are ready to bring the same rowdy support that has roared on Denmark at home in the tournament and even when they played in Amsterdam.

"Ive heard that Danish fans are supposed to be quiet ones but it's a very curious rumour," says Rothmann. "The organised support is actually not quiet, some of the fans are really, really loud."

cbw/map/jr/td/gj
Update: The story of Eddie Cox and the Black Mafia was covered in Kansas City news stories of the time. Read more about their rise and fall in the underworld here.

Eddie David Cox, an ex-Kansas City crime ring leader whose organization was briefly considered the top supplier of drugs and violence on the East Side, has been released early from prison on an order of compassionate release.

In mid-June, a federal judge granted a request seeking Coxs early release on a life sentence. Cox, 86, walked out a free man Thursday after spending the past 32 years behind bars, according to a legal representative who also did time with Cox in Leavenworth.

Most of Coxs life has been spent in prison. Prior to his most recent conviction in 1990, he was sentenced on charges of bank robbery and conspiracy to violate narcotics laws dating to the early 1970s.

Cox gained notoriety in Kansas City as a leader of what the Justice Department dubbed the Black Mafia of the East Side. Cox, who is white, was named as one of three leaders of the outfit, which was fueled by drug trade, prostitution and loan sharking. He was considered the mastermind of the criminal enterprise by federal authorities.

Between early 1969 until the mid-1970s, the so-called Black Mafia was thought to control the East Side. The federal government described Cox at the time as a cold-blooded killer accused of taking part in at least 17 murders in the Kansas City area. He was also accused of being involved in the killing of a federal narcotics agent in Chicago.

After he was released from prison, Cox was again found guilty by jury in 1990 after being charged with a dozen felonies, including conspiracy to distribute cocaine and impersonating a federal agent.

At the time Cox was pretending to be with the Drug Enforcement Agency  he carried a badge, a gun and drove a red Ford Crown Victoria  so he could shake down drug dealers, according to court records.

Witnesses later told authorities Cox was demanding weekly payments from some and threatening them with jail time otherwise. One recalled a joke Cox had made saying he was putting more drug dealers out of business than the Kansas City Police Department or any of the federal agencies combined. Several left town to avoid having to pay, the witness said.

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Cox has long been described as a cunning and highly intelligent man. He gained a reputation as one of the greatest jailhouse lawyers in the country.

Russell Marks, a paralegal helping Cox readjust to civilian life, said Cox helped set him on a good path while they were both in prison. Marks said Cox has spent many years helping other inmates become familiar with the legal system.

He added that for all the bad things from his past, Cox has spent recent years doing a lot of good. He was worthy of compassionate release, Marks said.

Compassionate release is rarely granted to prisoners. In the Western District of Missouri, 251 applications have been made and 30 granted not including Coxs, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Cox is being set up with an apartment and will work with the same law firm to focus on helping other prisoners seeking to be heard in court, Marks said.
For months, President Joe Biden has hailed the Fourth of July as the day America returns to normal. In Myrtle Beach, it seems, tourists are ready for just that, as officials expect it to be the biggest travel weekend since before the pandemic.

In recent weeks, hotel occupancy in the Grand Strand has shot up to near 90% and could go even higher this coming weekend. The cost of rooms has quickly risen as well, to an average daily rate of $215.03 per room, an increase of 14% in the last month.

Gone are the days of cheap, last-minute travel when hotels struggled to find travelers to come and stay and tourism tanked as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This holiday weekend, many hotels are likely to not have any vacancies, so book ahead of time, and sooner rather than later.

The differences are quite stark from last year, said Karen Riordan, Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce CEO. The ones that wake up Friday morning and say, Oh, this is Fourth of July weekend. Lets go to Myrtle Beach. Theyre going to start looking online, and theyre going to see that theres really not very much availability at all.

Visiting Myrtle Beach for the Fourth of July

Every part of the tourism industry has been affected by the recent surge in demand: air travel, restaurants, shopping, hotels and entertainment. No matter how many times you or your family have visited Myrtle Beach in the past, make sure to plan ahead for long lines, big crowds and unexpected changes to your travel plans.

Many parts of the hospitality industry are still facing a worker shortage and have been forced to adapt, tourism officials say.

Were still in the middle of our strongest season, and we are desperately still in need of staff. And I dont envision that changing anytime soon, Myrtle Beach Hospitality Association CEO Stephen Greene said.

LandShark Bar & Grill on the Myrtle Beach Boardwalk is offering $1,000 bonuses for new hires as the Grand Strand faces a historic worker shortage.

As a result of the worker shortage and supply-chain issues (there was a shortage of chicken wings and crab legs earlier this year, for example), many restaurants also might have scaled down menus. Greene said that repeat travelers might not be able to order their favorite items this time around, if they can get a table at all. Getting a reservation ahead of time, if possible, is recommended, he said, as some restaurants have seen hour-plus waits even for smaller tables of two or four.

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As much as people may feel some delays and may feel traffic, its a lot better than what we faced during the pandemic where nobody was open and you had limited opportunities to be out and about, Greene said. We have to take that as a blessing.

Most hotels are not providing daily housekeeping services to rooms, and many others have minimum stay durations, like three to four days, Greene said. Some hotels also might have empty rooms but still be at full capacity because they dont have the staff to maintain all of their rooms.

More than 50,000 people are expected to depart from Myrtle Beach International Airport Friday through Monday. The airport has seen a quick rise in the number of people flying in and out and now recommends arriving two, even three hours early to make sure passengers can get through security.

A lot of people are very, very surprised by that, (but) this is what happens when your airport starts to grow and is popular, Riordan said. You cant just dance through the line and think that you can give yourself a minimum amount of time. You really do need to prepare.

Keep an eye on your specific flight, too. American Airlines and Southwest have both had to cancel or delay flights in recent weeks due to staffing shortages and software malfunctions, respectively.

Compared to 2019, scheduled seat capacity and scheduled flights have increased more than 70%, as Myrtle Beach has continued to trend as a top vacation destination in the U.S., the airport said.

A Spirit Airlines plane lands at Myrtle Beach International Airport on May 23, 2021. The low-cost carrier has vastly expanded the number of flights to the Grand Strand as leisure travel becomes more popular as the pandemic wanes.

Myrtle Beach Mayor Brenda Bethune said its important for visitors and locals alike to not be in a hurry this weekend. Businesses will be doing as best as they can and may not be able to accommodate what everyone wants.

The restaurants are short staffed, so are the food delivery and supply companies. So, it is a chain reaction, but I think everybody is as prepared as we possibly can be, Bethune said. The Myrtle Beach area, the hospitality industry suffered so much all through COVID, so it is great to see that these businesses are able to recover more quickly and to welcome people back, even with all the struggles that theyre experiencing now. Theyre all happy to have business back and to see Myrtle Beach alive again.

One thing will be the same this weekend compared to any other year: traffic. Expect lots of traffic going to and from the beach, especially at night, and when heading toward any destination thats hosting a fireworks show. However, there will not be any special traffic detours in place like there were for Memorial Day or the Carolina Country Music Festival.

As for COVID-19, Horry County and South Carolina are still lagging far behind the presidents goal of 70% of adults vaccinated by the Fourth of July, but Riordan said cases have trended downward far enough that people can vacation without the cloud of worry that enveloped Myrtle Beach this time last year.

I think it psychologically is making people feel like were back now, she said. Its not perfect, and you cant say that recovery is complete, but we are back.

Fireworks?

Around the Grand Strand, there will be more than two dozen fireworks shows and related events to celebrate the Fourth of July. The shows and events are scattered across the region, with plenty viewable from the beach.

Looking to shoot off your own fireworks? Keep in mind that there is a shortage of fireworks nationwide, and that it is illegal to launch them within the city limits of any city in Horry County. There are also unincorporated parts of the county designated as fireworks free zones. Be sure to check to make sure it is legal to fire off in the location you chose before doing so.

Fireworks can be very dangerous, and anyone who uses fireworks needs to follow the manufacturers direction to a T, Horry County Fire spokesman Tony Casey said in an email. They should never, ever be pointed at anyone. Fireworks can start a fire, so it would be recommended to have a careful and practiced emergency plan in place before lighting them off. Keeping a hose around any kind of fire is a always a great idea. Exercise extreme, sober caution when using fireworks.

Fireworks shoot off the end of the Cherry Grove Pier for the piers July 4 celebration Thursday night.

The summer heat

Many people want to spend the Fourth of July outside, in the sun, enjoying the beach or on the water. The current forecast shows highs in the low 80s this weekend, but be wary of heat exhaustion  and sunburns. No one wants to end the weekend looking like a tomato.

Drink lots of water! Casey said. Heat stroke and heat exhaustion are no joke. Hydrate well and stay cooled off in the shade as much as possible.

Keep an eye out for children and pets as well; make sure they are drinking lots of water and have sunscreen on; and know where they are at all times when enjoying the Atlantic.

Pools, retention ponds and bodies of water like the ocean can be dangerous, Casey said. Designate a sober, responsible (adult) the sole job of being on kid duty, so you can have the assurance of safety on the July 4th holiday and throughout the summer.
North Carolinians likely wont be cut off from federal unemployment benefits early, after Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a bill Friday that would have stopped the money.

On top of the normal state-funded unemployment benefits, the federal government originally gave jobless people an extra $600 a week due to COVID-19, although that has since been reduced to $300. But Republican lawmakers wanted to stop North Carolina from taking those payments, saying they think the extra $300 a week is stopping people from going back to work.

With a severe labor shortage, now is no time to pay people extra money not to work, Sen. Chuck Edwards, a Republican from Hendersonville, said in late June when the legislature passed the bill.

Cooper said Friday that the extra federal money runs out in September anyway, and he saw no reason to cut people off from it early.

The federal help that this bill cuts off will only last a few more weeks and it supplements North Carolinas state benefits, which are among the stingiest in the country, Cooper said in a press release. Prematurely stopping these benefits hurts our state by sending back money that could be injected into our economy with people using it for things like food and rent.

Nationwide, many Republican-run states have ended their residents benefits early. But The New York Times reported recently that in Missouri, one of the first to cut off federal unemployment aid, there has been no sign that it worked to get more people back into the workforce.

Work-force development officials said they had seen virtually no uptick in applicants, The New York Times reported.

The Wall Street Journal also wrote about Missouri and quoted one business owner who said ending the benefits did help with hiring, and another who said it didnt.

In North Carolina, theres no question that some employers  especially in the service industry  are having trouble finding workers. The News & Observer reported last month that 80,000 fewer people are working in restaurants and hotels than before the pandemic began, and that Nearly every restaurant in the Triangle is trying to hire workers  servers, bartenders and especially cooks.

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But the bigger question is why people arent going back to work  Republicans have pointed to the federal $300 a week unemployment benefits while Democrats have pointed to the minimum wage and high cost of child care, among other factors.

In his veto announcement, Cooper said he would support a bill to provide businesses with funds for hiring bonuses.

The N.C. Senate passed a bill with that idea in early June, which had bipartisan support as well as backing from the N.C. Restaurant and Lodging Association, a service industry lobbying group. It would not have done away with federal benefits but would instead have allowed the money to be turned into $1,500 signing bonuses for anyone who got off unemployment and found a job.

However, even though it passed the Senate with the support of all the Republicans and about half the Democrats, it ran into ideological opposition in the House of Representatives, where conservatives said they wouldnt support any bill that kept the unemployment money.

So the version of the bill the legislature ended up passing, and which Cooper vetoed Friday, did not contain the $1,500 signing bonuses. Instead it would only have stopped the state from receiving the extra money from the federal government for unemployment.

It passed with no Democratic support in the Senate and only a few Democrats in the House, meaning GOP lawmakers are unlikely to be able to override Coopers veto.

For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.

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On The News & Observer's Under the Dome podcast, were unpacking legislation and issues that matter, keeping you updated on whats happening in North Carolina politics twice a week on Monday and Friday mornings. Check us out here and sign up for our weekly Under the Dome newsletter for more political news.
People look at the collapsed Champlain Towers South building from afar on Miami Beach in Surfside, Fla. on June 30, 2021.

People look at the collapsed Champlain Towers South building from the beach in Surfside, Fla. on June 30, 2021. Credit - Ysa Perez for TIME

In the days since the deadly collapse of a condo tower in Surfside, Florida, residents of Miamis waterfront buildings have found themselves looking up more often. Cracks in garage ceilings, corroded rebar in concrete columns, and signs of saltwater seepage after bad weathernot uncommon features of older seaside structures in this part of the stateare being seen with new and wary eyes. They are being documented on social media, spread rapidly on group chats and shared in unnerved emails to building managers and inspectors.

Sometimes it takes the exposure from a tragedy for people to really pay attention! one person commented on an Instagram video posted on Tuesday thats been viewed more than 620,000 times, which showed a long crack in the ceiling garage of an apartment building in Key Biscayne, an island off the coast of Miami.

The sudden collapse of a 13-story condo tower on June 24 just north of Miami Beach has left at least 18 people dead and more than 140 people still missing as of Thursday. The tragedy has shaken Miami residents who have grown used to natural disasters and regular warnings that they are in the crosshairs of climate change as rising sea levels threaten the citys coastline. But though its not yet clear what factors caused the building to crumble, experts say the fresh sense of panic that the Surfside disaster has set off could have ripple effects that shake years of breakneck growth in Miami real estate, threatening the regional economy which depends on a robust real estate sector.

I think this just makes the coast a lot less valuable, says Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at Tulane University who has led research on climate change and financial risk. That value plays out in the market, it plays out in public finance and it plays out in peoples perception of what it means to move to Florida.

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A memorial wall, set up on a nearby tennis court fence, full of posters of missing victims on June 30. Ysa Perez for TIME

For years, experts have warned that real estate in Miami is vulnerable to climate-induced rising sea levels and increasingly stronger storms. For those living on South Floridas coast, waking up with an ocean view comes with calculated risks. From June to November, homes can be battered by hurricane-force winds that force occupants to evacuate inland. Its not unusual for people to to wade through knee-deep water to get to their cars after a heavy rain, or watch U.S. Army Corps trucks dumping tens of thousands of pounds of fresh sand to replenish the beaches that serve as a buffer from the rising water. The City of Miami, population 470,000, is home to 26% of all U.S. homes at risk from rising seas, according to real estate site Zillow. According to studies conducted by the Risky Business Project, between $15 and $23 billion of property in the city could be underwater by 2050.

But all of this was supposed to happen gradually. The illusion of time allows for a certain dissonance, with booming real estate continuing to sell the dream of sunny Florida. It remains to be seen what roleif anyclimate-related conditions played in the collapse in Surfside, but the event has nonetheless brought to the fore concerns about the ability of the Miami real estate market to sustain its pace of growth as the region grows increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Before, when you hired an inspector to inspect your condo, you would never think that the building could just fall, says Miami real estate analyst Ana Bozovic. It just doesnt happen. Thats crazy.

An officer stands guard at the memorial wall as people and press take photos of Mayor of Miami-Dade County Daniella Levine Cava and Miami Heat basketball player Udonis Haslem. Ysa Perez for TIME

The immediate aftershocks of the disaster have played out in a raft of investigations and audits meant to reassure anxious residents. Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Cava-Levine ordered an immediate review of all buildings in the county that are five stories or taller and constructed more than 40 years ago. (The Surfside building was built in 1981, before Floridas building codes were strengthened after Hurricane Andrew devastated the area.) The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a federal agency that investigated the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11, has dispatched researchers to the site. The town of Surfside has also hired a leading structural engineer to analyze what caused the collapse and determine if the adjacent buildings are at risk.

But the tragedy has also focused outrage and public attention on the infighting, mismanagement and lack of transparency of some homeowners and condo associations, which in South Florida is worsened by the often astronomical cost estimates for fixes which may defer necessary maintenance. Residents of Champlain Towers South were looking at a $15 million assessment to repair major structural damage flagged by engineers, with owners being asked to pay between roughly $80,000 for one-bedroom units to $336,000 for the penthouse.

A sign, that reads "Surfside Strong", hangs off of the balcony of a nearby apartment building. Ysa Perez for TIME

Experts say it may take months before clues start to emerge in publicly reported data on what effects the Surfside collapse will have on real estate in the long term. Most immediately, more buyers may be reluctant to buy condos in older buildings located on the oceans edge out of concern that a building may have some of the same issues as the one in Surfside, leaving owners to sell at a steep discount or take their property off the market. In the medium term, insurance companies may decide to reprice their policies for oceanside condominiums, raising the cost of living there and likely decreasing their value. In a region where a significant share of the populationand the taxbaselives in close proximity to the ocean, this could have a ripple effect, drying up public coffers in a state where 30% of local government revenue comes from property taxes.

Speculation about this potential chain of events isnt anything new. Experts have warned for years that South Florida is particularly vulnerable to a climate-related real estate devaluation. In a January 2020 interview before he joined the Biden Administration, Brian Deese, who now heads the National Economic Council, told TIME that climate risk had not been adequately priced into housing in South Florida and that the region faced the possibility of devaluation as that awareness grows. Physical risks are not being appropriately priced in, Deese said. The degree of capital reallocation and the speed of that is going to be larger and happen more quickly than most market participants expect. The White House didnt respond to a request for a comment.

Flowers attached to barriers on the beach near where the Champlain Towers South collapsed. Ysa Perez for TIME

For now, concerns of buildings going underwater in the coming decades still seem distant. Condominium associations are reassuring residents that the factors in their own oceanfront buildings vary drastically from those of the Surfside building and that they should have peace of mind, according to emails seen by TIME. And as far as the market goes, demand in Miami was so high that it can survive a small dip following a one-off eventif thats what the Surfside disaster proves to be. The pandemic has driven the local market to record highs: from May 2020 to May 2021, sales of existing condos jumped 286%, from 563 to 2,176, according to the Miami Association of Realtors.

But for many who live here, the sudden wake-up call to the tangible and deadly consequences of ignoring costly inspections, maintenance and repairs in oceanfront properties may lead some to realize that their Florida dream is unsustainable. Indeed, Keenan, who is on the faculty of Tulanes architecture school, estimates that addressing the problems at the collapsed building could have been an even steeper bill that would draw into question the economics of the building altogether.

The fear is very real, says Bozovic, the real estate analyst. The older condo buildings dotting the beach may be hard hit in the short term, especially those around the site of the collapse, just north of Miami Beach, where she says buyers wont want to live in view of the site of the tragedy. People died there. Who wants to look at that? Its very sad.
A former Kansas City police sergeant said he remembers seeing crime ring leader Eddie Cox drive around in a Crown Victoria that looked like a police car.

Gary Jenkins, who was with the Kansas City Police Department from 1971 to 1996, described the vehicle as part of Coxs crime shtick.

Cox spent 32 years in prison after being handed down a life sentence on drug and firearm charges as well as impersonating an officer. According to court documents, he pretended to be a Drug Enforcement Administration officer, carrying a badge and gun and driving a red Ford Crown Victoria.

On several occasions, he presented himself as a federal agent and confiscated cash, cocaine and firearms.

Cox was granted a compassionate release by a federal judge and was freed Thursday from the federal penitentiary in Pekin, Illinois.

Eddie David Cox, a former leader of Kansas Citys Black Mafia, was released from prison Thursday. In an interview Friday, he said he plans on working as a paralegal at a law firm helping prisoners.

Black Mafia

As a sergeant supervising KCPDs intelligence unit, Jenkins said, We all knew who (Cox) was, he was pretty well known.

Cox, a white man, was one of the leaders in the so-called Black Mafia, along with James Eugene Richardson and James Phillip Doc Dearborn. The group controlled Kansas Citys East Side for a short time during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The crime ring was active in the drug trade, prostitution and loan sharking.

The organization was said to be responsible for 17 murders. In an interview Friday with Cox, he said he has never committed murder.

Eddie David Cox, 86, was part of a criminal organization in Kansas City that rose to notoriety in 1970. Cox was released from federal prison on Thursday.

Cox was known for being really bright,Jenkins said, but anyone who crossed the Black Mafia risked getting killed. Jenkins said he wasnt sure how the FBI learned Cox was posing as a federal agent, but that a couple of his officers later helped in Coxs arrest in 1989.

Organized crime in KC

Terence OMalley, a filmmaker who has made documentaries about organized crime in Kansas City, said the mob had a very pervasive presence in the 1960s and 1970s.

The main ring leader was Nick Civella, who was part of the Italian mafia. That group ran bars, restaurants and cash businesses like arcades and car washes. Other factions were more strong-armed, according to OMalley, and participated in truck hijackings and other violent crime.

OMalley said the Italian and Black mafias may have associated, but that the Italian mafia wasnt threatened because there was less money on Kansas Citys East Side.

The FBI caught on to organized crime activity in the 1980s in Kansas City and gutted the mafia, OMalley said.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. The first Nashville police officer ever charged with murder in an on-duty shooting reached an unexpected deal with prosecutors  mere days before he was set to go to trial.

Andrew Delke, who resigned from the force Thursday, will serve three years on a charge of voluntary manslaughter. He pleaded guilty Friday during a tense and emotional hearing that erupted in outbursts from the victim's mother and family.

Delke, 27, who is white, shot Daniel Hambrick, a 25-year-old Black man, three times in the back as he ran away after a traffic stop on July 26, 2018.

Delke was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting. Under the terms of the plea agreement, he is expected to serve three years. Details of any possible early release or probation were not available ahead of the court hearing. Voluntary manslaughter is a class C felony in Tennessee.

Andrew Delke sits in court before he pleads guilty to manslaughter on July 2, 2021, for the 2018 killing of Daniel Hambrick.

Hambrick's mother, Vickie Hambrick, addressed the court and exploded in anger, screaming: "I hate you."

Her emotional outbursts continued for minutes. She tried to knock over the prosecution's table. Delke was removed from the courtroom and Vickie Hambrick was escorted from the room by supporters and other family members.

Outside the courthouse Friday, protesters gathered, calling for justice for Hambrick.

"They need to know the decisions they are making are not OK with us," said Jamel Campbell-Hooch, a leader with Gideons Army, a local group pushing for police reforms. "Until we get there pressure, pressure, pressure and more pressure we are not OK with the way they treat Black lives and Black bodies."

Davidson County Sheriffs Office deputies watched the group as they stood along the perimeter of the courthouse.

Hambrick family urged judge to reject plea deal

Inside, court was called to order just before 9:30 a.m. At the start, Joy Kimbrough, the attorney for the Hambrick family, stood up and asked the judge to reject the plea.

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"On behalf of the family, the attorneys for the family and the general public, we're asking you as your citizens, citizens of this community, Judge Monte Watkins, that you reject this plea agreement," Kimbrough said.

Vickie Hambrick is comforted by family members as their attorney Joy Kimbrough reads victim impact statements in court as Andrew Delke pleads guilty to manslaughter on July 2, 2021, for the 2018 killing of Daniel Hambrick.

The judge started asking Delke questions. It led to an outburst from Hambrick's mother, who was one of several members of the Hambrick family in the courtroom.

"You're a damn liar," Vickie Hambrick said from the gallery when the judge asked Delke if he was on any medications or had any mental health issues.

He was the first Nashville police officer to be charged with premeditated murder for an on-duty shooting, and his ultimate conviction for the death through the plea remains the highest penalty handed down in similar circumstances.

He has maintained he shot in self defense after he saw Hambrick holding a gun.

Delke: 'I am responsible for her loss'

Friday morning, Assistant District Attorney Ronald Dowdy said the "shooting was not reasonably necessary." Delke echoed those words when he addressed the court.

"Mrs. Hambrick lost her son that day and I am responsible for her loss," Delke said. "I am deeply sorry for the harm my actions caused."

In a statement read on Vickie Hambrick's behalf, she said she disagreed with the plea deal.

"My son was murdered on video by Nashville police. My son has a right. He has a right to a public jury trial. I want citizens of this community to render a judgment," Vickie Hambrick said in the statement.

The statement continued: "There is not one hour that goes by that I do not think of Daniel. There is a void in me that cannot be filled. Nothing and no one compares to my precious son. I am angry, mad and disgusted but I pray that no other mother have to endure what I've endured these last three years."

Delke fired his service weapon four times, striking Hambrick twice in the back and once in the back of the head. Investigators found a gun near Hambrick's body, but surveillance footage preserved from the scene does not show Hambrick turning or aiming.

While video footage from surveillance cameras captured most of the foot chase through the apartment complex where the shooting took place, a crucial stretch of grass between houses, approximately 36 feet, was missing from the tape preserved from the scene. It's unclear if it ever existed. The two men crossed the so-called "void area" in seconds.

It's there that Delke told investigators he saw Hambrick turn and point the gun.

Delke's defense attorney, David Raybin, has argued he was following his training to stop what he saw as a threat to the neighborhood.

Debates over police training and policy

From the beginning, the case has raised debate about whether the criminal court system can bring justice to the victims of police shootings. The landmark murder trial was framed by prosecutors as a chance to hold police accountable to the people and an indictment of policy and training.

Hambrick's death galvanized the long-simmering effort to create a civilian watchdog group to investigate police misconduct. The Community Oversight Board was approved by voters in November 2018.

Hambrick's family sued the city in federal court, saying his death illustrated the "culture of fear, violence, racism and impunity" that exists within the police department. They said officers like Delke were trained from their first days to lean on lethal force and to discriminate against people of color.

Vicki Hambrick prays during a Mothers Over Murder meeting in Nashville, Tenn., Thursday, July 1, 2021. Metro Nashville police officer Andrew Delke will appear in court Friday morning to confirm a guilty plea and serve a three-year sentence for shooting Hambricks son Daniel Hambrick in 2018.

The city settled the wrongful death lawsuit earlier this year for $2.25 million.

After all of that, many activists said, the surprising end to the criminal case was underwhelming.

"It feels like they took the easy way out," said Rasheedat Fetuga, founder of the activist group Gideon's Army. "Im disappointed, and Im disappointed in myself for feeling disappointed because the system is what it is.

Sameka Hambrick, Daniel Hambrick's cousin, said the family was devastated by the decision.

Adam Tamburin, Natalie Neysa Alund, Brinley Hineman and Rachel Wegner contributed to this report.

Reach reporter Mariah Timms at mtimms@tennessean.com or 615-259-8344 and on Twitter @MariahTimms.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Ex-Tennessee officer pleads guilty in 2018 shooting death of Black man
By Swati Pandey

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Fresh COVID-19 outbreaks in Australia and a snail-paced vaccination rollout are starting to take the shine off the country's stunning economic recovery, souring the business mood and casting doubts over its path to post-pandemic life.

Sydney, Australia's largest city, this week entered its strictest lockdown since the pandemic began as the Delta variant of the virus spread out from the beach suburb of Bondi. Partial curbs were imposed across other major cities, limiting movement for 80% of the nation's population.

The mobility restrictions come amid mounting concerns about the sluggish and dysfunctional vaccination rollout in Australia, which currently has one of the lowest COVID-19 inoculation rates in the developed world at just 8% of the adult population.

The new challenges are starting to irk investors and businesses. Expectations are growing that policymakers will need to maintain current emergency levels of support for the economy rather than paring it back, pushing the Australian dollar to a six-month trough despite solid data on jobs, trade and credit growth this week.

"Covid remains a concern and a headwind for the Aussie," said Rodrigo Catril, senior forex strategist at National Australia Bank.

The currency hit a three-year high in February, led by Australia's economic strength and success in curbing the pandemic, prompting investors to price-in interest rate hikes from late 2022.

But some economists are now predicting a dovish tilt by the country's central bank at its monthly policy meeting next Tuesday, with the current Sydney lockdown expected to shave 0.1% off annual output.

Economists in a Reuters poll this week forecast the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) would choose to not extend its three-year yield target of 0.1% to November 2024, from April 2024 now, driven by stronger-than-expected economic data. [AU/INT]

"Though clearly the risk headed into the meeting...is that the Delta variant brings out the doves, and the RBA opt to roll to the November 2024 bond," said Eleanor Creagh, market strategist at Saxo Capital Markets.

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Shane Oliver, chief economist for Australian fund manager AMP, expects a third round of RBA quantitative easing at A$75 billion, higher than his previous expectation of A$50 billion. Most other economists have predicted a "flexible" setting.

The RBA's bond buying programme has pushed borrowing costs to all-time lows as the government ran up record budget deficits for its massive fiscal stimulus programmes.

In a sign of the enduring after-effects of the pandemic, the government's own projections show deficits out to 2060/61 compared to ambitious forecasts for surpluses in 2019, begging the need for strong productivity growth.

LACK OF VISION

Businesses are also frustrated, not just with the on-again, off-again lockdowns across the nation with just a handful of cases but the absence of a clear roadmap out of the pandemic.

Companies, led by Australia's largest employers' association, have been clamouring for borders to reopen.

"You look overseas and, of course, you are seeing Europe opening up but for some reason we are not in a hurry," said Simon Bernardi, managing director at tour operator Australia & Beyond Holidays.

Bernardi says he lost "hundreds of thousands of dollars" due to the latest state border closures and stay-at-home orders.

"Unfortunately it's driven by politics because it's easy for people to win elections if they lock everyone down," he added.

Drowning out the business case for reopening is the political reality that closed borders and a conservative approach win votes in Australia, as seen in two state elections recently.

Treasury estimates assume a reopening in mid-2022, though Prime Minister Scott Morrison, with an eye on an election some time in the year ahead, has refused to commit to a timeline.

Facing scathing criticism from all quarters, Morrison on Friday announced a vague roadmap out of the pandemic where lockdowns would be used as a "last resort". Yet, still absent was any firm timeframe for international borders to fully reopen.

Australia & Beyond's Bernardi thinks the damage is already done, with the effects set to be long-lasting.

"These lockdowns will impact us going forward too because people just aren't confident to book anymore. That's been a big challenge and it's been pretty miserable for this industry," he said.

(Reporting by Swati Pandey; Editing by Sam Holmes and Kim Coghill)
BERLIN (AP)  Germany is recommending that all people who get a first shot of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine switch to a different type of vaccine for their second shot. The aim is to increase the speed and effectiveness of vaccinations as the more contagious delta variant spreads.

Health Minister Jens Spahn conferred with his colleagues from Germany's 16 states on Friday, the day after the country's standing committee on vaccination issued a draft recommendation. In a statement, the committee said that according to current study results, the immune response from a mixture of AstraZeneca with an mRNA vaccine was significantly superior to that from two doses of AstraZeneca.

It recommended that the second dose with an mRNA vaccine  Germany uses those made by BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna  be administered four weeks or more after the first AstraZeneca shot. That is much shorter than the nine to 12 weeks the committee recommends between two doses of AstraZeneca.

The committee, known by its German acronym STIKO, didn't detail what studies its conclusion was based on. Germany's disease control center noted that it was a draft, and that a final recommendation with more detail and sourcing will follow. Researchers have said that mixing vaccines is likely safe and effective, but are still gathering data to be sure.

German authorities already decided in April that under-60s who had received a first AstraZeneca shot should as a rule get a second shot of an mRNA vaccine. The decision came after the AstraZeneca vaccine was linked to extremely rare blood clots in younger people. Germany recommends that under-60s consult with a doctor before taking it.

Spahn said Friday that enough mRNA vaccine is available to implement the new recommendation quickly and that it makes the AstraZeneca vaccine more attractive, with large quantities now arriving and the prospect of a much shorter wait for the second shot.

He said the head of STIKO told ministers that the combination of AstraZeneca and BioNTech protects as least as well as BioNTech-BioNTech as a combination, in some cases even better. But he also stressed that two doses of AstraZeneca give good protection. BioNTech-Pfizer has been the mainstay of Germany's campaign, with AstraZeneca a distant second in terms of doses administered.

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Germany is keen to keep upping the pace of its vaccination campaign even as new infections have sunk to their lowest level in months, pointing to the rise of the delta variant. Authorities believe it now accounts for more than half of new cases, and are keen to ensure that people get their second vaccine shots.

Only double-vaccinated protects well against delta, except in the case of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Spahn said.

As of Wednesday, Germany had given at least one shot to 55.1% of its population, and 37.3% were fully vaccinated. That's a good figure, but it's still not enough, Spahn said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is 66, recently received a second shot of Moderna's vaccine after taking a first shot of AstraZeneca. Her spokesman said that was a conscious effort to encourage people not to be afraid if they are advised to get a mix of shots.
The meeting, hosted at Johnson's Chequers country residence on what will be Merkel's last trip to Britain as chancellor, was officially aimed at deepening relations.

However, Johnson is also seeking to argue that Britain's advanced vaccine program should permit its citizens to travel abroad more widely this year - something a hard-hit travel industry says it needs to survive after more than a year of pandemic restrictions.

But while Britain looks at easing quarantine requirements for the fully vaccinated when they return from holiday, some European states including Germany are implementing a period of quarantine for British arrivals, regardless of vaccination status.
(Bloomberg) -- Sanjeev Gupta has fallen out with one of his top aides over the sale of his companys aluminum assets, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The clash with Jay Hambro, chief investment officer at Guptas GFG Alliance, has reopened the competition for the groups aluminum unit, which includes Europes largest aluminum smelter at Dunkirk, France, the people said.

Hambro has angered Gupta by backing a bid from U.S. private equity group American Industrial Partners. Now Gupta is considering proposals from several others, including commodity traders Glencore Plc and Trafigura Group, the people said, noting that AIP could yet secure the deal if it improves its offer.

The competition for Guptas aluminum unit, which could be worth close to $1 billion including debt, highlights the changing fortunes of the businessman. He has been fending off creditors since the collapse of his main lender Greensill Capital in March, and is facing a U.K. investigation into suspected fraud and money laundering. Still, soaring steel and aluminum prices have made many of his assets attractive to potential buyers.

A spokesman for GFG Alliance said in response to questions that the group was focused on the refinancing of its business, and that its mergers and acquisitions team have led many acquisitions for GFG and have always acted with utmost integrity and professionalism.

Hambro, who remains in his role, couldnt immediately be reached for comment. AIP didnt respond to an emailed request for comment.

Relationship Soured

Hambro, a scion of the British banking family, joined Guptas group in 2016 and has been one of his closest and most senior aides. However, the relationship between the two men soured after Hambro became involved with AIPs bid for the aluminum assets, the people said.

In April, AIP bought most of the senior debt on Guptas two main aluminum assets, the Dunkirk smelter and the Duffel rolling mill in Belgium, putting it in position to buy them. Under AIPs proposal, Hambro would have left GFG when the assets were sold and taken a job as a top executive of the newly-separate aluminum group, the people said.

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Gupta, disappointed by Hambros willingness to desert him as well as the relatively low price offered by AIP, is now considering rival proposals. Glencore has offered a prepayment for aluminum that would help Gupta to repay senior creditors of the Dunkirk smelter, while Trafigura -- which also holds a portion of the roughly $250 million in senior debt -- has also indicated its interest in the smelter.

Spokespeople for Glencore and Trafigura declined to comment. Details of the refinancing talks with Glencore were first reported by the Financial Times.

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Jul. 1A brief hearing Thursday in Harford County Circuit Court was the culmination of nearly two years of stress and worry for McKenzie Lee Wright, as attempted murder and other charges against her were dropped by prosecutors.

Following almost two years home detention, jail time and wondering, "Am I going to jail today," Wright said after the hearing there is no way for her to get back to normal.

"This is just going to make me grow," she said.

Wright, 26, of Churchville, was twice indicted on charges of attempted murder, accused of striking her boyfriend with a car during a drunken, early morning argument in September 2019.

Her defense attorneys argued that a "knowingly false statement" penned by the arresting officer from the Aberdeen Police Department was a deciding factor in Wright initially being held without bond, and her two indictments.

In the first case against Wright filed on Sept. 27, 2019, police wrote in charging documents that Wright "got so mad at [her boyfriend] that she got inside her Hyundai, and struck [him] with the vehicle while he was standing in the street."

Her attorneys filed a motion to dismiss, calling the statement false, after the prosecution disavowed the officer's statement at Wright's second bail review hearing on Nov. 20, 2019, when she was released after being in jail for weeks. A major factor in her bail consideration was the severity and intentional nature of the crime.

The initial charges were dropped at a February 2020 hearing, where Assistant State's Attorney Cristin Treaster said she recognized something "wrong" with the first case against Wright and moved to correct it. But a new grand jury was convened and certified the same charges against Wright about a week before that hearing, leading to a second indictment.

Defense attorney Karen Jones said after Thursday's hearing that grand jury proceedings are secret, but she believes the same false statement was used to certify the second case against Wright.

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Because of the false statement, defense attorneys wrote in a motion to dismiss the second case, Wright was held without bail for weeks on the elevated charges of attempted first-degree murder.

Deputy State's Attorney for Harford County Gavin Patashnick said Thursday that the case was not able to move forward because witnesses and the alleged victim were not cooperating. But that does not mean the case can't be indicted again.

"Our office constantly reviews cases and, to the extent we are able to do that, of course we will move forward," he said.

Jones said an expert contacted by the defense said Wright's boyfriend's injuries were not consistent with being hit by a car, and maintained that he had been "car-surfing."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines car-surfing as riding on the outside of a car being driven by another person.

"This case should not have been prosecuted," Jones said Thursday.

Though the case against her was dropped, Wright said she does not know what she will do next, but will not be the same person as before.

Since she was charged in September 2019, Wright had trouble finding work, she said. Nasty comments on the internet followed her indictment. She lost friends  Wright ventured that she spoke to half as many people now as she did before the charges  and out in public, she was persona non grata.

"They may not point me out, but they definitely recognize me," Wright said of passersby.

Jones said "there certainly is" a opportunity for a civil case, but the family is weighing its options.

A message sent to an Aberdeen Police Department spokesperson was not immediately returned by 4:30 p.m. Thursday.

In February, Aberdeen police Lt. Will Reiber said that there had been no formal complaint filed about the officer's misstatement and no investigation has been opened.
Lucia Guara may have been just a kid, but she wasnt too young to want to make the world a better place.

Last fall, she asked her dad, Marcus Guara, to mail a letter for her. It was addressed to St. Judes Childrens Research Hospital, and it was overflowing with cash she had saved, the largess of birthday gifts and a particularly generous Tooth Fairy.

Why was she sending this bounty to St. Jude, which treats childhood cancers and pediatric diseases? Because they need it more than I do.

The story, which Lucias proud father posted on his Facebook page, motivated him to create a fundraiser of his own for the hospital.

What Lucias unselfish act might have inspired in the future, we cant know.

The Guara family  Marcus, 52; Lucia, 10; mother Anaely Rodriguez, 42; and Emma, 4  died in the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium, which fell in a crushing rumble of concrete and steel last week. Marcus Guara was pulled from the remains on Saturday, while the rest of his family was recovered Wednesday. They lived on the eighth floor.

There is no scale with which to measure the depths of the tragedy in Surfside, and trying to weigh the relative values of so many distinct and precious lives is pointless. But in terms of hope and promise, the loss of the Guara family hits hard, in Miami and around the rest of the world.

There will be other casualties of this disaster, and some of them will be children (Jonah Handler, 15, was pulled from the wreckage alive last week.) But the younger Guaras are the first young children whose bodies have been found, and they are a painful and vivid reminder of the unbearable nature of this catastrophe.

Lucia and Emma Guara

Everyone is beside themselves feeling tremendous sadness for these families who were lost, said Father Juan Sosa at St. Josephs Catholic Church in Miami Beach, where the Guaras were members. When you talk about the deaths of the senior citizens, they have lived their lives, and we thank God for their lives and their contributions to the world. But children havent even begun to live their lives. The girls each had their whole life ahead of them.

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The church, three blocks from Champlain Towers, was a part of the Guaras lives. Lucia had her first communion there in 2019; Emma was baptized on Sept. 10, 2016.

The girls also loved the beach they lived on, posing for photos that found their way to their fathers social media page. Marcus, a graduate of Christopher Columbus High School and captain of the rowing team at the University of Miami, taught his girls how to throw up the U sign, as any good Hurricane fan would.

Guaras cousin Peter Milian said that siblings Manuel Guara and Annette Guara-Hurst were devastated by the news about their brother, who worked as a regional sales manager for New York-based bed and bath textile company Kassatex.

He was a great brother, uncle, cousin, son, and loved his daughters passionately, Milian said. He loved life.

His former teammates on the UM rowing team paid tribute to Guara on miamihurricanes.com.

The UM crew team was a big family then and I have always considered Marc like the big brother I never had, posted Deb Sullivan, class of 1992.

Anaely Rodriguez attended Miami Dade College and worked there in the payroll department from 2013-14. She was a good co-worker, said her colleague Ronald Rodriguez. Fun, had an infectious smile and laugh and definitely had the spirit of a fighter.

Marcus Guara and Anaely Rodriguez with daughters Lucia and Emma.

In 2014, she took a job at Florida International University, working in graduate programs student services for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and later as a career development analyst at the Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management.

While she was working at FIU, she also earned a bachelors degree in business in 2019.

She was the archetypal Cuban woman who wanted to get ahead, who wanted an education, who wanted to be a professional, and at the same time she had two children and a very loving husband, said Allan Richards, who was associate dean of the journalism school when Rodriguez worked there (hes now an associate professor). To me she represented the strong Cuban woman who handled work, her education and her family.

At a press conference Wednesday, a visibly moved Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava echoed the feelings of everyone who has learned the fate of the family seen smiling from photographs, wearing sunglasses, carefree and happy.

The loss of our children is too great to bear, she said. Our community, our nation and the world, we are all mourning with these families.

Lucia Guara

Miami Herald staff writer Joan Chrissos contributed to this story.

Here are the names and stories of the missing and dead in Surfside condo collapse
The Daily Beast

YouTube/Rise of the MoorsA cadre of armed men from a militia group called the Rise of the Moors shut down a highway outside of Boston for more than nine hours on Saturday morning after allegedly refusing to comply with police orders and taking off into the woods with guns.The group says on their website that theyre Moorish Americans dedicated to educating new Moors and influencing our Elders. In YouTube videos of the incident, they claimed they were only trying to travel peacefully to their 
HONG KONG (Reuters) - A Hong Kong court denied bail on Friday to pro-democracy activist Chow Hang-tung, who was re-arrested on the eve of the anniversary of the former British colony's handover to Beijing and the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party.

Chow, the vice-chairwoman of a group that organises annual vigils for the victims of China's 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, was released this month after being arrested for promoting an unauthorised assembly on June 4.

She was again arrested on Wednesday and charged with incitement to knowingly take part in an unauthorised assembly.

Magistrate Veronica Heung of the West Kowloon court denied her bail, but she can next seek bail on July 9. The case was adjourned until July 30.

Chow, a barrister, could not be reached for comment. Earlier in June she had rejected the charge as "absurd".

Concerns are growing over freedom in the financial hub, which Britain returned to China on July 1, 1997, under a "one country, two systems" formula of government that guaranteed wide-ranging autonomy not seen on the mainland.

Government critics say authorities have shrunk those rights, including freedom of speech and assembly, and are now using a contentious national security law to crush dissent.

Officials in Beijing and Hong Kong reject those assertions and say the law was necessary to plug gaping holes in the city's national security defences exposed during anti-government protests in 2019.

On Thursday, as on June 4, thousands of police officers, as well as armoured vehicles and trucks carrying water cannon fanned out across the city to discourage gatherings.

Tens of thousands of people traditionally rally on the handover anniversary to protest against anything from Beijing's grip on the city to unaffordable housing. Police had banned gatherings this year, citing the coronavirus.

(Reporting by Jessie Pang; Writing by Marius Zaharia; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
HONG KONG (AP)  A Hong Kong police officer who was stabbed in the back has been moved from critical to serious condition, officials said Friday, indicating a likely recovery from the incident in which the assailant later stabbed himself and died.

Authorities were still looking into the motivation behind Thursday night's attack, which followed annual commemorations of Hong Kongs handover from British to Chinese control in 1997, as well as the centenary of the founding of Chinas ruling Communist Party.

The attack comes amid a sweeping crackdown on political dissent, with authorities banning large-scale demonstrations and arresting scores of pro-democracy activists over the past year.

Authorities said that the assailant was a 50-year-old man, but did not identify him. He allegedly stabbed the police officer in the back with a knife, and then turned the knife on himself.

Hong Kong Security Secretary Chris Tang said it appeared to be a terrorist act committed by a single individual that he described as a lone wolf," but said others were guilty of egging-on such violence.

I would like to state that it was not just the assailant who was responsible. There are also many people who have encouraged violence and incited hatred toward society and the country, and have beautified these violent acts, he said Friday.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said it was very regrettable that this has come at a time when everyone in Hong Kong sets great store by the peaceful situation we have achieved."

The officer was attacked outside the Sogo department store in the busy Causeway Bay shopping district where police were standing guard to prevent demonstrations.

Michael Gazeley, a Hong Kong resident who was at the scene when the attack happened, said that there was heavy police presence in the shopping district and that the situation seemed peaceful before the attack happened.

As soon as the attack happened, a mass of police ran to help their colleague, said Gazeley.

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Hong Kong's hospital authority on Friday confirmed the improvement in the condition of officer, who has not been identified apart from that he was a 28-year-old member of the elite Police Tactical Unit.

Hong Kong has protected the identities of police officers since the onset of increasingly violent demonstrations in 2019 led by pro-democracy protestors opposed to the semi-autonomous region's Beijing-backed government.

Demonstrations largely ended after opposition figures won big in elections for local councilors, but the central government swiftly moved punish those behind the protests and stamp out any challenges to its authority.

That was spearheaded by the imposition last year of a sweeping national security law and followed this year by alternations to representation in the city's Legislative Council to ensure a strong pro-Beijing majority. Both measures were enacted by China's ceremonial legislature, the National People's Congress, without Hong Kong voters being given a say.

On Friday, pro-democracy activist Chow Hang Tung  known for helping to organize the annual June 4 candlelight vigils in commemoration of the 1989 crackdown in Beijings Tiananmen Square  was charged in court for inciting others to join an unauthorized assembly.

Chow was first arrested on June 4 and then released on bail, but was rearrested this week a day ahead of the handover anniversary. She was not given bail on Friday.

Large-scale independent political gatherings have been banned and most opposition figures have been imprisoned, intimidated into silence or fled abroad.

Last month, police arrested seven journalists and executives of the now-defunct Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper that was a vocal critic of Hong Kong and Chinas governments. Authorities also froze $2.3 million in assets linked to Apple Daily, forcing it to cease operations last week.

___

Associated Press news assistant Matthew Cheng contributed to this report.
James Jerome Youngblom, a Cal State Stanislaus biology professor admired for his research in molecular genetics, died while hiking alone in Yosemite National Park. He was 64.

Youngblom was hiking from White Wolf to the Glen Aulin trailhead, according to park officials. His body was discovered in LeConte Falls on June 25.

The genetics professor taught at the university for nearly 31 years and served as chair of the Department of Biological Sciences. He taught genetic biotechnology courses and led undergraduate student research programs.

Youngblom was "a great department chair" and "one of the kindest people I've known, David Evans, dean of the College of Science at Cal State Stanislaus, said in a statement. He loved his job and worked incredibly hard. His focus was always on students. Our hearts go out to all [his] friends and family at this difficult time.

Students and peers described Youngblom as a kind, passionate educator whose dedication to teaching and his zest for being outdoors could be superseded only by his love for San Francisco Giants baseball.

I believe his passion for biology and genetics was infectious, Cassandra Morden, a former student said in an email. He inspired and bolstered my love for genetics and helped me define my career path.

As a professor, Youngblom was enthusiastic about genetics and the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR, former student Ethan Dawson said. He would often invite students to get involved in his genetic research lab, providing real-world exposure to cutting-edge technology.

He also often advocated for underserved students of color, Livier Camarena-Sanchez said. Before becoming his student, she was seeking research programs to join at the university. Because she was unable to join a federally funded program, Youngblom invited Camarena-Sanchez to join his program, which eventually landed her a position in his research lab during her senior year.

From 2011-15, Youngblom led the Central Valley Math and Science Alliance, a five-year, federally funded club at the university aimed at providing resources and aid for underprivileged STEM students like Camarena-Sanchez.

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Before arriving at Cal State Stanislaus in 1990, Youngblom graduated with a bachelor's degree from Winona State University and attended graduate school at the University of Minnesota, where he received his doctorate in cell biology.

Youngblom is survived by his wife and two children.

Anyone who may have seen Youngblom in the area of White Wolf, Pate Valley or the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne from June 22-25 is asked to contact the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch at (888) 653-0009 or submit an online tip on its website.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Japanese prosecutors said Friday they are seeking jail sentences of nearly three years for an American father-son duo who admit helping former Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn jump bail and flee Japan.

The prosecutors told a Tokyo court they are seeking a sentence of two years, 10 months for former special forces operative Michael Taylor, and two years, six months for his son Peter.

"Michael Taylor... played a leading role. His responsibility is extremely grave," one of the prosecutors said, calling Ghosn's "unprecedented" December 2019 escape a "sophisticated and bold crime".

"The case considerably infringed upon our country's criminal justice," he added.

The Taylors have been in custody since their arrest in May 2020 in the United States for helping smuggle Ghosn onto a private jet in an audio equipment case so he could fly to Lebanon, which has no extradition agreement with Japan.

Ghosn had led Nissan for nearly two decades, earning celebrity status as a rare foreign executive to thrive in Japan -- until he was arrested in 2018 on allegations of financial crimes, which he denies.

The Taylors, who had faced a maximum of three years in jail each, were extradited to Japan earlier this year.

They first appeared in court last month, when they admitted to helping orchestrate Ghosn's audacious flight.

Earlier this week, the Taylors said they now "regret" their role in Ghosn's escape, bowing deeply in court as they apologised, according to local media.

The former auto tycoon, who remains an international fugitive in Lebanon, was out on bail while awaiting trial on four counts of financial misconduct when he fled, transiting in Turkey before arriving in Lebanon.

The escape was hugely embarrassing for Japanese authorities. US prosecutors called it "one of the most brazen and well-orchestrated escape acts in recent history".

Ghosn was questioned last month by French investigators in Lebanon over a series of alleged financial improprieties.

His former Nissan aide Greg Kelly is on trial in Tokyo over allegations he helped underreport Ghosn's salary. A verdict in his case is expected later this year.

si-kaf/je
FBI

A former cop accused of taking part in the Capitol riot was granted a pre-trial release in the weeks after his arrest, on the condition that he not own any guns.

But in the months since, he has secretly bought at least 34 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunitionincluding armor-penetrating roundsand tried to disguise some of the payments as being for wedding photos, according to an FBI search warrant affidavit filed Friday.

Now prosecutors are asking a judge to revoke Thomas Robertsons bail, and arrest him for violating his pretrial release conditions for the second time in six months.

Robertson, who was a sergeant with the Rocky Mount, Virginia Police Department until he was fired in late January for his alleged role in the sacking of the Capitol, has pleaded not guilty to obstruction of an official proceeding, aiding and abetting, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, and disorderly conduct in the Capitol building. His attorney, Mark Rollins, did not immediately respond to The Daily Beasts request for comment.

Two Cops, Including a Trained Sniper, Arrested for Taking Part in Capitol Insurrection

The day after the insurrection, Robertson wrote on Facebook, Being nice, polite, writing letters and sending emails hasn't worked. Peaceful protests haven't worked. Millions of FB posts, tweets ,and other social media hasn't worked. All thats [sic] left is violence and YOU and your Friends on the other side of the isle [sic] have pushed Americans into that corner. The picture of Senators cowering on the floor with genuine fear on their faces is the most American thing I have seen in my life. Once....for real....you people ACTUALLY realized who you work for.

Robertson also insisted he would do whatever it took to disrupt then-President-elect Joe Bidens inauguration, posting a Facebook message on Jan. 10 saying he would be going to fight the cocksuckers who stole our country, in DC on the 20th for sure. By bullet or ballot restoration of the republic is coming, he wrote.

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After his Jan. 13 arrest, Robertsonwhose alleged partner in crime at the insurrection boasted that he pissed in Nancy Ps toiletwas released pending trial. Among the conditions set by Judge G. Michael Harvey: Robertson was forbidden from owning any guns or destructive devices while his case worked its way through the system. Any guns he already had were to be relocated by Jan. 15, the affidavit states.

On Jan. 19, law enforcement executed a search warrant at Robertsons Ferrum, Virginia home. There, they seized eight firearms in Robertsons possession, including three Glock handguns. During a search of a shed on the property, officers found large amounts of ammunition, as well as what appeared to be equipment used for re-loading ammunition, according to the affidavit.

Cops hauled Robertson back into court that day, where Harvey gave him a second chance and once again instructed him not to possess a firearm, destructive device, or other dangerous weapon, states the affidavit.

FBI

Ten days later, Robertson was indicted by a Washington, D.C. grand jury. Less than three weeks after that, the FBI received information indicating that Robertson was involved in the purchase, sale, and possession of firearms and ammunition, and got a warrant to search his email account.

On February 13, 2021, the [redacted]@yahoo.com account received an email that was Generated from: ar15.com, the affidavit states.

Hey TomI sold you the M855A1, it read, apparently referring to a powerful 5.56mm round used by the U.S. military. [I]f youre interested, or know anyone that is, I have more M85561 available as well as M80A1.

I absolutely am interested, Robertson replied, according to the affidavit. Price and quantity?

After a bit of back-and-forth between Robertson and the seller, whose name is redacted in court documents, Robertson replied that he would take 2,000 rounds of M855A1 ammo for $3,600, and that he can do venmo, zelle, or MO. Robertson explained in a follow-up email that he couldnt use PayPal as the company had suspended [his] account because someone felt the need to put gun stuff in an email, states the affidavit.

Robertson allegedly sent the money via Venmo, whose records the FBI subpoenaed. They showed that Robertson marked the $3,600 payment as Wedding Photos. According to the affidavit, he then sent the seller a screenshot of the transaction, which read, You paid [redacted], and a debit from Robertsons account showing -$3,600.

When spring rolled around, Robertsonwhose release conditions were never modified to allow him to own guns while out on bailallegedly upped his game.

On April 12, Robertson paid $530 for Armor Piercing Ap/Black Tip 192 Round Sealed Spam Can, which was to be shipped from Texas to his home in Virginia, according to the affidavit. The next day, Robertson allegedly ordered an Inland General Motors U.S. Military M1 Carbine 30us Semi-auto Rifle for $995. A CMP M1 Garand Unissued for $1,500 followed, a Bandolier of US Spec AYR Armor Piercing Ammunition, and more, for a grand total of 34 firearms the FBI says Robertson illicitly procured after he was indicted.

On June 29, the FBI raided Robertsons home for a second time. This time, they found an arsenal of 34 firearms... a loaded M4 rifle, ammunition, and a partially assembled pipe bomb, the affidavit states. In the outbuilding where Robertson allegedly stored his ammunition, agents found a box labeled with the words Booby Trap. Inside the box, agents found a metal pipe with two ends caps, with a fuse inserted into a hole that had been drilled into the device; epoxy had been used around the sides of the fuse to secure it. It did not contain explosive powder, but agents say they found a cache of it nearby. They also found a loaded M4 on his bed.

FBI

What they didnt find at Robertsons home, however, were the newly purchased gunsor Robertson. When they tracked him down that same day, Robertson told agents that he had bought the weapons online, but that they had been shipped to licensed dealers and he hadnt picked them up yet.

The owner of Tactical Operations, a Federal Firearms License broker in Roanoke that serves as an intermediary for online gun purchases, told agents in an interview that Robertson had 34 firearms waiting for him at the store, according to a motion filed Wednesday by prosecutors seeking to revoke Robertsons bail.

It continues: Defendant Robertsons extensive and flagrant violations of the terms of his release order, including numerous violations of the federal firearms laws, strongly support revocation of his pretrial release in this case. This conduct, coupled with his calls for future violence, shows that no condition or combination of conditions can adequately protect the public from the defendant, and warrants immediate action by the court through the issuance of an arrest warrant.

Robertson is due back in court on Aug. 3.

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July 2 is now Thurgood Marshall Day in Maryland.

With proclamations from Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, July 2, Marshalls birthday, will now honor the Baltimore native and first African American justice on the Supreme Court.

Marshall, born in Baltimore in 1908, worked as a lawyer and civil rights activist before his time as a justice. He argued groundbreaking civil rights cases on behalf of the NAACP, including Brown v. Board of Education, that resulted in the Supreme Court ruling that segregated schools were unconstitutional.

Thurgood Marshall was a formidable and transformational figure in the history of this country, said Chief Judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals Robert M. Bell during a news conference. Thurgood Marshall moved this country closer to the more perfect union which the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Marshall grew up in West Baltimore, and attended elementary school at P.S. 103, also known as Henry Highland Garnet School, where community members gathered Friday to celebrate the first Thurgood Marshall Day.

The former school, now a vacant red brick building emblazoned with a No Loitering sign and marred by chipping paint, was the epicenter of Marshalls neighborhood growing up, just blocks away from his house, church and family store.

Larry S. Gibson, author of Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice, said P.S. 103 in Upton was the most elite school at the time for Black children in Baltimore.

Cynthia Shaw, a 1956 graduate of P.S. 103, said that growing up, she did not know Marshalls legacy, or that his activism was the reason many of her classmates went on to integrated high schools.

When we attended, we didnt know anything about Thurgood Marshall, Shaw said.

But Shaw said she felt his legacy in the strong sense of community and Black leadership that P.S. 103 created.

Now, with the designation of Thurgood Marshall day and plans to redevelop and reopen the former school on Division Street as a community center, Shaw said she hopes children growing up in Upton will know Marshalls name and the legacy of the school.

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Thurgood Marshall can shine within the walls, Shaw said.

The new building will undergo an $8.2 million renovation, according to the Rev. Alvin C. Hathaway Sr., senior pastor of Union Baptist Church and president of Beloved Community Services Corp., the nonprofit leading the renovation.

The new project will create space for legal offices, gun violence prevention work and community outreach programs targeted at engaging young people in West Baltimore. There will also be exhibits to honor Marshall as well as U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, who donated artifacts from his campaign to the project prior to his death in 2019.

The project will take nine months of construction, and aims to break ground in January 2022, opening by the end of the year.

Organizers hope to create resources for the Upton and West Baltimore community, while allowing the values and activism of Marshall to live on in a new generation, according to Hathaway.

Justice Thurgood Marshall will be to Baltimore as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is to Atlanta, Hathaway said. He is our native son.

The National Park Service is also studying whether P.S. 103 could be designated as a National Park unit, which would formalize P.S. 103s place in the history books of Baltimore. Currently, Fort McHenry is the only National Park unit in Baltimore.

In a statement, Gov. Larry Hogan praised Marshall and the new holiday designated in his honor.

It is because of him and the example he set that, while there is still work left to be done, our state and our nation have come a long way in the struggle for equal rights and equal opportunity, he said.
"The Kissing Booth 3" is coming this summer. Netflix

Netflix's "Kissing Booth" film is set to be released on August 11.

The third film was shot in tandem with the second.

The main cast of "The Kissing Booth 2" will all be reprising their roles in the third movie.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

The leading cast members from "The Kissing Booth 2" will be returning.

Joel Courtney and Joey King in "The Kissing Booth 2." Marcos Cruz/Net

Based on self-published book series by British author Beth Reekles, the trilogy of films follows the lives of Elle (Joey King), her boyfriend Noah (Jacob Elordi), and her best friend Lee (Joel Courtney).

During Netflix's #TKBFanFest livestream event last year, the films' main cast, including King, Courtney, Taylor Zakhar Perez (who played Marco), Maisie Richardson-Sellers (who played Chloe), and Meganne Young (who played Rachel), said that they are all set to appear in the third installment.

Elordi is also set to reprise his role as Noah.

The movie has already been filmed.

Joel Courtney played Lee in both "Kissing Booth" movies, and he's returning for the third. Netflix

During last year's Netflix #TKBFanFest livestream, Courtney, who plays Lee in the films, said the third installment of the "Kissing Booth" movies was already in post-production.

The second and third films were shot in tandem in South Africa.

King, the star of the films and executive producer of "The Kissing Booth 2," added that it was "the hardest secret to keep ever."

The teaser trailer suggests the third film will delve deeper into Elle's indecision about college.

The short trailer includes a shot of Elle declining a call from Harvard. Netflix

Fans can assume that the third film will pick up where the second left off  specifically with Elle still unsure about where she wants to go to college.

"The Kissing Booth 2" ended with Elle telling Noah, Lee, and Rachel that she was wait-listed by both Harvard and Berkeley when, in reality, she was accepted by both.

In Netflix's teaser trailer for "The Kissing Booth 3," the group of four is hanging out by a pool when Elle receives a phone call from the Harvard admissions office.

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She declines the call and bypasses Noah's questions about it.

The film is set to be released on Netflix in August.

"The Kissing Booth 3" is set to debut this summer. Netflix

Luckily, fans of the franchise will not have to wait too long to find out where Elle's next stage of life will take her.

"The Kissing Booth 3" is set to debut on Netflix on August 11.

Read more:

Read the original article on Insider
Its shaping up to be a duel of which candidate is more conservative. And one of them is taking the unusual campaign approach of giving away a gun to try to attract voters over the July 4 holiday.

Republican U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie of Lewis County, who has been in Congress since 2012 representing Northern Kentuckys 4th District, claims on his campaign website that he is Kentuckys most conservative Congressman on the job.

He often has drawn public attention for advocating libertarian policies while typically voting for and being involved with the Republican Party.

Now, Claire Wirth of Oldham County is starting her Republican campaign to unseat Massie next year with inspiration from controversial freshman U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia. She has been touting since May 24 on her campaigns Facebook page the giveaway of an AM-15 pistol and how to contribute to her campaign.

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Vanceburg

Massie said he understands why anyone would want a chance to win a free gun but this candidate is full of other surprises, like the fact she just recently started living in Kentucky. Massies campaign also produced records that showed Wirth did not start voting in Kentucky elections until the 2019 general election.

Wirth, who is involved in real estate and investment with Wirth Capital and is making her first bid for public office, said she moved with her family to Kentucky in January 2018 from Arizona.

She said her family was looking for a red state that didnt have the problems Arizona has with illegal immigrants.

This is the reason we moved from Arizona to Kentucky only to find out our Congressman was voting against the border wall. Illegal immigration costs the United States over $132 billion per year, so this is very much an issue any fiscal conservative should address.

Massie voted in February 2019 to support a Democratic-led resolution to block then-President Trumps plan to build a wall on the countrys southern border, saying it violated the Constitution.

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Massie said his last primary opponent couldnt run to the right of me, so he ran to the Trump of me. That strategy yielded him a whopping 19 percentof the vote. Massie defeated Covington attorney Todd McMurty in the 2020 GOP primary election.

Wirth is hoping that Trump will endorse her in the race. Her website notes that Trump said in March 2020 that his party should throw Massie out of the GOP.

Several of his congressional colleagues and Trump got angry at Massie. His opposition to a $2 trillion coronavirus relief package forced lawmakers to return to the Capitol to vote on it. Leaders of both parties had hoped to pass the measure on a voice vote. Massie defended his actions.

Wirth said Trump knows she is the candidate in the race more aligned with his values.

The gun she is giving away, she said, is designed for protection or sport and shows her strong commitment to the right to bear arms.

Massie, an avid gun collector, said his 2nd Amendment credentials are impeccable.

Persons interested in winning the gun Wirth is giving away can register and donate $25 to $2,900, which is the maximum an individual can contribute in next years Republican primary election

Her Facebook post also says a person may register to be eligible for the gun she values at $1,100 to be given away the Fourth of July without any donation. She notes that it was made right here in Kentuckys Fourth District by Anderson Manufacturing, a family-owned business with over 30 years of innovation in Hebron in Boone County.

This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it.

Comments on the post range from Dat weapon needs ta be in my hands brother! to This is an embarrassment to my party. And only furthers my desire to live in a cave.

The Second Amendment is a cornerstone of our republic says Wirths campaign website. She promises that she will deny any incremental gains attempted by the Democrats to erode our Bill of Rights.

Wirths gun giveaway comes as President Biden announces various efforts to control gun violence. The National Public Radio reported June 17 that this year is on a pace to be the most violent year for the U.S. in two decades.

The Gun Violence Archive reported July 2 that there have been 22,090 gun deaths in America this year. That is 10,012 by homicide and 12,078 by suicide. It reported 318 mass shootings so far this year, defined as incidents in which at least four people have been shot or killed, not including the shooter.

Gun sweepstakes have been a feature of life in parts of the United States for years, but they now are becoming more frequently used by politicians in trying to lure prospective supporters, says political consultant Jim Cauley of Louisville.

We are seeing more and more candidates, typically Republicans, across the nation in their elections raffling guns, said Cauley, who managed Steve Beshears successful campaign for Kentucky governor in 2007 and Barack Obamas successful senatorial campaign in Illinois in 2004. He said he was not familiar with gun giveaways in Kentucky political elections.

Wirth said she got the idea for her gun giveaway from Republican U.S. Rep. Greene, a far-right conspiracy theorist who is a strong supporter of former president Donald Trump. Greene gave away an AR pistol this year and organized several gun draws before her election in 2020.

For her gun giveaway, Wirth worked with WinRed, the official online fundraising platform designed to help Republican candidates. Trump and the Kentucky Republican National Committee have officially endorsed the platform.

WinRed was launched in 2019 to compete with the Democratic Partys success in online grassroots funding with their platform ActBlue, which started in 2004. WinRed and ActBlue did not respond to questions from the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Cauley said Wirths gun giveaway might get her some publicity but the question is how much can she raise with a raffle. You need millions to knock off a congressional incumbent, he said.

What does the law say about gun giveaways in political campaigns?

Christian Hilland, deputy press officer for the Federal Election Commission, said the commission cannot comment on the campaign activity of specific federal candidates and their committees, but, generally speaking, selling or raffling items are permitted for fundraising purposes.

While federal law allows candidates for federal offices like Congress to use campaign giveaways, Kentucky law prohibits candidates for state and local offices like the Kentucky legislature or a city council from conducting a campaign raffle, said John R. Steffen, executive director of the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance.

State law defines a raffle as a form of charitable gaming under the jurisdiction of the Department of Charitable Gaming.

Under current Kentucky law, charitable gaming can only be conducted to benefit schools or organizations that qualify as charitable organizations under the Internal Revenue Code.

Political campaigns and committees are not charitable organizations under the Internal Revenue Code. Instead they are political organizations., said Steffen.
By Tife Owolabi

YENAGOA, Nigeria (Reuters) - A Nigerian separatist leader arrested after years on the run was badly mistreated in detention in Kenya before being returned to Nigeria, his lawyer said on Friday, while the Kenyan high commissioner flatly denied his country's involvement.

Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) group, disappeared from Nigeria after skipping bail in 2017.

He appeared on Tuesday, handcuffed and hooded, at a court in Abuja, flanked by security agents. Nigerian authorities said he had been captured abroad and brought back to face charges, but refused to say where he had been caught.

On Friday, Kanu's lawyer, Ifeanyi Ejiofor, said Kanu was abducted by Kenya's special police force and held for eight days before being turned over to Nigerian authorities.

"He was tortured and subjected to all forms of inhuman treatment which worsened his health condition," Ejiofor said in a statement.

Wilfred Machage, Kenya's high commissioner to Nigeria, emphatically denied his country's involvement in Kanu's arrest. In a statement posted on Twitter, he called any such charge "fictional, imaginary and deliberately concocted to fuel antagonistic feelings among certain sections of the Nigerian people."

IPOB's 1967 campaign for an independent nation in southeastern Nigeria, called the Republic of Biafra, triggered a three-year civil war in which more than a million people died, mostly from starvation.

Kanu is facing 11 charges including treason, terrorism and illegal possession of firearms. His case is due to resume in court on July 26-27.

(Reporting by Tife Owolabi, writing by Libby George; Editing by Howard Goller)
My native Peru has begun its descent into hell. Western embassies are besieged by people seeking visas. Capital flight has started. There is talk of a military coup. And the result hasnt even been declared yet.

As I predicted a couple of months back, the presidential election has been won by Pedro Castillo, an unreconstructed Marxist who wants to kick out foreign companies and confiscate their assets.

Until last year, Peru had been doing enormously well. Per capita gross domestic product had doubled since the millennium, life expectancy had increased from 71 to 76, the number of children completing secondary education had risen from 75% to 100%, and inequality had tumbled.

Then came the lockdown, one of the harshest in the world. The impact on a largely informal economy can well be imagined, yet a curfew enforced by the military failed to prevent Peru from topping the global league table for COVID-19 deaths per million. The coronavirus, like a war, had altered peoples psychology, making them more demanding of big government. Two authoritarian candidates reached the runoff: Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the jailed dictator, and Castillo, whose manifesto openly promised Marxism-Leninism.

By the tiniest of margins  50.13% to 49.87%  Castillo won. The narrowness of that result has inevitably led to frantic protests and court challenges. I have every sympathy with the demonstrators. It does seem extraordinary that someone can take office in such unusual circumstances, with such a negligible mandate, and then enact the sort of revolution that Castillo proposes, scrapping the constitution, refounding the republic on socialist principles, liquidating Congress, and realigning the country with China.

Human nature being what it is, liberals, conservatives, and democrats of every stripe cant bring themselves to believe the outcome. Several Peruvian friends, many of them the epitome of reason and moderation, have been calling to ask me to make British and American readers aware of the supposedly stolen election.

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The trouble is, there is no evidence that the result was fraudulent. That is not to say that there was no impropriety. We can never definitively say that about any election. But the 150 international observers who scrutinized the process have given it a clean bill of health. That is the test we normally apply and, more importantly, the test both sides had accepted in advance.

Is it unreasonable that a previously successful nation can be destroyed because of 40,000 votes cast desperately during a lockdown? Yes. Is it wrong that the system can now be revolutionized with barely any checks? Absolutely. Is it scary that Peru is set to follow Venezuela? You bet. But thems the rules  the rules, to repeat, accepted beforehand by all the candidates.

Once you decide that process should be subordinated to the outcome, you open the door to arbitrary government. That distinction explains why North America is so much richer and more stable than Latin America. The rule of law, pure and simple, is why no Mexican politician has ever had to propose building a wall to keep the gringos out.

Elevating a set of rules over a flesh-and-blood candidate is nonetheless difficult and unnatural, even in countries long habituated to the idea. Consider two recent examples. In 2016, the United Kingdom voted narrowly to leave the European Union. In 2020, the United States voted narrowly for Joe Biden.

In both cases, lots of people on the losing side refused point-blank to accept the verdict, insisting that there had been malpractice. But they were two very different groups of people. British commentators who had spent four years trying to demonstrate that the Brexit referendum had been rigged by the Russians switched seamlessly to condemning former President Donald Trump because he did not accept the verdict. A similar hypocrisy worked the other way around for people on the other side.

Even as I write those words, I sense readers disagreement. How can I possibly liken X (a result you happen to favor) to Y (where you detect obvious fraud)? We all tend to see what we want and to regard our own take as the only objective one. Indeed, the really extraordinary thing is that we have managed to sustain a pluralist model for as long as we have.

I used to imagine that, over time, places such as Peru would become more like Britain or the U.S., that democracy would be habit-forming, and that a taboo would grow up around the abuse of power. Now, I know better. The real question is how long it will take before places such as Britain and the U.S. slide into being more like Peru. Even before the coronavirus, the guardrails were buckling under the strain. Next time, we will not be so lucky.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: Peru, Coronavirus, Election, Socialism, United Kingdom, Donald Trump

Original Author: Dan Hannan

Original Location: How long will it take the US to become like Peru?
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia's highest court on Friday ordered news portal Malaysiakini to pay 550,000 ringgit ($132,179.76) in damages for in a defamation case filed by a now-defunct Australian mining firm.

The ruling comes amid concern among activists about freedom of expression in Malaysia and is the latest against Malaysiakini, an independent publication that has often attracted scrutiny from authorities.

Malaysiakini was sued in 2012 for publishing several articles and videos about residents' concerns over pollution allegedly linked to Raub Australian Gold Mine Sdn Bhd's gold mining operations in Malaysia. The company had said the articles were defamatory and malicious.

The Kuala Lumpur High Court in 2016 ruled in favour of Malaysiakini on the grounds of responsible journalism and reportage, but the decision was later overturned on appeal.

On Friday, the Federal Court upheld the appellate court's decision in a 3-2 majority ruling, saying Malaysiakini had not been "fair, disinterested or adopted a neutral approach" in reporting the residents' campaign against the mining activities.

The court found Malaysiakini had failed to take steps to verify assertions made in the articles.

"This is irresponsible rather than responsible journalism," the court said in a copy of its judgment seen by Reuters.

Malaysiakini editor-in-chief Steven Gan expressed disappointment with the outcome and said the news portal had merely been carrying out its duties as journalists in reporting the residents' health concerns.

Raub Australian Gold Mine could not be contacted for comment. Lawyers for the company did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

In February, Malaysiakini was fined 500,000 ringgit after the Federal Court found it in contempt over publishing readers' comments about the judiciary, a ruling condemned by rights groups as a blow to press freedoms.

($1 = 4.1610 ringgit)

(Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; Editing by Martin Petty)
NORFOLK, Va. (AP)  A member of an elite group of U.S. Marines has been convicted of involuntary manslaughter and related charges for his role in the hazing death of a U.S. Green Beret while the men served in Africa, the U.S. Navy said in a news release Friday.

But Gunnery Sgt. Mario Madera-Rodriguez was found not guilty of felony murder. He still faces a maximum possible sentence of 27.5 years in prison as well as a reduction in rank and a dishonorable discharge.

A jury of U.S. Navy sailors and Marines returned its verdict late Thursday at a Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia, following a weeks-long trial that pulled back the curtain on alleged misconduct in Americas special operations community.

Madera-Rodriguez belongs to a special operations group in the Marines known as the Raiders. Prosecutor's said he, another Raider and two Navy SEALs conspired to humiliate Army Green Beret Logan Melgar in 2017.

The men were angry over perceived slights during their time together in the country of Mali, prosecutors said. In particular, some were upset that they missed a party at the French embassy in the capital city of Bamako because Melgar and the others got separated in traffic.

Their plan was to break into Melgar's room, tie him up and choke him into unconsciousness while filming their prank on a phone, prosecutors said. Melgar died from strangulation.

A defense attorney for Madera-Rodriguez had argued that he played a minor role in the hazing and should not be found guilty of murder and other crimes.

The attorney said Madera-Rodriguez never touched Melgar until he tried to help revive him. He said the Marine's role was only to break down Melgar's door with a sledge hammer, play some music and bring in Malian guards who were part of the joke.

Madera-Rodriguez's attorneys also said military prosecutors misapplied the law when it came to the murder charge. They said he can only be found guilty of felony murder if hes found guilty of burglary, a charge related to the accusation that the men broke into Melgars room. They said the burglary charge depends on the alleged crime happening at night, which they said it no longer was by the time of the hazing.

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You dont have night time, you dont have burglary, Marine Lt. Col. Timothy Kuhn argued on behalf of Madera-Rodriguez. You dont have burglary, you dont have felony murder.

Prosecutors argued that Madera-Rodriguez was culpable because he chose to partake in the hazing, despite the known risks of placing someone in a chokehold.

Madera-Rodriguez is the last of the four servicemembers to face a court-martial. He also was the only one to plead not guilty.

SEAL Tony DeDolph, who had applied the chokehold, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter earlier this year and received a 10-year prison sentence. His attorney said he planned to appeal the punishment.

Adam Matthews, the other SEAL, and Marine Kevin Maxwell Jr., made plea deals and were sentenced to shorter terms in military prison.

Charging documents dont state why the service members were in Mali. But U.S. Special Forces have been in Africa to support and train local troops in their fight against extremists.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in the 1980s with Bookshelf, a new compact disc for computers which holds all the information contained in the books pictured. Doug Wilson/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images

Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce in May after nearly three decades of marriage.

Insiders say there's a different side of Gates than the nerdy tech CEO known to the public.

Four women who worked with Gates at Microsoft told Insider he was brash and hot-tempered.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

In the wake of Bill and Melinda Gates divorce announcement, people who have known the Microsoft cofounder over the years told Insider there's a different side to Gates than his meticulously crafted public image of a computer nerd and humanitarian.

Four women who worked with Gates at Microsoft told Insider he was brash and hot-tempered. "Having a meeting with Bill was just an opportunity to get yelled at, so I tried to avoid that," a former Microsoft executive who spoke on condition of anonymity said.

Gates was known among some for swearing and berating underlings. "That's the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard" became a catchphrase for the CEO. He kept tabs on employees by memorizing their license plates. Gates tried to dilute Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's equity in the company because he was "unproductive" while dealing with his first bout of cancer, Allen wrote in his memoir. Gates' spokesperson denied that he mistreated employees.

Maria Klawe, a Microsoft board member from 2009 to 2015, told Insider she felt suggestions about improving diversity in succession planning were not anything Gates "was interested in hearing about." Gates, Klawe said, would respond to those suggestions with statements like "'Are you trying to effing destroy the company?' The message was, 'Caring about diversity has nothing to do with the success of Microsoft.'"

A Gates spokesperson called that a "gross mischaracterization to suggest that Mr. Gates lacked interest in speaking about or promoting diversity and inclusion at Microsoft."

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Another former Microsoft executive who also spoke on condition of anonymity said Gates was direct and honest. While his management style could intimidate some employees, she appreciated his candor. "Bill yelled at everyone the same," she said.

As a current Microsoft employee told Insider, "He's just an awkward human being as far as social interactions go."

Do you work at Microsoft or have insight to share? Contact reporter Ashley Stewart via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email (astewart@insider.com).

Read the original article on Business Insider
Jul. 2Three and a half years after Gabriel Sanchez was accused of killing a Hernandez man, a state judge denied a motion Thursday to dismiss the charges against him based on the argument his right to a speedy trial had been violated.

Sanchez, 28, of Santa Clara Pueblo is scheduled to stand trial next week in the 2017 shooting death of 67-year-old William Jimerson.

Police believe the two men had a dispute involving Sanchez's former fiancee, according to previous reports. And before his death, Jimerson told state police Sanchez planned to kill him.

Judge Jason Lidyard found a recent delay in the case  caused by prosecutors being unable to enter the courthouse for jury selection because they'd been in contact with another staffer whose husband had tested positive for COVID-19  should be held against the state.

But the 29-day delay in the start of the trial  from early June to early July  wasn't prejudicial enough to justify dismissing the charges, he said.

Witnesses in the case hadn't disappeared during that time, Lidyard said, nor had their testimonies been delayed so long it would affect their memories.

Sanchez also was not forced to spend more time incarcerated as a result of the postponement, Lidyard said, because he is awaiting trial out of custody now, though he had spent more than a year in jail awaiting trial before being released on electronic monitoring.

Lidyard found the most substantive delays in the case, including one about 13 months long, were related to court closures ordered by the New Mexico Supreme Court and didn't count against either side for purposes of speedy trial calculations.

While there is no firm rule on how long is too long for a case to be brought to trial in New Mexico, in cases deemed to be complex, defense attorneys can ask for a judicial review of the reasons for the delay and the prejudicial effect on the defendant after 18 months have elapsed.

By the time Sanchez's case goes to trial, more than 40 months will have passed since he was indicted.

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Thursday was the second time public defender Craig Hay had asked the court to dismiss charges of first-degree murder, aggravated burglary and tampering with evidence against Sanchez on the grounds that his speedy trial rights had been violated. The first time was in April 2020.

In arguing his motion Thursday, Hay said state prosecutors had disregarded Sanchez's speedy trial rights by not conducting themselves in a way that would ensure they could pass screening questions to enter the courthouse. And he said they intentionally delayed the case previously by filing an appeal on an insignificant discovery issue.

But Lidyard found the incident that led to prosecutors being denied entry into the courthouse  an unmasked exposure by at least one of them to a staffer who was later asked to quarantine due to a spouse's positive COVID-19 test  was understandable given rules regarding masking had recently been relaxed.

Jimerson was found dead in his trailer Dec. 18, 2017, with two gunshot wounds to his head.

Police had been at the trailer the night before, according to an affidavit for arrest warrant in the case, responding to a fire that Jimerson told them he suspected Sanchez had set.

"William Jimerson was concerned that Gabriel Sanchez was going to kill him," state police Officer Joey Gallegos wrote in his affidavit seeking Sanchez's arrest in the case. "... This was the last time William Jimerson was verified to be alive."

Sanchez admitted he had a motive to kill Jimerson, according to the officer's report, but said he'd been playing cards at a friend's house on the night in question.

Investigators later found what they described as blood and bone on the boots Sanchez was said to have been wearing that night, according to the affidavit.

But according to court records, the blood and bone were later determined not to be human.

No murder weapon was ever recovered in the case.

Sanchez's trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday in Tierra Amarilla with two days of jury selection followed by opening arguments July 8. The trial is expected to last through July 16.
No survivors have been found since the first few hours after the building collapsed

A firefighter has carried the body of his own seven-year-old daughter from the rubble of the apartment block that collapsed near Miami last week.

He had kept vigil at the site for nine days and was there when she was extracted from the ruins.

Stella Cattarossi was one of two more victims pulled from the wreckage on Friday, taking the death toll to 22, with 126 people still missing.

Residents of another block have been told to leave on safety grounds.

Crestview Towers Condominium residents were ordered to evacuate by North Miami Beach Building Department.

Officials are investigating many of the local tower blocks for structural faults following the partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside on 24 June.

An engineer report from January states that Crestview is "not structurally nor electrically safe for continued occupancy", local TV outlet Miami Seven reports.

Crews continue to scour the wreckage of the 12-storey Champlain Towers South for survivors, despite the risk of falling debris and an incoming hurricane.

Stella Cattarossi is the third child to be recovered from the site in the Miami suburb of Surfside.

She was with her mother, grandparents and an aunt visiting from Argentina, according to local10.com.

"When he was made aware that we were close to where his loved one may have been, then he stood side by side with some of his other fellow firefighters," Miami Fire Rescue Capt Ignatius Carroll told WPLG.

"We were able to bring her and then at least give him an opportunity to say his farewells."

Stella's father used his jacket to cover his daughter's body, placed a small US flag over her and carried her out of the area.

The other body found has not yet been publicly identified.

On Friday the mayor of Miami-Dade County ordered the demolition of the remaining structure of Champlain Towers South, amid fears it could collapse on rescue crews below.

The bodies of two sisters, Lucia Guara, 4, and Emma Guara, 10, were found on Wednesday.

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No-one has been pulled alive since the first hours after the Champlain Towers South apartment block caved in on itself in the early hours of 24 June as residents slept.

Some 126 people remain missing nine days after the collapse

Rescuers are keen to make progress before the arrival of Storm Elsa, a 75-mph (120kmh) hurricane that could potentially hit Florida early next week.

What caused the 40-year-old building to crumble remains unclear. But a 2018 inspection warned of "major" design flaws in the original design.

The building association's board says it will appoint an "independent receiver... to oversee the legal and claims process".
Reuters

HONG KONG (Reuters) -Shares of Hong Kong beverage maker Vitasoy tumbled 12% on Monday after a worker sent around a memo offering condolences to the family of a colleague who stabbed a Hong Kong policeman, prompting social media users in China to call for a boycott of the company. Vitasoy said in a statement on social media platform Weibo on Saturday that a staff member had circulated an internal memo that was widely shared online, describing it as "extremely inappropriate" and without authorisation. The employee's memo offered condolences to the family of a 50-year-old Vitasoy worker who had stabbed a police officer, 28, and then killed himself on Thursday, the anniversary of the former British colony's return to Chinese rule.
A college student in Michigan who posted a picture of a semi-automatic rifle lost an appeal to drop the terrorist threat" charge he faces.

Lucas Gerhard, a student at Lake Superior State University in Michigans Upper Peninsula, can be charged for posting a Snapchat story of an AR-15 accompanied by an offensive caption, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled June 24.

Takin this bad boy up, this outta make the snowflakes melt, aye? And I mean snowflakes as in snow [winky face emoji], Gerhard wrote in the Aug. 22, 2019 post, referencing his plans to bring his gun with him to college.

FORMER DETROIT POLICE CHIEF: AMERICA HAS A CRIMINAL PROBLEM, NOT A GUN PROBLEM

After Gerhard made the post, two Lake Superior State students alerted the public safety department. The university allows students to bring firearms to school so long as they are registered with the campus police. When Gerhard went to register his gun the next morning, he was questioned by security.

In his reference to snowflakes  a pejorative for Democrats, liberals, and leftists  Gerhard meant he wanted to make liberal students minds melt by offending them, he told public safety. He was arrested and accused of threatening terrorism, a charge he attempted to have thrown out. When he was unsuccessful the first time, he appealed the decision.

To the extent defendant argues that the facts failed to establish that he made a true threat for purposes of whether the speech in his Snapchat post was protected by the First Amendment, we again disagree, but his arguments are appropriate for consideration by the jury, the court said.

Gerhards lawyers argued his comments were protected by the First Amendment and that the statute under which he was being prosecuted was too vague and, therefore, unconstitutional.

That law prohibits people from threatening to commit an act of terrorism and communicates the threat to any other person. It defines an act of terrorism as a violent felony, an act dangerous to human life, or one meant to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or influence or affect the conduct of government or a unit of government through intimidation or coercion.

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In response to Gerhard facing a "terrorist threat" charge, Michigan state Rep. John Reilly, a Republican, introduced a bill to make the language in the law more specific, but it failed to make it out of committee, the Sault News reported.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Gerhards fate is now in the hands of a jury in Chippewa County, Michigan. He could face up to 20 years in prison, a fine of $20,000, or both.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, guns, Michigan, Michigan House, ar-15, College, Court, Terrorism

Original Author: Charles Hilu

Original Location: Michigan college student loses appeal to drop terrorist threat charge
Jul. 2LANSING  The Michigan legislature agreed to appropriate $25 million toward funding gaps in the state's 2019 no-fault insurance reforms, just as a provision slashing rates paid to caregivers went into effect.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is expected to sign the bill, her office said previously, which will use federal COVID stimulus aid to fund the program.

At issue is the 45 percent rate reduction paid to healthcare providers who care for people injured in automobile crashes, which went into effect Thursday.

The state Department of Insurance and Financial Services will have 21 days to come up with an application process for providers to apply for the funds, the department will vet applications and the money is first come, first serve for those who can prove a "systemic deficit."

Supporters, including state House Speaker Jason Wentworth (R-Farwell) and some insurance groups, say it will give lawmakers time to collect data on possible policy issues which could then be addressed at a later date.

Critics of the measure say it is too little too late, that no-fault reform will now likely put some in-patient rehab facilities out of business and won't help the most severely injured car crash survivors or those who care for them.

"Providers can't wait around for six months to try and make payroll at 45 percent of their funding stream," said Tom Judd, president of the Michigan Brain Injury Provider Council.

"We now have no long-term solution, and frankly we have no short-term solution either," Judd said. "Those funds are not going to be available to providers until well down the road, six months down the road at least."

In 2019 the state reformed auto insurance laws in an effort to save drivers money on premiums by no longer requiring unlimited personal injury protection.

Drivers now have a choice between $250,000, $500,000, unlimited lifetime PIP coverage or can opt out entirely if they can show they have other health insurance covering auto-related injuries.

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Under the new law, auto insurance companies are required to lower PIP premiums between 10 and 100 percent depending on the level of coverage purchased for the next eight years, the Insurance Alliance of Michigan states on its website.

Savings will vary from company to company and driver to driver, and in the event medical costs exceed coverage limits, drivers can inquire with their employer's health care plan, Medicaid, Medicare or seek damages from the at-fault driver's insurance policy, IAM says.

The law also bans insurance companies from using "non-driving factors," such as zip code, credit score, gender, marital status, occupation, education or homeownership to set rates.

These cost cutting measures aren't the problem Judd said  it's the arbitrary cut in rates paid to caregivers which insurance companies are expected to apply to new claims as well as those made years before reforms were passed.

"This is the legislature admitting there's a problem, but not offering any real solutions for families like mine," said Kris Ruckle-Mahon, whose daughter, Brittney Ruckle, was injured in a car crash in 2007 and requires 24-hour care.

"It's really sad the legislature did not try harder to represent us," Ruckle-Mahon of Traverse City said. "I feel like Brittney has been screwed over and her care bought out by the insurance companies."

The fund does not have a provision to pay for care provided by family members of those injured or to reimburse families like the Ruckle-Mahon's who hire caregivers on their own dime when agencies can't provide staff due to industry-wide shortages.

"There is no safety net for people like that," Judd confirmed.

Todd Nienhouse, co-owner of Agevix, a Michigan healthcare business providing therapy services to 40 people who've sustained catastrophic injuries as the result of car crashes, said he expects to lose a third of those clients.

"We have adjusted our client mix and will probably not take any new clients related to auto," Nienhouse said, adding the firm will be forced to cut back on visits to clients' homes.

The rate cut is likely to cause some who receive in-patient care at facilities like The Lighthouse of Traverse City, to be moved home or to adult foster care facilities where families and staff may not have the training to care for them, Judd said.

Jessica Stark, a therapist with The Lighthouse, previously said care for 21 of the facility's 23 in-patients was paid for by auto insurance claims.

State Long Term Care Ombudsman Salli Pung previously said in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R-Clarklake) that moving such patients to nursing homes was not a viable option.

"These specialized services are not available in nursing homes or other long-term care settings, and the staff in these new settings have not been trained to meet the unique needs of these survivors," Pung said.

A grassroots group, We Can't Wait, made up of survivors, their family members and caregivers, contends providers won't receive any funds from the appropriation until sometime in 2022.

One member, Randy Bruce, owner of Aspire Rehabilitation Services, LLC, of Troy, posted an obituary for his company on the group's Facebook page.

"Aspire Rehabilitation Services, LLC, passed away peacefully on June 30, 2021, after a long battle with corporate greed and legislative malfeasance, at the age of seven years old, surrounded by family and friends," Bruce wrote. "Aspire leaves behind over 20 clients and 50 employees, and was loved by all with whom they had the privilege to work."

Nienhouse and Ruckle-Mahon said they've pinned their last hopes for fair reimbursement of services on an ongoing insurance-related lawsuit.

A brain injury rehabilitation clinic and guardians of two auto crash victims filed suit against Citizens Insurance and USAA Casualty Insurance, which was dismissed in November by Ingham County Circuit Court Judge Wanda Stokes.

The case, now with the state's Court of Appeals, seeks clarity on whether state no-fault insurance reforms can be applied retroactively.
A mother and her 3 children were shot at after picking up food from a Burger King drive-thru in Washington Tuesday night, according to authorities.

Rebecca Ramirez said she was with her kids, ages 3, 5 and 16, and picking up a DoorDash order at a Burger King in Yakima when her cars window was shot out, KNDO reported.

We were in the wrong place at the wrong time, Ramirez said, according to the station.

Yakima police told McClatchy News that the woman told them she was turning east onto Nob Hill when she saw a car in front of her speeding and a dark SUV approaching in her rearview mirror.

Ramirez said after her window was shattered, she pulled into a parking lot near Starbucks to check on her children, police said. No one was injured in the shooting, according to officials.

Police said they found a .45 caliber bullet in the car and a .45 caliber casing on the street in front of a Wendys near the Burger King. Ramirez said she thought she was caught in the crossfire of the two speeding vehicles but didnt see who fired the shot, according to authorities.

The incident has been turned over to Yakima Polices Gang Unit for investigation, officials said.

Our gang detectives are canvassing the area looking for video surveillance that may have captured the incident, Yakima Police Captain Jay Seely said.

McClatchy News has reached out to DoorDash but did not immediately receive a response.
Netflix has pulled an Australian spy show from its services in Vietnam over scenes containing a map of the South China Sea showing Beijing's claims in the flashpoint waterway.

The map -- shown briefly in two episodes of "Pine Gap" -- had prompted a complaint from the Southeast Asian country's broadcasting authority.

China has long used its so-called nine-dash line to justify its claims over most of the resource-rich South China Sea, often to the displeasure of Vietnam, which also claims parts of the waterway.

Vietnam's Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information said on its website that the images shown during the six-episode drama had "violated the country's sovereignty over sea and islands".

"Netflix's violations have hurt feelings and caused outrage among the entire Vietnamese people," it added.

The statement also said this was the third time over the past 12 months that Netflix had been found to "distribute movies and TV shows containing content which violates Vietnam's sovereignty".

It singled out Chinese rom-com "Put Your Head on My Shoulder" and the political drama "Madam Secretary".

Netflix confirmed that Pine Gap -- which it describes as an international political thriller set around the Australian and American joint defence intelligence facility at Pine Gap in Australia's Northern Territory -- had been removed in Vietnam.

"Following a written legal demand from the Vietnamese regulator, we have removed the licensed series, Pine Gap, from Netflix in Vietnam, to comply with local law.

"It remains available on our service in the rest of the world."

China claims the majority of the South China Sea, often invoking its nine-dash line as a supposed historical justification to the waters, a key global shipping route.

In October 2019, Vietnamese authorities pulled the animated film "Abominable", a joint production by DreamWorks and China's Pearl Studio, from cinemas over a scene featuring a similar map showing the nine-dash line.

Story continues

Some films are barred in Vietnam, a one-party state where free speech is tightly controlled, while others are approved for screening only with significant edits.

In the 2018 romantic comedy "Crazy Rich Asians", one of the scenes cut from screening in Vietnam featured a designer bag with a map of the world showing disputed South China Sea islands under Beijing's control.

lqb/aph/axn
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California Democrats gambled by accelerating the date for the state's Sept. 14 recall election that could cost Gov. Gavin Newsom his job. Their hope is that during a relatively brief stretch of about 10 weeks, the economy will continue to rebound, coronavirus cases will remain low and the embattled Democratic governor can avoid any politically embarrassing missteps.

The risk is that it doesn't go that way.

The mid-September date was formalized Thursday by Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a Democrat and Newsom ally, after election officials certified that enough valid petition signatures had been turned in to qualify the election for the ballot.

Her decision came after political maneuvering in the Democratic-dominated Legislature that cleared the way for a late-summer election, rather than the fall contest many had been expecting.

Newsom has steadied his public standing since the tumultuous depths of the pandemic, when his popularity declined. With recent polls showing Newsom would beat back the recall, Democrats believe the earlier date will benefit his chances.

Businessman John Cox, one of the leading Republicans in the race, shrugged off the strategy.

Newsom's insiders and allies have done their best to manipulate the election date ... but it doesnt matter, Cox said in a statement.

Wildfires are starting to rage, were still not sure schools will open on time, homelessness is out of control and taxes are way too high, Cox added. We have shortages of electricity and water. Crime is out of control. ... Newsom will be recalled."

The election in the nations most populous state will be a marquee contest with national implications, watched closely as a barometer of the public mood heading toward the 2022 elections, when a closely divided Congress again will be in play.

The announcement will set off a furious burst of campaigning through the California summer, a time when voters typically ignore politics to enjoy vacationing, barbecuing and traveling.

Story continues

Its not uncommon in California for residents to seek recalls but they rarely get on the ballot  and even fewer succeed. A sitting governor has been ousted just once in the state, when unpopular Democrat Gray Davis was recalled in 2003 and replaced by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Many voters have yet to pay attention to the emerging election. And while polls have shown Newsom surviving the recall, those same surveys reveal signs of an unsettled public. Independent voters, for example, tend to view his job performance skeptically and most say the state is going in the wrong direction.

Amid a homeless crisis and a continuing pandemic, the election will give voters in the heavily Democratic state a stark choice between Newsom's liberal-minded policies or a change that could bring a Republican into the governor's office for the first time since Schwarzenegger's tenure.

Republican candidates have depicted Newsom as an incompetent fop whose bungled leadership inflicted unnecessary financial pain statewide, while Democrats have sought to frame the contest as driven by far-right extremists and supporters of former President Donald Trump eager to stop Newsom's agenda.

Newsom's campaign has described the election as a naked attempt by Trump Republicans to grab control in California." Kevin Faulconer, a former San Diego mayor and another leading Republican in the race, predicted that retirement is coming for Gavin Newsom.

While a final date wasn't set until Thursday, the campaign has been underway for months after it became clear that organizers had gathered more than the required 1.5 million petition signatures needed to place the recall on the ballot.

Conservative talk show host Larry Elder, 69, said in a statement Wednesday night that he was seriously considering entering the race and would announce his decision early next week. His candidacy would give the Republican field another jolt of celebrity sparkle  he's known through his nationally syndicated radio show and appearances on Fox News.

Along with Faulconer and Cox, who was defeated by Newsom in 2018, other Republicans who have said they intend to run include former U.S. Rep. Doug Ose and reality TV personality and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner.

The GOP field is expected to continue to grow: Candidates have until July 16 to file papers to declare their candidacy.

In the recall election, voters will be asked two questions: First, whether Newsom should be ousted, and second, if he is removed, who from the list of candidates should replace him.

Tom Del Beccaro, a former head of the state Republican Party who chairs Rescue California, one of the groups promoting the recall, said Elder would help drive support for the critical first question in his home Los Angeles area, the most populous in the state.

Statewide races in California are often won or lost in L.A. county, said Del Beccaro, who is not aligned with any candidate. Elder is going to bring a constituency that is going to help us get a yes on the question No. 1.

Elder, a Black man, also would bring more diversity to the Republican ranks.

Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney said Elder's entry into the race would be a setback for Cox because Elder would appeal to the hard-core Republican, conservative base that would have been Cox's base. Faulconer is considered a GOP moderate.

Pitney doubted Elder's race would play a significant factor, with the Black vote typically running strongly Democratic. Elder has a reputation for being a provocative conservative, not a champion of African American interests, Pitney said.

___

Blood reported from Los Angeles.
Fireworks over North Hollywood, as seen from Burbank, in 2020. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

On a Monday evening in June, Rosimeiry Brown was making a smoothie when she felt a draft of hot air envelop the kitchen and looked out the window of her Vallejo home.

I could feel heat, and I looked over my shoulder and I could see fire, said Brown, 42, describing a blaze that was climbing up her neighborhood's brushy hillside. Like a wall of fire.

Minutes earlier, residents had reported hearing sharp, popping sounds  a common occurrence in the area  and investigators now believe the wildfire that scorched at least 10 acres and sent a firefighter to the hospital was probably caused by illegal fireworks.

It's a scenario that public safety officials fear could be a preview of a fiery Fourth of July as fireworks explode across drought-stricken California.

The troubling trend lines, decades in the making, have only accelerated. 2020 marked the worst wildfire season California had ever seen, and last month was one of the hottest, driest Junes in recent memory. Yet even as the state grows increasingly combustible, fireworks are proliferating like never before, creating what experts call a recipe for potential disaster.

"The conditions are dry and ready to burn," Chief Mike Richwine of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said during a news conference Thursday, "and all it takes is a single firework or a single spark."

The drought has dried up millions of acres of forestland and chaparral-studded mountains across rural California, but it has also left vulnerable countless areas in big cities and suburbs that abut parched hillsides and canyons. In many of these neighborhoods, the bangs, booms and pops of fireworks erupt on a regular basis, and often intensify in the days surrounding the Fourth of July holiday.

Officials and wildfire experts are now pleading with the public to refrain from setting off fireworks, and authorities in L.A. are moving to ban online sales and make it easier to issue violations.

Story continues

But despite the increased danger, fireworks persist as one of L.A.'s favorite illicit pastimes, and the explosives continue flooding into the state: Cal Fire, in conjunction with federal, state and local agencies, seized nearly 80,000 pounds of illegal fireworks along the California border in May and June alone, said Richwine, who is also the state fire marshal.

"Ten years ago, 15 years ago, it was just a few people in an area that would have access" to fireworks, he said. "Now it's in every community, almost on every street."

In California, there are two categories of fireworks  "dangerous" and "safe and sane."

Dangerous fireworks include rockets, firecrackers, Roman candles and those made with a variety of chemicals such as boron and arsenic sulfide. Safe and sane fireworks include fountains, sparklers, snap caps and other small items that don't leave the ground.

While some parts of Los Angeles County allow safe and sane fireworks, all fireworks are illegal in the city of Los Angeles and in unincorporated areas, officials said.

Exceptions are made for public fireworks shows conducted by state-licensed pyrotechnicians.

Otherwise, if its airborne, its illegal, said Daryl Osby, fire chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Although the "wow" factor differs dramatically between backyard fireworks and professional fireworks, their mechanisms are nearly identical, said Julie Heckman, executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Assn.

In terms of the science and the chemistry, and how theyre made, basically they are one and the same, she said.

Professional fireworks typically burst between 500 and 800 feet in the air, Heckman said, depending on the size of their shells. Consumer fireworks burst at closer to 200 feet.

The blast radius and spread of debris depends on the shell's effects, she said, but sparks can travel, especially if there is wind.

"Our posture is, you need to obey your local law, and if there are drought conditions and burn bans, you should abide by those," she said, noting that even simple sparklers burn at roughly 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yet Heckman and others acknowledged that just because something is illegal doesn't mean people won't do it. In fact, many agencies reported a significant increase in firework explosions during the COVID-19 pandemic, officials said.

"It's out of control," Osby said. "Every year, we confiscate more illegal fireworks. We think that's a good year, but if you live in Los Angeles County, you can see all the aerial fireworks that go up. They're all illegal."

The problem has become so widespread that Los Angeles City Atty. Mark Feuer last week vowed to disrupt the supply chain by cracking down on online sales.

Days later, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a motion directing the city's fire and police departments to look into a system that would track and respond to fireworks complaints through a mobile application that would issue automatic violations.

A similar program has been established in San Bernardino County.

The bottom line has to be safety," Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas said in a statement about the motion, which he wrote. "Too many of our neighbors are literally playing with fire, and the results can be lethal."

Last month, more than 100 fire scientists signed a letter urging the Western U.S. to forgo fireworks this Fourth of July. The letter noted that this year's holiday will be "like no other weve experienced in the nations history" because of the heat and drought.

Jacob Bendix, a professor at Syracuse University who specializes in the study of wildfire distribution, was one of the scientists who signed the letter. He said there is "no question" that the current conditions make the fire danger greater. The West has in recent weeks been mired in treacherous, record-breaking heat.

And while dryness is a huge factor, the heat adds to the threat because it draws moisture from plants and evaporates water from the soil, making vegetation drier, he said. It also preheats fuels so that they ignite more readily and enable fire to spread faster.

Given the increasingly flammable landscape, pleas to skip the fireworks make perfect sense, Bendix said.

"This is particularly true in Southern California, where the vast majority of wildfires are started by people rather than lightning," he said, "so that it is largely in our hands as to whether our behavior causes catastrophe."

In Los Angeles, fines for selling or discharging fireworks in the city and the county can range as high as $1,000, officials said. But, as many Angelenos can attest, those penalties dont seem to deter some residents from igniting the explosives at all hours of the day and night.

Every year it gets worse, said City Terrace resident Mary Lou Hernandez, who has lived in the East Los Angeles neighborhood since 1962. I think the individuals who are doing this are not mindful, and they dont care about their surroundings. They dont have any regard for anyone anymore.

In 2019, the Los Angeles County Fire Department responded to three fires that started because of fireworks, Osby said. In 2020, that number exploded to 39.

And vegetation dryness heading into the Fourth of July weekend this year is at levels not typically seen in the area until the end of August, according to Osby.

"I'm really concerned," he said. "Our hillsides are dry. They are crispy."

On the Fourth of July last year, the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to 424 more emergency incidents than the daily average, according to spokesperson Erik Scott. Calls included fires in rubbish, trees, grass and structures near the dangerous displays.

Some chalked up last year's increase in firework activity to early pandemic boredom, but on Wednesday, 17 people were injured when a bomb squad attempted to detonate explosive devices that had been seized from a South Los Angeles home along with about 5,000 pounds of illegal fireworks.

The threat of even more catastrophe looms this weekend, said Robert Garcia, fire chief of the Angeles National Forest.

Adding to his concerns are what Garcia described as a "long history" of fireworks-related challenges. Between sundown and sunrise on the Fourth of July holiday last year, for example, the Angeles National Forest team responded to more than 20 wildfires.

It is bracing for a similar pattern this weekend and is bringing in additional resources, including more crews and engines to help with the response, he said.

We're pleading with the public to help us address the 90% of wildfires that are human-caused, Garcia said. That's going to be the fireworks, thats going to be the barbecues. These incidents emerge rapidly, and they affect far more people than just those that are directly affected.

Yet some who have come face-to-face with fireworks-sparked blazes are all too familiar with how stubborn some people can be when it comes to the explosive devices.

Brown, whose Vallejo neighborhood lit up with flames less than two weeks ago, said people in the area are already back to igniting fireworks every night.

And while Brown understands their appeal, she urgently wants people to think about their danger, she said. The wildfire came within just a few feet of her home.

"It's very fun, and it's beautiful to watch," Brown said of the explosive displays. "But the thing is, nobody really knows how to control fireworks."





This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
More than 100 staff members at Houston Methodist Hospital who were fired for refusing to get vaccinated for COVID-19 appealed a judges ruling that sided with the hospitals right to terminate their employment.

We are going to most likely go all the way up to the Supreme Court, Jennifer Bridges, a registered nurse and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by 117 former employees of the hospital, told Yahoo News.

Health care facilities across the country routinely require their employees to be vaccinated for a host of viruses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes on its website, including the coronavirus.

It is our responsibility to prevent ourselves from getting ill and from spreading the disease to others, Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, told Yahoo News. This should not be a choice that individual providers are able to make when this is actually about our job, our oath, the responsibility that we signed up for to care for our most vulnerable patients.

Jennifer Bridges speaks at an anti-vaccine rally outside Houston Methodist Hospital in June. (Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images)

Bridges is one of 153 workers who were fired or resigned from Houston Methodist last Monday after refusing to comply with the hospitals vaccine mandate, the Texas Tribune reported. The hospital system  comprising nearly 25,000 employees  was one of the first employers in the country to require COVID-19 vaccinations for its workers, announcing its policy on April 1.

Yet despite rigorous trials involving tens of thousands of people and overwhelming research that proves the three emergency FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective in preventing the spread of the disease as well as death from it, some medical workers remain skeptical.

Im not anti-vax. Ive had all my other vaccines, but this one was rushed and it didnt have the proper research, Bridges said, adding, I would rather take my chances rather than get the shot.

Since instituting its policy requiring workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19, Houston Methodist has been unwavering in its stance.

Story continues

Our decision to mandate the COVID vaccine for all of our employees was not made lightly and is based on the proven science that the vaccines are not only safe, but extremely effective, Amy Rose, a spokesperson for Houston Methodist, told Becker's Healthcare in May. As healthcare workers, weve taken a sacred oath to do everything possible to keep our patients safe and healthy.

Houston Methodist Baytown Hospital in Baytown, Texas. (Francois Picard/AFP via Getty Images)

Last month, a federal judge dismissed Bridgess initial lawsuit against the hospital, in which she claimed the hospital had forced staffers to be guinea pigs for vaccines.

This is not coercion, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes wrote in his dissent on June 12. Methodist is trying to do their business of saving lives without giving them the COVID-19 virus. It is a choice made to keep staff, patients, and their families safer.

Houston Methodist CEO Marc Boom applauded the ruling in a statement. We can now put this behind us and continue our focus on unparalleled safety, quality, service and innovation, the statement read.

In an internal memo sent to employees on June 8 that was shared with Yahoo News, Boom thanked employees for helping the hospital get through a difficult time.

Since I announced this mandate in April, Houston Methodist has been challenged by the media, some outspoken employees and even sued, he wrote in the memo. As the first hospital system to mandate COVID-19 vaccines, we were prepared for this. The criticism is sometimes the price we pay for leading medicine.

A COVID-19 vaccination. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

More than 156 million Americans have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as of July 2, according to the CDC data tracker. Only a tiny fraction of people who have been vaccinated experience breakthrough cases.

There will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19, the CDC site reads. Like with other vaccines, vaccine breakthrough cases will occur, even though the vaccines are working as expected.

As of Friday afternoon, more than 33 million Americans have tested positive for COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic and more than 602,000 have died from the disease. In Texas, more than 2.9 million people have tested positive for the virus and 52,000 have died from it.

Those statistics have not motivated some medical professionals to get vaccinated for COVID-19. Freenea Stewart is another former employee at Houston Methodist who was fired for defying the hospitals vaccine policy.

An anti-vaccine rally at Houston Methodist Hospital. (Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images)

This isnt about my job, Stewart, a former charge nurse, told Yahoo News. This is about you saying we have to get this vaccine. [In the hospital] you could cut the tension with a knife, between those who were vaccinated and those who werent.

Stewart was terminated on June 21 even though she contracted COVID-19 earlier this year. She believes the antibodies she gained from the illness should have been enough to exempt her from vaccination, and she questions why the hospital didnt allow her to keep her job.

I want my body to use its immune system to work. Thats the best antibody to give, she said, before echoing a frequent refrain from those skeptical of vaccines. There is not enough information about the vaccine yet.  My body has no idea what is in that shot.

Like many Republican lawmakers, Stewart believes that an individuals right to decide whether to get vaccinated outweighs considerations of public health.

Everyone needs to do what they think is best for them and their right to choose, she said. In the United States we have freedom of choice. That is what makes the United States so amazing.

A young anti-vaxxer participates in a rally at Houston Methodist. (Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images)

But for other medical professionals, freedom of choice has its limits, especially during a pandemic.

Yahoo News Medical Contributor Dr. Kavita Patel, a primary care physician in Washington, D.C., who also serves as a health policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, says she is not surprised by the reluctance of some health care workers to get vaccinated.

Health professionals are humans too. This is a reflection of what people in America think  that the trials were not enough and they don't want to be experiments, Patel said. Having said that, I think health professionals have an incredible responsibility to their patients, and ignoring the large body of clinical trial data, as well as real-world evidence, is the height of selfish irresponsibility.

Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images, Francois Picard/AFP via Getty Images

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:
Live wedding painter Maggie Smith Kuhn says her artwork can be passed down as "priceless heirlooms." Sarah Dyche/Sarah Elizabeth photography

Live wedding painter Maggie Smith Kuhn says the response to her art on TikTok has been "insane."

The Atlanta-based artist spends between three and five hours painting couples on their special day.

Smith Kuhn, who has painted nearly 600 weddings, spoke to Insider about her unique career.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Wedding content is so popular on TikTok that videos with the #wedding tag have gotten over 27.9 billion views to date.

It's also where artist Maggie Smith Kuhn told Insider her work is finally getting noticed.

Smith Kuhn's account depicting her day-to-day of painting portraits of newlyweds on their special day has gotten so popular that she's received over 27.7 million likes.

Smith Kuhn started bringing her sketchbook to house parties when she was in college, and things grew from there.

"Word got around there was a girl creating art at parties. Then an engaged girl asked me if I would try painting her wedding," Smith Kuhn, 34, told Insider.

Since then Smith Kuhn, who is based in Atlanta, Georgia, has painted nearly 600 weddings.

Reagan Sumrall found Smith on TikTok and reached out to her the day she got engaged in September 2020. Sarah Dyche/Sarah Elizabeth photography

Smith Kuhn says paintings 'capture more than what a moment looked like.'

"Part of my aim is to use color and style to create how the moment felt," Smith Kuhn said. "I can honor loved ones who couldn't be at the wedding or who have passed away. I can even capture different moments in time and string them together."

"A painted portrait is the closest a human being can ever get to seeing how someone else sees them," she added.

Smith Kuhn spends anywhere from three to five hours painting a wedding, charging between $2,600-$6,000 excluding travel costs.

Story continues

When it comes to her clients, Smith Kuhn says faith is a must: "I like for my couples to just enjoy their day and trust that I'm seeing everything because I'm right there onsite."

One of the joys of hiring a live wedding painter is the unveiling of the finished piece of art, which gets a priceless reaction from the couple and their guests. Sarah Dyche/Sarah Elizabeth photography

The parts Smith Kuhn enjoys the most are performing for guests and the big portrait reveal.

"I set up my French easel, plug in my easel light, grab some paint water and get to work," Smith Kuhn said. "My favorite part is revealing the painting to my excited couples. The reactions are priceless!"

Everything Smith Kuhn paints happens in the moment. Sarah Dyche/Sarah Elizabeth photography

After Reagan Sumrall and Joseph Thompson tied the knot in June 2021, they noticed how their wedding photos caught guests with phones out.

Sumrall, 21, told Insider: "The cool thing about wedding painting is how Maggie took the time to go around those things so you can just see us."

The way Smith Kuhn brought to life her wedding dress also stood out to the couple.

"I don't know how she did it but Maggie captured the essence of the dress," Sumrall recalled. "That's all my husband talks about when he looks at the painting!"

While 2020 wasn't the year for weddings, it was the year live wedding painting started getting more attention.

"I've been live wedding painting full-time for years," Smith Kuhn, whose most viewed TikTok now has over 4 million likes, said, "but most of my marketing was just letting people know that this kind of art exists."

Smith Kuhn says the energy at weddings in 2021 is unlike anything she's experienced in years prior. Sarah Dyche/Sarah Elizabeth photography

Like many people, Smith Kuhn got TikTok during quarantine. "A lot of my brides were forced to reschedule their weddings during 2020," she said. "I decided to comb through all my painting footage and make short-form videos for fun - the response was insane!"

Brides like Sumrall, who got engaged in September 2020, now reach out after discovering her TikTok.

"As soon as he asked me to marry him I said I'm going to book the wedding painter," Sumrall joked, "I don't care about anything else."

Now Smith Kuhn's schedule is busier than ever. "I'm trying to enjoy it and soak up every second," she said. "The energy at these events is unlike anything I've ever experienced before, the joy at being free from quarantine is palpable."

Read the original article on Insider
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Armenia's opposition alliance, led by former president Robert Kocharyan, has asked the constitutional court to overturn the results of a June 20 election which it lost, the TASS news agency cited the group as saying on Friday.

Acting prime minister Nikol Pashinyan's party won 53.91% of the vote at parliamentary elections last month with Kocharyan's Armenia political bloc trailing with 21.9%.

International observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said the elections were competitive and generally well-managed.

Pashinyan called the election early in a bid to quell a political crisis that began when ethnic Armenian forces lost control of territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh in fighting with Azeri forces last year.

(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; writing by Tom Balmforth; editing by Andrew Osborn)
A "Orem City Fireworks Restriction" sign is shown on Tuesday, June 22, 2021, in Orem, Utah. Many Americans aching for normalcy as pandemic restrictions end are looking forward to traditional Fourth of July fireworks. But with a historic drought in the U.S. West and fears of another devastating wildfire season, officials are canceling displays, passing bans or begging for caution. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Cities in the western United States are banning fireworks ahead of the Fourth of July and amid drought and a historic heat wave.

Portland, Bend and Tualatin, Oregon, along with a slew of Colorado mountain communities -- including Vail and Beaver Creek -- have canceled firework shows. In Washington, fireworks are also banned in the City of Tacoma and in Bellevue, among other areas.

Authorities warn that the combination of record-breaking temperatures and extreme drought could create a disastrous "tinderbox-like situation" that could ignite a wildfire, The Guardian reported.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP

About 98% of the West is suffering from at least a moderate drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Nearly 60% is considered extreme.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler banned the sale of fireworks Wednesday, one day after Portland Fire and Rescue announced a ban on their use, according to local NBC affiliate KGW8.



"With the recent historic, once-in-a-millennium heat wave and the forecast for continued warm weather, saving lives and property are a top priority," Wheeler said in a press release. "A decision like this doesn't come easily, but it's imperative that we do all we can to ensure everyone's safety."

Fireworks are shown in a fireworks vendor's tent Thursday, June 24, 2021, in Sandy, Utah. Many Americans aching for normalcy as pandemic restrictions end are looking forward to traditional Fourth of July fireworks. But with a historic drought in the U.S. West and fears of another devastating wildfire season, officials are canceling displays, passing bans or begging for caution. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

The series of local bans in Oregon and Washington could be a result of state laws that prohibit statewide fireworks bans, according to KGW8. The power to enact such a ban is not vested in the governor.

Story continues

Since there are no statewide bans on selling fireworks, some are still purchasing fireworks in counties where there are no such restrictions.

Packaged fireworks ahead of July Fourth. (AFP)

One seller, identified only as DeAndre, told AFP that business is slow, adding that people will still probably set them off -- but hopefully it will be in a place where "it's not going to be able to catch stuff on fire."

Another seller, Sam, also emphasized the importance of personal responsibility.



"I would hope that people would be very responsible this Fourth of July. And it's not just for their protection, but it's for the protection of everybody around you," she told AFP.

Meanwhile, more than 150 fire scientists co-signed an article in The Conversation that urges residents in the West to forgo the fireworks this year. Scientists warned that this year could bring about a record-breaking fire season.

To stay safe, the fire scientists encourage residents to clear flammable materials -- like dried leaves, firewood, gas and propane containers -- away from homes. Folks should clear out the gutters, according to the article. Those with trailers should make sure the chains don't hang too low that they'd spark against the pavement. And residents shouldn't drop cigarette butts on the ground.

Scientists urge those in the West to opt for safer alternatives, like a laser light show or microwave s'mores.
Police officer plays Taylor Swift video to prevent protest video going on YouTube (twitter/APTP)

A California police officer played a Taylor Swift song on his phone to try and prevent protesters from posting video of their encounter on YouTube.

Sergeant David Shelby hit play on the singers hit Blank Space song as he confronted protesters over a banner outside a courthouse in an attempt to create copyright issues for them.

You can record all you want, I just know it cant be posted on YouTube, the officer told activists from the Anti Police-Terror Project outside the courthouse in Alameda County, California.
(Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who is presiding over the central banks examination of digital currencies, met with the head of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc. on May 11 and crypto advocate Christopher Giancarlo a day later, the Fed chairs monthly diary shows.

Powells in-person meeting with Coinbase Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Paul Ryan lasted 30 minutes, his schedule in May shows. The meeting took place during a week of intense volatility for crypto currencies including Bitcoin, which fell steeply on that day.

Spokespeople for both the Fed and Coinbase declined to comment on what was discussed.

Coinbase is the largest U.S. crypto exchange and its initial public offering earlier this year supercharged theories that crypto had made it to the investing mainstream.

Powells meeting on May 12 with Giancarlo, the former chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and director of the Digital Dollar Project, was virtual and also lasted 30 minutes.

The meetings took place as the Fed digs deeper on the digital dollar. It will publish a discussion paper on central bank digital currencies this summer.

We are committed at the Federal Reserve to hearing a wide range of voices on this important issue before making any decision on whether and how to move forward with a U.S. CBDC, Powell said in a statement on May 20, a few days after his meetings.

Powell also said he wants the Fed to play a leading role in the development of international standards. Central banks around the world -- most notably the Peoples Bank of China -- are moving ahead with digital currencies, which could give them a head-start in how standards develop partly because they have actual experience.

(Updates with Bitcoin fall on May 11 in second paragraph.)

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Some progressives are distancing themselves from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)  leader of their revolution.

The big picture: Three factors are fueling the shift. Some feel he's not pushing President Biden far enough to the left anymore. Some believe his time as the movement leader has simply passed. Some fear tying their brand to Sanders is a gift to opponents to weaponize in crowded primaries or in general elections  and they're instead weighing the merits of aligning more directly with Biden.

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Driving the news: Even some of Sanders closest allies  like Nina Turner, his 2020 campaign co-chair, who's running in a hotly contested Aug. 3 Democratic primary for a special election for Ohio's 11th congressional district  haven't been running with his endorsement front and center.

What they're saying: "When I'm knocking door-to-door, people aren't asking me about endorsements," Turner tells Axios. "The race that I'm running is about Ohio 11, and I'm the one running this race."

Turner is running on Sanders' liberal agenda but not his name.

"The senator and I are still close," she said. "We forged a strong relationship and we still have that to this day."

Jeff Weaver, a longtime Sanders aide and consultant to Turner, said in a statement: "The progressive movement is in a period of maturation. Progressives have shown they can inspire voters and win in state after state  as Bernie did in 2016 and 2020. Now, they are showing they can govern in an effective and principled way in coalition with more conservative elements of the party."

The big picture: Several progressives in Congress and on the outside lament Sanders unwillingness to raise hell now that Biden is in office and begging for party unity.

They want Sanders to be the liberal lightning rod he was before dropping out of the race and joining Biden task forces.

The intrigue: Turner's political dilemma is more complicated. Aides and backers tell Axios that part of the calculation around Sanders is actually the fact that Ohio 11's voters overwhelmingly embraced Biden last year.

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In a crowded primary, they don't want to give Turner's opponents any easy ways to argue that her ties to Sanders would pit her against Biden or make her unwilling to work with more moderate Democrats.

House Majority Whip Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) recently got involved in Turner's race to endorse one of her opponents, Shontel Brown. Instead of making the endorsement about Brown, Clyburn seemed to take his frustrations with some progressive colleagues out on Turner.

He told the New York Times his aversion to "sloganeering" and phrases like "defund the police" and "abolish ICE" helped him make this decision  but Turner doesn't call for either of those.

Rather than describe herself as a Sanders protege, Turner mentions President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Black women who played historic roles in U.S. politics and the voting rights movement: "I'm a Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm Democrat. In the vein of FDR. That's the kind of Democrat I am. I'm a Fannie Hamer Democrat."

Between the lines: Progressives are operating without a clear, commanding leadership structure.

Some say the time has passed for Sanders, 79, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), 72, while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and fellow Squad members still have not achieved leadership positions in Congress.

Why it matters: The progressive movement is in a new phase. Activists say theyve changed the conversation on key issues but need to start banking more wins  legislatively and in terms of which candidates emerge from Democratic primaries to get elected.

They don't yet have the numbers to override the Manchin-Sinema Senate caucus, land a $6 trillion infrastructure demand or make Biden hold to his veto threats.

Meanwhile, calls for police and voting rights reforms are bumping up against GOP efforts to brand Democrats as weak on crime or exaggerate the aim of critical race theory education.

That, in turn, is bumping up against a razor-thin majority in the House, a 50-50 Senate  and Democrats' fears of losing both chambers in next year's midterms.

Editor's note: This story has been updated with comment from Sanders and Turner ally Jeff Weaver.

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British billionaire Richard Branson one-upped his rival Jeff Bezos on Thursday, announcing that he too will travel to space -- as many as nine days ahead of the Amazon founder.

Branson's company Virgin Galactic said in a statement that he would be a "mission specialist" aboard the SpaceShipTwo Unity, which will go to space as early as July 11, "pending weather and technical checks."

If the schedule holds, Branson would make it to the cosmos before Bezos, who said he would travel to space aboard the New Shepard launch vehicle belonging to his company Blue Origin on July 20.

The two billionaires have founded rival companies to take tourists on short flights to suborbital space.

Branson "will evaluate the private astronaut experience and will undergo the same training, preparation and flight as Virgin Galactic's future astronauts.

"The Company will use his observations from his flight training and spaceflight experience to enhance the journey for all future astronaut customers," Virgin Galactic said.

The company plans to livestream the flight.

Virgin Galactic's spacecraft is not a classic rocket, but rather a carrier airplane that reaches a high altitude and releases a smaller spacecraft, the VSS Unity, that fires its engines and reaches suborbital space, then glides back to earth.

"I truly believe that space belongs to all of us," Branson said.

"After more than 16 years of research, engineering, and testing, Virgin Galactic stands at the vanguard of a new commercial space industry, which is set to open space to humankind."

After this flight, two more tests are expected before the start of regular commercial flights in 2022, according to Virgin Galactic.

la/cjc/ch/acb
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's embassy in Washington said on Friday that Moscow categorically denied new hacking allegations levelled against it a day earlier by U.S. and British authorities.

The two governments said in a joint advisory on Thursday that Russian spies accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election had spent much of the past two years abusing virtual private networks to target hundreds of organisations worldwide.

Russia's embassy in Washington said on Facebook that it hoped the United States would refrain from making what it called further unfounded allegations and focus instead on working with Russia to fight cybercrime.

"We categorically deny the involvement of any Russian state structures in attacks on 'government and private facilities in the United States and abroad,'" the embassy said.

It said it was time for Washington to get its own house in order, alleging that "constant attacks" on critical infrastructure in Russia emanated from the United States.

(Reporting by Moscow Buro; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
President Joe Biden recalled attending a naturalization ceremony in Iraq for U.S. troops during a White House event celebrating a new batch of immigrant citizens before Independence Day.

"One of my most, I don't know how to say it, fulfilling moments was, as vice president, when I went over to Saddam Hussein's god-awful, gaudy palace and there were, I think, 167 men and women in uniform standing in that palace," he said Friday. "I thought to myself, 'What an incredible justification of all the things that Saddam didn't believe in.'"

HARRIS AND BUTTIGIEG JOSTLE FOR LIMELIGHT IN PREVIEW OF FUTURE PRIMARY FIGHT

Biden and his wife Jill visited Baghdad on a 2009 diplomatic mission, a trip that coincided with a July 4 naturalization ceremony for 237 troops at Hussein's Al Faw Palace. On that day, 12 Iraqis became U.S. citizens.

Fast-forward 12 years and Biden repeated the oath of allegiance in the White House's East Room Friday with 21 new citizens from various countries, including Iraq. Candidates were also from Afghanistan, Nepal, Panama, and the United Kingdom.

"Thank you for choosing the United States of America, believing that America is worthy of your aspirations," he said. "All of you represent how immigration has always been essential to America."

During his somewhat meandering speech, Biden also said that the country could not be defined. But he went on to say that it could be defined as a nation "founded on an idea that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights," quoting the Declaration of Independence.

The last White House naturalization ceremony was overseen by former President Donald Trump during the 2020 Republican National Convention. The proceedings, broadcast during prime time, were widely slammed for using immigrants as political props. House Democrats responded by calling for an investigation into then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to see whether he had violated the Hatch Act by agreeing to take part.

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Biden is under increasing pressure to grant visas to Afghans who worked with U.S. forces during the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the country's longest war.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration had identified a number of applicants who will be relocated outside of Afghanistan, pending visa approval.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

"There are a range of options, and that will happen before we complete our military drawdown by the end of August," she added Friday of reports that they will be sent to Central Asia.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Citizenship, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, White House, Joe Biden

Original Author: Naomi Lim

Original Location: 'Saddam Hussein's god-awful, gaudy palace': Biden recalls naturalization ceremony in Iraq before Fourth of July
As members of Safe Streets Cherry Hill mourned another killing of one of their own, Baltimore Police detectives said Friday they are stymied in their investigation, including figuring out where the shooting occurred.

Kenyell Benny Wilson, 44, an outreach worker for Safe Streets, drove himself to Harbor Hospital around 4:40 p.m. Thursday for treatment of a gunshot wound. Police said Friday that he crashed in the parking lot before making it to the emergency room entrance.

But investigators do not know where the shooting took place. Typically, police can cross reference 911 calls or other information and determine a crime scene, police said, but as of Friday afternoon they had been unable to do so. They even released a picture of Wilsons vehicle in hopes it might jog someones memory of seeing him.

Were hoping someone may have seen it in the course of his drive, said police spokesman Donny Moses. The vehicle was described as a silver Volvo XC90, with a tag of 3DS8016.

The shooting stunned city leaders and the Safe Streets community, coming just one week after Safe Streets Cherry Hill celebrated a year without a fatal shooting within its boundaries. Earlier this year, one of the leaders of Safe Streets, Dante Barksdale, was gunned down in East Baltimore. Police announced the arrest of a suspect in May.

The Cherry Hill sites office, which is run by FHCB Health Service, was shut down on Friday to allow workers to mourn.

Senate President Bill Ferguson, a Baltimore Democrat whose district includes Cherry Hill, said he was told by a Safe Streets worker that Wilson left the office around 4 p.m. and said he was going to get food and would return. He never made it back.

Theyre devastated, beyond devastated, Ferguson said of Safe Streets. They were up all night trying to figure out what happened, mitigate retaliation or other issues.

Safe Streets employs people, typically with a criminal past, to use their credibility in the community to mediate disputes and spread a message of peace.

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Ferguson said the killing just a week after the site celebrated a year without a homicide in its boundaries was jarring.

Its the epitome of the challenge [we face], to go from such a high to such a low. Its very deflating, Ferguson said.

Attempts to reach Wilsons family Friday were unsuccessful. City officials who oversee Safe Streets also were not available for comment.

As someone who turned their life around to do the work of curing Cherry Hill of violence, Benny epitomized redemption, Shantay Jackson, director of the Mayors Office of Neighborhood Safety and Community Engagement, said in a statement Thursday night. While he has transitioned physically, his light will never leave us and it guides us as we continue the critical work of interrupting violence in our neighborhoods.

Sun reporter Phillip Jackson contributed to this article.
(Corrects region of country to Central from South America)

By Liamar Ramos

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) - Sara Rogel, a Salvadoran woman who spent 10 years in prison on charges of violating the Central American country's harsh abortion ban when she terminated her own pregnancy, is trying to get her life back after being released last week.

Rogel, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison, was arrested in October 2012 after going to a hospital with bleeding caused by what she said was a fall at home. But she was prosecuted for having an abortion.

She was released on June 8 from a jail in Zacatecoluca, 35 miles (56 km) southeast of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador.

In an interview with Reuters, Rogel said she plans to resume her career.

"I seek to better myself; that is what I have planned," she said. "To finish my studies and have a job so I can have a good family because life outside is very difficult."

One of her greatest desires is to be able to help her former prison mates.

"(Prison) is not an easy place. I know what I have experienced in that place. I know that my companions who are there are suffering, but I want to help them. They are struggling; that's why I want to help them so that one day they can feel the peace of mind that I have felt," she told Reuters on Thursday.

El Salvador has one of the world's strictest bans on abortion. There are no exceptions, and prison sentences can stretch up to 40 years.

In recent years some rulings have been reversed, with women released from prison after serving parts of their long sentences.

(Corrects region of country to Central from South America)

(Editing by Gerry Doyle)
Sha'Carri Richardson won the 100m at the Olympic Trials last month in just 10.86 seconds, and was expected to compete for a Gold medal in Tokyo. (Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

American sprinter ShaCarri Richardson, a medal favorite in the 100-meter dash at the upcoming Olympics, tested positive for marijuana last month and won't be able to run her signature race at the Tokyo Games.

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency announced Friday morning that Richardson had accepted a one-month suspension after testing positive for THC, the primary psychoactive compound of cannabis. The positive test occurred after Richardson won the 100 at U.S. Olympic Trials on June 19.

She has been retroactively disqualified from trials, and her place in the event in Tokyo has been handed to the fourth-place finisher, Jenna Prandini. Gabby Thomas, who finished fifth, will become the alternate.

Richardson's suspension began June 28, meaning she'll be reinstated in time for all track events at the Olympics. USA Track & Field could still name her to a relay team.

Richardson, in an interview with the Today Show on Friday morning, confirmed that she ingested marijuana just days before Olympic trials, after learning of the death of her biological mother. She said she learned of her mother's death from a reporter, "a complete stranger." She said that experience was "definitely triggering" and "nerve-shocking," and that it sent her into "a state of emotional panic."

She did not say specifically that that is why she used marijuana, but spoke about "dealing with my mental health," and having to "put on a face" with cameras on her, in the biggest moment of her track career. "I know that I can't hide myself, so at least, in some type of way, I would just try to hide my pain," she said.

On Thursday, after learning of the positive test, she tweeted: "I am human."

This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it.

On Friday, Richardson apologized to fans and sponsors, and took responsibility for her actions. "I know what I did, I know what I'm supposed to do, what I'm allowed not to do," she said. "And I still made that decision."

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Although marijuana use is legal in Oregon, where trials took place, and in other U.S. states, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) considers cannabis a substance of abuse. All cannabis-based products except for cannabidiol, or CBD, are on WADA's 2021 Prohibited List and banned in-competition." The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and USA Track and Field adhere to WADA's code.

[Read more: Why is marijuana still on WADA's prohibited list?]

The maximum punishment for a positive test is a years-long suspension. The minimum length is one month. WADA guidance states that, if the athlete can establish that any ingestion or use occurred out-of-competition and was unrelated to sport performance, then the period of Ineligibility shall be three months." And it "may be reduced to one month if the athlete satisfactorily completes a substance of abuse treatment program.

USADA said Friday that "Richardsons period of ineligibility was reduced to one month because her use of cannabis occurred out of competition and was unrelated to sport performance, and because she successfully completed a counseling program regarding her use of cannabis." The anti-doping body said she was the third athlete to accept such a suspension for a "substance of abuse" this year. Just last month, 400-meter runner Kahmari Montgomery also accepted a one-month ban for marijuana.

On Richardson's suspension, USADA CEO Travis Tygart said that the rules are clear, but this is heartbreaking on many levels."

Richardson, 21, had been widely considered a potential breakout star at the Olympics. She won the 100 at trials in 10.86 seconds.

The former LSU star turned pro after her first season with the Tigers, but not before she won the NCAA title and set a record in the 100 after running it in just 10.75 seconds. Just before trials in April, Richardson ran the sixth-fastest time in the history of the event, a personal best of 10.72.

Only one other person in the world  Jamaicas Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce  has recorded a faster 100 time this year. Fraser-Price, who ran it in 10.63 seconds, is a two-time gold medalist in the event. Their showdown was one of the most anticipated races at the Olympics, which begin July 23.

More from Yahoo Sports:
Five suspected rebels and a soldier were killed Friday in the latest of a series of clashes in Indian Kashmir that have left 17 dead in two weeks, police said.

The six died in a gunfight in the Rajpora area of the Kashmir valley that started Thursday night. Police said the five militants were members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group.

The troubled Muslim-majority region, also claimed by Pakistan, has seen a new rise in unrest in recent weeks.

Three suspected rebels were killed by soldiers in the Kulgam forest on Wednesday, a day after police said an influential rebel commander Nadeem Abrar was killed with a Pakistani associate while in custody.

The commander, captured on Monday, was taken to a house where he had hidden a rifle and was killed after his associate fired at security forces as they approached, police said.

Suspected rebels have used hand grenades and automatic weapons in other earlier attacks, killing six people including a police intelligence officer, a special police officer and his wife and daughter, a shopkeeper and one civilian.

The military said on Thursday that 61 suspected rebels have been killed this year so far.

India has also been on the alert since the first known drone attack in Kashmir damaged a small building and injured two personnel at an air base inside the main airport at the southern city of Jammu.

The surge in violence came after 14 pro-India leaders from Kashmir held talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi last month.

The leaders included three former chief ministers of the former Jammu and Kashmir state who were detained for months after the government cancelled Kashmir's semi-autonomous status in 2019. It is now divided into two territories ruled from Delhi.

Public disenchantment with New Delhi has steadily increased in the region, where an insurgency against Indian forces erupted in 1989. The conflict has left tens of thousands dead, mainly civilians. There are about 500,000 Indian troops in the region.

pzb/tw/axn
A Wisconsin judge Thursday ordered the conditional release of one of the two women who was sentenced in the stabbing of a classmate to please the fictional Slender Man' when all three were 12 years old.

Anissa Weier, 19, has spent three and a half years of her 25-year sentence at the states Winnebago Mental Health Institute after she was found not guilty in the 2014 stabbing by reason of mental disease or defect, according to FOX 6 in Milwaukee.

Weier and friend Morgan Geyser had lured classmate Payton Leutner into the woods near a Waukesha, Wisconsin, park after a sleepover in 2014 where Geyser then stabbed Leutner 19 times while Weier cheered her on.

The girls left Leutner for dead but she was able to crawl out of the woods where she was found by a bicyclist and survived.

SLENDER MAN STABBING VICTIM SPEAKS OUT: BRUTAL ATTACK IS 'JUST A PART OF ME

Waukesha County Judge Michael Bohren gave state officials 60 days to draw up a conditional release plan and sent Weier back to the mental hospital pending another hearing on Sept. 10.

Her supervised release will likely involve her living with a family member, getting a job or attending college, according to FOX 6.

In addition to the conditions of release, Weier will be assigned state Department of Health Services case managers to track her progress until she's 37 years old, the length of her commitment.

When Weier petitioned Bohren for conditional release in March, she said she had exhausted all her treatment options at Winnebago and she needed to rejoin society. She vowed she'd never let herself "become a weapon again" and promised to comply with whatever conditions Bohren imposed.

Geyser was sentenced in 2018 to 40 years in a mental health facility after being found not guilty.

Weier and Geyser told investigators they stabbed Leutner because they thought Slender Man was real. They said they believed attacking her would make them his servants and keep him from killing their families.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Slender Man is a character that started as a Creepypasta internet meme in 2009 and is often depicted stalking or abducting children.
PRAGUE (Reuters) - Slovakia has sold most Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccines back to the country of origin, the Slovak Health Ministry said on Friday, as public interest is low after months of government hesitation over using the product that lacks European regulatory approval.

Slovakia shipped back 160,000 out of 200,000 doses imported in March, at $9.95 per dose, the same price as the original purchase, a ministry spokeswoman said.

Slovakia's adventure with Sputnik was a political fiasco for then-Prime Minister Igor Matovic, who bought the shots without telling his coalition partners and over their opposition.

He was forced to resign in a political crisis, though he returned to a reshuffled cabinet as finance minister.

Slovakia's drug agency SUKL refused to give a recommendation for using Sputnik V, citing insufficient data from the producer.

The government eventually allowed usage of Sputnik V last month for those who prefer it to other, EU-registered vaccines, but public interest was far below the available amount.

The Health Ministry said on Friday 10,500 Slovaks had received their first dose of the vaccine and 8,000 more were on a waiting list for the two-dose product.

The government closed registrations on June 30, and said last week it planned to sell or donate the vaccines, which are nearing expiration dates.

Matovic had originally planned to buy 2 million doses of the vaccines, at a time when western-made vaccines were slow to arrive in the country badly hit by the pandemic in the winter.

Slovakia is only the second EU country after Hungary to use the Russian vaccine.

(Reporting by Jan Lopatka; Editing by Richard Chang)
PARIS  Zara owner Inditex and SMCP, the group behind labels including Sandro and Maje, have denied sourcing products made with forced labor from the Uyghur region in China, responding to reports that French prosecutors have opened an inquiry following a complaint launched by a group of nongovernmental organizations.

We strongly refute the claims in this complaint, said Inditex in an emailed statement.

More from WWD

Inditex conducts rigorous traceability controls and we intend to fully cooperate with the French authorities to confirm that the allegations are unfounded, the statement continued.

SMCP strongly denies these accusations and will fully cooperate with the investigation to prove them false, the group said in an emailed statement.

An investigation was launched in June after a trio of nongovernmental organizations filed a complaint with the antiterrorist unit of the prosecutors office in France against Inditex, SMCP, Uniqlo and Skechers, accusing the companies of concealing crimes of humanity, according to AFP, confirming a report from the investigative news site Mediapart.

Our organizations have filed this complaint to shed some light on the role played by multinational companies in this situation and to enable the French courts to rule on their possible criminal liability, said the organizations Sherpa, the Collectif Ethique sur lEtiquette and the European Uyghur Institute in a joint statement.

The launch of an investigation is a necessary step to establish the truth and does not constitute recognition of the complaints merits, said SMCP.

The fashion group added that it does not have direct suppliers from the region, and that most of its supply chain is based in Europe and the Mediterranean region, noting that it operates an entirely independent supply chain from that of its majority shareholder, Shangdong Ruyi Group.

Inditex said it has policies aimed at preventing forced labor in its supply chain.

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At Inditex, we have zero tolerance for all forms of forced labor and have established policies and procedures to ensure this practice does not take place in our supply chain, said the Spanish fast fashion retailer.

Noting that it has signed the United Nations Global Compact, a pact encouraging companies to adopt socially responsible policies, SMCP said it formalized rules with suppliers regarding human rights through general purchasing conditions and a code of conduct. Suppliers have to agree to all clauses, as well as to ensuring that their subcontractors comply with them, the group said, noting it regularly conducts audits through an expert and independent third party to ensure the process is respected.

Inditex fully complies with all existing legislation and recommendations regarding the protection of workers rights and has implemented a human rights compliance framework based on the highest international standards, said the retailer.

Uniqlo and Skechers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The garment industry has faced increasing pressure to scrutinize supply chains in recent months. The U.S. declared the plight of the Uyghurs in China a genocide earlier this year, and, along with the European Union, the U.K. and Canada, placed sanctions against Chinese officials, citing human rights abuses against the minority group in the Xinjiang region.

The region has few apparel factories, but accounts for around 20 percent of the worlds supply of cotton. While much of that is used for goods sold in China, cotton is mixed and distributed globally, further putting pressure on labels to prove that the cotton in garments they bring to the U.S. or countries in Europe doesnt come from Xinjiang.

Foreign companies like Hennes & Mauritz AB that have said they wont source cotton from Xinjiang have faced a backlash in China, from the government and consumers.

A host of foreign brands have been ensnared, including Nike, Adidas, Uniqlo and Burberry, but H&M was the only one to have had its online stores on major Chinese e-commerce sites blocked.

Asked about business in China during a conference call with analysts this week, H&M chief executive officer Helena Helmersson said, Were still in a complex situation.

See more:

Xinjiang Cotton: Li Ning, Anta Shares Surge While Nike, Adidas, Burberry Hit With Backlash

H&M Emphasizes Long Term Commitment to China

H&M Removed From All Major Chinese Platforms Over Xinjiang Cotton Ban
Jul. 2A Maine State Police trooper took the stand for the first time Thursday to answer questions about allegations of racial profiling during his traffic stops on Interstate 95.

A prosecutor dismissed a criminal case last year after a cruiser microphone captured Trooper John Darcy describing the Black man he was pulling over as "looking like a thug." Darcy, who is white, denied that he stops drivers because of their race.

But the federal judge presiding over a separate case allowed a defense attorney to cross-examine Darcy on Thursday about his recorded comments. Other lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine are actively challenging past arrests made by Darcy on the same basis.

"Trooper Darcy has what the defense now knows to be a pattern of manufacturing reasons to stop and impermissibly detaining and searching people of color, particularly as they drive on Interstate 95 near York, Maine," assistant federal public defender Daphne Hallett Donahue wrote in one motion.

The Maine State Police conducted a review of the traffic stop that involved his recorded comments but said earlier this year that the findings are confidential. State police also have not made Darcy available for an interview. So when he testified in U.S. District Court in Portland on Thursday during a hearing on a motion to suppress evidence from one of his stops, he was making his first public comments about the accusations against him.

"When I used the word 'thug,' I was referencing a person involved in criminal activity," Darcy said Thursday. "The purpose of what I was trying to say was ... race wouldn't matter in anything we do."

The recording in question came from a traffic stop on Aug. 15, 2019. Darcy, who is white, pulled over a Black man who was driving north through York on I-95. The internal microphone in the cruiser caught Darcy's comments to another trooper moments before the stop, and they have since been quoted in motions filed in that case and others.

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"This guy kinda looks like a thug to be honest with you," Darcy said to an unidentified trooper riding with him.

This video contains vulgar language. Trooper John Darcy is heard speaking with an unidentified trooper and can later be seen questioning the driver of a vehicle he pulled over. Darcy later found drugs in the car, but the case was dropped after the video was introduced as evidence of what the defense attorney called racial profiling.

Darcy went on to say the driver in question looked "like a thug" because, "he's wearing a wifebeater" and "he's got dreads." A "wifebeater" is a reference to a sleeveless white T-shirt. He then tells the other trooper that he is not racially profiling the man.

"I hate when people try to make it seem like that's what it is," Darcy said. "I care about where people are from, and the way they seem ... you know what I mean? Do they seem like they can be involved in drug dealing or gangs or something. I don't give a (expletive) if someone's black or white."

Darcy then stopped the man for driving in the middle lane of the three-lane highway without passing or overtaking any other vehicles. Maine law says that drivers should stay in the right-hand lane when the speed limit is greater than 65 mph unless they are passing other vehicles. A search uncovered cocaine and pills, and the driver was eventually charged in federal court with possession of cocaine with intent to distribute and holding a counterfeit drug for sale. When the man's lawyer raised the recording, the prosecutor dismissed the charges without explanation.

Other attorneys have since used the recording to challenge other traffic stops and criminal cases involving Darcy. They have asked the court to suppress evidence from those stops and order the government to produce records about Darcy's policing.

In one case, the federal defender's office filed motions in April that called into question at least 11 traffic stops led by Darcy. Donahue, the public defender, wrote in her motion that those cases all involved people of color, and the stops appear to be based on manufactured reasons or selective enforcement. She said she believes that pattern extends to the state police's Proactive Criminal Enforcement team, which includes Darcy and focuses on intercepting illegal drugs coming into Maine, and she made a sweeping request for information about their work.

"These are likely just some of many examples of Trooper Darcy's predatory, race-based, policing strategies," Donahue wrote. "There are likely many other people of color driving northbound in the state of Maine who have been subjected to this type of unconstitutional search and seizure, but who are ultimately permitted to continue their trip because the searches yield nothing."

The ACLU of Maine echoed those arguments in an amicus brief.

"By emphasizing the need for officers to be truthful and by explicitly recognizing the racist bent to Trooper Darcy's training, experience and inferences, the Court can rewrite the rulebook that is currently in circulation, at least among the Maine State Police Pro-Active Enforcement Team," that brief says.

The U.S. Attorney's Office has not yet filed a response to those motions.

Among the cases cited by the federal defender's office is the one that was dismissed last year. Another is that of Damon Fagan.

Court documents show Darcy pulled Fagan over on I-95 in 2019 after he allegedly cut off a tractor-trailer. He requested a narcotics dog that was brought to the scene. The trooper later found drugs on the man, and he was charged with possession with intent to distribute heroin. U.S. District Judge D. Brock Hornby rejected a motion to suppress evidence from that traffic stop last year, but reopened the matter so the attorneys could question Darcy under oath about his recorded comments. That hearing took place Thursday.

"Trooper Darcy, does a person's race play a conscious role in your decision whether to pull them over for a traffic infraction?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Scott asked him.

"No," Darcy answered.

Scott argued that the trooper stopped Fagan for making an unsafe lane change, not for any subjective intention.

"Overall, what the evidence in this case shows is that Trooper Darcy had lawful basis to stop the defendant," Scott said.

Defense attorney David Bobrow pointed both to the recorded comments and a message Darcy sent to another trooper before he stopped Fagan: "I'm on the hunt tonight."

"Why does that cast doubt on his credibility?" Bobrow said. "For the simple reason that it casts doubt on his motivations."

Hornby did not make a ruling at the hearing and said he would issue an order at a later date.

Before Darcy stepped down from the witness stand, Bobrow also asked him about a traffic stop he made about an hour before he pulled over Fagan. The trooper testified that he called for a narcotics dog to conduct a search in that stop as well, but the dog was not available, and ultimately he did not arrest anyone from that vehicle.

"Do you recall the race of the operator?" Bobrow asked.

"I do not," Darcy answered.

"If I were to tell you that it was a Black male, would that surprise you?" the attorney asked.

The prosecutor objected, and Darcy ended his testimony without answering the question.
The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to take up a case on a tuition assistance program in Maine that bars the use of state money for religious schools, setting up yet another battle in the high court on the intersection of religious freedom and school choice.

The case, Carson v. Makin, stems from a Maine program that provides tuition for Maine residents to attend private high schools if their local district does not have a public school. It comes in the wake of a recent Supreme Court case that ruled the government can't ban government aid in a generally available program from going to religious schools.

The previous case, Espinoza v. Montana, was considered a major win for religious liberty advocates. But the Maine program includes different language that, if upheld, could effectively neuter Espinoza.

The state says it can't discriminate against schools based on their status of being connected to religious institutions. But it says it can ban money from going to the school if it promotes a certain religious view to its students  something many religious schools do.

SUPREME COURT DECLINES TO HEAR CASE OF FLOWER SHOP OWNER SUED FOR NOT SERVING GAY WEDDING

The First Circuit Court of Appeals, in upholding this part of Maine's program, called it a "use-based" distinction.

Because the Maine program is only for people who live in areas without public schools, the appeals court said those seeking "publicly funded biblically-integrated or religiously intertwined education are not seeking equal access to the benefit that Maine makes available to all others  namely, the free benefits of a public education."

The circuit court also said that Maine is applying a different standard on which schools it bans from receiving state money. Where Montana in the Espinoza case banned all schools connected with religious institutions from getting state money  "status" discrimination  Maine bans schools based on "what the school teaches through its curriculum."

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This, the circuit court argued, follows the logic of the Espinoza case in which the justices distinguished between funding for schools that are connected with religious institutions and funding for "the training of clergy." A ban on state money funding clergy training was upheld by a 2004 Supreme Court case called Locke v. Davey.

"[A]lthough Espinoza prohibits Maine from excluding schools because they are religious, Maine can still exclude parents from choosing schools that do religious things," Institute for Justice, the group representing the families challenging the Maine policy, said in a press release, summarizing the state's argument.

SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS ARIZONA VOTER FRAUD PROTECTIONS

Kirby Thomas West, a lawyer for Institute for Justice, appeared to ridicule Maine's law in a Friday tweet.

"Big news! @IJ headed back to SCOTUS for another important #schoolchoice case," she said. "This time arguing that, when SCOTUS said in Espinoza that states can't discriminate against religious schools, it meant that states can't discriminate against religious schools. Way to go, team!"

The Maine Department of Education has argued that its situation is rather unique, as many students in Maine would not have a publicly funded education without its tuition assistance program. So therefore, it says, the program is not the same as the Montana one which was meant to fund alternatives to public education.

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"The tuition program is not a voucher program or another vehicle for school choice," the state said in a brief.

"The tuition program is the result of a specific legislative determination that a sectarian education is not equivalent to a public education," the state also said. "The tuition program is not designed as an alternative to Maines public education system but as a part of it."

The case is likely to be argued in late 2021 or early 2022, and should be decided by the end of June 2022.
WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court on Friday sided with an Amish community that is challenging on religious grounds a Minnesota county's requirement that its members install septic systems to treat wastewater.

The high court overturned a state court ruling that had sided with the county and asked the state's courts to review the case again in light of its recent ruling in favor of a Catholic foster care agency in Philadelphia that refused to screen same-sex couples.

Fillmore County in 2013 began requiring that the Swartzentruber Amish, who reject modern technology as part of their religion, install septic systems to treat the wastewater from laundry, bathing and cooking  known as gray water. The Amish instead want to reuse that water for irrigation or treat it through less sophisticated systems.

In an opinion concurring with the Supreme Court's decision, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch said the state courts misread a federal law dealing with how such land use regulations may be applied to religious entities. It was the latest example of the Supreme Court siding with a claim of religious freedom in a contest with an asserted governmental interest.

"County officials have subjected the Amish to threats of reprisals and inspections of their homes and farms. They have attacked the sincerity of the Amishs faith," Gorsuch wrote. "In this country, neither the Amish nor anyone else should have to choose between their farms and their faith."

Gorsuch said state courts should reconsider the case in light of a unanimous Supreme Court decision on June 17 that a Catholic foster care agency in Philadelphia may turn away gay and lesbian couples as clients because same-sex marriage conflicts with its religious beliefs. The high court also struck down several coronavirus regulations this year that limited attendance at churches and synagogues.

As in the Philadelphia case, Gorsuch said that the septic system law at issue in Minnesota had an exception and, because of that, courts need to heavily scrutinize a law that imposes a burden on religious organizations or activities while offering exceptions to secular ones.

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"In Minnesota," Gorsuch wrote, "those who 'hand-carr[y]' their gray water are allowed to discharge it onto the land directly."

Big picture: Supreme Court ruling likely to prompt tests of religion vs. LGBTQ rights

COVID: COVID-19 cases influence battle between religion, same-sex couples

A law signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 requires governments to tread carefully when zoning and other property regulations affect religious entities. To enforce such regulations, a government  such as a county  must have a compelling interest to do so and its rule must be as narrowly tailored as possible to serve that interest.

The Amish plaintiffs said that while Fillmore County has a general interest in ensuring wastewater is treated, it isn't necessary on the rural farms where they live. They also said 20 other states allow gray water reuse systems in place of septic tanks. Raw sewage is not at issue because the community uses outhouses rather than toilets.

A Swartzentruber Amish buggy heads along Winter Road on Friday, April 21, 2017, in West Salem, Ohio.

"If they are forced to choose between their beliefs and the farms that provide their livelihood, they will choose their beliefs," a lawyer for the Amish told the justices. "That is the choice the government is forcing upon them."

Local officials countered that they require the systems, even when raw sewage is not involved, because gray water on its own "may contain pathogens, viruses, bacteria, and other materials harmful to human health and the environment."

The Minnesota Supreme Court declined last year to review lower state court decisions that had sided with the government in the case. Four members of the Amish community appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in January.

Religious freedom claims have met with much success at the Supreme Court in recent years. The justices have allowed taxpayer money to be directed to religious entities in some situations, exempted employers with religious objections from requirements that they provide health insurance coverage for contraceptives and let a massive Latin cross stay on government land within a few minutes' drive from the nation's capital.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court backs Amish religious opposition to septic systems
By Noor Zainab Hussain and Tom Wilson

(Reuters) - Thailand's financial watchdog filed a criminal complaint against cryptocurrency exchange Binance on Friday for operating a digital asset business without a licence, the latest in a string of crackdowns on the platform by regulators globally.

Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said in a statement that Binance had been operating a digital asset business "in the category of a digital asset exchange" without a licence.

In Thailand, only licensed firms are allowed to provide services related to digital asset trading, the SEC said.

The Commission had warned Binance over its activities in a letter in April but received no response, it said, leading it to then file a criminal complaint with the Thai police.

A Binance spokesperson declined to comment specifically on the Thai complaint, saying it takes a collaborative approach to working with regulators and takes its compliance obligations seriously.

Britain's financial watchdog last week barred the company, one of the world's biggest exchanges, from carrying out regulated activities in the country.

Japan's regulator said last week Binance was operating in the country illegally, while Germany's watchdog said in April it risked being fined for offering tokens connected to stocks.

In May, Bloomberg reported Binance was under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service.

The complaint filed in Thailand by the SEC is the start of a criminal procedure, with a police investigation possibly leading to a recommendation to a public attorney who has authority for prosecution, the Commission said.

The offence carries a penalty of two to five years imprisonment, a fine of 200,000-500,000 baht ($6,200-15,500), and a further daily fine of up to 10,000 baht for every day the contravention continues, it added.

Trading volumes at the exchange in June were $662 billion, up almost ten-fold from July 2020, according to data from CryptoCompare.

(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru and Tom Wilson in London; Editing by Arun Koyyur and Jan Harvey)
Pets not only make good companions, they make good bucks, too.

In 2020, Americans spent more than $100 billion on their furry friends for the first time ever, and that trend is expected to keep growing post-pandemic.

The current stock price of new entrants into public markets  namely, Chewy (CHWY) and Petco (WOOF)  hardly reflect the same investor enthusiasm that prevailed when they debuted. Yet according to one analyst, historical trends in industry growth rates are proof that the pet retail boom isnt going anywhere.

The industry itself has always been very resilient to economic downturns even in the financial crisis, Mickey Chadha, Moody's Vice President and senior credit officer, told Yahoo Finance Live in a recent interview.

When the rest of retail was actually having a very hard time, pet retailers were doing fine, he added. That's primarily because the trend of humanization and 'premiumization' of products for your pets and the fact that pets obviously, as you know, become family members.

Winners and losers

Chewy CEO Sumit Singh is interviewed on the trading floor on the morning of his company's IPO at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., June 14, 2019. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

During the pandemic, 23 million American households got a pet, according to The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). As social guidelines ease, services such as grooming, dog walking and boarding that took a hit during lockdowns are expected to recover, and the pet retail industry is expected to grow 5.8%, according to the American Pet Products Association.

From 2019 to 2020, total pet retail sales increased by 6.7%, according to the APPA. Moreover, nearly half of pet owners reported they bought more stuff online, as specialty and independent retailers experienced solid growth.

For 2020, Petco reported an 11% increase in revenue, in part because remote workers either adopted new pets, or splurged on their current ones during COVID-19 lockdowns.

The retailer operates more than 1,500 Petco locations across the U.S., Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, online retailer Chewy, which was founded a decade ago and went public in June 2019, reported a 47% jump in net sales year-over-year for fiscal 2020.

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Despite growth in the industry as a whole, he does not expect consolidation any time soon.

"I think pet products are attractive for a company like Target (TGT), but a big acquisition in the pet industry would be quite prohibitive, especially if you're talking about Chewy," said Chadha.

While the pandemic rewarded many companies handsomely, smaller retailers have not had the same financial success. Independent neighborhood chains cannot fully take on well-heeled rivals to raise their e-commerce presence, so they cannot sell their products to more people.

"Those are the ones that are probably going to be challenged because you have a lot of big players that are playing in this game," he said.

"With the humanization of pets, that has really helped out the pet retailers. There's legs to the momentum."Mickey Chadha, Moody's

By far, the majority of pet spending goes towards food and treats, and almost half of the country is doing so digitally.

E-commerce has grown at a rate of almost 40% a year, notes Chadha, while the total retail industry has grown about 5%. Going forward, he thinks digital can see growth of 10% annually, and brick-and-mortars about 2%.

"If you look at the industry, this biggest share is still with the mass market, so retailers like Walmart (WMT) and even Amazon (AMZN) are getting into [it] because it's actually a pretty good revenue generator," he noted.

"With the humanization of pets, that has really helped out the pet retailers. There's legs to the momentum," said Chadha.

Pamela Granda is a producer on Yahoo Finance Live. Follow her on Twitter.

Read more:

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Donald Trump's children and their partners, from left: Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Lara Trump, Michael Boulos, and Tiffany Trump. Getty

Trump's children Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr. would be likely to flip on him, his niece Mary said.

She said she believes her cousins would not show the same loyalty to Trump as Allen Weisselberg had.

"They're not going to risk anything for him, just as he wouldn't risk anything for them," she said.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Donald Trump's children would likely flip on their father if they faced criminal charges, Mary Trump, the former president's niece, suggested.

She told MSNBC on Thursday that Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Trump Jr. would be unlikely to show the same sort of loyalty to their father during a criminal case as Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's longtime chief financial officer, had.

Weisselberg and the Trump Organization on Thursday were charged with several crimes stemming from an investigation into Trump's financial arrangements. Weisselberg had refused to cooperate with investigators.

A 25-page indictment suggested that other Trump Organization executives had benefited from the scheme investigators described, raising the prospect that Trump's children could be next to face charges.

Mary Trump told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that she thought Trump's three eldest children "should be quite anxious right now."

She said that while her uncle would "expect the same kind and level of loyalty from them as he expects from Allen," it would likely not be forthcoming.

She said she thought he "would be surprised to learn that I don't believe my cousins would exercise that kind of loyalty towards him, because his relationship with them and their relationship with him is entirely transactional and conditional."

"They're not going to risk anything for him, just as he wouldn't risk anything for them," she added.

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In June, she told CNN's Chris Cuomo that she believed Trump would never sacrifice himself for his children if he were to face legal peril.

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"What would it mean to Donald Trump if they came after his kids?" Cuomo asked her, adding: "Would that change his disposition, you think? Would he take one for his kids?"

"No, he wouldn't," she replied.

Weisselberg and the Trump Organization pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against them by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Insider's Sonam Sheth and Jacob Shamsian reported.

Read the original article on Business Insider
By Mark Hosenball and Jan Wolfe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Federal prosecutors are discussing possible plea bargains with at least 12 of 16 defendants in the U.S. Capitol riot accused of links with the far-right Oath Keepers movement, a government lawyer said in court on Friday.

Three people described as Oath Keeper defendants have already entered guilty pleas and agreed to cooperate with investigators. Prosecutor Kathryn Rakoczy, at a hearing to discuss the status of the cases, told Judge Amit Mehta that it is likely more Oath Keepers would plead guilty.

Five people died, including a U.S. Capitol Police officer, when supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 to try to stop the formal certification of Joe Biden as the winner in last November's election.

The Oath Keepers are focused on recruiting current and former military, law enforcement and emergency services personnel and the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies it as "one of the largest radical anti-government groups" in the United States.

While most defendants accused of Oath Keeper links have been released on bail, at least three remain in pre-trial custody. Lawyers and Mehta indicated that at least some of the pending Oath Keeper cases could ultimately proceed to trial.

In a separate federal court hearing in Washington on Friday, a San Antonio man pleaded guilty to a single riot-related misdemeanor charge.

Matthew Carl Mazzocco, 37, of San Antonio, Texas, pleaded guilty to a charge of violent conduct on U.S. Capitol grounds. A court document describes Mazzocco as a mortgage loan officer for CMG Financial and says he posted pictures of himself on Facebook at the U.S. Capitol with the caption, "The capital [sic] is ours!"

A spokesperson for CMG Financial said in a statement that Mazzocco "was not a CMG Financial employee in January 2021 and had not been a CMG employee for several months at that time."

(Reporting By Mark Hosenball and Jan Wolfe; editing by Grant McCool)
Bagram Air Base Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. military has left Bagram Air Base after nearly 20 years and handed it over to Afghanistan, two U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Friday. President Biden said U.S. forces will be out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11, but the handover of Bagram Air Base to the Afghan National Security and Defense Force is the latest sign the pullout date will be much sooner, closer to July 4. Most of the 7,000 allied NATO troops have already quietly left the country, AP reports, citing announcements from several European countries.

Bagram Air Base, first built by the Soviet Union in the 1950s, was the center of military power after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S. "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," AP reports. Under U.S. control, CNN adds, "the airfield became a small city in its own right, complete with shops, gyms, and classrooms for the thousands of service members and contractors who worked at the base and its facilities."

In 2012, more than 100,000 U.S. troops passed through Bagram, about an hour's drive north of Kabul, the capital, and Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all visited the air base. Bagram has two giant runways, three large hangars, a 50-bed hospital, and a notorious prison. Over the past few days, crews have loaded the last of what was deemed valuable enough to remove onto C-17 cargo planes. U.S. Central Command said Tuesday the U.S. military has destroyed another 16,000 piece of equipment.

When the U.S.-led Resolute Support Mission has officially wound down, the U.S. will still have about 650 troops protecting the sprawling U.S. embassy in Kabul under a separate agreement with the Afghan government. The Resolute Support agreement will likely stay in effect until the U.S., Turkey, and Afghanistan work out security arrangements for Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport. The future of Afghanistan's elected government is uncertain as the Taliban makes gains in several parts of the country.

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The Treasury Department said Friday it had removed sanctions against three Iranians, restoring access to their U.S. assets, according to Reuters.

Why it matters: Treasury officials said Behzad Ferdows, Mehrzad Ferdows and Mohammad Reza Dezfulian should not be sanctioned but that the roll back had nothing to do with ongoing indirect talks on reviving the 2015 nuclear deal.

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Their assets had been blocked under Executive Order 13382, which focuses on proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and their supporters, according to Reuters.

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KABUL  American forces have vacated Afghanistan's Bagram Airbase, once a bustling mini-city that housed U.S. troops as well as NATO forces, a senior U.S. official told NBC News on Friday.

The official, who has direct knowledge of the withdrawal, spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because the decision has not yet been officially announced.

The move is a stark statement of intent on the part of President Joe Biden's administration, and an indication that the remaining 2,500 to 3,500 U.S. troops have left or are close to exiting the country, months ahead of the president's Sept. 11 deadline.

Pentagon officials were not immediately available for comment on the news. NATO officials referred NBC News to American officials.

Officials from the U.S.-backed Afghan government, which relies heavily on foreign support particularly in the face of ongoing Taliban victories throughout the country, did not immediately respond to the news.

Two U.S. officials told The Associated Press that the airfield had been handed over in its entirety to the Afghan National Security and Defense Force.

Afghanistan's district administrator for Bagram, Darwaish Raufi, told The AP that the American departure happened overnight without coordination with local officials, and as a result early Friday dozens of looters stormed through the unprotected gates.

The U.S. toppled the Taliban in 2001 after the group sheltered Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. The U.S.-led international mission was once full of promise, with armies and governments from around the world coming together in the wake of the devastating attack on the United States and pledging a brighter future for the war-torn country.

Nearly 20 years and billions in civilian and military aid later, some have questioned whether Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest and most violent countries, is much better off.

America's longest war has cost the lives of around 2,300 U.S. troops and left thousands more wounded. More than 100,000 Afghans are estimated to have been killed or wounded since the conflict began.

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The country ranks among the worst places in the world to be born a female, with high infant and maternal mortality rates. Millions of children, in particular girls, do not attend school, and the country's government is widely considered to be rife with corruption.

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But many in Afghanistan and the international community see a return of the Taliban as catastrophic for Afghan women, who under militant rule were banned from attending school and whipped and stoned for adultery. In the last two decades, a generation of Afghan women and girls flooded into schools and many in urban centers have been able to go to work outside the home.

The Bagram exit is a major step amid a wider U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. In 2020, former-President Donald Trump pledged that all U.S. forces would leave the country by May. In a similar bid to end America's so-called "forever wars" Biden promised that U.S. troops would leave Afghanistan by Sept. 11.

At its peak around 2012, Bagram Airfield saw more than 100,000 U.S. troops pass through its sprawling compound about an hour's drive north of the capital, Kabul.

The departure is rife with symbolism. It's the second time that an invading army has come and gone through the base, after the Soviet Union built the installation in the 1950s. The Soviets withdrew from the country in 1989.

When the U.S. and NATO inherited Bagram in 2001, they found it in ruins and largely abandoned.

In response to the U.S. withdrawal from Bagram, members of the Afghan Taliban told NBC News on Friday that while they were waiting for an official announcement of the move, the exit was a "result of our sacrifices."

The militants, however, did not have immediate plans to try and capture the base, spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid added.

Image: U.S. soldiers enjoy Christmas lunch at a military base in the coalition headquarters in Bagram, north of Kabul, Afghanistan (Rafiq Maqbool / AP)

Earlier this week, the U.S.'s top general in Afghanistan gave a sobering assessment of the country's deteriorating security situation as America winds down its presence.

Gen. Austin S. Miller said on Tuesday that the rapid loss of districts around the country to the Taliban was worrisome. He also cautioned that the militias deployed to help the 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 it's on right now, that should be of concern to the world," Miller said.

Some U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan, largely to protect the sprawling embassy in Kabul and possibly the international airport, according to the State Department.

Richard Engel and Marc Smith reported from Kabul, Mushtaq Yusufzai reported from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Adela Suliman reported from London.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Prisoners taken by the warring parties in the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine have endured systematic torture, sexual violence and other abuses, the United Nations human rights agency said in a report released Friday.

The report issued by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said that prisoners' abuse was particularly rampant in the initial stage of the seven-year conflict, but noted that it continues to this day.

Seven years since the outbreak of the conflict, it is unacceptable that such egregious human rights violation remain largely unaddressed, said Matilda Bogner, Head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine. The prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is absolute. Torture can never be justified.

The conflict in Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland called the Donbas erupted in April 2014 weeks after Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula that followed the ouster of the country's former Moscow-leaning president. Russia-backed separatists took control of large areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, established the so-called peoples republics' and fought the government forces attempting to reclaim control. More than 14,000 people have been killed.

The OHCHR estimated the total number of conflict-related detentions from April 14, 2014 until April 30, 2021 at 7,900-8,700 , including 3,600-4,000 by the government side and 4,300-4,700 by separatists.

It said in the report that both sides used secret detention facilities immune from any prosecutorial oversight or access by rights monitors. The government side stopped using them in 2017 but the separatists continue to hold prisoners incommunicado, denying access to their relatives and monitors to that moment, the OHCHR said.

The OHCHR analyzed more than 1,300 individual cases of conflict-related detention. It said that in cases that occurred only between 2014-2015, 74% of detainees held by government forces and 82.2% to 85.7% of those held by the rebels in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions respectively were frequently subjected to torture and ill-treatment.

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It estimated the total number of conflict-related detainees subjected to torture and ill-treatment in 2014-2021 at around 4,000 - 1,500 at the hands of government agents and about 2,500 by separatists. They included an estimated 340 victims of sexual violence.

The OHCHR said that both in the government-controlled and separatist-held territories "torture and ill-treatment, including conflict-related sexual violence, were used to extract confessions or information, or to otherwise force detainees to cooperate, as well as for punitive purposes, to humiliate and intimidate, and to extort money and property.

Methods of torture and ill-treatment used by both sides included beatings, dry and wet asphyxiation, electrocution, rape, forced nudity, water, food, sleep or toilet deprivation, mock executions, hooding, and threats of death or further torture or sexual violence, or harm to family members.

Stanislav Aseyev, a journalist who worked for the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and spent 28 months in the Izoliatsia (Isolation) separatist prison in Donetsk, said the facility had an elaborate system of torture that put emphasis on electric shock.

They would strip a person naked tied to a metal chair with a band and then apply electric shock to different body parts, Aseyev, who was released in a 2019 prisoner swap, told The Associated Press.

Aseyev, who was also subjected to torture, said that hearing others screaming in pain under torture in a nearby cell has added to the trauma. It's unbearable to hear a person crying from torture in a neighboring room, he told the AP.

OHCHR pointed to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) as the most common perpetrator of arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment on the government side, adding that volunteer battalions were also responsible at the initial stages of the conflict.

On the rebel side, the report said that various armed groups and later members of separatist ministries of state security were responsible for prisoner torture and abuse.

The report noted that most of the abuses have remained unpunished.

"We have observed a lack of political will and motivation to investigate the cases allegedly perpetrated by government actors, as well as misuse of procedures to avoid proper investigation of such cases, Bogner said. While we can count victims in the thousands, perpetrators brought to account only number in the dozens.
Most federal death row inmates are housed in Terre Haute, Indiana

The US attorney general has ordered a pause on federal executions that were resumed in 2020 under the Trump administration after a 17-year hiatus.

Merrick Garland, the US government's top lawyer, also ordered a review of the rules around the death penalty.

The decision had the backing of President Joe Biden, who appointed Mr Garland vowing to pause executions.

The Trump administration carried out 13 federal executions during the former president's final months in office.

In issuing the moratorium, Attorney General Garland cited the disproportionate number of racial minorities who are sentenced to capital punishment.

"The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely," Mr Garland said.

"That obligation has special force in capital cases."

No federal inmates have been put to death since Mr Biden took office. There are about 50 people currently on federal death row, according to the non-partisan Death Penalty Information Center.

Executions had been ordered to resume in 2020 by former Attorney General William Barr, who argued that the federal government owed "the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system".

Mr Garland also ordered officials to review the drugs administered during lethal injection amid reports that prisoners may have experienced severe pain while dying.

The majority of US executions are administered by states, where some 2,500 prisoners are on death row. Texas leads the country with 570 executions since 1976.

As a candidate Mr Biden promised to end federal executions, and encourage states to also end the practice. Already nearly half of states have abolished the death penalty.

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In March 2021, Virginia became the first southern state to ban capital punishment.

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WASHINGTON  American military troops have left Bagram Airfield and handed the base over to Afghan security forces, effectively ending the U.S. combat role after nearly 20 years of war.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby confirmed the handover on Friday and said the U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan will focus on protecting American diplomats, securing the international airport in Kabul, advising Afghan forces and supporting counter-terrorism efforts.

At the White House, spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the full U.S. withdrawal will not be complete until the end of August, though a senior U.S. official has said it will be largely done by July 4. As many as 650 U.S. troops will stay in Afghanistan indefinitely to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

The U.S. departure from Bagram  which served as the hub of the American-led war against al-Qaida and the Taliban for nearly two decades  comes even as some U.S. officials warn that a resurgent Taliban could soon topple the Afghan government.

Afghan National Army soldiers stand guard at a road checkpoint outside Bagram Air Base, after all U.S. and NATO troops left, on July 2, 2021.

Most European troops have pulled out of Afghanistan in recent days, quietly withdrawing months before the U.S.-led mission officially ended  part of an anticlimactic close to the forever war that risks leaving the country on the brink of civil war.

NATO agreed to withdraw its roughly 7,000 forces from Afghanistan in April, after President Joe Bidens announced his decision to pull all American troops from the country by Sept. 11  the 20-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks that triggered America's longest war.

Biden's national security advisers have emphasized that U.S. will continue to support Afghanistan with humanitarian and economic assistance.

"We're going to stick with you," Biden said in a June 25 meeting with Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani and other officials. Ghani said Biden's decision to withdraw would mark a "new chapter" in the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan.

More: Biden meets with Afghanistan leaders as US troop withdrawal expected well ahead of 9/11 deadline

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But the security situation in Afghanistan has grown increasingly dire, as Taliban fighters rout Afghan forces in districts across the country. The commander of the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin Miller, recently offered a stark public assessment of Afghanistan's future.

Civil war is certainly a path that can be visualized if it continues on the trajectory its on, Miller told reporters during a June 29 news conference in Afghanistan. That should be a concern for the world.

In this June 6, 2021, photo, Afghan security personnel leave the scene of a roadside bomb explosion in Kabul, Afghanistan. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is more than half done, and U.S. officials say that while it could be completed by July 4, the final exit of equipment and troops more likely will be later in the summer.

Republicans in Congress have echoed those concerns and warned the U.S. withdrawal could jeopardize hard-fought gains in the fight against al-Qaida.

In his remarks to reporters Friday, Biden said he believed the Afghan government could sustain itself and noted the U.S. will continue to provide Afghan forces some support from U.S. bases outside the country.

"We have worked out an over-the-horizon capacity," the president said, though how the U.S. will execute that is still unclear.

At the White House briefing Friday, Psaki noted that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was set in motion by former President Donald Trump. Under a deal Trump's advisers brokered with the Taliban, the U.S. agreed to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban promised to sever its ties with al-Qaida and end its attacks on American forces.

Biden announced the Sept. 11 deadline earlier this year, arguing the U.S. had achieved its goal of routing al-Qaida and that it was "time for American troops to come home."

At the wars peak, the U.S. and NATO military numbers surpassed 150,000. The conflict has cost more than $2 trillion, according to a Brown University analysis released in April. More than 2,400 American service members were killed, along with scores of allied troops, humanitarian workers, journalists and tens of thousands of civilians.

Psaki said last week that Biden's decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan "is consistent with his view over the last 20 years about the war." But she also noted that the Taliban had threatened to renew its attacks on American forces if the U.S. failed to adhere to the Trump administration's agreement.

"That was not something, as the Commander-in-Chief, that he felt was acceptable," she said.

Contributing: Tom Vanden Brook, Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: US military vacates Bagram Airfield, full Afghanistan withdrawal near
Customers wait for their food at Colony, a ghost kitchen on Santa Monica Boulevard. The building is divided into several kitchen spaces, and dozens of brands serve food from a single location. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

For the last decade or so, Benito's Taco Shop on Santa Monica Boulevard has been my favorite California burrito spot on the west side.

Its my go-to, not necessarily because its the best-tasting or fanciest burrito, but because its the burrito thats been there for me time and time again.

Benitos has rescued many a night with the simple virtue of being open until 3 a.m. And though Ive since had better burritos, I still find its California burrito delicious, with a toothy, slightly translucent flour tortilla, tender carne asada and the option to substitute fries for potatoes.

A few weeks ago I called and placed my regular order, a California burrito and three rolled tacos.

But when I drove down Santa Monica Boulevard, the familiar yellow and orange Benitos sign was nowhere to be found. I checked Yelp and found that the page was still active, even listing photos of the storefront and a Santa Monica Boulevard address.

I started to become very alarmed. I careened into a parking spot and began to pace frantically up and down the block, flip-flops flapping, sweat pouring and my heart thumping. Surely they had just changed locations, I thought. Please, not my Benito's, too.

The acceleration of delivery and takeout as well as the economic stress caused by the pandemic have led more restaurants to participate in ghost kitchens, also known as virtual or cloud kitchens. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The truth was a bit harder to swallow. Benitos had closed its brick-and-mortar location awhile back and relocated to a ghost kitchen inside a building calling itself Colony, a former Ethan Allen furniture space converted to kitchen facilities and a dining patio. As for the Benitos sign, I finally located it on a far wall.

It was displayed with more than a dozen other brands in a grid of rounded squares that hauntingly recalled the app icons of a smartphone home screen.

Colony, I learned, is an example of a new evolution in commercial real estate called a ghost kitchen, also known as a cloud or virtual kitchen. There are at least two in Los Angeles and one in Pasadena. Each facility is divided into several kitchen spaces and dozens of brands, both virtual-only and established brick-and-mortar places like Canters, serve food out of a single space.

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Ghost kitchens allow restaurateurs to create brands without having to go through the expensive and time-consuming process of finding a space. Existing restaurant brands can also spin off new brands with far fewer startup costs. My colleague Roger Vincent chronicled the rise a few months ago, noting that ghost kitchens can cost as little as $20,000 to establish and rent for as low as $5,000 a month.

In Pasadena, Eats on Madison offers a dizzying array of food options out of a single space, including but not limited to barbecue, pizza, kabobs, tacos, burgers, musubi, sub sandwiches, burritos, wings, acai bowls and more.

Each brand must register with the city as its own business and apply for a shared kitchen permit, said Rachel Janbek, manager of the Pasadena Environmental Health Division. Each brand also receives an individual food inspection and pays its own taxes.

Cloud kitchens allow chefs and business owners flexibility by reducing startup costs, said Blake Kaplan, a retail broker with JLL who has worked with cloud kitchens. The pandemics lockdown conditions have created delivery and takeout habits that may not change even with vaccines and reopening.

According to an International Foodservice Manufacturer's Assn. study of delivery habits done in 201`7, 21% of my generation, millennials, orders delivery at least three times a week. Among Gen Z, the proportion is 24%.

A CBRE report estimates that ghost kitchens will account for 21% of total restaurant sales by 2025. Online food ordering business is expected to grow by 64% over that same time period.

Ghost kitchens are supposed to help restaurants respond to these changed conditions by lowering startup costs and encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation, said Jim Crocenzi, an advisor with CBRE who focuses on restaurant retail. Ghost kitchens can launch new restaurants in as little as two weeks, while brick-and-mortar restaurants often take more than a year to get off the ground.

But I cant help but worry for these brick-and-mortar spaces, which to me are an essential, undervalued component of the life of a city. After nearly two years of lockdown conditions, we are all now intimately familiar with how lonely and barren life can be without these spaces to mingle and interact.

With the city and state reopening, many of us are reveling in the taste of food  any food  that did not spend 45 minutes in a Styrofoam container. We are rediscovering the joys of meeting in person at beloved bars, restaurants and cafes. We are learning that a city is more than the things you can buy  its the places you go and the people you can meet.

And now, these brick-and-mortar spaces face competition with entirely virtual brands that have much lower costs and much higher flexibility. On a delivery app listing, its impossible to tell which brands are brick and mortar and which exist only online.

I decided to go ahead and try the burrito. My phone order at Order Colony didnt end up going through. An employee told me to get in line and reenter the order on an iPad.

And so there I was, another vacant face in a line of millennials dressed in pajamas or workout clothes, all of us staring at their iPhones as we waited to enter our orders on a smudged tablet. It was a grim look at what a future entirely shaped by the desires of my generation might look like. Or at least, what a private equity or venture capital firm interprets our desires to be based on the data collected from our social feeds.

What if delivery and takeout market share grow to the point that running a brick-and-mortar restaurant is unsustainable, or so expensive that only wealthy patrons can afford to dine in? What if the most profitable use of our citys buildings becomes a staging ground for some still-unborn online juggernaut? What if Instagram traffic replaces foot traffic? What if another pandemic accelerates these evolutions and makes them permanent? This city wouldn't be the same.

The ghost kitchen version of the burrito Ive eaten for more than a decade finally arrived. I ate it at home over my coffee table, as I've taken most meals in this pandemic. The food tasted like I remember  the tortilla was nice and chewy, and the rolled tacos were drowning in guacamole and orange cheese.

I couldnt shake the feeling that I'd been tricked. But in the end I was just glad the burrito still existed.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
A human chain is formed by workers from the civil society, humanitarian aid, and medical and rescue services in a vigil calling for maintaining a UN resolution authorizing the passage of humanitarian aid into Syria's rebel-held northwestern province of Idlib through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey, near Bab al-Hawa along the motorway linking it to the city of Idlib on July 2, 2021. - The UN resolution is set to expire on July 10 -- by which time the Security Council must have voted on its renewal, which is currently threatened by a veto from Russia on grounds that it violates Syria's sovereignty, in a bid to re-route aid through regime-controlled territory. OMAR HAJ KADOUR/AFP via Getty Images

The rebel-held Syrian province of Idlib is home to some 3.4 million people, many of them displaced.

This part of northwestern Syria is under blockade and gets bombed by Russia and the Syrian regime.

There is only one internationally sanctioned border crossing for humanitarian aid.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

A majority of the those who live in the last opposition-held sliver of northwestern Syria are internally displaced, having already fled Russian and regime bombing campaigns elsewhere. Their final refuge is controlled by extremist militants and blockaded, with Damascus and its allies continuing to rain missiles and artillery fire on what is essentially one large refugee camp.

The single internationally sanctioned gateway to the outside is Bab al-Hawa, where the United Nations transports aid to hundreds of thousands of people who depend it. But even that gateway is tenuous, with Russia threatening to veto an effort at the UN Security Council to renew the border crossing's mandate, which expires July 10. Moscow maintains that, going forward, all aid should pass through the territory of its ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who has previously denied such aid as a means of starving his opponents

Mark Cutts, the UN's deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis, told Insider what's at stake.

Charles Davis: What is the humanitarian situation on the ground in northwest Syria? Isn't the war over?

Mark Cutts: The violence continues daily. Hospitals have been badly damaged, aid convoys hit, and scores of people killed and injured, including children, disabled people, humanitarians, and medics. More than 2.7 million people are displaced by the conflict, where the humanitarian situation is at its most heartbreaking. Millions of people are pushed up against the border with Turkey. Poverty has gotten worse due to the conflict, an economic crisis and COVID-19. The number of people reliant on aid has increased by 20% to 3.4 million people. Prices of food staples rose by over 200% in the last year alone, while income sources and livelihoods have been eroded by the ongoing economic crisis.

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CD: How does aid currently get there and who supplies it?

MC: More than UN 1,000 trucks cross the border at Bab-al Hawa every month from our transport hub in Turkey.

CD: Isn't this area controlled by extremist groups? Do they manage distribution of this aid?

MC: Since 2014, the UN has delivered 39,000 trucks of humanitarian aid through this corridor. Every single one of these trucks has been inspected by UN monitors. We also check the goods when they arrive at warehouses in Syria, and at distribution points, and we do post distribution monitoring. It is the most scrutinized aid distribution in the world.

CD: Russia has been saying aid could go through regime-controlled Syria. Why isn't that acceptable?

MC: The scale of the needs in northwest Syria, where 90 percent of the 3.4 million affected people are in extreme need of humanitarian aid for their survival, is such that a massive cross-border aid operation is needed. Most of the displaced people are in camps close to the Turkish border, and with the war still going on, the cross-border aid operation has proven to be the safest and most direct way of getting aid to these people. Crossline convoys will only be possible if the parties to the conflict agree to this. The UN is ready to carry out crossline convoys if the parties to the conflict reach agreement on this.

Read the original article on Business Insider
WASHINGTON  A Washington state lawmaker apologized Thursday for wearing a yellow Star of David on his shirt during an event last weekend where he spoke to conservative activists.

In a brief statement, state Rep. Jim Walsh said, I apologize for using a profound image in a way that was inappropriate and offensive to so many people. It was wrong. It won't happen ever again.

A video posted to Walsh's Facebook account on June 26 shows him in a church basketball gym speaking to an audience with a microphone and a yellow Star of David affixed to his shirt.

Walsh, a Republican who has served in Washingtons state legislature since 2016, told The Seattle Times that he had been given the star by someone at the event and that most people in the audience were also wearing yellow stars on their clothing.

Some of the organizers are deeply concerned about vaccine passports and vaccine segregation, he told the newspaper, suggesting that the yellow stars were a way to protest Covid-19 vaccinations.

The video remains up on Walsh's Facebook account despite his apology, and in response to a person asking if he was using the yellow star to make a point, Walsh wrote in the comments, Its an echo from history, he said. In the current context, we're all Jews.

One commenter responded, "this is repellent and a total misunderstanding of Holocaust history."

Another wrote, Love your star! nice statement A great way to show solidarity.

Walsh then responded, During WWII, when the Nazis told the Danes that Danish Jews had to wear yellow stars, the Danes ALL wore yellow stars. So the Nazis couldn't ID the Danish Jews. It worked. The Nazis focused their evil efforts elsewhere.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., says that story is fictional and that unlike Jews in other countries under German occupation, Jews in Denmark never wore an identification mark such as a yellow star.

The Nazis required that Jews in many countries wear a yellow star that said Jew in the local language so that they could be identified. According to the Holocaust museum, the badges were a key element in their plan to persecute and eventually to destroy the Jewish population of Europe.

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They used the badge not only to stigmatize and humiliate Jews but also to segregate them and to watch and control their movements, the museum says. The badge also facilitated deportation.

Walsh's remarks come as antisemitic incidents in the U.S. have dramatically increased over the last year. The Anti-Defamation League said it recorded 251 incidents from May 11 through the end of the month, a 115 percent increase over the same period in 2020.

Meanwhile, freshman U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., compared mask-wearing requirements at the Capitol to the Holocaust. She later apologized after she said she visited the Holocaust museum.
By David Shepardson

(Reuters) - President Joe Biden plans to nominate a senior lawyer for a U.S. House of Representatives committee to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), along with a lawyer at the agency for another commissioner slot, the White House said.

Biden announced late on Friday that he intends to nominate Alexander Hoehn-Saric, a Democrat who is chief counsel for the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on communications and consumer protection to head the CPSC. Reuters reported the planned nominations earlier.

Hoehn-Saric works on legislation and oversight related to product safety, consumer protection, and communications.

The Democratic president also plans to nominate Mary Boyle to the commission, the White House said. She is the CPSC's current executive director and has spent more than a decade at the agency in senior positions.

"American families need a strong cop on the beat at the Consumer Product Safety Commission," Senate Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell said in a statement, adding Hoehn-Saric, who is also a former Senate Commerce Committee senior counsel "has been at the forefront of the fight for a strong CPSC to protect consumers, children, and families from dangerous products."In December 2019, Senate Democrats said in a report that the CPSC was inappropriately deferential to companies it investigates.

Settlements reached by the commission under Republican then-President Donald Trump "are at odds with traditional recall agreements negotiated by the CPSC, the Senate Commerce Committee report said.

Rather than providing consumers with a specific remedy that repairs all impacted products or a refund to remove the dangerous products from homes, these recalls perversely serve as marketing tools to allow the recalling company to sell additional products, the report found.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; editing by Jonathan Oatis and David Gregorio)
Trundling on the rutted dirt road back to the barn, Horne pulled over by a pole barn he said went up in two days, the work of an Amish team leading an ROTC platoon from Liberty University. One day, it will serve as the lumber barn, where veterans will learn to process wood and put resources toward their future woodworking programs  part of another partnership with an area woodworking guild.

Back at the the equestrian center, horses grazed in outdoor pens or were stabled in the barn. Farm dogs, like a droopy-eared hound named Max, greeted every car that pulled into the lot and a team of volunteers from St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Lynchburg were helping care for the horses and pitch a tent for reprieve from the heat.

Be it electrical installation at the homes or laying the foundation for a new shed, the staff at the center were constantly in motion, bounded by a rotating group of volunteers from various organizations.

Jennifer Gonzalez, who was chaperoning a youth ministry group from St. Thomas More, said she was excited to be doing their first work group somewhere local, particularly for a cause she believed in.

Both she and her husband are disabled veterans who served in Iraq. She said the center will offer the kind of support she would have loved when she got back from overseas.
You can feel it all over town, just an influx of people on the tourism side, and people who live here are out and about," she said. "Theres good energy.

At the same time, airlines have been struggling to get enough crew members to fly their planes. Pools and beaches have been hit with a shortage of lifeguards. And restaurants and bars in tourist destinations have had to scale back hours because of a lack of help.

President Joe Biden has welcomed the holiday as a historic moment in the nation's recovery from a crisis that has killed over 600,000 Americans and led to months of restrictions that are now almost gone. He plans to host more than 1,000 people at the White House  first responders, essential workers and troops  for a cookout and fireworks to mark what the administration is calling a summer of freedom.

Im going to celebrate it, Biden said Friday ahead of the holiday. Theres great things happening. ... All across America, people are going to ballgames, doing good things. But he also warned that "lives will be lost" because of people who didn't get vaccinated.
The court concluded that prosecutor who later brought the charges was obligated to stick to the nonprosecution agreement, so the conviction cannot stand. The justices wrote that "denying the defendant the benefit of that decision is an affront to fundamental fairness, particularly when it results in a criminal prosecution that was foregone for more than a decade."

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THE NONPROSECUTION AGREEMENT?

The promise not to prosecute Cosby was made in 2005 by Bruce Castor, who was then the top prosecutor for Montgomery County. Castor was also on the legal team that defended former President Donald Trump during his historic second impeachment trial over the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

During a court hearing weeks after Cosby's 2015 arrest, Castor testified that he promised Cosby he wouldn't be prosecuted in the hopes that it would persuade the actor to testify in a civil case brought by Constand and allow her to win damages. Castor acknowledged the only place the matter was put in writing was in the 2005 press release announcing his decision not to prosecute, but said his decision was meant to shield Cosby from prosecution "for all time."
The Pentagon had been drawing down the troop presence in Afghanistan for years, and the Biden administration made it clear the last remaining troops would be out by September 11 at the latest. As the withdrawal progressed, it became clear they would be out far earlier. Over the last few days of the US withdrawal, crews loaded shipping crates onto cargo planes, loading up the last of what was deemed valuable enough to remove from the country. On Tuesday, US Central Command, which oversees Afghanistan, said it had removed the equivalent of nearly 900 C-17 cargo loads out of Afghanistan and destroyed nearly 16,000 pieces of equipment.
Virginias most glaring deficiency was its handling of legacy costs  how well it is meeting retirement obligations for public employees. The commonwealth earned a D average, but shortcomings were worse in seven other states that earned a D-minus (the lowest possible grade). Only seven states were worthy of an A grade.

This five-year snapshot only takes us so far. Our world looks far different than it did at the end of FY 2019 (June 30 of that year). The economy was doing well, with low unemployment. Masks largely were reserved for professional settings, like a health care operating room or a construction site. Social distancing markers were not part of floors across indoor atmospheres, from grocery stores to offices.

But regardless of a historic public health crisis impact on daily life, government budgets always should tell the truth and be premised on integrity. The Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA)  an organization representing more than 20,000 public finance officials in the U.S. and Canada  has helped push that message for decades.
A call to action

A new report is due out in August from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that will provide the scientific basis for the meeting of all UN countries in Glasgow in November. The report is expected to provide more evidence on how human-caused global warming is influencing the current heat waves and downpours and other extreme events.

Scientists have warned of the dangers faced by emissions of CO2 for over 30 years. The decision-makers in Congress and in the White House have not been concerned because it would affect the next generation and not the next election. The single most important action we can take to mitigate the negative impacts of global warming it to put a price on CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Put the price on them so that the free market makes determinations as to how emissions are reduced.
A group of 130 countries and territories reached a broad agreement on a global minimum corporate tax rate of at least 15 percent.

The group includes Japan and other members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. They began online talks on global tax rules on Thursday, Japan time.

The participants reached a consensus on new rules for taxing cross-border business, including digital service. The rules will apply to companies with global turnover above 23.7 billion dollars and profitability above 10%. The right to tax will be re-allocated to countries and regions, where companies conduct business regardless of physical presence. The measure is expected to affect about 100 global companies.

Countries with low corporate tax rates such as Ireland and Hungary participated in the negotiations, but put off joining the agreement.

Corporate tax rates around the world now vary. Japan's is currently 29.7%, whereas it is 21% in the United States and 19% in the United Kingdom. The US and UK are planning to increase their respective rates.

OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said, "This historic package will ensure that large multinational companies pay their fair share of tax everywhere." He added, "This package does not eliminate tax competition, as it should not, but it does set multilaterally agreed limitations on it."

Negotiations will continue with the aim of reaching a final deal by October, with the new rules to take in effect in 2023.
Japanese carmaker Nissan and its partners plan to invest 1 billion ($1.4 billion) pounds to expand production of electric vehicles and batteries in northeast England, a major victory for the UK governments efforts to attract jobs and investment following the countrys departure from the European Union.

Nissan said Thursday it will build a new all-electric crossover sport utility vehicle at the companys plant in Sunderland, creating more than 6,200 jobs at the factory and its suppliers. As part of the project, Envision AESC will build the UKs first gigafactory to supply next generation batteries for the cars.

The announcement marks a turnaround for Nissan, which last year warned its UK operations would be unsustainable if Britain failed to secure a post-Brexit free-trade agreement with the EU. The government reached a deal with Brussels in December and, freed from EU competition rules, is now able to offer financial incentives to attract investment.

Nissans announcement  is a major vote of confidence in the UK and our highly skilled workers in the Northeast, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a statement.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng suggested the government would help finance the plant, but he declined to provide specifics because talks are continuing with other electric carmakers amid the shift away from fossil fuels.
Modern Japanese appear to be genetically descended from the Paleolithic Minatogawa people, according to DNA analysis of human remains in Okinawa Prefecture dating from 20,000 years ago.

According to current mainstream theory, Japanese have mixed origins in the Jomon people known for their distinctive pottery culture (c. 14500 B.C.-1000 B.C.) and the Yayoi people with their own pottery culture (1000 B.C.-A.D. 250).

The latest study indicates the origins of Japanese can be traced to a more distant past.

Minatogawa refers to people whose remains were unearthed in Okinawa Prefecture in 1970. Named after the site where the bones were discovered, the Minatogawa people are among the few Paleolithic humans whose remains have so far been discovered in Japan.

They were small in stature, standing around 150 centimeters. Narrow-shouldered, they had a sturdy lower-body skeletal build, which experts believe made them suited to running on barren land.

DNA analysis and other studies support the theory that modern Japanese have mixed origins in Jomon hunter-gatherers who inhabited broad areas of Japan from Hokkaido to Okinawa between 15,000 and 3,000 years ago and the Yayoi farming people, who arrived later from the Asian mainland.
New Delhi: A drone was spotted over the Indian high commission in Islamabad over the weekend. The matter has been raised by the Indian officials with their counterparts.

India has taken up the matter and raised it with the Pakistani authorities regarding the drone movement.

This is the first time such an incident involving a drone being spotted inside the Indian mission in Pakistan has happened.

The incident happened during the weekend on Saturday, apparently the day when the drone was used to carry out terror attack at the Indian air force base in Jammu.

Indian air force in a release on 27th June said, Two low-intensity explosions were reported early Sunday morning in the technical area of Jammu Air Force Station. One caused minor damage to the roof of a building while the other exploded in an open area.

This morning also, drone activity was observed at International Border in Arnia sector. BSF said that alert troops fired at the drone while it was trying to cross the International Border in the Arnia sector.

Due to this firing, the drone returned immediately. It was meant for carrying out surveillance of the area, the BSF said.
Dirt is flying on the northwest corner of South 24th Street and Veterans Memorial Highway in Council Bluffs as an army of excavators works to remove a foundation that never got a building.

XTL started to build a cold storage facility on the site in spring 2016 and ended up backing out of the project the following year.

Now, plans are taking shape for another company to build there.

As of Wednesday, permits had only been issued for demolition and grading at the site, according to Steve Carmichael, chief building official for the City of Council Bluff. He said the companys application for a building permit was still under review.

Drew Kamp, president and CEO of the Council Bluffs Area Chamber of Commerce, confirmed that a sizeable warehouse/distribution center would be constructed there following the demo.

Were seeing a lot of warehouse-distribution activity in in the area right now, he said. Well continue to work with Paula (Hazlewood, executive director of Advance Southwest Iowa Corp.) and others to try to supply the workforce needed, he said.

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Officials declined to name the company on the record. Hazlewood said an announcement will be made during the week of July 12.
Mt. Hope United Methodist Church, 290th and Highway 6, will not have service on Sunday. The church welcomes all to join in the return of worship service on July 11, at 9:30 a.m. and Sunday school will start at 10 a.m. You do not have to be a member of the church to participate in our activities.

Carter Lake United Methodist Church, 3025 Mabrey Lane in Carter Lake, would like to invite the public to join in our live worship service at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings. Face masks are optional. The Sunday worship can also be viewed live on our Facebook page at Carter Lake, Iowa United Methodist Church. Other events this week include AA meeting at 5:15 p.m. and NA meeting at 7 p.m. on Monday and Bible study at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday.

Epworth United Methodist Church, 2447 Ave. B, would like to invite the public to Sunday worship at 9:25 a.m. and social distancing will be in place. The church is handicap accessible and membership is not necessary to participate. Masks are not required but are available for those who need or want one, and we have plenty of hand sanitizer. We will meet in the church sanctuary. If you are sick, please do not join us. The scripture for this coming Sunday is 2 Corinthians 12:2-10 and Mark 6:1-13. If you decide not to attend at this time, you can join us in worship at home through Facebook Live. There is Bible study on Thursdays at 9 a.m. We are in prayer for all those affected by this virus. Prayer requests can be made at epworthumccb.org/about-us/our-values/. Office hours are 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The office phone number is 712-323-3124. You can check us out at Facebook.com/pages/Epworth. Have a happy Fourth of July!
A Council Bluffs student placed in the finals of the National History Day National Contest, which was held virtually for the second straight year.

Dean Pope, a student at Kirn Middle School, placed sixth in the Junior Individual Performance category with his project, Setting a Precedent for Presidents: Radios Role in Uplifting a Nation, according to a press release from the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs. He was one of 15 Iowa students who made the national finals.

Iowas National History Day program continues to be strong because of the time and effort our students and educators have devoted to it over the past year, said Susan Kloewer, administrator of the State Historical Society of Iowa. We congratulate all of our students who represented Iowa at the national level, and we are proud of their achievements.

National History Day is a year-long academic enrichment program that challenges students to research, develop and present papers, exhibits, documentaries, websites and performances about historical topics related to an annual theme, the press release stated. This years theme was Communication in History: The Key to Understanding.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)  Extensive publicity about the December police killing of Andre Hill makes it impossible to convene a fair jury locally and so the trial should be moved, an attorney representing Adam Coy, the ex-Columbus officer charged in Hill's death, said in a court filing.

That publicity includes news coverage, posts on social media and billboards in Columbus calling for justice for Hill, said attorney Mark Collins.

Compiling an impartial jury in Franklin County would be impossible because potential jurors are not only exposed to the extensive news coverage but also to their fellow neighbors' opinions, Collins said in a filing late last month.

Hill, 47, who was Black, was fatally shot by Coy, who is white, on Dec. 22 as Hill emerged from a garage holding up a cellphone. Coy was fired and has pleaded not guilty to murder and reckless homicide charges. His trial is currently scheduled for July 21.

A message was left with the Franklin County Prosecutor's office seeking comment on the request to move the trial.
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Paul Shaner was 17 when he volunteered for the U.S. Army in 1969 with more than a little encouragement from his father.

I wouldnt change a thing, Shaner said of his military experience during the Vietnam War. It was all worth it. I grew up a lot and it made me a better person.

Shaner was one of five veterans who received a Quilt of Valor during a short ceremony Thursday morning at the Lincoln County Historical Museum. The group also included Raymond Hansen, Lawrence Mora Jr., Thomas Rivera and Charles Lynch.

The five are the latest of 54 individuals who have been honored by the Heartland of Nebraska Quilt of Valor Group since November 2019, and are among more than 750 veterans who have received quilts from organizations across the state.

I feel very honored and blessed with all of my family here, Rivera said of the ceremony.

Shaner went to the demilitarized zone in Vietnam for advanced training in December 1970 and served in a motor pool.

He was promoted to sergeant and spent his last six months in Vietnam on fire support bases, He said the living quarters or underground bunkers on the bases were sprayed with Agent Orange to clear the foliage.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor Ronnie Green touted the universitys successes over the last year Thursday morning while visiting the West Central Research and Extension Center.

Weve had a really tremendously successful year, even in light of the pandemic that weve come through, Green said. We are, of course, looking forward to a very exciting year ahead as we return pretty much back to normal operations for the university.

Beginning in August, Green said, students were on campus in Lincoln with nearly two-thirds of classes in person.

We had as many of our classes as possible in person, especially during the spring semester, Green said, much in contrast to much of higher (education) across the United States.

He said the university is very proud of that accomplishment as well as other milestones.

We had the largest graduating class in our history at UNL, Green said. It was the first time we ever did (graduation) in Memorial Stadium, which is awesome.

That record was unexpected amid the pandemic.

It was partially because our students took more courses during the pandemic, sped up the completion of their degrees, Green said.
An emergency cooling center in Portland, Oregon. Photo: Maranie Staab/Reuters

The phrase Jay Inslee used was permanent emergency. This was before Lytton  the town that had, days earlier, set Canadas all-time heat record, drawing waves of heat tourists as witnesses to desert heat north of 120 degrees in a place where typical June highs were in the mid-70s  burned to the ground just 15 minutes after the arrival of smoke. It was before wildfires raging in British Columbia produced their own pyrocumulus thunderstorms, which produced their own lightning strikes that lit up the landscape again with fire  3,800 lightning strikes, according to one count, each striking the dry tinder that those in the West now know to call fuel and the rest of the world, watching an agonizing drought and heat event unfold, is learning to call just the West. A tinderbox half a continent wide.

In Portland, Oregon, where temperatures got as high as 116, setting new records three days in a row, with power cables melting in the heat, the smoke plume from Northern Californias Lava fire settled over downtown on Tuesday. If the whole region was enclosed in a heat dome, as the meteorologists kept saying, it was beginning to fill with wildfire smoke and not slowly. While the Lava fire had grown to 15,000 acres in its first day, just on the other side of Mount Shasta burned the Tennant fire. What lies ahead is quite likely to be the worst fire season in modern California history, its strongest competition the fires of last year and the ones only two years before that.

Photo: California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection

In British Columbia, there were at least 486 sudden deaths in the midst of the heatwave  a number that is sure to grow many times over, since deaths from heat are rarely so obvious they can be identified in real time rather than statistical analysis. In Portland, at least 63 have died, and in Seattle, where less than half of homes have air conditioning, the extreme heat has put more than a thousand people in the hospital already. Local hoteliers were celebrating, however  their hotels full for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, with locals fleeing their homes in search of the relief of AC. Its been a blessing, one said.

Elsewhere in Washington State, the roads were melting and agricultural workers as young as 12 and as old as 70 were starting their shifts at 4 a.m. to try to harvest the regions cherries and blueberries before the fruit was fried by the heat. In Sacramento, residents complaining that the tap water tasted too much like dirt, thanks to the ongoing drought that may be the worst the American West has seen in millennia, were told to add lemon. In Santa Barbara, people have been advised to jerry-rig DIY clean-air rooms in preparation for the coming fire season, now already in full swing  months ahead of what used to mark the beginning of peak activity in the fall. Suppliers of sparklers were shuttered headed into the Fourth of July weekend. In Alaska, at the edge of the heat dome, the climate writer Eric Holthaus noted, calving glaciers are producing ice quakes as powerful as small earthquakes as they crumble into the sea. It was hotter in parts of Canada and Oregon, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather pointed out, than it has ever been in the history of Las Vegas, smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

It blows my mind that we could get the temperatures that were observing here in the Pacific Northwest, especially on the west sides of the Cascade, the Washington State climatologist Nick Bond told the Guardian. I would have been willing to guess something like that in the middle of the century, in the latter part of the century.

Fires swept British Columbia following record-high temperatures. Photo: 2 Rivers Remix Society

Even in the middle of a permanent climate emergency, this heat wave is an extraordinary event, and yet Bond the specialist is naming the same intuition felt this week by many climate normies whove managed somehow to find ways to blink past the spectacular tragedies of the last few years: In certain places and on certain days, at least, even the terrifying distant future is already here. Speaking to Axios, oceans-policy expert Jean Flemma, who lives in Portland, went further. I fear for the future of humanity. Casting ones perspective backward instead is just as disarming and disorienting, since even the most cautious estimates put this heat event as, by historical norms, a once-in-several-centuries phenomenononce in the course of American history, say, or once since the invention of industrialization. According to one calculation, the heat wave was five standard deviations above expectations, meaning it was an event that should arrive, in the absence of climate change, once every 5,000 years. Thats once since the age of Ancient Egypt.

We are experiencing that five-sigma event this year. In British Columbia, it was as hot as it was in Death Valley, California. They called it Death Valley for a reason.

I know there have been a lot of warm-up acts and preshows, but it really feels like the climate apocalypse said WELCOME TO THE BIG SHOW this week, the poet Saeed Jones wrote on Twitter. This moment will be talked about for centuries, the meteorologist Scott Duncan predicted. But will it?

Prophecies often come true as anticlimaxes, the predictions themselves having set the stage too well  serving to acculturate as well as alarm, introducing first and then effectively normalizing the possibility of events that would have seemed, not so long ago, unthinkable. Climate activists, often privately despondent themselves, have long worried about the costs of alarmism as a rhetorical strategy, warning it would end not in panicked action but fatalism and despair. What worries me more, as an avowed alarmist, is not that dire warnings inspire leaders and potential activists to give up but that, in shifting our expectations, they encourage us to count as successes any merely catastrophic outcomes that fall short of true apocalypse  and make us see what should be freakish showcases of climate horror nevertheless on a continuum with normal rather than as signs of profound ecological disjuncture. Adaptability is a virtue, or at least a tool, in a time of cascading environmental change like the one we are stepping into now. It is also a painkiller or a form of climate dementia.

At the moment, the heat dome is triggering much more public alarm than it is complacency  and that is before the death tolls grow higher and before months more of intense fire likely burn through the same region baked by this heat and sucked dry by this drought. But as the climate journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis suggested, in a fit of justified despair, we have been here before  when last years fires turned San Francisco orange and produced an eerily biblical darkness at noon; when Australias Black Summer bushfires burned through 46 million acres and killed more than a billion animals; when deforestation fires tore through the Amazon and briefly inspired international outrage approaching levels reserved for genocide. Thats to name just a few recent local apocalypses and not even mention the many disasters that have not shaken American consciences, like the drought and famine unfolding today in Madagascar, putting 400,000 on the brink of starvation. Just try to watch this video all the way through.

Earlier this month, a heat wave across the Middle East saw five countries hit temperatures above those seen in the western U.S. and Canada. In Pakistan, 20 children in a single classroom collapsed from heat stress and were rushed to the hospital. Already, scientists have discovered that across Pakistan and throughout the Persian Gulf, regions have reached combinations of temperature and humidity that are literally beyond the human threshold of survivability. The term for this measure is wet-bulb temperature, and it is sure to become terrifyingly more familiar in the years ahead, just as red flag warning, fire tornado, and even carbon dioxide equivalent and 1.5 degrees Celsius have in the years just past.

What kind of awareness quotient are we looking for? the writer Sarah Miller asked Wednesday, in a brilliant, raw blog post, republished by Nieman Lab, meditating on the limits of climate communication in the face of rolling disaster. What more about climate change does anyone need to know? What else is there to say?

She closed her essay this way:

Writing is stupid. I just want to be alive. I want all of us to just be alive. It is hard to accept the way things are, to know that the fight is outside the realm of argument and persuasion and appeals to how much it all hurts. It is terrifying to know that the prize for many who care may be prison or worse. But all the right words about climate have already been deployed. Its time for different weapons.

Last week, a few months in advance of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, to be held this fall, a draft of the upcoming IPCC report, which essentially summarizes the state of scientific understanding of climate change for policy-makers, was leaked to the press  presumably as a corrective to a recent wave of positive coverage of net-zero pledges by nations and corporations. It was also a tactical leak, since the report itself wont be released until long after COP, and one that served as a kind of admonition  that to satisfy the standards of not just the worlds scientists but the planets climate itself, everybody is going to have to do much, much better. In general, these reports, which are issued only about once a decade, traffic in the language of scientific caution. This one seems to have been written more like a hostage note.

Agence France-Presse, which received the leak and has since guarded it quite closely, summarized the draft report in three striking paragraphs:

Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas  these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.

The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds  But dangerous thresholds are closer than once thought, and dire consequences stemming from decades of unbridled carbon pollution are unavoidable in the short term.

This is just the journalistic summary, of course, and journalists are always subject to criticism for hyperbole even when merely restating the findings of the most pedigreed science. Unfortunately, the quoted portions of the leaked report are just as grim as the write-through.

The worst is yet to come, affecting our childrens and grandchildrens lives much more than our own, the report states, according to the AFP. We need transformational change operating on processes and behaviours at all levels: individual, communities, business, institutions and governments, it continues. We must redefine our way of life and consumption. In an obvious understatement, it notes, current levels of adaptation will be inadequate.

The message is literally earth-shaking. At two degrees of warming, the draft suggests, 420 million more people would be exposed to extreme, potentially lethal heat waves, and 410 million more would suffer from water scarcity. By just 2050, tens of millions more would suffer chronic hunger and 130 million more extreme poverty.

And yet beyond the four corners of the climate world, it barely registered a peep, perhaps a sign that, as much as alarmism has achieved in recent years in activating genuine climate action, it has also acquainted us so well with apocalyptic premonitions that new ones glide by and the old ones, when fulfilled, manage to hold attention only briefly before the world snaps back into deadening complacency and a growing tolerance for the pains of warming. Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems, the draft reportedly concludes. Humans cannot.

That last part is almost certainly not true, at least within the range of temperatures even climate Cassandras expect this century, though of course there may be surprises in store even if we do radically cut carbon emissions. It is also especially striking as a statement of climate fatalism, given that the upcoming IPCC report is expected to devote considerable attention not just to the science of warming and the project of decarbonization but the urgent need for climate adaptation.

That word, adaptation, has been a dirty one for environmental advocates now for decades  a seeming excuse to delay decarbonization, which has always appeared the more urgent matter (and correctly). But climate action alone is no longer enough  it cant be enough, even given where we are today. And almost no matter what is done, wildfires in the West are likely to grow sixfold, tens of millions more are likely to die from the air pollution produced from the burning of fossil fuels, and as ecologist Simon Lewis noted in a perceptive essay in the Guardian, headlined More and More of the World Will Soon Be Too Hot for Humans, unlivable temperatures are predicted to last longer and occur over larger areas and in new locations, including parts of Africa and the U.S. south-east, over the decades to come.

The forecast looks grim, at least setting aside, for a moment, the matter of human response to such changes. And yet, in its way, when contemplating our response to that unforgiving future, livability is too forgiving a standard  too forgiving of us, that is. As the horror those in the West are living through illustrates, the matter of warming cannot be reduced to a fork in the road, with one path leading to apocalypse and the other victory. The possibility of the first has already been likely averted, thanks to recent climate action; the opportunity for the second is obviously long past. We are living already in the muddy thick of climate difficulty, some of us sunk deeper into it than others, but we cant let ourselves be satisfied for keeping our heads out of the muck. Simply because tens of millions of people in Canada and the U.S. are living through the heat dome, however many thousands die from it, and will survive the fire season to come, however much they choke on its smoke, it would be criminal to look back on what is happening now and will happen in the months ahead and think, We managed.

But probably it would be just as criminal to fail to focus on managing climate change in addition to stopping it. Indeed, almost inevitably, the matter of management will likely move more and more center stage, as Lewis suggests in his essay, which name-checks a number of areas of needed investment and planning: early warning systems, dramatically expanded cooling centers, and forecasts featuring wet-bulb temperatures, when it comes to heat waves; rebuilding infrastructure, energy infrastructure particularly, to make it resilient in the face of new climate extremes; retrofitting homes and future-proofing agriculture by developing new strains of crops that can thrive, or at least survive, in our brutal new world. He didnt mention defensive infrastructure, such as sea walls and levees, or large-scale controlled burns of forests in places like the American west, or driving mosquitoes extinct through genetic engineering so they dont begin spreading tropical diseases like dengue or malaria as far north as Scandanavia in the decades ahead. According to models developed by Portland States Vivek Shandas, simply greening cities through more grass and green roofs, lighter building colors and more tree canopy, could reduce the on-ground temperature there, in intense heat waves, by as much as 25 degrees, compared to an extreme scenario in which the entire city is simply paved into an asphalt futurethough he cautions that these are idealized, extreme models, and that the greening, though it sounds simple, would not be exactly easy to implement, certainly in the absence of regular heat emergencies.

For years now, hyperbolic headliners have used those kinds of disasters of warming to declare that the age of climate change had arrived. This year suggests the possibility of a new arrival  the age of adaptation, or what climate-and-energy researcher Juan Moreno-Cruz yesterday called climate realism.

Alarmism, he said, was useless, and even efforts to decarbonize have served as a kind of distraction. Stop dreaming up climate solutions, think of climate managing strategies, he admonished.

Talking climate solutions has left us unprepared for actual climate change. We keep running models and fighting over which solution is the best, but we have done nothing to address the impacts of climate change.

Managing climate change is not as sexy as solving climate change, but its what we need. Yes, we need real action to achieve deep decarbonization in our economy. There is no amount of adaptation we can do if we dont get emissions under control. But we already baked in so much warming we need to deal with it now. We painted ourselves into this corner, and we need to navigate our way out of it. Dreaming about a future carbon-free system will do nothing for people in India and Pakistan today.



Perhaps the great awakening on warming has already happened  or keeps happening and keeps being forgotten, among other reasons so that we can continue to believe we stand just at the threshold of climate suffering rather than well beyond it. But the great awakening on adaptation probably still lies ahead of us. Or maybe that permanent emergency is beginning right now.
The House Minority Leader has some unhappy options. Photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is conducting himself in a manner suggesting hes not entirely in control of his caucus when it comes to Republican participation in the Select Committee on January 6, which was just authorized by the House on a party-line vote. According to multiple sources, hes threatening his troops with withdrawal of committee assignments if they answer Speaker Nancy Pelosis call for Republicans to fill the seats on the January 6 panel that have been reserved for them. Per CNN:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday issued a blanket threat during a meeting with freshmen members of his caucus that he would strip any Republican member of their committee assignments if they accept an offer from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to serve on the select committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection, according to two GOP sources with knowledge of the matter.

So far the previously stigmatized former House GOP leadership member Liz Cheney of Wyoming is the only Republican to violate McCarthys edict. But she is already a leper, and will probably soon be an ex-congresswoman. She was, moreover, one of just two House Republicans to vote for establishment of the select committee. The other, fellow Trump-impeacher Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, responded to McCarthys threats by telling Politico, Who gives a shit?

Its possible that McCarthy, having asserted his power to take or leave committee assignments offered by Pelosi, will relent and appoint some members of his own choosing. But that could lead to a different problem: the eagerness of some of his most out-of-control members (e.g., Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert) to serve on it so that they can own the libs with daily explosions of juvenile obstruction. If McCarthy wants to convey an attitude of mild contempt for the investigation instead of letting the Wild Things identify their party with loopy conspiracy theories and rabid Trump worship, finding an excuse not to cooperate at all might be the best play.

The cross-pressures on the Californian may be intensified by reactions to Greenes chronic misconduct in particular. Over the weekend, she was a warm-up act for the MAGA crowd at Donald Trumps Ohio rally, at which she heaped abuse on her Democratic colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom she called a little communist, feeding and then nodding at cries of lock her up. Since Greene had already lost her committee assignments in no small part for threats of violence against AOC and other members of the so-called Squad, this was a pretty clear provocation. And it spurred a letter to McCarthy from a group of House Democrats (including AOC) demanding immediate action to head off potential violence against members of Congress.

Its the threat of violence against members of Congress, of course, that animates the effort to fully investigate the Capitol riot of January 6, which Republicans cannot decide if they should cheer, condemn, ignore, blame on antifa, or treat as a normal tourist visit (in the words of Greenes extremist Georgia colleague, Andrew Clyde). As CNNs Ryan Nobles notes, McCarthy has dodged serious discipline for Greene up until now, and is unlikely to throw her completely under the bus as opposed to the occasional fatherly injunction to behave herself:

[A]s evidenced by her appearance at Trumps rally  which he held for a primary challenger to one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him  Greene has strong support from the former President. McCarthy has repeatedly shown an unwillingness to cross the base of the party or Trump.

So the Minority Leader has no clear and safe path, other than passive resistance to the select committee and other investigations of MAGA threats, and the hope that intervening news creates more congenial spotlights.
The next term of the Court could be highly consequential. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

A day after the Supreme Court closed its 20202021 term with two decisions that irked progressive voting-rights and anti-corruption advocates, the Court continued to shape its docket for the next term, with orders on cases it will and will not hear. The final order list had an unusual number of rulings in which justices felt the need to express agreement or disagreement. But perhaps the most noteworthy case came down without comment:

ARLENES FLOWERS, INC., ET AL. V. WASHINGTON, ET AL. The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied. Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, and Justice Gorsuch would grant the petition for a writ of certiorari.

Behind this bland notice was a battle over whether, where, and when the Courts conservative majority will choose to expand its religious liberty jurisprudence to give religious conservatives a license to discriminate against those whose lifestyles they disdain (loving the sinner, of course, if not the sin). In the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, the Supreme Court upheld the right of a conservative Christian baker in Colorado to refuse his cake-making services to a same-sex couple. Subsequently, the Court accepted a case in which a florist was held in violation of a Washington State law banning discrimination against LGBTQ people by businesses selling goods and services to the general public. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the state court with instructions to reconsider the facts in light of Masterpiece Cakeshop, and it did so holding that the kind of hostility to conservative religious views exhibited by Colorado authorities was not present in the Washington case. The florist appealed, and six justices declined to review the state courts decision.

Presumably Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch  clearly emerging during this last term as the hard core of the Courts conservative majority  wanted to take the case and perhaps carve out some new ground for those seeking a safe zone for religion-based bigotry. But it fell short of the four justices required to grant certiorari. Not for the first time this term, the decision showed Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joining Chief Justice John Roberts in splitting with the other conservatives. But as the Court demonstrated the day before, a solid conservative bloc in really consequential cases is still more than possible.

As it happens, the Court did on the same day act on a different religious liberty case involving an environmental regulation being challenged by Amish farmers (Mast v. Fillmore County). The Supreme Court sent the case back to state court with instructions to reconsider a decision to enforce a requirement that the technology-averse farmers install certain septic systems, in light of its Fulton v. City of Philadelphia decision earlier this term that struck down a regulatory ruling adverse to a Catholic social-service agency. And it also agreed to hear Carson v. Makin, a challenge to a Maine program providing tuition assistance to private-school students but denying it to those attending schools providing religious instruction, in light of last years Espinosa decision on a similar case involving a Montana ban on state subsidies for religious institutions.

There were some other cases in the final order list in which justices felt the need to express objections to decisions against accepting cases. In Berisha v. Lawson, Justices Thomas and Gorsuch complained that the Court passed up an opportunity to revise or reverse the long-standing precedent governing defamation cases brought by public figures in New York Times v. Sullivan. And in Dunn v. Reeves, the Courts three liberals dissented from a rejection of an appeal by a convicted murderer based on right to counsel considerations, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing: The lengths to which this Court goes to ensure that Reeves remains on death row are extraordinary.

The biggest dog that did not bark as the Supreme Court begins its summer recess was the absence (so far) of any indication that any justice is about to retire. Eighty-two-year-old Stephen Breyer has been under considerable pressure from progressive activists to hang it up to ensure the Biden administration can nominate a younger successor (a Black woman, in fact, as the president has pledged) while Democrats still control the Senate. It appears he and his colleagues will stick around for a 20212022 term that could be very consequential, with major cases involving abortion, guns, and affirmative action, along with the new cases accepted today.
WASHINGTON  Top science officials in the Biden administration sought on Thursday to allay concerns about the highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus, which has prompted renewed calls for mask wearing in some places.

Compounding the alarm was an announcement last week from the World Health Organization that even vaccinated people should continue to wear masks. Vaccine alone won't stop community transmission," a top WHO deputy explained in justifying the move, which appeared to cause some confusion.

But as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top science adviser to the Biden administration, explained during a Thursday briefing of the White House pandemic response team, the global situation cannot be compared to that in the United States. Those vaccination rates are dramatically different, he said, showing a chart that made the vast gap vividly apparent: While only about 11 percent of the world has been vaccinated, 47 percent of the American population is immunized against the coronavirus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing in May. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Delta variant also appears to puncture the protection offered by the first dose of a two-dose mRNA vaccine. Partially vaccinated people appear to be better protected against other versions of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen. Those other variants, however, are far less concerning to most public health officials than Delta.

As Fauci noted, studies have shown the Pfizer vaccine  one of the two mRNA vaccines most widely used in the United States, alongside Modernas  to be 96 percent effective in preventing illness from the Delta variant serious enough to require hospitalization. (There is less evidence regarding the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but Fauci said one could anticipate that its efficacy would turn out to be at least similar, perhaps even better than that of its mRNA relatives.)

The Delta variant is believed to be about 60 percent more transmissible than the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, but that does not mean it is necessarily more lethal. So, for example, while that strain is becoming more prevalent in Israel, and infections are indeed rising there, that nations highest-in-the-world vaccination status has offered consistent protection. Only one person in Israel died from the coronavirus during the second half of June.

Story continues

Although many Americans discarded masks in May, some believe it is time for them to return. That, at least, is the position of Los Angeles County public health officials, who advised even vaccinated people to mask up in indoor settings.

Nurse practitioner Tara Biller administers a COVID-19 vaccination in Seattle on June 16. (David Ryder/Getty Images)

But how concerning is the Delta variant to Los Angeles, which is 60 percent vaccinated? The county, which is home to 10 million people, has averaged only five new coronavirus deaths per day over the last week, even though infection rates have risen slightly since the arrival of the Delta variant several weeks ago.

The Biden administration is obviously uninterested in litigating the mask culture wars, given how fraught that issue has been from the very start. To be sure, masks are highly effective in preventing the spread of the coronavirus, but vaccines provide what is for many people a more lasting, more convenient and possibly less contentious solution.

If you are vaccinated, you have a high degree of protection, Fauci said at Thursdays briefing. So you need not wear a mask, either indoor or outdoor.

The day before, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky made the same point in a television interview. If you are vaccinated, you are safe from the variants that are circulating here in the United States, she said. Unvaccinated people still need to wear masks, according to CDC guidelines.

____

Read more from Yahoo News:
Actor Stuart Damon, who for decades played Dr. Alan Quartermaine on the popular daytime soap "General Hospital," has died at age 84.

The veteran TV star died Saturday around 1 a.m. after struggling with renal failure and other "compounding issues" in recent years, his son Christopher Damon told the Daily News.

"It was very peaceful. I was with him at the time," Christopher Damon said, adding that other family members also got a chance to say goodbye the night before at the Motion Picture Television Fund's 20-acre assisted living campus in Woodland Hills, Calif.

He added that his dad relished his three decades on the longest-running American soap opera still in production. He joined the show in 1977 and was on until 2008. He returned for two guest appearances in 2011 and two more in 2013.

"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."

He said his dad was very proud of the 1999 Daytime Emmy he won for his work on a story line that followed Alan Quartermaine's addiction to hydrocodone.
Washington, PA (15301)

Today

Mostly cloudy skies this morning will become partly cloudy this afternoon. High 88F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Some passing clouds. Low 69F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.
as somebody who will eventually watch this in a few months, i appreciate the recaps

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I will never watch this but I will read the hell out of recaps

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OK the best part about this is I now know what Aubrey actually looks like

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She clapped back on someone on her Twitter the other day when they tagged her about her weight gain on the show and she said she gained Covid weight and also started antidepressants which added to it. They were being assholes and she handled it well tbh.

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i'm surprised she did this show where she wouldn't be filtered

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Literally my first thought seeing that YT video!

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This episode was good. Im so confused why Aubrey switched up after becoming the Queen. Im really loving the song Pam wrote. They all sound good on it. Also why is Kiley there if shes not on any of the songs???

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its all editing. Ive never slept through any business or rehearsals in my life on God.. i just didnt participate in one of the produced drunk and fight each other nights because thats not where my heart is at anymore, and it was mad depressing. https://t.co/S1Chqud6fQ  Aubrey O'Day (@AubreyODay) July 1, 2021



hahaha. that was at night. Once they started handing out the liquor bottles for scenes, i knew it would become a mess.. i dont really drink & after a year of covid/political negativity, i just wasnt there to make tv.. all i wanted was a dope group that could have longevity. https://t.co/Tc6fO5UTE2  Aubrey O'Day (@AubreyODay) July 1, 2021



i checked out because i saw the goal wasnt to create something incredible musically.. exploiting drama was always the central factor. https://t.co/YDhuVZaruf  Aubrey O'Day (@AubreyODay) July 1, 2021 Aubrey's been tweeting about all this

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I could see that it was heavy editing but she did check out you cant deny that. It makes me sad cause the previous episode I was really loving Aubreys passion for the project. They were shady to put the clips of her bad vocals after just waking up.

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One thing about Aubrey is that she LOVES singing. From day 1 on Danity Kane you could see how passionate she is but got caught up in the C-list HW nonsense.

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Well-stated. She got caught up and caught up QUICK.

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Episode 4 and Im still team Aubrey and Nivea. 

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can that awesome person who provided me with links to episode 1 and 2 do the same for these plz

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Sorry for the late reply. The show has become quite successful and Youtube is taking down uploads. This video has 80 percent good audio , with some static and the video is delayed, but this week that really does not hurt. It also has closed captions. The show is uploaded on the BET app the next week.





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I tried to watch this and I couldn't do it but thank you anyway. I looked all over youtube for links. my cable company doesn't get ANY viacom channels. it's so dumb. I guess one day I might get to see the rest. thank you though!!! <3

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Ok. Remember that the BET app puts full episodes for free a week after the show airs. I downloaded the app on my Roku tv, but it can be downloaded anywhere like any other app.

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thank you! idk I thought it was going to be blocked like vh1, mtv, comedy central, etc. I can at least watch ep 3 now. thanks!

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Your welcome!!

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This show is so corny lol which kind of surprises me since it's from the former RHOA showrunner and Kandis husband.



I dont understand why no one asks Aubrey how she's doing/feeling if she checked out once she became Queen.



Why is Kiely here? Why?





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Maybe her mom got her on the show like she got her her own girl group.

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Kiely has no purpose whatsoever. If anything SHE needed a quick check and some exposure. I mean shes not participating or showing passion in anything other than drama. She throws a boomerang then cries when it smacks her in the face. She wanted a camera, a check and some free wine from what I can tell. And according to Nivea the wine is disappointing Lol



Edited at 2021-07-02 06:52 pm (UTC)

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Before the longtime children's TV hitmaker Dan Schneider abruptly left Nickelodeon in 2018, an investigation by ViacomCBS found that he could be verbally abusive to people he worked with. Now hes eyeing a return to television.https://t.co/QLS1OJEQLm  The New York Times (@nytimes) July 1, 2021

 Article opens on the 2014 Kids Choice Awards where many of the stars on Schneider's beloved television shows celebrated him and presented him with Nickelodeon's first (and only) Lifetime Achievement Award. But in spring 2018 he and Nickelodeon suddenly parted ways and Schneider disappeared from public life. His Twitter went silent and despite the statement saying he and Nickelodeon ended their partnership so he could pursue other projects, none came to fruition. The iCarly reboot on Paramount Plus happened with zero involvement from him. The truth behind his departure is finally out it seems, as interviews the New York Times conducted with former co-workers and executives reveal that  Schneider defends the way he ran his sets and production, and denies that he left the studio on bad terms at all. Says his departure was 'a natural confluence of events' after running so many shows that produced upwards of 50 episodes a year The piece deftly writes around the accusations lobbed at Schneider (you know which ones), and he calls them ridiculous and it was social media pushing ~any lie~. "Kids find feet goofy and funny, he said, and there was no effort to sexualize his young stars." The bosses at ViacomCBS paid attention to the online chatter though and in 2018 they interviewed dozens of employees. The review found no evidence of sexual misconduct conducted by Schneider, but found evidence of verbal abuse. In recent interviews former employees said they found him to be controlling, difficult, prone to tantrums, and made employees feel like they were walking on eggshells Several employees said he made them feel uncomfortable when he asked a costume department employee for shoulder and neck massages (something he apparently did frequently). He was also known to text the child actors working on his shows outside of work hours. Schneider denies that he ever acted inappropriately, says he wouldn't be able to have 'long term' friendships and the loyalty of 'so many reputable people' if he had mistreated any of the actors on his shows. Says that he was seen as difficult because he had ~high standards~ The piece includes several fawning paragraphs about his early life and rise to prominence within the network and there's a lot of "he's just a big kid!!" energy here. Some people working on his shows who asked for anonymity out of fear that he would punish them for speaking out said that they found his relationships with his teen stars awkward and odd. "Several recalled that he often spent time during the work day interacting with young fans online and, after work, texting child actors about silly matters of teenage internet life." Defends his interaction with young fans online, saying that he only talked to them "in very public ways" and that he texted so frequently with his stars because that was their preferred mode of communication. Former crew members talk about how Schneider viewed himself as "king" of the Nick studios with a private bathroom located next to one the rest of the crew used, and how staff members used to push him from room to room in a roller chair. Some former colleagues speak out about how he was a workaholic who frequently yelled and expected workers to put in 16 to 20 hour days and for writers to work on weekends at his home. One writer, Arthur Gradstein, praises Schneider and says he taught him a lot but then goes on to say: he was also unreasonably demanding, controlling, belittling and vindictive, with a wilful disregard for boundaries or workplace appropriateness. Some former colleagues talked about how Schneider's attitude is not uncommon in Hollywood, but that it was harder to bear because it was children's television. Other colleagues (including actress Yvette Nicole Brown and former Nick exec Tracy Katsky) said that they never saw his cool and that his 'zealous' attention to detail and refusal to settle is what made his shows so popular. Schneider denies all the accounts, and says he holds no ill will towards Nickelodeon and that he wishes everyone involved with the iCarly reboot "the best" The article concludes with the news that Schneider has several projects in development and has sold a pilot to another network.
The oil world is waiting with bated breath to learn what, exactly, OPEC and its partners in production curbs will decide at their meeting in Vienna this week. The oil-producing cartel is giving everyone a run for their money, with final decisions delayed because of internal disagreements.

The future of oil prices hangs in the air, and OPEC is once again calling the shots.

A few years agoin 2014, to be precisethe Financial Times published an opinion piece by Nawaf Obaid, a fellow and associate instructor at the Belfer Center at Harvards Kennedy School of Government, who pointed to Saudi Arabias decision to keep pumping oil despite falling prices as an example of why OPEC was becoming irrelevant. The Saudis showed their fellow OPEC members that the market, and not a producers group, should dictate where prices should go.

Of course, we all know how that attempt to let the market dictate prices didnt end well for Saudi Arabia or its fellow OPEC members. Actually, Saudi Arabias 2014 attempt to let the market rule as Obaid put it, created the foundation for the next round of claims of irrelevance for OPEC.

The 2014 oil price crash targeted Saudi Arabiasand OPECsbiggest rival at the time, U.S. shale. Shale producers were supposed to die under the weight of low oil prices and high debt burdens. While many did go under, many others survived and became leaner and meaner, and better prepared to withstand any future crises.

Three years later, U.S. shale was thriving, the country was on its way to becoming the worlds largest oil and gas producer, which it achieved in 2019, and OPEC was, once again, becoming increasingly irrelevant, according to various commentators and analysts.

There was more than one reason for these claims of irrelevance. In addition to the rise of U.S. shale, along with other non-OPEC producers such as Brazil, for example, Europe spearheaded what we all now know as the energy transition. In this transition, any oil producer (not just OPEC) would lose its relevance as the world weans itself off oil. That was the plan. It still is the plan; but it appears this will take a lot longer to pan out than previously expected.

The pandemic was the wild card nobody could have expected, and it was the pandemic that led to OPEC returning to relevance with a vengeance only to prove it had never actually become irrelevant.

When prices tanked in the soaring of last year, with WTI even sliding below zero for the first time ever, all eyes were on OPEC, the increasingly irrelevant oil cartel to do something about it. And OPEC, this time bigger with Russia and nine other producers, delivered. The extended cartel agreed to cut a massive 7.7 million bpd in combined production in order to arrest the inexorable slide in oil prices caused by the pandemic.

Now, a year later, OPEC continues to be the single most important factor driving oil prices, while U.S. shale drillers, the great challengers, keep their priorities in check, focusing on returning cash to shareholders than on boosting production even with prices at the highest in three years.

Related: Exxon Sting Reveals Black Book Of Senators



OPEC+ members produce as much as 45 percent of the worlds oil. OPEC on its own produces around 40 percent. The sheer size of that number is enough evidence that OPEC could never become irrelevant unless its members quarrel, which has happened before raising suspicions of a looming breakdown. Yet OPEC seems to survive every one of its internal rifts, whether they are between sworn enemies such as Saudi Arabia and Iran or, as in this meeting, the UAE and the rest.

Early reports from Vienna this week suggested there is already a preliminary agreement among OPEC+ members to gradually return 2 million bpd to global production between August and December. This would be less than most observers expected but the news still drove oil prices higher simply because it provided some clarity on the future balance between supply and demand.

Uncertainty brought about by the pandemic last year wreaked havoc on virtually every industry with the exception of online retail. To say that the coronavirus took the world by storm would not be an exaggeration. Yet in oil, the industry was lucky to have a cartel that accounted for enough of global production that if it agreed to curb this production, it would relieve the global supply excess.

This is perhaps the biggest reason why OPEC is and will continue to be relevant until the world runs on oil.

The cartel, for all its faultssuch as the very fact it is an oil cartelprovides much needed certainty in times of excessive uncertainty everywhere else.

While U.S. shale drillers are private companies whose top priority is the interest of their own shareholders, OPEC+ is made up of state-owned companies. It is the states that dictate what the companies do, not the market. Ironically, this version of central planning appears to be of benefit for more than just the planners.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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There was some unexpected 11th-hour drama in the OPEC+ meeting, with the members deciding to delay a decision due to disagreements between some nations.

Friday, July 2nd, 2021

The OPEC+ meeting resulted in some unexpected 11th-hour drama, delaying a decision that was expected on Thursday. Oil prices slipped on the news.

But the outcome could still be a bullish one. The size of the proposed production increase was lower than most analysts had expected, coming in at an average monthly addition of 400,000 bpd, whereas expectations had been for 500,000 bpd. But there is also a possibility that OPEC+ might not add any barrels to production. The group meets again on Friday.

UAE delays decision. The UAE delayed a deal as it demanded a higher production quota. Negotiations today will be difficult as OPEC+ knows that if the UAE is allowed to produce from a different base, other members may protest, Rystad Energy said in a note.

Indias demand back to 90%. Indias gasoline consumption has rebounded to 90% of pre-virus levels as motorists took back to the roads with Covid-19 curbs being eased

ExxonMobil caught on tape. An ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) lobbyist was caught on tape suggesting that its support for a carbon tax was a ploy to head off more restrictive measures. He also acknowledged that the company supported front groups to muddy the public perception on climate change. On Friday, CEO Darren Woods wrote in a post disavowing the comments and reiterating support for certain climate measures.

Americans face higher gas prices. Heading into the holiday weekend, American motorists face the highest average gasoline prices in seven years.

Shadow lenders take over U.S. shale patch. Banks have started to cut their exposure to the U.S. shale patch. While traditional lenders are cutting their losses and de-risking energy loan portfolios, alternative capital providers are stepping up to scoop up U.S. energy debt at a discount and take part in debt or equity transactions that could give them returns sooner than a loan would for a bank.

Canada to phaseout ICE vehicles by 2035. Canada announced new regulations that would effectively ban the sale of gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2035.

Chevron and partners to invest $4.5 billion in Australian gas. Chevron (NYSE: CVX), Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS.A), and ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) will investanother $4.5 billion in Gorgon LNG to keep the supply of gas going.

Canadian oil sands expected to grow. The 590,000 b/d Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion and the 370,000 b/d Line 3 expansion by Enbridge (NYSE: ENB) opens up room for the increase in Canadian oil sands production, according to IHS Markit. The 10-year forecast still calls for 3.6 million b/d, up 22% from the fully restored, post-Covid-19 pace of 2.95 million b/d.

Gas producers want higher prices for green gas. U.S. natural gas drillers are trying to market green gas or responsibly produced gas for a markup of around 5%, but so far there are few takers.

EPA underestimating methane leaks. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has underestimated methane emissions caused by oil and gas production by as much as 76 percent, according to a new study.

Utilities need $500 billion to make grid resilient. The heat dome led to blackouts in the Pacific Northwest, in a preview of what is to come with rising temperatures. One study says that U.S. utilities need to invest $500 billion to upgrade the electric grid and harden it for a warming world.

$3.2 trillion needed for renewables. IRENA, based in Abu Dhabi, says that private lenders and capital markets will need a fourfold increase in funding for renewables to as much as $3.2 trillion this decade.

EV sales on the rise in Europe. Roughly 11% of cars sold in Europe were an EV or hybrid in 2020, a sharp increase from 3.5% in 2019.

Freeport LNG optimistic on FID. Freeport LNG could sign sufficient long-term contracts by the end of the year to sanction a proposed fourth liquefaction train at its Texas export facility, according to S&P Global Platts. Related: Nio Defies Semiconductor Shortage With Blowout Delivery Report

Chevron considers sale of some Permian assets. Chevron (NYSE: CVX) is considering a sale of two collections of Permian assets for as much as $1 billion.

Shell, EDF and rsted win offshore wind in NJ. NJ awarded approvals for 2.6 GW of offshore wind this week, handing out permits to Shell New Energies US and EDF Renewables North America, as well as rsted.

Shell plans to exit California venture with Exxon. Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS.A) plans to exit its California-based oil and gas joint venture with ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM). The unit produces 125,000 bpd.

Global gas prices soar. Global prices for natural gas are at multi-year highs, with high temperatures driving up demand for power generation in the northern hemisphere for air conditioning and as traders in some regions replenish stocks ahead of winter. European gas markers TTF hit multi-year highs, as well as the important JKM marker in Asia, which jumped above $13/MMBtu.

Shortage of EV metals. Reuters does a deep dive into the long-term trajectory of metals markets as the EV boom accelerates.

Perus oil industry bouncing back. The growing likelihood of the socialist candidate winning has sent a shudder through Perus political establishment, the business community as well as mining and oil industries. There are signs, however, despite the political turmoil Perus petroleum industry is recovering.

By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com

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Crude oil prices slid lower today after OPEC+ said it would postpone a decision on the return of more barrels to the market for later today.

At the time of writing, Brent crude was trading at $75.76 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate was at $75.00 a barrel, amid an internal disagreement in the cartel, with the United Arab Emirates unsure about joining the agreement to add a total 2 million bpd to combined production between August and December.

On Thursday, before the meeting of the OPEC+ producers wrapped for the day, prices jumped on reports that Russia and Saudi Arabia had reached a preliminary deal to add more barrels to global supply.

The size of the proposed production increase was lower than most analysts had expected, coming in at an average monthly addition of 400,000 bpd, whereas expectations had been for 500,000 bpd.

But there is also a possibility that OPEC+ might not add any barrels to production.

"Failure to come to an agreement could mean that the group continues with current levels of production, which would mean that the market tightens even quicker," commodity strategists from ING said in a note, as quoted by Reuters.

If this happens, however slim the chance, forecasts of Brent crude hitting $100 might come true. And while slim, the chance is still there as OPEC said earlier it expected the oil market to return to oversupply next year.

OPEC+ is trying to follow the market, rather than lead the market, IHS Markit vice chairman Dan Yergin told CNBC. I think both the Saudis and the Russians see this in their interests. I think the Russians want to be sure that their aim is not to have the price so high that it brings back another flood of U.S. shale. Theyre much more concerned about that than the Saudis are.

Theyre just starting to get their heads above water with this price, Francisco Blanch, Bank of America head of commodities, said, as quoted by CNBC. My sense is the group wants to preserve these prices. They probably dont want to push prices much higher right now.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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The Lebanese army was called to step in and rein in armed protests sparked by plans to increase fuel prices.

Protests erupted in the troubled country at the start of this week after the energy ministry said it would hike prices at the pump on Tuesday. Lebanon is in the throes of a major economic crisis that has led to fuel and power shortages, AFP reported.

Then, on Tuesday, the Lebanese energy ministry announced a massive increase in fuel pricesat 35 percentafter saying last week it would slash fuel subsidies to ease the burden of a plunging national currency on its foreign exchange reserves.

The move comes at a bad time, right as the world was seeing a rally in commodity prices, adding further fuel the price fire in Lebanon.

The move is expected to help government finances and stop the bleeding of foreign currency reserves. But it is a severe blow to consumers in Lebanon, who have been grappling with a plunge of the local currency in addition to the fuel shortages--even before the gasoline and diesel price hikes.

As a result, according to AFP correspondents on the ground, protesters have been blocking roads and burning tires and garbage bins in Beirut. Also in Beirut, drivers formed long queues at gas stations to stock up on fuel before the price hike entered into effect, Middle Eastern Eye reported.

In Tripoli, however, the protesters went further, firing guns into the air, according to the Middle Eastern Eye report, in a bid to force shop owners to join the protest and close their shops. Also, according to unconfirmed reports from the ground, protesters tried to storm two banks.

The army stepped in, which led to clashes in which some 20 people were reportedly injured. According to AFP reports, some protesters set fire to the entrance of a government office and others tried to force their way into the homes of two politicians.

Lebanon is struggling with one of the worst crises in recent memory as well as with forming a new government.

The country is the only nation in the Middle East and Central Asia region where activity is expected to contract further, reflecting the deep economic and financial crisis that has been worsened by the pandemics second wave, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in its April 2021 regional outlook

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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As agreed in April, OPEC opened the taps in the second quarter of the year to meet a rebound in global oil demand, boosting crude production by 855,000 barrels per day (bpd) in June, the largest output hike in a year, a Bloomberg survey found on Friday.

The 13-member organization raised its production to 26.47 million bpd last month, up by 855,000 bpd compared to May, according to the survey based on ship-tracking data, information from officials, and estimates from energy consultancies.

Saudi Arabia, OPECs top producer and the worlds top exporter, accounted for more than half of Junes production increase as it hiked its output by 490,000 bpd to 8.95 million bpd, the Bloomberg survey showed.

As per the OPEC+ groups decision from early April, the collective OPEC+ oil production was set to rise by 350,000 bpd in both May and June and by more than 400,000 bpd in July.

Additionally, Saudi Arabia was also gradually easing its extra unilateral cut of 1 million bpd between May and July, beginning with monthly production increases of 250,000 bpd in both May and June.

Overall, OPEC+ will have returned to the market as much as 2.1 million bpd between May and the end of July.

A similar Reuters survey showed earlier this week that OPEC boosted its production by 740,000 bpd to 26.24 million bpd in June. The estimate of Saudi Arabias production increase was similar to the one in the Bloomberg survey. According to the Reuters survey, the Kingdom raised its production by 500,000 bpd in June compared to May.

Judging from the re-opening of economies in the second quarter and the increased fuel demand, especially in the United States, OPEC made the right call back in April to gradually boost supply to the market.

The organization, together with its non-OPEC partners led by Russia, was discussing early on Friday how to proceed with the cuts from August onwards. Disagreements over baseline production levels for the future cuts delayed the meetings from Thursday to Friday.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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An explosion rocked early on Friday Romanias largest oil refinery just outside the Black Sea city of Constanta, killing one person and injuring five others, Romanian officials and authorities say.

The blast occurred early today at the Petromidia refinery, within the hydrorefinement facility (HPM) at the plant, the owner of the refinery, Rompetrol Rafinare, said in a stock exchange filing.

The technological processes at the refinery were safely stopped as per internal crisis management procedures, and emergency crews were working to extinguish the fire, the refinery owner added.

Emergency crew airlifted five people to take them to hospitals for treatment, the Associated Press reports.

It was not immediately clear what was the cause of the explosion.

The direction of the smoke is in the opposite direction to the beach and the city  which is why the citizens are safe, Romanias Interior Ministry said in a statement carried by the AP.

The ministry, however, advised people to close their windows as a preventive measure as plumes of black smoke were seen rising from the refinery.

The fire has been now extinguished, local media report. Two of the five injured people had severe burns, the other three sustained minor injuries, according to local authorities.

All other employees have been evacuated, they added.

According to representatives of the refinery, it was unlikely that a human error was the cause of the incident, Romanian outlet Business Review reported. All safety inspections at the refinery were up to date, with the most recent carried out in the spring of last year.

Authorities are now monitoring the potential environmental fallout from the explosion.

The smoke is going offshore, and some ... is going to the beach but its not populated there, the head of Romanias Environmental Guard, Octavian Berceanu, told the AP.

The refinery, Romanias largest, is close to the Black Sea port and large city of Constanta and to the most popular sea resort in Romania, Mamaia.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Mohamed Ghanem, the son of a Libyan oil minister during Muammar Gaddafis rule, has to pay $1.5 million after he was found guilty of bribery, a Swiss court ruled on Friday.

In one of the rare corruption cases tried internationally against officials from the Gaddafi regime, the Federal Criminal Court of Switzerland found Ghanem guilty of passive bribery of foreign public officials, and ordered him to pay the sum to the Swiss government, Reuters reports.

Libyas National Oil Corporation (NOC) was the plaintiff in the corruption case and was seeking the $1.5 million as compensation. The Swiss court, however, dismissed NOCs claim and ordered Ghanem to pay the sum to the government of Switzerland.

Mohamed Ghanem is the son of Shukri Ghanem, who was oil minister at one point during Gaddafis rule in Libya.

Shukri Ghanems body was found floating on the Danube in Vienna in 2012. At the time, Austrian prosecutors ruled out foul play and said he died of a heart attack before falling into the river. Ghanem had fled Libya in 2011 after the uprising in the country started. The uprising ended in October 2011 when Gaddafi was captured and killed in Sirte.

The bribery case tried in Switzerland is one of the rare international cases bought against Gaddafi-era senior state officials.

Jean-Marc Carnice, the lawyer of Shukri Ghanems son Mohamed, told Reuters he planned to appeal the Swiss court ruling from Friday, saying Mohamed Ghanem was not involved in corruption. Ghanem is now based in Bahrain and is a senior bank executive.

For me it is a judgement based on mistaken findings. And I consider this verdict to be unjust since there is no incident of corruption, Carnice told Reuters.

Back in 2016, a Norwegian court convicted the former chief legal officer of Norway-based fertilizer maker Yara, Kendrick Wallace, but acquitted the former CEO Thorleif Enger, on bribery charges, including bribes allegedly paid to the family of Shukri Ghanem.

The bribery case tried in Switzerland involved an alleged payment made by Yara into Ghanems Swiss bank account, a source with knowledge of the case told Reuters.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Crude oil exports from Venezuela inched up last month as traders rushed to sell Venezuelan crude to Chinese buyers ahead of the entry into effect of a new tax.

Reuters reports Venezuelan exports for Asia were most commonly masked as Malaysian oil, and the biggest portion of these entered Asia before June 12, when the new Chinese import tax entered into effect, raising the costs of fuel imports by as much as 40 percent.

Yet Venezuela also reported a rare increase in production last month, thanks to the restart of a crude upgrader under PDVSAs joint venture with TotalEnergies and Norways Equinor. A blending plant was also restarted last month, contributing to the production increase.

According to shipping data cited by Reuters, PDVSA exported some 631,900 bpd of crude last month, up by 6.5 percent from May and as much as 66 percent from June 2020.

A couple of weeks ago, Venezuelas oil minister, Tareck el Assaimi, told Bloomberg in an interview the government was investing in a reversal of its oil production decline and had plans to quadruple output by the end of the year.

Without any financing, with our own money, weve been able to invest enough to stop the slide and start a gradual recovery, El Aissami said.

Venezuela boosting oil production to 1.5 million bpd by end-2021 is an impossible target, Francisco Monaldi, an expert on Venezuelas oil industry at Rice University, told Bloomberg.

Even getting to that would be implausible in the medium term; production capacity has been falling since 2014 and there have been no oil rigs operating in Venezuela for a year, Monaldi also said.

Earlier this year, state-owned PDVSA calculated it would need investments of $58 billion to boost production to where it was before Hugo Chavez rose to power in the late 90s. In 1998, Venezuela was pumping 2.3 million barrels of crude daily. The company said it planned to seek investments from both local and foreign companies to that end.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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Redefining Downtown: Could warehouse conversion have worked for Omaha's Jobbers Canyon?

History Nebraska logo REBECCA S. GRATZ, THE WORLD-HERALD The atrium at The Breakers apartments features beams and a crane original to a power plant complex that dated back to about 1920. CHRIS MACHIAN, THE WORLD-HERALD The Millwork Commons is an emerging redevelopment area north of TD Ameritrade Park. Buildings about 140 years old are being restored as worksites to be complemented by new housing under construction in the area. CHRIS MACHIAN, THE WORLD-HERALD Developers are about to restore the old Disbrow building in the foreground as part of the 45-acre Millwork Commons redevelopment area in north downtown. CHRIS MACHIAN, THE WORLD-HERALD The Ashton warehouse near 13th and Nicholas Streets is an anchor of Omahas emerging Millwork Commons district, where vintage buildings are being restored and turned into trendy space. While impressive, Millwork Commons is not as huge a redevelopment project as the Jobbers Canyon district would have been. CHRIS MACHIAN, THE WORLD-HERALD The north entrance where "The Dock" is located at a Millwork Commons building at 1229 Millwork Avenue photographed on Wednesday. CHRIS MACHIAN, THE WORLD-HERALD Renovated office space where architects tried to keep the historical details of the Millwork Commons Ashton building at 1229 Millwork Ave. CHRIS MACHIAN, THE WORLD-HERALD A common space for tech company WP Engine (formerly known as Flywheel) inside the Millwork Commons Ashton building, 1229 Millwork Ave. CHRIS MACHIAN, THE WORLD-HERALD Archetype Coffee is among new tenants set to settle in the Ashton building of the emerging Millwork Commons neighborhood of north downtown Omaha. CHRIS MACHIAN, THE WORLD-HERALD An elevator shaft of an old warehouse has been converted to a quirky conference room inside the Millwork Commons' Ashton building at 1229 Millwork Ave. Schemmer Associates The New Idea building after it was converted and opened in 1986 as apartments and commercial space. Shortly afterward, it was demolished along with the rest of the historic Jobbers Canyon in the late 1980s to make way for the Conagra-anchored riverfront project.

Before demolition of Jobbers Canyon was even a thought, a piece of the historic warehouse district had been turned into a hip place to live.

RJ Neary remembers because he not only helped renovate the century-old New Idea building, he also lived there after it became edgy apartments in 1986.

With its rooftop deck, patio and street-level commercial space, the former farm equipment center at Ninth and Jackson Streets was the first downtown Omaha housing created east of 10th Street in modern times. People were fascinated, Neary said, and the five-story New Idea became a hot spot for guests wanting to check out the repurposed digs.

The New Idea renovation provides a glimpse of what might have happened on a broader scale if the six-block district  including New Idea  hadnt been cleared for the multimillion-dollar Conagra-anchored riverfront project.

But it doesnt answer a related question: How long might it have taken to convert Jobbers Canyon to new uses?

Todd Heistand of NuStyle Development, another Omaha housing pioneer who has converted many downtown buildings, says the Jobbers Canyon neighborhood in the 1980s was rather rough. He thinks construction of the Conagra campus and neighboring Heartland of America Park helped accelerate the conversion of other downtown warehouses into cool housing and commercial space.

Indeed, he said the suburban-like Conagra complex brought a sense of stability. Without it, he wonders when the hundreds of housing units that NuStyle later developed near it would have come into the market.

Conagra really did change the feel of downtown, Heistand said. It brought a level of safety to downtown.

So goes discussion, speculation and debate  still decades later  over what downtown might be today if the mother lode of historic Omaha warehouses had remained and blossomed into the extension of Old Market lofts and shops that some envisioned.

Business and civic leaders say the Conagra project brought jobs to the riverfront and spurred lots of development. Even though Conagra in 2016 relocated its corporate headquarters and top leadership to Chicago, about 1,300 Conagra employees still work on its downsized campus.

Others lament the loss of more than 20 buildings that collectively represented an irreplaceable part of Omahas history and commercial growth. The demolition and its impact remain a case study for urban planning students.

To this day, people still talk about it, Martin Janousek, a local architect with Leo A Daly, said about the fight waged to save the Canyon. I mean, it rocked a lot of people.

The World-Herald, in partnership with History Nebraska, is examining key issues in Omahas downtown redevelopment over the past 50 years. That includes both the destruction of Jobbers Canyon (bounded generally by Eighth, 10th, Farnam and Jackson Streets) and the recent conversion of numerous vintage structures into worksites, housing and shops.

For some, its hard to reconcile the two facts.

You look at that and say: Wow, it could have been so different,  said Jeff Slobotski, ecosystem and business development manager for the emerging Millwork Commons neighborhood near 12th and Nicholas Streets. The area is near Hot Shops, a former mattress factory dating back to 1886 that turned into an art center in 1999.

Launched about three years ago, Millwork Commons is trying to create a 45-acre live-work-play campus for tech and other creative businesses. Investors led by Paul and Annette Smith and Black Dog Management are directing up to $300 million for the effort.

An anchor of Millwork Commons is the recently renovated Ashton warehouse, built in the 1880s, which covers nearly 200,000 square feet. The Ashton features a spacious public lobby called The Dock, where people can watch movies on a giant screen and socialize over a latte from Archetype Coffee or house-made beer from the Kros Strain taproom.

The Dock opens up to an outdoor park and event area and a few hundred new housing units under construction. Also, there is the 1940s-era Mastercraft, whose lengthy transformation from furniture factory to business office center began under different owners in 2005.

So far, Ashton business tenants include WP Engine (formerly known as Flywheel), a clothing boutique, a restaurant-meal deliverer. More are coming, including a home furnishing store and an information technology school. South of the Ashton, another like-sized millwork operation built in 1886 and known as the Disbrow block is soon to be renovated into offices, retailers and residences.

While impressive, Millwork Commons is not as huge a redevelopment project as the Jobbers Canyon district would have been. And while the recent efforts are transforming older warehouses (often built in the same era as Jobbers Canyon), the bulk of those structures still sat derelict or underused for a long time.

At a different downtown spot, south of the Old Market along 10th Street, another cavernous brick structure stood inactive and was mainly used for storage for roughly four decades. Jon Crane of Boyd Jones Construction had the idea to turn the former railroad mail-sorting facility into a now fully occupied, 100,000-square-foot modern worksite.

Four years after the renovated Rail & Commerce Building opened, tenants include Boyd Jones, Warren Distribution, HTI Labs and Cafe Postale. Theres also a co-working level called Commerce Village, where about 40 entrepreneurs are based.

When Crane bought the dilapidated structure, he hoped its location and ambiance would help recruit talent for his company, which had outgrown space near 44th and Nicholas Streets. That happened, he said.

He anticipates further growth, noting that the buildings design allows for two additional floors.

Not every old building is salvageable, Crane said. But he says he is pleased he took on the $25 million renovation challenge at 10th and Mason Streets.

You get to breathe new life into these historic buildings, and, in a way, youre living in the best of both worlds.

A few other emerging areas:

Flat Iron District: Developers are turning old buildings (and building some new ones) near 18th Street and St. Marys Avenue into housing, offices, restaurants and other commercial space. Neeraj Agarwal, for instance, is rehabbing a century-old Buick dealership and the historic Standard Oil facility. Dicon Corp. led conversion of the century-old Freiden building into micro apartments.

New North Makerhood: The Peter Kiewit Foundations aim is to turn a worn pocket of structures northwest of 11th and Cuming into an affordable neighborhood for artisans and entrepreneurs. In its heyday, the area was a bustling industrial tract. Next step is turning an old lumber warehouse into artist studios and outdoor event space.

At 12th and Jones Streets, the Fairmont Creamery stands as an example of how challenging a conversion project can get. Omahan Paul Waggener bought the former cold storage and meat-processing plant, which dates back to 1898, and planned to create 142,000 square feet of residences, retail and gallery space.

The estimated $30 million rehab now has stalled, due mostly to rising wood and steel prices, said Waggener, who is considering bringing on a partner. Earlier, Waggener said he fell in love with the structure, then only about 20% in use, adding that he wanted to make sure she was taken care of properly.Neary felt similarly back in the mid-1980s when he walked into the New Idea building then operated by Lindsay Brothers Co. as a wholesale distributor of farm equipment. He thought: This is a perfect conversion (project).

Within a few months of completing the rehab, its 24 apartments were filled, proving that demand existed, said Neary, a real estate businessman who recently ran unsuccessfully for mayor.

Neary and his partners ultimately sold the property to the Omaha Development Foundation as it assembled land for Conagras new campus and more. Neary said his group got about $1 million more than its original investment.

Heistand  who is Omahas largest converter of old structures into trendy housing  views demolition of Jobbers Canyon as a double-edged sword.

From a builders perspective, he is confident that in todays market, the warehouses could have been swiftly turned into the kind of history-filled, mixed-use centers urban dwellers flock to.

But, he said, that wasnt as easily said or done in the 1980s, when the area was not as appealing for residential living.

Heistand said demand for his own early conversion efforts, including the Bull Durham apartments that opened in 1997 at 10th and Leavenworth, likely benefited from the post-Conagra project environment that infused more office workers and corporate feel near the riverfront.

NuStyle, boosted also by development tools including tax-increment financing, went on a roll converting old buildings. Around 2002, for example, the company finished transformation of two century-old 11th and Jones Streets warehouses into about 260 Old Market Lofts with street-level business space.

The previous owner, Ford storage and moving company, had been downtown about 85 years when it sold NuStyle the nine-story structures and another six-story warehouse at 11th and Dodge (which also became apartments and then condos).

Other NuStyle conversions included the eight-story Beebe & Runyan warehouse into condos at Ninth and Douglas in 1998 and Tiptop facility into apartments and commercial space at 15th and Cuming in 2005.

Increased popularity of urban core living helped create demand for more transformations. Since 2013, NuStyle carved out more than 2,000 apartments from eight aging structures spanning 2.5 million square feet within a few miles of the Missouri River.

Most recently, NuStyle turned an old power plant just south of Conagra into a 217-apartment complex called The Breakers. The plant hadnt operated for three decades, and, according to Heistand, was his teams most difficult conversion yet.

For starters, it had no traditional floors, only a framework of iron grates that former power plant workers walked around on. Crews had to start from scratch to build an internal structure for individual apartments.

NuStyle turned it down twice before buying it in 2015 at a discount price.

Soon after opening two years later, the $40 million Breakers filled up. An architect who worked on the design liked the finished product  and its views of the river and casinos to the east  so much that he and his wife sold their house of many years to move there.

Heistand recalls a couple of decades back when Omahas growing urban housing market caught the attention of peer cities. Officials from Kansas City and Des Moines visited to see Omahas downtown projects.

Today, Heistand says he can feel the loss of the historic Jobbers Canyon that could have been turned into housing and more.

At the same time, he said, if they wouldnt have done Conagra, a Fortune 500 company, down there, would those warehouse buildings have sat for another 15 or 20 years like in other cities?
An Omaha property and storage business owner who sparked several debates at City Hall died Thursday in a small-plane crash in Iowa, his brother said Friday.

Dave Paladino, 54, and a young relative were killed in a plane crash in Lamoni, Iowa, just before 8 a.m. Thursday. Lamoni is near the Iowa-Missouri border, about 145 miles from Omaha and straight south of Des Moines.

Tony Molinaro, a spokesman with the Federal Aviation Administration, said a single-engine Cirrus SR-22 had crashed west of the Lamoni Municipal Airport.

Kevin Paladino said Friday that his brother was flying the plane from Omaha to a lake property in Iowa. After taking off, Kevin Paladino said, his brother realized something was wrong with the plane. As he landed at the Lamoni airport, the plane went off the runway and crashed, he said.

Were all in shock, he said. Its quite a loss.

Dave Paladino was married with two sons and a daughter.

The plane, which was manufactured in 2004, is registered to Airmark Group LLC in Valley, Nebraska.

According to an initial FAA report, the aircraft attempted to land but took off immediately and appeared to stall on departure resulting in a crash.
CHESAPEAKE, Va. (AP)  A judge in Virginia swiftly rebuked a conservative groups effort Friday to remove a Black state senator from office over her role in a protest that ended with heavy damage to a Confederate monument.

Few expected the petition of 4,600 signatures gathered by members of the Virginia Tea Party to succeed against Sen. Louise Lucas, a longtime Democratic legislator and a key Statehouse power broker. The judge quickly ruled that, under Virginia's Constitution, only the state Senate can expel one of its members.

There is a process for that, Chesapeake Circuit Court Chief Judge John W. Brown said from the bench. This is not that process.

The courtroom briefly served as a battleground for the nation's culture wars over race, history and policing that intensified last year after George Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody.

Our country was under absolute siege by these angry mobs, Virginia Tea Party Chair Nelson Velez told The Associated Press before the hearing. "We had an elected official, a state senator orchestrate a riot.

But many saw the petition  as well as a failed criminal case against Lucas  as a vindictive political stunt against a powerful Black woman.
In the 2020 election, more than 2,000 voters in Apache County were placed on a list because of questions surrounding their residency, the Navajo Nation noted in court documents. Neither the state nor the county had online options for voters to determine their polling location without a street address, tribal attorneys wrote.

There's no public transportation on the 27,000-square-mile (70,000-square-kilometer) Navajo Nation that's bigger than 10 U.S. states. It stretches into Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Many people rely on friends, family or strangers for rides.

Poor roads increase the difficulties of voting, the tribe said. More than four-fifths of the reservation's roads are unpaved. During elections, many Navajos tell politicians they want better roads.

Even just gravel, we'd be very grateful, said Tovina Yazzie, manager of the Sweetwater Chapter on the Navajo Nation.

Yazzie tries to impress upon tribal members that voting could result in more funding to the small community near the Arizona-Utah border. She also recognizes the obstacles.

We run into some people or community members who don't have vehicles, so it is a hindrance for our community to come in and vote, she said. And also, the weather has a role in it, if it's snowing or rainy or muddy.
Black activist and actor Patrick Mathurin said some in the Netherlands try to ignore the country's colonial past, "but through our activism, we forced them to look at it. And also what happened, of course, with George Floyd made it all ... evolve faster.

Halsema said history casts a shadow that reaches into the present day.

The city officials and the ruling elite who, in their hunger for profit and power, participated in the trade in enslaved people, in doing so entrenched a system of oppression based on skin color and race, she said. The past from which our city still draws its distinctive commercial spirit is therefore indivisible from the persistent racism that still festers.

She closed her speech with the words: On behalf of the College of Mayor and Alderpersons, I apologize. Cheers and applause erupted from the small group of invited guests sitting on socially distanced white chairs.

The apology came during an annual ceremony marking the abolition of slavery in Dutch colonies in Suriname and the Dutch Antilles on July 1, 1863. The anniversary is now known as Keti Koti, which means Chains Broken.

Activists say many people who had been enslaved were forced to work without pay for their former masters for a further decade.
Many people live in one country and work in the other, for shopping one goes across the border ... and the idea of the classic nation-state has long been overcome because one knows that many problems can only be solved transnationally, Laschet said.

He earned a law degree and worked as a journalist before joining Germany's parliament as a lawmaker with the CDU in 1994. From 1999-2005, Laschet was a member of the European Parliament. He became governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, a center-left stronghold, in 2017.

Laschet has led his state in a coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats, a traditional CDU ally, but is considered capable of working with the more leftist Greens.

In the late 2000s, Laschet was his state's minister for the integration of immigrants. Well before other German states, he stressed the importance of language fluency, stronger women's rights in immigrant communities, an easier path to citizenship and a need to bring Islamic religious teaching out of storefront mosques and into classrooms, with teachers raised and educated in Germany.

The fight against growing antisemitism in Germany is also close to his heart. He strengthened high school exchanges between Germans and Israelis, and, like Merkel, is a strong supporter of Israel.
Over the past year, our nation has grappled with long-simmering issues of racial inequality and law enforcement interactions with people of color. Nebraska, and Omaha in particular, have responded to these issues in a reasoned, productive manner while some other communities around the nation reacted in ways that were ill-considered at best, and often counterproductive.

Nebraska recently enacted legislation, widely supported by police organizations, that meaningfully enhances law enforcement professionalism in numerous ways. The new law requires additional training and establishes a grant program to help pay for the training. It establishes an online, public listing of officers who have been decertified due to misconduct, and mandates a duty to intervene when officers see colleagues using excessive force. The legislation also restricts the use of chokeholds and carotid restraint holds, with common sense exceptions.

In contrast, New York City implemented a striking example of an unwise response to last summers unrest with a city statute making it a misdemeanor to restrain an individual by sitting, kneeling or standing on the chest or back ... in the course of effecting or attempting to effect an arrest. This hastily enacted law criminalizes a widely accepted law enforcement restraint technique for arrests of noncompliant suspects and ignores the realities of police work.
Mindsets like that and Mr. Stenbergs illustrate the reason for government intervention to discourage individuals from acts which clearly and overtly negatively impact lands and waters and wildlife that can only exist if such oversight is present. Years of lack of adequate state oversight at Alt-En near Mead, though a different problem, come to mind.

Mr. Stenberg, just because what happened on a remote and private stretch of land along the Snake is out of sight makes it even more important that what was done by one mans actions isnt out of mind. Think, Rule of Law, Don.

CRT radicalism

In regard to critical race theory and its proponents, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to side with those GOP figureheads who have expressed opposition to it. CRT is a toxic ongoing scam put forth by such racialist frauds as Nikole Hannah-Jones in order to advance their own power and/or income. The entire premise of their malignant hard sell is that the American people (specifically school-age children) are too simple minded to embrace the position that the entire white populace is inherently racist and that all blacks are noble victims of this racism which denies them equity, security and other vague conditions/degrees of ongoing victimhood which must be redressed by immediate, radical social engineering. Therefore this deficiency must be addressed by self-appointed experts utilizing CRT.
Kings Harbor to Reschedule 4th of July Fireworks Due to Inclement Weather

Due to inclement weather, Kings Harbor will be rescheduling their July 4th concert and fireworks show to ensure the safety of guests, performers, vendors, and staff. The festivities will now be held on Sunday, September 5.

Fireworks Show and Concert to be Rescheduled for Sunday, September 5

WHAT: Due to inclement weather, Midway and Kings Harbor will be rescheduling todays July 4th concert and fireworks show to ensure the safety of our guests, performers, vendors, and staff.

The festivities will now be held on Sunday, September 5. Kings Harbor looks forward to celebrating Labor Day with a spectacular fireworks display and concert.

COST: All events are free and open to the public.

WHEN: Sunday, September 5

*Event is weather permitting. Please look at Kings Harbors Facebook and Instagram pages for any updated information on any delays or cancellations.

WHERE: Kings Harbor Waterfront Village  Green Area, 1660 W Lake Houston Pkwy, Kingwood, TX 77339
Five persons have been arrested by the police in a hotel at Dansoman in Accra with wads of counterfeit foreign and local currencies.

The police also retrieved a pistol, which they believed belonged to one of the suspects.



The suspects, who the police believe were involved in the production of counterfeit currencies, were operating in a room in the Bean Lodge at Dansoman.



The police gave their names as Akwasi Boateng, alias Honourable; Michael Marfo Ohene, alias Ghost; Bismarck Tawiah, Richard Walker and Prince Nketiah.



Tip-off



The Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Accra Regional Police Command, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Mrs Effia Tenge, told the Daily Graphic that the police received a tip-off about 3 p.m. last Tuesday about the activities of the suspects.



Immediately, she said, a team of policemen from the Dansoman District Police Command was dispatched to the Bean Lodge, where it arrested the five suspects in one of the rooms in the hotel.



The police found 108 wads of fake dollars, a wooden box containing 34 wads of fake CFA and a number of GH200 notes suspected to be counterfeit, with some white powdery substance on them and concealed in an ice chest.



An unspecified quantity of Ghana cedis notes suspected to be genuine were also found in the room.



The police have since taken the statements of the suspects, who were taken to the Dansoman Police Station.



Investigations have commenced into the matter.









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 National President of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Mrs Philippa Larsen, has assured teachers that negotiations on issues that have to do with salary, arrears, upgrading and other allowances are ongoing and the government is committed to paying what teachers deserved.



Discussions on negotiations on minimum wage and base pay have been ongoing and I hope such negotiations would be concluded meaningfully and the GNAT members, as well as all teachers shall be informed accordingly, she said.



The GNAT President was addressing members of the association at the sixth Quadrennial Delegates Conference at Senchi last Thursday on the theme, GNAT @ 90 surviving as a reliable and vibrant teacher union in the 21st century.



GNAT leadership takes information from neither radio nor television. Whatever information the leadership puts out into the public domain comes out of meetings held with the government and other stakeholders.



Let me say that teachers are safe with regards to the negotiations held so far with government and there should be no room for any fear or doubt, Mrs. Larsen assured teachers.



According to the National President, a template had been sent to the district, municipal and metropolitan education offices to collate data of beneficiaries for validation and payments.



She also announced that negotiations with the government were far advanced to supply every teacher with a laptop computer on cost sharing bases.



She explained that the government would bear 70 per cent of the cost, while a teacher would contribute the remaining 30 per cent and was hopeful that it would boost the morale of teachers in this technological age.



Technological age



The Headmaster of Adjena Senior High Technical School, Mr James Affadu, who was the guest speaker, said pupils/students were in the technological age and teachers should, therefore, look at innovative ways of delivering their lessons in order to make the learners global citizens.



He also advised the teachers to build their corporate images by dressing decently anywhere they found themselves.



The Asuogyaman District Director of Education, Mrs Theodora Kutorkor Entee, praised the teachers in the district for their commitment and dedication towards quality education.



Health insurance



The outgone District Chairman of GNAT, Mr Moses K. Bosu, in his report, said for the union to continue to be relevant, reliable and vibrant, leadership of GNAT at the national level should consider instituting a workable health insurance scheme for its members and immediate dependents.



The conference elected nine member new executives under the chairmanship of Harrison Mompi.









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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National Youth Organizer of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Henry Nana Boakye is singing the praise of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for instructing the Interior Minister to undertake a public inquiry into the Ejura incidents in the Ashanti Region.



The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Wednesday, June 30, 2021, has instructed the Minister for the Interior, Hon. Ambrose Dery, Member of Parliament for Nandom Constituency to conduct a Public Inquiry into the circumstances that led to the unfortunate occurrences of Tuesday, 29th June 2021.



According to the release signed by the Acting Director of Communications at the Presidency, Eugene Ahin, the Interior Minister is to provide a detailed report from the Inquiry with recommendations for appropriate action within ten (10) days.



"The President is deeply saddened by the deaths of Ibrahim Mohammed, alias Kaaka, Abdul Nasir Yussif and Murtala Mohammed. He extends sincere condolences to the families of the deceased, and wishes the injured a speedy recovery, the statement read.



Commenting on the directive from the Office of the President, Nana B as he is popularly called said on Okay FMs 'Ade Akye Abia' Morning Show that the instructions from President Akufo-Addo gladden the heart of the youth of the ruling NPP especially those in Ejura as Kaaka, one of the deceased is a member of the ruling party.



We the youth of the NPP are happy about the instructions of the President on the incidents that took place in Ejura. He has demonstrated that he is a good father and a true leader, he applauded the President.



Acknowledging that the late Ibrahim Mohammed, alias Kaaka was a member of the ruling NPP, Nana B noted that the deceased was a social media activist who always broadcasted the good and the bad of whatever is happening in Ejura irrespective of the person involved.



I personally know Kaaka as a member of the NPP and I know the entire Ejura is bereaved . . . he was a social media activist and he talked about everything. He did a video to address a heap of refuse closer to the NDC MP and at times too he would talk about an unfinished project of our government and when the project is completed too, he would get back to talk about it . . . he spoke about anything and everything, he disclosed.



Watch Video Below





Source: Daniel Adu Darko/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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Atik Mohammed has condemned the Military/Police shooting incident that occurred at Ejura on Tuesday, June 29, 2021 involving them and residents in the community.



Some residents embarked on a protest demanding justice for an activist and resident in the area, Ibrahim Mohammed alias 'Kaaka', who died as a result of a mob assault.



A combined team of soldiers and Police personnel deployed to mitigate the tension in the community, upon arrival, fired gunshots into the protesters killing two and leaving four seriously injured.



Addressing the issue during a discussion on Peace FM's ''Kokrokoo'', Atik Mohammed labeled the security forces' action as an extreme act of unprofessionalism.



He wondered why the soldiers decided to fire live bullets into the protesters stressing, "I do not see how they (protesters) posed so much of a threat as to have invited live shots".



To Atik, deploying the Military to the community was a wrong move because the soldiers are trained for combat not crowd control.



"How can protesting against the loss of one life result(s) in the loss of two more? It doesn't just make sense," he fumed.



He held that the Police should have led the operation at Ejura.



"I don't think that crowd control is so much a responsibility for the Police to handle. But they have demonstrated by several examples that they are not good at crowd control and that calls into question the very architecture of our security, in fact of our Police administration in this country. We do not have crowd control experts.



"That's why I earlier said this is the job of the Police, but if you consign that responsibility to other body whose job is different, as for them, like you said; their training even directs them that, when they're invited and have to shoot, they're not shooting to maim you. They're shooting to permanently disable you and by saying permanently disable you, I mean to finish you and you invite those people and gave them rather the lead role. What happened is what definitely would happen . . . As for me, it's an unfortunate incident," he expressed his disappointments.



He advised the Police to set up a department dedicated for crowd control or train officers with the necessary skills to de-escalate a crowd-related situation.







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 Minister of Information, Mr Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has urged actors in the Ghanaian political space to fashion out a mechanism to tackle issues of suspicion during election.



He said suspicion around election processes triggered huge mistrust among political actors and could serve as a basis of violence if not curtailed.



Mr Oppong Nkrumah, who is also the Member of Parliament for Ofoase-Ayirebi in the Eastern Region, was speaking at a three-day National Stakeholders Dialogue on countering Post-2020 Election Violence and Building Consensus for Greater Political Tolerance in Ghana held at Ada.



The dialogue was organised by the National Peace Council with support from the Commonwealth Secretariat and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)



Proposals



He urged the participants, to among other recommendations, come out with proposals that would deal with the phenomenon of suspicion around electoral processes.



Mr Oppong Nkrumah bemoaned the situation where some unscrupulous persons used the very important electoral processes to achieve infamy.



Those individuals, he said, embarked on nefarious activities such as ballot box snatching and other activities that resulted in violence and associated offences.



Fact-checking



The minister appealed to the media to play its fact-checking role well during the election process instead of amplifying the interest of parties, which sometimes generated tension and could lead to violence.



He said the role of the media in the electoral process was not to amplify the suspicions and interest of parties or players but to do that which the nation required of them such as subjecting claims put out by political actors to scrutiny through fact checking.



The United Nations Development Programme Resident Representative, Dr Angela Lusigi, while recognising the significant progress and good track record Ghana had chalked up on elections, said the country must recognise that evolving tensions, misunderstandings and pockets of violence had marred recent elections.



She said it was time to change that negative trajectory and show Ghanas good example to the rest of the world.



Dr Lusigi appealed to the stakeholders to make good use of the opportunity to work collectively to consolidate Ghanas democratic gains as a nation.



She said by committing to dialogue and peaceful means of resolving differences and misunderstanding, safe spaces would be created for a better future for all.

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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About 28 per cent of people are currently living in areas with scarce water in Ghana, with the figure projected to reach about 46 per cent by 2030.

The Head of Surface Water Division of the WRI, Dr Emmanuel Obuobie, said even without the impact of galamsey, places like the Pra Basin could be described as scarce water areas.



He said based on recent turbidity measurements, it was clear that galamsey had rendered the Pra and Ankobra rivers not fit for any use without treatment, exacerbating the already dire water scarcity conditions of the people who depended on those rivers.



He said water bodies played major roles in our daily lives for both domestic and industrial purposes, and cautioned that water scarcity could have dire consequences on the nation.



Dr Obuobie made the statements at a days seminar aimed at finding the impact of illegal mining, popularly known as galamsey, and water security in Accra.



Lasting solution



A Senior Research Scientist and Head of Ground Water Division of the Water Research Institute (WRI), Dr Anthony Duah, called on Ghanaians to join in finding a lasting solution to the galamsey menace and help safeguard the countrys water bodies.



He said stopping galamsey at all cost would help improve the quality of water bodies in the country, which served as sources of drinking water and other domestic uses for the citizenry.



Results from studies carried out by the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Water Research Institute in recent times on the Southwestern Rivers system, which are being used by the citizens in the communities within the area for domestic purposes, recorded very high levels in colour, turbidity and total suspended solids.



The levels recorded were far above World Health Organisations (WHOs) recommended levels for fresh water. Furthermore, the heavy metals used in galamsey operations such as mercury for gold extraction adversely affects soil and water quality, Dr Duah said at the seminar in Accra last Tuesday.



The seminar, organised by the WRI, brought together environmentalists, health experts, media practitioners, security agencies, and representatives from the Ghana Water Company Limited and senior high school students to help find a solution to the galamsey menace.



It was christened Galamsey and Water Security.



Health issues



Dr Duah stated that the destruction of the countrys water bodies contributed to the many health issues which continued to be recorded in hospitals.



Lead poisoning in particular causes anemia, weakness, constipation, colic, palsy and often paralysis of the wrists and ankles. Lead can reduce intelligence in children, delay motor development, impair memory and cause hearing problems.



For example, lead found in water can increase blood pressure in adults, and it can also cross the placenta which results in miscarriages, still births and neurological damage, he said.



The Senior Research Scientist stressed the need to intensify education on the fact that water is life.



He said the use of chemicals such as mercury in galamsey operations in water bodies was affecting our foods and fishes.



High levels of mercury have been found in soil and river sediment samples in these areas.



Several lands have been degraded because of the illegal mining activities in the area. This also deprives the people whose livelihood depends on the land and its needed resources for their survival, he noted.









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 Vice-President, Alhaji Dr. Mahammudu Bawumia, has donated 1, 000 bags of cement and cash of GH50,000.00 towards the construction of a Police Divisional Office at Ejura in the Ashanti Region.



The project is designed to resource the Police to enhance security in the area.



It comes in the wake of the recent violent clashes between some youth in the area and security personnel, leading to the death of two young men from the Dagomba-Line Muslim Community.



Alhaji Dr. Bawumia, who was on a visit to Ejura on Friday, July 02, and accompanied by the National Chief Imam, Shiekh Dr. Osman Sharabutu, in a speech read on his behalf, in a meeting with the traditional authorities, expressed worry at the tragedy.



The government, he said, was saddened by the loss of the precious lives, and assured the people of its commitment to probe the unfortunate issue to its logical conclusion.



According to the Vice-President, the aim was to avert such occurrences in future, and appealed to the people of Ejura to remain calm.



He prayed for the departed souls, saying, the government had stepped up efforts to support the affected families in the shooting incident.



Alhaji Dr. Bawumia said everything was being done to console the bereaved families in their difficult moments.



On his part, the National Chief Imam also donated 500 bags and GH2, 000.00 towards the project.



In a speech read on his behalf, he said the Muslim community was praying for the souls of the deceased men.



He advised the youth and affected families to exercise restraint and remain calm as the government had commissioned a Ministerial Committee to probe the issue.



The deceased, Nasiru Yussif and Murtala Mohammed, both in their 20s, were buried in line with Islamic tradition by the Dagomba-Line Muslim Community at Ejura, on Tuesday evening, June 29.



The violence leading to the shooting incident and subsequent demise of the two men was triggered by the death of one Ibrahim Mohammed, alias Kaaka, 45, who was said to have been brutally assaulted while returning home on a motorbike on Saturday night.



He died at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) three days after the attack, after his transfer from the Ejura Government Hospital.



What was expected to be a peaceful demonstration on Monday, following the burial of Kaaka, turned violent as the protesters clashed with the security personnel detailed to maintain order, resulting in the deaths of the two young men.

Source: GNA









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Media personality Nana Aba Anamoah has expressed her disappointment in the Christian Council of Ghana over their silence about the current happenings in the country.



According to Nana Aba Anamoah, the Christian Council of Ghana used to be one outspoken institution in the country which wasnt afraid to comment of issues concerning the well-being of the country.



She stated the institution used to roar like a lion trying to put the government and its policy on their toes but nowadays feels and behaves like a cat who about the current killing of protesters in the country.



The Christian Council of Ghana is the biggest disappointment. They could roar for days. Now dier its just meooowww



The Christian Council of Ghana is one of the oldest institutions or organization in the country with Rt. Rev. Prof. Joseph Obiri Yeboah Mante who was elected at the councils last Annual General Meeting.



The council through its work serves as an advisory board to the president and the various politicians in the country\ hence people expecting them to come out and condemn the act by the police and the military who clashed with the youth of Ejura leaving three (3) persons died.

Source: ghgossip.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 National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament for Lawra, Mr Bede A. Ziedeng, has expressed concern about the poor state of the Lawra Municipal Hospital and the state of health care in the municipality.



He said for the past few years, there had been numerous complaints from patients about the poor services they received at the facility.



They receive poor service, though the Lawra Hospital remains the foremost health facility in the municipality, he said.



Drugs



Presenting a statement on the state of healthcare delivery in the municipality on the floor of Parliament last Tuesday, Mr Ziedeng said the hospital had no drugs to the extent that when prescriptions were made, the only way patients could have their drugs was for them to purchase them from drugstores and pharmacies outside the hospital.



And this is so for virtually every drug except perhaps for paracetamol. The lack of drugs and other facilities have rendered completely useless the holding of the National Health Insurance cards as the holders are simply told to buy their drugs.



No laboratory tests can be conducted in the hospital due to the lack of equipment and reagents. So patients are again compelled to access laboratory services from private sources outside the hospital, which services they have to pay for even though they hold NHIA cards which entitle them to free medical services, he explained.



Oxygen



Mr Ziedeng also noted that there was a shortage of oxygen to undertake surgeries or even support patients who need to be supported with artificial respiration.



There is also no Central Sterile Supply Department (CSSD). The hospital depends on one small and old autoclave, which breaks down frequently. When this happens, the hospital has to fall on Babile Polyclinic for sterilisation of its operation instruments and dressing packs.



Records booklet



Mr Ziedeng said the hospital had also ran out of child health records booklets for pregnant women and children.



He said the residents of the municipality were crying for immediate attention and solutions to the challenges confronting healthcare delivery.



For now I am appealing to the minister of Health and the government, as a matter of urgency, to come to the aid of the Lawra Municipal Hospital so as to not only give it the dignified status that it deserves but also to enable it give adequate and quality health care to the people of the municipality, he stated.









Source: Graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Four organisations in the country have called on the security agencies to be professional in the discharge of their duties, especially in the maintenance of law and order during protests.

They have also urged protesters to be equally law-abiding by acting responsibly within the remit of the law while exercising their rights.



The organisations are the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), the Ghana Catholic Bishops Conference (GCBC), the National Peace Council (NPC) and the Federation of Muslim Councils of Ghana (FMC).



NCCE



In a statement signed by the Chairperson of the NCCE, Ms Josephine Nkrumah, the commission reminded the security agencies that lives lost could not be replaced.



Our law enforcement agencies are to maintain law and order and also protect the citizenry. Unfortunately, there is a perception of growing loss of public confidence in them, it said.



It said the illegality or otherwise of citizens protests should not lead to unjustified and unwarranted use of force against unarmed citizens of the country.



The right to express ourselves is one of the key pillars of a vibrant democracy and any illegitimate attempt to thwart such a right is repugnant to our democratic culture, it said.



The statement urged well-meaning people to speak against those brutalities and reiterated the need for all to refrain from acts that could worsen the already volatile situation in Ejura.



Bishops



In a statement signed by the President of the GCBC, the Most Rev. Philip Naameh, the bishops described the incident at Ejura as unfortunate.



The situation is rather getting out of hand and this does not augur well for our country. How can one justify the action of the military man seen in the viral video aiming and shooting at unprotected and unarmed civilians in an attempt to stop the demonstration?



This act is not only condemnable but also criminal and must be investigated and the perpetrators duly punished, it said.



It also appealed to all agitated youth across the country, particularly those at Ejura, to restrain themselves from engaging in further acts of violence, adding that those who wished to exercise their fundamental human rights to demonstrate must do so within the remit of the laws of the country.



NPC



The NPCs statement, which was signed by its Chairman, Rev. Dr Ernest Adu Gyamfi, expressed appreciation to the President for the directive to the Minister of the Interior to conduct a public inquiry into the circumstances that led to the unfortunate occurrences at Ejura.



We encourage the proposed committee to work within its terms of reference, it said, and urged all the people in the community to keep calm and allow investigations to take their full course.



Federation of Muslim Councils



According to FMC, the firing of live bullets by the military into unarmed youth who were peacefully protesting the gruesome murder of one of their own was inconsistent with contemporary policing, civilian crowd control and standard military engagements.



The unleashing of the military on civilians in purely civil matters is becoming a bane under this government. Examples are not far-fetched, a statement signed by the Secretary-General of the FMC, Hajj Muhammad Amir Kpakpo Addo, claimed.



It said the governments sparing condemnation of such incidents and assurances of conducting investigations into them no longer engendered confidence in the citizenry about its sincerity to walk the talk on such matters.



Background



Following the alleged murder of a social media activist, Ibrahim Mohammed, alias Macho Kaaka, at Ejura last Sunday, the town was put on the edge last Tuesday as some military men were alleged to have shot and killed two persons and injured four others who were protesting Kaakas killing by unknown assailants in front of his home.





Source: Graphiconline.com









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The police in the Savannah Region in collaboration with a local search party has intensified the search for six members of a kidnapping gang.



The gang kidnapped a four-year-old boy at Busunu in the West Gonja Municipality in the Savannah Region last Tuesday.



The kidnappers said to be about 10, ran into the search party in the bush at the outskirts of Busunu and engaged it in a shootout, resulting in the death of four of them and injury to a member of the search party.



However, the other six managed to flee the scene of the incident onboard three motorbikes with the victim, while the bodies of the four suspected kidnappers have since been deposited at the West Gonja Municipal Hospital in Damongo.



The Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Savannah Regional Police Command, Inspector Adjekum Owusu, who confirmed the incident to the Daily Graphic, said the combined search party being led by the police had intensified its search for the remaining six kidnappers who fled from the scene.



Frequency



According to the police, it was the third time in a year a case of kidnapping had been reported, and in two of the cases, the victims were rescued.



Inspector Owusu said the incidence of kidnapping was on the rise in Busunu and its surrounding communities which led to the formation of the search party by the community, and it was believed that it was the same kidnapping gang operating in the area which had kidnapped the four-year-old boy who was still in their custody.



Facts



Briefing the Daily Graphic, Inspector Owusu said that last Wednesday at about 2 p.m., the chief linguist of Yagbonwuru (the Overlord of Gonja), Alhaji Afoli Losina, accompanied by Gbanfuwura, Alhaji Abudu. and the Busunu Fulani chief came to the regional crime office to report that at about 11 a.m. on the same day, one of their children aged four had been abducted the previous day.



He said a search party was organized to look for the abducted child and in the course of the search the party ran into a group of kidnappers in the bush.



Inspector Owusu said the kidnappers started shooting at the members of the search party and they also shot back, killing four of them.



He said based on the report, a police team led by the Regional Commander, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Mr. Ebenezer Larbi, went to the crime scene in the bush, about four miles from the Busunu township, where the four bodies of male adults between the ages of 18 and 34 years were found in a pool of blood.



Inspector Owusu said the police found four BB cartridges, sandals and shoes at the scene and the items had been kept for investigation.



The bodies have been deposited at the West Gonja Municipal Hospital in Damongo for preservation and autopsy, while the investigation continues.









Source: Graphiconline.com









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A viral video on social media on Thursday, July 1, 2021, shows armed military officers brutalizing some residents in the streets of Wa, the Upper West Regional capital, allegedly over a missing mobile phone.

Some eyewitnesses said the soldiers claimed they were searching for their stolen mobile phone.



They recounted how the officers who could not be immediately identified, stopped tricycles and brutalized particularly young men.



The Public Relations Officer of the Upper West Regional Coordinating Council, Cletus Awuni was also beaten by the officers.



They hit my head about three times and my back, because they used the taser on my hands and my chest, Awuni said in a radio interview with Accra based Citi FM.



In detailing his account of the incident, Mr. Awuni said, This afternoon I got a call that the military personnel was brutalizing people in town. We saw that they were beating everybody. In the process of inquiring why people were being beaten, I was also beaten.



I called the Military Commander to find out what was happening, and he said he didnt know anything about what they were doing, so the Commander said he wanted to call the 2nd in command. As we were speaking, people were being beaten, so I decided to take a video and send it to the commander, so he sees what the boys are doing. They saw that I was filming them, and they asked why I was filming them. I said I was on a phone call with their commander, then they started beating me up.



They demanded that I deleted the video, and I told them I wont delete it. They started using the taser on me to delete the video.



It took the intervention of one police DSP to shout at them that they are beating the PRO of the Upper West Regional Coordinating Council before they stopped beating me They gave my phone back to me, and I was driven to the hospital by my driver, he explained.



Watch video attached below.



Another victim, a pupil teacher, told Citi FM that he was accosted in front of his shop in town and was beaten by the officers.



Click this link to watch video





Source: Graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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A group of concerned residents of McCarthy Hill in the Weija-Gbawe Municipality in Accra have petitioned the Parliamentary Select Committee on Environment, Science and Technology to intervene for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to grant permit for the continuation of work on the construction of the Empire Cement Factory at McCarthy Hill.



The residents made the appeal in a petition presented to the Committee on Environment, Science and Technology at Parliament House today.



Mr Andrews Agbayizah a concerned resident told Peace FM News that the Factory being constructed is a fulfilment of the President's flagship Program of One District One Factory and will create jobs for about thirteen thousand (13,000) youth in the area and other socio-economic benefits that will be derived from its operation.



According to the residents, the siting of the Factory will also open up the Weija- Gbawe Municipality .

Source: Emmanuel Akorli/Parliamentary Correspondent/Peace FM









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Featured Video
Social commentator, Bernard Allotey Jacobs has censured the National Democratic Congress (NDC) over their Communications Officers comments regarding the Ejura incident.



The NDC Communications Officer, Sammy Gyamfi has blamed the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) for the death of an activist and a resident at Ejura in the Ashanti Region, Ibrahim Mohammed a.k.a Kaaka.



Allegations



The NDC National Communications Officer is convinced the mob that attacked Kaaka are members of the ruling party stressing the killing of the activist is an indication of insecurity under the leadership of President Nana Akufo-Addo.



In an interview with Okay FM, Sammy Gyamfi alleged, There is hardship in the country and people are afraid to talk because they are afraid for their lives. Today, they have killed Kaaka. NPP killed Kaaka. Kaaka stays in Ejura and has been on this #fixthecountry campaign. He has been talking about abandoned projects. Before he was attacked by a mob, he announced that he has been threatened by the known NPP members. He even published the threats. He was beaten by a mob.



Allotey Hits NDC



In a quick reply on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' programme, Allotey Jacobs condemned the allegations saying, "I would toll the line of Mr. Kan-Dapaah that there's too much political intolerance in this country. Everything is attributed to either this party or that party. It is not helping".



He wondered why any person would politicize sensitive issues as that of the Ejura incident.



"As political leaders in this country, do we want to destroy this country . . . Are we helping this country? Are we building Ghana?'', he asked.



He advised politicians to stop inciting the citizenry because their actions are a danger to the lives of the populace.



He stated, "Where there is anger, there is no more wisdom. Everything that comes out of the person is either bloody or death or something far dangerous and that is what some politicians are doing. Inciting people to violence, that is what they are doing!''



''Ghana belongs to all of us. We have nowhere to go except this country . . . We shouldn't be identified with violence and rioting. It leads to nothing . . . Always wanting to score cheap political points, let us stop it," he warned.







President Akufo-Addo's Response



Meanwhile, the President has instructed the Interior Minister, Ambrose Dery to conduct a public inquiry into the Ejura incident.



A statement issued by the Acting Communications Director at the Presidency, Eugene Arhin read; The Interior Minister is to provide a detailed report from the Inquiry, with recommendations for appropriate action, within ten days, i.e., by 9th July, 2021, to President Akufo-Addo



Ex-President Mahama's Call



Former President John Dramani Mahama has also called on the President to direct an immediate de-escalation of the situation at Ejura in the Ashanti Region.



I add my voice to calls for calm following the shooting to death of two persons and the injury to many in Ejura today, following the murder of youth activist Ibrahim Kaaka Mohammed. I have just seen a video of the firing of live ammunition into a crowd by persons wearing military attire, after the burial of the murdered youth activist.



There must be a very thorough investigation of both the murder of the youth activist and the security rules of engagement, which resulted in the shooting to death of the two others, Mr. Mahama stated on his website.

Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Former General Secretary of the People's National Convention (PNC), Atik Mohammed, has backed the calls by Ex-President John Dramani Mahama on the Ejura killings.



The former President, speaking on the death of a social media activist and resident of Ejura named Ibrahim Mohammed a.k.a Macho Kaaka, has asked President Nana Akufo-Addo to direct an immediate de-escalation of the situation at Ejura in the Ashanti Region.



I add my voice to calls for calm following the shooting to death of two persons and the injury to many in Ejura today, following the murder of youth activist Ibrahim Kaaka Mohammed. I have just seen a video of the firing of live ammunition into a crowd by persons wearing military attire, after the burial of the murdered youth activist.



There must be a very thorough investigation of both the murder of the youth activist and the security rules of engagement, which resulted in the shooting to death of the two others, Mr. Mahama stated on his website.



Reacting to the Ejura incident, Atik Mohammed commended Mr. Mahama for adding his voice to the calls for calm.



"I think the Ex-President has every right to say there is the need to de-escalate the situation in Ejura. It is not a misplaced call. In fact, it is important that he makes such a call, but of course, usually when politicians make calls like this; it's easy for us to read meanings into these calls . . . If there's a conflict, the first thing to do is to de-escalate the situation, then you move to management and probably resolve the conflict.



"So, if he says we should de-escalate what's happening in Ejura, it's a good call because if we don't de-escalate, maybe tomorrow; another group, probably because of the shooting incident, might be upset and, in that process, could also decide to do something. They might decide to attack a Police station or something," he stated on Peace FM's morning show 'Kokrokoo'.



Atik added; ''...it's important that we de-escalate the situation and I think that call and that of the President's instructions are mutually reinforcing because he also said the Interior Minister and all other security Chiefs should move very swiftly to deal with the situation and also conduct public inquiry into what happened. So, the two, I think are not mutually exclusive. They're actually mutually reinforcing, so it's not a bad call at all.''



Watch video below





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
The Minister for Interior, Ambrose Dery, has announced that his Ministry has set up a three-member ministerial committee to investigate the killing of three persons at Ejura in the Ejura Sekyedumase Municipality.



The three members of the committee are; Justice George Kingsley Koomson (Justice of the Court of Appeal), Dr Vladimir Antwi Danso, a Security Expert and Juliet Antwi Amoah, Executive Director, Penplusbyte.



Mrs. Marie Louise Simmons who is a Principal State Attorney will be the Secretary for the committee.



The inauguration of the committee followed the Presidents 10 days ultimatum given to the Interior Minister to submit a report on the disturbances that claimed two lives and injured others.



Ambrose Dery believes the members of the committee are very hardworking and efficient to work within the given time for the report.



The Interior Minister was speaking at the Ejuramanhene's palace when he paid a working visit to the town to gather first-hand information on the incident.



His visit saw the presence of the Ashanti Regional Security Council accompanying him to the grounds.



He said that the President, HE Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo appreciates the relevance of peace and therefore wont underrate the peace and stability of the country.



Every citizen has the right to demonstrate as rightly stated in Article 5 of the 1992 constitution without interference, however, the police will have to be notified for adequate protection to be provided.



He reminded Ghanaians that the country is currently facing challenges with the coronavirus pandemic and thus advised the public not to underrate its effects and therefore need to also reconsider when planning to stage a demonstration.



He noted that the report from the three-member committee after the ten days duration will help the country to avert similar occurrences in future.



The Ashanti Regional Minister, Simon Osei Mensah who doubles as the Chairman of the Ashanti Regional Security Council expressed worry over the disturbances and thus assured the full commitment of the RESEC in supporting the government to arrest tension in the Ejura community.



The Interior Minister, Ambrose Dery, and his entourage later commiserated with the bereaved families and also visited the injured at the Ejura Government Hospital.



The government has asked the Police Administration to fast-track investigation into the death of Ibrahim Mohammed, alias Macho Kaaka, and subsequent rioting at Ejura in the Ashanti Region after his burial on Tuesday, June 29, leading to two more deaths.



Addressing the media in Accra on Wednesday on the matter, Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah described the death of Macho Kaaka as unfortunate and condemnable and urged the Police to work assiduously towards bringing finality to all other similar murders, in order to regain public confidence in them.



According to him, the continuous delay in identifying persons behind such unfortunate incidents often breed suspicion, leading to what was witnessed in Ejura.















Source: Prince Kwadwo Boadu/Hello FM









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
The President of the Catholic Bishops Conference, Most Rev Philip Naameh, strongly believes the Nana Addo-led government has failed Ghanaians.



He claims the country is not safe after alleging that the security services are at the beck and call of the government.



It is a great pity that people who are trained, paid to protect Ghanaians have ended up in the name of loyalty to a particular party in government and are shooting and killing Ghanaians...it is not only condemnable but also criminal and must be investigated and the perpetrators duly punished, he said.



Three persons lost their lives under tragic circumstances at Ejura in the Ejura Sekyedumase District of the Ashanti Region a few days ago.



The trio died in the space of 48 hours with youth activist Ibrahim Mohammed, 45, also known as Macho Kaaka dying on June 28 from injuries he sustained in an attack a day before.



The killing of Mohammed sparked protests on Tuesday, June 29, in Ejura leading to clashes between some residents and security personnel which resulted in the death of two persons (Abdul Nasir Yussif and Muntala Mohammed) who were among six persons who were shot in the skirmish.



Most Rev Philip Naameh in an interview on NEAT FMs "Ghana Montie" morning show said the Catholic Bishops Conference strongly condemns the shooting in Ejura.



Situation there is very distasteful, he noted.



Ministerial Committee



Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry has constituted a three-member committee to investigate the incident.



This follows a directive by President Akufo-Addo, calling for a public inquiry to be conducted into the circumstances surrounding the Ejura killing incident on Tuesday, which also left four persons severely injured.



The committee members include George Kingsley Koomson, Justice of the Court of Appeal as Chairman, Security Expert, Dr Vladimir Antwi Danso and Juliet Amoah, Executive Director of Penplusbyte, a civil society organisation.



Marie Louis Simmons, a principal state attorney will be the secretary of the committee.



The committee is expected to investigate and recommend sanctions for persons found culpable by 9 July 2021.





Listen to interview







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.

Featured Video
The Minister for Defence, Dominic Nitiwul has said the Military has identified victims of the military molestation of civilians in Wa and will take care of them.



He rendered apology to the victims and the entire people of Wa for the incident which he described as very unfortunate.



Dominic Nitiwul made the comment in Parliament today, July 2.



He expressed no objection to the decision by Parliament to investigate the incident.



The Minister said the country is building a democracy of which the military is an integral part.



He therefore urged the public especially Members of Parliament(MPs) to be measured in their utterances on issues such as the Wa incident.



Prior to the assurance given by the Defence Minister, the Minority in Parliament had demanded a Parliamentary inquiry into the military molestation of civilians at Wa in the Upper West region.



The Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu made the demand whilst commenting on the incident.



He said military-civil relation is currently at its lowest level in the country and added that the military has no moral right to undermine the peace of the country.



Commenting on the statement made by Haruna Iddrisu, the Majority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu described the statement made by the Minority Leader on the Wa incident as a matter of urgent public importance.



The First Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Joseph Osei Owusu who presided over proceedings in Parliament directed the Committee on Defence and Interior of Parliament to investigate the Wa incident and report to the House within one month.

Source: Emmanuel Akorli/Parliamentary Correspondent/Peace FM









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
The Vice President, Dr. Alhaji Mahamud Bawumia has condemned the recent killings and disturbances in Ejura that has claimed three lives.



He has however, asked the youth to cease fire and let calm prevail.



He described the incident as unfortunate and prayed such incident wont repeat itself again in the future as the country waits for the report by the 3 member Ministerial committee set up by the Interior Minister, Ambrose Dery.



The Vice President, who was in the company of the Ashanti Regional Minister, Simon Osei Mensah, disclosed this at the Ejurahenes Palace when they visited the community to commiserate with the bereaved families.



The Vice President together with the National Chief Imam and other Ministers had gone to the town following the murder of one social media activist, Macho Kaaka which further led to the untimely death of two people during a deadly clash with the military during a protest by some irate youth in the community.



The vice president also presented 1000 bags of cement and an amount of GHc 50,000 to support the construction of a Divisional Police Command in the municipality



He also made a cash donation of GHC 20, 000 to each family and assured them of the government's commitment to ensuring justice.



The Spokesperson for the National Chief Imam, Sheik Shaibu Aremeyaw implored the Muslim youth who are heavily affected to calm down as the 3 member Ministerial committee work efficiently for their recommendations.



Paramount Chief of Ejura Traditional Area, Barima Osei Hwedie ll appealed to the Vice President for the installation of a Military detachment to address the rate at which violence is creeping into the community.























Source: Prince Kwadwo Boadu / Hellofm









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Featured Video
The Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture, Awal Mohammed together with his deputy minister Mark Okraku-Mantey held a brief meeting with stakeholders in the film and music industry.



The meeting which took place on Friday, 25 June 2021 in Accra, forms part of series of engagements with all fields under the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture.



The meeting was attended by musicians including Samini, Shatta Wale, Joe Mettle, Kwabena Kwabena, D-Black, Okyeame Kwame, Edem, Patience Nyarko, Cwesi Oteng, Kaywa, Appeitus, Celestine Donkor, Joyce Blessing, King Promise, Amandzeba, MOG Music and many others.



John Dumelo, James Gardiner, Van Vicker, Prince David-Osei, Juliet Ibrahim, Gloria Sarfo, Bill Asamoah and a few others were present as film makers.



Media personalities including Andy Dosty, George Quaye, Kwame Dadzie, George Britton, Chris Konney also joined the meeting.



During the engagement, industry players requested that government and stakeholders focus on solving one problem of the industry at a time.



The Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture indicated that industry players will later be engaged in smaller groups in order to find solutions to specific problems.



Other fields that fall under the Ministry are expected to be engaged in the coming weeks.

Source: facebook/class fm









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By Johan Ahlander and Simon Johnson

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Sweden's caretaker Prime Minister Stefan Lofven was handed the task of forming a new government on Thursday after the country's right-wing opposition leader said he had failed to secure enough parliamentary votes to become premier himself.

Social Democrat Lofven's fragile centre-left minority government collapsed this month after the Left Party withdrew its support over plans to ease some rent controls on housing, ushering in a no-confidence vote in parliament.

Parliamentary Speaker Andreas Norlen invited him to form a new administration hours after opposition leader Ulf Kristersson abandoned his own attempt. It had become clear that lawmakers would not support his premiership, despite last-ditch efforts to win over centrists with spending pledges.

"I have this morning spoken on the phone with Prime Minister Stefan Lofven and given him the task of sounding out the possibilities for a new government," Norlen told a news conference.

Lofven will report back to the speaker on Monday at the latest and could face a vote in parliament days later, Norlen added.

"My answer remains that the Social Democrats and I are ready to shoulder the responsibility of together with other constructive forces leading the country forward," the caretaker prime minister said on social media.

The collapse of the government has reignited turmoil seen in the wake of the 2018 election, where gains by the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats redrew the political landscape, leaving Lofven needing months to hammer out a workable, if precarious, coalition.

The government had wanted to ease Sweden's rigid system for rent control, a form of collective bargaining, to boost the building of new apartments. The Left party claimed it would lead to increased rent for Sweden's 3 million tenants.

After backing away from those plans, Lofven may have sufficient backing for his premiership to be approved by parliament, but it would still likely be inadequate to assure passage of his budgets unless some form of accord between a disparate set of parties is once again forged.

Story continues

To take office, he must avoid an absolute majority of deputies voting against his candidacy.

It will be the first vote initiated by the speaker to form a new government - if four such attempts fail, snap elections are automatically triggered.

(Reporting by Johan Ahlander and Simon Johnson; Editing by Niklas Pollard and Pravin Char)
Plumes of smoke rise from the Long Loch wildfire and the Derrickson Lake wildfire in British Columbia on June 30, 2021.

About 1,000 people were evacuated in western Canada, authorities said Thursday, as fires raged amid an unprecedented heat wave, charring most of at least one town.

The province of British Columbia has recorded 62 new fires in the past 24 hours, premier John Horgan told a press conference.

"I cannot stress enough how extreme the fire risk is at this time in almost every part of British Columbia," Horgan said.

The town of Lytton, 250 kilometers (155 miles) northeast of Vancouver, "has sustained structural damage and 90 percent of the village is burned, including the centre of town," local MP Brad Vis said.

The village's 250 residents were evacuated on Wednesday evening, one day after it set a jaw-dropping Canadian record high temperature of 49.6 degrees Celsius (121 degrees Fahrenheit).

The evacuation order was extended Wednesday night to residents of about 100 properties north of Lytton.

"The last 24 hours have been devastating for Lytton residents," Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan wrote on Twitter, adding that the Canadian armed forces "are ready to support residents as we move forward in the next steps."

Provincial authorities have not yet announced any injuries or death related to the fires, a number of which were also clustered north of the city of Kamloops, located some 150 kilometers northeast of Lytton.

The Sparks Lake wildfire is seen in British Columbia on June 29, 2021.

Early Thursday evening, British Columbia fire authorities said the unprecedented hot and dry conditions had led them to expect another difficult day ahead.

Environment Canada said in a bulletin issued early Thursday morning for the Prince George, BC area that "an exceptionally strong ridge of high pressure over British Columbia will continue to bring record-breaking temperatures over the next couple of days."

"The duration of this heat wave is concerning as there is little relief at night with elevated overnight temperatures," it added.

The heat wave continued to move eastward on Thursday into the central Canadian prairies.

In addition to British Columbia, heat wave warnings have been issued for the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and parts of the Northwest Territories, and now northern Ontario.

In addition to Western Canada, the US states of Washington and Oregon, across the border, have also been sweltering under record temperatures this week and several hundred sudden deaths have been reported.

Explore further Deadly heat wave slams Canada, US

 2021 AFP
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Any cat lover who has watched an allergic friend react to a beloved pet knows the dark powers that lurk in that luxurious feline fur. Within minutes, an allergic human exposed to a cat can begin sneezing and wheezing. Eyes water and itch. The misery is obvious.

Solutions for people who want to be around cats despite allergies are labor-intensive, of questionable value, and sometimes defy common sense. How many emergency department trips would ensue if we all tried to give our cats frequent baths?

This predicament has triggered the imagination of researchers, who see a lucrative market for better solutions in a country that has more than 50 million cats in more than 20 million homes. Some scientists are now taking a different approach to human pet allergies. Rather than trying to change allergic humans or their environment, they're trying to change cats.

Purina began the competition in the early days of the pandemic with a cat foodPro Plan LiveClearthat it says can reduce the protein that most allergic people react to by 47% after three weeks.

"This is really, in my mind as a veterinarian, a ground-breaking and revolutionary pet food," said Kurt Venator, Purina's chief veterinary officer. "We truly believe this is going to help cats and people get closer together."

Another research group based in Switzerland is working on a vaccine against the offending protein, called Fel d 1. And a team from Indoor Biotechnologies in Virginia is exploring CRISPR gene-editing techniques to knock out the gene that makes Fel d 1. Those two projects are years from fruition.

Indoor Biotechnologies primarily detects, tests for, and purifies allergens. Martin Chapman, its president and CEO, had a long interest in cat allergens, but a bogus company that marketed fake hypoallergenic cats until about 2015 really got his attention.

"It sort of established there was a market for cats that would be up to $7,000 apiece," said Chapman, a former professor of medicine and microbiology at the University of Virginia.

Although some cats may wind up in shelters because allergic owners couldn't live with them, allergists said there is no doubt that many often choose their cat over their own comfort. They said it is rare that an allergic cat owner will give up the cat or even banish it from the bedroom.

"I haven't really encountered patients who are willing to get rid of their cats," said Patrick Gleeson, a Penn Medicine allergist. Of the new cat food, he added, "I think there's a huge market for this product."

Venator said one allergic cat owner who participated in a Purina focus group said he bought a new couch every six months so he could get allergens out of his house and keep his cat.

A problem that affects millions

Cat allergies affect 10% to 20% of adults. More than 90% of them react to Fel d 1. About 5% of adults are allergic to dogs, but many substances are involved in those allergies. That makes modifying dogs a more complicated project. Researchers say allergies to furry animals are increasing.

Fel d 1 is produced in salivary, skin and anal glands of cats and is found in their tears. Cats spread it when they clean themselves. It winds up all over the house when they shed fur or dander. All cats make it, including hairless cats, although amounts vary by cat or even by day. Bruce Kornreich, director of the Cornell Feline Health Center, said there is evidence that uncastrated male cats make more of it than females or neutered males. There is no such thing as a hypoallergenic cat.

And, there is no way to totally escape Fel d 1. It rides on people's clothes to work and school. "It's everywhere," James Wedner, an allergist at Washington University in St. Louis, said. He once saw five allergy sufferers who worked in a brand new office building. None had cats. He tested the building for mold, cockroaches and mice and found nothing. Then he found "incredibly high levels" of Fel d 1. Other workers were bringing it in, he said.

No one knows what role Fel d 1 plays in the cat's body, which is why any effort to get rid of it has to look at the effect on cats. Kornreich said there has been speculation that Fel d 1 might protect skin from pathogens. Another possibility is that it is involved in chemical signaling. Nicole Brackett, a postdoctoral researcher with Indoor Biotechnologies, sequenced the genes that make Fel d 1 in 50 domestic cats as well as some big and wild cats. She said the genes are not "well-conserved" in the domestic cats, a sign that they likely are not essential.

Purina says its tests show its food is safe.

LiveClear already comes in six varieties, including weight management, senior, and sensitive stomach. Chewy.com sells a 3.5-pound bag for $21.58. (A similar-sized bag of non-specialty cat food could cost less than $10.) Allergen-reducing kitten food is coming in September, Venator said.

The company's novel approach started about a decade ago when Ebenezer Satyaraj, a nutritional immunologist, learned his daughter was allergic to cats. He discovered that chickens produce an antibody to Fel d 1 that can be found in their eggs. The company added the antibody to cat food. The resulting food neutralized up to about half of the Fel d 1 some cats produced.

That means the treated cats are still making Fel d 1, of course, so it does not automatically mean allergic people will feel better around them. However, Wedner said higher doses of an allergen generally cause more symptoms.

But Gleeson, who said Purina's new food is "promising," said doctors "don't really know how much allergen reduction is necessary in order to reduce symptoms."

He said doctors often recommend getting rid of the catmost patients won'tor washing it weekly. "I haven't talked to patients who have actually done that," he said. They can also get rid of rugs, vacuum frequently and get a HEPA air purifier. And, they can try allergy shots. "This is another area where the evidence is not very good," Gleeson said. Then there are medications.

Wedner led a small Washington University study funded by Purina that found that some people with allergies could reliably detect the difference between blankets used by cats that ate LiveClear and cats that ate other foods. These heroic volunteers sat with the blankets for three hours in enclosed chambers made for growing tomatoes. Their allergy symptoms were monitored every 15 minutes.

Wedner recently finished a larger study that used real cats in people's homes. It has not yet been published so he could not release full results, but he said, "patients were better off with the food than they were without it."

He also said that patients not in studies volunteer that the food has helped them.

Elizabeth Knighton, a veterinarian with City Cat Vets in Philadelphia, said her mother was allergic to cats. "Even though I wanted a cat my whole life, I didn't get one till I was 11," she said. Her mother wouldn't allow the cat in her room and had to get allergy shots. "She was always using an inhaler," Knighton said.

She has mentioned the new Purina food to some clients. "Because it's so new, I just don't have any feedback yet," she said. "I'd like to know if I'm recommending something that works."

Vaccines and gene editing are on the horizon

Saiba Animal Health, a Swiss company initially known as HypoPet, is taking a very different approach. It is working on a vaccine that turns the cat's immune system against Fel d 1 proteins. The company's research has shown the experimental HypoCat vaccine lowered Fel d 1 in cat tears and reduced symptoms in 10 allergic cat owners.

Saiba also hopes to produce a vaccine for dogs.

Kornreich said one worry with this type of vaccine is an errant immune reaction. "There's always a concern that that the immune system can be stimulated to start neutralizing things that are not the target of interest," he said.

As for the genetic approach, Brackett, at Indoor Biotechnologies, achieved 55% efficiency in knocking out Fel d 1 in a cat cell line. That is a good rate, she and Chapman said. "Cat cells are notoriously difficult to work with," Brackett said.

The next step will be to see whether they can reduce the allergen in cat salivary glands. Then will come the really hard part: figuring how to deliver the genetic treatment to embryos or adult cats. They'll be keeping an eye on techniques that other CRISPR researchers test.

"It does seem to be that there is a significant roadblock for CRISPR at the moment," Chapman said.

Knighton, the Philadelphia veterinarian, said she is more comfortable with the special food, which neutralizes Fel d 1 after the cat makes it, than with making bigger biological changes to cats. "I'm very wary of something that tells your body to attack something your body makes," she said.

2021 The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Japan, and one in Norway has found evidence that suggests domesticated pig genes in pig-boar hybrids living in the Fukushima exclusion zone are diminishing. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes their genetic study of tissue samples taken from wild boar, pigs and hybrids in the exclusion zone.

Back in 2011, Japan experienced its largest earthquake everthat quake and the tsunami that followed led to a disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The release of radiation from the plant forced people that lived and worked in the area to evacuateofficials soon declared the areas around the site an exclusion zone. In the absence of people, wild animals began to move into the area, including wild boars. Prior research has shown that as the wild boars moved in, some of them mated with abandoned domesticated pigs, producing hybrids. In this new effort, the researchers wondered if the addition of domesticated pig genes to the boar gene pool was having an impact on them.

To learn more, the researchers collected genetic material from 243 animalssome from within a 20-kilometer radius of the reactor, and some from within 40 kilometers. The team then conducted a mitochondrial analysis of the samples to identify the genes that each was carrying along maternal lines.

In looking at their data, the researchers found that 16% of the population they studied was made up of hybridsand that 75% of those were found within the inner exclusion zone, suggesting that the hybrids had not traveled very far. They also found that along extended lines of ancestry, the pig genes in the wild boar did not persist for very long over several generations. Those boars with pig ancestry had just 8% of their genes. The researchers suggest that features of domesticated pigs have not served boars very well, and because of that, the hybrids have not survived or reproduced very well. They further suggest that it appears likely that the pig genes will continue to diminish.

Explore further Modern pigs found to have more wild boar genes than thought

More information: Donovan Anderson et al, Introgression dynamics from invasive pigs into wild boar following the March 2011 natural and anthropogenic disasters at Fukushima, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2021). Journal information: Proceedings of the Royal Society B Donovan Anderson et al, Introgression dynamics from invasive pigs into wild boar following the March 2011 natural and anthropogenic disasters at Fukushima,(2021). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.0874

 2021 Science X Network
In this undated image from video provided by Blue Origin on Thursday, July 1, 2021, Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk, right, meets with Jeff Bezos. On Thursday, Blue Origin announced the early female aerospace pioneer will be aboard the company's July 20 launch from West Texas, flying as an "honored guest." Credit: Blue Origin via AP

Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson is aiming to beat fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos into space by nine days.

Branson's company announced Thursday evening that its next test flight will be July 11 and that its founder will be among the six people on board. The winged rocket ship will soar from New Mexicothe first carrying a full crew of company employees. It will be only the fourth trip to space for Virgin Galactic.

The news came just hours after Bezos' Blue Origin said Bezos would be accompanied into space on July 20 by a female aerospace pioneer who's waited 60 years to rocket away.

Bezos chose July 20 as his West Texas launch datethe 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He assigned himself to the flight just a month ago, the final stretch in a yearslong race to space between the two rich rocketeers.

Amazon's founder will be on Blue Origin's debut launch with people on board, accompanied by his brother, the winner of a $28 million charity auction and Wally Funk, one of the last surviving members of the Mercury 13 who was chosen as his "honored guest." The 13 female pilots passed the same tests as NASA's original Mercury 7 astronauts back in the early 1960s, but were barred from the corpsand spaceflightbecause they were women.

This image provided by Virgin Galactic shows, from left: Chief Pilot Dave Mackay, Lead Operations Engineer Colin Bennett, Chief Astronaut Instructor Beth Moses, Founder of Virgin Galactic Richard Branson, Vice President of Government Affairs and Research Operations Sirisha Bandla and pilot Michael Masucci. Branson is aiming to beat fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos into space by nine days. Branson's company announced Thursday, July 1, 2021 that its next test flight will be July 11 and that its founder will be among the six people on board. The winged rocket ship will soar from New Mexico -- the first carrying a full crew of company employees. It will be only the fourth trip to space for Virgin Galactic. Credit: Virgin Galactic via AP

As late as Wednesday, Branson declined to say when he would ride into space because of restrictions placed on him by his publicly traded company. But he stressed he was "fit and healthy" to fly as soon as his engineers give him the go.

"I've always been a dreamer. My mum taught me to never give up and to reach for the stars. On July 11, it's time to turn that dream into a reality aboard the next @VirginGalactic," he said via Twitter.

Virgin Galactic launches its rocket ship from an aircraft, reaching an altitude of roughly 55 miles (88 kilometers). Blue Origin launches its New Shepard rocket from the ground, with its capsule soaring to about 66 miles (106 kilometers). Both those heights are considered the edge of space. By comparison, Elon Musk's SpaceX launches its capsulesboth crew and cargointo orbit around Earth.

In this Monday, Oct. 28, 2019 file photo, Richard Branson, right, founder of Virgin Galactic, and company executives gather for photos outside the New York Stock Exchange before his company's IPO. Branson announced Thursday, July 1, 2021 he plans to fly into space this month on the next test flight of his Virgin Galactic rocket ship. The launch window will open July 11. Credit: AP Photo/Richard Drew, File

All three private space companies plan to take paying customers into space. SpaceX will be the first with a private flight coming up in September.

Flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin last about 10 minutes, with three or so minutes of weightlessness. But the returns are quite different: Virgin Galactic's rocket plane glides to a landing on a runway, like NASA's old space shuttles did, with a pair of pilots in charge. Blue Origin's automated capsules parachute to the desert floor, similar to how NASA's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules made ocean splashdowns. Their spaceports are just 200 miles (320 kilometers) apart.

Funk, at age 82, will become the oldest person to launch into space when Blue Origin takes its turn.

"I'll love every second of it. Whoooo! Ha-ha. I can hardly wait," Funk said in an Instagram video posted by Bezos.

In this 1995 file photo, members of the FLATs, also known as the Mercury 13, gather for a photo as they attend a shuttle launch in Florida. From left are Gene Nora Jessen, Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Truhill, Sarah Rutley, Myrtle Cagle and Bernice Steadman. Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos has chosen Funk, an early female aerospace pioneer, to rocket into space with him later this month. The company announced Thursday, July 1, 2021, that Funk will be aboard the July 20 launch from West Texas, flying as an "honored guest." Funk, along with the other women of Mercury 13, went through astronaut training in the 1960s, but never made it to space - or even NASA's astronaut corps - because of their gender. Credit: NASA via AP

"Nothing has ever gotten in my way," she added. "They said, 'Well, you're a girl, you can't do that.' I said, 'Guess what, doesn't matter what you are. You can still do it if you want to do it and I like to do things that nobody has ever done."

She'll beat the late John Glenn, who set a record at age 77 when flying aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998. Glenn pooh-poohed the idea of women flying in space, shortly after he became the first American to orbit the world in 1962.

"No one has waited longer," Bezos said via Instagram. "It's time. Welcome to the crew, Wally."

Bezos is stepping down as Amazon's CEO on Monday.

Blue Origin has yet to announce ticket prices or when the public might strap into the spacious six-seat capsule. Its New Shepard rocket is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

In this 2019 photo made available by NASA, Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk visits the Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio. On Thursday, July 1, 2021, Blue Origin announced the early female aerospace pioneer will be aboard the company's July 20 launch from West Texas, flying as an "honored guest." Credit: NASA via AP

In this 2019 photo made available by NASA, Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk visits the Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio. On Thursday, July 1, 2021, Blue Origin announced the early female aerospace pioneer will be aboard the company's July 20 launch from West Texas, flying as an "honored guest." Credit: NASA via AP

Virgin Galactic has more than 600 reservations in the pipeline. These original tickets went for $250,000. The company will start accepting more following the upcoming flight with Branson. Keen to get to space, Funk reserved a seat years ago.

Virgin Galactic plans three more test flights before taking up customers, Branson was initially supposed to be on the second demo coming up, but moved it up in an apparent bid to outdo Bezos. He said Wednesday, after his other company Virgin Orbit launched a batch of satellites, that it's important for his customers to see him ride his rocket ship first, before they climb on board.

Explore further Branson mum on when he'll launch to space on Virgin Galactic

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Schematic diagram of antineutron production and interaction with a proton in the target. Credit: IHEP

A paper based on joint research by Prof. Yuan Changzheng from Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. Marek Karliner from Tel Aviv University of Israel, was published in Physical Review Letters. It points out a new abundant source of antineutrons and hyperons. These rare subatomic particles are essential for studying forces governing the behavior of matter at the smallest distances, from atomic nuclei to neutron stars.

Physicists investigate the subatomic world by bombarding their subjects with a hail of tiny subatomic 'bullets'. Based on how these 'bullets' bounce off their target, one can infer a wealth of detailed information about the target's structure. This method was pioneered by Ernest Rutherford, who used it to discover the atomic nucleus more than 100 years ago.

Different kinds of subatomic 'bullets' probe different aspects of the target, just like X-rays, MRI and PET scanners reveal various essential features of a body part in medical imaging. Certain important aspects of the force holding atomic nuclei together can only be investigated by shooting particles called antineutrons and hyperons, which are currently very difficult to produce and control.

The paper points out that these usually rare particles can be produced in copious amounts and easily launched as a spinoff of a future "super J/y factory." This is a facility proposed for the detailed study of specific types of subatomic particles with a property called 'hidden charm', whose discovery has been recognized by a Nobel Prize in physics. This opens fresh research opportunities in particle and nuclear physics, as well as in astrophysics and medical physics.

Traditional setups need to produce many different kinds of beams for different dedicated experiments and need to share accelerator time among them. This requires substantial resources in terms of manpower and funding, thus impeding such experiments. In contrast, the approach proposed in this new research will allow experiments with different beams at the same time, requiring no additional infrastructure and minimal further investment.

Explore further High-precision measurements of the strong interaction between stable and unstable particles

More information: Chang-Zheng Yuan et al, Cornucopia of Antineutrons and Hyperons from a Super J/ Factory for Next-Generation Nuclear and Particle Physics High-Precision Experiments, Physical Review Letters (2021). Journal information: Physical Review Letters Chang-Zheng Yuan et al, Cornucopia of Antineutrons and Hyperons from a Super J/ Factory for Next-Generation Nuclear and Particle Physics High-Precision Experiments,(2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.012003
Alexei Stakhanov on the cover of Time in 1935. Credit: SOVFOTO/TimeUSA

One summer night in August, 1935, a young Soviet miner named Alexei Stakhanov managed to extract 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift. This was nothing short of extraordinary (according to Soviet planning, the official average for a single shift was seven tonnes).

Stakhanov shattered this norm by a staggering 1,400%. But the sheer quantity involved was not the whole story. It was Stakhanov's achievement as an individual that became the most meaningful aspect of this episode. And the work ethic he embodied thenwhich spread all over the USSRhas been invoked by managers in the West ever since.

Stakhanov's personal striving, commitment, potential and passion led to the emergence of a new ideal figure in the imagination of Stalin's Communist Party. He even made the cover of Time magazine in 1935 as the figurehead of a new workers movement dedicated to increasing production. Stakhanov became the embodiment of a new human type and the beginning of a new social and political trend known as "Stakhanovism."

That trend still holds sway in the workplaces of todaywhat are human resources, after all? Management language is replete with the same rhetoric used in the 1930s by the Communist Party. It could even be argued that the atmosphere of Stakhanovite enthusiasm is even more intense today than it was in Soviet Russia. It thrives in the jargon of Human Resource Management (HRM), as its constant calls to express our passion, individual creativity, innovation and talents echo down through management structures.

But all this "positive" talk comes at a price. For over two decades, our research has charted the evolution of managerialism, HRM, employability and performance management systems, all the way through to the cultures they create. We have shown how it leaves employees with a permanent sense of never feeling good enough and the nagging worry that someone else (probably right next to us) is always performing so much better.

From the mid-1990s, we charted the rise of a new language for managing peopleone that constantly urges us to see work as a place where we should discover "who we truly are" and express that "unique" personal "potential" which could make us endlessly "resourceful."

The speed with which this language grew and spread was remarkable. But even more remarkable are the ways in which it is now spoken seamlessly in all spheres of popular culture. This is no less than the very language of the modern sense of self. And so it cannot fail to be effective. Focusing on the "self" gives management unprecedented cultural power. It intensifies work in ways which are nearly impossible to resist. Who would be able to refuse the invitation to express themselves and their presumed potential or talents?

Stakhanov was a kind of early poster boy for refrains like: "potential," "talent," "creativity," "innovation," "passion and commitment," "continuous learning" and "personal growth." They have all become the attributes management systems now hail as the qualities of ideal "human resources." These ideas have become so entrenched in the collective psyche that many people believe they are qualities they expect of themselves, at work and at home.

The superhero worker

So, why does the spectre of this long-forgotten miner still haunt our imaginations? In the 1930s, miners lay on their sides and used picks to work the coal, which was then loaded on to carts and pulled out of the shaft by pit ponies. Stakhanov came up with some innovations, but it was his adoption of the mining drill over the pick which helped drive his productivity. The mining drill was still a novelty and required specialist training in 1930s because it was extremely heavy (more than 15kgs).

Once the Communist Party realised the potential of Stakhanov's achievement, Stakhanovism took off rapidly. By the autumn of 1935, equivalents of Stakhanov emerged in every sector of industrial production. From machine building and steel works, to textile factories and milk production, record-breaking individuals were rising to the elite status of "Stakhanovite." They were stimulated by the Communist Party's ready adoption of Stakhanov as a leading symbol for a new economic plan. The party wanted to create an increasingly formalised elite representing the human qualities of a superhero worker.

Such workers began to receive special privileges (from high wages to new housing, as well as educational opportunities for themselves and their children). And so the Stakhanovites became central characters in Soviet Communist propaganda. They were showing the world what the USSR could achieve when technology was mastered by a new kind of worker who was committed, passionate, talented and creative. This new worker was promising to be the force that would propel Soviet Russia ahead of its western capitalist rivals.

Soviet propaganda seized the moment. A whole narrative emerged showing how the future of work and productivity in the USSR should unfold over the coming decades. Stakhanov ceased to be a person and became the human form of a system of ideas and values, outlining a new mode of thinking and feeling about work.

It turns out that such a story was sorely needed. The Soviet economy was not performing well. Despite gigantic investments in technological industrialisation during the so-called "First Five-Year Plan" (1928-1932), productivity was far from satisfactory. Soviet Russia had not overcome its own technological and economic backwardness, let alone leap over capitalist America and Europe.

"Personnel decides everything'

The five-year plans were systematic programmes of resource allocation, production quotas and work rates for all sectors of the economy. The first aimed to inject the latest technology in key areas, especially industrial machine building. Its official Communist Party slogan was "Technology Decides Everything". But this technological push failed to raise production; the standard of living and real wages ended up lower in 1932 than in 1928.

The "Second Five-Year Plan" (1933-1937) was going to have a new focus: "Personnel Decides Everything". But not just any personnel. This was how Stakhanov stopped being a person and became an ideal type, a necessary ingredient in the recipe for this new plan.

On May 4, 1935, Stalin had already delivered an address entitled "Cadres [Personnel] Decide Everything". So the new plan needed figures like Stakhanov. Once he showed that it could be done, in a matter of weeks, thousands of "record-breakers" were allowed to try their hand in every sector of production. This happened despite reservations from managers and engineers who knew that machines, tools and people cannot withstand such pressures for any length of time.

Regardless, the party propaganda needed to let a new kind of working class elite grow as if it was spontaneoussimple workers, coming from nowhere, driven by their refusal to admit quotas dictated by the limits of machines and engineers. Indeed, they were going to show the world that it was the very denial of such limitations that constituted the essence of personal involvement in work: break all records, accept no limits, show how every person and every machine is always capable of "more."

On November 17, 1935, Stalin provided a definitive explanation of Stakhanovism. Closing the First Conference of Stakhanovites of Industry and Transport of the Soviet Union, he defined the essence of Stakhanovism as a leap in "consciousness"not just a simple technical or institutional matter. Quite the contrary, the movement demanded a new kind of worker, with a new kind of soul and will, driven by the principle of unlimited progress. Stalin said: "These are new people, people of a special type  the Stakhanov movement is a movement of working men and women which sets itself the aim of surpassing the present technical standards, surpassing the existing designed capacities, surpassing the existing production plans and estimates. Surpassing thembecause these standards have already become antiquated for our day, for our new people."

In the ensuing propaganda, Stakhanov became a symbol burdened with meanings. Ancestral hero, powerful, raw and unstoppable. But also one with a modern, rational and progressive mind which could liberate the hidden, untapped powers of technology and take command of its limitless possibilities. He was cast as a Promethean figure, leading an elite of workers whose nerves and muscles, minds and souls, were utterly attuned to the technological production systems themselves. Stakhanovism was the vision of a new humanity.

"The possibilities are endless'

The Stakhanovites' celebrity-status offered enormous ideological opportunities. It allowed the rise of production quotas. Yet this rise had to remain moderate, otherwise Stakhanovites could not be maintained as an elite. And, as an elite, Stakhanovites themselves had to be subjected to a limitation: how many top performers could really be accommodated before the very idea collapsed into normality? So quotas were engineered in a way which we might recognise today: by the forced distribution or "stack ranking" of all employees according to their performance.

After all, how many high-performers can there be at any one time? The former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, suggested 20% (no more, no less) every year. Indeed, the Civil Service in the UK operated on this principle until 2019 but used a 25% top performer quota. In 2013, Welch claimed this system was "nuanced and humane," that it was all "about building great teams and great companies through consistency, transparency and candor" as opposed to "corporate plots, secrecy or purges." Welch's argument was, however, always flawed. Any forced distribution system inextricably leads to exclusion and marginalisation of those who fall in the lower categories. Far from humane, these systems are always, inherently, threatening and ruthless.

And so Stakhanovism is still flowing through modern management systems and cultures, with their focus on employee performance and constant preoccupation with "high performing" individuals.

Something that often gets forgotten is that Stalinism itself was centred on an ideal of the individual soul and will: what is there that "I" am not able to do? Stakhanov fitted perfectly this ideal. Western culture has been telling itself the same ever since"the possibilities are endless".

This was the logic of the Stakhanovite Movement in the 1930s. But it is also the logic of contemporary popular and corporate cultures, whose messages are now everywhere. Promises that "possibilities are endless," that potential is "limitless," or that you can craft any future you want, can now be found in "inspirational" posts on social media, in management consultancy speil and in just about every graduate job advertisement. One management consultancy firm even calls itself Infinite Possibilities.

Indeed, these very sentences made it on to a seemingly minor coffee coaster used by Deloitte in the early 2000s for their graduate management scheme. On one side it said: "The possibilities are endless." While on the other side, it challenged the reader to take control of destiny itself: "It's your future. How far will you take it?"

Insignificant though these objects may appear, a discerning future archaeologist would know that they carry a most fateful kind of thinking, driving employees now as much as it drove Stakhanovites.

Stalins booklet on the benefits of the Stakhanov movement. Credit: Bogdan Costea, Author provided

But are these serious propositions, or just ironic tropes? Since the 1980s, management vocabularies have grown almost incessantly in this respect. The rapid proliferation of fashionable management trends follows the increased preoccupation with the pursuit of "endless possibilities," of new and unlimited horizons of self-expression and self-actualisation.

It is in this light that we have to show our selves as worthy members of corporate cultures. Pursuing endless possibilities becomes central to our everyday working lives. The human type created by that Soviet ideology so many decades ago, now seems to gaze at us from mission statements, values and commitments in meeting rooms, headquarters and cafeteriasbut also through every website and every public expression of corporate identity.

Stakhanovism's essence was a new form of individuality, of self-involvement in work. And it is this form that now finds its home as much in offices, executive suites, corporate campuses, as in schools and universities. Stakhanovism has become a movement of the individual soul. But what does an office worker actually produce and what do Stakhanovites look like today?

Today's corporate Stakhanovites

In 2020, the drama series, Industry, created by two people with direct experience of corporate workplaces, gave us a glimpse into modern Stakhanovism. It is a sensitive and detailed examination of the destinies of five graduates joining a fictional, but utterly recognisable, financial institution. The show's characters become almost instantly ruthless neo-Stakhanovites. They knew and understood that it was not what they could produce that mattered for their own success, but how they performed their successful and cool personas on the corporate stage. It was not what they did but how they appeared that mattered.

The dangers of failing to appear extraordinary, talented or creative were significant. The series showed how working life descends into unending personal, private and public struggles. In them, every character loses a sense of direction and personal integrity. Trust disappears and their very sense of self increasingly dissolves.

Normal days of work, normal shifts, no longer exist. Workers have to perform endlessly, gesturing so that they look committed, passionate and creative. These things are compulsory if employees are to retain some legitimacy in the workplace. So working life carries the weight of potentially determining a person's sense of worth in every glance exchanged and in every inflection of seemingly insignificant interactionswhether in a board room, over a sandwich or a cup of coffee.

Friendships become impossible because human connection is no longer desirable since trusting others weakens anyone whose success is at stake. Nobody wants to fall out of the Stakhanovite society of hyper-performing top talents. Performance appraisals that may lead to dismissal are a scary prospect. And this is the case both in the series and in real life.

The last episode of Industry culminates in half the remaining graduates getting sacked following an operation called "Reduction In Force". This is basically a drastic final performance appraisal where each employee is forced to make a public statement arguing why they should remainmuch like on the reality TV series The Apprentice. In Industry, the characters' statements are broadcast on screens throughout the building as they describe what would make them stand out from the crowd and why they are worthier than all others.

Reactions to Industry emerged very quickly and viewers were enthusiastic about the show's realism and how it resonated with their own experiences. One YouTube channel host with extensive experience of the sector reacted to each episode in turn; the business press too reacted promptly, alongside other media. They converged in their conclusions: this is a serious corporate drama whose realism reveals much of the essence of work cultures today.

Industry is important because it touches directly on an experience so many have: the sense of a continuous competition of all against all. When we know that performance appraisals compare us all against each other, the consequences on mental health can be severe.

This idea is taken further in an episode of Black Mirror. Entitled Nosedive, the story depicts a world in which everything we think, feel and do becomes the object of everyone else's rating. What if every mobile phone becomes the seat of a perpetual tribunal that decides our personal valuebeyond any possibility of appeal? What if everyone around us becomes our judge? What does life feel like when all we have to measure ourselves by are other people's instant ratings of us?

We asked these questions in detail in our research which charted the evolution of performance management systems and the cultures they create over two decades. We found that performance appraisals are becoming more public (just as in Industry), involving staff in 360-degree systems in which every individual is rated anonymously by colleagues, managers and even clients on multiple dimensions of personal qualities.

Management systems focusing on individual personality are now combining with the latest technologies to become permanent. Ways of reporting continuously on every aspect of our personality at work are increasingly seen as central to mobilising "creativity" and "innovation."

And so it might be that the atmosphere of Stakhanovite competition today is more dangerous than in 1930s Soviet Russia. It is even more pernicious because it is now driven by a confrontation between people, a confrontation between the worth of "me" against the worth of "you" as human beingsnot just between the worth of what "I am able to do" against what "you are able to do." It is a matter of a direct encounter of personal characters and their own sense of worth that has become the medium of competitive, high-performance work cultures.

The Circle, by Dave Eggers, is perhaps the most nuanced exploration of the world of 21st-century Stakhanovism. Its characters, plot and context, its attention to detail, bring to light what it means to take up one's personal destiny in the name of the imperative to hyper-perform and over-perform one's self and everyone around us.

When the ultimate dream of becoming the central star of corporate culture comes true, a new Stakhanov is born. But who can maintain this kind of hyper-performative life? Is it even possible to be excellent, extraordinary, creative and innovative all day long? How long can a shift of performative work be anyway? The answer turns out not to be fictional at all.

Stakhanovism's limits

In the summer of 2013, an intern at a major city financial institution, Moritz Erhardt, was found dead one morning in the shower of his flat. It turns out that Erhardt really did try to put in a neo-Stakhanovite shift: three days and three nights of continuous work (known among London City workers and taxi drivers as a "magic roundabout").

But his body could not take it. We examined this case in detail in our previous research as well as anticipating just such a tragic scenario a year before it happened. In 2010, we reviewed a decade of the Times 100 Graduate Employers and showed explicitly how such jobs can embody the spirit of neo-Stakhanovism.

Then in 2012, we published our review which signalled the dangers of the hyper-performative mould promoted in such publications. We argued that the graduate market is driven by an ideology of potentiality which is likely to overwhelm anyone who follows it too closely in the real world. A year later, this sense of danger became real in Erhardt's case.

Stakhanov died after a stroke in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, in 1977. A city in the region is named after him. The legacy of his achievementor at least the propaganda that perpetuated itlives on.

But the truth is that people do have limits. They do now, just as they did in the USSR in the 1930s. Possibilities are not infinite. Working towards goals of endless performance, growth and personal potential is simply not possible. Everything is finite.

Who we are and who we become when we work are actually fundamental and very concrete aspects of our everyday lives. Stakhanovite models of high-performance have become the register and rhythm of our working lives even though we no longer remember who Stakhanov was.

The danger is that we will not be able to sustain this rhythm. Just as the characters in Industry, Black Mirror or The Circle, our working lives take destructive, toxic and dark forms because we inevitably come up against the very real limits of our own purported potential, creativity or talent.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
During pelagic red crab stranding events--like this one documented at a beach in Pacific Grove, California--the small red crustaceans wash ashore en masse in areas far north of their usual home range in the Mexican state of Baja California. Credit: Stephanie Brodie

For decades, people have wondered why pelagic red crabsalso called tuna crabssometimes wash ashore in the millions on the West Coast of the United States. New research shows that atypical currents, rather than abnormal temperatures, likely bring them up from their home range off Baja California.

Alongside the discovery, the scientists also created a seawater flow index that could help researchers and managers detect abnormal current years.

The new study, published July 1 in Limnology and Oceanography, began after lead author Megan Cimino biked past a pelagic red crab stranding on her way to her office in Monterey in 2018. Cimino, a biological oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and UC Santa Cruz through the Institute of Marine Sciences Fisheries Collaborative Program, had witnessed a different stranding near where she grew up in Southern California a few years prior.

"At that time, I had no clue what a red crab was, what was going on, why they would be there," she said. "But it was very clear something different was going on in the oceansomething unusual."

She brought the question to her colleagues, and the lab decided to dive into the mechanism behind the seemingly random appearances.

The group spent months compiling data about the crabs and their recorded range. They scoured oceanographic research surveys, video data from remotely operated vehicles, citizen science programs, and even online media, such as Twitter.

Integrating the different data types proved challenging, but eventually the team had a clear idea of the species' range and strandings from 1950 to 2019.

Comparing these data with ocean conditions like temperature and current movements, the scientists found that the appearance of red crabs outside of their normal range correlated with the amount of seawater flowing from Baja California to central California. The finding supports strong currents as the key indicator for the presence of the crabs over the other major hypothesisthat warm water brought by marine heatwaves and El Nino events causes the appearances.

To study the currents, the researchers used a regional ocean model of the California Current System, developed by researchers in the UC Santa Cruz ocean modeling group.

"What you're doing is putting a traceryou could think of it like a dyeinto a particular part of the ocean and then running the model backwards in time to see where that came from," said Michael Jacox, a physical oceanographer with dual affiliation with NOAA and UC Santa Cruz.

Based on those tracer experiments, the team created the "southern source water index" (SSWI), which shows how much water off the central California coast comes from south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

"It's that pathway of water that brings up some of these unusual species," said Ryan Rykaczewski, a fisheries oceanographer at NOAA and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. "It's not just the pelagic red crabs, even though those might be the most conspicuous species that we see on the coast."

The red crabs draw the public's interest and serve as an important food source for lots of other species. These factors made them a good study subject, but they're not the only thing brought up by currents. They represent a larger phenomenon that researchers can use the SSWI to better understand.

"The index could be used as a kind of early warning system about what the ocean state is that year and whether we're going to expect southern species in northern regions," said Cimino. "That can help us plan and manage and give expectations for bycatch or different fisheries."

As climate change increases variability in ocean conditions, the locations of species will begin to shift. Knowing where to look for particular organisms helps researchers make more accurate observations and population estimates.

"We can go back and look at that source water index and use that perhaps as a predictive tool of how the composition of coastal species is going to change," said Rykaczewski. "And that might help us with ecosystem management."

The way currents shift is an often-overlooked piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding climate change. Scientists are now in the process of testing whether the southern source water index is sensitive to it.

"We think a lot about the changes in things like temperature and oxygen, but changes in the contribution of waters from different locations in the broader North Pacific is also really important for understanding climate change," said Rykaczewski.

The movement of pelagic red crabs provides just one example of the practical applications of such studies.

"I think it's really, really important that when we think about climate change, we don't just think about 'warm temperature equals some response', and we really try to dig into the mechanisms," said Jacox.

With the case study of red crabs and the creation of the southern source water index, researchers now have another tool for doing just that.

More information: Megan A. Cimino et al, Anomalous poleward advection facilitates episodic range expansions of pelagic red crabs in the eastern North Pacific, Limnology and Oceanography (2021). Megan A. Cimino et al, Anomalous poleward advection facilitates episodic range expansions of pelagic red crabs in the eastern North Pacific,(2021). DOI: 10.1002/lno.11870
Fires raged across California with authorities battling to put out the flames and people asked to evacuate.

Dozens of fires raged across western Canada and California on Friday with little relief expected from a deadly heat wave that has seen temperatures hit record highs.

Around 1,000 people were evacuated in Canada's British Columbia province Thursday when a wildfire burnt down 90 percent of a small town that had set a national high-temperature record for three days running.

Experts say the heat wave on "steroids" was brought on by the global climate change crisis and has caused several hundred deaths in Canada and the United States.

The town of Lytton, 250 kilometers (155 miles) northeast of Vancouver, "has sustained structural damage and 90 percent of the village is burned, including the centre of town," local MP Brad Vis said.

Evacuation notices were issued for large swathes of a California county where a large fire has engulfed nearly 20,000 acres with less than 20 percent contained by Friday, local authorities reported.

The fire has been blazing for a week after it was ignited by a bolt of lightning, a government fire alert service said.

Footage from the area showed hills and forests ablaze and the sky filled with smoke as firefighters rushed to calm the flames. A dozen different fires have been reported across California, which was hit by some of the worst wildfires in its history last year.

Plumes of smoke rose into the sky as nearly 20,000 acres in California were engulfed by the lava fire.

British Columbia has recorded 62 new fires in the past 24 hours, premier John Horgan told a press conference.

"I cannot stress enough how extreme the fire risk is at this time in almost every part of British Columbia," Horgan said.

'Devastating'

Lytton's 250 residents were evacuated on Wednesday evening, one day after it set a jaw-dropping Canadian record high temperature of 49.6 degrees Celsius (121 degrees Fahrenheit).

The evacuation order was extended Wednesday night to residents of about 100 properties north of Lytton.

"The last 24 hours have been devastating for Lytton residents," Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan wrote on Twitter, adding that the Canadian armed forces "are ready to support residents as we move forward in the next steps."

Provincial authorities have not yet announced any injuries or deaths related to the fires. A number of the blazes were clustered north of the city of Kamloops, located about 150 kilometers northeast of Lytton.

Plumes of smoke rise from the Long Loch wildfire and the Derrickson Lake wildfire in British Columbia on June 30, 2021.

Firefighters in California are battling a dozen different fires a year after the state dealt with some of the worst wildfires in its history.

The Sparks Lake wildfire is seen in British Columbia on June 29, 2021.

Environment Canada said in a bulletin issued early Thursday morning for the Prince George, BC area that "an exceptionally strong ridge of high pressure over British Columbia will continue to bring record-breaking temperatures over the next couple of days."

"The duration of this heat wave is concerning as there is little relief at night with elevated overnight temperatures," it added.

The heat wave continued to move eastward on Thursday into the central Canadian prairies.

In addition to British Columbia, heat warnings have been issued for the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and parts of the Northwest Territories, and now northern Ontario.

Across the border, the US states of Washington and Oregon have also been sweltering under record temperatures this week and several hundred sudden deaths have been reported.

Explore further Approximately 1,000 evacuated as Canadian fires engulf town

 2021 AFP
Maybe with wage growth and inflation having peaked, we can get past the peak fears of some sort of wage-price doom-loop, said Brian Jacobsen, senior investment strategist, Wells Fargo Asset Management.

The Fed has been insisting that the higher inflation hitting the economy now will be only temporary, which would give it more leeway to keep its support for the economy in place. Many investors expect it to announce a pullback in its bond purchases later this year, well before expectations for the Fed to move short-term rates off their record low in 2022 or 2023.

If job growth or inflation is stronger and more persistent than expected, though, it could force the Fed to move up its timetable and raise rates more aggressively.

The Fed wants to let the economy run as hot as possible and the let the unemployment rate get as low as possible without triggering hot inflation, said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Independent Advisor Alliance. Inflation may run hot, and that could speed up plans for tapering, but as far as raising rates I think they are still going to wait a long time.
Leveille called the town and villages decision another positive step to returning to the days we remember before COVID.

I think it sends a positive message to our guests, many of whom have been with us for many, many years, he said.

The decision to drop the vaccination requirement hasnt been officially voted on by either the Lake Placid Village Board or the North Elba Town Council, according to Community Development Director Haley Breen. Breen said on Wednesday the decision did not require a vote by either the town or the village, but that the village board discussed it during a workshop and the town board discussed it via email. The village board plans to discuss the decision and formally take a vote at its next meeting, according to Mayor Art Devlin.

The town and village governments made the decision in consideration with the federal governments updated (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) guidelines and Gov. (Andrew) Cuomos lifting of the COVID-19 restrictions, including an end to the New York state of emergency.
SOMERS POINT  Five recent high school graduates are somewhat more financially ready to head off to college thanks to some help from the American Legion Riders Post 352. The five were each awarded $1,000 scholarships from the Stephen J. Wolicki Scholarship Fund Monday, June 28 in Somers Point. The late Jo Carney, a Mainland Regional High School teacher and the organizer of the Support Our Troops Club and many veterans events was also honored with each of the scholarships.

The students were awarded the scholarships on the basis of an essay, What Does the Veteran in Your Family Mean to You? All of the applicants for the scholarship are children of veterans or the Sons of the American Legion. The recipients are; Bradley Jamison of Ocean City High School who is heading off to Bucknell University. Two other Ocean City graduates were also among the recipients: George Bryant who is attending Widener University and Giovanna Dattilo who will attend West Chester University. From Absegami High School, Michael Reitzel is headed to Stockton University and Riley Murray, a Mainland Regional High School graduate will attend the University of Maryland in the fall.
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New veterans clinic in Northfield to be ready by 2023

mpost-pressofac / U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs A rendering of the new Atlantic County veterans clinic to be built at 2101 New Road in Northfield.

NORTHFIELD  A long-awaited new and larger Atlantic County veterans clinic will be built near the existing one on New Road and will open in 2023, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs said Thursday.

It caps off a series of improvements in veterans care in the region that followed the 2016 suicide of a local veteran on the lawn of the Northfield facility. That traumatic act brought attention to long wait times, especially for mental health services.

The new location, at 2101 New Road, will be the only Veterans Affairs clinic in South Jersey that provides on-site radiology, greatly reducing travel times for local veterans, said U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-2nd, who has been working with local veterans on the project. At 30,000 square feet, it will be three times the size of the current clinic, which opened in 2011.

Im just elated, said veterans advocate Marco Polo Smigliani, of Egg Harbor Township, chairman of the South Jersey Veterans Consortium. This will help thousands of families for years to come.

The consortium worked for years to help the VA improve services in the region and helped guide decisions on the clinics in Vineland, Rio Grande and Northfield, he said.

For far too long, our South Jersey Veterans were forgotten about, Van Drew said in a news release. They are every bit as noble, every bit as brave and every bit as deserving as any veteran anywhere in our nation.

The new site, across the street from the Northfield Community School, is currently occupied by Tilt-In Windows and Siding. Van Drew said the business is relocating and the building will be demolished to make way for the VA facility.

A message was left with Tilt-In Windows management seeking comment.

The new Northfield clinic will include primary care, womens health, phlebotomy, specialty care, optometry, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and home-based primary and community care.

As the veteran population of southern New Jersey grows, we must grow with them, said Vince Kane, Wilmington VA Medical Center director. The Wilmington VA runs the clinics in South Jersey.

For decades, veterans and their advocates complained of a lack of local health care options in South Jersey, which forced them to take buses to Philadelphia or Wilmington for treatment.

Then in 2016, a concerted effort by federal and state legislators, including U.S. Sens. Bob Menendez and Cory Booker, both D-N.J., and former U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-2nd, began a series of dramatic improvements.

That same year, Charles Ingram, of Egg Harbor Township, set himself on fire on the lawn outside the Northfield clinic and later died. The federal report that followed was highly critical of veterans services here.

Cape veterans clinic crowns years of improved care in South Jersey Literally for decades this newspaper lamented the paucity of local health care options for the many veterans living in South Jersey. That forced them to take buses to Philadelphia or Wilmington, Delaware, for treatments everyone else can get near home. The giant Veterans Health Administration couldnt be budged.

Van Drew, a state senator at the time, cited Ingrams death and asked the VA to approve a pilot program that would allow South Jersey veterans to receive health care from local providers, and continued pushing for improved care.

While we do not know all of the circumstances surrounding this tragedy, media reports indicate that veterans seeking care at the facility can experience lengthy delays in receiving treatment, Van Drew wrote in a letter to then-VA Secretary Robert A. McDonald.

The VA admitted it had issues at its Northfield clinic and added four behavioral health and six medical staffers there, as well as an on-site clinic manager.

Another big change came in 2016, with an expanded veterans clinic in Vineland that brought services such as hearing and vision not available there before.

By the following year, the VA had developed partnerships with Cape Regional Medical Center, Shore Medical Center, Inspira Health Network and AtlantiCare that made more procedures available through the Veterans Choice Program.

Unstoppable veterans updated on advances in South Jersey, COVID care Gathering annually in Wildwood has been a tradition of the New Jersey Veterans of Foreign Wars for half a century. Having served their nation in the face of the most dire threats, veterans werent going to cancel their convention this year.

In 2018, Atlantic County opened a new veterans wing at its Meadowview Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Northfield, and a similar facility opened at Eastern Pines Convalescent Center in Atlantic City, both under a five-year VA contract.

The New Jersey Hospital Association trained seven teams of professionals to provide a Mental Health First Aid course to veterans, their families and caregivers. And the Wilmington VA contracted to give South Jersey veterans increased access to specialty palliative, hospice, dementia and respite care through several long-term-care facilities in the region.

In 2020, a new, bigger outpatient clinic for veterans in the Rio Grande section of Middle Township opened.

The new Atlantic County clinic is expected to open in summer 2023. Construction is expected to start in the fall, and services will continue at the current location until the new clinic is available, according to the Wilmington VA.

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ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP)  New Jersey's yearlong coronavirus-inspired ban on smoking in Atlantic City casinos will end Sunday, just in time for the Fourth of July holiday.

+6 Casino workers call on state officials to ban indoor smoking permanently ATLANTIC CITY  More than 50 casino workers and representatives from Smoke Free Atlantic Cit

Gov. Phil Murphy said Wednesday that an order he signed ending a public health emergency contained a sunset provision winding down the smoking ban within 30 days, which is Sunday.

While acknowledging gamblers will be free to light up again starting Sunday, the Democratic governor indicated he would look favorably on a measure lawmakers are considering to permanently end smoking in New Jersey's casinos.

I would be very constructive on that, he said at a coronavirus briefing, stopping short of saying he would sign the legislation.

The governor's remarks came two hours after dozens of casino workers and anti-smoking advocates rallied on the Atlantic City boardwalk to call for a permanent smoking ban.

Casinos are exempted from a state law banning most indoor smoking, while an Atlantic City law limits smoking to no more than 25% of the casino floor.

New Jersey has even prohibited smoking on beaches and public parks, which was not lost on many of the rallying casino workers.
The civil claim filed by the mother of the child Frazier abused between 2016 and 2019 names several defendants, including the Atlantic City Board of Education and employees there, as well as Mayor Marty Small Sr., but not DCF. The mother states in her lawsuit that Fraziers hiring by DCF was the reason she continued to let him and her son spend time together.

We and our client believe there are many people and entities legally liable for what happened to our client and her son, said Terrell A. Ratliff of Lento Law Group, the firm representing Jane Doe and her child, when asked why DCF was not named in the suit. We are continuing our investigation and will leave no stone unturned in our quest to ensure justice is served for our client and her son.

An October 2020 memo from Atlantic City School District Solicitor Tracy Riley notes that LaQuetta Small, the mayors wife and Fraziers cousin who was principal of the Pennsylvania Avenue School at the time of Fraziers employment with the district, notified the state agency in February 2017 about inappropriate contact Frazier had with a student outside of school.

That same memo notes that Frazier was investigated by the state, which found no evidence of abuse or neglect. Frazier was fired from the district, but hired by the state later that same year.
LOWER TOWNSHIP  The township Rescue Squad is set to disband, with Inspira Health taking over local ambulance services.

Plans were to make the change in September, but, according to Mayor Frank Sippel, the existing Rescue Squad let the township know it would not survive the summer. The longtime organization struggled for years with mounting debt and increasing difficulty finding qualified members.

For the last couple of years, theyve been having financial problems, and the pandemic put them under, Sippel said.

Pretty much COVID was killing us, said Tom Conrad, a member of Township Council and a captain with the rescue squad. We thought we had more time, but when the bottom starts dropping out, it drops quickly.

Conrad said training for potential new emergency medical technicians became unavailable due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions, and many people were reluctant to start as EMTs because of the risk of exposure to the coronavirus.

+2 Cannabis company announces partnership with Atlantic Cape Community College MIDDLE TOWNSHIP  Insa, a Massachusetts-based cannabis company with plans to become the firs

There was an economic impact as well, he said. The squad was taking an increased number of calls, but fewer people were willing to be taken to the hospital. The payments for the ambulance trip, mostly covered by insurance, were the primary source of revenue for the squad, he said.
For the eighth straight year, beachgoers chose Ocean City as New Jerseys Favorite Beach at the start of Fourth of July weekend.

The statewide poll has been held by the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium since 2008 and is designed to inspire pride in and the stewardship of New Jerseys beaches while promoting a little healthy competition between New Jerseys favorite beach towns, according to a news release.

Representatives announced the winner in a presentation Friday morning at the Ocean City Music Pier.

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Gov. Murphy to march in 2 Cape May County Fourth of July parades this weekend Gov. Phil Murphy and first lady Tammy Murphy plan to make several appearances this holiday w

Ocean City was the top beach, and Sea Isle City was second. They were the top two finishers in Cape May County.

Voters may only vote once, according to the organization.

Congratulations to everybody in Ocean City for achieving this honor, Mayor Jay Gillian said in the release. The recognition is a testament to the hard work of the city team, the Ocean City Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Tourism Development Commission, the Boardwalk and Downtown Merchants associations, local businesses, all volunteer groups and the entire community in making Ocean City a superior place to live, work and play.
After years of declining crime rates, the United States is suddenly contending with an upsurge in shootings and murders  and the numbers are sobering.

In Chicago, homicides soared 56% last year, and theyre up again this year. In New York, last years increase was almost 45%; in Los Angeles, it was 36%. If the current pace holds up, 2021 could produce the highest murder rate in a quarter-century.

Experts havent settled on an explanation for the wave of violence, but many say the COVID-19 pandemic was a factor: too many young men with no jobs, time on their hands and plenty of reasons to be angry.

Many Republicans say the crime surge is the fault of Joe Biden and the soft-on-crime Democrats.

Heres the Democrat plan for America: crime, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, chairman of the GOPs Senate campaign, says in a commercial over dramatic images of rioters smashing plate-glass windows. The Democrats have embraced the idea of defunding the police, which is the dumbest idea ever.

The claim that Democrats criminal justice policies lead to more crime has been a favorite Republican campaign theme for generations.

But this time, at least, the facts dont support their charges.
Weve advocated for the acquisition and use of police body cameras for several years, and before that for the dash-mounted cameras that became available earlier.

This technology benefits everyone. Making video recordings of police encounters with the public can help everyone involved. Just knowing there will be a record encourages officers and citizens to behave better. Police are less likely to improperly use the force they legitimately wield. Suspects are less likely to falsely accuse police.

The state Legislature and Gov. Phil Murphy fulfilled one of our hopes last fall when they made the use of police body cams mandatory in New Jersey. In doing so, they joined at least six other states. Surely more will follow as best practices for their use become settled and the advantages of the technology become more widely known and accepted.

Then at years end, they delivered on another hope, approving $58 million in grants for departments to buy the cameras.

Readers may recall that South Jersey police departments have been in the forefront of the body camera movement in the state. When the mandate was announced last year, 70% of Atlantic County departments already were using body cams. In Cape May County, they had already been deployed in all municipalities except Cape May City.
TEAM DREAMER VS. TEAM CALLIS, THE ROAD TO SLAMMIVERSARY CONTINUES & MORE: IMPACT WRESTLING ON AXS TV REPORT

Impact Wrestling opened with a recap of last week.

Satoshi Kojima came to the ring for his bout against Eddie Edwards. Edwards did not come out for his bout. W. Morrisey appeared on the video screen and said that it appeared that Edwards was going to make it tonight. He said he knows Edwards has had his back and back and forth. Everyone loves Edwards and has his back, but who had his back when Edwards was jumped by Morrisey in the parking lot. He said Kojima was left all alone like everyone else in the world.

Brian Myers and Sam Beale came to the ring. Myers cut a promo saying that Kojima doesn't have a match and he can leave. He would normally use this as an opportunity for his young boy, but Beale is around Myers all the time. There's nothing to learn from Kojima. He told Kojima to leave the ring and went to address Jake Something. Kojima took umbrage with this and they attacked him. Jake Something came to the ring and made the save. Impact made a tag team match right now.

Jake Something & Satoshi Kojima vs. Brian Myers & Sam Beale.

Everyone brawled at ringside until they returned to the ring. Kojima controlled Beale. He hiptossed and tackled the youngster.

Jake and Kojima tagged in and out, working over Beale. Something lifted him for a suplex and tossed him across the ring to Myers, who tagged in. Myers shoved him, faking him out and scoring with a big chop. Something was sent into the ring ropes but throttled with a big burst of energy. Myers avoided the Black Hole Slam but Myers avoided it. Something drilled Beale off the apron but was caught with a big knee strike.

Beale and Myers tagged in and out, beating down Something. Myers locked in a rear chinlock but Something fought his way to his feet with a series of elbows. Something went to rebound off the ropes but Myers tripped him. He worked over Something, scoring several two counts. Beale tagged back in and locked in another real chinlock, then drilled him from behind with a clothesline for a two count. Beale locked in another side chinlock but Something fought his way to his feet. Beale tripped him up and he and Myers continued holding the momentum. Myers suplexed Something for a two count. Myers continued to grind away at Something. Beale and Myers continued to hold down Something as the beatings continued.

Something finally fought them off and crawled to make the hot tag for Kojima, tagging in the New Japan star. Kojima exploded with offense. He tackled Beale and drilled him with the rapid-fire chops in the corner. Kojima nailed a leaping clothesline in the corner. He dropped the flying elbow but Beale kicked up at the last second. Kojima peppered him with forearms. Kojima and Beale battled over a move but Beale ate a DDT. Satoshi went for the Koji-Cutter but Myers nailed the Flatliner. He charged Kojima but Something nailed a Black Hole Slam. Kojima nailed Beale with a Koji-Cutter and a lariat for the pin.

Your winners, Brian Myers & Satoshi Kojima!

Not the match we expected but a very strong tag match.

Gia Miller interviewed Scott D'Amore when Havok and Rosemary teleported in. She said they've had Fire N' Flayva's number and that they would be excellent representatives of the Knockouts Tag Team division as champions. Scott said he will take it under advisement. He was freaked by their mystical arts.

D'Lo Brown and Josh Mathews ran down the lineup for tonight.

Tenille Dashwood with Kaleb with A K vs. Rachael Ellering with Jazz.

Tenille attacked Ellering before the bell and mocked her. That fired up Rachael who drilled her. Tenille backed off, second guessing her decision to wrestle. Ellering grabbed her by the leg but Tenille held onto the ring ropes. They countered each other until Tenille drilled her with a back elbow. Proud of herself, Dashwood found herself eating a back elbow. Ellering worked her over, capitalizing with a back senton splash for a two count.

Dashwood hid against the ropes but Ellering charged her with a kick. Tenille moved and Kaleb, who was on the apron consoling his charge, was kicked to the floor. After commercials, Dashwood had regained control and choked Ellering against the ropes. The story was that again Jordynne Grace was nowhere to be found. Ellering was drilled with a suplex for a two count. Dashwood went for a move but Ellering rolled her into a small package for a two count. Dashwood clobbered her with a clothesline to regain control of the match. Dashwood peppered her with forearms and kicks in the corner.

Dashwood scored a series of two counts and nailed her crossbody splash against the buckles for another.

Ellering came back with a Slingblade but was too spent to gain momentum immediately. She pulled herself up as Tenille went to the apron and nailed a neckbreaker through the ropes. Dashwood went to the top but was cut off by Ellering. They battled back into the ring, where Ellering drilled her. Kaleb distracted her with a podcasting ring light, allowing Dashwood to nail her but Ellering reversed it into a pinfall combination and scored the pin.

Your winner, Rachael Ellering!

Dashwood immediately attacked her. Jazz hit the ring to make the save. Kaleb grabbed her, allowing Dashwood to nail her. THAT brought out Jordynne Grace, who attacked Kaleb and clotheslined Dashwood. Ellering helped clear the ring, leaving her and Grace left in the ring. Grace stared at her. Ellering offered a handshake. Grace accepted and hugged her. Jazz hugged them both.

They showed the footage of Chris Bey watching everything going on last week and not picking a side in the Ultimate X issues.

Backstage, Bey was interviewed by Chris Bey. He denied that he was an instigator in the issues last week. Ace Austin and Rohit Raju showed up but Bey said he was going to stay neutral. Austin said the muscle was covered with Shera and Madman Fulton. Raju said Bey doing his own thing means the numbers game remains in their favor. They thanked him for staying in his lane and making sure they win, since he has no chance in Ultimate X. They walked off and Bey told Gia that she's always instigating before storming off himself.

TJP & Fallah Bahh vs. Rich Swann & Willie Mack

Everyone battled and went back and forth until they faced off. Mack and Bahh agreed to continue and drilled each other back and forth with powerful shots. Mack finally nailed a big Samoan Drop on Bahh but TJP dropkicked him. Swann nailed him and then hit a twisting flip off the buckles to the floor, taking everyone out.

As Swann celebrated, Deaner and Joe Doering attacked everyone at ringside. Rhino joined the fray.

No contest.

Swann was attacked and forced to watch as Rhino gored Mack. Deaner nailed a DDT on TJP. Violent By Design destroyed everyone.

Backstage, The Knockouts Tag Team Champions were upset Rosemary and Havok were demanding a title shot when they should have to work themselves up from the bottom. They beat them before when they had other partners. They decided to go talk to Scott D'Amore. He saw them coming and tried to run but it was too late. They said they had to earn their name and title and now others get to call their shots. D'Amore said they are the best and they are looking for competition. He said they haven't earned a title shot so next week, they can earn an opportunity at the titles next week. He slunk his way out after telling them they can evaluate the challengers next week.

Gia Miller interviewed Team Dreamer. Tommy Dreamer said that united we stand, divided we fall. He never wanted to share a locker room with Raven but they got the job done. He doesn't like them and they don't like him but they can get the job done. Sabin said he hates Moose but he's going to put it all aside for everyone as it's about Impact. Moose said no one has a bigger issue with Kenny Omega than him. Callihan said he has issues with everyone on Omega's team but all of this is bigger than them. This is about them putting their issues aside and kicking Team Omega's ass tonight.

Petey Williams vs. Chris Bey

They had some nice back and forth wrestling early. Bey was super aggressive working over Petey in the corner. Williams nailed a tilowhirl head scissors and scored with a leaping rana out of the corner. Williams nailed a dropkick to the back for a two count. Bey cut him off and scored several two counts. Williams tried to fire back with shoulderblocks but was snatched into a swinging neckbreaker for a two count. Williams used an Oklahoma Roll for a two count but was caught with a lariat for a two count.

Williams used a head scissor to grind Williams down but Petey fought his way out. He nailed a series of rights. Williams nailed a big German suplex and hit a running knee strike. He called for the Canadian Destroyer but Bey countered it and nailed a Torture Rack into a neckbreaker for a two count. Williams came back with a Side Russian Legsweep for a two count. He went for an exploder but Bey elbowed his way out of it. Bey was caught with a pop-up powerbomb. Another Destroyer attempt was countered but Bey was trapped in a Sharpshooter. Bey made it to the ropes, forcing a break.

Williams went for a suplex but Bey used a small package for a two count. Bey escaped a back slide at two. Bey nailed a cutter and hit the Art of the Finesse and scored the pin.

Your winner, Chris Bey!

A strong back and forth match.

Ace Austin, Rohit Raju, Shera and Madman Fulton made their way to the ring. Shera and Fulton attacked Williams as the other tried to convince Bey to join their side. Bey went to the back, leaving them to it as Trey Miguel and Josh Alexander hit the ring to make the save. Bey wasn't sure what side to join and watched it all unfold. He finally said the hell with it and hit the ring and nailed Shera with a missile dropkick. So, he's on the side of the babyfaces. Fulton went for a powerbomb on him but Bey saved him and nailed a rana over the ropes to the floor. Bey turned the tide of the battle, trapping Austin in the ring alone with the others. He was beaten down by all the faces. Austin was dumped out of the ring atop of Shera, Fulton and Raju. Very easy story to tell but it was done well and worked.

They showed footage of Deonna Purrazzo defeating Kimber Lee on BTI earlier tonight. Backstage, Susan told Lee the plan wasn't working. Lee said that they can still be a team and win the titles. Susan said what if that doesn't work. Lee said they have the backup plan, Su Yung. Susan asked her who that was.

Backstage, Jake Something said he made a name for himself and stands on his own two feet. He said no one should question him as to whether he's a man or professional. He challenged Myers to a bout. If Jake loses, he'll tell Myers he's the most professional wrestler. If Jake wins, he's going to be acknowledged as a professional.

Steve Macklin vs. Manny Smith.

Mackin controlled Smith and took him down to the mat. He used a sideheadlock to maintain control. Manny got a few hope spots in but was wiped out with a big lariat. He tried Smith to the tree of woe and kept kicking away at him to the point the referee interceded. He then dove into the corner, mauling poor Smith.

Maclin dropped Smith down to the mat. He chopped him and sent him into the buckles. He nailed a back suplex on Smith and destroyed him with elbow strikes to the face. Maclin nailed a Michinoku Driver with authority and scored the pin.

Your winner, Maclin!

Another squash to get over Maclin as an evil badass.

Backstage, Brian Myers said he knows what a professional he is. He wants Sam Beale to hear Jake Something say it so he knows the lessons are paying off. So, he accepts.

Team Dreamer: Sami Callihan & Chris Sabin & Moose vs. Team Callis: Impact Champion Kenny Omega & The Good Brothers

Chris Sabin and Karl Anderson started out, going back and forth. Sabin shoulderblocked him down and went for a crucifix pinfall combination. Anderson escaped and they went back and forth until facing off.

Omega tagged in but them Callihan did and Omega wanted nothing to do with him and ran up the aisle. When they returned from commercial, Team Dreamer was worrking over Anderson. Moose and Sabin were not on the same page at all, given their personal issues. Tommy Dreamer even got on the apron to try and stop them. That allowed Anderson to rake Sabin's face and toss him to the floor, where Omega and Gallows worked him over. Omega tagged in and drilled Sabin into the buckles. Team Callis tagged in and out, beating down Sabin in their corner. Gallows wiped him out with a big uppercut. Sabin was worked over for a long time.

Sabin finally fought his way to the corner but Moose walked away and wouldn't take it. Anderson tagged in but Sabin finally tagged Callihan. Callihan nailed a DDT and scored the two count. He called for a piledriver but Anderson nailed a low blow as Omega distracted the referee. Sabin tagged in and hit a flying bodypress for a two count.

Omega and Gallows went to double team Sabin but he avoided them and Anderson. He nailed a tornado DDT off Anderson's back, kicking Gallows away as he drilled Omega. Moose tagged himself in as Sabin nailed a shining wizard on Omega. Moose entered the ring as he went for a Cradleshock and demanded he leave the ring. Sabin shoved him away but Moose tagged him back and and drilled him. Moose and Dreamer had words. Callis shoved Dreamer from behind into Moose. Thinking Dreamer hit him, Moose nailed him back. Sabin nailed a dive on Moose and exasperated, took him out. He rained down punches on Moose and returned to the ring. Omega tried to catch him with the V-Trigger but Sabin avoided it. Omega caught him with the Snap Dragon suplex. The Good Brothers nailed the Magic Killer and Omega nailed a V-Trigger on Sabin for the pin.

Your winners, Team Callis!

Good main event with some nice storytelling to build the issues among everyone.

Moose stood on the entrance stage fuming at everything and everyone.

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A Clinton County man was sentenced Thursday to serve the rest of his natural life in prison for his role in sexually abusing four children over a three-year period.

During a sentencing hearing in Clinton County District Court, District Court Judge Patrick McElyea sentenced Todd William Adams, 54, to a term of natural life for being convicted of five counts of second-degree sexual abuse, each a Class A felony under Iowa law. Each count carries a prison sentence of up to life.

In his sentencing order, McElyea noted that sentencing on the first two counts of second-degree sexual abuse  counts one and two in the court document  are to run consecutively, or back-to-back. McElyea also sentenced Adams to four years on two counts of indecent contact with a child, with one of those counts running consecutively, or back-to-back, with the first two counts of second-degree sexual abuse.

On May 20, a Clinton County jury found Adams guilty on the five counts of second-degree sexual abuse and the two counts of indecent contact with a child after a trial that began May 17.

According to the affidavit filed by Clinton County Sheriffs Detective Marissa Mussmann, the case was opened Oct. 9 based on a report by the Iowa Department of Human Services.
Criminal cases for 53 of the officers ended in a non-conviction, while 45 cases are still pending, according to the findings.

Nineteen of those 45 convicted were through a guilty plea  similar to what is planned in Delke's case  while the rest were through a jury conviction, according to Stinson's research.

In only 25 of the 143 arrests did the person who was fatally shot have a gun; just five were convicted, according to Stinsons tally. He said there's always risk for prosecutors that a case like this could end in an acquittal or a mistrial with a hung jury.

It's not uncommon for the case to end in a guilty plea and it's not uncommon for the case to end in a guilty plea on the eve of trial, either, Stinson said.

Delkes attorneys argued the officer followed his training and Tennessee law in response to an armed suspect who ignored repeated orders to drop his gun. Funk argued Delke had other alternatives, adding that the officer could have stopped, sought cover and called for help.
Days after Darren Cole went public last March about being detained by Chicago police more than 60 times because he shared a name with a man with a downstate warrant, the city helped clear the matter up.

But the cooperation did not last long.

Now the city of Chicago and Cole are embroiled in a more complicated and potentially protracted court fight over whether the departments computer data system was to blame for the repeated stops. The Chicago man faced scrutiny for some 15 years because of an outstanding arrest warrant for another man named Darren Cole in Marion County.

Coles attorneys have argued that the departments data system has been flagged by oversight agencies as deficient and in need of reform and that the database directly contributed to the repeat stops and accompanying fear and harassment the Cole in Chicago lived with.

Now city officials have countered in court filings that the repeated stops happened because the outstanding warrant for the downstate Cole was entered into a statewide database they have no control over. And when Chicago officers stopped Cole, they were performing their duties and lawfully and constitutionally detained him to investigate the warrant, the city argued.
Legal documents filed by the city in June show Lightfoot officials have downplayed one of the more horrifying elements of the bungled raid, how long Young was left exposed as officers swarmed her home while acting on a bad tip about a felon with a gun.

In handling Youngs case, Lightfoot faces a challenging political and legal dynamic. She wants to show empathy toward Young while also overseeing a Law Department charged with mounting a defense in a case that could cost the city millions of dollars.

But some wonder why the administration isnt doing more to live up to the mayors promises.

Whats morally and (ethically) right or appropriate shouldnt be at odds with any actions our city is taking in order to protect itself, said Far North Side Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, who has pushed an ordinance to impose tighter restrictions on search warrants that is opposed by Lightfoot.

Can we do both? I think we can, Hadden said. I think folks with maybe more legal experience and more legal practice are so used to finding loopholes or fine print or utilizing every particular legal tool in order to obfuscate whats really happening or have as small a liability as possible. That may be what theyre trained to do but  maybe its not the way we should act.
That's because when levees are constructed, and they physically will block water, of course, which is their purpose, but then if a flood map were to be changed to show that there's no longer flooding behind this levee where it used to flood, then inevitably, development will happen, Heistand said. Houses, stores, whatever kind of development, the land use will not be encumbered by the floodplain regulations that used to encumber those locations. And so, it invites development. And then that development implies that they're safe when they're only as safe as the levee is strong.
Cahill also is wanted in Rock Island County on three counts of failure to return from furlough, a Class 3 felony under Illinois law that carries a prison sentence of two to five years.

He also is serving two years on probation in Rock Island County on convictions of use of a forged credit or debit card, a Class 4 felony for which he could have been sentenced to prison from one to three years, and a conviction for theft less than $500, a Class A misdemeanor for which he could have been sentenced to up to one year in the Rock Island County Jail.

Cahill also has been wanted since April 8 for violating his probation on the first-degree theft charges in Scott County.

In those cases, Cahill stole a GMC van with a trailer and its contents, and on another date stole an Audi. Both of those thefts occurred in 2018.

Cahill pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree theft and in April of 2019 was sentenced to four years on supervised probation by District Court Judge Marlita Greve. Cahill has violated that probation several times, according to Scott County District Court electronic records.

He will make a first appearance Friday in Scott County District Court on the charges he has pending in Scott County.

Cahill was being held Thursday night in the Scott County Jail on cash-only bonds totaling $20,200, and cash or surety bonds totaling $72,000.

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Assistant State's Attorney Stephanie Barrick maintained that Daum's plea had been voluntary, as she had told the judge.

These are the rules that govern the court," Barrick said. "The court was satisfied that it is a knowing and voluntary plea. At no time did she say otherwise. There was nothing that stopped her at any subsequent appearances from saying the plea was coerced. No letter saying she wanted to take her plea back. At no time did she say to the court, 'I don't want to do this.'

Barrack noted Stockton had filed a motion to withdraw her plea, but she said it wasn't raised on appeal.

To say simply because something is done at the last minute, that is not in and of itself a concern, she said.

Barrick also said Stockton had negotiated a plea deal that subsantially benefited Daum, who faced a maximum penalty of 90 years in prison had she been found guilty of all charges filed. Pleading guilty to the Class 1 conspiracy charges to commit murder had a maximum of two consecutive 15-year terms, which is what she got.

It was a very favorable negotiation, said Barrick.
A Port Byron man was sentenced to six years in prison Friday for six charges of possession of child pornography.

Cody Lee Redman, 26, was arrested by Illinois State Police on April 24, 2019, after a search warrant was executed at 6:30 a.m. in Port Byron.

State's Attorney Dora Villarreal recommended the highest possible sentence of seven years, while public defender Michael Wassell recommend Redman receive probation with required mental health treatment.

Rock Island County Judge Norma Kauzlarich said she didn't give Redman the highest sentence because she felt he deserved credit for having no previous criminal record, not even a traffic ticket. She said she chose to give him more than probation, however, in order to avoid discounting the seriousness of his crime.

The sentence is day for day, meaning each day served counts for two days towards the sentence, and Redman will also receive credit for time served in the Rock Island County Jail. He's been in jail for just over two years, and has a little less than one year left to serve.
The sanctions freeze any assets they or any companies they own may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar Americans from doing business with them.

Treasury offered no explanation for the lifting of sanctions on the three Iranians, but administration officials have said previous similar removals were based solely on the targets no longer meeting the criteria for the penalties and were unrelated to indirect negotiations on salvaging the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which that former President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018.

The Iranians  Behzad Daniel Ferdows, Behzad Daniel Ferdows and Mohammed Reza Dezfulian  were sanctioned by the Trump administration in September 2020 for their work with the Mammut Industrial Group and an affiliated company, Mammut Diesel, which Treasury said at the time were key producers and suppliers of military-grade, dual-use goods for Irans missile programs.

Also Friday, Treasury issued a final rule revoking Trump-era sanctions against International Criminal Court prosecutors and staff. The rule, which will take effect on July 6 after its publication in the Federal Register, completes President Joe Biden's April 1 revocation of Trump's authorization to impose sanctions on ICC officials involved in war crimes investigations into U.S. citizens.
CEDAR RAPIDS  In a game of political musical chairs, what was shaping up as a three-way race for the Democratic nomination in Iowa Senate 33 now looks to be a two-person race, with one of the candidates opting instead to run for an open House seat in southeast Cedar Rapids.

After Rep. Liz Bennett formally entered the race for the seat now held by Sen. Rob Hogg, a fellow Democrat who is not seeking re-election in 2022, community organizer Sami Scheetz announced Thursday morning he would withdraw from the race and seek the [artys nomination for Bennetts southeast Cedar Rapids House 65 seat.

His decision was based on his respect for Bennett and belief she will be an excellent member of the Iowa Senate.

Bennett, who had said earlier in the week that she was exploring a bid for Hoggs Senate seat, announced her decision at a Linn County Democratic Party meeting Wednesday evening.

Iowans deserve a fair shot, Bennett said. The basic agreement in our society is that if you work hard, you should be able to succeed. Too many Iowans struggle with low wages, high medical costs, and underfunded public schools. Im running for Senate because now, more than ever, everyday Iowans need an experienced, progressive voice fighting for them.
So far, Whites office has worked with Google and Microsoft to identify 104 fraudulent websites connected to the prolific scam and placed a warning on 76 of them to alert consumers since problems first arose around April, Druker said.

The office also is working to put labels on the other sites, but they are popping up so quickly that one agency official said combating the websites is like a game of whack-a-mole. It is unclear who is behind them, Druker said.

The text sent to a Tribune reporter, like other suspect texts and emails, provided a link that was not to a state website.

But the text also carried a series of red flags, including the typo in the first sentence: Office of illinois Secretary of State. You are required to update your drivers license.

The text also purportedly originated from a 708 Area Code rather than the 217 traditionally associated with Springfield, the state capital, or even a 312 from Chicago, where many state offices are located.

Still another clue was that the drivers license of the reporter who received the warning wouldnt expire for nearly two more years.
Illinois officials will pick the first $1 million winner in its COVID-19 vaccine lottery on July 8. Three $150,000 college scholarship winners also will be drawn that day.

The $10 million vaccine promotion in Illinois, called "All In For The Win," is designed to thank people who already have received at least one dose of vaccine and as an incentive for people who have not gotten a shot to get one, according to Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

"It's our way of saying to those who haven't been vaccinated, 'Please join us,'" the governor said in mid-June. "Vaccines are incredibly effective, and they keep you protected, but they also make your community safer. It's great that your grandma or grandpa has been vaccinated, but you can make them even safer by getting vaccinated, too."

The Illinois Lottery will handle the drawings, which will continue throughout the summer. All Illinois residents who have been vaccinated are automatically entered to win.

The prize money will be paid from federal grants Illinois has received to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

The $1 million drawing on July 8 will be among three $1 million jackpots and 40 $100,000 cash prizes. After July 8, three winners of $100,000 cash prizes will be chosen every Monday between July 12 and Aug. 16 from a statewide pool.
A roundup of legislative and Capitol news items:

NEW FLUORIDATION LAW: Officials with the state Department of Public Health say a new Iowa law that took effect Thursday requires an owner or operator of a public water supply system to notify its consumers at least 90 days before taking any action to permanently discontinue fluoridation of its water supply. The public water supply also must provide notice to the Iowa Department of Public Health.

According to the agency, community water fluoridation is the precise adjustment of natural fluoride levels to the optimal level of 0.7 mg/L to prevent cavities  noting that for every $1 spent on community water fluoridation, $38 in dental treatment costs are saved. The IDPH Bureau of Oral and Health Delivery Systems monitors the fluoride levels of Iowa communities and provides information, education and assistance to water supply professionals, health care professionals and the public.

DOT HIGHWAY MESSAGING: The Iowa Department of Transportation has announced a change to its interstate highway overhead message board program. Under an updated program called Roadside Chat, the overhead message boards on the interstates and major highways that began in August 2013 will be lit from 12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. every Friday instead of Monday.
CEDAR RAPIDS  Pareen Mhatre has lived in Iowa for nearly 21 years. But as she enters her final year at the University of Iowa, the biomedical engineering major fears she will have to win a lottery to stay in the United States.

Even if I identify myself as an Iowan, I lack the sense of permanence and security, Mhatre said Thursday.

She was just 4 months old when her parents brought her from India to Iowa City so they could attend the UI. For most of her life, Mhatre has been on an H4 visa as a dependent of someone holding a U.S. visa. However, because shes 21 and aging out of the immigration system, Mhatre must start the process of applying for an F1 student visa and then an H1B work visa, which is essentially a lottery system.

Our existence in the country we think of as our home shouldn't come down to luck, Mhatre told a U.S. House panel during a hearing on the introduction of bipartisan legislation, the American Children Act, proposed to protect documented dependents of long-term nonimmigrant visa holders.

The current legal immigration system has disadvantaged children like her, Mhatre and members of groups advocating for Indian Americans told representatives, because once they turn 21 they lose their dependent status and must start the immigration process all over again.
In a democracy the intent is that the people elect the government officials to represent their interests and desires, except in Illinois. Time and again politicians ignore the wishes of the electorate.

Eight years ago, 72% of the voters voted to reduce the size of the county board from 26 to no more than 15. Supposedly, the change could not occur until redistricting following the census, which is now. The Rock Island County Board has decided to reduce the board to 19 members, which is obviously woefully short of the direction provided by the voters. The voters should not accept this dismal effort and hold the board accountable to the desires of the electorate. Remember, Scott County with a larger population operates quite well with five board members.

Now, turning to the state of Illinois and its proposed redistricting for legislative seats: A few years ago over 600,000 residents signed petitions asking for a vote to change the process to an impartial commission. But a handful of politicians decided they knew better and did not give the people a voice. We now have a new map that supposedly is "racially and ethnically" correct but is not politically equitable. Millions of voters are basically disenfranchised. The new map is a perfect example of gerrymandering where the politicians select the voters instead of the voters selecting their elected officials.
Before fireworks fill the Rapid City sky for Independence Day, the Rapid City Municipal Band will fill the air with patriotic and folk tunes for about an hour Sunday.

The band will be under the direction of council member Bill Evans, who celebrates his 51st season with the band.

Evans said its not a tradition for the band to play on the Fourth of July, but it has done so a few times.

This year we were going to have a group concert with the Air Force band from Omaha, but that was canceled because of the fireworks at Mount Rushmore getting canceled, he said.

After the cancellation, the band wasnt going to perform, but many members expressed interest and set up an 8 p.m. show at the bandshell in Memorial Park. It will feature Alex and Chris Massa, jazz musicians who are a product of the Rapid City music program and now play in New Orleans and Chicago.

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We are always doing ground improvements. We added a new crows nest and some work on the arena, Anderson added. We always try to keep it new and improved and setup for four great nights of rodeo. And we change up our specialty acts all the time to keep it new.

Thursdays opening performance served up a couple of area bareback riders and NFR qualifiers  Shane OConnell (Rapid City) and Jamie Howlett (Wasta)  looking to make the most of the 4th of July stretch known as Cowboy Christmas, a nod to the numerous events and large payouts available by padding the pocket book in a local rodeo.

Ive won a lot of saddles out of that arena, said OConnell, who came into the event sitting 11th in PRCA world standings. Won my first buckle in that arena in 2004, won four high school titles there so its kind of like a second home to me. I love going and there will be a lot of family so its just about like going to a rodeo in Rapid City.

While OConnell shared second spot in the round (81-point ride) with two other cowboys, Howlett spurred his way to an 83-point ride aboard Burch Rodeo buckskin, Sunday Service, to grab the overall lead after one performance.
It will also incorporate whole health services like chiropractic care, yoga and healthy eating habits.

Sandra Horsman, director of the VA Black Hills Health Care System, said she was humbled by the states dedication to serve veterans when she moved to the area about six years ago.

Its a healing environment, were going to be able to expand services, Horsman said.

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The current Fifth Street facility is about 17,000 square feet, she said.

Lt. Gov. Larry Rhoden said the project has been on the drawing board for 17 years.

We can never repay the tremendous sacrifice our veterans have made to keep our nation safe, but continuing to cut red tape to make the return to civilian life easier and building facilities like this is one way we can try, he said.

Thune said he discovered through working on the facility that when working with government, people have to play the long game. He said they played the long game with Ellsworth Air Force Base, with Veterans Affairs in Hot Springs and with the Sanford Underground Research Facility.
Gov. Kristi Noem said she met Willis Johnson just a while ago while looking at old-fashioned cars.

She said Johnson has never been a political contributor of hers, and was introduced to him a short time ago through acquaintances and friends.

Noem announced this week she was deploying up to 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to Texas at Texas Gov. Greg Abbotts request to secure the Texas-Mexico border. Johnson fit the bill with a $1 million donation to the state, the Associated Press reported.

Johnson lives in Tennessee and built Copart Inc., which is a publicly traded global business dealing with cars. He previously donated to President Donald Trumps campaign and has given at least $2.3 million to federal campaigns over the last decade.

This is an incredibly important issue for our country, Noem said. In my opinion, the National Guard is best suited for going down there and securing our border. This is what our National Guard does, and people need to remember theyre trained and equipped for missions to go into situations exactly like what were seeing.
"Our existing workforce in these fields are demoralized. They got into these fields to help people, to make communities better, to save lives  all of these values," Allender said. "What they've experienced over the last year and a half has really been widespread community dysfunction. Not that they aren't used to that, but the percentage of that dysfunction has just grown so much. That causes employees to be demotivated, demoralized and then they leave that profession."

Johnson, Masterson and Allender believe that a wide showing of support throughout the community with the "Red, White and Blue" campaign will show that western South Dakotans are united, thankful and proud of these heroes.

"This is a place that appreciates these professions more than a lot of places in other parts of the country," Johnson said. "We think that support might be a strategy as well that allows us to attract additional workforce in those fields as Rapid City continues to grow.

"Everyone can get behind this. We think that all of us support those who put their lives on the line every day. This is the right thing to do on a human level  by telling folks who have been in the middle of this tragic pandemic that we appreciate what they have done, and we will continue to support you."

Contact Nathan Thompson at nathan.thompson@rapidcityjournal.com.

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To the north, the Lava Fire burning partly on the flanks of Mount Shasta covered more than 37 square miles (96 square kilometers) but was 27% contained. Several thousand residents of Lake Shastina were allowed to return home late Thursday.

The blazes erupted during an extreme heat wave in the U.S. West. The heat has since moderated but temperatures in the Mount Shasta area were still expected to reach nearly 100 degrees (38 Celsius) over the weekend.

Arizona, New Mexico and Utah have been forced to battle wildfires and California is bracing for what some experts fear will be one of its worst fire seasons yet.

Last year, California wildfires scorched more than 6,562 square miles (17,000 square kilometers) of land, the most in its recorded history. And just three years ago, a fire in Butte County in Northern California killed 85 people and largely destroyed the town of Paradise.

This year, many of Californias national parks have restrictions on campfires, cooking and smoking because of fire risks in the hot, dry summer. The parks are bracing for large crowds over the holiday weekend.
Still greener than green at our house; got two inches of rain the other night. We hope and pray this last moisture blast continues east across South Dakota.

I had the privilege to speak at the home dedication for Lacy Piazza of Hot Springs. This was a gratifying experience because Lacy got into a Governors House in conjunction with the Black Hills area Habitat for Humanity. As you probably know, the late great Gov. Janklow started the Governors House program. The Governors House program was created to get low-income families into affordable housing, while at the same time giving the prisoner at a minimum-security penitentiary a skill that they could use once they are released from prison. I was surprised and thankful that the Executive Director of South Dakota Housing Development Authority came from Pierre to the dedication. Yep, Lori Polak drove from Pierre for this great event and gave a short talk.

Also present was Hot Springs Mayor Bob Nelson, who also spoke. Thanks, Mayor! Scott Ergman from Rapid City is the Executive Director of the Black Hills Habitat for Humanity office. Another nice touch was all the local businesses who furnished the place with basic essentials all the way down to  yep  toilet paper.
Fifth, the proletariat isnt going to put up with this exploitation for long. Enslaved humans will seek liberation. They will seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie in a revolution in order to abolish both the state and private property (which Marx also opposed) and establish a classless world and socially-planned economy in a new era of human history. (This type of epic showdown he envisioned never happened, though worker strikes and economic-related revolutions regularly have.)

Sixth, capitalist ideologies are the result of material economic conditions, and those ideas then go back to shape the material world. This is called dialectical materialism, because there is a constant back and forth between ideas and the physical world that generated them, and yet that material world is also influenced by ideas. (Its similar to racist ideology: racist ideas about African Americans developed after the slave trade began in order to justify those profitable economic activities. Southern planters didnt wake up one day and think we should enslave African Americans because theyre inferior.) Our ideas about the economy ultimately serve the wealthy bourgeoisie, like propaganda from a kings court vindicates the king.
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.
Even though the written Declaration of Independence was dated and approved on July 4, the Second Continental Congress actually voted for independence from Great Britain on July 2, 1776.

In fact, the final copy of the document wasn't signed by members of Congress until a month later on August 2. The Liberty Bell did not ring out on July 4th, but rather four days later to announce the first public reading of the document.

Signee and future president John Adams predicted July 2 would mark the official day of American's independence. Adams was so adamant in his belief that he turned down invitations to celebrate Independence on July 4th.

There are those who think the marking major events with fireworks originated with John Adams. In a letter to his wife Abigail, he suggested that celebrations should include Pomp and ParadeGames, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one end of this Continent to the other.

The tradition of using fireworks on the Fourth of July began in Philadelphia on July 4, 1777, during the first organized celebration of Independence Day.
The deviled crabs, crab cakes and other seafood products should be available sometime in the fall, he said.

I know we will disappoint some people because the crab products wont be available until the fall, but we keep telling people that love that product for 40 years that its worth the wait, Fay said. For the most part, this will be the first time people have been able to get any kind of Dickies Seafood products in over a year.

The exception was last November and December when the company produced cooked shrimp outside under tents in its parking lot and packaged it for sale at Kroger and Food Lion stores. It just flew off the shelves, Fay said.

We did it for the primary purpose of keeping our name out there, he said. It was also going to show our insurance company that we were doing our every effort we could to keep [our] business interruption claim as low as possible.

Fay thought the rebuilding process would have been completed in March.
A foundation dedicated to honoring and supporting first-responders, veterans and their families announced Friday that it has paid off the mortgage on the Hanover County home where Virginia State Police trooper Nathan-Michael Smith lived with his family before he was killed on duty while responding to a crash in Prince George County in 2015.

In observance of Independence Day, the Smith home is one of 19 owned by fallen first responder families across the country for which the Tunnel to Towers Foundation recently satisfied the mortgages on the houses.

A ceremony attended by state police and Tunnel to Towers representatives was held last week at the Smith family home to celebrate the occasion, which included a ribbon cutting and ceremonial key to the house.

I am brought to tears thinking about our home being paid off by the Tunnels to Towers Foundation, Smiths widow, Jennifer, said in a prepared statement. This was our first home together, a home we worked and prayed to get for years. When Nate passed it was devastating that he wouldnt get to live in the dream house we worked so hard to purchase.

Being able to say I dont have the burden of paying a monthly mortgage as a single parent is breathtaking, she added.
Its just the beginning of what will be a yearslong process. Legal sales in Virginia wont kick off until at least 2024, leaving recreational users three avenues to procure marijuana: the illicit market or illegal imports, gifts from other adults and the harvest of their own plants.

Medical marijuana users will continue to have access to the states dispensaries.

Your CBD owner Jennifer Elliot described significant enthusiasm during the seed distribution event Thursday. The event was supposed to start at noon, but a line had already begun to form by 8:30 a.m.

Due to the size of the event, an official for the shopping centers property management company began directing people away from the premises, telling them to wait in their vehicles for their turn to pick up seeds. Henrico County police were present to help with crowd control.

Elliot said the store was handing out six seeds, all legally donated, per person.

I think that Virginia has stepped up and that were going in the right direction, Elliot said. Our goal here is to make sure people that need it have access.
Victoria Zachary, a designer and an owner of Flowerama Richmond  a flower shop in Stratford Hills Shopping Center at the corner of Hathaway Road and Forest Hill Avenue  said the roadway project has affected her sales, particularly this year.

I think sales are down slightly this year, over the previous year, Zachary said, as people get more and more frustrated and find alternative routes to go around.

Drivers are also using the parking lot as a way to get through traffic faster, which Zachary said can be dangerous for customers and staff.

People are bypassing the parking lot or cutting through the parking lot, just not wanting to be out any longer and dealing with waiting in traffic, she said. Weve always had an issue with people cutting through the parking lot to go out on the other side and try to bypass. And then that just creates a hazard for employees and customers coming into the store.

Additionally, Zacharys store was hit with construction debris. No one was injured, but one of the stores windows was broken. With that situation and others, Zachary said her landlord has been more communicative than the city.
He said there was a very large percentage chance that the case would have ended in a hung jury, which he said would have meant the emotion seen in the courtroom Friday would have been played out 100-fold. Funk also called it significant progress that "tonight will be the first night Nashville has had a police officer in jail for shooting a Black man on duty."

I was not willing to risk not having a felony conviction, not having him off the force, not having him incarcerated, not having him be able to make a guilty plea where he conceded that he did in fact use deadly force that was not reasonably necessary, Funk said.

Delke, 27, submitted his resignation Thursday. He had been decommissioned, which means he had to turn over his gun but was able to work a desk job and still get paid.

After COVID-19 delays and pretrial back-and-forth, jury selection was slated to start next week . The trial was going to center on a handgun Hambrick was holding that Delke claims was pointed at him for a moment, which prosecutors dispute and video footage does not show.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Nearly 20 years after invading Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and hunt down al-Qaida, the U.S. military has vacated its biggest airfield in the country, advancing a final withdrawal that the Pentagon on Friday said will be completed by the end of August.

President Joe Biden had instructed the Pentagon to complete the military withdrawal by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, but the Pentagon now says it can finish the drawdown a little earlier. In fact, the drawdown is already largely completed and officials had said it could be wrapped up this weekend. But a number of related issues need to be worked out in coming weeks, including a new U.S. military command structure in Kabul and talks with Turkey on an arrangement for maintaining security at the Kabul airport, and so an official end to the pullout will not be announced soon.

A safe, orderly drawdown enables us to maintain an ongoing diplomatic presence, support the Afghan people and the government, and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for terrorists that threatens our homeland, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said.
More than 150 years later, there is a disturbing echo of this in the rants of a defeated American president to his unquestioning followers, some of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol in January to reverse an election result that was rooted in reality but inconsistent with their prejudices.

White outrage was affirmed by the local press  including the Daily Dispatch, an antecedent to the Richmond Times-Dispatch  in florid accounts laced with bigoted descriptions of Black people. Northern newspapers, too, oozed contempt for freshly freed people of color.

Said the Daily Dispatch in its holiday coverage in 1866, 15 months into the Union occupation, The Southern people, feeling that they have no part in the government of the country, have little disposition to participate in the national jubilee, and hence the Fourth of July in Richmond, so far as the white population were concerned, was a dies non  Latin, for a date that, in effect, does not exist.

Not so, however, with the freedmen and freedwomen, the Daily Dispatch said. It wrote that, They took complete possession of the day and of the city; the highways, the byways, and Capitol Square, were black with moving masses of darkeys, many of them armed and apparently ready for anything, belligerent or otherwise.
Sunday is Independence Day. Americans are planning to spend an estimated $9 billion on food, beer and wine this year celebrating the Fourth of July, according to the personal finance website WalletHub.com. The figure breaks down to $7.5 billion on food and more than $1.4 billion on beer and wine. Consider this: Every holiday, Americans consume 150 million hot dogs on July 4. With the pandemic and its restrictions scrubbing many festivities last year, Americans plan to embrace the holiday with gusto and make up for lost time. And that will be evident through travel: An estimated 47 million people are expected to travel between July 1 and July 5, AAA reports  and more than 90% of them will take to the road. This weekend is expected to have the highest auto-travel volume on record, surpassing 2019 levels. Travel is in full swing this summer, as Americans eagerly pursue travel opportunities theyve deferred for the last year-and-a-half, said Paula Twidale, senior vice president of AAA Travel. We saw strong demand for travel around Memorial Day and the kick-off of summer, and all indications now point to a busy Independence Day to follow. Wheres a good place to enjoy parties, parades and patriotism? The top five cities to celebrate the Fourth of July are New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis and Atlanta, with Washington, D.C., ranking eighth, WalletHub reports. Virginia Beach placed 34th; Norfolk, 51st; and Chesapeake, 58th. The Richmond region will offer its share of fireworks and festivities  check richmond.com for the areas happenings.
During the career day, volunteers gave students a tour of the office and an overview of the firm and different career opportunities within it. The students also had a chance to participate as jurors in two mock cases, hearing attorneys opening and closing statements and arguments, and then deliberating.

2 Roanoke graduates receive scholarshipsTwo recent Roanoke graduates have received scholarships from Virginia Theta of Alpha Delta Kappa sorority to continue their education with a goal of pursuing a degree in any related field of education. Arianna Rodgers of William Fleming High School and Samuel English of Patrick Henry High School will each receive $1,100 toward their college expenses in the fall.

Rogers plans to pursue a degree in school counseling for a career as a school social worker and will be attending Norfolk State Universitys School of Social Work.

English plans to pursue a degree in secondary education with a concentration in history and will be attending Virginia Commonwealth University.

Virginia Theta is a chapter of the International Alpha Delta Kappa Teachers Sorority that promotes excellence in education, altruism and world understanding. Over the past 12 years, Theta has awarded approximately $15,000 in scholarships to Roanoke City Public School graduates.
Freestanding stone chimneys  representative of what was left of the many abandoned and burned-out homes on park land  have come to be the iconic symbol of the organization and the monuments. On each memorial chimney, a plaque displays the surnames of families and landowners displaced from the mountains in that county.

If you go up in the park today, youll find quite a few chimneys still standing, Bill Henry, who founded the Blue Ridge Heritage Project, told me in 2017. The first chimney I came across in the backcountry was a very powerful experience. I didnt know the whole story back then. It was like, Wow, somebody lived here.

Once I learned about the people being evicted and the houses being burned  the chimneys left standing really had a lot of meaning to me, said Henry, a retired school teacher in the area who grew up in Fairfax County and regularly visited Shenandoah National Park as a child, but has no personal connection to the displaced families. The chimneys show the determination and spirit of the mountain people.
Anthony Troy and Verbena Askew wrote in their request for sanctions that the recall petition was a frivolous pleading ghost written by Anderson that was not well ground in fact nor warranted by existing law or good faith.

A hearing on that request will happen later.

Outside the courthouse Friday, Troy said the state constitution, which turned 50 this week, speaks for itself.

The people of Virginia voted for that constitution, they approved that constitution and they embraced that constitution. And the statutes  are clear, that the removal proceedings are not applicable to any other officer whose removal is guided by the constitution, Troy said.

He said the case has been time-consuming and draining for Lucas, but shes moving on.

Lucas didnt make a statement, but Troy said shed reiterate what shes said before: Read the (state) constitution.

Experts have said this is likely the first time voters have tested Virginias recall law against a state lawmaker.
The problem with some companies is they cant think past the next quarterly report.

The problem with some politicians is they cant think past the next election.

And that brings us to the recent report that said the birth rate in the United States last year fell by its sharpest rate since 1973. So much for all those predictions that said the pandemic lockdowns would inevitably lead to a baby boom.

Instead, it led to just the opposite. Nor is this is an isolated event, skewed by the pandemic. The precise numbers are, indeed, skewed by the pandemic, but the larger fact is that the birth rate in the United States has generally been falling for a long time.

Heres another stat keyed to 1973: That was the last year the fertility rate in the U.S. was above what demographics call the replacement rate by which one generation can fully replace another. (Demographers are kind of morbid.)

That replacement rate is 2.1 births per woman (2.1 and not 2.0 because, well, some kids die. Again, demographers are morbid but so is reality sometimes).
The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) needs to study and direct Vietnam Electricity (EVN) to issue regulations on the transmission and distribution system to ensure the stable operation of the power system amid abundant wind and solar power sources, said Tran Viet Ngai, Chairman of the Vietnam Energy Association.

He said the ministry should also develop energy storage systems (ESS), stored hydroelectricity to be synchronised with renewable energy development.

One of the difficulties to develop wind and solar power in the Draft Power Plan VIII is to ensure the construction of a synchronised and stable grid system. Projects that combine offshore wind power with green hydrogen production with a large enough scale bring a new approach for both domestic and export to international market, a viable solution that is applied and accelerated in many countries.

Nguyen Viet Anh, Vice President of the German-Vietnamese Innovative Network, said: Hydrogen will be an important foundation to provide stable and sustainable energy for Vietnam and an important foundation in National Power Planning VIII. However, the necessary condition here is to continue to expand and improve the existing infrastructure through international programmes and cooperation.

Green hydrogen is produced using renewable energy to provide electrolysed energy - separating water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, which is strongly developed to replace fossil fuels, serving the production, storage of electricity, industry, transportation, fertiliser production and chemicals.

According to analysts of Fitch Solutions, global annual hydrogen demand is forecast to increase from about 80 million tonnes in 2021 to 100 million tonnes by 2030. The green hydrogen sector could produce about 10 million tonnes per year by 2030 - up from the current 0.1 percent hydrogen market share.

The portfolio of green hydrogen projects reached 71 GW in February although there were no projects in the 2019-20 period and increased in the second quarter to 121GW, including 136 projects in the planning and development phase. The average investment is about 4.5 billion USD.

Global growth is being driven by Western Europe and Asia-Pacific, with these regions accounting for 82 percent of the above-mentioned green hydrogen projects. This is due to increasingly strict emissions regulations, the strong development of renewable energy with low electricity prices and "ambitious" decarbonisation targets.

Reaching the economic target of zero greenhouse emissions by the middle of this century will likely require the use of about 500 to 800 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year, a 5-7 times increase from today. By 2050, green hydrogen (and its derivatives) can account for 15-20 percent of the final energy demand, according to the Energy Transition Committee.

There are two factors that greatly affect the cost of producing green hydrogen, including the cost of input electricity, accounting for up to 80 percent and the cost of storage and transportation. Vietnam has world-class wind and solar power potential according to the figures outlined in the Draft Power Plan VIII, especially offshore wind power up to 475GW.

The country is located on international maritime routes with many seaports. These are favourable factors to attract foreign investment to develop offshore wind power projects and green hydrogen projects, exporting to potential markets such as Japan, the Republic of Korea and EU countries.

The combination of offshore wind power projects with green hydrogen also reduces the investment burden of the domestic transmission grid and maintains the systems stability through electricity storage by green hydrogen batteries, solving the challenges of electricity generation. The current guidelines set out in the Draft Power Master Plan VIII promote the development of renewable energy in particular and industries in general in a green and sustainable direction.

Resolution 55-NQ/TW dated February 11, 2020 of the Politburo has set the task of Performing technological research, developing a number of pilot projects for production and encouraging the use of hydrogen energy appropriately with the general trend of the world. The draft power plan VIII needs to be supplemented with goals and a roadmap for the development of offshore wind power with green hydrogen.

Currently, Vietnam has a number of investors interested in developing hydrogen, including Enterprize Energy Group (EE-UK) has proposed to the Government and the MoIT to combine the development of Thang Long offshore wind power project (in Binh Thuan province) with green hydrogen production.

Ian Hatton, the groups chairman, said: With the results of the survey, wind measurement for more than 12 consecutive months and the geology of the seabed off the coast of Binh Thuan province that EE Group has obtained, the use of wind turbines with large capacity to produce electricity combined with hydrogen through the seawater electrolysed system is very potential. Vietnam can fully use wind energy towards this goal, meeting domestic demand and exports.
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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Governments Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
FLORENCE, S.C.  People attending the 18th annual Spirit of Central event Wednesday evening got a sneak preview of the veterans nursing home under construction on National Cemetery Road.

Randy Godbold, Florence County veterans affairs officer, delivered the keynote address at the event. His presentation included several photos of the inside and outside of the nursing home.

Godbold said the nursing home was completely built but not yet open. He said the nursing home is looking for employees and had just hired a director.

He said each resident will have an individual room. Godbold said the nursing home would cost veterans around $65 per day with lower rates for veterans who have been determined to be disabled and free for veterans determined to be at least 70% disabled.

He said the home would be divided into 104 individual rooms divided into four sections. He said each section would feature a bistro area and a common area.

He added that the nursing home will feature a Purple Heart room, a gym, and a chapel He said he was working on a feature to replace a fountain that was canceled in the project.

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He also said the nursing home could open in September.
We love you, PC, we love you, several people in the crowd shouted during his pause.

For being able to be here to help. Thank you, Cockfield concluded, raised a hand and walked away from the lectern.

But not far before LeGrande Richardson with Florence School District Two (Hannah-Pamplico schools) corralled him for a handshake and pictures.

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Lots of pictures. Everybody wanted one of them posing with him.

It was a big surprise. I thank God for being able to be here this long  and Jesus, Cockfield said between photos. Some days were good and some were bad, but most were good, working hard and trying to keep the children safe.

Not a bad career for somebody who didnt actually apply for the job.

I was out of a job. And the principal of the school back then told my sister, What I was doing? and she said, Nothing And he said, Tell him to come out, I need him to do a favor for me and that was in 1975. I went to do that favor and Ive been in the school system ever since, he said.

In his years he has done a little bit of everything, he said  including a bit of teaching.
 "Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Imposes a Moratorium on Federal Executions; Orders Review of Policies and Procedures" | Main | New Federal Sentencing Reporter issue considers "After Trump: The Future of the Presidents Pardon Power" 

July 2, 2021

In final order list of of SCOTUS OT20, Justices grant cert on 924(c) matter and spar over summary reversal in capital case

Though we are now two days into July 2021, the US Supreme Court has delivered this morning a last jolt of October 2020 Term action with this lengthy order list that has a little something for all SCOTUS fans. For starters, there are nine grants of certiorari. The only criminal law grant is yet another debate over what qualifies as a "crime of violence" under federal statutory law. This time the issue concerns application of 924(c)'s added mandatory punishments for gun use in the case of United States v. Taylor, 20-1459, which formally presents this question:

Whether 18 U.S.C. 924(c)(3)(A)s definition of crime of violence excludes attempted Hobbs Act robbery, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1951(a).

In addition, there are lots of GVRs and statements concerning cert dispositions on free speech, religion, takings and qualified immunity issues. But nearly half of the 54-page order list is consumed with a per curiam summary reversal and dissent in the capital case of Dunn v. Reeves, 20-1084 (S. Ct. July 2, 2021). Here is how the 12-page majority opinion starts (with cites mostly removed):

Willie Johnson towed Matthew Reeves broken-down car back to the city after finding Reeves stranded on an Alabama dirt road. In payment for this act of kindness, Reeves murdered Johnson, stole his money, and mocked his dying spasms. Years after being convicted of murder and sentenced to death, Reeves sought state postconviction relief, arguing that his trial counsel should have hired an expert to develop sentencing-phase mitigation evidence of intellectual disability. But despite having the burden to rebut the strong presumption that his attorneys made a legitimate strategic choice, Reeves did not call any of them to testify. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals denied relief, stressing that lack of evidence about counsels decisions impeded Reeves efforts to prove that they acted unreasonably. On federal habeas review, the Eleventh Circuit held that this analysis was not only wrong, but indefensible. In an unpublished, per curiam opinion that drew heavily on a dissent from denial of certiorari, the Eleventh Circuit reinterpreted the Alabama courts lengthy opinion as imposing a simple per se prohibition on relief in all cases where a prisoner fails to question his counsel. It was the Eleventh Circuit, however, that went astray in its readiness to attribute error. Federal habeas courts must defer to reasonable state-court decisions, 28 U.S.C. 2254(d), and the Alabama courts treatment of the spotty record in this case was consistent with this Courts recognition that the absence of evidence cannot overcome the strong presumption that counsels conduct fell within the wide range of reasonable professional assistance.

Justice Sotomayor authored a 14-page dissent joined by Justice Kagan. (Justice Breyer also dissented, but without opinion.) Justice Sotomayor dissent ends this way:

Todays decision continues a troubling trend in which this Court strains to reverse summarily any grants of relief to those facing execution. See, e.g., United States v. Higgs, 592 U.S. ___ (2021) (emergency vacatur of stay and reversal); Shinn v. Kayer, 592 U.S. ___ (2020) (per curiam) (summary vacatur); Dunn v. Ray, 586 U.S. ___ (2019) (emergency vacatur of stay). This Court has shown no such interest in cases in which defendants seek relief based on compelling showings that their constitutional rights were violated. See, e.g., Johnson v. Precythe, 593 U.S. ___ (2021) (denying certiorari); Whatley v. Warden, 593 U.S. ___ (2021) (same); Bernard v. United States, 592 U.S. ___ (2020) (same). In Reeves case, this Court stops the lower court from granting Reeves petition by adopting an utterly implausible reading of the state courts decision. In essence, the Court turns deference, ante, at 7, into a rule that federal habeas relief is never available to those facing execution. I respectfully dissent.

July 2, 2021 at 10:04 AM | Permalink

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 New Federal Sentencing Reporter issue considers "After Trump: The Future of the Presidents Pardon Power" | Main | Reviewing a few Fourth of July postings (while awaiting Prez Biden clemency action to enhance liberty) 

July 2, 2021

Lots of recommended reading for a long weekend

A busy week has meant a lot of interesting stories and commentaries have piled up on my "to read" list. Fortunately, I have a long weekend to catch up. Here is a (only partial) list of pieces that seem worth checking out:

From the Albuquerque Journal, "It makes humane, fiscal sense to release nonviolent inmates"

From Business Insider, "4,000 Americans were sent home from prison during COVID. They repaired their lives, but now could be forced back to prison because of a ridiculous technicality."

From the Christian Science Monitor, "How race shaped the Souths punitive approach to justice"

From The Crime Report, "Time to End Crack-Cocaine Disparity Once and For All: Police Group"

From The Marshall Project, "Prisons Have a Health Care Issue  And It Starts at the Top, Critics Say"

From The Marshall Project, "Lost Opportunity, Lost Lives: During the pandemic, prison officials could have prevented sickness and death by releasing those who were most vulnerable to coronavirus and least likely to reoffend  older incarcerated people."

From Newsweek, "The End of Mass Incarceration Is Within Reach"

From New York, "Progressives Dont Need to Downplay Rising Homicides"

From the New York Times Magazine, "I Write About the Law. But Could I Really Help Free a Prisoner?"

From Politico, "Can Journalism Wean Itself Off the Cheap Clicks of Bad Crime Coverage?"

From the Texas Observer, "A Wrongful Execution in Texas Points to the Fallibility of the Death Penalty"

From the Washington Post, "Whats striking about Bidens crime plan? It actually focuses on reducing crime."

From The Washington Times, "Building off the First Step Act"

July 2, 2021 at 01:08 PM | Permalink

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(Getty Images)

Heavyweights Belgium and Italy face off tonight in an eagerly anticipated Euro 2020 quarter-final match.

The world's best team have lived up to their billing as they coasted through Group B with a perfect record before then dispatching holders Portugal in Seville with a fine strike from Thorgan Hazard followed by determined defending during the closing stages.

Victory came at a cost, though, with the fitness of Kevin De Bruyne and Eden Hazard to be closely monitored ahead of their trip to Munich.

Italy also impressed as they won Group A ahead of Wales without breaking sweat. However, Roberto Mancini's men were stretched by a determined Austria in their last-16 tie at Wembley - and could have been behind in the closing stages but for the intervention of VAR to rule out Marko Arnautovic's header.

Eventually, though, Italy ground out another result with goals in extra-time from Federico Chiesa and Matteo Pessina, before a rare breach of their defence. The Azzurri are unbeaten through 31 games, a new national record - one which will be put to the test against Belgium.

Where to watch Belgium vs Italy

TV channel: The match will be televised on BBC One for free, with kick-off at 8pm BST.

Live stream: UK viewers will be able to watch the match online for free via the BBC iPlayer.

Live coverage: Standard Sport will bring you all the match action, analysis and reaction.

Read our dedicated match preview here.

Read More

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Willy Bardon on 14 June 2021 in the court in Douai, France before the appeal hearing over the 2002 murder of Elodie Kulik

A French court on Monday sentenced a man to 30 years in prison for the rape and murder of a young woman almost two decades ago, in a case that has long gripped and shocked the country.

An appeals court in Douai in northern France confirmed the earlier 30 year jail sentence for Willy Bardon handed down by a lower court in 2019 but, crucially, added a conviction for murder as well as rape and abduction.

Bank employee Elodie Kulik, 24, was kidnapped, raped, strangled and her corpse then burned in January 2002 in Tertry, 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Saint-Quentin in the Aisne region.

In court for the verdict dressed in a black shirt and with head shaven, Bardon closed his eyes as the verdict was read out.

Since he was arrested in 2013, Bardon has always maintained his innocence in the murder of Kulik, a position he reaffirmed in court on Thursday. "I never took part in this horrific crime," he said.

But the victim's father Jacky said after the verdict that as in the initial verdict "he (Bardon) did not succeed in deceiving anyone".

Addressing his dead daughter, Jacky Kulik added: "I kept my promise.... It is the end of my struggle."

Bardon's lawyer Gabriel Dumenil accused the court of ignoring defence arguments and said his client now intended to take the case to the Court of Cassation, France's highest court of appeal.

When he was initially convicted in December 2019, Bardon swallowed pesticide in a dramatic suicide bid in the courtroom and spent five days in hospital.

Before dying, Kulik managed to call emergency services and the harrowing 26-second recording was the key piece of evidence in the trial.

Another suspect Gregory Wiart, whose DNA was found at the scene, died in 2003. But six witnesses told the court in the initial trial they recognised the voice of Willy Bardon on the tape.

eva-sjw/har
By Sangmi Cha

SEOUL (Reuters) - Fighting disease, death and disillusionment, members of South Koreas rapidly dwindling sisterhood of surviving "comfort women" say they are facing the twilight of their lives with diminished camaraderie and will to wage political battles.

Only 14 of the 240 registered survivors of Japan's wartime brothels are still alive in South Korea, nearly half the number who were alive just three years ago.

One major organisation that advocated for them was brought down by a corruption scandal last year, and in April a South Korean court dismissed a case some of the women brought against Tokyo.

That has left the women more divided than ever over whether to keep seeking greater compensation and contrition from the Japanese government, an issue that has helped sour relations between Seoul and Tokyo and brought intense personal scrutiny and controversy.

I just wish I could live at peace for one single day, said Lee Ok-sun, 91, who has been bedridden for years.

Under a 2015 deal Tokyo issued an official apology and provided 1 billion yen ($9.3 million) to a fund that helps comfort women victims, with both sides promising to "irreversibly" end the dispute, but South Korea effectively backed out of the deal after some victims said they had been overlooked.

Some historians estimate up to 200,000 Korean girls and women were forced to provide sex to Japanese troops during the colonial era, sometimes under the pretext of employment or to pay off a relative's debt.

The experiences of the women should not be forgotten, said Cho Young-kun, a manager of the House of Sharing, which has served as a shelter for elderly survivors for 26 years.

"Most of the grandmothers were born in the 1920s and just over a dozen remain nationwide," he said. "I'm afraid such accounts will vanish in the mists of history when the remaining ones pass away."

After over eight decades, the three women who spoke to Reuters still fought back tears when remembering their past.

Story continues

"They treated Koreans worse than a dog. They kicked and beat me up," Kang Il-chul, 92, said as she displayed scars on the back of her head.

'ENDING THE FIGHT'

The comfort women  a euphemism for women forced into brothels in World War 2 - have been a fixture of South Korean politics since Kim Hak-sun first came forward in 1991 to publicly testify of her experience.

Since then, victims and activists have lobbied for compensation and apologies from the Japanese government.

A 1996 UN human rights report concluded that the women had been military sexual slaves. Japan contests that finding, and the 2015 compensation agreement between Japan and South Korea did not address the issue of whether coercion was a policy of imperial Japan.

In 2018 the South Korean government shut down a fund created under the 2015 deal and vowed to pursue a more victim-oriented approach, a move Japan said threatened the two countries relations.

Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment for this article.

And some say the fight is far from over. Lee Ok-sun denounced South Korea for participating in the Tokyo Olympics.

"Don't go. What's the point of going? They shouldn't go," said Lee, who said she was forcibly taken for Japan's brothels at age 16.

Prominent activist and victim Lee Yong-soo, 92, was among those rejecting the 2015 deal, vowing to seek a judgment from the International Court of Justice.

I wish time would wait for me, but I know it won't," Lee said. "I am determined not to die before I resolve this... I need to be alive as much as 200 years to resolve this.

(Reporting by Sangmi Cha; Writing by Josh Smith; Editing by Gerry Doyle)
(PHOTO: Pixibo)

SINGAPORE  We have all increased the amount of shopping online since the Coronavirus outbreak, which also means that we have all bought something online only to find that when it arrives, it is totally the wrong size, or the style actually makes us uncomfortable. So what can we do about it? When it came to pre-COVID shopping, we dropped into a store to try something on, right? But if youre shopping at an online-only brand, what do you do?

This is where the new company Pixibo has stepped in to help. Instead of ordering - and paying for - three different sizes of a garment and then having to send it back and fight for a refund on the two sizes that dont fit, Pixibo will basically do it for you. You choose the items on a particular website you want to buy, but instead of shipping them to your home, you have them sent to the Pixibo Fit Centre, where you can try them on. You only need to pay for the item you actually want to buy, i.e. the one that fits. If you decide you dont want any of the items, then Pixibo will organise to return them to the original retailer.

(PHOTO: Pixibo)

We dont pay upfront to try on a pair of jeans in a mall, so why do we do it online? While we are all well versed with the benefits of e-commerce, buying and selling fashion online has always come with the added challenge of trying to get the fit right without trying on the product. For close to two decades, the online fashion industry has operated on a pay upfront model, explains Rohit Kumar, CEO and Co-Founder of Pixibo.

Pay full price, get a bunch of clothes sent to your home. Then, if it doesnt suit you or doesnt fit you, maybe you can apply for a refund? [But] youll have to check if you are eligible for a refund. And [the retailers are] also hoping that perhaps you wont go through the hassle of returns and end up just keeping it even if youre not going to wear it.

(PHOTO: Pixibo)

This is unnatural. Physical retail store operators wouldnt think of charging shoppers before going into the fitting rooms. Try Before You Buy (TBYB) changes all of that. We wanted to create a checkout product that was purpose-built for the needs of online fashion shopping, an inherently physical/experience-based activity.

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According to Mr Kumar, the primary benefit for shoppers is the ability to pay only after they know for sure if the product fits them and suits them. This is a game-changer for online fashion and removes the risk and stress out of buying apparel online.

Pixibo's Try Before You Buy (TBYB) service is the exact midpoint between online fashion and offline retail. All of the things we love about online fashion combined with all of the things we love about offline retail. But most of all, it's a coalition. It's a coalition of like-minded brands, technology companies, shipping and logistics companies, payment providers and mall operators, Mr Kumar explains.

On top of the convenience and benefits to the shoppers, the Pixibo TBYB system also has a sustainable component integrated into the way it functions.

(PHOTO: Pixibo)

The fashion industry as a whole is incredibly aware of the very serious environmental challenges that face us. Most of the leading brands in this sector are already making great strides in reducing their impact on the environment through various measures from reducing water consumption at the production stage to all the way down the chain by encouraging resale and building on the circular economy, says Mr Kumar.

As a B2B enabler for online fashion brands, we play a small but important role in reducing the CO2 emissions per order. For example, all Try Before You Buy orders are consolidated and fulfilled by Pixibo, eliminating last-mile trips. Weve also completely removed single-use plastics from our packaging, switching to reusable cloth bags instead.

TBYB orders move from a Pixibo warehouse to a Pixibo Fit Centre; on a per order basis, we reduce CO2 emissions by about 70 per cent.

To try the Pixibo TBYB service, go to wearepixibo.com/trybeforeyoubuy. Brands include Tove & Libra, Twosisters, eco brand Kibo, and Peachi. The Pixibo Fit Centre is located at #02-42, The Centrepoint, 176 Orchard Road, Singapore 238843.
With more than 300 Storm Lake students taking part in summer school, Cole said, those college students have been invaluable, working side by side with district teachers.

They're also helping meet students' emotional needs. Four Buena Vista social work students are among those on the summer staff, sitting in on morning social/emotional sessions in which students are free to talk about whatever's bothering them.

"Kids are suffering from some mental health issues that they don't know how to deal with," Cole said.

It stems from many sources: the disruption of their normal school routine, being separated from one another, watching family members get sick with COVID-19. Cole said school counselors noticed increased signs of anxiety, depression and quick-to-anger behaviors among kids as this past school year progressed. It's one reason why Cole expects to use federal COVID relief funds to pay for expanded summer school sessions and the salaries of those who teach them for a couple more years.

"We really think this year and the following year are probably going to be the toughest years to get through," she said.
Harrison had called his girlfriend to pick him up outside the bar, and when she arrived at about 1 a.m., Canady punched her in the face, telling her it was revenge for Harrison assaulting a friend's girlfriend, court documents said. Canady told his friend in a recorded jail phone call that he would assault Harrison.

After punching Harrison's girlfriend, court documents say, Canady told Evans to get a gun. Harrison pulled Canady away from the woman, and the two began fighting. As the fight continued into the street, Canady continued to punch Harrison and got him on the ground. Court documents say that while Harrison was on the ground, Evans fired the first shot, striking him in the flank. Standing above Harrison, Evans fired a second, fatal shot into his chest. Canady continued to punch Harrison in the face and kick him in the head after the second shot.

Evans and Canady then fled on foot. Harrison, 22, of Sioux City, died later at a Sioux City hospital.

Police arrested Evans and Canady hours after the shooting.

Evans, of Sioux City, has pleaded not guilty of first-degree murder, going armed with intent, possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance and failure to affix a drug tax stamp. His trial is scheduled for Sept. 14. He remains in the Woodbury County Jail on a $1 million bond.

At the time of his arrest, Canady was on probation from a September 2019 shooting at Riverview Apartments. He pleaded guilty in March to one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm and received a suspended five-year prison sentence and three years probation.

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"We are aware of the litigation and are in the process of reviewing it," Kollbaum said in an emailed statement.

Doug Phillips, a Sioux City attorney representing the city and Hegenbarth, declined to comment.

The suit stems from a Feb. 9, 2020, incident in which Cundiff's roommate Kyiah Kastner created a video showing roommate Ellie Thompson putting dried skin shavings from her heel into a bag of shredded cheese belonging to a fourth roommate. The video, as well as a video and pictures showing the roommate, unaware of the skin, eating the cheese, were posted on Snapchat. Kastner later admitted to school officials she shaved Thompson's skin and put it in the cheese bag, the lawsuit said.

An initial report compiled by NCC administrators, based in part on statements from other students, indicated Cundiff was involved in the incident with Kastner and Thompson. The college fined the three $100, moved them into separate dorm rooms and put them on notice they'd be evicted from on-campus housing in case of another violation. Cundiff also was stripped of her role as a student ambassador.
NEW YORK (AP)  Alvin Bragg, a former top deputy to New Yorks attorney general, was poised to become Manhattans first Black district attorney and to take over the investigation of former President Donald Trump after his closest opponent conceded in the Democratic primary.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  A Charter Communications worker was killed in a South Carolina shooting and standoff that also wounded two public workers repairing a sewer main, a deputy and a woman inside the home where the shooter was barricaded, authorities said.

The man who shot the workers fixing the sewer, 45-year-old Shannon Earl Smith, died from at least one gunshot wound at the hospital shortly after the standoff ended Thursday around 5 p.m., authorities said.

The cable TV worker killed and the woman wounded were inside Smith's Spartanburg home during the standoff where officers also fired shots, said Greenville County Sheriff's spokesman Lt. Ryan Flood, whose agency was asked to investigate because it was not involved in the incident.

The deputy was shot trying to get into the home after the workers were wounded, authorities said.

The public workers, deputy and woman in the home are all expected to survive, investigators said.
State and federal wildlife authorities are seeking who is responsible for cutting the head and paws off a grizzly bear that may have drowned and washed up on a gravel bar in the Yellowstone River north of Gardiner in mid-June.

It could have been a purposeful take, or half innocent not knowing about the illegality, said Kevin Frey, FWP wildlife management specialist based in Bozeman. Theres a lot of interest in having the skull or claws off them.

Possession of grizzly bear parts, since it is protected under the Endangered Species Act, is a violation of federal law. That means investigators from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are involved.

The 25-year-old male bear was a known Yellowstone National Park resident, having been captured and tagged with the number 394.

Gardiner sculptor George Bumann heard about the dead bear from a rafting guide and boated to the site to take measurements for his artwork. On June 11, he posted on his website a blog about the bear, along with several photos of its claws, paws and worn-down canine teeth, taking care to not identify where the bear was located.
NEW YORK (AP)  Companies give perks to their employees all the time. Many top executives at Fortune 500 companies have access to a corporate jet for personal use, a company apartment, or an expense account for fancy meals. Even lower-level employees regularly get access to perks like tuition reimbursement or cash to join a gym.
President Joe Biden will hold a naturalization ceremony Friday at the White House in which 21 immigrants will become citizens as the administration pushes for more pathways to citizenship.

An administration official said Biden would use the moment to call for the option of citizenship for immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, for foreign-born people who have temporary protected status due to strife in their birth countries and for farm workers. The official was not authorized to publicly discuss the upcoming ceremony and insisted on anonymity.

Immigration has been a political flashpoint as Biden has sought to renew visa and refugee programs that were cut or suspended during the Trump administration.

In February, Biden and congressional Democrats proposed a major immigration overhaul that included an eight-year pathway to citizenship for the roughly 11 million people living in the United States illegally. Republican lawmakers blocked the effort and have criticized the administration for the rise in people attempting to cross the southern border without visas.
SUQUAMISH, Wash. (AP)  The children of a Native American man killed by police in Washington state two years ago are suing, saying his death was unnecessary.

Stonechild Chiefstick, a member of Montanas Chippewa Cree tribe who had close ties to the Suquamish Tribe in Washington, was shot and killed while attending an early Independence Day celebration in the city of Poulsbo on July 3, 2019.

He had reportedly been menacing people with a screwdriver at the crowded event. When officers moved in to arrest him, a scuffle ensued. Chiefstick scrambled away, and the lead officer, Craig Keller, shot and killed him from about 9 feet away. The encounter lasted about 13 seconds and occurred among people who had laid out blankets to watch a fireworks display.

Kitsap County Prosecutor Chad Enright declined to charge Keller, finding the shooting justified and citing witnesses who said Chiefstick lunged toward the officer with the screwdriver in his hand. Chiefstick, 39, had methamphetamine and alcohol in his system when he died, according to the medical examiner.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP)  Rhode Island is poised to become the first state to authorize so-called harm reduction centers where people dealing with addiction can take heroin and other illegal drugs under the supervision of medical professionals.

Legislation cleared the state General Assembly Thursday creating a two-year pilot program for the centers, which are also referred to as safe injection sites or supervised injection sites.

The Senate-approved bill now heads to Democratic Gov. Dan McKee after the state House of Representatives approved the measure earlier this week. The Democrat has said he'll review the proposal when it reaches his desk.

Having a place where someone can save them from an overdose and where there are people offering them the resources they need for treatment is a much better alternative to people dying alone in their homes or their cars, state Sen. Joshua Miller, the bills sponsor, said in a statement.

Canada is among at least 10 countries that allow the facilities, but none exist in the U.S. Assembly leaders said their bill would make Rhode Island the first state to authorize such a pilot program.
This is all unprecedented, said Jamie Holt, lead fisheries technician for the Yurok Tribe. Where do you go from here? When do you start having the larger conversation of complete unsustainability?

Near the rivers source, some of the farmers who are seeing their lives upended by the same drought say a guarantee of less water  but some water  each year would be better than the parched fields they have now. Some worry problems in the basin are being blamed on a way of life they also inherited.

I know turning off the project is easy, said Tricia Hill, a fourth-generation farmer. But sometimes the story that gets told ... doesnt represent how progressive we are here and how we do want to make things better for all species. This single-species management is not working for the fish  and its destroying our community and hurting our wildlife.

DuVals daughter dreams of taking over the family farm someday. But DuVal isnt sure he and his wife, Erika, can hang onto the land if things dont change.

We had a plan on how were going to grow our farm and to be able to send my daughters to a good college, said DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association. And that plan just unravels further and further with every bad water year.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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It is not easy to stand something up like this quickly, and do it right, but I think you can see that this is a place where kids can be healthy and safe," Becerra said of the Pomona facility.

The government set up the temporary shelters this spring as tens of thousands of children crossed the border alone. Of the 14 centers that opened, two have been shuttered because they did not meet government standards; others have been closing as more children are released to family in the U.S. or to facilities with higher levels of care.

While the emergency shelters are widely considered an improvement over border holding facilities packed with kids, the Biden administration is facing increasing pressure to address concerns that migrant children have been languishing in the unlicensed centers rather than being quickly reunited with their families in the United States, causing anxiety and panic attacks.

Republicans say the administration was caught flat-footed by the situation at the border and that President Joe Bidens immigration policies have encouraged unaccompanied children to come. Nearly 19,000 children traveling alone were picked up along the border in March, by far the highest month on record.
A study chronicled by The Cedar Raids Gazettes Erin Jordan this week found that people headed out to Iowa and Minnesota lakes are willing to travel farther for clean water. The analysis of social media photos found that lake goers were willing to travel 56 miles farther for every 1 meter increase in water clarity.

Its latest evidence that clean water attracts tourism and tourism dollars. In Iowa and six surrounding Midwestern states, outdoor recreation generates $880 billion in spending and 7.6 million jobs, according to the Outdoor industry Association.

But Iowa suffers from persistent water quality problems. Nitrates and phosphorous flowing mostly from cropland foul Iowa waterways and, in particular, feed algae blooms in lakes that can spawn dangerous toxins. In 2020, half of Iowas state park beaches posted at least one swim warning and a smaller number of lakes had several weeks of advisories.

Republicans who have controlled much of state government in recent years have been reluctant to take on Iowas water challenges in any meaningful way. The states voluntary Nutrient Reduction Strategy has not received enough buy-in from farmers to significantly reduce polluted runoff.
On Friday, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed  as expected  a Republican-sponsored return-to-work bill that would require North Carolina to withdraw early from two federal pandemic relief unemployment benefit programs.

Those programs pay a $300 weekly federal benefit to eligible North Carolinians. They are set to expire Sept. 6.

The latest version of SB116 also makes permanent changes to work-search requirements that significantly stiffen eligibility criteria, such as a claimant must respond within 48 hours of an employers interview request.

Cooper said he vetoed Senate Bill 116 in part because the programs are set to last just eight more weeks, and in part because the state has "among the stingiest (state unemployment benefits) in the country."

The bill would bar the N.C. Division of Employment Security from authorizing or administering the $300 federal UI payments. The legislation would not go into effect until 30 days after it becomes law.

"Unemployment is declining with more people getting vaccinated and into the workforce as North Carolina has strengthened work-search requirements for those receiving benefits," Cooper said. "The federal help that this bill cuts off will only last a few more weeks, and it supplements North Carolinas state benefits."
The program displays the year-to-date roadway fatality count for Iowa, as well as a conversation-starting message related to highway safety. Corresponding social media and blog posts that give a back story to the messages also will be moved to Fridays. The change to Friday will catch travelers on the second-highest fatal crash day of the week and leads into the weekend, which statistically features the highest fatal day in Iowa of Saturday and the third-highest day of Sunday (tied with Monday) based on data from 2010-20, Steve Gent, traffic and safety bureau director, said.

The move to Friday will catch both weekday commuter traffic, as well as travelers who may be heading out of town for weekend activities. Another change in the new Roadside Chat program is more active encouragement of public suggestions that could be used on the highway message boards and in social media and blog posts, Gent said. Interested Iowans may go to https://zerofatalitiesiowa.com/roadsidechat.aspx

DEMOCRATS SLAM NEW LAWS: A trio of Statehouse Democrats on Thursday criticized a number of new state laws that took effect July 1 as the product of a divisive and partisan agenda promoted by Gov. Kim Reynolds and majority GOP legislators during the 2021 session.
Three judges on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued Friday's decision. They said it's clear from federal law that Congress balanced wide-ranging economic, energy-security, and geopolitical implications and that the wording of the law reflects a compromise, not simply a desire to maximize ethanol production at all costs. They concluded Congress did not intend to allow ethanol blends higher than 10% to be widely sold year-round. They said the EPA overstepped its authority.

The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the trade group for the petroleum industry that challenged the EPA decision, said the court simply followed government's interpretation of the law in effect for 30 years.

There is no ambiguity in statute and the previous administrations reinterpretation overstepped the will of Congress, said AFPM President and CEO Chet Thompson.

The Iowa Corn Growers Association said it will continue to work with the Biden administration, Congress and state officials to maintain consumer access to E15 year-round.

"It does not make sense to reinstate barriers that could inhibit market access to a cleaner-burning fuel choice that combats climate change, said Carl Jardon, a farmer from Randolph, Iowa, and president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association.
According to Career Academy principal Katie Towler, the school district partners with several area businesses while offering a variety of internships.

Our aim is to allow students to experience a career path that interests them, she said. An internship in a particular field may be a perfect fit for the student and thats fine. Or it may turn out to be something that gives them second thoughts. Finding out a career pathway isnt the right fit saves our students both time and money down the road.

After discussing the internship program with McWilliams, teacher Anthony Gaul discovered his student had a mind for mechanics.

I knew Cale had the ambition and a strong work ethic, Gaul said. Becoming a prefabricator turned out to be something that Cale really wanted to do.

Thompson Electric prefabrication manager Corey Floyd nodded his head in agreement.

During the school semester, I worked out a schedule that fit with Cales school schedule, he said. Cale would come to the shop and learn through experience what a prefabricator does.

Floyd said this isnt a new effort by Thompson Electric.
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP)  The families of nearly 200 soldiers have welcomed their loved ones home in Sioux Falls following a long deployment in the Horn of Africa.

Family members were reunited at Augustana Universitys Elmen Center Thursday afternoon.

The 196th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade was in Djbouti, Africa, for 10 months. And, a lot can happen in that time.

Its great, Im here with my daughter who I just met for the first time and my wife, 1st Lt. Andrew Hanson said. My wonderful, beautiful wife.

Hanson wasn't the only one who met his child for the first time. A number of soldiers in the unit came home to babies born while they were overseas, KELO-TV reported.

Its great, I get to meet my daughter for the first time, Chief Warrant Officer David Goodwin said.

Its a relief, Im happy. No better feeling, said Goodwin's wife, Beth.

The soldiers say they are looking forward to some down time to relax with their families.
CEDAR RAPIDS -- Pareen Mhatre has lived in Iowa for nearly 21 years. But as she enters her final year at the University of Iowa, the biomedical engineering major fears she will have to win a lottery to stay in the United States.

Even if I identify myself as an Iowan, I lack the sense of permanence and security, Mhatre said Thursday.

She was just 4 months old when her parents brought her from India to Iowa City so they could attend the UI. For most of her life, Mhatre has been on an H4 visa as a dependent of someone holding a U.S. visa. However, because shes 21 and aging out of the immigration system, Mhatre must start the process of applying for an F1 student visa and then an H1B work visa, which is essentially a lottery system.

Our existence in the country we think of as our home shouldn't come down to luck, Mhatre told a U.S. House panel during a hearing on the introduction of bipartisan legislation, the American Children Act, proposed to protect documented dependents of long-term non-immigrant visa holders.

The current legal immigration system has disadvantaged children like her, Mhatre and members of groups advocating for Indian Americans told representatives, because once they turn 21 they lose their dependent status and must start the immigration process all over again.
He entered the Stuck at Prom scholarship contest because he likes art and dislikes English.

I didnt have to write an essay for this one, he said, smiling. Im a creative person. Im a good student, but English is my worst subject.

Caseys parents encouraged him early on to apply for scholarships. He graduated from Jesup High in May and will attend Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the fall where hell study ministry and leadership. Private college is an expensive endeavor, and Tom and Kay Alferink left it to their son to find scholarships to help pay for it.

Kay Alferink didnt know Casey was working on his Duck Tape tux until he was well into the process. When she saw his work, she was astonished.

Ive always known he was artistic, but this blew my mind, she said. Its so detailed and colorful. He worked so hard on it, and Im so proud of him.

Hundreds of students across the country submitted photos and videos of their Duck prom designs. A panel of judges narrowed the field to 10 finalists based on workmanship, originality, use of colors, accessories and use of Duck brand duct tape.
In Iowa, its never too early for a presidential campaign.

That much has been clear in 2021 as potential Republican candidates have been laying the groundwork in Iowa for possible campaigns, even while more than half of their base continues to mistakenly believe their partys candidate was the rightful winner of the last one.

The 2024 Iowa caucuses are more than two-and-a-half years away, and yet here were Nikki Haley and Tom Cotton in Iowa this past week. And while this wonderful state has many terrific experiences to offer, Haley and Cotton were not here to see the sights or hit the Pizza Ranch buffet.

Haley, a former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Cotton, a U.S. senator from Arkansas, both appeared at state party fundraisers this past week: Haley in West Des Moines and Cotton in Sioux Center.

And the early-worn trail will remain busy; later this month, former Vice President Mike Pence, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem  each possible 2024 Republican presidential candidates  are scheduled to appear at an event hosted by the Iowa faith-based organization The Family Leader.
America is back, President Biden announced repeatedly in meeting with allies in Europe. The question, of course, is back for what? Biden has sensibly insisted that we must build back better at home and abroad. Our neighbors to the south in Latin America offer a clear opportunity to show that is true. Now more than ever, it is time for a new Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America.

Donald Trump had little interest in Latin America, other than labeling its refugees as terrorists, drug dealers, and rapists. He reversed the initial steps Obama took to move to better relations with Cuba. He doubled down on crippling sanctions, illegal under international law, on Venezuela, and pushed to overturn the president of the country.

Biden has both an opportunity and an imperative to offer better relations. Latin America has been battered by the economic collapse accompanying the pandemic. Poverty has soared as has the death toll of the coronavirus, over 500,000 dead in Brazil alone.

Now elections promise to bring a new generation of progressive leaders to power across the hemisphere. Peru has led the way with the election of Pedro Castillo, running on a populist agenda accusing the mining barons of looting and promising to tax them to invest in health care and education.
This piece was originally published on Just Security, an online forum for analysis of U.S. national security law and policy.

Trumps eyes and ears took a pounding in court on Thursday with a 15-count indictment that spanned tax fraud, grand larceny, conspiracy, and more. The 73-year-old accountant who, it has been said, knows essentially where every penny goes regarding the Trump Organization, took a beating and will now have some big decisions to make that will impact how he chooses to live the rest of his life and how other members of his family may live theirs. And then there is the matter of Allen Weisselbergs loyalty to the head of the Trump Organization, the entity that was also indicted yesterday, and the potential impact the chief financial officers full cooperation may have on the public life of former President Donald Trump.

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Undoubtedly, after seeing the indictment filed by the Manhattan district attorney and New York state attorney general, Weisselbergs first question to his legal defense team was: How much jail time am I looking at? It is that question that may shape the future of all of the associated individuals and organizations. It requires peering not only into the current charges and the language of the indictment, however. It also requires knowing what the indictment may signal about prosecutors next steps in ratcheting up their pressure.

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While the number of counts in the indictment (15) sounds menacing, the only real numbers that count are those that drive the sentencing guidelines calculations. And that is why there are a surplus of numbers referenced in the indictment. The amounts of income that Weisselberg received and evaded reporting to the taxing authorities and included in the indictment charges are one thing. The cumulative totals of income received and unreported plus the total taxes evaded on the federal, state, and New York City level will be counted and then referenced in the sentencing guidelines to arrive at a baseline sentencing exposure level, usually calculated in months to serve in prison for discussion at the sentencing hearing.

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Whatever the baseline figure is will then be adjusted upward and downward and therein lies the rub and why Weisselberg has a difficult hand. He has three options:

(1) fight the charges and risk conviction after trial (most likely two to six years or higher in state prison),

(2) plead guilty but do not cooperate with the prosecutors (likely as much as a year in state prison),

(3) plead guilty and cooperate (likely probation and payment of civil fines).

Under option 2, Weisselberg can obtain a pretty significant reduction if he falls on his sword and makes a full admissionacceptance of responsibility. But that still likely leaves him with some jail time to serve, which is why the prosecutors charged him with what they did.

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The only other substantive reduction to sentence left Weisselberg would then be through door No. 3: full cooperation with the ongoing investigation and prosecution of all crimes associated with the Trump Organization and by those officials associated with it. Should the erstwhile CFO choose this option and in fact fully and truthfully testify as to where all the bodies are located, then the accountant might skate in terms of jail time. He would still likely be on probation and would also be looking at significant back taxes and penalties, but he and his family would have avoided any risk of Rikerssomething that other Trump executives may well have to endure.

A leading expert and former federal and New York state prosecutor, Daniel R. Alonso, told us:

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These are the kinds of dollar amounts that ordinarily carry jail time in Manhattan courts. If he pleads guilty and cooperates, he has an excellent chance of a probationary sentence. If he goes to trial and is convicted, it is very likely that he would be sentenced to state prison timeat least a term of 13 but more likely 26 years or higher. And if he pleads guilty without cooperating, it will depend on the judge, but I would think any judge would be hard-pressed not to mete out at least some incarceration on a case involving $900,000 in fraud. If hes able to persuade the judge that the amount really shouldnt be that high, then perhaps he has a better chance. The DAs decision to charge fraud against the IRS was brilliant in that it made the case about much higher dollar figures, and therefore, much higher likelihood of incarceration.

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What are other factors that Weisselberg must now consider?

Strength of Case Going to Trial

Count if you will the number of times the indictment uses the word conceal up unto the final sentence. Concealment is the embodiment of intent when it comes to tax fraud. The prosecution must be able to provide evidence of intentthat Weisselberg willfully acted in a manner to evade the tax laws. Evidence of intent is found in overt acts taken by the tax evader to conceal or secrete, and are defined in a seminal federal criminal tax case called Spies v. United States (pronounced Speez). The Supreme Court found in that case that overt acts of intent such as maintaining a double set of books and records, submitting false invoices, falsifying records, disguising payments off the books, and the like make up what has become known as Spies type evasions of intent.

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The New York indictment appears to cover many of these examples of intent. What is particularly damaging in my opinion is the reference to an internal set of spreadsheets or records that document the actual total receipt of compensation not captured by the wage statements (W-2 forms) prepared and issued to the employee and the tax agencies. This recording of off-the-books compensation that is then omitted from the W-2 occurs time and time again: the use of Mercedes-Benz vehicles by both Mr. and Mrs. Weisselberg, the rent-free apartment in Manhattan, the payment of utilities and garage space for parking, the purchase of big-screen television sets, carpeting and furniture for the Weisselbergs personal residences, and the payment of private school tuition in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from the coffers of the Trump Organization as well as from Donald Trumps personal account for the Weisselbergs grandchildren.

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Allen Weisselberg not only received off-the-books compensation in the hundreds of thousands of dollars as part of his annual salary of $940,000, but he was also the person responsible for the preparation of the Trump Organization books, records, and payroll accounting to track all compensation. The free apartment, for example, was not booked in the Trump Organizations general ledger as employee compensation but was instead labeled and deducted as rent expense in the general ledger. The indictment pinpoints one occasion where Weisselberg directed a staff member in the accounting department to remove the notation Per Allen Weisselberg from the entries in Donald J. Trumps Detail General Ledger relating to tuition payments paid on Weisselbergs behalf for tuition to a private school.

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In short, this kind of evidence suggests a very strong case for the prosecution.

Potential Criminal Cases Against Other Weisselberg Family Members

Prosecutors conspicuously made references throughout the indictment to other Weisselberg family members who received what appears to be untaxed benefits. This includes Weisselbergs wife who was provided her own Mercedes-Benz as well as furniture and carpeting for private residences. Did she know that these benefits were untaxed? Did she willfully and knowingly sign a false joint tax return? Does Allen want to take a chance that his wife will not be prosecuted?

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What about Weisselbergs son Barry who ran the Trump Wollman skating rink and whose son was the beneficiary of the private school tuition payments? Did Barry report the benefits on his tax return? What about his rent-free apartment? Does he have some criminal exposure? Does Allen want to take a chance on that too? He would be well advised to avoid those risks especially after the prosecutors have now issued these public signals.

Potential Additional Charges That Could Be Brought in Superseding Indictment(s)

What if the initial indictment is just the tip of the iceberg? Prosecutors obviously have witnesses that can bring the internal records of true compensation to life in the courtroom. Are witnesses also available to testify about the rumored doctoring of Trump Organization financial statements wherein assets were inflated or minimized depending on the circumstances, such as application of a business loan, where it would be helpful to maximize the value of the asset, or the reporting of property taxes, where the lower the property value, the lower the taxes?

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A strong indication that prosecutors may have that kind of weapon is the indictments reference to Unindicted Co-Conspirator #1, who CNN reports is Jeff McConney, the Trump Organizations longtime controller. McConney reportedly testified before the special grand jury, for which he was granted immunity under New York state law.

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Whats the potential risk to Weisselberg from any such additional charges? Submission of false financial statements to a financial institution for the purposes of obtaining a business loan could provide the basis for bank fraud charges, which contain significant sentencing exposure. Submission of false property values to artificially lower property taxes could bring mail or wire fraud charges, which also contain significant sentencing exposure.

What if prosecutors determine the entire Trump Organization operated as a criminal enterprise and brought racketeering charges against those responsible, which could come with that category of charges? Such counts, under New Yorks little RICO law, contain a maximum statutory exposure of 25 years and have weakened the knees of many a Mafia capo!

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Superseding indictments will seriously raise the sentencing guidelines baseline, and the enticing plea deal available to Allen Weisselberg now will vanish. Little RICO charges, for example, come with a mandatory minimum of one to three years. The longer Weisselberg delays on copping a plea, the greater the cost to him in terms of potential jail time. Hed be well advised to plea and cooperate now, rather than after any such indictment is entered.

Prosecutors may also extract a price for Weisselberg to pay for his procrastination, since, among other things, there is a cost to them in terms of trial preparation. Of course, the closer the trial becomes, the greater the anxiety level, as Weisselberg nears an iron bars destiny.

Potential Federal and IRS Penalties

The indictment contains multiple references to the amounts of federal taxes evaded by Weisselberg and to the false W-2 statements submitted to the IRS by Weisselberg and the Trump Organization where substantive fringe benefits were omitted despite the existence of internal documentation that contained the true compensation figures. Could Weisselberg be looking down the barrel of federal tax fraud charges?

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Never say never.

There could be residual issues left over from the Southern District of New York immunity granted Weisselberg from the Michael Cohen caper involving hush money reimbursements paid to Cohen by Trump Organization executives. But the real issue is that the resource-strained IRS will not likely spend valuable manpower on a tax case that has already been successfully prosecuted at the state level. It would be ordinary practice for the IRS to let the state prosecution stand for the individuals criminal liability. The fact that established practices would be for the IRS to exercise restraint does not mean the IRS wont pile on with another criminal indictment, but the IRS chief counsel will not likely authorize prosecution, and the Criminal Investigation chief wont likely expend valuable resources on Weisselberg that could be better invested elsewhere. The IRS does not want to be perceived as persecuting in lieu of prosecuting tax thieves. That goes against its mission, which is to encourage voluntary compliance with the tax law.

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But the IRS has another weapon at its disposal, and it is very likely to wield it in Weisselbergs case. There is no statute of limitations in the IRS tax code with regard to pursuit of civil fraud penalties, which can climb to as much as 75 percent of the tax evaded. That figure could easily total six figures and may very well climb into seven figures for the Trump Organizations chief accountant. Something to think about.

In short, Weisselberg had a terrible day and will have more of those in the foreseeable future. The DAs case against him appears strong. His family may come under further attack. While his loyalty to his longtime boss is clearly being severely tested with the initial indictment filed, the CFO must know that he could be looking at spending the rest of his life in jail, should he spurn cooperation and provoke the prosecutors into filing superseding indictments containing very steep jail time.

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Donald Trump exclaimed to the media prior to the unveiling of the indictment that his companys actions were standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime. Should this case actually go to trial, it will be fascinating to see not only if Weisselberg will testify, but just how many corporate chieftains Mr. Trump can bring to court to testify in support of his statement that the tax frauds delineated in the New York indictment are standard practice. How many real estate moguls and hotel honchos will want to take the stand and acknowledge that their companies do not tax fringe benefits of their executives and falsify their corporate records to conceal such fraud? The question answers itself.

The very fact that Trump can make such statements highlights the need for federal, state, and local prosecutors to vigorously enforce the tax law in order to induce voluntary compliance. Business leaders need to be deterred from thinking they are entitled or above the law or that they can negotiate some sort of deal that precludes jail time for executives guilty of tax fraud.

Trump and other corporate executives of the Trump Organization should be concerned about incurring their own legal trouble as the machines of the Manhattan DAs office and the New York state attorney generals office have now fired what appears to be just an initial salvo. Knowing how such tax crime investigations and prosecutions work in stages, I anticipate there is more to come. So should Mr. Weisselberg, if he listens to his attorneys.

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American sprinter ShaCarri Richardson, who was set to be a breakout star at the Olympic Games later this month, has tested positive for marijuana, putting her participation in the Tokyo games in doubt. The 21-year-old, sporting bright orange hair and an electric personality, roared to victory in the womens 100-meter sprint at the U.S. Olympic trials, making her a fan favorite as well as a favorite to win gold. The positive test taken at the trials last month means Richardson will likely face a competition ban of some length; the sanction for a positive test for marijuana can range from a maximum penalty of a two-year ban down to a minimum of one month depending on the nature of the infraction.

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I am human  ShaCarri Richardson (@itskerrii) July 1, 2021

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THC, the main psychoactive substance in marijuana, is banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency during in-competition periods, a timeframe that technically begins at 11:59 p.m. the day before the competition starts. Under world anti-doping rules, athletes are allowed to have up to 150 nanograms per milliliter of THC without causing a positive test.The U.S. anti-doping and Olympic bodies are signatories to the WADA rules, meaning they follow and enforce their laws. Penalties are lowered in instances where the drug violation is not considered performance enhancing, which will likely be argued in Richardsons case.

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ShaCarri Richardson (@itskerrii) joins us live for an exclusive interview to discuss the positive marijuana test thats put her Olympic future in limbo. pic.twitter.com/iVBp3zhvja  TODAY (@TODAYshow) July 2, 2021

The sports national governing body, USA Track & Field, also has some discretion over when the ban would start and it could be retroactively imposed from the date of Richardsons positive test at the trials. Richardson qualified for the Olympic team with her performance on June 19; the test was reportedly conducted several days later, such that a one-month suspension from the time of the infraction would make Richardson eligible again on July 23, the day the Tokyo Games open. The track and field events do not begin until July 30.

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Its unclear if Richardson will appeal the result. Even if given a one-month ban from the date of the positive test, meaning she was reinstated ahead of her Olympic event, as things currently stand, Richardson would not be eligible for the 100-meter individual race but could conceivably be included in the 4x100-meter relay team. Richardsons positive test automatically nullifies her qualifying time at the trials, which is required to make the U.S. team. Unlike the Olympic selection processes of some other countries, U.S.A. Track & Fields procedures leave little room for discretion over who qualifies, according to the New York Times. They dictate that the top three finishers in a given event at the trials qualify for the Olympics, provided their performances reach the Olympic standard.

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USA Track & Field has reportedly informed other runners that they have been moved up due to the disqualification; fourth place finisher Jenna Prandini has been told she will now be one of the three runners to represent the U.S. at the Olympics and fifth place Gabby Thomas has now been designated an alternate. The national track and field body does have some discretion in selecting the six-person relay team pool for the 4x100-meter event, four of whom race in the actual event. The four top finishers at the trials are automatically part of the team, but the final two slots are selected by USA Track & Field, which, depending on the length and timing of her suspension, could still include Richardson.

For more on the Olympic controversy surrounding Gwen Berrys protest at the trials, listen to this episode of A Word.
A record-breaking heat dome has washed over the Pacfic Northwest and Canada this past week, leaving hundreds in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia dead from heat-related causes. Its been especially harrowing in British Columbia. A wildfire destroyed 90 percent of Lytton, a small village in the province. Intense and plentiful lightning strikes produced a literal firestorm.

And yet one Canadian official, when asked about whether the government had done enough to inform British Columbians about health risks associated with the heat crisis striking his province, took it upon himself to blame the victims.

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Ill await the coroners determinationas Dr. Henry said, fatalities are a part of lifeand the consequences of those fatalities are examined by officials that we put in place as a society to make sure were getting the best information possible, said Premier John Horgan during a press conference Tuesday. (Horgan was referring to the provinces public health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry.)

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The public was acutely aware that we had a heat problem, and we were doing our best to try to break through all of the other noise to encourage people to take steps to protect themselves, he added. But it was apparent to everyone who walked out doors that we were in an unprecedented heat wave, and again, theres a level of personal responsibility.

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Its typical for some public officials to be callous toward their constituents during moments of crisis. And public health disasters are often boiled down to an individuals lack of preparednessa macro manifestation of the micro tactic of writing off health consequences as a result of personal choices. Horgans comments are indicative of how institutions, and their leaders, often default to personal responsibility and individualism during crises to avoid answering tough questions. (This is my third time writing some variation of this.)

The same logic that blames obesity on people refusing to eat properly can blame whole communities for failing to evacuate during a hurricane. A collective or societal problem becomes a matter of each person failing to do what they were theoretically supposed to donever mind how many other people shared the same outcome, or how adverse the conditions may have been.

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In British Columbia, first responders have been stretched thin by the number of sudden death calls and pleading with civilians to check in on one another. Officials estimate that 486 people died from heat-related causes between June 25 and June 30an 195 percent increase from what is normal for a five-day perioddespite the opening of cooling centers.

While it is too early to say with certainty how many of these deaths are heat related, said Lisa Lapointe, the chief coroner of the province, in a statement, it is believed likely that the significant increase in deaths reported is attributable to the extreme weather BC has experienced and continues to impact many parts of our province.

Horgan has since offered his condolences to the families that have lost loved ones.
On Wednesday, two dozen House Republicans flocked to Texas to show their support for Donald Trump. They joined the states Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in applauding the former president as he toured the border, denounced the U.S. government, and repeated the lie that he had been removed from office illegally. Biden is destroying our country, and it all started with a fake election, Trump declared as the lawmakers looked on in silence or approval. He accused the United States of phony elections, called it a sick country, and bragged that as president, he had seized military fundsagainst the will of Congress, and in defiance of the Constitutionto fund his border wall.

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For many Americans, Trumps disappearance from Facebook, Twitter, and the mainstream media has left the impression that he has gone away. That impression is false and dangerous. Trump has tightened his grip on the GOP, and he has escalated his campaign to undermine American institutions. His authoritarian movement is a direct challenge not just to President Joe Biden but to the larger alliance of democracies. The fundamental political conflict in our country is no longer between Democrats and Republicans. Its between people who believe in a democratic republic and people who dont.

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Biden understands the gravity of the threat. Since the day he took office, he has pledged to confront China and Russia, rebuild democratic alliances, and rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally, to push back [against] authoritarianisms advance. In February, Biden said he had made clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a manner very different from my predecessor, that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russias aggressive actionsinterfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poisoning its citizensare over.

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The authoritarian menace extends into our country. In his inaugural address, Biden noted that he was taking office just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy. He described his inauguration, in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, as the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause: the cause of democracy. A month later, in a conference with European allies, Biden implicitly connected Putins propaganda to Trumps attacks on NATO and the American electoral system. Russian leaders want people to think that our system is more corrupt or as corrupt as theirs, said Biden.

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Trump is working to spread that message of American corruption and to destabilize the U.S. government. In rallies, interviews, and emails to his supporters, the former president rejects the 2020 election as fake, a hoax, and a crime. He calls Bidens government illegitimate and unconstitutionally elected. In May, he said his supporters were right to call him the true President, and he essentially demanded to be restored to office, arguing, If a thief robs a jewelry store of all of its diamonds (the 2020 Presidential Election), the diamonds must be returned. Republican leaders, far from repudiating Trumps role in the Jan. 6 attack, blocked his conviction in a Senate trial, thwarted a proposed commission to investigate the attack, and reaffirmed their allegiance to him. On Thursday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was asked twice whether Trump was accountable in some way for the events leading up to Jan. 6. McCarthy refused to answer.

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Trump trashes democracies, extols autocrats, and advocates a foreign policy based on profit, not human rights. In a Fox News interview on June 16, he savaged our allies in EuropeThey are in many ways worse than China, he assertedand called for closer ties with Russia, arguing that we need things that they have, such as valuable land in terms of mineral rights. At a rally in Ohio on Saturday, Trump praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and bragged that China was helping American farmers by honoring trade deals, thanks to Trumps great relationship with President Xi Jinping. In a written statement, Trump urged foreign governments to ban Twitter and Facebook.

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Forty years ago, Republicans cheered when Ronald Reagan, on the eve of his presidential election, called America a shining city on a hill. Now they cheer when Trump parrots Russian propaganda that American democracy is fake. On June 5, in a speech to the North Carolina Republican convention, Trump scoffed, All over the world, they used to say, Oh, theyre [America] the land of the free, they have great elections. We dont have great elections. On Saturday, at his rally in Ohio, he said of the 2020 election, What happened here is what the State Department used to criticize in communist countries.  [T]hey did a North Korean-style turnout. On Wednesday, as Abbott nodded along, Trump said the United States was becoming a banana republic and a third-world country  because our elections are a mess.

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When you watch this parade of madness and cynicism, its tempting to write off the whole GOP. But thats a mistake. To defeat authoritarianism, we need help from Republicans who believe in a republic. Its a small faction, but its real, and last year in Arizona, it was arguably decisive. In January, 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump; in February, seven Senate Republicans voted to convict him. The third-ranking House Republican, Rep. Liz Cheney, sacrificed her leadership post to defend democracy against the former president. Every week, Trump denounces more Republican officeholders. His stated list of Republican enemies includes four senators, three members of the House, two governors, and state legislators in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Last Friday, Trump went after Reagan, sneering that the 40th presidents endorsements, unlike Trumps, didnt mean anything. The more Trump talks, the more enemies he makes. Every one of those enemies can be part of the alliance for democracy.

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One of Trumps targets, Sen. Mitt Romney, understands whats at stake. In a CNN interview on Sunday, the Utah Republican warned that Trumps lies about the election were being used around the world to undermine support for democracy. Theres a battle going on in the world right now between the autocratic nations, like China and Russia, and nations that believe in democracy, said Romney. The goal of the authoritarians, he explained, was to discredit elections by point[ing] to the United States and saying, Look, they cant even run an election there thats not fraudulent.

Romney is echoing what Biden and many Democrats have said. Hes standing with the president not because they agree on policythey dontbut because they agree on democracy. A decade ago, when Romney was the Republican presidential nominee, that agreement might have seemed trivial. Its not trivial anymore.
U.S. forces handed over control of Bagram air base to the Afghan military, a move rife with symbolism and consequence, as the American drawdown of forces in the country continues. The handover of the base, which sits 45 miles north of Kabul, indicates the withdrawal of U.S. forces will surely be complete well before President Joe Bidens September 11th deadline and, officials say, could be complete within days. The handover of Bagram, which served as the U.S. hub for its offensive in Afghanistan, comes at an uncertain time in the country as the security situation continues to deteriorate. Taliban advances throughout the country, coupled with the U.S. withdrawal, have raised concerns about civil war nearly two decades after American forces attacked the Taliban regime that was in power at the time.

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Bagram became an entry point for thousands of American troops engaged in the U.S.-declared War on Terror in the wake of the September 11th attacks. The history of the base in many ways embodies the failure of foreign conquests in the country and, after the Americans took over, the staggering scale of the modern American military machine. With a line of snow-capped mountains as its backdrop, the Bagram airfield was built in the 1950s by the Soviet Union. It became a vital military hub during the Soviets 10-year occupation of Afghanistan. After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the Taliban and what was known as the Northern Alliance fought for the base, sometimes with their trenches at either end, the Washington Post notes. By 2011, at the height of the American war, the base had ballooned into a small city, with two runaways, tens of thousands of occupants, shops and a U.S. military prison that became notorious for its use as a C.I.A. black site.

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The handover of the lynchpin of the U.S. and allied military effort is an indication the end is near for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan after years of dwindling troop numbers. A decade ago, there were almost 100,000 American troops and tens of thousands of U.S. contractors stationed in the country, a presence that had been scaled back to 2,500 troops this year. At the end of the withdrawal process, the U.S. presence on the ground will consist of some 650 forces to protect the American embassy in Kabul. Over the course of the conflict, 2,400 American troops have been killed and 20,000 wounded. Tens of thousands Afghan forces died in battle, but Afghan civilians have carried the biggest burden with 47,245 dying during the two-decade long war.
The world of MAGA social networks is starting to feel as crowded as the landscape of non-MAGA social networks.

Associates of Donald Trump launched an alternative social media site called GETTR on Thursday that was almost immediately overrun by porn and white supremacists. Former Trump aide and spokesperson Jason Miller is the founder of the platform, and another former campaign spokesperson, Tim Murtaugh, is a consultant. The Daily Beast also reported that Guo Wengui, an exiled billionaire from China and associate of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, provided early funding for GETTR. Yet the former president himself is apparently not a part of the venture, as reports indicate he has no plans to set up an account or acquire a financial stake in GETTR. Given the depravity that has already consumed the site, it doesnt seem very likely hell change his mind.

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GETTR is a lot like Twitter, except with worse functionality and more racism. The main interface is a feed of posts from accounts you follow. When setting up your account, theres actually an option to import your Twitter content into GETTR. It appears the platform is reserving handles that prominent conservatives have on Twitter in case they want to join. For instance, you cant claim the handle @realDonaldTrump; Miller told Politico, The former president is going to make his own decision, its certainly there and ready for him should he make the decisionwe would welcome that. There is an account reserved for him and waiting for him but thats a decision for him to make. My attempts to snag such a coveted handle revealed that @Mike_Pence, @DonaldJTrumpJr, and @TiffanyATrump have also apparently been reserved. Well-known conservatives like Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward and Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate Sean Parnell already have accounts set up. GETTRs promotional image showing a user named Cameron Miily, though, reportedly actually uses a stock photo of a woman in Kazakhstan.

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The allure of GETTR is supposed to be its laxer approach to moderation, a common subject of complaint among right-wingers when it comes to mainstream social media, even as they seem to generally thrive there. However, GETTR leaves the door open for content that even most MAGA fans probably wouldnt be too comfortable with. As Mother Jones Ali Breland reports, in its first day online the platform was flooded with hentai and crude photoshops of Hillary Clintons head on a nude womans body. Users are also apparently trying to hijack the #QAnon hashtag with outre porn and a picture of a pig with extremely large balls. Mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook typically use automated systems to censor or remove pornography; while GETTRs terms of service say it reserves the right to remove obscene and pornographic material, it does not seem to have a similar automated system in place.

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The platforms terms of service also note that while it holds freedom of speech as its core value and does not wish to censor your opinions, it nevertheless prohibits hateful, racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable material of any kind. Yet its still easy to find 4chan-level racist shitposting, with users spamming feeds with racial epithets and endorsements of Hitler. Hashtags with slurs are also gaining a lot of traction on the platform. GETTR decided to step in on Thursday to suspend an account belonging to Tim Gionet, better known as Baked Alaska, a prominent white supremacist who was arrested by the FBI for allegedly participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. An account purporting to belong to far-right celebrity Nick Fuentes has also called on his groyper army of followers to take over GETTR, and the platform has reportedly begun to suspend some of these users as well. His first post on GETTR read, Shalom Groypers, time to violate TOS [terms of service]. As is the case on other alternative platforms, GETTR is discovering that its tough to draw lines for what does and doesnt count as free speech on the site. Anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election are also gaining traction on GETTR.

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After pretty much every major platform either suspended or banned Trump for posts that moderators saw as encouraging the Capitol riot, the former president and some of his supporters have been trying to find a new social media home. Trump and his team had reportedly been in talks over the past year for him to join two other conservative-leaning platforms, Parler and Gab, though the negotiations ultimately went nowhere. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly stepped in to prevent him from joining because he felt the platforms werent well managed. The two sites have notably also reserved accounts for Trump in case he eventually decides to join. The former presidents first attempt to stage a comeback on social media was by creating a janky microblog connected to his official website called From the Desk of Donald J. Trump, though he decided to shutter the platform due to poor readership and people making fun of him. Last weekend he ended up joining Rumble, a YouTube clone popular among conservatives, where he livestreamed his rally in Ohio. Hes also been teasing the release of his own platform to compete with Facebook, which is apparently separate from GETTR, though the details of the forthcoming project are scant.
Maine has just passed the nations toughest law restricting the use of facial recognition technology.

LD 1585 was unanimously approved by the Maine House and Senate on June 16 and 17, respectively, and became law without the signature of Gov. Janet Mills. The bills sponsor, Rep. Grayson Lookner, D-Portland, hopes that Maines new lawwhich goes into effect Oct. 1will provide an example to other states that want to rein in the governments ability to use facial recognition and other invasive biometric technologies.

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The countrys only other statewide law regulating facial recognition was passed in Washington in 2020, and it authorized state police to use facial recognition technology for mass surveillance of peoples public movements, habits, and associations. The Washington lawwritten by state Sen. and Microsoft employee Joe Nguyen was opposed by the ACLU.

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In sharp contrast, the ACLU championed the Maine bill as a victory for privacy rights and civil liberties: Maine is showing the rest of the country what it looks like when we the people are in control of our civil rights and civil liberties, not tech companies that stand to profit from widespread government use of face surveillance technology, Michael Kebede, policy counsel at the ACLU of Maine, said in a press release.

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Other states have also passed legislation to partially regulate the use of facial recognition as a surveillance tool. For instance, Virginia requires law enforcement to obtain authorization for the use of the technology from the state legislature, while Massachusetts mandates authorization from a court.

Maines legislation goes onevery significantstep further by prohibiting use of the technology across all levels of state, county, and municipal government. The law has strict parameters for the limited exceptions made for law enforcement purposes, and ensures that workaroundslike Washington polices secret request networksarent permitted.

The law states that law enforcement can use facial recognition technology only with probable cause to believe an unidentified person in an image committed a serious crime, or when seeking to identify a deceased or missing person. It stipulates that facial recognition data alone cannot establish probable cause for an arrest, and that the Maine State Police and Bureau of Motor Vehicles must maintain de-identified records of every requested and performed search, which will be designated as public records. Facial recognition data that is obtained in violation of the law will be inadmissible as evidence. The bill also provides a pathway for anyone wishing to bring legal action against the state if they believe that the technology was used in violation of the law.

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Maines law stands alone in the limitations it places on law enforcement, especially when compared to the federal governments regulation on facial recognition (or, more accurately, their lack of regulation). A report released on Tuesday from the Government Accountability Office found that 14 out of 42 federal agencies surveyed had used privately built facial recognition for criminal investigations. Despite the widespread use of the technology, only one of the 14 agencies had any awareness of which systems their employees were using in criminal investigations. The GAO report also found that six agencies had used facial recognition technology to help identify people suspected of violating the law during protests following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and three agencies reported using the technology on images from the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack. This report raises concerns over federal agencies unawareness of how exactly their employees are using outside systems for facial recognition technologies and highlights a stark lack of privacy protections, as well as calling attention to the governments apparent inability to assess the accuracy of this technology.

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The GAOs recommendations to federal agencies are two-fold: start tracking what non-federal systems employees are using, and then figure out their risks. For Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P), the recommendations are insufficient in addressing the threat posed by government use of facial recognition technology: Its alarming that six federal agencies targeted facial recognition at BLM protesters. In a democracy, police should not be allowed to use surveillance to punish dissent.* S.T.O.Pciting the need for a ban of the technology rather than simply regulationis calling on President Biden to issue a moratorium on federal facial recognition.

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A central worry for opponents of facial recognition technology is its racial bias. Despite boasting a classification accuracy of over 90 percent, a Harvard study notes that these outcomes are not universal. The technology has been found to have the poorest accuracy when analyzing images of people who are Black, female, and 18 to 30 years old. Another study performed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that the highest error rates came in identifying Native Americans, while Black and Asian faces were falsely identified 10-100 times more frequently than White faces.

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The dangers of a racially-biased technology being used by law enforcement dont exist only in the theoretical realm of scientific studies: Theyve manifested in the wrongful arrests of at least three Black men.

In June 2020, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM announced that they would halt sales of facial recognition to the federal government until Congress passed legislation to regulate the technology. In May, Amazon extended what was originally a one-year moratorium indefinitely, drawing attention to the fact that, despite a year of pressure, no federal legislative action has been taken to properly regulate a technology that has already fulfilled its promises to infringe upon civil liberties and privacy.

The threat posed by facial recognition likely wont be solved solely by companies like Amazon calling for federal regulation, or by more diverse data setswhich are built in part from the nonconsenting faces of victims of child pornography, U.S. visa applicants, and the deceased. Whats needed is more comprehensive legislation that bansrather than lightly regulatesthis technology. Policies written by people who understand the risks that marginalized populations in the U.S. face from the technology are a good step toward achieving such bans, as Os Keyes, Nikki Stevens, and Jacqueline Wernimont wrote for Slate in 2019.So yes, lets celebrate Maines new law: It reins in law enforcement and allows citizens to sue if theyve been wronged by facial recognition technology and the people who wield it. But the law comes alongside the terrifying findings of the GAO report. The GAOs previous recommendations urging U.S. Customs and Border Protection to ensure accuracy and establish privacy protections for travelers data have gone unimplemented for almost a yearwill the latest reports recommendations suffer the same stagnant fate? As we waitperhaps indefinitelyfor federal action, other states should follow in Maines footsteps and place stricter limitations on their own governments use of facial recognition technology.

Correction, July 2, 2021: This piece has been corrected to include the full name of Albert Fox Cahn.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
They thought I was an assistant. Women in law still struggle with prejudice

What is the representation of women in law firms?

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Motherhood comes with the risk that the attorney will not have sufficient time to build her own clientele, or will lose the clientele she had built before going on maternity leave. Successful attorneys recommend that women maintain contact with law firms during maternity leave and that male lawyers go on parental leave to discover how a few months out of the office affects their expertise.

There are over 42 percent of women, including attorneys, working for the largest law firms in Slovakia. There are significant differences between individual firms, and it is not the case that only large transnational law firms automatically have a gender-balanced team.

This stems from data the 43 largest law firms in Slovakia provided to the Sme daily and The Slovak Spectator.

It is not clear if the representation of women among Slovak attorneys is on the rise or decline because there is no systematic tracking of data. The data that appears from time to time comes from different sources, may not be consistent, and is thus hard to compare.

The Better Attorneys Initiative (Iniciativa za Lepsiu Advokaciu) published data in 2016, showing that women in the 50 largest law firms in Slovakia comprised 45 percent of their employees, but only about 10 percent in partner positions.

The 2020 data from the Lexis Nexis analytical company suggests that among law firms in the US, the representation of women attorneys is about 40 percent, while only about 25 percent hold the position of partners.

For the first time in the five years, they have been compiling rankings of the largest law firms, Sme and The Slovak Spectator also asked law firms about the representation of women among their staff. We will monitor and publish this data in the future.

Equal opportunities is an important issue and data is essential to lead an honest debate about it, to show over time what is the trend in the representation of women among attorneys, what the causes may be, said Jan Pallo, publisher of The Slovak Spectator. They can also help lawyers in their considerations on whether they want to apply for a job in a more female, more male, or a gender-balanced team.

Prejudice

2. Jul 2021 at 7:00 | Adam Valcek
Keeping dogs on chains will be banned. A victory for all dogs in Slovakia, animal rights advocate claims

Chained dogs are the most frequently reported cases of animal torture.

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Dog rescue centres sometimes post photos of a rescued dog with a chain stuck on its neck. That might happen when the dog is held solely by a chain without being let out for a walk regularly.

Even though Slovakia has had a law stating that dogs cannot be kept permanently chained, the enforcement of the law has remained complicated. This should change after the Slovak parliament passed an amendment on June 22 with a clear ban on keeping dogs on a chain. The amendment, sponsored by a group of MPs from all four coalition parties, was supported by 96 of the 117 deputies present in the plenum during the vote.

The new legislation should be effective from January 1, 2022 for newborn and young dogs. There is a transition period until 2024, and the law contains a number of exceptions.

Despite big compromises, [the amendment] is a huge victory for thousands of dogs in Slovakia, Pavla Dugovicova, chair of Sloboda Zvierat (Freedom of Animals), told The Slovak Spectator.

The NGO that she leads and that operates its own shelter had campaigned to change the law for years now. Dugovicova is optimistic about the better enforcement of the amended law, but said that they will try to scrap some of the exceptions remaining in the amendment for now.

Dangerous and service dogs exempt

The amended law poses a clear ban on keeping a dog chained with a tying tool in breeding facilities and households. For dog owners or keepers, the significant change is that if they had maintained the dog tied until now, they will not able to so anymore, unless one of the exceptions applies to them.

2. Jul 2021 at 11:31 | Nina Hrabovska Francelova
The sale catalogue and past performances booklet for the Tattersalls Summer Mixed Sale are now available online and on the Equineline Sales Catalogue app. Print catalogues will be mailed next week to prospective buyers.

Supplements to the sale are being accepted now through July 11. Horses may be added to this all-racehorse sale by entering on the Tattersalls website or by calling the sales company office at (914) 773-7777.

The Summer Mixed gets underway on Sunday, July 18 at noon in the Meadowlands race paddock. It caps off one of the tracks biggest weekends, as the $700,000 est. Meadowlands Pace and its stakes-laden undercard will be contested the night before.

Although the Summer Mixed is an in-person sale, real-time video and bidding will be offered through Proxibid. Sign up information is available in the catalogue.

This venue is important in providing sales liquidity for our business, and Im extremely pleased with the quality in the book.

Sellers are likely to be very well-rewarded, as many horses in the sale are stakes winners and upper conditioned types that are in such demand  the kind you wont find in high claimers and the kind that bring fair market value to buyer and seller only at an auction house.

Highlighting the sale is a pair of four-year-olds that have raced in the Graduate Series at the Meadowlands: Allywag Hanover, who won a leg of the event in 1:48.1 over Ruthless Hanover and is in again this weekend; and The Greek Freak, timed in 1:47.4 while racing against Captain Barbossa and Warrawee Vital.

Also catalogued is $350,000 winner Eurobond, who comes into the sale off three consecutive Open Trot wins at Plainridge, along with Blood Line, stakes winner of more than $500,000 and a consistent 1:50 pacer at the top levels.

Fourteen two-year-olds are entered that include Mcclelland Hanover, 1:55.3 baby race winner last Monday at Gaitway, plus royally-bred fillies like the half-sister to last weeks Meadowlands Preferred winner Backstreet Shadow and a Captaintreacherous lass whos linebred 3 x 2 to the golden producer World Order.

(Tattersalls Sales Co.)
The 2021 Erie County Fair Sire Stakes races will take place at the historic Buffalo Raceway on Friday (July 9), with first post time at 12:30 p.m.

The races can be watched from inside the clubhouse or in the grandstand. The New York Sire Stakes promote the breeding, buying, and racing of Standardbred horses in New York State, and are administered by the Agriculture and New York State Horse Breeding Development Fund. A total of eight races are expected by fair management, but will be dependent upon the draw on July 5.

The Erie County Fair races are part of a series of non-pari-mutuel harness races hosted at county fairs across New York State. The races are open to eligible two- and three-year-old New York Standardbreds and are separated into eight divisions based on age and gait. The races precede the 181st Erie County Fair, which opens on Wednesday, Aug. 11.

Harness racing at the Erie County Fair is a tradition that dates back to the 1850s, when the Fair was held at various racetracks across the County. Racing at Buffalo Raceway predates the Erie County Fairs move to its current location at the Hamburg Fairgrounds, as the site was originally home to the Hamburg Driving Grounds.

(Erie, N.Y., County Fair)
The Ohio Harness Horsemens Association (OHHA) will host Saturday Night at the Races presented by the Galbreath Equine Center at The Ohio State University Veterinary Medical Center on July 3 from Eldorado Scioto Downs on Facebook Live.

The live stream will begin approximately at 7:45 p.m. and include coverage of the Next Generation Filly Pace and Next Generation Colt and Gelding Pace.

OHHA outreach and public relations coordinator Frank Fraas and Little Brown Jug publicity director Jay Wolf will host the coverage.

Saturday Night at the Races will include interviews with drivers, trainers, and owners as well as analysis of the races.

Last year, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we presented the races via Facebook so fans that did not feel comfortable attending could watch, said Fraas. We had great feedback and decided we would bring Saturday Night at the Races at the Races back this year for the fans that are not able to make it to Eldorado Scioto Downs.

Saturday Night at the Races is sponsored by Midland Acres, The Little Brown Jug and Bow River Jewelry.

(Ohio Harness Horsemen's Association)
July Fourth, 2013. At 6:15 a.m. Gary and I depart for Charlottesville, having scored tickets for a sold-out event. The venue was Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, and no, it wasnt a rock concert, even though Dave Matthews was the headliner. It was Monticellos annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony.

Our designated arrival time to the remote parking at the High School was 7:15 a.m. There we were searched, banded and loaded on buses for a 7:45 departure to Monticello. Like excited children on a field trip the passengers stretched their necks and squirmed for a look-see out the windows as our bus wound its way up to the top of the mountain.

Bus after bus followed and for ninety minutes, they disgorged hundreds of enthusiastic visitors who made their way to the great lawn where rows of folding chairs were positioned facing the podium with a backdrop of four massive columns draped in patriotic bunting. Streaming up the path behind us was an undulating sea of red, white and blue.

Pausing, I thought, Gary and I must be NUTS to be doing this! But then again, I thought, so are the hundreds of other people around us. Yup. We were surrounded by democracy junkies! Some said they attended year after year, because they cant think of a better way to spend the Fourth of July!
These special victims require and deserve all critical decisions about their case to be made by a highly trained special victim prosecutor who is independent from the chain of command, the report says. A commanders position within the unit leads to an inherent appearance of a conflict of interest.

Biden said during an International Women's Day speech in March that there would be an all-hands-on-deck effort under my administration to end the scourge of sexual assault in the military." He underscored on Friday that reform was essential for the health of the military.

This will be among the most significant reforms to our military undertaken in recent history, and Im committed to delivering results,"" Biden said.

The commission made 28 recommendations and 54 sub-recommendations in its report to Biden, including specific changes to improve accountability of leadership, climate and culture and victim care and support.

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Biden and Austin's embrace of the commission's recommendations demonstrated the administration is treating this issue with the urgency it deserves."

As I have said, the scourge of sexual assault in our military must come to an end, and after years of trying and failing to address the problem the time has come to remove the prosecution of sexual assault crimes from the chain of command," Smith said.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Lamb had been living with the boys mother, Kassandra Orona, and her three children in the apartment, Orona told investigators, according to the affidavit.

Orona and Lamb used the two-burner butane torch to smoke marijuana, she told investigators.

The size and shape of the torch's burners appeared very similar to the shape and size of the burns on Athian, the affidavit said. The boy died two to four hours before he was found of blunt force trauma, lack of oxygen to the brain, or both, the coroner concluded.

Orona told police that Lamb was watching her three children the night before her son was killed while she worked a sandwich shop shift, court documents said.

She told investigators she arrived home at about 3:30 a.m. and was later awakened by Lamb, who wanted her to drive her daughter to school a few minutes away because the girl was running late, according to the documents.

After Orona and Lamb got back, Orona told investigators that she went back to bed. Lamb woke her up just after 12 p.m., saying Athian was missing, according to her account provided to investigators.
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?
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Will Phillip L. Baity be the next mayor of Love Valley?

He certainly hopes so after being the first candidate for any office to file at the Iredell County Board of Elections on Friday.

Baity said he hopes if he is elected mayor, he can lead the town forward while preserving its past.

Ive got a few ideas I think can improve the town, Baity said. I want to keep it the way Andy (Barker) wanted it.

Barker was the founder of the town in 1954 and Baity said he wants to bring more to the town for its children, bring in more rodeos to the Cowboy Capital and fix the long-running sewage issues the town of 90 people have faced.

What competition Baity will face isnt known yet as the beginning of filing is more of a slow trickle than a rush in election years like this one, Board of Elections Director Becky Galliher said.

Friday saw the opening of filing for municipal offices in Davidson, Harmony, Love Valley and Troutman, which will hold their elections in November. The end of the filing period is July 16 at noon.

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Her beautiful smile is every morning greeting not only Armenian, but also American TV viewers, behind her gentle appearance there is a real warrior struggling for justice and truth- a warrior, that is ready to cover peoples stories and global problems despite the difficulties that usually strike before her!

And all these above said is about one of the most renown anchors of American TV, Araksya Karapetyan. Emmy award winning anchor anchors the morning newscasts on FOX 11s Good Day LA in Los Angeles.

Although its been years since she and her family moved to USA, Araksya has never forgotten about her roots. She is actively covering Armenian developments trying to do the best for her homeland: Now the anchor is raising her two daughters, Sevan and Sona, trying to keep them close to Armenian culture and language.

NEWS.am STYLE has talked to Araksya Karapetyan for its column Armens.

Araksya, what memories do you have from your childhood in Gyumri?

I have many wonderful memories from my childhood. I spent lots of time going back and forth between Gyumri and Yerevan. Both of my parents are from Gyumri but once my mother was accepted to Yerevan State University my maternal grandparents moved to Yerevan. So, I spent a great deal of time going back and forth between the two cities. My childhood is filled with carefree beautiful moments. It was the simple things like playing in my grandparent's backyard under the apricot trees; climbing the tree to pick cherries or standing on top of the roof to the garage to pick mulberries I treasure most. I loved going to the park and making friends every day. I was an only child for a while, so I got a lot of attention and had quite a routine and schedule. I would go to the park twice a day -- once in the morning, once in the evening. I would go to art galleries and concerts all the time-- I grew up having immense appreciation for the arts at an early age because I was exposed to these things early on. I also loved going to the bazaar! I loved people watching and listening to the conversations as I walked by. There was so much energy and life! For me it is the everyday moments that make up my memories and put a smile on my face.

Unfortunately you have witnessed the tragic earthquake in Gyumri. Did it have any impact on your further life?

I remember that day vividly. I have flashbacks of moments and even of conversations on that day. I was in kindergarten... I had just finished painting a bird and my teacher was walking over to hang my painting for it to dry-- when all of a sudden the whole building tilted to one side. We all lost our balance and fell... the teacher yelled for us to run... so we ran. Down the stairs as the building continued to shake, dust and bricks were coming down overhead. My grandmother was the principal of the school and I remember glancing into her office (the door was open) to see if she was there -- she was not, so I kept running. Once outside -- the shaking had stopped. We stood there for what felt like forever as parents came to pick their children up. I was one of the last children to get picked up. My mother describes the moment she saw me, standing there covered in dust, with tears coming down my face. We crammed into the car-- my father was driving, I sat in the front with my mother, my uncle's wife and one of my cousins was in the back. We started driving all over town -- looking for our family. I remember people standing around on the corner-- people needed to go the hospital, some were injured, but we had no room and we were panicking... it was pure chaos. We got to the front of the hospital where my aunt worked. She was a doctor. The hospital had not collapsed and we all felt our anxiety lift a little. But then... while waiting in the car we got word that my aunt had left that hospital earlier in the day and had gone to another hospital to check on a patient. And... that hospital had collapsed. At that moment-- I will never forget how my cousin threw her head back and screamed in pain. I will never forget that moment. I was young. I was scared. I knew in my heart something horrible had just happened to her mother, my aunt-- and that this earthquake was going to change so many people's lives. And it certainly did... nothing was the same in Gyumri after that. There was so much sadness in the city that was once filled with laughter. Months later, I started attending first grade in a "domik", doing homework under candlelight, and we only had running water for a few hours a day. But my family left that reality and moved to America. For so many though, they lived that reality for years. Those were some dark, cold times.... I think about that all the time.

And to this day when there is an earthquake here in California... my heart skips a beat. I am terrified of earthquakes.

How did your family decide to move to the USA?

My family moved to the U.S. in April 1990. I was 7-years-old. The devastating earthquake, the war with Azerbaijan and the demise of the Soviet Union all contributed to my grandfather's (Rafik Tumanyan) decision to leave. His brother, my late great-uncle George Tumanjan, had come to America after WWII and he helped us make the big move to America. A move which changed my life. I obviously wouldn't be where I am or be doing what I am doing... I think about him all the time.

Being a foreigner, what difficulties have you faced in America ?

I was so young, so for me it was rather easy to assimilate. I didn't speak any English, but I remember it didn't take very long for me to pick up the language. I imagine for my family it was much more difficult. They left their careers, our extended family, their friends, their memories behind and came to a foreign land to start all over. That cannot be easy. It was emotionally so difficult for them.

I wouldn't say I faced difficulties necessarily... but without a doubt I did battle with balancing out who I was and my new surroundings. I wanted to fit in-- yet I didn't want to lose who I was. As the years have gone on, I have learned to balance this part of my identity rather well. I take the best of both worlds; and if anything over the years my connection to Armenia has only strengthened.

When did you become interested in TV journalism?

People ask this question all the time ... and the answer is--- in a way I stumbled into it. At the same time, this is what I was meant to do with my life. I know this now. I went to Syracuse University in upstate New York. While majoring in International Relations I found out Syracuse had one of the best broadcasting programs in the country. So I double majored at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. It was meant to be...

I will say though that once I graduated I was still uncertain if this was what I was going to pursue. I came back to Los Angeles confused and a little lost. I applied to the London School of Economics ( I got accepted) -- I was debating going to get a master's. I thought about going into the Peace Corps, I considered Teach for America, I applied for jobs in Advertising and Public Relations (I got the jobs) ... I just hadn't interned anywhere yet and didn't have a job lined up so I felt intimidated to apply for jobs in broadcasting. I also really did not want to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere to begin my career in this field.

So, I decided to go to Armenia in 2006 to escape reality. I wasn't ready to make a decision. It was during that trip that my passion for journalism and for telling people's stories came to life. I went around interviewing people in the community and that experience sparked my hunger for journalism. I came back to LA and started interning at a number of places, made a resume tape, sent my tape all over the country (to small towns I had never heard of) , got several offers, randomly picked Idaho Falls, Idaho -- and just went for it!

What did you have to overcome before getting to the place you are now?

With this career you have to have patience and be willing to work hard. If you are focused on money, you aren't going to make much money in the beginning... I believe it is a true test to see if this is your passion. In many ways this industry is all about timing. I landed the morning anchor job in Los Angeles because my timing was right -- in addition to many other factors of course. After two and a half years in Idaho, I moved to Portland, Oregon for two years, then decided to make the move back home to LA. I had an offer to go work in New York City and overseas as a network correspondent, but my family was in LA and that's where my heart was.

Its been a long time since you moved to the USA, but you have remained so Armenian. How did you manage to be so devoted to your roots in such a big country very far from your homeland?

I don't know.... as I mentioned previously over the years my connection has intensified. I feel a pulling in my soul for Armenia. It has been many years since I have gone back because I have been so focused on my career , marriage and now children-- but that feeling of when I step off the plane onto Armenian soil is magical. I feel as though I can breathe at last. I feel like I have come home. When I see Ararat in the distance, my eyes fill with tears. The soil calls me. It isn't something I can explain. It is a feeling. A feeling that gives me strength, yet makes me incredibly emotional at the same time.

What's interesting is when I visit Gyumri, my Gyumritsi accent comes out immediately; words start coming out of my mouth that I didn't even know I knew! It is remarkable how that just organically happens.

Being so far away and not using the language as much as I would like does frustrate me at times, but at the same time I am comforted by the fact that the feeling I was describing above has not left me.

Araksya, now you have two beautiful kids. Do you teach them Armenian?

Yes I try to. My eldest was speaking well, and then COVID happened and we distanced ourselves from family which impacted her exposure to the language a great deal. She also started school and started to only answer back in English. I just kept speaking in Armenian. I know she listens and is absorbing it. When I read to her, I read in English, then say what I read in Armenian. When she asks a question I reply in Armenian. When she doesn't know a word I say it in both languages. I am trying my best, it certainly isn't easy. I also have enrolled her in ToTalk Armenian courses, where she has zoom classes with a teacher in Armenia twice a week. We don't live near any Armenian communities, so it makes things harder on my end. But I am committed and I am stubborn... so I won't give up!

Youve been to Armenia in 2006 for the last time. Do you plan to come back in near future?

I had made grand plans to go in 2018, but I was expecting my second child and the doctor advised against my travel. I was so disappointed.

Of course I plan to go and take my family with me. I can't wait to show my girls where I grew up and take them to the places I remember as a child.

What is your biggest success and what dreams do you have?

I have always been career oriented. My focus has always been work-- but once I became a mother that changed somewhat, and I am glad about that. I feel I have a better balance now. Children help put things in perspective and you realize what's really important in life. I take the responsibility of being a parent seriously (as one should). My focus is to make sure they grow up to be good people and to be the best version of themselves-- as I try to be the best version of myself.

Syune Arakelyan

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The delta variant hasnt been identified in any Cowlitz County cases, but Krager said hed be surprised if the variant wasnt spreading here.

Most Cowlitz County confirmed cases have not been genetically sequenced, and the state proportions are likely more reflective of what variants are spreading in the county, Krager said.

The state has sequenced 7.3% of total cases, and 18.4% of cases in May, according to the report.

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The most common variant in the state is still the alpha variant, but the gamma and delta variants appear to be outcompeting it, Acting State Health Officer Dr. Scott Lindquist said Wednesday.

Most recently, the Department of Health has seen an increase in delta from 7% of variants in mid- to-late May to 17.6% from May 30 to June 12. The gamma variant made up 16.3% of the variants.

Lindquist said the gamma variant is the most concerning right now because it has double the hospitalization and death rate of all confirmed cases in 2021.

About 5.8% of identified cases infected with the gamma variant were hospitalized, compared to 2.3% of all positive cases in 2021, according to the report. The report states 1.2% of gamma cases have died, compared to 0.4% of all cases.
No legal documents were drafted. No immunity agreements went before a judge. Even Castors top assistant, who had led the initial investigation, said she knew nothing about it. Neither did Constands lawyer, according to testimony at the sometimes surreal preliminary hearing in February 2016.

Castor said he discussed the agreement with a Cosby lawyer who had since died. And he said he issued a signed press release to announce the end of the investigation. Several courts have since parsed the wording of that press release, which opines that both parties in the case could be seen in a less than flattering light, and cautions that Castor would reconsider this decision should the need arise.

Constand, in the wake of that decision, sued Cosby in federal court.

In the depositions that followed, the trailblazing actor made lurid admissions about his sexual encounters with a string of young women. He acknowledged giving them drugs or alcohol beforehand, while he stayed sober and in control. The list included Constand, who said she took what she thought were herbal products at Cosbys direction, only to find herself semiconscious on his couch.

Cosby, in the deposition, famously said he ventured into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection as Constand lay still.
Some of the harshest critics called for Rashad to be removed from her post, saying her apparent indifference to serial sexual assault allegations made her unfit for a position of authority over students.

Jelani Cobb, a Columbia University journalism professor and frequent New Yorker magazine contributor, tweeted directly to Howard University, bluntly stating: This person should not be a Dean.

Rashad's support for Cosby is not new. She had publicly defended him during his years-long legal battles. But the rise of the #Metoo movement and her new position at a prominent educational institution have contributed to the intense backlash as Cosby goes free.

Hours after her tweet Wednesday, Rashad sent out a clarification, stating her sympathy for all survivors of sexual assault but not mentioning Cosby or his case.

I fully support survivors of sexual assault coming forward. My post was in no way intended to be insensitive to their truth," she wrote. "Personally, I know from friends and family that such abuse has lifelong residual effects. My heartfelt wish is for healing.
Washington state authorities have linked about 30 deaths to the heat, with more reports coming in each day this week.

I think, over time, we will understand that the numbers are only going to climb," said Dr. Steve Mitchell, director of Harborview Medical Center's Emergency Medicine Department in Seattle. "I know, in my experience, that Im expecting to see much larger numbers than what we are currently able to report because of talking to EMS colleagues who were experiencing twice as many calls for help that day.

There were 1,792 emergency room visits for suspected heat-related illness since June 25, the Washington state Department of Health said Thursday. Of those visits, 21% required people to be admitted to the hospital.

Monday had the most emergency room visits, with 702, the health department said. It was the hottest day of the heat wave in many areas, with Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and other cities smashing all-time heat records. It reached 108 F (42 C) in Seattle, and 116 F (47) in Oregon's largest city.

With this latest heat emergency, when we were dealing with it, the only thing comparable at Harborview and in the region that weve experienced recently was actually the early days of COVID," Mitchell said.
GENEVA (AP)  The World Health Organization said Thursday that any COVID-19 vaccines it has authorized for emergency use should be recognized by countries as they open up their borders to inoculated travelers.

The move could challenge Western countries to broaden their acceptance of two apparently less effective Chinese vaccines, which the U.N. health agency has licensed but most European and North American countries have not.

In addition to vaccines by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna Inc., AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, the WHO has also given the green light to the two Chinese jabs, made by Sinovac and Sinopharm.

In its aim to restore travel across Europe, the European Union said in May that it would only recognize people as vaccinated if they had received shots licensed by the European Medicines Agency  although its up to individual countries if they wish to let in travelers who have received other vaccines, including Russias Sputnik V.

The EU drug regulator is currently considering licensing China's Sinovac vaccine, but there is no timeline on a decision. It also does not recognize versions of the AstraZeneca vaccine that were made in India, effectively barring travel for people in developing countries who received doses via the U.N.-backed initiative known as COVAX.
Update - Added in vivo, HONOR, Acer and LG at the bottom



As usual, the annual 7.7 Mid Year Sales is coming upon us once again and there are plenty of attractive offers. In case you missed some, a few brands have already sent out what they are offering and we got you covered. So far, we have Samsung, OPPO, Xiaomi, Apple and even Shopee with a wide variety of gadgets on sale. Without further ado, let's get into it.

Samsung - Up to RM1100 discount on Samsung Galaxy phones

Starting with the Korean tech brand, a few of their smartphones are having a discount sale. For us, we think the Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G and Galaxy Note20 5G are worth getting because there is an over RM1000 discount right now. Even the latest Galaxy S21 series are on sale too but not too much. If you are looking for something else cheaper, there's the Galaxy A11 for just RM423 (the lowest).

In addition, some of their accessories are on sale with up to 67% off. You can also have a purchase with purchase (PWP) such as buying a 75-inch The Frame QLED 4K Smart LifeStyle TV that comes bundled with a free LTV Bezel. The promotion will go on for the whole month of July so for more information, you can visit our news coverage right here.

OPPO - Buy and win a Smart TV

Next, OPPO Malaysia has already begun its Mid Year Full Speed Bonanza until 18 July 2021. As usual, OPPO fans and customers alike can hope and get gifts, lucky draws, discounts, cashbacks and more. You can refer to the table below for your reference:

OPPO products Freebies Find X3 Pro (RM4299) RM300 cash rebate

OPPO Enco X (worth RM699) Reno5 (RM1699) 10,000mAh fast-charging Powerbank

Limited Edition Autographed Box & Case

RM20 Value KFC cash vouchers (East Msia) or RM20 Touch 'n Go gift card (West Msia)

Add-on only RM59 for 1-Year Screen Protection (original is RM139) Reno5 F (RM1199) 10,000mAh fast-charging Powerbank

Limited Edition Autographed Box & Case

Add-on only RM59 for 1-Year Screen Protection (original is RM139) OPPO Watch 46mm (RM1299) OPPO Watch 41mm (worth RM899) Enco W51 Earbuds (RM369) RM100 cash rebate

Thats not all, the company is also looking to reward 12 lucky purchasers of any OPPO smartphone as well! Customers who purchase an OPPO smartphone are entitled to a lucky draw entry for a brand-new 43 Smart TV, with 12 units up for grabs! To be in the running, simply follow the steps below:

Purchase any OPPO smartphone from now till 18 July 2021 Download the My OPPO App and register an account Participate in the Mid-Year Full Speed Bonanza Lucky Draw activity via the app and fill in your particulars (including your new phones IMEI number!) Be on standby as the 12 winners will be announced via the My OPPO App on 23 July!

For more information about the OPPO Mid-Year Full Speed Bonanza, you can visit the official webpage right here.

Xiaomi - Discounts up to 30% off and Shop With Mi

Xiaomi Malaysia initially did a Shop With Mi campaign last June but there's a new one from the 7th until the 16th of July. On 7.7, you can get deals of up to 30% off and exclusive free gifts on selected smartphones and ecosystem products. Then from 8 - 16 July, you can purchase a Mi Robot Vacuum Mop at a special After Party price! You can refer to the table below:

Product RRP (RM) 7.7 promo price (RM) 7.7 freebies After Party sales (RM) Lazada and Shopee Store links Mi Robot Vacuum Mop P 1399 999 n/a 1249 Lazada Shopee Mi Robot Vacuum Mop 999 699 n/a 899 Lazada Shopee Mi Robot Vacuum Mop Essential 699 499 n/a 559 Lazada Shopee Mi 360 Home Security Camera 2K 189 149 n/a n/a Lazada Shopee Redmi 9 (4GB + 64GB) 599 n/a 10,000mAh Redmi Powerbank + RM30 Starbucks gift card n/a Lazada Shopee Redmi 9A (2GB + 32GB) 359 n/a Mi True Wireless Earbuds Basic 2 n/a Lazada Shopee Redmi 9T (4GB + 64GB) 599 n/a Sandisk Ultra Micro + Mi Ionic Hair Dryer H300 n/a Lazada Shopee Redmi 9T (6GB + 128GB) 699 n/a Sandisk Ultra Micro + Mi Ionic Hair Dryer H300 n/a Lazada Shopee Redmi Note 10 (4GB + 64GB) 699 649 Sandick Ultra Micro n/a Lazada Shopee Redmi Note 10 (6GB + 128GB) 799 n/a Sandick Ultra Micro n/a Lazada Shopee Redmi Note 10S (8GB + 128GB) 899 n/a Mi True Wireless Earbuds Basic 2 n/a Lazada Shopee Mi 11 (8GB + 256GB) 2999 n/a Mi Portable Photo Printer + Mi True Wireless Earbuds Basic 2 n/a Lazada Shopee Mi 11 Lite (8GB + 128GB) 1199 n/a 10,000mAh Mi Powerbank 3 Ultra Compact n/a Shopee POCO M3 Pro 5G (4GB + 64GB) 699 599 n/a n/a Lazada Shopee POCO M3 Pro 5G (6GB + 128GB) 799 699 n/a n/a Lazada Shopee POCO X3 Pro (6GB + 128GB) 999 899 n/a n/a Lazada Shopee POCO X3 Pro (8GB + 256GB) 1299 999 n/a n/a Lazada Shopee

To add on, the Earn with Mi referral program is still ongoing as well until 31 July 2021. If you don't know what that is, basically you can promote a Xiaomi product and get a referral commission of up to RM30 after purchasing and using a period. If you visit the image above, there are steps for you to register and start earning.

Apple - Many flash sales at midnight

If you want to get yourself an Apple product, here's what we found about its official store page in Lazada. Starting from 5 until 7 July, those who have a Standard Chartered Mastercard can use the promo code - SCBAPPLE and get RM100 off from minimum spending of RM3000. Plus, the iPhone 11 (128GB) will be priced at RM2895 for two hours only (12 AM - 2 AM) on 7 July 2021.

There are plenty of Apple devices on sale as well, this includes the iPad lineup going as low as RM1549, as well as the latest MacBook Air with the M1 chip for RM4249. Apple wearables like the Apple Watch Series, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max and other accessories will be on sale too. For more information, you may visit the official Apple Store here.

Shopee - A wide variety of gadgets

If you are looking for other gadgets such as computers, audio, cameras and TVs, For starters, you can get yourself an AirPods Pro (with a wireless charging case) for RM799 which is the lowest we have seen so far. There are some cameras on sale too such as Sony and Canon, and the lowest TV promotion that we saw was the Xiaomi TVP1 Android 9.0 Smart TV for RM899.

For smartphones, there are plenty of that in Shopee. There are the iPhone 12 mini (RM2899), OPPO Reno4 (RM959), OnePlus Nord CE 5G (RM1499), POCO X3 Pro (RM899) and many more. For the full list, you can visit our news coverage about Shopee's Electrifying Tech Deals.

vivo x LazMall 7.7 Mid-Year Sale

vivo Malaysia also just entered the party starting today (5 July) and will last until 7 July 2021. On its official store in Lazada, the vivo x LazMall 7.7 Mid Year sale will offer customers and fans discounts up a 77% discount with a minimum spend of RM1, capped at RM5, and redeem discount vouchers up to RM70 with a minimum spend of RM100, with terms and conditions apply.

During the period, customers can purchase a new vivo Y12A smartphone with a 5000mAh battery at RM529. Then exclusively on 7 July (12 AM to 2 AM), the vivo V20 will be available for RM999. At the same time, those who purchase the vivo X60 or V21 series are entitled to enjoy 1-year Extended Warranty and 1-year Screen Crack Protection worth RM399.

Below is the list of promo prices for your reference:

vivo Products RRP (RM) Promo Price (RM) NEX 3 (8GB + 256GB) (complimentary 1 year warranty) 3899 2299 X50 Pro 5G (8GB + 256GB) 3299 2199 X50 5G (8GB + 128GB) 2399 1799 V20 2021 (8GB + 128GB) 1499 999 V20 Pro (8GB + 128GB) 1899 1299 V20 SE (8GB + 128GB) 1199 899 V20 (8GB + 128GB) 1499 999 Y20s G (6GB + 128GB) 749 689 Y1s (2GB + 32GB) 399 359

By the way, customers who purchase selected the vivo smartphones will be receiving complimentary gifts worth up to RM399, including a premium washbag, sanitiser pouch, mask clip and weighing scale, while stocks last. You may also collect your Lazada Bonus during the period on the vivo official store and add them to the cart, then check out the products on Mega Day on 7.7.

HONOR - Laptops, smart bands and smartwatches

As for HONOR Malaysia, the company also just kickoff their mid-year sales today (5 July) which will take place on Shopee until 7.7. Customers can enjoy savings up to RM280 for laptops, smart bands and smartwatches. With each purchase, customers will take home freebies based on a first-come-first-serve basis. Below is the table for your reference:

HONOR Products RRP (RM) Promo Price (RM) Freebies MagicBook Pro 3599 3319 HONOR laptop backpack and Bluetooth wireless mouse MagicBook 15 3699 3679 HONOR laptop backpack and Bluetooth wireless mouse MagicBook X15 (i5) 2899 n/a HONOR laptop backpack, Bluetooth wireless mouse and thermos flask MagicBook X15 (i3) 2299 n/a HONOR laptop backpack and thermos flask Band 6 189 169 Flask MagicWath 2 42mm (Agate Black) 599 499 Umbrella MagicWath 2 46mm (Flax Brown) 699 599 Umbrella MagicWath 2 46mm (Charcoal Black) 649 549 Umbrella

Acer - More laptops, desktops, monitors and accessories

Speaking of laptops, Acer Malaysia has a series of promotions for laptops, desktops, monitors and accessories in the Acer official and certified stores in Shopee and Lazada. There are a couple of attractive deals on specific dates so do check the point forms out below:

Acer Swift 5 (11th Intel Core i7) - RM4499 (RRP RM4799)

Acer XV270P, XB273UGX, AOpen 22CV1Q and AOpen 27HC5RP monitors are over 15% off

14-inch Acer laptop sleeve, Acer E300 Trueharmony Earphones, Predator Galea 311 gaming headset and other accessories with more than 50% off

Predator Helios 300 (model PH315-53-79E7 and PH315-53-58U0) are RM500 off

Promotion Period Acer Official Online Store Link 7 July 2021 Acer Official Store (Shopee) shopee.com.my/acer_os_my 7 July 2021 Acer Certified Store - Just IT (Shopee) shopee.com.my/acer.os.justit 7 July 2021 Acer Certified Store - NBP (Shopee) shopee.com.my/acer.os.nbp 5-7 July 2021 Acer Certified Store - Aoneplus (Lazada) lazada.com.my/shop/acer-store-aoneplus 5-7 July 2021 Acer Certified Store - NBP (Lazada) lazada.com.my/shop/acer-certified-store-nbp

LG - All about TVs

If you're only really looking for a TV, you can now get your hands on the best-in-class TVs offered by LG. This includes an OLED 4K, NanoCell 4K or Premium UHD series from the LG Flagship Stores on Lazada and Shopee . LG offers up to RM4000 in savings for 24 hours on 7th July 2021. To add on, there is a new gaming display, 48 LG 4K OLED C1 TV as well.

OLED 4K

(NEW) OLED48C1PT B - RM8499 RM5699 RM5699

OLED65CXPTA - RM16999 RM12999 RM12999

OLED55CXPTA - RM10999 RM7499

- RM7499 (NEW) OLED65A1PTA - RM12999 RM104999

- RM104999 (NEW) OLED55A1PTA - RM8999 RM7499

NanoCell 4K

(NEW) 75NANO75TPA - RM10999 RM7999

- RM7999 (NEW) 65NANO75TPA - RM6199 RM5199

- RM5199 (NEW) 55NANO75TPA - RM4599 RM3499

- RM3499 (NEW) 50NANO75TPA - RM3699 RM3099

Premium UHD

43UN7000PTA - RM1949 RM1549

- RM1549 (NEW) 65UP8100PTB - RM5299 RM4499

- RM4499 (NEW) 55UP8100PTB - RM3799 RM3349

- RM3349 (NEW) 75UP7750PTB - RM8999 RM6699

- RM6699 (NEW) 70UP7750PTB - RM6499 RM4899

We are expecting more brands to send us their Mid Year Sales promotion soon. So until then, we will just keep updating this page whenever there's a new one. Stay safe and stay tuned for more trending tech gadget deals at TechNave.com.
In this April 27, 2017, file photo, visitors walk past a sign for Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing. China's internet watchdog said Friday, July 2, 2021 that it has launched an investigation into ride-hailing company Didi Global Inc. to protect national security and public interest, days after the company went public in New York. Credit: AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein,File

China's internet watchdog said Friday that it has launched an investigation into ride-hailing company Didi Global Inc. to protect national security and public interest, days after the company went public in New York.

In a statement on its website, the Cyberspace Administration of China said that it would conduct a cybersecurity review in accordance with China's cybersecurity law. While the investigation is ongoing, Didi will not accept registrations of new users.

The watchdog did not give further details on the investigation.

"DiDi will fully cooperate with the relevant government authority during the review," the company said in a statement.

"We plan to conduct comprehensive examination of cybersecurity risks, and continuously improve on our cybersecurity systems and technology capacities."

The announcement of the investigation comes two days after the company had its stock market debut on the New York Stock Exchange. Its stock price fell 6% to $15.31 in morning trading Friday.

China's government has grown increasingly concerned over the influence of China's technology companies, as their servicessuch as e-commerce, payments and on-demand deliveriesbecome ubiquitous in the lives of millions of Chinese citizens.

Authorities have launched antitrust probes into firms like e-commerce company Alibaba and food delivery firm Meituan. In April, China's market regulator fined Alibaba a record $2.8 billion for violating antitrust rules.

Authorities have also fined dozens of tech firms in recent months for not properly disclosing previous deals and acquisitions.

Didi Global, which is backed by companies such as Japan's Softbank and Chinese technology giants Alibaba and Tencent, was initially founded in 2012 by Cheng Wei as a taxi-hailing app. It has since expanded to include other ride-hailing options such as private cars and bus rides.

Didi said it lost $5.5 billion over the past three years, though the firm also touted its global reach and investments in developing electric and self-driving cars.

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Countries that invest more in renewable energy enjoy greater economic growth and lower levels of income inequality, a new study from academics at the University of Sussex Business School and the University of Portsmouth has revealed.

Renewable energy acts as a catalyst for reducing income inequality and energy poverty within a country according to the authors of the study, which analysed data from over 200 countries between 2000-2019.

Countries where renewable energy use is close to half (47%) of total energy consumption will see income inequality decrease by 0.2% for every additional 1% percent increase in renewable consumption, the study found.

The findings of the study, to be published in the August 2021 edition of Energy Economics, indicate that economic growth discourages the use of pollutant sources of energy consumption.

The research also indicates that a country's economic growth has to reach a threshold before it begins to stimulate a rise in renewable energy consumption and a fall in fossil fuel energy consumptionon average this was around $17,000 per capita.

For every $1,000 increase in income per capita beyond that threshold, the authors found that renewable consumption will increase by 1%.

The study authors suggest policymakers across the globe should recognise the opportunities for promoting renewable energy as a driver of equal and balanced growth and offer incentives, such as tax credits, carbon taxes and markets for renewable energy certificates, to increase renewable energy production.

Dr. Panagiotis Tzouvanas, lecturer in finance at the University of Sussex Business School, said: "The positive relationship between economic growth and renewable energy is endogenous. The more you invest in renewable energy, the higher the economic growth. In turn, the higher the economic growth, the more renewable energy consumption. The challenge is to reach a sufficient level of economic development to initiate this win-win cycle."

Michail Filippidis, teaching fellow at Portsmouth Business School, said: "The main implications of our study highlight renewable energy as a catalyst for reducing income inequality and energy poverty within a country. It should be stressed renewable energy, although it is clearly an important factor towards the reduction of energy poverty, is not so effective during the early stages of growth. In this regard, our findings suggest that societies with higher levels of income, that have probably also achieved higher levels of education and environmental awareness, benefit more from the applications of renewable energy."

Dr. Ioannis Chatziantoniou, visiting fellow in economics and finance, University of Portsmouth, said: "The dominant view is that increasing consumption and economic growth leads to environmental degradation. What our research indicates is that the reality is more complicated. If people increase the level of their environmental literacy and learn what to consume, how to consume and where to invest their income then economic growth can potentially be used as an essential tool for the fight against climate change."

The study authors focused their research on the Energy-Environmental Kuznets Curve (EEKC) hypothesis which suggests that energy consumption increases with income per capita at the early stages of economic growth and then reaches a peak for a specific threshold of income, before starting to decline at the late stages of economic growth.

The study found that in the early stages of a country's economic expansion, both renewable energy consumption and production declined as the economy grew while income inequality also grew initially when renewable energy consumption started to increase.

The authors explain that as the cost of installing renewable energy systems is passed to consumers through electricity bills this decreases the incentive to consume renewable electricity. But then economic growth helps promote renewable technologies leading to higher renewable electricity production over time and consequently a reduction in the costs for income groups.

Dr. Tzouvanas said: "The link between economic growth and renewable energy production and consumption is strongest in developed countries. High income countries are characterised by political stability, well-developed financial markets and financial institutions, trade openness, and access to quality education, which all generates resources for government subsidies or technological innovations to advance renewable energy systems. For developing countries, the benefits of growing a renewable energy system will not be felt immediately."

Explore further Renewable energy powers ahead in 2020: report

More information: Michail Filippidis et al, Energy poverty through the lens of the energy-environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, Energy Economics (2021). Michail Filippidis et al, Energy poverty through the lens of the energy-environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2021.105328
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A new study focused on the auto industry finds that tightening emissions standards not only fails to curtail on-road emissions, but actually increases the likelihood of non-compliance by automakers.

In the paper "The Effects of Tightening Standards on Emissions", to appear in Production and Operations Management, researchers confirm the relationship between increased threshold-based regulations and non-compliance in the auto industry. The study also found higher non-compliance rates in automakers facing greater substitution pressure from competitors, as well as those with less advanced emissions control technology.

The study, co-authored by Kejia Hu from Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management, Sunil Chopra from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, and Yuche Chen from University of South Carolina, uses on-road data collected from the European Union between 2000-2014, a period in which regulators tightened restrictions on Nitrogen Dioxide (NO x ) three separate times.

"The main issue here is that the EU is using a straightforward cutoff standard. You have to hit the score to make it," explained Hu. "Anything like that is easily going to trigger unethical conduct."

This phenomenon isn't limited to the auto industry, although the 2015 Volkswagen emissions scandal is a well-known example. The paper mentions several instances of high-profile, threshold-based non-compliance, from dairy providers to accounting firms and financial institutions.

According to the researchers, the non-compliance stems from conflicting interests and external forces that impact automakers' strategic approach.

Economically, automakers have little financial incentive to abide by the tight emissions standards. The most common ways to meet emissions thresholds are to install expensive catalytic converters or reduce the weight or horsepower of the vehicle. Price and safety are at the top of a car buyer's consideration list. "Emissions performance" is either at the bottom or hard to evaluate for a regular buyer. Non-compliant automakers are left with an unappealing set of options: increase the sticker price (or take a hit on profitability), reduce the perceived safety, exit the market, or cheat.

Moreover, other potential factors do not dissuade automakers from skirting the emissions requirements. Social pressure can be a powerful influencer but has not been in this particular arena. Regulatory oversight, as exhibited by the study's findings, has not been effective enough to compel compliance.

The co-authors recommend policymakers several options to address the study's findings: accompany tighter standards with stricter monitoring, regulate on technology instead of performance or offer credit-borrowing for automakers.

Hu noted that a switch from thresholds to guidelines or alternative requirements give companies more room to operate ethically. "In the electricity market, if you don't make the guideline, you can buy credits," she said. "Or we could get rid of outcome-based rules and change the requirement to a type of technology."

The authors urge policymakers and managers across industries to take note of their study. "When setting limit-based performance goals in situations with conflicting interests and imperfect monitoring," the paper states, "they should anticipate non-compliance from the regulated parties." The unintended consequence can occur in both public domain and private entities.

Explore further Eying deal, GM softens on tough standards for car pollution
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.
THE FUTURE IS FEMALE: With women leading in 29 Democratic and 2 Republican primary races for City Council so far, the Council may for the first time have a female majority. The group 21 in '21, created by then-Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Elizabeth Crowley, set the goal four years ago of ensuring more women were elected into the legislative body, which has just 14 female members. Above, the Councils Womens Caucus at a rally in 2019.
Finch said the librarys staff members have been processing records requests and otherwise kept busy on a range of artifact processing projects, but are thrilled to be reopening to the public.

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College Station Councilwoman Linda Harvell described the library and museum one of the city and regions major tourist attractions, and said she hoped people from near and far take the opportunity to learn about President and Mrs. Bushs life and commitment to service.

With all of the various events happening here in College Station, I know the staff and volunteers are also so excited to see people coming through their front doors again, Harvell said. For our locals, be sure you go out and explore yourselves  there are a lot of brand new displays for yall to enjoy.

The museum features new exhibits Oceans of Plastic, a collection of art made from plastics acquired along beaches along the Texas Gulf Coast, and Texas Sea Grant: 50 Years of Science and Stewardship.

As her family moved through the museum, Leslie Buer said she was particularly moved by one of Bushs quotes reflecting on the end of World War II: I remember thinking about all my buddies who had died, and I remember squeezing Bars hand and thanking God one more time for letting me live to see this day, the Bush quote read.
Foster was killed during a night of protests and unrest in several U.S. cities. In the immediate aftermath, then-Police Chief Brian Manley said officers heard two separate volleys of gunfire and made their way to the crowd, where they found Foster with multiple gunshot wounds.

Perrys attorneys have previously told The Associated Press that their client had just dropped off a rider when he turned onto a street filled with protesters who began beating on his vehicle. They said that Foster approached the car and motioned with his gun for Perry to lower his window. Perry initially thought Foster worked in law enforcement and put his window down, they said. But when Foster raised his weapon toward Perry, the soldier realized Foster was not a police officer and shot him in self-defense with a handgun in his car, the attorneys said.
Richwood, TX (77531)

Today

Cloudy skies this morning followed by thunderstorms during the afternoon. High near 85F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Low near 75F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.
Fire them, came the reply. The superintendent then asked Rogers, I suppose you think you are going to fire Tony? Rogers admitted he had thought about it. The superintendent continues: Tony is the most reliable worker weve ever had. I know he is a grouch, but he comes in first and leaves last. There has not been an accident for eight years on the hill where he works.

The next day Rogers told Tony about his conversation with the superintendent. When he told Tony all the good things the superintendent had said, Tony dropped his shovelful of sand, tears streaming down his face. Tony said, Why he no tell me dat eight years ago?

That night, the lead teamster was talking in the washroom: Did you see Tony today? He threw enough sand for 12 hills and he smiled all day Just then, Tony invited young Rogers to go home for supper. They walked until they got to a tiny log cabin. Tonys four children came out to meet them. It turned out that the old grouch was a kind and loving father whose children adored him. Tony said, I told Maria, you first foreman in deese country who ever say, Good work, Tony, and it make Maria feel like Christmas.
Bonan II knew certain borrowers had multi-million dollar at-risk loans with Peoples at the time Bonan II was encouraging Grand Rivers to extend new ones, but failed to relay this information to a concerned board member, the FDIC notice said.

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Further, according to the FDIC report, Bonan II moved to unsecure a loan by removing an oil rig that had served as collateral, causing the bank to suffer financial loss when the borrowers defaulted.

The borrowers in question included two employees of Bonan IIs and companies involved in the oil industry owned by a father-daughter pair who later became his wife and father-in-law. The FDIC concluded that Bonan IIs reckless practices and breaches involving personal dishonesty showed a willful and continuing disregard for the safety and soundness of Grand Rivers.

The May 5 FDIC order stated that Bonan II had 20 days to request a hearing contesting the agencys findings and punitive actions before an administrative law judge. It was not immediately clear to the newspaper whether Bonan II had requested such a hearing. A FDIC spokesperson said the agency could not offer any additional information beyond that in the published notice, including whether a hearing was requested. A message left with Peoples National Bank seeking comment and/or assistance in relaying a message to Bonan II went unreturned.
Like many colleagues, Marlow said his organization is working to combat or prevent emotional exhaustion in nurses.

We try to make sure that they get an appropriate amount of time off  at least two days in a row, maybe three, he said. We also try to make sure to make sure our facility is somewhere they want to be.

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He said leaders also must show compassion  such as assisting nurses with duties and picking up nursing or housekeeping rounds themselves.

Rolling up their sleeves and showing that they care, he called it.

The SIU study used the widely accepted Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) to measure the prevalence of burnout among nurses across the nation. An MBI score of 27 indicates burnout. Nearly half of the study participants reported a total score of 27 or higher.

Whittington said length of nursing career, ages and area of nursing did not seem to impact the level of burnout.

We saw it all over the place, which tells me that if nurses are working as nurses, they are experiencing emotional exhaustion, she said.

She said the study also offered suggestions to combat or prevent burnout.
A reporter for the Redding Record Searchlight saw at least a dozen buildings destroyed south of Lakehead, including homes, garages and outbuildings, the paper reported.

Johnson told the paper that investigators were trying to locate a car that may have started the fire Wednesday afternoon near Interstate 5 when hot pieces or parts apparently flew off and ignited dry brush.

About 300 firefighters battled the blaze but were hampered by hot weather and challenging terrain, officials said.

The fire was a threat to homes around Shasta Lake north of the city of Redding, more than 200 miles (322 kilometers) north of San Francisco. The huge lake is popular with vacationers, but its water level is dramatically low because of the drought.

No building damage was reported from two other northern fires, which erupted as California and the rest of the U.S. West was mired in a historic drought tied to climate change.
For decades, the two little grave markers sat side by side in a Mississippi Coast cemetery, identified only as Baby Jane and Baby Jane II.

The infants, both Jane Does, were found on different occasions, in 1982 and 1988, in Jackson County rivers and buried by community members, after investigators found no leads in either case.

Then late last year, investigators were able to identify Baby Jane through DNA testing, almost 40 years after her death. This week, investigators exhumed Baby Jane II from her resting place in Jackson County Memorial Park in Pascagoula, with hopes of finding her true name.

Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell said in a news release that the remains of the infant have been sent to the Mississippi Crime Lab. Once her DNA is collected, investigators hope to use it to build a family tree.

Baby Jane II was found in the Pascagoula River on June 28, 1988, by two men fishing near the wildlife management area in Wade. The child was found tangled in a fishing line.

An autopsy showed that the baby, 3 to 5 weeks old at the time, had died by drowning.

The case has had a devastating impact on the community, even years later.
CHICAGO (AP)  Fewer killings were reported over the first six months of 2021 in Chicago compared with the same period last year even as the number of shootings and people shot increased, according to statistics released Thursday by police.

Between Jan. 1 and Wednesday, there were 332 killings in the city  six fewer than in the first six months of 2020. Both numbers are much higher than the 246 recorded over the first half of 2019.

Chicago has seen a number of mass shootings and mass killings in recent weeks. Coupled with others around the country in June, shootings stoked concerns about a spike in U.S. gun violence heading into the summer, as coronavirus restrictions ease and more people are free to socialize.

Chicago ended 2020 with 769 slayings. So far this year, there have been 1,515 shooting incidents and 1,880 people shot in the city. Shootings incidents and victims over the first six months of 2020 totaled 1,377 and 1,656, respectively.
WASHINGTON  If you follow the news about President Joe Biden's investment plans, you might think that his agenda is destined to be derailed by acrimony between the parties -- and among Democrats themselves.

But Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Budget Committee and a leader of the party's progressive wing, suggests that everyone might usefully calm down about the prospects of enacting a big program.

"It has to be done," Sanders told me, "and I'm confident that it will be done."

The trick is to move the debate to what he, Biden and Democrats of various stripes want to accomplish, and the independent senator from Vermont ticked off a formidable list in an interview on Tuesday. It included the child tax credit, universal pre-K, child care, paid family and medical leave, action on climate change, Medicare improvements and affordable higher education.

"The media has been focusing on process, focusing on conflict, along with other stuff," Sanders said. "I don't know if there's anybody in America who knows what the hell we are trying to do."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is doing all he can to keep things that way. He wants the conversation to be all about whether a bipartisan infrastructure agreement Biden reached last week with a group of Republicans and moderate Democrats is linked to the passage of a bigger, Democrats-only "reconciliation" bill. McConnell is trying to bury the first bill by turning the second bill into a form of dangerous overreach.

Sanders is relaxed about this, too.

"McConnell is a very good politician and he understands that what we are trying to do through this reconciliation bill is meet the needs of the American people," Sanders said. "And that poll after poll shows that it is extremely popular. So as a good politician, he is trying to do everything he can to see that the Democrats don't pass something."

Talking to Sanders is instructive because his standing as a leader of the left often gets in the way of understanding another aspect of his approach to politics: He's operational. He wants to get stuff done. So does the rest of the party's progressive wing.

They aren't invested in bipartisanship the way Biden is. But they'll back his approach to a first, cross-party infrastructure bill -- Sanders says he, too, wants to finance "roads and bridges and broadband, public transit and water and wastewater and all of that stuff" -- as long as they can see it as a vehicle for getting more done in a Democrats-only bill.

This speaks to the intricate balancing act that Biden is engaged in. The two political parties include many factions, and an administration official pointed to three that will be central to Biden's success: "available Republicans, moderate Democrats, and more liberal Democrats."

The administration believes that many Senate Republicans -- and even, perhaps, a dozen or more House Republicans -- are "available" to vote for the bipartisan bill because it contains measures valuable to the states and districts they represent. These include not only roads, bridges and expanded access to broadband but also spending on "coastal resilience" in the wake of hurricanes and flooding. This matters in many Republican states, including Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Alabama.

McConnell's counter, as Sanders suggests, is to keep pushing the debate away from such specifics and to argue that Republicans who vote for the carefully negotiated bipartisan bill will become enablers of Biden's broader agenda that appeals to progressives. Everything Biden says or does to reassure progressives will be used against him with Republicans.

This is what happened when Biden said at the unveiling of the physical infrastructure bill that he wouldn't sign it without also being able to approve his broader investments. The president pulled back, and he is now on notice about the narrowness of the path he has to walk.

The coming weeks will be noisy. Progressives will be battling for their priorities, including the child tax credit and additional investments to fight climate change. Fixing a broken unemployment insurance system and expanding Medicaid in states that refused the Obamacare expansions also have a large claim on Democrats' attention.

But the party has an advantage in negotiating bills that can satisfy its various wings: The Senate Budget Committee that Sanders leads and its House counterpart, under Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., include representation across the party's philosophical spectrum. As a result, the compromises Sanders and Yarmuth hammer out in their committees are likely to reflect opinion in the party as a whole.

And all the party's factions have a powerful reason to get to yes: If they blow up Biden's program, they will blow up their chances of holding the House and Senate. This alone should keep them focused, as Sanders would say, on "what the hell" they are trying to do.
To the Editor:

Were all bad at something. I struggled with math growing up. Even today, Ill wake up in the middle of the night, heart a-flutter in a fetal position after dreaming that I forgot to study for an algebra test.

At least Im not alone being bad at something. Politicians offer good company. Republicans, for example used to be good at humor, sometimes by accident:

Is our children learning? - George W. Bush

Im pleased to announce that Ive signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union. The bombing begins in five minutes. - Ronald Reagan

Its wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago. - Dan Quayle

Bush knew he wasnt considered the smartest man in the room, but he good naturedly laughed at himself with us. And I dont remember him complaining after being mocked on Saturday Night Live." Can the same be said about Donald Trump?

Conservatives have certainly mastered talk radio, but something is missing: the Reagan wit that coaxed a chuckle even from the staunchest Democrats, and Bushs willingness to be the butt of a joke. Reading Dan Quayle quotes make me feel better about being a C student in school.
COLUMBIA  The Office of Regulatory Staff, along with the South Carolina Department of Consumer Affairs, AARP, Frank Knapp Jr., the Sierra Club, the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and Dominion Energy South Carolina announced a settlement in the utilitys electric rate case before the Public Service Commission of South Carolina.

The result of months of negotiations, the settlement filed Friday provides customer benefits while ensuring continued delivery of affordable, reliable and increasingly sustainable electricity. The settlement is subject to review and approval by the PSC.

On behalf of ORS, I appreciate everyones diligence and persistence in reaching this settlement agreement, which was only made possible thanks to the additional time the commission afforded us, said Nanette Edwards, ORS executive director.

We are thankful for the partnership of interested parties involved in this matter, said SCDCA Administrator and Consumer Advocate Carri Grube Lybarker. We believe the negotiations led to a well-rounded, creative resolution containing consumer-friendly measures that otherwise would not be available through a formal proceeding.

Customer benefits
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UNSUNG HEROES: EMS, National Guard put team in teamwork with COVID outreach

LARRY HARDY, T&D Orangeburg County EMS and the S.C. National Guard cooperated to provide support at vaccination and testing sites around the region. Kevin Varnadoe, Orangeburg County EMS training officer, says, Weve been calling it ... building bridges back toward each other. We have to have it because on those bad scenes, on those scenes with lots of patients, we have to have each other."

The coronavirus pandemic forced new ways of doing things, including testing and vaccination of individuals for an unpredictable virus that still presents challenges.

Through it all, providing for the general welfare and safety of communities had to remain paramount, with Orangeburg Emergency Medical Services staff and South Carolina National Guard members providing needed support at vaccination and testing sites spread throughout The T&D Region.

This past year has been quite a challenge for our organization to be able to meet all of our demands. Certainly, though, were thankful to have been available and able to work with our communities such as in Orangeburg, where youre trying to make a difference in the lives of individuals by being there at a critical time in helping to, if nothing else, provide hope that things will get better. Im confident that things are getting better, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Van McCarty said.

McCarty serves as the states 29th adjutant general and head of the South Carolina Military Department. He administers the affairs of the South Carolina Army and Air National Guard, the Emergency Management Division, the State Guard and the Youth ChalleNGe Academy.

UNSUNG HEROES: S.C. Farm Bureau: We can always count on farmers; growers use creativity to provide healthy food during pandemic The need for nourishment did not stop with the coronavirus.

Our primary resource here that we support would be generally the Department of Health and Environmental Control, but we also partner with our public and private health care providers, hospitals and other health care workers. We have also partnered with other state agencies such as the Department of Corrections and have done a variety of missions now over the past year, McCarty said.

He continued, Our soldiers have done everything from helping at food distribution centers to screening inmates at the prison, also cooking and serving food to inmates at the prison when their prison cook staff was sick and unable to fulfill those duties.

Weve had soldiers assisting with the DHEC rural COVID testing sites. Probably most notable here as we work through the latter part of our mission was the actual operation of administering COVID shots. As a partner there, were proud to say that our soldiers have to date given well over 100,000 vaccines to the public.

The challenge was worth the effort, McCarty said.

It was a challenge, but we got there and were still today giving shots to the public. Thats a good thing. If we are able to get more and more of our populace vaccinated, along with those who have already been affected by the virus, it will help us to achieve that ultimate term of herd immunity so that we can fully get back, he said.

UNSUNG HEROES: Orangeburg non-profit steps up with food during pandemic For many throughout The T&D Region, access to healthy foods is a challenge.

Kevin Varnadoe, Orangeburg County EMS training officer, said his department also provided support in the coordination of the coronavirus testing and vaccination sites.

We would have people on scene to help with reactions, help with people that might need us, help get people back to their cars, things like that. Basically a supportive role. It was good for us on our side because we saw it firsthand, Varnadoe said.

He said the coronavirus was impacting individuals and families in a serious manner, so to be supportive of the vaccinations, helping people get the vaccinations and being of assistance in any way we could was good for us.

Its a very odd virus in that it affects everybody differently. Sometimes theres no rhyme or reason for why someone would be sicker than someone else who just had minor symptoms, but certainly it was attacking our elderly, our diabetic patients, our renal patients and, again, our elderly that were not able to take care of themselves like the average citizen could, Varnadoe said.

McCarty said, But, all in all, the mission has been very rewarding to our soldiers. Theyve been able to interact and work with the public and been able to do things they feel very proud of and Im glad they were able to do. Part of our job is to be there when the state needs our support and assistance.

Orangeburg County Administrator Harold Young said, It was a beautiful partnership, and then a lot of the National Guard people are local people. So they already understood what we were dealing with and how much it would help us to deal with the pandemic through testing and now with vaccinations.

Responding to weather emergencies is yet another duty of the Guard, McCarty said, while weve also still been supporting the war effort."

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Weve got airmen now that are deployed overseas in support of operations either in Afghanistan or Iraq. Weve got soldiers that are in the nations capital, and weve had soldiers deployed here in the state for other purposes, to include civil unrest, he said.

Varnadoe said it takes teamwork among not only EMS staff and state National Guard members, but several other local entities, including fire, law enforcement and risk-management departments.

Weve been calling it ... building bridges back toward each other. We have to have it because on those bad scenes, on those scenes with lots of patients, we have to have each other, he said.

His more than 20-year career in providing EMS services started early, but he also credited Orangeburg County EMS Director Stephanie Givens for creating a warm environment that puts employee morale and community safety first.

She has a want to help this community. She has a drive to lift up this EMS system, and its palpable. Her drive and her want to do things the correct way got me here. Shes all about all of us being a family and a team, Varnadoe said.

He said COVID presented extraordinary work challenges for the EMS staff.

We were not even bringing our computers in because we didnt want the cross contamination from the patient to the computer, to the nurse, to the next patient and who knows where. So it changed how we ... did our business side, to starting to wear N-95 masks on every call and just really making us understand its not so much if we get sick, but the understanding if we dont use proper cleanliness, we could get someone else who is susceptible sick, Varnadoe said.

He said he doesnt feel like he and his EMS colleagues are heroes, but their families are in having to adjust to what has become a "lifestyle for them.

Unsung Heroes: A T&D series about those on the front lines during the pandemic

Our families have to live with us, and theres things that we have to do that our families have to understand. [Its like], OK, well, Dads not going to be home because hes stuck on this call, or Dads got to quarantine because hes been around this sickness, Varnadoe said.

The long hours, the things that we see, it is absolutely a lifestyle and, in my opinion, our families that do this with us are more heroes than we are, he said.

Young said the work of the countys EMS staff and the Guard is appreciated.

We appreciate it a whole lot. A lot of times the sacrifices that they make are not always recognized, the administrator said.

McCarty said, I am very proud of my soldiers, but Im also very proud of their families. ... And I always like to also thank our employers, who are willing to give their employees the opportunity to leave their jobs and come and do this. Without that type of support, we really could not do what we do.

Related
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  The third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House is embarking on a listening tour to talk up the Biden administration's federal aid package and push for Medicaid expansion in states that have not taken that step.

On a Thursday call with reporters, U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn laid out his Help is Here town hall tour, which will focus on rural and low-income communities in his native South Carolina. Kicking off Tuesday in Ridgeland, he'll make stops in Manning, North Charleston, Santee and Hopkins over the following week.

Throughout the state, Clyburn said he will be highlighting the benefits of the American Rescue Plan, signed into law in March by President Joe Biden. That includes an expanded child tax credit that will pay out up to $300 per month for qualified parents.

Clyburn said representatives from the Internal Revenue Service will be on hand at the events to answer questions. Also at the town halls, Clyburn said that community health center workers will be available to provide COVID-19 vaccines for those who are eligible.

All of us are aware of how catastrophic COVID-19 has been to rural and low-income communities, Clyburn said. And what we have seen in the Biden administration is a very comprehensive program to build back better.
The INVEST Act would infuse $60 billion into rail, including tripling funding for Amtrak to $29 billion over five years, increase funding for the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) grant program to $7 billion to fund passenger and freight rail projects, and boosts Amtraks union workforce.

This is a partisan product filled with special interest policy riders and unnecessary operational requirements, said Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., during an InsideSources infrastructure roundtable. We have a bill that will stifle innovation, hurt jobs, and negatively impact rail fluidity and service, lead to a modal shift away from the rails and to a less environmentally friendly mode of transportation, furthering congesting our highways.

Two components highlighted in fact sheet from the Transportation Committee Democrats are taking action against long trains that stretch for more than 7,500 feet and train crossings that are blocked for more than 10 minutes at a time, plus prohibiting the Department of Transportation from permitting rail transport of liquified natural gas until extensive safety analysis is done.

Crawford said the bill will set back the freight rail industry at least a decade.
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Coquille, OR (97420)

Today

Some clouds this morning will give way to generally sunny skies for the afternoon. High 74F. Winds NNW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Some clouds. Low 54F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph.
Today

Plenty of sunshine. High 89F. Winds light and variable.

Tonight

A few passing clouds. Low near 65F. Winds light and variable.

Tomorrow

Partly cloudy skies during the morning hours will become overcast in the afternoon. High 87F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph.
Today

Sunny to partly cloudy. High 89F. Winds light and variable.

Tonight

A few passing clouds. Low around 65F. Winds light and variable.

Tomorrow

A mix of clouds and sun early, then becoming cloudy later in the day. High 87F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph.
BILLINGS  State and federal wildlife authorities are seeking who is responsible for cutting the head and paws off a grizzly bear that may have drowned and washed up on a gravel bar in the Yellowstone River north of Gardiner, Montana, in mid-June.

It could have been a purposeful take, or half innocent not knowing about the illegality, said Kevin Frey, FWP wildlife management specialist based in Bozeman. Theres a lot of interest in having the skull or claws off them.

Possession of grizzly bear parts, since it is protected under the Endangered Species Act, is a violation of the federal law. That means investigators from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are involved.

The 25-year-old male bear was a known Yellowstone National Park resident, having been captured and tagged with the number 394.

Gardiner sculptor George Bumann heard about the dead bear from a rafting guide and boated to the site to take measurements for his artwork. On June 11, he posted on his website a blog about the bear, along with several photos of its claws, paws and worn-down canine teeth, taking care to not identify where the bear was located.
But that brought little resolution in the final days of school.

I think there were some process blunders between staff and administration, Jennings said. More importantly, I think there needs to be a conversation with students about how they felt and how can we come together and become stronger?

That sort of de-escalation and conversation didnt happen as the situation played out in the final days of school, Ramsey said. LGBTQ students were left feeling like school officials had relented to a bullying attitude among a segment of students, he said. Assurances from school officials that policy, not anti-Pride or anti-LGBTQ pressure from other students, was the basis of administrative actions fell flat.

Ramsey said several LGBTQ students didnt want to return to classes during the clash over Pride posters. Some are even debating homeschooling because of the fact of that lack of support and because they feel at danger at school.

Pride is a symbol of inclusion and understanding, former NCHS student Ewalt said. More than that, its a symbol of identity for many students.
The warriors consisted of young Crow Tribe riders who played braves from the Crow, Sioux and Cheyenne tribes. They rode bareback at high speeds while wearing full war regalia. Real Bird noted that the warriors had to be qualified to take the field.

The cavalry riders trained at the U.S. Cavalry School in Helena. The program leader, Keith Harrin, said his group was energized by being here.

We have a strong love for the horses, the land and Montana, Harrin said.

The reenactment itself is not just Custers Last Stand, but also explains the culture of different tribes in the area, and the colonization of Europeans. At one point, organizers released a stampede of wild horses, which were then herded and forced to cross the river by the Native riders.

The horses are essential to the story, Real Bird, himself a horse rancher, said. The reason the Sioux could win the battle was their quality of horses. It is a game changer.

Real Bird opened up his reenactment 29 years ago after he grew sick of the version in Hardin that came from the perspective of the U.S. Government, which eventually closed in 2015. His story is from the narrative of Spotted Wolf, a prominent Northern Cheyenne warrior who fought in the battle.
The framers debates on the question of the duration of a term went off in many directions. For House members, the preferences ranged from one to two to three years. For Senators, proposals included four, six and seven year terms, service during good behavior and even life tenure. There was no magical number, and advocates of various positions admitted as much. Brutus, an anti-Federalist, for example, acknowledged in a paper published on April 10, 1788, that, It is difficult to fix the precise period for which the senate should be chosen. He nevertheless believed a six-year term was too long.

In the end, the framers deliberations, as Madison observed, were guided by the question of whether too-frequent elections would prevent members of Congress from acquiring sufficient knowledge of the common interests of the nation, and the necessary experience required of those who would write laws and determine policies that would govern an expansive nation, what Madison characterized in Federalist No. 53 as, the great theater of the United States. Annual elections, Madison explained, might actually interfere with congressional representatives on-the-job training and education. The length of terms for each chamber, moreover, should reflect the duties and powers of its members, as well as constituents expectations of their representatives.
After the bill passes, the federal building at 308 West 21st Street in Cheyenne will be rededicated in Swains name.

When that happens it will mark the first federal building in the state to be named after a woman.

This year will also see the first state building to be named after a woman Thyra Thomson, the long term secretary of state.

The state Building Commission, that includes the five top elected state officials chose that name for the new state office building in Casper and the Legislature agreed.

The federal building in Cheyenne was home to the federal court from 1933 to 1965 when the court was moved a few blocks west to the new Joseph C OMahoney federal courthouse, named for a former U.S. Senator..

The old federal building still is in use by various federal agencies, according to the General Service Administrations web site.

The late long term federal Judge Ewing T. Kerr often said he missed the old courthouse on West 21st Street because it was so beautiful with its period architecture with lamps and soft light. The new federal courthouse was sleek and up-to-date with fluorescent lights but lacked the ambiance of the old one.
I had a little dinger on the evening of October 26th and they crated me up and took me to Swedish Medical Center in Denver where they cleaned out a carotid artery and messed around in my head  where they found a diminutive brain and no apparent damage! They shipped me back to Cody five days later. I do not have any physical difficulties, have continued my regimen of exercising, and except for a slip of the tongue in the later evening hours after a glass of nice red wine, I am right where I was before  talkative! It is truly a blessing and many prayers were winged out toward me. Dear amazing wife Ann was alert to the difficulty or there might have been some different results! As it was, we were in the 24 hour window for major recovery.
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.
Downtown

Tucsons big show is on this year, with fireworks taking off from A Mountain, downtown starting at about 9:15 p.m. on July 4. Drive in and watch the action in Parking Lot B of the Tucson Convention Center, off of West Cushing Street, between South Church and South Granada avenues. Parking Lot C off of South Granada Avenue will also be available. Parking in both lots will be free. If youd prefer not to deal with the traffic around the convention center, park at one of the lots near the university and take the Sun Link Streetcar to the action. The streetcar is offering free rides through Dec. 31 and has stops at the Tucson Convention Center and the Mercado District on the west side of Interstate 10. It will run until about 30 minutes after the fireworks end so that you can get back to your vehicle. Masks are required on the streetcar. Make it to the Mercado District, then pop over to the MSA Annex, 267 S. Avenida del Convento, for its IndepenDANCE Party, running from 7-11 p.m. The all-ages event, just east of A Mountain, will feature performances from Los Esplifs, DJ Herm and the Tucson Circus Arts and Circus Sanctuary. In addition to the fireworks and music, there will be food trucks, a bar and even stilt walkers. Tickets are $15 at the door with children 12 and younger free. More details at facebook.com/msaannex
Mexican 7-layer dip is a staple at parties, potlucks and summer barbecues for a reason. It's easy to throw together, doesn't require any special ingredients and can be served at room temperature.

Now that it's officially summer and the living is supposed to be easy, shouldn't dinner be, too?

It is with chicken taco lettuce cups. They're inspired by the popular appetizer but more filling and easier to eat because all the ingredients are tucked neatly together inside a lettuce leaf.

I used Boston lettuce, which has large, supple leaves that make perfect "cups" for meat and veggies, but Bibb lettuce, which has smaller leaves, would work perfectly, and so would Romaine if you desire extra crunch. To spice things up, I opted for Trader Joe's chicken shawarma thighs instead of my go-to shredded rotisserie chicken. They come already seasoned and only take 20 minutes to roast. I also subbed in black beans for refried beans.

A zesty cilantro-lime dressing, made extra creamy with Greek yogurt, is drizzled on top. Leftovers can be used as a dip for crudites or sauce for chicken, steak or fish.

CHICKEN TACO LETTUCE CUPS

PG tested

For dressing
Lawmakers are powerless to rescind the surcharge as it was approved by voters. So instead they created a new 4.5% top rate, effectively reducing the tax rate for other earnings for those affected to just 1%.

That plan, however, still provides the funds for K-12 education, with what is not paid by the wealthy instead coming out of general tax revenues paid by everyone else.

Thats not the case with SB 1783. It creates a new small business tax category which, because it did not exist when Prop. 208 was approved, is exempt from the surcharge.

And that could reduce the collections for education, which otherwise might reach $940 million, by more than $200 million a year.

Lujan said hes not buying the argument by the governor and Republican supporters of the tax-cut plan that a top tax rate of 8% would harm the Arizona economy or make the state less attractive.

He pointed out that the new laws have been on the books since it was approved. And Lujan said there has been plenty of publicity about the changes.

Since that time weve seen reports that luxury home purchases are surging in the Valley, Lujan said.
What has not changed, he said, is that the administration continues to urge people to get vaccinated.

When we get reports that show that many, if not most, of the new cases are people whove not had the vaccine there is no better reminder that the best way to put this public health emergency behind us is to get the vaccine, Karamargin said.

The vaccine works. People should get the shot, he continued. The public health emergency will come to an end quicker if everyone rolls up their sleeve and gets a shot.

Still, not all of the powers that Ducey has chosen to use so far have been in that direction.

Just last month the governor used his authority under the emergency declaration to preclude state universities and community colleges from requiring that students get vaccinated to attend class.

No university actually had done that. But what they had done is said that students who cannot or will not show proof they had been inoculated would have to get tested regularly and have to wear a mask.

The executive order overruled those regulations. Karamargin defended the move.

Given the success weve had so far, theres no need for that, he said.
Pima County has been awarded a $6.5 million grant to help reduce health disparities that have become more obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A public-health crisis was declared last December in Pima County and the grant is intended to address medical care inequities, particularly for people of color and racial minorities, said Dr. Theresa Cullen, the countys health director.

We know that disparities, while they were revealed by COVID-19, have persisted and not been created by COVID-19, Cullen said. While the grant highlights racial and ethnic inequalities, Cullen said the department also plans to address overall socio-economic disparities as well.

The grant is part of a national initiative through the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that was set up to help historically high-risk and underserved communities, as well as rural areas.

The CDC has provided grants for the same purpose to every state, including Arizona, as well as other counties or cities with a population of over 2 million. The funding will continue until June 30, 2023.

Arizona has also allotted some of its CDC funding to the University of Arizonas Center for Rural Health in order to reduce COVID-19-related health risks in Pima Countys rural populations, according to Cullen.
After successfully vaccinating almost 60% of the Pima County population eligible to receive a vaccine, the health department is changing its approach to getting shots in arms.

The countys standing vaccination centers at the University of Arizona, the Udall Center, El Pueblo Library and Tucson Mall closed last week because of decreased demand of vaccinations. Now, the goal is to get the remaining population vaccinated at other fixed sites such as pharmacies, doctors offices and clinics.

The vaccination site at the Kino Event Center closed Friday and will move to the third floor of the Abrams Public Health Center, 3950 S. Country Club Road, on Tuesday, July 6.

The county health department has held several mobile vaccine events at schools, churches, malls and sporting events. Many of them were run in partnership with FEMA, but the collaboration ended June 26.

FEMA staff partnered with the health department for the last eight weeks to vaccinate 8,124 people. According to the county, 59% of those recipients identified as Hispanic and 66% were from minority populations.
I looked at some of the curriculum that was out there, Kais said after the measure passed, on local talk radio show Wake Up! Tucson. We are not using that curriculum at Continental, and I honestly dont think any of our teachers were even thinking about it, but its all over the country.  And so Im thinking, why do we wait until we have a lineup of parents going out the door, yelling and screaming? Why dont we just address this right now?

Critical race theory is an academic discipline typically studied at the collegiate and post-graduate level that examines how systemic racism maintains and reinforces inequity in public policies and practices.

The resolution at Continental doesnt define critical race theory but says the administration should make sure nothing in the curriculum contains the concepts that one race is inherently superior or inferior to another race, that an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of their race or that someones moral character is determined by their race.

The state ban was similar, but also prohibits teaching students that any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or psychological distress because of their race, ethnicity or sex.
NEW YORK (AP)  Lawyers for British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell are arguing a court decision that freed Bill Cosby from prison backs up tossing out her sex trafficking case.

In court papers filed on Friday, the lawyers said the former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein is in a similar situation as Cosby because both were covered by non-prosecution deals at the time they were charged in sex abuse cases.

Cosby was convicted in 2018 on charges of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004, when she was a Temple University employee. He was released earlier this week after Pennsylvania's highest court found prosecutors violated his rights by reneging on an apparent promise not to charge him.

The same principle applies to Maxwells case because she was covered by a non-prosecution agreement Epstein signed with federal prosecutors in Florida in the late 2000s, her lawyers said.
Police officials say 35-year-old Randi Duarte faces charges of sexual battery by an authority figure, coercion of a witness and tampering with evidence. Police received a complaint in late May and worked with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and the Hamilton County District Attorneys office to investigate the allegation.

Police did not provide any additional information about the abuse claim. Its unknown if the arrest is related to the abuse allegation cited by Nichols in June. The department says one of the youths housed at the shelter said he had witnessed a staff member kissing another youth.

The shelter is run by the Baptiste Group, which began operating last year under then-President Donald Trumps administration after receiving a conditional license by the department. The shelter has a federal contract with the Office of Refugee Resettlement to temporarily house unaccompanied migrant minors.

Baptiste Group did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. It was not clear whether Duarte has an attorney who could comment on his behalf.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The U.S. Supreme Court sided Friday with members of an Amish group in Minnesota who are fighting efforts by authorities to compel them to install septic systems, sending their appeal back to a state court for reconsideration in light of the high court's recent ruling in a religious freedom case.

Families with the Swartzentruber Amish in southeastern Minnesota are fighting efforts by Fillmore County to require septic systems. Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that they're among the most traditional Amish groups in the country. The Minnesota Court of Appeals and a trial court both sided with the county, and the state Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

But the U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back to the Minnesota Court of Appeals with instructions to take another look in light of its ruling last month in favor of a Philadelphia-based Catholic foster care agency that says its religious views prevent it from working with same-sex couples. While the Supreme Court's order was a strong indicator of how the justices think the lower court should rule, the next step is up to the Minnesota court.
The prison was known during Saddams rule as one of the main facilities for jailing and executing his opponents. After Saddam, Abu Ghraib became notorious once again, for the 2004 scandal over shocking abuses of detainees by American guards.

When news broke of Rumsfelds death in the United States on Wednesday at 88, many Iraqis took to social media to express lingering anger and bitterness. They aired memories of the dark era in Iraq that Bush and Rumsfeld represent.

Some tweeted: Rot in Hell." Others described Rumsfeld as a war criminal.

Al-Tamimi said he holds Rumsfeld personally responsible for his own detention in 2006, on suspicion of undertaking in anti-U.S. activities, including, he said, allegations of inciting against the U.S. presence in Iraq. Speaking to the AP over the phone on Thursday, he would not elaborate.

He was held in Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq for two years without a conviction. His son was just over a month old when he was detained. He killed me while I was alive," al-Tamimi said of Rumsfeld.

Al-Tamimi's son was growing up for those two years not knowing he had a father or where he was, he said. Al-Tamimi was later found innocent by an Iraqi court and freed in 2008.
Though "The Purge'' saga is fictional, with the very real rising levels of divisiveness, intolerance and violence in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic could fiction become reality?

Obviously we shot it before all the disaster that happened in America in the last year, but I think thats the genius of James DeMonaco, who has the clairvoyance to see five minutes into the future, Gout said. It is a current film. If some aliens came to Earth, I think it would be one of the 10 films that represent who we are. 

And when it seems that the complicated relationship between Mexico and the United States has been introduced, the film reminds that long before the border issues, Native American people were in the region. In a prominent role, an indigenous ally (played by Gregory Zaragoza) who guides them through the desert points out that they have been fighting oppression and extermination for 500 years.

Behind the camera there is also a Mexican presence. Gout called on his friend Luis Sansans to be the director of photography: I needed my guardian.

For the director, the most difficult part of the production was to do everything that the apocalyptic script proposed  and stick to the budget.

You have to resort to Spielberg from Jaws, where the shark was broken all the time and thats why its so scary, because you dont see the damn shark until the end, he said. Although it looks very big, we did not have those conditions and that was the real challenge from start to finish.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
LONDON (AP)  U.K. authorities on Friday halted the prosecution of two former British soldiers over the killing of three people almost 50 years ago in Northern Ireland, including two who died on Bloody Sunday  one of the deadliest days in the conflict known as The Troubles.

The decision to discontinue proceedings against the two men, known only as Soldier F and Soldier B, came after a judge recently threw out evidence against two other former soldiers because of the way it was obtained. As the cases were similar, prosecutors concluded there was no reasonable prospect of a conviction in the cases against Soldier F and Soldier B.

Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Herron said prosecutors had a duty to review the cases in light of the new information, despite the extreme distress caused by their decision.

I recognize these decisions bring further pain to victims and bereaved families who have relentlessly sought justice for almost 50 years and have faced many setbacks, Herron said. It is clear to see how these devastating events in 1972, in which the families involved lost an innocent loved one, caused an enduring pain which continues to weigh heavily.
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
How to spend one day in Tucson  from a staycation at a hotel to trying a new local restaurant (and eating lots of frozen treats afterwards), we've compiled some ideas on the perfect summer day in Tucson, Arizona.
Two companies added some flavor to their food preparation businesses Friday.

Old World Spices and Seasonings of Overland Park, Kansas, announced that it has acquired Ponca City-based barbecue sauce firm Head Country.

The companies will pursue wider availability of Head Country products, together with meeting the increased demand for the award-winning line-up of barbecue sauces, seasonings and marinade that have helped Head Country make its mark in the south-central United States.

Head Country production and distribution will continue without interruption at its Ponca City plant, which employs 35 people.

A regional favorite for nearly 75 years, Head Country has been the market share leader in Oklahoma for decades with barbecue sauces, seasonings and marinade. It is the third-largest market share leader in the south central region, the fifth-largest in Dallas and in the top 10 nationwide.

Old World Spices and Seasonings, which started in 1977, is a manufacturer of custom-blended spices, private-label seasonings, dry food products and sauces.

Between its manufacturing facility in Concordia, Missouri, and its headquarters in Overland Park, Old World employs 135.
A Tulsa man died Wednesday evening after he was arrested by Tulsa police officers, the Tulsa Police Department reported Thursday in a news release.

Emmitt Weaver, 44, died at a Tulsa hospital after he reportedly developed respiratory distress while running from the officers, the release states.

Two officers were patrolling the area around 31st Street and Memorial Drive just before 7 p.m. Wednesday when they saw three men standing outside a motel on 79th East Avenue. As soon as the men saw the marked police vehicle, two of them started running away, police said in the news release.

Tulsa Police Capt. Richard Meulenberg said the officers were not specifically looking for those three men but just happened to see them run away. According to the news release, the officers were patrolling in an ongoing effort to reduce gun violence in the area.

The officers ran after the men who fled, and during the pursuit, they saw one of the men throw a gun away, the press release says.

After running about 400 feet, Weaver stopped near another hotel on 79th East Avenue.

The other man continued running from the officers, who both continued to pursue him until one of the officers stopped to keep Weaver in his eyesight.
A Tulsa County jury found a 78-year-old Owasso woman guilty of manslaughter in the 2013 shooting death of her husband and recommended that she spend 25 years in prison.

Vicky McNeely had faced a charge of first-degree murder in the Jan. 11, 2013, death of her longtime husband, Daniel McNeely, but jurors this week were able to consider a lesser-included charge of first-degree manslaughter.

Although the jury opted to find her guilty of a lesser-included offense, it chose not to recommend a prison sentence toward the statutory minimum of four years for that charge.

Manslaughter in the first degree is punishable by imprisonment between four years and life.

The case remained pending for nearly a decade due at least partly to pretrial litigation, which entailed waiting for opinions on several petitions to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals.

McNeely was in and out of custody while the case was pending because a judge revoked her bond at least twice for noncompliance with orders not to drink alcohol  which at one point resulted in an unrelated DUI charge to which she pleaded no contest.
After reaching the victim, officers in the parking lot stopped a vehicle driven by Cato. Cox and Morgan were passengers in the vehicle, according to the affidavit, and the room was rented in Coxs name.

In the vehicle, officers found a stolen handgun by the drivers seat, a bottle of prescription drugs, and a backpack at Morgans feet that contained nine packaged bags of marijuana and various paraphernalia, a court affidavit alleges.

The three were booked into the Tulsa County jail and charged in Tulsa County District Court with child human trafficking, possession of a controlled drug with intent to distribute, possession of a firearm while in the commission of a felony, and manufacturing, possessing or procuring child pornography. Morgan was additionally charged with possession of a firearm after conviction of a felony.

The state court proceedings remain ongoing. The three are scheduled for a preliminary hearing July 20.

On the federal side, each was charged in a superseding indictment in December with sex trafficking of children. Morgan was additionally charged with possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute, possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime, felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition, and coercion and enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity.
Reconstruction work on the Tulsa-west Tulsa levee system could begin as soon as late 2022 if U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofes funding requests make it through the federal budgeting process.

Inhofe announced Thursday that he will ask Congress to approve $13.8 million for the project and $5 million to continue and expedite design work on the first phase of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation Systems 12-foot channel deepening project.

Oklahoma is not only working hard to recover from the past year, but we are quickly getting back to growing and thriving as a state, Inhofe said in a news release. I am proud of the people of our state for their dedication to community and moving forward. All of these community projects show this dedication.

I will continue to fight to ensure Oklahoma projects that are transparent and accountable, like these, are given priority in Congress.

Tulsa County Commissioner Karen Keith, a major advocate of the levee project, said she was grateful for Inhofes continued efforts to move the project forward.

It was such an appropriate day, with all of the rain coming down, to have this news, Keith said Thursday.
With COVID-19 cases on the rise across the state, health officials are urging Oklahomans to take some precautions as they celebrate the Fourth of July.

The Oklahoma State Department of Health released two sets of guidance  for vaccinated and unvaccinated Oklahomans  to help mitigate virus transmission through the weekend.

We hope you take this time to relax with family and friends, said Dr. Lance Frye, health commissioner for the state of Oklahoma, in a news release. However, we want everyone to be cautious when gathering this weekend, especially if you have not been vaccinated, as some areas across the state are seeing an uptick in recent case numbers.

Fully vaccinated people dont need masks when gathering indoors or outdoors with other fully vaccinated people, according to CDC and Health Department guidance, unless required by businesses or local laws, but vaccinated people can still wear a mask, especially when attending a crowded gathering with unvaccinated people.

Take the celebration outside, especially if vaccinated people are meeting with unvaccinated people, health officials said.

The Health Department and the CDC recommend that unvaccinated people wear masks if they plan to gather indoors with people outside their household.
Meeting with local health care advocates Thursday morning, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra came to Tulsa to mark the first day of Medicaid expansion in Oklahoma as nearly 200,000 more state residents became qualified for the program.

Oklahoma became the 37th state to join the federal governments expanded Medicaid program as State Question 802 took effect.

July 1 will go down in history, Becerra said, as the day Oklahoma expanded access to peace of mind, explaining that tens of thousands of residents will no longer have to worry about affording health care.

Medicaid expansion started with the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare, which originally mandated that states would have to expand coverage for people under 65 with incomes below 133% of the federal poverty level.

In June 2012, however, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the part of the Affordable Care Act that penalized states for not expanding Medicare, which gave states the choice to expand their programs or not.
Phan Minh Quy, a physically disabled resident from Ninh Binh Province, Vietnam, is uplifting his local community by providing jobs and skills training for those with special needs.

Quy has dedicated much of his lift to helping people with disabilities improve their quality of life through employment and social integration.

In addition to serving as the deputy director of the provinces Vocational Training, Job Development, and Support Center for the Disabled, the 31-yar-old social entrepreneur also runs a textile factory where he provides employment for 12 disabled employees.

First steps

As a baby, Quy came down with a fever that left him with partial paralysis and the inability to walk. As a result, the first nine years of his life were spent crawling.

His parents visited dozens of major hospitals trying to find him help, but their search was in vain.

Because of his disability, he did not start school until her turned nine.

Shortly after, his parents found an experienced doctor who was able to perform a surgery that enabled him to regain some of his mobility.

At the age of 10, he took his first steps.

When I first learned how to walk, I was so shaky that Id fall over from the slightest touch, Quy recalled.

I often suffered leg contractures and had to put a sack of sand beneath my legs to stretch them.

Part of Quys routine to keep his legs working included regular therapy and weight lifting.

Quy dropped out of school after finishing the ninth grade and soon began looking for work in order to provide for himself.

At 19 years old, with just VND500,000 (US$22) to his name, he left his hometown in Ninh Binh Province for Nam Dinh Province, approximately 32 kilometers away, to work in industrial processing zones but was consistently denied work due to his pronounced limp.

Eventually, he landed a job as a painter at a decorative wood workshop.

It did not take long before Quy realized that working as a day laborer did not provide a stable income.

He returned to his hometown where he learned how to sew at a textile vocation workshop for physically challenged people.

What Quy found most challenging about the learning process was using his feeble feet to operate the pedal sewing machine.

It took him six months to master the machine and make his first shirt  a keepsake he still holds on to.

Eager to find a decent-paying job, the young man again found himself struggling in a job market that felt prejudiced against people like him.

Despite his skills, his applications were all turned down due to his disability.

My parents would tell me to stay home. They said I couldnt become somebody, he shared.

My parents can provide for me while they are still around, but what about after theyre gone?

"I knew I needed to give it my all and stand on my own feet to protect my future.

Luck finally smiled on him when he landed a job at a Korean garment enterprise.

After working at the company for two years, Quy found a job at an even larger business where he was able to prove his capacity and gain experience in the textile industry.

A man on a mission

According to Quy, even in 2021, the job market is staked against disabled people.

How can such a man be good at his work? and How on earth could we employ such a man? are just a few of the comments he has faced.

Hoping to change the narrative, Quy is determined to help his community earn fair treatment in a job market that often works against it.

Quy got his chance to make a difference when a friend offered to help him launch a garment workshop where he could provide training and employment for those with special needs.

With an initial investment of VND800 million ($34,700) he scraped up from his own and his familys savings, Quy put his workshop into operation last October, well aware the outbreaks of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic within the country in 2020 could badly hurt his business.

Looking back at what Ive been through, Im set on providing training and stable jobs to people with disabilities, he said.

The workers at Quys workshop, both disabled and able-bodied, earn VND4.5-7 million ($195- 303) each month.

Among them is Mai, a hearing- and speaking-impaired 20-year-old, who cannot read or write and has never ventured out of her neighborhood.

After just a few months, she was able to transform from a shy girl to a skilled worker who can churn out products with ease.

Since its launch in October 2020, during a year which saw many textile and garment enterprises make large numbers of workers redundant to cope with the COVID-19 impacts, Quys business has found itself a group of loyal customers and a steady flow of orders from now until the years end.

Looking at what he has been achieving so far, he modestly said there is room for improvement.

For his future plans, the young man hopes to work with more members of the physically challenged community to help them achieve self-empowerment.

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PARIS -- Most of the countries negotiating a global overhaul of cross-border taxation of multinationals have backed plans for new rules on where companies are taxed and a tax rate of at least 15%, they said on Thursday after two days of talks.

The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which hosted the talks, said a global minimum corporate income tax of at least 15% could yield around $150 billion in additional global tax revenues annually.

It said 130 countries, representing more than 90% of global GDP, had backed the agreement at the talks.

New rules on where the biggest multinationals are taxed would shift taxing rights on more than $100 billion of profits to countries where the profits are earned, it added.

"With a global minimum tax in place, multinational corporations will no longer be able to pit countries against one another in a bid to push tax rates down," U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement.

"They will no longer be able to avoid paying their fair share by hiding profits generated in the United States, or any other country, in lower-tax jurisdictions," he said.

One source close to the talks said it had taken tough negotiations to get Beijing on board. A U.S. administration official said there were no China-specific carveouts or exceptions in the deal.

Minimumm tax

The minimum corporate tax does not require countries to set their rates at the agreed floor but gives other countries the right to apply a top-up levy to the minimum on companies' income coming from a country that has a lower rate.

The Group of Seven advanced economies agreed in June on a minimum tax rate of at least 15%. The broader agreement will go to the Group of Twenty major economies for political endorsement at a meeting in Venice next week.

Technical details are to be agreed by October so that the new rules can be implemented by 2023, a statement from countries that backed the agreement said.

The nine countries that did not sign werethe low-tax EU members Ireland, Estonia and Hungary as well as Peru, Barbados, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Kenya.

Holdouts risk becoming isolated because not only did all major economies sign up, but so did many noted tax havens such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands.

Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe, whose country has attracted many big U.S. tech firms with its 12.5% corporate tax rate, said he was "not in a position to join the consensus," but would still try to find an outcome he could support.

In the European Union, the deal will need an EU law to be passed, most likely during France's presidency of the bloc in the first half of 2022, and that will require unanimous backing from all EU members.

Welcoming the deal as the most important international tax deal reached in a century, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said he would try to win over those holding out.

"I ask them to do everything to join this historical agreement which is largely supported by most countries," he said, adding that all big digital corporations would be covered by the agreement.

Thresholds

The new minimum tax rate of at least 15% would apply to companies with turnover above a 750-million-euro ($889-million)threshold, with only the shipping industry exempted.

The new rules on where multinationals are taxed aims to divide the right to tax their profits in a fairer way among countries as the emergence of digital commerce had made it possible for big tech firms to book profits in low tax countries regardless where they money was earned.

Companies considered in scope would be multinationals with global turnover above 20 billion euros and a pre-tax profit margin above 10%, with the turnover threshold possibly coming down to 10 billion euros after seven years following a review.

Extractive industries and regulated financial services are to be excluded from the rules on where multinationals are taxed.

Implementation of the deal could still prove rocky not least in the U.S. Congress, where Representative Kevin Brady, the top Republican on the tax-writing U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, described it as "a dangerous economic surrender that sends U.S. jobs overseas, undermines our economy and strips away our U.S. tax base."

($1 = 0.8437 euro)
The United States will continue assisting Vietnam in accessing COVID-19 vaccines to fight the ongoing pandemic, according to U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

The U.S. official had a phone talk with Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh on Thursday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed later the same day.

During the conversation, Minh praised the U.S. role in promoting vaccine supplies to countries worldwide via the COVAX Facility as well as bilateral cooperation.

He hoped that further support will be provided so Vietnam will soon access the vaccine doses committed by the U.S..

The deputy premier also suggested the two nations work closely to promote and ensure harmonious and sustainable cooperation in terms of business, trade, and investment.

Sullivan affirmed that the U.S. treasures its comprehensive partnership with Vietnam and spoke highly of the nations increasingly important role in the region and the world.

He said the U.S. will continue assisting Vietnam and other countries in accessing vaccines to push back the COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. will also work closely with Vietnam to enhance economic, trade and investment ties to bring benefits to enterprises and people of both nations.

Deputy PM Minh and U.S. National Security Advisor Sullivan agreed that their two countries comprehensive partnership has been growing strongly in all fields, making active contributions to maintaining peace, stability, cooperation, and development in the Asia-Pacific region and the world.

They consented on enhancing cooperation to further deepen bilateral ties via specific measures and stepping up collaboration in dealing with post-war consequences, science - technology, education - training, and climate change response.

The U.S. previously pledged to share at least 80 million COVID-19 vaccine doses with the world to help end the pandemic.

Around seven million of the doses would be donated to Asia, including Vietnam, through the COVAX scheme.

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Flight NH833, operated by All Nippon Airways, landed in Ho Chi Minh City early Friday morning, carrying 400,000 AstraZeneca vaccine jabs donated to Vietnam by Japan.

This batch of vaccine doses is among the one million COVID-19 vaccine shots that Japan pledged to gift to Vietnam in an announcement on June 25.

The second shipment, carrying the remaining 600,000 doses, is expected to arrive on July 8.

The Southeast Asian country received an initial donation of 966,320 jabs of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine from Japan on June 17.

The newly-arrived 400,000 doses are in temporary storage with Tan Son Nhat Cargo Services Joint Stock Company while they await customs clearance procedures before being sent to their final storage destination.

Containers of AstraZeneca vaccine shots at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City, July 2, 2021. Photo: C.Trinh / Tuoi Tre

Vietnam has so far administered more than 3.81 million doses of the vaccine since inoculations began on March 8.

More than 204,000 people have finished their two-shot regimen.

The Vietnamese Ministry of Health said that Vietnam has received aid commitments and signed purchasing contracts for about 105 million COVID-19 vaccine doses so far, according to Thanh Nien (Young People) newspaper.

The country is projected to receive about 30 million additional doses by the third quarter of this year.

Containers of AstraZeneca vaccine shots donated by Japan are temporarily kept at Tan Son Nhat Cargo Services Joint Stock Company in Ho Chi Minh City, July 2, 2021. Photo: C.Trinh / Tuoi Tre

The health ministry on Friday morning confirmed 151 new COVID-19 cases, including four imported and 147 domestic infections, taking the national caseload to 17,727 patients, with 7,247 recoveries and 81 deaths.

Since the eruption of the current virus wave on April 27, Vietnam has recorded 14,335 domestically-infected patients in 51 of its 63 provinces and cities.

Bac Giang is leading the table with 5,656 patients, followed by Ho Chi Minh City with 4,420 and Bac Ninh Province with 1,608.

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What you need to know in Vietnam today:

COVID-19 Updates

-- Vietnam reported 147 local infections on Friday morning, including 118 in Ho Chi Minh City. The nation has detected 15,905 domestic cases and 1,822 imported infections since early last year. Recoveries have reached 7,247 while 81 virus-related deaths have been recorded so far.

-- Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh held telephone talks on Thursday with Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz on COVID-19 prevention and potential vaccine production cooperation.

-- Flight NH833 operated by All Nippon Airways landed in Ho Chi Minh City early on Friday, carrying 400,000 AstraZeneca vaccine shots donated by Japan to Vietnam.

Society

-- Police in Thai Binh Province, located in northern Vietnam, said on Thursday that they had arrested Dao Van Thinh, 43, for allegedly killing his wife and parents-in-law. Thinh had turned himself in to police officers on June 28.

-- Vietnam Airlines brought back 250 Vietnamese repatriates from Canada on Thursday, the national carrier said the same day.

Business

-- Vietnam will still stick to its target of 6-6.5 percent growth in GDP this year despite a serious coronavirus outbreak that has hit Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and other industrial park hubs since late April, PM Pham Minh Chinh said during a government meeting on Thursday.

- A program promoting Vietnams green mangos is running in Australia till the end of July, after five tonnes of the fruit has arrived in the Oceanian country, according to the Vietnam News Agency.

Sports

-- Vietnam's Viettel FC will take on Thailand's BG Pathum United Football Club in the 2021 AFC Champions League on Thai soil at 9:00 pm on Friday.

-- "Crowds at Euro 2020 football stadiums and in pubs and bars in host cities are driving the current rise in coronavirus infections in Europe," Reuters cited the World Health Organisation (WHO) as saying on Thursday.
Hanoi police have seized a sizable batch of perfume and beauty products imitating famous designer brand names such as Dior, Chanel and Gucci.

The commodities were found in a warehouse of Hancorp, a state-owned construction company in Yen Phu Ward of Tay Ho District, during a raid on Wednesday, local authorities said.

They included some 12,000 boxes of perfume, moisturizer, facial mask, deodorant, and make-up remover.

As per local officers, this is one of the biggest seizures of fake designer perfume that Hanoi has seen in the past few years.

These fake items were mostly sold online to avoid scrutiny from competent authorities, officers added.

The owner of the cargo was identified to be Hoang Quoc Phuong, 32, from Yen Phu Ward.

According to preliminary inspection, Phuong sourced the counterfeit perfume on social media at the price of VND40,000-120,000 (US$1.7-5.2) per bottle and distributed them exclusively to online sellers in surrounding provinces.

His contraband was temporarily stored at the Hancorp warehouse before being distributed to sellers in less than a day.

It is suspected that Phuong has connections with certain personnel of the state firm, as he was able to pass the security check and use a warehouse inside to store his products.

He was not able to present any certificate of origin to the police at the time of the bust.

His items were also confirmed to be fakes by representatives of the high-end brands in Vietnam.

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Ho Chi Minh City documented 419 domestic infections on Friday, most detectecd in isolated areas.

Three hundred and thirty-five of the new cases were infected patients contacts already put in quarantine centers or locked-down places, the Ho Chi Minh City Center for Disease Control said in a report.

The remaining 84 patients were detected via mass screening at medical facilities and in the community.

Vietnam logged 527 locally-infected patients, including 428 in isolated areas, and 148 recoveries the same day, according to the Ministry of Health.

The country has reported 16,285 domestic infections and 1,836 imported cases, including 7,395 recoveries and 84 deaths, from the beginning of the pandemic last year.

Since a new outbreak started in Vietnam on April 27, the nation has registered 14,716 local cases in 52 out of its 63 provinces and cities.

Bac Giang is on top of the table with 5,710 patients, followed by Ho Chi Minh City with 4,723 and Bac Ninh Province with 1,610.

By comparison, Vietnam confirmed 106 community 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.

A total of 3,813,767 shots have been administered across the country since inoculation was rolled out on March 8.

More than 204,000 people have finished their two-shot regimen.

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Two girls fell into a deep pond and drowned after going with their friends to a mining area to take photographs in the southern Vietnamese province of Tay Ninh on Thursday afternoon.

The local forensic agency completed the autopsy on the bodies of 13-year-old L.K.N. and 12-year-old N.T.H.D., both hailing from Tan Bien District, and handed them over to their families at around 9:00 pm on the same day, according to local authorities.

According to initial information, the two victims and four other friends went to the in-operation Khanh Nhan mining site in Tan Binh Commune in the district to take pictures at around 4:30 pm on Thursday.

While playing there, N. and D. slipped into a deep pond and drowned.

Upon receiving the report on the incident, rescuers quickly arrived at the scene and managed to retrieve the bodies of the two victims at 8:00 pm on the same day.

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A Vietnam Airlines flight from Canada repatriated 250 Vietnamese nationals to Da Nang Airport in the namesake city on Thursday, a representative of the national carrier said.

The flight, numbered VN8, landed at Da Nang Airport at 1:40 pm after an 18-hour journey from Canadas Toronto Pearson Airport and a technical stop in Japan.

It was the result of months-long negotiations between Vietnam Airlines, Vietnams Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Vietnamese Embassy in Canada, and relevant Canadian agencies.

In 2020, Vietnam Airlines was the only carrier in Vietnam to be awarded a permit from Canadian authorities to operate repatriation flights from the North American country.

However, the certificate expired after just four months.

In June 2021, the permit was reissued to the flagship carrier after it passed a rigorous vetting process that required it to prove its flight operation, aircraft maintenance, ground service, human training, and COVID-19 prevention capacities to Transport Canada.

The entire process took around six months, the airline shared.

For the first repatriation flight from Canada this year, Vietnam Airlines mobilized a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner wide-body aircraft.

The carrier also upheld coronavirus prevention level 4  the highest level of COVID-19 prevention  requiring full PPE donning on all flight attendants and passengers.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in Vietnam in early 2020, the country has closed it borders to all international entries except for foreign experts, investors, diplomats, and Vietnamese repatriates.

The Vietnamese prime minister has ordered local airlines to arrange flights to bring Vietnamese citizens abroad back into the country, but they must be quarantined at military-run facilities and other designated venues before they can enter the community.

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A woman visited a bustling seafood market in south-central Vietnam every day for a week before being diagnosed with COVID-19, according to epidemiological investigation.

The 37-year-old woman hails from Dong Hoa Town in the south-central province of Phu Yen, the provincial Center for Disease Control confirmed.

Every day from June 18 to 24, the woman traveled on a refrigerator truck from Phu Yen to neighboring Khanh Hoa Province at around 6:30 am to visit Hon Ro, a major wholesale seafood market in the south-central region.

After purchasing fish at the venue, the woman and truck driver returned to Phu Yen at 2:00 pm to resell the products at Tuy Hoa Market in the namesake city.

The woman began showing such symptoms as fatigue and a mild fever on June 25.

On the morning of June 29, she visited the local medical center to fill out a health declaration and have her samples collected for COVID-19 testing.

Her result came back positive for the novel coronavirus on Thursday.

She is being quarantined and treated at the makeshift hospital for COVID-19 treatment in Dong Hoa Town.

Contact tracing has been initiated in Phu Yen as well as at the seafood market in Khanh Hoa.

Vietnam has documented 17,902 COVID-19 cases as of Friday afternoon, with 7,274 recoveries and 81 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health.

The country has recorded 14,505 local infections in 51 provinces and cities, including 131 cases in Phu Yen, since a new outbreak began on April 27.

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Nguyen Van Thai is a Vietnamese conservationist on a life mission to protect pangolins, which are critically endangered, and one of the most trafficked animals in the world.

"In Vietnam, as well as in the world, pangolins are the most-captured species. Their black market price is high, up to $200 to $300 per kilogram. That is why they are constantly being hunted and sourced."

In Asia, pangolins are trafficked for use in traditional medicine, with their parts said to be able to cure everything from cancer to male impotence.

This illegal trade is worth billions of dollars.

"When we look at them, we think they are scary because they look like a dinosaur. But in fact they are really nice and shy, incapable of attacking or posing a threat to humans, but we are the reason for their declining numbers that could lead to extinction."

Thai's passion started at a young age.

A neighbor dug up a pangolin which was in a curled-up ball - the position used as a defence mechanism by the animal to ward off predators.

It was that experience that inspired him to protect pangolins.

At first he worked as a volunteer, before starting his own rescue group called Save Vietnam's Wildlife.

Now, he employs more than 60 staff and has rescued close to 1,600 pangolins.

Thai's protection group has helped set up joint task forces with rangers and locals to patrol and destroy traps set by poachers.

His work has inspired others to get involved.

"I started from zero here. The work was completely new to me. Thai was always there to guide me, little by little."
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centerpiece

East Texas World War II veterans share their stories of service ahead of Rose City Airfest

ZAK WELLERMAN/ TYLER MORNING TELEGRAPH Above: From left, World War II Air Force veteran Ralph Coleman Graham, 99, and Garrett Bragg stand inside a B-17 bomber, which is the same aircraft Graham flew during his military service in World War II, at the Historic Aviation Memorial Museum at the Tyler Pounds Regional Airport on Thursday. Top: A photo of Graham during his service is pictured in his book 12 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Ghost Plane at The Battle of the Bulge. ZAK WELLERMAN/ TYLER MORNING TELEGRAPH From left, Garrett Bragg and World War II Air Force veteran Ralph Coleman Graham, 99, stands in front of a B-17 bomber, which is the same aircraft Graham flew during his military service in World War II, at the Historic Aviation Memorial Museum at the Tyler Pounds Regional Airport on Thursday. JOHN ANDERSON/ TYLER MORNING TELEGRAPH U.S. Marine Corp. Col. Joe McPhail, 99, speaks about his experiences serving in World War II on Thursday morning at CampV in Tyler. JOHN ANDERSON/ TYLER MORNING TELEGRAPH Air Force veteran Ralph Coleman Graham, 99, speaks about his experiences serving in World War II on Thursday morning at CampV in Tyler. JOHN ANDERSON/ TYLER MORNING TELEGRAPH Air Force veteran Ralph Coleman Graham, 99, wrote a book about his experiences in World War II and the Battle of the Bulge called, 12 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Ghost Plane at The Battle of the Bulge. He discussed his service in the war on Thursday morning at CampV in Tyler. JOHN ANDERSON/Tyler Morning Telegraph Air Force veteran Ralph Coleman Graham, 99, speaks to reporters with his family about his experiences serving in World War II on Thursday morning at CampV in Tyler. ZAK WELLERMAN/ TYLER MORNING TELEGRAPH World War II Air Force veteran Ralph Coleman Graham, 99, stands inside a B-17 bomber, which is the same aircraft he flew during his military service in World War II, at the Historic Aviation Memorial Museum at the Tyler Pounds Regional Airport on Thursday. ZAK WELLERMAN/ TYLER MORNING TELEGRAPH World War II Air Force veteran Ralph Coleman Graham, 99, steps off a B-17 bomber, which is the same aircraft he flew during his military service in World War II, at the Historic Aviation Memorial Museum at the Tyler Pounds Regional Airport on Thursday. ZAK WELLERMAN/ TYLER MORNING TELEGRAPH World War II Air Force veteran Ralph Coleman Graham, 99, steps off a B-17 bomber, which is the same aircraft he flew during his military service in World War II, at the Historic Aviation Memorial Museum at the Tyler Pounds Regional Airport on Thursday.

In 1940, World War II Air Force veteran and East Texas native Ralph Coleman Graham signed up for one year in the U.S. Army.

But a few years later as a U.S. Army Air Forces member, he was involved in one of the most important battles in Europe in the fight against the Germans.

Things were really looking tough in Europe and everywhere really but they came with a bulletin saying there wont be anybody discharged after one year, Graham, an Athens native, said Thursday morning at CampV in Tyler. They said were in an emergency and no ones going to be discharged until the emergencys over. Of course, that was five years later.

Graham and U.S. Marine Corp. Col. Joe McPhail, 99, also an East Texas native, shared their war stories at the veteran resource center CampV Thursday ahead of the Rose City Airfest on Friday.

The World War II veterans were honored for their service with an American flag that was flown over the U.S. Capitol at the Historic Aviation Memorial Museum at the Tyler Pounds Regional Airport during the air shows Thursday evening reception.

Both men are set to fly in a military aircraft Friday at the airshow that benefits CampV.

Graham, 99, recalled the military officials requesting troops take a test to become a cadet to fly a plane. He remembered in basic training dealing with 450 horsepower motors and blacking out while on the plane.

Officials suggested a medical operation to possibly fix the issue, but the problem still wasnt fixed. He was sent to radio school and trained as a radio operator and a gunner. He flew 33 missions over Germany.

He said January and February 1945 were the coldest months seen in Europe.

The temperature would get down so low. That made it a little tougher, he said. We had to wear oxygen masks.

Later in life, he wrote a book about his squadron, the 8th Air Forces experience in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, 12 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Ghost Plane at The Battle of the Bulge.

That 12 minutes was the time when pulled out to fly the mission, everybody else took off and to check the plane wouldnt go, Graham said. We carried it back to get another plane it took 12 minutes to do it.

He said the fog lifted the Germans sent out their fighter aircraft and the other Air Force jets went ahead.

Once we got rigged up and I took off and was trying to catch them, we got a notice that squadron was under attack, he said.

Graham said the leader of the 8th Air Force, was shot down. So, Grahams group found another crew to fight alongside.

After the battle concluded, Graham said officials reported nine of the 13 planes were shot down.

They reported nine were shot down, but actually, they thought we were one of them. Nobody knew we had trouble, he said. The 12 minutes we lost tell the story, the mystery and the story of what happened to us. Nobody didnt know it but us. Even though we told them when we got back to the base that we werent in the battle, we went with another bunch.

He said the number of missing planes has never been corrected.

Even after the war was over and they wrote the big history book, they still reported there were nine missing. There was so much confusion that day. Nobody ever thought about asking us where wed been or what happened, Graham said. You dont forget things that happen in that book. Once you read it, youll understand

He said he would only speak about the battle with his fellow crew members, and he decided to write the book after the other crew members died.

Years after we got home, we would get together and say whos going to tell the story, and every time someone would bring it up, Graham said. Its all in there (the book) just as it happened.

On the boat to go home in 1945, Graham said the proclamation ending the war was signed. He didnt share a lot about his experience in the war with his family.

Nobody wants to talk about it. I never did until I was around my crew. There was not really any interest in telling a story unless somebody knew and wanted to hear it, Graham said. My family never really did know and theyre all gone, but they never asked.

After the war, he spent time in the flooring business, opened his own store in Athens, and worked for Sears. He then went into the insurance business and made his own agency, Graham Insurance.

He retired in 1998 and he spends his time playing golf.

McPhail, who was born in Grand Saline and moved to Tyler in 1937, has had a love of flying nearly all his life.

I really wanted to fly and figured the other services had transport and patrol planes that I didnt want to fly, he said. I wanted to fly fighters and so I kind of centered in on the Marine Corp.

Before the war, he said a person needed 60 hours of college and had to be 20 years old. He had a college education, but not the age requirement. Eight days after he turned 20, he was sworn in at a naval air station in Dallas.

He fought in the war against the Japanese, calling it a bitter war. He said his first mission was April 12, 1945, and his crew climbed to 22,000 feet in their jets.

I looked down and saw a blue airplane chasing a brown airplane down below. I was going to go check it out and was probably at 22,000 feet and saw four Japanese zeros in front of me. I picked on the tail end and shooting him and he blew up, he said. Shooting down that first Jap was interesting for me. I did shoot down one other airplane. Neither airplane ever saw me. I came behind them and there was no dog fight like that.

In addition to World War II, McPhail also served in the Korean War. In both wars, he flew around 240 missions. Following his first war, McPhail said he stayed in the reserve to help in any way he could.

After the military, he worked for a gas transmission company out of Houston and flew for that company for 33 years all over the world.

It was interesting for me. I really enjoyed it. That all Ive done was fly, McPhail said. I never did have a regular job.

The last time he flew was in 1990, and hes looking forward to taking flight as a passenger Friday.

Its an honor it really is. I dont think its that big of a deal but not many people have done it, McPhail said. I feel blessed.

Hes spent his retirement attending airshows alongside his son, who organizes the trips.
Tyler, TX (75702)

Today

Partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High around 90F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 73F. Winds light and variable.
Tyler, TX (75702)

Today

Cloudy early with peeks of sunshine expected late. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High around 90F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 73F. Winds light and variable.
A number of public organizations are appealing to President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky due to the order of Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova to remove Deputy Prosecutor General Gunduz Mamedov from supervising the Department of Supervision in Criminal Proceedings for crimes committed in the context of an armed conflict.

"We, representatives of civil society organizations and associations of victims of the armed conflict, appeal to you [President Zelensky] in connection with the order of Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova to remove from the list of duties her deputy Gunduz Mamedov of the Department of Supervision in Criminal Proceedings for crimes committed in the context of an armed conflict. By the same order, Iryna Venediktova first appointed her deputy, Maksym Yakubovsky, responsible for this area of work, and the next day, she reassigned the Department to herself," according to the text of the appeal released on the website of the ZMINA Center for Human Rights.

It is noted that the decision of the prosecutor general levels the seven-year work of civil society organizations, the international community and the Department itself and threaten the justice and restoration of the rights of victims of grave international crimes committed during the armed conflict on the territory of Ukraine.

"In fact, it was the only department in the Prosecutor General's Office, to which neither human rights activists, nor journalists, nor international partners had any significant questions," the organizations said.

According to the appeal, the Department's prosecutors require further support in developing specialized knowledge and skills, and "their development is possible only with the support of a powerful, experienced leader who understands the critical importance of these processes."

"Therefore, the decision of Iryna Venediktov to remove an effective procedural leader and subordinate the Department to ourselves is overwhelming for us, given that she has neither the relevant knowledge, nor experience, nor conceptual vision and understanding in the field of prosecution for serious international crimes," the public organizations said.

In addition, they said this area requires full and deep inclusion, since it contains a huge amount of work in the form of more than 30,000 criminal offenses, a heap of legislative gaps, the lack of a unified and coherent mechanism of investigation and prosecution for war crimes.

"Due to the above, we appeal to you, Mr. President, with a request to ensure the independent and unhindered work of the Department's prosecutors and their further development. This is the second time in the last year that Iryna Venediktova has unjustifiably endangered the work of the Department. For us, this is a reason for doubts about her professionalism, independence and impartiality and serious concerns about the real continuation of legal opposition to the aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine," the organizations said in the appeal.

The appeal was signed, in particular, by the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group, the Diia Human Rights Center, the Crimean Human Rights Group, the Center for Huge Freedoms, the ZMINA Human Rights Center, KrymSOS, the Media Initiative for Human Rights, the Association of the Kremlin's Political Prisoners' Relatives, Vitaliy Tytych, lawyer of the victims, Center for Civil Education "Almenda," Regional Center for Human Rights and others.
Subsequent to Switzerland announcing that it will permit COVISHIELD administered Indian visitors, 7 other countries from European Union and Ireland have confirmed permission for Indian visitors who are administered COVISHIELD. The countries, as per sources, include Austria, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Slovenia and Spain. Ireland also confirmed accepting COVISHIELD.

The Green Pass, European Unions Digital COVID Certificate will be in effect from today. European Medical Association (EMA) has earlier announced a list of approved vaccines based on which incoming visitors to any of the European Union countries will be allowed to enter.

This list included Pfizers Comirnaty, Moderna, Janssen by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZanecas Vaxzervria. COVISHIELD, which is also a AstraZaneca product, was not in the list. Under the rules, Indian travellers were subject to quarantine on visiting these countries. Both Covishield and Vaxzevria are the same vaccine: developed and licensed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca. As a result, a majority of vaccinated Indians were considered unvaccanatited. However, the EU had said that member countries can opt to include other vaccines in their approved list.

Now, COVISHIELD has been accepted by 9 European countries, which means that Indian travellers administered with both doses of COVISHIELD will not be taken under quarantine.

Sources in the foreign ministry has suggested that India will begin a reciprocal policy of subjecting European travellers to mandatory quarantine, unless the countries accept both COVISHIELD and COVAXIN.

A meeting between Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishanker and Borrell Fontelles, High Representative of the European Union took place on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Italy. Jaishanker had taken up the issue of COVISHIEL being excluded from the EU Digital Certification Scheme.
Vials of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine (PA Wire)

Boris Johnson has said he sees no reason why people who received Indian-made AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines should be unable to travel to European Union countries.

About five million people in Britain are thought to have had the vaccine made by Serum Institute in India, known as Covishield.

It emerged on Thursday night that UK citizens who received doses from those batches do not have their jab status recognised by the European Unions new vaccine passport scheme.

This is because the Indian factory has yet to apply to license the doses with the European Medicines Agency  meaning the EU does not regard it as a valid vaccine for entry into the bloc.

Mr Johnson told a joint press conference with Germans Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday afternoon: I see no reason at all why the MHRA-approved vaccines should not be recognised as part of the vaccine passports and Im very confident that that will not prove to be a problem.

UK vaccine experts earlier voiced confidence that an administrative hurdle preventing Britons who received the India-made AstraZeneca jab from travelling to Europe would soon be resolved.

Professor Adam Finn, a member of the UKs Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said it was a bureaucratic issue and there was no suggestion that the Indian-manufactured jab was less able to protect against Covid.

He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: Theyre exactly the same vaccine. Theyre just made in a different factory. People should be reassured, who have received these batches, that they have received exactly the same stuff as people who have received other batches made elsewhere.

He continued: I think this is an administrative hurdle that needs to be straightened out but people should not be concerned that they are in some way less well-protected.

There are fears that the current situation could see holidaying Britons trying to enter countries such as France turned away at the border when their vaccine data on the NHS App, which includes the batch number of the doses they have received, is scanned.

Story continues

Earlier this week, there were problems in Malta, with the country unable to read the QR code on the NHS App and asking UK travellers for paper documents proving their vaccination status.

Britons seeking to enter the US also face problems because of its reluctance to accept the AstraZeneca vaccine. No version of the AZ jab has been licenced by the US.

The EUs newly launched digital Covid certificate is meant to allow Covid-secure travel across the continent without the need to quarantine or take extra Covid tests.

But it does not recognise Covishield, the name of the Oxford/AZ vaccine produced in India, because the manufacturer, Serum Institute of India, has yet to apply for EU approval.

Up to five million doses of this version of the vaccine are thought to have been administered in the UK. The batch numbers are 4120Z001, 4120Z002, 4120Z003. These numbers should have been written on the credit card-sized vaccine cards given to Britons after receiving a jab, and will also appear on the NHS App when downloaded by vaccinated Britons who have a NHS number. As many as 10 million doses of Covishield were reportedly ordered by the UK Government.

Professor Finn said there were no health grounds to differentiate between the AZ vaccines made in India and those made elsewhere. He blamed the issue on teething problems with the international roll-out of vaccine passports.

The problem is likely to cause problems for millions of travellers.

Professor Finn said: Its clearly ultimately not in anybodys interests, including the European Unions, to create hurdles that dont need to be there. I would anticipate this will get straightened out in due course.

Doses of the AZ vaccine manufactured in the UK and Europe, which is known by the brand name Vaxzevria, plus the Pfizer and Moderna jabs also being given in the UK, are recognised by the EU vaccine passport scheme.

A further 46 per cent weekly increase in the number of Delta cases of the Covid variant first seen in India was reported by Public Health England on Friday. It said that a total of 161,981 confirmed and probable Delta cases have now been identified in the UK  up by 50,824 on the previous week.

In London, a further 2,705 cases of Covid  of which Delta accounts for about 95 per cent of infections  were diagnosed yesterday. The number of Covid patients in London hospitals increased by about 30 to 329.

About 2.7 million more jabs are needed in London for it to hit the Prime Ministers national targets of offering a first dose to all over-18s and double-jabbing all over-40s by July 19.

Martin Machray, the capitals joint chief nurse, appealed on Friday to younger Londoners to get jabbed this weekend ahead of the England v Ukraine Euro 2020 clash on Saturday.

Make sure that its football coming home this weekend, not Covid, he said.

Hundreds of vaccination centres, park pop-ups, pharmacies and sports stadiums will open, including Crystal Palaces Selhurst Park stadium and Saracens StoneX Stadium in Hendon. More than 5.2 million people in London have had the jab so far, including 3.5million who have had both doses.

Mr Machray said: Were calling on all those who havent been vaccinated to come forward to protect themselves and their families.

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Hundreds of Iraqis protested in Baghdad on Friday over worsening power and water cuts as temperatures exceeded 50 degrees Celsius in some parts of Iraq.

At Friday prayer in the Sadr City district of Baghdad, men sweated and prayed under parasols, then held a protest criticizing the government for not providing its citizens with enough electricity.

"It's just getting worse. We can take power cuts, even 10 hours of cuts a day, but just give us something," said Haider Hussein, a 32-year-old labourer.

Power went out completely across most of the country's provinces before dawn, residents said, in some of the worst shortages this year. Some main grid electricity had returned to Baghdad by the afternoon.

The sky over Baghdad, where residents enjoy better supply than poorer southern parts of Iraq, clouded with smog after sunrise as homes ran their diesel-fuelled generators for much longer periods than usual.

Power from Iraq's main grid suffers year-round from hours-long cuts each day, but the shortages worsen during the hot summer months when temperatures regularly reach 50 degrees and households rely on air conditioning.

Iraqis blame a government which relies on energy imports from Iran and which they say has failed to develop Iraq's own grid to serve its population. Iraq's electricity minister resigned this week under pressure over the power crisis, local media reported.

Haider al-Saidi, a 52-year-old tribal leader protesting in Sadr City, blamed the political class that has ruled Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

"From that regime to this one, still we don't have enough electricity. What has democracy brought? It just goes from bad to worse," he said.

Reduced power supplies from Iran this month and a series of attacks on power lines by militants have compounded the electricity crisis.

(Reporting by Reuters TV, writing by John Davison, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
Jacob Martin originally wanted to be a doctor, but then a teacher at Lumpkin County High School helped change his mind. A retired nurse, the woman's stories about caring for her patients impacted Martin.

Martin has pursued the training for that passion ever since and is scheduled to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) from the University of North Georgia (UNG) in May 2022. He shifted his focus because he feels a career as a nurse will provide him more opportunities to interact with patients.

"Hearing her stories of how she was able to connect with her patients made me feel like that would be a better fit for me," Martin said. "Health care should be about regular interactions with the people you're taking care of and hopefully watching them get better."

During clinical rotations, a requirement of his degree, Martin watched the nurses working alongside him exude professionalism and a calming presence. He points to these traits as evidence that being a nurse requires knowledge and skill beyond how to bandage a wound, administer medications or check vital signs.

"You can get a lot further by being nice when you're explaining things to patients," Martin said.

His goal is to work either in an operating room or cardiology unit upon graduation.

The Dahlonega, Georgia, native was one of several BSN students at UNG who gained valuable clinical experience administering COVID-19 vaccines during the spring 2021 semester. He was grateful for the hands-on experience and pleased to help battle the pandemic.

"I saw how genuinely scared some of the people were. They had masks on, but I could hear it in their voice and see it in their eyes," Martin said. "Some of them gave a literal sigh of relief after getting the vaccine. Their voice got calmer. I never thought that getting jabbed with a needle would do that to somebody."
When dockworkers at the Port of Algiers discovered two dead pigs in a shipment of milling wheat from France on June 17, there was outrage amongst Muslim Algerians. With the pig an unclean animal in Islam, Agriculture Minister Al-Hamid Hamidani promptly blacklisted the French supplier and sent the 27,000-ton cargo back, demanding compensation.

Asia Times reports that the bakers of Algiers were not left without wheat to make bread for long, though. Only five days later, 28,000 tons of milling wheat was reportedly on its way to Algiers  the first such cargo in four years from a country far further afield than France: Russia. Indeed, nowadays across the Maghreb  the northwest African countries from Libya to Mauritania  traditional European powers are being challenged by states that have either long been absent from the region, or which are entirely new to it. The rising influence of Turkey, Russia and even China has diminished the involvement of the traditional players, especially France.

In recent years, the Maghreb has become an increasingly crowded field, Intissar Fakir, head of the North Africa Program at the Middle East Institute, told Asia Times. This competition does not stop at grain, either, but includes weapons, soldiers  and political influence. It is a competition that also impacts a much wider geography. When you talk about the Maghreb, you also have to talk about the Sahel region, too, Arezki Daoud, principle analyst at MEA Risk and editor of the North Africa Journal, told Asia Times. And that region is now potentially at an inflection point. Indeed, south of Morocco, Algeria and Libya lie a belt of countries  Mali, Niger and Chad  where conflict now threatens to overturn the whole balance of power in North Africa.

Colonial, post-colonial, neo-colonial

From the 19th century onwards, the Maghreb  the West in Arabic  was dominated by European colonial powers. France ruled in Tunisia and Algeria and shared control of Morocco with Spain. At the start of the 20th century, Italy also invaded and occupied Libya, ejecting the Ottoman Empire  to whom most North African states had at one time or another held allegiance. A series of wars of independence, however, saw all these states break free in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, post-independence, the bonds with former colonial powers continued  economically, and culturally.

In 2019, France, Italy and Spain were by far the top three trading partners for Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, while the European Union regularly accounted for more than half of all trade in the Maghreb. The regions people are also often linked to Europe. In France today, for example, estimates of the number of citizens of Maghrebi descent range from five to eight million. French also remains a major language in Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania and Morocco.

In recent times, however, other influences have started to strengthen. There has been a long-term de-coupling between North Africa and the West, Riccardo Fabiani, the International Crisis Groups North Africa project director, told Asia Times. Two major factors have been behind this  economic and geo-strategic. On the economic front, the eurozone crisis  a multi-year affair starting back in 2009 knocked Europe back as a major source of finance and investment. There was a sense of Europe retreating after that, says Fakir, of not paying as close attention as before to its North African allies.

On the geostrategic level, the US has been playing a lot more distant role in North Africa, says Fabiani, first under Trump, but it seems Biden is continuing on the same path. The US doesnt seem particularly concerned with Western Sahara, Tunisia, even Libya, while Europe is just unable to fill that gap. This has created a space for non-traditional actors to enter more fully.

In Libya, Turkey is now a major power, with troops on the ground in Tripoli, while Turkish businesses and products are major players in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. In Tunisia, the Ennahda Party is one of the largest, and is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the pan-Arab Islamist movement widely supported by Ankara. This connection has also brought the Maghreb into the post-Arab Spring competition between supporters of groups tied to the MB  Turkey and Qatar  and their opponents  Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. This entanglement is most evident in Libya, where the UAE has sent money and military resources to oppose the Turkey-backed government in Tripoli.

At the same time, Turkish soft power is also evident across the Maghreb, in popular TV series, educational exchanges  and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans leadership style. Independent, unyielding and with a tough skin, he is building the posture of a regional leader  which appeals to many here, says Fakir. Russia is also a major military player in Libya  avoiding any direct presence by working through the mercenary Wagner Group  while it is also a big arms supplier across the region. Algeria is the biggest buyer of Russian arms in Africa, says Fakir, while Russia is also heavily invested in Algerias energy sector, through Gazprom and Lukoil. Algeria has extensive gas and oil reserves, mostly run by state-owned Sonatrach, the largest company on the continent. Russia has also had some success with vaccine diplomacy. Algeria and Tunisia have authorized the Sputnik vaccine and are hoping to manufacture it locally, adds Fakir.

East-West corridors

Another country engaging in vaccine diplomacy these days is China, which has sent Sinopharm shots to the Maghreb, as its influence also grows. Beijing doesnt speak out about human rights, or against authoritarianism, or criticize a countrys behavior, which states here do have to worry about when it comes to Europe, adds Fakir. Indeed, on June 21, Germany announced it was suspending its US$1 billion aid program to Morocco, due to a dispute over Moroccos occupation of Western Sahara, the former Spanish colony taken over by Rabat back in 1979.

In contrast, China makes no comment on the Western Sahara and has instead been increasing its investment footprint around the Maghreb, largely through construction. This has included prestige projects such as the $1 billion Great Mosque of Algiers  the largest in Africa  and the $32.5 million Rabat-Sale bridge in Morocco  the longest on the continent. China has also reportedly assisted Algeria in installing Huawei surveillance equipment to monitor oppositionists.

Yet, China hasnt been as successful in North Africa as it has been in Sub-Saharan Africa, says Daoud. The North African countries remain wary of Chinese debt diplomacy, while there have also recently been a number of problems with projects  such as Moroccos Rabat-Sale airport and Tangier Tech City. The Maghreb also remains some way off the main focus of Chinas Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is about connecting China to Europe, says Fabiani, and the Mediterranean is a part of this  but the eastern part, not the western.

Rising and falling

Meanwhile, the other side of the coin to the growing presence of non-traditional actors is the fading of traditional influencers. You have to ask, what happened to the Europeans? says Daoud, and in North Africa and the Sahel, that really means, what happened to the French? Theyve simply been unable to update and upgrade their Africa policy as times have changed.

This troubled role was further highlighted on June 10, when French President Emanuel Macron announced he was ending French military operations in the Sahel against jihadist fighters. France could not maintain a constant presence there any longer, he said. In the Maghreb, too, the Europeans already dont think of themselves as having leverage over what happens there, says Fakir.

That may change, as European states begin to take the rising presence of Turkey, Russia and even China into account, however. The Europeans are now making clear that they see China as a threat, says Fabiani, so there could be an increase in competition over infrastructure that might boost the Maghrebs importance to both, going forward. For now though, while Europe and North Africa cant really do without each other, says Fakir, The relationship will continue to erode  and to grow a lot more complicated.
Turkey could play an important role in bringing peace to Afghanistan due to its position of respect in the war-torn country, political and security experts from three countries said Wednesday.

Anadolu Agency reports that speaking at a seminar on "Conversations on the Afghan Peace Process: Turkey's Role in Afghanistan" organized by the think-tank the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI), Pakistans former Foreign Secretary Aziz Ahmad Chaudhry said the situation in Afghanistan is very critical. "We all know how critical it is that we have peace in Afghanistan. I think nobody knows more than the Pakistani government, its leaders and people that an unstable Afghanistan can be a nightmare for all the region," said Chaudhry, who is also director general of the ISSI. Turkey and Afghanistan have long-standing diplomatic relations that go back to 1920 and Ankara has been trying to find ways to start some kind of political process, he added.

Murat Aslan, a security expert from Turkey, said Ankaras policies are based on a shared interest policy as opposed to one based on self-interest. "Afghanistans interests lie in a peaceful stable country in order for any development projects to be realized," he said. "When I was in Kabul, I asked one question to several people -- How do you look to Turkey? And all of them gave the same answer: Turkey is our brother, he recalled.

With Turkeys proposal of a new trilateral mechanism involving Turkey for protecting Kabuls airport after the US pulls out of Afghanistan, Ankara-based defense expert Merve Seren suggested that Turkeys presence in Kabul needs legal cover from the United Nations. "Turkeys presence in Afghanistan needs to be legitimized through a UN resolution and also the Afghan government to officially request Ankara to help the Afghan people," said Seren, an assistant professor at Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University. "Turkey has to be there not only just because of the NATO issue, but I think we have a very big migration problem, [as] we are getting the most migration from Syria and then from Afghanistan," she added.

Speaking to reporters on June 14 at the end of a series of meetings with NATO leaders on the sidelines of the alliances summit in Brussels, Belgium, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey was also seeking Pakistan and Hungary's involvement in the new mission in Afghanistan following the departure of the US-led NATO force.

Turkeys large role in Afghanistan

While welcoming Erdogans proposal for Turkish troops to guard Kabul airport, Zalmai Nishat, a Kabul-based senior policy expert, said he sees a larger Turkish role in Afghanistan. "Turkey could play an important role in internal consensus building among Afghanistans multi ethnic populace and also in regional consensus building," he said.

"Turkey has evolved to play a reconstruction and capacity building role in Afghanistan. Therefore, Turkey is in the best position to play a potentially great role, which should be strongly encouraged," said Pakistans former ambassador to Turkey Muhammad Haroon Shaukat.

Referring to the current situation in Afghanistan, experts said the political process is the only way to resolve things. "With limited gains, Afghanistan is far from being stable, as it continues to be challenged by a plethora of problems, thus presenting challenges to the international community and the region," said Amina Khan, director of the Centre for Afghanistan, Middle East and Africa at ISSI.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday discussed peace and cooperation in Afghanistan with his Uzbek and Tajik counterparts during separate bilateral meetings in Washington.

"The Secretary thanked the Foreign Minister (Abdulaziz Kamilov) for Uzbekistan's continued support for a just and durable peace settlement in Afghanistan. He also welcomed Uzbekistan's focus on regional connectivity, including closer political and economic cooperation with Afghanistan in ways that would support prosperity and growth across Central and South Asia," State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement.

In a separate meeting with Tajik Foreign Minister Muhriddin, Secretary Blinken reaffirmed the strength and importance of the U.S.-Tajikistan bilateral ties and expressed his appreciation for Muhriddin's continued leadership on regional security issues.

Blinken and the Tajik Foreign Minister agreed that a just and durable settlement in Afghanistan would advance regional economic growth and integration, the State Department said.

"The Secretary expressed a desire for further bilateral collaboration on promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms as well as economic development, and affirmed the U.S. commitment to Tajikistan's security, stability, and territorial integrity," the statement added.

Tajik Foreign Minister likewise agreed that a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Afghanistan would advance integration and economic growth in the region, Sputnik reported.

According to the state department, Blinken expressed a desire to further human rights, freedom, and economic development in Central Asia, including through the C5+1 diplomatic platform.
NATO's Sea Breeze-2021 naval exercise in the Black Sea is provocative muscle flexing and bears outspokenly anti-Russian implications, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a news briefing on Thursday.

"It goes without saying that this is provocative muscle flexing," Zakharova said. "Combat deployment of such a scale near Russian territory evokes a corresponding reaction from us. Washington and its allies are systematically turning the Black Sea from a space of cooperation, created there, into a zone of military standoff. This is being done intentionally, in order to make another region of the world unstable under the United States' guidance and turn it into a source of threat".

"It is beyond doubt that this exercise conveys an obvious anti-Russian message. Examples of this are more than enough," she stressed, adding that one should also bear in mind the incident with the British destroyer that intruded into Russia's territorial waters and dangerous maneuvers by a Dutch frigate on June 24.
Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Ruslan Kazakbaev has arrived in Azerbaijan on an official visit, according to the diplomatic source.

The source stressed that Kazakbaev will hold the meetings with Azerbaijani officials on July 2.

Earlier, Kazakbaev received Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of Azerbaijan to Kyrgyzstan Hidayat Orujov. The sides stressed the high level of bilateral relations and a broad agenda.

The views on topical issues of the cooperation between Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan were exchanged. A schedule of contacts at high and highest levels was discussed.

The sides expressed the firm's readiness to continue active practical interaction in the political, diplomatic, trade, economic, social, humanitarian, and other spheres.
Russias state nuclear corporation Rosatom may be granted the license on construction of two units of the first nuclear power plant in Egypt in El-Dabaa on the coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea in the first half of 2022, the Egyptian Electricity and Renewable Energy Ministrys spokesman Ayman Hamza told TASS on Thursday.

"It is expected that the permit on construction of first two units will be granted in the first half of next year," he said, adding that it will be "followed by procedures on drafting documents for Units 3 and 4".

Rosatom said earlier on Thursday that the Nuclear Power Plants Authority (NPPA) of Egypt handed over the licensing documentation for Units 1 and 2 of El Dabaa NPP construction to the Egyptian Nuclear and Radiological Regulation Authority (ENRRA), TASS reported.

The El Dabaa nuclear power plant will be the first nuclear power plant in Egypt. It will be built in El-Dabaa city in the Governorate of Matrouh on the coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea. The El Dabaa NPP will comprise four units, with each of them having a capacity of 1200 MW, equipped with a Generation III+ VVER-1200 reactor, considered to be the latest technology for nuclear power plants, which has already been successfully implemented.
The meeting of the OPEC+ ministerial monitoring committee and the OPEC+ ministerial meeting will be held on Friday, July 2, the OPEC Secretariat said in a statement. As sources told TASS earlier, the ministers failed to reach an agreement on productions levels from August at Thursday meeting and decided to continue consultations on Friday.

The meeting of the monitoring committee is now scheduled for 4:00 pm Moscow time, while the OPEC+ ministerial meeting - for 5:30 pm Moscow time.

On Thursday, OPEC+ ministers tried to agree on the production level starting August. During the consultations, sources said that the general recommendation would be based on an increase in oil production by 2 mln barrels per day from August to the end of 2021, TASS reported.

However, several countries, among them the United Arab Emirates and Kazakhstan, were against the output levels offered to them.
ISIS militants (the terrorist group banned in Russia) are building up their forces in northern Afghanistan as U.S. and NATO troops leave the country and it's a worry for Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday.

He said Islamic State was actively gaining territory in Afghanistan amid the withdrawal and what he described as the "irresponsible" stance taken by officials in Kabul, the Interfax news agency reported.
Russia is working on an updated concept for security in the Persian Gulf region, and will present it soon, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has announced following talks with Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani in Moscow on Friday..

"Our friends are expressing interest in our old initiative on the concept for collective security in the Gulf zone. Right now, taking account of recent events, we are working on an updated version of the concept. We will be ready to share it with interested parties in the very near future," Sputnik cited Lavrov as saying.

The Russian Persian Gulf security concept drafted in 2019 proceeds from the inadmissibility of large-scaled armed confrontation in the strategic region, and calls for collective work to establish a consensus and compromise-based solutions to reduce tensions. It includes the consolidation of a single counter-terrorism coalition, a commitment to adhere to international law and the United Nations Charter, a universal and comprehensive security system for the Gulf area which respects the interests of all regional and other parties, military transparency, arms control, strengthening of a nuclear non-proliferation regime in the Middle East, and other measures.
U.S. and UK intelligence have accused Russian military hackers of being behind an ongoing cyber-campaign to steal emails and other information, including from parliaments.

There are said to be hundreds of targets around the world, including UK political parties.

The campaign is said to have begun in mid-2019 and to be "almost certainly" ongoing. It has mainly been directed at organisations using Microsoft Office 365 cloud services, but other service providers have also been targeted, BBC reported.

The National Security Agency (NSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the UK's National Cyber Security Centre have released a joint advisory accusing Unit 26165 of Russia's GRU of being behind what they call a global campaign "to compromise enterprise and cloud environments".
The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed the bill on indigenous peoples, which denies this status to Russians, with 325 votes on Thursday. Just minutes earlier, the bill was approved in the first reading with 331 votes.

"The bill provides a definition of the concept of an indigenous people of Ukraine as an autochthonous ethnical entity, formed on Ukrainian territory, which carries an authentic language and culture, has traditional, social, cultural or representative structures, considers itself an indigenous people of Ukraine, comprises an ethnic minority in its population, and does not have its own state entity beyond Ukraine. According to this definition, the indigenous peoples of Ukraine are Crimean Tatars, Karaims and Krymchaks," the accompanying memo says.

This definition means that Russians cannot be considered an indigenous people of Ukraine.

The law was completely rejected by the Opposition Platform - For Life. The ruling Servant of the People party contributed 226 votes, while Pyotr Poroshenkos European Solidarity gave 25 votes, and Yuliya Timoshenkos Batkivschina added 19 votes.

The bill defines the legal status of the indigenous people and cements legal guarantees of possession of all human rights and basic freedoms, stipulated in the national and international law.

"The implementation of the bill would facilitate the protection of rights of the Indigenous people of Ukraine for self-determination, independent definition of its political status, free implementation of its economic, social and cultural development by means that do not contradict the Constitution and laws of Ukraine," the memo says.

Under the law, the indigenous peoples become protected against actions aimed at: the elimination of their ethnicity, destruction of cultural values, "deportation or forced displacement from the location of compact residence in any form," "forceful assimilation or forceful integration in any form," incitement of racial, ethnic or religious hate against them. They also have their cultural, educational, linguistic and informational rights guaranteed, TASS reported.
Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City retail landlords continue to face declining rents due to social distancing and competition from e-commerce.

E-commerce dominating as retail spaces struggle. -- Source: freepik.com

Despite reducing rent by 20 per cent and then later to as much as 50 per cent, landlords in the central areas of these two cities are suffering as their tenants are giving back the rented spaces which remain unoccupied for months.

Nguyen Van Hien, owner of a fashion kiosk in Ho Chi Minh City, said that she has to pay VND40 million ($1,700) per month for rent, staffs salary, and other expenses. However, during the last year, Hiens revenue was only 30 per cent compared to before the pandemic.

I am negotiating with my landlord to reduce the rent by a half to keep this business until the pandemic is over. However I do not know how I can survive till then, Hien said.

Many street kiosks located in the Phu My Hung Township in Ho Chi Minh Citys District 7 have been closed for the past several months, even before pandemic restrictions were tightened. Most of these businesses are active in accommodation, food and beverages, and beauty and massage services. With a rent of more than $5,000 per unit per month, many tenants cannot ensure their livelihoods during these times.

Nguyen Van My, a landlord in Lang Street in Hanoi, said that his house was returned by the tenant in February, even though he had offered a 50-per-cent reduction in rent. My tenant is a fruit trader who could not manage to exist anymore after many months of making losses. Moreover the house has been unoccupied since then with zero demand, My said.

Like the tourism-residential real estate segment, the retail space also fell into a double crisis. The outbreak of COVID-19 has caused closures and merges many large retailers such as Auchan, Parkson, and Big C.

The latest case belongs to the South Korean retail giant Lotte Mart which will permanently close its centre in Hanois Mipec Tower on July 1 due to restructuring plans. A representative from Lotte Mart insisted that the closure of this centre was to reshuffle the groups investment strategy and expand its network nationwide, but did not elaborate on whether Lotte Mart had been impacted severely by the pandemic.

Despite the serious impact of the pandemic, Vietnam still sees the demand for rental space from luxury brands that want to expand and enter the domestic market.

Figures from the Ministry of Planning and Investment show that among the 66 new registered projects in the Hanoi at the end of March, five projects belong to trade centres and supermarkets with around $13.5 million of total foreign investment inflows. All five projects were invested by retail developers coming from Japan and South Korea.

Matthew Powell, director of Savills Hanoi, confirmed that high-end retail in Vietnam is one of the best-performing markets in the world. Currently, there are many luxury brands that want to expand and enter the Vietnamese market. Retail rents in Vietnam are relatively low compared to other markets in Asia such as Singapore, Hong Kong, or Tokyo, Powell said.

Due to travel restrictions, buyers currently mainly look for luxury products right inside the country, instead of going to other markets.

Moreover in recent years, Vietnams average income has increased markedly with a significant rise of the middle class, which has expanded corporations target market. Powell also added that, the retail market in large-scale trade centres would continue to develop in Vietnam.

In the cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the retail real estate market saw the expansion of foreign brands such as Uniqlo, Muji, and Decathlon over the last two years. Luxury brands such as Balenciaga and Tiffany are also planning to enter the market. These retail brands are attracting many customers from different market segments, rather than just targeting a single one.

During the pandemic, social distancing measures have accelerated the participation of many businesses in e-commerce.

Online traffic on Vietnams shopping sites in 2020 skyrocketed by 150 per cent against a year earlier, with daily visits to e-commerce sites growing to 3.5 million, as figures from the Vietnam e-Commerce Association state.

Nearly a third of the population participates in online shopping. Most online shoppers are young people between 18 and 25, with 77 per cent of internet users shopping online at least once in 2019, mainly on mobile devices.

The report on Vietnams Digital Advertising Market by Adsota and its strategic partner SOL Premier released earlier in June noted that e-commerce platforms in Vietnam have entered a golden era due to the pandemic.

The number of new users on e-commerce platforms in Vietnam reached more than 41 per cent, the highest rate in Southeast Asia, compared to the average growth rate of the whole region of 36 per cent. Up to 91 per cent of the new users in Vietnam confirmed that they would continue using e-commerce platforms, even after the pandemic.

Vietnams e-commerce has achieved impressive growth of 18 per cent as the market size has reached $11.8 billion, accounting for around 5.5 per cent of the national retail sales of consumer goods and services.

According to the National E-commerce Development Master Plan for the period 2021-2025, by 2025 up to 55 per cent of the population will participate in online shopping, with the average value of online purchases of goods and services amounting to about $600 per person per year.

Source: VIR

Experts: E-commerce to grow solidly in 2021 Vietnams e-commerce market will maintain its solid growth trajectory this year, analysts said at a ceremony announcing Vietnams E-Business Index within the framework of the Vietnam Online Business Forum on Tuesday.
Vietnam makes great strides in clean energy development: Asiatimes



Vietnam is making rapid strides in shifting from fossil fuels to clean energy in the post-COVID-19 world, according to a recent article published by the website asiatimes.com.

According to the article, the renewable energy sector is booming in Vietnam thanks to its rapid economic growth over the past five years, led by massive inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) as multinational companies set up their factories here to diversify supply chains and to benefit from Vietnams young and well-educated labour force.

Economic growth and FDI inflows have led to a huge surge in demand for energy in the country, it said.

In the context of limited domestic power sources, in recent years, Vietnam has shifted towards development of renewable energy, mainly solar and wind energy, the article noted.

According to Fitch Ratings, Vietnams solar production already reached 16,640 MW last year, accounting for 24 percent of the total energy output of the country.

Asiatimes.com quoted Frederick Burke, Managing Director of Baker McKenzie/Vietnam, as saying that Vietnam has hit a home run in terms of solar energy, and it is way above its original power development plan target at about double what it was targeting.

He said that one reason for the clean energy boom in Vietnam is due to customer demand, specifically from brand-name consumer product conglomerates that are looking for a Green supply chain to satisfy their home market requirements for more climate-friendly goods.

Investment flowing into Vietnam's industrial parks has been spent on rooftop solar as a climate-appropriate solution to meet the electricity demand of those IPs themselves.

Obbon Thiracahi, senior analyst for corporates at Fitch Ratings, said many energy giants have come to Vietnam because there are many opportunities for investment in the Southeast Asia nation./.

Target for agro-forestry-fishery export value revised up to 45 billion USD

The total export turnover of agricultural, forestry and aquaculture products reached 24.23 billion USD in the first six months of 2021, an increase of 28.2 percent compared to the same period of 2020, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD).

Based on the encouraging outcome and signs of recovery in the world market, the ministry has raised the yearly target for export earnings from those products to 45 billion USD, 3 billion VND higher than the amount assigned by the government.

The high export turnover in the first half was attributable to surges in the export value of several products, such as rubber, tea, pepper bean, cashew nuts, fruit and vegetables, cassava and cassava products, timber and wood products. Notably, rubber saw increases of 41.3 percent in export volume and 80 percent in value; cashew nut up 22.2 percent in volume and 11.1 percent in value; timber and wood products up almost 75 percent in value.



Regarding the growth of fruit and vegetable exports, Dang Phuc Nguyen, General Secretary of the Vietnam Fruit and Vegetables Association explained that it was buoyed by increases in shipments to China, which is the main buyer, accounting for 60 percent of Vietnams total vegetable and fruit exports value. He added that however, the growth is still lower compared to pre-COVID-19 period.



The four biggest export markets for Vietnams agro-forestry-fishery products in the period are China, the US, Japan and the Republic of Korea.



In the first half of 2021, Vietnams exports to China through border gates was under pressure due to the fourth COVID-19 resurgence which coincided with the harvest season of several main agriculture produce. With knowledge and experience gained from the previous outbreaks, ministries, agencies and localities have proactively handled the flow of goods through the border gates while still ensuring disease prevention measures.



In order to achieve the new goal for the year, the agricultural sector will implement solutions to assist key export products that have good prospects to increase export value, while striving to make better use of advantages brought by free trade agreements such as the EVFTA, CPTPP to remove barriers and facilitate markets entry.



At the same time, the sector will work to reach markets of economies with complementary product structures with Vietnam such as Japan, the Republic of Korea, India, the European Union or the Middle East; and select suitable products to export to potential markets such as Russia, the Middle East and Africa.



Nguyen Quoc Toan, Director of the MARDs Agricultural Products Processing and Market Development Department, said the ministry is negotiating with countries to remove trade and technology barriers for Vietnamese agriculture exports.



According to Nguyen Nhu Tiep, head of the National Agro-Forestry-Fisheries Quality Assurance Department, Vietnamese exports will continue to face new obstacles as the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed up production and logistics costs. Therefore, the ministry will continue to provide information on foreign markets and immediately handle any arising market problems./.

Quang Ninh acts as gateway for Vietnam-China cross-border economic ties

Over the past years, the northern province of Quang Ninh has been working to gradually establish itself as a gateway for cross-border trade between Vietnam and China, thus contributing to bilateral economic ties.

Quang Ninh, which shares more than 118km of land border and 191km of sea border with China, is located at the start of the countries Two Corridors, One Belt economic cooperation zone, in the Nanning - Singapore Economic Corridor, and the expanded Gulf of Tonkin inter-regional cooperation area under the ASEAN - China Free Trade Area.

It has signed 26 provincial-level agreements with Chinese localities. Via these cooperative ties, the province has gradually established itself as a gateway, a bridge in the Vietnam - ASEAN - China cooperation, helping to achieve major outcomes in almost all areas, especially cross-border economic and trade partnerships, road transport, border gate opening and upgrade, border management, and the fight against cross-border crimes.

In 2020, the value of goods traded through Quang Ninhs border gates approximated 2.79 billion USD, including over 1.11 billion USD in exports, 980 million USD in imports, and 695 million USD worth of items temporarily imported for re-export or stored in bonded warehouses.

Of the total figure, Mong Cai city of the province posted over 1.09 billion USD in exports, nearly 1.04 billion USD in imports, and 694 million USD of goods temporarily imported for re-export or stored in bonded warehouses. Hai Ha district recorded 3.5 million USD in exports and 4.5 million USD in imports, and Binh Lieu district had 16.6 million USD in exports and 65.9 million USD in imports.

On July 16, 2021, authorities of Quang Ninh and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China officially launched customs clearance through Bac Luan No 2 Bridge, which links Mong Cai International Border Gate of Vietnam with Dongxing Border Gate of China.

The two sides have also coordinated to complete infrastructure for Hoanh Mo - Dong Zhong border gate area so that this border gate pair will officially make debut in the near future.

After a hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, some local border gates, crossings, and sites for shipping goods to China have been reopened such as the Mong Cai International Border Gate and Bac Luan No 2 Bridge (on February 7, 2020), and the Hoanh Mo Border Gate in Binh Lieu district (March 2, 2020). Bac Phong Sinh Border Gate in Hai Ha district resumed customs clearance on June 18 last year and export and import activities less than one month later, on July 6.

Facing the pandemics substantial impacts on trading, peoples exit from and entry into the country, as well as cooperation between Quang Ninh and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the provincial Party Committee has ordered relevant authorities and localities to comply with the Party and Governments directions while proactively adjusting plans so as to simultaneously curbing the outbreak and sustaining cooperation activities with the Chinese side.

Since the beginning of 2021, the administration of Mong Cai city has held five meetings with its Guangxi counterpart to work out measures to promote bilateral trade.

As a result, in spite of the pandemics impacts, the citys environment for export and import activities has continued to improve, more goods have been traded via official channels, and the trade revenue has also been on the rise.

As of May 31, Mong Cai recorded 1.47 billion USD in trade revenue, growing 14 percent from a year earlier. The turnover included 628 million USD in imports, down 28 percent, and 842 million USD in exports, up 103 percent.

For 2021, Quang Ninh province is moving to carry out the Party and States foreign policy and effectively implementing friendship exchanges and cooperation programmes with Guangxi. Its authorities and localities are also working to maintain relations with their Guangxi counterparts in combating COVID-19, stepping up transport connectivity, upgrading border gate pairs, facilitating customs clearance, and gradually resuming cross-border trade, investment, and tourism./.

HCMC encourages enterprises to conduct weekly Covid-19 tests on laborers

The HCMC government has encouraged enterprises in the city to buy test kits and conduct quick Covid-19 tests on their employees once a week as part of the citys plan to combat the pandemic until July 10.

Accordingly, enterprises will conduct the tests under the instructions of the municipal Center for Disease Control, the local media reported.

The city has also worked out a plan to take samples and conduct screening in industrial and export processing zones and hi-tech parks and produce the results within 12 hours. In addition, the testing of residents in districts has been enhanced.

The healthcare sector should take the initiative to improve the testing capacity. People at centralized quarantine centers and in areas under lockdown should have their samples taken daily.

If quick tests show a negative result, the healthcare sector will conduct group tests of five to 10 samples, using the Realtime-PCR method, to test one million samples per day.

The city has also asked the healthcare sector to determine the areas with a high risk of pandemic transmission an hour after Covid-19 cases are detected.

As some medical workers have been infected with the coronavirus, the municipal government asked all medical staff to strictly comply with protective measures and prevent cross infection at treatment facilities.

The city has also reviewed the capacity of existing centralized quarantine centers to draw up plans to expand them to meet the demand in case the number of direct contacts of confirmed Covid-19 cases increases sharply. Hotels meeting requirements in the city have been requisitioned as paid quarantine facilities.

In addition, the city has piloted the home quarantine of those in direct contact with Covid-19 cases in line with the Ministry of Healths directions.

Plans and resources have been made available in case of 10,000 Covid-19 patients.

A group in charge of buying Covid-19 vaccines must quickly work with partners and vaccine producers to accelerate the purchase of the vaccines. The first vaccine batch must be shipped to the city at the end of this quarter at the latest so that two thirds of the citys population will be vaccinated against Covid-19 this year.

Besides monitoring the compliance with anti-pandemic regulations at supermarkets, wholesale and traditional wet markets, the city will shut down those failing to ensure safety.

HCMC is experiencing the largest-ever Covid-19 outbreak with the number of new Covid-19 cases surging despite social distancing measures.

Farm exports expected at US$45 billion this year

Despite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development is determined to beat the agro-forestry-fishery export target for 2021 by US$3 billion, reaching US$45 billion.

The ministry is upbeat about the new target given the positive results in the first half of the year. Between January and June, the countrys agro-forestry-fishery exports reached US$24.2 billion, a year-on-year rise of 28.2%, with agricultural, fishery and forestry products gaining respective export growth of 13%, 12.5% and 61.1%.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Le Minh Hoan asked the relevant units to enhance their efforts to implement the dual task of fighting Covid-19 and ensuring economic growth in the second half of the year to fulfill the target of farm exports.

It is necessary to adopt effective solutions focusing on key products to ramp up their exports, said Minister Hoan.

In 2021, the ministry set a target for the agriculture sectors gross domestic product growth rate at 3%-3.2%. Besides, the sectors production value is projected to rise by 3.2%-3.5%, of which cultivation, husbandry, forestry and aquaculture will advance by 1.55%, 5.9%, 4% and 3.8%, respectively.

Over the past six months, Vietnam saw an impressive performance in the cultivation, husbandry, forestry and aquaculture sectors. Specifically, the total area under perennial plant cultivation was over 3.6 million hectares, up by 46,100 hectares year-on-year, while the fruit tree area reached 1.1 million hectares, a 3.2% year-on-year rise.

As for the husbandry sector, cattle and poultry farming recovered. The total meat output reached some 3.2 million tons over the six-month period, up 22.6% year-on-year.

Apart from this, the total output of fishery products was 4.1 million tons between January and June, up 2.8% year-on-year, the local media reported.

Green hydrogen development associated with offshore wind power, experts say

The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) needs to study and direct Vietnam Electricity (EVN) to issue regulations on the transmission and distribution system to ensure the stable operation of the power system amid abundant wind and solar power sources, said Tran Viet Ngai, Chairman of the Vietnam Energy Association.

He said the ministry should also develop energy storage systems (ESS), stored hydroelectricity to be synchronised with renewable energy development.

One of the difficulties to develop wind and solar power in the Draft Power Plan VIII is to ensure the construction of a synchronised and stable grid system. Projects that combine offshore wind power with green hydrogen production with a large enough scale bring a new approach for both domestic and export to international market, a viable solution that is applied and accelerated in many countries.

Nguyen Viet Anh, Vice President of the German-Vietnamese Innovative Network, said: Hydrogen will be an important foundation to provide stable and sustainable energy for Vietnam and an important foundation in National Power Planning VIII. However, the necessary condition here is to continue to expand and improve the existing infrastructure through international programmes and cooperation.

Green hydrogen is produced using renewable energy to provide electrolysed energy - separating water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, which is strongly developed to replace fossil fuels, serving the production, storage of electricity, industry, transportation, fertiliser production and chemicals.

According to analysts of Fitch Solutions, global annual hydrogen demand is forecast to increase from about 80 million tonnes in 2021 to 100 million tonnes by 2030. The green hydrogen sector could produce about 10 million tonnes per year by 2030 - up from the current 0.1 percent hydrogen market share.

The portfolio of green hydrogen projects reached 71 GW in February although there were no projects in the 2019-20 period and increased in the second quarter to 121GW, including 136 projects in the planning and development phase. The average investment is about 4.5 billion USD.

Global growth is being driven by Western Europe and Asia-Pacific, with these regions accounting for 82 percent of the above-mentioned green hydrogen projects. This is due to increasingly strict emissions regulations, the strong development of renewable energy with low electricity prices and "ambitious" decarbonisation targets.

Reaching the economic target of zero greenhouse emissions by the middle of this century will likely require the use of about 500 to 800 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year, a 5-7 times increase from today. By 2050, green hydrogen (and its derivatives) can account for 15-20 percent of the final energy demand, according to the Energy Transition Committee.

There are two factors that greatly affect the cost of producing green hydrogen, including the cost of input electricity, accounting for up to 80 percent and the cost of storage and transportation. Vietnam has world-class wind and solar power potential according to the figures outlined in the Draft Power Plan VIII, especially offshore wind power up to 475GW.

The country is located on international maritime routes with many seaports. These are favourable factors to attract foreign investment to develop offshore wind power projects and green hydrogen projects, exporting to potential markets such as Japan, the Republic of Korea and EU countries.

The combination of offshore wind power projects with green hydrogen also reduces the investment burden of the domestic transmission grid and maintains the systems stability through electricity storage by green hydrogen batteries, solving the challenges of electricity generation. The current guidelines set out in the Draft Power Master Plan VIII promote the development of renewable energy in particular and industries in general in a green and sustainable direction.

Resolution 55-NQ/TW dated February 11, 2020 of the Politburo has set the task of Performing technological research, developing a number of pilot projects for production and encouraging the use of hydrogen energy appropriately with the general trend of the world. The draft power plan VIII needs to be supplemented with goals and a roadmap for the development of offshore wind power with green hydrogen.

Currently, Vietnam has a number of investors interested in developing hydrogen, including Enterprize Energy Group (EE-UK) has proposed to the Government and the MoIT to combine the development of Thang Long offshore wind power project (in Binh Thuan province) with green hydrogen production.

Ian Hatton, the groups chairman, said: With the results of the survey, wind measurement for more than 12 consecutive months and the geology of the seabed off the coast of Binh Thuan province that EE Group has obtained, the use of wind turbines with large capacity to produce electricity combined with hydrogen through the seawater electrolysed system is very potential. Vietnam can fully use wind energy towards this goal, meeting domestic demand and exports./.

Vietnams green mangos promoted in Australia

A programme popularising Vietnams green mangos is being held in Australia till the end of July, after five tonnes of the fruit have arrived in the country.

The batch was imported by Melbourne-based Dalat Import-Export Company and distributed by ASEAN Produce Pty Company.

Another batch of 25 tonnes of Son La green mangos, exported by Rong Do Company, is also expected to be delivered soon.

As part of the programme, the Vietnam Trade Office in Australia is also working to add Vietnamese green mangos to restaurants menus.

Accordingly, An Viet restaurant chain in Sydney agreed to not only bring green mangos to its menus but also place orders and deliver them to consumers.

The office also offered a prize worth 500 AUD for a lucky consumer who buys green mangos or orders dishes made from the fruit.

It also launched marketing campaigns on social media and called on residents to buy mangos in Sydney and Melbourne.

Consumers will also have a chance to win prizes such as Vietnamese coffee branded Dr. Nam.

In the first four months of this year, Vietnam exported mangos worth 275,000 USD to Australia.

Since 2019, green mangos have been chosen by the office to step up marketing, together with frozen durian, rice and other farm produce. In 2020, green mango exports to Australia doubled the volume in the previous year.

In the first five months of 2021, Vietnams farm produce exports to Australia surged by 51 percent year-on-year to over 34 million USD./.

Austria supports EU-Vietnam Investment Protection Agreement

An Austrian economic official has voiced his countrys support for the EU-Vietnam Investment Protection Agreement (EVIPA) during receiving Vietnamese ambassador to Austria Nguyen Trung Kien on June 30.



Austrian Deputy Minister for Digital and Economic Affairs Michael Esterl said he will work closely with the Vietnamese Embassy to lobby for early ratification of the investment pact.

Ambassador Kien thanked Austria for its support and said Austrian businesses have many opportunities to invest in Vietnam in the future.

Austrian companies can invest in Vietnam to access a market of 97 million people, and through Vietnam to access the ASEAN market with 670 million consumers, noted the diplomat.

The two sides highly appreciated the positive development of bilateral economic, trade and investment relations in recent times, especially after the Free Trade Agreement between the EU and Vietnam (EVFTA) officially took effect in August 1, 2020.

Vietnam wishes to absorb leading technologies from Austria to improve the competitiveness of its economy, and on the other hand, it wants to bring its high-quality agricultural products to the Austrian market, Kien said.

The two sides agreed to organize various activities in the coming time to promote their products and increase trade exchanges, including activities to celebrate 50 years of bilateral diplomacy in 2022.

They reaffirmed their desires to cooperate in vocational training and employment, especially in the fields of information technology and nursing.

They also consented to strengthen bilateral cooperation in e-commerce, aiming to serve the interests of micro, small and medium enterprises.

The two sides agreed to maintain and soon kick-start the regular roundtable meeting every quarter between the Embassy and the Austrian Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs in order to remove difficulties in bilateral cooperation and to exchange information about opportunities and potential areas of cooperation.

Vietnam, Tunisia strive to enhance trade exchanges

Approximately 100 Tunisian and Vietnamese businesses attended a teleconference held on June 30 with the aim of seeking greater import-export opportunities to markets of both sides in the near future.



A conference on trade exchange between Vietnam and Tunisia is held via online platform

Le Hoang Tai, deputy director general at Vietnam Trade Promotion Agency (Vietrade), affirmed that although Vietnam is striving to play an important role in the global supply chain, a number of Tunisian enterprises have little information about the capacity of their Vietnamese firms.

Tai noted that the event will allow local businesses to introduce import and export prospects for their agricultural products, seafood, and beverages to Tunisian consumers, along with potential customers in the African market as a whole.

In response, Najeh ben Abdesalem, vice president of the Tunisian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the teleconference provided an ideal venue in which businesses could promote trade exchanges, adding that Tunisia represents an important gateway for Vietnamese enterprises and foreign investors to penetrate Africa's vast market.

With a population of more than 1.25 billion people, there are major prospects ahead throughout the continent, with North Africa in particular having plenty of prospects, especially countries such as Algeria and Libya.

It was reported at the event that two-way trade exchanges between both countries remains modest at only US$65 million annually. The two sides were therefore advised to increase their exchange of trade delegations and actively participate in forums, trade fairs and exhibitions in the near future.

According to the General Department of Vietnam Customs, trade turnover between Vietnam and Tunisia in 2019 stood at only US$36.2 million, of which Vietnam exported goods worth US$21.4 million, mainly coffee, peppers, cashew nuts, seafood, machinery and equipment, tools and spare parts, along with garments and textiles.

Meanwhile, Tunisias key exports to the Vietnamese market include seafood, chemicals, machinery and equipment, plastics, garments and textiles, in addition to animal feed and raw materials.

Hoang Duc Nhuan, Vietnamese Trade Councilor in Algeria, underlined the need to disseminate market information, organise seminars, forums, and international trade fairs like Vietnam Expo or Vietnam Food Expo in order to boost connectivity among businesses via both direct and online platforms in order to boost trade exchanges.

He also suggested bringing into full play the meeting of the Vietnam-Tunisia intergovernmental committee, fine-tuning the legal framework by signing an Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on co-operation between Vietrade and the Tunisian Center for Export Promotion (CEPEC), and setting up business councils in both countries.

IFC helps GreenFeed Vietnam expand sustainable livestock production

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, is set to pour approximately US$43 million in order to help GreenFeed Vietnam Corporation increase its pig breeding and farming capacity.

The primary aim of the move is to help ensure a reliable supply of safe and quality pork, while simultaneously enhancing livestock production practices and supporting the Vietnamese growing livestock industry.

IFC's investment is set to come through a seven-year bond and will allow GreenFeed to expand its pork production activities in Vietnam. The company's fattening pig production capacity is anticipated to increase by 750,000 pigs by 2023 and supply over 125,000 metric tonnes of pork annually, which the IFC estimates will benefit roughly 385,000 additional pork consumers.

Pork remains a staple and a vital source of protein for Vietnamese consumers, accounting for up to 70% of the total meat consumption in the country. At present, about half of Vietnams pork is supplied by small-scale pig farms which typically have low biosecurity standards.

Over the past two years, the spread of African Swine Fever (ASF), a fatal and highly contagious viral disease affecting pigs globally, within Vietnam has dramatically reduced supply, thereby causing a sharp rise in pork prices. Indeed, live hog prices are now some 50% higher than pre-ASF prices, after doubling since 2019.

IFC's investment comes in alignment with the Government's target of producing 70% of the nation's pork in industrial farms which are both modern and biosecure. It is thought that this will serve to help address the severe pork supply shortage and the price volatility triggered by the ASF.

"IFC's financing will help GreenFeed scale up its pig farming capacity, providing traceable and safe pork to meet the rising demand for animal-based food in Vietnam," said Ly Anh Dung, chairman of GreenFeed Vietnam Corporation.

"IFC's support will also help us continue working toward becoming a leading player in the pork-based food value chain in Vietnam and globally, while adhering to Vietnam and global industry best practices, Dung noted.

"Adopting biosecure and sustainable production practices will help improve the resilience of Vietnam's livestock sector, ensuring a stable supply of vital animal protein products in the country," added Kyle Kelhofer, country manager for Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos of IFC.

"By supporting companies like GreenFeed, we are promoting the development of more efficient and sustainable local private enterprises along the agribusiness supply chain. This will help boost competition and improve farming standards, supporting the sector's continued modernization and implementation of international best practices," Kelhofer stated.

Ha Giang tourism businesses seeking measures to survive

Tourism businesses and authorities in the northern province of Ha Giang are implementing several solutions to survive amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The tourism sector was the first and worst impacted by the pandemic, with the number of tourists decreasing sharply and the number of tours dropping.

Cancellation of bookings was common for local homestays, hotels and tourism businesses.

The fourth wave of COVID-19 cases in late April this year has pushed many businesses into further difficulties.

According to many tourism establishments, most tours to Ha Giang Province in June were cancelled.

Dinh Quoc Khanh, owner of Sky View Homestay in Suoi Thau 2 Hamlet, Ban Luoc Commune of Hoang Su Phi District, said: My homestay covers an area of 3,000 sq.m and we invested over VND4 billion (US$173,000). We just opened in early 2020.

But since then, we have been continuously affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, Khanh said.

During May and June this year, we had to cancel tours and refund tourists, he said.

The homestay owner had to find ways to maintain income while waiting for the pandemic to be brought under control and tourism activities to resume.

We decided to plant fruit trees such as plums, pears and peaches to increase our income as well as make the area greener, she said.

Along with that, we are trying to promote our image, so that when the pandemic is controlled, we can welcome more guests, Khanh said.

For tourism businesses, the larger the investment, the greater the damage.

Hmong Village Investment and Tourism Company is one example.

With an investment of over VND80 billion (US$3.5 million), when it first came into operation last year, this facility was also continuously affected by the COVID-19 pandemic due to continuous postponment and cancellation, causing great losses to the business.

In May and June this year, all accommodation bookings in H'Mong Village Resort. Quan Ba District, were cancelled due to the fourth wave of the pandemic spreading to many localities in the country.

Lai Quoc Tinh, the companys management board chairman, said: "In the difficult situation, we planned to lauch promotion programmes to assure tourists that Ha Giang is a safe destination.

We built a programme to welcome tourists for 1 to 2 days, which is enough for visitors to experience the cultural space. The goal was to welcome tourists in Ha Giang and some neighbouring provinces," Tinh said.

Nguyen Hong Hai, director of the provincial Culture, Sport and Tourism Department, said that Ha Giang was one of the provinces that did well in the prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic but the provincial tourism industry was still facing great difficulties.

All business establishments, resorts, cultural villages, travel businesses and tourism-related services have been badly affected, he said.

In the first six months this year, Ha Giang Province attracted an estimated 642,000 tourists, just 38 per cent of the regular figure, and total revenue from tourists reached VND1.157 trillion (US$50 million), 37.8 per cent of the yearly plan.

Due to the pandemic, all cultural and tourism events in Ha Giang were postponed, meaning tourism and service businesses had no income.

Business establishments still had to pay salaries, insurance for employees, rental fees and interest that caused losses to these establishments.

To help tourism businesses survive in the pandemic, the province has directed the tourism industry to coordinate with relevant sectors to focus on guiding and supporting tourism and service businesses to enjoy the supporting policies of the Government and the province to partly ease difficulties, said Hai.

The province also requested the establishments to strictly comply with anti-pandemic regulations and prepare well for when the pandemic was controlled, he added.

HCM City economy expands by 5.46% in 1st half despite COVID

Despite being hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, HCM Citys economy grew by 5.46 per cent in the first half of the year, according to the city Statistics Office.

The outbreak has affected the growth of many industries, but smart growth by the services sector made up for the declines in others.

It grew by 5.86 per cent year-on-year, with the commercial sector growing at 6.01 per cent, transportation and warehousing at 5.73 per cent, and finance, banking and insurance at 8.22 per cent.

Industrial production grew at 4.16 per cent, double the rate in the same period last year and showing green shoots of recovery.

Construction growth shrank to 0.98 per cent from 1.17 per cent since many projects were interrupted and prices of materials increased.

Retail sales of consumer goods and services were estimated at VND541.68 trillion (US$23.6 billion), up 7.3 per cent.

There were 18,441 newly registered enterprises with a total investment of nearly VND311trillion ($13.5 billion), year-on-year increases of 3.8 per cent and 39.2 per cent.

But FDI decreased by nearly 30 per cent to $1.43 billion.

Public investment has been worth only 25 per cent of the planned amount at VND9.09 trillion.

Exports by city enterprises (including crude oil) rose by 5.6 per cent to $20.34 billion.

They included five items exceeding $1 billion each: computers, electronic products and components ($7.7 billion), garment and textiles ($1.6 billion), machinery, equipment, tools, and parts ($1.13 billion), and footwear ($ 1.1 billion).

Fruit, vegetable prices soar

The prices of fresh fruit and vegetables sold at traditional markets in HCM City have soared over the last few days amid tightening of social distancing measures to curb the spread of COVID-19.

On Monday tomatoes and cucumbers sold for VND25,000-30,000 ($1-1.3) a kilo, a rise of nearly VND10,000 a kilogramme compared to earlier this month.

The price of other vegetables increased by VND5,000-10,000 a kilogramme, while some types of fruit and vegetables sold at double the previous prices.

A trader at Ba Hoa Market in Tan Binh District said the prices of fresh fruit and vegetables sold at wholesale markets in the city had risen by 30 per cent.

HCM City and many provinces are currently implementing social distancing measures to curb the recent COVID-19 outbreak, which has resulted in a spike in goods transport fares from other provinces to the city.

Fresh fruit and vegetables transported to markets from other provinces are being sold at higher prices.

However, the price of fresh fruit and vegetable sold at supermarkets has risen only slightly or remained the same.

The Hoc Mon agricultural wholesale market in HCM City has been closed for one week, starting from Monday for disinfection following four COVID-19 infection cases.

Nguyen Tien Dung, director of Hoc Mon Agriculture Wholesale Market Co said that infection cases were found after quick tests at the market on June 25.

The citys Department of Industry and Trade on Sunday shifted the supply of goods from Hoc Mon Market to Binh Dien and Thu Duc wholesale markets.

It also asked supermarkets and businesses in the city to join the price stabilisation programme to ensure a sufficient supply of goods.

New firms, registered capital hit records on business optimism

The number of new firms set up in the first half of this year and the capital registered to be poured into the economy hit record highs, reflecting the business optimism for post-pandemic recovery.

The latest updates from the General Statistics Office (GSO) showed that nearly 67,100 new firms were established in the first half of this year with a total registered capital of VND942.6 trillion (US$40.6 billion) employing 484,300 people, representing a rise of 8.1 per cent, 34.3 per cent and a drop of 4.5 per cent, respectively.

On average, each new firm had a registered capital of VND14.1 billion, 24.2 per cent higher than the same period last year.

Bui Anh Tuan, Director of the Ministry of Planning and Investments Agency for Business Registration, said the number of new firms in the first half of this year hit a record high ever, breaking the previous record of 66,958 firms recorded in the first half of 2019.

This is a special record in the outbreak of the COVID19-pandemic since the end of April with the most complicated development so far, Tuan said.

"The record new firms demonstrated the business optimism on the economic recovery and business opportunities."

Together with nearly VND1.2 trillion worth of additional capital from 23,700 existing enterprises, more than VND2.09 trillion was registered to be poured into the economy, excluding two new firms with unusually huge registered capital of VND25 trillion and VND500 trillion on May 20 in HCM City. This also set a new record for the registered capital, Tuan said.

This is a positive sign, reflecting the recovery of production and business, he added.

Still, the pandemic was heavily affecting the production of business of many enterprises, especially those operating in virus-hit sectors such as trade and services and those of small and medium sized enterprises, he said.

He added that most enterprises which temporarily halted operation or were dissolved were those which were operating for less than five years, of small scale and operating in the virus-hit sectors.

About 26,100 enterprises resumed operations in the first half of this year, 3.9 per cent higher than the same period in 2020.

On average, 15,500 enterprises were set up and resumed operation each month.

In June alone, 11,300 enterprises were created with a total registered capital of VND164.3 trillion, a drop of 2.5 per cent in the number of new firms but a increase of 9.1 per cent in the registered capital, together with more than 4,800 enterprises returning to the market.

June saw 3,877 firms temporarily halt operations, up by 20.2 per cent, 5,238 waiting for dissolution procedures, up 36.3 per cent and 1.919 completing dissolved, up by 40.3 per cent over the same period last year.

GSOs survey on enterprises operating in the processing and manufacturing industry in the second quarter of this year showed that 30.5 per cent saw better business than the first quarter, 37.7 per cent saw stable while 38.6 per cent saw a more difficult business climate.

More than 39 per cent expected better business in the third quarter while 22 per cent forecast difficult times ahead.

Business community plays important role in Viet Nam-US ties: Deputy PM

The US business community plays an important role in promoting economic partnership between Viet Nam and the US, Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh has said.

The Deputy PM was speaking during online talks with US firms on Wednesday to discuss promoting bilateral ties and supporting Viet Nam in its post-pandemic recovery and development.

At the event, which gathered representatives of nearly 500 US firms, Minh said the Vietnamese Government is working hard to control COVID-19 and boost economic growth.

He said Viet Nam has maintained positive growth, with an expansion of 2.91 per cent in 2020 and 5.64 per cent in the first half of 2021. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund has forecast that the Vietnamese economy will expand 6.5 per cent this year.

The Deputy PM said economic cooperation plays a key role in Viet Nam-US relations. Two-way trade has grown to US$90 billion in 2020 from $450 million in 1994.

Over the years, the US has been the largest export market of Viet Nam, while the country is 11th out of 40 countries and territories investing in Viet Nam, with a total capital of nearly $10 billion. Combined with investment through a third country, US investors have poured more than $14 billion into Viet Nam, noted Minh, adding that many leading American firms are prospering in Viet Nam.

Deputy PM Minh recognised and lauded the contributions of US businesses, including the US Chamber of Commerce, US-ASEAN Business Council, and Business Council for International Understanding, in deepening economic ties between the two countries.

The Vietnamese Government is always willing to listen to straightforward and constructive opinions from US firms regarding the national investment and business environment, as well as ideas on measures to enhance ties between the two countries, said Minh.

The Deputy PM praised the US commitment of $4 billion to the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative, expressing a hope that the government and businesses of the US will continue helping Viet Nam access vaccine sources as well as vaccine production technology.

Representatives of the US firms hailed Viet Nams achievements in COVID-19 prevention and control, as well as the economic cooperation potential between the two countries.

They proposed a number of ideas on how to foster bilateral cooperation in digital economy, infrastructure building, renewable and green energy, and sustainable development, as well as collaboration in areas of Viet Nams demand and the US' strength.

They spoke highly of the coordination among ministries, sectors and localities of Viet Nam in seeking measures to remove obstacles facing foreign investors.

Participants also discussed initiatives and solutions to support Viet Nam in accessing vaccine supplies and seeking cooperation in vaccine production, as well as in post-pandemic economic recovery and development.

Experts call for speeding up life-course immunisation in Southeast Asia

Vaccination remains one of the most cost-effective interventions available to protect against infectious diseases, a report titled The Decade of Healthy Ageing in ASEAN: Role of Life-Course Immunisation has emphasised.

Released by the EU-ASEAN Business Council, KPMG in Singapore and drug company Sanofi with support from the Western Pacific Pharmaceutical Forum (WPPF), it lists healthy ageing barriers in Southeast Asia and calls for urgent and greater focus on implementing life-course immunisation.

With age, the immune function goes into decline, increasing older peoples susceptibility to infectious diseases such as the flu and pneumonia, which can cause other health risks and complications, and vaccination helps protect against the diseases, it said.

Despite the obvious benefits, Southeast Asia lags behind the rest of the world in life-course immunisation, falling significantly short of the 75 per cent target rate set by the World Health Organization, it added.

John Jackson, president of the WPPF, said: While the region focuses on COVID-19, and rightly so, we need to also give attention urgently to another pressing issue, ageing societies.

As we age, we are more susceptible to health complications. Many diseases that afflict the elderly can be thwarted by immunisation. Yet, the role and value of life-course vaccination or vaccination at every stage of life beyond childhood is not fully realised.

Todays report provides a starting point for governments across the region to implement incremental policy changes that can further empower healthy ageing and economies.

The report, which seeks to inform programming and high-level dialogue at the regional and local levels, covers Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Viet Nam, the Philippines, and Indonesia with insights and inputs from 27 experts in the six countries as well as Switzerland and the US.

Chris Humphrey, executive director of the EU-ASEAN Business Council, said: This report shows us the dividends that we can harness by better ensuring a healthier, more productive older working population. Southeast Asia needs to start planning now to ensure that we take the right policy action including preventative care.

Eric Mansion, general manager, Asia Zone, Sanofi Pasteur, said: Health is wealth but protecting our older adults goes beyond monetary impacts [since] healthy ageing allows ageing populations to enjoy a good quality of life in their golden years and contribute meaningfully to social situations and beyond.

Life-course immunisation should urgently be prioritised as a vital part of healthy ageing policies in Southeast Asia to lessen the impact of ageing societies and to protect against vaccine-preventable diseases.

Jackson said: Although further implementing life-course immunisation programmes will be a costly and logistically complex endeavour, the alternative will be far more expensive and not just in monetary terms.

Time is running out, and swift, decisive action to address the issues that threaten to undermine having a healthy, ageing population is imperative.

Shares bounce back on strong growth of securities group

Shares advanced on Thursday after a slight drop in the previous session, boosted by strong growth of brokerage companies.

On the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, the VN-Index increased 0.61 per cent to close the trade at 1,417.08 points. The southern markets index inched down 0.1 per cent on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the HNX-Index on the Ha Noi Stock Exchange gained 0.74 per cent to end the day at 325.72 points. The northern markets index also lost 0.1 per cent on Wednesday.

The market breadth was positive with 312 gainers, 257 losers and 138 unchanged on the two markets.

Market liquidity was high with 910 million shares worth VND29.9 trillion (US$1.3 billion) traded, up 30 per cent in volume and 27.5 per cent in value compared to Wednesdays levels.

The securities industry led the market with an average growth of more than 5 per cent, according to data on vietstock.vn. Many shares hit the intra-day maximum growth, including Vietinbank Securities (CTS), Bao Viet Securities (BVS), BIDV Securities (BSI), Agribank Securities (AGR) and MB Securities (MBS).

Of which, AGRs liquidity increased substantially to more than 11 million shares, the highest in the past year, following information that its estimated six-month profit before tax reached VND160 billion, up 132 per cent compared to the same period last year and exceeding the profit plan for the whole year.

Saigon Securities Inc (SSI), the biggest brokerage house on the stock market, also gained 4.5 per cent, closing Thursday at VND57,500 ($2.48) per share, setting a new record high since going public.

On Thursday, the liquidity of all securities groups reached more than VND2.7 trillion and was also net bought by foreign investors.

Besides securities, the building materials industry, which represents the two big names  Hoa Phat Group (HPG) and Hoa Sen Group (HSG)  also performed positively. HPG increased by 4.5 per cent and HSG rose 1.7 per cent.

Blue chips maintained growth momentum on Thursday as 22 of the top 30 largest shares by market value and liquidity gained value and only seven declined.

Ending June, Viet Nams stock market was the second best performer in the world with a six-month growth of 27.6 per cent, only behind Saudi Arabias Adu Dhabi Index. The market capitalisation also increased more than 29 per cent while the trading value soared 146 per cent compared to the same period of 2020.

According to KB Securities Vietnam (KBSC), Viet Nams stock market is predicted to sustain its growth in the latter half of this year, propped up by recovery in production and business activities of listed companies, especially the large-cap firms in banking, steel, securities, utilities and IT.

However, a correction phase may happen in the second half of the third quarter when the positive effects from the second quarter business results reporting season are over, analysts at KBSC said in a note.

VCI repurchases over $21 million unmatured bonds

Viet Capital Securities JSC (VCI) just announced the repurchase of bonds prior to maturity, which were issued in 2020.

Accordingly, the securities firm agreed to buy back 50,000 bonds, worth VND500 billion (US$21.7 million). The deal will be carried out 10 days after the announcement, starting from July 7 to July 12.

VCI has raised over VND1.35 trillion through bond issuance since the beginning of the year to increase the size of working capital. Of which, it will divide the fund to supplement capital for government bond business activities, pay expenses related to the bond issuance, and supplement regular operating capital.

On June 21, VCI also completed the issuance of 166.5 million shares. Therefore, the company's charter capital doubled from nearly VND1.67 trillion to VND3.33 trillion.

Issuance rate was 1:1, meaning shareholders with one share will receive one new share. Issuing value at par value of nearly VND1.67 trillion.

In 2021, the company set a target of VND2.05 trillion in revenue and VND1.25 trillion in profit after tax, up 18.5 per cent and more than 31 per cent, respectively, compared to the previous year.

The forecasted numbers were based on the current situation of the stock market and expectation that the VN-Index will hover around 1,250 points at the end of this year.

VCI said that the main driving force of the global economy in 2021 is that the pandemic is brought under control. COVID-19 will gradually be contained with the production and distribution of vaccines in many countries around the world this year, including Viet Nam.

On the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HoSE), VCI shares were traded at VND53,000 per share yesterday.

Further FDI incentives forecast to spur on high-value inflows

While 2021s difficulties have significantly hurt Vietnams foreign direct investment mobilisation so far this year, the remarkable increase of the average size of ventures that are going ahead is reflecting an improvement in quality of selection.

Bright spots for foreign direct investment (FDI) mobilisation in the first half of the year mainly come from new and additionally-registered investment, according to the latest announcement from the Ministry of Planning and Investments Foreign Investment Agency (FIA). Of these, 804 projects  down 43.3 per cent on-year  received new investment certificates, with the total registered capital of nearly $9.55 billion, a rise of 13.2 per cent on-year.

Explaining the decrease of project numbers and the rise of newly-registered capital, FIA director general Do Nhat Hoang said that the number of small-scale initiatives have dropped in particular. The number of new projects under $5 million in the first half declined by 48.2 per cent on-year, and by 56.1 per cent over 2019, while the number of new projects between $5-50 million was also reduced by 13.4 per cent on-year.

However, the number of new projects with more $50 million has risen by 73.3 per cent on-year, Hoang said.

The most outstanding of these projects remains the Long An I and II liquefied natural gas scheme developed by VinaCapital GS Energy Pte., Ltd., a joint venture between South Korean GS Energy and VinaCapital. They were granted investment certificates in March and are expected to be put into operation by the end of 2025 with capacity of 3,000MW.

Meanwhile the billion-dollar O Mon II thermal power plant developed by a joint venture between Vietnam Trading Engineering Construction JSC and Marubeni Corporation from Japan was granted an investment certificate in January.

Despite the prolonged pandemic, many overseas investors are attempting to retain commitment and belief in Vietnams investment climate through the expansion and increase of FDI over recent times. In the first half of 2021, 460 projects  down 12.5 per cent on-year  increased capital with a total of $4.12 billion, up 10.6 per cent on-year. The most contributions are the adjustment of Polytex Far Eastern Vietnam Co., Ltd. from Taiwan, which raised its capital by $610 million in May, and LG Display Haiphong of South Korea with the capital by $750 million in February.

Hoang of the FIA also highlighted that while the number of newly- and additionally-registered projects declined, the average size of a new project has soared to $11.8 million per venture from about $6 million in the first half of last year, and adjusted project have risen to $8.9 million each from $7.1 million last year.

However, capital contributions and share purchases were still on the downtrend during 2020 and in the first half of 2021. There were only 1,855 such instances  down 55 per cent on-year, and the total investment of $1.61 billion - down 54.3 per cent on-year in the first half of the year.

The health crisis has significantly hit deals because investors need to research the market and business operations carefully before making any decision of capital contributions and share purchases, Hoang explained. The difficulties in travel since last year have been holding back numerous decisions and plans of investors.

The total newly-registered and added capital, as well as capital contributions and share purchases in the first half of 2021, amounted to $15.27 billion, equalling 97.4 per cent on-year. Of this, new and additionally-registered FDI captures almost 90 per cent of total FDI, and soared by 12.4 per cent. The FIA stated that some reasons could explain the decrease of the number of new, adjusted, and capital-contribution and share-purchase projects. Global FDI activities are on a downtrend and the pandemic is still causing chaos, and most countries are still heavily restricting travel.

Vietnams selective investment attraction policies have reduced the volume and increased the value. However, some investment and business procedures are still challenging investors, and it is difficult to find out new effective measures replacing the old investment promotion activities, Hoang added.

He highlighted some advantages and disadvantages of FDI mobilisation, as well as an expected boom in such investment when new policies on incentives and management of industrial zones will be adopted in the near future.

SBV asked to weigh piloting virtual currencies

The prime minister has requested the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) to study and pilot the use of virtual currencies from 2021 to 2023.

Under a prime minister's decision on the e-Government development strategy heading toward the digital Government in 2021-2025, the study, development and pilot of virtual currencies is one of the missions to master core technologies.

To date, Vietnam has yet to determine a clear definition of virtual currencies and assets.

The trading of Bitcoin, Etherum and the like has become popular among financial investors worldwide.

However, in Vietnam, the central bank has repeatedly affirmed that virtual currencies are not legal e-money and cryptocurrencies remain an illegal means of transaction in Vietnam.

SBV and the Ministries of Justice and Finance are building a legal foundation for the management of virtual currencies and assets. The Ministry of Finance has established a team to study virtual currencies and assets.

The prime minister also sought the study and development of core technologies. The Ministry of Science-Technology and Information-Communications were assigned to boost the study of technologies where Vietnam has an advantage, such as Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, virtual reality/augmented reality and Big Data.

Ecommerce platforms required to provide sellers data to tax agencies

Ecommerce platforms will have to provide certain personal data of sellers to tax agencies on a monthly basis, as regulated in Circular No. 40/2021 which will take effect from August 1 this year.

The Ministry of Finance has issued Circular No. 40 giving guidelines on value added tax, personal income tax and tax management for business households and business individuals. Under the circular, business individuals offering ecommerce services, including those earning revenue from digital products and services, have been added to the list of taxpayers.

Commenting on the tax collection methods for these business individuals, Nguyen Thi Lan Anh, head of the Tax Administration Department on Small and Medium Enterprises, Business Households and Individuals under the ministrys General Department of Taxation, said that ecommerce platforms will have to make tax statements and pay taxes on behalf of business individuals as stipulated in Clause 1, Article 8, of the circular.

To do this, Lan said that ecommerce platforms will identify taxable revenues and the amount of taxes they have to pay on behalf of business individuals based on revenues and other earnings that these business individuals have obtained via ecommerce platforms. The other earnings include the amount of money gained through delivery service providers and intermediary payment services.

Ecommerce platforms will record all the information about tax statements and tax payments that they paid on behalf of sellers, Anh told a virtual conference held by the General Department of Taxation on June 15.

Ecommerce platforms are also required to provide invoices and other legal documents for each order for buyers and sellers from now on. Sellers have to provide invoices and related documents upon the request of buyers, in line with prevailing regulations.

She added that ecommerce platforms are responsible for providing e-information about sellers full names, identity cards/passports, tax codes, email addresses, residential addresses, phone numbers, revenues and bank accounts to tax agencies monthly.

As for platforms that have insufficient data as mentioned above, they have to update their data system before August 1 this year, she noted.

In addition, sellers on ecommerce platforms were required to have fixed business locations and register for tax at their place of business to be granted tax codes. Besides this, sellers have to provide business information for ecommerce platforms, including names, addresses of their business locations, business registration certificate/tax codes, phone numbers, information about products, services, prices, delivery services and payment methods.

Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen, deputy general director of EY Vietnam Company, said that Circular No.40 taking effect from August 1 would leave a huge impact on enterprises and such a regulation is unprecedented. She added that up to 3.5 million transactions are made on e-commerce platforms each day in Vietnam.

Ecommerce platforms handle a substantial amount of workload every day. Therefore, tax agencies should arrange groups of IT experts in the taxation sector to coordinate with ecommerce platforms to upgrade their infrastructure to serve the tax administration, Huyen suggested.

Vu Thi Minh Tu, director of Lazada Company, proposed the local taxation authority work out a feasible roadmap to implement the circular as well as issue guidelines on which State agencies are authorized to ask for information and the scope of information from enterprises to ensure information security and avoid violating regulations of other sectors.

Wrapping up the online event, Dang Ngoc Minh, deputy head of the General Department of Taxation, said that all feedback from businesses on the circular was recorded. Tax authorities will study and suggest solutions to address problems arising in the tax management on ecommerce platforms and submit them to the higher authority for consideration.

Source: VNA/VNS/VOV/VIR/SGT/Nhan Dan/Hanoitimes
Tran Duong Chinh, a 12th grader majoring in physics of the Hung Vuong High School for the Gifted, has become the first student from Phu Tho province to win a gold medal at the European Physics Olympiad (EuPhO).

Tran Duong Chinh wins a gold medal from EuPhO

This is the second gold medal Vietnam has won from EuPhO. As many as 220 students from 46 countries attended this years competition. Chinh was one of five students with the highest scores at the competition.

Passion

Chinh said he loved natural sciences in childhood and discovered the most interesting subject  physics - during secondary school. When he was a ninth grader, he was selected as a member of the team of excellent students to attend the provincial physics competition where he won the second prize.

Physics lectures and experiments always excited me. I always tried to learn both in practice and in theory. I had a lot of opportunities to study and interact with good teachers and friends, partly because I was a member of the selected team of excellent students. This gave me more reason to be determined to pass the exam to enter the provincial high school for the gifted, he recalled.

Chinh came in second at the entrance exam to the physics majoring class at the Hung Vuong High School for the Gifted that year, and the mathematics major class as well.

He decided to study in the physics major class and won high prizes at competitions. When he was in 10th grade, he won a gold medal at the Olympiad for coastal provinces and northern delta students, and a gold medal in physics at the Olympiad of natural sciences.

He also won third prize and then second prize at national competitions when he was in 11th and 12th grades, respectively.

With a father who is a public employee and mother a teacher, Chinh always has good favorable conditions to study.

His great love for physics inspired his younger brother, who placed first in the entrance exam to the physics major class of the Hung Vuong High School for the Gifted last year. Quan, he brother, is also a potential member of the team of selected students to attend the upcoming national competition.

Automation

Tran Duong Chinh, a 12th grader majoring in physics of the Hung Vuong High School for the Gifted, has become the first student from Phu Tho province to win a gold medal at the European Physics Olympiad (EuPhO).

I first met Chinh when he was in 9th grade and I soon realized his ability as well his passion for physics. Later, I became a head teacher of his class and accompanied him through competitions. Chinh had left good impressions about his great efforts and achievements, said Than Thi Thanh Binh, a teacher of the Hung Vuong High School for the Gifted.

The two factors that help Chinh gain the impressive achievements, according to Binh, are good scientific thinking, passion for scientific research and perseverance in learning.

Regularly reviewing for competitions and exams together with Chinh, the teacher helped Chinh supplement his knowledge. He had the chance to study with physics experts invited from the Vietnam Physics Association as well for in-depth study.

Binh also gave encouragement and advice. When attending the EuPhO selection round, Binh was affected by his failure to enter the selected team to attend a competition in Asia.

Binh then told Chinh that the competition was just a playing field which helped broaden ones knowledge. She also said that the path ahead would be more difficult to follow and there would be fewer fellow-travelers.

Asked about his learning method, Chinh said in addition to the lessons in class, he regularly reads documents and gets knowledge from other sources. He always sets plans in details and arranges his time reasonably so as to avoid pressure.

He revealed that he likes assembling models, such as magnifiers and watches. For Chinh, this is an interesting way to discover the applications of physics.

Chinh said he felt stress, but he could overcome all difficulties thanks to the encouragement from teachers.

When I have a difficult question, I would gather my strength on it until I can solve it, forgetting about the time, he said.

I am lucky as I can receive the strong support and attention from parents, who remind me that I need to both learn and play in a reasonable way, and that I should not bear the pressure of obtaining achievements, he said.

Chinh is one of five Phu Tho students who were able to go to university without having to attend entrance exams. He plans to study automation at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology.

Ngoc Linh

All four Vietnamese students win silver at Intl informatics Olympiad All four Vietnamese students participating in the International Olympiad in Informatics 2021 brought home silver medals, according to the Ministry of Education and Trainings Quality Management Department.
Along with free vaccinations for priority groups, the Ministry of Health (MOH) is planning to activate the expanded program on immunization (free of charge) and the vaccination that requires payment.

Deputy Minister of Health Tran Van Thuan

At a meeting on June 18, the Standing Committee of the National Committee for Covid-19 Prevention and Control proposed that MOH, after completing the free vaccination for priority groups of people and reaching herd community, prepare for the next period, kicking off the expanded vaccination (free of charge) and the vaccination that requires payment.

At a roundtable talk on VietNamNet, Deputy Minister of Health Tran Van Thuan said the information related to paid vaccination is a matter of great concern.

According to Thuan, the available vaccines in Vietnam from the Covax program, 38.9 million doses, will be reserved for 19.4 million people belonging to priority groups as stipulated in Government Resolution 21.

Vietnam will also vaccinate factory to ensure uninterrupted production. There are now 30 million AstraZeneca doses imported through VNVC which the Government has bought at non-profit prices.

As such, the people with not so comfortable conditions can access vaccination for free. And in order to increase the supply, diversify vaccine sources, diversify resources and support the national budget, we believe that the paid vaccination mechanism, which is a reasonable one, will be proposed by MOH at a suitable time, Thuan said.

Also according to Thuan, Covid-19 vaccine supply will still be limited until September, so Vietnam will continue to vaccinate priority groups mentioned in Resolution 21.

Under the Governments guideline, which says that Vietnam needs to both fight the pandemic and ensure uninterrupted economic development, workers in Industrial Zones (IZ) will also get priority.

Of the 400,000 people vaccinated in HCM City, there were 1,100 cases of anaphylactic reactions after injection (15 3rd-level and 2 4th-level anaphylactic shocks). The ratio in Vietnam is the same as the global ratio, the permitted level as declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) for AstraZeneca and some other vaccines.

Amid peoples tendency of postponing vaccinations and waiting to get vaccines with fewer side effects, Thuan advised people not to be selective and to get vaccinated immediately if they belong to priority groups.

He went on to say that people can have two different vaccines for two shots at two different moments. For example, they can have AstraZeneca now and Pfizer or other vaccines later.

Some surveys have found that using different vaccines can bring higher immune effects.

We respectfully ask people not to be too selective about vaccines. Please be responsible and get the vaccines available. And please strictly follow the vaccine plus 5K principle set by MOH, Thuan said.

According to Dang Duc Anh, head of the Central Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, there is no 100 percent safe vaccine.

Of the 400,000 people vaccinated in HCM City, there were 1,100 cases of anaphylactic reactions after injection (15 3rd-level and 2 4th-level anaphylactic shocks). The ratio in Vietnam is the same as the global ratio, the permitted level as declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) for AstraZeneca and some other vaccines.

According to Anh, in some European countries and the US, scientists are considering injecting two kinds of vaccines for two shots. In Spain, AstraZeneca vaccine as the first shot and Pfizer for the second brings very high immune effects, and even better than the injection of the same vaccine two times.

Meanwhile, the UK is considering injecting other vaccines, such as Moderna and Sputnik for the second shot, and the initial results are very satisfactory.

We absolutely agree with the Deputy Minister that people should use the vaccines available, because the post-injection reactions are nearly the same for different vaccines, Anh said.

Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam, at the meeting of the Steering Committee on Covid-19 Vaccination on June 23, assigned MOH to consider the injection of two different vaccines following experiences in the rest of the world.

Germany, Canada, the UK, Sweden, France and Spain have allowed, or even encouraged, people to be immunized with vaccines of two different manufacturers after the first shot with AstraZeneca.

Thuy Hanh

PM ask AstraZeneca to deliver 10 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine by August Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has asked AstraZeneca to create the best possible conditions to deliver 10 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by the beginning of August, out of its 31-million-dose order for 2021.
PM Pham Minh Chinh held phone talks on July 1 with his Cuban counterpart Manuel Marrero Cruz to share their experience in the COVID-19 fight in their respective nations and to discuss the possibility of co-operation in vaccine supply and production.

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh holds phone talks his Cuban counterpart Manuel Marrero Cruz. (Photo: VGP)

During the course of talks, they also discussed orientations and measures aimed at continuing to boost the special traditional friendship that exists between the two countries.

PM Chinh also congratulated Cuba on their successful 8th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (CPC) held from April 16 to April 19 and congratulated the Cuban PM on his election a Politburo member of the CPC.

He affirmed the importance and determination to further deepen the strong ties and multifaceted co-operation between both sides in the time ahead, while praising the joint efforts to enhance consultation and exchange, along with carrying out bilateral co-operation in flexible forms amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Vietnamese PM sincerely thanked the Cuban Government for sending medical experts to help the nation to cope with the ongoing impact of the pandemic, along with gifting Vietnam drugs in support of COVID-19 treatment. This has demonstrated mutual support between the two countries, particularly in difficult times.

He went on to express his how impressed he has been by Cuban efforts and congratulated the Cuban side on obtaining positive results in research and development of vaccine candidates to combat COVID-19.

In response, Cuban PM Cruz told PM Chinh that the Cuban Government and people always treasure the solidarity, valuable support, and sharing of hands-on experience of the Doi Moi (Renewal) process that Vietnam gave to Cuba in the past. Indeed, this process helped the Caribbean nation to overcome challenges and difficulties, along with successfully implementing the policy of updating the socio-economic development model.

In response, Cuban PM Cruz affirmed his desire to expand co-operation with Vietnam in the fields of trade, investment, agriculture, health care, and pharmaceutical research and production. This includes the supply and transfer of crucial COVID-19 vaccine production technology.

The pair then shared the experience in the COVID-19 fight of their respective nations and the possibility of future co-operation in vaccine supply and production.

They therefore agreed to direct both countries' competent agencies to urgently exchange information regarding expertise on the matter, as well as co-ordinating necessary steps in order to reach an agreement on supply and transfer of COVID-19 vaccine production technology from Cuba to Vietnam.

The two leaders used the phone talks to express their belief that the close ties between both sides will enter a new stage of development, especially in terms of economics, trade, and investment. This will be for the mutual benefit of citizens from the two nations, significantly contributing to peace, stability, and development in the two regions in the process.

Both sides pledged to continue working closely and offering mutual support at international organisations and multilateral forums.

The Vietnamese PM also affirmed that, despite the geographical distance, Vietnam continues to stand alongside and support the Caribbean nation in all circumstances.

He also expressed the countrys consistent stance on strongly supporting a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly calling on the United States to end its longstanding embargo against Cuba.

Source: VOV
The Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation in developing digital government, digital economy and digital society.

The signing ceremony between the Ministry of Information and Communications and the ADB.

The agreement lays the foundation for specific cooperation between the Ministry of Information and Communications and the Asian Development Bank to implement the national digital transformation program.



Under this agreement, ADB will provide technical support in four areas to the Ministry of Information and Communications during the 2021-2025 period.



They include: amending and upgrading the Law on Electronic Transactions 2005 to the Law on Electronic Transactions and Digital Economy; compiling the Law on Digital Technology Industry to replace the Law on Information Technology 2006; formulating the Development Strategy for Digital Economy and Digital Society to 2025, with a vision to 2030; and developing and implementing action programs to develop the digital economy and digital society.



The Government has issued the National Digital Transformation Program with three pillars: digital government, digital economy and digital society.

Digital government helps the government operate more efficiently, effectively and transparently. The digital economy promotes innovation, creates new values, new growth engines and helps increase labor productivity. Digital society helps people have equal opportunities to services, training and knowledge, narrows the development gap and reduces inequality.



Meanwhile, ADB's Country Partnership Strategy (CPS) focuses on digital transformation, taking digital technology as the driving force to implement priorities to support economic growth and sustainable development in Vietnam. Those shared goals and aspirations have fueled the initiative for a joint cooperation plan between the two sides.



According to Deputy Minister Nguyen Huy Dung, ADB and the Ministry of Information and Communications will jointly develop a plan to implement specific cooperation activities to support research, build a legal framework, policies, and breakthrough solutions to boost the digital economy. The goal is for Vietnam's digital economy to account for 20% of the national GDP by 2025.



The two sides will seek resources to support the development of national digital platforms to promote national digital transformation and development of the digital government, digital economy and digital society in a comprehensive and universal way.



The Ministry of Information and Communications and ADB will also research and promote investment in digital infrastructure projects, ICT infrastructure, and telecommunications infrastructure to turn this into a foundation for promoting Vietnam's economy to develop quickly and sustainably.



In addition, the two sides will jointly share views on how to achieve an inclusive, sustainable, secure, reliable and innovative digital society.



Recommendations for Vietnam's digital economy



According to Mr. Andrew Jeffries, ADB Country Director for Vietnam, digital transformation has the potential to become a core part of economic recovery. At the same time, digital technology brings both opportunities and challenges that Vietnam needs to pay attention to.



The inclusive digital economy requires the Government to carefully consider the impacts of digitization and the regulations and policies that help shape this new economy.



The ADB representative said that a favorable environment to apply digital technologies and promote the startup ecosystem will be important factors for success.



Vietnam can develop its digital economy by attracting investment in the technology industry, leveraging technology talent and skills, and accelerating productivity growth through digital transformation.



As Vietnam moves towards a digital society, Vietnam needs guidance and support to make the most of digital technology to strengthen social structures, promote cultural development and build trust.



The ADB expert also recommended that Vietnam increase digital literacy among vulnerable groups, ensure affordable Internet access devices, and engage a wide range of stakeholders in discussions on technology policy.



Regarding digital government, Vietnam needs to digitize public services, adjust processes and procedures to increase speed and efficiency, and change regulations and policies.



According to the an ADB official, the technological challenge is also a cultural challenge. Therefore, Vietnam needs the right leadership and incentives to realize its ambitions.



Trong Dat
The incident that occurred on June 22 on the AAG cable route will be fixed from July 2, while repair of the AAE-1 undersea fiber optic cable route will take place on July 2-11.

In just over a month from May 11 to June 22, up to three of five international undersea fiber optic cable routes that connect Vietnam to the world, namely Asia Pacific Gateway (APG), Asia Africa Europe 1 (AAE-1) and Asia America Gateway (AAG), had problems. These incidents have been affecting the quality of Internet services in Vietnam.



According to Internet service providers (ISPs) in Vietnam, every time there is a problem with any undersea cable route, they immediately implement plans to balance the load, and adjust the traffic via other undersea and land cable routes.



However, in a situation where two undersea cable lines have problems at the same time, it is very difficult for ISPs to ensure the quality of service, especially during peak hours.



While the problem on the S6 branch of the APG undersea cable line was fixed on June 11, the problems on two other international undersea optical cables, AAE-1 and AAG, have not been fixed.



Photo: It is expected that in about 10 days, the sea cable problems will be fixed and Vietnam's Internet services will return to normal.



An ISP In Vietnam told VietNamNet that the plan to fix the problem that occurred on the AAE-1 cable route on May 25 has been adjusted. This is the second time the repair schedule of this cable line has been changed. Specifically, the time for repair will be changed from July 1-7 to July 2-11.



The repair schedule for the AAG line will be from July 2 to July 7.



On May 11, May 22 and June 22, the three undersea cables of APG, AAE-1 and AAG had problems, respectively. The problem on the APG cable has been fixed.



With a length of 20,191 km, the AAG route connects Southeast Asia with the US. This cable route has been put into operation since November 2009, passing through Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei, Hong Kong (China), the Philippines and the United States (Guam, Hawaii and California).



Van Anh
So far, a total of 459 Covid-19 patients have been detected while they were using medical services at 55 of 130 hospitals in HCM City.

Most of the cases were detected in time by the hospitals, but some medical facilities detected patients later, leading to the spread of pathogens in the hospital.



Recently, many hospitals in the city have been locked down for certain periods, such as the Tan Phu District Hospital, Saigon South Hospital, Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Pham Ngoc Thach Hospital and Saigon General Hospital.



Hospitals in HCM City are facing difficulties due to the rapid spread of the Delta variant. The Department of Health has asked all hospitals to strictly implement solutions set by the Ministry of Health and the Department of Health.

The HCMC Department of Health asked hospitals to conduct Covid-19 tests using the RT-PCR method for all caregivers and those who visit the hospitals for medical checkups, apart from conducting Covid-19 screening and checking the body temperature of outpatients.

The department also asked hospitals to prepare sufficient facilities for the health declaration and screening areas and separate them from their departments.

In addition, people who are hospitalized must temporarily quarantine at hospitals and wait for their RT-PCR test results before being transferred to the departments for inpatients.

Further, hospitals should regularly conduct Covid-19 tests for their employees to prevent the potential spread of Covid-19, the local media reported.

The city has planned to conduct COVID-19 testing for one million aggregate samples per day, with a hope to control the pandemic before July 10.

An urgent action programme to prevent and control the COVID-19 pandemic from now until July 10 has been announced by the municipal authorities.

Apart from increasing the testing, every effort will be exerted to trace, zone off and stamp out the pandemic while attention will be paid to strictly controlling quarantine sites to minimise cross-infection risks.

Large-scale sample collection and narrow-scale lockdown will be conducted in areas where COVID-19 infections were confirmed. Test results in these areas are expected to be confirmed within 12 hours.

The local authorities have also prepared a response scenario for treatment of 10,000 infections. The citys health sector has prepared oxygen reserves, medical supplies and equipment serving the work.

Regarding the vaccination campaign against COVID-19, the municipal authorities are urgently working with partners and negotiating with vaccine manufacturers to accelerate the purchase and import of vaccines, so that the city can receive the first vaccine batch at the end of the third quarter.

The city has set to give vaccinations to two-thirds of its population in late 2021.

As of July 2 morning, HCM City recorded 4,422 COVID-19 infections.

Tu Anh
As both employers and employees suffer under the global health crisis, issuing new bailout packages is considered an urgent requirement to not only support their operations and livelihoods but also spur economic growth in the long run.

The MoLISA thrashes out latest labour bailout proposals. -- Illustration photo

The Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MoLISA) is collecting opinions from ministries and relevant authorities to finalise a draft resolution on supporting policies for employees, employers, and businesses facing difficulties due to the pandemic. In the framework of the draft resolution, the MoLISA proposed to issue another bailout package worth VND27 trillion ($1.17 billion).

The proposal is being built as up to 9.1 million workers were affected by the pandemic in the first quarter of 2021, in which, more than 500,000 lost their jobs and over 2.8 million people had to take unpaid leave. When the pandemic at the end of April spread to industrial zones, it directly affected production and export as well as the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers, according to the General Statistics Office. Industries such as passenger transport, aviation, tourism, and hospitality continue to be the most strongly affected.

Along with the proposal of the MoLISA, on June 6, in the framework of the seminar organised by the Economic Committee of the National Assembly to review the socioeconomic situation in the first half of the year and forecast for the second, Vu Hong Thanh, Chairman of the committee, asked experts to evaluate supporting policies and mechanisms for businesses and people affected.

Dau Anh Tuan, director general of the Legal Department at the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said that it had published its assessment results on the impact of COVID-19 on businesses in April.

The survey was conducted with 12,000 businesses in 63 cities and provinces from the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2021. The results showed that the pandemic caused an extreme impact on domestic businesses, with 87.2 per cent of those surveyed saying that the crisis had a negative or very negative impact on their business activities.

About 65 per cent of private enterprises and 62 per cent of foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) saw a decrease in revenue in 2020 with an average decrease of 36 per cent at private enterprises and 34 per cent at FIEs, compared to 2019.

Tuan explained that traditionally strong sectors of Vietnam such as textiles and garments, and leather and footwear had to deal with supply disruptions and changed consumption behaviour of the target market. Service industries, such as tourism, have been particularly hard hit.

As requested by the government, the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) is continuing to formulate new policies and solutions to assist people and businesses vulnerable to COVID-19, which are expected to help people and businesses capitalise on possible opportunities to recover from their difficulties, helping the economy grow further.

The MPI is now also building a governmental resolution on supporting and developing businesses for the 2021-2025 period.

The MoLISA is also reviewing implementation of the VND62 trillion ($2.69 billion) package launched one year ago to support 20 million poor and unemployed people.

The package comprised of a VND16 trillion ($695 million) sum aimed at providing loans to businesses at a zero rate to help them pay salaries for employees. However, it is reported that so far only VND14 trillion ($608 million) or 22 per cent of this package have been disbursed due to numerous impediments.

Since the second quarter of 2020, the government has also been deploying some drastic measures to support businesses. For example, the State Bank of Vietnam is deploying a package worth VND180 trillion ($7.82 billion) for businesses and households with debt payment deferral and preferential loans. However, no concrete reports on the disbursed amount have been revealed so far.

Source: VIR
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Dang Hoang Giang on July 1 chaired a meeting to review Vietnams non-permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the first six months of 2021.

An overview of the meeting. (Photo: VNA)

At the meeting, delegates shared the view that the worlds political-security and socio-economic situation continued to develop complicatedly and unpredictably in the first half of this year due to competition between world powers, prolonged and tense conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, and global challenges like climate change, terrorism, cross-border crime, and food and water security, notably the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.



Given this, countries have better acknowledged the need to maintain peace and enhance international cooperation and multilateral activities to cope with these challenges.



Amid such context, the UNSC continued to demonstrate and promote its role as a leading mechanism in sustaining international peace and security with nearly 200 meetings at the ambassador- and delegation head-level and above as well as hundreds of working sessions. The council ratified 63 documents of different kinds and discussed pressing issues across the globe such as COVID-19, anti-terrorism, climate change, children in armed conflicts, and peacekeeping activities.



On the basis of the 13th National Party Congresss foreign policy of independence, self-resilience, multilateralisation and diversification of international relations and intensive, extensive, comprehensive and effective international integration, Vietnam has made active contributions to the councils activities, obtaining many remarkable outcomes.

Notably, the nation successfully completed its role as President of the UNSC in April 2021. It worked to promote four key events of the council that included the High-level Open Debate on "Cooperation between the UN and regional organisations in enhancing confidence-building and dialogue in conflict prevention and resolution chaired by President Nguyen Xuan Phuc; the open debate on Mine action and sustaining peace: Stronger partnerships for better delivery, and the in-person and online debate on Protection of Objects Indispensable to the Survival of the Civilian Population presided over by Minister of Foreign Affairs Bui Thanh Son; and the annual open debate on sex violence in conflicts chaired by Ambassador Dang Dinh Quy, head of the Vietnamese Mission to the UN.



Speaking at the meeting, Giang, who is also head of the multi-sectoral working group, highly valued active contributions and effective and timely coordination of member agencies of the group, and other relevant agencies in popularising Vietnam's activities at the UN Security Council, (UNSC) especially in April when the country held the UNSC Presidency.



These have contributed to creating a favourable international environment for Vietnams integration and development and promoting bilateral relations between Vietnam and countries worldwide, Giang said.



He also pointed out solutions to and key orientations to implement Vietnams tasks at the UNSC in the remaining months of 2021.



The Deputy FM suggested relevant agencies keep a close watch on developments at the UNSC, strengthen coordination and share information, and predict early international and regional problems that may see complexities, thus recommending effective measures to deal with them.



Vietnam is hoped to successfully perform its responsibilities and missions as a non-permanent member of the UNSC in the 2020-2021 tenure, thus improving the countrys position and prestige, and strengthening cooperation between Vietnam and countries and partners in line with the motto Partnership for a sustainable peace.

Source: VNA
HOUSTON (AP)  Two suburban Houston officers and a jailer were indicted Thursday in an alleged assault of a man during a traffic stop.

Baytown police Officers Teddy Sims and Samuel Serrett and detention officer Shan Dunlap were each indicted on a felony charge of aggravated assault.

Prosecutors allege they assaulted Kedric Crawford after officers stopped him in July 2019. Baytown police say Crawford resisted officers as they searched his vehicle and were forced to use a stun gun on him. They charged him with assaulting an officer, but that count was later dropped.

Nobody is above the law, including those who have a duty to enforce the law, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in a statement.

Baytown Assistant Police Chief Eric Freed said his agency could not immediately comment on the indictments.

Court records did not list attorneys who could speak on behalf of the officers.

In a lawsuit, Crawford's attorney said his client cooperated with officers and was punched and violently slammed to the ground for no justifiable reason. The lawsuit is pending in federal court in Houston.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Wacos average stood at $2.65-per-gallon in early July 2019, according to AAA.

Prices are going up due to factors opposite of what brought prices down, GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick DeHaan said. The economy is improving, America is reopening, and oil prices are soaring, reaching $75.23 per barrel on Thursday. Oil production had plunged due to the pandemic. On July 1 a year ago, for example, the per-barrel price was $39.82.

DeHaan said oil companies have remained disciplined in their response to increased demand, resisting any urge to drastically boost production. He said the Energy Information Administration reports oil production has increased only 100,000 barrels daily, and only 2% on four-week averages.

Considering all factors, including Americans desire to get out of the house after being cooped up 14 months, oil prices could reach $80 per barrel and gas prices could surge another 10 to 20 cents per gallon, DeHaan said. The national average on Thursday was $3.12 per gallon for regular unleaded.

DeHaan, based in Chicago, said the station a half-block from his home posted $3.59 for a gallon of regular unleaded Thursday. That is much more than the $2.62 available at some locations in Greater Waco but well below Californias $4.30 statewide average, he said.
Bruno's injuries made the cause of death all too clear.

Wandering onto a road and being hit by traffic accounts for 80% of the 45 to 55 bear carcasses the Louisiana department deals with each year, Davidson said. Since Bruno was a celebrity, the department sent a news release about his death.

Im so upset that Bruno died this way, Kline said.

What is a mystery is Bruno's rambles. There's been speculation that he was looking for love. But Davidson said it's youngsters that head out into the great unknown in search of territory and a mate.

Missouri biologists estimated that the bear was 2 or 3 years old  definitely adult, but not old, Sumners said.

Moreover, he traveled year-round, not just in breeding season, so he wasnt looking for a mate, Davidson noted.

Its very, very, very rare for an adult bear like that to travel the distance he did. ... It's very strange behavior, she said.



This story was first published on June 30, 2021. It was updated on July 1, 2021 to correct the description of Sue Kline as a local lobbyist for the Humane Society of the United States. She is not an employee of the organization but an active supporter. The AP also incorrectly identified the organization as the U.S. Humane Society. The correct name for the group is the Humane Society of the United States.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
The goal of the migrant is the same worldwide: a better, safer life.

The political price paid by the stable democracies continues to be huge. It played a role in Donald Trumps election as president and will play a role in the next presidential election, whether Trump runs or not. It was the great driver for Brexit and Britains seeming self-harming. It has driven the move of Hungary, under Viktor Orban, to autocracy.

It is hard to stop people who have nothing to lose from crossing a frontier if they can. But they arent the only migrants. Some, a small number, are opportunists. These are the migrants who overstay student visas, manipulate qualifications for residence and willfully circumvent the law or contract so-called green card marriages.

But they arent what the border crisis is about  any more than it is what the overloaded boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea is about. It is the physical manifestation of desperation.

Because the migration problem is so complex  human problems are almost by definition complex  it isnt a matter of resolution so much as management. We want, for example, immigrants with high-tech skills, but we are worried about the impact of millions of desperate peasants walking across the deserts.
Insider accounts can be very useful. But its a comically convenient framing of Christies role in the Trump saga. He wasnt merely an observer, he was a participant, and one whose behind-the-scenes and front-facing work enabled and emboldened the Trump administration and other Republicans to ultimately secure their own demise.

Defending Trump, even around the edges at times, conditioned the very environment Christie is presumably lamenting  one that resulted in the spread of dangerous conspiracy theories, baseless claims of election fraud, the rise of GOP kooks like Marjorie Taylor Greene and an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Theres a difference between being an insider and a co-conspirator. Christie can offer an insiders account of the GOPs self-destruction in the same way the getaway driver can offer an insiders account of a bank robbery.

Finally, and most eye-rollingly, the book will offer no-nonsense solutions for how to recover the partys image and integrity, and how to beat back the ultra-liberal policies of Joe Bidens Democrats.
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With the studio only being about 15 minutes away from Lincoln and fairly centered between Palmyra, Bennett and Waverly, its a central location and can be beneficial to the community as both a photography studio and venue.

With the space holding up to 60 guests and a bar, Herold expects to be able to hold small weddings, baby showers, get-togethers with friends and other events.

I just see so many memories being captured here, she said.

As for her own business and photography, Herold plans to host different styled sessions, boudoir sessions and days similar to their grand opening.

When Herold first got the location, she only wanted to use it for her photography. She soon realized she didnt need all that space to herself. She hopes to use it as an opportunity to allow other voices to be heard as well.

Im really not a competitive person, Im only competitive with myself, Herold said I love to help other people grow, and my goal is to really help a lot of local photographers in the southeast Nebraska area.
China State Media revealed the three-stage battle plan to invade Taiwan as the U.S. stages war games in the Pacific. Meanwhile, China and India move tens of thousands of military troops to their mutual border in the largest buildup in decades.

Genuine fears are rising that China may trigger World War III after it vowed to invade Taiwan and explained how it would do it as the Communist Party celebrates its centenary.

A state-controlled newspaper released an article offering a glimpse of a terrifying three-stage plan to pave the way for an invasion force to storm the breakaway island.

The release of the Taiwan invasion plane came as President Xi Jinping yesterday pledged a "complete reunification" with Taiwan as he delivered a speech to mark 100 years of the Chinese Communist Party.

Xi's pledge comes as tensions are increasing in the seas around China. The U.S. and Japan have been holding joint military exercises amid fears of a possible conflict.

Any invasion would represent a potential starting gun of deadly hostilities and could compel the United States to defend Taiwan as a result of a mutual defense pact.

U.S. regional allies such as South Korea, Japan, and Australia would also likely be sucked into a military conflict if China invades Taiwan. In addition, NATO forces such as the UK, France, Germany, etc. could enter any such conflict because the US is a member of the alliance.

Xi's vow to invade Taiwan was followed up with an article in the publication "Naval and Merchant Ships" that outlined a three-pronged attack that would pave the way for an amphibious landing and the toppling of the government in Taipei.

The first stage would see DF-16 short-range ballistic missile attacks pulverizing airports, early warning radar, anti-air missile bases, and command centers across the island

"The attacks against Taiwan's airports would continue until [Chinese] surface troops had accomplished an assault landing."

Following this initial attack

"China's H-6 bombers and J-16 fighter jets would attack naval ports, although the facilities would not be 'completely destroyed' so the People's Liberation Army (PLA) could use them for a landing."

In the second stage of the Chinese invasion, the article states

"YJ-91 and CJ-10 cruise missiles would be unleashed from land, warships, and submarines.

"Military bases, ammunition depots, communications infrastructure, and key road junctions would be crippled.

"Drones would then be dispatched to assess the damage."

The article ends with the third stage of the invasion that relies on 

"Warships and land-based rocket forces wiping out any remaining obstacles so the PLA's Marine Corps and amphibious landing troops would safely land."

According to the British newspaper The Sun

"This was the second time this publication has outlined a scenario for an attack on Taiwan.

"Last year, it detailed how an assault on the island's defense systems could occur to coincide with the start of the independence-leaning president Tsai Ing-wen's second term."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that

"China and India have sent tens of thousands of soldiers and advanced military equipment to their disputed border, as troop deployments in the region reach the highest level in decades."

"China's People's Liberation Army has gradually increased its troop presence, mostly over the past few months, to at least 50,000, up from about 15,000 at this time last year, according to Indian intelligence and military officials. Those moves have been matched by India, which has sent tens of thousands of its own troops and advanced artillery to the region, the officials said."

"Both countries have built up infrastructure at the border in recent months, including insulated cabins and huts to keep troops stationed there through the frigid Himalayan winters."

"China has moved advanced surface-to-air missiles to the region, the officials said, including its HQ-9 system, which is similar to Russia's S-300 and America's Patriot antimissile batteries."

"The country's army has built hundreds of new structures to support troops at military encampments at the towns of Rudok, in Tibet's Ladakh frontier, and Kangxiwar, which is north of a plateau controlled by China, known as Aksai Chin, that connects Tibet with the Xinjiang region."

"China has dug underground bunkers and tunnels and built small hydroelectric power stations and solar panels, the officials said. They have installed portable cabins and huts for troops, helipads, and field hospitals."

All of this is stoking fears that World War III may be approaching. China, the United States, India, Great Britain, and France have nuclear arsenals. Tensions between the United States and China have been rising in recent months over the lack of cooperation by the Chinese in allowing researchers to determine how and when the Covid-19 pandemic started.

Taiwan's foreign minister says China is 'preparing for war.'
PEOPLE

Leidos' latest exec realignment includes new space leader

Leidos has initiated a series of changes in its senior leadership team to take effect Monday as one executive prepares to retire this year.

The company said Thursday that Paul Engola, chief human resources officer, will move to executive vice president of national security space with responsibility for charting a growth path in that market.

Engolas position as chief HR officer will be filled on a temporary basis by George Reiter, senior vice president of Leidos HR centers for excellence. Leidos will conduct a search for a new CHRO.

Jim Cantor, chief of performance excellence and strategic partnerships, will retire from the company later this year and is moving into a consulting employee role.

Leidos has created a new corporate operations role that has been taken up by current intelligence group president Vicki Schmanske.

Schmanske also becomes an executive vice president with this appointment and now holds responsibility over performance excellence, strategic partnerships, corporate real estate and facilities, security operations, marketing and communications, corporate strategy and special projects.

Roy Stevens, current head of business development and strategy, will move over to succeed Schmanske as intelligence group president. Stevens role as BD chief will be temporarily filled by Bill Bender, a senior vice president, while Leidos searches for a replacement.

Monday also sees the completion of one other leadership transition, where Christopher Cage succeeds the retiring James Reagan as chief financial officer.
Air Force asks for reconsideration of $4B protest that went against them

The Air Force has asked the Government Accountability Office to rethink a decision to sustain a protest filed by ManTech International involving a highly classified, $4 billion contract.

Ive tried and failed to get more details on this contract and the still-sealed GAO decision.

I do know this is an odd one, given that ManTech was one of three winners alongside General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman.

The unanswered question remains why would a company that was a winner protest? ManTech has declined to comment.

The Air Force will use the contract to implement security protocols, conduct information security operations, counterintelligence training, analysis, and investigations. The three companies are to compete for task orders.

On June 17, GAO ruled in ManTechs favor and is still working with the Air Force on a public version of the decision. Given that the work is classified, the Air Force has the final say on what can be released. That could take months.

Only if and then, we will get any insights into what ManTech protested and why GAO agreed.

The reconsideration filed by the Air Force is a request for GAO to take a second look at the decision. These moves rarely result in a reversal, but I guess there is always a chance.
Deadline extended for Industry Innovator Awards

A lot of effort goes into innovation, as does what goes into nominating your successes for recognition. So weve extended the deadline for the 2021 Industry Innovation Awards.

In fact, the deadline for all the Government Innovation Awards has been extended to 11:59 Eastern time on Friday, July 16.

Click here to submit your nomination. Dont wait until the night before.

This is a great opportunity to brag about what youve accomplished in a year that really has been like no other.

We want to recognize and celebrate the vital role government contractors play in the public sector IT community.

Any company supporting the public sector is eligible for a 2021 Industry Innovator award. Nominees will be judged based on their contributions and leadership in the government market over the past year.

We are looking for examples of what industry has done to bring innovation to their government customers. We arent looking for work on a specific project, but instead seeking examples of how you have developed a technology solution or offering that meets a customer need in a new and unique way.

Winners will be selected on three core criteria:

Tangible evidence of efforts driving innovation in this space. That includes but is not limited to internal investments, acquisitions, partnerships or alliances, relevant patents and key contract wins.

The innovative solution itself -- both the technology involved and how the company is leveraging it.

Mission impact: problems or challenges that government customers need to solve, and how this innovative company is helping to address those challenges.

The form calls out several specific technology areas -- artificial intelligence, analytics and automation, cybersecurity, cloud and infrastructure, digital transformation, Internet of Things and smart cities, and unmanned systems.

But your companys work can be in any corner of government IT. The focus should be on how your solution serves your customer and addresses a need.

The awards program is part of broader effort by Washington Technology and our sibling publications FCW, GCN and Defense Systems to recognize and celebrate innovations that are occurring across the government market.
WATERLOO  Citing a devastating arson fire that gutted the building, as well as a down economy that limited chances of reopening, a longtime Waterloo restaurant known for its chicken, tenderloins and hot subs will permanently close its doors.

Wishbone Restaurant, at 201 West 18th St. since 1963, made the announcement on its Facebook page Wednesday, saying it was a difficult decision.

We would like to thank all patrons and employees for helping us become a great, successful restaurant, read the post, which was shared hundreds of times. With the economy the way it is, its just not feasible for us to re-open. Thank you again for your loyalty.

The restaurant has been closed since March 5, 2020, when a fire was intentionally started in the business.

Most people do not realize exactly how much damage there actually was, Wishbone owners replied to a comment asking if theyd consider an online fundraiser to stay open.

Wishbones owners, contacted through Facebook, declined to comment for this story.
SPARTANBURG, S.C. (AP)  Two public workers repairing a sewer main in South Carolina were shot by a man who also fired on a deputy Thursday, authorities said.

The shooter was involved in a standoff inside a home that ended after a few hours, but Spartanburg Sheriff Chuck Wright said he didn't know the condition of the man or if anyone else was inside the house.

We really don't know what triggered anything, Wright said at a news conference late Thursday afternoon. We literally just secured the house. I dont know any other details.

Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger said his investigators were called to the home for at least one death but didn't give additional details.

The man walked up to the workers near Cleveland Park in Spartanburg about 3 p.m., asked them what they were doing and then started shooting, Spartanburg Water spokeswoman Jennifer Candler told news outlets.

The workers were taken to the hospital but are expected to be all right, Spartanburg police spokesman Maj. Art Littlejohn said.

Spartanburg city officers and county deputies were fired on as they rushed to get into a home after the initial shooting because they feared someone might be hurt inside, Littlejohn said.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden praised sports' ability to heal and bring a nation together in a time of crisis as he hosted the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers at the White House on Friday.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)  A historical plaque memorializing the dozens of Native American children who died while attending a boarding school in New Mexico more than a century ago has gone missing, sparking concern among Indigenous activists.

Members of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women are among those pushing the city of Albuquerque to investigate. The small plaque was in a park near the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center and the original site of the Albuquerque Indian School.

The plaque noted the site of a burial ground for students who attended the school between 1882 and 1933. They included children from the Navajo Nation, Zuni Pueblo and Apache tribes.

The removal of the plaque comes as the U.S. government embarks on a nationwide investigation aimed at uncovering the troubling history of boarding schools that sought to assimilate Indigenous youth into white society over many decades. U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the massive undertaking last month while addressing tribal leaders from across the nation.

Advocacy groups have praised the effort as a first step toward acknowledging what many have referred to as a dark history.
Lubbock, TX (79423)

Today

Cloudy early with scattered thunderstorms developing this afternoon. High 84F. Winds ESE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Partial cloudiness early, with scattered showers and thunderstorms overnight. Low 69F. Winds ESE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
Hillsborough's kooky "Flintstone House" has been the topic of much debate in the town, where homeowner Florence Fang says she has been harassed by local officials and residents to remove her cartoonish decor. But guess what? Fred and Wilma win!

Plus, California may soon prohibit male-gendered language in state documents, SF's Honey Mahogany enters politics and gets a Vogue spotlight, and more local headlines to put you in the holiday mood.



Pride celebrations return to San Francisco in all their rainbow glory, Datebook

While the parade was called off before California's reopening, nothing could stop Pride celebrations from lighting up the city IRL this past weekend. Read more.





'Yabba dabba do!' Flintstone house owner can keep statues after settlement, New York Post

Florence Fang, owner of Hillsborough's iconic (for better or for worse) Flintstone house with its "Yabba Dabba Do" sign and statues of dinosaurs, gets to keep her home's eccentric lookand the town owes her a $125,000 settlement. Read more.





California lawmakers seek to remove 'he' from state laws, ABC News

If Gavin Newsom approves AB 378, then 16th State Assembly district representative Rebecca Bauer-Kahan's proposed law would remove male-gendered language from state codeand a related bill would allow "nonbinary" to be an option on death certificates. Read more.

How RuPaul's Drag Race Prepared Honey Mahogany For a Career In Politics, Vogue



Our own Honey Mahogany is the first black trans woman to be elected to San Francisco's Democratic County Central Committee. Her time witnessing displacement while working as a social worker with the LGBTQ community sparked her motivation to get involved in politics, while RuPaul's Drag Race provided her with experience being in a high-pressure public setting. Read more.





San Francisco Chinatown Woman Helps Dozens of Businesses Survive the Pandemic, NBC Bay Area

In addition to starting a campaign to illuminate the streets of Chinatown at night, credit union manager Lily Lo has provided Chinatown businesses like Buddha Lounge and Imperial Palace Restaurant with help applying for government aid. Read more.







New California national monument near Santa Cruz to open next summer, SF Chronicle

In as little as one year's time, the Cotoni-Coast Dairies National Monument could open for day use with 27 miles of trails and epic Pacific views (plus livestock grazing). Read more.
There's a new age dawning in the mental health industry, says Pamela Hadfield, cofounder of Eastra Health, the world's first biotech company with psychedelics and women's wellness at its core.

Recreational drugs like ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA, once believed to be everything from ethically dubious to downright dangerous, are getting a second look from health practitioners and from the FDAand the findings are shocking, that is to everyone except for longtime proponents of psychedelic therapy.

"Psychedelics are possibly one of the biggest healthcare disruptors of our generation," says Hadfield.

One study showed that MDMA-assisted therapy can virtually "cure" PTSD (i.e., wipe out its diagnostic symptoms) in 70 percent of patients, even those who were unsuccessful with traditional SSRI treatment. Another found that people with severe depressive disorder experienced significant, lasting improvement in their symptoms after just two weeks of treatment with ketamine.

Shaking up healthcare is something Hadfield knows more than a little about. Eight years ago she cofounded HelloMD, a health-tech platform centered on cannabis where visitors could obtain medical marijuana cards and source advice and information on products and treatments.

While many have found relief through cannabis, Hadfield has noticed a troubling trend over the years: Women are suffering disproportionately, and cannabis alone is often not enough.

"People started to ask me really detailed questions about psychedelics," she remembers. "It wasn't just in California, it was Suzy from Iowa asking 'how do I deal with my mental health challenges if cannabis isn't helping? Can I access MDMA? Can I access psilocybin?' It got me thinking, how can psychedelics help women?"

In June, Hadfield officially announced the launch of Eastra Health, the first psychedelic company focused specifically on women's health challenges including menopause and PMS.

"Women have been underserved and often ignored within the healthcare space," she explains. "When we look at the drugs on the market...they've been designed for men. The medical establishment has viewed women as difficult [from a clinical trials perspective] because of their hormonal cycle." Eastraa company named for the Germanic goddess of fertility, dawn and lightwill place women at its heart, from research and development to clinical trials and treatment.

There's little in Hadfield's early career that predicted her rise as a pioneer of alternative cannabis and psychedelic healthcare. More than two decades ago, she came to the Bay Area from Boston as a young art school graduate on a cross-country road trip. It was supposed to be a vacation, but Hadfield never left. Soon after, she began as a product designer at Netscape and went on to work with other Fortune 500 companies, startups, and creative agencies.

Eventually Hadfield returned to the East Coast to get an MFA in installation sculpture in New York, but California wasn't done with her yet. "I showed in museums and galleries there for a while but chose to come back to the Bay Area for the lifestyle," she says. Hadfield started a family, having three girls in four years, and caught the startup bug that led her to HelloMD.

One variety of psychedelic mushroom from the Psilocybe genus. (Courtesy of Creative Commons)

As in the early days of cannabis legalization, with Eastra, Hadfield is once again entering an uncharted frontier of the healthcare industry with a wild west mentality and a whole lot of money at play. A recent study indicated that the psychedelics industry will skyrocket in value from an estimated $2 billion dollars in 2019 to nearly $7 billion in 2026which is an awful lot considering these drugs still remain illegal in the most of the United States.

Several companiesincluding Canadian-based Cybin Inc, the American Silo Pharma, and the U.K. operation Compass Pathwayshave gone public in the last year and dozens of others are vying to establish themselves in an increasingly competitive field flush with investor cash. Hadfield claims that Eastra has already experienced one copycat attempt.



But even beyond the potential profits psychedelic healthcare could provide, there's good reason for the biotech frenzy: Drugs like psilocybin, MDMA, and ketamine are a desperately needed medical breakthrough in the field of mental health.

"When it comes to mental health, I would say psychiatry is floundering right now," says Erica Zelfand, an Oregon-licensed physician specializing in integrative mental health and psychedelic healing. "We've done an abysmal job of controlling the mental health epidemic, not just with women but especially with women."

In its current state, psychiatry fails miserably at addressing mental health issues in a holistic way. But psychedelics, says Zelfand, don't just treat the exterior symptoms of a problem, they treat all of our emotional, spiritual, and psychiatric needs simultaneously.

Despite the buzz around them, the use of psychedelics still faces some resistance in the U.S. While a handful of progressive places like Oakland and Oregon have decriminalized psilocybin and some other drugs, they are few and far between. The FDA is increasingly moving towards their approval, however. They've already authorized clinical trials to examine the therapeutic potential of MDMA and, two months ago, the agency gave some therapists the go-ahead to administer and study the drug in patientsa move, incidentally, that Canadian regulators made months ago. In 2019, the agency approved its first ketamine-based antidepressant.

Eastra is nearing completion of its seed round funding and Dr. Emeline Maillet, a top pharmacologist and neuroscientist in psychedelics, has just signed on as the company's chief scientific officer. Research and development comes next, a process for which they'll be using both AI and independent biotech partners for drug and molecule discovery versus running a dedicated lab of their own. Hadfield estimates this first attempt will take just three to five years.

"We are looking at an accelerated roadmap to get a mainstream psychedelic-derived drug to market," she says. Discovery will be followed with clinical trials with women in Europe and the United States.

Eastra will focus on accessible micro-dose medicationsdaily pills that are sub-hallucinogenic but that still provide many of the same psychedelic benefits. "The hope is that they move into being adopted by the pharmaceutical industry," explains Hadfield. "We want to go through well-established channels and typical prescribing models."

For the millions of women who get little to no relief from traditional medications like SSRIs and birth control pills for issues related to PMS and menopause, Hadfield thinks that women will naturally turn to psychedelic-derived medicines. Some who take medications developed by Eastra may not even be aware they were derived from drugs like psychedelic molecules, and that's just fine. All that matters is that "Suzy from Iowa" has access to medication which helps to solve her health challenge, says Hadfield.

"Women's biology is different, so the reality is [that] we need different treatments," she says. "We believe we've just seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what psychedelics may be able to address from a healthcare perspective."

// For more information, visit eastrahealth.com.
Also notable

The Guncle by Steven Rowley

A feel-good, funny tale from the author of Lily and the Octopus and The Editor, The Guncle follows gay Uncle Patrick, who has to adapt to a new way of life as he hosts niece Maisie and nephew Grant for the summer in the aftermath of a family tragedy. (May 25)

Love and Fury by Samantha Silva

Silva imagines the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, the late 18th-century feminist thinker and mother of the novelist Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein). Wollstonecraft led a fascinating life, which Silva depicts with rich detail. (May 25)

Golden Girl by Elin Hilderbrand

Already a number 1 best seller, this latest from the beach-reads queen is about a novelist on Nantucket (of course) who's killed in a hit-and-run, and looks down upon her family from a place called the Beyond. She's given the power to influence them, and wrestles with how best to do so. (June 1)

The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin

In Cronin's tender debut (already slated to be adapted for film), a feisty 17-year-old who's facing a tough terminal illness bonds with an 83-year-old patient in a hospital art therapy class. Together the two decide to create 100 paintings depicting a story from each year of their combined lives. (June 1)

Ridgeline by Michael Punke

The author who brought us the 2002 novel The Revenant (turned into a 2015 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio) has a new historical saga, this one featuring fierce tensions between land-hungry settlers and Lakota people, including Crazy Horse, in 1860s Wyoming. (June 1)

Island Queen by Vanessa Riley

This historical novel is based on the real-life story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a former enslaved person in the colonial West Indies who became a wealthy landowner and businesswoman. Doll, as she's known, attracts the wrath of powerful men as she defies all conventions. (July 21)

Blind Tiger by Sandra Brown

A thriller set in 1920s Texas, Brown's latest features a ranch hand, Thatcher, who becomes the prime suspect in the possible murder of a woman who's disappeared. A tough young widow joins forces with Thatcher against a tide of corruption and menace in town. (Aug. 3)

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

Inti Flynn, a biologist working with her team to reintroduce wolves into the Scottish Highlands, faces the locals fury, while trying to help her twin sister, Aggie, heal from a traumatic past. It's a moving, moody story by the author of the 2020 novel Migrations. (Aug. 3)

In the Country of Others by Leila Slimani

Slimani's first novel since her hit The Perfect Nanny is set during World War II, and focuses on a young Frenchwoman, Mathilde, who moves to Morocco after falling for a Moroccan soldier. The independent Mathilde finds herself constricted in a land with rigid social codes, as conflict erupts. (Aug. 10)
Pointing to a handful of new studies, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a recent briefing that after both doses, the mRNA vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech is about 80 percent effective at preventing infection from the delta variant, 88 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease and 96 percent effective at preventing hospitalization caused by delta. (Moderna's vaccine also uses mRNA technology and has shown similar rates of overall effectiveness to the Pfizer-BioNTech in previous studies.)

The key to this high-level protection, however, is full vaccination, Pekosz says. If you've only gotten one of your mRNA shots, that's where you can really see the delta variant being able to evade some of those immune responses, he says. In fact, one dose of the two-dose mRNA vaccines was found to be only 33 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease caused by the delta variant in a preprint study out of the U.K.

"So if you've got a good strong immune response generated by both doses of the mRNA vaccine, then you should be in a good place, Pekosz says. But if you're only partially immune  if you're in between doses or if you take in the first dose and you decide to skip the second dose  then you're in an area where the vaccine may protect you against older strains, but it may not be enough immunity to protect you against the delta variant.

Johnson & Johnson released a statement on July 1 noting that its one-shot vaccine generated strong, persistent activity against the rapidly spreading delta variant and other highly prevalent SARS-CoV-2 viral variants. The studies containing this data are currently being submitted for publication. Hours before J&J's announcement, Fauci said it's reasonable to assume the effectiveness of J&J's vaccine is on par with AstraZeneca's vaccine, which uses the same viral vector technology. The AstraZeneca vaccine, which isn't authorized for use in the U.S., has been shown to be 60 percent effective at preventing infection and 92 percent effective at preventing hospitalization caused by the delta variant.

Experts will be keeping a close eye on the strength and duration of these vaccines  especially in more vulnerable populations. Pekosz doesn't see the need for a national booster campaign yet but says it's not outside the realm of possibilities that highly vulnerable populations might be asked to go in and take a booster that consists of the delta variant or maybe the next variant that comes by, just to make sure that they're maintaining that level of immunity.

5. You may still want to keep your mask handy

Fully vaccinated individuals no longer need to wear a mask in most situations, according to CDC guidance issued in mid-May. But experts say you may want to keep one handy  especially with delta on the tear.

The reason? No vaccine is 100 percent effective at preventing infection or illness, and with a highly transmissible virus gaining traction in a number of communities throughout the country, a little extra caution makes sense, Pekosz says: If you know you're in a situation where you'll be coming in contact with people who might be carrying the virus, it's always best to have another layer of protection, like a mask or some level of social distancing.

Los Angeles County recently recommended that its residents, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks in indoor public settings until we better understand how and to who the delta variant is spreading. The area has seen a surge in new COVID-19 cases, likely attributable to delta.

Timothy Brewer, M.D., a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), says there's no good evidence to suggest that vaccinated individuals need to mask up when they're outside, but it's probably reasonable to consider wearing a mask when you're indoors and around lots of other people, particularly if you can't physically distance. He still wears a mask at the grocery store and says he would do the same if he were going to a large indoor event like a concert or a movie theater.

It's unclear whether other communities will follow L.A. County and issue new mask guidelines. In the meantime, experts say, pay attention to what's happening in your area. If vaccination rates are high where you are, there's less of a risk. The more you're exposed to people who are unvaccinated, that possibility of getting infected increases, El-Sadr says.

Keep this in mind, too, as you travel this summer  especially considering that more than one-third of U.S. counties have vaccination rates under 30 percent, according to CDC data.

"If the risk increases, why not do something to help mitigate that risk? Mask wearing is an easy solution, Pekosz says.


Appoints CFO

Perth, July 1, 2021 AEST (ABN Newswire) - OzAurum Resources Ltd ( ASX:OZM ) is pleased to announce that it has appointed Stephen Hewitt-Dutton to Chief Financial Officer (CFO), effective 1 July 2021. The appointment is in addition to Stephen's existing Company Secretarial role with the Company.Stephen is an experienced accountant having spent over 25 years in senior financial roles, including CFO roles at MacPhersons Resources Limited and CZR Resources Limited.OzAurum's Chief Executive Officer, Andrew Pumphrey, said:"I am very pleased that we have secured the professional and high calibre appointment of Stephen as OzAurum's new CFO. Stephen's appointment brings a wealth of skills and experience to the Company and to the Board, and I am looking forward to working with Stephen in the future."About OzAurum Resources Limited

OzAurum Resources Ltd (ASX:OZM) is a Western Australian gold explorer with two advanced gold projects located 130 km north east of Kalgoorlie. The Company's main objective is to make a significant gold discovery that can be brought to production.


Company Presentation

Perth, July 2, 2021 AEST (ABN Newswire) - BPH Energy Limited ( ASX:BPH ) is pleased to provide an opportunity for shareholders and investors to view a virtual presentation by the Company's Managing Director, David Breeze, who will present at The Capital Network's MarketLit Conference, Australia's first financial influencer, Millennial and Generation Z investment conference.Event: MarketLit ConferenceDate: Friday 2 JulyTime: 8am - 1pm AESTFormat: WebinarRegister: The event is free and investors can register online to view the presentation here:To download the presentation, please visit:About BPH Energy Limited

BPH Energy Limited (ASX:BPH) is an Australian Securities Exchange listed company developing biomedical research and technologies within Australian Universities and Hospital Institutes.

The company provides early stage funding, project management and commercialisation strategies for a direct collaboration, a spin out company or to secure a license.

BPH provides funding for commercial strategies for proof of concept, research and product development, whilst the institutional partner provides infrastructure and the core scientific expertise.

BPH currently partners with several academic institutions including The Harry Perkins Institute for Medical Research and Swinburne University of Technology (SUT).


Pangaea Acquisition Update

Sydney, July 2, 2021 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Empire Energy Group Limited ( ASX:EEG ) ( OTCMKTS:EEGUF ) is pleased to announce the release of its Notice of General Meeting to consider Empire's acquisition of Pangaea (NT) Pty Limited ("Pangaea") and EMG Northern Territory Holdings Pty Limited ("EMG NT") 100% interests in EP167, EP168, EP169, EP198 and EP305, located onshore Northern Territory. The General Meeting will be convened at 2pm (AEST) on Tuesday 3 August 2021.The Notice of Meeting reflects a change to the transaction terms from those announced by Empire to ASX on 14 April 2021. The amended terms mean that the number of Empire shares to be issued to Pangaea at completion will be limited to an amount that will not result in Pangaea or its associates acquiring more than a 20% shareholding in the Company at any time. Following completion and subject to all requisite approvals (including Empire shareholder approval and Northern Territory Government approval), Pangaea may call for the issuance of any remaining or unissued consideration shares provided that it will not result in Pangaea or its associates holding more than a 20% interest in the shares of the Company.All other terms including total consideration for the acquisition remain unchanged.The Notice of General Meeting contains important information about the transaction, including the terms of the transaction and information about the assets to be acquired.We invite all Shareholders to read the Notice of General Meeting and accompanying Explanatory Statement and cast their vote either in person at the General Meeting or by proxy, by postal vote or online.About Empire Energy Group Ltd

Empire Energy (ASX:EEG) (OTCMKTS:EEGUF) holds over 14.5 million acres of highly prospective exploration tenements in the McArthur and Beetaloo Basins, Northern Territory. Work undertaken by the Company since 2010 demonstrates that the Eastern depositional Trough of the McArthur Basin, of which the Company holds 80% has very considerable conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon potential. The Beetaloo sub-Basin, in which Empire holds a substantial position, has independently assessed world class hydrocarbon volumes in place with a major ramp up in industry activity underway to appraise substantial discoveries already made by major Australian oil and gas operators.

Empire Energy is an experienced conventional oil and gas producer with operations in the Appalachia region (New York and Pennsylvania). Empire has been successfully developing and producing oil and gas since 2006.
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Take a break from the heat and enjoy music, art and more at Angel Fire Resort.

The resort has brought back its Cool Summer Nights outdoor concert series, from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. every Friday through Sept. 3, with a special performance from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on the Fourth of July. The concert series started in late June. It continues with The Project on Friday, July 2; Baracutanga on July 4, Jimmy Stadler on July 9, Atomic Balm on July 16, The Project on July 23, D.K. and the Affordables on July 30, WesternHers on Aug. 6, Jimmy Stadler on Aug. 13, Alchemie on Aug. 20, Katy P & Business on Aug. 27 and Rudy Jarmillo on Sept. 3.

With the reopening of our state, we are thrilled to announce we have a full slate of amazing performers lined up for our Cool Summer Nights concert in the park series, Angel Fire Resort marketing director Greg Ralph states in a resort news release. We also are bringing back the Sunday morning Farmers and Artisan market and have added live music to that weekly gathering as well. These weekend events will offer the community an opportunity to reconnect and be entertained in a safe, outdoor, engaging environment.

The Angel Fire Farmers and Artisan Market showcases a diverse selection of local and regional artists, live music, food and fresh produce from growers and nonprofits, according to the news release. The market will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Sunday through Sept. 5.

Our Farmers and Artisan Market has always been one of the most attended events in Angel Fire in the summer, Ralph says in the news release. Were expecting vendors with fresh produce and eggs, local meats, and dairy products, fresh roasted-on-site Hatch Green Chile and artisanal breads, baked goods, and raw honey. Also, plenty of live musical acts to keep people entertained while they shop.

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Angel Fire Resort is offering incentives to encourage families to stay a few nights, with deep discounts on lodging. Guests who stay two nights will get the third night free at The Lodge or any Angel Fire Resort private condominium or home vacation rentals through July 31. Blackout dates are Friday, July 2, through Sunday, July 4, and July 22-25, according to the Angel Fire Resort website. There is a three-night minimum stay, based on availability. The discount will be applied when a reservation payment is made. The offer applies to new reservations only.

The Lodge has an indoor pool and hot tub, fitness center, free Wi-Fi, pet-friendly rooms, complimentary parking and on-site security 24 hours a day. Several dining options are available at or near The Lodge. Elements offers a selection of appetizers, steaks, seafood and handcrafted cocktails. The Lift Cafe serves coffee, baked goods, burritos, melts, wraps, salads and more, as well as beer, wine and Cutwater Spirits. El Jefe taqueria and Mexican-themed bar offers tacos and burritos, as well as tequila, tap and bottle beers and more. Par & Grill is open for breakfast and lunch. Menu items include hot dogs, burgers, chicken sandwiches and milkshakes. The Summit Haus features amazing views that extend beyond Eagle Nest Lake to Colorado. It offers a full bar with a menu of burgers and more on a wraparound patio.

The one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom vacation rentals are fully furnished, with kitchens, separate living areas, bedroom and bathroom linens and more. Most of the units offer fireplaces, mountain views, decks or balconies and more. Benefits include access to The Lodges fitness room, check-in and service at The Lodges front desk at 4 p.m. or after, including key pickup, according to the website. On-call full service maintenance is available seven days a week. Guests also have access to concierge services from Angel Fire Resort Property Services.

Lodging details can be found at angelfireresort.com.
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Editors note: Venue Plus continues In Case You Didnt Know, a weekly features with fun tidbits about New Mexicans and there projects.

Its difficult for Casper Leo Gomez to remember a moment without music.

Growing up, he never knew he had an ear for music; none of his relatives are musicians.

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As he began to play French horn in middle school, the excitement for performance began to grow.

The New Mexico native originally thought he would be an actor  specializing in improvisation.

Then a buddy of mine had a guitar in high school and he told me I should take the guitar class, he says. I had taken a full semester of acting when I went into that and Ive never looked back.

Today, Gomez is a musician deep in the scene in Albuquerque. Hes also a teacher.

I came from the music industry from two fronts, he says. I teach concept of music theory which Ive written for Albuquerque Public Schools programs. I teach how we program to produce sounds. I also work in music production. Ive learned it all from the ground up.

The guitar is also Gomezs main instrument, although he can play a few others.

Improv is still in his blood as well.

On Thursday nights, he performs at the Doubletree Hotel Lounge 201 from 7 to 9 p.m. as part of Black & Tan, a jazz fusion duo with Nathanial Morse on electric saxophone.

Its sax and guitar, he says. Every note is made on the spot. Well also feature other acts in the near future.

Like many others during the pandemic, Gomez lost his lifeline  on all fronts.

He would perform many times a week, and he would set up sound for other shows.

He had to pivot and came up with the concept Plug and Play.

We did video commercials for local businesses, distilleries and breweries, he says. We would record musicians in the venue with no crowd and it would stream for music lovers. It became a passion project to help both the musicians and venues.

Gomez also teamed up with Ryan Montano on the single Elevatin.

He continues to work on new music, all while pushing himself professionally.

Theres nothing like being onstage, he says. I know that this is where I belong, and I hope to keep moving forward with the music.

Gomezs music is available at redgorillastudio.com.

Here are five things you probably didnt know about Gomez:

1 I had at one point, considered an acting and improv comedy career. Planned on moving to LA or New York to pursue this dream until I got a guitar in my hands when I was 15.

2 I stay healthy. I cycle a lot. I can easily cycle 40 miles daily. I find its my favorite way to get the heart pumping, besides performing live. I also meditate frequently, even throughout the day to maintain a balanced thought and energy.

3 While working audio production, locally and on tour with international acts such as Tom Petty, Santana, Rush, Ive visited every big city in America and parts of eastern Canada, while on tour with renowned guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen.

4 In the studio and on the stage, Ive recorded guitar parts for multiple artists, both local and international. Currently, I am working with Gregg Bissonette (drummer for Ringo Starr All Star Band, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Robert Downey Jr.)

5 I have been a music educator with APS, private schools and multiple institutions. I used my music industry model, similar to a School of Rock, which was integrated in a successful high school format.

Online

Find Casper Gomezs body of work at casperleogomez.com
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Call it The Fast and the Precarious.

Liam Neeson just turned 69, but hes still taking on brutally punishing roles that would challenge actors half his age  and this time around, hes facing myriad obstacles, from bad guys to financial strain to the elements, in The Ice Road, a Netflix movie that plays like an extended revival episode of Ice Road Truckers crossed with William Friedkins classic 1977 trucker thriller Sorcerer (which itself was a remake of 1953s Wages of Fear).

The dialogue is hokey, and the action throttles to the very edge of implausibility, but writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh (The Punisher) has a keen sense of pacing, the practical effects and CGI-laden stunt work are first-rate and, come on, weve got Liam Neeson smacking a guy in the chest with a Thermos and saying things like, Kiss my Irish ass!

Neeson plays Mike McCann, a financially strapped veteran trucker based in North Dakota who takes on dangerous long-haul work where he can get it  but hes been fired from one job after another in recent years, because his mechanic brother and traveling companion, Gurty (Marcus Thomas), is a war veteran with PTSD who has a condition called aphasia, which jumbles up his words and makes it nearly impossible for him to communicate with anyone other than Mike.

After losing yet another gig, Mike is just about out of options when he gets a job offer from a man named Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne), who is putting together an emergency crew to embark on a dangerous rescue mission to a mine in Winnipeg. Theres been a methane gas explosion, killing eight miners and leaving 26 unaccounted-for, and Goldenrod needs drivers for three trucks that will haul the enormous 18-foot wellheads and about 300 feet of pipe necessary to drill and cap the wells and save the miners before their oxygen supply runs out.

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Complicating matters: Its April, five weeks after the traditional season for ice road trucking, and the path to the mine is beginning to thin and might well crack under the spring sun. As one driver puts it, You go too fast, you create a pressure wave, and in [the ice] you go. Too slow and the ice cant handle the pounds per square inch on your tire  in you go. This is why each driver will be paid $50,000  if they successfully carry out the mission. Meanwhile, theres a separate drama taking place within the collapsed mine, as a veteran miner named Rene (Holt McCallany from Mindhunter) begins to suspect the explosion was due to deliberate neglect from the obligatory greedy corporate owners.

Its a three-truck mission. and Goldenrod (what a name!) takes the wheel behind one truck, with Mike and Gurty in rig No. 2. A young driver named Tantoo (Amber Midthunder) will take the wheel of the third truck, with company insurance claims adjuster Varnay (Benjamin Walker) along for the ride for reasons that become as slippery as the road ahead. (Goldenrod has to assemble this makeshift team because all his regular drivers have scattered to warm locales on vacation.)

Canada has stood in for any number of American locales over the years, but this time around, Manitoba is, well, Manitoba, and the vistas are breathtakingly beautiful. The rescue team runs into virtually every obstacle imaginable  some created by nature, others human-made. We get a number of scenes where the ice buckles, or cracks, and Mike et al. have to resort to MacGyver-esque improvisation to stay out of the water. (Spoiler alert: Not everybody stays dry.)

Neeson is his reliable self; even though Mike is a crusty old bird, we dont doubt he can still handle a rig and throw a punch and pull someone out of the icy waters. The supporting cast is excellent, with Amber Midthunder particularly terrific as Tantoo, who will do anything to carry out the mission because one of those trapped miners is her brother. The Ice Road is what we used to call a B-movie, but theres no shame in a B-movie that carries out its mission with such competence and star power.

THE ICE ROAD

3 stars

RATED: PG-13 (for strong language and sequences of action and violence)

WHEN: Available now

WHERE: Netflix
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DENVER  Colorado Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert has raised more than $1.5 million in her bid for reelection, including more than $750,000 in the fundraising quarter that ended at midnight Wednesday.

The campaign for Boebert, the first-term representative for the sprawling 3rd Congressional District, provided no details on the latest quarters totals, including money spent and money saved in the bank. Quarterly reports are due to the Federal Election Commission on July 15.

A leading Democratic challenger, state Sen. Kerry Donovan, has raised more than $1.1 million since the start of the year, including $457,000 in the second quarter, Colorado Politics reports.

State Rep. Don Valdez of La Jara and several other Democrats are seeking to run against Boebert, who defeated five-term Rep. Scott Tipton in the GOP primary on her way to election last year. Shes closely aligned herself with former President Donald Trump and assiduously assails the Joe Biden administration and Democrats in Congress.

Congressional redistricting this year, in which Colorado is adding an eighth House district and redrawing its seven existing districts, could affect the parameters of the 3rd District election.

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BOISE, Idaho  Five Idaho State Police troopers will go to Arizona for 21 days to help with border security, Gov. Brad Little said Thursday.

The Republican governor said the troopers will will start a 21-day mission on Tuesday to help Arizona law enforcement officials with intelligence gathering and investigative work to prevent illicit drugs from crossing the border.

The crisis at the United States-Mexico border and the alarming bump in illegal drug activity are direct results of failed policies of the Biden-Harris administration that harm the people of Idaho, Little said in a statement.

Republican Govs. Doug Ducey of Arizona and Greg Abbott of Texas sent a letter to fellow governors last month asking for law-enforcement help.

On behalf of Texas and Arizona, we respectfully but urgently request that you send all available law-enforcement resources to the border in defense of our sovereignty and territorial integrity, the two governors wrote.

Little, who faces reelection next year and is being challenged by far-right Republican Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, said it will cost Idaho just over $53,000 to send the troopers to Arizona. He said Idaho State Police leadership assured him that the troopers duties in Idaho will be covered while theyre in Arizona.

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We did our homework and worked closely with Arizona State Police to determine the true needs and how Idaho can help in a meaningful, impactful way without compromising public safety here at home, Little said.

Immigration continues to be an animating issue in the Republican Party. On Wednesday, former President Donald Trump and a group of about two-dozen Republican members of Congress toured the border in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where they railed against President Joe Bidens handling of the border.

Four other states with Republican governors are also responding. Florida is sending 50 law enforcement officers. South Dakota is sending 50 national guardsman following a $1 million donation from a wealthy Republican donor to pay for the deployment. Iowa is sending 30 state police officers on a two-week deployment to Texas, and Nebraska is sending 25 state patrol troopers for up to 16 days.

Idaho will continue to evaluate our resources and the border states needs to determine if we can do even more to help in the fight to protect Americans against the Biden-Harris inaction, Little said.

In Arizona, the Idaho troopers will be deputized and will act under the same authority given to Arizona State Troopers.
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HOUSTON  Two suburban Houston officers and a jailer were indicted Thursday in an alleged assault of a man during a traffic stop.

Baytown police Officers Teddy Sims and Samuel Serrett and detention officer Shan Dunlap were each indicted on a felony charge of aggravated assault.

Prosecutors allege they assaulted Kedric Crawford after officers stopped him in July 2019. Baytown police say Crawford resisted officers as they searched his vehicle and were forced to use a stun gun on him. They charged him with assaulting an officer, but that count was later dropped.

Nobody is above the law, including those who have a duty to enforce the law, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in a statement.

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Baytown Assistant Police Chief Eric Freed said his agency could not immediately comment on the indictments.

Court records did not list attorneys who could speak on behalf of the officers.

In a lawsuit, Crawfords attorney said his client cooperated with officers and was punched and violently slammed to the ground for no justifiable reason. The lawsuit is pending in federal court in Houston.
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Bring in the Fourth of July with a bang at Santa Ana Star Casino Hotel.

The casino is celebrating Independence Day with its $25,000 Firecracker Cash promotion on Sunday, July 4.

Star Rewards Club members will be eligible for four times the points all day. Hourly $1,000 cash drawings will be held from noon to 5 p.m. Four winners will be selected every hour, according to a Santa Ana Star news release.

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Choices Food Court, which offers various selections of filling breakfasts to hearty comfort foods, recently welcomed Billys BBQ. The barbecue joint offers meats, sweet and rich sauces, flame-cooked burgers and more. Guests can enjoy Billys BBQ from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.

Feast on the Chefs dinner special every Friday and Saturday in July at the Juniper Steakhouse, according to the news release.The special features pinon-crusted trout served with red chile butter and roasted garlic white bean puree.

Reservations are recommended and can be made by calling 505-771-7145 or by visiting junipersteakhouse.com. The steakhouse is open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday, Sunday and Monday.

For more information on Santa Ana Star Casino Hotel, visit santaanastar.com.
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Startled by earsplitting blasts, many otherwise stable pets will endure almost continual panic this weekend. Dogs may hide, tremble, drool, cry or howl, and even urine soil, vomit or pass diarrhea. Many get clingy, but some escape the home and risk serious injuries.

A freaked-out dog or cat needs reassurance, but shelter from the bombardment is much better. Allow an anxious pet to find relief anywhere she or he feels better. A bathroom, dark closet, or an open, covered pet crate, located away from windows and exterior walls, should be available. Unpredictable flashes trigger even more fear. Close the blinds and turn off the TV.

You can cancel out some of the racket with a white noise machine or a loud fan. Through a Dogs Ear is music that promotes canine-specific calming brain waves. Mutt Muffs, well tolerated by most dogs, help dampen loud noises. Promote a calm emotional state with a plug-in Adaptil pheromone diffuser.

A compelling, canine-specific behavioral opportunity will make a difference. With the morning meal delayed a food-motivated dog can focus on extracting his sustenance from food-dispensing toys or puzzles. Working his brain, mouth and paws will divert his or her attention away from your neighbors pyrotechnic proclivities.

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There are oral anti-anxiety medications that can be given as needed. Alprazolam and trazodone are helpful for dogs; lorazepam or gabapentin is better for cats. A prescription medication, called Sileo, is a gel that is placed between a dogs lower lip and gum. With no sedation or side effects, Sileo, best administered prior to the artillery assault, can also be given after the explosions are underway. This short-acting oral-transmucosal treatment can be repeated every two hours. Sileo is safe when given with other medications. Your veterinarian can order Sileo for you.

Avoid acepromazine. This old-fashioned tranquilizer sedates pets, but does little to reduce anxiety. Unable to physically act out their fear, groggy dogs and cats are trapped in a chemical straightjacket, leading to intense panic. Be ready. Freaked-out pets who are left to fend for themselves worsen with each terrifying event.

Sign-up for a Zoom Group Conference for help with behavior problems on my website, drjeffnichol.com.

Dr. Jeff Nichol is a residency-trained veterinary behaviorist. He provides consultations in person and in groups via Zoom (505-792-5131). Each week, he shares a blog and a Facebook Live video to help bring out the best in pets and their people. Sign up at no charge at drjeffnichol.com. Post pet questions on facebook.com/drjeffnichol or by mail to 4000 Montgomery NE, Albuquerque, NM, 87109.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

University of New Mexico officials say they havent decided if students, faculty and staff will be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before returning to campus next month.

UNM in May published a draft vaccination policy that would require university staff members to be vaccinated no later than Aug. 2 in order to return to campus, and for students and faculty to be vaccinated by the start of the fall semester on Aug. 23.

Asked about the policy during a recent virtual town hall, UNM President Garnett Stokes said school leaders were still considering a vaccine requirement.

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She said the university could enact the full policy, or it could implement a partial policy  such as requiring the vaccine before students could move into a dorm  or UNM could just encourage vaccinations.

This is a constant conversation that we have. You know, there are political and logistical and legal ramifications for any decision surrounding a vaccine mandate, Stokes said during the town hall. Ultimately, I think weve been successful through this pandemic by focusing on (the) health and safety of our community by following science-driven guidance.

When UNM released the draft proposal, it also created a system for students, employees and community members to comment on the requirement. UNM received more than 1,300 comments. Of those, 786 people said they were opposed to the policy and 443 were in favor of the requirement, according to a UNM spreadsheet summarizing the comments.

Among students, 211 wrote against the policy and 153 were in favor of it. Faculty members were supportive of requiring the vaccine, 111 to 23, according to the spreadsheet.

The draft said the policy wont be enforced until the Food and Drug Administration gives full approval to a COVID vaccine, which hasnt happened.

Currently, the federal agency has given emergency use authorization for several types of COVID vaccines. Drug makers Pfizer and Moderna have applied to the FDA for full approval of their respective vaccines.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are distributed in a two-shot regimen spaced three or four weeks apart from each other, and then the vaccines take two weeks to be fully effective. So any students holding off on getting vaccinated would be pressed to get inoculated ahead of the start of the semester, if UNM enacts its policy.

Across the country and the region, colleges and universities are divided on vaccine requirements. Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, is requiring students get vaccinated. The Colorado State University system will require the vaccine for students, faculty and staff once one or more vaccines get full FDA approval.

Arizona State University announced plans last month to require students to provide the university with proof of a vaccine, or face measures like submitting a daily health check, twice weekly testing and an indoor and outdoor mask requirement. That policy was blocked by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who issued an executive order preventing a public university or community college in the state from requiring the vaccine.

Justin Bannister, a spokesman for New Mexico State University, said the school isnt requiring the vaccine but officials are encouraging students and employees to get vaccinated.
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Editors note: Today, the Journal continues The Good News File, a series of uplifting stories in partnership with KOAT-TV and KKOB Radio. The Journal will publish a Good News feature the first Friday of the month, KOAT-TV will present its feature each second Friday and KKOB each third Friday.

Christine Glidden never had visions or dreams or plans or even an inkling she would become a humanitarian.

She now runs the successful nonprofit Women To Be, which provides menstrual hygiene products for girls and women around the world. Her organization became even more critical during the recent pandemic, expanding to help those on the Navajo nation obtain much needed food, water and other supplies.

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Im an accidental humanitarian, she said. If you are not generous, you are not fully participating in life and who you are meant to be.

It was a trip to Nepal in 2012 that would change the way she looked at life. There she met a woman who shared stories with her about refugees, especially young women, who did not have access to basic hygiene products. Glidden said a lack of sanitary napkins and a way to dispose of them is severely impacting the lives of women, leading them to drop out of school, marry prematurely, isolate themselves and use weeds, rags and even paper in the absence of sanitary napkins.

She started Women To Be in 2014. The organization puts together hygiene kits with eight reusable sanitary napkins and two pair of underwear. When COVID-19 shut everything down, her operation came to a standstill.

But then a new opportunity emerged.

The pandemic stampeded across New Mexico in March 2020, hitting the Navajo Nation pretty hard. Not only were Navajo people dying in great numbers, their members found themselves isolated and cut off from basic supplies like food and water.

I get home and start reading about Navajo people dying during the pandemic, she said. I started going through my pantry and asking my neighbors for stuff.

Having done community service work for years, Glidden was able to quickly mobilize others.

Everything changed when she met 24th Navajo Nation Council member Mark Freeland, who oversees eight communities in San Juan and McKinley counties. He was able to connect her with the very people she hoped to help.

Freeland said many of the people he represents do not have running water or electricity, and many were afraid or unable to leave their homes during the pandemic.

I knew there was a great need, he said. A lot of people are living in multi-generational homes.

Freeland helped with the logistics, Glidden secured a $25,000 grant from the Rotary Club, of which she is a member. The Jewish Community Center, Kirtland Air Force Base, the Albuquerque Community Foundation, Vegan Outreach, Community Organized Relief Effort and DreamLab also stepped in to help.

There were 250 vehicles waiting for us when we showed up (the first time), she said. Then 100 more showed up. We ran out of stuff. It was heartbreaking.

They went every other Saturday from May until January and delivered a total of 35 tons of food, water, household supplies and hygiene products.

It made a huge difference, Freeland said. It helped with addressing the needs of a lot of people.

Glidden said she will continue helping where she is needed.

Experiencing these humanitarian projects has changed me, she said. I am a kinder, more engaged, more personally powerful person. That does not make me wonderful, it makes me lucky.

If you have a story you would like to suggest for this series, please send your tip to ebriseno@abqjournal.com.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  For parents like Cecilia Romero, the cost of child care can be daunting.

Romero, an early childhood educator herself, said she and her husband initially held off on having a second child due to cost concerns and faced a budget crunch when they did ultimately have a son during the pandemic.

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The anxiety of trying to find care has been really crippling, a tearful Romero said during a Thursday news conference in Santa Fe.

But an estimated 20,000 additional New Mexico children  including Romeros young son  could qualify for child care assistance under a sweeping eligibility expansion that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said would bring New Mexico to about 80% of state-sponsored universal pre-kindergarten and nearly double the number of children who currently qualify.

The child care expansion, and a related change in how subsidy rates paid to providers are calculated, will be paid for over the next two years with roughly $300 million in federal stimulus dollars, a figure that includes about $130 million in discretionary funds to pay for the eligibility expansion, state officials said.

Future funding could come in part from a proposal to increase the annual distribution rate from New Mexicos largest permanent fund, which will go before statewide voters in November 2022.

Im feeling more secure that we can figure this out than ever before, Lujan Grisham told reporters after Thursdays news conference at the offices of the Early Childhood Education and Care Department in Santa Fe.

New Mexico has already ramped up its spending on early childhood programs in recent years  from about $140 million in 2012 to nearly $500 million in the current budget year  and lawmakers approved legislation in 2019 creating the new early childhood department.

But the changes announced Thursday will make New Mexicos income eligibility cut-off for state-sponsored child care the highest in the nation.

Currently, the program is available to families of four who make less than $53,000 per year  or 200% of the federal poverty level. That income ceiling will go up to up to $92,750 for a family of four once the expansion takes effect in August, and could be phased up even higher in some cases to ensure families dont lose access to the assistance.

Sen. Michael Padilla, D-Albuquerque, who sponsored the 2019 bill creating the early childhood agency, said the child care expansion  and accompanying spending infusion  will help address chronically high New Mexico poverty and high-school dropout rates.

The byproduct (of this) is a workforce thats second to none, Padilla said.

However, Rep. Rebecca Dow, R-Truth or Consequences, who founded a child care center, said the state should target its early childhood efforts at low-income families who need help the most.

She also expressed concerns about using federal pandemic relief funds to pay for the changes, saying child care assistance was initially intended as a temporary support  not a universal benefit for New Mexico families.

A large-scale growth using one-time money is not sustainable, Dow told the Journal.

Lujan Grisham, a Democrat who is running for reelection next year, acknowledged the significant cost of early childhood programs Thursday, saying the state has been dancing around the edges for years when it comes to funding such expansions.

But she said the funding infusion is necessary to ensure greater access to child care centers around New Mexico and higher pay levels for early childhood workers, who are frequently paid less than licensed teachers.

Meanwhile, Early Childhood Education and Care Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky said the changes to child care provider rates and income eligibility thresholds would help close gaps in New Mexicos early childhood system.

We still have much work to do, but right-sizing our child care assistance program for parents and providers is an important landmark on our journey toward creating a true cradle-to-career education system that helps all New Mexicans thrive, Groginsky said.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the states child care center system, as there were 599 licensed child care centers around New Mexico at the start of May, according to the Early Childhood Education and Care Department.

Thats down from 753 such centers before the start of the pandemic in March 2020, though some centers may have recently reopened their doors, a department spokesman said.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

The state of New Mexico filed a class action lawsuit against some of the largest financial institutions in the country alleging a 15-year pattern of manipulating the market for complex financial instruments called credit default swaps.

The lawsuit was filed Wednesday on behalf of the New Mexico State Investment Council by the Attorney Generals Office and Kirby McInerney LLP, a New York law firm, in New Mexico federal court.

The lawsuit does not specify how much the alleged market manipulation cost the SIC over a 15-year period starting in 2005 and asks for the court to determine damages.

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But the lawsuit claims that the SIC suffered losses from trading at artificial prices caused by a conspiracy to manipulate the auction price of the complex financial instruments in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

It appears to be the first lawsuit in the nation making these allegations, according to the Attorney Generals Office.

The SIC oversees and invests more than $30 billion in permanent endowments for the state as well as investments for 23 other state agencies.

New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas said, New Mexican families should not be harmed by Wall Street greed, and we will enforce the rule of law against anyone who exploits our state.

The lawsuit alleges that Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Barclays Bank, Citi Corp., Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, their affiliated companies, and others participated in the alleged scheme.

Those companies will have weeks to respond to the allegations in court filings once they have been served with the lawsuit. Court records dont show that anyone has been served as of Thursday.

The lawsuit involves the market for credit default swaps, which are a form of financial insurance.

The seller of the swap promises to pay compensation to the buyer for losses the buyer sustains if the underlying investment, like a corporate bond issue, fails.

In exchange for the promise of compensation from the seller, the buyer makes premium payments to the seller over the life of the swap contract.

Payment on a credit default swap is triggered when the issuer of the bond files for bankruptcy or fails to make an interest payment on the bond.

Unlike a typical insurance policy, the buyer of the credit default swap does not have to own the underlying bonds. The investor not owning the underlying bonds is making a bet that the underlying investment will fail.

According to the lawsuit, the price of a credit default swap is supposed to be set through an auction, but it alleges that the auction system was set up by the banks and rigged.

The lawsuit alleges that the banks communicated prior to the auctions and used inside information not available to the buyers to set benchmarks on the prices prior to the auction.

The result, the lawsuit claims, was that the auctions were not competitive, allowing the banks to make billions of dollars at the expense of investors like the SIC, according to the lawsuit.

Institutional investors, like the State Investment Council, pension funds, and others invest in credit default swaps directly or indirectly through investments in hedge funds or other financial firms.

Prior to the Great Recession in 2008, the market for the credit default swaps was nearly $40 trillion a year.

It now ranges between $5 trillion and $8 trillion a year, according to the lawsuit.
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WASHINGTON  Nearly 20 years after invading Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and hunt down al-Qaida, the U.S. military has vacated its biggest airfield in the country, advancing a final withdrawal that the Pentagon on Friday said will be completed by the end of August.

President Joe Biden had instructed the Pentagon to complete the military withdrawal by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, but the Pentagon now says it can finish the drawdown a little earlier. In fact, the drawdown is already largely completed and officials had said it could be wrapped up this weekend. But a number of related issues need to be worked out in coming weeks, including a new U.S. military command structure in Kabul and talks with Turkey on an arrangement for maintaining security at the Kabul airport, and so an official end to the pullout will not be announced soon.

A safe, orderly drawdown enables us to maintain an ongoing diplomatic presence, support the Afghan people and the government, and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for terrorists that threatens our homeland, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said.

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The administration is meanwhile narrowing options for ensuring the safety of thousands of Afghans whose applications for special visas to come to the United States have yet to be approved. The administration has already said its willing to evacuate them to third countries pending their visa approvals but has yet to determine where. Officials said Friday that one possibility is to relocate them to neighboring countries in Central Asia where they could be protected from possible retaliation by the Taliban or other groups.

The White House and State Department have declined to comment on the numbers to be relocated or where they might go, but the foreign ministers of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were both in Washington this week and the subject of Afghan security was raised in meetings they held with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Kirby said that Austin on Friday approved a new command structure in Afghanistan to transition the U.S. military mission from warfighting to two new objectives  protecting a continuing U.S. diplomatic presence in Kabul and maintaining liaison with the Afghan military.

Austins plan calls for the top commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Scott Miller, to transfer his combat authorities to the Florida-based head of U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, before relinquishing his command this month. Also, a two-star Navy admiral will head a U.S. Embassy-based military office, dubbed U.S. Forces Afghanistan-Forward, to oversee the new mission of providing security for the embassy and its diplomats.

A satellite military office based in Qatar and headed by a U.S. one-star general will be established to administer U.S. financial support for the Afghan military and police, plus maintenance support provided for Afghan aircraft from outside Afghanistan.

Kirby said Miller, who already is the longest-serving commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in the 20 years of warfare, will remain in command for a couple of weeks longer but was not more specific. He said Miller will be preparing for and completing the turnover of his duties to McKenzie and also will be traveling inside and beyond Afghanistan.

Miller met Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Friday and, according to a Dari-language tweet by the presidential palace, the two discussed continued U.S. assistance and cooperation with Afghanistan, particularly in supporting the defense and security forces.

Bagram Airfield has been the epicenter of the war to oust the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. At its peak in and around 2012, Bagram Airfield saw more than 100,000 U.S. troops pass through the massive compound barely an hours drive north of Kabul.

Meanwhile, Afghanistans district administrator for Bagram, Darwaish Raufi, said the American departure was done overnight without any coordination with local officials, and as a result early Friday, dozens of local looters stormed through the unprotected gates before Afghan forces regained control.

They were stopped and some have been arrested and the rest have been cleared from the base, Raufi told The Associated Press, adding that the looters ransacked several buildings before being arrested and the Afghan forces took control.

However, U.S. military spokesman Col. Sonny Leggett said the handover was an extensive process that spanned several weeks and began soon after Bidens mid-April announcement that America was withdrawing the last of its forces.

All handovers of Resolute Support bases and facilities, to include Bagram Airfield, have been closely coordinated, both with senior leaders from the government and with our Afghan partners in the security forces, including leadership of the locally based units respective to each base, said Col. Leggett.

The Taliban welcomed the American withdrawal from Bagram Airfield. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid tweeted that Fridays departure was a positive step, urging for the withdrawal of foreign forces from all parts of the country.

As of this week, most other NATO soldiers have already quietly exited Afghanistan. Announcements from several countries analyzed by the AP show that a majority of European troops has left with little ceremony  a stark contrast to the dramatic and public show of force and unity when NATO allies lined up to back the U.S. invasion in 2001.

The U.S. has refused to say when the last American soldier would leave Afghanistan, citing security concerns, but also future security and protection for Kabul International Airport is still being negotiated. Turkish and U.S. soldiers are currently protecting the airport, still under Resolute Support Mission, which is the military mission being wound down.

Until a new agreement for the airport is struck by Turkey and the Afghan government, and possibly the United States, it appears the Resolute Support mission would to have to continue to be in charge of the facility.

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Gannon reported from Kabul. Associated Press writers Lolita Baldor and Matthew Lee in Washington, Farid Tanha, in Bagram, Afghanistan, and Rahim Faiez in Kabul, contributed to this report.
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KABUL, Afghanistan  Imtiaz Mohmand, just 19, makes a living selling melons out of a crate perched on his three-wheel motorcycle in the Afghan capitals Kart-e-Now neighborhood. He only managed to finish grade 7 before being sent to work to help support a family of 13. He has been robbed twice. Both times, his mobile phone was taken, along with his meager earnings of the day.

In four days, he and four friends will leave Afghanistan. They have paid a smuggler to sneak them across the border to Iran and into Turkey.

Theres no job, no security here. There are thieves everywhere. I tried to make a living but I cant, said Mohmand, who has seven friends already on their way to Turkey.

Mohmands frustration and anxieties run like a theme through most conversations in todays Afghanistan as Afghans witness the final withdrawal of the U.S. military and its NATO allies.

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President Joe Biden has said that America did what it came to Afghanistan to do  hunt down and punish the al-Qaida terrorist network that carried out the 9/11 attacks. After nearly 20 years, Biden said it was time to end Americas forever war.

Afghans, however, say international forces are leaving a country deeply impoverished, on the brink of another civil war and with worsening lawlessness that terrifies some more than the advancing Taliban. The warlords with whom the U.S.-led coalition partnered to oust the Taliban are resurrecting militias with a history of devastating violence to fight the insurgents, who have made gains even in the warlords northern strongholds.

So significant is the danger that Washingtons top general in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, warned this week in Kabul at what had all the hallmarks of a farewell press briefing that escalating violence risked a civil war that should be a concern to the world.

Outside the Turkish Visa Center in Kabuls city center, the road is crowded with four-wheel drive vehicles and new Toyota Corollas belonging to the wealthier who are looking for visas to leave. Since the announcement of the final withdrawal, thousands of visa applications have inundated the Turkish Embassy in Kabul. Other embassies have also reported a dramatic increase.

Our people are thinking maybe a civil war will start and that is the main problem why people want to go abroad, said Abdullah Saeed, a lecturer at Kabuls Polytechnic University. He was applying for a visa to attend a conference. Our political parties are all getting weapons. Everyone has weapons here, so that is why people are frightened.

The closure of some Western embassies and warnings by others for their citizens to leave only deepen the sense of dread. While some Afghans choose to leave, legally or illegally, others settle their families abroad then continue to work in Afghanistan.

Afghans are lining up by the thousands at the Afghan Passport Office to get new passports, possibly to leave, uncertain what tomorrow will bring.

Salia Siddiqi sat under a tree with three of her seven children, one of thousands of people at the passport office. She was waiting to submit her papers for her familys passports, though she wasnt sure whether shed be able to travel or how even to afford it.

There is no security anywhere. You cant travel to the provinces, she said. Its not about me but what about my children? I dont know if they will have a future here. We think there will be violence, it will be a dark time.

Our biggest enemy is uncertainty, said Tamim Asey, founder and executive chairman of the Kabul-based Institute of War and Peace Studies. It is not that we dont have hope  Its not that we dont have the capability to formulate or create a vision for the country in the absence of the international community. Its that dark cloud of uncertainty looming.

Afghanistan looks significantly different than in 2001. There is internet, most people have mobile phones, women are in the workforce and schools for boys and girls are open, though most Afghans, who can afford only public schools, complain of the lack of qualified teachers, supplies and even buildings.

Even the Taliban have sought to encourage Afghans to stay in the country, promising they have nothing to fear from them. The Taliban have sent some of their senior council members from their political headquarters in the Middle Eastern state of Qatar to assure minority ethnic groups that they can live safely under the Pashtun-dominated movement.

Still, many Afghans say after 20 years and billions of dollars their future seems bleak. Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International. Its political leadership is deeply divided, squabbling over almost everything, even the presidency. Last year, there were briefly two presidents.

Many of Afghanistans elite and political leadership have a passport other than Afghan, and often their families live abroad. They are dual citizens. They do their business here, whether its in government, outside of the government, said Asey. They are not invested in blood and treasure in this country.

The jobless rate is officially at 35%, though likely higher. Asey says barely 13% of the hundreds of thousands of new university graduates every year find jobs. According to the World Bank, 54% of the population is below the poverty line, making less than $1.90 a day.

The melon seller Imtiaz Mohmand earns roughly 300 Afghanis a day, around $3, but theres days he doesnt make a sale, like Thursday, when he had to pay 400 Afghanis out of pocket to his supplier. Nearby, Azizullah Rahman makes 200 Afghanis ($2.50) a day selling car-cleaning cloths. Hes single but back home in Logar province, and he has more than a dozen people relying on his income. Across from the grand Eid Gah Mosque, Dost Mohammad, who drives a communal taxi on the route to the eastern city to Jalalabad, hasnt had a fare in two days.

Yet since 2002, the United States has spent more than $144 billion on reconstruction and development  more than $17 billion just to assist Afghan government ministries, according to Washingtons own watchdog monitoring U.S. tax dollar spending on Afghan reconstruction. Billions more have been spent on security.

Gen. Dawlat Waziri, a former Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, complained that the international community didnt create lasting jobs or hand off skills and industries to Afghans to become self-sufficient.

For example, every bullet had to come from America, he said. Why werent we making them here?

But most Afghans blame corrupt politicians and officials, many of whom live in Kabuls luxurious Shairpur neighborhood. There, five- and six-story marble mansions jostle for space, many protected by barricade and heavily armed guards. For decades, the district was home to some of the citys poorest, living in homes of sun-baked mud or rough-hewn bricks, until they were pushed out by the rich.

At his small family woodworking shop, Ghulam Farooq complained that all the foreign cash ended up going to warlords.

For every regime we had hope and every regime disappointed us, even the foreigners, he said. Now people are escaping through every border  Only those who have no money and no means will stay here as they always have. And they will suffer.
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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico  Elsa strengthened into the first hurricane of the Atlantic season on Friday as it blew off roofs, snapped trees and destroyed crops in the eastern Caribbean, where officials closed schools, businesses and airports. It appeared headed eventually in the general direction of Florida.

The Category 1 storm is the first hurricane to hit Barbados in more than 60 years, unleashing heavy rains and winds on the island and then on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which are struggling to recover from recent massive volcanic eruptions.

Elsa was centered about 395 miles (635 kilometers) east-southeast of Isla Beata in the Dominican Republic and was moving west-northwest at 29 mph (46 kph). It had maximum sustained winds of 80 mph (130 kph), according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

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That level of sustained wind can blow down a lot of buildings and cause a lot of damage, said St. Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves. I am pleading with you. Let us not take this hurricane lightly. This is not the time to play the fool.

The long-term forecast track showed it heading toward Florida as a tropical storm by Tuesday morning, but some models would carry it into the Gulf or up the Atlantic Coast.

Authorities in Barbados said they received calls about families trapped in their homes, collapsed houses and power and water outages, but no reports of serious injuries or deaths. Wilfred Abrahams, minister of home affairs, information and public affairs, urged people to open their homes to those in need.

We are getting a lot of reports of damage, he said.

Meanwhile, officials in St. Lucia said that 90% of power customers were without electricity at the height of the storm. Landslides, flooding and damaged homes also were reported.

A hurricane warning was in effect for Jamaica and from the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince to Punta Palenque in the Dominican Republic. A hurricane watch was issued for the Cuban provinces of Camaguey, Granma, Guantanamo, Holguin, Las Tunas, and Santiago de Cuba.

The forecast track showed the fast-moving storm rolling toward Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as a hurricane before reaching Cuba and weakening back to tropical storm force.

Authorities opened dozens of shelters in St. Vincent and urged people to evacuate if they lived near a valley, given the threat of flash flooding, mudslides and lahars, especially in the northern part of the island where La Soufriere volcano is located.

Gonsalves said 94 shelters are open, a smaller number than in previous years because some 2,000 people remain in other shelters following massive volcanic eruptions that began in early April.

Elsa is the earliest fifth-named storm on record, beating out last years Eduardo which formed on July 6, according to Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. He also noted that its the farthest east that a hurricane has formed this early in the tropical Atlantic since 1933. The 1991-2020 average date for the first Atlantic hurricane formation is mid-August.

The storm was forecast to bring 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) of rain with maximum totals of 15 inches (38 centimeters) inches on Friday across the Windward and southern Leeward Islands. The rain could unleash isolated flash flooding and mudslides.
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MEXICO CITY  Mexicos governmental human rights commission said Thursday that migrants have been detained in filthy conditions in the border town of Piedras Negras, across from Eagle Pass, Texas.

The commission described visiting a municipal police facility where there was sewage, blocked toilets, rats and a horrendous smell in some cells.

The commission said its inspectors found 13 migrants in the facility; while it did not list their nationalities, most migrants detained in Mexico are from Central America. It called on authorities to improve the conditions.

It said the cells also lacked proper ventilation, despite the heat in the area. Both migrants and Mexicans held at the jail said they were not given food.

One HIV-positive migrant was found being held without access to medications.

Local police forces generally dont fall under the aegis of the federal commission, nor are they empowered to detain people because of their immigration status.

But the local immigration detention center, which is a federal office, was also found to be holding migrants at more than twice its approved capacity.

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  Police say a man was shot early Friday morning near Copper and Wyoming and later died at a hospital, bringing the number of homicides in Albuquerque so far this year to 66.

Gilbert Gallegos, an Albuquerque police spokesman, said officers were dispatched at 3:30 a.m. to 421 Tennessee St. NE. When they got there they found a man with at least one gunshot wound to the chest, Gallegos said.

The male was taken to the hospital where he later was pronounced dead, he added. Homicide detectives are currently conducting interviews and canvassing the area.

Albuquerque has seen 66 homicides so far this year, although State Police is handling the investigation of two of those slayings, according to Journal records. The Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office, meanwhile, has confirmed six homicides in its jurisdiction.

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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

KRQE-TV investigative reporter Larry Barker is known for his confrontational style, but a tense exchange he had with the governors press secretary this week has many people outraged and the station apologizing for his behavior.

The incident occurred Wednesday at a cannabis conference at the Albuquerque Convention Center and was documented in a photo that was posted on social media. The image shows Barker confronting Nora Meyers Sackett, whose back is against a wall. The veteran television reporter is inches away from Sackett, wagging a finger in her masked face.

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A television camera hoisted atop a cameramans shoulder  just behind Barker, who is maskless  captured the encounter.

Barker declined to comment Thursday evening, saying company policy prohibited him. However, station Vice President and General Manager Bill Anderson, after reviewing video of the interaction, said Friday, we deeply regret what happened. He offered his apologies to Sackett and anyone who may have witnessed the incident.

I want to be very clear that regardless of the story he was pursuing, Larrys conduct was completely inappropriate and inexcusable, Anderson said. He added that Barker contacted Sackett by telephone to apologize and she accepted it.

The photo of the incident was posted on Twitter, on the website of the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and on other social media platforms, and it elicited comments from people who described the incident as inappropriate, unacceptable, unprofessional, terrible, bullying, intimidation, outrageous and gross.

The Rio Grande chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists condemned the incident, posting on its website that it is appalled by Barkers conduct.

No person, especially a journalist, should treat another human being the way Barker treated Sackett, SPJs board of directors said in a statement.

However frustrated, angry and just plain pissed off we get at each other, it is never, ever, ever  let us repeat  EVER even remotely acceptable to physically corner a source, no matter how important we think it may be.

A number of other online comments also came from members of the media, including Albuquerque journalist Andy Lyman of NM Political Report, who witnessed the confrontation and confirmed Friday that he was the first person to post about it on social media.

Sackett later responded with some Twitter posts of her own: The press and I dont have to be best buddies all the time but I always respect them and their work, and them as people. (Wednesday) was a real low point in that relationship when I was physically accosted and practically assaulted by a KRQE reporter while doing my job at a public event.

In an interview with the Journal, Sackett explained that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham was on a tight schedule going from one event to another during Wednesdays New Mexico Cannabis Legalization Conference when Barker tried to speak with the governor about an issue unrelated to the conference.

She was literally about to be introduced to give her speech, and immediately afterward passed through a doorway into an adjacent room to attend another event. He (Barker) wasnt happy to hear that.

Thats when the confrontation occurred.

Lyman confirmed that chronology. It was an uncomfortable and awkward situation, and it made me feel really uncomfortable to see it go down like that, he said.

Sackett called the incident upsetting and unprofessional.

I completely understand that journalists want to talk to the governor. Thats my job, thats what Im here to do, to set that up, to facilitate that. But there is a process for it because the governor is a very busy person. Shes the executive of the state of New Mexico, and it doesnt serve anyone, not journalists, not the public, for it to be a free for all.

Barker, she said, had me backed against a wall, with no mask and a finger in my face, and I could not move.

And as a woman, she noted, thats very frightening.

The governor was aware of the incident, Sackett said, but declined to elaborate.

KRQEs Anderson said he spoke to Barker about the incident, although he declined to discuss any disciplinary action, calling it a personnel matter.

KRQE and its corporate parent have well-defined policies related to employee conduct: We expect employees to demonstrate high standards of business conduct in their relationships, to be exemplary citizens in the communities in which they live and work, and to treat everyone with respect. Larry violated these policies, and we are addressing his actions directly with him.
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BBC has decided not to 'progress any projects' with the 'Bulletproof' actor after the British star was slapped with multiple damning allegations of sexual misconduct.

Jul 2, 2021

AceShowbiz - BBC bosses have shelved work on an adaptation of Alex Wheatle's book "Crongton Knights" after producer Noel Clarke was accused of sexual misconduct.

Clarke and his staffmembers at Unstoppable Film & Television picked up the rights to the young adult novel and were developing the project when the star was accused of inappropriate behaviour in a The Guardian expose.

Clarke, who has denied any wrongdoing, has lost a series of projects as a result of the drama.

"We are not progressing any projects with Noel Clarke at this time," a BBC spokesman tells Deadline.

Sky bosses have also cancelled the fourth season of Clarke's hit drama series "Bulletproof".

ITV chiefs have additionally pulled a final episode of his drama "Viewpoint" following the allegations, insisting they felt it was "no longer appropriate" to air the show.

On top of that, he was suspended by BAFTA weeks after he received the organisation's Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema award at a ceremony on 10 April (21).

The BAFTA officials insisted they were not aware of the full extent of the sexual misconduct allegations levelled at the star when they picked him as the recipient of the special honor.

The embattled star recently announced he sought professional help and vowed to change for the better.

"Some of my actions have affected people in ways I did not intend or realise. To those individuals, I am deeply sorry," he said while continuing to deny the allegations of inappropriate behaviour.
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The 'Get Carter' actor is set to host a new podcast series that will tell the real-life stories of infamous criminals around the world including The Krays and John Gotti.

Jul 2, 2021

AceShowbiz - Michael Caine will host a new podcast series about famous gangsters, including The Krays and John Gotti.

The two-time Oscar winner's Audible Original series is called "Michael Caine: Gangs".

"In this new podcast series, I uncover the remarkable real-life stories from gangs across the globe, including my personal experience in 1960s London," the "Get Carter" star said.

Michael will begin with the infamous Kray brothers of London's East End, with whom he crossed paths in the '60s.

"I met the (Kray twins) in a discotheque. They came in there and everyone went quiet. I met them three or four times, but I tried very hard not to become a close friend. They were very scary," he related.

The British veteran explained, "I knew enough gangsters. I just wanted to be a simple actor and not hit anyone or slash anyone with a razor."

The Krays inspired two movies, the 1990 film starring Martin and Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, and the 2015 biopic "Legend", with Tom Hardy playing both twins.

Throughout the six-part podcast, Michael will reveal the hidden realities behind the myths that surround famous gangsters. Upcoming episodes will focus on Colombian Black Widow Griselda Blanco and American Western outlaw Jesse James.

"Throughout Gangs, we determine whether the truth is stranger than fiction with these famous cases in history, as well as the present day realities of gang life," he added.
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The 'X-Men: Apocalypse' actress has responded to the internet chatters suggesting she enters a relationship with the 'Saturday Night Live' alum following his divorce.

Jul 2, 2021

AceShowbiz - Olivia Munn has shot down rumours she's dating comedian John Mulaney, insisting all the online fuss about the romance is "incorrect."

In a new interview with New Beauty, the actress opened up about the reports, confessing she is frustrated with what is being written about her and the comic.

"I think what's more surprising is how much is incorrect," she said.

"There is so much attention on things that aren't the truth. And if you speak up and try to say the truth, you're accused of being messy or just not believed. I've gotten used to it, but it hasn't made it easier."

Mulaney recently split from his wife of six years, Anna Marie Tendler.

It was he who asked for divorce amid his struggle with addiction, and she claimed she was blindsided by his decision.

John Mulaney checked himself into a 60-day program at a Pennsylvania treatment facility late last year for alcohol and cocaine addiction. He completed his rehab in late February this year and continued his sobriety work as an outpatient.

Munn previously tweeted her support for the comedian/actor back in December (20) when he entered rehab, writing, "Sending SO MUCH love and support to John Mulaney. You got this."

They sparked romance rumors in May after they reportedly met at a church in Los Angeles.

Olivia Munn previously dated sportsman Aaron Rodgers and she was linked to Chris Pine, Justin Timberlake, Matthew Morrison, and Joel Kinnaman in the past.
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In a picture that circulated online, the 'Jesus Is King' rapper is seen snuggling up close with daughter North West who is busy with her phone as they wait to board the plane.

Jul 2, 2021

AceShowbiz - Kanye West is having a quality time with his kids while Kim Kardashian is travelling around Rome. The "Gold Digger" rapper is taking her kids, North West, Saint West, Psalm West and Chicago West, to south of the border as they enjoyed a getaway in Mexico.

In a picture that circulated online, Kanye was seen snuggling up close with daughter North West as they waited to board the plane. North, who donned a white sweater and sweatpants, was busy with her phone. The Yeezy founder's sons Saint and Psalm were also occupied with their device.

According to The Sun, the rapper and the kids spent some times in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, as they stayed on the Oaxacan coast of Mexico. However, it was reported that Kanye might not go to the country solely for vacation as his team was spotted carrying trunks, suitcases and huge speakers.

Kanye took his kids to the Mexican vacation while Kim is enjoying her time in Italy. The "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" star made headlines after she allegedly strolled Vatican City with her bold style. It was said that the reality TV star wore a sheer, off-the-shoulder white lace cutout dress that exposed skin across her midsection and back.

She completed her style with ankle strap heels and eye-catching gray sunglasses. It appeared that the church demanded her to cover up as she donned in a long black leather jacket before entering the Sistine Chapel.

As for Kanye, he is rumored to be dating Irina Shayk. Amid his alleged relationship with the model, it was said that the "Jesus Is King" rapper is working on music. "Kanye has been working on some new tracks - and they are going to be bangers. He's gone back to the happy, cheeky vibe, the Kanye of old, with tunes to get you up on your feet dancing like The College Dropout and Late Registration album days," a source said. "It looks as though his relationship with Irina has inspired him."
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Although the SKIMS founder explains that she made sure to cover up when she went inside St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel, some of her fans still believe that her dress was 'inappropriate.'

Jul 2, 2021

AceShowbiz - Kim Kardashian knew how to prevent backlash. When sharing some pictures of her wearing a sexy lace dress during her Vatican tour with Kate Moss, the SKIMS founder assured fans that she "adhered" to the dress code, which says visitors can't wear "low cut or sleeveless clothing."

The "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" star posted the snaps in question on Instagram on Thursday, July 1. In the photos, she was seen rocking a white off-the-shoulder dress with side hip cutouts. The 40-year-old, however, brought a chic black leather jacket which she wore inside the historical building.

In the caption, the estranged wife of Kanye West wrote, "We had the most incredible experience touring Vatican City @vaticanmuseums." She added, "It was amazing to be able to view all of the iconic art, architecture and ancient Roman sculptures in person, especially Michelangelo's works."

Kim continued, "We even had an opportunity to view their private archive of robes worn by every pope in history, dating back to the 1500's. Thank you @ocspecial for arranging the visit." She then explained, "(Don't worry, I adhered to the dress code and fully covered up while inside St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel's).

Despite Kim's clarification, some of her fans still believed that her dress was "inappropriate." One user in particular commented, "Totally not appropriate for the Vatican and church even if you were covered up a little, IMO." Another echoed, "The most inappropriate dress worn to go to church let alone to visit the Vatican."

Kim was also criticized for taking pictures inside the chapel. One person argued, "Bizaaarre, u took photo in [sistine] chapel?!!! because guards are screaming NO FOTO NO FOTO all the time." An individual stressed, "You're not allowed to take pics in there missy!" Someone else chimed in, "I guess the no pictures rule they have posted EVERYWHERE in there does not apply to you."

That aside, Kim apparently has had a great time in Rome. A few days prior, she shared on Instagram some pictures of her at the Colosseum. For the outing, she went casual by wearing a white keyhole top, blue shorts and gray flip flops. She paired her outfit with sunglasses and a necklace.
Marvel Studios Movie

Filmmaker Cate Shortland spills on how the lead actress of the Marvel blockbuster managed to convince her that she was the perfect candidate to take charge of the action movie.

Jul 2, 2021

AceShowbiz - Scarlett Johansson engaged in a "courtship" with filmmaker Cate Shortland in a bid to win her over as director of Marvel's "Black Widow" blockbuster.

The Australian moviemaker had only worked on three small theatrical releases when she was initially approached by Marvel Studios officials about taking on the action film, centered around Johansson's titular "Avengers" character, and the baffled director promptly ruled herself out of the big gig.

"I told my manager in L.A., 'There's no way I can do this movie, and I'm not sure why they're asking me. It's crazy, the whole endeavour,' " Shortland recalled to Variety. "And then she never told them no."

Johansson reveals she was the one who pushed for Shortland to be interviewed for the job, after becoming a fan of her second film, 2012 World War Two drama "Lore".

"It was only Cate for me from the beginning," the actress said. "It was very important to me that the person that directed this film had to have made a masterpiece and then some other good movies. One masterpiece, you know? And I really think 'Lore' is really so close to - I mean, it's a perfect film."

Johansson soon reached out to try and convince Shortland she was the perfect candidate to take charge of "Black Widow", but admits it was "very hard" to track her down, and when they finally connected via video conferencing app Zoom, they avoided talk of work altogether.

"We were quite tentative with each other," Shortland shared. "She told me how much she had liked some of my movies, and then I told her how much I have liked some of her performances. It was like a courtship."

"We made lists of, like, our top 20 favorite songs, and our top 20 favorite movies, and our top 20 favorite things, and we sent them to each other."

Shortland eventually agreed to meet with Marvel bosses as she just couldn't pass up the creative opportunities offered with a movie like "Black Widow", which is a prequel film set immediately after 2016's "Captain America: Civil War", when the superhero, aka Natasha Romanoff, is a fugitive.

"I got hooked on the idea of trying to tell a really personal, intimate story in amongst so much beauty and spectacle," she said. "When I really decided that I wanted to do it, I decided 150 per cent - like, I never wanted to do anything as much as this, in a way. It was strange."

After a series of launch delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, "Black Widow" is now finally poised for release, and Shortland is glad she took a chance on the project.

"I'm just so happy I did it," she smiled. "[It's been] joyous working with the actors and the producers on bringing out rawness and vulnerability in amongst this massive world."

Shortland was even able to make the movie a family affair - her 12-year-old daughter and some of her friends landed small roles as extras in "Black Widow".
Universal Pictures Movie

In other news, the actress also officially confirms that the script for the sequel to 'The Old Guard' has been completed with the production being set to start in the first quarter of 2022.

Jul 2, 2021

AceShowbiz - Charlize Theron might lead a new spin-off movie of "Fast & Furious". In a new intervie, Vin Diesel has teased a new movie from the popular franchise which may center on Charlize's character Cipher.

Speaking with Variety, the Dominic Toretto depicter shared that a script for the planned project was already finished. Further details about the spin-off, unfortunately, have yet to be released. Charlize first played Cipher in 2017's "The Fate of the Furious". She then reprised the role in "F9".

Back in 2019, Vin announced on his Instagram account that that three female-led "Fast & Furious" spin-off started to take shape with one of them heading to Universal. He also revealed that Nicole Perlman, Lindsey Beer and Geneva Robertson-Dworet were all attached.

"As you know, there are three new spin offs that We have promised Universal... well this week we heard a pitch for the Fast female protagonist driven spinoff I created in 2017, and you can tell by the smile on Samantha's face it was VERY exciting," so he wrote in the caption at the time. "Shout out to Nicole Perlman, Lindsey Beer, Geneva Robertson-Dworet. Welcome to the Fast FAMILY..."

It remains to be seen where these spin-offs are currently going, but it seems like like they are pushed back just like how "F9" was delayed five times since 2019.

In other news, Charlize officially confirmed that the script for the sequel to "The Old Guard" had been completed.It was said that the production is set o start in the first quarter of 2022.

Charlize also added that the show's gay couple, played by Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli will return to the sequel of the Netflix movie. "They're definitely there" the "Mad Max: Fury Road" star revealed.
WENN Movie

The 'Total Recall' actress wins Best Actress title for her role in movie 'Farming' while the former 'Office' star is awarded Best Screenplay for Netflix series 'Afterlife'.

Jul 3, 2021

AceShowbiz - Kate Beckinsale, Ricky Gervais, and Rowan Atkinson were among the winners at the National Film Awards U.K.

The ceremony was held at the Porchester Hall in London on Thursday (01Ju21) to celebrate the efforts of those in the motion picture industry, with Rowan honoured with the Global Contribution to Motion Picture and Lifetime Achievement Award for his legendary career on screen.

The "Johnny English" star said, "I would like to thank the National Film Academy for this special honour and all the film fans who have supported my career for so long."

Kate took home the Best Actress gong for her role in the movie "Farming" while Ricky picked up the Best Screenplay award for his hit Netflix comedy series "Afterlife".

She said, "Thank you for voting me Best Actress at this year's National Film Awards U.K. I wish I could be there to pick it up in person but unfortunately the COVID quarantine is stopping me from being able to do that."

"I want to thank all of our cast but particularly Damson Idris, who was the sun around which everybody orbited as is the most brilliant actor."

Farming writer/ director Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje took home the Best Actor award.

Other winners included Vanessa Redgrave, who claimed an Outstanding Achievement Award - a surprise accolade that was bestowed on her for her decades of contribution to the world of film.

Mathew Horne claimed the award for Best Actor in a TV Series for "Gavin & Stacey" while T'Nia Miller won Best Actress in a TV series for "Years & Years".
OROVILLE, Calif. - The last open boat launch ramp at Bidwell Canyon Marina is on its final days.

Lake levels currently sit at 683 feet, but once the lake levels drop to around 665 feet, the concrete ramp will close down.

"Well nobody likes it, but we all understand it. If there's not enough water to launch the boat then that's the way it is, said John Flieschmann, who lives in Oroville.

Flieschmann was taking a ride on the lake this week before the concrete boat ramp at Bidwell Canyon Marina shuts down.

"When they cut that off, we're done for the summer, said Flieschmann. Nothing you can do about it."

California Parks and Recreation projects will shut down the last standing ramp in just a week or two, making the holiday weekend the last chance people can take their boats in and out of the water at Lake Oroville.

"I think that the public is going to take this opportunity to go out and use the lake before we lose this last launch facility and take advantage of the holiday weekend on the lake, said Matt Teague, district superintendent of the Northern State District of California State Parks.

When the ramp does close, the Spillway gravel ramp managed by the California Department of Water Resources will open up.

"That is for experienced boat users that have four-wheel-drive vehicles only, Teague told Action News Now.

With fewer boaters out on the water, local restaurants are concerned that they might not get as much business this summer.

"It's definitely going to have its impact because Oroville is definitely known for the many water features that it has, and the Lake is definitely its biggest feature, said Brian Wong, the president of The Union, a Downtown Oroville restaurant.

The timeline for the concrete ramps to open back up mostly depends on getting some rainfall this winter.

"We are hoping to use the spillway when this shuts down, but we'll just have to wait and see, said Flieschmann.

California Parks and Recreation reminds people to be safe out on the water this weekend as they will have a more concentrated area on the body of the lake.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - A Corning woman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for participating in a refund fraud scheme, according to Acting U.S. Attorney Phillip A Talbert.

A federal grand jury returned a 14-count superseding indictment against 26-year-old Sabrina Toilolo in June 2020, the Department of Justice said.

Toilolo and her previously charged co-defendant Johnathon Ward were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, the DOJ said.

From July 2017 to September 2019 Toilolo, Ward, Monica Nunes and Talalima Toilolo conspired to defraud financial institutions by trying to exploit the merchant refund process used by businesses and retail establishments to give refunds to customers for returns, reimbursements and erroneous charges, according to court documents.

Sabrina is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 23, as she faces 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, according to the DOJ.

On April 2, Nunes was sentenced to 12  years in prison. Talalima was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Feb. 11 and charges against Ward are pending, according to the DOJ.
Former SVP, CMO of Samsung Ranjivjit Singh has recently joined Hero MotoCorp as its Chief Marketing Officer after replacing Gurinder Sandhu who recently stepped down from this post.

Before joining Her MotoCorp, Singh was working with Hindustan Lever in 1987 as a brand manager for nine years. He has also been associated with well known brands such as Levi Strauss Inida, Ericsson Communications, Microsoft India, and HP India.

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He is an experienced Chief Marketing Officer - Senior Vice President Marketing with a demonstrated history of working in the consumer electronics industry.

Singh is also a Co-founder of Strategic Services Consultancy in Gurugam Harayana.

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Gaasha Aeri has recently joined HT Media as the Head of PR and Corp Comm and will directly report to Group CEO, Praveen Someshwar, according to the sources.

She will be responsible for internal communication and brand building of the group and will also manage the internal and external communications of the stakeholders.

A communications and marketing professional with over twelve years of experience in marketing, Aeri has also worked with the famous brand named Volkswagen Group of India for more than four years. She also expertises in media management, brand management, strategy making and content generation.

Before joining HT Media, she was associated with well known organizations like Eaton, Zee Media Corporation Limited, and Next Gen Publishing Limited.

She has also done internships at Financial Express and Bennett and Coleman(Times Group).
Saji Cherian, the New Kerala Minister for Cinema and Culture on Wednesday, said that he plans to make large scale changes in the way the Malayalam film industry will be modernised.

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The state will float a new OTT platform for release of the Malayalam films.

According to media reports, Chithranjali studio, heart of the state will also be revamped to make it as a destination for shooting of South Indian films.

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Shes the rising French actress who beamed into homes as the best friend wed all want if we moved to Paris. LOreal Paris is thrilled to announce the worlds favorite new Parisienne, actress Camille Razat as global ambassador. With the message: youre worth it just the way you are.

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Dont compare yourself to others, youre enough. Love yourself so others can love you and if they dont, thats not your problem. Camille Razat

THE NEW PARISIENNE

Who is Camille Razat? The question on everyones lips during the first season of Emily in Paris, the Netflix series from Sex and the City creator Darren Star. Befriending Emily, played by Lily Collins, as she navigates the culture shock of new life in the city of light, Camille keeps her own name to play the quintessential French cool girl with all the invites and the effortless chic. The incarnation of the Parisienne she plays, while the series introduced Camille to a global audience, the 27-year-old has been lighting up French screens since she was 21.

FORGING HER OWN PATH

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At 18, she shelved plans to train as a journalist, following her instinct to enrol in Paris prestigious Cours Florent acting school. Still in her second year there, she landed a role in French tv drama, Disparue (The Disappearance) which went on to global distribution. Small parts followed, alongside Gerard Depardieu in Capitaine Marleau, then in Clint Eastwoods 15:17 to Paris. Further roles include in the comedies Ami Ami by Victor Saint Macary and Rockn roll directed by Guillaume Canet. In 2019, she was nominated for a Cesar award, for her role in LAmour est une fete (Love is a party). And that same year she made her solo theatrical debut in Le Vieux Juif blonde, a role for which she was preselected for Frances leading theatre awards, the Molieres

LOreal Paris is a brand that sincerely cares about women. They actually give power to all types of women whatever their origin, whatever their age. They challenge stereotypes to share a modern vision of femininity. I think of it as a synergy between multiple women to help each other and believe in each other. So, Im really happy and humbled to be a part of this beautiful sisterhood and mission. - Camille Razat

Encouraging women to chase their dreams is our mission at LOreal Paris, and Camille Razat is a rising actress doing just that. Beyond her namesake character as the new Parisienne, her bold stage performances and independent French cinema choices show the freedom of daring your own potential. Were delighted to welcome Camille to our LOreal Paris family, inspiring women on their journey to fulfilment. - Delphine Viguier-Hovasse, Global Brand President, LOreal Paris.

FREE SPIRIT

Determined to avoid typecasting, while currently filming season 2 of Emily in Paris, Camille Razat is going places with tougher material. In 2021, she stars alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg in Les choses humaines directed by Yvan Attal, which examines consent and sexual assault. She also takes on the devastating demons awakened in a young psychiatrist for her lead role in thriller Mastemah from new director Didier D Daarwin. And shes currently producing her own screenplay.

BELIEVING IN SELF-WORTH

If you want it, go get it. Do NOT accept NO for an answer. Most influential and successful people did not take no for an answer. They started from the bottom now theyre here. Camille Razat.

Living to the mantra Keep walking that she has tattooed on her forearm in memory of a loved one, Camille Razat has overcome the self-doubt that besieged her when she began modelling in her teens, when she says: I felt like I wasnt worth it. Today a vision of self-confidence, a keen boxer and gamer, shes an inspiration for young women to step outside their comfort zone and to keep going to achieve their goals.
While the global pandemic has bought economies to a halt and massively disrupted businesses, it has also fuelled start-up dreams and we are seeing several Indian start-ups achieving Unicorn status during the pandemic period. The times have never been better for the budding entrepreneurs to give wings to their start-up dreams.

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The Government, too, has come up with various schemes to support its Vocal for Local drive. A case in point is the Rs 1,000 crore Start-up India Seed Fund announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the Start-up India International Summit 2021 held earlier this year.

Adgully is turning the spotlight on the entrepreneurs who fought against all odds to bring their dreams to fruition in our special series  START-UP STARS. We at Adgully wholeheartedly support the Vocal for Local movement and over the next few months will be featuring all local/ homegrown businesses, brands and Apps.

Working as a full-time professional, it was a constant challenge for Prerna Kalra to carry healthy food & snacks to work every day. She barely had time to cook breakfast or lunch or mid-day snacks, and would find herself craving for fresh home-cooked food and snacks. Food delivery simply got tiresome, expensive, and just didnt match her schedule between meetings, and one needed an instant or quick snacking option to match up long working schedules.

During one of her work visits to China, Kalra came across vending machines that dispensed almost every kind of fresh food item  from fruits to momos and more. While vending machines based retail was so deeply penetrated in China, she saw her father, owning a mom-n-pop store in a Tier 2 city, finding it challenging to grow it to more locations.

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Inspired by this and after coming face to face with this problem, it just clicked in Kalras mind and Daalchini was born. Kalra founded Daalchini along with Vidya B, her colleague from Paytm, in August 2017. Her experience in Product Management, Strategy and Business P&L has helped Kalra to grow her entrepreneurial venture.

In conversation with Adgully, Prerna Kalra, Co-Founder, Daalchini, shares how Daalchini provides healthy and affordable home cooked meal to the customers through IoT-enabled phygital vending machines, bringing cloud kitchens and tiffin services into the new business fold and much more.

What gap did you want to fulfil with your start-up? What is the core business proposition?

Despite having hundreds of D2C brands in healthy-snacking, their reach is limited to grocery and e-commerce apps, and modern retail outlets. The logistics infrastructure to reach a large network of mom-n-pop stores was not in place and there were little ways to reach the end customers. Cloud kitchens and Tiffin Services are also able to reach beyond food-delivery apps.

With the lack of affordable distribution channels, the final cost of a sub-99 snack/ meal to the end customer is doubled up. While customers are willing to pay this additional cost for restaurant food for casual dining, they are unwilling to do so to meet their daily nutrition requirements.

There was also a gap of Rs 40 on each delivery cost, and 40 minutes of delivery time, which was not acceptable when looking for sub-99 snacks. Daalchini bridges the demand-supply gap for home-cooked food and now D2C brands that are instantly available and healthy  a gap that food delivery apps, tiffin services, etc. are yet unable to fulfill. With our mobile app and unique distribution channel of IoT based smart vending machines, we offer fresh home food, snacks and beverages in offices, hospitals, hostels, co-working and co-living spaces, residences, etc.

How did you identify your TG? Did you carry out any feasibility study prior to starting your business?

Our target was to enable our vending machines with sub-99 snacking and home-style food serving users in offices, hospitals, hostels, hotels, apartments, metro stations, educational institutes, etc. We target young professionals and students looking for affordable and instant food. Since the pandemic hit our nation, we are now also available in residential societies and have also started mobility vending machines in cabs and buses in Delhi-NCR.

What were the challenges that you faced in your start-up journey and how did you overcome them?

Initially, after setting up the vending machines, cloud kitchens and tiffin services were not prepared for food items specific for vending machines. We then started preparing our own checklist along with consultants and food-experts to find what it takes. This became our bible and rule-book while on-boarding cloud-kitchens and tiffin services.

Particularly post pandemic, customers were concerned about hygiene and safety. We launched our 100% contactless kiosk solution then, which helped in further adoption.

What were the clearances that you required for your venture from various authorities?

As we enable food through our technology so FSSAI license for F&B Vending Machines and Kiosks is required. Our partner cloud kitchens needed various clearances from FSSAI to shelf-life test reports, etc.

Funds/ finance is the prime issue of almost all start-ups. What can the industry and the Government do to address this issue and ease the capital requirements of start-ups?

While there are some steps already being taken by the government, however, for a new start-up to get finance is still a challenge. In a building up stage, profit versus growth is the key question every entrepreneur faces today and filling the gap for the funding requirements to scale the business until the start-up is self sustainable and profitable.

Prime Minister Modi has announced a Startup India Seed Fund earlier this year. How do you see start-ups benefiting from it?

Startup Indias Funds-of-fund schemes have helped the micro-VCs to grow in India, which in turn has helped the early stage start-ups.

How is digital helping you further your business?

We, at Daalchini provide healthy and affordable home cooked meal to our customers through IoT-enabled phygital (physical + digital) vending machines. We have an app that helps the users to discover the nearby kiosks, browse the products placed in that and book them after paying digitally. At this time amidst the pandemic, contactless is key to safety. To this end, we are now offering a 100% contactless solution for 6-meals-a-day. Buying from unmanned Daalchini itself ensures social distancing, furthermore, we do regular monitoring of our refilling staff and also flash the refilling persons body temperature on the screen. Specific to our kiosks, we ensure regular sanitisation and the timings of sanitisation are also flashed on the machine to instill confidence and a sense of safety among our users.

What were your key learnings from 2020? How do you see the start-up ecosystem progressing in 2021?

Keep the team connected, adapt the business and embrace the change happening to the world. We kept the teams spirits high and focused on the larger purpose that we all are working towards.

What would be your message for the budding entrepreneurs?

A start-up entrepreneur wears various hats in a day and hence, they need to be resilient, however in current times, it is important for them to be empathetic towards the mental and physical health of their own as well as that of their family and teams.
Most cars and trucks use a sensor that consists of a foam or plastic float that rides up and down on the top of the fuel. The float is connect
You are the owner of this article.
Ten miles southwest of the central Montana town of Winnett lies the Joe C. King and Sons Ranch. The multi-generational cow/calf operation is now owned by Chris and Gari King. On June 10, at the Montana Stockgrowers Associations (MSGA) annual mid-year meeting in Lewistown, the ranch was awarded the 2021 Environmental Stewardship Award.

For the Kings, ranching and grazing management has been a family affair. The ranch was started in the 1930s and for nearly 80 years it has survived wet years, dry years, and a drought in the early 1960s that was so bad the family was forced to liquidate their herd and build it again.

It was Chris father, Joe King, who began to critically examine commonplace grazing practices and question whether or not there was a better way to manage the land.

When I was a kid, this country was all grazed in common. At least a dozen ranchers would turn out and everyone was just supposed to put out an appropriate number (of cows). It was just season-long grazing and the cattle kind of focused where they wanted to, Chris said.

In the late 1960s, while grazing in common was being practiced, Joe was reading and learning about rest-rotation and other methods of grazing management. In the early 1970s, he approached the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and inquired if he could apply a rest-rotation grazing plan on his ranch.

The BLM was more than willing to work with Joe and help him fence off his grazing area. Reflecting on that time, Chris says that within a few years of employing a rest-rotation grazing system the family started to see positive results on their rangeland.
Horrific memories on the front lines of war are still vivid for U.S. Army Major General Charles Barr of Liberty, Nebraska.

A third generation Army soldier, Major General Barr now farms corn, soybeans and hay and has a cow-calf operation with his son, Daniel, brother, Skip, and nephew, Lee.

Barr recalls the intense, gut-wrenching times when the threat of roadside bombs intensified just before he arrived in Kuwait in 2005. In his year of command, six soldiers and two airmen were tragically killed as a result of enemy IEDs  improvised explosive devices.

With immense respect for the eight men killed during the tenure of his command, Barr personally traveled to each of their graves to honor them and their ultimate service to America.

Four are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, two are in different cemeteries in Baltimore, and two are buried in Wisconsin.

Of the four buried at Arlington, Staff Sergeant Brian McElroy and Tech Sergeant Jason Norton were their two airmen killed Jan. 22, 2006 near Taji, Iraq by an IED that engulfed their gun truck in flames. Theyre buried close to the Space Shuttle Challenger crew members, Barr said. He remembers McElroy and Norton, even though he did not know them personally.

Days before he died, Barr meet and eat with Corporal Bernard Ceo, who is also buried at Arlington. Ceo was killed in a gun truck crash Oct. 14, 2005.

He described the crash: Corporal Ceo, Army Specialist Sam Boswell and Staff Sergeant Brian Connor died in that gun truck crash when they rear-ended a semi-truck in their convoy as that truck stopped in the middle of the road, in the dark of the night and shut his lights off.

The fourth soldier buried at Arlington is Army Staff Sergeant Michael McMullen, a highly decorated soldier.

McMullen was another of our many mobilized Army National Guard soldiers who was awarded a Silver Star posthumously after rescuing Staff Sergeant Dival, whose uniform was ablaze from his burning semi tractor-trailer on Dec. 24, 2005 at Camp Corregidor near Ramadi, Iraq, Barr said.

Dival's truck was near the front in a long convoy, and was hit by an IED after exiting the camp. McMullen, a firefighter with the Salisbury, Maryland, fire department, went toward the fire, not away, Barr said. He went against standard Army operations for convoys and to the burning vehicle by maneuvering his truck along the side of the road to get close.

There, he dismounted from his armor-protected truck cab and ran, entirely exposed to enemy fire, to yank Dival from his burning truck. He rolled him on the ground to extinguish the flames on him.

At that moment, another IED exploded sending shrapnel into McMullin's back, below his body armor protective vest, causing a spinal wound, Barr said.

Although Dival survived, McMullen lived for only a few weeks. After being medivacked to Baghdad, then Landstuhl, Germany, and finally Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., McMullin succumbed to his wounds. McMullins Silver Star Medal was approved by the time of his burial at Arlington National Cemetery and presented to his family at his burial service, Barr said.

The Major Generals Army history goes back, and forward several generations.

Barrs father, J.D. Barr, served in the U.S. Navy Armed Guard in World War II as an anti-aircraft gunner on board two different merchant ships in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans and the Mediterranean Sea.

Barrs grandfather served in World War I but couldnt go overseas because of the Spanish flu pandemic that hit Camp Funston/Fort Riley, Kansas, when he was in boot camp.

Barrs brother, John, served in the U.S. Army in Germany and during the Cold War. John Barr used his G.I. education bill to further his aviation training. After being a fixed wing airframe and power plant mechanic and a utility helicopter mechanic and crew chief, he got a job with a small airline. He eventually flew for American Airlines for many years until he retired.

Barrs son, Captain Ross Barr, is the RC-135 pilot in the U.S. Air Force. Daughter Jenny Barr Wickham is a Captain in the Nebraska Army National Guard, and a nurse practitioner in her civilian job at the Webster County Hospital and Clinic in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and a citizen soldier in a medical detachment.

Barrs nephew, U.S. Army Captain Regan Barr, is now deployed to South Korea. Another nephew, Chief Master Sergeant J Barr, deployed twice to Afghanistan and is a combat controller in the Air Force Special Forces, preparing for a year-long deployment to Latvia.

Thanks to an Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship just prior to high school graduation, the Major General was able to enroll in the University of Nebraska, major in mechanized agriculture. He completed four years of Army ROTC. Barr was commissioned into the regular Army the same day that he received his Bachelor of Science degree.

The very next Monday, he flew to Fort Lewis, Washington, and began his active duty service.

Growing up on a farm helped provide a solid foundation and produced an interest in farming.

My father and family got me involved in farming from the time I was old enough to drive a tractor, Barr said recalling his fourth-grade self on a two-row cultivator and driving the baler tractor. You can't sugar coat it.

The Army paid Barrs tuition and books for his college education in agriculture.

During his five years of active duty, he saved enough money from his modest monthly Army salary to buy a new John Deere 4440 tractor and a used disk to pull behind it. So, when he resigned from active duty and transferred to the U.S. Army Reserve, Barr began farming on his own.

To help Barr while he was mobilized, his brother, Skip, and his in-laws helped with planting, harvest and moving cattle. Barrs wife, Marsha, their three children and neighbors helped however they could.

Barr was in Kuwait for the assault into Iraq and the taking down of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He went home for two years, but was called up in July 2005 for a year to lead the 143rd Transportation Command, overseeing 4,400 soldiers, sailors, Coast Guard and Air Force personnel. At the time, he was a Brigadier General.

It was a huge job, including the operation and clearing of cargo and rolling stock coming into Kuwait's seaports, overseeing traffic movement control throughout Kuwait, clearing airports of cargo and troops, and force protection of the Kuwait seaports, Barr said.

It was also that intense, heart-wrenching time under Barrs command when he saw their gun truck destroyed and the soldiers killed in action.

Well, I've got that off my chest. I suppose it is my therapy, Barr said. I will never forget what they gave. They gave all they had.

Reporter Amy Hadachek is a two-time Emmy Award winning meteorologist and a storm chaser who earned her NWA and AMS Broadcast Meteorology Seals of Approval. She and her husband live on a diversified farm in Kansas. Reach her at amy.hadachek@midwestmessenger.com.

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The crisis at the nation's southern border has grown exponentially. Some states are beginning to take an approach to this crisis that would appear to be more in line with the Founding Fathers' vision of America than what America has evolved (or devolved, depending on one's perspective) into.

Instead of waiting on the federal government to act, states are taking matters into their own hands. Texas is transferring $250 million from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to a disaster fund to build its own wall along the border with Mexico. While technically this is the federal government's responsibility, if the federal government is unwilling or unable to act, the Founding Fathers would have been more than enthusiastic to see local governments taking this duty up for themselves. The Founders greatly distrusted a strong centralized government, as evidenced by the weak Articles of Confederation that they wrote to organize the country.

Florida announced that it will send law enforcement to Texas and Arizona to assist along the border. Nebraska announced that it would do the same. Have some states found a way around bumbling federal policies? It seems so.

The Founders did not envision the country being ruled by a centralized ruling class. The vision for this country was one of decentralized power, where citizens would take time off from their respective trades, serve in office for a short time  not for a lifetime  and then return to their lives.

The country has changed from what the Founders imagined and intended. The rugged individualist, the Gary Cooper, strong, silent type that Tony Soprano loved to reference, has disappeared. That spirit has been replaced by an attitude that Big Brother will care for all...er, older nonbirthing person sibling will care for all. The Founders foresaw this, which is why the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, is a litany of what the government cannot do instead of what the government's responsibilities should be.

The vision for this country was truly one of self-reliance, not one of a government providing for the people. The Founders were heavily influenced by John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, which clearly states that "the great and chief purpose of men's uniting under government is the preservation of their property." This sentence explains it all. Government is supposed to preserve our property, not provide us with property. The Founders were all too familiar with government seizing property and wealth, hence the Constitution's Third Amendment barring the confiscation of property to quarter soldiers without the consent of the owner.

Somewhere between the founding of this republic and now, government has pushed the limits of what it is constitutionally supposed to and allowed to do. Clearly, Lord Acton was correct: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" and "Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited." Apparently, some in power have decided that it was more convenient to neglect the duties of securing the border and protecting the property of the citizens in this country because it was far more important to keep power by ensuring votes for themselves. Locke and the Founders believed that people organize themselves through a government to set rules to govern their behavior in order to settle disputes and to secure their property. What happens when government, specifically the federal government, refuses to secure the property of the people?

It appears the answer is that the states themselves will step up and begin to cooperate and assist each other independently of the federal government, as Florida, Nebraska, and Iowa are doing. Unfortunately, the republic's system of checks and balances has broken down. The biggest offender is the Supreme Court. Tasked with determining the constitutionality of laws, the court has taken on power by ruling on issues that are not mentioned in the Constitution.

Amendment X clearly states, "Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Simply put, anything the Constitution does not grant the federal government the power to do (for instance, determining when the appropriate age is for children to operate a motor vehicle) each state has the right to decide for itself. The Supreme Court has, over the years, taken to "legislating from the bench," meaning creating law by interpreting what should be law based upon legal, linguistic gymnastics by way of reinterpreting the Constitution, rather than taking it at face value. Such real-world decisions made by the Court that practically codified issues not mentioned in the Constitution include, but are not limited to, Roe v. Wade, Lockett v. Ohio (concerns sentencing guidelines), and Roper v. Simmons (deals with age of the offender in capital punishment).

The power overreach does not end with the Supreme Court. The other two branches are just as guilty and often work together to accomplish the amassing of power. FDR and Congress at the time oversaw the largest growth of the federal government at any time in American history through laws passed by Congress and executive orders written by the president.

Once individuals, or branches of government, gain power, they are reticent to relinquish those powers. The answer to the federal government being derelict in its duties to protect our border and property can be found in Amendment X, in that the Constitution does not prohibit the states from doing protecting borders or property and thus allows the states to come to the aid of one another to do so.

Imagine what else could be accomplished by cutting out the heavy-handed red tape of the federal government and the states taking care of issues themselves. This may be the way to restore our country and our freedoms.

Image via Pixy.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
Mondoweiss reports that the Seattle Education Association (SEA) passed a resolution endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and also called for an end to collaboration between the Seattle police and Israeli military. While I cannot give legal advice, SEA may have exposed itself to something called ultra vires, or "outside powers."

An ultra vires act can conceivably put a nonprofit organization's tax exemption at risk. The American Studies Association (ASA) was in fact sued under the ultra vires doctrine but had the suit dismissed because the court found that an anti-Israel boycott did not violate its charter or bylaws. "The boycott resolution was aimed both at encouraging academic freedom for Palestinians and strengthening relations between American institutions and Palestinians. At the very least, it was 'reasonably in furtherance of the objects' [sic] of the ASA. Thus, it was not contrary to the ASA's express purposes." It looks to me as though ASA was lucky to have had the right language in its charter or mission statement. Others such as the SEA and the NEA, which also are contemplating support of the BDS movement, might or might not have this escape route.

It is to be noted that the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt Jewish Voice for Peace, despite its own repugnant support for BDS, appears to operate intra vires (within its mission statement), but the SEA's mission statement from its 2018 Form 990 says only "To promote the cause of public education on behalf of its members." Its bylaws state that it "shall exist for the purpose of representing the employees of the Seattle School District in their employment relations with the District; and for the development of the public understanding of the objective of education, the promotion of it's [sic] goals, and for encouraging the professional growth of the corporation's members." Yes, the Seeatul Edjukashun Assosheashun uses "it's" as the possessive form, which is yet another good argument for homeschooling, charter schools, and indeed anything other than the public schools at which SEA's members teach.

The IRS's opinion is the only one that counts as to whether support for BDS is ultra vires for 501(c) nonprofit organizations. The IRS will probably be more receptive to Form 13909 complaint with objective evidence it can verify for itself, as opposed to having to take the complainant's word for it.

It Takes Two to Cancel

A class-action suit might be another way to take down a BDS-supporting nonprofit. While I can't give legal advice, it looks as though it takes exactly two people to "cancel" any 501(c)(3) professional organization or 501(c)(5) union that supports the BDS movement and whose charter or bylaws do not give it the necessary latitude as ASA's apparently did. One is an attorney with standing to file a class-action suit, and the other is at least one disgruntled member as a plaintiff to represent the class. The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights sued the ASA on behalf of some members. If you are an SEA member who does not want your dues used to support BDS, you might want to contact the LDB. "The LDB said that the motion [relating to the Modern Language Association] 'seeks unprecedented action from the MLA that is far beyond the capacity and powers set forth in the MLA's corporate charter' [i.e., ultra vires] and is 'also inconsistent with the mission and programs that the MLA reports to the IRS.'" The MLA, however, had the good sense to back away from this agenda, so nothing further came of it. The mission that the SEA reported to the IRS on its Form 990 consists solely of "To promote the cause of public education on behalf of its members," which means (again, not legal advice) that it might not be able to dodge the same litigation bullet the ASA did.

Here is where things get even better, or worse depending on your perspective. "Ultra Vires Acts: Why Nonprofits Must Follow Their Articles & Bylaws" says, "D&O policies typically exclude ultra vires acts from coverage and corporate indemnification is generally not available to those acting outside the scope of their authority," which means that the directors or officers can be held personally liable, whereas the agitators for BDS will probably suffer no consequences whatsoever (as long as they are not directors or officers). Remember that sacrifices for the Cause always seem to be made by just about everybody but the agitators themselves. If the directors and officers get sued, or the organization loses its nonprofit status or good name, the BDS people will just walk away from the mess they made and move on to make yet another.

You Just Have to Feel Unsafe

Here is yet another possible angle for disgruntled members of the SEA and similar organizations. Recent episodes of anti-Semitic violence might, for example, make members feel physically unsafe in a BDS-supporting professional organization or union. Whether they are unsafe is immaterial; all that is necessary is that they believe reasonably that the organization might be physically unsafe for anybody who is discovered to support Israel. Even more reasonable is the belief that the organization is not professionally safe for supporters of Israel regardless of their religion, and "professionally unsafe" could carry over into unequal treatment and unequal opportunity for the members in question. A good lawyer could probably do quite a bit with this, while public statements that "I no longer feel professionally safe here" are reasonable expressions of opinion.

In the meantime, if SEA is actually representative of teachers in Seattle, communities should move immediately to defund the public schools in favor of vouchers that students can use to attend cyber-schools or charter schools of their choice to avoid being taught hatred of Israel and possibly Jews in general, and that "it's" is possessive.

The National Education Association (NEA) also is contemplating a BDS vote. The NEA's Form 990 as filed in 2019 says its mission is to advocate for education professionals and "fulfill the promise of public education to prepare every student to succeed[.]" The United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) is contemplating a similar vote.

Don't Make Your Nonprofit the Nonviolent Counterpart of a War Zone

The BDS movement is the repugnant, but nonviolent and legal, civilian-side support element for an actual war by terrorists against the Middle East's only democracy. War makes BDS-supporters legitimate targets for whatever nonviolent and lawful means the other side deploys against them. Form 13909s are not even a dime a dozen, as they come in electronic form, can be filled out with objective evidence the IRS can verify for itself and can be filed electronically in less than half an hour. The kind of litigation described above takes substantially more effort, but the instant your organization joins the BDS movement, it, and possibly its directors and officers, will be squarely in the crosshairs. The smart thing to do is tell the BDS agitators to take their agenda elsewhere to avoid turning your nonprofit union or professional society into the civil counterpart of a war zone, with some of your own members turning on you as well.

Civis Americanus is the pen name of a contributor who remembers the lessons of history and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way. The author is remaining anonymous due to the likely prospect of being subjected to "cancel culture" for exposing the Big Lie behind Black Lives Matter.

Image via Pixy.

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I suppose it was not entirely his fault. The Distinguished Visitor was only delivering a message, you see. While he was part of the faction that had created the message, he had not actually formulated what he was going to say. That, it became obvious, had been done by someone else.

The occasion was a joint PhysicsSocial Sciences colloquium at one of the campuses of the University of California. Ronald Reagan was president. The president had recently established his Strategic Defense Initiative, also somewhat derisively called his Star Wars Program. The topic of this day was defense against ballistic missiles using high-energy lasers (HELs). Since that was a big part of my professional activity, I was looking forward to the event.

The Distinguished Visitor was indeed distinguished. He was a key figure in the academic world, a presidential science adviser, a JASON (the top technical advisers to the Pentagon), and he had made significant contributions to theoretical physics.

The venue was the main lecture hall of the Physics Department. In marched the Social Sciences faculty. Down the aisle they strutted and captured the front rows, the seats normally reserved for the physics faculty. The physics professors, quite conscious of the deliberate insult, took the seats in the far back. There I joined them.

Eventually, the Distinguished Visitor arrived. He was late, well more than an hour late. "Traffic," he mumbled as he began his lecture.

His thesis was the stupid silliness of using ray guns (i.e., HELs) to defend against unstoppable ballistic missiles. Rather than discussing the real systems that we were working on, the visitor threw up straw-man concepts with the intent to show how ridiculous they were.

Worse, his numbers were off. I was baffled. The performances he quoted were three orders of magnitude too pessimistic. Eventually, I realized that whoever had prepared the lecture had confused calories with Calories (kilocalories). It didn't speak well that the Distinguished Visitor had not checked the numbers before delivering his presentation. Equally troubling was something else.

The lecture finished, the head of Social Sciences effusively applauded this wonderful presentation. The Physics faculty remained dead silent. I stood to speak. The Social Sciences professor turned and scowled. "Who are you? Who do you think you are?" Calmly, I presented my credentials: I had been a major figure in two HEL development programs and had invented some of the key technology that made HELs practical as weapons. Visibly still angry, the Social Science professor collapsed back into his seat.

I started by briefly pointing out that the visitor's straw-man systems were absurd. And his numbers were orders of magnitude too pessimistic. However, there wasn't time to go into detail on the technical issues. My real challenge to the visitor was something else.

All through his presentation, the Distinguished Visitor had been bad-mouthing Reagan's program. Much worse, he had been sarcastically denigrating the scientists and engineers working on HEL development and the other Star Wars efforts. This left him vulnerable. I pointed out his inexcusable nonstop ad hominem attacks on the very high-quality people who were working these programs. I insisted that an apology was in order.

Completely deflated, his presentation shredded, the visitor apologized.

As I sat down, someone sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder. The individual was a physicist of considerable accomplishment and reputation. "Chet, I'm so glad you said that. It needed to be said." I turned to my friend. "Greg, that really was your job. Why didn't you guys speak up?" "You don't understand," he replied. "The visitor is the National Science Foundation. He controls our research funds. We can't challenge him."

This was my real introduction to the Golden Rule: "He who has the gold rules!"

Gold of the metal kind can be good. It is essential in our lives. With money, we purchase sustenance, comfort, and some personal freedom. This is good gold. Unfortunately, we are increasingly constrained by coercive gold  bad gold. It was coercive bad gold that inhibited my professor friends.

As I gained experience through a long career, I began to realize that it isn't money that is the gold of the Golden Rule. There is something much deeper behind the slogan. The gold we are talking about is not some shiny metal. The true gold really is empowerment. This empowerment comes in two forms: coercive power, bad gold, and voluntary cooperation, good gold.

You want an example of bad gold coercion? How about the federal government taxing you and then compelling your community to obey some pernicious law in order to receive part of this money back? That's been standard practice since FDR's administration.

Bad gold is used to silence opposition. Coercive power begets fear. Fear begets obedience. Obedience begets conformity  often immoral conformity. Conformity kills freedom. When freedom dies so does creativity. When creativity dies, so does civilization. We then have a savage Dark Age.

Governments have, by their very nature, coercive power. This is the power to arrest. Paradoxically, government also has negative coercive power by refusing to arrest when it is essential. In recent years a number of public officials  elected, appointed, and judicial  have delegated coercive destructive power to BLM and Antifa thugs, and to many other known criminals, by shielding them from arrest or prosecution. This is intentional political intimidation. These officials are the Defund the Police political gangsters.

The COVID pandemic has given us a bitter taste of government coercive bad gold. People died unnecessarily. Witness what happened to many of New York's senior citizens. Consider also the government prohibitions against simple remedies such as the hydroxychloroquine cocktail and the use of steroids. My doctors ignored the prohibitions and saved lives.

Worse, blue-state citizens have been in lockdown prison for more than a year  and, here in California, we still substantially are. Moreover, the federal government continues to mandate masks. You can't fly without a mask. Science has nothing to do with it. It's all about power and control.

For me, the exemplar of this tyranny was the fellow who was paddle-boarding completely alone in the ocean far off the Malibu shore. With sunshine and sea breeze, beaches are, by their very nature, as COVID-safe as any place on the planet. Nevertheless, California's beaches were off-limits. Power and control, you see!

A boat was sent to arrest the poor surfer. Once on shore, he was manhandled by two burly cops. Rather than keeping a safe social distance, as he had been, this victim of state coercion suddenly found himself in very intimate contact with strangers. He was literally, not figuratively, imprisoned. There was no reason for the arrest. It was an exercise in pure, unbridled coercive state power. Thanks, Governor Newsom!

Access to information is another form of gold. We all know about the censorship of information and ideas by the liberal legacy media, by Big Tech, by government agencies, and by schools. Censorship is bad gold. Fortunately, modern internet technology breaks that longstanding information monopoly. The good gold of the internet and its freedom of comment provide us with a modern form of the samizdat (underground correspondence) that helped bring down the Soviet Union. It also is our safeguard for individual freedom.

American Samizdat shows us the remedy for bad gold: for more than a year, the liberal media bombarded us with tales of a wet market in Wuhan. But the truth filtered out through our samizdat, and now the majority of Americans recognize that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible, that our government was involved, and that people within our government used the media for a cover-up. The consequence? Trust was lost  probably permanently. In a democracy, trust is true gold. Without trust, institutions are functionally bankrupt. Government agencies and the liberal media have taken a permanent big hit. The cover-up is the crime!

It is apparent that many professional Democrats, and their lackeys, despise democracy. The proof is their corruption of elections. These people simply do not believe in the collective wisdom of the vote. Nonetheless, American samizdat ensures that, eventually, a solid consensus will develop that overwhelms the vote corruption and gets us back on track. We already see that happening in the red states and in many of the blue states.

In America, it is the citizen-voter who is the real boss. It is the citizen who voluntarily cooperates to create the good gold of democracy. It is the citizen, not the institutional elitist, who has the true gold.

Image via Peakpx.

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While the mainstream media in America are lavishing love on that frump Hausfrau, Jill Biden, and reveling in the fact that, after spending millions of dollars, New York's prosecutors were able to find some alleged, marginal tax malfeasance by Trump's corporation (not Trump), Britain's Daily Mail is doggedly sifting through the treasure trove that is Hunter Biden's hard drive. The latest revelation shows that Biden, contrary to his denials during the campaign, used his position as vice president to actively further Hunter's "business" deals  in this case, a "flippin gigantic" one in Mexico.

We all remember how, during the second presidential debate, Joe Biden emphatically denied having anything to do with business deals involving his son Hunter, a corrupt, child-abandoning, widow-shtupping, prostitute-frolicking, drug-taking, and otherwise all-around disgusting human being. According to The Hill:

"He's the vice president of the United States and his son, his brother and his other brother are getting rich. They're like a vacuum cleaner," Trump said. The president has fixated on unproven allegations of corruption against the Biden family in the final stretch of the campaign....

The latest revelations from Hunter's hard drive show that (of course) Trump was correct and (of course) the corrupt mainstream media were wrong. From the Daily Mail:

Joe Biden entertained his son's business associates in the vice president's office, including Mexican billionaires Carlos Slim and Miguel Aleman Velasco. The then-vice president also flew Hunter and his partner Jeff Cooper on Air Force 2 to Mexico City in 2016 where Hunter arranged to meet Aleman's son for meetings over a 'flippin gigantic' business deal. The revelations, laid bare in photographs and emails on Hunter's abandoned laptop, are the latest in a growing body of evidence calling into question the president's claim that he never spoke about business with Hunter. In the light of shocking documents uncovered by DailyMail.com from the laptop, the president now faces serious questions  not just whether he knew about Hunter's controversial business dealings, but also whether he was involved in facilitating them himself while vice president.

The Daily Mail, which has made the journalistic effort to sift through the Hunter hard drive, has the facts to back up those allegations. In addition to myriad photos showing Biden in his vice presidential office posing with Slim, Velasco, and airline CEO, as well as Hunter and Cooper, there are reams of emails detailing how closely Biden was involved in Hunter's using Biden's position to enrich himself.

Hunter's partner in the deal was Jeff Cooper, a huge Biden donor. In 2013, when he and Hunter came up with the plan to invest in businesses in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, Cooper wrote to Hunter, "'This is setting up to be flippin gigantic brother."

By 2014, the two men tried to get even greater profits by leveraging Hunter's seat on Burisma (a job for which he had no qualifications other than Joe's position). Again, the Daily Mail:

The prospects for profit only grew when Hunter joined the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma the following year. He and Cooper sought the help of Valdes' grandson, airline CEO Miguel Aleman Magnani, to forge a relationship with the richest man in Latin America, Carlos Slim, in an attempt to cash in on the privatization of the giant state-owned oil company Pemex for Burisma and themselves.

By 2015, Hunter had arranged for the billionaires to meet with Joe at the vice president's residence in D.C. This cropped photo of Biden, Hunter, Cooper, and the billionaires is representative of that meeting, although the hard drive suggests that there were multiple such meetings:

The Daily Mail has all the details of Hunter's and Cooper's plans to get rich, very rich, thanks to the benefits that Hunter's Ukraine connection would bestow upon the Mexican investors. In addition, "Joe Biden's brother Jim also tried to cash in on the potential for bumper profits from Mexico's huge privatization plans," although he was too late to get in on the deal. Most of this correspondence bespeaks greed and an enormous sense of entitlement.

Things get really interesting when correspondence shows that Joe Biden facilitated the plans, not just by meeting with the Mexican billionaires, but also by putting Air Force 2 at Hunter's service:

In February 2016, Hunter wrote an email to Magnani revealing that in the midst of their Mexican oil deal, his father was flying him and his business partner on Air Force 2 to Mexico City, where he and Cooper would be sitting in on a meeting with the country's president. Joe Biden flew to Mexico on February 25 to 26, 2016 for trade talks with then-president Enrique Pena Nieto. 'We are arriving late tonight on Air Force 2 to MX City. We will be there for Thursday - I'm attending meeting w/ President N w/ Dad. Jeff is with me on lane [sic] and we will be with us all day,' Hunter wrote to Magnani on February 24, 2016. The then-US vice president took Hunter and his business partner, who were setting up 'gigantic' business deals in Mexico, on the official trip despite recent concerns over Hunter's potential conflicts of interest in his commercial dealings.

Air Force 2 is an asset belonging to the American people.

There's way more in the Daily Mail article than I can summarize in this post. Suffice it to say that we have irrefutable proof that Biden was lying through his teeth during the presidential campaign when he denied any knowledge about Hunter's business deals. It's also patently clear that a more corrupt man has never occupied the Oval Office since America's inception  nor one more willing to sell America, piece by piece, to foreign interests. No wonder that the White House has refused to respond to the Daily Mail's questions about these latest revelations.

Image: Biden, in the veep's residence, hanging with Mexico billionaires to facilitate his sons money-making deals. Photo (cropped) from Hunter Biden's hard drive, courtesy of the Daily Mail.

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Ivory Hecker, an astute and brave local Fox reporter, interviewed Dr. Joseph Varon, despite Fox threatening her job if the unedited interview went live. It's worth listening to in its entirety, but here's some of what it says.

It's certainly not the first time Dr. Varon's been interviewed. He's talked with the media 1,640 times, including Hecker's interview. The first 1,639 interviews were edited to exclude specific information about his successes in treating hospitalized COVID patients.

This doctor is certainly no quack. He's chief of staff at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas. He invented the MATH+ protocol for treatment, and his death rate has consistently been far less than half that of other hospitals, even a third compared to many. Back in the beginning, when he was able to include hydroxychloroquine in his formula, his death rate was close to 4%, as opposed to around 20% in other hospitals.

Hecker interviewed several of his patients for the piece. One, a urologist from a hospital on the other side of Texas, was airlifted (at his own request) to Dr. Varon. He described how thankful he was to have gone from desperate and dying, with nearly no lung capacity, to healthy. He was clearly robust, despite his COVID experience. He says his improvement began "within hours" of starting the protocol.

Dr. Varon clearly states that "there's no reason for patients to die. We have options, we just have to make those options available."

Hecker also speaks with Dr. Pierre Kory, who co-authored a peer-reviewed study on ivermectin with Dr. Varon. He states without equivocation that, if patients receive ivermectin early in the course of the virus, ivermectin alone is effective as a treatment. He testified in the Senate about it, too.

Most outlets blocked the video, except Fox. Oddly, after a lot of views, Fox set the video to private, so nobody else could see it. Another example of censorship occurred when Dr. Kory talked with Bret Weinstein, something Joe Rogan highlighted.

Dr. Varon states that "every time I use the word ivermectin [on Facebook], I go to Facebook jail." Social media and news outlets in the U.S. have completely blacked out any mention of the drug.

The interview also shows what's happening in India, complete with a chart graphically demonstrating the stark difference in the states that use ivermectin versus the one, Tamil Nadu, that doesn't. Where all the rest of the states have had cases plummet, Tamil Nadu's virus cases have continued to climb precipitously. Dr. Varon, who hasn't taken a day off in the last year and a half, is teaming with India to help save lives there.

Hecker also interviews a weasel from the WHO, who discounts everything Varon is saying.

Finally, I don't want to imply that Dr. Varon is anti-vaccine. He states clearly that he believes in the vaccine, but he also believes in life-saving treatment.

If you skip to 16:43 in the interview, you get to the crux of the matter. Hecker explains there why was this information was omitted from 1,639 of the 1,640 interviews Varon has given. It's simple: "If there was a successful treatment protocol for COVID, by law the emergency use authorization for the vaccines would be disallowed."

Think about that: to obtain emergency use authorization for the vaccine, there couldn't be an effective treatment for COVID. This basically means the vaccine would have been delayed by more trials. Or the rules could have been changed so that you could treat people effectively and allow the vaccine authorization.

I've questioned this lack of early treatment, and the denial of life-saving drugs, every time I've written on this subject. (If you look at my archives on American Thinker, there are a good half-dozen articles going back to January about this.) Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are old drugs, no longer on patent. You can successfully treat people using them, in combination with other vitamins, etc., without breaking the bank.

What's been taken from all of us is the opportunity to make an informed choice. These few facts would have changed the course of the pandemic. Far fewer people would be dead. Dread wouldn't hang over us.

If we'd had open discourse, perhaps fewer people, especially younger ones of childbearing age and below, would opt to become guinea pigs for a vaccine that's untried. Although children don't get very sick from COVID, if parents knew there was a treatment should things go wrong, parents would think more before they vaccinated their kids, or kept schools closed, or masked them. If we knew there were successful and economical treatments that made the virus less of a threat, many decisions could have been made differently.

Our unwieldy bureaucracy, and the financial interests of the few, left this giant roadblock in place. Bluntly speaking, allowing so many to die unnecessarily is mass murder by bureaucratic incompetence and the desire for personal enrichment.

Image: Dr. Joseph Varon. Bitchute screen grab.

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Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis is as impressive as they come, and his record to show for it continues.

According to an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times by Scott Gerber, he's now targeting the leftist university monolith.

Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill to protect against indoctrination in the state's colleges and universities. The new law, which went into effect on July 1, requires Florida's public colleges and universities to conduct an annual survey measuring "intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity" on their campuses. The law's goal is to assess "the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented" and how free students, faculty, and staff feel "to express their beliefs and viewpoints." The Florida law does not specify what will be done with the survey results, but Gov. DeSantis suggested that budget cuts could result if universities and colleges are found to be "indoctrinating" students. "It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you'd be exposed to a lot of different ideas," DeSantis said. "Unfortunately, now the norm is really these are more intellectually repressive environments."

It's the intolerable setup that forces taxpayers of all ideological persuasions to fund far-left universities, where only leftists can get hired, leaving a great void of "viewpoint diversity." Kids today go to college never hearing a word of conservative thought, and to please their professors and get the As they want, they must mouth leftist tropes, because who'd want to take a chance otherwise? Worse still, the lack of ideological diversity serves to drive the viewpoints farther and farther left, like a bus with no brakes, no checks and balances, no respectable opposition. That explains the state we've gotten to, with university professors the craziest people on the left, having no exposure to any tempering ideas. The only solution to this is to force at least the publicly funded universities to hire according to affirmative action criteria, which they have not been doing, to achieve diversity of ideas, given the abuses and discriminations taking place.

It's a longtime issue that has turned universities into cesspits of leftism with no serious reason to support them, given that, as DeSantis has pointed out, their educational product amounts to "indoctrination."

Here's how bad it's gotten, according to Gerber:

The problem DeSantis has identified is not unique to Florida  Indiana's Republican governor signed a similar bill last month  and it traces directly to the political biases of the processes by which faculty are hired. Many of the same colleges and universities that tout tenure as a way to encourage free thought censor it by not allowing conservative and libertarian faculty candidates who think freely to get in the door. I once suggested on the ConLawProf group email list that law schools need to hire more conservative and libertarian candidates (with "more" meaning, at a minimum, at least one). The reaction? One law professor posted that I was "nuts" to suggest such a thing. Libertarian law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz quipped at a Federalist Society conference on intellectual diversity in the legal academy that his leftist colleagues at Georgetown felt that three conservatives on a law faculty of 120 was "plenty  and perhaps even one or two too many."

That's flaming discrimination, and it's an outrage that taxpayers should have to bankroll it.

It's also of a piece with some of the other impressive things that DeSantis has targeted. According to his Wikipedia page, his achievements since his election on the cultural war front, which the late Andrew Breitbart always considered most important, have been numerous.

He's gone after social media and Big Tech censorship. He's scrapped Common Core. He's gone after males competing in girls' sports. He's ended sanctuary cities for foreign lawbreakers. He's protected Confederate monuments. He's scrapped sovereign immunity for municipalities that fail to provide adequate police protection and told violent protesters obstructing and abusing others that they're on their own. He's signed bills to make it harder for election cheats. He's recently targeted Chinese influence in Florida's universities.

While he's most famous for protecting Florida with all its elderly citizens from the abhorrent killings seen in blue-state nursing homes and getting his state back to normal, it's his narrowly targeted attacks on the far-left cultural monolith  the media, academia, and Hollywood  that stand out. Unlike President Trump, he works with a scalpel rather than an ax and targets the cultural roots of the problem. These problems weren't attacked all that much by President Trump during his presidency, because his focus was far broader and his obstructions were far greater, and he was not by nature a micromanager. He was, as American Thinker contributor Robert Weissberg memorably noted, a hotel manager adept at putting out flash fires, which was valuable and necessary, too.

But rest assured: these longstanding issues that DeSantis has targeted are extremely important. They are the true roots and foundations of the problem of an overbearing, unelected, entitled, and ever crazier left attempting to rule us with zero rightful claim to do so. These people own the culture now, and the walls they have erected to preserve their permanent fortress of power have gone corrupt and rotten in the absence of any intellectual cross-currents. They are overdue for a good wrecking ball, and DeSantis has carefully laid the groundwork for it. Perhaps it's his law degree and the kind of thinking of a legal mindset that enables him to be so narrow and precise. We know he's also nuanced  he recently vetoed a bill passed unanimously in both Florida legislative houses on civic education because the left could have easily co-opted it to allow students to get class credit for protests  even as the law's intentions were good. He knows an airtight bill from a bad one that the left can run circles around and acts accordingly.

DeSantis is a bit different from Trump with regard to his achievements. They are very different kinds of achievements, yet it's amazing how the two styles of the men complement each other.

The bill to diversify universities has been a long time coming, and it's wonderful to see action taken on it now  not a whole bill to force them to hire according to representative voter bases, but just a poll to expose what is going on, which the left will scream bloody murder about.

It's part of a plan, all right. They can see it, and DeSantis will steadily pursue it. With each and every one of these acts, his stature rises higher and his "presidenciability" goes with it. Others will follow his acts, which is part of what leadership is. Voters will eventually recognize that DeSantis is a foundation man, and he might just be the guy to save the country.

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

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The defeat of Israel's longest-serving Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, demonstrated the rising political influence of both Israeli Arabs (for the first time, a Palestinian party is a member of a government coalition) and the anti-Israel lobby in America. Since Democrats returned to power, U.S.-Israel relations have rapidly deteriorated. Trump, who recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state and the Golan Heights as part of Israel, might have been the most pro-Israeli president in American history. Most Democrats, by contrast, are known to be critical of exprime minister Netanyahu's policies while the more progressive ones express openly anti-Semitic sentiments.

Despite Biden's public support for Israel amid the latest clashes between the Israelis and Palestinians, America's left-wing lawmakers appear to blame Israel, rather than Hamas terrorists, for the violence. To push the Biden administration to rethink its relationship with Israel, pro-Palestinian American elites have been using proxies. Many of these proxies get their funding from George Soros.

Over the past several decades, the left-wing billionaire has been attempting to discredit the Jewish state and weaken the pro-Israel lobby's influence in Washington. It was revealed in 2016 that Soros's organization, then known as the Open Society Institute, had begun an ambitious project in 2009 to persuade Europe and the U.S. to "hold Israel accountable" for violations of international law.

The leftist business mogul never criticizes Palestine or Hamas in his speeches while pouring millions of dollars into anti-Israeli initiatives. According to the NGO Monitor:

These NGOs are leaders in anti-Israel lawfare campaigns.

The NGO Monitor also highlights that Soros's foundations provide financial assistance to the American and European organizations tied to the global anti-Jewish movement BDS, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Friends Service Committee. Other Soros money funds a hard-left "Jewish" group called Bend the Arc, which supports progressive Democrats Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, both of whom accused Israel of "terrorism" during the most recent clashes with Hamas.

Finally, as the New York Times proudly informed its readers, the OSF finances the Black Lives Matter movement, yet another tool in Soros's war against the Jewish state. According to the New York Post, BLM has thrown its full support behind the Palestinians in the ongoing bloody conflict between Hamas and Israel. The protest group harshly spreads anti-Semitic statements referring to Israel as "an apartheid state." BLM activists also blame the Israel police for training American cops to commit racist acts of murder while advocating "the eradication of Israel."

Apparently, Soros's influence goes beyond this. Here's the OSF list of donations to various NGOs from 2015 to 2018 to promote its anti-Israel agenda (go to the link for a larger version).

The OSF's 2020 budget was valued at over $1.2 billion and divided among seven regions. It allocated $34.3 million to projects in the Middle East and North Africa. Soros's foundations still provide grants to controversial and politicized NGOs engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including Breaking the Silence, Gisha, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).

OSF has as its goal financing outlets and journalists to present and promote a distorted version of the conflict based only on the Palestinian narrative. It's no coincidence that the OSF gave money to political activist Michael Sfard to write his book The Gate and The Wall: Israel, Palestine and The Legal Battle for Human Rights.

Soros-funded organizations have also orchestrated pro-Palestinian demonstrations and protests in Israel, America, and Europe (see, e.g., this article about bail funding). The NGOs' activities, along with the rise of violence, have increased tensions in the region and certainly influenced the outcome of the 2021 Israeli elections. It remains to be seen whether Israel's new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, will allow Soros-supported radical groups to undermine or even destroy the Jewish state.

Image: George Soros (cropped). YouTube screen grab.

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I could have written Kamala Harris's public statements following her visit to the border. In fact, I believe they were written well in advance of her visit. As is usual with her, she was long on platitudes, slogans, and blame-shifting and short on substance. A member of her own party criticized her for not even visiting the problem areas of the border and, instead, going to El Paso.

Harris pretty much used the same theme the Biden administration and the Democrats have been using since before taking office January 20, 2021  Blame Trump. It doesn't matter what the issue is: blame Trump and blame the Republicans. That is their go-to answer for everything.

I was pleased to see Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) criticize Harris. It's a departure from the Democrat playbook since Obama's election. For eight years, the Obama administration blamed the administration of George W. Bush for the sluggish economy. Obama even did so standing next to Bush at the unveiling ceremony for President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush's portraits.

Obama also claimed publicly that candidate Donald Trump was making false claims about jobs coming back and the economy improving if he were elected president. When jobs came back and the economy improved under Trump, after eight years of a dismal Obama economy, Obama claimed credit for the robust economy.

In keeping with the Democrat game plan, Harris stated that the problem at the border was inherited from the previous administration. This raises the question: exactly what problem at the border was that? Harris didn't really state anything specifically, which is par for the course with her. So what could it be? Perhaps it was that there weren't enough illegals crossing the border who could one day become Democrat voters. Perhaps that problem is why Democrats needed so desperately to pass the inappropriately named "For the People" act (S1 in the Senate and HR1 in the House).

If passed into law (and they will try again), a "For the People" act would allow anyone, literally with or without a pulse, to vote. It would eliminate a fair election process  although it would be open to challenge in court on the ground that it would be unconstitutional.

Harris's other comments were the usual platitudes and slogans. These were statements as lacking in substance and truths as the claims that President Trump stole the election from Hillary Clinton by colluding with Vladimir Putin. Hillary Clinton and other Democrats still assert this even though Robert Mueller's investigation yielded no proof. Instead, it showed only that Christopher Steele had admitted that his dossier was nothing but unsubstantiated gossip. Hillary keeps making this claim every time she is in front of a camera.

Harris's comments are the typical ones put forth by incompetent people. Let's be honest: she is the epitome of an affirmative action pick if ever there was one. Luckily for her, the fact that she uses the same lame narratives never seems to grow old for her base, or the entire Democrat party.

Specifically, when she claims that the Biden administration inherited the problem at the border from the Trump administration, she offers no proof, only the accusation. That her comments lack substance is proof of her incompetence. The actual numbers prove that the Biden administration created the border problem. As Texas governor Greg Abbott made clear, the problem has increased by 1,000 percent since Biden took office.

Harris also deflected from a real possible solution by offering a red herring. She reiterated what she tweeted in March: "[We] have to address the root causes of migration. It won't be easy work  but it's necessary."

This is a way of admitting she is completely clueless. We know the cause of the problem: the Biden administration opened the border. Those coming illegally are not being sent back and are not being punished. That seems like the definition of the problem. Perhaps that level of thinking is above her pay grade. Or maybe she still believes, as she clearly stated, that global warming is to blame for the border crisis. If only we could solve that problem once and for all. We need to wrap our heads around that for a while to learn how our vice president thinks.

No, I would say Governor Abbott said it quite succinctly when he said we didn't have this crisis when President Trump was in charge.

Harris got support from the equally clueless Veronica Escobar, Democrat congresswoman from Texas, who unilaterally christened El Paso as the new Ellis Island. That would come as a great shock to all four of my grandparents, who came to this country legally from southern Italy and were properly processed through Ellis Island at the beginning of the 20th century.

Indeed, it was a serious process for both my grandfathers. They had to establish themselves and show they could support themselves. They could not rely on welfare, food stamps, housing allowance, or free cell phones. Moreover, everyone at Ellis Island was coming legally. If they could show that they could contribute to society and were physically healthy, they could go back to Italy, get their wives, and return.

By the mid-1920s, immigration from Italy and much of Europe was stopped. Yes, Ms. Escobar, Vice President Harris, people in the media and their clueless audience, the Democrat party, and our current occupant of the White House, the United States of America was never an open borders country.

David Ennocenti is a retired accountant and graduate of the State University of N.Y. at Buffalo, School of Management with a degree in accounting and finance. He passed the CPA examination in 1983. His writing has appeared in the American Thinker, USA Today, The New York Times, and several other publications. His screenplay, Sniper Queen, was an official selection of The Artemis Women in Action Films Festival. He is a past winner of the Writers Digest Annual Competition.

Image: Kamala Harris at El Paso. YouTube screen grab.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
Quick: Which President created the Environmental Protection Agency? Answer: Richard Nixon.

When I was a child growing up in Southern California in the late 1960s, the smog was bad  so bad that on some days, I would experience a profound heaviness in my chest and shortness of breath, as though my lungs had been singed. I also remember a particular television ad featuring an American Indian on horseback with a feather headdress, riding by a polluted American landscape. The commercial concluded with a close-up showing tears running down his face. I also remember when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969. I was already watching the news and aware of what was going on in the broader world. So it was a relief to me when Nixon created the EPA, even though the benefits of its regulations wouldn't bear fruit right away.

Nixon wasn't the first Republican president concerned about the environment. That would be Theodore Roosevelt, who was a prominent advocate of the conservation movement, which was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s. Roosevelt's environmental legacy includes the creation of many national parks and nature preserves, to protect America's natural beauty from destructive development so that it could be shared and experienced by more Americans, thus creating a broader appreciation of the importance of conservation.

Now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was the first place in the nation to form a regional air quality district, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). I remember attending a district-sponsored event featuring Al Gore, who did his "Inconvenient Truth" presentation. I mention this because the warm-up man for the event was former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, who pointed out that one of the people most responsible for creating the BAAQMD was a Santa Clara County supervisor who was a Republican. Brown said something to the effect that Democrats might normally try to conceal a fact like that. I can't remember the guy's name, though Brown mentioned it in his remarks at the time. I tried to find it poking around the internet to no avail, so maybe there is some concealment going on.

The point is that Republicans have a history of leadership on environmental protection. It's not something to be ashamed of. If you're a conservative, ask yourself if it bothers you when you're driving along and see litter on the side of the highway. Or whether the Deepwater Horizon disaster kept you up at night. Or the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

The problem is that the environmental movement now is focused on climate change, the lower-hanging fruit having already been addressed. Climate change is a divisive issue for many people because they don't see the direct impacts in their day-to-day lives; there's no American Indian crying on a horse in front of a polluted landscape, though some enterprising people have tried to substitute a polar bear for that purpose. My purpose here is not to try to convince anyone of the reality of climate change, about which I have my own doubts. I guess you can say I'm agnostic on the subject. Instead, I would just remind everyone that the current divisiveness around climate change shouldn't scare off conservatives from the issue of environmental protection in general. Why should Democrats get to check that box when, in fact, it was Republican leadership that got the ball rolling? It's analogous to how Democrats claim the mantle of anti-racism when Lincoln was the one who freed the slaves.

Finally, remember that conservation stems from "conservative." I encourage conservatives to embrace environmentalism in general as a conservative tradition, even if you think climate change is bunk.

Image via Pexels.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
On July 1, the Supreme Court of the United States, in a 6-3 decision, ruled that Arizona did not violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it required in-person voting to take place in the precinct to which the voter is assigned and limited collection of early-voting ballots to the U.S. Postal Service, election officials, family members, household members, and caregivers.

In overturning a Ninth Circuit en banc decision rejecting Arizona's voting requirements, Justice Sam Alito, for  let it be said  the six justices appointed by Republican presidents, recognized the legitimate interests of a state in preventing fraud and intimidation or pressure on voters. Justice Alito noted that fraud does not have to be shown before a state can act to take legitimate measures to prevent fraud. He also indicated that "disparate impact" must be shown to be significant before overturning a state's voting laws.

On the matter of "disparate impact," Justice Alito pointed to the use of statistics to mislead, rather than to inform. He observed that the Ninth Circuit found that twice as many minority voters cast ballots out of their assigned precincts as non-minority voters, based on 99.5% of nonminority voters compared to 99% of minority voters voting in their home precincts. Justice Alito indicated that the more accurate picture focuses on the 99% for minority voters, not the difference between 0.5% and 0.0%. That is to say, in absolute terms, the disparity between 99.5% and 99% is insignificant.

Justice Alito noted that the dissent would treat any disparity as significant. He also had some sharp words to say of the dissent by Justice Elena Kagan:

[T]here is nothing democratic about the dissent's attempt to bring about a wholesale transfer of the authority to set voting rule from the States to the federal courts.

This observation might well be directed at House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Charles E. Schumer, who are pressing for legislation that would federalize elections.

The dissenters, all three appointed by Democrat presidents, would disregard a state's interest in preventing voting fraud, or voter intimidation, and enthrone a federal approach, supported, in reality, by the Democrat majorities in House and Senate, plus the Democrat president. It is, therefore, difficult to escape the rank partisanship of the dissent in approving Democrat moves to increase, vastly, the numbers of voters who are registered Democrats.

One can expect howls of condemnation to come from zealous Democrat partisans like the New York Times and the Washington Post, which would use misleading statistics to exaggerate voter disparity and would dismiss rules against fraud if fraud has not been shown. But on that expected argument from the undemocratic left, here is Justice Alito: "Fraud is a real risk that accompanies mail-in voting even if Arizona had the good fortune to avoid it." He commented, further, "A State doesn't have to wait for fraud to happen."

An observer might be excused for allowing that the Supreme Court's opinion in Brnovich was its way of throwing a sop to Donald J. Trump, conceding that fraud can occur by means of ballot collection, early mail-in voting  and out-of-assigned-precinct voting, with the added concession that mail-in votes just might result from intimidation or pressure on the voter.

Now imagine the High Court's ruling if Merrick Garland had made it to the Supreme Court and Donald J. Trump had failed to be elected in 2016. The ruthlessly partisan H.R. 1 and S. 1 would have been pronounced, effectively, by a totalitarian-trending Supreme Court of the United States.

Some Democrats already are calling for court-packing. What next? A move by Pelosi to impeach Justice Alito?

Photo credit: David, CC BY 2.0 license.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
Tom Hanks has a long track record of social justice activism. He has a long history of donating to Democrat candidates and causes. One might logically believe he would be a hero to self-proclaimed progressives everywhere. One, apparently, would be wrong.

Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio recently published a piece titled "Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist," by 55-year-old Eric Deggans, a Black man. Deggans opined:

The toughest thing for some white Americans ... is to admit how they were personally and specifically connected to the elevation of white culture over other cultures. Baby boomer filmmakers have made fortunes amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism[.] ... [Hanks] has built his career on stories about American white men 'doing the right thing[.]' ... It is time for folks like Hanks to be anti-racist.

He then claimed that work that focuses on the achievements of "virtuous white, male Americans" may well "have made it tougher" for tales of white "atrocities" to "find space."

Deggans went on to note how successful white filmmakers like Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg, themselves both liberal, have made it difficult if not impossible for anyone to make films about Black people facing discrimination because their movies didn't feature Black people facing discrimination. Huh? Almost every current movie, television show, commercial, or pop song that I've seen for the last year has at least a reference to Black people facing discrimination.

Deggans added:

Hanks and other stars need to talk specifically about how their work has contributed to these problems and how they will change. They need to make specific commitments to changing the conversation in story subjects, casting and execution. That is the truly hard work of building change.

The passive-aggressive NPR hit piece then suggested that part of the "truly hard work of building change" is to "dismantle" the idea, notion, or concept of any white American males  past or present  being heroes.

If Hanks truly is a "non-racist," as NPR snarkily labeled him  he is not racist. To say he needs to become an "anti-racist" in this context means he must actually become a racist...in the preferred manner of today's race-baiters and grievance-traffickers.

Does Deggans believe that no white American males were or are heroes? Not one? Hanks played the role of Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, an airline pilot who saved countless lives with his actions. He has played Walt Disney, Fred ("Mr.") Rogers, Sheriff "Woody"...and himself. Does NPR believe that all these "white American males" were racist scum unworthy of being celebrated in any way?



Tom Hanks plays Sully Sullenberger, and it's somehow racist or something.

The idea that, since some movies don't feature a particular group of people facing discrimination, they make it impossible for all other movies to feature that group of people facing discrimination is truly preposterous. Just because somebody may have made successful movies that didn't feature Jews getting abused and exterminated by Nazis, that does not necessarily make it impossible for anyone else to make films depicting Jews getting abused and exterminated by Nazis.

In 2016, Hanks received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from that notorious racist, Barack Hussein Obama. Tom Hanks is not a racist. He may even be an anti-racist.

And what else was Hanks supposed to do? If he didn't play white people, if he routinely took roles of people "of color," different nationalities, or women, he would have been savaged for inexcusable appropriation. Should he be limited to playing the parts of evil white tyrants? Ignorant Caucasian a-------?

I guess he could just play the roles of mainstream media types like Brian Stelter, Brian Williams, Chris Cuomo, Jake Tapper...and assorted NPR hacks.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
For the better part of a decade, the widely celebrated and esteemed Louvre Museum of Paris proudly displayed a supposedly ancient tiara made of solid gold. Experts at the Louvre identified it as belonging to the Scythian king Saitapharnes who ruled sometime in the 3rd century BCE. An inscription on the tiara mentioning that it was a gift from Olbia, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast, to King Saitaphernes left no doubt about the items authenticity and great age. But later it became clear that the tiara's new owner had been a little haste in acquiring the item. The exhibit is now locked away in storagean embarrassment, for the tiara was proved to be a hoax perpetuated by two Russian art dealers.

A postcard ridiculing the Louvres dubious purchase. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The story of the tiara began in 1894 in the Russian city of Odessa. Two art dealers Schapschelle Hochmann and his brother Leiba approached a skilled goldsmith Israel Rouchomovsky and convinced him into making a dome-like crown out of gold for an archaeologist friend of theirs. Rouchomovsky was unfamiliar with Greek mythology and so the men provided the artisan with books of drawings of ancient finds and details from recent excavations to aid his design.

The finished product stood 7 inches tall and weighed a little more than a pound of solid gold. The lower part of the tiara was decorated with scenes of Scythian daily life, while an upper wider band showed episodes from Iliad including Agamemnon and Achilles quarreling over Briseis. An inscription ran around the tiara reading: The council and citizens of Olbia honor the great and invincible King Saitapharnes. The text was an allusion to an episode dating to the late 3rd-century BCE or early 2nd-century BCE, where King Saitapharnes had besieged the Greek colony of Olbia and was convinced to leave the city in peace only through the offering of expensive gifts.

Rouchomovsky handed over the crown to the Hochmanns, collected his commission, and didn't think any more about it.

Tiara of Saitaferne. Photo: British Museum

Several months later, the Hochmann brothers went to Vienna to exhibit some of the newly discovered Russian antiques that a group of Crimean peasants supposedly found in a field. At that time, Greek and Scythian artwork from Russia were highly coveted by European museums as a result of magnificent finds from sites such as Kul Oba (1830), Chertomlyk (1863), and Seven Brothers (1875-1878). Among the finds exhibited was the tiara that Rouchomovsky had unknowingly forged.

The Imperial Court Museum in Vienna and British Museum had some reserves and both passed on the tiara, but the Louvre jumped at the opportunity to purchase it, paying 200,000 francs for it. Perhaps appropriately, the deal was signed on April 1, 1896.

Shortly after the Louvre acquired the tiara, questions about its origins arose. German archaeologist Adolf Furtwangler noted many stylistic problems with the tiara's design and questioned the artifacts pristine condition. But the Louvre rebuffed, accusing the archeologists motives to have been dictated by spitehis being German and the museum being French. For six years, a battle ensued between the Louvre and the Parisian press.

Israel Rouchomovski

News of the tiara eventually reached Rouchomovsky, who was alerted of the possible fraud by his friend and associate named Lifschitz, to whom Rouchomovsky had shown the piece in passing. Lifschitz also wrote a letter to the editor of the the French newspaper Le Matin claiming to have witnessed Israel Rouchomovski making the tiara. This letter was published in 1903.

Rouchomovsky was indignant for having been cheated. He traveled to Paris and presented himself to the Louvre. He explained how he had been tricked into making a phony crown. He even pointed out the exact books the Hochmanns gave him, and described to the Louvre how he made it in three parts and soldered them together. Still unconvinced, the museum provided Rouchomovsky with some gold and asked him to do his best. It was only when the artist had reproduced a portion of the crown, did the museum realize that they had bought a dud.

Later, the World Today wrote a scathing article in 1907:

There are a lot on indentations on the tiara and these furnish a comical note in this affair. They were supposed to have been caused by the falling of stones of the mouldering tomb. These stones certainly possessed a rare and discriminating appreciation of art, since they had avoided falling on any of the numerous figures in relief, but had dented in most of the smooth spaces. What was more, unless the worthy Scythian potentate had turned around a few times in his tomb one could not explain why dents were found on all sides of his tiara. However there had been no miracle, the bumps and indentations were made by using alternately the ends of a common ballpane hammer.

This story attracted a lot of public attention. Merchants sold postcards, souvenirs and copies and tiaras. Cartoons were drawn about it and sang in cabarets.

A satirical postcard. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Louvre still owns the Tiara of Saitapharnes, though it is no longer on display. In 1954, the tiara was included in a "Salon of Fakes" at the Louvre along with eight Mona Lisas. The tiara has been borrowed a few number of times by other museums and exhibited. There are two copies of the tiara, one each at the British Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

The tiara fiasco made Rouchomovsky a celebrity. The Odessa master was introduced to the wealthiest Jewish banker and art collector of Paris, Baron Edmond Rothschild, who immediately ordered a number of objects from him. Other works earned him a Gold Medal at the Paris Salon of Decorative Arts. In 2014, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the wall of Rouchomovskys workshop in Odessa where the tiara was forged.

Memorial plaque to jeweler Israel Rukhomovsky in Odessa. Photo: Mitrius/Wikimedia Commons

References:

# Saitaphernes' Golden Tiara, Archaeology

# The scandal of the antique gold tiara sold to the Louvre Museum. A fake artefact made in Odessa, The Odessa Journal

# Wikipedia




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Study says Communicating with Female Friends will Reduce Stress:- A research from the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said that communicating with a female friend decreases the stress for women across the life. The study is titled What are friends for? The impact of friendship on communicative efficiency and cortisol response during collaborative problem solving among younger and older women'. It is published in the Journal of Women and Aging. Be it a meeting or a discussion, women are more comfortable with women and this reduced stress hormone levels for them. The friendship and bond is the best among the two females. Michelle Rodrigues and Si On Yoon, the former Beckman Institute postdoctoral researchers evaluated about the interlocutors and the impact of their conversations.

They are reviewed and the stress responses are generated. Most of them said that the conversations between women reduced their stress levels. Michelle Rodrigues said that the women are the alternate mechanism for stress. Women of all ages tend to discuss and if the discussion is healthy, it turns out to be a great bond. This will not apply for older women. The approach includes both language processing and physiological measures. The impact of the communications are observed and their tendencies to befriend was calculated. 32 women are tested and 16 of them are older adults aged between 62 and 79. 16 are young adults who are aged between 18 and 25. Each participant was paired with a female friend or a stranger. A series of conversations are observed and it was observed that the younger adult pairs communicated well and more efficiently when compared to the older women.
In a recent APK teardown, folks at XDA have spotted Google working on a homescreen widget for the Memories option on Google Photos.

Notably, Google released a new update back in October for iOS. It added a homescreen widget for the Google Photos app, but for iOS devices.

This homescreen widget cycles through the Memories album created by Google Photos automatically. On Android, the Google Photos Memories feature appears on top of the Photos tab.

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But soon, we may see Google add a homescreen widget, just like on iOS, for Android users that will enable users to view photos of their Memories album through a widget.

This new feature for Google Photos on Android was spotted on the app version 5.49, which is currently rolling out for users. Decompiling the APK that a widget is under construction.

There are multiple strings that show Google is indeed working on an iOS-like Google Photos homescreen widget for the Android app.

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However, do note that the features found on an APK teardown post dont necessarily mean that it will be available for everyone. It basically depends on Google, whether to include the spotted feature in the coming updates or not.

The strings on the widget suggest Memories album will include images from this week last year

For your reference, here are the strings of codes that folks at XDA found after the APK teardown of the Google Photos Android app version 5.49;

<string name = "photos_widget_account_not_found" > Account not found </string> <string name = "photos_widget_description" > Rediscover moments from Google Photos </string> <string name = "photos_widget_label" > Your memories </string> <string name = "photos_widget_loading" > Loading </string> <string name = "photos_widget_no_logged_in_account" > Please add your Google Account before setting up the Google Photos widget </string> <string name = "photos_widget_one_year_ago_title" > 1 year ago </string> <string name = "photos_widget_select_an_account" > Select an account </string> <string name = "photos_widget_this_week_subtitle" > This week </string>

Taking a look at the strings and widgets of the preview image section suggests that the Memories album will only show images for this week last year.

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Being an optimist, we hope this Google Photos homescreen widget app will behave more like how it does on iOS. Meaning you should be able to add a widget that cycles through all of your Memories album that is generated automatically by the app itself.

Even after finding the requisite receiver and activities being listed in the apps Manifest, our friends at XDA werent able to add the widget on the homescreen. Apparently, that is disabled at the moment. Google may enable this feature in a future update or via a server-side update.
A new Nokia-branded wireless earphone named Nokia Clarity Solo Bud+ has just picked up the FCC certification with the model number SB-501. The listing has revealed its design from all angles, along with some key specifications.

The Nokia Clarity Solo Bud+ is an old-school single-piece Bluetooth earphone featuring an ear-hook and a long stem with control buttons. The device prominently features the Nokia branding on the reflective outer surface. There are volume up and down buttons on the edge, which also double up as the controls to switch to the previous/next track.

A third multifunction button sits under the reflective surface that features the Nokia brand. This button can be used to play/pause the music, answer/reject incoming calls, end ongoing calls, or summon your connected devices voice assistant.

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The device houses a 95mAh battery, which charges through a USB Type-C port found at the top of the body. An LED indicator on the outside will show the battery status so you know when it needs charging. The user manual in the FCC listing suggests that the Nokia Clarity Solo Bud+ will be compatible with both Android smartphones and iPhones. However, some features like soundtrack instructions apparently do not respond to iOS devices.

The Nokia Clarity Solo Bud+ runs on Qualcomms QCC3020 SoC. It is an entry-level programmable Bluetooth Audio chipset with support for the companys aptX audio. Unfortunately, we dont have any information on the devices audio driver units as well as other features. However, its quite clear that the Nokia Clarity Solo Bud+ is an affordable single earpiece solution.

There are more Nokia wireless earphones in the works

The Nokia Clarity Solo Bud+ isnt the only unannounced Nokia-branded wireless earphone to appear on the internet recently. Nokia license HMD Global is seemingly working on several of them, with confusing names and sometimes, identical designs as well.

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Towards the end of May, the Nokia Solo Bud+ picked up the FCC certification with the model number SB-201. That was followed by the Bluetooth certification for the Nokia Comfort Earbuds (TWS-411), Nokia Comfort Earbud+ (TWS-411W), Nokia Go Earbuds+ (TWS-201), and Nokia Clarity Solo Bud+ (SB-501) in mid-June. Now, the latter, i.e. the Nokia Clarity Solo Bud+ has received the FCC certification. So thats five of them.

While some of these earphones support Bluetooth 5.1, some others support Bluetooth 5.0. However, apart from these, not much is known about how each of these devices differs from the other. We will have to wait for more information to emerge. Perhaps, with the devices picking up necessary certifications thick and fast, it may not be long before they go official. Once they do, we will make sure to let you know.
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(ANSA) - ROME, JUL 2 - Italian and Albanian police on Friday arrested 38 Albanian people in a probe into a drug trafficking operation between Albania and Puglia, judicial sources said.

The arrests were made in Albania, Italy, Montenegro and Spain, sources said.

Those arrested have been charged with drug trafficking, corruption, abuse of office and money laundering.

Assets worth millions of euros were seized in the probe.

The probe, which use d informants, led to the arrest in Albania of a public prosecutor, a public administrator, three police functionaries and two members of the police escort of a former Albanian minister.

The Albanian public officials in some cases were the owners of the drugs and ensured that shipments were made to Puglia "in full safety and security", police said.

The offences date back to the 2014-2017 period, police said.

Four powerful Albanian crime organizations worked with Puglian gangs to move "huge" quantities of drugs, police said. (ANSA).


Syria: minors transferred from Al Hol camp, Kurds 30 teens moved, aid requested for 15 rehabilitation centers

(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, JULY 2 - Syrian Kurdish authorities have transferred a reported 30 teens from the Al-Hol camp to a rehabilitation center for the children of jihadists, asking for international aid to create about 15 similar institutions, a local official has said.



The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has sounded the alarm on the detention "of hundreds of children, mostly teens, some as young as 12" in "prisons for adults, which are not places for them".



After leading several offensives against ISIS, the semi-autonomous Kurdish authorities in northeastern Syria are now managing the presence in their prisons of thousands of fighters and of thousands of women and children in camps.



Recognizing the detention condition of many minors, Abdelkarim Omar, the foreign affairs chief of the Kurdish administration, however said they were separated from adults in special lodgings, highlighting the importance of creating rehabilitation centers.



"The place for children is neither a prison nor a camp", he told the AFP news agency, confirming that between 30 and 35 minors over the age of 12 were taken away from the Al-Hol camp and that a rehabilitation center for them in Hassake (in the north-east) will be "ready in the coming days".



Al-Hol has become a real tent camp hosting nearly 62,000 people - including about 10,000 foreign women and children according to the UN, which warned against "radicalization cases". (ANSAmed)
Migrants: eight bodies found off Sfax after shipwreck 13 rescued, search operations continue; 33 others saved

(ANSAmed) - TUNIS, JULY 2 - The Tunisian coast guard found the bodies of eight migrants who were on a boat that sank off Sfax in the night between Wednesday and Thursday, said the spokesman of the National Guard, Houssemeddine Jebabli. He added that 13 migrants who were on the same boat were rescued and that search operations for potential survivors are ongoing.



According to Jebabli, 33 sub Saharan migrants were also rescued by coast guards off Sfax after their boat, which left from Sidi Mansour to reach Italy's coast illegally, had started to take on water. (ANSAmed)
Bill Cosbys release from prison has given hope to lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell that her sex trafficking charges might also be thrown out, a newspaper has reported.

Cosby was released from jail on Wednesday after three years of a three to 10-year sentence for sex assault. A judge in Pennsylvania overturned his conviction based on an earlier non-prosecution agreement with the 83-year-old.

Now, Maxwells lawyer David Oscar Markus says the same principle should be applied to his client, who is charged with procuring teenage girls for her former partner Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse.

Mr Markus told The Daily Telegraph the British socialite should be freed due to a 2007 plea deal struck with Epstein. That agreement allowed Epstein to avoid prosecution on federal sex-trafficking charges if he pleaded guilty to lesser state crimes, and shielded his alleged co-conspirators from prosecution, the paper said.

I am hopeful that the Maxwell judge will reconsider her decision in light of the Cosby opinion, Mr Markus told the Telegraph.

If not, then there will be a trial and hopefully an appeal wont be necessary as the case is so weak. But if so, then this will be a primary issue for us.

Ghislaine Maxwell is charged with procuring girls for Jeffrey Epstein (Jim James/PA)

Federal prosecutors have said Epsteins plea deal does not apply to Maxwell as it was negotiated in Florida and not the Southern District of New York, where she has been charged.

Prosecutors have also maintained that because Maxwell was not involved with negotiations around the deal, she cannot enforce its provisions.

Mr Markus argued their reasoning makes no sense, saying: We have one federal government, and the agreement says clearly that the United States would not prosecute Maxwell.

Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to six counts including sex trafficking of a minor and sex trafficking conspiracy. Her trial is scheduled for November.
The Queen has hosted Angela Merkel at her Windsor Castle home as the politician made her final visit to the UK as German Chancellor.

After a day of talks with Prime Minister Boris Johnson at Chequers, Mrs Merkel sat down for a meeting with the Queen.

Just a few hours earlier, the informally dressed Queen had joined visitors at the Royal Windsor Horse Show and she clearly enjoyed herself watching horses and ponies being put through their paces.

During a press conference with the prime minister, Mrs Merkel gave an update on her position on Britons visiting the continent, saying those who had been double-jabbed should be able to holiday in Europe without quarantine in the foreseeable future.

The head of state and the German Chancellor posed for a picture before their audience began at the Queens Berkshire home.

The pair met only a few weeks ago when the UK hosted G7 leaders in Cornwall and the Queen led her family at a reception for the foreign guests at the Eden Project.

The Queen receives German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Steve Parsons/PA)

After a family photo with world leaders, Mrs Merkel walked over to the Queen and thanked her for posing for the picture, saying: Thank you for doing that for us.

The Windsor Castle meeting comes days after England defeated Germany 2-0 to in Euro 2020, crushing their old rivals dreams.

The Queens great-grandson Prince George, with his parents the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, were among those at Wembley on Tuesday night to see England beat Germany in a tournament knockout game for the first time since 1966.
HONOLULU (AP)  A cargo plane made an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii early Friday and both people on board have been rescued.

The pilots of the Transair Flight 810 had reported engine trouble and were attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to land the Boeing 737 cargo aircraft in the water, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Commander Karin Evelyn said in an email that they received a report around 1:40 a.m. of a downed inter-island transport plane. About an hour later, rescuers in a Coast Guard helicopter spotted the debris field and two people in the water, Evelyn said.

One person was hoisted into the helicopter and taken to Queens Medical Center in good condition, Evelyn said. The Honolulu Fire Department rescued the other person who was also in good condition, she said.

The plane debris remains, Evelyn said, and the Coast Guard will evaluate the pollution at first light.

According to the state Department of Transportation, the crash happened about 2 miles (3 kilometers) off Kalaeloa Airport, Hawaii News Now reported.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate.

No other information was immediately released.
By APD writer Melo M. Acuna

MANILA  Chinese Embassys Charge dAffaires Tan Qingsheng said from a small group of 50 members in 1921, it has become the worlds largest Marxist ruling party with 95 million members.

Speaking at the online Forum on the Role of the Communist Party of China sponsored by the Association for Philippines China Understanding (APCU), Charge Tan said transformation has taken place under the leadership of the Party.

Under the leadership of the CPC, China has achieved its industrialization in just a few decades that took development Western countries several centuries, hailed as the greatest economic revolution in the history of mankind, said Charge Tan at an online forum entitled Celebrating the Centenary Anniversary of the Communist Party of China.

In his remarks entitled Role of the Communist Party of China in the Making of Modern China, Charge Tan said the countrys leadership has worked hard for the common good of the world and strongly committed to building a community with a shared future for mankind.

He added China now stands as the worlds second largest economy and largest trader of goods. He said there are 30,000 kilometers of high-speed train lines which is more than two-thirds of the worlds total.

Charge Tan added the government lifted over 800 million people from poverty which is more than 70 percent of the global total and has made great contribution to the world poverty reduction program.

He claimed China has established what he described as highly efficient governance system with their peoples congresses, CPC-led multiparty cooperation and political consultation along with regional ethnic autonomy, and self-governance at the grassroot level.

Unknown to many, China has become the largest contributor of peacekeepers among the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council as well as the second largest funding contributor to the UN peacekeeping operations.

China stand ready to deepen win-win cooperation with other countries, including the Philippines, to build a community with a shared future for mankind and will continue to further exchanges with the political parties of the Philippines, he concluded.

(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
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When you picture a Jeep breaking free of the roads and traversing the trails where four-door sedans wont tread, what kind of landscape comes to mind?

Perhaps you think of the deserts of the Southwest, where the tires kick up sand and dust, or maybe the Big Sky Country of the Intermountain West, bounding up and down the hills in what may be America at its most picturesque. You may even picture a Jeep twisting and turning through the forests of Michigans Upper Peninsula  though the less said about Michigan here, the better.

Ohio may not conjure up those same images, but the Buckeye State is still a haven for outdoor enthusiasts seeking some thrills off the beaten path. Eastern Ohios position along the edge of Appalachia makes it a scenic and exciting setting for off-road excursions. Plan a trip to one of the best off-roading destinations in Ohio and take in the excitement of driving beyond the highways.

Monday Creek OHV System

Southeast of Columbus lies Wayne National Forest, which boasts more than 250,000 miles of parkland in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, the range that separates the Midwest from the South and Northeast. Theres much more to Ohio than cornfields, as this reserve proves, with its miles of off-highway vehicle trails for Jeeps, mountain bikes, and ATVs to explore. It may be a bit of a trip from north central Ohio, but its well worth the journey.

Hanging Rock OHV System

Further south in Wayne National Forest  closer to Ashland, Kentucky, than to Ashland County  is Hanging Rock, a region along the Kentucky and West Virginia borders where strip-mining for natural resources ravaged the land but left behind exciting topographic challenges for off-roaders. Dirt paths and ponds combine for a fun but muddy experience.

Please bear in mind that the Wayne National Forest itself does not allow Jeep use on any of its trails.

Heiney Farm

Funny name, serious fun: this private plot of land is open to off-roaders who plan group excursions in advance. The farmland straddles wide-open fields and light wooded areas, providing challenges and contrast for off-road drivers. With campsites available as well, its the perfect place to take advantage of everything your Jeep can do, from tackling the trails to towing a camper for staying overnight.

Southington Offroad Park

Midway between Akron and the Pennsylvania state line is one of the best off-roading destinations in Ohio: Southington Offroad Park, which features a full range of trails for novices, intermediate off-roaders, and veterans of all things wild. No mountain bikes or ATVs here  this is reserved for Jeep drivers to hit the trails and do some camping afterward.
Applicants do not need a job offer to apply

New Delhi: Britain on Thursday announced that it has opened a "new graduation route" that will allow international students, including those from India, to stay longer in the UK after they have finished their studies there. The Graduate route visa, announced last year by UK home secretary Priti Patel, offers overseas students the option to apply for the right to stay in the country for job experiences at the end of their university courses.

The graduate route visa, open for applications from this week, is for international graduates who have been awarded their degree from a recognised UK university to stay on and look for work for at least two years, or three years for Doctoral PhD students

Applicants do not need a job offer to apply and, crucially, there are no minimum salary requirements or caps on numbers, allowing graduates on the route to work flexibly, switch jobs and develop their career as required.

In a statement, the British High Commission (BHC) said on Thursday, A new graduate immigration route has been opened by the UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, for applications today (1 July 2021), allowing Indian students the opportunity to stay longer in the UK after they have finished their studies. The Graduate route provides an opportunity for talented international students who have been awarded their degree to stay in the UK and work, or look for work, at any skill level for at least two years.

The BHC added, For the first time, the vast majority of applicants to the Graduate route will be able to apply in a fully digital way, using the UK Immigration ID Check smartphone app. Successful applicants will be issued an eVisa and be able to conveniently access this status whenever needed to prove their rights in the UK. This is a more convenient application process which means applicants will not have to visit a UK Visa and Citizenship Application Service or re-submit their biometrics. Customers who cannot use the app can still apply online but will need to visit a UK Visa and Citizenship Application Service.

Ms Patel was quoted as saying, Under the UK Governments points-based immigration system, talented students from India and across the globe now have the opportunity to kick start their careers in the UK at the highest levels of business, science, technology and the arts. Once theyve received their world-leading qualification from one of our fantastic education institutions, this new visa will give them the freedom to fulfil their aspirations and advance their careers.

Acting British High Commissioner Jan Thompson said, The numbers show that UK universities are already a popular destination for Indian students, who contribute immensely to the unique living bridge that exists between the UK and India. The Graduate route will further help students who wish to stay and work in the UK, strengthening this bond between our two countries even more. Cooperation in higher education is one of the crucial commitments in the UK and Indias 2030 Roadmap, and this is another positive step in that direction."
The Indian mission has already taken up the issue strongly with the Pakistani authorities through a note verbale

There was no official comment on the incident. (Photo: AFP/File)

New Delhi: A drone was spotted over the Indian High Commission complex in Islamabad late last week, prompting India to lodge a strong protest with Pakistan over the incident, people familiar with the development said on Friday.

They said India considered the incident as a breach of security that triggered concerns in the mission.

The Indian mission has already taken up the issue strongly with the Pakistani authorities through a note verbale.

There was no official comment on the incident yet that came to light amid growing concerns in the security establishment in India after explosives-laden drones were used to carry out an attack on the Jammu Air Force station on June 27.

According to security officials, it was the first instance of suspected Pakistan-based terrorists deploying unmanned aerial vehicles to strike at vital installations in India.

Army Chief Gen MM Naravane on Thursday said that the easy availability of drones has increased the complexity of security challenges from both state and state-sponsored actors.

A day after the attack on the Air Force station attempts to target the Ratnuchak-Kaluchak military station in Jammu with drones was thwarted by soldiers.
The BJP legislature party is due to meet in the state capital on Saturday to choose his successor

New Delhi/Dehradun: Uttarakhand chief minister Tirath Singh Rawat resigned late on Friday night when he met state governor Baby Rani Maurya in Dehradun, after holding the post for less than four months. The BJP legislature party is due to meet in the state capital on Saturday to choose his successor.

Mr Tirath Rawat, who replaced Trivendra Singh Rawat as CM on March 10 but was an MP, not a member of the state legislature, was required under the Constitution to get elected to the Assembly within six months, by September 10, to continue as CM. But with the Election Commission now unlikely to hold any byelection, as fresh Assembly elections are due in just over seven months, the state was facing a constitutional crisis, as Mr Tirath Rawat himself said.

The BJP was anyway looking for a change of guard in the state as it did not want to go into an election under the current CMs leadership. The BJP bagged 56 out of the states 70 Assembly seats in 2017 but retaining power in next years Assembly polls may be a challenge, partly because of a resurgent Congress Party.

Mr Rawat went to Raj Bhavan to resign hours after returning from New Delhi, where he had been summoned by the BJPs top leadership on Wednesday. He met both BJP president J.P. Nadda and home minister Amit Shah in the national capital.

The CM held a press conference in Dehradun late Friday soon after he returned from Delhi to highlight the development work, including Covid-19 relief measures, undertaken during his 117-day tenure, but did not say anything about whether or not he had offered to resign.

For the BJP, already mired in Covid-19 mismanagement issues during the Kumbh Mela and corruption allegations, and with the Congress in a resurgent mode, a third CM in its five-year tenure will only add to its already existing worries. Earlier, its decision to change Trivendra Singh Rawat in March, less than a year ahead of polls, had put a question mark on its rule and gave enough ammunition to the Opposition party.

A BJP legislature party meeting will take place Saturday where central observers, including Union minister Narendra Singh Tomar, will oversee the process of choosing Mr Rawats successor.

While a constitutional crisis was cited for Mr Tirath Singh Rawats exit, speculation was rife that it would not be easy for Mr Rawat to win the bypolls  in case the EC agreed to hold them -- if he was not fielded from a party stronghold. Two Assembly seats are now vacant -- Gangotri and Haldwani -- after the death of sitting MLAs, including Congress stalwart Indira Hridayesh, who represented Haldwani Assembly constituency.

What made matters complicated for him was the ECs decision to defer the holding of some Lok Sabha and Assembly bypolls due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The poll panel had said it would not be appropriate to hold the electoral exercise till the pandemic situation improves significantly.

Observers said with the Assemblys term coming to an end in less than a year, the EC was under no compulsion to order bypolls for vacant seats. Scathing criticism by the courts of the string of elections held during the Covid-19 pandemic may have also contributed to the ECs decision on the Uttarakhand byelections.

Section 151A of the Representation of the People Act 1951 mandates the Election Commission to fill vacancies in Parliament and state legislatures through bypolls within six months from the date of occurrence, provided that the remainder of the term of the new member is one year or more. The term of Uttarakhand Assembly is due to end in March.

Political observers said the Centre might also not press for holding byelections in Uttarakhand as these are also due in other parts of the country and the hill state cannot be made an exception.
The successful campaign 'Operation All Out' launched by the Indian security forces through 2017-18 triggered the Pulwama attack in 2019

It is not something really unexpected. Whenever a serious initiative is taken by the establishment in India towards normalisation of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir or a fillip is given to a process which is otherwise languishing, there invariably comes a dampener in the form of an unexpected high-profile event. Such events become trendsetters or an element of transformation in the conflict situation, both in the military and political fields. Former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayees famous Lahore Yatra ended with the Kargil intrusion in 1999. Narendra Modis effort to give India-Pakistan relations a touch of informality with his surprise visit to Nawaz Sharifs family home outside Lahore in December 2015 was met a week later by the Pathankot attack on the first day of 2016. The successful campaign Operation All Out launched by the Indian security forces through 2017-18 triggered the Pulwama attack in early 2019; the aim was to send home a message on the relevance of the proxies. Given this backdrop, as soon as the top Indian leadership invited 14 leaders of J&Ks mainstream political parties for talks and consultations to break the ice after the two-year disquiet, an initiative dampener designed to take away attention from the positives was expected. In the context of our current times, such an expectation should also have been because of the relative frustration among those who are opposed to the Indian narratives over J&K. In the two years since the constitutional decisions, the Indian government broke the stranglehold that separatists, terrorists and Pakistans Deep State had established in J&K. By its relentless actions against inimical elements and a successful programme of cultivation of international opinion, the government made all these supposed stakeholders irrelevant to the people of J&K.

Was the drone attack serious enough to be classified as a spectacular event which could prospectively have an effect on the J&K situation? We have had mass casualty events earlier which acted as trendsetters and had the potential of being gamechangers. The 2016 Uri attack and 2019s Pulwama were two such events. Both acted as sparks with the message of extant proxy capability and to convey that the battle was still on. So, unlike conventional operations, this is a typical characteristic of hybrid conflict; it rises and falls in intensity and manifestation. After the successful run of counter-terror operations through the 1990s, the proxies adopted the so called fidayeen tactics of suicide attacks on Indian forces camps and government installations. This forced the deployment of an out-of-proportion ratio of troops to secure billets, camps and facilities. For some time, it did create fair consternation in the forces ranks. The run of such attacks lasted for about five years, by when the forces found solutions to reduce their impact. But making suicide attacks impossible could never be achieved.

There is another interesting analogy which deserves recall. We were hit hard by the improvised explosive devices used by the LTTE in Sri Lanka. That threat came back to hit us in Kashmir too in the 1990s. It was supposed to be crude technology which should have been countered by sophisticated neutralisation through the electronic spectrum, especially when the trigger system moved on to the remote mobile type. For a long time, the Army tried a plethora of neutralisers, but the IED has continued to remain a threat till as late as Pulwama. The United States was hit by car bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq; no credible counter to that has yet been developed. What I am alluding to is the fact that counters to an emerging technology or even a crude antiquated one may not always be found. One has just to learn to minimise the impact if the device gets past all security and manages to strike. This is exactly what the threat from drones may end up as. We are just witnessing the advent of drone tactics in the field, in the terrorist domain in our environment and there is unnecessary finger pointing alleging tardiness by the military. In the armed forces, a lot of effort has been going on in the past decade to study the threat from drones, but more in the domain of conventional warfare employing armed fixed-wing drones. The use of the quad and hexa helicopters of a smaller variety have also been under the scanner ever since logistics drops from across the border were seen in Punjab and parts of Jammu division. The feasibility of the use of these to drop lethal payloads or be employed as rammers from the sky was anticipated. Now that the nature of threat becomes more focused, the specific measures to counter them will be refined progressively. Besides technology, which is the obvious answer, there will have to be awareness training and specific reporting procedures developed for the civilian population too as the threat is of a nature that can proliferate rapidly. It will not be restricted to military targets alone, but also to a wider variety which will have an effect on society at large; recalling the basics of the terrorist mantra.

Did the Jammu incident and the subsequent sightings of drones have a specific purpose? I call these relevance operations, desperate efforts at the revival of relevance. The Lashkar-e-Tayyaba is under pressure with Hafiz Saeed serving a jail sentence due to his involvement in terror financing. Recently, blasts have occurred outside his house in Pakistan with reported casualties. The LeTs capability to be of significance in Kashmir has taken a beating and it is desperate to get back to business, especially since the Deep State in Pakistan will want it to keep the resistance alive even as they worry about Afghanistan. That task may manifest itself in different ways; perhaps a drone threat is one way, the innovative one.

Lastly, a question that is being frequently asked in several quarters if whether a drone attack on an Air Force base is an act of war? It is best to parry that question for now, more due to the regional geopolitical environment and the developing internal dynamics in J&K. Specific answers to this question will not be available as the issue remains rooted in the grey zone. Its not as if we are giving Pakistan any leeway. Its just that we are recognising the world has moved far beyond the either/or labelling of events which might require specific responses. Our response too may be in the realm of pragmatic realism, which is awaiting the right opportunity.
AIMF board member Altaire Cambata participates in the fifth Global Meeting of the Mountain Partnership held in December of 2017 at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations headquarters in Rome, Italy.
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The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, which is getting ready to celebrate Independence Day on July 4, has stolen this title from Europe, with the Molsheim automaker stating that orders were up seven times in the first half of the year, compared to 2020.These excellent results are, in part, due to our engaged dealer network in North America, said the brands regional COO, Cedric Davy, adding that since they brought the Chiron Pur Sport to showrooms across the U.S., 70% of orders came from customers who are new to the brand. As a result, the French company expects a record 2021 in the market.The Chiron Pur Sport celebrated its local premiere this a few months ago, at Willow Springs, subsequent to traveling all over Europe.Thanks to its numerous upgrades over the regular Chiron, such as the more advanced aerodynamics, stiffer suspension, shorter gear ratio, additional driving mode, and so on, the Chiron Pur Sport has stunned those who have had the chance to drive it.With 1,479 horsepower (1,500 PS / 1,103) and 1,180 pound-feet (1,600 Nm) of torque available via the right pedal, produced by the 8.0-liter, quad-turbo W16 engine, the limited edition hypercar takes a neck-snapping 2.3 seconds from zero to 62 mph (0-100 kph), and will tap out at 217 mph (350 kph).Production of the Chiron Pur Sport is limited to 60 cars, and youll need very deep pockets to buy it, as each one has a $4 million starting price.
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Finally, a law suit over something profoundly important! https://t.co/AjOR4wTg5o  Tom Miller (@millerworks) June 29, 2021

Heres a headline you probably didnt expect to be reading today: one artist from Florida, U.S., plans to sue another artist from Italy because, earlier this year, he (the Italian) was able to sell what he called the first-ever sculpture of nothing. The American now says he did it first.They say NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are the future. As the world is slowly becoming more technologized, humanity is dreaming of a future in which even art will be enjoyed digitally. The NFT market is blooming, with everyone from carmakers to watchmakers , fashion and shoe designers and architects, musicians and everyone else in between rushing to grab a piece of the pie.Certain folks might think that the whole NFT craze is just insane, with people throwing away fake money at stuff that doesnt even exist, but those caught up in the craze swear this is the future So, when Italian Salvatore Garau auctioned off his latest work, I Am, in May this year for an estimated $18,000, the media and the artistic community rushed to draw comparisons between it and NFTs. Garaus sculpture was even better than NFTs, it was said, because it did not exist , neither in the digital realm or reality. It was immaterial, invisible, a void filled with the energy of the object that had been removed from that space. Because the sculpture did not exist, it had no footprint, so it was the very definition of sustainabilitywhich you cant say about either NFTs or the cryptocurrency used to buy them.Now that the media attention around Garaus work has died down, another artist is vying for it. His name is Tom Miller, a known multidisciplinary performance artist from Gainsville, Florida, and he claims to have created a sculpture out of nothing first. Called Sculpture of Nothing, Made from Nothing or Nothing, for short, it was revealed to the public in 2016, when it was instilled in Bo Diddley Plaza. He even has a certificate from the council attesting that the artwork went up in the specified location.Like Garaus piece, Millers doesnt exist. Its invisible, has no physical representation, and lives only in the minds of those who see it or find out about it. In fact, Miller tellsaffiliate WCJB , the similitude between the two works of art is too much. Put it simply, Garau stole Millers idea and made a lot of money selling it as his ownand a world first Miller claims he called Garau as soon as he found out about this supposed revolutionary piece of art, but he was dismissed. He then contacted an Italian lawyer to see about his options, and, by the looks of it, theyre pointing him in the direction of a lawsuit. Not to overgeneralize or anything, but Americans are known to be very lawsuit-happy, so if Miller does file, it should surprise no one.The space in our world is legitimate to work with as an artistic product. So the idea is fashioning nothing into a sculpture, and thats what the lawsuit is all about, Miller says, explaining how all he ever wanted was proper attribution. If you Google Tom Miller Nothing you can easily see I had this whole paradigm sorted out before before Salvatore Garau ever even thought of doing a sculpture of nothing.We could dissect this kerfuffle in a variety of ways. The easiest way would be to say that two grown men who literally contributed nothing to our reality are fighting over whos the brainiest artist. We could discuss about how art is constantly cannibalizing itself, so nothing truly new is ever created. Miller himself admits that he got the idea for his Nothing from John Cages piano concert Four Minutes and Thirty Four Seconds, during which time Nothing was performed on the piano. We could flip the argument on its head and note how attribution is important, especially if you come up with the concept of creating art out of Nothing, arguably an impossible mission.Or we can laugh. Out of all the pretentious, artsy-fartsy squabbles, this is probably tops. Invisible sculpture might be revolutionary and sustainable, but its also, you know, non-existent. And people are fighting because of it. Its best to stick with NFTs, even if that means paying half a million bucks for a house on Mars that doesnt exist either. At the very least, you get a nice video with soothing music.End this on a high note, with 433.
It looks like we might be hearing about more and more wind-powered vessels in the near future. One of them, the EcoClipper500, draws inspiration from the past and brings a historical design to modern times.First of all, what is a clipper? Its a vessel with sharp lines, which is meant to reach high speeds, with tall masts and, most of all, with the largest possible spread of canvas to help it reach those speeds  this is what sailors said back in the day and its still true.EcoClipper, a Dutch young company (founded in 2018), is determined to adapt the clipper concept to modern times, by creating an emission-free, wind-powered ship based on an 1857 model.Called Noach, this clippership was considered, at the time, the fastest Dutch sailing vessel. The new EcoClipper500 will be built based on the design of this historic ship. 59-meter (193.5 feet) long, this modern version will be able to transport not only 500 tons of cargo, but also a total of 60 people (including passengers, crew members and trainees), thanks to its twin deck construction (one below another).The most important aspect of the future clipper is that its designed to have the maximum propulsion power that an emission-free ship can get. In order to do so, it will be rigged with 3 square masts and more than 23 sails, which will amount to a total of 976 m2 of sail area, while hydro-generators will provide the electricity it needs.The EcoClipper500 is currently being developed in partnership with Cape Horn Engineering, a marine technology consultant that will help adapt the original design of the Noach clipper and create the best hull design for the future ship.
The mechanical predator comes equipped with a two-stroke 249cc V-twin powerplant that boasts a healthy compression ratio of 13.2:1. Despite its tiny displacement, the liquid-cooled fiend is capable of producing as much as 70 hp at around 11,900 rpm.On the other hand, a peak torque output figure of 28 pound-feet (38 Nm) will be accomplished at 10,750 spins. The force makes its way to a chain final drive via a six-speed transmission, enabling the RS250 to cover the quarter-mile distance in 12.5 seconds at 107 mph (172 kph). Moreover, its top speed is rated at a generous 130 mph (209 kph).An aluminum twin spar frame s tasked with holding the powertrain components in place, and it rolls on five-spoke hoops with a diameter of 17 inches on both ends. The Italian gem will tip the scales at a mere 311 pounds (141 kg) before receiving any of the necessary fluids. Long story short, this sexy thing is a force to be reckoned with, alright?On that note, we have the pleasure of introducing you to an RS250 Loris Reggiani Replica thats searching for a new home at no reserve. The ongoing auction is happening on Bring A Trailer , where youll be able to place your bids until Thursday, July 8. At this time, the top bidder is offering a hefty $11,000 to get their hands on Aprilias limited-edition treasure.However, the bike youre seeing here is a little different to a factory-spec beast developed by the House of Noale . In terms of suspension, it features a 99 MY RS250 Cups inverted forks up front and a top-grade Penske Racing monoshock on the other end. The wheels have been enveloped in high-performance rubber from Dunlops inventory, while an aluminum subframe and several titanium goodies help to reduce the motorcycles dry weight to 302 pounds (137 kg).Additionally, the engine was thoroughly rebuilt using new spark plugs and pistons, as well as ported cylinder heads, a higher-spec crankshaft and fresh valves. The mill exhales a bit more freely via an aftermarket exhaust system that wears a pair of carbon-clad Arrow mufflers. Last but not least, extra stopping power is achieved thanks to premium front brake discs from BrakeTech.
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Pricing for the UK market hasn't been announced, but in mainland Europe, the 2021 Alfa Romeo Giulia GTA starts at 175,281 ($207,743). By comparison, one could get two brand new BMW M3 Competitions for the cost of a single Giulia GTA. The more track-focused 2021 Giulia GTAm is even more expensive, at 180,281 ($213,669).Only a few hundred people will get to own the two hot Giulias, as production for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) regions is capped at 500 units. So far, the Italian automaker, which is part of the Stellantis Group, has no plans to introduce them in the United States, though some believe that it could be possible, at one point, so fingers crossed.Thanks to the expensive use of carbon fiber and composite materials, the 2021 Giulia GTA is 220 pounds (100 kg) lighter than the Quadrifoglio. It is also more powerful, with the twin-turbocharged 2.9-liter V6 engine getting redesigned rods and pistons, antune, and an Akrapovic exhaust system with central pipes.It produces 540 PS (532/ 397), a 30 PS (30 HP / 22 kW) boost, rocketing the car to 62 mph (100 kph) in just 3.6 seconds with the new Launch Control system engaged.The Giulia GTAm uses the same engine, in the same configuration, but doesnt feature rear seats, getting a half-cage instead, and space for helmets and a fire extinguisher. It also has racing harnesses, polycarbonate side and rear windows, a large front splitter, and a huge rear wing.
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As a star collector, Michelin stars that is, Massimo has built his career by blending Italian culinary tradition with freedom of expression. And we can see the latter reflected on this Maserati Levante too. The three-starred chef has a unique bond with speed and art. In his younger days, he loved racing through the Emilian countryside in vintage cars with his brothers.At the end of the races, the cars bodies were covered with splashes of mud. In order to keep the memory alive for longer, he would usually not wash the cars for days after these off-road adventures. Now, the 58-year old chef has tried to recreate one of those memories in a special Levante Trofeo.Part of the Maserati Fuoriserie customization program, which lets customers design their car according to their style and taste, this Fuoriserie Edition comes with a Blu Stradale exterior that perfectly contrasts the multi-colored splashes.The interior is also brushed with vivid colors. Its central console and the dashboard add a drop of life to the black canvas. From any direction you look at it, this Maserati represents an explosion of creativity. Being the brands first, this car makes for the ideal blank sheet for a powerful burst of energy. In the top-of-the-range Trofeo trim, with a 580 hp V8 engine, it combines performance and speed. Maserati and Massimo share the concept of self-expression, and the Levante Trofeo Fuoriserie Edition for Massimo Bottura embodies that. The machine, covered in multi-colored splats, was unveiled during Motor Valley Fest 2021 in Modena, Italy.
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Rosenbauer decided to call it revolutionary not only due to the battery pack that powers its two electric propulsion motors  one per axle. It also has a monocoque structure and other elements that make it quite a unique fire truck, such as its pneumatic suspension system. It reduces the ground clearance truck to grant easier access to equipment to firefighters. The cab can accommodate from four people up to nine crew members.In Europe, the RT is 7.20 meters (283.5 inches) long, 2.35 m (92.5 in) wide, and 2.90 m (114.2 in) tall with a 3.80 m (149.6 in) wheelbase  the smallest one available. In the US, due to different safety regulations, it is slightly longer: 7.30 m (287.4 in). The Rosenbauer electric truck can be ordered with a 4.10-m (161.4-in) and a 4.40-m (173.2-in) wheelbases.The suspension can have four operating ground clearances: 17.5 centimeters (6.9 in), 25 cm (9.8 in), 35 cm (13.8 in), and 47 cm (18.5 in). That allows the vehicle to overcome most obstacles in the way. The higher ground clearances are for off-roading or fording through floods if that is necessary.The electric fire truck has two battery pack options: one or two, which means you can order it with a single 50battery pack or with a pair, which increases the available energy to 100 kWh. The main one sits low between the front and rear axles, helping it lower its gravity center. The second one is installed vertically, standing between the water tank and the back wall of the cabin. The fire truck can carry 946 liters of water (250 gallons) or up to 3,785 l (1,000 gal). The European specs describe 1,000 l up to 4,000 l.The 100-kWh RT has a pure electric urban range of 100 kilometers (62 miles). Thats the distance the fully-charged battery packs take to have just 20% of capacity left. After that point, a 200-(268-hp) six-cylinder turbodiesel range extender automatically fires up to increase the range in 500 km (310 mi) for a total of 600 km (372 mi).The RT may never need to consume the 125 l (33 gal) of diesel in the fuel tank. However, an emergency vehicle cannot afford to run out of power, which makes the diesel backup a relevant one. We hope Rosenbauer considers fuel cells in the future to do the same job.With the battery packs at 100% of charge, the water pump can work continuously for one hour at 528 gpm until the charge falls to 20%. When the turbodiesel engine kicks in, the truck can keep pumping water for five hours more.The electric fire truck  which some will prefer to call a series hybrid  can have regular rear-view mirrors or cameras, with screens placed on each side of the windscreen. Inside the cabin, a 17-in screen helps firefighters receive instructions or the truck driver to control the vehicle and its functions better.The RT has all the safety aids we normally see in passenger cars, such as hill-assist, blind-spot monitoring, lane-departure warning, front collision warning, and some that are more specific to trucks, such as turning assist.The Rosenbauer RT will have an electric driveline created by Volvo Penta . It has four electric machines, as the supplier calls them: two for propulsion, one for the range extender to generate electricity, and one for electric power take-off. The image above, released by Volvo Penta, shows precisely where the two battery packs are, as well as the other components the company is sourcing to the RT.A revolutionary aspect of the RT that deserves to be mentioned is that its rear axle also steers. That gives the electric fire truck a turning circle of 12.5 m (41 feet) in the 3.80 m wheelbase version. The driver has the option not to use the rear axle turning, which raises the turning circle to 15 m (42.2 ft).They can also make the rear wheels steer in the same direction as the front wheels, delivering what Rosenbauer calls crab mode. Considering the RTs deliveries will start by the end of the year, it will beat the GMC Hummer EV on that. We cant wait to see them on duty.
As with many other aircraft, the F-16 is not exclusive to the U.S. Air Force, as it is shared with several allied countries (close to 30 of them) from all continents. The Royal Moroccan Air Force is one of the 30.The North African nation also holds joint training exercises together with Tunisia, Senegal, and some NATO countries. The largest military exercise it attended was "African Lion," which took place back in June with 7,000 troops taking to the desert.The main photo of this piece was taken during the said exercise and published last week by USAF. It shows a Royal Moroccan Air Force F-16 in desert camo overalls in very close proximity to a USAF KC-135 Stratotanker , getting its much-needed fuel to continue its run.The F-16, nicknamed Viper by USAF pilots who dreamed of themselves as protagonists in the Battlestar Galactica sci-fi series, can fly at speeds as high as Mach 2 (1,535 mph/2,470 kph) for as much as 2,620 miles (4,217 km) when using drop tanks.It can carry a wide range of weapons, from missiles to bombs, and is fitted with a Vulcan 6-barrel rotary cannon for high-intensity and close range engagement.Some of the planes of this kind are presently getting ready for a major upgrade when it comes to electronic warfare. L3Harris's Viper Shield , meant to better detect and counter threats, will be fitted on F-16 Block 70/72 aircraft configurations, namely the airplanes deployed by allied countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe.
The moment I saw the first start of the Meteor Interceptor a few days ago, I just knew I wanted to get in touch with its creator, Daniel Werner from Sweden. There were several things I wanted to ask him, so I started writing up all the questions that went through my mind. There has been a lot of work involved in developing this build from the ground up, and it's still not complete, but it's getting there.Non-petrolheads will sometimes tend to look at people with an overwhelming passion for cars and label that passion as a kind of illness. And to some extent, I can agree with that point of view. And as with all illnesses, there has to be a point of origin. And for most of us, that point of origin tends to be our childhood. So I asked Daniel about how his interest in cars came to be.I could see the whole picture painted from his very first sentence: "My father is a real petrolhead ." That pretty much explains everything. As the story goes on, we learned that Daniel's dad had over 70 cars in just ten years when he was young. Naturally, Daniel found himself behind the wheel at a young age, when he was just 11. He managed to save up enough money over the next five years to buy his car at age 16.Of course, he promised his parents that he would just work on the car and not drive it, but let's just say that he couldn't stay put, at least not when he was home alone. Daniel points out that growing up in Sweden in the '70s there would be two types of families: the ones that had Volvo s and the ones that had Saabs. Although his father had several American cars in his youth, by the time Daniel was born, he quickly became accustomed to Volvos.So it only made sense that his first car was going to be a 1977 Volvo 244. With him living in Sweden, he's owned several Volvos after that point in time, but he's also experienced various other brands such as BMW, Audi, Chevrolet, or Ford. One of the cars that he wishes he had kept to this day used to be a BMW M3 E46. I was curious to see what other major projects he had worked on before taking up the Meteor Interceptor.And to my surprise, he has only done minor things to his previous cars, and the V12 -powered Ford Crown Victoria is his first large-scale project. Talk about a brave move! Seeing the car, I immediately thought of the Y2K motorcycle, which is sort of a two-wheel equivalent, but Daniel assured me that he is more of a car guy and that he'd rather stick to four wheels instead. Then I kept thinking that he must have been a fighter-plane enthusiast or something along those lines.But his answer as to why he wanted to get involved in a project like this was fairly simple: "I have always wanted to put a large engine into a regular passenger car". Most of the cool swaps people usually dream about involve V8 engines of under 610 ci (10 liters) of displacement, but it just so happens that Daniel had bigger dreams than that. He put in years' worth of research until he met a Rolls-Royce aero-engine expert in Sweden.It was then that the idea of a Meteor engine came to be, as the Meteor is the tank version of the Rolls-Royce Merlin aero unit. This idea led him to travel over to the neighboring country of Finland, where someone had bought 50 old surplus engines from the Swedish military. These engines are quite popular in tractor-pulling races, a less known form of racing invented by man.I must admit that I've never done any research on tank engines up until I came across the Meteor Interceptor Ford Crown Victoria, so I wanted to get Daniel's thoughts on the whole thing. "Well in a way it is a great engine because it has 4 valves per cylinder, and it is made of aluminum. Since it was built for tanks, you could run it on almost any fuel. But the heads are not very good, the combustions chambers are very big and the valves are too small".Some of those issues might be addressed shortly, but no final decision on the topic has been reached yet. I had two other questions in my mind that I knew any petrolhead would fear to answer. These are the exact kind of questions I usually try to dodge as well because nobody likes to think of all the hours spent working on a project car or the money used to make it happen. But as things go among petrolheads , Daniel was lucky to have several of his good friends alongside him throughout the journey.I then asked him what were the main issues he had encountered with the build, and I kind of expected his reply. "To be honest with you, everything with this build has been a challenge. Since everything has to be custom made I cant point out anything more difficult than the other. But that is also why it has taken 5 years to come this far"Five years in, but they're oh so close to having it run at its full potential! They expect it to be ready this fall or winter, and after they manage to find a dyno that's capable enough, they'll set out to locate an old airfield in Sweden to go for the 200 mph (321 kph) test. But Daniel seems to be dreaming about taking the car to Bonneville Speedweek, so with any luck, we might see it there.As for Misha's proposal of taking the car to the 'Ring, Daniel doesn't expect the Meteor Interceptor to be particularly fast on the race track, as it was not built for that. Weight isn't that big of an issue, as this is only about 440 lbs (200 kgs) heavier than an original Crown Vic, and the way it's distributed isn't half bad either at about 55%-45%. However, it still won't set any track records, as fun as it may be when it gets there.I was curious to know what Daniel would do with the car after he's achieved everything he had set out to achieve. Even though he has never intended to build this project just to sell it afterward, he doesn't rule out the possibility of doing so if the resulting budget would allow him to develop something with an even bigger engine.Don't think of the sky as being your limit; go even further than that. As we wait to see the car doing some fast runs, I'll leave you with some short videos that showcase the project's development so far.
Known as the US-2, an upgraded version of its predecessor, the US-1, this amphibious STOL is currently in use with the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force (JMSDF) for search and rescue missions. All of its remarkable characteristics are put to good use when it comes to rescuing victims at sea or from remote islands.First of all, it has a much wider range compared to a helicopter (which is commonly used for search and rescue missions)  and that is 4,700 km (2,920 miles) versus 850 km (528 miles). With a cruise speed of 480 kph (298 mph), its also faster than helicopters (260 kph/161 mph).Perhaps the most crucial aspect is that it can access many more remote islands, compared to other types of aircraft, according to the studies performed by its manufacturer, Shinmaywa.Designed with some of the most remarkable STOL capabilities in the world, the US-2 needs only one-fourth of the standard take-off and landing distance of commercial airliners. And, as an amphibian, it can do the same on the water, where it also requires only 280 meters (918 feet) for take-off and 330 meters (1,082 feet) for landing.Of course, this also means it doesnt need a runway, which makes it a great option for accessing remote areas.This top-notch performance is due to the US-2 upgrades, which included a fly-by-wire (computer-controlled) flight system, a pressurized cabin, and new-generation high-powered engines (Rolls-Royce AE2100J).The company that built both the US-1 and US-2 has a long tradition in manufacturing powerful aircraft, including ancestors of todays amphibians. With the US-2, Shinmaywa considers that it has developed the best STOL amphibious in the world. Whether this is the case or not, the most important thing is that over 1,000 rescue operations were conducted so far by the two JMSDF amphibious aircraft.
If a celebrity said something bad about an American's rust bucket, they might get into a messy legal battle, right? So this must have been okay-ed by the big wigs at Universal just because it's about the UK. On the other hand, we'd like to think car people have thicker skin and can take a joke.And surprisingly, the famous actors liked some of the cars they were supposed to roast. There's one white Volvo in particular that we want to talk about. Car Throttle has made fun of it in the past, but we thought it was unfair from a channel/website that caters to the car modding scene. The owner of the C30 must have been pretty happy with John Cena coming to his "rescue" there.Cena appeared really knowledgeable in this video. For example, when talking about a record-holding Nissan Altima, he said there's not much point to doing a V6 quarter-mile car, as by the time you're done with the engine mods, you'd have spent more than on a V8 or a dedicated drag racing car.But the video starts with one of Car Throttle's own builds, the 3 Series hatch they recently had fitted with a heart-shaped bosozoku exhaust. We get why Ludacris says that should be taken off the road, but Fast & Furious was built on Japanese tuner culture. Plus, he's got a Maybach GLS , so don't listen to him.The "Act a Fool" rapper was also way too critical of a custom VW Scirocco. Admittedly, that thing was too low, and the wheels too big, but that's how they roll in the VW community. Also, James Pumphrey or Jason Camisa would have gotten really excited to see a Scirocco in any condition because they didn't sell that one in America.But everybody gets a Mazda Miata, and the Car Throttle team sneaks in Alex's custom example with a V6 swap to have it roasted. This is followed up by an E36 BMW M3, which Cena just loves and says "I wish I had a car like that when I was 17."
Top White House officials are mobilizing to defend Vice President Kamala Harris amid a gusher of leaks about dysfunction and infighting in her office.

Driving the news: White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told Axios in a statement: "The President's trust and confidence in her is obvious when you see them in the Oval Office together." Biden senior adviser Cedric Richmond said in an interview late Thursday night: "Its a whisper campaign designed to sabotage her."

Details: Their responses came after Axios approached the White House with new reporting about growing tensions between West Wing officials and the Harris team, including chief of staff Tina Flournoy.

Some White House officials have been frustrated by a series of missteps from Harris and increasingly public bickering in her orbit, which spilled out in a Politico story on Wednesday. Flournoy's old boss, former President Bill Clinton, came to her defense with a statement calling her "an extraordinary person."

Why it matters: 2024 is the elephant in the room. While Biden aides overwhelmingly believe he'll be the Democratic nominee, they also know he'd be 81 when seeking re-election.

An operation sometimes visibly out of sync with Biden's  and missteps during a recent trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, following a scrutinized interview with NBC's Lester Holt  have reignited questions from Harris' 2020 primary bid.

Harris would be the presumptive nominee if Biden didn't run. Administration sources believe it would be nearly impossible to unseat the first Black woman vice president.

Yet many Democrats, including some current senior administration officials, are concerned she could not defeat whomever the Republican Party puts up  even if it were Donald Trump.

One Democratic operative tells Axios' Alayna Treene that most Democrats aren't saying, "'Oh, no, our heir apparent is f***ing up, what are we gonna do? It's more that people think, 'Oh, shes f***ing up, maybe she shouldn't be the heir apparent.'"

Some Democrats close to the White House are increasingly concerned about Harriss handling of high-profile issues and political tone deafness, and question her ability to maintain the coalition that Biden rode to the White House, sources tell Axios' Hans Nichols.

What we're hearing: Relations between the West Wing and the Vice President's office are tense.

Several administration officials used "shitshow" when describing Harris' office, and contrast her operation with disciplined, virtually leakproof Biden aides.

Some Biden officials view the Harris operation as poorly-managed and staffed with people who don't have long-term relationships with her. They feel she's gotten bad advice from her press and communications shop and think it's telling that she's already lost two advance aides and a digital director.

Case in point: A few months ago, what should have been a no-brainer of a press request came to the vice president's office. Forbes wanted to feature Harris on the cover of its "50 Over 50" issue  saluting her rise to be the "first woman, the first Black person, and the first South Asian-American to become U.S. vice president."

After concluding that Flournoy had been sitting on the request  a characterization that an aide to the V.P. flatly disputes, explaining that she was simply nailing down details before sharing it with a larger White House circle  ultimately the West Wing intervened to get an answer for Forbes.

The vice president ended up participating  and getting glowing treatment. But Biden advisers couldn't understand why it had to be this hard, people familiar with the incident tell Axios.

What they're saying: Harris' senior adviser, Symone Sanders, and deputy chief of staff Michael Fuchs defended Harris and Flournoy. Harris' team notes the president has entrusted the V.P. with a portfolio that includes voting rights, migration from Central America, space, labor, broadband, small-business assistance and women in the workforce.

"People are not fighting every day," Sanders said. "There's not consternation among aides. That is not true. ... I hear that there are critics. Those who talk often do not know and those who know usually are not the ones talking."

Fuchs dismissed criticisms of Flournoy and Harris as "rumors" and "not true," and said they've shown integrity and leadership as the pandemic added more hurdles to an already difficult job.

Klain praised Harris and her team as "off to the fastest and strongest start of any Vice President I have seen," and said "her talents and determination have made a huge difference" already.

"Shes delivering for the American people on immigration, small business, voting rights, and economic growth," Klain said. "The results speak for themselves: a decline of border arrivals from the Northern Triangle, improved vaccine equity, and increased economic opportunities for women."

Richmond called Harris a "staunch advocate for the Biden-Harris agenda," and said demand for her participation in events remains high.
The State Revenue Committee (SRC) said on Friday that the Class A drug was hidden in a truck driven by the unidentified man and searched by law-enforcement officers at a customs checkpoint on the Armenian-Iranian border.

It released a video that shows plainclothes officers pulling plastic boxes out of makeshift metal containers attached to a truck body. The SRC said they found 119 such packs filled with heroin.

The market value of the confiscated narcotics varies from $10 million to $11 million, said Vartan Vartanian, the head of the SRCs anti-smuggling unit.

Vartanian indicated that more arrests could be made soon as a result of what was the second massive seizure of heroin reported in Armenia so far this year.

Together with our colleagues from the National Security Service and the police, we are now taking intensive, around-the-clock investigative measures to ascertain the circle of all individuals who may be connected with this crime, he said.

At least six Armenian and foreign nationals were arrested in late February and early March after the SRC claimed to have seized more than 365 kilograms of heroin also smuggled from Iran. The government agency comprising Armenias customs and tax services said that the drugs were destined for Europe.

Also in February, authorities in Bulgaria found 400 kilograms of heroin from Iran which they said arrived in the eastern European country in a container ship. They arrested two Turkish citizens on drug trafficking charges.

The largest drug bust in Armenias history was reported in 2014. Armenian authorities seized at the time as many as 850 kilograms of heroin which they said was smuggled from Iran by a drug trafficking ring led by a Turkish national. The latter was arrested and subsequently sentenced by an Armenian court to 19 years in prison.

Iran is believed to be the main source of drug trafficking in and through Armenia. Hundreds of Iranians as well as their local accomplices have been imprisoned in the South Caucasus country on corresponding charges since the 1990s.

Drug trafficking is a serious challenge for the Islamic Republic as it borders Afghanistan, the worlds largest opium producer, and Pakistan, a major transit country for drugs.
The Communist Party of China has won the Chinese peoples trust since its inception by defying numerous challenges and leading the country along the path of sovereignty, empowerment and socio-economic development, Pashinian said in a congratulatory message to Chinese President Xi Jinping sent on Thursday.

The achievements of the CPC continued and multiplied under your leadership, he wrote amid official celebrations of the jubilee held in Beijing.

Armenia is eager to further develop the friendly relations and ongoing mutually beneficial cooperation with the Peoples Republic of China. I am confident that the Armenian-Chinese relations will continue to strengthen and deepen for the benefit of our two countries and peoples, added Pashinian.

Former Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian also congratulated Xi on the occasion. He noted the Chinese Communist Partys deep and comprehensive partnership with his Republican Party of Armenia.

Both the current and former Armenian governments have maintained a cordial relationship with Beijing and sought to cement it with closer commercial ties. Xi called for joint efforts to elevate our multifaceted cooperation to a new level in a September 2020 letter to President Armen Sarkissian.

China solidified last year its position as Armenias second largest trading partner after Russia. According to official statistics, Chinese-Armenian trade rose by 2 percent to $965 million on the back of an almost 50 percent surge in Armenian exports to China totaling $290 million.

China thus accounted for 13.6 percent of Armenias foreign trade, compared with Russias 30.3 percent share in the total.
Crews recount rescue of two pilots after a cargo plane crashed off the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
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
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP)  The first cruise ship to leave a U.S. port since the coronavirus pandemic brought the industry to a 15-month standstill is preparing to set sail with nearly all vaccinated passengers on board.

Celebrity Edge will depart Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at 6 p.m. Saturday with the number of passengers limited to about 40 percent capacity, and with virtually all passengers vaccinated against COVID-19. Celebrity Cruises, one of Royal Caribbean Cruise's brands, says 99% of the passengers are vaccinated, well over the 95% requirement imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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To comply with both the CDCs requirement and a new Florida law banning businesses from requiring customers to show proof of vaccination, Celebrity Cruises is asking guests if they would like to share their vaccination status. Those who do not show or say they are vaccinated face additional restrictions.

Saturdays sailing kicks off the cruise lines return to business with Carnival vessels already scheduled to depart from other ports next month.

Celebrity Cruises had unveiled the $1 billion boat in December 2018  betting on luxury cruising, offering a giant spa and multifloor suites. The ship will be led by Capt. Kate McCue, the first American woman to captain a cruise ship, who has more than 1 million followers on TikTok.

Words cant describe how excited we are to be a part of this historic sailing today, said Elizabeth Rosner, 28, who moved from Michigan to Orlando, Florida, in December 2019 with her fiance just to be close to the cruise industry's hub.

Industry officials are hoping all goes smooth to move past a chapter last year of deadly outbreaks on cruise ships that prompted ships to be rejected at ports and passengers to be forced into quarantine. Some passengers died of COVID-19 at sea while others fell so ill they had to be carried out of the vessels on stretchers.

The CDC extended no-sail orders repeatedly last year as the pandemic raged, and came up with strict requirements for the industry that have already been contested in court by the state of Florida. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says the industry generates billions for the state's economy.

On Saturday, officials at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale said only that port lost more than $30 million in revenue in fiscal year 2020 from the cruise shutdown.

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During that hiatus, Carnival, Norwegian and Royal Caribbean, the three largest cruise companies, have had to raise more than $40 billion in financing just to stay afloat. Collectively they lost $20 billion last year and another $4.5 billion in the first quarter of 2021, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

The pandemic forced Kurt and Carol Budde to cancel their beach celebration wedding aboard the world's largest ship, Symphony of the Seas, in March 2020. COVID-19 halted cruising six days before they were scheduled to tie the knot in St. Maarten. Kurt Budde's part-time gig as a travel agent also dried up.

It's a honeymoon make-up cruise, said Kurt Budde, sporting matching shirts with the phrase On Cruise Control."

We are living our best lives post COVID today," he said.
Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas has welcomed its first class of developing physicians enrolled in its new internal medicine residency program. The system hopes the program will build more opportunities for future local medical students and improve physician recruitment.

The group of 18 doctors came from medical schools both across the world to learn from the system's physicians. Some of them may spend up to three years in the program serving Southeast Texas patients.

But they wont be the only ones.

The system plans to accommodate up to 39 residents when the program ramps up to full speed. Residents also will eventually be joined by medical students, who are observing in the Beaumont hospital as a part of Baptists partnership with Sam Houston State Universitys College of Osteopathic Medicine in Conroe.

Todd Senters, associate vice president of operations, said the move to create a learning hospital will give the system opportunities to advance the level of care and support it can give to its growing patient population. But it also helps solve the growing issue of physician recruitment that regional hospitals are confronting.

It can be difficult to recruit doctors into a market like this and even harder to explain the benefits of an area that candidates arent familiar with, Senters said. Programs like this are going to become best practice for making sure we have enough physicians to meet patient needs.

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The new program joins Baptists already-existing pharmacy practice program, which also welcomed new residents in June.

Combined with its Sam Houston partnership, Baptist hopes to leverage a kind-of educational pipeline where local students with a passion for serving their hometowns could go from Lamar University, to Sam Houston and back to Beaumont as a resident.

After an orientation day on June 30 where residents reviewed procedures and training, Thursday was their first full day of duties.

Physicians from the Baptist Physician Network, the group contracted to staff the systems hospital, and educators including Dr. Jim Barker from Sam Houston Universitys College of Osteopathic Medicine were on-hand to give skills demonstrations during the orientation.

Dr. Nikki Hancock, a network physician helping coordinate residents, said the program will be a foundational advancement for the area and could give participants a unique learning experience.

The size of this program means it will be a lot more personal and community based, with more time with patients, Hancock said. Its the only program like it in this area, which makes the residents learning a priority.

As the nations healthcare industry continues to consolidate and evolve and Texas communities increase in size, state agencies have predicted that shortages of health professionals could grow exponentially within the next few years.

A 2017 report from the Texas Department of State Health Services concluded that, by 2030, general internal medicine will have the greatest need for physicians.

In the Gulf Coast region, which includes most of Southeast Texas, demand for general internists will outpace supply by more than 15% by the beginning of the next decade.

Those changes will continue to disproportionately impact the states most rural areas, which Senters said has a potential snowball effect for systems like Baptist that increasingly see more patients from Newton, Jasper, Orange and other outlying counties.

When patients lack access to care, they delay their treatment, Senters said. That means when they reach us, they are in dire need. Thats why we have to find the next generation of professionals to provide the level of care they need and get to them sooner.

jacob.dick@beaumontenterprise.com

twitter.com/jd_journalism
MANISTEE  CASMAN Academy's opening budget for the 2021-22 school year is looking strong  so much so Manistee County School Business Cooperative finance director Kris Mauntler said now is the time to give CASMAN staff a pay raise.

"The budget is looking really good. ... I am recommending a 3% raise," she said. "We did talk about this in our finance committee meeting  even with that raise put in, and the budget being conservative, I still think we're going to end up in the black. I'm feeling comfortable about that, so that would be my recommendation for all staff at this time."

Mauntler attended a CASMAN school board meeting on June 28 to go over the budget which the board went on to unanimously approve.

Board treasurer Benjamin Beaumont, who serves on the financial committee, said the hard work of CASMAN staff is very much appreciated and he hopes it can be rewarded further in the future.

"We talked a little bit about the 3% increase for the teachers and we all thought we would like to do more. However, it's important that we keep our budget more on the conservative side so that the health of the school is in tact," he said. "I think it's important that since we're able to do something for the teachers that we make sure that's a priority and we do that. Again, hopefully moving forward we can do a little bit more, but I think we need to do that."

Mauntler said the budget was made using conservative estimates with regards to things like enrollment numbers and per-pupil funding.

"There is no state budget at this time. ... They're talking anywhere between $100-250 per student so we went with $100 just to be safe, knowing it will probably come in better," she said. "I figure that's the best way to go at this point, and then there's one-time federal funding that I did take out. Without that money in there, we're still looking at an estimated surplus of about $24,000."

Michigan lawmakers on Wednesday approved a $17.1 billion K-12 budget, which boosts overall funding by 10%. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is expected to sign the bill.

CASMAN is struggling to find a math teacher, so Mauntler budgeted money for Michigan Virtual, which would provide online math courses for CASMAN students.

"We did put in a virtual teacher for math. We're just having a really hard time finding a math teacher  a lot of our districts are," she said. "I think next year we're going to use Michigan Virtual unless we happen to get a teacher, so we do have that placeholder in there. ... I think it was about $36,000 for that class."

With the raises and allocation for Michigan Virtual, CASMAN has budgeted $181,343 for instruction for the upcoming school year.

Mauntler said Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding could strengthen the budget further if need be.

"(CASMAN director) Shelly (VanVoorst) and I have talked about that ESSER money. We can use some of it for custodial and if we do happen to have to go online we can use a portion for that," Mauntler said. "We did not put that in the opening budget. We're kind of holding back on that to see how our numbers come in and what it looks like, but it's there if we need it."

Beaumont said the school's financials look to be in good shape.

"In general terms, we're looking like we're moving in the right direction," he said. "Everything should be on par with where we want to be moving into the next school year."

The school board also voted to approve the final budget for the 2020-21 fiscal year, the surplus of which left CASMAN with a July 1 fund balance of $466,724.

"(There were) a couple changes between the amended and the final. We did use some ESSER money for supplies in the basic programs that I updated in the final," Mauntler said. "Then I removed the cushion for the operation and maintenance. When all is said and done, there's a surplus of about $84,000, which is very good. We definitely keep moving in the right direction, so we're very pleased with this final budget."

SEE ALSO:

CASMAN director proud of staff, students for adapting amid pandemic

Photos: CASMAN Academy holds commencement ceremony at Ramsdell Theatre
Just two days after holding a press conference to suspend the intake of animals at Laredo Animal Care Services following disturbing photos of animals in poor conditions that emerged on social media the night before, the City of Laredo stated that it officially concluded its investigation early on Thursday.

The city dismissed the legitimacy of the photos, stating that most were not recent and the others were not from the shelter.

As information was obtained during the investigation, city officials found that some of these images were not taken at the LACS shelter, some were taken last year during a previous administration and some of the pets were surrendered to the shelter in an ailing state due to animal cruelty they endured with their owner, the City of Laredo said in a statement regarding the investigation.

With the city announcing the end of the investigation, it also announced that it reinstated the interim director that had been demoted in the wake of the controversy in LACS Operations Manager Karina Elizondo. She also was elected in 2020 to Laredo College Board of Trustees Place 7.

The City of Laredo has concluded its investigation and found that the allegations of animal cruelty have been determined to be unfounded against Karina Elizondo, the city said. Robert Eads, Laredo City Manager, has requested that Ms. Elizondo returns to the position as Interim Animal Care Services Director, the position she held before the investigation.

Elizondo could not be reached for comment by LMT on Thursday.

The images originally were shared online with the Laredo community by citizen journalist Priscilla La Gordiloca Villarreal.

Omg!! I had been holding off on posting about the animal shelter located in Maher and holy s balls!! I will not stay (quiet) and I hope that something is done like ya!!! said La Gordiloca on Monday night. People need to be fired immediately!!! Im posting pictures and all so VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED!!

I have messaged most of council and City manager just now about this issue and its disturbing and unacceptable!!!! she continued an ensuing post containing the images. Karina Elizondo needs to be held accountable for this mess, its been months of messages after messages about the neglect and abuse of animals in this shelter! Someone needs to contact some animal activist that are going to come down and get s done here!! ... The City has failed these animals and continue to do so! ... The City Manager needs to grow a pair and STOP all this nonsense immediately!!! Enough is enough!!!

La Gordiloca shared that she met with Eads and then-interim leader of the shelter John Orfila, the City of Laredo Public Works Director, on Wednesday afternoon. She said the closed door meeting went absolutely awesome and a plan was set forth to get this shelter running the way it should.

However, La Gordiloca would not provide comment regarding the origin of the photos she shared or the timeframe they were taken. But after the city released its findings Thursday, she shared the press release to her followers and stated, Karina Elizondo was (given) back her position!

It is unfortunate that the shelter has come a long way historically and that false images have deviated the publics attention of what the real issue is, City of Laredo Veterinarian Dr. Sandra Leyendecker said. During Ms. Elizondos tenure, the shelter has had satisfactory inspections by the Texas Department of State Health Services. We continue to work diligently alongside city management to ensure the shelter remains in the best state possible, despite the unprecedented surge of stray animals, owner surrenders and lack of personnel.

As the photos have now come into question, one person close to the animal shelter argues that they are indeed not new. Animal shelter rescue volunteer Angie Ancira stated that she believed they were taken before Elizondo took her position.

Those pictures, I have seen them before, and the dog that is almost dying there he had parvo, Ancira said. Puppies do get that and get that way, but he was dying because the owner took him like that ... they could give it medicine, but not all dogs survive because parvo is a hard disease and very painful for the puppies.

Ancira said the pictures were not taken recently but during the previous administration by an employee who was let go. Ancira also said that the reason why the shelter looked in such disarray was not because of the leadership itself but rather because the workers and volunteers did little to clean and take care of the animals adequately, and also because no one is at the shelter over nights as workers clock in at 8 a.m. and the dogs dirty their kennels and their necessities during that time period.

Although she does not know if all the pictures are from the animal shelter  she believes some could be from other places as the city stated in its findings  she does state that most pictures are indeed from LACS just not recently.

The city further commented stating that the investigation was done in such a short period of time due to the photographs.

The investigation was done quickly because it was only on the validity of the pictures which was easily determined through intake records, City of Laredo Public Information Officer Noraida Negron said. Some of the pictures were clearly not from our shelter, some were old from a prior administration.

City of Laredo District IV Councilman Alberto Torres Jr., who has established various animal cruelty campaigns locally, stated that the investigation focused on the pictures and that the animal shelter was not deemed unsafe as it currently succeeds in all of the certifications it is required to have.

"The investigation by the city manager pertained exclusively to the pictures that circulated in social media, Torres said. It is my understanding from city management that historically shelter inspections by the Texas Department of Health Services have been satisfactory under the current administration. As per City Charter, Mr. Eads has sole oversight authority as it pertains to departments and personnel matters.

La Gordiloca posted a video on social media discussing the photographs indirectly but did not state where she obtained them from. She said she made it public after individuals like Ancira messaged her to talk about the animal shelter and its needs.

Ancira did state that she had been in contact with La Gordiloca and that the shelter is immensely in need of resources, stating city officials have not listened to the demands of the rescue volunteers. But she said that the efforts of La Gordiloca did not bring solutions but rather more problems as the suspension of the intake of new animals might lead to the killing of many others already in the shelter.

Even though the investigation concerning the photographs is now over, Torres stated that a staff report is still ongoing by the city management office to see if there are any more details and facts that need to be assorted. Nevertheless, Torres stated that he remains committed to supporting all pets in the community.

We await a staff report update on Mr. Eads findings and investigation conclusion, Torres said. I remain committed to working diligently to ensure we continue to provide the best care for our four-legged friends while working hand-in-hand with our community and rescue groups."

Eads, however, did provide a statement on Thursday night applauding the efforts of Elizondo with her work at the shelter and how unfortunate it was for the viral circulation of the photos for the reputation of the shelter.

Eads also commended Elizondos efforts against animal cruelty.

Karina Elizondo has previously proven results for the local animal shelter, Eads said. For example, she has launched an animal cruelty campaign with the purpose of reducing violation rates. Thanks to her efforts, many cases of animal cruelty have been brought forth. Ms. Elizondo also holds various certifications that make her the right fit for this job.

As for the shelter still not allowing the intake of new animals due to a lack of resources and manpower at the shelter, that was still not resolved as of Thursday, according to Negron.

We continue to work with the rescue groups so that we are able to release pets, and we are able to reinstate the intake of animals, Negron said. This will take some time, and we continue to ask the public to assist in the adopting and fostering of pets.

Ancira said that the No. 1 problem is the community itself, stating that the shelter currently has anywhere between 500-800 dogs which will most likely be euthanized if they are not adopted or taken care of as room needs to be made for more animals to be taken in by the facility.

The real culprit behind this problem is not just one person but rather the community, as we need to spay and neuter our animals, Ancira said.

jorge.vela@lmtonline.com
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden on Friday put his stamp of approval on a long-debated change to the military justice system that would remove decisions on prosecuting sexual assault cases from military commanders.

Biden, however, stopped short of backing a congressional effort to strip commanders of oversight of all major crimes.

The president formally approved more than two dozen recommendations made by an independent review commission on sexual assault in the military. The changes include shifting decisions on prosecuting sexual assault cases to special victims prosecutors outside the chain of command to remove any appearance of conflicts of interest.

The militarys sexual assault response coordinators and victims advocates also would be removed from the command structure system.

Reports of sexual assaults in the military have steadily gone up since 2006, according to Defense Department reports, including a 13% jump in 2018 and a 3% increase in 2019.

I look forward to working with Congress to implement these necessary reforms and promote a work environment that is free from sexual assault and harassment for every one of our brave service members," Biden said in a statement endorsing the recommendations.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has the support of 66 senators for a bill that would have independent prosecutors handle all felony cases that call for more than a year in prison. But other key lawmakers and leaders of the military services have balked at including all major crimes. There are concerns that stripping control of all crimes from commanders could hurt military readiness, erode command authority and require far more time and resources.

Biden hailed Gillibrands work on the issue. But he asked the commission to focus only on addressing the problems of sexual assault and harassment in the military, said a senior administration official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Asked about the Gillibrand legislation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden looks forward to working with Congress to implement these necessary reforms," but she sidestepped whether he would be supportive of the proposed legislation.

Gillibrand in her own statement said the commission's recommendations  and the administration's embrace of them  would add momentum to efforts to reform the military justice system. Still, she urged a broader overhaul.

We must resist the urge to create a separate but unequal system of justice within the military and must guarantee a professional, unbiased system for all service members, said Gillibrand, adding she would push for debate and a vote on a broader military justice reform bill when Congress returns.

Last month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for the first time, voiced support for taking sexual assault and related crimes away from the chain of command and letting independent military lawyers handle them.

He issued a memo to Pentagon leadership Friday directing that they immediately move on the commission recommendation including adding sexual harassment as an offense under military law.

Austin's support came even as military service secretaries and chiefs, in memos to Austin and letters to Capitol Hill, said they were wary about the sexual assault change, and laid out greater reservations on more broadly revamping the military justice system.

Gillibrand has argued against limiting the change to sexual assault, saying it would be discriminatory and set up what some call a pink court to deal with crimes usually involving female victims.

Im deeply concerned that if they limit it to just sexual assault, it will really harm female service members. It will further marginalize them, further undermine them, and theyll be seen as getting special treatment, she previously told the AP.

The Armys handling of sexual assaults and other violence has come under significant scrutiny in the aftermath of a series of crimes, including murders and suicides last year at Fort Hood, Texas. A review panel found that military leaders at the post were not adequately dealing with high rates of sexual assault and harassment and were utterly neglecting the sexual assault prevention program.

These special victims require and deserve all critical decisions about their case to be made by a highly trained special victim prosecutor who is independent from the chain of command, the report says. A commanders position within the unit leads to an inherent appearance of a conflict of interest.

Biden said during an International Women's Day speech in March that there would be an all-hands-on-deck effort under my administration to end the scourge of sexual assault in the military." He underscored on Friday that reform was essential for the health of the military.

This will be among the most significant reforms to our military undertaken in recent history, and Im committed to delivering results,"" Biden said.

The commission made 28 recommendations and 54 sub-recommendations in its report to Biden, including specific changes to improve accountability of leadership, climate and culture and victim care and support.

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Biden and Austin's embrace of the commission's recommendations demonstrated the administration is treating this issue with the urgency it deserves."

As I have said, the scourge of sexual assault in our military must come to an end, and after years of trying and failing to address the problem the time has come to remove the prosecution of sexual assault crimes from the chain of command," Smith said.
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP)  The body of a longtime Northern California university professor was found last week in Yosemite National Park, and park officials are asking anyone who may have seen him at the park to call investigators.

James Youngblom, 64, had been hiking alone. His body was found on June 25, the National Park Service said in a statement Wednesday.

The statement did not disclose details on how Youngblom died. Tuolumne County Sheriffs Office spokesman Deputy Nico Sandelin said an autopsy has not yet been completed. Park spokesman Scott Gediman provided no other information, citing an ongoing investigation.

Anyone who may have seen Youngblom in the area of White Wolf, Pate Valley or the Grand Canyon of The Tuolumne between June 22 and June 25 should contact the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch, the statement said.

Youngblom taught biological sciences at California State University Stanislaus for 31 years. He was an avid outdoorsman and experienced backpacker who took at least one solo backpacking trip each year, said David Evans, the university's dean of the College of Science.

Youngblom was the chair of the Department of Biological Services. His expertise was on genetics and DNA technology, but his focus was on the students, Evans said.

He was passionate about getting youth and college students interested in science, Evans said.

Youngblom, who was set to retire in the fall, for years ran a program for middle schoolers called Dinner with a Scientist that brought hundreds of young students to the university in Turlock, California. His wife, Janey, was also a genetics professor at Stanislaus State until her retirement, Evans said.

Our thoughts are with Janey, their family, loved ones, friends, colleagues and students during this sad time, Evans said in a message to the campus community.
FARMINGTON, N.M. (AP)  The body of a Navajo woman missing for two years has been found in Nevada, and her boyfriend is facing murder charges.

Authorities in Farmington, New Mexico, say the body was found in Clark County, Nevada, in February. DNA test results this week showed the remains belonged to Cecelia Finona, who was 59 when she was last seen at her Farmington home the evening of May 30, 2019.

Police on Friday filed charges of murder, kidnapping and and tampering with evidence against her boyfriend, Jerry Jay. It was not clear if he had an attorney who could comment on his behalf.

In court documents from 2019, Finona's mother recalled that Finona and Jay had been arguing the night she disappeared and then someone left the house in the middle of the night.

According to a court document, Jay used Finonas ATM card several times, with the first withdrawal made around 6 a.m. May 31 in Farmington and the next around 9:30 a.m. the same day in Window Rock, Arizona. Window Rock is the capital of the Navajo Nation.

He also used her debit card the following two days in Las Vegas and Kingman, Arizona, according to police. The total withdrawn amounted to more than $1,200.

Police said surveillance footage did not show Finona with him.

A missing persons report was filed for Finona on June 1, 2019, when her mother told others she hadnt been home in two days. Her family has since logged searches in Farmington and the nearby Navajo Nation, her daughter Julietta Finona said shortly after the disappearance.

The daughter said the family found blood at Finonas home and reported it to police. She also said her aunts dog led them to her mothers eyeglass lens on the property.

Police note in court documents that the blood at the home stretched from the bottom of the porch to Finonas gravel driveway and that someone had tried to cover it with potting soil. A single eyeglass lens covered in blood also was found, the officer said.

Julietta Finona said in 2019 that she and her mother were close and the last time they spoke was the morning before she disappeared. Cecelia Finona had been excited about her nephews recent graduation, her daughter said.

Finona had returned to New Mexico after 31 years in the U.S. Army. Months before her disappearance, she was featured in the Farmington Daily Times in a story about women in the military being honored in Shiprock.

She was very active and involved in the community, Julietta Finona said.
PHILADELPHIA (AP)  Bill Cosby's sexual assault conviction was thrown out Wednesday by Pennsylvania's highest court in a ruling that swiftly freed the actor from prison more than three years after he was found guilty of drugging and molesting Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia mansion.

Cosby, 83, was the first celebrity tried and convicted in the #MeToo era, and his conviction was seen as a turning point in the movement to hold powerful men accountable for sexual misconduct.

Here's a look at the case against Cosby and the court's decision:

WHY DID THE COURT TOSS HIS CONVICTION?

The split court found that Cosby was unfairly prosecuted because the previous district attorney had promised the comedian once known as America's Dad that he wouldn't be charged over Constand's accusations. Cosby was charged by another prosecutor who claimed he wasn't bound by that agreement.

The court said that's not the case. The justices found that Cosby relied on that promise when he agreed to testify without invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a lawsuit brought against him by Constand.

The court concluded that prosecutor who later brought the charges was obligated to stick to the nonprosecution agreement, so the conviction cannot stand. The justices wrote that denying the defendant the benefit of that decision is an affront to fundamental fairness, particularly when it results in a criminal prosecution that was foregone for more than a decade.

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THE NONPROSECUTION AGREEMENT?

The promise not to prosecute Cosby was made in 2005 by Bruce Castor, who was then the top prosecutor for Montgomery County. Castor was also on the legal team that defended former President Donald Trump during his historic second impeachment trial over the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

During a court hearing weeks after Cosby's 2015 arrest, Castor testified that he promised Cosby he wouldn't be prosecuted in the hopes that it would persuade the actor to testify in a civil case brought by Constand and allow her to win damages. Castor acknowledged the only place the matter was put in writing was in the 2005 press release announcing his decision not to prosecute, but said his decision was meant to shield Cosby from prosecution for all time.

His successor noted, during the appeal arguments, that Castor went on to say in the press release that he could revisit the decision in the future.

Castor had said that Constands case would be difficult to prove in court because she waited a year to come forward and stayed in contact with Cosby.

The first jurors who heard the case may have agreed with him, as they could not reach a verdict in 2017. But a second jury empaneled after the #MeToo movement exploded found him guilty at his 2018 retrial. Constand settled her civil case against Cosby for more than $3 million.

Castor's successor, District Attorney Kevin Steele, charged Cosby in 2015 after a federal judge, acting on a request from The Associated Press, unsealed documents from her 2005 lawsuit against Cosby, revealing his damaging testimony about sexual encounters with Constand and others. Castor has said Cosby wouldve had to have been nuts to say those things if there was any chance he couldve been prosecuted."

HOW RARE IS THIS?

Extremely rare.

Wesley Oliver, a Pennsylvania law professor who has followed Cosbys case closely over the years, said he has never heard of a high court in Pennsylvania or anywhere else grappling with a prosecutors informal promise not to prosecute.

It breaks new ground entirely, said Oliver, who teaches at Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh. It sets precedent not just for Pennsylvania but probably other states.

He said the ruling should drive home to prosecutors the risks of suggesting at news conferences, in press releases or verbally in private that they will not prosecute.

They should at least add three words  at this time, he said. If you add that qualifier, which wasnt done in Cosbys case, you should be good to go, Oliver said.

CAN COSBY BE TRIED AGAIN?

Its highly unlikely. The decision on Wednesday bars Cosby from being tried again over Constands complaint, finding it to be the only remedy that comports with societys reasonable expectations of its elected prosecutors and our criminal justice system.

And the accusations raised by dozens of other women, including the five who testified at his 2018 trial, often go back decades and are most likely too remote to prosecute.

Cosby turns 84 next month. However, his lawyer said he remains in good health, except for vision problems that render him legally blind.

The trial judge deemed him a sexually violent predator who could still pose a danger to women given his wealth, power and fame, and ordered that he be on a lifetime sex offender registry and check in monthly with authorities. However, the decision negates that finding.

___

Richer reported from Boston. Associated Press reporter Michael Tarm contributed to this report from Chicago.
Kim Blalock, who says she has chronic back pain, battled excruciating aches during her most recent pregnancy, so she turned to painkillers prescribed by her doctor, hoping for relief.

Instead, the 36-year-old mother of six has endured a distressing ordeal: Her baby tested positive for the opioid, which precipitated an investigation that led an Alabama prosecutor to charge Blalock with prescription fraud in a case her attorneys say is an unprecedented violation of a pregnant woman's privacy and freedoms. Lauderdale County District Attorney Chris Connolly said this is the first time he has prosecuted a pregnant woman refilling her prescription as fraud.

RELATED: Grim report ranks Texas last in nation for children with health insurance

"I'm not a crusader," he told The Washington Post. "I'm not looking to make precedent about this, but the facts are the facts. Our position is that she concealed the material fact from her doctor that she was pregnant in order to continue to get hydrocodone."

This new punitive step in Alabama, the state with the nation's harshest statute against drug use during pregnancy, is part of policies set by dozens of states that researchers say are "divorced from health care."

The case, which was first reported by al.com, comes at a time when officials are wary of pain pills in the wake of a nationwide epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths, leaving chronic pain patients like Blalock at odds with the crackdown on opioid prescribing.

"It really has taken a toll," she wrote in an email. "I didn't get to bond with my baby. I've had severe postpartum depression with this baby."

Blalock, who said she has suffered from arthritis and degenerative disk disease for more than 14 years, said the hydrocodone prescribed by her orthopedist allowed her to function with what "feels like an electric pain" that has plagued her with limited mobility.

"It is worse in the morning or when I'm overdoing it, but it also happens when I'm lying in bed too much," she said.

When she was pregnant with her youngest son this year, she stopped taking the hydrocodone until six weeks before the birth, when she said the pain was unbearable.

"It's not just the pain, which is bad enough. But dealing with chronic pain, I have a lot of anxiety and depression surrounding the pain," she said. "I tried not to take it, but it was getting to the point where I felt like I had no other choice."

After she gave birth in September, she said she told her obstetrician about the hydrocodone and her newborn was tested, triggering an investigation under a state law authorities use to prosecute parents for exposing children to fumes from home-based meth labs.

Lawmakers later clarified in 2016 that pregnant women taking legally prescribed medications are exempt from the chemical endangerment law following reporting by al.com and ProPublica that revealed officials prosecuted more than 500 women in over a decade under the statute.

Blalock said she showed investigators her pill bottle to prove her medication was prescribed, but the Lauderdale County District Attorney's Office pursued a prescription fraud charge, accusing her of refilling her prescription without informing her doctor she was pregnant.

Blalock's case is the latest in a decades-long trend of states enacting punitive measures against substance use during pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an organization focused on reproductive health and rights. Nearly two dozen states and D.C. consider substance use during pregnancy to be child abuse under civil child welfare statutes, according to a state-by-state tracker maintained by the group.

Public health groups, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, oppose punishment for drug use while pregnant.

Connolly said he does not wish to "demonize" Blalock, acknowledging she was seeking the medication for her chronic pain. But, he said, he is recommending she participate in a pretrial diversion program in which she could possibly be drug tested and weaned off her medication, alluding to people who have become addicted after long-term use.

"We have an opioid epidemic in not only our state but in the nation," he said. "The idea is there's got to be an alternative to chronic opiate use that can address whatever chronic pain situation this person has or other people. The answer to chronic pain is not to use opiates for the rest of your life."

Blalock's attorneys from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women have represented pregnant women in similar cases across the country, including Chelsea Becker, who was charged by California authorities with murder after she consumed methamphetamine and delivered a stillborn child. The case, which drew widespread attention from civil rights groups and reproductive health advocates, was dismissed in May.

The legal advocacy group says the case against Blalock could possibly set a precedent in Alabama, if she is convicted, for limiting those who are pregnant from refilling prescriptions they would otherwise be allowed to.

"What's particularly troubling is that it is creating a criminal penalty for perceived failure to disclose one's pregnancy - which is private information - even without being asked," Dana Sussman, one of the attorneys representing Blalock, told The Post.

Blalock said she was not asked by her orthopedist if she was pregnant.

Hytham Imseis, an obstetrician on the board of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said even if Blalock's doctor was aware she was pregnant, that doesn't necessarily mean Blalock's pain should not be treated.

"It was certainly worth being treated when she was not pregnant," he said. "And then when she becomes pregnant, she does not become less worthy of being treated."

"But everyone is fearful of harm to the fetus," Imseis added.

Newborns exposed to opioids in the womb may experience neonatal abstinence syndrome, with symptoms including tremors, trouble feeding and irritability days after birth.

Imseis said studies have shown the diagnosis of the condition is subjective.

While Blalock said her child was born healthy, the prosecution alleges the baby suffered from withdrawal symptoms.

Concerns about addiction have run rampant since the misuse of prescription opioids fueled the deadly opioid epidemic, leading to more than 500,000 deaths in the 21st century. The majority of overdose deaths in recent years have been caused by illegal drugs such as heroin and methamphetamines, increasingly laced with the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl.

In an effort to address the surge in overdose deaths, officials have clamped down on prescription opioids, leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release prescribing guidance that was misconstrued by some doctors to cut off prescriptions and leave patients to fend for themselves.

About 20 percent of American adults - 50.2 million people - live with chronic pain, according to the CDC.

Kate Nicholson, the founder and president of the National Pain Advocacy Center, citing a finding that less than 8 percent of people prescribed opioids become addicted, said most chronic pain patients continue taking opioids long-term without abuse.

While people suffering from pain have endured stigmatization and lost access to care, Nicholson said a criminal charge such as this for filling a prescription is uncommon.

"The idea that someone filling a legitimate prescription would be subjected to a felony charge is outrageous," Nicholson said.
Noahs Ark is a private Christian school located at 748 Quaker Valley Road, New Paris and is celebrating its 25th year anniversary in the fall.
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Officials urge patience as tests remain pending on impact of Chemtool fire

Photo courtesy of Steve McCorkle Firefighters work to suppress the raging fire at the Chemtool site in Rockton.

ROCKTON  Many Rockton residents still have questions about whether there will be negative negative health and environmental impacts from the Chemtool industrial fire from June 14, but officials say air and water quality testing remain ongoing near the site and around Rockton.

Rockton Fire Protection District Chief Kirk Wilson, who served as the incident commander while the fire was active, asked residents for patience.

We want to reassure people that we are here for them and we are empathetic that people are still having issues from the fire, Wilson said. We are concerned just like they are. I live two miles from the Chemtool plant. We are all concerned and we want to make sure that peoples voices are heard.

Wilson said the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) remains on scene and soil and water quality testing is ongoing.

Its up to the environmental cleanup crew that is out there right now, Wilson said.

Environmental cleanup company Clean Harbors has been on site since June 17 assisting in debris removal from around Rockton and at the site.

This isnt over just because the smoke has cleared, Wilson said. This is going to be lingering in our community for many months, if not years, to come.

Water quality test results could take up to six weeks to complete, according to Syverson Dells biologist Jillian Neece.

Neece published a blog post explaining various aspects of the EPAs release of testing data.

I know scientific reports like these are inaccessible and overwhelming to many, if not most people, so I want to use my training as a biologist to help translate the tables, numbers, and maps into language that we can all digest, Neece said.

Neece said tests run by Illinois EPA officials include measuring how much oxygen is needed for microbes in the water to break down pollutants; total suspended solids in the water; nutrient testing to determine what is exactly in the water fueling biological growth; heavy metal testing; testing for per fluoroalkyl perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and identifying volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds.

Just remember that all of these water quality tests are still being run, so we dont have information about what the river or groundwater contain just yet, Neece said.

Wilson said the Village of Rockton is in the process of setting up a news conference at an undecided date to address resident concerns and to give an update to the community regarding the investigation.

In regards to questions about the fire suppression system at the site, Wilson said that since Lubrizol had occupied the site of the former Beloit Corp., Winnebago County ordinance did not require them to install an expansive fire suppression system through the entire facility. Wilson said an administrative office area was remodeled and required to have fire suppression sprinklers installed. Neither the village nor the fire protection district have ordinances that require fire suppression systems in all structures.

Wilson said the village would continue to work to be transparent in the arduous process.

We want to be transparent and up-front with everything, Wilson said. We all have concerns.

The Winnebago County Health Department based in Rockford is running an online survey for those impacted by the fire that is aimed at helping scientists better understand the incident, the community, and any health effects that might be related to the event.

The survey is available at www.winnebagohealth.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4PIGa2zzyNzy08m.

It takes about 15 minutes to complete the survey and all questions are voluntary. Questions cover where you were during the event or how you might have been exposed; if you are experiencing any new or worsening symptoms; and if you received care or treatment.

Residents have until July 15 to complete the survey.

This survey will help us understand the impact the fire had on the Rockton community, said Winnebago County Health Department Administrator Sandra Martell. We have heard concerns from residents and we feel this is an important step to take.

Residents within a designated impact zone and had already registered with the health department for a COVID-19 vaccine, the health department will send a survey via email. All responses will be kept confidential.

Martell said Thursday that air, surface and water tests remained under hazardous levels, with Martell noting that sustained levels of elevated air quality results would be a concernbut the tests have come back mostly stable.

As previously reported by the Beloit Daily News, an initial fire investigation shows the most credible scenario is that a scissor lift operated by an outside contractor conducting insulation repairs struck a valve or other piece of piping causing a pipe to burst and release heated mineral oil at the source of the fire on June 14. The investigation has not yet determined the exact source of the ignition, according to the initial investigation.
Police bomb-squad members inspect the wreckage of a motorcycle used to carry out a suicide bombing at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral in Makassar, Indonesia, March 29, 2021.

Authorities in Indonesia flew dozens of suspected militants to Jakarta for questioning and detention, including members of a Makassar cell linked to a church bombing on Palm Sunday, officials said Friday.

The alleged members of the Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) militant network were taken to Jakarta on a charter flight Thursday and immediately sent to a jail designated for terrorism inmates in Bogor, near the Indonesian capital, national police spokesman Ahmad Ramadhan said.

The transfer of the terrorism detainees to Jakarta is for the purpose of further legal proceedings, Ramadhan said.

Most of the suspects were arrested in a series of raids in Makassar and surrounding areas, after the March 28 suicide bombing at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral in the capital of South Sulawesi province, the police spokesman said.

The rest were arrested last month in Merauke, a regency in Indonesias troubled far-eastern Papua region, on suspicion they were planning an attack on the Archbishop of Merauke, Petrus Canisius Mandagi, and police targets, Ramadhan said.

Papua police chief Inspector General Mathius Fakhiri said in a statement that among those arrested in Merauke were a married couple and their 6-month-old baby.

A married couple suspected to be JAD Makassar cell-members carried out the suicide bombing outside the Makassar church on March 28, which left the two attackers dead and injured 20 people.

Indonesian authorities have blamed JAD, which is linked to the so-called Islamic State (IS) group, for other attacks in Indonesia in recent years, including suicide bombings that targeted churches in the second largest city, Surabaya, in May 2018.

The Surabaya attacks killed 22 people, including the bombers.

JAD suspect escapes

Separately, a JAD suspect arrested this week for allegedly sending weapons and ammunition to fellow militants in Jakarta escaped on Thursday from police detention in Bangka Belitung province, according to an internal police report seen by BenarNews.

The suspect, identified as Agus Setianto alias Abu Raffa, 44, slipped out of an interrogation room at the provincial police headquarters in Pangkal Pinang in the early hours of Thursday after uncuffing himself following a questioning session, the report said.

Its true that yesterday during the investigation the person escaped and he is currently being pursued, the news portal Detik.com quoted provincial police chief Inspector General Anang Syarif Hidayat as saying.

Anang said police had circulated Aguss wanted posters and urged members of the public not to harbor the fugitive.

People should remain calm and not protect him because they could be liable to prosecution under the Terrorism Law, he said.

Meanwhile, police arrested a suspected member of the outlawed Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) militant group in Deli Serdang, a regency in North Sumatra province, on Thursday, police spokesman Ramadhan said.

The suspect, identified by his initials B.A., was allegedly involved in military-style training with JI and had been a member of the group since 2015.

Since February, police have arrested at least 49 suspected members of JI, an al-Qaeda-linked militant group blamed for a series of deadly attacks in Indonesia in the early 2000s, including the 2002 bombings in Bali, which killed 202 people.

Late last year, police said JI had been raising funds by setting up more than 20,000 charity boxes at restaurants and convenience stores in seven provinces.

JADs propaganda trap

JAD, meanwhile, remains formidable despite the absence of an overall leader after the jailing of its founder, Aman Abdurrahman, according to Stanislaus Riyanta, an intelligence and security analyst at the University of Indonesia.

In 2018, a Jakarta court sentenced Aman to death for orchestrating attacks carried out by JAD militants.

They have a person in charge, Syaifulloh (alias Daniel), who is believed to be in Afghanistan, Stanislaus told BenarNews.

The Indonesian Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center, a government anti-money laundering agency, detected transfers of funds from Syaifulloh to pro-IS militants in Indonesia, Stanislaus said, adding that JAD militants had formed small cells to avoid police detection.

Thats why in the last three years weve heard so much about JAD members who acted as lone wolves or couples who committed suicide bombings. The smaller the cell, the more difficult it is to trace, he said.

Although such attacks often cause little damage and few casualties, security authorities must step up their vigilance, he said.

Many JAD combatants are not well-trained, but they always learn, both from books and the internet, and they are determined to carry out attacks, Stanislaus said.

Khairul Fahmi, a terrorism analyst at the Institute for Security and Strategic Studies, said he believed the small cells that have emerged recently were not necessarily part of the JAD network.

Because they might actually be just sympathizers, supporters of ISIS  who are not directly under the command of JAD, Khairul told BenarNews, using another acronym for Islamic State.

Khairul said it was important for the authorities not to rush into classifying pro-IS groups as JAD.

By making such claims, police fall into JADs propaganda trap, creating a perception that the group is still large and that they are everywhere, he said.
Police man a checkpoint inside the danger zone near the Taal volcano in Laurel, a town in Batangas province, Philippines, July 2, 2021.

Thousands of Filipinos were evacuated from towns around the Taal Volcano south of Manila after it sent a plume of ash and debris 1 kilometer into the sky, authorities said Friday as some expressed concern about social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The volcano, located in Batangas province about 64 km (40 miles) south of Manila, roared back to life on Thursday in what volcanologists said was a short-lived phreatomagmatic eruption. Magmatic gases and groundwater steam were expelled as a dark grayish plume spewed from the volcano.

Nearly 4,000 families (or about 15,000 individuals) have been evacuated as of Friday, the provincial government said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Save the Children, an NGO with local networks in the region, gave a higher figure of about 21,500  in the high-risk towns of Agoncillo and Laurel alone. It said forced evacuation was being implemented in some villages.

As shelters filled, a Save the Children official expressed worry about a lack of physical distancing as the country continues to reel from the COVID-19 outbreak. Batangas has recorded more than 30,000 confirmed cases and 818 deaths from the virus since the pandemic began, according to government statistics.

We are also concerned that, amidst the chaos of the evacuations, families will be unable to follow social distancing guidelines and are at risk of being infected with the virus, said Jerome Balinton, the Philippines humanitarian manager for Save the Children.

If the evacuation of families becomes overwhelming, it may contribute to the spread of the virus, he said in a statement.

Volcanic quakes

Four smaller eruptions on Friday that lasted minutes each followed Thursdays initial volcanic activity, according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS), a government agency.

It pointed to a series of volcanic quakes over the previous 24 hours as the agency raised Taals alert level to the third of a five-step system. Level three means that magma was rising and could drive an explosive eruption while level five signals a life-threatening eruption.

On Friday, PHIVOLCS Director Renato Solidum told Philippine media that monitoring was necessary even though he did not expect a major eruption.

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said mayors in at least five townships in Batangas province were on alert and that some residents had been evacuated.

Food packs and medications were prepared for distribution, the council said, adding that police and the army were ready to assist if needed.

Sen. Richard Gordon, chairman of the Philippine Red Cross, said ambulances, volunteers and doctors were on standby.

In fact we have prepositioned some of our supplies, assets and life-saving equipment, he said.

Our experiences with disasters taught us the value of being prepared and how every second counts when lives are at stake.

Maj. Gen. Edgard Arevalo, a spokesman for the military, said troops were deployed to affected communities to assist in evacuations, particularly in the towns of Laurel and Agoncillo.

The evacuees are being brought to upland areas, he said in a statement. We have placed more persons on alert and [are] ready for immediate deployment.

Given the lessons and experience last year with Taal Volcano, we are better prepared to assist the local government units who are well prepared with their incident management teams, Arevalo said.

Located on an island inside a lake, the volcano erupted suddenly in January 2020, raining ash across the island and darkening the sky above Manila. While no one died, the eruption caught many by surprise, shutting Manilas airport and triggering mass evacuations.

Taal is regarded as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. The 1,020-foot (311-meter) volcano's 1754 eruption lasted seven months.

The Philippines, with 24 active volcanoes, sits in the Pacific Ring of Fire where eruptions and earthquakes are frequent.
Health staff prepare bedding for patients at the gymnasium of Narathiwat Rajanagarindra University, which has been converted into a field hospital for COVID-19 patients in southern Thailands Narathiwat province, June 25, 2021.

The COVID-19 inoculation rate in Thailands troubled Deep South is lower than the rest of the country because many people here distrust the central government, said the leader of a group that promotes self-determination for the regions majority Malay-Muslim population.

The Thai government should allow local authorities to take a lead in the southern-most provinces in allaying vaccine fears and promoting coronavirus health protocols, said Artef Sohko, president of the activist group The Patani. The insurgency-stricken Deep South is among Thai regions hardest hit by a new wave in the pandemic.

The mistrust is related to the security aspect which arises from conflicts between locals and the government, he told BenarNews. The trust gap between the Malay Muslims and the Thai state agencies remain high.

For decades dating back to the 1960s, the Deep South has been the flash point of armed conflict between government troops and separatist rebel groups, of which the largest remains Barisan Revolusi Nasional (the National Revolutionary Front, or BRN). The region along the Thai-Malaysia frontier encompasses Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala provinces, and four districts of Songkhla province.

The conflict in the heavily militarized region has fueled mistrust of the Thai government among residents. In May, the U.S. State Department, too, noted in its 2020 International Religious Freedom Report that Muslims in the Deep South said they had faced discrimination by state agencies despite being victims themselves in some of insurgent attacks.

Against the backdrop of insurgency, local Muslims often doubt that the central government has their best interests in mind and, according to Artef, this has hampered COVID-19 counter-measures in the southern border region.

About six people per 1,000 in the Deep South have contracted the virus, which is well above the four per 1,000 nationwide, according to data compiled by the Southern Border Provinces Administration Center (SBPAC), a government agency, and the national anti-COVID task force.

At the same time, only 4.38 percent of Pattanis population, 4.54 percent of Yalas residents and 7 percent of people in Narathiwat, respectively, had received at least one jab of vaccine, an official said. By contrast, 11.1 percent of Thailands population had received at least one vaccine dose, of which 4.3 percent was fully vaccinated.

On Friday, doctors said that more than 3,200 coronavirus patients were being treated in hospitals in the three southern provinces, overwhelming the health facilities capacity.

This situation has to be remedied, and the way to do that is by allowing local agencies and officials to take over vaccination and other efforts to counter the virus, according to Artef.

The government should hand over some powers to local authorities who have proven themselves efficient, and handles [pandemic] tasks better than the governments bodies  Yala municipality, for example, did well, he said.

The Thai Islamic Medical Association also did a good job in the beginning, the government should use them.

Among others reasons for the Deep Souths lower inoculation rates, Artef said, were insufficient government efforts to dispel vaccine fears and some Muslims saying that Islam did not allow such medical measures.

Weve helped people

Meanwhile, a senior officer at the Internal Security Operations Command for Region 4 (the Deep South), said it had performed all its pandemic tasks and had been working with local NGOs in helping deal with COVID-19.

Weve helped people, screening patients at check points  giving them masks, educating them about COVID and the importance of vaccines, Col. Kiatisak Neewong, the ISOC-4 spokesman, told BenarNews on Friday.

Weve offered them food from royally sponsored cuisine and even delivered food to their remote homes.

Kiatisak, however, declined to comment about Artefs recommendation to give local agencies more power in inoculation and other anti-virus efforts.

One Pattani native, Saima Poka, said she wanted to be inoculated but was not confident about being jabbed with the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine. When she mentioned this to a government official, the official merely blamed her for refusing to be jabbed instead of allaying her fears, Saima said.

Im waiting for better vaccines, Saima told BenarNews.

The country is using Sinovac and AstraZenecas COVID-19 vaccines in its national inoculation program.

Another Pattani resident who asked to be identified as Jerohing said he had placed his trust in God.

All things are at the wishes of Allah  neither masks nor vaccines can help us, only prayers, he told BenarNews.

Thailand kicked off a long-awaited national campaign to inoculate the general population against COVID-19 on June 6, amid a soaring wave of infections that began in April.

On Monday, 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.

The Ministry of Labor and Welfare said that close to 100,000 foreign workers, including those in food processing factories in Songkhla and Pattani, were infected with COVID-19.

Thailand reported a record 61 virus-related deaths on Friday, taking the pandemic death toll to 2,141. With 6,087 new COVID-19 infections, the total number of infections in the country rose to 270,921.
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Greg Sukiennik has worked at all three Vermont News & Media newspapers and was their managing editor from 2017-19. He previously worked for ESPN.com, for the AP in Boston, and at The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass.
A man suspected of repeatedly stabbing a rabbi near a Jewish day school in Boston was held without bail at his arraignment pending a hearing next week to determine whether he's a danger to society
If You Go

Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival 2021 runs onsite through Aug. 29; with online streaming through Sept. 23. Here are a few season highlights:

On-site

 Through July 4  "Dorrance Dance Plays the Pillow," a tap dance takeover with dance and live music from Michelle Dorrance, Josette Wiggan-Freund, Nicholas Van Young, special guests, and the dancers and musicians of Dorrance Dance.

 July 7-11  Contra-Tiempo a multilingual dance theater company that draws on their Los Angeles lineage with work rooted in Salsa, Afro-Cuban, hip-hop, and contemporary dance.

 July 17  "Eastern Woodland Dances," an event featuring the breadth of Indigenous performance traditions within the Eastern Woodland region and its diaspora.

 July 24  real-time augmented reality performance from Brian Brooks.

 July 28-Aug. 1  "Life Encounters," with Archie Burnett and collaborators that chronicles the evolution of New York City underground dance history.

 Aug. 6-7  a world premiere from Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born telling the story of a Black girl with hair so powerful it allows her to receive and send messages through time.

 Aug. 13-15  Cirque Barcode & Acting for Climate Montreal

 Aug. 25-29  "Ballet Coast to Coast," a Pillow-exclusive production that features artists from Boston Ballet, Houston Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet.

More information/tickets: 413-243-0745, jacobspillow.org
When youre on an airplane and the flight attendants are instructing you about disasters, they tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before 
Jennifer Huberdeau, features editor for The Berkshire Eagle, has won a coveted national award for her reporting on arts and culture.
Francesca Paris is The Eagle's data and public records reporter. She was previously the North Adams reporter. A California native and Williams College alumna, she has worked at NPR in Washington, D.C. and WBUR in Boston. Find her on Twitter at @fparises.
William Bill Cameron has served in a variety of educational roles in his career, including as chairman of the Berkshire County Education Task Force, pictured here in 2019. As he officially steps down as interim superintendent of the Lenox Public Schools, Cameron talked about his stay at Lenox with the columnist.
Ladies, where yall at?

It was the Year Of the Black Woman in full effect at the 2021 BET Awards on Sunday, June 27 where, outside of the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, BET.com spoke to several celebs on the red carpet to see who they were most excited to see.

Grammy winning rapper Lil Kim, Sistas actress KJ Smith, legendary rapper Rhapsody and more gave us all the deets on why this night was so special to each of them.

Queen Latifah is my sister. She paved the way, said Lil Kim. Whenever I get a chance to give another female her flowers, Im all for it and I want to be a major part of it.

Kim was part of the all-star team of women MCs including MC Lyte, Rhapsody and Monie Love who saluted Latifah during her Lifetime Achievement Award presentation.

RELATED: BET Awards 2021: Hip Hop Legends Honor Queen Latifah With Lifetime Achievement Award

With actress Taraji P. Henson as the host of cultures biggest night, it truly was an evening to celebrate Black women!

RELATED: It's Giving... FASHION!: Taraji P. Henson Wore Over 10 Stylish Looks To Host The BET Awards 2021

Watch the video below as your favorite celebs share who they were looking forward to seeing and what being in the presence of these amazing Black women meant to them.
Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta is entering its tenth season, and Yandy Smith and Yung Baby Tate are on board.

It looks like Smith, who has been the center of the Love & Hip Hop: New York franchise, will join her husband Mendeecees Harris in Atlanta; the couple will also jet set to Dubai to renew their vows.

The new trailer released on Wednesday (June 30) teases drama amongst the new stars and other cast members, a social justice trip to Louisville, and more.

RELATED: Erica Mena And Safaree Samuels Reportedly File For Divorce

Cast members Rasheeda and her husband Kirk Frost appear to be facing family and financial struggles, and Bambi and Erica Mena are both pregnant for a second time and having relationship issues with their husbands, Lil Scrappy and Safaree.

The new season premieres Monday (July 5).

Watch the trailer below:
Two R&B powerhouses are slated to square off in the next Verzuz battle. Keith Sweat and Bobby Brown will go head to head as part of Essence magazines virtual Festival of Culture. The live event is slated to start at 8 p.m. EST and can viewed via VerzuzTV, Essence.com, Triller or FiteTV.

This evenings R&B showdown will bring back some New Jack Swing vibes and help fans relive their favorite 90s hits.

RELATED: Keith Sweat Says He Doesn't Want The 'King Of R&B' Throne

Previous veteran R&B Verzuz battles have included Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle, Earth, Wind & Fire and the Isley Brothers, and Brandy and Monica.

#TeamBobby and #TeamSweat hashtags have already appeared all over social media.

Tune in tonight!
A father who fatally punched his five-year-old son over a cheesecake in June 2019 has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that Travis Stackhouse, 30, was sentenced Tuesday (June 29) after being convictedin May on charges of first degree homicide in the death of his son, Sir Ameer Stackhouse, and also child neglect, and child abuse. He must also remain on extended supervision for eight years after serving his prison sentence.

Stackhouse faced up to 37 years behind bars. After two days of witness testimony, he pled guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree reckless homicide.

Prosecutors say he beat Sir Ameer because he was angry that his children, including the boy, were eating cheesecake that he had gotten for Fathers Day 2019, when he had only eaten one slice. Stackhouse later admitted that he punched Sir Ameer in the stomach and struck his face with the back of his hand, which had a metal rod in it from surgery.

RELATED: Florida Man Found Guilty Of Killing Girlfriend, Daughter And Stabbing His Son

After hitting his son, Stackhouse went to a bar with his friends until about 2 a.m. When he returned home, his girlfriend called 911 and Sir Ameer was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics. The childs autopsy found that his cause of death was blunt force trauma to the abdomen.

According to the The Washington Post, Stackhouse had originally told the police that Sir Ameer had fallen down the stairs while playing with one of his siblings.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge David Borowski said, prior to sentencing Stackhouse, Its hard to know where to start in a case like this because its so atrocious.

The judge continued, The average person that hears about this case cant understand how you would beat or punch any living human being as badly as you did in this case  let alone your own child. How you can live with yourself ever for a day  I dont understand.

Stackhouse made no comment during his sentencing hearing.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has finally been granted tenure at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

According to NBC News, during a June 30 board meeting, her tenure was approved by a 9-4 vote by the universitys board of trustees.

Hannah-Jones said in a statement, "This fight is about ensuring the journalistic and academic freedom of Black writers, researchers, teachers and students. We must ensure that our work is protected and able to proceed free from the risk of repercussions, and we are not there yet."



In April, UNC announced Hannah-Jones was appointed to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, where she would teach as a professor while also remaining with The New York Times Magazine. However, UNC offered her a five-year contract with eligibility for tenure review at the end, rather than the tenured position that was typical for past appointments.

RELATED: UNC Declining To Grant Tenure to Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones Sparks Backlash

According to CNN, in May, the creator of The New York Times 1619 Project, said in a submitted letter to UNC that she would not take a position at the school without tenure.

Hannah-Jones lawyers wrote "since signing the fixed-term contract, Ms. Hannah-Jones has come to learn that political interference and influence from a powerful donor contributed to the Board of Trustees' failure to consider her tenure application."

"Under these circumstances, any appointment of Ms. Hannah-Jones without tenure is unacceptable," the letter continues.

UNC received backlash since the alleged influence behind the offer was initially reported. The UNC Board of Trustees told The Washington Post last month that tenure wasnt offered because Hannah Jones was a non academic. Critics responded that the decision didnt make sense, since the Knight Chair was designed to attract professional journalists.

NBC News reports the reasoning to not offer tenure originally to Nikole Hannah-Jones was not explained at the June 30 board meeting.
Randy Moore, a forester with a long history as a conservationist in several regions of the United States, has officially been tapped to be the first African American chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

According to The Hill, Moore will take over for current chief Vicki Christiansen after she steps down late next month.

The U.S. Forest Service is a 116-year-old agency that oversees 600 million acres of forestland. Moore has led the agencys Pacific Southwest Region since 2007 and previously the Eastern Region.

RELATED: William Bill Tate Named Louisiana State University President, First Black Person To Lead School In Its History

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, whose department oversees the Forest Service, praised Moores conservation work in a statement and says hes the perfect person for the position.

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 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.

In addition to the acres of forest hell be tasked with managing, Moore will also oversee 193 million acres of public lands in 43 states and Puerto Rico.
On June 30, Bill Cosby was released from prison after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his sexual assault conviction. The comedian has reportedly been enjoying life and is even ready to go back on tour.

According to an exclusive from Fox News, Cosbys spokesperson Andrew Wyatt said the 83-year-old celebrated his freedom with pizza and jokes.

He had Zio's pizza and we stayed up last night 'til 2 in the morning just laughing and joking and him doing comedy routines," Wyatt said.

Wyatt also confirmed Cosby wants to get back on stage sooner or later.

The spokesperson also said Cosby is ignoring the backlash from social media, saying, not "even paying attention to that. That's not even on our radar screen."

BREAKING NEWS: Bill Cosby Released From Prison, Sex Assault Conviction Overturned

Cosby served more than two years of a three-to-10-year sentence at Philadelphia-area state prison. Previously, Cosby vowed to serve all 10 years rather than acknowledge remorse over the 2004 encounter with victim and accuser Andrea Constand.

The 83-year-old was convicted of drugging and molesting Constand at his suburban home. In late 2015, he was charged when a prosecutor presented newly unsealed evidence.

According to CBS News, in 2005, Cosbys team made a deal with former prosecutor Bruce Castor, who defended Trump at his second impeachment trial, to not pursue criminal charges, which was designed to prevent Cosby from invoking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to answer questions in civil court.

However, this non-prosecution deal was never in writing, The Washington Post reports.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that testimony tainted the trial, even though a lower appeals court had found it appropriate to show a signature pattern of drugging and molesting women.

Prosecutors didnt clarify if they would appeal or seek to try Cosby a third time.
The Kentucky police detective who obtained the no-knock search warrant that led to Breonna Taylors death has had his firing upheld.

The Associated Press reports the Louisville Metro Police Merit Board upheld Joshua Jaynes termination with a 4-0 vote on Wednesday (June 30). The vote came after three days of hearings in which Jaymes sought reinstatement to the Louisville Police.

Jaynes was fired by former interim Police Chief Yvette Gentry last January. Gentry said Jaynes was untruthful about how he obtained some of the information about Taylor included in the warrant.

RELATED: Louisville Police Investigation Finds Officers Should Not Have Shot Inside Breonna Taylors Apartment

In an interview with Louisville police investigators last year, Jaynes admitted that he did not personally verify that a drug-trafficking suspect was receiving mail at Taylors apartment, even though he had said that he had personally verified the information in an earlier affidavit. Jaynes said he had relied on information from a fellow officer.

Jaynes lawyer, Thomas Clay, argued that Jaynes did not lie on the affidavit and did not have a responsibility to verify information from a fellow officer before putting it in his affidavit. Clay also said that Jaynes will appeal the merit board ruling to circuit court after the official order is issued.

At least three officers involved with the raid have been fired, but none of the officers who fired their weapons have faced criminal charges directly over Taylor's death, according to NPR.

Last April, Kentucky governor [name] signed a law limiting the use of no-knock warrants in the state. The city of Louisvilles Breonnas law, passed in June 2020, outright bans the use of no-knock warrants.
News

McConnell: Democrat spending plans 'wildly inappropriate'

U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell talks with Warren County Judge-Executive Mike Buchanon during a visit with business and local government leaders at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, July 1, 2021. (Grace Ramey/photo@bgdailynews.com) U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell speaks about Kentuckians returning to work following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, the continuation of $300-per-week federal unemployment bonus payments and other issues of importance to the Commonwealth and the nation during a visit with business and local government leaders at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, July 1, 2021. (Grace Ramey/photo@bgdailynews.com) U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell speaks about Kentuckians returning to work following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, the continuation of $300-per-week federal unemployment bonus payments and other issues of importance to the Commonwealth and the nation during a visit with business and local government leaders at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, July 1, 2021. (Grace Ramey/photo@bgdailynews.com) U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell speaks about Kentuckians returning to work following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, the continuation of $300-per-week federal unemployment bonus payments and other issues of importance to the Commonwealth and the nation during a visit with business and local government leaders at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, July 1, 2021. (Grace Ramey/photo@bgdailynews.com) Bowling Green Chamber President and CEO Ron Bunch invites U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to speak during a visit with business and local government leaders at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, July 1, 2021. (Grace Ramey/photo@bgdailynews.com) U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell speaks about Kentuckians returning to work following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, the continuation of $300-per-week federal unemployment bonus payments and other issues of importance to the Commonwealth and the nation during a visit with business and local government leaders at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, July 1, 2021. (Grace Ramey/photo@bgdailynews.com) U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell speaks about Kentuckians returning to work following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, the continuation of $300-per-week federal unemployment bonus payments and other issues of importance to the Commonwealth and the nation during a visit with business and local government leaders at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, July 1, 2021. (Grace Ramey/photo@bgdailynews.com) U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell speaks about Kentuckians returning to work following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, the continuation of $300-per-week federal unemployment bonus payments and other issues of importance to the Commonwealth and the nation during a visit with business and local government leaders at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, July 1, 2021. (Grace Ramey/photo@bgdailynews.com) U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell speaks about Kentuckians returning to work following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, the continuation of $300-per-week federal unemployment bonus payments and other issues of importance to the Commonwealth and the nation during a visit with business and local government leaders at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, July 1, 2021. (Grace Ramey/photo@bgdailynews.com)

Meeting with business and government leaders Thursday in Bowling Green only heightened U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnells belief that the 2022 midterm elections will be crucial for the country.

Railing against spending proposals he called wildly inappropriate, the Kentucky Republican said the Democrats now in control of the White House and by narrow margins in the House and Senate are playing Russian roulette with the countrys economy.

While saying he can get behind a bill now making its way through Congress to invest about $1 trillion in roads, bridges, rail and other infrastructure, McConnell made it clear that he is no fan of a reconciliation bill that would address climate change, expand social programs and cost nearly another $6 trillion.

We have some really serious differences about the way forward, said McConnell, the Senate minority leader. The infrastructure bill is popular on both sides of the aisle, but the Democrats would like to authorize spending a total of $7 trillion.

The increase in the federal debt and the tax hikes needed to pay for the spending and debt service simply arent palatable for McConnells conservative tastes, he said, making next years elections all the more important for the seven-term senator who would like to return to the majority leader post he held from 2015 until this January.

The advantage is, the majority leader gets to set the agenda, McConnell said.

If he is to return to setting the agenda, McConnell needs a strong GOP showing in 2022, when 20 Republican-held Senate seats and 14 Democrat-controlled seats are up for grabs in a body that now has 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats and two independents who align with the Democrats.

He feels good about one race: U.S. Sen. Rand Pauls run for a third term, presumably against Democratic challenger Charles Booker.

I support Paul, and I think he has an excellent chance of being reelected, McConnell said of his GOP colleague.

As for Booker, a former member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, McConnell lumps him in with what he sees as left-leaning Democrats.

Senator Paul has an interesting opponent, McConnell said. Booker is an unabashed Bernie Sanders acolyte, and I dont think Kentucky wants that.

Paul has a lot of advantages going into this. Booker has taken positions that might be good in a New York City mayors race but not in Kentucky.

McConnell broadened his criticism of Democrats during his visit Thursday with local business leaders at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce.

As he has in recent months, the senator took aim at Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and his refusal to discontinue the $300-per-week federal unemployment bonus payments started during the coronavirus pandemic.

Ive been back and forth with Gov. Beshear about not discontinuing those payments, McConnell said of the unemployment bonus that will expire in September. What we need to do is quit paying people more to not work.

The single best way to get people back to work is to discontinue those payments.

McConnell has backing from Wade Watson, plant manager at the Bendix Spicer Foundation Brake plant in Bowling Green.

Bendix started a $65 million expansion of its plant in 2019 and has held some job fairs recently in hopes of filling newly created jobs.

There are plenty of good-paying jobs available, Watson said. But we cant compete with not working. Its very difficult for us to find people. We have increased wages and benefits and installed a health care center. Were doing everything we can.

Watson even takes issue with Beshears incentive plan to use $22.5 million in federal CARES Act funds to pay as many as 15,000 Kentuckians on unemployment insurance a one-time $1,500 bonus to rejoin the workforce.

I think wed see a broader impact if the $300 bonus was discontinued, Watson said.

Although hes opposed to proposals by President Joe Biden and House and Senate Democrats to spend more money, McConnell admitted the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan have provided boosts to state and local governments.

There is about $4 billion coming to Kentucky, he said. I think of this as a once-in-a-lifetime windfall. At least I hope its once-in-a-lifetime.
Spearfish, SD (57783)

Today

Partial cloudiness early, with scattered showers and thunderstorms during the afternoon. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. High near 90F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms this evening becoming more widespread overnight. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. Low 61F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
Spearfish, SD (57783)

Today

Partly cloudy this morning with thunderstorms becoming likely this afternoon. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. High near 90F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms likely this evening. Then a chance of scattered thunderstorms overnight. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. Low 61F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
There are quite a few references throughout the New Testament that assert Christ lives in each believer, meaning those who have professed faith in Christ and given their lives to Him. The Apostle John is the author of the 1 John epistle, which is where readers find this often quoted, but perhaps misunderstood verse and concept.

You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world (1 John 4:4).

The powerful message of this verse means that Jesus, who lives in each believer, is more powerful than the enemy who is in the world. What an amazing guarantee that God is greater than anything followers of Jesus will endure or face in the world, because they belong to God. This verse serves as a blessed assurance and encouragement that Christians do not have to worry or fear, but may be at peace in the power of God who lives in them.

What Does It Mean Greater Is He That Is in Me?

This verse is a promise to everyone who has accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior. The reality is that all people face hardships, go through unexpected battles, and will encounter difficult or deceitful individuals. This verse gives confidence to Christians that God lives within them. And this same God who lives within each Christian has overcome all their troubles.

This aligns with a similar message that Jesus imparted to His disciples in the final days before He went to the cross (see John 16:33). Christians do not have to be afraid or disheartened in the same way as nonbelievers because Jesus has overcome their darkest and hardest troubles.

The Apostle Paul also taught that Jesus lives within every believer. Though this may be difficult to understand, it is what Scripture declares consistently. When one puts their faith in Jesus, He makes His home in their heart (see Ephesians 3:17). Therefore, the One who lives in every believer is greater than the evil one that lives in the world.

What Is the Context of 1 John 4?

The authorship of 1 John is attributed to the apostle John, who was one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. The apostle John addressed this letter to a body of believers near Ephesus. From the content of this letter, we see that the recipients were dealing with false teachings that denied the full humanity of Christ, struggling to understand sinfulness versus righteousness, love versus hate, and salvation by ones own merit.

John wrote this letter to assert the truth around these and other issues this congregation was unclear or being led astray about. John was counteracting any false teaching that had impacted the body of Christ. He wrote with the intent to bring clarity and Gods truth to these spiritual areas.

Specifically in the fourth chapter of this letter, where readers find this reference greater is he that is in me, John was asserting that Jesus is indeed from God and that for anyone to say otherwise is an indication that they are speaking false knowledge and not sent from God. John taught in this part of the epistle that Christians should test the spirits  meaning to know confidently that someone is truly a believer  if they acknowledge that Jesus came in the flesh and is from God (see 1 John 4:3).

But every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world (1 John 4:3-4).

When believers encounter false teachers, they do not have to be concerned or worried, because they are from God and God is in them. God is in every believer and is greater than the enemy who seeks to lie and deceive the world. This verse is a necessary reminder that God is in every Christian and therefore, believers can rely on Him for wisdom and strength, and to not be overcome by evil or false teachings.





Photo credit: Getty Images/Aaron Amat

What Does It Mean That God Is "in Me"?

God is not far off, and He has not removed Himself from the lives of His beloved children. Rather Scripture teaches that God is in every believer and involved in their lives. When a person confesses Jesus as their Lord and Savior, Christ takes residence in their heart. The apostle Paul further explained this concept of what it means for God to be in a believer.

But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness (Romans 8:10).

Humans are body and humans are also spirit. It is a new believers spirit that is joined with Christ and He resides in them. He unites with the spirit of a person and empowers them to live righteously and bear the fruit of the Spirit.

Is It True That God Is Greater Than Anything in the World?

The answer to this question, Is God greater than anything in the world, is a resounding yes! God is truly greater than anything in the world. Christs followers will encounter false teachers. Yet God is greater. Christians will face hardships, and sorrows, and all sorts of troubles. God is greater. Believers will be let down and hurt by others, but God is greater than all of that. God is greater than ones worries, fears, and concerns. God is greater than the enemy who roams around like a lion looking for someone to devour (see 1 Peter 5:8).

Earlier in this letter, the apostle John wrote that believers are beloved children of God (see 1 John 3:1). The love Jesus has for His children is deeper, wider, and more real than any other love. Christians truly have nothing to worry about because God is greater than anything they will encounter in this world, including the enemy who tries to wreak havoc in their lives.

It is, therefore, imperative for every believer to keep God first and to seek Him whenever they are going through a difficult time. Believers go to Jesus because He is greater than anything else and is the only one that can provide the help and saving grace needed.

A Prayer for God's Strength in Difficult Times

Heavenly Father,

You are good and gracious. I praise you that you are a perfect father, fully of mercy, compassion, and lovingkindness. You love me dearly. I am so grateful that I can come to you with any need, with any concern, and when I am feeling lost. Lord, you know the troubles I am facing, and all the details of my circumstances. You know how weary I have become from this battle. Jesus, give me strength. I look to You for help, oh Lord. Help me to take one step of faith at a time, trusting You every step of the way. Bring breakthrough, healing, and a way out of my situation. Thank you, Jesus, for Your faithfulness. Thank you for hearing my prayers.

Amen.

This verse is truly an incredible promise that believers can trust in God. It is a verse that gives hope in the midst of whatever someone is going through because God is greater, and He will see a Christian through when they call upon His name. He will not let His children be led astray when they choose to cling to His truth above all.

Followers of Jesus can test the spirits and know what is of God and what is not. God has not left us on our own. He lives in the hearts of His believers who have committed their lives to Him and will be with them no matter what they face. Jesus declared that whatever comes, He has already overcome those troubles. Christians can have heavenly peace on earth because God, who is in them, is greater.

Related articles

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Photo credit: Getty Images/NiseriN

Pamela Palmer is a writer, chaplain, and the founder of upheldlife.com, the platform on which she produces weekly devotionals and faith resource articles to inspire keeping faith at the center of it all. She lives and thrives on Jesus, coffee, and music. She is in pastoral ministry and gets to share in the emotional and spiritual lives of many people, being a small piece of each journey. Pamela married the perfect man for her and they have two beautiful kiddos. She has been published on herviewfromhome.com and you can follow her at upheldlife.com, or on Facebook.com/upheldlife.
BIG RAPIDS  An online guide for nursing and healthcare education lists Ferris State University's Dental Hygiene program among Michigan's best.

Ferris' Associate of Applied Science degree in Dental Hygiene grants third-year curriculum students the ability to take the professional licensing exam of Michigan and other states.

Theresa Raglin, the associate dean for operations, assessment and compliance in the College of Health Professions, is a program alumna. She said AAS graduates and Dental Hygiene students from other schools favor Ferris' online Bachelor of Science degree.

"It has proven to be a valuable option for those intending to establish themselves professionally or for those seeking to become leaders at their workplace," Raglin said. "Ours is the largest Dental Hygiene program in the state, with great facilities for learning and more than 50 years of experience in providing this career opportunity."

Ferris' Dental Hygiene graduates earn high marks from their employers, according to Raglin.

"Graduates are employed at dental practices and clinics throughout the state," Raglin said. "We are proud to receive these reports, as employers are impressed by our graduates' skills and abilities when they take their place at these offices."

The report publisher, nursingprocess.org, boasts a 10-year history of researching and presenting reports on nursing and health care programs in each state to provide an independent assessment of more than 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions, nationally. Raglin said Ferris is pleased to trail only the University of Michigan's program in this report.

"Our ability to provide a full-fledged university experience for our students in a rural setting is one of our key attributes," Raglin said. "We believe the training and campus community available to our students is perhaps the chief reason we enjoy an offering of this size and stature."

The website with nursingprocess.org provides its assessment to more than 100,000 students monthly.
Bill scrutinizes the strange situation in the White House involving VP Kamala Harris and her boss. According to a Politico article, the vice president's staff is complaining that she is a tyrannical boss who routinely berates her staff. It is also an open secret that President Biden simply does not like Ms. Harris, who essentially accused him of being a racist during the presidential debates.

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A 27-year-old female recipient underwent the first robot-assisted surgery in kidney

Max Super Speciality Hospital, Vaishali announced the installation of the latest in robot-assisted surgery technology, Da Vinci Xi, by US-based Intuitive. By using this technology, Dr Anant Kumar (Chairman, Urology, Robotics & Renal Transplant, MSSH Vaishali) and Dr Vimal Dassi (Associate Director  Urology, Robotics, Kidney Transplant and Uro-Oncology) at MSSH Vaishali successfully performed the first-ever robotic kidney transplant in Uttar Pradesh.

The procedure was carried out on the 27-year-old female recipient, a resident of Noida, Uttar Pradesh, with minimal muscle cuts, reducing pain and blood loss as the incision was only 6 to 7 cms compared to 20-25 cm long incisions in the normal transplants. The Da Vinci surgical system was used in the procedure, allowing the tremor-free movement of the instruments. As a result, there was no damage to the graft kidney, ensuring swift recovery.

Dr Kumar, said, "We are happy to bring robotic surgery in kidney transplants in UP for the first time. We hope that this is a good start to robotic surgeries in the state, and this will go a long way in availing new age surgical technology for people in this part of the country without having to travel to nearby metros like Delhi.

Commenting on this installation, Dr Gaurav Aggarwal, Senior Vice President  Operations; Max Hospital Vaishali, said, "The installation will help to get better clinical outcomes in kidney surgeries, urological reconstructive surgeries, gallbladder removal, prostate removal, bariatric surgery, abdominal wall reconstruction, fibroids removal, urinary incontinence, thoracic surgery, ENT surgery as well."

Dr Vivek Bindal, Associate Director & Head  Institute of Minimal Access, Bariatric & Robotic Surgery, MSSH, Vaishali said, " In another ventral hernia case, a 44-year-old patient could travel back home in 48 hrs, as the abdominal wall reconstruction for this patient was done with just 8 mm incisions by using da Vinci Xi technology.

These benefits go a long way in enabling the surgeon and care teams in providing life-enhancing care for patients. For example, in the recent prostate cancer surgery performed by Dr Puneet Ahluwalia (Principal Consultant  Surgical (Uro)Oncology, Max Institute of Cancer Care, Vaishali), the 52-year-old patient could get discharged and get back to his everyday life within 24 hours.

Mandeep Singh Kumar, VP&GM- Intuitive India, said, "It gives us great pleasure to expand our association with Max healthcare, this being our fourth installation at Max group of hospitals. The installation of the da Vinci system at the Max Vaishali centre serves as a testament to the growing trust our customers have in the ingenuity of our technology."
Dr Vardhan also highlighted the crucial role undertaken by India to stop cervical cancer heeding to WHOs 2030 target

Dr Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare addressed an audience of eminent doctors, professors of medical science and stalwarts of medical fraternity specialising in cervical pathology and colposcopy through video conference at the inaugural session of the 17th World Congress for Cervical Pathology and Colposcopy.

The event organised by the Indian Society of Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology was inaugurated by the Vice President of India Venkaiah Naidu. Dr Vardhan congratulated the Indian Society of Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology for pioneering training in colposcopy and treatment of precancerous lesions of the cervix and for bringing the World Congress for the first time to Asia. The theme of the World Congress 'Eliminating Cervical Cancer: Call for Action' is aligned to the WHO call for Elimination of Cervical Cancer by 2030, he stated.

Speaking on the topic of cervical cancer, the Union Health Minister said, It is the fourth most common cancer in women. It affects over half a million women across the world each year and kills a quarter of a million. Tragically, one woman dies of cervical cancer every two minutes, making it one of the greatest threats to womens health. The sad part is that our women are suffering and dying even though when diagnosed cervical cancer is one of the most successfully treatable forms of cancer, as long as it is detected early and managed effectively. Cancers diagnosed in late stages can also be controlled with appropriate treatment and palliative care. With a comprehensive approach to prevent, screen and treat, cervical cancer can be eliminated as a public health problem within a generation.

Dr Vardhan also highlighted the crucial role undertaken by India to stop cervical cancer heeding to WHOs 2030 target. He said, "I can proudly state that India is one of the few developing countries that have formulated the national cancer control program. As a leader in Asia, in 2016, we have launched the operational guidelines for screening of common cancers - cervical, breast, oral and Cervical Cancer. India along with 194 other countries has collectively resolved to work together for the elimination of this major killer a goal which is achievable through 90 per cent HPV vaccination coverage, 70 per cent screening coverage and 90 per cent treatment for cervical precancer and cancer including access to palliative care.

The Union Health Minister explained how the Government of India is offering the intervention to end cancer through the two wings of the Ayushman Bharat Programme.
Whether it is the industry or academia, life sciences workers are gradually accepting the fact that lab data digitisation improves processes, simplifies workflows and makes research and development (R&D) more efficient. With increasing advances in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), digitisation in the research environment is set to become an integral part of every laboratory worldwide. But in emerging markets such as India, there are a large number of factors responsible for its slow adoption such as lack of skilled workforce, high maintenance and service costs, limited expertise, data security etc.
South African health and well-being retailer Wellness Warehouse has opened three new-look stores, reflecting the company's recent brand refresh and offering an elevated in-store customer experience. The new-look stores are located at La Lucia and Westville Malls in Durban, and Somerset Mall in Somerset West.

Source: Supplied

Supporting journeys to natural well-being

Source: Supplied

Interior design and display

Source: Supplied

Inside Sandton's new luxury beauty destination Arc A newcomer to the beauty retail landscape, Arc launched online in April this year and is now branching out into physical retail...

Exeo Capital buys stake in Wellness Warehouse holding company Exeo Capital has announced an investment into Maia Group, a holding company focused on consumer health businesses including Wellness Warehouse and True Health Holdings...

Wellness Warehouse has been working on its transformation with branding agency International Trends Institute (ITI) for the past few months. Updated branding includes  amongst other things  a new logo and colour palette, which have been rolled out across the business.The new Wellness Warehouse store concept was inspired by nature and a sense of locality. "Using nature as our guide, we have fine-tuned our aesthetics to express our core mission and value of empowering personal journeys to natural well-being," Kate Aitken, marketing manager of Wellness Warehouse toldAitken said that Wellness focused on how it could further support its customers on this journey, by creating stores that are designed to meet a range of unique needs, with a team on hand to help shoppers connect and consume more consciously. She explained that the store layout was re-engineered with core shopper needs and journeys in mind - from basic replenishment to individual consulting.The refreshed store design incorporates more rounded edges throughout to soften the space, with all-natural wooden finishes and granite tops to elevate the feel of the store, and texture to create interest. Sustainable materials were used wherever possible, said Aitken.Factored into the redesign was the desire to deliver an increased feeling of space and breathability for customers moving through the stores. And to deliver a multi-sensory experience, the air inside the store is infused with the retailer's signature scent, the Wellness Balance Essential Oil, and experiential zones have been added in which customers can fully engage with the products."Our Inspire Tables showcase carefully curated products across categories to encourage customers to see wellness for what it is  a truly holistic experience that goes beyond what we eat or how we move. Where possible, we have displayed key ingredients that speak to what sets our products apart."The new store design and customer experience will be rolled out to all new Wellness stores going forward.Aitken said, "At its core, our transformation has been inspired by our mission to create a brand and space that truly reflects who we are at our core, facilitating a connection between mind and body in one seamless holistic experience. Inspired by a reverence for nature and locality, our new brand and store design honours our deep connection to the natural environment, while supporting physical, emotional and mental well-being for all who inhabit it."Wellness Warehouse CEO Simon Alston commented, We are thrilled to launch our new store concept, which represents the culmination of our partnership with local brand agency, International Trend Institute. At Wellness Warehouse, our passion is making good health and wellbeing accessible to more people. For far too long, navigating the natural health industry has been difficult and overwhelming for many people, and we set out to change that."ITI understood that our stores need to simplify the customer experience, while simultaneously elevating the sense of excitement and discovery that comes with a journey to holistic well-being. With this transformation, we believe that we have set the new benchmark for the health industry.Wellness Warehouse also recently revamped its Live Life Well Rewards programme, which now offers shoppers up to 3% cashback across all purchases, which can be redeemed in store and online.Aitken concluded, "From a brand point of view, our messaging focuses on inspiring customers to live life well. Were on the wellness journey with them, and we meet them wherever theyre at. Were focused on building our community by offering value through accessible education, as well as through our newly-improved Live Life Well Rewards Programme."
The Airlines Association of Southern Africa (AASA) has appointed Wrenelle Stander as its new chief executive officer, with effect from mid-July 2021. Stander takes over the reins from Chris Zweigenthal who is retiring from the industry body, for which he served with distinction for over 19 years.

Wrenelle Stander

"Wrenelle, whose career includes extensive leadership experience in the public and private sectors of the air transport and energy industries as well as in the South African Government, is the ideal choice to lead AASA and represent its members in its engagements on matters of common interest. As a former AASA chairperson, she is also familiar with the association and the kinds of issues it takes up," said Zweigenthal"Finding the sweet spot in the nexus between government and industry is the thread that has strung together my various roles in the energy and aviation industries and one that is crucial to the vital role that AASA fulfils in representing the air transport industry throughout the Southern African Development Community region," explained Stander"Wrenelle is widely respected throughout the Southern African air transport industry and her ability to navigate and further enhance our relationships with all stakeholders will be a tremendous asset for AASA and our industry, especially as we grapple with the slow and painful recovery of the Covid-19 pandemic and the devasting impact that related travel restrictions have had for air transport, tourism, trade, jobs and livelihoods in our region," said Elmar ConradieAASA chairperson.Prior to joining AASA, Stander, who holds an MBA from Oxford Brookes University in the UK and a BA (Hons) from the University of Cape Town, held a number of key executive positions including CEO of Comair, managing director of South Africas Air Traffic Navigation Service (ATNS) and Sasols Gas business. She also held executive and non-executive directorships on various boards.Stander began her career in South Africas National Department of Transport where she rose to become chief director of aviation and maritime regulation and also served as deputy CEO of the SA Civil Aviation Authority.
Via: Guardian:

Donald Rumsfelds name will forever be associated with the biggest military fiasco in US history, the 2003 invasion of Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, alongside the widespread use of torture that has dogged Americas reputation ever since.

It is not just the poor decisions he made as defence secretary for which Rumsfeld will be remembered, but also his efforts to cover up inconvenient facts that did not align with his version of reality.

Documents surfaced after the invasion that showed that Rumsfeld was quite aware of the gaping holes in the intelligence about Iraqi WMD, but he consistently presented the claims to the public as if they were cast-iron certainties.

He also played down the growing insurgency against the US-led occupation after Saddam Husseins fall, dismissing the collapse of law and order in Baghdad with the insouciant phrase stuff happens, which would go on to haunt him for the rest of his life.




Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday had his company send out Orwellian messages warning some users that they "may have been exposed to harmful extremist content" and telling others to rat out their friends and family if they suspect they're "becoming an extremist."



"You may have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently," one message states. "Violent groups try to manipulate your anger and disappointment. You can take action now to protect yourself and others."







When you click through, it takes you to a page saying, "What arguments do violent groups use to gain followers?"



"Some violent extremist groups wrongly say that for the United States to succeed, its citizens should all be of one culture. However, there are amazing benefits to diversity, and minority groups like immigrants contribute a great deal to American society," one statement says.



"Did you know that Jewish people account for only 0.2% of the global population and do not exercise any more power or control than any other group?" says another.











Facebook is also sending messages to some users encouraging them to rat out their friends and family to the US government-funded anti-racism group "Life After Hate" and report their posts to Facebook staff who "work with law enforcement."















From The Post Millennial:

Life After Hate states that they are "committed to helping people leave the violent far-right to connect with humanity and lead compassionate lives."



The group was awarded $400,000 in 2017 by the Obama administration, though co-founder Christian Picciolini, a former skinhead, said that those funds were rescinded by the Trump administration. The Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security later funded the group with a $750,000 grant in September 2020 to "disrupt domestic terrorism."



"Our vision," they write, "is a world that allows people to change and contribute to a society without violence." They go on to say that "It was these principles that guided us away from lives of hate and that drive us to help individuals exit hate groups today and to support those who have already left."

Last month, the Biden regime called on Americans to rat out their friends and family if they detect signs of "potential" radicalization.



Mark Zuckerberg, whose social media company just passed a $1 trillion valuation, is now carrying out their bidding.



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Soros-funded Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza on Thursday had Army Sgt Daniel Perry indicted for fatally shooting AK-47-toting Black Lives Matter "protester" Garrett Foster after he approached Perry's car and allegedly raised his rifle at him during a "protest" in downtown Austin one year ago.



Perry was let go by police without any charges after the July 25, 2020 shooting but D.A. Garza is working to turn Austin into the next St. Louis by criminalizing self-defense.





Our office was proud to attend the flag raising ceremony today to mark the first time Travis County has flown a pride flag.



We celebrated how far our community has come and we are reminded of how much work we still have to do. pic.twitter.com/FKrBr9y2dl  Travis County District Attorney's Office (@DATravisCounty) June 29, 2021

Today our office announced that a Travis County grand jury has returned indictments against Daniel Perry for the charges of Murder and Aggravated Assault in the death of Garrett Foster.



The grand jury also returned one indictment for a misdemeanor count of deadly conduct.  Travis County District Attorney's Office (@DATravisCounty) July 2, 2021







From The Texas Tribune, "Army sergeant indicted on murder and aggravated assault charges after fatally shooting Austin protester Garrett Foster in 2020":

A Travis County grand jury on Thursday indicted Army Sgt. Daniel Perry on charges of murder, aggravated assault and deadly conduct after he shot and killed Garrett Foster, an armed protester in downtown Austin last year.



The former Fort Hood soldier turned himself into the Travis County Jail and was shortly released after around 2:30 p.m. Thursday on a combined $300,000 bond, according to Kristen Dark, a spokesperson for the Travis County Sheriffs Office.



[...] Clint Broden, a Dallas-based attorney for Perry, expressed disappointment at the indictment but repeated his clients claim of self defense and said he was confident that Perry would be acquitted.



It is important to note that the standard of proof required for an indictment is significantly less than the standard of proof required for a conviction, he said.



Broden said the prosecutors in the Travis County District Attorney's office refused to allow Perry's attorney to present written evidence to the jury.



This refusal is unusual in Texas and begs the question of why the District Attorneys Office would not allow this, Broden said. We understand the political motivations of the District Attorney, however, when this case is presented to a jury at trial and the jury gets to hear all the evidence instead of a one-sided presentation, we have every confidence that Sgt. Perry will be acquitted.

AntifaWatch has more:





The man who defended himself against BLM rioters was indicted today a year after the incident in yet another example of how illegitimate our justice system is



Army Sgt Daniel Perry was driving Uber when rioters mobbed his car and pointed a gun towards himpic.twitter.com/RQb3yX354o  AntifaWatch (@AntifaWatch2) July 1, 2021

The media describes mobbing his car and pointing a gun towards him as "motioned with the assault rifle for Mr. Perry to lower his window", as if one could tell that https://t.co/Wf6dT9txMw



Shortly before being killed Garrett made it clear why he was therepic.twitter.com/0vQFahoJWj  AntifaWatch (@AntifaWatch2) July 1, 2021

Another BLM rioter shot at Perry shortly after he defended himself. Perry then fled and immediately called police upon getting to safety.



Texas is a stand your ground state, but it looks like that doesn't apply if you defend yourself from those with a system approved ideology pic.twitter.com/nqpSG1Opue  AntifaWatch (@AntifaWatch2) July 1, 2021

Side-by-side video with both angles, you can see Perry come to a complete stop before having to defend himself from the mob and Garrett Foster



Might be worth mentioning as well, Foster was a BLM allied boogpic.twitter.com/eYAoq9BzX9  AntifaWatch (@AntifaWatch2) July 1, 2021

The district attorney in Travis County (Austin TX)https://t.co/mccrqR4rJ5  AntifaWatch (@AntifaWatch2) July 2, 2021



Perry shared his side of the story on his legal defense fund page at GoGetFunding:

In what can only be described as a travesty of justice, Sgt. Daniel Perry, an active duty soldier serving his country, is being prosecuted in Travis County, Texas for defending himself against a masked protestor who raised an AK-47 toward him.



Daniel Perry is a former Eagle Scout from the North Texas area and has served our country proudly for almost ten years. Sgt. Perry served a tour in Afghanistan and has been the recipient of numerous army awards, and commendations including five Army Achievement Medals.



Sgt. Perry was in the Austin area on July 25, 2020, driving for Uber. Sgt. Perry sometimes did Uber driving on the weekends to make ends meet. Although Sgt. Perry was from the North Texas area, army restrictions limited his travel to within about 80 miles of his base at Fort Hood and Austin was the most profitable locale within that radius.



Also on July 25, 2021 and prior to the incident, Garrett Foster was interviewed by a reporter regarding his decision to carry an assault weapon to an Austin protest march in a one point sling. During the interview, Foster explained that he chose to bring an assault weapon to a peaceful protest because he wanted to march and that people were too big of pussies to stop him from marching.



Sgt. Perry had dropped his client on or close to West 6th Street at approximately 9:15 p.m. Sgt. Perry made a right onto Congress Avenue from Fourth Street, and it was there that he first encountered a throng of people in the street. It was not immediately apparent to Sgt. Perry what group was demonstrating and, prior to turning onto Congress Avenue, Sgt. Perry had been unaware that a demonstration was taking place. After Sgt. Perry turned onto Congress Avenue, several people started beating on his vehicle. Picture showing the damage to Sgt. Perrys car are in the possession of the police. The pictures included pictures of damage done by protestors hitting the car with brick, trying to pull the door of the frame and from bullets.



Sgt. Perry was then quickly approached by Mr. Foster, who was carrying an AK-47 in a one point sling. Sgt. Perry, initially believing that Mr. Foster was associated with law enforcement (who else would carry an assault rifle on the streets), complied with the command. Nevertheless, after lowering the window, it became apparent to Sgt. Perry that the individual was not with law enforcement. Foster, the individual with the AK-47, began to raise the AK-47 toward Sgt. Perry. It was only then that Sgt. Perry, who carried a handgun in his car for his own protection, fired on Foster because he believed his life to be in jeopardy. Moreover, Sgt. Perry acted in the manner in which he was trained to act when presented with a deadly threat and, consistent with that training, aimed center mass.



This training also prevented the injury of bystanders. Indeed, Sgt. Perry was only concerned with protecting his own life which was threatened by Fosters actions and Sgt. Perry had absolutely no desire to injure other protestors, (even despite the fact that some were beating on his car) as some have tried to claim. The false narrative spread by some of the protestors that Mr. Perry purposely drove into the crowd to injure protestors is also refuted by the fact that no individuals claim they were injured by Mr. Perrys vehicle.



Immediately thereafter, a member of the crowd began firing on Sgt. Perrys vehicle. Sgt. Perry drove to safety and immediately called the police. He waited for the police to arrive and was fully cooperative with the police following the shooting.



Below are some of Fosters social media posts from the days prior to the incident.























Unfortunately, these social media posts by Foster, as well as the interview Foster did immediately prior to the protest march, paint a picture of a person who believed that anybody who interrupted what he viewed to be the exercise of his rights deserved to be shot.



To be clear, the death of Foster was tragic, and Sgt. Perry deeply sympathizes with the loss and grief experienced by Fosters family. Nevertheless, that does not change facts. The law in Texas is clear that the State must disprove self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt. Here, Fosters comments and actions strongly indicate that he believed he could take action into his own hands if anybody interrupted what he viewed to be the exercise of his rights. Foster did so on July 25, 2020, by starting to raise his AK-47 toward somebody who he viewed as a pussy interfering with the march.

Right before indicting Perry for defending himself, Garza let two of the juveniles allegedly involved in the Austin mass shooting earlier this month off the hook.





https://t.co/CUXvTQhb6g How are the kids who shot up Sixth Street already free?@JosePGarza is using his departments prosecutorial ability to push a radical ideology thats focused on completely handcuffing the citys criminal justice system. Where is the outrage? #Austin #safety  Austin Network (@Austin_Network) June 29, 2021



"The news that the Travis County District Attorney will drop all charges against the two teenagers previously in custody for the mass shooting in downtown Austin is not sitting well with the family of the man killed in the crossfire," KXAN reported last week.

Nick Kantor, whose brother Douglas Kantor died after the June 12 incident on Sixth Street, said he has little faith in DA Jose Garza -- and believes the investigation is heading in the wrong direction.



"Basically, what I took away from the press conference was that they are not prosecuting violent criminals anymore," Kantor said. "Nothing we can do now is going to bring my brother back. And that's something we have to accept and grieve in our own way. But moving forward, we don't want to see more people going through what we are going through."



[...] "This was a planned hit. This was the making of an assassination. And my brother was caught in the crossfire. And these assassins were free to go," Kantor said. "I have no faith in what is going on down there."

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We're now living in post-America.



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A lot of progress was made by the U.S. government in dealing with the threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations and in particular dealing with the way those organizations operated, the way they recruited individuals, the way they communicated, the way they developed plans, the way they saw to introduce operatives into the domestic environment, the way they sought to recruit people here domestically, Cohen said. I think it is safe to say that the U.S. created quite a robust counterterrorism capability. The challenge is the threat we face today is significantly different than the one we faced after Sept. 11, DHS counterterrorism chief John Cohen said.

As America closes in on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Feds want the public to believe that unknown terrorist organizations are recruiting your neighbor[s] to become a domestic extremist. But it is not just any neighbor, this time it is far-right "extremists" or White supremacists and Trump supporters who they want to recruit.

For years DHS officials have warned Americans of the dangers that lurk just outside their front doors or worse in the far-flung Middle East where extremists are plotting to bomb us, shoot us, or poison our water systems. The only difference to the terrors that await Americans is that now they are allegedly targeting a person's ideological beliefs.

According to Cohen, the most significant terrorist threat facing the U.S. today comes from individuals or lone offenders, and small groups of individuals who based on an ideological belief system, primarily an ideological belief system they self-connect with online activity, but theyll go out and commit an act of violence on behalf of that belief or a combination of ideological beliefs, or a combination of ideological beliefs and personal grievances.

What does this mean for Americans?

It means that the Feds can target individual's for expressing anti-government sentiments.

In many respects, this is a much more individualized threat, and what I mean by that is if you look at the lethal attacks that have occurred in the U.S. over the last several years, they have been conducted by individuals who spend incredible amounts of time online viewing extremist content, content about past violent attacks, they tend to be individuals who have shared behavioral health or environmental characteristics, Cohen said.

Targeting people for their ideological beliefs is horrifying in and of itself. Biden's new domestic terror law will also give law enforcement the right to target people based on their behaviors.

What we mean by that, yes, the motive and ideological beliefs are important as part of the analytic process, but the threat tends to come from individuals who have a very superficial understanding of the ideological belief system they use as the validation for an act of violence, but they do have shared behavioral characteristics, Cohen said.

If any of this is beginning to sound like China, one only need look at Hong Kong to see the similarities. Speaking out in print against an authoritative regime is an arrestable offense, demonstrating against police brutality is an arrestable offense and so on.

As a recent Brietbart article pointed out, there is no "official Pentagon definition of extremism." So how can our government give more powers to law enforcement to surveil and arrest suspected "domestic extremists"?

Mike Berry, the general counsel for First Liberty Institute, said he asked the Counter-Extremism Working Group (CEWG) how it intended to define extremism and the answer he got was something to the effect of: Were still working on that, well probably take the existing definition and expand it. Berry said that response was problematic.

When an organization that backed President Trump warns people about Biden's new domestic terror law, it is time for all of us to take notice.

Berry warned, I just dont know how you can reconcile the Constitution with trying to criminalize someones thoughts and beliefs. And that is the crux of the problem.

When DHS counterterrorism chief Cohen goes on record saying, "There have been several cases where individuals have not met the threshold for domestic terror yet they eventually go out and commit an act of violence", they are admitting that this is another scam that the mass media is only too happy to perpetuate.

When the Feds and the mass media started asking American's to "enhance domestic terrorism reporting" by reporting family members and co-workers, you know law enforcement has become a mirror image of other authoritarian regimes.

"Our goal is to enhance domestic terrorism analysis and improve information sharing throughout law enforcement at the federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial level, and where appropriate with private sector partners."

This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence, the White House official said.

Imagine if I used the same logic that the Feds and law enforcement use. It could go something like this:

One day, I looked outside my window and saw my neighbor talking to a Black man and then I saw them talking to what appeared to be a Muslim but I couldn't see the person's face because it was covered with a hijab. Then I saw my neighbor putting anti-government and Black Lives Matter signs in their front yard; they even put up a Pride flag. The next day, my neighbor knocked on my front door asking me to sign a police reform petition. Little did I know that my wife and kids had already signed the petition.

The next day when I went to work, I overheard my co-workers saying that they planned to march in a Black Lives Matter protest and asked me to sign a police brutality petition.

So when I got off work I immediately called DHS's new, "Be On The Lookout For Domestic Terrorists" hotline and filed reports on my neighbors, my family and co-workers, I even called my local police department and filed reports with the local Fusion Center. I did this to protect my Homeland, because you never really know about a person's ideological beliefs and behaviors. (FYI, there is no domestic terrorists hotline, yet.)

When did freedom of expression become a tool for law enforcement to use to identify family members, friends, neighbors and co-workers as potential extremists?

Giving law enforcement more powers to target people based on made-up or junk science and unsound definitions of domestic terrorism has all the earmarks of an ever-expanding police state that began 11 years ago.
As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.

A major witness in the US case against Julian Assange has just admitted fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin, an Icelandic newspaper. The paper interviewed the witness, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, who admitted that he had made false allegations against Assange after being recruited by US authorities. Thordarson, who has several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and financial fraud, began working with the US Department of Justice and the FBI after receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. He even admitted to continuing his crime spree while working with the US authorities.

Last summer, US officials had presented an updated version of their indictment against Assange to Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser at the Old Bailey in London. Key to this update was the assertion that Assange had instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland.

As the Stundin article reported:

The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well. This activity was said to include attempts to hack into the computers of members of [the Icelandic] parliament and record their conversations. In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs.

Judge Baraitsers ruling on 4 January, 2021 was against extradition to the US. But she did so purely on humanitarian grounds concerning Assanges health, suicide risk and the extreme conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons.

The Stundin article continued:

With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question. Other misleading elements can be found in the indictment, and later reflected in the Magistrates judgement, based on Thordarsons now admitted lies.

The Stundin article further details Thordarsons lies and deceptions, including mispresenting himself as an official representative of WikiLeaks while a volunteer in 2010-2011, even impersonating Assange, and embezzling more than $50,000 from the organisation.

By August 2011, Thordarson was being pursued by WikiLeaks staff trying to locate the missing funds. In fact, Thordarson had arranged for the money to be sent to his private bank account by forging an email in Assanges name. That month, Thordarson sought a way out by contacting the US Embassy in Iceland, offering to be an informant in the case against Assange.

Stundin noted:

within 48 hrs a private jet landed in Reykjavik with around eight [US] agents who quickly set up meetings with Thordarson and with people from the Icelandic State Prosecutors office and the State Police Commissioner.

But it turned out that the US officers did not have permission from the Icelandic government to operate in the country and Ogmundur Jonasson, then Icelands minister of interior, ordered them to leave. Meanwhile, the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks. In reality, the approach was a ruse to fool Iceland into cooperation in an attempt to entrap Assange

Continue reading the article
Federal law enforcement agencies secretly seek the data of Microsoft customers thousands of times a year, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by a senior executive at the technology company.

Tom Burt, Microsofts corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.

Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an Americans email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud, said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.

The relationship between law enforcement and Big Tech has attracted fresh scrutiny in recent weeks with the revelation that Trump-era Justice Department prosecutors obtained as part of leak investigations phone records belonging not only to journalists but also to members of Congress and their staffers. Microsoft, for instance, was among the companies that turned over records under a court order, and because of a gag order, had to then wait more than two years before disclosing it.
Beginning this week, the censorship heavy Facebook rolled out a new warning to users alerting them to the possibility that they may have seen extremist content or may be friends with extremists. Every member of the Free Thought Project received one of these warnings  despite years of promoting only peace and freedom for all.

Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist? read one of the messages that some users received. Another read, you may have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently. Both included links to get support where users can report content they deem extremist.

This move comes after Joe Biden announced last month that they are creating a means for family and friends to snitch on each other.

In a teleconference three weeks ago, a senior administration official told reporters of a plan that sounds reminiscent of the Minority Report by attacking pre-crime.

We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs, the official said.

The official went on to explain how this would work, which involves family members and friends snitching on each other.

We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs. And on that, I would just note that one of the things were talking about is the need to do something in this space, like the See something  If you see something, say something concept that has been promulgated previously by DHS. This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence.

The official also announced that the government would be partnering with big tech to achieve increased information sharing between tech platforms to help combat this potential for radicalization.

It now appears that its here.

On Thursday, Facebook said the extremist warning was a test for a global approach to prevent radicalization on the site.

This test is part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk, said a Facebook spokesperson in an emailed statement to Reuters. We are partnering with NGOs and academic experts in this space and hope to have more to share in the future.

But exactly what Facebook considers extremism or extremist content remains unclear. What is perfectly clear, however, is that they will undoubtedly crack down on political speech, vaccine safety speech, and all other legal free speech that may challenge the status quo  as this has been their MO from the start.

As Facebook moves the needle on censorship of free speech to an all time high, last week, they were sued in the Texas Supreme Court for allowing child predators to groom and recruit children for sex-trafficking.

The lawsuit, carried out by a group of children who were recruited on Facebook by their abusers, was successful in moving forward last week. The group sued Facebook for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle.

The three victims accused Facebook of running an unrestricted platform to stalk, exploit, recruit, groom, and extort children into the sex trade. One was 15 when an older man contacted her on Facebook, offered her a modeling job, photographed her, posted the pictures on the now-defunct BackPage website, and prostituted her to other men, leading her to be raped, beaten, and forced into further sex trafficking. The other two girls were 14, and reported almost identical experiences, with one openly pimped out for dates on Instagram, a Facebook subsidiary, Graham Dockery explained.

Facebook lawyers argued the company was shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not akin to a publisher conveying the same message.

This should totally be the case, but if Facebook can claim Section 230 on child trafficking, then why do they target and eliminate political speech so viciously? If Facebook does not act as a neutral party and removes peaceful anti-establishment content, they have no legal basis to claim entitlement under Section 230.

The court disagreed with Facebooks lawyers, ruling, 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 opinion said. Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking.

For years, TFTP has reported on this phenomenon of Facebook attacking political speech while child exploitation goes unchecked. In 2018, Facebook and Twitter  without warning or justification  deleted the pages of Free Thought Project and Police the Police which had over 5 million followers.

During this purge, they also removed hundreds of other pages including massive police accountability groups, antiwar activists, alternative media, and libertarian news outlets. Facebook claimed to remove these pages in the name of fighting disinformation online and creating a safer user experience. But this was a farce. Illustrating just how big of an ostentatious sham this was, just weeks after claiming to keep their community safe, a child was openly sold on their platform.

This was no isolated incident either. The Guardian reported a study in 2020 that suggested Facebook is not fully enforcing its own standards banning content that exploits or endangers children.

According to the study, it examined at least 366 cases between January 2013 and December 2019, according to a report from the not-for-profit investigative group Tech Transparency Project (TPP) analyzing Department of Justice news releases.

Of the 366 cases of child sex abuse on Facebook, the social media giant reported just 9% of them to authorities. Investigations initiated by authorities discovered the other 91% of the cases  not Facebook.

As the great purge of anti-establishment views continues, remember that this company who claims they have your best interests in mind, according to the aforementioned lawsuit, is benefiting from the exploitation and trafficking of children.

About Matt Agorist


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Getting a vaccination card has been a difficult process for some Manitobans, but it has been even harder for seniors.

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Getting a vaccination card has been a difficult process for some Manitobans, but it has been even harder for seniors.

This week, the Sun received several calls from seniors in the area without internet access who have had trouble applying for their cards.

When Premier Brian Pallister first announced the creation of the program on June 8, the accompanying press release included this sentence:

"People who would like to request their card but do not have internet access can contact the Insured Benefits Branch of Manitoba Health and Seniors Care at 204-786-7101 or 1-800-392-1207 (toll-free) to request a card."

If you call that number during business hours, which readers reported was also given to them by Manitoba Health, Prairie Mountain Health and their MLAs, youre likely to get a busy signal.

One of the people trying to get through to that number is Charles Ostiuk of Brandon, who is more than two weeks past receiving his second dose of vaccine and wants to take advantage of vaccination card holders ability to eat inside restaurants with other fully vaccinated people.

"Im stuck in my own residence," he said. "My buddy, we got our shots the same day. We planned on sitting together in the very near future having coffee at the mall, but you cant even do that."

Though he owns a smartphone, he doesnt have internet access at home or mobile data.

Linda Plowman, the acting executive director of Brandon Seniors for Seniors Co-op, said that shed also heard of seniors without internet access facing the same problem, trying to call that number and always getting a busy signal.

Despite that number having been given out by various government sources, a Manitoba Health spokesperson told the Sun by email on Wednesday that officially the only way to sign up for a vaccination card is through the online portal or the smartphone app.

Those needing to reach the Insured Benefits Branch, which is responsible for managing Manitoba health cards among other benefits for residents, should keep trying the number throughout the day and consider getting a friend or family member to assist them in applying for their cards, according to the spokesperson.

They also said a phone option is being developed.

At Wednesdays vaccine briefing, vaccine implementation task force co-lead Johanu Botha talked about the issues of developing a phone line with enough capacity to handle the demand.

"In terms of the accessibility approach about getting a phone number in place that can handle this level of demand, were actively building that," Botha said. "Id love to be able to sit here and give that number and say its good to go right now, but we want to ensure it has all the capacity in place, all the boxes have been checked, so when we release that number, it can do the job. Because, frankly, the first number that went out there, we didnt quite anticipate the demand on the system."

Reached by phone on Wednesday, Brandon East Progressive Conservative MLA Len Isleifson said hed received a "couple calls" about the phone issues.

"Starting Monday, when well allow a person here or there to come into the office, we can help them out," Isleifson said. "If people are having issues, they can certainly call our office, make an appointment, come down and see us, and we can log on the system and walk them through it that way if they dont have access to a computer."

Because of remaining public health orders about COVID-19 limiting the number of people allowed to be in the office, Isleifson stressed that people will need to make an appointment before visiting his office at 217 10th St.

Those wishing to call Isleifsons constituency office can call 204-717-0977.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Ostiuk told the Sun hed found a temporary workaround. He said hed arranged with the Prairie Mountain Health office at The Town Centre to drop by and get a printout of his vaccination record that he could use as a temporary document while he waits for his card.

He also said the health district had offered to help him apply for his card at a later date by sending his personal information to the office handling the rollout of the cards.

The Sun reached out to a PMH spokesperson on Wednesday to see if there was any kind of formal program the health district is offering to assist seniors in getting their vaccination cards, but received no response.

 cslark@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @ColinSlark
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Canada Day was marked differently in Brandon and around Westman on Thursday.

Many people around the city dressed in orange T-shirts for the day, instead of the traditional red and white, to commemorate the hundreds of unmarked graves found at former residential schools across the country.

I will make space to be thankful for my privilege to be Canadian, but I dont believe this country is worth celebrating, per se, this year. I think the collective outrage and devastation towards the discovery of all of the childrens bodies is a step forward, but our Indigenous folks have suffered too much, after telling us for too damn long that there are bodies everywhere.  Heather Thompson

At the site of the former Brandon Indian Residential School, Archie Scott, who wore an orange sweater, said he walked all the way from 23rd Street to reflect.

The potential graves of 104 children who attended the school have been found spread across three burial sites, including at Turtle Crossing Campground, the Sioux Valley property at the north side of Grand Valley Road and the Brandon Research and Development Centre property.

"That was before my time. I was only three when the last residential school closed. Im glad I didnt have to come to a place like this," Scott told the Sun after looking at memorials placed around the property.

Today our family wont be celebrating anything but we will be taking the time to reflect and discuss as a family. We will be talking to our kids about the history of this country and its peoples before and after colonization.  Michelle Renee Budiwski

The walk took approximately an hour, he said. At times he wanted to turn around, but he kept on.

Scott, who is from Misipawistik Cree Nation, said he wanted to walk to the site rather than drive to take more time to reflect.

"Im glad I made it," he said.

Im celebrating it like we do every year! Barbecue with friends followed by our yearly fireworks! Every country has a past and even though its sad Im proud to be Canadian and we will celebrate our freedom that our great grandparents fought so hard for!  Samantha Kennedy

The Killarney Turtle Mountain Arts Council held a community art project to commemorate the children who died in residential schools.

The project was an alternative to Canada Day celebrations, said arts administrator Jane Ireland. People were invited to the Heritage Home for the Arts to create a small piece of art, such as a poem, picture, drawing or anything else meaningful, which are set to be hung on doors and trees at the gallery.

After four days, Ireland said the plan is to burn the pieces in a sacred fire.

We acknowledge that today is the nations birthday. We have a great country with a dark and hurtful past. We are reflecting on this past in the light of the recently found graves and the continued inequality shared by so many Canadians.  Tony Nault

"We thought it was probably more appropriate to take the day and reflect on what has been happening and on what the calls to action have been from the Truth and Reconciliation (Commission) report, but also to respect and give space to the mourning our Indigenous communities are experiencing," she said.

"We had a lot of discussions about it  some people feel like they are OK celebrating Canada Day in the normal way and many others dont  this is a day of mourning for them and they dont feel like they can celebrate Canada right now, which is totally understandable."

The art project was an attempt to respect that, she said, and the aim is to help people get a better understanding of the history of the country.

We will sit have food and drinks in the yard like every Canada Day, this year we are fully vaccinated and proud to be Canadian; but the conversation will be humbling and reflective of Canadian past and the Canadian future how we change and improve things.  Lisa Grantham

"I think many people are grieving right now and its a chance for our community to come together in a way and grieve together as well," she said.

In a statement, Manitoba Metis Federation president David Chartrand said Canada Day 2021 was a day to reflect on the countrys ideals and confronting when Canada has not lived up to them.

"Still, we should not discard our country. Instead, we should face the truth as we continue down the road to reconciliation, without losing sight of what we have gained," he said.

Archie Scott reflects on the display of orange hearts at the site of the former Brandon Indian Residential School on Canada Day. (Drew May/The Brandon Sun)

Premier Brian Pallister said the discovery of unmarked graves is "heartbreaking" and should be inspiration for Canadians to build a better future while righting past wrongs.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has handed us new and ever greater challenges than ever before. It has challenged our determination, resiliency and resolve. Over the past year and a half, Manitobans and Canadians have made great personal sacrifices in order to protect their community and country," he said in a statement.

"In this post-pandemic era we are about to enter, I believe now more than ever before, we stand united in our commitment to build a healthier, stronger and more prosperous country for all Canadians."

I will honour my First Nations relatives ... and hold our children super close today. Enjoy them, mourn with my family and pray. Think about all those that have been sacrificing and pushing to get the children home. Happy First Nations day.  Helena Mazawasicuna

Canada Day fireworks were also cancelled at the Riverbank Discovery Centre due to COVID-19 gathering size restrictions.

The Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program has a hotline to help residential school survivors and their relatives suffering from trauma invoked by the recall of past abuse. The number is 1-866-925-4419.

 dmay@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @DrewMay_
WINNIPEG - Statues of two queens on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature were toppled during a rally over the deaths of Indigenous children at residential schools.

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A headless statue of Queen Victoria is seen overturned and vandalized at the provincial legislature in Winnipeg, Friday, July 2, 2021. The statue and a statue of Queen Elizabeth were toppled on Canada Day during demonstrations concerning Indigenous children who died at residential schools. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kelly Geraldine Malone

WINNIPEG - Statues of two queens on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature were toppled during a rally over the deaths of Indigenous children at residential schools.

The statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth were tied with ropes and brought down by a crowd that gathered on Canada Day.

The statue of Queen Victoria, a large structure near the main entrance to the grounds, was covered in red paint and its base had red handprints on it.

The statue's head was also removed. It was retrieved Friday from the river behind the legislature by a man who happened to come by in a kayak. A worker then carted it away in agolf-cart-sized vehicle.

On the steps behind the toppled statue were hundreds of tiny shoes, placed there to recognize the children who went to residential schools.

"This is what you call rising up. Its what you call rising up from oppression and genocide," Tre Delaron, whose spiritual name is Waabishkaamaniingan, said Friday.

Delaron said he did not take part in the destruction. He has been at a camp on the legislature grounds where people are keeping a fire going for residential school survivors.

He said the statues should have been removed by the government a long time ago.

It was victory. If Canada wants reconciliation, this is how to start it.

Some people attempted to take off the statues head with an axe and a sledgehammer Thursday night, Delaron said. Both tools broke. People then used a ball in the queen's hand to knock the head off. The crown was also removed.

The grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Arlen Dumas, was at a separate Canada Day event. He said he was shocked.

"I personally wouldn't have participated in that ... mind you, it has been a very triggering time over the past few weeks," Dumas said.

"It's unfortunate that they chose to express themselves the way that they did. But it's actually a symbol of the fact that there is a lot of hurt and that there's a lot of frustration and anger with just how things have happened."

Premier Brian Pallister called the acts of vandalism unacceptable.

"They are a major setback for those who are working toward real reconciliation and do nothing to advance this important goal," Pallister said in a statement.

"Those who commit acts of violence will be pursued actively in the courts."

Winnipeg police said some officers were assaulted and spit on and their vehicles struck with rocks and paint.

Police Chief Danny Smyth said officers did not try to stop the damage to the statues, which was done by a small number of the 1,000 or more people in the crowd.

"We did not want to further incite the crowd that had gathered."

One man was arrested and faces a charge of damaging a private vehicle after the event, Smyth said. More charges may come as the investigation, aided by security cameras, gets underway.

Many events normally associated with Canada Day were either cancelled or scaled back this year after hundreds of unmarked graves were found at residential school sites in British Columbia and Saskatchewan.

There were also other acts of vandalism.

A statue of Queen Victoria in Kitchener, Ont., was doused in red paint.

In Victoria, B.C., a statue of Captain James Cook was dismantled and thrown into the harbour. The statue was replaced with a wooden cut out of a red dress  a symbol representing murdered and missing Indigenous women  and its base was smeared with red handprints.

In St. John's, N.L., two prominent buildings and a statue dedicated to the local police force were vandalized with bright red paint.

Back in Winnipeg, Dumas said he would be willing to help replace the statues at the legislature.

"I'd be willing to help facilitate ... creating perhaps a replacement monument that's more reflective of all of us," he said. "Statues can be replaced but the children we've lost will never return."

The Manitoba government was planning to erect a statue of Chief Peguis on the legislature grounds. The move, announced last October, is aimed at commemorating the signing of the first treaty in Western Canada in 1817.

 With files from Kelly Geraldine Malone in Winnipeg and Melissa Coutu in Toronto

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 2, 2021.
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:
Want to praise someone or get something off your chest? Darts and Pats is the place to do it.
The past three years have seen a spike in the number of reports of sexual assault on West Australian mine sites and camps made to the state safety regulator.

In 2021 alone there have been five incidents reported to the Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety, which came after four instances last year and three in 2019.

There have been five sexual assaults reported to the Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety in 2021. Credit:WAtoday

The jump in reporting stands out compared to the period between 2011 and 2018 when there were just three reports of sexual assault made to the department.

Sexual harassment incidents have also increased this year to six, which is nearly a third of all reported cases in the past decade.
Scandinavia has set the pace for crime thrillers  chilly, perverse and brim-full of intensity, with a side order of homespun knitwear  so effectively that the excellence of other kinds of films and television can be overlooked. We know what we want from the North: bodies and bleakness.

But Scandinavian film comes in many colours besides noir. Last Oscar season saw the crowning of the Danish film about middle-aged men and drinking, Another Round. In the forthcoming Scandinavian Film Festival, several films burrow into the interior of family life. Scandinavian parents conventionally eschew smacking and shouting, but you cant legislate against unspoken tensions or tides of feeling. From such things is cinema made.

The very best of them is Hope, Norwegian director Maria Sodahls film about a choreographer whose life is turned upside down by a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Andrea Braein Hovig plays Anja, speeding on steroids and suddenly prepared to say anything; all the careful conventions that make her relationships seem functional now seem like a waste of time. Stellan Skarsgard plays Tomas, her longstanding partner and father of her three children. He also has three older children; it seems to be a model, modern, blended family, although we can see hairline cracks in the edifice starting to spoil its glaze.

This is a sort of shamefully autobiographical project, says Sodahl, who was told four years ago that she was about to die. Its so close to what happened to me both medically and as a family story. Having decided to write about it, she knew she had to be completely honest, not least about life in a blended family. And how that works when tragedy hits. I believe many people like me try to treat biological and non-biological children the same way.
Were already seeing evidence of that in other jurisdictions that have higher levels of vaccination, he said. So, when it is like the flu, we should treat it like the flu, and that means no lockdowns. Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly said health experts could in the future measure success based on the number of people severely unwell with COVID-19, rather than total case numbers. This year, Australia has recorded just over 2000 cases of COVID-19, with one death in a person who had returned from overseas. Besides Queensland, where the state keeps all positive cases in hospital, Professor Kelly said there have been few hospitalisations and very few cases in intensive care.

Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: There are active cases in all but two of our jurisdictions in Australia. But throughout that, and as of today, there are only three people in intensive care out of all of those hundreds of cases now that are active in Australia, he said. Thats a really crucial point. It does point to and will increasingly point to how vaccination will see us get out of this current situation, he said. There were more than 900 deaths from coronavirus in Australia last year, mostly in Victoria. Burnet Institute infectious diseases expert and physician Suman Majumdar said he thought a rough vaccination target of 80 per cent would reasonably allow Australians to live with coronavirus in the community, without regular lockdowns.

Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly believes vaccination will reduce the countrys reliance on lockdowns to manage COVID-19. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen But he said the public should not expect it would be possible to just let the virus go. Instead there would likely be a gradual release of restrictions. Rather than the flu, I would say measles might be more similar, because measles is catastrophic if it is rampant in an unvaccinated population, Dr Majumdar said. University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely said while it was sensible to plan for living with the virus, a high level of vaccination alone would not be sufficient to protect the public as Australia opened up. Thats because he estimated that an extremely high vaccination rate of 90 per cent of all Australians, including children, would be required to get close to herd immunity  the point where it becomes difficult for the virus to spread through the community.

So we will we need to keep wearing masks after some period of time ... in high-risk places like buses, trains and cramped indoor environments, he said. Professor Blakely also said contact tracers would need to continue tracking the virus. Vaccination alone is not enough for this little bugger, he said. It requires a package of vaccination, contact tracing, mask wearing and physical distancing. Professor Blakely said that living with the virus would mean there would be some deaths and illness in Australia from coronavirus but we just have to get our way through it.

Loading I think learning to live with the virus is the most sensible scenario to have. It is going to be bumpy out in the community with outbreaks here and there until we really get on top of it, and its going to be a little bit bumpy inside the health sector. Professor Baxter called for a shift in attitudes on how to prevent the spread of infectious airborne diseases, including by following the lead of many Asian countries and making regular mask-wearing the norm, as well as a bigger focus on ventilation. A rare silver lining of coronavirus restrictions has been that cases of the flu have dropped so dramatically, its suspected the virus could have been eradicated from the community. Last month there were just 52 cases of influenza detected, compared with almost 60,000 in June 2019. In the past, Professor Baxter said not enough attention had been given to how the flu could be prevented, and it was just accepted that it killed older people.
A miner isolating at a remote Northern Territory gold mine after a COVID-19 outbreak says he and hundreds of colleagues were kept in their bedroom-sized accommodation for six days without being let outside for exercise.

The worker said televisions and kettles only arrived on Thursday  five days into lockdown  and their first chance to wash clothes and exercise in the car park came on Friday.

With internet so poor that he could not read the news on his phone or send emails, the man, who asked to remain anonymous to protect him from being sacked, said he passed the hours by sleeping, stretching and walking around in circles.

The Tanami Road north-west of Alice Springs: The problem is the closest place is 250kms away. Credit:Janie Barrett

Were getting a third of a cup of orange juice  one gulp, he said. The Special K or Cornflakes, you can just about count [the flakes] on your hands. Some people didnt even get breakfast or lunch  or breakfast came at four in the afternoon.
West Australian billionaire Angela Bennett has seen off a claim to her fortune by younger brother Julian Wright, with a judge finding a settlement signed in 2008 stopped him from claiming one-third of her company Wright Prospecting.

Meanwhile, Hancock Prospecting magnate Gina Rinehart will be taking legal stock over two decisions that leave a door open to her childrens claim over her multibillion-dollar fortune.

War of the Rineharts: Bianca Rinehart is challenging her mother Gina to Hancock Prospectings Pilbara assets. Credit:Fairfax Media

In a locked down, empty Supreme Court in Western Australia on Friday, Justice Rene Le Miere delivered three significant judgments that will shape one of the biggest iron ore clashes the nation has seen.

The three-decade legal battle over Lang Hancocks multibillion-dollar Hope Downs mine site in the states Pilbara region is set down for trial in late April next year, with the primary parties Wright Prospecting and Hancock Prospecting. A third Pilbara prospecting dynasty, under the company name DFD Rhodes, is also seeking royalty payments from the mine.
I am the opposite of vaccine-hesitant. Im vaccine  enthusiastic! Ive always embraced vaccines; the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine in high school; Gardasil in my 20s; the yellow fever vaccine when I moved to Uganda in 2012. Vaccines have overwhelmingly been a force for good in my life; theyve allowed me to travel and not get - say - cervical cancer.

Since our COVID 19 vaccine rollout began in February, Ive been patiently waiting my turn towards the tail end of an increasingly backlogged queue with the rest of the under-40s. Like most Australians, I have watched with a degree of helplessness as the goalposts shifted and then shifted again leaving us lagging significantly behind the rest of the developed world in our rollout.

Jan Fran: Vaccines have been overwhelmingly a force for good in my life. Credit:AP

Contrary to Prime Ministerial belief, the vaccine rollout is absolutely a race and so when Scott Morrison announced on Monday evening that the AstraZeneca vaccine would be made available through GPs to anyone who wanted it, including those under 40-years-old, I called my GP the following morning to arrange an appointment.

I never made it to the clinic!
A woman, who was randomly attacked by a married Sydney couple experiencing drug-induced psychosis, believed she was going to die as she was punched, dragged 10 metres by her hair and had her head forced into a brick wall and car window.

Tongia Halisi Heaki held a kitchen knife to his victims leg during the terrifying ordeal on April 26 last year and said, Im going to assassinate you now, the NSW District Court heard as the pair were sentenced on Friday.

Naquita Heaki (right) leaves court after she was sentenced to an intensive correction order lasting two years and four months. Credit:Janie Barrett

Heaki, 38, and his wife of more than a decade, Naquita Heaki, 32, pleaded guilty earlier this year to reckless grievous bodily harm in company and destroying or damaging property, being the victims Apple Watch that was ripped off her wrist and shattered as she tried to activate Siri to call police.

Summarising the agreed facts, Judge Phillip Mahony said the couple had ingested drugs on a night out and were acting maniacally the next morning. They thought their friend was dead and that their car was a crime scene. A family member, whom they asked to call police, said they were freaking out.
The motorcyclist killed in a suspected Queensland hit-and-run has been named as Jakob Opacic  reportedly the brother of current Parramatta Eels centre, and ex-Brisbane Bronco, Tom Opacic.

Emergency services were called to the crash on Nerang Murwillumbah Road in Natural Bridge in the Gold Coast hinterland about 10.15am on Friday.

Crash victim Jakob Opacic. Credit:Facebook

The victim, 28-year-old Jakob Opacic, was declared dead at the scene by paramedics. He lived in the Moreton Bay suburb of Bracalba, north of Brisbane.

However, forensic crash unit investigators were joined by criminal detectives and scientific officers at the scene on Friday, with the motorbike riders death being treated as suspicious.
A motorbike rider has died after he was hit by a vehicle on the Gold Coast, with criminal detectives investigating whether the motorcyclist was deliberately targeted by another driver.

Emergency services were called to the crash on Nerang Murwillumbah Road in Natural Bridge in the Gold Coast hinterland about 10.15am on Friday.

The motorcyclist  a 28-year-old man from the Moreton Bay suburb of Bracalba, north of Brisbane  was declared dead at the scene by paramedics.

However, police believe the victim was involved in an argument with two men outside Numinbah Correctional Centre about five minutes before the crash.
Brisbane and Moreton Bay local council areas are spending another day in lockdown, as health authorities work to find where a mum and daughter became infected and the Queensland government warns its hotel quarantine system is full to bursting.

While most of the local government areas, including Townsville in north Queensland, had restrictions lifted from 6pm Friday, Brisbane and Moreton Bay council areas were told to stay locked down for another 24 hours.

Brisbane and Moreton Bay are remaining in lockdown for another day as contact tracers track down the origins of a handful of mystery cases. Credit: Jono Searle/Getty Images

The decision followed Queensland recording six new virus cases on Friday, two in hotel quarantine and four in the community.

One of the community cases was linked to previous cases  a baggage handler who was the partner of an airport check-in clerk who previously tested positive.
A dance music festival that was to have been held in Port Melbourne over the weekend has been cancelled by the Andrews government, leaving thousands of revellers stranded, several international DJs without a gig and event organisers out of pocket.

Almost 4000 people had bought tickets for Paradigm Festival on Saturday and Sunday, which was to have been staged in a modified warehouse and a series of large tents.

People arriving at the site of the cancelled Paradigm Festival. Credit:Wayne Taylor

Scottish DJ Will Atkinson posted an image from inside the warehouse on Thursday afternoon, when he told fans that the stage is set - I need this bad.

However, Victorias health authorities intervened on Friday afternoon.
Michael OBriens chief of staff is leaving his job by mutual agreement following an internal review of the Opposition Leaders office in the lead up to the November 2022 state election.

In an email to colleagues on Friday, Mr OBrien confirmed Brett Hogan had been appointed to a new policy role within the Victorian Liberal Party.

Victorian Liberal leader Michael OBrien his removed his chief of staff Brett Hogan from the role. Credit:Scott McNaughton

In his new role Mr Hogan will work on the partys policy platform and help prepare the opposition for office, should the Coalition win the state election.

Mr Hogans departure follows a review of the functioning of Mr OBriens office by former Liberal Party federal director Brian Loughnane, first revealed by The Age.
That is the third consecutive day of zero cases. Thats really good news and I think were very excited to see a very stable picture now of the other remaining. Authorities still had 210 primary close contacts to clear from quarantine, he said. Mr Weimar said he wanted to see many of those people cleared to return to the community soon including the remaining four cases from the Southbank cluster and the Kings Park apartment complex cluster who contracted the virus late in their initial 14-day quarantine. We thank all the residents of those apartment buildings for the ongoing support and cooperation over what looked like a week ago quite a worrying outbreak but now appears to be in very good hands, Mr Weimar said on Saturday.

At Southbank weve got four of the 12 cases remaining active, those are the cases that turned active very late in their activation cycle. All the people at the apartment complex at the Kings Park site were released last week and were very confident with the way thats been handled. There were 19,623 vaccinations administered and 24,247 tests carried out. There are now 30 active cases in the state. Victorias latest zero day prompted a tweet from Victorias Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton on Saturday morning reading simply: Crushing it, Victoria. Dedicated quarantine preferred Mr Weimar said it was unlikely that Victoria would test out home quarantine for vaccinated travellers until much later in the pandemic.

South Australia is planning a trial of a shorter, home-based quarantine for people returning to Australia who have been fully vaccinated but Mr Weimar said he did not think Victoria would do the same until more of the public was vaccinated and the dedicated quarantine facility at Mickleham was operating. At some point in time everythings on the table and if you look at the Commonwealths road map that was released yesterday  I think all these things start to become possible when you get into far higher levels of vaccination. Were still struggling with bringing people in from overseas, who are incubating a really high level of very aggressive variants of the COVID virus which is why its leaking out of hotel quarantine. So today is not the day to be looking at a home quarantine systems.

Mr Weimar said results show any state would prefer to have a dedicated quarantine facility rather than hotel quarantine. All outbreaks were caused by leaks from hotel quarantine in four different sites systems, thats a trend were seeing with more aggressive variants like the Delta variant so, absolutely, we should be concerned about that. Mr Weimar said Howard Springs in the Northern Territory was the only quarantine location that had not leaked the virus. I think one of the hallmarks of the Victorian approach over the last 18 months has been that weve always learned from our mistakes, Mr Weimar said.

Its a long walk, and weve got a long way to go yet to get to the top of the mountain so youve got to continue to improve and build. With NSW recording another double digit in increase in case numbers, Premier Gladys Berejiklian, noting the green shoots of what the lockdown was meant to achieve had begun to emerge but it was too early to say when her government and its health experts would be able to make the call on whether the lockdown is extended beyond Friday. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Queensland and Western Australia both announced the end of targeted lockdowns in those states on Saturday. Queensland recorded eight new cases on Saturday  three in hotel quarantine and five locally acquired. Chief Health Officer Dr Jeannette Young said some of the cases came to light quite late, which was why the morning press conference was delayed by nearly two hours.
The occupational violence and aggression that weve been experiencing is really because theres been a disconnect between trying to meet the expectations of the public. Nobody expects to come to work and experience violence and aggression. Nobody expects to come to work and experience violence and aggression, says nurse unit manager at the Showgrounds Vaccination Hub Alison Lamb. Credit:Jason South She said people often hold the expectation that they get to choose which vaccines that theyll be receiving when medical staff are restricted by the departments guidelines. Try and understand that were doing the best that we can, she said.

Theres a lot of hurdles that we deal with on a day-to-day basis, that is not widely known to the public. Victoria recorded no new locally acquired coronavirus cases in the 24 hours to midnight on Thursday. The state recorded three new coronavirus cases in hotel quarantine. More than 24,700 COVID-19 test results were processed in the past 24 hours, and nearly 19,500 people received vaccine doses. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews will take his plan to slash overseas arrivals to national cabinet on Friday morning. Credit:Getty Mr Foley said more than 49,000 people in the state became fully vaccinated against COVID-19 this week, and 50,000 Victorians were booked in next week to receive their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

Meanwhile, national cabinet on Friday resolved to halve the number of people arriving in Australia. That followed a strong push from some state leaders, including Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. He said it would be desperately sad to have to reject some Australians trying to come home for compassionate reasons, but if they did come home, a coronavirus outbreak was much more likely, as were lockdowns. The greatest good for the greatest number, and thats exactly what well do, Mr Andrews said. Travel changes for Victorians entering from NSW

There are no longer any green zones left in NSW, after Victorian authorities at 6am on Thursday made all those remaining orange under the states traffic light travel system. This means Melburnians and regional Victorians who arent from a border community wont be able to re-enter Victoria from the NSW side of the border unless they obtain a permit, agree to isolate upon arrival and get a COVID-19 test within 72 hours. Previously, Melburnians were able to travel freely to and from the NSW side of the border (for example, to Albury) but not any further into NSW due to the states COVID-19 outbreak. The Department of Health says it made this change out of an abundance of caution. Mr Foley said 50 members of the Australian Defence Force have been enlisted to help with the states COVID-19 home visit program.

The ADF will assist authorised officers checking in on people isolating in Victoria. Some will be isolating because theyve returned from a designated red zone interstate, which dictates that residents have to quarantine for 14 days upon their arrival in Victoria. Mr Foley said officers yesterday conducted 160 household checks in Victoria and the majority of those isolating were doing the right thing. These ADF members are specially trained to conduct these household visits, Mr Foley said. More visits give us more confidence that everyone who is staying home is doing the right thing by themself, and the community.

Officers in the states border patrol operation with NSW stopped and checked 2100 people yesterday, Mr Foley said. That was in addition to the 2000 people stopped at the border on Wednesday. Businesses still waiting for support More than 53,000 Victorian businesses are still waiting for lockdown support payments, a month after a state government assistance scheme went live. The assistance fund was set up to help small businesses and local venues after Victorias latest lockdown.

Nearly 123,000 small businesses and venues applied for the grants. The Business Victoria website received 10,000 hits a minute after the grants went live and businesses had three weeks to apply. Loading As of Thursday, more than 63,000 businesses were yet to receive a payment from the scheme, but that number fell to more than 53,000 on Friday after 10,000 payments went through overnight. A Victorian government spokesman said direct economic support for businesses had topped $6 billion over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The government has so far delivered more than $278 million in grants to 59,000 small and medium-sized businesses and sole traders through the latest round of business support programs, the spokesman said.
People are so over waiting for these flights, and for things to happen, he said. This can mean months for people stuck in India, where theyre not getting any medical or financial help. Are we just assuming theyre going to be ok? Its very wrong. We need a more human approach to this. These people [are citizens], theyre supposed to be here. Kiruthika Prasanna and her husband Mathew also received an exemption to go to India on compassionate grounds in April, because her father-in-law was critically ill. He, too, has since died, and the couple has been trying to return home. Ms Prasanna says DFAT had been no help - even when they offered to chaperone other families stranded children - while commercial flights for June to August were unaffordable, and only became more so with travel caps.

It was approximately $11,000 per ticket. So for the two of us, it would be approximately $27,000 for tickets and quarantine. This is not a viable option for us and I believe many other Australians stranded here, she said. Kiruthika Prasanna and her husband Mathew have become stuck in India after visiting a critically ill parent in April, Our whole life is waiting for us in Brisbane, our dog, house and jobs, she said. Loading Our whole life is waiting for us in Brisbane: our dog, house and jobs. As we both are essential workers, our employers expect us back in the office. The [repatriation flights are] not enough, and we are worried [about] when we can come back home. Haroon Kasim, co-founder of the Humanism Project which works with the global Indian diaspora, said it was pleased the Morrison government and national cabinet had offered a four-phase plan out of lockdown.

We understand the national cabinets demands to reduce international arrivals to reduce the pressure on quarantine facilities, due to the increased risks of the Delta strain, he said. However, we remain conscious that there are many Australians stranded overseas who have been separated from their families and are unable to be with their sick and dying relatives. Leaving them stranded overseas is a breach of their human rights. He urged the government to commit to an explicit timeline for boosting vaccine numbers and said it should have enhanced its quarantine capacity. This would help us ensure that we are doing everything to make it safer for our fellow Australians to return home safely and reunite them with their families and loved ones as soon as possible. Elaine Howlett was one of thousands overseas who were dismayed by national cabinets decision on Friday to halve international arrivals until the population is widely vaccinated. Last March, Ms Howletts Australian husband Bob died from cancer in Hong Kong, where the couple was living.

Of their four adult-aged children visiting in March, three flew home before Mr Howletts death as Australia started shutting its international borders. They went home and went into lockdown immediately, Ms Howlett said from Hong Kong on Friday. Elaine and Bob Howlett with two of their sons. Elaine is in Hong Kong and hasnt been able to see her family since Bob died last March. An Irish national who doesnt have an Australian passport, Ms Howlett said the familys dream of reuniting in either Hong Kong or Australia this year - for example if the kids were granted an exemption to fly overseas and back - had been all but dashed. She expects it to have been at least two years before they meet in person again. Its a deferred kind of grief. We havent had a celebration of Bob and I dont think I realised it until now how important those rituals are, the 64-year-old said.

Its tough on us and I know there are many cases who its even tougher on. Wed like to just grieve together as a family, have a celebration of life, a few drinks in Bobs honour. None of us have been able to do that. Ms Howlett said she found it that illogical vaccinations and non-hotel quarantine hadnt been urgently prioritised to avoid Fridays slash to arrival caps. I find it cruel and I find it completely out of step with whats happening in so many countries in the world that are opening up. Jacinta Reddan, founder of The Alliance of Australians Abroad group of citizens overseas, called the cut to international caps devastating news. Its already almost impossible to get flights and when you do theyre incredibly expensive, she said.
Parents of public school students across the Perth and Peel regions have this week increasingly kept their children home as term two holidays edge closer.

While schools remained open, WA Premier Mark McGowan admitted at a press conference on Wedneday he understood why parents were reluctant to send children to classes, particularly those in the northern suburbs near the centre of the latest COVID-19 outbreak.

School attendances have dropped increasingly through the week as school holidays near. Credit:Gabriele Charlotte

Just 66 per cent of students attended public schools across Perth on Tuesday, compared with 90 per cent at the same time last year, while official public school attendance for Wednesday showed a further 4 per cent drop:
Western Australias fourth lockdown ended at midnight on Friday and has been followed by a two-stage step-down in the coming week.

The first stage of slightly relaxed restrictions were put in place from 12.01am Saturday and are expected to be lifted 12.01am Tuesday, before a six-day period similar to the phase 1 rules to run until July 12.

Perth and Peel is coming out of lockdown from midnight on Friday. Credit:Getty

Pending no further community cases, the Perth and Peel regions could go back to pre-lockdown life on July 12 from 12.01am.

Heres what the new rules mean for you.
Australians are being promised a path out of lockdowns from as soon as next year while international arrivals will be halved within weeks in a four-stage national plan to move on from suppressing COVID-19 in order to live with the virus.

National cabinet backed the proposal to use lockdowns and border checks as required until at least the start of 2022, when the vaccination rollout could reach a key threshold to ease the controls.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the four stages promised to get the country back to normal. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the plan would need a mindset change in the community around living with COVID-19 even when cases increased because vaccinations would prevent serious illness and death.

But premiers and chief ministers have agreed only in principle and will not finalise their position until they see advice from scientists in the next few weeks on the vaccination rate needed to open borders.
Singapore: A week after unveiling its road map towards living with COVID-19 as an endemic disease, Singapore has outlined ambitions for quarantine-free travel to resume for vaccinated passengers by the end of the year.

Although the south-east Asian city state has maintained significant restrictions on social gatherings as well as on incoming arrivals, it plans to further relax measures this month as it works towards a new normal of treating the virus like influenza.

The vision, outlined in an editorial last week by the three ministers who co-chair Singapores multi-ministry COVID-19 taskforce, is tied to the vaccination rate, which is the highest in the region - 58 per cent of the population has received at least one dose of Pfizer or Moderna and 37 per cent are fully inoculated.

Singapore is planning ways to live with coronavirus as it speeds up vaccination rates.

In an interview with Singapores The Straits Times, the countrys health minister, Ong Ye Kung, has now told of how it is targeting the return of international travel without the need for isolation before the new year.
Why? Because China pulled off the impossible, enduring decades of appalling poverty, Maos ruthless Cultural Revolution and the environmental and social cost of rapid industrialisation to challenge the US for global supremacy.

Nor has the United States prevailed entirely; it is no longer the worlds policeman or even the unquestionably dominant economic and cultural power it was back in Nixons day.

Half a century later and the USSR is no more. On the world stage some might regard Russia as either influential or troublesome, but its no longer the great lurking threat to democracy the Soviet Union once was.

His diplomatic olive branch was firmly aimed at levering China away from the sphere of influence of its enormous northern neighbour and fellow traveller, the Soviet Union.

I t seems highly unlikely that when Richard Nixon famously announced his visit to China 50 years ago he had much of an inkling of where relations between the US and the worlds most populous nation would lie today.

The competition is now about Beijing and Washington pulling different groups of countries towards their agendas. For China, this is the developing world, spanning the Indo-Pacific, Asia and Africa. These countries have vastly larger populations than the developed world but some feel they have been ignored by Western liberal democracies as the gap between the rich and the poor grows wider.

No. Biden was trying not to single out China but the overall focus of that speech showed the US sees China becoming the dominant alternative power of the 21st century. In military, economic, diplomatic and environmental capability, these two superpowers will define the decades to come.

On his 100th day of office, US President Joe Biden told his audience, Were in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century. Are any other nations in the race?

After 50 years of diplomatic sparring, the US and China are now openly rivals, seeking dominance in diplomatic clout , economic heft, military might, technology mastery and even climate change reform .

The main story in American politics in recent years has been how polarised the two major parties have become. But one thing both parties agree on is the need to take a more hawkish approach to China. This is coupled with a recognition that the US has to step up its game to compete economically, militarily and diplomatically.

Yes, definitely. Russia can inflict damage on America by meddling in its elections and hacking into its cyber systems . But it is operating from a position of weakness rather than strength. With its lacklustre economy, it doesnt pose a serious challenge to America as a global superpower. China is a more formidable rival, and that realisation is shared across the political spectrum in America.

The United States has focused on containing China by pulling together like-minded democracies in Europe and Asia and highlighting concerns about Chinas breaches of human rights, national security and territory in pursuit of economic dominance.

The financial crash of 2008 made the nation more inward-looking and (understandably in many ways) focused on problems at home, such as the loss of manufacturing jobs to China.

There is a long-term aspect to Americas decline, and a short-term one. Future historians will focus a lot on September 11 and its aftermath as the turning point. The US became bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq , and its fixation on wars in the Middle East led it to neglect traditional diplomacy.

Matt, youve written previously that the US has managed to scramble from behind to gain an edge in the battle to influence global politics. Why is that?

Biden has also framed his pitch for a massive infrastructure package around the need to out-compete China, including on renewable energy. Were seeing a paradigm shift away from the small government ethos that dominated US politics from the Reagan era until now. Competition with China is helping to drive that.

This shared recognition leads to some surprising results. As much as he campaigned as the anti-Trump in last years election, Joe Biden has kept Trumps China tariffs in place. And while most Republicans are hostile to government spending and market intervention, enough senators got on board to pass a sweeping $US250 billion ($323 billion) bill in June that funnels money into advanced scientific research and semiconductor manufacturing. The explicit reason for the bill was that America needs a more active federal government, with a willingness to pick economic winners and losers, to compete with China.

For a country that covered up the initial Wuhan outbreak of COVID-19, China has done remarkably well emerging from a virus that has since killed almost 4 million people. The economy grew by around 2 per cent last year, the only major economy to do so, after its aggressive lockdowns were followed by government stimulus and a rebound in consumer demand.

How has China, in contrast, emerged from the pandemic? Has its superpower status been strengthened or weakened over the past year?

Then came Donald Trump. He did not initiate Americas decline but he accelerated it with his aversion to multilateral institutions and disdain for many traditional US allies. Then came his chaotic response to the coronavirus and attempts to overturn the result of last years election. All this harmed Americas standing on the world stage.

America is an increasingly fractious and fragmented country that regularly swings between Democratic and Republican administrations. As a one-party state, China can plan further into the future with initiatives such as Belt and Road without worries that a future administration will tear it up.

Has the US recovered from its disastrous 2020 this year?

Recovered is a strong word, but it does feel like a remarkably different country. The vaccine rollout has been a big success and COVID-19 cases and deaths are currently at their lowest levels since the pandemic began. Life feels almost entirely back to normal here for most people, except occasionally having to wear a mask.

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America is now in a position to donate hundreds of millions of vaccines to other countries. The Biden administration is far more conventional and predictable than Trumps White House: the new administration gets things wrong but it is not straining Americas institutions (the courts, the press, the electoral system) in the way that Trump did. The big question is whether the chaos we saw after last years election  Trump refusing to accept defeat, and a riot at the Capitol  was an unfortunate blip or a preview of worse things to come. The lack of national unity undermines Americas ability to get things done and assert itself in the world.

Whats the relationship like between Biden and Xi? Why do you think theres been no summit between these two leaders?

Timing mostly. Summits between heads of states take months of planning so that when they actually meet only the top-level details need to be signed off. The order in which new presidents meet their counterparts also signifies the importance of the relationship. Significantly, Bidens first two visits to the White House were from Japans Yoshihide Suga and South Koreas Moon Jae-in. Both are key Indopacific US allies and the latter only landed in Washington on May 21. Biden has been in office since January and the domestic response to the coronavirus pandemic was always going to be his top priority.

So what did we learn from the diplomatic meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, in March, where officials from China and the US ended up trading barbs on camera?

In the US there was a lot of debate following the meeting about which side won the very dramatic war of words between the officials. I think the most important takeaway, though, was that the shift from Biden to Trump will not lead to a substantial thaw in the US-China relationship any time soon. If anything, the problems may grow deeper, even if the rhetoric from the new administration is less confrontational than before. While Trump was surrounded by China hawks like Mike Pompeo and Peter Navarro, he was personally almost entirely focused on trade policy (specifically the idea that China was ripping the US off and stealing American jobs). Biden is more interested in human rights issues and promoting the idea of a global alliance between democracies.

Chinese Communist Party foreign affairs chief Yang Jiechi and the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken square off during the opening remarks of the Alaska bilateral talks, March 18, 2021. Credit:Fair dealing

Thats right, theres a much more palatable shift in the framing from the Biden administration away from self-interest to global co-ordination. There was also an element of China playing to a domestic audience in Alaska. The whole thing was so over the top from Chinas foreign affairs chief Yang Jiechi (who is usually more erudite than other wolf warriors) that it had the distinct look of China standing up to the US on its own turf.

Beijings targeting of human rights abuses in other countries is a telltale sign of when it is feeling vulnerable and is appealing to nationalists back home. The Black Lives Matter movement is a critical issue in the United States, but it is not on the same scale as the allegations of genocide taking place against the Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Will China try to take over Taiwan by force? Could the US stop them?

China is using intimidation as its main tactic, sending fighter jets over the Taiwan Strait, launching cyber attacks and escalating its military rhetoric. Ideally, China would hope that Taiwan would become part of the mainland through the threat of invasion without actually acting on it. This could involve missile strikes but no ground troops.

What do US analysts say about the risk of war between these nations?

Its been interesting to see a difference of opinion between top American military leaders on this question. In March, Admiral Phil Davidson, the outgoing US Indo-Pacific Command commander, said he believed China could try to invade Taiwan within the next six years. General Mark Milley, the head of the Joint Chief of Staff, applied a different emphasis when he testified before Congress in June. Milley said that, while China wants to develop the military capacity to invade Taiwan, he does not believe Beijing intends to do so in the near term.

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Another thing worth bearing in mind from a US perspective is that there is little appetite among the public to be involved in overseas military conflicts, including with China. Military interventionism is out of fashion in US politics right now, as most Americans focus on issues closer to home. Donald Trump spoke for many here when he said the US should not act as the policeman of the world.

Where is the competition between the US and China most heated?

Technology. It is where both are relatively evenly matched and have comparative advantages. China has speed and scale and America has a legacy of innovation. But China is pouring vast amounts of resources into developing the next generation of Huaweis and TikToks.

Robotics are a high priority in Beijings Made in China policy. Credit:AP

Critically, it has the advantage of being able to road test cutting-edge hardware and software among its 1.4 billion-strong population. The question is can it innovate without giving its creators the freedom to challenge authority?

I agree with Eryk that the competition for tech dominance is especially fierce. But I was surprised by how evenly matched the contest for global diplomatic clout is, especially trying to compare Chinas influence with low-income, non-democratic countries to Americas close alliances with wealthier democratic nations.

Something the Lowy Institutes Herve Lemahieu told me was that the US has to do a better job reaching out to hedging countries such as Vietnam that may not be democratic but dont want to be vassal states for China either. Thats something Joe Biden should keep in mind given the huge emphasis he has placed on democracies working together to solve global challenges.

Is it possible for these two great rivals to truly co-operate on climate change reform?

Climate change could become the vector through which the two superpowers may look to try and normalise broader relations, but its also fraught with long, murky objectives. China is not known for its transparency so holding it to its international targets is going to be tricky, but it also has some vested interests.

The pollution from coal-fired power plants got so bad in its tier one cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen from the 2000s, that smog became a part of daily existence. Blue sky days have, over the past few years for the first time, become a part of the publics expectations. A policy that the public can see, taste and feel is a powerful incentive for China to collaborate internationally on. It also gives China some of the international diplomatic credibility that it craves.

Visitors to Tiannanmen Square in Beijing wear face masks against smog, not COVID-19. With strong public demand to continue battling Chinas choking air pollution, some green policies also are likely to be popular at home and reduce social pressure the government sees as a threat. Credit:Getty

I think it is possible as long as a US president who is committed to climate action is in the White House. Biden and his top advisers have stressed that while they see China as a strategic competitor and rival, they want to co-operate with Beijing on climate action.

So, who do you think is the dominant nation right now?

The US still has the upper hand. It has spent decades building up its global networks as the undisputed superpower since the end of the Cold War. But China is catching up quickly because of its ability to dedicate resources into areas it feels it needs to be more competitive in. A state-controlled economy does not need to ask voters if they want to spend billions more on semiconductors, mining projects or warships.

There has been plenty of evidence of Americas seemingly inevitable decline over recent years. But the US still retains significant military, economic and diplomatic advantages that keep it in first place.

The US remains the dominant power for now. Credit:AP

Who will be winning it in 10 years time?

The US will remain globally stronger than China in a decade but China will become the dominant power in its region. Chinas priorities remain primarily domestic  it still has decades before it reaches the living standards of the US. But by 2049, when it has declared it will unify with Taiwan, it will be ready to challenge the US as the worlds dominant superpower. It is not going to enter a war it thinks it can lose. It will plunge resources into those objectives.

The US situation is more volatile, making it harder to predict how the nation will look in 10 years. If political polarisation continues to deepen and the nations electoral system begins to buckle (for example if state legislatures try to overturn election results in the 2024 presidential election) then that bodes ill for Americas global dominance.

In this worst-case scenario, the US will become increasingly inward-looking and focused on its own divisions, leaving the playing field open for China to run world affairs. But America is a resilient and dynamic country that has overcome past crises. Given Chinas rapid rise in recent years it has a good chance to overtake the US, but this is far from inevitable.

Chinas rise is fast and they will be the dominant power in the region within the decade. Credit:Getty

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Into the Great Unknown, then, goes Donald Rumsfeld, who died Tuesday at 88, and whose tenure as George W. Bushs defence secretary was a monument to both ramrod certainty and tactical equivocation, the twin dogmas of Washington. He was a paradox in spectacles, an exacting presence who helped to produce inexact outcomes.

There are known knowns - there are things we know we know, Rumsfeld said in February 2002, when asked for evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. We also know there are known unknowns - that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we dont know we dont know.

Donald Rumsfeld in 2004. Credit:Bloomberg

A journalist followed up: Is this alleged link between Hussein and other terrorists an unknown unknown?

Im not going to say which it is, Rumsfeld replied with a grin. Perhaps he knew and wasnt telling. Perhaps he didnt know. Perhaps he believed that he knew, and that was enough - for him, if not for the country, which would be drained of blood and treasure by catastrophic interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Electric's CEO said he will step down to take responsibility for "three decades of systematic deceit" during which the Japanese firm falsified inspection data for air conditioners and brake compressors used in trains.

The admission by Mitsubishi, whose products range from air conditioners and vacuum cleaners to industrial printers and satellites, further dents Japan's reputation for high-quality manufacturing, already tarnished by other cases of companies falsifying or covering up test data.

"I am shocked by this," Takeshi Sugiyama told a news conference, at which he apologised for the falsification and promised to appoint a successor as early as this month once he had helped coordinate the company's response to the problem.

Sugiyama, who became CEO in 2018 and has been with for more than four decades, said on Friday he regretted not informing shareholders at its annual meeting on June 29.

management was aware of the air conditioner data problem two weeks before and knew about the air compressor falsifications the day before shareholders met, but chose not to release the information until June 30, he said.

The latest corporate scandal comes amid heightened concern over corporate governance in after an investigation found managers at Toshiba Corp, another well-established conglomerates, had colluded with the trade ministry to pressure foreign shareholders.

Japan's economy and trade minister, Hiroshi Kajiyama, said earlier that the government would act if it found that Mitsubishi had broken any laws or regulations.

Mitsubishi said the equipment supplied with falsified inspection data posed no safety risk, and although it breached contracts with customers, did not break any laws.

The company said it would release a full report in September, alongside measures to deal with the problem.

In the 35 years that Mitsubishi falsified inspection data, it supplied 84,600 air conditioning units to 80 rail companies.

It said it shipped 1,500 compressors, used in train brakes and doors, including in Japan's high-speed bullet trains, to 20 mostly domestic companies.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly. Editing by Jane Merriman and Alexander Smith)

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State-run Ltd., Indias largest power generator, aims to take its renewables unit public to help fund a 2.5 trillion rupees ($34 billion) clean energy expansion, according to a company official with knowledge of the plans.

The New Delhi-based producer wants to list its Renewable Energy Ltd. unit in the next fiscal year, which begins in April 2022, the official said, requesting anonymity as the discussions are private.

Its intended to enable a dramatic transformation over the next decade for a company that relies on coal to produce the vast majority of its electricity. is aiming to double generation capacity to 130 gigawatts by 2032 and slash the share of fossil fuels in that energy mix to about half from 92% currently.

NTPC rose as much as 1.5% in early trading Friday, before paring the gain to 0.5% as of 11:12 a.m. in Mumbai. The stock has climbed 26% over the past year, compared with a 46% gain in the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex. The company did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment sent outside usual office hours in India.

Indias biggest fossil-fuel tycoons and plan to expand in renewable energy with investor pressure mounting on businesses to reduce carbon emissions and as Prime Minister Narendra Modis government debates aggressive climate targets. Mukesh Ambani, Asias richest man, last month said Reliance Industries Ltd. will invest about $10 billion over three years on sectors including solar, hydrogen and batteries.

NTPC plans to build large renewable energy parks and has secured land for a 5 gigawatt facility in the western state of Gujarat, the official said. It has also signed an accord with state-run oil explorer Oil and Natural Gas Corp. to set up offshore wind power plants, he said.





ALSO READ: NTPC to hive renewable arm and list it soon, plans to add 60 Gw capacity

In addition to the renewables unit IPO, the company will seek to issue bonds and add loans from domestic and overseas banks to fund its clean energy plans, according to the official. NTPC will also consider selling some assets to raise funds.

The company has been raising the scale of its ambition in renewables, recently flagging it had almost doubled its clean energy target and would help develop 60 gigawatts of capacity by 2032. A target to reduce the share of fossil fuels in its generation fleet to 50% compares to an earlier goal of 70%.

Continuing government policy support and tumbling costs of renewables are also offering additional impetus to Indias utilities and fuel producers. Its now cheaper to build new utility-scale solar capacity in India than to run most existing coal and gas power stations, according to BloombergNEF.

New coal-fired plants are also becoming more expensive amid requirements to add equipment to curb the countrys air pollution.
Swedish giant Modern Times Group (MTG) has acquired a 100 per cent stake in Bengaluru-based word games developer PlaySimple for $360 million in a cash-and-equity deal.

Were very happy to welcome PlaySimple to our family of companies, said MTGs Group President and CEO Maria Redin. PlaySimple is a rapidly growing and highly profitable games studio that quickly has established itself as one of the leading global developers of free-to-play word games, an exciting new genre for MTG.

Redin said an experienced management team and focused, data-driven operating model has allowed PlaySimple to develop multiple game hits especially popular with the growing global audience of female gamers. She said the company has a pipeline of several exciting new games, some of which are card games, a new genre for PlaySimple.

MTG said the up-front consideration amounts to approximately SEK 3,090 million (on a cash and debt-free basis) and performance-based earn-out payments amount to an expected value of SEK 1,287 million in aggregate. Since December 2020, MTG has, with the acquisitions of Hutch, Ninja Kiwi and now PlaySimple, been accelerating the buildup of a highly attractive vertical which on a pro forma basis generated revenues of approximately SEK 4,421 million in 2020 and SEK 1,158 million in Q1 2021 with monthly (MAU) and daily active users (DAU) of approximately 30 and 6 million respectively.

Were delighted to join the MTG family  MTGs approach to investments offers us creative freedom, and the opportunities created by the GamingCo really resonate with our team, said PlaySimples co-founder and CEO Siddharth Jain. Were excited to have found a new home for our company, one where our team can learn and grow alongside our fellow 

PlaySimple co-founders and management team members Siddhanth Jain, Suraj Nalin and Preeti Reddy jointly said as they join the MTG family, they look forward to leveraging their proprietary technology across MTGs gaming portfolio. They said this would also help in expanding into the European market, investing in cutting-edge technology and building exciting new games.

The acquisition of PlaySimple marks an important next step in the build-up of a diversified gaming vertical with high-quality gaming and is in line with MTGs strategy to drive value creation through organic growth and strategic M&A. Scaling and diversifying the GamingCo helps to accelerate the operational performance while at the same time creating a more stable business.

The acquisition of PlaySimple is a perfect fit for MTG as it will significantly strengthen the companys position in the casual games genre and enable access to the fast-growing word games genre. PlaySimple will strengthen MTGs position amongst the female gaming audience while also enabling access to the strategically important talent pool in India.

Acquisitions are a strategic part of our value creation story, said Redin of MTG. Through the acquisitions of Hutch, Ninja Kiwi and now PlaySimple, MTG has built a highly attractive games portfolio that is significantly more diversified in terms of genres, audiences, and revenues, which provides improved visibility, stability and opportunities.

PlaySimple has a highly experienced and data-driven management with a proven track-record of developing multiple highly successful free-to-play games with over 75 million installs and 1.9 million DAU (daily active users) across its titles. It has developed best-in class advertising infrastructure, providing opportunities for improved monetization, more efficient user acquisition and cross-promotion throughout MTGs gaming vertical.

PlaySimple grew its revenues by 144 per cent in the 2020 calendar year to SEK 706 million ($ 83 million) with an adjusted EBITDA of SEK 154 million ( $18 million). The strong momentum has continued into 2021 with estimated H1 revenues of SEK 510-540 million ($60-64 million), up approximately 82 per cent, and an estimated adjusted EBITDA increase of 140 per cent to SEK 145-155 million ($17-18 million), compared to the corresponding period last year

Following the acquisition of PlaySimple, MTGs gaming vertical has become a diversified global gaming group with across Europe, North America, and Australasia. The gaming vertical now holds strong positions in the city building and strategy genres through InnoGames, mobile racing through Hutch, idle games through Kongregate, tower defense through Ninja Kiwi, and word games  with card games soon to follow  through PlaySimple.
leader Marri Shashidhar Reddy on Thursday urged the Central government to hold simultaneous delimitation of constituencies in and alongside Jammu and Kashmir.

Speaking to ANI, Reddy said, "The process of delimitation will be subject to the provisions of Article 170 of Indian Constitution after August 5, 2019 and prior to that date, the delimitation of constituencies was subject to the state constitution of Jammu and Kashmir and to the Jammu and Kashmir State Representation of People's Act of 1957."

Bringing and in this context, the leader said, "Going back to 2014, the Reorganization Act has provided both the Telugu speaking states to increase their number of assembly seats in both the states respectively. In Telangana, assembly seats were increased from 119 to 153. While in Andhra Pradesh, the assembly seats were increased from 175 to 225. And these were subject to the provisions of Article 170 of the Indian Constitution."

He further said the Central government should take into consideration of both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana for the delimitation exercise. He urged the Central Government that the simultaneous delimitation of constituencies must happen in both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh alongside Jammu and Kashmir.

"We request the Central government that both the Telugu speaking states must also be included as this is coming out of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganization Act of 2014. Under the Reorganization Act of 2014, there was another provision to hand over 7 revenue mandal of the erstwhile Khammam district of Telangana to Andhra Pradesh and there was an unconstitutional order issued by the Election Commission of India in September 2018. This must also be done in a constitutional manner.

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COVAX, the global alliance for vaccine distribution, on Thursday urged governments around the world to recognize as fully vaccinated all people have received COVID-19 vaccines that have been deemed safe and effective by the World Health Organization (WHO).

COVAX in a statement said it was built on the principle of equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines to protect the health of people all across the globe and that means protecting their lives and livelihoods, including their ability to travel and conduct trade.

"As travel and other possibilities begin to open up in some parts of the world, COVAX urges all regional, national and local government authorities to recognise as fully vaccinated all people have received Covid-19 vaccines that have been deemed safe and effective by the World Health Organisation and/or the 11 Stringent Regulatory Authorities (SRAs) approved for Covid-19 vaccines, when making decisions on is able to travel or attend events," COVAX said.

Furthermore, it stressed that "any measure" that only allows people protected by a subset of WHO-approved vaccines to benefit from the re-opening of travel into and with that region would effectively create a two-tier system, further "exacerbating the inequities we have already seen in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines."

"Such moves are already undermining confidence in life-saving vaccines that have already been shown to be safe and effective, affecting uptake of vaccines and potentially putting billions of people at risk," the statement added.

COVAX commended countries that have already shown commitment to equity as well as safety by accepting travelers protected by all vaccines validated by WHO Emergency Use Listing (EUL) and/or the 11 Stringent Regulatory Authorities (SRAs) approved for COVID-19 vaccines. "We call on other nations and regions to do the same."

Previously, External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar, during the G20 summit, had taken up with the EU leaders to accept Covishield and Covaxin. Later on Thursday, Switzerland, Iceland and 7 EU nations allowed the Serum Institute-manufactured Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine.

According to sources, Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Estonia and Spain have confirmed accepting Covishield for travel entry. Switzerland has also allowed Covishield for the Schengen state. Estonia has confirmed that it will recognize all the vaccines authorized by the Government of India for the travel of Indians to Estonia, said sources.

Union minister Jaishankar had on Tuesday met Josep Borrell Fontelles, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and discussed vaccine production and access. He also took up 'Covishield' authorisation for travel to Europe.

Jaishankar, who is in Italy for G20 foreign ministers meeting, said he will be following up on the matter concerning authorisation for made in India COVID-19 vaccine.

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Antibiotic sales soared during the first COVID-19 wave in India last year, according to a study which suggests that the drugs were used to treat mild and moderate cases of the viral disease.

The researchers at Washington University in the US estimated that COVID-19 likely contributed to 216.4 million excess doses of antibiotics and 38 million more doses of azithromycin in adults from June 2020 through September 2020, a period of peak COVID-19 activity in India.

Such misuse of drugs is considered inappropriate because antibiotics are only effective against bacterial infections, not viral infections such as COVID-19, the researchers said.

Overuse of antibiotics increases the risk for drug-resistant infections, they said.

"Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to global public health," said the study's senior author, Sumanth Gandra, an associate hospital epidemiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in the US.

"Overuse of antibiotics lessens their ability to effectively treat minor injuries and common infections such as pneumonia, which means that these conditions can become serious and deadly," Gandra said.

The study, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, analysed monthly sales of all antibiotics in India's private health sector from January 2018 through December 2020.

The data came from an Indian branch of IQVIA, a U.S.-based health information technology company.

The study, conducted in collaboration with McGill University in Canada, examined the total sales volume of all antibiotics as well as the individual sales for azithromycin, a vital drug for treating typhoid fever, non-typhoidal Salmonella and traveller's diarrhoea.

Azithromycin was studied because some countries experienced a spike in its sales early in the pandemic after observational studies suggested the antibiotic could help treat COVID-19.

However, such a claim was disputed by subsequent studies.

The researchers determined that a total of 16.29 billion doses of antibiotics were sold in India in 2020, which is slightly less than the amounts sold in 2018 and in 2019.

However, when researchers focused on adult doses, usage increased from 72.6 per cent in 2018 and 72.5 per cent in 2019 to 76.8 per cent in 2020.

Additionally, sales of azithromycin for adults in India increased from 4 per cent in 2018 and 4.5 per cent in 2019 to 5.9 per cent in 2020.

The study also showed notable increases in the sales of doxycycline and faropenem, two antibiotics commonly used to treat respiratory infections.

The researchers used previously published studies to compare India's antibiotic use with that in the US and other high-income countries.

In those countries, they found that adult antibiotic use decreased drastically during the pandemic compared with such use in 2018 and 2019.

"It's critical to acknowledge that antibiotic use in high-income countries plummeted in 2020," Gandra said.

"People isolated, schools and offices closed, and fewer people got the flu and, overall, stayed healthier compared with the pre-pandemic years. This reduced the overall need for antibiotics, as did cancelling dental procedures and outpatient surgeries," he said.

The researchers noted that India also had restrictions and experienced dramatic decreases in malaria, dengue, chikungunya and other infections typically treated with antibiotics.

"Antibiotic use should have gone down, but it didn't. Not only that but antibiotic use increased along with the rise of COVID cases," Gandra added.

The researchers statistically adjusted antibiotic use for seasonality and mandatory lockdown periods.

They estimated that COVID-19 likely contributed to 216.4 million excess doses of antibiotics for adults and 38 million excess doses of azithromycin for adults from June 2020 through September 2020, a four-month period of peak COVID-19 activity in India.

"Our results indicate that almost everybody who was diagnosed with COVID-19 received an antibiotic in India," Gandra added.

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India on Friday reported a net reduction of 13,620 in active cases to take its count to 509,637. Indias share of global active cases now stands at 4.42 per cent (one in 22). The country is third among the most affected countries by active cases. On Thursday, it added 46,617 cases to take its total caseload to 30,458,251 from 30,411,634  an increase of 0.2%. And, with 853 new fatalities, its Covid-19 reached 400,312, or 1.31 per cent of total confirmed infections.

With 4,264,123 more Covid-19 vaccine doses being administered on Thursday, Indias total count of vaccine shots so far reached 340,076,232. The count of recovered cases across India, meanwhile, reached 29,488,918  or 97.01 per cent of total caseload  with 59,384 new cured cases being reported on Friday.

Now the third-most-affected country by active cases and deaths, second by total cases, and first by recoveries, India has added 323,806 cases in the past 7 days.

India now accounts for 4.42% of all active cases globally (one in every 22 active cases), and 10.08% of all deaths (one in every 10 deaths).

India has so far administered 340,076,232 vaccine doses. That is 1116.53 per cent of its total caseload, and 24.4 per cent of its population.

Among Indian states, the top 5 in terms of number of vaccine shots administered are Maharashtra (37416262), Uttar Pradesh (36488964), Gujarat (29927691), Rajasthan (29565308), and West Bengal (26134635).

Among states with more than 10 million population, the top 5 in number of vaccine shots per one million population are Delhi (485567), Kerala (471697), Gujarat (468554), Uttarakhand (445710), and J&K (384182).

Backwards from here, the last 1 million cases for India have come in 19 days.

The count of active cases across India on Friday saw a net reduction of 13,620, compared with 13,807 on Thursday. States and UTs hat have seen the biggest daily net increase in active cases are Kerala (1180), Meghalaya (321), Maharashtra (309), Sikkim (84), and Arunachal Pradesh (21).

With 59,384 new daily recoveries, Indias recovery rate stands at 97.01%, while fatality rate remained unchanged at 1.31%.

The Indian states and UTs with the worst case fatality rates at present are Punjab (2.70%), Uttarakhand (2.15%), and Maharashtra (2.01%). The rate in as many as 18 is higher than the national average.

Indias new daily closed cases stand at 60,237  853 deaths and 59,384 recoveries. The share of deaths in total closed cases stands at 1.41%.

Indias 5-day moving average of daily rate of addition to total cases stands at 0.1%.

Indias doubling time for total cases stands at 452.5 days, and for deaths at 344.5 days.

Overall, five states with the biggest 24-hour jump in total cases are Kerala (12868), Maharashtra (9195), Tamil Nadu (4481), Andhra Pradesh (3841), and Karnataka (3203).

Among states with more than 100,000 cases, the five with worst recovery rates at present are Maharashtra (96.01%) and Kerala (96.05%).

India on Thursday conducted 1,880,026 to take the total count of tests conducted so far in the country to 414,251,520. The test positivity rate recorded was 2.5%.

Five states with the highest test positivity rate (TPR)  percentage of tested people turning out to be positive for Covid-19 infection (by cumulative data for tests and cases  are Goa (18.01%), Dadra & Nagar Haveli-Daman & Diu (14.59%), Maharashtra (14.5%), Kerala (12.66%), and Sikkim (12.27%).

Five states with the highest TPR by daily numbers for tests and cases added  are, Chhattisgarh (24.38%), Sikkim (15.78%), Meghalaya (15.64%), Manipur (11.39%), and Kerala (10.3%).

Among states and UTs with more than 10 million population, five that have carried out the highest number of tests (per million population) are Delhi (1151932), J&K (736240), Kerala (649829), Karnataka (509537), and Uttarakhand (491870).

The five most affected states by total cases are Maharashtra (6070599), Kerala (2937033), Karnataka (2847013), Tamil Nadu (2484177), and Andhra Pradesh (1893354).

Maharashtra, the most affected state overall, has reported 9195 new cases to take its tally to 6070599.

Kerala, the second-most-affected state by total tally, has added 12868 cases to take its tally to 2937033.

Karnataka, the third-most-affected state, has reported 3382 cases to take its tally to 2847013.

Tamil Nadu has added 4481 cases to take its tally to 2484177.

Andhra Pradesh has seen its tally going up by 3841 to 1893354.

Uttar Pradesh has added 161 cases to take its tally to 1706268.

Delhi has added 93 cases to take its tally to 1434281.




The Delta variant of COVID-19 continues to spread in the UK with a further 50,824 cases logged on Friday, marking a 46 per cent increase over the previous week, according to health officials.

While the infections are rising, there has not been a corresponding rise in the number of hospitalisations with COVID-19, indicating that the vaccinations are effective against the highly transmissible variant first identified in India, Public Health England (PHE) said.

Of the 50,824 cases of Delta B1.617.2 variant over the past week, 42 are from the Delta AY.1 sub lineage with the mutation K417N which is feared to be more vaccine resistant.

Cases across the UK continue to rise and it is incredibly important that we do not forget to be careful, said Dr Jenny Harries, Chief Executive of the UK Health Security Agency.

Although cases are rising, we are not seeing a proportional rise in the number of people who are being admitted to hospital. The data suggest this is testament to the success of the vaccination programme so far and clearly demonstrates the importance of getting both doses of the vaccine, she said, urging people to come forward for their vaccines.

It will help us to break the chain of transmission, and it will save lives, she said.

The genomic sequencing data released by PHE weekly on the variants of concern (VOCs) and variants under investigation (VUIs) show that the Alpha VOC, first identified in the English county of Kent, accounts for the second highest infections in the country.

An additional 823 COVID-19 cases were logged of the Alpha VOC, followed by 11 of the Beta VOC first detected in South Africa.

The latest data comes as the UK recorded 27,989 new daily cases of on Thursday, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson indicating that extra precautions may have to stay in place as the country prepares to lift lockdown restrictions on July 19.

The government is also expected to review the travel list again this month, with only a few countries on the green list of free travel at the moment, while much of Europe remains on the amber list.

Meanwhile, India along with South America and Africa and most other countries remain on the travel ban red list, requiring compulsory hotel quarantine for British residents.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Delta variant is the second most prevalent mutation in the US and is predicted to become the predominant one in the coming weeks, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said on Thursday (local time).

"An estimated 25 percent of all reported SARS-COV-2 sequences nationwide are the Delta variants, and in some regions of the country, nearly one in two sequences is a Delta variant," Walensky added, as quoted by Sputnik.

Speaking at a press briefing, Walensky also underscored the correlation that exists between the low vaccination rates and the spread of the Delta variant. According to reports, the Delta strain is believed to be the fastest spreading and most contagious variant.

On Thursday, Dr Hans Henri Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe said that a 10-week decline in the number of COVID-19 cases in the 53 countries in the WHO European Region has come to an end.

"This is taking place in the context of a rapidly evolving situation; a new variant of concern - the Delta variant; and in a Region where despite tremendous efforts by the Member States, millions remain unvaccinated," he added.

With cases now doubling in Africa every three weeks, the Delta variant of COVID-19 has spread to 16 countries and it is present in three of the five nations reporting the highest caseloads, UN News reported. The variant is the most contagious yet - up to 60 percent more transmissible than other variants.

Along with Alpha and Beta, Delta is fuelling an aggressive third wave across Africa, with case numbers climbing faster than all earlier peaks, according to the WHO.

On Thursday, WHO experts warned that the numbers have increased for six consecutive weeks, up by 25 percent last week, reaching 202,000 positive cases. Deaths also rose by 15 percent across 38 African countries, to nearly 3,000.

Meanwhile, the WHO's chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan has said all COVID-19 vaccines that have been approved by the World Health Organization are effective at preventing severe disease and death caused by the highly contagious Delta variant.

"The good news is that all of the WHO emergency use listed vaccines do protect against developing severe disease, hospitalization and death due to the Delta variant," Swaminathan 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.)
Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit has termed "total nonsense" the claims that his government was involved in alleged abduction of diamantaire Mehul Choksi, wanted in Rs 13,5000 crore scam in Punjab Bank, from Antigua and Barbuda, neighbouring local media there reported.

In his weekly "annou palay" show, Skerrit said his government will allow the court to carry out its process regarding Choksi and gave the assurance that his rights and obligations will be respected, Dominica News Online reported.

Skerrit refuted the allegations of a plot between India and Dominica government to kidnap Choksi from neighbouring Caribbean country Antigua and Barbuda, where he was staying since 2018 as a citizen, after fleeing from India, and bring him to Dominica, the news portal reported.

"To say that the government of Dominica and the government of Antigua along with India colluded in any way, give me a break, that's total nonsense. We don't get involved ourselves in those kinds of activities, those practices, not at all. I mean that is absurd and we reject it and it is unfortunate that anybody would want to propagate this unsubstantiated claim by a gentleman who is before the courts," he was quoted as saying by Dominica News Online.

He further said "whether it would be fair for a local who commits murder in Dominica and flees to another country, is allowed to roam free or instead be apprehended and sent back to Dominica to face his charges".

Citing the case of a Dominica citizen wanted by the United States whose extradition proceedings are going on in courts to counter opposition on Choksi, Skerrit said the country cannot treat people differently depending on who they are or how much money they may have.

"All of us are subjected to the laws irrespective of our position or how much money we may have or how much we don't have. And I believe that in this circumstanceDominica has a right and obligation to apprehend this person and bring the person before the courts and let the courts determine," he said.

"We here in Dominica with the opposition talking about Choksi but there is a young boy from Grand BayWhere there is an extradition request by the United States government on allegations that he committed a crime in St Thomas and we are mandated and obligated to apprehend him.

"And the police acted on the instruction of the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) arrested the young man and he is remanded at the state prison awaiting his extradition hearing. His lawyers will fight his case. If the courts believe that there is no reason to extradite him to the United States then he will go freely," Skerrit said.

Choksi's lawyer in Dominica Justin Simon claimed that United Kingdom's Metropolitan Police, known as Scotland Yard, has started looking into allegations of torture and kidnapping of Choksi as citizens there were allegedly part of the plot, the news site reported.

Simon told media that there will be international implications if Dominica or Antigua turns out to be involved in the alleged plot, it 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.)
Pregnant women in India are now eligible to get vaccinated against Covid with the union health ministry Friday giving the approval based on recommendations of the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI).

The decision empowers pregnant women to make an informed choice on taking the Covid vaccination, the ministry said, adding these women can now register on CoWIN or walk-in to the nearest Covid vaccination centre to get themselves inoculated.

The decision has been communicated to all the states and union territories to implement it under the ongoing National Covid Vaccination Program, it said in a statement.

India's Covid vaccination program incorporates recommendations of the foremost experts in the field of immunization, public health, disease control and information technology.

Based on scientific and epidemiological evidence, the programme gives priority to strengthening the country's healthcare system by protecting the professionals, health and frontline workers, manning it, as well as protecting the most vulnerable population groups, the ministry said.

Till now, all groups except pregnant women were eligible for Covid vaccination. Now, it is expanded to even pregnant women in the world's largest immunization drive, the statement said.

Studies have shown that Covid infection during pregnancy may result in rapid deterioration of health of pregnant women and they are at an increased risk of severe diseases and it might affect fetus too, it said.

The matter has been examined by domain knowledge experts based on the evidence that indicate that pregnant women are at an increased risk for severe illness from Covid compared to non-pregnant women in case they get infected.

"Further, pregnant women with COVID-19 infection are at an increased risk for preterm birth and other adverse pregnancy outcomes including higher chances of neonatal morbidity. Additionally, the experts have also highlighted pre-existing co-morbidities, advanced maternal age, and high body mass Index as factors for severe COVID-19 in pregnancy," the statement said.

The NTAGI has recommended vaccination for pregnant women. The National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19 (NEGVAC) too has unanimously recommended it. Further, a national level consultation on Covid vaccination for pregnant women was also convened by the health ministry to build consensus on Covid vaccination of pregnant women.

The consultation unanimously welcomed the recommendation of NTAGI to vaccinate pregnant women. The consultation included professional bodies like FOGSI, representatives of state governments, CSOs, NGOs, Development Partner agencies, technical experts etc.

The ministry has accepted these recommendations and prepared an operational guideline for vaccination of pregnant women, counselling kit for medical officers and frontline workers, and information education communication material for general public to equip the states and union territories to carry out the vaccination of pregnant women.

Pregnant women, who opt for vaccination, can be inoculated with Covid vaccines available in the country any time during their pregnancy at the nearest government or private vaccination centre after registration on CoWIN or by walk-in registration at the nearest centre, the statement said.

The procedures and modalities like registration, generation of certificates after vaccination etc. will remain the same as it is for any beneficiaries above 18 years of age under the Covid vaccination programme, it said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHWF) partnered with Indic language social media platform, and short video app Moj to organise a webinar to spread awareness about Covid appropriate behaviour and the world's largest vaccination drive.

The webinar aimed to make influencers act as catalysts, and to educate and share reliable information with their community of followers. It was held on the occasion of World Social Media Day, celebrated on June 30 each year.

During the webinar, an actionable Toolkit was also shared, which listed out the steps that social influencers can take to encourage Covid appropriate behaviour and taking the vaccine. The webinar encouraged the social influencers to act as advocates to amplify and share accurate and credible information on Covid-19, counter vaccine hesitancy and misinformation.

"As influencers, you represent the youth of this country, and we need your support to make an impact in disseminating factual and evidence-based information to reach people far and wide and help the country to come out of Covid-19 successfully," Joint Secretary, Health, Lav Agarwal, said.

and Moj's Chief Commercial Officer Ajit Varghese said: "We are excited to work with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and play a part in their effort to fight Covid-19. The event was a massive success with 400+ influencers attending the webinar. We now hope the influencers with their massive reach on the platforms, will put in their efforts to fight Covid by driving home the importance of safety measures, drop vaccine hesitancy and misinformation."

ShareChat, with over 160 million monthly active users in India, allows users to share their opinions, record their lives and make new friends - all within the comfort of their native language.

With the highest monthly active user base, Moj has emerged a market leader in the Indian short video space.

--IANS

rvt/vd

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India has launched the latest phase of its COVID-19 vaccination campaign, offering free vaccinations to everyone in India around 940 million adults. However, the question remains about how this drive can reach its intended population amidst emerging challenges. Since its June 21 start date, the program has been marred by controversies like the use of digital apps, websites and high costs that excluded the digitally deprived and rural poor.

The current COVID-19 vaccination program is the largest of any adult vaccination effort in India's history. To date, the country has administered 315 million vaccine doses, with approximately 4 percent of the population receiving both doses so far.

The first phase of the massive vaccination rollout started on January 16, 2021, and targeted mainly frontline workers and people aged 60 and over.

By March, the second wave of COVID-19 hit India with rising death and infection rates, devastating India's healthcare system. Demands for expanding the vaccination drive forced the Indian government to suspend the foreign export of COVID-19 vaccines to address the shortages.

On April 1, the second phase of vaccinations launched for those over 45 years old. The government faced vaccine shortages despite the export ban as the country struggled to vaccinate its 1.3 billion people.

In the third phase, starting May 1, the program was extended to anyone over the age of 18. On May 18, India recorded the highest number of deaths reported in a single day, with 4,529 deaths in addition to 267,122 new cases.





ALSO READ: 51% of Covid-19 vaccinations in May-June have been in rural centres

Online registration woes:

The online registration for the COVID-19 vaccination started on March 1, 2021, via the app Aarogya Setu. Eventually, other resources including the Winning over COVID-19 or Co-WIN website and the Umang App were also opened for registration. Some of these websites crashed because they could not handle the spike in registrations after the vaccine opened for those over 18 years old on April 28.

Indias digital-centric approach to vaccine registration has excluded many people in rural areas, especially the digitally deprived. To register for a vaccine, citizens needed an active mobile number with SMS capabilities, an internet connection and a government ID  which created barriers for many low-income, rural and disadvantaged communities.

A recent report from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India estimated that only about one-third of the rural population has internet access and many do not know how to access the vaccine apps and portals.

Anshuraj Maria, a Video Volunteers Community Correspondent published a video highlighting the disparity.

Amit Kumar, a Dalit activist and Community Correspondent from Haryana discusses the video, A significant part of rural India is still illiterate and COVID-19 lockdowns have further affected the education system of India. In such a scenario, the government assumes every citizen of India owns a digital device (smartphone/laptop) and will register for their COVID-19 vaccine slots online themselves. However, many don't own a smartphone and have no idea how to use one,

If the government sets up a camp here we will take the jab, said one of the other villagers she spoke to. People are facing problems registering for their slots online. This is because people generally rely on designated stores that charge a small fee to do work online. This could be everything from applying to a government job, PAN card registration, or even music downloads on your phone. But since these shops are closed due to the lockdown, the local people don't know how to navigate the online world and register for their vaccine slots.

Even for those able to register for the vaccine, getting a vaccine appointment proved difficult. Some vaccination centres cancelled appointments at the last minute as they ran out of vaccines. To solve the problem, Indian tech startups and developers have stepped up and launched several sites to alert people about available appointments near them.

Free vaccine access

So far, the Indian federal government has provided free shots only to front-line workers and those above 45 years old. With some exceptions, Indians between 1845 years old have had to purchase vaccines in private facilities. Although the government tried to cap the price of the vaccines, people often paid more in private markets  from 3 US dollars to 17 US dollars, depending on the type of vaccine and the centre. The cost of the Covishield vaccine is almost 12 US dollars and the Covaxin is 17 US dollars  some of the highest COVID vaccine prices in the world. This has deprived many poor people who could not afford the price and spurred a movement calling for free vaccines for all.

On June 7, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India will provide free vaccines for all starting June 21. The federal government will procure 75 percent of all vaccines and provide them to states for free, while the remaining 25 percent will be procured and sold in the private sector.

It's important to highlight that prior registration on Co-WIN website is not mandatory in this new program, as citizens are allowed to register in person.

From June 2126, India recorded its highest weekly vaccination rates as over 33 million vaccination doses were administered in just five days. On June 21, the Indian government claimed that a record 8.6 million vaccines were administered across India; a spike in number, which many called falsely engineered data.

Reddit user Purtiram comments on the news of the highest vaccination on June 21st, To people ascribing the prolonged vaccination fiasco to our large population, this is what India's vaccination infrastructure is when adequate vaccines are made available.

It remains to be seen whether this campaign can boost vaccination numbers as there are other challenges ahead including a lack of vaccine supply and vaccine hesitancy.
The coronavirus has killed six fully vaccinated people in the Seychelles, which is suffering heightened Covid-19 infections despite inoculating a greater proportion of its people than any other nation.

Of those, five had taken Covishield, a version of the Plc vaccine made in India, and one had been given Sinopharm, Jude Gedeon, the island nations public health commissioner said at a press conference on Thursday. Covishield has mainly been reserved for people over 60 in the Seychelles.

The rise in infections, which surged at the beginning of May and has remained at elevated levels ever since, is likely due to the arrival of the highly-transmissible delta variant, which was first identified in India, Gedeon said.





ALSO READ: India to dispatch 'Covishield' vaccine to Myanmar, Seychelles, Mauritius

It looks like delta came in Seychelles in May which explain the surge at the beginning of May, Gedeon said. We presume that the majority of cases we got in May was from that variant.

The palm-fringed archipelago had rushed to inoculate its 98,000 people so that it could reopen to tourism, the lifeblood of its economy. It has now had to impose restrictions on gatherings and opening times for bars and restaurants.

For the last three weeks a team of experts from World Health Organization and Africa Centers for Disease Control have been working with us to evaluate our vaccination rate, data and response, Gedeon said. They will produce a report which will help us decide on the strategy to be used moving forward in terms of vaccination, measures etc.

Frequent genomic studies have been reccomended, he said.
India on Friday said that it is closely monitoring legal proceedings against fugitive businessmen Mehul Choksi, and

In a media briefing, (MEA) Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said, "We are of course closely monitoring the ongoing legal proceedings in both cases," when asked about the latest update on Mehul and Nirav.

Choksi, who is currently in Dominica facing trial, went missing from Antigua on May 23 and was caught in Dominica. He was charged with illegal entry into Dominica by police after he allegedly fled Antigua and Barbuda in a possible attempt to avoid extradition to India. The 62-year-old fugitive is wanted in India in connection with the Rs 13,500 crore fraud in Punjab Bank.

Meanwhile, is currently held at Wandsworth prison in South London where he has been lodged since his arrest in London in March 2019 in connection with the largest bank fraud perpetrated in India.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday transferred seized assets worth Rs 9,371.17 crore in cases related to Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, and Choksi, to public sector banks and the central government. Assets worth Rs 18,170.02 crore have so far been seized by the ED.

Further, Bagchi also answered on the Indian objections on social media posts that targeted the Indian diplomats in Male.

He said, "Maldives Foreign Ministry today issued a statement on the matter. The Maldivian Democratic Party has also issued a statement. I think that answers the question."

Maldives Foreign Ministry has requested local media to work in such a way that the country's diplomatic relations with other countries are not affected. The Foreign Ministry made the request while the Indian High Commission in the Maldives has requested the ministry to take action against local media that publish content that criticizes India, reported AVAS.

A statement issued by the Foreign Ministry on Friday said recurring content recently published by some local media have targeted foreign ambassadors to the Maldives, diplomatic missions, and the member of the missions, and that such malicious content massacre the dignity of said individuals.

Such actions will affect the age-old relationships the Maldives enjoys with its bilateral partners and will create enmity and hatred in the hearts of Maldivian citizens towards its diplomatic partners.

Such actions will also endanger the diplomats and puts them at risk, while also affecting their performance and efficiency, said the statement.

The statement also referred to article 29 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which states that the receiving state of any diplomatic state must treat the agent with due respect, and take all appropriate steps to prevent any attack on his person, freedom, and dignity.

Therefore, all media are encouraged to work within the boundaries set by the international convention and in such a way that bilateral relations with foreign countries are not affected, said the statement.

AVAS has seen a copy of the written request sent to the Foreign Ministry by the Indian High Commission requesting to take action against local media.

The letter expressed concern over some articles published by local media and how they portrayed the neighbouring country in an unpleasant light.

It also said the High Commission's work was being hindered due to the articles, and that it attacked the dignity of the Indian High Commissioner to the Maldives, Sanjay Sudhir. Therefore, action must be taken against media that publish such content, the letter said, reported AVAS.

(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.)
Over 46,000 fresh cases reported

India reported 46,617 fresh infections on Friday, taking the cumulative caseload to 30.4 million, according to central health ministry data. The country saw 853 deaths due to the pandemic, taking the death toll to 400,312. The active caseload is at 509,637, while the total recoveries have surged to 29.5 million. As many as 340 million vaccine shots have been administered since the nationwide inoculation programme kicked off on January 16. Of these, 4.2 million were given on Thursday. Read more

In this Pune satellite town, the vaccine will come to you if you're confined to your bed

The municipal corporation of Pimpri-Chinchwad, a satellite city of Pune, has already begun door-to-door administration of Covid vaccines for people who are confined to their beds, a report in ThePrint said. This comes at a time the Maharashtra government and the Centre are yet to reach a consensus on door-to-door Covid vaccination drives. Rajesh Patil, municipal commissioner, PCMC, told ThePrint, We have an app called Me Zababdar (I am responsible) on which we ask bedridden people to first register for vaccinations. We then schedule several such cases together on a single day, to manage the logistics and get them vaccinated. Read more

Northeast: Pandemic is slowing but at a slower rate than the rest of India

The rate of decline in Covid cases in many of the smaller North Eastern states continues to be slower than the rest of the country, a report in the Scroll said. In some states such as Sikkim, Manipur and Meghalaya, the drop in active cases has not lowered test positivity rates. This suggests that chains of transmissions have not been effectively terminated and the drop in absolute numbers is artificial and a result of low testing, the report said. Read more

Kerala: Opposition seeks actual Covid toll

The demand to review the Covid death tally in Kerala has gathered momentum after the Supreme Court's direction to the National Disaster Management Authority to recommend guidelines for ex gratia to the kin of those who lost their lives to the pandemic, a report in The Indian Express said. The state administration has been receiving flak from the opposition parties and even some public health experts for allegedly removing many Covid deaths from the official count, the report said. Read more

Explained: What are antibodies?

Antibodies are proteins created by the bodys immune system to fight a particular virus, such as the novel coronavirus, an explainer in The Indian Express said. As antibodies are specific to their intended target. Those meant for one virus would not provide protection from another. For instance, if you have had measles, your body has antibodies for the measles virus, but measles antibodies will not protect you from catching a The antibody test isn't checking for the virus itself. It actually looks to see if your immune system has responded to the infection, the report said. Read more
On April 8, 2021, union minister Ramesh Pokhriyal launched the 'Students' and Teachers' Holistic Advancement through Quality Education' (Sarthaq) plan as the first step toward materialising the Policy 2020 (NEP 2020). Sarthaq "links recommendations of NEP with 297 Tasks along with responsible agencies, timelines and 304 outputs of these Tasks", said the Ministry of release.

Education in India is on the concurrent list, meaning it is governed by both state and central Under Sarthaq, states and union territories, which have their own education laws, must establish their respective State School Standards Authority (SSSA) to regulate, set standards for and provide certification to private schools. Setting up an SSSA would require overhauling the regulatory architecture for K-12 education at the state level, NEP 2020 says.

Legislative reform can be based on qualitative or quantitative assessment of the law in question. As India undertakes a K-12 overhaul, the RegData India project of the public policy think-tank Centre for Civil Society (CCS), Delhi, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Arlington, US, undertook a quantitative analysis of all 145 state in India in January 2021. RegData India is one of the first attempts to quantify Indian laws, using custom-made text analysis and algorithms.

State education were reviewed on three metrics: law volume (or total word count), the number of restrictions a law imposes, and the complexity of the law. How voluminous, restrictive and complex a country's laws are, affects its economic growth, productivity and cost to consumers, according to an analysis of laws in Australia, Canada and the United States by Mercatus Center in March 2019.

For state laws in India, these metrics may indicate the extent of regulatory burden and restrictions on schools. While quantitative indicators may not necessarily guarantee the best performance on education, they can reveal the ease with which regulatees can understand the law. A law governing schools should be easy enough for students to make sense of.

West Bengal has the most voluminous laws and Nagaland the least, this analysis found. Uttar Pradesh has 11 laws regulating school education and Andhra Pradesh 10. Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Nagaland and Uttarakhand have just one each.





ALSO READ: 'India's gross enrolment in higher education rose marginally in 2019-20'

Arunachal Pradesh has the most restrictive school education law with terms such as 'seize', 'punished', 'fine' and 'suspend' appearing after every 231 words. Nagaland and Odisha have the least restrictive education laws.

A law that's difficult to comprehend may increase costs in terms of effort, time and money for regulated entities to comply with it. Mizoram and Delhi have the most difficult-to-read school education laws, the study found.

How long are state education laws?

There is a strong positive correlation between the volume of a law and its complexity, the analysis found. As the volume of a law increases, it also tends to become more complicated to read. The total word count of all 145 state school education laws is over 650,000 words. On average, an education law is 4,700 words long--more than twice the length of this article. The average word count per state is over 21,000 words.

West Bengal has the most voluminous education laws, with a total word count of 61,458 words, followed by Telangana (43,333), Karnataka (43,267), Maharashtra (42,811), and Uttar Pradesh (41,651). Arunachal Pradesh has the highest average word count. States with the least total voluminous education laws are Nagaland (1,002), Chhattisgarh (4,322), Odisha (6,056), Sikkim (7,006), and Kerala (7,312).

How restrictive are state education laws?

A sample of 29 of the 145 education laws was analysed to identify words that restrict individuals' actions, such as those willing to set up schools, existing school owners, or other non-government entities. Nineteen binding words--'bound', 'binding', 'deemed to be guilty', 'comply', 'impose', 'shall be punishable', 'punished', 'fine', 'imprisonment', 'withdraw', 'withdrawal', 'suspend', 'suspended', 'supersede', 'shall be liable', 'discontinue', 'contravene', 'contravenes', 'seize'--were identified.

Along with a total count of binding words, the density of restrictiveness in each law, referred to as 'normalised binding words', was also assessed to facilitate comparison between states. It counts the average number of words after which a binding word appears--a score of 300 implies that a binding word appears after every 300 words. A lower count of normalised binding words would mean that a law is more restrictive.

On average, a state school education law uses 10 binding words. Arunachal Pradesh has the most restrictive school education laws, with a restrictive term appearing after every 231 words, on average. In Chhattisgarh and Karnataka, binding words appear after every 254 and 259 words, respectively. Nagaland is the only state that uses only one binding word in its law. The five states and union territories with the least restrictive laws include Odisha, Nagaland, Jharkhand, Jammu & Kashmir and West Bengal.

The most commonly used restrictive terms are 'fine' (as in, 'monetary penalty', 233 times) and 'comply' (200 times). Karnataka Education Act, 1983, has the highest usage of the word 'fine' (31 times). Arunachal Pradesh Education Act 2010 has the most frequent use of the term 'comply' (14 times).

How complicated are state education laws?

A law that is difficult to comprehend may also increase the costs (in terms of effort, time and money) for regulated entities to comply with it, the RegData project has established. The RegData study uses four sub-metrics--the Flesch reading ease score, sentence length, use of conditional or branching words, and the Shannon entropy score--to estimate how complicated or straightforward a law is.

The Flesch Reading Ease Score measures the ease of reading a document, in this case, a piece of legislation. Each law is assigned a score on a scale of 0 to 100, with the higher the Flesch score, the easier the reading. To understand laws that fall in the 30-50 score-band, an individual must be at least a college graduate. A Flesch reading score can also be negative.

The average Flesch score of state school education laws is 30. Mizoram is the worst-performing state on this metric, with an average Flesch score of 2.5, followed by Delhi (7.5). The three worst-performing laws have a negative Flesch score. These are the Mizoram Education Act, 2003; Maharashtra Educational Institutions (Transfer of Management) Act, 1971; and UP Self-Financed Independent Schools (Fee Regulation) Act, 2018. Even a college graduate will struggle to read and understand these laws.

The three best performing states on this metric are Manipur (49.75), Telangana (46) and Himachal Pradesh (44). However, even their laws fall in the 'difficult to read' category, and only a college graduate can understand them. The three easiest-to-read laws are the UP Educational Institutions (Taking-Over of Management) Act, 1976 (73), West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education Act, 1975 (65) and Manipur Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 1972 (64).

Shorter sentences are easier to read while longer sentences tend to be more challenging. The average sentence length in a state education law is 39 words. (For comparison, the first sentence in this paragraph contains 14 words.) Three states and union territories with the highest sentence length, on average, include Chhattisgarh (68), Delhi (66) and Puducherry (60). The worst performing law on this metric is the West Bengal Non-Government Educational Institutions and Local Authorities (Control of Provident Fund of Employees) Act, 1983, with an average sentence length of 81.52. Next is the Mizoram Education Act, 2003, at an average sentence length of 74.55.

Punjab is the best-performing state on this metric, with an average sentence length of 10 words. Telangana and Manipur follow with a sentence length of 22.63 words and 24.78 words, respectively. The three best performing laws include the UP Educational Institutions (Taking-Over of Management) Act, 1976 (6.58); Telangana Private Educational Institutions Maintenance Grant (Regulation) Act, 1995 (12.86); and West Bengal Council Of Higher Secondary Education Act, 1975 (13.81).

Terms such as 'if', 'but', and 'provided' create logical branches in a law and add to its complexity. These words are called 'branching words' or 'conditionals'.

On average, state school education laws have 23 branching words. The Arunachal Pradesh Education Act, 2010, has the highest count with 151 branching words. Nagaland uses only four branching words in its law. Odisha follows by using approximately five branching words per law. These laws are likely to be easier to read.

Lastly, a law's Shannon entropy score reflects the likelihood of encountering new words and concepts. It measures the amount of information conveyed in a given text. A high score would imply that a lot of new information is being communicated in the text, making it difficult to comprehend. The average Shannon entropy score of state school education laws is 8.23. The three worst-performing states on this metric are Arunachal Pradesh (9.58), Uttarakhand (9.15), and Manipur (8.92). The three best-performing states on this metric are Nagaland (7.44), Odisha (7.49) and Tamil Nadu (7.85).
on Thursday (local time) announced that its single-shot COVID-19 vaccine showed promising signs of protection against the Delta variant rapidly spreading across the US and other countries, in a small laboratory study.

According to the company report, the vaccine generated strong, persistent activity against the rapidly spreading Delta variant and other highly prevalent SARS-CoV-2 viral variants. In addition, the data showed that the durability of the immune response lasted through at least eight months, the length of time evaluated to date. The two preprint study summaries have been submitted today to bioRxiv, a non-profit preprint server for the life sciences.

The single-dose vaccine, elicited neutralising antibody activity against the Delta variant at an even higher level than what was recently observed for the Beta (B.1.351) variant in South Africa, the report stated.

In the ensemble trial, Johnson & Johnson's vaccine was 85 per cent effective against severe/critical disease and demonstrated protection against hospitalisation and death. The vaccine was consistently effective across all regions studied globally, including in South Africa and Brazil, where there was a high prevalence of rapidly emerging Beta and Zeta variants during the study period.

"Today's newly announced studies reinforce the ability of the COVID-19 vaccine to help protect the health of people globally," said Paul Stoffels, MD, Vice Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Scientific Officer at

"We believe that our vaccine offers durable protection against COVID-19 and elicits neutralizing activity against the Delta variant. This adds to the robust body of clinical data supporting our single-shot vaccine's ability to protect against multiple variants of concern," Stoffels added.

Mathai Mammen, MD, PhD, Global Head, Janssen Research & Development, Johnson & Johnson, said: "Current data for the eight months studied so far show that the single-shot Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine generates a strong neutralizing antibody response that does not wane; rather, we observe an improvement over time. In addition, we observe a persistent and particularly robust, durable cellular immune response."

"With each new dataset, we build on our solid foundation of evidence that our single-shot COVID-19 vaccine plays a critical role in ending the pandemic, which continues to evolve and pose new challenges to global health," Mammen said.

The data showed that humoral and cellular immune responses generated by the Johnson & Johnson single-shot COVID-19 vaccine lasted through at least eight months, the latest timepoint recorded in the study thus far.

The vaccine is now available in many regions and countries on a not-for-profit basis during the emergency pandemic period. It received emergency use authorisation (EUA) in the United States on February 27 and Conditional Marketing Authorization (CMA) by the European Commission on March 11.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New research found that certain factors, such as a history of severe pain episodes and coexisting organ conditions, increase the risk of severe COVID-19 illness, including hospitalization, in individuals living with sickle cell disease (SCD).

The study published in the journal Blood Advances underscores the need for COVID-19 risk reduction strategies and vaccination for this medically vulnerable population.

SCD is the most common inherited red blood cell disorder in the United States, affecting an estimated 100,000 people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, SCD affects one out of every 365 Black or African American births and one out of every 16,300 Hispanic American births.

The condition can cause severe pain, joint and organ damage, and stroke; these conditions predispose individuals with SCD to worse outcomes with infections, including infection with COVID-19. Previous research has shown patients with COVID-19 and SCD are at greater risks for hospitalization compared with Black individuals without SCD who become infected.

The new study draws data from SECURE-SCD, an international registry that collects information about COVID-19 infections in individuals living with SCD, including details on hospitalization, severity, management strategies, and complications.

Researchers assessed reports on 750 children and adults submitted to the registry between March 2020 and March 2021. Half the patients they studied were children aged 18 and under, and half were adults with a median age of 31 years old. Ninety per cent of participants were identified as Black and 7 per cent as Hispanic or Latino.

The researchers found that children living with SCD who had previously suffered more than two pain events requiring acute care were 2.2 times more likely to be hospitalized for COVID-19 and more than 3 times likely to suffer severe COVID-19 illness.

A history of pain events was also found to be a risk factor for adults, as those with more than two prior acute care visits for pain were 1.8 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and 1.9 times more likely to suffer severe COVID-19 illness.

SCD-related heart, lung, and kidney conditions were associated with a higher risk of severe illness in children, while SCD-related heart and lung conditions were also associated with higher risk of hospitalization. However, these conditions did not have the same effect in adults.

"This study tells us that all individuals with sickle cell disease are not at equal levels of risk," said study author Lana Mucalo, MD, of the Medical College of Wisconsin. "Patients with a history of pain, as well as individuals with coexisting organ conditions, need to be even more careful to avoid COVID-19 infection than those without any comorbidities," said Dr Mucalo.

Dr Mucalo also noted that now that COVID-19 vaccines are available, physicians and patients alike need to recognize these risk factors when considering vaccination. "Providers that care for individuals living with sickle cell disease should recommend vaccination, particularly for those with these comorbidities that put them at greater risk."

Pain is the most common complication of SCD, and severe pain is the leading cause of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for people with this disease. Notably, this study found that pain was also the most common presenting symptom during COVID-19 illness in both children and adults living with SCD and that many patients only had pain as their presenting COVID-19 symptom.

"This means individuals with sickle cell disease who come to the hospital presenting with pain should also be tested for COVID-19," said Dr Mucalo.

The research team also sought to understand the effects of hydroxyurea, a drug commonly prescribed to individuals with SCD to reduce the frequency of pain episodes, on COVID-19. About half of the 750 patients studied were taking hydroxyurea, and the researchers found that hydroxyurea use was associated with a lower risk of presenting with pain during COVID-19 in adults living with SCD.

However, hydroxyurea did not affect whether an individual would develop a serious case of COVID-19 or need to be hospitalized in children or adults.

"Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, physicians were worried about whether to use hydroxyurea simply because we did not yet know the effects," said Dr Mucalo. "Now we can see that while it does not affect COVID-19 severity, it does help to lower the incidence of pain episodes in adults with sickle cell disease, so those who are using it for treatment of their sickle cell conditions should not stop using it."

The analysis was limited to patient data reported to SECURE-SCD; given the voluntary reporting system of the registry, it does not capture all known cases of patients with sickle cell disease and COVID-19 infection.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi [India], July 2 (ANI): Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat will address an internal meeting of Muslim Rashtriya Manch, an organisation associated with the Sangh. The meeting is expected to finalise the projects that the organisation will undertake in the coming years.

Sources said the focus of the meeting would be and making separatists leaders and those who still talk about and 35 A irrelevant in the country. The meeting is scheduled to take place on July 5 in Ghaziabad.

MRM will complete 20 years in 2022 and a roadmap for coming years is expected to be prepared in this internal meeting.

Mohammed Afzal, convenor of MRM, said that the organisation will start a countrywide agitation to create an environment so that the government will act on its promise to reclaim Pakistan-occupied

"We will now talk about only one thing to reclaim regions of Gilgit and Baltistan from Pakistan and will tell the Centre to settle this finally," he said.

Sources in the organisation said that apart from Kashmir, the discussion is expected on issues like consolidation of tasks done through years, modernisation of Madarsas, greater participation of Muslim community in building the country and projects to be taken up.

The meeting will be attended by Sah Sarkaryawah Krishan Gopal and patron of MRM Indresh Kumar, RSS functionary Ram Lal apart from Union Minister VK Singh, MLAs and other public representatives of the area.

"Approximately 30 to 40 office bearers of Muslim Rashtriya Manch will attend the address of on July 5. The meeting will take place in Ghaziabad, " a source said.

"Projects related to service, education and intellectual development are being run by the Muslim Rashtriya Manch and how to consolidate them in the right direction are some of the other topics that are likely to be taken up for discussion," the source added.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The in its judgment had on June 28 dismissed the review petition filed by the central government challenging the interpretation of the 102nd Constitutional amendment in the case.

A five-judge bench of the apex court headed by Justice Ashok Bhushan passed the judgment on June 28, which was released by the court on Thursday.

The other four judges on the bench of the top court were Justices L Nageswara Rao, S Abdul Nazeer, Hemant Gupta and Shripathi Ravindra Bhat.

"Application for an oral hearing is rejected. We have gone through the review petition filed against the judgment of May 05, 2021, in the writ petition. The grounds taken in the review petition do not fall within the limited ground on which review petition can be considered," the apex court said, in its verdict.

"The various grounds taken in the review petition have already been dealt with in the main judgment. We do not find any sufficient ground to entertain this review petition. The review petition is dismissed," the top court said, in its judgment.

The Central government on May 13 filed a review petition before the urging it to review its judgement where it unanimously declared a Maharashtra law which provided reservation benefits to the Maratha community, taking the quota limit in the state above 50 per cent, as unconstitutional.

"The Constitution Bench of the has pronounced Judgement dated May 5, in the matter of Shiv Sangram v/s Union of India and other various civil appeals involving interpretation of the provisions of the Constitution 102nd Amendment Act, 2018. As provided in the Supreme Court Rules, 2013, a review petition for review of the judgement of the Supreme Court has been filed by the Union of India on May 13," the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment had stated in a release.

The Supreme Court, on May 5, struck down the reservation in government jobs and educational institutions for the Maratha community brought in by the Maharashtra government in 2018, saying it exceeded the 50 per cent cap imposed earlier.

(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.)
Top headlines at this hour: A second wave of Covid-19 infections has pulled down consumer credit demand, said India's central bank. Taiwan's exceeds its PLI investment obligation in India in eight months



Second Covid-19 wave sharply hit consumer credit demand: FSR

The second wave of the pandemic had a negative impact on the consumer credit demand as inquiries for such loans fell sharply across product categories after a rebound during the festive season in the third quarter of FY21, the half-yearly financial stability report (FSR) of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said.

The FSR report has highlighted that the overall demand for consumer credit, as reflected in inquiry volumes, had stabilised in Q4FY21 following a sharp rebound during the festive season in Q3FY21 after the first Covid wave receded. Read more

Limited plans $5-billion capex for 3 years

Anil Agarwal-led Limited has planned a capex of $5 billion (around Rs 37,500 crore) over a period of three years.

A major chunk of this capex would go into oil and gas business. Vedantas capex for three years to FY20 stood at Rs 20,000 crore, according to the companys annual report for the year. In FY21, it spent Rs 7,286 crore, which is a 14 per cent increase over the previous years Rs 6,385-crore capex. Read more

Taiwanese giant exceeds PLI investment obligation in just 8 months

Taiwanese giant Wistron, has exceeded its investment obligation in India in just eight months, although the governments production-linked investment (PLI) scheme allowed it to complete the investment in four years.

Between August 2020 and end March 2021, made an investment of Rs 1255 crore  25 per cent more than the total investment it had committed to the government. Under the PLI scheme for mobile devices, the government had stipulated that each of the five participating global companies needed to invest Rs 250 crore every year for the first four years, totalling Rs 1,000 crore. Read more

Govt likely to indemnify PSU buyers from past claims

The government, in pre-bidding consultations, has informed potential buyers of public sector undertakings (PSUs) that they will not be held liable for any claims arising prior to the sale of state-owned entities.

This will be done through the representation and warranty clause in the share purchase agreement, which is a shift from the governments earlier stance of selling assets on an as is where is basis. This comes in the backdrop of Devas Multimedia and Cairn Energy moving a New York court seeking to seize assets of divestment-bound Air India. Read more

Novavax denied trials on children; no nod needed for Sputnik Light

The vaccine expert panel denied permission to Serum Institute of India (SII) to conduct clinical trials on children for Novavax, on Thursday. It has also felt that there was no need to conduct a separate Indian clinical trial of Sputnik Light, as adequate safety and immunogenicity data is already available.

The Subject Expert Committees (SEC) decision means DRL does not require separate safety and immunogenicity trials on Indians for getting approval for Sputnik Light. As for SII, the permission was denied as the adult vaccine was not approved in neither US nor India. Read more
The UK's medicines regulator has shared relevant data with its counterpart in the European Union (EU) to facilitate the clearance of Covishield, the India-made version of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines, Downing Street said on Friday.



British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also said that he is 'very confident' of the approvals of the Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs by the EU.



The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) had approved the Serum Institute of India (SII) produced vaccines, but the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is yet to give its nod for the region's so-called vaccine passports for travel.



It has led to concerns that Indians vaccinated with Covishield and thousands in Britain who received the India imported jabs may face hurdles when travelling to the EU.



I am very confident that there will not prove to be a problem," Prime Minister Johnson told reporters at a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at Downing Street when asked about the issue.



Five million Covishield-branded doses were shipped from India as part of the UK's 100-million-dose AstraZeneca order with SII earlier this year. On being asked about travel-related concerns, Johnson reiterated that he saw "no reason at all" why MHRA-approved vaccines should not be used for vaccine passports.



"They're the same product which has been authorised and checked for safety and quality by our MHRA," a Downing Street spokesperson had said earlier on Friday, as it confirmed that the MHRA had shared its assessment of the vaccines with the EMA to assist the approvals process.



The EU is rolling out a Digital Covid Certificate so travellers can prove their vaccination status to be exempt from quarantining when crossing an international border. Several European countries have separately already approved the India-made vaccine, including Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Greece, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, Iceland and Switzerland.



According to The Daily Telegraph', people who have received doses from batches manufactured in India could face being blocked from taking European holidays due to the Covishield vaccine not being authorised by Europe's regulator, and therefore not recognised by the EU.



I realise that a lot of Indians who 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, SII CEO Adar Poonawalla said on Twitter earlier this week.



Addressing the recently-concluded India Global Forum, Poonawalla had said the delay in the EMA's approval was just a matter of time.



The EMA is correct in asking us to apply, which we have through AstraZeneca a month ago, and that process has to take its time. In a month, we are confident the EMA will approve Covishield. There is no reason not to as it is based on AstraZeneca data and our product is identical to AstraZeneca, more or less," he said.



UK Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi also expressed his confidence in the jabs during his session at the forum on Thursday.

They (SII) are backed by the world's most highly regarded regulator, the UK's MHRA, which makes them one of the safest, best and largest vaccine manufacturers in the world, Zahawi said.



India on Friday said it expects that its CoWIN vaccination certificate would be recognised by the European Union on a reciprocal basis for travel and it is in touch with member states of the bloc over this issue.



Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said in New Delhi that the European Union has now instituted what is called an EU digital COVID certificate for exempting restrictions on the movement of vaccinated people.



"Our expectation is that Indians who have been vaccinated through our domestic vaccination programme would be treated at par with those vaccinated in the EU and the CoWIN vaccination certificate would be recognized by the EU on a reciprocal basis," he said at an online media briefing.



"As you are aware, such CoWIN vaccination certificates can be authenticated on the CoWIN website itself. We are in touch with the EU member states in this regard for reciprocal acceptance," Bagchi said, noting that a number of EU countries have already taken "positive steps" in this direction.



His remarks came a day after sources said nine European nations are accepting Covishield vaccines for travel to their countries.

Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland and Spain are among the countries allowing travel by people who have taken Covishield vaccines, the sources said.



They said Switzerland is also accepting Covishield as a Schengen state.

(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.)
Six fully-vaccinated people die of Covid-19 in Seychelles, world's most-vaccinated nation

Seychelles, the country of a little over 98,000 people, had rushed to inoculate most of them in a bid to reopen tourism, the mainstay for its economy. However, infections began climbing in May and there are no signs of subsiding, mainly on account of the highly-contagious delta variant. Recently, the has killed six fully-vaccinated people in the country that has inoculated a greater proportion of its people than any other nation. Of those, five had taken Covishield, a version of the AstraZeneca vaccine made in India, and one had been given Sinopharm. Read here

Let's look at the global statistics Global infections: 182,645,084 Global deaths: 3,955,824 Vaccine doses administered: 3,091,613,411 Nations with most cases: US (33,679,482), India (30,458,251), Brazil (18,622,304), France (5,839,929), Russia (5,472,722). Source: John Hopkins Research Center

Foreign investors dump ASEAN stocks

High expectations that inoculations will reopen economies and kickstart the recovery in Southeast Asian nations are being dashed for now as countries struggle to contain the Delta variant. In line with the trend, Foreign funds are dumping Southeast Asian equities for bonds that have attractive yields. Slow vaccine rollout could mean that the selloff is likely to continue. Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia had combined outflows of $2.7 billion from their equities in the April-June period, the biggest exodus since the quarter ended September 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Read here

Johnson & Johnson vaccine protects against Delta variant, firm says

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is effective against the highly contagious Delta variant, even eight months after inoculation, the company said in a release. It said that, both studies conducted for finding the efficacy of the vaccine against Delta variant, had been submitted for online publication. One of those studies has been accepted for publication in a scientific journal. Both studies are small, and the researchers said they had released the results early because of intense interest from the public. Read here

World watches UKs race between vaccine and virus

The world is keenly watching the United Kingdom, a leader in vaccination against coronavirus, and probably not for the first time as to how the pandemic unfolds in the country in coming months. There is a great interest worldwide to learn from what happens in the UK. Most obvious is how the Delta variant spreads in the population and what impact different vaccines, and different levels of vaccination, have on cases, hospitalisations and deaths. Countries looking on will want to know who are the people needing hospital care, who needs mechanical ventilation, who dies, and in what numbers. Read here
A ratings downgrade for India has rubbed off on Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and its subsidiary Videsh (OVL).

In a statement, Fitch Ratings said it has issued a Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR) of 'BBB-' to Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC). This rating has also been issued to OVL's subsidiary, Videsh Vankorneft, and the medium-term note programme co-issued by the three entities.

This makes it harder for the two to raise money for financing their project needs. is currently said to be in the process of raising $500 million to repay some existing debt in an exercise that will trim the overall finance cost for the company.

ONGCs ratings are constrained by the ratings of the state of India (BBB-/Negative), its majority owner, according to Fitch's Government-Related Entities Rating Criteria, and the Negative Outlook reflects that of the Indian sovereign, a Fitch statement said.

Fitch also rated ONGC's Standalone Credit Profile (SCP) at 'bbb+'. This is reflecting its scale as the largest oil and gas producer in India, significant reserves and production and a diversified business model comparable with that of peers rated in the 'A' category by Fitch.

Fitch has assessed ONGC's standalone credit profile as two notches higher than the assigned rating. However, ratings are constrained by the sovereign rating of India (BBB-/Negative) which is normal practice, an official told Business Standard.

ONGC and its subsidiaries OVL/ OVVL bonds were earlier rated by two leading agencies (Moodys and S&P) and with this initiation of ratings by Fitch, investors of these bonds get benefit of perspective of all the three top international rating agencies, the official added.

Commenting on the operational performance of ONGC, Fitch said, We believe ONGC's vertically integrated oil and gas operations help reduce cash flow volatility. It has production across India and globally. It is integrated into the refining, marketing and petrochemical business through controlling stakes in Hindustan Petroleum Corporation and other subsidiaries. We expect the downstream business to make up around 30 per cent of consolidated earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) in the financial year ending March 2022 to financial year 2023-2024.
Days after the lowered the import duty on edible oils, it imposed stock holding limits on all save moong, held by wholesalers, retailers, importers and millers till October.

Incidentally, the decision has come at a time when prices of most have come off from their peaks and have softened by Rs 5-20 per kg in the retail markets the past one month, as per data from department of consumer affairs.

prices in the domestic markets had soared in the months of March to May due to low domestic stocks, prompting the to allow free imports.

However, since then prices have cooled down due to low demand and fear of imports.

There was a sustained increase in the price of pulses in March-April. The need for an urgent policy decision was felt to send the right signal to the market, the ministry said in a statement.

Meanwhile, as per todays order which came into effect immediately, a stock limit of 200 tonnes has been imposed on wholesalers provided they do not hold more than 200 tonnes of one variety of pulses.

On retailers, the stock limit will be 5 tonnes.

In case of millers, the stock limit will be the last three months of production or 25 percent of annual installed capacity, whichever is higher.

Lastly, for importers, the stock limit will be the same as that of wholesalers for stocks held/imported prior to May 15, 2021.

And for pulses imported after May 15, stock limit applicable on wholesalers will apply after 45 days from date of customs clearance, the order said.

According to the ministry, if the stocks of entities exceed the prescribed limits, they have to be declared on the online portal of the Department of Consumer Affairs and have to be brought within the prescribed limit within 30 days of the notification of the order.

Meanwhile, the also said that it is enhancing the buffer stock limit under Price Stabilization Fund (PSF) to 2.3 million tonnes in FY22.

The Centre has also entered into long-term MoUs with Myanmar, Malawi and Mozambique for import of over 0.55 million tonnes of tur and urad.

These MoUs will ensure predictability in the quantity of pulses being produced abroad and exported to India, thus benefiting both India and the pulse exporting country, the government said.

The Center said that a SoP for faster clearance of import consignments of pulses and edible oils have been prepared, as a result of which the dwell time for clearances of consignments has come down to 6.9 days from 10 to 11 days in case of pulses and 3.4 days in case of edible oils.

(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 has initiated a into alleged dumping of electrogalvanized steel, used in auto and electronics industries, from Korea, Japan, Singapore following a complaint by a domestic company.

American Precoat Speciality Pvt Ltd has filed an application before the Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) for investigation of anti-dumping duty concerning the imports of electrogalvanized steel from the three countries.

The directorate, under the Commerce Ministry, will see whether the product is being dumped by firms of these nations in India and if it is impacting the domestic industry.

If it is established in the that the dumping is denting margins of the domestic firm, the DGTR would recommend anti-dumping duty with a view to guard local industry from cheap imports.

"The authority, hereby, initiates an investigation to determine the existence, degree and effect of any alleged dumping in respect of the subject goods originating in or exported from the subject countries and to recommend the amount of anti-dumping duty, which if levied, would be adequate to remove the injury to the domestic industry," it has said.

The DGTR is also probing a similar case on imports of Clear Float Glass from Bangladesh and Thailand.

Asahi India Glass Ltd, Gold Plus Glass Industry, Sisecam Flat Glass India, and Saint-Gobain India have filed the application for the and imposition of the duty.

The product finds major uses in construction, refrigeration, mirror and solar energy industries etc. It is a superior quality of glass.

Further the directorate has initiated a sunset-review investigation concerning imports of jute products from Bangladesh and Nepal.

Indian Jute Mills Association has alleged likelihood of continuation or recurrence of dumping of the goods from these two neighbouring countries if the existing duty would be ended.

"The authority hereby initiates sunset review investigation to review the need for continued imposition of the duties in force in respect of subject goods (jute products), originating in or exported from the subject countries and to determine whether expiry of existing anti-dumping duty is likely to lead to continuation or recurrence of dumping and consequent injury to the domestic industry," it added.

Countries carry out anti-dumping probes to determine if their domestic industries have been hurt because of a surge in below-cost imports.

As a counter-measure, they impose duties under the multilateral regime of the World Trade Organization.

The duty is also aimed at ensuring fair trading practises and creating a level-playing field for domestic producers with regard to foreign producers and exporters.

(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.)
Indias pharmaceutical pricing regulator has allowed a one-time price hike of 50 per cent for three key -- ibuprofen (analgesic), ranitidine (antacid), and carbamazepine (epilepsy) -- that are used as the first line of treatment.

These are scheduled (or ones that are under price control) and low priced. After the latest increase, the price of carbamazepine would range from Rs 1 to Rs 4.61 per tablet, depending on the dosage; for ranitidine, the new price would be in the range of Rs 1-2.43 per tablet or per ml of liquid; for ibuprofen, it would be 59 paise to Rs 1.04 per tablet. These prices are exclusive of goods and services tax.

Some of the companies that stand to benefit by the move are Torrent Pharmaceuticals, Cadila Pharmaceuticals, Zydus Cadila, and J B Chemicals as they have top-selling ranitidine brands. had stopped selling this molecule globally after the controversy around ranitidine containing a carcinogenic element in its bulk drug. Sun Pharmaceuticals, Torrent Pharmaceuticals, Intas, and Abbott have leading carbamazepine brands, while Cipla and Abbott have popular ibuprofen brands.

The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), in its meeting held on June 28, allowed the price hike, noting that these were essential medicines for public health management, and pricing shouldnt be the reason for their shortage, discontinuation or unavailability.

The said its mandate is to ensure the availability of at affordable prices. While ensuring affordability, access cannot be jeopardised, and life-saving essential drugs should remain available to the general public at all times, it said. The Authority added that unviability of these formulations should not lead to a situation where these drugs become unavailable in the market and the public is forced to switch to costly alternatives.

In the past few months, prices of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) have shot up, thanks to a sudden surge in demand for some key drugs (especially those used in Covid-19 treatment) and slower supplies from China. Thus, the prices of drugs like paracetamol, azithromycin, doxycycline, and ivermectin, which are antibiotics or analgesics, and other drugs used to treat Covid-19, have gone up.

For example, the price of APIs for paracetamol, a fever and pain medication, has jumped about 25 per cent from Rs 450-480 per kg in December 2020 to Rs 580-600 per kg in April. When compared to the pre-Covid prices of December 2019, the price surge is steeper at around 140 per cent.





The industry, which has been making representations to the government in this regard, welcomed the move.

The government has started recognising the role of increased API prices in the overall cost. Production of price-controlled drugs becomes unviable when the API prices go up. One cannot stop manufacturing these, but pharma players start reducing the production step by step, and eventually cut down entirely, a senior executive at a pharma firm said.

Earlier, in December 2019, the had allowed a one-time increase in prices of 21 formulations, including common antibiotics, leprosy and malaria drugs, vitamin C, and anti-allergy medicines, by 50 per cent. The API prices of some of those drugs had gone up by over 80 per cent.

This time, an upward price revision of 13 drugs comprising 27 formulations was discussed, of which the felt only three could be allowed to increase prices.

nasal spray gets 5-yr exemption from price control

The NPPA has granted exemption to Torrent Pharmaceuticals Tapentadol nasal spray for five years as it is covered under the Indian Patent Act. A patent has been granted to the Ahmedabad-based pharma major for 20 years. The patent was granted in January 2021, following which the company had applied to the NPPA in May. Tapentadol is exempted from price control for five years from the date of commencement of commercial marketing.
The United Kingdoms medicines regulator has shared relevant data with its counterpart in the (EU) to facilitate the clearance of Covishield, the India-made version of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines, Downing Street said on Friday.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also said that he is very confident of the approvals of the Oxford/ AstraZeneca jabs by the EU.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) had approved the Serum Institute of India (SII) produced vaccines, but the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is yet to give its nod for the region's so-called vaccine passports for travel.

It has led to concerns that Indians vaccinated with Covishield and thousands in Britain who received the India imported jabs may face hurdles when travelling to the EU. I am very confident that there will not prove to be a problem, Prime Minister Johnson told reporters at a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at Downing Street when asked about the issue.

Five million Covishield-branded doses were shipped from India as part of the UKs 100-million-dose Astra-Zeneca order with SII earlier this year. On being asked about travel-related concerns, Johnson reiterated that he saw no reason at all why MHRA-approved vaccines should not be used for vaccine passports.

They're the same product which has been authorised and checked for safety and quality by our MHRA, a Downing Street spokesperson had said earlier on Friday, as it confirmed that the MHRA had shared its assessment of the vaccines with the EMA to assist the approvals process.

The European Commission, too, said it is looking at ways to agree a coordinated approach to accepting Covishield across the but will need some time.

The Commission reiterated that the jab, which has been given to millions of Britons, is not yet approved by the European Medicines Agency or recognised under the EUs new vaccine passport scheme to travel freely within the bloc from July 1. I don't think you can say that it wont be possible to come to the EU with this vaccine, a spokesperson for the EU executive said.

Merkel said Germany is reviewing its restrictions and that the rules could change once the UK variant classification is lowered.
The European Union (EU) Digital Covid Certificate has officially came into force, allowing citizens and residents to have their pass issued and verified across the bloc.

By Wednesday evening, 21 out of the 27 EU member states, as well as Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, were connected to the system's network while the were technically ready and joined the system on Thursday, reports Xinhua news agency.

Some countries already began using the new health certificate in June.

According to the European Commission, all member states should now be in a position to issue and accept the pass.

The EU Digital Covid Certificate is free and should be recognized by all 27 member states as well as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway.

The certificate will facilitate travel, helping to exempt holders from restrictions such as quarantine.

The EU had said it was in talks with several other countries, such as the UK and the US, over mutual recognition and operation of Covid-related documents.

The certificate applies in three situations: it attests whether a person has been vaccinated against Covid-19, whether they have had a recent negative test, or whether they are considered immune having previously contracted the disease.

Countries are obliged to accept vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), namely Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

Welcoming its entry into application, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that "the Certificate is a symbol of an open and safe Europe that is opening cautiously putting the protection of the health of our citizens first".

She said that more than 200 million certificates have already been generated.

Under the new rules, member states must refrain from imposing additional travel restrictions on holders of an EU Digital Covid Certificate, unless they are necessary and proportionate to safeguard public health.

--IANS

ksk/

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
While the U.S., the United Kingdom and Russia are expected to sit high on any list of cyber nations, one surprise name also mixes with the best, highlighting the value of having solid allies over technical prowess.

came in eighth out of 194 states in this years Global Index released Tuesday by the Telecoms Union, a United Nations agency. With 98.06 out of a possible 100 points, the Southeast Asian country was only fractionally behind Singapore and South Korea, and equal with Russia and the United Arab Emirates. Its been in the top 10 since the first report was released in 2014.

While neither a technology powerhouse nor a prolific hacker, Malaysias standing comes from an early commitment to issues and a solid national strategy. Yet, other developing countries could learn a lot from Kuala Lumpurs ability to apply its long-standing geopolitical strength  gather friends and avoid making enemies  to the electronic realm where information is as valuable as weaponry.

The countrys first dates back at least 15 years and outlines areas of key importance. Today, the government operates a Critical National Information Infrastructure portal for sharing information and a coordination and command center that deals with crises and evaluates the national threat level daily. Its also been running annual drills, called X-Maya, to test its readiness and to game-plan attack scenarios, while implementing a scheme to evaluate and certify the security of technology products such as data storage, access control systems, and networking equipment.

Many of these measures are carried out elsewhere and arent necessarily unique to Yet underlying the ITUs assessment is a nations commitment to cybersecurity issues and practice, and its focus on improvement, rather than actual capability. Thats why the country rates so highly.

It achieved the top score in three of five categories used by the ITU: a legal framework for handling security and crime, capacity measures based on R&D, education and training, and partnerships and information sharing. Its slight weaknesses were in organizational and technical areas.

Global cooperation helps make up for the fact that Malaysias own cyber proficiencies are sometimes lacking. In fact, if skill alone was the deciding factor, the nation would be rated much more poorly. The Harvard Kennedy Schools Belfer Center, for example, puts the country 19th out of 30 in its ranking of cyber powers. The analysts here combine both intent and actual capabilities, finding that is relatively weak in defensive abilities while being not particularly keen on carrying out cyber attacks.

In other words, the country isnt so adept at destroying or disabling an adversarys infrastructure (Russia and the U.S. are at the top) and shows deficiencies when it comes to the defense of government and national assets and systems (China and Singapore lead here). Its also lacking at controlling information, particular specialties of the U.S. and Russia. The same analysis sees Malaysia highly regarded for its capability to gather foreign intelligence but handicapped by apparent lack of interest in doing so.

This dichotomy between and projection also puts Malaysia in the bottom of three tiers in research on 15 nations released Monday by London-based Institute for Strategic Studies. The U.S. was once again the standout superpower, with China and Russia in the second tier. Malaysias domestic strategy and international links are strong, but a failure to flex its cyber muscle makes it trail the likes of Australia, France and Israel.

With centuries of trading links due to its strategic position on the Straits of Malacca, Malaysia is one of few nations to have a well-regarded foot in the Middle East, East Asia and the West and is a fairly easy place to do business. Yet that porousness has given rise to trouble, including the 1MDB scandal that brought down former Prime Minister Najib Razak, and use as an illegal base in the Libyan and Pakistani nuclear weapons programs. Its also less-well regarded on graft, coming in at 57 out of 180 on Transparency Internationals corruption perceptions index.

You have to invest in diplomacy, said Greg Austin, IISSs Senior Fellow for Cyber, Space and Future Conflict. If youre a tier-three country, you cannot be secure in cyberspace without securing the support of stronger countries who can help you.

Even then, straddling a crossroads is no guarantee of protection. Having a (rare) embassy in Pyongyang didnt stop North Korea from sending assassins to Kuala Lumpurs international airport to murder leader Kim Jong-uns estranged half-brother in 2017. And the U.S. continues to warn its citizens about the possibility of armed terrorist attacks in Malaysia against foreigners, including Americans.

But overall, its nuanced and neutral approach to global affairs has helped Malaysia gain trust and thus tap into the intelligence networks of more powerful nations. The country compensates for some of its shortcomings in cyber capability through international alliances, particularly with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore, the IISS wrote.

Having decided it actually cares about cybersecurity, and by implementing policies to ensure a coordinated strategy to deal with it, Malaysias greatest advantage may not be its own skillset but an ability to leverage stronger allies. For a small country, thats an effective way to maintain the balance of power in cyberspace.
The Russian Embassy to the United States has strongly rejected the alleged involvement of the Russian authorities in a series of on government and private facilities in the United States and other countries.

Earlier this week, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) published a report in which they accused the Russian intelligence services of carrying out a series of in 2019-2021.

"We strictly deny the involvement of Russian government agencies in attacks 'on government and private facilities in the United States and abroad.' We emphasize that fighting against cybercrime is an inherent priority for and an integral part of its state policy to combat all forms of crime. A wide range of law enforcement instruments is used for its implementation," the Russian embassy wrote on its Facebook page on late Thursday.

"We hope that the American side will abandon the practice of unfounded accusations and focus on professional work with Russian experts to strengthen information security, and in this context, on joint efforts to combat cybercrime. Besides, it's high time to put things in order on the American soil, from where constant attacks on critical infrastructure in emerge," the diplomatic mission added.

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Trump Organization's chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg has surrendered to Manhattan District Attorney's Office as the veteran accountant and the Trump Organization face criminal charges on alleged tax crimes, according to local media reports.

It's reported that a Manhattan grand jury indicted the Trump Organization and Weisselberg on Wednesday.

Weisselberg and the Trump Organization would be arraigned later on Thursday at a lower Manhattan court, Xinhua reported.

US former President Donald Trump isn't expected to be charged in the case.

The charges result from a multi-year investigation by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who doesn't run for re-election and would leave his office at the end of 2021.

Vance has been working on the investigation for around two years covering hush money paid to females on Trump's behalf, tax practices, property valuations and others.

A court recently suspended Rudolph Giuliani's law license after ruling that the former City mayor and Donald Trump's personal lawyer made demonstrably false and misleading statements on 2020 general election results.

Weisselberg is now being used by the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former US president, according to a statement by the Trump Organization on Thursday.

"The District Attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution involving employee benefits that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would ever think of bringing. This is not justice; this is politics," added the statement.

At the end of May, prosecutors from City convened a special grand jury to look into evidence in a criminal investigation involving Trump.

--IANS

int/pgh

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The US has added along with 14 other countries in a list of Child Soldiers Prevention Act which identifies foreign governments having government-supported armed groups that recruit or use child soldiers, a designation that could result in restrictions on certain security assistance and commercial licensing of military equipment.

The US Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA) requires publication in the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report a list of foreign governments that have recruited or used child soldiers during the previous year (April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021).

The countries which have been added to the annual TIP list of the US State Department are Pakistan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

According to the State Department, the governments identified on the list are subject to restrictions, in the following fiscal year, on certain security assistance and commercial licensing of military equipment.

The term child soldier means any person under 18 years of age who takes a direct part in hostilities or who has been compulsorily recruited into governmental armed forces, police, or other security forces.

It also means any person under 15 years of age who has been voluntarily recruited into governmental armed forces, police, or other security forces or any person under 18 years of age who has been recruited or used in hostilities by armed forces distinct from the armed forces of a state.

It also includes any such person who is serving in any capacity, including in a support role, such as a cook, porter, messenger, medic, guard or sex slave.

The CSPA prohibits assistance to governments that are identified in the list under the following authorities: Military Education and Training, Foreign Military Financing, Excess Defence Articles, and Peacekeeping Operations, with exceptions for some programmes undertaken pursuant to the Peacekeeping Operations authority.

It also prohibits the issuance of licenses for direct commercial sales of military equipment to such governments.

Beginning October 1, 2021, and effective throughout fiscal year 2022, these restrictions will apply to the listed countries, absent a presidential waiver, applicable exception, or reinstatement of assistance pursuant to the terms of the CSPA.

The determination to include a government in the CSPA list is informed by a range of sources, including first-hand observation by the personnel and research and credible reporting from various UN entities, organisations, local and NGOs, and international and domestic media outlets.
The Joe Biden administration asked three Central Asian nations  Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan  to temporarily house around 9,000 Afghans who worked with American forces and could be targeted by the Taliban as US and Nato troops withdraw after nearly two decades, according to three people familiar with the request.

That effort comes as US forces handed over Bagram airbase, their biggest facility, late Thursday night in a milestone symbolising the effective departure of combat forces from after 20 years.

The US had said it would have most troops out by September 11, keeping a contingent of about 650 in the country to protect diplomats, but that timetable was accelerated.

The handover raises the potential threats facing the many Afghan translators, drivers and other workers and their families who helped sustain the American presence after the US-led coalition ousted the Taliban regime following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Shares of hit an all-time high of Rs 765.35 after rallying 9 per cent on the BSE in intra-day deal on Friday in an otherwise range-bound market on the back of heavy volumes. The stock surpassed its previous high of Rs 754, touched on October 7, 2020. The trading volumes on the counter jumped nearly three-fold with a combined 933,000 shares changing hands on the NSE and BSE. In comparison, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 0.07 per cent at 52,284 points, at 10:04 am.

The stock of the IT software products company has surged 30 per cent in the past four trading days after the company 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.

Nucleus Software is the leading software product company that provides lending and transaction banking products to global financial leaders.

FinnOne Neo is the next-generation digital lending solution that is built on an advanced technology platform, designed to shape the future of lending across Retail, Corporate and Islamic sectors for banks and other financial service companies. The 10 time winner of Worlds Best Selling Lending Solution, helps digitize the complete loan lifecycle.

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, the company said on Tuesday, June 29, 2021.
Nifty futures on Singapore Exchange traded 20 points higher at 15,747, indicating a positive start for the benchmark indices on Friday.

Here are the top stocks to track in today's session:

Eicher Motors: Motorcycle maker Royal Enfield, part of Eicher Motors, said its total sales increased 13 per cent YoY to 43,048 units in June.

Hero MotoCorp: The two-wheeler maker recorded 3.8 per cent YoY growth in its total sales at 4,69,160 units in June 2021, as against 4,51,983 units in June 2020.

Vodafone Idea: The telecom major has approached the government to seek one-year moratorium on payment of spectrum instalment of over Rs 8,200 crore, due in April 2022, suggest reports. READ MORE

Bank stocks: Stocks of lenders are likely to be in focus after RBI's Financial Stability Report said the gross non-performing assets (GNPAs) ratio of banks may rise to 9.8 per cent by March 2022, under a baseline scenario, from 7.48 per cent in March 2021. It, however, added that banks have sufficient capital, both at the aggregate and individual level, even under stress.

NMDC: State-owned iron ore miner reported a 34 per cent YoY increase in its output to 8.89 million tonne in the first quarter of the current fiscal.

Dixon Tech: The company is one of the 14 eligible applicants to get the Ministry of Electronics and IT'/s approval under the Production Linked Incentive Scheme (PLI) for IT hardware.

Lupin: Lupin's US-based arm has received approval from the US health regulator for its supplemental new drug application to expand the use of Solosec to include the treatment of trichomoniasis, a sexually transmitted disease.

Coforge: The board will meet on July 6 to consider a proposal for raising funds.

Coal India: State-owned CIL said overall coal offtake rose by 32.7 per cent to 160.4 million tonnes (MT) in the first quarter of this ongoing fiscal. Production in June up 2 per cent YoY to 40 MT.

Affle: Affle (India) said it has completed the acquisition of Jampp, a global programmatic mobile marketing company. In June, Affle had announced the acquisition of Jampp (Ireland) Ltd and its subsidiaries.

Srei Infra Finance: The board has approved a resolution to raise up to Rs 2,500 crore through various means, including qualified institutional placement.

Gail (India): The company has been awarded Rs 930 crore ($125 million) in an arbitration matter against Andhra Pradesh Gas Power Corp. over gas supply price, according to a Bloomberg report.

Aurobindo Pharma: The board has approved the transfer of business undertaking comprised in Unit 4 to Eugia Pharma Specialities, a wholly-owned subsidiary. Further the company will transfer Unit 10 to subsidiary APL Healthcare for Rs 1,315 crore.

Tata Consultancy Services: The company has partnered with John Wiley & Sons to modernise its ecommerce platform with SAP Commerce, creating a unified, seamless customer experience.

Tata Power Company: The board has decided to withdraw the amalgamation of Tata Power Solar Systems with the company and accordingly approved the amendment to the Composite Scheme.

BHEL: India Ratings downgraded the rating on the long-term bank facilities of the company from 'AA' to 'AA-' and reaffirmed the outlook to 'Negative'. The rating on the short-term facilities have been reaffirmed at 'A1+'.

NCC: The company received five new orders totaling to Rs 2,149 crore in June. Out of the total orders, two orders valuing Rs 1,254 crore pertain to water and environment division and one order valuing Rs 729 crore pertains to buildings division and one order valuing Rs 166 crore pertains to mining division.
The Mainland China share market finished session lower on Friday, 02 July 2021, as risk aversion selloff triggered across the board on growth concerns after latest data showed China's June factory activity dipped to a four-month, while China's non-manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index also fell during the month.

Sentiments were also dampened after the Chinese Communist Party marked its centenary with tough talk by Chinese President Xi Jinping. In a speech Thursday, Xi warned that anyone who tries to bully China will face broken heads and bloodshed. Xi appeared to be hitting back at the U.

S. and others that have criticized China's trade and technology polices, military expansion and human rights record.

At closing bell, the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index was down 1.95%, or 70.02 points, to 3,518.76. The Shenzhen Composite Index, which tracks stocks on China's second exchange, fell 1.86%, or 45.48 points, to 2,396.78. The blue-chip CSI300 index fell 2.84%, or 148.54 points, to 5,081.12.

Stocks have pulled back amid concerns about China's economic slowdown after data on manufacturing and services industries in recent weeks, while a flare-up in Covid-19 cases involving the more contagious Delta variant also dashed the hopes for further reopening of borders.

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Hero MotoCorp said that with the gradual easing of the COVID-19 related restrictions and lockdowns across key markets in the country, the company witnessed a strong rebound in the month of June to sell 469,160 units of motorcycles and scooters.

In compliance with the guidelines as prescribed by state and local authorities, almost all of the customer touchpoints of Hero MotoCorp are now operational, with strict safety measures and protocols in place.

Heading into the upcoming festive season, the company remains cautiously optimistic about the customer demand in the coming months. The expected surge in personal mobility, forecast of a normal monsoon in several parts of the country and the improving rural sentiment are expected to lead to a swift revival in sales.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) partnered with John Wiley & Sons, an American multinational publishing company, to modernize its ecommerce platform with SAP Commerce, creating a unified, seamless customer experience.

Coal India and its subsidiaries on a provisional basis achieved coal production of 40 million tonnes in June 2021 compared to 39.2 million tonnes in June 2020, recording a growth of 2%. Coal offtake stood at 51.3 million tonnes in June 2021 compared to 41.7 million tonnes in June 2020, recording a growth of 23%.

Lupin Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the U.S. based wholly-owned subsidiary of Lupin announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the company's supplemental New Drug Application (sNDA) to expand the use of SOLOSEC (secnidazole) to include the treatment of trichomoniasis in adults.

NCC has received five new orders totaling to Rs 2,149 crore (exclusive of GST) in the month of June 2021. These orders are received from PSU/ Central/ State Government agencies and do not include any internal orders.

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JSW Steel is one of the first steel companies in India to get the GreenPro ecolabel certification for JSW Neosteel, its brand of TMT rebars.

GreenPro is a Type - 1 Ecolabel by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) which enables the end users in the building sector and manufacturing sector to make informed decisions by choosing sustainable products, materials and technologies for the construction, operation and maintenance of their buildings and factories.

JSW Steel has always been the front runner in the industry to demonstrate its commitment to sustainable products.

JSW Neosteel TMT bars are manufactured through High Yield Quenched and Self Tempered (HYQST) technology which ensures uniform quality across the bar.

In addition, the TMT bars have the highest grade of purity and lowest Sulphur and phosphorous content which makes it more stronger and sustainable.

In addition to the product sustainability, Green Pro assign credits to the environment friendly manufacturing processes thus recognizing JSW Steel as a sustainable manufacturer.

All the company's rebar manufacturing units along with all grades (Fe 500D, Fe 550D, Fe 600, CS2:2012 500B, BS 4449 B500B, Fe 500D CRS, Fe 550D CRS, Fe 600 CRS, Fe 650) are covered under the certification.

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Key benchmark indices are trading lower in early trade on selling pressure in index pivotals. At 9:25 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, was down 62.13 points or 0.12% at 52,256.47. The Nifty 50 index was down 13.10 points or 0.08% at 15,666.90. Asian stocks are trading mixed.

The S&P BSE Mid-Cap index was up 0.23%. The S&P BSE Small-Cap index was down 0.04%.

The market breadth, indicating the overall health of the market, is strong. On the BSE, 1670 shares rose and 860 shares fell. A total of 90 shares were unchanged.

Stocks in news:

Hero MotoCorp rose 0.6%. Hero MotoCorp said that with the gradual easing of the COVID-19 related restrictions and lockdowns across key markets in the country, the company witnessed a strong rebound in the month of June to sell 469,160 units of motorcycles and scooters.

In compliance with the guidelines as prescribed by state and local authorities, almost all of the customer touchpoints of Hero MotoCorp are now operational, with strict safety measures and protocols in place.

Heading into the upcoming festive season, the company remains cautiously optimistic about the customer demand in the coming months. The expected surge in personal mobility, forecast of a normal monsoon in several parts of the country and the improving rural sentiment are expected to lead to a swift revival in sales.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) fell 1.31%. TCS partnered with John Wiley & Sons, an American multinational publishing company, to modernize its ecommerce platform with SAP Commerce, creating a unified, seamless customer experience.

Coal India gained 1.41%. Coal India and its subsidiaries on a provisional basis achieved coal production of 40 million tonnes in June 2021 compared to 39.2 million tonnes in June 2020, recording a growth of 2%. Coal offtake stood at 51.3 million tonnes in June 2021 compared to 41.7 million tonnes in June 2020, recording a growth of 23%.

Lupin rose 1.36%. Lupin Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the U.S. based wholly-owned subsidiary of Lupin announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the company's supplemental New Drug Application (sNDA) to expand the use of SOLOSEC (secnidazole) to include the treatment of trichomoniasis in adults.

NCC gained 1.78%. NCC has received five new orders totaling to Rs 2,149 crore (exclusive of GST) in the month of June 2021. These orders are received from PSU/ Central/ State Government agencies and do not include any internal orders.

Global Markets:

Asia-Pacific stocks are trading mixed on Friday as investors look ahead to a closely-watched U.S. jobs report set to be released later.

The S&P 500 reached its sixth consecutive all-time closing high on Thursday, as a new quarter and the second half of the year began with upbeat economic data and a broad-based rally.

The number of Americans applying for unemployment aid fell again last week. The Labor Department reported Thursday that jobless claims dropped by 51,000 to 364,000.

The International Monetary Fund raised its 2021 U.S. growth projection sharply to 7% due to a strong recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and an assumption that much of President Joe Biden's infrastructure and social spending plans will be enacted.

The IMF's latest forecast, marking the fastest U.S. growth pace since 1984, compares with an April projection of 4.6% growth in 2021. The Fund raised its 2022 U.S. GDP growth forecast to 4.9%, up from its previous 3.5% April forecast.

Back home, the key equity indices ended with modest losses on Thursday. The barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, fell 164.11 points or 0.31% to 52,318.60. The Nifty 50 index lost 41.50 points or 0.26% to 15,680.

Foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) sold shares worth Rs 1,245.29 crore, while domestic institutional investors (DIIs), were net buyers to the tune of Rs 880.60 crore in the Indian equity market on 1 July, provisional data showed.

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Election commission of India on Friday sought a response from the government over elections to two seats.

Two seats which were earlier being held by Dinesh Trivedi and Manas Bhuiyan lie vacant.

Manas Bhunia, who is now state water resources minister, stepped down from his seat. In February former Trinamool Congress MP Dinesh Trivedi announced his resignation from the Rajya Sabha seat after saying that he felt suffocated.

It is also to be noted that the state's chief electoral officer has written to regarding the pending by-elections.

Significantly, by-elections are important as Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and the finance minister Dr Amit Mitra is currently non-MLAs and needs to get elected within six months i.e. November 5 to continue as MLA or as CM.

The first Assembly session of after the assembly elections begins today.

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A day after BJP MLA met Solicitor General of India, Tushar Mehta, the (TMC) wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding his removal.

In its letter, TMC has alleged that Adhikari who is accused in the Narada case and Sarada Chit Fund scam, held a meeting with the SG to influence the outcome of the cases.

The latter by TMC said that is accused in various criminal cases of cheating, illegal gratification and bribery and in various offences being investigated by CBI and ED.

"The Solicitor General of India is the second law officer in the country after Attorney General of India and advises Government of India and its various organs in crucial legal matters such as Narada and Sarada cases. Such meeting with an accused is a grave offence," the letter said.

The letter further said, "In order to avoid any doubt in the mind of the public at large, as to the integrity and neutrality of the office of the Learned Solicitor General of India, we approach you to initiate necessary steps for the removal of Tushar Mehta from the post of the Solicitor General of India."

The letter has been undersigned by TMC MPs Derek O'Brien, Mahua Moitra and Sukhendu Sekhar Roy Adhikari.

Meanwhile, Tushar Mehta has denied the meeting with the BJP leader and clarified that Adhikari came to his residence "unannounced".

Tushar Mehta said, " came to my residence/office yesterday, unannounced. As I was in a pre-scheduled meet, my staff asked him to wait. After my meeting, my staff informed him of my inability to meet him. He left without insisting to meet me. Hence, the question of my meeting with him did not arise."

Leader of Opposition in Suvendu Adhikari on Thursday had meetings with Bharatiya Janata Party leadership including Union Home Minister Amit Shah as the state BJP prepares to take on the Mamata Banerjee government over post-poll violence in the state during the budget session of assembly starting from July 2.

It will be the first such session after the results of assembly polls on May 2.

Sources stated that Adhikari briefed Shah regarding the prevailing situation in

The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a notice to the Centre, Trinamool Congress government and Election Commission of India (ECI) on a plea seeking Special Investigation Team (SIT) probe to investigate into causes and reasons of post-poll violence in West Bengal.

Mamata Banerjee has also challenged Adhikari's victory from Nandigram in Kolkata High Court.

Apart from the post-poll violence, the BJP is likely to take on the Trinamool Congress government on "fake vaccination camps" and "poor preparedness of the government to fight COVID-19" during the assembly session.

The budget session is expected to witness fireworks between BJP and the ruling TMC.

An NHRC team had recently visited Bengal to probe the post-poll violence. The team, which went to the state on orders of Calcutta High Court, faced "heckling" in Jadavpur.

.

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The Trinamool Congress on Friday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking the removal of Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta over his meeting with Opposition Leader in Delhi.

The letter, written by TMC MPs Derek O'Brien, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy and Mahua Maitra, stated that the meeting between Adhikari and the solicitor general "reeks of impropriety" as the BJP MLA is an accused in the Narada and Saradha cases where investigations are underway.

According to the letter, the meeting "curiously" took place subsequent to Adhikari's meeting with Home Minister Amit Shah.

The TMC MPs claimed that Adhikari was accused in various cases of cheating, bribery and illegal gratification, related to Narada and Saradha.

The Solicitor General is appearing for the CBI in the Narada case in the Supreme Court and the high court, besides advising the investigation agency in the Saradha chit fund scam, they said.

The meeting between Adhikari and the solicitor general "not only reeks of impropriety, there is a direct conflict of interest and also taints the position of the second highest law officer of the country, the Solicitor General", they added.

To maintain the "neutrality and integrity" of the office of the Solicitor General of India, necessary steps be taken for the removal of Mehta from the post, the TMC MPs said in the letter to the prime minister.

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Pakistan on Friday rejected India's claims that a drone was spotted over the complex here last week and said no proof has been shared with it to substantiate the charge.



The external affairs ministry in New Delhi on Friday said that a drone was spotted over the complex in Islamabad last week and Pakistan has been asked to investigate the incident and prevent recurrence of such "breach of security".



The Indian mission has also lodged a strong protest with Pakistan over the incident through a note verbale which is a diplomatic communique, people familiar with the development said in New Delhi.



The incident came to light amid growing concerns in the security establishment in India after explosives-laden drones were used to carry out an attack on the Jammu Air Force station on June 27.



Foreign Office spokesperson Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri, in response to media queries here, termed the claims as Indian propaganda.



We have seen the Indian MEA's statement and reports in certain sections of the Indian media alleging a drone flying over the premises of the in Islamabad.



These preposterous claims have no basis in facts and no proof whatsoever has been shared with Pakistan to substantiate these allegations, he said.



The incident came to light amid growing concerns in the security establishment in India after explosives-laden drones were used to carry out an attack on the Jammu Air Force station on June 27.

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State-run NTPC has plans to list its arm Ltd in 2022-23, to raise funds for achieving its ambitious target of 60 GW installed capacity by 2032, which entails a total investment of Rs 2.5 lakh crore, a source said.

The source, however, did not disclose the quantum of money to be raised through the initial public offering (IPO) of the but said that the equity component of the firm would be around Rs 50,000 crore and rest of the requirement would be met through long-term loans, debentures, bonds and other such modes.

Last year in October, state-owned NTPC incorporated a wholly-owned subsidiary for its renewable energy business in the name of Ltd.

Earlier this week, NTPC had indicated its intention to list NTPC Renewable Energy Ltd.

Participating in the virtual BloombergNEF (BNEF) Summit, NTPC Chairman and Managing Director Gurdeep Singh had said, "We should not focus on one way of raising funds. We want to soon go to public for raising funds."



Singh was talking about raising funds for NTPC's ambitious renewable energy (RE) target and stressed that the company would add 7-8 GW RE every year, which would not be an uphill task for it.

The source said that initially, NTPC Renewable Energy Ltd would begin by adding around 4,000 MW of clean energy capacity in a year, which would be scaled up to 7,000 MW to 8,000 MW eventually in 10 years' period till 2032.

Singh had exuded confidence that NTPC would exceed its target of 60 GW of RE by 2032.

The source further said that since NTPC is not going for any greenfield power generation capacity addition based on fossil fuels in future, the funding of Rs 2.5 lakh crore spread over next 10 years for clean energy capacity of 60 GW can be achieved easily.

According to the Union Budget 2021, the annual capital expenditure of NTPC is budgeted at Rs 23,736 crore for 2021-22, which is higher than the revised estimates of its capex of Rs 21,000 crore in 2020-21. Its actual capex in 2019-20 was Rs 36,618.4 crore.

At present, the NTPC Group has a renewable energy capacity of around 1,365 MW. It plans to have 132 GW of total power generation capacity by 2032, including 60 GW of clean energy.

NTPC has become India's first energy company to declare its energy compact goals as part of the UN High-level Dialogue on Energy (HLDE). NTPC looks to install 60 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2032.

The country's largest power producer is also aiming for a 10 per cent reduction in net energy intensity by 2032.

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The Union government on Friday announced fresh guidelines to include wholesale and retail trades as micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in a move that is expected to benefit as many as 25 million traders battered by the Covid-19 pandemic.

MSME Minister said the decision would make such traders eligible for finance under priority sectors classified by the (RBI).

The government has received various representations and it has been decided to include retail and wholesale trades as MSMEs, and they are allowed to be registered on the Udyam Registration portal. However, benefits to retail and wholesale trade are to be restricted to priority sector lending only, according to an official release.

This means that apart from getting the priority sector lending tag, these traders will not get any other benefit that small businesses otherwise get from the government.

The Udyam portal provides a single-page registration, consumes less time, and simplifies the process of registering any enterprise under the MSME category.

In the past, wholesale and retail trading activities were classified as MSMEs, but were excluded in 2017 as they did not cater to manufacturing activity. Currently, central schemes such as the capital subsidy scheme and SFURTI (Scheme of Fund for Regeneration of Traditional Industries) are aimed at supporting traditional industries.





Traders associations welcomed the move. The pandemic-affected traders will now be able to restore their businesses by obtaining necessary finances from banks, which had earlier denied the same, said Praveen Khandelwal, secretary general, Confederation of All India Traders.

A section of small businesses, however, expressed their concerns.

According to Anil Bharadwaj, secretary general of Federation of Indian Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (FISME), the concern here is once retail and wholesale traders get included in the priority sector lending category under MSMEs, bankers may prefer them to give loans in the place of small manufacturing units, thereby increasing competition for the limited funds.

Banks will always opt for less risky businesses to give their funds, and retail and wholesale trades are less risky than manufacturing, which can have an impact on the overall sector. Although the order says retail and wholesale trades will be treated as only for priority sector lending, manufacturing feel that once trading gets registered, they could also get preference in government procurements, etc. These concerns shouldnt be brushed aside, Bhardwaj said.

N K Mishra, professor in the Department of Economics at Banaras Hindu University (BHU), said that in the short term, the move would definitely help businesses. But, the concern is whether it will be broad based or those retail and wholesale traders who already have access to banking finance will corner all the benefits, Mishra said.
NASA's newest six-wheeled robot on Mars, the Perseverance rover, is beginning an epic journey across a crater floor seeking signs of ancient life, the US space agency announced on Thursday.

A NASA release said the rover team is deeply engaged with planning navigation routes, drafting instructions to be beamed up, even donning special 3D glasses to help map their course.

But increasingly, the rover will take charge of the drive-by itself, using a powerful auto-navigation system. Called AutoNav, this enhanced system makes 3D maps of the terrain ahead, identifies hazards, and plans a route around any obstacles without additional direction from controllers back on Earth.

"We have a capability called 'thinking while driving,'" said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer, rover planner, and driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "The rover is thinking about the autonomous drive while its wheels are turning."

That capability, combined with other improvements, might enable Perseverance to hit a top speed of 393 feet (120 meters) per hour; its predecessor, Curiosity, equipped with an earlier version of AutoNav, covers about 66 feet (20 meters) per hour as it climbs Mount Sharp to the southeast, it added.

"We sped up AutoNav by four or five times," said Michael McHenry, the mobility domain lead and part of JPL's team of rover planners. "We're driving a lot farther in a lot less time than Curiosity demonstrated."

As Perseverance begins its first science campaign on the floor of Jezero Crater, AutoNav will be a key feature in helping get the job done.

This crater once was a lake, when, billions of years ago, was wetter than today, and Perseverance's destination is a dried-out river delta at the crater's edge. If life ever took hold on early Mars, signs of it might be found there. The rover will gather samples over some 9 miles (15 kilometers), then prep the samples for collection by a future mission that would take them back to Earth for analysis.

"We're going to be able to get to places the scientists want to go much more quickly," said Jennifer Trosper, who has worked on every one of NASA's Martian rovers and is the 2020 Perseverance rover project manager. "Now we are able to drive through these more complex terrains instead of going around them: It's not something we've been able to do before."

Of course, Perseverance can't get by on AutoNav alone. The involvement of the rover team remains critical in planning and driving Perseverance's route. An entire team of specialists develops a navigation route along with planning the rover's activity, whether it's examining a geologically interesting feature on the way to its destination or, soon, taking samples.

Because of the radio signal delay between Earth and Mars, they can't simply move the rover forward with a joystick. Instead, they scrutinize satellite images, sometimes donning those 3D glasses to view the Martian surface in the rover's vicinity. Once the team signs off, they beam the instructions to Mars, and the rover executes those instructions the following day.

Perseverance's wheels were modified as well to help with just how swiftly those plans are executed: Along with being slightly greater in diameter and narrower than Curiosity's wheels, they each feature 48 treads that look like slightly wavy lines, as opposed to Curiosity's 24 chevron-pattern treads. The goals were to help with traction as well as durability.

"Curiosity couldn't AutoNav because of the wheel-wear issue," Trosper said. "Early in the mission, we experienced small, sharp, pointy rocks starting to put holes in the wheels, and our AutoNav didn't avoid those."

Higher clearance for Perseverance's belly also enables the rover to roll safely over rougher ground - including good-size rocks. And Perseverance's beefed-up auto-navigation capabilities include ENav, or enhanced navigation, an algorithm-and-software combination that allows more precise hazard detection.

Unlike its predecessors, Perseverance can employ one of its computers just for navigation on the surface; its main computer can devote itself to the many other tasks that keep the rover healthy and active.

This Vision Compute Element, or VCE, guided Perseverance to the Martian surface during its entry, descent, and landing in February. Now it's being used full-time to map out the rover's journey while helping it avoid trouble along the way.

The rover also keeps track of how far it's moved from one spot to another using a system called "visual odometry." Perseverance periodically captures images as it moves, comparing one position to the next to see if it moved the expected distance.

Team members say they look forward to letting AutoNav "take the wheel." But they'll also be ready to intervene when needed.

And just what is it like to drive on The planners and drivers say it never gets old.

"Jezero is incredible," Verma said. "It's a rover driver's paradise. When you put on the 3D glasses, you see so much more undulation in the terrain. Some days I just stare at the images.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi [India], July 2 (ANI/NewsVoir): To overcome the logistics woes and establish a streamlined, seamless, and cost-efficient delivery channel for all its clients; StoreHippo, the leading e-commerce platform announces a new strategic partnership with the market leader shipping aggregator service - Shiprocket.

As a result of this tie-up, businesses will get access to easy, reliable, and automated shipping solutions to foray into untapped markets and strengthen their foothold in the existing ones.

Shiprocket's simplified logistics solutions integrated with StoreHippo's feature-rich e-commerce platform offers the launchpad for a successful business. This integration will allow merchants having their stores on StoreHippo to avail multiple shipping options and choose from a spectrum of trusted delivery partners to make their order deliveries faster, smarter and cost-optimized.

Furthermore, StoreHippo's patrons will also be able to get automatic real-time shipment status. The merchants as well as their customers will get access to the tracking ID enabling them to monitor the progress of the order in transit and would thus be able to get timely updates about the delivery of the order.

Additionally, this partnership will allow StoreHippo clients to offer COD options to their clients and thus reach a wider customer base across the country.

Through this integration, StoreHippo intends to help its clients streamline their supply chain by offering timely and error-free logistics services across India as well as in the international markets.

With this mutually beneficial partnership, businesses can:

Quickly launch their online store in a few days

Build tailor-made B2B and B2C e-commerce solutions

Offer streamlined order delivery using Shiprocket on their StoreHippo powered online stores

Sell better in domestic markets by offering COD options to customers

Gain customer trust with next day delivery

Easily sell Omni-channel and fulfil orders seamlessly using extensive logistics services of multiple shipping partners

Speaking about the collaboration further, Rajiv Kumar, Founder & CEO, StoreHippo, said, "At StoreHippo, we aim to offer an end-to-end solution to businesses planning to build their online presence. Shipping is the backbone of a successful e-commerce business and with Shiprocket integration, we are hoping to offer a streamlined, transparent, automated, and efficient shipping solution to our clients. Our aim is to provide a fully integrated ecosystem along with automated supply chain management to our customers."

StoreHippo is designed to offer cutting-edge e-commerce solutions for SMEs, enterprise businesses, and high-volume businesses. The mobile-ready, fully integrated, hosted and managed e-commerce platform offers customizable solutions to build innovative e-commerce systems for B2B and B2C businesses.

StoreHippo offers brands of every size and industry a complete ecosystem to run their online business including seamless logistics services. To ensure the same, StoreHippo has integrated with the D2C logistics aggregator Shiprocket to offer smooth and efficient logistic operations to its clients.

With StoreHippo's flexible and scalable SaaS e-commerce platform, Indian enterprise brands can go to market in the shortest possible time. StoreHippo's headless commerce solutions with 120+ integrations and 300+ inbuilt features help brands build extremely personalized Omni-channel buyer journeys.

Commenting on the same, Saahil Goel, CEO & Co-founder of Shiprocket, said, "Logistics is one of the key pillars that enables satisfaction at both ends, be it the customer or the seller. Apart from setting up an online store, accuracy plays a major role in maintaining this experience. Real-time updates are indispensable to ensure transparency and reduced support costs, which consequently enhance the experience at both the buyer and seller level. We are delighted to have StoreHippo as our partner and aim to provide an end to end seamless logistics experience to the merchants. With this alliance, they will have access to our e-commerce fulfilment services that can help them offer 1-Day delivery to their customers, across more than 29,000 pin codes PAN India with 17+ best-in-class courier partners to build scalable ventures."

Started in 2014, StoreHippo is the most flexible enterprise e-commerce platform designed for diverse B2B and B2C business models. Driving success with innovative solutions, StoreHippo envisions giving powerful solutions to brands that need a mobile-ready and customizable solution to rule the market.

With the headless commerce architecture at its core, StoreHippo builds mobile-ready PWA stores that are fully customizable and have a quick turnaround time.

StoreHippo offers fully integrated solutions for enterprise brands where they can integrate ERP, CRM, accounting, and any other software of their choice. Designed for diverse B2B, B2C, and enterprise solutions, StoreHippo-The leading e-commerce platform in India is a part of the inspiring journey of customers in 25 countries across 40+ industry verticals.

This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir)

DISCLAIMER

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ireland was among only 9 nations that yesterday refused to sign an agreement that will result in wide-ranging changes to the rules around the taxation of multinationals. Goodbody Stockbrokers today warned that along with only two other European states and some small tax havens and African states in doing so, it is surely risking some reputational damage.



An agreement was signed yesterday by countries that account for more than 90% of global GDP. Having held out earlier, Goodbody say it is notable that China and India were signatories to the deal. Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe noted in a statement yesterday that while Ireland agrees with Pillar 1 of the statement on the issue of the distribution of profits of multinationals across jurisdictions, it continues to have issues with Pillar II  that of a global minimum tax rate of at least 15%.

While Ireland has said that it remains committed to the process of finding an outcome, it did not, in public at least, offer any potential solution to get it on board.



A final agreement is expected to be reached by October. Goodbody say the Irish government may use this time to prepare the public for changes that now seem inevitable and that an important message will be that Irelands corporate tax rate will remain competitive in the context of significantly higher rates in most of the rest of Europe.



According to Goodbody Stockbrokers, "Having been committed to process of international negotiation and cooperation on this issue, Ireland finds itself between a rock and a hard place by holding out on an agreement that most of the world has signed up to. Ireland has clearly been trying hard to negotiate the global minimum tax rate downwards and has been largely successful regarding both the headline rate and the carve-outs that were part of the statement yesterday."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
It was announced today that Kirby Group Engineering plans to create 300 new jobs as part of a significant expansion to meet demand for its services in Ireland and across Europe.



Kirby has also announced a significant structural investment, comprising a 2 million plan to upgrade its company headquarters in County Limerick. The company currently employs over 1,200 people, with 200 new employees having joined during 2020.



The family-founded, privately owned company says the new jobs will include engineering, commercial, operations and administrative staff, with recruitment for many of these roles already underway. As part of this recruitment drive, Kirby is looking to attract almost 100 people to be deployed across its Apprenticeship Scheme and Graduate Programme.



Welcoming the news this week, Taoiseach, Micheal Martin said, "Todays announcement of an additional 300 jobs represents another great milestone for Kirby Group Engineering, Limerick and the wider Mid-West region. We want Ireland to be a great location, and a competitive location, to start and scale businesses just like this. Kirbys expansion is testament to the skills and talent this country has to offer, and I note in particular the value the company places on graduates and apprentices in shaping its future. I wish everyone at Kirby Group Engineering many more decades of success."



Managing Director of Kirby Group Engineering, Mark Flanagan added, "Im very proud to unveil this expansion plan at our Limerick Headquarters on a landmark day for Kirby. This announcement, coupled with recruitment last year in spite of the global pandemic, will result in our team growing by 500 in a two year period. Our team is making fantastic inroads at the cutting edge of construction across Europe and the people we welcome onboard in this phase will be a vital support to the future of the company."

Source: www.businessworld.ie


Savills Ireland today released figures that showed 1.5bn was invested in the Irish property market in the second quarter of 2021, bringing total year-to-date investment volumes in Irish real estate to 2.7bn. This represents the second highest level on record and 170% ahead of the first half of 2020.

Investor appetite was strong across the board but the industrial sector was the stand-out performer of the quarter. In total, 325 million worth of industrial assets traded giving the sector a 22% market share, well ahead of the long-run average of 4%. With a tight vacancy rate of 1.3% and strong occupational demand, investors are seeking exposure to the sector which has proved resilient during the pandemic.



An additional 757 million was invested in PRS assets this quarter, which brought the total year-to-date PRS investment volumes to 1.5bn  25% higher than full-year investment into the sector in 2020. The market share of PRS fell slightly from 58% in the first quarter to 51% in the second quarter but still accounted for four of the five largest deals of the quarter.

The role of the private rented sector in unlocking new supply is evident with 90% of residential units being forward purchased compared to 10% of transactions consisting of standing stock. Savills say without a healthy investment base giving certainty for developers, it is highly unlikely that this construction would be happening.

A total of 311 million was invested into office assets during the quarter. The major deals in the quarter were Dekas 164 million purchase of Block A, Riverside IV in Dublin 2 and Corums 60 million purchase of One Navigation Square in Cork. Block B Liffey Valley also sold, trading for 18 million and included life sciences tenants such as AstraZeneca and Abbot. The life sciences sector is predicted to be one of the next big growth sectors of the global economy as Ireland emerges from the pandemic.



Commenting the figures, Divisional Director of Investments at Savills, Brendan Delaney said, "Investment in the office sector has been hampered by Covid-related interruptions to the construction pipeline and occupational market. As the year progresses and offices reach completion lease-up we would expect to see a pick-up in investment volumes in the sector. Therefore, while the PRS share of the market at the moment is relatively high, this will balance out as the year progresses with significant office and retail assets set to transact in the second-half of the year."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Pictured is a receptacle for used syringes and vials of COVID-19 vaccine and the substance mixed as a diluent for certain brands.About $5 million in cash and college scholarships will be given away in lottery-style drawings aimed at raising Michigans COVID-19 vaccination rate, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced Thursday.
The global debate on a minimum corporate tax has been driven by the massive profits reaped by tech giants. Photo: VCG

(Nikkei Asia)  Negotiators from 130 nations and territories on Thursday reached a broad agreement on corporate taxation meant to halt a race to the bottom in tax rates and pin down borderless tech giants.

The proposed plan calls for a minimum tax rate of at least 15%, an amount pushed for by U.S. President Joe Biden's administration. At the same time, a new digital tax would target about 100 tech companies that make at least 20 billion euros ($23.7 billion) in revenue with a profit margin of 10%.

A final agreement by leaders this year would mark a turning point away from a trend of falling tax burdens on multinationals.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, made up of mostly advanced economies, on Thursday presented the agreement after working-level talks. The U.S., China and India  which has rolled out its own digital tax  were part of the consensus.

Biden praised the agreement as an important step in moving the global economy forward to be more equitable for workers and middle-class families around the world.

The U.S. president said in a White House statement the agreement would force multinational corporations to pay their fair share in taxes and prevent them from hiding assets in offshore havens.

With a global minimum tax in place, multinational corporations will no longer be able to pit countries against one another in a bid to push tax rates down and protect their profits at the expense of public revenue, Biden said.

The 130 countries and jurisdictions represent more than 90% of global gross domestic product. A small group of the tax debate's 139 members have yet to join the statement, the organization said.

Ireland, a prominent low-tax jurisdiction that has competed for global investment with a 12.5% corporate tax rate, is part of the discussions but not the statement.

Global financial chiefs and central bank governors will gather next week for a two-day Group of 20 meeting. There, the proposals discussed at the OECD will be presented for an agreement at the ministerial level.

Once the details are ironed out, the plan would be put forward for a final agreement by October, with the aim of putting it into force in 2023.

The global debate on a minimum corporate tax has been driven by the massive profits reaped by tech giants like Google parent Alphabet, Apple and Facebook. Critics say tech companies' scarcity of physical assets like factories allows them to set up subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions and channel their digital earnings through there, avoiding payment in countries where they earn most of their profits.

The framework updates key elements of the century-old international tax system, which is no longer fit for purpose in a globalized and digitalized 21st century economy, the OECD said in a statement.

OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said: This package does not eliminate tax competition, as it should not, but it does set multilaterally agreed limitations on it.

The profit margin at Amazon.com was less than 10% for the latest reporting period. There is an exception being considered that would open a company to the digital tax if a single business within the company makes 20 billion euros in revenue with a profit margin over 10%.

Governments face the daunting task of balancing their budgets after the coronavirus pandemic. The next issue facing negotiations is the fate of the digital service taxes put in place unilaterally by nations. France and the U.K. tax domestic revenue gained from online ads and similar sources.

The U.S. is demanding that such digital service taxes be promptly suspended or abolished after an international tax agreement is reached. But the jurisdictions that have already introduced their own digital service tax are hesitant to go down that route owing to the risk of lost revenue.

This package will provide for appropriate coordination between the application of the new international tax rules and the removal of all Digital Service Taxes and other relevant similar measures on all companies, the OCED statement said.

This story was first published in Nikkei Asia.

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A large-scale LNG membrane tank in the northern city of Tianjin on June 7. Photo: VCG

Natural gas /

In Depth: New pipeline network shakes up Chinas natural gas dynamics

Chinas recent love affair with natural gas is taking a new twist, following last years creation of a national pipeline network.

The shift has been shaking up the landscape in recent months among Chinas three energy majors, China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), China Petrochemical Corp. (Sinopec) and China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC). Each is suddenly finding its position greatly altered following the creation of a modern national distribution network accessible to all.

That network came to life in October with the formal launch of China Oil & Gas Network Corp., also known as PipeChina. Years in the making, the new company took over the oil and gas pipeline assets, storage facilities and import terminals of the three state-run majors, with CNPC, which does business under the name PetroChina, contributing the most assets. The shift was meant to make the system more efficient and to open the door for competition among the three giants and potentially other future players by giving everyone access to the same national network.

PMI /

Chinas manufacturing recovery takes a breather, Caixin PMI shows

Chinas manufacturing sector expanded at the slowest pace in three months in June as growth in production and new orders softened, a Caixin-sponsored survey showed.

The Caixin China General Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), which gives an independent snapshot of the countrys manufacturing sector, fell to 51.3 in June from 52 the previous month, according to a report released Thursday. A number above 50 signals an expansion, while a reading below that indicates a contraction.

FINANCE & ECONOMY



Centenary /

China has achieved goal of building moderately prosperous society, President Xi says

China has achieved the goal of building a moderately well-off society and is on its way to becoming a great modern socialist country, President Xi Jinping announced at an event celebrating the Communist Partys 100-year anniversary.

China has realized the first centenary goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, President Xi Jinping told a crowd of thousands gathered at Beijings Tiananmen Square Thursday morning.

He also said the country has realized a historic resolution to the problem of absolute poverty.

Banking /

Biggest China bank abandons $3 billion Zimbabwe coal plant

Chinas biggest bank dumped a plan to finance a $3 billion coal-fired power plant in Zimbabwe, dealing a blow to coal developers in Africa that see China as the last potential funder of their projects.

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd. (ICBC) told Go Clean ICBC, an ad hoc body representing 32 environmental groups, that it wont fund the 2,800-megawatt Sengwa coal project in northern Zimbabwe, according to a June 18 email seen by Bloomberg. The message was sent to 350.org, one of the Go Clean groups. ICBC didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rating /

Moody's downgrades Evergrande despite debt relief progress

Moodys Investors Service downgraded China Evergrande Groups credit rating by one notch to B2 as the debt-ridden property developer struggles to ease its debt crunch.

"The downgrade reflects Evergrande's weakened funding access and reduced liquidity buffer given its large debt maturities in the coming 1218 months amid the tight credit environment in China and volatility in the capital markets," said Cedric Lai, a Moody's vice president and senior analyst, in a Wednesday statement.

Debt /

China tightens oversight of local government borrowing

Chinas Ministry of Finance ordered that the allocation of quotas for local governments borrowing via special purpose bonds (SPBs) be linked to performance targets for the projects the bonds fund.

Authorities are moving to apply more rigorous oversight to trillions of yuan of local government debt taken on to finance public infrastructure and other projects that often dont pay for themselves as intended, increasing risks associated with the borrowing.

Quick hits /

JPMorgan fund adds Chinese internet stocks hit by crackdown

Peoples of China and Singapore have greatly benefited from their ruling parties ties, Lee Hsien Loong says

BUSINESS & TECH





Reorganization /

Chinese offshore drilling rig giant gets $129 million SOE cash injection

China International Marine Containers (Group) Ltd. signed a $129 million strategic cooperation agreement with a state-owned enterprise to shore up its struggling marine engineering operations, the Shenzhen-based company said Wednesday.

State-owned investment company Yantai Guofeng Investment Holdings Co. Ltd. agreed to invest 835 million yuan ($129 million) in a joint venture with China International Marine Containers. The deal is intended to integrate the container enterprises money-losing marine engineering and fishery assets in the Yantai area and form a development platform for deep sea industries, the company said.

The global marine engineering industry is suffering from years of oversupply and sustained weakness in oil prices. Marine engineering companies are moving to transform or reorganize their businesses.

Property /

Property development glory days are over, Vanke says, as it hypes services

China Vanke Co. Ltd. said it will give more weight to real estate management and services as the countrys largest property developers tweak their business models to bolster profitability amid tighter government restrictions on borrowing.

The move heralds a shift away from the Hong Kong- and Shenzhen-listed firms focus on real estate development and toward a multi-pronged approach that balances other sides of its business, executives said at Vankes annual general meeting Tuesday.

IPO /

Didi gains 1% after second-biggest U.S. IPO by Chinese company

Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global Inc. closed its U.S. trading debut up 1% after raising $4.4 billion in an initial public offering (IPO).

The companys American depositary shares opened Wednesday at $16.65, rising as much as 29% from the $14 offering price. The shares closed at $14.14, giving Didi a market value of about $68 billion. Accounting for stock options and restricted stock units, the companys value exceeds $71 billion.

Consumer goods /

Chinas cautious consumers give little lift to weak household goods market

Chinas fast-moving consumer goods market experienced sluggish recovery as consumers remained cautious and tended to choose cost-effective foods, beverages and personal care products, according to a report from consultancy Bain & Co.

Sales of fast-moving consumer goods rose 1.6% in the first quarter this year compared with the same period in 2019, slower than the 3% growth achieved two years earlier, according to the report on the countrys shopper behavior published Tuesday. Overall, growth is regaining traction but remains subdued, the report said.

Quick hits /

Bubble-tea maker falls flat in Hong Kong trading debut

Christie's names media veteran to head China operation

China approves innovative new drugs for insurance price-setting talks

Energy Insider /

Energy Insider: Shanxi regulator warns of risks in power transactions; Datang clean energy unit names new chief

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Today's CX Daily was compiled and edited by Kevin Guo (xinguo@caixin.com).
In todays Caixin energy news wrap: Chinese offshore drilling rig giant gets $129 million SOE cash injection; Tongwei plans to invest $2.2 billion in high-purity silicon project; a power complex will be built in Huizhou; and China develops new power generation using hot dry rock.

Longyuan Power inks $1.1 million overseas carbon trading deal

The South Africa branch of China Longyuan Power Group Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of state-owned China Energy Group, signed a $1.1 million carbon trading contract in South Africa for 630,000 tons of emission quota. The firm's De Aar wind power project is the only large-scale renewable energy project registered in South Africa that meets voluntary emission reduction standards under which emission quota buyers pay to fulfill voluntary emission reduction obligations.

Chinese offshore drilling rig giant gets $129 million SOE cash injection

China International Marine Containers (Group) Ltd. (000039.SZ) signed a $129 million strategic cooperation agreement with a state-owned enterprise to shore up its struggling marine engineering operations, the Shenzhen-based company said Wednesday. State-owned investment company Yantai Guofeng Investment Holdings Co. Ltd. agreed to invest 835 million yuan ($129 million) in a joint venture with China International Marine Containers. The deal is intended to integrate the container enterprises money-losing marine engineering and fishery assets in the Yantai area and form a development platform for deep sea industries, the company said.

Tongwei to invest $2.2 billion in high-purity silicon project

Chinese polysilicon maker Tongwei Co. Ltd. (600438.SH) said it plans to invest 14 billion yuan ($2.2 billion) to build a high-purity crystalline silicon project in Sichuan with an annual output of 200,000 tons. The first phase of the project with investment of 7 billion yuan is scheduled to start production by late December 2022.

Guangdong Electric unit to build power complex in Huizhou

Guangdong Electric Power Development Co. Ltd. (000539.SZ) said one of its subsidiaries won regulatory approval to build a power generation complex in Huizhou, Guangdong province. The project, consisting of two gas powered generating units with capacity of 600,000 kilowatts each, will involve investment of about 3.82 billion yuan ($592 million).

Hot dry rock resource is used to generate power in Hebei

A pilot project in Hebei province successfully generated power from hot dry rock resources, marking a breakthrough in Chinas effort to develop the geothermal resource for clean energy generation, the Guangming Daily reported Tuesday. Considered as a key potential energy source for the future, hot dry rock power generation converts underground thermal energy into electricity.

First unit at the Yangfanggou Hydropower Station starts operation

The first unit at the Yangfanggou Hydropower Station located on the Yalong River  a major national project in Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture, Sichuan province  officially connected to the Sichuan power grid to deliver electricity. It is the first 1 million kilowatt hydropower station to be designed and constructed in China. The project is expected to have a total installed capacity of 80 million kilowatts. Upon completion, it will become one of the worlds largest green and clean energy bases.

Beijing Shougang expects a 542% first-half net profit rise

Beijing Shougang Co. Ltd. (000959.SZ) Wednesday estimated a 542% jump in first-half net income to 3.36 billion yuan (520 million). The company attributed the stronger profitability to capital operations, asset investments.

Contact editors Han Wei (weihan@caixin.com) and Bob Simison (bobsimison@caixin.com)

Download our app to receive breaking news alerts and read the news on the go.

Follow the Chinese markets in real time with Caixin Globals new stock database.
(Nikkei Asia)  The Malaysian government has awarded Swedens Ericsson an 11 billion ringgit ($2.6 billion) contract to design and build its 5G telecommunications network, snubbing Chinese competitor Huawei Technologies.

Thursdays announcement comes as Malaysia aims to make 5G connectivity available by year-end and cover 80% of the population by 2024. For starters, services are to be rolled out in Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya as well as multimedia hub Cyberjaya within 2021.

Local media outlet The Edge reported in April that Digital Nasional  a Finance Ministry entity entrusted with owning and operating the 5G network  had invited eight vendors to participate in the tender: Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE, Cisco, NEC, Nokia, Samsung and Fi-berHome.

Malaysia has not shown the same aversion to Huawei as the U.S. and several other Western countries, which have blocked it from bidding for government contracts and especially 5G projects over concerns about security and links to Beijing. In February, Malaysia decided to partner with Huawei on a cybersecurity lab.

Earlier, in October 2019, Huawei was brought in as a 5G hardware supplier for Maxis, Malaysia's largest mobile provider by subscribers. Under the deal, the Chinese company was to provide 5G radio equipment, services and expertise for Maxis' network.

But the Maxis agreement was reached assuming that 5G spectrum allocations would be awarded to individual telecommunications companies, and that the choice of hardware suppliers would be up to the respective spectrum holders. Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yas-sins government, however, shifted away from the traditional allocation method by establishing Digital Nasional to own the 5G assets and spectrums.

In a statement on Thursday, Digital Nasional said Ericsson will handle the design and development of the countrys end-to-end 5G network. Ericsson has undertaken to arrange to finance for the supply, delivery, and management of the entire 5G network, Digital Na-sional said. The agency said it will securitize future cash flows from its wholesale business via Islamic bonds to finance all other network operating expenses and repay all vendor financing arrangements.

The 11 billion ringgit arrangement includes tower rental and fiber leasing, of which more than 60% will benefit local contractors over the next 10 years, Digital Nasional said.

Ericsson has also committed to value-creation activities in Malaysia, through knowledge building and technology transfers. These endeavors are estimated to be worth 4 billion ringgit over the life of the contract.

The faster connectivity speeds, ultra-low latency and greater bandwidth of 5G for mobile broadband will empower Malaysia to quickly close the digital divide, Ericsson President and CEO Borje Ekholm said. To this end, we will collaborate with Digital Nasional on a 5G Experience and Innovation Lab.

Ericsson currently deploys 86 live 5G networks and has been involved in Malaysia since 1965.

This story was first published in Nikkei Asia.

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Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou leaves her home to attend a hearing at the Supreme Court in Vancouver, Canada, on April 19. Photo: Bloomberg

(Bloomberg)  A Canadian prosecutor urged a British Columbia judge to reject Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.s chief financial officers attempt to use bank records to undermine a U.S. extradition request.

Meng Wanzhou, 49, is seeking to have HSBC Holdings PLC documents admitted as evidence in the extradition hearing, arguing they show that the U.S. handover request is fundamentally flawed and should be thrown out.

They want you to get down into the weeds of inference-drawing and that is the exclusive preserve of the trial court, Robert Frater, a Canadian government lawyer arguing on behalf of U.S. authorities, told British Columbia Supreme Court Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes Wednesday.

The defense obtained the HSBC documents under the supervision of a Hong Kong court. Meng is attempting to use the documents in a final round of extradition hearings scheduled for August.

The eldest daughter of Huaweis billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei, Meng is accused of lying to HSBC about Huaweis relationship with Skycom, a company that did business in Iran in violation of U.S. trade sanctions. U.S. prosecutors claim she exposed the bank to criminal liability for sanctions violations.

Mengs lawyers say the stash of records and emails show that HSBC officials were fully aware that Huawei controlled Skycom when it conducted risk assessments. As such, the U.S. allegations, which the Canadian court is being asked to rely on, are false and misleading, they said.

Frater told the judge Wednesday that the records dont prove that HSBC executives knew that Huawei controlled Skycom. The bank did have information on the true state of Skycoms ownership in its records, but there is no evidence that someone connected the dots, Frater said.

Also, the HSBC manager who handled the banks relationship with Huawei testified that he didnt know about Huaweis control of Skycom, Frater said.

If they want to challenge him on that point, they have to do it at trial, in the U.S., Frater said.

Contact editor Michael Bellart (michaelbellart@caixin.com)

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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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As more and more companies offer the option of remote working, motor and home insurer Liberty Insurance is advising employers and employees alike that the practice has potential insurance implications, which are less understood.

Liberty Insurance recently partnered with award-winning social enterprise Grow Remote and welcomes the #MakingRemoteWork campaign launched yesterday (Monday 28 June) by Grow Remote alongside Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Leo Varadkar.

This campaign aims to make remote and home working a much bigger part of working life after the Covid-19 pandemic. Liberty, as an employer who recently committed to remote working for all its people in Ireland, brings its own experience to bear and has listed five of the most important insurance considerations for employees working from home and employers considering a more permanent role for out-of-office remote work.

1. Computers and printers might not be covered by home insurance

Most home insurance policies that include contents cover will include cover for a limited amount of home office equipment, such as a computer and printer. However, some home insurance policies may not give any cover for office contents, as they are not deemed to be household goods. If employers or employees are unsure on this point contact your employer or your insurer.

2. Office equipment removed from the office can lose business insurance cover

Over the last 15 months, many employees have borrowed workplace hardware to facilitate their remote working, in many cases at short notice. The main purpose of business insurance is typically to cover company assets in a specific workplace, although some commercial business policies allow for an element of cover for business equipment being temporarily removed. Therefore, if an employer is moving to a remote working model, they will need to speak with their insurer and update their insurance policy accordingly.

3. Prepare for hacks, data breaches, and lost devices

It is the responsibility of the employer to ensure all computer hardware is provided to an employee to enable remote working. Typically, this is covered under the businesss material damage section of its insurance policy. Whats most important is that employers update and communicate their security policies to reflect emerging teleworking practices and the rapidly evolving space of data security. Insurance products in the data security space are constantly evolving. Some insurers provide custom computer insurance cover, such as all risks basis cover that enables employers to insure for damage or interference to computer systems and loss of data, whether electronic or non-electronic.

4. Accidents in a remote work environment are still workplace accidents

All employers have a duty of care to take reasonable steps to ensure employees have a safe and ergonomic place to work, regardless of whether that is on-site or at home. If remote working is a relatively new development within an organisation, Employers should ensure their employer liability policy provides the appropriate level of coverage.

5. Meetings held at home should be digital only

Remote workers hosting meetings at home has implications for the employer and employee. Most home insurance policies require people to specify that their home is not used in connection with their business or profession. Therefore, were an accident to occur in the home during a meeting with a client or customer, this would not be covered by their insurer. Again employees and employers should be encouraged to hold only digital meetings at home and go to a co-working space or the office for in-person meetings.
South Park, just south of downtown Raleigh, is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. According to a study by UNC Center for Urban and Regional Studies, 61% of its predominantly Black households earn less than $25,000 per year. Of the 280,000 North Carolina households still behind on rent, 91% are low-income and 57% people of color, according to a Census Household Survey conducted in May. Carolina Public Press / Mark Darrough
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Graduating in 1959, Duga joined United Productions of America (UPA) in Burbank. His first job was storyboarding on the tv series Mister Magoo (196062), which starred the studios best-known character. He got his big break when asked to replace the head writer, and ended up working on the storyboards, layouts, and design of the show.

Duga moved to New York and ended up as an art director at Pelican Films, which specialized in commercials. He would remain active in advertising throughout the 1960s and 1970s, not least for food company Hostess, for which he designed iconic characters including Twinkie the Kid, Captain Cupcake, King Ding Dong, and Fruit Pie the Magician.

It was in New York that Duga met Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass, founders of the eponymous studio, which produced popular hand-drawn and stop-motion seasonal specials (with animation generally outsourced to Japan). Duga joined the studio as it was working on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964).

He went on to pick up credits for continuity design on tv specials like Santa Claus Is Comin to Town (1970), the Emmy-nominated The Little Drummer Boy, perennial holiday favorite Frosty the Snowman, cult comedy Mad Monster Party? (1967), and feature The Last Unicorn (1982). He storyboarded, too. Describing his work on Frosty, Duga told MyLITV: A lot of it comes from the actors: whats their import to it? Wheres the direction to it? And then my job is to take it and really push that: whats [Frosty] going to look like if hes buoyant, you know?

After a period spent working in Italy, Duga returned to Manhattan and in 1976 founded Polestar with Irra Verbitsky, his wife and fellow artist. The studio produced a number of shorts for young audiences which Duga and Verbitsky co-directed, such as Owen (1995), Chicken Little (1998), and The Island of the Skog (2000). They won numerous awards, including the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Childrens Video for Owen. Polestar was also behind educational spots for clients like Sesame Street and Nickelodeon.

The whole time, Duga taught animation at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan: he joined the school in 1962 and stayed there for half a century. On learning of his death, several former students took to Twitter to pay tribute:

Sad to hear one of my animation teachers from SVA just passed away. Don Duga worked on Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer & Frosty! I remember one day the life drawing model didnt show up, so Don got on stage and pretended to be animals so we could keep drawing. RIP Don Duga.  pic.twitter.com/q1aEmGwa5P  Giancarlo Volpe (@Giancarlo_Volpe) June 7, 2021

Really saddened to hear the news that Don Duga, animator & teacher, recently passed away at the age of 87. Don was my first year life drawing teacher at SVA. He was a gentle soul with such a calm demeanor and encouraging spirit, which was just what I needed that 1st year [THREAD] pic.twitter.com/Mce2LDGE1M  Michael Ruocco (@AGuyWhoDraws) June 6, 2021

In his later years, Duga continued to pursue his art, hosting shows, exhibiting paintings, illustrating magazine covers, and generally remaining active in the community in the Long Island town of Riverhead, where he had a home.

He is survived by Verbitsky, daughter Amanita Duga-Carroll, and son Brady Duga, as well as four grandchildren (Jacob, Kyle, Lily, and Cameron), son-in-law Bruce Carroll, and daughter-in-law Gina Pisello.
Photo: The Canadian Press Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk, right, meets with Jeff Bezos.

Virgin Galactics Richard Branson is aiming to beat fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos into space by nine days.

Bransons company announced Thursday evening that its next test flight will be July 11 and that its founder will be among the six people on board, all company employees. The winged rocket ship will soar from New Mexico  the first carrying a full crew.

Bezos, meanwhile, plans to blast into space from West Texas on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Hell be on the debut flight of a Blue Origin rocket with people, accompanied by his brother, a female aerospace pioneer and the winner of a $28 million charity auction.

As late as Wednesday, Branson declined to say when he would rocket into space because of restrictions placed on him by his publicly traded company. But he stressed he was healthy and fit to fly as soon as his engineers give him the go. Hell turn 71 a week after the scheduled launch.

Virgin Galactic launches its rocket ship from an aircraft, reaching an altitude of roughly 55 miles (88 kilometers). Blue Origin launches its New Shepard rocket from the ground, with its capsule soaring to about 66 miles (106 kilometers). Both those heights are considered the edge of space. By comparison, SpaceX launches its capsules  both crew and cargo  into orbit around the world.

Bezos' company Blue Origin announced Thursday that the pioneering pilot will be aboard the July 20 launch from West Texas, flying in the capsule as an honored guest. She'll join Bezos, his brother and the winner of a $28 million charity auction, as the first people to ride a New Shepard rocket.

At 82, she'll be the oldest person to launch into space.

Funk was the youngest of the so-called Mercury 13 women who went through astronaut testing in the early 1960s, but never made it to space  or even NASAs astronaut corps  because they were female. Back then, all of NASA's astronauts were male military test pilots.

Funk said she feels fabulous about finally getting the chance to go to space.

Ill love every second of it. Whoooo! Ha-ha. I can hardly wait, Funk said in an Instagram video posted by Bezos.

Nothing has ever gotten in my way," she added. "They said, Well, youre a girl, you cant do that. I said, Guess what, doesnt matter what you are. You can still do it if you want to do it and I like to do things that nobody has ever done.

In a cosmic twist, she'll beat the late John Glenn, who set a record at age 77 when flying aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998. Glenn pooh-poohed the idea of women flying in space, shortly after he became the first American to orbit the world in 1962.

No one has waited longer, Bezos said via Instagram. Its time. Welcome to the crew, Wally."

The Amazon founder is stepping down as the company's CEO on Monday.

The upcoming launch  which follows 15 successful test flights  will open the door to paying customers. Blue Origin has yet to announce ticket prices or when the public might strap into the spacious six-seat capsule, which reaches an altitude of about 65 miles, just beyond the edge of space. The up-and-down flights last 10 minutes.

The reusable rocket is named for Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and July 20 is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Funk, who lives near Dallas, was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. In the posted video, she said she has 19,600 flying hours and has taught more than 3,000 people to fly.

She was among two dozen female pilots who underwent six days of rigorous physical tests  the same ones administered to the Mercury astronaut candidates  in 1960 and 1961. The doctor who had tested the Mercury 7 men had heard the Soviets planned to send a woman to space and he wanted to see if women could endure the effects of weightlessness.

The candidates had to spend hours in an isolation water tank, swallow rubber hose, and get needles stuck in their heads, among other things.

Thirteen of the women  including Funk  passed. But the program was abruptly canceled, and the Soviets went on to launch the first woman into space  Valentina Tereshkova  in 1963.

They told me that I had done better and completed the work faster than any of the guys, Funk recalled. "So I got hold of NASA four times. I said I want to become an astronaut, but nobody would take me. I didnt think that I would ever get to go up.

It wasn't until 1983 that the first American woman soared into space  Sally Ride, who died in 2012. And it wasn't until 1995 that an American woman piloted a spaceship  Eileen Collins aboard shuttle Discovery. Many of the Mercury 13 women gathered at Cape Canaveral for that launch.

Keen to get to space, Funk reserved a seat years ago on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic rocket ship. She remains on the passenger list; the company plans three more test flights from New Mexico, one of them with Branson on board, before launching customers.

In the video, Bezos describes to Funk how the four Blue Origin passengers will experience zero gravity for a few minutes, then land gently on the desert surface and open the hatch.

You step outside. Whats the first thing you say? he asked her.

I will say, 'Honey, that was the best thing that ever happened to me! Funk replied, embracing Bezos in a big bear hug.
It's not surprising that news broke this week that more bodies of indigenous children have been found. Also not surprising that First Nations leaders don't expect an apology from the Catholic church (No Guarantees of Papal Apology). Why would they, after all this evil entity has spread tentacles of oppression, conquest and predatory pedophilia all across the world. It has never accepted its responsibility, hiding and moving offenders and failing to address the key issues. Where is the apology, the reparations, and the punishment for the Catholic church?

What of Canada this week, as we seek to celebrate the emergence of the great era of repression and health tyranny with a few cold beers on what was an extremely hot Canada Day? What is Canada? Who are we? Well we could begin with educating ourselves about Dominion, about this nation, about the founding of it by the Crown, about the very nature of the Crown itself as a corporate entity. Of Crown Temple, the source of Crown power and influence. But history is boring and all this stuff is complicated. Save to say, if one puts their feet inside a first nations shoe and looks at this with a deep historical perspective, the same patterns, trends, goals, ends and means can be seen anywhere in the world. Who benefited and who took the spoils and profits? Which parties aligned themselves with this genocidal expansion of empire? Death will once again be used to divide us, where instead we could reflect and look at the causes and conspirators of these great evils. Who currently in power had a foreperson who attempted to cover up residential schools? Who has an interest in further dividing us? They divide and they conquer, whether in war or in complicated psychological operations against their own people. Such smokescreens, pretences of righteous benevolent acts. Canada can afford to fund $100m in foreign aid, but we still have first nations without clean drinking water and safe accommodation. $100m of foreign aid is yet more virtue signalling from Junior to his global audience. Charity begins at home, after which you can play God on a global stage, Junior. But fill the kitchen cupboards with soup first before you order caviar. Just so Liberal. These champagne socialists.

Death seems to haunt us, but as we move into better times, we can reflect back that in 2020 we saw the world population grow by about 80m people. So much for this terrible deadly pandemic, and the masses of dead bodies in Brazil, India and Mexico. The death count tells a very different story to that of the mainstream media. In Portugal, just this week, we learned that total Covid deaths were 152, not the alleged 17,000. Perhaps a rollout across the world of this analysis would validate the population growth figures, proving the sheer scale and level of casedemic fraud involved.

In BC death haunts us everywhere, and not just from the mouths of the unmasked. In approximately the same timeframe as the pandemic, 2,579 predominantly young males died of drug related causes. That compares to 1,754 of/with Covid deaths. Those being predominantly the very old, dying past average age of death, or the very vulnerable and already-sick.

Drug related deaths are a pandemic of their own, and coming out of a period of severe health tyranny that has destroyed mental health across the world we can expect the drug related pandemic to continue. But who will virtue signal for these people? Who will wear a trendy novelty adornment to show compassion and unity with these people? What government propaganda will we see to fight the war on unnecessary drug related deaths? Death is convenient when it can be repackaged and repositioned as a political weapon for a very dark anti-human agenda.

Death is a constant. Life is a battle, and we must keep fighting against the enemies of unity and humanity.

Ricky Daytona, West Kelowna
Photo: The Canadian Press

It used to be common to see Tyler Rumi and his B.C. cannabis farm staff out watering their plants until the recent heat wave hit.

Now extreme temperatures have the co-founder and chief executive of Good Budsand his crew waking up under the cover of darkness to tend to their Salt Spring Island farm and wrap their shifts by 10 a.m.

"When we typically would water, early in the morning, by around 9 or 10 a.m. the water was evaporating right into the air because it was so hot out," said Rumi.

"Now we've moved our irrigation scheduling completely."

Rumi's new 2 a.m. wake-up calls are part of a new process the company has implemented as it and other cannabis farms try to cope with rising temperatures that have blanketed several provinces and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of people in B.C.

Heat warnings have been in effect recently in B.C. and Alberta, large parts of Saskatchewan, Northwest Territories and a section of Yukon as temperatures reached 40 C in some areas.

Sixty temperature records were topped in B.C., including in the Village of Lytton, where an all-time Canadian high was beat when the mercury hit 46.6 C.

Wildfires also ensnared Lytton, resulting in an emergency evacuation order as much of the area was scorched this week.

Cannabis plants can deal with heat, but too much of it poses a threat to their health, while wildfires can level crops within seconds and wreak havoc on an already short growing season in Canada.

Rumi's been watching the thermometer closely and as soon as he noticed it creeping up, he had staff begin pulling out "water suckers," weeds that snatch up water meant for the cannabis plans.

He's also been ensuring staff cool.

"It just gets too hot out there, so we go out and we do our weeding and different activities early in the morning before the peak heat arrives and then we go down to the ocean or down to the lake to enjoy the afternoon," he said.

While the Good Buds farm is roughly six hours away from Lytton, Rumi is not taking any chances with his crop of small-batch and organic cannabis because wildfires not far from his property posed challenges last year.

Staff had to dawn masks because the air quality was so poor and they fretted about the plants because the wildfires were wiping out all the sun they need to grow.

"So that's something that's very much on our minds," said Rumi. "It can become very detrimental."
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Saudi Cement announces new board member

02 July 2021

Saudi Cement Co has announced the resignation of board member Mohammad Sulaiman Balghonaim and the appointment of Mansour Mohammed Balghonaim as a member of the board to complete the term of his predecessor for the remainder of the current term, which ends on 31 December 2021.



Mr Blaghonaim has around 16 years of experience in banking and currently serves as head of Business Development for Wholesale Banking at the Gulf International Bank.

Published under
Cemex's new growth phase

02 July 2021

Cemex Day was held last week and looked at the company's investment and sustainability strategy going forwards.



One of the most significant developments for the company is it reaching an investment-grade (IG) capital structure by the end of June.



"We believe that we currently have the best market outlook in years, and that we are entering a period of sustainable growth. We can turn the page on what has been a lengthy chapter for Cemex and open a new book where we consolidate our recent achievements and shift our strategic balance a bit more towards growth," said Fernando A. Gonzalez, Cemex CEO.



The company is looking to maintain its investment grade rating throughout the upcoming growth cycles, supported by EBITDA generated from its investment pipeline.



"An IG rating means we have a more flexible capital structure that can sustain the ebb and flow of economic cycles, and which translates to a lower cost of capital" said Maher Al-Haffar, CFO. As cement companies are capital-intensive by nature, every reduction in the cost of capital results in a higher valuation for the company.



Regarding the companys planned investment pipeline, it is split into two sections  new capacity and bolt-on investments/margin enhancement projects.



Cement projects

The new capacity projects are expected to be brought online by the end of 2023 and will represent around US$425m of incremental investment, while contributing around 10Mta to the companys total cement capacity. The plans are designed to target rising demand in the US, Mexico, South America and the Caribbean, and are expected to deliver around US$170m of EBITDA on a steady-state basis.



Cemexs 10Mta of capacity improvement includes 4.3Mta from legacy investments which began in Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines years ago. The remaining 5.7Mta constitutes de-bottlenecking works, brownfield expansions, new grinding mills and the reopening of idle capacity.



Around 3.5Mta of cement capacity will be added in Mexico alone. This is through 1.5Mta of additional capacity at Tepeaca, an 0.5Mta expansion at Huichapan and 1.5Mta of capacity by bringing both lines back online at its mothballed CPN plant in Sonora. One of the lines at Sonora is already producing cement, according to Jose Antonio Gonzalez, EVP of Strategic Planning & Business development.



Furthermore, 1.2Mta will be added in the US and Europe, including expanding grinding capacity at two European plants. Around 1Mta of capacity will be introduced in South America, including restarting a 0.5Mta kiln in the Dominican Republic, alongside a new 0.5Mta grinding mill in Guatemala.



Bolt-ons & margin enhancement projects

The other side of its investment growth plan, bolt-ons & margin enhancement projects, has a US$500m pipeline but could return a steady-state EBIDTA of US$350m. Aside from capacity projects, these investments include improvements to operational efficiency and reducing the groups CO 2 footprint.



"Regarding our CO 2 reduction investments, these are directed mostly towards increasing alternative fuels and also at reducing our clinker factor. These initiatives also generate attractive returns. [] We expect to invest at a rate of US$60m per year in carbon reduction initiatives," said the EVP.

As reported recently, these plans include setting a carbon reduction target of below 475kg of CO 2 per tonne of clinker produced, approximately a 40 per cent reduction in CO 2 emissions by 2030. The new target is below the two degree global warming scenario of the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi).



This investment stream will also be targeted at adding reserves and increasing production in its aggregates segment, enhancing vertical integration for ready-mix, and improving the commercial capabilities of its Urbanisation Solutions division.



Overall, Cemex is driving towards a new period of sustainable growth, where it can maintain its investment-grade rating while investing in new cement capacity in high demand areas and reducing its CO 2 footprint.



For more information on Cemexs role in Mexico and the countrys encouraging demand recovery, read Credit Suisses report in ICR July.

Published under
Buena Vista, CO (81211)

Today

Sunshine this morning. Scattered thunderstorms developing this afternoon. High 81F. Winds ESE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening. Partly cloudy skies after midnight. Low 53F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
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Crews abandoned their search for the fifth victim in a Dan River accident; Martinsville Police file charges in a shooting death; Poor maintenance on a dryer sparks a house fire in Danville; Traffic guidelines if you're headed to the river.
Maria Coco Alder passed away peacefully on Sunday, June 27, 2021, at a local long term care facility due to various health complications.

She is originally from Rivas, Nicaragua, and spent most of her life living in Guatemala and Honduras with her husband the late George Byron Alder Jr. of Chattanooga. The last 10 years were spent here with him until his death in 2015.

She is survived by her children, Marta S. Alder, and Patricia L. Krizek, and granddaughter, Rachel S. Krizek, son-in-law, James L. Krizek, as well as many siblings in Nicaragua and Miami, FL.

She was a loving mother and dearly loved by so many. She was a dedicated and compassionate human being with a great sense of humor. She was raised Catholic and gave so much of her time during her life to helping the poor, and the homeless that were blind or disabled. She is now home with her Lord and Savior.

A Celebration of Life service will be held at Hamilton Funeral Home on Thursday, July 1, at 1:30 p.m. in the funeral home chapel.

Interment will follow at Forest Hills Cemetery.

Visitation will be held on Thursday, July 1, from 12:30-1:30 p.m. prior to the Chapel service at Hamilton Funeral Home.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be given in Maria's honor to St. Jude Catholic Church.

Arrangements are by Hamilton Funeral Home & Cremation Services, 4506 Hixson Pike, Hixson, 423 531-3975.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is asking for the publics help in identifying potential historical victims of convicted sexual offender Mark Alan Deakins who were victimized, photographed, and/or filmed/videoed by Deakins from the 1990s through June, 2021.

Victims of Deakins most likely include males between the ages of 7 and 17.

It is believed there could be more than 20 victims throughout the Southeast.

On June 16, a federal grand jury in Knoxville returned a one count indictment against Mark Alan Deakins, 61, of Chattanooga, for the sexual exploitation of a child. Deakins is currently being held pending trial in United States District Court, in Chattanooga.

The indictment alleges that Deakins sexually exploited a child under the age of 12 from June, 2018 through September, 2018.

If you believe you have been a victim of Mark Alan Deakins or suspect someone who has, please contact the FBI Chattanooga office at 423 265-3601 or report it at https://tips.fbi.gov.

The indictment is the result of an investigation by the Chattanooga Crimes Against Children Task Force and included the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Marshals Service, Homeland Security Investigations, Chattanooga Police Department, Tennessee Highway Patrol, Hamilton County Sheriffs Office, and Red Bank Police Department.

The FBI is legally mandated to identify victims of federal crimes it investigates. Identified victims may be eligible for certain services and rights under federal and/or state law.
Tennessee's Department of Children's Services (DCS) Commissioner Jennifer Nichols announced the state has suspended the license for the Baptiste Group to manage La Casa de Sydney, a facility in Chattanooga where unaccompanied migrant children were housed.

The suspension order says, "The summary suspension is based upon a finding that the health, safety, or welfare of the children in the care of the Facility imperatively requires such emergency action."



Reports of child abuse followed a DCS unannounced inspection of the facility on June 3, 2021. Six children were interviewed by DCS staff and one reported alleged child abuse, saying he had seen a staff member kiss another boy.

Staff referred the report to the child abuse hotline and an investigation began, after which the staff member was immediately fired. The victim was said to have already left the program.



The former staff member was charged with sexual battery by Chattanooga police on June 30 and is in Whitfield County Jail, awaiting extradition to Hamilton County.



A 16-year-old boy was reported as a missing runaway by DCS on June 15. The boy was later found safe with his family in Guatemala, according to Chattanooga police.

All children have been moved from the facility as of June 22, according to the DCS.

The Baptiste Group was issued a conditional license on May 29, 2020 and a full license on Feb. 29 of this year. The suspension issued by the DCS is not time limited and under state law a licensee may request an informal hearing before an administrative law judge within three business days of the suspension.


Chambliss Center for Children invites the community to participate in the Isaiah 117 House

Lemonade Stand Challenge on Saturday, July 17 to help raise awareness for the first Isaiah 117 House in Hamilton County.



Chambliss Center for Children has partnered with Isaiah 117 House, an East Tennessee-based nonprofit who serves children and teens entering state custody, to establish the first Hamilton County Isaiah 117 House which will provide a safe, welcoming space for youth awaiting placement.

Every summer, Isaiah 117 Houses recruit groups throughout their respective communities to host lemonade stands to raise awareness and funds in support of the organization.



In the summer of 2017, as we were raising awareness for the first Isaiah 117 House in Elizabethton, Tennessee, children started holding lemonade stands because they heard there were children that needed a home, says Ronda Paulson, founder and executive director of Isaiah 117 House. Children helping children is at the very heart of Isaiah 117 House.



This year, youth groups, scout troops, teams, children and families throughout Hamilton County are invited to set up stands in neighborhoods, at churches, at sporting events or other locations in support of the Isaiah 117 House at Chambliss Center for Children. The group that raises the most money at their lemonade stand will receive a special prize, courtesy of The Chattanooga Lookouts.

Interested parties can go to www.ChamblissCenter.org for more information and to sign up. Local restaurants 1885 Grill (in both St. Elmo and Ooltewah), FEED and The Big Chill and Grill will also be selling lemonade-based drinks on July 17 to benefit the organization and support The Lemonade Stand Challenge.



We are very excited to bring Isaiah 117 House to our community, says Katie Harbison, president of Chambliss Center for Children. The key to success is community support, and the Lemonade Stand Challenge is an easy way for children and youth to be involved. We provide all of the advertising tools. All we ask is that you provide the lemonade and be willing to spread the word about Isaiah 117 House.
The very first thing I read this morning was about the Tennessee Department of Childrens Services (TDCS) suspended the license of the Baptiste Group to house unaccompanied migrant children. The only pertinent information given was 1) it was a state level DCS decision 2) unaccompanied migrant children and 3) the kiss.Heaven forbid that our fine and glowing city could be contaminated by these unaccompanied migrant children. Before they were ever brought here the facilities were inspected and a plan presented to care for these children.Since they arrived the facilities have been inspected and found to be in order, all the way down to the paperwork. The children were housed, fed and being educated without interfering with our way of life. The government was funding the Baptiste Group and of course they had markers they had to hit and all were hit until the kiss.Now to address the kiss. Would someone please tell me what kind of kiss it was. I kiss my children, ranging from age 50 to 34 almost every time I see them (three sons and a daughter). I kiss my daughter-in-laws and my grandchildren. Its a peck on the cheek kiss. My grandson, who is now about 4 inches taller than I, kisses the top of my bald head when I see him. I love it. Was it that kind of kiss? Was it a male or employee kissing the boy? Does that even matter? What matters to me is the kind of kiss it was. That should matter to you too and I want to know.The employee is no longer employed there. I dont know if he/she (or them for you woke police) quit or was fired. The child, who should have never been here in the first place, has returned home to Guatemala. There are so many underlying stories I dont know and can only imagine as a result of my time spent in Cuba, Central America and South America. Immigration needs to be done properly. It wasnt, so the Baptiste Group stepped up to the plate to be servants.Maybe I should have titled this baby thrown out with bathwater.J. Pat Williams
This year, Special Olympics Tennessee is completing a statewide Law Enforcement Torch Run running the Flame of Hope across the state. The goal is to have the entire state completed by end of July.

The Collegedale to Cleveland leg of the run will take place on Thursday, July 8. The run is open to the community. Runners will leave from the Collegedale Police Department at 9 a.m.

More than 400 officers representing more than 40 Tennessee agencies have already participated carrying the torch more than 450 miles already.

Due to the impact of Covid-19, officials are unable to host the annual State Summer Games. Currently, plans are underway for three Regional Summer Games which will allow for the opportunity for more Special Olympics athletes and Unified partners to participate in this year's events. Proceeds from the statewide run will support the more than 18,000 Special Olympics athletes across the state.

The run is open to the community. $20 covers registration and participation in the Law Enforcement Torch Run and secures a Torch Run T-shirt.
Retired Colonel Scott McReynolds Schoolfield passed away peacefully at his home on Signal Mountain,Tennessee, on June 29, 2021. He had just celebrated his 90th birthday on June 17, 2021.

He was born in 1931 to the late Raulston and Julia (McReynolds) Schoolfield. He enjoyed life to the fullest! He loved his family, country, and serving in the United States Air Force. After high school he enlisted in the Air Force and in 1955 completed his pilot's training. He received many awards during his military career. He spent 24 years serving his country and retired as a Colonel in 1977. He often told us stories of his travels and his love for flying. He returned home to Chattanooga where he began another chapter in his life. He worked for Hamilton County starting at Chester Frost Park and ended up as the Administrator of Human Services overseeing five county departments. He worked for Hamilton County for 31 years. He loved both of his careers, but flying was his passion!

He was also preceded in death by his childrens mother, Rosemary Schoolfield, and his brother, Carter Schoolfield.

He is survived by his four children, Karen (Tim) Brown, Jennifer Schoolfield, Kevin (Cindy) Schoolfield, and Julie (Frank) Daniel. His eight grandchildren, Mindy (Shane) Ransom, Jonathan Duckett, Brian Duckett, Spencer Schoolfield, Hannah (Austin) Melton, Caroline Daniel, Jeremiah Daniel, Michelle (Jeff) Graham and four great grandchildren. His aunt, Martha Sue Brown, who celebrated her 100th birthday.

A Celebration of Life will be at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, July 13, at Chattanooga Funeral Home, North Chapel. Interment will follow the service in the Chattanooga National Cemetery with full military honors.

Family will receive friends from 4-7 p.m. on Monday, July 12, at the funeral home.

In lieu of flowers, the family would like donations be made to a charity of your choice.

Please share your memories of Scott with the family at www.chattanooganorthchapel.com

Arrangements are by the North Chapel of Chattanooga Funeral Home, Crematory and Florist, 5401 Highway 153, Hixson, Tn. 37343.
The Tennessee Historical Commission, the state agency that is designated as the State Historic Preservation Office, today announced the addition of seven properties to the National Register of Historic Places. They include a WWII-era aircraft hangar, African American Cemetery, foundry complex, apartment complex, and three fire lookout towers.



This designation recognizes the significance of properties that highlight Tennessees important history and the value of their presence in Tennessees landscape, said State Historic Preservation Officer and Executive Director Patrick McIntyre.



The sites recently added to the National Register of Historic Places are:



T-201 Aircraft Hangar (Tullahoma - Coffee County)

Middle Tennessee was a center of military training during WWII, with Camp Forrest in Tullahoma and the Smyrna Army Airfield in Rutherford County. The Tullahoma Army Base (now Tullahoma Regional Airport) was a supplementary training base where the T-201 Aircraft Hangar was built in 1941. When it was built, the 1,300 acre training center included over 100 buildings and three runways capable of handling bomber planes. Constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the center was in use from 1941-1945. The aircraft hangar was used for flight operation and maintenance training. Clad in metal, the hangar is distinguished by the large sliding glass and metal doors and its irregular roofline. It is one of the few extant buildings from the training center.



Beck Knob Cemetery (Chattanooga  Hamilton County)

Beck Knob Cemetery is a one-acre site believed to have been started around 1865 for deceased African American contraband soldiers. Joshua Beck, a Union supporter, donated the land to the African American community. The first known documented burial was in 1884 and in 1888 the property was deeded to a local African American church (now the Hurst United Methodist). There are 188 known burials and 42 grave markers; it is thought that many graves have not yet been discovered. The cemetery represents the diversity of individuals and families who were a part of the African American community in northern Chattanooga. The austerity of the cemetery design and use of handmade markers is an often-seen feature of African American cemeteries in the state.



Price-Evans Foundry (Chattanooga  Hamilton County)

The five buildings of the erstwhile Price-Evans Foundry were built between 1907 and 1923. Most of the buildings were constructed of brick with large expanses of glass. Resources at the site include the bungalow-style office building, foundry and storage facilities. Located in the Highland Park section of Chattanooga, near the railroad, the foundry was active during the heyday of the citys industrial development when Chattanooga was branded as the Dynamo of Dixie. Price-Evans was known for ornamental ironwork that was used in-state and shipped throughout the eastern US. Their ironwork can be found on Chattanoogas historic buildings. Although the company declared bankruptcy in 1934, the site continued to operate under various other names, manufacturing products such as boilers, mining machinery and industrial metal wheels.



Overton Park Court Apartments (Memphis  Shelby County)

Located in Midtown Memphis, the 1924 Overton Park Court Apartments consist of two two-story with raised basement apartment buildings set in a u-shape. The layout of the buildings provides a large grassy courtyard for residents. The brick veneer buildings feature multi-light windows, eave brackets and belt courses on the exterior. An interesting feature of each building is the tall curved central parapet, reflective of Renaissance Revival or Mission Revival styles. Architect William Lester designed the apartments, as well as other apartment buildings in Memphis. Overton Park Court Apartments were designed to attract the middle-class who worked in the city. The complex was near the streetcar lines and close to retail businesses and restaurants.



Fire Lookout Towers

Three fire lookout towers were listed in the National Register of Historic Places. In 2015 a consultant prepared Tennessee Division of Forestry Fire Lookout Towers, 1933-1975. This document contains a comprehensive history of the states fire towers constructed from 1933-1975. Often called a cover form, individual nominations that are written for fire lookout towers require less context, since that is in the larger document. The document makes preparing individual nominations easier.



Big Hill Fire Lookout Tower (Sequatchie  Marion County)

The Tennessee Division of Forestry constructed the tower, operators cabin, utility building and crew house around 1947 as part of its efforts to manage forest fires. Aeromotor Company built many of Tennessees lookout towers and although there is no marking on the Big Hill tower, it is believed to be an Aeromotor MC-39. The 60-foot tower was ideally suited to provide an all-around view of the surrounding forest in Marion County. As with other fire lookout towers, this tower was permanently staffed. Of the five towers that were once located in Marion County, the Big Hill tower was sited at the highest elevation of 2,032 feet. Big Hill is one of the three remaining in the county, Prentice Cooper and Cave Spring are the other extant towers.



Twinton Fire Lookout Tower (Crawford  Overton County)

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) erected the 80-foot Aeromotor MC-39 Twinton Fire Lookout Tower in Overton County in 1933. The square cab at the top provided an unobscured panoramic view of the surrounding forests, allowing rangers to spot fires more easily than at ground level. Although this was built by a federal government program, fire lookout towers were part of the Tennessee Division of Forestrys statewide forest fire protection program. Aeromotor was a leading manufacturer of steel fire towers in the 20th century. Federal and state agencies cooperated to conserve forests and prevent fires and the Twinton Fire Lookout Tower is a good example of this. The tower was built as part of the conservation efforts that included having permanently staffed towers. At one time Tennessee had 208 lookout towers, but little more than half remain.



Chuck Swan Fire Lookout Tower (Sharps Chapel  Union County)

Unlike the other two fire lookout towers, the Chuck Swain Fire Lookout Tower was built for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) rather than for the state of Tennessee. An example of the TVAs efforts to improve fire and forest management in the state, the CCC erected the tower around 1935. In 1952, the TVA sold the tower and forest lands to the state. When constructed, the tower was known as the Central Peninsula Fire Lookout Tower. It was later named for Commissioner of the Department of Conservation, Chuck Swann, who oversaw the purchase. The 100-foot Aeromotor LS-40 tower, lookout operators cabin, privy, crew house, workshop, shed and two utility buildings are included in the National Register nomination.



The National Register of Historic Places is the nations official list of cultural resources worthy of preservation. It is part of a nationwide program that coordinates and supports efforts to identify, evaluate and protect historic resources. The SHPO administers the program in Tennessee.



For more information or copies of the nominations contact Rebecca Schmitt at Rebecca.schmitt@tn.gov Copies of the nominations can also be found on the National Register web page.


Senator Bill Hagerty on Friday released the following statement after Chattanooga Police announced the arrest of an individual for sexual wrongdoing against a juvenile victim at a facility for unaccompanied migrant children in U.S. Department of Health and Human Services custody and the subsequent closure of that facility:

The new criminal charge stemming from alleged sexual misconduct against an unaccompanied migrant child in federal HHS custody in Chattanooga is disturbing and heartbreaking. I commend and fully support law enforcements investigation to ensure that justice is done in this case and that any culpable actors are held accountable. For more than a month, my calls for greater transparency from the Secretary of Health and Human Services regarding the resettlement occurring at this facility and the well-being of the children there have gone unanswered. The answer received in the form of this tragic news demands an immediate, broader investigation to ensure the safety of the tens of thousands of children in HHS custody or being placed by HHS with sponsors in the United States. It is past time for the Biden Administration to take responsibility for the ongoing border crisis and its consequences, which I have been urging since January, and take real steps to protect both Americans and migrants by ending the crisis.

Rep. Chuck Fleischmann said, I am glad to hear that the Department of Child Services has taken decisive action to suspend the Baptiste Groups license to operate a child migrant facility in Chattanooga. The safety and wellbeing of unaccompanied migrant children must always come first.

There must be a transparent and thorough investigation into these horrific allegations. This sad situation should never have happened in the first place. The Biden Admirations lawless policies at the southern border have created a humanitarian and national security crisis and has led to the abuse and neglect of migrant children on U.S. soil.

I will continue to demand accountability from the Administration to protect migrant children temporarily here in Tennessee.
Firefighters from Tennessee and Georgia received training in Chattanooga this week that will help save their lives should they ever find themselves trapped or lost while fighting a fire. Master instructors from the International Association of Firefighters taught the Fire Ground Survival (FGS) Class to members of several different fire departments over the course of four days. The Chattanooga Fire Department hosted the event and used new equipment for the program, which was made possible by a grant.

Twenty-eight firefighters from the CFD, Soddy Daisy FD, Cleveland FD, East Ridge FD, Oak Ridge FD, Catoosa County FD, Dalton FD and Bradley County Fire-Rescue took part in the class. It culminated in a large training exercise at the recently-closed Hamilton County Jail on Friday morning where all of the skills learned during the week were put into practice. This was a train the trainer program, so all of the participants were instructors. They can now take the knowledge learned in the class back to their individual departments to teach their own firefighters.



We gave them skills so they know what to do when theyre in trouble. When they leave here, theyre going to train their firefighters what to do when they run into a situation where theyre trapped, entangled, etc. They will be able to share all of that information with their organization, said Dorian Jackson, master instructor with the International Association of Firefighters.



"This ensures consistent training to thousands firefighters in the area," officials said. "FGS teaches skills that are essential to surviving in the event the firefighter is lost, disoriented, low on air, trapped, injured or if they are experiencing an SCBA mask malfunction. It also teaches communications protocols during a firefighter emergency so that firefighters responding with other jurisdictions on automatic and mutual aid incidents know how to properly communicate with other fire agencies



"Firefighters will not only be more aware of fire conditions, but most importantly, will be safer by being better prepared to respond to situations in which firefighters are fighting for survival. This training dealt with teaching firefighters survival skills of disentanglement, removing oneself from a hazardous environment by breaching and exiting through a wall and self-rescuing out of an upper floor window. We appreciate the Hamilton County Sheriffs Office providing a location for Fridays exercise."



As the public is well aware, the jail closed June 1. The Sheriffs Office will maintain control of this facility for a while and until a decision is made about whats going to happen with the building, were utilizing it for public safety training, said Chief Deputy Austin Garrett. We were more than glad to offer it for this class. Public safety is a partnership and we want our firefighters and our law enforcement officers, when the call comes in, to be able to respond with the best resources and training to save lives.
Captain Sandy Yawn from Below Deck Mediterranean has no hard feelings toward chef Adam Glick and would choose him from the Below Deck chefs to be her private chef. I actually really like Adam, because hes an awesome guy, she said during a recent appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen. So I think  personal chef would be Adam.

Chef Adam is a personal favorite, but maybe not for Captain Sandys Below Deck Med guests

But on the flipside, Yawn said shed trust Glick the least to stick to the guests preference sheet. Of course, she has good reason to feel that way. A guest requested no onions in his food on charter during Below Deck Med Season 2, but Glick added them anyway.

Below Deck Mediterraneans Adam Glick on WWHL |Charles Sykes/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank

Yawn was recently asked on Twitter if Glick was a favorite chef from the series. Adam didnt follow the preference sheet and put onions in the clients food when he asked him not to. So no, he is not. Ben and Tom were the best on #BelowDeckMed, Yawn replied.

But personally, Yawn was always in Glicks corner, even giving him a second chance after he purposely added onions to the guests dish during season 2. Everyone deserves a second chance, and Im all about believing in people, Yawn told Bravos The Daily Dish prior to season 3. And someone gave me a chance. And I really believe that there is a soul inside of their human bodies that really wants to do well.

Chef Adam seemed to shade Captain Sandy on Below Deck Sailing Yacht

Glick and Yawn hung out after Below Deck Mediterranean Season 3 when he met up with her in Colorado. They had mutual respect for one another and Yawn cheered for Glicks success. Thats why his comments about her when he joined Below Deck Sailing Yacht came as a surprise.

Glicks first Below Deck Sailing Yacht confessional seemingly shaded Yawn. So, it feels really good to work for someone that actually trusts the crew, Glick said after cameras flashed back to Below Deck Med. I guess the big question is if hell be able to trust us all season long.

He later clarified his remarks, which didnt seem to make his comments any sunnier. Glick appeared on WWHL and a caller asked him to share the biggest differences between Yawn and Captain Glenn Shephard. The key difference is that Glenn really allowed me to excel, he said. You know, he just let me go. And he trusted me.

Captain Sandy said Chef Adam got 2 seasons of Below Deck Med

Yawn said she was saddened by Glicks comments about her. Yepwas sad to hear that from Adam, Yawn responded on Twitter to a viewers question about Glick. He got 2 seasons on #BelowDeckMed, one of which was a redemption season. Hope he learned from his BDM experience and brought something special to #BelowDeckSailing. Thanks for your support of BDM!

Glick has yet to comment on Yawns latest personal chef remark.

Below Deck Mediterranean airs on Mondays at 9 pm ET/PT. New episodes will be available on Peacock one week early on Mondays.
Candyman is back this summer in an all new take from writer/director Nia DaCosta. The horror film was supposed to come out in 2020, but even saying Candymans name five times couldnt make him appear during the coronavius (COVID-19) pandemic. Now, his Aug. 27 release date is secure, and original Candyman Tony Todd is back in the new film, too.

Candyman, | Universal Pictures/MGM Pictures

Todd also provides a voice for Masters of the Universe: Revelation. Todd spoke with reporters about the Netflix animated series by Zoom on June 3. Well have more with Todd on Masters of the Universe before it premieres July 23, but first we asked him how working on DaCostas Candyman compared to the three films he made in the 90s.

Tony Todd says Candyman is different from other monsters in this way

If you say Candyman in the mirror five times, he will appear and stab you with his hook, while unleashing a swarm of bees on you. However, Candyman is not just a monster, Todd reminds viewers. Candyman was Daniel Robitaille, a slave who was lynched for a relationship wtih a white woman. They cut off his hand and subjected him to bee stings, hence his weapons of choice now. DaCostas film updates his origin story.

Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen | TriStar/Getty Images

RELATED: Candyman Wields Bees, But Tony Todd Rocks The Beatles

Its going to be twisted, Todd said. Youve got to always remember, Candyman was a victim first. He wasnt just born creepy. He was a victim first. So I think people are going to enjoy it.

Nia DaCostas Candyman could be the start of a new franchise

DaCosta cowrote Candyman with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld. They describe the film as a spiritual sequel to the 1992 original. Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) moves to Cabrini Green. The Chicago housing projects from the 1992 movie are now a gentrified neighborhood, but the neighbors still know the rules about Candyman. Todds role in the new film remains ambiguous.

Tony Todd | Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

RELATED: Candyman Executive Producer Jordan Peele Confessed Why Black Fans Dig Horror Characters That Dont Give a F*ck

I was completely honored and flattered because Ive been living that character for 30 years, Todd said. I think, I know its going to be a hit and I think its going to be a nice spiritual continuation. Hopefully therell be more versions to come.

Heres how Tony Todd knows hes made it

After the original film, Todd reprised the role in two sequels. Despite completing a trilogy with Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh and Candyman: Day of the Dead, Todds slasher struggled to become as well known as Freddy Krueger, Jason or Chucky. Todd, however, would continue to thrive in horror movies from Final Destination to Hell Fest. Now that the new movie is coming out, Todd sees signs that hes has joined the ranks of horrors revered killers.

RELATED: Before The Flash and Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Tony Todd Became a King of Horror

I just found out were going to have a Funko character for Candyman so thats great, Todd said. Im proud to be a part of pop culture.
Darcey & Stacey is one of the many 90 Day Fiance spin-offs that have proven to be successful for the TLC network. Focusing on the trials and travails of Darcey Silva and her twin sister, Stacey, the show shows how the Connecticut-based twins juggle their careers in the fashion industry, their family obligations, and their romantic relationships.

Darcey & Stacey season two will soon air on TLC. | Photo Credit: TLC/YouTube

But now, after a COVID-induced delay, the show is back for a second season. Lets take a look at what we know so far about season two.

When will Darcey & Stacey premiere?

Darcey & Stacey will premiere on July 19, 2021, at 8:00 p.m. ET on TLC. Based on the first look that TLC showed us for Darcey & Stacey Season 2, we already know that were in for a wild and weird ride.

Stacey is faring much better than her sister, with her impromptu wedding to beau Florian Sukaj going off without much of a hitch. This season, well see Stacey and Sukaj visiting a fertility doctor to aid with getting pregnant. While Stacey already has two children of her own  Mateo, 18, and Parker, 16, with ex-husband Goran Vasic  Sukaj already told her that he was interested in having a baby of his own with his new American wife.

Meanwhile, Darcey is still dealing with the fallout from discovering that her boyfriend, Georgi Rusev, is still legally married. In the first episode of the new season, Stacey accuses Rusev of only being with her sister for her fat wallet (who knew that men could be gold-diggers?), and Rusev storms off in response. The twins then decide to meet up with Rusevs soon-to-be ex-wife, while Rusev decides to have a video chat with none other than Jesse Meester, Darceys infamous ex and fellow 90 Day Fiance castmate.

Darcey & Stacey  and Jesse?

Fans of Darcey & Stacey know that Darcey and Jesse Meester have a history together. They were on 90 Day Fiance, after all, for several seasons together. But theyre also wondering why Meester continues to appear on shows with the Silva sisters even though he and Darcey broke up.

Darcey & Stacey Silva. | Photo Credit: TLC/YouTube

And if you believe Meester, his split with Darcey wasnt exactly a friendly one. When word about Darcey & Stacey was first released to the general public, Meester slammed TLC for giving the Silva sisters a platform. She [Darcey] only had to use, abuse and manipulate 5 guys to get what she wanted all along from the network. Ethics, TLC? he said, according to The Blast. She still owes me money too, maybe she can finally pay me back now. Been a sugar daddy for her for far too long so she could get help.

So now that Meester is making special guest appearances on Darcey & Stacey, fans are wondering what his true motivations are. It could be that he, himself, wants to get some publicity for his own relationships  including the rumored one with another 90 Day Fiance alumnus, Jeniffer Tarazona.

This isnt their first reality show

While Darcey & Stacey is a runaway hit for the Silva sisters, it wasnt their first reality TV rodeo, either. The twins have always been honest about their famous aspirations, and one of the most infamous ones was their show, The Twin Life. In the sole video clip for the show  which you can see above  Darcey and Stacey, who look very different from their current incarnations, introduce the audience to their entire family, including their then-husbands Goran Vasic and Frank Bollock.

Were two busy moms and wives dreaming of making it in showbiz, they say in the teaser clip. Did I mention that were twins? And we live under one roof?

Its safe to say that their showbiz dreams have come true.

RELATED: 90 Day Fiance: Darcey Silva Shares a Selfie, Fans React
When the entire point of a movie is its central mystery, its hard for fans to get new information ahead of its release. However, the recent run of casting announcements for Knives Out 2 has certainly helped tide fans over. They havent even truly realized just how little they know about writer-director Rian Johnsons Knives Out sequel. But one thing they can start looking forward to is seeing the new ensemble cast play off each other.

Daniel Craig and the rest of the Knives Out cast pose next to the movies logo | Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic

Knives Out introduced Daniel Craig as master detective Benoit Blanc

Off of the heels of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, writer-director Rian Johnson chose not to put his own spin on an established franchise. Rather, the filmmaker created one of his own. A self-professed fan of author Agatha Christies mystery novels, Johnson created a master detective of his own. And in fall 2019, audiences met Daniel Craigs gentleman detective, Benoit Blanc, in Knives Out.

In that movie, Blanc pays a visit to the Thrombey family after its patriarch (Christopher Plummer) turns up dead. The ensemble cast included Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, and Toni Collette. And as development of a sequel began to take shape, Johnson was adamant that essentially none of the first films cast  with the notable exception of Craig  would return.

Aaaaaaaand WERE OFF! Day one of filming on the next Benoit Blanc mystery. Thanks to all the lovely patient people here in Greece for letting us do all this murdering on their peaceful shores. pic.twitter.com/SUFptCpl3G  Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) June 28, 2021

RELATED: Knives Out Director Rian Johnson Once Pointed Out His Movie Spoils Its Own Mystery

Knives Out 2 has already lined up an even more impressive ensemble supporting cast

So far thats certainly been the case. But if anything, Johnson has assembled an even more intriguing group of actors to serve as murder suspects in Knives Out 2. Dave Bautista, Edward Norton, Janelle Monae, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Kate Hudson, Madelyn Cline, Jessica Henwick, and Ethan Hawke will all join Craig in the movie. Of course, no details about their characters have been officially revealed.

Already, the above list of names feature far more variety. Johnson clearly cherry-picked a few key stars from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including WandaVision breakout Hahn. But he also has some musical talent at play this time around, with both Monae and Tony winner Odom among the cast. Prior to the onslaught of casting news, fans had a blast speculating who could join the film. Even then, some of these are surprises.

Ethan Hawke has been cast in 'Knives Out 2'



(via @DailyMail) pic.twitter.com/0BhkvyAQRE  Culture Crave (@CultureCrave) June 29, 2021

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When can fans finally watch Knives Out 2?

Johnson announced on Twitter that Knives Out 2 had begun filming in Greece in June 2021. But the film already has a groundswell of anticipation surrounding it. So when can fans count on seeing the movie for themselves? Theres no official release date just yet. But Netflix paid $450 million for two Knives Out sequels.

So whenever the second film is done, its likely to land in Netflixs streaming library sometime in 2022 or so. For now, Johnsons hard at work. And after delivering an original franchise starter in a cinematic landscape overwhelmed by sequels, reboots, and remakes, the director certainly deserves to take his time and do it right.
Marvels Loki has taken fans through time and space, expanding the franchises current universe and laying the groundwork for whats to come. The Time Variance Authority could play a big role in that, and theres one character who has caught fans attention: Miss Minutes. Touted as the organizations mascot, the orange clock might have her own stake in the TVAs actions. Miss Minutes will also sound familiar to viewers since the Loki character is voiced by none other than Tara Strong.

Who is Tara Strong? Shes had prominent roles in childhood favorites like Rugrats and Teen Titans

Loki fans wondering where theyve heard Miss Minutes voice before may recognize some of the childhood hits Strong has starred in. Nickelodeon fans will know her as Dil Pickles from the Rugrats and its All Grown Up! spinoff, as well as Timmy Turner and Poof from the networks Fairly Odd Parents.

Strong also held prominent roles in other childhood favorites, appearing as Bubbles in The Powerpuff Girls, Ashi in Samurai Jack, Twilight Sparkle in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and Cece Proud in The Proud Family.

Strong is no stranger to superhero stories either. She voiced Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) in The New Batman Adventures and Gotham Girls, Raven in Teen Titans, Marrow in Wolverine and the X-Men, and Harley Quinn across multiple DC projects. Perhaps these roles helped spark the Loki stars interest in joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Miss Minutes.

Tara Strong began acting at age 13

Tara Strong | Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images

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Strong is best known for her voiceover roles, but she started her acting career in television, film, and musical theater at the age of 13. Her early days in the industry were spent with Second City, a theater company based in Toronto, Canada.

Thats not to say those years didnt involve any voice acting; Strongs first voiceover part was as the lead in Hello Kitty. Her professional website also reveals that she appeared in more than 20 animated series by the time she left Second City.

Of course, thats nothing compared to the number of voice roles she currently has under her belt, which falls somewhere in the hundreds. With so many projects on her resume, Strong must have had a compelling reason to pursue the role of Miss Minutes in Marvels Loki.

What made Tara Strong play Miss Minutes on Loki?

Miss Minutes on Loki | Marvel Studios

RELATED: Loki: Tara Strong Teases Miss Minutes Role: Youll See Her Again

Given Strongs long list of experience, viewers might be tempted to think Marvel tracked the Miss Minutes actor down to join the cast of Loki. However, speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Strong emphasized that she still needs to audition for such parts, even after being in the industry for so long.

I had to audition! Strong explained. Its actually quite surprising for many people to learn that most voice actors  even ones whove been in the business for 30 or 40 years  often audition for parts theyve already had.

As for why the Loki star was interested in playing Miss Minutes, she spoke to the fact that the little orange clock is much more than she appears. When Tom Hiddlestons trickster first runs into her, shes welcoming and educational. However, shes got a bite behind that friendly appearance.

Miss Minutes is such an interesting character because initially you think shes just someone whos giving exposition on what happens to you when you get to the TVA, she said. But by episode two, you realize shes got a little attitude. So shes a lot of fun to play with.

Whether that attitude will turn into something more sinister is the question fans are asking, especially with the TVA becoming Lokis Big Bad. Could Strongs character be the mastermind behind everything happening on the show? Only time will tell.
Serena Joy is on her own. The Handmaids Tale Season 4 finale shocked viewers with Fred Waterfords fate. And in The Handmaids Tale Season 5, the widowed Serena will have to strategize more than ever to secure her and her sons future. Her one goal will be making sure she gets to raise her child. And Yvonne Strahovski is confident shell get to. Not only does the actor think Serena will improve her circumstances, but she also has a theory about the characters future that will be infuriating for fans. And the unsettling thing about this theory is just how possible it feels.

[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for The Handmaids Tale Season 4.]

Yvonne Strahovski as Serena Joy Waterford in The Handmaids Tale Season 4 | Sophie Giraud/Hulu

Yvonne Strahovski thinks Serena Joy will pursue politics The Handmaids Tale Season 5

Serena and Fred spent all of The Handmaids Tale Season 4 trying to strategize their way out of prison. Eventually, Fred made a plea deal to guarantee their freedom. But then, June killed Fred, so plans have changed. And the stakes couldnt be higher for Serena. If she stays in prison in Canada, she wont get to raise her child. If she is sent back to Gilead, the state could take her baby and make her a Handmaid. Without Freds plea bargain to get her out of prison, shell have to find a new path to freedom.

Strahovski told Harpers Bazaar shell use her flirtatious relationship with Mark Tuello on that front. And once shes out, Strahovski thinks Serena will stay in Canada and finally be the architect of her own life. However, Serena helped build Gilead, so the idea of her getting a fresh start with newly fueled ambitions is scary to say the least. And Strahovskis Serena theory only makes things scarier. She said:

I think she is an incredibly powerful woman. I could see her becoming the leader of a political party or something, and gaining a following, and gaining a lot of traction. We see that happen in the real world. I actually think that would be the most kind of realistic outcome for her and the next season.

RELATED: The Handmaids Tale Season 4: Serena Joys Baby Should Be Raised by Rita, Amanda Brugel Says

Serena Joys popularity is concerning

The Chuck alum also teased Serenas platform could grow so large, she could end up becoming the female president of Canada. While the actor chuckled at that possibility, its really not outside the realm of possibility.

Serena and Fred had a fanbase in Canada in The Handmaids Tale Season 4. A crowd of supporters was waiting outside for them when the couple left the courtroom following Junes testimony. Serenas pregnancy is an endorsement of Gileads practices to improve the birth rate. And she published a successful book and had a steady political platform pre-Gilead. There are plenty of people who would support Serenas rise, should she get out of prison. And Serena could absolutely use Freds grizzly murder to her advantage to drum up sympathy.

Strahovski told The Wrap her characters popularity freaks her out because of its real-world implications. She said:

I remember reading it and thinking, Oh, my God  why is there a fan club? And then catching myself, thinking, Oh, of course. I mean, this is totally what is happening in real life. There are fan clubs for all kinds of things and all the things weve seen, all the kind of extremist behavior out there, theres a fan club for it. And its confronting, honestly.

Yvonne Strahovski as Serena Joy and Joseph Fiennes as Fred in The Handmaids Tale Season 4 | Sophie Giraud/Hulu

RELATED: The Handmaids Tale Season 5: Yvonne Strahovski Hopes This Serena Joy Fan Theory Comes True

The Handmaids Tale Season 5 will be June vs. Serena

Outside of her political ambitions, Serena will try to take June down and vice versa. Showrunner Bruce Miller told The Hollywood Reporter Serena hates losing more than anything. And by killing Fred, June delivered a massive loss to Serena even though she had no love left for him. He said:

She wants the future to be better for her coming son and she absolutely wants to be that childs mother, and shes not really in a position to get that yet. Paired with that now is going to be a white-hot fever of revenge. Even though Serena didnt like Fred and they have a complicated relationship, its now a June-Serena thing. She will want to find a way to metaphorically or realistically get June for this. June hit her house and she wants to hit her back. Theres that absolute toe-to-toe, woman-to-woman venom, but also, what is the relationship between two women where one killed the others abuser? Its complicated.

The show has been building up a showdown between June and Serena for the entire series. That time could finally come in The Handmaids Tale Season 5.
Dr. Randell Daily draws a dose of COVID-19 vaccine at the community vaccination center at Tulsa Community College Northeast Campus in April.
Cherokee Nation District Court Judge T. Luke Barteaux prepares to hear cases June 15. Since the McGirt v. Oklahoma ruling, more than 1,000 cases that would have been handled by the state before the ruling have been filed in CN District Court.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visits a memorial at the Eternal Flame on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, June 1, 2021, that's in recognition of discovery of children's remains at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.
The Fourth of July falls on a Sunday this year. As American churches consider how to recognize the United States independence day during their worship services, CT decided to revisit a question first posed to American church leaders in 2013.

Heres what their counterparts from 11 different countries have to say in 2021. Answers are arranged from Yes to No:

Egypt: Sameh Maurice, senior pastor, Kasr El Dobara Evangelical Church in Cairo

Yes, I agree with displaying the flag of my country in the church. The flag of my country only and not other countries, as it is a spiritual and not a political orientation.

The purpose of raising the flag is to keep my heart united with my people in prayer for the salvation of their souls. Its to remember that I must stand in the gap for my people, that they may know the Lord and see the light of the gospel, and to tell my country and my people how much I love them and pray for them.

Jordan: Hani Nuqul, pastor, Evangelical Free Church in Jabal Al Hussein, Amman

I strongly believe that each church building should post the flag on the building and in the sanctuary. As an elder and pastor, we made this decision a few years ago to do so in order to show our loyalty as citizens to the country of Jordan. We believe that by doing so, we are a good example and testimony to others and also following the teachings of the Bible.

As the Evangelical Free Church council, we have taken the decision to put the Jordanian flag in all local churches that belong to the council along with the church logo and flag.

Indonesia: Wahyu Pramudya, pastor, Indonesia Christian Church Ngagel in Surabaya

In Indonesia, we usually display our national flag in the sanctuary every August, which is the month when we celebrate our Independence Day (August 17). We proudly display the flag, as a strong symbol of our nationality, on the altar. We even decorate the church with red and white decorations and hold a special service on August 17 or on the closest Sunday.

When we display the flag in our church, it is not to express idolatry. We want to honor our national identity. It reminds us of our responsibilities as Christian citizens. Its also a sign of gratitude for living in Indonesia.

Nigeria: Janet Onaolapo, general overseer, Abundant Life Gospel Church in Lagos

A flag is a symbol of a country and flying it indicates the importance of the country. So I fly the Nigerian flag in the church to present the country perpetually before the Lord for his divine visitation and to also indicate that we love Nigeria dearly. We pray for her every Sunday service.

I also fly the American flag in the church sanctuary because I really love America. The presence of this flag in the church is therefore to present her before God. Moreover, my daughter and husband live in America. Praying for America is also praying for them. I also fly the flags of all the countries I have visited to minister the Word, which includes America.

Philippines: Herman Dionson, national youth director, Assemblies of God

In many churches in the Philippines, you would not see the Philippine flag on stage or on any part of the building. We are [too] consumed with our church affairs to [reflect] much on wider needs to identify with our country.

Although, interestingly, instead of the Philippine flag or even the Christian flag, you would often see churches with the flag of Israel proudly displayed. This is embedded in the theology of Israel as a chosen people and our low sense of nationalism. I believe for a proper Christian identification to the country, the Philippine flag can be a powerful symbol for us Christians to identify that we are Christs ambassadors to this broken nation.

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Israel: Danny Kopp, pastor, Narkis Street Congregation in Jerusalem

I suspect that how one feels about displaying flags in churches stems from what we believe about the legitimacy of nationalist loyalties in general. I live in a part of the world, among Palestinian Christians and Messianic Jews, where congregations often celebrate the suffusion of their own religious and nationalist identity but rarely appreciate that same suffusion in each others. Until we come to recognize that Gods calling and plan for individual nations is legitimately unique and special, but not superior, we will continue to offend and be offended by nationalist expressions such as flags.

For Palestinian Christians and Messianic Jews, this is especially difficult as each often refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the notion that God could have a unique calling and plan for the other as a nation in particular. Each celebrates the righteousness of their own nationalist cause but, at most, only tolerates an expression and role for the other as individuals in their nation.

Panama: Cesar Forero J., director, Infusion Ministries Latinoamerica

The flag carries the power of unification, pride, and connection. But we should be clear that this does not represent the kingdom of God. The reason its representative power is limited is because it is only an earthly symbol. Our citizenship, as the apostle Paul says well, comes from heaven (Phil. 3:20). We are called to be exemplary citizens in our countries, not because their laws are the best or because their symbols or structures are superior, but because the way we live our lives proves the kingdom of God and this without a doubt is greater than everything.

In my walk and service with God, initially as a missionary and now as a pastor and speaker, I have been able to visit a significant number of churches in a number of countries in no less than two continents, and the great majority dont have controversy over having or not having their countrys flag inside the sanctuary. Our decision on matters like these should be focused not on who is already at the church but toward who we want to reach with the gospel. The flag should not be a source of conflict, at least as one that limits the entrance of new believers to the community of faith, as the flag of our country does not represent an essential element of our faith.

Angola: Federico Catihe, pastor, uniao Evangelical Church in Lubango

In the Angolan context, the simple answer would be no, because of the political context. The flag was mostly adopted by a single political party which had strong links with Marxist Leninism, which was anti-Christian and even persecuted Christians. Therefore, many Christians do not completely see themselves in the flag. Using it in the church could be seen by many, especially elders, as an aberration, and loaded with political connotations.

Brazil: Robinson Grangeiro, pastor, Tambau Presbyterian Church in Joao Pessoa

Christians should not display their countrys flag in sanctuaries. Its not for lack of patriotism; every Christian has duties as a citizen, including giving honor to one of the symbols of their nation. The main reason is that the church is the prophetic voice of the state, not the pole to hold its flag. Often administrations do not represent the beliefs and values that Christianity supports, and the use of the flag demands blind alignment to their specific political positions and policies. During Christian services, the focus of the worship is on Christ, his gospel, and the symbols of Gods presence.

Furthermore, almost every country is a home away from home for people from many nations. Which flag could represent this global and multicultural church? The only symbol that fully represents Christianity is the cross that unites everyone under Christs redemption.

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France: Fabien Fourcasse, pastor for the Baptist Federation in Amiens and first deputy mayor, Rubempre City Council

For me, as a French elected official and as a pastor, the decision to display flags reflects an implicit political opinion. First, as far as the choice of flags is concerned, should we display the flags of all 193 countries recognized by the UN in order not to discriminate against anyone? Could an independence claim have its place, such as a Catalan flag in a church in Barcelona? What about the theological and political claims that would be implied by a Palestinian flag?

Obviously, the motivation to display a flag may come from wanting to recognize members of the community. But will the person from an unrecognized country feel integrated when walking through into the sanctuary for the first time?

Instead, the church should raise the palms of adoration for Christ the King (Rev. 7:9) who gathers people around his person through the Spirit of Pentecost.

Taiwan: Mu-tien Chiou (), academic director, Cross-media Academy

National flags have not been adopted in general until the European maritime expansion and nationalistic movement in recent centuries. Both have involved a degree of coercion and compromises against certain people to drive their ideological causes home. In spite of the religious fervors that may have historically helped give birth to a number of our modern nations, there is little justification to give exclusive national symbols a prominent place in the Christian church, which stands as a call to all peoples of God into a crosscultural union, in his saving grace alone.

The gospel of Jesus began to spread to the world as a breakaway from national solidarity to see the cosmos eventually reconciled, subsuming all human-imposed boundaries. Lets stay true and focused on that sanctified imagination.

With additional reporting and translation help from Gideon Para-Mallam, Marisa Lopes, Maria Fennita, Addison Lin, Leo Lehmann, and Jayson Casper.
Three days after polls closed on one of the most divisive elections in recent American history, Joe Biden delivered a victory speech intended to unite a fractured nation. Ive always believed we can define America in one word: possibilities, Biden said. Yet more than six months later, a majority of Republicans still insist the 2020 election was not conducted fairly, and just fewer than one-third of all Americans dont consider Biden to be the legitimately elected president. Samuel Goldmans new book, After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, helps to place both Bidens attempts at unity and national partisan polarization in a broader historical context.

After Nationalismis a gripping, fast-paced, and probing study into how American political leaders and thinkersranging from John Jay to Abraham Lincoln to Fredrick Douglass to Dwight Eisenhowerhave debated the essence of American identity and what binds the nation together. Goldman, a political scientist at George Washington University, tells a history of repeated failed attempts by these American elites to sustain compelling narratives of belonging. He offers three symbols, or myths, of American identity that progress chronologically: covenant, crucible, and creed. Drawing inspiration from philosopher Alasdair MacIntyres After Virtue (1981), which identified fundamentally different conceptions of virtue in which people mean different things by the same words, After Nationalism points to a similar ambiguity surrounding the word nationalism.

Like MacIntrye, Goldman does not just describe a situation but also suggests a path forward. Instead of endorsing another attempt to define a single American nationalism, Goldman calls for embracing pluralism and strengthening the institutions of disagreement that can lead to compromise between communities.

This is an ambitious, possibly unfeasible proposition. Yet it charts a path forward for a polarized American society and, though it is not Goldmans focus or concern, an equally polarized American Christianity. When Christians are confronted with a surging Christian nationalist movement that assures their centrality to American identity, a sober look at past projects of nationalism can spoil the allure, dampen the zeal, and spark the Christian imagination toward different, and better, narratives of belonging that honor the gospel.

Covenant, crucible, and creed

Any singular origin story of American national identity is flawed. The 1619 Project has recently been at the center of academic and popular debate in part because it posits that traditional nationalist motifs of pilgrims and yeoman farmers are incomplete without slaves, indentured servants, and displaced Native Americans. The myths of nationalism that Goldman catalogs and explores fail for many reasons, but one consistent bug is that none manages to acknowledge this complexity.

The elites of the American Revolution and early republic, many of whom envisioned a broader citizenry in the future but framed the nation for white male property owners, based their earliest attempts at nation-building on the shared mythology of New England Puritanism. Seventeenth-century New Englanders had propounded the classic Calvinist conception of a covenantal relationship between obedient humans and Gods favor. After the American Revolution, the covenantal ideal was revived by some founders as the basis for defining the new American nation.

This attempt, one of many in the early republic, was a mixed success at best. Covenantalism originated in the ethnically and religiously homogenous communities of New England, which were governed in cooperation with church authorities. The concept was a poor fit for a new nation that spanned 13 former colonies, contained diverse ethnic and religious communities, encompassed slave and free states, and pursued a federal separation of church and state. Yet a critical mass of New England founding fathers, especially John Adams and John Jay, and supportive New England intellectuals such as Yale president Timothy Dwight and lexicographer Noah Webster, took the New England origin myth of American greatness and tried to shoehorn it into the new nation.

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Grading on a curve, covenantal nationalism was more coherent than what came later. But even by the early 19th century it had failed to solve the problem of national identity, address the sin of chattel slavery, or anticipate looming demographic changes. The republic was becoming far more theologically diverse (if still overwhelmingly Protestant), and New England no longer dominated its culture. Waves of European immigrants made the country less ethnically homogenous and geographically confined, and the symbol of a crucible (or a melting pot; Goldman uses the two terms interchangeably) to describe American identity emerged to accommodate this new reality for the next century.

The idea of a crucible, writes Goldman, was optimistic and open-ended, which made the symbol a very different image of American origin and purpose to the New English covenant. Where the covenant had rooted itself in patriarchs who established a sacred community, the crucible looked to the future, to a new type of human and a new type of nation, to something far more innately good and innocent than a Calvinist would allow.

A crucible is intrinsically violent to the things you throw into it, and the American crucible was no exception. The increasing diversity of the nations population led to ethnic strife, urban mobs, and actual wars, including the Civil War, as more immigrants from more parts of the globe (still mostly Europe, but now including eastern and southern Europe as well as East Asia) joined the body politic. Many did so only partially, with enclaves like the German Triangle between Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and St. Louis maintaining significant autonomy until the xenophobia of World War I led to its demise.

Both chattel slavery and the rise of Jim Crow segregation overlapped with the height of crucible nationalism. The durability of anti-Black racism and the predominant feeling among white elites, from politicians to intellectuals to new social scientists, that African Americans were prototypical unmeltables, prompted observers, Fredrick A. Douglass chief among them, to hammer on the shortcomings of the melting-pot ideal. Douglass emerges as one of Goldmans favorite thinkers for his insights into the limits of American identity based on ethnic, religious, and cultural fusion. Douglass saw earlier than most that anything less than perfect civil equality to the peoples of all races and of all creeds would leave African Americans out.

Douglass uttered these words in 1869. Nothing close to perfect civil equality was on the horizon until the mid-20th century and the rise of a new metaphor for national identity: the creed. The line from Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr., who perfected the call for white Americans to finally fulfill their creedal destiny, was anything but foreordained. Creedal nationalism arose in response to new pressures, to a unique moment in and around World War II that fostered a vision of national unity among ever-increasing pluralism. As the US absorbed great numbers of European immigrants into a de-ethnicized whiteness while emerging as the primary global challenger against fascism and communism, Americans increasingly articulated a shared identity supposedly unencumbered by, and unrelated to, racial, ethnic, religious, geographical, or cultural difference.

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This attempt at a creedal identity failed, too. Racial tensions, including expanded immigration from the Global South, white resistance to desegregation, and urban violence, dismantled the creedal vision that King and many other Americans endorsed. The Vietnam War shattered any semblance of creedal consensus. In its place was a new tribalism that rejected the melting pot, exposed the failed promises of unlimited growth and mobility, and called into question the basic values on which the American creed supposedly rested.

Christianity and national identity

In Goldmans telling, we live on the other side of creedal nationalism with no clear successor. Historians have experimented with new formulations, including systemic critiques of the American project like Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States(which Goldman notes could better be titled A Peoples History ). Zinns work is just one element of a much wider contemporary debate over public school curricula. Conservatives, including many evangelicals, have responded with their own interpretations of American history that often include covenantal, crucible, and creedal tropes. Still others have not given up on the creedal dream. Jill Lepores recent volume, These Truths, is a valiant effort, in Goldmans estimation, to update the consensus creedalism of the mid-20th century, even if he believes it fails, in its more than 900 pages, to navigate the tensions between unity and inclusivity.

When Biden delivered his victory speech in November 2020, he recycled some of the classic tools of covenantal, crucible, and creedal nationalism. He called Americans to join him in embark[ing] on the work that God and history have called us to do. He appealed to the promise of America for everybody, no matter their race, their ethnicity, their faith, their identity, or their disability. He fixed the nations goodness on the slow, yet steady widening of opportunity. Biden made these gestures in an era of waning nationalism, but his faith seemed undaunted.

The rhetoric of American nationalism has always featured a Christian edge. Biden, a Catholic born in 1942, grew up at the height of Judeo-Christian civic religion and creedal nationalism, the very pressures that produced an exceptional, if incomplete, expansion in religious pluralism and racial equality. His maintenance of a type of creedal exceptionalismthat at our best America is a beacon for the globehas been one popular response to forestalling the absolute collapse of American nationalism.

Another response has been the hard-edged Christian nationalism that evokes many of the same nationalist myths and tropes but in the service of a narrower identity that seeks to circumscribe rather than embrace pluralism. There have been many thoughtful theological critiques of Christian nationalism, in CT and elsewhere, and many of them do more than rebut ethnocentrism. They raise the uncomfortable question of how Christians should then understand their relationship to national identity. Should Christians cheer the end of nationalism or seek to revive it on their preferred terms? Should they go local, fixing their identity to their neighborhoods and congregations? Or should they go international, seeing themselves foremost as members of the global church?

Goldman spends frustratingly little time on prescriptions. Even so, there is something enduring about Fredrick Douglasss composite ideal that demands neither homogeneity nor separation and warns against the almost inevitable concomitants of general conformity when sameness is the sought end.

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Goldmans final suggestion to embrace difference as the driving characteristic of American society, and to strengthen institutions of disagreement that allow for mediated compromise between communities, is one Christians can consider. Christians should contemplate the limits of a covenantalism that applies biblical promises intended for ancient Israel and the church to a modern nation, a crucible-ism that invests the nation with vast coercive powers over diverse communities, and a creedalism that sees a particular nation, and even a particular historical moment in a nations life, as revelatory of Gods ultimate ways. As the Catholic historian Carlton Hayes wrote almost 100 years ago, in the wake of the First World War, nationalism taken to its logical conclusion becomes a religion of its own. When it does, it represents a reaction against historic Christianity, against the universal mission of Christ. This should be the first acknowledgment in any Christian attempt at grappling with American identity after nationalism.

Which is not to discount that Christians have obligations to their fellow citizens and to their nations. Goldman claims for himself the word patriot as a way to acknowledge that this country is, if imperfect, worthy of loyalty, celebration, and, when necessary, defense. The difference between a nationalist and a patriot is often one of semantics, but Goldman insists there is an important distinction. If there is a difference, he writes, it lies in whether one treats we, the people as generated and sustained by our interactions under specific institutions in a particular place [nationalism], or bases the legitimacy of our institutions on an independent and previously existing communities [patriotism].

As people who confess along with the psalmist that all the nations are Gods inheritance and under Gods judgment (82:8), this distinction is vital. In times of competing nationalist religions, just as in times when nationalist myths are ascendant, Christians will be tempted to conflate the tropes of the nation with the tenets of their faith. Wisdom may be the difficult task of untangling both without discarding either.

Daniel G. Hummel is a religious historian and the director for university engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center located on the campus of the University of WisconsinMadison. He is the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations.
If you come to the campus of Brentwood Baptist Church in Brentwood, Tennessee, you'll notice some new construction at the southeast corner of our campus. The building under construction is the Rowen Glenn Center for Special Needs. Rowen Glenn is my four year old granddaughter. She is also a child with special needs.

Our church started researching how we could best engage families with special needs children several years ago. When we started this process, we were overwhelmed by what we found out. First, there were several hundred families with special needs children who lived a few minutes drive from our church. If you extended the study area out further from our church, we could soon name several thousand families. We also found out that most of these families aren't engaged with a church on any level. Every one of them had the same story. Initially they would try to take their special needs child to church, but either the church wasn't prepared or was uncomfortable with the level of care required and the parents would end up caring for their child while at church. Soon enough, the parents would find it easier to stay home and eventually, the family would stop coming to church all together.

As you can imagine, having a child with special needs stresses the marriage of the parents and complicates being parents to the other siblings. Going on vacation is sometimes more trouble than it's worth. There is the constant pressure of responding to changing symptoms and simple chores like bathing, feeding and getting dressed can take hours. By the time the basics are done, the family is too tired to attempt much else. Unless they are very intentional about how they live, the family can end up being very isolated and alone.

I know more about this than I wish I did. Rowen Elise Glenn was born four years ago. Before she was born, the doctors told my son and daughter in law there was a problem. She was diagnosed with Sotos. Sotos is a genetic deletion that affects the way she deals with protein. Sotos can present itself in a myriad of ways -- or not at all. Rowen has had her challenges. When she was born she spent several weeks in ICU and therapy. Everyday, my wife and I give thanks for the talented doctors, nurses, technicians and other medical professionals that cared so expertly for our granddaughter.

She's home now and attends her therapy sessions several times a week. She's doing better, but she still has her challenges. A few months ago, my son told me about his day. He gets up and gets Rowen dressed and takes care of her first feeding. He then tries to get dressed for work before he checks her oxygen, gives medication and handles any phone calls to doctors, state child care agencies that assist with Rowen's care, arranging nurses and well, you get the idea.

"Dad," he told me, "when you get up in the morning, your day is 50% filled. If something goes wrong, you have time to adjust. When I get up, my day is 98% filled. If something, anything, the smallest thing goes wrong, I don't have any slack to fix it." His words hit me hard. Real hard. On some days, my son didn't have time to talk to me on the phone. His time was already planned out for him.

Now, don't get me wrong. Our family is extremely blessed. I'm not being shallow or trying to blow a bunch of Jesus hype at you. I mean it. Rowen is an absolute inspiration to us. She's strong. She's tough. (Her pain threshold is through the roof). She's funny and curious. She loves to dance and twirl and if she's in a good mood, she'll sing for you. Her laughter can pull the sun through the clouds.

When she squeezes your face to kiss your cheeks, there's nothing in the world like it. Being with Rowen is absolutely magical. The conversations between my wife and I are already filled with our favorite Rowen stories.

But when you get home and find a quiet space, you worry about her future. I can't help it. Will she ever be able live on her own? Will she overcome her current symptoms the way she's pushed through the others? Will she go to school? Will the other kids be mean to her? Will there be enough money to take care of her? Yes, I know God is faithful...but I still worry.

Sometime over the weekend, I'll go to see Rowen. She'll run up and hug me. I'll feel her hands patting down my pockets as she looks for my phone. When she finds it, she'll hold it up triumphantly and laugh at me. Then, she open up the apps to see if I have any new pictures of her. I'll love every minute I'm with her.

But when I get home, I have the same heartache I have every night. I'll worry about her. The Apostle Paul tells us creation itself is frustrated and groans for the day when everything is completed as it was intended -- even Rowen. The whole universe knows things shouldn't be this way and we pray -- and hurt a little -- until the day when Christ finishes all He has started.
Boy Scouts reach settlement with nearly 60K sex abuse victims that could exceed $1 billion

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The Boy Scouts of America has reached a historic settlement agreement with some 60,000 sexual abuse victims that legal experts believe is likely to exceed $1 billion in compensation, a restructuring support agreement filed Thursday in a federal bankruptcy court in Delaware shows.

After months of intensive negotiations, the Debtors have reached resolution with every single official and major creditor constituency in these chapter 11 cases. The debtors now have a plan of reorganization that is supported by the Future Claimants Representative, the TCC, the Creditors Committee, JPM (the Debtors senior secured lender), the Coalition, and the AHCLC, attorneys for the BSA wrote.

Attorneys for the tort claimants committee, or TCC, previously estimated the value of some 82,500 sexual abuse claims at about $103 billion, Fox News reported.

Earlier this year, the BSA proposed in its revised bankruptcy plan to issue an unsecured promissory note for $80 million for a victims trust fund and to use its restricted assets to cover post-bankruptcy expenses, the Rockland County Times reported. Changes to the youth organizations original Chapter 11 filing increased the BSA's contribution to the trust fund from $120 million under its previous plan to $250 million.

Under the latest plan, according to Fox News, the BSAs more than 250 local councils would contribute $600 million into the fund for abuse victims, and at least half of the councils contribution would be in cash.

With their contributions to the trust fund and the transfer of insurance rights, the BSA and local councils would be released from liability, Fox News noted. Similar action by sponsoring organizations such as churches and civic groups could also release them from further liability.



Ken Rothweiler, a lawyer representing a group of survivors, told USA Today that the new agreement, which reflects an initial settlement of $850 million, is the largest settlement of sexual abuse claims in United States history."

"I am pleased that both the BSA and their local councils have stepped up to be the first to compensate the survivors, Rothweiler said.

Paul Mones, another attorney also representing survivors, told USA TODAY that with contributions from insurance companies, he expects the settlement amount to exceed $1 billion.

"It is important that people see this dollar amount, and know this is not the end; this is just the beginning," plaintiff attorney Jordan Merson told the publication. "There are billions of dollars in insurance money, and the fight to get that money is continuing."

Attorneys for some insurance companies like Century Indemnity Company were displeased with the agreement and said they were shut out of the deal-making process.

Century argued in a filing Thursday that the BSA allowed attorneys representing the victims to reframe the youth organizations restructuring plan to make it more favorable for their clients while paying themselves significant fees.

The new Plan, new Disclosure Statement, and new TDPs are the product of the closed-door meetings between BSA and Claimants Representatives that have occurred from June 2nd, and from which the insurers were wholly excluded, Centurys attorneys argued.

A review of publicly available documents indicates that, after BSA and the Local Councils reached an agreement fixing their contributions to a plan of reorganization, and thus no longer had an economic interest in what claims are allowed, BSA turned over the pen to the claimants representatives to re-draft the Plan and the terms for allowing and valuing the claims of their constituents, they continued. With only the fox guarding the henhouse, the outcome is utterly at odds with what BSA itself asserted was necessary for a confirmable plan and is permissible under the Bankruptcy Code.

Roger C. Mosby, president and CEO of the BSA, noted in a declaration in support of the RSA, however, that it is the best path forward because it will allow the organization to compensate survivors and keep the BSA running.

In my opinion, as well as the Boards, the path set forth in the RSA is the most realistic approach to achieve the Debtors objectives. Any other option would likely involve significant litigation and would not yield the support of holders of Direct Abuse Claims, whose acceptance is necessary to confirm a plan that includes third party releases, Mosby stated.

I understand that these releases are essential for a global resolution of abuse claims for the Local Councils that are essential to the Debtors ability to carry out the charitable mission of Scouting after the conclusion of these chapter 11 cases, he added.
Supreme Court rejects appeal by Christian grandma florist fined for refusing same-sex wedding

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The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of a Christian florist from Washington state fined refusing to make a floral arrangement for a same-sex wedding because she felt it went against her religious beliefs about marriage.

In doing so, the Washington Supreme Court ruling against the Christian florist remains intact. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch each said the court should have taken the case.

Though the case dates back to 2013, religious liberty legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom said the fight to defend Barronelle Stutzman, the owner of Arlenes Flowers and Gifts in Richland, Washington, for standing for her beliefs is not over.

Barronelle Stutzman kindly served a gay customer for YEARS before declining to make art for a ceremony that's sacred in her religion. She was sued & persecuted for acting on deeply held beliefs, ADF tweeted after Fridays decision.

SCOTUS' decision not to hear this case is disappointing  but our fight isn't over, ADF continued.

Barronelle Stutzman kindly served a gay customer for YEARS before declining to make art for a ceremony that's sacred in her religion. She was sued & persecuted for acting on deeply held beliefs.



SCOTUS' decision not to hear this case is disappointing  but our fight isn't over. pic.twitter.com/w4gDao518r  Alliance Defending Freedom (@AllianceDefends) July 2, 2021

As a Southern Baptist, Stutzman denied making the floral arrangement for the wedding of Rob Ingersoll and Curt Freed because she holds the belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.

In 2015, she was fined by a county court just over $1,000. She is liable to pay upwards of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

The Washington Supreme Court ruled against Stutzman in February 2017. It argued she violated the state's anti-discrimination laws protecting based on sexual orientation when she refused to make floral arrangements for the same-sex wedding.

The U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Washington courts 2017 decision in 2018, sending Arlene's Flowers, Inc. v. Washington et al. back to the court for further consideration.

Citing the 7-2 ruling in favor of Colorado Christian baker Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court asked the Washington high court to consider whether or not there was any animus against the florists religious beliefs.

In Phillips case, the court found the Colorado government showed hostility against the bakers Christian beliefs on marriage and sexuality.

The Washington court unanimously upheld its 2017 decision when it heard Stutzmans case again in June 2019, contending that Stutzman discriminated based on sexual orientation.

We, therefore, hold that the conduct for which Stutzman was cited and fined in this case  refusing her commercially marketed wedding floral services to Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed because theirs would be a same-sex wedding  constitutes sexual orientation discrimination under the [state law], the ruling reads.

Stutzman was sued by the same-sex couple, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

After Curt and I were turned away from our local flower shop, we cancelled the plans for our dream wedding because we were afraid it would happen again, Ingersoll said in a statement. "We had a small ceremony at home instead. We hope this decision sends a message to other LGBTQ people that no one should have to experience the hurt that we did.

ACLU attorney Ria Tabacco Mar said that the court's decision "confirmed that LGBTQ people should receive equal service when they walk into a store."

"No one should walk into a store and have to wonder whether they will be turned away because of who they are," she said in a statement. "Preventing that kind of humiliation and hurt is exactly why we have nondiscrimination laws. Yet 60 percent of states still dont have express protections for LGBTQ people like the kind in Washington State. Our work isnt over yet.

Kristen Waggoner, Stutzman's lawyer from ADF, called the courts decision "tragic.



"[T]he critical work of protecting the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans must continue," Waggoner said, according to CNN. "No one should be forced to express a message or celebrate an event they disagree with."

Waggoner said the right to hold to religious beliefs is constitutionally protected.

We are confident that the Supreme Court will eventually join those courts in affirming the constitutionally protected freedom of creative professionals to live and work consistently with their most deeply held beliefs, she said, according to NBC News.

Six out of the nine justices, the majority of the court, were appointed by Republican presidents.
Christian economics 101: You're not entitled to the labor or product of any other person

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Basic economics is nearly a lost skill in our current culture. But basic economics is at the heart of many policy positions.

There are many reasons to reject slavery as both unbiblical and inhuman. We could cite the creation of every person in Gods image (Gen. 1:27; James 3:9) and that slavery mars the image of God in our fellow man as just one reason. We could review history and note that Israels enemies often carried them into slavery after Israel lost in battle and note that God wanted Israel to be set apart from its enemies. And we can certainly agree on the fact that Americas desire for every person to have the freedom to chase life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, precludes slavery.

Slavery also holds a common element with socialism, communism, tyranny, and many other oppressive forms of government seeking an audience in the world today: they all make slaves of producers.

Repeat after me: You are not entitled to the labor or product of any other person.

An absolutely fundamental aspect to a free society is that every person is entitled to and has sole rightful ownership over their labor and production. Without this critical understanding of labor and economics, it is just a matter of time before tyranny and oppression (often masked as socialism and communism) overtakes the system.

Someone might reply that an employer has the right to the labor of the employee, but that is not the case. If I work for ABC Company, it is at-will. This means that at any time the employer or the employee can terminate the employment contract. This maintains the freedom of the employee to work where he wants and to change jobs when he so desires. The employer has no right to demand an employee remain an employee (that would be slavery).

But, and this is important, this universal truth concerning labor and production, also means that the consumer is never entitled to the labor or production of any other person. For example, if Bill creates a vaccine to eradicate cancer permanently, he is not obligated to share it with humanity. We could argue that he is being selfish. We could present moral arguments compelling Bill to share his breakthrough. In the end, however, no one is entitled to Bills labor or production. And, though we might vehemently disagree, if Bill chose to sell his medical miracle to the highest bidder (maybe a pharmaceutical company), who then decided to keep it locked away from the public, both Bill and the purchaser would have that right.

This same principle applies to social media platforms, utilities, commodities, smart phones, automobiles, and houses. Remember, the American creed is that we are all entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nowhere in Scripture or in the Founding Documents do we see any evidence that any person is entitled to anything specific.

The minute that we argue that anyone is entitled to the labor or production of any other person, we are arguing for both slavery and political tyranny (oppression).

Consider: You believe it is wrong for the owner of a company to have a $1 million per year income. You argue that many in the world are starving and living in poverty and even here in the U.S. many families do not have basic necessities, therefore, it is wrong for a single person to have such an extravagant income. You argue that no one needs or should earn more than $500,000 per year.

You have just determined, quite subjectively, what that persons labor and production is worth. You have created a slave.

Look at the issue from another perspective. If your boss came to you and said your income could never go beyond X, how would you feel? You would feel trapped, as if you had a barrier stopping you from achieving your dream. Just because your dream and your employers dream are different doesnt make one wrong and one right. Just because you have a (subjective) idea of how much a person should or should not earn, doesnt make your idea right.

Any argument that seeks to determine conclusively how much a person can earn or own, is not only subjective and faulty from the outset, but it necessarily leads to both slavery and political oppression (Eph. 4:28). It especially leads to political oppression when we demand the government get involved and pass laws limiting freedoms.

The essence of socialism and many oppressive forms of government is both greed and envy. We angrily declare that another person should not have X or Y while ignoring that we (Americans) have far more than most people in the world. Yet we refuse to reduce our lifestyle while simultaneously demanding that those with more than we have reduce their lifestyle. It is hypocritical.

Governments do this by enacting oppressive policies that, fundamentally, enslave people and demand their labor and production. But as Christians, we must continue to reject slavery in all its forms.
Bishop says hes more concerned with Matt Hancock not social distancing than having an affair

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A Church of England bishop for the diocese of Manchester, England, is facing criticism for saying he's more concerned about former health secretary Matt Hancock breaking social distancing rules than having an adulterous affair.

When Bishop David Walker was asked whether the moral character of political leaders should be debated, he replied that he felt sorry for Hancock and was more concerned about him and other politicians breaking the government's social distancing rules than his sexual infidelity.



"I think what is of concern is, of course, when somebody who is telling the rest of us how we have to behave during the pandemic then is videoed very blatantly behaving in an extremely different way, Walker said in an interview with Nigel Farage and Dehenna Davison, a Conservative Member of Parliament, on GB News' "Political Correction" on Sunday.

Disappointed to see Bishop @BishManchester encouraging sinful behaviour on GBNews.



Apparently, breaking the 6th Commandment isnt controversial.



+David says hes more concerned with breaking government guidelines.



Still obsessing over Cummings at Barnard Castle, too. For shame pic.twitter.com/s0Z1uuvrIU  Calvin Robinson (@calvinrobinson) June 28, 2021





Hancock was caught on CCTV surveillance video recorded in May embracing and kissing his aide, Gina Coladangelo, in defiance of COVID-19 social distancing regulations. The incident is being compared in the British press to another incident involving a government official flouting regulations. Last year, at the height of the lockdowns, Prime Minister Boris Johnsons then-senior aide Dominic Cummings visited his parents' farm in Barnard Castle in Durham County, driving 260 miles from his home when people were ordered to stay at their primary residence.

What [Hancock] has got right and what Mr. Cummings got wrong with the Barnard Castle incident last year is that if the rest of us are going to keep the rules, then the people who make the rules have to be seen to be keeping them as well. So I think I'm more worried about the fact that he failed to keep the social distancing than I am about the fact that here is a middle-aged bloke having a bit of a fling," Walker added.



"It is a betrayal; it is a betrayal of marriage vows by both parties because both the people involved were married, both have got children. It is a betrayal. In the church, we put a lot of effort into helping couples who are going through difficulties in their marriage; we pray for marriage.



He continued: The Mother's Union, one of our longest-standing organizations, was set up in the 19th century specifically to promote marriage and family life. So we really care about people who make those marriage vows, and many of them in our churches are keeping them, and we try to help them to do that.

Media commentators and others interpreted the bishop's remarks differently, some were astonished and others gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Journalist Calvin Robinson opined that Walkers words didn't convey the appropriate degree of seriousness from a religious leader and said he was "disappointed" to see the bishop "encouraging sinful behavior."

Hancock and Colangelo are both married with children. Their adultery has broken apart two families, he tweeted. For a bishop in the Church of England to say its just a bit of a fling seems somewhat frivolous.



Author Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, the largest Jewish publication in the U.K., was incredulous, tweeting Sunday: The man is a BISHOP! If even a bishop thinks marriage vows meaningless

Replying to Pollard on Twitter, The U.K. Times' journalist Georgie Frost said she didnt think the bishop was saying vows had no meaning.

Think of everything we've had to sacrifice due to the restrictions: being with dying loved ones, funerals, weddings, religious services...Those millions of people are probably who he cares about more than one man's acts, she said of Walkers words.






Boy Scouts of America Lifts Ban on Gay Youth; 61 Percent Voted for Resolution

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After a contentious challenge to their membership policy, 1,400 delegates of the 103-year-old Boy Scouts of America youth organization voted overwhelmingly to adopt an amendment that effectively lifts the ban on homosexual youth in the organization on Thursday.

The ban on gay adult scout leaders will remain.

Sixty-one percent of the delegates voted in favor of the resolution while 39 percent voted against it at the organization's National Annual Meeting in Grapevine, Texas.

On Wednesday, the organization's president, Wayne Perry, called on the 1,400 delegates of the organization in a USA Today op-ed to adopt the resolution charging that the BSA was not the forum for resolving such complex issues.

"Somehow, Scouting has become one of the focal points in the debate on homosexuality. However, it is not the role of the Boy Scouts to resolve this complex issue, nor can the decision we will make today," wrote Perry.

Several faith-based organizations shared their regret on the ruling on Thursday and predicted a mass exodus from the organization and offered alternative programs consistent with biblical values.

"Assemblies of God leadership regrets that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has voted to change its policy regarding inclusion of homosexual youth members. We believe  as do a majority of Boy Scout volunteer leaders and parents  that this is not the best policy for BSA, nor for the young men it serves," the church body said in its official statement on the decision.

"We believe that the BSA policy change will lead to a mass exodus from the Boy Scout program, as Assemblies of God and many other churches can no longer support groups that are part of an organization allowing members who are openly homosexual. However, as a positive alternative, we offer a program  the Royal Rangers  that operates with values consistent to that of the BSA prior to today's change," the statement continued.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said, "Sadly, the Boy Scouts' legacy of producing great leaders has become yet another casualty of moral compromise. Unfortunately, Boy Scout delegates capitulated to strong-arm tactics and abandoned the timeless values that have served the organization well for more than 100 years."

"The delegates succumbed to a concerted and manipulative effort by the national BSA leadership despite the BSA's own survey showing 61 percent of its members in opposition to changing the policy," he added.

And the Florida Family Policy Council asked, "What kind of a message are we sending to young people about being brave when its top adult leaders don't even have the courage to stand up to the peer pressure of their own adult peers when the bullies in Washington DC, Hollywood or even some of their own renegade councils start pressuring and harassing them?"

Last week Cathy Ruse, senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council, argued that the change to the organization's membership policy is a roundabout way for gay rights activists to create a window for later legal challenges to the Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) Supreme Court ruling.

The ruling maintains that the BSA's old membership policy is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment because it explicitly states that homosexuality is inconsistent with the values it seeks to instill. Now that the BSA has adopted the amendments, it technically becomes silent on the issue relinquishing not just the right to ban gay youth from the organization, but a strong legal defense to ban adults as well.

In an interview with The Christian Post on Wednesday, Elizabeth Pritchard, the pack committee chair for Pack 928 in Southlake, Texas, said the vote will likely fracture the organization and scare away members who disagree with the ruling.

"I just can't imagine going to camp with my son, being with him every step of the way saying: 'I'm sorry, he can't sleep in tents with other boys. I'm sorry, he can't take a shower unless I'm outside the shower and he's the only person in there. I'm sorry, he can't go biking with other boys unless his father or I are there.' How is that scouting?" she asked.

Boy Scouts of America is one of the largest youth groups in the U.S., boasting 2.7 million youth members and more than one million adult volunteers. Since its founding in 1910, more than 110 million Americans have been members of the BSA.
Church of England bishop calls for 'gender neutral marriage canon' to 'bless' same-sex unions

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The Bishop of Liverpool, Paul Bayes, has ramped up pressure on the Church of England to allow clergy to bless same-sex relationships by making the controversial call for a "gender neutral marriage canon."

The call comes in advance of elections to the governing body, the General Synod, where evangelicals are seeking to increase numbers in a bid to protect the doctrine of the Church.

Speaking to a national conference on Saturday for revisionist activists in the CofE, Bishop Bayes said: "I want to see a gender-neutral marriage canon, such as they have in the Episcopal Church (in the U.S.) or in the Scottish Episcopal Church.

"And as a necessary but not sufficient first step I want to see conscientious freedom for the Church's ministers and local leaders to honor, recognize and, yes indeed, to bless same-sex unions whether civil partnerships or civil marriages."

Bishop Bayes was addressing the Movement of Supporting Anglicans for an Inclusive Church (MoSAIC), which launched in February.

The group announced: "The movement aims to have a presence in each diocese of the Church of England, where it will work with local clergy and laity on projects that promote inclusion for all those who are currently marginalized by the Church of England  whether that be due to race, ability, sexuality, gender or gender identity."

Bayes told the national conference: "I want to see an abolition of the foolishness that sees the call to ordained ministry as a call to a state morally higher than that of the baptized, as though baptism called us to a lesser holiness.

"I want to see an end to LGBTQ+ people hiding who they are for fear of being exposed to conversion therapy or to being forbidden to minister in churches. I want to see an end to the inquisition of ordinands about their private lives."

Elections for members of the General Synod, the CofE's governing body, are due to take place in the fall. The five-yearly elections were postponed from 2020 due to the Covid crisis.

Flagging up the upcoming elections, Bayes told MoSAIC activists: "Inclusion is seamless, and I think MoSAIC understands that. So I want to see more people like you, and to encourage you, and to share with you the task of holding these values before the Church, and before the electors to the General Synod, and in the end before the world."

Evangelicals worried about the direction of the Church of England are equally conscious of the elections. The Evangelical Group of the General Synod (EGGS) has been working hard this last year to increase evangelical representation.

A campaign leaflet from the group spells out the importance: "If you believe that it is important to maintain the historic, orthodox beliefs and practices of the Church, then the General Synod is very relevant to you and your parish. It is vital that this voice is clearly heard in the forthcoming elections in 2021, as the future of our Church might well be decided in the five years after 2021."

On the agenda for the upcoming July Synod is a presentation on the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) resources on marriage, sexuality and gender identity, which sparked a war of words when they were first launched late last year, and which are being discussed across the Church of England nationally this year.

Originally published at Christian Today
Fight Church founding pastor pleads guilty to child sex abuse 3 years after son owned abuse charge

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Joe Burress, the 71-year-old founding pastor of Victory Church in Rochester, New York, also known as the Fight Church, has pled guilty to one of two second-degree sexual abuse charges against him three years after his son Paul Burress pleaded guilty to third-degree sexual abuse.

Court documents cited in a recent WHAM report say two teenagers accused Joe Burress of sexually abusing them in separate incidents while they were under the age of 14. One of the accusers says she was abused between Sept. 1, 2018, and Aug. 15, 2020, while the other said she was abused between Jan. 1, 2014, and Jan. 31, 2017.

Joe Burress is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 2 in Pittsford Town Court but will remain out of custody on his own recognizance until the hearing, WHAM reports.

In March 2018, Paul Burress, who was previously charged with four counts of forcible touching after allegedly groping three women in his Henrietta, New York, home, pleaded guilty to third-degree sexual abuse, a misdemeanor.

Paul Burress, who also served as pastor of Victory Church, gained national attention in 2014 after being featured in a documentary on mixed martial arts called "Fight Church."

Allegations of sexual abuse and claims that he enjoyed life as a swinger dogged his time at the church's helm.

In 2009, Paul showed me fully nude photos of his wife, and also showed me a pornographic video of him having sex with his wife. This occurred on several occasions that year, an unidentified source wrote in a letter sent to the leadership team of Victory Church in 2013. I was a single, 21 year-old at the time. This weighed on me for years, until I couldn't take it anymore and eventually left Victory because of it. A person should be able to trust his pastor. I could not. 1 Cor 4:2 says it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy."

While the church is currently led by Pastor Alex True and his wife, Sarah, the church has not escaped its abusive past.

Filed on Monday, court documents allege that the church allowed and even encouraged multiple men with histories of sexual abuse in the past to serve on staff and look after girls in unsupervised settings, according to a Democrat & Chronicle report.

The allegations were made in three new lawsuits filed under the Child Victims Act in New York State Supreme Court in Monroe County.

Ashton-Krebs, 56, of Penfield, New York, and two other women alleged the churchs leadership created a haven for sexual predators throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Ashton-Krebs recounts how she was groomed by her abuser, who she married after getting pregnant at 19. The three women seek judgments against the church with compensatory and punitive damages to be determined at trial.

When asked about the lawsuits at his home, Joe Burress said he had heard about them but told the Democrat & Chronicle he did not think the claims were valid.

"In all honesty, I dont even understand the story. Its silly stuff," Joe Burress said. "It just sounds like that three girls got together and decided, Hey, lets see if we could get some money."
Museum of the Bible unveils Magna Carta exhibit, highlights influence on Americas founding documents

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WASHINGTON  The Museum of the Bible is set to unveil a Magna Carta exhibit Friday, which will examine the role of the church and the Bible in the formulation of the centuries-old document.

On June 22, the Museum of the Bible announced that it would be debuting a major new exhibit called Magna Carta: Tyranny. Justice. Liberty. The exhibit, a partnership between the Museum of the Bible and Hawkwood International, will be on display on the museum's fifth floor from July 2 to Jan. 2, 2022.

As noted in the Museum of the Bible's statement announcing the exhibit, The Magna Carta is widely considered a major inspiration for the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the British Human Rights Act.

The exhibit will feature an original 1217 Magna Carta, one of only four in existence, as well as the Kings Writ, an initial agreement between Englands most powerful barons and King John to restore their ancient liberties.

The exhibit illustrates how The king and rebel barons gathered at the ancient site of Runnymede, where a treaty in the form of a charter was crafted over several days in June 1215. However, John, described as a tyrant in the exhibit, quickly broke the promises in the Kings Writ and the Magna Carta did not come to fruition until 1217, after King John died.

Prior to the exhibits opening, a press preview was held for the media. At the event, Jeffrey Kloha, chief curational officer of the Museum of the Bible, elaborated on how the Museum of the Bibles Magna Carta exhibit advances its mission as a global, innovative, educational institution whose purpose is to invite all people to engage in the transformative power of the Bible.

Kloha explained that the exhibit is designed to highlight the role of the church and the Bible in the background of Magna Carta, specifically noting that the first clause features a religious freedom element to the Magna Carta that actually guarantees the liberty of the English Church.

In a statement issued last week, Kloha predicted that In Magna Carta: Tyranny. Justice. Liberty, visitors will encounter these early, foundational documents in an interactive and engaging exhibit. Additionally, he said, They will leave with a greater understanding of the relevance of the Magna Carta, the enduring importance of the rights that developed from it, and the central role played by the church and the Christian faith in its creation and longevity.

Luke Purcer, the CEO of Hawkwood International, recalled how he first conceived the idea of a Magna Carta exhibit after putting together the worlds first music performance at Stonehenge and asking what do we do next immediately thereafter.

Citing a desire to create an engaging, interesting experience around something that is culturally and historically significant, Purcer said he thought of the Magna Carta and worked to put together the exhibit in collaboration with the Hereford Cathedral, where the 1217 Magna Carta and the Kings Writ previously resided, from there.

Purcer stressed that there is no such thing as the Magna Carta, and that between 20 and 25 Magna Cartas have been issued over time, beginning with the 1217 Magna Carta. He asserted that in 1217, a new document was issued alongside a second charter, which was a little bit smaller than the first one, so the first one was called the big charter, magna charter. The other document became known as the Charter of the Forest.

As part of its effort to explore the medieval world, the context of the creation of the Magna Carta and the personalities involved, the exhibition includes additional historic documents from a period of over 500 years. One such artifact is the Codex Valmadonna, a liturgical Torah written in 1189, which is the only surviving dated Hebrew text from England prior to King Edward Is expulsion of the Jews in 1290.

The exhibit also includes an illuminated New Testament dating back to 1215 and a Magna Carta issued by King Edward I in 1300 accompanied by its corresponding Charter of the Forest. The existence of the 1300 Magna Carta was unknown until five years ago, and it was also viewed by Thomas Paine, an influential figure in the American Revolution, while he still lived in England.

A portion of the exhibit titled The Road to Liberty highlights the 1217 Magna Cartas influence on the founding documents of the United States: As the Constitution was drafted, core concepts from Magna Carta were considered essential components. The rule of law, due process and habeas corpus represent important continuities between English and American legal traditions. Magna Cartas legacy is reflected most clearly in the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution ratified in 1791.

In addition to featuring pictures of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights obtained from the National Archives, the exhibit contains hard copies of the Journal of the Proceedings of the Continental Congress from 1774, shortly before the American Revolution, as well as Thomas Paines pamphlet Common Sense, which rebuked the tyranny of the English monarchy and is credited with pushing colonists to openly call for independence.

Additionally, the exhibit highlighted the role of Stephen Langton, appointed by Pope Innocent III to serve as archbishop of Canterbury, in crafting the Magna Carta. While Innocent appointed Langton to that post in 1207, King John refused to recognize his legitimacy.

As noted in the exhibit, Langton was a leading figure in the opposition to King John that eventually led to Magna Carta, and he may have been responsible for writing some [of] the charters clauses. Langton argued that God had not intended for the world to be ruled by kings, who could be tempted to rule oppressively and outside the law and frequently criticized the avarice  of modern kings who collect treasure not in order that they may sustain necessity but to satiate their cupidity.
Migrant children struggle with depression, suicide amid horrid conditions at Texas shelter Overcrowded migrant border facilities for children raise alarm

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Lice outbreaks, unsanitary living conditions, suicide attempts and reports of rape are emerging from the tent camps housing thousands of migrant children at the U.S. southern border, where the children are held before being bussed or flown to cities in Texas and other states.

As the border crisis continues to escalate, reports reveal what it's like for many children living in overcrowded holding facilities and tent camps who suffering in living conditions described as terrible.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set up a system of over a dozen emergency camps to temporarily house unaccompanied minors at the beginning of the year.

Unaccompanied minors came to the southern border in record numbers after the Biden administration reversed many strict Trump-era immigration policies early in his term, including rescinding a national emergency proclamation.

Border agents have for years complained of being understaffed and under-resourced. Nearly 15,000 unaccompanied minors are said to be housed in U.S. government-run facilities.

Many migrant children at the Fort Bliss Army Base in El Paso, Texas, which once housed thousands of children before many of them departed in recent days, were depressed and discouraged.

Some children in Fort Bliss large tent complex required one-on-one supervision to ensure they did not harm themselves or commit suicide.

Last week, attorneys filed complaints on behalf of over a dozen minors who detailed the conditions they faced, with one girl saying she spent over 60 days in the facility.

A released court document details the account of a 13-year-old girl from Honduras who had been at the Fort Bliss Emergency Intake Site in El Paso for a few months. She described her time on the 1:1 suicide watch list, where a staffer is required to supervise the suicidal minor at all times.

At the time of her account, eight people were on the suicide watch list, but the number was once as high as 28 individuals, she said.

Since pencils, pens, scissors, nail clippers and regular toothbrushes have been banned inside tent housing due to fears of self-harm, some have resorted to using their identification cards to cut themselves.

She shared how she virtually ate only juice and popsicles due to the food smelling foul she described as horrible.

Staff members have reported multiple cases of self-harm, according to interviewees who spoke with BBC.

"I thought that I was not going to get out of there, that I was not going to see my family again," a 15-year-old told BBC.

"Sometimes, and at night, we would cry. During the worst time, I was nearly at the point of committing suicide," he said.

One migrant minor reported having trouble setting up appointments with counselors for her depression. She told Reuters that a lot of minors "end up having to talk to someone because they have thoughts of cutting themselves."

A teenage girl from Honduras complains there is no one to help her with her case.

"There is no one here I can talk to about my case," said a 17-year-old Honduran detainee, according to Reuters. "There's also no one here I can talk to when I'm feeling sad. There's no one here; I just talk to God. It helps me, and I cry. It would help if I could have a Bible."

Another story shared by the Associated Press was of a 16-year-old boy who had to wait more than three weeks to see if he could live with his sister in New Orleans.

I am desperate, he shared with AP. I wouldnt mind being here for 20 or 30 days if I knew that I was going to be released soon. But because the process hasnt started and because I had no idea whats happening or when the process will start, that makes me feel very, very anxious. I dont know when this will end.

Fort Bliss is an unlicensed shelter that has been repeatedly singled out in reports for its allegedly filthy conditions and lack of staff, The Dallas Morning News reports.

Reports have even surfaced about children suffering sexual abuse from staff members at the Fort Bliss camp.

"We have already caught staff with minors inappropriately," an employee said at a camp training session secretly recorded by a staff member and shared with the BBC.

Another employee said the Department of Homeland Security had discussed rape with the staff members.

"DHS mentioned there was a rape  they are giving the girls pregnancy tests," an employee told BBC. "And I heard the other night that another contractor was caught in a boys' tent, you know, doing things with him."

HHS did not respond to BBC about the specific allegations uncovered at Fort Bliss. However, the agency released a statement saying that it is "providing required standards of care for children such as clean and comfortable sleeping quarters, meals, toiletries, laundry, educational and recreational activities, and access to medical services."

Carlos Holguin, a lead attorney representing migrant children in a federal case, saw distressed children close to their breaking point when he visited the Fort Bliss facility earlier this month. He compared it to "industrial-scale detention.

"I saw that in the faces of virtually every kid I interviewed at Fort Bliss: A sense of despair and isolation," Holguin told CBS News.

"It cannot be healthy for children who have left endemic violence in the Northern Triangle of Central America, endured the gauntlet that they had run to get here from Mexico and then to wind up in a facility that is so large and impersonal as Fort Bliss," Holguin continued.

After visiting the Fort Bliss holding facility, attorney Leecia Welch of the National Center for Youth Law said the government should seek alternatives to the border facilities and focus on more permanent solutions.

"The government makes a poor parent to begin with  and Fort Bliss exemplifies this beyond measure," Welch told CBS News.

Journalists have not been allowed inside this makeshift facility made to assist overcrowded Border Patrol facilities.

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra visited the Fort Bliss shelter on Monday. He praised the improved processing that had fallen from 4,000 children in May to now under 790 boys. He said all the girls were reunited either with relatives in the U.S. sent to a sponsor family or sent to licensed facilities that have a higher standard of care.

However, he did not address the specific requests about the inhuman conditions of the facility, Dallas Morning News reported.

In a trip to Guatemala and Mexico last month to address the root causes of immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris told migrants, do not come, do not come to the border.

Harris toured the Texas border in El Paso for the first time last week since being tapped as the administrations border czar in March.

Harris faced heavy criticism for visiting the border in El Paso, which is nearly 800 miles from the epicenter of the crisis in the Rio Grande Valley. Critics claimed her border visit was nothing more than a check-the-box trip.

As the border surge continues and children remain in rough living conditions at overwhelmed border facilities, the Biden administration faces backlash from both sides of the political aisle that it is not rising to adequately address the crisis and overrun facilities.

The Biden-Harris campaign promised a fair and humane immigration system." It campaigned on the commitment to improve the humanitarian situation at the southern border.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has announced plans to invest at least $250 million in border wall construction after the Biden administration halted construction on the Trump administration's border wall.

Trump visited the "decimated southern border" with Abbott this week to discuss the surge in illegal immigration, decreased national security and the need to complete the southern border on Wednesday.
Will 'in-country' migration turn Texas blue?

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Increasingly large numbers of statisticians, analysts, reporters and politicians have noticed, and are noticing, a significant and swelling internal migration of native-born Americans moving from certain sections of the country to other regions.

In some ways, it is the most significant in-country migration of population since the great Western frontier expansion of the country in the last half of the 19th century. Unlike the great shifts of population initiated by the Great Depression of the 1930s (from the Midwest Dust Bowl to California in the 1930s, and the vast migration of rural southern blacks to the industrial Midwest and Eastern population centers at the same time), this migration is driven more by cultural and social forces rather than economic necessities.

California has been experiencing a domestic outmigration since 1991, according to the California Department of Finance. The Golden State had been an almost irresistible population magnet since the Gold Rush days of the mid-19th century. Almost from its establishment as a state, California has had a majority of residents who were from some place else other than California (born in another state or another country). In the 2010 Census, for the first time, native-born Californians emerged as a majority of the states residents.

In the 2020 census, California lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history. In contrast, Texas gained an additional two seats in the 2020 census after having already gained an almost unprecedented three additional congressional seats in the 2010 census.

New York and Florida had a similar dynamic, with record population decline in New York and rapid population growth in Florida due to migration.

Many political prognosticators have been predicting (or is it hoping?) that these population shifts will turn Texas, and Florida, purple, then full-blown blue, greatly enhancing Democratic political fortunes nationwide.

However, as this profound wishful thinking has congealed into predictions and analysis, the desired result seems less and less likely.

It is the Americans who are the most dissatisfied with the extremely progressive public policies of California and New York who are exercising their freedom to relocate to states where their cultural and economic philosophies are far more in sync with their own.

The evidence so far seems to rebut that prediction. For example, in the white-hot Texas senate race in 2018 between conservative firebrand Sen. Ted Cruz and flamboyant liberal lightning rod, Congressman Robert Beto ORourke, recent arrivals from California favored Cruz by a margin of 57% to 42%, while ORourke was favored by native Texans (51% to 47%).

Objectivity is usually greatly to be desired in commentators and reporters. However, personal insight and experience can be invaluable in seeking to analyze what is really going on. My background is a politically-active native Texan whose first hands-on experience was as a 15-year-old volunteer handing out flyers for Senator John Tower, who was elected in 1961 as the first Republican senator from a formerly confederate state since the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

From everything I know and have experienced about my native state (my great, great, great-grandfather and my great, great, great uncle fought together in the Texas War of Independence), Texas will not turn purple or blue.

The majority of the people who moved to Texas from another region of the country end up falling in love with its ambiance of individualism and its culture of the sky is the limit!, Lets go for it!, and  America is the greatest country in the world!

In fact, one of the most popular bumper stickers statewide for many years in Texas has been I wasnt born here, but I got here as fast as I could!

I, for one, cannot help but laud, honor and commend our founders for constructing a democratic, representative federal government of individual states that are allowed to develop different economic and cultural policies, where people can see and compare for themselves which one betters their lives and preserves their individual freedoms.

I read a cover story in The Economist (the British Time), two decades ago that predicted that Americas future would eventually be California or Texas. I would not bet against Texas.
Iowa Supreme Court: State can ban Planned Parenthood from receiving sex-ed funds

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The Iowa Supreme Court has upheld a state law prohibiting abortion providers like Planned Parenthood from participating in two federally-funded education grant programs, reversing a lower court decision.

In a decision released Wednesday, the court ruled 6-1 in favor of sections 99 and 100 of House File 766, which were passed by the Iowa General Assembly in 2019.

The sections prohibit abortion providers from receiving funds from the Community Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program overseen by the Iowa Department of Human Services and the Personal Responsibility Education Program overseen by the Iowa Department of Public Health.

Justice Dana Oxley wrote the majority opinion, concluding, in part, that the state has considerable leeway in selecting who will deliver a government message, whether the message is a diversity and inclusion program, a drug prevention program, or, in this case, a sexual education and teen pregnancy prevention program.

The state presented three different purposes for the law: to express its preference for childbirth over abortion, to ensure that its state-sponsored sexual education message is not delivered by entities that derive significant revenue from abortion-related activities, and to avoid indirectly subsidizing abortion providers, wrote Oxley.

Even if the programs do not include any discussions about abortion, the goals of promoting abstinence and reducing teenage pregnancy could arguably still be undermined when taught by the entity that performs nearly all abortions in Iowa.

Oxley also concluded that an abortion provider lacks a freestanding constitutional right to provide abortions and thus any conditions premised on providing abortions cannot be considered unconstitutional.

 precluding abortion providers from receiving funding for the educational CAPP and PREP programs has no effect on a womans ability to obtain an abortion, added Oxley.

Where abortion providers have no constitutional right to perform abortions, we conclude the unconstitutional conditions doctrine does not prohibit the state from barring abortion providers from receiving CAPP and PREP funding.

Justice Brent Appel authored a dissenting opinion, arguing that the statutes impose unconstitutional conditions on Planned Parenthood of the Heartland (PPH) by attempting to restrict abortion activities done on their own time and dime.

The legislature through unconstitutional conditions in these statutes is trying to accomplish indirectly what it cannot do directly: namely, attack abortion rights, wrote Appel.

This cannot be permitted. For the reasons expressed below, I would affirm the lower courts grant of PPHs motion for summary judgment on other grounds.

In 2019, the Iowa General Assembly passed a bill that banned abortion providers from CAPP and PREP, with Gov. Kim Reynlds signing the bill into law.

Soon after, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland and the Iowa chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against Iowa, arguing that the new law was unconstitutional.

In May 2020, Fifth Judicial District Judge Paul Scott ruled in favor of Planned Parenthood, placing a permanent injunction on the enforcement of the law.

The Act has no valid, realistically conceivable purpose that serves a legitimate government interest as it is both irrationally over-inclusive and under-inclusive. The Act violates PPHs right to equal protection under the law and is therefore unconstitutional, wrote Scott last year.
NSA denies Tucker Carlson's claim that agency is spying to take him off the air

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Fox News host Tucker Carlson is reiterating his claim that the National Security Agency is spying on him as the intelligence agency has denied his earlier claim that it is targeting him in an effort to take him off the air.

The broadcast journalist first asserted Monday that the Biden administration was snooping on him. He said an intelligence community whistleblower told him he was aware of the content in private exchanges that only Carlson would know.



He further alleged that the NSA was spying on his teams electronic communications and was planning to leak them to remove his show from the air. Carlson insisted again on Tuesday that the government was surveilling him and said that a statement from the NSA contesting his assertion did not deny his specific claims.



The whistleblower, 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 stressed Tuesday.



Theres no other possible source for that information, period, he said, noting that he had a conversation with NSA officials Tuesday that was Orwellian.



In a statement, the NSA said that the Fox News broadcaster was not targeted for surveillance. The statement stressed that Carlson's claim that the NSA is "monitoring our communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air" is "untrue."

Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air, the agency stressed.



"NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States. With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting."

Speaking with journalists aboard Air Force One Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki echoed the NSAs statement when asked about Carlson's claim. She noted that the agency is an entity that focuses on foreign threats and individuals who are attempting to do us harm on foreign soil.

So that is their purview. But beyond that, I would point you to the intelligence community, Psaki said.

Carlson was not moved by the NSA's response. He claimed that the agency's statement did not answer the main question: "Did the Biden administration ready my personal emails?"

"That's the question was asked to NSA officials when we spoke to them in a very heated conversation. Again, they refused to say," Carlson said. "Then, they refused to explain why they couldn't answer that simple question: 'We can't tell you and we can't tell you why we can't tell you.'"

"The message was clear: 'We can do whatever we want. We can read your personal texts. We can read your personal emails. We can send veiled threats your way to brush you back if we don't like your politics. We can do anything. We are our own country and there is literally nothing you can do about it. We are in charge, you're not.' Orwellian does not begin to describe the experience. It is like living in China."

The ways intelligence agencies can surveil people domestically in an era of increased international terrorism remains a point of consternation among civil libertarians who often argue against government overreach.

Civil rights attorney Harmeet Dhillon explained on Carlsons show Tuesday that several ways exist for the NSA to defend its actions, particularly since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

The military-industrial complex and the national security apparatus have justified their activities by saying that they are focusing on foreigners, but any data gathered from U.S. citizens is deemed "incidental," Dhillon said.



If theyre able to get a surveillance order on an individual, what theyre able to do is scoop up all of the people who reach out to that person, text them even without any predicate. So thats really where its at; thats a huge dragnet, she said.

When these questionable security agency actions are challenged in court, she said cases last many years with no meaningful resolution.

Dhillon subsequently noted on social media that the NSAs statement asserting Carlson was not a target does not mean it did not read his text messages and emails. She contends the rest of the statement is deceptive trust me" theater.




Sen. Hawley urges USCIRF to add Canada to Watch List, says religious freedom is 'in peril'

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Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has urged the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to consider placing Canada on its Watch List due to its continued lockdown restrictions, arrests of Christian pastors and seizure of church property.

Hawley called out what he deems as the government's systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom, adding that he's deeply concerned that freedom is in peril across our nations northern border."

Some congregations in Canada have seen the forced closure of church buildings, arrests of pastors, in addition to stiff fines and jail time for church leaders over their defiance of authorities' ongoing lockdown orders in response to COVID-19.

Many have contended that secular entities, non-Christian religious gatherings and protesters have also gathered in large numbers but haven't faced similar penalties.

In his letter to the USCIRF, Hawley added, I am troubled that our Canadian neighbors are effectively being forced to gather in secret, undisclosed locations to exercise their basic freedom to worship."

Frankly, I would expect this sort of religious crackdown in Communist China, not in a prominent Western nation like Canada, he continued. Canadian authorities arrest of faith leaders and seizure of church property, among other enforcement actions, appear to constitute systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.

He asked the Commission to address the situation and consider adding Canada to its Watch List for these violations of religious freedom.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is an independent, bipartisan federal commission dedicated to defending the universal right to freedom of religion worldwide.

Hawley mentioned Canadian Pastor Tim Stephens of Fairview Baptist Church in Calgary and Pastor James Coates of GraceLife Church in Spruce Grove, Alberta, as examples of faith leaders who've been arrested and jailed for holding worship services in defiance of ongoing COVID-19 gathering restrictions.

Stephens was arrested for holding an outdoor worship service after authorities ordered the church building to close its doors.

Police arrested him earlier this month in front of his tearful eight children after an outdoor worship gathering was discovered by a police helicopter flying above.

Stephens was previously arrested for holding a church service that did not comply with public health orders, including masking, physical distancing and attendance limits.

Coates of GraceLife Church in Canada has also faced arrest for breaking COVID-19 gathering restrictions.

His church was subsequently fenced off by Alberta Health Services to prevent Sunday worship gatherings.

A judge recently ruled that the actions taken against Coates did not violate his religious freedom despite his claim that the government's restrictions were unconstitutional.

Artur Pawlowski, the pastor of Street Church and Cave of Adullam Church in Calgary, Alberta, accused the Canadian government of a double standard in a recent interview with The Christian Post.

Pawlowski asserted that law enforcement repeatedly descended on his church services but allowed mosques to remain "fully operational.

Not one Imam was being harassed or intimidated. And to this day, theres not one Imam or one Muslim that has a ticket, even though we have video evidence and pictures [of] them gathering even recently through the whole Ramadan by the thousands, he added. Pawlowskis YouTube channel includes a video of a gathering of thousands of Muslims that took place on the last day of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Muslim calendar.

Pawlowski had been arrested along with his brother for violating gathering restrictions.

He said he had received 29 COVID-19 tickets, three court orders, two injunctions and two court contempt trials over the past year.

Im not afraid of what I believe in; the Bible is filled with people that have resisted authorities, evil authorities, from the very beginning to the very end, Pawlowski said as he described the mistreatment he has endured due to his defiance to the governments gathering restrictions.

Hawley noted that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that [e]veryone has the following fundamental freedoms, which include the freedom of conscience and religion.

He claimed Canadas actions to enforce overly burdensome and unjustified orders do not live up to the charters praiseworthy statement.

I urge the Commission on International Religious Freedom to take whatever action is necessary to address and rectify this situation, and consider adding Canada to the Commissions Watch List.

Last year, Hawley similarly urged the Department of Justice to bring federal lawsuits to defend the rights of houses of worship under burdened by unjust restrictions.
Wis. gov. orders gender-neutral birth certificates for parents who dont identify as mother, father

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Parents in Wisconsin will have the option of choosing gender-neutral terms for themselves instead of mother and father on their baby's birth certificate, Gov. Tony Evers and the state's Department of Health Services announced this week.

The new birth certificates, which will be available starting on Thursday, will include "parent-parent in addition to mother-father. The gender-neutral terminology reflects the governor's push to incorporate trans language in official government 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 on Monday.

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, he continued.

Terminology changes on the birth certificates also include the term "parent giving birth instead of mother.

The new forms will be available in three languages: English, Spanish and Hmong.

Wisconsin DHS Secretary-designee Karen Timberlake said updating birth certificate forms is one important step on the long road to adopting gender-neutral language in all of our external documents.

We are working hard to make Wisconsin a more inclusive, equitable, and just state and this update ensures our LGBTQ Wisconsinites are seen and heard when welcoming a child into the world, Timberlake said in a statement.

The governor also praised the decision on social media.

As we celebrate #Pride, @DHSWI and I are excited to announce that, starting Thursday, Wisconsin parents will have a gender-neutral option for parents. This change reflects our continued commitment to recognizing that every family deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, Evers tweeted.

I'm glad to see this change being made as we continue to update our state policies and procedures to better reflect the Wisconsinites we serve. More on this announcement below ?? https://t.co/N0PdXmHSXz  Governor Tony Evers (@GovEvers) June 28, 2021

Rep. Gae Magnafici, the Republican chairwoman of the Assembly Family Law committee, said the policy "is something that even the best satire writers cannot imagine," the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported.

"As the Assembly chair of Family Law, a nurse, and a mom, I am insulted. Im calling on Governor Evers to stop downplaying womanhood, stop downplaying motherhood, and stop downplaying settled science," Magnafici said.

UnityPoint Health-Meriter President and CEO Sue Erickson, however, praised this action, arguing that same-sex couples are not reflected on birth certificates.

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, Erickson said in a statement.

We are so pleased that Wisconsin created a more inclusive birth certificate form to reflect the families of our state and community, she added. This change allows all birthing parents to focus solely on their newborn.

This comes after the Biden administration was criticized for using so-called bias-free language in regard to gender and replacing the term mothers with birthing people as part of their push to use trans-inclusive language.

On the first day of June, Wisconsin flew the rainbow pride flag at the state Capitol to celebrate what LGBT activists call "LGBT Pride Month."

For the third year in a row, we kicked off #PrideMonth today by raising the Rainbow Pride Flag above the State Capitol. It's never been more important to celebrate the vibrance, resilience, and contributions of our LGBTQ neighbors who help make our state great, Evers tweeted on June 1.

Evers also signed an executive order on June 1 to direct state agencies to use gender-neutral language in external communications.
Pakistani court upholds life sentence of Christian man accused of blasphemous text messages

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A Pakistani Christians life sentence for allegedly sending blasphemous text messages was reportedly upheld by a court in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, last week despite his attorneys claim the prosecutions evidence was manipulated and his client was framed for the crime.

Fifty-six-year-old Zafar Bhatti will continue to serve a life sentence, which is 25 years in Pakistan, for violating Section 295-C of Pakistans blasphemy laws, Morning Star News reported.

The sentence for violating Section 295-C usually is death, but the attorney said he was given a life sentence since there was not enough evidence for the death penalty.

Bhatti continues to deny the charge that he allegedly sent text messages derogatory toward Islams prophet.

Bhatti said police tortured him into confessing the blasphemy crime he did not commit, according to religious persecution watchdog International Christian Concern.

He was initially arrested in 2012 and sentenced on May 3, 2017.

Bhatti and his attorney claim he was wrongfully accused of sending the messages from an unregistered number, possibly connected with a woman named Ghazala Khan, who passed away in 2016 from Hepatitis C.

Bhattis attorney believes the judge was under pressure to deliver a sentence.

The trial court judge gave this verdict under immense pressure because the complainant was an office-bearer of the Islamist extremist outfit Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, Bhattis attorney, Tahir Bashir, told the nonprofit persecution news outlet Morning Star News. I believe the verdict delivered this time was also under pressure because theres no direct evidence against Bhatti.

Bashir alleges the evidence was tampered with to frame Bhatti for sending the blasphemous text messages through a SIM card and audio recordings.

When someone calls the cellular company for activation of the SIM card, their voices are recorded, Bashir said. In this case, the SIM used in the alleged offense was activated thrice  the first two times by some people related to Ms. Khan, and the third time by the woman herself. Bhatti never possessed the SIM, but his phone set was mysteriously used to send those blasphemous text messages.

Its quite clear that the convict was trapped in the case through his phone, the attorney said, citing evidence manipulation.

Bhattis attorney remains hopeful the Lahore High Court will eventually accept Bhattis appeal and order his acquittal, despite the disappointing verdict, according to Morning Star News.

The Pakistani government is aware its blasphemy laws are misused and often lead to false accusations. Still, little has been done to achieve reform in this area despite calls from the international community.

Human rights activists have advocated for decades to reform Pakistans blasphemy laws that disproportionately charge religious minorities due to prejudices and are often based on false accusations, according to the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom.

Vague provisions found in sections 295 and 298 of Pakistans Penal Code criminalize any speech or act insulting a religion or belief or defiling the Quran, the [Islamic] prophet Muhammad, a place of worship, or religious symbols, USCIRF reported.

A Pakistani couple on death row for false accusations of blasphemous text messages were recently acquitted after nearly eight years behind bars.

International persecution watchdog group Open Doors USA ranks Pakistan fifth on its 2021 World Watch List of countries where Christians face persecution.

With a population of over 208 million people, there are only about 4 million Christians in Pakistan.

Pakistani Christians face persecution due to an extreme level of Islamic oppression. Pakistan is also listed by the U.S. State Department as a "country of particular concern" for tolerating in or engaging in egregious violations of religious freedom.

False accusations of blasphemy in Pakistan, mainly targeting Christians and other minority faiths, are widespread and often fueled by religious hatred or personal vendettas.

Under Pakistan's blasphemy laws, people accused of insulting Islam or its prophet Muhammad can face life in prison, a death sentence or vigilante violence and threats from the community.

Blasphemy accusations can also lead to mass protests and mob violence.
Think Twitter is mostly a waste of time?

Meet AZiah Zola King, or at least her on-screen counterpart played by Taylour Paige. In 2015, King posted a sporadic 148-tweet thread detailing an unpredictable trip to Tampa, Fla. The epic thread went massively viral and landed her a 90-minute feature film with A24.

Six years after the original thread, the movie "Zola" finally released Wednesday.

Written and directed by Janicza Bravo along with co-writer Jeremy O. Harris, Zola is a whimsical recollection of Kings viral tweets which she documented on her Twitter account October 27, 2015.

The story begins at Hooters, where Zola (Taylour Paige) meets and befriends a customer, Stefani (Riley Keough), while on the job. The two quickly create a bond over exotic dancing. Not-too-soon after, they take a short excursion to Tampa for whats supposed to be a profitable trip dedicated to stripping, but swiftly takes a turn for the worse. Accompanying the two women is Stefani's boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and her pimp, X (Colman Domingo) who she initially introduces to Zola as her roommate.

Taylor Jewell/Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP

Although the film is marketed as a fun and suspenseful dramedy, it proves to be an insightful exploration into sex work and its cultural relevance in the digital age.

In typical Hollywood fashion, some moments of the film are dramatized, but for the most part, Bravo and Harris create a fair depiction of Kings original story without watering down the role technology and social media play within the tale. They tastefully remind viewers of this, with frequent notification buzzers and flashy heart-button images which appear on the screen.

Whats most notable about Bravos directorial skills is the mere fact that she doesn't romanticize the plight of sex work. Just like any other job, sex workers are overworked and underpaid.

Anna Kooris/AP

We see this in many scenarios in the film but specifically in a scene where Stefani is denied a cut of her money after a night of pleasuring uncouth men. Its easy to sympathize with Stefani  until you realize she is a complacent player in this mess of a trip.

Stefani often makes microaggressive comments, and for me, her mannerisms are comparable to the ones of rapper/internet sensation Bhad Bhabie. In a situation where Stefani finds herself in trouble, Zola comes to a chilling realization: Whos looking out for me? she asks.

The scene is a subtle comment on Black women's worth and value in contrast to their white counterparts within the industry.

Anna Kooris/AP

On a related note, the film lightly alludes to occurrences of human-trafficking, which is a tragic reality in sex work. After California, Texas as a whole ranks No. 2 in terms of human trafficking numbers, according to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The film leaves out the real-life fact that X was wanted and arrested for kidnapping and trafficking 15 underage girls, as well as linked to six murders.

Overall, Bravo and Harris along with the rest of the cast do a stellar job breathing life into Kings story.

It also helps that King was heavily involved in the making of the film and acts as executive producer  which is uncommon, as real-life subjects are often left out of their own narrative.

"Zola" sets the bar pretty high as the first ever (big budget) tweet-turned-film. Im intrigued to see other compelling Twitter adaptations thatll surely follow this one.
Hot dogs are a cookout staple, and the rest of America agrees with me.

Seventy-three percent of Americans believe a cookout is incomplete without hot dogs, per a new survey from the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (NHDSC) and the North American Meat Institute. Seventy-five percent prefer their hot dogs to be grilled.

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As Americans kick off grilling season this weekend, it only makes sense that one of our countrys most iconic foods is front and center, said Eric Mittenthal, NHDSC's Top Dog. The people have spoken, and frankly, nothing else cuts the mustard.

The survey also found that 68 percent of Americans who eat hot dogs say they top their hot dogs with mustard (I am among this group of people).

Here are a few other dishes that are sure to be found at any cookout. If they're not, you may want to get a new family. (No offense).

1. Ribs. (Duh.)

This honestly goes without saying.

2. Macaroni and cheese

This is one of my favorite dishes on any given day and if it's not at the cookout, neither am I.

3. Baked beans

Please don't invite guests to your cookout if you don't have baked beans that include ground beef or some variation of it. I mean seriously, if you're going to eat meatless baked beans you might as well grab a spoon and eat it straight out of the can.

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4. Potato salad

While I personally am not a fan, but it certainly wouldn't be fair to withhold this dish from lovers everywhere.

So, who's grilling this weekend?
Terri McSweeny doesnt know the precise spot where her Revolutionary War hero ancestor is buried, but theres 18th century documentation indicating Lt. David Fellows final resting place is in the Hudson Valley - possibly on private property believed by some to hold the remains of many American patriots.

That property in the Dutchess County town of Fishkill has been the focus of a years-long battle pitting local preservationists against a Westchester-based developer who wants to build retail shops, a 90-room hotel and a chain restaurant on his 10.5-acre site, a roughly L-shaped parcel bordered on the west by Route 9, Snook Road on the north and Van Wyck Lake Road to the south.

Located in the southwest corner of owner Domenic Broccolis property is a clearing flanked on the north by a gas station-convenience store and on the south by a Mexican restaurant. It is there, at the base of the L, where preservationists have pinpointed the location of an unmarked cemetery in what was known during the American Revolution as the Fishkill Supply Depot.

Broccoli insists that the project will help protect, not trample, a purported cemetery located on the property. But McSweeny said shes appalled and devastated by the idea of a commercial enterprise looming so closely over the graves of soldiers who died during the nations fight for freedom from the British.

Why not park food trucks on top of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier? McSweeny, of Vero Beach, Fla., said in an email. It's the same as a strip mall on top of a mass grave holding the remains of my revered ancestor, Lt. David Fellows, a man who gave the last full measure for the country he loved.

Historical significance to the Revolutionary War effort

For nearly the entire duration of the American Revolution (1775-1783), the Fishkill Supply Depot was a major encampment and the main source of military supplies for the northern segments of Gen. George Washingtons Continental Army. Thousands of American soldiers, along with British and Hessian prisoners (German soldiers who served as auxiliaries to the British Army) spent time at the depot.

Hundreds are believed to have died there, mostly from illness, exposure and diseases such smallpox. Given the burial practices of the period, most of those soldiers wouldve been buried near where they died.

Few people outside Dutchess County have ever heard of the Fishkill Supply Depot. No battles were fought there, although British incursions from the south threatened the supply base, forcing the Americans to move supplies to safer locations nearby. Still, the Fishkill Supply Depot should be held in the same regard as patriot victories at Saratoga, Trenton or Yorktown, according to one supporter of the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, the not-for-profit group leading the effort to stop Broccolis project.

A depot is not as dramatic a site as a Gettysburg or another battlefield, but without the support network the battles would not be possible, said Paul Dolan, a retired ABC News International executive director known for his work on Revolutionary War preservation projects in New York and elsewhere.

Contentious legal battle

Since June 2015, when Broccoli announced his plans to develop his Fishkill property, there have been contentious public meetings, accusations of underhanded tactics and political maneuverings by both sides, as well as lawsuits and counter-lawsuits.

The current litigation includes a pending appeal by the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot to a December 2019 ruling by a State Supreme Court judge in Dutchess County, who upheld the town planning boards determination that commercial development wont have an adverse environmental impact on Broccolis property.

According to Rodenhausen Chale & Polidoro, the Rhinebeck law firm handling the Friends appeal, the group will claim the planning board failed to properly consider the views of professional archaeologists who say the site still holds significant Revolutionary War artifacts, including human remains, that would be threatened by Broccolis proposed project.

Lance Ashworth, a West Point graduate and Army veteran who is president of the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, contends that more extensive archaeological work would reveal a trove of artifacts and likely provide evidence of Revolutionary War-era burials numbering in the dozens, if not more.

Over the past decade, his group has scoured wartime muster rolls and other documents to put names to 90 soldiers known to have died at Fishkill, including McSweenys ancestor, David Fellows. An officer from Connecticut, Fellows fought in the American invasion of Canada in 1775-76, was captured after a battle near Montreal, eventually returned to the United States and died at the Fishkill Supply Depot on Dec. 10, 1779.

Located on the Hudson Rivers east bank about 50 miles north of New York City, the Fishkill Supply Depot sprawled across several miles, with its core areas centered near the intersection of the north-south Albany Post Road (now Route 9) and the east-west route (now Interstate 84) that connected the Hudson Valley and southern New England.

Starting in late 1776, barracks, stables, storehouses, hospitals, armories, grist mills, sawmills and boat yards sprung up amid the farmland, with the depots boundaries stretching inland from Fishkill Landing (now Beacon) to beyond the Post Road. The depots headquarters were centrally located at the Van Wyck Homestead, where such notable figures as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, the Marquis de Lafayette, John Adams and John Hancock stayed or visited during the war. Located just off I-84s East Fishkill exit, the historic site is home to the Fishkill Historical Society.

Contemporary American military maps of the depot show the location of barracks, stables and other structures, but no cemeteries. According to local oral history, a cemetery was located in what is now the southwest corner of Broccolis property. In the late 19th century, the Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated a historical marker at the site identifying it as the location of a military cemetery. That marker was later moved several hundred yards north to the Van Wyck Homestead.

Just south of the Van Wyck Homestead is Broccolis property, located across Route 9 from the former Dutchess Mall, now the site of a Home Depot. Broccolis plans for his property call for buildings designed to resemble 18th-century landmarks in nearby Hudson Valley communities. He also says the project will include an education center for living history events such as re-enactments, with walkways providing public access to the neighboring cemetery site, which Broccoli plans to preserve.

A five-minute video produced by Broccoli's proposed development, Continental Commons, and posted on its website touts the project as an exciting opportunity to weave together History, Education, Tourism and Commerce.

While conceding that some human remains had been found on his property during one of the dozens of archaeological studies conducted there over the decades, Broccoli contends all those excavations and soil samplings have turned up no firm evidence to support the preservationists claims that his property contains multiple gravesites.

The depot likely had several cemeteries, according to his spokesman, Gregory Lane, who accuses the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot of purposely inflating the extent of the burials on Broccolis property in an effort to derail the commercial project.

Their credibility is questionable, Lane said. We know with great certitude that there are not dozens or hundreds of burials.

For now, Broccolis plans to develop what preservationists deem hallowed ground remain on hold as the lawsuits make their way through the courts. In the meantime, Ashworth and his group say theyll continue their fight to save this last remnant of the Fishkill Supply Depot.

Once the bulldozers roll, Ashworth said, you destroy this site and you cant get it back.
With a recent increase in DWIs on southwest Montgomery County roads and an expected influx of visitors on Lake Conroe, law enforcement is imploring drivers exercise safety on July Fourth weekend.

Be sensible and be safe when youre on the water, said Precinct 1 Constable Philip Cash. adding a boost in enforcement has been done to make this an enjoyable weekend, a great time on the lake.

Cashs remarks were made at a Friday morning press conference on Lake Conroe. He was joined by Assistant DA and Vehicular Crimes Chief Andrew James, who stressed there will be use over the weekend of No Refusal, where a warrant will be expedited to draw a blood sample from those suspected of impaired driving.

Later Friday morning in Magnolia, James and Precinct 5 Constable Chris Jones elaborated on the issue at a presser.

Have fun, enjoy it, but do so safely. Dont put yourself in danger. Dont put your family in danger. Dont put other people in danger, James said. Spending $20, $30 on an Uber or a Lyft or a cab is considerably less expensive than having to hire someone to represent you for that DWI offense that you get arrested for.

On Lake Conroe, Cash said all his patrol staff will be on duty, joined by game wardens with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and EMT from the Montgomery County Hospital District. Safety checks reviewing for essentials required by state law will be voluntary on arrival at the lake and mandatory on the water. Among the items checked for are life jackets, which Cash said should be kept within reach and not boxed away.

If the winds blowing and you jump in the water, the boat will drift faster than you can swim. Sadly, thats what happens in a lot of these drownings, he said as he encouraged the use of life jackets while on the water.

Cash signaled to how Independence Day weekend is historically one of the busiest on the lake. Meanwhile, Jones acknowledged his precinct has experienced an increase in DWIs in the past two months as he pressed for revelers to have a designated driver.

Cash also encouraged the use of designated and knowledgeable drivers on boats as he explained most watercraft wrecks involve intoxication.

Usually, Jones explained, there are three to four deputies on weekend nighttime patrol at Precinct 5. There will likely be double as many Saturday and Sunday, and some during daytime hours. Nationally, Andrew James said a lot of intoxicated driving on the July holiday weekend takes place during the evening after people are drinking in the day as they socialize at get-togethers and then head home.

Dont think just because you go home before dark, youre safe, Chris Jones warned.

There was a dip in incidents last Fourth of July weekend compared to 2019, James mentioned. In 2020, the prosecutor said there were 44 DWIs compared to 70 the year before  possibly a reflection of limited business operations in the heat of the pandemic.

Towards the close of the press conference in Magnolia, James reminded residents that prescription drugs, as much as alcohol or other substances, can impair driving. He noted there is a continued rise in cases involving drugs intended for medicinal use  prescribed or not. They account for about a quarter of intoxicated driving arrests, he said.

James also implored drivers be conscious of their abilities to operate a vehicle.

If youre feeling the effects of alcohol, if youre feeling buzzed, youre legally intoxicated, he said.

jose.gonzalez@chron.com

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Jerry Lara /Staff photographer

Six Flags Fiesta Texas is responding to a viral TikTok video showing guests stuck on one of the park's newest rides.

Dare Devil Dive Flying Machines is shown locked up in a video that's garnered more than 3 million views on the platform. The steampunk-themed ride sends riders through loops and dives 48 feet in the air. Some guests were left in an upside down position when the ride stopped.
SRINAGAR, India (AP)  Five suspected rebels and an army soldier were killed Friday in a gunfight in Indian-controlled Kashmir which triggered anti-India protests and clashes between government forces and local residents, officials said.

The gunfight erupted shortly after scores of counterinsurgency police and soldiers launched an operation based on a tip that militants were present in a village in southern Pulwama district late Thursday, police said.

Police said five militants were killed in Friday's firefight, and an Indian soldier wounded overnight died in a military hospital. Inspector-General Vijay Kumar called the operation a big success.

As the fighting raged, anti-India protests broke out in the neighborhood in solidarity with the rebels. Police fired tear gas and shotgun pellets to stop scores of stone-throwing young men from marching in the area.

The protesters chants slogans such as Go India, go back and We want freedom. No one was reported injured in the clashes.

Government forces have stepped up operations against anti-India rebels in the region, which is divided between India and Pakistan and claimed in its entirety by both. Suspected militants have also carried out attacks on police and in one case killed two family members of a police official.

On Wednesday, Indian police said government forces killed three suspected militants in a gun battle and recovered a rifle and two pistols. However, family members of one of the slain men said that 17-year-old Zakir Bashir was picked up from his home, killed in custody and then presented as a militant who had died fighting.

Police insisted that the teenager had joined rebel ranks just a few days before he was eliminated.

Last week, suspected militants barged into the home of a low-ranking police official and fatally shot him along with his wife and their daughter. On June 22, assailants shot and killed a police intelligence officer in the regions main city of Srinagar. Police blamed militants.

Indias military last week said it thwarted a major threat when it intercepted two drones flying over an army base in the regions Jammu area, a day after suspected explosives-laden drones were used to attack an air base there.

Rebels have been fighting Indian rule since 1989, seeking to unite 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 struggle. Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government forces have been killed in the conflict.
TIRANA, Albania (AP)  Some 38 Albanian nationals including a prosecutor, a government department head and three senior police officers have been arrested for drug trafficking, corruption, abuse of post and money laundering, Albanian authorities said on Friday.

Albanias Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, or SPAK, said that the two-year, Italian-led probe showed that the suspects who operated in Albania, Italy, Montenegro and Spain were part of four international criminal groups mainly involved in drug trafficking.
CLEVELAND (AP)  A Cleveland-area Roman Catholic priest intends to plead guilty to federal charges involving the sexual exploitation of children and child pornography, according to his attorney.

Attorney Robert Dixon filed a motion Thursday saying Robert McWilliams will plead guilty to charges contained in an indictment without a plea agreement.
NEW YORK (AP)  Alvin Bragg, a former top deputy to New Yorks attorney general, was poised to become Manhattans first Black district attorney and to take over the investigation of former President Donald Trump after his closest opponent conceded in the Democratic primary.

The candidate trailing him by several thousand votes in the race, former federal prosecutor Tali Farhadian Weinstein, said in a statement Friday that after several days of absentee votes being counted, it is clear we cannot overcome the vote margin.

New York City's Board of Election has not publicly released updates on the count of absentee ballots. As a result, The Associated Press has been unable to call a winner.

This has been a long journey that started in Harlem, Bragg said in a statement, referring to the Manhattan neighborhood where he grew up. And today, that 15-year old boy who was stopped numerous times at gunpoint by the police is the Democratic nominee to be Manhattan District Attorney.

Bragg led Farhadian Weinstein by about 3 percentage points when voting ended June 22.

With a win, Bragg would be virtually guaranteed to succeed District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who has been leading an investigation of Trump and his company and is retiring at the end of the year.

The Republican candidate in the general election will be Thomas Kenniff, a defense attorney, former prosecutor and Army Judge Advocate General. Democrats outnumber Republicans heavily in Manhattan.

A former federal prosecutor who now teaches at New York Law School, Bragg worked as a civil rights lawyer before entering government service. He currently represents the mother of Eric Garner in a judicial inquiry into his 2014 death after being placed in a police chokehold.

Bragg said he was drawn to a career in law after having a gun pointed at him six times as a youth  three times by police. In one encounter, amid the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, Bragg said an officer stuck a gun in his face and wrongly accused him of being a drug dealer as he walked to get groceries for his father.

Bragg, 47, defeated a big field of candidates that also included three former assistants in the district attorneys office, Lucy Lang, Liz Crotty and Diana Florence, and three candidates who have never been prosecutors  public defender Eliza Orlins, civil rights lawyer Tahanie Aboushi and state Assembly member Dan Quart.

Farhadian Weinstein said that while she had disagreements with Bragg, she supported his commitment to justice." She also said she heard a demand for more women in political leadership while campaigning and hoped other would heed that call.

Manhattan has never had a woman district attorney.

The Manhattan district attorneys office has spent two years looking at Trumps business dealings.

A special grand jury this week indicted the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. They were charged with helping Weisselberg and other top executives evade taxes he should have paid on apartments, cars and tuition aid given him by the company.

Trump himself was not charged in the case, but the investigation is not over.

Vance, the Democrat who brought the charges, will lead the Trump probe until he leaves office.

All of the Democrats running for the office had said they werent afraid of taking on Trump, but they were also cautious not to appear as if they were prejudging the case or making the matter a campaign issue.

Bragg has investigated Trump before as the states chief deputy attorney general in 2018. He helped oversee a lawsuit that led to the closure of Trumps charitable foundation over allegations he used the nonprofit to further his political and business interests.

Prior to that, Bragg led a unit of the state attorney generals office that investigates killings by police.

Campaigning for district attorney, Bragg pledged a culture change in the district attorney's office, prioritizing public safety and police accountability while declining to pursue many low-level offenses and de-emphasizing conviction rates.

Bragg said he'd use data to spot racial disparities in the criminal justice system. In deciding which cases to pursue, Bragg said he'd want prosecutors to ask: Does this case make us safer.

Manhattan district attorney is one of the most high-profile prosecution jobs in the U.S., dramatized on TVs Law and Order and Blue Bloods.

The office has a staff of 500 lawyers and a $125 million annual budget.

A separate forfeiture fund bankrolled by Wall Street settlements and worth more than $800 million is used for grants to criminal justice and community organizations and big initiatives, such as testing backlogged rape kits.

Vance will have been in office for 12 years when he steps side. His successor will be just the fourth elected district attorney in Manhattan in the last 80 years. Frank Hogan served for 31 years. Robert Morgenthau was in office for 34 years, until he was 90.
NORTH MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP)  The city of North Miami Beach ordered the evacuation of a condominium building Friday after a review found unsafe conditions about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the site of last week's deadly collapse in South Florida.

An audit prompted by the collapse of Champlain Towers South in nearby Surfside found that the 156-unit Crestview Towers had been deemed structurally and electrically unsafe in January, the city said in a news release. Officials did not immediately release details about the structural problems that prompted the evacuation, but the building had reported millions of dollars in damage from 2017's Hurricane Irma.

In an abundance of caution, the City ordered the building closed immediately and the residents evacuated for their protection, while a full structural assessment is conducted and next steps are determined, City Manager Arthur H. Sorey III said in the news release.

It is the first building to be evacuated since municipal officials in South Florida, and statewide, began scrutinizing older high-rises in the wake of the Surfside collapse to ensure that substantial structural problems are not being ignored.

The Crestview condo association could not be immediately reached for comment on the delay between the January recertification report and Fridays evacuation.

Evacuating residents hauling suitcases packed items into cars Friday evening outside the Crestview, which was built in 1972.

Harold Dauphin was on his way home from picking up his son Harold at camp Friday when he noticed a helicopter buzzing around his apartment and a heightened police presence. He wondered whether there had been a shooting nearby but then came home to find out that his building was being evacuated.

The two live on the second floor of the building. He said he hadnt heard anything about the problems that have come to light. He grabbed what he could  clothes, his work uniform and some electronic devices  and they left.

Its unfortunate, but I understand. Knowing what happened in Surfside, you know, its understandable, he said.

North Miami Beach commissioner Fortuna Smukler rushed to the building Friday afternoon. She said authorities were working to help the evacuated residents find places to go. She said with the approaching storm it was an especially stressful time for the residents. Smukler knows two people who are still unaccounted for in the Surfside building collapse.

I ran here right away because this is important to me. I needed to ensure that what happened in Surfside doesnt happen here, she said. It could have been our building instead of Surfside.

The mayor of Miami-Dade County had suggested an audit of buildings 40 and older to make sure they are in compliance with the local recertification process after the condo building collapse last week that killed at least 22 people and left more than 120 still missing.

After reviewing files, the city Building and Zoning Department sent a notification that the Crestview building was not in compliance. On Friday, the building manager submitted a January recertification report in which an engineer hired by the condo association board found the property unsafe. The city then ordered all residents to evacuate immediately.

I am concerned that more buildings are in this condition. Hopefully, this is an easy fix. Thankfully, we have at least evacuated the residents and no harm will come to them or their pets, Smukler said.

The North Miami Beach Police Department was helping with the evacuation.

The Crestview Towers Condo Association said in a lawsuit in federal court that it suffered $8.1 million in damage from Hurricane Irma. The condo association had sued its insurer, Liberty Surplus Insurance Corp., for not paying the claim.

Itemized estimates listed in the lawsuit showed repair needs of more than $533,000 for the roof, $750,000 for concrete restoration, $605,000 for electrical work and $405,000 for new windows, among other repairs.

In court papers, the insurer said that the condo association reported the damage in 2019, two years after Irma tore through Florida. An inspection conducted for the insurer showed the pooling of water on low spots of the roof and multiple layers of previous repairs to the aged roof. It also showed that windows in the units were deteriorated from age.

Plaintiff did not provide Liberty with notice as soon as possible and further, at Libertys post-loss inspection there was still confusion regarding where the loss or damage occurred at the subject property, the insurer said.

A parallel lawsuit also was filed in state court in Miami. This spring, the parties asked that the federal lawsuit be dismissed and agreed to begin mediation in May in the state lawsuit.

___

AP writers Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida, and Denise Lavoie in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency rule change that allowed for the sale of a 15% ethanol gasoline blend in the summer months.

The decision deals a significant blow to the ethanol industry and corn farmers who grow the crop from which the fuel additive is made. They had anticipated increased ethanol demand through year-round sales of the higher blend.

Most gasoline sold in the U.S. today is blended with 10% ethanol. Corn farmers and ethanol refiners have pushed for the government to allow the widespread sale of a 15% ethanol blend.

The Trump administration made the change to fulfill a campaign promise to Midwest farmers. The EPA under President Donald Trump announced the change in May 2019, ending a summer ban on the E15 blend. Provisions of the Clean Air Act have prohibited the sale of certain fuels with a higher volatility from June 1 through Sept. 15 to limit smog. Congress has allowed 10% ethanol, and the EPA in its 2019 ruling revised the interpretation of the exemption to federal law to include the 15% ethanol blend.

Ethanol supporters contend that using more of the corn-based renewable fuel is better for the environment and helps meet federal climate change goals.

Three judges on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued Friday's decision. They said it's clear from federal law that Congress balanced wide-ranging economic, energy-security, and geopolitical implications and that the wording of the law reflects a compromise, not simply a desire to maximize ethanol production at all costs. They concluded Congress did not intend to allow ethanol blends higher than 10% to be widely sold year-round. They said the EPA overstepped its authority.

The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the trade group for the petroleum industry that challenged the EPA decision, said the court simply followed government's interpretation of the law in effect for 30 years.

There is no ambiguity in statute and the previous administrations reinterpretation overstepped the will of Congress, said AFPM President and CEO Chet Thompson.

The Iowa Corn Growers Association said it will continue to work with the Biden administration, Congress and state officials to maintain consumer access to E15 year-round.

"It does not make sense to reinstate barriers that could inhibit market access to a cleaner-burning fuel choice that combats climate change, said Carl Jardon, a farmer from Randolph, Iowa, and president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association.

The decision is the second major court defeat for the ethanol industry in a week. On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court said some petroleum refiners may exempt themselves from requirements to blend ethanol into the gasoline they produce, further cutting into the amount of ethanol blended into the national fuel supply.

Ethanol supporters could ask the full D.C. Circuit Court to review the decision of the three-judge panel. They also could ask Congress to change the law to allow for year around E15 sales.

The industry is hoping this year's sales will not be curtailed because by the time the court issues its mandate and the EPA is required to comply most of the summer season will have passed.

This is the third summer E15 sales have been allowed and there were indications sales were increasing. Sales jumped 24% in Iowa from 2019 to 2020, surpassing 60.5 million gallons in 2020, the Renewable Fuels Association reported. That increase was despite a 14% drop in the state's overall petroleum consumption from 2019 levels due to fewer people driving because of he coronavirus pandemic.
WOOD RIVER  Public health officials continue to make strides in the battle against COVID-19, but the emergence of new strains of the virus, such as the Delta variant, serves as a reminder that the fight isnt over.

The Delta variant is considered to be two to three times more contagious than other variants and is already causing problems in the U.S., with Missouri, in particular, seeing an uptick in cases in areas with low vaccination rates.

The Delta variant is the one that came from India, where it wreaked havoc about six weeks ago, said Amy Yeager, public information officer for the Madison County Health Department. Right now, its the Delta variant that is setting the United Kingdom into another lockdown and it was announced Tuesday morning that Australia is going into another lockdown. Israel has the highest vaccination rate of any country on the globe and they just instituted a mask mandate again.

We dont know what the Delta is going to do here, but we do know it has the highest multiplying or doubling rate of any of the variants. Its moving a lot faster than any of the other variants.

The Illinois Department of Public Health lists the Delta among its COVID-19 Variants of Concern, along with the Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma and two strains of the Epsilon variant.

As far as Delta, there is still a lot we dont know, but (public health director) Toni Corona has put forth some questions that we have to the IDPH, Yeager said. We are still meeting every other week with the PIOs (public information officers) from the bi-state area.

We know that Delta is in Missouri and that there are some specific hot spots there. A lot of people from Illinois travel back and forth to Missouri for work and we know that the Lake of the Ozarks area is a hotspot for Delta right now. We know that its here in the area and we dont know much at this point, but were trying to get answers.

Yeager noted that the Delta variant seems to be hitting two age groups in the U.S. the hardest  unvaccinated adults and children under 12, who have not yet had a vaccine approved for their use.

Pfizer and Moderna are working through clinical trials for the vaccine for kids under 12, so its not like were going to have a vaccine for them in the next couple weeks, Yeager said. For those 12 and older who are unvaccinated, its important for them to get the vaccine.

There is a small number of people with specific medical conditions that are unable to get the vaccine, so for the sake of those people and for the kids under 12, we ask that other people get vaccinated to continue building that wall of protection around them.

The number of new COVID-19 cases on the Madison County Health Department COVID-19 Dashboard (https://gisportal.co.madison.il.us/portal/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/c2a8d5f6752f498286bfc31252ecee1b), which had been steadily declining, have started to increase again, and the Delta variant might be the reason.

Four or five weeks ago, we had new cases in the lower range, like one to six new cases a day, Yeager said. Then it started to creep up a bit and it held pretty strong for two weeks or so with numbers in the seven to nine range. Then we started getting into double digits again and now its really picked up steam, where it went from the lower 10s to the upper teens pretty quickly.

Weve had six or seven days, all except for one, in the twenties for new cases per day, and Monday we had 29. Last Monday (June 21) we had 101 active cases and this Monday we had 192. Last Monday we had a seven-day positivity rate of 1.65 percent and this Monday we had a rate of 4.99 percent, and thats a big jump for one week. Whether or not its Delta, I dont know, but in the end, it doesnt matter, its COVID. Youre still going to get sick from it and you could wind up in the hospital.

For Yeager, the upward tick is another reminder that the pandemic is not over, and that people shouldnt let their guard down.

We are one of the most vaccinated counties in the state at 41.59 percent fully vaccinated and St. Clair County is 39.71 percent, Yeager said. Those are great numbers but nowhere near the 70 to 85 percent suggested range. The bottom line is that we encourage everyone to get vaccinated, especially with the unknowns of the Delta variant.

On June 21, the average number of new cases per day was eight, and by Monday, that number had jumped to 20 new cases per day.

Were on an uptick, so we encourage people to go back to our original messaging, Yeager said. Wash your hands often, keep some distance from other people especially if you dont know their vaccine status. If youre vaccinated, wear your mask if you want to, and if youre not vaccinated, you should wear a mask, and kids ages 2 to 12 should be wearing a mask.

Despite the challenges presented by the Delta and other variants, Yeager remains upbeat.

Were not done with COVID and the pandemic is not over yet, but were in a much better place than we were in last year at this time, Yeager said. A year ago, we were really deep in long-term care outbreaks and lost a lot of older folks.

Things are getting better, but its a matter of following the necessary steps and doing your part to help keep everybody healthy and try to slow the spread of the virus.

Yeager urges people who are not vaccinated to continue wearing masks.

As a health department, we follow the CDC and IDPH recommendations and we understand that we are still in a global pandemic, Yeager said. We understand that there is a whole mental health layer to all of this.

Even if youre vaccinated, if you feel more comfortable wearing your mask, then by all means wear it. Were still learning a lot about the Delta variant and I still wear my mask. From what weve seen so far, its been making people sicker faster and putting them in the hospital faster. Its primarily hitting people who are unvaccinated, including kids.

Yeager, who was on a call with the IDPH Tuesday morning, added that the Alpha is still the primary variant in Illinois.

However, they are closely watching Delta and its movement, especially with our proximity to Missouri, Yeager said.

COVID testing sites are still listed on the Madison County dashboard, and Yeager urges people to take advantage of them.

All of the Walgreens and CVS stores in Madison County offer free COVID testing, as do a lot of the health providers, Yeager said. We encourage people, especially in higher-risk situations, if they are having symptoms of COVID, to get tested.

If you choose to get a COVID home test, please follow up with a medical provider afterward. Those results should always be confirmed at a testing site such as CVS or Walgreens, one of the sites on our dashboard, or by a medical provider.

This is the last week of the Madison County mass vaccination clinic at Gateway Center in Collinsville, with the clinic set to close at the end of the day on Saturday. It is the last mass vaccination in Illinois outside of Chicago.

The clinic is closed on Wednesday but is open on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Its been a very successful site and it has served its purpose, Yeager said. Were grateful to the city of Collinsville for making that facility available to us for over six months. We could not have done this without the Illinois National Guard, and it has been a great working relationship.

Appointments are available on the Madison County Health Department website, but walk-ins are also welcome.

We still have part of the facility reserved for a few random days for community-based mobile clinics in July and August, probably one or two days a week, Yeager said. We will only have one National Guard unit after July 3.

Yeager added that the COVID-19 vaccine is now available at many other sites in Madison County.

Most pharmacies have the vaccine and you can make an appointment, and some of them take walk-ins, Yeager said. We have several pediatricians offices that have the vaccine now and some of them will vaccinate people who are not their clients. We will continue to post our community-based clinics on our website.
AP

LANSING, Mich. (AP)  The former host of the To Catch a Predator TV series turned himself in Friday after a Michigan judge issued a warrant for his arrest for no-showing at a court hearing to explain why he had not given a defense lawyer more footage of a police sting operation.

Chris Hansen, 61, checked in at the Shiawassee County jail in Corunna  65 miles (104.61 kilometers) northwest of Detroit  was released and has 14 days to produce the full video, prosecutor Scott Koerner said. Hansen later posted a photo of the county courthouse on Instagram and said all matters had been resolved.
Stretching some 30 miles from Midland to Clare, the Pere Marquette Rail Trail welcomes bikers, rollerbladers and walkers  but it looked significantly different and stretched much longer in its original run.

Originally operating in the late-1860s, the Flint and Pere Marquette Rail Line ran all the way from Flint to Ludington and ran through Midland County.

The name Pere Marquette stems from Jacques Marquette  a French Jesuit missionary who founded Michigans first European settlement, Sault Ste. Marie. The word Pere translates to father in French  making the translated name of the trail Father Marquette.

The railway was a mode of transportation for Midlanders to make the trek from Midland to Flint or Saginaw in much less time than taking the Belle Seymour steamboat on the Tittabawassee River  a trip which could take roughly 12 hours.

However, transporting people was not the only benefit of the rail, said Jake Huss, the historical programs and exhibits manager at the Midland Center for the Arts. Huss also serves as the historian of the trail.

It not only revolutionized travel, but it revolutionized business, Huss said. (Midland) was, of course, big into the lumber industry and our entire area was covered with old grove white pines. When youre establishing a sawmill to do business, you need to have documents going around, you need to have mail and you need to be able to get people here. Thats how important the rail was.

After the Civil War, Midland was full of free land ready for the taking, and a large majority of new settlers made their way up to Midland and the surrounding area by taking the Flint and Pere Marquette Rail Line.

Herbert Henry Dow was one of the new settlers that made his way to Midland by stepping off a train on the Flint and Pere Marquette Rail Line in the late 1890s  and he soon left his mark on the town and the world by becoming one of the most well-known chemists and opening Dow Chemical.

Jonathan Pierce also used the railway to catch the first construction train on the railway to become the first settler in the newly-founded village of Coleman shortly after the rail had extended to the West from Midland in 1870. From there, he built the Exchange Hotel and a mill that was responsible for the construction of banks, churches and the business district.

After beginning operation in the 1860s, the trail itself has undergone several name changes. In the early 1900s, it was changed from the Flint and Pere Marquette Rail Line to the Pere Marquette and was consolidated to The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in 1947.

The Pere Marquette became the largest railroad system in the state when Chicago and West Michigan, Flint and Pere Marquette, Grand Rapids and Western and Detroit consolidated to form one Pere Marquette Railroad in 1900.

In 1902, the railroad opened Union Station in Lansing and added the railroads principal resort train  The Resort Special  in 1909.

After establishing itself as one of the top railways in the state, the Pere Marquette went national by becoming part of a multi-state railroad system created by the Van Swerigen Brothers in Cleveland, Ohio in 1929.

The train ran until the late 1980s and provided transportation of people and goods for over 120 years.

While the line benefited the area in many ways, it also had its share of disasters  many of which occurred in the early 1900s and 1910s. MCFTA archives show photos of depots and stations along the Pere Marquette Rail Line and photos of disasters including wrecks and train derailments.

In 1903, an accident killed 18 people at East Paris along the rail. Shortly after, in 1907, the trail had Michigans worst railroad crash when two trains collided head-on on the rail East of Salem due to misread train orders  killing 30 people.

Some of the photos show the results of the 1912 flood and washing the tracks away, causing a disastrous derailment. Other records show a derailment of a train near Smiths Crossing near the boarder of Midland and Ingersoll Townships. An engineer and fireman were killed in the incident, according to the description of the archived photo.

Another archived photo from September 1986 shows the Ann Street Pere Marquette depot surrounded by water as the river crested at a historic and catastrophic 33.89 feet. Other archived photos show Brown Lumber and the Farmers Market engulfed in water during the March 1976 flood.

After the railway was discontinued in the late 1980s, it became a project of locals to transform the rail into something beneficial to the community. The land was already flat due to the railroad occupying the space, so the first section of the trail itself was completed in 1993 and stretched out to Coleman in 1994.

The trail was extended out to Clare in the early 2000s and has remained that way since. While there has been past discussion of expanding to Ludington  an original spot on the rail  no expansion talks have taken place in recent years.

Now, the trail serves as a great source of exercise for walking, rollerblading and bike riding for locals  and it helps preserve the memory of the historic railroad.

As a youngster, Huss said he recalled taking birthday trips to the trail where he and his family would go for a bike ride to celebrate the occasion. As a historian, he said he loves the fact the trail and its history can be preserved into something beneficial to the community.

Not everything can be turned into a museum, Huss said. One of the best ways to actually preserve our history is to make modern use of it.  Its history, just the fact that the rail trail is named the Pere Marquette Rail Trial is important to our areas heritage  its very existence is a monument to our history.
LONDON (AP)  German Chancellor Angela Merkel made her final visit to Britain on Friday before she steps down later this year, laying out her hope that relations between two of Europe's major powers can be reset following years of Brexit-related tensions.

In her 22nd visit to the U.K. since she became chancellor 16 years ago, Merkel sought to downplay the tensions that clearly arose after British voters decided in June 2016 to leave the European Union. She even expressed interest in a new treaty between the two countries to cement the new relationship.

It is, now that Britain has left the European Union, a good opportunity to open a new chapter in our relationship, she told a joint press conference alongside her host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, after they dined on English asparagus and Oxfordshire beef during a working lunch at his Chequers country retreat.

We would be very happy on the German side to work together on a friendship treaty or a cooperation treaty, which would reflect the whole breadth of relations," she said before heading off to meet with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle.

Merkel also addressed Johnson's Cabinet via video call, the first foreign leader to do so since U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1997. Both leaders agreed during their discussions that their respective cabinets would meet annually, the first arrangement of its kind for the U.K.

Merkel said she was optimistic that pragmatic solutions can be found to post-Brexit trading arrangements as they relate to Northern Ireland, the U.K.'s sole land border with the EU and its tariff-free single market and customs union.

The Northern Ireland protocol has seen customs and border checks imposed on some goods moving between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. to ensure there is no hard border on the island of Ireland. Thats angered Northern Irelands unionist community, and many members of Johnson's Conservative Party, who say the checks amount to a border in the Irish Sea and weaken ties between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.

One flash point since the new arrangements came into place at the start of the year has centered on chilled meats, such as sausages, which are staples of German and British cuisine. Under EU rules, sales of such products are not allowed from so-called third countries, which Britain is after Brexit. A grace period to allow British banger sales to Northern Ireland was extended earlier this week by a further three months to the end of September.

Johnson said he was confident the thorny issue will be resolved following his meeting with Merkel.

Imagine if Bratwurst could not be moved from Dortmund to Duesseldorf because of the jurisdiction of an international court," he said. Youd think it was absolutely extraordinary. So we have to sort it out. Im sure as Angela says with goodwill and with patience we can sort it out.

Merkel also said double-jabbed Britons should be able to travel to Germany without quarantine in the foreseeable future."

But she expressed grave concern to Johnson over the number of fans being allowed into Wembley Stadium for the latter stages of soccer's European Championship given high levels of infection of the more contagious delta variant of coronavirus in the U.K.

More than 60,000 spectators will be at the stadium in north London for the semifinals on July 6 and 7 and the final on July 11 as part of a government program on holding mass events safely. All ticket-holders must show evidence of a negative COVID-19 test or proof of two vaccine doses.

Merkel also said she was a little bit sad that the England soccer team beat Germany 2-0 in their round of 16 match earlier this week but sent her best wishes to the England team for the rest of the tournament.

Im obviously grateful to you for breaking with that tradition, just for once, Johnson quipped.

Johnson also announced the creation of a new academic medal in honor of Merkel, a scientist by training. An award of 10,000 pound ($13,800) will be given each year from 2022 to a British or German woman in science. It is named after Caroline Herschel, a German-born British astrophysicist who was a pioneer in the field.

___

Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this story.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  An Iowa man has been sentenced to eight months in federal prison for mail fraud after pleading guilty to an unemployment insurance fraud scheme in which he illegally collected thousands of dollars in pandemic-related benefits.

Jerry Johnson, 54, of Webster City was sentenced Thursday in Sioux City's federal court after pleading guilty in January.

Federal prosecutors said he used his credit union account to receive over $31,000 in unemployment insurance money he was not entitled to. It was paid out by the state of Washington as benefits to those unemployed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Court documents indicate Johnson received the money in the names of others in May 2020. He withdrew the benefits in cash and mailed the money to others. The scheme ended after the credit union later rejected as fraudulent a similar $20,000 payment from Massachusetts.

Johnson also was ordered to pay restitution to Washington state and must serve a two-year term of supervised release after the prison term.

His federal defender, Michael Maloney, argued for 30 days of imprisonment followed by seven months of home confinement as a punishment sufficient to deter a 54-year-old, who has never served a day in jail, from future criminal activity.

Johnson was released on bond and is to surrender to the Bureau of Prison on a date yet to be set.
CAIRO (AP)  Libyan maritime authorities have acknowledged that a Libyan coast guard vessel had fired warning shots at a migrant boat it was chasing in the Mediterranean Sea, in an apparent effort to stop it from crossing to Europe.

The Libyan navy issued a statement late Thursday condemning any acts that violate local and international standards and laws" and vowing to hold those responsible to account. The statement added that the Libyan vessel had endangered the lives of migrants during the chase.

On Thursday, the German non-governmental group Sea-Watch released footage filmed from a plane showing the Libyan coast guard chasing at high speed a blue wooden boat with a small engine and at least two dozen people onboard.

During the chase, which occurred in international waters in Maltas search and rescue responsibility zone, men in uniform aboard the Libyan vessel could be seen firing at least two times toward the boat, with bullets hitting the water nearby. The Libyan coast guard came close to crashing into the boat several times.

On Friday, EU Commission spokesman Peter Stano deplored the incident as a cause of concern, adding that the commission had already asked for explanations from the Libyan government.

We are checking the facts and circumstances behind that event and certainly we will follow this up very closely. And ask for explanations but also to carry out an investigation on what happened, Stano said.

The EU trains, equips and supports the Libyan coast guard to intercept people trying to cross the Central Mediterranean to Europe. At least 723 people are known to have either died or gone missing taking this route on unseaworthy boats so far this year.

On Friday, Safa Msehli, spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration, said bodies of six individuals believed to be migrants had washed ashore in Libya just that day. She tweeted the deaths were a grim reminder that many people sink quietly in the Mediterranean in invisible shipwrecks, amid an absence of effective and responsible State Search and Rescue."

Nearly 15,000 men, women and children have been intercepted by the Libyan coast guard and returned to Libyan shores from the start of the year up to June 26, a record number.

The Libyan navy also vowed in the statement to pursue its duties to save lives at sea and safeguard the Libyan coast, according to local and international laws and humanitarian standards."
SOMERVILLE, Mass. (AP)  A Massachusetts man has returned long overdue books that were checked out in the 1920s and 1930s to the Somerville Public Library.

Bob Alvarez, 63, found the books in the basement of his Methuen home in a wooden box, The Boston Globe reported on Thursday.

The books were stored in a wooden box in the attic of the family's Somerville home until it was sold in 2010. Alvarez moved the box and other items into his basement and never examined the contents until June.

The books belonged to his late aunt, Helen Godimis, who died in 1937 at the age of 16 from the flu, the newspaper reported.

She left behind 39 books. Some of them were from Somerville schools, some from the library and others were apparently from his aunts personal collection. The oldest books had copyrights from the 19th century.

When he found the books, Alvarez contacted the library, saying Ive got some overdue books, am I talking to the right people?

Alvarez will not be charged late fees as the library stopped charging the fees as of July 1.

Some of the returned books are currently on display at the West Branch of the library with a note explaining how the books made their way back decades after they were checked out.
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP)  Prosecutors in Wisconsin want a judge to allow evidence at Kyle Rittenhouse's trial that shows he had a previous violent encounter in Kenosha before he fatally shot two men and injured another during a police brutality protest last year.

The state's motion filed Thursday in Kenosha County Circuit Court also seeks to show Rittenhouse was associated with the far-right Proud Boys, a group linked to political violence.

Rittenhouse, 18, is charged with killing Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, on Aug. 25 during protests in Kenosha over the police shooting two days earlier of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was left paralyzed when he was shot by a white police officer.

Prosecutors want to introduce a video from July 1, 2020, which they say shows Rittenhouse striking a teenage girl in the back at Kenosha's lakefront.

In both the July 1, 2020 incident and the August 25, 2020 incident, the defendant, an Illinois resident, willingly and intentionally put himself in violent situations in Wisconsin that do not involve him in order to commit further acts of violence, the motion states.

Prosecutors also said Rittenhouses association with the Proud Boys should be considered at the trial because it shows that he takes pride in violence.

Photos taken in January show Rittenhouse drinking inside a Mount Pleasant bar and gesturing with what appeared to be a white power symbol. The motion states that prosecutors have since learned that the people with Rittenhouse at the bar included the leader of the Wisconsin Proud Boys chapter and several of its highest-ranking members.

Prosecutors allege Rittenhouse, who is white, left his home in Antioch, Illinois, and traveled to Kenosha to answer a call for paramilitary groups to protect businesses during the protest.

Rittenhouse faces multiple charges, including two homicide counts. He has argued he fired in self-defense after protesters attacked him.

Black Lives Matter supporters have painted him as a trigger-happy white supremacist, but some conservatives see him as a symbol for gun rights and have rallied around him, generating $2 million for his bail in November.

Rittenhouse's defense attorney did not immediately respond to a message and email seeking comment on prosecutors' latest motion.

Rittenhouse's trial is scheduled to start Nov. 1.
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)  New York is seeing signs that more people are testing positive for the coronavirus, a contrast from weeks of declining rates of new positive tests.

An average of 365 people tested positive each day over the seven day period ending Thursday, according to state data. That's up 17% from 312 as of a week ago.

Exactly why is unclear, but data show the numbers are rising even as less testing is occurring. The state averaged 75,500 COVID-19 tests in the seven days through Thursday, down from nearly 87,000 the previous week.

Department of Health spokesperson Abigail Barker said the highly contagious Delta variant represents an increasing percentage of the coronavirus variants identified in New York, which is in line with national trends.

As the rate of vaccination increases and the rate of testing decreases, individuals getting tested are more likely to be positive, Barker said in an email.

Parts of New York City and its suburbs are driving much of the increase in positive tests: Staten Island averaged 33 new positives each day, up 45% from the previous week. Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx also saw upticks to an average of 39, 58 and 29 people testing positive each day, while the rate was flat in Queens at 50.

Still, far fewer people are testing positive in New York now than during this spring: 781 people were testing positive each day in the last week of May.

Meanwhile, hospitals statewide reported a record low of 330 COVID-19 patients as of last Saturday. That figure has fluctuated in recent days to 349 patients as of Thursday. Hospitals in Manhattan, Staten Island and Suffolk counties are reporting among the most patients per-capita in the state.

The uptick in new positives comes weeks after New York removed most COVID-19 restrictions, and ahead of the Fourth of July weekend and a busy travel season.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo urged residents to get vaccinated. Public health experts say the variant poses the most danger where vaccinations are sparse.

About 54.2% of New York's 20 million residents are fully vaccinated, according to federal data.

Rates are lowest in parts of western New York and New York City: from one-third of residents in Allegany County, to 42% in the Bronx, to 44% in Brooklyn.
NEW YORK (AP)  All three candidates who are still in the running in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary have filed legal actions seeking the right to review the ongoing ranked choice vote tally.

Civil rights attorney Maya Wiley filed a lawsuit Thursday in state court in Brooklyn seeking to preserve her right to challenge the election results and asking for all of the ballots that were cast or attempted to be cast to be saved.
LONDON (AP)  U.K. authorities on Friday halted the prosecution of two former British soldiers over the killing of three people almost 50 years ago in Northern Ireland, including two who died on Bloody Sunday  one of the deadliest days in the conflict known as The Troubles.

The decision to discontinue proceedings against the two men, known only as Soldier F and Soldier B, came after a judge recently threw out evidence against two other former soldiers because of the way it was obtained. As the cases were similar, prosecutors concluded there was no reasonable prospect of a conviction in the cases against Soldier F and Soldier B.

Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Herron said prosecutors had a duty to review the cases in light of the new information, despite the extreme distress caused by their decision.

I recognize these decisions bring further pain to victims and bereaved families who have relentlessly sought justice for almost 50 years and have faced many setbacks, Herron said. It is clear to see how these devastating events in 1972, in which the families involved lost an innocent loved one, caused an enduring pain which continues to weigh heavily.

The victims families have spent years campaigning for justice for those killed and injured on Bloody Sunday, while supporters of British veterans argue that aging former soldiers shouldnt be prosecuted for making split-second decisions decades ago.

Family members were bitterly disappointed by Fridays decision and said they planned to challenge it.

You can get away with the murder of a child if you are in the British Army because the state will always protect you, Des Doherty, the lawyer for one of the families, said after meeting with prosecutors. The state will subvert the legal system and use it to their advantage. And theyve done so in the past. And then the illegitimate will be legitimized by the (Public Prosecution Service) and the courts.

The decision means Soldier F wont be tried for the killings of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted killings of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick ODonnell in Londonderry, also known as Derry, on Bloody Sunday, Jan. 30, 1972.

In a separate case, the veteran identified as Soldier B wont face prosecution for the killing of 15-year-old Daniel Hegarty on July 31, 1972, in the same community.

The shooting occurred during Operation Motorman, an Army drive to wrest control of no-go areas from the Irish Republican Army. Daniel and his 16-year-old cousin, Christopher, who had gone to watch the military operation, were shot after encountering an Army patrol.

Prosecutors began pursuing the cases after the conclusion of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry in 2010, which was designed to find out what happened, not bring criminal charges.

The inquiry found that British soldiers had opened fire without justification at unarmed, fleeing civilians and then lied about it for decades. Those findings refuted an initial investigation that took place soon after the slayings, which branded the demonstrators as IRA bombers and gunmen.

Herron stressed that Fridays decision doesnt change the fact that those killed and injured in these tragic incidents were entirely innocent.

Bloody Sunday has come to symbolize The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the long-running conflict between mainly Roman Catholic supporters of a united Ireland and predominantly Protestant forces that want to remain part of the United Kingdom. Tensions have eased since the 1998 Good Friday peace accord, which created a system for Republican and Unionist parties to share power in Northern Ireland.

But the aftermath of the conflict still lingers for the survivors and the soldiers who were dispatched to Northern Ireland during the violence.

Johnny Mercer, a Conservative Party lawmaker, has sought legislation to prevent Northern Ireland veterans from facing repeated investigations for alleged crimes that took place decades ago in the heat of battle. He resigned from Prime Minister Boris Johnsons Cabinet after the government failed to back his proposal.

Another terribly sad day for Northern Ireland, Mercer said on Twitter. Both for families who have been dragged along an unachievable path, and for veterans whove been broken by the process.
TOKYO (AP)  The trial in Tokyo of two Americans charged with helping Nissans former chairman, Carlos Ghosn, flee Japan wrapped up Friday with prosecutors seeking prison terms of more than two years for each of them.

The Americans, former Green Beret Michael Taylor and his son Peter Taylor, were arrested in Massachusetts last year and extradited in March. They acknowledged guilt when their trial opened last month and have apologized for their alleged roles in Ghosns escape.

Ghosn was arrested in November 2018 and fled in December 2019 to Lebanon while out on bail awaiting trial.

The maximum penalty in Japan for helping a criminal is three years in prison. Prosecutors demanded a sentence of of two years and 10 months for Michael Taylor and two years and six months for his son.

The Taylors defense argued for suspended sentences for the two, who spent 10 months in custody before their extradition.

Chief Judge Hideo Nirei said sentencing was set for July 19. The Taylors case has sped along compared to most Japanese trials, which tend to drag on for many months, if not years.

When asked for comment, Michael Taylor, audibly sobbing, asked for forgiveness.

I stand here today a man whose life has been destroyed because of this, he told the court. I am a citizen of this earth. No one will stand before you and be more remorseful and sorry than me and my son.

He denied prosecutors' allegations that he had profited from helping Ghosn to escape. He said he was so deep in debt because of this.

Peter Taylor appeared calm but also apologized.

After my experience in the Japanese judicial system, my impression has changed a lot, he said. And last but not least, I apologize to the people of Japan, and I deeply regret my action.

The prosecutors described Ghosn's flight as a very cunning and brash escape.

Ghosn is still wanted on charges of falsifying securities statements in under-reporting his compensation, and of breach of trust in using Nissan money for personal gain. He is a citizen of France, Brazil and Lebanon, which does not have an extradition treaty with Japan.

Ghosn, who led Nissan Motor Co. for two decades, has insisted he is innocent, stressing the compensation was never agreed upon or paid, and the expenses were for legitimate business.

In December 2019, Ghosn put on sunglasses and walked from his Tokyo home to Shinagawa station. He rode a bullet train to a hotel in Osaka, where he hid in a big box, supposedly containing audio equipment, that had air holes punched in it so he could breathe, according to prosecutors.

The box was taken to a private jet, skirting luggage inspections, and flown to Turkey. Ghosn then traveled on to Lebanon.

Our judicial system was undermined, prosecutor Ryozo Kitajima told the court, stressing prospects were now slim Ghosn will ever stand trial.

The Taylors defense lawyer Keiji Isaji argued that Ghosn was the chief culprit, and his clients were exploited because they didnt understand Japanese law.

Isaji asked the court to treat Michael Taylor with leniency given his record as a Green Beret and work in FBI anti-terrorism operations and humanitarian charities. He described Peter Taylor as a young businessman showing promise." He said neither were likely to commit another crime.

They deeply regret what they did, Isaji said.

___

Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama
CONCORD, N.H. (AP)  The New Hampshire Supreme Court struck a final blow Friday to a 2017 voter registration law that faced repeated legislative and court challenges, upholding a previous ruling that its unconstitutional.

The law required additional documentation from voters who register within 30 days of an election. It was passed by the Republican Legislature after President Donald Trump alleged that widespread voter fraud led to his loss in the state in 2016, though there is no evidence to support that and voter fraud cases are rare. Supporters said the law would increase trust in elections by requiring people to prove they live where they vote, but opponents argued it was confusing, unnecessary and intimidating.

After the New Hampshire Democratic Party and the League of Women Voters sued, a judge allowed the law to take effect in 2018 but blocked penalties of a $5,000 fine and a year in jail for fraud. In 2019, after Democrats won control of the Legislature, lawmakers passed a bill to repeal the law, but it was vetoed by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu.

The case went to trial in late 2019, and a judge ruled in April 2020 that the law was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld that decision Friday.

We acknowledge that the interests identified by the state are important, if not vital, Justice Patrick Donovan wrote in the unanimous order. But the law failed to further those objectives while imposing unreasonable burdens on the right to vote, the court concluded.

Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley said the ruling sends a clear message to Chris Sununu and NH Republicans that their insidious voter suppression schemes will not stand in New Hampshire.

Today, we celebrate this incredible victory for voting rights. Tomorrow, we will continue to work to protect voting rights in the Granite State," he said in a statement.

Sununu encouraged the Legislature to propose new legislation taking the court order into account.

It's disappointing that these commonsense reforms were not supported by our Supreme Court, but we have to respect their decision, he said.

In its ruling, the court rejected the states argument that the law could only be struck down if it was unconstitutional in every set of circumstances. Similarly, it disagreed with the states claim that the law shouldnt be deemed unconstitutional because only some, but not all, voters are burdened by it.

The state also unsuccessfully argued that the secretary of state should have been allowed to revise the voter registration form to make it easier to understand. At trial, an expert witness for the plaintiffs testified it was written at a readability level equivalent to the Harvard Law Review.

Judge David Anderson, who presided over the bench trial in Manchester, agreed with the state that the burdens imposed by the law were not severe in that they didnt outright exclude voters from the process. But he said the burdens themselves are neither reasonable nor nondiscriminatory, particularly for young, mobile, low-income and homeless voters who use same-day registration more frequently.

Rep. David Cote, the ranking Democrat on the House Election Law Committee, said the ruling confirms what Democrats have said all along  there is no reasonable justification for enacting unnecessary obstacles to voting.

I thank the New Hampshire Supreme Court for its clear, unanimous ruling today, striking down a law that never should have been enacted, he said.

Republican House Speaker Sherm Packard, meanwhile, said his party would continue working to strengthen election integrity.

While this outcome is not ideal, it does give the Legislature a renewed sense of purpose as we work together to ensure New Hampshires elections remain fair with open transparency," he said.
CHICAGO (AP)  Another member of Chicagos City Council is facing corruption charges, the U.S. attorneys office announced Thursday.

Alderman Carrie Austin and her chief of staff Chester Wilson are accused of bribery. The indictment alleges Austin, 72, and Wilson, 55, conspired to receive home improvements from construction contractors seeking city assistance for a proposed development in Austins ward.

Austin, who is also charged with lying to the FBI, is now one of three sitting members of Chicagos City Council under federal indictment. Also facing corruption charges are long-time Alderman Ed Burke and Alderman Patrick Daley Thompson, who is related to former Mayors Richard J. Daley and Richard M. Daley.

Austin, who was appointed in 1994, is second in seniority to Burke, who was charged with racketeering two years ago. Thompson was accused earlier this year with filing false tax returns and lying to insurance officials. Both Burke and Thompson have pleaded not guilty to charges.

Austins ward office was raided by the FBI on June 19, 2019. Federal prosecutors allege she lied to the FBI the same day, denying she received anything from the developer of the project. No date has been set for the arraignment of Austin or Wilson.

Austin could not be immediately reached for comment. Wilson, who is also charged with theft of government funds, refused to comment.
PHOENIX (AP)  State officials concerned about wildfires are urging Arizonans to refrain from using fireworks.

The Department of Forestry and Fire Management said Friday that fireworks are a concern because more than half of the state remains in exceptional drought status at a time when wildfire activity continues across much of the state.

The department noted that fireworks are banned year-round on state trust land and that temporary fire restrictions remain in effect on other public lands due to fire activity, drought-stressed conditions and safety concerns.

Some fireworks are legal in Arizona but Prevention Officer Aaron Casem said it'd be best for the public to understand the threat, make good choices, and if possible, partake in alternative 4th of July activities."

Fireworks started a 260-acre fire off Interstate 17 and northwest of New River last year.
LONDON (AP)  Labour leader Keir Starmer breathed a sigh of relief Friday after the party eked out victory in a special election in one of its northern strongholds, easing discontent after a series of poor showings by Britains main opposition party.

Starmer praised Kim Leadbeaters 323-vote triumph in the election to represent the Batley and Spen district of West Yorkshire in the House of Commons as a fantastic result. While the margin of victory was far below the 3,525-vote cushion Labour achieved in 2019, polls had suggested the party could lose the seat it has held since 1997.
POMONA, Calif. (AP)  Teenage boys chased down soccer balls on grassy fields. Dormitory beds were organized into small pods with a TV in each section. Some kids laid on the cots reading, while others played cards nearby with caseworkers.

The Biden administration on Friday gave a rare look inside an emergency shelter it opened to house migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border alone, calling the California facility a model among its large-scale sites.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, whose agency is in charge of caring for migrant children, was joined by elected officials as he toured the shelter housing nearly 1,400 children at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds in the city of Pomona. Two journalists from The Associated Press were allowed to accompany them and shared notes and photos of the tour with other news outlets as part of a pool arrangement.

The facility was a sharp contrast to conditions reported at other emergency shelters, where children have complained of foul-smelling food, little outdoor recreational space and having to spend their days sleeping with little to do and no knowledge of when they would be released to relatives in the United States.

We consider this a model, Becerra told reporters after touring the Pomona facility, which has a 30,000-square-foot (2,787-square-meter) air-conditioned room with foosball and ping pong tables, wooden blocks and other games. Large signs in Spanish above the rooms entryway read welcome, hope, and love.

In a room filled with caseworkers, Becerra spoke to the kids in Spanish about when they would be reunited with their families.

We are trying to do this as soon as possible, but in a safe manner," he said.

Within four hours of arriving at the shelter, each child can use the call center, a room with brightly colored paintings of butterflies and sea creatures. After that, they can call their families twice a week.

Next to the call area, scores of blue, pink and silver stars with names nearly covered a wall. An official said staffers post a star with a childs name when they are discharged from the facility.

Youre running out of space, Becerra noted.

Staff at the shelter roam the dorms and outdoor spaces to be on alert for any emergencies. Teachers from the Pomona Unified School District provide 90-minute classes twice a week to each child, with half the time spent developing their English skills.

With its existing buildings and green spaces, the Pomona site had some advantages over places like Fort Bliss Army base near El Paso, Texas, where the governments largest shelter was erected as a tent camp from scratch, Becerra said. Advocates have said Fort Bliss, which Becerra visited days ago without allowing media to accompany him, has been particularly problematic.

It is not easy to stand something up like this quickly, and do it right, but I think you can see that this is a place where kids can be healthy and safe," Becerra said of the Pomona facility.

The government set up the temporary shelters this spring as tens of thousands of children crossed the border alone. Of the 14 centers that opened, two have been shuttered because they did not meet government standards; others have been closing as more children are released to family in the U.S. or to facilities with higher levels of care.

While the emergency shelters are widely considered an improvement over border holding facilities packed with kids, the Biden administration is facing increasing pressure to address concerns that migrant children have been languishing in the unlicensed centers rather than being quickly reunited with their families in the United States, causing anxiety and panic attacks.

Republicans say the administration was caught flat-footed by the situation at the border and that President Joe Bidens immigration policies have encouraged unaccompanied children to come. Nearly 19,000 children traveling alone were picked up along the border in March, by far the highest month on record.

Advocates say no shelter can replace a family or licensed facility in terms of providing care for children. They say the emergency sites were meant to be a safe place to house children for a couple of weeks to give the government time to contact and vet their relatives. Those without family in the U.S. are supposed to be sent to a state-licensed facility.

As of this week, the average stay at temporary shelters was 37 days, with the network of facilities filled at just over half its capacity, according to Health and Human Services data obtained by the AP.

More than half of the 5,300 children at emergency shelters have close family in the U.S. such as a parent or grandparent. No such contact was identified for a third of the youth at those sites, the data showed.

Immigration attorney Karina Ramos of Immigrant Defenders Law Center in California visits the Pomona shelter twice a week. Of the 2,605 children who have come there, more than half have been reunited with their families, Becerras agency said.

The number one question is: When am I going home? Ramos said, which is obviously understandable.

But Ramos said the children generally don't have complaints. Most at the Pomona facility are teenage boys, with fewer than 300 children under 12. Most are from Guatemala and Honduras.

This is definitely not Fort Bliss, Ramos said. Children are generally active, and theyre happy, and they come talk to us.

In transcripts of interviews done by attorneys from March to early June and filed in federal court in Los Angeles, more than a dozen migrant children described their desperation to get out of the emergency facilities. In one account, a teenage girl said she had been at Fort Bliss for nearly 60 days and had resorted to eating only popsicles and juice because the food was foul.

Becerra said conditions have improved in recent weeks with additional spiritual, recreational, educational and mental health services. The Fort Bliss shelter also was being reconfigured to a more child-friendly pod system with single cots instead of doubles. More caseworkers have been added, speeding up family reunifications.

Because of the progress, Becerra said the number of children his agency is caring for has dropped from a high of more than 22,000 to just over 14,400, with more than half at licensed shelters. His agency said it will close four emergency facilities this summer, with Pomona and Fort Bliss staying open.

___

Watson reported from San Diego.
Imagine your ideal summertime grilling menu, and it might include burgers and hot dogs, or maybe some veggie and chicken kabobs. But what about miso-rubbed ribeye or abalone grilled right in its shell? These are just some of the recipes that the diverse cooking community in D.C. grew up with, and their memories and talents are a major part of what makes our dining scene so special.

This week, four of D.C.s most prominent immigrant chefs are taking you on a culinary voyage, offering up their favorite grilling recipes for you to enjoy at home.

Paolo Dungca of Pogiboy Pogiboy

Filipino Chicken Inasal



Chef: Paolo Dungca of Pogiboy

A native of the Philippines, chef Paolo Dungca takes his inspiration for this recipe from Bacolod, on the northwest coast of Negros Island. To hear Dungca tell it, chicken inasal is so popular and well-loved in this province that they have a market strip in Bacolod City named Manokan Country (Chicken Country) where all menus have Inasal on the menu.

The dish, whose name comes from the Ilonggo term for char-grilled or roasted, sees chicken marinated in a sweet-and-savory combo of aromatics and Sprite before being brushed in oil infused with aromatic lemongrass, garlic, and deep orange achiote.

This is a dish that evokes a lot of nostalgia for me, Dungca says. From the time I was a boy, I can remember chicken inasal being served at all of our family parties and gatherings  in the Philippines when I was really little and also when we moved to Los Angeles when I was 13. The flavors of this dish really remind me of home and that indescribable warmth you feel when sitting around a table full of delicious food with the people you love most.

Ingredients

For the achiote oil:



2 lemongrass stalks, trimmed, tough outer layers removed, thinly sliced

6 garlic cloves, crushed

1 (2-inch) piece ginger, peeled, thinly sliced

1 cups chicken fat or canola oil

 cup achiote (annatto) seeds

12 bay leaves



For the chicken:



12 lemongrass stalks, tough outer layers removed, thinly sliced

6 heads of garlic, cloves separated, chopped

2 small shallots, chopped

2 2-inch pieces ginger, peeled, chopped

2 cups sugar cane vinegar or coconut vinegar

1 cup Sprite or 7Up

10 tablespoons ground annatto seeds

2 tablespoons kosher salt

2 teaspoons ground black pepper

5 chicken leg quarters

Method

To make the achiote oil, bring lemongrass, garlic, ginger, oil, and achiote seeds to a simmer in a small saucepan over medium heat. Reduce the heat and simmer gently, stirring very occasionally, until oil is brick-red and fragrant. Remove from the heat and add the bay leaf. Steep 30 to 45 minutes. (The achiote oil can be made 1 week ahead. Let cool; cover and chill. This will be used for basting the chicken on the grill to give it that nice amber color.)

To make the chicken marinade, combine the lemongrass, garlic, shallot, ginger, vinegar, Sprite, annatto, black pepper, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Whisk to dissolve the salt. Set chicken legs, skin side down, on a cutting board. Working one at a time, cut a -inch deep slash along both sides of the thigh bone with a knife. This helps marinate the chicken deeper with flavor. Add the chicken and marinade to a bag and seal, pressing out as much air as possible; turn to coat. Marinate at least 6 hours and up to 12 hours.



Prepare the grill for medium-high indirect heat (for a charcoal grill, bank coals on one side; for a gas grill, leave one or two burners off). Remove the chicken from the marinade and discard the marinade. Secure each piece of chicken with 2 skewers if desired (the skewers will help you maneuver the chicken on the grill without tearing the skin). Season lightly with salt.



Grill the chicken over hottest side of grill, turning occasionally, until deeply browned and charred in spots, about 5 minutes. Move to cooler side of grill and cover. Continue grilling (covered), basting with achiote oil and turning every 5 minutes or so, until skin is crisp and meat is cooked through, 3040 minutes longer. Once cooked, baste with more achiote oil for the amber color finish.

Hong Kong Grilled Abalone with Trout Roe Queens English

Hong Kong Grilled Abalone with Trout Roe



Chef: Henji Cheung of Queens English

For Henji Cheung, grilling in his native Hong Kong is a very simple affair where seafood is often the star ingredient.

A lot of my memories of grilling [are] with my older brother and his friends, he says. You would go to your local seafood market in the morning where everything is alive. People in Hong Kong dont buy fish/seafood that isnt swimming. Then you go home, prepare the food, chill the beer and wait for sunset. Then you grill into the early morning.

With seafood so fresh, its no surprise that traditionally, its prepared very simply: marinated with garlic and soy and cooked to perfection. At his Queens English, the recent recipient of a Michelin Bib Gourmand award, he takes inspiration from a popular local recipe  scallop grilled in its shell  for a similar dish made with abalone.

The abalone is sliced thin, brushed with oyster sauce and quickly charred, he says. Topped with trout roe marinated in rice wine, its a deceptively simple dish that offers a complex interplay of textures and flavors.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon trout roe

30 grams (2 tablespoons) rice wine

1 piece abalone

1 teaspoon oyster sauce

Method

Gently toss the trout roe in the rice wine and set aside.

Bring a pot of water to a boil, and poach the abalone for 10 seconds. Remove from the water, and remove the abalone from the shell, rinsing well. Set aside. Discard all of the abalone guts, and rinse under running water. Slice about 1 centimeter (1/3 inch) thick.

Place the abalone shell on a hot grill. When hot, place the sliced abalone back in the shell to quickly cook  just 1 to 2 minutes. Brush with the oyster sauce.

Remove from the grill, top with the trout roe, and serve.

Japanese Ribeye Hoba Yaki Izakaya Seki

Japanese Ribeye Hoba Yaki



Chef: Cizuka Seki of Izakaya Seki

According to chef Cizuka Seki, many older, traditional homes in Japan boast their very own hibachi grill  an all-purpose heating element that serves the family day-in and day-out.

Charcoal is placed directly inside, she explains, and the surface can thus be used to boil a kettle of water for tea, or a grill can be placed on top to grill.

In some cases, she continues, a large hoba leaf hailing from a species of magnolia is placed on the grill as a cooking surface for the food. Any ingredient cooked over this leaf is called hoba-yaki, says Seki. One of my favorite dishes using hoba-yaki consists of grilling strips of beef or pork and mushrooms.

In this dish, which Seki has adapted for a standard gas or charcoal grill, the leaf gives off a very subtle smokey flavor and helps to round out the saltiness of the miso. You can easily find hoba leaf on Amazon to try this dish out at home.

Ingredients

1 hoba leaf

100g (3  ounces) sliced ribeye roll or top blade steak (pre-sliced, as for Korean barbecue)

50g (1  ounces) shimeji mushrooms (or other mushrooms: Seki recommends maitake, erengi, or shiitake)

1 tablespoon white miso

1 tablespoon red miso

1 tablespoon cooking sake

 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

Method

Soak the dried hoba leaf in tap water for about three minutes, or until pliable.

Remove the base from the shimeji mushrooms, and separate the mushrooms. Do not rinse in water. Remove any dirt by using a damp paper towel.

In a heat-safe bowl, combine all of the ingredients for the sauce. Heat in the microwave for one minute, or until the sauce is slightly bubbly. This can be done in a saucepan over the stove as well, but requires keeping a careful eye on the sauce to avoid burning, as miso burns easily.

Lay out the leaves and place a few spoonfuls of the miso sauce on the leaf. Top with the beef and mushrooms, leaving plenty of room around the edges. Do not overcrowd the leaf! Each leaf can hold about 2-3 slices of meat and a few mushrooms.

Place the leaves over the grill and cook for about 10 minutes, or until the beef and mushrooms are done. The miso sauce should be bubbling and caramelized.

Remove and plate the entire leaf to serve. The leaf is not edible but makes for a pretty presentation.

Colombian Grilled Trout Fillet in Beer Butter El Secreto de Rosita

Colombian Grilled Trout Fillet in Beer Butter



Chef: Cristian Grenada of El Secreto de Rosita

In Colombia, explains Chef Cristian Grenada, homemade grills are a staple cooking apparatus.

The most popular grills in Colombia are charcoal and wood, he explains. This always makes the food have a particular flavor.

His recipe for trout with beer butter and a red pepper sauce, he notes, is inspired by the tradition that exists in some sectors of the country of fishing for trout and cooking it in their homemade grills.

Grenada loves serving this dish with a yuca puree. In this way, he says, alongside the fish, red pepper, and onion, the plate represents the diversity of the country.

Ingredients

For the beer butter:

 cup beer

1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

1 teaspoon chopped garlic

1 tablespoon chopped parsley

1 teaspoon olive oil

For the trout:

1 skin-on trout fillet

1 teaspoon Kosher salt

1 teaspoon chopped parsley

For the red pepper sauce:



1 red pepper

250 ml (about 1 cup) olive oil

1 teaspoon kosher salt

 red onion

Method

Combine the beer, butter, garlic, parsley, and olive oil, and mix until smooth.

Preheat the grill to about 450-500 degrees Fahrenheit. Season the dry fish with kosher salt and chopped parsley, then cover with the beer butter. Let rest for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, place the red pepper on the grill and roast it until the skin is nicely charred. Remove from the grill and, using a damp paper towel, remove the skin. Pull the pepper apart and remove the seeds and stem, and place the pepper pieces into the blender with the olive oil, salt, and onion. Blend until a smooth sauce forms.

When the fish has marinated in the butter, place it, skin-side down, on the grill. Cook for 3 to 4 minutes, then flip. Cook until the fish is flaky and cooked through. Serve with the sauce.

This article was featured in the InsideHook DC newsletter. Sign up now for more from the Beltway.

The post What Four First-Generation DC Chefs Are Grilling This 4th of July appeared first on InsideHook.
One of two Wisconsin girls convicted of stabbing a classmate to please fictional internet horror character Slender Man will be released from a mental institution.



More Slender Man stabbing case coverage from sister station WISN

Anissa Weier is now 19. She appeared Thursday before Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren.

He sentenced her in December 2017 to 25 years at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute in Oshkosh. Weier has been in the state's custody since the stabbing in 2014.

Bohren said Weier would remain institutionalized for 60 days while a conditional release living plan is prepared. The plan will include where she will live and how she would support herself.

Bohren said Weier did not pose a significant threat to herself or the community.

He scheduled a final hearing for Sept. 10 to show the terms of her conditional release have been met. Weier smiled as she left the courtroom. A jury found her not guilty of second-degree intentional homicide due to mental illness.

Weier said earlier this year she no longer poses a risk to others and wants to be released. She submitted a letter to the court.

"I hate my actions May 31, 2014, but through countless hours of therapy, I no longer hate myself for them," it read in part. "I have exhausted all the resources available to me at the Winnebago Mental Health Institution. If I am to become a productive member of society, I need to be part of society."

Read: Letter Anissa Weier wrote to Judge Bohren

Three doctors agreed she could be released early.

Weier's attorney said Weier has done well with treatment at Winnebago and was ready to move forward with her life.

"She's always applied herself to anything that's been asked of her," attorney Maura McMahon said. "It's important to her. Look at her letter, it's very important to her that she continues to improve throughout her life and use her experiences to help others."

Bohren said Weier had completed her GED while institutionalized and intends to go on to college.

Weier and Morgan Geyser lured their friend, Payton Leutner, into a Wisconsin park in 2014.

Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times as Weier cheered Geyser on.

Leutner nearly died. Her parents were in the courtroom for Thursday's decision. All three girls were 12 years old at the time.

Weier and Geyser told investigators they attacked Leutner to win favor with Slender Man.

They were tried as adults.

Geyser was sentenced to up to 40 years in a mental institution. A state appeals court last year upheld that sentence.
Broden & Mickelsen law firm

AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  An Army soldier who shot and killed an armed protester after driving into a crowd demonstrating against police violence in the Texas capital last summer has been indicted on murder charge, authorities said Thursday.

Sgt. Daniel Perry, who was stationed at Fort Hood, was booked and released on $300,000 bail, said Kristen Dark, a spokeswoman for the Travis County Sheriff's Office. She said Perry was booked on one count of murder and one count of deadly conduct in the death of Garrett Foster, 28.
(Bloomberg) -- The Boy Scouts of America reached settlement with a major group of sex-abuse survivors, a defining moment in the organizations bankruptcy case.

The Boy Scouts have offered $850 million in cash and other assets to 60,000 abuse victims, including $59 million worth of art, according to court documents. The money will be paid to a trust set up to compensate victims.

RELATED: Opinion: Why Houston's Phylicia Rashad deserves to be under fire for supporting Bill Cosby

The settlement leaves open the possibility that victims will fight for more from the Boy Scouts insurance companies, including Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Under the deal victim representatives have the option to oppose any reorganization plan that includes a $650 million settlement with Hartford.

The deal is a significant step in shifting the focus of the Boy Scouts restructuring efforts to provide victims a stronger voice in the process and for the first time in these cases, a path to equitable compensation for the victims, a representative for the survivors said in a statement.

The agreement, outlined Thursday in the latest version of the organizations Chapter 11 plan, could help put an end to a nearly 18-month bankruptcy case that has cost the embattled nonprofit more than $100 million.

After months of intensive negotiations, the debtors have reached resolution with every single official and major creditor constituency in these Chapter 11 cases, attorneys for the Boy Scout organization wrote in a statement.

The organization, based in Irving, Texas, sought bankruptcy protection in February 2020, halting hundreds of lawsuits and creating a compensation fund for men who were molested in their youth decades ago by scoutmasters or other Boy Scout leaders.

RELATED: Harris County's constable's office accused of abusing female deputies

The Boy Scouts reorganization plan is similar to those set up by various Catholic churches and companies that made cancer-causing asbestos products. Under U.S. bankruptcy law, a judge can block lawsuits by channeling claims to an adequately funded trust, which is typically controlled by victims and their lawyers. Insurance companies play a key role in funding the trust and setting up rules to decide who gets paid.

The plan must pass a creditor vote and win approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware, to take affect. A hearing is scheduled for July 20 with objections from parties due July 13, court papers show.

The case is In re Boy Scouts of America, Bankr. D. Del., No. 20-10343, amended plan filed 6/18/21.

2021 Bloomberg L.P.
A. There's still plenty of nature on the Nature Coast.

B. The county should require a percentage of tree preservation on new commercial, residential developments.

C. If it's private property, it's the owner's full right to strip all nature from the lot.

D. Someone needs to speak for the trees.

Vote

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An invitation-only organization, Ally Law, maintains its member firms' quality and reliability through rigorous vetting processes and ongoing monitoring of client satisfaction.

FREMONT, CA: Ally Law, a prominent global network, announced the launch of AllyLatinx, a collaborative regional platform for delivering international services in eight countries and 11 dynamic cities across the Americas. This project unites more than 250 top-tier lawyers and nine-member firms that are, individually and collectively, highly ranked by Chambers, Legal 500, and IFLR. An invitation-only organization, Ally Law maintains the quality and reliability of its member firms through rigorous vetting processes and ongoing monitoring of client satisfaction.

Ally Law Director Juan Pablo M. Cardinal, a founding partner in Buenos Aires, Argentina member firm Richards, Cardinal, Tutzer, Zabala, Zaefferer, commented, "In the last year, we have added several dynamic new firms in the region, with proven credentials in our key business sectors. The AllyLatinx initiative is an exciting next step. Our alternative model offers high service standards and competitive pricing with firms bound by common quality standards and a similar business culture, rather than merger."

AllyLatinx has launched with nine member firms in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Information about the participating firms is available through a new online resource that provides legal news, regional member firm credentials, and information on practice areas and industries of focus for the region.

Added Paul Franke, president of Ally Law and a partner in Denver, Colorado member firm Moye White, "Our member firms and their clients continue to see commercial, infrastructure, and international trade opportunities throughout Latin America. As an organization, our primary goal is to help clients identify potential collaborations, negotiate forward-thinking deals and achieve their business objectives. AllyLatinx further enhances our ability to meet these needs."
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With just days to go till the citys summer school program kicks off Tuesday, educators and community-based organizations are scrambling to prepare for an influx of students to sites all across the city.

Its been an ambitious undertaking  one that has been both praised by educators and community leaders for the relief it will offer families and criticized for the logistical issues that have occurred in its rollout.

The free program, called Summer Rising, is available to all K-12 students, rather than solely those who are behind in their school work as was the case in previous years. Over 200,000 K-12 students have signed up as of June 31  a number that is likely only going to rise before the program begins Tuesday, July 6, as parents can still sign up. Chalkbeat reported that last year, roughly 115,000 students were required or recommended to attend.

Many organizations and principals at the hundreds of Summer Rising sites across the city have struggled to recruit enough staff to match the demand.

Further complicating things, educators were told Wednesday to expect an additional influx of students. Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter informed educators in an email that students who were waitlisted at oversubscribed programs would be placed in a summer program site regardless of the previous number of seats available. The late decision could mean some sites will have more children showing up on the first day of the program than educators had planned for when purchasing supplies and recruiting staff.

While this news could bring some relief to parents like Sonia Diaz who tried to sign her 9-year-old daughter up for the site at her school in Staten Island, its also been met with some concern from educators and providers who were already scrambling to hire additional staff prior to the announcement.

"For months, we have raised concerns and frustrations about how the DOE has chosen to handle Summer Rising enrollment. This last-minute change is a desperate attempt to solve for a problem, on the backs of principals, that the DOE created and had plenty of time to correct, said Mark Cannizzaro, the head of the city principals union, in a statement.

Diaz said she wants Summer Rising to be an outlet for her daughter and a place she can interact with her peers.

She has been exclusively remote all this time, not stepping foot into a school building in over a year, Diaz said. Its important she gets signed up to let her get out of the house and interact with her school friends again before they head into the building in September.

Department of Education Associate Press Secretary Sarah Casasnovas said the department would share updated communication with families regarding student program placement by the end of this week.

Every student will have a place within our Summer Rising program, and we're thrilled over 200,000 students are signed up, she said. We look forward to welcoming families to programs next week and providing students with a comprehensive summer experience that includes rigorous academics, social emotional support and opportunities to have fun.

Educators and city leaders have touted Summer Rising as an experience that combines academic support with social and emotional learning and enrichment programming to offer families child care services and provide a bridge to childrens return to the classroom in the fall following a vastly challenging school year.

K-8 students will experience a blend of academic programming staffed by the Department of Education in the morning as well as enrichment activities which are being run by community organizations in the afternoon. High schoolers will receive additional academic support or can participate in paid work experience and internship opportunities like the Summer Youth Employment Program, according to the Department of Education.

A spokesperson from the teachers union United Federation of Teachers said rigorous health and safety protocols will be followed, and each site will have access to nursing support and a telehealth center.

However, efforts to pull off the summer program largely hinge on educators and community organization staff. The city announced Summer Rising in April, so educators and program operators have been operating on a tight deadline all while learning to navigate the multi-agency partnership of the city Department of Youth and Community Development, which is the contractor of the community organizations running the afternoon enrichment activities, and the city Department of Education.

Casasnovas said the DOE is working closely with schools and union partners to make sure there is appropriate staffing to hit the ground running on Tuesday. She said theres been a strong number of applicants overall and a supportive number of substitute teachers available to help as needed. Interested educators are still able to apply.

These efforts are still unlikely to solve the issue of staffing for the Department of Educations community organization partners.

While many teachers need a break after a year of unprecedented challenges, we are hearing the more pressing staffing shortages are for school administrators and for the community-based organizations that are involved with this years extended-day programming, said a UFT spokesperson.

Chante Brown, a division director at Good Shepherd Services, which is running 15 Summer Rising sites in the Bronx, said theres a lot of pressure given the looming Tuesday start date.

We want to gain our communitys trust, we want our children to be safe and have fun, we just need the people to help us do it, she said, explaining that recruiting and getting staff cleared has been a challenging process.

Brown said Good Shepherd Services has changed its approach in how its trying to recruit staff, leaning away from touting monetary compensation and realizing people are going to get involved because they are passionate about working with children.

This is about love now. We are going back to the community. We are going old school  we are really sending out fliers in the community, Brown said.

Posting fliers is just one example of problem-solving that has been born from the challenges of preparing for Summer Rising. Unsure about whether theyll be able to take students on field trips given the evolving nature of the pandemic and pending approval of administrators, Brown said Good Shepherd Services also purchased virtual reality headsets to give students virtual experiences like hiking in Paris.

An initial lack of funding for Summer Rising has been a big contributor to the hiring challenges, according to Nora Moran, director of policy and advocacy at Good Neighborhood Housing, a group whose members are holding Summer Rising programs at 165 sites.

She explained that community organization partners were told in June that they would only be given a 3% increase of their contracted funding levels. According to her and other community organizations, this was not an adequate increase because the current mandated staffing ratios are lower than what they were during previous years due to the pandemic, meaning that community-based organizations have had to hire more staff than they have in the past.

Community organization providers received some relief Wednesday with the approval of the fiscal year 2022 budget in the form of a $24 million increase to the Summer Rising budget. According to a Department of Youth and Community Development email sent to Summer Rising providers Wednesday afternoon, this amounts to a 30% increase to the budget for elementary school programs and a 10% increase for middle school.

Moran said the increased funding does give providers some more financial stability for their programming, meaning theyll be able to cover some of the higher costs of staffing and additional supplies. However, she said, given the citys announcement that all waitlisted students are going to be assigned a site, there is concern about having enough staff Tuesday to safely serve the students who show up.

We are monitoring this very closely and calling on the city to make sure that the program (starting) on Tuesday has adequate staffing coverage, she said.

Sandra Escamilla, executive director of Childrens Aid, which is operating a number of Summer Rising sites throughout Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx, said that while government coordination and preparation for the program hasnt been seamless, principals, providers and community school directors have been problem-solving in real time.

That has always been the real treasure of this  that we are building on existing partnerships, existing relationships that are trying to map out a myriad of scenarios before they get word, Escamilla said. More than ever I would say that partnership has been solidified through the lack of clarity.

Like other community organization providers, she said things have been stressful  at some sites they wont know if some staff members will receive clearances to work until opening day, but she thinks the city is doing everything it can to make sure it happens in a timely manner.

Despite the challenges though, shes hopeful for what the future might bring  both for students this summer and fall as well as future collaboration between the various organizations and agencies.

When we look back to tell this story, I am hopeful that we will be able to say that there was a moment in time when things changed in the city  to meet young people at a most critical time in their lives and give them what they need, Escamilla said. Thats the story that I want to be part of telling.
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You might ask what Kamala Harris was best known for prior to becoming the first female vice president in US history. One piece of notoriety was, as attorney general of the state of California, she oversaw the prosecution of Wells Fargo & Co., the American multinational bank and financial services company for violation of  632 and 632.7 of the California Penal Code.

The allegation was that the company failed to timely and adequately disclose its automatic recording of phone calls with members of the public. That criminal prosecution led to a settlement in which Wells Fargo paid total fines of $7,616,000, reimbursed the prosecutors investigative costs of $384,000, and agreed to contribute $500,000 to two statewide organizations dedicated to advancing consumer protection and privacy rights. The previous year, Attorney General Harris reached a similar settlement with Houzz Inc., an online platform for home remodeling and design. Houzz had been recording incoming and outgoing telephone calls but failing to notify all parties on the call that they were being recorded.

Businesses who record telephone calls for training and quality assurance purposes should be on high alert that their actions could carry significant consequences. The same is true for insurance professionals and claims investigators who record phone calls and interviews with witnesses. Knowing and understanding the law in this area is an absolute necessity; and complying with it is not always easy.

Companies record incoming calls for a variety of reasons. True, it is sometimes for purposes of training an employee when complaints are made. In the same sense, the recording is also technically done for quality assurance purposes. But contact centers and companies often also rely on the records to assist them if and when claims are made against them and for other reasons having nothing to do with training and quality. But there are risks for both companies and individuals when a phone call or conversation is recorded.

Individuals, businesses, and the government often have a need to record telephone conversations that relate to their business, customers, or business dealings. Congress and most state legislatures have passed telephone call recording statutes and regulations that may require the person wanting to record the conversation to provide notice and obtain consent before doing so. Most states require one-party consent, which can come from the person recording if present on the call. However, some states require that all parties to a call consent to recording.

Laws governing telephone call recording are typically found within state criminal statutes and codes because most states frame call recording as eavesdropping, wiretapping, or as a type of intercepted communication. State laws may not explicitly mention telephone call recording because of these technical definitions. Accordingly, counsel may need to infer when and under what circumstances a state permits telephone call recording by reviewing prohibited actions.

The big issue when it comes to recording someone is whether the jurisdiction you are in requires that you get the consent of the person or persons being recorded. This begs the question of which jurisdiction governs when you are talking to a person in another state. Some states require the consent of all parties to the conversation, while others require only the consent of one party. It is not always clear whether federal or state law applies, and if state law applies which of the two (or more) relevant state laws controls. A good rule of thumb is that the law of the jurisdiction in which the recording device is located will apply. Some jurisdictions, however, take a different approach when addressing this issue and apply the law of the state in which the person being recorded is located. Therefore, when recording a call with parties in multiple states, it is best to comply with the strictest laws that may apply or get the consent of all parties. It is generally legal to record a conversation where all the parties to it consent.

One-Party Consent

If the consent of one party is required, you can record a conversation if youre a party to the conversation. If youre not a party to the conversation, you can record a conversation or phone call provided one party consents to it after having full knowledge and notice that the conversation will be recorded. Under Federal law, 18 U.S.C.  2511(2)(d) requires only that one party give consent. In addition to this Federal statute, thirty-eight (38) states and the District of Columbia have adopted a one-party consent requirement. Nevada has a one-party consent law, but Nevadas Supreme Court has interpreted it as an all-party consent law.

All-Party Consent

Eleven (11) states require the consent of everybody involved in a conversation or phone call before the conversation can be recorded. Those states are California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington. These laws are sometimes referred to as two-party consent laws but, technically, require that all parties to a conversation must give consent before the conversation can be recorded.

Consent

What constitutes consent is also an issue of contention when you are considering recording a conversation. In some states, consent is given if the parties to the call are clearly notified that the conversation will be recorded, and they engage in the conversation anyway. Their consent is implied. For example, we have all experienced calling a customer service department only to hear a recorded voice warning, This call may be recorded for quality assurance or training purposes. It is usually a good practice for practitioners to let the witness know they are recording the conversation to accurately recall and commemorate the testimony being given  such as during the taking of a witness statement.

Exceptions

Nearly all states include an extensive list of exceptions to their consent requirements. Common exceptions found in a majority of states laws include recordings captured by police, court order, communication service providers, emergency services, etc. Generally, it is permissible to record conversations if all parties to the conversation are aware and consent to the interception of the communication. There are certain limited exceptions to the general prohibition against electronic surveillance. For example, so-called providers of wire or electronic communication service (e.g., telephone companies and the like) and law enforcement in the furtherance of criminal investigative activities have certain abilities to eavesdrop.

Interstate/Multi-State Phone Calls

Telephone calls are routinely originated in one state and participated in by residents of another state. In conference call settings, multiple states (and even countries) could be participating in a telephone call which is subject to being recorded by one or more parties to the call. This presents some rather challenging legal scenarios when trying to evaluate whether a call may legally be recorded. A call from Pennsylvania to a person in New York involves the laws of both states. Which states laws apply and/or whether the law of each state must be adhered to are questions parties to a call are routinely faced with.

When it comes to insurance subrogation claims, investigation is key. Recorded statements are a routine staple of such investigation. Discovery rules around the country vary, but generally, investigation performed in anticipation of litigation can be privileged and exempt from discovery under the right circumstances. But too many claims professionals believe that anything they put in the claim file can be protected and need not be divulged. They are wrong. Many are refusing to provide copies of recorded statements to their insureds, thinking that such work product is protected and privileged. However, the laws of many states require a person taking a written statement to provide a copy of it to the person who made the statement. For example, Floridas  92.33 does this and more. It not only requires a person taking a statement to give a true and correct copy to the person giving the statement, but it also requires providing a copy to such person at any time upon request. Failure to do so means the statement cannot be introduced in evidence. Such failure may also subject the person violating the statute to administrative penalties; and even bad faith liability.

In Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney, Inc., 137 P.3d 914 (Cal. 2006), the California Supreme Court applied California wiretap law to a company located in Georgia that routinely recorded business phone calls with its clients in California. California law requires all party consent to record any telephone calls, while Georgia law requires only one-party consent. Applying California choice-of-law rules, the Court reasoned that the failure to apply California law would impair Californias interest in protecting the degree of privacy afforded to California residents by California law more severely than the application of California law would impair any interests of the State of Georgia.

When a telephone conversation is between parties who are in different states, it also increases the chance that federal law might apply.

In most cases, both state and federal laws may apply. State laws are enforced by your local police department and the states attorney office. Federal wiretapping laws are enforced by the FBI and U.S. Attorneys office. It is a federal crime to wiretap or to use a machine to capture the communications of others without court approval, unless one of the parties has given their prior consent. This means that if you are initiating a recording on a call that you are participating in, the other party does not need to be notified that the call is being recorded. It is likewise a federal crime to use or disclose any information acquired by illegal wiretapping or electronic eavesdropping. Violations can result in imprisonment for not more than five years; fines up to $250,000 (up to $500,000 for organizations); in civil liability for damages, attorneys fees and possibly punitive damages; in disciplinary action against any attorneys involved; and in suppression of any derivative evidence. Congress has created separate, but comparable, protective schemes for electronic mail (e-mail) and against the surreptitious use of telephone call monitoring practices such as pen registers and trap and trace devices. But state law must also be looked considered.

Even seemingly minor infractions can have consequences. On April 1, 2021, the Supreme Court of California allowed a class action against a California lender named LoanMe, Inc. to go forward. Unbelievably, the entire case arose out of a very brief phone conversation. LoanMe extended a loan to the wife of plaintiff Jeremiah Smith. In October of 2015, a LoanMe employee called a phone number Smiths wife had provided. Smith answered, on what he asserts was a cordless phone. Smith advised the LoanMe representative that his wife was not at home. The call then ended, 18 seconds after it began. LoanMe recorded the call. Three seconds into the call, LoanMe caused a beep tone to sound. The LoanMe representative on the call did not orally advise plaintiff that the call was being recorded.

In September of 2016, Smith hired a lawyer who filed suit on behalf of a putative class consisting of all persons in California whose inbound and outbound telephone conversations involving their cellular or cordless telephones were recorded without their consent by LoanMe or its agent/s within the one year prior to the filing of this action. The complaint alleged that the recording of these calls violated California law. The trial court dismissed the case, ruling that the beep gave Smith sufficient notice that the call was being recorded. On appeal, the Court of Appeals took a different tack, ruling that California law prohibits only third-party eavesdroppers from intentionally recording telephonic communications. They held that it did not prohibit participants in a phone call from recording the call. Interestingly, the Court of Appeals ruling was the first published opinion by a California appellate court to have specifically addressed whether  632.7 applies to the intentional recording of a communication by a party. On appeal, the California Supreme Court reversed, and allowed the class action to go forward. In Smith v. LoanMe, Inc., 2021 WL 1217873 (Cal. 2021), the court said that the law is a general prohibition against the intentional recording of a covered communication without the consent of all parties, regardless of whether the recording is performed by a party to the communication or by someone else. Under California law, the potential damages in the case are $5,000 per call that is improperly monitored.

Claims professionals and investigators who record statements and phone calls should take effort to get permission of the other party before they start recording the call. Businesses should remember that all organizations who record calls (incoming or outgoing) should immediately alert all parties to the call if it is being recorded. Some companies could offer a non-recorded line available by pressing 1 or something similar. It is also important to have the recording start after the announcement of the call being recorded, and not before.

For businesses who have a recording which says, This call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance and training purposes, should be aware that recording and monitoring are different things. Recording is self-explanatory. But monitoring includes things such as:

Listening : When a manager can only hear what is going on. Essentially, he or she is eavesdropping on a customer call.

: When a manager can only hear what is going on. Essentially, he or she is eavesdropping on a customer call. Whispering : This occurs when a manager listens to the conversation and can provide feedback to the employee on the call in real time.

: This occurs when a manager listens to the conversation and can provide feedback to the employee on the call in real time. Barging : This is when a manager is asked to join a call to support the employee on the call.

All three functions are considered monitoring. Whats more, when insurance companies are involved, quite frequently Protected Health Information (PHI), Electronic Health Records (EHR), and even Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI) may be involved. PCI and PHI compliance rules and regulations apply to call recordings. As a result, there are many ways in which an individual claims handler or an entire company can slip up and find themselves with multiple infractions and violations. Just ask Wells Fargo.

For more information on the laws in all 50 states regarding the recording of phone conversations, see our chart found HERE.
MORRIS, Ill. (AP)  Toxic fumes and smoke from a burning former paper mill in northern Illinois that officials had believed was long abandoned but actually contained massive amounts of lithium batteries prompted officials to extend an evacuation order into Thursday for residents in the area.

The fire that started in Morris around midday Tuesday prompted city officials to order the evacuation of 3,000-4,000 people in some 950 nearby homes, a school, church and small businesses.

The fire continued to burn Thursday morning about 70 miles (115 kilometers) southwest of Chicago, and residents now will not be allowed to return home until 9 p.m. Thursday, officials said. An earlier order was to end at 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Lithium batteries have exploded inside the building and fire officials have said they decided to let the blaze burn out because they fear trying to extinguish it could trigger more explosions.

The building  to the surprise of the fire department and other city agencies  was being used to store nearly 100 tons of lithium batteries ranging in size from cellphone batteries to large car batteries.

Mayor Chris Brown has said the city didnt know the building was being used to store batteries until it caught fire, and that he knows very little about Superior Battery, the company that owns them.

Company representatives were not invited to a Wednesday news conference about the fire, officials said.

The mayor said the police department will conduct an investigation about the storage of the batteries and that other agencies, including the state fire marshal and the Illinois Attorney Generals office, have already been contacted.

The Morris fire came two weeks after explosions and a massive blaze at a chemical plant near Rockton, an Illinois town along the Wisconsin border, forced the evacuation of hundreds of homes for several days. Nobody at the plant or the surrounding community was injured by the June 13 fire that officials later determined was started accidentally during maintenance work.

About the photo: Firefighters work the scene of an industrial fire Tuesday, June 29, 2021, in Morris, Ill. Lithium batteries have been noisily exploding inside a burning abandoned paper mill in northern Illinois and firefighters are letting the blaze burn out because they fear trying to extinguish it could trigger more explosions, officials said Wednesday. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune via AP)

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Five lawsuits have been filed against the Champlain Towers South Condominium Association in Surfside, Florida as of Thursday afternoon as plaintiffs move to preserve evidence at the site of the partially collapsed high-rise to stake a claim to a share of the reported $48 million in insurance coverage available.

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman held an online emergency meeting Thursday morning. Attorneys for the condo association told him that they are aware of a $30 million property insurance policy from Great American and $18 million in liability insurance, according to a webcast of a segment of the hearing posted by the Miami Herald.

It looks like for the property damage claims and for the injury and death claims theres going to be a total of $48 million, which will obviously be inadequate to compensate everyone fully for the extent of their losses, Hanzman said. I dont know whether there are any third-party claims. Maybe there are, maybe there arent. But we are dealing certainly with a limited pot as far as insurers go.

As of Thursday, rescuers had found the remains of 18 people who had perished in the collapse of the condo tower and 145 residents were missing. The search and rescue effort was suspended on Thursday after movement in the debris pile raised concerns that the still-standing portion of the condo tower may fall as well.

A public relations firm hired by the condominium association board issued a statement on Friday saying that an independent receiver should be appointed to oversee the legal and claims process. Hanzman said during Thursdays hearing that he was considering such an appointment.

The collapse of Champlain Towers South is an unspeakable tragedy that has devastated our community, our neighbors, and our friends, the association said. We are grieving and our hearts ache for those who have been lost and for their families. They have our deepest condolences.

Miami-Dade court records show that plaintiffs are suing the association and also a structural engineering firm and an architectural firm that participated in the 40-year recertification of the building. Morabito Consultants inspected the building in 2018 and reported that the pool deck was improperly constructed, causing water damage to the concrete below. SD Architects also participated in the recertification process.

The suits filed so far:

A construction defects lawsuit by plaintiffs Steven, Mark, Shoshana and the estate of Harold Rosenberg against the association; Morabito Consultants and SD Architects.

A premises liability lawsuit filed against the association by Alex J. Anton and the estate of Beatrice Guerra Rodriguez.

A contract and indebtedness lawsuit filed against the association by Raysa Rodriguez.

A construction defect lawsuit filed against the association by Manuel Drezner

A construction defect lawsuit filed by Steve Rosenthal.

There will be many people to blame for the tragic collapse of the Champlain Towers South Condominium. Therefore, it is crucial now to locate and preserve all of the relevant discovery and materials, states the lawsuit filed by Rodriguez, who owns Unit 907 of the destroyed condo building.

At least one insurers has already agreed to pay up. The Miami Herald reported that an attorney for James River Insurance pledged during the hearing to tender the full $2 million limit on a liability insurance policy issued to the condominium association.

Donna Berger, an attorney who represents the condominium association, told USA Today that it was despicable that a lawsuit had been filed assigning blame while emergency crews were still searching for survivors.

But Chip Merlin, a Tampa attorney whose law firm represents Rodriguez, said a two-year claim filing deadline imposed by Senate Bill 76, signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis on June 11, forces attorneys to assert their clients rights early on. Merlin railed against the bill during his regular Tuesday webcast, saying it will harm people with complicated claims, such as his Champlain Towers South clients.

How can you make a claim for law and ordinance in two years when the claim for it will not ripen for three years because it takes that long to do major work? he said in an email in response to a question by the Claims Journal.

Attorneys for the Rosenberg family asked the court for permission to fly a drone over the rubble pile, according to media reports.

The Morgan & Morgan and Saltz Mongeluzzi & Bendesky law firms stressed the importance of early intervention to preserve evidence in the complaint they filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. The two firms said they have experience in litigation related to previous structural collapses in Philadelphia, Atlantic City and New Orleans.

On the basis of this extensive experience in building collapse litigation, plaintiffs counsel has seen first-hand that the evidence immediately observed and documented at a collapse site is often the most critical evidence in the case and can lead to figuring out how the collapse happened, the suit says.

Stephen Marino, an attorney with Ver Ploeg & Marino in Miami, said most of the recovery to homeowners for property damage to the Champlain Towers building would likely come from the associations property insurance policy. He said condo owners often buy additional coverage to insure their personal property, but that would not go toward reconstruction of the building.

He said judging by press reports, lengthy litigation seems inevitable. The Miami Herald reported the condominium association directors resigned their positions in 2019 because of constant squabbling over a potential $15 million special assessment to make repairs. A former city official reportedly told residents that the building was in good condition.

A negligence lawsuit would require the plaintiff to show that a responsible party knew or reasonably should have known of a defect, but failed to correct it, Marino said. More must be known about what caused the collapse before assigning blame.

There seems to be a several-year history of awareness of a significant structural issues and a seeming, if not failure, at least a seeming slow approach to repairing those issues, he said.

About the photo: Search and rescue personnel work atop the rubble at the Champlain Towers South condo building, where scores of people remain missing almost a week after it partially collapsed, Wednesday, June 30, 2021, in Surfside, Fla. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
LOS ANGELES (AP)  A cache of homemade fireworks exploded as it was being destroyed by a bomb squad, flipping and damaging cars, smashing windows in homes and injuring 17 people including police officers, authorities said.

It could take days to determine why the material exploded inside an iron containment vessel on a tractor-trailer Wednesday night, tearing the rig apart in what was supposed to be a safe operation to handle explosives that were too unstable to remove from a South Los Angeles neighborhood where tons of illegal fireworks were discovered.

Clearly, protocols were followed and pursued. But something happened in that containment vessel that should not have happened and we dont know why, Police Chief Michel Moore said. But we intend to find out why.

Homes, cars and a laundromat had windows shattered and one car had its side plowed in and was knocked on its side by the force of the blast, which was heard two blocks away.

The blast shortly after 7:30 p.m. sent nine police officers and a federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives officer to the hospital with minor injuries, Fire Chief Ralph M. Terrazas said.

Six civilians, ranging from 51 to 85 years old, were taken to the hospital, three with minor and three with moderate injuries, and one person was examined at the scene but wasnt transported, fire officials said.

News reports showed several women and men on gurneys being taken to ambulances.

Fireworks are illegal to sell or possess in Los Angeles and in unincorporated areas of the county but every year, we see the devastation and destruction from them, Terazas said.

Authorities said the blast illustrated the dangers of underground pyrotechnic sales. In March, a massive fireworks explosion at a home in Ontario, east of Los Angeles, left two people dead and caused at least $3.2 million in damage.

The explosion came after police had spent the day disposing of some 3,000 to 5,000 pounds of commercial-grade fireworks that were found in the home following an early-morning tip. Police found some them on a patio in cartons stacked 8 to 10 feet high, Moore said.

A resident, Arturo Cejas, 27, was arrested on suspicion of possessing a destructive device but he also may face charges of child endangerment because his 10-year-old brother was in the home, Moore said.

It wasnt immediately known whether Cejas had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.

The bomb squad was called because the large volume of explosives at the home posed an imminent and real danger to the community, Moore said.

The fireworks cartons were marked Made in China. The police chief said they were bought out of state in order to sell them in the neighborhood for use on the Fourth of July.

Moore said three box trucks and a 53-foot trailer were brought in to load up the fireworks and move them to a safe location. However, improvised explosives also were found that were too dangerous to move, the chief said.

He described them as 40 home-made devices the size of Coca-Cola cans with simple fuses and 200 smaller but similar devices.

The material was taken to a total containment vehicle, Moore said. The multi-ton semi-tractor trailer rig has a spherical iron chamber that is designed to safely detonate explosives.

Moore said less than 10 pounds of material was placed in the chamber, far less than its safety rating.

This vessel should have been able to dispose of that material, he said but instead there was a total, catastrophic failure of that containment vehicle.

As a safety measure, police had knocked on doors before the blast to evacuate homes on both sides of the street where the truck was parked. But firefighters later found people in some of the homes, Terrazas said.

Despite shattered windows, Terrazas said the explosion seemed to have caused mainly superficial damage to homes and gas and water lines were intact.

Moore said a response team consisting of members from around the country would be arriving in town to examine the site and walk through it for an investigation that could take several days. The chief also said the blast may have thrown debris and possibly dangerous material some distance.

People who spot something suspicious in their yards shouldnt touch it but should call police, he said.

About the photo: Emergency personnel stand near the scene of a fireworks explosion in Los Angeles on Wednesday, June 30, 2021. A cache of illegal fireworks seized at a South Los Angeles home exploded, damaging nearby homes and cars and causing injuries, authorities said. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
SALEM, Ore. (AP)  Firefighters on Wednesday tried to contain a wildfire that burned 10,000 acres near the farming community of Dufur, Oregon.

Gov. Kate Brown invoked the Emergency Conflagration Act in response to the fire, allowing the state fire marshal to mobilize firefighters and equipment to help local firefighters. Some 40 personnel, 12 fire engines engines and other resources were on the scene, authorities said.

The fire was burning in wheat and brush in the sparsely populated area of north-central Oregon. Firefighters from the Portland area were among those assisting the effort to extinguish the blaze, which ignited Tuesday.

The FBI, meanwhile, on Wednesday offered a reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to the arrest, and conviction of those responsible for setting a fire on the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Reservation on June 21.

The fire burned approximately 42 acres of brush and grass alongside Highway 3 near the reservation fish hatchery in central Oregon. Warm Springs emergency crews battled the blaze.

The FBI and the Warm Springs Police Department want anyone with information about the fire to contact them.

Brown on Tuesday declared a state of emergency to ensure every resource is made available for firefighting efforts.

With the extended forecast in Oregon calling for unseasonably high temperatures with no rain in the forecast  and with 19 counties already in declared drought emergencies  the threat of wildfire in Oregon is imminent, Brown said.

Several communities banned fireworks, a tradition during the Fourth of July holidays.

On Wednesday, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler signed an emergency declaration immediately banning all sales of fireworks in the city because of hot weather and dry conditions.

The ban comes one day after Portland Fire & Rescue announced a ban on the use of all fireworks through the holiday weekend.

A decision like this doesnt come easily but its imperative that we do all we can to ensure the everyones safety, Wheeler said in a news release. This sales ban is another necessary measure to reduce threats posed by wildfires to the city and all who live here.

Bend, a city in Central Oregons high desert near the Cascade Range, was among other cities that also banned them, sparking ire among fireworks vendors.

Jake Dennis, working at the Discount Fireworks Superstore in the city, said the ban  in effect through July 9  is anti-American.

(They are) directly telling us what we can and cannot do on our driveway to celebrate our freedom, our liberty, Dennis told local TV station KTVZ.

Bend City Councilor Gena Goodman-Campbell said there are other ways to mark the holiday safely.

We know its been a long year-plus, and that youre ready to celebrate, and we would just ask you to find safe ways to do that without, lighting fireworks, she said.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
William Russell Allton was born in Dewey, Oklahoma on April 25, 1931 to Russell Frank and Alice Mae (Steffens) Allton. He attended school in Claremore and graduated with the class of 1948. On August 26, 1949 Bill married Jimmie Louise Reed and the couple made Tulsa home for the first 25 year
Cleburne, TX (76033)

Today

Some clouds and possibly an isolated thunderstorm this afternoon. High 86F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Some clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph.
Cedar Point in Sandusky was set to celebrate its 150th anniversary in summer 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic prevented that from happening. The park was forced to close until July of last year before reopening with numerous restrictions and protocols.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine discusses details of the state's two-year, $75 billion budget, flanked by members of his cabinet and by state lawmakers, on Thursday, July 1, 2021, in Columbus, Ohio. DeWine signed the budget into law early Thursday, July 1, 2021 but also vetoed several provisions, including one which would have returned fines to businesses cited for violating public health orders meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus. DeWine said such a move was unfair to the vast majority of companies that followed the rules.
Wearable tech aids freedivers, cardiac patients

Carnegie Mellon University researchers are part of an international team working on wearable biomedical technology that will enhance freediver safety, as well as provide fresh treatment insights for cardiac patients.

June 30, 2021

With dives lasting more than four minutes and reaching depths of more than 100 meters on a single-breath hold, freedivers test the limits of human endurance. Carnegie Mellon University researchers are part of an international team working on wearable biomedical technology that will enhance freediver safety, as well as provide fresh treatment insights for cardiac patients.

The smartwatch-like, wearable device uses light emitting LEDs in contact with the skin to measure heart rate, blood volume, and oxygen levels in the brain. It can withstand depths of at least 107 meters.

Before now, understanding the effects on divers neural and cardiovascular systems during deep dives was not possible, as research was focused only on simulated dives, said Erika Schagatay, a professor of animal physiology who is leading the project at Mid Sweden University. Ultimately, the diver can reach a point where hypoxic (low oxygen) blackout occurs, and they need to be rescued. One of the main aims of our research is to warn both the diver and safety personnel of an imminent blackout.

As part of the groups research, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society BOpens in new window, existing, non-invasive technology called near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) was adapted to withstand the extreme pressure of deep dives in the open ocean.

NIRS is a powerful tool, which has extensively been used for measuring brain function in healthy subjects, as well as clinical populations, explains Jana KainerstorferOpens in new window, associate professor of biomedical engineeringOpens in new window at Carnegie Mellon. Recent advances in miniaturizing NIRS devices enabled measurements of brain function in more natural environments. The application of NIRS to study diving physiology is particularly exciting and will help us understand how brain function can be maintained under such extreme environmental conditions.

Studying how freedivers have conditioned themselves to tolerate bouts of extremely low oxygen and brain oxygen delivery could provide insights for pre-treatment (pre-conditioning), for surgical procedures. Perhaps the same procedures can be developed to improve protection of the brain and heart during cardiac surgery, and for post-conditioning therapeutic intervention after events such as a cardiac event.

"The application of NIRS to study diving physiology is particularly exciting and will help us understand how brain function can be maintained under such extreme environmental conditions."

Quote: Jana Kainerstorfer, Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering

Beyond the exceptional physiological responses that freedivers display and the extremes they can tolerate, they may be a very informative physiological group, suggested lead researcher Chris McKnight, a research fellow at the University of St. Andrews. Their physiological reactions are so unique and the conditions theyre exposed to are not easily replicated, so they offer a unique way of understanding how the body responds to low blood oxygen, low brain oxygenation, and severe cardiovascular suppression.

University of St. Andrews is leading the collaboration with additional researchers from Mid Sweden University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Tokyo.

View the original article on the College of Engineering website.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 1)  A Health Department official noted the efficacy of mixing and matching AstraZeneca and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines in creating a strong immune response based on a study in the United Kingdom, but emphasized the need for larger clinical trials.

Health Undersecretary Leopoldo Vega emphasized the generation of a good quantity of antibodies and cell-mediated immunity in the study, which he described as very effective in terms of the results.

But this is just a very preliminary study, explained Vega, who is also the countrys treatment czar.

International news outlets reported this week on the Comparing COVID-19 Vaccine Schedule Combinations (Com-COV) trials results so far, which point to a good immune response after implementing a mixed schedule of the said vaccine brands on participants.

The trial also aims to determine how common vaccine side effects will manifest after mixed schedules of administering doses, noting this will create a more flexible immunization program, potentially allowing more people to be immunized more quickly.

We still have to make use of the bigger clinical trials, which is actually the same vaccines, the same platforms, he added.

Still, the official noted a flexibility in mixing and matching different vaccine brands may be recommended later on because of the study.

So probably in the near future a bigger study has to be concluded. I think this will be a better prospective or advantage for countries wherein the vaccines are limited, said Vega, adding that such an approach will help the national vaccination program.

Pfizer and AstraZeneca are among the COVID-19 vaccine brands administered in the Philippines alongside Sinovac, Sputnik V, and Moderna.

The Philippines breached the 10-million mark in total doses administered this week. It hopes to fully inoculate 70 million Filipinos against COVID-19 by year-end.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 1)  Amid threats caused by Taal Volcano, President Rodrigo Duterte said it is not a serious concern for now, even joking about putting a cap on the volcano's crater.

"Siguro lagyan ko lang ng cap iyong butas," Duterte said during his speech at the inauguration of the LRT-2 East Extension Project in Antipolo City on Thursday.

[Translation: Maybe I will put a cap on the crater.]

"We will raise the alert on the level that it should. Now, it's just a rumbling and it's spewing...but it's not really a grave concern for us at this time. Maybe it will degenerate into something bad, by that time we will know," the President added.

Authorities on Thursday raised the status of the volcano to Alert Level 3 following a phreatomagmatic eruption, which was recorded at 3:16 p.m. and lasted until 3:21 p.m.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said two smaller eruptions were recorded at 6:26 p.m. and 7:21 p.m. that lasted two minutes and produced plumes as high as 200 meters.

READ: Alert level 3 raised over Taal Volcano after phreatomagmatic eruption

With residents in nearby communities evacuated, the President said the national government is ready to respond and assistance will be available for those affected.

"It could get worse, but I said there will be instant gratification because there are workers on the ground ready," he added.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 2)  The government is on alert for a possible increase in Taal's volcanic activity, officials said Friday, as residents in nearby areas continued to flee to evacuation centers for safety.

Bernardo Alejandro, operations service director of the Office of Civil Defense, told CNN Philippines' The Source that the agency is preparing measures in the event that Taal Volcano's status will be further raised to Alert Level 4, a day after its phreatomagmatic eruption.

On Thursday, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology raised Taal Volcano's status to Alert Level 3 after it had a magmatic intrusion "that may further drive succeeding eruptions."

"Ang pinaghahandaan namin ngayon ay in the event na itataas sa (What we are now preparing for is in the event that they raise it to) Level 4 because this would entail a lot of evacuation already, this would cover additional towns," Alejandro said.

Alert Level 4 means that hazardous eruption is imminent, with intensified volcanic unrest "characterized by earthquake swarms and volcanic tremor."

As of Friday afternoon, around 1,495 residents from Agoncillo and Laurel in Batangas have sought shelter in evacuation centers and in the homes of nearby relatives as a preemptive measure, National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council Executive Director Ricardo Jalad said in a media briefing. There were no casualties or untoward incidents reported during the evacuation, he added.

"Doon sa dalawang areas na sinabi ng Phivolcs ay forced evacuation muna ang gagawin dyan to make sure na zero casualty tayo sa event ng Taal ngayong taon," Alejandro said.

[Translation: In those two areas mentioned by Phivolcs, there needs to be a forced evacuation because we have to make sure that we will have zero casualty in the course of events brought by Taal's unrest this year.]

In an advisory, Malacanang said the Department of Social Welfare and Development has prepared stockpiles of food packs worth 1.4M and non-food items worth 11M for the affected residents. The military, police and coast guard are also assisting efforts on the ground, it added

Batangas Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management head Lito Castro said other nearby towns may be able to accommodate evacuees from the affected areas to reduce crowding.

Alejandro said they are also ready to augment resources for evacuees so they can still be protected from the spread of COVID-19.

He said the government will provide PPEs, masks, and other supplies to evacuees, and they will reduce capacity of evacuation centers from 10 to five families per classroom to comply with physical distancing and other necessary protocols. They will also ensure that there is continuous supply of water so everyone can still practice good hygiene.

There is also antigen testing conducted in the evacuation centers, according to the NDRRMC. During the agency's pre-disaster risk assessment meeting with local officials, Jalad said there was also talk of vaccinating responders in Batangas.

Jalad also mentioned authorities are monitoring two low pressure areas that could pass by Taal and possibly blow away ashfall. They will wait for Phivolcs' advisory in the next few days.

Evacuees can expect to return to their homes once Phivolcs lowers the alert level back to 2, Jalad added.

Law enforcement agencies like the Philippine National Police and the Philippine Coast Guard will also be on alert to ensure that no one enters Taal's danger zone.

Taal had been on Alert Level 2 since March this year due to an "increasing unrest" brought by its eruption in January 2020, just months before the pandemic raged on.

Malacanang advised residents surrounding Taal Volcano to remain vigilant, take precautionary measures and cooperate with local authorities for their next announcements.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 2)  The Philippine Insitute of Volcanology and Seismology on Friday said it recorded 29 volcanic earthquakes, including an explosion type of tremor, in the past 24 hours as it maintained Alert Level 3 for Taal Volcano a day after its phreatomagmatic eruption.

High levels of emissions of volcanic sulfur dioxide and steam-laden plumes that rose 3,000 meters high from the main crater before drifting south were observed, Phivolcs said in its 8 a.m. bulletin.

Sulfur dioxide emission averaged at 13,287 tons per day on July 1, with smog seen over and near Taal Volcano, Phivolcs said.

A phreatomagmatic eruption on Thursday afternoon -- when Taal ejected a dark grayish plume that rose 1,000 meters -- prompted Phivolcs to raise the status of Taal to Alert Level 3.

This explosion is caused by the interaction of magma and surface water, Phivolcs chief Renato Solidum explained Friday in an interview with CNN Philippines' The Source.

Around 317 families or 1,282 residents from high-risk areas were evacuated due to the threat of another explosion, Lito Castro, head of the Batangas Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management, told CNN Philippines' New Day earlier in the day.

Taal's current alert level means "if the trend is one of increasing unrest, [a] hazardous eruption is possible within days to weeks," the institute said.

Phivolcs has a 5-level alert system for Taal, with Alert Level 5 being the highest and indicating that a hazardous eruption is in progress.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 3)  An investigation on the alleged sale of COVID-19 vaccines is ongoing, according to Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez.

"We already identified the lot numbers of the vaccines, and a combined follow up operation is now being conducted by a composite team of the Food and Drug Administration, NBI (National Bureau of Investigation), AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) intelligence unit, and Philippine National Police to apprehend the offenders," Galvez said in a statement.

"We will ensure that a thorough investigation on the matter is conducted, and those involved will be penalized under RA (Republic Act No.) 11525, or the COVID-19 Vaccination Program Act of 2021," he added.

Based on earlier reports, the NBI apprehended three individuals - a nurse, a medical technologist, and a Filipino-Chinese - for allegedly selling 300 Sinovac doses. The NBI said the usual buyers of Sinovac are Chinese nationals.

COVID-19 vaccines being used in the country are only approved for emergency use and cannot be sold commercially.
Under drizzling rains with steep mountain ski slopes set behind them, Central Pennsylvanians filed in and set up lawn chairs for the first Thursday of Tussey Mountain WingFest.

Beginning more than 20 years ago at the Tussey Mountain Ski Area, the festival has progressively grown into its current form, which features live music, food vendors and a chicken wing contest that runs until mid-August.

What started as a small social gathering with live music, WingFest grew large enough to move to the Tussey Mountain amphitheater where it currently takes place, Tussey Mountain director of marketing Aaron Weyman said.

Its evolved into a fun little concert, Weyman said. "Some people come for the food, some people come for the drinks, a lot of people come for the music, and other people just come to socialize and hang out with their friends."

WingFest 2020 was canceled due to coronavirus restrictions last summer, but many restrictions have since been lifted, allowing for a largely maskless experience during this years festival.

Not having to put [WingFest] on for a year, I think, was a nice break, but were certainly happy that its not going to be a two-year break, Weyman said.

Finda Reichert said she and her husband, Mike Reichert, have been coming to WingFest for the past decade. Both lovers of live music, the two said they had seen both musical acts before and returned for this years opening day.

When you want to just lay back and have fun with your friends, you can come chill here whatever age you are, Finda said. And thats the cool thing about this.

Though her husband said he observed crowds were somewhat smaller than previous years of WingFest due to rain, he said he was still impressed by the music and numbers the festival had drawn.

WingFest opened this summer with two musical acts  The JR Mangan Band w/ Veronica as well as Velveeta  who played covers of classic rock tunes from the 60s to the early 2000s.

At one point, some audience members joined Velveeta in a singalong to Free Fallin by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers while waving flashlights side to side. Later, a small mosh developed, which hit its peak during a cover of Mr. Brightside by The Killers.

Jason Ebersol, bassist, and Mark Toci, guitarist, of the JR Mangan Band w/ Veronica said WingFest was their first large gig in 15 months because of the pandemic.

Toci said the band was initially nervous to return to the stage, but the group ultimately found the songs coming back to them.

Its awesome to be back out with everybody, finally, Toci said.

In the coming weeks, many other acts will take the stage at the Tussey Mountain Amphitheater. Some will be local bands like Pure Cane Sugar and Katz 22, while others will be tribute bands like The Ten Band, a Pearl Jam tribute, and Completely Unchained, a Van Halen tribute.

The wing contest Thursday featured three local contestants for attendees to pick from and vote on.

Edges Pub, the in-house restaurant of Tussey Mountain Ski Area, featured smoked buffalo, garlic parmesan and barbecue dry rub flavors. Sweet Tooth Bakery & Cafe in State College featured options like blueberry barbecue, monkey bread and aprihot flavors. State College's Texas Roadhouse also featured barbecue, mild, and hot flavored wings.

Luke Yanoshack, a Penn State student, and Nina Trach, a Penn State alumna, said they were new to WingFest but enjoyed their time at the gathering.

Trach said she particularly enjoyed some of the unique flavors from Sweet Tooth Bakery like its monkey bread variety. Yanoshack agreed, and said he enjoyed the blueberry barbecue wings.

Both said WingFest was one of the first large gatherings they had attended in State College since coronavirus restrictions have lessened in Pennsylvania.

[Its] fun, safe and normal again, Yanoshack (junior-mechanical engineering) said.

Ultimately, Sweet Tooth Bakery & Cafe was crowned winner of the first Thursday of WingFest. It received 161 votes compared to Edges Pubs 139 votes.

The bakery will return Aug. 12 to compete in the Tussey Mountain WingFest finals  the last of this years WingFest events.

MORE BOROUGH COVERAGE
State Rep. Scott Conklin announced Thursday Penn State would receive a $69,767 grant to aid the university's spotted lanternfly mitigation efforts.

The lanternfly has had a severe impact on the hardwood ornamentals industry in Centre County, according to a release.

Conklin said he will utilize provisions under the Pennsylvania Farm Bill, funded by the Pennsylvania Specialty Crop Block Grant. The grant is intended for use in the protection of high-value and priority crops such as Pennsylvania hardwoods, the release said.

MORE CAMPUS COVERAGE
Penn State employees are now able to travel domestically without unit executive approvals, as of Thursday, and may return to following their units' pre-pandemic approval processes for business trips.

All employees considering making travel plans are expected to follow all university coronavirus travel guidelines, according to a release.

All non-essential domestic travel plans that can be replaced with virtual alternatives are preferred by the university, the release said.

Penn State also encourages employees to be fully vaccinated before engaging in university travel, but full vaccination status is no longer required, according to the release.

Additionally, Penn State announced it will update its travel guidelines for students and international travel guidelines for employees "soon."

MORE CAMPUS COVERAGE
As students return and new freshmen flock to Penn State's campuses for the beginning of its second summer session, unvaccinated students who live on campus are required to receive weekly testing, which was announced in May.

The guidelines  which include the requirement of a mask indoors for unvaccinated students  apply to campuses with more than 25 students living in residence halls over the summer, according to Penn State spokesperson Wyatt DuBois.

Students who are fully vaccinated are not required to comply with the testing regulations.

All vaccinated students are encouraged by the university to upload their vaccine information to the myUHS portal. DuBois said Penn State uses voluntary vaccination information to inform its decision making for the fall's coronavirus mitigation plans.

No decisions have been announced regarding fall vaccination and testing strategies by the university.

Information regarding coronavirus testing will be delivered via the universitys coronavirus dashboard throughout the summer.

Editor's note: A previous version of this article stated the university accessed student's health records. This is not true. Students can voluntarily upload their coronavirus vaccination information. The Daily Collegian apologizes for this error.

MORE CAMPUS COVERAGE

Penn State receives grant for spotted lanternfly mitigation efforts State Rep. Scott Conklin announced Thursday Penn State would receive a $69,767 grant to aid 
After the coronavirus pandemic brought the spring 2020 semester not to a halt but, rather, to unprecedented territory, the internet at Penn State transformed from an assistant to learning into the main tool utilized in academia.

Vaccines are widely available in the United States. The rate of Pennsylvania adults who are fully vaccinated continually increases. And, the frequency of remote learning options is rapidly decreasing. Penn State is aiming to hold 96% of classes in person this fall  quite the adjustment from a majority of virtual or hybrid classes for the past school year.

Many may rejoice at the thought of a return to normal this fall: no more lazily logging into Zoom classes just to open other distracting tabs. Concerts are returning to light up the Bryce Jordan Center, and Beaver Stadium will once again host a much fuller fan base during each home game.

Yet, some people simply may not feel comfortable returning to normal in a few short months  especially with coronavirus variants appearing and spreading in the U.S. After the more exciting announcements of concerts at the BJC and other live events, Penn State University Libraries announced the end of its virtual services Tuesday. During the pandemic, the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service provided digital access to library resources. It will be no more on July 10.

Something that was an emergency temporary access service wasnt meant to last forever, but continuing some form of virtual library access even after the pandemic would benefit not only those with lingering coronavirus hesitancy but also the Penn State community as a whole.

Education is the key to societal improvement: While the world may not be counting on Penn State in lowly State College to solve all of societys problems, making education more accessible is surely a start to improve our little central Pennsylvania town.

Dedicating resources to continue funding and creating virtual education would work to create a more vibrant, knowledgeable and equitable community. Virtual classes, books, seminars, events and more would expand the universitys educational opportunities past the young, able-bodied majority compromising Penn States University Park campus.

Online classes are still available  in small numbers  at University Park, and World Campus offers solely virtual courses. But, the resources and opportunities available at University Park should extend beyond its campus. Virtual learning opportunities would help decrease some inequalities among the commonwealth.

Moreover, virtual resources went further than learning amid the pandemic  Penn States Counseling and Psychological Services offered virtual mental health resources. Making mental health services more accessible  through an online format  also continues to benefit the communitys wellbeing.

Online education and other resources arent perfect, but theyve primarily worked. And, continuing these remote options will only allow improvement. Improvement will lead to more innovation. Improvement will lead to more accessibility.

The world is inevitably moving into a more online format, and the coronavirus abruptly moved the world even more online. There are definite drawbacks to the online format, but the people it would help would slowly but impactfully improve the community.

Daily Collegian Managing Editor Becky Marcinko can be reached at rnm5187@psu.edu.
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!
I've been a reporter and editor at Missouri community newspapers for 35 years and joined the Columbia Missourian in 2003. My emphasis at the Missourian is on local government and elections. You can reach me at swaffords@missouri.edu or at 573-884-5366.

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UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak highlights financial services, trade with Singapore, India

The United Kingdom's Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak pledged yesterday to sharpen the competitive advantage of the UK financial services sector and seek new economic alliances as he set out his vision for the nation and London's post-Brexit future.

Sunak said that the UK was a very heavily services-oriented economy. Photo courtesy: gov.uk

In his first Mansion House speech, traditionally an annual address given by the chancellor in Londons financial district, Sunak said Britains departure from the EU was a unique opportunity to tailor rules while maintaining high regulatory standards and open markets.

Sunaks ministry set out plans to change a slew of rules inherited from the EU as the British government began to look further abroad for new economic partnerships.

"As we pursue an independent path outside the European Union, they will guide our economic relationships with other countries and jurisdictions," Sunak said in the speech.

He added that the government's plan was to seek closer links with advanced and emerging financial centres around the world and published a document setting out its vision.

Watch live as I deliver a speech at #MansionHouse on the UK's economic diplomacy and the future of UK financial services. https://t.co/ybzHmKcBFW  Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) July 1, 2021

Sunak and Singapores Senior Minister and Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam had on Wednesday signed a new partnership for financial services between the UK and Singapore as well.

"Our financial partnership will help increase investment and trade with Singapore and the Asia-Pacific region and boost collaboration on important areas such as fintech and green finance," Sunak said.

We've signed an ambitious new financial services partnership with Singapore  This will:



boost jobs, trade and investment

increase financial services between both countries

create greater cooperation on fintech, green finance and cybersecurityhttps://t.co/QUodHzBA82 pic.twitter.com/lgaT8zs7HN  Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) June 30, 2021

He had also said that both India and the UK were working towards doubling bilateral trade by 2030. India-UK bilateral trade stood at GBP 18.3 billion (about USD 25.3 billion) in 2020, down from GBP 23.3 billion (USD 32.2 billion) at the end of the previous year.

"We all have an ambition to hit this target of doubling our trade by 2030...(it) is the goal that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister (Boris) Johnson agreed," he had said at the India Global Forum.

Last month, India and Britain opened a new chapter in bilateral ties by launching a new Enhanced Trade Partnership, which also paved the way for a future Free Trade Agreement between two countries.

Talking about areas of collaboration, Sunak said that the UK was a very heavily services-oriented economy.

"It is not just financial services, it's engineering, it's professional services like legal, accounting, engineering, architecture and so I think there's a great opportunity for our two nations to liberalise services trade between our countries to create jobs in both places," he added.

Besides trade and economy, he said, India and the UK are pursuing a comprehensive strategic alliance tackling some of the combined security threats both nations face.
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The twins are seemingly deleted from reality at the end of the show, but then Wanda hears them calling for help in the post-credits scene, suggesting that they'll be brought back at some point (presumably as teenagers, or 27-year-old actors playing teenagers). There's a big chance they'll at least play a role in 2022's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where their mom is slated to show up next.

But Wiccan and Speed are not the first Young Avengers to appear in the MCU: that distinction goes to Ant-Man's daughter, Cassie Lang, who was introduced as an adorable little girl in the first Ant-Man movie and then aged to a more Young Avengers-appropriate age in Avengers: Endgame. In the comics, Cassie becomes a size-shifting superhero called Stature after revealing that she's been micro-dosing with the Pym Particles that give her dad his powers since she was a kid.

Marvel Comics

Marvel Studios If she was truly Paul Rudd's kid, she wouldn't age at all.

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It's been confirmed that Cassie will show up in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which will also feature Kang, a time-traveling Avengers villain. And, as it turns out, (we already gave you a spoiler warning at the start but here's another one since no one reads the intro) Kang is the future version of another Young Avenger, Iron Lad. In fact, Iron Lad is the one who puts together the team while trying to prevent his evil future. It's kind of like if Kid Hitler was the leader of the Teen Titans.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier also introduces a Young Avenger. Remember when they go visit the Black vet who was experimented on by the U.S. government while trying to recreate Captain America? (As if Uncle Sam would ever do anything like that!) No, the old guy isn't in the Young Avengers, his grandkid Eli a.k.a. Patriot is.

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At first, Eli claims that he got Cap-like powers after his grandpa gave him a blood transfusion, but then it turns out he's actually been shooting up a mutant growth hormone (presumably derived from Wolverine's castrated and regrown balls). Later, Marvel scrapped that and made the blood transfusion story real, probably because they finally realized how "one of our few Black teen heroes is a junkie" sounded.

Marvel Comics
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Waseca Police Officer Arik Matson and his wife Megan took a photo with Minnesota senators Tuesday. The Senate began its floor session Tuesday by recognizing Matson. Waseca County Attorney Rachel Cornelius also joined the Matsons at the Senate. (Photo courtesy Minnesota Senate Republicans)
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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The United States and the United Kingdom cyber and law enforcement entities (NSA, FBI, CISA and NCSC) have joined forces to protect enterprises in their respective nations and the globe, with the July 1 issuance of defensive guidance regarding Russian the intelligence services targeting and attack methodologies. While bilateral sharing of information between the US and UK intelligence services occurs daily, the public sharing of their joint perspective and guidance is especially noteworthy and should be taken on board by every CISO, regardless of company size.

Russian GRU global brute force campaign

The report, Russian GRU Global Brute Force Campaign, notes since at least mid-2019 through early 2021, the Russian GRUs (military intelligence) Unit 26165 has used a Kubernetes cluster to conduct widespread, distributed, and anonymized brute force access attempts against hundreds of government and private sector targets worldwide. The cybersecurity world has previously identified the efforts of Unit 26165 with the monikers Fancy Bear, APT28, and Strontium.

When the attack is successful, the report said, the adversary can access protected data, including email, and identify valid account credentials.

They then use the credentials to move laterally within the targeted entity, collecting data, establishing additional footholds, and perhaps most importantly from the adversarys perspective, evade detection.

US Department of Defense

The report detailed how the targeting efforts of Unit 26165, while global, have focused primarily on the United States and Europe and included the energy, logistics, academia, research, media, legal, defense, and government sectors. They also targeted political parties, organizations, and consultants.

Security guidance for network managers

The report is unambiguous in its guidance to network managers and those charged with the protection of data and infrastructure:

Expand usage of multi-factor authentication using strong authentication factors that are not guessable.

Use time-out and lock-out features. Increase time-out after each fail and lock out after multiple failed attempts to access network resources.

Mandate strong password usage that directly addresses brute force dictionary or guessing attacks.

Embrace zero trust security including least-privileged access and segmenting networks.

Deny inbound activity from anonymization services such as Tor and commercial VPNs. (CactusVPN, IPVanish, NordVPN, ProtonVPN, Surfshark and WorldVPN are all identified by name.)

GRU Unit 26165

This is not the first time GRU Unit 26165 has been highlighted in a government bulletin or advisory. Indeed, the window of activity, mid-2019 through early 2021, might lead some to believe these activities by GRU Unit 26165 are new, but nothing could be further from the truth. The GRU and its robust offensive cyber capabilities have been engaged in cyberattacks and penetrations or many years. Examples include the 2016 US elections, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and the 2020 advisory for Malware: Drovorub.

U.S. election: Almost exactly three years ago, the US Department of Justice announced the grand jury indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for offenses related to the 2016 electionhacking the Democratic National Committee, the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The entity then went on to publish portions of the stolen content via a fictitious Romanian, Guccifer 2.0.

Winter Olympics: In October 2018, a separate grand jury issued an indictment of seven Russian intelligence officers concerning Russias state-sponsored athlete doping program. The indictment notes how from 2014 through 2018, GRU Unit 26165 played a key part in the Russia efforts to adjust the narrative and Unit 26165 conducted persistent and sophisticated computer intrusions affecting US persons, corporate entities, international organizations, and their respective employees.

Drovorub: In August 2020, the NSA and FBI issued a bulletin concerning Unit 26165 deployment of malware called Drovorub, which targeted Linux systems as part of a cyber-espionage activity.

CISOs, use this guidance with your C-suite

CISOs should recognize that this guidance is neither new nor difficult to implement. The recommendations could be pulled from network security 101. This does not diminish the importance of the joint guidance. Rather, it serves to highlight the current state of play. The multiple agencies arepublicly sharing their guidance. The fact is, adversaries continue to be successful because information security implementation, maintenance, and governance is uneven and within some entities poorly implemented.

That said, CISOs should use this guidance with the C-Suite as a demonstrable tool to garner resources for information security teams to successfully muscle through resistance to the need to resource information security. We must engage in defensive actions to make it too costly or difficult for the adversary to be successful and have a plan in place to mitigate those instances when the adversary is successful.

GRU Unit 26165 isnt going to pack up shop; they are in it for the long-haul. What they can be expected to do is change their tactics. Their targeting, however, wont change: You are the target.
PHOENIX (AP)  Republican lawmakers in Arizona lost seats in last year's election and entered the 2021 legislative session with the smallest House and Senate majorities they have seen in years.

Yet despite shrinking numbers and Democratic ascendancy at the ballot box, the GOP managed to enact one of the most conservative agendas in memory during the legislative session that ended this week. From abortion to taxes to policing and much more, Republicans moved the state decisively to the right.

This years legislative session is one for the record books, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey said in a statement Thursday. I believe it will go down in history as one of the most successful legislative sessions in recent memory.

The GOP's rightward shift was enabled by the departure of two moderate Republicans who lost their reelection bids last year. Sen. Heather Carter lost the GOP primary to the more conservative Nancy Barto, while Sen. Kate Brophy McGee lost to Democrat Christine Marsh in the general election. Without Carter and Brophy McGee, the Senate Republican caucus was smaller but more conservative.

A year ago, political observers from both parties expected Democrats to tie or win a majority in at least one chamber. But while Democrats won the top races on the Arizona ballot  president and U.S. Senate  their successes did not carry down. They posted a net gain of just one state Senate seat, leaving Republicans controlling 31 of 60 House seats and 16 of 30 Senate seats.

Opposition from any Republicans was enough to kill legislation if no Democrats were on board, creating what Republican Rep. John Kavanagh called 47 governors with veto power.

The conservative victories ran the gamut:

TAXES

 Tax rates were fixed for most people at 2.5%, eliminating the state's progressive tax schedule in which higher levels of income are taxed at higher rates. Once fully phased in, state revenue will be slashed by about $1.9 billion a year, with benefits accruing mostly for the wealthiest taxpayers.

 As part of the tax cut plan, wealthy Arizonans will be shielded from a 3.5% tax surcharge voters approved last year to increase salaries for teachers and other school employees. High earners who get their income from estates, trusts and business profits will save even more.

ABORTION

Arizona's already restrictive abortion laws got even more so. Lawmakers and Ducey made it a crime for medical providers to perform abortions solely because of genetic abnormalities like Down syndrome. They gave personhood rights to fetuses and banned the dispensing of abortion-inducing drugs through the mail. And they funded a hotline to discourage pregnant women considering abortions from going through with it  something Senate moderates had blocked in prior years.

SEX EDUCATION

If Ducey signs a bill still on his desk, schools won't be able to teach sex education before fifth grade and parents will have to opt in to any discussion of sex outside of sex ed lessons. Ducey vetoed an earlier version of the bill, so lawmakers tweaked the measure in response and hope to win his support.

POLICE REFORM

Lawmakers threw cold water on a police reform push that has intensified since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year. Police misconduct investigations will have to be conducted by sworn officers from the same department as the person being investigated, and civilian-controlled review boards are outlawed.

PANDEMIC POWERS

The government's public health powers were curtailed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Schools, universities and local governments won't be able to require masks or vaccination. Mayors won't be able to order business closures or capacity limits. Governors will lose their power to order people to be vaccinated. And businesses will be largely shielded from pandemic-related lawsuits.

ELECTION LAWS

A host of new election rules were adopted following former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him in Arizona and other battleground states. People who skip two consecutive election cycles will be purged from the permanent early voting list, and election officials won't be able to accept private grants.

SCHOOL CHOICE

Several school choice priorities were advanced. School districts and charter schools will be able to pay parents to bring children to school, an effort to eliminate transportation barriers that might make it harder for parents to enroll their children somewhere other than their assigned neighborhood school. The most successful schools will get extra money through a results-based funding program.

Conservative Republicans didn't bat perfectly. Some of the most aggressive measures  making it harder to vote or allowing the Legislature to overturn voters' choices in the presidential contest  did not pass. Nor did an effort to strip the Corporation Commission, the state's utility regulator, of its power to regulate renewable energy. A push to expand vouchers for private school tuition was scaled back significantly.

Democrats were dejected but also predicted voters will punish Republicans for overreaching.

We see you. We hear you. We know what youre trying to do to Arizona, and we wont let it happen, Rep. Charlene Fernandez, a Yuma Democrat, told Republicans at the end of the session.
HONOLULU (AP)  Two pilots told air traffic controllers that their engine had cut out and they needed help moments before crashing their cargo plane into the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii on Friday.

It doesnt look good out here, one of the pilots said before the Boeing 737 broke apart as it entered the water.

Both pilots, the only people aboard, were seriously injured but survived the crash. An hour later, rescuers found the two clinging to packages and parts of the plane in about 150 feet (46 meters) of water several miles off Oahu, authorities said.

Craig T. Kojima/AP

One was on the tail and the other clinging to packages, Coast Guard Lt. Commander Karin Evelyn wrote in an email to The Associated Press. As an agency helicopter got close, the airplane began to sink putting the individual on the tail in the water. The crews hoisted them safely on the aircraft. The rescue swimmer then assisted the other individual.

The pilots of Transair Flight 810 heading from Honolulu to Maui reported engine trouble and were trying to return to Honolulu, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

Weve lost No. 1 engine, and were coming straight to the airport," one of the pilots said in air traffic control communications. Were going to need the fire department. Theres a chance were going to lose the other engine, too, its running very hot. Were very low on speed.

The pilot said they werent carrying hazardous materials and had two hours worth of fuel. They asked the tower to advise the Coast Guard, then asked if there was a closer airport than Honolulu.

After a stretch of silence, the controller asks if the pilot is still there. There was no response.

Looks like they went down in the water, the tower says.

Later, a rescuer aboard a Coast Guard helicopter sent to search for the pilots tells air traffic control: We do have an aircraft in the water ... were currently overhead (the) debris field.

Minutes later: We have zero, two souls in sight in the water.

The tower responded, OK, so you have both guys, both souls in sight?

Both souls in sight, yes, sir, the rescuers responded.

The pilots, whose identities were not immediately released, were taken to a hospital. Officials at Queens Medical Center said a 58-year-old was in critical condition, Hawaii News Now reported. The other pilot, a 50-year-old, was in serious condition with a head injury and multiple lacerations, the TV station reported.

The Coast Guard reported flying over the crash site off Oahu to evaluate for pollution after the sun came up in the morning. Debris and fuel remained in the water.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. The NTSB said in a tweet that it will send a team of 10 investigators.

The plane is a 46-year-old Boeing 737-200, a much earlier version of the 737 than the Max, and one that U.S. airlines no longer use for passenger flights. There are fewer than 60 737-200s still flying worldwide, according to aviation-data researcher Cirium.

The Boeing 737 first flew in the late 1960s and is the most popular airline plane still in production. Boeing has delivered more than 10,500 of them and has unfilled orders for about 4,000 more, almost all of those for the latest version of the plane, the 737 Max.

Over the years, about 200 737s have been destroyed in crashes and several hundred others have been involved in less serious accidents and incidents, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.

For a jet that has been in production for so long and is being used so extensively, 203 hull-loss accidents can be considered a very good safety record, said Harro Ranter, who runs the database.

He said the planes accident rate improved dramatically from the first models to more recent ones that preceded the Max.

Boeing said in a statement: We are aware of the reports out of Honolulu, Hawaii and are closely monitoring the situation. We are in contact with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and are working to gather more information.

There have been some water landings over the years in which people survived, the most famous being the 2009 crash of a US Airways flight in New York's Hudson River where all 155 people on board survived.

All four people on board survived a cargo plane crash into water short of a runway in Gabon in 2011.

In other cases, some passengers and crew survived but some died, including a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines plane that ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean in 1996, a Tunisian airliner that went down off the coast of Sicily in 2005, and an Indonesian airliner that landed in a river during a thunderstorm in 2002.

___

Koenig reported from Dallas. Monroe reported from Phoenix.
NEW ORLEANS (AP)  The owner of Gulf of Mexico oil wells broken in 2004 cannot demand damages from a federal contractor who says his equipment has captured enough oil to fill scores of tank trucks, a federal appeals court has ruled.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld a decision that Taylor Energy Co. LLC cannot sue Couvillion Group LLC for trespass because Couvillion has a federal contract to contain oil from a spill that began when Hurricane Ivan toppled a Taylor platform off Louisiana.

Representatives of Taylor, which sold its leases and assets four years after the rig was destroyed and now exists only for the specific purpose of dealing with the accident, did not respond to an email and telephone call seeking comment Thursday.

The company has consistently said that oil stirred up from sediments, rather than leaking wells, is the main cause of a persistent sheen on the surface, and that it involves much less oil than others say.

Timmy Couvillion, president and CEO of Couvillion Group, disagrees.

"Taylor Energy has continuously made the assertions that the sky is not blue and if we say it, saying it makes it true, he said Thursday.

This is a money-grubbing story, said his attorney, Patrick McShane.

McShane said the suit is among 11 that Taylor has filed in attempts to get $432 million out of a federal escrow account set up to stop the leaks if engineers ever figure out how to do that.

Taylor plugged some of the wells but says further attempts would endanger workers and create a much greater environmental danger than currently exists.

In 2019, a federal judge in Washingon, D.C., dismissed a suit saying the U.S. Interior Department should be made to return the money.

The underwater mudslide that overturned Taylors platform also dragged it nearly 560 feet (170 meters) and buried the pipe casings for its cluster of 28 oil wells under up to 165 feet (50 meters) of sediment.

The well bores for the 28 wells ... rest in a tangled web, U.S. District Judge Gerard Guidry noted in his August 2020 summary judgment dismissing Taylors claims against Couvillion.

The 5th Circuit upheld his ruling that Couvillions contract with the Coast Guard was valid and correctly supervised, and makes the company immune to trespass claims.

The agency had ordered Taylor to end the leak in October 2018, one day after The Washington Post published an article including what was then a new estimate that 10,500 to 29,400 gallons (39,747 to 111,291 liters) of oil was leaking daily.

Taylor sued to block that order the same day it sued Couvillion Group, which was hired in November 2018.

Couvillion set up its containment system on April 12, 2019, and had captured 735,000 gallons (nearly 2.8 million liters) by late May, according to its reports.

That would be enough to fill about 58 large tanker trailers.

The amount of oil coming from the area has been a contentious issue from the start.

A study by Taylor consultants, published last year in a peer-reviewed journal, said the sheens contained synthetics that probably came from work done before 2012.

Though they said Couvillion's figures had never been verified, the consultants noted that the containment tent ... has resulted in a substantial reduction in the frequency and extent of surface sheens.

This respite should be used to have the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine study what could be done, they wrote.
Christian Abraham / Hearst Connecticut Media

The average price of a gallon of gas in Connecticut has reached its highest point this year, in line with the national average, according to AAA Northeast.

On Thursday, the average price is $3.13 a gallon in the state, three cents higher than last week and $1.03 more than last year. Nationally, the average price Thursday is $3.12, two cents higher than last week and 94 cents higher than 2020.
BRANFORD - Legacy Theatre is holding two week-long youth summer 2021 intensives this July with Broadway and television stars Stephanie Gibson (Cinderella, The Addams Family, Spamalot), Linda Mugleston (Beautiful, Hello, Dolly!, My Fair Lady), and Andrew Pastides (Blue Bloods, Law & Order, Suits). Registration is now open at www.LegacyTheatreCT.org/classes

Students will spend the week learning the ins and outs of musical theatre. Each day will consist of music (song interpretation and presentation), acting (games working with text and movement, monologues) and dance (learning original Broadway choreography). The intensive will culminate in a presentation for all to see what students worked on for the entire week!

The Emerging Actor Intensive runs from Monday July 12th through Friday July 16th from 9:00 AM- 3:00 PM for students ages 8-12. Students will experience all aspects of production and performance, with a public showcase on July 16th at 3:00 PM.

The Young Professionals Intensive runs July 19-23, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. for ages 13-18. Students will experience all aspects of production and performance, with a public showcase on July 23rd at 3:00 PM.

For the most up-to-date policies regarding intensive safety protocols, please visit: www.LegacyTheatreCT.org/classes

To learn more about Legacy Theatres ongoing shows and events, visit LegacyTheatreCT.org

Crafters wanted for church fair

MIDDLETOWN  The Church of the Holy Trinity will hold their Annual Holiday Fair Dec. 4, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. at 381 Main St. Middletown.

The fair will be held on the first and second floors of the Parish Hall and the church, with elevator access to the second floor.

With the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce building right next door, this is a great location as the Holiday on Main Street activities are all going on. The horse and wagon rides and the fun train for the kiddies stops right in front of the church. Many people are out and about on Main Street during the holidays, organizers said.

Download an application at www.holytrinityct.org, at About CHT, Community Resources, Holiday Fair Crafter Application 2021, or call the Holy Trinity office at 860-347-2591, Taylor Walsh at 860-342-3800, or e-mail to office.holytrinityct@gmail.com for more information about renting a space. $40 for a 6 foot table.

Fireworks safety tips for residents

The Connecticut Commission on Fire Prevention and Control and Connecticuts Office of the State Fire Marshal are urging residents to be Fire Safe this July 4, according to Alan Zygmunt, Public Education Coordinator for the Connecticut Fire Academy.

According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), fireworks caused 19,500 fires in 2018 with 9,100 firework related injuries. By following a few simple safety tips, we can insure a safe and happy holiday.

Fireworks are illegal in the State of Connecticut - Use only Sparklers and Fountains if you are 16 or older. Keep children several feet away from lit fireworks. Sparklers and Fountains produce very hot sparks and can cause permanent eye or burn injuries. Never light fireworks indoors or near dry grass.

Grilling Safety: Before using a gas grill, check the connection between the propane tank and the fuel line. Make sure the venturi tubes (where the air and gas mix) are not blocked. Grill at least 10 feet from any building. Dont let children play close to the grill. Be careful when using lighter fluid. Do not add fluid to an already lit fire. Dispose of hot coals properly. Never grill/barbecue in enclosed areas as Carbon Monoxide is produced.

Campfire Safety: Prior to having a Campfire, Bonfire, Fire Pit, Chiminea and Other Similar Devices check with your local fire marshal or burn official in your community for regulations or permit requirements. Burn only clean, non-processed wood. Build campfires where they will not spread, away from dry grass and leaves. Never leave campfires unattended.

Go to www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/Seasonal-fire-causes for additional information on these and other important fire safety topics. You can also contact Alan Zygmunt, Public Education Coordinator at alan.zygmunt@ct.gov for more information.

Shoreline Arts Alliance offering workshops, support

Shoreline Arts Alliance has received grants from Branford Community Fund, Community Foundation of Middlesex County, Guilford Foundation, Guilford Savings Bank and The Madison Foundation in support of its newest program, Expressions in Art. Created in collaboration with Art and Soul Art Therapy and Innovative Counseling, the virtual arts workshop and support group for high school students will aim to help alleviate feelings of isolation through artistic expression, interpersonal connection and community building.

Students can create digital artwork collaboratively with a facilitator present during two four-week sessions, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings from 7-8:30 p.m. All meetings will take place remotely via Zoom and Magmastudio. Opportunities for artwork to be displayed will be offered.

This program is open to all students who reside in Shoreline Arts Alliances 24-town region (Branford, Chester, Clinton, Cromwell, Deep River, Durham, East Haddam, East Hampton, East Haven, East Lyme, Essex, Guilford, Haddam, Killingworth, Lyme, Madison, Middlefield, Middletown, North Branford, Old Lyme, Old Saybrook, Portland, Salem & Westbrook) The registration fee is $115. Scholarships are available for students from Branford, Guilford, Madison and Middlesex County.

Session 1 is Aug. 17-Sept. 15, Session 2, Sept. 28-Oct. 27. Registration is limited for this program. Interested high school students can register and apply for the available scholarships through the Shoreline Arts Alliance website: www.shorelinearts.org/expressions-in-art For more information or to become a community partner, email communications@shorelinearts.org
Thousands of residents and visitors are expected to flock to Connecticut shoreline communities this July Fourth weekend, and for the first time in generations, adults in the crowd will be able to bring their marijuana.

For both consumers and police, that means navigating lingering prohibitions in the nearly 300-page legalization law, which went into effect Thursday.

In preparation for legalization, the Connecticut Police Officers Standards and Training Council in Meriden sent new guidance last week to departments across the state, outlining the new law and how officers should handle suspected violations.

For example, the document states that simple possession of marijuana does not constitute probable cause for police to stop and search someone if they dont have other evidence that the person has more than the legally allowed amount.

However, someone can still be found guilty of an infraction if they are smoking cannabis in an area where it is prohibited, such as an indoor restaurant or school.

In Guilford, Police Chief Warren Hyatt said he used the document to get his officers up to speed with the new law, although he anticipated that the holiday weekend would be educational for officers and civilians.

Its been 11 hours or so [since legalization went into effect]. I dont know that weve seen an increase yet, Hyatt said Thursday morning. I dont know what to expect yet, and certainly there may be times when people are taking advantage of the new law in a place that may not be appropriate.

Some police departments along the shoreline said they are beefing up patrols for the weekend. DeVaughn Ward, the senior legislative counsel for the Marijuana Policy Project, said consumers should also expect police to be on the alert for impaired drivers.

Smoking marijuana is prohibited for both drivers and passengers under the new law. While police are generally restricted from using the smell of burnt cannabis as a pretext for stopping someone, it can be used as the basis for an impairment test if the officer suspects someone of driving under the influence, according to the guidance given to police departments.

Because of this new law, officers will be out enforcing this, Ward said.

Connecticuts legalization allows adults to carry up to 1.5 ounces (up to 5 ounces if its in a locked container in a car or house), though municipalities may still adopt ordinances banning the drug from many public places, such as parks and beaches. Cities and towns with more than 50,000 residents are required to designate some outdoor public spaces for marijuana use if they choose to regulate public consumption.

Mike Muszynski, the state and federal relations manager at the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, said its unclear how many towns have already adopted formal rules regulating the use of marijuana in public, though he added that many are actively working with their attorneys and groups such as CCM to develop clear policies.

Theres a lot of moving parts still in the works as [legalization] is still in its infancy, Muszynski said.

In Old Lyme, for example, officials said an existing smoking ban on public property, such as parks and beaches, would apply to marijuana. Asked whether the ban would apply to edible versions of the drug, First Selectman Timothy Griswold said it would not be a priority for police.

If they come in with brownies, I dont think theyre going to have a dog sniffing brownies, Griswold said.

For visitors to state parks and beaches, the use of marijuana is expressly prohibited under the law, and violators could be subject to a $250 fine from agents of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

Private attractions may set their own policies against pot, similar to those against smoking tobacco.

For example, the Mystic Aquarium in Stonington prohibits smoking tobacco or marijuana throughout its property, including outdoor areas, according to a spokesperson. Visitors are also prohibited from bringing in outside food and drinks (so, no gummies).

Ward said people should expect local smoking bans to apply to marijuana as well as tobacco, and smokers should be courteous even in areas where the policy is unclear.

If someone asks you, even if its not prohibited by law, to put out your joint, be considerate of others, Ward said.

Staff writer Christine DeRosa contributed to this story.
Content is king  if you can find it.

As streaming services proliferate, it's becoming more of a challenge to track down your favorite TV shows and blockbuster movies when streaming services can change up their offerings every month. That's complicating life for those who know what they want to watch, but just don't know where to locate it.

Some hits are practically itinerants. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight," for instance, bounced around four different services between March 2020 and March 2021  Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and Peacock. Some of these services hosted the movies twice in that time according to Reelgood, a service that tracks videos across streaming services. (You can currently find the movies on Hulu and HBO Max.)

Want to watch a Harry Potter movie? Films in the series started on HBO Max in May 2020 before heading to Peacock in August. They then jumped back to HBO Max in June 2021  but only for a single month. At the moment, the first three films are available for free on Peacock, but you'll need a premium subscription for the last five.

Not long after its March launch, Paramount+ reclaimed some of its movies, like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" and the Paul Rudd comedy I Love You Man," from other services.

This merry-go-round arguably started in 2019 when NBC said it would no longer license The Office to Netflix, although Netflix kept the rights through 2020  a move intended to bolster NBC's Peacock streaming service. The Office was the most viewed show on Netflix in 2018, streamed for over 52 billion minutes, according to Nielsen. HBO Max made a similar move when it yanked back Friends" from Netflix.

The Hollywood producers of these shows and films likely appreciate the extra cash they've earned from licensing shows to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and similar services. But those partners have steadily morphed into competitors as studios like NBCUniversal, Disney and WarnerMedia created their own streaming options to get in on the gold rush. In the meantime, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have focused more on creating their own original content.

Exclusive content has always been an important factor in the battle for streaming dominance, said Reelgood CEO David Sanderson. Production companies that want a bigger piece of the pie, he said, have realized that their best chance of success involves their own properties.

Consumers, meanwhile, are left to frantically scan for the shows they want. Chris Kaufman, a 35-year-old in Logan, Utah, once put movies like the Ocean's 11" trilogy in his Netflix queue to watch later. But when he got around to them, they were gone. (They left Netflix in December 2020 and are now on HBO Max).

I dont have a whole lot of time in the day to watch, and now I have to go and search it out," he said.

Search engines can help. Alan Keane, a 35-year-old Brooklyn resident, says he uses Google when not searching through individual services. Other choices include apps such as Reelgood and JustWatch, which let you search a customizable list of services for particular titles. Digital media players like Roku and Apple TV also let you search across all the streaming apps you subscribe to.

But constantly having to search out those shows and movies can be frustrating. Since there are no penalties for consumers who drop a streaming service, it can also lead to customer churn," an industry term for the pace at which people sign up for and drop services, said Jeff Wlodarczak, an analyst at Pivotal Research.

If your streaming service runs out of interesting content, I would simply drop the service and come back at a later date, he said.

Kaufman said he and his family, including his wife and toddler, are considering dropping Netflix since they're using HBO Max more now.

We have been in discussion as a household, we might be dropping a service on a monthly basis, and reacquiring it a couple months later when it is fresh and new for us," he said.

Kevin Westcott, who heads consulting firm Deloitte's U.S. technology, media and telecom business, said his firm's research finds that this content merry-go-round is the leading frustration subscribers report with streaming services. It's also the No. 2 reason people say they may cancel a service, coming in just after price increases.

But he doesn't see things changing any time soon. In fact, Westcott figures that a version of windowing"  the process of releasing a movie first in a theater, then on cable channels and streaming services  will stick around because it's a major source of revenue for the studios. We're always going to be in a situation where content will move," he said.

Netflix, Amazon, NBCUniversal, Disney and WarnerMedia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A 30-year-old Hong Kong man Thursday pleaded guilty to charges in U.S. District Court, after authorities alleged he attempted to smuggle glass eels out of the United States throught Connecticut, the U.S. Attorneys Office said.

King Sheung Chan, who also goes by Nelson, pleaded guilty in Bridgeport federal court to one count of attempted smuggling of glass eels, the office said.

In a statement, the office said there exists  strong foreign demand for the export of live juvenile American glass eels,which are taken to eel farms in mainland China to be raised and eaten by people.

In the U.S., harvesting the eels commercially is only legal in South Carolina and Maine, with Maine using a quota system. That means the eels can run anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 per kilo depending on the year, the U.S. attorneys office said.

Harvesting the eels has led to them being listed as an endangered species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Authorities say Chan worked for a company based in Hong Kong and another based in Canada that obtained eels from the U.S. and Europe to be flown overnight to Hong Kong.

The U.S. Attorneys Office said that on April 7, Chan packaged more than 19 kilos of live eels stored at a Connecticut facility. The eels were worth about $86,000, the office said.

Chan was told by undercover U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) officers who were posing as fisherman that these glass eels had been unlawfully harvested from Virginia, Maryland and Massachusetts, the press release said.

Authorities alleged he paid more than $29,000 to the undercover officers and drove the eels to JFK International Airport.

Authorities claim he then mixed the bags containing live eels that had been stored in Connecticut with boxes containing both dead and live eels, before sealing them back up and sending the boxes for export to Hong Kong.

Fish and Wildlife officers then arrested Chan, seizing the eels from the cargo area, which were later released.

The U.S. Attorneys Office said in his guilty plea, Chan admitted to smuggling 103 kilos of eels out of the U.S. to Hong Kong in 2017. The eels were worth around $340,000  some of which were harvested in Connecticut.

Chan is due to be sentenced Sept. 30. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
5 1 of 5 Echo Hose Hook & Ladder Co. 1 / Contributed Show More Show Less 2 of 5 Echo Hose Hook & Ladder Co. 1 / Contributed Show More Show Less 3 of 5 4 of 5 Eagle Hose & Hook & Ladder Company No. 6 / Contributed Show More Show Less 5 of 5









ANSONIA  A Benz Street house fire Thursday reached a second alarm and took several hours to fully extinguish, according to officials.

Fire units responded to the 30 block of Benz Street for a reported structure fire around 2:30 a.m.
The venture capitalist and author of Hillbilly Elegy officially joined the crowded Republican race for the Ohio U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Rob Portman.

JD Vance, whose book was widely seen in 2016 as helping explain Republican Donald Trump's appeal to struggling white, working-class voters, made the announcement Thursday night at the steel fabricator Middletown Tube Works in his Ohio hometown.

We have to send people to Washington who are willing to shake the system up, to fight, to fight smart and to make our country a little bit better, Vance said.

Vance will face former state GOP chair Jane Timken, former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, and two Cleveland businesspeople, Mike Gibbons and Bernie Moreno, in next year's GOP primary. Portman, a Republican, decided earlier this year not to seek a third term, citing dismay at partisan gridlock.

While Vance, 36, hasn't run for elective office before, a political action committee formed this year to encourage his candidacy got an eyebrow-raising $10 million contribution from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Vance had worked for the billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur in California.

Vance returned to his home state to live after Trump was elected in 2016, which was the first of two times the former president carried Ohio by 8 percentage points.

Vance's book, made into a movie starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close that earned the latter a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination, tells of his hardscrabble, colorful upbringing in the struggling Ohio steel mill city of Middletown and his familial roots in Appalachian Kentucky.

He went on to serve in the Marines, including in Iraq, and to success at Ohio State University and Yale Law School, from which he graduated in 2013, and in the technology industry in Silicon Valley.

Vance said when he came back to Ohio in 2016 that he hoped to contribute to anti-addiction efforts. He and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, settled in Cincinnati, where he helped found a venture capital firm.

Among Vance's close associates is Jai Chabria, a longtime strategist for former Republican Gov. John Kasich, a 2016 Trump presidential rival and detractor of the former president.

Vance and Usha, who met at Yale Law, have two children.

___

Sewell reported from Cincinnati. After four decades with The Associated Press, he retired yesterday.

___

This story has been corrected to show that Vance is 36, not 38.
LOS ANGELES (AP)  The Los Angeles City Council passed a sweeping anti-camping measure Thursday to remove widespread homeless encampments that have become an eyesore across the city.

The measure was billed as a compassionate approach to get people off streets and restore access to public spaces in the city with nation's second-largest homeless population, though critics said it would criminalize the problem.

I cant think of any reason why we would not unite in support of what the people of Los Angeles want us to do," said Councilman Paul Krekorian, coauthor of the measure. "Restore order to our streets, while also uplifting and providing services to those in need.

Among other limits, the ordinance that passed 13-2 would ban sitting, lying, sleeping or storing personal property that blocks sidewalks, streets and bike lanes or near driveways, fire hydrants, schools, day care centers, libraries, homeless shelters and parks.

It wouldnt be enforced in some locations until someone has turned down an offer of shelter and the council has passed a resolution placing that space off-limits, posting signs and giving two weeks' notice. It could be enforced immediately if a person or tent is blocking handicap access guaranteed under the Americans with Disabilities Act or placing themselves or others in danger such as blocking a loading dock.

The measure, which requires a second vote in late July, replaces a more punitive anti-camping proposal that stalled in a committee. Under the ordinance approved, police would only get involved if there's a crime, and people who resist leaving would be fined rather than arrested.

The majority of callers during a limited public comment period spoke in support of the measure, describing homeless encounters that included assaults, break-ins and one explaining how children walking to school are forced into a busy street to avoid tents crowding sidewalks.

People who opposed the measure, including a couple who used profanity, said it lacked compassion and would criminalize a problem the city has failed to solve.

The meeting was closed to the public because of coronavirus restrictions, but a group of advocates for the homeless protested outside City Hall.

Pete White of the LA Community Action Network said the measure is loosely written to allow broad interpretation for enforcement and will make most of the city off-limits to people living on the street.

Draconian is definitely the correct word, he said. Its impossible to comply.

White said that an ordinance that limited where people could park RVs and sleep in cars overnight left little more than 5% of streets available for parking.

California is home to more than a quarter of the nations homeless people, according to federal data, and it has reached a crisis point in many cities. There are deep disagreements in how to solve a problem that goes beyond economics and is often complicated by mental illness and addiction issues that require treatment and can make people resistant to accepting shelter.

The city of Los Angeles has an estimated homeless population of more than 40,000, which is second only to New York's.

Encampments have steadily grown over several years and often sprawl entire blocks. They can include barbecues, sofas, recliner chairs and even a shower. Many are crammed with piles of belongings, scavenged junk and covered in tarps.

A federal judge directed the city of LA to offer housing to thousands of homeless people on Skid Row by this fall, though the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals put that on hold.

The appeals court has separately held that cities can't make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the streets when alternative shelter is not available.

The leading Republican candidates seeking to replace Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall election came to LA County this week to announce their plans to address the statewide problem.

Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer called for more shelters, while rival businessman John Cox said people insisting on sleeping on streets should be locked up or forced into treatment.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat, has proposed a right to housing that would require the city to provide shelter to all residents.

While the crisis is widespread across Los Angeles, a dispute about how to solve the problem has become a flashpoint on Venice Beach recently, where an encampment exploded in size during the coronavirus pandemic.

The situation has left residents weary and worried for their safety  and for the wellbeing of those in camps  after several violent incidents. A homeless man was arrested last week in the killing of another homeless man who was bludgeoned in his tent on the beach.

Sheriff Alex Villanueva, whose deputies patrol unincorporated parts of the county, entered city turf with a homeless outreach team to announce a plan to get people into housing by July 4.

His lofty overture, which has moved some people off the boardwalk but is unlikely to meet his goal this weekend, was met with resistance from much of LA's political establishment, particularly Councilman Mike Bonin, whose district includes Venice.

Bonin, who criticized an approach that could lead to jail time if people don't leave, launched his own plan days later. That effort, which has moved 64 people indoors, is being rolled out in several phases into August and promises to eventually provide permanent housing.

Bonin opposed the ordinance Thursday, saying the city doesn't have tens of thousands of beds needed for the homeless and criticizing the plan for not showing where people can sleep.

Bonin, who is recovering from alcohol and drug addiction, disclosed that he lived without a home in his 20s and ended up sleeping on the beach when his car was in the shop or he couldn't crash at a friend's house.

I can't tell you how much turmoil, there is in your heart when the sun is setting and you dont know where you can sleep, Bonin said. I cannot describe how demoralizing and dehumanizing and defeating that experience is when you dont know where youre gonna sleep.

___

This story has been corrected to reflect that the measure requires a second vote later this month, not next month.
WESTPORT  Are the towns restaurants biting off more than they can chew?

Thats the concern of the local health director, who is worried about the impact outdoor restaurant seating added during the COVID-19 pandemic will have on restaurants now that restrictions on indoor dining have largely been lifted.

Westport Weston Health District Director Mark Cooper sent a letter on June 23 to Planning and Zoning Deputy Director Michelle Perillie detailing potential safety concerns associated with keeping outdoor dining at pandemic levels.

During Connecticuts COVID-19 pandemic efforts to keep restaurants viable, outdoor dining was considered as a way for restaurants to maintain some acceptable level of service, because of the Governors Directive that only 50% of the indoor capacity could be used, Cooper wrote. The WWHD supported the creation of safer outdoor dining areas, which basically gave food service facilities a way to get back closer to their maximum approved seating capacity  50% inside and 50% outside.

But now that most COVID restrictions have been lifted, Cooper said, restaurants can return to 100 percent capacity indoors.

The concern is, with indoor dining back full force, are we going to be overtaxing the restaurants ability to serve food, Cooper said on Thursday.

For example, he said, a restaurant might be equipped to handle 100 seats. During the pandemic, he said, they would have had to reduce to 50 seats inside, but added 50 seats outside to compensate. Now they can go back to 100 seats inside, Cooper said, but they might want to keep those additional 50 seats outside. However, they might not be equipped to handle that extra seating.

If restaurants have to scramble to meet the increased demand, Cooper said, they could lose sight of safety concerns, leading to dangerous conditions and possibly even foodborne illness outbreaks.

You cant let your (health inspection) scores go down, he said. We cant see you being unsafe.

In his email to Perillie, Cooper asked that the health department have an opportunity to review all outdoor dining proposals to evaluate the facilities capacity to handle additional seating safely. Coopers request was reviewed Wednesday during a virtual meeting of the Planning & Zoning Commissions revision subcommittee.

Many of those present, including some local restaurant owners, wanted to hang on to some outdoor dining. Howard Bass, whose wife, Stacy Bass, is one of the owners of Manna Toast on Church Lane, said he hoped outdoor dining could stay.

New York has opened up so much street space to outdoor dining and I think it offers incredible vibrancy, he said.

However, some pointed out that, during COVID, there were some restaurants that were able to open their outdoor dining on town streets, some of which were closed for that purpose. Other businesses werent afforded that luxury.

RTM member Sal Liccione, who serves the towns ninth district, said after the meeting that he would prefer to see a more level playing field.

Whats good for one should be good for all, he said.

Steven Carpentieri, owner of Dunvilles Restaurant on Saugatuck Avenue, said the purpose of allowing outdoor dining was to help compensate for the pandemic-mandated reduction in indoor capacity  not to allow for de facto expansion of some restaurants. He said some facilities, such as his own, couldnt expand onto town property.

Instead, Carpentieri said, he closed part of his parking lot to add tables. He said he understands wanting to keep outdoor dining, but wants it to be done in a way thats safe and fair.

You need to create a better platforrm so everyone can participate, he said.
STORY LINK GBP/AUD Forecast: Pound Australian Dollar Exchange Rate Firms after Lack of Data Limits Sterling Gains

Pound (GBP) Mixed on UK Lockdown Easing Hopes

Trust leaders are increasingly confident that vaccines are breaking the chain between infections, serious illness and deaths. But they are understandably nervous about what a wholesale lifting of restrictions on 19 July could mean for the NHS.

We are dealing with a fast-moving, ever-changing picture and the reality on the frontline is that even a small increase in Covid-19 admissions or emergency care pressures could affect our ability to deliver non-Covid services in a context where many staff are exhausted.

Australian Dollar (AUD) Lacks Direction as Markets Await US Employment Data

The person who brought the virus into Queensland was a regular traveller, not a vulnerable Australian returning home. I honestly think we need a serious discussion about ensuring that people are vaccinated coming into this country. We have got to minimise the risk. We are at a pressure cooker moment at the moment. Right across Australia.

GBP/AUD Exchange Rate Outlook: PMI Data in Focus

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The Pound to Australian Dollar (GBP/AUD) exchange rate has firmed this morning after a lack of notable data from the UK limits Sterling gains.At the time of writing the GBP/AUD pairing are trading around the AU$1.8455 level as the global market mood continues to drive the Aussie.The Pound has been mixed against many of its counterparts today as the UKs reopening from coronavirus restrictions edges ever closer.The 19th July has been dubbed freedom day as its thought the final set of coronavirus restrictions will be eased on the date.Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, commented on the effect that easing restrictions could have on the NHS:The Australian Dollar has been limited this morning as markets await the latest non-farm payrolls figures from the US this afternoon.More so, the Australian Dollar continues to struggle on the back of the surge in coronavirus cases across Australia.It comes as seven Australian cities are now under lockdown measures to help battle the prevalence of the delta variant of the virus.Australia has today announced that they will halve the number of international arrivals after the coronavirus outbreak in the country.Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk had called for stricter rules surrounding international travel earlier in the week:Heading into next week, the latest Markit PMI figures from the UK and Australia are expected to drive movement in the GBP/AUD pairing.The figures should give an indication into how the respective economies were performing during June.The GBP/AUD pairing will continue to be driven by any further coronavirus developments in the coming days as Pound investors await the UKs 19th July freedom day.

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
Sunbury, PA (17801)

Today

Morning clouds will give way to afternoon sunshine. High near 90F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

A few passing clouds. Low 68F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
@ChescoCourtNews on Twitter

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.
The alarm went off at 5.30 on a bitterly cold winters morning. I switched on the light. Nothing happened. Another power cut.

In the city, a power cut is an inconvenience. When youre running a dairy farm and there are 60 cows waiting impatiently to be milked, it is a potential disaster.

Thank God for the generator in the milking parlour. It was powered by a tractor. You reverse up to a hole in the parlour wall and stick the power shaft through it. Easy.

Except that the tractor wouldnt start. It had been so cold overnight the diesel had waxed up. There was another tractor inside the shed. It started, but when I tried connecting it to the generator it wouldnt fit through the hole.

In the city, a power cut is an inconvenience. When youre running a dairy farm and there are 60 cows waiting impatiently to be milked, it is a potential disaster. John Humphrys is pictured above on the farm

By now the cows, with their bulging udders, were getting cross and if I ever did manage to start milking them I knew theyd make me pay for the delay. And anyway, cows know when their milker is an amateur. I still bear the bruises to prove it  psychological if not physical.

Id bought the dairy farm on an impulse with dreams of a rural idyll. Id have been wiser to consider why farming has a higher suicide rate than many other industries.

Forty years after Id finally given up and sold my farm, I knew exactly what to expect when everyone started talking about Clarksons Farm on telly. Or at least I thought I did.

Jeremy Clarkson is a master of the medium. Id worked with him on Top Gear once. My role had been to steal a car  allegedly the smallest car in the world  and drive it around the BBC corridors with Jeremy chasing after me. A daft idea, but he made it very funny.

So hed play Farm for laughs, too, wouldnt he?

Hed treat the whole idea of managing his thousand-acre arable farm as a bit of a joke. The bumbling amateur would emerge a hero by overcoming whatever obstacles got in his way.

Mostly by signing a cheque.

The tractor he bought was a massive Lamborghini. The control panel made a space rocket look primitive. It cost the same as what I had paid for my entire farm.

He bought a flock of sheep and a fancy drone to control them. The sheep ignored it after a day or two, even though it could bark hilariously. So he hired a shepherd.

Whenever something went wrong, which it did all the time, he called in an expert. He got all his financial advice from his land agent. His tractor driver and handyman was a 21-year-old local called Kaleb Cooper, who treated Clarkson as a buffoon and frequently told him to f*** off.

So I was right. He did play it for laughs. Jeremy Clarkson running a farm would prove about as convincing as Boris Johnson running a monastery.

The tractor he bought was a massive Lamborghini. The control panel made a space rocket look primitive. It cost the same as what I had paid for my entire farm

But I was also spectacularly wrong. True, there are plenty of jolly japes. I leave to your imagination the scene where he decides to measure the size of the testicles on the two rams hes just bought. But Clarkson is serious. He really does want to make a success of managing the farm.

On one level he cant really fail. As hes the first to admit, if the farm loses money well, thats a pity, but theres plenty more where that came from. There arent too many farmers who can take that approach.

But Clarkson is not a farmer. Hes a communicator. A brilliant one. And the most memorable scene in this entire series was not when he was single-handedly excavating a pond with a digger he could barely control, or fleeing from an angry bee, but when he was talking at some length about why insects matter. He was passionate, even angry, and convincing. Eat your heart out David Attenborough.

This, remember, from a man who made his fame and fortune driving gas-guzzling monsters on Top Gear and ridiculing all those spoilsport environmentalists who said he shouldnt.

Here was the nations most famous petrolhead telling us that the human race is doing its damnedest to destroy the biosphere, and if we succeed thats the end of the human race.

This was a new Clarkson. I half expected to see Greta Thunberg leading a chorus of For hes a jolly good fellow.

To prove his eco credentials, he is rewilding a large chunk of his land. Hed dug a pond for all those valuable species that need water to survive. Hed created strips in arable fields for wild flowers and the insects that thrive on them. Hed erected nest boxes for barn owls. Hed imported beehives.

What he had not done was banish oilseed rape from his fields. Arable farmers grow rape because it can make them a shedload of money. But the environmental cost is horrendous.

You need to use lots of nasty chemicals to grow the stuff and they dont just kill pests. They kill the very insects Clarkson is desperate to protect above the ground and below it.

We can plant as many forests and dig as many ponds as we like, but if we kill the life in our soil, we kill the planet. There are more micro-organisms in a spoonful of healthy soil than there are people on earth.

And soil captures and stores carbon. If we destroy that life, we lose the battle against climate change. After decades of intensive agriculture, we are well on the way to doing just that.

But lets try to be optimistic. After the massive success of this series, I suspect Clarkson is already signed up for another one. So let him put even more money where his mouth is by banishing rape.

He has already shown serious interest in the regenerative movement, which is gaining huge support from worried farmers. They know healthy soil doesnt come from a chemical sprayer but from good farming practices.

And heres another challenge for you, Jeremy. Try a bit of real hands-on farming. Use a modest slice of your fortune to buy a small livestock farm and spend a year running it. Single handed.

Youll have no trouble finding one. Small dairy farmers are going out of business faster than you can drive a Ferrari. Twenty-five years ago, there were 36,000 of them in Britain.

The latest figures suggest there are just over 8,000.

The reason is simple. We dont pay enough for our milk. It is, of course, possible to produce cheap milk but only if you treat cows like factory units. Keep them in vast sheds. Never let them graze in fields. Slaughter them after a few years when they can no longer produce 10,000 litres a year.

Thats not what I call farming, Jeremy, and I suspect youd agree. Your telly series has worked wonders in making millions think about farming.

We all sympathised when things went wrong  even if it was your fault. But with the greatest respect, large arable farmers have it easy compared with small family farms. Your lot work their socks off when youre sowing and when youre reaping, but a dairy farmer works seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.

Of course we need great arable farms  better to grow some of our own food than import it all  but think about the countryside for a moment.

Would you prefer the sight of a vast field of wheat (or, God forbid, rape) stretching to the horizon or a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of small fields with all those hedges buzzing with insects and birds?

Youve gained considerable moral authority with your Farm series, Jeremy, so why not use some of it in the cause of family farming? Say yes and Ill even come to help. Or maybe not. Id prefer that you succeed.
What womans heart would not melt at this sweet picture of actress Amber Heard, 35, clutching to her breast her baby daughter Oonagh Paige?

Five years after she separated so messily from her wife-beating nightmare of a husband, Johnny Depp, the glowing Amber now says she has won what was always her right.

Four years ago, I decided I wanted to have a child, she tweets. I wanted to do it on my own terms. I now appreciate how radical it is for us as women to think about one of the most fundamental parts of our destiny in this way.

Amber adds she wants the world to think it normal to not want a ring in order to have a crib.

What womans heart would not melt at this sweet picture of actress Amber Heard, 35, clutching to her breast her baby daughter Oonagh Paige?

But is she right? Sure, the appeal of surrogacy is obvious: maternal ecstasy for Mum without the hassle of pregnancy or the pain of giving birth. You can defy biology and have a child whenever the fancy takes you.

Yet womb-renting, as its critics call it, is not a straightforward business. The baby has been gestated by a stranger  possibly paid  and the newborn taken from its birth mothers arms younger than we would take a puppy from its. Thanks to donor sperm, theres often no father to be seen.

When we think of Amber, and the appalling chaotic life she led with Johnny, are we enthusiastic about her prospects as a mother? The couples violent drug-and-alcohol-fuelled brawls were played out in open court, as this warring and vindictive pair chose to relive the hideous end of their ugly marriage.

That was a few years ago, of course, and Amber has been supported by her lesbian partner Bianca Butti. Lets hope she is calmer today.

Yet I find her own language rather troubling. Not only does Amber apparently believe its her right to have a child on my own terms, she also says revealingly that baby Oonagh is the beginning of the rest of my life.

Sorry, what? How about the beginning of someone elses life? Having a child, Amber, is not about you. Its about the tiny, helpless person you have chosen to bring into the world.

No one has a right to be a parent. Countless women who cant have children still enjoy fulfilling, happy lives. I know  because Im one of them.

Becoming a mother is the most selfless thing a woman can do. Forgive me if I have my lingering doubts that Amber understands that.

Talent rules, Jodie

As the first black woman to play Henry VIIIs scheming second wife Anne Boleyn in the recent C5 series, the magnificent Jodie Turner-Smith arrives on the red carpet promoting her new film Zola.

This is about a stripper, so it was appropriate, I suppose, that Jodie chose to wear a yellow strapped dress . . . and no underwear.

Surely now, at 34, Jodie realises that her talent  and not her perfectly honed buttocks  is enough to get her the plum roles.

As the greatest British actresses  Kate Winslet, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter  have all proven, its not the pertness of your posterior that wins out in the end, but the power of your performance.

Tory-loathing, comedian Romesh Ranganathan is to replace Anne Robinson on a celeb version of The Weakest Link quiz show, saying that to step into her shoes is an anxiety-inducing privilege. This humourless dolt isnt fit to shine Annes stilettos, let alone try to wedge his big feet into them. Unlike Romesh  cited by a pressure group as typical of Left-wing BBC comedy bias  Anne is not prejudiced . . . she is equally spiky with absolutely everyone. Romesh, you are the weakest link  goodbye!

++Westminster wars++

Is there anything more irritating than celebs posting pictures of their kids taken from behind so we cant see their faces? Now the third Mrs Johnson shares yet another snap of the back of toddler Wilfs head, with its mane of Bozzie Bear hair. The subtext seems to be: my child is so important, you cant possibly see their face.

Matt Hancock is apparently set on rebuilding his ruined career on the back of causes he feels passionately about. What might these be? This is the man who, when he gave his wedding speech, reportedly thanked George Osborne before saying a word to his blushing bride. As one friend rightly says: Im not sure what Matt feels passionate about, other than his career.

Gorgeous pictures of Rishi Sunak and his new fox-red labrador puppy, Nova. But a curious name for an ambitious politician to choose: a nova is a star that bursts into the night sky, dazzles brilliantly  then goes pfutt. And who would want Dylin to be the pooch next door?

Love Isle hate-fest

So much for Love Islands promise to be a kinder show this year, concerned for the wellbeing of its preening contestants. Just four episodes in, its already embroiled in a social media hate-fest.

The arrival of Chloe Burrows, 25, caused Shannon Singh (whod claimed to enjoy sex up to eight times a day) to be booted off. Chloe has been bombarded with death threats and told by trolls to kill herself, and her family have begged people to stop these vile attacks.

As if all that wasnt bad enough, this year the show  and Shannon in particular  have treated us to the eye-watering underboob bikini, which exposes the bottom half of a womans breasts.

Time to put the whole rotten format in the bin.

We all adore Claudia Winkleman, yet enough with the faux self-deprecation from a woman whos made a fortune out of her stupid fringe, minimal talent and fake tan. As she approaches her 50th, she told Woman & Home mag: My body is falling apart: I look like Meat Loaf naked. It gets a bit trying for fans when a woman whos a size 6 laments about her body when her slender frame could fit into one of Meat Loafs trouser legs.

How cynical that after 27 million viewers tuned in to the BBC to watch England defeat Germany  Aunties biggest audience share in years  the Corporation announces it will pursue and prosecute anyone over 75 who dares not to pay their licence fee, even though they used to get it for free.

As my sprightly neighbour Gary, whos of a certain age, said to me: Another own goal for the BBC  Ill see them in court!

The Di is cast  but what a mess

As Princes William and Harry unveiled the long-awaited statue of Princess Diana, a nation gasped  in disbelief. One of the most beautiful women in our history had been reimagined with the muscular body of an Eastern European shot-putter. A sullen and icy glare, a welders hands, the arms of an orangutan and those tree-trunk legs? Unforgivable. Im surprised her boys didnt fling the shroud right back over it.

Now worth 45 million and her life so micro-managed by her conservator father that she even cant buy chewing gum without his approval, Britney Spears has sadly lost her court action to free herself from daddys control. Given that dad lives off her earnings, my advice would be to stop singing, have the baby you long for and marry your boyfriend. Like any parasite, as her father clearly is, it only survives by feeding off its host.

A home fit for a British hero

After Corporal Shaun Jardine, then just 21, single-handedly stormed two enemy positions in Iraq, allowing his patrol to drive the enemy from a third, he was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross.

Eighteen years later this dad-of-two is selling his medals, expected to fetch some 140,000, so he can get his foot on the property ladder and provide a house for his growing family.

Many have been saddened by the news: but I salute him. He doesnt need a ribbon to be sure his country appreciates its debt to him.

And what better tribute to his heroism than a family home of his own?
Single Sydney men have been brutally mocked in a series of videos detailing the city's notoriously shallow dating scene.

The five clips left no one unscathed, poking fun at tattooed Irishmen living in the Eastern Suburbs who are 'a solid three inches shorter' than they claim to be on their dating app profiles and North Shore bankers who will 'ghost' you after a week.

The withering videos uploaded to TikTok by American expat, 'Rachel in Australia', said the first man you are likely to meet is a commercial real estate agent who spends most of his time taking selfies in suits and smoking a blue raspberry vape.

These savage stereotypes of the Harbour City's bachelors, which have been viewed 483,000 times since the first clip was uploaded online on June 28, sparked passionate responses.

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Single Sydney men have been brutally mocked in a series of videos detailing the city's notoriously shallow dating scene from American expat, Rachel (pictured)

'So accurate. This hits close to home,' one woman replied, while a second said: '100%, I've never heard anything truer.'

Another added: 'Oh the real estate guy... I just assumed he was a drug dealer.'

Others slammed the Sydney dating scene as more shallow than anywhere else on Earth.

'It's so horrid. Took me leaving the country to realise,' one woman wrote.

'The guy who works in commercial real estate'

Rachel said the first type of man newcomers to Sydney will go out with is the 'guy who works in commercial real estate'.

She said he will be 'super vague' about what he does, spending most of his time posting selfies in a suit or videos of himself walking through abandoned warehouses somewhere on the 'very outskirts' of Western Sydney.

'On your first date, he's going to buy you both a pitcher of something, probably Young Henrys, and he's going to pick an outdoor table because he will spend the whole time vaping, preferably blue raspberry,' Rachel said.

She added: 'But I'll tell you a secret, he's not looking for anything serious!'

Rachel said the man who works in commercial real estate (left) will spend most of his time taking selfies in suits and smoking a blue raspberry vape (right)

Poll Which single Sydney man would YOU rather date? The Irish guy living in Bondi The guy from Manly The mid 20s bartender The mid 20s investment banker The commercial real estate guy Which single Sydney man would YOU rather date? The Irish guy living in Bondi 17 votes

The guy from Manly 24 votes

The mid 20s bartender 22 votes

The mid 20s investment banker 16 votes

The commercial real estate guy 7 votes Now share your opinion





'The Irish guy who lives in Bondi'

Next on Rachel's list is the 'Irish guy who lives in Bondi', who she said will almost certainly have a tattoo on his bum that he 'really regrets' but will show you then second you ask.

This man will have the 'quintessential' Irishman haircut, she added, which you can spot 'a mile away'.

Rachel warned he will arrive to the date 'a solid three inches shorter' than his dating profile suggests, and will drink so much he becomes impossible to understand.

'In the span of two hours, he's going to get so drunk you're not going to be able to understand a single word that comes out of his mouth,' she said.

Rachel said the Irish guy who lives in Bondi will have the 'quintessential' Irishman haircut (pictured on Peaky Blinders star, Cillian Murphy) which you can spot 'a mile away'

'The mid 20s guy who works in investment banking'

The following target of Rachel's attack was the 'mid 20s guy who works in investment banking', who she said is likely to behave like billionaire businessman Warren Buffett despite working in the industry for 'about three years'.

'He probably grew up on the North Shore, and there's a good chance his dad probably got him his job,' she explained.

Rachel warned the single investment banker will text 'excessively' for three weeks before the first date, then suggest taking you out to a corporate venue.

After the first drink, she said he will tell you he's only recently out of a long-term relationship and isn't looking for anything serious.

But three beers in, she said he will tell you he wants five children and you are the 'perfect girl' to have start a family with.

'But I'll tell you a secret,' she added. 'He's gonna ghost you in a few weeks anyway!'

Rachel said the 'mid 20s guy who works in investment banking' is likely to behave like billionaire businessman Warren Buffett despite working in the industry for 'about three years'

'The mid 20s bartender'

Rachel then described the 'mid 20s bartender', who works at one of the city's coolest yet most underrated venues.

Despite his relatively low income, she said he 'somehow manages' to live in a luxury penthouse in Vaucluse, one of the city's most sought-after suburbs where the average house prices is a cool $5.8million.

'Based on the lack of furniture he's either a squatter or his great-grandfather invented the electric kettle,' Rachel concluded.

'But you don't really care because you're just having fun, and the stories you get to post on Instagram are worth not knowing.'

Rachel said the typical Manly guy might meet you after work at Ryan's, a bustling city bar (left), but she warned he is more likely to head to the Steyne Hotel (right) with his mates

'The guy from Manly'

The final victim of Rachel's blistering summation was the 'guy from Manly', who she said works in the CBD but swiftly scurries home to his 'safe haven' in the Northern Beaches.

'If you're really lucky, he'll tell you to meet him at Ryan's on Friday after work,' she said, referencing a bustling courtyard bar in the centre of the city.

But Rachel warned this type of man is more likely to choose surfing with his mates and drinking with his mates at the Steyne Hotel, Manly's most iconic pub, than committing to a 'long distance relationship'.

'Which to him is considered anything south of Mosman,' she added.
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She's had a busy week of engagements in Scotland, but nothing can keep the Queen away from the Royal Windsor Horse Show, said to be Her Majesty's favourite event of the year.

The monarch, 95, jetted back from Scotland yesterday to attend the show in the afternoon and this morning, she was seen arriving first thing so as not to miss any of the action.

Eager to get to the grounds, the Queen was seen driving herself to the course in her Range Rover, accompanied by a female friend and security guards.

Dressed in more casual attire than usual for the occasion, she wore a navy padded gilet over her smart white shirt, teamed with a grey checked skirt.

Her Royal Happiness! The Queen was all smiles when attending the second day of the Royal Windsor Horse Show today

She's in the driving seat! Not wanting to miss any of the action, the Queen drove herself to the prestigious event, said to be her favourite of the year

She's had a busy week of engagements in Scotland, but nothing can keep the Queen (pictured) away from the Royal Windsor Horse Show

The monarch (pictured), 95, jetted back from Scotland yesterday to attend the show in the afternoon and this morning, she was seen arriving first thing so as not to miss any of the action

The Queen, sporting a vibrant floral blue and green ensemble, continued her busy schedule for the day when receiving the Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel, pictured left, dressed in a smart blue blazer

The 95-year-old monarch hosted the Chancellor of Germany during an audience at Windsor Castle in Berkshire, this afternoon

The monarch could be seen beaming with joy as she watched the action and soaked up the atmosphere at one of her favourite equestrian events of the year in the private grounds of her home.

The Queen is a regular fixture at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, which is now in its 77th year and attracts well-heeled visitors from all over the world.

Yesterday, the Queen returned from Royal Week in Scotland to attend the horse show, which is thought to be one of her favourite events of the year, after joining her daughter Princess Anne, 70, at the University of Edinburgh.

The Queen, in her role as patron of the British Horse Society (BHS), presents the British Horse Society Queen's Award for Equestrianism to actor Martin Clunes, President of the BHS, at the Royal Windsor Horse Show

Eager to get to the grounds, the Queen (pictured) was seen driving herself to the course in her Range Rover, accompanied by a female friend and security guards

Dressed in more casual attire than usual for the occasion, the monarch (pictured) wore a navy padded gilet over her smart white shirt, teamed with a grey checked skirt

The monarch (pictured driving) could be seen beaming with joy as she watched the action and soaked up the atmosphere at one of her favourite equestrian events of the year in the private grounds of her home

The Queen (pictured) is a regular fixture at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, which is now in its 77th year and attracts well-heeled visitors from all over the world

Yesterday, the Queen (pictured) returned from Royal Week in Scotland to attend the horse show, which is thought to be one of her favourite events of the year, after joining her daughter Princess Anne , 70, at the University of Edinburgh

The Queen is believed to have attended every single year since it began as a wartime fundraising event back in 1943. Last year the show was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic and went online instead.

It was also forced to postpone in 2001 due to foot and mouth disease, while one day of the show was previously cancelled in May 2016 due to flooding.

The event is intrinsically linked with the royal family; both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh competed at it during their younger years, with Prince Philip entering the Carriage Driving at Royal Windsor Horse Show for 30 years, winning it just once in 1982.

In more recent years, the Queen has watched many of her own horses take part in the showing class competitions. The Royal Windsor Horse Show continues tomorrow until its final event on Sunday, July 4.

The Queen (above) is believed to have attended every single year since it began as a wartime fundraising event back in 1943

The Queen (pictured) eagerly watched the proceedings today, while looking sophisticated in a white shirt teamed with a navy padded gilet

Actor Martin Clunes (pictured with the Queen as she presents him the British Horse Society Queen's Award for Equestrianism) has enjoyed riding since he was a child

Jessica Springsteen riding Don Juan van de Donkhoeve competes in the Manama Speed Stakes at the Royal Windsor Horse Show

Bruce Springsteen's daughter - who has represented the United States in international show jumping competitions - wore black riding boots and a protective helmet
A mischievous dog that went missing after getting spooked by fireworks was then caught on camera ringing the doorbell of her home at 3AM in order to be let back in - seven hours after she ran off into the night, leaving her owner terrified.

Talented pooch Rajah disappeared from her home earlier this month after fleeing in fear when a neighbor started setting off fireworks in their backyard.

Owner Mary Lynn, 23, from Greenville, South Carolina, drove around the neighborhood and posted on Facebook asking for help in locating the missing 18-month-old pooch, only for Rajah to return home on her own in the early hours of the morning.

Having clearly had her fill of the great outdoors, Rajah then jumped up to ring the bell of Mary Lynn's home, a brilliant moment that was caught on film by the family's doorbell camera.

Who let the dog out? A North Carolina family has shared hilarious footage of the moment their missing dog turned up on their doorstep and rang the doorbell to be let back inside

Hello? Rescue pup Rajah ran off into the night when she got spooked by fireworks, only to return to the front porch seven hours later at 3AM

Skills! Rajah pushed the doorbell with her nose, leaving her owner Mary Lynn, 23, stunned

'She was in the backyard with our other dog and our neighbor started shooting off fireworks and I knew she'd be scared,' Mary Lynn recalled.

'I went to the backyard - and she was gone.'

Mary Lynn and her husband Ryan looked for Rajah, recruited others in the search and even created a Facebook post about the missing rescue dog.

They had just started thinking about calling their local shelters in case their pup had been brought in when Rajah appeared on their doorstep and alerted them to her return by ringing the bell.

Mary Lynn, who works in data entry, added: 'My husband came home and was driving around looking for her. We were ready to call all the shelters and she just showed up and rang the doorbell.'

Rajah returned home at 3 A.M., on June 27, jumping up and sticking her face into the doorbell and camera.

'I don't even know how she knew how to do that, I've never shown her how,' Mary Lynn said.

Together again! Mary Lynn and her husband Ryand were preparing to ring local shelters to see if Rajah had been brought in when the pup turned up at the door

Safe and sound: Mary Lynn says she has never taught Rajah how to use the doorbell and added that she had no idea her dog even knew what the bell was

'She doesn't go out in the front yard, except to the car, so she's never seen us use the doorbell.

'Ryan was up waiting around to see if she'd pop up. He saw her on the porch, and he ran off and got her.'

When Rajah returned, she was afraid she'd be in trouble, but the family was just happy to have their hound back.

'She thought she was in so much trouble and she was sad and sulking, but we were like, "We're just happy you're back,"' Mary Lynn said.

'It was hilarious, and we couldn't stop laughing.'

Though the husband and wife drove around for hours looking for Rajah, Mary Lynn added that they have no idea where she spent her missing hours.

'She had thorns on her and seemed to have rolled in poop,' she said.

'So, it seems like she had a great time.'
Dear Bel,

Im in my early 30s. Last year I left my partner of seven years due to alcoholism, painkiller addiction, nastiness and refusal to work.

I did night shifts to pay the rent. Weirdly enough, despite him physically assaulting me in lockdown, what made me leave was the lack of intimacy. He wouldnt initiate anything, from hugs to sex. Hed wipe his mouth if I kissed him. I never received any compliments, just criticism on what I said or what I chose to wear. He hated me showing cleavage.

Im not ugly by any means, I may have put on a few lockdown pounds but I am not overweight. Eventually I left, but he was violent and would turn up at my mothers with a weapon.

An old friend, Dave, offered me a place to stay  to be safe. I didnt expect anything to happen between us. I am also five years older. Hes handsome, smart, with a secure job and ambitions . . . way out of my league.

We got on as friends and had so many things in common. I had no idea that he actually fancied me until I arrived and he confessed. So began an intense relationship.

At first I was sceptical. Wasnt I too old? What if, in five years time, he wants children? (I dont particularly.) I told him I wasnt interested in being played around and we were putting our friendship at risk. He told me hed liked me for a while and spending time with me only cemented how sure he was.

Daves been so affectionate from day one. He kisses freely, hugs me . . . hes what I wanted and have needed for a long time. Hes supportive, although not vocal with compliments.

Whats the problem? Hes suddenly lost interest in sex. We still kiss, hold hands, cuddle, laugh and adore each other. I know he fancies me. So why the loss of interest?

He is very routine-oriented and only really likes to have sex at the weekend when we can sleep in, but the past two months have been different. Ive tried initiating and being spontaneous. He doesnt get annoyed, but says: Im tired, lets just cuddle up.

Hes in his late 20s, in good shape. History is beginning to repeat itself where a partner just wont have sex with me. Am I the problem? I try not to make a big deal about it, as I know that can sometimes makes things worse and Im lucky enough to have the other forms of intimacy, but I just want to be lusted after occasionally. Why cant he tell me what the matter is?

JADE

This week Bel answers a question from a woman who wonders why her lovers fall out of lust with her

Perhaps your boyfriend cant, or wont, talk to you about this because he doesnt think you will understand that for him the sexual act (rather messy and ludicrous as it is  although were not supposed to say that) is not as important as conversation and cuddles.

Thought of the day We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. We are so privileged to still have time. We have but the one life and it is a shame to limit it by fear and false barriers. From Anam Cara by John ODonohue (Irish poet, priest and philosopher, 1956 -2008) Advertisement

Many people will think it surprising that a man in his late 20s could possibly feel this way, but I dont. Nobody should be taken in by the widespread propaganda in this sex-mad society that everybodys at it like bunnies all the time.

About 20 years ago, I watched a young friend marry the man who had adored her since their schooldays and been broken-hearted when she married somebody else. When that marriage ended it was his chance and he took it  and they are still together today.

But at the time she confided in me ruefully that he was pretty lazy in bed. It must have come to be unimportant.

Of course its wonderful to be desired. But you are right to describe it as weird that you can list the appalling failings of the man you lived with for seven years then admit that your chief concern was that he didnt initiate sex or pay you compliments.

Lord, Id want to disinfect myself head to toe if a guy like that laid a leery finger on me! (I should mention to readers that there was a lot more detail in your longer uncut email).

So now you are with Dave and the most interesting thing is that you praise him as way out of my league.

The way you describe it, you spent seven years with a man some uncharitable people (like me) might describe as a low life, a yobbish person who lived off you. Now you have escaped to a better life with a thoroughly decent man who seems to be everything the other one was not. Yet you are still upset by the lack of sex.

The subject line of your email was Am I repulsive? which reveals much.

Its as if your self-esteem is so low that you believe the only thing you can offer is sexual performance, and as a result youre desperate to prove yourself in that department.

Of course, some people are more highly sexed than others and if thats the case maybe find other interesting, self-sufficient ways of gaining satisfaction.

Is the disparity in desire enough to end a love affair? Sometimes, but not necessarily.

But look. You have years ahead. Whether or not the relationship with Dave lasts you need to think about who you are, what you want to do with your life, how you can make it better.

Why not work on making yourself the kind of person you will judge as way out of the league of the person you once were? Conversations, cuddles and more confidence could be the way forward.

Im so upset about my thinning hair

Dear Bel,

After reading your last column, as I do each week, I wrote this. Its about one problem Im afraid you cannot help with:

I stand at the mirror and look at my hair

But have to admit there isnt much there.

Since I caught Covid it gets thinner each day

And each time I brush it more hairs come away.

I can cope with being old, with wrinkles and pain,

But not with the loss of my once-curly mane.

I am 91 and live alone but I can fill my days writing little poems. I suspect there must be many people who can relate to the one I share here. Do you think its trivial to worry about such things when you are old?

Susan

Ah, nothing is trivial that afflicts the human heart, small though the issue might seem.

Why should any of us feel ashamed to admit that we hate thinning hair (Im with you on that one  and so are many chaps) or those sags around the chin or the way once-cute love handles have become post-menopausal rolls?

Its all very well to pretend that wrinkles are the proud signs of a life well-lived and all that  but I slather on the moisturiser in the vain (and thats the right word) hope that time can be kept at bay for just a bit longer.

It cant, of course. But your rueful poem will chime with many people, because that nostalgia for lost youth and beauty is something which has affected human beings for centuries.

Its why artists used to remind people of mortality by showing a beautiful young girl next to a wrinkled old woman. Even more brutally, they used the symbol of the skull to remind us all of what lies ahead.

Those thoughts can be depressing and thats why its vital to flip them over and shout: Hey, Im still alive and kicking! Important to remember that there are older people who have not lost their spark, their humour, their zest for life. Captain Tom was one, and you sound like another.

Your poem reminds me that while we might have to accept loss of hair as well as vigour, its still important to try. Not to give up. Not to indulge in self-pity. At the moment I have tendonitis in my left heel and a dodgy right hip and get tired more easily and often catch myself limping.

No! I think. Try to stride out as if you could still conquer the world. Yes, it can be hard, but the fire of life  and rebellion  still glows and will not go out.

Thats what your poems prove, Susan. You sit there alone, at your great age, and write down your thoughts and feelings  and its marvellous because youre keeping the vital flame a-flicker.

You inspire me! So I hope youve made a full recovery from the virus, that you treat your precious hair very gently and try a nourishing mask once a week  and that when you look in that mirror you see a beautiful soul smiling back at you.

And finally... We can learn to be better and braver

Those of you who have Facebook accounts will know that it reminds you of memories. Sure enough, this time last year I was trying to keep my head above lockdown blues and wrote this:

Beginning each day with at least half an hour of reading poetry in bed is calming and necessary. This morning I finished with a small selection of the Bronte sisters, chosen by a poet, Gillian Clarke.

When Charlotte sent her poems to Robert Southey (Poet Laureate 1813-1843), he replied: Literature cannot be the business of a womans life, and it ought not to be. Gillian Clarke comments: No use now to rage against Southey. He was a man of his time.

Anyway, I post this because of her wise words about rage and figures in the past. Let history be, but at the same time rejoice in shifts of meaning and points of view, and let us learn from the whole process.

Contact Bel Bel answers readers' questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Write to Bel Mooney, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT, or email bel.mooney@dailymail.co.uk. Names are changed to protect identities. Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Advertisement

Of course, the so-called debates about problematic statues and people suddenly cancelled for things written decades ago go on and on, and show no signs of stopping. Intelligence seems in flight.

If thats not enough to get you down, what about the appalling spectacle of Professor Chris Whitty being manhandled by anti-lockdown yobs?

And the realisation that Islamic extremism seems to be colonising Africa? Prejudice and tyranny are everywhere.

Yes, youd be right that your advice columnist often needs help through low moods herself.

This latest feeling of bewilderment is fuelled by finishing a big, brilliant book, Barbarossa by Jonathan Dimbleby, after which my soul feels battered by yet more proof of humankinds perennial suffering.

I dont tend to read much war history (unlike war poetry) but had to tackle this one through interest, loyalty, great reviews and enduring hatred of Hitler.

In the aftermath, this vivid, absorbing account of Germanys doomed attack on Russia triggered the awareness that human beings are at once bestial and unimaginably brave  equally capable of wanton slaughter and heroic sacrifice.

Nothing new there. But we must study history for understanding, compassion  and warning.
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Officials across the country are warning about a rise in COVID-19 cases as the U.S. prepares to celebrate Independence Day festivities.

States including Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi and Nevada are reporting increases in infections by as much as 200 percent in the last two weeks.

All five states have among the lowest vaccination rates - fully vaccinating less than 45 percent of their populations - which is below the national average.

What's more, health experts say this is helping the highly transmissible Indian 'Delta' variant spread rapidly among several U.S. communities.

The variant has now been detected in every state, with South Dakota being the last to report a case linked to the strain, and Washington, DC - and, in some areas, it makes up more than three-quarters of all new infections.

Many doctors had hoped that the Fourth of July weekend would mark a return to normalcy but some health officials say it seems that the holiday will instead be the beginning of a third wave.

It comes as President Biden admitted that more lives will be lost to the Delta variant even as he encouraged Americans to enjoy their holiday weekend.

Local officials in several states, such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi and Nevada, are reporting an increase in cases of COVID-19 ahead of July 4 weekend

Health experts blame the Indian 'Delta' variant spreading, making up 26.1% of new cases in the country and as many as 77% of cases in some states

Many states where COVID-19 cases are rising have fully vaccinated less than 45% of their populations - which is below the national average

Arkansas is one of the states to see cases surge with a 202 percent rise from an average of 234 cases per day to 707 per day over the last two weeks, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins data.

'We are now going in the wrong direction yet again with COVID10-19 infections here in the state of Arkansas,' said Dr Cam Patterson, chancellor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, during a briefing on Tuesday.

'With July 4th holiday coming up and eventually kids going back to school, we have to be concerned that this would be a trend that could continue.

'And if it does, it would appear that we may be in the beginning of the third surge of COVID-19 here in the state of Arkansas.'

The Natural State has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation, having fully vaccinated just 34.5 percent of its population, according to CDC data.

During the briefing, Gov Asa Hutchinson said about 90 percent of cases are among unvaccinated people and - of the nearly 1,000 deaths recorded since January - 99.6 percent were unvaccinated individuals.

What's more, over the course of 2021, Hutchinson said 98.3 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in those who did not receive their shots.

'The vaccine, as well as continued practicing of social distancing and masking when that is necessary, are our pathways out of a third surge of COVID-19,' Patterson said.

This is helping give rise to the Delta variant.

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.

Arkansas has seen a 202% rise in infections from an average of 234 cases per day to 7070 per day over the last two weeks with just 34.5% of the total population vaccinated

Missouri reported a 53% spike in coronavirus cases 648 per day to 996 over 14 days, with some cities reporting a jump in hospitalizations by a much as 225%

In the West, Nevada has a slightly higher vaccination rate even though cases have risen by 167% from 247 per day to 660 per day

According to the Arkansas Times, out of 191 state samples submitted to the global database GISAID for genome sequencing, the variant was detected in nearly 30 percent.

Patterson said he expects that the variant will make up more than half of cases within the next week or two.

Meanwhile, in nearby Missouri, cases are also rapidly spiking from an average of 648 per day to 996 in the last two weeks, an increase of 53 percent, the DailyMail.com analysis found.

KSHB reported that the state recorded more than 15,000 new COVID-19 cases in June after reporting just 9,600 cases in May.

It also marks the most infections reported since March 2021 and ending six consecutive months of declines, according to the news station.

Officials blame the spread of the Delta variant among unvaccinated segments of the population. Most counties have seen fewer than 40 percent of residents receive at least one dose, and one county is as low as 13 percent.

However, 67 percent of new cases in the state between May 31 to June 14, according to a report compiled by the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, using GISAID data.

Steve Edwards, the CEO of CoxHealth hospitals, based in Springfield, said the city has seen a 225 percent rise in patients, almost all of whom are unvaccinated and encouraged residents to get their shots.

'I would encourage anyone in a community that doesn't have a strong number of variants, especially Delta, that the window is still open to protect yourself,' Edwards told St Louis Public Radio.

President Biden said: 'I am not concerned there's going to be a major outbreak, in other words that we're going to have another major epidemic nationwide, but I am concerned that lives will be lost'

The West is also seeing a rise in cases as Nevada rose by 167 percent from 247 per day to 660 per day in the last 14 days.

According to a release from the Nevada Hospital Association, hospitalizations have risen to about 250 with around 100 more patients than a week ago.

And, although vaccination rates are higher than in many Southern and Midwestern states with 45.3 percent fully vaccinated, the Delta variant is still spreading rapidly.

The report from the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine shows that the variant accounts for 77 percent of new infections in the Silver State.

Health officials are now calling on more residents to step up and roll up their sleeves.

'As our community began the process of reopening, this increase in cases is not unexpected. However, it is preventable,' Dr Fermin Leguen, District Health Officer for the Southern Nevada Health District, said in a news release.

'There are many preventive measures people can do to protect themselves from COVID-19 and to help keep the virus from spreading.

'People who are not vaccinated should continue to wear face masks, or better yet, make an appointment to get the vaccine or stop by one of the many locations that accept walk-in patients.'

Meanwhile. President Biden admitted that more lives will be lost to the Delta variant even as he encouraged Americans to enjoy their Fourth of July holiday weekend.

Delivering an optimistic message at the White House on positive jobs numbers, he struck an uneasy balance as he warned of more COVID deaths ahead but played down worries that the Delta variant would turn back the clock to the worst days of the pandemic.

'I am concerned that people who have not gotten vaccinated have the capacity to catch the variant and spread the variant to other people who have not been vaccinated,' he said.

'I am not concerned there's going to be a major outbreak, in other words that we're going to have another major epidemic nationwide, but I am concerned that lives will be lost.'
BOOK OF THE WEEK

HITLERS AND A MARILYN

by Adam Andrusier (Headline 16.99, 320 pp)

Did you ever practise your signature when you were a child? Just in case  on the off-chance  that you became famous?

Of course you did. Everyone does.

Adam Andrusier probably didnt, because he was too busy acquiring other peoples signatures. Collecting autographs is one of those hobbies that, if not kept in check, can become an obsession. Youll do pretty much anything for a Kirk Douglas.

Andrusier started small but the bug got him, and now, in his mid-40s, he is a dealer in rare, valuable autographs. He probably has more Kirk Douglases than you could shake a stick at.

Adam Andrusier, who has been collecting autographs since age ten, has penned a book about his life. Pictured: Liz Taylor

And this is his story. Andrusier grew up in the North London suburb of Pinner in a secular Jewish family of rare comic potential. His father Adrian collected postcards of old European synagogues and went every Thursday to an Israeli folk dance club.

He appears to have been the extroverts extrovert, a man so intent on having a good time he didnt notice that the rest of his family desperately wanted to be somewhere else.

Adams mother was a ferociously clever, thwarted woman who, in these more liberal days, would probably have been the CEO of a multinational company but in the 1970s and 1980s had to settle for being a housewife.

The first half of this book is a little like binge-watching an entire series of Friday Night Dinner. Its effortlessly funny and human, and Adrian is a comic character so extreme that, somehow, you know he is exactly like that, with not a shred of exaggeration in the telling.

Underlying all this are the autographs. Andrusiers epic journey begins when, at the age of ten, he learns that Ronnie Barker lives round the corner. He and his best friend, also called Adam, try to get a glimpse through Barkers shrubbery. Instantly, we saw the back of an old mans head through the bay window, talking to another man

Adam said Elizabeth Taylor rejected him after her appearance at Selfridges. Pictured: Liz Taylor signing autographs

 Oh my God, I think its him! I exclaimed.

 It is him! It is! shouted Adam. But something wasnt right; the man looked tired. His face was solemn and impatient. He wasnt laughing or making the other man laugh

$9.8m The amount George Washingtons signature sold for in 2012 Advertisement

 Are you sure? I asked.

Barker wont come to the door, but Andrusiers mother says he should write a letter to the great man, and a few days later a signed photograph appears in the post.

Watching The Two Ronnies on his Betamax video, I felt a special connection with Ronnie Barker that set me apart from my parents and sister. It was as if he was now mine  no longer theirs, or the countrys. I was swept away by a feeling that something amazing had been set in motion.

Often, I have thought people dont find what they are going to collect, their collections find them. Under different circumstances, stamp collectors could just as easily become trainspotters and vice versa.

On holiday in the South of France, Andrusier realises that the wrestler Big Daddy is staying at the same hotel. Not that you could miss him, exactly. He was tall and hugely fat, and walked like a titan. His biceps were easily three times the size of Dads, and his enormous swimming trunks went in a big circle around his belly.

Five minutes later, his signature has been added to the collection.

He is thrilled to get a Frank Sinatra, but it turns out to be phoney, forged by a minion. (Many autographs are.)

Adam keeps his best autographs in the bathroom, two Hitlers and a Marilyn'. Pictured: Marilyn Monroe delights youngsters

He sends three 8 in x 10 in photos of Clint Eastwood to the actors home address, and is thrilled to get one back with his genuine signature on it. (Andrusier knows the difference now.)

He finds out Elizabeth Taylor is doing a public appearance at Selfridges to promote her not-very-nice perfume, and waits at the back door for her. Out she pops, and he asks for her autograph.

We had a moment together, Liz and I. We looked deep into each others souls . . . But then something else happened. A deadness took hold of the actresss gaze. She switched off. Shed been through this a million times.

HITLERS AND A MARILYN by Adam Andrusier (Headline 16.99, 320 pp)

 Sorry, said Liz Taylor, I cant. 

Andrusier is bitterly disappointed but also, on some level, relieved. Liz Taylor was out of my league, that was all. My desire had got the better of me. The book sags a little in the middle when he goes to university, falls out of love with autographs and, without realising, himself.

Theres also what appears to be the slow and rather grim break-up of his parents marriage, and the high spirits of the first half are superseded by rather more soul-searching than you might wish for.

But its his story, isnt it? He can only tell it the way it happened.

In the main, though, this is a really good book. Andrusier has a genuine comic gift and hes remarkably technically adept. You could easily assume he had been writing this sort of stuff for years.

And the title? It comes from an American collector, a weird guy whose house has a moat and is full of huge framed photographs of Hitler.

This man keeps his best autographs in the bathroom, two Hitlers and a Marilyn. And in between these autographs, mounted on the wall, are guns
SOCIETY

ETTA LEMON

by Tessa Boase (Aurum 9.99, 320 pp)

Sitting in a London church in 1887, a young woman gazed over the congregation and the sea of elegant ladies hats.

In her notebook, she jotted down the names of the birds whose feathers decorated those hats  swallows, robins, blue tits, chaffinches, hummingbirds and even eagles and herons. Just as she did every week, she would write to each of the hat wearers, calmly describing the slaughter of the birds who had ended up as their fashion accessories.

Today, her name is almost entirely forgotten. Yet, as this beguiling book shows, Etta Lemon is one of the great heroines of British nature conservation. Her long and doughty campaign against murderous millinery led to the founding of the Royal Society For The Protection Of Birds (RSPB) and saved millions of birds.

Tessa Boase has penned a book about Etta Lemon (pictured), who was one of the great heroines of British nature conservation

Born Etta Smith in 1860, she grew up on the Kent coast and developed a passion for birds at an early age. For many of her contemporaries, though, birds were nothing more than a source of brightly coloured feathers for their hats. Hats were big business  in 1891, central London alone had 548 milliners  and feathers were an essential adornment. Women who couldnt afford their own exotic feather would club together to buy one, taking it in turns to wear it on their best hat.

By the time Etta reached her 20s, there was a ghastly new trend for hats decorated with the corpses of birds: whole owls heads with staring glass eyes were all the rage  along with the breasts and wings of brightly coloured parrots, Tessa Boase writes. Tiny songbirds were used to trim bodices and decorate capes, or arranged to look as if they were flying out of collars. In 1891, Emily Williamson from Manchester launched the all-female Society For The Protection Of Birds to campaign against the killing of birds for avian adornment.

The following year Etta, now married to lawyer Frank Lemon, became its Honorary Secretary, bringing organisational skill and boundless energy to the cause.

Within two years, membership had reached 10,000 and the women were tireless in their efforts to persuade others to take the pledge to eschew feathers. Their sympathisers included Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII and, in 1904 the society was given a Royal Charter and became the RSPB.

Tessa Boase draws many parallels between Ettas championing of birds and Emmeline Pankhursts long fight for womens votes; the Womens Social And Political Union, set up to campaign for female suffrage, was founded in 1903. You might expect the two organisations to have had plenty in common but they viewed each other with deep suspicion.

Etta's campaign against the use of bird corpse on hats, led to the founding of the Royal Society For The Protection Of Birds (RSPB)

Mrs Pankhurst believed suffragettes needed to be well dressed to convince the public they were womanly rather than screaming viragos, and extravagantly large hats, often trimmed with feathers, were an important part of their image.

In short, she had little time for bird enthusiasts. Etta, for her part, opposed the campaign for womens votes. When the rules of the Royal Charter stipulated that a woman couldnt be the RSPBs honorary secretary, she cheerfully handed over the role to her husband.

For all Ettas energy and campaigning skills, there was little public enthusiasm for outlawing the killing of birds for fashion and they were still being slaughtered on an industrial scale for the British market.

ETTA LEMON by Tessa Boase (Aurum 9.99, 320 pp)

In just one month in 1907, one London wholesaler sold 20,000 kingfisher carcasses. Etta may have disliked the suffragettes, but she could see their shock tactics were effective. In 1911, the RSPB hired ten men to walk through central London wearing sandwich boards depicting an egrets story, showing the egret chicks starving to death after their parents were killed for their feathers. Posters of the picture went up all around London.

The stunt worked and the tide of public opinion began to turn, though it wasnt until 1921 that the Plumage Act, banning the import of exotic feathers, finally became law.

Theres no doubt that Britain was shamefully slow to act  in America a similar law had been passed nine years earlier and women arriving from England on liners often had their hats confiscated at the New York docks.

Etta worked tirelessly for the RSPB for another 18 years, until she was unceremoniously forced into retirement.

After that, she was more or less airbrushed from its history.

When the first edition of this book was published three years ago, the RSPB website carried little information on Etta Lemon and her picture wasnt even on display in its headquarters. Now, Tessa Boase reports, that has been put right and Ettas enormous contribution to nature conservation is acknowledged.

Boase writes warmly and sympathetically about the redoubtable Mrs Lemon, even while admitting she is a hard woman to love: blunt and so relentless that people would hide rather than risk being harangued by her. Well, thank goodness for Etta and women like her. Britain, and our wildlife, would be much poorer without them.
British motorists will no longer need a Green Card for their car before driving to EU countries, it has been confirmed.

The European Commission has announced its plans to scrap the Brexit-related insurance meaning drivers are still part of the free circulation zone and don't need to purchase any added cover.

Initially, there was confusion after Britain left the EU as to whether the Green Card would be reintroduced for British citizens as a proof of insurance document.

If that was the case, any driver without a card driving in the EU could have faced fines, prosecution or having their car impounded.

The European Commission has decided to scrap the Green Card for British drivers in the EU

However, the Commission decided to drop the card in an effort to reduce tension around the Northern Ireland protocol.

This is because Northern Irish drivers have needed to carry a Green Card when visiting other EU destinations, including the neighbouring Republic of Ireland.

It is a physical document proving a motorist has third-party insurance and is part of a system created by insurers in the countries that make up the Green Card system.

Drivers would have had to carry the Green Card as there may be checks at borders and at random in certain countries and they could risk legal action if not able to produce it.

Without one, motorists would have to be covered by third-party insurance bought in the country they are driving in, else face fines from the local authorities.

While the commission has this week confirmed it is ditching the card, the rules haven't come into force just yet.

Until the EU has fully implemented the change, anyone taking their car to Europe will still need to get a Green Card from their insurer before they head off abroad to countries that require one.

This includes the Republic of Ireland, all other EU countries and non-EU countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, Serbia and Andorra.

The Green Card is a physical document proving a motorist has third-party insurance in the EU

Here's the break down of countries where UK motorists could have to carry a Green Card to prove they have valid insurance to drive in Europe

The move to remove the Green Card has been welcomed by the insurance industry who have campaigned to see an end to the practice.

Clare Egan, head of motor product at Admiral, said: 'It's great to see that the European Commission has agreed to scrap the need for motorists to show a Green Card as proof they have the minimum cover in place for driving their own car abroad.

'Although the decision is yet to take effect, it's a welcome change that will hopefully be rubber stamped by the European Union soon so that things are a little less complicated for Britons who are still hoping for a getaway this year but who would prefer to drive to Europe instead of flying there.'

Huw Evans, Director General at the Association of British Insurers, added: 'This is excellent news. We have long campaigned for the UK to be part of the Green Card Free Circulation Zone so we warmly welcome the decision by the European Commission today.

'The Commission has taken a pragmatic approach on the matter. UK drivers will no longer need to apply for a Green Card through their insurer which will help reduce bureaucracy for drivers and road hauliers travelling between the UK and EU.

'It will be especially welcomed by motorists in Northern Ireland driving across the border to the Republic of Ireland.'
GlaxoSmithKline is fighting back against Elliott Management by backing boss Emma Walmsley.

Responding to a 17-page letter published by the Wall Street raider, the pharmaceutical giant's board dismissed calls to review Walmsley's position as chief executive and said they 'strongly believe' she is the right person for the job.

The response comes after Elliott demanded the firm conducted a search for an 'appropriate' leader after its consumer healthcare business is spun off next year. This would have effectively required Walmsley, 52, to re-apply for her position.

Backing: The GlaxoSmithKline board dismissed calls to review Emma Walmsley's position

Elliott had also called for a sale of the consumer division to be considered rather than a stock market listing.

The hedge fund's letter amounted to an attack on Walmsley, repeatedly referring to a lack of 'credibility' under current management and 'poor communication'. Elliott was revealed to have taken a significant stake in GlaxoSmithKline earlier this year but only made its intentions clear this week.

But responding yesterday, the GSK board led by chairman Sir Jonathan Symonds said: 'The board strongly believes Emma Walmsley is the right leader of New GSK.

'Under Emma's leadership, the board fully expects this team to deliver a step-change in performance and long-term shareholder value creation through the separation and in the years beyond.'

After the consumer division is separated next year, the remaining 'New GSK' will be comprised of the pharmaceuticals and vaccine businesses.

Walmsley has expressed her determination to remain in charge of the New GSK, having led a turnaround effort since 2017 when she first took over from Sir Andrew Witty.

But some investors have questioned that decision, pointing to her lack of scientific background and previous experience in consumer businesses at GSK and L'Oreal. Elliott said the future chief executives of both new arms 'must have the skillsets and expertise to match their respective tasks at hand'. The statement was widely seen as a snipe at Walmsley.

The firm also called on GSK to seriously consider an alternative to the proposed plan for separation, such as an outright sale.

However, fund manager Jupiter, a top-40 GSK investor, threw its weight behind Walmsley last night. It follows support from Royal London Asset Management and M&G.
Playtech investors received a welcome surprise as a rival bidder for the company's financial trading division surfaced.

Gopher Investments, part of Hong Kong-based finance firm TTB Partners, tabled an all-cash 181million offer for Finalto.

Gaming software firm Playtech had already agreed to sell the business, which owns trading platform Markets.com, to a consortium of Israeli investors earlier this year for up to 152million  the deal had been two years in the making.

Surprise: Playtech investors received a welcome surprise as a rival bidder for the company's financial trading division surfaced

So the 11th hour bid from Gopher met Playtech's board with some bemusement. Because the directors have already signed the agreement with the Israeli consortium, they are unable to engage with the new suitor.

The decision over which bid to choose now rests with shareholders. They were due to vote on the original deal on July 15.

But Gopher is now urging them to turn it down, as it attempts to win them over with its own offer.

Shareholders will have to weigh whether they would prefer the certainty of the first bid, which has already been signed, or the potentially higher price proposed by Gopher. Shares in Playtech edged up 3.1 per cent, or 13.4p, to 443.8p, suggesting at least some investors were leaning towards the increased offer.

Playtech's rise helped the FTSE 250 close up 0.6 per cent, or 124.45 points, at 22746.99 points, while the FTSE 100 index of major companies was struggling for direction, ending the day down 0.03 per cent, or 1.89 points, at 7123.27.

Top of the pile of blue chips was Informa. It has been a dreadful 18 months or so for events and conferences. But analysts at Berenberg have upgraded Informa as authorities around the world begin to lift Covid restrictions. 'Restrictions, which have prevented the running of large trade shows, are being eased globally, and while 2021 shows will be smaller and less profitable than normal, we think they set Informa up for a substantial recovery in profitability from 2022,' the analysts said in a research note sent to clients.

Raising its target price from 610p to 640p, the German broker added: 'As 2021 begins to fade in the rear-view mirror, and 2022 becomes the main focus of investors, we think Informa has potential for a strong recovery. Buy.'

Shares in the business rose 3.2 per cent, or 16.4p, to 529p.

Banks, however, were dragging the index down amid concerns that the spread of the Delta variant could put a damper on the recent bout of economic optimism.

Standard Chartered slid 2.4 per cent, or 11.1p, to 456.5p, Natwest was down 2.2 per cent, or 4.5p, to 202.4p, Barclays fell 1.7 per cent, or 2.94p, to 172.36p, Lloyds slipped 1.7 per cent, or 0.8p, to 46.83p, and HSBC edged down 1.6 per cent, or 6.7p, to 416.65p.

It came as economists at HSBC warned Britain could face more long-term damage, or scarring, from the pandemic than its neighbours in the eurozone.

On Wall Street, Tesla posted record car deliveries of 201,250 for the second quarter despite a shortage of chips and raw materials that is wreaking havoc in the industry worldwide.

Delivered: On Wall Street, Tesla posted record car deliveries of 201,250 for the second quarter

'Congrats Tesla Team on over 200,000 car built & delivered in Q2, despite many challenges!!' boss Elon Musk said in a tweet. Shares rose 3 per cent in early trading but fell back.

Back in the UK, Jefferies maintained its upbeat stance on UK homebuilders, lifting Barratt Developments (up 0.3 per cent, or 1.8p, to 713.2p) and Bellway (up 0.8 per cent, or 27p, to 3327p) to 'buy' from 'hold'.

'The sector remains a firm favourite with investors,' said Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell.
Marks & Spencer is shutting all 29 of its bank branches today, with the closure of all its current accounts to follow on the 31 August.

That means that between now and the end of August, M&S Bank - whose branches are all located inside its stores - will be an internet and telephone-only bank for its customers.

It means today is the last day elderly and vulnerable customers can visit in person to close accounts.

The bank, half-owned by the supermarket and HSBC, first unveiled the closures in March, when it said it would focus on credit cards, digital payments instead and currency services.

Closing down for good: Marks & Spencer is shutting down all its 29 bank branches today

M&S has already taken the current account off-sale for new applicants, while existing customers will have to switched bank by the end of August, M&S said today.

Customers can close their current accounts via the M&S website, but they will need to have a balance of zero to do so.

That means that any money deposited on the account will need to be moved to another bank before closing the account.

Likewise, if a customer is in overdraft, they will have to clear that first before closing the account.

If by the 31 August there are still funds or debts in the account, they will be frozen and customers will need to contact M&S to transfer the balance elsewhere.

They are part of a growing trend on the high street, with banks saying it is down to of a surge in online banking.

In reality for M&S, the move is more likely to be down to the current account business not making it much money.

In contrast, it is a strong player in the the credit card, personal loan and travel money sectors, where it is likely to focus on more heavily.

M&S still has travel money bureaux branches located in 100 stores.

Banks have recently stepped up branch closures after many paused restructuring for much of last year to focus on responding to the pandemic.

Last month, Lloyds Banking Group announced it was shutting 44 more bank branches across England and Wales this year.

Back in March, M&S bank chief executive Paul Spencer, said: 'As we adapt to meet the changing needs of our customers, and we deliver some new  more digitally-focused products and services  it does regrettably mean we will move away from branch-based servicing and the 29-in-store bank branches and associated current account will close this summer.'

Customers may want to request copies of statements before 31 August and make a list of any recurring payments, such as direct debits, to minimise disruption.
Advertisement

It was built in the Thames Estuary in 1943 to protect London and Allied shipping from devastating German bombing raids in the Second World War.

Although the Red Sands sea fort has since been hammered by the passage of time and pilfered by vandals, its seven structures - which were once connected by walkways - still tower above the waves seven miles off the coast of Whitstable.

Now, thanks to a group of dedicated volunteers, the fort is being faithfully restored and turned into a heritage museum which will tell its incredible role in keeping Britain safe from Nazi attacks.

In a new documentary on streaming platform History Hit, historian Dan Snow is seen touring the towers which make up the fort. He also speaks to David Foulkes, who is part of the restoration team at Project Redsand.

By 1944, there were 220 men stationed on the fort, with accommodation based on a 'hot bed' system where soldiers would alternate between sleeping and being on duty.

In total, 22 German planes and 30 flying bombs, known as 'doodlebugs', were shot down by men stationed at Red Sands, who used search lights and enormous guns fitted to the roofs of the towers for the task.

Stunning footage in the History Hit documentary shows how the fort still contains original toilets and baths, as well as the 'shell lockers' which housed some of the munitions used to take out enemy planes.

After the war, the fort stood vacant before some of its towers were taken over by illegal 'pirate' radio broadcasters. The towers became fully derelict from 1967 and then were a prime target for thieves.

Mr Foulkes told Mr Snow in the programme: 'Since the pirate radio people left the place has become a pilferer's paradise. All the brass fittings off the radiators they've come along and literally just smashed them all off.'

The Red Sands sea fort was built in the Thames Estuary in 1943 to protect London and Allied shipping from devastating German bombing raids in the Second World War

The volunteer is careful about leaving any equipment or artefacts at the site because of the ongoing threat posed by vandals.

Civil engineer Guy Maunsell was the man tasked with producing the designs for forts in the Thames Estuary when it was decided that something needed to be done about devastating German bombing raids.

Before they were built, German pilots simply had to follow the path of the Rive Thames to get to London and drop their munitions.

The forts would provide a virtually invisible bulwark against these kinds of attacks.

The first forts to be built were designed to have a flat pedestal sitting atop two cylinders. The later designs were installed between July and September 1943.

Along with the surviving Red Sands structures, forts of the same design were installed elsewhere on the Thames Estuary.

They were the known as the Nore and Shivering Sand forts. Nore was dismantled in 1959, whilst Shivering Sand was lost in 1963.

Although they have since been hammered by the passage of time and pilfered by vandals, the seven Red Sands Sea structures still tower above the waves seven miles off the coast of Whitstable

Now, thanks to a group of dedicated volunteers, the fort is being faithfully restored and turned into a heritage museum which will tell its incredible role in keeping Britain safe from Nazi attacks

Mr Snow is seen touring the towers which make up the fort and speaking to David Foulkes (right), who is part of the restoration team at Project Redsand

The fort was fitted with then revolutionary radar detection system which could spot planes in the sky.

The fort also boasted bathrooms with flushing toilets and baths, as well as a diesel-powered boilers and a gulley system which collected rain water into a separate tank for drinking.

In its first months of operation, there were 140 men stationed across the seven towers at Red Sands.

This had increased to 180 by the end of the year. Shortly after the beginning of 1944, there were 220 people.

On each tower was a dining room where the men ate their meals, whilst walkways connected the structures to each other.

Incredibly, although the steel forts were only designed to last for the duration of the war, Mr Foulkes revealed that a structural survey carried out two years ago found that the forts were in 'pretty damn good' condition.

In the History Hit documentary, Mr Snow was taken to the roof of one of the forts, where he was shown where the gun emplacements once were.

The shell lockers, where deadly munitions were once housed, are now seen lying empty. Mr Foulkes said they have also been harmed by the weather because vandals have opened their doors.

The fort was fitted with then revolutionary radar detection system which could spot planes in the sky. Above: A wartime photo showing personnel walking along one of the walkways between the structures. The gun emplacements which targeted German planes can also be seen

A faded sign on one of the doors in the fort bears the acronym for the Light Anti-Aircraft Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers

Incredibly, although the steel forts were only designed to last for the duration of the war, Mr Foulkes revealed that a structural survey carried out two years ago found that the forts were in 'pretty damn good' condition

Mr Foulkes revealed that sea water is used to flush the toilets, some of which are still in working order

Historian Margaret Flo McEwan told Mr Snow that the biggest challenge faced by the men who lived in the fort's towers was that of keeping themselves busy.

'Although they were in the middle of a war, the big challenge they had was boredom,' she said.

'If you imagine you're out there there's a bit of action but not a lot of action. So there's a lot of hours in the day to fill.

'And the guys serving on the forts were encourage to take up arts and crafts and knitting and painting and all kinds of things just to keep them occupied.'

One game devised to make the time on the Red Sands fort more interesting involved tying a length of string to two pieces of bacon rind and then letting seagulls fight over the scraps of meat.

'And so two sea gulls would grab it, swallow it and there would be this amazing dance and a fight between the two sea gulls. And the guys would bet to see which of the two would be the winner,' Ms McEwan said.

However, she said the men were well aware that danger could be just around the corner.

'Those guys are out there in isolation, in darkness at night. It is a very long, dark night to spend on a fort. Imagine you don't know what's coming,' she said.

Mr Snow was also impressed to discover that the original baths remained inside one of the towers. On each tower there was also a dining room where the men ate their meals, whilst walkways connected the structures to each other

Only one of the walkways which once linked all seven towers together still remains. The others have fallen into the sea

The shell lockers, where deadly munitions were once housed, are now seen lying empty. Mr Foulkes said they have also been harmed by the weather because vandals have opened their doors

A CGI image displayed in the History Hit documentary reveals how the Red Sands fort would once have looked; with each tower connected via a central structure

'You know the searchlights up there looking out for the enemy aircraft. And once the signal goes up that it is all about to kick off, suddenly they're in action.'

In July 1964, the fort became a base for pirate radio station Radio Invicta, which was owned by Harry Featherbee.

But the project was short-lived: Featherbee, along with fellow DJ Barry Hoy and engineer Martin Shaw drowned in December 1963 during a return trip to the fort.

By February of the following year, Radio Invicta had stopped broadcasting.

Shortly afterwards, the fort was occupied by Radio King, which lasted only six months and did not attract an audience.

The most successful broadcasting venture came with Radio 390, which was the first station to try to get the correct authority allowing them to broadcast legally.

A valve from an old radio is a sign of the broadcasting activity which went on after the military connection to the towers ceased

In the History Hit documentary, Mr Snow was taken to the roof of one of the forts, where he was shown where the gun emplacements once were

Unfortunately, the request was denied a year later and Radio 390 was summoned to court and shut down in 1967.

The Government then made it illegal for anyone to resupply the stations from the UK, making it impossible for them to continue broadcasting from the fort.

Speaking of the pirate radio operation, Ms McEwan added: 'If you remember back then, normal radio was so dull so they needed an outlet for the more exciting music that was coming across from the states. And they needed somewhere to broadcast.

'And there they were out there in the coolest location ever. A real playground. With this amazing music it was just great times.'

Mr Foulkes told Mr Snow that, when the restoration of the structures is complete, a 'coastal defence' museum will be set up and a new 'pirate' radio station - this time a legal one - will begin broadcasting.
Heartbroken grandmother has vowed to ensure Parker's life won't be in vain

Will be moved to children's hospice as distraught family prepare to say goodbye

Four-month-old spent this week on life support after a cardiac arrest at home

A heartbroken family is preparing to say goodbye to their tiny brave fighter described as the happiest baby with a smile that melted everyone's hearts.

The odds were stacked against little Parker Williamson well before he entered the world on February 22.

Brisbane couple Chelsea Holman and Luke Williamson found out at 30 weeks that he had a congenital heart condition known as transposition of the greater arteries (TGA).

Parker underwent complex open heart surgery when he was 12 days old and suffered a stroke a day later.

He spent the next four months in and out of hospital before things took a tragic turn last Sunday when he went into cardiac arrest at home.

Ms Holman, 27, found her little boy unconscious, not breathing and surrounded by blood and vomit.

She frantically performed CPR on Parker for 20 minutes while waiting for paramedics to arrive.

Parker has spent the last four days on life support in Queensland's Childrens Hospital, where a MRI has confirmed the devastating news no parent ever wants to hear.

Chelsea Holman and Luke Williamson will say goodbye to their son Parker in the coming days when he's moved from hospital to a children's hospice

This was baby Parker with his mum Chelsea on June 11, just one week before his life took a tragic turn for the worst

'We've received the worst news possible,' Parker's grandmother, Liz Holman, told Daily Mail Australia.

'He's been given no chance. His little brain is no good because he was starved of oxygen for 23 minutes.

'We're now gathering close family together so everyone can say goodbye. No one should ever bury their child.'

Parker's devastated parents met with palliative care staff on Thursday to discuss plans to transfer him to children's hospice Hummingbird House, where he'll take his final breaths in the next few days.

'They'll take out the tube where he could go straight away or he could breathe on his own a little longer.'

While his family knew Parker had brain damage as a result of the stroke following open heart surgery, the extent wouldn't be known until he was older.

Liz Holman described her grandson Parker as the happiest and smiliest baby, despite what he's been through

Parker Williamson (pictured) has been on life support for the last four days

Parker (pictured on life support this week) was diagnosed with transposition of the greater arteries, a congenital heart condition before he was born

The family said they will always treasure the precious time they've had with Parker, which included to a trip to his parents hometown of Cairns in May, where he met his great-great grandmother.

Beautiful photos with his proud parents show a delighted Parker smiling for the camera just a week before he went into cardiac arrest at home.

His grandmother said her little fighter was like a cat with nine lives who inherited his mother's placid nature.

'He was the smiliest happy baby who would light up the room,' she said.

'The only time he ever cried was when he had a wet nappy or if he was hungry, despite being poked and prodded every time he went to the hospital.

'He has been to hell and back.'

Her daughter Chelsea described the last few days as 'the worst of our lives'.

Beautiful photos with his parents show a delighted Parker smiling cheekily for the camera just a week before he went into cardiac arrest at home

Chelsea Holman has been at her critically-ill son's hospital bedside since Sunday when he went into cardiac arrest at home

'Our beautiful little family has been through so much, emotionally as well as financially'

'Firstly, Parker, Luke and I are humbled, honoured and overwhelmed with the love and support we have received,' she posted on Facebook on Tuesday.

'Our Parker Leigh is still alive, which is a miracle! The doctors cant believe that he is still surviving and still fighting.. but we all knew he was a fighter from the start.

'Unfortunately due to his body and brain being starved of oxygen so long, we still dont know what this looks like. At the moment, his eyes are open, however he isnt alert of what is happening.

'They believe he can hear us, however is unresponsive.'

A GoFundMe was set up by Chelsea's mother this week received more than $20,000 within two days.

The couple, who run a small business, have no savings as they bought a house shortly before Chelsea found out she was pregnant.

Friends and family have rallied Chelsea Holman and Luke Williamson, pictured with Parker a week before their son was rushed to hospital

Parker with grandmother Liz, aunt Sophie (left) and mum Chelsea (right)

Liz Holman (right) said her daughter Chelsea is determined to ensure Parker's life isn't in vain

The money, which was going to be used to modify the home for Parker's needs, will now go towards his funeral and easing the financial burden on his parents while they come to terms with their tragic loss.

'This has been truly heartbreaking for our family and it is taking its toll. Our beautiful little family has been through so much, emotionally as well as financially,' the page states.

The family are also determined to ensure Parker's legacy will continue and have given permission for his organs and tissue to be donated.

They've been overwhelmed by the community's generosity.

'I would give it back in a heartbeat,' Ms Holman said.

'Parker's life won't be in vain as there are so many things we want to do.

'My daughter wants to share her story with others and encourage other pregnant mums to get the scan for TGA at 30 weeks.'

Parker after having open heart surgery at 12 days old
A Year 12 student almost skipped her school formal after discovering a group of cruel boys had written her name down on a 'fat list'.

Summa Wirth, 18, from south-east Queensland, considered staying home from the end of year celebration in November after she became the victim of heartless bullies at her co-ed school.

To make matters worse, one of the girls in her year tried to ban her from wearing the colour green because she wanted to wear it instead.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, Summa bravely opened up about the traumatic experience and stressed why it's important for others to understand their worth no matter how they look.

Summa Wirth, 18, (pictured with her boyfriend) from south-east Queensland considered staying home from the end of year celebration in November after she became the victim of heartless bullies at her co-ed school

'Just hearing that there was a ''fat list'' of the Year 12 girls and I was on it, I just tried to brush it aside but I had so much anger,' she said.

'To think that there's still people out there trying to put women down and even young teens is horrible.'

Summa said when confronted by staff, the boys who wrote the list said it was just a rumour and while one was suspended, the rest escaped punishment.

The girls in her class held a meeting to voice their opinions about the bullying and some teachers decided to serve snacks.

But the same boys who ridiculed their peers then took it a step further and questioned if the snacks were 'healthy' enough.

The 18-year-old is seen with Erin McKenna, the owner of Curve Bridal Boutique while shopping for her formal dress

'I just don't think they realise what they're doing and what bullying can lead to,' Summa said.

But the bullying didn't just come from the male students, with one girl specifically demanding Summa didn't wear emerald green to the formal as it was the colour of her dress.

'She was acting as if I wanted to be her, it was so uncalled for, for a teen to act like that towards another teen.'

Summa said the reason she wanted to wear emerald green was to honour her sister who passed away before she was born, and whose ashes are kept in a necklace of that colour.

Her classmate has since apologised.

The teenager said she wanted to speak out to let others know they were beautiful no matter what size they were

Summa said finding the right dress to wear was also a battle with one shop assistant leaving her in tears.

'I was body shamed by one worker who told me there was only a couple of dresses in the whole store for someone of my size,' she said.

It wasn't until she met Erin McKenna, the owner of Curve Bridal Boutique, that she suddenly found a new sense of confidence - and the perfect dress.

'Erin has changed my whole perspective on life and how I see myself, I have a partner but I had never really felt comfortable in my skin around anyone at all,' Summa said.

'I walked into that store in tears and I was crying while trying on gowns because I didn't feel like myself but Erin calmed me down and told me it was OK.'

Ms McKenna, who runs the store offering bridal and formal dresses for sizes 14 and up, said she was touched by Summa's bravery and courage.

Summa said choosing the right dress was a battle with one shop assistant leaving her in tears

'When you meet ladies like Summa, you can't help but see your younger self in them,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'So vulnerable and brave, beautiful and completely unaware of their potential. She will always be a special person to me, she has touched my heart and helped me see how important our mission is.'

Summa said she wanted to speak out to encourage others who may be self-conscious to know they were more than what people saw.

'It's kind of always been there, people looking at me the way they do because I'm a bigger girl,' she said.

'It's OK to be curvy. Just because you're chubbier in different places it doesn't mean you're a horrible person or ugly.

'Everyone's beautiful in their own way.'
A Texas congressman who has been an outspoken critic of COVID-19 mask mandates went without a mask for at least a portion of a commercial airline flight Tuesday evening, an apparent violation of federal law.

Republican Rep. Chip Roy flew from Washington back to his home district in Austin to attend a border security event held Wednesday with former President Donald Trump.

The Associated Press was provided a photo and a nearly three-minute video from a Southwest Airlines flight showing a bare-faced Roy chatting with fellow passengers while standing in the aisle of the plane.

The video and a photo were provided to the AP on the condition of anonymity by another passenger.

Maskless Chip Roy, R-Texas, an ardent critic of COVID-19 mask mandates, mingles with others during a Southwest Airlines flight late Tuesday from Washington to his home district in Austin, Texas

Roy flew from Washington back to his home district in Austin to attend a border security event held Wednesday with former President Donald Trump

Roy is listed as a co-sponsor on a GOP-backed bill introduced in Congress last week that seeks to bar federal authorities from requiring masks to be worn on commercial airliners or in airports, as well as other transportation hubs such as train and bus stations.

His staff did not respond to multiple calls and emails seeking comment Wednesday, including questions about whether the congressman had been vaccinated.

Roy was issued a formal warning by congressional leaders in May after he and a handful of other Republicans refused to wear masks on the House floor, as then required by the chambers rules.

In a May 18 tweet, Roy said his refusal was to wear a mask was a protest 'to stand up for every student and every hard working American wanting the insanity to end.'

Democratic leaders later relaxed the mask mandate on Capitol Hill after the Centers for Disease Control changed its guidance last month to say it's safe for vaccinated adults to go without a mask when indoors in most circumstances.

Masks are still required by federal law on commercial aircraft and in all indoor spaces at airports for everyone older than 2 years of age.

Those who fail to mask up on planes are subject to civil fines, ranging from $250 for the first offense and up to $1,500 for repeat offenders.

Most U.S. airlines also prominently include mask wearing as a requirement in their written terms of service when passengers purchase tickets, with verbal reminders issued during boarding and safety briefings. Those who refuse can be denied service and removed.

A Southwest spokesperson said in an email Wednesday the airline couldnt comment on details involving individual passengers, but no 'irregularity reports' were generated from the specific flight the congressman was filmed on.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas is seen attending a border security rally with former President Donald Trump in Texas on Wednesday

The Transportation Security Administration is responsible for enforcing COVID-19 safety restrictions of commercial aircraft. Agency spokesperson Sarah Rodriguez reiterated that airline passengers are still required to wear masks on planes and in airports, though she did not respond to specific questions about the congressman's failure to wear one.

Last year, after Roy was exposed to a fellow GOP congressman who then tested positive for COVID-19, he declined to self-quarantine and said he wasnt worried about catching the virus.

In a July 2020 interview with CNN, Roy questioned the effectiveness of mask wearing for preventing the spread of the virus, especially during 'interactions with perfect strangers on an airplane with circulating air.'

'With cotton masks on an airplane, where everybody is pretending like theyre doing something noble to try to save people from a virus on a cylinder with 50 people on it flying through the air,' Roy said in the interview. 'My question to you all is how are people wearing a cotton mask on an airplane saving you from circulating virus on an airplane?'
The killer grandfather who stabbed his wife to death and tried to murder his daughter was a child raping monster destined to kill, his step-daughter has claimed.

Neville Michell, 67, murdered his wife Michelle, 50, before seriously injuring his daughter Jennifer, 21, in a frenzied attack in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

He then fled their Inverell home in northern New South Wales to a property on the outskirts of town where he killed himself as a police manhunt closed in on him.

Now his traumatised stepdaughter, Rebecca Gibbs-McKenzie, 42, has told her story to Daily Mail Australia for the first time, detailing her childhood from hell - and how she feared his murderous rage.

'He was a ticking timebomb,' Ms Gibbs-McKenzie said.

'This murder was predicted years ago. We all knew it was going to happen.

'It was just a matter of when.'

Neville Michell, 67, (top) murdered his wife Michelle, 50, (left) before seriously injuring his daughter Jennifer, 21, (centre) in a frenzied attack in the early hours of Wednesday morning

Ms Gibbs-McKenzie's mother, Rhonda, was 20 and pregnant with Rebecca when she met Michell and set up home with him.

Michell started raping Ms Gibbs-McKenzie when she was just six years old - and she was forced to endure a five-year nightmare of horrifying sex attacks in her home.

Not only did Michell rape her, but she says he passed her around to other men to abuse.

Ms Gibbs-McKenzie estimates she was been raped by 21 different men before she was 11.

'I can remember it began when I was three or four years old and he started grooming me, then it just escalated,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

Neville Michell was a child raping monster destined to kill, says his stepdaughter Rebecca Gibbs-McKenzie (seen here as an infant on the lap of her late grandmother Ethel Wells, with Michell, centre, and Rebecca's mother, Rhonda, right, in a family portrait from around 1980)

'It was physical and mental abuse at first then, when I was six, it was sexual.

'I'd go to bed at night and just wait for the footsteps to come into the room in the shadow of the night.

'And then he would pass me around other men like I was a rag doll.'

She added: 'I didn't understand. I did everything I could to this man, to love him, to keep me as his daughter, to make sure he didn't hurt my mum.

'I did everything he wanted, everything he wished, even if I didn't agree to it. I didn't even know what was normal any more.'

The sex attacks ended abruptly when she had her first period aged 11 - and Michell kicked her out of the house and onto the streets.

Neville Michell started raping Rebecca Gibbs-McKenzie (pictured) when she was just six years old, and she then endured a five year nightmare of constant horrifying sex attacks at home

'I was homeless at 11,' she said.

'I tried to take my life and then I ended up in DoCS [Department of Community Services].'

She was eventually placed with a foster family until authorities returned her to Michell and put her back in the hands of her abuser.

'They handed me to the predator who was hurting me,' she said.

'I had nobody - and I feared that if spoke out, I'd be fed to the pigs at the piggery where he worked.'

She says Michell was a small-time crook, and she grew up surrounded by stolen property at the family home in Inverell.

'I thought it was all normal,' she said.

'It was not normal. It was dysfunctional. It was a crazy house.'

The alarm was finally raised in 1993 by a high school counsellor who told her: 'I've known Neville for many years. He doesn't want you as a daughter.

'He wants you as a girlfriend.'

'I said, "Get me out! Help!'' revealed Ms Gibbs-McKenzie, who now lives in Port Macquarie with her husband John, 40.

As well as raping her himself, Rebecca Gibbs-McKenzie says Neville Michell (pictured here with second wife Michelle who he murdered on Wednesday) also passed her around other men. She estimates she was raped by 21 different men before she was 11

Police and social workers swooped on the home, but Michell escaped charges after he insisted his stepdaughter was making up the allegations.

Her childhood scarred Ms Gibbs-McKenzie for life.

'My husband has to come in and calm me down as I scream the house down because I can't get the horror out,' she said.

After being let down by the system, she fled Inverell to make a new life for herself in Brisbane, where she finished school and studied law.

But she has maintained contact with Michell's large family, which includes three half-sisters and a half-brother through her mother.

His second wife, Michelle, had a son from a previous relationship when she met Michell in the 90s and the couple had two children of their own.

Ms Gibbs-McKenzie's mother Rhonda (above left) was pregnant with Rebecca (seen here as baby in her mother's arms) when she met Neville Michell. Michell's sex attacks ended abruptly when Ms Gibbs-McKenzie (right) had her first period aged 11 - and Michell kicked her out of the house and onto the streets

'He was always fiddling around with other women,' Ms Gibbs-McKenzie said.

'There were chicks going through the house all the time.

'This is how he worked. He thought he had blond hair, blue eyes and was a hot piece of stuff. He was never faithful to anyone. He was treated like a king all his life.

'And he was always in out and out of jail, God knows how many times, for anything from domestic violence to theft.'

Ms Gibbs-McKenzie says Michell was a manipulative narcissist, who kept everyone on a short leash.

On Wednesday, neighbours around the murder scene in Inverell said they had only ever seen Michell near the home since the family moved in last September.

Rebecca Gibbs-McKenzie says grandfather of seven Neville Michell (pictured) was a manipulative narcissist who kept everyone on a short leash

One said she had never even seen his wife, Michelle, who married Michell in 2019, after two decades as his partner.

'That's how he worked,' Ms Gibbs-McKenzie said.

'Michelle was beaten down from the get-go.

'She'd be inside the house because he didn't like anyone being out beyond his control.

'He needed to know where you were, what you were doing and how you were doing it at all times. That's how he controlled you and he did it with many women in his life.

'He once said, "If you can't control a b***h, you can kill them". That was 15 years ago.

'I always knew he would kill somebody. I'm just amazed it took this long.'

In chilling social media posts in the hours before his murderous spree, Michell warned: 'They have pushed me to my limits. Can't take anymore. Love yous. [sic]'

He changed his Facebook status to widowed before stabbing his wife to death and almost killing his daughter who is fighting for life after being airlifted to Newcastle's John Hunter Hospital.

Two days earlier the grandfather of seven had also posted: 'How much pain can a daughter cause. So much pain and your wifey take her side.'

Rebecca Gibbs-McKenzie (pictured) was awarded compensation for the years of abuse she suffered at the hands of Michell

Ms Gibbs-McKenzie - who in 2003 was awarded compensation for the years of abuse she suffered at Michell's hands - believes the women in his life had finally begun to stand up for themselves against him.

She added: 'He's slowly been losing control of his family.

'His daughter was pulling away from him. Michelle was standing up to him. She was pushing him away and his daughter was putting up boundaries.

'He's just snapped. All his life, he's been told he's the best, he's a legend and then someone has said, 'You hurt kids, you bash women...' and he's finally snapped.

'I feel devastated and gutted for Michelle, knowing she would be alive if the police or someone stepped in years ago.

'I wish the law was strong enough to prevent these tragedies. Nobody should ever feel unsafe in their own home.

'I just pray every minute of the day for his daughter to pull through.'

Ms Gibbs-McKenzie said waves of relief swept over her when she heard he had killed himself.

'I was released,' she said on Thursday.

'The monster was dead.

'It was the first night in 38 years I was going to close my eyes and just go to sleep.'

NSW Police today said they were preparing a report for the coroner into the murder-suicide deaths.
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Looking menacing in their military uniforms, German soldiers fighting in the Second World War stand in a line next to a Jeep - but all is not as it seems.

The image was in fact taken in 2007 - as evidenced by the motorway gantry in the background.

Historian Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, 49, is fighting against fake history, and uses it and other images to demonstrate how even photographic evidence can be manufactured.

Miss Teeuwisse, who captured the photos at various history-themed events, said it was as simple as using an old camera.

She said: 'I've been a historian specialising in daily life in the 1930s and 1940s for over 20 years.

'I've also done some historical re-enactments and living history myself, and have spent a lot of time on movie and TV sets, in museums and at 1930s-themed events etc.

'I made the photos with original 1920s and 1930s cameras, using no Photoshop, no filters and not even artificial light.

'I mostly use the basic box camera  one of the first types of camera that was affordable and available to the general public over a century ago.

Looking menacing in their military uniforms, German soldiers fighting in the Second World War stand in a line next to a Jeep - but all is not as it seems. The image was in fact taken in 2007 - as evidenced by the motorway gantry in the background. Historian Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, 49, is fighting against fake history, and uses it and other images to demonstrate how even photographic evidence can be manufactured

In another picture, a young soldier sits at a machine gun in an urban battlefield  but an elderly man in modern clothing has crept into the photo behind him and his comrades

'It's very simple: just point and click.' In some of her images, there are clues to be found, but in others, there are no obvious signs.

One image that does bear a sign is that of a young soldier sitting at a machine gun in an urban battlefield  but an elderly man in modern clothing has crept into the photo behind him and his comrades.

In a third image, a young girl walking behind a group of soldiers lying on a beach while holding their guns next to an amphibious vehicle is the only possible hint that the image isn't from World War Two.

Most of the photos, however, have nothing to distinguish them from the genuine article.

Miss Teeuwisse, who is based in the Netherlands, said: 'There are many little details that can help you find out if a photo is genuine or a modern fake, but it can be quite difficult.

'Sometimes it's a hairstyle, glasses, or shoes that are not right for the period; sometimes there's something not quite right about how the people behave or look.

'Sometimes it's a traffic sign in the background  in most cases all you've got to help you be sure is something modern sneaking into the frame.'

Otherwise, she added, even with access to the original negative, it would take a photography expert to tell a real from a fake.

In a third image, a young girl walking behind a group of soldiers lying on a beach while holding their guns next to an amphibious vehicle gives a hint that the image isn't from World War Two. Another sign is the '25km' max speed sign on the back of the vehicle

Miss Teeuwisse, who is based in the Netherlands, said: 'There are many little details that can help you find out if a photo is genuine or a modern fake, but it can be quite difficult. 'Sometimes it's a hairstyle, glasses, or shoes that are not right for the period; sometimes there's something not quite right about how the people behave or look'. Above: Another image showing what look like RAF officers in the Second World War. One is sitting in a car from the era

This 'fake' image is one of the hardest to spot. It shows soldiers appearing to storm across a stretch of land, with houses seen in the background. It could be one of dozens of famous military skirmishes which took place in the Second World War. But the image just shows actors taking part in historical renactment. Miss Teeuwisse took the image took the image using a basic box camera, one of the first photo devices that was affordable in the Second World War

'We should always have a healthy suspicion of photos, old or new,' she said. 'Editing, improving, fixing but also purposefully altering photos to make a political point is almost as old as photography itself.

'One of the first photos ever is a fake  photography pioneer Hippolyte Bayard took a photo of himself in the 1830s pretending he was a drowned man.

'History is full of fake photos and pictures with descriptions that are incorrect or even straight lies.

'But today, even if you don't have access to an old camera or people in historical clothing, it is not that difficult to make photos that look old using filters and Photoshop etc.'

Now Miss Teeuwisse is battling fake history in cyberspace. Using her Twitter account Fake History Hunter, the historian has racked up nearly 100,000 followers by swatting down inaccurate memes about the past.

In this image, men who appear to be US soldiers are seen standing and sitting in what could be a military base. On a pillar, a holstered gun hangs from a hook. The picture was actually taken at a history event in the UK, and the men are simply actors

Dressed in their pristine uniforms, actors at a history event in the UK appear to be German soldiers posing for a photo in the Second World War. The image was taken by Miss Teeuwisse to highlight how easy it is for photos to be presented as something they are not

What looks like soldiers carrying out an Allied attack on a beach is in fact actors involved in a re-enactment in the UK. Miss Teeuwisse added: 'People are too trustworthy of what is put in front of them,' she said. 'A picture may look a certain way, and the story shared with it may seem to fit, and that's often enough for people to believe and share it all over the internet'

'People are too trustworthy of what is put in front of them,' she said. 'A picture may look a certain way, and the story shared with it may seem to fit, and that's often enough for people to believe and share it all over the internet.'

She continued: 'I've had to correct celebrities with millions of followers who shared pictures with false information.

'But even someone with just a few followers on Twitter or Facebook can one day make a post that goes viral and reaches thousands.

'Memes are extra dangerous because the image and the claim are just not that important to the person sharing them.

'They just want a bit of attention or to have a laugh, but at the same time their story is spread again and again.' Keep up with Jo's efforts via her Twitter account, @fakehistoryhunt, or her website: www.fakehistoryhunter.net
An Army soldier who shot and killed a Black Lives Matter protester armed with an AK-47 after driving into a crowd demonstrating against police violence in Austin last summer has been indicted on a murder charge.

Sgt. Daniel Perry, 33, who was stationed at Fort Hood, was booked into the Travis County jail on Thursday and later released on $300,000 bail, said Kristen Dark, a spokeswoman for the Travis County Sheriff's Office.

Perry's attorney, Clint Broden, has said the soldier was working for a ride-sharing company and acted in self-defense after protester Garrett Foster, 28, pointed an assault rifle at him.

Broden issued a statement Thursday expressing disappointment in the indictment and confidence that Perry would be acquitted.

Sgt Daniel Perry, 33, pictured in his new mugshot, left, has been indicted on a murder charge for the July 2020 killing of BLM protester Garrett Foster (right)

Foster (left) was armed with an AK-47 while protesting police brutality alongside his wheelchair-bound fiancee, Whitney Mitchell (right)

This photo shows the moment Foster (circled in red) armed with an AK-47 confronted Perry after he drove his car into a crowd of protesters in Austin on July 25. Perry opened fire moments after this photo was taken

'Sgt. Perry will vigorously fight all of these charges,' Broden stated. 'It is important to note that the standard of proof required for an indictment is significantly less than the standard of proof required for a conviction.'

Broden's statement continued: 'Sgt. Perry again simply asks that anybody who might want to engage in a hindsight review of this incident picture themselves trapped in a car as a masked stranger raises an AK-47 in their direction and reflect upon what they might have done if faced with the split-second decision he faced.'

Perry, 33, is a career solider who was stationed at Fort Hood and served a tour of duty in Afghanistan

Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza said in a press conference Thursday that the grand jury returned indictments against Perry for the charges of murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and a deadly conduct misdemeanor charge in the July 25, 2020, death of Foster.

He said the grand jury reviewed evidence from investigations by the District Attorney's office and a three-week investigation by Austin officers, who reviewed over 150 exhibits and interviewed 22 witnesses.

Garza said Perry declined to testify before the grand jury, but that Perry's attorney did provide a packet with information, which was shared with the grand jury with the exception of details not admissible in a trial.

Garza said his office planned to request that Perry surrender his firearms, in addition to other conditions, for his release.

This photo shows first responders administering first aid to Foster, who later died

Foster was killed during a night of protests and unrest in several US cities. In the immediate aftermath, then-Police Chief Brian Manley said officers heard 'two separate volleys of gunfire' and made their way to the crowd, where they found Foster with multiple gunshot wounds.

Foster was a former US Air Force mechanic who was discharged from the service aged 19 to became his fiancee's full-time caretaker

Perry's attorneys have previously told The Associated Press that their client had just dropped off a rider when he turned onto a street filled with a large crowd of protesters who began beating on his vehicle.

They said that Foster approached the car and motioned with his assault rifle for Perry to lower his window. Perry initially thought Foster worked in law enforcement and put his window down, they said.

But when Foster raised his weapon toward Perry, the soldier realized Foster was not a police officer and shot him in self-defense with a handgun in his car, the attorneys said.

A photograph taken at the scene showed Foster standing at the driver's window moments before the fatal shots rang out. The barrel of his AK-47 appears to be pointing towards the floor, however, he is leaning towards the car with right arm raised and his hand seemingly placed around the weapon's grip.

Protesters who were there said Foster's car swerved toward them and Foster jumped in front of his wheelchair-bound fiancee, Whitney Mitchell, a quadruple amputee, fearing she was a target.

Whitney Mitchell, center, fiancee of Garrett Foster, and Chase Mayo, left, with his wife, Anna Mayo, who is the sister of Foster, join with hundreds of people for a vigil in memory of Foster on July 26, 2020, in Austin

After shooting Foster with his handgun multiple times, Foster fled but called 911, telling dispatchers he had 'just been involved in a shooting and driven away.'

Perry was taken to the Austin PD's homicide office and questioned but later released without charge, according to a statement released by police.

Foster, a former US Air Force mechanic who was discharged from the service aged 19 to became his fiancee's full-time caretaker, died in the hospital from his injuries.

DailyMail.com previously unearthed disturbing social media posts which paint a troubling picture of Perry, who was described by his lawyer as an active duty sergeant who has served in the military for eight years, during which he served a tour in Afghanistan and received 'numerous army awards and commendations.'.

In the wake of the killing, Perry was taken to the Austin PD's homicide office and questioned but later released without charge

The fervent Trump supporter wrote about 'deadly force' against 'the mobs' and posted online about how to kill someone with a firearm just weeks before the fatal shooting.

According to court records Perry was arrested and charged with 'assault causes actual bodily injury' on a family member in November, 2005.

Perry was slapped with 15 months community supervision over the misdemeanor offense, following which the charge was dismissed.
Australians could be offered lottery tickets, prizes and gifts to get a Covid jab in an effort to speed up the nation's stalling vaccine rollout.

The man in charge of getting the rollout back on track, Lt General John Frewan, said he was in discussions with businesses about incentives that could increase those 'less immediately motivated' to get a vaccine.

'There's been good examples overseas, there's been lotteries  even just practical inducements like offering people Ubers, all of that stuff is on the table right now,' Lt Gen Frewan told The Daily Telegraph.

Overseas incentives such as cash, lottery tickets and free beer have been announced to encourage people to get a Covid vaccine (stock image)

Australians who get a Covid vaccine could be offered gifts under an incentive scheme to increase uptake (pictured: nurse John Maya administers a vaccine in Sydney on Thursday)

In the United States UCLA survey of 75,000 people showed one in three would be more likely to get a vaccine if a $100 gift was included.

The State of West Virginia did just that and offered $100 government bonds to those aged 16-35 who got a vaccine and even went one step further - announcing a $1.5million lottery for vaccinated locals.

Such schemes have become common in the US with other incentives including vaccination badges on dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble and tax incentives.

Private businesses are also getting in on the action with breweries in the US offering 'shots and a chaser' and major beer company Anheuser Busch also announcing free beer.

Krispy Kreme said they would give out out free donuts to those getting a jab and Amazon offered their employees cash to get a shot.

In Australia, businesses are already thinking about how they could reward those who roll up their sleeve - particularly airlines with Virgin Australia announcing a competition later this year and Qantas considering free airfares and frequent flyer points.

Lt General Frewan said a large number of Australians were prepared to get vaccinated though many do not consider getting the jab urgent.

Kelly Nankivell (pictured) registers to receive her first Pfizer vaccination at the Inner City Covid-19 Vaccine Hub in Sydney on Thursday

He said he would be studying vaccination rates for drop-offs where incentives might be able to boost numbers back up.

Supply is less of an issue than motivation with Australia having enough doses to give the entire population the jab by the end of 2021, Lt Gen Frewan said.

'I'm less concerned about [supply] right now. I would like to help us build  more convenience into the ways people can get vaccinated.'

Lt General Frewan has been the Principal Deputy Director of the Australia Signals Directorate since 2018 and has been overseeing the vaccine rollout for less than a month.

He has already been working with state and territory governments to increase the number of vaccine hubs and will meet with major business leaders next week to discuss how existing workplace flu jab programs could be adapted for Covid.

People flocked to the NSW vaccination centre in Homebush, Sydney on Friday (pictured) amid a recent outbreak in the city

He has also been eyeing chemists as central players in increasing vaccine uptake in the initial rollout and onwards.

'I think pharmacies will have a really central role.'

He revealed Australia's abundant supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine was being used to help Pacific nations such as PNG and Fiji.

In the three days since Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced under 40s could access the AZ option, Lt Gen Frewan said 2,616 young Aussies had taken up the offer.
Scott Morrison and state premiers will discuss the percentage of Australians who need to be vaccinated against Covid-19 before strict border bans and crippling lockdowns can end.

State premiers and chief health officers across the country have speculated that the 'magic number' is 80 per cent - but a figure has not been officially agreed.

With 12 million Australians currently locked down and the vaccine rollout progressing slowly, the Prime Minister wants to provide an incentive for Aussies to get jabbed.

Scott Morrison is pictured leaving quarantine after two weeks in his house in Canberra following the G7 summit

'It's time to start laying it out for the Australian public. It is imperative that the premiers, chief ministers and I address that question,' Mr Morrison told The Australian ahead of Friday's crucial National Cabinet meeting.

The Prime Minister said modelling had already been done on how to reach herd immunity against the Alpha variant and was almost complete on the more contagious Delta variant.

'Australians have been patient and that has helped us achieve what we have achieved to protect lives and livelihoods,' he said.

'We now need to get to the next level. The package the public deserves needs a consolidated agreement from all of us.'

The Prime Minister is holding a national cabinet meeting today with Premiers including Dan Andrews (pictured) as they look to agree a plan for Australia's pandemic future

What are the weekly arrival caps? NSW: 3,010 QLD: 1,300 VIC: 1,000 SA: 530 WA: 530 NT: Federal repatriation flights to Howard Springs Advertisement

The virtual meeting of state and territory leaders hosted by the Prime Minister will also discuss international passenger caps.

International arrivals are currently capped at 6,370 a week but Labor premiers want this dramatically reduced to ease pressure on the hotel quarantine system.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has written to Scott Morrison to ask the numbers are slashed in half, while Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews wants the numbers cut by up to 80 per cent.

'We are at a pressure cooker moment,' Ms Palaszczuk told reporters in Brisbane on Wednesday.

Mr Andrews agreed, saying: 'We have it within our power to dramatically reduce the number of people who are coming back just for these next three or four months until we get a critical mass of people with a jab.

'It won't be easy to lock some people out. But locking some people out is much better than locking everybody down,' he added.

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said the caps should not be cut because Australians should be allowed to come home.

But Finance Minister Simon Birmingham said the government will consider the states' concerns.

Mr Morrison leaving The Lodge in Canberra

'We've shown a willingness to adjust based on changed risk profiles and we'll always look at that,' he said.

The National Cabinet meeting will also focus on the troubled national vaccine rollout and mixed messaging around the AstraZeneca jab.

Mr Morrison triggered a week of competing claims about vaccine advice after highlighting a path for younger people to receive AstraZeneca after consulting with their GP.

After days of confusion and conflicting statements, Australia's expert immunisation panel reiterated its advice that Pfizer was preferred for all people aged under 60.

Their advice is based on the vanishingly small risk of rare blood clots associated with the AstraZeneca jab.

Thursday was a record day for vaccinations with more than 160,000 people receiving jabs nationwide.

Almost eight per cent of Australian adults are now fully vaccinated, but the nation lags far behind all other comparable countries.

Mr Morrison late on Thursday completed 14 days of quarantine at The Lodge in Canberra, after returning from the G7 summit in the UK, and headed to Parliament House to lead the meeting.
A former soldier and loving father-of-two has been told he has just weeks to live after finding a cancerous lump on his testicle.

Brendan Nikolajew, 29, has faced many battles in his life, including several tours in war-torn Afghanistan.

Now he is facing his biggest one yet after he was given the shocking news he will die from terminal cancer in just a matter of weeks.

Mr Nikolajew, who lives in Queensland's Moreton Bay, was first diagnosed with cancer after discovering a lump on his testicle three-and-a-half years ago.

The cancer was successfully treated before doctors discovered it had spread to other parts of his body in November, 2020.

'People say when you die, you're going to a better place,' Mr Nikolajew said.

'I don't understand how a place without my wife, kids, family and everyone else I love is a better place.'

A former soldier and loving father-of-two has been told he has just weeks to live after finding a cancerous lump on his testicle (pictured, Brendan Nikolajew with partner Leah and children Georgie and Roman)

In one touching photo, a hospitalised Mr Nikolajew can be seen lying on a bed cradling his youngest son Roman

Brendan Nikolajew, 29, has faced many battles in his life including several tours in war-torn Afghanistan

Mr Nikolajew has remained positive in spite of the grave prognosis and documented his gruelling fight to survive on social media.

His wife Leah and children Georgie, four, and Roman, one, have stood by him every step of the way.

Mr Nikolajew has battled through several rounds of chemotherapy, contended with a serious infection that nearly led to sepsis and pulled through a Deep Vein Thrombosis - a blood clot that forms in the vein and that can lead to death.

'The DVT blood clot put me in ICU over Christmas 2018 and into 2019,' he wrote in one post.

'Every nurse that came in and saw the clot on paper just looked horrified and then looked at me with a smile and would say "that's the worst clot I've seen".'

The rounds of chemotherapy have taken a toll with the self-professed fitness fanatic losing his muscle mass and dropping to worrying weights.

'I've been all shapes and sizes the past three years,' he wrote in one post. 'Huge, chubby and chemo bloated, thin and unhealthy due to medical reasons,' he said.

'I like being healthy and fit, training properly and after radiation I've found it really impacted my energy levels to the point where chronic fatigue and pain are big issues.'

Mr Nikolajew has remained positive in spite of the grave prognosis and documented his gruelling fight to survive on social media

Mr Nikolajew has battled through several rounds of chemotherapy, contended with a serious infection that nearly led to sepsis and pulled through a Deep Vein Thrombosis - a blood clot that forms in the vein and that can lead to death

Mr Nikolajew takes regular trips to the hospital to undergo rounds of chemotherapy to fight the aggressive cancer

Mr Nikolajew has credited his family for giving him the necessary strength to pull through the continuous bouts with death.

In one touching photo, a hospitalised Mr Nikolajew can be seen lying on a bed cradling his youngest son Roman.

'The day before chemo started, Roman and I were just having a chat about what the man of the house duties are and just general man stuff you know,' he wrote.

Mr Nikolajew has kickstarted a GoFundMe page and has already raised $98,000 of the $200,000 target.

'Thanks for everyone's support all this way, it's been full of ups and downs,' he wrote. 'This period is unfortunately one of those down points!'

'I've been told some ridiculous living statistics but I've beaten them before, we buy all the right organic foods, supplements, try and get at much sun as possible.'

His wife Leah and children Georgie, 4, and Roman, 1, have stood by him every step of the way

Mr Nikolajew has credited his family for giving him the necessary strength to pull through the continuous bouts with death
A former senior advisor to Donald Trump launched a social media app called GETTR in efforts to fight big tech monopolies and create a platform for unfiltered free speech.

Trump's former senior advisor Jason Miller created the app, which is available to download in its beta form, before its official launch on July 4 at 10am

It's description on the Apple's App Store reads, 'GETTR is a non-bias social network for people all over the world. GETTR tried the best to provide best software quality to the users, allow anyone to express their opinion freely.'

Trump himself has teased plans to starting his own conservative social media app for months and is still in the process of planning one. So far, he does not have a verified account on GETTR, and Miller says GETTR is not the app that Trump has been planning.

A former senior advisor for former president Donald Trump launched a social media app called GETTR

GETTR's user interface appears similar to that of Twitter and users could pull their Twitter history into their new profile

Posts will be 777 characters long, the app will host videos up to three minutes in length, and will also be capable of hosting livestreams, a spokesman said.

The app's headquarters are located in New York. The app is listed as restricted for ages 17+ and has so far garnered a 4.9-star rating with several reviews from users raving about it as a space for 'truth' and 'freedom of speech.'

Miller said that the name is a combination of the words, 'Get Together.'

'Let's get together, we're talking about a sense of community. We think it will ultimately be a global platformnot just conservatives in the U.S. We want people from all political stripes to join the platform,' Miller told Fox News in an interview.

'This ties in with Independence Day. Independent from social media monopolies, independent from cancel culture; embracing free speechour launch on Sunday is very much intentional. We believe there needs to be a new social media platform that really defends free speech, and one that doesn't de-platform for political beliefs. This is a challenge to social media monopolies.'

Miller also told Fox News that GETTR will have a live-streaming option, as well as an option for users to donate to political candidates. Miller said the company is still reviewing how it will cap users' political donations to fall within election laws but stressed that there was 'no cap for online appreciation givers.'

He added that he hoped Trump would join and that an account named realDonaldTrump is ready for him. That is the same handle Trump used for his beloved Twitter profile, which was permanently deleted on January 8 in the wake of the US Capitol riots.

Miller says that Trump is not funding the platform, with the former president still considering a potential rival.

'The former president is going to make his own decision, it's certainly there and ready for him should he make the decision  we would welcome that. There is an account reserved for him and waiting for him but that's a decision for him to make,' an unnamed person involved with the app told Politico, which first reported the story.

GETTR's user interface appears similar to that of Twitter. Initial promotional materials for GETTR on the app stores displayed posts of users celebrating the House of Representatives no longer requiring masks on the floor of the chamber.

Trump's former senior advisor Jason Miller created the app, which is in its beta form and will officially launched on July 4 at 10am

But the similarities run deeper. GETTR's app also claims to offer new users the ability to 'import copies of your content from Twitter to GETTR.' And evidence on the site indicates that the new platform is also allowing users to import their actual Twitter followers  who somehow end up with GETTR accounts of their own.

For example, Politico reported, Republican Senate candidate Sean Parnell in Pennsylvania had over 175,000 followers on GETTR as of Thursday afternoon, despite only joining the platform Thursday. His follower count on GETTR is identical to his follower count on Twitter.

The same goes for Murtaugh, Trump's former 2020 communications director, who had amassed over 220,000 followers on both GETTR and Twitter as of Thursday afternoon.

'Tweets are up to the point you join, it won't continuously suck them in. The idea is we want people to move from Twitter to Gettr,' said the person involved with the app. The person added that the app does not harvest the users current Twitter followers for the app, and again noted it is still in its testing phase.

At least one profile sending out Trump-esque tweets claims to be the ex-president, although Miller's comments suggest it is an impersonator.

Eric Trump also appears to have a profile, but has not posted anything yet.

trump has not joined the app as of now. He was banned from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but has a Rumble profile through which he has been communicating with his base

DailyMail.com has reached out to Jason Miller to find out more about the site.

Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube after lauding those who stormed the U.S. Capitol in the January 6 riot.

He was known to love sharing his thoughts with his 80 million followers, but that ban is now permanent.

Facebook and its sister site Instagram have banned him for at least two years, while YouTube has suspended the ex-president's channel indefinitely.

Trump's bans stoked criticism of liberal-leaning tech companies willingness to crack down on high-profile right wing users. Critics say the firms wield too much power, and are warping free speech.

They have also slated online left wing 'mobs' who seek to destroy the lives of people who disagree with them, or who have committed minor infractions.

Those who support Trump's ban highlight that Twitter and its rivals are private companies, and that no one is automatically entitled to use their platforms.

Around the same time, Trump was in talks with right-wing social networking site Parler about a deal to join the social media site under conditions the app later refused to accept, New York Magazine reported on Monday.

Trump representatives wanted Parler to grant the former president 40 percent of the company's gross revenues and a promise to 'ban anyone who spoke negatively about him,' the new outlet reported.

Parler has been in hot water after its forced removal following violent content on the platform amid the January 6 riot.

It slowly came back to app downloading services after agreeing to crack down on violent and racist content, but it's still not available on Google's Play Store, and its attempts to become a conservative rival to Twitter appear to have stalled.

Trump attempted to engage with his fan base through his own effort called 'From The Desk of Donald Trump,' but it never gained traction and was shut down within a month of its inception.

The former president's spokeswoman Liz Harrington said that he recently joined another popular conservative app called Rumble: 'It is a great way to reach the American people in a time of unprecedented assault on free speech in our country by Big Tech tyrants,' she said.

Trump advisor Dan Scavino tweeted about his joining the app ahead of a June 26 rally in Ohio that would be his first rally post Biden's inauguration. Scavino tweeted, 'We have some great news! Head on over to @RumbleVideo and subscribe to 45's new page  where he will be LIVE at 7:00pmE tonight in Wellington, Ohio!'

More than 340,000 of his supporters subscribe to his channel as of Monday afternoon; more than 800,000 people had watched the rally.
Despite troubled former NRL player Jamil Hopoate's alleged role in importing 514kg of cocaine the prosecution has backed down and consented to his release on bail.

The son of former Manly winger John Hopoate is to be released into his father's care and driven directly to the home of Mormon brother and Canterbury star William, who also promised $200,000 in surety for him.

On Thursday in the NSW Supreme Court, 'vigorous opposition' against his release was laid out by the prosecutor who pointed out Hopoate had been on bail for another unrelated matter when he committed the alleged crime.

Crown prosecutor David Laird said Hopoate had gone to a truck 'in circumstances where it's demonstrably obvious that he believed there was a prohibited drug inside that truck'.

Justice Elizabeth Fullerton had reserved handing down her bail decision overnight after Hopoate's barrister Greg James QC argued the charge his client faced was complicated by the fact he was found with fake cocaine.

Fallen NRL star Jamil Hopoate (pictured with co-accused Leanne Mafoa) has been granted bail over an alleged cocaine importation in May

The former Brisbane Broncos backrower, 26, has been charged with supplying a large commercial quantity of cocaine after collecting eight one-kilogram slabs of what he allegedly believed was the party drug from a truck in Botany, in Sydney's south-east, in May.

On Friday, Justice Fullerton said she had been advised the Crown was now consenting to Hopoate's release.

'Is that the case?' Justice Fullerton said. 'That's the case Your Honour,' Mr Laird responded.

In May, Australian Border Force officers found more than half a tonne of cocaine hidden in a consignment of toolboxes that arrived in Sydney. The drugs had an estimated street value of almost $155 million.

Police switched the blocks out and monitored a hi-vis-wearing Hopoate removing eight blocks of 'fake cocaine' from the truck before placing them in his backpack, the court was told on Thursday.

He then told his co-accused Leanne Mafoa 'to drive quickly,' due to police presence at the scene, before running from the vehicle and throwing the backpack 'some distance' away.

Police gave chase and detained him shortly after.

Mafoa, a mother of one, who along with Hopoate had no personal identification or a mobile phone on her, was also granted bail on Thursday.

Mr James argued Hopoate's charge did not extend so far under the NSW Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act, given he was found with no traceable element of drugs on him.

'Presumably it's sought to be made out on the basis he is seeking to obtain what he believed to be drugs and that renders them in possession,' Mr James said.

Jamil Hopoate's father John - better known for probing the bottoms of footy players in his colourful career - has been trusted by the court to care for his troubled son while on bail for commercial drug charges

NRL star and Mormon Will Hopoate (pictured) has coughed up $200,000 surety to ensure his troubled sibling Jamil received bail for serious drug charges

The Crown earlier submitted Hopoate was 'trusted' with the significant amount of the illicit substance by criminals still unknown to authorities.

On Friday after Justice Fullerton read out Hopoate's strict bail conditions, he remained confused in his cell.

'So what's happening? Is it granted?' Hopoate was heard saying.

In a separate matter, Hopoate faces sentencing in July for three counts of common assault, two of stalking or intimidation with intent to cause fear of physical harm, one charge of mid-range drink driving, and driving on a suspended licence.
Australians on employment contracts may soon have their pay docked under new superannuation rules.

As of July 1, compulsory employer contributions rose to 10 per cent from 9.5 per cent.

But in some cases, bosses may be docking your pay to cover the super increase.

RateCity research director Sally Tindall, an adviser to former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard, said this was more likely to happen if someone was on an employment contract that grouped superannuation with salary.

'If you've negotiated a "package" salary which includes the company's super contributions in the total amount, there's a chance your company will cut your take-home pay to fund this super increase,' she said.

Australians on employment contracts may soon be having their pay docked under new superannuation rules. As of July 1, compulsory employer contributions rose to 10 per cent from 9.5 per cent

'Most people are likely to find their employers are footing the bill for the extra super, but for some employees, it could come down to the wording of their employment contract.'

Ms Tindall's former boss Ms Gillard legislated to have super increase to 10 per cent on July 1, 2015 with the goal of reaching 12 per cent by July 2019.

But Liberal PM Tony Abbott's government in 2014 delayed the super increase to 10 per cent to July 1, 2021.

Compulsory superannuation contributions are increasing in 0.5 percentage point increments on July 1 every year until they hit 12 per cent by July 2025.

Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, the architect of the compulsory super scheme that debuted in 1992, wants 15 per cent superannuation and that is still the Labor Party's position.

In some cases, bosses may be docking pay to cover the super increase. RateCity research director Sally Tindall (pictured), an adviser to former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard, said this was more likely to happen if someone was on an employment contract that grouped superannuation with salary

But Superannuation Minister Jane Hume, a Liberal, is unenthusiastic about legislated super increases, in March telling the ABC it would compromise pay levels.

'We shouldn't fool ourselves. A rise in the super guarantee will come at a trade-off, it will come as a trade-off to wages and particularly to wage growth,' she said.

Australian wages grew by just 1.5 per cent in the year to March and have been stuck below the long-term average of 3 per cent since mid-2013.

The Grattan Institute think tank has also warned a super increase will hamper wages.

Compulsory superannuation contributions are increasing in 0.5 percentage point increments on July 1 every year until they hit 12 per cent by July 2025. Pictured is a cafe worker at Manly on Sydney's Northern Beaches

Brendan Coates, an economist with this group, said Australians on median incomes of $60,000 only needed $150,000 for retirement, provided they had already paid off their home by retirement.

This is well below the $535,000 the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia recommended for a comfortable retirement, with the pension age rising to 67 from 2023.

Ms Tindall said employees on contracts really needed to negotiate a better deal with their bosses so the superannuation increase didn't affect their salary.

'If you're affected adversely by this super change, use it as an opportunity to take your pay packet back to the negotiating table,' she said.
A drunk mother-of-six who was found guilty of assault after spitting on a cop who pulled her over for dangerous driving insists she was aiming for her ex.

Khyla Puketapu Ngawai Rangi, 31, first caught the attention of police after she nearly ran over a group of pedestrians when leaving a hotel carpark before she drove along a motorway at 150km/h.

Police found her lying on the ground at Francis Street, North Ipswich in Queensland about 6.30pm on February 13 wearing just a bra and having defecated on the street nearby.

Khyla Rangi (pictured) was found by police lying on the side of an Ipswich road in her underwear after driving down a motorway at 150km/h

She then got up and climbed into a nearby Ford Falcon, and when police tried to open the car door she repeatedly slammed it on them, a Queensland court heard this week.

Rangi then stuck her leg smeared with feces out the window and said to one officer: 'wanna lick my s**t?', the Courier Mail reported.

Concerned about her welfare in her highly intoxicated state, the officers called paramedics.

The court heard as she was walking to the ambulance, Rangi then spat onto the back and neck of one officer.

However, Rangi has insisted she was not aiming for police but rather her former partner.

'Yeah, like get your facts straight. I didn't spit on [them] I spat on my ex,' Rangi told Daily Mail Australia when asked about the incident.

The court heard police were earlier called twice about Rangi's car - firstly after she narrowly avoided six pedestrians outside the Commercial Hotel in Ipswich.

They were called again when witnesses spotted her speeding down the Ipswich Motorway.

'She was so grossly intoxicated that she was not in control of her bodily functions. She had an alcohol reading of 0.138,' police prosecutor Sergeant Brad Dick said.

'It was a disgusting assault on the officer, to humiliate and belittle.'

Rangi's defence lawyer said her client was deeply embarrassed and remorseful over the events of that night.

The mother-of-six was found guilty of assaulting a police officer after she spat on them but has insisted she was not trying to but was rather aiming for her ex-partner

She said there was stress in her personal life including allegations of domestic violence and she went to the hotel to avoid an argument.

There was also no history of trouble with the law except for one conviction for robbery more than a decade ago.

Rangi plead guilty to serious assault of a police officer, obstructing a police officer, dangerous operation of a vehicle when intoxicated; and unlicensed driving.

The magistrate described the behaviour as 'extraordinarily disgusting' and said it was fortunate people were not hurt.

She was sentenced to 12 months jail for dangerous driving while intoxicated and the assault of the police officer.

She was also ordered to do 80 hours of community service for obstructing police.

For the unlicensed driving she had her license cancelled for six months and then a further two years under the dangerous driving charge.

Rangi walked from court after she was immediately released on parole.
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Donald Trump Jr has accused New York prosecutors of acting like Vladimir Putin and running 'a banana republic' after the Trump Organization chief financial officer was indicted on charges of tax fraud.

Allen Weisselberg, 73, appeared before a judge in New York on Thursday, charged with running a 15-year scheme to help its executives evade taxes by compensating them with $1.7 million in fringe benefits that were hidden from the authorities.

Prosecutors painted Weisselberg as a 'soldier' in the Trump Organization, having worked for the company ever since 1973, under Donald Trump's father Fred.

Trump Jr, an executive vice president at The Trump Organization, told Fox News' Jesse Watters on Thursday that the charges against Weisselberg were akin to those pressed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

'This is the political persecution of a political enemy,' he said.

'This is what Vladimir Putin does. Just ask Navalny,' Trump Jr said referencing the dissident Alexei Navalny. 'That's what's happened in New York. It's the equivalent of Russia, Russia, Russia.

He added: 'After five years, three million documents, countless witnesses and hours of grand jury testimony and forensic auditors, this is what they come up with.

'They're going to charge a guy who is 75 years old on crimes of avoiding taxes on fringe benefit. People in corporate America get a corporate card.'

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Donald Trump Jr (left) accused New York prosecutors of acting like Vladimir Putin and running 'a banana republic' after they indicted Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg (right) on charges of tax fraud

Weisselberg is seen being led through a Manhattan court on Thursday, to appear before a judge

Weisselberg (center) is seen with Donald Trump and his son, Don Jr, in January 2017

The 15 counts against the Trump Organization and its long-serving chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg Prosecutors unveiled their case against Allen Weisselberg and the Trump Organization in Manhattan Supreme Court on Thursday. It contained 15 charges, several of which only apply to the chief financial officer. They are: Scheme to defraud in the first degree Conspiracy in the fourth degree Grand larceny in the second degree (Weisselberg only) Criminal tax fraud in the third degree Criminal tax fraud in the third degree Criminal tax fraud in the third degree Criminal tax fraud in the fourth degree Offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree (Weisselberg only) Offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree (Weisselberg only) Offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree (Weisselberg only) Offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree (Weisselberg only) Falsifying business records in the first degree Falsifying business records in the first degree Falsifying business records in the first degree Falsifying business records in the first degree Advertisement

'I'm sure you've paid taxes every time you've taken a car to or from work. It happens sometimes,' Trump Jr continued.

'This is what - this is not what they promised the American public, but they have to do something.'

The Trump Organization was also charged in a 15-count indictment, that included charges of conspiracy, grand larceny, tax fraud and falsifying business accounts.

The maximum prison sentence is 15 years, but Weisselberg would likely get less, if any time at all.

Assistant District Attorney Carey Dunne said: 'As spelled out in the indictment, this was a 15-year long tax fraud scheme.

'It was orchestrated by the most senior executives who were financially benefiting themselves and others.'

Trump Jr said that they deliberately announced the charges on the Thursday of the July 4 weekend 'because it's nonsense'.

He added: 'But this is what they do to their enemies. No different than Putin.'

The indictment accused Weisselberg of failing to pay tax on two leased Mercedes-Benzes, a rent-free apartment, bonuses and about $360,000 in school fees paid for by the Trump Organization.

It also said that other, unnamed executives were given similar benefits and that Weisselberg orchestrated the scheme with 'others.'

Trump Jr accused the New York officials of attempting 'to destroy a man's life, his reputation', and said it was like living 'in a banana republic'.

He added: 'And in this is what they've got after all of that time.

'Imagine the millions they spent had they done that actually trying to stop real criminals in New York, like the tens of thousands that looted in New York last year.

'Hundreds of thousands of them were released without even a slap on the wrist just last week.

'Penn station is like a war zone. The city is going to hell and this is where they are focusing. '

Trump Jr disputed the $1.7million figure, insisting that it was income.

'The taxable portion of that to New York state is eight percent,' he claimed.

'That's $136,000 over 16 years. That's ten grand a year.

'Half of that, because my father is a good guy, he paid for this guy's grandchildren's education.

'Our tax experts say that's not even taxable. You can pay for someone's education that way. It comes out to less than ten grand a year. '

He concluded: 'This is a farce. It's a disgrace that they spent millions of dollars and years, instead of prosecuting actual murderous thugs on the streets of New York, they go after their political enemies.'

A loose pair of handcuffs, which would be used to secure him to an escort, can be seen behind Weisselberg's back as he is brought into court to hear 15 charges against him

Weisselberg pleaded not guilty and was released on bail. Former president Donald Trump's company and its long-serving chief financial officer were charged in the first indictments brought in a two-year investigation

'Trump is in the clear': Legal analyst 'doubts additional charges' from NY DA following indictment of CFO Allen Weisselberg An attorney who helped bring impeachment charges against Donald Trump says he thinks the ex-president is in the clear over New York prosecutors' probes into his finances. Daniel Goldman dismissed the idea of any further indictments while chatting on MSNBC Thursday, as Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg appeared in a Manhattan court on tax avoidance charges. The former US assistant attorney also issued a series of tweets suggesting that it would be hard to find incriminating evidence against the president, because he does not use emails or texts, which can be retrieved by investigators. The lawyer noted that the case in which the Trump Organization's Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg is involved would normally have been settled in civil court. Goldman believes Weisselberg's refusal to cooperate with prosecutors or even enter settlement negotiations could be instructive of what is to come. An attorney who was involved in legal team in the impeachment of Donald Trump, Daniel Goldman, has said he does not believe the Manhattan District Attorney will bring any additional charges in the investigation Weisselberg was paraded in court wearing handcuffs on Thursday to hear charges that he failed to pay taxes for years on a company car, apartment and school fees for his grandchildren. The investigation has cost millions of dollars but could yield just tens of thousands of dollars in back tax. Weisselberg is accused of failing to pay tax on $1.76 million of perks since 2005, according to the 25-page indictment. The Trump Organization was also charged in a 15-count indictment, that included charges of conspiracy, grand larceny, tax fraud and falsifying business accounts. The maximum prison sentence is 15 years, but he would likely get less, if any time at all. 'This type of case is often settled civilly,' Goldman, who acted as a prosecutor for Trump's January 2020 impeachment, explained: 'If the Trump Organization wanted to, my guess is they could have engaged in good faith negotiations to try to settle this case with a fine and perhaps avoid a guilty plea or a conviction. 'They chose to fight this. That says something. It's typical of Donald Trump. But I am a little surprised that this ultimately ended, based on these allegations, in a criminal charge rather than a settlement.' 'They've already taken a run at Allen Weisselberg. They have also approached Allen Weisselberg, I am certain, and said, 'This is what we have. We would like you to cooperate.' Allen Weisselberg said, 'Thanks but no thanks, I'm not going to cooperate. I'll take my chances,'' Goldman theorized. 'He's not facing that much jail time. And I don't think there's any more pressure to add to him based on the fact that he was in handcuffs today. He knew that was coming. He made that conscious decision to get arrested and get indicted rather than cooperate. 'And so I don't think we have any good reason to suspect that he is going to cooperate down the road. So I don't see why there would be additional charges against the Trump Organization unless new evidence comes in. My guess is that they've evaluated this evidence. 'I don't really see any statute of limitations issues in this indictment that would have required them to do this now as opposed to later, which could be a reason why they're going to bifurcate any charges. So, it's a little confusing to me if they have more, why they would charge this. And for that reason, common sense leads me to believe that they're not going to have any more.' Goldman made similar points in a series of tweets where he explained how he believes there is unlikely to be any further charges. He wrote: 'A short explanation of my analysis of the Trump Org indictment: 1) the allegations laid out in the indictment are powerful, persuasive and backed up by a lot of evidence. The scheme was premeditated and blatant cheating over a long period of time. The indictment is impressive. 'Weisselberg and the other unidentified employees referenced in the Indictment should be charged with these crimes. But this is not a typical case against a corp, even tho the heightened bar required to charge corporations is met. The consequences for the Org could be dire. 'I spent some time learning about the Trump Org and I spent a lot of time with Michael Cohen, including deposing him. Based on my knowledge and experience, it is my belief that Weisselberg's cooperation is likely necessary to charge Donald Trump, who does not email or text. 'As a former prosecutor, it is my experience that when you want to flip a defendant, you throw everything you have at him. I'm assuming that is what the DA did with AW bc that provides the most leverage. Defendants are more likely to cooperate if they face a lot of jail time. 'Because of AW's position as the financial/accounting hub of the TO, I suspect he would have been involved in any other fraudulent activity (insurance fraud, loan fraud, accounting fraud, or corporate tax fraud). Thus, the DA would wait to see if he could charge AW with more. 'AW declined to cooperate pre-indictment so they charged him with what they had. That means they likely don't yet have a case to make on other fraud. But they likely would not have rushed this indictment if they might get there on other fraud and gain more leverage against AW. Goldman added: 'As a result, my educated guess is that this is all they will charge AW with. And while it is a serious and brazen crime that should land him in jail, he has made the decision not to cooperate and I don't think that will change. 'Ordinarily, the co is the last one charged in a case because you want to flesh out all of the individuals and see who cooperates. So it would be very unusual to charge the co twice. I have no doubt they will continue to investigate and perhaps other lower level ppl will flip. 'but this is why a) I think these are all the charges against Weisselberg, b) I don't think he will flip, c) I don't think Trump will be charged and d) I don't think the Trump Org will be charged with anything else. 'Two final thoughts: A) insurance fraud, accounting fraud and loan fraud are very difficult cases to make. You need admissible evidence that proves every element beyond a reasonable doubt, including knowledge and intent. For someone like Trump who does not email, it's even harder. 'B) I'm no fan of Trump but I do not believe he should be charged with a crime because one doesn't like him or his politics. If you objected to his attack on the rule of law during his presidency, then you must stand up for the rule of law now even if he benefits from.' Reporting by James Gordon for DailyMail.com Advertisement

Weisselberg, dressed in dark suit and open-necked pale blue shirt, cut a diminished figure in a crowded New York Supreme Court on Thursday.

He was frequently invisible behind black shirted court officers and spoke only to enter a plea of not guilty. He was required to turn in his passport and will return to court on September 9.

The charges against the company and Weisselberg - whom Trump once praised as doing 'whatever was necessary to protect the bottom line' - were the first indictments delivered in a two-year investigation by the Manhattan district attorney's office.

The various schemes alleged in the indictment include: $1,174,018 in untaxed income used to pay Weisselberg's rent $359,058 in unreported compensation for private school fees $196,245 in untaxed income for Mercedes Benz leases $29,400 in under-the-table cash used to pay holiday tips

Trump Organization lawyers believe they can strip out the school fees and some other items from the charges, possibly reducing the taxable amount to $800,000.

With a state income tax rate of about 10 percent, that means Weisselberg may face a tax bill of just $80,000.

But the real target may be creating enough leverage to persuade him to 'flip,' according to Michael Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes related to his work as Trump's fixer.

'Weisselberg now knows what handcuffs feel like as well as being placed in a cell,' he told DailyMail.com.

'As the pressure by prosecutors increase on him and his sons, the smart money would be on Weisselberg cooperating for leniency.'

The charges could also complicate the Trump Organization's relationships with banks and partners, not to mention the political future of the former president.

'The political witch hunt by the radical left Democrats, with New York now taking over the assignment, continues,' Trump said in a statement. 'It is dividing our country like never before.'

His office emailed another statement later in the afternoon, linking the case more directly to the votes of his supporters.

He asked: 'Do people see the radical left prosecutors, and what they are trying to do to 75M+++ voters and patriots, for what it is?'

New York Attorney General Letitia James said the developments were an 'important marker' in the investigation of the Trump Organization.

'This investigation will continue, and we will follow the facts and the law wherever they may lead,' she said.

But Trump's son Eric blasted the investigation before the charges were unsealed, saying taxpayers' money had been wasted.

'It is an absolute abuse of power and a political vendetta,' he told DailyMail.com.

'They are petrified my father will run again in 2024.

'After five years, hundreds of subpoenas, three and a half million pages of documents, and dozens of witnesses, this is what they have?'

The Trump Organization described Weisselberg as 'a loving and devoted husband, father and grandfather.'

'He is now being used by the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former President,' it said in a statement.

'The District Attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution involving employee benefits that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would ever think of bringing.

'This is not justice; this is politics.'

The case against Trump's trusted lieutenant - who began work for the Trump family in 1973 - could give New York prosecutors an opening to pressure him into cooperating and offering evidence about the former president's financial dealings.

But so far Trump has shrugged off the threat and Weisselberg is not believed to have flipped on his boss.

Insiders say he is like a member of the family and are confident he will not give evidence against his employer.

'He's a great guy, just one of the best,' said one. 'Comes in, does his job, has the same lunch every day and goes home to his wife.'

Another source said Trump viewed Weisselberg, two years his junior, like a brother.

The indictment follows months of increasing pressure after the Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, announced he was going to step down at the end of this 2021.

Vance fought a long battle to get Trump's tax records released and has been subpoenaing documents and interviewing company executives and other Trump insiders.

Trump did not respond to reporters' shouted questions about the New York case as he visited Texas on Wednesday, but earlier in the week, the Republican blasted the prosecutors as 'rude, nasty, and totally biased' and said his company's actions were 'standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime.'

Just how essential Weisselberg would be to prosecutors is a matter of debate  with high-stakes relevancy Trump.

On Tuesday, top House Democratic impeachment lawyer Daniel Goldman tweeted that Weisselberg's cooperation is vital to whether prosecutors are able to go after Trump himself.

'As I've been saying for a while, if Allen Weisselberg does not cooperate with the Manhattan DA's office  and all indications are that he has not and will not  that office will not be able to criminally charge Donald Trump for any of the conduct under investigation,' Goldman wrote.

That drew a retort from longtime Cohen, who has met numerous times with prosecutors in New York amid the probe.

'Wrong! They have documents to prove more than you know or should be commenting on. Weisselberg is not the key to a Trump indictment,' Cohen responded.

Another former federal prosecutor in New York, Daniel Alonson, later tweeted his own view that that potential charges being publicly discussed might not be enough to ensure Weisselberg's cooperation.

Cohen also reacted on Wednesday to the news of a looming potential indictment, calling it a 'Bad day for Trump Organization' but a 'good day for The United States of America!'

'Evading taxes on fringe benefits is important to prosecute - but by itself isn't the type of earth-shaking charge that typically leads defendants to cooperate,' he wrote.'

Trump's former spokesman Jason Miller took to Twitter to ridicule the way the investigation had fallen far short of its intended target.

'This is politically terrible for the Democrats,' he wrote.

'They told their crazies and their supplicants in the mainstream media this was about President Trump. Instead, their Witch Hunt is persecuting an innocent 80 year-old man for maybe taking free parking!'

Trump's lawyers have shrugged off the threat, saying it would be highly unusual for the district attorney to target a company over employee compensation or fringe benefits.

They met with prosecutors on Monday in a final push to persuade prosecutors not to bring charges.

But reports suggest prosecutors have spent months building a case against Weisselberg, a senior executive, in the hope that he might flip, and offer evidence against his boss.

Photographs on Tuesday captured a man in a suit carrying a cardboard banker's box with '45 Office' written on the outside. That is the same phrase the former president attaches to his post-presidential statements from his taxpayer-funded post-presidential office. Perched atop the case was a tan briefcase with a combo lock.

Trump himself was spotted exiting his Fifth Avenue building in the afternoon, departing after longtime aide Dan Scavino, who helps organize Trump's social media strategy and served as his golf caddie decades ago.

Trump's attorney Fischetti says he doesn't expect charges to be brought against the former president after meeting New York prosecutors on Monday.

The Trump Organization released a statement saying Weisselberg was being used as a 'pawn' in an effort to harm the former president. Perks given to employees are believed to be at the center of the investigation

Trump Organization chief Allen Weisselberg surrendered this morning to the Manhattan district attorney's office as he faces a tax indictment due to be unsealed later today

Cars, apartments at school tuition: The perks at the center of New York prosecutors' investigation of the Trump Organization Charges against the Trump Organization and one of its most senior executives are expected on Thursday. The Manhattan district attorney has spent months investigating whether chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg avoided paying taxes on company perks. Some of the details are believed to have emerged from documents saved by his daughter-in-law Jennifer Weisselberg after an acrimonious divorce from his son Barry. The perks reportedly include: Some $500,000 paid to Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School for two of Weisselberg's grandchildren An apartment in an Upper East Side townhouse, used by Weisselberg's son and daughter-in-law during their divorce A rent-free apartment in the Trump property at 100 Central Park South, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, where they lived before that Prosecutors are also scrutinizing whether taxes were properly paid on cars leased through the Trump Organization Other members have staff have said they were given tickets to the U.S. Open at Flushing Meadow each year Advertisement

Weisselberg helped run the company when Donald Trump took the White House.

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.

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 said.

She was previously married to Weisselberg's son, Barry. She did not say whether prosecutors had requested her to testify, although she has handed over voluminous documents.

During the meeting, senior officials with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and the New York State Attorney General's Office 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 charges.

But the collateral damage from any indictments could spread far and wide, affecting relationships with banks and other business partners, Trump Organization lawyers are purported to have said.

Meetings 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.

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 despite 'millions of dollars of taxpayer funds wasted.'

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.

'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.

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.

He noted he expects charges to be filed against the company this week or next.

The charges would be the first criminal allegations to emerge from Vance's long-running investigation into Trump's business work in New York.
The age at which patients in England qualify for free NHS prescriptions could rise from 60 to 66.

Millions more could be made to pay 9.35 per item as ministers look at proposals to boost income after the pandemic.

The Department of Health wants to bring the age exemption in line with the state pension age.

It is estimated the move, which is now out to public consultation, could bring in an extra 300million for the NHS by 2026/27.

Prescription charges generated more than 2.8billion between 2015/16 and 2019/20.

However, the consultation acknowledges people may not take their prescribed medicines due to cost and warns this could lead to an additional burden on GPs, hospital A&Es and social care.

Millions more could be made to pay 9.35 per item if the free NHS prescription age rises to 66, as ministers look at proposals to boost income after the pandemic

Patients currently receive free prescriptions in England when they turn 60, which has not changed since 1974 for women and 1995 for men.

The state pension age in England is 66 and is due to increase to 68 between 2037 and 2039.

More people are claiming free prescriptions as increasing numbers live longer.

By 2066, there will be an additional 8.6million UK residents aged 65 and over, who will account for 26 per cent of the population.

Health minister Lord Bethell said: We are committed to improving patient care and supporting the NHS with the funding it needs to recover from this pandemic.

The upper age exemption for free prescriptions used to align with the state pension age, but that link has been lost over the years.

Prescription charges are an important source of income for the NHS, and the costs of providing free prescriptions continues to increase with our ageing population.

I encourage anyone with views on our proposals to share them through the consultation response form.

One option under consideration includes a grace period, so people aged 60 to 65 at the point of any change continue to receive free prescriptions until they reach 66.

The Government has not proposed any other changes to existing exemptions, which will remain in place for some vulnerable groups, including those on low incomes.

Out of 1.1billion items dispensed in 2018 in England, almost 90 per cent were free of charge. Almost 63 per cent of all items were dispensed free because the patient was aged 60 or over.

The proposal says: The Government has abolished the default retirement age, meaning that most people can work as long as they want to and are able.

This means many people in the age range 60 to 65 are and can remain in employment and be economically active and more able to meet the cost of their prescriptions.

Health minister Lord Bethell (pictured) said: We are committed to improving patient care and supporting the NHS with the funding it needs to recover from this pandemic'

The consultation seeks views from the public, healthcare organisations and staff and will run for eight weeks.

Other groups exempt from prescription charges are children under 16, those aged 16 to 18 in full-time education, pregnant women and new mothers, and patients with certain medical conditions.

Prescriptions are free in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In England they rose from 9.15 to 9.35 in April.

Charities have warned an NHS prescription will soon cost more than 10 per item as the tax on ill health continues to increase.

Age UK said raising the age for free prescriptions would have a disastrous impact on older peoples health and cost more in the long term.
Just imagine you are one of the employees working for the national charity Oxfam.

Perhaps youre a manager in one of their High Street shops, overseeing the selfless volunteers who give up hours of their time to work behind the counter or sort donations.

Or maybe youre employed in a back-office role, taking pride in the fact your work makes a positive contribution to the world, a small cog in a bigger set of machines that make a difference to those in need.

Although not necessarily the right sort of difference, apparently: this week it emerged that Oxfam had sent out a racial justice survey to its 1,800 strong British staff.

Surveys, of course, usually exist to canvass opinion, although it seems this one took an unusual approach. It made the claim that racism was so deeply embedded in our society that all echelons of power, to some degree, exist to serve whiteness.

To underline the point, employees were asked to define themselves as either non-racist, anti-racist or none/either.

What does that even mean? How stressful it must be to tick the right box without causing offence. What a farce! And besides, no genuine racist is going to admit that fact.

This week it emerged that Oxfam had sent out a racial justice survey to its 1,800 strong British staff. Employees were asked to define themselves as either non-racist, anti-racist or none/either

Little wonder the survey has caused huge upset among members of Oxfams staff, some of whom understandably feel under attack for doing their job  a job you might think was more vital than ever in a world where, according to the World Bank, the pandemic has plunged even more of the global population into extreme poverty.

Instead, here they are, engaging in what seems to me to be little more than a ludicrous box-ticking exercise which, rather than improving race relations in our society, actually hinders them.

Set aside for a moment the fact that many think it is not for a charitable organisation  one to which the taxpayer contributes through gift aid, not to mention the portion of the 13.4 billion we shell out to meet overseas aid targets  to make declarations about how white privilege underpins our society.

It chillingly exposes the extent to which Critical Race Theory (CRT), imported from America, has taken hold of our organisations at home.

CRT is a divisive discourse that decrees every human interaction is governed by race, which essentially pits white people against black people in stark opposition.

Its so divisive that nearly half of all U.S. states are taking measures to ban CRT being taught in public schools.

To see Oxfam subscribe to this damaging form of thinking is something that I find both patronising and infuriating  a ludicrous exercise in virtue-signalling from an organisation mired in its own genuine scandals.

Only two years ago, Oxfam was severely rebuked by the Charity Commission, which accused the organisation of covering up claims that staff sexually exploited vulnerable victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Male staff members threw parties where they paid for sex with women, some of whom were allegedly underage girls.

Orgy-loving Roland van Hauwermeiren (pictured), the Belgian who ran the charitys local operation after the disaster, admitted using prostitutes at the villa rented for him by Oxfam

Orgy-loving Roland van Hauwermeiren, the Belgian who ran the charitys local operation after the disaster, admitted using prostitutes at the villa rented for him by Oxfam.

He had previously been dismissed by a British NGO for similar misconduct and was also reportedly sent home from a job in Liberia after holding sex parties with local women.

And it seems that lessons werent learned. Just weeks ago, three of its employees in the Democratic Republic of Congo were sacked following an investigation into sexual harassment, intimidation, nepotism and fraud.

You might think that these shameful incidents would be enough to persuade the charity to focus on getting its house in order. In fact, it has been notably quiet on the subject.

But then its far easier to engage in a display of self-righteous sanctimony than tackle these very real problems.

A puff of holier-than-thou smoke can, after all, provide helpful moral cover for historical bad behaviour, not to mention the charitys very real failings in terms of minority recruitment  the number of employees from ethnic minority backgrounds working at Oxfam fell from 16 per cent in 2019 to 11.8 per cent in 2020.

This statistic wouldnt be as concerning if Oxfam werent so busy giving moral lectures to its majority white employees in the name of social justice.

It seems that lessons werent learned. Just weeks ago, three of its employees in the Democratic Republic of Congo were sacked following an investigation into sexual harassment, intimidation, nepotism and fraud (file photo)

In 2019, for example, it suspended a manager at its Hay-on-Wye shop after someone took to Twitter to accuse them of racism towards a Welsh customer.

Oxfam immediately dismissed Vaughan Evans, closed the shop and apologised for the alleged remark  despite a later investigation concluding that the alleged anti-Welsh conduct could not be substantiated.

Moreover, it is ironic that a charity that seems determined to prove whether its white employees are secretly racist is doing so against a backdrop of declining numbers of ethnic minority staff.

Who do those behind this survey think they are helping, and how?

No one can deny there are race issues to be tackled here in the UK and across the world.

History is littered with terrible examples of abuse of power, whether it be European or otherwise  a legacy that looms large to this day. None of what I am about to say next nullifies the pain that has been caused over time, and the historical hurt that lingers.

The problem is that we have ended up in a place where all our major institutions  among them pockets of government, our educational establishments and charities  have subscribed literally to a black and white narrative.

It is a worldview that decrees white people are oppressors, while black people are the dispossessed underdog  the narrative that underpins Critical Race Theory.

In fact, the evidence shows that the truth is more nuanced, such as the recent report by the Education Committee that revealed it is white working-class children, not those from ethnic minorities, that are falling furthest behind in the classroom and in the achievement index.

It is astonishing that it is deemed constructive to lump all black people together in the same social group, as though the only reality black people have is one blighted by hardship and struggle.

It is not always easy to speak openly about this, especially when, like me, your background is one of mixed heritage. There remain huge pockets of anger in the black community, some of whom see people like me as traitors to our race.

But there are plenty of others who agree with me and believe that demanding white people own up to their perceived privilege and innate racism only ends up masking more complex issues.

Thats what many  black and white  think in the real world, a world I suspect many of those at the top of the development sector dont really understand.

Oxfams survey bears all the hallmarks of something dreamed up over tea and biscuits by people who can afford the luxury of political grandstanding

As the Mail has already highlighted in recent months, the overseas aid sector is presided over by a network of individuals on inflated six-figure salaries, which often exceed those in corporate jobs.

Oxfams survey bears all the hallmarks of something dreamed up over tea and biscuits by people who can afford the luxury of political grandstanding.

If you were being generous, you might concede their efforts were rooted in good intentions, and a desire to further the cause of racial equality.

Sadly, however, they come across as nothing less than a back-patting exercise and a distraction from Oxfams manifest failings in recent years.
Police officers who stopped and searched a black British sprinter, pulling her from a car and handcuffing her, are being investigated for alleged racism.

Footage of Team GB sprinter Bianca Williams and her partner Ricardo dos Santos, a fellow athlete, being removed from their car provoked public outrage last July.

The couple were stopped in north-west London by officers from the Metropolitan police's Territorial Support Group, who searched them for drugs and weapons while their three-month-old son was in the back seat.

Police officers who stopped and searched black British sprinter Bianca Williams, pulling her from a car and handcuffing her, are being investigated for alleged racism

The reason they gave for stopping the vehicle was that it was driving erratically.

Yesterday it emerged that a police watchdog inquiry into the incident had been escalated.

The probe by the Independent Office for Police Conduct began last year into lower-level misconduct claims against five officers.

Three officers are now under investigation for gross misconduct over claims they were influenced by racial bias and two of them are facing a dishonesty probe.

Footage of Team GB sprinter Bianca Williams and her partner Ricardo dos Santos (pictured together), a fellow athlete, being removed from their car provoked public outrage last July

Three others are under investigation for misconduct offences, one of whom is facing an allegation they might have acted in a discriminatory way.

All the officers are understood to deny wrongdoing and continue to work.

Miss Williams and Portuguese sprinter Mr dos Santos are due to compete in the Tokyo Olympics this month.

Miss Williams said she lacked confidence in Met Commissioner Cressida Dick, who defended her officers at the time.

'There is a problem of racism in the Metropolitan police, but it is not going to go away unless there is a commitment from the top to tackle it,' Miss Williams said.
A dangerous canine disease has spread through an inner-east Melbourne dog park, leaving some family pets struggling on intravenous drips for days at a time.

More than 100 dogs have been hit with gastro after attending Citizens Park in Richmond in the last three weeks since June 11.

The incredibly contagious virus has spread through Melbourne's canine population, with some older and more vulnerable family pets struggling to pull through.

Citizens Park in Richmond (pictured) is the centre of a mass spread of dog gastroenteritis

Richmond Vet Clinic partner Dr Ross Ansell told the Herald Sun on Thursday he believes dog gastroenteritis is now being spread to multiple suburbs.

'I have a feeling it's not just limited to Richmond but is going through the city's inner suburbs,' Dr Ansell said.

'I had over a dozen a couple of days ago and close to 10 today.

'It's very unpleasant and very contagious.'

Dr Ansell said he had treated more than 100 family pets for the virus since June 11.

More than 100 dogs have caught the virus which is easily caught when the pets interact (pictured right) and some older pets are being treated with intravenous drips

The signs of dog gastroenteritis are vomiting, diarrhoea, little to no appetite and lethargy, with symptoms lasting up to 10 days.

The pets that have been hit the hardest are being treated with drips to rehydrate them, while in normal circumstances dogs are only given medication to stop vomiting.

If you believe your dog is sick, vets advise keeping it at home to stop the spread of the virus which can be fatal for vulnerable animals.
Despite seven major cities locked down across the country and coronavirus cases threatening to spiral out of control, some Australians are carrying on with life as normal and flouting the rules.

Cafe owners in Bowral in the New South Wales Southern Highlands were arrested for refusing to wear masks, hairdressers were pictured giving foils in Sydney's Northern Beaches and dozens were fined for sunbaking at Bondi - all in the past 24 hours.

The Bondi cluster grew to 226 on Friday morning after a worrying 31 new cases of the highly-contagious Delta variant were recorded across Sydney.

Meanwhile, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk on Friday announced Brisbane's lockdown would be extended by another week after five new cases across the state, while Darwin and Alice Springs also are under stay-at-home-orders.

The four-day snap lockdown for Perth and Peel will end at midnight on Friday after Western Australia recorded one new coronavirus case. The state will remain under tight restrictions.

In Sydney, police handed out fines for a string of offences including failing to wear masks and breaking public orders by leaving home without a valid reason.

Extraordinary images snapped at Bondi Beach's outdoor gym on Friday showed dozens of locals dressed in activewear working out together.

Under NSW restrictions, people are allowed to exercise in groups of up to 10 - and there is no suggestion the fitness fanatics were doing anything wrong.

Under NSW restrictions, people are allowed to exercise in groups of up to ten - and there is no suggestion these fitness fanatics were doing anything wrong

Beachgoers enjoyed the unseasonable weather at Sydney's Bondi Beach on Friday afternoon

Several shirtless and barefooted men worked out on the small exercise park next to the beach's surf lifesaving club alongside a woman dressed in pink activewear

Police officers are seen speaking with people sitting on benches on Bondi Beach's promenade on Friday afternoon

Several shirtless and barefooted men worked out on the small exercise park next to the beach's surf lifesaving club alongside a woman dressed in pink activewear.

Bizarrely, another woman was seen exercising in nothing but her underwear and a pair of platform heels.

By mid-afternoon the promenade appeared jam packed with people - with nearly all not wearing face masks.

Bizarrely, another woman was seen exercising in nothing but her underwear and a pair of shiny high-heels

Another couple were pictured embracing while laying on the grass behind the famous beach

By mid-afternoon the promenade appeared jam packed with people - with nearly all not wearing face masks

Lisa Wilkinson and fellow Channel Ten stars on Thursday night blasted Sydneysiders for not taking Covid lockdown seriously and refusing to wear face masks.

'I would say whenever I go to the supermarket there are about 50 per cent wearing masks, the shops themselves last time were really monitoring masks,' Wilkinson said.

'I don't get the sense that they're doing that if I'm seeing that many people without masks going shopping.'

She said at her local cafe on Thursday only about a third of people stopping in to get a takeaway coffee were wearing masks.

'They almost all had activewear on, so they could probably argue, "I'm out exercising", but it didn't look very strenuous,' Wilkinson said.

She said NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian doesn't seem to be getting the message across when it comes to the seriousness of the stay-at-home orders and the dangers posed by the deadly virus.

'We still feel like this is the lockdown you have when you're not really having a lockdown,' she said.

Meanwhile, a defiant hair salon in Sydney's Northern Beaches was spotted breaking lockdown rules on Thursday.

Lisa Wilkinson and fellow Channel Ten stars slammed Sydneysiders for not taking Covid lockdown seriously. Pictured: A large group of people are pictured during lockdown in Bondi

Two young women are pictured exiting the water after a dip at the world famous Bondi Beach on Friday afternoon

ISM Hairdressing at Dee Why was open for business after being closed from Monday through to Wednesday following confirmation of the lockdown Ms Berejiklian last weekend.

On Thursday night, a client was spotted in the salon chair with foils in her hair and not wearing a face mask.

When quizzed as to why they were ignoring imposed rules from the NSW Government during the two-week lockdown, ISM salon worker Sharon Carr said they were 'totally confused'.

People across New South Wales and Queensland have been spotted failing to wear masks in shops and populated areas across the eastern states. It is not mandatory to wear them outdoors

'We were open on Thursday as we are an essential service.. I had a look at a government website and we fall under that category,' Ms Carr told Daily Mail Australia.

'The last lockdown we were open... online it says hairdressing salons were recommended to close, it isn't mandatory.

'We are a small salon and if we socially distance from our customers we should be able to trade. We are totally confused by the rules, we look to follow what is outlined on government websites.'

The salon worker went onto said they would 'close in a minute' if they have committed a safety breach.

'We have been to the (Dee Why) police station to double check and they requested we ring the Covid hotline,' Ms Carr added.

'We couldn't get through to them.'

Life is a beach in Bondi as people, walk, swim, sunbake and relax during lockdown

Two beachgoers are seen peering to the north of Bondi Beach on Friday afternoon

The Bondi to Coogee coastal walk has been packed with locals exercising after the state government introduced stay-at-home-orders for all of Greater Sydney

People exercise on the boardwalk at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday with the city in lockdown

The NSW Health website states hairdressers are not an essential service and must stay closed during Greater Sydney's two-week lockdown.

Earlier this week, the owner of Auburn's Golden Cuts in Sydney's west was fined $5,000 for breaching a public health order.

It is understood NSW Police were tipped off by a member of the public that the hairdresser was continuing to operate as normal.

The same lockdown rules apply for the likes of gyms, pubs and caravan parks, which have remained closed.

In separate incidents, two barbers have each been issued a $1,000 fine after continuing to operate in breach of the Public Health Order.

A client was spotted in the salon chair on Thursday night, not wearing a face mask - hairdressing is not considered an essential service according to the NSW Health website

ISM Hairdressing, at Dee Why on Sydney's northern beaches, was spotted trading on Thursday night - during lockdown

Leaving City Limits A travel company was 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. 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. Advertisement

Meanwhile on Thursday afternoon, the owners of an organic grocery store in Bowral were arrested in a violent clash with police over their refusal to allow mask use inside their store for 'hygiene reasons'.

Video of the confrontation showed the female owner being bundled into the back of a police van by two police officers.

When the male owner stepped in to object to her arrest, he was grabbed by officers, slammed into the back of the van and then wrestled to the ground.

On the store's Instagram page, which contains a number of anti-mask posts and others questioning Covid-19 vaccines, the owners explained the strife had begun inside the store when police were called about the shop's opposition to mask use - stated on a sign outside.

'For over 1.5 hours the police discussed this with owners,' the post said.

'A customer and a friend decided to film the discussion - that's when it all kicked off. They refused to allow the filming and forcibly tried to remove her from the store.'

The owners accused an officer of putting her hands behind her back and pushing her from the store.

The video showed the male shopkeeper approaching officers as they tried to put the female owner into the police van, and he asked 'what has she done?' as the officers warned him to 'walk away'.

After the woman was pushed inside the van, the owner was immediately grabbed by an officer, to which he shouted 'don't touch me' as the woman filming can be heard calling out 'Mark, Mark!'.

One of the store's owners (pictured, left and right) is seen in a clash with police as they tried to arrest him in Bowral, after being alerted by the public that the shop had banned mask-wearers

The Organic Store in Bowral are very open about their anti-Covid views, with a chalkboard outside the shop banning customers who have recently had vaccines or are wearing a mask - which is mandatory in New South Wales

Officers then pushed the owner against the back of the van with enough force to knock the cap from his head, and pushed a hand into his face.

One officer warned him to 'stop resisting, you're under arrest' and he replied 'what about this fat bloke' in reference to another officer.

The man, who was being held by two officers, was then tripped by a third and pushed face first to the footpath.

In total, 75 infringement notices were issued on Thursday under the Public Health Act. Of those 46 were $200 infringements for failing to wear a mask.

NSW Police told Daily Mail Australia many more were issued on Friday.
More than one million workers came off furlough in May as the economy reopened  but around 2.4million were still reliant on the scheme.

The data from HMRC showed the biggest reduction came in businesses serving drinks where nearly 180,000 went back to work.

Restaurants also saw a significant fall  with 133,000 workers coming off the scheme.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak hailed the fantastic figures, saying: The scheme is naturally winding down as the economy reopens but continuing to support those businesses and employees that need our help.

More than one million workers came off furlough in May as the economy reopened  but around 2.4million were still reliant on the scheme. Chancellor Rishi Sunak hailed the figures as fantastic

But Daniel Tomlinson, of the Resolution Foundation think-tank, said the number of those still using the scheme was higher than predicted. He added that the figures offered a sobering reminder of how incomplete our Covid recovery is.

Between 1.3 and 1.9 million people are still on furlough in the UK, according to the ONS.

The scheme, which is to start being phased out this month, will finish entirely at the end of September.

The figures come as the scale of support for businesses starts to be curtailed - even though some, such as nightclubs, pubs and travel firms continually to be subject to severe limitations on trading.

Bosses will need to pick up 10per cent of their furloughed workers pay in July, rising to 20per cent in August and September.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said it will cost businesses 322 in July to keep an employee earning 20,000 a year on the books. In August and September this will rise to 489.

It warned that businesses are likely to make many staff redundant this summer as a result.

Many of these same companies, such as pubs, will also face a second hit as they start paying business rates again from today.

The data from HMRC showed the biggest reduction came in businesses serving drinks where nearly 180,000 went back to work. Restaurants also saw a significant fall  with 133,000 workers coming off the scheme (file photo)

Relief for those in the leisure, hospitality and retail sectors - will also taper off today, falling from 100per cent to a 66per cent discount.

The Labour party calculated that around 450,000 companies who still have furloughed staff will need to start picking up 10per cent of the bill from July 1.

This will cost them a combined 225 million, the party said.

House buyers are also no longer eligible for the same levels of reduction in stamp duty that have been available during the pandemic.

Stamp duty was eliminated early in the crisis for all property purchases up to 500,000 in England and Northern Ireland

From today, the tax-free threshold drops to 250,000 before reaching its normal 125,000 level in October.
Shoppers should never be more than a kilometre away from somewhere they can withdraw cash free of charge under proposed laws.

The plans outlined yesterday by the Treasury said people should not have to travel beyond a reasonable distance to take out or deposit cash.

It comes as the use of coins and notes has plummeted in recent years, while more bank branches have closed.

The Treasury documents outlined how a minimum percentage of the population should not have to travel more than 1km (0.6mile) to withdraw cash free of charge.

However, this distance could be extended over time if coins and notes become less popular.

But there was nothing in the plans to force banks to keep certain branches open.

Plans outlined yesterday by the Treasury said people should not have to travel beyond a reasonable distance to take out or deposit cash free of charge

Instead, City watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority could be tasked with making sure high street banks stick to new rules to protect cash.

Last year 17 per cent of payments were made with coins and notes, according to banking trade body UK Finance.

It added that the decline of cash purchases was accelerated by businesses trying to reduce the spread of Covid.

And shoppers were encouraged to pay with their cards and smartphones.

The hike of the contactless limit from 30 to 45 in April last year also made these methods more popular, and one in four payments were made this way last year.

Last year, just 17 per cent of payments were made with coins and notes, according to banking trade body UK Finance. [Stock image]

Yet research commissioned by the Bank of England found that the risk of catching the virus from notes was low.

More than 4,000 bank branches have closed in the last six years, according to consumer group Which? Campaigners have been calling for laws to be introduced as quickly as possible to preserve cash for those who depend on it.

The Daily Mail has long campaigned against the closures of bank branches and free cash machines.

A report by Age UK last month revealed that 2.4million people aged 65 and over relied on cash in their daily lives.

It said people should have the same guaranteed access to cash as they do with water.

Natalie Ceeney, chairman of the Access to Cash Review, said last night: Legislation to protect access to cash is vital.

'There are still a lot of people who rely on cash and they tend to be the oldest, the poorest and most vulnerable in society.

Consultation on the proposals ends on September 23.
Boris Johnson urged parents and pupils to be patient so schools can prepare

Revealed 375,000 children had been sent home because of positive Covid test

Boris Johnson urged parents, pupils and Tory MPs yesterday to be patient over calls to end the bubble system that has been responsible for tens of thousands of children missing school.

The Prime Minister hinted that a 'summer holiday firebreak' would be needed to give schools time to prepare for a new set of arrangements.

A reminder of the damaging effect on education came as figures showed the average pupil lost at least a week's worth of learning in autumn term last year, despite schools being open.

Boris Johnson urged parents, pupils and Tory MPs yesterday to be patient over calls to end the bubble system that has been responsible for tens of thousands of children missing school

Mr Johnson is under pressure after it was revealed that 375,000 children had been sent home because a member of their 'bubble' had tested positive for Covid.

They have to isolate for ten days if another pupil in their group gets the virus. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has suggested that school bubbles will end when classes return after the summer holidays in September.

He has also indicated that the changes could happen when the next stage of easing restrictions takes place on July 19.

This is the date that many schools are due to break up for summer, making it a meaningless promise in practice.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister said he understands the frustration over whole bubbles being sent home but said a Public Health England review into favouring testing over isolation has not finished yet.

'They haven't concluded yet so what I want to do is just to be cautious as we go forward to that natural firebreak of the summer holidays when the risk in schools will greatly diminish and just ask people to be a little bit patient,' he said during a visit to the Nissan plant in Sunderland.

Tory MPs are demanding the system is scrapped amid fears it would create a 'ghost generation'.

Former party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith is among 48 MPs to have signed a letter to the Prime Minister warning that the current policy is 'disproportionate' and 'unsustainable'.

They said it was essential that schools 'go back to normal' when lockdown is lifted, even if it is 'just for the last few days of term'.

'This will send an important signal ahead of the autumn that the route to freedom is a "one-way road",' the letter said.

Mr Johnson is under pressure after it was revealed that 375,000 children had been sent home because a member of their 'bubble' had tested positive for Covid (stock photo)

It added that pupils have suffered 'unnecessary and significant disruptions' in order to keep the rest of the country safe.

'They have lost physical fitness, suffered mental health damage, and experienced catastrophic learning loss,' it said.

Other signatories include former cabinet minister Esther McVey and Commons education committee chairman Robert Halfon.

Molly Kingsley, of the UsforThem campaign, which organised the letter, said: 'Children have been at the bottom of the heap in decision-making for the last 15 months.

'They need to recover their health and wellbeing, education and their futures, and now we owe it to them to put their interests first.'

Yesterday Department for Education analysis of autumn term 2020 showed that the average pupil lost five days for Covid-related reasons, equating to a total of 33million days, despite school being open.

ASCL, the secondary heads' union, wrote to the Prime Minister hitting back at claims schools were sending too many children home.

The letter said: 'This feels like a cynical attempt to shift the blame for your Government's failure to address the escalating educational disruption of recent weeks.'
Hundreds of thousands of people across the UK have been suffering from long Covid, figures suggest.

Nearly one million people were found in May to be experiencing long Covid  defined as symptoms which last for more than four weeks after infection, according to the Office for National Statistics.

An estimated 385,000 were struggling with persistent symptoms that had gone on since last summer.

Fatigue was the most common symptom, affecting an estimated 535,000 people, followed by shortness of breath striking 397,000 and muscle ache hitting 309,000

Around two-thirds of those with long Covid said it restricted their ability to carry out day-to-day activities. Symptoms include organ failure, tiredness, shortness of breath, hair loss and brain fog.

Fatigue was the most common symptom, affecting an estimated 535,000 people, followed by shortness of breath striking 397,000 and muscle ache hitting 309,000.

Lib Dem MP Layla Moran, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on coronavirus, said: Weve heard how the patchwork of support services for long Covid patients is already overstretched.

Previous research has estimated that as many as two million people in England could be suffering ongoing symptoms after a Covid-19 infection.

It comes after a study found that only a small proportion of cases of long Covid are being recorded by GPs.

Experts from Oxford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said their study raised questions about how long Covid is diagnosed, recorded and managed in the NHS.

They found that only 23,273 cases were formally recorded between February 2020 and April 2021 at GP practices in England.

More than a quarter of practices had never logged a case, according to the article in the British Journal of General Practice.

Lib Dem MP Layla Moran, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on coronavirus, said: Weve heard how the patchwork of support services for long Covid patients is already overstretched

Ms Moran said: Covid is not like the flu, it can cause long-term serious illness in otherwise young and healthy people, including children.

Even those who are not hospitalised have a risk of developing this debilitating condition, leaving them needing ongoing support for many months to recover.

She added: The new Health Secretary must consider the impact of long Covid ahead of lifting restrictions on July 19 to prevent another wave of cases that could have a devastating impact on our health service and economy.

Gavin Williamson must also consider the risk posed by long Covid to pupils as part of plans to relax Covid measures in schools.

The Governments current approach risks condemning thousands more people to live with the cruel impact of long Covid while struggling to access the support they need.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a halt on federal executions after telling officials that capital punishment is too arbitrary, disproportionately targets people of color, and risks wrongly killing innocent people.

Garland sent a memo to Department of Justice Officials Thursday sharing his 'serious concerns' over federal executions, including the 'troubling number of exonerations' for people sentenced to death.

The AG's statement added: 'The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States but is also treated fairly and humanly.'

Executions ordered by the US government were halted for close to two decades over shortages of drugs used for lethal injections, and concerns that that method of putting prisoners to death was inhumane.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a halt on federal executions after telling officials that capital punishment is too arbitrary, disproportionately targets people of color, and risks wrongly killing innocent people

But Attorney General Bill Barr - who served under Donald Trump - ordered them to resume in 2019. That saw 13 prisoners put to death by the federal government between July 2020 and January 2021. No president in more than 120 years had overseen as many federal executions.

Executions on the federal level have always been rare and the government has put to death only three defendants between restoring the federal death penalty in 1988 and Trump's presidency. The last came in 2003, when Louis Jones was executed for the 1995 kidnapping, rape and murder of a young female soldier.

In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma, President Barack Obama directed the Justice Department to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs.

Barr said last July that the Obama-era review had been completed, clearing the way for executions to resume. He approved a new procedure for lethal injections that replaces the three-drug combination previously used in federal executions with one drug, pentobarbital. This is similar to the procedure used in several states, including Georgia, Missouri and Texas, but not all.

Barr told the AP in November that the federal Bureau of Prisons had been testing and conducting practice drills ahead of the first execution. He would not say where the drugs would come from.

President Donald Trump has spoken often about capital punishment and his belief that executions serve as an effective deterrent and an appropriate punishment for some crimes, including mass shootings and the killings of police officers.

Joe Biden, who is anti-capital punishment, and his campaign platform called for working 'to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal governments example.'

In February, anonymous officials from the Biden administration told the Associated Press that the president was in talks of instructing the Department of Justice to stop scheduling new executions.

However, last month, the Biden's Justice Department has urged the Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after it was overturned by an appellate court last summer.

Nevertheless, Garland has stood by his position on capital punishment even when questioned by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) about similar heinous cases like the Oklahoma City bombing, which Garland prosecuted, or a mass shooting in a church like the one that occurred in South Carolina.

'If we develop a policy of a moratorium, then it would apply across the board,' Garland responded.

The US government's execution chamber at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana

Attorney General Bill Barr - who served under Donald Trump - ordered federal executions to resume at the facility, pictured, in 2019

The Trump administration carried out 13 executions between July 2020 and January 2021
Three Met Police officers face a misconduct hearing over breaches of standards of 'equality and diversity' after Team GB sprinter Bianca Williams was subjected to a stop and search.

The athlete, 27, accused the force of 'racially profiling' her, and her partner, Ricardo dos Santos, when they were handcuffed and separated from their three-month-old son.

Three officers are now subject to a gross misconduct investigation over 'potential breaches of police standards of professional behaviour', the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has said.

Three other police officers are also being investigated over the incident last July.

Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick has previously apologised to the athlete after footage of their car being stopped in Maida Vale, west London, was posted online by the former Olympic medallist, Linford Christie.

Three Met Police officers who stopped and searched Team GB sprinter Bianca Williams (above with her partner Ricardo dos Santo) will face a misconduct hearing

Footage captured the moment the Metropolitan Police stopped and handcuffed Williams

An IOPC spokesman said: 'Three MPS officers are now subject to a gross misconduct investigation for potential breaches of police standards of professional behaviour.

'The three officers were already subject to a misconduct investigation for various potential breaches of police standards of professional behaviour relating to the use of force; duties and responsibilities; and authority, respect and courtesy.

'After reviewing a range of new evidence, they were informed they are now subject to an investigation for potential breaches of the police standards of professional behaviour relating to equality and diversity, which requires officers to act with fairness and impartiality and not to discriminate unlawfully or unfairly.

'Two of those officers are also now being investigated for potential breaches of the standards relating to honesty and integrity, requiring them to be honest and act with integrity at all times.

A photo shared on Instagram by Ms Williams of the stop and search confrontation. She is to the right of the centre of the photo, with her three-month-old son

Ms Williams has slammed the police for 'racial profiling' - though the Met insists there is no evidence of misconduct on the part of its officers

'Collectively, these alleged breaches amount to potential gross misconduct.'

It said a fourth officer is being investigated for potential breaches of the standards relating to 'equality and diversity, and duties and responsibilities'.

Two other officers also face an inquiry over behaviour relating to use of 'force; duties and responsibilities; and authority, respect and courtesy'.

It added: 'Our investigatory work has now concluded and preparation of the final report is under way.'

Earlier this year, it was announced a review would take place into the use of handcuffs where an arrest has not been made - a tactic most commonly used during stop and search.

Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick has previously apologised to the athlete after footage of their car being stopped in Maida Vale, west London, was posted online

Williams welcomed that announcement, but said further 'effective' racial bias training was also needed.

The sprinter said: 'The handcuffs were painful and it was incredibly humiliating to be separated from my baby, in handcuffs outside my home with neighbours walking past.

'While I welcome better training in the Met on the use of handcuffs, the trauma of the incident did not start or end with the handcuffing. It was racial stereotyping and prejudice.

'I would like to see some effective bias training in the police as well as better training on the use of force and not just in relation to handcuffs.'
While many Australians wait for Pfizer and Moderna, Malaysians seemingly can't get enough of the AstraZeneca jab - even after it was briefly pulled from the country's main immunisation program in April.

In recent weeks, the south-east Asian nation has been smashed by up to 7,000 Covid cases and 70 deaths per day following an outbreak linked to end-of-Ramadan celebrations in May.

The intensive care system has come close to capacity and the country is entering its sixth week of an 'indefinite' lockdown that won't end until cases dip below 4,000 per day.

While Malaysia's situation is vastly more dire than Australia's, where 12 million people are in lockdown over small outbreaks, the country is treading a different path with the controversial Oxford University-designer AstraZeneca vaccine.

In April, the Malaysian government pulled the vaccine from its main vaccine rollout after experts revealed a rare link to a blood clotting illness and thousands of residents cancelled their bookings.

MALAYSIA: Volunteers in protective suits lay down the body of a coronavirus victim at a cemetery in Kuala Lumpur. The country has suffered up to 7,000 cases per day recently

The corpse is disinfected prior to the burial at the Raudhatul Sakinah Islamic cemetery on June 15

On left: workers are seen at the gravesite. On right, a disabled woman received a Covid dose at a care home in Kuala Lumpur

But the government still made the jab available to Malaysians on an opt-in basis - and the demand was huge.

The first batch of 260,800 AZ shots, for residents of the hard-hit Klang Valley an hour's south of the capital Kuala Lumpur, booked out in three hours at the begnining of May.

Two further batches released later that month were likewise snapped up within hours, local media reported. One was restricted to people aged over 60.

The scramble for AstraZeneca led the government to reverse course and push the jab back into its main vaccination program.

"It appears that the people no longer have any aversion towards this vaccine as seen before following media reports linking blood clots to AstraZeneca,' Vaccine Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said at a press conference in late May.

Part of the reason for the collapse in that vaccine hesitancy may be the devastating surge in cases which has peaked at over 7,000 cases a day.

Malaysia has two alternative vaccine sources - Pfizer and the Chinese-made Sinovac - however, like Australia has suffered supply issues.

A swimmer suns herself on Bondi Beach and scrolls through her phone last Sunday, some 48 hours after the Sydney lockdown began

Bondi locals get their exercise during Sydney's lockdown, which will last at least until next Saturday. Australia's vaccine rollout has been criticised as a 'strollout'

Australia's drug regulator approved AstraZeneca for all residents over 18.

However, the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisations has twice changed its advice on who should get the jab, first recommending people under 50 get Pfizer,

However, on Monday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australians under 60 could still receive AstraZeneca from their doctor, provided they consider the benefits and risks.

The rules surrounding AstraZeneca differ around the world. In Germany, the vaccine is available to all adults.

In South Korea under 50s are offered alternative jabs. The UK, which now has four brands of vaccines, recently announced it will offer under 40s an alternative.

Australian authorities are expecting shipments of Pfizer and Moderna to arrive later this year and can only manufacture AstraZeneca's vaccine locally.
Garbage with Australian fitness blogger Beck Lomas' name on it has been found on a building site after being illegally dumped.

Builders in Melbourne found the discarded boxes which appeared to have been sent to the Instagram star from PR companies to promote their products.

The packages, which had Lomas' name and address written on a sticker, were found by tradies in a bin on a construction site in the affluent suburb of Brighton on Wednesday morning.

'Funnily enough some of the packaging had Beck Lomas' name and address on it. We have some of the packaging for products she was promoting on her Instagram stories today such as Fiji Water and Kind-ly,' construction company owner Matt Crawford told Pedestrian.

Lomas rejected claims she had personally gotten rid of the unwanted PR gifts, and said waste removal companies were responsible for the illegal dumping.

The packages had Lomas' name and address written on a sticker and appeared to have been gifted to her by PR companies

Lomas rejected claims she had personally gotten rid of the unwanted PR gifts, and said waste removal companies were responsible for the illegal dumping

The discarded boxes are pictured. 'I'd mentioned to the construction worker who originally DM'd me that we had organisation for someone to remove the rubbish from our house and had no idea that he has inappropriately dumped it,' Lomas said.

The packages were found by tradies in a bin on a construction site in the affluent suburb of Brighton on Wednesday morning

'I'd mentioned to the construction worker who originally DM'd me that we had organised for someone to remove the rubbish from our house and had no idea that he has inappropriately dumped it,' she said.

'I was under the impression he was taking it to the tip. I'm trying to get to the bottom of it all myself now.'

Mr Crawford said illegal dumping is common in Victoria, and it adds an unnecessary burden to his business.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Ms Lomas for further comment.

Lomas came under fire during Melbourne's stage four lockdown last August when she breached public health orders.

The 26-year-old boasted about doing 'a couple of extra laps' around the lake on Saturday while waiting for her boyfriend Josh Klein to set up her birthday surprise.

The Melburnian shared her activity online, telling her Instagram followers on her story she was going to run for 'as long as I feel like' after having already exercised in the morning - but at the time there was an hour limit on exercise outdoors.

Lomas was aiming to beat Klein in the Fitbit Couples Challenge, where participants try to outdo each other for the 'most active minutes' within six days.

Videos and screenshots showed her posing outside in activewear without a face mask, which was also against the rules at the time.

Lomas came under fire during Melbourne's stage four lockdown last August when she breached public health orders

The 26-year-old boasted about doing 'a couple of extra laps' around the lake on Saturday while waiting for her boyfriend Josh Klein to set up her birthday surprise

'I'd like to express how sorry I am for what I've done,' Lomas wrote in a public apology which she posted on Instagram.

'I'm not going to make excuses for it or try to spin the situation to make it sound better than it was. I'm a human and I made a mistake.

'I meant absolutely no harm to anyone however can now see the seriousness of the situation.'
A defiant hair salon on Sydney's northern beaches was spotted breaking Sydney's lockdown on Thursday.

ISM Hairdressing at Dee Why were open for business - after being closed from Monday through to Wednesday - following confirmation of the lockdown from NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian last weekend.

On Thursday night, a client was spotted in the salon chair with foils in her hair - and not wearing a face mask.

When quizzed as to why they were ignoring imposed rules from the NSW government during the two-week lockdown, ISM salon worker Sharon Carr said they were 'totally confused.'

ISM Hairdressing, at Dee Why on Sydney's northern beaches, was spotted trading on Thursday night - during lockdown

A client was spotted in the salon chair on Thursday night, not wearing a face mask - hairdressing is not considered an essential service according to the NSW Health website

'We were open on Thursday as we are an essential service.. I had a look at a government website and we fall under that category,' Ms Carr told Daily Mail Australia.

'The last lockdown we were open...online it says hairdressing salons were recommended to close, it isn't mandatory.

'We are a small salon and if we socially distance from our customers we should be able to trade.

'We are totally confused by the rules, we look to follow what is outlined on government websites.'

The salon worker went onto state ' they would close in a minute' if they have committed a safety breach.

'We have been to the (Dee Why) police station to double check and they requested we ring the Covid hotline,' Ms Carr added. 'We couldn't get through to them.'

The NSW Health website clearly states hairdressers are not an essential service and must stay closed during Greater Sydney's two-week lockdown.

Earlier this week, the owner of Auburn's Golden Cuts in Sydney's west was fined $5000 for breaching a public health order.

It is understood NSW Police were tipped off by a member of the public that the hairdresser was continuing to operate as normal, despite Greater Sydney being in a hard lockdown.

The same lockdown rules apply for the likes of gyms, pubs and caravan parks, which have remained closed.

In separate incidents, two barbers have each been issued a $1000 fine after continuing to operate in breach of the Public Health Order.

About 4pm on Thursday, police from Sydney's east attended a barber shop on Maloney Street, Eastlakes, and spoke with the barber, a man, 38.

The owner of Golden Cuts in Sydney's west at Auburn was fined $5000 for breaching a public health order this week

A couple of hours later at 6.30pm, officers from Campsie in Sydney's west attended a barber shop on Beamish Street and spoke with a man, 30, who was cutting a customers hair.

Both stores were operating in breach of the Public Order Health Order, with customers receiving hair cuts at the time police stopped by.

The two men were issued a $1000 PIN for fail to comply with noticed direction (other than a face covering breach)  individual.

A customer at the Campsie store was also issued a $200 infringement notice for not wear fitted face covering when in indoor area of retail/business premises.

In a statement, NSW Police said they wouldn't comment on every individual potential breach, before urging people to report instances not following Covid rules during the lockdown.

'As police have repeatedly stated, anyone who has information regarding individuals or businesses in contravention of a Covid-19-related ministerial direction is urged to contact Crime Stoppers,' they said.

NSW Health was approached for comment.
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Wildfires destroyed 90 percent of a town in Canada just days after it recorded the country's hottest temperature ever - 121 degrees Fahrenheit - amid a devastating heat wave ravaging the Pacific Northwest.

Roughly 1,000 people living in and around Lytton, British Columbia, fled from their homes on Wednesday as flames fueled by soaring temperatures ripped through the area, engulfing the town in a matter of minutes.

The extent of the damage was revealed on Thursday as authorities said 'most homes' and structures were razed.

Officials said it could take days for the region to be deemed safe enough for first responders to begin searching the wreckage for possible fatalities.

BC Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is working to locate an unspecified number of residents who are unaccounted for.

Scott Hildebrand, chief administrative officer with the Thompson-Nicola Regional District, said dozens of families who evacuated when the fire swept in are now desperately searching for their loved ones.

'We are receiving calls from people looking for family and loved ones as well, and it's really hard because of power outages and cellphone towers being down, but we're working on that,' Hildebrand told CBC News.

Wildfires destroyed 90 percent of Lytton, British Columbia, just days after it recorded Canada's hottest temperature ever - 121 degrees Fahrenheit - amid a devastating heat wave ravaging the Pacific Northwest

The extent of the damage in Lytton was revealed on Thursday as authorities said 'most homes' and structures were razed

Roughly 1,000 people living in and around Lytton fled from their homes on Wednesday as flames fueled by soaring temperatures ripped through the area, engulfing the town in a matter of minutes

Officials said it could take days for the region to be deemed safe enough for first responders to begin searching the wreckage for possible fatalities

Dozens of families who fled when the fire swept in are now desperately searching for their loved ones. Pictured: Resident Martha Van Dyke stands outside her car on Thursday after evacuating

Lytton Mayor Jan Polderman, who ordered the village of less than 300 people to evacuate Wednesday, said it took 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to 'all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere'.

'It's dire. The whole town is on fire,' Polderman told CBC.

'At the First Nation band office, the fire was a wall about three, four feet high coming up to the fence line. I drove through town and it was just smoke, flames, the wires were down.'

There's been no official report on fatalities connected to the Lytton fires, but Polderman told CityNews1130 'it would be a miracle if everyone made it out alive.'

'There were all sorts of houses on fire. People were frantic to get out,' he said.

Edith Loring Kuhanga, a school administrator of the Stein Valley Nlakapamux School on First Nations land directly north of Lytton posted a picture of the fires and smoke to Facebook late Wednesday.

'Our poor little town of Lytton is gone,' she said. 'This is so devastating. We are all in shock! Our community members have lost everything.'

Lytton Mayor Jan Polderman, who ordered the village of less than 300 people to evacuate Wednesday, said it took 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to 'all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere'

Out-of-control forest fires decimated the small British Columbia village of Lytton in Canada following three consecutive days of record-breaking heat

The village of Lytton - which has a population of 300 - was ordered to evacuate by mayor Jan Polderman at 6pm PST Wednesday. He said the situation caused by the fire was 'dire'

Smoke from wildfires in the Sparks Lake area of British Columbia rise into the sky

Lytton in British Columbia was consumed by flames on Wednesday evening - one day after experiencing the hottest weather ever recorded in Canada -121F

The sweltering temperatures are being caused by a heat dome of static high-pressure hot air which traps the heat in one location

British Columbia's chief coroner, Lisa Lapointe, said her office received reports of at least 486 'sudden and unexpected deaths' between Friday and Wednesday. Normally, she said about 165 people would die in the Canadian province over a five-day period

But officials fear the multi-day heatwave may have caused around 500 deaths across the US and Canada.

British Columbia's Chief Coroner, Lisa LaPointe, said her office received reports of 486 'sudden and unexpected deaths' between Friday and Wednesday.

She told AP that around 165 people would normally die in the province over a five day period - raising the specter of 321 deaths caused by the heat.

Vancouver Police Sergeant Steve Addison, whose city also sits within the same province, added: 'Vancouver has never experienced heat like this, and sadly dozens of people are dying because of it.'

As the village of Lytton and the rest of British Columbia try to come to grips with the devastation of their homes and loss of life, B.C. Premier John Horgan offered little relief; instead choosing to blame the victims.

'Fatalities are a part of life,' Horgan said on Tuesday. 'It was apparent to anyone who walked outdoors that we were in an unprecedented heatwave and there's a level of personal responsibility.'

The 'heat dome' responsible for the unprecedented weather in Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest region of the US settled over British Columbia.

The phenomenon is caused by a high-pressure jet stream, which essentially acts like a lid to a boiling pot.

The heat dome has baked Lytton and the surrounding areas and created the country's hottest temperatures ever three consecutive days starting with 115F on Monday, 118F on Tuesday and 121F on Wednesday.

Temperatures are expected to drop below triple digits starting Thursday, according to AccuWeather, and hover in the 90s for the rest of the week.

While cooler than the unprecedented temperatures, the 90-plus degree heat far exceeds the usual 60F to 70F weather normally seen in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia at this time of year.

Lytton and the surrounding area remained on fire Thursday, with 101 active fires in British Columbia, according to the BC Wildfire dashboard, with 58.8 percent of the fires suspected to be caused by lightning.

Of the current 101 fires, 58 are classified as 'new' and 18 are 'out of control,' according to the BC Wildfire dashboard.

Smoke is rising from wildfires at Long Loch and Derrickson Lake in Central Okanagan, British Columbia

Around 20 buildings have so far been destroyed by the blaze. It is unclear if anyone was injured

The wild temperatures are stretching from the US west coast up to Canada where records have now been broken for three days in a row

The nearby city of Merritt opened a reception center for Lytton evacuees, city officials said on Twitter Wednesday night.

British Columbia has been hit by two separate wildfires - a 15 square mile blaze near Kamloops Lake, which has forced the evacuation of 160 homes.

And a 20-square-mile fire is burning in Lillooet, with four helicopters drafted in to help battle that blaze.

Cities in the US also saw record-breaking weather - including Portland, where the mercury hit 116F.

That is hotter than any temperature ever recorded in well-know American hotspots including Los Angeles, Dallas and New Orleans.

Oregon and Washington, including Seattle, which saw 108F weather, have now begun to cool down.

Smoke rises from a wildfire in McKinley Lake, British Columbia

Mayor Jan Polderman says he told everyone to leave Lytton, a community of some 250 people, as the situation rapidly deteriorated

The 'heat dome' that's wrecking havoc in the British Columbia is directly related to dozens of deaths in the US and causing wildfires to rage in California.

The largest of the fires, the lightning-sparked Lava fire in Siskiyou County in northern California, forced the evacuation of at least 8,000 residents Monday afternoon and expanded to almost 20,000 acres by Thursday, according to the interactive California wildfires map.

Only 19 percent of that fire is contained, according to the map.

The region's death toll continues to climb. Oregon has tied 79 deaths to the heat, with another 20 suspected fatalities recorded in Washington.

'This was a true health crisis that has underscored how deadly an extreme heat wave can be, especially to otherwise vulnerable people,' Dr. Jennifer Vines, the Multnomah County, Oregon, health officer said in a statement. 'I know many county residents were looking out for each other and am deeply saddened by this initial death toll.'

King County Medical Office, which includes Seattle, reported Wednesday that 13 people had died of heat-related causes, including three men, aged 51, 75, and 77, who had been killed by heat stroke.

Extreme heat is particularly dangerous for the elderly and vulnerable. Most homes in the Pacific Northwest do not have air conditioning, because the region is so unused to such hot weather.

Meteorologists say the heat wave was a once in a millennium event.

It was caused by a wide, deep mass of high pressure air that parked itself over the Pacific North West because of a wavy jet stream.

That high pressure area acted like a lid - or heat dome - trapping hot air inside, so temperatures get higher and higher.

The phenomenon has seen air conditioners sell out, triggered rolling blackouts in Spokane, Washington - and left locals praying for rain.

CANADA: A Salvation Army EMS vehicle is setup as a cooling station as people lineup to get into a splash park while trying to beat the heat in Calgary, Alberta, on Wednesday

OREGON: Salem Fire Department paramedics and employees of Falck Northwest ambulance service respond to a heat exposure call during a heat wave

WASHINGTON: Katherine Milton, who is experiencing homelessness, cools off under a homemade cooling-off station and mist system that a neighbor set up in their front yard for people, especially those without homes, to use during the scorching weather of a heatwave in Seattle
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Scott Morrison has outlined a four-phase transition towards living with Covid and finally ending the cycle of lockdowns and border closures.

The Prime Minister hailed a 'new deal for Australians' as he explained the stages titled vaccinate, prepare and pilot; post vaccination phase; consolidation phase; and final phase.

The first phase involves halving the number of arrivals into the country to 3,035 a week until August 31 to help keep out the highly contagious Delta strain, while the final stage sees all restrictions lifted except for testing of unvaccinated arrivals.

The pace of the plan - which will eventually let the country manage Covid like flu - depends on the vaccine rollout, with lockdowns eliminated once a certain percentage of Aussies have been fully jabbed with two doses.

'I have made it very clear today what is on the other side. If we all get vaccinated then this all changes,' Mr Morrison said.

'The pathway we have agreed today gives all Australians encouragement and much needed hope in what has been a very difficult time.'

The plan was announced after 12 million Australians were locked down this week due to several outbreaks across the nation. Darwin ended its lockdown on Friday at 1pm after recording zero cases but Brisbane's was extended until Saturday night due to two new infections.

Scott Morrison is pictured leaving quarantine after two weeks in his house in Canberra following the G7 summit

The plan came after 12 million Australians were locked down this week due to several outbreaks across the nation. Pictured: A runner during Sydney lockdown on Friday

What are the four phases of opening up? 1. Vaccinate, prepare and pilot (from July 14) Arrival caps cut in half to 3,035 a week until August 31; lockdowns and state border closures as a last resort; trials of seven-day home quarantine for vaccinated arrivals; medicare vaccination certificates available on apps like apple wallet 2. Post vaccination phase (when an as-yet unannounced percentage of Aussies are jabbed, expected early next year) No lockdowns or state borders except for 'extreme circumstances'; caps for unvaccinated arrivals doubled to 6,070; home quarantine for vaccinated arrivals; capped entry for students and economic visa holders 3. Consolidation phase (date not announced) Lifting all restrictions for outbound travel for vaccinated travellers; no caps for vaccinated arrivals; vaccinated people exempted from domestic restrictions; increased caps for students and visa holders; more travel bubbles being set up with countries such as Singapore; booster shots rolled out 4. Final phase (date not announced) Uncapped arrivals for vaccinated people without any quarantine and uncapped arrivals for unvaccinated people with testing before departure and on arrival Advertisement

1. Vaccinate, prepare and pilot

During the first stage from July 14, Australia's weekly arrival cap will be cut in half from to 3,035 to decrease the risk of outbreaks of the more contagious Delta strain from hotel quarantine. The cut will be in place until at least 31 August and will then be regularly reviewed for the rest of the year.

Some 34,000 Australians stranded overseas may now find it more difficult to get home, but repatriation flights to Howard Springs near Darwin will increase.

'Simply reducing the caps doesn't necessarily provide a fail safe but because of the particular virulency of the Delta strain, it is believed that is a prudent action while we remain in this suppression phase of the virus,' Mr Morrison said.

State premiers agreed that lockdowns and state border closures would be used as a 'last resort' - but no case threshold for lockdowns was agreed.

There will also be a small trial in South Australia to allow fully vaccinated travellers to quarantine at home for seven days, instead of 14 days in a hotel, after medical evidence showed they pose far less risk than unvaccinated arrivals.

Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said home quarantine can even be safer than hotel quarantine to reduce contact with staff.

'Seven days of home quarantine can be very similar to the outcome of 14 days' hotel quarantine. If people are staying at home, it actually can be safer for them and the community because of the decreased interaction with staff,' he said.

Digital vaccination passports will be issued to everyone who has been jabbed via the Medicare app which will work with the Apple Wallet from the end of the month.

Trials will also allow international students and visa holders to enter in small numbers during this phase.

New South Wales residents queue up to get vaccinated at Olympic Park in Sydney on Thursday

The final phase of the plan involves no travel restrictions. Pictured: Australians evacuated from South America landing at Brisbane International Airport in April 2020

What are the new arrival caps from 14 July? NSW: 1,505 QLD: 500 VIC: 500 SA: 265 WA: 265 NT: Federal repatriation flights to Howard Springs Total: 3,035 Advertisement

2. Post vaccination phase

State premiers have speculated that the post vaccination phase will begin when 80 per cent are jabbed - but the figure is yet to be agreed as modelling continues.

The Prime Minister said Australia is on track to offer all adults a first dose by the end of the year.

This second phase will have no lockdowns or state border controls except for in 'extreme circumstances' to prevent mass hospitalisations and deaths.

'Once we get through that gate, and that will be determined by the scientific evidence, then we will move into a phase where we seek to minimise serious illness, hospitalisation and fatality as a result of Covid-19,' Mr Morrison said.

Inbound passenger caps for unvaccinated travellers will increase to 6,070 and there will be a higher cap for vaccinated travellers with 'new quarantine' such as home quarantine for seven days.

There will also be capped entry for students and economic visa holders, depending on quarantine space.

3. Consolidation phase

The consolidation phase will involve lifting all restrictions for outbound travel for vaccinated people.

This will allow Australians, who have been banned from leaving the country since March 2020 except to New Zealand, to finally go on holiday and visit family overseas.

There will also be increased arrival caps for students and visa holders and more travel bubbles will be set up with countries such as Singapore to allow foreigners to enter.

Australia has had a travel bubble with New Zealand since April, but it is currently closed to due coronavirus outbreaks in Australia.

During this phase, Aussies will also be offered vaccine booster shots to combat any new strains of the virus.

In the second phase vaccinated travellers will be able to quarantine at home for seven days. Pictured: Healthcare workers and Defence personnel transport luggage from a Skybus outside the Intercontinental quarantine hotel in Melbourne in April

The Prime Minister held a National Cabinet meeting today with Premiers including Daniel Andrews (pictured) as they planned Australia's pandemic future

4. Final phase

The final phase will allow uncapped arrivals for vaccinated people without any quarantine and uncapped arrivals for unvaccinated people with testing before departure and on arrival.

'What it means is, Australia gets vaccinated, Australia is able to live differently,' Mr Morrison said.

Before today, international arrivals were capped at 6,070 a week but Labor premiers wanted this dramatically reduced.

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian - whose state has taken half of all returned travellers - said she didn't agree but accepted the decision.

'I am disappointed that every State hasn't done its fair share but I appreciate and have to respect the decision of National Cabinet,' she said.

'I don't support the view that other Premiers have that this means mistakes aren't going to happen and we're not going to have outbreaks. That is still going to occur,' she warned.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk wanted the caps cut in half while Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews wanted the numbers cut by up to 80 per cent.

Mr Morrison (pictured on Friday) completed 14 days of quarantine at The Lodge in Canberra, after returning from the G7 summit in the UK

A family from New Zealand reunite at Sydney International Airport in April. More travel bubbles will be set up in the third phase of the plan

'We are at a pressure cooker moment,' Ms Palaszczuk told reporters in Brisbane on Wednesday as the state's quarantine hotels filled up.

Mr Andrews agreed, saying: 'We have it within our power to dramatically reduce the number of people who are coming back just for these next three or four months until we get a critical mass of people with a jab.

'It won't be easy to lock some people out. But locking some people out is much better than locking everybody down,' he added.

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews on Wednesday said the caps should not be cut because Australians should be allowed to come home.

Professor Kelly said only six in 1,000 international arrivals had Covid-19.

The National Cabinet also discussed the troubled national vaccine rollout and mixed messaging around the AstraZeneca jab.

Mr Morrison on Monday said Australians under 40 could consult their GP about getting the abundant AstraZeneca vaccine.

But Queensland's chief health officer Jeannette Young said they should wait for Pfizer because of a very small risk of blood clots.

Australia's expert immunisation panel reiterated its advice that Pfizer was preferred for all people aged under 60.

Thursday was a record day for vaccinations with more than 160,000 people receiving jabs nationwide.

Almost eight per cent of Australian adults are now fully vaccinated, but the nation lags far behind all other comparable countries.

Mr Morrison late on Thursday completed 14 days of quarantine at The Lodge in Canberra, after returning from the G7 summit in the UK, and headed to Parliament House to lead the meeting.

On Friday Sydney - which is in day six of a two-week lockdown - recorded 31 new locally acquired cases of Covid-19, with 13 of them active in the community for all or part of their infectious period.

The new case numbers take the tally to 226 since the current outbreak began on June 16.

More warnings have been issued for potential exposure sites, including the T2 domestic terminal at Sydney Airport, the Des Renford Swimming Pool at Maroubra in Sydney's east and Club Marconi at Bossley Park in the west.

There are three Sydney residents and one in Brisbane in ICU.

The virtual meeting of state and territory leaders hosted by the PM decided to halve international travel caps. Pictured: NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian
Gladys Berejiklian has taken a swipe at 'frenemy' Annastasia Palaszczukby saying she is disappointed the Queensland premier called for lower the caps for international arrivals.

Ms Palaszczuk on Thursday said she wants the travel cap of arrivals to be reduced by at least 50 per cent, which has since been granted by Scott Morrison.

'We are at capacity. We're stretched, and we need an immediate reduction by 50 per cent,' Ms Palaszczuk said.

When asked on Friday morning about the Queensland premier's suggestions, Ms Berejiklian said her 'heart goes out to thousands' of Australians who are still stranded overseas.

'Secondly, and I expressed this view - I have expressed it publicly, but I have also expressed it to my colleagues, the Premiers and Chief Ministers in other jurisdictions: Just because you reduce the number of people coming in, doesn't mean outbreaks aren't going to happen,' she told reporters after announcing 31 new cases in NSW.

When asked on Friday morning about the Queensland premier's suggestions, Ms Berejiklian (pictured) said her 'heart goes out to thousands' of Australians who have had to wait longer to come home from overseas

Ms Palaszczuk on Thursday said she wants the travel cap of arrivals into Queensland to be reduced by at least 50 per cent

'NSW, without complaint, has been welcoming home 3,000 Aussies every single week. We have more than 5,500 people in our quarantine system right now.

'Yes, we have had issues but if you compare that to other states who have only had a few hundred coming in or far less numbers, bringing less people home doesn't mean you won't have outbreaks.'

Ms Palaszczuk said Queensland's hotel quarantine system was 'stretched' and 'down to the final number of beds'.

'We are now searching for additional hotels for our hotel quarantine,' she said.

Scott Morrison on Friday announced Australia's weekly arrival cap will be cut in half to decrease the risk of Covid-19 outbreaks from hotel quarantine.

Scott Morrison on Friday announced Australia's weekly arrival cap will be cut in half to decrease the risk of Covid-19 outbreaks from hotel quarantine

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews on Wednesday said the caps should not be cut because Australians should be allowed to come home. Pictured: Sydney hotel quarantine at the Marriott

He announced the change after a National Cabinet meeting on Friday morning as 12 million Australians endured lockdowns.

International arrivals were capped at 6,370 a week but Labor premiers wanted this dramatically reduced.

Ms Berejiklian - whose state has taken half of all returned travellers - said she didn't agree but accepted the decision.

'I am disappointed that every State hasn't done its fair share but I appreciate and have to respect the decision of National Cabinet,' she said.

What were the weekly arrival caps before the cut in half? NSW: 3,010 QLD: 1,300 VIC: 1,000 SA: 530 WA: 530 NT: Federal repatriation flights to Howard Springs Advertisement

'I don't support the view that other Premiers have that this means mistakes aren't going to happen and we're not going to have outbreaks. That is still going to occur,' she warned.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews disagreed with his NSW counterpart, saying: 'We have it within our power to dramatically reduce the number of people who are coming back just for these next three or four months until we get a critical mass of people with a jab.

'It won't be easy to lock some people out. But locking some people out is much better than locking everybody down,' he added.

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews on Wednesday said the caps should not be cut because Australians should be allowed to come home.

Chief Health Officer Paul Kelly said only six in 1,000 international arrivals had Covid-19.

The National Cabinet also focussed on the troubled national vaccine rollout and mixed messaging around the AstraZeneca jab.

Mr Morrison on Monday said Australians under 40 could consult their GP about getting the abundant AstraZeneca vaccine.

But Queensland's chief health officer Jeannette Young urged said they should wait for Pfizer because of a very small risk of blood clots.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has blasted her critics as sexist and racist - just six weeks after she sparked fury by refusing to be interviewed by white journalists.

Her comments came in an interview with WTTW, a local PBS station, when she was discussing the city's recent spike in violence as well as critiques of her approach to handling it.

Phil Ponce, of WTTW, said, In recent months, there have been questions raised about your temperament and your reaction to criticism  a (Chicago) Tribune editorial used the term irascible  how much of this do you think might have to do with the fact that youre a woman and specifically a black woman?

In response, Lightfoot said, 99percent of it.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has blasted her critics as sexist and racist in an interview with WTTW, a local PBS station

Lightfoot also addressed the backlash she faced after refusing to be interviewed by white journalists to mark her two-year anniversary

Asked to elaborate, Lightfoot said, Look at my predecessors. Did people say that Rich Daly held tea sessions with people that he didnt disagree on? Ron Emmanuel was a polite guy who was a uniter? No. Woman and people of color are always held to a different standard. I understand that. Ive known that my whole life.'

'And the Tribune or whoever could write what they want. What Im doing is fighting for the residents of this city. Im an advocate. Im going to continue fighting. Obviously we need to be focused on uniting people as much as we can, but I was elected and ran on disrupting the status quo. And when you disrupt the status quo, you are gonna make people uncomfortable. Youre are gonna have people criticizing you.

Ponce and Lightfoot referenced an op-ed by The Chicago Tribunes editorial board titled, Add to Chicagos problems our defensive, irascible mayor.'

The article read, What voters didnt know is that they also were getting in Lori Lightfoot someone with a tendency toward the thin-skinned, the defensive, the short-tempered. And no, those arent personality quirks assigned to female leaders that would be treasured in a man. They are traits that interfere with advancing the goals of any politician, boss, CEO.

Lightfoot would have more wins on her policy agenda if she could better manage relationships. Instead, she battles with those from whom she needs support  from Chicago aldermen to state lawmakers to her own staff and even rank-and-file police officers, a constituency she desperately needs to help keep the city safe but for whom she offers little public support.

Lightfoot noted that the editorial was published shortly after she faced backlash in May over her decision to grant one-on-one interviews to only 'black and brown' reporters to mark her two-year anniversary in the role.

Gregory Pratt, a Chicago Tribune reporter who is Latino, revealed he was among those who had been granted an interview but the newspaper decided to cancel it when Lightfoot refused to lift her ban on other reporters.

'I am a Latino reporter @chicagotribune whose interview request was granted for today. However, I asked the mayor's office to lift its condition on others and when they said no, we respectfully canceled,' Pratt tweeted. 'Politicians don't get to choose who covers them.'

The Young Americans Foundation, a conservative network geared toward college students, wrote in a tweet on Thursday that, Lori Lightfoot has failed Chicago' in response to her latest claims

Lightfoot, who is the city's first female black mayor, said to WTTW, This criticism comes just about a month or so after I made a pointed decision at my two-year anniversary that I was only gonna give interviews for that two-year anniversary to journalists of color and it was like the sky was falling on the part of some of the folks that are embodiments of the status quo, including some of the media folks.

'Look around, look at the Tribune editorial board. Look at the editorial boards of most of the big media companies here in this city. They do not reflect our diversity and many of the people on those boards dont even live in Chicago. So Im sorry if I offend people by fighting for what people elected me to do, which is disrupt the machine, disrupt the status quo and make city government more responsive to the residents.

Following the interview, Lightfoot drew even more ire from her critics. The Young Americans Foundation, a conservative network geared toward college students, wrote in a tweet on Thursday that, Lori Lightfoot has failed Chicago.

And Tucker Carlson took aim at the mayor on his Fox News show.

He said: This is Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot was destroying our city explaining that anyone who complains about Chicago skyrocketing murder rate, anyone who mentions that is both a racist and a sexist.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been slammed for sending an 'unhinged' email to one of her female staffers berating her for failing to scheduled enough 'office time'

Lightfoot was blasted for sending a bizarre message last month repeating phrases to berate her staff for not coming into their office to work

'People are fleeing Chicago in huge numbers because Lori Lightfoot has completely mismanaged at the city. Dozens of people were shot last weekend, people are dying because of her mismanagement, but she takes no responsibility at all. None of them do. It's always your fault.

'I wonder how long the country is going to put up with this. No wonder our leaders seem so paranoid about Q-Anon and Proud Boys and all of these groups you've never heard of. Are they worried about groups that pose no threat to them? Maybe they know if they keep acting like this, there may be a revolution. These people are too incompetent, too nasty, too selfish, and too stupid to lead this country.

Last month, Lightfoot was also compared to Jack Torrance - the crazed character played by Jack Nicholson in The Shining - after sending an angry email which repeated the phrase 'Breaks or transition times between meetings are not office time,' in a bid to berate staff.

So far in 2021, shootings have gone up by 12 percent compared to the same period last year, with 1,489 incidents this year and 1,333 in 2020. This is a 59 percent increase since 2019, according to the Chicago Police Department's crime statistics for the week ending June 27.

Shootings were down in June, however, by 20percent, compared to last year. And total criminal complaints filed in the past 7 days have stagnated compared to the same period in 2020. There were 944 complaints reported this year, a three percent change from last years 918.
South Australia has reported one new Covid-19 case with a baby less than 12 months old testing positive to the virus.

State premier Steven Marshall said the baby is the fourth child of a miner to test positive after their father returned to Adelaide from the Northern Territory last Friday.

All six family members, who all have the infection, have been transferred to Adelaide's Tom's Court medi-hotel and are not considered a risk to the wider community.

'Our thoughts are with this family at the moment,' Mr Marshall said.

South Australia has reported one new Covid-19 case with a baby less than 12 months old testing positive to the virus (pictured, state premier Steven Marshall)

State premier Steven Marshall said the baby is the fourth child to test positive of a miner who returned to Adelaide from the Northern Territory last Friday (pictured, FIFO mine works catch a flight in Perth)

South Australia Chief Health Officer Nicola Spurrier said the baby had shown few symptoms.

'Little ones can catch Covid,' she said. 'Whilst children can catch Covid, they don't tend to get as sick.'

The miner father is 'very unwell' and may need to be transferred to Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Despite recording just one new case, Mr Marshall said South Australia will not roll back its current Covid-19 restrictions.

Those measures include a reduced density requirement for most venues, mandatory mask-wearing in high-risk settings and a limit of 10 people at family gatherings.

The premier says those measures are likely to stay in place until at least early next week.

South Australia also has hard border closures in place with Western Australia, NSW, Queensland and the ACT.

Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier said she was 'feeling very comfortable this morning' about the situation in South Australia.

Despite recording just one new case, Mr Marshall said South Australia will not reduce its current Covid-19 restrictions

Those measures include a reduced density requirement for most venues, mandatory mask-wearing in high-risk settings and a limit of 10 people at family gatherings

Close and casual contacts of the miner, who flew back into Adelaide last week, have been tested and all returned negative tests, including a group of his fellow workers.

The miner had been working in the Northern Territory before flying back to Adelaide last Friday.

South Australia Health said they were also testing 28 other miners who had been working at the same site.

Chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier said officials had moved to require anyone on the same Alice Springs to Adelaide flight as the infected miner to go into isolation.

More than 100 people who were on board VA1742 have already been contacted.

Checking is also underway to identify any possible contacts at Adelaide Airport and at a suburban takeaway food outlet the man visited on his way home (pictured, health workers conduct Covid-19 tests at Victoria Park in Adelaide)

Checking is also underway to identify any possible contacts at Adelaide Airport and at a suburban takeaway food outlet the man visited on his way home.

Professor Spurrier said while the outbreak was regarded as contained at this stage, more work remained to be done and officials did not want the Delta strain of the virus to become widespread in the community.

'What we're seeing with this Delta variant is there's almost a 100 per cent hit rate for close contacts,' she said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky have said that getting vaccinated is more important than wearing a mask to combat the Indian Delta variant of COVID-19.

The two health experts spoke at a White House press briefing Thursday, amid a 10 percent spike in COVID cases nationwide and said that vaccinated residents are, in fact, protected from the variant and the WHOs recommendations are meant for communities with low vaccination rates.

White House COVID tsar Fauci said, You have a broad recommendation for the country as a whole that, if you are vaccinated, you have a high degree of protection so you need not wear a mask indoor or outdoor.

'But also as its been said and as the CDC has recommended, theres a degree of flexibility. People at the local level, depending on the on-ground situation, will make recommendations or not according to the local situation.

Furthermore, they said that it is more important for unvaccinated residents to get their shots to protect against the Delta variant as opposed to wearing face masks.

Receiving one dose of a two-dose mRNA vaccine - those made by Pfizer and Moderna - is not believed to offer sufficient protection from the highly-infectious Delta variant. But completing the two dose vaccine is currently thought to offer around 96 per cent protection from serious illness as a result of a COVID infection.

The Delta variant is now believed to account for a fifth of new COVID infections in the US, amid fears numbers could soon surge, especially in areas with low vaccination take-up.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky recently said that vaccinations, not masks, are the tool to protect against the COVID Delta variant

Walensky spoke with TODAY co-anchor Savannah Guthrie on Wednesday to address confusion over masks in reference to the World Health Organizations recommendations.

Los Angeles County Health Department has urged even fully-vaccinated locals to begin wearing the face coverings indoors, although it has stopped short of making that advice mandatory.

I think this is a very important thing to qualify, she said. We know that the WHO has to make guidelines and provide information to the world. Right now, we know as we look across the globe that less than 15 per cent of people around the world have been vaccinated, and many of those people have only received a one dose of a two-dose vaccine. There are places around the world that are surging, and so as the WHO makes those recommendations, they do so in that context.

Here, in the United States, were fortunate. We have three vaccines that we know are safe and effective. We have two-thirds of the adult population that is fully vaccinated and really quite protected from the variants that we have circulating here in the United States . . . those masking policies are not to protect the vaccinated, theyre to protect the unvaccinated.

She later added, If you are vaccinated, you are safe from the variants that are circulating here in the United States.

A tweet from immunologist Trevor Bedford breaks down Delta cases - pictured in purple - by state, showing how quickly it has grown in Missouri, Colorado, Utah and Arkansas

About 11 percent of the world has been inoculated compared to 47 percent of the American population, according to the CDCs most recent data, dated June 30

About 11 percent of the world has been inoculated compared to 47 percent of the American population, according to the CDCs most recent data, dated June 30. Nevertheless, some cities are suggesting that their residents begin wearing masks again despite many shedding their mask policies in May.

Los Angeles County public health officials advised even vaccinated people to mask up in indoor settings, despite the county being 60 percent vaccinated. The county, which is home to 10 million people, has averaged only five new coronavirus deaths per day over the last week and infection rates have risen slightly since the arrival of the Delta variant almost two months ago.

California Governor Gavin Newsom only lifted the Golden State's COVID restrictions on June 15.

He is facing a recall that could cost him his job over his handling of the crisis, meaning he will be reluctant to reimpose any more draconian COVID measures.

A chart created by DailyMail.com breaks down COVID cases by state

The above chart created by DailyMail.com reveals the number of deaths, per day, in June by COVID
The former artistic director of the State Opera of South Australia has been jailed for 14 years after being found guilty of abusing two teenage girls while working as a music teacher three decades ago.

Sentencing Timothy Adrian Sexton, 60, on Friday, Judge Geraldine Davison said the protection of children was paramount as she also imposed a non-parole period of eight years in relation to Sexton's convictions on two counts of maintaining an unlawful sexual relationship with a child.

Judge Davison said the lengthy terms were appropriate given Sexton had not accepted the verdict of the jury and continued to deny any sexual offending.

Timothy Adrian Sexton (pictured) was sentenced to 14 years jail for unlawfully maintaining a sexual relationship with two girls from 1989-1993

"You are not remorseful for it and you, therefore, have no insight in relation to the impact of your behaviour on others," she said.

At the start of his District Court trial, the jury heard the Sexton had "beguiled" the girls, believing his good reputation meant there was almost no risk of his conduct being exposed.

He pleaded not guilty to maintaining an unlawful sexual relationship with two of the girls.

He also denied multiple counts of unlawful sexual intercourse and indecent assault in relation to a third victim, with the jury acquitting him in relation to those allegations.

The offences were all alleged to have occurred between 1989 and 1993.

Opening the crown case, prosecutor Carmen Matteo said the girls came to develop strong feelings for their teacher.

"They were beguiled by the talented, handsome and charismatic Mr Sexton," she said.

"Each girl admired the accused musically and as a teacher and on the prosecution case, he would have known that.

"Each girl had a crush on him and on the prosecution case, he would have known that too.

"They flirted with the young, handsome Mr Sexton and it is the prosecution case he returned that attention."

In District court in South Australia, Mr Sexton (pictured) denied the claims and pleaded not guilty, as his non-parole period was set to eight years by judge Geraldine Davison

Ms Matteo told the jury that a common thread through the accounts of the three alleged victims was that they were willing participants in flirtatious conduct and ultimately sexual activity with the accused.

"Nevertheless, these were teenage girls under the age of legal consent. They were children and the accused was their teacher," she said.

Sexton spent several days in the witness box defending himself and denying the prosecution allegations.

Before resigning in 2017, he was also the state opera's chief executive.

He had been with the company since 2011 and was in charge of both its administration and artistic management.
Winston Marshall has revealed how he felt pressured to apologize for praising a right-wing book by woke 'swarm of snakes' online who branded him a Nazi before he dramatically quit Mumford & Sons.

Marshall, 33, told former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss about his announcement last week that he was quitting the band after 14 years, following the fallout from his recommendation of Andy Ngo's book attacking the Antifa movement.

Asked how he felt about announcing his departure from the band, replied: 'Bloody terrified. Yeah, particularly the last half an hour before I was very nervous, but I feel like it's gone.

'I feel like I got my integrity back and I feel like I got my soul back. I feel good now.'

Winston Marshall, 33, announced last week that he was quitting Mumford & Sons after 14 years. He left the band following controversy over his March tweet, saying he was interested by Andy Ngo's book. Marshall was attacked and hounded from the band

Marshall (second from right) is seen with bandmates - from left, Ben Lovett, Marcus Mumford, and Ted Dwane

Writing on Medium, Mr Marshall said he 'failed to foresee' that his praise of the book Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan To Destroy Democracy 'could be interpreted as approval of the equally abhorrent Far-Right'

In March, Marshall shared his thoughts on Ngo's book, 'Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.'

He tweeted: 'Finally had the time to read your important book. You're a brave man.'

The post was met with backlash from fans, and Marshall apologized and announced he would take some time away from Mumford & Sons 'to examine my blindspots.'

On June 25, Marshall announced he was exiting the band, which he co-founded with Marcus Mumford, Ben Lovett and Ted Dwane in 2007.

Marshall spoke to Bari Weiss for her podcast

He told Bari Weiss on Thursday that he was 'terrified' to quit the band.

'It was the bloody hardest decision I can remember,' he said.

'I've been in the band since I was 19. It was a really difficult thing, but I didn't see another way out of this sort of moral conundrum that I found myself in. And so this felt like the right way forward

Marshall told Weiss that he had been labelled 'a fascist and a Nazi' for his tweet, and his band members had been trolled.

He said he had unleashed 'a swarm of snakes who come for every aspect of your life'.

'I was absolutely, totally sincere in being sorry to the band and remain so,' he said.

'What I had done had been unintentional, but it brought a lot of trouble to them. And so I was and am still sorry for that.

'The apology wasn't for what I did, it was for how it was interpreted. So I think it was true at the time.'

The musician said that he found solace in his faith, and was now focusing on his work with human rights in Hong Kong.

'Well, if I can quote the great American theologian of all time, Kanye West, he said, fear God and you will fear nothing else,' Marshall said. 'And I love that because for me, I do fear God. And I think it's true. That if you fear God sincerely, then you won't fear worldly issues, worldly problems.'

Weiss is no stranger to abrupt departures herself, having quit the Times last year with a resignation letter that went viral where she railed against the liberal newspaper's bias and said it no longer served journalism.

Marshall referenced her letter in the interview when she asked him: 'Had you felt in the past like you had had you stumbled onto land mines before? Or had you been tamping down your views about any number of issues for the sake of the band?

He replied: 'Well, this is where I thought that your resignation letter. One thing that resonated with me is the idea that Twitter had become the editor of The New York Times, and I'm aware that similar in music or I'm sure for all companies dealing with public relations, is that Twitter basically dictates their public relations.

'Because if you say the wrong thing or support the wrong thing, according to whatever Twitter mob that then dictates the press, then the press damages reputations. So there's a real similarity there, I think.

And a previous example certainly for me was meeting Jordan Peterson a few years ago. For me, his work was pretty influential on my contribution to the last record. But the difficult thing is that, according to Twitter, it's a divisive issue.

'And the music press, on the whole, is probably quite biased. So I never really trusted them to be able to talk about something that I thought was really positive and cool and exciting.'

Ngo's (left) book Unmasked claims to expose Antifa - the name for protesters in the US who arrive at far-right marches to oppose them - as a 'violent extremist movement'. Pictured right: Marshall's tweet

Marshall said that he was relieved to have left the band which he co-founded in 2007. (L-R) Ben Lovett, Marcus Mumford, Winston Marshall and Ted Dwane of Mumford & Sons

In a separate interview earlier this week, Marshall told BBC Radio 4 that he quit Mumford & Sons to spare his bandmates from being 'dragged under a bus' by the 'cancel culture viral mob'.

'In the public eye we were a unit and that's what I suppose these internet mobs do,' he said.

'They go for all those people around you and that's what I think as so troubling for me about the experience was to see my friends get dragged under the bus with me which is not fair on them.

'It felt like very distracting unwanted attention and possibly damaging for the brand of the band. That's why I've decided I should let them be.'

Marshall, the son of British hedge fund tycoon Sir Paul Marshall, 61, said his former bandmates were 'so sweet and stood by me and invited me to continue'.

'They've been perfectly honorable throughout and I'm very grateful for that,' he said.

'I still, sort of, obviously regret that this situation even came about and, with hindsight, it was a foolish tweet to have made.

'But it's sort of happened and I'm at peace with it, I think.'

The folk rock musician was attacked on social media earlier after calling Mr Ngo's book 'important' and describing the US journalist - who has been attacked while covering street clashes - a 'brave man'.

However, following a backlash he apologized, saying that he was 'taking time away from the band to examine my blindspots'.

On Tuesday Marshall said he regretted the statement, saying: 'The apology I put out I felt participated a little bit in the lie that such extremism doesn't exist. That was really bothering my conscience.

'Internally I was quite distraught by that. I felt my integrity being gnawed at and the only way I could square those two things is by this decision I made.'

Marshall said he hoped to be more outspoken on the future about the issues close to him.

'Whenever topics so inspire me I hope I can speak about them, whatever those topics may be,' he said.

'I want to be able to speak without those around me, those I love, getting in trouble for that. So whatever those topics might be, if its Hong Kong, if it's the Uighurs, who knows what's next.

'But I hope to speak freely and that's a big part of the decision I made.'

Marshall's Brexiteer father Sir Paul backed him for quitting the band.

The investor shared his son's Medium.com essay on Twitter with the caption: 'Very proud of my son!'.

In a 1,263-word essay on Medium, the 33-year-old described how his 'innocuous' endorsement of Andy Ngo's book on far-Left extremist group Antifa triggered 'tens of thousands of angry retweets and comments'.

He said he 'failed to foresee' his praise of Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan To Destroy Democracy 'could be interpreted as approval of the equally abhorrent Far-Right' and feared it would bring his bandmates 'more trouble'.
Australians are so confused about the ever-changing vaccine advice that 90 per cent of complaints about jab scams are from genuine announcements.

Ninety per cent of vaccine-related complaints to ACCC-run Scamwatch in June turned out to be from 'legitimate' advice about AstraZeneca or Pfizer jabs.

The service received 108 reports pertaining to Covid vaccines, however 101 of them were deemed to be genuine information from nonfraudulent websites.

Sydneysiders under 40 said they didn't have to undergo eligibility questions on Facebook and WhatsApp in order to book a Pfizer vaccine.

How the links became assessable to the general public isn't known, but cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt said some links have URLs that are not 'consistent with what we'd expect for a government site and are similar with patterns seen in phishing attacks'.

Ninety per cent of vaccine-related complaints to ACCC-run Scamwatch in June turned out to be from 'legitimate' advice about AstraZeneca or Pfizer jabs

Sydneysiders under 40 said they didn't have to undergo eligibility questions on Facebook and WhatsApp in order to book a Pfizer vaccine

'It is dangerous that links are circulating that don't use government domain names. More needs to be done to make it easy to make sure the public understand the correct websites to use for vaccine registration,' he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Alan Zheng, from Eastwood, said a link he and his friends used to book Pfizer said it seemed 'too good to be true'.

'The website seemed a bit strange and had no government domain name but the confirmation for the appointment was at a Liverpool vaccination clinic. When I called the COVID-19 hotline they hadn't heard of the website I was using to book,' he told the publication.

Mr Zheng cancelled his appointment and even thought about suspending his Medicare card because he was so worried the site was fraudulent.

'If the site was legitimate it seems like it could have been designed in a better way,' he said.

Scott Morrison announced a Friday crisis meeting with the states to try and get some agreement on what fully vaccinated Australians can do - including thresholds for lockdowns and travel exemptions for the fully vaccinated.

But just 7.9 per cent of the Australian population have had both shots of a Covid vaccine, compared to 46 per cent in the United States and 47 per cent in the United Kingdom.

The Prime Minister hailed a 'new deal for Australians' as he explained the stages titled vaccinate, prepare and pilot; post vaccination phase; consolidation phase; and final phase.

The first phase involves halving the number of arrivals into the country to 3,035 a week until August 31 to help keep out the highly contagious Delta strain, while the final stage sees all restrictions lifted except for testing of unvaccinated arrivals.

The pace of the plan depends on the vaccine rollout, with lockdowns eliminated once a certain percentage of Aussies have been fully jabbed with two doses

Scott Morrison announced a Friday hailed a 'new deal for Australians' as he explained the stages titled vaccinate, prepare and pilot; post vaccination phase; consolidation phase; and final phase

The pace of the plan - which will eventually let the country manage Covid like flu - depends on the vaccine rollout, with lockdowns eliminated once a certain percentage of Aussies have been fully jabbed with two doses.

'I have made it very clear today what is on the other side. If we all get vaccinated then this all changes,' Mr Morrison said.

'The pathway we have agreed today gives all Australians encouragement and much needed hope in what has been a very difficult time.'

The plan was announced after 12 million Australians were locked down this week due to several outbreaks across the nation.

Darwin ended its lockdown on Friday at 1pm after recording zero cases but Brisbane's was extended until Saturday night due to two new infections.
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Batley & Spen 2021 by-election results Kim Leadbeater (Lab) 13,296 (35.27%)

Ryan Stephenson (C) 12,973 (34.42%)

George Galloway (WP) 8,264 (21.92%)

Thomas Gordon (LD) 1,254 (3.33%)

Corey Robinson (Yorkshire) 816 (2.16%)

Therese Hirst (Eng Dem) 207 (0.55%)

Jack Thomson (UKIP) 151 (0.40%)

Howling Laud Hope (Loony) 107 (0.28%)

Mike Davies (Green Soc) 104 (0.28%)

Paul Bickerdike (CPA) 102 (0.27%)

Jonathan Tilt (FA) 100 (0.27%)

Anne Marie Waters (FB) 97 (0.26%)

Andrew Smith (Rejoin) 75 (0.20%)

Oliver Purser (Soc Dem) 66 (0.18%)

Jayda Fransen (Ind) 50 (0.13%)

Susan Laird (Heritage) 33 (0.09%)

Lab maj 323 (0.86%)

Electorate 79,373; Turnout 37,695 (47.49%) Advertisement

Sir Keir Starmer today claimed 'Labour is coming home' after the party's narrow victory in the Batley and Spen by-election delivered a massive boost to his struggling leadership.

Labour managed to cling onto the seat by securing a majority of just 323 votes and a jubilant Sir Keir tried to fuse the win with England's Euro 2020 success.

Speaking in the constituency this morning, Sir Keir declared: 'Labour is back. This is just the start. I want many more days like this. Labour is coming home.

The victory is likely to stave off a political crisis for Sir Keir who reportedly would have faced a leadership challenge from deputy leader Angela Rayner if the party lost another of its Red Wall seats after defeat in the Hartlepool by-election in May.

Meanwhile, senior Tories blamed their second-placed finish on Matt Hancock.

Amanda Milling, the co-chairman of the Conservative Party, said the former health secretary's romance with aide Gina Coladangelo 'was something that came up' on the doorstep following his resignation last Saturday.

Tory peer and pollster Lord Hayward said Mr Hancock's behaviour was likely one of the reasons why the party lost, along with Boris Johnson's failure to sack him.

He said: 'I think it's a combination of both sides- it's not just Matt Hancock, it is the decision of the Prime Minister, because of the apparent delay in taking action.'

The polling expert Sir John Curtice said many Tories will inevitably blame the scandal for the election defeat.

Labour held the constituency with a wafer-thin majority following a brutal few weeks on the campaign trail that saw candidates abused and heightened racial and sectarian tension.

Murdered Jo Cox's sister Kim Leadbeater won for the party as she fended off Tory challenger Ryan Stephenson, who came second, and maverick George Galloway, who came third.

Speaking after she was declared the winner, Ms Leadbeater said she had thought about her family and her sister often during the last few weeks, adding: 'If I can be half the MP Jo was, I know I will do her proud.'

She also thanked West Yorkshire Police for the protection she had been given amid claims supporters of Mr Galloway's Workers Party had intimidated her, as she said: 'Sadly I needed them more than ever.'

The Labour MP added: 'I'm absolutely delighted that the people of Batley and Spen have rejected division and they've voted for hope.'

Labour sources suggested the win should prompt Sir Keir's critics to retreat, telling Politico: 'Everyone's been calling this a referendum on Keir's leadership. Well, we've won  bucked the trend, held onto this marginal seat and advanced in Tory areas. A fantastic result.'

In a sign that Sir Keir's position is now stabilising, Diane Abbott, the former shadow home secretary and a key figure on the Labour left, said 'we won and we are moving forward'. She had said in May that a defeat in the by-election would have meant it was 'curtains' for Sir Keir.

Meanwhile, Lord Mandelson, a key figure in the Blair governments, said there should now be a 'period of silence' from those on the Labour hard-left who he claimed have been 'conspiring' against Sir Keir, hoping that Mr Galloway would deprive the party of victory 'to result in a blow' to the current leader.

The peer claimed that Ms Rayner had been 'egged on by people who are serving their own factional purposes and interests' and that 'she should realise that these are not her friends'.

Sir Keir said: 'Kim embodies everything I want the Labour Party to stand for: passionate about her local community and determined to bring people together.

'We won this election against the odds, and we did so by showing that when we are true to our values  decency, honesty, committed to improving lives - then Labour can win. This result shows Labour at its best.'

Ms Rayner tweeted: 'Congrats to @kimleadbeater and the whole Labour team. Thank you to the people of Batley & Spen It was so good to see so many activists out on the doorstep.'

And Ms Cox's widower Brendan - who lost his wife in 2016 - added on Twitter: 'We are all incredibly proud of @kimleadbeater today and Jo would have been too.

'While the result between the two main parties was close the extremists & haters were left trailing. The people of Batley & Spen have voted for decency and positivity once again.'

Speaking to media outside the count at Cathedral House in Huddersfield, Mr Galloway said he will apply to the courts to have the election result set aside.

The Tories had gone into polling day as the bookmakers' favourite but the party fell short as Mr Johnson took a second by-election hit in the space of just one month after the Conservatives shock loss to the Lib Dems in Chesham and Amersham.

Kim Leadbeater of the Labour Party sticks up her thumb as she reacts to the media after winning the Batley and Spen by-election this morning

Sir Keir Starmer's leadership staved clear of crisis today after the Labour Party clung onto Batley and Spen in a crucial by-election, despite hard-Left insurgent George Galloway's efforts to woo Muslim voters in one of the most fractious campaigns in recent memory

A cheerful Sir Keir, who was facing a potential leadership challenge if the party lost the by-election, said this morning that the victory is 'just the start'

Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater, the sister of murdered MP Jo Cox, has managed to fend off Tory challenger Ryan Stephenson, who came second, and maverick Mr Galloway, who came third, with a majority of just 323

George Galloway and Ryan Stephenson at Cathedral House in Huddersfield, for the Batley and Spen by-election

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer leaves his London home on the morning of the Batley and Spen by-election

Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater celebrates after winning at Cathedral House in Huddersfield

The West Yorkshire constituency has voted Labour since 1997, but a Survation poll published last week put the Tories on 47 per cent, up 11 per cent from the 2019 general election, while Labour was on 43 per cent.

Ms Milling said the outcome in the by-election was a 'really disappointing result' but insisted it was 'always going to be a really tough battle for us'.

Asked by Sky News if the party lost because of the 'Hancock effect', Ms Milling replied: 'There are a whole load of issues that affected our campaign. It is lots of issues that come up on the doorstep.

'We fought a really hard campaign, I am really disappointed and particularly disappointed for Ryan but at the end of the day this wasn't a great result for Labour.'

Asked if she conceded that Mr Hancock's behaviour had an impact on the result, she said: 'It was something that came up on the doorstep, I have to be honest about that.

'They had some issues over the weekend in terms of what happened but Matt resigned and that was the right thing to do but there is a whole host of different issues that came up.

'But we also need to remember that governing parties don't gain by-elections and actually taking it to such a small number of votes in itself was a tremendous result, quite extraordinary I would say.'

Lord Hayward told Sky News: 'I think it's a combination of both sides- not just Matt Hancock, it the decision of the Prime Minister, because of the apparent delay in taking action.

'When you lose an election, particularly by a small margin, you can point to all sorts of things.'

The peer said some voters may have been 'upset' at the failure of Mr Johnson to sack Mr Hancock but he stressed that the scandal was not the sole reason for the seat being held by Labour.

He added: 'Certainly the supposition that every brick in the Red Wall will fall has been put to bed... There will be pressures from Conservative MPs in the south to say 'look, we lost Chesham and Amersham a fortnight ago, so please pay attention to us'.'

Meanwhile, Sir John, who is in charge of the main exit polls at general elections, added some in the Tory Party may blame the Hancock saga for not winning the seat.

He told the Today programme: 'The Tories will be kicking themselves that they did not manage to win one guess is perhaps the finger of blame may perhaps be pointed by some of his colleagues at Matt Hancock.

'There's been some signs in the polls that resignation has indeed has seen some slippage in the Conservative position over Labour.

'Given how narrow Labours victory has been that slip is bound to be another source of speculation about why in the end the Conservatives didn't make it.'

Ms Leadbeater paid tribute to her late sister this morning and said that she hoped she could be half the MP she was.

She told BBC Breakfast: 'It has been a very emotional campaign and today is very emotional for me, for lots of reasons... if I can be half the MP Jo was, I know I will do her proud. Fingers crossed that I do a fantastic job, just as she did.'

Earlier, she said in her victory speech: 'There's way too many people to mention by name, but I do want to refer to my family and my friends, who, without them, I could not have got through the last five years, never mind the last five weeks.

'My amazing parents and my wonderful partner, and I want to give a special shout out to my niece and nephew who I cannot wait to hug as soon as I see them', she added referring to the children of her late sister.

After taking the seat vacated by Labour's Tracey Brabin becoming the mayor of West Yorkshire in May, Ms Leadbeater also thanked the police for their help during the hard fought campaign, without going into specifics.

'I want to say a huge thank you to the police who, sadly, I have needed more than ever over the last few weeks.

'And I want to say a huge thank you to the whole Labour Party team for the hours, and the time, and the commitment that they have put into supporting me and helping me to get to this fantastic result this evening.'

She added to BBC Breakfast: 'It is very sad that when I should be incredibly excited - which I am and really looking forward to the future - that I am also conscious of security and safety.'

'We have got to reconnect with some of our voters... I don't think there is something fundamentally wrong but there is work to be done.

Earlier, she said in her victory speech: 'There's way too many people to mention by name, but I do want to refer to my family and my friends, who, without them, I could not have got through the last five years, never mind the last five weeks'

Kim Leadbeater of the Labour Party reacts after winning the Batley and Spen by-election at Cathedral House

Speaking after her victory was declared, Miss Leadbeater thanked West Yorkshire Police for the protection she had been given amid allegations of intimidation by supporters of Mr Galloway's Workers Party, but remarked: 'Sadly I needed them more than ever'

A supporter of the Monster Raving Loony Party waits as a bundle recount is undertaken for the Batley and Spen by-election at Cathedral House in Huddersfield

Workers Party candidate George Galloway at Cathedral House in Huddersfield talks to supporters during the Batley and Spen by-election count

Labour leader Sir Keir said the crunch by-election was a 'fantastic result for the brilliant and brave' Miss Leadbeater, adding: 'Kim ran a positive campaign of hope, in the face of division. She will be an outstanding Labour MP for Batley and Spen.'

Deputy leader Angela Rayner tweeted: 'It was good to see so many activists out on the doorstep'

Brendan Cox, the widower of Miss Cox, the Batley and Spen MP who was murdered by a far-Right extremist in June 2016 during the EU referendum campaign, tweeted: 'We are all incredibly proud of @kimleadbeater today and Jo would have been too'

'What I found during the campaign is, whatever people's backgrounds, we all care about the same things - we want close communities, good schools, good social care, a strong NHS... the values of the Labour party around those key issues are really important to pretty much everybody.'

After the early morning declaration, Ms Leadbeater said after catching up on some sleep and 'maybe having a few glasses of fizz' she would step into her work as soon as possible.

She said: 'I think the campaign has highlighted that there's lots to do. But I'm going to crack on with it and I will do my very best to represent the whole of Batley and Spen as their new MP. I am absolutely delighted that the people of Batley and Spen have rejected division and they voted for hope.'

Speculation had been rife Sir Keir could have faced a leadership challenge if Labour had lost yet another Red Wall election.

The victory will be seized upon by allies of the Labour leader as evidence that he can take the party back to power at the 2024 general election.

Sir Keir's position at the top of the Labour Party appeared to be stabilising this morning as some of his critics welcomed the victory.

Ms Abbott, who just last month had said it would be 'curtains' for Sir Keir if the party lost the by-election, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'I think it was Winston Churchill that said when it comes to elections one is enough.

We won and we have to move forward. Of course we have to continue to think about policy and sharpen and better define policy. But we won and we are moving forward.

But Lord Adonis, a Blairite former cabinet minister, said the situation for Labour was 'grim' despite the by-election success.

'The tiny Labour majority of 323 in Batley and Spen will stave off an immediate leadership challenge to Keir Starmer, just as the tiny Labour majority of 683 in the Peterborough by-election of June 2019 preserved Corbyn's leadership two years ago,' he said. 'But obviously the situation is grim.'

Meanwhile, Lord Mandelson said it was a 'really important victory as he called for Sir Keir's critics to be quiet.

He told the BBC: There were elements of the Corbynite left who seemed far too eager during this campaign for Galloways presence to result in a blow to Keir Starmer and his leadership.

'While others were campaigning in Batley they were conspiring and they should now stop their whispering, their agitation of Angela Rayner. She should realise that these are not her friends.

'She has been egged on by people who are serving their own factional purposes and interests, not hers.'

He added: To paraphrase an old Clement Attlee quote about these elements, a period of silence on their part would now be welcome.'

Ms Leadbeater would not be drawn on whether her victory had saved Sir Keir's job, as she said: 'I think lots of people have made this by-election about lots of other things. For me, it was always about the people of Batley and Spen and getting them the right MP, who cares for this area.

'So, the national stuff is going to play out, of course it is. But, for me, it's been about what's right for this area and it will continue to be about that.'

Labour national campaign co-ordinator Shabana Mahmood said Ms Leadbeater's win was 'richly deserved'.

She told BBC Breakfast: 'This was a collective effort. I was so pleased to see so many campaigners across the country.

'It was an election where local issues were at the heart of it. It was local and national but Kim is a local woman and she's the only candidate in this election who lived in that area.'

It follows a divisive by-election campaign in which Ms Leadbeater faced abuse from rival canvassers but was also accused of stoking racial and sectarian tensions by distributing leaflets aimed at the Pakistani Muslim population in the area.

Turnout was significantly down on the 66.5 per cent attained at the 2019 General Election at 47.61 per cent. However, there is normally a 15-point drop in turnout at by-elections compared to general elections.

Votes are counted for the Batley and Spen by-election at Cathedral House

Votes are counted at Cathedral House in Huddersfield, for the Batley and Spen by-election ahead of Miss Leadbeater's victory this morning

Votes are counted at Cathedral House in Huddersfield, for the Batley and Spen by-election

As the polls closed at 10pm, Ms Leadbeater accused her political rivals of 'intimidation and violence' and said there had been 'some unacceptable lows' during the six-week campaign for the West Yorkshire seat.

In a statement published on Twitter, she called on the victor to 'bring our community together and start working for local people' after a vicious campaign by Labour canvassers and supporters of Mr Galloway's Workers Party.

Ms Leadbeater, whose sister was murdered by a far-Right extremist during the 2016 referendum on EU membership, said: 'There have been many highs of this election campaign but sadly there have also been some unacceptable lows.

'The acts of intimidation and violence by some who have come here with the sole aim of sowing division have been deeply upsetting to witness. Whatever the result tonight, the first priorities of the new MP must be to bring our community together and start working for local people in every part of the constituency I am proud to call my home.'

The Labour victory is likely to deter any potential challengers to Sir Keir from going public amid rumours that Ms Rayner had received the backing of major trade unions if she had decided to run against her boss in the event of a defeat.

However, the deputy leader has apparently not approached any unions directly or told them that she wants the job.

It follows new polling this week which suggested as many as four in 10 party members would want him to stand down and make for new leadership in the wake of a loss.

A spokesman for Ms Rayner told the Times: 'These apparent conversations are news to Angela. She has been campaigning to get the vote out for Kim and has not had a conversation with anyone - from a trade union or otherwise - regarding the leadership of the Labour Party.'

Yesterday the Ashton under Lyne MP called reports she had been canvassing support from MPs and trade unions 'news to me'.

Meanwhile, her allies told the Guardian she does not want to stand now and they are concerned about the risk to her reputation if she stabs Sir Keir in the back.

Mr Galloway's Workers Party targeted Labour's Asian and white working-class coalition in a bid to topple Sir Keir's candidate.

In a polling day video, the former Labour MP said he had a 'real chance to bring about the biggest shock in British political history' and warned: 'One thing is certain: it's curtains for Keir.'

Tensions flared between Mr Galloway's party and Labour supporters as both sides sought the support of the constituency's Asian communities by grandstanding on international issues including Kashmir and Palestine.

George Galloway of the Workers Party reacts after the announcement of the results of the Batley and Spen by-election at Cathedral House

Prime Minister Boris Johnson pictured with Tory candidate for Batley and Spen Ryan Stephenson

Labour party candidate Kim Leadbeater leaves Norristhorpe United Reformed Church polling station after casting her vote in the West Yorkshire constituency by-election at Batley and Spen

Ballot boxes arrive at Cathedral House in Huddersfield, ready for the votes to be counted in the Batley and Spen by-election at Norristhorpe United Reformed Church in Liversedge

Ballot boxes arrive at Cathedral House in Huddersfield, ready for the votes to be counted in the Batley and Spen by-election

Kim Leadbeater, whose sister Miss Cox was murdered by a neo-Nazi terrorist during the 2016 referendum on EU membership, said there have been 'some unacceptable lows' during the six-week campaign for the seat in the West Yorkshire constituency

Voters in the West Yorkshire constituency of Batley and Spen are going to the polls in a by-election touted as a fundamental test of Sir Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party

Labour is defending a majority of more than 3,000 in the seat but the bookies have the Conservatives as odds-on favourites to follow up their victory in Hartlepool in May and heap further pressure on Sir Keir

Labour is under pressure 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

Earlier this week, Labour lashed out over a fake leaflet which purported to have been released by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) highlighting party leader Keir Starmer's support for Black Lives Matter in a bid to hit his popularity among working class white voters

Sir Keir's party was accused of stoking religious tensions after distributing a campaign leaflet which printed a photo of Mr Johnson shaking hands with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, in an area with a sizable Muslim population.

An arrow pointing to the photo said: 'The risk of voting for anyone but Labour is clear.' Mr Johnson also faced allegations he acted slowly on closing UK borders earlier this year despite concerns about the so-called Delta coronavirus variant because he wanted a trade deal with India.

Last week, supporters of Mr Galloway were accused of using the recent fighting between Israel and Hamas in Palestine - and the Jewish heritage of Sir Keir's wife - to attack Labour.

Sir Keir condemned as 'disgraceful' the abuse Ms Leadbeater faced from a man who challenged her over the situation in Kashmir and her stance on LGBT+ education in schools amid what he said were concerns from Muslim parents.

It comes after a teacher at Batley Grammar School was suspended after Muslim parents complained he had showed a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad to a blasphemy class.

Though an independent inquiry ruled that he could rejoin the school, the teacher continues to live in hiding. Voters have been concerned about rising crime, the closure of the Batley police station and the state of the economy after successive lockdowns.

An elderly Labour activist was allegedly physically attacked and pelted with eggs last week - with West Yorkshire Police confirming an 18-year-old man from Batley had been arrested on suspicion of assault.

Ms Leadbeater cast her vote early on Thursday morning in the Liversedge area, giving a thumbs-up to photographers.

She stressed she was the only one of the 16 candidates eligible to vote because she lives and works in the constituency.

In a message to voters after polls closed, Mr Stephenson said: 'Whatever the result, you proved that more and more local people are ready for change.'

Labour Leader Keir Starmer and Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater during a visit to the Jo Cox Community Wood in Liversedge

Labour party candidate Kim Leadbeater leaves Norristhorpe United Reformed Church polling station after casting her vote in the West Yorkshire constituency by-election at Batley and Spen

A man leaves Batley Town Hall aftert casting his vote on July 1, 2021 in Batley

Labour party candidate Kim Leadbeater leaves Norristhorpe United Reformed Church polling station today after casting her vote in the West Yorkshire constituency

Voters in the West Yorkshire constituency of Batley & Spen are heading to the polls in a crunch by-election which is being widely touted as a referendum on Sir Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party

Allies of Angela Rayner have been laying the groundwork for her to launch a leadership challenge against Sir Keir if Labour loses the crunch Batley and Spen by-election

Sir Keir's spokesman had insisted earlier this week that the leader is on a 'four-year path' to lead the party back into power and would not be standing down if he oversaw another electoral defeat.

'But he played down the prospect of a victory by saying it 'has always been a marginal seat' and that winning 'was always going to be challenging'.

The Batley and Spen by-election was triggered after Ms Brabin, who won the seat for Labour in 2019 with a 3,525 majority over the Conservatives, was elected as the mayor of West Yorkshire in May.

Ms Brabin, who quit after being elected mayor of West Yorkshire, also claimed last night that activists had been pelted with eggs and kicked in the head while on the campaign trail earlier this week.

She 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'.

She said: 'The group I was with included young people and the elderly. I witnessed them being egged, pushed and forced to the ground and kicked in the head.'

West Yorkshire Police confirmed on Sunday evening it was investigating, and Ms Brabin - who also holds the police and crime commissioner responsibility for the region - praised officers for their swift response.

She said: 'We know why tensions are rising in our streets. Those who want to sow division are not welcome in our community. 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. Lawless thugs are seeking to intimidate and attack those involved in the proper democratic process.'

Residents are voting amid accusations of foul play. Earlier this week, Labour lashed out over a fake leaflet allegedly released by the Trades Union Congress which highlighted Sir Keir Starmer's support for Black Lives Matter in a bid to hit his popularity among white working-class voters.

The TUC said it was part of a 'dirty tricks campaign' and that those responsible 'should be ashamed of themselves'.
Democrats are demanding that President Joe Biden pack the US Supreme Court with liberal justices after it upheld Republican-backed Arizona voting rules in its final decision of the 2020-2021 term.

Biden expressed his disappointment in the ruling on Thursday and called on Congress to restore fundamental voting rights, saying: 'In a span of just eight years, the Court has now done severe damage to two of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965  a law that took years of struggle and strife to secure.

'After all we have been through to deliver the promise of this nation to all Americans, we should be fully enforcing voting rights laws, not weakening them.'

Now Democrats are calling for Biden to take swift action to avoid further damage by the court by expanding it with more of his own appointees.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi branded the court's decision an 'unprecedented assault on voting rights' while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called it 'jaw-dropping' and 'unconscionable'.

'If you believe in open and fair democracy and the principle of one person, one vote, today is one of the darkest days in all of the Supreme Courts history,' Schumer said.

Sen Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, declared: 'Todays ruling is another blow to voting rights. We have no time to waste to protect the right to vote. We must abolish the filibuster and pass the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

'And we must expand the Supreme Court.'

Rep Mondaire Jones (D - New York), chimed in: 'And still some people have the nerve to question whether Court expansion is necessary. Expand the damn court.'

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Arizona voting regulations designed to protect against fraud. The six conservative justices voted in the majority

Democrats including Sen Ed Markey are now calling for Biden to take swift action to avoid further damage by the court by expanding it with more of his own liberal appointees

The 6-3 ruling, with the court's conservative justices in the majority, endorsed regulations designed to restrict so-called ballot harvesting and preventing voters from casting ballots outside their home precinct.

It comes as a raft of Republican states looks to tighten voting rules amid President Donald Trump's claims that fraud cost him the 2020 election.

The Supreme Court split along ideological lines. The justices in the majority, led by Samuel Alito said the measures did not violate a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal law that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.

He wrote: 'Having to identify one's own polling place and then travel there to vote does not exceed the 'usual burdens of voting.''

GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the decision was a 'resounding victory', adding that 'Democrats were attempting to make Arizona ballots less secure for political gain, and the Court saw right through their partisan lies.'

Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell praised the ruling and said activists were attempting to overturn the laws by blaming racial discrimination.

'Today, the Supreme Court affirmed that protections of the right to vote remain strong and that states are rightly empowered to administer and protect Americas elections.'

THE MEASURES CHALLENGED BY DEMS AND THE JUSTICES' ARGUMENTS AGAINST The Democratic National Committee challenged the following Arizona voting laws: An 'out-of-precinct' policy that prohibits provisional ballots from being counted if they weren't cast at a voter's designated polling place

The Supreme Court ruled the 'out of precinct policy' does 'not exceed usual burdens of voting'

A ban on third parties submitting ballots - or 'ballot harvesting' - outside of certain people including a voter's family and household, mail carriers and caregivers.

The justices argued that these measures 'deter potential fraud and improves voter confidence' The Democrats said these measures discriminated against racial minorities. Justice Alito said he would 'decline' to 'announce a test' on that could determine whether other Republican laws violate the Voting Rights Act. Alito wrote: 'Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act provides vital protection against discriminatory voting rules, and no one suggests that discrimination in voting has been extirpated or that the threat has been eliminated. But [the sectio] does not deprive the States of their authority to establish non-discriminatory voting rules Advertisement

'Today is a win for election integrity safeguards in Arizona and across the country,' Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich said in a statement following the court's ruling.

'Fair elections are the cornerstone of our republic, and they start with rational laws that protect both the right to vote and the accuracy of the results.'

Liberal justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the decision.

'What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten  in order to weaken  a statute that stands as a monument to America's greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,' wrote Kagan for the minority.

'What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about 'the end of discrimination in voting.'

'I respectfully dissent.'

The ruling represented a victory for the Arizona Republican Party and Brnovich. They had appealed a lower court ruling that deemed the restrictions unlawful.

The case involves a 2016 Arizona law that made it a crime to provide another person's completed early ballot to election officials, with the exception of family members or caregivers. Community activists sometimes engage in ballot collection to facilitate voting and increase voter turnout.

Ballot collecting is legal in most states, with varying limitations. Republican critics call the practice 'ballot harvesting.'

The other restriction at issue was a longstanding Arizona policy that discards ballots cast in-person at a precinct other than the one to which a voter has been assigned. In some places, voters' precincts are not the closest one to their home.

The case raised questions over whether fraud must be documented in order to justify new curbs.

Democrats have accused Republicans at the state level of enacting voter-suppression measures to make it harder for racial minorities who tend to support Democratic candidates to cast ballots. Many Republicans have justified new restrictions as a means to reduce voter fraud, a phenomenon that election experts have said is rare in the United States.

The Supreme Court split along ideological lines. The justices in the majority, led by Samuel Alito said the measures did not violate a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal law that prohibits racial discrimination in voting

Republicans are seeking to regain control of the U.S. Congress from the Democrats in the 2022 mid-term elections.

The Arizona legal battle concerned a specific provision called Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that bans voting policies or practices that result in racial discrimination.

Section 2 has been the main tool used to show that voting curbs discriminate against minorities since the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted another section of the statute that determined which states with a history of racial discrimination needed federal approval to change voting laws.

Arizona Republicans said in court papers that voting restrictions have partisan effects and impact elections. Invalidating the out-of-precinct policy would reduce Republican electoral prospects because it would increase Democratic turnout, they told the justices during March 2 arguments in the case.

The Republicans said that 'race-neutral' regulations on the time, place or manner of an election do not deny anyone their right to vote and that federal law does not require protocols to maximize the participation of racial minorities.

The Democratic National Committee and the Arizona Democratic Party sued over the restrictions. Arizona's Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has backed the challenge to the measures.

Republicans said the decision was a 'resounding victory' for election integrity, while President Biden said he was disappointed and urged Congress to pass voting rights legislation. Voters line up to cast their ballots in Arizona in November 2020

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year found Arizona's restrictions violated the Voting Rights Act, though they remained in effect for the Nov. 3 election in which Joe Biden, a Democrat, defeated Donald Trump, a Republican, in the state.

The 9th Circuit also found that 'false, race-based claims of ballot collection fraud' were used to convince Arizona legislators to enact that restriction with discriminatory intent, violating the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on denying voting rights based on race.

U.S. Senate Republicans on June 23 blocked Democratic-backed legislation that would broadly expand voting rights and establish uniform national voting standards to offset the wave new Republican-led voting restrictions in states.

Biden has sharply criticized Republican-backed state voting restrictions.

He described a measure signed by Georgia's Republican governor in March as 'an atrocity' and likened it to racist 'Jim Crow' laws enacted in Southern states in the decades after the 1861-65 U.S. Civil War to legalize racial segregation and disenfranchise Black people.
Outraged students have called for Bill Cosby's former co-star to be ousted from her position as dean at a top university for tweeting her support to him.

The hashtag 'ByePhilicia' began trending after Phylicia Rashad - who played Cosby's wife Clair Huxtable in The Cosby Show between 1984 and 1992 - tweeted: 'FINALLY! A terrible wrong is being righted - a miscarriage of justice is corrected.'

Rashad, 73, also shared her thoughts on Instagram, after Cosby was freed three years into a 10 year sentence when his conviction for indecent assault was overturned.

Her support prompted outrage among students and alumni at Howard University in Washington DC, where Rashad has worked as its dean of College of Fine Arts since May.

Former student, Andrew Addison, said Rashad's words showed she was unfit for her position, and called on Howard to 'do the right thing and rectify the situation.'

Another alumnus, Nylah Burton shared Rashad's tweet, and wrote: 'So proud to be from Howard University! Look at our role models! Defending serial rapists, warms the heart, it really does.'

Phylicia Rashad was condemned by students at Howard University in Washington DC - where she is a dean - over a tweet supporting the release of Bill Cosby

Rahsad sent this tweet after Cosby was released Wednesday - and condemnation soon followed

The journalist later added: 'SO, since the Dean of College of Fine Arts wants to tell all of her students that sexual assault doesnt matter to her.'

Whitney Meritus, who is part of Howard's class of 2024, wrote on Instagram: 'Hold her ass accountable.

'Id take a non-famous dean who believes SA victims over a celebrity dean who does sh*t like this...

'Dont get me wrong, I know she was his professor and all, but I dont think she deserves to lead the Chadwick A. Boseman School of Fine Arts. Not anymore.'

The school was named after Black Panther star Boseman after he died of cancer aged just 43 in August 2020.

Thousands of others took to Twitter to condemn Rashad too.

A tweeter called Mister Race Bannon shared a photo of the actress from the Cosby show, and wrote: 'I dont wanna live in a world where you cant even trust Clair Huxtable.'

Former student turned journalist Nylah Burton sarcastically tweeted she was 'so proud' to have gone to the college where Rashad now teaches

Whitney Meritus, a member of Howard's Class of 2024, took to Instagram and wrote 'Hold her ass accountable'

Other tweeters were stunned that the actress - famed for playing a wholesome TV mom - could share such a controversial sentiment

Black History Matters screenshotted the offending tweet, and captioned it: 'Tell me youre a hypocrite without telling me youre a hypocrite #ByePhylicia.'

Angela Belcamino said: 'Imagine rooting for Cosby's release from prison who admitted to drugging and assaulting women.'

And comedienne Jenny Johnson said: 'Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad mustve buried a body together. Its the only plausible reason I can come up with for her to still support him.

'#ByePhylicia' The hashtag was a play on the phrase 'Bye Felicia,' which first appeared in cult 1995 film Friday, and has since become a sassy way to dismiss someone.

Rashad later deleted the offending tweet, and posted a groveling apology.

She said: 'I fully support survivors of sexual assault coming forward. My post was in no way intended to be insensitive to their truth. Personally, I know from friends and family that such abuse has lifelong residual effects. My heartfelt wish is for healing.'

Howard University also posted a tweet claiming that 'survivors of sexual assault will always be our priority,' and admitting that Rashad's words 'lacked sensitivity.'

Rashad deleted the offending tweet, and issued this apology

Howard also shared a statement disavowing its dean's words - but did not say if she would be disciplined

It is unclear if she will face any disciplinary action.

Cosby was freed from prison in Montgomery County Correctional Facility on Wednesday, and was driven home to his mansion in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania to be reunited with his wife Camille.

He was freed three years into a ten year sentence after Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ruled that Cosby should never have been charged, tried or convicted in the first place.

Former Montgomery County Prosecutor Bruce Castor did not believe that Cosby accuser Andrea Constand's 2005 allegation of being drugged and raped was strong enough to bring charges against the star.

Rashad is pictured in the blue dress alongside Bill Cosby in hit sitcom The Cosby Show, which ran from 1984 to 1992

Cosby, 83, was released from prison in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, two years into his 10 year sentence after having his sexual assault conviction overturned

He persuaded Cosby to sit for a taped deposition for a civil case brought by Constand, which saw the comedian admit illegally drugging women and molesting them.

Castor - who defended Cosby at his second impeachment trial - gave Cosby a written guarantee that his admissions would not be used as evidence to bring criminal charges.

But after Castor quit his role, his successor Kevin Steele used the deposition admissions to bring criminal charges against Cosby in 2015.

Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ruled that the written promise to Cosby was binding, and overturned his conviction.
A Republican congressman claims Joe Biden is deliberately letting thousands of illegal migrants cross the US southern border.

Virginia Representative Bob Good told Fox News: 'We have no operational control, no legal control, no law enforcement control of our border.

'We are not enforcing our laws, we are not preventing people. This is willful and intentional on the part of this administration to facilitate the illegal entry into our country of tens of thousands, 180,000 in [the] month of Maysome 700,000 this year, of the ones weve apprehended.'

Good returned from a trip to the border on Thursday and said that he and several other Republican lawmakers witnessed groups of migrants crossing into Texas and boarding flights to other states.

Good joined with 19 other lawmakers from the Republican Study Committee to visit McAllen, Texas, concurrent to former President Donald Trump and Governor Greg Abbotts tour of the unfinished border wall.

Good said that, in addition to the families and young people crossing the border, he fears that there is no way to tell how many MS-13 gang members or criminals are able to cross freely and evade border security

A Republican congressman returned from a trip to the border on Thursday and said that the U.S. has lost all control of security

Virginia Representative Bob Good said he and several other Republican lawmakers witnessed groups of migrants crossing into Texas and boarding flights to other states

The group of Republicans visited the wall late at night to see what Good described as groups of migrants nonchalantly turning themselves over to Border Patrol as they crossed into the U.S.

We saw hundreds coming through in just a short time, we were there about midnight and just saw many many folks coming across the border, many illegals streaming across, he said. The crafty, the most cunning, most dangerous ones are trying to evade apprehension and theyre estimating tens of thousands of those on a monthly basis as well, and all of it controlled . . . by the Mexican crime cartels who are making hundreds of millions of dollars a month off of this.

Good said that, in addition to the families and young people crossing the border, he fears that there is no way to tell how many MS-13 gang members or criminals are able to cross freely and evade border security.

He added that Bidens administration has only allowed more illegal border crossings, despite claiming that the border is secure.

Vice President Kamala Harris - who has been tasked with fixing the border crisis - has been condemned over what critics say is her weak approach to the issue.

Good continued, The memo has not been received by these illegal aliens who continue to stream across because there is no prevention there at the border we can see. Its just accommodating them once they get across.

While boarding a plane at the Dallas International Airport, Good recalled seeing groups of supposed migrants on the plane with manila folder he believed to contain a Notice to Appear from the Department of Homeland Security.

I would estimate a third of people on that flight were illegal aliens who had their manila folders with some information marked on there to help them navigate the transportation through the airport and onto the plane, he said.

He added that his team spoke with a 31-year old woman with a manila envelop who was Guatemalan and spoke little English, but said she was traveling alone to Dallas and then Miami, Florida.

So here she is in McAllen taking the same flight we are to Dallas and, I presume from there from Dallas to Miami with no specific day on when she has to appear, and I guess were just hoping we'll be able to reach her at some date in the future and tell her when to appear, Good said.

Over 60,000 migrants were released into the country with a notice to appear in court or before Immigration Customs Enforcement, according to the Fox News article. Many immigrants have Notice to Appears because the Department of Justice is resuming non-detained immigration hearings this month.

He added that Bidens administration has only allowed more illegal border crossings, despite claiming that the border is secure

Good's trip coincided with former President Donald Trump and Governor Greg Abbotts tour of the unfinished border wall

Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the U.S.-Mexico border on June 23 after Republicans criticized her for three months for not making the trek as border czar. While she was there, agents with the El Paso Station Anti-Smuggling Unit found the 35 undocumented immigrants in a Central El Paso residence.

Seven of the illegal migrants were Mexicans, 19 were Guatemalan, seven Ecuadorian, one Nicaraguan and one Honduran, USBP officials said in a release.

The migrants were all sent back to Mexico under Title 42 and prosecution is still pending for one Mexican national who was the caretaker of the home where the migrants were found, officials said.

On returning from the border, Harris said, My trip to Guatemala and Mexico was about addressing the root causes.

'The stories that I heard and the interactions that we had today reinforce the nature of those root causes: a lack of economic opportunity; very often violence, corruption, and food insecurity; and basic needs not being met, including a fear of cartels and gang violence.

'So, the work that we have to do is the work of addressing the cause  the root causes. Otherwise, we will continue to see the effect: what is happening at the border.
The states' top doctors repeatedly talking down to Australians, telling people what to do and 'overreacting endlessly' to Covid is wearing thin - even to an infectious diseases expert.

Sixteen months after the country suffered through its first lockdowns, the nation's chief health officers have become household names, some even collecting gushing online fan bases.

But it's not just members of the public who are tiring of the constant updates, lifestyle restrictions and 'fearmongering' as 12 million Australians in four states and territories are locked down again.

Professor Emma McBryde, a disease modeller at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health & Medicine at James Cook University, said trigger happy doctors are grating even on her.

'I think it's really wearing thin these endless news cycles of chief health officers - and premiers for that matter - talking down to us, telling us what we should be doing and overreacting endlessly to Covid outbreaks and doing what they think might be popular at the time.'

Professor McBryde was particularly incensed about repeated state lockdowns based on single cases.

'If you're chief health officer and you haven't got a health department handle on one case, you shouldn't be showing your face in public as far as I'm concerned,' she said.

Queensland's Chief Health Officer - and governor-in-waiting - Dr Jeannette Young urged Australians aged under 40 not to get the AstraZeneca vaccine over rare blood clotting fears

The epidemiologist slammed Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr Jeannette Young's comments this week where she said 'I do not want under 40s to get (the) AstraZeneca (vaccine)' due to the extremely rare risk of blood clots.

'It was excessively cautious and really unhelpful,' said Prof McBryde, who has described the comments as 'fear mongering.'

'What she was really saying is, don't take advice from your local doctor, don't make an informed decision yourself, just listen to me and I say, don't do it.

'What motivated her to do that, I have no idea. The reasons she gave were fairly hard to credit.'

Professor Emma McBryde, an infectious diseases modeller with James Cook University in Queensland

Dr Young said she doesn't want to see an 18-year-old Queenslander dying from a blood clot.

(And Dr Young claimed at a later press conference that she wasn't telling people not to make an informed choice by speaking to their doctor, just giving her opinion).

But Prof. McBryde said the ratio of 18-year-olds to die from Covid without being vaccinated was 80 per million, compared to the one in a million chance of death from a clot after being vaccinated with jabbed with AstraZeneca.

'Your risk of dying in a car accident every day is about one in a million... this is a very safe vaccine.

'To say "don't have it" because she doesn't personally want to be responsible for the one death that may happen in Queensland - to me that's a bizarre stand to take.

'Especially when our lives are being shut down, we're losing our jobs, the mental health consequences of all these shutdowns are starting to show (and) people are missing months of school.'

Other chief health officers have rightly or wrongly come under fire recently from some experts for hyped-up comments about the virus.

Brett Sutton - who garnered a large female fan base - drew criticism in May for hyping Melbourne's May Covid variant as an 'absolute beast'

Victoria's Professor Brett Sutton was criticised in May for describing the Kappa Covid outbreak sweeping Melbourne as an 'absolute beast'.

He claimed the virus 'spreading in settings and circumstances we've never seen before.'

That was rejected by University of Melbourne Professor James McCaw, who told The Age there was no evidence the virus was spreading in different ways.

South Australia's Professor Nicola Spurrier drew howls from footy fans in June while giving advice for spectators at a Collingwood AFL game at Adelaide Oval.

'If you are at Adelaide Oval and the ball comes towards you, my advice to you is to duck and just do not touch that ball,' she said.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Friday announced the four 'phases' Australia will go through to get past the pandemic

Professor McBryde told Daily Mail Australia she hoped Australia had reached the low point of the pandemic this week.

Confusion and inter-state bickering has reigned over the nation's vaccination program in the wake of Prime Minister Scott Morrison opening the door to under 40s getting the AstraZeneca jab.

Prof McBryde said getting vaccinated is the most important thing all Australians can do to get the country out of the pandemic.

Mask wearing and avoiding crowded indoor spaces may be with us for some time to come, she said.

She hopes for more detail on National Cabinet's four-phase plan out of the pandemic, announced on Friday.

'We're all fed up, we're sick of the bickering. We need a timetable on the way out.'
Newly-released video footage shows cop killer socialite Jasmine Hartin blasting a watermelon to pieces with a perfectly-aimed shot - and hanging from the ceiling of a bar.

The clips, shared with 7 News Belize on Wednesday, showed 32 year-old Hartin - accused of the manslaughter of police Superintendent Henry Jemmott - taking aim with a 12-gauge shotgun at a watermelon impaled on stakes on a paradise beach.

She easily strikes the foodstuff with the weapon, spraying the fruits' bright red flesh through the air.

Afterwards, Hartin - who was wearing a black halter neck top for the outing - turns to smile at the camera, then pretends to blow smoke of the gun barrel.

Other photos showed her during separate visits to shooting ranges, with 7 News saying the images gave the impression that Hartin is a 'masterful' markswoman.

She is understood to have told police that she 'struggled' with getting the magazine clip out of the gun on the night of Supt Jemmott's death, saying she had no idea there was a bullet in the chamber.

Newly-released footage shows Canadian socialite Jasmine Hartin taking aim at a watermelon on a paradise beach with a 12-gauge shotgun...

...and hitting her target, sending bright red flesh spraying through the air

Afterwards, Hartin, 32, can be seen turning to smile at the camera...

...before pretending to blow smoke off the barrel of the gun

And the TV station also shared footage of her confidently clambering into the rafters of a beach-hut style bar, before plonking herself down on a saddle suspended from its roof and dancing while sitting down.

7 News speculated that the damaging images had been shared to try and prevent Hartin, who is from Canada, from regaining custody of her children - a twin boy and girl aged four.

After being released from a notorious Belizean prison on bail last month, Hartin was filmed confronting her common-law husband Andrew Ashcroft about why he wouldn't let her see their two young children.

Andrew Ashcroft's father is British billionaire businessman Lord Michael Ashcroft.

Hartin was also filmed climbing onto the roof of a beach hut-style bar, before sitting down on a saddle suspended from the ceiling and dancing

Hartin fears the embarrassing images were released to stop her seeing her children, a twin boy and girl aged four

Hartin accused her husband and in-laws of abandoning her in the wake of Jemmott's killing. She said it was accidental, and happened while he was showing her how to use his gun.

Hartin claims no-one from the family of her former partner Andrew Ashcroft visited her while she was on bail over the shooting because they had been told they couldn't have 'bad press associated with their reputation'.

She has also claimed that her husband sent a back-channel request in an attempt to persuade her to give up her stake in their business.

'It was the Monday the 31st of May I was in the San Pedro police station after a magistrate had denied my bail,' she told 7 News.

'I was clearly upset, very stressed out and a letter was sent with a mutual friend to meet me in the male's bathroom at the front of the police station to sign a one paragraph statement that says, I Jasmine Hartin sign all shares of Kidd Estates Limited which is 10 percent to Andrew Ashcroft for the sum of one dollar a share.

'Meanwhile on that piece of paper it didn't say anything about witness, I didn't see his signature, I've never received compensation for that,' she added.

The mother-of-two, 32, was released from jail on bail for a second time on June 30 as she awaits trial for shooting Superintendent Henry Jemmott, a father-of-five, with his own service pistol in May, which she says was an accident.

Speaking to 7 News Belize's Cherisse Halsall, Hartin said the Ashcroft family was told to 'distance' themselves from her, adding that she wasn't allowed to speak to her infant twins while she was in Belize Central Prison.

She said although she has had a 'complicated' seven-year relationship with Ashcroft - the son of Lord Ashcroft - with many 'ups and downs', she has been 'shocked' about the Ashcroft family's treatment of her since her arrest.

She added: 'Even with all of that though, I can't believe how I've been treated.'

Jasmine Hartin (pictured) claimed she did not have any familial visitors in jail after the family of her former partner Andrew, the son of Lord Ashcroft, were told they couldn't have 'bad press'

It is unclear whether the family accept the claims. They have been approached and asked to provide a comment.

In the new interview following her release on bail on Wednesday, Hartin said: 'From what I've been told by the family, they were instructed to distance themselves from me immediately.

'That they couldn't have bad press associated with their reputation, so therefore, I wasn't - I didn't have any family come to visit me in jail, I didn't have any family call me.

'Instead a couple of friends came to see me, but never once was I allowed to speak to the children during that time.'

Hartin said that her brother tried to call her from Canada while her mother was 'worried sick' while she was in jail, but claimed that Ashcroft told them that she had visitors every single day - which she said was 'exaggerated'.

Hartin, 32, said the Ashcroft family were told to 'distance' themselves from her, claiming that she wasn't allowed to speak to her young twins while she was in Belize Central Prison

Hartin said although she has had a 'complicated' seven-year relationship with Andrew Ashcroft (pictured), she is still 'shocked' about her treatment from Ashcroft family since her arrest

Her full interview with the local news channel will air on 7 News Belize's evening television program on Thursday.

Her comments came after a family friend, who is believed to have secured her release from prison by posting bail for her, claimed Hartin had been 'thrown to the wolves'.

Wendy Auxillou told MailOnline that Hartin has been denied access to her children and locked out of her home.

Auxillou said she posted Hartin's $30,000 bail by supplying the title to a property she owns as collateral, according to The Times.

Auxillou, who works as a lawyer, added Hartin is 'being psychologically and emotionally abused'.

Hartin is awaiting trial for shooting Supt Jemmott with his own service pistol last month.

Jemmott, a highly-rated officer tipped as a future leader of his country's police force, was struck behind his right ear by a 9mm round from his own Glock 17 service pistol.

According to a criminal complaint he had been 'socializing' and drinking alone with Hartin on a secluded hotel pier in Ambergris Caye, a tropical island haven for millionaire expats.

A security guard heard a 'loud bang' at 12.45am and police arrived to find Canadian national Hartin 'covered in red substance as that of blood' and Jemmott, 42, floating dead on his back 30ft from the shore.

An expended shell casing was still lodged inside the gun which was found on the Mata Rocks hotel pier along with a magazine, live bullets and a pool of blood.

After spending the weekend behind bars, Hartin gave a statement saying the off-duty officer was showing her how to handle his firearm as the pair drank and hung out.

Before her release yesterday, Hartin had previously been out on bail but was re-arrested and charged with assaulting a hotel worker last week.

Her bail had originally been covered by the manager of the resort where she had lived with Ashcroft but he withdrew it following her re-arrest.

When previously out on bail, Hartin was turned away by security when she tried to access her family apartment at the Grand Colony resort to see her young twins.

According to The Times, Auxillou said: 'In the beginning, people viewed her as some type of rich entitled kid, basically.

The former partner of Lord Ashcroft's son Andrew is awaiting trial for shooting Superintendent Henry Jemmott (pictured), a father-of-five, with his own service pistol last month

'After what transpired with her being locked out of her house and kept away from her kids and all that, she's now being viewed with a bit of sympathy.'

It has not been specified whether Auxillou is part of her legal team, which is being led by high-profile attorney Richard 'Dickie' Bradley as Hartin awaits trial over the shooting of Superintendent Henry Jemmott, which she claims was an accident.

Authorities at the Central Prison received confirmation of Hartin meeting requirements for bail and she was released as of 3pm yesterday, according to Breaking Belize News.

Her conditions for bail reportedly include daily reports to the police station, a daily curfew, not leaving the jurisdiction, not interfering with witnesses, and maintaining good behavior.

Hartin's legal team is being led by high-profile attorney Richard 'Dickie' Bradley, after an apparent split with Godfrey Smith - the former attorney general of Belize who was hired on her behalf in the hours after Jemmot's shooting.

It comes after Hartin's mother Candace Castiglione claimed that her daughter's treatment amounted 'persecution from the Ashcroft family'.

Hartin pleaded not guilty last week when she appeared in court in San Pedro accused of assaulting the hotel worker during a clash with her former partner.

The mother-of-two (pictured) was released from prison yesterday after her family friend, lawyer Wendy Auxillou, posted her $30,000 bail

The court heard she had attempted to push Sandra Grisham, the general manager of the Alaia, however, Hartin representing herself, pleaded not guilty and denied attacking anyone.

Frank Habet, a manager of a resort, then withdrew her bail funds saying he was worried he would lose his 60,000 Belizean dollars ($30,000/22,000) if Hartin did not show up for trial.

He said he decided to pull the plug after the accused mother was turned back by security on Tuesday when she tried to access her family apartment at the Grand Colony resort to see her young twins.

Habet said: 'Miss Hartin appeared at Grand Colony resort behaving in a disorderly and abusive manner and creating great disturbance at the hotel in the presence of guests.

'I now think Miss Hartin is quite capable of not showing up for trial and I therefore wish to immediately withdraw my cash deposit.'

Videos showed Hartin, 32, chasing her partner Andrew Ashcroft into the neighboring Alaia Belize hotel, which the couple ran together before the Jemmott shooting.

Hartin took the videos on her own cell phone and could be heard repeatedly asking Ashcroft why he allegedly wouldn't give her access to Ellie and Charlie, four.

Auxillou, who works as a lawyer, also claims Hartin (pictured) is 'being psychologically and emotionally abused'

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, she reiterated her version of events, saying the gun went off unexpectedly in her hands as she tried to re-insert a clip and hand it back.

'Henry was my friend. It was an accident, I didn't flee the scene. The first thing I did was call the police myself,' she said.

'There's literally not a day that goes by when I don't cry and my frigging chest doesn't hurt and ache for his kids, for his family, for him.'

Hartin (pictured) re-told her version of events that led to Jemmott's death, saying the gun went off unexpectedly in her hands as she tried to re-insert a clip and hand it to him

She also revealed for the first time that the reason she was practicing with the gun was because an unnamed man had tried to rape her at a party six days earlier.

Three days after Jemmott's death Hartin was charged with manslaughter by negligence after prosecutors opted against murder or full-fledged manslaughter on the strength of her witness statement insisting it was an accident.

The offense carries a maximum prison sentence of nine months or a fine of around 10,000 Belizean dollars ($5,000 in US money).
Johnson & Johnson's one-shot COVID-19 vaccine is highly effective against the Indian 'Delta' variant even after eight months.

The American drug giant said there was only a small drop in potency against the highly transmissible variant compared to earlier versions of the virus.

The findings - in line with how other vaccines have fared against the mutant strain - will reassure the more than 12.4 million Americans who have been jabbed with J&J's shot.

There had been concerns that the rapid rise of the Delta variant in the US - where it makes up 26.1 percent of cases - could derail the country's hugely successful vaccine rollout.

But the fact that the UK has managed to keep deaths and hospital rates low, despite the variant accounting for 99 percent of cases in the country, has given confidence that the crisis can be kept under control in America.

It also means that the majority of the world's approved coronavirus vaccines have now been shown to be highly effective at preventing serious illness from the strain.

Johnson & Johnson 's single-dose Covid vaccine has finally been authorised for use by the UK medicines regulator but it will not be available until later this year

Antibody levels only fell by 1.6-fold when tested against the variant (B.1.617.2) compared to the original strain and other variants

The findings were detailed in a press release published by the New Brunswick, New Jersey-based firm on Thursday night.

Experts took blood samples from eight volunteers who participated in early-stage trials of the vaccine.

The samples were then exposed to the Delta variant and tested for antibody levels.

Antibodies are a key part of the immune response to COVID-19 and a critical indicator of how likely someone is to be protected.

Britain has ordered 20 million doses of the vaccine and they are expected to arrive later this year.

Antibodies are a key part of the immune response to Covid and a critical indicator of how likely someone is to be protected.

They found that levels of neutralizing antibodies only fell by 1.6-fold when tested against the Delta variant compared to the original strain.

'Today's newly announced studies reinforce the ability of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine to help protect the health of people globally,' said J&J Chief Scientific Officer Dr Paul Stoffels in a statement.

'We believe that our vaccine offers durable protection against COVID-19 and elicits neutralizing activity against the Delta variant.'

'This adds to the robust body of clinical data supporting our single-shot vaccine's ability to protect against multiple variants of concern.'

The findings - in line with how other vaccines have fared against the mutant strain - will reassure the more than 12.4 million Americans who have been jabbed with J&J's shot

In fact, the study found that neutralizing antibodies level fell more steeply against other variants, including 3.6-fold against the Beta variant, which originated in South Africa, and 3.4-fold against the Gamma variant, which originated in Brazil.

The levels were still high enough to be effective, but encouraging because these variants are far less widespread in the U.S.

What's more, a sub-study conducted by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center looked at 20 volunteers and found that immune responses were still strong after eight months.

This included T-cells generated by the vaccine such as CD8+ T-cells, which seek out and destroy virus-infected cells.

People had more of these antibodies eight months after being jabbed than they did 28 days after having the vaccine, it found.

'Current data for the eight months studied so far show that the single-shot Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine generates a strong neutralizing antibody response that does not wane' said Dr Mathai Mammen, global head of research and development at J&J's Janssen vaccine arm, in a statement.

'Rather, we observe an improvement over time. In addition, we observe a persistent and particularly robust, durable cellular immune response.'

Britain originally ordered 30million doses of the Johnson and Johnson, or Janssen, vaccine but its order has been reduced to 20million

Covid now just 'a bad cold' thanks to vaccines Covid is now more like a 'bad cold' thanks to the effect of vaccines, a top epidemiologist has claimed after data showed symptoms of the disease are becoming milder across the board despite rising cases. King's College London's Covid symptom study estimated there were 25,210 new cases every day in the UK last week, up by almost a third (31 per cent) from the previous seven-day spell. It said there was a 50 per cent increase in the number of partially or fully vaccinated people catching the virus  but in most cases their symptoms were mild. More than 80 per cent of infections were among the unvaccinated. Professor Tim Spector, who leads Britain's biggest Covid surveillance study, said people catching the virus after being vaccinated suffered a milder form of the disease similar to a cold, with sneezing emerging as a new symptom. 'While rates of Covid infection are high, it's reassuring to see vaccinations protecting the vulnerable and deaths remain very low,' he said. ZOE Covid study data shows symptoms are more mild and are similar to those of a bad cold, with a runny nose, headache and a sore throat among the top symptoms for all groups. Sneezing has also emerged as a symptom among partially and fully vaccinated people.' Advertisement

An earlier trial by J&J found that a single dose of its vaccine was 85 percent effective at preventing severe disease from Covid. It also reduces the risk of being hospitalized or dying from the virus among all age groups.

However, J&J stressed that its vaccine provides protection against all if the so-called 'variants of concern'.

In the U.S., 200 million shots have been ordered, but only around 21.4 million have been delivered to states and 12.4 million have been administered.

The company has been plagued by several setback, including contamination problems at a Baltimore factory that helps manufacture the shot and pause after links to rare blood clots.

In April. the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was paused for 10 days after six women under the age of 50 developed CVST,.

This figure was later updated to include 28 people, including one 45-year-old woman who died.

J&J doses are expected to arrive in the UK sometime this autumn after getting approval from the medicines regulator in late May.

The vaccine can be given to people aged 18 and over and is likely to be used as a booster jab for care home residents ahead of winter because it can be easily stored and transported at fridge temperatures.

The UK's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) will issue advice on exactly who should receive the Belgian-made jab before its officially deployed.

There is a chance it could be restricted in younger age groups because of its link to extremely rare blood clots.

Like AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine, which is not being used in under-40s in Britain for the same reason, the J&J shot uses adenovirus technology to stimulate the immune system.

This appears to trigger a devastating immune overreaction in a tiny number of people, mostly young and healthy.

Trials have shown the vaccine - which US regulators approved in February - to be 67 per cent effective at blocking Covid symptoms from earlier forms of Covid. Other studies have shown it is even better at preventing patients falling severely ill.

No10's Vaccine Taskforce originally secured 30million doses of the vaccine last year, based on predicted demand at the time.

But because of the huge success of UK's vaccination program, ministers reduced their order to 20m.

In April, the European Medicines Agency ruled that the jab should come with a clear warning about a serious blood clotting disorder. It made the same recommendation for AstraZeneca's jab.

In April, the firm itself asked Europe to pause the roll-out of the jab to allow experts to probe the clot cases thoroughly. It later concluded the risk was rare and urged all countries to keep using it.

Officials insist the disorder - the same as the one seen in AstraZeneca's vaccine - is extremely rare but seems to be happening slightly more often in young people who have been vaccinated.
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Australians split apart from their families and stranded overseas have slammed Labor premiers who have forced through a cut to the Covid-19 international arrival caps.

From July 14 until at least the end of August, the weekly cap will be halved to just 3,035 to help keep out the highly contagious Delta strain of the disease which is responsible for Sydney's two-week lockdown.

The change was agreed by Prime Minister Scott Morrison at National Cabinet on Friday after demands from Queensland's Annastacia Palaszczuk, Victoria's Daniel Andrews and Western Australia's Mark McGowan.

Breast cancer sufferer Martine Dines (pictured with her parents and fiance), whose parents have been granted an exemption to enter Australia from Ireland to be with her, is worried the caps may affect their travel next week because they could be implemented by states any time from now

Martine Dines (pictured with her fiance Sean Keenan) fought for her parents to be allowed to enter from Ireland as she battles breast cancer

Some 34,000 Australians stranded overseas may now find it more difficult to get home despite an increase to repatriation flights to the Howard Springs quarantine facility near Darwin.

Breast cancer sufferer Martine Dines, whose parents have been granted an exemption to enter Australia from Ireland to be with her, is worried the caps may affect their travel next week because they could be implemented by states any time from now.

Her fiance Sean Keenan said the move was a 'backwards step' that puts the country further away from returning to normality.

'It's like we're going backwards with this, we're no closer to things going back to normal. It just seems like they don't listen to ordinary people,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'This is going to make things so much worse for anyone trying to get their family here.'

Sydney bride-to-be Martine Dines, 29, wanted her Irish parents to be allowed in to the country as she battles breast cancer

Sydney resident Miss Dines, 29, was on holiday on Hamilton Island when she found two lumps on her breast and now faces a gruelling six-months of surgery, chemotherapy and fertility treatment.

On Thursday her Irish parents were granted an exemption to enter on compassionate grounds, which include, but are not limited to, needing to travel due to the death or critical illness of a close family member.

The exemption was required because the rules allow 'immediate family' of Australians and residents to enter via hotel quarantine but this only includes spouses and dependent children, not parents.

Mr Keenan said the definition was cruel.

'Imagine if Scott Morrison wanted to visit his children overseas but they had to turn to him and say, ''sorry you're not immediate family''.

'Martine came out of her mother's womb, how much more immediate can you get?'

A group of mothers including Audiologist Sophie Robinson and IT consultant Azadeh Oskouipour visited Parliament House last month because their foreign parents have never met their grandchildren born during the pandemic.

Mr Morrison (pictured on Friday) completed 14 days of quarantine at The Lodge in Canberra, after returning from the G7 summit in the UK

Lauren Newman, who is from Wodonga on the New South Wales Victoria border but lives in the US, said the caps reduced her hope of seeing her Australian parents again soon.

'It's awful. So awful. My husband and I expected this closure to be done by Dec 2021. I'm really doubting that after this week,' she wrote.

'I feel so angry and sorry for those who are desperate to get back. We are secure in our living here in the US, and love being here, but it's hard to know our kids are away from their grandparents, and others are missing out on precious tome with their families. There's nothing right about this.'

The Australian Border Force says allowing parents would mean at least 100,000 would enter the country, overwhelming the quarantine system and preventing Australians from returning home.

After sharing the good news of the exemption with his social media followers, photographer Mr Keenan said his inbox has been flooded with more than 500 messages from desperate people separated from their families, many of them Australian citizens stranded overseas.

Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk (pictured) wanted arrivals halved to help stop the Delta variant of Covid enter the country

The Prime Minister held a National Cabinet meeting today with premiers including Daniel Andrews (pictured) as they planned Australia's pandemic future

'People are desperate. It's not just Irish or English, it's people from all around the world stuck in similar situations. This is just going to kick up a bigger storm,' he said.

Ms Dines' parents are waiting to receive their tourist visas that will allow them to enter Australia and Mr Keenan is anxious to confirm flight bookings for July 5 or July 9 to ensure they arrive in New South Wales before the caps take effect.

Ahead of Friday's National Cabinet meeting, Ms Palaszczuk wanted the caps cut in half while Mr Andrews wanted the numbers cut by up to 80 per cent.

It's like we're going backwards with this, we're no closer to things going back to normal

'We are at a pressure cooker moment,' Ms Palaszczuk told reporters in Brisbane on Wednesday as the state's quarantine hotels filled up due to domestic border restrictions and international arrivals.

Mr Andrews agreed, saying: 'It won't be easy to lock some people out. But locking some people out is much better than locking everybody down.'

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews on Wednesday said the caps should not be cut because Australians should be allowed to come home and Chief Medical Officer Professor Kelly said only six in 1,000 international arrivals had Covid-19.

Ms Andrews called the move a 'smokescreen' to distract from the Queensland Government's own failures.

The latest lockdown of Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Townsville was sparked after the State Government let an infected hospital clerk, 19, work while unvaccinated and put a FIFO worker in quarantine next to high-risk international travellers from whom he caught Covid before spreading the disease in the Northern Territory.

'Clearly what Annastacia Palaszczuk is doing [putting] up a smokescreen to hide the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of quarantine that is administered and managed by the Queensland Government,' Ms Andrews said in a press conference at the Gold Coast on Wednesday.

A family from New Zealand reunite at Sydney International Airport in April. These types of reunions could be on ice for many as travel caps are cut

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian - whose state has taken half of all returned travellers - said she didn't agree but accepted the decision.

'I am disappointed that every State hasn't done its fair share but I appreciate and have to respect the decision of National Cabinet,' she said.

'I don't support the view that other Premiers have that this means mistakes aren't going to happen and we're not going to have outbreaks. That is still going to occur,' she warned.

The cut to travel caps came as Mr Morrison outlined a four-phase transition towards living with Covid and finally ending the cycle of lockdowns and border closures.

The Prime Minister hailed a 'new deal for Australians' as he explained the stages titled vaccinate, prepare and pilot; post vaccination phase; consolidation phase; and final phase.

The pace of the plan - which will eventually let the country manage Covid like flu - depends on the vaccine rollout, with lockdowns eliminated once a certain percentage of Aussies have been fully jabbed with two doses.

'I have made it very clear today what is on the other side. If we all get vaccinated then this all changes,' Mr Morrison said.

'The pathway we have agreed today gives all Australians encouragement and much needed hope in what has been a very difficult time.'

The plan was announced after 12 million Australians were locked down this week due to several outbreaks across the nation. Darwin ended its lockdown on Friday at 1pm after recording zero cases but Brisbane's was extended until Saturday night due to two new infections.

Scott Morrison is pictured leaving quarantine after two weeks in his house in Canberra following the G7 summit

The plan came after 12 million Australians were locked down this week due to several outbreaks across the nation. Pictured: A runner during Sydney lockdown on Friday

What are the four phases of opening up? 1. Vaccinate, prepare and pilot (from July 14) Arrival caps cut in half to 3,035 a week; lockdowns and state border closures as a last resort; trials of seven-day home quarantine for vaccinated arrivals; medicare vaccination certificates available on apps like apple wallet 2. Post vaccination phase (when an as-yet unannounced percentage of Aussies are jabbed, expected early next year) No lockdowns or state borders except for 'extreme circumstances'; caps for unvaccinated arrivals doubled to 6,070; home quarantine for vaccinated arrivals; capped entry for students and economic visa holders 3. Consolidation phase (date not announced) Lifting all restrictions for outbound travel for vaccinated travellers; no caps for vaccinated arrivals; vaccinated people exempted from domestic restrictions; increased caps for students and visa holders; more travel bubbles being set up with countries such as Singapore; booster shots rolled out 4. Final phase (date not announced) Uncapped arrivals for vaccinated people without any quarantine and uncapped arrivals for unvaccinated people with testing before departure and on arrival Advertisement

1. Vaccinate, prepare and pilot

During the first stage from July 14, Australia's weekly arrival cap will be cut in half from to 3,035 to decrease the risk of outbreaks of the more contagious Delta strain from hotel quarantine. The cut will be in place until at least 31 August and will then be regularly reviewed for the rest of the year.

Some 34,000 Australians stranded overseas may now find it more difficult to get home, but repatriation flights to Howard Springs near Darwin will increase.

'Simply reducing the caps doesn't necessarily provide a fail safe but because of the particular virulency of the Delta strain, it is believed that is a prudent action while we remain in this suppression phase of the virus,' Mr Morrison said.

State premiers agreed that lockdowns and state border closures would be used as a 'last resort' - but no case threshold for lockdowns was agreed.

There will also be a small trial in South Australia to allow fully vaccinated travellers to quarantine at home for seven days, instead of 14 days in a hotel, after medical evidence showed they pose far less risk than unvaccinated arrivals.

Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said home quarantine can even be safer than hotel quarantine to reduce contact with staff.

'Seven days of home quarantine can be very similar to the outcome of 14 days' hotel quarantine. If people are staying at home, it actually can be safer for them and the community because of the decreased interaction with staff,' he said.

Digital vaccination passports will be issued to everyone who has been jabbed via the Medicare app which will work with the Apple Wallet from the end of the month.

Trials will also allow international students and visa holders to enter in small numbers during this phase.

New South Wales residents queue up to get vaccinated at Olympic Park in Sydney on Thursday

The final phase of the plan involves no travel restrictions. Pictured: Australians evacuated from South America landing at Brisbane International Airport in April 2020

What are the new arrival caps from 14 July? NSW: 1,505 QLD: 500 VIC: 500 SA: 265 WA: 265 NT: Federal repatriation flights to Howard Springs Total: 3,035 Advertisement

2. Post vaccination phase

State premiers have speculated that the post vaccination phase will begin when 80 per cent are jabbed - but the figure is yet to be agreed as modelling continues.

The Prime Minister said Australia is on track to offer all adults a first dose by the end of the year.

This second phase will have no lockdowns or state border controls except for in 'extreme circumstances' to prevent mass hospitalisations and deaths.

'Once we get through that gate, and that will be determined by the scientific evidence, then we will move into a phase where we seek to minimise serious illness, hospitalisation and fatality as a result of Covid-19,' Mr Morrison said.

Inbound passenger caps for unvaccinated travellers will increase to 6,070 and there will be a higher cap for vaccinated travellers with 'new quarantine' such as home quarantine for seven days.

There will also be capped entry for students and economic visa holders, depending on quarantine space.

3. Consolidation phase

The consolidation phase will involve lifting all restrictions for outbound travel for vaccinated people.

This will allow Australians, who have been banned from leaving the country since March 2020 except to New Zealand, to finally go on holiday and visit family overseas.

There will also be increased arrival caps for students and visa holders and more travel bubbles will be set up with countries such as Singapore to allow foreigners to enter.

Australia has had a travel bubble with New Zealand since April, but it is currently closed to due coronavirus outbreaks in Australia.

During this phase, Aussies will also be offered vaccine booster shots to combat any new strains of the virus.

In the second phase vaccinated travellers will be able to quarantine at home for seven days. Pictured: Healthcare workers and Defence personnel transport luggage from a Skybus outside the Intercontinental quarantine hotel in Melbourne in April

4. Final phase

The final phase will allow uncapped arrivals for vaccinated people without any quarantine and uncapped arrivals for unvaccinated people with testing before departure and on arrival.

'What it means is, Australia gets vaccinated, Australia is able to live differently,' Mr Morrison said.

The National Cabinet also discussed the troubled national vaccine rollout and mixed messaging around the AstraZeneca jab.

Mr Morrison on Monday said Australians under 40 could consult their GP about getting the abundant AstraZeneca vaccine.

But Queensland's chief health officer Jeannette Young said they should wait for Pfizer because of a very small risk of blood clots.

Australia's expert immunisation panel reiterated its advice that Pfizer was preferred for all people aged under 60.

Thursday was a record day for vaccinations with more than 160,000 people receiving jabs nationwide.

Almost eight per cent of Australian adults are now fully vaccinated, but the nation lags far behind all other comparable countries.

Mr Morrison late on Thursday completed 14 days of quarantine at The Lodge in Canberra, after returning from the G7 summit in the UK, and headed to Parliament House to lead the meeting.

On Friday Sydney - which is in day six of a two-week lockdown - recorded 31 new locally acquired cases of Covid-19, with 13 of them active in the community for all or part of their infectious period.

The new case numbers take the tally to 226 since the current outbreak began on June 16.

More warnings have been issued for potential exposure sites, including the T2 domestic terminal at Sydney Airport, the Des Renford Swimming Pool at Maroubra in Sydney's east and Club Marconi at Bossley Park in the west.

There are three Sydney residents and one in Brisbane in ICU.

The virtual meeting of state and territory leaders hosted by the PM decided to halve international travel caps. Pictured: NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian
Western forces have skulked out of Bagram airbase under a news blackout as the gloating Taliban announced they 'welcomed and supported' the exit.

Save for pictures of US transport aircraft arriving to take the last of the troops home on Thursday, there has been a conspicuous lack of fanfare about the withdrawal following two decades of futile struggle.

The Taliban, meanwhile, made hay of the long-awaited retreat, saying today it 'will pave the way for Afghans to decide about their future between themselves.'

The exit, months ahead of Joe Biden's planned symbolic withdrawal on September 11, appears to have been expedited by the Taliban's capture of swathes of the Afghan hinterland.

Over the last two months, the resurgent jihadists have forced the government's security forces to consolidate in the cities, taking up defensive positions in preparation for what threatens to be a bloody civil war in the wake of the Western withdrawal.

The Taliban has already seized more than 700 trucks and armoured cars, as well as artillery from the now-isolated Afghan National Army (ANA), who were kitted out top-of-the-line US military hardware.

Pictured: Afghan soldiers stand guard at the gate of Bahram U.S. air base, on the day the last American troops vacated it, July 2, 2021. The Taliban said they 'welcome and support' the withdrawal of US and NATO forces from the base as part of a peace deal with the group

Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers stand guard at a road checkpoint outside Bagram Air Base on Friday after all US and NATO troops left

Footage shared on social media last week purports to show ANA troops laying down their arms and parking their Humvees for Taliban militants to take control of

An investigation of online footage and pictures by the Oryx blog has tallied up 715 light vehicles which fell into Taliban hands in June alone.

It included more than 300 M1152 Humvees which feature enhanced armour protection built to withstand terrorist IEDs, .50-calibre mounted machine guns and powerful engines for fast off-roading.

Footage shared on social media last week purports to show ANA troops laying down their arms and parking their Humvees for Taliban militants to take control of.

The colossal seizure of hardware comes as the last troops left Bagram, leaving it in the hands of their former comrades in the ANA.

The airfield, first secured by British special forces nearly 20 years ago, became a sprawling US fortress which thousands of troops passed through in the war to hunt down the Taliban and the al-Qaida perpetrators of 9/11.

The long campaign was fought with air strikes and resupply missions from Bagram's runways.

'All coalition forces are off Bagram,' said a U.S. official - who asked not to be identified - said on Friday without specifying when the last foreign troops left the base, 30 miles north of Afghanistan's capital Kabul.

A line of American-made Humvee trucks is seen in the footage being commandeered by what appear to be Taliban militants.

A pile of guns which ANA troops are seen laying down purportedly for the Taliban to seize

The airfield was handed over to the Afghan National Security and Defence Force in its entirety, they said on condition they not be identified because they were not authorised to release the information to the media.

One of the officials also said the U.S. top commander in Afghanistan, General Austin S. Miller, 'still retains all the capabilities and authorities to protect the forces.'

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that Islamic State militants are building up their forces in northern Afghanistan.

Being quoted by Interfax news agency, he said Islamic State was actively gaining territory in Afghanistan amid the withdrawal and what he described as the 'irresponsible' stance taken by officials in Kabul.

Bagram Air Base (pictured on Thursday, July 1 as a military plane comes in to land) served as the linchpin for US operations in Afghanistan. Now, all US and NATO troops have left the base, according to US defence sources

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

Afghan soldiers move into Bagram airbase today following the departure of US, NATO forces

The US military and NATO are in the final stages of winding up involvement in Afghanistan, bringing home an unspecified number of remaining troops by a deadline of September 11 - a pledge made by U.S. president Joe Biden.

They are leaving what probably everyone connected to the base - whether American or Afghan - considers a strained legacy after almost 20 years in the country, a period triggered by the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

The Taliban have launched relentless offensives across Afghanistan in the past two months, gobbling up dozens of districts as Afghan security forces have largely consolidated their power in the country's major urban areas.

The ability of Afghan forces to maintain control over the vital Bagram airfield will likely prove pivotal to maintaining security in the nearby capital Kabul and keeping pressure on the Taliban.

With the departure of the US forces, 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.

At its peak around 2012, the mini-city saw more than 100,000 U.S. troops and NATO service members pass through its sprawling compound barely an hour's drive north of the Afghan capital Kabul.

It boasted swimming pools, cinemas and spas - and even a boardwalk featuring fast-food outlets such as Burger King and Pizza Hut.

The base also hosted a prison that held thousands of Taliban and jihadist inmates.

It has cost the US military 2,312 lives and $816bn, according to the Department of Defence.

An Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier sits at a road checkpoint near the a US military base in Bagram, some 50 km north of Kabul on July 1, 2021

Pictured: US troops load up helicopter onto a C-17 Globesmaster at Bagram on June 16. The western forces are leaving what probably everyone connected to the base, whether American, British or Afghan, considers a strained legacy

The withdrawal from Bagram Airfield is the clearest indication that the last of the 2,500-3,500 U.S. troops have left Afghanistan or are nearing a departure, months ahead of President Joe Biden's promise that they would be gone by Sept. 11.

It was clear soon after the mid-April announcement that the U.S. was ending its 'forever war,' that the departure of U.S. soldiers and their estimated 7,000 NATO allies would be nearer to July 4, when America celebrates its Independence Day.

Most NATO soldiers have already quietly exited as of this week.

Announcements from several countries analysed by The Associated Press show that a majority of European troops has now left with little ceremony - a stark contrast to the dramatic and public show of force and unity when NATO allies lined up to back the U.S. invasion in 2001.

The U.S. has refused to say when the last U.S. soldier would leave Afghanistan, citing security concerns, but also the protection of Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport is still being negotiated.

Turkish and U.S. soldiers currently are protecting the airport. That protection is currently covered under the Resolute Support Mission, which is the military mission being wound down.

Until a new agreement for the airport's protection is negotiated between Turkey and the Afghan government, and possibly the United States, the Resolute Support mission would appear to have to continue in order to give international troops the legal authority.

The U.S. will also have about 650 troops in Afghanistan to protect its sprawling embassy in the capital. Their presence it is understood will be covered in a bilateral agreement with the Afghan government.

Bagram was built by the US for its Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s

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

Bagram was built by the US for its Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s as a bulwark against the Soviet Union in the north.

Ironically, it became the staging point for the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, and the Red Army expanded it significantly during their near decade-long occupation.

When Moscow pulled out, it became central to the raging civil war -- it was reported that at one point the Taliban controlled one end of the three-kilometre (two-mile) runway and the opposition Northern Alliance the other.

In recent months, Bagram has come under rocket barrages claimed by the jihadist Islamic State, stirring fears that militants are already eyeing the base for future attacks.

The NATO-led non-combat mission aimed to train Afghan forces into ensuring their country's security after the departure of foreign forces.

As of February 2021, there were about 9,500 foreign troops in Afghanistan, of which the US made up the largest contingent of 2,500.

So far Germany and Italy have both confirmed the full withdrawal of their troops.

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 June 25, as the last US troops withdraw from Afghanistan

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.

The U.S. and NATO leaving comes as Taliban insurgents make strides in several parts of the country, overrunning dozens of districts and overwhelming beleaguered Afghan security Forces.

In a worrying development, the government has resurrected militias with a history of brutal violence to assist the Afghan security forces. At what had all the hallmarks of a final press conference, Gen. Miller this week warned that continued violence risked a civil war in Afghanistan that should have the world worried.

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.
The family of a Cambridge graduate killed by Fishmongers Hall terrorist Usman Khan today revealed the 'devastating impact' of her murder as they broke their silence for the first time and demanded the event's 'arrogant' organisers step down.

Saskia Jones' uncles believe Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow must not remain in charge of the Cambridge University Learning Together programme.

Miss Jones and Jack Merritt were stabbed to death by Khan in November 2019 after the terrorist 'manipulated' Learning Together into thinking he was rehabilitated.

Her uncle Pete Jones blasted the arrogance of Dr Armstrong and Dr Ludlow's organisation when it came to dealing with Khan, telling BBC Radio 4's Today programme: They shouldnt be leading an organisation that got something badly and tragically wrong.

'From a family point of view wed be very distressed, upset and frankly insulted if they did.

Saskia Jones sits with her killer Usman Khan at the Fishmongers' Hall event shortly before he stabbed her to death

Saskia's grieving uncles believe Saskia will have been kind to Khan, who 'manipulated' Learning Together to kill after his release from prison

Miss Jones' uncles, Phil and Pete Jones, spoke to the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning

Paying tribute to Miss Jones, Mr Jones continued: 'I've lived for 20 years longer than Saskia did. And I know what she achieved in her short life as far greater than anything I've achieved so far.'

Another uncle, Phil Jones, said the family wanted to build on their relative's legacy.

He said: 'We want to represent how she saw the world, how she interacted with people, how much we loved her and still loved her. People need to know the enormity of what's happened and what a devastating effect it has had on our family.

'It's actually emotionally difficult to come to terms with anyone sitting next to someone for that amount of time and then doing what they did to that person after being in such close proximity.'

Khan was lawfully killed by police who shot him 20 times after he stabbed two Cambridge graduates at Fishmongers' Hall.

Six officers blasted the knifeman moments after he launched his bloody rampage, killing Saskia, 23, and Jack, 25.

The 28-year-old, who had a fake suicide vest and kitchen knives strapped to his hands, was shot twice at close range when he ran from Fishmongers' Hall onto London Bridge.

Khan had been released on licence from prison 11 months earlier, after serving half of a 16-year sentence for being part of a terror cell plotting to blow up the London Stock Exchange.

He had to wear an electronic tag and was supposed to be monitored by a multi-agency public protection arrangement (Mappa), made up of prison, probation and police officers.

Usman Khan, 28, pictured, murdered Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23, during a Learning Together event at Fishmongers' Hall in London in November 2019

Mappa knew that Khan had spent his entire jail term trying to radicalise, bully and forcibly convert other prisoners.

But astonishingly, officials believed he had changed his ways and sanctioned his trip to London for the Learning Together event.

An inquest jury found that police were forced to 'neutralise the risk' as officers believed he was about to trigger an explosive device on London Bridge.

In a narrative verdict, jurors concluded: 'The police believed Khan was trying to find a trigger. Khan sat up which was interpreted by the police as a move to detonate the device.

'As a result of this, officers decided to take multiple critical shots to neutralise this risk.'

A City of London Police officer who tackled him could be heard shouting, 'He's got a bomb!' as he tried to clear people out of the way before shooting Khan twice at close range.

He told the inquest: 'I thought he was going to detonate it. I thought we were going to die.'

Another firearms commander recalled: 'I thought he was going to detonate that device.

'I was just in a cold sweat, I could hear my own heartbeat, I was sweating profusely, my mouth went so dry.

'It was like watching a slow motion car crash.

'I was squinting at the monitor thinking he would detonate that at any moment, thinking he would kill my officers, the public as well.'

The suicide belt was later found to be a fake made from a weightlifting belt, cling film, wiring from an Energizer battery charger and a circuit board from Khan's Xbox games console.

Coroner Mark Lucraft, QC, had earlier directed the jury to return a verdict of lawful killing and said jurors should not criticise the actions of the officers because they 'all provided justifications in their evidence for why they fired'.

Earlier this month it emerged the creators of a controversial prison education programme that worked with London Bridge terrorist Usman Khan did not pass a training course after clashing with organisers about staff safety.

An inquest jury last month found that failings by the police, probation service and MI5 contributed to the unlawful killings of the two graduates

Saskia Jones, 23, and Jack Merritt, 25, were both killed by the convicted terrorist

Cambridge University academics Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow attended a course hosted by the US Inside-Out programme, forerunner to other schemes including their Learning Together project, in 2015.

But they walked out after rejecting Inside-Out's policies of banning contact with prisoners outside the programme. The US scheme has a near total ban on supporting terrorists after release from jail.

Inside-Out founder Lori Pompa told The Mail on Sunday: 'Though some of the ways that Learning Together describes its philosophy and goals are similar to the underpinnings of Inside-Out, what they do and how they do it seems to contrast fundamentally with the way that Inside-Out operates.'

Learning Together decided that it would work with released terrorists, including Khan, 28. He murdered Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23, during a Learning Together event at Fishmongers' Hall in London in November 2019.

An inquest jury last month found that failings by the police, probation service and MI5 contributed to the unlawful killings of the two graduates.

After the verdict, Ms Jones's family criticised Dr Armstrong and Dr Ludlow for the 'scant regard they had for the fundamental safety of their staff'.

The inquest heard that Learning Together often did not know details of prisoners' offending backgrounds and staff did not receive training on handling dangerous inmates.

John Podmore, professor of sociology at Durham University, which works with Inside-Out, said: 'Inside-Out sets out that there should be no contact outside the programme. But Cambridge just believed they could do it their own way.'
Haribo has warned that the lorry driver shortage has left it struggling to deliver its much-loved sweets to UK shops.

Popular items like jelly babies, gummy bears and mini-fried eggs could all be affected with the German firm the latest to be hit by supply chain issues.

A Haribo spokesperson said that it was 'experiencing challenges' that were hampering supplies, like many other manufacturers and retailers.

It comes after a driver shortage triggered calls for the Army to be on standby to deliver food to convenience stores, pubs, restaurants and care homes.

The Federation of Wholesale Distributors (FWD) says the situation has reached crisis point, leading to bare shelves and a risk of empty plates.

A Haribo spokesperson said that it was 'experiencing challenges' that were hampering supplies, like many other manufacturers and retailers

The Road Haulage Association believes there is a shortfall of about 70,000 drivers.

It also believes that around 30,000 HGV driving tests did not take place last year because of the pandemic.

Experts also say that the double impact from Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic has sparked disruption to the chilled food supply chain.

Haribo is the latest to fall victim to the shortage, with the company being reportedly forced to cancel planned promotions on its share bags.

A spokesperson said: 'As is the case with many manufacturers and retailers throughout the country, we are experiencing challenges with regards to the nationwide driver shortage.

'We are working with partners across the food and drink industry to address and respond to this problem.'

The firm has told wholesale and retail customers it had a number of problems in the supply chain and was 'working flat out to manage the situation', according to trade paper the Grocer.

The lack of lorry drivers has led to fears of a shortage in a range of products, with the pandemic and Brexit being blamed.

Typically, 72,000 candidates train to become HGV drivers, with 40,000 passing. But only 15,000 were able to complete training last year, the Road Haulage Association said.

The RHA has written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson warning many drivers also returned to their country of origin during extended periods of lockdown and restricted travel, with the vast majority not returning.

The Road Haulage Association believes there is a shortfall of about 70,000 drivers. It also believes that around 30,000 HGV driving tests did not take place last year because of the pandemic

He was also quizzed on the issue at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday this week.

Brexit is also playing a part in the shortage, according to the RHA, with many drivers unsure of their rights to work in the UK.

Retailers have been complaining for months over the issues, including Tesco and Currys PC World acknowledging the impact.

Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium, recently said: 'Retailers are aware of a fall in HGV driver numbers, resulting in minor disruption to some supply chains.

'Supermarkets are working closely with their suppliers to ensure that consumers still have access to the same great selection of goods.

'Government must rapidly increase the number of HGV driving tests taking place while also looking for a longer-term solution to this issue.'

Local convenience stores are now resorting to putting up notices warning customers of shortages due to the lack of delivery drivers.

Pub and restaurant chains are also not getting the fresh produce deliveries they expect.

Supplies of beer, milk and other chilled products are being hit, while there are fears the situation might affect tanker deliveries of fuel to petrol stations.

James Bielby, chief executive of the FWD, said there is an estimated 70,000 shortfall in HGV drivers.

The Road Haulage Association said the crisis has been triggered by a combination of Brexit, which has led to a cut in European truckers, and Covid, which has seen no new HGV drivers trained for a year.

Mr Bielby said: 'The situation has reached crisis point and it is likely to get worse as more hospitality venues open and demand increases. The Government needs to act very quickly.

'We are concerned enough to suggest that the Government considers having Army trucks on standby to ensure there are enough vehicles and drivers to distribute food.'

It comes after Tim O'Malley, managing director of Nationwide Produce PLC - one of the biggest companies supplying fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and restaurants across Britain - warned fruit and vegetables are rotting in cold stores because of a major shortage of HGV drivers.

He has warned that perfectly good food is being left to rot as there are not enough truck drivers to transport produce across the country.

In an article in the Fresh Produce Journal, Mr O'Malley warned that his industry has been hit by Brexit, Covid-19 and changes to the tax system of HGV agency drivers.

Mr O'Malley wrote: 'The acute shortage of HGV drivers is now the direct cause of perfectly good, graded and packed fresh produce being dumped or left rotting in cold stores, waiting for wheels to go under it.

'Supermarket shelves and restaurant plates are going empty, and this is now a crisis of national importance.'
Angela Merkel has arrived at Chequers for crunch talks with Boris Johnson amid reports she is set to ease German quarantine rules for fully-vaccinated British travellers.

The Prime Minister welcomed Mrs Merkel to his country residence in Buckinghamshire at lunchtime as they greeted each other with attempted fist and elbow bumps.

The meeting is taking place as part of an international swan song for the German Chancellor before she steps down later this year.

A row over travel rules is expected to feature heavily during the talks as Mr Johnson pushes to make it easier for Brits to go on holiday to Europe.

Germany has designated the UK as an area of concern due to the spread of the 'Delta' coronavirus variant and it has effectively banned British travellers from visiting.

Any Brits arriving in Germany must spend 14 days in quarantine with no exemptions, including for the fully vaccinated.

But Mrs Merkel is preparing to relax the rules to allow double-jabbed Brits or people who have had Covid-19 in the past six months to enter without having to self-isolate, according to The Times.

Mrs Merkel had urged the EU to adopt her hardline approach across all member states.

But countries like Spain resisted a blanket border policy because of the damage it would do its crucial tourism sector.

The decision to ease the rules in Germany would pave the way for travel to Europe to resume for people who have had both coronavirus vaccinations.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are meeting for talks at Chequers this afternoon

Travel restrictions were expected to feature heavily in the talks after Mrs Merkel had urged all EU member states to adopt the same tough border rules as Germany

But reports suggest that the German Chancellor is preparing to lift quarantine restrictions for double-jabbed Brits

Mr Johnson bounded out of the Chequers front door just as Mrs Merkel's convoy crunched up the gravel driveway on Friday afternoon.

He said: 'Angela, how are you? Welcome. You've been here many times before?'

Mrs Merkel replied: 'Twice.'

Mrs Merkel addressed a virtual meeting of the UK Cabinet, the first foreign leader to do so since Bill Clinton in 1997.

The pair had a working lunch of English asparagus tart, Oxfordshire beef fillet and baked custard tart.

Travel restrictions were top of the list of items to be discussed, with the UK planning to lift quarantine requirements for amber list travel for the fully vaccinated.

The two leaders, who met at the G7 summit in Cornwall last month, were also expected to discuss post-Brexit relations between the UK and Germany.

Ahead of the visit, Mr Johnson announced the creation of a new academic medal in the German Chancellors honour.

Downing Street said an award of 10,000 will be given each year to a British or German woman in science - an area the German Chancellor previously worked in.

It will be named after Caroline Herschel, a German-born British astrophysicist who was a pioneer in the field, with the first medal expected to be awarded in early 2022.

The leaders have announced annual joint meetings of the UK and German cabinets, starting next year, as well as an intention to increase future funding to a bilateral programme for young people in both countries.

Mr Johnson said yesterday that he believes double jabs can be a 'liberator' for summer holidays.

Speaking during a visit to a Nissan plant in Sunderland, he said: 'Everybody who is frustrated about travel over the summer  double jabs will be a liberator.

'I want travel to be possible but I've got to stress that this year will not be like every other year because of the difficulties with Covid. People shouldn't expect it will be completely hassle free.'

Tony Blair yesterday urged Mr Johnson to challenge Mrs Merkel over Germany's travel rules as he said it 'makes no sense' to force fully vaccinated people to quarantine.

Mrs Merkel is expected to address a virtual meeting of the UK Cabinet, the first foreign leader to do so since Bill Clinton in 1997, while the two leaders are set to discuss relations between London and Berlin

UK travellers are currently subject to a wide array of different border rules in European countries. Mrs Merkel has called for the EU to adopt a single hardline policy

The former PM said: 'We continue to believe that those who are doubly vaccinated should be treated differently from those who are unvaccinated.

'The data is clear: they're less likely to get the virus, less likely to transmit it and much less likely to be severely sick.

'Germany's attempt to block UK travellers to Europe even if vaccinated on the basis of the prevalence of the Delta variant, makes no sense when we know the variant is already in Europe and will become the dominant strain there also; and when the UK, because it does so much more genomic sequencing, has a better handle on the prevalence of the variant, but is not necessarily a greater risk.'

Mr Blair's institute recommended in a new policy paper that the EU, including Germany, should base travel restrictions on individual vaccine status rather the prevalence of variants in the traveller's home country.

It also called for the UK to play a 'proactive role in the creation of a European-wide Covid Pass that removes restrictions for fully vaccinated travellers, and this should be introduced now'.
A motorcyclist who was pronounced dead by paramedics after a crash in Brazil has been saved by a reporter who filmed the body bag moving.

Street seller Raimundo da Silva, 71, starting feeling unwell as he rode to work on his motorbike on Tuesday in the city of Araguaina.

He collapsed and fell off the vehicle and paramedics rushed to the crash site to save him.

But they pronounced Mr Da Silva dead and placed his body in a bag, leaving the scene to be supervised by police who waited for the coroner's arrival.

Street seller Raimundo da Silva, 71, was placed inside a bodybag by paramedics who pronounced him dead after the crash in the city of Araguaina

However moments after paramedics left, police officers and a reporter covering the crash noticed that the plastic bag was moving very slightly on its own (pictured: Mr Da Silva inside an ambulance after being saved)

However moments after they'd gone, the officers and a reporter covering the crash noticed that the plastic bag was moving very slightly on its own.

Reporter Geovanni Pereira told news site G1: 'When I arrived, the bag was already closed.'

In the footage, the bag can be seen moving, which resulted in the man being rescued.

He said: 'They (the cops) opened it and I saw a small bubble of air coming out of the corner of his mouth. I performed CPR on him for 10 minutes out of a gut instinct to help.'

The sheepish paramedics were called back to the scene and they took the man to hospital alive. His current condition has not been reported.

The sheepish paramedics were called back to the scene and they took the man to hospital alive. His current condition has not been divulged

The paramedics have since said they performed CPR on the man when they were first called to the scene. However, they pronounced him dead 'based on technical evaluation'.

They have said they will look over the man's medical record to try to understand what happened.

Pereira told G1: 'We were in the right place at the right time. I think it was a miracle.'
An NRL star's brother has died in a 'suspicious' motorbike crash, as police probe whether the tragedy was related to a love triangle at a nearby jail.

Jake Opacic, 28, was killed at about 10am on Friday while riding on Nerang-Murwillumbah Road in the Numinbah Valley on the Gold Coast.

His brother is Parramatta Eels centre and former Brisbane Broncos star Tom Opacic.

Police believe Mr Opacic was involved in a heated conversation with at least two others outside the Numinbah Correctional Centre before he took off on his bike.

Jake Opacic, 28, died at around 10am on Friday while riding his motorbike on Nerang-Murwillumbah Road in the Numinbah Valley on the Gold Coast

Police believe Mr Opacic was caught in a heated conversation with at least two others outside the Numinbah Correctional Centre before he took off on his bike (pictured emergency services crews at the scene on Friday morning)

He veered off the road about three kilometres away and died on impact.

Detective Inspector Chris Ahearn said the death is being treated as suspicious and police were working to determine if Mr Opacic was run off the road by another vehicle.

It's understood police are investigating if Mr Opacic was previously in a relationship with a woman who was released from the correctional facility on the same day he died, the Courier Mail reported.

Detectives are probing whether the 28-year-old argued with the woman's current partner, who also arrived at the prison.

'We believe there may have been an altercation between the deceased and some other people at this location,' Mr Ahearn said.

'We're trying to work out the circumstances of how all these people know each other...whether they knew they were all going to be here at the same time together, what the nature of their discussion was, all of these questions are yet to be answered.

His brother is Parramatta Eels centre and former Brisbane Broncos star Tom Opacic (pictured with partner)

'We don't know if he has had contact with another car or what the circumstances were in ending with him coming off his bike.'

The woman who was released from the correctional facility has been spoken to by police.

Anyone driving on the Nerang Murwillumbah Road between Numinbah Valley and Natural Bridge between 9.30 and 10.30am on Friday have been urged to contact police.
Queensland has recorded another Covid-19 case after three infections were earlier revealed on Friday - forcing Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to announce Brisbane would remain in lockdown for another day.

The new case is in a man aged in his 50s from Aroona on the Sunshine Coast who received a positive result on Friday.

Health Minister Yvette D'Ath has urged anyone in the Caloundra, Mooloolaba, Sippy Downs or Maroochydore areas to get tested for even the mildest of symptoms.

'The man was only in the community while potentially infectious for two days before the lockdown began, at his workplace, and briefly during lockdown,' she tweeted.

'The man works at the Sippy Downs campus of the University of the Sunshine Coast and was at work on June 28 and June 29.

'He had minimal contact with others so it will not be listed as a contact tracing site, but as always, anyone with symptoms, come forward for testing immediately.'

The health minister also urged anyone who shopped at the Coles supermarket in Sippy Downs on June 29 between 8.15am and 8.35am to get tested.

Queensland has recorded another Covid-19 case late on Friday afternoon with the Coles in Sippy Downs (pictured), on the Sunshine Coast now on alert

The new case is in a man aged in his 50s who worked at the Sippy Downs campus of the University of the Sunshine Coast (pictured) on June 28 and June 29

Chief health officer Jeanette Young said the new infection would not change the decision to lift lockdown in some areas of the state.

'Contact tracing is already underway and we are contacting everyone that we can identify,' she said.

The new case will be counted in Saturday's total infection numbers.

Ms Palaszczuk earlier sparked backlash and ridicule after saying her state will be wearing masks until everyone is vaccinated - which could be a year away.

She made the comments at a press conference on Friday morning, where she announced Brisbane will remain in lockdown for another day after the three new local infections were acquired.

The current lockdown restrictions will be lifted for the Noosa and the rest of the Sunshine Coast, Ipswich, Logan, Redlands, Gold Coast, Scenic Rim, Lockyer Valley, Somerset and Townsville local government areas.

'That means everyone will have to carry a mask on them and wear that mask whenever they're outside of their home but of course not when you're driving your vehicle ... At the moment until everyone gets their vaccine,' she said during the briefing.

With just seven per cent of Australia's population vaccinated, Queenslanders are set to be wearing masks until well into 2022 - or face fines of $200 for disobeying.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk made the misstep at a press conference on Friday morning, where she announced Brisbane will remain in lockdown for another day

In Queensland, citizens living in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Noosa and the wider Sunshine Coast, Ipswich, Logan, Redlands, Moreton Bay, the Scenic Rim, the Lockyer Valley and Somerset regions must wear masks in public whether outdoors or inside.

Ms Palaszczuk's draconian suggestion was quickly met with criticism online from Queenslanders.

'Did the premier just say Queensland will have mandatory mask wearing until EVERYONE is vaccinated? Going to be a long long wait,' one woman wrote on social media.

'Just watched the three stooges Young, Palaszczuk and 'Bugs Bunny' Miles deliver their nauseating drivel,' wrote another.

'The Queensland premier just said she doesn't want her job any longer.'

Ms Palaszczuk says Brisbane and Moreton Bay will remain in lockdown for another day after three new cases emerged, particularly a mother and daughter from Carindale, in Brisbane's east, who have also tested positive and have spent time in the community while infectious.

Ms Palaszczuk says Brisbane and Moreton Bay will remain in lockdown for another day after the new cases emerged

The premier says that means the lockdown can not be relaxed in Brisbane and Moreton Bay until Saturday.

'Now we will come back early tomorrow morning, once your contact tracers get on top of this, and we'll look at the case numbers overnight,' Palaszczuk said.

'So I want to thank everyone for doing the right thing, but as you can see we've just got a situation at the moment, that has just come in, and we really need to give the people, our contact tracers the time to do that.'

Another case was reported as a contact of the Qatar Airways check-in desk staffer, who was announced as a case on Thursday, but authorities are not concerned about it.

Currently, people in the Noosa, Sunshine Coast, Ipswich, Logan, Redlands, Moreton Bay, Brisbane, Gold Coast, the Scenic Rim, the Lockyer Valley and Somerset regions are required to wear masks in public, both outdoors and inside

Deputy Premier Steven Miles has warned that the state could have to open up a new quarantine hotel with the system set to hit capacity on Friday

He said the state has 285 available rooms, but it's expecting 259 international arrivals during the day and an unknown number of domestic arrivals.

Mr Miles again called the federal Government to cut to quarantine caps.

'It will take seven days for our police and hotel quarantine coordinators to get a new hotel up and running and so it's absolutely critical that we see that cut in the number of international visitors and we would hope that the prime minister agrees to that at national cabinet today,' he said.

Meanwhile, Ms Palaszczuk said every eligible Australian should be offered a vaccine of their choice before the international borders are reopened.

'You think about it, if for example members of your family had not had that offer of the vaccine, and the virus came in, and they ended up on ventilator, you wouldn't forgive yourself,' she said.

'So I think every eligible Australian should have the opportunity to have been offered a vaccine and then I think we then need to look at (that).'
otal of 46 forces analysed in UK with 15 found to have a female chief constable

A third of police chiefs are now women with a record 15 forces having a female leader, as experts say they have become less like The Sweeney and more like Line of Duty.

A total of 46 forces, including British Transport Police, were analysed in the UK with 15 found to have a female chief constable - a steep rise from just four forces in 2019.

The figure is also the highest since records began in 1995, when Pauline Clare brought an end to 166 years of male leadership by becoming the first ever female boss of a force - namely Lancashire Constabulary - in Britain.

Police chiefs and experts told The Daily Telegraph that they credited the rise to a crackdown on the 'sexist canteen culture' seen on TV series such as The Sweeney and Life on Mars - crime dramas set in the 1970s with males predominantly cast as the detectives or officers leading investigations.

It follows the announcement that Pippa Mills will be promoted from deputy chief constable in Essex to chief of West Mercia Police, alongside Debbie Tedds taking over as the first female boss of Warwickshire Police.

Pippa Mills (pictured above) has been announced as the chief constable of West Mercia Police, after working as a deputy chief constable in Essex

Warwickshire's incoming first ever female chief constable, Debbie Tedds, pictured alongside Warwickshire police and crime commissioner Philip Seccombe

Rick Muir, director of the Police Foundation, an independent research body, said: 'There is not the macho sexist canteen culture that there was.

Who are the UK's 15 female police chiefs? British Transport Police: Lucy D'Orsi

Lucy D'Orsi Cumbria Constabulary: Michelle Skeer

Michelle Skeer Derbyshire Constabulary: Rachel Swann

Rachel Swann Durham Constabulary: Jo Farrell

Jo Farrell Dyfed-Powys Police: Claire Parmenter

Claire Parmenter Gwent Police: Pam Kelly

Pam Kelly Hampshire Constabulary: Olivia Pinkney

Olivia Pinkney Merseyside Police : Serena Kennedy

: Serena Kennedy Met Police: Dame Cressida Dick

Dame Cressida Dick North Yorkshire Police: Lisa Winward

Lisa Winward South Yorkshire Police: Lauren Poultney

Lauren Poultney Staffordshire Police: Jane Sawyers

Jane Sawyers Sussex Police: Jo Shiner

Jo Shiner Warwickshire Police: Debbie Tedds

Debbie Tedds West Mercia Police: Pippa Mills (incoming) Advertisement

'And as policing has changed, the representation of female characters has shifted so you have female officers or detectives leading investigations like Line of Duty.'

In addition to the 15 chiefs who are women, there are also two female assistant commissioners at the Metropolitan Police, which is led by the force's commissioner Dame Cressida Dick.

Some 20,000 officers will be recruited in England and Wales by 2023 and the Met Police alone wants to bring 11,000 more employees into various job roles between now and 2025.

Policing minister Kit Malthouse praised the shift and said the Government is continuing to work with the police to improve diversity while it seeks to hire 20,000 more officers.

A total of 32.1 per cent - almost a third - of all constables in the UK are female with seven forces taking on more women than men over the past year, according to the newspaper's analysis.

But Durham Constabulary's Chief, Jo Farrell, said police still have progress to make.

She said: 'Ultimately, we are working towards the day when our communities are policed by a constabulary which reflects them.'

It comes after Rachel Swann, who is the first female chief of Derbyshire Constabulary, faced sexist and homophobic abuse about her hairstyle.

She was mocked by cruel TV viewers who threw jibes at her spiked, dyed hairstyle on social media while she was at the centre of the Whaley Bridge evacuation in 2019.

Following a confirmation hearing by Derbyshire's Police and Crime Panel last year, Chief Constable Swann was handed the top job and dubbed an 'outstanding strategic leader' with a 'refreshing and positive approach'.

The analysis comes after Rachel Swann (pictured above), the first female chief of Derbyshire Constabulary, faced sexist and homophobic abuse about her hairstyle

British Transport Police chief Lucy D'Orsi (pictured left) and Cumbria Constabulary boss Michelle Skeer (right)

Durham Constabulary chief Jo Farrell (pictured left) and Dyfed-Powys Police boss Claire Parmenter (right)

Gwent Police chief Pam Kelly (pictured left) and Hampshire Constabulary boss Olivia Pinkney (right)

Chief Constable Swann said some of the abuse she received about her looks at the time was 'misogynistic and homophobic' and she took a temporary break from Twitter. She has since returned to the platform.

She told BBC Radio Derby at the time: 'I can take a bit of banter but it became sexist and homophobic, and really insulting.

'The bit that really hurt was people saying I had no standards and I was letting policing down.'

She added: 'Yes, I am a woman. Yes, I might have a slightly different hairstyle. Yes, I am quite small. I could not believe that my mere existence could cause such a depth of feeling.

'Some comments were misogynistic and homophobic and the abuse has been recorded as a hate incident, just as for the public.'

In addition to the 15 chiefs who are women, there are also two female assistant commissioners at the Met Police, which is led by the force's commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (pictured)

Merseyside Police chief Serena Kennedy (pictured left) and North Yorkshire Police boss Lisa Winward (right)

South Yorkshire Police chief Lauren Poultney (pictured left) and Staffordshire Police boss Jane Sawyers (right
Vladimir Putin has made it illegal to compare the Soviets to the Nazis, ordering that Russia's 'humanitarian mission' in liberating Europe must be recognised.

The Russian president's uncompromising view whitewashes Stalin's tyranny, his early alliance with Hitler in carving up Poland and the genocidal terror of the Great Purge.

Putin signed the bill last night which bans the publication of material which draws parallels between the 'aims and decisions' of the Soviets and the Third Reich, and anything which denies the Red Army's 'decisive role' in defeating Hitler.

The Kremlin has increasingly hardened its historical revisionism to use World War Two as a pillar to unite a society that Putin has said lost its moral bearings following the 1991 Soviet collapse.

Joseph Stalin (left) and Adolf Hitler must not be compared to one and other, according to a new Russian law signed by Vladimir Putin. This despite wholly legitimate historical parallels based on their respective tyrannies, mass murder and starvation of civilians, as well as the military and economic help they gave each other in WWII

A group of child survivors behind a barbed wire fence at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland, on the day of the camp's liberation by the Red Army, 27th January 1945

Prisoners of the Vorkuta Gulag (Vorkutlag) - one of the major Soviet labor camps, Russia, Komi Republic, 1945.

A famous cartoon by Sir David Low satirising the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Hitler says to Stalin: 'The scum of the earth, I believe?' And Stalin replies, 'The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?' It was published in The Evening Standard in September, 1939

Hitler's alliance with Stalin that paved the way for WWII In August 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, agreeing on Soviet and German spheres of influence across Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. For Hitler, the secret pact meant he could carry out his imperialistic designs on eastern Europe without having to worry about Stalin's intervention. After Hitler invaded Poland on September 1 the Soviets moved in from the east, seizing great tracts of territory agreed upon in a secret clause. Poland was crushed between the vice of Moscow and Berlin. More than three million people perished in Nazi-occupied Poland and an estimated 500,000 in the Soviet occupied part. Stalin also annexed eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania; he also attacked Finland and extorted territorial concessions. Over the next two years the Soviet Union and Germany signed economic pacts, with Moscow supplying raw materials to the German war machine including 865,000 tonnes of oil and 1.5 million tonnes of grain. In exchange, Berlin shipped locomotives, turbines, generators, diesel engines and vital military intelligence to Moscow. Stalin received plans for naval cruisers, destroyers, heavy naval guns and samples of the Nazi's latest warplanes, including Messerschmitt fighters and Junkers 'fast bombers.' The Soviets even explored a possible entry into the Axis. Hitler and Stalin's envoys, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyachesla Molotov, who signed the eponymous non-aggression pact the year before, met for a two-day conference in Berlin in November, 1940. Germany presented the Soviets with a draft of an Axis pact which defined the world into spheres of influence, German, Italian, Japanese and Soviet. The talks eventually collapsed because of the intransigence of Hitler and Stalin over access to territories including Finland, as well as Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Hitler remarked to his top brass that Stalin 'demands more and more', 'he's a cold-blooded blackmailer' and 'a German victory has become unbearable for Russia' so that 'she must be brought to her knees as soon as possible.' Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, tearing up existing treaties, in an attempt to conquer Communism. He told his generals to conduct a 'war without rules' in which all cruelties were legitimate. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, founded after the Cold War to help keep peace in Europe, has said the Soviet Union was equally responsible for WWII, which claimed 50 million lives. In 2009, the OSCE said both Stalinism and Nazism 'brought about crimes against humanity and genocide' and called for August 23 to be a day of remembrance for the victims. Advertisement

The new legislation demands acknowledgement of 'the Soviet Union's humanitarian mission in liberating the countries of Europe.'

The claim is bound to infuriate former Soviet states like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which say they were occupied by the Red Army and forced to join the Soviet Union.

Indeed, the Fall of Berlin, the Red Army's proud victory celebrated in Red Square each year, was in part fuelled by Stalin's suspicion that the Western Allies wouldn't hand back territory occupied by them in the post-war Soviet zone.

Putin approved the new law in January following a period of bitter dispute with Poland over who caused the Second World War.

Two years ago, the European parliament adopted a resolution which agreed that the Soviet Union and Germany jointly 'paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War' in August, 1939, with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Putin hit back in a press conference in December 2019, claiming that the Soviet Union was the last country in Europe to sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany after the other powers appeased him.

'Stalin did not stain himself with direct contact with Hitler whereas the French and British leaders met with him and signed some documents,' he said, adding that Soviet forces only entered Poland, 'after the Polish government lost control over their armed forces'.

Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called Putin a 'liar.'

The United States even entered the row, with Georgette Mosbacher, the American ambassador to Warsaw, tweeting: 'Dear President Putin, Hitler and Stalin colluded to start WWII. That is a fact. Poland was a victim of this horrible conflict.'

The secret peace agreement between Hitler and Stalin, signed in Moscow by their envoys Vyachesla Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, outlined the Soviet and German spheres of influence across Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland.

A month later, the two countries invaded Poland, carving it up into Nazi west and Soviet east, before Stalin went on to annex Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Romania.

Poland was crushed between the vice of Moscow and Berlin. More than three million people perished in Nazi-occupied Poland and an estimated 500,000 in the Soviet occupied part.

Hitler's invasion of Poland was a gamble, he signed the pact with Stalin thinking that only Russia might throw a spanner in the works, believing Britain and France would continue to appease his aggression. He was wrong; war was declared on Germany two days after the invasion of Poland.

While the secret deal was in force, Stalin supplied Hitler with 865,000 tonnes of oil, 1.5 million tonnes of grain and other raw materials, in exchange Berlin shipped military hardware to Moscow.

During the Battle of Britain, Soviet weather ships were even sending meteorological data to the Luftwaffe.

The Nazi's eventually turned on Moscow and invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in a bid to conquer Communism.

Hitler told his generals to conduct a 'war without rules' in which all cruelties were legitimate.

Putin's hardline position on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact has been revised over the years.

In 2009, he conceded the agreement had been 'immoral' but blamed Britain and France for crippling any hopes of putting up an anti-fascist front with the Munich Agreement in 1938.

Russian leader Joseph Stalin (1879 - 1953) shakes hands with Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893 - 1946), the German foreign minister, in Moscow, during discussions on developments in Poland

Soviet Foreign Minister signs the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in the Kremlin. Stalin and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop of the Third Reich (extreme left) look on

The pact, forged by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French PM Edouard Daladier with Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini, permitted the German annexation of the Sudetenland - the German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia.

The Munich Agreement has become synonymous with the futility of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement which only emboldened Hitler, although it did buy the Allies time to arm themselves.

In 2015, Putin claimed that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact 'made sense.'

And last year, the Russian president asserted it was unfair to say the pact was 'the main reason for the start of the Second World War,' but historians should make a 'balanced assessment' of what unfolded.
Japanese prosecutors are seeking jail sentences of nearly three years for an American father-son duo who admitted helping former Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn jump bail and flee Japan.

Former special forces operative Michael Taylor and his son Peter have been in custody since their arrest last year in the United States for helping to smuggle Ghosn onto a private jet in an audio equipment case.

Ghosn had led Nissan for nearly two decades, earning celebrity status as a rare foreign executive to thrive in Japan - until he was arrested in 2018 on allegations of financial crimes, which he denies.

At a Tokyo court on Friday, public prosecutors said they were seeking a sentence of two years, 10 months for Michael, and two years, six months for Peter, for their role in Ghosn's audacious December 2019 escape.

'Michael Taylor... played a leading role. His responsibility is extremely grave,' one of the prosecutors said on Friday, calling it a 'sophisticated and bold crime'.

The Taylors, who were extradited to Tokyo earlier this year, listened to an English translation of the comments through headphones, both dressed in smart jackets and shirts with no tie.

Ropes were tied around their waists and each man was flanked by guards who unlocked their handcuffs when they took their seats in the dock.

Their lawyers asked for a suspended sentence, with a verdict to come later this month.

Former special forces operative Michael Taylor (right) and his son Peter (left) have been in custody since their arrest last year in the United States for helping to smuggle Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn onto a private jet in an audio equipment case

Ghosn (pictured) had led Nissan for nearly two decades, earning celebrity status as a rare foreign executive to thrive in Japan - until he was arrested in 2018 on allegations of financial crimes, which he denies

At their first hearing, prosecutors described the almost cinematic details of the operation - including that Ghosn was hidden in a large case (pictured) with air holes drilled into it to slip past security at an airport

'I'm remorseful, and I'm sorry,' 60-year-old Michael Taylor told the court in a tearful voice, adding: 'It wasn't for money.'

Peter Taylor, 28, said: 'After my experience in the Japanese judicial system, my impression has changed a lot.'

'I apologize to the people of Japan, and I deeply regret my action.'

Both men bowed deeply to the judge after speaking.

When he made his dramatic escape, Ghosn was on bail awaiting trial on four counts of financial misconduct.

He transited through Turkey before arriving in Lebanon, which has no extradition agreement with Japan.

The flight of the former auto tycoon, a Brazilian native who remains an international fugitive in Lebanon, was hugely embarrassing for Japanese authorities.

US prosecutors called it 'one of the most brazen and well-orchestrated escape acts in recent history'.

This graphic shows details of Carlos Ghosn's escape from Japan in December 2019

The Taylors, who arrived in Tokyo in March, admitted to helping orchestrate Ghosn's audacious flight at their first court hearing last month, facing a maximum of three years in jail each.

At their first hearing, prosecutors described the almost cinematic details of the operation - including that Ghosn was hidden in a large case with air holes drilled into it to slip past security at an airport.

A third man, identified as George Antoine Zayek, is also accused of involvement in the escape but remains at large.

Prosecutors said last month that Ghosn and his wife paid the Taylors for their help.

Ghosn was questioned last month by French investigators in Lebanon over a series of alleged financial improprieties.

His former Nissan aide Greg Kelly is on trial in Tokyo over allegations he helped underreport Ghosn's salary.

A verdict in his case is expected later this year.
Wally the Walrus could be moved from his temporary home in the Isles of Scilly after capsizing boats and taking 48 hour naps on fishing vessels.

The 2,000lb beast should be living near Greenland in the North Atlantic ocean but probably drifted south while sleeping on an iceberg.

Wally has now replaced his favoured napping spot with angry fishermen's boats and yachts moored along Porthcressa Beach on the southern side of St Mary's, the largest of the islands.

Experts have warned Wally is at risk of harm from the public and sea vessels after he made it to the Isles of Scilly in the latest stop of an epic journey that took in Spain, France, Wales and Ireland.

And sources from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told The Sun it was working on a plan to transport him elsewhere safely.

A team of divers are on hand to work out how to move the walrus without causing it stress, or allowing it to swim back to the islands.

Wally has now replaced his favoured napping spot with angry fishermen's boats and yachts moored along Porthcressa Beach on the southern side of St Mary's, the largest of the islands

The beast, which was originally considered a fun novelty, has begun to seriously annoy those living on the Isles of Scilly.

John Hourston, who runs marine group Blue Planet Society, said: 'We are getting quite a few people asking us why Wally can't be taken home. He is causing a fair amount of mayhem and the novelty of having him around might be wearing thin.'

It is not yet known where the mammal could be moved to

DEFRA said: 'Moving marine mammals has the potential to cause a large amount of stress to the animal and it is not guaranteed that they won't swim back to the original location.

'We would therefore want to ensure that any action taken to move Wally minimises stress which could negatively impact his welfare.'

Last month the sea mammal was snapped by boatman Joe Badock taking a nap on the tail ramp of the Star of Life - a purpose built floating ambulance that serves the archipelago.

He has been spotted on boats and rocks in St Mary's harbour with some people keen to get close.

British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) has worked with a number of organisations including conservation groups, Devon and Cornwall Police, RNLI, and the harbour authority on the plan to entice Wally away from the harbour on St Mary's, the largest of the island group 28 miles (45km) off Cornwall.

Their statement said: 'Unfortunately, his presence in a commercial harbour within an island community is posing huge risks, first to himself, and to livelihoods but potentially human safety.'

'He may prevent emergency response vessels from being immediately operational or cause serious injury or worse if he capsizes a boat with people on board.'

Wally was snapped by boatman Joe Badock taking a nap on the tail ramp of the Star of Life - a purpose built floating ambulance that serves the archipelago

Dan Jarvis from BDMLR told the BBC: 'It is causing a lot of angst in the community, especially for those whose boats have been damaged.

'It is becoming a really big issue in that harbour and we need to do something to discourage him from being in it.'

After consulting with the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration in Alaska, measures being considered are barriers to stop him boarding boats, and acoustic deterrents above and below water.

'No-one has ever been in this situation in this country before, we don't have animals that are this big. It is extremely unique,' Mr Jarvis said.

'The welfare of the animal and the safety of people are paramount.

'It is hoped that by discouraging him from being around the inhabited islands, he will choose a more secluded wild site, and that he will soon be rested enough to continue back north to his native Arctic.'

In Tenby, Wales, Wally reacted to airhorns to move him off the RNLI lifeboat slipway, but he became used to these.

Capture and relocation was 'not warranted' said Mr Jarvis and would be an 'extremely difficult and potentially dangerous option for the walrus and for any handlers involved'.

The Marine Management Organisation (MMO) felt prompted to remind the public that all walruses are legally protected from disturbance.

The Walrus has been finding boats to nap on to build up his strength before returning north

Wally pictured off the Isles of Scilly earlier this month on June 17. Since March, Wally has visited Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, France and Spain

A from the MMO said: 'We have received messages that the walrus currently on the Isles of Scilly is regularly being disturbed by vessels and the public.

'Walruses are protected from disturbance under section 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. So please keep your distance and do not approach.'

On Wednesday, St Mary's harbour towed a RIB (Rigid-hulled Inflatable Boat) that Wally climbed aboard to a safer position and asked people to 'give this vessel a wide berth'.

The Isles of Scilly Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority posted on Twitter: 'Please use common sense, binoculars and zoom lenses and give the walrus plenty of space.'

Lucy Babey, head of science and conservation at the Orca charity which protects marine wildlife, explained why the animal was behaving the way he is.

She told the BBC: 'Walruses spend 25 per cent of the time resting so Wally is going around trying to find resting places.

'He is building up his energy reserves as he has done a lot of swimming to get here from Spain, and has a lot more swimming to do to get home.'

She said it was hoped he would continue to make his way to the Arctic, but 'judging by what has happened over the last few months he might take a leisurely swim back north and so we might see him around the UK for a little while yet.'

Wally the famous Arctic Walrus causing havoc for boat owners of the Isles of Scilly earlier this month after returning to the UK coast. Images show the walrus deflating rubber dinghies after trying to climb on top for a rest (pictured)

Witnesses previously said Wally's sharp tusks popped several dinghies that were attached to the back of yachts in the area (pictured)

Ms Babey added that he was being monitored and appeared to be healthy but 'he probably hasn't come into contact with humans before so is curious - another reason to keep a distance is for our safety, as well as his'.

A petition has also been set up entitled: 'Get Wally the walrus home.'

It says: 'Perhaps a large boat with a flat and large enough rear access deck for Wally to come and go as he wished with zero human contact could work?'

Animal welfare groups say Wally was first seen around the islands north of Scotland, then Ireland before taking up residence in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, in March this year.

He then travelled to Cornwall and spent time near Padstow before swimming 390 miles to the French coast.

He then moved 230 miles across the Bay of Biscay to Bilbao, Spain.
A groom with terminal cancer collapsed and died at the altar as his horrified bride walked down the aisle with their son.

Father-of-eleven Paul Wynn, 57, from North Ayrshire, Scotland, collapsed at Saltcoats town hall last Friday just minutes before he was due to be wed to Alison Wynn, his partner of 21 years.

Mr Wynn was originally diagnosed with cancer in May but had only been told it had turned terminal eight days before - prompting him and his partner Alison, 36, to tie the knot before he died.

He was given between six weeks and two months left to live by doctors, who told him his pancreatic cancer had spread to his liver and lungs.

However, he collapsed just as Alison  who changed her surname by deed poll a few years ago  walked towards him during their wedding with first-aiders unable to revive him.

Paul Wynn, 57, from North Ayrshire, Scotland, died minutes before he was due to be wed to Alison Wynn

Alison with her daughters Poppy and Louise ahead of the wedding. Her partner died as she walked down the aisle

Alison described him as a 'fantastic dad' in a heartfelt tribute following his sudden death.

She also revealed that her partner hadn't received any treatment before his death.

Alison said: 'If I had known we didn't have long I would've tried to arrange the wedding for the beginning of the week. He never actually got any treatment.'

Reliving last week's tragedy, Alison left her home in the afternoon overwhelmed after organising a wedding at such short notice.

She waited 10 minutes outside the town hall for a friend to bring her flowers after she forgot them at home.

After collecting them, she went upstairs where she saw the groom, who she said looked uncomfortable.

She explained: 'By the time I had gotten my flowers and went up the stairs. Everything seemed to be okay although Paul seemed to be a bit uncomfortable by this point and his kilt had been loosened a wee bit to help him feel more comfortable.

'He had actually been wheeled up in an office chair into the lift and taken up the stairs as he had no energy to get up to the room. He was out of breath and struggling from what I was told.'

Sandy, 20, the couple's eldest child, walked her mother down the aisle after the guests were seated.

However, as Alison started her walk, she realised Mr Wynn had slumped down in the chair.

She said: 'By the time I got to him I called his name a couple of times. He didn't turn round, he didn't look at me and I realised there was something wrong and I started breaking down and I started shouting his name and we knew something wasn't right.'

Danielle Sood, a friend of the couple and Mr Wynn's best woman, at the wedding, him off the chair and on to the ground.

First-aiders also rushed to administer CPR and use a defibrillator - but Mr Wynn couldn't be revived.

Paul Wynn with his sons Sandy, Marcus, and Tarquin on his wedding day - before his death

Reacting to her partner's death, Alison said: 'It was hard. It's taken me a wee while to get to where I am now and every day just seems to merge into one.

'It feels like only yesterday that it happened. I'm having to get up and moving every day for the sake of my children but I can't eat.

'Paul and I lost a child in 2004 after I had a miscarriage so it give me a bit of comfort that he's up there with our child. His mother passed away in 2020 so at least he's with her now too.'

Mr Wynn first contacted his GP in May this year after constantly bleeding from his navel and becoming alarmed at how much weight he was losing.

He was also struggling to eat and keep food down - eventually only consuming liquids.

An endoscopy showed he had three hernias and a CT scan the following day revealed his pancreatic cancer.

The diagnosis prompted the couple to bring forward their wedding, which had originally been set for July 16.

The couple had met in 1999 through the Jehovah's Witnesses, before having an on-and-off relationship.

They had five kids together, Sandy, 20; Tarquin, 15, Marcus, 13, Louise, eight, and Poppy, four.

Mr Wynn had six other children, though their mother or mothers are unknown.

A freelance photographer, Paul has been described as one of the 'most lovely' guys anyone could hope to meet.

Alison said: 'Paul loved going out and taking pictures of anything and everything.

'We were his life, he would do anything for his kids. He would move heaven and earth for his kids and everyone loved him.

'He would give you every last penny he had. He made sure that everyone got before him. He was there for everybody.

'He really was a fantastic dad and his kids were his life.

'Paul was never a man to go to the pub or anything like that and if he went anywhere he went with me or with the kids; he never went anywhere without us.'

Now a fundraising bid has been launched to support the family and to pay for Paul's funeral.

Anyone that wants to donate can do so here: https://gofund.me/8557c958

Paul's funeral will take place on Tuesday, July 6 at Stevenston High Road Cemetery at 2pm
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An African elephant was rescued last month after it become stuck in the mud and began sinking into the ground.

Dr Kieran Avery, 34, from Kenya, was part of the small team that made the dramatic rescue of the female elephant after she became stuck in the waters on the edge of a dam.

The veterinary surgeon and conservationist took images of the elephant in June after receiving a call from the local community to inform him that an elephant had become stuck at in Isiolo County in Kenya.

Pictured: A distressed and exhausted elephant fights for her life after becoming stuck in a muddy dam in Isiolo County, Kenya

The elephant (pictured) made a lucky escape when a team of conservationists were able to free her from the predicament

A small team of rescuers were called to the scene by concerned locals who found the elephant stuck in the mud.

With past experience of rescuing elephants from similar predicaments, the team knew they only needed a few tools - including straps and a tractor - to pull off the rescue operation.

Dr Avery said they put the straps around the elephant, and gently pulled it from the muddy prison until she was well clear. Having been left behind by her heard, she ran off after them once she regained her energy.

The doctor said: 'A call came in from the community first thing that morning to inform us of the stuck elephant.

'Given our experience with removing elephants stuck like this, we mobilised immediately to assist.

'Members of the community sent us photos to guide us on what would be needed to remove her.

The elephant (pictured) was almost completely submerged in the mud, with just her head managing to stay in the open

Using the right tools, rescuers (pictured left) were able to free the elephant (right) after working for an hour and a half

The team of rescuers were able to drag the elephant out of the muddy pool (pictured). They used carefully positioned straps and a tractor to pull her out, while taking care to ensure she didn't grab any of the team with her trunk

Pictured: The elephant stuck in the mud in June. The photographs were taken by Dr Kieran Avery, 34, from Kenya who was part of a small team that made the dramatic rescue

'She was stuck on her own and her herd had moved away from the dam. She was clearly distressed and exhausted - but she still had a fight in her which is always a good sign that there is hope.

'To free an elephant of this size you have to have the right tools. This included a tractor, heavy-duty straps and shackles, and knowledge of elephant behaviour.'

It took the team an hour and a half to free the stuck elephant.

A picture showing the exhausted elephant as it struggles to free itself from the muddy prison. In the background, a crowd of people can be seen watching on as the team of rescuers work to free the animal

According to Dr Avery, the rescuers were informed of the stuck elephant by locals first thing in the morning. The team are known to have experience of saving elephants from similar situations in the past

Dr Avery said that the elephant (pictured) had become stuck on her own, and that her herd had moved away from the dam, leaving her behind in the mud

Kieran says that the process involves carefully positioning the straps in a way that will allow the tractor to pull her out and ensuring that the elephant doesn't grab you with her trunk which would result in serious injury to the team.

He added: 'Ideally the straps should be placed around her bum, below her tail.

'The tractor then applies careful tension and we observe the elephant and the position of the straps - if all looks good then the tractor continues to pull until the elephant is well clear of the mud and on stable ground.

'It doesn't take a big team - just a handful of us with the right tools.

The female African elephant (pictured) was 'was clearly distressed and exhausted - but she still had a fight in her which is always a good sign that there is hope', said Dr Avery

Pictured: The elephant, now half-way out of the muddy pool, lies on the side as rescuers work to free her

A tractor was used to pull the elephant out of the pool. The rescuers had applied straps 'around her bum, below her tail', before the vehicle applied careful tension to ease her out of the mud

The rescuers observe carefully as the tractor applies tension to the straps around the elephant (pictured) to make sure the process is working. If it is, the tractor continues to pull the elephant until it is well clear of the pool, Dr Avery said

Pictured: The elephant rests on the ground after being pulled from the muddy pool by the team of rescuers in Kenya

Pictured: The rescued elephant runs away to find her her after she was freed from the mud in a dam in Kenya in June

'Elephants are magnificent animals with a massive presence. Being up close with a wild adult like this makes you realise how powerful and intelligent they are.

'Their eyes capture you and you can see their emotions in their expressions.. It is humbling.

'To me, there is nothing better than seeing free-roaming wild elephants across the landscape, and to be able to free one from an inevitable death trap and watch her walk away back into the wilderness where she belongs just can't be beaten.'

As of 2021, African elephants are considered to be at heavy risk of extinction, and are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN ) Red List.

Habitat loss and fragmentation, as well as poaching for the illegal ivory trade are both major threats faced by the rare creatures.

Today, just two species make up the African elephant genus - the African bush elephant, and the smaller African forest elephant. Four other species of African elephants went extinct between the 18th and 20th centuries, with evidence of their existence found only through fossils.
The daring escape attempts made by British officers from a German prisoner of war camp called Castle Tittmoning have been revealed 80 years later.

The desperate efforts to break out of the little-known camp, in Bavaria, south-east Germany, included three men who hid inside a cramped fireplace for eight days before being found by guards covered in soot.

Other officers, many of whom were Eton-educated aristocrats, concealed themselves under piles of rubbish on a horse-drawn cart and allowed themselves to be driven out of the fortress before they were discovered.

Two men expertly made German uniforms out of blankets and brazenly walked out of the camp disguised as guards before being rumbled.

One of them was Walter Southern, whose fluent German emboldened him to pose as a sentry escorting a PoW to a dental appointment on the outside.

The comical escape attempts made by British officers from a German prisoner of war camp called Castle Tittmoning have been revealed 80 years later. Above: A tunnel dug by British PoWs, who were caught after getting within 25inches of the castle walls

Another would-be escapee was Lord Campbell of Alloway, who later became a British judge and House of Lords life peer. He shinned down a rope outside the castle wall only to become trapped in barbed wire at the bottom

The accounts have been uncovered for the first time in German archives by military historian Robin Shaefer for the British publication Iron Cross Magazine.

Three men were caught abseiling out of a window on a length of rope stolen from a local church.

Another would-be escapee was Lord Campbell of Alloway, who later became a British judge and House of Lords life peer.

He shinned down a rope outside the castle wall only to become trapped in barbed wire at the bottom.

A German sketch of the attempt shows the moment he lands in the barbed wire.

Lieutenant John Hamilton-Baillie, who was a repeated escaper, simply cut a hole in a wire gate and spent 10 days on the run before being captured agonisingly close to the Swiss border.

Lieutenant John Hamilton-Baillie, who was a repeated escaper, simply cut a hole in a wire gate and spent 10 days on the run before being captured agonisingly close to the Swiss border

Castle Tittmoning, a 12th century Gothic fortress on the German-Austrian border, was used temporarily in 1941 as a PoW camp for British army officers before it was made into an internment camp

The PoWs also painstakingly dug at least three tunnels using basic tools like pocket knives and a fire stoker.

They dug to within 25inches of the castle wall on one occasion before the tunnel was discovered.

Castle Tittmoning, a 12th century Gothic fortress on the German-Austrian border, was used temporarily in 1941 as a PoW camp for British army officers before it was made into an internment camp.

Between March and October 1941 attempts to escape at the camp, which was named Oflag VII-D, became almost a full-time sport between the British men and their guards who always got the better of them.

Iron Cross editor Andy Saunders, said: 'Everything about these escape attempts has an element of comedy about them, right down to the amusing name of the camp.

'Trying to escape from Castle Tittmoning in 1941 was a full-time sport for the British men. They must have had a degree of fun in trying.

A ladder in one of the tunnels under Castle Tittmoning dug by the British POWs. The images were taken by German soldiers who discovered their escape attempts

Between March and October 1941 attempts to escape became almost a full-time sport between the British men and their guards who always got the better of them. Above: One of the tunnels dug by the PoWs

'Many of them went to Eton. They were highly intelligent blokes who were stuck in a PoW camp with nothing better to do than work out how to get out, often in the most bizarre ways imaginable.

'They became masters of the art.

'There weren't really any great tunnelling attempts like The Great Escape. They did dig tunnels but never got to use them.

'No, these men hid and disguised themselves in a brazen bid to get out.'

Members of the British aristocracy who were held at Castle Tittmoning included Major Colin Mackenzie of Farr, who was page of honour to King George VI and the 9th Earl of Hopetoun.

Both men served in the Seaforth Highlanders and won the Military Cross at Dunkirk where they were captured.

The most extraordinary attempt occurred in October 1941. A roll call on October 13 revealed that four men were missing.

A transcription of Lieutenant James Yule's escape attempt. The transcription was produced by a clerk at Castle Tittmoning after Lieutenant Yule had been re-captured

The men even used homemade compasses as part of efforts to navigate their way to safety if they were lucky enough to make it beyond the castle walls

The PoWs also painstakingly dug at least three tunnels using basic tools like pocket knives and a fire stoker. Above: Some of the tools which were seized after the first tunnel dug by the men was discovered

This photograph taken by German soldiers shows the first tunnel which British PoWs dug at Castle Tittmoning

A thorough search of the camp found no sign of them and no evidence of a break out.

Three days later guards found a small hole had been sawn into the wooden floor under a bed and next to a bricked-up fireplace.

Their knocking signals were answered from within the fireplace and after it had been opened up a dishevelled-looking Captain George Campbell-Preston was found.

Aware the camp was about to close, he had hoped to hide and walk out later when everyone had left.

Three days later a second fireplace was unblocked by guards and they found the other three missing men, Lieutenants Clement Elson, Michael Scott and Baronet Sir Peter Meintosh Greenwell, who had spent eight days in the cavity.

A German sketch map detailing the escape attempt of two POWs posing as a German soldier and a POW on the way to a dentist appointment

The German sketch one of the tunnels dug by the POWs. Iron Cross editor Andy Saunders said the PoWs enjoyed the 'sport' of seeing if they could get out of camps

Mr Saunders said: 'The story of the three men who hid in the fireplace chimney that had been bricked up is just extraordinary.

'These men knew the camp was going to close and as soon as the guards left they could escape. They blocked themselves in a chimney and the plan was to break out when the Germans finally left.

'In reality, escapees would have had great difficulty getting home. It was more a sport to see if they could get out. The reality was that PoWs who escaped camps were recaptured very quickly.

'It was accepted on both sides that it was the duty of PoWs to try and escape.

Another would-be escapee was Lord Campbell of Alloway, who later became a British judge and House of Lords life peer. The above image shows the items he had on him when he was caught

These ladders were recovered from the third tunnel which was dug by the PoWs and later discovered

These tools and items, which include a lightbulb and hammer, were found after the discovery of the third tunnel dug by British PoWs

'Prisoners could be shot if they were caught on the act and failed to stop when told to. But for the most part they were put into solitary confinement..'

He said that the execution of 50 of the 76 men who broke out of Stalag Luft III - The Great Escape - was a 'one off'.

He added: 'The Great Escape killings contravened all the rules of the Geneva Convention, which the Germans generally stuck to.

'It was a one off and was ordered by Adolf Hitler as a warning. Those men who carried out his orders were caught, tried and executed after the war.'

The full article on Castle Tittmoning is published in this month's issue of Iron Cross Magazine.
But the Warwick University expert has now confessed Britain was 'in a much better situation than we thought'

Dr Mike Tildesley and his team predicted there could be 72,000 deaths from the virus before next winter

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A SAGE scientist has admitted the Covid modelling that spooked No10 into delaying 'Freedom Day' last month underestimated the power of vaccines.

Dr Mike Tildesley was behind one of the more optimistic models which predicted there could be 72,000 deaths from the virus before next winter due to the rapidly rising Indian variant.

But the Warwick University expert has now confessed Britain is 'in a much better situation than we thought' when the models were published last month.

Asked whether the original terminus date on June 21 could have gone ahead safely, he said: 'In hindsight, possibly.'

The Government and its scientists have come under criticism about the modes, some of which forecast up to 200,000 deaths in a worst-case scenario, because they used out of date data on the vaccines.

The forecasts were based on the assumption that the AstraZeneca vaccine only cut the risk of hospitalisation from the Indian 'Delta' variant by a maximum of 77 per cent, and Pfizer's by 84 per cent.

The calculations were published on Monday, June 14, and it later emerged that Public Health England was sitting on real-world data showing they were much more effective than that from at least Friday, June 11.

Warwick scientists also predicted there would be 500 to 600 hospitalisations a day now because of the Indian variant. But the country is in fact seeing around 250.

It comes as PHE said today there had been 50,824 new cases of the Indian variant in the last week, with the mutant strain now accounting for 96 per cent of all infections in Britain.

But there is confidence brewing in No10 at the fact hospitalisations and deaths have remained stagnant in the face of the extremely infectious strain.

Boris Johnson is doubling-down on his re-scheduled July 19 reopening, telling reporters yesterday that vaccines had 'broken the link' between cases and deaths.

Daily Covid hospitalisations are currently half of SAGE's most optimistic forecasts fore June 22, which predicted there would be around 531 admissions a day by this time

Boris Johnson yesterday hailed vaccines for 'breaking the link' between Covid infections (left) and deaths (right). Despite infections soaring to levels on par with the second wave, deaths have remained almost completely flat

This has also meant that hospital admissions are running at a tenth of level at the same time at the start of the second wave (left) and kept the NHS at manageable occupancy (right)

Dr Mike Tildesley has admitted Britain was in a 'better situation than we thought' when the models were published

Dr Tildesley, who is a member of the Government's SPI-M (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling), admitted in an interview with Unherd: 'We're in a position that the vaccine efficacy is a lot more effective, but this is the caveat here, the delay also enabled us to vaccinate a lot more people with a slightly higher level of restrictions in place.

'These models are only as good as the data that goes in.

'I work as an infectious disease modeller and I've always said that models should only form part of the decision-making process  you need health experts, economists, social scientists and a huge range of expertise.'

Officials insisted the estimates came too late to be included in the models. But Dr Susan Hopkins, the deputy director of PHE's national infection service, admitted to MPs that the Government knew about the figures at least a week before the models were published. It suggests ministers pushed ahead with the publication instead of trying to use the latest available data.

The Indian variant sparked concern when it began to spread rapidly in the country and replace the Kent 'Alpha' strain which caused the devastating second wave. But amid a successful vaccination roll-out hospitalisations and deaths from the virus have remained flat.

Modelling by SAGE scientists predicted there could be more than 200,000 fatalities from the virus by next June in a 'worst case' scenario, although this figure was quickly disputed by critics.

Warwick University's model showed there could be between 72,400 to 17,100 total deaths this summer and autumn, with daily deaths ranging from fewer than 500 per day to 3,000 depending on how well the vaccines work. The new PHE data means these estimates will likely be too high

Modelling submitted to SAGE showed how many people could die each day with the rapid spread of the Indian variant. Warwick University researchers made their estimates (red) based on the assumption that the Indian variant is 56 per cent more transmissible, and that fully vaccinated people are given 90 per cent protection against hospital admission. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researchers (blue) used similar figures to come to their conclusions. Dotted lines number one to four show the different dates restrictions were eased

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and Warwick University all underestimated how well the vaccines would protect people from being hospitalised with the Indian Covid variant. This meant their models likely overestimated the number of deaths and hospitalisations that will follow in the coming weeks and months. Public Health England's real-world analysis showed the jabs were extremely effective after two doses

'What are we waiting for?' Boris Johnson faces growing Tory backlash over scrapping school bubbles after hols Boris Johnson is facing increasing pressure from Tory MPs and parents today to take action on school bubbles before the summer holidays. The Prime Minister came under fire after claiming that schools needed the 'fire break' of the summer holidays before they implement new rules to replace the current bubble system. Critics say the system, which sees large numbers of children forced to stay at home if one person tests positive for Covid has been responsible for tens of thousands of children missing school. There are also fears over the economic damage of having large numbers of parents having to take time off work to care for them. Senior Tories told the Telegraph today that the PM's remarks had fallen 'on stony ground' The former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson joined the clamour for a swifter release from the bubbles today. Writing in the Telegraph the new peer said there needed to be a plan to reintroduce 'play; this summer, adding: 'Where is the respite for parents this summer after the pressure-cooker of multiple lockdowns, especially for those without outdoor space at home? 'Why do the bubble rules still in force mean many holiday camps and play schemes are being forced to keep their doors shut, when the need for places and spaces for play is more acute than ever? 'Where is the national summer drive for play to give back to the generation who were statistically at least risk, but had to sacrifice most?' A reminder of the damaging effect on education came as figures showed the average pupil lost at least a week's worth of learning in autumn term last year, despite schools being open. Advertisement

Imperial College London said there could be 203,824 deaths by next summer in a 'worst case' scenario, falling to 26,854 in a 'best case'. Warwick's said their estimate of 72,400 fatalities could fall to 17,100. And scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine warned there could be 33,200 deaths in an optimistic scenario.

Dr Tildesley said it now looked as though a 'shallow' third wave was more likely because of the successful roll-out, and called on ministers to stick to July 19 easings.

'It is very much not going to be the situation we saw in October or January because of the fantastic progress with the vaccines,' he said.

'I'm cautiously optimistic given where we are. If you look at cases, they are going up in a really concerning way  however, we haven't yet seen that translate into a significant rise in hospital admissions and deaths.

'I am pretty hopeful that July 19 should proceed as planned and we won't see a big rise in hospitalisations beyond that. We may see something of a rise. I think there will be a wave, but nothing like the same scale we saw in January.'

The modeller also joined calls for the Government to ditch its daily cases and deaths updates, saying it was 'unhelpful' in terms of getting the country back to normality.

More than 44.8million Britons  85.2 per cent of adults  have received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine and 33million  or 62.7 per cent  have got both doses.

Britain has so far dished out more than 45million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, and 29million Pfizer jabs.

PHE estimates based on real-world data released yesterday found two doses of the AstraZeneca jab were more than 92 per cent effective at blocking severe illness from the Indian variant among over-65s. For the Pfizer jab, it was 98 per cent.

Amid the successful roll-out, the Prime Minister is doubling-down on his July 19 Freedom Day as hospitalisations and deaths remain flat while cases rise.

Speaking while visiting a Nissan car factory in Sunderland yesterday, Mr Johnson said: 'I know that people are impatient for us to open up faster and of course I want to do that.

'But what I would say to people is we are now in the final furlong, I really believe.

'We have to look very carefully at the data and at the moment what we are certainly seeing is a big increase in cases - 26,000 as you will have seen.

'But that is not translating into a big increase in serious illness and death.

'So, it looks ever clearer that we have broken, the vaccination programme, the speed of that vaccine rollout, has broken that link between infection and mortality and that is an amazing thing.

'That gives us the scope we think on the 19th to go ahead, cautiously, irreversibly, to go ahead.'

Last month MPs on the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee grilled Dr Hopkins about using out of date data in their modelling.

Committee chair Greg Clark, a former Tory science minister, said: 'Wouldn't it have been possible given the relatively new real world data, to say actually, in the light of this data, we need a few more days to assess it, before we decide what is going to be the right implications of public policy?'

He added that the UK's Covid crisis had been 'beset by uncertainties and difficulties with modelling evidence informing government policy decisions'.

Mr Clark called for the models to be redone as soon as possible 'so that, as the Prime Minister promised, a reappraisal can be made and a change made if it's justified'.

Dr Hopkins said she was in 'no doubt' that SAGE would plug the new figures into heir models.

But Tory MP Aaron Bell suggested it was too late and that the new data may have altered 'the case for the continuation of restrictions'.

He added: 'The models that we seem to be relying on to justify the extension of restrictions don't appear to be using [the PHE] numbers.

'This is really important because the number of deaths that those numbers ultimately forecast, are for people who have had both doses, so if they have been using numbers that are now superseded, doesn't that alter the case for the continuation of restrictions?'

'We are voting in the House of Commons on the basis of those models. And it's obviously very good news. These numbers are coming out so far ahead of even the optimistic scenarios that have been modelled.'
The parents of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn have said they 'stood up and spoke for him' after flying to the US and giving evidence in a damages claim against their son's alleged killer.

Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn gave legal testimony against Anne Sacoolas during their depositions on Thursday, after flying out to Washington DC earlier this week.

Mr Dunn's parents faced lawyers acting on behalf of suspect Ms Sacoolas, who left the UK after diplomatic immunity was asserted on her behalf following the 19-year-old's death in August 2019.

Mrs Charles said her latest trip to the US had been 'arduous and difficult' but added: 'We stood up and spoke for him as he cannot speak for himself now.'

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 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 US State Department in January last year.

The parents of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn flew 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, the parents of Harry Dunn, arrive at Terminal 2 of Heathrow Airport, London

Mr Dunn's parents faced 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

The 43-year-old will also be required to give legal testimony by the end of August as part of the civil claim.

Speaking after the her deposition, Mrs Charles said: 'We are so glad that our depositions are out of the way now.

'We can't go into the detail of what happened at all but we were required to come out to the USA to do the depositions in person and that is just what we have done.

'Although it has been an arduous day and a difficult trip, right smack in the middle of the pandemic, the reality is that it is easy for us to come to the States and for us to talk about our son Harry and the impact his loss has had on all of us.

'We are enduring life, not living it, but we will do everything in our power to get justice for our boy and for ourselves.

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

'He deserves that. We deserve that, and we will not stop until we have achieved justice in both the civil and criminal cases.'

The depositions are 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.

The damages 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'.

Mrs Charles added: 'I really think Harry would have been proud of us today. We stood up and spoke for him as he cannot speak for himself now.

'The American people have been so wonderful and supportive since we have been out here this week and we are so grateful to them for all their support.

'But now that we have come to do what we had to do, we cannot wait to get back home to the safety of our home.'

Mr Dunn's father said the depositions marked a 'giant step' in their quest for justice in the civil claim.

He told PA: 'I am really proud of Charlotte and myself for what we have achieved today.

'The build up to coming on this trip for the depositions has been so stressful for all of our family and I am really pleased we are through that now and can now look forward to getting back home.

'Harry was everything to me. I cannot bear to be without him. But I know I have to.

'He is not coming back but we can honour his life by doing what we are doing and he is going to leave a huge legacy behind him with everything our campaign has achieved.'

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.

Mr Dunn added: 'This trip could not have gone any better and I feel we have taken another giant step towards getting justice in the civil claim.

Harry Dunn's parents with family advisor Radd Seiger arriving at Terminal 2 of Heathrow Airport, London

'We know the path is now clear in the criminal case too and I want to appeal on behalf of my family to the authorities in both London and Washington to do everything within their power to help alleviate our suffering a little and speed up the process of justice in the criminal case.

'We are almost at two years since Harry died and the time has come for them all to do the right thing now.'

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.

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 British ex-pat who was arrested in Singapore for refusing to wear a face covering on the train appeared in court today without a mask.

Father-of-two Benjamin Glynn, 39, received one count of failing to wear a mask without reasonable excuse, one count of public nuisance and one count of using threatening words towards a public servant.

He only put a mask on after being ordered to do so by court officers, and the judge presiding over his case made numerous remarks during proceedings for Glynn to wear his mask properly.

If found guilty at trial, he could face up to six months in a Singapore jail.

Benjamin Glynn, 39 (pictured) arrived for his court appearance in Singapore without a mask after being arrested for not wearing a mask on a train

Glynn (pictured) is against the wearing of masks as he doesn't believe them to be effective

He only wore a mask when ordered to do so by court officials, and he took it off immediately after leaving the courtroom

Glynn is a British expat originally from Helmsley, Yorkshire, who is now stuck in Singapore awaiting trial after Singapore police arrested him on May 8 for not wearing a mask on public transport the day before

Glynn was arrested in June after a fellow commuter secretly filmed him without a mask on the train and put the clip on social media, prompting officers to arrest him hours later.

After 28 hours in a cell, the Yorkshireman was charged with a public nuisance offence. Mr Glynn claims officers said he faces up to six months behind bars, if found guilty.

Mr Glynn's passport was confiscated, meaning he couldn't return to the UK as planned with his partner and two children - aged five and two.

He also lost a new job he was due to start in the UK and fears he could have to spend as much as 12 months on bail before his trial.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, is assisting him.

JUST IN: Benjamin Glynn, a 39-year-old British expatriate, arrives in court, without a mask on. Reports have identified him as the man who is set to be charged for failing to wear a mask while in an MRT train, public nuisance and using threatening words towards police officers who were on duty. READ: https://bit.ly/3656s11 (Video: Wan Ting Koh/Yahoo News Singapore) Posted by Yahoo Singapore on Thursday, July 1, 2021

Mr Glynn said: 'I had no idea anyone had even been filming, but it turned out a video of me unmasked on the late train home from work surfaced online.

'The police obviously saw it and the next day they were at the door.

'I don't believe there is any evidence that masks protect you from Covid-19.

'Normally I would just tell people I'm exempt and it had never posed any issues before.

'But now I'm stuck here without my family and I don't even know when I will appear in court, never mind what my sentence will be.

'All for something I don't even believe in.'

Mr Glynn had been working for a Singapore branch of a British recruitment company since January 2017.

Weeks before he was due to return to the UK for a new job, he was filmed without a mask near Raffles Place, the financial district of Singapore, on May 7.

In Singapore it is mandatory to wear a mask when residents leave their homes, with very few exceptions.

Glynn also lost a new job he was due to start in the UK and fears he could have to spend as much as 12 months on bail before his trial

'I never normally wear a mask but this is the first time it has been an issue,' he said.

'I had no idea anyone had even been filming until the police were at the door - I've never even seen the video because it was removed before I had chance.'

Police knocked on his door on the evening of May 8 and arrested him while his family were asleep, he said.

Mr Glynn said he was told he was being charged with being a 'public nuisance', after he was spotted un-masked on a train the day before.

His arrest papers confirm the charge and set his bail bond at 270.

The anti-masker spent two days in a holding cell before being released the following Monday on bail.

He said officers warned him it could take 12 months for the case to come to trial, and he will face up to six months in jail if he is found guilty.

The Foreign Office said they were assisting Glynn

Mr Glynn, whose family returned to Leeds on May 31, said: 'This whole situation is ridiculous.

'I want to leave the country anyway - just let me go!

'I think it's insane that I am facing a trial at all, just for not wearing a mask.'

He is now out of work because he was due to transfer to a position back in the UK, which has now been revoked.

'It's a horrible situation to be in when I don't know when I can next see my family,' he said.

'Especially when I don't even believe masks stop the spread of the virus in the first place.

'I honestly believe it's a hoax - I don't feel there is any evidence to show mask-wearing is effective in any way.

'From a scientific basis, I think it's nonsense, but now all I can do is wait.'

A spokesperson for the Singapore Police said: 'As information related to police investigations are confidential in nature, we are unable to comment further on the case.'

A spokesperson for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: 'We are assisting a British man who is awaiting trial in Singapore, and have been in contact with the local police about his case.'
Changes to blood cells caused by the coronavirus may explain why so many patients suffer from long Covid, researchers say.

German researchers have found that the virus alters the size and stiffness of red and white blood cells, making it harder to get oxygen and nutrients around the body.

Their small study of 55 people found that these changes can last for several months, which may explain why many Covid patients become 'long haulers'.

They believe the disruption to oxygen flow is the root of the common symptoms which plague long Covid patients - breathing issues, tiredness and headaches.

But these physical alterations to the blood cells may also explain why some very sick Covid patients develop blood clots or suffer organ damage.

Scientists from the Max Planck Center for Physics and Medicine in Germany, who made the finding, analysed blood samples of current and former Covid patients and compared them to healthy volunteers.

Long Covid is an umbrella term encompassing symptoms that persist for more than a month and is poorly understood.

But official figures suggest hundreds of thousands of people across the UK have been suffering from the condition.

Fatigue was the most common symptom, affecting an estimated 535,000 people, followed by shortness of breath striking 397,000 and muscle ache hitting 309,000, according to the Office for National Statistics

The researchers found that blood cells were different sizes and shapes in people who were healthy (left), previously had the virus (middle) and had currently had the virus and were hospitalised (right). The graphs show how deformation increased slightly for people who had the virus, while those currently infected had cells that were much more deformed

The graph on the left estimates what blood cells look like in health (grey), recovered (green) and currently infected (yellow) patients

The researchers found volunteers who had Covid suffered poorer blood circulation, limited oxygen transport and blood clots.

'These are all phenomena in which the blood cells and their physical properties play a key role,' they said in their report, which was published last month in Biophysical Journal.

WHAT ARE THE LONG-TERM SYMPTOMS OF COVID-19? Most coronavirus patients will recover within a fortnight, suffering a fever, cough and losing their sense of smell or taste for several days. However, evidence is beginning to show that the tell-tale symptoms of the virus can persist for weeks on end in 'long haulers'  the term for patients plagued by lasting complications. Data from the Covid Symptom Study app, by King's College London and health company Zoe, suggests one in ten people may still have symptoms after three weeks, and some may suffer for months. Long term symptoms include: Chronic tiredness

Breathlessness

Raised heart rate

Delusions

Strokes

Insomnia

Loss of taste/smell

Kidney disease

Mobility issues

Headaches

Muscle pains

Fevers For those with more severe disease, Italian researchers who tracked 143 people who had been hospitalised with the disease found almost 90 per cent still had symptoms including fatigue two months after first falling unwell. The most common complaints were fatigue, a shortness of breath and joint pain - all of which were reported during their battle with the illness. Source: NHS Advertisement

The scientists examined over four million blood cells from 17 patients acutely ill with Covid aged between 41 and 87, from 14 people aged 27 to 76 who recovered and from 24 healthy people aged 26 to 81 as a comparison group.

They measured the shape of red and white blood cells using a microscopic camera and analysed the data on a computer.

Red blood cells - vital for carrying oxygen and nutrients around the body - were found to be drastically different sizes and shapes in Covid patients.

The researchers believe this can make blood clumpy and therefore harder to get oxygen around the body.

Additionally, they found that the size and shape of white blood cells - a key part of the immune system - in patients with the virus were also found to be deformed in Covid patients.

The researchers believe the combination of damage to both red and white blood cells was behind long-Covid.

It comes after official figures suggested hundreds of thousands of people across the UK have been suffering from long Covid.

Nearly one million people were found in May to be experiencing long Covid  defined as symptoms which last for more than four weeks after infection, according to the Office for National Statistics.

An estimated 385,000 were struggling with persistent symptoms that had gone on since last summer.

Around two-thirds of those with long Covid said it restricted their ability to carry out day-to-day activities. Symptoms include organ failure, tiredness, shortness of breath, hair loss and brain fog.

Fatigue was the most common symptom, affecting an estimated 535,000 people, followed by shortness of breath striking 397,000 and muscle ache hitting 309,000.

Lib Dem MP Layla Moran, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on coronavirus, said: Weve heard how the patchwork of support services for long Covid patients is already overstretched.

Previous research has estimated that as many as two million people in England could be suffering ongoing symptoms after a Covid-19 infection.

It comes after a study found that only a small proportion of cases of long Covid are being recorded by GPs.

Experts from Oxford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said their study raised questions about how long Covid is diagnosed, recorded and managed in the NHS.

They found that only 23,273 cases were formally recorded between February 2020 and April 2021 at GP practices in England.

More than a quarter of practices had never logged a case, according to the article in the British Journal of General Practice.

Ms Moran said: Covid is not like the flu, it can cause long-term serious illness in otherwise young and healthy people, including children.

Even those who are not hospitalised have a risk of developing this debilitating condition, leaving them needing ongoing support for many months to recover.

She added: The new Health Secretary must consider the impact of long Covid ahead of lifting restrictions on July 19 to prevent another wave of cases that could have a devastating impact on our health service and economy.

Gavin Williamson must also consider the risk posed by long Covid to pupils as part of plans to relax Covid measures in schools.

The Governments current approach risks condemning thousands more people to live with the cruel impact of long Covid while struggling to access the support they need.
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Boris Johnson today decried the violent mob who celebrated 'tearing this b**ch down' as they toppled and desecrated statues of Britain's Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II during Canada Day protests sparked by the discovery of mass graves of indigenous schoolchildren.

In scenes reminiscent of the BLM protests where a 'hit list' of 'racist' statues in the US and UK was drawn up for destruction after the murder of George Floyd, the bronze sculptures of Britain's current monarch and her great-great grandmother in Winnipeg were hauled down, daubed with red paint and even appeared to have been strangled with Mohawk flags.

With no police to be seen anywhere, protesters in orange led by members of the left-wing anti-colonial 'Idle No More' group campaigning for Canada Day to be cancelled, tied ropes to the necks of the statues and ripped them to the ground to chants of 'no to genocide' and 'bring her down' amid fury over the deaths of 1,000 indigenous children found buried in mass graves this month.

Sharing footage of Victoria's statue coming down, self-styled 'Land Defender' Waabishkaa Ma'iingan Naakshig, tweeted: 'I helped tear the b**ch down'.

1,500 miles west, a statue of Captain Cook - the first Briton to land in British Columbia - was also pulled down in the city of Victoria before being hurled into the harbour in scenes reminiscent of the destruction of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol last year. Cook's statue was replaced by a red wooden dress - a colour and symbol for indigenous people in Canada with the plinth vandalised with 'colonizer'.

Between the 18th century and the 1970s, 150,000 indigenous Canadian children were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages after being sent to Catholic schools. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died, but the policy of the Canadian Government appears to have little to do with the British Royal Family, who are ceremonial heads of state.

350 Native American boarding schools were also established in the United States during the early 19th and mid 20th centuries to 'civilize' Native American children into Euro-American culture. Yesterday's protests in Canada raise the prospect of them spreading to the US and similar investigations into mass graves there after claims of neglect, abuse, and death.

Downing Street has today condemned the toppling of statues of the Queen and Queen Victoria in Canada during protests over the discovery of unmarked graves belonging to indigenous children.

Boris Johnson's spokesman said: 'We obviously condemn any defacing of statues of the Queen', adding: Our thoughts are with Canada's indigenous community following these tragic discoveries and we follow these issues closely and continue to engage with the government of Canada with indigenous matters.'

Tory MP Alexander Stafford branded the vandalism incredibly disrespectful and said it was an odd juxtaposition trying to blame the monarchy for the tragedy over which it had no political control.

Frankly I think it is people trying to link and use the awfulness of the tragedy that has been uncovered for their own politician, republican views. I dont think the two should be linked, he told MailOnline, adding: 'Its up to Canada their debate about the Commonwealth and our current monarch  but they shouldnt try to rewrite history and force their own political views about a constitutional matter on what was clearly a horrific issue that happened in the past.

He also volunteered to take the statues and have them erected in his Rother Valley constituency in South Yorkshire, saying: We havent got a statue of any of the monarchs, Ill definitely take them, so rather than destroy them send them my way.

A gigantic statue of Queen Victoria has been torn down and daubed in red paint in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Canada Day as a backlash over the country's colonial history ramps up

Queen Elizabeth's statue was also torn down amid growing anger in Canada over the treatment of its indigenous communities over hundreds of years

Video footage showing the statue leaning forward (left) and then falling flat (right) after being pulled down by the mob

The defaced statue after being toppled during a rally, following the discovery of the remains of hundreds of children at former indigenous residential schools, outside the provincial legislature on Canada Day in Winnipeg

Victoria's face appears to have been smothered with a flag with a rope used to tear it down before it was covered in paint

One protester places a boot on Queen Victoria's toppled statue in Winnipeg

A wooden red dress symbolising the struggle of indigenous people in Canada and severed bronze leg of Capt. James Cook's statue in Victoria, British Columbia, where the monument was pulled down by a crowd and dumped into the harbour. 'Colonizer' was daubed on the plinth

The vandalism took place after a group of protesters gathered at the Manitoba legislature and then pulled down the statue of Victoria on Canada Day  an annual celebration on July 1 that marks the country's confederation - with Victoria's plinth covered in hand prints to represent the dead children

Huge crowds gathered to watch the statue fall, with hundreds screaming and cheering as the statue came down

Protesters who also brought their children stood on the statue and the plinth and covered the bronze with red paint representing blood

Canada became an independent state in 1867 but Queen Elizabeth II remain's Canada's constitutional monarch and is still seen as representative of colonialism but some Canadians. This is her statue before and after it was torn down

Revealed: The left-wing anti-colonial group toppling statues, trying to cancel Canada Day (and punish Israel) Protesters in orange led by members of the 'Idle No More' group have led the statue toppling across Canada - with their supporters calling themselves 'light warriors'. It is a left-wing organisation that describes itself as 'a grassroots advocacy group, opposing unilateral & colonial legislation' in Canada. But also campaigns on global issues including for Justin Trudeau to sanction Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. Its supporters are encouraged to wear orange to events - and also have links to groups such as Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter. Advertisement

Extraordinary footage of Queen Victoria's Winnipeg statue being toppled in broad daylight showed hundreds of people cheering and squealing with joy as she fell, before many began dancing with joy on the fallen figure and its plinth while waving Canadian indigenous flags. The statue of the current Queen, yards away, was brought down soon afterwards.

A nearby statue of Queen Victoria is taped off after being covered in paint - but a mob failed to destroy it - and at least ten churches were also desecrated overnight.

The attacks have been spearheaded by Idle No More, a left-wing organisation that describes itself as 'a grassroots advocacy group, opposing unilateral & colonial legislation' in Canada, but also campaigns on global issues including for Justin Trudeau to sanction Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.

Prime Minister Trudeau said recently he was 'terribly saddened' by the at Marieval Indian Residential School, and told indigenous people that 'the hurt and the trauma that you feel is Canadas responsibility to bear'.

But it appears protesters are also focussed on damaging monuments of British queens, even though the country became an independent state in 1867 while retaining its link to the Royal Family.

The vandalism took place across the North American country yesterday - on Canada Day - amid fury over the gruesome discovery of more than 1,000 Indigenous children's graves - with at least ten churches also desecrated last night.

Amid growing fury over the scandal coinciding with Canada Day yesterday, Queen Victoria's statue was toppled in Winnipeg, in the central Canadian province of Manitoba, before being covered in red paint with a message that read 'we were children once. Bring them home'.

A smaller statue of Elizabeth was also toppled in the same area, with protesters insisting both royals are the face of Canada's colonial history.

The Canadian flag on the Peace Tower in Ottawa was flown at half-mast to honour indigenous children, as was the flag on the central tower of the Quebec National Assembly.

'This year, the tragic history of residential schools has overshadowed Canada Day celebrations,' said Quebec premier Francois Legault.

But opposition leader Erin O'Toole defended Canada Day. 'The road to reconciliation does not start by tearing Canada down,' the Conservative leader said, admitting that Canada is 'not a perfect country.'

There were even calls to cancel Canada Day over the discovery of the dead children - Victoria's face is covered by a Mohawk society flag

Wooden red dresses and red hand prints are seen on the statue of Capt. James Cook in Victoria, British Columbia, where the statue was pulled down by a crowd and dumped into Victoria's inner harbour

Red hand prints are seen on the statue of Capt. James Cook, who is branded a 'colonizer'

Lucy Sager, visits a growing memorial as another Indigenous community in British Columbia this week

How thousands of indigenous children died after being taken from their families and placed in boarding school across Canada in a policy that continued until the 1970s By Harry Howard, History Correspondent for MailOnline More than 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families and placed in residential schools across Canada from 1863 until the 1970s. The system was created by Christian churches and the Canadian government in the 19th century in an attempt to 'assimilate' and convert indigenous youngsters into Canadian society. The children were forced to cut their long hair, banned from speaking their own languages and many were both physically and sexually abused. An estimated 6,000 children are believed to have died at the schools. Yesterday's protests -which saw the toppling of statues of both Queen Victoria and current Queen Elizabeth II - came after a series of discoveries of mass graves in recent weeks and months. The latest find - on Wednesday - of 182 children's bodies was made by an indigenous group using ground-penetrating radar at the former St. Eugene's Mission School in Cranbrook, British Columbia. In the US, a similar system of boarding schools, for Native Americans, existed with the aim of 'civilising' children into Western culture. The US system was in place from the mid-19th century until the mid-20th century. The Kamloops Indian Residential School in 1937. The school was established in 1890 and operated until 1969, its roll peaking at 500 during the 1950s Did Queen Victoria or the Queen have any influence over the schools policy? In 1867, the Canadian confederation of what had been separate British colonies in North America were established, creating a self-governing state within the British Empire. Queen Victoria, who ruled from 1837 until her death in 1901, was on the throne when the residential school system was in full swing. Victoria never visited Canada and  given her status as a constitutional monarch - had very limited influence over the Government in the UK and even less ability to question policies made in Canada. The system was largely a result of Canada's Indian Act, which was passed in 1876 under Canada's Liberal Prime Minister Alexander MacKenzie, with no influence from the British Government. However, prior to Confederation, it was the passing of the Gradual Civilisation Act  which required indigenous people to speak either English or French  which the system ultimately rested on. Its aim was for indigenous people to 'no longer be deemed an Indian' and instead become a regular British subject. An undated photo of indigenous children with their parents at the Kamloops residential school In 1920, attendance at the residential schools became compulsory for indigenous children between the ages of 7 and 15. When Dominion Status was formally granted to Canada in 1926, it was recognised as an 'autonomous' community within the British Empire. In 1931, the Statue of Westminster confirmed its full legislative independence, although full sovereignty was not formally passed until 1982. It meant that, while the indigenous school system continued, the British Government and Monarch were not involved in its maintenance. It wasn't until 1982 that the Canadian Constitution was amended to recognize the rights of 'Indian, Inuit, and Metis peoples of Canada'. Queen Elizabeth II, who remains Canada's monarch, has a purely constitutional role both in the UK and in former British colonies where she remains head of state. It means that, while statues of her have been toppled, she had no ability to influence Canada's residential school system. A statue of 18th century British explorer Captain James Cook was also targeted in the recent protests. The Royal Navy captain famously made three voyages in the Pacific Ocean and to Australia, but did also spend time in Canada. He was involved in the blockade of Louisbourg against French forces in 1758 and in 1761 made charts of the town and harbour at Halifax. He also took part in the assault on the then French-held Quebec. Advertisement

Thousands held a similar rally in Montreal with slogans like 'Happy denial day.'

'I come here because I have small children and I think it's important to send the message that we don't want our children to be touched, to be mistreated,' said an emotional Therese Dube, 56, an indigenous woman from the Akikamekw nation and a survivor of one of the residential schools in Quebec.

April Courtney Kipling, a 29-year-old indigenous woman, came 'to remember, to recognize all the children who will never go home.'

Others had a more pointed reason for showing up. 'Canada Day is like celebrating genocide,' said Olivia Lya, a 22-year-old Innu woman.

'Anyone celebrating Canada on July 1 is celebrating oppression,' said Nakuset, co-organiser of the Montreal Native Women's Shelter, in a statement.

Several indigenous people noted the presence of non-indigenous Canadians at the Montreal rally.

'It's hopeful, it shows that people are listening,' said Nadine Bellerose Lavallee, a 50-year-old Metis woman.

Protests in support of the indigenous children also took place on Thursday in Toronto, Canada's financial hub, while a #CancelCanadaDay march in the capital Ottawa drew thousands in support of victims and survivors of the residential school system.

Vigils and rallies were held across other parts of the country. Many participants wore orange clothing, which has become the symbol of the movement.

In his Canada Day message, Trudeau said the discoveries of the remains of the children at the former schools 'have rightfully pressed us to reflect on our country's historical failures'. Injustices still exist for indigenous peoples and many others in Canada, he said.

The row intensified earlier this month when indigenous group in Canada's Saskatchewan province said it had found the unmarked graves of 751 people at a now-defunct Catholic residential school where tribal children were 'assimilated' into society.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was 'terribly saddened' by the new discovery at Marieval Indian Residential School, and told indigenous people that 'the hurt and the trauma that you feel is Canadas responsibility to bear.'

It comes just one month after 215 children were found at another residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia - taking the total to more than 1,000.

The Marieval Indian Residential School remains were found after the First Nation teamed up with an underground radar detection team from Saskatchewan Polytechnic just over three weeks ago.

Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme said that the graves were marked at one time, but that the Roman Catholic Church that operated the school had removed the markers.

'Canada will be known as a nation who tried to exterminate the First Nations. Now we have evidence,' said Bobby Cameron, Chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, which represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan.

'This is just the beginning.'

From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into Canadian society.

They were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages.

Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died.

'This was a crime against humanity, an assault on First Nations,' said Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nations in Saskatchewan. He said he expects more graves will be found on residential school grounds across Canada.

'We will not stop until we find all the bodies,' he said.

Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report in 2015 said: 'Many students who went to residential school never returned. They were lost to their families.

'They died at rates that were far higher than those experienced by the general school-aged population. 

'Their parents were often uninformed of their sickness and death. They were buried away from their families in long-neglected graves.'

The Canadian government apologized in Parliament in 2008 and admitted that physical and sexual abuse in the schools was rampant.

Many students recall being beaten for speaking their native languages; they also lost touch with their parents and customs.

Indigenous leaders have cited that legacy of abuse and isolation as the root cause of epidemic rates of alcoholism and drug addiction on reservations.

Last month the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were found buried on the site of what was once Canada's largest Indigenous residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia.

Those youngsters were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia that closed in 1978, according to the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation, which said the remains were found with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist.

None of them have been identified, and it remains unclear how they died. Survivors fear more bodies will be found at the same site - as well as at the 80 other former residential school sites across Canada.

The Kamloops discovery reopened old wounds in Canada about the lack of information and accountability around the residential school system, which forcibly separated indigenous children from their families and subjected them to malnutrition and physical and sexual abuse.

'The Pope needs to apologize for what happened,' Delorme said. 'An apology is one stage in the way of a healing journey.'

Pope Francis said in early June that he was pained by the Kamloops revelation and called for respect for the rights and cultures of native peoples. But he stopped short of the direct apology some Canadians had demanded.

'It's a harsh reality and it's our truth, it's our history,' Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Chief Rosanne Casimir told a media conference Friday.

'And it's something that we've always had to fight to prove. To me, it's always been a horrible, horrible history.'

The area of the Marieval Indian Residential School is seen in an undated map on the Cowessess Reserve near Grayson, Saskatchewan, Canada

 Slide me  NOW and THEN: The site of Marieval Indian Residential School, left today, and right in 1923

Young students and their Catholic teachers are seen in an undated photo. The Marieval Indian Residential School remains were found after the First Nation teamed up with an underground radar detection team from Saskatchewan Polytechnic just over three weeks ago

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was 'terribly saddened' by the new discovery at Marieval Indian Residential School, and told indigenous people that 'the hurt and the trauma that you feel is Canadas responsibility to bear.. Justin Trudeau visits the makeshift memorial erected in honor of the 215 indigenous children remains found at a boarding school in British Columbia, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 1

Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme said that the graves were marked at one time, but that the Roman Catholic Church that operated the school had removed the markers. Marieval Residential School in Saskatchewan in an undated photo

From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into Canadian society. Indigenous boys of the Indian School of Marieval in 1934

People from Mosakahiken Cree Nation hug in front of a makeshift memorial at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School on June 4 to honor the 215 children whose remains have been discovered buried near the facility, in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada

People gather outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School on June 6 as they welcome a group of runners from the Syilx Okanagan Nation taking part in The Spirit of Syilx Unity Run, following the discovery of the remains of 215 children buried near the facility, in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada

In this photo taken on June 6, a staked child's dress is seen on the side of Hwy 5, placed there to represent an ongoing genocide against First Nations people in Canada, near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, where the remains of 215 children were discovered buried near the facility, in Kamloops

215 pairs of children's shoes are seen on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery as a memorial to the 215 children whose remains were found last month

The children whose remains were found last month were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia (pictured) that closed in 1978
The son of the limo driver blamed for Sydney's Covid outbreak has issued an angry defence of his father, claiming his 'honest, hardworking' dad has been made 'a scapegoat'.

The 60-year-old airport limousine driver is thought to be 'patient zero' in Sydney's outbreak that started with the Bondi cluster and has so far grown to 226 active cases of the highly contagious Indian Delta variant.

In an emotional statement on a GoFundMe page set-up in support of his father on Friday, the limo driver's son said the NSW Government had 'traumatised the family' with its claims.

He explained his father had spent four to five hours with relatives, and had 'hugged and kissed' his daughter and grandchildren after he was believed to have contracted Covid on June 11 - and yet none of the family members he visited that day have tested positive.

The son of the airport limousine driver blamed for Sydney's Covid outbreak issued an angry defence of his father, claiming his 'honest, hardworking' dad has been made 'a scapegoat'

In an emotional statement on a GoFundMe page set-up in support of the man on Friday, the limo driver's son said the NSW Government had 'traumatised the family' with the claims

Despite his contact with international flights crews, the driver has fervently denied claims by NSW Health that he is the cause of the outbreak.

He insisted he caught coronavirus from a 'coughing man in his 30s' at Belle Cafe in Vaucluse instead.

His son claimed statements by Premier Gladys Berejiklian, Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant and Health Minister Brad Hazzard that his father was 'patient zero' were 'unsubstantiated'.

'Being the first to test positive doesn't make you patient zero,' the son wrote.

'My father always wore gloves, masks and sanitized his vehicles between passengers and this was confirmed by the numerous people that police interviewed during their investigation.

Sydney's outbreak that started with the Bondi cluster and has so far grown to 226 active cases of the highly contagious Indian Delta variant

'All international air crew that he drove have tested negative to COVID, so how on earth could Gladys Berejiklian, Dr Kerry Chant and Brad Hazzard go on public television and make unsubstantiated claims that he is patient zero?

'The government and media has relentlessly and without any evidence tried to blame an honest, hard working and well respected man who did nothing but follow all of the health orders given to him,' the statement read.

The official version of events is that the driver caught the Indian Delta variant while ferrying Fed Ex air staff to hotel quarantine and unknowingly spread it to a 50-year-old man and a 70-year-old woman in the eastern suburbs on June 11.

'How is it that such a contagious disease skipped his children and grandchildren, but infected a man in his 50s at Myer the same morning?' his son said.

The driver's son was also clearly angry the public scrutiny had taken place while his father was recovering from the Delta variant.

'Our family has had to endure the stress of my parents both having caught COVID and my mum being admitted to hospital in the midst of it,' he said.

'The government has tried to use him as a scapegoat for a system that clearly had large gaps that were not accounted for.'

This week, the driver told Daily Mail Australia he had recovered from the virus but can't return to work until he is vaccinated.

The man and his wife were finally allowed to leave their apartment in Bondi after two weeks in isolation from his positive test on June 15.

We are recovered, I'm feeling great,' he told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday.

The driver has not returned to work yet because he needs to be vaccinated against coronavirus. Pictured is a woman getting her jab at St Vincent's Hospital clinic in Sydney

The 60-year-old and his wife were finally allowed to leave their apartment in Bondi after two weeks in isolation from his positive test on June 15

However, the driver has not returned to work yet because he needs to be vaccinated against coronavirus.

'I need to register and need to be vaccinated in order to get back to work. I am not sure when yet,' he said.

Having refused refused AstraZeneca because of a family history of blood clots, he added: 'I'm hoping for Pfizer.'

Government policy enacted in response to him triggering the outbreak now requires anyone working with quarantined or international arrivals to be vaccinated.

If a worker does not comply, employers can be fined up to $11,000.

The driver was not legally required to be vaccinated at the time he caught the virus, but said he was wearing a face mask during the ill-fated trip from the airport on June 11.

People working around the hotel quarantine system were asked to present for daily Covid testing, but the driver admitted he had not been tested on his days off.

Upon leaving their eastern suburbs home, the husband and wife visited a grocery store and Bondi Post Office.

'It's my first day out of the house and I'm enjoying myself,' he said. He is afraid to reveal his identify and risk extreme public backlash and even physical harm.

The infection was caught when testing resumed when he returned to work - but he was already out in the community for several days before getting the positive result.

During that time, he had fleeting contact with a man in his 50s in Myer at Westfield Bondi Junction who latest tested positive.

Later that week, a woman in her 70s also caught it while sitting outside Belle Cafe as the driver walked past her to get inside.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian was quick to slam him in a press conference by blaming 'people in and around the system who think complacency is okay'.

'It's not okay. We know it and we feel it and we will get to the bottom of it,' she said.

The Sydney Airport driver is thought to have caught the Indian Delta variant while ferrying Fed Ex air staff to hotel quarantine

The infected limo driver believed to be 'patient zero' claims vividly remembered another customer in his 30s sat near to him at the Belle Cafe in Vaucluse (pictured) who was violently coughing and sneezing

She then dodged questions about why the driver was unvaccinated, saying: 'Obviously we will have more to say about that once police have completed their investigations.

'Everybody in NSW who works in our systems know their obligations, and we certainly look forward to providing certainty around what occurred in this situation.'

Police launched an investigated to determine whether the driver was in breach of public health orders, but the probe was dropped on Saturday.

'[On Friday] I advised we had sent the case for urgent external legal advice due to the significance of this outbreak and the community concern,' Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said.

'I can now confirm we have received advice that there is insufficient evidence to establish that either the limousine driver or his employer breached any public health orders.'

Two weeks after the limo driver was infected, Premier Gladys Berejiklian (pictured) announced that Sydney would enter a two-week lockdown on Saturday

The driver's earlier claims he was not patient zero were dismissed on Saturday by NSW chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant, who said their investigations had found no evidence to support his story.

On Nine's A Current Affair last week, the driver said he feared for his life after he was blamed for sparking the current outbreak.

Reporter Lauren Golman said: 'He says he sanitises his car in between passengers. He wants to look after his own family - he has a wife and daughters and three grandchildren.

'He wants to keep everyone safe, not to mention the wider community.'
A man sitting on the tracks of a subway line in New York was reportedly decapitated after he was struck by a train on Wednesday evening.

The man, who has not been identified, was sitting on the tracks at Castle Hill Avenue subway station when he was hit by a northbound 6 train at around 10.40pm, according to police.

The man's body remained on the elevated tracks while his head fell down off the tracks and landed on a sidewalk, according to the New York Post.

He died on the scene. More details about the fatal incident at the Bronx subway station are not currently known as the investigation is ongoing.

An unidentified man was reportedly sitting on the tracks at Castle Hill Avenue subway station (pictured) when he was hit by a northbound 6 train at around 10.40pm

A spokesperson for the New York Police Department said: 'On June 30, 2021, at 2244hrs, police officers responded to Castle Hill Avenue and Westchester Avenue within the confines of the 43rd Precinct.

'Upon arrival, officers were informed that a male was sitting on the roadbed at the south end of the northbound train tracks at the location and was struck by the train.

'EMS responded and pronounced the male deceased on the scene. The Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death and the investigation is ongoing.'

Castle Hill Avenue is an elevated subway line on the IRT Pelham line of the New York City Subway and is served by the 6 train at all times, apart from in the peak direction on weekdays.

The local station has three tracks and two side platforms and is located at the intersection of Castle Hill and Westchester Avenues in the Bronx borough.

In another incident, an Asian man was pushed into the path of an oncoming F train at the 21st St Queensbridge station in Long Island City in May, International Business Times reported.

The man's body remained on the elevated tracks while his head fell down off the tracks and landed on a sidewalk. Pictured: Castle Hill Avenue Station in Bronx

The train stopped before running over the victim, 35, who suffered cuts to his head after the fall.

The assailant was heard muttering under his breath before pushing the man, reports said. Police were investigating whether the matter was a hate crime.

Another subway incident saw a man die after jumping in front of a Brooklyn train at around 9am on April 15, according to reports.

The man, 37, reportedly jumped in front of oncoming trains at the Livonia Avenue L train platform in Brownsville. He was believed to have died at the scene.

In 2019, at least 62 people reportedly died on city subway tracks, while the number of people who were killed in subway train accidents in 2020 is said to be 43.

Out of the fatalities last year, 32 people had either jumped from platforms in front on an oncoming train, or stood on the tracks before the train arrived.
Tory MPs have warned it will be 'far fetched' to expect fully-vaccinated Britons to 'tolerate' coronavirus rules in the future amid claims health officials have drawn up a five year plan for winter curbs.

Staff at the Department of Health and Social Care are said to have come up with a contingency plan for the next five winters.

The aim of the document is to stop large waves of Covid-19 infections in the colder months.

Suggested measures include encouraging people to work from home and to resume social distancing, according to The Mirror.

But anti-lockdown Conservative MPs have rubbished the idea of reimposing curbs as they said the success of the vaccination programme should herald a return to normal life.

Staff at the Department of Health and Social Care are said to have come up with a contingency plan for the next five winters which could see social distancing measures reimposed

Lockdown critic and former minister Steve Baker said he does not believe people would put up with restrictions if they have had both doses of a vaccine

Boris Johnson said yesterday that it 'looks ever clearer' that the jabs have now 'broken the link' between infections and deaths.

The Prime Minister said that while there has been a significant spike in case numbers in recent weeks 'that is not translating into a big increase in serious illness and death'.

Lockdown critic and former minister Steve Baker said he does not believe people would put up with restrictions if they have had both doses of a vaccine.

He said: 'It sounds far fetched. I don't see how the public would tolerate long term future lockdowns, especially with everyone vaccinated with two doses.'

Health officials are said to believe that the winter plan could help to avoid the need for another full lockdown.

They were reportedly angered by comments made by the new Health Secretary Sajid Javid earlier this week when he said there will be 'no going back' once restrictions are lifted on July 19.

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said that if officials and ministers are 'drawing up a winter restriction plan then the Health Secretary should share it with the public'.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: 'We do not recognise this story and do not know where it has come from.'

It comes after Chris Whitty told Cabinet that the winter period will be 'difficult' as he supported pressing ahead with 'freedom day' on July 19.

A Cabinet source said: 'The view among the scientists was that we should get as much open this summer as possible before winter, which will be much more difficult. It was very encouraging.'

The Government has already announced plans for a coronavirus booster jab programme from September which will see millions of the most vulnerable people in the UK offered a third dose.

Ministers hope the vaccines will be able to do the heavy-lifting after 'freedom day', keeping hospitalisations and deaths low once rules are eased.

Mr Johnson said yesterday that he believes the nation is now in the 'final furlong' of restrictions.

There are growing fears among Tory MPs that the taste of freedom could prove short-lived if cases continue to surge. A further 27,989 cases were recorded yesterday  the highest daily figure since January 22

'We have to look very carefully at the data and at the moment what we are certainly seeing is a big increase in cases - 26,000 as you will have seen,' he said.

'But that is not translating into a big increase in serious illness and death.

'So, it looks ever clearer that we have broken, the vaccination programme, the speed of that vaccine rollout, has broken that link between infection and mortality and that is an amazing thing.

'That gives us the scope we think on the 19th to go ahead, cautiously, irreversibly, to go ahead.'

However, Mr Johnson did suggest that some rules or guidance could remain in place beyond 'freedom day'.

He said the aim is to 'try to get back to life as close to it was before Covid but there may be some things we have to do and some extra precautions that we have to take'.
Boris Johnson is facing increasing pressure from Tory MPs and parents today to take action on school bubbles before the summer holidays.

The Prime Minister came under fire after claiming that schools needed the 'fire break' of the summer holidays before they implement new rules to replace the current bubble system.

Critics say the system, which sees large numbers of children forced to stay at home if one person tests positive for Covid has been responsible for tens of thousands of children missing school.

There are also fears over the economic damage of having large numbers of parents having to take time off work to care for them.

Senior Tories told the Telegraph today that the PM's remarks had fallen 'on stony ground'

The former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson joined the clamour for a swifter release from the bubbles today.

Writing in the Telegraph the new peer said there needed to be a plan to reintroduce 'play; this summer, adding: 'Where is the respite for parents this summer after the pressure-cooker of multiple lockdowns, especially for those without outdoor space at home?

'Why do the bubble rules still in force mean many holiday camps and play schemes are being forced to keep their doors shut, when the need for places and spaces for play is more acute than ever?

The Prime Minister came under fire after claiming that schools needed the 'fire break' of the summer holidays before they implement new rules to replace the current bubble system.

The former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson joined the clamour for a swifter release from the bubbles today.

'Where is the national summer drive for play to give back to the generation who were statistically at least risk, but had to sacrifice most?'

A reminder of the damaging effect on education came as figures showed the average pupil lost at least a week's worth of learning in autumn term last year, despite schools being open.

Mr Johnson is under pressure after it was revealed that 375,000 children had been sent home because a member of their 'bubble' had tested positive for Covid.

They have to isolate for ten days if another pupil in their group gets the virus. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has suggested that school bubbles will end when classes return after the summer holidays in September.

He has also indicated that the changes could happen when the next stage of easing restrictions takes place on July 19.

But this is the date that many schools are due to break up for summer, making it a meaningless promise in practice.

Mr Johnson is under pressure after it was revealed that 375,000 children had been sent home because a member of their 'bubble' had tested positive for Covid (stock photo)

Tim Loughton, a Tory MP and former children's minister, told the Telegraph: 'Common sense has been thrown out the window, they just need to get rid of all these bubbles asap.

'The whole Department for Education operation has lacked a sense of urgency and the children have been the collateral damage.'

Former party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith is among 48 MPs to have signed a letter to the Prime Minister warning that the current policy is 'disproportionate' and 'unsustainable'.

They said it was essential that schools 'go back to normal' when lockdown is lifted, even if it is 'just for the last few days of term'.

'This will send an important signal ahead of the autumn that the route to freedom is a ''one-way road'',' the letter said.

It added that pupils have suffered 'unnecessary and significant disruptions' in order to keep the rest of the country safe.

'They have lost physical fitness, suffered mental health damage, and experienced catastrophic learning loss,' it said.

Other signatories include former cabinet minister Esther McVey and Commons education committee chairman Robert Halfon.

Department for Education analysis of autumn term 2020 showed that the average pupil lost five days for Covid-related reasons, equating to a total of 33million days, despite school being open.

ASCL, the secondary heads' union, wrote to the Prime Minister hitting back at claims schools were sending too many children home.

The letter said: 'This feels like a cynical attempt to shift the blame for your Government's failure to address the escalating educational disruption of recent weeks.'
A young artist from Ukraine has died aged just ten due to a rare premature ageing condition called progeria.

Iryna Irochka Khimich was only ten years old, but the consequences of the genetic condition meant that her body was around 80 according to doctors.

The girl, from Vinnytsia, had been an inspiration in raising money for her own treatment for progeria, also known as Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome, by selling her works of art.

She dreamed of visiting Paris where there were plans for her impressive artwork to go on display, but tragically time ran out for the remarkable girl.

Iryna shows off her artwork which was set to go on display in France before she died from her condition

Iryna dreamed of visiting Paris where her artwork was to be displayed after receiving more treatment for her condition in the US, but died before she could make the trip to America

Her grief-stricken mother Dina, 39, announced on social media: "Irochka has died.

Her heart stopped yesterday.

Sorry Sunshine, we couldn't save you this time.

Doctors said that every year her body aged by almost a decade, causing Iryna to die before she was able to fly to Boston in the US to receive treatment for her condition.

Ukrainian businessman Andrey Zdesenko, who helped raise money for her treatment, said: "Irochka Khimich has gone to heaven."

Progeria is a genetic disorder that causes children to age rapidly. Iryna (pictured) died at 10 years old, but doctors said she had the body of an 80-year-old

He made a moving statement about the girl:

A fragile, unique and talented girl, she bravely struggled for ten years with the terrible and rare disease progeria 

There was so much light, love, vitality, sincerity in her.

How vividly she saw the world, how she hurried to express it all in her paintings.

She drew different pictures with both hands. Incredible

Dina Khimich (pictured right) released a statement about Iryna's death on Facebook: "Irochka has died. Her heart stopped yesterday. Sorry Sunshine, we couldn't save you this time.

We are happy that we managed to show her work.

I remember her happy eyes and shy smile...

A smile and recognition of the creator, to whom so many people came to the personal exhibition

And the happy pride of parents

Thank you for your contribution to our world.

Be forever among your bright and beautiful heroes, there on the clouds

We mourn with your loved ones

Her mother said last year: "I'm taking a risk for her to live (with treatments).

I am afraid of how her body will react, but I want her to be alive and fine.

You live as if on a powder keg.

You wake up in the morning - and feel Thank God.
Facebook is targeting conservative voices and asking them if they need 'support' after becoming 'extremist' in its latest overreach on free speech and censorship which users say is patronizing and offensive.

Several conservative voices like Newsmax TV host John Cardillo, House Delegate Nick Freitas and Alex Berenson shared screenshots of the alerts they received on Twitter.

One Canadian user who'd accessed a meme on the page 'Boobs Guns Freedom Beer and Trump 2' got the alert and so did RT journalist Rachel Blevin.

Journalist Kira Davis also said she had a friend who'd received the alert.

It asked: 'Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist? We care about preventing extremism. Others in your situation have received confidential support.'

Another targeted people who Facebook deemed had been 'exposed' to 'violent extremism' and asked them if they needed 'support'.

Facebook said it is identifying people based on 'key words related to white supremacy' but they won't say which words, prompting many to assume they are just targeting people who have accessed Republican or right-wing pages they disagree with.

Several conservative voices like John Cardillo, House Delegate Nick Freitas and Alex Berenson shared screenshots of the alerts they received on Twitter

Freitas, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, shared an image of the alert he received

Alex Berenson, a conservative commentator and journalist, received the alert

A Canadian user who'd accessed a meme on the page 'Boobs Guns Freedom Beer and Trump 2' got the alert

RT journalist Rachel Blevins also got the alert on Thursday. RT is a Russian outlet which is right-leaning

The 'support' being offered is access to groups like Life After Hate which seeks to rehabilitate people with alt-right views. On its website, they use a photo of the Capitol rioters as an example.

Over the last year, the company has gone out of its way to censor conservative voices like Donald Trump, who remains banned from the platform, and media outlets which have gone against its left-leaning agenda to criticize Joe Biden.

Irate users shared screenshots of the 'warnings' on Twitter and said the only extremists they are concerned about are Facebook, which they said had become 'Orwellian' in its attempts to silence them.

Freitas, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, shared an image of the alert he received, writing: 'Yesactually I have a real concern that some leftist technocrats are creating an Orwellian environment where people are being arbitrarily silenced or banned for saying something the 'thought police' doesn't like.'

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone proudly confirmed what the company was doing but is refusing to tell people which key terms they're using to identify 'extremists at risk'

One of the groups that Facebook will turn people on to as part of their proposed rehabilitation process is Life After Hate which identifies Capitol rioters as extremists

'Nice to see Facebook going full Stasi/NKVD.

'Learning from the former East Germans who now advise leftist 'anti-extremist' organizations,' Malaysian commentator Ian Miles Cheong wrote in a Twitter post.

The program is called The Redirect Initiative.

It was first tested in the US - where the social media giant has a history of trying to censor conservative views - but is expected to be rolled out around the world.

It identifies extremists based on 'key words' they search for that are 'related to white supremacy' but Facebook won't say what those words are.

Once extremists have been identified, Facebook plans to offer them 'support' by passing them on to groups like Life After Hate, which seeks to rehabilitate people with alt-right views.

On its website, Life After Hate uses a photo of Capitol rioters as an example of extremists.

Facebook said it is identifying people based on 'key words related to white supremacy' but they won't say which words, prompting many to assume they are just targeting people who have accessed Republican or right-wing pages they disagree with

Facebook won't say which groups it considers to be extremist but it's previously defined QAnon as a 'militarized social movement and violence-inducing conspiracy network.'

There is huge concern over how the company defines extremism and what they'll do with the person's information if they get it.

'Facebook now has some serious questions to ask over people's privacy. Specifically, how do they choose who gets these pop-ups?

'Are they tapping into specific users' timelines, and are they tracking specific posts to see who's engaging with them? Given the security implications, we have an urgent need to know,' Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), said

Writer Alex Berenson also out hit out at Facebook, saying the platform needed to either take responsibility for all content its hosts or 'STAY OUT OF THE WAY'

'Yeah, I'm becoming an extremist. An anti-@Facebook extremist.

'Confidential help is available?' Who do they think they are? Either they're a publisher and a political platform legally liable for every bit of content they host, or they need to STAY OUT OF THE WAY.

'Zuck's choice,' Berenson wrote on Twitter.

Many say Facebook is just targeting Republicans whose views they disagree with.
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NHS staff have blasted the Government's track and trace system as a fifth of double-jabbed workers, and also millions of Britons, could be asked to self-isolate - which could create a situation 'similar to lockdown'.

Sage expert Dr Adam Kucharski, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group, said the government needed to find an alternative to long quarantine periods following contact with a positive case or risk creating a lockdown in all but name.

Dr Kucharski told BBC Radio 4's World At One programme: 'If we get to a situation over the summer where there's 30,000 to 40,000 cases per day, you'll be potentially looking at maybe even over a million contacts per day who may be eligible for quarantine.

'In situations where you're quarantining large numbers of people you do end up with similar outcomes to lockdown.'

The academic said colleagues are investigating whether rapid daily testing over five days may be as effective as longer quarantine periods.

'These measures are reducing transmission considerably and I think if we have an alternative that gives a similar reduction in transmission but less disruption, we do need to seriously consider if that's going to be a better option,' he said.

It came as more furious pub and restaurant owners today came forward to blast the NHS Test and Trace app for causing a staffing crisis, with businesses forced to close because employees are being repeatedly pinged.

Workers must stay at home for up to ten days after coming into contact with a positive case even if they test negative for Covid. Hospitality chiefs want this changed so that anyone who receives a negative result can go back to work as part of a 'test and release scheme'.

Meanwhile, the NHS is facing similar issues with up to a fifth of staff in parts of the UK off on sick leave and self-isolation notifications increasing the burden on already threadbare rotas.

Hospitality chiefs and NHS bosses are frustrated that the Test and Trace app - for which Matt Hancock (pictured) was a cheerleader - is causing a staffing crisis

Nick Collins, (left) chief executive of the chain Loungers, which runs 173 cafe-bars, has had to temporarily close some sites. Steve Alton, (right) CEO of the British Institute of Innkeeping, called self-isolating staff 'a huge problem'

Nearly two million people a week could be forced to self- isolate by the end of the month unless ministers reform the rules. Analysis of official figures predicts that this figure will soar to 1,734,000 by July 28 if current trends continue, given the steep week-on-week rise in case and high levels of testing

Even employees who have been double-jabbed and test negative for Covid had to stay at home - a situation healthcare chiefs want changed.

The issue of nurses being off work due to contact tracing and mandatory self-isolation is a 'big issue', one top-level NHS official told The Telegraph.

A senior NHS manager added: 'The rules around [self-isolation] need a rethink. I've got lots of medics who are saying, ''I'm double jabbed, I've done a flow test, I'm negative, can I come back to work?''.'

Figures from the Office for National Statistics and the NHS suggest that the number of Britons self-isolating will rise to 1.7million by the end of July, according to analysis by the Adam Smith Institute.

Meanwhile, NHS consultant Ben Lovell tweeted: 'Desperately desperately desperately understaffed due to the NHS Covid app telling Covid-negative, asymptomatic, double-vaxxed doctors to go into isolation for up to 10 days at a time. This cannot go on.'

It came as a leading Tory critic of Covid rules has been forced to quarantine at home.

Dr Adam Kucharski today warned long quarantine periods after contact with positive cases risk a return to lockdown in all but name

Forest of Dean MP Mark Harper, who is leading backbench efforts to remove Covid rules as soon as possible, said he was self-isolating in his rural constituency after a parliamentary contact tested positive.

With what will be seen as a dig at former health secretary - and supporter of lockdowns - Matt Hancock, he tweeted: 'Even though I'm double vaccinated, and have no Covid symptoms, I still think it's really important that elected politicians follow the rules - so that's exactly what I'm doing.'

He added: 'I didn't vote for these rules but, as an MP, I can't just break the law, even if I think the rules are daft.

'Many were justifiably outraged by last week's revelations. We can't have ''one rule for them, one for the rest of us'''

New figures out yesterday revealed fewer people who contract Covid are falling badly ill, with just one in 100 NHS beds being taken up by Covid patients in England last week  fourteen times fewer than at the start of the second wave, according to official figures that highlight the power of the vaccines.

The low inpatient numbers are made more impressive by the fact average daily infections have risen to more than 20,000 due to an outbreak of the ultra-infectious Indian variant.

The think-tank's deputy director, Matt Kilcoyne, said Test and Trace was a 'great idea at the height of the previous waves when we had no treatments and no vaccines'.

He added: 'Now it means millions forced to sit at home who pose no risk but are going bear the brunt of lost income, passing the buck on to businesses that will take less income.

'Matt Hancock might well have left office, but we're at risk of his legacy being an app that kills the economy.'

Nick Collins, chief executive of the chain Loungers, which runs 173 cafe-bars, has had to temporarily close some sites.

'It's really challenging,' he told the BBC, adding that he fears the situation 'could get worse' as cases continue to spike.

NHS consultant Ben Lovell tweeted has complained about the problems caused by NHS staff self-isolating despite testing negative and being double-jabbed

He tweeted: 'Desperately desperately desperately understaffed due to the NHS Covid app telling Covid-negative, asymptomatic, double-vaxxed doctors to go into isolation for up to 10 days at a time. This cannot go on'

Mike Reeves, who runs the Yew Tree in Walton le Dale, Preston, closed his site this week after the majority of his staff were alerted by NHS Test and Trace to isolate, costing the pub between 15,000 and 20,000.

He told The Morning Advertiser: 'We've had to shut in a week with decent weather and two England games. We're just left in limbo because everyone has different dates [for when isolation.'

Mr Reeves wants isolation period shortened. 'You just get a ping on your phone and you have no way of knowing what the contact was,' he said.

Graham Harris, chief financial officer at the East London Pub Co, said the issue was 'limiting' his businesses' ability to recover.

Admiral Taverns CEO Chris Jowsey suggested hospitality had been 'unfairly targeted' throughout the pandemic while Steve Alton, CEO of the British Institute of Innkeeping, called self-isolating staff 'a huge problem'.

A single Wetherspoons in Weston-super-Mare this week had 75 members of staff forced to stay at home after coming into contact with positive cases, while Hawksmoor steakhouse in London received 25 test and trace notifications within four weeks of reopening.

Small businesses are particularly struggling under the deluge of app notifications, with one restaurant in Liverpool revealing it lost a quarter of its workforce over the weekend on top of an existing labour shortage caused by Brexit and employees quitting over lockdown.

The nature of the NHS Covid app - which tells people to self-isolate if they have been in 'close contact' with someone who later tests positive - means hospitality staff walking around busy venues are particularly likely to receive notifications.

Close contact means being within two metres of a person who tested positive for the virus for 15 minutes or more or within one metre for one minute or more.

The Cabot Court Hotel, a Wetherspoon pub in Weston-super-Mare, saw 75 staff forced to self-isolate for 10 days last week after four of their colleagues tested positive. Pictured on the left is Wetherspoon founder Tim Martin

Chef Gary Usher has had to close his Manchester restaurant Kala twice because of staff being pinged by the Covid app

Dave Critchley, executive chef and director at Lu Ban restaurant and bar in Liverpool, told MailOnline: 'We lost five people over the weekend at minimal notice after they were pinged by the app.

'When you are only a small business anyway losing five members of staff meant we had lost a quarter of our workforce.

'It was already a monumental task to take on this year to make up all the money we lost from last year because we've still got last year's rent and bills to pay.

'And this is at a time when staff problems are the worst they've ever been because of Brexit and people going into different jobs during lockdown.'

Industry body UKHospitality is urging the government to change the rules so staff can return to work after a negative tests.

The rules currently require a period of 10 days self-isolation after the day of coming into contact with the positive case - regardless of whether they then test negative.

Dave Critchley, executive chef and director at Lu Ban restaurant and bar in Liverpool, told MailOnline: 'We lost five people over the weekend at minimal notice after they were pinged by the app'

Admiral Taverns CEO Chris Jowsey (left) suggested hospitality had been 'unfairly targeted' throughout the pandemic. Graham Harris, (right) chief financial officer at the East London Pub Co, said staff repeatedly being put into self-isolation was 'limiting' his businesses' ability to recover

The steakhouse and cocktail bar Hawksmoor has received 25 test and trace notifications within four weeks of reopening. Staff are testing three times a week and only one has reported a positive result

The nature of the NHS Covid app - which tells people to self-isolate if they have come within a certain distance of someone who later tests positive - means hospitality staff walking around busy venues are particularly likely to receive notifications

Mr Critchley backed the calls, adding: 'We are seeing 45,000 people in stadiums with no mask and no social distancing and all they've had to do is take a test in the morning, so why can't my staff do that.

'We are testing our staff every day with a lateral flow test and temperature checks. So why can't our staff still go into work if they've had a negative test?'

The Cabot Court Hotel, a Wetherspoon pub in Weston-super-Mare, saw 75 staff forced to self-isolate for 10 days last week after four of their colleagues tested positive.

Mark Derry, who sits on the board of several restaurant businesses including New World Trading Company in Cheshire, which has lost 35 days of trading from four of its 29 venues because of staff self-isolating.

'It's complete chaos,' he told the Financial Times.

Will Beckett, co-founder of Hawksmoor, said the steakhouse and cocktail bar has received 25 test and trace notifications within four weeks of reopening.

Staff are testing three times a week and only one has reported a positive result.

Meanwhile, chef Gary Usher has had to close his Manchester restaurant Kala twice because of staff being pinged by the Covid app.

It will now stay shut until 'Freedom Day' on July 19. 'Reopening and closing the restaurants costs so much money, energy and time, and we are just not able to do this again,' his restaurant group, Elite Bistros, said.

Boris Johnson yesterday hailed vaccines for 'breaking the link' between Covid infections (left) and deaths (right). Despite infections soaring to levels on par with the second wave, deaths have remained almost completely flat

This has also meant that hospital admissions are running at a tenth of level at the same time at the start of the second wave (left) and kept the NHS at manageable occupancy (right)

Kate Nicholls, chief executive of industry body UKHospitality, said the situation was 'a nightmare' for firms, particularly given many are already suffering a staffing shortage.

Her group is leading calls for a 'test and release' scheme which would see staff who were self-isolating could return to work if they had a negative test result.

The NHS Covid app has previously been criticised for glitches, including sending out phantom exposure alerts, causing unnecessary alarm and periods of self-isolation for users.
Boston authorities are looking into the brutal stabbing of a Boston rabbi as a possible hate crime as the alleged assailant was arraigned on assault charges.

Khaled Awad, 24, appeared in Brighton District Church on Friday and was charged with assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon and assault and battery on an officer and will be held without bail until a dangerousness hearing on July 8.

Awad allegedly stabbed Rabbi Shlomo Noginksi eight times on the street outside Shaloh House, a Jewish Day School and synagogue on Chestnut Hill Avenue in Brighton, at around 1.19pm on Thursday afternoon.

Rabbi Noginski, who is a teacher and rabbi at the Shaloh House, was reportedly sitting outside talking on his cell phone when the suspect launched his attack on him.

Awad allegedly approached the rabbi, drew a firearm and attempted to force him in the car and kidnap him, reports Chabad. But Rabbi Noginski struggled and attempted to run across the street where the suspect stabbed him in the arm multiple times.

The rabbi's family and community leaders believe he was targeted in the attack because he is Jewish, reports Fox News.

24-year-old Khaled Awad was lead into court on Friday for his arraignment in Brighton District Court

Khaled Awad, 24, (pictured) was charged with assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon and assault and battery on a police officer

A bloodied Rabbi Shlomo Noginksi gets treated for his multiple stab wounds after an alleged kidnapping attempt on Thursday

On Friday Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins said the DA's civil rights unit and the Boston Police Department Civil Rights Unit were conducting a civil rights investigation into the alleged assault and would keep the community updated.

Rollins attended a community vigil on Friday morning with Mayor Kim Janey where the attack against Rabbi Noginski allegedly took place.

'We have to recognize that anti-Semitism is on the rise and we need to hold people accountable when they do this so that they are made an example of,' Rollins said.

'It's important that we recognize with respect to the Jewish community that not only globally, but locally, they are being terrorized and hate crime is on the rise,' Rollins added.

Janey said the investigation into whether the alleged attack was a hate crime will give the shaken community the answers it needs.

'It is important that we understand what the motives of this hate, of this violence are,' she said. 'An investigation is underway to determine whether this is a hate crime or not, and we will get the answers we seek.'

Rabbi Shlomo Noginksi was stabbed eight times and was later rushed to hospital where he needed surgery to treat the wounds

Police officers arrived at the scene to find Rabbi Noginski suffering from stab wounds. Pictured: Officers at the scene

Police officers arrived at the scene to find Rabbi Noginski, who moved to Boston from Israel, suffering from 'multiple stab wounds', Boston Police Department said in a statement. He was later rushed to a local hospital where he was treated for 'non-life threatening injuries'.

Police have not yet said whether they are treating the attack as a hate crime, nor have they disclosed a motive for the attack.

But the antisemitism civil rights group Anti-Defamation League (ADL) New England have said there are 'multiple indicators pointing towards antisemitism' and called for the police to investigate the incident as a hate crime.

Sources told WHDV that Rabbi Noginsk was wearing a yarmulke at the time of the attack, which was caught on CCTV.

As soon as staff became aware of the situation outside the building, where a summer day camp was being held for children, the facility went into lockdown to ensure their safety, Rabbi Dan Rodkin, the Executive Director of Shaloh House said in a statement.

Images shared on social media appear to show Rabbi Noginksi grimacing in pain as a Boston police officer tries so stem the bleeding from a stab wound to the victim's left arm. His white shirt can be seen covered in splotches of blood.

Hours later, another image was shared from the hospital which showed Rabbi Noginski lying on a bed while looking at the camera. Cuts can be seen on his fingers and arms.

Speaking from his hospital bed, Rabbi Noginski told Lubavitch.com : 'I am grateful to the Boston Police Department for their rapid response, and relieved that the perpetrator is in custody. I am looking forward to returning to my work as soon as possible.'

Rabbi Shlomo Noginksi was attacked on the street outside Shaloh House, a Jewish Day School and synagogue on Chestnut Hill Avenue in Brighton, at around 1.19pm on Thursday afternoon

Rabbi Rodkin said he and the staff 'are all very shaken' by the attack and asked the public to keep Rabbi Noginski in their prayers for a speedy recovery, while adding that Shaloh House would be increasing their security for the rest of the summer.

Dov Hikind, a former New York state assemblyman and founder of the grassroots coalition Americans Against Antisemitism, told Fox News he spoke with Rabbi Noginski's brother, who said the rabbi is expected to undergo surgery for eight stab wounds.

Hikind said the rabbi's family believe he was targeted because he is Jewish.

'Based on my conversation with his brother (he) believes the guy wanted to kidnap him,' he said. 'The perpetrator was not interested in his money, not interested in his cell phone, was not interested in anything except to attack this individual.'

Hikind said anti-Israel rhetoric has contributed to a rise in anti-Semitic attacks and singled out Democrat Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib for their comments.

Rep. Ilhan Omar has been accused of being a 'rabid anti-Semite' for saying her Jewish colleagues in Congress 'haven't been equal partners in justice' and defending her comments equating the U.S. and Israel to terrorist groups like Hamas and the Taliban.

While police have not revealed details about what motivated the attack, others are also concerned that Rabbi Noginski was attacked because he was Jewish.

The Anti-Defamation League has said there are 'multiple indicators pointing towards antisemitism' and called for the police to investigate the incident as a hate crime.

'Facts emerging from the stabbing of a Rabbi in Brighton yesterday include multiple indicators pointing towards antisemitism,' said Robert Trestan, Regional Director of Anti-Defamation League in a statement on Friday.

'We call on the Boston Police Department Civil Rights Unit to investigate yesterday's violent attack as a hate crime. Boston's Jewish community is angry, living in fear and need answers, accountability and security.'

Rabbi Rodkin said in a statement on Thursday: 'Earlier today, Rabbi Shlomo Noginski was attacked on the street outside the Shaloh House.

'He is, thank God, in stable condition and in good spirits and being treated in the hospital for stab wounds.'

Rabbi Noginski, who is a teacher and Rabbi at the Shaloh House, was reportedly sat outside the synagogue (pictured: file image) talking on his cell phone when the suspect launched his attack on him

He continued: 'As soon as our staff became aware of what happened outside, our facility went into lock down to ensure the safety of all the children and staff in our program. At no point during the incident were any of the children in danger.

'The safety of our children and staff is of the utmost importance to us and we will be increasing security at the Shaloh House throughout the remainder of the summer.'

'We are all very shaken by what happened and ask for you to please keep Rabbi Noginski in your prayers for a... speedy and complete recovery.

'We are heartened by the outpouring of concern and compassion we have received in just the last hours since the incident.'

The police department said that Awad, who is from Brighton, has been arrested and will appear in Brighton District Court on charges of Assault and Battery by Means of a Dangerous Weapon and Assault and Battery on a police officer.

A knife and gun were allegedly found in a nearby alley where police arrested Awad, reports WCVB.

There has been an outpouring of support from the local community, with many wishing Rabbi Noginsky a speedy recovery.

Yaacov Behrman, the founder of The Jewish Future Alliance, an advocacy charity for those in the Jewish community and other minority groups, tweeted: 'I spoke to Rabbi Shlomo Noginsky from the hospital.

'He was in terrible pain, but said he was inspired by the tremendous amount of love and support from the community.'

Rabbi Aryeh Spero, the president of the Conference of Jewish Affairs, told Fox News the attack was not the only one.

'There is a climate of more than just anti-Semitism,' he said. 'It's physical attacks with the intent of killing people who are Jewish. Conspicuously Jewish. And that just doesn't come out of thin air.'

The investigation into the attack is ongoing, police said, adding that anyone with information should contact District D-14 Detectives at 617-343-4256.

For community members wishing to contact the police anonymously about the investigation, police urged them to call the CrimeStoppers Tip Line at 1 (800) 494-TIPS or by texting the word TIP to CRIME (27463).
A man has been charged with burglary after raiders broke into celebrity optician Tom Davies' shop in Sloane Square and stole hundreds of frames worth 500,000 including glasses made for the new movie 'Cruella'.

Kirk Marchbank, 49, who lives in Fulham, south west London, will appear at Westminster Magistrates Court today.

The arrest comes three weeks after two masked burglars broke into the flagship store during a dawn raid on June 9 and stole up to half a million pounds worth of glasses, counting six pairs of the most iconic Cruella frames.

Entrepreneur Mr Davies - who designed five sets of 120 pairs of frames for the Disney film  had planned to display its key frames in the shop to coincide with London Fashion Week.

The 46-year-old told MailOnline: Were hugely grateful to the police for acting swiftly and hope that they will soon be able to charge both burglars.

The incident was horrible for me and my staff, but weve been overwhelmed by the kindness of people all around the world whove heard this story.

The entrance can be seen smashed after two masked burglars broke into the shop in Sloane Square, London, during a dawn raid on June 9 and stole up to 500,000 worth of glasses

The two burglars were captured in footage during the raid. They even stole six pairs of glasses designed for the new Disney movie Cruella

Weve been inundated with messages of goodwill from friends and complete strangers - one lovely elderly lady in a care home even sent us a 10 note to help compensate for our loss.

'Wed like to thank everyone whos been in touch for their tremendous support.

The optician is very much the Willy Wonka of eyewear, using gold business cards and making glasses out of crushed meteorites and glow-in-the-dark stars in his Brentford factory.

He rose to fame after making glasses for celebrities such as Ed Sheeran, Heston Blumenthal, Carrie Fisher and Susannah Constantine.

The businessman has also created frames for a dozen Hollywood films including Superman, Spiderman, Angelina Jolie in the Tourist, Brad Pitt in Allied and Rowan Atkinson in Keeping Mum.

He was commissioned by costume designer Jenny Beavan to create a pair of glasses for Emma Thompson - who plays the narcissistic head of a London fashion house, Baroness von Hellman, in Cruella - but ended up making frames for nearly every member of the cast.

The interior of celebrity optician Tom Davies' flagship store in Sloane Square following the smash and grab raid where hundreds of frames were stolen

Mr Davies was commissioned by costume designer Jenny Beavan to create a pair of glasses for Emma Thompson (pictured above) - who plays the narcissistic head of a London fashion house, Baroness von Hellman, in Cruella

After the raid Mr Davies released dramatic CCTV footage of the raid and put up posters with the headline WANTED! #TomDaviesTheft on lamp posts around London, appealing for the glasses to be returned.

He wrote: If you are offered any sunglasses with "TOM DAVIES FOR CRUELLA" engraved on the inside arm, please can you let us know @tdtomdavies.

Our store was broken into on 9 June at 2am and hundreds of frames were taken.

The thieves probably didn't know they had also stolen glasses recently made for the film Cruella which were due to be auctioned off for charity.

These distinctive frames have a far bigger value at a charity auction than to the criminals who vandalised our store and will struggle to sell them.

Mr Davies (pictured) rose to fame after making glasses for celebrities such as Ed Sheeran, Heston Blumenthal, Carrie Fisher and Susannah Constantine

After the burglary Davies released dramatic CCTV footage of the raid and put up posters with the headline WANTED! #TomDaviesTheft on lamp posts around London

If you are offered any of these frames or have any information you can share, please let us or the local police know. If you have the glasses in your possession, we will swap them for a pair of Tom Davies sunglasses.

Metropolitan Police detectives are believed to have retrieved one pair of Tom Davies sunglasses, which retail at 295, but none of the Cruella frames so far.

Mr Davies, who lives in Petersham, south west London, with his 44-year-old wife Kerstin and two children Oscar, 14, and Amelia, 12, added: Were still missing hundreds of pairs of glasses, including those from Cruella, and dont know if any more will be returned.

Our offer to swap any returned Cruella frames for a pair of Tom Davies sunglasses still stands. Hopefully the sequel to this story will be a happy one.

Mr Davies said the frames 'have a far bigger value at a charity auction than to the criminals who vandalised our store and will struggle to sell them' (Sloane Square shop pictured)
Eric Trump dismissed fears he could be indicted and insisted he has led a 'clean life' after the Trump Organization was charged in a 15-count indictment.

The son of the former president, 37, was asked if he was concerned if an indictment was coming his way after prosecutors brought tax fraud charges against the Trump Organization and chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg.

Speaking to Newsmax's Eric Bolling on Thursday, Eric dismissed these fears and insisted that he and his siblings Donald Jr, 43, and Ivanka, 39, have always led 'amazingly clean' lives.

Eric, who is the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said: 'You know what? I'm not, Eric, because guess what, we've always lived amazingly clean lives.

Eric Trump is not taking this well... pic.twitter.com/WtzimpjEhy  Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) July 1, 2021

Eric Trump, 37, said he is not concerned about being indicted prosecutors brought tax fraud charges against the Trump Organization and chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg

'And believe me, if they could've, they already would've, right? I mean, that's what they wanted, that was their end goal.'

He went on to blast Joe Biden's son Hunter, 51, referring to reports that the President might have inadvertently paid for a series of wild nights Hunter had with a prostitute at a Los Angeles hotel in 2018.

Eric also referred to reports that Hunter made a deal to sell his paintings for up to $500,000 to 'confidential' buyers, sparking concerns over bribery and potential money laundering. It came after his alleged corruption over prior business deals in Ukraine and China.

The businessman went on to say that, unlike President Joe Biden's children, he and his siblings entered the business world long before their father ever began politics and were 'very successful'.

He continued: 'Don, Invanka and I live nice clean lives and we work very, very hard and guess what?

'Long before politics ever came into our lives we were in the business world and we were successful, and we worked very hard and we lived clean lives.

Eric (centre right) dismissed these fears and insisted that he and his siblings Donald Jr (left), 43, and Ivanka (centre left), 39, have always led 'clean' lives. Also pictured: Tiffany Trump

'It's very different from the Bidens who were never in business until their father got into politics. And they milked it for everything it's worth and they still do it to this day.'

Meanwhile, Eric's wife Lara Trump told Fox News yesterday that the charges brought against the Trump Organization's chief financial officer Alan Weisselberg were 'disgraceful'.

She fumed: 'Let me be really clear with people: what we saw happen to Alan Weisselberg today was absolutely disgraceful.

'Had this happened to anyone else, we are talking about five years of an investigation by Cy Vance [Jr.], the district attorney, we are talking about 3.5 million pages of documents because they are so desperate Dan to find anything on Donald Trump because they want to disqualify him from running for president in 2024.'

Allen Weisselberg, 73, appeared before a judge in New York on Thursday, charged with running a 15-year scheme to help its executives evade taxes by compensating them with $1.7 million in fringe benefits that were hidden from the authorities.

Prosecutors painted Weisselberg as a 'soldier' in the Trump Organization, having worked for the company ever since 1973, under Donald Trump's father Fred.

But Trump Jr, an executive vice president at The Trump Organization, told Fox News' Jesse Watters on Thursday that the charges against Weisselberg were akin to those pressed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

'This is the political persecution of a political enemy,' he said.

'This is what Vladimir Putin does. Just ask Navalny,' Trump Jr said referencing the dissident Alexei Navalny. 'That's what's happened in New York. It's the equivalent of Russia, Russia, Russia.

He added: 'After five years, three million documents, countless witnesses and hours of grand jury testimony and forensic auditors, this is what they come up with.'

'They're going to charge a guy who is 75 years old on crimes of avoiding taxes on fringe benefit. People in corporate America get a corporate card.'

'I'm sure you've paid taxes every time you've taken a car to or from work. It happens sometimes,' Trump Jr continued.

'This is what - this is not what they promised the American public, but they have to do something.'

Allen Weisselberg, 73, was charged with running a 15-year scheme to help its executives evade taxes by compensating them with $1.7 million in fringe benefits were hidden from authorities

The Trump Organization was also charged in a 15-count indictment, that included charges of conspiracy, grand larceny, tax fraud and falsifying business accounts.

The maximum prison sentence is 15 years, but Weisselberg would likely get less, if any time at all.

Assistant District Attorney Carey Dunne said: 'As spelled out in the indictment, this was a 15-year long tax fraud scheme.

'It was orchestrated by the most senior executives who were financially benefiting themselves and others.'

Trump Jr said that they deliberately announced the charges on the Thursday of the July 4 weekend 'because it's nonsense'.

He added: 'But this is what they do to their enemies. No different than Putin.'

The indictment accused Weisselberg of failing to pay tax on two leased Mercedes-Benzes, a rent-free apartment, bonuses and about $360,000 in school fees paid for by the Trump Organization.

It also said that other, unnamed executives were given similar benefits and that Weisselberg orchestrated the scheme with 'others.'

Trump Jr accused the New York officials of attempting 'to destroy a man's life, his reputation', and said it was like living 'in a banana republic'.

He added: 'And in this is what they've got after all of that time.

'Imagine the millions they spent had they done that actually trying to stop real criminals in New York, like the tens of thousands that looted in New York last year.

'Hundreds of thousands of them were released without even a slap on the wrist just last week.

'Penn station is like a war zone. The city is going to hell and this is where they are focusing. '

Trump Jr disputed the $1.7million figure, insisting that it was income.

'The taxable portion of that to New York state is eight percent,' he claimed.

'That's $136,000 over 16 years. That's ten grand a year.

'Half of that, because my father is a good guy, he paid for this guy's grandchildren's education.

'Our tax experts say that's not even taxable. You can pay for someone's education that way. It comes out to less than ten grand a year. '

Eric's wife Lara Trump (pictured with Eric left) said the charges brought against Trump Organization chief financial officer Alan Weisselberg were 'disgraceful'. Also pictured: Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr and Kimberly Guilfoyle

He concluded: 'This is a farce. It's a disgrace that they spent millions of dollars and years, instead of prosecuting actual murderous thugs on the streets of New York, they go after their political enemies.'

Weisselberg, dressed in dark suit and open-necked pale blue shirt, cut a diminished figure in a crowded New York Supreme Court on Thursday.

He was frequently invisible behind black shirted court officers and spoke only to enter a plea of not guilty. He was required to turn in his passport and will return to court on September 9.

The charges against the company and Weisselberg - whom Trump once praised as doing 'whatever was necessary to protect the bottom line' - were the first indictments delivered in a two-year investigation by the Manhattan district attorney's office.

The various schemes alleged in the indictment include: $1,174,018 in untaxed income used to pay Weisselberg's rent $359,058 in unreported compensation for private school fees $196,245 in untaxed income for Mercedes Benz leases $29,400 in under-the-table cash used to pay holiday tips

The 15 counts against the Trump Organization and its long-serving chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg Prosecutors unveiled their case against Allen Weisselberg and the Trump Organization in Manhattan Supreme Court on Thursday. It contained 15 charges, several of which only apply to the chief financial officer. They are: Scheme to defraud in the first degree Conspiracy in the fourth degree Grand larceny in the second degree (Weisselberg only) Criminal tax fraud in the third degree Criminal tax fraud in the third degree Criminal tax fraud in the third degree Criminal tax fraud in the fourth degree Offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree (Weisselberg only) Offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree (Weisselberg only) Offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree (Weisselberg only) Offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree (Weisselberg only) Falsifying business records in the first degree Falsifying business records in the first degree Falsifying business records in the first degree Falsifying business records in the first degree Advertisement

Trump Organization lawyers believe they can strip out the school fees and some other items from the charges, possibly reducing the taxable amount to $800,000.

With a state income tax rate of about 10 percent, that means Weisselberg may face a tax bill of just $80,000.

But the real target may be creating enough leverage to persuade him to 'flip,' according to Michael Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes related to his work as Trump's fixer.

'Weisselberg now knows what handcuffs feel like as well as being placed in a cell,' he told DailyMail.com.

'As the pressure by prosecutors increase on him and his sons, the smart money would be on Weisselberg cooperating for leniency.'

The charges could also complicate the Trump Organization's relationships with banks and partners, not to mention the political future of the former president.

'The political witch hunt by the radical left Democrats, with New York now taking over the assignment, continues,' Trump said in a statement. 'It is dividing our country like never before.'

His office emailed another statement later in the afternoon, linking the case more directly to the votes of his supporters.

He asked: 'Do people see the radical left prosecutors, and what they are trying to do to 75M+++ voters and patriots, for what it is?'

New York Attorney General Letitia James said the developments were an 'important marker' in the investigation of the Trump Organization.

'This investigation will continue, and we will follow the facts and the law wherever they may lead,' she said.

But Trump's son Eric blasted the investigation before the charges were unsealed, saying taxpayers' money had been wasted.

'It is an absolute abuse of power and a political vendetta,' he told DailyMail.com.

'They are petrified my father will run again in 2024.

'After five years, hundreds of subpoenas, three and a half million pages of documents, and dozens of witnesses, this is what they have?'

The Trump Organization described Weisselberg as 'a loving and devoted husband, father and grandfather.'

'He is now being used by the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former President,' it said in a statement.

'The District Attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution involving employee benefits that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would ever think of bringing.

'This is not justice; this is politics.'

The case against Trump's trusted lieutenant - who began work for the Trump family in 1973 - could give New York prosecutors an opening to pressure him into cooperating and offering evidence about the former president's financial dealings.

But so far Trump has shrugged off the threat and Weisselberg is not believed to have flipped on his boss.

The indictment follows months of increasing pressure after the Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, announced he was going to step down at the end of this 2021.

Donald Trump Jr (right) said on Thursday that the charges against Weisselberg (back) were akin to those pressed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin

Vance fought a long battle to get Trump's tax records released and has been subpoenaing documents and interviewing company executives and other Trump insiders.

Trump did not respond to reporters' shouted questions about the New York case as he visited Texas on Wednesday, but earlier in the week, the Republican blasted the prosecutors as 'rude, nasty, and totally biased' and said his company's actions were 'standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime.'

Just how essential Weisselberg would be to prosecutors is a matter of debate  with high-stakes relevancy Trump.

On Tuesday, top House Democratic impeachment lawyer Daniel Goldman tweeted that Weisselberg's cooperation is vital to whether prosecutors are able to go after Trump himself.

'As I've been saying for a while, if Allen Weisselberg does not cooperate with the Manhattan DA's office  and all indications are that he has not and will not  that office will not be able to criminally charge Donald Trump for any of the conduct under investigation,' Goldman wrote.

That drew a retort from longtime Cohen, who has met numerous times with prosecutors in New York amid the probe.

'Wrong! They have documents to prove more than you know or should be commenting on. Weisselberg is not the key to a Trump indictment,' Cohen responded.

Another former federal prosecutor in New York, Daniel Alonson, later tweeted his own view that that potential charges being publicly discussed might not be enough to ensure Weisselberg's cooperation.

Cohen also reacted on Wednesday to the news of a looming potential indictment, calling it a 'Bad day for Trump Organization' but a 'good day for The United States of America!'

'Evading taxes on fringe benefits is important to prosecute - but by itself isn't the type of earth-shaking charge that typically leads defendants to cooperate,' he wrote.'

Trump's former spokesman Jason Miller took to Twitter to ridicule the way the investigation had fallen far short of its intended target.

'This is politically terrible for the Democrats,' he wrote.

Weisselberg pleaded not guilty and was released on bail. Former president Donald Trump's company and its long-serving chief financial officer were charged in the first indictments brought in a two-year investigation

'They told their crazies and their supplicants in the mainstream media this was about President Trump. Instead, their Witch Hunt is persecuting an innocent 80 year-old man for maybe taking free parking!'

Trump's lawyers have shrugged off the threat, saying it would be highly unusual for the district attorney to target a company over employee compensation or fringe benefits.

They met with prosecutors on Monday in a final push to persuade prosecutors not to bring charges.

But reports suggest prosecutors have spent months building a case against Weisselberg, a senior executive, in the hope that he might flip, and offer evidence against his boss.

Photographs on Tuesday captured a man in a suit carrying a cardboard banker's box with '45 Office' written on the outside. That is the same phrase the former president attaches to his post-presidential statements from his taxpayer-funded post-presidential office. Perched atop the case was a tan briefcase with a combo lock.

Trump himself was spotted exiting his Fifth Avenue building in the afternoon, departing after longtime aide Dan Scavino, who helps organize Trump's social media strategy and served as his golf caddie decades ago.

Trump's attorney Fischetti says he doesn't expect charges to be brought against the former president after meeting New York prosecutors on Monday.

An attorney who helped bring impeachment charges against Trump also said he thinks the ex-president is in the clear over New York prosecutors' probes into his finances.

Daniel Goldman dismissed the idea of any further indictments while chatting on MSNBC Thursday, as Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg appeared in a Manhattan court on tax avoidance charges.

The former US assistant attorney issued a series of tweets suggesting that it would be hard to find incriminating evidence against the president, because he does not use emails or texts, which can be retrieved by investigators.

The lawyer noted that the case in which the Trump Organization's Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg is involved would normally have been settled in civil court.

Goldman believes Weisselberg's refusal to cooperate with prosecutors or even enter settlement negotiations could be instructive of what is to come.

A loose pair of handcuffs, which would be used to secure him to an escort, can be seen behind Weisselberg's back as he is brought into court to hear 15 charges against him

The investigation has cost millions of dollars but could yield just tens of thousands of dollars in back tax.

'This type of case is often settled civilly,' Goldman, who acted as a prosecutor for Trump's January 2020 impeachment, explained: 'If the Trump Organization wanted to, my guess is they could have engaged in good faith negotiations to try to settle this case with a fine and perhaps avoid a guilty plea or a conviction.

'They chose to fight this. That says something. It's typical of Donald Trump. But I am a little surprised that this ultimately ended, based on these allegations, in a criminal charge rather than a settlement.'

'They've already taken a run at Allen Weisselberg. They have also approached Allen Weisselberg, I am certain, and said, 'This is what we have. We would like you to cooperate.' Allen Weisselberg said, 'Thanks but no thanks, I'm not going to cooperate. I'll take my chances,'' Goldman theorized.

'He's not facing that much jail time. And I don't think there's any more pressure to add to him based on the fact that he was in handcuffs today. He knew that was coming. He made that conscious decision to get arrested and get indicted rather than cooperate.

'And so I don't think we have any good reason to suspect that he is going to cooperate down the road. So I don't see why there would be additional charges against the Trump Organization unless new evidence comes in. My guess is that they've evaluated this evidence.

'I don't really see any statute of limitations issues in this indictment that would have required them to do this now as opposed to later, which could be a reason why they're going to bifurcate any charges. So, it's a little confusing to me if they have more, why they would charge this. And for that reason, common sense leads me to believe that they're not going to have any more.'

Goldman made similar points in a series of tweets where he explained how he believes there is unlikely to be any further charges.

He wrote: 'A short explanation of my analysis of the Trump Org indictment: 1) the allegations laid out in the indictment are powerful, persuasive and backed up by a lot of evidence. The scheme was premeditated and blatant cheating over a long period of time. The indictment is impressive.

'Weisselberg and the other unidentified employees referenced in the Indictment should be charged with these crimes. But this is not a typical case against a corp, even tho the heightened bar required to charge corporations is met. The consequences for the Org could be dire.

'I spent some time learning about the Trump Org and I spent a lot of time with Michael Cohen, including deposing him. Based on my knowledge and experience, it is my belief that Weisselberg's cooperation is likely necessary to charge Donald Trump, who does not email or text.

'As a former prosecutor, it is my experience that when you want to flip a defendant, you throw everything you have at him. I'm assuming that is what the DA did with AW bc that provides the most leverage. Defendants are more likely to cooperate if they face a lot of jail time.

Weisselberg was released on bail after surrendering his passport and is due to return to court on September 9.

'Because of AW's position as the financial/accounting hub of the TO, I suspect he would have been involved in any other fraudulent activity (insurance fraud, loan fraud, accounting fraud, or corporate tax fraud). Thus, the DA would wait to see if he could charge AW with more.

'AW declined to cooperate pre-indictment so they charged him with what they had. That means they likely don't yet have a case to make on other fraud. But they likely would not have rushed this indictment if they might get there on other fraud and gain more leverage against AW.

Goldman added: 'As a result, my educated guess is that this is all they will charge AW with. And while it is a serious and brazen crime that should land him in jail, he has made the decision not to cooperate and I don't think that will change.

'Ordinarily, the co is the last one charged in a case because you want to flesh out all of the individuals and see who cooperates. So it would be very unusual to charge the co twice. I have no doubt they will continue to investigate and perhaps other lower level ppl will flip.

'but this is why a) I think these are all the charges against Weisselberg, b) I don't think he will flip, c) I don't think Trump will be charged and d) I don't think the Trump Org will be charged with anything else.

'Two final thoughts: A) insurance fraud, accounting fraud and loan fraud are very difficult cases to make. You need admissible evidence that proves every element beyond a reasonable doubt, including knowledge and intent. For someone like Trump who does not email, it's even harder.

'B) I'm no fan of Trump but I do not believe he should be charged with a crime because one doesn't like him or his politics. If you objected to his attack on the rule of law during his presidency, then you must stand up for the rule of law now even if he benefits from.'
After her husband confessed to an affair with Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath desperately tried to rescue their six-year marriage.

But when Ted Hughes disappeared for two weeks to London, leaving no contact address, she realised that they had to separate.

In October 1962, he returned for the last time to their house in Devon, where Sylvia was living with their two small children...

To Aurelia Plath (Sylvias mother)

Tuesday, October 9, 1962

Ted is in love, humming, packing, leaving this week. Hell live with the woman [Assia Wevill, then married to her third husband], I think marry her, though he wont admit it.

To hell. I am getting a divorce. It is the only thing.

He wants absolute freedom, and I could not live out a life legally married to someone I now hate and despise.

The foulness I have lived, his wanting to kill all I have lived for six years by saying he was just waiting for a chance to get out, that he was bored & stifled by me, a hag in a world of beautiful women just waiting for him, is only part of it.

If I am divorced, he can never be unfaithful to me again, I can start a new life. It is the hardest 30th birthday present I could envision. I am fighting on all fronts, I have to stand my ground.

He has been brutal, cruel, bastardly, cowardly and the flesh has dropped from my bones. But I am stubborn. I am a fighter.

PS: He goes tomorrow. Everything is breaking  my dinner set cracking in half. Even my beloved bees set upon me today when I numbly knocked aside their sugar feeder & I am all over stings.

Sylvia Plath is pictured with her daughter Frieda Hughes as a baby

To Dr Ruth Beuscher (Sylvias former psychiatrist in the U.S.)

Tuesday, October 9

Ted would have left me with all the lies, but bit by bit, the truth has come out. Or what he thinks is the truth. He has been building up a secret life in London all summer  flat, separate bank account, this woman, another woman. Hes lied to the end.

He is mad for [Assia], afraid to tell me [in case] I wont go through with the divorce (I think). I guess her husband will either divorce her or commit suicide. I found he went after Ted with a knife at Waterloo Station & tried to commit suicide after.

Ted says he has been a hypocrite for at least the last 3 years of our marriage, I have been eating not real bread, but a delusion of love. He has nothing but shattering things to say of me, seems to want to kill me, as he kills all he does not want.

He has agreed to pay 1,000 maintenance for the house-running & children a year. He is turning into a terror, a miser. Im not to have sherry, to have roast beef, Im to smoke the last quarter inch of my cigarette  theyre expensive. 1,000, he taunts me, seems too much.

How can I ever get free? My writing is my one hope, and that income is so small. The humiliation of being dependent for my childrens support on a man I hate & despise is a torture.

He switches on & off like an electrode. I face the worst (for me): he will live with this woman, marry her, they will have a wonderful life  wealthy, no children, travel, people, affairs, & every time they are bored, screw us by forgetting the money. Bloody hell.

I long for the divorce, for my independence, like clear water. I am, in my good minutes, excited about my new life. I want to fight back to a London flat by next fall, keep this place [in Devon] for summers.

Perhaps when his first kicking, killing passion is past, & he is free, & with this woman, Ted may be not such a bastard. I have to be nice, cant afford the luxury of a fury even. Be good little doggy & you shall have a penny. It is the last degradation.

Right now I hate men. I am stunned, bitter. I have the consolation of being no doubt the only woman who will know the early years of a charming genius. On my skin. Like a Belsen label.

Plath is pictured with her husband of six years Hughes

To Aurelia Plath

Friday, October 12

Ted left yesterday, after a ghastly week, with all his stuff, clothes, books, papers. It is over. My life can begin.

Thursday, October 18

I am myself, proud, and full of plans. I need time to breathe, sun, recover my flesh. I have enough ideas & subjects to last me a year or more!

To Olive Higgins Prouty (American novelist and poet)

Thursday, October 18

I suppose it is something to have been the first wife of a genius.

To Dr Ruth Beuscher

Sunday, October 21

What has astounded me is my reaction to [Teds] departure, and to my decision to get a divorce as fast as I can. I felt the most fantastic exhilaration & relief.

In the last 3 years I have produced & nursed two children, had a miscarriage [in February 1961], and been so intrigued & delighted by my bodily processes & infants I have been out for the count. Also, my relation to Ted was in many, many ways, gravely regressed, more & more I was calling on him to be a father.

After I drove him to the station with his things, I returned to the empty house expecting to be morbid and huge with gloom. I was ecstatic. My life, my sense of identity, seemed to be flying back to me from all quarters.

I knew what I wanted to do, pretty much who I was, where I wanted to go, who I wanted see, even just how, when I get to a good London haircutter, I wanted to do my weird hair. I was my own woman.

Now I get up at 4 every morning & write like fury till 8, stuffing the babes with rusks & juice. I am doing a poem a day, all marvellous, free, full songs.

I think my marriage, though it had much good, was a pretty sick one. Ted has reverted to pretty much what he was when I met him  the greatest seducer in Cambridge, only now it is the world.

Even in love with this barren ad agency writer [Assia] who commands a huge salary & puts it all on her back, he picks up Finns in coffee bars & takes them to hotels  he & this Assia are such a perfect match I laugh in my guts when I think of them married.

They look exactly alike: the same color, shape, everything. She is his twin sister, & like his sister, barren, uncreative, a real vamp. All sophistication. They smoke (Ted, a non-smoker, has been desperately practising) & drop names of the opposite sex, to titillate each other. They will be elaborately unfaithful to each other, very rich, & have no children, I presume, if her 2 abortions & 4 miscarriages can let me have this satisfaction.

A photograph of American poet Sylvia Plath, annotated 1955, one of the items belonging to Ms Plath going under the hammer at Sotheby's on July 9

I suppose it will be hell for me to meet them together at my first party or literary affair. But I will.

Oddly, I think some day she & I may be friends, not friends, but speaking. Ted says she has got my book out of the library, adores my work, etc. etc.

His stay here before the final departure almost killed me. I have never felt such hate.

He told me openly he wished me dead, it would be convenient, he could sell the house, take all the money & Frieda, told me I was brainless, hideous, had all sorts of flaws in making love he had never told me, and even two years ago he had not wanted to live with me.

Why in Gods name should the killing of me be so elaborate, and the torture so prolonged!

He told me London was death to him, got me down here [to Devon] hand-hemming curtains & painting furniture for a year hoping to see him radiant with what he wanted, & he seemed to be, then pouf!

Two years of hypocrisy, just waiting for the right bed to fall in? I cant believe it. It just seems insane to me.

Ted is on the brink of real wealth. His mss. sell for $100 a poem, just the handwriting. He is at the peak of fame. I was scrimping 6 years for this, balancing check books, dying for first nights, trips, dresses & a nanny. His family wants him to give us nothing. He has left me no address.

I hope time may mellow him toward the children, but I doubt it. His ethic is that of the hawk in one of his most famous poems, being taught to all British school-children: I kill where I please, it is all mine. He was furious I didnt commit suicide, he said he was sure I would!

Just tell me where all this hate comes from? He says he thinks I am dangerous toward him now. Well, I should think so!

I see, too, that domesticity was a fake cloak for me. My trouble is that I can do an awful lot of stuff well. I can give a floor a beautiful scrub, cook a fine pie, deliver a baby with ease, and stitch up a nightgown.

I also love hanging out a clean laundry in the apple orchard. But I hate doing housework all, or much of the time. I have been running a 103 fever out of sheer mad excitement with my own writing.

I am ravenous for study, experience, travel. I love learning how to manage things  I have kept bees this year, my own hive, & am very proud of my bottled honey, & my stings. I am learning to ride horseback & the riding mistress is delighted, I am a natural. My mind is dying of starvation here.

And I am tied by nothing but money. And the sense my husband wants to kill me by cutting it off altogether, so I am hogtied & cant work. Its enough to make any woman sail to Lesbos!

What I dont want is a nice, safe, dull, sweet reliable husband to take Teds place. He has to marry again  wholl cook? And what a showpiece for looks hes got!

But me  my independence, my self, is so dear to me I shall never bind it to anyone again. Most men who are domestic are dull  I hate routine jobs, and most men who are creative or scientific miracles are bastards.

I dont mind knowing a bastard, or having an affair with a bastard, I just dont want to be married to a bastard. I suppose it sounds as if I think all men are bastards, I dont, but the interesting ones I would rather have as either friends, lovers or both, than husbands.

Faithfulness, the ethic of faithfulness, is essentially boring. I see that. Ted made much better love while he was having these other affairs, & the tart in me appreciated this.

But I also just havent the time to be married to a philanderer. That bores me too. There is so much else besides sex. I want my career, my children, and a free supple life.

I am so happy, everything intrigues me. It is as if this divorce were the key to free all my repressed energy, which is fierce from six years of boiling in a vacuum.

After 6 years of having only one man attract me as much as Ted  what I wouldnt give to see him now!  I am again interested in other men, but few men are both beautiful physically, tremendous lovers & creative geniuses as Ted is. I cant even imagine anybody ever making me feel passionate enough to have an affair, after him. And I am so bloody proud & particular.

To Aurelia Plath

Wednesday, November 7

I am writing from London, so happy I can hardly speak. I think I have found a place. And guess what, it is W. B. Yeats house. With a blue plaque over the door saying he lived there!

Ted is behind me in this, he took me round looking at places. Now he sees he has nothing to fear from me  no scenes or vengefulness  he is more human.

His life is nothing to me & I am now staying with a wonderful Portuguese couple, the girl a best friend of Teds girlfriend, & they see how I am, full of interest in my own life, & are amazed, as everyone is, at my complete lack of jealousy or sorrow.

I amaze myself. It is my work that does it, my sense of myself as a writer. I am, I think, & will be when I get this London flat arranged, the happiest of women.

I had my fringe cut just before I came up to London in the most fashionable style  high on top, curling down round the ears  and kept my long coronet in back. It looks fabulous. Ted didnt even recognize me at the train station!

My morale is so much improved. Truck drivers whistle & so on, its amazing. Living apart from Ted is wonderful  I am no longer in his shadow, & it is heaven to be liked for myself alone. I may even borrow a table for my flat from Teds girl  I could be gracious to her now, & kindly.

She has only her high-paid ad agency job, her vanity & no chance of children & everybody wants to be a writer, like me. I may be poor in bank funds, but I am so much richer in every other way I envy them nothing.

My babies & my writing are my life & let them have affairs & parties, pouf! What a bore.

Monday, November 19

I am happier than ever before in my life. I realize now that all my married life I have sacrificed everything to Ted & his work, putting his work first, going to get part-time jobs, with great faith in his future wealth & fame.

I never even got a new dress or went to a hairdresser!

Now he goes out with fashion models. Well, I have finished a 2nd book of poems in this last month, & the minute I get a mothers help in London I will do novel after novel.

Friday, December 14

Well, here I am! Safely in Yeats house! And I can truly say I have never been so happy in my life. I just sit thinking Whew! I have done it, and beaming  shall I write a poem, shall I paint a floor, shall I hug a baby? Everything is such fun, such an adventure.

Wednesday, January 16, 1963

Ted comes about once a week to see Frieda & sometimes is nice & sometimes awful. It is very hard for me to think of him living in an expensive flat, being wined & dined, taking his girlfriend to Spain when I have worked so hard all these years & looked so forward to what I saw was to be our good fortune.

It is the starting from scratch that is so hard.

I guess I just need somebody to cheer me up by saying Ive done all right so far.

To Olive Higgins Prouty

Tuesday, January 22

Frieda [aged nearly three] makes me so sad. Ted comes once a week to see her, she hangs on him dotingly, then cries Daddy come soon for the rest of the week, waking in the night, tearful and obsessed with him.

It is like a kind of mirror, utterly innocent, to my own sense of loss. Having been so deeply and spiritually and physically happy with my dear, beautiful husband makes this harder than if I had never known love at all.

I could never live under the same roof with him again, but I hope for the childrens sake that each week he visits I can be brave and merry, without sorrow or accusation, and forge my life anew.

Ted has some of the inhumanity of the true genius that must kill to get what it wants.

I desperately want to make an inner strength in myself, an independence that can face bringing up the children alone & in face of great uncertainties.

To Aurelia Plath

Monday, February 4

I have been feeling a bit grim  the upheaval over, I am seeing the finality of it all.

To Marcia B. Stern

(American college friend)

Monday, February 4

I am in a limbo between the old world & the very uncertain & rather grim new. Ted comes once a week [to see the children] like a kind of apocalyptic Santa Claus.

To Dr Ruth Beuscher

Monday, February 4

I have finally read the Fromm [Erich Fromms The Art Of Loving] & think that I have been guilty of what he calls Idolatrous love, that I lost myself in Ted instead of finding myself.

There was enough identity left to me in Devon to make me feel immense relief at his departure  now I shall grow out of his shadow, I thought, I shall be me.

While we were married we were never apart & all experience filtered through each other. On a grown-up level, I dont think I could have endured a marriage of infidelities.

I had a beautiful, virile, brilliant man & he still is, whatever immaturities there may be in his throwing over everything in such a violent way. He has said he is sorry for the lying, and shows concern that we get on on our own.

What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst  cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies.

Perhaps this is accentuated by my seeing Ted once a week when he comes to see Frieda  seeing how happy & whole & independent he is, how much more I admire him like this, & what good friends we could be if I could manage to grow up too.

He is gaga over this ad-agency girl who has gone back to live with her 3rd husband to keep the passion hot, although she did live for three weeks with Ted & flew to Spain for a holiday with him.

If I were simply jealous about this it would be okay. But I know Spain and lovemaking would do me no good now, not until I find myself again.

I feel I need a ritual for survival from day to day until I begin to grow out of this death & found Fromms recommendation for concentration, patience & faith gave me a kind of peace, but that I keep slipping into this pit of panic & deepfreeze.

I am living on sleeping pills & nerve tonic & have managed a few commissions for a magazine & the BBC and poems very good but, I feel written on the edge of madness.

The publicity of Teds leaving is universal & I was taking it all with dignity & verve at first  people were buying poems & putting BBC work in my way, & I am scared to death I shall just pull up the psychic shroud & give up.

A poet, a writer, I am I think very narcissistic & the despair at being 30 & having let myself slide, studied nothing for years, having mastered no body of objective knowledge is on me like a cold, accusing wind.

Just now it is torture to me to dress, plan meals, put one foot in front of the other. Ironically my novel [The Bell Jar] about my first breakdown is getting rave reviews over here.

I feel a simple act of will would make the world steady & solidify. No one can save me but myself, but I need help & my doctor is referring me to a woman psychiatrist.

Living on my wits, my writing  even partially, is very hard at this time, it is so subjective & dependent on objectivity. I am, for the first time since my marriage, relating to people without Ted, but my own lack of center, of mature identity, is a great torment.

I am aware of a cowardice in myself, a wanting to give up. If I could study, read, enjoy people on my own Teds leaving would be hard, but manageable. But there is this damned, self-induced freeze.

I am suddenly in agony, desperate, thinking Yes, let him take over the house, the children, let me just die & be done with it. How can I get out of this ghastly defeatist cycle & grow up.

I am only too aware that love and a husband are impossible to me at this time, I am incapable of being myself & loving myself.

Now the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea.

With love,

Sylvia

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Footnote: Sylvia Plath killed herself a week later. Ted Hughes had another child by Assia Wevill. In 1969, she killed both herself and their four-year-old daughter. Until he died in October 1998, Ted Hughes proved to be a devoted father to Frieda and Nicholas.

The Letters Of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1953-63 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, to be published by Faber at 35 in the UK on September 6. To buy this book for 28 (20 per cent discount) call 0844 571 0640 or go to mailbookshop.co.uk/books. P&P is free on orders over 15, offer valid until September 5, 2018.
A member of the Washington House of Representatives is apologizing after wearing a yellow Star of David to protest COVID-19 restrictions, saying it was a 'dumb idea.'

On Saturday, Republican Rep. Jim Walsh was giving a speech in Lacey, where he was wearing a pink shirt adorned with the Star of David.

Yellow stars were used to identify, isolate and humiliate Jewish people in Nazi-occupied countries during the 1930s and 1940s.

Many Jewish organizations consider the comparison between vaccination mandates and the Holocaust to be offensive.

During his speech, Walsh urged the approximately 100 people in attendance at the gym to resist government overreach.

Scroll down for video

On Saturday, Republican Rep. Jim Walsh was giving a speech in Lacey, where he was wearing a pink shirt adorned with the Star of David

In comments on a Facebook post of the speech, Walsh called it 'an echo from history' and relayed a false story about how all Danes wore yellow stars during WWII

Yellow stars were used to identify, isolate and humiliate Jewish people in Nazi-occupied countries during the 1930s and 1940s

'What we have lost in the last two generations is that notion of individual liberty, of privacy, of the right to own property, of the right to your conscience, and your right to protect yourself,' Walsh says in his speech.

Walsh doesn't appear to reference Hitler or Nazis or the Holocaust in his speech, but he did defend his choice of attire in a comment on the Facebook Live video.

'Its an echo from history,' Walsh wrote. 'In the current context, were all Jews.'

The state representative went on to claim in an interview on Tuesday that he was given the Star of David by an attendee of the church gym gathering. He didn't explicitly apologize during that interview.

He also said that most people in attendance were wearing one and that they were 'deeply concerned about vaccine passports and vaccine segregation,' despite no vaccine mandate being in place in Washington.

The state representative went on to claim in an interview on Tuesday that he was given the Star of David by an attendee of the church gym gathering. He didn't apologize during that interview

Michelle Le, a leader of Washingtonians for Change - which arranged Walsh's speaking event - claimed that the star 'was not my idea' and said one attendee wanted to wear it to show solidarity with Israel.

Walsh compared wearing the star to a false story about Danish people wearing them during the Nazi occupation to prevent Jews from being singled out.

He made the same point in the Facebook comments, where a follow-up comment called him out for the false story.

Walsh, who has been a member of the state House of Representatives since 2016, failed to disclose his own vaccination status, saying 'I wont say publicly whether I am vaccinated or not.'

'Some people are offended by having to provide vaccine documentation at their work,' Walsh said about potentially offending people with the star. 'I cant control who is offended by what.'

On Tuesday, the the Anti-Defamation League Pacific Northwest Region released a statement, condemning Walsh.

'During these challenging times of rising antisemitism, elected officials continue to deepen the pain through ignorant Holocaust analogies to COVID-19 health guidelines,' the statement read in part.

'Let us be clear, Rep. Walshs comparisons are a gross misappropriation of history to advance an ignorant political point of freedom." It is deeply offensive and discounts the painful history of marginalized communities.

'There is simply no comparison for the systematic murder of six million Jews and the segregation of the African American community that has lasting impacts to today.'

One day after he refused to back down on Tuesday, Walsh went on a radio show with Jim Rantz, where he apologized on Wednesday.

One day after he refused to back down on Tuesday, Walsh (left) went on a radio show with Jim Rantz, where he apologized on Wednesday

'This gesture went too far,' Walsh said. 'It was inappropriate and offensive and Im terribly sorry that it happened and that I was a part of it.'

Walsh added, 'The imagery is intense and cant effectively be used to make points like this. You cant use some things as a metaphor because they go beyond the pale. They go beyond what people can accept  will accept  as a metaphoric point.'

He went on to refer to wearing the star as 'a dumb idea.'

Separately, Walsh released a statement: 'I apologize for using a profound image in a way that was inappropriate and offensive to so many people. It was wrong. It won't happen ever again.'

Dee Simon, Baral Family executive director of the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle, criticized Walsh for wearing the star.

'Our government is making an effort to protect their own citizens, not kill them,' Simon said to the Seattle Times. 'It not only trivializes it, it distorts history.'

The Department of Labor and Industries in Washington does require verification of vaccine status before mask requirements are lifted in individual workplaces.

Walsh is not the first politician to draw fire for making a parallel between COVID-19 vaccines and the Holocaust.

Last month, Marjorie Taylor Greene apologized for likening mask mandates to the Holocaust, admitting there was 'no comparison' and saying she was 'very sorry.'

On May 20, she told David Brody for his podcast The Water Cooler that Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, was 'mentally ill' for maintaining COVID restrictions.

'You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany,' Greene said.

On May 25, she tweeted: 'Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi's forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.

'Vaccine passports & mask mandates create discrimination against unvaxxed people who trust their immune systems to a virus that is 99% survivable.'

Even her own party condemned her stance.

Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, called her latest comments 'wrong' and 'appalling' and said the rest of the party was behind him.

HatWRKS owner Gigi Gaskins had announced that items reminiscent of the Star of David were on sale in a post shared to Instagram, ultimately leading to an apology

Additionally, a Nashville hat store owner issued an apology recently for selling 'Not Vaccinated' patches reminiscent of those Nazis forced Jews to wear in the 1930s and 40s, after major hat producers announced they would stop doing business with the store.

HatWRKS owner Gigi Gaskins had announced that the items were on sale in a post shared to Instagram.

But she apologized on the social media site on Saturday night, and insisted she did not intend to 'exploit or make a profit' from the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered.
The prosecution of two former soldiers over three deaths during Northern Ireland's Troubles have been halted.

Soldier F was being prosecuted for the murder of two men, James Wray and William McKinney, shot during a civil rights demonstration in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday in 1972.

Soldier B, meanwhile, was to be prosecuted for the murder of 15-year-old Daniel Hegarty in the city six months later.

The families of the victims were informed of the decisions during meetings on Derry on Friday morning.

It comes after a review of evidence in the cases.

These reviews follow a recent court ruling that caused the collapse of another Troubles murder trial involving two military veterans.

Conservative MP Johnny Mercer, who resigned as a defence minister over the treatment of veterans who served in Northern Ireland, said he had sympathy with the families, but said it was difficult to progress prosecutions after so many years.

He told the BBC: 'I don't think that you can have prosecutions of sufficient integrity that will stick 40/50 years later after these events and I feel very strongly that Government has failed veterans of that conflict.

'But, it is not one-sided, I have a huge amount of sympathy for the families.'

Soldier F was accused of murdering James Wray (left) and William McKinney (right) on January 30, 1972, when British troops opened fire on civil rights demonstrators in the Bogside area of Derry, killing a total of 13 people

Soldier B, meanwhile, was to be prosecuted for the murder of 15-year-old Daniel Hegarty in the city six months later

The veterans were formally acquitted of the murder of Official IRA leader Joe McCann after prosecutors offered no further evidence at Belfast Crown Court.

It came after previous statements the two men had given years ago were ruled inadmissible, collapsing the case.

Soldier F, an ex-paratrooper, was accused of murdering Mr Wray and Mr McKinney on Bloody Sunday on January 30 1972, when troops opened fire on civil rights demonstrators in Derry's Bogside, killing 13 people.

He also stood accused of the attempted murders of Patrick O'Donnell, Joseph Friel, Joe Mahon and Michael Quinn. He faced a further supporting charge of the attempted murder of a person or persons unknown on the day.

The case against him had reached the stage of a committal hearing at Derry Magistrates' Court to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to proceed to trial.

In the case of Soldier B, the PPS had announced in 2019 an intention to prosecute him for the murder of Daniel and the wounding with intent of his cousin Christopher Hegarty, then aged 16.

The shooting happened during Operation Motorman - an Army attempt to wrest control of no-go areas of Derry from the grip of the IRA.

Daniel and Christopher, who had gone to watch the military operation, were shot after encountering an Army patrol in the Creggan area in the early hours of July 31, 1972.

The PPS had not yet got to the stage of issuing summons to formally commence the prosecution of Soldier B - a delay caused by the veteran's unsuccessful High Court bid to challenge the move to bring charges against him.

His planned prosecution will now no longer proceed.

He faced a seventh supporting charge of the attempted murder of a person or persons unknown on the day.

Northern Ireland's deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said it was a 'bad day for justice'.

'We will continue to stand by the Bloody Sunday and Hegarty families,' she tweeted.

Nationalist politicians in Northern Ireland have described the decision as 'devastating' for the victims' families.

SDLP leader and Foyle MP Colum Eastwood said the decision was 'bitterly disappointing' and has raised concerns about the way families have been treated.

Mr Eastwood said: 'This is devastating news.

The family of William McKinney, who was killed in the Bloody Sunday shootings in Londonderry on January 30 1972, John (second left) and Mickey (second right), walk in with solicitors, brothers, Fearghal and Ciaran Shiels, as they arrive at the City Hotel in Londonderry, for a meeting with the Public Prosecution Service

The family of Liam Wray who was killed in the Bloody Sunday shootings in Londonderry on January 30 1972, (left to right) Margaret Wray, unidentified man, Doreen and Liam, in Londonderry today

'Devastating for the Bloody Sunday families and the family of Daniel Hegarty who have placed their faith in process after process only to be let down badly as they seek justice and accountability for the murder of their loved ones.

'It is galling that these cases appear to have collapsed because the British Army's historical investigation process was so deficient that the evidence collected is considered to be inadmissible.

'These families are now in a position where their loved ones were killed by members of the British Army and their prosecutions have been discontinued because of the conduct of the British Army.

'It is totally unjust.'

Mr Eastwood added: 'The Bloody Sunday Families and Daniel Hegarty's family have been through worse days than this and they have marched on with dignity, decency and pride.

'The people of Derry have stood with them on every step of their long march toward justice, we're with them today and we'll be with them until the end.'

Soldier F had been granted anonymity ahead of his trial.

While not exactly the same, the evidence against the former soldiers was of a similar nature to that ruled inadmissible in the Joe McCann trial.

Following receipt of Justice O'Hara's detailed written judgment, the PPS initiated formal reviews of the cases.

The PPS is under an ongoing obligation to keep prosecutorial decisions under review to account for changing circumstances.

While the PPS has long acknowledged that free-standing Royal Military Police statements given by soldiers could not be used in evidence against them, in the Bloody Sunday case the PPS was attempting to use RMP statements given by other soldiers in the Bogside that day.

They were going to try to use the accounts of Soldiers H and G as hearsay evidence that Soldier F was in the area and had fired shots at the civil rights demonstrators.

They were going to ask the court to rely on the aspects of Soldiers H and G's statement that claimed Soldier F was firing in Glenfada Park North when the victims were shot.

Without that evidence, the PPS had no way of proving that basic, but absolutely crucial, fact.

The ex-paratrooper was also accused of the attempted murders of Patrick O'Donnell, Joseph Friel, Joe Mahon and Michael Quinn. Pictured: Youths confront British soldiers before paratroopers opened fire on Bloody Sunday

A pivotal piece of evidence in this case related to a statement Soldier B gave to the HET in 2006.

In it, he admitted to firing the shots that hit Daniel and his cousin Christopher.

He had also given a statement to the RMP in 1972 but prosecutors accepted that would have been inadmissible.

The 2006 HET statement was therefore the only evidence that could be used to identify Soldier B as the person who fired the shots. The PPS review concluded that deficiencies identified by Justice O'Hara in relation to the HET evidence in the Joe McCann case were also relevant to the 2006 statement in the Hagerty case.

With the prospect of that being ruled inadmissible as well, the Crown case against Soldier B fell away.

A total of 13 people were killed and 15 wounded when members of the Army's Parachute Regiment opened fire on demonstrators on Sunday January 30 1972.

It was one of the catalysts for the Northern Ireland conflict which lasted for decades and cost thousands of lives.

Joe McCann, 24, was shot dead as he ran from police and Army in Belfast in 1972

His trial collapsed in May after a judge said statements made by the men could not be used against them.

Mr Justice O'Hara had earlier described as 'remarkable' the fact the ex-soldiers had been prosecuted for 24-year-old McCann's murder on the basis of a report by a police legacy unit, the Historical Enquiries Team (HET), and not as a result of a follow-up criminal investigation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

This was despite the HET telling the court - which was sitting without a jury over tamper fears - it did not think there was any evidence to reopen the case.

Philip Barden, a senior partner at Devonshires who represents the soldiers, called for an urgent independent review of the approach taken by the PPS in the case, including their decision to prosecute.

He said: 'It is extraordinary that one of the first cases following the work of the HET to come to trial was that of a man who lived by the gun and who shot and killed at will.

Joe McCann, pictured above, 24, was shot dead by soldiers in the Markets area of Belfast in 1972 while dressed in disguise as he attempted to evade arrest at the hands of Royal Ulster Constabulary officers

'McCann and men like him caused the very violence which led to so many innocent people dying, yet their families are in the queue for justice behind him. This is not justice or fairness.

'Morally this is indefensible and a strong indication that there is a desire to use the criminal justice system to settle old scores. How was it that Joe McCann's death became a priority before the Public Prosecution Service?

'The stress of these proceedings on the soldiers and their families cannot be underestimated.

'This is a prosecution that should never have got off the ground.'

News of the acquittal was hailed by MP Johnny Mercer and first Veterans Commissioner for Northern Ireland Danny Kinahan.

Mr Mercer said: ''Not guilty' Should never have happened. Hopefully this marks the lowest point in this Nation's treatment of her Veterans. Government must act.'

Mr Kinahan said: 'I welcome that soldiers A&C were found not guilty. It should never have got to this stage.

'I pay tribute to the two veterans and their families for the dignity and fortitude they have shown. I hope they will be allowed to get on with their lives in peace.'
A missing grandfather has been saved by a police drone which spotted him after he had spent 18 hours lost in fields of 4ft high grass while out on a walk.

Roy Giblin, 82, became disorientated while walking through long grass not far from his home in Abergele, Conwy on June 8.

When he failed to return home his worried family called the police and an 18-hour rescue mission began.

Mr Giblin's family say a drone saved his life when its handler spotted Mr Giblin's head in a disturbed area of grass, and that he 'didn't stand a chance' without it.

He had been tracked down lost and alone in the field near the town's railway station where grass had been left to grow.

His granddaughter Laura Delany, 30 said the family 'prepared for the worst' as they waited for word of his disappearance.

She said: 'As soon as I heard the news that he'd been found, I just burst into tears. It's overwhelming. If they'd not had the drone, he would probably have still been there now. We wouldn't have had a clue where he was, and he wouldn't even be here.

Roy Giblin (pictured), 82, became disorientated while walking through long grass not far from his home in Abergele, Conwy on June 8

'Without that drone, he didn't stand a chance.'

She said the police were 'absolutely amazing' and 'literally pulled out every stop to find him'.

North Wales Police force only launched the drone for the first time in April and the force says it has now been deployed more than 250 times.

Lead pilot sergeant Paul Terry said it was 'very likely' that the device had saved Mr Giblin's life.

Mr Giblin's family say a drone saved his life when its handler spotted Mr Giblin's head (pictured) in a disturbed area of grass, and that he 'didn't stand a chance' without it

He said: 'I'd say this was the most significant find we've had in the two months since launching.

'What's critical about that story is that we were working with local officers who were doing a huge amount of foundational work looking for CCTV sightings in the last location that we'd seen him and manually on the ground searching with teams looking across the area.

'As we searched along the train line, we had a sighting of him in some very long grass around 4ft high, away from the area where the ground team were searching.

'But because we had aerial cover, it could capture an area wider than what they were searching for visually.

'It was when we saw a disturbance in the pattern of grass, we noticed his head poking out over the really long grass.

Lead pilot sergeant Paul Terry said it was 'very likely' that the device had saved Mr Giblin's life

He had been tracked down lost and alone in the field near the town's railway station where grass had been left to grow. Pictured, police arrive at the scene

'If the drone hadn't been there, Mr Giblin wouldn't have been seen.'

He said it was 'very likely he wouldn't have been located that night', meaning use of the drone saved his life.

Sgt Terry said using a drone was far cheaper for officers than using force helicopters to provide a similar service.

He said: 'We can be deployed alongside officers on the ground to multiple locations during an operation over a number of hours, carrying out multiple flights throughout an operation and at much lower cost.'

The DJI M300 RTK drones boast thermal camera and powerful 200x zoom lens with a flight time of up to 45 minutes and the ability to fly in rain and winds up to 33mph.
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A former Army couple who killed themselves in a suicide pact had their house raided by police just four days before their deaths, it has emerged.

Officers investigating the sharing of child pornography searched the home of Peter McGuinness, 54, and wife Deborah, a 49-year-old former personal assistant to three heads of the military, on July 29 last year and seized a number of devices.

On August 2, the couple died in their car by carbon monoxide poisoning at a Dorset beauty spot, leaving poignant notes for their family, saying 'neither of us can be without the other'.

Friends and family are still mystified over why the couple, who held a Mexican-themed party at their home in Kingston-upon-Thames just a day before driving to Durlston Country Park in Dorset, chose to kill themselves.

Mr McGuinness had suffered from depression possibly caused by PTSD after several tours of Iraq, and had talked about taking his own life before. But his wife, who had been given the all clear from cancer just five months before her death, had no history of mental illness.

The couple each served in the Armed Forces in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers for more than 20 years and Mrs McGuinness was later personal assistant to three consecutive heads of the Army: Generals Sir David Richards, Sir Richard Dannatt and Sir Peter Wall.

Following the couple's deaths, Sir Richard paid tribute to Mrs McGuinness, calling her a 'model soldier' and the couple's deaths 'a double tragedy'.

Peter McGuinness, 54, and wife Deborah (pictured), a former PA to three heads of the military, were found dead in a Range Rover at a remote beauty spot

Cards containing money and poignant messages to family members were also found at the scene in the car park at Durlston Country Park, near Swanage, Dorset

A coroner in Bournemouth heard this week that Mr and Mrs McGuinness were visited by PC Vicky Currie, and colleagues from the Metropolitan Police Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation team on July 29, 2020.

She told the court: 'In the morning I went to the home address. I had no previous contact with them. They were assisting police with their enquiries.

'They were both spoken to together on the day and both of them seemed fine, happy and were joking with us.

'When we left I had no concerns and they didn't mention anything to us or any mental health going on, both were completely fine when we left the address.'

A Met spokesperson told MailOnline: 'Our thoughts remain with the families of Peter and Deborah at this sad and difficult time.

'Officers from the Met executed a search warrant at the address of Mr and Mrs McGuinness as part of an investigation into the sharing of indecent images of children.

'No arrests were made and a number of devices were seized from the property.

'This investigation was ongoing at the time of their death.

'As is usual after a death following police contact, a referral was made to the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards and the IOPC. No misconduct issues were identified.'

Mr McGuinness and his wife were found dead in a Range Rover at a remote beauty spot after spending several weeks planning their death, the inquest heard.

Mr McGuinness had suffered from depression, possibly caused by PTSD following several tours of Iraq, and had talked about taking his own life before.

But Mrs McGuinness, who had been given the all-clear from cancer just five months before her death, had no history of mental illness.

The devoted couple died of carbon monoxide poisoning and told their loved ones in poignant notes found in the vehicle 'neither of us can be without the other'.

Also found dead in the hired vehicle was their pet cat they had taken with them from their home in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey.

Cards containing money and poignant messages to family members were also discovered at the scene in the car park at Durlston Country Park, near Swanage, Dorset.

Mr McGuinness had suffered from depression, possibly caused by PTSD after several tours of Iraq, and had talked about taking his own life before. But Mrs McGuinness, who had been given the all clear from cancer just five months before her death, had no history of mental health illness

The couple, known by friends as Mac and Debs (above), each served in the Armed Forces in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers for more than 20 years

The inquest heard Mr McGuinness, who served in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, left the Army in 2007 and had suffered recent bouts of anxiety and depression which may have been triggered by PTSD.

Mrs McGuinness had discouraged him when he had previously questioned whether life was worth living.

Mrs McGuinness served in the army from 1989 to 2012, doing tours in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Iraq, and was personal assistant to three consecutive heads of the Army, Generals Sir David Richards, Sir Richard Dannatt and Sir Peter Wall.

Following the couple's death, Sir Richard paid tribute to Mrs McGuinness, calling her a 'model soldier' and the couple's deaths 'a double tragedy'.

He told the Sun newspaper: 'It is only some comfort that she and her husband were together.'

Their family told the Bournemouth inquest that the couple had been together for 23 years and they were 'confused' by their deaths as 'they seemed so happy'.

The hearing was told that in mid-July last year - about two weeks before their deaths - the couple started searching online for dealing with wills.

They threw a Mexican-themed fancy dress party at their home on August 1 for friends and drove to Durlston Country Park the next day.

Giving evidence, Mrs McGuinness's mother Rosemary Carlisle said: 'As a family we are so confused as to why they chose to end their lives.

'They threw a Mexican-themed party for Debs' birthday on August 1 and there was no indication about what would happen next as they were talking about going on holiday to Spain and buying a flat.'

Giving evidence about the party, army friend Thomas Rutherford said: 'They were both in fancy dress and seemed to be enjoying themselves a great deal.

'There was no indication that anything was amiss.'

The next day, they drove a Range Rover Evoque hire car down to Dorset and it was captured on CCTV entering the car park at about 6pm.

The vehicle was spotted at about 7.30am the following morning by a staff member at the park.

Sir Richard Dannatt paid tribute to Mrs McGuinness, calling her a 'model soldier' and the couple's deaths 'a double tragedy'

Mrs McGuinness was personal assistant to three consecutive heads of the Army, including Sir Peter Wall (left) and Sir David Richards (right)

She banged on the windows to try and wake the pair who were reclined in the driver and passenger seats but after getting no response called 999.

The emergency services forced entry to the vehicle and found the pair lifeless inside. They were pronounced dead at the scene. Their dead cat was in the footwell.

A post-mortem examination carried out by pathologist Dr Robert Blahut ruled out foul play and said their cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning.

A search of the couple's computer history showed that they had looked at websites for doing online wills in mid-July.

In the car, they left a notepad with passwords inside it for their electronic devices and advice on what to do with their ashes.

At the time of their deaths, Mrs McGuinness was working as an office manager at the same security firm as her husband, who was an insurance handler.

Mrs McGuinness's niece Esther Carlisle, who lived with the couple before moving to Taiwan, said Mr McGuinness had got angry when his son asked him if he had PTSD in 2018.

She said: 'They were together for 23 years and loved each other dearly. Peter got low sometimes and said he didn't think he'd live till he was 60.

In the car (pictured), they left a notepad with passwords inside it for their electronic devices and advice on what to do with their ashes

'I remember the only time he got angry and it was when his son suggested he might have PTSD and suggested he get help. It was a regular occurrence for his army friends to commit suicide and he would not be shocked by it.'

Dorset Coroner Rachael Griffin, who recorded a conclusion of suicide for both parties, said of the notes found in the vehicle:

'Some of the notes were in Peter's writing and some were in Deborah's writing. There was a card with some money in it, a card for the children and another to the family.'

She concluded: 'It is very clear to me that Debs and Peter were devoted to each other and were popular, hardworking and social people.

'Their behaviour to their close family and friends in the days leading up to their death gave no indication of what was going to happen.

'Peter had been diagnosed with depression but on the other hand Debs had no history of mental health conditions and had actually discouraged Peter when talking about not wanting to be alive.

'I'm satisfied on the balance of probabilities that they did the act that caused their deaths and in doing so intended these consequences.'
Former minister Lord Mandelson told Labour's hard left to shut up today as he rounded on critics of party leader Sir Keir Starmer in the wake of the Batley & Spen by-election victory

The Blairite peer demanded 'a period of silence' from Corbynista critics of the Opposition Leader who hoped for a Labour defeat in order to mount a challenge against him.

Lord Mandelson also hit out at deputy leader Angela Rayner, seen as one of the leading candidates to challenge Sir Keir, saying she had been 'egged on by people who are serving their own factional purposes and interests' and that 'she should realise that these are not her friends'.

Ms Rayner has denied being involved in a potential putsch against her boss a little over a year into his leadership. But last night's by-election victory in West Yorkshire has been seen by many of the Left as a make-or-break moment for many on the left.

In May former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said a defeat in a seat which Tracy Brabin won with a majority of 3,525 in 2019 would have meant it was 'curtains' for Sir Keir.

He was under pressure following a series of humiliating electoral defeats in the hartlepool by-election and mayoral votes in the West Midlands and Tees Valley.

But after Kim Leadbeater won with a slim majority of 323 over the Tories - with hard Left challenger George Galloway taking 8,000 votes, Lord Mandelson told the BBC: 'There were elements of the Corbynite left who seemed far too eager during this campaign for Galloway's presence to result in a blow to Keir Starmer and his leadership.

The Blairite peer demanded 'a period of silence' from Corbynista critics of the Opposition Leader who hoped for a Labour defeat in order to mount a challenge against him.

Lord Mandelson also hit out at deputy leader Angela Rayner, seen as one of the leading candidates to challenge Sir Keir, saying she had been 'egged on by people who are serving their own factional purposes and interests' and that 'she should realise that these are not her friends'.

Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater, the sister of murdered MP Jo Cox, has managed to fend off Tory challenger Ryan Stephenson, who came second, and maverick Mr Galloway, who came third, with a majority of just 323

Kim Leadbeater of the Labour Party sticks up her thumb as she reacts to the media after winning the Batley and Spen by-election this morning

'While others were campaigning in Batley they were conspiring and they should now stop their whispering, their agitation of Angela Rayner. She should realise that these are not her friends.

'She has been egged on by people who are serving their own factional purposes and interests, not hers.'

He added: 'To paraphrase an old Clement Attlee quote about these elements, a period of silence on their part would now be welcome.'

Speaking in the constituency this morning, Sir Keir tried to fuse the win with England's Euro 2020 success, declaring: 'Labour is back. This is just the start. I want many more days like this. Labour is coming home.

Meanwhile, senior Tories blamed their second-placed finish on Matt Hancock.

Amanda Milling, the co-chairman of the Conservative Party, said the former health secretary's romance with aide Gina Coladangelo 'was something that came up' on the doorstep following his resignation last Saturday.

In May former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said a defeat in a seat which Tracy Brabin won with a majority of 3,525 in 2019 would have meant it was 'curtains' for Sir Keir.

Tory peer and pollster Lord Hayward said Mr Hancock's behaviour was likely one of the reasons why the party lost, along with Boris Johnson's failure to sack him.

He said: 'I think it's a combination of both sides- it's not just Matt Hancock, it is the decision of the Prime Minister, because of the apparent delay in taking action.'

The polling expert Sir John Curtice said many Tories will inevitably blame the scandal for the election defeat.

Labour held the constituency with a wafer-thin majority following a brutal few weeks on the campaign trail that saw candidates abused and heightened racial and sectarian tension.

Murdered Jo Cox's sister Kim Leadbeater won for the party as she fended off Tory challenger Ryan Stephenson, who came second, and maverick George Galloway, who came third.

Speaking after she was declared the winner, Ms Leadbeater said she had thought about her family and her sister often during the last few weeks, adding: 'If I can be half the MP Jo was, I know I will do her proud.'

She also thanked West Yorkshire Police for the protection she had been given amid claims supporters of Mr Galloway's Workers Party had intimidated her, as she said: 'Sadly I needed them more than ever.'

The Labour MP added: 'I'm absolutely delighted that the people of Batley and Spen have rejected division and they've voted for hope.'

Labour sources suggested the win should prompt Sir Keir's critics to retreat, telling Politico: 'Everyone's been calling this a referendum on Keir's leadership. Well, we've won  bucked the trend, held onto this marginal seat and advanced in Tory areas. A fantastic result.'

In a sign that Sir Keir's position is now stabilising, Diane Abbott, the former shadow home secretary and a key figure on the Labour left, said 'we won and we are moving forward'.
Robin DiAngelo, an anti-racist author who wrote a NYT bestseller 'White Fragility,' makes an estimated $728,000 a year from speaking engagements, according to Reason.com

White anti-racist author Robin DiAngelo is making an estimated $728,000 a year from speaking engagements and workshops and is charging an average of $14,000 per speech, more than double what she charged in 2018.

DiAngelo, who has a PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington and has written multiple books about confronting racism including New York Times bestseller 'White Fragility', is represented by Big Speak for speaking arrangements.

When 'White Fragility' debuted in 2018, her average speaking fees were $6,200, according to her website.

From there they steadily climbed to to $9,200 in 2019 and $14,000 by August 2020.

Now, she said her agency - Big Speak - negotiates her fees, which are listed on the the company's website as $30,000 to $40,000. She also makes 7.5 percent in royalties from 'White Fragility.'

Her main focus is 'accountability within antiracist work is the understanding that what I profess to value must be demonstrated in action,' according to her website.

In addition to being an author, DiAngelo is a tenured professor at Westfield State University in Massachusetts

DiAngelo is represented by the agency Big Speak, which lists her speaker fees as $30,000 to $40,000

DiAngelo's 'Confronting Racism' LinkedIn presentation to Coca-Cola in February, which included slides that encouraging people to 'try to be less white,' was met with backlash.

The slides in question, which went viral on social media after they were revealed by a 'whistleblower' working for the soft drink giant in the US, told viewers that being 'less white' meant being 'less oppressive', 'less arrogant' and 'less ignorant'.

After calls for boycotts and lawsuits against Coca-Cola, the firm said it merely provided access to the slides on the LinkedIn Learning site as part of its diversity training, rather than making them required viewing. They've since been taken down.

It's unknown how much she was paid for the presentation.

Other speaking engagements included a $12,750 presentation at the University of Wisconsin in October 2020, which was reported by The Washington Free Beacon, a $12,000 two-hour lecture at the University of Kentucky, which was reported by The Daily Signal, and the Tulsa City-County Library paid her $15,000 for a 90-minute Zoom discussion, according to ocpathink.org.

All the outlets filed Freedom of Information requests to find out how much she was paid.

It's unclear how much money she makes per year from her book, speaking arrangements and as a tenured professor at Westfield State University in Massachusetts and an Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington, Seattle.

But after George Floyd's murder last May, anti-racism speeches and training have became a booming industry.

A July 1 story on Reason.com estimates she makes about $728,000 a year from speeches and workshops alone, with would put her in the top-earning 1 percent.

White Fragility debuted in 2018, but has become more popular as the country has become more keen on race-based issues

In her 'accountability' section on her website, DiAngelo defended her speaking fees, saying fees are rarely fixed and 'rise and fall based on the type of organization and fluctuations in demand.'

'My fee is on a sliding scale; I am paid more by corporate orgs, and much less by non-profits, particularly non-profits that are focused on anti-racist work and/or are BIPOC-led,' she said on her website, adding that she does a lot of reduced-rate, pro bono and fundraising work.

'This year thus far, with the popularity of my book and more work in the corporate sector, my fee has ranged from pro bono (zero) to upwards of $30,000, which is well within the standard range for a best-selling author who is in high demand,' she says on her website.

Her listed speaking fee is at the top end of anti-racism speakers listed on allamericanspeakers.com, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter Dr. Bernice King, whose speaker fees are listed as $20,000 to $30,000.

But DiAngelo isn't the only person who's making money as the country has become more sensitive to race and race-based issues.

Anti-racism speeches, training sessions and books have become a booming industry after Floyd's murder last May.

For example, Robette Ann Dias has been training people how not to be racist for nearly 20 years, but her organization - Crossroads Antiracism Organization and Training - would previously get about nine requests a month, according to a July 2020 Washington Post story.

Within two weeks of Floyd's murder, her organization received 110 requests.

The organization charges $4,000 per day plus the expenses for trainers for introductory workshops, which run four to eight hours and includes 25 to 100 people.

For 'in-depth workshops,' the organization charges $9,000 per workshop plus the expenses for two trainers. Workshops typically run 2.5 days for a maximum of 45 participants.

The Washington Post story mentions DiAngelo's book as one of four examples of anti-racism training books that have climbed the bestseller list as the country became more 'woke' and sensitive towards race.

She and several other anti-racist authors and civil rights activists have been paid tens of thousands of dollars by higher learning institutions for lectures, fireside chats or keynote addresses.

Boston University professor and author Ibram Kendi, who wrote the NYT's bestseller 'How to be an Antiracist' among other books, was payed more $300,000 over the past few years to deliver speeches, mainly in universities, according to reporting by The Fix.

The outlet reported all the contracts with Kendi were worth at least $10,000 since 2019, and payments jumped after Floyd's death.

Kendi received $12,500 to $24,000 from five schools for anti-rasist lectures, most of which were 45 minutes plus a 15-minute Q&A section, between August and November 2020, The Fix reported.

What is critical race theory? The concept dividing the nation which asserts that US institutions are inherently racist The fight over critical race theory in schools has escalated in the United States over the last year. The theory has sparked a fierce nationwide debate in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests around the country over the last year and the introduction of the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project, which was published by the New York Times in 2019 to mark 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived on American shores, reframes American history by 'placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of the US narrative'. The debate surrounding critical race theory regards concerns that some children are being indoctrinated into thinking that white people are inherently racist or sexist. Those against critical race theory have argued it reduces people to the categories of 'privileged' or 'oppressed' based on their skin color. Supporters, however, say the theory is vital to eliminating racism because it examines the ways in which race influence American politics, culture and the law. Advertisement

The outlet is still waiting on multiple Freedom of Information requests for other public speaking engagements.

One of Kendi's most recent speeches was a $25,000 endeavor paid for by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which angered two top North Carolina Republicans.

Republican Senate Leader Phil Berger and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson issued a joint press release on June 23 condemning presentation while admitting they didn't watch it or read his book.

'The states second-largest school district paid $25,000 to leading Critical Race Theory proponent Ibram X. Kendi for an event just last week,' Berger said in a statement.

'This is clear and direct evidence that Critical Race Theory is being pushed in North Carolina. The fact that a public school district would pay someone who chooses to teach others that "the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination" is unimaginable, Robinson said.

Another high profile speaker is Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and lead author of the New York Times '1619 Project.'

She was paid $50,000 by the Oregon State Education Department for two seminars and $25,000 for an online Zoom lecture given to the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.

Both were revealed through Freedom of Information requests. She's represented by the Lavin Agency, but her speaking fees aren't listed.

Other antiracist speakers paid thousands of dollars for lectures or talks are Tim Wise, who was paid $10,000 by the University of Michigan for Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, and Dena Simmons, who was paid by the Naperville, Illinois school district in February for a 60-minute presentation.

Critical race theory and anti-racist literature have been polarizing topics, with some admonishing the idea, claiming it divides people of different races.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (left) - author of the controversial New York Times 1619 Project (right) - was paid $50,000 by the Oregon Education Department for two seminars where she reportedly told children: 'What we call American history is really white history'

DiAngelo's work is no exception.

On her website, she said, 'We work towards creating a culture in which not engaging in antiracist practices within a racist society is what is actually uncomfortable.'

Critics, like Steve QJ, a black writer whose story titled 'Robin DiAngelo Is The Vanilla Ice Of Anti-Racism' was published by Illuminated-Curated, flat out called DiAngelo a 'racist.'

'Robin DiAngelos "White Fragility" has singlehandedly confused millions of people about race. It manages to talk down to black people and white people, all whilst offering nothing in the way of solutions,' he wrote.

'The most valuable contribution most people can make is to change their world. To stop treating black people as a field of study and start treating us like ordinary human beings.'
A 60-year-old man has died after he was stabbed in a 'random and unprovoked assault' on Oxford Circus yesterday.

A murder investigation has been launched and a 25-year-old man is in police custody following the attack.

The victim, the 61st person to be killed in the Capital this year, was rushed to a central London hospital after he was stabbed at the junction of Regent Street at 8pm.

Metropolitan Police arrested a 25-year-old man at the scene after he was detained by members of the public who were nearby during the daylight stabbing.

The force has not linked the stabbing to terrorism and police want to speak to two men with skateboards who helped detain the suspect.

Footage posted to social media shows a large cordon in place on Oxford Street.

The suspect was taken to hospital for treatment to a head injury, which is not believed to be life threatening.

The victim was rushed to a central London hospital after sustaining knife injuries at the junction of Regent Street at 8pm. Pictured: The scene

The man's next of kin has been informed and is being supported by specially trained officers, and a post-mortem examination will be scheduled soon.

A 25-year-old man was arrested at the scene on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and possession of an offensive weapon. After the victim died he was arrested on suspicion of murder and remains in custody at a central London police station.

Detective Chief Inspector Vicky Tunstall, from the Specialist Crime Command, said: 'This is being treated as a random and unprovoked assault and we are not actively looking for anybody else in connection with the incident. I would like to reassure the public that his is not believed to be linked to terrorism.

'It is clear that this area of Oxford Circus was very busy at the time of the attack. Members of the public intervened to detain the suspect and I hope to trace and speak to them, to secure their accounts and offer support. In particular, I would like to trace two young males with skateboards who led this intervention.

'I am appealing to any person who witnessed the assault, or who has mobile phone footage, to contact us. I am also appealing to the owners of any passing cars with dashcams to check whether they have recorded the incident.'

Several horrified shoppers took to Twitter following the stabbing to describe the scene, with one writing: 'Wrong time to be walking down Oxford Street.'

Another said he saw members of the public grab the suspect and disarm him.

The passerby, who asked not to be named, said members of the public 'detained him and put the knife in a cylinder'.

They added: 'One man grabbed him and soon after the police were there holding him down and he was shouting. I couldn't hear what he was saying though.

'It was awful. I didn't see much. Obviously it's very busy and I only realised something bad happened when people were shouting and very soon after the police were there.'

Metropolitan Police arrested a 25-year-old man at the scene after he was detained by members of the public who were nearby during the daylight stabbing

The suspect was taken to hospital for treatment to a head injury which is not believed to be life threatening. Pictured: The scene

Another said: 'Oxford Circus locked off due to stabbing.

'A middle aged gentleman who just got stabbed in Oxford Street looks ok. Hopefully he fully recovers.'

Police ask anyone who witnessed the assault, or who captured it on mobile phone, to contact them via 101 quoting reference Cad 7129/01Jul.

Alternatively, to remain anonymous, call Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

The victim's stabbing came just hours after a 16-year-old was knifed to death outside a house in south London.

He was found with multiple stab wounds at a flat on the Shrublands Estate in Croydon, south London, shortly before 1am.

The victim, who has not been named, was pronounced dead at the scene just after 1.30am. There have been no arrests.

A 16-year-old boy has become the fifth teenager to be murdered in London in less than a month after he was brutally stabbed to death on his doorstep yesterday

He was the 19th teenager to be murdered in London this year, two more than in the whole of 2020, and the fifth in the last four weeks.

Detectives are appealing for information.

A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said: 'Police were called at 12.46am to reports of a disturbance at a residential address on Bracken Avenue in Shrublands, Croydon.

'Officers attended and found a 16-year-old inside suffering from stab injuries. They provided First Aid prior to the arrival of the London Ambulance Service and London's Air Ambulance.'
A New York woman is suing department store Macy's after she was sexually assaulted by a delivery driver after after purchasing a $2,400 mattress.

The 46-year-old victim opted for the department store's 'white glove delivery service,' to her Queens apartment after splurging on the Aireloom Hybrid luxury mattress at Macy's Herald Square in Manhattan during a President's Day sale in March.

The executive assistant, who works across the street from the Macy's flagship location, told the New York Post she was sexually assaulted by a deliveryman who worked for an unlicensed truck company subcontracted by the firm the department store uses for deliveries.

She is suing Macy's and the two trucking companies for $50 million.

A Queens woman, 45, is suing American retail giant, Macy's (Herald Square location in Manhattan pictured) for $50,000 after purchasing a $2,400 mattress, only to be sexually assaulted by the deliveryman

The woman opted for the department store's 'white glove delivery service,' after splurging on the Aireloom Hybrid luxury mattress at Macy's Herald Square in Manhattan during a President's Day sale in March

'I was in hysterics,' the woman told the New York Post, referring to a phone conversation with a Macy's customer service representative following the terrifying March 7 incident.

'I told her my name and told her that I just had a delivery of this mattress and they needed to get this guy off the road right away because he'd tried to rape me,' said the woman, who's identified as 'Jane Doe' in the Manhattan Supreme Court suit.

The woman initially opted for the chain's 'white glove delivery service,' which offers free mattress delivery on mattresses $787 and over, in addition to a 'worry no more' mattress protection plan, which includes delivery, setup and removal of her old furniture.

On the day of the delivery, the drivers arrived around noon at the woman's Queens home. The woman, who lives alone, let the two deliverymen from Macy's into her apartment, the suit claims.

The executive assistant, who works across the street from the Macy's flagship location, said she was sexually assaulted by the deliveryman after the department store subcontracted the job to a day laborer from an unlicensed trucking company

The woman has been identified as 'Jane Doe' in the Manhattan Supreme Court (pictured) lawsuit

While one of the deliverymen took her old mattress outside to the truck, the other remained behind, cornering her in her bedroom and grabbing her breasts.

'I tried to shove him off. I'm saying, 'No! What are you doing? Get out! Stop,'' the woman recalled. 'And he wouldn't.'

The man then put the woman's hand on his penis and his mouth on her breast. When he tried to force himself on her, she told him he couldn't because she was on her period.

The deliveryman eventually stopped.

'I tried to keep myself calm and to just come out of there alive. My main goal was not to get hurt, I didn't know what was going to happen,' she added.

The woman also mentioned that because of a recent surgery to her Achilles tendon, she was unable to run.

'I also had heard him cutting up the plastic [on the mattress] with something sharp. It was a box cutter or something,' she added.

Before leaving, the man stared the woman down and said, 'This is just between us,' she told the New York Post.

After phoning Macy's immediately after, the victim called the police and was taken to a local hospital for a DNA swab since the deliveryman had put his mouth on her breast.

Unfortunately, there was no DNA match, and the case was closed a month later after detectives were unable to identify the deliveryman, according to the victim's lawyer, Susan Karten.

Macy's had subcontracted the job to NEHDS Logistics, which handed the delivery over to VJ Trucking LLC.

The company, which is based in Elizabeth, New Jersey, is listed as 'out of service' with the US Department of Transportation, the suit says.

'There are many women in this city who open the door for deliverymen trusting that the company having the products delivered has vetted the delivery man, Karten said.

'This can happen to anybody,' she added.
James Le Mesurier (pictured), 48, died after falling from a balcony in Turkey 20 minutes after talking to his wife, the inquest at Woking Coroners' Court heard

The death of an ex-Army captain behind the Syrian 'White Helmet' volunteers cannot be ruled a suicide because there is 'not enough' evidence, a coroner has found.

James Le Mesurier, 48, died after falling from a balcony in Turkey 20 minutes after talking to his wife, the inquest at Woking Coroners' Court heard.

His body was found under his apartment in Istanbul on November 11, 2019, having passed away from multiple injuries.

Mr Le Mesurier worked in the Middle East as a soldier and then humanitarian worker for 17 years.

He was hailed as a 'visionary' and was a major figure behind the not-for-profit White Helmets who train local volunteers to rescue war victims.

Assistant Surrey coroner Dr Karen Henderson said: 'There is no evidence that this was an accidental fall.

'James Le Mesurier had a long history of depression, he was distressed and fearful for his organisation.

'He spoke to his wife 20 minutes earlier where there was no indication that he was stressed and he did not leave a note.'

She continued: 'To return a conclusion of suicide, there needs to be an act and an intention to do so.

He was hailed as a 'visionary' and was a major figure behind the not-for-profit White Helmets who train local volunteers to rescue war victims (pictured)

'I accept the evidence lends itself to a deliberate act of self harm but I am satisfied this evidence is insufficient on the balance of probabilities.

'My conclusion is one of open conclusion. This conclusion is not to cloud his death in suspicion but there is real doubt as to how he fell from the balcony.'

Mr Le Mesurier was born in Singapore and rose to be a lieutenant-colonel and commandant of the Royal Marines.

He joined the Queen's Belfast Officer Training Corps before leaving the cadets to study international politics and strategic studies at Aberystwyth University.

Le Mesurier, left, and his wife Emma Winberg, right, pose happily before his tragic death

Le Mesurier fell from the circled ledge. His death came a week after Russia accused him of being an MI6 spy

The solider moved to Sandhurst, Berkshire, where he won the Queen's medal for character and leadership in 1993.

He served in the Royal Green Jackets in Kosovo as a young captain before joining the UN mission as an adviser. He left the Army in 2000.

Mr Le Mesurier spent five years in the UAE at security firm Good Harbour then moved to Syria and set up the not-for-profit Mayday Rescue - leading to the White Helmets.

The organisation won awards in France, Ireland and South Korea as well as the Elie Wiesel award from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The group has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in every year since 2014.

But it drew criticism from President Bashar al-Assad for footage it produced showing the horrors in Syria.

The scrutiny intensified in 2015 when Russia launched a campaign to discredit the White Helmets, seeing Mr Le Mesurier as the ringleader.

His sister Rebecca Packard, who spoke over video link, looked visibly upset as the coroner concluded: 'I want to offer my sincerest condolences to the family.'
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US defense officials have confirmed that all American troops have quietly left Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan after almost two decades of war.

The airbase, which is located 30 miles north of Kabul, has now been handed over to the Afghan National Security and Defence Force in its entirety.

The moves comes after President Biden vowed to have every US soldier out of Afghanistan by September 11 - a move which will conclude America's longest ever war, which has killed 2,312 American troops and cost the military an eyewatering $816 billion.

According to a CNN source, 'Biden remains convinced that after two decades of war, there is little American troops can do to resolve what is increasingly viewed inside the government as an intractable problem'. His decision to pull all remaining troops has been described by one insider as a 'gut decision'.

Bagram has been at the center of the US war effort in Afghanistan, with cameras on hand as Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump all visited in recent years. However, there was no media present on Friday as the last US troops skulked quietly out of the airbase.

Many experts now fear that their exit will bring a new eruption of chaos to the country.

The Taliban have launched a relentless offensives across Afghanistan in the past two months, gobbling up dozens of districts as Afghan security forces have largely consolidated their power in the country's major urban areas.

The Islamic military organization say they 'welcome' the US exit from Bagram.

Afghan soldiers stand guard at the gate of Bahram U.S. air base on July 2, 2021, after American troops finally vacated it after close to two decades of occupation

Afghan soldiers move into Bagram airbase today following the departure of US and NATO forces on July 2

US troops load up helicopter onto a C-17 Globesmaster at Bagram on June 16 as they prepare to leave the airbase

A gate is seen at the Bagram on June 25, as the last US troops prepared to withdraw

The fact that all US troops are now out of Bagram is extremely significant, given that the base is seen as the strategic heart of the American war in Afghanistan.

Prior to the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, Bagram was a dilapidated airbase without electricity in its surrounding buildings. However, after it was determined that al-Qaeda were responsible for the attacks, and that they were based in Afghanistan, the base became occupied by US forces.

Al- Qaeda were supported by the Taliban - an Islamic military organization that had controlled Afghanistan since the 1990s - and the Bagram base soon became the strategic heart of America's mission to crush terrorists and those who harbored them.

By mid-2002, Bagram was home to more than 7,000 US troops, and quickly turned into a sprawling mini-city, complete with its own swimming pools, shops, gyms and classrooms. A Pizza Hut, a Subway and Green Beans coffee shop soon popped up on the base.

At its peak in 2012, Bagram saw more than 100,000 U.S. troops and NATO service members pass through its sprawling compound.

The ability of Afghan forces to maintain control over the vital Bagram airfield will likely prove pivotal to maintaining security in the nearby capital Kabul and keeping pressure on the Taliban.

With the departure of the US forces, 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.

Bagram Air Base (pictured on Thursday, July 1 as a military plane comes in to land) served as the linchpin for US operations in Afghanistan. Now, all US and NATO troops have left the base, according to US defence sources

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

An Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier sits at a road checkpoint near the a US military base in Bagram, some 50 km north of Kabul on July 1, 2021

The withdrawal from Bagram Airfield is the clearest indication that the last of the 2,500-3,500 U.S. troops have left Afghanistan or are nearing a departure, months ahead of President Joe Biden's promise that they would be gone by Sept. 11.

It was clear soon after the mid-April announcement that the U.S. was ending its 'forever war,' that the departure of U.S. soldiers and their estimated 7,000 NATO allies would be nearer to July 4, when America celebrates its Independence Day.

Most NATO soldiers have already quietly exited as of this week.

Announcements from several countries analyzed by The Associated Press show that a majority of European troops has now left with little ceremony - a stark contrast to the dramatic and public show of force and unity when NATO allies lined up to back the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Bagram was built by the US for its Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s

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

Bagram was built by the US for its Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s as a bulwark against the Soviet Union in the north.

Ironically, it became the staging point for the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, and the Red Army expanded it significantly during their near decade-long occupation.

When Moscow pulled out, it became central to the raging civil war -- it was reported that at one point the Taliban controlled one end of the three-kilometre (two-mile) runway and the opposition Northern Alliance the other.

In recent months, Bagram has come under rocket barrages claimed by the jihadist Islamic State, stirring fears that militants are already eyeing the base for future attacks.

The NATO-led non-combat mission aimed to train Afghan forces into ensuring their country's security after the departure of foreign forces.

As of February 2021, there were about 9,500 foreign troops in Afghanistan, of which the US made up the largest contingent of 2,500.

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

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.

The U.S. and NATO leaving comes as Taliban insurgents make strides in several parts of the country, overrunning dozens of districts and overwhelming beleaguered Afghan security Forces.

In a worrying development, the government has resurrected militias with a history of brutal violence to assist the Afghan security forces. At what had all the hallmarks of a final press conference, Gen. Miller this week warned that continued violence risked a civil war in Afghanistan that should have the world worried.

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.
Senior White House officials are racing to defend Vice President Kamala Harris amid reports of a dysfunctional workplace, staff resignations and tensions between the West Wing and her team.

Criticism has focused on her chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, and aides described an environment where they were treated 'like s***.'

But top White House officials mobilized to defend Harris, accusing anonymous critics of a 'whispering campaign' designed to bring her down.

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told Axios: 'The president's trust and confidence in her is obvious when you see them in the Oval Office together.'

He said her talents and determination had already made a big difference to some of the toughest challenges facing the administration.

'Shes delivering for the American people on immigration, small business, voting rights, and economic growth, he added.

'The results speak for themselves: a decline of border arrivals from the Northern Triangle, improved vaccine equity, and increased economic opportunities for women.'

Senior White House staff rushed to defend Vice President Kamala Harris amid a welter of criticism that her office was dysfunctional and complaints that staff were not valued

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain raced to the defense of Harris. 'The president's trust and confidence in her is obvious when you see them in the Oval Office together,' he said.

Tina Flournoy is the vice president's chief of staff and is being blamed for creating a hostile work environment which allies of Kamala Harris say is nothing but a 'whispering campaign' designed to sabotage her

Tensions reportedly boiled over last week when the vice president finally decided to visit the border with Mexico.

The decision blindsided officials tasked with arranging travel and others outside her office responsible for messaging across the administration, according to Politico.

The outlet cited 22 officials, former officials, aides and associates of President Biden and Harris who described low morale, a tense atmosphere, porous lines of communication and diminished trust. Much of the blame was directed at Flournoy.

'People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it's an abusive environment,' said one source.

'It's not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It's not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s**t.'

When asked about the reports during her daily briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said she tried not to 'speak to or engage on anonymous reports.'

'The vice president is an incredibly important partner to the president of the United States,' she added.

'She has a challenging job, a hard job and she has a great supportive team of people around her.'

Cedric Richmond, senior adviser to Biden, dismissed the anonymous criticism, saying: 'Its a whisper campaign designed to sabotage her.'

He said she remained in high demand for public events.

'At some point it just becomes, one person says something long enough and it becomes an urban legend,' he said.

'It doesnt have to be credible. It doesnt have to be real. Someone says something and it can just snowball.'

Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser to Biden, dismissed the anonymous criticism as a 'whispering campaign.' He said: 'It doesnt have to be credible. It doesnt have to be real. Someone says something and it can just snowball'

Tensions started to boil over after Harris finally decided to visit the border last week, blindsiding staffers

Tina Flournoy, pictured, has allegedly created an environment where 'ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out'

Even so, the allegations will be treated with alarm inside an administration that knows Biden will be 81 at the time of the next election and has done much to promote Harris as the last person in the room when decisions are taken, setting her up for a possible primary run.

The sources claimed that President Biden's office was concerned about the treatment of staff.

Biden, on the day he was inaugurated, warned presidential appointees while swearing them in that he would fire them 'on the spot' if he were to hear that they have shown 'disrespect' others.

'I'm not joking when I say this: If you're ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect or talk down to someone, I promise you, I will fire you on the spot  on the spot. No ifs ands or buts,' Biden said at the time.

Flournoy has allegedly created an environment where 'ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out,' the outlet reported. She allegedly 'refuses to take responsibility' and blames staffers for negative results.

Some of the sources told Politico that Harris also is responsible for how her office is run, claiming that the toxic environment 'all starts at the top.'

Biden, on the day he was inaugurated, warned presidential appointees while swearing them in that he would fire them 'on the spot' if he were to hear that they have shown 'disrespect' others

Harris aides are reportedly already looking to leave the administration while some already have - like staffers Karly Satkowiak and Gabrielle DeFranceschi, who oversaw the vice president's travel.

Satkowiak and DeFranceschi left under what had been described as 'long-planned departures' but sources contested that characterization to Politico.

DeFranceschi, who previously worked in the Obama administration, reportedly left over a 'difference in opinion on how things should run.'

'If you have an opinion about how things should run and it's not listened to, that can be frustrating,' the source told Politico.

Harris' chief spokesperson Symone Sanders, pushed back against the claims and called those who made them 'cowards,' according to Politico.

'People are cowards to do this this way,' Sanders said.

She added: 'We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day. What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I'm like 'welcome to the club.'

'We have created a culture where people, if there is anything anyone would like to raise, there are avenues for them to do so. Whoever has something they would like to raise, they should raise it directly.'

Sanders also said that Harris 'is focused on the work' and 'not the chatter at the water cooler.'

The chief spokesperson also defended Flournoy and said she has an 'open door policy' and that 'black women like me would not have the opportunity to work in politics without Tina.'

Harris tours the El Paso Border Patrol Station on June 25 in El Paso, Texas

Harris speaks with El Paso Border Patrol Chief agent Gloria Chavez as she tour the US Customs and Border Protection Central Processing Center

Bill Clinton defended Kamala Harris' embattled chief of staff after the vice president's office was rocked by a report in which staffers claimed they are 'treated like sh**' and that Tina Flournoy has created 'blame culture'

Bill Clinton also came to the defense of Flournoy, who ran his post-White House office.

'Tina Flournoy ran my office for more than eight years, making it more efficient, effective, and transparent. She made it easier, not harder, for me to advance my philanthropic work and my post-presidential activities, and keep in touch with my friends,' he said in a statement to CNBC on Thursday.

'She has a unique ability to focus on the big picture and adapt to changing conditions. And she does it all with a great sense of humor and an unwavering belief that we all have an ability and an obligation to make a difference.'

Jennifer Palmieri, who worked in the Obama White House and Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign, said sometimes chiefs of staff just weren't popular.

'Sounds like whats happening here is that Tina Flournoy is doing her job. Chiefs of staff gotta run interference. Doesnt always make you popular. But its part of the job. Protect the boss time,' she wrote on Twitter.

Others who spoke to Politico to defend Harris and Flournoy said that black women were held to standards that others in politics are not - and that a 'demanding office environment' would be seen as a virtue for other leaders.

'Look, [Tina's] strong, she's intelligent, she's driven, and she expects strong, intelligent, driven people around her,' said Leah Daughtry.

'But some people may find strong, driven, smart people intimidating, but I think that's more projection than reality because that's just not Tina's intent or style. And nothing in her experience would lead you to think that she's an intimidating person.'

Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to the president, also defended Flournoy.

Dunn said keeping the border trip news private to a small group of people was made because Harris' office didn't want it to leak or 'turn it into a spectacle,' Politico reported.

'It was closely held and there may be people whose feelings were a little hurt on her staff that they weren't brought into the discussion,' Dunn said.

'But any suggestion that it was mishandled or kept a secret from people who needed to know about the arrangements or needed to know about it is absolutely not true.'

When Politico asked Dunn about complaints in the office, Dunn said complaints were 'not anywhere near what you are describing.'

Flournoy previously worked in the White House under President Bill Clinton and then worked on his reelection campaign, as well as then-Vice President Al Gore's campaign for president in 2000.

She was working as Clinton's post-presidential chief of staff before she was tapped to work for Harris.

One source told Politico: 'People who Clinton knew for decades all of a sudden couldn't get through to him because Tina choked off contact.'

'Because Clinton didn't use email, she was able to keep many [friends of Bill] out,' the source said.

The source added: 'You can't just flat out ignore people and not get back to them.'

A friend of Harris' recently tried to reach Flournoy on behalf of a top Democratic donor but was also ignored, the outlet reported.

Vice President Kamala Harris participates in a roundtable discussion with faith and community leaders and local service providers, during a visit to the Paso del Norte Port of Entry on June 25

Vice President Kamala Harris visits the Paso del Norte Port of Entry on June 25 in El Paso, Texas

When they were ignored, the donor then contact Harris' office directly and did not hear back for weeks. They were later told Harris was too busy to meet with them.

The friend told Politico: 'This is someone who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollarsmillions, evenfor your boss and you're just blowing them off?'

'Next time Kamala wants [them] for something, it's like, 'Hey, I couldn't even get a call-back from your chief of staff!',' the friend said.

Some Harris allies explained to Politico that the vice president has 'gone out of her way not to engage in politicking' to prove her loyalty to Biden as it remains unclear if he will run for reelection in 2024.

Other allies explained Harris' apparent strategy of not raising her own profile as 'foolish' for someone who has 'been in public life for 30 years.'

'You don't just all of a sudden go radio silent,' said one former aide.

That former aide indicated that Harris is likely aware of the purported problems in her office.

'She is the most perceptive person on the planet. She might not have first-hand knowledge, but it's hard to imagine she doesn't have a sense of what's going on,' the person said.

The sources who spoke to Politico blamed some of the low morale in Harris' office on the issues she has been tasked with tackling for the Biden administration which made her an early target for conservatives - such as slowing the flow of migrants.

Instead of flying to the border, Harris had flown to the countries where the migrants had come from or traveled through on their way to the United States.

Harris finally visited the border weeks later as her aides insisted she did not make the trek because of criticism she faced. But others claimed she inadvertently seemed to affirm conservative criticism against her with the seemingly impromptu trip.
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A British cellist is organising concerts for cows in Denmark after he started playing for the animals during the pandemic.

Jacob Shaw, 30, began to perform for the cows in the Danish countryside of Stevns, where he runs a cello school, when he was no longer able to play for regular audiences as a result of COVID-19.

Shaw believes the cello is popular with the cows because it is similar to the sound of their mooing, and has said that the experience is so rewarding that he intends to continue.

The local farmer who owns the cows has confirmed that they seem 'calmer and more relaxed' for listening to Shaw's music.

Cellist Jacob Shaw, the head of a music school in Stevns, Denmark, has been playing for cows during the pandemic as a replacement for regular audiences

In the autumn of 2020, he convinced music-loving farmer Mogens Haugaard to expose his beef cattle to classical music to improve their welfare

Shaw (right) said that the experience was so enjoyable that he continues it even after the reopening of the theaters, whilst Roberta Verna (left) said the cows 'really listen and they respect us'

'Playing for cows is a continuation of what I've always done in my solo career - I'm passionate about taking classical music out of the concert hall,' Shaw told AFP.

'During corona, of course, it wasn't always possible and we decided to move on to the next best thing: playing for animals,' the 30-year-old said.

In the autumn, he convinced music-loving farmer Mogens Haugaard to expose his beef cattle to classical music to improve their welfare.

'When he told me about it, I didn't think it was crazy but rather exciting,' said Haugaard.

'I feel the calming effect of music on my own body, so I thought it would be the same for the cows, and I was right.'

Shaw and his fellow musicians load the car with their instruments and drive to the farm to meet farmer Mogens Haugaard who previously played classical music to the cows through a loudspeaker in the barn

Holding a Stradivarius, Verna and Shaw played pieces by Reinhold Gliere and Bela Bartok for the ruminants, who were seemingly as moved by the beauty of the melody as they were by the distribution of food

Shaw, 30, is the head of the Scandinavian Cello School which opened in 2016 and is often accompanied at the farm by musicians who come to study there

The cows were first introduced to the classical repertoire through loudspeakers installed in their barn in the winter, but it quickly seemed to strike a chord with the bovine audience.

'Everyone could see from the first time that they liked it, so we continued.

'Now they are getting used to it and the result is that they are fantastically pleasant and healthy animals,' said Shaw.

'They are calmer and more relaxed. They are easier to approach,' Haugaard said.

Cattle even have their preferences, Shaw argues, even if the subtlety may escape the layman.

The cows on Mogens Haugaard's farm are clearly benefitting from listening to the cello music on a regular basis according to Haugaard and Shaw

'They react differently to different pieces, we played something that was slightly catchier and a bit more modern and a lot of them didn't like it and left,' he said.

'I think the type of piece that is closest to their voice, their mooing, is actually similar to the sound of a cello, which is why it's so popular with them,' he added.

While he sometimes comes to play alone, the cellist is also often accompanied by one or more musicians who have come to spend time at his institution, the Scandinavian Cello School, opened in 2016.

The school offers expert tuition to an elite group of international award winning cello players who are among the best young cellists in the world.

'I feel the calming effect of music on my own body, so I thought it would be the same for the cows, and I was right," said farmer Mogens Haugaard

Shaw (right) is joined by several students who come to study at the Scandinavian Cello School in Stevns

Shaw said that the cows have clear preferences and are less interested in modern music

According to Shaw, playing in the open air in front of this perhaps less discerning audience helps visiting artists relieve some of the stress of a performance.

'If they get a chance to play in front of the cows, I think it allows them to relax and enjoy what they are doing more.'

Roberta Verna, a 22-year-old violinist, came to Stevns to 'get a different perspective on things.'

'It was a different situation than usual, but not worse.

'It was really interesting because they really listen and they respect us,' the young musician explained.

At the end of the fifteen-minute concert, the second of the day for the cattle, calves and cows calmly graze the pasture awaiting the next recital.

'I think it's going to be very interesting in the next few years: their children and their children's children are going to grow up with classical music.

'The normal thing for a cow in this field is to listen to music,' Shaw said, adding that he has no plans to stop.
A former faculty member at a prestigious $55,000-a-year private school in Southern California is under investigation for sexual misconduct in a case that was instigated after an internal report conducted by the school found 'several' former students who claimed they were sexually abused by employees.

The staff member in question, who is currently facing criminal charges over the abuse allegations, was working at the Cate School in Carpinteria as recently as February 2020, school officials said in a statement.

The criminal case came about after April 1, when the Santa Barbara County Sheriffs Office received a report from a mandated reporter that identified 'several sexual assault survivors in this case who are both current and former students of Cate School,' according to Raquel Zick, a public information officer with the sheriffs office.

According to the Los Angeles Times, two alumnae who attended the school in the 1980s and early 1990s, had recently come forward claiming 'mistreatment by Cate faculty,' spurring the school's internal inquiry that led to a criminal investigation.

The bombshell allegations revealed in the Los Angeles Times report come after California's recent changes in statute of limitations for civil claims that took effect last year, which created a three-year window for victims of sexual abuse to file such cases that might have otherwise expired.

News of the alleged sexual abuse became public on Friday, months after the school informed former students that it was conducting an internal investigation of its own into the abuse claims that could potentially date back decades.

The Times reports that the school is looking into 'sexual misconduct involving faculty members and students that occurred several decades ago' at the prestigious boarding school, however officials did not reveal the name of the person who reported the allegations due to protections under state law.

The sprawling 150-acre campus is located just minutes from Santa Barbara

Investigators from the Santa Barbara County district attorneys office served search warrants on June 24 at the Cate campus to gather evidence, with school officials stating they intend on fully cooperating with authorities.

The school's current Head of School, Ben Williams, released a statement to the campus community in the wake of the allegations, stating they are 'cooperating with an investigation by local law enforcement into alleged sexual misconduct by a former employee, who worked at Cate School for six months, and whose employment was terminated in February of 2020.'

However, that employee has yet to be publicly named, with school officials citing the ongoing criminal investigation as the reason behind not releasing the former employee's identity.

'Per the request of the Sheriffs Department, we are not sharing the suspects name in order to protect the integrity of the pending criminal investigation,' Williams added.

The news comes just weeks after another prominent California school, the Thacher School in Ojai, released a 91-page report revealing decades of sexual abuse after receiving reports of sexual misconduct in last summer.

Now, officials with the Santa Barbara County Sheriffs Office are asking for more potential victims to reach out to the department as they continue to investigate claims of sexual abuse by both named and unnamed survivors, according to the Los Angeles Times.

'We really want to emphasize that we are seeking additional survivors as well as witnesses for any sexual misconduct that has occurred at Cate School,' Zick said.

The Cate School, with an endowment of $111 million, a 150-acre campus, and boarding tuition costs of $68,150, is one of 85 boarding schools located in the Golden State and located just minutes from Santa Barbara.

School officials said they had retained an independent investigator, and requested that any alumni that had experienced abuse at the hands of Cate faculty to come forward.

Two alumnae reached out to the investigator shortly thereafter.

'In both cases, we conducted investigations and took action with respect to the former Cate faculty members who engaged in the misconduct and in acknowledgment of the alumnae who came forward to detail their experiences and to discuss the impacts of surviving abuse,' officials said in the email.

Wendy Ward Hoffer, a member of Cate's graduating class of 1987, told the news outlet that she had been groomed by a faculty member beginning in her sophomore year.

Ward Hoffer claims the teacher invited her over to his apartment on the last day of school, where he aggressively kissed her and touched her under her clothes before rolling on top of her.

Head of School Ben Williams (pictured) says Cate is 'cooperating with an investigation... into alleged sexual misconduct by a former employee,' who was terminated in February 2020

'It was an experience of being crushed under him and feeling really trapped and frozen,' she told the Times, while adding that the teacher in question continued to sexually abuse her on class camping trips despite leaving the school that same year.

'What were these adults doing? They should have been paying attention,' she said. 'They really had their heads in the sand and let me be preyed upon.'

Ward Hoffer states that she broke her silence upon her own daughter reaching high school age with a 12-page letter sent to the school in December 2019 by her lawyer, Eric MacLeish, in a civil claim against the Cate School, which was resolved in February 2020.

'No 15-year-old should ever have to be in such a position with their teacher,' the letter stated.

'I realize people have been critical of Thachers work, but in my observation they seem to have really owned their history in a way that Cate just hasnt,' Ward Hoffer said. 'I feel like the school is trying to cover it up.... And in the meanwhile, they are putting kids at risk.'

Amy Oppenheimer, whose law firm is conducting the boarding schools investigation, declined to discuss the details of the investigation, according to the Times.

The school boasts such notable alumni as David Crosby, Sir John Bond, Otis Chandler and Barnaby Conrad.
A copy of the United States Declaration of Independence discovered in an attic in Scotland has sold at auction for more than 3 million.

The signer's copy, one of only six known to still be in private hands, is a representation of the original 1776 document that declared the independence of Britain's 13 American colonies.

It was presented to the only Catholic Founding Father Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who was one of the signers of the declaration and later a United States senator.

He gave it to his grandson-in-law, John MacTavish (1787-1852), a Scottish-Canadian diplomat, and it descended in the Scottish family.

It was discovered in the attic of a Scottish ancestral home by Edinburgh-based auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull, who passed it to their sister auction house Freeman's, in the US.

MacTavish's descendants, who had asked a specialist from Lyon & Turnbull to come and look at some documents, wished to remain anonymous.

The document that changed history was approved on July 4, 1776, and made the US fully independent from Britain.

A copy of the United States Declaration of Independence discovered in an attic in Scotland has sold at auction for more than 3 million. The signer's copy, one of only six known to still be in private hands, is a representation of the original 1776 document that declared the independence of Britain's 13 American colonies

The Scottish family's rare document sold on July 1 for $4,420,000 (3,210,000), the second highest ever paid at auction for a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

Cathy Marsden, who works at Lyon & Turnbull, discovered the document, which was unaccounted for for nearly 180 years.

She said: 'I was looking through a pile of papers which had been brought down from the attic, amongst which was a folded up, vellum, document.

'Opening it up, I could see was a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

It was presented to Charles Carroll of Carrollton (above), a Founding Father who was one of the signers of the declaration and later a United States senator

He gave it to his grandson-in-law, John MacTavish (1787-1852), a Scottish-Canadian diplomat, and it descended in the Scottish family

'When I got back to the office and started doing some research I became really excited as its significance became clearer.

'After extensive research we confirmed it was indeed one of the 201 copies made by William Stone, of which only 48 of them are known to still exist. Being able to identify to whom the copy belonged made it even more exciting and rare.'

Paul Roberts, vice-chairman of Lyon & Turnbull and president of Freeman's in Philadelphia, said: 'This was a great effort from both teams on both sides of the Atlantic, a very proud moment for me personally - an international team working in perfect harmony to achieve a wonderful result on behalf of an extremely appreciative and supportive client.

'When Cathy Marsden first showed me this document on Christmas Eve I knew it was interesting, but today's outcome - achieving $4,420,000 on the eve of Independence Day weekend nearly 4,000 miles away - is extraordinary.'

The Declaration of Independence, which helped establish the guiding principles of modern democracy, was written mainly by U.S. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson.

It has been described by historians as 'America's birth certificate'.

The Scottish family's rare document sold on July 1 for $4,420,000 (3,210,000), the second highest ever paid at auction for a copy of the Declaration of Independence

It includes the then extraordinary assertion: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'

It was signed by 56 delegates from the 13 American colonies that were at war with Britain.

As well as Jefferson, the other key founding fathers were John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

The 200 first copies were made by printer John Dunlap on the night the document was signed.

It was then distributed throughout the North American colonies the following morning to be read aloud to the colonists and their militia.

Washington became the first President of the United States and was followed in the office by Adams and then Jefferson.
A three-year-old boy has died after his foster carer accidentally left him in her SUV for hours in 92F heat after thinking she had dropped him off at day care in South Carolina.

Police officers arrived at the scene in Spartanburg on Wednesday at around 5.45pm and were told by the child's guardian that she had mistakenly left him inside her vehicle.

The foster carer told cops she thought she had dropped the child off at day care with her other children on Wednesday morning, Spartanburg Police said in a statement.

A three-year-old boy has died after his foster carer accidentally left him in her SUV for hours in 92F heat after thinking she had dropped him off at day care in South Carolina

But she claimed she did not realize the three-year-old did not go inside with the other children until hours later. The boy had been trapped inside when temperatures reached 92F, reports ABC News.

The guardian found the boy sitting in the back of her SUV and called the police, but when officers and medics arrived at 225 North Lanford Road they were unable to revive the child, police said.

Preliminary autopsy results suggest the boy's death was related to heat exhaustion, according to the Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger.

The name of the child, who is in foster care, has not been released because the Coroner's office is trying to contact the boy's biological mother.

The Department of Social Services said in a statement: 'The Department of Social Services is aware of the child fatality in Spartanburg County and is conducting our own investigation as well as coordinating with local law enforcement.

'DSS Staff mourns the tragic loss of life of this child along with the childs family.'

The guardian found the boy sitting in the back of her SUV and called the police, but when officers and medics arrived at 225 North Lanford Road they were unable to revive the child, police said

The boy is the seventh child to die in a hot car in the US this year alone, according to charity Kids and Cars.

In 2018, a record 54 children died in hot cars, while 53 died in 2019 and 26 children died last year, according to their data.

Last month, a toddler died in California after her mother left her alone in a car for three hours in 100 degree weather to tend to her marijuana farm.

The Visalia Police Department said they found three-year-old Jessica Campos not breathing after being left alone in a car for three hours, with the vehicle's interior temperature rocketing to 100F.

Her mother Eustajia Mojica Dominguez, 28, has since been arrested over the killing, and is said to have been tending to her huge cannabis farm while her daughter suffocated in the searing heat.

Police say the car interior was have been so scorching that Jessica would not have been able to breathe.

Jessica's mother, 28-year-old Eustajia Mojica Dominguez, (pictured) was tending to a marijuana grow and processing pot while the toddler was in the scorching car, it is alleged

Justin Ross Harris is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of his son, Cooper, after he left him in a hot car for seven hours. His attorneys are arguing for a retrial arguing that his murder trial had been improperly joined with one in which he solicited pictures from underage girls

In May, a Georgia man convicted of murder for intentionally leaving his one-year-old son in a hot car so he could meet up with an underage girl was denied a new trial.

Justin Ross Harris, 40, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2016 after his son Cooper died after spending seven hours in a hot car.

Cobb County Superior Court Judge Mary Staley Clark, who presided over the original trial, denied Harris' bid for a new trial in May.

Harris worked as a software developer for Home Depot, and on June 18, 2014 at 9.25 am, he left his son in the parking lot of the Vinings, Georgia office where he worked.

At one point Harris returned to his car early in the afternoon to drop off light bulbs he had just purchased, but it was not clear whether he realized his son was still in the car at that time.

It was only after Harris got out of work at 4.16pm that he said he realized Cooper was still in the car and attempted to perform CPR, although he never called 911, police said.

He claimed he had forgotten to drop his son off at daycare that morning. Temperatures reached 92 degrees that day, and experts in the trial argued that it likely rose to 125 degrees within the car.

Harris with his son, Cooper. Harris' attorneys vowed to take their motion to the Georgia State Supreme Court

Harris was convicted on three counts of murder for his role in his son's death. He maintains he believe he dropped Cooper off at daycare that morning

Last year, Florida mother Megan Dauphin, 30, was accused of leaving her newborn daughter in a hot car to die while high on crystal meth - and she only realized what she'd done when a woman walked in on her masturbating in bed.

Dauphin allegedly left her newborn, McKinley Garner, in a vehicle in Panama City for almost four hours on September 2, a day that reached 90 degrees in the afternoon.

The mother was arrested and charged with the aggravated manslaughter of her child, who was born July 14 and died at less than two months old.

Dauphin had left McKinley alone in the hot car for almost four hours on September 2 before a witness said she caught Dauphin in bed masturbating with her shorts unbuttoned, court papers show.

According to police interviews and surveillance video, McKinley was left in the car from approximately 9:15 a.m. to 1 p.m., where she missed a feeding as temperatures climbed toward 90 degrees.

Megan Dauphin, 30, was masturbating in bed September 2 when a woman found her and asked about her infant daughter, according to court papers. Dauphin said 'Oh my God' and rushed to the hot car where she'd allegedly left her newborn to die on a 90-degree day almost four hours prior

McKinley Garner was less than two months old when she died on September 2

In 2019, two infants tragically died just an hour apart after they were left in hot cars in sweltering heat in separate states.

A baby girl in New Jersey died after she was left in a hot minivan parked at a local train station for more than eight hours in blistering temperatures.

The child, 22-month-old Milliani Robertson-Lawrence, was found unresponsive sitting on her car seat with the passenger window broken in the parking lot of a PATCO Hi-Speedline commuter rail station in Lindenwold.

A 22-month-old baby girl named Milliani Robertson-Lawrence died after she was found unresponsive in a hot car in a New Jersey train station parking lot in 2019

She was found unresponsive sitting on her car seat with the passenger window broken in the parking lot of a PATCO Hi-Speedline commuter rail station in Lindenwold and pronounced dead

About 900 miles away in Booneville, Mississippi a 21-month-old boy was found dead in a hot car in a parking lot in blistering hot temperatures.

Police found the boy in the rural parking lot that is shared by Mighty Cubs Daycare and Field of Dreams adult daycare, though 'neither business had anything to do with the events that led to the death of the child', Booneville police.

Authorities said the child, described as a white male, had been left in the car at a workplace in Boonville for several hours during the day before arriving to the daycare parking lot around 5pm.

'Hot car deaths continue to take place because nobody believes this could happen to them,' Janette Fennell, president of Kids and Car Safety, told ABC News.

'The unfortunate reality is that this has happened to even the most loving, responsible, and attentive parents.

'Factors such as fatigue, stress, or a sudden change in routine can contribute to parents unknowingly leaving a child alone in a car.'
A family-of-six has been applauded for potentially saving South Australia from a major Covid-19 outbreak and lockdown after isolating on their own accord before they tested positive to the highly-contagious Delta variant.

Kristen and Adam Ryan, along with their four children including a baby girl are quarantining together in an Adelaide medi-hotel after they were struck down with the virus in the past week.

Mr Ryan flew back to Adelaide from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory last Friday and started isolating 'as a precaution' after learning one of his mining colleagues had tested positive.

Three of the couple's children aged under 10 then caught the virus before it emerged on Friday that their baby had also tested positive.

Kristen and Adam Ryan, along with their four children - all under the age of 10 including a baby girl - are all quarantining together after being struck down with the virus within the past week

Mr Ryan had a brief stop at the Royal Adelaide Hospital on Friday as he suffers some of the virus' more severe symptoms

The family said they had been overwhelmed with the support they'd received from other South Australians while undergoing quarantine at the Tom's Court medi-hotel.

'All the love has been a major uplift for us all,' Mrs Ryan told Nine News.

'All we did was isolate for a few days as a precaution, and so many would have done the same already.'

Mr Ryan had a brief stay at the Royal Adelaide Hospital on Friday as he suffered some severe symptoms, with authorities saying he was 'very unwell'.

Mrs Ryan has been providing regular updates to loved ones via social media, saying her husband was doing well and the staff were being 'supportive and cautious'.

The Red Cross has donated toys to keep the kids entertained during their two-week quarantine stint while the family's pregnant dog is also being cared for.

The family have so far saved South Australia from a Covid-19 outbreak after isolating on their own accord

Government officials applauded the family's decision to isolate, with Chief Health Officer Professor Nicola Spurrier singing their praise.

'This family has done absolutely the right thing,' she said.

'This is a perfect example of quarantining as you need to and it's really helped us in South Australia.'

Premier Steven Marshall also thanked the family for their actions after the only new local case in the state was the Ryan's baby daughter.

'The actions they have taken have been exactly what has kept out state safe during this very difficult time of the Delta variant,' he said.

The Ryan family's response has meant the state has managed to avoid a lockdown but some restrictions have still been enforced

Mr Ryan had flown back to Adelaide from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory last Friday and started isolating 'as a precaution' after learning one of his mining colleagues had tested positive





Those measures include a reduced density requirement for most venues, mandatory mask-wearing in high-risk settings and a limit of 10 people at family gatherings.

The Premier said those measures are likely to stay in place until at least early next week.

Health authorities have so far contacted 344 close contacts and 144 secondary contacts of the miner who have been put into isolation.

Mr Ryan's positive result prompted Alice Springs to go into a three-day lockdown this week in a bid to stop any potential spread of the virus.
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Both engines of a Boeing 737-200 cargo plane failed in the early hours of Friday off the coast of Hawaii, forcing an emergency landing in the sea as the pilot radioed air traffic control to inform them they had lost one engine; the second one appeared to be failing and was 'running very hot', and 'it doesn't look good here'.

In the latest fiasco for Boeing, the two pilots - one 50, one 58 - were rescued from the sea by the Coast Guard. One sustained serious injuries and was airlifted to hospital; the second, less severely harmed, was transported back to land by boat.

The plane was operated by Rhoades Aviation Inc, which does business as Transair. Transair is one of Hawaii's largest air cargo carriers and has been in business since 1982.

'Rhoades 810, we've lost an engine. We're on a 220 heading,' one of the pilots told Honolulu air traffic control, giving the compass reading.

The recording was posted on LiveATC, an audio streaming site that broadcasts air traffic control communications.

Several minutes later, the pilot reported: 'We've lost number one engine, we're coming straight to the airport.

'We're going to need the fire department, there's a chance we're going to lose the other engine, it's running very hot.

'It doesn't look good here - you may want to let the coastguard know as well.'

The loss of both engines in the 46-year-old plane - a workhorse of trans-Atlantic passenger travel, some of the busiest flight routes in the world - has raised worrying questions. Engines do sometimes fail when hampered by a bird strike or volcanic ash, but it was unclear what caused these engines to malfunction.

A Coast Guard cutter is seen on Friday afternoon patrolling the area where the Boeing 737-200 crashed in the early hours of Friday. Both people onboard survived and were rescued from the sea, but the crash is bad news for Boeing, which is struggling after a series of devastating accidents involving the Boeing 737-MAX

Images from the Coast Guard show the downed plane, and the helicopter (lit up) winching one of the pilots from the sea

The Coast Guard vessel is visible below the brightly-lit helicopter at around 2am on Friday morning

The National Transportation Safety Board on Friday afternoon said it was sending seven investigators.

The plane went down off West Oahu, about two miles off Kalaeloa Airport, at around 1.45am local time after experiencing trouble with both the plane's engines.

Initial reports suggested that there was not enough altitude to return to Honolulu, prompting the aircraft to ditch into the sea.

Both crew members were alive after the splashdown, but one of them was said to be in critical condition.

After the news of the plane ditching into the sea, shares of Boeing fell three per cent by closing on Friday.

One of the two pilots who were rescued after a Boeing 737 cargo plane that crashed in the water off Honolulu on Friday is pictured being taken to a hospital

It's been reported that a 50-year-old pilot suffered a head injury and was in a serious condition. It is unclear from the photo which of the pilots is pictured being pushed in a wheelchair

Two pilots were rescued after their Boeing 737 cargo plane crashed on Friday morning in the water off Honolulu

This map from FlightAware.com shows Transair Flight 810 landing in the water 33 minutes after takeoff

The Department of Transportation said the US Coast Guard airlifted one of the pilots to the Queen's Medical Center, while a rescue boat was transporting the other pilot to shore before he was taken by ambulance to the hospital.

Queen's officials said the pilot who was airlifted, described as a 58-year-old man, was in the intensive care unit in critical condition.

The pilot who was rescued by boat, aged 50, was in serious condition with a head injury and multiple lacerations.

Transair Flight 810 departed from the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu at 1.33am, bound for Kahului, Maui, but quickly turned back, reported Hawaii News Now.

The Transair Boeing 737-200 cargo plane was en route to Maui from Honolulu when the pilots reported that one engine was down.

Initial tracking data from RadarBox.com showed that the aircraft reached a maximum altitude of just 2,125 feet.

The aircraft's descent path 'looks reasonably slow and steady, suggesting that the pilots could glide the aircraft down to the ocean in a controlled manner,' said SimpleFlying.com.

They said they were having trouble with the second and attempting to return to Honolulu, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

At around 1.46am, the pilots lost their second engine and radioed in that they were going down and being forced to land the aircraft in the ocean.

Flight tracking data stops at around 01:45, with a final recorded altitude of 75 feet.

The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the incident.

This is one of Transair's five Boeing 737 planes that are used to transport cargo in Hawaii

Shares of Boeing closed down 3pc on Friday after the emergency landing in the sea

US Coast Guard Lt. Commander Karin Evelyn said in an email that they received a report around 1.40am of a downed inter-island transport plane.

About an hour later, rescuers in a Coast Guard helicopter spotted the debris field and two people in the water, Evelyn said.

Ditching into the water is rare, and complicated.

Captain Chesley B 'Sully' Sullenberger III on January 15, 2009, successfully landed his Airbus 320 in the Hudson river in New York City, saving the lives of all 155 passengers and crew after the aircraft struck a flock of birds, putting both engines out of action, shortly after its take-off from LaGuardia airport.

He retired from US Airways the following year, after 30 years as a commercial pilot, and now, aged 70, has been nominated by Joe Biden as the U.S. representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization.

In 2009 a U.S. Airways plane landed in the Hudson River in New York City shortly after take-off, with all 155 people on board safely evacuating

Retired airline captain Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger prepares to testify during the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation hearing on 'Status of the Boeing 737 MAX: Stakeholder Perspectives' in June 2019

Boeing 737 ditching off Hawaii is eerily similar to the plot of Cast Away were cargo pilot is stranded on desert island after emergency landing In the 2000 film Cast Away, Tom Hanks plays a FedEx troubleshooter stranded on a desert island after his plane makes an emergency landing in the South Pacific. Hanks plays Chuck, who is washed up on a desert island when his plane crashes into the sea The plane went down in a storm, and Hanks' character was the only survivor. He went on to spend four years on the island, until he was eventually rescued. The film was shot in Monuriki, an island that forms part of Fiji. The island of Monuriki saw a boom in tourism after the film was made Advertisement

'It's not something that is very common,' said Carolina Anderson, an associate professor of aeronautical science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

She told Insider in February: 'You see them in smaller airplanes more often, in big airliners not very often.'

While ditching, pilots have to keep the wings level and maintain an incoming angle that is not too steep to prevent a hard impact, and avoid the plane breaking up.

The crew will brace for impact.

The weather conditions in Hawaii have not been specified, but clear conditions give a pilot better control over the aircraft and increased visibility.

'You're not going to float for very long, and if you land too hard, the chances of breaking it are very high because water is going to get in and it's going to start sinking,' said Anderson.

'Basically, you want to touch down as slow and as soft as possible. If the airplane has retractable landing gear, you want the gear to be up and you want the flaps to be completely down.'

Transair bills itself as Hawaii's largest air cargo providers, boasting a fleet of five Boeing 737 and five Bombardier SD3-60-300 planes that fly daily to all major islands. The company has been in operation since 1982.

DailyMail.com reached out to Transair for comment on the crash and was awaiting a response.

FAA records show the plane that crashed was manufactured in 1975. The plane was first delivered to Pacific Western Airlines and joined Transair's fleet in 2014, according to Flightradar24.com.

Rhoades Aviation Inc does business as Transair.

It has a fleet of five Boeing 737 planes that fly daily to all major Hawaiian island destinations, according to its website.

Boeing said it was 'aware of the reports out of Honolulu, Hawaii and are closely monitoring the situation. We are in contact with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and are working to gather more information.'

Boeing 737s are among the most popular planes in circulation.

In July 2012 it became the first commercial plane to have received more than 10,000 orders.

Boeing state that, from 2004-13, sales of the 737 accounted for 56 per cent of all their commercial planes in circulation.

More than 300 airlines, in 111 countries, fly Boeing 737s, and on average 2,000 737s are in the air at any given moment.

One takes off or lands every two seconds.

Boeing's 737 MAX was cleared to fly by regulators late last year after a 20-month grounding following two accidents that killed hundreds of people.

In October 2018, a Lion Air plane crashed in Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board.

Less than five months later, in March 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashed, killing all 157 people on board.

It emerged that the pilots required additional training in the plane's software, which was not included by Boeing and which the airlines did not supply. The problem was that the software was forcing the plane's nose downwards, and the pilots could not override it manually.

Since then, the MCAS - the software causing the problem - has been updated.

Boeing state that the software function now operates in unusual flight conditions only, and now relies on two sensors, and activates only once.

It now will never override pilots' ability to control the airplane.

The 737 in Friday's incident was an older generation than the MAX.
Former Fox host Ed Henry is suing NPR, CNN and three of their journalists - Brian Stelter, Alisyn Camerota and David Folkenflik

Former Fox host Ed Henry is suing NPR, CNN and three of their journalists - Brian Stelter, Alisyn Camerota and David Folkenflik - for how they reported rape allegations against him from one of his former colleagues.

Henry was fired by Fox in July 2020 after the network received a complaint that he had raped Jennifer Eckhart. They didn't reveal what the complaint was but weeks after his firing, Eckhart sued him, describing how he'd 'violently raped' her.

He has always denied her claims, insisting they had a consensual relationship. He says he was fired instead to distract the public from CEO Suzanne Scott 'covering up' an alleged affair that the company president, Jay Wallace, was having with an employee.

Fox said in a statement to DailyMail.com that it conducted a 'full and independent investigation of the claims against Jay Wallace' and 'he was cleared of any wrongdoing and the allegations are false.'

On Thursday, Henry sued Scott for defamation for painting him as a 'sex criminal' and now he has also sued CNN, NPR and the three journalists for how they reported the story back in July 2020.

He tweeted a link to the lawsuit and promised it wouldn't be the last.

Folkenflik wrote in an NPR article that Fox had been 'warned' that giving Henry roles would damage its attempts to repair its reputation after the sex scandals involving Roger Ailes emerged.

He wrote: 'In 2017, a written complaint was filed to senior Fox executives warning against giving Henry greater profile on the air, including as a substitute host and anchor, according to a former colleague with knowledge of those events.

Henry promised that the lawsuit - his third since being fired - would not be his last

In his lawsuit, he points to a segment titled 'Camerota on new lawsuit: I guess Fox News is rotten to the core' where Stelter was discussing the rape allegation in Eckhart's lawsuit

NPR reporter David Folkenflik is also named as one of the defendants

'The complaint said the prospect of Henry's greater prominence on Fox was crushing for female colleagues after the network had promised sweeping changes following Ailes' ouster.

'Among those with whom the complaint was shared: Jay Wallace, Fox's chief news executive, and Kevin Lord, the chief human relations executive who was brought in with the mandate to help transform the culture.'

Jennifer Eckhart claimed in a lawsuit that Henry 'violently raped her'

Henry claims that the statement is false and defamatory because it 'portrayed Mr. Henry in a false light because it implied that Mr. Henry had a history of sexual misconduct at Fox News.'

Fox said it had never received a complaint about any misconduct before he was fired.

He then points to a video of a CNN segment titled 'Camerota on new lawsuit: I guess Fox News is rotten to the core' where Stelter was discussing the rape allegation in Eckhart's lawsuit.

He said: 'This explains why Henry was fired' which Henry says is defamatory because he insists he was not fired over the rape allegation, and instead was fired as a 'scapegoat' for other sexual misconduct at the network.

Camerota said: 'And didnt [Fox News] know this? When that outside law firm Paul Weiss did their investigation back in 2016, didnt Ed Henrys name come up? Didnt they know things about Ed Henry and yet they promoted him? And doesnt that tell us all we need to know about the culture?'

Henry says she was implying that the allegations were fact.

Eckkhart's lawsuit includes a string of WhatsApp messages Henry, 49, allegedly sent to Eckhart in which he calls her his 'little w***e' and refers to their relationship in graphic terms

'Im sad to think that four years after Roger Ailes was gone that the young women there feel like theyre still having to operate in this culture,' she went on.

Henry says that he was not a part of the culture they were describing.

'Indeed there were (and are) ongoing problems at Fox News, but those problems lay at the feet of Ms. Scott and Mr. Wallace. Mr. Henry was used as a scapegoat by Ms. Scott and Mr. Wallace, and Defendants Stelter, Camerota, and Folkenflik took the bait, recklessly promoting the myth that Mr. Henry was fired for sexual harassment or assault,' his attorneys write in his lawsuit.

Neither CNN, NPR or any of the journalists mentioned have yet responded to the lawsuit.

In his suit against Scott, Henry said: 'Ms. Scott sandbagged [Henry] with her statement, lending credence to the false allegations because she was trying to save her own career and burnish her image as a tough, no nonsense female executive who cleaned up Fox News,' the lawsuit reads.

Henry alleges that he was used as 'an instrument' and 'scapegoat' to cover up the existence of sexual misconduct at Fox News and divert attention away from Scott's 'own sordid history' at the network.

In a statement, Fox told DailyMail.com: 'As we stated one year ago, FOX News Media conducted a thorough independent investigation into Ed Henry immediately after we were made aware of a serious misconduct claim against him by a former employee. Based on the results of those findings, we promptly terminated Mr. Henrys employment for willful sexual misconduct and stand by the decision entirely.

'We are fully prepared to vigorously defend against these baseless allegations as Mr. Henry further embarrasses himself in a lawsuit rife with inaccuracies after driving his personal life into the ground with countless extramarital affairs in a desperate attempt for relevance and redemption.'

It added: 'Under the leadership of CEO Suzanne Scott, FOX News Media has worked tirelessly to transform the company culture, implementing annual, mandatory in-person harassment prevention training, creating an entirely new reporting structure, more than tripling the size of our HR footprint, conducting quarterly company meetings and mentoring events, as well as executing a zero tolerance policy regarding workplace misconduct for which we engage outside independent firms to handle investigations.'
Germany has recommended mixing Covid-19 vaccine types, saying it gives a 'significantly superior' immune response than two AstraZeneca shots.

For those that got the Oxford University-developed jab as their first dose, the country is recommending they switch to a different shot for their second.

The aim is to increase the speed and effectiveness of vaccinations as the more contagious delta variant spreads through Europe, causing Covid cases to rise.

Like many countries in the EU, Germany's vaccination started slow, and while it has picked up pace, it is still far behind the likes of the UK and the US.

This in part is due to a supply row earlier this year between the EU and the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, and countries - including Germany and France - questioning the safety of the vaccine earlier in their jab programmes.

Pictured: Vials of Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, and Moderna coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine (file photo). Germany has recommended mixing Covid-19 vaccine doses, saying it gives a 'significantly superior' immune response than two AstraZeneca shots

Health Minister Jens Spahn conferred with his colleagues from Germany's 16 states on Friday, the day after the country's standing committee on vaccination issued a draft recommendation.

In a statement, the committee said that 'according to current study results,' the immune response from a mixture of AstraZeneca with an mRNA vaccine was 'significantly superior' to that from two doses of AstraZeneca.

It recommended that the second dose with an mRNA vaccine - Germany uses those made by BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna - be administered four weeks or more after the first AstraZeneca shot.

That is much shorter than the nine to 12 weeks the committee recommends between two doses of AstraZeneca, which is a viral vector-based vaccine.

Pictured: Germany's Health Minister Jens Spahn. He conferred with his colleagues from Germany's 16 states on Friday, the day after the country's standing committee on vaccination issued a draft recommendation about using difference

Mixing AstraZeneca and Pfizer Covid vaccines generates 'robust' immune response, study finds By Mary Kekatos, Acting U.S. Health Editor for DailyMail.com and PA Media Mixing doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines generates a robust immune response against COVID-19, research suggests. The study found that using Pfizer followed by AstraZeneca or vice versa induced high concentrations of antibodies against the spike protein of the virus when doses were given four weeks apart. However, the Com-COV study, run by the University of Oxford, found that the order of vaccines made a difference. AstraZeneca followed by Pfizer induced higher antibodies and T cell responses than Pfizer followed by AstraZeneca. But both schedules induced higher antibodies than the licensed, and highly effective, standard two-dose AstraZeneca schedule. The findings could allow flexibility in the UK and global vaccine rollouts, allowing people to receive whatever jab is available, rather than waiting for a matching one. 'The Com-COV study has evaluated "mix and match" combinations of the Oxford and Pfizer vaccines to see to what extent these vaccines can be used interchangeably, potentially allowing flexibility in the UK and global vaccine rollout,' said chief investigator Dr Matthew Snape, associate professor in pediatrics and vaccinology at the University of Oxford 'The results show that when given at a four-week interval both mixed schedules induce an immune response that is above the threshold set by the standard schedule of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.' Advertisement

The committee, known by its German acronym STIKO, didn't detail what studies its conclusion was based on.

Germany's disease control centre noted that it was a draft, and that a final recommendation with more detail and sourcing will follow.

Researchers have said that mixing vaccines is likely safe and effective, but are still gathering data to be sure.

German authorities already decided in April that under-60s who had received a first AstraZeneca shot should as a rule get a second shot of an mRNA vaccine.

The decision came after the AstraZeneca vaccine was linked to extremely rare blood clots in younger people. Germany recommends that under-60s consult with a doctor before taking it.

Spahn said Friday that enough mRNA vaccine is available to implement the new recommendation quickly and that it 'makes the AstraZeneca vaccine more attractive,' with large quantities now arriving and the prospect of a much shorter wait for the second shot.

He said the head of STIKO told ministers that the combination of AstraZeneca and BioNTech 'protects as least as well as BioNTech-BioNTech as a combination, in some cases even better.'

But he also stressed that two doses of AstraZeneca give good protection. BioNTech-Pfizer has been the mainstay of Germany's campaign, with AstraZeneca a distant second in terms of doses administered.

Germany is keen to keep upping the pace of its vaccination campaign even as new infections have sunk to their lowest level in months, pointing to the rise of the delta variant. Authorities believe it now accounts for more than half of new cases, and are keen to ensure that people get their second vaccine shots.

'Only double-vaccinated protects well against delta,' except in the case of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Spahn said.

As of Wednesday, Germany had given at least one shot to 55.1 percent of its population, and 37.3 percent were fully vaccinated. 'That's a good figure, but it's still not enough,' Spahn said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is 66, recently received a second shot of Moderna's vaccine after taking a first shot of AstraZeneca.

Her spokesman said that was a conscious effort to encourage people not to be afraid if they are advised to get a mix of shots.

Pictured: Vials of the Moderna vaccine in a German vaccine centre. The country's vaccine standing committee 'according to current study results,' the immune response from a mixture of AstraZeneca with an mRNA vaccine was 'significantly superior' to that from two doses of AZ

Germany frequently altered its approach to the AstraZeneca vaccine; first approving it for under 65s amid false concerns of its efficacy in older patients, then in early March walking back on the move by approving its use in over 65s.

On March 30, it was announced that the two-dose jab would no longer be offered to people under 60 and federal and regional health ministers agreed to give people under 60 who had been given a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine a different jab for their second dose.

Germany was not routinely offering jabs to those aged under 60 before the AstraZeneca ban took effect, meaning the group affected was only a small portion of the population - likely the clinically vulnerable and other risk groups who had priority.

The World Health Organization has previously said it cannot recommend switching vaccines between two doses as a protection against Covid-19, due to insufficient data showing the effects.

The concern over clots and mixed messages surrounding the vaccine are likely to have affected people's willingness to take it in Germany and elsewhere in the EU.

As of June 30, Germany had fully vaccinated 37 percent of its population. By comparison, the UK has vaccinated 48.7 percent, the United States 46.6 percent and Israel almost 60 percent.

The recommendation comes on Friday as Angela Merkel backed down in a row over travel rules as she said in the 'foreseeable future' fully-vaccinated Brits will be able to visit Germany without having to quarantine.

Speaking alongside Boris Johnson at a press conference at Chequers, Mrs Merkel said Germany is 'reviewing continuously' its travel restrictions.

At the moment all UK travellers have to self-isolate on arrival in Germany for 14 days, with no exemptions.

But Mrs Merkel said that soon double-jabbed people 'will be able to travel again without having to go into quarantine'.

Mrs Merkel last month had urged all EU member states to adopt Germany's hardline approach to border rules.

Her comments today, following bilateral talks with Mr Johnson on the subject, pave the way for quarantine-free travel to open up across Europe in a massive boost for British holidaymakers.
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Statues of Britain's Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth II and explorer Captain James Cook have been toppled and desecrated by a violent mob during protests across Canada on its national day over the discovery of mass graves of indigenous schoolchildren.

In scenes reminiscent of the BLM protests where a 'hit list' of 'racist' statues was drawn up for destruction after the murder of George Floyd, the bronze sculptures of Britain's current monarch and her great-great grandmother were hauled down in Winnipeg, daubed with red paint and even appeared to have been strangled with Mohawk flags.

With no police to be seen anywhere, protesters in orange led by members of the left-wing anti-colonial 'Idle No More' group, who are campaigning for Canada Day to be canceled, tied ropes to the necks of the statues and ripped them to the ground to chants of 'no to genocide' and 'bring her down' amid fury over the deaths of 1,000 indigenous children found buried in mass graves over the last month.

The head of the Queen Victoria statue was later removed and thrown into the Assiniboine River.

Between the 18th century and the 1970s, 150,000 indigenous Canadian children were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages after being sent to Catholic schools.

Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died, but the policy of the Canadian Government appears to have little to do with the British Royal Family, who are ceremonial heads of state.

Yesterday's protests in Canada raise the prospect of them spreading to the US and similar investigations into mass graves there after claims of neglect, abuse and death.

In the United States, monuments to figures now deemed racist or problematic by activists have been removed from sites across the country.

Scroll down for video

A gigantic statue of Queen Victoria has been torn down and daubed in red paint in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Canada Day as a backlash over the country's colonial history ramps up

A kayaker fishes the head of the statue of Queen Victoria from the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg

Canada became an independent state in 1867 but Queen Elizabeth II remain's Canada's constitutional monarch and is still seen as representative of colonialism but some Canadians. This is her statue before and after it was torn down

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was 'terribly saddened' by the new discovery at Marieval Indian Residential School, and told indigenous people that 'the hurt and the trauma that you feel is Canadas responsibility to bear.. Justin Trudeau visits the makeshift memorial erected in honor of the 215 indigenous children remains found at a boarding school in British Columbia, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 1

In particular, statues of Confederate figures in the South have been toppled in the wake of the police killing Floyd, which sparked nationwide protests demanding an end to systemic racism.

Statues that paid tribute to the likes of Christopher Columbus, Robert E. Lee and George Washington were among those removed or defaced during anti-racism protests.

While there's no official number of statues taken down over the last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center previously revealed that 168 Confederate symbols were removed in 2020, including 94 monuments.

The United States is also grappling with historical treatment of Native Americans. Hundreds of Native American boarding schools were also established in the United States during the early 19th and mid 20th centuries to 'civilize' Native American children into Euro-American culture.

One protester places a boot on Queen Victoria's toppled statue in Winnipeg

The headless toppled statue of Queen Victoria on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature

The statues were daubed in graffiti after being torn down by protestors in Winnipeg

As many as 40,000 Native American children may have died from care at government-run boarding schools around the US, a researcher has claimed, prompting a federal investigation to address the trauma's 'intergenerational impact.'

US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a June 22 memo that her department will prepare a report that identifies federal boarding school facilities, map out the locations of known and possible student burial sites, and learn the identities and tribal affiliations of the children.

In her memo, Haaland - a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and first Native American Cabinet Secretary - said most indigenous parents could not visit their children at these schools, where some were abused, killed and buried in unmarked graves.

'Survivors of the traumas of boarding school policies carried their memories into adulthood as they became the aunts and uncles, parents, and grandparents to subsequent generations,' Haaland wrote in her memo.

'The loss of those who did not return left an enduring need in their families for answers that, in many cases, were never provided. Distance, time, and the scattering of school records have made it more difficult, if not impossible, for their families to locate a loved ones final resting place and bring closure through the appropriate ceremonies.'

That's why she's directing the Department of the Interior to undertake this investigation and address the 'intergenerational impact' of Indian boarding schools 'to shed light on the traumas of the past.'

'While it may be difficult to learn of the traumas suffered in the boarding school era, understanding its impacts on communities today cannot occur without acknowledging that painful history,' she said.

US interior secretary Deb Haaland said in a June 22 memo that the US federal government will investigate US-run boarding schools for Native Americans following a Dartmouth scholar's grim discovery that 'it's quite likely 40,000 children died ' in these institutions

The investigation comes after Preston McBride, a Dartmouth College scholar, documented at least 1,000 deaths from 1879 to 1934 at just four of the over 500 schools.

Haaland, in an essay published on June 11 in the Washington Post, said the news from Canada made her 'sick to my stomach.'

'Many Americans may be alarmed to learn that the United States also has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as people,' wrote Haaland.

For over 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were uprooted from their communities and forced into US government-operated boarding schools that focused on assimilation.

Before shutting down in 1918, the Carlisle school housed some 10,000 indigenous children.

Many students were forced to cut their braids, dress in uniforms, speak English and adopt European names. Infectious diseases and harsh conditions claimed the lives of many children buried there.

The deaths were primarily from diseases made far more lethal in many of the schools because of poor treatment.

Extraordinary footage of Queen Victoria's Winnipeg statue being toppled in broad daylight showed hundreds of people cheering and squealing with joy as she fell, before many began dancing with joy on the fallen figure and its plinth while waving Canadian indigenous flags. The statue of the current Queen, yards away, was brought down soon afterwards.

1,500 miles west, a statue of Captain Cook - the first Briton to land in British Columbia - was also pulled down in the city of Victoria before being hurled in the harbor in scenes reminiscent of the destruction of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol last year.

Cook's statue was replaced by a red wooden dress - a color and symbol for indigenous people in Canada with the plinth vandalized with 'colonizer.'

A nearby statue of Queen Victoria is taped off after being covered in paint - but a mob failed to destroy it - and at least ten churches were also desecrated overnight.

Queen Elizabeth's statue was also torn down amid growing anger in Canada over the treatment of its indigenous communities over hundreds of years

The defaced statue after being toppled during a rally, following the discovery of the remains of hundreds of children at former indigenous residential schools, outside the provincial legislature on Canada Day in Winnipeg

Victoria's face appears to have been smothered with a flag with a rope used to tear it down before it was covered in paint

A wooden red dress symbolizing the struggle of indigenous people in Canada and severed bronze leg of Capt. James Cook's statue in Victoria, British Columbia, where the monument was pulled down by a crowd and dumped into the harbor. 'Colonizer' was daubed on the plinth

The vandalism took place after a group of protesters gathered at the Manitoba legislature and then pulled down the statue of Victoria on Canada Day  an annual celebration on July 1 that marks the country's confederation - with Victoria's plinth covered in hand prints to represent the dead children

Huge crowds gathered to watch the statue fall, with hundreds screaming and cheering as the statue came down

Protesters who also brought their children stood on the statue and the plinth and covered the bronze with red paint representing blood

The attacks have been spearheaded by Idle No More, a left-wing organization that describes itself as 'a grassroots advocacy group, opposing unilateral & colonial legislation' in Canada, but also campaigns on global issues including for Justin Trudeau to sanction Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.

Prime Minister Trudeau said recently he was 'terribly saddened' by the discovery at Marieval Indian Residential School, and told indigenous people that 'the hurt and the trauma that you feel is Canadas responsibility to bear.'

The vandalism took place across the North American country yesterday - on Canada Day - amid fury over the gruesome discovery of more than 1,000 Indigenous children's graves - with at least ten churches also desecrated last night.

Amid growing fury over the scandal coinciding with Canada Day yesterday, Queen Victoria's statue was toppled in Winnipeg, in the central Canadian province of Manitoba, before being covered in red paint with a message that read 'we were children once. Bring them home.'

A smaller statue of Elizabeth was also toppled in the same area, with protesters insisting both royals are the face of Canada's colonial history.





The Canadian flag on the Peace Tower in Ottawa was flown at half-mast to honor indigenous children, as was the flag on the central tower of the Quebec National Assembly.

'This year, the tragic history of residential schools has overshadowed Canada Day celebrations,' said Quebec premier Francois Legault.

But opposition leader Erin O'Toole defended Canada Day. 'The road to reconciliation does not start by tearing Canada down,' the Conservative leader said, admitting that Canada is 'not a perfect country.'

Protests in support of the indigenous children also took place on Thursday in Toronto, Canada's financial hub, while a #CancelCanadaDay march in the capital Ottawa drew thousands in support of victims and survivors of the residential school system.

In his Canada Day message, Trudeau said the discoveries of the remains of the children at the former schools 'have rightfully pressed us to reflect on our country's historical failures'. Injustices still exist for indigenous peoples and many others in Canada, he said.

The row intensified earlier this month when indigenous group in Canada's Saskatchewan province said it had found the unmarked graves of 751 people at a now-defunct Catholic residential school where tribal children were 'assimilated' into society.

It comes just one month after 215 children were found at another residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia - taking the total to more than 1,000.

The Marieval Indian Residential School remains were found after the First Nation teamed up with an underground radar detection team from Saskatchewan Polytechnic just over three weeks ago.

Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme said that the graves were marked at one time, but that the Roman Catholic Church that operated the school had removed the markers.

'Canada will be known as a nation who tried to exterminate the First Nations. Now we have evidence,' said Bobby Cameron, Chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, which represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan.

'This is just the beginning.'

'This was a crime against humanity, an assault on First Nations,' said Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nations in Saskatchewan. He said he expects more graves will be found on residential school grounds across Canada.

'We will not stop until we find all the bodies,' he said.

Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report in 2015 said: 'Many students who went to residential school never returned. They were lost to their families.

'They died at rates that were far higher than those experienced by the general school-aged population. 

'Their parents were often uninformed of their sickness and death. They were buried away from their families in long-neglected graves.'

There were even calls to cancel Canada Day over the discovery of the dead children - Victoria's face is covered by a Mohawk society flag

Red hand prints are seen on the statue of Capt. James Cook, who is branded a 'colonizer'

Lucy Sager, visits a growing memorial as another Indigenous community in British Columbia this week

The area of the Marieval Indian Residential School is seen in an undated map on the Cowessess Reserve near Grayson, Saskatchewan, Canada

 Slide me  NOW and THEN: The site of Marieval Indian Residential School, left today, and right in 1923

From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into Canadian society. Indigenous boys of the Indian School of Marieval in 1934

215 pairs of children's shoes are seen on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery as a memorial to the 215 children whose remains were found last month

The children whose remains were found last month were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia (pictured) that closed in 1978

The Kamloops school was established in 1890 and operated until 1969, its roll peaking at 500 during the 1950s when it was the largest in the country. Children were banned from speaking their own language or practicing any of their customs. This undated archival photo shows a group of young girls at the school

The Canadian government apologized in Parliament in 2008 and admitted that physical and sexual abuse in the schools was rampant.

Many students recall being beaten for speaking their native languages; they also lost touch with their parents and customs.

Indigenous leaders have cited that legacy of abuse and isolation as the root cause of epidemic rates of alcoholism and drug addiction on reservations.

Last month the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were found buried on the site of what was once Canada's largest Indigenous residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia.

Those youngsters were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia that closed in 1978, according to the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation, which said the remains were found with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist.

None of them have been identified, and it remains unclear how they died. Survivors fear more bodies will be found at the same site - as well as at the 80 other former residential school sites across Canada.

The Kamloops discovery reopened old wounds in Canada about the lack of information and accountability around the residential school system, which forcibly separated indigenous children from their families and subjected them to malnutrition and physical and sexual abuse.

'The Pope needs to apologize for what happened,' Delorme said. 'An apology is one stage in the way of a healing journey.'

Pope Francis said in early June that he was pained by the Kamloops revelation and called for respect for the rights and cultures of native peoples. But he stopped short of the direct apology some Canadians had demanded.

'It's a harsh reality and it's our truth, it's our history,' Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Chief Rosanne Casimir told a media conference Friday.

'And it's something that we've always had to fight to prove. To me, it's always been a horrible, horrible history.'
Police released an image of four youths in the hunt for teenagers who spat at cancer sufferer in Thorpe Park 'because she had a shaved head'.

The boys were standing on a platform when the young girl, eight, and her parents walked below.

Officers said that one of the boys spat at the girl who had a shaved head as a result of undergoing cancer treatment.

Police have released an image of four youths in the hunt for teenagers who spat at cancer sufferer in Thorpe Park 'because she had a shaved head' (pictured)

A spokesman for Surrey Police said that they hoped the CCTV image of the boys would lead to someone coming forward to identify them.

It said: 'We are appealing to the public for information following an assault at Thorpe Park on Sunday, June 6.

'The eight-year-old victim, who was with her family, was at the theme park between 6pm-7pm when the family was approached by four teenage boys who started spitting at them.

'The parents were concerned that their eight-year-old daughter had been deliberately targeted because she has a shaved head due to cancer treatment.

'The four suspects are described as 17-year-old boys, all around 5ft 8ins tall. The boy who spat on the informant's daughter was described as Mediterranean, with curly black brown hair and wearing a black tee-shirt.

'The other boys were described as white. One had short blond hair and wore a black tee-shirt and grey tracksuit bottoms. One was wearing shorts and a tee-shirt with a side pouch.

'We are now releasing a photograph of four boys we would like to identify as part of this ongoing investigation. Surrey Police is working collaboratively with Thorpe Park on this investigation.'

Anyone who recognises the boys or witnessed the incident are asked to identify the boy by contacting Surrey Police via their webchat or on 101.
Boris Johnson attempted to sooth the holiday fears of up to five million Britons today over fears their Covid jabs could see them barred from Europe - as a host of countries desperate for their money said they would still be allowed in.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) does not recognise a version of the vaccine produced by Covishield at the Serum Institute of India (SII), even though it is just as effective as AstraZeneca doses made elsewhere.

Holidaymakers given this vaccine could therefore be refused entry at EU border crossings when batch numbers are checked on digital Covid passports.

However countries including Greece, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, Estonia, Germany, Slovenia, Iceland, Switzerland and Ireland all confirmed plans to accept the jab.

Downing Street this morning hit out at the potential for a ban, saying the vaccine is identical wherever it is made.

And Boris Johnson used a press conference with German leader Angela Merkel to try to assuage fears as well.

'I see no reason at all why the MHRA-approved vaccines should not be recognised as part of the vaccine passports, and I am very confident that that will not prove to be a problem,' he said from Chequers.

The EU Digital Covid Certificate allows those who are fully vaccinated to move through Europe without having to quarantine or undergo further testing.

But it only recognises vaccines currently approved by the EMA: Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine made in Europe.

Britons will be able to determine whether they had the SII jab by looking at their batch number, which appears on vaccination record cards.

Those who were given the Covishield jab will have the numbers 4120Z001, 4120Z002 or 4120Z003.

Up to five million British holidaymakers could potentially be banned from Europe because they were given Indian-made versions of the AstraZeneca Covid jab. Pictured: Stock image

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) does not recognise a version of the vaccine produced by Covishield at the Serum Institute of India (SII), even though it is no less effective than jabs made elsewhere. Pictured: Stock image

Those who were given the Covishield jab will have the numbers 4120Z001, 4120Z002 or 4120Z003

HOW YOU CAN FIND OUT IF YOU WILL BE AFFECTED Every AZ vaccine administered in the UK will appear under the same name - Vaxzevria - in medical records and on the NHS app. The only way you can find out if your jab was in India is by checking the batch number. This appears on the vaccination record card you will have received when you got your jab. For those who did not hold on to their card, they can find the batch number on their NHS Covid pass letter, which can be downloaded online. The letter is used for travelling abroad or going to mass events in future, which may require proof of vaccination. You can get your pass letter if you've had two doses of the vaccine in England. To apply for a physical pass letter you can visit the NHS website by clicking here. Or you can download a digital version on the NHS App or the online Covid Pass service. Those who were given the jab will have the numbers 4120Z001, 4120Z002 or 4120Z003. Advertisement

UK Government experts said there is nothing to suggest the AZ doses made at the Serum Institute are any less effective than UK batches.

Professor Adam Finn, who advises No10 on Covid vaccines, said the EU issue was simply an 'administrative hurdle'.

Both versions of the AZ vaccine have been shown to be 94 per cent effective at stopping Covid deaths and up to 92 per cent at reducing hospitalisations, even from the Indian variant.

However, the issue of British exclusion from the Continent is still largely theoretical because there are so few EU destinations on the 'green' travel list.

The EMA has not approved the Covishield jab only because its Indian manufacturers have not yet sought a licence for the vaccine in Europe, reports say.

There is no evidence the vaccine is any less effective than the Vaxzevria AstraZeneca jab, which is produced in the UK and Europe.

Despite the EMA refusing to accept the SII jab, nine European countries have reportedly told India they will accept travellers inoculated with Covishield.

According to sources at the Indian Foreign Ministry, Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Spain and Switzerland have disregarded the EMA's dismissal.

Insiders added that Estonia has confirmed it will recognise all vaccines authorities by the Indian government.

Minister Subrahmanyan Jaishankar said he raised the issue of authorisation of the Covishield vaccine during a meeting with EU representatives in Italy this week.

Another insider said India has told the EU that it would lift quarantine for anyone carrying the EU Digital Covid Certificate if Indians were allowed equal access.

'We have also conveyed to EU Member States that India will institute a reciprocal policy for recognition of the EU Digital Covid Certificate,' the source said.

Friction has emerged elsewhere over the issue, with Covid vaccine facility Covax urging leaders to consider all people inoculated with products approved by WHO equally.

The Covishield jab was widely provided to people who live in Africa, and Covax says the EMA's decision to not authorise it discriminates against low-income countries.

'Any measure that only allows people protected by a subset of WHO-approved vaccines to benefit from the re-opening of travel into and with that region would effectively create a two-tier system,' a statement said.

That would widen 'the global vaccine divide' and exacerbate 'inequities we have already seen in the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines,' it added.

A spokesperson for the European Commission said entry into the EU should be allowed to people 'fully vaccinated with one of the vaccines authorised in the EU.'

The Department for Health has refused to say exactly how many doses of the Indian-made jab have been administered in the UK, but five million were imported in 2021.

A statement said: 'As we continue to cautiously reopen international travel, NHS Covid Pass will be a key service that allows people to demonstrate their Covid-19 vaccination status.'

It added that all AstraZeneca doses used in the UK will appear under the European name - Vaxzevria - on the NHS app, even if they were made in India.

They can, therefore, only be identified by the batch number.
Bosses said there is no set number of days staff will be expected in the office

at Asda House in Leeds and George House in Leicester able to choose

Asda will introduce a permanent hybrid working model for staff at its head offices once coronavirus restrictions are eased this month.

The supermarket chain has confirmed that around 4,000 employees at Asda House in Leeds and George House in Leicester will be able to choose the location from which they wish to work.

Bosses said there is no set number of days staff will be expected in the office but they should talk to their managers to 'strike the right balance between home and office working, whilst ensuring this is led by the needs of the business'.

It comes as new Health Secretary Sajid Javid said July 19 would be the 'end of the line' for England's lockdown as he demanded 'a return of the economic and social life that makes this country so great'.

Asda will introduce a permanent hybrid working model for around 4,000 employees at Asda House in Leeds and George House in Leicester. (Stock image)

Asda has said it has 'learned a great deal about working patterns during the last 16 months' and its new approach 'will help us attract and retain the best talent'.

Jacki Simpson, Asda vice president of people operations, said: 'We have learned a great deal about working patterns during the last 16 months and have seen colleagues work productively across different locations.

'Having consulted extensively with them about future ways of working, we know they welcome the increased flexibility of remote working.

'However, they also acknowledge there is some work that is simply better done from the office, so, as we move forward, a hybrid working model is the right approach for our people and the business.

'We believe this approach will help us attract and retain the best talent and will continue to position Asda as an employer of choice.'

In May, a BBC survey revealed nearly 50 of Britain's biggest firms plan on adopting a 'hybrid' model of working, allowing staff to work from home two or three days a week once Covid restrictions are relaxed.

Earlier this year Google and KPMG revealed their post-pandemic plans to let staff work from home.

Accounting firm KPMG told its 16,000 UK staff that they will work in the office for up to four days in a fortnight starting from June under a new hybrid working model.

KPMG spokeswoman Zoe Sheppard said in an emailed statement: 'As part of the firm's new hybrid way of working, from June onwards, the expectation will be that KPMG's people spend up to four days in the office spread over a fortnight, with the rest spent at home or at client sites.'

And U.S. tech giant Google revealed plans to allow 20 per cent of its 140,000 employees to permanently work from home starting from September 1.

The company had originally planned to have all of its employees return to work at its offices at least three times a week.

A spokesperson for Google said that starting in September, the company will also transition to a 'hybrid model' with a majority of employees required in the office for at least three days per week.

Accounting firm KPMG told its 16,000 UK staff that they will work in the office for up to four days in a fortnight under a new hybrid working model. Pictured: KPMG's London headquarters

Google revealed plans to allow 20 per cent of its 140,000 employees to permanently work from home starting from September 1. Pictured: Google's London headquarters

Advertising company WPP said staff will only be in the office for one of two days per week. Pictured: WPP's London HQ pictured

Elsewhere, advertising company WPP and business advisors PriceWaterhouseCooper also revealed that their post-lockdown working models would involve a mix of in-office and at home shifts.

WPP staff will only be in the office for one or two days per week while PriceWaterhouseCooper will allow its staff to work from home a couple of days a week and start at any time they like.

KPMG unveils a TWO-day week in the office post-pandemic Accounting firm KPMG told its 16,000 UK staff on Wednesday that they will work in the office for up to four days in a fortnight starting next month under a hybrid working model drawn up following the recent decline in British Covid cases. KPMG spokeswoman Zoe Sheppard said in an emailed statement: 'As part of the firm's new hybrid way of working, from June onwards, the expectation will be that KPMG's people spend up to four days in the office spread over a fortnight, with the rest spent at home or at client sites.' KPMG UK head Bill Michael resigned in February after reports that he told staff to 'stop moaning' about the impact of Covid-19 on their lives. He was replaced by Jon Holt. Sheppard said the hybrid plan was drawn up incorporating feedback from staff. Advertisement

Advertising company WPP's chief executive Mark Read said: 'We're never going to go back to working the way we used to work.'

Insurance firm Aviva also said 95 per cent of its 16,000-strong work force want to be flexible about where they work.

And recruiter Adecco said four-fifths of its 34,000 employees are working from home.

Not all firms have favoured working from home, however, and multinational investment bank Goldman Sachs told staff to be ready to return to the office in June.

In February, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, 59, slammed working from home as an 'aberration' and insisted the firm would 'correct' the remote working situation .

Mr Solomon, who is based out of the company's New York headquarters, suggested the measure does not suit his investment bank, despite suggestions from other firms that they may seek to retain a form of remote working even after restrictions lift.

'I do think for a business like ours, which is an innovative, collaborative apprenticeship culture, this is not ideal for us,' he told the annual Credit Suisse virtual financial services forum.

He added that he was a 'big believer in personal connectivity' and foresaw that Goldman's pre-pandemic operating style would return.

'I am very focused on the fact that I don't want another class of young people arriving at Goldman Sachs in the summer remotely,' he told the conference.

'I don't think as we get out of the pandemic the overall operating mode of the way a business like ours operates will be vastly different.'

JP Morgan said earlier this year it was targeting U.S. workers' return to office on a rotational basis from July.

And James Bardrick, the UK boss of Citigroup said the 'vast majority' of his workers - 6,000 in London and 3,000 in Belfast - will be called in three days a week if restrictions are eased on July 19.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, 59, claimed in a virtual financial services forum this year that the firm will end remote work 'as soon as possible'

The UK boss of Citigroup has said 'business works best from being together' as the American banking giant plans to get staff back in the office. Pictured: The group's London offices

James Bardrick (left, with Sajid Javid and George Osborne in 2018) said the 'vast majority' of its workers - 6,000 in London and 3,000 in Belfast - will be called in three days a week if restrictions are eased on July 19

He said the move is so employees are together again 'to get the best out of yourself and for the team'.

He told the Today programme: 'We strongly believe that our business works best from being together.

'We think that we are better together. We think we succeed for our clients and for our organisation together.

'So what we are saying is that, yes, use greater flexibility, but to do your job well, to develop as an employee, to get the best out of yourself and for the team, we need to be together.'

The businessman also said Citigroup would not follow fellow banking giant JP Morgan in registering staff members' vaccination status.

But he said anyone heading into one of their buildings would have to 'demonstrate that they have got a negative test result'.

Last month, Professor Cary Cooper, a psychologist from Alliance Manchester Business School, warned if men choose to take up the offer to return to the office while women use the hybrid model this could 'adversely affect their career'.

He told The Guardian: 'Employers now see that employees dont have to show face time.

'The big question we dont have the answer to is, during this 15-month period, have enough men said to themselves life isnt just about work. Did they begin to reprioritise and understand how important the family is?'

He added: 'Women will be working substantially from home and the men will go in more days a week than the women, and that will adversely affect their career.'

This month, proposals revealed that millions of office staff will be given a 'default' right to work from home under post-pandemic plans.

The proposals would change the law to make it impossible for employers to insist on staff attending the workplace unless they can show it is essential.

The Government will consult on the plan  part of a drive to promote flexible working  over the summer, ahead of possible legislation later this year.

The move is likely to spark a backlash amid fears it could damage productivity, harm businesses that rely on workers going into the office and prevent a return to normality in town and city centres.
Surgeons and other senior doctors in England are threatening to strike if No10 does not improve the one per cent pay rise it has proposed for NHS staff.

The British Medical Association said today that the original offer was 'little more than an insult' after a year of battling the pandemic.

It will will advise 'exhausted and demoralised' members to take industrial action if the annual pay bump is not increased to at least five per cent. The BMA had originally been calling for a 12.5 per cent rise.

Striking would involve stopping all overtime, paid and unpaid. Doctors generally work up to 20 per cent over their contracted hours every week, the BMA said.

The move could be highly disruptive as the NHS tries to clear record backlogs triggered by the pandemic.

A record 5.12million people are on waiting lists in England for routine care, the highest since records began. Among them, 65,000 have been waiting for more than 18 months.

And there are early signs that hospital rates from Covid are picking up too, with 304 patients admitted with the virus on June 28, the latest data available.

This was a 35 per cent rise on the previous week but still a far cry from levels in previous waves of the Covid crisis.

Consultants, the most senior doctors in hospitals, have not taken any industrial action since the 1970s, apart from one day of action over pensions in 2012.

Dr Vishal Sharma, deputy chair of the BMA consultants committee, said the proposed 1 per cent pay rise for consultants comes as they are 'exhausted, suffering from high levels of burnout and are expected to deal with the longest waiting lists on records'

The number of people on the NHS waiting lists hit its highest-ever number of 5.12million last month, including around 65,000 people who have waited more than 18 months

How long is the NHS waiting list? More than 5million people in England are now waiting for NHS hospital treatment  the highest number ever recorded. Official data released in June showed the number now stands at 5.12million, and has risen consistently since the Covid pandemic began. Statistics released for the first time also revealed the true extent of the NHS backlog, with almost 65,000 patients waiting at least 18 months for routine operations, such as hip and knee replacements. Around 2,700 patients haven't been treated within two years. Critics slammed the 'grim milestone', calling on ministers to make tackling the 'gigantic' backlog their top priority. The Royal College of Surgeons called the data on patients waiting at least one year 'particularly troubling'. Hospitals turned their attention to treating coronavirus patients during the first and second waves, cancelling thousands of non-urgent procedures. Health chiefs fear non-Covid care could be threatened again if the Indian variant's rapid spread  which has left hopes of 'Freedom Day' going ahead on a knife-edge  causes hospital admissions to spike. Vaccines have broken the link between cases and serious illness, but SAGE advisers still fear the mutant strain could trigger a 'substantial' third wave. Millions of over-50s have yet to be fully vaccinated and data shows a single dose is slightly less effective against the Delta variant, which has bolstered calls for No10 to delay June 21 to give the NHS more time to dish out top-up jabs. Advertisement

The BMA has been lobbying No10 for an NHS pay rise since March.

It said that, since the pandemic began doctors and members of the public have written over 4,000 letters to MPs demanding a significant pay increase for healthcare workers.

Dr Vishal Sharma, deputy chair of the BMA consultants committee, said doctors feel a 'huge sense of obligation to stay on well beyond the end of their shift' to help colleagues see patients who are waiting to be seen.

He said: 'The NHS has always relied on the goodwill of its staff, like consultants, to paper over the cracks in an under-funded NHS.

'This has never been the case more than during the pandemic when consultants have gone above and beyond to care for patients, putting themselves and their families' lives at risk in the process.

'Consultants are exhausted, suffering from high levels of burnout and are expected to deal with the longest waiting lists on records.

'It is therefore essential to maintain the goodwill of consultants so that they can help to clear the patient backlog, undertake additional waiting list clinics and take on extra weekend work.

'Instead, with its suggestion of a pay award of 1 per cent, an effective pay-cut, the Government has left consultants feeling angry and undervalued.

'It is within the gift of Ministers to award NHS staff a fair pay award and to demonstrate that consultants are valued and avoid any potential disputes at a time when extra capacity in the NHS is crucial.'

A DHSC spokesperson said: 'We are incredibly grateful to all our NHS staff. This year the Government has committed to providing a pay uplift for NHS staff, including consultants, when uplifts across the public sector have been paused, to acknowledge the extraordinary effort of NHS staff through the pandemic.

'We recognise the recommendations from the pay review bodies are an incredibly important issue and we will carefully consider them before responding.'

Data from the NHS Business Authority shows that since 2008, 21 per cent of doctors have left the NHS.

A recent survey by the BMA found that 72 per cent may retire early, with pay cuts and taxes imposed on their pensions being the biggest drivers.

Jenny McGee, one of the nurses who looked after Boris Johnson when he was in hospital with Covid, announced in May that she had handed in her resignation, because nurses were not getting the pay or respect they deserved.

The pay increase offered to consultants is identical to the 1 per cent rise offered to nurses earlier this year.

Disgraced former Health Secretary Matt Hancock defended the nurses pay rise as 'fair' in light of the 'financial consequences' caused by the pandemic, but medics described it as a 'slap in the face'.

In Scotland, NHS workers negotiated a 4 per cent pay rise earlier this year.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon also announced a 500 bonus last year for all health and social care to show the country's appreciation for their work during the pandemic.
Americans have given President Joe Biden a dismal rating on his handling of crime amid a surge in violence across the country, a new poll has found.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Friday morning shows just 38 per cent of the public approve of how he is dealing with the spike in crime and 48 percent disapprove.

Murder rates in major cities have risen by 30 percent in the last year and shootings have spiked by 8 percent.

President Joe Biden, who met with the World Series champion L.A. Dodgers Friday, gets poor marks for his handling of crime, with just 38 per cent support amid a spike in crime

A 59 percent majority of Americans believe crime is an 'extremely' or 'very' serious problem in the U.S., an increase from 51 percent in a Gallup poll released last fall, which was the highest rate since 2007.

The poll found 55 percent of Americans say increasing funding for law enforcement would reduce violent crime.

It comes just a week after Biden announced his bid to crackdown on crime by targeting gun dealers.

A near-majority disapproves of Biden's handling of crime

The number considering crime an extremely serious problem also is on the rise

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - JUNE 23: A blood-soaked sheet sits among evidence markers following a shooting where three people were shot at the Wentworth Gardens housing complex in the Bridgeport neighborhood on June 23, 2021 in Chicago, Illinois

Chicago police work the scene where at least eight people were shot in the 6300 block of South Artesian Avenue in the Marquette Park neighborhood, late Sunday, June 27, 2021, in Chicago

His administration has insisted that guns are to blame for the surge in crime, even though there has been a spike in violence in major cities in general.

Biden's plan would also allow communities to use coronavirus relief funds to hire police officers or engage in other bids to crack down on crime.

But his proposals to focus on dealers rather than criminals and his mockery for gun advocates brought a rapid backlash from Republicans who accused him of bowing to his parties radical wing.

He promised 'zero tolerance' for dealers who break the rules but also mocked Americans who believe they need firearms to protect their rights from the government.

'If you want to think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons,' he said.

He delivered his message from the White House against a surge in violence around the country

'Crime historically rises during the summer,' said Biden.

'And as we emerge from this pandemic... the country opening back up again... the traditional summer spike may be more pronounced than it usually would be.'

Before delivering his speech he met with state leaders, mayors, a police chief and other experts to discuss the best way to make the country safer.

It left him with a delicate balancing act, straddling calls from within his own party to 'defund the police' while heading off political critics on the right ready to accuse him of being soft on crime.

But he did not shy from tackling the gun lobby directly.

Asked about potential solutions to the crime problem, 75 per cent said increased funding for economic opportunities; 65 per cent said more social workers would help the situation. A narrower majority, 55 per cent, said increased funding for police  a move backed by 76 per cent of Republicans but only 45 per cent of Democrats.

A total of 46 per cent backed stricter gun laws  an option Biden has called for repeatedly. The view is shared by 81 per cent of Democrats but just 13 per cent of Republicans, who have been able to stop gun control measures for years in Congress.
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President Joe Biden on Friday cut off reporters who questioned him about the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying he wanted to focus on the upcoming Fourth of July holiday and 'happy things.'

'I want to talk about happy things, man,' he told reporters who asked him about the American troops who left Bagram Airbase after almost two decades of war.

Biden had come out to brag about Friday's strong jobs report when he was asked about the exit of American troops in the middle of a Taliban resurgence that has sparked fears Afghanistan could descend into civil war. The Taliban claims to have recently captured more than 100 of the over 400 districts across Afghanistan.

The airbase, which is located 30 miles north of Kabul, Afghanistan, has now been handed over to the Afghan National Security and Defense Force in its entirety. The American troops left quietly, with little fanfare and no public ceremony.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki later accused reporters of reading too much into the president's snappy responses, arguing he wanted to focus on the upcoming Independence Day celebrations.

'I think what he was trying to convey to all of you is that he is heading into July 4 weekend, a weekend for family, we can celebrate America, and he was ready to be done answering questions. It wasn't it wasn't related to Afghanistan,' she said at her White House press briefing.

And she grew defensive when pressed on the issue.

'People are a little over reading into his response to a series of q&a, leading into a holiday weekend when he had already answered three questions on that and he just said, this is the fourth question. And he then went on and answered a couple additional questions. The President could not be more proud of the men and women serving, who have served over the last 20 years and he is going to use every opportunity again to thank them for their service,' she noted.

Biden did address the US drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, which is expected to be completed by the end of August.

'We're on track exactly as to where we expected to be,' said Biden, who had previously pledged to have all US troops out of Afghanistan by Sept 11. 'There will be some forces left. But it's a rational drawdown with our allies.'

But as reporters pressed him on the topic, asking a third question on it, he grew visibly annoyed and said he wouldn't answer anymore questions on Afghanistan.

'I'm not going to answer anymore on Afghanistan. It's Fourth of July,' Biden said.

'I'm concerned that you guys are asking me questions that I'll answer next week. It's the holiday weekend. I'm going to celebrate it,' he added.

He then turned to talking about his administration's accomplishments.

'There are great things happening. The economy is growing faster than any time in 40 years. We got a record number of new jobs, COVID deaths are down 90%, wages are up faster than any time in 15 years. We're bringing our troops home. All across America people are going to ballgames. This is good,' he said.

'I'll answer all your negative questions - not negative questions - legitimate questions,' he added, indicating he would do so at a later time.

The president grew annoyed again when reporters asked him if Congress would pass infrastructure and families' plan.

'Come on guys,' he said. 'I love you guys but it's a process.'

President Joe Biden cut off reporters who questioned him about the US troop withdraw from Afghanistan

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

Biden's defensive posture came after American defense officials confirmed that all American troops have quietly left Bagram Airbase.

The moves comes after President Biden vowed to have every US soldier out of Afghanistan by September 11 - a move which will conclude America's longest ever war, which has killed 2,312 American troops and cost the military an eyewatering $816 billion.

According to a CNN source, 'Biden remains convinced that after two decades of war, there is little American troops can do to resolve what is increasingly viewed inside the government as an intractable problem'. His decision to pull all remaining troops has been described by one insider as a 'gut decision'.

Bagram has been at the center of the US war effort in Afghanistan, with cameras on hand as Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump all visited in recent years. However, there was no media present on Friday as the last US troops skulked quietly out of the airbase.

Many experts now fear that their exit will bring a new eruption of chaos to the country.

The Taliban have launched a relentless offensives across Afghanistan in the past two months, gobbling up dozens of districts as Afghan security forces have largely consolidated their power in the country's major urban areas.

The Islamic military organization say they 'welcome' the US exit from Bagram.

Afghan soldiers stand guard at the gate of Bahram U.S. air base on July 2, 2021, after American troops finally vacated it after close to two decades of occupation

Afghan soldiers move into Bagram airbase today following the departure of US and NATO forces on July 2

US troops load up helicopter onto a C-17 Globesmaster at Bagram on June 16 as they prepare to leave the airbase

A gate is seen at the Bagram on June 25, as the last US troops prepared to withdraw

The fact that all US troops are now out of Bagram is extremely significant, given that the base is seen as the strategic heart of the American war in Afghanistan.

Prior to the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, Bagram was a dilapidated airbase without electricity in its surrounding buildings. However, after it was determined that al-Qaeda were responsible for the attacks, and that they were based in Afghanistan, the base became occupied by US forces.

Al- Qaeda were supported by the Taliban - an Islamic military organization that had controlled Afghanistan since the 1990s - and the Bagram base soon became the strategic heart of America's mission to crush terrorists and those who harbored them.

By mid-2002, Bagram was home to more than 7,000 US troops, and quickly turned into a sprawling mini-city, complete with its own swimming pools, shops, gyms and classrooms. A Pizza Hut, a Subway and Green Beans coffee shop soon popped up on the base.

At its peak in 2012, Bagram saw more than 100,000 U.S. troops and NATO service members pass through its sprawling compound.

The ability of Afghan forces to maintain control over the vital Bagram airfield will likely prove pivotal to maintaining security in the nearby capital Kabul and keeping pressure on the Taliban.

With the departure of the US forces, 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.

Bagram Air Base (pictured on Thursday, July 1 as a military plane comes in to land) served as the linchpin for US operations in Afghanistan. Now, all US and NATO troops have left the base, according to US defence sources

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

An Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier sits at a road checkpoint near the a US military base in Bagram, some 50 km north of Kabul on July 1, 2021

The withdrawal from Bagram Airfield is the clearest indication that the last of the 2,500-3,500 U.S. troops have left Afghanistan or are nearing a departure, months ahead of President Joe Biden's promise that they would be gone by Sept. 11.

It was clear soon after the mid-April announcement that the U.S. was ending its 'forever war,' that the departure of U.S. soldiers and their estimated 7,000 NATO allies would be nearer to July 4, when America celebrates its Independence Day.

Most NATO soldiers have already quietly exited as of this week.

Announcements from several countries analyzed by The Associated Press show that a majority of European troops has now left with little ceremony - a stark contrast to the dramatic and public show of force and unity when NATO allies lined up to back the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Bagram was built by the US for its Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s

Bagram was built by the US for its Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s as a bulwark against the Soviet Union in the north.

Ironically, it became the staging point for the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, and the Red Army expanded it significantly during their near decade-long occupation.

When Moscow pulled out, it became central to the raging civil war -- it was reported that at one point the Taliban controlled one end of the three-kilometre (two-mile) runway and the opposition Northern Alliance the other.

In recent months, Bagram has come under rocket barrages claimed by the jihadist Islamic State, stirring fears that militants are already eyeing the base for future attacks.

The NATO-led non-combat mission aimed to train Afghan forces into ensuring their country's security after the departure of foreign forces.

As of February 2021, there were about 9,500 foreign troops in Afghanistan, of which the US made up the largest contingent of 2,500.

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

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.

The U.S. and NATO leaving comes as Taliban insurgents make strides in several parts of the country, overrunning dozens of districts and overwhelming beleaguered Afghan security Forces.

In a worrying development, the government has resurrected militias with a history of brutal violence to assist the Afghan security forces. At what had all the hallmarks of a final press conference, Gen. Miller this week warned that continued violence risked a civil war in Afghanistan that should have the world worried.

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.
Ousted Teen Vogue editor Alexi McCammond has been re-hired by Axios months after she was forced to resign at Conde Nast when anti-Asian tweets she wrote in 2011 sparked a backlash among staff.

Axios announced on Thursday that McCammond, who was previously hired by the outlet in 2017, would rejoin its team as a national political reporter and will work on the 2022 midterm elections.

'Alexi McCammond is an accomplished journalist and professional. We're excited and proud that she is returning to Axios,' Axios co-founder and CEO Jim VandeHei said in the press release.

McCammond was covering the Biden administration's presidential campaign for Axios when she met her boyfriend TJ Ducklo who became a deputy press secretary in the White House. Earlier this year, Ducklo was suspended for a week from his role after he threatened a Politico reporter when she asked questions about their relationship.

In March, McCammond was ousted from her newly appointed editor-in-chief position at Teen Vogue. In the interim, she has been working at NBC News and often appeared on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe.'

Ousted Teen Vogue editor Alexi McCammond (pictured) has been re-hired by Axios months after she was fired by Conde Nast when anti-Asian tweets she wrote in 2011 caused backlash among staff

Axios announced on Thursday that McCammond, (pictured) who was previously hired by the outlet in 2017, would rejoin its team as a national political reporter and will work on the 2022 midterm elections

In May, McCammond joined Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to discuss her story for NBC's Know Your Value, in which she explains the impact black women will likely have on the 2022 midterm elections.

Brzezinski referenced the Teen Vogue debacle while welcoming her.

McCammond responded by admitting the drama over her appointment and rapid departure from the Conde Nast online magazine had been 'painful.'

Brzezinski said: 'Alexi, it's great to have you back on Morning Joe. And for our viewers, you may have heard of Alexi and her story, because we talked about her, right here on Morning Joe.

'It was a very lengthy segment about cancel culture and forgiveness. And if you missed it, you can see that on our website,' she said. 'And Alexi since you weren't there, we were talking about you. Before you get into your new article, would you like to say anything?'

McCammond covered Joe Biden's presidential campaign as a reporter for politics website Axios, and was serving as a contributor for NBC and MSNBC, before she was offered the editor-in-chief position at Teen Vogue. But just two weeks later, officials for Conde Nast, which owns Teen Vogue, announced that she had resigned in light of racist tweets she wrote in 2011

Alexi McCammond admitted her resignation from Teen Vogue had been 'painful' while chatting with Mika Brzezinski during her first assignment since

McCammond's first report was about black female politicians tipped to do well in the 2022 midterm elections. It also appeared on NBC's Know Your Value website

'First, Mika, thank you so, so much for having me on this morning,' McCammond said in response, 'It's so good to see you, even though we're not together in person.

'And I appreciate you even asking that question. The last few weeks have been really painful, to be sure, not just for me, but for many folks in the AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) community and others who were hurt by all of this.

'And I totally understand that,' she said. 'And I'm just really grateful to have the opportunity to be reporting again on the issues that I care about, to really try to lift up minority voices and the voices of folks from marginalized communities who might not get the coverage that they deserve otherwise.'

McCammond then shared her report about black female politicians to watch ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. It also appeared on the Know Your Value section of NBC News's website.

Know Your Value is inspired by a self-help book of the same name written by Brzezinski, and is described as 'an empowered community helping women to grow their career, form healthy habits and reach their full potential.'

'I became a journalist to help lift up the stories and voices of our most vulnerable communities,' McCammond said in a statement back in March. 'As a young woman of color, that's part of the reason I was so excited to lead the Teen Vogue team in its next chapter.'

Prior to the Teen Vogue outcry, McCammond was named 'Emerging Black Journalist of the Year' by the National Association of Black Journalists in 2019.

She covered Joe Biden's presidential campaign as a reporter for politics website Axios, and was serving as a contributor for NBC and MSNBC, before she was offered the editor-in-chief position at Teen Vogue.

But just two weeks later, officials for Conde Nast, which owns Teen Vogue, announced that she had resigned in light of racist tweets she wrote in 2011.

Bosses initially resisted calls to fire McCammond, but were spooked when advertisers including Ulta Beauty withdrew ads from Teen Vogue over the appointment.

They included a message saying 'Outdone by Asian #whatsnew,' another that read 'now googling how not to wake up with swollen Asian eyes,' and a third tweet attacking a 'stupid Asian T.A.' (teaching assistant)

'After speaking with Alexi this morning, we agreed that it was best to part ways, so as to not overshadow the important work happening at Teen Vogue,' Stan Duncan, the chief people officer at Conde Nast, which owns Teen Vogue, said in an internal email obtained by The New York Times as her departure was announced.

At around the same time, McCammond took to Twitter saying she 'decided to part ways with Conde Nast.'

'My past tweets have overshadowed the work I've done to highlight the people and issues that I care about - issues that Teen Vogue has worked tirelessly to share with the world - and so Conde Nast and I have decided to part ways,' she wrote.

'I should not have tweeted what I did and I have taken full responsibility for that.'

Diana Tsui, the editor director for food magazine The Infatuation, found her old tweets and posted them on Instagram when she was announced as the new editor in chief for Teen Vogue

McCammond had previously apologized for the tweets in 2019 and deleted them.

Diana Tsui, the editor director for food magazine The Infatuation, however, managed to find the tweets and post them to her Instagram, saying 'Let's talk about Conde Nast HR and this questionable hire for Teen Vogue EIC.'

Within days, more than 20 staff members at Teen Vogue used their personal social media accounts to say they had made a complaint to company leaders about McCammond's hiring in light of these tweets.

When she heard this, McCammond once again apologized, writing on Twitter, 'There's no excuse for perpetuating those awful stereotypes in any way. I am so sorry to have used such hurtful and inexcusable language.'

McCammond had been vetted before Conde Nast hired her, The New York Times reports, and top executives were aware of the tweets.

Anna Wintour, chief content officer and global editorial director of Vogue, allegedly discussed them with leaders of color in the company before offering her the job.

Conde Nast officials told The New York Times they were not aware of a photo circulating on right-wing media of McCammond, right, in a Native American costume for Halloween

The Conde Nast executives decided to overlook them, a company executive told the Times, because they felt she was 'an impressive candidate' and 'her 2019 apology showed she had learned from her mistakes.'

They did not, however, know of another photo that circulated on right-wing media showing McCammond wearing a Native American costume at a Halloween party because it had been deleted.

Her boyfriend TJ Ducklo, 32, was hit with his own scandal after being forced to resign as the White House's deputy press secretary in February over threats to a female reporter.

The couple initially met in 2019, when McCammond began covering President Joe Biden's presidential campaign for Axios. At the time, Ducklo was Biden's press secretary.

Ducklo, who has battled stage four lung cancer, stepped down after it emerged he'd threatened to 'destroy' Politico reporter Tara Palmeri.

He issued the threat after Palmeri she contacted him about his romance with McCammond during last year's presidential campaign and highlighted the potential conflict of interest.

McCammond's boyfriend TJ Ducklo, 32, (right) was hit with his own scandal after being forced to resign as the White House's deputy press secretary in February over threats to a female reporter

McCammond was working for Axios, covering Joe Biden's campaign for president, when she was offered the editor in chief position at Teen Vogue

Teen Vogue social media manager Christine Davitt, pictured, came under fire for her use of racist language in the wake of McCammond's departure

Versha Sharma, pictured, has since been announced as McCammond's replacement at Teen Vogue

After McCammond's departure, Teen Vogue was hit by a second hypocrisy scandal after racist tweets by social media editor Christine Davitt emerged.

In May, the company announced that it had hired Versha Sharma from NowThis News to be its new top editor.

Sharma has worked at NowThis since 2014, as managing editor of the social media-focused news organization. In addition to overseeing daily news, video and social platforms, she directed US election coverage over four election cycles, according to Conde Nast.

Her appointment took effect on May 24.
Boris Johnson today attempted to make light of the so-called 'sausage war' row between the UK and the EU as he joked to Angela Merkel that the 'wurst is behind us'.

Mr Johnson and Mrs Merkel discussed the UK's post-Brexit relationship with the bloc this afternoon during talks at Chequers.

The German Chancellor said she and the Prime Minister talked about the implementation of the contentious Northern Ireland Protocol and she expressed optimism that 'pragmatic solutions' can be agreed to smooth border checks.

Britain and Brussels agreed a truce this week on one of the thorniest issues relating to the protocol: The export of chilled meat from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

EU rules would effectively ban those exports but the two sides have agreed to extend a grace period to the end of September to allow shipments to continue and to provide more time to find a permanent solution.

Mr Johnson said that 'with goodwill and with patience we can sort it out'.

Boris Johnson today attempted to make light of the so-called 'sausage war' row between the UK and the EU as he joked to Angela Merkel that the 'wurst is behind us'

Mr Johnson and Mrs Merkel discussed the UK's post-Brexit relationship with the bloc this afternoon during talks at Chequers

Speaking alongside Mrs Merkel at a press conference, Mr Johnson said: 'Imagine if bratwurst could not be moved from Dortmund to Dusseldorf because of the jurisdiction of an international court  you'd think it was absolutely extraordinary.

'So we have to sort it out. I'm sure, as Angela says, with goodwill and with patience we can sort it out.

'Hopefully, as we said at our bilateral, when it comes to chilled meats the wurst is behind us, as I think Angela said, or maybe I said that.'

The potential prohibition on chilled meats from Great Britain is one result of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which has created a series of economic barriers in the Irish Sea.

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 generally banned  a prohibition which will eventually cover the rest of the UK unless a lasting solution is found.

Mrs Merkel said: 'Of course we talked about the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

'I personally believe that on the basis of this Protocol, and within the framework of how it was negotiated, we can find pragmatic solutions that on the one hand maintain the integrity of the single market, but that will also on the other hand contribute to creating acceptable solutions for the people.

'It is obviously understandable that this was prolonged, and I think it's a good thing that it was prolonged for another few months, and I think it should be possible for all of us to come to a pragmatic solution within this grace period.

'And I think I'm optimistic that this can happen.'
A billionaire arms dealer has been ordered to pay his ex-girlfriend more than 120,000 after sacking her when she refused to become his 'sex slave'.

Edward Banayoti, 56, had a brief relationship with the woman two years before he emailed her 'out of the blue' to offer her the role of senior executive assistant - a job based in Washington DC.

The founder of Defence Unlimited International went on to tell the British woman he was still attracted to her, asked if he could sneak into her room and made jokes about making her pregnant.

The Canadian businessman is the former brother-in-law of King Abdullah II of Jordan thanks to a six-month-long marriage to his sister Princess Aisha bint Hussein.

The Central London Employment Tribunal sided with the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and found in her favour on claims of sexual harassment, direct discrimination based on sex, victimisation and breach of contract against the businessman and two of his companies.

Edward Banayoti (pictured), 56, had a brief relationship with the woman two years before he emailed her 'out of the blue' to offer her the role of senior executive assistant - a job based in Washington DC

Mr Banayoti was ordered to pay 122,788.32 in compensation and interest to the woman, with the payout including 33,000 for injuries to feelings with a further 8,000 aggravated damages and a 25 per cent overall uplift for failure to apply the ACAS code to try and work through the problems.

Mr Banayoti, who was born Ernest Anderson but changed his name when he converted to Islam, met the woman soon after his 2016 divorce from Princess Aisha, the tribunal was told.

Two years after their relationship ended she received an email from him 'out of the blue', she told the hearing. She claimed it was agreed she should go to the firm's office in Malta instead of the US due to the wait for a visa.

Soon afterwards Mr Banayoti began to make suggestive remarks, the tribunal heard.

She told the tribunal: 'I was very much taken aback* [and] told him I wanted to work in a professional footing. I told him I was not interested in these sexual advances.'

Four days later, the woman's contract was terminated. In her witness statement, she said Mr Banayoti wanted her to be his 'sex slave'.

She said: 'I refused to reciprocate Edward's sexual advances and desire for me to be his sexual object and this was the reason for the termination of my employment.'

Mr Banayoti's solicitors provided images of him and the claimant kissing, but the tribunal heard they were taken during their brief relationship.

He also insisted the woman, a successful businesswoman with a PhD, was nothing but an 'escort'.

The tribunal found Mr Banayoti conducted proceedings in an 'unnecessarily offensive manner', as he claimed he wanted to warn other men about 'the claimant's traps'.

Employment Judge Andrew Glennie struck out Mr Banayoti's defence as 'weak' and denied arguments that claimed Mr Banayoti was unable to pay remedy.

Mr Banayoti asked for the ruling to be overturned but it was denied by an employment judge.

Mr Banayoti's initial listing at Companies House in 2016 valued his business at around 1.5billon. His firm's website says it provides guns, military aircraft and electronic systems to various governments.

The Central London Employment Tribunal (pictured) sided with the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and found in her favour on claims of sexual harassment, direct discrimination based on sex, victimisation and breach of contract against the businessman and two of his companies

Mr Glennie said in his ruling: 'The claimant's employment was short-lived, so this was not a case of discriminatory conduct continuing over a period of years.

'There was, however, significant verbal harassment, the claimant was not paid during her employment and she was dismissed because she rejected [Mr Banayoti's] advances.

'In her fifth witness statement, the claimant stated that she felt belittled by and ashamed of her experience with the respondents and that she had lost confidence and felt less able to trust others.

'She described herself as feeling crushed, devastated and homeless, and that at times she felt suicidal.

The Canadian businessman is the former brother-in-law of King Abdullah II of Jordan thanks to a six-month-long marriage to his sister Princess Aisha bint Hussein (pictured)

'It was particularly upsetting for the claimant to be subjected to sexual advances from [Mr Banayoti] and, when she rejected them, to be dismissed - and dismissed at a time when she had committed herself to the job by giving up her private accommodation.'

The tribunal found Mr Banayoti had conducted proceedings in an 'unnecessarily offensive manner'.

Mr Glennie said: 'Some of the offensive conduct has been directly aimed at the claimant.

'[Mr Banayoti] has repeatedly referred to the claimant's apparent activities as an escort - most recently in his witness statement of 16 March 2021, headed as I have observed with the claimant's name - without showing how these may be relevant to the issues to be decided.

'He also said that he wanted to warn other men about what he described as "the claimant's traps".

'There is also a wider sense in which the Respondents' conduct of the litigation merits criticism and has added insult to injury.'

The judge concluded: '[Mr Banayoti] was, as an individual, responsible for all of the acts of discrimination.

'He was also responsible for the conduct of the litigation. He should therefore be personally liable for these elements.'

The payout was made against Mr Banayoti as well as Defence International Limited (London) and Defence International Limited (Ottawa).
President Biden admitted that more lives will be lost to the Delta variant of COVID-19, even as he encouraged Americans to enjoy their Fourth of July holiday weekend.

Delivering an optimistic message at the White House on positive jobs numbers, he struck an uneasy balance as he warned of more COVID deaths ahead but played down worries that the Delta variant would turn back the clock to the worst days of the pandemic.

'I am concerned that people who have not gotten vaccinated have the capacity to catch the variant and spread the variant to other people who have not been vaccinated,' he said.

'I am not concerned there's going to be a major outbreak, in other words that we're going to have another major epidemic nationwide, but I am concerned that lives will be lost.'

President Biden said: 'I am not concerned there's going to be a major outbreak, in other words that we're going to have another major epidemic nationwide, but I am concerned that lives will be lost'

AAA is forecasting that more than 47.7 million Americans will take to the roads and skies over the weekend as families prepare to enjoy the holiday in pre-pandemic numbers.

Local officials in several states, such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi and Nevada, are reporting an increase in cases of COVID-19 ahead of July 4 weekend

Health experts blame the Indian 'Delta' variant spreading, making up 26.1% of new cases in the country and as many as 77% of cases in some states

He was speaking as Americans prepared to celebrate Independence Day in numbers not seen since before the pandemic, at cookouts, family reunions and fireworks parties.

The president plans to host more than 1000 people - including first responders and troops - at the White House for a party celebrating a 'summer of freedom.'

According to AAA, more than 47.7 million Americans will take to the roads and skies over the weekend, in a return to pre-pandemic numbers.

Yet health officials have sounded the alarm at vaccinated and unvaccinated people mingling at large gatherings as the Delta variant spreads rapidly in the U.S.

They fear it could undo some of the progress made this year.

The latest figures show an average of about 12,000 new cases and 250 deaths every day.

And the country has yet to reach the target of delivering one vaccine dose to 70 percent of adults by July 4.

Biden urged the hesitant to get vaccinated in the hope that next year's celebrations could be even better.

'For those of you who haven't been vaccinated, because you don't think you want to go through it, it doesn't hurt, it's accessible, it's free, it's available,' he said.

'Don't think about yourself, think about your family, think about those around you.

'That's what we should be thinking about so the Fourth of July this year is different to the Fourth of July last year. It's going to be better next year.'

Many states where COVID-19 cases are rising have fully vaccinated less than 45% of their populations - which is below the national average

The Delta variant was first spotted in India. It carries a cluster of mutations, including one that enables it to infect human cells more easily.

Its increased infectivity has triggered a fresh wave of lockdowns around the world.

In the United Kingdom, it now accounts for almost 100 percent of new cases.

And it has now been detected in every state of the U.S., with South Dakota being the last to report a case linked to the strain, and Washington, DC - and, in some areas, it makes up more than three-quarters of all new infections.

Arkansas is one of the states to see cases surge with a 202 percent rise from an average of 234 cases per day to 707 per day over the last two weeks, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins data.

'We are now going in the wrong direction yet again with COVID10-19 infections here in the state of Arkansas,' said Dr Cam Patterson, chancellor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, during a briefing on Tuesday.
Marks & Spencer is set to be the first UK supermarket to stop selling unnaturally-fast grown fresh chicken after a probe unveiled the shocking conditions such birds live in.

The British supermarket giant has become the first in the country to pledge to replace its fast-grown fresh chicken with slower breeds by next year.

And in a further promise and major boost to British farmers, M&S said all the chicken it sells will come from homegrown farms that use slower growth methods and are backed by the RSPCA.

A 2019 report by the Times revealed how the fast-growing chickens, developed using genetic selection, were buckling under their own went and would spend their final days lame and in pain.

M&S beat out competition from rival retailer Waitrose and other High Street luminaries such as Greggs, Nando's, KFC and Pizza Express - who have all signed the 'better chicken commitment' that promises better welfare for the birds.

Chicken remains Britain's most popular bird, with more than 2.7million of them eaten daily.

Marks & Spencer is set to be the first UK supermarket to stop selling unnaturally-fast grown fresh chicken after a probe unveiled the shocking conditions such birds live in

Marks & Spencer signed the 'Better Chicken Commitment' - an industry-wide pledge to better protect the welfare of birds - in 2017.

While most UK chickens are bred with the expectation of gaining almost 100 grams in weight each day for just over a month, slower-growing and less profitable breeds tend to be slaughtered at 56 days.

The Times reports that the growth rates of UK chickens have nearly quadrupled over the last half century from 25g per day.

After the news broke, a host of industry leaders praised the supermarket's newest announcement and called on other retailers to follow the 'landmark' move.

Chris Sherwood, RSPCA chief executive, explained that the move by M&S was a 'landmark achievement for animal welfare'.

'By simply switching to using only slower growing breeds of chicken, retailers can make an enormous difference to the lives and welfare of millions of chickens reared in this country every year for their meat.'

Dr Tracey Jones, Director of Food Business at Compassion in World Farming said: 'We applaud M&S for being the first retailer to sign up to the Better Chicken Commitment, the first to start transitioning supply, and the first to roll out product on shelf with their 'Oakham Gold' fresh chicken.

Marks & Spencer signed the 'Better Chicken Commitment' - an industry-wide pledge to better protect the welfare of birds - in 2017. [File picture]

'Making commitments across the entire supply is a major step towards higher welfare chicken becoming a baseline standard, however concrete plans and contracts with suppliers are imperative to move the market forwards.

'Companies that have made the Better Chicken Commitment must start their transition now and those that are yet to sign up need to get on board.

'M&S are leading the UK market and we urge others to follow suit if we are to succeed in achieving genuine change for chickens.'
A man has been accused of firing four shots from a gun he smuggled into his cell during a stop and search - which allegedly murdered Sergeant Matt Ratana.

Louis de Zoysa, 23, discharged one bullet into Sgt Ratana's chest, one into his leg, and another caused a life-threatening wound in his own neck.

He smuggled the gun into a holding cell at Croydon Custody Centre in the early hours of September 25, 2020.

De Zoysa has been in hospital under police guard since the killing, but was charged with the murder last Tuesday evening.

On Wednesday, de Zoysa appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court via video link from his hospital bed and used a whiteboard to show his name and date of birth rather than speaking.

Louis de Zoysa (pictured in his hospital bed), 23, discharged one bullet into Sergeant Matt Ratana's chest, one into his leg, and another caused a life-threatening wound in his own neck

On Friday he appeared at the Old Bailey, again by video link, but was sitting up in a chair flanked by two medical workers.

Judge Mark Lucraft, the Recorder of London, listed the case for a plea hearing on September 17.

The court heard New Zealand-born Sgt Ratana was allegedly shot and killed by De Zoysa after he was arrested following a stop and search in Norwood, south London.

De Zoysa has been in hospital under police guard since the killing, but was charged with the murder last Tuesday evening. Pictured, Sgt Ratana

The court heard New Zealand-born Sgt Ratana (pictured with Commissioner Cressida Dick) was allegedly shot and killed by De Zoysa after he was arrested following a stop and search in Norwood, south London

Sgt Ratana was taken to St Georges Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead, while De Zoysa survived after he was treated by officers and London Ambulance staff.

Scotland Yard said the decision to charge De Zoysa was made after recent changes to his medical condition.

Judge Lucraft refused De Zoysa bail, remarking that he would be held in prison until the end of the case if he were to become well enough to be discharged from hospital.
Australia is slowly cutting itself off from the world after the government announced it will halve the number of people allowed to enter the country, as it struggles to contain the Indian coronavirus variant that has plunged millions into lockdown.

With 12 million Australians - nearly half the population - now under stay-at-home orders, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said quotas for overseas arrivals would be cut by around 50 per cent to help prevent further outbreaks.

It comes as the new lockdown rules were announced earlier this week as cases of the Indian variant have flared up across the country after escaping from quarantine hotels.

Under the current 'zero Covid' strategy, just 6,000 people are allowed to enter Australia on overseas commercial flights each week and arrivals must undergo two weeks of hotel quarantine.

That quota will be cut to around 3,000 by the middle of July, Morrison indicated, although the government will at the same time step up its private repatriation flights.

Australia is slowly cutting itself off from the world after the government announced it will halve the number of people allowed to enter the country, as it struggles to contain the Indiant coronavirus variant that has plunged millions into lockdown. Pictured: Passengers line up to check in at Sydney Airport on June 23

With 12 million Australians - nearly half the population - now under stay-at-home orders, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said quotas for overseas arrivals would be cut by around 50 per cent to help prevent further outbreaks

Morrison announced the decision amid growing anger over repeated snap lockdowns, the leakiness of hotel quarantine facilities and what critics have dubbed a vaccine 'stroll out'.

'This is a difficult time when people are dealing with restriction,' Morrison said. 'There is still quite a journey ahead of us.'

More than 18 months into the pandemic, less than eight per cent of adults have been fully vaccinated and with the infectious Indian variant on the loose, Australia's vaunted 'zero Covid' strategy is on precarious ground.

On Thursday, Australians in New South Wales, where there are now 263 active Covid cases, were pictured queuing to get vaccinated as the country plays catch up.

A long line formed outside the NSW Vaccination Centre in Sydney, with all of those waiting wearing face masks.

Sydney and Brisbane - home to around 10 million people combined - remain in lockdown in an effort to suppress outbreaks that delivered 27 new local cases on Thursday.

Although shutdowns are being lifted in Alice Springs, Darwin, Perth and Queensland's Gold Coast, the clusters continue to grow, particularly in Sydney.

There, a Bondi cluster has infected 188 people since being discovered on June 16.

On Thursday, Australians in New South Wales, where there are now 263 active Covid cases, were pictured queuing to get vaccinated as the country plays catch up

A long line formed outside the NSW Vaccination Centre in Sydney, with all of those waiting wearing face masks

Reaction to the tighter border restrictions was mixed, with the opposition centre-left Labor welcoming the move, but human rights groups expressing concern.

'This reduction in international arrivals is devastating news for the more than 34,000 Australians still stranded overseas and their families,' said Sophie McNeill of Human Rights Watch.

'Australia has heavily restricted entry of its own citizens in a way that no other democratic nation has. But we need to remember that all Australians have a right of return to their own country.'

In an attempt to address growing anger at the prospect of border restrictions stretching into a second year, Morrison previewed a 'new deal' that would shift the country's strategy from suppressing coronavirus to managing it.

The government, he said, would soon adopt a series of vaccination targets which, when reached, would allow the gradual opening of borders and a return to normal life.

He indicated borders would open first for vaccinated Australians and overseas travellers, who could also be subject to reduced quarantine requirements.

Scott Morrison indicated borders would open first for vaccinated Australians and overseas travellers, who could also be subject to reduced quarantine requirements

The vaccination targets are likely to be set by scientific advisors rather than politicians.

'If you get vaccinated, you get to change how we live as a country, you get to change how you live in Australia,' Morrison said.

Before the pandemic began, around 260,000 people entered Australia each week, and citizens were free to travel overseas.

Morrison has urged Australians to get vaccinated amid the spread of the infectious Delta variant and has backtracked on his earlier advice that people under 40 should not get the AstraZeneca jab.

On Thursday, it emerged that one in five Covid jabs in Australia are going spare due to a lack of interest in getting vaccinated.

The most recent Covid-19 rollout update has shown that 19 per cent of vaccine doses available to the states have not yet been used, with Western Australia have the most jabs going spare.

These are intended to be used in aged care and disability homes, as well as for GPs to give to the elderly.

Morrison, who is under fire for the glacial vaccine roll-out, constant 'circuit breakers' and brutal border restrictions, chaired a national security committee on Monday before announcing that all care home workers must have a vaccine.

The PM also ordered mandatory jabs for anyone working, either directly or indirectly, in quarantine hotels - including airport private hire drivers.

Morrison made another policy shift as he invited anyone under 40 to get an AstraZeneca jab if they want to, despite earlier advice that younger people should get another vaccine amid the slight health risks related to the jab.

But the ever-changing advice on the safety of the AstaZeneca jab, and the fact that the alternative Pfizer jab is in short supply, has meant very few Australians have been fully vaccinated.

People are seen queued to receive their vaccination at the NSW Vaccine Centre in Sydney today

Australians are forming long queues as they line up to get their Covid-19 vaccines after the country's slow roll-out and a reluctance to use the AstaZeneca jab has left less than eight per cent of the population vaccinated

AstraZeneca had been recommended for all adults until a 48-year-old Australian died from blood clots in April. The vaccine was then recommended for people older than 50 until a 52-year-old died in May.

Many people are refusing to take their second AstraZeneca jab, recommended three months after the first, because of the evolving safety advice. Many have canceled appointments for their first shots.

The leader of the Australian military's pandemic response, Lt. Gen. John Frewen, said Pfizer was restricted to people older than 40 because of limited supplies.

'It's really important that Australians have now got a choice about whether they make an informed decision about accessing AstraZeneca,' Frewen said on Thursday.

'We've got AstraZeneca available and I think Australians who want to should be able to have a conversation with their G.P. about whether they access AstraZeneca now or whether they wait for another vaccine later on,' Frewen added, referring to general practice doctors.

But fewer than 3,000 adults under 40 had taken up the opportunity for a first dose of AstraZeneca by Thursday.

Queensland state Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young was accused by critics of scaremongering when she said on Wednesday that with only 42 coronavirus cases active in the state, AstraZeneca was not worth the risk for younger adults.

'I don't want an 18-year-old in Queensland dying from a clotting illness who, if they got COVID, probably wouldn't die,' Young said.

She was contradicted by former Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Australia Nick Coates, who said younger Australians were at greater risk of dying of COVID-19 than they were from AstraZeneca side effects.

Young was 'unfortunately out on a very lonely limb there,' Coates told Seven Network.

But Prof. Chris Blyth, the co-chair of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunization that advised the government to recommend Pfizer for those younger than 60, said few young adults should take AstraZeneca.

'I do not believe at this stage that young people should be receiving AstraZeneca at this stage unless their circumstances press for that,' Blyth told Australian Broadcasting Corp. 'There are some situations where that would be warranted, but they are quite small.'

The alternative to AstraZeneca is to wait for more Pfizer or an as-yet-unregistered Moderna vaccine contracted to be delivered between October and December.

The situation in Australia could get worse if people are still unsure about getting vaccinated.

Over the past week, leaders in New South Wales, Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory have imposed crippling lockdowns with 204 cases nationwide while South Australia and the ACT mandated masks without any Covid-19 infections.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has come under fire for the glacial vaccine rollout. Pictured: Queues outside at a mass COVID-19 vaccination hub in Sydney

The situation is a far cry from the vision Mr Morrison outlined in a press conference on February 5 when he suggested lockdowns may not be needed in three months' time.

'Right now, a breakout of a case has a particular context. Three months from now, when vaccinations are occurring, where there is a downward pressure on the risk of serious, serious illness, then the risk is different. And so it is about trying to recalibrate,' he said in his Parliament House courtyard.

A month after that, Mr Morrison gave the same message in a speech at the Australian Financial Review Business Summit in Sydney.

'With sufficient vaccination of the population, we can start treating Covid like a bad flu,' he said.

'And if we can continue to manage new strains of the virus, this changing risk profile will allow for controls to be further relaxed, as we recently discussed at National Cabinet.'

Unfortunately for the Prime Minister - and the whole country - his two biggest fears came true.

Not enough people have been vaccinated and the new Indian Delta variant has spooked state premiers because it is much harder to manage than earlier strains.

Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr Jeannette Young said on Wednesday it was 'impossible to control'.

Furthermore, most Australians have shown no appetite to live alongside the virus, instead favouring strong border controls and voting for pro-lockdown state premiers like WA's Mark McGowan.

Even New Zealand, which only uses Pfizer, is now ahead of Australia, with 10.7 per cent vaccinated.

Mr Morrison has insisted the supply issues and changing medical advice were 'beyond the government's control'.

But 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.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said the government has always followed the advice of medical experts when signing vaccine deals.

Australia has been relatively successful in containing clusters throughout the pandemic, registering fewer than 31,000 cases and 910 deaths total.

Australia introduced extraordinarily tough border restrictions in March 2020 that prevent Australian citizens and permanent residents from leaving the country as well as foreigners from arriving except under limited circumstances.

The government forecasts that normal flights won't resume until mid-2022, which frightens business groups.

Those involved in international education, Australia's third-largest export industry, have warned that would mean overseas students would turn to universities in other countries next year and stay with those institutions throughout their courses for years.
The partner of a Canadian socialite who is facing trial in Belize after the shooting of a police chief has denied he ever prevented her from seeing their children.

A statement from Andrew Ashcroft, 43, in which he reportedly never told his former partner Jasmine Hartin that she could not see their children, has been shared by local media outlets while the mother-of-two prepares for her manslaughter trial.

In the full three page statement, believed to have been shared with police before being released on social media, Mr Ashcroft recalls his version of events from June 22 and claims Hartin has made 'unreasonable demands'.

The statement reads: 'At no time have I told Jasmine that she cannot see her children.'

On June 22, an explosive video in which 32-year-old wealthy socialite Hartin lambasted the youngest son of Lord Ashcroft, and accused him of refusing her access to the couple's children, was made public.

Hartin was released on bail earlier this week as she awaits trial for shooting Superintendent Henry Jemmott, a father-of-five, with his own service pistol in May, which she says was an accident.

In an interview with 7 News Belize, Hartin said the Ashcroft family was told to 'distance' themselves from her, adding that she wasn't allowed to speak to her infant twins while she was in Belize Central Prison.

In an interview with 7 News Belize , Hartin said the Ashcroft family was told to 'distance' themselves from her, adding that she wasn't allowed to speak to her infant twins while she was in Belize Central Prison

Hartin was released on bail earlier this week as she awaits trial for shooting Superintendent Henry Jemmott (above), a father-of-five, with his own service pistol in May, which she says was an accident

Jasmine Hartin filmed on her cell phone as she chased Andrew Ashcroft, the son of influential British billionaire, Lord Michael Ashcroft. Why wont you let me see the kids Andrew? Why wont you let me see the children? Hartin, 32, says as she confronts Ashcroft in a hotel kitchen

The couple have been embroiled in a bitter public row since Hartin was charged with manslaughter in the Caribbean hotspot of Belize earlier this year.

Jasmine Hartin claimed no-one from the family of her former partner Andrew Ashcroft visited her while she was on bail over the shooting because they had been told they couldn't have 'bad press associated with their reputation'.

Speaking to 7 News Belize's Cherisse Halsall, Hartin said the Ashcroft family was told to 'distance' themselves from her, adding that she wasn't allowed to speak to her infant twins while she was in Belize Central Prison.

She said although she has had a 'complicated' seven-year relationship with Ashcroft - the son of Lord Ashcroft - with many 'ups and downs', she has been 'shocked' about the Ashcroft family's treatment of her since her arrest.

Her public interview followed the release of an eye-opening video in which she filmed on her cell phone as she chased Andrew Ashcroft, the youngest son of influential British billionaire, Lord Michael Ashcroft.

MailOnine understands the clash took place at the luxurious Alaia Hotel which Hartin ran with her common law husband before she accidentally gunned down Jemmott, 42, last month on a secluded pier in San Pedro island.

Why wont you let me see the kids Andrew? Why wont you let me see the children? Hartin, 32, says as she confronts Ashcroft in a hotel kitchen.

The full three-page statement, reportedly signed off by Andrew Ashcroft, was released by local media outlet 7 News Belize today

Within it, Ashcroft reportedly denies preventing Hartin access to their children and says she has made 'unreasonable demands'

The statement bears a signature purported to be that of Mr Ashcroft, who has been embroiled in a bitter public row with ex-partner Jasmine Hartin

Hartin and Ashcroft with their children in happier times at Belize's first Marriott Luxury Resort

Why are you stopping me from being at my house and seeing my kids Andrew? You dont want to be on camera? Why are you keeping my children from me Andrew? You lied to my whole family. Let me see my children.

Today, a three page post was shared by 7 News Belize's Facebook page that claims to be a statement signed off by Ashcroft himself on June 25.

Early reports suggest it was a statement provided to investigating officers with Belizean police as part of their enquiries.

Within it, Ashcroft reportedly refutes the suggestion that he prevented Hartin from having access to their twin children, Elle and Charlie, and claims she has made 'unreasonable demands'.

He also provides excruciating detail of the events of June 22 - the day of the video that saw him accused of refusing her access to her children.

The statement reads: 'At no time have I told Jasmine that she cannot see her children.

'When she was situated in the Cayo district after being granted bail, I flew the children all the way from San Pedro there to spend several hours with her.

'The following week I again arranged to have the children flown over to see her, only to discover that she had abandoned the residence I had arranged for her.

'I have explained to Jasmine that we have to agree on dates, time and place convenient to all of us where she can see the children.

'Instead, she insists on making unreasonable demands, showing up without prior notification and alerts the media.'

Hartin is awaiting trial for shooting Supt Jemmott with his own service pistol last month.

Jemmott, a highly-rated officer tipped as a future leader of his country's police force, was struck behind his right ear by a 9mm round from his own Glock 17 service pistol.

According to a criminal complaint he had been 'socializing' and drinking alone with Hartin on a secluded hotel pier in Ambergris Caye, a tropical island haven for millionaire expats.

A security guard heard a 'loud bang' at 12.45am and police arrived to find Canadian national Hartin 'covered in red substance as that of blood' and Jemmott, 42, floating dead on his back 30ft from the shore.
The former partner of an ex-Miss Scotland finalist has been sentenced to nearly 15 years in jail for her attempted murder.

State prosecutors asked trial judges to cage William McDonald for eight years if they convicted him of the brutal stabbing of Mhairi Campbell following a one-day trial at a court in Alicante last month.

Today it emerged he had been handed a 14-year, 11-month prison sentence after the three judges sided with a private lawyer acting for Mhairi who said his July 19 2017 crime warranted a stiffer punishment.

They agreed 61-year-old McDonald had sought to minimise his victim's ability to defend herself and increase his chances of hurting her, making him guilty of a crime of attempted murder under Spanish law and not attempted homicide which carries a shorter sentence in Spain.

In a written 22-page sentence issued by Alicante Provincial Court's First Section, lead trial judge Jose Antonio Dura Carrillo ruled: 'The attack on the victim was a surprise one when she had her back turned to the accused and it consisted of an initial stabbing to her side followed by another one to her left arm when she was on the floor and saw her attacker with the knife.

'The weapon used was capable of causing death and the area where the stabbings occurred put the victim's life at risk.

'There is no doubt about the defendant's wish to kill his victim and not just injure her.'

He added: 'It should be noted that even though the result of death sought by the accused did not prosper, everything that should have caused it occurred including his use of the means to bring it about.

William McDonald, 61, was today handed a 14-year, 11-month prison sentence at Alicante Provisional Court (pictured) for the attempted murder of his ex-partner Mhairi Campbell

'The fact it didn't occur was for reasons outside his control.'

East Kilbride-born Mhairi split with McDonald, from Rutherglen near Glasgow, around two weeks before the stabbing following a five-year relationship.

It occurred at her holiday home in Rojales near Torrevieja in the early hours of July 19 2017 after he showed up despite a restraining order and they began to row.

The court sentencing document said it had been proven Mhairi was attacked after asking him to leave the property when he started shouting at her and demanding money.

After stabbing her McDonald asked her if she wanted to write a letter to her daughter as she lay bleeding and in agony on her bed, before proceeding to clean the crime scene with bleach and flee without alerting the authorities.

Mhairi was saved by neighbours who called 999. She spent several days in hospital recovering from her injuries, was left scarred for life and has suffered post-traumatic stress as well as depression as a result of the attack.

McDonald's claims during his trial that he was not even with his ex the night she was knifed, and was instead on a street bench because he had been ordered not to go to Mhairi's place, were rubbished by the judges.

They also threw out his claim his victim had blamed him for the attack because she was a 'professional fraudster.'

Mhairi split with McDonald around two weeks before the stabbing following a five-year relationship. It occurred at her holiday home in Rojales near Torrevieja in the early hours of July 19 2017 after he showed up despite a restraining order and they began to row

Neighbours told the trial they had seen McDonald coming out of the house with a suitcase the night of the stabbing after hearing shouting in English and heard Mhairi calling for help.

As well as his prison sentence, the Scot has been given a 24-year restraining order which stops him going within 500 metres of his victim.

He has also been ordered to pay his victim more than 20,000 in compensation for the injuries he inflicted on her.

Mhairi, 60, complained earlier this year she had been trapped in Spain for five months after travelling to the Costa Blanca to give evidence against her former partner before the case was delayed.

She said she was 'stranded' because she couldn't afford to quarantine under Covid rules if she returned to Scotland and could be barred re-entry to Spain if she did return.

Speaking ahead of the detention on a European Arrest Warrant of McDonald in July 2017 after ten months on the run, Mhairi told the Sunday Mail as she recalled the knife attack: 'I was right at the door when I felt something very cold hit my back. I fell to the floor.

'Then he stabbed me again, in the arm. That was when I realised the cold sharpness I felt was the knife.

'I kept begging him to get me help. I told him I'd tell the police it was an accident but he still said no. So I asked him to go, told him to run - anything to get him out of the apartment.

'Eventually, that's what he did.

'As soon as he was gone, I started screaming for help.

'He said he'd call an ambulance from a pay phone but he never did.

'My neighbour saved my life. She heard me and called for help.'

Mhairi, who had emergency surgery for internal bleeding and also suffered damage to her spleen and broken ribs, gave evidence via video-link at McDonald's June 16 trial. He had been held in prison since his arrest in the UK and extradition to Spain.

Retired department store account manager Mhairi made the Miss Scotland finals in 1978 and later moved to Hollywood to work as a nanny for a film producer.

She is said to have suffered problems with alcohol she has worked hard to overcome and suffered a mini-stroke recently.
A Texas mother living near the Mexico border has revealed the migrant crisis has become so bad that she is too scared to let her children play outside.

Alison Anderson, who recently moved to the Texas border town of Del Rio with her family, told 'Fox and Friends' Friday that the situation has been getting worse over the last six months.

'Three nights ago, there was a group at our next-door neighbor's house circling the vehicles and tapping on their daughter's bedroom window,' Anderson said.

'I have neighbors constantly calling me  elderly neighbors, specifically  that are concerned and fearful.'

'It was peaceful for a while,' she said. 'I was actually enjoying having peace of mind and allowing our kids to play outside, but they can't do that anymore.'

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem announced earlier this week she is sending the National Guard to the southern border in response to the recent influx of migrants from Central America.

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Alison Anderson (pictured) who recently moved to Del Rio, Texas, with her family, says that she is constantly worried for the safety of her three daughters amid the worsening border crisis

A group of migrants, mainly from Venezuela, wade through the Rio Grande as they cross the US-Mexico border on Wednesday as overall migration swells

However, MSNBC host Joy Reid slammed the move while insisting that the migrant issue is a 'nonexistent crisis' in a debate segment with Noem on Thursday. =

Reid lambasted Noem and like-minded politicians for pandering to the MAGA crowd after the South Dakota governor made the announcement on Tuesday.

'It would appear that our inaugural Absolute Worst is jealous of all the attention that our two record-holders, Republican Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Florida's Ron DeSantis and so she's sending South Dakota's National Guard troops roaming, deploying them to the southern border of Texas, joining MAGA sycophant DeSantis and the governors of Iowa and Nebraska in sending help to the border,' Reid said.

THE ABSOLUTE WORST...@JoyAnnReid on SD Gov. Noem's controversial deployment of SD National Guard to TX: "This is where we've come to. A super-wealthy political donor is paying for American soldiers to deploy on a military mission with political undertones." #TheReidOut #reiders pic.twitter.com/tbmwxeI5Ab  The ReidOut (@thereidout) July 2, 2021

MSNBC's Joy Reid slammed South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for deploying the National Guard to the southern border

A member of the National Guard shines a flashlight on immigrants crossing the Rio Grande into the US on June 19 in Roma, Texas

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was criticized by MSNBC host Joy Reid for deploying the National Guard along the Texas-Mexico border, with Reid calling it a 'nonexistent crisis'

'50 National Guard troops are being deployed in response to Greg Abbott's plea for more border security for a nonexistent crisis.'

Reid also pointed out how Noem's deployment of the National Guard will be privately funded by billionaire Republican donor Willis Johnson.

'So there you have it! This is where we've come to, America!' Reid stated.

'A super-wealthy political donor is paying for American soldiers to deploy on a military mission with political undertones It's certainly not in the best interest of South Dakotans. It's totally political theater.'

But Texans living by the Mexico border face the reality of the migrant issue on a daily basis, according to Anderson, who told Fox that she and her family have encountered illegal immigrants in the area for years.

'It's scary. I want safety. I want something done,' she said.

'I'm grateful for the additional support that we're getting here with law enforcement,' she added. 'I wish Border Patrol was able to go and do their jobs again.'

Billionaire GOP Donor Willis Johnson is funding South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's endeavor to send the South Dakota National Guard to secure the Texas-Mexico border

Pictured: a map highlighting the states that are sending help and resources to the Texas-Mexico border, including Florida, South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa

For Noem, sending the National Guard is the answer to Anderson's plight, saying she is acting on what the Biden administration is failing to do in securing the border.

'Typically, securing the border would be the responsibility of the federal government, but our federal government is not doing their job and we know that we have dangerous people crossing the border,' she told Fox's Lawrence Jones.

'We have a lot of drugs coming into our country. We have a lot of human trafficking going on. The governors of Texas and Arizona have asked us for help. And this is a mission that National Guard is trained and equipped and does with excellence.'

'So when they made the request to me, I started running the protocols asking if we had volunteers in my National Guard that would want to do this mission and had more than I could possibly anticipate,' Noem said.

In a bipartisan move, Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar has backed state Republicans to compel the Biden administration to act on the migrant issue while calling it a 'humanitarian crisis.'
A group of thugs axed down trees, 'intimidated' forestry staff, and 'kicked ducks' while camping at a beauty spot.

Police were called after the group of men were seen damaging environmentally protected areas at Glenmore, Scottish Highlands.

Nearby residents complained about the noise coming from the camp, the extensive litter left behind and the group's fire - which was lit on peaty ground.

Nearby residents complained about the noise coming from the camp, the extensive litter

FLS staff said they also received complaints from distressed visitors about the group kicking ducks

Pictures of the scene show abandoned tents, plastic bags and bottles strewn across the floor and chunks of wood chopped from a nearby tree.

The men were said to have verbally abused Forestry and Land Scotland staff and collected deadwood from environmentally designated areas.

FLS staff said they also received complaints from distressed visitors about the group kicking ducks.

Laura McNally, FLS' area visitor services manager, said: 'Situations such as this can be very intimidating for our staff and I have to commend our Glenmore team for dealing with this so professionally over the course of three days.

'We engaged with the group of young men on Saturday to explain why they had to move their camp and to clarify appropriate behaviours but this fell on deaf ears and was met with abuse. Further engagement met with the same response.

'Police Scotland did attend and the group seemed to comply but simply moved their camp.

'We've also seen other groups put on a show of good behaviour when they have to and we continue to work closely with our local police partners to learn lessons from this event.

'Anti-social behaviour by a small group can spoil a visit for everyone else.

'This is the case no matter where it occurs.

The men were said to have verbally abused Forestry and Land Scotland staff and collected deadwood from environmentally designated areas

'Our rangers will do what they can to manage a situation but public support is vital, especially if the rangers aren't in the area at the time.

'We would encourage members of the public to call Police Scotland on 101 or use the online form.

'Concerted action raises the profile of incidents, provide Police Scotland with a detailed understanding of the issues and provide them with the intelligence they need to marshal their resources appropriately.'

Maree Morrison, recreation ranger for FLS in Glenmore, said: 'It's such a beautiful area and some people simply don't understand what's okay and what's not: we have had real successes.

'We see our role as "here to help" and most of the time it's a great job, speaking to such a diverse crowd.'
A US Marine has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the 2017 hazing death of a Green Beret in Africa.

A military jury returned the verdict on Thursday night after a three-week trial, finding Gunnery Sgt Mario Madera-Rodriguez guilty of manslaughter, hazing, false official statements, conspiracy to commit assault and housebreaking.

Jurors at Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia cleared Madera-Rodriguez of felony murder and burglary stemming from the strangulation death of Army Green Beret Staff Sgt Logan Melgar.

Melgar, 34, had been placed in a chokehold and duct-taped as part of a prank that was meant to teach him a lesson over some perceived slights while he and his attackers served in Mali in June 2017. He lost consciousness and never woke up.

Gunnery Sgt Mario Madera-Rodriguez has found guilty of manslaughter, hazing, false official statements and conspiracy to commit assault for the strangulation death of Staff Sgt Logan Melgar (pictured) in June 2017

Madera-Rodriguez, who was the last of the four servicemen to be convicted in this case, could face up to 10 years when he is sentenced later this month, reported Marine Corps Times.

Had he been convicted of murder, Madera-Rodriguez could have been looking at 20 years behind bars.

The Marine's three co-conspirators have all accepted plea deals. He was the only person charged in Melgar's death to have gone to trial.

Madera-Rodriguez's defense attorney argued during the trial that his client played a minor role in the hazing and should be acquitted.

In May 2019, Adam Matthews, a US Navy SEAL, who was the first of the four servicemen to face a court-martial in this case, was sentenced to one year in military prison

Addressing the jury during closing arguments on Wednesday, Marine Lt. Col. Timothy Kuhn said that the Marine Raider never touched Melgar during the hazing incident in Mali until he tried to help revive him.

'Facts have been manipulated and moved around like a puzzle to fit the governments theory,' Kuhn said.

Madera-Rodriguez, who belongs to a special operations group in the Marines known as the Raiders, was the only one of the four accused men to plead not guilty.

The others, who include another Marine and two Navy SEALS, have already made plea deals with military prosecutors.

Military prosecutors have said the men were angry over Melgars perceived slights during their time in Mali. In particular, some were upset that they missed a party at the French embassy in the capital city of Bamako because Melgar and the others got separated in traffic.

Their plan was to choke Melgar into unconsciousness and then humiliate him while filming it on a phone camera, prosecutors said

Despite the 'text-book' risks and known dangers of such chokeholds, 'they do it anyway,' military prosecutor Benjamin Garcia said Wednesday during his closing argument.

Navy Cmdr. Garcia told the jurors that Madera-Rodriguez chose to get some duct tape to help tie up the Green Beret. And Garcia said Madera-Rodriguez chose to help restrain him while a Navy SEAL applied the chokehold. Melgar died of strangulation.

'They tied him up, and he could not tap out,' Garcia said.

Much of the closing argument from Madera-Rodriguezs defense attorneys was held in closed session because classified information was discussed. But in open court, his attorneys disputed much of the governments case.

Kuhn said that Madera-Rodriguezs task was limited to breaking down Melgars door with a sledge hammer, putting on some music and bringing in two Malian guards who were part of the joke.

Melgar, 34, died in June 2017 in Mali after being placed in a chokehold and duct-taped as part of a prank-gone-wrong meant to punish him for perceived slights

Madera-Rodriguez did not restrain Melgar, Kuhn said.

Kuhn also said that the governments case against Madera-Rodriguez was like 'a house of cards' based on a flawed application of the law.

For instance, Kuhn said that Madera-Rodriguez can only be found guilty of felony murder if hes found guilty of burglary, a charge related to the accusation that the men broke into Melgars room.

But Kuhn said the burglary charge depends on the alleged crime happening at night, which he said it no longer was.

'You dont have night time, you dont have burglary,' Kuhn said. 'You dont have burglary, you dont have felony murder.'

Madera-Rodriguez's conviction comes five months after Chief Petty Officer Tony DeDolph, a member of the elite SEAL Team 6, pleaded guilty to some of the same charges and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

At a plea hearing on January 14, DeDolph offered a detailed account of the night in which he and other servicemembers initiated the prank known as a 'tape job' on Melgar.

DeDolph said said his role in the prank was to cause Melgar to temporarily lose consciousness by placing him in a martial-arts-style chokehold. He said the 'rear naked choke' restricts blood flow in the neck and is used in the military.

'I effectively applied the chokehold as I have done numerous times in training, in combatives, and has been done to me,' DeDolph said.

Melgar lost consciousness in about 10 seconds, but failed to wake up after the typical 30 seconds, the SEAL said.

'Usually by that time, the individual has gotten up,' he said. 'And he did not.'

In May 2019, Adam Matthews, a US Navy SEAL, who was the first of the four servicemen to face a court-martial in this case, was sentenced to one year in military prison after pleading guilty to hazing and assault charges as well as attempts to cover up the crime.

Melgar was described by his colleagues as fearless and 'unflappable' under enemy fire

During his sentencing, Matthews apologized, saying: 'Ive carried the weight of Staff Sgt. Melgars death every minute of every day since that night in Mali.'

Melgar was fearless and 'unflappable' under enemy fire, his colleagues said. He was meticulous when it came to his job, which included finding explosives in Afghanistan at night while bullets struck the trees above him.

His wife, Michelle Melgar, testified that her husband told her about the 'immature' SEALs that he was having trouble with.

In June 2019, Army Staff Sergeant Kevin Maxwell Jr. pleaded guilty to charges including negligent homicide, hazing and making false official statements.

He was sentenced to four years at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
Police probing the murder of a woman found dead in 1994 have released a picture of a figurine found at the scene in a fresh appeal to find her killer.

Shona Stevens, 31, was found with serious head injuries on a footpath in Irvine, North Ayrshire, on the afternoon of November 10 1994. She died in hospital days later.

No-one has been convicted over the killing of Ms Stevens, who had a seven-year-old daughter at the time.

Officers have now released an image of a figurine that was found at the scene during the initial forensic examination.

The toy depicts an overweight man wearing a red waistcoat and blue tie, with black shoes but no trousers.

Police said it could have come off a novelty keyring.

Police probing the murder of a woman found dead in 1994 have released a picture of a figurine (pictured) found at the scene in a fresh appeal to find her killer

No-one has been convicted over the killing of Ms Stevens (pictured), who had a seven-year-old daughter at the time

Detective Inspector Fraser Normansell, of Police Scotland's Major Investigation Team, said: 'We know the item didn't belong to Shona and, while we can't be sure of its origins, we believe it may hold significance to this case.

'Although it was found almost 27 years ago, it's very distinctive and could prove vital to our inquiries. I'm urging anyone with information to come forward and help us get justice for Shona.

'I'm asking anyone who believes they recognise this item or who has any information, no matter how small, to please get in touch.

'We are committed to getting Shona's devastated family the answers they deserve.'

On the day she died, Ms Stevens had visited the Co-op store in Bourtreehill Shopping Centre at around 1pm.

She was last seen alone at about 1.10pm on Towerlands Road.

She was found injured around 200 yards from her home, within a wooded area, at around 1.20pm, near to the rear of Alder Green in the Bourtreehill Park area.
A woman who stalked her concert pianist ex boyfriend and sent him naked pictures of herself after he broke off their six month relationship has avoided jail.

Karl Lutchmayer, 52, ended his six-month relationship with Emily Bentley-Leek, 32, after it became very 'intense' before quickly moving on.

After Bentley-Leek spotted critically-acclaimed concert pianist Mr Lutchmayer's new partner watching him perform at a concert hall, she began sending 'incoherant messages' to him.

Mutual friends warned Mr Lutchmayer that he had an 'unhealthy obsession' with her ex boyfriend.

Initially, messages suggested Bentley-Leek was going to travel to Mr Lutchmayer's home to confront him.

She sent pictures of herself in handcuffs before emailing him her rail ticket from Oxford to Marylebone, where he was based.

Bentley-Leek told Oxford Crown Court she felt compelled to stalk her ex by a supernatural force - despite knowing it was wrong - and had a male voice in her head telling her what to do.

Karl Lutchmayer, 52, (left) ended his six-month relationship with Emily Bentley-Leek, 32, (right) after it became very 'intense' before quickly moving on

Judge Michael Gledhill QC handed her a suspended sentence of 18 months. He also set a restraining order to prevent her contacting the victim and his parents.

Prosecuting counsel Anne-Marie Critchley said: 'On March 5 last year a bag was placed on Mr Lutchmayer's doorstep with a card and various gifts including handcuffs, a mug, a toy elephant, two cakes and a pencil case.

'Some of the messages included a photo of a shrine and nude photos of herself.

'She also sent video clips of herself in her underwear where she was pleading with him to meet her.'

Bentley-Leek called Mr Lutchmayer from different hotels before hanging up the phone.

She even knocked on the door of the home he shared with his new partner before sprinting away, a judge heard.

The stalking escalated when she tracked down the victim's father in the phone book and paid him a visit in a desperate attempt to meet him.

Bentley-Leek, of Herefordshire, told the court: 'I ought to have known my actions were going to cause alarm but it was so far from my intention.

'Now of course I realise, having heard back the messages, that they were a little hyper. They were not sent in aggression but in anxiety and anguish.

'Obviously the relationship has had a big impact on my life. It was a big thing for me, not so much for Karl and it was sad for me.

'I had a male voice in my head telling me what to do. I walked into a bar, I saw the word "Bombardier" and I thought it was telling me to bombard so I sent him 20 questions.

Bentley-Leek told Oxford Crown Court (pictured) she felt compelled to stalk her ex by a supernatural force - despite knowing it was wrong - and had a male voice in her head telling her what to do

'I am truly sorry for the effect this has had, I did not realise I was on a mission to get this peace that I needed.

'I did not have malice, I am a peaceful and compassionate person. My life philosophy is built on compassion.'

Bentley-Leek studied British Politics at the Royal Holloway University of London.

She described herself as a 'passionate writer, tutor and thinker' online, offering her skills as a content writer and teacher of English as a foreign language.

Sitting in the courtroom was victim Mr Lutchmayer alongside the defendant's father, Brad Bentley-Leek, her mother and her best friend.

Mr Bentley-Leek told the judge: 'There are arrangements in place to bring her back to her normal self, she has a large circle of loving friends and family.

'It is an emotional situation for the family and it is my sincerest regret that Karl Lutchmayer has had to go through this.

'We promise we will do everything in our power to make sure we follow your instructions.'

The judge concluded: 'For four months your behaviour towards Karl Lutchmayer caused him serious alarm and distress.

'You were a very troubled young lady at that time, I am very pleased to hear your family is going to take you back home and, with the support of family and friends, you will get back to be the person you were before these events.

'I hope that this is the end of these proceedings and the court will never see you again.

'Somebody like you should never have been here in the first place. This is the end of the dreadful period in your life.'

Mr Lutchmayer explained in a victim impact statement how he suffered horrific nightmares and would wake up in the middle of the night in a state of panic after being stalked by Bentley-Leek for four months.

The 52-year-old explained that the nightmares involved him being stalked, trapped, chased and attacked.

He would sometimes have to get up and check the house was still secure.

In the sentencing hearing Judge Gledhill heard how Mr Lutchmayer made detailed plans of how he would escape if his stalker arrived at his house.

The pianist and lecturer set out clothes for a potential quick getaway, keeping several phones charged-up and even left a pair of shoes by the front door in case of emergency.
Gordon Ramsay has been slammed for making what he called a 'staple local dish' that is actually just what natives describe as rice being stuck to the bottom of a pot.

The British chef made what he thought was a dish called pegao - or crispy rice - as part of his YouTube series Scrambled.

Filming on a Puerto Rican cliff top, he told the camera: 'I'll show you a local , beautiful dish made with left over rice it's called pegao.

'The beauty of this dish is that it's a staple - nothing fancy but the flavor profile is unique.'

Puerto Rican chefs and others slammed his effort, saying pegao is not a dish itself but the word that's used for rice that sticks to the bottom of a pan and goes crispy.

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The British chef made what he thought was a dish called pegao - or crispy rice - as part of his YouTube series Scrambled. Filming on a Puerto Rican cliff top, he told the camera: 'I'll show you a local , beautiful dish made with left over rice it's called pegao

This is what Ramsay made - he called it the 'beautiful, local dish pegao' and he added eggs, chicken and sausage to it

This is what locals say pegao is - the sticky part of rice that's often at the bottom of the pot after it has burned onto it

'This is not pegao. This is a hate crime,' one Twitter user said.

Another said: 'This is not a thing. Pegao is literally the crispy part stuck to the pot after making rice.'

Others fumed that Ramsay didn't seem to have consulted local chefs.

'Did you even bother to consult with Puerto Rican chefs about this recipe?' one said.

In his video, Ramsay first fried all of the ingredients in a pan, then added the rice and flipped it all over onto a plate almost like a frittata.

'It's going to be done, almost like a sticky rice in a cast iron. The secret is beautiful sausage. I've got some cooked chicken in here first.

Puerto Ricans slammed Ramsay for his effort, saying pegao isn't 'a thing' and asking if he even consulted any locals before he made the video

'Now, this is about how do you elevate that?' he said at the start of the video.

He first called the plate an 'elevated' version of a dish in the YouTube caption, but it has since been changed.

Now, the footage is titled: 'Can Gordon Ramsay Make a Puerto Rican Crispy Rice Dish? | Scrambled'.

On YouTube, the comments were slightly more forgiving.

'I'm puertorrican and even I dunno what this dish is. Appreciate the love though,' one commentator said.

He hasn't responded to the criticism of his efforts yet.
Manhattan real estate prices are experiencing a sudden surge, as buyers return to the city and boost demand for extravagant and costly properties, a new report states.

The median resale prices for Manhattan apartments hit $999,000 in the second quarter - an all-time high since before the COVID-19 pandemic hit - according to the report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samue.

Average sale prices in the area rose 12% in the quarter, surpassing $1.9 million.

The buying frenzy comes despite a net 70,000 New Yorkers fleeing the city at the height of the pandemic - costing the city roughly $34 billion in lost income, according to estimates from Unacast.

Wealthy neighborhoods, like Hell's Kitchen and the Upper East Side, saw the biggest exodus with nearly 11% of its residents fleeing, according to research from CRBE. Most of those are young professionals who work in financial hubs of Midtown and the Financial District, as well as creatives working in Broadway Theaters.

According to the report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel, median resale prices for Manhattan apartments hit $999,000 in the second quarter - an all-time high since before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. (Pictured: Morgan House at 153 E 87th St on the Upper East Side which currently has a one-bedroom apartment under contract for $999,000)

Average sale prices in the area rose 12% in the quarter, surpassing $1.9 million. Pictured: Morgan House at 153 E 87th St on the Upper East Side

Mayor Bill de Blasio has since lauded the city's comeback from the pandemic with more than 4.1 million residents fully vaccinated despite a massive spike in violent crime, including a 12% increase in murders. The state lifted its mask mandate and other pandemic restrictions in May.

But while residential properties are being snapped up, 19% of office buildings in Manhattan are still completely vacant. And business leaders have warned that dozens of top companies which operate out of the city's main financial hubs are on the verge of departing for Florida on the back of New York state proposing a $7 billion tax hike.

Among those considering a move to Florida is Goldman Sachs, which maintains its head office at an upscale address in Lower Manhattan.

There was a 150% gain from last year, with 3,417 sales in the second quarter due to restrictions preventing apartments from being shown for much of the quarter, according to the report

The influx in property buying has also led to fewer apartments on the market

Experts say the spike in real estate value indicates that Manhattan real estate is swiftly recovering, as more families look to trade up to larger apartments, while buyers hope to take advantage of lower prices and low mortgage rates.

There was a 150% gain from last year, with 3,417 sales in the second quarter due to restrictions preventing apartments from being shown for much of the quarter, according to the report.

'It's a sign of the frenzy and intensity of the market,' Jonathan Miller, CEO of real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel told CNBC. 'It's rebounding much faster than most participants expected.'

According to Douglas Elliman listings, a two-bedroom apartment, one bathroom apartment in the Upper East Side is currently under contract for $999,000. On the Upper West Side, a second-floor two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment has been sold for $1.08 million. Further south, in Hudson Yards, a corner one-bedroom, one-bath apartment in a 30-floor high-rise, complete with a gym and pool facilities, has also sold for $999,000.

Two other apartments listed on Douglas Elliman sold in Harlem and the Upper West Side also sold for exactly the median price. The Harlem apartment, located on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, is boasts a massive 1,300-square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and 10-foot ceilings.

Another, in Greenwich Village - a one-bedroom loft marketed as being in mint condition on busy Broadway - also sold for $999,000.

In Hudson Yards, a corner one-bedroom, one-bath apartment in a 30-floor high-rise, complete with a gym and pool facilities, has also sold for $999,000

The strongest growth is at the top of the market, with more than 220 penthouses sold in Manhattan so far this year, according to Corcoran market research. Pictured: The Orion at 350 W 42nd St in Hudson Yards

The influx in property buying has also led to fewer apartments on the market.

According to Miller, apartment listings fell 27% compared to year ago, with the supply of homes for sale being lower than the historical average of about eight to nine months.

The strongest growth is at the top of the market, with more than 220 penthouses sold in Manhattan so far this year, according to Corcoran market research.

That marks a 35% increase from the 164 penthouse contacts signed for the same period in 2019, before the pandemic.

However, while residential property values continue increasing throughout the city, office space occupancy has declined.

A three-bedroom, two bathroom apartment in Harlem has sold for $999,000

The Harlem apartment, located on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, is boasts a massive 1,300-square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and 10-foot ceilings

Nearly 19% of all office space in Manhattan have no tenants, reaching a record high as companies break leases and adopt remote work, according to a New York Times article.

That rate is a 15% jump since the end of 2020, and more than double the rate from before the pandemic, according to Newmark, a real estate services company.

Other neighborhoods, such as Downtown Manhattan, are faring worse, with 21% of offices having no tenants - a stark contrast to the city's recent real estate surge.

'This is as close as we've come to that type of scenario where there's an exodus from the city, and the recovery took 30 years,' Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City told The Times.

Wylde notes that the city is facing its biggest crisis since the 1970s, when half of the city's 125 Fortune 500 companies moved out.

According to estimates from Unacast, a location analytics company, a net of 70,000 people fled the metropolitan region at the height of the pandemic, resulting in roughly $34 billion in lost income.

About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, the report highlighted.

Thanks to widespread vaccination and coronavirus positivity rates dropping, that's swiftly changing.

Crowds are swarming Manhattan sidewalks, parks, bars and restaurants at growing rates.

Within recent weeks, New York City has witnessed a liveliness not witnessed since the before the pandemic.

However, vaccine distribution has also slowed, questioning whether or not the country is fully back on its feet.

in Greenwich Village - a one-bedroom loft marketed as being in mint condition on busy Broadway - also sold for $999,000

Median sale prices for three- and four-bedroom apartments increased by double digits in the second quarter from the first quarter. Pictured: The Renwick at 808 Broadway in Greenwich Village

Nearly 19% of all office space in Manhattan have no tenants, reaching a record high as companies break leases and adopt remote work, according to a New York Times article. Pictured: The Renwick at 808 Broadway in Greenwich Village

According to a recent Washington Post report, the U.S. is averaging fewer than 1 million shots per day - a decline of more than two-thirds from a peak of 3.4 million in April.

Furthermore, the rising property rates throughout the city raises another question of how individuals are affording such luxuries, especially after the pandemic triggered unprecedented mass layoffs and furloughs.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than 29 million Americans experienced layoffs related to the pandemic, imprinting a lasting mark on the U.S. economy.

'Depending on how you count it, you're talking about something like a quarter of all U.S. jobs being disrupted by the pandemic,' Erica Groshen, a former Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner appointed by President Obama told The Wall Street Journal back in 2020.

The strength of the high-end market, which ranks about $5 million, unveils a dramatic turnaround from since before the pandemic.

Median sale prices for three- and four-bedroom apartments increased by double digits in the second quarter from the first quarter.

But according to Miller Samuel, the inventory of luxury apartments remains high  at 13 months.
An Ohio police chief from a Cleveland suburb has retired after being caught on surveillance video placing a note saying 'Ku Klux Klan' and a raincoat displayed like a KKK robe and hood on a black officer's desk.

Anthony Campo, 61, stepped down shortly after Sheffield Lake Mayor Dennis Bring confronted him on Tuesday.

Bring learned what happened from the city law director after the police union representing the black officer filed a harassment complaint.

The video from the Sheffield Lake police station, which did not include sound, shows Campo last Friday standing at a printer, then carrying a small note with 'Ku Klux Klan' typed on it and putting it on the yellow police raincoat deliberately spread on the officer's desk.

A note saying 'Ku Klux Klan' is laying atop a raincoat arranged to resemble a KKK robe and hood on a black police officer's desk at the Sheffield Lake Police Department in Ohio

Sheffield Lake Police Chief Anthony Campo, 61, retired early after being caught on video placing the KKK note on the officer's desk

When the officer enters the room and sees the display, he looks in the direction of Campo's office. Video then shows the two talking briefly.

The officer removes the note from the coat, but then puts it back when two of his colleagues, both white, arrive.

Mayor Bring said Campo, who is white, later told him it was supposed to be a prank. Bring called it 'embarrassing and disgusting.'

The mayor detailed his exchange with Campo to WKYC, saying that when he arrived in his office to confront him, the chief asked with a smile if he would be fired.

Bring said he gave Campo 10 minutes to hand in his badge and keys to his police cruiser, and clear the premises the office. During the tense conversation, the mayor said he asked the disgraced police chief whether he was 'psychologically OK.'

Bring also revealed that besides printing the KKK note, Campo made a cone-shaped hat out of a newspaper and put in on his own head.

Video from June 25 shows Campo, seen in an orange shirt, printing the note and placing it on the police raincoat

The target of the prank, who has been with the department for just nine months, was away from his desk at the time

Campo was a Sheffield Lake police officer for 33 years and chief for the last eight, earning an annual salary of more than $86,000. The black officer has been with the department for just nine months.

Bring said he and the officer cried during a conversation about what happened.

'I apologized to him,' Bring told cleveland.com. 'This is not a mistake. This is something so egregious I can't describe it.'

The black officer is seen looking in the direction of Campo's office after noticing the racist display on his desk

The chief and the officer talk briefly in the video, which has no audio

Other officers later arrive at the station and talk to their colleague about the note

Campo dismissed the incident to a local newspaper as some 'off-color comments' and 'police station antics.'

Campo also defended his record with the department, which he described as 'spotless' and 'unblemished,' as The Chronicle reported.

In an interview with WKYC, Campo doubled down that the note was meant to be a 'joke,' and said that he has great respect for the officer and was the one who hired him. He also stressed that he was not fired but retired.

The town mayor said he does not believe Campo realizes the severity of his misconduct.

'Shame on him,' Bring said.
One of the biggest mysteries surrounding Stonehenge is how any of it is still standing, given the predations of souvenir-hunters and vandals including the great 17th-century architect Sir Christopher Wren.

He paid many visits to the ancient monument on Salisbury Plain and his surname can still be seen carved on one of its stones.

The Victorians were even more destructive, renting chisels to visitors so they could take great chunks of Stonehenge home, and over the centuries farmers purloined stones for building their barns.

Perhaps they might all have had more respect for the monument, now a Unesco World Heritage site, had they heard the extraordinary theory being put forward in a new book by 62-year-old landscape architect Sarah Ewbank.

She would have us believe that the Stonehenge we see today represents the ruins of a majestic building which once had a spectacular thatched roof.

Landscape architect Sarah Ewbank believes Stonehenge (pictured) once had thatched roof

As mind-boggling as contemplating an upright Tower of Pisa or a Day-Glo Taj Mahal, this may seem as barking as other ideas expounded about Stonehenge over the centuries: that its layout was based on the female private parts, or that it was a site of human sacrifice or a landing pad for aliens.

But Sarah is deadly serious, and she backs up her arguments with the rather ferocious electric saw she keeps in the garage of her pretty Cotswolds cottage near Lechlade, Gloucestershire.

The feisty grandmother does not use this to intimidate those who disagree with her  although she is rather frustrated with the academics who have repeatedly refused to engage with her idea that Stonehenge was a Neolithic version of the Royal Albert Hall.

No, the saw is used to fashion ever-more detailed models of how she thinks Stonehenge might have looked. Each has taken about two months to complete and they have got bigger each time.

While three earlier models have been banished to the attic, version four is currently taking pride of place in the dining room.

Sarah points out that Stonehenge has a total diameter  some 30 metres  which is almost exactly the same as Shakespeares Globe (pictured), a very similarly thatched building

Built on a scale of 1:33, it is surprisingly persuasive. The moment you see the familiar stone slabs as the supports for an upper storey you think Ah, yes, of course it was a building. What else could it have been?

As to what kind of building, Sarah thinks it was an all-purpose Neolithic temple with a large oval hall overlooked by galleries in which crowds might have gathered to hear speakers below.

She points out that the total diameter  some 30 metres  is almost exactly the same as Shakespeares Globe, a similarly thatched building in which, several millennia later, the human voice could carry to every audience member.

It is unquestionably the right size for an enclosed public venue, she says, speculating that the scenes at Stonehenge might have been as boisterous as in Elizabethan times.

Maybe there was feasting in the galleries, with dancing and musicians playing below, or perhaps ceremonies took place to welcome in the solstices. It all sounds rather splendid.

It does indeed, and Sarah contends that archaeologists have under-estimated our Neolithic and Bronze Age forebears who built Stonehenge over centuries, years starting around 5,000 BC.

Building blocks: the basic structure which can be deduced from what is left to this day

Layers upon layers: architect Sarah Ewbank's theory has an inner wall and doorway

A giant roof: Sarah believes the monument took the shape of an all purpose Neolithic temple

They have assumed they were rough, tough, types who had advanced little from grunting cavemen and were hardy enough to worship outdoors.

But we know that the Bronze Age was sophisticated enough to have goldsmiths making absolutely stunning jewellery and they knew how to make copper alloys like bronze.

It seems obvious to me that they would have wanted to mark the winter solstice inside, under a roof, not outside in the freezing cold.

It has taken five years for Sarah to develop her theory with the support of Crispin Scott, a 65-year-old retired Army officer who is her partner of 14 years.

They are both divorced, with five grown-up children between them, and Sarah has fitted in her research around her work and their shared hobby of bell-ringing.

Initially, Cris couldnt understand why I was doing it. But as I got more into it, he realised that I was on to something, she says.

It has taken five years for Sarah to develop her theory with the support of Crispin Scott, a 65-year-old retired Army officer who is her partner of 14 years. Pictured: One of Sarah's model

Sarah has been in architecture for more than 40 years and has been involved in consultancy and planning for everything from historic estates to Oxford colleges. Pictured: Sarah's model

Her interest was first sparked when she saw a TV documentary about new excavations at Stonehenge. I wondered: Why keep digging down instead of looking up?

'I could see its slabs were of a suitable size to be support piers for a roof and wondered if their layout held clues that would reveal its shape.

Designing landscapes for more than 40 years, shes been involved in consultancy and planning for everything from historic estates to Oxford colleges. But this task involved throwing her brain into reverse.

Instead of creating a design from scratch, she was trying to deduce what a design might have been from the four concentric formations of stones which make up Stonehenge: an outer and an inner circle, a horseshoe and an oval.

None is complete, and indications of where the missing stones once stood have been identified by archaeological investigations.

These suggest that the outer ring consisted of 30 pillars of grey sarsen stone, each about four metres high, somehow transported from quarries on the Marlborough Downs, about 20 miles away.

Sarah has built multiple models of how she see's how Stonehenge was originally built

Sarah points to other famous historic buildings  most notably the Parthenon in Athens  whose roofs are supported by similar columns. Its a common building form, she explains.

Its believed that these pillars were all originally capped by horizontally placed stones known as lintels.

Where these are missing its possible to see two knobs on top of each pillar which would have slotted into two corresponding holes in the bottom of the lintels.

Since gravity alone would have been enough to hold the lintels in place, Sarah argues that the knobs and sockets would not have been necessary unless they were supporting something.

Their existence suggests that the sarsens uprights and lintels were engineered as if to take the load of a roof, she says.

While the sarsen stones would have formed an outer colonnade, a wraparound walkway covered by the roof but open to the elements, Sarah believes its logical that the hall would have had a wall to give protection from the weather.

A sketch showing how Sarah Ewbank, from Gloucestershire, imagines Stonehenge looked

According to her, the remains of the doorways within that wall can be seen in Stonehenges inner circle, made up of smaller bluestones transported from the Preseli mountains in Wales, some 150 miles away.

Before metal hinges were available, doors were jointed onto pivoting vertical poles that turned when the door was open or shut.

One of the bluestone uprights contains a vertical groove into which such a pole would have fitted perfectly, while the two bluestone lintels remaining contain holes which Sarah thinks may have been used to secure a wooden board containing sockets for the door-poles.

Moving towards the centre of Stonehenge, the next formation is a horseshoe of four trilithons  sets of two stones capped by a lintel  with another taller trilithon at the end.

Sarah suggests that all were supports for a central wooden framework spanning the centre of the oval hall, with rafters radiating downwards to the outer circle of sarsen stones to support the roofs lower slopes.

Innovative: architect Sarah Ewbank

In her view, Stonehenges builders would have known exactly how to build the central wooden cradle she posits as holding up the roof because it resembles a large upturned boat.

Her final challenge was to find a purpose for the oval of bluestones at the centre of Stonehenge. She concludes that these supported columns held up the balcony.

While her fourth model shows this being reached via a spiral staircase, she admits that this is pure guesswork.

But she is more confident that our Neolithic predecessors were capable of high-quality carpentry using oaks from the woodlands which covered about a third of Great Britain.

All this begs a question. If Stonehenge really was a building, then how on earth did they go about constructing it?

Using her experiences of shifting weighty objects with very limited resources, Sarah imagines an ingenious arrangement for raising Stonehenges wooden trusses, the largest of which she estimates as weighing 20 tonnes.

This involves building a high platform on which each truss could be laid flat, with one end butting the top of the lintel before being hoisted upright with ropes.

So what do the experts make of all this? Over the years, Sarah has asked but received no real replies.

I would like to sit down and have a sensible conversation with them, but it seems anything challenging the view of a broad consensus of current archaeologists is routinely rejected, she says,.

But English Heritage is unlikely to be entering such discussions any time soon. The idea of a roof on Stonehenge wouldnt make any sense, says the monuments curator, Heather Sebire.

Part of the point of the place is the majesty of the stones, so why would you put a roof on them? The bottom line is that there isnt any evidence for it.

This doesnt sit well with Sarah. Just because something hasnt survived, doesnt mean it didnt exist, she says, and her book certainly makes a plausible case that the roof on Stonehenge did exist.

One thing is certain. Given the huge distances over which the stones had to be transported by land, the construction of Stonehenge was an astonishing technical accomplishment  with or without a roof.

Stonehenge  Temple Cipher Roof, by Sarah Ewbank, 24.95 including delivery, from stonehengeroof.uk
President Joe Biden praised a nurse who was the first American to get the COVID vaccine for her dedication to her work on Friday at a naturalization ceremony at the White House.

He also recognized Sandra Lindsay, a naturalized American, as an 'Outstanding American by Choice.'

Biden said she 'poured her heart and soul into the work' of saving COVID-19 patients.

'During the height of the pandemic, she poured her heart and soul, working with patients and keeping her fellow nurses safe,' he said. 'When the time came she became the first person in America to get fully vaccinated outside the trials. She can now hug her grandson. She's out there making sure her patients and folks in the community get vaccinated.'

Lindsay, who emigrated to Queens, New York from Jamaica, is believed to be the first American to be vaccinated against COVID-19 outside of a clinical trial. She is the director of nursing for critical care at Northwell Health's Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, New York.

'Thank you for representing the best in America,' Biden told her. He presented her with a certification of her honor.

Her scrubs, vaccination card and hospital badge will be included in the Smithsonian's National Museum American History Center.

President Biden recognized Sandra Lindsay as an 'Outstanding American by Choice'

President Biden praised Sandra Lindsay for her dedication to her work

President Joe Biden applauds as people wave US flags during a naturalization ceremony for new citizens at the White House

At the ceremony, Biden called for extended paths of citizenship on Friday, which could add another 9 million people to the US population, at a naturalization ceremony that took place in the East Room of the White House.

There were 21 people who took the citizenship oath at the White House, which was administered by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Mayorkas immigrated from Cuba as a child. They cheered after they became Americans and waved small American flags.

Biden used the occasion to call for citizenship for immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children - the so-called Dreamers, for foreign-born people who have temporary protected status due to strife in their birth countries, and for farm workers.

'We can work together on critical issues as well pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, young people,' he said, and for those 'who are here on temporary protected status. ... And a pathway for farmworkers.'

'We need an immigration system both reflects our values and upholds our laws. We can do both,' the president added.

Biden's call for more paths to citizenship is part of an unprecedented effort by the administration to encourage eligible immigrants to apply for US citizenship.

'The idea is to find a whole-of-government way to reach out to people who are able to naturalize,' a Citizenship and Immigration Services official told CNN, adding that there are 9 million people in the US who are lawful permanent residents who may be eligible to apply for citizenship.

Immigration has been a political flashpoint as Biden has sought to renew visa and refugee programs that were cut or suspended during the Trump administration.

Biden has overturned some changes Trump made to the process for becoming a citizen, including removing changes made to the citizenship test.

In February, Biden and congressional Democrats proposed a major immigration overhaul that included an eight-year pathway to citizenship for the roughly 11 million people living in the United States illegally. Republican lawmakers blocked the effort and have criticized the administration for the rise in people attempting to cross the southern border without visas.

President Biden praised Sandra Lindsey as someone who 'poured her heart and soul into the work' of saving COVID-19 patients

President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas join in the Pledge of Allegiance during the naturalization ceremony

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas administered the citizenship oath to 21 people at the White House

President Biden cheers after the citizenship ceremony

The immigration debate involves fundamental issues of national security and economic growth.

Republican lawmakers seeking to limit immigration say it will help keep the U.S. safe and protect jobs for native-born citizens. But economists - many associated with Democrats - say increased immigration would boost economic growth that is currently weighed down by falling fertility rates.

Friday's ceremony is among more than 100 such ceremonies scheduled between June 30 and July 7 to welcome more than 9,400 new citizens.
Dozens of looters have moved onto the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan just hours after the final group of American troops vacated the base - without telling local officials.

Bagram, located 30 miles north of Kabul, was the strategic hub for the US war in Afghanistan, which is poised to come to an end in the coming months after President Biden vowed to have every American soldier out of the country by September 11.

The US war in Afghanistan began 20 years ago, and is America's longest running conflict. It has killed 2,312 US troops and cost the military an eyewatering $816 billion.

But experts fear Biden's 'gut decision' to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan could bring renewed chaos to the region - as evidenced by the looting on Friday morning.

Defense officials confirmed all American soldiers had left Bagram by Friday, and said the airbase has been handed over to the Afghan National Security and Defence Force in its entirety.

However, Darwaish Raufi, who serves as district administrator for the town of Bagram, told the Associated Press that 'the Americans left without any coordination' and the airfield's gates were subsequently left unsecured, leading to the looting.

Another local official told Stars & Stripes reporter J.P. Lawrence: 'They [the US troops] told us nothing, and that's why there was a gap, there was nothing to secure the airport'.

The looters quickly moved in around 4am local time, entering several unsecured buildings, seizing plastics and metal. They were able to steal for several hours before they were finally booted off the base by Afghan National Security and Defence Forces, who eventually gained control.

One eyewitness told J.P. Lawrence: 'People are used to looting. That's why Afghanistan is getting destroyed day by day'.

The incident is a disturbing sign of the unrest that may come following the hasty withdrawal of US troops.

Dozens of looters moved onto the Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan early Thursday morning, just hours after the final group of US troops vacated the base without telling local officials. Pictured: An Afghan National Army soldier stands guard at the base after they managed to regain control on Friday

The once-bustling base has now been abandoned by American troops. Back in 2012, Bagram saw more than 100,000 U.S. troops and NATO service members pass through its sprawling compound. It is pictured looking eerily deserted on Friday

Empty: For two decades, the ever-expanding airbase was filled with US troops. This week, the last group of American soldiers there finally departed

Ashiqullah, a resident of the town outside Bagram, said locals stormed the base at 4 am. He said it continued for hours, and he saw people taking out metal and plastic to be sold as scrap.

"People are used to looting. That's why Afghanistan is getting destroyed day by day." pic.twitter.com/BgQ7FqGFl1  J.p. Lawrence (@JpLawrence3) July 2, 2021

The Taliban have launched a relentless offensives across Afghanistan in the past two months, gobbling up dozens of districts. They are also celebrating the US withdrawal from the Bagram Airbase.

Meanwhile, earlier this week, footage showed the Taliban stealing trucks and Humvees from Afghan security forces who were once backed up by American forces.

According to Forbes, the Taliban has managed to seize 700 armored military vehicles frim the US-back forces in the past month alone.

The ability of Afghan forces to maintain control over the vital Bagram airfield will likely prove pivotal to maintaining security in the nearby capital Kabul and keeping pressure on the Taliban.

Afghan soldiers stand guard at the gate of Bahram U.S. air base on Friday, after American troops finally vacated it after close to two decades of occupation

US troops are seen loading a helicopter onto a C-17 Globesmaster at Bagram on June 16 as they prepare to leave the airbase

A gate is seen at the Bagram on June 25, as the last US troops prepared to withdraw

Bagram: the abandoned air strip that became America's main Afghan base The airfield was built by the Soviet Union back in the 1950s against the backdrop of Afghanistan's snow-capped mountains. It became a vital post for Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan in 1979. However, the Soviets withdrew from the country in 1989 and by the late 1990s, the abandoned air strip was composed of bombed-out hangars and watchtowers without electricity. After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, US forces quickly occupied the air strip, using it as the Soviets had before them as their main base in the country. In the early years of the war under President George W. Bush, the CIA used Bagram as a 'black site' detention center for terrorism suspects, subjecting them to abuse that President Barack Obama would later acknowledge as torture. Later, as the U.S. and NATO presence in Afghanistan grew, so did the base. A second runway was built, as were pools, gyms and classrooms. A Pizza Hut, a Subway and a Green Beans coffee shop even popped up on the base. By 2007, Bagram had become a huge base, with three rings of security, processing arriving troops before they were flown to frontline positions. At its peak in 2012, Bagram saw more than 100,000 U.S. troops and NATO service members pass through its sprawling compound. US presidents visited frequently to meet the troops, most recently Donald Trump, who dropped in for Thanksgiving in 2019. Robin Williams, Jay Leno and Kid Rock were among the celebrities who visited over the years. In 2007, while then-Vice President Dick Cheney was in the country, a suicide bomber struck Bagram, killing up to 23 people and injuring 20 Bagram Air Base served as the linchpin for US operations in Afghanistan Advertisement

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 withdrawal from Bagram Airfield is the clearest indication that the last of the 2,500-3,500 U.S. troops have left Afghanistan or are nearing a departure, months ahead of President Joe Biden's promise that they would be gone by Sept. 11.

It was clear soon after the mid-April announcement that the U.S. was ending its 'forever war,' that the departure of U.S. soldiers and their estimated 7,000 NATO allies would be nearer to July 4, when America celebrates its Independence Day.

Most NATO soldiers have already quietly exited as of this week.

Announcements from several countries analyzed by The Associated Press show that a majority of European troops has now left with little ceremony - a stark contrast to the dramatic and public show of force and unity when NATO allies lined up to back the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Bagram was built by the US for its Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s

Bagram was built by the US for its Afghan ally during the Cold War in the 1950s as a bulwark against the Soviet Union in the north.

Ironically, it became the staging point for the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, and the Red Army expanded it significantly during their near decade-long occupation.

When Moscow pulled out, it became central to the raging civil war -- it was reported that at one point the Taliban controlled one end of the three-kilometre (two-mile) runway and the opposition Northern Alliance the other.

In recent months, Bagram has come under rocket barrages claimed by the jihadist Islamic State, stirring fears that militants are already eyeing the base for future attacks.

The NATO-led non-combat mission aimed to train Afghan forces into ensuring their country's security after the departure of foreign forces.

As of February 2021, there were about 9,500 foreign troops in Afghanistan, of which the US made up the largest contingent of 2,500.

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

The 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.

The U.S. and NATO leaving comes as Taliban insurgents make strides in several parts of the country, overrunning dozens of districts and overwhelming beleaguered Afghan security Forces.

In a worrying development, the government has resurrected militias with a history of brutal violence to assist the Afghan security forces. At what had all the hallmarks of a final press conference, Gen. Miller this week warned that continued violence risked a civil war in Afghanistan that should have the world worried.

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

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
Amid defenses and recriminations following reports of dysfunction in the office of Vice President Kamala Harris is a concern among some Democrats that the political figure most prominently positioned to succeed Biden isn't up to the task.

Some Democrats fear that Harris, despite being in the public eye as Biden's partner and four years as a senator from California, might lack the ability to keep the White House.

A Democratic operative told Axios  which ran an explosive story that drew furious pushback Friday  that the issue isn't: "'Oh, no, our heir apparent is f***ing up, what are we gonna do? It's more that people think, 'Oh, shes f***ing up, maybe she shouldn't be the heir apparent.'"

Of particular concern is whether Harris, who has struggled to control the narrative on border issues Biden put in her portfolio, would be able to reassemble the coalition that drove Biden to victory in 2020.

Senior White House staff rushed to defend Vice President Kamala Harris amid a welter of criticism that her office was dysfunctional and complaints that staff were not valued

A new Pew analysis of the 2020 election and polling notes that Biden made gains among men, while also improved on Hillary Clinton among white voters without a college degree. Even though younger and minority voters were critical to his primary and overall win, moderate and centrist voters were also a key part of his coalition.

'White voters without a college degree were critical to Trumps victory in 2016, when he won the group by 64% to 28%. In 2018, Democrats were able to gain some ground with these voters, earning 36% of the White, non-college vote to Republicans 61%,' according to Pew.

'In 2020, Biden roughly maintained Democrats 2018 share among the group, improving upon Clintons 2016 performance by receiving the votes of 33%. But Trumps share of the vote among this group  who represented 42% of the total electorate this year  was nearly identical to his vote share in 2016 (65%).'

When asked about the reports of office dysfunction during her daily briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said she tried not to 'speak to or engage on anonymous reports'  then came to Harris's defense

Harris, if running in effect on a second Biden turn in the event that he decides not to run, might not be well-situated to run with the same coalition, particularly having been a target in conservative media.

Biden, who has not said for sure he will run again, certainly isn't ruling out being atop the ticket again, which would make any Harris staff struggles less relevant.

Last week, Biden told Israel's President Reuven Rivlin that his only regret is that he's leaving as president  only to add: 'not me, not soon.'

He has made repeated efforts to bolster Harris, as he did Friday when he invited her onstage during an event with the Los Angeles Dodgers, who hail from her home state  although as Biden noted, Harris hails from northern California and is a Giants fan.

The quip recalled yet another time Harris had to walk the tight rope, when she was photographed wearing a Dodgers cap while preparing for a presidential debate even though the Oakland-born Harris roots for the Giants.

Notably, top Democrats are not attaching their name to the grousing, and Harris has not suffered any kind of personal scandal. Biden has held up his history-making decision to put her on the ticket, and may find it hard to back away from her  although he learned in 2015 and 2016 how being vice president is no guarantee of succession.

When asked about the reports of office dysfunction during her daily briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said she tried not to 'speak to or engage on anonymous reports'  then came to Harris's defense.

'The vice president is an incredibly important partner to the president of the United States,' she added.

'She has a challenging job, a hard job and she has a great supportive team of people around her,' Psaki said.

Senior White House officials are racing to defend Vice President Kamala Harris amid reports of a dysfunctional workplace, staff resignations and tensions between the West Wing and her team.

Criticism has focused on her chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, and aides described an environment where they were treated 'like s***.'

But top White House officials mobilized to defend Harris, accusing anonymous critics of a 'whispering campaign' designed to bring her down.

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told Axios: 'The president's trust and confidence in her is obvious when you see them in the Oval Office together.'

He said her talents and determination had already made a big difference to some of the toughest challenges facing the administration.

'Shes delivering for the American people on immigration, small business, voting rights, and economic growth, he added.

'The results speak for themselves: a decline of border arrivals from the Northern Triangle, improved vaccine equity, and increased economic opportunities for women.'

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain raced to the defense of Harris. 'The president's trust and confidence in her is obvious when you see them in the Oval Office together,' he said.

Tina Flournoy is the vice president's chief of staff and is being blamed for creating a hostile work environment which allies of Kamala Harris say is nothing but a 'whispering campaign' designed to sabotage her

Tensions reportedly boiled over last week when the vice president finally decided to visit the border with Mexico.

The decision blindsided officials tasked with arranging travel and others outside her office responsible for messaging across the administration, according to Politico.

The outlet cited 22 officials, former officials, aides and associates of President Biden and Harris who described low morale, a tense atmosphere, porous lines of communication and diminished trust. Much of the blame was directed at Flournoy.

'People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it's an abusive environment,' said one source.

'It's not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It's not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s**t.'

Cedric Richmond, senior adviser to Biden, dismissed the anonymous criticism, saying: 'Its a whisper campaign designed to sabotage her.'

He said she remained in high demand for public events.

'At some point it just becomes, one person says something long enough and it becomes an urban legend,' he said.

'It doesnt have to be credible. It doesnt have to be real. Someone says something and it can just snowball.'

Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser to Biden, dismissed the anonymous criticism as a 'whispering campaign.' He said: 'It doesnt have to be credible. It doesnt have to be real. Someone says something and it can just snowball'

Tensions started to boil over after Harris finally decided to visit the border last week, blindsiding staffers

Tina Flournoy, pictured, has allegedly created an environment where 'ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out'

Even so, the allegations will be treated with alarm inside an administration that knows Biden will be 81 at the time of the next election and has done much to promote Harris as the last person in the room when decisions are taken, setting her up for a possible primary run.

The sources claimed that President Biden's office was concerned about the treatment of staff.

Biden, on the day he was inaugurated, warned presidential appointees while swearing them in that he would fire them 'on the spot' if he were to hear that they have shown 'disrespect' others.

'I'm not joking when I say this: If you're ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect or talk down to someone, I promise you, I will fire you on the spot  on the spot. No ifs ands or buts,' Biden said at the time.

Flournoy has allegedly created an environment where 'ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out,' the outlet reported. She allegedly 'refuses to take responsibility' and blames staffers for negative results.

Some of the sources told Politico that Harris also is responsible for how her office is run, claiming that the toxic environment 'all starts at the top.'

Biden, on the day he was inaugurated, warned presidential appointees while swearing them in that he would fire them 'on the spot' if he were to hear that they have shown 'disrespect' others

Harris aides are reportedly already looking to leave the administration while some already have - like staffers Karly Satkowiak and Gabrielle DeFranceschi, who oversaw the vice president's travel.

Satkowiak and DeFranceschi left under what had been described as 'long-planned departures' but sources contested that characterization to Politico.

DeFranceschi, who previously worked in the Obama administration, reportedly left over a 'difference in opinion on how things should run.'

'If you have an opinion about how things should run and it's not listened to, that can be frustrating,' the source told Politico.

Harris' chief spokesperson Symone Sanders, pushed back against the claims and called those who made them 'cowards,' according to Politico.

'People are cowards to do this this way,' Sanders said.

She added: 'We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day. What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I'm like 'welcome to the club.'

'We have created a culture where people, if there is anything anyone would like to raise, there are avenues for them to do so. Whoever has something they would like to raise, they should raise it directly.'

Sanders also said that Harris 'is focused on the work' and 'not the chatter at the water cooler.'

The chief spokesperson also defended Flournoy and said she has an 'open door policy' and that 'black women like me would not have the opportunity to work in politics without Tina.'

Harris tours the El Paso Border Patrol Station on June 25 in El Paso, Texas

Harris speaks with El Paso Border Patrol Chief agent Gloria Chavez as she tour the US Customs and Border Protection Central Processing Center

Bill Clinton defended Kamala Harris' embattled chief of staff after the vice president's office was rocked by a report in which staffers claimed they are 'treated like sh**' and that Tina Flournoy has created 'blame culture'

Bill Clinton also came to the defense of Flournoy, who ran his post-White House office.

'Tina Flournoy ran my office for more than eight years, making it more efficient, effective, and transparent. She made it easier, not harder, for me to advance my philanthropic work and my post-presidential activities, and keep in touch with my friends,' he said in a statement to CNBC on Thursday.

'She has a unique ability to focus on the big picture and adapt to changing conditions. And she does it all with a great sense of humor and an unwavering belief that we all have an ability and an obligation to make a difference.'

Jennifer Palmieri, who worked in the Obama White House and Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign, said sometimes chiefs of staff just weren't popular.

'Sounds like whats happening here is that Tina Flournoy is doing her job. Chiefs of staff gotta run interference. Doesnt always make you popular. But its part of the job. Protect the boss time,' she wrote on Twitter.

Others who spoke to Politico to defend Harris and Flournoy said that black women were held to standards that others in politics are not - and that a 'demanding office environment' would be seen as a virtue for other leaders.

'Look, [Tina's] strong, she's intelligent, she's driven, and she expects strong, intelligent, driven people around her,' said Leah Daughtry.

'But some people may find strong, driven, smart people intimidating, but I think that's more projection than reality because that's just not Tina's intent or style. And nothing in her experience would lead you to think that she's an intimidating person.'

Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to the president, also defended Flournoy.

Dunn said keeping the border trip news private to a small group of people was made because Harris' office didn't want it to leak or 'turn it into a spectacle,' Politico reported.

'It was closely held and there may be people whose feelings were a little hurt on her staff that they weren't brought into the discussion,' Dunn said.

'But any suggestion that it was mishandled or kept a secret from people who needed to know about the arrangements or needed to know about it is absolutely not true.'

When Politico asked Dunn about complaints in the office, Dunn said complaints were 'not anywhere near what you are describing.'

Flournoy previously worked in the White House under President Bill Clinton and then worked on his reelection campaign, as well as then-Vice President Al Gore's campaign for president in 2000.

She was working as Clinton's post-presidential chief of staff before she was tapped to work for Harris.

One source told Politico: 'People who Clinton knew for decades all of a sudden couldn't get through to him because Tina choked off contact.'

'Because Clinton didn't use email, she was able to keep many [friends of Bill] out,' the source said.

The source added: 'You can't just flat out ignore people and not get back to them.'

A friend of Harris' recently tried to reach Flournoy on behalf of a top Democratic donor but was also ignored, the outlet reported.

Vice President Kamala Harris participates in a roundtable discussion with faith and community leaders and local service providers, during a visit to the Paso del Norte Port of Entry on June 25

Vice President Kamala Harris visits the Paso del Norte Port of Entry on June 25 in El Paso, Texas

When they were ignored, the donor then contact Harris' office directly and did not hear back for weeks. They were later told Harris was too busy to meet with them.

The friend told Politico: 'This is someone who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollarsmillions, evenfor your boss and you're just blowing them off?'

'Next time Kamala wants [them] for something, it's like, 'Hey, I couldn't even get a call-back from your chief of staff!',' the friend said.

Some Harris allies explained to Politico that the vice president has 'gone out of her way not to engage in politicking' to prove her loyalty to Biden as it remains unclear if he will run for reelection in 2024.

Other allies explained Harris' apparent strategy of not raising her own profile as 'foolish' for someone who has 'been in public life for 30 years.'

'You don't just all of a sudden go radio silent,' said one former aide.

That former aide indicated that Harris is likely aware of the purported problems in her office.

'She is the most perceptive person on the planet. She might not have first-hand knowledge, but it's hard to imagine she doesn't have a sense of what's going on,' the person said.

The sources who spoke to Politico blamed some of the low morale in Harris' office on the issues she has been tasked with tackling for the Biden administration which made her an early target for conservatives - such as slowing the flow of migrants.

Instead of flying to the border, Harris had flown to the countries where the migrants had come from or traveled through on their way to the United States.

Harris finally visited the border weeks later as her aides insisted she did not make the trek because of criticism she faced. But others claimed she inadvertently seemed to affirm conservative criticism against her with the seemingly impromptu trip.
Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyers have asked the judge in her case to dismiss the charges against her and let her go in the wake of Bill Cosby's release this week.

In a letter on Friday, her team of attorneys asked Judge Alison J. Nathan to dismiss the sex trafficking charges against her, claiming that she, like Cosby, was promised that she wouldn't be prosecuted under a deal that Jeffrey Epstein was given in 2010.

'Dear Judge Nathan,

'We respectfully submit this letter to bring the Court's attention to the recent decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in which the court vacated Mr. Cosby's conviction and sentence.

'Ms Maxwell's case presents a similar situation. The government failed to abide by its promise not to prosecute.

Ghislaine Maxwell's attorney claims she should be let out of jail now because Bill Cosby has been freed, claiming she was promised she wouldn't be prosecuted in a round-about-way when Jeffrey Epstein got his sweetheart deal in 2010

'Ms Maxwell for the offenses for which she was immunized by the Epstein Non-Prosecution Agreement,' the letter says.

Cosby was freed on Wednesday because of a promise a prosecutor made in 2005 that he would not be charged. He went on to incriminate himself in a civil case and another prosecutor, years later, used those remarks to charge him.

Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that it was unconstitutional and that had he not thought he was beyond reproach, he wouldn't have made the incriminating remarks.

Writing for The New York Daily News on Thursday, Maxwell's appellate lawyer David Oscar Markus, said prosecutors in New York should never have gone after her because years earlier, a different prosecutor in Florida promised Epstein in a deal that he wouldn't charge his 'co-conspirators.' Markus is shown in April at court

Writing for The New York Daily News on Thursday, Maxwell's appellate lawyer David Oscar Markus, said prosecutors in New York should never have gone after her because years earlier, a different prosecutor in Florida promised Epstein in a deal that he wouldn't charge his 'co-conspirators.'

Maxwell wasn't named as one of the co-conspirators and it is in a different state that she is facing sex trafficking charges now.

But Markus argues it's another example of people not being able to trust prosecutors at their word.

'If a prosecutor promises something, he should be bound by his word  just like the rest of us,' he wrote.

In 2010, Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from an underage prostitute in Palm Beach.

As part of his deal, he served one year in 'prison' - he was allowed to go to his office every day - and prosecutors promised not to charge his three unnamed 'co-conspirators'.

It was a deal given to him Alex Acosta, who went on to become Trump's Labor Secretary.

Writing on Thursday, Markus said: 'This opinion and reasoning applies directly to Ghislaine Maxwells case.

'In her case, Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty and struck a bargain with the prosecutors in Miami: In exchange for pleading guilty in state court, the U.S. attorneys office agreed that it would not prosecute any of his alleged co-conspirators,' Markus wrote.

Epstein was given a deal in 2010 that his co-conspirators wouldn't be charged if he served a year

'But she should not have to fight her case at trial and her case should be thrown out, just like Cosbys has been, because prosecutors promised Epstein when he pleaded guilty that they would not prosecute her.

'The Cosby case reaffirms that a prosecutor is bound to act with integrity and the public must be able to rely on his word.

'What a concept,' he wrote.

Maxwell is due to go on trial later this summer.

She has pleaded not guilty and has always, in civil court too, protested her innocence.

Cosby was freed by Pennsylvania's Supreme Court which ruled it was unfair that in 2005, a prosecutor promised him he wouldn't be charged for sexually assaulting Andrea Constand.

As a result of that promise, Cosby, the court ruled, went on to incriminate himself in a civil deposition.

The incriminating remarks he made were then used by a different prosecutor to charge him in 2015.

The court ruled that Cosby had his constitutional rights violated by the false promise.

Others like Harvey Weinstein say his release could help them for different reasons.

One part of Cosby's appeal was that the prosecution at his trial used five witnesses to testify about his character, even though they weren't involved in the actual charges at hand.

The same tactic was used by prosecutors at Weinstein's trial in 2020. He protested it, saying they shouldn't have been allowed to testify.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not rule on the issue in its decision, instead focusing only on the promise that was made to Cosby.

But Cosby's team - and Weinstein's - believe the fact he got out sets a precedent for others.

'It's a major issue. What we have always said is how can you bring women in from 30 years ago who had nothing to do with the trial to say something happened

'We were not allowed to examine them on the witness stand. This sets a precedent for so many cases. Even Harvey Weinstein now are using our same strategy.

'They say look the people who testified had nothing to do with the accusers.

'Mr. Cosby's case sets a precedent for the country. It's going to be talked about.

'It changes case law,' Andrew Wyatt, Cosby's rep, said on Thursday outside his house.
The mother of a black man who was fatally shot by a Nashville cop was restrained during Friday's emotional court appearance when he pleaded guilty to killing her son.

Andrew Delke, 27, who was the first Nashville police officer ever charged with murder in an on-duty shooting, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter as part of a plea deal and will serve three years in prison.

He gunned down Daniel Hambrick, 25, during a foot pursuit in 2018.

Hambrick's mom, Vickie, is seen in court photos being held back after lunging at Delke during Friday's court appearance.

'I hate you,' she screamed at Delke.

The proceeding was temporarily paused until emotions calmed and ordered was restored.

Despite the anger and frustration on Hambrick's side of the courtroom, a police officer being charged, found guilty and getting prison time is a rarity.

'The reality is tonight for the first time ever a Nashville officer is going to bed in jail for killing a black man,' District Attorney General Glenn Funk told The Tennessean. 'Nashville officers now know they will be held accountable for their actions.'

Vickie Hambrick was restrained in court on Friday while the Nashville police officer who fatally shot her son, Daniel, pleaded guilty to manslaughter

Vickie Hambrick enters the courtroom on Friday

Andrew Delke (left), who is no longer with the Nashville Police Department, will serve three years in prison and avoids going to trial for murder

Daniel Hambrick, 25, was fatally shot by a Nashville police officer during a foot chase in 2018

Vickie and Hambrick's supporters had been opposed to the plea deal, which was finalized less than two weeks before Delke's murder trial was set to begin.

Joy Kimbrough, who's representing Hambrick's family, said on Thursday that Vickie was never contacted about the plea deal until after it was agreed to.

Delke shot Hambrick three times after he ran from a traffic stop on July 26, 2018. Hambrick was armed at the time.

Delke had been following a 'suspicious' white Chevrolet Impala initially stopped at a stop sign, according to CNN. Delke ran plates and found it wasn't stolen, but followed it anyway 'to see if he could develop a reason to stop the Impala.'

Hambrick was in the area at the time when Delke mistook his car for the Impala and pulled up in the parking lot. Hambrick ran and can be seen being gunned down from behind on a surveillance video.

'My son was murdered on video by Nashville police. My son has a right. He has a right to a public jury trial. I want citizens of this community to render a judgment,' Vickie Hambrick said in the victim impact statement that Kimbrough read.

'There is not one hour that goes by that I do not think of Daniel,' she said in her statement.

All the anger and emotion came rushing back to Vickie while she was in the courtroom as she tried knock over the prosecution's table and raged into an expletive-laden rant, the Tennessean reported.

'There is a void in me that cannot be filled. Nothing and no one compares to my precious son. I am angry, mad and disgusted but I pray that no other mother have to endure what I've endured these last three years,' she said in her statement that her lawyer read when the proceeding resumed.

Vickie Hambrick is comforted by family members as their attorney Joy Kimbrough reads victim impact statements in court on Friday

Sheila Clemmons-Lee addresses the media in Nashville after Andrew Delke pleaded guilty to manslaughter on July 2

During former Nashville police officer's statement to the judge, Delke agreed with the court that 'shooting was not reasonably necessary'

On July 26, 2018, Delke was caught on video shooting a fleeing Hambrick, who was armed

Delke, who's long with the Nashville Police Department, read a statement in court saying he agreed with prosecutors that 'shooting was not reasonably necessary' and there were other options.

'Mrs. Hambrick lost her son that day and I am responsible for her loss,' Delke said. 'I am deeply sorry for the harm my actions caused.'

District Attorney Funk said he was ready to go to trial but told The Tennessean the plea deal is 'appropriate' and 'what's best for Nashville.'

'Daniel Hambrick's life is worth more than three years. But it's all of the facts in this case that make this the right disposition,' he said. 'Incarceration is primarily a deterrent to future crime. What I'm hoping is that this deters future unjustified killings.'
Boris Johnson is ready to ditch the work from home guidance  but it will be left to employers and their staff to decide when workers go back to their desks.

The work from home if you can rule is set to be formally abandoned as part of the lifting of the remaining lockdown restrictions on July 19.

But last night government sources told the Daily Mail that individual companies and their staff would be left to determine when and how workers return to the office.

Ministers will not launch a campaign encouraging them to do so because they are resigned to there not being a mass return this summer.

Boris Johnson is ready to ditch the work from home guidance  but it will be left to employers and their staff to decide when workers go back to their desks

The approach is unlikely to go down well with senior Tories, who have said the Prime Minister must tell workers to go back to the office to help fire up the economy.

Many town and city centres have suffered amid the move to home-working, and there are concerns it has hit productivity.

Asda yesterday became the latest business to announce that it will allow head office staff to work from home on a permanent basis.

The supermarket said it will introduce a hybrid model for the about 4,000 employees at its two main bases in Leeds and Leicester, and staff will be able to work from any location best suited to their job.

Bosses said there will be no set number of days staff will be expected in the office but they should talk to their managers to strike the right balance ... whilst ensuring this is led by the needs of the business.

Ministers will not launch a campaign encouraging workers to return to the office because they are resigned to there not being a mass return this summer (file photo)

Previously banks Lloyds, Barclays and HSBC, call-centre operator Capita and British Gas owner Centrica have announced plans for hybrid working.

Ministers are expected to meet next week to finalise plans for removing the work from home advice.

A Cabinet source: It will be left up to employers working with their employees.

The reality is coming into the summer probably there will be some people who choose to keep working from home.

'I am not sure if it will be a rush back to the cities because July and August are always quiet anyway.

Many town and city centres have suffered amid the move to home-working, and there are concerns it has hit productivity

Last night former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith urged ministers to do all they can to encourage people back to the workplace.

Instead of saying work from home if you can, they should say work from the office if you can, he said. But of course they wont because they are gripped by fear.

The Mail revealed yesterday that while a final decision on lifting restrictions will not be made until July 12, a plan will be published next week to give business and individuals more time to adjust.
Two 13-year-old boys were rushed to hospital after eating sweets laced with suspected cannabis as police issued an urgent warning to parents in the area.

The teenagers, from Wallasey, Merseyside, were hospitalised and had to receive urgent treatment after they became more seriously ill yesterday.

Police were made aware of the incident at 1.10pm on Friday. Two others had tasted the sweets but not swallowed them.

Merseyside Police have seized the remaining sweets, nicknamed 'Cannaburst' and 'Chuckles', and are now urging parents and young people to remain vigilant.

Merseyside Police seized the cannabis-laced sweets, branded as 'Cannaburst' and 'Chuckles', after two 13-year-old boys ate some and were hospitalised

While no-one has ever died as a direct result of cannabis, users or those who have never taken the drug can misjudge doses, especially when eating it, and suffer side effects like vomiting and panic attacks (stock picture)

While no-one has ever died as a direct result of cannabis, users or those who have never taken the drug can misjudge doses, especially when eating it, and suffer side effects like vomiting and panic attacks.

Police have now issued a warning to parents and said children caught with the weed sweets will be referred to them.

Previously, experts warned that although the products may come within professional packaging, they should never be assumed to be safe nor legal.

On some websites that say they stock 'Cannaburst gummies', the weed sweets are advertised as giving you 'the best trip possible'.

While others advertising 'Chuckles' say the gummies make for 'delicious and potent cannabis edibles'.

Detective Sergeant Nick Glascott-Tull said: 'We're pleased to have removed these drugs from the community, and will continue to investigate this and similar incidents.

'Worryingly, these drugs are clearly designed to appeal to younger people.

'We are asking that all parents and carers are vigilant if coming across them, and ensure they don't not get into the hands of children as they could be mistaken for ordinary sweets.

'While we believe these sweets contain cannabis, there is no way for people to be sure what other chemicals or drugs could be contained in a product being sold illegally, which could lead to side effects, serious illness or worse.

'If you see drugs similar to those pictured, or have any information, come forward and we will do the rest.'

Anybody with information on the suspected storage or supply of drugs, please contact us via our social media desk via Twitter @MerPolCC or Facebook 'Merseyside Police Contact Centre'.

Cannabis is illegal for recreational use in the UK, although it can be prescribed for medicinal purposes.

Some MPs have also said recently they believe the drug could become fully legalised in just a few years.
Hours before a bombshell TV interview with cop killer Jasmine Hartin aired on Thursday night, a remarkable video emerged online.

It showed the gregarious 32-year-old blonde, wearing a black swimsuit and very short shorts, blasting watermelons on an idyllic Belize beach with a pump-action shotgun, then pretending to blow smoke from the barrel.

Separate new footage also showed her clambering onto a saddle suspended from a ceiling during a party.

Hours before a bombshell TV interview with cop killer Jasmine Hartin aired on Thursday night, a remarkable video emerged online

The timing hardly seemed coincidental. Miss Hartins interview with the local Belize station 7 News was intended to put forward her side of the story, and settle scores with her partner Andrew Ashcroft, son of the Tory billionaire Lord Ashcroft.

Miss Hartin has always claimed she had shot a respected Belizean police chief accidentally as they sat at the end of a jetty after a night of heavy drinking in late May.

Many may now feel the new watermelon footage shows that she knows how to handle a gun.

Its the latest twist in an extraordinary tale that has gripped this tiny Central American nation.

To many ordinary Belizeans, Jasmine Hartin was just another spoilt and wealthy expat who more than deserved to be in her predicament.

After all, she has not denied shooting dead her friend Superintendent Henry Jemmott just over a month ago. And when prosecutors charged her with only the relatively minor offence of manslaughter by negligence, many were outraged by what they saw as near-colonial-era corruption.

It showed the gregarious 32-year-old blonde, wearing a black swimsuit and very short shorts, blasting watermelons on an idyllic Belize beach with a pump-action shotgun, then pretending to blow smoke from the barrel

Yet following her TV appearance  and despite the watermelon footage  some may now have a sneaking sympathy for her.

For, as she emotionally relayed, ever since the police superintendents death she has been sucked into a downward spiral of events that she says have allegedly deprived her of her money, home and even her two young children.

Once she flitted between smart restaurants and glitzy parties. But of late she has been dividing her time between scorpion-infested prisons and cramped police cells.

And where home used to be a beachfront villa in the resort of San Pedro, where an army of staff attended to her every need, the Canadian  now on bail  reportedly shares a modest Airbnb with her mother on the less fashionable, landlocked side of the country.

During her jaw-dropping interview  which inevitably will have infuriated the Ashcroft family, who have decades-old ties to the former British colony  Miss Hartin accused Andrew, 42, of exploiting her incarceration and emotional state to persuade her to give up her stake in their business.

She claimed he had sent a letter to her via a friend on the night of May 31  three days after her arrest  and provided a copy to 7 News that was shown on air.

Miss Hartin (right) accused Andrew, 42, (left) of exploiting her incarceration and emotional state to persuade her to give up her stake in their business

I was in the San Pedro police station after a magistrate had denied me bail, she explained.

I was clearly upset and stressed out, and Andrew had sent a letter with a mutual friend to meet me in the males bathroom at the front of the police station to sign a one-paragraph statement that says: I, Jasmine Hartin, sign all shares in Kidd Estates Ltd, which is 10 per cent, to Andrew Ashcroft for the sum of $1 a share.  She said she had signed the statement, but has not received any compensation.

Miss Hartin claimed she was told that if she didnt sign, hotel giant Marriott would rescind its franchise agreement to let her and Andrew run their luxury boutique hotel, the Alaia.

This, she said, would mean everything wed worked for was going to be taken away.

She went on: All I thought was: We built this for our kids, weve worked so hard to get this, so Ill sign it over but Im sure hell make sure I get it back. But it wasnt right to sign it at that time, under those pressures.

A source who knows the couple told the Mail that Andrew and Jasmine split up some time ago  in part because of his refusal to marry her (although, under Belize common law, they are considered married)  but had stayed together for appearances sake.

Following her release on bail after Superintendent Jemmotts death, Jasmine was re-arrested last week. She had stormed into the Alaia to confront Andrew over not being able to see their four-year-old twins. She allegedly assaulted a member of staff (she denies this) before posting footage of the incident on social media.

She revealed to 7 News that shed had previous custody battles with Andrew, one in 2018. It was a very, very bad time in our relationship.

She took the children to Canada to visit family and stayed for two-and-a-half months, although their father wasnt denied visitation and came to see them.

She said she returned to Belize because she felt they owed it to the children to make it work.

Mr Ashcrofts alleged refusal to let his former partner see their children is just one puzzling aspect of this saga.

For as Miss Hartins new Belizean lawyer, Richard Dickie Bradley, stressed this week, under local law a single mother has sole custody of her children, with the father having visitation rights and a responsibility to pay maintenance.

It has been alleged that Miss Hartin has been threatened with losing her children, although that didnt come up in the TV interview.

Becoming tearful, she went on: Withholding a mother from her children when we have nothing on custody in writing  I dont know of another situation where theyve done this to a mother: taken the children and put up a blockade of security guards to keep you from them on your own property, and then try to put charges on you for trying to see your kids.

She also claimed shed been told by the Ashcroft family that theyd been instructed to distance themselves from me and that they couldnt have bad Press associated with their reputation. As a result, she says, she received no family visits during the 19 days she spent behind bars and didnt speak to Andrew or their children at all.

Meanwhile, Andrew kept Hartins family at bay, thousands of miles away in Ontario, allegedly telling her mother, who was worried sick, that she was fine and had visitors every day. I wouldnt say I was a wild party girl but I do have fun with my friends  I like to dance . . . I am a social person, Miss Hartin said.

As to rumours that she is a heavy cocaine user  she has been charged with possessing a small quantity when she was arrested on the jetty where she killed Mr Jemmott  she said: I heard that, too, and that was a shock to me as well. People are always talking  its Belize.

Following her release on bail after Superintendent Jemmotts (pictured) death, Jasmine was re-arrested last week

On legal advice, Miss Hartin refused to say any more about how Henry Jemmott came to die. However, she addressed speculation  dismissed by insiders as highly unlikely  that there may have been a sexual element to their stroll to a deserted jetty to watch the stars and discuss guns in the early hours of May 29.

She said the policeman hadnt told her he was having problems with Romit, his common-law wife and mother of three of his five children. I saw he posted on Facebook that Im single or something . . . and then he said he wanted to come to San Pedro to blow off some steam, said Miss Hartin. I figured if he wanted to talk about [the break-up], he would. He didnt.

She has previously revealed that she felt grateful to him after he had rescued her from a party where she had been threatened by a man. Miss Hartin said she had let him have an apartment at the Grand Colony, the beachside resort she and Mr Ashcroft own and where the family home is.

Many Belizeans are angry that Miss Hartins woes are getting so much attention when a police officer died  even if accidentally  at her hands.

Is Jasmine Hartin a careless killer, is she a dispossessed mother or is she a party girl who just didnt know when to stop? pondered her 7 News interviewer, covering all the bases.

Ms Hartins TV interview certainly leaves various riddles unanswered, and there could indeed be another side to this story. In fact, although the Ashcrofts have so far refused to comment, Andrew broke his silence yesterday to explain his treatment of his partner.

Family reputation: Tory donor Lord Ashcroft

In a statement he said: At no time have I told Jasmine she cannot see her children.

Mr Ashcroft said he had arranged to have the children flown over to spend several hours with her when she was first released on bail and living in a house 100 miles away that he had found for her.

I have explained to Jasmine that we have to agree on dates, times and places convenient to all of us where she can see the children, he said.

Instead, she insists on making unreasonable demands, showing up without prior notification and alerts the media to deliberately make a scene.

He revealed that when Miss Hartin turned up at the Alaia hotel demanding to see the children, he was so determined to stop her that he put them in a boat and headed off shore.

A source close to the Ashcroft family say they reject her claims that they abandoned her. The insider said prosecutors had been determined to refuse bail after she initially claimed Mr Jemmott had been shot from a passing boat and was uncooperative with police.

Mr Ashcrofts insistence that he decides when Miss Hartin can see her children was challenged last night.

Legal sources in Belize said the twins father could win custody of them only if he applied for a court order, and he has yet to do so.

However, Miss Hartins ability to get them back could be severely restricted because she is a foreigner, said a lawyer.

Andrew Ashcroft had arranged for a prominent lawyer, Godfrey Smith, to represent his former partner and paid her legal fees, which have amounted to $130,000 (U.S.). He not only arranged for her to stay in a comfortable house with armed security after she was given bail, but he chartered a helicopter and took the children to see her, said the source. Miss Hartin later abandoned the house without telling her guards.

Miss Hartin hired a new lawyer and found new accommodation after the confrontation with Andrew at their hotel. She had turned up with her mother, Candice, and chased him, shouting angrily and demanding to be allowed to see her children and collect her possessions from their home.

Ms Hartin and her lawyer say she is in fear for her life, although they havent specified who poses the threat. She says she had felt forced to dye her blonde hair brown and has refused to disclose exactly where she is living.

She arrives for her court-ordered daily check-in visits at the local police station in the Belize district of Cayo with a masked friend, who appears to be armed.

Others have decided to fight her beleaguered corner in a battle for public opinion that Andrew Ashcroft may not be winning.

Wendy Auxillou, a Belizean barrister and friend, stepped in to post Miss Hartins 21,500 bail when the hotel manager who had been the original guarantor decided to revoke it, prompting her rearrest and imprisonment  a move Jasmine blames on Andrew Ashcroft.

Miss Auxillou said Miss Hartin had been thrown to the wolves by the Ashcrofts, who were psychologically and emotionally abusing her.

Many of us women are victims to this. Rich, powerful men do things like this all the time, she said.

Miss Hartins lawyer, Richard Bradley, says his client is not being prosecuted but persecuted.

He says Belize police and prosecutors have gone out of their way to put her behind bars, and attacked the courts decision to make her sign in each day at a police station 100 miles from where she is staying.

Once you start to mess with a mother and her love for her children, youre begging for trouble, big time trouble, he said.

A story that was bizarre enough to begin with is getting odder by the day.
President Donald Trump and key allies undertook a furious campaign to try to get to Republican county election officials in Arizona as part of their election overturn effort  with the White House dialing New Year's Eve and Rudy Giuliani phoning repeatedly.

'POTUS will probably be calling you,' Arizona state GOP chair Kelli Ward texted one such official, Maricopa County supervisor Clint Hickman, who held sway on the county board overseeing elections in a state that had been called for Joe Biden back in November.

On New Year's Eve, the White House called with a message that mentioned Trump's desire to speak to the county official.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is heard on voicemails calling Arizona county election officials and telling them Trump wants to talk to them

'Just a check in from the President of the United States ... So I guess that means you could/should take the call,' Ward pressed him.

Hickman said he didn't want to discuss litigation, amid a flurry of 'Kraken' lawsuits by Trump allies challenging results in states where Joe Biden won.

The pressure was contained in documents obtained by the Arizona Republic. The paper published audio of the 8:30 pm call, which Hickman didn't take.

Hickman told the paper he heard similar audio when Trump sought to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. 'I was horrified,' he said.

'Hello, sir. This is the White House operator I was calling to let you know that the president's available to take your call if you're free,' said a message an operator left on his voicemail. 'If you could please give us a call back, sir, that'd be great. You have a good evening.'

State GOP chair Kelli Ward told officials they should talk to Trump and his lawyers despite their own concerns about doing so amid litigation

Trump fought to overturn the election results, and claims the election was rife with fraud

UNDER PRESSURE: Clint Hickman, Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said he didn't want to take the calls

He wouldn't take either of two calls from a White House number. 'I'm not going to tape a president, so I'm not going to talk to a president,' he said.

Ward told supervisors to 'stop the counting,' and told Hickman: 'A hand count before counts are complete is CRUCIAL.' She wrote: 'Make this happen!'

'We need you to stop the counting,' she told Hickman.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was then spearheading ultimately doomed legal efforts on Trump's behalf, also phoned local officials again and again.

Trump's loss in Arizona was devastating to his electoral math, and the president was reportedly furious when Fox News first called the state for Biden late on election night.

Giuliani dialed GOP supervisor Steve Chucri, who had earlier rejected outreach from pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell due to ongoing litigation, in November, according to the records, and mentioned the Trump camp's push to look at voting machines.

'I see we're gonna get a chance to take a good look at those machines. And we've got people that are ready to come out right now. Let's get it done quickly. And at least get some preliminary stuff done right away,' he said.

There was loud music during the call, suggesting it came from a restaurant or bar or event. 'So give me a call as soon as you get a chance. The president also wanted me to pass on a few things to you, too.'

Chucri said he met with Giuliani at one point.

Giuliani also called Hickman. 'I was very happy to see that there's going to be a forensic audit of the machines,' Giuliani said in a voicemail. 'And I really wanted to talk to you about it a bit. The president wanted me to give you a call. All right. Thank you. Give me a call back. I'd really appreciate it.'

Giuliani tried to reach supervisor Bill Gates on Christmas Eve. 'If you get a chance, would you please give me a call,' Giuliani said on the voicemail. 'I have a few things I'd like to talk over with you. Maybe we can get this thing fixed up. You know, I really think it's a shame that Republicans sort of are both in this kind of situation. And I think there may be a nice way to resolve this for everybody.'

Trump supporters would later riot in the Capitol Jan. 6th amid his demands that Vice President Mike Pence refuse to accept electoral votes from states like Arizona where Trump and his allies claimed there was voter fraud.

Trump is under investigation in Georgia following the release of a taped recording where he asked Raffensperger to 'find' 12,000 votes. Trump claims he won both states.
Victoria's state of emergency has been extended again despite no new cases being reported on Saturday and restrictions gradually being eased.

The system was first enabled in March 2020 and from 11:59pm on July 1st the emergency powers of Premier Dan Andrews and Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton were extended until 11:59pm July 29.

The move comes after Andrews' government pulled the plug on Paradigm Music Festival on the eve of it beginning after concerns over capacity of patrons.

Victoria's state of emergency has been extended again, giving Dan Andrews and Brett Sutton overarching powers, despite 0 new cases being recorded Saturday

The move comes after Andrews' government pulled the plug on Paradigm Music Festival on the eve of it beginning after concerns over the capacity

The popular event, held in Port Melbourne and with four thousand people buying tickets, was told on Friday that it would not be able to go ahead, leaving organisers 'heartbroken'

The Andrews Government first brought in the state of emergency powers on March 16, 2020, and has quietly extended it for the last two months despite Victoria having its coronavirus situation under control.

The first state of emergency was initially set to remain in place for four weeks, but has since been extended 18 times.

The powers of the order include 'detaining people, restricting movement and preventing entry to premises', through lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing and hotel quarantine.

The extension of the state of emergency powers means the government has the legal right to lockdown until July 29.

The state emergency was signed off to 'assist with measures designed to 'flatten the curve' of Covid-19 and give our health system the best chance of managing the virus', Mr Andrews said last year.

Health Minister Martin Foley has extended the state of emergency 'due to the ongoing serious risk to public health throughout Victoria' - despite zero new infections on Friday and Saturday.

The decision gives overarching power to Victoria's uncompromising Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton who has been described by senior figures in the Victorian government as a 'catastrophist'.

The first state of emergency was initially set to remain in place for four weeks, but has since been extended 18 times - the latest coming despite no new cases

The decision gives overarching power to Victoria's Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, who has been described by senior figures in the Victorian government as a 'catastrophist'

On Friday the Andrews government pulled the plug on Paradigm Music Festival the day before it was supposed to start due to concerns over the number of people attending.

The popular event, held in Port Melbourne and with four thousand people buying tickets, was told that it would not be able to go ahead, leaving organisers 'heartbroken'.

'Unfortunately, at 3pm today, Friday, July 2, 20 hours before gates open, we were notified that we are not permitted to operate Paradigm Festival this weekend,' a post on Paradigm's Facebook page said.

'We have been going back and forth with our staff and various stakeholders while jumping through numerous hoops to give us every chance of going ahead this weekend.

'Our event site was set up and ready to roll.'

The event, which has been in the works since 2019, was pushed back from June after the state's most recent lockdown meant it couldn't go ahead on the planned date

The event, which has been in the works since 2019, was pushed back from June after the state's most recent lockdown meant it couldn't go ahead on the planned date.

It now appears as if Paradigm will be unable to take place at all.

'Over 600 people have collectively worked on this show, pushing boundaries of music, production and site set-up, our artists have also endured more in this last month than most artists will endure in years, ticking every box required to proceed in a manner we believed to be legally and safely, only to be told hours before gates open, that the event cannot proceed,' organisers said.

'This is heartbreaking for all of us.'
Face-to-face appointments with family doctors will never return to their pre-pandemic levels, Britains top GP Professor Martin Marshall has warned

Face-to-face appointments with family doctors will never return to their pre-pandemic levels, Britains top GP has warned.

Only around half of GP appointments are now in person  with the remainder via telephone or video services such as Skype.

Prior to Covid, most appointments were face-to-face. Many patients, particularly the elderly, are thought to be uncomfortable with phone and video arrangements.

Experts, meanwhile, have warned that symptoms can be missed if patients are not seen in person.

But Professor Martin Marshall, the chairman of the Royal College of GPs, told the Mail that remote consultations with GPs were here to stay.

He said that despite the concerns of many, a 50-50 split between face-to-face and remote appointments was about right and that the pre-pandemic approach would never return.

He suggested patients would get used to it in the same way they have got used to online banking.

Professor Marshall also predicted that waiting times for any type of consultations would grow even longer thanks to a post-lockdown surge in demand.

Before the first lockdown in March last year, as many as 80 per cent of GP appointments were face-to-face.

In April last year, that fell to just 10 per cent. It has since risen to 55 per cent  and Professor Marshall said this was unlikely to increase.

Although I know some patients are very uncomfortable about the loss of face-to-face, we need to remember that remote care is here to stay because it is more convenient and it does have a number of advantages, he said.

Face-to-face appointments with family doctors will never return to their pre-pandemic levels, Britains top GP has warned. Only around half of GP appointments are now in person  with the remainder via telephone or video services such as Skype (stock image)

Asked what the ratio would be, he replied: I have said in the past 50-50 is about right. But thats a finger in the air.

He continued: Practices want to embrace technology. Theres some really exciting things we can do with technology and I dont think it will go back.

Professor Marshall said he accepted, however, that remote or virtual consultations should certainly not be the default and that face-to-face appointments were still crucial.

Our view is that face-to-face care is a fundamental part of our ability to provide good care for our patients, he said.

It isnt just about being able to examine somebody, its about being in the same room and being able to pick up the soft signs, maybe being dishevelled, maybe smelling of alcohol.

Those soft signs allow you to make a good diagnosis and be able to help the patient as much as possible. A lot of GPs are... saying they dont want to be part of a speciality which is largely remote.

In May, NHS England sent a letter to GP practices stating patients must be offered face-to-face appointments if they demand them.

But the move triggered a row with family doctors who were concerned this would increase Covid transmission in surgeries, at a time when infections were already on the rise.

Last night, Rachel Power, head of the Patients Association, said most people preferred a face-to-face approach.

She said: Phone consultations, and to a lesser extent online appointments, have become more common, and some patients like and will prefer them in future.

But patients have made clear to us that most commonly they prefer to see their GP in person.

Professor Marshall said waiting lists are expected to grow as rising numbers of patients are seeking help for issues they have sat on for a year  such as chronic pain or deafness  or for conditions that have worsened while they waited for hospital treatment.

Doctors are also seeing more long Covid patients and those with mental health conditions triggered or exacerbated by the pandemic.

In terms of waiting to see a GP  particularly a GP of your choosing, and most patients would like to see someone that they know and trust  that is going to get worse, Professor Marshall said.

'GPs try really hard to ensure patients receive as good care as possible, but it might well be less accessible and thats a worry and a real concern.

In May, NHS England sent a letter to GP practices stating patients must be offered face-to-face appointments if they demand them (pictured, a woman waits for an appointment)

His college is also concerned that plans to offer booster jabs to all over-50s this autumn, as outlined by government scientists this week, could further increase GP workload and reduce their availability for appointments.

Professor Marshall, who practises at a surgery in Newham, east London, also predicted that up to a third of family doctors would leave the profession within the next five years, further intensifying the pressures.

A recent survey by the college involving 1,250 of its GP members found that 34 per cent expected to leave or retire within the next five years, including 15 per cent who planned to do so within the next two years.

Thats a real worry, he said. Were seeing a significant and worsening crisis in general practice and its going to get worse if people are leaving, if theyre off sick or theyre retiring. Theres a real risk of thing will spiral.

Imelda Redmond CBE, national director at Healthwatch England, the patient champion organisation, said: We acknowledge there are significant long-term workload and workforce pressures... however, we are still hearing from thousands of people who are struggling to access the care they need.

Among those affected are often the most vulnerable in our society: older people, disabled people, people on low incomes and those whose first language isnt English.

An NHS spokesman said: Face-to-face appointments are available for those that need them, as are virtual consultations, which can offer a more convenient way for patients to see their GP team, so as has been the case throughout the pandemic. Please come forward for care when you need it.
Standing on the end of a gangplank a couple of hundred metres above a canyon, Im absolutely terrified.

Its April 2017 and Im about to experience The Flying Fox, the worlds highest cliff zip wire, located near Queenstown in New Zealand.

I have to run and hurl myself onto the mercy of the inadequate-looking thread that attaches me to the wire.

Im wondering if it might be easier to slowly crawl and ungracefully dribble off at the last possible moment.

Then someone behind me hollers encouragement: Shout Mikes name as you jump!

Mike was my younger brother. The reason Im here is that in January 2015 Mike died of motor neurone disease, aged 39, leaving me a bucket list to complete on his behalf.

If I tell you that hurling myself into that canyon was by no means the hardest task, you get a hint of what made him tick.

Just run and scream Mikes name, comes another shout.

I get it. The shaking fear in me steadies and I can feel Mike, the adrenaline junkie. If he could see me like this, Id never hear the end of it.

Royd Tolkien (left) completed an epic bucket list of challenges left by his younger brother Mike (right) after he died from motor neurone disease. Pictured: brothers at Hobbiton, New Zealand

I feel his name in my throat. Im going to do it. I have to do it. I cant shout his name and then chicken out. I wish he was here.

I open my mouth, the M of his name already forming, and I run.

MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKE, I scream at the top of my lungs. Im not sure if the K really comes out; Im too busy flailing like a rag doll.

But as my descent becomes smoother, I slide across the canyon in the sunshine and I laugh. Euphoric.

Once again, my beloved brother has shown me the beauty of life, and the simple joy of throwing yourself into things. Quite literally.

This was just one of 50 items on Mikes bucket list full of tasks meant to challenge me (bungee jumping, skydiving, stroking a tarantula), remind me of times spent with him (fishing, camping, snowboarding), or just make me look like a fool! Thats brothers for you.

Mike and I were always very close growing up and as adults lived just ten minutes apart in North Wales.

Happy, fun, full of drive, loyal, always on an adventure, Mike was someone I looked up to, even though he was five years younger than me.

By the time he became ill in November 2011, he was 35, working as a printer, and had an eight-year-old son called Edan. What started with a high fever and flu-like symptoms developed into cramps in his calf and weakness in his hands.

It wasnt until April 2012 that the diagnosis finally came. The average life expectancy with MND is 18 months. I held my tough, handsome, caring, loyal little brother in my arms and sobbed uncontrollably.

Pictured: First challenge Royd was asked to do by Mike was simply to trip over at this funeral

Thats the only time we acknowledged the unavoidable fact. Mike was going to die.

And it would be sooner rather than later. Everything was going to be stolen from him, as he would gradually be stolen from us.

The bucket list originated more as a plan of things we wanted to do together with the limited time we had left: camping in Norway for the last time; snowboarding in France; returning to New Zealand.

We never did make it back to New Zealand together, but that was where Mike set most of the bucket list. It was a place he knew I loved. He also asked me to make a film of the whole process to raise awareness of MND, which I did.

Over the last three years of his life, I became Mikes carer, along with his girlfriend Laura. I was there during the day; Laura took over in the evening. We learned how to use all the equipment  breathing machines, hoists and so on.

In 2014 Mike deteriorated quickly, and on January 28, 2015, he passed away. The gaping hole he left was made larger by the fact that my role as a carer had also been taken away. I was bereft and didnt know who I was any more.

Little did I realise Mikes bucket list would start so soon  or that it would be so helpful in giving me focus in the darkest of times. Here, I open my diary to reveal the most memorable challenges . . .

February 2015

A few days prior to Mikes funeral, Laura hands me a piece of paper. Mike wanted you to have this, she tells me.

Its the first task on the list. Im only allowed to know each item moments before I have to do it. The first challenge will take place at his funeral.

When its my time to say a few words, I move towards the pulpit. A chair creaks. Someone sniffs. A muffled cough echoes around the packed room. It has to be now. This matters. It really matters.

I kick my foot forward, hard into the side of the step. Bang. And Im falling. My momentum carries me forwards, and down. I crumple onto the remaining steps and my head bangs into the side of the pulpit. The crash thunders around the room.

I lie there, hidden from the congregation, feeling the silence somehow intensify. Nobody knows what to do.

Royd returned to a favourite retreat in the French Alps to scatter some of his brother's ashes wearing nothing but a leopard print thong and a pink cowboy hat while snowboarding in 2017

I did it.

Once on my feet again, I fumble in my pocket and hold up a piece of paper that reads: TRIP OVER.

Mikes instructions are: 1. The Funeral Trip. Please make a fool of yourself before you speak. Trip over and make it really dramatic. Make everyone laugh for me and lighten the moment.

Theres a second of quiet while the penny drops, and then the room laughs with me. Thank you, Mike. Without this, I wouldnt have been able to stand up here now and say what I want to say.

Were here to remember your life, not your death.

January 2017

It took over a year-and-a-half to secure funding for Mikes film, and for the second task I find myself in Avoriaz, in the French Alps, where I went with Mike in early 2012 and where Ive returned to spread some of his ashes.

I am on a slope with my snowboard, wearing boots and a coat. And not much beneath it except a snug leopard-print thong.

Aside from that, perhaps in the spirit of dubious anonymity, Im wearing sunglasses and a lovely shocking pink cowboy hat. This is Mike stitching me right up!

Its cold, and there are people around. But I have to do it. For Mike. Thats all I need to remember; Ill do anything for Mike.

I stand up and slide out of my coat. I set off, albeit slowly. Well, nobody said I had to do this at speed, did they? Dont fall. Dont fall. Everyone is looking at me.

And then, after the initial nerves, everything is suddenly OK. It doesnt matter that I look ridiculous in this thong. I feel a grin stretch over my face. I feel oddly liberated.

One less challenging task set by Mike asked Royd to don the costume worn by Sir Ian McKellan in the Lord of the Rings films and welcome people onboard a flight to New Zealand as Gandalf

February 2, 2017

I am awaiting my flight to New Zealand, where the bucket list will begin in earnest, when a representative of Air New Zealand reads me a note from Mike.

Last time we went to New Zealand, she begins, and just those first words send a tsunami of emotion through me. I was struggling with my walking, using a cane to help steady myself. Get into the spirit of the journey by dressing up as Gandalf. Embrace the character.

Im crying.

My mum, Joanna Tolkien, read us The Hobbit  written by my great-grandfather J.R.R. Tolkien  when I was about nine years old, without ceremony. It was only when I went to secondary school that I understood the importance of that book  to our family and the wider world.

One of the films producers presents me with a bag: Its Sir Ian McKellens actual costume from the films, so be careful with it.

Wow! The costume fits great, but Ive not got the special glue to stick the beard on, so I improvise with double-sided sticky tape. I stand awkwardly in the doorway to the plane greeting passengers in full Gandalf mode, with his whopping great staff in my hand.

You shall not pass! I boom.

They laugh.

Fly, you fools!

This isnt so bad.

Pictured: Royd hurling himself from the Nevis Highwire dressed in a pink tutu in New Zealand

February 20, 2017

Whenever a task is read out to me, I think: Oh no! I never want to do it, but thats immediately overridden by the fact that its Mike saying these things  I am hearing his voice again. Getting that connection back is my reward.

I never know when the producers are going to hit me with a new task. Sometimes there are three in a day, other times Im granted a few days respite.

My tenth task is to jump from the Sky Tower in Auckland. It is the first of several jumps on the list.

Later, in Shotover Canyon, I will fall backwards sitting in a chair. I will also hurl myself from the Nevis Highwire dressed in a pink tutu. Each one becomes harder to do as I know whats coming.

Now, wearing a multicoloured jumpsuit, I am clipped to the metal walkway that juts out from the tower. The woman at the top has doubtless seen every manifestation of fear up here.

Im just another idiot thats too scared to jump.

Come on, Royd! she says, after a failed attempt.

I really dont want to.

Go!

I go. Im at the mercy of gravity, looking at the ground billions of feet below me.

And then, out of nowhere, the concrete rushes up towards my face and the brakes kick in. My seemingly fatal fall is rapidly slowed and Im pulled upright just before I come to a standstill and land perfectly, if a little shakily, on the ground.

Tick. Finished. Awful.

Pictured: Although unable to draw, Royd was tasked with approaching people at Hobbiton, where the movie was filmed and now a popular tourist attraction, and offer to sketch them

March 14, 2017

Hobbiton  the set for The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings films  is now a tourist destination nestled in the rolling hills of the New Zealand countryside. I came here in 2012 with Mike and we got to take a proper look in Bilbo Bagginss home and spend a day exploring this magical place. One of my happiest memories.

Five years later Im back again. Im handed an iPad and some headphones.

Royd, a voice fills my ears, oddly familiar. Its John Rhys-Davies, Gimli the dwarf in The Lord of the Rings films.

Welcome to New Zealand. This is my little place in the Waikato. I have for you some instructions. These are your brothers words.

I feel a surge of emotion in my chest. Mike is about to talk to me. I cant help but smile.

You are an artist. There should be an outfit waiting for you. Offer to paint Hobbiton visitors. I love this place, and our time here.

I feel my eyes filling with bittersweet tears.

I am with you and Im everywhere. I love you, bro.

I crumble.

Then I remember the humiliating part  I cant draw. Its awkward as hell but I force myself to approach people and end up drawing three spectacularly bad portraits.

March 22, 2017

Plenty of the tasks are cringe-inducing. One involved me dressing as a hippy and spreading some love; another playing music on a busy street and enticing people to dance with me.

But this, the 17th, is the most agonising yet. Mike wrote: You think youre funny. Find an open-mic comedy night and see how many laughs you get. I am given just an hours notice.

Its an open-mic night in a bar, with several other comedians and a large audience. I struggle through my seemingly endless five minutes, making terrible jokes. Its excruciating. Thanks for that, Mike!

April 18, 2017

Mike and I loved fishing. While my technique was devoid of skill and I rarely caught anything, Mike was far more dedicated  and successful.

My 42nd task is to catch a fish in Fiordland, New Zealand, wearing Mikes favourite green Tilley hat for good luck. See if it brings you luck to catch a fish for once. I hold it to my face, crying. It still smells of him.

I can picture him in Norway, where we used to fish together, sitting on a rock away from the shore. I feel hes as close as Ive ever felt him.

I cast once.

Twice.

A third time. And I get a bite. It worked! I can barely believe it. I reel it in carefully, imagining Mike proudly beaming down at me.

I did it, Mike.

One of Mike's lifelong dreams was to visit Machu Picchu and, although he never got to go, Royd was able to visit the site and scatter his ashes there in a final challenge on the bucket list

Autumn 2017

More than anywhere in the world, Mike wanted to see Machu Picchu. He never got to go. But hes here with me now, a portion of his ashes kept safe and dry in their small wooden casket hanging around my neck. The last task is to scatter his ashes here.

Mike would have been thrilled I have made this long journey up into the Andes. I can feel the rising emotion of what Im about to do. This is the end.

But I cant do it. I dont want this to come to an end and I dont feel right being here on my own. Edan should be here. Dad and Laura too. And our sister, Mandy. My son Story should be here and so should Mikes best mate, Ali.

I break down. Im here for you, Mike. I made it. Im in Machu Picchu. Youre in Machu Picchu.

Im happy to sit on top of this cliff, on the side of this mountain, revelling in the glory of nature.

Just me.

And Mike. My brother.

Its only right that he should have the last word. Love you and thank you, bro. I hope youve had the time of your life. My life wouldnt have been the same without you. Live to the max. I live through you. Im still with you in spirit, always. xxxxx

Theres A Hole In My Bucket: A Journey Of Two Brothers, by Royd Tolkien (Little A, 8.99), will be released on August 1 on Amazon.

The film, Theres A Hole In My Bucket, will be released shortly after.
The BBC has faced a furious backlash from environmental activists after sharing an online GCSE revision guide that listed the positive impacts of climate change.

Among the benefits were the creation of shipping routes due to melting ice and that lower heating bills thanks to warmer winters.

Campaigners called the BBC Bitesize material for GCSE geography students an absolute disgrace.

The BBC said the decision to remove the list of positive effectsit had failed to reflect the national curriculum.

The guide now shows only the negative impacts of global warming, such as rising sea levels, droughts and greater risk of flooding.

Other benefits of climate change listed in bullet points included the claims that warmer temperatures lead to healthier outdoor lifestyles, there would be new tourist destinations, oil becoming available in Alaska and Siberia as the ice melts, and some animals and plants may flourish.

The BBC has faced a furious backlash from environmental activists over an online GCSE revision guide that listed the positive impacts of climate change, including the creation of shipping routes due to melting ice (pictured, graffiti in Wales in September 2020)

The page was first highlighted on Thursday by Guardian journalist George Monbiot to his near-half a million Twitter followers after he was tipped off by a teacher.

The lifelong environmental activist branded it an absolute disgrace, arguing the web page read like fossil fuel propaganda and would leave schoolchildren thinking global warming was pretty good.

It prompted fury among climate experts, campaigners and teachers who said the arguments were flat wrong and did not reflect what was on the current syllabus.

GCSE revision tips that saw the positives in pollution 1. Warmer temperatures and increased CO2 levels, leading to more vigorous plant growth. 2. Some animals and plants could benefit and flourish. The guide failed to note that polar bears, right, are struggling to survive. 3. New shipping routes, such as the Northwest Passage, would become available. 4. More resources, for example oil, becoming available in places such as Siberia as ice melts. 5. Energy consumption decreasing due to a warmer climate. 6. Longer growing season leading to higher yields in farming areas. 7. Frozen regions, such as Canada and Siberia, could be farmed to grow crops. 8. New tourist destinations becoming available. 9. Warmer temperatures could lead to healthier outdoor lifestyles. Advertisement

Exam board Eduqas said the suggestions were not within its GCSE geography specifications, adding that while it asked students to explore opposing attitudes to climate change it did not advocate a positive viewpoint.

Stuart Lock, the chief executive of a group of schools in Bedfordshire, was among the education experts to speak out before the BBC revision guide was amended.

He tweeted: I think this is flat wrong, doesnt align with the national curriculum or exam specs, and needs reconsidering. Climate change isnt a both sides argument.

Extinction Rebellions south-east group said: GCSE students, young people, those facing future disasters, deserve better than to be judged on questions which warp and distort the truth.

Yesterday the BBC said: We have reviewed the page and have amended the content to be in line with current curricula.

In 2018, the Corporation accepted failures over its coverage of climate change after a series of apologies and censures for not challenging sceptics during interviews.

In a briefing note sent to staff, it stated: To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken.

Following a meeting with climate experts in Edinburgh, the Queen said on Thursday that tackling climate change would mean we have to change the way we do things.

Last month, Government advisers said the UK is woefully prepared to deal with the changing climate.

They warned of more severe heatwaves and more intense rainfall, with an increased risk of flooding across the UK.
Health food store owners dramatically arrested and charged by police after banning masks are QAnon fans who post wild anti-vax conspiracy theories online.

Police swooped on the Organic Whole Food Store in Bowral in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales after the owners refused to wear masks - or allow any customers to enter wearing masks - on Thursday.

Signs outside the shop also banned anyone from entering the store if they were wearing a mask - or if they had been vaccinated against Covid in the last 14 days - a policy they've had for more than on year.

A customer in the shop caught the arrests of the two middle-aged owners on camera and posted the footage on social media.

But the shop's Instagram account reveals the owners' posts suddenly took a dark turn almost a year ago to the day when they got sucked into the QAnon cult.

The store's social media dramatically pivoted from six years of posts about healthy eating and pics of fruit and veg, seen here, to a near non-stop series of conspiracy theories about Covid

The store's owners (pictured, left and right) is seen in a clash with police as they were arrested in Bowral, after being alerted by the public that the shop had banned mask-wearers

Their social media dramatically pivoted from six years of sporadic posts about healthy eating and pictures of fruit and vegetables to a near non-stop series of conspiracy theories about Covid.

On June 29, 2020 they started posting anti-vaxxer quotes which rapidly escalated to posting up to several times a day with QAnon-style memes of Covid and US election conspiracy theories.

QAnon is a discredited far-right conspiracy theory that claims a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic paedophiles run a global child sex trafficking ring and conspired against former President Donald Trump while in office.

It has a cult-like following and played a large part in the USA's January 6 uprising over the Presidential election results.

At the end of August, the store published a series of QAnon posts including a t-shirt with a slogan reading: 'A Great Awakening'. They added a caption: 'It's happening. Trust the plan.'

They added another post the same day with what appears to be the back of their t-shirt with a letter Q and the cult's motto 'WWG1WGA ' - 'Where we go one, we go all'.

The caption added: 'Everybody needs to rally. We need to wake up.'

At the end of August, they published a series of QAnon posts including a t-shirt with the cult's 'A Great Awakening' slogan (pictured, left). They added a caption: 'It's happening. Trust the plan.' They added another post the same day (right) with what appears to be the back of their t-shirt with a letter Q and the cult's motto 'WWG1WGA ' - 'Where we go one, we go all'.

Three days later they posted a pic of the QAnon logo (pictured)

Three days later they posted a pic of the QAnon logo, followed by a further 96 posts over the next year mostly attacking vaccination programmes, mask wearing, government efforts to fight Covid - and even hand sanitiser.

Likes for their posts went from a handful for their healthy eating posts to 432 for a post four days ago saying: 'No mask? We won't ask. Safe space for all'

They added in the caption: 'Our reasons are clear. 1. Hygiene - mask wearers constantly touch them. Are they 3 min, 3 days or 3 months old! We are an open food store. Not appropriate.

'2. Depleted 02 could result in fainting or worse in store. Not pleasant. 3. We like to hear our customers requests and see their happy faces. Not muzzle them. 4. Simple really. Not law.'

Other posts focused on fake anti-vaxxer news stories about vaccinations and claims masks were ineffective or that governments are lying about the pandemic.

Instagram flagged many of the store's posts as false or misleading with links to fact check websites, or even obscuring the post entirely unless users clicked to see it.

Google Reviews for the store also suddenly went from five stars to one star a year ago as stunned customers complained about the 'rude' and 'weirdo' owners banning anyone wearing masks.

One Google reviewer Joanne Laxton said she was told in the shop: 'We don't allow masks to be worn in this store. I am a nurse; they (masks) carry pathogens.'

Ms Laxton added: 'What a lovely welcome to this store by, presumably, the owner on my first visit.

'I am at high risk of contracting COVID-19 as I have recently had cancer and radiotherapy. Are you freakin' kidding me??? I would give zero stars if possible.'

Another one-star reviewer said: 'Had an awful experience with the owner, lectured me at the register. Telling me she only serves regular customers and people she knows personally. Very rude and arrogant owner.'

The stand-off with authorities came to a head on Thursday when the owners were arrested in a violent clash with police.

Video showed the female owner being bundled into the back of a police van by two police officers.

When the male owner stepped in to object to her arrest, he was grabbed by officers, slammed into the back of the van and then wrestled to the ground.

'For over 1.5 hours the police discussed this with owners,' the post said.

'A customer and a friend decided to film the discussion - that's when it all kicked off. They refused to allow the filming and forcibly tried to remove her from the store.'

Police on Friday said they had been tipped off about the shop and on arrival found the manageress, 62, not wearing a mask, who was arrested when she allegedly refused to comply.

A customer, 61, also came into the shop not wearing a mask and was also arrested when she also allegedly refused to put one after she was confronted by police.

A police statement said that as the two women were being led to a police vehicle a 63 year old man tried to intervene and pulled off the mask of a police sergeant, before he was also arrested.

The Organic Store in Bowral are very open about their anti-Covid views, with a chalkboard outside the shop banning customers who have recently had vaccines or are wearing a mask - which is mandatory in New South Wales

The man was charged with assaulting an officer, resisting police and inciting to resist or hinder police. He was released on bail.

The customer was fined $200 for breaking the mask regulations and both women were released, with possible changes and infringements pending further inquiries into other Public Health Order breaches, said police.

The owners had accused an officer of putting her hands behind her back and pushing her from the store.

The video showed the male shopkeeper approaching officers as they tried to put the female owner into the police van, and he asked 'what has she done?' as the officers warned him to 'walk away'.

After the woman was pushed inside the van, the owner was immediately grabbed by an officer, to which he shouted 'don't touch me' as the woman filming can be heard calling out 'Mark, Mark!'.

Officers then pushed the owner against the back of the van with enough force to knock the cap from his head, and pushed a hand into his face.

One officer warned him to 'stop resisting, you're under arrest' and he replied 'what about this fat bloke' in reference to another officer.

The man, who was being held by two officers, was then tripped by a third and pushed face first to the footpath.

Since the lockdown was imposed by the New South Wales government on Saturday, all people entering shops, workplaces and any indoor public space must wear masks when inside.
Amazon is being urged to rename its personal assistant because girls also named Alexa are being relentlessly bullied by other schoolchildren, their parents say.

The Alexa assistant  which was launched in 2014, but only had its UK debut in 2016  can increasingly be found in homes via Amazon's Echo and Echo Dot devices.

Not only is the AI-powered system named Alexa, it is also the default 'wake word' used to alert Amazon devices that an instruction or question will follow.

However, this has led to individuals named Alexa becoming the butt of recurring jokes in which their name is shouted, followed by a command.

The assistant's granting of a name shared by real people has resulted in movements such as 'Alexa is a Human'  which is lobbying Amazon to reconsider the choice.

There are some 4,000 individuals named Alexa under the age of 25 in the UK alone  many of whom report experiencing mockery thanks to their digital namesake.

Amazon is being urged to rename its personal assistant because girls also named Alexa are being relentlessly bullied by other schoolchildren, their parents say (stock image)

'HEI, SIGRID!' Amazon is not the only smart device manufacturer to have given their voice assistant a name used by real people. Siri  the name of Apple's assistant  is the diminutive form of the name 'Sigrid' and is used in Norway, Sweden and the Faroe Islands. Fortunately, the pronunciation is slightly different, with both a longer vowel sound and a rolled 'r'. However, there are some people named Siri that do pronounce the word in the same way. One such woman told the BBC that she often received jokes about her name  once even from an Apple employee. Pictured: Apple's voice assistance, Siri Advertisement

'Alexa is a Human' is the initiative of Massachusetts resident Lauren Johnson, who was moved to act after the distress experienced by her own daughter.

'My daughter Alexa is nine now. The whole thing is a step beyond 'normal' teasing and bullying. It's identity erasure,' Ms Johnson told BBC News.

From older children, she added, the jokes can even take on a sexual component.

As a result of this treatment, some parents have felt forced to take the extreme step of legally changing their daughters' name to something other than Alexa.

One woman, who wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC that her teenage daughter Alexa started to receive abuse from other children  and even teachers  as a result of her name as soon as she entered secondary school.

'She started to not want to introduce herself because of the jokes and the backlash. She was and still is a child, yet adults thought it was OK to make a joke of her. It's devastating. The school was unhelpful and told her she needed to build resilience.'

As a result of the impact the teasing was having on her mental health, the family made the decision to change Alexa's name.

Another mother told the BBC that her daughter Alexa, who is only 6, began being mocked for her name when she entered reception classes.

'Older children would say things like "Alexa, play disco". Other boys picked up on it and shouted commands at her.'

She said the issue is now affecting her daughter's confidence, with children 'constantly' mocking her when she goes to the park.

In response, Amazon said that it was 'saddened' and 'condemned' the bullying, adding that its devices can be programmed to respond to different names.

However  at least for now  it appears that Alexa will remain the default wake work for the tech giant's smart devices and the name most associated with the voice assistant.

This might well see the name abandoned by real people  with 'Alexa' having already fallen from the 167th most popular baby name in the UK in 2016 to 920th by 2019.

Critics of Amazon have suggested that the tech firm has not sufficiently advertised the fact that the wake word for their devices can be changed.

The Alexa assistant  which was launched in 2014, but only had its UK debut in 2016  can increasingly be found in homes via Amazon's Echo (pictured) and Echo Dot smart devices

'Alexa is a Human' is the initiative of Massachussets resident Lauren Johnson, who was moved to act after the distress experienced by her own daughter. 'The word Alexa has become synonymous with servant or slave. It gives people a licence to treat people with the name Alexa in a subservient manner,' Ms Johnson said. Pictured: a t-shirt branded with an Alexa joke

'As an alternative to Alexa, we also offer several other wake words customers can choose from, including Echo, Computer, and Amazon,' an Amazon spokesperson told MailOnline.

'We value feedback from customers, and as with everything we do, we will continue to look for ways to offer them more choice in this area.

'We designed our voice assistant to reflect qualities we value in people - being smart, considerate, empathetic, and inclusive.

'We're saddened by [these] experiences [] and want to be very clear: bullying of any kind is unacceptable, and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms.'
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The Hubble telescope may be 'beyond repair' and this 'could be the end of its story', experts have said, although NASA insists it still has multiple options to try and fix it almost three weeks after it went offline.

The US space agency has dismissed fears the ageing observatory will never work again after a computer glitch caused it to shut down on June 13.

Hubble, a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), has been observing the Universe for more than 30 years.

Engineers have tried a range of measures to get it up and running again, including switching to a backup memory module, restarting the machine and turning on a backup version of the payload computer - but none of them solved the issue.

They found that the fault was in the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SI C&DH) unit, where the payload computer sits, and so are designing a way to safely switch to a backup unit, which is a 'very risky process,' said NASA.

The ongoing issues have caused experts to speculate about the telescope's future, with former NASA space shuttle pilot Clayton C Anderson saying he believes Hubble is 'beyond repair'.

FermiLab director and leading physicist Don Lincoln also said this 'could be the end of Hubble's story', but told CNN he couldn't discount the ingenuity of NASA engineers.

NASA insists there is still life in the telescope, telling MailOnline it has 'multiple redundancies on board and therefore options available to address this issue.'

NASA dismissed fears the Hubble space telescope 'is beyond repair,' insisting there are multiple options to fix it weeks after a computer glitch caused it to shut down

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the famous Pillars of Creation, revealing a sharper and wider view of the structures in this visible-light image

As well as images of distant galaxies and star clusters, Hubble has given us some of the best and most iconic images of planets in our own solar system including Saturn (pictured)

For the 26th birthday of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are highlighting a Hubble image of an enormous bubble being blown into space by a super-hot, massive star

In the Hubble portrait, the giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbour (NGC 2020) are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud

THE 31-YEAR HISTORY OF HUBBLE: HOW NASA'S TELESCOPE CHANGED OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE UNIVERSE The Hubble space telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, via the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. It cost $4.7 billion (3.4 billion) to build and has a 7ft 10in mirror which can observe in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared. It is named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble who was born in Missouri in 1889. He is arguably most famous for discovering that the universe is expanding and the rate at which it does so - now coined the Hubble constant. Hubble has made over 1.5 million observations of more than 43,500 celestial objects and helped publish more than 15,000 scientific papers. The first of those observations was the planet Jupiter in March 1991, a subject it came back to regularly. Hubble also provided the first conclusive evidence of the existence of supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies after observing the galaxy M87 in 1993. Other major discoveries included the 'Pillars of Creation', one of the most iconic images in astronomy, taken in 1995 and showing the violent tendrils of gas and dust in a stellar nursery. It orbits Earth at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles in altitude, slightly higher than the ISS. Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 meters (7 feet, 10.5 inches) across and in total is 13.3 meters (43.5 feet) long - the length of a large school bus. However, the mirror was the subject of the first of five servicing missions using the space shuttle. The first service mission was in December 1993 when Commander Richard Covey and his crew installed devices designed to fix a vision problem caused by a misshaped mirror. The issue meant that the telescope couldn't focus all the light from an object to a single sharp point, resulting in a fuzzy halo. Future missions saw the installation of cameras that could see infrared light to allow astronomers to see more distant galaxies. Other missions were designed to repair issues on board, such as when three gyroscopes failed in 1999, and when its solar panels needed to be re-aligned. The last Hubble service mission was on Atlantis in 2009 and was the 'most challenging and intense servicing mission'. It involved five spacewalks to install two new instruments including the Wide Field Camera making it 100 times more powerful than when it first launched. There was also an issue with the systems that command the science instruments, similar to the problems being experienced now with the telescope. This resulted in a new set of systems, as well as further backups that could be managed from the ground, being installed inside the telescope. Hubble has been described as the most important telescope since the first used by Galileo to view Jupiter's moons and would be a 'huge loss' to astronomy if it stops working. Hubble space telescope: Mission duration: 31 years, 2 months, 8 days

31 years, 2 months, 8 days Manufacturer : Lockheed Martin and Perkin-Elmere

: Lockheed Martin and Perkin-Elmere Mass : 24,490lb

: 24,490lb Launch date : April 24, 1990

: April 24, 1990 Launch site : Kennedy Space Center, Florida

: Kennedy Space Center, Florida Started service : May 20, 1990

: May 20, 1990 First observation : Jupiter (March 1991)

: Jupiter (March 1991) Orbit : 333-336 miles

: 333-336 miles Wavelengths : Near-infrared, visible light, ultraviolet Advertisement

Astronomer Boris Gaensicke, University of Warwick professor, says the fact the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs much of the Hubble operations, has called for proposals for time on the telescope in 2022 is a good sign.

'I think STScI would know if Hubble is beyond repair, otherwise they would not ask people to now put in the effort to work out the details of how they will use Hubble from October 2022 onwards,' he told MailOnline.

However, the backup computer, which NASA hopes will solve the issue, hadn't been powered on since it was installed in 2009 during Hubble's last servicing mission.

Former space shuttle program manger, Wayne Hale, said there would be more options if the shuttle hadn't been scrapped.

'I think we could easily repair Hubble if there was a LEO spacecraft that had a robot arm to hold it, an airlock to support space walkers to repair it, and could hold a crew of about 6 to do the work. Oh yes, we used to have one of those. Reusable too.'

NASA says it is taking additional steps to investigate the Hubble Space Telescopes payload computer issue, and in parallel is preparing and testing procedures to switch on the backup hardware installed on the telescope in 2009.

'The telescope itself and science instruments remain healthy and in a safe configuration,' according to an agency blog post.

The source of the computer problem lies in the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SI C&DH) unit, where the payload computer sits.

A few hardware pieces on the SI C&DH could be the culprit, but every single item has to be tested remotely one by one, which is why it is taking so much time.

Engineers are currently scrutinising the Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF), which sends and formats commands and data.

They are also examining a power regulator within the Power Control Unit, which is designed to ensure a steady voltage supply to the payload computers hardware.

NASA says if one of these is the likely cause they will complete a more complicated operation to switch to the backup units.

'This procedure would be more complex and riskier than those the team executed last week, which involved switching to the backup payload computer hardware and memory modules,' according to the agency.

'To switch to the backup CU/SDF or power regulator, several other hardware boxes on the spacecraft must also be switched due to the way they are connected.'

The latest update from NASA on the state of operations for Hubble was published on June 30 and the agency says it is still working to solve the problem.

The agency said it needed a week to review and update all of the operations procedures involved in switching to backup hardware before testing the execution in a simulator.

This isn't the first issue with Hubble, the telescope has had a number of problems requiring repair or hardware backup since it was first launched in 1990.

'The team performed a similar switch in 2008, which allowed Hubble to continue normal science operations after a CU/SDF module failed,' NASA said.

'A servicing mission in 2009 then replaced the entire SI C&DH unit, including the faulty CU/SDF module, with the SI C&DH unit currently in use.'

Since that servicing mission, Hubble has taken more than 600,000 additional observations to exceed 1.5 million during its lifetime.

Those observations continue to change our understanding of the universe.

'It's been definitely been one of the most important instruments astronomers have ever had,' Professor Gaensicke from Warwick University told MailOnline.

'Because Hubble is in space, so not affected by the blurry Earth atmosphere, it can take super-sharp pictures, which reveal fine structures otherwise invisible.

'And those pictures are of stunning beauty, too, so Hubble is almost certainly the best-known telescope among the wider community, and many, many people have been admiring the amazing pictures Hubble took.'

It has contributed to some of the most significant discoveries of our cosmos, including the accelerating expansion of the universe, the evolution of galaxies over time, and the first atmospheric studies of planets beyond our solar system.

Jupiter has also been subject to study from Hubble, including observation of the great red spot

The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant in the Milky Way, captured in its beautiful colour and brightness by Hubble

Hubble, a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), has been observing the universe for over 30 years

MAJOR DISCOVERIES MADE USING HUBBLE The Hubble space telescope launched for low Earth orbit in 1990 and has been used to change our understanding of the universe. Captured images of the debris left behind by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 after it collided with Jupiter.

Hubble provided the first conclusive evidence of the existence of supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies after observing the galaxy M87.

Measured the elements within the atmosphere of exoplanets, giving insight into worlds beyond our solar system.

Hubble observations revealed the dwarf planet Eris is actually larger than Pluto, a year after it was demoted to dwarf planet status.

Captured images of distant galaxies from when the universe was less than a tenth of its current age.

Helped expand our understanding of how planets formed through observations of proto-planetary discs in distant systems. Advertisement

Leading physicist and director of FermiLab, Don Lincoln told CNN that it was 'too soon to accept the demise of the Hubble Space Telescope'.

He said in an article for the broadcaster that the 'telescope's operational staff are both talented and clever,' but that it 'could be the end of Hubble's story'.

It is a story that has forever changed our understanding of the universe, according to Professor Gaensicke, and through more than just taking pretty pictures.

'It has a range of instruments, so you can think of it as a toolbox, and astronomers keep developing better ways to use the tools in that box, for example, to study the composition of the atmospheres of planets hundreds of light years away.

'We didn't even know those planets exist when Hubble was built, so this is a good illustration how a 30-year old facility keeps being at the absolute forefront of astronomy.'

Affelia Wibisono, from the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said Hubble was one of the most successful space missions ever launched.

'It has revolutionised our understanding of the Universe  from discovering new moons around Pluto, to taking the first visual image of a planet orbiting a star that is not the Sun,' the PhD student said.

It has also helped us make a 3D map of dark matter, and discover that every galaxy has a black hole at its heart.

'Hubble has made astronomers rewrite textbooks. 'Without the Hubble Space Telescope, it would be much more difficult for me to do my work in studying Jupiters northern and southern lights,' Wibisono added.

NASA is 'confident' it can get Hubble back up and running, adding that all on board observation equipment is in 'safe mode' and operating as expected.

This is a mosaic of images from Hubble showing a roiling region of star birth in a portion of the Monkey Head Nebula

This colourful image, taken by NASAs Hubble Space Telescope, celebrates the Earth-orbiting observatorys 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens, giving us a window seat to the universes extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction

This is a 50-light-year wide view of the centre of the Carina Nebula where a number of stars are born and die. Stitched from 48 individual Hubble images

WHAT HAS NASA TRIED SO FAR TO FIX THE PROBLEM? June 16: The Hubble operations team attempted to switch to one of several backup memory modules inside the payload computer. June 18: Attempted restart failed and memory module ruled out as cause of shutdown. June 22: Memory issues found to be a symptom of a wider problem. Tests designed to check the Central Processing Module. June 25: An attempt to turn on the backup computer failed to fix the issue. Now investigating the Command Unit/Science Data Formatter. June 30: Further tests of the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling unit which holds the payload computer while also designing a way to switch completely to the backup computer. Advertisement

On June 14, flight controllers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland tried to restart the computer after they noticed it stopped working on June 13, but they ran into the same issue and could not get it to operate normally.

Last week, after several tests on the main payload computer, a NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 (NSSC-1) system built in the 1980s, the space agency admitted the issue was bigger than first believed.

'After performing tests on several of the computers memory modules, the results indicate that a different piece of computer hardware may have caused the problem, with the memory errors being only a symptom,' the US space agency wrote in a June 22 update.

'The operations team is investigating whether the Standard Interface (STINT) hardware, which bridges communications between the computers Central Processing Module (CPM) and other components, or the CPM itself is responsible for the issue.'

Initially, it was believed that a memory module on the NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 (NSSC-1) system was failing.

Launched in 1990, Hubble is showing more and more signs of ageing, despite a series of repairs and updates by spacewalking astronauts during NASA's shuttle era.

The Hubble recently marked its 31st anniversary in space, doing so with an image of a giant star that is 'on the edge of destruction'.

The US space agency is going to replace the Hubble with $10 billion James Webb Telescope, however it has run into delays recently.

Professor Gaensicke hopes Hubble will be able to continue, even after the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope launches in October.

This is a dying star at the centre of the dainty 'butterfly wings', made from roiling cauldrons of gas heated to 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit

They have attempted a range of measures to get it up and running, in an attempt to pinpoint the root cause of the issue finally opting to move to backup hardware

'The James Webb Telescope, JWST, which should be launched later this year, is often touted as Hubble's successor - which it is not,' he told MailOnline.

'It is more specialised than Hubble, and will only be sensitive to the infrared part of the spectrum, that means light that is so red that human eyes could not see it. As such, many of the amazing things Hubble can do, JWST won't be able to carry on.'

HOW IMPORTANT IS HUBBLE TO ASTRONOMY? MailOnline spoke to a number of eminent astronomers, to ask how important Hubble is to astronomy. Professor Peter Wheatley, University of Warwick Department of Physics: 'Apart perhaps from Galileos first use of a telescope for astronomy in 1609, Hubble has been the most important telescope in the history of astronomy. 'Its ability to make pin-sharp images of nebulae and distant galaxies has been transformational. And being in space has also provided access to ultraviolet light from stars and galaxies that is blocked by the Earths atmosphere. 'Hubble is also designed to be a very versatile telescope, with lots of different cameras, and this has allowed it to stay relevant as new branches of astronomy have become more important. 'For instance, Hubble has made a major contribution to my own field, studying exoplanet atmospheres, even though the first exoplanet hadnt even been discovered when Hubble was launched. 'Much of its versatility and longevity has come from the series of servicing missions carried out by NASA astronauts. 'These were extremely ambitious and challenging, and apart from the moon landings, I think these servicing missions have been the most impressive achievement of manned spaceflight.' Affelia Wibisono, a researcher at UCLs Mullard Space Science Laboratory: 'The Hubble Space Telescope is definitely one of the most successful space missions ever. 'It has revolutionised our understanding of the Universe  from discovering new moons around Pluto, to taking the first visual image of a planet orbiting a star that is not the Sun, from finding out that each galaxy has a black hole at its heart, to helping make a 3D map of dark matter  Hubble has made astronomers rewrite textbooks. 'Without the Hubble Space Telescope, it would be much more difficult for me to do my work in studying Jupiters northern and southern lights. 'Hubble has made more than 1.5 million observations which has resulted in tens of thousands of scientific papers, but I believe that one of the most important things that it has done is to inspire and cause wonder to anyone who has seen its stunning images.' Boris Gaensicke, Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick: 'It's been definitely been one of the most important instruments astronomers have ever had. Because Hubble is in space, so not affected by the blurry Earth atmosphere, it can take super-sharp pictures, which reveal fine structures otherwise invisible. 'And those pictures are of stunning beauty, too, so Hubble is almost certainly the best-known telescope among the wider community, and many, many people have been admiring the amazing pictures Hubble took. 'But Hubble has done so much more than taking pretty pictures: it has a range of instruments, so you can think of it as a toolbox, and astronomers keep developing better ways to use the tools in that box, for example, to study the composition of the atmospheres of planets hundreds of light years away. 'We didn't even know those planets exist when Hubble was built, so this is a good illustration how a 30-year old facility keeps being at the absolute forefront of astronomy.' Advertisement

NASA plans to continue working on the problems with Hubble, in the hope of once again extending the life of this telescope now in its third decade.

When Hubble launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the space shuttle discovery in April 1990, the agency said it had an expected lifespan of a decade.

It is named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble who was born in Missouri in 1889 and discovered that the universe is expanding and the rate it is doing so.

This is something the telescope that carries his name has been able to confirm, again and again, as well as show some of the earliest galaxies.

The telescope has been essential in expanding our understanding of the universe, with millions of observations resulting in tens of thousands of scientific papers.

It orbits Earth at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles in altitude, slightly higher than the International Space Station.

Hubble has the pointing accuracy of .007 arc seconds, which is like being able to shine a laser beam focused the Queen's head on a coin 200 miles (320km) away.

It launched during the space shuttle-era of NASA, where astronauts could go on a spacewalk and repair any issues with the telescope.

This allowed the space agency to extend its life, from the initial ten years to reach 31 years this year.

Between 1993 and 2009, astronauts visited Hubble five times to replace limited-life items such as batteries, gyroscopes and electronic boxes, and to install state-of-the-art science instruments.

Each time astronauts visited Hubble, they left it a more capable, more productive observatory that could be managed from the ground.

Because Hubble was designed to be serviced, the items astronauts replaced were easily accessible. Ranging in size from a shoebox to a telephone booth, most of these items could be removed or installed using special wrenches and power tools.

The first service mission was in December 1993 when Commander Richard Covey and his crew installed devices designed to fix a vision problem caused by a misshaped mirror.

The issue meant that the telescope couldn't focus all the light from an object to a single sharp point, resulting in a fuzzy halo.

Future missions saw the installation of cameras that could see infrared light to allow astronomers to see more distant galaxies.

Other missions were designed to repair issues on board, such as when three gyroscopes failed, and when the solar panels needed to be re-aligned.

The 1999 mission that saw the replacement of gyroscopes, also saw the installation of an advanced central computer, a digital data recorder and battery improvements that effectively made the telescope 'good as new'.

The last service mission was on Atlantis in 2009 and was the 'most challenging and intense servicing mission'.

It involved five spacewalks to install two new instruments including the famous Wide Field Camera making it 100 times more powerful than when it first launched.

There was also an issue with the systems that command the science instruments, similar to the problems being experienced now with the telescope.

This resulted in a new set of systems, as well as further backups that could be managed from the ground, being installed inside the telescope.

At that last mission they also installed a new device known as the Soft Capture Mechanism which would allow a robotic spacecraft to attach itself to Hubble and either push it into the Earth, or boost it to a higher orbit to operate for longer.

When asked if he thinks this is the end of Hubble, Professor Peter Wheatley from the University of Warwick Department of Physics said he 'certainly hopes not.'

'Especially because many of us at Warwick have observations scheduled to be carried out with Hubble,' he told MailOnline.

'It is clear, however, that Hubble is beginning to show its age, and we do need to be prepared for that fact that it wont go on forever.

'That is going to be a painful shock, because for most of us Hubble has been operating throughout our careers and we have come to take it granted. While other space telescopes have come and gone, Hubble has been a constant presence.'

NASAs Hubble Space Telescope is still working and has made more than 1.3 million observations since its mission began in 1990 The Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, via the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. It is named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble who was born in Missouri in 1889. He is arguably most famous for discovering that the universe is expanding and the rate at which is does so - now coined the Hubble constant. The Hubble telescope is named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble who was born in Missouri in 1889 (pictured) Hubble has made more than 1.3 million observations since its mission began in 1990 and helped publish more than 15,000 scientific papers. It orbits Earth at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles in altitude. Hubble has the pointing accuracy of .007 arc seconds, which is like being able to shine a laser beam focused on Franklin D. Roosevelt's head on a dime roughly 200 miles (320km) away. The Hubble telescope is named after Edwin Hubble who was responsible for coming up with the Hubble constant and is one of the greatest astronomers of all-time Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 meters (7 feet, 10.5 inches) across and in total is 13.3 meters (43.5 feet) long - the length of a large school bus. Hubble's launch and deployment in April 1990 marked the most significant advance in astronomy since Galileo's telescope. Thanks to five servicing missions and more than 25 years of operation, our view of the universe and our place within it has never been the same. Advertisement
Antarctica has experienced its highest temperature on record, according to meteorologists at the UN.

The new record of 64.9F (18.3C) was set on February 6, 2020, a team at the UN agency the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has revealed.

The reading was captured at the Esperanza Base, an Argentine research station on the Antarctic Peninsula  the northwest tip near to South America, and among the fastest warming regions on Earth.

WMO scientists blamed global warming and said the reading is another reminder that 'climate change requires urgent measures'.

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The new reading of 64.9F (18.3C) was captured at the Esperanza Base, an Argentine research station on the Antarctic Peninsula on February 6, 2020

The Antarctic Peninsula, the northwest tip near South America, is among the fastest warming regions on Earth

Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, such as burning coal for power, cause the rise in global temperatures, leading to a potentially catastrophic rise in sea levels.

'It is essential to continue strengthening the observing, forecasting and early warning systems to respond to the extreme events that take place more and more often due to global warming,' said Professor Celeste Saulo, first vice president of WMO.

Antarctica spans more than 5 million square miles (14 million km2), making it roughly twice the size of Australia.

The average annual temperature ranges from about -10C on the Antarctic coast to -60C at the highest parts of the interior continent.

2020 was one of three warmest years on RECORD: WMO 2020 was one of three warmest years on record, according to a new report, despite La Nina  the large-scale cooling of the ocean surface temperatures in the Pacific. Global average temperatures last year reached around 2.16F (1.2C) above the pre-Industrial Revolution levels (1850-1900), revealed the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in April 2021. The six years since 2015 have been the warmest on record, while the period 2011 to 2020 was the warmest decade on record, WMO said in its State of the Global Climate 2020 report, published today. Statistically, 2020 was just behind 2016 and just ahead of 2019 in terms of global temperatures, putting it within the top three. But a WMO spokesperson told MailOnline that the difference between the three is so small that it falls within the margin of error. Overall, the report new documents the various causes and effects of climate crisis, including greenhouse gas concentrations, increasing land and ocean temperatures, sea level rise, melting ice and glacier retreat and extreme weather. Advertisement

Its immense ice sheet is up to 3 miles (4.8km) thick and contains 90 per cent of the worlds fresh water, enough to raise sea level by just under 200 feet (around 60 metres) were it all to melt from global warming.

The previous record for Antarctic land (Antarctica), including mainland and surrounding islands, was 17.5C (63.5F) recorded on March, 24 2015 at Esperanza.

But the record for the whole of the Antarctic region  all ice and land that's south of 60 degrees latitude  is 67.6F (19.8C), taken on Signy Island in January 1982.

According to the WMO, the Antarctic Peninsula is among the fastest warming regions of the planet, and has warmed by almost 5.4F (3C) over the last 50 years.

'This new temperature record is therefore consistent with the climate change we are observing,' said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas.

'Verification of the maximum temperature record is important because it helps us to build up a picture of the weather and climate in one of Earths final frontiers.

'Even more so than the Arctic, the Antarctic, is poorly covered in terms of continuous and sustained weather and climate observations and forecasts, even though both play an important role in driving climate and ocean patterns and in sea level rise.'

Researchers say a large high-pressure system over the area created what's known as 'fohn' conditions  downslope winds producing surface warming  resulting in local warming at Esperanza.

The new record will now be added to the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes, which includes the worlds highest and lowest temperatures, as well as data on rainfall, heaviest hailstone, longest dry period and maximum gust of wind.

The assessment is detailed further in a paper published by WMO scientists, published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The reading from the Esperanza base was recorded at midday on Thursday and beats beats the previous record of 17.5C (63.5F) in March 2015 by 0.8C (pictured, the church of Esperanza in Antarctica)

Antarctica spans more than 5 million square miles (14 million km2), making it roughly twice the size of Australia. Pictured, melting ice in Antarctica

Interestingly, WMO has also rejected an even higher temperature, of 69.35F (20.75C), which was reported on February 9, 2020 at a Brazil-operated monitoring station on Seymour Island, also on the the Antarctic Peninsula.

The erroneous reading was caused by an 'improvised radiation shield' that led to a 'thermal bias error' on the temperature sensor.

2020 has already set several worrying climate records  according to data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2020 was the warmest year on record for Europe.

2020 temperatures in the continent were more than 2.8F (1.6C) above the average for between 1981 and 2010, C3S revealed in April.

They were also at least 0.72F (0.4C) warmer than the next five warmest years on record, which all occurred during the last decade  2019, 2018, 2016, 2015 and 2014.

Globally, 2020 was also one of three warmest years on record, according to a previous report from the WMO.

WMO rejected a reading of 69.35F (20.75C), erroneously captured on February 9, 2020 at a Brazil-operated monitoring station on Seymour Island
NASA has launched an investigation into Apollo-era administrator James E Webb's alleged involvement in a purge of LGBT employees prior to the 1969 Moon landing.

The agency has named its $10 billion (7.3 billion) next generation space telescope after Webb, but there are calls from some scientists for a different name, saying the legacy of his leadership is 'complicated at best, and at worst, complicit with persecution.'

The James Webb telescope is being hailed as a successor to the Hubble space telescope, able to peer further into the history of our Universe than ever before.

NASA told MailOnline it was 'aware of concerns that have arisen about James E. Webb, and we are working with historians to examine his role in government.'

Webb served as NASA administrator from 1961 to 1968, leaving shortly before the launch of the first crewed Apollo mission. However, a group of scientists say he enacted a government policy to remove any LGBT employees during his reign.

A campaign to rename the telescope claims the history is already known and clear, and that NASA should get on with renaming it after someone who befits the honour, suggesting Harriet Tubman, who used celestial navigation to lead slaves to freedom.

NASA has so far ignored the calls to rename the telescope, insisting that Webb's work as administrator 'laid the groundwork for today's accomplishments'.

The telescope will launch for its orbit between Earth and the sun as early as October 31 on a European Space Agency (ESA) Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana.

An ESA spokesperson told MailOnline the agency was 'aware of the discussion' around the name and was keeping a close loop with NASA - 'as diversity is taken very seriously in both agencies.'

NASA has launched an investigation into the track record of its Apollo-era administrator James E Webb, over his alleged involvement in a 'purge' of LGBT employees

Webb served as administrator on the run up to the first crewed Apollo mission, and scientists say he enacted a government policy to remove any LGBT employees

WHO WAS JAMES E WEBB? James E Webb was the second administrator of NASA, joining the space agency from the State department in 1961. He oversaw the launch of the Mercury and Gemini missions, and left in 1968 before the first crewed Apollo flight. He was born in 1906 in North Carolina, studying law at George Washington University Law School, before starting his civil service career at the US House of Representatives. He was nominated by Harry Truman to serve as undersecretary of state in the State department, before joining NASA in 1961. He had a key role in creating the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and led the drive for planetary exploration through Mariner and Pioneer. Advertisement

James E Webb was born in 1906 and was the second appointed administrator of NASA, serving as the head of the space agency for most of the 1960s.

He oversaw NASA from the start of the Kennedy administration, including the Mercury and Gemini missions, leaving just before the first crewed Apollo flight.

While working at NASA he was responsible for implementing a federal policy that purged LGBT people from the NASA workforce. This is a policy he would have been aware of while at the State department, before taking over at the space agency.

What isn't clear is whether he was actively homophobic himself, whether he was merely complicit, or whether he pushed back against the federal policy.

NASA says it has appointed a historian to investigate his legacy, including a deep study of all correspondents and documents from his time as administrator.

His push to put science first during his tenure at NASA made him popular with many scientists, with NASA saying this has created a lasting legacy.

This is why the agency confirmed in 2002 that the then titled Next Generation Space Telescope would be named after James E Webb.

The telescope has been in development since 1996 and its budget has risen from an initial $500 million to just under $10 billion today.

The telescope will launch for its orbit between Earth and the sun as early as October 31 on a European Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana

'The agency made the naming decision in recognition of Webbs role in retaining an active science program at NASA in the agency's early years,' a spokesperson said.

'Webb's work as administrator laid the groundwork for today's accomplishments, and science remains a critical part of NASA's work: to understand the universe, advance exploration, and inspire the next generation.'

However, some within the agency, and others that might be working with data from the telescope, say this nostalgia isn't enough to counter his role in the purging.

NASA recently unfolded the giant mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope 'like a piece of origami artwork' one last time ahead of its launch later this year

EXCERPT: LETTER TO NASA FROM THE RENAME JWST CAMPAIGNERS 'We demand that NASA immediately rename JWST, and bestow this honor on someone whose legacy befits a telescope whose data will be used in discoveries that will inspire future generations of astronomers, discoveries that we the undersigned will make. 'In choosing an appropriate namesake for this inspiring mission, NASA should seek to honor someone whose legacy is truly worthy: for example, Harriet Tubman was proposed as an alternative namesake in this recent op-ed, because she led so many people to freedom navigating by the light and coordinates of the stars. 'We, the future users of NASAs next-generation space telescope and those who will inherit its legacy, demand that this telescope be given a name worthy of its remarkable discoveries, a name that stands for a future in which we are all free.' SOURCE: RENAME JWST Advertisement

They claim he was silent over the policy while at the State department, and then complicit in enforcing the purge at NASA.

Records uncovered by Columbia University astronomer, Adrian Lucy, suggest Webb actively handed over material on LGBT employees while in charge.

Astronomers Sarah Tuttle and Lucianne Walkowicz and physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein have been leading the charge for a new name, and writing an article for Scientific American, they said Webb was a poor choice to honour.

Speaking to astrophysicist Grant Tremblay, NASA director of Astrophysics, Paul Hertz said it was being reviewed at the highest levels.

There is a campaign called 'Rename the James Webb Space Telescope' that includes a petition the group aim to present to NASA that has run for a number of years.

In an open letter, the campaign team said: 'We are not only space science professionals and space enthusiasts, we are also future users of JWST.

'Together, we are part of the constituency that NASA purports to serve and inspire through its mission to reveal the unknown for the benefit of all humankind.'

They say that examining the archive of Webb's leadership time 'isn't enough' to solve the problem as the historical record was already clear on the issue.

'Those who would excuse Webbs failure of leadership cannot simultaneously award him credit for his management of Apollo,' the authors of the letter said.

'As we have noted previously, Webbs legacy of leadership is complicated at best, and at worst, complicit with persecution.'

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will launch 'no earlier than October 31,' a NASA spokesperson told DailyMail.com

Current telescopes aren't able to detect signs of life within an exoplanet atmosphere or whether it is truly habitable, but future observatories including the NASA James Webb space telescope will delve deeper into these distant worlds than ever before

They have 'demanded' NASA immediately rename the telescope, to bestow the honour on someone 'whose legacy befits a telescope whose data will be used in discoveries that will inspire future generations of astronomers'.

They haven't said who they think should be given the honour, but suggest one person could be Harriet Tubman, who led slaves to freedom by the light and coordinates of the stars.

Tubman was born into slavery and after escaping made 13 missions to rescue 70 enslaved people - including family and friends.

NASA says it is investigating Webb's history and Hertz told Tremblay the agency was aware of the petition and concerns from the community.
Billionaire Sir Richard Branson said in an interview on Friday that his upcoming journey to space on July 11 will be 'the most extraordinary trip of my lifetime.'

'I'm just expecting the most extraordinary trip of my lifetime, Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic, said in an interview with Michael Strahan on Good Morning America.

'Pioneering it myself and extraordinary trips of a lifetime for other people in the future and for the other five people that will be aboard the spaceship with me, we're all hitting the ceiling.'

The 70-year-old Branson, who will fly aboard Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity, added that he and the company have spent 17 years trying to get to this point, something that 'means a lot to him.'

He also noted that he got 'truly excited' on Thursday after the final safety check came through and he was asked whether he would like to go into space, along with the five other astronauts.

Billionaire Sir Richard Branson said in an interview on Friday that his upcoming trip to space on July 11 will be 'the most extraordinary trip of my lifetime'

GMA EXCLUSIVE: "I'm just expecting the most extraordinary trip of my lifetime..."



Sir @richardbranson one-on-one with @michaelstrahan on his race to space. https://t.co/eUwpx99mqC pic.twitter.com/KEEtZFJLDZ  Good Morning America (@GMA) July 2, 2021

Richard Branson, Astronaut 001, will be heading to space on a July 11 Virgin Galactic spaceflight. 'Pioneering it myself and extraordinary trips of a lifetime for other people in the future and for the other five people that will be aboard the spaceship with me, we're all hitting the ceiling,' he told Strahan

Shares of Virgin Galactic opened sharply higher Friday on back of the news, gaining nearly 25 percent to trade at $53.25.

By flying onboard the suborbital vehicle, Branson will beat fellow billionaire, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos by nine days.

Bezos announced on Thursday that Mary Wallace 'Wally' Funk, a trailblazing 82-year-old female aviator, will join him as an 'honored guest' aboard Blue Origin's July 20th flight of its New Shepard Rocket.

Branson, who dubbed himself Astronaut 001 on Twitter late Thursday night, a play on James Bond's 007 moniker (and perhaps a thinly veiled shot at Amazon's pending MGM purchase), was originally scheduled to fly on the second of two upcoming test flights but has been bumped up to the next one to steal a march on his billionaire rival and get to space first.

The aviation billionaire - who also started Virgin Atlantic airlines - declined to say when he might go into space as late as Wednesday.

Branson, who dubbed himself Astronaut 001 on Twitter late Thursday night, was originally scheduled to fly on the second of two upcoming test flights but has been bumped up to the next one to steal a march on his billionaire rival and get to space first

The aviation billionaire - who also set up Virgin Atlantic airlines - had declined to say when he might go into space as late as Wednesday

Late Thursday, Branson teased an announcement about others traveling into space

Branson has repeatedly stressed that he was 'fit and healthy' and ready to go as soon as his engineers gave him the green light.

Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said having Sir Richard on board the flight would be 'invaluable.'

'Tapping into Sir Richard's expertise and long history of creating amazing customer experiences will be invaluable as we work to open the wonder of space travel and create awe-inspiring journeys for our customers,' Colglazier said.

In an interview with DailyMail.com, Will Whitehorn, former President of Virgin Galactic and now Chair Designate at Seraphim, said the Branson news caps off 'one of the biggest weeks' in the history of the British space industry.

'Furthermore, Virgin Orbit and Virgin Galactic provide a gateway to human and satellite launches from Cornwall next year,' Whitehorn said.

'This really matters because the Space industry already employs 50,000 people and is responsible for 5bn of annual exports. It needs to be a top priority for the British Government, and the whole industry is working hard to get the Government to publish a national space strategy as soon as possible.'

It will be Virgin Galactic's fourth test spaceflight and the first mission with a crew of four on board.

Joining Branson will Beth Moses, Astronaut 002 and Virgin Galactic's chief astronaut instructor, who flew to space on the company's second spaceflight mission.

Colin Bennett, the company's lead operations engineer and Astronaut 003, will also join the flight.

Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic's chief astronaut instructor, who flew to space on the company's second spaceflight mission will be on board

Colin Bennett, the company's lead operations engineer, will also join the flight

Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic's vice president of government affairs and research operations

Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic's vice president of government affairs and research operations will also be on board as Astronaut 004.

This month's Unity 22 mission will be the 22nd flight test for rocket plane VSS Unity and the company's fourth crewed spaceflight. Virgin Galactic's rocket travels 50 miles into the sky, to the edge of space, before gliding back to Earth and landing on a runway. Blue Earth will see its passengers parachute back to solid ground on capsules.

By flying aboard the VSS Unity, Branson will test the 'private astronaut experience' during the next test flight window, something he hopes to help 'ensure his business delivers a unique customer experience'.

Earlier this month, the US Federal Aviation Administration gave Virgin Galactic the go-ahead to fly paying customers to space after its license was updated.

Virgin Galactics Richard Branson is set to beat Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos being the first to blast off into space on their July 11 flight. Branson is pictured in 2019

Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity, piloted by CJ Sturckow and Dave Mackay, is released from its mothership, VMS Eve, on the way to its first spaceflight after launch from Spaceport America, New Mexico in May

A photo shows the release of VSS Unity from VMS Eve and ignition of rocket motor over Spaceport America, New Mexico

THE BILLIONAIRE SPACE RACE: HOW BRANSON, MUSK AND BEZOS ARE VYING FOR GALACTIC SUPREMACY Jeff Bezos in front of Blue Origin's space capsule Dubbed the 'NewSpace' set, Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson and Elon Musk all say they were inspired by the first moon landing in 1969, when the US beat the Soviet Union in the space race, and there is no doubt how much it would mean to each of them to win the 'new space race'. Amazon founder Bezos had looked set to be the first of the three to fly to space, having announced plans to launch aboard his space company Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft on July 20. The billionaire mogul will travel with his younger brother Mark, a charity auction winner who's shelling out $28 million and pioneering female astronaut Wally Funk, 82. However, Branson has now announced he's planning to make a suborbital flight nine days before Bezos and his brother. He revealed on Twitter that he plans to be Astronaut 001 on Virgin Galactic's July 11 test flight. Although SpaceX and Tesla founder Musk has said he wants to go into space, and even 'die on Mars', he has not said when he might blast into orbit. SpaceX appears to be leading the way in the broader billionaire space race with numerous launches carrying NASA equipment to the ISS and partnerships to send tourists to space by 2021. On February 6 2018, SpaceX sent rocket towards the orbit of Mars, 140 million miles away, with Musk's own red Tesla roadster attached. Elon Musk with his Dragon Crew capsule NASA has already selected two astronauts who will be on-board the first manned Dragon mission. SpaceX has also started sending batches of 60 satellites into space to help form its Starlink network. Musk hopes this will provide an interconnected web of satellites around Earth which will beam down free internet to people worldwide. Branson and Virgin Galactic are taking a different approach to conquering space. It has repeatedly, and successfully, conducted test flights of the Virgin Galactic's Unity space plane. The first took place in December 2018 and the latest on May 22, with the flight accelerating to more than 2,000 miles per hour (Mach 2.7). More than 600 affluent customers to date, including celebrities Brad Pitt and Katy Perry, have reserved a $250,000 (200,000) seat on one of Virgin's space trips. Branson has previously said he expects Elon Musk to win the race to Mars with his private rocket firm SpaceX. Richard Branson with the Virgin Galactic craft SpaceShipTwo can carry six passengers and two pilots. Each passenger gets the same seating position with two large windows - one to the side and one overhead. The space ship is 60ft long with a 90inch diameter cabin allowing maximum room for the astronauts to float in zero gravity. It climbs to 50,000ft before the rocket engine ignites. SpaceShipTwo separates from its carrier craft, White Knight II, once it has passed the 50-mile mark. Passengers become 'astronauts' when they reach the Karman line, the boundary of Earth's atmosphere. The spaceship will then make a suborbital journey with approximately six minutes of weightlessness, with the entire flight lasting approximately 1.5 hours. Bezos revealed in April 2017 that he finances Blue Origin with around $1 billion (720 million) of Amazon stock each year. The system consists of a pressurised crew capsule atop a reusable 'New Shepard' booster rocket. Bezos is one of the richest men in the world and Blue Origin has successfully flown the New Shepard rocket 15 times. At its peak, the capsule reached 65 miles (104 kilometres), just above the official threshold for space and landed vertically seven minutes after liftoff. Advertisement

Join us July 11th for our first fully crewed rocket powered test flight, and the beginning of a new space age.

The countdown begins. #Unity22

https://t.co/5UalYT7Hjb. @RichardBranson pic.twitter.com/ZL9xbCeWQX  Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) July 1, 2021

Dave Mackay will be piloting the Virgin Galactic spacecraft

Virgin passengers will be able to see the curvature of the Earth against the blackness of space. The entire flight lasts around 10 minutes, including three minutes of weightlessness.

Guests will pay around $250,000-a-ticket, with more than 600 so far reserving a seat. A date for paid passenger flights has yet to be announced, although the company has said it will start the service following three additional successful test flights, set to happen later this year.

The main objectives Virgin's next test flight, taking off from Virgin Galactic's spaceport in New Mexico, will be 'evaluating seat comfort, the weightless experience and the views of Earth' in the space cabin.

The company said it also wants to demonstrate the conditions for conducting human-tended research experiments and confirm the training program at Spaceport America supports the spaceflight experience.

Virgin Galactic plans three more test flights to the edge of space this summer and early fall, before launching with customers

Last week, Virgin Galactic got the Federal Aviation Administration's OK to start launching customers

Virgin Galactic made its third flight to space in May, with two pilots in the cockpit of the winged spaceship.

Conversely, Blue Origin has planned July 20 for its first manned launch, coinciding with the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

Blue Origin's flight from West Texas will include Bezos, his brother, a charity auction winner who's shelling out $28 million and the aforementioned Funk.

Funk has also booked herself a seat on an upcoming Virgin Galactic flight too, so she may fly into space twice after having repeatedly been rejected over the years.

At 82, she will beat former NASA astronaut John Glenn's record for being the oldest person in space. He was 77 when he last flew aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1998.

Glenn infamously dismissed the idea of sending women into space shortly after becoming the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962.

Unlike Elon Musk's SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are looking to send space tourists on brief up-and-down hops - not into orbit around the world.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos is targeting July 20 for his rocket company's first launch with people

Participants enjoy the Blue Origin Space Simulator in June 2019. An unnamed bidder paid $28 million at auction on June 12, 2021, for a seat on board the first crewed spaceflight of Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin on July 20
A 1,000-year-old church built by Otto the Great, the first Holy Roman Emperor, has been discovered under a cornfield in Germany.

Archaeologists uncovered the foundation walls of the 100-foot-long structure at the rediscovered Royal Palace of Helfta near Eisleben, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

The church, which was used for more than 500 years, was constructed in 968 AD and is believed to have been dedicated to Saint Radegund, a 6th century queen in France who led who husband to start a monastery for women.

A cemetery with 70 graves and several stone tombs were also found during excavations, which researchers say was used as a burial site for the region's aristocratic families.

A 1,000-year-old church built by Otto the Great, the first Holy Roman Emperor, has been discovered under a cornfield in Germany

Otto the Great was a German king whose reign is considered to be the true beginning of the Holy Roman Empire, which was a German empire that existed from 962 to 1806 in Central Europe  and Otto was crowned the first emperor.

The Holy Roman Empire was named after the Roman Empire and was considered its extension that aimed to restore Catholicism as the only religion in the empire and suppress Protestantism.

Otto built many lavish churches throughout Central Europe, including the one recently discovered in Germany.

The 66-foot-wide structure was designed as a mini cathedral, project manager Felix Biermann told Zenger.

Otto the Great was a German king whose reign is considered to be the true beginning of the Holy Roman Empire

Although the church was active for five centuries, it was eventually demolished during the Protestant Reformation, the split of the Western Church into Protestantism and what is now the Roman Catholic Church.

The Reformation is said to have been organized in 1571, when Martin Luther, a German monk and university professor, posted his 95 theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.

Luther argued that the church had to be reformed and believed that individuals could be saved only by personal faith in Jesus Christ and the grace of God.

He thought the Catholic Church's practices focusing on works were immoral.

These works include pilgrimages, the sale of indulgences to obtain forgiveness, and prayers addressed to saints.

The French Enlightenment writer Voltaire remarked sardonically: 'This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire,' according to the Holy Roman Empire Association.

Archaeologists uncovered the foundation walls of the 100-foot-long structure at the rediscovered Royal Palace of Helfta near Eisleben, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt

A cemetery with 70 graves and several stone tombs were also found during excavations, which researchers say was used as a burial site for the region's aristocratic families

Numerous disc brooches from the Ottoman times, made of bronze, enameled and with glass inlays in a rectangular and circular shape were also found at the site

Otto's church in Germany, however, provides a glimpse into the Ottoman Empire.

Archaeologists found a number of coins and a tiled stove from the 14th and 15th centuries, as well as a fragment of a bell.

'In addition, belt fittings, belt buckles made of bronze, coins, knives and various utensils came to light,' said Biermann.

'Numerous disc brooches from the Ottoman times, made of bronze, enameled and with glass inlays in a rectangular and circular shape, were excavated.'
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Around 200 well-preserved medieval skeletons have now been recovered from one of Britain's best beaches, archaeologists say, including 90 in the last three weeks alone.

The bodies, believed to belong to an early Christian community, are thought to date back as far as the 6th century and were laid to rest in the cemetery of a former chapel at Whitesands Bay in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

They are well preserved because they have been buried in sand at what was once a medieval trading post with Ireland.

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Up to 200 skeletons have been found in total, just yards from Whitesands Bay. Natural erosion and storms exposed the graves before excavation work took place

Preservation of the bones is 'absolutely incredible' because the skeletons have been immersed in sand, according to Dyfed Archaeological Trust

ST PATRICK'S CHAPEL St Patricks Chapel is an medieval chapel dating to the 11th century, at Whitesands Bay, Wales. The chapel is named for St. Patrick, who allegedly set sail from the beach in 432 AD to convert Ireland to Christianity. The holy building was reportedly decayed by the 16th century and first excavated in 1924. The chapel had a burial ground that was in use from the 8th to 11th centuries. Bodies are still being excavated from the burial ground today. A description of the chapel by George Owen in 1603 said: 'Capel Patrick [is] full west of St Davids and placed as near his country, namely Ireland, as it could well be. It is now wholly decayed.' Advertisement

Excavation work is ongoing at Whitesands Bay, a Blue Flag beach near the city of St David's, which used to be the location of the chapel, called St Patrick's.

The skeletons were found just below the surface of the dunes where the chapel's cemetery used to be, exposed by natural erosion and storms.

They are now being preserved by experts at the University of Sheffield.

Preservation of the bones is 'absolutely incredible' because the skeletons have been immersed in sand, according to Jenna Smith at Dyfed Archaeological Trust, which is leading the dig.

'We've lifted over 90 burials in the last three weeks,' Smith told the BBC.

'It's really important that we do so because it gives that snapshot in time which we don't normally get in Wales. The bone doesn't normally exist.

'And the main reason that we're here is because we are here to stop the bones and the burials from eroding into the sea.'

Analysis by the University of Sheffield revealed the burials were of all ages and a mix of men, women and children and are likely to date between the 6th and 11th centuries.

All the graves were aligned with the head pointing west and with no possessions, in keeping with early Christian burial traditions.

Some of the skeletons were found to be in cists  graves lined and capped with stone slabs, a burial tradition common across western Britain in the early medieval period.

Some of the child burials were also found with white quartz pebbles placed on the top of the cists.

Whitesands Bay has been the focus for archaeologists since the early 1920s, because of St Patrick's Chapel and its associated cemetery.

Very little is known about the chapel, the only historical reference being from George Owen's Description of Pembrokeshire from 1603.

Whitesands beach, which curves north towards the remote rocky headland of St Davids Head, is said to be one of the best surfing beaches in the country (stock image)

Whitesands Bay is a popular location for families on sunny days. It's a Blue Flag beach near the city of St David's in west Wales

It reads: 'Capel Patrick [is] full west of St Davids and placed as near his country, namely Ireland, as it could well be. It is now wholly decayed.'

Although the cemetery is thought to have been in use from the 6th century, the chapel is believed to have been built in the 11th century and was reportedly decayed by the 16th century.

Remains of the building were first excavated in 1924 when a cross-incised stone was found.

As for the burial ground, erosion continued to affect the site so badly that human remains periodically became exposed from the sand, before finally the graves were excavated in 1970.

There was an attempt by Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority to protect the burial site in 2004 when large boulders were placed on the dunes to try to slow erosion.

When human remains were exposed during the severe storms of 2014, a large-scale rescue excavation was undertaken by Dyfed Archaeological Trust and the University of Sheffield. Pictured, excavation work at the site in 2021 during the most recent six-week excavation

All the graves were aligned with the head pointing west and with no possessions, in keeping with early Christian burial traditions

However, in 2014 stormy weather ripped the boulders away and exposed further burials, leading to a large-scale rescue excavation by Dyfed Archaeological Trust, followed by two further seasons of excavation in 2015 and 2016.

By 2016, efforts had revealed over 100 burials, but more found remains over the six-week excavation has brought the total to about 200.

The Dyfed Archaeological Trust said there is 'still a significant amount of evidence left to excavate', including an 'intriguing stone structure which pre-dates the burials'.

The excavations from Whitesands Beach are set to be stored at the National Museum of Wales.
A heat dome in the Pacific Northwest that raised temperatures to 121 degrees Fahrenheit this past week caused blackouts, deaths and cooked clams on a Washington State beach.

Hama Hama Oyster company, a family-run shellfish farm, shared images to social media of their clam beds in Hood Canal that are littered with open shells and dead clams that were baked to death by the heat.

Lissa Monberg, Marketing Director of her familys Hama Hama Company, told DailyMail.com: 'The epic heatwave is something no one has seen and then we had a low tide that was as far as it has been in 15 years and it happened mid-day.

'They [the clams] look like they had just been cooked, like they were ready to eat.'

'It is too early to tell [how many], we have to wait for the next string of low tides.'

Images of the clam grave shows dozens, perhaps hundreds, of empty shells littering the beach, all of which were opened by heat stress.

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Hama Hama Oyster company, a family-run shellfish farm, shared images of their clam beds in Hood Canal that are littered with open shells and dead clams that were baked to death by the heat

The historic heatwave has its grips on parts of Canada, Oregon and Washington - where temperatures surpassed a record of 121 degrees - as well as the Northern Great Basin, Northern Idaho and parts of northwest Nevada and northern California.

Weather officials say this heat dome, which is caused by a high-pressure jet stream trapping the hot weather in place.

It has killed hundreds of people, but is also massacring marine life that call beaches in Washington home.

The clam graveyard was only seen on Hama Hamas southern beaches and not its northern beds that are currently being harvested for the year.

Images of the clam grave shows dozens, maybe even hundreds, of empty shells littering the beach, all of which were opened by heat stress

However, the heat may have gotten to these marine creatures as well.

'Terry King, a shell fish researcher, called it a forest fire,' Monberg told DailyMail.com.

'For wildfires in California there has to be a lot of elements that align, and the same factors came together this past weekend.'

The company ends its unfortunate post with: Please vote for politicians who are brave enough to address climate change.

Monberg said Hama Hama has had a number of mass die offs at their shell fish farms over the past 15 years that are likely linked to climate change.

'There was a big oyster seed storage in 2008, 2009 because the water was too acidic.

Along with the heatwave, the area had the lowest tide in 15 years. So when the clam shells were open, the meat was left exposed

'We've had drought years and big winter storms that have covered 10 acres of our best farms overnight.

'Slowly the food producers are waking up to how chaotic to how things have been. We arent being political. This is our food supply.

Scientists have spoken up during this historic heat wave and put the blame on climate change.

Larry O'Neill, an associate professor at Oregon State University, told NBC: We see evidence of climate change in the data already, but in the Pacific Northwest, we thought maybe by the middle of the century is when we would start to see really substantial and impactful events.

But we're seeing those now.

Nicholas Bond, a research scientist at the University of Washington and Washington's state climatologist, also told NBC that temperature highs are being broken, but not just by one degree  some are seeing as much as five degrees.

Bond, just like ONeill, thought such extremes would occur, but in the distant future.
Apple has come under intense scrutiny from developers and lawmakers over its App Store guidelines and commissions, but the company is allowing the in-app purchase of marijuana where the drug is legalized.

In an update to its developer guidelines on June 7, the Cupertino, California-based tech giant noted that facilitating the sale of marijuana is legal for licensed businesses, such as pharmacies and dispensaries.

However, the businesses must be in a state where the use of marijuana is legal and the use of the app is geo-restricted, or only allowed in that jurisdiction.

'Apps that encourage consumption of tobacco and vape products, illegal drugs, or excessive amounts of alcohol are not permitted on the App Store,' Apple wrote on another page on its website.

In an update to its developer guidelines on June 7, Apple will allow the facilitating the sale of marijuana is legal for licensed businesses, such as pharmacies and dispensaries

The apps have to come from 'legal entity that provides the services' and not an individual developer

The businesses must be in a state where the use of marijuana is legal and the use of the app is geo-restricted, or only allowed in that jurisdiction

It's unclear if Apple would be taking a commission on the in-app purchases

'Apps that encourage minors to consume any of these substances will be rejected. Facilitating the sale of controlled substances (except for licensed pharmacies and licensed or otherwise legal cannabis dispensaries), or tobacco is not allowed.'

Separately the apps can not come from an individual developer themselves, but rather a 'legal entity that provides the services.'

The news was first reported by TechCrunch as part of a wider crack down by Apple on frauds and scams in its app store.

In contrast, Google does not allow apps that 'facilitate the sale of marijuana or marijuana products' on its Google Play store, regardless of legality.

On its support page, Google lists examples of marijuana-related apps will violate its terms and conditions:

Allowing users to order marijuana through an in-app shopping cart feature.

Assisting users in arranging delivery or pick up of marijuana.

Facilitating the sale of products containing THC(Tetrahydrocannabinol), including products such as CBD oils containing THC.

DailyMail.com has reached out to Google with a request for comment for this story.

In April, Virginia became the 16th state in the country to legalize marijuana for adults.

As of July 1, Virginians were able to legally grow up to four cannabis plants and possess up to one ounce.

A 2020 study by Governor Ralph Northam's office found marijuana tax revenue in the state could bring in up to $274 million. The legal industry could bring in between $698 million and $1.2 billion annually in economic activity.

In doing so, Virginia joined several other states, including New York and New Jersey, to approve similar measures, though it is the first US state to allow recreational use in the politically conservative US south.

With Virginia's legislation, 16 states and Washington DC have legalized marijuana for recreational use, and 34 states have relaxed marijuana laws in different ways, with medical marijuana legalization and decriminalization elsewhere.

Including Virginia's legalization in April, 34 states and Washington D.C. have legalized marijuana in some form, including recreational use, medical use and sales

More than 90 percent of Americans think that marijuana should be legal in some form with almost two-thirds saying they support legalizing both medicinal and recreational use, according to an April survey

Separately in April, a new poll suggested that 90 percent of Americans believe marijuana should be legal in some form, according to the study done by Pew Research Center.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they support the legalization of both medicinal and recreational use.

Conversely, only 8 percent said marijuana should not be legal for use.
With just over 24 hours to go until they step out in Rome for their Euro 2020 quarter-final against Ukraine, England's players were put through their paces in their final training session at St George's Park.

Gareth Southgate and his 26-man squad looked in high spirits during the workout on Friday morning, ahead of their lunchtime flight to the Italian capital.

The entire playing squad took part in the session in Burton-upon-Trent, with Southgate pictured smiling as he chatted to Harry Kane, Harry Maguire and Kieran Trippier.

Gareth Southgate (centre) laughs with Harry Maguire (L), Kieran Trippier (R) and Harry Kane

All 26 of England's Euro 2020 players trained ahead of their flight to Rome on Friday afternoon

Jadon Sancho walks out to training on the day after his move to Man United was confirmed

The Three Lions squad are now ready to leave the UK for the first time in the tournament, where they take on Ukraine for a spot in the semi-final.

If they come through Saturday's test in Rome, England will face either Denmark or Switzerland at Wembley next Wednesday, before Sunday's final in the same stadium.

There appears to be a very positive mood in the camp, with the likes of Kane, Luke Shaw and Jordan Pickford all pictured laughing during the session.

Fan favourite Jack Grealish runs with the ball during the training session at St George's Park

Captain Kane cracks a smile before England's massive last-eight showdown with Ukraine

Ben White, Raheem Sterling and Reece James (left-right) take part in the training session

Despite Southgate's good mood, the England boss does have plenty to consider going into tomorrow night's game, with four of his players at risk of missing the semi-final if they pick up a yellow card.

Maguire, Declan Rice, Phil Foden and Kalvin Phillips all run the risk of a ban if they are booked against Ukraine and England get through, before all bookings are wiped ahead of the last four.

Trippier, meanwhile, has been nursing a muscular injury but did train with the squad on Friday, hinting that he will be fit to feature on Saturday night.

Jordan Pickford, who has so far not put a foot wrong in the tournament, takes part in a drill

Phil Foden, Luke Shaw and Mason Mount (left-right) share a joke during the session on Friday
Hairspray (Coliseum, London)

Verdict: Spray it all over

Rating:

Hairspray could be the musical fix we've all been waiting for.

Starring Michael Ball, Les Dennis and Lizzie Bea, it will be dismissed by some as 1960s escapism.

But the crowd's roar at the end of the show this week damn near blew the actors off stage.

Clearly moved, Ball's pantodame mum, Edna, thanked the audience.

'You've no idea what it feels like to hear that after so long!', sighed the man who won an Olivier Award for the role in 2008.

The show's story is of plus-size school girl Tracy Turnblad (Bea) taking on racial inequality in suburban Maryland.

Hairspray could be the musical fix we've all been waiting for. Starring Michael Ball, Les Dennis and Lizzie Bea, it will be dismissed by some as 1960s escapism

Jack O'Brien's production has jet fuel running through its veins, thanks to Jerry Mitchell's formation choreography, William Ivey Long's colourful costumes and David Rockwell's cartoon sets

It sets the burners going with Good Morning Baltimore, blasts off with Mama, I'm A Big Girl Now and soars into belter Welcome To The 60s.

Jack O'Brien's production has jet fuel running through its veins, thanks to Jerry Mitchell's formation choreography, William Ivey Long's colourful costumes and David Rockwell's cartoon sets.

Replacing the previously booked Paul Merton as Tracy's dad, Wilbur, Dennis is a perfect fit with Ball as Tracy's washerwoman mum.

But this is Bea's show as gutsy Tracy. She can move, she can croon and she can light the show's blue touch paper  and possibly ignite the whole West End too.

Heathers (Theatre Royal, Haymarket)

Verdict: Niche black comedy

Rating:

Heathers is another 1980s cult movie turned musical, but its dark comedy is far more teenage and niche.

The film starred Winona Ryder as a High School new girl who seeks protection from three bullies called Heather.

But she falls for Christian Slater's character JD, who turns out to be a psycho-killer.

Kevin Murphy and Laurence O'Keefe's musical softens some of the film's difficult themes with tunes including ('I want the world to know I love...') My Dead Gay Son and rock anthem Seventeen.

Heathers is another 1980s cult movie turned musical, but its dark comedy is far more teenage and niche

Andy Fickman's production has the feel of a school show staged in a red brick assembly hall

Jodie Steele (middle) is cold as a blade as lead bully Heather Chandler, Jordan Luke Gage as psycho JD is a baby-faced Clint Eastwood and Christina Bennington makes a feisty enough heroine, Veronica

Andy Fickman's production has the feel of a school show staged in a red brick assembly hall.

Jodie Steele is cold as a blade as lead bully Heather Chandler, Jordan Luke Gage as psycho JD is a baby-faced Clint Eastwood and Christina Bennington makes a feisty enough heroine, Veronica.

I'm just glad I didn't take my 11-year-old, who might think this is what awaits her at secondary school.

The big top beckons with lots of fun

The Hooley - Giffords Circus

Verdict: A terrific family affair

Rating:

Giffords Circus is a slick, traditional and warmly welcoming Irish operation touring Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and London.

Inside the grotto-style big top tricks include clog-dancing elves and the Caomhanach Family of pixie tumblers.

Giffords Circus is a slick, traditional and warmly welcoming Irish operation touring Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and London

Inside the grotto-style big top tricks include clog-dancing elves and the Caomhanach Family of pixie tumblers

With a talking dog and pony muscling in on microphones using ventriloquism, it's all done with an Irish twinkle and set to the whistle, violin and piano tunes of The Joyce Country Ceili Band

My pick, though,was Colm Banus's routine with half a dozen doves leaping from his puff sleeves.

And there's balletic beauty in the aerialism of Cathal O Cearbhaill and Finnian O Fearghail revolving in a hoop overhead.

With a talking dog and pony muscling in on microphones using ventriloquism, it's all done with an Irish twinkle and set to the whistle, violin and piano tunes of The Joyce Country Ceili Band.

I pine to be locked up with them in a pub on the Emerald Isle  as soon as Covid allows.

Bach and Sons (Bridge Theatre, London)

Verdict: More growl than Bach

Rating:

The genius composer Johann Sebastian Bach in Nina Raine's new play starring Simon Russell Beale, comes across as a grumpy old man.

It's a show that achieves the dubious distinction of making me like Bach and his work little bit less.

For the devoutly protestant 18th century German, music was an offering to God.

Yet Raine suggests that Bach's outspoken first wife Maria Barbara was not greatly impressed. Raine has her scoffing that his mathematical compositions were also 'boring and smug'.

Nor was JSB much of a family man. His two sons Wilhelm and Carl who follow in his footsteps are respectively over indulged and under encouraged.

When their mother dies before the interval, they are dismayed to discover that Dad has a pretty soprano to replace her.

Where there might have been story, Raine offers grievance at lesser musicians and rivals, together with lamentation over lost children who don't seem to mean all that much to JSB.

And there's a good deal of very dry discussion of Bach's use of musical counterpoint: 'hope filled with pain' he explains.

Raine writes in modern, four-letter vernacular deliberately at odds with Bach's ecclesiastical reputation.

'What is this crap?' he carps and there's scarcely a line where the author of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, isn't f-ing and blinding.

Sir Nicholas Hytner's production ditches any sense of the divine with battered harpsichord and a piano forte, which move about on marbleised plinths like ice floes.

Despite his warm, cuddly demeanour, Russell Beale's Bach comes over as a morose introvert who justifies his charmlessness in the name of honesty and the need to work.

Douggie McMeekin as Bach's favoured, wastrel older son Wilhelm is (as dad says) 'interesting' in his dereliction, while Samuel Blenkin is 'more correct' as the hard working, less talented younger son who tries to rise above his neglect.

More mischievous is Pravessh Rana as King Frederick The Great who relates a disturbing childhood and amuses himself by toying with the fearfully obsequious Carl. Pandora Colin's Maria Barbara despairs of her husband's attention, while Ruth Lass is movingly desiccated by devotion to him.

It's remarked that everyone loves Bach 'unrequitedly', but Raine never shows why. I still love his music - I think - but I may have to forget this play to carry on doing so.
Julianne Moore has slammed the phrase 'aging gracefully' as being 'totally sexist' because it is most often applied to women.

The 60-year-old actress remarked on growing older in a new cover story for As If magazine according to People.

'There's so much judgment in the term "aging gracefully." Is there an ungraceful way to age?' argued the Hannibal star.

'Is there an ungraceful way to age?': Julianne Moore has slammed the phrase 'aging gracefully' as being 'totally sexist' because it is most often applied to women; pictured last year

'We don't have an option of course. No one has an option about aging, so it's not a positive or a negative thing, it just is. It's part of the human condition, so why are we always talking about it as if it is something that we have control over?' said Julianne.

'We are given a narrative as children that we keep growing through school, maybe go to college then, after school is finished, the idea of growth is done.'

She noted however that at that point people 'have all this life left to live' and there is potential for 'inner growth' during that time.

'How do we continue to challenge ourselves, to interest ourselves, learn new things, be more helpful to other people, be the person that your friends and family need or want? How do we continue to evolve? How do we navigate life to have even deeper experiences? That's what aging should be about.'

Cover star: The 60-year-old actress remarked on growing older in a new cover story for As If magazine according to People

Julianne approvingly quoted Helen Mirren as having said: 'Aging is a requirement of life: You either grow old or die young.'

Helen, 75, made the point late last year during an interview with O, The Oprah Magazine where she denounced the phrase 'anti-aging.'

'I take great issue with the term, actually. You can't avoid aging. The way I see it, you have two choices in life: You can either get older, or die,' she said.

'We don't have an option of course': Julianne, pictured at Milan Fashion Week in 2018, said: 'No one has an option about aging, so it's not a positive or a negative thing, it just is'

'And I want to continue to see what life has in store. I think about Kurt Cobain and all that he missed. I mean, how sad is it that he never knew about GPS.'

Julianne, who won a best actress Oscar for her portrayal of an Alzheimer's patient in Still Alice, has a number of projects in the pipeline.

One of them is a movie adaptation of the Broadway show Dear Evan Hansen starring Ben Platt in the role he originated on the New York stage.

Fellow Oscar winner: Julianne approvingly quoted Helen Mirren as having said: 'Aging is a requirement of life: You either grow old or die young'; Helen is pictured last March

Ben, 27, whose father Marc E. Platt is a producer on the film, has been criticized for looking too old to play his teenage character.

In a tweet he has since deleted Ben took aim at 'the randos being jerks about age' and advised them to 'watch grease.'

Since its release in 1978 Grease has been mocked for casting stars visibly much older than their teens, including John Travolta and Olivia Newton John, as high schoolers.
The relationship between a parent and their first-born child oftentimes can result in a special and impregnable bond.

Over the years, Jennifer Garner appears to have one of those special mother-daughter connections with the oldest of her three children she shares with ex-husband Ben Affleck.

And that bond was on display after the Golden Globe Award-winning actress took her 15-year-old daughter, Violet Affleck, with her to Paris, France.

Quality time: Jennifer Garner, 49, was the picture of the attentive mother when she arrived in Paris, France with her oldest child, 15-year-old daughter Violet Affleck

The pair were spotted soon after they arrived in the City Of Light on Thursday with their luggage in tow.

Being the take charge mom, Garner was busy orchestrating their ride from a car service to their destination, which was likely the hotel where they're staying.

She kept it casual-cool in the fashion department in cream-colored jeans with a matching striped shirt, sneakers, and her long brown tresses pulled into a bun.

Her look-alike daughter opted for a long floral dress over a white long-sleeve shirt and blue sneakers.

The mother-daughter duo waited patiently for their luggage after getting a ride from a car service not long after arriving in the City Of Light

With the COVID-19 pandemic still a serious health concern, both mother and daughter wore protective masks over their mouths and noses while in the midst of people on the bustling streets.

At the time, they appeared to have been dropped off by the driver who, after a brief moment, unloaded their luggage out of the SUV.

Waiting patiently, Garner assessed their bags and belongings, gave thanks to the driver, and everyone was on their way.

So far, it's unclear whether the Miracles From Heaven star's other to two kids - daughter Seraphina, 12, and son Samuel, nine - were going to join them during the trip to Europe.

Easy does it: The Miracles From Heaven star kept it casual-cool in the fashion department in cream-colored jeans with a matching striped shirt and sneakers, while Violet opted for a floral dress over a white long-sleeve shirt and sneakers

It's now been nearly six-years to the day that Garner and Affleck announced their separation, which came just one day after their 10th wedding anniversary back on June 30, 2015.

Since then the former couple have made it a priority to remain on good terms, and in turn have spent numerous holidays and family trips together, including at least one family vacation to Paris within a year of going public with their split.

On the love front, the former couple have both rekindled old romances: Garner is reportedly giving it another shot with businessman John Miller after one-year apart, according to Us Weekly, while Affleck looks to have gone all-in with ex-fiancee Jennifer Lopez in recent months.

Giving it another shot: Garner has reportedly rekindled her romance with with businessman John Miller after one-year apart; he is seen in 2019
She's one of the most famous faces on Australian TV.

And MasterChef judge Melissa Leong has opened up about the important role privilege plays as she continues to champion diversity on television.

The 39-year-old shared a quote on Instagram on Thursday, which read: 'Privilege isn't the presence of perks and benefits. It's the absence of obstacles and barriers.'

Advocate: MasterChef judge Melissa Leong made a statement about privilege on Thursday

Melissa, who is of Chinese-Singaporean heritage, accompanied the quote with a caption addressing minority Australians.

'I had a discussion with a friend recently about the challenge of explaining why representation, diversity and inclusion is important, to people who don't get it,' she said.

'This wonderfully succinct statement rings clear for me, as much as that resonant clarity can awaken so much repressed hurt.'

She then described herself as an activist who strives to speak up for others.

Sharing the message: The 39-year-old shared a quote on Instagram on Thursday, which read: 'Privilege isn't the presence of perks and benefits. It's the absence of obstacles and barriers'

'For those who fight every day against your obstacles and barriers, I feel you. But we don't just do it for ourselves, we do it for so many others in the toil,' she said.

'Please remember you are not alone in whatever you stand up for.'

Melissa featured on the cover Prevention magazine's 100th issue in May.

Cover star: Melissa featured on the cover Prevention magazine's 100th issue in May

At the time, she explained the cultural significance of her cover shoot.

'Representation matters, and to be an Asian on a magazine cover anywhere in the world right now matters now more than ever,' she wrote on Instagram.

She added the hashtags #DiversityMatters, #StopAsianHate and #MasterchefAU.
Strictly Come Dancing's Amy Dowden has revealed she'd love to have Prince William as her next celebrity partner.

The professional dancer, 30, has set her sights on the Duke of Cambridge, 39, taking a turn on the dancefloor, noting that she believes he has 'a nice posture'.

Meanwhile, Amy also gave her verdict on the news that Anton Du Beke is set to hang up his dancing shoes and become a judge this series as he replaces Bruno Tonioli.

Royal request: Strictly Come Dancing's Amy Dowden has revealed she'd love to have Prince William as her next celebrity partner (pictured in 2020)

Discussing all things Strictly on Fubar Radio's Access All Areas, Amy revealed that she'd love to get the royal in sequins, while she also has her eye on Hollywood hunk Hugh Jackman, 52.

She told hosts Stephen Leng and Bobby Norris: 'For me, I always say, from looking at him in The Greatest Showman, I reckon Hugh Jackman's teachable you know? Another one I'd love to dance with is a Royal. A member of the Royal Family.

'I think William looks like he's got a nice posture. So that'd be an advantage - got a good ballroom frame!'

Does one waltz? The professional dancer, 30, has set her sights on the Duke of Cambridge, 39, taking a turn on the dancefloor, noting that she believes he has 'a nice posture'

The Welsh beauty also told how 'exited' she was that Anton would be stepping into the judges role alongside Shirley Ballas, Motsi Mabuse and Craig Revel Horwood.

She said: 'Im so excited. I thought he was brilliant when he filled in last year, because he had a few weeks where he replaced Motsi.'

She went on: 'I think it's quite nice for us pros because he knows it from our perspective as well and what the celebrity is going through.

'So I think for us pros that's quite refreshing. He obviously knows his knowledge. He lives and breathes Strictly. So yeah, I'm really excited.'

Eyes on the prize: 'I think William looks like he's got a nice posture. So that'd be an advantage - got a good ballroom frame!'

Fabulous: Meanwhile, Amy also gave her verdict on the news that Anton Du Beke is set to hang up his dancing shoes and become a judge this series as he replaces Bruno Tonioli

On what type of judge she think he'll be, she added: 'I don't think hell start too generous but I do think he's going to fair.'

Anton's appointment isn't the only change on the show this year as fellow pro dancer Janette Manrara was recently announced as Zoe Ball's replacement on It Takes Two.

Discussing Janette's big role, Amy gushed at how happy she was for the dancer, but at the same time admitted that things would be 'strange' without her.

She said: 'It's going to be strange, but I'm also at the same time delighted. She's got herself her dream role. She's worked really, really hard.

Thoughts: 'I think it's quite nice for us pros because he knows it from our perspective as well and what the celebrity is going through. So I think for us pros that's quite refreshing'

New role: Discussing Janette's big role, Amy gushed at how happy she was for the dancer, but at the same time admitted that things would be 'strange' without her

Its great to see progression and, you know, to show that if you work hard at something, if you believe in it, dreams can come true.

'So I'm delighted for Janette. And I know like again, she lives and breathes Strictly, so I don't think she could have ever pulled herself away from the show. So this is perfect!'

It comes as Amy's fellow Strictly star Oti Mabuse revealed she would consider another role on Strictly Come Dancing in the future, but probably not as a judge.

The professional dancer, 30, has soared to victory twice on the BBC series but wouldn't want to join the panel as her sister Motsi is already a judge.

Career: Oti Mabuse revealed she would consider another role on Strictly Come Dancing in the future, but probably not as a judge

Oti appeared on Steph's Packed Lunch on Wednesday alongside fellow dancer Johannes Radebe, 34, who revealed he would like to see an all-male couple on this year's show.

Asked about becoming a judge, Oti said: 'I don't know, I don't like to jinx things. I feel like my sister's there and she's doing such a brilliant job, maybe something else, maybe another role'

Oti also discussed how, this year, the professional dancers are having to rely on gyms to get into shape for the new series, rather than regular dancing.

She said: 'It is hard. We've never been in this situation of having to go to the gym to get fit. We usually dance, so we are trying to get into it.'
Chris Pratt revealed that he and wife Katherine Schwarzenegger got In-N-Out Burger to celebrate their second wedding anniversary.

The 42-year-old actor during an appearance Thursday on The Late Late Show With James Corden also admitted that he additionally gifted Katherine, 31, with diamonds.

Chris was asked about his momentous month of June by James, 42, who noted the actor recently celebrated both his birthday and his wedding anniversary.

Second anniversary: Chris Pratt revealed that he and wife Katherine Schwarzenegger got In-N-Out Burger to celebrate their second wedding anniversary

'Well, June is a big month for me because it is my wedding anniversary and my birthday. And they were good, man, it's good. I'm here in Los Angeles, which is home for me,' Chris said.

He added that he's been working on a show in Los Angeles and enjoys sleeping in his own bed at night after working.

'Kept it really low key, I'm kind of a low key birthday or celebration guy. We got In-N-Out Burger for our anniversary,' Chris said referencing the popular Southern California fast-food chain.

'Oh, wow,' James said.

Diamonds also: The 42-year-old actor during an appearance Thursday on The Late Late Show With James Corden also admitted that he additionally gifted Katherine, 31, with diamonds

Cute couple: Chris took to Instagram in June to celebrate his anniversary with Katherine

'She deserves the world, you know. So I got her the In-N-Out,' quipped Chris.

'And a nice piece of jewelry,' Chris added.

Chris noted how the traditional second-year anniversary gift is wood and and he thought of getting Katherine something wooden.

Milestones month: The actor was asked about his momentous month of June by James, 42, who noted Chris recently celebrated both his birthday and his wedding anniversary

'And then her sister was like, ''You're going to get her diamonds'' and I was like, ''I'm going to get her diamonds'',' Chris said.

Chris said he agreed with his father-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger who suggested that he could be an excellent talk show host.

'I would love to take over your show, thank you,' Chris joked.

Not wood: 'And then her sister was like, ''You're going to get her diamonds'' and I was like, ''I'm going to get her diamonds'',' Chris said

Chris also reflected on his Hollywood career that has spanned 20 years and stood up for Los Angeles saying it gets a 'bad rap'.

'There is a lot of wackos and weirdoes who live here, people are insane, but they're artists and artists are crazy. But this town has been so good to me, man. I mean I have waited tables in this town. And I was a room service waiter and I was trying to park people's cars and I had no money. And I have accomplished more than I could have ever possibly imagined. And so I feel good about it, man. It is a positive thing,' he said.

The Guardians Of The Galaxy Star remembered when just scoring an audition was considered a 'win'.

Good city: 'And I have accomplished more than I could have ever possibly imagined. And so I feel good about it, man. It is a positive thing,' Chris said while standing up for Los Angeles

'Guess who's auditioning for a Friskies commercial, homeboy? That's right,' Chris said with a grin.

Chris was on the CBS talk show as he wrapped promotional duty for his new film The Tomorrow War.

The Tomorrow War originally was going to be released in theaters but its distribution rights were acquired during the COVID-19 pandemic by Amazon Studios.

New film: Chris was on the CBS talk show as he wrapped promotional duty for his new film The Tomorrow War

LA premiere: Sam Richardson, Yvonne Strahovski, Chris, Betty Gilpin and J.K. Simmons of The Tomorrow War are shown at the Los Angeles premiere of the film on Wednesday at Banc of California Stadium

Chris stars in and also executive produced the military sci-fi action film that premiered Friday on Amazon Prime Video.

James challenged Chris to complete a Rubik's Cube puzzle in under minute while promoting the film.

Chris described the film while completing the puzzle and then jokingly asked if he was getting the talk show now.
She enjoyed a brief stint on TOWIE before departing the reality show in 2019.

And Chloe Ross put on a leggy display as she headed to dinner with pals MKNY house in London's Mayfair on Thursday.

The TV personality, 28, looked radiant in a white broderie anglaise mini dress as she posed up a storm after attending fellow TOWIE alum Chloe Lewis' Style Cheat clothing launch.

Legs for days: Chloe Ross put on a leggy display as she headed to dinner with pals MKNY house in London's Mayfair on Thursday

Chloe oozed confidence in the thigh-skimming, tie-waist dress, which she teamed with towering wedges.

The beauty accessorised her look with a taupe handbag and pretty pearl earrings, while she kept her make-up neutral and swept her brunette tresses into a high ponytail.

Chloe appeared in great spirits as she strutted down the street with her friends, who looked lovely in neutral and denim ensembles.

Lovely: The TV personality, 28, looked radiant in a white broderie anglaise mini dress as she posed up a storm after attending fellow TOWIE alum Chloe Lewis' Style Cheat clothing launch

Back in October Chloe revealed her plans to get married and have children with her boyfriend, Ben.

The former TOWIE star explained to MailOnline that she previously split with her beau before deciding to get back together in 2019, and said the break has only made them 'stronger'.

During an interview about her new Ann Summers Halloween campaign, Chloe revealed: 'I do have a boyfriend, he's my ex-boyfriend basically. He was my boyfriend, then we split up.

Strike a pose: Chloe was on fine form as she posed with her pals ahead of dinner

Work it: Chloe oozed confidence in the thigh-skimming, tie-waist dress, which she teamed with towering wedges

Glamorous: She kept her make-up neutral and swept her brunette tresses into a high ponytail

Fun times: Chloe appeared in great spirits as she strutted down the street with her friends, who looked lovely in neutral and denim ensembles

'Then I joined TOWIE, and then we started dating again just before my second series and now we're back together, and I'm really, really happy.

'Some relationships need a break and so did ours, but it made us stronger. We are really good, and I think our relationship is coming up to a year now.'

Chloe exited the hit reality show in 2019 alongside Jayden Beales, and said that her relationship played a part in her departure.

Girl power: The ladies held hands as they made their way down the street

Fashionistas: The friends wowed in co-ordinated outfits, with Chloe's pals offsetting the white ensembles with denim

If you've got it: Chloe and her friends put on a leggy display as they prepared to dine at the swanky eatery

The brunette beauty added: 'For me, I got back with Ben and I didn't really want to have my relationship on the show and there wasn't much storyline for me to be on there.

'It's not like I was going to be dating anyone, so it was just the perfect time for me to leave the show.

She also divulged their plans to have children in the future, as she declared: 'Definitely, I would love to have children. Because I'm one of four, I've always said I want four but Ben says, "No, I want two".

'You never know what the future holds, I'll just be grateful if I can have one child, so it will happen when it is meant to happen.'
They're two of the male stars of opposing reality TV franchises Married At First Sight and The Bachelorette.

And a feud broke out between Dean Wells and Lee Elliott on Friday, when MAFS 'villain' Wells took to the comments section of his reality TV rival's Instagram post with a very pointed quip.

After Elliott posted a throwback pic of his time on the Channel 10 reality TV series, Wells wrote, 'Bro, let it go. Stop milking it'.

Fight! A reality TV feud broke out between Dean Wells and Lee Elliott on Friday, when MAFS 'villain' Wells took to the comments section of his reality TV rival's Instagram post

Elliott returned fire with humour, paraphrasing the comedy film Meet The Parents by writing 'I have nipples @deanwells can you milk me?'

Sharing the exchange to his Instagram Stories, Lee added the comment, 'Completely flattered that of all the things you could be doing at 3am you chose to peruse my profile. #blessed'.

The post in question was a throwback inspired by Elliot's five year Bachelorette anniversary.

Fired up: After Elliott posted a throwback pic of his time on the Channel 10 reality TV series, Wells (pictured) wrote, 'Bro, let it go. Stop milking it'

Love: The post in question was a throwback inspired by Elliot's five year Bachelorette anniversary. Lee pictured here with now-wife Georgia Love in 2018

The plumber met his future wife Georgia Love on the 2016 season of the dating show.

Lee, 40, shared a sweet throwback image this week 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.
Big Dog Britain

Rating:

The Hotel Inspector

Rating:

Certain women go gooey for him. He is handsome, in a strange way, though he bumbles around like a giant dishmop on a Spacehopper. Generally, whatever he wants, he gets.

Naturally, his name is Boris. Hes a Chien de Berger des Pyrenees or Pyrenean Shepherd dog. Hes blond and nutty and good-looking, sighs his owner, Susan.

Boris hogs the bed, which youd expect, and he also likes to eat standing up at the dining table, which somehow does not come as a surprise either.

In fact, he needs to be fed by hand. Providing hes permitted all the luxuries of life, hes happy to do whatever the lady of the house tells him.

Im not convinced that Boris, one of the stars of Big Dog Britain (C4), really exists. He might have been invented as a political satire by Fluck and Law, the creators of Spitting Image.

Certain women go gooey for him. He is handsome, in a strange way, though he bumbles around like a giant dishmop on a Spacehopper. Generally, whatever he wants, he gets

If so, its a joke that can run endlessly on: for instance, though hes soppily charming, you might not want him actually in your house. You certainly wouldnt trust him with a roast chicken, or any other bird.

Someone else always has to clean up his messes. And so on.

This whole hour was an unremitting advert on behalf of the Dog Party. We met a couple with ten Irish wolfhounds, and another pair with five St Bernards (and a sixth on the way).

The only voice of dissent came from Wade, a young lad whose mum and dad kept half a dozen Newfoundlands at their cottage in Northumberland.

Wade was a cat person. But in a family where a Newfoundland dog was Best Woman at his parents wedding, Wades chances of a tabby kitten for his birthday were nil.

Film-maker Richard Macer asked the boy what he disliked about sharing his home with a pack of bear-sized mutts. Wade looked around. From the ceiling hung a lump of moulted hair, dripping with slobber. Words failed him.

He might become a convert. This gently probing documentary discovered a pattern in most of the dog-mad households  at least one of the adults grew up with a pet that looked like the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Carlos, from Brazil, had Great Danes as a child. Now he runs a motorbike repair shop in South London, where one of his two current Danes, called Diego, likes to ride in a sidecar. Ears flapping in the wind, Diego even wears bikers goggles.

Come on, Boris, make Diego your Transport Secretary.

With her poodle ringlets, Alex Polizzi looks as if shed sleep curled up on the end of a bed piled with eiderdowns. She wasnt happy to be roughing it in a backpackers hostel in Bude, Cornwall, as The Hotel Inspector (C5). The owners werent happy either. Enthusiastic world travellers, Sean and Janine made the mistake of setting up their own budget B&B to enjoy that adventurous vibe all year round.

They ended up with all the worst bits  the cramped kitchen, the smelly dorms, the total absence of privacy  and none of the fun.

I just dont want any part of it, moaned Janine, 50, who foresaw divorce if they couldnt sell the place.

Alex helped the couple to spruce the joint up, attracting more guests (at 15 a night) as well as a buyer for the business.

But it was a downbeat and glum episode, as most of the current series has been.

With the UK travel industry veering from shutdown to overload, the shows concept is suddenly out of date.

Next time, Id much rather see Alex showcase a few surprising and enticing hideaways for holidays in Britain.

Royal tour of the week: Susan Calman was trundling along the prom at Southend in Essex, greeting her subjects from an open-top bus, on her Grand Week By The Sea (C5).

If you ever see me, just wave, she hooted. It brings me such great joy. Hiya, Susan . . . hello!
Oscar-winning songwriter Lady Gaga slipped into a cozy grey-knit sweater on a couch for a selfie on Thursday.

The 35-year-old pop diva - who boasts 211.2M social media followers - captioned her Instagram snap: 'Love for sale.'

Earlier that day, Gaga (born Stefani Germanotta) wowed in a white ruffled organza gown by Giambattista Valli beneath a creamy Fendi coat while exiting the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Comfy: Oscar-winning songwriter Lady Gaga slipped into a cozy grey-knit sweater on a couch for a selfie on Thursday

The 35-year-old pop diva - who boasts 211.2M social media followers - captioned her Instagram snap: 'Love for sale'

Mother Monster accessorized her bridal look with Jimmy Choo heels, a mint Mark Cross bag, and cat-eye shades selected by styling duo Sandra Amador + Tom Eerebout.

Hairstylist/wig designer Frederic Aspiras coiffed Gaga's French twist and make-up artist Sarah Nicole Tanno made sure her complexion was fully contoured with lashes.

The native New Yorker was in the Big Apple to perform a sold-out MTV Unplugged concert with 18-time Grammy winner Tony Bennett this Friday at 11am - according to New York Post.

It could very well be one of the final performances by the legendary jazz crooner, who turns 95 in 33 days and has been battling Alzheimer's disease.

Chic: Earlier that day, Gaga (born Stefani Germanotta) wowed in a white ruffled organza gown by Giambattista Valli beneath a creamy Fendi coat while exiting the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan

Elegant: Mother Monster accessorized her bridal look with Jimmy Choo heels, a mint Mark Cross bag, and cat-eye shades selected by styling duo Sandra Amador + Tom Eerebout

Takes a village: Hairstylist/wig designer Frederic Aspiras coiffed Gaga's French twist and make-up artist Sarah Nicole Tanno made sure her complexion was fully contoured with lashes

During the second quarter of 2021, Lady Gaga is said to be releasing her second album with Tony (born Anthony Benedetto), which was recorded between 2018-2020.

To prepare, Bennett has been singing twice a week with pianist Lee Musiker and exercising three days a week with his fitness trainer David.

The 12-time Grammy winner's Cheek to Cheek partner - who served in the US Army during WWII - has sold over 50M records worldwide during his seven-decade career.

And on May 8, Gaga wrapped Ridley Scott's Patrizia Reggiani biopic House of Gucci, which is scheduled to hit US theaters November 24 and UK theaters November 26.

Reunited: The native New Yorker was in the Big Apple to perform a sold-out MTV Unplugged concert with 18-time Grammy winner Tony Bennett (R, pictured in 2019) this Friday at 11am

Looking good! It could very well be one of the final performances by the legendary jazz crooner, who turns 95 in 33 days and has been battling Alzheimer's disease (pictured Wednesday)

Cheek to Cheek Pt. 2: During the second quarter of 2021, Lady Gaga is said to be releasing her second album with Tony, which was recorded between 2018-2020 (pictured in 2015)

In it, the Friends Reunion guest star plays the fellow fiery 5ft Italian socialite Patrizia who was convicted of orchestrating the 1995 murder of her ex-husband, Gucci heir Maurizio Gucci.

The Milan-born 72-year-old completed 18 years of her 29-year prison sentence in 2016 along with four accomplices - including the hitman who gunned down Maurizio at his office.

House of Gucci also stars Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jared Leto, Salma Hayek, Jack Huston, Reeve Carney, and Jeremy Irons.
She's the former Neighbours star who recently embarked on a new career as a writer and director for female-led pornography website Afterglow.

And Caitlin Stasey offered fans a glimpse of her assets on Thursday as she posed braless in a clinging white top for an Instagram selfie.

The Australian actress, 30, teamed her revealing rash vest from surf brand Roxy with cargo pants and a '90s-style bucket hat.

Eyes up here! Former Neighbours star Caitlin Stasey posed braless in a clinging white top for an Instagram selfie on Thursday

She completed her look with white sneakers with green laces.

Caitlin made headlines in February when she announced her new career path: making feminist pornography.

That month, she also revealed what it was like working on an adult film set, saying it was 'a lot more inclusive' than mainstream Hollywood.

'A hell of a lot more inclusive': The Australian actress, 30, made headlines in February when she announced her new career path: making feminist pornography

'Porn sets tend to be a hell of a lot more inclusive than traditional film sets,' she told The New York Times.

'There's also a lot more conversations surrounding consent, respect and on-set conduct,' she added.

Caitlin spoke about the cultural differences between adult and mainstream filmmaking in another interview with Rose & Ivy in January

'The porn world is a complicated one, but like any industry there are myriad experiences you can have,' she said.

'Mine have all been exceedingly positive, respectful and professional.'

'Traditional film sets are often dominated by men': That month, she revealed what it was like working on an adult film set, saying it was 'a lot more inclusive' than mainstream Hollywood

She added: 'Traditional film sets are often dominated by men, and it may surprise people to know that porn sets are incredibly diverse, often captained by queer people all along the gender spectrum.'

Caitlin has directed three erotic films for Afterglow, each one focusing on female empowerment, intimacy and sexual inclusivity.

One of her films, titled U Up?, explores intimacy during the Covid-19 pandemic by telling the story of a couple who have a sexual encounter via their mobile phones.

New career: Caitlin has directed three erotic films for female-led pornography website Afterglow, each one focusing on female empowerment, intimacy and sexual inclusivity

Making a statement: One of her films, titled U Up?, explores intimacy during the Covid-19 pandemic by telling the story of a couple who have a sexual encounter via their mobile phones

'Caitlin's a fabulous narrative director, and her involvement brings the high-quality, cinematic Hollywood experience we strive for at Afterglow,' company founder Lilly Sparks said in statement.

'We're thrilled to be working with her in reducing the shame and stigma around sex and sex work.'

Caitlin joined Afterglow after befriending intimacy coordinator and Afterglow's Head of Production Allie Oops while they were both working on another project together.

Allie invited her to join the team as a director after discovering the Sleepover Club star's passion for expressing her sexuality.
Rare Beauty founder Selena Gomez celebrated her inclusive cosmetics company going global on Thursday while on set shooting her next campaign.

'So excited that @rarebeauty is now global!' the 28-year-old 'Texican' pop star - who boasts 448M social media followers - gushed.

'I've put my heart and soul into my brand and couldn't be more grateful I get to share it all over the world...so sad I couldn't be in each country to celebrate. Can't wait to visit and see y'all soon!'

'So excited!' Rare Beauty founder Selena Gomez celebrated her inclusive cosmetics company going global on Thursday while on set shooting her next campaign

Fans can now buy Selena's make-up in person at Sephora stores in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Switzerland, Greece, Portugal, Turkey, Romania, Czech Republic, and the Middle East.

Gomez originally launched Rare Beauty in September featuring 'no less than 48 shades of foundation and concealer' with a portion of the proceeds benefitting her Rare Impact Fund.

The Selfish Love songstress will also launch her collaboration with swimwear company La'Mariette this Saturday at 9am PST.

The 28-year-old 'Texican' pop star - who boasts 448M social media followers - gushed: 'I've put my heart and soul into my brand and couldn't be more grateful I get to share it all over the world...so sad I couldn't be in each country to celebrate. Can't wait to visit and see y'all soon!'

But not Asia? Fans can now buy Selena's make-up in person at Sephora stores in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Switzerland, Greece, Portugal, Turkey, Romania, Czech Republic, and the Middle East

Mental health matters: Gomez originally launched Rare Beauty in September featuring 'no less than 48 shades of foundation and concealer' with a portion of the proceeds benefitting her Rare Impact Fund

Selena's six-piece collection all feature the same purple, orange, and neon print dubbed 'Aura.'

'I didn't want to do the traditional red. I didn't want to do white or anything that I'm used to,' Gomez explained on Wednesday.

'I thought that purple would be so different for me and adding pops of color, like a little bit of green and a neon here and there.

Busy girl: The Selfish Love songstress will also launch her collaboration with swimwear company La'Mariette this Saturday at 9am PST (pictured Tuesday)

Excited? Selena's six-piece collection all feature the same purple, orange, and neon print dubbed 'Aura'

Gomez explained on Wednesday: 'I thought that purple would be so different for me and adding pops of color, like a little bit of green and a neon here and there. That it's kind of become, like, it becomes your own bathing suit. However, you wear it'

'That it's kind of become, like, it becomes your own bathing suit. However, you wear it.'

Fans can next catch the former Disney Channel star as true crime fan Mabel Mora in the 10-episode comedy Only Murders in the Building, which premieres August 31 on Hulu.

Co-creators Steve Martin and John Hoffman's series also features Martin Short, Sting, Aaron Dominguez, Amy Ryan, and Nathan Lane.
Ben Affleck has not let his rekindled romance with Jennifer Lopez keep him from being a doting dad to his three children.

And on Thursday, the 48-year-old actor was spotted holding hands with his nine-year-old son Samuel while dropping him off at swimming lessons in Los Angeles.

Affleck showcased his fit form in a plain blue tee and a pair of dark wash denim jeans.

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Doting dad: Ben Affleck was spotted holding hands with his nine-year-old son Samuel while dropping him off at swimming lessons in Los Angeles on Thursday

Samuel strolled beside his very famous dad in an adorable blue wetsuit and a pair of matching Adidas slides.

With a huge smile on his face, the youngest child of Ben and ex wife Jennifer Garner looked eager to get in the pool.

The Goodwill Hunting actor had a blue and black backpack slung over one shoulder, which he later passed off to Samuel.

Once they reached the practice space, Ben bid farewell to Samuel and returned to his parked vehicle.

Looking good: Affleck showcased his fit form in a plain blue tee and a pair of dark wash denim jeans

Adorable: Samuel strolled beside his very famous dad in an adorable blue wetsuit and a pair of matching Adidas slides

Affleck erred on the side of caution while in close proximity to other swim class attendees and their parents by rocking a face mask.

With the sun blazing in Southern California, the Argo star kept his eyes protected with a pair of orange tinted aviator shades.

As he waited for Samuel's swim lessons to end, Ben smoked on a cigarette.

Cautious: Affleck erred on the side of caution while in close proximity to other swim class attendees and their parents by rocking a face mask

Along with Samuel, Affleck shares daughters Violet, 15, and Seraphina, 12, with ex Jennifer Garner.

The former couple famously split in 2018 after 13 years of marriage.

Ben recently rekindled his romance with former fiancee Jennifer Lopez, just weeks after her split from Alex Rodriguez in April.

The A-listers confirmed the romance as they enjoyed a make-out session in front of J.Lo's kids at Nobu Malibu last month during a birth celebration for her sister Lynda.

All the goods: The Goodwill Hunting actor had a blue and black backpack slung over one shoulder, which he later passed off to Samuel

Passing time: As he waited for Samuel's swim lessons to end, Ben smoked on a cigarette

Lopez and Affleck first started dating in 2002 and announced their engagement that November.

In September 2003, just days before the couple was to say 'I do,' they called off their wedding. Months later the couple broke up for good in January 2004.

That seems to be all water under the bridge as though she has a large $28M home in Bel Air, California, sources say that Lopez would like to live closer to Affleck's Pacific Palisades bachelor pad worth $20M.

Last month, People reported that Ben and Jennifer are 'discussing summer plans' because they 'love being together and the weekends away they had been spending together have really sealed the deal.'

Co-parenting: Along with Samuel, Affleck shares daughters Violet, 15, and Seraphina, 12, with ex Jennifer Garner; Jennifer and Ben pictured

Rekindled: Ben recently rekindled his romance with former fiancee Jennifer Lopez; Jennifer and Ben pictured in 2003

Their insider continued: 'Friends say they can see them staying together forever this time around. They are soulmates and always have been.'

And Lopez loves that Affleck has taken to her twins. 'Ben is great with kids and that is what really rekindled J. Lo's attraction to him. She saw how well he treated and interacted with her kids and fell back in love with him.'

Jennifer shares her 13-year-old daughter Emme and son Max with her third ex husband Marc Anthony. The pair were married from 2004 until their divorce in 2014.

Seemingly reiterating other reports, a source told UsWeekly that Jennifer and Ben are 'in love' again after 17 years and that they feel like they are 'soul mates.'

Split: Her rekindled romance with Ben came just weeks after her split from fiance Alex Rodriguez in April; Alex and Jennifer pictured in 2020
She's been enjoying working and living in Australia with her husband Sacha Baron Cohen since moving back Down Under.

And Isla Fisher stepped out to purchase some creature comforts on Thursday amid Sydney's current two-week lockdown.

During the outing, the 45-year-old donned a mandatory face mask while out shopping at a local store.

Lockdown comforts! Isla Fisher stepped out to buy an Oodie and slippers in Sydney on Thursday before buying fish and chips for lunch amid the city's two-week stay at home orders

She opted for a bohemian style outfit, wearing a long floral print skirt with an oversized cable knit jumper.

The actress teamed the look with lavender trainers, a trendy fedora hat and carried a white tote bag.

She looked through several items on offer out the front, spotting something of interest at the lower level of a rack.

The Godmothered star found some cosy slipper socks, picking up a few pairs of her family, as well as a pink one likely for herself.

Mask on: It was safety first for the 45-year-old who donned a face mask while out shopping at local store

A good find! She looked through several items on offer out the front, spotting something of interest at the lower level of a rack

She continued looking at the other items on offer and found a light blue Oodie - an oversized wearable blanket with a hood and took it inside to pay for it.

A short time later, she was seen leaving the store with a plastic bag, the cosy Oodie and box of coloured pens.

Casual: She opted for a bohemian style outfit, wearing a long floral print skirt with an oversized cable knit jumper and carried a white tote

Accessories: The actress teamed the look with lavender trainers and a trendy fedora hat

She wants it, she's got it! Isla reached for the Oodie - that featured the cartoon character Charlie Brown printed on it - and took it inside to pay for it

Isla returned to her car before heading off to buy lunch for her family.

The Oman-born, Perth-raised actress donned a pair of stylish sunglasses while on her way to a fish and chip store.

A few moments later, she was seen leaving with a bag full of several boxes of food, while chatting to someone on the phone.

Confessions of a Shopaholic: The actress continued to browsing at the many items on offer

Purchases: She was seen leaving the store with a plastic bag with the slippers

Extra items: She also carried the cosy Oodie and box of coloured pens. Isla returned to her car before heading off to buy lunch for her family

Prior to lockdown, Isla was busy filming the Stan's new TV series Wolf Like Me in Sydney, starring opposite Josh Gad.

The Original Series is written by Aussie filmmaker Abe Forsythe, and is based on his own life experience.

The six-part series will also be directed by Forsythe and is being made in conjunction with NBCUniversal's streaming service Peacock in the U.S.

Sunny day: The Oman-born, Perth-raised actress donned a pair of stylish sunglasses while on her way to a fish and chip store

Bringing home the goods! A few moments later, she was seen leaving with a bag full of several boxes of food, while chatting to someone on the phone

Isla recently revealed her husband had kept details of the pranks he was pulling a secret from her during filming.

'I'm so grateful I didn't know before, so I didn't have to worry,' the Godmothered star admitted in an interview with Marie Claire Australia in May.

Sacha was away for 70 days shooting the Amazon Original movie, during which time Isla was in the dark about his exploits.

'So I didn't have to worry': Isla recently revealed her husband - Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen - had kept details of the pranks he was pulling a secret from her while filming Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. 'Sacha was very kind in not sharing what he intended to shoot each day,' she said

'Sacha was very kind in not sharing what he intended to shoot each day,' she said.

After he got home safe, he told his wife of one scene: 'Oh, I was at a pro-gun rally; everyone was carrying guns.'

The scene in question depicted Sacha - as Borat - leading a racist singalong at a gun rally, before fleeing the event in a bulletproof vest after his real identity was exposed.

Power couple: Isla spoke about her marriage to the funnyman and their decision to relocate to Australia with their three children. 'I'm always surprised that I'm employed, married and have my family  everything else feels like a bonus,' she added

Elsewhere in the interview, she spoke about her marriage to the funnyman and their decision to relocate to Australia with their three children.

The notoriously private actress admitted she felt 'very lucky to have met' the Sacha at a party in Sydney in 2002.

'I'm always surprised that I'm employed, married and have my family  everything else feels like a bonus,' she added.
She celebrated the end of many of Los Angeles' Covid-19 restrictions by joining her friends Darren Criss and Vanessa Hudgens for a round of karaoke.

But Ashley Benson was spotted without her celebrity friends as she left Tramp Stamp Granny's karaoke bar in Hollywood with an an unknown woman on Wednesday night.

The 31-year-old Pretty Little Liars star tightly held the other woman's hand as they appeared to leave the bar together on their way home.

Holding hands: Ashley Benson, 31, looked sleek in black as she locked hands with a female friend on Wednesday after leaving Tramp Stamp Granny's karaoke bar in Hollywood

Ashley looked ultra cool for her night out in a double-breasted black leather jacket with wide lapels that channeled classic 1970s style.

She also had on black jeans and showed off a hint of her toned tummy thanks to her black crop top.

The Her Smell actress elevated her 5ft4in height in black leather boots, and she wore a pill-shaped beige handbag while holding her red-dyed hair back with a clip.

Her friend wore a casual blue T-shirt tied off at her waist, along with skinny jeans and tall platform heels.

Old school: Ashley looked ultra cool for her night out in a double-breasted black leather jacket with wide lapels that channeled classic 1970s style

Low key: Her friend wore a casual blue T-shirt tied off at her waist, along with skinny jeans and tall platform heels

Pretty in pink: Ashley was seen holding the other woman's hand as they left while showing off her neon pink nails

Ashley's neon pink nails glowed in the night as she locked hands with the woman as they left the bar together.

The actress' ex, Cara Delevingne, recently spoke to Cosmopolitan about their relationship, which ended in May 2020 after two years.

Although she was light on specifics, she called their quarantine 'the most trying time,' and said that it 'really makes or breaks you.'

Following her split from Delevingne, she dated rapper G-Eazy until earlier this year.

She had been celebrating with her friends, famous and not, to mark a pre-grand re-opening celebration for the bar.

Although Ashley was spotted maskless outside the bar getting close to her friends, she may not have been fully vaccinated at the time.

On Thursday, she shared a photo of herself at a clinic with syringes in view while masked up, which she captioned 'Vaccine time.'

Risky business: Later on Thursday, Ashley showed a photo of herself in a clinic getting vaccinated, suggesting she may have been unvaccinated while partying on Wednesday night

Although the photo may have been taken earlier, she sported her new red hair, which she only debuted a week earlier.

People aren't considered fully vaccinated until two weeks after getting a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine or two weeks after getting their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.

However, she didn't specify whether she was getting a coronavirus vaccine or another inoculation.

Also joining her at the karaoke party was her Spring Breakers co-star, Vanessa Hudgens, who dressed to the nines and belted out a Grease ballad while partying the night away with friends.

She was greeted at the door by Criss, 34, who looked equally excited to get back into the swing of things as LA County lifted bans on indoor dining and drinking more than one year into the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Friends! Ashley Benson looked elated to see Darren Criss at the Hollywood bar for its pre-grand re-opening party

Criss, 34, rocked an eclectic shiny silver blazer with a pair of blue-and-white floral slacks for the big night out.

He was spotted at the mic singing You'll Be In My Heart to a packed house before sitting down at the piano for a duet of A Whole New World with Lizzy McAlpine.

Vanessa, 32, simply sparkled in a sexy blue sheath with a halter top and a plunging neckline.

Jazzy: Her Spring Breakers costar Vanessa Hudgens simply sparkled in a sexy blue sheath which wrapped around her neck and featured a plunging neckline

Blue mood: Vanessa kept her accessories simple and wore her dark brown hair in an updo with curly tendrils framing her face

Loud and proud: Not one to waste a moment off stage, she grabbed the microphone for a sultry rendition of Stockard Channing's There Are Worse Things (I Could Do)

Not one to waste a moment off stage, she grabbed the microphone for a sultry rendition of Stockard Channing's There Are Worse Things (I Could Do).

A few of the Vanderpump Rules kids also came out to play after LaLa Kent's #GiveThemLalaBeauty launch at Beauty & Essex just down the street.

Fancy AF Cocktails authors Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix headed into the party closely behind their neighbors and co-stars, Tom Sandoval and Katie Maloney.
The brother of the late Mac Miller, Miller McCormick appeared to criticize Machine Gun Kelly's upcoming film Good News, which reportedly is inspired by recently deceased rappers like Mac Miller, Pop Smoke, Lil Peep, and Juice WRLD.

While the film has been listed as fiction, the project shared the name of Miller's posthumous song released January 2020, some 16-months after his tragic death from an accidental drug overdose.

McCormick didn't specifically mention MGK (born Colson Baker) or the film by name when he took to Instagram to slam the project, but his criticism, and others on social media, was enough to have the production company reverse course and change the title.

On Thursday, July 1, McCormick didn't hold back when he wrote on his Instagram Story, 'F**k you, f**k your movie, at least change the title.'

Backlash: The brother of late rapper Mac Miller criticized the upcoming film Good News, starring Machine Gun Kelly, and its title, which is the same name of the first posthumous song released as part of the Circles album that dropped in January 2020

Once the criticism started to swell on social media, Rivulet Media announced to E! News that the title would, in fact, be changed, while also reminding fans that the story is a work of fiction, and only a homage to Miller (born Malcolm James McCormick).

'Our film is about a fictional musician on the rise with a troubled life,' the statement began.

'It's not in any way a biopic or based on any artist's true life. We realize the title, which was intended as an homage to Mac Miller, and other artists gone too soon, feels disrespectful. We've heard from many people on social media who have found offense with the title so, without hesitation, we will change it.'

Miller McCormick dropped a couple four letter curse words when he took to Instagram to slam the film, Good News, which production company Rivulet Media revealed was a work of fiction and only a homage to Mac Miller

Criticism heard! In the end, the growing criticism was enough for production company, Rivulet Media, to announce it was going to change the title of the movie, starring MGK

MGK, who goes by Colsen Baker in his previous film credits, plays the troubled musician in the now untitled movie,

His screen resume also includes playing drummer Tommy Lee of Motley Crue in the biopic, The Dirt, as well as Power Project and Bird Box.

Production on the new music-based project is expected to start on July 8 in Los Angeles.

Jib Polhemus will produce alongside Rivulet Medias film division President, Rob Paris and COO Mike Witherill.

Music to movies: MGK, who goes by Colsen Baker in his previous film credits, plays the troubled musician in the now untitled movie

At this point, MGK has not yet directly addressed the controversy or the subsequent movie title change.

The Houston, Texas native has been out en force promoting his latest studio album, Tickets To My Downfall, since it dropped in September 2020 and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.

He is also set to star in three new films: the western The Last Son Of Isaac LeMay alongside Sam Worthington and Heather Graham, the action-thriller One Way with Kevin Bacon, and the crime-thriller film Midnight In The Switchgrass.

Miller began his career in Pittsburgh's hip hop scene in 2007, at the age of 15. By the time of his death in 2018 at 26, he had released five studio albums, including his debut, Blue Slide Park (2011), which became the first independently distributed debut album to top the US Billboard 200 since 1995.


Former Hollyoaks actress Stephanie Davis has been hospitalised with Covid.

The 28-year-old, who is asthmatic and has not been vaccinated, was admitted on Thursday night after she 'woke up and couldn't move'.

A spokesperson for Stephanie told MailOnline: 'She has been in isolation and is awaiting a chest X-ray.

'She's at risk because of her underlying asthma. Stephanie has not been vaccinated yet because of her allergies and anaphylaxis.'

Late last night, while in her hospital bed and wearing an oxygen mask, the soap star explained in a video that the onset of her symptoms 'happened so quick.'

Despite being in her twenties, the actress falls into a higher risk category for Covid because of her asthma.

Patients with severe asthma were at the top of the priority list when the vaccines began to be rolled out late last year and mild asthmatics were offered the jab during the second phase of the rollout.

But some people with severe food allergies or a history of anaphylaxis were advised to consult with their doctor before getting the jabs.

Oh no! Stephanie Davis, 28, has tested positive for Covid-19

Terrifying: The Hollyoaks actress, who suffers from asthma and has not been vaccinated against coronavirus, was rushed to hospital on in an ambulance Thursday night

Just days ago: Two days earlier, Stephanie looked happy and healthy as she attended a friend's wedding with her bike shop worker beau Oliver Tasker

What happened? Stephanie explained: 'Last night I had a bit of a headache before bed, and my sinuses. I woke up so ill. I had to call an ambulance, and I've tested positive for Covid-19'

Speaking to her camera phone, Stephanie explained: 'So last night I had a bit of a headache before bed, and my sinuses.

'I woke up so ill. I had to call an ambulance basically, and I've tested positive for Covid-19. I feel like I've been ran over.

'The worst part is my skin. I can't touch my skin, it's killing me. I'm just in so much pain.

WHY HAS STEPHANIE NOT BEEN GIVEN A COVID VACCINE? The vaccine rollout began opening to people under 30 in June. But former Hollyoaks actress Stephanie Davis, 28, may have been prioritised for the jabs ahead of her peers because she is asthmatic. Severe asthmatics were considered 'extremely clinically vulnerable' and included in the top four priority groups when the vaccines were first rolled out. People with more mild forms started to be offered the jab from April. But Stephanie is believed to have serious food allergies and a history of anaphylaxis which will have complicated the rollout. In the Government's Covid vaccine guidance it says that the jabs: Should not be given to those who have had a previous systemic allergic reaction (including immediate-onset anaphylaxis) to:  a previous dose of the same Covid-19 vaccine  any component (excipient) of the Covid-19 vaccine e.g. polyethylene glycol (PEG) The three vaccines being used in the UK currently are made by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. The two mRNA vaccines use completely different ingredients to the British-made AstraZeneca jab. People who are allergic to the substances in one jab will normally be offered an alternative. But the AZ vaccine is being restricted in under-40s because in very rare cases it can cause deadly blood clots. Advertisement

'Oh my god, it's horrible. And it just, it happened so quick. I basically woke up and couldn't move,' revealed the soap star.

'I've never had sore skin before, so I thought: 'Well, this isn't like a chest infection'. Normally, I suffer with my chest. I feel rotten,' added the mother-of-one, who has asthma.

After having her breathing device removed, Stephanie returned and told fans: 'I'm going back to sleep now. Trying to get an hours' sleep.

'I feel like I've been ran over. My skin, I can't touch my skin.

Following a little rest, Stephanie explained to her followers: 'They've started me on some more fluids and some painkillers and intravenous for the pain... Honestly, my god. I feel like I've been ran over.

'Did anyone else [with Covid-19] have sore skin? I feel like I can't touch my skin, and my back. My chest feels a bit better after having some nebulisers, but my god!'

MailOnline has contacted Stephanie Davis' representatives for comment.

Stephanie is believed to suffer from serious food allergies and have a history of anaphylaxis which complicates whether she can receive the vaccine.

The Government's Covid advice says jabs should not be given to those who 'had a previous systemic allergic reaction (including immediate-onset anaphylaxis)' to either a previous dose of the Covid jab, or any component of the jab.

Britain's medical regulator has recommended under-40s should receive the Pfizer vaccine.

The jab contains polyethylene glycol  a substance that can trigger allergic reactions in very rare cases.

When this happens the body's immune system makes antibodies against the substance, which can then trigger a reaction when it is attacked.

Just two days earlier, Stephanie looked happy and healthy as she attended a friend's wedding with her bike shop worker beau Oliver Tasker.

The Liverpudlian star oozed glamour in a chic black pencil dress, and gushed about having had a: 'a wonderful night' at the celebratory event.

She confirmed her relationship with Oliver, in loved-up post shared to Instagram at the beginning of June.

Her social media upload included a trio of snaps showing them cosied up together in various locations.

Agony: 'The worst part is my skin. I can't touch my skin, it's killing me. I'm just in so much pain. Oh my god, it's horrible' admitted the actress as she lay in her hospital bed

Fast deterioration: 'And it just, it happened so quick. I basically woke up and couldn't move,' revealed the soap star

When was the vaccine offered to people with asthma? People with asthma were in the sixth priority group for getting a vaccine in the UK, behind the over 65s. But people with the condition who did not get a shielding letter and have not been admitted to hospital because of their asthma, or prescribed three courses of oral steroids over a three-month period, were not prioritised in the vaccine rollout. Instead, everybody else with asthma was invited to get the jabs when the vaccine opened to their age group. However, people who have had a severe allergic reaction to any of the vaccine ingredients, or experience anaphylaxis after the first dose, are advised not to get the vaccine. Charity Asthma UK said that people with the condition have not been found to be at a higher risk of dying from Covid than the rest of the population, but that evidence shows people with asthma are at a greater risk of hospitalisation and long Covid. Advertisement

The Hollyoaks actress - who is mum to son Caben-Albi, four - told excited friends of her bearded ginger beau: 'He's the male version of me!'

Alongside the photographs of Oliver - who works as a buyer for Formby Cycles in Liverpool - Stephanie simply wrote 'You,' followed by a single red love heart emoji.

Her Hollyoaks pal Ross Evans demanded: 'I want to know EVERYTHING,' to which she responded: 'hahahaha your going to love him. [sic] He's the male version of me haha.'

Stephanie previously split from Owen Warner, who plays Romeo Quinn in Hollyoaks, in September 2019, after nine months together, amid rumours the hunk felt that the relationship was 'moving too quickly'.

The pair met on the set of the soap and moved in together just a month into their relationship.

A source told the Sun at the time: 'Stephanie and Owen have decided to split after weeks of trying to work through their differences.

'They decided to end it today and Steph is insisting there's no going back.

'She couldn't be more devastated as she saw a real future with Owen, particularly as he's been a father figure to Caben.

'Steph is absolutely heartbroken and devastated it's over - she wanted to be with Owen forever and now all of a sudden she's mourning the loss of him in her and Caben's lives.'

Prior to dating Owen, the actress had a short-lived romance with long-haired hunk, Jacob Gill.

Stephanie famously embarked on a turbulent relationship with Beauty School Cop Outs star Jeremy McConnell, 31, during their time on Celebrity Big Brother in January 2016.

The ex: Stephanie split from Owen Warner, who plays Romeo Quinn in Hollyoaks, in September 2019, after nine months together

Prior to dating Owen, the actress had a short-lived romance with long-haired hunk, Jacob Gill

Their on/off relationship resulted in public spats, domestic violence and a consequential three-year restraining order.

Jeremy was charged for domestic violence in August 2017 after being accused of assaulting Stephanie in a drug-fuelled row, and was sentenced to 20 weeks in prison, suspended for 12 months and 200 hours community service.

The estranged couple are parents to Caben-Albi, while Jeremy also has a 19-months-old daughter named Storm with his current partner Katie McCreath.
She is expecting her sixth child with her boxer husband.

And Paris Fury hinted that she's set to welcome her unborn baby any day now, as she teased she is 'ready to pop' to fans on Instagram.

The pregnant star, 31, was seen showcasing her growing baby bump in a pink shirt on Thursday for the Menagerie Rose launch night in Manchester, while her partner and boxing champ Tyson completes his training camp in Las Vegas.

Any day now: Paris Fury is expecting her sixth child and revealed she is 'ready to pop' as she teased fans with a baby bump snap on Instagram on Thursday

Posting to Instagram, Paris shared a photo of her cradling her bump at the fancy launch and revealed: 'Ready to pop.'

She joked: 'Not sure whats bigger that giant balloon on the right or my belly.'

The pregnant star, 31, stood out from the crowd in her neon shirt with a Moschino belt placed above her blossoming tummy as she was seen exiting Menagerie restaurant.

She sported leather-look leggings and boosted her height with strappy heels which complemented her small clutch bag.

Pregnancy glow: The pregnant star showcased her growing baby bump in a pink shirt for the Menagerie Rose launch night in Manchester, while Tyson trains in Las Vegas

Pretty in pink: Paris, 31, stood out from the crowd in her neon shirt with a Moschino belt placed above her blossoming tummy as she was seen exiting Menagerie restaurant

Paris styled her blonde locks in glamorous loose curls and rocked full coverage make-up as she was joined by friends for the outing.

She and her children recently returned from America to visit Tyson, 32, who has been training for his upcoming fight against Deontay Wilder.

The couple share sons Prince John James, eight, Prince Tyson II, four, and Prince Adonis Amaziah, two, and daughters Venezuela, 11, and Valencia, three.

Paris revealed she is expecting a baby girl with husband Tyson, after having a gender reveal celebration with her family in March.

Across the pond: Tyson seen in America on Thursday as he throws himself into his training

The mother-of-five took to Instagram to reveal the news as she shared an image of Tyson and their children covered in pink confetti.

Captioning the heartwarming image, Paris wrote: 'Its a girl... We are due another little princess, god willing come summer we will have 3 girls and 3 boys. So blessed.'

As the expectant mother shared snaps of the gifts she has received, she also posted a video from an interview with her husband in which he confirmed the baby's gender.

Speaking with Behind The Gloves News, the athlete said that he'd probably have 'another 20 kids' with his wife as he praised her 'good child-bearing hips'

Style: She sported leather-look leggings and boosted her height with strappy heels which complemented her small clutch bag

Girly meetup: Paris styled her blonde locks in glamorous loose curls and rocked full coverage make-up as she was joined by friends for the outing

Couple: The pregnant star and her children recently returned from America to visit Tyson who has been training for his upcoming fight against Deontay Wilder

As he was congratulated on the approaching arrival of his baby, he said: 'Number six coming up, another little girl, so happy days.'

And when asked how many more he plans to have, he responded: 'Just gonna keep popping 'em out, yeah. For the next 20 years, probably have another 25 kids... Probably another 20 kids. I've got a good wife, who's got good child-bearing hips.'

A month earlier during an appearance on ITV's Loose Women, Paris swore live on air as she discussed the excitement of welcoming another child.

Appearing as a guest panellist, Paris was asked how she has been feeling during the pregnancy.

She said: 'I'm feeling good now, I felt bad the first few weeks but yeah, it was great news. We were planning this one.

Back together again: The couple share sons Prince John James, eight, Prince Tyson II, four, and Prince Adonis Amaziah, two, and daughters Venezuela, 11, and Valencia, three

It's a girl! Paris revealed she is expecting a baby girl with her husband Tyson, after having a gender reveal celebration with her family in March

'It was all great news until we came home and everything was in lockdown and everything is back up in the air. So yeah, it was a great idea and then s**t hit the fan and it's not going too well.'

Jane Moore quickly apologised to viewers for the 'little bit of language' while Paris added: 'Sorry about that, sorry!'

Quickly moving on with the chat, Paris was asked how her other children reacted to the news.

Paris said: 'The little ones don't really understand, they were a bit excited. I have an 11-year-old daughter, she's a bit older and I don't think she took it very well.

'The first day she wasn't that impressed but she's come round now, she hopes she gets a sister.'

'OMG CRINGE': As the expectant mother shared snaps of the gifts she has received, she also posted a video from an interview with her husband in which he confirmed the baby's gender
Musical icons Sir Elton John, Ed Sheeran and Stevie Wonder are being lined up for a star-studded concert in honour of Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee in 2022.

The BBC are 'going all out' to bring in entertainers from all over to celebrate the Queen's 70 years on the throne next summer.

The spectacular is set to be 'the biggest celebration' of the year in the UK.

Iconic: Musical icons Sir Elton John, (pictured in April), Ed Sheeran and Stevie Wonder are being lined up for a star-studded concert in honour of Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee in 2022

A source told The Sun newspaper: 'The BBC is going all out for their Party at the Palace to mark the Queens Platinum Jubilee.'

'The concert will see a range of the worlds best musicians and entertainers put on a two-and-a-half-hour show, which will be broadcast live on BBC One,' the source said.

'Given the events of the past year and everything that has happened in the pandemic, the organisers want the Party at the Palace to be the biggest celebration of not only Her Majesty but of everything that is great about the UK.'

'Going all out': The BBC are bringing in entertainers from all over to celebrate the Queen's 70 years on the throne next summer, including Sheeran (pictured)

Milestone show: The BBC have reportedly started to contact big name artists like Sir Elton John, Ed Sheeran and Stevie Wonder to discuss their availability for the show

They have reportedly started to contact big name artists like Sir Elton John, Ed Sheeran and Stevie Wonder to discuss their availability for the 95-year-old monarch's milestone show.

Elton may not be able to perform in person, due to a scheduling clash with his world tour 'Farewell Yellow Brick Road', but organisers hope he can still be involved in some capacity.

The insider added: 'Whether it is something pre-recorded like he did for Party at the Palace in 2002 for the Queens Golden Jubilee, or if hell be able to appear via a live stream, they want him on board.'

In 2012, the Queen celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, which had a similar concert organised by Gary Barlow.

The three-hour event saw over 16 million viewers.

Performers included Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Tom Jones, Gary's Take That bandmate Robbie Williams, as well as Kylie Minogue, Madness, and Annie Lennox.

Monarch: In 2012, the Queen celebrated her Diamond Jubilee (pictured on Thursday)

Celebration: Gary Barlow organised the three-hour event, which had a star-studded concert

Hosts of the event included comics Sir Lenny Henry, Rob Brydon and Jimmy Carr.

The insider confirmed that The BBC are making sure...people can expect the best of the best when it comes to the line-up this year.
With two weeks of time to kill, Married at First Sight's Jessika Power gave her followers a sneak peek of what hotel quarantine is really like.

The 28-year-old shared a series of videos to her Instagram on Friday as she arrived in her home state of Perth after a flight from Queensland's Gold Coast, and was whisked off into hotel quarantine.

Jessika began asking her fans for ideas on what to do to keep busy, then gave an update on her quarantine situation and a tour of her hotel room.

New home: MAFS star Jessika Power, 28, (pictured) showed her followers what hotel quarantine is like and gave a tour of her hotel room as she returns to her home state of Perth

'I just got here, it's really not that crash hot,' she says to the camera, unimpressed with her new living arrangements for the next two weeks.

In the clips, Jessika is wearing an olive crop top jumper, matching pants and a gold necklace.

Power then begins to rotate her camera to give the short tour around the modest room, before stating, 'That's it!'

'That's it!': An unimpressed Jessika rotated the camera to show her living arrangements for the next two weeks

Killing time: Power began initially asking her fans for ideas on what to do to keep busy, then gave an update on her quarantine situation after the tour

'I get really claustrophobic in small rooms,' she continued. 'And this room is f**king small. So that's fun.'

'Just trying to not let my anxiety eat me alive,' Jessica says as she informs her followers that she's ordering food because the hotel hasn't provided any.

'I'm going to go insane in here,' the MAFS alumni added.

'I'm going to go insane in here': The MAFS star tells her followers that her room is small and she's 'really claustrophobic' of 'small rooms'

Border restrictions are currently tough - exempt travellers arriving to Western Australia after 3pm Tuesday, 29 June 2021 must: self-quarantine in a suitable premise for 14 days.

They must also present for an initial COVID-19 test within 48 hours, as well as present for a COVID-19 test if any symptoms develop during quarantine.

They must present for a COVID-19 test on day 11 after arrival in Western Australia.
Karl Stefanovic fired up the BBQ before lockdown as he enjoyed a lovely family lunch with wife Jasmine and daughter Harper.

In a photo shared to Instagram on Friday, the family were joined by a friend as they tucked into vegan sausages and burgers.

Jasmine explained in the caption: 'Pre-lockdown lunch with the grill-master @karlstefanovic_ serving up something different this time.

Family time: Karl Stefanovic fired up the BBQ before lockdown as he enjoyed a lovely family lunch with wife Jasmine and daughter Harper. Karl and Harper pictured with a pal

'We thought we'd try swapping out our usual BBQ classics for the delicious, v2 plant-based snags. They taste just as good, even the grill-master was impressed'.

Karl and Jasmine finally moved into their new home in Castlecrag, on Sydney's Lower North Shore, earlier this week.

The couple took ownership of the property just two days before Sydney was forced into lockdown on Saturday, reports Realestate.com.au.

Tasty: In photos shared to Instagram on Friday, the family were joined by a friend as they tucked into vegan sausages and burgers

Tasty: Jasmine explained in the caption: 'Pre-lockdown lunch with the grill-master @karlstefanovic_ serving up something different this time'

The Today host, 46, and his shoe designer wife, 37, purchased the home in March for $3.2million after the house they'd been renting nearby was sold for more than $8million.

The new property, which the Stefanovics are expected to renovate, boasts views over Castlecrag's north escarpment and is close to the village's cafes and shops.

It includes a self-contained unit with a separate entry and its own bathroom.

Welcome home! Karl and Jasmine (left) finally moved into their new home in Castlecrag, on Sydney's Lower North Shore, earlier this week

They also own a holiday home on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, which they bought for $3.6million in January last year and travel to frequently.

Karl and Jasmine - along with their one-year-old daughter, Harper - divide their time between Sydney and Queensland.

The Yarborough family is based in the Sunshine State, while Karl also began his journalism career there.

The couple married in December 2018 in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico.
Christopher Eccleston displayed his muscular biceps in a black vest as he left the set of the BBC's new Oliver Twist adaptation Dodger on Thursday.

The Doctor Who alum, 57, revealed his defined guns as he loaded his bag in his Range Rover after a long day on set at the National Waterways Museum in Cheshire .

He sported a short haircut and goatee as he ditched his Victorian-era costume after playing criminal organiser Fagin in the 10-part family drama.

(Doctor) Who knew? Christopher Eccleston, 57, displayed his muscular biceps in a black vest on Thursday after filming BBC's new Oliver Twist adaptation at the National Waterways Museum in Cheshire

Fagin - one of the main characters in the original 1838 Oliver Twist novel - is the leader of a group of children who he teaches to pickpocket in exchange for shelter.

Saira Choudhry, 31, who is best known for playing Anita Roy in Hollyoaks and Tegan in Paul Abbott's No Offence, takes on the role of Nancy who is a member of Fagin's gang and Bill Sikes' lover.

Shameless star David Threlfall, 67, will play chief of police Sir Charles Rowan in the series, while child actor Billy Jenkins, 14, - who was in The Crown - will also feature in the new drama.

The series, which will appear on CBBC and BBC iPlayer, has been written by Rhys Thomas and Lucy Montgomery, while Charlie Higson has also guest-written an episode.

Heading home: The Doctor Who star revealed his defined biceps in a sleeveless top which he paired with cargo shorts as he loaded his bag in his Range Rover after a long day on set

Oliver Twist is Charles Dickens' second novel, and was published as a serial from 1837 to 1839. It was released as a three-volume book in 1838, before the serialisation ended.

The story centres around orphan Oliver who was born in a workhouse and sold into an apprenticeship with an undertaker.

After escaping, Oliver travels to London, where he meets the 'Artful Dodger' Jack Dawkins, a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by Fagin.

Christopher said of the upcoming series: 'Fagin is an iconic role, I'm a very fortunate actor.

'Rhys Thomas and Lucy Montgomery have taken Charles Dickens' extraordinary characters and imagined a whole new world and lives for them. I'm very, very excited.'

New project! Christopher seen in his Victorian-era costume earlier on Thursday as he plays criminal organiser Fagin in the 10-part family drama, Dodger

Thomas, who is also co-directing the series, said: 'I have always loved Oliver Twist but wasn't so keen on Oliver himself. I preferred the company of Dodger, Fagin and the gang.

'I thought it would be fun to create a family show with Dodger at its heart and see how he came to be a master criminal in Victorian London.

'Working with the very best material as a springboard, it's a total delight to expand Dickens' rich world of characters and create a few of my own.

'To top it all, we have an incredible cast who are starring in the show. I can't wait for families all over the world to see it!'

Christopher left the role of Doctor Who after appearing for just one series in 2005, despite being praised by fans for her performance as the Time Lord.

The series gripped viewers with the return of the infamous Daleks, the debut of Captain Jack (played by John Barrowman) and the Doctor's blossoming romance with Rose Tyler.

But the end of series one saw Christopher's Doctor regenerate, with David Tennant taking over the role for the second series in 2006.

Since his departure, the actor has candidly revealed that he battled anorexia during filming for the sci-fi drama, and was praised by fans for bravely revealing his mental health struggles.

Writing in his book I Love The Bones Of You, he said: 'The illness is still there raging within me as the Doctor.

'People love the way I look in that series, but I was very ill. The reward for that illness was the part. And therein lies the perpetuation of the whole sorry situation.'

For help and support with eating disorders contact SEED on (01482) 718130 or visit www.seedeatingdisorders.org.uk
Dacre Montgomery has shared a scathing video addressing the Australian government's bungled vaccine rollout scheme.

The Stranger Things actor, 26, who lives in Sydney with his girlfriend Liv Pollock, uploaded the clip to his Instagram on Friday, in which he slammed lack of access of a Covid-19 jab of his choice as a young person under the age of 30.

He said at length: 'This message is for our under 30s and all the decision makers in governments across our great country.

Anger: Dacre Montgomery (pictured) has shared a scathing video addressing the Australian government's bungled vaccine rollout scheme

'I want to talk to you about my future Australia. A future Australia where my generation and those yet to come feel protected by governments who listen and act.

'Every day when I put on my mask and go out to get food or to exercise I ask myself a simple question.

'Why can't I get a vaccine of my choice in a nation that until the roll-out had done so well at keeping Australians safe?'

Comments: The Stranger Things actor, 26, who lives in Sydney with his girlfriend Liv Pollock, uploaded the clip to his Instagram on Friday, in which he slammed lack of access of a Covid-19 jab of his choice as a young person under the age of 30

Anger: 'Every day when I put on my mask and go out to get food or to exercise I ask myself a simple question. Why can't I get a vaccine of my choice in a nation that until the roll-out had done so well at keeping Australians safe?' he asked in the clip

Safe: 'We are all waiting to feel safe again. Decisions about our future Australia need to be made now. Please give us options. Our future Australia is in your hands,' he added

'We are all waiting to feel safe again. Decisions about our future Australia need to be made now. Please give us options. Our future Australia is in your hands,' he concluded.

Dacre is one of many young Australians frustrated by a lack of access to Covid-19 vaccinations.

The government has recommended that people under 50 take the Pfizer rather than AstraZeneca shot, due to a blood clot risk.

However, Australia has a limited supply of Pfizer, meaning that many young people are left waiting without access to the jab of their choice.

Locals: The Stranger Things actor lives in Sydney with his girlfriend Liv Pollock (left)

Delays: The government has recommended that people under 50 take the Pfizer rather than AstraZeneca shot, due to a blood clot risk. However, Australia has a limited supply of Pfizer, meaning that many young people are left waiting without access to the jab of their choice

Prime Minister Scott Morrison gave the nod for under 40s to get the AstraZeneca jab on Monday, however, many have opted not to dice with an 0.004% chance of a deadly blood clot.

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.

Around 18 million Australians, 70 per cent of the population, are now under some form of lockdown restrictions after cases of the Indian variant exploded out of quarantine hotels in Brisbane, Darwin, Perth and Sydney.
Jennifer Hawkins announced that she expecting her second child with her husband Jake Hall, a baby boy, on Friday.

And the 37-year-old was inundated with well wishes from her wide range of celebrity pals.

Under photos shared to Instagram, picturing Jen showing off her bump, Big Borther host Sonia Kruger wrote: 'Congrats sweetheart. Thats such lovely news'.

Friends: Jennifer Hawkins (pictured) announced that she expecting her second child with her husband Jake Hall, a baby boy, on Friday. And the 37-year-old was inundated with well wishes from her wide range of celebrity pals

Rachael Finch chimed in: 'Omg!!! So so excited for you all!!!!!' while designer Alex Perry added a series of heart emojis.

Sally Obermeder commented: 'Congratulations darling - what beautiful news' while Ricki Lee wrote: 'Congratulations!'

Designer Lana Wilkinson said: 'Congratulations beautiful! So thrilled for you both'.

Sally Obermeder commented: 'Congratulations darling - what beautiful news' while Ricki Lee wrote: 'Congratulations!'

Nikki Phillips wrote: 'YES! Congratulations beautiful Mumma. So excited for you guys'.

The Project's Lisa Wilkinson added: 'Beautiful news Jen. Congrats to all three of you.'

Jodi Gordon chimed in: 'Ohhhh so beautiful!! Congratulations' while Jules Sebastian added: 'Congrats you guys! What a blessing'.

Laura Csortan commented: 'Oh AMAZING! Congratulations to you all' while Guy Sebastian said, 'Congrats guys!'

'Beautiful news! Congratulations to you all. Enjoy Round two and everything it holds for you,' Megan Gale said, while Zoe Foster Blake added, 'Congratulations!'

Laura Csortan commented: 'Oh AMAZING! Congratulations to you all' while Guy Sebastian said, 'Congrats guys!'

Ksenija Lukich said: 'Congrats beautiful! Such a special time' while Tash Oakley wrote, 'Congratulations'.

The Miss Universe Australia winner announced the news on her Instagram page on Friday, and showed off her baby bump in a series of stunning pictures.

'Round two!! Jake and I are so happy to share that we are expecting a baby BOY!!! We both feel really blessed and couldn't be happier to grow our little family!' she wrote in the caption.

Motherhood: The Miss Universe Australia winner announced the news on her Instagram page on Friday, and showed off her baby bump in a series of stunning pictures

She added: 'Can't wait to see our Frankie girl as a big sis!!'

A number of high profile celebrities flocked to the post to congratulate the supermodel on the exciting news.

Jennifer and husband Jake are already parents to a young daughter, Frankie, who they welcomed in October, 2019.

The model announced Frankie's birth in an Instagram post on October 22.

Family: Jennifer and husband Jake (left) are already parents to a young daughter, Frankie, who they welcomed in October, 2019. All pictured

Welcome: The model announced Frankie's birth in an Instagram post on October 22

Captioning her Instagram post, Jennifer wrote: 'Frankie Violet Hawkins Wall. Dream come true! So thankful to be holding our beautiful, healthy baby girl!

'We couldn't be more in love,' she added, tagging Jake's Instagram account.

The accompanying photos show the newborn wearing a white onesie and swaddled in a pink sheet as Jennifer holds her close.

Captioning her Instagram post, Jennifer wrote: 'Frankie Violet Hawkins Wall. Dream come true! So thankful to be holding our beautiful, healthy baby girl!'

Famous baby The model often shares photos of her little one as she grows

'I'm so happy to share with you some exciting news! Jake and I are expecting a baby girl! We can't wait to meet her!' Jennifer wrote.

'Thank you to our beautiful family and friends for their love and support and, most importantly, to my hubby Jake  I can't wait to see you as a daddy!'

The former Miss Universe Australia first revealed she and husband Jake, 37, were expecting a child together in May last year.

Happy family! The former Miss Universe Australia first revealed she and husband Jake, 37, were expecting a child together in May last year

The blonde beauty accompanied her exciting announcement with a gorgeous photo of herself cradling her baby bump alongside Jake.

The beauty went to document her pregnancy on social media, albeit sparingly. She frequently shares photos of little Frankie as she grows.

Jennifer expressed her desire to start a family in September 2018, following her departure from Myer after 12 years as the department store's ambassador.

Baby love: The beauty went to document her pregnancy on social media, albeit sparingly

Priorities: Jennifer expressed her desire to start a family in September 2018, following her departure from Myer after 12 years as the department store's ambassador

Speaking at her final runway show for the retailer, she told the Herald Sun: 'I'd love to have a family, it's taking the time to look ahead.

'I want to have the time to be able to do that,' she added.

Jennifer married property developer Jake in Bali, Indonesia in 2013, after eight years of dating.
She shot to fame last spring when Normal People debuted on BBC.

And, Daisy Edgar-Jones, 23, went make-up free while wearing dungarees and grubby pumps as she filmed for Where The Crawdads Sing, in Louisiana on Tuesday.

The British actress plays Kya, a loner known as Marsh Girl, in the upcoming flick set in 1969, and was seen in full costume while shooting scenes.

FIRST LOOK: Daisy Edgar-Jones, 23, went make-up free while wearing dungarees and grubby pumps as she filmed for Where The Crawdads Sing, in Louisiana on Tuesday

While the fresh-faced star allowed her natural beauty to shine, her brunette tresses were parted in the middle and looked decidedly unkempt.

Daisy changed outfits in-between scenes, slipping into a different pair of dungarees and a shirt.

Her character appeared to be in trouble with the police as she was seen getting into a vintage looking marked patrol car, while cameras rolled.

She was also spotted sitting in the back seat with her hands over her face as she shot scenes in a village outside New Orleans.

In character: While the fresh-faced star allowed her natural beauty to shine, her brunette tresses were parted in the middle and looked decidedly unkempt

Where the Crawdads Sing is an upcoming American drama film based on the best-selling 2018 novel of the same name by Delia Owens.

In the movie, Daisy's oddball character comes under suspicion of a shocking murder in a quiet North Carolina town in 1969.

The Normal People star is appearing alongside British actor Harris Dickinson and American actor Taylor John Smith.

The film is slated for release on June 24, 2022.

Daisy - who plays Kya, a loner known as Marsh Girl, in the upcoming flick - changed outfits in-between scenes, slipping into a different pair of dungarees and a shirt

And Daisy is working hard, after being thrust into the limelight following the success of Normal People.

The actress is also signed up to play a Mormon woman in Hulu limited series, Under The Banner Of Heaven.

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.

The series set among the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints in Utah follows a devout detective (played by Andrew Garfield) as he investigates the brutal murder of a young Mormon woman (played by Daisy).
Fans are eagerly awaiting for Knives Out 2 to finally be release, with filming for the sequel firmly underway in Greece.

On Friday, production continued as actress Madelyn Cline, 23, was seen back on set and hitching a ride on the back of her co-star Dave Bautista's motorbike as they filmed action-packed scenes in the sun.

As the cameras started rolling, Madelyn stepped out sporting a tiny pair of denim white hot pants and tasselled leather boots - before it was James Bond star Daniel Craig's turn to shoot.

Fast ride: Madelyn Cline, 23, was seen back on set and hitching a ride on the back of her co-star Dave Bautista's motorbike as they continued to film for Knives Out 2 in Greece

Hot to trot: Stranger Things star Madelyn stunned on set in a tiny pair of denim shorts and leather tasselled boots

The actress stunned in her skimpy getup that paired her ripped denim hot pants with a crochet tie-up blouse that was cropped at the waist and flashed a look at Madelyn's taut stomach.

She arrived to set sporting a black face mask to adhere to coronavirus protocols and clutched onto a bottle of water in one hand to keep herself hydrated in the heat.

Madelyn wore her hair down and accessorised her filming look with huge gold hoop earrings and a tasselled shoulder bag to match her cowboy-inspired boots.

She was joined by former wrestler turned actor Bautista who was sporting a feathered white fedora hat, a funky shirt and pink trousers.

Back to it: Daniel Craig was also spotted filming on set later in the evening, with the actor being serenaded by waiters dressed in white and wearing protective visors and masks

He was seen driving the pair along a promenade on a flash motorbike, with Madelyn sitting behind him sporting a huge backpack.

They were later joined by Craig who was see filming scenes for the Netflix film later in the evening at The Poseidonion Hotel on the island of Spetses.

A dapper looking Craig was spotted wearing a white shirt while sat at a table, as he was serenaded by waiters sporting masks and protective plastic visors.

The actor is reprising his role as Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out sequel, which also stars Hollywood actress Kate Hudson.

Returning star: Craig is reprising his role as detective Benoit Blanc for the Netflix sequel

Other stars pictured on set - and still yet to be announced as part of the cast - included WandaVision actress Kathryn Hahn, Ethan Hawke - who was seen chatting with Leslie Odom Jr - and Jada Pinkett Smith.

So far, plot details for Knives Out 2 are being kept firmly under wraps and is expected to be released in 2022.

The sequel's director Rian Johnson confirmed that the second movie was underway via Twitter, as he posted when filming began last month: ' Aaaaaaaand WERE OFF! Day one of filming on the next Benoit Blanc mystery.

'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, followed Craig's character, detective Blanc, investigating the murder of iconic crime writer, Harlan Thrombey.

Thrombey's death first appears to be a suicide, but Blanc goes on to uncover secrets, along with the help of nurse Marta Cabrera played by Ana de Armas, that suggest otherwise.

In March, it was revealed that Netflix has paid out $450million (327.5m) for the rights to make two sequels to the original movie that will be directed by Johnson and see the return of leading man Craig.
Rebel Wilson has been busy in recent weeks shooting her upcoming film, Senior Year, in Atlanta in the US.

And on Friday, the 41-year-old actress thrilled fans as she posted a lighthearted compilation of photos and videos in which she and her Aussie co-star Angourie Rice, 20, hammed it up on set.

The pair were both dressed up in a retro early-2000s style with pink crop tops, love heart chain belts, rainbow beaded necklaces, bootcut jeans and butterfly clips in the behind the scenes footage.

It's set to be a hit! On Friday, Rebel Wilson showed off her slim physique in a tight pink top and flared jeans as she gave fans a behind the scenes look at her new film Senior Year with Aussie actress Angourie Rice

They were also sporting matching haircuts and dancing by an old red sedan as 'Candy' by Mandy Moore played in the background.

In the post, Rebel said that Angourie has just wrapped filming her part in the flick.

Rebel wrote, 'Happy wrap @angourierice I love being your ''senior''. Ps if you haven't seen Angourie in Mare of Easttown check her out on HBO #senioryear.'

'Are you stealing my twin gig?!' asked Property Brothers star, Drew Scott.

Twinning it: The pair were both dressed up as identical twins rocking an retro early-2000s style with pink crop tops, love heart chain belts, rainbow beaded necklaces, bootcut jeans and butterfly clips

Backstory: Senior Year stars Wilson as a cheerleader who wakes up from a 20-year coma, and returns to high school in the hopes of regaining her popular status and the prom queen title

Senior Year stars Wilson as a cheerleader who wakes up from a 20-year coma, and returns to high school in the hopes of regaining her popular status and the prom queen title.

The movie will also star Clueless actress Alicia Silverstone and is expected to land on Netflix in March 2022.

It comes after Rebel debuted a sneak peek of another Netflix project that's set to be released around the same time.

All star cast: Senior Year will also star Clueless actress Alicia Silverstone (pictured right with Rebel) and is set to land on Netflix in March 2022

The project will be a new series based around animals that will have Rebel narrating.

The actress posted two screenshots of herself inside a studio on Tuesday with a large microphone, headset and a picture of an animal displayed on a monitor.

'Narrating a new animal series coming to Netflix early 2022,' the actress wrote.

Accompanying the caption was a shush face emoji, along with a koala and kangaroo image - possibly hinting that the project may focus on Australian wildlife.
Maura Higgins supported boyfriend Giovanni Pernice in Blackpool at the opening night of his new show  before staying with the Strictly hunk at a hotel.

The Love Island star, 30, was spotted at Blackpool's Opera House where Giovanni, 30, and his Strictly co-star Anton Du Beke, 54, performed the first night of their dance show, Him & Me.

It comes after MailOnline revealed that Maura and Giovanni have been dating in secret following the Irish presenter's split from fellow Love Island contestant Chris Taylor, 30.

'She loved seeing him in action': Maura Higgins supported boyfriend Giovanni Pernice in Blackpool at the opening night of his new show before staying with the Strictly hunk at a hotel

A source said: 'Giovanni was so thrilled that Maura was in the audience for his opening night  and she loved seeing him in action.

'Although Giovanni is working it's been like a mini break for them, they're staying at Blackpool's The Big Blue Hotel, which has been a fun experience.'

MailOnline revealed Maura and the Strictly dancer are in the 'early stages of a relationship' this week after the couple were spotted sitting alongside each other during Italy's Euro 2020 win over Austria at Wembley on Saturday.

They were also seen enjoying a staycation together in Cornwall last month, though they have attempted to keep their blossoming romance under wraps for as long as possible.

MailOnline contacted Maura and Giovanni's representatives for comment.

New romance: The Love Island star was spotted at Blackpool's Opera House where Giovanni and his Strictly co-star Anton Du Beke performed the first night of their dance show, Him & Me

'It's a mood': Model Laura Stanford shared a picture on Instagram of Maura in Blackpool on Friday, as the two enjoyed the food and attractions that the Pleasure Beach has to offer

Following Thursday night's show, Giovanni said on Instagram: 'Opening night and I couldn't be more proud of this production. Anton Du Beke and I are super ready for you UK.'

One shocked fan of Maura's tweeted about meeting the star in Blackpool on Friday, writing online: 'Why the duck have I met Maura Higgins in BLACKPOOL.'

While the pair is yet to publicly acknowledge their romance, Maura and Giovanni do follow each other on Instagram and the dancer has been showing his affection for the ex-Islander by liking her pictures.

Maura's ex-boyfriend Chris, who she split from in May, hasn't posted on social media since the news broke of her new relationship with Giovanni.

Back on stage: Following Thursday's show, Giovanni said on Instagram: 'Opening night and I couldn't be more proud of this production. Anton Du Beke and I are super ready for you UK'

Giovanni's ex-girlfriends include Pussycat Doll Ashley Roberts, TOWIE's Jess Wright and soap actress Georgia May Foote, while Maura fell for ballroom dancer Curtis Pritchard on Love Island in 2019.

Curtis' brother AJ will know Giovanni well after starring with him on Strictly for years, before he left the BBC series in 2020.

Last year, while performing with his celeb partner Ranvir Singh, the pair were rumoured to have grown close due to their chemistry, which was noted by the Strictly judges.

Giovanni started dating Georgia after they were paired together on Strictly, while his ex-Ashley also competed on the series prior them becoming a couple.
She has been busy modelling for the new Dolce & Gabbana advert.

And Monica Bellucci's daughter, Deva Cassel, 16, was pictured wearing a crop top and khaki joggers when she headed back to work on the second day of her shoot.

Meanwhile, Monica, 56, took some time to enjoy lunch with her youngest daughter Leonie, 11, while Deva was hard at work.

Beautiful: Monica Bellucci's model daughter Deva, 16, headed to a Dolce and Gabbana shoot wearing a crop top and khaki joggers in Portofino on Friday

Quality time: Meanwhile Monica, 52, enjoyed lunch with her youngest daughter Leoni, 11, while Deva was hard at work

Deva opted for comfort with a pair of white D&G buckled sandals and kept her brunette hair - infamously similar to her mother's, curled.

The young model carried a black item of clothing and kept safety first with a black facemask.

Later that day, Deva, whose father is Vincent Cassel, 54, continued to prove that she was a dead ringer for her mother as she got to work in showing off her modelling skills.

Mini me: The teen, whose father is Vincent Cassel, was a dead ringer for her legendary mother as she got to work in showing off her modelling skills on the shoot

The Dolce & Gabbana ambassador, who is the face of the luxury Italian brand's newest fragrance, Dolce Rose, looked a vision as she rocked a dreamy ruffled lilac floral dress in the picturesque Italian town.

Deva's colouring in the pretty look was extremely similar to when her mother modelled a similar coloured gown at the Women's World Awards ceremony in 2009.

She tried her best to keep the dress in place as the wind kept rearranging it.

Lookalike: The young model's mother wore a similar coloured dress at the Women's World Awards ceremony in 2009 (pictured above)

Parents: Deva is the daughter of Monica Belluci and Vincent Cassel (pictured in 2002) - they divorced in 2013 after 14 years of marriage

The raven-haired stunner styled her locks into waves that fell over her shoulders and managed to keep them in place in the windy weather.

Deva shared the initial perfume campaign video for Dolce Rose to her Instagram, which has 189K followers, three weeks ago.

The advert sees her twirling through fields of flowers, picking roses and sifting through scenic postcards before diving off a boat into the Ligurian sea.

The budding model posted the video alongside a series of professional images from the campaign which were also shared to the site.
Carpice Bourret is setting her sights on Hollywood as she aims for her big break since her turn on screens back in the 90s.

On Friday, the stunner was seen setting pulses racing in a sheer dress as she left Laylow restaurant after a meeting with a film producer where she is in talks to take the lead in a new movie, following her stint on Baywatch in the 90s.

Insiders told MailOnline: ''Caprice is in talks with a big film producer to star as the lead in his new movie. She is really excited as this is her break after she turned down the lead in Baywatch to follow in Pamela Anderson's footsteps in the late 90s.'

Wow: Carpice Bourret is setting her sights on Hollywood as she aims for her big break since her turn on screens back in the 90s

Caprice was just 29 when she took on the role for a brief stint and later stated that she had turned down the role of lead made famous by Pamela.

Now ready to reestablish herself in the acting world, she was seen leaving the meeting while sporting her bold and bright ensemble.

Caprice looked beach ready as she walked through the streets of London in her see-through maxi dress and stylish pink and navy bikini.

The former Dancing On Ice star completed the eye-catching look with a pair of gold stilettos that featured a flower detail at the front.

Starring role: Caprice was just 29 (pictured) when she took on the role for a brief stint and later stated that she had turned down the role of lead made famous by Pamela

Made famous: Caprice is said to have turned down the role Pamela Anderson was famed for

Meetings: Insiders told MailOnline: ''Caprice is in talks with a big film producer to star as the lead in his new movie. She is really excited as this is her break after she turned down the lead in Baywatch to follow in Pamela Anderson's footsteps in the late 90s'

She wore her long blonde two-tone tresses in a relaxed straight style and added a sultry smokey eye and some nude lipliner to her look.

Caprice kept off the chill with a mushroom coloured shall and toted a Stella McCartney beach bag with all her essentials for a day in the sun.

Ready for an afternoon at the pool, Caprice displayed her toned physique in the sheer dress.

Caprice kept off the chill with a mushroom coloured shall and toted a Stella McCartney beach bag with all her essentials for a day in the sun.

And she didn't fail to turn heads as she walked along the street with her luminous bikini on full display.

Caprice put on a glamorous display as her log tresses blew dramatically in the wind while she walked.

The model put on a leggy display as she lifted her stiletto onto a wall to readjust her footwear.

Shining: The former Dancing On Ice star completed the eye-catching look with a pair of gold stilettos that featured a flower detail at the front

The outing comes after Caprice was 'shocked' to learn that her name and phone numbers are listed in Jeffrey Epstein's Little Black Book earlier this week.

The US model has no idea who gave the billionaire paedophile her contact details because only her close family have her home numbers.

A source close to Caprice said she 'doesn't want to be involved' and finds the allegations of a paedophile ring 'totally toxic'.

Stunning: Ready for an afternoon at the pool, Caprice displayed her toned physique in the sheer dress

Epstein, who killed himself in prison in August 2019, cultivated an extraordinary cache of more than 1,000 phone numbers and email addresses for hundreds of famous names across the Atlantic.

The source added: 'Caprice is shocked to hear her name is in Jeffrey Epsteins Little Black Book of contacts.

'She didnt know he had her personal phone numbers or who he got them from. It wasnt just her mobile number but the landlines of two of her personal residences in the UK and NYC. Only close family had those numbers for in an emergency.

Model: Caprice put on a glamorous display as her log tresses blew dramatically in the wind while she walked

Caprice knew Ghislaine Maxwell, who the source said 'was always nice to Caprice', adding that the star 'was really shocked when the story broke about her and Jeffrey'.

Last year it was revealed Caprice dated Prince Andrew, who has been accused of having sex with one of Epstein's 'sex slaves', Virginia Giuffre.

Prince Andrew let Caprice sit on the Queen's throne at Buckingham Palace during one of their dates, it was claimed.

The Duke of York, 60, met the American lingerie designer at a dinner party and the pair dated for two months in 2000, reports The Sun.

On one of the dates he took her to Buckingham Palace and let her take a decorative bowl without staff knowing, according to the paper.

Heels: The model put on a leggy display as she lifted her stiletto onto a wall to readjust her footwear

Meanwhile, Epstein's 'little black book' contained the names of 301 of Britain's richest and most powerful people including Sir Mick Jagger, Tony Blair, Sir Richard Branson, Prince Andrew and his former wife Sarah Ferguson.

Epstein is said to have written down 16 phone numbers for Prince Andrew including a mobile number and landlines for Sandringham and Balmoral, where the prince once invited him for a visit.

There were also 18 numbers for Andrew's ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, who once had a 15,000 dept paid off by Epstein, according to the Mirror.

The book is now in the hands of the FBI - but there is no suggestion that the people named were involved with Epstein's crimes and many will never have met him.
She is a German actress and former supermodel.

And, Diane Kruger channeled her inner ringmaster in a chic corset dress and thigh-high boots as she led the models attending a private Maison Chaumet dinner in Paris, on Wednesday.

The Inglorious Basterds star, 44, oozed sex appeal in the double-breasted mini dress as she posed for photographs at the newly-opened Cafe Laperouse.

Wow! Diane Kruger, 44, channeled her inner ringmaster in a chic corset dress and thigh-high boots as she led the stars attending a private Maison Chaumet dinner in Paris, on Wednesday

Guest of honour, Diane, was joined at the swanky affair by models Natalia Vodianova, Cindy Bruna and Natasha Poly.

Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova, 39, exuded femininity in a silver sequined floral gown.

Fellow Russian beauty Natasha Poly, 35, displayed her washboard abs in an Asymmetric cut-out frock with sheer red detailing

French model Cindy Bruna, 26, risked baring her chest as she went braless in a deep plunging khaki shacket, which she teamed with joggers and baby pink ankle boots

Bevvy of beauties: Guest of honour, Diane, was joined at the swanky affair by models (L-R) Cindy Bruna, Natalia Vodianova and Natasha Poly

Gorgeous: Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova, 39, exuded femininity in a silver sequined floral gown

Commanding attention: Russian beauty Natasha Poly, 35, displayed her washboard abs in an Asymmetric cut-out frock with sheer red detailing

Creative director Alex Riviere showed off her flair for fashion in a stand-out mini dress.

Princess Alessandra of Hanover, known to friends as Sassa de Osma, 33, teamed a simple black gown with a flat pair of glossy black shoes.

Virtuoso cellist Camille Thomas, 33, gave a recital of works by Chopin, a composer closely connected to the history of 12 Vendome, the Chaumet hotel particulier.

Jean-Marc Mansvelt, CEO of Chaumet hosted the high-fashion event, and all guests wore Chaumet High Jewellery creations.

Careful! Cindy Bruna, 26, risked baring her chest as she went braless in a deep plunging khaki shacket, which she teamed with joggers and baby pink ankle boots

Artistic: Creative director Alex Riviere showed off her flair for fashion in a stand-out mini dress

Simple: Princess Alessandra of Hanover, known to friends as Sassa de Osma, 33, teamed a simple black gown with a flat pair of glossy black shoes

Meanwhile, Diane Kruger met her Walking Dead actor boyfriend Norman Reedus, 52, while filming Sky in 2015.

They were first seen together as a couple in July 2016 before welcoming their first child, a daughter, in 2018.

Diane was previously married to actor Guillaume Canet for five years before a 10-year relationship with Joshua Jackson. Norman shares a son, Mingus Lucien Reedus, with his ex, Helena Christensen.
Netflix is reportedly set to launch a rival show to the popular SAS: Who Dares Wins programme.

The streaming giant's version of the popular formula is thought to see millennials used to living in luxury sent into the wilderness in a test of their survival skills.

According to The Sun, the series, which has not yet been named, has already been filmed in the British countryside and will feature twenty to forty-year-olds.

New show? Netflix is reportedly launching a new reality show which will see twenty to forty-year-olds trying to survive in the wild (pictured Ant Middleton on SAS: Who Dares Wins)

A source told the publication that the production will aim to push millennials out of their comfort zones by removing their creature comforts.

They said: 'This will make for delicious viewing for all those people who know how difficult life can be beyond the confines of a social media bubbles.

'They certainly won't be tethered to their mobiles and laptops like they usually would.

'But the overall aim of the show isn't to punish anyone or be cruel, it's just intended to be an eye-opening experience which has a distinct feel-good factor.'

Interesting: The streaming giant's version is thought to see millennials sent into the wilderness in a test of their survival skills (pictured Channel 4's SAS: Who Dares Wins which aired in June)

The show, which is set to put contestants through their paces like similar series SAS: Who Dares Wins, is believed to be aired on Netflix later this year or early next year.

Netflix declined to comment when approached by MailOnline.

The reported new show has also been likened to Snowflake Mountain with Ant Middleton, which was being developed by Channel 4.

In the Channel 4 series, the 40-year-old former soldier would have given young contestants the shock of their lives in the wilderness.

The show was unfortunately called to a halt before it had begun. Ant has since parted ways with the channel.

Feel good factor: The series, which has not yet been named, has supposedly completed filming in the British countryside (pictured a shot from Channel 4's show in June)

It comes amid reports that the next series of Channel 4's SAS: Who Dares Wins is in doubt as bosses are struggling to find a replacement for Ant.

Producers have reportedly held emergency meetings in June as the show tries to cope with the Covid traffic lights travel system.

A source told The Sun replacing Ant, 40, has proved difficult after he was dropped by Channel 4 due to his alleged 'personal conduct'.

The insider alleged that bosses are keen for the first season without the usual front-man to be staged in a show-stopping destination such as th African desert.

However they said: 'They're struggling to replace Ant. They can't bring in a complete novice. It's got to be someone who has that star appeal of Ant.'

Claims: It comes amid reports that next series of Channel 4's SAS: Who Dares Wins is in doubt as bosses are struggling to find a replacement for Ant Middleton (pictured in February 2020)

A Channel 4 spokesperson told MailOnline at the time: 'We are still in the early stages of planning the next series of SAS: Who Dares Wins, so it is too early to confirm the details.

'Lots of options are being considered but it is shaping up to be another spectacular but brutal series. As with all Channel 4 productions, strict Covid guidelines will be followed.'

Ant was dropped by Channel 4 - the home of SAS: Who Dares Wins UK - due to his alleged 'personal conduct,' with the presenter fiercely denying claims that he was axed for making 'inappropriate' or 'lewd comments' to female staff on set.

Speaking on a recent podcast, he hit out at 'victim mentality' and said he's 'too far gone now to be completely cancelled'.

He said: 'I can get as drunk as a skunk and that's not in my nature, that's not who I am. My family knows that and my wife knows that.

'I'm more of a boys' boy  let's f*** off the chicks and go and have a drink with the lads. It makes me realise how this victim mentality is really taking over.

'My career could be cancelled if I wasn't who I am. I'm too far gone and too long in the tooth now to be completely cancelled.'

Ant went on to claim there has been a 'witch hunt' against him in the UK, remarking: 'Witch hunt? I never thought that existed until the latest shenanigans with SAS UK.'
Mark Wahlberg paid tribute to his wife with a selection of photos on Thursday.

Calling Rhea, who turned 43 this week, a 'total' smokeshow' the 50-year-old actor posted snaps of Rhea in swimsuits and during family moments.

'Happy birthday to my wife Rhea, who is not only a total smokeshow, but most importantly, an incredible mother to our four amazing children,' Mark wrote in a Facebook post with four photos.

'Total smokeshow' Mark Wahlberg praised his wife Rhea on her 43rd birthday this week

'Love you, babe!!' he added.

The couple have been married since 2009 and are parents to Ella, 17, Michael, 15, Brendan, 12, and Grace, 10.

On Instagram Mark shared another post for the mom-of-four but with a shorter caption.

'Happy B day babe!!!,' he wrote along with heart and prayer hands emojis.

On her own Instagram, Rhea showed off the stunning balloon arrangement she was gifted for her birthday as well as some family vacation snaps from a trip to Idaho.

Family love: The 50-year-old actor shared four snaps on Facebook with a sweet message for his wife of 11 years

'Incredible mother': The couple have been married since 2009 and are parents to Ella, 17, Michael, 15, Brendan, 12, and Grace, 10

'I love you guys, Birthday love' she wrote.

Mark previously gushed about his model wife in a 2018 interview with The Sun.

'I owe a lot to my wife. She has helped me become the man that I am and created a beautiful life for me and our children.'

The actor added, 'I also knew that she loved me for who I am and that she was someone I could trust. Until I met her, I wasn't ready to get married.'

The actor recently piled on the pounds to play boxer-turned-priest Stuart Long in Father Stu, a project which he's been working on for more than six years.

Birthday girl: Rhea shared a snap of the colorful balloon display she received for her birthday

Getaway: The family appeared to be enjoying a trip to Idaho this week

In May he thanked his personal chef Lawrence Duran as he showed off his 20lb weight gain and revealing that he aimed to gain an additional 20lb for the movie, which he is also producing.

Duran told E! News that Mark was eating 'eight meals a day at about 7,000 calories' in order to achieve his extreme six-week transformation.

To add at least 30 pounds, the actor had to stop and eat 'about every three hours' and was under the supervision of a physician and a nutritionist.
The Crown has covered controversies from Royal affairs to family feuds but it's conveniently going to end in the early 2000s and miss of perhaps some of the most controversial storylines of all.

The Royal drama won't be covering Prince Harry's wild years and Megxit because recent events haven't had enough time to 'gain a proper perspective', an executive producer has confirmed.

Suzanna Mackie revealed that the Royal drama will come to an end in the early 2000s, when Prince Harry and William were just teenagers, meaning Harry's past behavior will be avoided by the creators.

Harry's off the hook! The Crown has covered controversies from Royal affairs to family feuds but it's conveniently going to end in the early 2000s and miss of perhaps some of the most controversial storylines of all

Speaking to Broadcast on Thursday, the producer, 35, claimed the Netflix show's creator Peter Morgan 'simply can't' write another season because recent history hasn't 'had time to gain a proper perspective'.

She explained: 'Peter has said it very articulately, that he simply can't write something unless there has been time to gain a proper perspective.'

Suzanne also reflected on the fact that Peter likes to leave a decade between The Crown's plot lines and current modern life.

Moving on: Suzanna Mackie revealed that the Royal drama will come to an end in the early 2000s, when Prince Harry and William were just teenagers, meaning Harry's past behavior will be avoided by the creators (pictured in 2002)

Final season: The Crown creator Peter Morgan will end the show after season six because the plot is too close to present day, executive producer Suzanne Mackie confirmed on Thursday

She explained: 'I think he's [Peter] always felt 10 years is the minimum amount of time that he can see something in a historical context, to allow him to really understand it. I don't think he'll deviate from that.

The executive producer continued: 'We all know these stories, but what Peter does so brilliantly is get underneath that, and understand the landscape in a more nuanced, complex, surprising way.'

The Crown insider then explained that if the show's script gets too close to present day events she fears the plot will start to feel contrived.

Choice: Susanne added Peter 'simply can't' write another script because recent history hasn't 'had time to gain a proper perspective' (Emma Corrin and Josh O'Connor pictured in show)

Praise: The executive producer (pictured in 2019) added: 'What Peter does so brilliantly is get underneath that, and understand the landscape in a more nuanced, complex, surprising way'

Peter also previously expressed his relief at not having to write about recent events regarding the Riyals.

He told T&C: 'The Meghan and Harry story is nowhere near over yet. And Im happy that Im never going to write it.'

Despite the show's success, Suzanne said she agreed with Peter's decision and thought it was definitely time to move on from the popular show.

Preference: Suzanne also reflected on the fact that Peter likes to leave a decade between The Crown's plot lines and current modern life

Reflecting on casting Emma Corrin as Diana, Princess of Wales, in season four, Suzanne claimed it was one of her proudest career highlights.

Emma was originally brought to the show to help out while Emerald Fennell ran her lines as Camilla Parker-Bowles.

But after the young actress impressed executives at the read-through they gave her a screen test and realised 'that might be Diana'.

Executive producer Suzanne Mackie shared earlier this year: 'To be honest, whatever the life of 'The Crown' is after where we are now, I doubt we'll ever go as far into the present day.'

Shining star: Suzanne also gushed that casting Emma (pictured) as Princess Diana in season four of the show was one of her proudest career highlights

Key moments in the Royal Family's history the show will not cover includes Harry's romance with Meghan Markle and the couple's decision to step back as senior Royals.

Meghan and Harry rocked the foundations of the Royal Family in 2020 when they announced their shock decision as they 'work to become financially independent'.

In an extraordinary statement, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said they wanted to 'carve out a progressive new role' and 'step back as 'senior' members of the Royal Family'.

What you WON'T see - the key Royal moments that will be skipped as The Crown comes to an end in the early 2000s HARRY, MEGHAN AND MEGXIT Harry's off the hook! Key moments in the Royal Family's history the show will not cover includes Harry's romance with Meghan Markle and the couple's decision to step back as senior Royals Meghan and Harry rocked the foundations of the Royal Family in 2020 when they announced their shock decision as they 'work to become financially independent'. In an extraordinary statement, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said they wanted to 'carve out a progressive new role' and 'step back as 'senior' members of the Royal Family'. HARRY'S NAZI SHAME In 2005, he caused major controversy as the then 20-year-old Prince was widely condemned for wearing a Nazi uniform, complete with swastika armband, to a fancy dress party. Images of Harry, pictured holding a drink and a cigarette caused 'public outrage', with the young Prince forced to issue and apology. BOMBSHELL OPRAH INTERVIEW The show will of course skip the latest controversy surrounding the Royal family - Harry and Meghan's bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they made a number of claims about 'the firm'. Claims included allegations of racism aimed towards their son Archie, while it was also said that Meghan's pleas for help were ignored when she was suicidal. Skipped: Harry and Meghan's bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they made a number of claims about 'the firm', will be missed PRINCE ANDREW'S EPSTEIN SCANDAL In a turbulent time for the House of Windsor Prince Andrew was also 'sacked' from all Royal duties by the Queen after a disastrous Newsnight interview about his years of friendship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Prince Andrew was also alleged to have had sex with then 17-year-old Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, and has denied any wrongdoing. Scandal: It will also not include Prince Andrew's scandalous friendship with billionaire paedophile Epstein, which engulfed the Royals and resulted in his 'sacking' CHARLES AND CAMILLA'S MARRIAGE The latter years will notably skip Charles' relationship with Camilla following Diana's death in 1997. The couple were photographed publicly together for the first time in two years later 1999, though they had tried to keep their rekindled romance out of the public eye amid the huge outpouring of grief over Diana. Charles and Camilla moved in together in 2003, announced their engagement in 2005 and went on to tie the knot at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, in April that year. Love: The latter years will notably skip Charles' relationship with Camilla following Diana's death in 1997 (Charles and Camilla on their wedding day in April 2005) Advertisement

They said they wanted to balance their time between the UK and North America, 'continuing to honour our duty to the Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages'.

Since their exit, the couple first moved to Canada before later settling in an 11m mansion in Montecito in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles.

They've since welcomed a daughter Lilibet Diana last month, a baby sister to their son Archie Harrison, two.

But while Harry's life as a loving husband and father will be skipped, his wild partying days will also not be aired, which will no doubt come as a relief to the Duke.

Most notably, his 2005 controversy in which the then 20-year-old Prince was widely condemned for wearing a Nazi uniform, complete with swastika armband, to a fancy dress party.

Not to be: It's thought the sixth series will end before portraying Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's sensational break from the Royal Family (pictured October 2019)

Images of Harry, pictured holding a drink and a cigarette caused 'public outrage', with the young Prince forced to issue and apology.

His actions sparked angry condemnation from politicians, anti-fascist groups and Jewish human rights organisations.

In a statement, he said: 'I'm very sorry if I caused any offence or embarrassment to anyone'.

He added: 'It was a poor choice of costume and I apologise.'

With The Crown ending in the early 2000s, the show will of course skip the latest controversy surrounding the Royal family - Harry and Meghan's bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they made a number of claims about 'the firm'.

Claims included allegations of racism aimed towards their son Archie, while it was also said that Meghan's pleas for help were ignored when she was suicidal.

Missed: With The Crown ending in the early 2000s, the show will of course miss Harry and Meghan's bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they made a number of claims about 'the firm'

Outrage: In 2005, Harry caused major controversy as the then 20-year-old Prince was widely condemned for wearing a Nazi uniform, complete with swastika armband, to a fancy dress party (pictured in 2005)

In a turbulent time for the House of Windsor Prince Andrew was also 'sacked' from all Royal duties by the Queen after a disastrous Newsnight interview about his years of friendship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Prince Andrew was also alleged to have had sex with then 17-year-old Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, and has strenuously denied any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, with the current series of The Crown largely focusing on the love triangle between Charles, Diana and Camilla, the latter years will notably skip Charles' relationship with Camilla following Diana's death in 1997.

The couple were photographed publicly together for the first time in two years later 1999, though they had tried to keep their rekindled romance out of the public eye amid the huge outpouring of grief over Diana.

Key historical moments involving the Royal Family between 1999 and 2003 1999: The marriage of the Queen's son Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex: The wedding took place at St George's Chapel in Windsor. 2000: The Queen celebrates the Millennium: Millennium celebrations take place throughout the UK. The Millennium Dome in London is officially opened by HM The Queen on January 1. 2001: Queen Elizabeth reacts to 9/11 terrorist attacks: A week after the tragedy she sent a message to the British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer to offer her condolences. She wrote: 'Each and every one of us has been shocked and numbed by what we have witnessed in these recent days. 'At your service today, we think especially of the British victims. These are dark and harrowing times for families and friends of those who are missing or who suffered in the attack - many of you here today. 'My thoughts and my prayers are with you all now and in the difficult days ahead'. On September 13 The Queen ordered the Changing of the Guard ceremony to be paused for a two minute silence, followed by the playing of the American national anthem. 2002: The Queen's Golden Jubilee: The Queen celebrated the milestone on February 6 and it was an international event to mark the 50th anniversary of her ascension to the throne. On June 4, an estimated one million people headed to central London to line The Mall on the last day of the official celebrations. Queen guitarist Brian May played 'God Save The Queen' from the roof of Buckingham Palace in her honour. 2002: The Queen dines at 10 Downing Street with the five living former Prime Ministers who served under her. She met with Tony Blair, John Major, Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan and Edward Heath. 2002: The death of Princess Margaret: The Queen's younger sister dies after suffering a stroke aged 71. The pair had had a troubled relationship after The Queen said she couldn't marry her love Peter Townsend. 2002: The Queen Mother dies: She passed away aged 101 at Royal Lodge Windsor. Advertisement

Scandal: It will also not include Prince Andrew's scandalous friendship with billionaire paedophile Epstein, which engulfed the Royals and resulted in his 'sacking'

Shocking: Prince Andrew was also alleged to have had sex with then 17-year-old Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, and has strenuously denied any wrongdoing (Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts, aged 17, and Ghislaine Maxwell at Ghislaine Maxwell's townhouse in London in 2001)

It is said that Camilla was first introduced to William in 1998, though Harry was not present. Camilla later accompanied Charles and the boys on a trip to Greece in 1999.

Charles and Camilla moved in together in 2003, announced their engagement in 2005 and went on to tie the knot at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, in April that year.

The Crown's wrapping up of the Royal saga in the early 2000s comes after Harry and Meghan signed a mega bucks deal streaming service Netflix last year, worth a whopping 112m.

Love: With the current series of The Crown largely focusing on the love triangle between Charles, Diana and Camilla, the latter years will notably skip Charles' relationship with Camilla following Diana's death in 1997 (Charles and Camilla on their wedding day in April 2005)

The production company, Archewell productions, will see documentaries, feature films, scripted shows and children's programming made for the streaming giant.

The couple currently have one production in the works, Heart of Invictus, which will be a multi-episode documentary series about the Invictus Games - the international tournament for wounded soldiers which the Prince founded in 2014.

Netflix announced last July that The Crown will air for six series after originally being confirmed to end with season five.

Kerching: The Crown's wrapping up of the Royal saga in the early 2000s comes after Harry and Meghan signed a mega bucks deal streaming service Netflix last year, worth a whopping 112m

Creator Peter Morgan revealed he decided to 'return to the original plan,' meaning Imelda Staunton will now appear for two series as an older Queen Elizabeth II instead of the planned one.

In recent times, The Crown has faced mounting criticism from politicians, Royal experts and friends of Charles for fabricating a string of controversial incidents.

In December last year, Netflix broke its silence on the controversy over the series, insisting there was no need to warn its millions of viewers that key scenes are invented.

The streaming giant claimed it was widely understood the hit series was a work of fiction based on historical events.

And it wrote to Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden, rejecting his suggestion that a disclaimer at the start of each episode would be helpful.

Controversy: In recent times, The Crown has faced mounting criticism from politicians, Royal experts and friends of Charles for fabricating a string of controversial incidents (pictured Emma Corrin as Princess Diana)

In a public statement on the controversy, Netflix told The Mail on Sunday: We have always presented The Crown as a drama, and we have every confidence our members understand its a work of fiction thats broadly based on historical events.

'As a result, we have no plans  and see no need  to add a disclaimer.

But the statement was described by one critic as arrogant. Others said the companys intransigence was adding to the Royal Familys disquiet over the affair.

Netflix has been accused of escalating the row by urging viewers to watch an explosive documentary about Princess Diana which it said would provide answers to criticism of The Crown.

Backlash: In December last year, Netflix broke its silence on the controversy over the series, insisting there was no need to warn its millions of viewers that key scenes are invented (pictured Josh O'Connor as Prince Charles)

Its tweet promoting the documentary  Diana: In Her Own Words  led to vicious online attacks on Prince Charles and Camilla.

The Queens former press secretary, Dickie Arbiter, accused Netflix of getting trolls to do their dirty work for them.

In January 2020 it was previously announced that The Crown would end after its fifth series, with series four, airing late last year.

Peter said: 'As we started to discuss the storylines for Series 5, it soon became clear that in order to do justice to the richness and complexity of the story we should go back to the original plan and do six seasons.'

There's more? The Crown will air for six series after originally being confirmed to end with season five (Olivia Colman pictured as Queen Elizabeth II in series 3)

The news was announced by Netflix on their Twitter account, as they wrote: 'News from the palace: we can confirm there will be a sixth (and final) season of @TheCrownNetflix, in addition to the previously announced five!'

The streaming service then clarified that fans will still have one more series featuring the current cast, including Olivia Colman and Helen Bonham Carter, with an older range of stars taking over in series five.

In the fifth series Lesley Manville will take over the role of Princess Margaret from Helena Bonham Carter.

Exciting: The news was announced by Netflix on Twitter, along with the statement from creator Peter Morgan, who said they 'went back to the original plan'

Royally good: Imelda Staunton is to play the Queen in The Crown's final two series. The 63-year-old will take over the role of Elizabeth II for seasons five and six of the Netflix drama

Congrats! Lesley Manville has been cast as Princess Margaret (right in 1966) for the fifth and sixth seasons of The Crown

Portrayal: The star, who is believed to have been producers first choice for the role, is set to play the Queen's younger sister during one of the 'darkest periods of her life' (pictured 1995)

She was believed to have been producers first choice for the role, is set to play the Queen's younger sister during one of the 'darkest periods of her life.'

The role was also taken on by Vanessa Kirby in season one and two, documenting the early years of Princess Margaret's marriage to Anthony Armstrong Jones.

Netflix previously revealed that more than 73 million households have streamed at least part of show since it first launched in November 2016.

Award-winning: Oscar-winner Olivia (L) is playing Queen Elizabeth II (pictured right in 1964) in series three and four of The Crown

Coronation: Claire Foy (L) played a young Queen Elizabeth II (pictured right in 1955) as she ascended the throne following her late father's death during seasons one and two

Series three of The Crown hit Netflix in November 2019, with Oscar-winner Olivia Colman taking the throne from Claire Foy, who portrayed the monarch in the first two seasons.

The third series followed events including the Aberfan mining disaster, the moon landing, the romance between Prince Charles and Camilla Shand and the investiture of Charles as the Prince of Wales.

Also appearing in the series are Tobias Menzies as Prince Phillip, Helena as Princess Margaret, Josh O'Connor as Prince Charles, and Ben Daniels as Anthony Armstrong Jones, the Earl of Snowdon.

Peter previously told The Sun: 'At the outset I had imagined The Crown running for six seasons.

'But now that we have begun work on the stories for season five it has become clear to me that this is the perfect time and place to stop.'

New guard: The fourth season, which will air in 2020, sees the addition of Emma Corrin as Princess Diana (L) and Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher (R)

When The Crown was first announced, it was thought the series would run for six series, spanning six decades, and cover The Royal Family's history up to 2003.

Cindy Holland, vice president of original content at Netflix, said: 'The first three seasons of The Crown defined an era, and I know the upcoming fourth season will build further on that success.

'It's a stunning example of award-winning entertainment, created in the UK and loved by millions of fans around the world.

'I fully support Peter Morgan's creative decision and am excited to see how he, Imelda Staunton and the cast and crew of season five, bring this landmark series to a fitting and spectacular end.'

It comes after it was revealed last week that The Crown bosses have cast Jonny Lee Miller as Prime Minister John Major in the upcoming series.

In the 'surprise' casting, Netflix chiefs revealed the Trainspotting star, 48, who is rumoured to have rekindled his romance with ex Angelina Jolie, will play the Tory Prime Minister, who was in charge of the country from November 1990 and May 1997.

Shock: It comes after it was revealed last week that The Crown bosses Jonny Lee Miller as Prime Minister John Major last week (pictured in Elementary)

He followed on from Margaret Thatcher's leadership, with The Iron Lady played by Gillian Anderson in the wildly-popular Netflix period drama.

Insiders told The Sun: 'It may seem like an unlikely casting as the two men couldn't be more different, but the creators of the Crown aren't interested in an actor playing a version of themselves.

'It was a similar idea to when Sex Education star Gillian Anderson was cast as Margaret Thatcher in the last series of The Crown, a decision which surprised fans of the show at the time.

'But at 48, Jonny is actually the perfect age to play Sir John, who became PM at the age of 47 after Maggie was removed from power.'

Former PM: Sir John was Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997, and served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary under Thatcher from 1987 to 1990 (pictured in 2015)

Insiders told The Sun: 'It may seem like an unlikely casting as the two men couldn't be more different, but the creators of the Crown aren't interested in an actor playing a version of themselves'

Sir John was Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997, and served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary under Thatcher from 1987 to 1990.

Major entered politics at a young age, standing as a young Conservative for Lambeth Council at the age of 21 and became chairman of the Housing Committee.

He then stood for Parliament twice in St Pancras from 1974 and lost, before winning in Huntingdonshire in 1979.

The politician became a minister in 1985 and became a part of the Cabinet in 1987 as Chief Secretary to the Treasury before being promoted to Foreign Secretary in 1989, and shortly after he was named Chancellor.

Major replaced Mrs Thatcher in 1990 after winning a leadership contest which she dropped out of.

Politician: Major replaced Mrs Thatcher in 1990 after winning a leadership contest which she dropped out of (pictured in 1990)

A Tale of Two Johnny's Jonny Lee Miller Born: Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey Known for: Acting for nearly 40 years in Film, TV and Theatre, with most notable roles in Trainspotting, Elementary, Hackers Romances: Married to Angelina Jolie from 1996 to 1999, also previously married to Michele Hicks from 2008 to 2018. Children: One son, Buster Timothy Miller, 13, with ex-wife Michele. Accolades: Miller won a Laurence Olivier Award for his performance in Frankenstein at the National Theatre in 2012. He was also nominated for a BAFTA in 2007 for The Flying Scotsman. Sir John Major Born: Carshalton, Surrey Known for: Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997, and served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary under Thatcher from 1987 to 1990 Romances: Major has been married to wife Norma Johnson since 1970. Children: Two children, daughter Elizabeth, 49, and son James, 46. Accolades: Major was given a Knighthood in 2005 as a Companion Of The Garter by Queen Elizabeth II. Advertisement

Mrs Thatcher had won a first ballot in the leadership contest, but failed to secure outright victory, and initially pledged to continue her bid.

But the majority of her cabinet members had told her she would not win, which Mr Major knew, and she later decided to step down.

He then pledged to 'destroy' his predecessor after believing she was critical of him following her departure, according to a book by former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore in 2019.

Major was known for having a mild-mannered style which may appear to be in stark contrast to Miller, who is known for playing bad boy characters like Sick Boy in Trainspotting.

Bit different: Major was known for having a mild-mannered style in stark contrast to Miller, who is known for playing bad boy characters like Sick Boy in Trainspotting (pictured)

THE CROWN: The Politicians WINSTON CHURCHILL John Lithgow SERIES: One TIME IN OFFICE: From 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955 - John was the only American actor to star in the first season of the show and wore a fat suit for the role WINSTON CHURCHILL ANTHONY EDEN Jeremy Northam SERIES: One TIME IN OFFICE: Succeeded Churchill in 1955 and held the post til 1957 ANTHONY EDEN HAROLD MACMILLAN Anton Lesser SERIES: Two TIME IN OFFICE: Took over from Eden when he resigned in 1957 until 1963 HAROLD MACMILLAN HAROLD WILSON Jason Watkins SERIES: Three TIME IN OFFICE: From October 1964 to June 1970, and again from March 1974 to April 1976 HAROLD WILSON JOHN F. KENNEDY AND JACKIE O Michael C. Hall and Jodi Balfour SERIES: Two - The Crown portrayed the late president as a high-functioning drug addict JACKIE O JOHN F. KENNEDY AND JACKIE O MARGARET THATCHER Gillian Anderson SERIES: Four TIME IN OFFICE: Thatcher became the first female prime minister when she was elected in 1979 and held the position until 1990. MARGARET THATCHER Advertisement

Fans of the show were notably surprised by Miller's casting announcement, and they took to Twitter to share their thoughts.

One person wrote: 'Jonny Lee Miller - best known for playing Sick Boy in Trainspotting - will play Prime Minister Sir John Major in the fifth season of The Crown. Didn't see that coming.. (sic)'

Another added: 'I think its unprecedented, yeah. A major part of the excitement also comes from the casting as opposed to to the storylines, which is quite unusual in itself.

'Jonny Lee Miller as John Major though, just announced. I mean, Sir John must be smiling today.'

While one person joked: 'Oh ok ok I'll start watching The Crown!! But I am going to be very confused hornily because Jonny Lee Miller is Mr Superhottypants-McBrilliantActor, and John Major is Mr Noneofthosethings (sic)'

Reaction: Fans of the show were notably surprised by Miller's casting announcement, and they took to Twitter to share their thoughts

The announcement comes after it was revealed he has been reconnecting with ex Angelina following her visits to his Brooklyn-area apartment.

She has been staying at the ultra luxurious Carlyle Hotel overlooking Central Park while visiting New York with her children, where room prices begin at $700, with suites ranging thousands of dollars per night.

The Sun recently claimed that Miller has not only met Pax, 17, but also Jolie's youngest son Knox, 12. Angelina shares custody of both kids with ex-husband Brad Pitt, in addition to Maddox, 19, Zahara, 16, Shiloh, 15 and and Vivienne, 12

'On her first evening with Jonny, Angelina only took Knox along, and they got on like a house on fire,' a source told the outlet. 'Knox is a sweet kid and I imagine she decided he was the easiest one to begin introductions with.'

And Pax was curious what Miller was like so he came the next evening.

They get along well: The announcement comes after it was revealed he has been reconnecting with ex Angelina following her visits to his Brooklyn-area apartment

'She went back the next afternoon with Pax, who was curious to meet this guy she's always spoken so fondly about,' said the insider. 'They only hung out for a short while at Jonny's apartment, but they seemed to get along well.'

Last week, The Girl Interrupted star spent about three hours inside  where the pair reportedly enjoyed dinner  and was then spotted exiting the premise at 10:30pm.

They were married in 1996 after meeting on the set of their movie Hackers a year prior, but separated shortly after and officially divorced in 1999.

Back in March, it was reported that The Crown's casting directors have begun looking for a sandy-haired pre-teen boy to play Prince William in the much-anticipated fifth series of the hit Netflix show.

Back then: He will play the Tory Prime Minister, who was in charge of the country from November 1990 and May 1997 (Major and his wife Norma in 1990)

Netflix is said to have already put out casting calls to hundreds of top schools and drama clubs for a youngster to play the future king as preparations to film the fifth series get underway.

A Netflix source told the Times that the hunt for the Duke of Cambridge was in its early days, while the search for his younger brother, Prince Harry, would begin at a later stage.

Casting director Nina Gold is said to be looking for youngsters between the ages of nine and 13 to play Prince William, who was played in the fourth series by Lucas Barber-Grant.
She never fails to put on a stylish display.

And Myleene Klass looked effortlessly chic once again as she strutted her stuff in a houndstooth blazer while arriving at work at Global Radio on Friday.

The radio host, 43, layered the timeless jacket over a ruffled cream blouse as she strutted to Smooth Radio in the London sunshine.

Stylish: Myleene Klass looked effortlessly chic in a houndstooth blazer as she arrived for work at Global Radio on Friday

Myleene paired the summer ready shirt with a pair of relaxed fit navy trousers with cream stripes down the side.

She completed the smart casual ensemble with a pair of comfy and stylish black velcro sandals from Chanel.

She accessorised with an enviable Chanel quilted crossbody bag and added a touch of sparkle with a gold watch and rings.

The presenter put on a glamorous display as she protected her eyes with a pair of large dark sunglasses and accentuated her features with lashings of lipliner.

Chic: The radio host, 43, layered the timeless jacket over a ruffled white blouse as she strutted to Smooth Radio in the London sunshine

The outing comes after Myleene recently hit back at accusations that she'd had lip filler, insisting her Filipino heritage is behind her plump pout.

Taking to Instagram last month, the star shared a series of behind-the-scenes clips of herself and Rachel Riley filming Countdown, flashing her fans a pout while looking typically chic in a tailored red suit.

Her post prompted one user to ask: 'Have you had your lips done or is this your selfie pout?' to which doting mother Myleene swiftly responded: 'I'm biracial! These are the lips I was given.'

Defiant: The outing comes after Myleene recently hit back at accusations that she'd had lip filler, insisting her Filipino heritage is behind her plump pout

Last June, Myleene, who has a Filipino mother and Austrian father, detailed the horrific racial abuse she experienced in her childhood and the prevalent prejudice she still witnesses.

The songstress, who was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, took to Instagram to reveal she was struggling to explain racism to her children amid the Black Lives Matter movement.

In her impassioned post, Myleene listed some of the horrendous slurs she has faced over the years, with a shocking list reading: 'Chink. Slit eye. Number 69, Fried rice. Mongrel. Ping pong. Sl*t. All Tai girls are sluts. Banana'.

Discussing her own experiences - yet conceding she cannot understand the struggles in the US - Myleene also shared a childhood snap.

Shocking: In June 2020 Myleene detailed the horrific racial abuse she experienced in her childhood and the prevalent prejudice she still witnesses

Myleene opened the post with explaining what she is working to do by revealing the struggles she has faced in her past. She wrote: 'I'm trying so hard to explain the complexities of racism to my children. How it happens...

'How whilst I don't understand the struggles a black person living in America might be experiencing, how I do understand and know my own experience of being a mixed race Filipino girl growing up in Norfolk...

'I had those words thrown at me. On other occasions, it wasn't just words, it was rock filled snowballs by a group of boys as I walked home, I had my hair cut in the school cloakrooms by some girls, later they threatened a lighter...
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Erika Jayne has been pictured boarding a private jet amid her money troubles, after being forced to turn over her financial records in the ongoing embezzlement lawsuit against herself and estranged husband Tom Girardi.

The 49-year-old Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star - who split with husband Tom, 82, last year - was pictured smiling and looking glam as she headed towards the swanky aircraft proving that she hasn't had to give up her extravagant lifestyle yet.

Dressed in white trousers, a pink bomber jacket and black pumps, Erika seemed to be in an upbeat mood despite her current legal and financial worries.

On the show - where her tagline says she is 'an enigma wrapped in a riddle... and cash!' - Erika has previously confessed to owning two private planes.

It's STILL expensive to be me! Smirking RHOBH star shakes off money woes as she boards private jet after being forced to turn over financial records in embezzlement lawsuit

The reality star and pop singer is also known for boasting about her expensive lifestyle, particularly in the song Xxpen$ive, featuring the line: 'It's expensive to be me.'

Speaking about the divorce on the Bravo series this week, Erika brought up what she could get out of it, saying: 'Based on Tom's two previous divorces he's a fighting mother f**ker 'til the end. If I got a Bentley out of this divorce, I'd be thrilled.'

In addition to her legal troubles, Jayne also cleared up a recent rumor about her having an alleged affair with music mogul Scooter Braun, which she denied on on RHOBH this week.

Meanwhile, the sighting comes after Jayne's accountant, divorce lawyer and landlord were all ordered to turn over her financial records by a judge, amid the ongoing embezzlement lawsuit.

People Magazine reported this week that Jayne - 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 and Jayne 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.'

Still smiling! The 49-year-old Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star - who split with husband Tom, 82, last year - was pictured smiling and looking glam as she headed towards the swanky aircraft

Luxe: On the show - where her tagline said she was 'an enigma wrapped in a riddle... and cash!' - Erika has previously confessed to owning two private planes

Let's get glam: Erika was seen being helped with her luggage and outfits, though it is unclear where she is jetting off to

On her way out: Erika will certainly be needing a break after her most recent legal troubles

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.'

Current battle: A lawsuit claims that both Girardi and Jayne allegedly embezzled settlement funds that were meant to help the families of plane crash victims on Lion Air Flight 610

Lifestyles of the rich and famous: Erika was pictured on her way out on Thursday amid her legal battle

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.

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.

Former flame: This comes just a day after it was reported that Jayne was being accused of refusing to submit bank records

'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.

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.

'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.

Flashing the cash: The reality star and pop singer is also known for boasting about her expensive lifestyle, particularly in the song Xxpen$ive, featuring the line: 'It's expensive to be me'

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

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.'

'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.'
Sarah Michelle Gellar enjoyed a much needed vacation with her husband Freddie Prinze Jr and their kids ahead of the July fourth weekend.

The 44-year-old Buffy actress shared snippets of her blissful Hawaii retreat which included water activities, breathtaking sunsets and lots of delicious food and drinks.

'Ok seriously...this is the peaceful look of two parents getting an actual vacation. We have officially found paradise,' she wrote as she posted a selfie with her husband of 19 years.

Paradise found! Sarah Michelle Gellar, 44, looks blissful in paradise as she shares snaps from her Hawaiian vacation with husband Freddie Prinze Jr. and their two kids

The blonde haired beauty looked bronzed and relaxed in a series of images posted on her Instagram story, one of which included her makeup free with wet tresses on the ocean.

She and the family continue to enjoy a stay at the Mauna Lani resort on The Big Island, which she called 'perfect,' and have been keen to take advantage of all it has to offer.

Gellar confessed that her newest 'passion' was canoe surfing and she, Freddie, and their kids Charlotte, 11, and Rocky, eight, took boats out at sunrise and later snorkeled.

Water activities: The Buffy actress shared a selfie post canoeing and snorkeling in the ocean

New hobby: 'New passion canoe surfing,' she wrote as she posted photos of the family in the water

Privacy: Sarah protected the privacy of her two children Rocky and Charlotte as she posted hearts over their face

But though the fiercely private actress did post family photos, she protected the identity of her children with hearts over their faces.

Other snaps she posted included very fresh sashimi from Canoe House and a mouthwatering looking Paloma cocktail which she drank while sunbathing on the beach.

'The most perfect paloma ever,' she said of the tequila and grapefruit cocktail.

And she could not help but to gush over the sunsets. 'And I have I mentioned the sunsets?' she lightly gloated of the stunning views from the resort.

Happy hour: One photo included a delicious looking Paloma cocktail

Catch of the day: Another photo was of fresh sashimi at the Canoe House restaurant

Sunsets: The views from the resort looked picturesque at sunset

Despite taking a break from work while on her tropical escape, she did 'interrupt' her vacation on Thursday to send a message to a musician she loves very much  Ed Sheeran.

She posted a segment of the UK based performer being interviewed on BBC's 'The One Show,' where she sent in a video message for the Shape of You crooner.

Gellar joked that she was head of the 'Ed Sheeran trivia contest,' at her kids' school after he had channeled a vampire in the latest music video for his song Bad Habits.

'Next time instead of being inspire by [Buffy], just put me in your video...please,' she joked on Instagram.
Dancing With the Stars' Cheryl Burke is struggling with her sobriety and 'confessed' that she 'feels like drinking again' in a revealing new YouTube video.

After eschewing traditional 12-step programs for private therapy to help her maintain her sobriety, after more than two years without drinking, Cheryl finally attended her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

The 37-year-old feels it is empowering to be able to 'confess' the challenges of staying sober and told GMA that she wanted to speak out before 'God forbid I relapse.'

Being honest: Dancing With the Stars' Cheryl Burke attended her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting after more than two years of sobriety and 'confessed' that she 'feels like drinking again'

On YouTube, Cheryl told viewers that rather then check into rehab or participate in a 12-step program she quit drinking nearly three years ago with the support of her long-time therapist.

However, recently, she's been feeling triggered and wanting to drink more. She turned to sober pal, Backstreet Boy AJ McClean, who brought Cheryl to her first AA meeting.

'I needed help, I knew that if I didn't take that step forward to be a part of Alcoholics Anonymous, I don't know  I don't know if I'd be sitting here today with you,' she told GMA.

Adding: 'The thought of having to be with a new group of strangers in a way really ate me alive. But I've realized that I needed to be able to hear other people's stories, other people who struggle with alcoholism and addiction.'

'I needed help, I knew that if I didn't take that step forward to be a part of Alcoholics Anonymous, I don't know  I don't know if I'd be sitting here today with you,' she told GMA.

Her decision to be so candid with the struggle is due in part to finding strength in not feeling like she is dealing with her addiction alone.

'It is extremely powerful to be able to confess and to do so before anything, God forbid I relapse,' Burke told the morning show. 'But I just needed something more to help me feel like I'm not alone.'

The professional dancer first decided to ditch booze after her engagement party back in 2018. It was a recent trip to Hawaii with her husband, actor Matthew Lawrence, that 'triggered' her desire to drink.

'I think us being in Hawaii, you know, just that carefree like feeling of being under the sun, my husband may have had a glass of champagne [and] my senses have come back even stronger ever since I decided to stop drinking,' she revealed on YouTube.

Support: Cheryl used private therapy to help her stop drinking but has been finding it challenging lately so she turned to sober pal and former dancing partner, Backstreet Boy AJ McClean, who brought Cheryl to her first AA meeting

Adding: 'So like the smell of it, I missed. But then I just try and like fast forward my life. Let's say I do have one drink and I fast forward and it just ends up me falling into this rabbit hole of it's never just one drink.'

Earlier this week, Cheryl 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.

'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.'

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.

'So like the smell of it, I missed,' she said of being triggered in Hawaii. 'But then I just try and like fast forward my life. Let's say I do have one drink and I fast forward and it just ends up me falling into this rabbit hole of it's never just one drink.'

Lawrence, who previously starred in Boy Meets World, 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].'

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.'
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Rita Ora and her boyfriend Taika Waititi appeared totally carefree as they enjoyed a date night after the director addressed the threeway kiss they shared with actress Tessa Thompson.

On Thursday, the Thor director, 45, insisted the steamy smooch was 'no big deal', despite reports he was 'reprimanded' by Marvel executives for his behaviour.

And Rita, 30, appeared equally unfazed by the controversy as she put on a giggly display with Taika, leaning into him as they shared drinks out in Los Angeles on Thursday night.

Loved-up! Rita Ora and her boyfriend Taika Waititi appeared totally carefree as they enjoyed a date night after the director addressed the threeway kiss they shared with actress Tessa Thompson

Rita cut a casually chic figure for their dinner date, as she sported a beige blazer with a white top and trousers, while adding a quirky touch with a red and yellow cap.

Meanwhile, Taika also flaunted his love of edgy dressing in an orange and black striped shirt, which he wore with a pair of black trousers and white trainers. Complete with a beige Gucci cap.

The loved-up couple dined al fresco at the eatery and appeared to only have eyes for each other as they sat among other guests at the resturant.

'Not a big deal': Thor director Taika spoke out on Thursday - after he was pictured kissing his girlfriend Rita and actress Tessa on the balcony of his Sydney home in May

Speaking: Thor director Taika spoke out after he was pictured kissing his girlfriend Rita and actress Tessa on the balcony of his Sydney home in May

Looking good: The loved-up couple dined al fresco at the eatery and appeared to only have eyes for each other as they sat among other guests at the resturant

Chilled: And Rita, 30, appeared equally unfazed by the controversy as she put on a giggly display with Taika, leaning into him as they shared drinks out in Los Angeles on Thursday night

Thor director Taika spoke out after he was pictured kissing his girlfriend Rita and actress Tessa on the balcony of his Sydney home in May.

Despite reports he was 'reprimanded' by Marvel executives for his behaviour, the New Zealand filmmaker told ET Canada it 'wasn't a big deal'.

When asked if he was upset by the media attention the photos received, Waititi said: 'Not really. I think in the world of the Internet, everything goes away pretty quick.

Claims: Despite reports he was 'reprimanded' by Marvel executives for his behaviour, the New Zealand filmmaker told ET Canada it 'wasn't a big deal'

Unfazed: When asked if he was upset by the media attention the photos received, Waititi said: 'Not really. I think in the world of the Internet, everything goes away pretty quick

'And also, "Is it that big a deal?" No, not really. I was doing nothing wrong. It's fine.'

Waititi made headlines around the world for his three-way kiss with Rita, whom he has been dating for several months, and Tessa, one of the stars of his new movie Thor: Love and Thunder, on the balcony of his Bondi home on May 23.

The trio locked lips after partying through the night during a break from filming the upcoming Marvel sequel, which is slated for a May 2022 release.

No big deal! 'And also, "Is it that big a deal?" No, not really. I was doing nothing wrong. It's fine'

Home time: The group were seen leaving in a blue car

Glam! Following her cosy night out Rita shared a series of glam vintage snaps on her Instagram

No dramas: Despite reports he was 'reprimanded' for his behaviour, the Kiwi filmmaker, 45, told ET Canada it 'wasn't a big deal'. Pictured with Tessa on July 20, 2019, in San Diego

While there is no suggestion he did anything wrong, reports later emerged that executives at the Disney-owned Marvel Studios weren't happy.

'[It's] not exactly the image they're looking to project in relation to one of their biggest franchises,' an industry insider said at the time.

The source added that Waititi's reputation for being a 'party animal' was no secret at Marvel, but the photos nonetheless 'crossed the line'.

Brushing it off: When asked if he was upset by the attention the photos received, Waititi said: 'Not really. I think in the world of the Internet, everything goes away pretty quick. Also, "Is it that big a deal?" Not really. I was doing nothing wrong. It's fine.' Pictured with Rita on May 16

Thor: Love and Thunder was filmed at various locations around Sydney in the first half of 2021, with production centred at Fox Studios.

Waititi, who last year won an Oscar for his film Jojo Rabbit, directed the movie after previously helming 2017's Thor: Ragnarok.

Tessa, 37, plays Valkyrie, who is noted for being the first LGBT character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Meanwhile, Rita was in Sydney filming her judging role on The Voice Australia.

Waititi was married to fellow Kiwi filmmaker Chelsea Winstanley from 2011 to 2018. The former couple share two children, Te Hinekaahu, eight, and Matewa, five.
After years of denying romance rumors, it seems as if Zendaya and Tom Holland sealed things with a kiss.

On Thursday July 1, The Spider-Man: No Way Home co-stars were seen sharing a few passionate kisses during a drive in Los Angeles, per Page Six.

The two first sparked dating rumors in 2017 after wrapping Spider-Man: Homecoming but the Euphoria actress, 24, shut the chatter down on numerous occasions.

Romance confirmed! Zendaya, 24, and Tom Holland, 25, seem to confirm their romance following years of denial as they were photographed on July 1, sharing a kiss in images obtained by Page Six; pictured June 2019

In the images the pair were seen driving in Holland's Audi, before they packed on the PDA at a red light.

The couple were seen smiling and laughing before the Cherry actor, 25, pulled her in and later gazed at her while resting his hand on her chin.

According to the publication the images were taken at sunset in the Silverlake neighborhood of LA, close to where her mother Claire Stoermer resides.

Zendaya was seen in a cropped white tank top that exposed her midriff and a pair of green painter pants with converse high tops as they stopped by her mom's residence.

Holland donned a white T-shirt and black shorts with a flannel and was photographed helping her carry personal belongings out to his car.

Romance rumors: The pair had fended off romance rumors since 2017 after they shot Spider-Man Homecoming

Reactions: The news set Twitter ablaze on Friday with fans freaking out over the romance

Shock and excitement: Fans took to Twitter to give their thoughts

Meme worthy: The romance sent Twitter users into a tailspin

The sighting comes after nearly four years of denying any romance between them, and on June 1, Zendaya continued to add fuel to the fire with a birthday tribute to Holland.

'Pretty glad you were born...happy birthday @tomholland2013,' she wrote on a photo of him.

In 2017 a source told People that they were dating but had been 'super careful to keep it private.'

'They started seeing each other while they were filming Spider-Man. They've been super careful to keep it private and out of the public eye but they've gone on vacations with each other and try and spend as much time as possible with one another,' the insider said.

The Dune actress then took the matter to Twitter in July 2017, where she tried to shrug off the insider report. 'My favorite is when it says we go on vacations together HA! I haven't been on a vacation in years! hbu @tomholland1996???,' she wrote with laughing cry emojis.

Privacy: 'They've been super careful to keep it private and out of the public eye but they've gone on vacations with each other and try and spend as much time as possible with one another,' a PEOPLE insider said in 2017; pictured 2016

Shutting it down: 'My favorite is when it says we go on vacations together HA! I haven't been on a vacation in years! hbu @tomholland1996???,' she wrote with laughing cry emojis

Birthday wishes! On June 1, Zendaya wished Holland a happy birthday on Instagram. 'Pretty glad you were born...happy birthday @tomholland2013,' she wrote on a photo of him

Flirty: She publicly commented on a photo of them with a joke about him not knowing 'how to work instagram'

And a month later she told Variety they were just really good pals. 'He's literally one of my best friends. This past how many months we've had to do press tours together. There's very few people that will understand what that's like at 20 years old.'

But it seemed as if the pair took a break from dating, as in 2019 Tom was linked to Olivia Bolton before it was reported that they had split in April 2020 and just wanted to 'be friends.'

Zendaya on the other hand was linked to Euphoria co-star Jacob Elordi around that same time, but last fall he began dating now girlfriend Kaia Gerber.

In the British actor's recent GQ cover story Hollan continued to sing Zendaya's praises while revealing she had helped him to be more approachable when it came to fan encounters.

Platonic? 'He's literally one of my best friends,' the Euphoria star said of Holland in a Variety interview

Growth: 'She totally changed the way I am able to be more comfortable in public,' he revealed to GQ in April; pictured May 22

'Talking to Zendaya's helped me a lot, actually,' Holland said in April. 'I used to come across sometimes as a bit of a dick to fans, mainly as I was always so surprised that they'd want a picture with me or signature or whatever.

'Zendaya spotted this and quickly told me that this sort of reaction was going to be more aggro than just smiling and taking the picture. She totally changed the way I am able to be more comfortable in public,' he revealed.

Tom also said that dating in the public eye was one of the things he 'worried about most,' as an actor.

'It's very nerve-racking. It means that if you are dating someone, you have to be really conscious of their feelings, because if something does happen between the two of you, it's not just happening between the two of you, it's happening in front of the entire world. It's one of the things I worry about most, of all the things in my career.'
She has been keeping her followers updated on her Rome getaway.

And Kim Kardashian shared another slew of sizzling snaps on Friday, as she posed for an impromptu photo shoot in her hotel room before heading out into the city.

The TV sensation, 40, looked typically flawless as she flaunted her ample assets in a form-fitting cardigan, which she wore almost completely unbuttoned.

Wow! Kim Kardashian shared another slew of sizzling snaps on Friday, as she posed for an impromptu photo shoot in her hotel room before heading out into the city

Kim styled the garment with a tiny leather mini skirt, which boasted an eye-catching sequin dragon on the front.

The Keeiping Up With The Kardashians star boosted her frame with a pair of slip on red mules and accessoirsed with neon green cross earrings.

She wore her brunette locks in a long sleek style and opted for a flawless coat of make-up, which was no doubt expertly applied.

Sizzling: The TV sensation, 40, looked typically flawless as she flaunted her ample assets in a form-fitting cardigan, which she wore almost completely unbuttoned

Glam squad: In one behind the scenes snap Kim's make-up table which was covered in products was visible, along with her personal MUA Mario Dedivanovic

In one behind the scenes snap Kim's make-up table which was covered in products was visible, along with her personal MUA Mario Dedivanovic.

She captioned the gallery: 'Inches on the Roman Runway.'

On Thursday, Kim shared an inside look at her trip to the Vatican with supermodel Kate Moss, which took place earlier this week.

In the caption of the images, the reality personality, addressed backlash over the sexy lace dress she wore to the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church.

Sharing a slew of behind-the-scenes snaps from her visit, Kim insisted she had 'adhered to the dress code' while inside St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel's.

Poser: Kim shared an inside look at her trip to the Vatican with supermodel Kate Moss, which took place earlier this week

Posting the new images to Instagram on Thursday, Kim could not hide her excitement as she put on an animated display while posing during the outing and rocking her revealing off-the-shoulder lacy number.

Kim sizzled in her cut-out dress, which highlighted her trim waist and ample assets, and she styled with a pair of white sandals.

The beauty ensured all eyes were on her statement ensemble as she slicked her long locks back into a chic up do.

Other snaps from Kim's latest Instagram post showed her posing with supermodel Kate Moss, with both women covering their shoulders with jackets.

The stunning duo were also pictured walking around the Vatican - with Kate draping her black coat over her shoulders - and posing on some steps with their teams.

Playing by the rules: Kim posed for a snap with supermodel Kate Moss, with them both covering their shoulders with jackets

'Don't worry, I adhered to the dress code!': Kim explained that she was 'fully covered up' while inside St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel's)'

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

Kate's daughter Lila was also present for the tour and rocked a bright blue dress under a black jacket in the group picture.

Never one to miss a photo opportunity, Kim also posed up a storm in a dramatic window and flashed a smile over a shoulder while sitting in her black car.

Sharing her snaps, Kim penned: 'We had the most incredible experience touring Vatican City @vaticanmuseums.

'It was amazing to be able to view all of the iconic art, architecture and ancient Roman sculptures in person, especially Michelangelo's works.

'We even had an opportunity to view their private archive of robes worn by every pope in history, dating back to the 1500's.

'Thank you @ocspecial for arranging the visit. (Don't worry, I adhered to the dress code and fully covered up while inside St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel's).'

Kim had appeared to fail to adhere to the church's strict rules by wearing a sexy lace dress which didn't cover her shoulders and had cut-out sections throughout her mid-section for the visit.

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).

Off they go: The women also posed with their backs to the camera while walking around the Vatican on their guided tour

Stunning: Never one to miss a photo opportunity, Kim also posed up a storm in a dramatic window

Group picture: Kim also posed with her team as well as Kate and Kate's daughter Lila Grace

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.

Chatting away: Kate and Kim seemed to be getting along very well as they smiled and talked

Work it: Kim also posed outside with a statue, ensuring to work all her angles in the skin-tight ensemble

Kim also uploaded 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.

Kim, 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.

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

Good morning! Kim looked ready to take on another day of exploring the city as she posed for a sultry topless snap in the bed of her hotel room on Thursday

Kim has been putting on a show-stopping display during her sightseeing visit to Rome over the past week - with her looks including a racy look for the Vatican and even having her very own Dolce Vita moment at the Trevi Fountain.

While on Thursday, Kim looked ready to take on another day of exploring the city as she posed for a sultry topless snap in her hotel room.

She exuded glamour in the snap as she gazed seductively down the lens with just her bed sheets protecting her modesty.

Making bed hair look catwalk ready, the mother-of-four wore her tresses in loose waves, while she wore minimal make-up to enhance her pretty features. Kim captioned the sultry snap: 'Good Morning Rome. Good Night LA'.

Kim's estranged husband Kanye, meanwhile, looked every inch the doting dad as he cuddled his eldest daughter North, eight, at Mexico Airport on Wednesday.

Style: Kim styled her stunning dress with cream heels and sunglasses

Model: She exuded confidence while strutting towards the camera on her outing this week

The rapper, 44, was on daddy duty as he sat with North, son Saint, five, daughter Chicago. three, and Psalm, two, on a ledge in the terminal ahead of the flight back to Los Angeles.

Kanye appeared to have handed North his phone so as to keep her entertained while they waited. The youngster was clad in a light grey tracksuit and wore a black face mask under her chin.

Saint, meanwhile looked effortlessly cool in a green T-shirt and red trousers, while a nanny helped looked after the other children.

Kanye and the kids arrived in Mexico on June 20 and then headed to his retreat located on the Oaxaca coast.

The former couple plan to have to joint custody of their children amid their divorce.
She was enjoying a picturesque trip to the Greek island of Mykonos with her husband Justin Bieber just days earlier.

But it was back to work for Hailey Bieber on Friday when she was seen leaving her office in West Hollywood.

The 24-year-old model managed to pair her flawless fashion instincts with some business-ready items including an striping gray blazer.

Out of office: Hailey Bieber, 24, was read for business in a gray double-breasted blazer and gray gingham slacks as she left her office in West Hollywood on Friday

Hailey had on a short double-breasted blazer with wide peaked lapels and imposing padded shoulders.

She left it open to show off her toned tummy thanks to her simple black crop top.

The 5ft7in beauty contrasted her pinstripe jacket with high-waisted pleated pants in a gingham pattern.

She had her dirty blond locks styled straight and cascading down her back, and she rounded out her ensemble with some low-key white trainers to dress it down.

Back home again: She showed off her taut tummy in a black crop top. Hailey was back in LA after a vacation with husband Justin Bieber to France and Greece

Hailey also accessorized with a black handbag and slim black sunglasses to tone down the piercing sun.

She was prepared for it to get chilly later in the day with a balled-up cream-colored sweatshirt wedged under her arm.

The daughter of Stephen Baldwin has been in travel mode throughout June.

Earlier in the month, she shared photos from a tropical vacation at the beach with Justin, before jetting off to Mexico's Cabo San Lucas with her close friend Kendall Jenner and some of their female pals.

On June 21, she and the pop star stopped by Paris and had a private meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife to reportedly discuss 'youth issues' on a music-themed French holiday.

High-profile meeting: On June 21, she and the pop star had a private meeting in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife to reportedly discuss 'youth issues'

Stunning: The couple's European vacation then headed toward the Mediterranean for a gorgeous Greek vacation with trips to the islands of Paros, Milos and Mykonos

The couple's European vacation then headed toward the Mediterranean for a gorgeous Greek vacation with trips to the islands of Paros, Milos and Mykonos.

She shared several photos of the stunning scenery, along with some cute snaps of her and Justin together, including a steamy photo of herself in a green bikini sitting between her husbands legs on a jet ski.

Hailey famously met Justin backstage at one of his concerts in 2009, when they were both just teenagers.

After a brief romance in late 2015 and early 2016, they called it quits, only to reunite in the summer of 2018.

They got engaged later that summer and confirmed in the fall of 2018 that they had married in a secret ceremony, though they later had a larger wedding for friends and family in South Carolina in September 2019.

Cover model: Hailey's career marched on, and she revealed on Thursday that she graces one of the 'icon' covers for the 'Golden Age' issue of V Magazine , photographed by Inez and Vinoodh

Even though she was enjoying fun in the sun, Hailey's career marched on, and she revealed on Thursday that she graces one of the 'icon' covers for the 'Golden Age' issue of V Magazine, photographed by Inez and Vinoodh.

'For me, beyond my career, I would love for people to look back and think back on how I made them feel,' the Arizona-born beauty told the magazine.

'I hope that I've made the people around me and that people I've worked with feel good and leave feeling better than they came in.'
She debuted her shorter hair last week.

And Katie Holmes stepped out showing off her new long bob on Friday, keeping it casual as she ran some errands in her neighborhood in Manhattan.

The 42-year-old actress donned a cream hooded sweater and some black pants as she rummaged around in a patterned tote bag on her walk.

On the go: Katie Holmes is pictured out in New York on Friday, dressed casually as she ran some errands

Completing her off duty look, the Batman Begins star wore some black Birkenstocks and some sunglasses with tan trim.

Katie appears to have opted for a fresh look following her split from younger beau Emilio Vitolo Jr.

Katie, who is mom to daughter Suri, 15, with ex Tom Cruise, split from Vitolo Jr., 33, in April after nine months of dating.

'They figured out theyre better off as friends. Theres no drama that went down with the breakup and in fact, theyre still friends.' a source told Us Weekly at the time.

Casual: Completing her off duty look, the Batman Begins star wore a hoodie and some black Birkenstocks

Fresh look: Katie showed off her new shorter hairstyle earlier this week. Seen here on Tuesday

Emilio collaborates with his father to run the popular Italian restaurant Emilio's Ballato, a favorite of celebrity visitors including Tom Hanks, Bradley Cooper and even former president Barack Obama.

His romance with Katie reportedly faded after she left for Connecticut to film her second feature as a director.

She stars in the untitled film with Jim Sturgess as two strangers stuck in unhealthy relationships who find themselves forced to quarantine together at an Upstate New York Airbnb, according to Deadline.

Katie, who is mom to daughter Suri, 15, with ex Tom Cruise, split from Emilio Vitolo Jr., 33, in April after nine months of dating. Seen here in September

According to ET, Katie took a 'wait and see' approach to her relationship while she was out of the state filming.

'Before she left, [Katie and Emilio] were inseparable, but their relationship was existing in a bubble,' said an insider. 'Because of the pandemic, she wasn't jet setting around the country for jobs and he wasn't tied up every night working at his family's restaurant.'

But once their regular social lives resumed, the couple found they were not 'as compatible anymore.'
ST. PAUL, Ore. (AP)  On his 38th birthday, Sebastian Francisco Perez, an immigrant from Guatemala, played chess with his nephew. The next day, he went to work at a nursery in a rural Oregon town as the thermometer soared well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius).

Perez collapsed that day, June 26, as a heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest in all-time, record-high temperatures. The workers had been moving irrigation lines when they noticed Perez wasn't there and found him. They called his nephew, Pedro Lucas, who arrived to find his uncle unconscious and dying.

Paramedics tried to revive him, but Perez didn't make it. A database of the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division listed his death as heat-related.

Hundreds of people are believed to have died from Friday to Tuesday in the historic heat wave that hit Oregon, Washington state and British Columbia. The death of Perez underscores the dangers that farm workers, most of them immigrants, face as they work under the hot sun, driving rain and snow, often packed in vans to travel to job sites.

In 2019, two of Lucas' cousins and a third person were killed when a pickup truck slammed into a van near Salem, Oregon, carrying them and 10 other Guatemalans home from work at a Christmas tree farm.

The fact that tragedy has struck Lucas' family again leaves him in disbelief.

I dont understand the things that sometimes happen, Lucas said in a phone interview in Spanish.

Last time, he used donations to pay a funeral home to have the bodies of his two cousins and the other man returned to Guatemala from Oregon.

Lucas said the family is awaiting an autopsy report on Perez. Lucas said Perez had worked in the heat before and did fine.

Perez had lived in the United States before, and returned about four months ago. He supported his wife, who stayed home in Ixcan, Guatemala, a town near the Mexico border.

He liked to be in the United States," Lucas said. "In Guatemala, the economy is not good. There's a lot of poverty, so you look out for your welfare and your future.

Reyna Lopez, executive director of a northwest farmworkers' union, known by its Spanish-language initials, PCUN, called the death shameful and faulted both the nursery and Oregon OSHA for not adopting emergency rules ahead of the heat wave.

Spokesman Aaron Corvin said Oregon OSHA is exploring adopting emergency requirements, and we continue to engage in discussions with labor and employer stakeholders.

He added that employers are obligated to provide ample water, shade, additional breaks and training about heat hazards.

An executive order issued in March 2020 by Oregon Gov. Kate Brown would formalize protecting workers from heat, but it is coming too late for Perez. Brown's order focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and also tells the Oregon Health Authority and Oregon OSHA to jointly propose standards to protect workers from excessive heat and wildfire smoke.

They had until June 30 to submit the proposals, but due to the coronavirus pandemic, the two agencies requested the deadline be pushed back to September.

Lucas remembers his uncle's last night as one of joy as they played games.

He was happy with me that night," Lucas said.

___

Selsky reported from Salem, Oregon.

___

Follow Andrew Selsky on Twitter at https://twitter.com/andrewselsky
Hearst Connecticut Media

To the Editor:

In response to the writer who complained of Pride flags. I dont believe we need to be asked about personal expression. I believe it falls under free speech. I for one was not fed up but impressed with town businesses willingness to be so open and accepting.
Daytona Beach, FL (32114)

Today

Sunshine and clouds mixed. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 86F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy with a slight chance of thunderstorms overnight. Low around 75F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
Daytona Beach, FL (32114)

Today

A mix of clouds and sun. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 86F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy with a slight chance of thunderstorms. Low around 75F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
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New Delhi: If an abducted person is not assaulted or threatened to be killed and treated well, then the kidnapper cannot be sentenced to life imprisonment under Section 364A of Indian Penal Code, the Supreme Court has said.

A bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and R. Subhash Reddy made the observation while setting aside the conviction of an autorickshaw driver, Shaik Ahmed of Hyderabad, who had kidnapped a minor, Class 6 student of St Marys High School, Rezimental Bazaar, Secunderabad in 2011 and demanded a ransom of Rs 2 lakh from his father.

The top court said that there are three essential ingredients to convict an accused under Section 364A (kidnapping for ransom) which need to be proved by prosecution.

It said the three essential ingredients are - kidnapping or abduction of any person or keeping him in detention; threatening to cause death or hurt to such person, or the kidnapper's conduct gives rise to a reasonable apprehension that victim may be put to death or hurt in order to compel the Government, foreign State or any Governmental organization or any other person to pay a ransom.

Referring to the punishment of life or death sentence provided for convictions under Section 364A, the top court said, In addition to the first condition either condition (ii) or (iii) has to be proved, failing which conviction under Section 364A cannot be sustained.

The top court was hearing an appeal filed by Telangana resident Shaik Ahmed challenging a high court order.

The High Court had dismissed his plea against conviction and sentence of life imprisonment under section 364 A of the IPC.

Shaik Ahmed had kidnapped a Class 6 student of St Marys High School on the pretext of dropping him home. The child was rescued by police when the child's father went to pay the ransom. The child, who was 13 years old at the time of incident in 2011, and his father had told the lower court that Ahmed never threatened to kill or harm the boy.

The top court set aside the conviction under section 364 A of the IPC.

From the evidence on record regarding kidnapping, it is proved that accused had kidnapped the victim for ransom, demand of ransom was also proved. Even though offence under Section 364A has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt but the offence of kidnapping has been fully established to which effect the learned Sessions Judge has recorded a categorical finding.

The offence of kidnapping having been proved, the appellant deserves to be convicted under Section 363 (Punishment for kidnapping). Section 363 provides for punishment which is imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to seven years and shall also be liable to fine, the bench said.

The apex court said that it is satisfied that the appellant deserves to be sentenced with imprisonment of seven years and also liable to pay fine of Rs 5,000.
Studies, Justice Ramana said, had shown that knowledge and awareness was negligible in rural India on diabetes. (PTI)

Hyderabad: Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana said huge economic losses inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic on India, and across the globe, should wake us up to the reality that there is no substitute for a free and universal public healthcare system that focuses on disease prevention.

The government, the Chief Justice of India said, was not giving priority to the medical sector or issues of immediate concern.

Launching the Defeat Diabetes campaign by the Research Society for the Study of Diabetes in India on Thursday, Justice Ramana, in a virtual address, said if diabetes was to be battled effectively, the state had to come up with a comprehensive policy framework in which awareness campaign became a part of diabetes eradication endeavours.

For the programme to be successful, it needs to be integrated into a free and universal public healthcare system. Left to individuals, we will never reach the goal, Justice Ramana said.

On the rising diabetes cases in India, he said, One must pause and wonder about the implications of this on the already strained healthcare system in the country. Formulating public healthcare policies based on intense scientific research is needed.

Studies, Justice Ramana said, had shown that knowledge and awareness was negligible in rural India on diabetes. The knowledge gap leads to myths like it is the obese, those who consume more sugar, are the ones who get the disease, or that it is contagious and the one that says women are immune to the disease.

Where there is room for myths, there is room for quackery. Quackery is the biggest disease affecting India. Quackery begins where awareness ends, he said.

Quoting the Telugu saying Aarogyamey mahabhagyam, the Chief Justice of India said it was the universal truth that health was wealth. Any investment is justified to acquire this wealth because only a healthy nation can become a wealthy nation, he said.

Here are a few thoughts and facts for all stakeholders to ponder over, he said, adding, Our doctors are being attacked while on duty. Why is it that our medical professionals are at the receiving end for someone elses failure?

This, the Chief Justice said, was because of insufficient number of medical professionals, insufficient infrastructure, lack of medicines and outdated technologies. The government was not giving priority to the medical sector or issues of immediate concern, he said.

Justice Ramana also said it was saddening to see how a good qualified doctor cannot start a hospital on his own and survive. Why is profiteering by corporators being blamed on doctors? After years of learning, doctors struggle to get decent salaries. The medical bodies and concerned agencies in the government should put their heads together to address these concerns, he added.

Only then, the Chief Justice of India said, can we sincerely greet the doctors on the first of July every year.

Calling doctors living Gods, Justice Ramana said no other professional could render sacrifices as valuable as those made by doctors. IMA data suggested that more than 798 doctors lost their lives in the second wave of pandemic, he said, adding that his heartfelt sympathies were with the families of medical professionals and health workers who lost their lives while saving the lives of patients during the pandemic.
Earlier, the High Court had issued interim orders to constitute the board and start the registration of unorganised sector workers and issue identity cards to them. (PTI)

Hyderabad: The Telangana High Court has directed the state government to implement the recent directions issued by the Supreme Court for registration of the unorganised sector workforce. The apex court had set a deadline for the Centre to complete the process by July 31.

The case came up at the High Court as a public interest litigation filed by Damodar Rajanarasimha, former deputy chief minister. He referred to the failure of the state government in constituting the state-level social security board (SSB).

He also sought directions to the government to identify, register and maintain the database of the unorganized workers, formulate a comprehensive policy and appropriate social security schemes for all sections of unorganised workforce as stipulated under Act 33 of 2008.

Earlier, the High Court had issued interim orders to constitute the board and start the registration of unorganised sector workers and issue identity cards to them.

The matter came up afresh before the division bench comprising Chief Justice Hima Kohli and Justice Vijaysen Reddy. The bench asked why there was non-compliance of its directions for starting the registration process.

Advocate-General B.S. Prasad informed the bench that the state government has constituted the state-level SSB with 28 members. It has identified 29,000 workers from the unorganised sector.

He said all the departments concerned had commenced the work of enumeration and identification of such workers including those in the construction sector, brick kilns, hotels, rice mills, manufacturing units and domestic sectors. He assured the court that the state government will implement all the directions issued by the Supreme Court.

Recording the Advocate-General's submissions, the bench directed the labour department secretary to complete the registration process within four weeks and submit the status report along with the information on social security schemes that are on offer for the underprivileged workers. The case has been listed for hearing on August 25.
Sulthana was interrogated by the Kavaratti police thrice last week in connection with the case. (Twitter)

Kochi: The Kerala High Court on Friday refused to stay further proceedings in the sedition case registered against Lakshadweep filmmaker Ayesha Sulthana.

Considering a plea filed by Sulthana seeking to quash the FIR registered against her by the Kavaratti police, the High Court said investigation in the case was in a preliminary stage and more time may be required for completing the probe.

Refusing to stay further proceedings in the case, the court directed the Lakshadweep administration to provide details of the investigation.

When the matter was taken up, the counsel for the administration opposed the plea, submitting that the investigation in the case was in a preliminary stage.

A case was registered on June 9 under Section 124-A (sedition) and 153 B (hate speech) of IPC on the basis of a petition lodged by a political leader hailing from Kavaratti.

Last week, the High Court had granted anticipatory bail to Sulthana in the sedition case.

Granting bail, Justice Ashok Menon had said there was no apparent indication in her statement, which amounts to imputations or assertions prejudicial to the national interest, nor does it propagate any class of persons against another group of persons.

Sulthana was interrogated by the Kavaratti police thrice last week in connection with the case.
There was no official comment on the incident. (Photo: AFP/File)

New Delhi: A drone was spotted over the Indian High Commission complex in Islamabad late last week, prompting India to lodge a strong protest with Pakistan over the incident, people familiar with the development said on Friday.

They said India considered the incident as a breach of security that triggered concerns in the mission.

The Indian mission has already taken up the issue strongly with the Pakistani authorities through a note verbale.

There was no official comment on the incident yet that came to light amid growing concerns in the security establishment in India after explosives-laden drones were used to carry out an attack on the Jammu Air Force station on June 27.

According to security officials, it was the first instance of suspected Pakistan-based terrorists deploying unmanned aerial vehicles to strike at vital installations in India.

Army Chief Gen MM Naravane on Thursday said that the easy availability of drones has increased the complexity of security challenges from both state and state-sponsored actors.

A day after the attack on the Air Force station attempts to target the Ratnuchak-Kaluchak military station in Jammu with drones was thwarted by soldiers.
A national level consultation on Covid vaccination for pregnant women was also convened by the health ministry to build consensus on Covid vaccination of pregnant women. (Photo: ANI)

New Delhi: Pregnant women in India are now eligible to get vaccinated against Covid with the union health ministry Friday giving the approval based on recommendations of the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI).

The decision empowers pregnant women to make an informed choice on taking the Covid vaccination, the ministry said, adding these women can now register on CoWIN or walk-in to the nearest Covid vaccination centre to get themselves inoculated.

The decision has been communicated to all the states and union territories to implement it under the ongoing National Covid Vaccination Program, it said in a statement.

India's Covid vaccination program incorporates recommendations of the foremost experts in the field of immunization, public health, disease control and information technology.

Based on scientific and epidemiological evidence, the programme gives priority to strengthening the country's healthcare system by protecting the professionals, health and frontline workers, manning it, as well as protecting the most vulnerable population groups, the ministry said.

Till now, all groups except pregnant women were eligible for Covid vaccination. Now, it is expanded to even pregnant women in the world's largest immunization drive, the statement said.

Studies have shown that Covid infection during pregnancy may result in rapid deterioration of health of pregnant women and they are at an increased risk of severe diseases and it might affect fetus too, it said.

The matter has been examined by domain knowledge experts based on the evidence that indicate that pregnant women are at an increased risk for severe illness from Covid compared to non-pregnant women in case they get infected.

"Further, pregnant women with COVID-19 infection are at an increased risk for preterm birth and other adverse pregnancy outcomes including higher chances of neonatal morbidity. Additionally, the experts have also highlighted pre-existing co-morbidities, advanced maternal age, and high body mass Index as factors for severe COVID-19 in pregnancy," the statement said.

The NTAGI has recommended vaccination for pregnant women. The National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19 (NEGVAC) too has unanimously recommended it. Further, a national level consultation on Covid vaccination for pregnant women was also convened by the health ministry to build consensus on Covid vaccination of pregnant women.

The consultation unanimously welcomed the recommendation of NTAGI to vaccinate pregnant women. The consultation included professional bodies like FOGSI, representatives of state governments, CSOs, NGOs, Development Partner agencies, technical experts etc.

The ministry has accepted these recommendations and prepared an operational guideline for vaccination of pregnant women, counselling kit for medical officers and frontline workers, and information education communication material for general public to equip the states and union territories to carry out the vaccination of pregnant women.

Pregnant women, who opt for vaccination, can be inoculated with Covid vaccines available in the country any time during their pregnancy at the nearest government or private vaccination centre after registration on CoWIN or by walk-in registration at the nearest centre, the statement said.

The procedures and modalities like registration, generation of certificates after vaccination etc. will remain the same as it is for any beneficiaries above 18 years of age under the Covid vaccination programme, it said.
VIJAYAWADA: The YSRC government on Thursday revised the guidelines for the YSR Bima scheme enabling the state government to directly pay the insurance amount to family of the deceased and make insurance claims easier. This was necessitated after the Centre, paying 50 per cent of premium, stopped paying its share from April 2020, forcing the AP government to step in. Apart from that the Centre also put more clauses and closed the existing group insurance system and made it mandatory that every person in the family has a bank account.

Chief Minister Y.S . Jagan Mohan Reddy pointed that the state government had brought 1.2 crore families under the insurance coverage and paid premium to banks. However, only 62.5 lakh accounts could be opened and the remaining accounts were yet to be opened by banks though AP had credited the insurance premium. He mentioned that the banks which had to follow up about individual insurance claims with the insurance firms to process the registration were unable to do so on time. This bottleneck led to a severe delay in receipt of claims.

In an additional clause put by the Centre, a 45-day lien period from the day of account opening meant that if someone dies within 45 days, the insurance will not be paid. Due to this, around 12,039 families who lost someone, after being enrolled with the 45-day lien period, were not eligible for the claims. The Chief Minister said that due to this, the state government came forward and paid for all those 12,039 claims at a cost of Rs 254 crore.

After witnessing all the chaos, the government took the entire responsibility of the scheme and shall clear the claims within one month of receiving the application. The responsibility for screening of insurance applications has been given to village/ward secretariats monitored by the Joint Collectors. Any eligible person who was left out from YSR Bima can call toll free number 155214 for getting registered or to resolve their issues related, the Chief Minister said.

The Chief Minister launched the 'YSR Bima' scheme with the new guidelines on Thursday. He said that in order to support 1.32 lakh families through the scheme, the state government had allocated Rs 750 crore for the year 2021-22. In the last two years, the state government had spent Rs 1,307 crore for YSR Bima.

Speaking on the occasion, the Chief Minister said that the government has prioritised public health care soon after forming the government. The annual income for being eligible under Aarogyasri scheme was fixed at Rs 5 lakh and the number of treatments increased to 2,450.

He recalled that as per promises made during elections, the government had launched YSR Bima, an insurance scheme to support those families who lost their breadwinner. He further stated that about 1.30 lakh families have been brought under the insurance coverage.

Under the scheme, an insurance amount of Rs 1 lakh will be paid if the beneficiary aged between 18 to 50 years, who is a breadwinner of the family, succumbs to natural death. A sum of Rs 5 lakh will be paid if the beneficiary in the 18 to 70 age group dies in an accident.

Minister for labour and employment Gummanuru Jayaram, Special Chief Secretary, Labour, G. Anantharamu, Special Chief Secretary Ajay Jain, Principal Secretary (PR&RD) Gopalakrishna Dwivedi, Special Commissioner (Labour) Rekha Rani, SERP CEO Rajababu and other officials were present at the event.
VIJAYAWADA: The Andhra Pradesh governments long-pending demand for monitoring of common projects like Srisailam and Nagarjunasagar on the Krishna river by the Krishna River Management Board (KRMB), has resurfaced in the wake of the dispute over sharing of water between Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

Water resources authorities said that at the time of bifurcation in 2014, there was a demand to keep these projects under the control of the KRMB so that it can oversee the maintenance of these projects and resolve any dispute on the river between the two governments

Similarly, there is also a demand to deploy Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) personnel at such projects instead of the present practice of deploying police by both the states in their respective areas which causes tension at the project sites. It may be mentioned that AP water resources officials were not allowed by the Telangana state police at Nagarjunasagar dam when they tried to meet their counterparts from Telangana to talk about the water dispute. Telangana state officials refused to meet their AP counterparts.

AP Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Jal Shakti minister Gajendra Singh Shekawat on the states water dispute with Telangana, and the AP government is eagerly waiting for their responses. Speaking to this correspondent, AP water resources engineer-in-chief C. Narayana Reddy said, We are awaiting the Centres response on the Krishna water dispute and we are also working on some remedies to resolve the issue.

On the other hand, the Telangana state government is continuing hydroelectric power generation from all three projects - Srisailam, Nagarjunasagar and Pulichinthala in the last few days by releasing nearly two to three tmc ft of water. AP authorities raise concern over release of water resulting in depletion of available quantum of water in the Krishna river catchment areas upstream with no sign of rainfall and also no hint of any floods.

The AP authorities say that the TS government is flouting Pulichintala project protocol by releasing water for generation of hydroelectric power even though water should be released based on needs of the delta area for cultivation of crops and for drinking water purposes. They maintain that the TS government move is even affecting its own farmers as they require water for cultivation of crops falling in Nagarjunasagar left main canal command area.

Nagarjunasagar right main canal superintendent engineer Ch. Purushottama Ganga Raju told this correspondent, We are preparing our case strongly as to how the Telangana government is flouting all norms to draw water from three common irrigation projects for power generation to present before the KRMB. We expect an amicable solution for the water dispute.Meanwhile, the KRMB has warned the TS government that whatever quantum of water it was drawing from the projects would be considered as usage of its share of water.

The discharged water from the upstream projects is reaching downstream resulting in Prakasam barrage receiving good inflow of water.

Krishna river conservator A. Raja Swaroop Kumar said, We have lifted 20 gates out of the total 70 at the barrage and released nearly 8,500 cusecs of water downstream into the sea.

Moreover, there is a demand to expedite construction of a new barrage across the Krishna river at Damuluru of Ibrahimpatnam mandal in Krishna district, located at 23 km distance upstream from Prakasam barrage as it is designed to store nearly 10 tmc ft of water in its reservoir and estimated to cost nearly Rs 2,000 crore. The project has gone for retendering process at present. If this project is executed, it will help store water instead of draining into the sea as Prakasam barrage has storage capacity of just 3.07 tmc ft.
If the founding of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai in 1921 in the shadow of the Russian revolution of 1917  Ten Days that Shook the World  as the title of a famous contemporary book by an American journalist put it  was an event that would hardly have been noticed, CPCs July 1 centenary would be analysed around the world. This is chiefly on account of the speech of Xi Jinping, who is CPC general secretary and President of his country for life.

It is a speech that sets out Chinas vision of the next one hundred to build a mighty military machine. This seems an eerie recall of Hitlers resolve as he went about building the Third Reich. In his hour-long address, Mr Xi noted that on the journey ahead the country and the Party should always be prepared for potential dangers and balance development and security imperatives.

For India, which has come to share a border with China in its Himalayan north and east after the obliteration of Tibets national status and Chinas militarist push through Aksai Chin into Indian Ladakh, the special address brings home the fact that India will be face to face with a national security state where the peoples military will be the driving force in securing Chinas vision of the next one hundred years.

Under the leadership of the Communist Party, the peoples military will be the strong pillar of strengthening socialism. China, Mr Xi warned, wont accept sanctimonious preaching from those who think they have a right to lecture us. This is no doubt upbraiding the US (which is in the habit of pointing fingers at those that dont show it love and affection).

Chinas leader also declared that his country will not tolerate any power trying to bully or subjugate it. Any attempt to do so will be on a collision course with a great wall of steel. It needs to be clarified that while some of the international news reporting on the centenary event in Beijing speaks of Mr Xi warning of broken heads and bloodshed if there is a bid to bully China, the official English language version of the speech circulated by the Chinese news agency Xinhua (and carried on the portal of Nikkei Asia) carries no such reference. If the official English version has been duly edited under the Partys guidance to soften the original, then India should take note. It is broken heads and bloodshed that was headline news from Galwan in June 2020.

Mr Xis special address collapses the Communist Party, the Chinese state, and the Chinese people, making clear Chinas intention to perpetuate its one-party State. It opens with the sentence that July 1 was a great and solemn day in the history of the CPC and the Chinese nation.

Chinas strongman says that socialism with Chinese characteristics transformed the country, through reforms, from being a highly centralised planned economy to becoming a socialist market economy. It is this which had made China a moderately prosperous society in all respects and the country is on course to becoming a great modern socialist country in all respects in the next one hundred years.

Evidently, the Vietnam Communists paid greater attention to the military state aspect and did not send Mr Xis felicitations on the big day, but the CPI(M) and the CPI did. Both noted Chinas success against the pandemic. CPI highlighted the need for peace on the border while the CPI(M) eulogised CPCs history.
The UK government is preparing to offer millions of vulnerable Britons, who have received two doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, a booster jab from September to ensure that the protection is maintained against new variants of the coronavirus before winter comes, according to media reports here.

The National Health Service (NHS) has been given the green light to start planning a Covid vaccine booster programme, the BBC reported.

Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid said ministers were working with the NHS to rapidly deliver the programme from September.

Read more: Centre may issue e-vouchers to economically weaker sections to get Covid vaccine at private centres

"Our first Covid-19 vaccination programme is restoring freedom in this country, and our booster programme will protect this freedom," he said.

The Department of Health said the plan had been drawn up following advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) and will take place alongside the annual flu jab rollout, according to the Express newspaper.

Interim advice from the JCVI is that boosters will help maintain protection against Covid-19 and new variants for those most at risk before winter comes.

Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi said, "Our Covid-19 vaccination programme has been a roaring success, with almost 85 per cent of adults across the UK receiving a first dose and more than 62 per cent getting both doses."

"We are now planning ahead to future-proof this progress and protect our most vulnerable from variants and flu ahead of the winter," he said.

More than 30 million of the most vulnerable should receive a third dose, vaccine experts are advising.

They will include all adults aged 50 and over, and anyone younger who qualifies for a flu jab.

Health service bosses had previously said they needed lots of warning of an autumn Covid-19 booster rollout to plan the logistics alongside vaccinating millions of people against flu, the BBC said.

The vaccines are thought to protect most people against serious illness for at least six months, but a lack of data on exactly how long immunity lasts is prompting a safety-first approach, it said.

No decisions have yet been made on which vaccines will be used.

Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, said, "We want to be on the front foot for Covid-19 booster vaccination to keep the probability of loss of vaccine protection, due to waning immunity or variants, as low as possible - especially over the coming autumn and winter."

He said other respiratory viruses, particularly flu, "will make a comeback" and be an additional problem this winter.

"We will need to ensure protection against flu, as well as maintaining protection against Covid-19," Prof Van-Tam said.

The JCVI's final advice will be published before September when better data will be available on how long protection from the first two doses of the vaccines lasts.

The latest figures on hospitalisations, emerging variants and trials will also be taken into account at that point, and could change their advice.

The government said that a final decision on whether a vaccine booster campaign was needed had not been made, but officials had advised that preparations should begin on a precautionary basis.

The JCVI advised the programme should take place in two stages, with the first round focusing on frontline health and social care workers, clinically vulnerable people, care home residents and those who are immunosuppressed.

All adults over 70 will also fall into this category.

Once these batches of people have been offered their booster vaccine, the next stage will concentrate on three categories.

These include all adults over 50, adults under 50 who are in high-risk groups and adults living with immunosuppressed individuals.

Prof Wei Shen Lim, Covid-19 chair for JCVI, said all these groups would also be eligible for the annual flu vaccine and were strongly advised to have it.

Younger adults will be not be given a third dose, because they will only have had their second dose in the summer, although this decision will be revisited at a later time, the JCVI said.

The latest data from the Government shows 44.7 million people have received their first dose and 32.8 million are fully inoculated with two jabs.

The UK on Wednesday recorded a further 26,068 cases of Covid-19, the highest daily figure since January 29.

The total number of coronavirus cases in the country now stands at 4,800,907 with 128,140 deaths.
India's Ambassador to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu on Thursday interacted with White House fellows and discussed with them the intricacies of diplomacy and the relationship between the world's oldest and largest democracies.

Sandhu, in a tweet, said "an enjoyable and substantial interaction" with the White House fellows at Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is part of the White House complex.

Also Read | Women make up 60% of White House staff, diversity total at 44%

"Covered wide areas ranging from diplomacy, India-US relations, regional developments, healthcare, energy, environment, IT and education with this group of young emerging American leaders in different fields! he added.

An enjoyable & substantial interaction w/ @WhiteHouse Fellows today at #EEOB. Covered wide areas ranging from #diplomacy, #India - #US relations, regional developments, healthcare, energy, envrnmnt , IT & edn. w/ this group of young emerging American leaders in different fields! pic.twitter.com/RgXxcg3wgp  Taranjit Singh Sandhu (@SandhuTaranjitS) July 1, 2021

Founded in 1964, the White House Fellowship is a non-partisan programme that brings young leaders into the federal government to provide first-hand experience working at the highest levels of government.

A key element of this unique fellowship is the education programme in which prominent leaders from across society meet the fellows.

In the past, the fellows have heard from dignitaries like Colin Powell, the former secretary of state.

Sandhu was the first one to be invited under the Biden administration to this interaction.

In the past, several Indian-Americans have been selected for the prestigious fellowship. Prominent among them include Dr Sanjay Gupta of CNN, Rajeev Venkayya, EVP Vaccines, Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

Indian-American Priya Dandiya from Florida is a White House fellow for the year 2020-21.

Pia is the founding principal of Democracy Prep Endurance High School in Harlem, New York. Every single graduate of her school went on to attend college despite nearly all living below the poverty line.
Pakistans desire to improve relations with the US is unlikely to happen unless Islamabad changes its policies on terrorism and its relations with China and India, according to two eminent American experts.

Addressing a seminar on US-Pakistan Relations after US Withdrawal from Afghanistan, Lisa Curtis, former Senior Director at the National Security Council and Senior Fellow at the Center for New American Security, said that strategic partners need converging strategic interests, and currently Pakistan and the US disagree on Afghanistan and China.

Curtis told a seminar organised by the Hudson Institute on Tuesday that Pakistans policies supporting the Taliban were not in its own interests.

If the Taliban does become ascendant in Afghanistan, which seems to be the direction we are headed, that there will be blowback in Pakistan from militants that target the Pakistani state, Curtis told the participants.

Pakistan would be better off trying to come to some form of modus vivendi with India, she added.

The seminar was moderated by Husain Haqqani, Director for South and Central Asia at Hudson Institute, who had once served as Pakistans ambassador to the United States.

Curtis, who was the Trump administrations point person for South Asia, said that the aid suspension under the Trump administration helped the US to realise that Pakistan would never really crack down on the Taliban and Taliban would never really cut ties with Al Qaeda.

Also Read | US hands Bagram Airfield to Afghans after nearly 20 years; Army to keep airstrike option till September

Joshua White, who served at the White House in the Obama administration and is now a professor at the School for Advanced International Studies, said that the US once again finds itself with a growing dependency on Pakistan while withdrawing from Afghanistan but this time Americans do not want to rush in with financial incentives to get Pakistans cooperation.

In previous cycles when the US needed Pakistan, White noted, the US would offer military sales, security cooperation of some kind, some form of economic assistance  overt or covert  and that would form the basis of a reasonable exchange.

But this time, there is no support within the US for large scale financial payments or security assistance to Pakistan.

White attributed the American reluctance to the close Pakistan-China relationship and the strong India-US partnership and noted that any secret arrangements like in the past have become more difficult.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan recently said that his country was seeking a "civilised" and "even-handed" relationship with Washington like the one that existed between the US and the UK or with India "right now" after America leaves war-torn Afghanistan.

Imran recalled that Pakistan has had a closer relationship with the US than other nations in the region, such as India, and was a US partner in the war against terrorism.

"Now, after the US leaves Afghanistan, basically Pakistan would want a civilised relationship, which you have between nations, and we would like to improve our trading relationship with the US," he told The New York Times, adding "the relationship during the war on terror was a bit lopsided".

The prime minister said that his government wanted the future relationship to be based on trust and common objectives, including a peaceful and stable Afghanistan.
Windows 11 - How to install the preview Dev release

Updated: Date, Year

Ah, Windows 11. The last Windows you'll ever need ... plus one. Marketing slogans aside, let's focus on the technical bits and pieces. Mostly. As it happens, in June, Microsoft announced the next major release of their operating system. It's going to be called Windows 11, it comes with a revamped user interface, it has new hardware requirements, and a few other important details. Before we can discuss all of those, we need to set up Windows 11.

This turned out to be far harder than I wanted or expected. As a member of the Windows Insider Program since the early days of Windows 10, I have been able to enroll various devices and try new builds without any issues. However, this time, I hit a whole bunch of snags. Almost like that song by Human League, Don't You Want Me Babe. Therefore, I decided to write a pre-review article, which only details my getting Windows 11 installed experience first, before we move onto the actual review. So let's have a look.

Hard hardware requirements

One of the topics that came out of the early testing by nerds worldwide - and astonished journalists looking for a dramatic scoop - is the set of minimum hardware requirements that Microsoft announced for Windows 11, and which may absolutely change as Microsoft has often shown remarkable market flexibility when it comes to making money. At the moment, these stand at Intel 8th gen or Ryzen 2 and above for the processor, and a motherboard with TPM 2.0 available and enabled. Fury, furor, shock, and anger. But why.

I noticed a lot of people finding the processor requirement harsh - but don't forget. Windows 10 will be supported until 2025. The requirements need to be looked at from a future perspective, four years from now. While Intel 8th gen processors are relatively new today, by the time Windows 10 goes into the digital heaven (or whatever), that processor family will be about eight years old. That's pretty reasonable.

The bigger issue is TPM. Technobabble aside, the question you want to ask yourselves is, does my processor support it? If you have Windows on your box, you can simply run Start > tpm.msc, and check what the utility reports. If it shows no TPM, that does not mean you're out of luck. It may simply be that your box isn't configured to use TPM.

Case in point, my new desktop from late 2019. It's a powerful, modern beast, and I intend to use it for a good decade or so. But then, on the surface, it reported no TPM. My first reaction was, there is NOOOOO scenario in this universe where I will throw away this awesome piece of kit in 2025 just so to be able to run Windows 11. My second reaction was, let's go into BIOS and see what gives.

The desktop has an Asus motherboard with AMD Ryzen 3700X processor. So technically, TPM isn't a thing. But then, under Advanced Settings, there is an option, clearly labeled fTPM, which stands for firmware TPM. By default, my motherboard was configured for Discrete TPM, which is not what Windows 11 requires. Switching to fTPM gives me the TPM 2.0 compatibility. Not that I have any intentions of upgrading this box to the new version, but more on that later.

A second case in point, my Lenovo IdeaPad 3 laptop. It's a new thing, bought just six months ago. It has no TPM option in BIOS. Instead, it has something called AMD Security Processor. But in essence, it's the same thing, as Windows reports full TPM 2.0 compatibility. So even if you're a Ryzen person, things ought not to be too bleak. And they will only becoming a limiting factor in 2025, if then.

Test 1: IdeaPad 3

All right, so what's the purpose of a test laptop if it ain't used for testing? At the moment, the laptop has a triple-boot configuration, Windows 10 plus two Linux distributions. I decided to upgrade the Windows 10 instance. But this proved much harder than I expected. The big problem was, I had no Windows Insider Program option listed under Settings > Updates.

I spent about an hour trawling the forums, trying to figure out what gives. I tried to make a number of registry changes, which would tell the system to go forth with the Windows 11 builds. Alas, no luck. I even found an unofficial workaround that lets you configure your device for different test rings in a completely offline fashion. It didn't help at all, of course.

And then, I realized the big problem - I was running under a standard user account - as one ought to.

BTW, unrelated and yet related, I did try to create a new account (in Windows 10), to see how this goes. Boy, oh boy. First, if you click Other Users > Add, you get an error that tells you go to Control Panel, y'know, the one that Settings is supposed to replace. There, the user applet redirects you back to Settings. Full circle. Nowhere does Windows 10 tell you that it can't do a task because of missing admin privileges. I was able to create a user account on the command line, of course.

I logged out, logged into the Administrator account, and lo and behold, the Insider Program option was there. Nowhere is this listed, plus it makes no sense, because you can receive updates as an ordinary user. One hurdle down, a few more to go.

At this point, Windows 10 started complaining about many things. First, generic errors, then, diagnostics and telemetry. As you know, I detest low-IQ stuff, which is why I have my systems configured for minimum intrusion and maximum privacy slash efficiency. The steps needed to achieve that are outlined in my somewhat older privacy guide and the much newer essential tweaks guide for Windows 10. Part of that lovely setup is disabling useless telemetry, of course.

Now, though, Windows 10 wouldn't let me turn telemetry on, even though I had started the service. In the end, I had to use another registry trick. I had to force-tell Windows to do full telemetry (integer value 3). It's really funny how Windows works, because all it needs is a registry value. There are no other sanity checks in place. Anyway, I had this fixed, but still no Windows 11 in the offing.

Windows 10 did offer me a Dev build now - of Windows 10. Download, install, reboot. A lot of time has elapsed at this point. I noticed that the new Dev release featured happier, shinier icons than the standard set. I guess this is an incremental change that will make the transition to Windows 11 feel more natural to ordinary users. Funny, the whole cycle of unnecessary modern software development. Windows 7 had a perfectly usable, decent-contrast interface. Then, Windows 10 went all-flat, like The Netherlands. But now, Windows 11 is bringing back color and roundedness into equation, as though they are magical artifacts of genius breakthrough. No, it's called simple human ergonomics, and it cannot be defeated by AI.

After reboot, I noticed I was signed out of the Insider Program. I had to join afresh, like nothing had happened before. But now, finally, finally, I had Windows 11 available. So I pressed the download button and waited. The image download completed in about 15 minutes. The in-vivo installation took about 20 minutes - on IdeaPad's Ryzen 5 and NVMe storage. The offline installation took only about 5 minutes and just two reboots. A surprisingly nimble result, I must say. Job done. Review to come very soon.

And here we go, but more details later!

Test 2: Virtual Machine

I also decided to see whether it's possible to try Windows 11 in a virtual machine - VirtualBox to be more precise. I had to start with Windows 10, because there isn't a downloadable Windows 11 ISO. I grabbed the latest '10 Dev build from the Insiders portal, and launched the virtual machine. Once I had the guest system configured, Windows told me that Windows 11 wasn't available, because my system didn't meet the minimum requirements.

As it happens, my Slimbook laptop (the host) comes with an 8th gen Intel processor, so that shouldn't be an issue, but then, I'm not sure which CPU flags are available or exposed inside the virtual machine. Anyway, once again, Microsoft allows you to bypass this with a set of registry key changes. Indeed.

This may not work for the final official build, but during the testing phase, it works just fine. And this is where things get fuzzy. It seems very likely you can install Windows 11 on systems that fall out of the requirements band (at least some), it's just you'll be running in an unsupported mode, ergo, if things go bad, you can't complain. How will this pan out eventually, well, we shall see.

Things sorted on the registry front, I started the download and installation. The laptop's fans went into overdrive, but that's kind of expected. The whole process took roughly two hours and change, but this is perfectly reasonable, given the fact I've allocated limited resources to the virtual machine, and also kept doing serious stuff in parallel. But in the end, I had Windows 11 installed and running.

BTW, check this notification out, which I received during the installation - the place to think, express and create in a natural way. Come again? Express what? Doesn't express require an object in a sentence? Maybe my mastery of English is rusty, or maybe I struggle with Marketingese. Natural way? Like painting with ox blood on cave walls? Oh boy, I'm such a lovely, grumpy dinosaur, and I so detest these pseudo-inspiring messages.

Conclusion

And with that, we must pause. I wanted to give the hardware requirements and installation process extra focus, so I decided not to dilute the message with the ranting and fussing that is bound to come once I start testing Windows 11. For me, the big hurdle was to convince Windows to let me test its latest Dev release on the IdeaPad, which is 100% supported. I guess part of the pain was induced by me creating a custom setup, with my own tweaks and whatnot. The other part is the convoluted way by which Windows 11 is currently offered - an ISO would do wonders to work around that. Then, if you're running a standard user, it won't see the Insider Program settings. Not even a wee message to tell you, hey, you need to be an admin for this.

Anyway, I checked whether my Ryzen systems could cope with Windows 11, and the answer is: affirmative. In fact, Windows 11 is one of three systems on the IdeaPad 3, residing happily side by side. It did not touch, change or mangle the GRUB bootloader, either. Very nice. On my desktop, and I presume, on many a machine out there, to be able to use Windows 11 (if they choose to), users will need to toggle TPM, fTPM or whatever equivalent setting in their BIOS to an enabled state. Easy enough for the nerds, but this could be a big hurdle for ordinary folks. Okay. So we did the installation and such. Now, is Windows 11 worth looking for? We shall see shortly.

Cheers.
Bill Cosby accuser Andrea Constand, left, embraces prosecutor Kristen Feden during a news conference after Cosby was found guilty in his sexual assault retrial in Norristown on April 26, 2018.
Vibra Healthcare Announces Plans to Establish New Hospital in Palm Beach County, Florida Over $32 million investment and 160 jobs planned
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Make your picks!
Pupils at schools in Derry have been recognised for their artistic talent.

UNISON, the largest public service union in Northern Ireland, recently launched an art competition called 'All We Need is Lunch' to raise awareness of a campaign for free school meals for all children.

Young people were asked to come up with creative artwork as part of the competition.

There were more than 2,000 entries received.

Alex Patterson from Foyle College won the 12-14 category of the competition.

Her artwork is pictured below.

Brandon Magee from Rossmar Special School in Limavady came third in the 15-19 age category.

A number of other local pupils received 'Great Effort' accolades for their artwork.

These were Ciara Duffy (Steelstown Primary School  Under 8 category); Emma McCullagh (St Canice's, Feeny  Under 9 category); Bridin Nig Raine (Gaelcholaiste Doire, Dungiven  age 12-14 category); and Aimee Kerr (12-14 age category).

The winning entries will be showcased online and in a local art gallery in September.

Acknowledging the tremendous success of the art competition, UNISON Northern Ireland Regional Secretary Patricia McKeown said: This initiative was a fun, positive experience that gave children and young people the chance to think about what school meals can really mean to them - the good food, the sharing with friends, the healthy future, the great staff.

Our goal is that every child and young person in school gets a free, nutritious meal as part of their education package. We want a future for them that is free from diabetes and heart disease. We want a school catering system that treats them all equally.

The competition is part of UNISON's wider campaign calling for the provision of free, nutritional meals for all pupils.

With the Covid-19 pandemic having a major impact on family incomes, extending the provision of free school meals would act as a measure to promote public health, to reduce poverty and to improve learning outcomes for all children and young people.

I congratulate all the winning artists, their schools and youth organisations, and all those UNISON members who made this initiative such a success by encouraging everyone to get involved.

The energy, talent and enthusiasm of all the young people involved has strengthened our resolve to win Free School Meals for All. They deserve nothing less.
The Public Prosecution Service (PPS) has dropped a murder case against a former British soldier charged with killing a 15-year-old Derry boy in 1972.

Daniel Hegarty was shot twice in the head during the British Army's Operation Motorman in the Creggan area of the city in July 1972.

In April 2019, the PPS announced that the former soldier, who cannot be identified, was to be charged with the 15-year-old's murder.

He was also to face prosecution for intentionally wounding Daniel's cousin Christopher Hegarty, then aged 17, in the same incident.

However, it is understood the Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Herron, today informed the Hegarty family that the cases will not proceed.

In 2011, an inquest jury unanimously found Daniel Hegarty posed no risk and had been shot without warning.

However, five years later a decision was taken not to prosecute the former soldier.

In May 2018, however, the High Court quashed that determination following legal action by the Hegarty family.

The PPS then carried out a review of the case before announcing charges were to be brought.

That decision had been challenged by the former soldier's legal team.
The families of Bloody Sunday victims today said they will 'fight on' to get justice for their loved ones.

It follows the decision announced today by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) that charges against a former soldier in connection with the 1972 shootings are not to proceed.

The PPS said it is to withdraw proceedings against Soldier F, a former member of the military facing trial for two charges of murder and five of attempted murder on Bloody Sunday in January 1972.

Separately, proceedings will not be commenced against Soldier B who was to be prosecuted with the murder of 15-year-old Daniel Hegarty in Creggan in July 1972, and of wounding with intent of his cousin Christopher Hegarty.

Families of the victims were told of the decisions not to proceed with the charges at a meeting in the City Hotel in Derry today.

Speaking after the meeting, Mickey McKinney, brother of William McKinney, one of the men that Soldier F had been accused of murdering, said today's announcement represents 'another damning indictment of the British justice system'.

A mass murderer has been permitted to evade justice without even standing trial, said Mr Kinney.

Whilst Soldier F was being prosecuted for two counts of murder on Bloody Sunday, he in fact murdered five people that day.

There is no dispute that his actions on Bloody Sunday resulted in 2 women being robbed of their husbands, 12 children being orphaned of their father, and dozens of young men and women deprived of a brother. 6 parents also lost a son.

These are the clear findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and the responsibility that it attaches directly and unequivocally to the actions of Soldier F.

Whilst hiding behind the shameful cloak of anonymity, he has so far escaped prosecution for the entirety of the mass murder that he committed on Bloody Sunday and our family, with the support of the other families and wounded shall challenge this decision as far as we can.

This issue is far from concluded. We will fight on.

Ciaran Shiels, solicitor, of Madden & Finucane, which represents some of the Bloody Sunday families, said they intend to seek an immediate judicial review of the PPS decision to discontinue the prosecution of Soldier F.

The reasons underpinning the PPS decision relate to the admissibility of statements made to the Royal Military Police in 1972 by a number of soldiers who were witnesses to events in Glenfada Park.

The admissibility of RMP statements in relation to the events of Bloody Sunday is a matter already under active judicial consideration by the High Court following proceedings which we lodged last December.

The High Court will hear detailed legal argument over five days in September. In those circumstances, the decision by the PPS to halt this prosecution is clearly premature in the absence of a High Court ruling on the issue."

Tony Doherty, chairperson of the Bloody Sunday Trust, whose father Patrick was also shot dead by Soldier F, expressed his solidarity with the families of Jim Wray, Willie McKinney and Daniel Hegarty.

"The decision today means that victims of state violence basically have been told that justice cannot be achieved within the Northern State," he said.

"The British government and its agencies have played the dirtiest of games from the very beginning including the Widgery Tribunal, during the Saville Enquiry and during the course of these prosecutions.

"No family should be forced to struggle for 50 years to achieve truth and justice.

"There are no more channels available. British no longer has any moral authority in the North of Ireland," said Mr Doherty.
Two people were trapped inside a house after a bin was set alight and pushed against the door of a flat in County Derry overnight.

Detectives in Coleraine are appealing for information following an arson attack on a flat in the Rochester Court area in the early hours of this morning (Friday July 2).

Detective Inspector McKenna said: Just before 3am, we received a report that a bin had been set alight and pushed against the front door of the property, trapping two people inside.

On arrival, officers also noticed that graffiti had been painted on the wall.

NIFRS extinguished the fire and no one was injured during the incident, however thiswreckless act could have turned out very differently.

We are treating this as arson with intent to endanger life and would appeal to anyone who may have been in the area and witnessed anything that could assist us with our investigations to contact police on 101 quoting reference 194 of 02/07/21."

A report can also be made online using the non-emergency reporting form at http://www.psni.police.uk/makeareport/.

You can also contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or online at http://crimestoppers-uk.org/.




SSE Airtricity has today announced it will be increasing electricity prices by 9.7% from August 1.

This will see the typical SSE Airtricity customer needing to find up to an extra 58 per year.

Raymond Gormley, Interim Head of Energy Policy at The Consumer Council, said: This is unwanted news for all SSE Airtricity customers across Northern Ireland especially considering it is the second increase in five months.

"This increase will adversely impact consumers who are already experiencing financial pressures on their household budgets.

However, we are aware this increase is due to the continuing rise of wholesale energy costs. Any customers who are struggling to pay their bill should contact SSE Airtricity without delay to discuss their available options.

Mr Gormley added: The Consumer Council would encourage all consumers to shop around to ensure they are on the best energy deal. SSE Airtricity have stated that there will be no exit fee applied to customers who switch supplier before 1 August 2021.

To support consumers in the switching process, our website has a free independent energy price comparison tool which empowers consumers to compare all electricity and gas tariffs across Northern Ireland in one place. In the last year over 72,000 consumers have used this tool to get the best deal.

The Consumer Council recognises that energy costs are one of the biggest household expenses.

Their website has a number of free resources including Switch On: A Guide for Home Energy Users to help consumers be more energy efficient at home, get the best from their electricity or gas supply and save money.

Consumers can also get in touch with The Consumer Council for free independent advice by calling Freephone 0800 121 6022 or by emailing contact@ consumercouncil.org.uk.
Pooja Hegde aka couch potato is 'ready to go' for Beast shoot in Chennai in style, see pics

The Pan-India star, Pooja Hegde looked uber cool as she got ready to fly off to Chennai for the shoot of her next, Beast with Thalapathy Vijay. The stunning actress took to her social media to share a picture in her super chic outfit, sitting on an adorably pink couch as she wrote, "This couch potato is ready to go..   #traveldiaries."

Pooja wore a co-ord outfit where she paired her blue check dress with a matching jacket and white sneakers, adding lots of swag and style with her red cat-eye sunglasses as she left for her Beast shoot in Chennai.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Pooja Hegde (@hegdepooja)

The Indian actress has some of the biggest countrywide lineups with films like 'Cirkus' with Ranveer Singh, her next with Salman Khan, Pan-India film 'Radhe Shyam' with Prabhas, 'Acharyaa' with Chiranjeevi and Ram Charan and 'Most Eligible Bachelor' besides 'Beast' with Thalapathy Vijay.
Rohit Saraf opens up about love and heartbreak, cringes at the status he wrote after his first break up

Actor Rohit Saraf shared his changing notions about love from being a kid having a crush on a teacher to growing up to want companionship. The actor shared his lessons about love in a sweet post with Humans of Bombay where he revealed all about his favorite teacher who he adorably made cards for to getting butterflies in the 8th standard and liking a girl in his building complex.

The Mismatched actor said, "Ive grown up watching love all around me. My parents were an ideal couple; they always stood by each other. And so, as a kid, Id dream of a love like that. But the first time I really admired someone, it was my school teacher! I was 7 & the only boy in school with long hair! And then I had my mundan ceremony & had to go back to school bald. My classmates made fun of me; I was upset so my teacher said, Dont worry, you still look cute! I lit up when she said that; she became my favourite.

His image of love changed growing up and he liked a girl for the first time and how he never thought hed get over the heartbreak of parting with her, She lived in my complex; wed text all day & meet in the evening for a walk. But when I went for a trip I really missed her, so after returning, I told her, I think I like you. She liked me too!

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Humans of Bombay (@officialhumansofbombay)

But then we broke up. Justin Beibers Baby used to be my favourite song so, I put up a status Thought youd always be mine I cringe now, but back then I thought Id never get over that heartbreak, he added.

The actor understood companionship after moving to Bombay and getting into a relationship there. Sadly that didnt work out too, I realised I always went out of my way to make sure it worked. So eventually, it ended.

Rohit who is a heartthrob of millions today says his experiences in love brought him understand what he wants from life. Sharing his current perspective on falling love he concluded, Im single, but Im happy & Ill only be with someone if they make me happier! Love for me today is two people holding hands, but looking at their own individual journeys & directions.
Sarat Saxena on being stereotyped and getting action roles in his early career- "I ended up in the hospital 12 times"

Veteran actor Sharat Saxena says it was not difficult to slip into the role of a chauvinist hunter in Vidya Balan-starrer Sherni as that is the mindset of most of the men in India. Amit Masurkar has directed the drama from a script by Aastha Tiku, which revolves around Balan's Vidya Vincent, an upright forest officer who is tasked to resolve the man-animal conflict.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sharat Saxena (@sharat_saxena)

The multi-layered film, which touches upon the man and animal conflict and gender dynamics, has been gathering applause from both audiences and critics for its nuanced narrative and performance by the cast. Saxena plays Ranjan Rajhans aka Pintu Bhaiya, a callous hunter, who believes only he can save the village from the man-eating tigress.

"This is a common factor about Indians (men) that they are always dominating the women all the time. This happens all the time. Men all over India think they know better than women. This is the atmosphere in which we have grown up," the Madhya Pradesh-born actor told PTI in an interview.

The 70-year-old actor, best known for his roles in movies like "Mr India", "Tridev", "Ghulam", "Krrish", "Hasee Toh Phasee" and "Bajrangi Bhaijaan", said he did not need to model his portrayal on any particular person.

"It is not very difficult for an actor to take up this kind of character. He is a typical Indian. We have always been making these characters in Hindi films. And there was no preparation required to behave like a male chauvinist p**, we are already that," he said.

Praising Masurkar's approach, the actor said the director ensured that the characters did not go overboard.

"The intention of the director was to not underline or put anything in brackets, he rather wanted to give a subtle message. The job has been done successfully as people have loved the subtlety of the film. There is nothing loud and aggressive in the film, it has depicted the way things happen in normal life," Saxena said.

Like many outsiders, Saxena a qualified engineer -- harboured the dream of becoming a hero in Bollywood and that's what brought him to Mumbai in the early 1970s. He, however, ended up making a mark for himself in negative and authoritarian roles.

"Nobody comes here with the intention to get a beating every day. Everybody comes to Bombay to become a hero and I am also one of those guys who came to become a hero. But we have a very set pattern for a hero like he should be fair, have straight hair and it will be a bonus if he has blue eyes. I didn't have all these qualities. I was muscular and being muscular in the '70s, '80s and '90s was a crime because you were considered brainless, uneducated, totally devoid of emotions and the ability to act."

The actor said the initial 40 years of his career saw him being stereotyped as an actor. It is only in the last decade that he has started getting interesting parts, he added.

"Every writer, director or producer would think that a person like me was fit for nothing else but action. It is very difficult to change their thinking. In the last 40 years, I did about 600 action sequences and I ended up in hospital about 12 times."

Saxena said despite not getting desired work, he never gave up and that helped him sail through difficult times. He has also not lost hope of leading a film someday.

You cannot come first in class or race or in any competition, one person will be first and the rest will come behind. So the person who comes first becomes the hero and the one who comes behind becomes the character actor. I am trying to come first, maybe one day I will. I am a hardworking person trying to make a mark.

Citing the example of his latest release Sherni , which premiered on Amazon Prime Video last month, Saxena said, the OTT (over-the-top) platform has given him a new lease of life.

I am still new to this platform. It is for the first time that a new film of mine has been released on OTT. Also, in the last 50 years, this is the first time that I have appeared in a critically-acclaimed film.

"Sherni" also stars Neeraj Kabi, Vijay Raaz, Brijendra Kala, Mukul Chadda and Ila Arun in key roles.
Haseen Dillruba Review: Despite top-notch performances, the film doesn't rise beyond being a tribute to B-grade films

Movie: Haseen Dillruba Rated: 2.5/5.0 Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Vikrant Massey Director: Vinil Mathew

When the trailer for Haseen Dillruba released, I was excited. Of course, there's a stellar star cast- Taapsee Pannu, Vikrant Massey and Harshvardhan Rane to look forward to. It also seemed to be taking major inspiration from Dinesh Pandit who can make his characters commit 'bade bade khoon' in 'chhote chhote sehar' and no one even knows. However, what we did not see coming is the fact that it would end up becoming a tribute to old B-grade Hindi films!

The story of the film starts off with a blast, and a death. Rishu, played by the amazing Vikrant Massey, is proclaimed dead. The body has burnt completely except for his hand, with the 'Rani' tattoo. A blunt hit is found on the skull, which makes the investigation officer suspect it's a murder. Rani, played by Taapsee Pannu, is considered the prime suspect, along with her 'lover' Neel Tripathi, played by Harshvardhan Rane. Incidentally, Neel is also Rishu's cousin. The story unfolds with Rani's statements to the Police.

If you had been expecting a thriller, you would be somewhat disappointed. By the time you reach the interval, or rather the understandable interval, you'd know what's going on. Yet, there is an element of thrill, which is exactly the reason why I won't preceded with the story anymore.

The film leaves you at a juncture where you can't really dismiss it altogether, but can't appreciate it too just as much. Haseen Dillruba, written by Kanika Dhillon could have been better than how it finally turns out to be. After all, there's a subtle depiction of the seven stages of love, there's so much unfolding after every scene, taking us deeper into the lives of the central characters. However, as we reach the climax, the build-up crumbles and it feels like a mere tribute to the old Hindi B-grade films. The reason lies in the climax and the sloppy treatment which makes it all the more silly. That's the problem- the climax. Everything else is good, even the problematic love and passion that Rishu and Rani share (as long as you understand that it's super toxic). While director Vinil Matthew tries to mount it to a grand climax, it all feels like an anti-climax that goes full filmy, full overdramatic, and this is what kind of mars the entire cinematic experience. The performances are definitely the strongest point of the film.

Taapsee Pannu plays the complex Rani Kashyap, who settles for an arranged marriage after all her love affairs fail. The Delhi girl goes to Jwalapur, but she is volatile and too overwhelmed to see the gestures of love by her husband Rishu. Her character grows in the film and Taapsee portrays it brilliantly. Vikrant's character also grows as the film progresses and he steals the show in this one. From the meek boy to the man who can go to any extent for love, he shows vulnerability, heartbreak, resolute, anger, passion, sacrifice and every emotion you can think of in the best possible way. He is the star in the film, and with Taapsee, it is a treat to watch them is sync and perform. Amongst them, Harshvardhan seems like a weak link, but his performance keeps the film afloat. There isn't much that he and his character Neel is given in the film, but he makes use of the material in the best possible way.

The music is brilliant and the songs are so perfect, in the story and otherwise. The cinematography captures the small-town off Jwalapur with perfection.

Overall, this film, at best is a one-time watch.
Iain Garner - the co-founder of Neon - Doctrine started a twitter thread about Platform X where he criticized the Platforms for their bias against Indie developers and their poor backend services.

About the Thread

Garner obviously did not name the Platform but said the following to describe the platform - ... it's the operator of a very successful console and does not have Games Pass!. At this point, it was pretty clear that Garner was talking about Sony and specifically, its PlayStation department.

OK. I am mad enough to burn some bridges. Because honestly, what's the point of a bridge that I am not allowed to cross.



So here is a thread about Platform X. I will not be defining Platform X but it's the operator of a very successful console and does not have Games Pass! pic.twitter.com/OJ2ZJz9BNy  Iain Garner (@NeonIain) June 30, 2021

Garner stated that Sony practically gives no attention to small Indie developers like him. He also accused Sony of apparently taking $25,000 from the developers to get featured on their store. He wrote this : Oh but don't worry. There is a way to guarantee you get featured! All you need to do is spend a VERY reasonable minimum of 25,000 USD to get featuring. Oh and then 30% of your subsequent earnings....

He said that Sony is super successful at hardware but their backend process is straight out of the 2000s. We definitely advise you to read the whole thread just to get a glimpse of how Sony is misbehaving with the developers.

It seemed like Garner was frustrated with Sony and all of its malpractices and hence decided to vent to his audience.

The Support

After this thread went viral, many other indie developers stepped up and shared their experiences on Twitter too and they were just as bad as Iains.

Matthew White, the CEO of Whitehorn Games posted this tweet :

Alright, I'm gonna unfortunately throw my hat in here as well. We **love** our Platform X friends, and I'm former Platform X employee myself, but we cannot move the needle on the platform.



Less than 3% of sales as a company are on PX. https://t.co/WjOTx43OLr pic.twitter.com/yXMsr9srYw  Matthew White (@matthewmwhite) June 30, 2021

White went on to say email communications with the platform are returned in months rather than days or weeks, the process of obtaining sales reports is unnecessarily time consuming and outdated, and it has no marketing, analytics, or advertising assessment tools for developers.

Ragnar Trnquist retweeted Iains original post and said that This thread mirrors out experience exactly

This thread mirrors our experiences exactly. Draugen has been out for over a year on consoles. When was the last time it was discounted or featured in a sale? And its definitely not for a lack of trying. Its disheartening. https://t.co/c3uUz3VDzV  Ragnar Trnquist (@ragso) June 30, 2021

Jay Tholen, the developer of HypnoSpace Outlaw even took names and accused Sony directly. He retweeted Iains tweet and said -  yeah playstation sucks for indie devs. 

yeah playstation sucks for indie devs. we've sold like trash on there compared the other big consoles. also we make more sales on itch alone than we do on PS I'm pretty sure.



(mike, i'll delete this if you want lol) https://t.co/l9Oz41oo5a  Jay Tholen

Conclusion

As of right now, there is a lot of heat being thrown at Sony. All the Indie developers are angry and they have a valid reason to be. Mike Rose - the founder of HypnoSpace Outlaw said - The reason you don't see more threads like it, is because devs are too worried to say it publicly. But trust me when I say that the vast majority of devs are reading that thread, and nodding their heads violently.
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Photo from http://www.jonndeltororichardson.com Gas Station Blues kicks off July 8 in downtown Issaquah, with Blues guitarist Jonn Del Toro Richardson.





ISSAQUAH  The Downtown Issaquah Association, in partnership with the Washington Blues Society, is bringing back the Blues this summer.





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HONOLULU (AP)  Hawaii officials are extending a vaccination incentive program to get more shots in arms.

Hawaii Public Radio reports a second round of vaccine incentives will be launched this month. People can register for the second round of incentives beginning July 12, with new prizes include cars, cash and furniture.





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SEATTLE  A new apartment building at 4710 20th Ave N.E. sold for almost $12.2 million, according to King County records.

The seller was University Flats LLC, a family group that had long owned the old house that was demolished and replaced.





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Mayor Todd Jordan sworn in, pledges to reshape delivery of government services

Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Mayor Todd Jordan raises his right hand as he recites the oath of office to become the citys 29th mayor. Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Tupelo Mayor Todd Jordan speaks after being sworn into office on July 1, 2021. Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Ward 1 Chad Mims Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Lynn Bryan Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Travis Beard Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Nettie Davis Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Buddy Palmer Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Ward 6 Janet Gaston Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Ward 7 Rosie Jones

TUPELO  Todd Jordan on Thursday became the city of Tupelos 29th mayor, promising to reshape the citys planning and zoning department, search for the new leaders of the citys fire and police departments and improve the delivery of local services.

After his swearing-in ceremony at the church at the Elvis Presley Birthplace, Jordan did not make an extended speech but simply said he is ready to get to work.

But after the ceremony, Jordan detailed to the Daily Journal many of his first steps and policy goals he plans to implement over the next few weeks.

Our customer service around the city is going to get better, Jordan said. Weve been lacking some in that department. There are some departments that are changing hands. Obviously, there are some recent appointees.

One major change involving a department head is the appointment of Tanner Newman, Jordans former campaign manager, to be the new director of development services. If confirmed by the City Council, Newman will replace Pat Falkner as the director. Falkner is expected to stay on as city planner.

Development Services, commonly referred to as the third floor because of its City Hall location, deals with issues such as zoning, building permits, and code enforcement.

I think what has been lacking is a crew manager on the third floor, Jordan said. That will be (Newmans) position first manning the third floor. Economic development will be second.

Another initiative the Republican mayor said will be rolling out soon is the creation of search committees that will aid Jordan in interviewing applications for police chief and fire chief.

Jordan has publicly committed to releasing the list of committee members and said that within a month, the committee will begin interviewing applicants for the two vacant positions.

Jordan also thanked his predecessor, former Mayor Jason Shelton, for his service to the city over the past eight years and expressed gratitude for his assistance during the transition period.

I am extremely impressed with Mayor Jordan and his team, Shelton said. I think he is much more prepared on day one than I was.

Members of the Tupelo City Council were also sworn into a new four-year term, with several historical achievements met and three new council members entering local government.

The three new council members sworn into office are Ward 1 Councilman Chad Mims, Ward 6 Councilwoman Janet Gaston and Ward 7 Councilwoman Rose Jones.

The four council members who were sworn in to return to the council for a new term are Ward 2 Councilman Lynn Bryan, Ward 3 Councilman Travis Beard, Ward 4 Councilwoman Nettie Davis and Ward 5 Councilman Buddy Palmer.

For the first time in the citys history, two Black women  Davis and Jones  will serve on the council at the same time. Thursdays event also marked the first time that three women will serve on the seven-member council, the largest percentage of women representation ever in the citys history.

Mims, Gaston and Jones, all newcomers, told the Daily Journal that they were excited to begin working for their districts and address the issues they raised on the campaign trail.

Im ready to meet with every council member and go to every ward, Jones said. Im just excited to make Ward 7 a part of Tupelo again.

Davis, the longest serving council member, said that she would advise the new members to try and be involved with as many activities and city business as they can to learn the ropes.

Even though Im the longest serving member, theres always something new you could learn, Davis said. I would also advise them to work as a team to move Tupelo forward.

The first time the new council and mayor publicly convene for an official meeting will be at 6 p.m. on July 6.
Reliance, Adnoc to jointly develop world-scale chemical projects in Abu Dhabi

Reliance Industries Limited (Reliance) has signed an agreement with Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) to jointly develop a new worldscale chlor-alkali, ethylene dichloride and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) production facility at TaZiz in Ruwais, Abu Dhabi.

The project, being constructed in the TaZiz Industrial Chemicals Zone, which is a joint venture between Adnoc and ADQ, will capitalise on growing demand for these critical industrial raw materials, RIL stated in a release.

The agreement is in line with Adnocs downstream and industry growth plans and its 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 TaZiz, a world-scale chemicals production hub and industrial ecosystem based in Ruwais, with investment in excess of AED 18 billion and a number of further growth projects in the downstream and industry sector. Since 2018, Adnoc has attracted significant foreign direct investment from international partners in the downstream business, including refining, fertilisers and gas pipelines.

Under the terms of the agreement, TaZiz and Reliance will construct an integrated plant, with capacity to produce 9,40,000 tonnes of chlor-alkali, 1.1 million tonnes of ethylene dichloride and 3,60,000 tonnes of PVC annually.

We are delighted to attract an investor of Reliances calibre to partner with Adnoc and ADQ in accelerating growth at TaZiz. This agreement is a significant milestone, as we continue to grow a globally competitive industrial ecosystem and highly attractive investor value proposition, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE minister of industry and advanced technology and Adnoc managing director and group CEO, said.

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, drives in-country value and accelerates the UAEs economic diversification, he added.

We at Reliance are excited to enter into a strategic partnership with Adnoc for establishing a world-class and world-scale chemical project at TaZiz in Ruwais. This important milestone further bolsters our long-standing relationship with Adnoc, reaffirming our faith in the global vision of the UAEs 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 Reliances operations, and we are proud to partner with Adnoc in this important project for the region, Reliance Industries chairman and managing director Mukesh D Ambani said.

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 a 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.

Production of these chemicals will create opportunities for local industry to source critical raw materials in the UAE for the first time, creating additional opportunities for in-county value. For example, chlor-alkali will enable production of caustic soda, essential for the production of aluminium. Ethylene dichloride and PVC have a wide range of applications across housing, infrastructure and consumer goods.

Since its launch in November 2020, TaZiz has made significant progress. Development activities at the site have moved forward, with land and marine surveys already completed. Considerable interest has been received from local and international investors in opportunities across the entire ecosystem and value chain, and agreements with the first phase of investors are nearing finalisation.

Contracts have been awarded for the first stages of development of the TaZiz site, and work is already underway. This includes geotechnical and topographical surveys, a marine bathymetric survey and health, safety, and environment impact assessments, which have already been completed. The surveys will enable civil engineering works to commence, preparing the TaZiz site for construction as well as dredging for an entirely new port facility.

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 EPC contracts are being targeted for 2022.

Adnoc is a leading diversified energy and petrochemicals group wholly owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Adnocs objective is to maximise the value of the Emirates vast hydrocarbon reserves through responsible and sustainable exploration and production to support the United Arab Emirates economic growth and diversification.

Established in Abu Dhabi in 2018, ADQ is one of the region's largest holding companies with direct and indirect investments in more than 90 companies locally and internationally. Both an asset owner and investor, ADQs broad portfolio of major enterprises span key sectors of a diversified economy, including energy and utilities, food and agriculture, healthcare and pharma, and mobility and logistics, amongst others.

In Arabic, TaZiz means advancement, strengthening or creating a foundation. It 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.
Suzlon announces Q4 FY21 Results

Suzlon Group, India's largest renewable energy solutions provider, has reported a consolidated net loss of Rs54.25 crore in the quarter ended 31 March 2021, against a net loss of Rs834.22 crore in the quarter ended 31 March 2020, according to a regulatory filing.

The reduction in net loss comes mainly on the back of higher revenues. Total income of the company rose to Rs1,141.15 crore in the January-March 2021 quarter, from Rs658.89 crore in the same period a year ago.

For the financial year 2020-21, however, the company posted a consolidated net profit of Rs103.59 crore, whereas it had reported a consolidated net loss of Rs2,691.84 crore in 2019-20. Total income during the fiscal rose to Rs3,365.59 crore, from Rs3,000.42 crore in 2019-20.

"It was an unprecedented and challenging year where economies around the world were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic... The sector (wind energy) was restricted to low volumes with installations of only 1.5 GW, which is lower by almost 30 per cent from last year  amounting to only 15 to 18 per cent capacity utilization in India," Tulsi Tanti, chairman and managing director, Suzlon Group, stated in a release.

At the same time, total wind energy installations in India stand at 39.24 GW which is nearly 42 percent of the total renewable energy installations in the country, Tanti said, adding that the massive global push for renewables and the government's thrust on 'Make in India' and 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat' will help Suzlon manufacture wind turbines and its components for the sector as a whole in the future and reduce imports while creating long term sustainable jobs and energy security.

"For Suzlon, this was the first year of restarting our operations post debt restructuring. However, exponential increase in commodity prices like those of steel has impacted our profitability significantly in India," Ashwani Kumar, CEO, Suzlon Group said. "We closed the year with a healthy order-book of over 817 MW, which we aim to service this year, Kumar added.

The board of directors of Suzlon at its meeting on Tuesday also approved divestment of the company's 75 per cent stake in Suzlon Generators Limited (SGL), a subsidiary of the company, to Voith Turbo Private Limited or its associates, subject to customary due diligence, necessary approvals and execution of definitive documents. The SGL sale or disposal is expected to be completed by the second quarter of 2021-22 ((July-September).

The said buyer does not belong to the promoter / promoter group / group companies of Suzlon Energy Limited, the company said adding that the consideration (for stake sale in SGL) would be received post execution of definitive agreements. The company's 26th annual general meeting will be held on 24 September 2021, it stated.

The company also said that Suzlon Wind Energy Corporation, USA (SWECO), a step-down subsidiary of the Suzlon Energy, has filed for voluntary liquidation in the US Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division under Chapter 7 of the United States Bankruptcy Code and Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure of the USA. "The board of SWECO took this decision in wake of continued financial stress sustained by its operations during the pandemic. We do not foresee this decision to have any direct and/or material impact on Suzlon Energy Ltd," it said.
Twitter's India head booked as website takes J&K, Ladakh out of India

The police in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr district have filed an FIR against Twitter India MD Manish Maheshwari and News Partnerships Head Amrita Tripathi, for showing the union territories of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir outside the map of India.

The FIR has named both Maheshwari and Tripathi as accused under section 505 (2) (public mischief) of the Indian Penal Code.

The map, which appeared on the career section of Twitter website under the header 'Tweep Life', had triggered outrage on social media, which forced Twitter to remove the map.

"Twitter is confirming by its actions the apprehensions expressed widely in the last few months about its bias towards Indian interests and sensitivities. Twitter's mischievous representation of Indian Map is strongly condemned. Twitter has to follow law of land..!" - tweeted BJP leader P Muralidhar Rao.

Micro-blogging app Twitter published the distorted map of India showing Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh as separate from India amid ongoing tension with the government over new rules for social media platforms.

The glaring distortion, which appeared on the career section of the Twitter website, drew sharp criticism from various quarters. Twitter had, last year, shown Leh as part of China when it had legal protection as an intermediary.

Twitter has now lost its legal shield as an intermediary in India as it refused to abide by new social media rules.

In a statement, the ministry of electronics and information technology had said that through its actions and deliberate defiance, Twitter is seeking to undermine the countrys legal system.

The new IT rules, which came into effect on 25 May, stipulate that social media companies appoint a grievance redressal mechanism to address complaints about objectionable material.

All social media companies with a user base of 5 million and above are required to appoint such a grievance officer and share details such as the name and number of these officers with the authorities. Social media companies are also required to appoint a chief compliance officer, a nodal contact person and a resident grievance officer.

Twitter in its response to the final notice by the government on 5 June said it intended to comply with new IT rules and will share the details of the chief compliance officer. It later announced the appointment of an interim resident grievance officer, who later quit the job.
Cabinet approves Rs19,041-cr viability gap funding for PPP implementation of BharatNet in 16 states

The union cabinet today accorded approval for revised implementation strategy of BharatNet through public private partnership (PPP) modal in 16 states of the country. BharatNet will now extend to all inhabited villages beyond gram panchayats (GPs), in these states.

The revised strategy also includes creation, upgradation, operation, maintenance and utilisation of BharatNet by the concessionaire who will be selected by a competitive international bidding process. The estimated maximum viability gap funding approved for the above PPP model is Rs19,041 crore.

The approved implementation programme of BharatNet will cover Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh. An estimated 3.61 lakh villages, including GPs, will be covered.

The cabinet also accorded in principle approval for extending BharatNet to cover all inhabited villages in the remaining states and UTs. The Department of Telecommunication will separately work out the modalities for these (remaining) states and UTs.

The PPP model will leverage private sector efficiency for operation, maintenance, utilisation and revenue generation and is expected to result in faster roll-out of BharatNet. The selected concessionaire (private sector partner) is expected to provide reliable, high speed broadband services as per pre-defined services level agreement (SLA).

Extension of reach of BharatNet to all inhabited villages with reliable, quality, high speed broadband will enable better access of e-services offered by various central and state government agencies. It will also enable online education, telemedicine, skill development, e-commerce and other applications of broadband. It is expected that revenue will be generated from different sources, including proliferation of broadband connections to individuals and institutions, sale of dark fibre, fiberisation of mobile towers, e-commerce etc.

Proliferation of broadband in rural areas will bridge the rural-urban divide of digital access and accelerate the realisation of Digital India. The penetration and proliferation of broadband is also expected to increase direct and indirect employment and income generation. The states where PPP model is envisaged will facilitate free Right of Way.

BharatNet PPP model will bring in following consumer friendly advantages:

Use of innovative technology by the private sector provider for the consumers;

High quality of service and service level to consumers;

Faster deployment of network and quick connectivity to consumers;

Competitive tariffs for services;

Variety of services on high-speed broadband including OTT services and multi-media services as part of packages offered to consumers; and

Access to all online services.

The private sector partner is also expected to bring an equity investment and raise resources towards capital expenditure and for operation and maintenance of the network. Hence, the PPP model for BharatNet will enhance efficiency, quality of service, consumer experience and leverage private sector expertise, entrepreneurship and capacities for accelerating achievement of digital India. This will be in addition to substantial savings of public money.
Dundalk FC could make it three SSE Airtricity League wins in a row for the first time in over a year when they take on Shamrock Rovers at Tallaght Stadium on Friday night.

The Lilywhites are unbeaten since Vinny Perth returned to the club, with a 1-1 draw with Longford Town being followed by wins over Drogheda United (1-0) and Derry City (2-1).

Not since the start of the 2020 season have Dundalk won three consecutive matches in the league, but form is on their side coming into Fridays game, having picked up 14 points from their last eight fixtures; in comparison to Rovers nine from their last eight.

Perth isnt getting carried away despite the upturn in form which has seen his team go within three points of fourth-place Bohemians and possible European qualification.

I thought we played really well against Longford a week ago, but just didnt take our chances, he said after last Fridays win over Derry at Oriel Park.

There was certainly intensity to our play. Together as a group, weve had three games and four training sessions in eight days. Weve a long way to go. I dont want it to be a false dawn.

We will have difficult moments because were chasing our tails a little bit because of the start we had. Im very proud of the players performance tonight. I think their work rate was phenomenal. Im just proud of the players tonight. It was a really strong performance.

I think we played together as a staff. Ive had eight days here, three games and four training sessions. People had spoken about the sporting director (Jim Magilton) here and myself and they spoke about different things, but he was a big help for me over that time, over them eight days.

The work hes doing in the background is phenomenal. I think its a togetherness about us. Theres a group mentality. But, were not there yet. Weve a lot to do, a lot to fix and it will take time. If we do it as a group, well get there.

Wins change moods and I dont want to be disrespectful of anyone thats been at this club. They had different beliefs than me. It doesnt mean Im right or theyre right.

Players are happier when they win. When you get positive performances like after we came in against Longford, it was a draw against a team who are currently bottom of the table, but they knew there was improvement there and they knew that they were getting better, so that keeps them happy. Its pretty simple in that sense.

Dundalk are sweating over the fitness of Andy Boyle and Sonni Nattestad ahead of tomorrows game, while Brian Gartland and Daniel Cleary are definitely out injured.

Junior Ogedi-Uzokwe and Jesus Perez have departed the club, but Will Patching has returned from his loan spell at Derry City and is available for selection on Friday night.
People in Louth can now avail of quick access to relevant information on their water supply, based on where they live, due to the rollout of a newly designed Irish Water website.

The changes will allow people in Louth to immediately see what works and projects are ongoing in their locality by setting their location at www.water.ie

This is already proving helpful for customers experiencing issues such as water outages.

A quick look at the Irish Water website immediately tells them what the issue is, the areas affected and when it will be rectified.

With over 900,000 users on the site ever year, this revamp will ensure water.ie continues to provide an essential public service, Irish Water said.

Designed to work on your mobile phone or any other device, the state of the art website lets you set your location with updates and news relevant to your locality served upfront on the homepage.

It also enables Irish Water to deliver important public health messages and reassurance to the public that we are working every day to provide a clean and safe supply of drinking water for our customers while returning wastewater safely to the environment.

Head of Customer Operations with Irish Water, Yvonne Harris explains how this dynamic, new-look website will better serve customers.

We have upgraded our website so it is more user-friendly", she said.

"We talked to our customers, we listened to their feedback and made changes to better improve the user experience for all.

We are now keeping our customers informed, in real time, about any issues that may be impacting their water supply as well as updates on significant projects, leakage works and water quality.

This new-look version of water.ie takes the effort out of the search for information by giving customers important, relevant, location-based information on the homepage. With one click to set your location or the option to choose a locality, visitors to the site can immediately view key information for their chosen geographical area.

Now, instead of Donegal residents seeing news for Dublin, or Cork residents seeing information on outages in Offaly, they see local news, supply updates, and information on water quality and projects.

"And its one click to turn it off and return to a national view.

"In addition, a mobile-first design caters to the vast majority of visitors who use mobiles to access water.ie.

Yvonne continued: From research and data analysis, Irish Waters Communications and Customer teams have a better understanding of what our customers want.

"The previous site structure meant customers had to undertake separate journeys to check for an outage or find relevant information on water quality or local news stories, making it a laborious process.

"The team wanted to give our customers the option to get a full picture of what was happening in their locality, all in one place.
Families of those who died due to Covid-19 outbreaks in Dealgan House are continuing to call for a public inquiry in the wake of an RTE Investigates documentary on nursing homes during the pandemic.

The nursing home in Toberona was one of the worst hit nursing homes in Ireland last year, with 22 residents passing away due to Covid-19.

The families have said that they are saddened but not surprised by what the documentary reveals, saying that it bolsters the need for a public inquiry into the private nursing home sector, not just in Dundalk, but across the country.

We watched with sadness, but not surprise, the RTE Investigates programme on the nursing home sector. It showed how tragic events unfolded because of the weak policies in place around the private nursing home sector, said the families in a statement.

They said that their concerns were raised with multiple state bodies and actors, like TDs, HIQA and the HSE, and that they are still having to engage with them, 14 months on.

Trying to gather pieces of information, through Freedom of Information requests, in order to put together a picture of what happened in Dealgan, has been time-consuming and frustrating to say the least.

The efforts we have made as families have been done against the very difficult background of our personal grief at losing our loved ones.

The group say that they are continuing to wait for a formal decision from the Louth coroner on whether or not an inquest will be held, and that they are still waiting for a response from Health Minister Stephen Donnelly.

We continue to wait for a substantive response from Health Minister Stephen Donnelly about our pleas for a public inquiry, despite having met him to put our case to him in October last year.

The families say that the state needs to face up to the gaps that are in the legislative framework to protect those living in nursing homes.

The truth must be discovered, heard and learned from.

Previously, Dealgan House have said that they would cooperate with any inquiry that the Government decided upon.

In a statement to The Democrat, Eoin Farrelly, managing director at Dealgan House said that the nursing home remains saddened by the deaths of 22 residents last year.

"Dealgan House Nursing Home remains deeply saddened by the loss of 22 residents due to Covid-19 during our outbreak in April and May of last year," said Mr Farrelly

"Over the last fourteen months we have engaged at length with any relatives of those who passed away who may have questions and we continue to do so."
Funding has been approved for on-street charge points for electric vehicles in Louth.

Louth County council have secured funding for 20 electic car charge points in the county.

The Minister for Transport, Eamon Ryan announced last Thursday the first approvals for funding under the SEAIs on-street public charge point scheme for local authorities.

These are the first grants under this particular scheme to roll out public Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure across counties and towns in Ireland.

Louth County Council and Dublin City Council were allocated funding under the local authority public charge point scheme.

Local Fianna Fail Senator Erin McGreehan welcomed the announcement saying: Its great news that Louth County Council have applied and secured funding for 20 charge points for EV charge points.

There are an increasing number of people changing to electric vehicles and to have 20 extra charging points around the county will be such a welcome addition.

Three applications have been approved for funding.

Louth County Council have applied for funding for 20 charge points with Dublin City Council applying for nine charge points under two applications.

Three applications have been approved for funding.

Louth County Council applied for funding for 20 charge points with Dublin City Council applying for nine charge points under two applications.

The move has been welcomed as more and more people in Ireland are making the switch to Electric Vehicles.

To date in 2021, applications for EV purchase grants are at 305% of 2020 equivalents.

The Climate Action Plan, committed to a target of 936,000 electric vehicles on Irish roads by 2030, with an updated Plan to be published shortly.

While the vast majority of EV owners in Ireland charge their vehicles at home, providing on street chargers will help encourage more take up of EVs by those who dont have a home charger, as well as addressing driver concerns about range anxiety.
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Tactics "characteristic of comedians and propagandists" are being used by the prosecution in the trial of four men accused of abducting and assaulting Quinn Industrial Holdings director Kevin Lunney, a barrister has told the Special Criminal Court.

Giollaiosa O'Lideadha SC, for the accused man Alan O'Brien, said Sean Guerin SC for the prosecution had asserted that the defence was trying to give criminals "invisibility" or make it so that they would never again have to wear balaclavas by having CCTV evidence ruled as inadmissible in court.

This was not, he said, an argument that was made by the defence.

Mr O'Lideadha added: "This is a tactic characteristic of comedians and propagandists which is to mischaracterise the argument raised by the other side in order to pour scorn on it."

Mr O'Lideadha said his client's and the wider public's privacy rights had been breached by gardai accessing CCTV footage from various locations between Dublin and Cavan on different dates.

The evidence in this case, counsel said, shows that there were no procedures in place to safeguard privacy rights, something that is required under the Constitution and European regulations. He told the three-judge court that if they admit the CCTV evidence, "that gives a green light to a system with no restraint and which is capable of infringing the rights of the population at large."

A 40-year-old man known as YZ, Alan OBrien (40), of Shelmalier Road, East Wall, Dublin 3, Darren Redmond (27), from Caledon Road, East Wall, Dublin 3 and Luke OReilly (67), with an address at Mullahoran Lower, Kilcogy, Co Cavan have all pleaded not (NOT) guilty to false imprisonment and intentionally causing serious harm to Mr Lunney at Drumbrade, Ballinagh, Co Cavan on September 17, 2019.

Mr Lunney has told the court that he was bundled into the boot of a car near his home and driven to a container where he was threatened and told to resign as a director of Quinn Industrial Holdings.

His abductors cut him with a Stanley knife, stripped him to his boxer shorts, doused him in bleach, broke his leg with two blows of a wooden bat, beat him on the ground, cut his face and scored the letters QIH into his chest.

They left him bloodied, beaten and shivering on a country road at Drumcoghill in Co Cavan where he was discovered by a man driving a tractor.

Michael O'Higgins SC, for the unnamed accused, said gardai accessed CCTV with no scrutiny and no consideration of the constitutional and privacy rights of individuals.

He said the only time civil rights are considered is when a criminal case is taken before the courts where CCTV is challenged and a judge is asked to adjudicate. "Otherwise," he said, "there is no scrutiny at all."

Mr O'Higgins also took issue with a submission by Mr Guerin that by trying to exclude CCTV evidence, the defence was trying to give the accused Dumbledore's "cloak of invisibility" or make it so that criminals would never again have to wear balaclavas.

Mr O'Higgins said that case was not made by the defence. He said: "We are asking them to prove the lawful provenance of the evidence, not seeking to make factories that make balaclavas redundant."



Counsel further submitted that the prosecution can take no comfort from the fact that CCTV owners willingly handed over footage to gardai.

The CCTV owners, he said, do not own the personal, private data of individuals who are recorded going about their business by their cameras.

He said: "Material which is personal data isn't within the gift of the Applegreen Service Station, or anyone else, to give out like that." The consent of the shop owner or manager, counsel said, does not make it lawful.

Mr Justice Tony Hunt, presiding, with Judge Gerard Griffin and Judge David McHugh, adjourned the trial until next Thursday when the court will rule on the admissibility of mobile phone and CCTV evidence.




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Member of the House of Representatives look up as a vote is tallied during the final session, Wednesday, June 30, 2021, at the State House in Augusta, Maine.
In this Saturday, June 19, 2021. file photo, artist Lydia Mallett, of Trinidad and Tobago, attends Juneteenth celebrations in the Harlem neighborhood of New York. With the recent passage of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, the country now has 12 federal holidays.
North Andover, MA (01845)

Today

Cloudy skies early, followed by partial clearing. High around 75F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will give way to occasional showers overnight. Low 67F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
CLOVIS  In what certainly felt like a no-brainer based on the weather outside, Curry County commissioners decided against extending a ban on specific fireworks ahead of the July 4 weekend.

The commission, citing drought conditions, in its June 1 meeting enacted the fireworks ban, with the knowledge theyd discuss the matter again at the Tuesday meeting.

By the time commissioners arrived to the meeting, they were greeted with rain in three of the last four days and predictions of more rain throughout the week.

County Fire and Safety Director David Kube told commissioners given recent rains, I cant reasonably say we need to extend it.

The fireworks mentioned in the ban, Kube said, were stocked by local firework vendors in anticipation the ban would be rescinded.

In other business covered during the three-hour meeting, which The News covered virtually:

 Commissioners approved a pay increase that, effective July 11, would move all detention officers at the Curry County Adult Detention Center to at least $15 an hour.

The move will cost the county $109,000 annually. Interim Administration Joe Alaniz said the shortage of detention officers, 27 for the facility, was part of a national trend.

Were very hopeful with this increase we can recruit some viable candidates and retain employees.

Before moving for approval, Commissioner Chet Spear said he hoped it wasnt the last raise commissioners would consider, and that he couldnt comprehend why somebody would take a $15/hour job at the detention center when jobs without the same risks offer the same wages.

Its not enough, Spear said. Ive been in the jail. Its high risk, high stress. Its dangerous. Unless youve worked there, you have no idea what were talking about.

We have to find ways to pay these detention officers more money.

 After some back and forth over the estimate of a judges bench, commissioners approved documents to enter a September bidding period for renovations at the Curry County Courthouse.

The county is holding off until September on many construction projects in hopes material prices may drop.

Spear had concerns about a $90,000 estimate on a judges bench, which he considered an outlandish estimate. Spear wasnt against the project as a whole, but the bench estimate needed discussion.

Im not picking on names, Spear said. Im picking on costs.

Bob Calvani of NCA Architects told commissioners the estimate was a simple placeholder, and hed hate to see the entire process held up for that reason. Pyle noted the $90,000 estimate did feel high, but it was part of a potential $7 million project that would last the county for a half century.

Like everybody else, we thought the bid came in high, Ninth Judicial District Administrator Kevin Spears said. The project as a whole, weve worked really hard on this. I just dont want the focus on a great project to be on this bench.

Dave Puritz of NCA said he didnt think it was a great option, but the county could provide the bench outside of the contract if it saw fit.

Commission Chairman Robert Thornton moved to go ahead with the documents, provided the bid process created bid alternates tied to the presence of the judges bench.

 Commissioners voted 4-1 to pay a $12,317 invoice to attorney Peter Nichols, who is aiding local entities in creating a land trust for water conservation surrounding Cannon Air Force Base.

Pyle told commissioners he wanted direction after the county received an opinion from County Attorney Steve Doerr, who was not present at the Tuesday meeting, that payment of the invoice could later be ruled outside of the contract and constitute an Antidonation Clause violation.

Spear and Thornton did not see an issue, and felt there was a responsibility to honor the contract.

This benefits everyone from south Clovis to Grady, Thornton said. This is important to our entire community. Even if we had to go get a legal opinion, I think were right in what were doing.

Sandoval was still concerned over the county attorney opinion, and cast the lone dissenting vote.

 Commissioners approved an application with the New Mexico Department of Finance for financial assistance to purchase a new truck for the Ranchvale Fire Department.

Spear said he had no plans to hold up the application, but asked if a shortage of firefighters could lead to the removal of state funds needed to pay the loan in future years. He noted many firefighters have aired concerns since the state eliminated qualified immunity  protection from civil liability while performing duties as a governmental employee.

Kube said he anticipated in that situation, a department would be provided an opportunity to rectify a situation and not immediately lose state funding.

 Commissioners approved a flat $5 daily fee and $12 weekly pass for the Curry County Fair, with free admission for children 12 and under. Future fairs would be $3 daily and $8 weekly for children 3-12, $7 daily and $18 weekly for adults, $6 daily and $15 weekly for senior citizens and $5 daily and $12 weekly for military members. Spear asked Events Center Manager K.C. Messick if the military rate included veterans. Messick said that hadnt been specifically discussed.

I dont know why we wouldnt, Messick said. Ill start the discussion, well go from there.

 The commission honored Suzanne Zamora, who is retiring July 16 as director of the countys RSVP and Foster Grandparent programs.

County Manager Lance Pyle said Zamora is in her second stint with the county, having left a personnel coordinator position in 2014. In 2015, the county was Having challenges with foster grandparent program. Pyle called Zamora and asked her to come back because he felt shed do well in the position.

She came back as a temporary employee, Pyle said. Within about a month, she applied for the position, got the position and turned the program around.

 The next commission meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. July 20.
EBRD and EU step up support for Georgian micro, small and medium-sized enterprises

EBRD 10 million loan for local firms to boost competitiveness at home and abroad

Borrowers to receive cash-back grants and free consultancy services, funded by the EU

Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Georgia are set to benefit from greater access to finance thanks to joint support by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Union (EU).

The EBRD is providing a 10 million loan to ProCredit Bank Georgia for on-lending to local companies, while the EU is complementing this support with grant incentives and free local and international consultancy services, funded under the EU4Business initiative.

The financing will allow local companies to modernise their production by investing in up-to-date technology and machinery, adopting EU standards, enhancing workplace health and safety and fostering sustainable environmental practices. At least 70 per cent of the loans from ProCredit Bank Georgia will finance investments in green technologies.

The funding is part of the EU4Business-EBRD credit line  an instrument that aims to boost the competitiveness of local firms in the Eastern Partnership region. Investments in modern technology and alignment with EU standards will allow companies to strengthen their operations locally and take advantage of international trade opportunities. Since the start of the initiative in 2016, in Georgia alone close to 170 companies have benefited in sectors ranging from manufacturing to agriculture and from hospitality to medical services.

The loan was signed by EBRD Managing Director for Financial Institutions, Francis Malige, General Director, ProCredit Bank, Alex Matua and Director of ProCredit Bank, Zeinab Lomashvili on the sidelines of the EBRDs 2021 Annual Meeting and Business Forum.

The EBRD is a leading institutional investor in Georgia. Since the start of its operations in the country, the Bank has invested over 4 billion in 262 projects in the financial, corporate, infrastructure and energy sectors, with 79 per cent of these investments in the private sector.

About EU4Business

The EU has been supporting SMEs in Georgia through the EU4Business initiative since 2009. With almost 50 different projects active with a total budget of over 320 million, the EU is the largest foreign supporter of private sector development in Georgia. These efforts are bringing results  in 2019 alone, more than 36,000 SMEs in Georgia were supported, creating an estimated 30,000 new jobs and generating an estimated 400 million of extra income. EU4Business is one of the key tools used by the EU to support economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with many programmes receiving financial top-ups and having lower eligibility criteria to assist as many SMEs as possible.

About ProCredit Bank Georgia

ProCredit Bank Georgia is the part of the international ProCredit group, which operates mainly in Eastern and South Eastern European countries with transition economies, as well as in Germany. The parent company of the development-oriented ProCredit group is ProCredit Holding AG & Co. KGaA, based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. ProCredit Bank Georgia has been operating in the Georgian banking sector since 1999. The banks main activities are financing small and medium-sized businesses that have a long-term development plan and providing banking services to private individuals who have the capacity to save and prefer doing their banking remotely.

As a development-oriented bank, ProCredit conducts banking operations in a highly responsible manner. This approach entails complying with social, ethical and environmental standards. The bank pays very close attention to the environmental impact of activities and makes every effort to mitigate this impact.
Read in Romanian

RON-equivalent of 40 million to help build resilient electricity distribution network in Romania

Digitalisation to lead to greater operational efficiency

Smart grid will promote integration of renewable projects

Reinforcing its position as a green development bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is supporting greater network efficiency and the digital transformation of electricity distribution in Romanias regions with new financing.

The Bank is extending a 40 million loan in RON-equivalent to Distributie Energie Electrica Romania SA (DEER), the electricity distribution subsidiary of Electrica Group. DEER serves more than 3.8 million users residential and industrial  in the regions of Northern Muntenia, Northern Transylvania and Southern Transylvania. It operates 198,988 km of electric lines in 18 counties, representing just over 40 per cent of Romanian territory.

DEER is implementing a comprehensive investment programme to upgrade its distribution network as well as improve the quality of its services and operational safety. Priorities in this upgrade also include digital transformation through systems such as SCADA, which is used to monitor and control industrial processes.

The investment programme supports the roll-out of smart meters and will enable more renewable capacity to be connected to the distribution network. It will significantly improve the networks reliability, reduce grid losses and consistently contribute to increased renewable energy use to the detriment of conventional energy, saving about 67,100 tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year.

The guarantee and loan agreements were signed by Mark Davis, EBRD Regional Director for Romania and Bulgaria; Corina Popescu, CEO of Electrica; and Valentin Branescu, Deputy CEO of DEER, on the side lines of the EBRDs 2021 Annual Meeting and Business Forum.

Mark Davis said: Our new financing will help Electrica Group build a resilient distribution network in Romania with enhanced efficiency and ready to integrate more renewable projects to achieve the countrys ambitious renewable targets.

Corina Popescu, CEO of Electrica, added: In view of the business development opportunities and the ambitious investment plan, Electrica Group is exploring several options for diverse financing sources. The main objectives of the strategy defined for the distribution segment consider optimisations in three areas: operational performance, quality of services and optimisation of costs to the final consumer. Added to these are the long-term strategic directions, focused on the business models development, corroborated with the preparation of the distribution networks to face the challenges of energy transition.

As part of its cooperation with the EBRD, Electrica Group has committed to providing a more equal workplace and improving working conditions for women. The company will adopt a gender-based violence and harassment policy in line with international best practice, and offer training to employees and contractors on how to implement this.

Electricas distribution network covers more than 40 per cent of Romanias territory. The state has a stake of 48.8 per cent in the company, with the remaining shares being held by investors, including the EBRD, on the Bucharest and London stock exchanges. Since its IPO in 2014, Electrica Group has invested a total of RON 4.39 billion in upgrading and retrofitting electricity distribution networks. As a result, service quality has improved significantly, contributing positively to the companys solid financial results.

The EBRDs overall investment in Romania stands at almost 9 billion, with 76 per cent in the private sector. Its focus is on financing infrastructure, especially in less-developed regions, boosting private sector productivity and further developing the financial sector and capital markets.
 

EBRD 25 million equivalent loan to boost ProCredit Banks lending to Ukrainian small businesses

Funds available in local and foreign currency

Green technology is focus of new credit line

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is providing a loan equivalent to 25 million, available in hryvnia or in euros, to ProCredit Bank for on-lending to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Ukraine . At least 70 per cent of the funds will be dedicated to financing green technology.

Sub-borrowers will be able to invest in equipment, machinery and technology that meets European Union (EU) standards for product quality, health and safety measures as well as environmental protection. The EU provides funding to identify the most suitable equipment and technology as well as for investment incentives covering up to 15 per cent of the cost of eligible technologies upon their successful implementation.

The funding is available under the EU4Business-EBRD credit line, which aims to increase the capacity of small businesses in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine to access and compete in the EU market.

The loan agreement was signed by Francis Malige, EBRD Managing Director for Financial Institutions, and Viktor Ponomarenko, General Manager of ProCredit Bank, on the sidelines of the EBRD 2021 Annual Meeting and Business Forum.

ProCredit Bank is a market leader in financing local MSMEs in Ukraine. The bank is a 100 per cent-owned subsidiary of ProCredit Holding, based in Germany.

The EBRD is a leading institutional investor in Ukraine. In the past two years alone, the Bank committed 2 billion to the economy. Financing smaller businesses directly and via financial institutions is a particular focus of the EBRDs work in Ukraine. The investments are combined with support for policies that promote the fight against corruption, good governance of state-owned enterprises, structural reforms and a more transparent business environment.
EBRD aligns with Paris Agreement, agrees on work plan for expansion

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development concluded its 30th Annual Meeting this week with decisions on the Banks future work on the green transition and towards expanding its activities. The Board of Governors adopted a resolution aligning the Banks activities with the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change by end-2022 and stop investing in upstream oil and gas projects. The Banks shareholders gave us a green light on the work plan to continue the exploratory work on possible limited and incremental expansion into sub-Saharan Africa and Iraq," EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso said during a press conference on the final day of the event.

Learn more here

In a statement on the climate resolution EBRD Managing Director Harry Boyd-Carpenter added: We will no longer invest in upstream oil and gas projects. However, we will continue to finance select projects in the midstream and downstream sectors but only where those projects are aligned with, and significantly contribute to, the goals of the Paris Agreement. This follows a pledge by the EBRD last year to raise the share of green investments in its investment activities to more than 50 per cent by 2025.

Read more here

EBRD President promises full strength support to accelerate recovery

In her opening speech at the Banks 30th Annual Meeting EBRD President Renaud-Basso pledged to increase support for the Covid-19 recovery and to step up the Banks work to tackle climate change. It was now time to move from coping with the immediate crisis to planning and investing for the longer term, she said.

Learn more here and watch here

This weeks event marked the EBRDs 30th anniversary and the Bank offered participants a wide range of events discussing urgent issues such as climate change, the state of the economy and recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. The event gathered prominent speaker such as US Climate Envoy John Kerry, EU Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans, UN Climate Envoy Mark Carney, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgiva, World Bank Chief Economist Carmen Reinhart and many more.

Watch the digital highlights of the EBRD 2021 Annual Meeting and Business Forum

Watch The Opening Session of the Board of Governors

Watch Rising to the Climate Challenge where John Kerry spoke of adapting the wartime mentality when dealing with climate change

Watch Thinking the Unthinkable- where Mark Carney spoke of achieving net-zero and Baroness Shafik talked of a need for a new social contract.

Watch The Sustainability Event

Watch Presentation of the Regional Economic Prospects and see social coverage #EBRDrep

Watch The Future of Capitalism- the State Strikes Back

Watch Digital Agenda  Maximising Opportunities, Minimising Threats

Watch Building a Better and More Equal Future: Voices from the EBRD Regions

Watch Chief Economists Panel  where Beata Javorcik, Gita Gopinath and Carmen Reinhardt named one key thing for policymakers to focus on in these uncertain times

Watch: 30 years of changing peoples lives: Guildhall Orchestra performance:

And come behind the scenes of filming with us: See the gallery

Watch 'The time for making history is not over'- President Odile Renaud-Basso special address

EBRD raises growth forecast for its region

The EBRD raised its forecast for emerging economies in eastern Europe, Central Asia and northern Africa to 4.2 per cent growth in 2021, according to its latest Regional Economic Prospects report published this week. This is an upward revision for 2021 from the 3.6 per cent the Bank forecast for the year in its previous report in September 2020. For 2022, the EBRD expects further solid expansion with 3.9 per cent growth. The contraction in output in 2020 was also milder than previously forecast (2.3 per cent rather than 3.9 per cent) after improvements in the overall economic environment late last year due to strong exports and fiscal support. EBRD Chief Economist Beata Javorcik said: Although the revised forecasts give reasons to be optimistic, huge uncertainty remains with regards to the path of the Covid-19 Delta variant which poses particularly large risks for countries that have made less progress on vaccinations and for economies highly reliant on international tourism.

Learn more here and watch the presentation here

MDBs climate finance rose to US$ 66 billion in 2020, joint report shows

Climate finance committed by major multilateral development banks rose to a total of US$ 66 billion last year from US$ 61.6 billion in 2019, according to the 2020 Joint Report on Multilateral Development Banks Climate Finance. Of this, 58 per cent  or US$ 38 billion  was committed to low- and middle-income economies. The annual report is a key indicator on the progress MDBs are making on accelerating the delivery of climate finance, for which demand is clearly going to grow over time.

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Support is key to helping EBRD partner financial institutions deal with climate risk, survey shows

Financial institutions in emerging economies show low adoption of comprehensive climate risk management and disclosures. Support by international partners and the regulatory framework will be key to helping them recognise and manage financial risks associated with climate change, a survey by the EBRD among partner financial institutions (PFIs) shows.



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EBRD TFP Awards announced

The EBRD Trade Facilitation Programme (TFP) honoured its most successful partner banks in 2020 during the Banks Annual Meeting. The EBRD highlighted best industry practices and crisis responses to the global pandemic. The Bank also recognised the most successful banks under its Green Trade Facilitation Programme (Green TFP) with awards for their performance last year.

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Learn more here

EBRD honours clients sustainability work

The EBRD also presented its Sustainability Awards during the Annual Meeting to clients. Sustainability is at the heart of the EBRDs operations and the awards recognise partner companies that are committed to ensuring sustainability as a key priority in their operations too.

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Project signings and agreements

EBRD details investment in Giurgiulesti International Free Port

The EBRD published details of its investment in Moldovas Giurgiulesti International Free Port, one of the countrys key strategic assets. To safeguard port operations and to safeguard and protect its financial interests, the EBRD became the sole ultimate legal owner of the operator of Giurgiulesti Port on 7 May 2021. Through its acquisition, the EBRD aims to support the ports continued operation and will seek to attract international investors to support and develop this key infrastructure asset.

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Supporting Polands Polpharma

The EBRD is providing Polish largest pharmaceuticals producer Polpharma with a PLN 200 million (45 million equivalent) loan for general and corporate purposes including in-house R&D activities, green investments and ESG strategy.

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Investing in Anadolu Efes Eurobond

The EBRD invested US$ 40 million in a US$ 500 million Eurobond issued by Turkeys Anadolu Efes Biraclk ve Malt Sanayii A.S (Anadolu Efes). With the EBRDs help, Anadolu Efes is also planning to become more sustainable and create opportunities for women and youth. Learn more

Expanding climate finance in Turkey

Reinforcing its commitment to expanding climate finance in economies where it invests, the EBRD is providing 25 million in new funds to Ak Finansal Kiralama A.S. (Aklease) to finance green investments by SMEs in Turkey. The EBRD loan will enable the company to provide funding to eligible private-sector companies for investments in energy efficiency, water efficiency, waste minimisation and small-scale renewable energy.

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Supporting green energy efficiency in Kosovo

More homeowners will be able to improve the energy efficiency of their households thanks to a new 2 million credit line extended by the EBRD to the Agency for Finance in Kosovo (AFK) to finance for investments in energy efficiency measures such as insulation, energy-efficient windows, heat pumps and solar panels. Borrowers will be eligible for cashback of up to 20 per cent of their total investment thanks to funding from the European Union (EU).

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Supporting solid waste management in Tbilisi

The EBRD is extending a 3.03 million sovereign loan to the Municipality of Tbilisi City in Georgia for the upgrade of the leachate system at the citys solid waste landfill. The upgrade applies to drainage collection of the liquid generated from rainfall and the natural decomposition of waste, so that it is properly removed from the landfill.

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EBRD, EU, GCF expand funding for SMEs in Armenia

Armenias private sector will benefit from new resources for green financing thanks to a US$ 10 million financial package put together by the EBRD in cooperation with the EU and the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to facilitate the private sectors transition to more sustainable, low-carbon and climate-resilient practices.

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Supporting the dairy industry in Uzbekistan

The EBRD is increasing its support to small and medium-sized enterprises in Uzbekistan in partnership with its long-term financial intermediary Hamkorbank. The two institutions are financially contributing to the development of dairy sector in the Khorezm region responsible for the production of nearly 10 per cent of the national milk output.

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Strengthening small businesses and trade in West Bank and Gaza

The EBRD is strengthening micro and small businesses and promoting international trade in the West Bank and Gaza, with a US$ 10 million financial package to Quds Bank. The package includes a credit line of up to US$ 5 million for MSMEs and corporates, providing them with vital liquidity to help mitigate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Investing in first internationally issued bonds by Erste Croatia

The EBRD invested 80 million in bonds issued by Erste & Steiermarkische Bank d.d., the Croatian subsidiary of Austrias Erste Group Bank AG, which are part of a 400 million international issuance listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange and marketed mainly to international institutional investors. The proceeds of the issuance will support the green agenda in Croatia.

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Appointments

Mark Bowman named EBRD Vice President, Policy and Partnerships

The EBRD named Mark Bowman as Vice President, Policy and Partnerships. He will start in his new position on 1 October and succeed Pierre Heilbronn,

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Kazuhiko Koguchi becomes new EBRD Secretary General

Kazuhiko Koguchi has been appointed the new Secretary General of the EBRD in London. He will start in his new role on 1 August and succeed Enzo Quattrociocche, who is retiring from the Bank after 12 years in the role

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Ayten Rustamova EBRD Regional Head Central Asia

Ayten Rustamova has been appointed EBRD Regional Head of the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. She will be based in Bishkek and assume her duties on 1 September 2021. She follows Neil McKain, who is returning to the Banks Headquarters in London.

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Ekaterina Solovova leads EBRD operation in Albania

Ekaterina Solovova has taken up her position as Head of Albania for the EBRD. She will be based in the capital Tirana and follows Matteo Colangeli who is now Regional Head for the Western Balkans.

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Rika Ishii new Head of Tajikistan

Rika Ishii has been appointed Head of Tajikistan for the EBRD. She will be based in the capital, Dushanbe and is due to take up her duties on 1 September 2021. She succeeds Ayten Rustamova.

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Donors

Small Business Impact Fund Assembly

On Tuesday, the Bank hosted the Small Business Impact Fund Assembly, where participants had the chance to review the successes of joint initiatives in support of SMEs, discuss lessons learned and the strategic direction of the partnership. SME F&D's Ines Rocha noted that the SBIF has been a trailblazer for pooled, agile donor funds, and has enabled the Bank to support SMEs, which have been disproportionately affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Fund is growing fast, having raised 59 million to date for 22 programmes.

Donor Assembly Meeting

Colleagues, guests and the donor community met on Wednesday for the main Annual Donor Meeting to discuss the common work during the past year as well as future plans and initiatives. EBRD Donor Co-Financing Director, Camilla Otto, highlighted donors crucial support to the Banks Covid-19 response. In 2020, the Bank mobilised 778 million in total as well as 75 million for EBRD-managed funds.

See the impact the donor partnership makes by watching our video

New donor contributions:

The Netherlands made a generous 20 million contribution to catalyse green investments and help achieve the necessary impact to address the ongoing climate and environmental crisis.

Japan committed 1 million to the SBIF, which will go towards helping SMEs support green operations of their businesses.

South Korea committed 4 million to small and medium enterprises and start-ups through advisory services, businesses and the wider population in Early Transition Countries as well as other priority groups.

Italy committed 2 million to the SBIF to support SMEs in the Western Balkans, and 1m to launch a business matching programme for SME clients.

Learn more here and here

Subscribe to instant email updates on EBRD news about topics such as coronavirus and climate finance.

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Loan of up to 18 million to finance district heating decarbonisation in Kragujevac

Project will help to significantly improve air quality in Serbias fourth-largest city

Additional work to introduce renewables to Kragujevacs heating supply will continue

Kragujevac, the fourth-largest city in Serbia, will make a big leap in its transition away from coal, thanks to an 18 million loan provided by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) for the decarbonisation of the district heating system.

The EBRD loan will finance the decommissioning of coal boilers in the citys district heating system, the installation of new natural gas boilers and the remediation of an open ash-disposal site. The financing will be complemented by technical support to the district heating company to help further decarbonise the heat supply and introduce renewable energy sources.

In coordination with the European Union, the EBRD will also support Serbia in the preparation of a national energy and climate plan. The plan will define goals for reducing emissions, increasing energy efficiency and boosting the share of renewable energy sources by 2030.

Matteo Colangeli, EBRD Regional Director for the Western Balkans and Head of Serbia, said: We are pleased to support Serbia in advancing towards its green targets, particularly in the district heating sector. The EBRD has been working with the government on developing projects leading towards decarbonisation and the introduction of renewables in district heating systems and we hope that Kragujevac will be among the first of many cities in Serbia to reach these goals. The new project is addressing the urgent issue of air pollution and we expect it to pave the way towards the citys greener and healthier future.

Kragujevac suffers from very poor air quality, with the citys district heating system one of the main sources of airborne pollution. Inefficient and dated coal-fired boilers are located near the city centre and cause severe damage to the environment. Air pollution is further exacerbated by an uncovered ash-disposal site, which not only emits airborne ash particles, but also contaminates soil and underground water.

The EBRD loan will help completely eliminate coal from Kragujevacs district heating system by replacing the coal boilers with new, natural-gas-fired hot water boilers that comply with EU standards, and by remediating the ash-disposal site. This is expected to have enormous environmental benefits, including reducing the heating systems emissions of carbon dioxide by 66 per cent, sulphur dioxide by 100 per cent, nitrous oxide by 89 per cent and particulate matter by 100 per cent, along with water savings of 55 per cent. The new boilers will also end the production of ash and slag and the related water contamination.

The EBRD is a leading institutional investor in Serbia. The Bank has invested more than 6.6 billion across 286 projects in the country to date. The EBRD is focusing on support for private-sector development, the improvement of public utility services and on the overall transition to a green economy.
EBRD supports improved solid waste management for Tbilisi residents

Additional sovereign financing to Tbilisi municipal solid waste company

Investment will further support citys green transition

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is extending a 3.03 million sovereign loan to the Municipality of Tbilisi City in Georgia for the upgrade of the leachate system at the citys solid waste landfill.

The project is part of the Green Cities Framework 2 and is a follow-on investment of the first phase, where the Bank extended a 15 million loan to Tbilisi in 2018 for the renewal of the citys solid waste collection fleet, as well as the upgrade of the existing solid waste transfer station and environmental protection measures. The Tbilisi Solid Waste Project employs the best available technology in line with European Union standards and will help to reduce environmental pollution from the existing landfill.

The upgrade applies to drainage collection of the liquid generated from rainfall and the natural decomposition of waste, so that it is properly removed from the landfill.

Catarina Bjorlin Hansen, EBRD Director for the Caucasus, said: We are pleased to sign this new agreement today. More than 1.1 million residents of Georgias capital will benefit from an improved solid waste management system. This new loan will provide additional resources to upgrade the infrastructure and make it more environmentally friendly for the citizens of Tbilisi.

The EBRD is a leading institutional investor in Georgia and, to date, has invested more than 4 billion in the country through 262 projects in the financial, corporate, infrastructure and energy sectors, with 79 per cent of those investments in the private sector.
A FORMER Lord Mayor has voiced concern about children as young as eight being used as drug runners in areas of Cork City.

Former Sinn Fein councillor Chris OLeary said this is something families have contacted him about in the context of his work as a community youth worker.

He described it as a sign of the times and said that often news of their childs activity hits parents like a bolt of lightning.

They feel its safer to give it to the younger ones because they rarely get stopped, Mr OLeary said of dealers.

Some of them are ruthless. A number of parents have called me looking for advice. They are worried that if their child has to make a statement it will escalate things. They begin to ask themselves where they went wrong and it becomes a blame game.

Mr OLeary, a youth worker, said he has received numerous calls from extremely concerned parents.

This is happening and the kids are getting younger, he said.

Its really a sign of the times.

Former Lord Mayor Chris O'Leary. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

This isnt occurring in one niche pocket of the city.

Often you observe a scene where people in their twenties are hanging around with children, Mr OLeary told The Echo.

Its not uncommon for children in this situation to be exploited in this way.

Families come to me who have done everything as parents only to find out their child was caught in possession.

Having access to stuff they might not normally be able to access is a huge draw for some children.

They see it like a part-time job and have no awareness of the long-term consequences.

Mr OLeary spoke of one family who called him in desperate need of help for their son.

This kid was in his early teens and had a very promising future.

He had come under serious pressure from a gang who was trying to persuade him to get involved in illegal activities.

They felt that, due to his affluent background, he would attract less attention and suspicion.

When he wanted to break away he started being threatened and receiving messages from those involved.

He had to stay in complete isolation just to break away from the gang.

Mr OLeary acknowledged the effect breaking away from a gang can have on kids. It can be very lonely for a child who is forced to isolate themselves like this and can lead to issues like depression, he said.

Thats when I advise parents to link in with services.

He said that often the child enjoys the feeling that they belong. Initially, it feels like fun for the child.

They are offered protection in a gang but that protection comes with a very serious price.

Parents ended up distraught and it became a very serious situation.
David Young and Rebecca Black, PA

The prosecution of two former British soldiers over three deaths during the Troubles in the North have been halted.

'Soldier F' was being prosecuted for the murder of two men, James Wray and William McKinney, shot in Derry on Bloody Sunday, 1972. The soldier was charged with two counts of murder and fice counts of attempted murder, according to The Irish Times.

Thirteen civilians were killed on Bloody Sunday when members of the elite regiment fired shots during an anti-internment demonstrations, with a fourteenth person dying later.

'Soldier B' was to be prosecuted for the murder of 15-year-old Daniel Hegarty in the city six months later.

The families of the victims were informed of the decisions during meetings with the North's Public Prosecution Service (PPS) in Derry on Friday morning.

The PPS decision to reportedly comes after a review of evidence in the cases.

These reviews follow a recent court ruling which caused the collapse of another trial of two soliders accused of murdering Offical IRA leader Joe McCann in Belfast in 1971, which said statements given by soldiers to police in 1972 could not be relied upon.
Indias apex drug regulator has turned down a proposal by Serum Institute of India to test the COVID-19 vaccine Covovax on children, saying it needs to evaluate safety and immunogenicity data from the ongoing bridging trial in adults.

Covovox is the Indian version of the vaccine by the US-based Novavax, which had shown efficacy of over 90% in Phase III clinical trials, the company claimed in a statement last month. It is yet to be approved by the US FDA.

The SII had applied to the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation earlier this week, seeking permission for conducting a trial of Covovax on 920 children, 460 each in the 12-17 and 2-11 age groups, across 10 sites.

The Pune-based vaccine maker had said last month that it hopes to start clinical trials of this on children by July and introduce the vaccine for adults in India by September. This vaccine is being tested for safety and immunogenicity in nearly 1600 adults in the country. The firm has already started producing its first batches ahead of its commercial launch in India.

The timeline to conduct the trial on children, however, may be pushed back with the latest development. Incidentally, senior authorities in the government were also keen for this trial to begin in children.

As you know, they (Serum Institute) are conducting a bridging trial already, which is in advanced stages of completion... We hope they will complete the trial on schedule, and also hope they will start, in good time, trials in children, V K Paul, member (health) of Niti Ayog and chairman of the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19.

He had added that it was time to start the trial in the paediatric population without delay. In the country, Covaxin by Bharat Biotech has so far been the only vaccine allowed to be tested on children and adolescents aged 2-17, while the Coronavirus vaccine by Zydus Cadila has already carried out safety and immunogenicity studies on a hundred 12-17-year-olds. The US has already started vaccinating anyone above the age of 12 with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, with several other countries like Canada, Japan, Italy and UAE also approving the vaccine for children above 12.
FILE  In this April 26, 2018 file photo, actor and comedian Bill Cosby departs the courthouse after he was found guilty in his sexual assault retrial, at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa. Pennsylvanias highest court has overturned comedian Bill Cosbys sex assault conviction. The court said Wednesday that they found an agreement with a previous prosecutor prevented him from being charged in the case.
The German authorities have announced that from Sunday they will include Catalonia in their list of risk areas for coronavirus, according to the Robert Koch Institute, the government agency responsible for controlling infectious diseases.

As well as Catalonia, they indicated that Cyprus, the Norwegian counties of Agder and Rogaland, and the Spanish region of Cantabria will also be included in these "basic risk areas", so it is not advisable to travel there. In Spain, Andalusia, Navarra, the Basque Country, La Rioja and Ceuta have already held this status for weeks.

At the other end of the spectrum, the German authorities have announced that Qatar, the Croatian county of Mejumurje, the French department of Guadeloupe and the Dutch overseas territory of Aruba have been excluded from the list, so that on Sunday they will no longer be considered "basic risk areas".

The weekly update of the German government's list of risk areas has few practical effects for travellers arriving in the country from these areas: they will have to present a negative test result, or the EU's digital Covid certificate proving their vaccination. However, inclusion on the list does indicate that the German government advises against travelling to these areas.

Germany classifies Covid risk areas as zones where there is a seven-day cumulative incidence of more than 50 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.

"Basic risk area" is the category of least concern in the German government lists, which has two types of higher classification - zones of special risk due to high incidence, and zones of special risk due to a dangerous variant. The lists are prepared by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), in collaboration with the ministries of foreign affairs, interior and health.

According to all forecasts, Covid indicators in Catalonia are on the rise. In the last few hours, 5,304 new infections have been registered and the outbreak risk has increased from 199 to 282. The Rt or transmission rate of the disease has also increased, from 1.54 to 1.71, while the average age of those infected continues to fall. Among the trends there is, however, one that remains positive: the situation in Catalan hospitals is under control. Despite the fact that day-after-day infections are rising, hospital pressure remains stable with 475 Covid patients admitted, only two more than yesterday. In Intensive Care Units, four patients have been discharged in the last few hours.

The data is good in Germany

In Germany itself, the seven day cumulative incidence fell this Friday to 5.0 cases per 100,000 population, a rate that has not been recorded since last August. According to the RKI, in the previous 24 hours 649 new cases were confirmed across the country, and 69 deaths with or from Covid. Germany thus has registered 3,729,682 infected and 91,007 dead since the pandemic began.
India-produced vaccines won't be a problem for EU travel scheme says Johnson

The British Prime Minister says he is "very confident" that the UK's use of India-produced jabs won't prevent people being able to travel abroad.

Boris Johnson played down concerns that people would miss out on foreign trips this summer because their COVID jabs aren't recognised by the EU's drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

It follows doses of an Astra-Zeneca vaccine batch made in India were given out in the UK and the Isle of Man.

It had been reported that up to five million Britons would not qualify for the EU's vaccine passport scheme because the AstraZeneca shots they received were manufactured in India.

But Mr Johnson said: "I see no reason at all why the MHRA-approved vaccines should not be recognised as part of the vaccine passports.

"I am very confident that will not prove to be a problem."

The Manx Government is yet to comment.
FILE - In this June 2, 2021 file photo, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey talks with customers at Filet & Vine in Montgomery, Ala. Ivey has raised $1.2 million in her bid for reelection, her campaign announced the figure Thursday, June 30.
Amazon has opened a new front in its streaming battle with Netflix. The company is bringing the anime hit Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon A Time to Prime Video globally, barring Japan, on August 13th, according to Deadline. Together with a revised version released last month, the fourth and final chapter in the movie saga has raked in more than $86 million at Japanese theaters, making it the biggest earner of the year. For those who missed the previous entries, the good news is they're also coming to Prime Video, including Evangelion: 1.11 You Are (Not) Alone, Evangelion: 2.22 You Can (Not) Advance and Evangelion: 3.33 You Can (Not) Redo.

Blending mech action with intimate teenage drama, the Evangelion franchise became a pop culture behemoth in Japan and a revered cult classic overseas. Netflix ran the original series back in 2019 along with two films  Evangelion: Death True and The End of Evangelion  as part of its push into Japanese animation. Though it probably helped to expand the show's reach, some legacy fans were upset that Netflix chose to go with a new voice cast for its English dub instead of the original players. More recently, the streamer announced that it's launching around 40 anime shows and movies in a bid to capture subscribers in Asia.

Amazon, on the other hand, has dabbled in anime in the past, most notably through its Blade of the Immortal adaptation in 2019. Evangelion is a big get for the company and success could prompt it to wade further into the genre.
Apple and Intel are reportedly testing chip designs with TSMC's 3-nanometer process and could be first to market with the technology, according to Nikkei. Intel may be planning to use the chips in next-gen notebooks and data centers, while Apple could be first to market with a 3-nanometer processor in future iPad models. Taiwan-based TSMC will reportedly start manufacturing processors for both companies as early as next year.

TSMC is currently manufacturing 5-nanometer chips for Apple's iPhone 12, and in 2022 will build next-gen AMD Zen 4 chips. It has targeted 3-nanometer volume production for the second half of 2022 with products likely coming along in 2023.

TSMC expects the new tech to deliver 10-15 percent greater performance at the same power levels, or reduce power 25 to 30 percent at the same transistor speeds over 5-nanometer tech. The company also has a 4-nanometer N4 process set to arrive in 2022, offering an evolution over 5-nanometer with minimal changes required by chip designers.

Apple's iPad will reportedly be the first devices powered by 3-nanometer chips, according to Nikkei's sources. The next generation of iPhones rolling out next year will supposedly use 4-nanometer tech for scheduling reasons.

Currently the chip volume planned for Intel is more than that for Apple's iPad using the 3-nanometer process.

The situation with Intel is perhaps more interesting. Intel confirmed to Nikkei that it would work with TSMC for its 2023 product lineup and has previously said that it would subcontract some chip manufacturing out to the Taiwan-based company, though it didn't say which technology it would use.

As it stands now, Intel has only just started rolling out its 10-nanometer chips (which are broadly equivalent to chips made with TSMC's 7-nanometer process), and has delayed 7-nanometer production until 2023.

According to Nikkei, TSMC will produce more chips for Intel than Apple. "Currently the chip volume planned for Intel is more than that for Apple's iPad using the 3-nanometer process," a source said. Intel plans to use TSMC to build processors for notebook and data servers "in an attempt to regain market share it has lost to Advanced Micro Devices and NVIDIA over the past few years," the story reads.

If the rumors prove accurate, Intel could possibly beat AMD to 3-nanometer tech, as AMD plans to use 5-nanometer chips for its next-gen Zen 4 processors. AMD now relies on TSMC for its processor and GPU chips, as its previous supplier GlobalFoundries decided not to manufacture 7-nanometer or smaller chips back in 2018.

TSMC is building a $12 billion chip fab plant in Arizona and plans to use its current 5-nanometer manufacturing technology. Intel, meanwhile, plans to invest $20 billion in two Arizona factories.
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As the holiday weekend approaches, deals on the latest gadgets have been popping up across the web. Apple's 10.2-inch iPad is $30 off right now and Solo Stove, the maker of compact, stainless steel fire pits, has knocked $120 off most of its devices. We even have a few holdouts from Amazon Prime Day still available, like deals on Anker's Eufy RoboVac 11S and a two-pack Nest WiFi system. Here are the best July 4th tech deals we could find.

10.2-inch iPad

The 10.2-inch iPad remains on sale for $299, or $30 off its normal price. It's arguably the best tablet for new tablet owners and we liked its improved performance, familiar design and support for the first-generation Apple Pencil.

Buy 10.2-inch iPad at Amazon - $299

MacBook Air M1

Apple's MacBook Air M1 has dropped to $899, which is the best price we've seen it. If you're looking to upgrade your notebook, this is one of the best options for most people right now. The Air M1 earned a score of 94 from us for its incredibly fast performance, excellent keyboard and trackpad, good battery life and lack of fan noise.

Buy MacBook Air M1 at Amazon - $899

24-inch iMac M1

Apple's colorful iMacs with 8-core GPUs are $50 off right now at Amazon, bringing them down to $1,450. We gave this desktop a score of 89 for its remarkable performance thanks to the M1 chip, lovely 24-inch Retina Display and its thin-and-light design.

Buy 24-inch iMac at Amazon - $1,450

Solo Stove Bonfire

Engadget

Solo Stove's Bonfire is $120 off for the company's July 4th sale, bringing it down to $230. That's the best price we've seen, and the other models are also $120 off for a limited time, too. These are smokeless, portable fire pits that we've recommended in the past as an easy way to upgrade your backyard setup.

Buy Bonfire at Solo Stove - $230

ThermoWorks Thermapen Mk4

Engadget

On the heels of the new Thermapen One announcement, the Thermapen Mk4 has been discounted to $69. It's the best instant-read thermometer we've used so far the backlit display makes it easy to read in almost any situation and the display rotates depending on how you're holding the pen. Plus, you never have to remember to turn it off because the pen automatically turns on when you pick it up and will shut off after some time of no use.

ThermoWorks is also running an Independence Day sale that knocks up to 20 percent off remote BBQ alarm thermometers.

Buy Thermapen Mk4 at ThermoWorks - $69 Shop ThermoWorks Independence Day sale

Apple Watch Series 6 Product Red Edition

Apple

The GPS + Cellular models of the Apple Watch Series 6 Product Red Edition are $100 off at Amazon. The 40mm is down to $399, or close to a record low, while the 44mm version has hit an all-time low of $429. We gave the Series 6 a score of 89 for its speedier performance, quicker charging and slightly improved battery life.

Buy Apple Watch Series 6 (40mm, GPS + Cellular) at Amazon - $399 Buy Apple Watch Series 6 (44mm, GPS + Cellular) at Amazon - $429

GameStop Independence Day sale

Through Sunday, July 4, GameStop is running a holiday sale that includes a "buy two, get one free" promo on a number of titles including Marios + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The sale also includes discounts on pre-owned games as well as $30 in extra credit when you trade in a PS4, XB1, Nintendo Switch or another console.

Shop GameStop's Independence Day sale

Samsung Galaxy Buds+

Billy Steele / Engadget

Both Amazon and Microsoft have the Galaxy Buds+ for $100, or $50 off their normal price. We gave them a score of 83 for their improved audio quality, longer battery life, deeper iOS integration and better call quality.

Buy Galaxy Buds+ at Amazon - $100 Buy Galaxy Buds+ at Microsoft - $100

Anker Eufy RoboVac 11S

One of our favorite budget robot vacuums, the Anker Eufy RoboVac 11S, has dropped to $140. That's $90 off its normal price and close to its record-low. Not only is this one of the slimmest robo-vacs we've tried, but it cleans hard floors and carpets thoroughly and it comes with a remote that you can use to manually direct the vacuum, set schedules and more.

Buy RoboVac 11S at Amazon - $140

Google Nest WiFi (2 pack)

The Nest WiFi pack with one router and one extension point is down to $189, or $80 off. We gave this mesh system a score of 84 for its unobtrusive design, simple installation process and built-in smart speaker capabilities.

Buy Nest WiFi (2 pack) at Walmart - $189

55-inch LG C1 OLED 4K smart TV

LG's 2021 C1 OLED 4K TVs have dropped in price, so you can grab the 55-inch for $1,497, or about $300 off its normal price. The C1 is the mid-tier lineup that includes the company's latest processor, HDMI 2.1 support and NVIDIA G-SYNC and FreeSync compatibility.

Buy 55-inch LG C1 OLED at Amazon - $1,497 Buy 55-inch LG C1 OLED at Best Buy - $1,500

48-inch LG CX OLED 4K smart TV

My Best Buy members can get the 48-inch LG CX OLED 4K smart TV for $1,250, or $250 off its normal price. It's free to sign up for My Best Buy and it's worth it to get a bit of extra money off all of the retailer's current sales. This OLED set has LG's a9 Gen 3 processor, support for Dolby Vision, Atmos, HDR10 and HLG plus Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa integration.

Buy 48-inch LG CX OLED at Best Buy - $1,250

Beats Solo Pro

The Beats Solo Pro are still discounted to a record-low of $149. We liked these on-ear cans for their excellent sound quality, good ANC and hands-free Siri capabilities.

Buy Beats Solo Pro at Walmart - $149

Omaze gaming PC giveaway

fpphotobank via Getty Images

Omaze is giving away another $20,000 to build your ultimate gaming PC. This sweepstakes is free to enter, but funds donated with purchased entries will benefit Schools on Wheels, an organization that provides free tutoring and mentoring services to children experiencing homelessness across Southern California. Through July 2, you can use the code RADNESS150 at checkout to get an additional 150 bonus entries.

Enter to win at Omaze

Pricing and availability is subject to change. No donation or payment necessary to enter or win this sweepstakes. See official rules on Omaze.

New tech deals

55-inch Sony A8H Bravia OLED smart TV

Amazon knocked about $600 off Sony's 55-inch A8H Bravia OLED smart TV. It includes the company's X1 Ultimate processor, Game Mode for a smoother, more responsive experience, the Android TV operating system and support for the Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa and even Apple's AirPlay 2.

Buy 55-inch Sony A8H Bravia OLED at Amazon - $1,298

MagSafe charger

Apple's MagSafe charger is down to $34 at Amazon, or $6 off its normal price. While not a huge discount, it's a good opportunity to get a first-party accessory for less. This thin disk magnetically attaches to the back of the latest iPhones to power them up.

Buy MagSage charger at Amazon - $34

Twelve South 4th of July sale

The accessory maker Twelve South is running a 4th of July sale through July 5th that knocks up to 60 percent off of many products. Of note are the AirFly Bluetooth transmitter for as low as $25, the Compass Pro adjustable iPad stand for $50 and the HiRise Lightning Stand for $25.

Shop Twelve South 4th of July sale

Casetify July 4th sale

Casetify's holiday sale gets you 15 percent off most items through July 5th when you use the code 4JULY21 at checkout. The company makes colorful cases and protective gear for numerous mobile devices including iPhones, Galaxy handsets, AirPods and more. They also make great gifts thanks to Casetify's extensive library of customizable accessories.

Shop Casetify's July 4th sale

Speck Independence Day sale

Through July 4th, you can get 30 percent off sitewide at Speck. In addition to iPhones and Android device cases, Speck has gear for AirPods, MacBooks, Kindles, Chromebooks and others. If you want a case for your smartphone that will both look good and keep your gadget safe, Speck accessories are good options.

Shop Speck's Independence Day sale

Aukey PowerZeus 500 portable power station

Aukey's PowerZeus 500 portable power station is on sale for $367 when you use the code AUKEYPLUS at checkout. This 518Wh station can easily come with you on a camping trip to provide juice to all your devices, or act as a backup battery during power outages.

Buy PowerZeus 500 at Aukey - $367

NordVPN

One of our recommended VPNs is running a good sale on a two-year subscription. You can sign up for NordVPN for only $89 for the first two years, which comes out to $44.50 per year. We like NordVPN for its speed, its no-logs policy, the thousands of servers it has to choose from and that one account supports up to six connected devices.

Sign up for NordVPN (two years) - $89

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
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Have a question about this story? Do you see something we missed? Do you have a story idea for Violet? Send an email to violeth@enidnews.com.
On the night of June 25, 1996, a bomb was detonated near the Khobar Towers housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 airmen and injuring more than 400 U.S. and international military members and civilians. The towers housed coalition forces supporting Operation Southern Watch, a no-fly zone operation in southern Iraq. (Photo provided)
U.S. Air Force 1st Lt. Kimberly Hegeman, a nurse with the 151st Medical Group, gives a sticker to a child visiting the pediatric section of the military field hospital on June 7 in Tafraoute, Morocco, during African Lion 2021. (U.S. Air National Guard Photo by Tech. Sgt. Annie Edwards).
Lori Waddell, 2020 Air Force Spouse of the Year, poses for a photo at Memorial Park at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont. Spouse of Master Sgt. Mitch Waddell, 341st Force Support Squadron sustainment superintendent, she was nominated for the award due to her contributions and volunteer events within the military community. (U.S. Air Force Photo by Staff Sgt. Tristan Truesdell)
Bill Cosby, through his spokesman, revealed the life he had during his jail time.

Following his release from prison, Cosby reflected on the time he spent behind the bars and how the people treated him.

On Wednesday, the disgraced actor officially saw the outside world again after serving two years of a three- to 10-year sentence. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction after discovering that District Attorney Kevin Steele violated an agreement.

His prison time already dented his life as a celebrity. Despite that, Cosby's spokesperson Andrew Wyatt expressed how grateful the actor is to have proper treatment inside the prison.

In a statement to Fox News, Wyatt said that the prison's staff treated the actor the way how everybody should be treated. This confirmed that no mistreatment happened to him during his stay.

He added that Cosby helped so many people in the prison that he considered it as "his platform" now.

The Heartbreaking Part of Bill Cosby's Arrest

Despite the positive approach he enjoyed, Cosby also experienced heartbreak as he never received any visitors except Wyatt himself.

In the last two years, not even his wife Camille was able to visit him.

"His wife has not seen him in almost three years. I was his only visitor. He's going to get back to his family [now,]" the spokesperson said. He clarified that the lack of visitors was not caused by repercussions.

READ ALSO: 'Bachelor' Franchise Will Regret Losing Chris Harrison, Peter Weber Warns

While he was allowed to receive visitors, Cosby arranged the rule himself since seeing his family might take away his mental toughness.

Cosby saw Wyatt for the last time on March 8, 2020, before the authorities prevented people from exposing prisoners to COVID-19.

Cosby's Health Status Was Alarming?

Apart from emotional and mental health, the actor's physical health also created buzzes.

Ahead of his sentencing, the public witnessed him walking to and from the court as he guided himself with a wooden cane.

Wyatt confirmed this time that until now, Cosby is still 100 percent blind.

"He's blind due to Glaucoma. He went blind six and a half, seven years ago. He used [a cane] to help him feel and hit against things when walking but now we're just leading him out now," he explained.

In the end, he claimed that the actor should have never been charged and convicted.

READ MORE: Pat Sajak Leaving 'Wheel of Fortune' Due to Worrying Reason?

See Now: Famous Actors Who Turned Down Iconic Movie Roles
Over the past few days, Kim Kardashian was heavily criticized after wearing a white see-through dress while travelling around Vatican City in Europe. More recently, the reality star is speaking out to explain her side.

Kardashian took to her Instagram account to explain her side. In a series of photos posted, she wrote, "Don't worry, I adhered to the dress code and fully covered up while inside St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel's."

In one photo, the "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" star can be seen wearing a baggy black leather coat over her controversial outfit.

Following this, many fans took to the comment section to point out Kardashian also broke another rule while inside the churches she visited.

Kim Kardashian broke another rule?

Many fans were outraged when they saw photos of the reality star posing inside St. Peter's Basilica and Sistine Chapel. They mentioned that they could not take pictures inside the Catholic buildings and think Kardashian used her "privelege" to do so.

"How is it possible that you are able to take a picture inside the chapel while the rest of us can't? This is a bit disrespectful and more like a privelege to me." one commented.

"Everyone else was told not to take pictures inside the Vatican because it will interfere with the paintings but you can?" another one wrote.

READ NOW: Iggy Azalea Witnessed How Controlled Britney Spears Was, Says Jamie Spears 'Tried to Control' Her AS WELL

Is Kim Kardashian still disrespectful even though she covered up?

Fans are still arguing over Kardashian's controversial dress even though she explained that she covered it up. Many still believe that she's "disrespectful."

"I love you Kim but this is so inappropriate. I know your brand is wearing the least amount of fabric but for us catholics this is a sacred place. The fact that you could care less is beyond me." one wrote.

"Sorry Kimmy, I find you disrespectful in your poses and choice of clother. This is a revered religious place of worship. Do better," one commented.

Other people also pointed out her group photo in front of the altar, saying it's inappropriate to pose in the crucifix.

Is it allowed to take photos inside as Kim Kardashian did?

Many believe tourists can't take photos and videos inside the Sistine chapel because flash photography can affect the quality of the paintings painted on the wall and ceilings.

This is not the case. According to Mental Floss, the management prohibits anything that documents inside the chapel for decades now, and it's because Nippon Television Network Corporation in Japan has the exclusive rights for the documentation.

Nippon TV was the highest bidder to restore Michaelangelo's artworks inside the chapel, making them the only management allowed to take photos and videos.

However, according to The New York Times, Nippon TV's exclusivity expired three years following the restoration, but photography and video are still banned up to this date.

READ ALSO: Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton To Tie The Knot This Weekend? Ranch Wedding Details Revealed

See Now: Famous Actors Who Turned Down Iconic Movie Roles
Richard Branson looks forward to beat Jeff Bezos by grabbing his chance to become the first billionaire in space.

Branson and his company, Virgin Galactic, launched a competitive plan that will break Bezos' desire in the space race. The spaceflight business publicized on Thursday that it has scheduled its next test flight on July 11.

The rocket ship will welcome six people on board including Branson.

The founder will fly with five other company employees as they try to complete Virgin Galactic's fourth flight to space.

Branson To Beat Bezos?

CBS News reported that the winged rocket ship will fly from New Mexico. The US Federal Aviation Administration gave the business magnate's company permission to take people to space in June following the successful test flight in May.

Branson and Virgin Galactic's move initiated a separate race in pursuit of preventing Bezos to become the first billionaire in space. To secure the win, the business mogul scheduled the flight nine days before Bezos flies with his team.

READ ALSO: $200 Billion Man! Jeff Bezos' Wealth Reaches Absurd Amount During Pandemic

Previously, he declined to reveal the exact date of the launch due to the restrictions placed by his traded company. However, he noted that he would fly once he is fit and healthy to receive a go.



This month, he finally revealed the final date on Twitter.

"I've always been a dreamer. My mum taught me to never give up and to reach for the stars. On July 11, it's time to turn that dream into a reality aboard the next @VirginGalactic," Branson wrote.

When Will Jeff Bezos Launch His Rocket Ship?

After assigning himself to the flight last month, Bezos scheduled his flight on July 20. The date will offer a nod to the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

His brother, Mark Bezos, will join him in the trip alongside the winner of a $28 million charity auction and Wally Funk. The American aviator was among the 13 female pilots who passed the tests for NASA's original Mercury 7 astronauts in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the group was barred just because they were women.

He first announced his plans on Instagram, saying that he always dreamed of traveling to space. Since he will officially end his stint on Amazon through the trip, his space race will surely be worthwhile.

READ MORE: Duggar Family's Downfall: Jinger Duggar Reveals Dark Times She Endured Due to Fame

See Now: Famous Actors Who Turned Down Iconic Movie Roles
Former television host in NBC, Chris Hansen received a warrant of arrest after deciding not to attend a court hearing in Michigan.

Sources reported that the host had been subpoenaed by Scott Koerner, the Shiawassee County Prosecuting Attorney.

The prosecuting attorney scheduled him to attend the country courtroom on Thursday but he failed to do so.

Hansen assisted authorities during a sting operation that resulted in the arrest of three pedophiles last October 2020.

The sting operation was somewhat similar to the procedure he did during "To Catch a Predator," which had been successful for the past years.

Chris's connection to the case made his presence in the court important as his expertise and statements will further prove that the three men purposely sought underaged girls.

Other than the "To Catch a Preditor," Hansen is also known for hosting "Killer Instinct with Chris Hansen" back in 2015.

'To Catch a Predator' host Chris Hansen wanted in Michigan for skipping court https://t.co/y7WWrPBxzg pic.twitter.com/Cb2vbDDmhx  New York Post (@nypost) July 2, 2021

Chris Hansen's Previous Arrest For a Shopping Spree Costing $13,000 Paid Using Bounced Checks

The incident in Michigan is not the first time Chris Hansen encountered a warrant arrest.

According to TMZ, the television journalist was locked in handcuffs for bouncing checks in Stamford, Connecticut.

In January 2019, Chris had turned himself in after being issued a warrant of arrest using null checks and a $13,000 debt.

Police officials reported that the former host had failed to properly pay a local business for a shopping spree he transacted in 2017.

The items he bought for planned "marketing events" included 355 mugs, 288 shirts, and 650 vinyl decals from a mom-and-pop shop, says Stamford PD.

The business owner revealed that he threatened to report Hansen after receiving the first bounced check to which Chris negotiated with him to allow four separate partial payments.

However, the owner refused the deal and finally approached local authorities after a second check bounced.

READ ALSO: Andy Dick Jailed For Assault Using Strange Deadly Weapon, Fiancee Spills What Actually Happened [FULL DETAILS]

Former 'To Catch A Predator' Host Chris Hansen Continues Legacy with Canadian Nonprofit Event

Before being issued an arrest for skipping court summons, Chris Hansen had been busy spreading his advocacy for child protection.

Last May 2021, Chris partnered with DEFEND for their "10-hour Ink-A-Thon," along with other celebrities.

This article said the former host had been assigned to read the names of those who signed a petition for all social media sites to have an age verification for its users.



READ MORE: Chris Brown Speaks Against Accusations of Hitting a Woman, Gains Some Fan Support [UPDATE]

See Now: Famous Actors Who Turned Down Iconic Movie Roles
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Laganja Estranja broke Twitter recently after her death-defying entrance as a lipsync assassin on "RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars 6."

Estranja, whose real name is Jay Jackson, initially competed on the sixth season of the regular series; she was invited back by host RuPaul to go head-to-head against the winner of this week's challenge to decide who will be eliminated.

At first, all the contestants, including the judges, were confused as there was no one behind the curtain. A few moments later, Estranja shouted her iconic entrance line in Season 6, saying, "Y'all wanted a twist eh?"

She immediately got everyone's attention when she entered the back of the stage by doing a towering split from what appears to be a high stool. (watch her entrance below)

NEVER gonna recover from this lip sync assassins entrance tbh  #AllStars6 #RuOClock pic.twitter.com/MGofMmWRp3  RuPaul's Drag Race (@RuPaulsDragRace) July 2, 2021

Estranja finished her line by saying, "Come on All-Stars 6, let's get sickening okurrrr." She then proceeded to fight her co-contestant from season 6, Trinity K Bonet, who won the maxi challenge.

In the end, Estranja won the lipsync to the song "Physical" by Dua Lipa after doing several stunts and splits, making her reveal the eliminated queen of the episode, Silky Nutmeg Ganache.

Fans React

At the time of this writing, the show is still a trending topic on Twitter, with over 35,000 tweets and counting. Fans immediately expressed their excitement with Estranja's return on the main stage after seven years.

"The behavior you exhibited was ICONIC, like, the legend LEGEND jumped out." one wrote in a meme. "I'm sorry but @LaganjaEstranja MURDERED THAT!!! From season 6 to season 6!!" A'Whora, an alum from Drag Race UK, wrote.

"Now THAT is THE @DUALIPA Lip Sync we NEEDED and DESERVED! @LaganjaEstranja & @trinitykbonet BOTH SERVED AND ATE, LEAVING NO CRUMBS. JESUS. IM IN AWE! IVE SEEN IT 3 TIMES AND COUNTING. #AllStars6 #RPDR," another fan tweeted.

READ NOW: Taika Waititi on Viral 'Threesome' Photos With Rita Ora And Tessa Thompson: 'Is it a Big Deal?'

Why isn't Laganja Estranja cast for All-Stars 6?

Before the current season, Laganja Estranja was heavily rumored to compete for All-Stars.

Fans were disappointed when she was not included in the lineup of 13 queens (the most number of contestants for All-Stars as past seasons only had 10.) Speaking to Gay Times,

Estranja, who recently came out as trans, revealed that the World Of Wonder (RPDR's production) had been asking her to compete for All-stars every year since her departure from her regular season.

Unfortunately, she mentioned that she has always refused the offer as her season was "quite traumatic." But when the time came, and she agreed, she was rejected after a psych evaluation because she refuses to give more information about herself, which is her legal right.

Per Reddit, fans pointed out that she might not return in future seasons after her experience on the show as she was painted as a "villain."

However, at the time of this writing, Laganja Estranja has not opened up whether she'll appear on All-Stars 7, but fans are ultimately rooting for her.

READ ALSO: R. Kelly's Lawyers Demand Pre-Trial Release; Brutal Jail Conditions and Unfair Treatment Reported

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Meghan McCain announced on Thursday that she would leave "The View" by the end of July.

The controversial host has been with the show for four years, and throughout those years, she had a lot of heated debates with her co-hosts.

Was Meghan McCain Fired From 'The View?'

For now, it isn't sure if she was fired or not, but Meghan McCain's announcement during yesterday's episode seemed to be framed as if she made a voluntary decision.

The host spoke about her home in Washington, saying it has become difficult for her to travel to and from New York, where "The View" is filmed.

The 36-year-old explained, "I just have this really wonderful life here that, ultimately, I felt like I didn't want to leave."

Meghan also stated that her decision wasn't "an easy one" and was only made after thinking about it so much and with guidance and consideration of those closest to her.

But it was recently revealed that she still has two years left in her contract, making many viewers wonder what really may be the reason for her exit - was it because of her differences with the co-hosts? Or perhaps she was fired?

.@MeghanMcCain announces her departure from @TheView at the end of the shows season, saying this was not an easy decision.



Im just eternally grateful to have had this opportunity here so, seriously, thank you from the absolute bottom of my heart. https://t.co/ZiP1UTs2xu pic.twitter.com/eLuEAJ4KLT  The View (@TheView) July 1, 2021

READ ALSO: Why Is Meghan McCain Leaving 'The View'? 5 Possible People To Replace Her Explored

Here are some theories about the possibility of Meghan McCain being fired from "The Voice."

Terminated For Recent On-Air Spat

In early 2021, Meghan McCain was recently worried about her job security after her on-air spat with co-host Joy Behar about anti-Semitism.

An insider revealed that McCain, who had just returned from her maternity leave, was not confident about her place on "The View."

"The show actually broke a record during her maternity leave and now she realizes that she doesn't have the job security that she once did. All of that has her shook."

Then in May, executives from the network reportedly had a meeting with "The View" hosts to fix whatever's going on with Joy and Meghan.

Since then, ABC has reportedly received a ton of requests to fire Meghan McCain following her heated exchange with Joy.

Referring to Herself As a 'Proud Zionist' on 'The View'

A day before Meghan McCain's announcement from "The View," she dedicated an almost 10-minute segment to an interview with music journalist Eve Barlow who is currently facing death threats for speaking out against anti-Jewish racism on her social media.

Since 2019, Meghan has also been vocal about her support of Israel and defending the Jewish community that she described herself as a "Zionist" on the show and her Twitter bio.

Though there wasn't a clear indication or nobody said that Meghan McCain's support for Israel and the Jews played a role in her departure, Eve Barlow tweeted, "Conclusion: the world hates women who refuse to censor themselves, but we keep showing up anyway."

Too Hot-blooded With 'The View' Co-Hosts

As mentioned in the May 2021 meeting with ABC and the hosts, the executives warned them that the debates have been getting too personal on-air.

Meghan has accused experienced trading insults with Whoopi Goldberg and being engaged in many other heated debates with each one of them.

So it's possible that her co-hosts were pushed too far already by Meghan McCain.

READ MORE: R. Kelly's Lawyers Demand Pre-Trial Release; Brutal Jail Conditions and Unfair Treatment Reported

See Now: Famous Actors Who Turned Down Iconic Movie Roles
Queen Elizabeth II has been warned that one of her beloved luxuries may end up being decommissioned because of its massive cost.

Her Majesty's royal train's days are reportedly numbered, according to a royal financial expert.

Recently, David McClure broke down the Queen's accounts after they released the annual Sovereign Grant Report.

Speaking to the Daily Mail Plus' Palace Confidential, he said that the royal train was "not financially viable" for the 95-year-old.

McClure explained that Prince William and his wife, Kate Middleton's, single rail journey to Scotland cost almost $64,000. He added that the royal train was only used one time this year for Cambridge's journey.

In 2020, the royal train was used only three times.

The Sovereign Grant is a type of grant used to pay for the royals' official work engagements and the upkeep of their properties.

The grant comes from some of the profits made from the Crown of State, which includes land and properties gifted to Queen Elizabeth II.

While most of the profits go to the Treasury, a certain percentage goes to funding the royal family members' official work, which is why it is also referred to as "taxpayers' money."

But McClure further shared some insight into the monarch's financial report for this year, saying, "The Sovereign Grant does not include all the costs of the monarchy."

"It doesn't include say the cost of local councils for organising visits by members of the Royal Family."

He continued that it still doesn't include security costs. Because of that, the government is refusing to give it a precise figure for security because they say it "might undermine" it.

However, McClure probed it and found that ten years ago, the total security cost was $175 million, and now, it's probably worth about $206 million.

READ ALSO: Prince Harry and Prince William Honoring Princess Diana Can Suffer More Heartaches - Here's Why

Queen Elizabeth II's Didn't Meet with Prince Harry

In other Queen Elizabeth II news, it was previously reported that the monarch was supposed to meet with Prince Harry before he leaves for the US.

After the Diana statue unveiling on Thursday, Prince Harry returns to his family Meghan Markle and their kids, Archie Harrison and Lilibet Diana.

This year, the reason why the Queen and her grandson missed each other was due to a clash with her schedule. Every year, Queen Elizabeth II travels to Scotland for Holyrood week and only ended this Thursday.

READ MORE: Was Princess Diana The Best Royal To Work For? Former Aides Reveal What Happened Behind Closed Doors

See Now: Famous Actors Who Turned Down Iconic Movie Roles
2021-07-02

Maeci

Vice Minister Sereni met today at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome with Iraqi Deputy for Foreign Minister Nizar Issa Al Khairullah, as part of the visit to Italy of a delegation of the Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Al-Kathimi.

The talks focused on the prospects for strengthening the bilateral partnership through the intensification of contacts at the political level and the revival of economic, commercial and cultural cooperation.

"We look favourably at the economic reforms underway in Iraq, Vice Minister Sereni declared. We hope that such reforms will encourage greater investment, always taking into account capital and investors' safety".

The issue of security was also addressed. Sereni declared, "Italy will continue to work alongside Iraq in the fight against terrorism and to guarantee stability to the country and Iraqi citizens, especially in the delicate electoral phase that will begin in the autumn. The smooth running of the elections will be an important moment in witnessing the success of international efforts, including Italian ones, to consolidate democracy in Iraq".

Sereni and Al Khairullah finally agreed to organise the next session of the Joint Commission in Baghdad as soon as conditions allow.
Estes Park, CO (80517)

Today

Partly cloudy this morning with thunderstorms becoming likely this afternoon. High around 75F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Low 53F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
Five world-renowned scientists have signed a letter to UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay to "thank UNESCO for its leadership in recognising the threat of climate change to the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage property."

Professor Terry Hughes, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Dr Sylvia Earle, Professor Johan Rockstrom and Professor Andrea Grottoli sent the letter last night from Australia.

Last month, UNESCO released a draft decision recommending the Great Barrier Reef be inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger.

The scientists' letter is a strong show of support for UNESCO from some of the most revered coral reef experts in the world.

They write UNESCO "has made the right decision" to recommend the in Danger listing of the Great Barrier Reef, because "tragically, the Reef has suffered extensive losses in recent years through three severe coral bleaching events, fuelled by global warming."

They stress that protecting the Reef requires global action to reduce carbon emissions, "yet Australia has so far not pulled its weight in this global effort."

"An 'in Danger' listing for the Great Barrier Reef will focus action on how to limit further damage to the Reef. It presents a challenge to all nations to immediately reduce greenhouse gas emissions," said Prof Terry Hughes.

"Australia has a lot to lose with current emission pledges only getting us to global surface temperatures of a lethal 3 degrees C above preindustrial levels," said Prof Hoegh-Guldberg, who also coordinated an Australian Academy of Science report on climate change earlier this year.

"We therefore greatly appreciate UNESCO's draft recommendation for Australia to urgently address the threat of climate change and welcome the draft report's recognition that 1.5 degrees C is widely recognised as a critical threshold for the property," the letter says.

The letter acknowledges efforts by the Australian and Queensland Governments to tackle sediment and nutrient pollution, which were also commended by UNESCO.

But, the scientists add UNESCO's draft decision "notes with the utmost concern that the water quality targets in the Reef 2050 Plan have not been met."

Finally, the scientists pledge that they "stand ready to help support UNESCO's efforts to secure the future of this global icon."

The 44th session of the World Heritage Committee, held online from 16 to 31 July 2021, will decide whether to accept or modify the draft decision on the Great Barrier Reef.

The Australian government has said it will strongly lobby member countries of the World Heritage Committee to remove the in Danger recommendation.

###

LETTER: https:/ / www. dropbox. com/ s/ 31e2xybn0j35hcu/ Letter%20to%20UNESCO. pdf?dl= 0

BACKGROUND

Professor Terry Hughes FAA is the Founding Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, headquartered at James Cook University, Queensland. In 2018, Nature recognised Professor Hughes as one of the "10 people who mattered this year" for his response to the global coral bleaching event caused by anthropogenic climate change.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg FAA is Professor of Marine Studies at the University of Queensland, a Founding Director of the Global Change Institute, and Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. He was Coordinating Lead Author on the Impacts chapter of the United Nations IPCC Special report on 1.5 degrees C.

Dr Sylvia Earle is an oceanographer, National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence, and Chair of Mission Blue which aims to achieve 30% protection of the ocean by 2030. She was named by Time Magazine as its first Hero for the Planet in 1998.

Professor Johan Rockstrom is Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. His climate science work formed the basis of the Sir David Attenborough-narrated Netflix documentary Breaking Boundaries.

Professor Andrea G. Grottoli, based at Ohio State University, is a Fellow and President of the International Coral Reef Society, and Director of the international Coral Bleaching Research Coordination Network.

CONTACT

Terry Hughes (Townsville, AEST)

P: +61 (0)400 720 164

E: terry.hughes@jcu.edu.au

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (Brisbane, AEST)

P: +61 (0)401 106 604

E: oveh@uq.edu.au

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

Melissa Lyne / Coral CoE at JCU (Sydney, AEST)

P: + 61 (0)415 514 328

E: melissa.lyne@jcu.edu.au
(Boston)--Would you be more willing to get vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus if you could participate in a lottery for cash and prizes? The answer was surprisingly no, according to Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) researchers who found that Ohio's "Vax-a-Million" lottery-based incentive system, intended to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates, was not associated with an increase in COVD-19 vaccinations.

Prior reports in the media had suggested that the Ohio lottery increased COVID-19 vaccinations, leading other states to use COVID-19 vaccine incentive lotteries in an attempt to increase slowing vaccination rates. "However, prior evaluations of the Ohio vaccine incentive lottery did not account for other changes in COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States, such as those that may have been due to expansion of vaccination to ages 12-15," explained corresponding author Allan J. Walkey, MD, MSc, professor of medicine at BUSM.

Using data from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control to evaluate trends in vaccination rates among adults 18 and older, the researchers compared vaccination rates before and after the Ohio lottery versus other states in the U.S. that did not yet have vaccine incentive lottery programs. Vaccination rates in other states served as a "control" for vaccination trends measured in Ohio, allowing the researchers to account for factors besides the Ohio lottery (such expanding vaccine eligibility to adolescents) throughout the country.

"Our results suggest that state-based lotteries are of limited value in increasing vaccine uptake. Therefore, the resources devoted to vaccine lotteries may be more successfully invested in programs that target underlying reasons for vaccine hesitancy and low vaccine uptake," said Walkey, a physician at Boston Medical Center.

The researchers believe identifying interventions that can successfully increase COVID-19 vaccination rates is a critical public health issue necessary to curb the pandemic. "It is important to rigorously evaluate strategies designed to increase vaccine uptake, rapidly deploy successful strategies, and phase out those that do not work," Walkey said.

Although Walkey and his colleagues were sorry to see that state lottery incentives were not associated with an increase COVID-19 vaccinations, they hope their findings will lead to a shift in focus away from ineffective and expensive lotteries, and on to further study of other programs that may more successfully increase vaccine uptake.

###

These findings appear online in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Allan J Walkey was funded by NIH R01HL139751, NIH R01HL151607, NIH R01HL136660, and NIH OT2HL156812-01. Anica C Law was funded by NIH K23HL 153482. Nicholas A Bosch was funded by NIH 1F32GM133061-01.
Lugano, Switzerland, 2 July 2021 - Doctors and patients are being advised to reduce unnecessary antibiotic use following new data suggesting that these medicines may increase the risk of cancer of the large intestine (colon), especially in people under 50 years. (1) The results, presented at the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer (30 June-3 July) raise fresh concerns about the impact of the estimated 65% increase in global antibiotic consumption reported between 2000 and 2015, despite not showing a direct cause and effect. (2)

"To our knowledge, this is the first study to link antibiotic use with the growing risk of early onset colon cancer - a disease which has been increasing at a rate of at least 3% per year over the last two decades. (3) Junk food, sugary drinks, obesity and alcohol are likely to have played a part in that rise, but our data stress the importance of avoiding unnecessary antibiotics, especially in children and young adults," said Ms Sarah Perrott, from the University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK, presenting the data.

Using a large Scottish primary care database of up to 2 million people, the study looked at nearly 8000 people with bowel cancer (colon and rectum) matched with people without bowel cancer. It found antibiotic use was associated with an increased risk of colon cancer across all ages, but the risk was increased by almost 50% in the under-50s compared to 9% in the over-50s. In the younger age group, antibiotic use was linked to cancers in the first part of the colon (the right side). Quinolones and sulfonamides/trimethoprim, which are used to treat a wide range of infections, were associated with these right-side cancers.

Dr Leslie Samuel, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, UK, senior author of the study, explained that the contents of the right side of the colon are more liquid and that the natural bacteria living there, called the microbiome, may be different from further along the colon.

"We now want to find out if there is a link between antibiotic use and changes in the microbiome which can make the colon more susceptible to cancer especially in younger people. It's a complex situation as we know that the microbiome can quickly revert to its previous state even when the bowel has been cleared out for a diagnostic procedure such as an endoscopy. We don't yet know if antibiotics can induce any effects on the microbiome that could directly or indirectly contribute to development of colon cancer," said Samuel.

Commenting on the new research, Professor Alberto Sobrero, Ospedale San Martino, Genoa, Italy, explained that, of the 2 million people diagnosed with colon cancer worldwide each year, (4) younger people aged 20-40 with colon cancer generally have a worse prognosis than older people because they are often diagnosed later.

"Physicians are less likely to investigate a patient with abdominal discomfort for colon cancer if they are in their 30s than if they are in their 70s, and younger patients are not eligible for bowel cancer screening. As a result, their cancer is usually diagnosed at a later stage, when it is more difficult to treat," he said.

Like Perrott and Samuel, he believes that physicians should now think of bowel cancer in younger patients with abdominal symptoms, and he supports more research into the multiple possible causes of the rising incidence of colon cancer in this age group.

"It is too early to say if excessive use of antibiotics could be a causative factor, and we need to understand more about the possible role of the microbiome in bowel cancer before we consider the impact of antibiotics on the intestinal flora. However, the new research does remind us that antibiotics should not be given unless they are really needed, and we cannot exclude the possibility that unnecessary use of antibiotics may be exposing people to an increased risk of cancer," Sobrero concluded.

###

Notes to Editors

Please make sure to use the official name of the meeting in your reports: ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer 2021

Official Congress Hashtag: #WorldGI2021

Disclaimer

This press release contains information provided by the author of the highlighted abstract and reflects the content of this abstract. It does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the ESMO WGI Organisers who cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of the data. Commentators quoted in the press release are required to comply with the ESMO Declaration of Interests policy and the ESMO Code of Conduct.

References

1 Abstract SO-25 'Global rise in early-onset colorectal cancer: an association with antibiotic consumption?' will be presented by Dr Sarah Perrott during Session VII: Presentation of Selected Colorectal Cancer Abstracts on Friday, 2 July, 08:00-12:00 CEST. Annals of Oncology, Volume 32, Supplement 3, July 2021 https:/ / www. worldgicancer. com/

2 Klein EY, Van Boeckel TP, Martinez EM et al. Global increase and geographic convergence in antibiotic consumption between 2000 and 2015.Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Apr 10;115(15):E3463-E3470.

3.Vuik FE, Nieuwenburg SA, Bardou M et al. Increasing incidence of colorectal cancer in young adults in Europe over the last 25 years. Gut 2019 Oct;68(10):1820-1826.

4. IARC/WHO. Globocan 2020. Colorectal cancer. https:/ / gco. iarc. fr/ today/ data/ factsheets/ cancers/ 10_8_9-Colorectum-fact-sheet. pdf

About the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)

ESMO is the leading professional organisation for medical oncology. With more than 25,000 members representing oncology professionals from over 160 countries worldwide, ESMO is the society of reference for oncology education and information. Driven by a shared determination to secure the best possible outcomes for patients, ESMO is committed to standing by those who care about cancer through addressing the diverse needs of #ONEoncologycommunity, offering #educationforLIFE, and advocating for #accessiblecancerCARE. Visit http://www. esmo. org

About the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer

The ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer represents the year's premier gathering of international oncology professionals, discussing the latest emerging data and new research in this rapidly advancing scientific field and dedicated to improving the lives of patients impacted by diseases of the GI tract.

SO-25 - Global rise in early-onset colorectal cancer: an association with antibiotic consumption

S. Perrott1, R. McDowell2, P. Murchie1, C. Cardwell2, L. Samuel3

1School of Medicine, Medical Sciences and Nutrition, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom, 2Centre for Public Health, School of Medicine, Dentistry & Biomedical Science, Queen's University, Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom, 3Department of Clinical Oncology, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, NHS Grampian, Aberdeen, United Kingdom

Background: Since the late 1980s, global antibiotic consumption and colorectal cancer (CRC) rates in those aged less than 50 years have soared. As the gut microbiome modulates many human processes, significantly altering microbiome structure and diversity with antibiotic therapy has previously been shown to influence CRC genesis in older adults. To our knowledge, no study before has investigated antibiotic usage in early-onset CRC (EOCRC). This study will investigate the association between exposure to antibiotics and risk of EOCRC predisposition, and also evaluate antibiotic usage in older adults with CRC for comparison.

Methods: A nested case-control study was conducted using Scottish primary care data. CRC cases, diagnosed between 1999 to 2011, were identified from GP records and matched with up to 5 controls. Analysis were conducted separately in EOCRC cases (diagnosed <50 years) and later-onset cases (diagnosed >=50 years). Prescriptions for oral antibiotics (by drug class and by anaerobic/non-anaerobic effect) were extracted and total antibiotic exposure period determined for each matched set. Total exposure time in days was categorised into 0, 1-15, 16-60, and >60 days. Cases and controls were described and conditional logistic regression used to calculate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the associations between each exposure and CRC (by tumour location), adjusting for comorbidities. Test for trend was used to evaluate any exposure-response relationship.

Results: 7,903 CRC (5,281 colon, 2,622 rectal) cases and 30,418 controls were identified. 445 cases were aged under 50 years. 45% were prescribed antibiotics during the exposure period. Use of antibiotics was associated with increased risk of colon cancer in both age-groups,?particularly in the EOCRC cohort (<50 years: adjusted odds ratio (ORadj) 1.49 (95%CI 1.07, 2.07), p=0.018); >= 50 years (ORadj (95%CI) 1.09 (1.01, 1.18), p=0.029). Antibiotic use was associated with a significantly increased risk of proximal colon cancer (pCC) among the under?50s (ORadj (95%CI) 3.78 (1.60, 8.92), p=0.002), but not among the older age-group (ORadj (95%CI) 0.89 (0.72, 1.11), p=0.315). This difference was of statistical significance (p=0.001). Among both age-groups, most classes of antibiotic were not significantly associated with colon, rectal, or distal colon cancer. However, quinolones and sulfonamides/trimethoprim were associated with pCC in the EOCRC cohort only (quinolones ORadj (95%CI) 7.47 (1.40, 39.94), p=0.019; sulfonamides/trimethoprim ORadj (95%CI) 4.66 (1.66, 13.09), p=0.003). Rectal cancer was not associated with antibiotic usage in either strata, with the exception of non anti-anaerobic antibiotics in the EOCRC cohort (ORadj (95%CI) 1.70 (1.06, 2.74), p=0.029). There was limited evidence of a positive exposure-response relationship between antibiotic use and risk of CRC, with the exception of pCC in the younger cohort (p-trend 0.004).

Conclusion: Our findings suggest antibiotics may have a role in colon tumour formation across all age groups, particularly in those aged less than 50 years. It is possible that exposure to antibiotics could be contributing to the observed increases in EOCRC, particularly in the proximal colon. If confirmed, our study will provide further reasons to reduce, where possible, frequent and unnecessary antibiotic prescribing.

Legal Entity Responsible for this Study: The authors.

Funding: This work was supported by Cancer Research UK (reference C37316/A25535)

Disclosure: All other authors have declared no conflicts of interest.
Lugano, Switzerland, 2 July 2021 - Obese patients with colorectal cancer receive lower cumulative doses of adjuvant chemotherapy, relative to their body surface area (BSA), than non-obese patients, show results from a large meta-analysis reported at the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer 2021 (1). Further findings showed that cumulative relative chemotherapy dose was associated with survival so may explain the poorer survival that has been seen in obese patients receiving adjuvant chemotherapy for colorectal cancer. (2)

"Adjuvant chemotherapy is dosed according to a person's body surface area, which is calculated from their height and weight. But in obese patients (with a high body mass index (BMI), and who are more likely to have high BSAs), doses are often capped, or based on an idealised weight, because of concern that large doses might increase side-effects. This means that obese patients may receive proportionately lower doses of chemotherapy" reported lead author Corinna Slawinski, from the Division of Cancer Sciences, University of Manchester, UK.

"Our study has demonstrated an association between increasing body mass index and modest reductions in the cumulative relative dose of adjuvant chemotherapy in patients with colorectal cancer. And we also saw an association between increased cumulative relative dose and improved survival," she said. "This supports the recently published ASCO guidance that full, weight-based chemotherapy doses should be used to treat obese adult patients" (3)

Commenting on the findings, Elizabeth Smyth, Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, UK, member of the ESMO Faculty for Gastrointestinal tumours, said: "Dose reductions for high BMI may be associated with lower cure rates in resected colon cancer treated with adjuvant chemotherapy." She added: "Adjuvant chemotherapy has the potential to cure patients with residual micrometastatic disease following curative surgery, so it is important that we maximise the benefits for all patients."

A number of previous studies have shown that obese patients with colorectal cancer have worse outcomes than non-obese patients. But limitations with these studies made it difficult to draw conclusions as to whether having a higher body mass index was directly associated with survival or if the association was due to other factors such as treatment (i.e. dose administered).

"One important factor is how chemotherapy doses are calculated for individual patients. We carried out our study to better understand the relationship between BMI, chemotherapy dosing and survival in colorectal cancer," explained Slawinski.

The OCTOPUS study analysed data for 7269 patients receiving adjuvant chemotherapy after curative surgery for colon and/or rectal cancer in four large, randomised trials. The researchers examined the relationship between BMI and chemotherapy dosing and the relationship between chemotherapy dosing and survival.

"We looked at two ways of measuring how much chemotherapy had been received as a proportion of actual-to-expected standard doses: average cumulative relative dose (ACRD) and average relative dose intensity (ARDI)." ACRD is the proportion of the total expected standard dose (per unit of body surface area) over the whole chemotherapy course that has actually been received. ARDI however, also takes into account the duration of treatment, and is the proportion of the expected standard dose intensity (the total dose per unit of BSA, divided by the number of weeks of treatment) that has actually been received. With both measures averaged over the number of drugs in the regimen, and expressed as a percentage.

Results showed that 5% increments in ACRD were significantly associated with improvements in disease-free survival (hazard ratio 0.953, 95% confidence interval 0926, 0.980, p=0.001). Overall survival was also associated with ACRD. However, there was no significant association with ARDI. Slawinski suggested that the lack of association between survival and ARDI may be because ARDI is a less sensitive measure of reductions in total (cumulative) dose of chemotherapy.

Further findings showed that each BMI increase of 5kg/m2 was associated with a 2% reduction in the relative dose of chemotherapy in the first cycle of chemotherapy and 1% reductions in both ACRD and ARDI. This means an obese patient with a BMI of 37.5kg/m2 would have a 3% reduction of ACRD and ARDI compared to a non-obese patient with a BMI of 22.5kg/m2.

"These results showed that elevated BMI is associated with a reduced relative dose of chemotherapy in the first treatment cycle and a modest reduction in ACRD. These indirect effects through sub-optimal treatment might explain poorer survival in obese patients, rather than direct effects of obesity resulting from, for example, tumour biology," concluded Slawinski. "Our results so far support giving obese patients a full dose of chemotherapy based on their body weight. But we are still exploring toxicity data, examining the relationship between BMI, dose capping, toxicity and survival," she cautioned. "Toxicity has the potential to reduce quality of life and can be life threatening. And there may also be other reasons for reducing chemotherapy doses, such as comorbidities, so it is important that dosing and treatment decisions are individualised to the patient."

Smyth agreed: "The main message from this study is that we should consider whether dose reductions are necessary in patients with a high BMI when treating them with adjuvant chemotherapy." But she added: "Dosing chemotherapy is complex and includes not only weight but fitness, co-morbidities including renal function and dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPD) testing results."

Smyth considered that more studies are needed before changing practice. "Prospective studies examining the impact of higher doses of chemotherapy may be needed, especially as there is an increase in the proportion of patients diagnosed with cancer and who are obese." For now, she concluded: "We should take all aspects of the patient into account when making chemotherapy dosing decisions. Dose reductions do seem to be associated with less good survival in this study, but these may still be required for safety."

###

Notes to Editors

Please make sure to use the official name of the meeting in your reports: ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer 2021

Official Congress Hashtag: #WorldGI2021

Disclaimer

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References

1 Abstract O-4 'Average cumulative relative dose (ACRD) of adjuvant chemotherapy is more important than average relative dose intensity (ARDI) for colorectal cancer survival, with implications for treating obese patients: the OCTOPUS consortium' will be presented by Corinna Slawinski during Session VII: Presentation of Selected Colorectal Cancer Abstracts on Friday, 2 July, 08:00-12:00 CEST. Annals of Oncology, Volume 32, Supplement 3, July 2021 - https:/ / www. worldgicancer. com

2 Parkin et al. Excess adiposity and survival in patients with colorectal cancer: a systematic review (2014). 15(5): 434-451.

3 Griggs JJ, Bohlke K, Balaban EP et al. Appropriate systemic therapy dosing for obese adult patients with cancer: ASCO Guideline Update. J Clin Oncol 2021 DOI https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1200/ JCO. 21. 00471

About the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)

ESMO is the leading professional organisation for medical oncology. With more than 25,000 members representing oncology professionals from over 160 countries worldwide, ESMO is the society of reference for oncology education and information. Driven by a shared determination to secure the best possible outcomes for patients, ESMO is committed to standing by those who care about cancer through addressing the diverse needs of #ONEoncologycommunity, offering #educationforLIFE, and advocating for #accessiblecancerCARE. Visit http://www. esmo. org

About the ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer

The ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer represents the year's premier gathering of international oncology professionals, discussing the latest emerging data and new research in this rapidly advancing scientific field and dedicated to improving the lives of patients impacted by diseases of the GI tract.

O-4 - Average cumulative relative dose (ACRD) of adjuvant chemotherapy is more important than average relative dose intensity (ARDI) for colorectal cancer survival, with implications for treating obese patients: the OCTOPUS consortium

C. Slawinski1, L. Malcomson1, J. Barriuso2, H. Guo1, A. Harkin3, T. Iveson4, R. Glynne-Jones5, C. Van de Velde6, A. Renehan2

1University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom, 2University of Manchester / The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester, United Kingdom, 3Cancer Research UK Glasgow Clinical Trials Unit, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 4University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom, 5Mount Vernon Cancer Centre, Northwood, United Kingdom, 6Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, Switzerland

Background: After curative surgery for colorectal cancer (CRC), some studies indicate poorer survival in obese patients. Adjuvant chemotherapy (ACT) for CRC is commonly capped at a body surface area (BSA) 2.2m2, potentially reducing chemotherapy average cumulative relative dose (ACRD) and average relative dose intensity (ARDI) in obese patients.

Methods: Individual participant-level data from MOSAIC, SCOT, PROCTORSCRIPT and CHRONICLE (CRC-ACT) randomised-trials, with derivable BMI, BSA and chemotherapy doses, were included from the OCTOPUS consortium. ARDI and ACRD were calculated as percentages of actual to expected (full BSA-based) dose intensity (cumulative dose/treatment duration in weeks) or cumulative dose respectively, averaged across the drugs in the regimen. A two-stage random-effects meta-analyses of linear or Cox proportional hazards regression models were performed to explore BMI-ARDI/-ACRD and ARDI-/ACRD-survival relationships respectively. The primary outcome was disease-free survival (DFS), and secondary outcomes were overall (OS) and cancer-specific (CSS) survival, in addition to ARDI and ACRD. All models where adjusted for age, sex, performance status, t-stage and n-stage (in addition to BMI in the survival models).

Results: 7269 patients were eligible. BMI 5kg/m2 increments were associated with a 2.04% reduction in cycle 1 dose (95% CI:-2.45,-1.64; p<0.001) and modest reductions in ACRD (-1.05% (-1.84, -0.26); p=0.009) and ARDI (-1.02% (-1.43, -0.62); p<0.001). Within study effect modification was demonstrated for ARDI (female vs. male: 1.55% (0.97,?2.13); p<0.001), but not ACRD (female vs. male: 0.88% (-0.14, 1.89); p=0.092).

ACRD 5% increments were associated with improved DFS (HR 0.953 (0.926, 0.980); p=0.001), OS (HR 0.931(0.908, 0.955); p<0.001) and CSS (HR 0.941(0.924, 0.959); p<0.001) survival. However, no significant relationship was demonstrated for ARDI (DFS HR 1.015 (0.967, 1.065); p =0.552; OS HR 1.035 (0.990, 1.081); p 0.134; CSS HR 1.022 (0.982, 1.064); p = 0.282), nor for sex-interactions for both ACRD and ARDI.

Conclusion: ACRD is more important than ARDI in determining survival. Elevated BMI is associated with a reduced cycle 1 dose and a modest ACRD reduction. These indirect effects through under-treatment might explain poorer survival in obese patients, rather than direct effects of obesity resulting from, for example, tumour biology.

Legal Entity Responsible for this Study: The authors.

Funding: This work was supported by Cancer Research UK via the funding to Cancer Research UK Manchester Centre: [C147/A18083] and [C147/A25254]. A.G. Renehan is supported by the Manchester NIHR Biomedical Research Centre (IS-BRC-1215-20007).

Disclosure: All authors have declared no conflicts of interest
MANHATTAN, KANSAS -- Research led by Kansas State University's Suprem Das, assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, in collaboration with Christopher Sorensen, university distinguished professor of physics, shows potential ways to manufacture graphene-based nano-inks for additive manufacturing of supercapacitors in the form of flexible and printable electronics.

As researchers around the world study the potential replacement of batteries by supercapacitors, an energy device that can charge and discharge very fast -- within few tens of seconds -- the team led by Das has an alternate prediction. The team's work could be adapted to integrate them to overcome the slow-charging processes of batteries. Furthermore, Das has been developing additive manufacturing of small supercapacitors -- called micro-supercapacitors -- so that one day they could be used for wafer-scale integration in silicon processing.

"Additive manufacturing is fascinating, cost-effective and has versatile design considerations," Das said.

The team has developed supercapacitors that have been tested for 10,000 cycles of charging and discharging cycles, a number that is promising to evaluate the reliability of these devices, Das said The team is also studying the versatility of these micro-supercapacitors by printing on mechanically flexible surfaces. For this, they used 20-micrometer-hin polyimide -- plastic -- substrates with high reliability. Das is highly interested in translating emerging materials to devices.

"When you think about best materials and wish to make the best devices, it is not simple and straightforward," Das said. "One needs to then understand the underpinning physics and chemistry involved in devices."

Another advantage of Das' invention is the green aspects of the research that he visualized through constructive discussions with Sorensen. When Das met Sorensen, he realized he could use his expertise in additive manufacturing to transform these materials into useful things; in this case, making tiny energy storage devices.

A few months later, Das filed for a U.S. patent after developing a nano-ink technology and used it to demonstrate printed micro-supercapacitors.

Das is particularly interested in forming this synergistic collaboration with Sorensen because of the energy-efficient, highly scalable and chemical-free nature of the graphene production process and his own group's graphene ink manufacturing process. Both of these processes are patented/patent-pending technologies and are industrially relevant, Das said.

"We make high-quality, multilayer graphene by detonating fuel-rich mixtures of unsaturated hydrocarbons such as acetylene with oxygen in a multi-liter chamber," Sorensen said. "Our patented method is simple requires very little energy, hence is ecologically benign; requires no toxic chemicals; and has been scaled up to yield high-quality, inexpensive graphene."

Graphene has been recognized as a wonder material with much potential because of its many superlative physical properties Many graphene manufacturing methods have been developed across the globe and graphene has been produced in ton quantities. Technologists, however, are well aware that graphene is not yet in the marketplace because none of these methods have had the right combination of economy, ecology and product quality to allow graphene to fulfill its potential. But both the methods of producing graphene and nano-inks pursued at Kansas State University are on target to address all of these requirements, according to Sorensen and Das.

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The printed supercapacitor research, Graphene Aerosol Gel Ink for Printing Micro-Supercapacitors, was recently published as the cover article in the journal ACS Applied Energy Materials.

Former postdoctoral researcher Anand Gaur from the Das research team, several graduate students in Das and Sorensen's groups, and associate professor Brice LaCroix in the K-State geology department have contributed to this work. The work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
BOSTON -- Gaurav Gaiha, MD, DPhil, a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, studies HIV, one of the fastest-mutating viruses known to humankind. But HIV's ability to mutate isn't unique among RNA viruses -- most viruses develop mutations, or changes in their genetic code, over time. If a virus is disease-causing, the right mutation can allow the virus to escape the immune response by changing the viral pieces the immune system uses to recognize the virus as a threat, pieces scientists call epitopes.

To combat HIV's high rate of mutation, Gaiha and Elizabeth Rossin, MD, PhD, a Retina Fellow at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, a member of Mass General Brigham, developed an approach known as structure-based network analysis. With this, they can identify viral pieces that are constrained, or restricted, from mutation. Changes in mutationally constrained epitopes are rare, as they can cause the virus to lose its ability to infect and replicate, essentially rendering it unable to propagate itself.

When the pandemic began, Gaiha immediately recognized an opportunity to apply the principles of HIV structure-based network analysis to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. He and his team reasoned that the virus would likely mutate, potentially in ways that would allow it to escape both natural and vaccine-induced immunity. Using this approach, the team identified mutationally constrained SARS-CoV-2 epitopes that can be recognized by immune cells known as T cells. These epitopes could then be used in a vaccine to train T cells, providing protective immunity. Recently published in Cell, this work highlights the possibility of a T cell vaccine which could offer broad protection against new and emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2 and other SARS-like coronaviruses.

From the earliest stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team knew it was imperative to prepare against potential future mutations. Other labs already had published the protein structures (blueprints) of roughly 40% of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and studies indicated that patients with a robust T cell response, specifically a CD8+ T cell response, were more likely to survive COVID-19 infection.

Gaiha's team knew these insights could be combined with their unique approach: the network analysis platform to identify mutationally constrained epitopes and an assay they had just developed, a report on which is currently in press at Cell Reports, to identify epitopes that were successfully targeted by CD8+ T cells in HIV-infected individuals. Applying these advances to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, they identified 311 highly networked epitopes in SARS-CoV-2 likely to be both mutationally constrained and recognized by CD8+ T cells.

"These highly networked viral epitopes are connected to many other viral parts, which likely provides a form of stability to the virus," says Anusha Nathan, a medical student in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program and co-first author of the study. "Therefore, the virus is unlikely to tolerate any structural changes in these highly networked areas, making them resistant to mutations."

You can think of a virus's structure like the design of a house, explains Nathan. The stability of a house depends on a few vital elements, like support beams and a foundation, which connect to and support the rest of the house's structure. It is therefore possible to change the shape or size of features like doors and windows without endangering the house itself. Changes to structural elements, like support beams, however, are far riskier. In biological terms, these support beams would be mutationally constrained -- any significant changes to size or shape would risk the structural integrity of the house and could easily lead to its collapse.

Highly networked epitopes in a virus function as support beams, connecting to many other parts of the virus. Mutations in such epitopes can risk the virus's ability to infect, replicate, and ultimately survive. These highly networked epitopes, therefore, are often identical, or nearly identical, across different viral variants and even across closely related viruses in the same family, making them an ideal vaccine target.

The team studied the identified 311 epitopes to find which were both present in large amounts and likely to be recognized by the vast majority of human immune systems. They ended up with 53 epitopes, each of which represents a potential target for a broadly protective T cell vaccine. Since patients who have recovered from COVID-19 infection have a T cell response, the team was able to verify their work by seeing if their epitopes were the same as ones that had provoked a T cell response in patients who had recovered from COVID-19. Half of the recovered COVID-19 patients studied had T cell responses to highly networked epitopes identified by the research team. This confirmed that the epitopes identified were capable of inducing an immune reaction, making them promising candidates for use in vaccines.

"A T cell vaccine that effectively targets these highly networked epitopes," says Rossin, who is also a co-first author of the study, "would potentially be able to provide long-lasting protection against multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2, including future variants."

By this time, it was February 2021, more than a year into the pandemic, and new variants of concern were showing up across the globe. If the team's predictions about SARS-CoV-2 were correct, these variants of concerns should have had little to no mutations in the highly networked epitopes they had identified.

The team obtained sequences from the newly circulating B.1.1.7 Alpha, B.1.351 Beta, P1 Gamma, and B.1.617.2 Delta SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. They compared these sequences with the original SARS-CoV-2 genome, cross-checking the genetic changes against their highly networked epitopes. Remarkably, of all the mutations they identified, only three mutations were found to affect highly networked epitopes sequences, and none of the changes affected the ability of these epitopes to interact with the immune system.

"Initially, it was all prediction," says Gaiha, an investigator in the MGH Division of Gastroenterology and senior author of the study. "But when we compared our network scores with sequences from the variants of concern and the composite of circulating variants, it was like nature was confirming our predictions."

In the same time period, mRNA vaccines were being deployed and immune responses to those vaccines were being studied. While the vaccines induce a strong and effective antibody response, Gaiha's group determined they had a much smaller T cell response against highly networked epitopes compared to patients who had recovered from COVID-19 infections.

While the current vaccines provide strong protection against COVID-19, Gaiha explains, it's unclear if they will continue to provide equally strong protection as more and more variants of concern begin to circulate. This study, however, shows that it may be possible to develop a broadly protective T cell vaccine that can protect against the variants of concern, such as the Delta variant, and potentially even extend protection to future SARS-CoV-2 variants and similar coronaviruses that may emerge.

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Gaiha is an assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Additional authors include Clarety Kaseke, Ryan J. Park, Dylan Koundakjian, Jonathan M. Urbach, PhD, Nishant K. Singh, PhD, Rhoda Tano-Menka, Fernando Senjobe, Michael T. Waring, Alicja Piechocka-Trocha, PhD, Wilfredo F. Garcia-Beltran, MD, and Bruce D. Walker, MD, from the Ragon Institute; A. John Iafrate, MD, Vivek Naranbhai and Ashok Khatri from MGH; Mary Carrington, PhD, of NIH; and Arman Bashirova, NCI.

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Massachusetts Consortium of Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR). Additional support was provided by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Ragon Institute, the Mark and Lisa Schwartz Foundation and Enid Schwartz (B.D.W.), and Sandy and Paul Edgerly. Roider is supported by the Heed Ophthalmic Foundation. Gaiha is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists and the Gilead HIV Research Scholars Program. This project has been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.

Conflicts of interest: Roider and Gaiha have filed patent application PCT/US2021/028245.

About the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard

The Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard was established in 2009 with a gift from the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Foundation, creating a collaborative scientific mission among these institutions to harness the immune system to combat and cure human diseases. With a focus on HIV and infectious diseases, the Ragon Institute draws scientists, clinicians and engineers from diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise to study and understand the immune system with the goal of benefiting patients. For more information, visit http://www. ragoninstitute. org

About the Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The Mass General Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with annual research operations of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In August 2020, Mass General was named #6 in the U.S. News & World Report list of "America's Best Hospitals."

About Mass Eye and Ear

Massachusetts Eye and Ear, founded in 1824, is an international center for treatment and research and a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. A member of Mass General Brigham, Mass Eye and Ear specializes in ophthalmology (eye care) and otolaryngology-head and neck surgery (ear, nose and throat care). Mass Eye and Ear clinicians provide care ranging from the routine to the very complex. Also home to the world's largest community of hearing and vision researchers, Mass Eye and Ear scientists are driven by a mission to discover the basic biology underlying conditions affecting the eyes, ears, nose, throat, head and neck and to develop new treatments and cures. In the 2020-2021 "Best Hospitals Survey," U.S. News & World Report ranked Mass Eye and Ear #4 in the nation for eye care and #6 for ear, nose and throat care. For more information about life-changing care and research at Mass Eye and Ear, visit our blog, Focus, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Originally discovered as a bacterial mode of defense against invading viruses, the remarkable ability of CRISPR-Cas9 to modify specific locations of DNA has made it a researcher favorite among gene editing tools. The ongoing effort to explore further possibilities of the CRISPR-Cas9 system is ushering in newer developments to this tool. In one of the latest refinements of the technique, as illustrated in a study published in BioDesign Research, scientists from Stanford University, USA have developed a CRISPR-Cas9 system that induces highly effective silencing of target genes.

The versatility of CRISPR-Cas9 based gene editing is largely achieved by modifying the Cas9 protein itself. In this approach, the endonuclease property of the Cas9 protein is removed, yielding a deactivated Cas9, or dCas9. Many effector proteins, including a wide variety of gene expression-altering enzymes, are then fused with dCas9 for targeted binding to specific sites on the DNA. When fused with an activating or repressing transcription factor, the dCas9 complex upregulates or downregulates the target gene, respectively. However, the gene-altering ability of such complexes is transient, as the effects persist only while the effector domains of the regulatory proteins remain physically bound or actively targeted to the region of interest.

For practical purposes, such as suppressing the effect of a disease-causing mutation, a longer-lasting effect of silencing is desirable. Dr. Lei S. Qi from Stanford University, the corresponding author of the study, and colleagues explain this concept further: "The Cas9 endonuclease, that stops the expression of a target gene, is analogous to a brake which stops the car by breaking its engine. In a modified dCas9-repressor fusion system, that contains a transcriptional repressor, the car remains stopped as long as one holds down the brake pedal actively. However, we aimed to develop a silencing system that, like a parking gear, prevents wheel movement until you switch the car out of it".

To achieve this goal, the researchers adopted an approach based on the epigenetic regulation of the eukaryotic genome where gene expression is altered stably and reversibly by the direct modification of genomic regions. Epigenetic silencing involves methylation of both histone proteins and DNA. In the present study, Dr. Qi and his colleagues fused dCas9 protein with a transcription repressor domain KRAB (Kruppel-associated box) and DNA methylating domains of DNMT3L and DNMT3A- two potent epigenetic modifiers. They named the construct dCas9-KAL and tested its silencing capacity in a cell-based reporter system. When stably integrated into human cells expressing fluorescent protein EGFP, the dCas9-KAL construct, designed to localize at the promoter of EGFP, repressed fluorescence for weeks.

The success in developing a robust and long-term epigenetic repressor has multifold implications. Successful silencing of critical or disease-inducing genetic elements can provide better treatment options for cancer and other genetic ailments. Additionally, the unique construct-synthetic reporter system developed in this study will help the scientists in assessing the activity of various domains or their combinations fused to dCas9. As Dr. Muneaki Nakamura from Stanford University, the lead author of the study, explains: "Since its adoption, CRISPR-Cas9 has revolutionized the face of genetic modification. Our system, as a powerful addition to the CRISPR toolbox, will facilitate further research in the field. It can be used to better engineer cells with desired behaviors, which could find use in the development of custom cell types with wide-ranging research and therapeutic applications,". reflects Dr. Qi.

The team's findings certainly make a noteworthy addition to the molecular Swiss knife that is the CRISPR-Cas9 system!

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Reference

Authors: Muneaki Nakamura1, Alexis E. Ivec1,2, Yuchen Gao1,3, *, Lei S. Qi1,4,5

Title of original paper: Durable CRISPR-based epigenetic silencing

Journal: BioDesign Research

DOI: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 34133/ 2021/ 9815820

Affiliations:

1Department of Bioengineering,

2Program in Human Biology,

3Cancer Biology Program,

4Department of Chemical and Systems Biology,

5ChEM-H Institute,Stanford University, Stanford, United States

*Current Affiliation: Mammoth Biosciences, South San Francisco, United States

About Dr. Lei S. Qi

Dr. Lei S. Qi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering, Department of Chemical and Systems Biology, and a faculty fellow in Stanford ChEM-H. His areas of research interest include CRISPR, Genome Editing, Synthetic Biology, and Cell Engineering. He received his Ph.D. degree in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley and UCSF (joint program), USA. He is one of the major contributors to the development of CRISPR technology for genome engineering. Dr. Qi has more than 120 papers, more than 10 patents, and several renowned awards to his credit.
A new state-of-the-art instrument has been built by a team from Swansea University's Nanomaterials Laboratory which will help scientists fight against climate change, microbial infection and other major global challenges.

The team invented and built the nanoparticle beam instrument with the help of scientists from Freiburg University, Germany and have now installed it at the UK's national synchrotron science facility, Diamond Light Source, based at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.

In an initial four-year contract, the instrument will be available for use by staff and users of the Diamond synchrotron and a new Swansea University satellite laboratory team based at the Diamond facility, seconded from the University's Nanomaterials Laboratory in Engineering led by Professor Richard Palmer. The Laboratory is a world leader in inventing revolutionary nanoparticle beam technology.

The new Swansea instrument located at Diamond's versatile soft X-ray (VerSoX) beamline B07 will enable the precise generation of nanoscale particles of diverse materials by the method of gas-phase condensation, their size-selection with a mass spectrometer and then deposition onto surfaces to make prototype devices. It will help scientists explore and optimise the influence of particle size, structure and composition on properties relevant to applications as varied as catalysis, batteries, and antibacterial coatings for medical implants. It has the potential to aid radical discovery and innovation in both energy and medical technologies. Initial focus will be on the generation of green hydrogen and green ammonia as clean fuels. This can positively contribute to tackling climate change by harnessing renewable but intermittent energy sources - such as wind, tidal and solar - and storing the energy in these molecules.

The nanoparticle source at Diamond will complement the Matrix Assembly Cluster Source (MACS) and two more new instruments developed by the group at Swansea University. The instrument at Diamond is an ultra-precision source of size-selected nanoparticles (also termed clusters) designed for materials discovery and optimisation, while the MACS is designed to scale-up discoveries made at this model scale to the level of manufacturing.

Professor Steve Wilks, Provost of Swansea University, said: "The installation of this new nanoparticle instrument heralds the start of a strategic partnership between Swansea University and Diamond Light Source, and is underpinned by the Welsh Government. It opens up new opportunities for the Diamond staff and user community to work alongside our Swansea University satellite team based at Diamond, as conceived by Professor Palmer. In particular, nanoparticles have tremendous potential as new catalysts for sustainable energy generation, such as the splitting of water by sunlight to make clean hydrogen fuel, and for the synthesis of medicines and sensors."

Professor Laurent Chapon, Diamond's Physical Sciences Director, commented: "Diamond always wants to offer state -of-the-art instruments - often unique in the world - to the user community. One of the ways we push our technology is by partnering with key universities to help us drive forward the balance of scientific vision and needs from the community. Our collaboration with Swansea University provides a unique experimental (nanoparticle beam) set-up for materials discovery, that supports our surface, interface and catalysis community in addressing the pressing challenges of global health and climate. We all now look forward to the advancement in knowledge this new capability will bring."

The Welsh Government Office for Science Ser Cymru Programme is supporting the secondment of Dr Yubiao Niu from the Swansea team to Diamond via a Ser Cymru Industrial Fellowship. He will commission the new instrument and explore the use of nanoparticle catalysts for low energy synthesis of ammonia and storage of hydrogen, with Imperial College also collaborating.

Professor Peter Halligan, WG's Chief Science Advisor, said: "Generating a hydrogen-based fuel such as ammonia promises to overcome several of the technical challenges faced by hydrogen but has its own challenges. The metallic cluster catalyst method is innovative technology and one which deserves to be explored and exploited to its full potential. Dr Yubiao Niu, Swansea University, Diamond Light Source and Imperial College should be applauded for their foresight and ambition in this exciting area of research."

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This flexible, durable robot can traverse complex terrain and quickly swerve to avoid obstacles, qualities that could one make it an asset for search and rescue operations

Berkeley -- Many insects and spiders get their uncanny ability to scurry up walls and walk upside down on ceilings with the help of specialized sticky footpads that allow them to adhere to surfaces in places where no human would dare to go.

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have used the principle behind some of these footpads, called electrostatic adhesion, to create an insect-scale robot that can swerve and pivot with the agility of a cheetah, giving it the ability to traverse complex terrain and quickly avoid unexpected obstacles.

The robot is constructed from a thin, layered material that bends and contracts when an electric voltage is applied. In a 2019 paper, the research team demonstrated that this simple design can be used to create a cockroach-sized robot that can scurry across a flat surface at a rate of 20 body lengths per second, or about 1.5 miles per hour -- nearly the speed of living cockroaches themselves, and the fastest relative speed of any insect-sized robot.

In a new study, the research team added two electrostatic footpads to the robot. Applying a voltage to either of the footpads increases the electrostatic force between the footpad and a surface, making that footpad stick more firmly to the surface and forcing the rest of the robot to rotate around the foot.

The two footpads give operators full control over the trajectory of the robot, and allow the robot to make turns with a centripetal acceleration that exceeds that of most insects.

"Our original robot could move very, very fast, but we could not really control whether the robot went left or right, and a lot of the time it would move randomly, because if there was a slight difference in the manufacturing process -- if the robot was not symmetrical - it would veer to one side," said Liwei Lin, a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. "In this work, the major innovation was adding these footpads that allow it to make very, very fast turns."

To demonstrate the robot's agility, the research team filmed the robot navigating Lego mazes while carrying a small gas sensor and swerving to avoid falling debris. Because of its simple design, the robot can also survive being stepped on by a 120-pound human.

Small, robust robots like these could be ideal for conducting search and rescue operations or investigating other hazardous situations, such as scoping out potential gas leaks, Lin said. While the team demonstrated most of the robot's skills while it was "tethered," or powered and controlled through a small electrical wire, they also created an "untethered" version that can operate on battery power for up to 19 minutes and 31 meters while carrying a gas sensor.

"One of the biggest challenges today is making smaller scale robots that maintain the power and control of bigger robots," Lin said. "With larger-scale robots, you can include a big battery and a control system, no problem. But when you try to shrink everything down to a smaller and smaller scale, the weight of those elements become difficult for the robot to carry and the robot generally moves very slowly. Our robot is very fast, quite strong, and requires very little power, allowing it to carry sensors and electronics while also carrying a battery."

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Lin is senior author of a paper describing the robot, which appeared online this week in the journal Science Robotics.

Co-authors of the paper include Jiaming Liang, Huimin Chen, Zicong Miao, Hanxiao Liu, Ying Liu, Yixin Liu, Dongkai Wang, Wenying Qiu, Min Zhang and Xiaohao Wang of the Tsinghua University in China; Yichuan Wu of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China; Justin Yim of Carnegie Mellon University; and Zhichun Shao and Junwen Zhong of UC Berkeley.

This work is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2020A1515010647), the Shenzhen Fundamental Research Funds (JCYJ20180508151910775), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 52005083) and a Start Research Grant from the University of Macau.
LOS ANGELES - Dr. Elizabeta Nemeth, professor of medicine and director of the Center for Iron Disorders at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, has been awarded the 2021 William Dameshek Prize by the American Society of Hematology (ASH) for her contributions to the field of hematology.

The award recognizes Nemeth for her work in iron metabolism and her contributions to the understanding of iron homeostasis and its dysregulation in many diseases.

Nemeth identified IL-6 as the main driver of hepcidin and defined the structural basis of the hepcidin-ferroportin interaction, developed hepcidin-like agonists and delineated the role of hepcidin in innate immunity against gram-negative bacteria. These discoveries have led to the creation of novel diagnostic tools and treatments to improve care for patients with iron disorders, common in clinical practice and global health.

Nemeth continues to study iron pathobiology in pregnancy, infectious disease, inflammatory disorders such as chronic kidney disease, and iron overload disorders such as hereditary hemochromatosis and hemoglobinopathies.

"Understanding the interplay between iron, infection and innate and adaptive immunity has the potential to be transformative not only because of the fundamental scientific importance of these discoveries but also from the public health perspective," said Nemeth. "Similarly, understanding how iron deficiency or excess impacts fetal development in utero, and what long-term organismal consequences stem from this exposure will have a global impact."

Nemeth has received numerous awards for her work, including the International BioIron Society Presidential Award for seminal work on the mode of action of hepcidin and the molecular basis of systemic iron homeostasis, was featured in the 2016 Cell Metabolism series on women leaders in the field of metabolism, and is the president-elect of the International Bioiron Society.

"One only has to look at the list of past recipients to realize what an extraordinary honor it is to receive this prize," Nemeth said. "The hematology research and clinical community, exemplified by ASH, is both inspiring and enabling."

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The William Dameshek Prize was established in honor of the late William Dameshek, a past president of ASH and the original editor of the Society's flagship journal, Blood. The award will be presented to Nemeth at the 63rd ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia in December.
A huge global network of researchers is working together to take the pulse of our global tropical forests.

ForestPlots.net, which is co-ordinated from the University of Leeds, brings together more than 2,500 scientists who have examined millions of trees to explore the effect of climate change on forests and biodiversity.

A new research paper published in Biological Conservation explains the origins of the network, and how the power of collaboration is transforming forest research in Africa, South America and Asia.

The paper includes 551 researchers and outlines 25 years of discovery in the carbon, biodiversity and dynamics of tropical forests.

Professor Oliver Phillips, of Leeds' School of Geography, said "Our new paper shows how we are linking students, botanists, foresters and policy-makers with the ForestPlots.net technology developed at Leeds.

"This drives a new model of collective research. This is helping to transform scientific understanding of how tropical forests work - and how they are helping to slow climate change.

"In this new synthesis we outline how this collaboration has been built, and trace the exciting potential of collaborative science that reaches across the world's tropical forests to embrace colleagues from all countries and backgrounds."

ForestPlots.net provides a unique place to measure, monitor, and understand the world's forests, and especially the tropical forests.

Established in 2009, it has grown fast to track 5,138 plots in 59 countries, with a network of 2,512 people.

The collaboration, funded by UK NERC and the Royal Society, aims to promote cooperation across countries and continents, and enable partners to access, analyse and manage the information from their long-term plots.

Professor Phillips said: "Our core approach links long-term, grassroots researchers to generate robust large-scale results.

"This global, diverse community is measuring thousands of forests tree-by-tree in long-term plots.

"By connecting tropical researchers together and valuing the key role of the data originator in scientific discovery, our Social Research Network model of research seeks to support the key workers who make 21st century big data science possible."

ForestPlots.net hosts data from many individual researchers and networks including AfriTRON, ECOFOR, PPBio, RAINFOR, TROBIT and T-FORCES.

Working together equitably, the network has shown that long-term monitoring of forests on-the-ground is irreplaceable, making scientific discoveries across the globe.

Through large scale analysis, ForestPlots.net researchers discover where and why forest carbon and biodiversity respond to climate change, and how they help control it with a billion tonne annual carbon sink.

The new research paper, Taking the pulse of Earth's tropical forests using networks of highly distributed plots, provides a vision for more integrated and equitable monitoring of Earth's most precious ecosystems.

The collaborative paper is particularly timely as it also highlights the impact Leeds and research partners have made to the understanding of carbon dynamics in tropical forests ahead of the global climate conference COP26, which takes place in Glasgow in November.

###

Further information

https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1016/ j. biocon. 2020. 108849

For image and video requests, or to arrange interviews, please contact Ian Rosser in the University of Leeds press office i.rosser@leeds.ac.uk
Neuroscientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated in new research that dopamine plays a key role in how songbirds learn complex new sounds.

Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the finding that dopamine drives plasticity in the auditory pallium of zebra finches lays new groundwork for advancing the understanding of the functions of this neurotransmitter in an area of the brain that encodes complex stimuli.

"People associate dopamine with reward and pleasure," says lead author Matheus Macedo-Lima, who performed the research in the lab of senior author Luke Remage-Healey as a Ph.D. student in UMass Amherst's Neuroscience and Behavior graduate program. "It's a very well-known concept that dopamine is involved in learning. But the knowledge about dopamine in areas related to sensory processing in the brain is limited. We wanted to understand whether dopamine was playing a role in how this brain region learns new sounds or changes with sounds."

Studying vocal learning in songbirds provides insight into how spoken language is learned, adds behavioral neuroscientist Remage-Healey, professor of psychological and brain sciences. "It's not just the songbird that comes up with this strategy of binding sounds and meaning using dopamine. There's something parallel here that we - as humans - are interested in."

The research team conducted a range of experiments in vitro and in vivo, poking neurons under the microscope and in the brains of live birds that were watching videos and hearing sounds. Ultimately, the scientists obtained anatomical, behavioral and physiological evidence to support their hypothesis about the role of dopamine.

Using antibodies, the researchers showed that dopamine receptors are present in many types of neurons in the songbird auditory brain - they can be inhibitory or excitatory and may also contain an enzyme that produces estrogens. "Dr. Remage-Healey's research has shown that in the auditory brain of songbirds of both sexes, neurons produce estrogen in social situations, like when listening to birdsong or seeing another bird. We think that dopamine and estrogens might be working together in the sound learning process, but this work focused on dopamine because there was still so much we didn't know about how dopamine affected the songbird brain," explains Macedo-Lima, now a postdoctoral associate at the University of Maryland.

Macedo-Lima developed a test, similar to the well-known Pavlov's dog experiment, in which the birds sat alone in a chamber and were presented with a random sound followed immediately by a silent video of other birds. "We wanted to focus on the association between a meaningless sound - a tone - and the behaviorally relevant thing, which is another bird on video," he says.

The researchers looked at the birds' auditory brain regions after this sound-video pairing, using a gene marker known to be expressed when a neuron goes through change or plasticity. "We found this very interesting increase in this gene expression in the left hemisphere, the ventral part of the auditory region, in dopamine receptor-expressing neurons, reflecting the learning process, and paralleling human brain lateralization for speech learning," Macedo-Lima says.

To show the effect of dopamine on the basic signaling of neurons, the researchers used a whole cell patch clamp technique, controlling and measuring the currents the neurons received. They found in a dish that dopamine activation decreases inhibition and increases excitation.

"This one modulator is tuning the system in a way that ramps down the stop signals and ramps up the go signals," Remage-Healey explains. "That's a simple yet powerful control mechanism for how animals are potentially encoding sound. It's a neurochemical lever that can change how stimuli are registered and passed on in this part of the brain."

The team then painlessly probed the brain cells of live birds. "What happened when we delivered dopamine was exactly as we were predicting from the whole cell data," Macedo-Lima says. "We saw that inhibitory neurons fired less when we delivered the dopamine agonist, while the excitatory neurons fired more."

The same effect occurred when the birds were played birdsong from other songbirds - the excitatory neurons responded more and the inhibitory neurons responded less when dopamine activation occurred. "We were happy to replicate what we saw in a dish in a live animal listening to actual relevant sounds," Macedo-Lima says.

Dopamine activation also made these neurons unable to adapt to new songs presented to the animal, which strongly corroborates the hypothesis of dopamine's role in sensory learning. "We currently don't know how dopamine affects sensory learning in most animals," Macedo-Lima says, "but this research gives many clues about how this mechanism could work across vertebrates that need to learn complex sounds, such as humans."

###
Lincoln, Nebraska, July 1, 2021 -- Carrie Heitman can still remember the moment when -- as an undergraduate visiting for the first time -- Chaco Culture National Historic Park became the cornerstone of her academic career in anthropology.

"You have to take this 30-mile road off the beaten path to get there, and then you drop into the canyon and there are these really majestic geological features," Heitman said. "There's Fajada Butte that stands up in the center of this canyon as it opens up in front of you. When I first went there, in 1997, that was a really powerful experience, to be in this place, surrounded by these absolutely grand and majestic buildings. I fell in love with it."

That love and respect for the ancient lands where many Indigenous ancestors lived and thrived for 300 years has inspired much of the research Heitman has done as an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research projects have included constructing a digital archive of Pueblo artifacts, GPS and lidar mapping of Indigenous architecture and ancient roads, and serving as director and co-principal investigator of the Chaco Research Archive, a vast digital humanities project.

Most recently, she co-edited the new book "The Greater Chaco Landscape: Ancestors, Scholarship and Advocacy" with Ruth Van Dyke, professor of anthropology at Binghamton University in New York.

"The Greater Chaco Landscape" is unique in that it is a published volume but also exists as an open access volume online through the University Press of Colorado. The website also houses extra features related to the book and the work preceding it, such as films with indigenous people, including members of the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni and Acoma tribes, speaking about their ancestors and their connection to the landscapes; films and digital resources regarding the technology used to map the ancient architecture and roads; and conference videos about the sites from anthropological perspectives.

The book's publication in May is the culmination of eight years of work to bring the perspectives of many stakeholders -- including indigenous people, policymakers, researchers and preservationists -- together to help navigate conflicts over energy development and, more importantly, inform the public about the history and importance of the Greater Chaco landscape and advocate for its protection.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park is located in Northwest New Mexico and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is home to ancient great houses built more than 1,000 years ago. In recent decades, land in and around the park has been used for oil and gas drilling, leading to concern among Indigenous communities, and the larger intermountain region there, that energy development was negatively impacting cultural and natural resources.

"It's a sacred ancestral site for many, if not all, of the Indigenous descendant communities in the region," Heitman said. "With funding, conversation and dialogue with the National Park Service, we developed a research plan that would help address some of those concerns by trying to get better information into the hands of the land managers who are managing those parcels of land right around Chaco. Our initial goal was to help them understand what we know about these ancestral and ancient places, and what we still don't yet know.

"We were afraid that in the process of leasing for oil and gas extraction, they will be destroying resources that we haven't even documented yet."

Heitman, Van Dyke and Stephen Lekson, professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, led the effort to bring groups of people together to discuss the various and sometimes competing interests. The first meeting was held in 2014.

"We quickly realized in those early meetings that everyone needed better information, and that meant we needed to bring multiple research teams together to reconcile discrepancies in our knowledge of locations, because the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the leases for oil and gas development, had imperfect data about the site locations," Heitman said of the initial effort.

After completing some research projects to reconcile and update the mapping and data related to the Chaco sites, the team again brought stakeholders together for a conference where everyone could learn from each other, and the idea for the book was formed.

"We're bringing together multiple perspectives on a complicated landscape that has both contemporary and ancient issues," Heitman said. "We're trying to share those perspectives and the concerns from this diverse range of stakeholders to help protect this landscape moving forward."

Through chapters by authors from different fields of expertise, the book charts the many dimensions of the Chacoan landscape. It covers the region's history, the research undertaken to document the great houses and roads, and how Indigenous communities use and connect to its landscapes still today. It is meant to be a resource for cultural and natural preservationists, policymakers and the academic community, but Heitman hopes the book and its accompanying online resources will resonate with many.

"I hope readers have a deeper understanding for the richness of the cultural history of this country and see the importance of protecting it," she said. "From my perspective, it's part of who we are as a nation. It's really important to understand and value the history of the nation going back to early inhabitants. We can be really proud and in awe of what Native people of this continent did and accomplished with their engineering, their artistry, and their rich and complex belief systems."

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A surprising study on the behavior of unrelated lizards demonstrates how evolution can lead to different species learning the same skills

A surprising study by UNSW on the behaviour of unrelated lizards in very different parts of the world has demonstrated how evolution can lead to different species learning the same skills.

The study in Ecology Letters documents how the Anolis lizard species in the Caribbean, and the Draco lizard species in Southeast Asia, have solved the challenge of communicating with one another to defend territories and attract mates.

It found males from both species perform elaborate head bob and push up displays, and rapidly extend and retract their often large and conspicuously coloured dewlap, or throat fan, specifically in habitats with lots of wind-blown vegetation or low light.

The lizards occupy the same range of rainforest and grassland habitats, and therefore face the same problems when it comes to communicating to a potential mate or enemy in visually 'noisy' environments.

Remarkably, they have evolved the same strategy to cope with the same selection problems, lead author Dr Terry Ord from the Evolution & Ecology Research Centre at the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences says.

According to his research, this scenario of two unrelated lizards displaying similar behaviour shows that natural selection directs evolution towards the same common set of adaptive outcomes over and over again.

"The surprise is that lizards in both groups have evolved remarkably similar displays for communication, but they also tailor the production of those displays according to the prevailing conditions experienced at the time of display," Dr Ord says.

"That is, increasing the speed or the length of time they spend displaying the movements as the viewing conditions deteriorate.

"Really there should be essentially innumerable ways these lizards could have adapted their displays to remain effective, and there is strong evolutionary predictions that would lead us to expect this as well."

Dr Ord says what this study shows is that natural selection driving similarities between different species.

Formally, this is known as convergent evolution -- the independent origin of similar adaptations, he says.

"It seemed that these types of convergent, common adaptations are outcomes that would only really occur among species that are closely-related in some capacity," he says.

"The reason for this is a bit complicated and it rests on the fact that adaptations build on characteristics that a species already possesses."

"So, the longer species have evolved independently of each other, the less likely they would evolve the same adaptive solutions if they were exposed to the same change in the environment."

But what this study highlights, he says, is what many evolutionary ecologists have argued - that natural selection is an extremely powerful process that can override the "baggage" of past history to produce the same adaptations.

"So if arm-waving is the most effective solution to some change in the environment, then natural selection would ultimately lead to its evolution rather than a more subtle (less effective) modification to an existing vocal call," he says.

"Evolutionary biologists are excited about convergent evolution because it gives us multiple examples of the same adaptation evolving time and time again in very different animals.?

"So it tells us what the challenges are faced by these animals and how they have solved it in terms of evolutionary adaptation."

The study documents this independent evolution of common communication strategies amongst groups that have evolved separately from each other for hundreds of millions of years.

Dr Ord says the striking similarities in communication strategies for maintaining an effective communication system in noisy conditions has evolved in various forms in many insects, fish, frogs, birds and mammals.

"For example, increasing the volume of calls when there's lots of acoustic background noise, or extending the length of those calls or even vibrational signals by spiders and such," Dr Ord says .

"The fact that many other groups of animals have also evolved thesesame adaptive strategies is even more extraordinary."

Read the study in Ecology Letters.

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Thursday, July 1, 2021

The Death Cafe in Albuquerque will hold two events in July: one online on July 11 and one in-person on July 18. The objective of the Death Cafe is To increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives. Its all about an interesting, unstructured conversation  open and free-flowing with no specific agenda.

When the pandemic took hold in March, 2020, Albuquerque Death Cafes were held online on Zoom. The format proved to be popular, not only with people in New Mexico, but also for those across the U.S. and around the world. As pandemic restrictions ease, in-person conversations are coming back.

Instead of a once-a-month discussion, ABQ Death Cafe host Gail Rubin will double up the number of events, holding one online and the other in person. Events will be held on Sunday afternoons. In-person events will be held at Manzano Del Sol, a retirement community in Albuquerque.

Those who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 may attend without masks. Those who are not yet fully vaccinated are required to wear masks while on the Manzano Del Sol campus. Manzano Del Sol is located at 5201 Roma Avenue NE. Meetings take place in the 5th Floor Lounge near the elevators.

Join The Meetup Group

The best way to keep in the loop on upcoming Death Cafes is to join the Albuquerque Death Cafe Meetup group. Click here to go to the Meetup page.

July 11 Online Death Cafe

Register through the Meetup group to get the Zoom link for the July 11 ABQ Death Cafe. Click here to RSVP for the online Death Cafe.

July 18 In-Person Death Cafe

We welcome your in-person participation and appreciate you letting us know if you will attend. Click here to RSVP for the in-person Death Cafe at Manzano Del Sol.

Your ABQ Death Cafe Host

All of these Albuquerque Death Cafes are hosted by Gail Rubin, Certified Thanatologist, and a pioneering death educator. Rubin is a public speaker, a published author of three books, host of a TV interview series and podcast, a blogger, a funeral industry trade journalist, a Certified Funeral Celebrant, and an innovator in the funeral business.

She created a conversation-starting game called The Newly-Dead Game, introduced the Death Cafe movement in the United States, and held the first Before I Die Festival west of the Mississippi in 2017. Albuquerque Business First named her one of their 2019 Women of Influence.

Gails motto is, Just as talking about sex wont make you pregnant, talking about funerals and end-of-life issues wont make you dead. Start a conversation today.

Related
The price of gasoline in San Antonio has nearly doubled since bottoming out last May amid pandemic-related travel restrictions. Still, drivers here were paying among the lowest prices in the nation heading into the long Independence Day weekend.

A gallon of regular unleaded in the San Antonio area was going for $2.75 on Friday, slightly less than the statewide average of $2.80, according to AAA. Nationally, prices were averaging $3.12 per gallon, a seven-year high for this time of year.

The only places in Texas with less expensive gas than San Antonio this weekend are Houston, Amarillo and the Sherman-Denison area in North Texas, AAA data showed.

While San Antonians are getting a discount compared to most American drivers, theyve seen prices jump, too. In the past six months, the price per gallon in San Antonio has increased nearly 54 percent from the $1.79 drivers were paying at the start of the year.

On ExpressNews.com: Hyped on Reddit, shares in tiny Texas oil driller surge 130 percent - then plummet

Prices have been going up as the pandemic wanes and more Americans feel safe traveling. But demand is increasing as supplies of oil  from which gasoline is refined  have remained tight. Thats helped drive up the price of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. oil benchmark, by 54 percent since Jan. 1. It was trading Friday afternoon at $74.98 per barrel.

The U.S. oil industry was producing about 13 million barrels of crude oil per day in March 2020, just before the pandemic struck. Then, with fewer people driving, demand for oil slumped and producers slashed output. As a result, for much of the past year U.S. oil companies have been producing about 11 million barrels per day, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.

The reduced supply of oil persists even as increasing numbers have been vaccinated and drivers are returning to the roads this vacation season. And record numbers are expected to be driving this weekend.

Nationally, AAA estimated 43.6 million Americans will drive to their destinations this weekend, the highest on record for a July 4 holiday  and up 5 percent from the previous record set in 2019. About 3.3 million Texans are hitting the road, up 41 percent from last year. Significantly, its up 10 percent from 2019.

More Americans are taking to the skies, as well. Nationwide, AAA estimated 3.5 million Americans will fly this weekend. Thats just 10 percent fewer than pre-pandemic levels in 2019. In Texas, AAA expects about 338,000 people to fly, an increase of 177 percent from a year ago  and only about 3 percent fewer than in 2019.

At San Antonio International Airport, between 14,000 and 15,000 passengers per day are expected over the holiday weekend, spokeswoman Tonya Hope said. The airport averaged between 15,000 and 16,000 passengers per day prior to the pandemic, she said, so its a sign air travel is edging back toward normal in San Antonio.

The busiest days are likely to be today and Monday, Hope said. On the roads, according to traffic data and analytics firm INRIX, congestion is likely in U.S. metro areas this weekend with the worst to come at midday Monday.

U.S. drivers are expected to consume 9.1 million barrels of oil per day this summer, nearly 17 percent more than a year ago, according to government projections. Still, gasoline demand this summer would be off about 4 percent from 2019, before the pandemic clamped down.

With the economic recovery from COVID continuing, gasoline demand has been very strong, said Patrick De Haan, head analyst at the fuel price tracking site GasBuddy. Amidst lower oil production as oil companies struggle to raise output, gas prices have been higher this summer than in the past few years.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio gas prices are the lowest among major U.S. cities, says AAA Texas

A meeting Friday of OPEC+, the cartel of oil producing nations and their allies, was expected to hint at where the price of oil could be headed later this year.

OPEC and its allies also cut their oil production when the pandemic began spreading globally last spring. And in March, the group maintained those cuts even as demand was returning, which sent the price of oil upward.

Now, some member nations want the alliance to increase production quotas. The current high price of oil mean super profits for OPEC+ nations, said Louise Dickson, an oil markets analyst with Rystad, a Norwegian energy research firm.

Analysts are expecting OPEC+ to boost oil production by about 500,000 barrels per day next month. Member states such as Saudi Arabia want to increase output gradually, however, in case demand for oil drops off in the fall.

An increase greater than 500,000 barrels would likely send down oil prices, Dickson said.

But if OPEC+ members cant reach a deal and end up keeping production cuts in place, oil prices are sure to climb further, she said, creating a very tight market and making oil very expensive in what is a very busy season for gasoline consumption.

diego.mendoza-moyers@express-news.net
Last week, a social media crowd judged USAA guilty of disrespecting the military, the foundation on which the Fortune 500 company was built.

The San Antonio insurance and financial services company is innocent of the charge, but more on that later.

The night of June 24, Fox News Channels Tucker Carlson scurrilously attacked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying of Gen. Mark Milley: Hes not just a pig. Hes stupid.

The day before, Milley clashed with GOP congressional lawmakers over a course taught at West Point called Understanding Whiteness and White Rage. The general had defended the offering. Hence Carlsons diatribe.

The subsequent complaint against USAA: It didnt pull its advertising from Tucker Carlson Tonight or condemn Carlsons vile attack on the nations top military leader.

Fred Wellman, executive director of the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump political action committee backed by former and current GOP operatives, fired off one of the first tweets of righteous indignation.

I cant for the life of me accept that @USAA still sponsors Tucker Carlson or even Fox News at all, Wellman said in a June 25 tweet. How much do they have to smear the US military that you represent before enough is enough? Is profit more important than the honor of those you claim to support?

Many irate posts followed, including some from vets organizations  like this one from the nonpartisan Veterans for Responsible Leadership: So, @USAA, is this who you advertise with? Asking for 18 million friends.

That last sentence was a reference to USAAs customers, all of whom are affiliated with the military  though the organization got the number wrong. Its more than 13 million, not 18 million.

The company serves active-duty military personnel, veterans and retirees and their families, and thats it.

This is the crux of the attacks on USAA: In smearing Milley, Carlson maligned the military  and the San Antonio company has abetted this vicious cartoon character with its advertising dollars.

Except it didnt.

Lose-lose situation

Turns out the company hasnt advertised on Carlsons show since September 2019, according to TVRev, a group that analyzes television advertising.

Yet USAA kept quiet as the vitriol  pouring in from Twitter, Facebook and the companys own online community forum  piled up around it.

A flurry of news stories followed the social-media commotion, including one by the Express-News. We posted a story on the controversy Monday morning on ExpressNews.com and published it on Tuesdays front page under the headline, Groups: USAA should pull ads.

On ExpressNews.com: USAA facing calls to drop advertising on Tucker Carlson show after he calls general pig, stupid

Before we go any further, please allow me a mea culpa moment. As the Express-News business editor, I assigned and edited the story  and I blew it. Our story was accurate as far as it went, but it didnt go far enough. We reported on the avalanche. We failed to uncover, until days later, the error that put it in motion.

Thats not to say we didnt ask USAA about its advertising on Carlsons show. We did. Tony Wells, USAAs chief brand officer, declined to comment for our story.

That was on Monday. Since then, there hasnt been so much as a peep from the companys Pentagon-scale headquarters on Fredericksburg Road  not even when I called Thursday to confirm the TVRev report that it hadnt sponsored Carlsons show since the fall of 2019.

Why would USAA squirm and stew in silence?

The only answer that makes sense is that the company found itself in a lose-lose situation. Yes, it could have spiked the controversy early on with a brief public statement, saying in effect, We didnt do it. But taking that route would have risked inflaming customers who take Carlsons word  and, by extension, former President Donald Trumps  as gospel.

The tweets would practically write themselves. USAA is TOO WOKE to support Tucker Carlson?!! Disgraceful!

Choosing between two bad alternatives, the company apparently decided to just hunker down. Why open yet another front in the culture war?

Social media has oozed into nearly every aspect of our lives. And were afflicted by extreme political polarization. These two realities are connected, with each exacerbating the other. Theyre like the blades of a giant scissors, and large, public-facing corporations frequently find themselves trapped between the two.

USAA has been in this predicament before.

Splitting the difference

On ExpressNews.com: USAA reverses course on Hannity, reinstates ads

Four years ago, under pressure from Media Matters and other liberal advocacy groups, the company pulled its advertising from Sean Hannitys show, also on Fox News Network. That touched off an online uprising among its conservative customers.

The company tried to split the difference; it resumed advertising during Hannitys prime-time slot but also began shoveling money to The Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball on MSNBC and Jake Tappers program on CNN.

Two years later, looking to avoid any more blowups, USAA quietly cut its advertising ties to national political talk shows altogether, not just Carlsons or Hannitys. The company still advertises on Fox News, but only during news programming. It does the same on MSNBC and CNN.

As we can see in Fred Wellmans tweet  in which he was aghast that USAA still sponsors Tucker Carlson or even Fox News  corporate advertising on the right-wing network will always be an irritant for progressives. But the business case for USAA to advertise on Fox News couldnt be clearer.

Nearly 48 percent of military veterans and reservists  a huge piece of USAAs base of potential customers  watched Fox News at some point in the last 30 days, according to consumer analytics firm MRI Simmons USA. Among cable networks, only the History Channel pulled a bigger share of vets and reservists, at 52.3 percent.

The data provided to me by MRI Simmons USA also sheds light on the opportunity USAA sacrificed in 2019.

The second most popular cable program among the military-minded: Tucker Carlson Tonight.

greg.jefferson@express-news.net
One of San Antonios biggest vaccine sites closed its doors Friday.

The Wonderland of the Americas vaccine hub run by University Health has been open for just over six months  since the first COVID-19 vaccines became available in San Antonio in late December.

Nearly 1.9 million vaccinations have been administered in Bexar County, and 22 percent, or 412,000, of those shots were given at Wonderland, a shopping mall near 410 and Interstate 10.

At our busiest time, we were giving close to 8,000 shots a day, said Bill Phillips, senior vice president and chief information officer at University Health. Phillips has been in charge of daily operations since the beginning.

But in recent weeks, the number of people walking in for shots has dwindled as more people got vaccinated.

That does not mean we are done, Phillips said. We are pivoting our vaccine strategy to offer the shots in more locations across the community.

This week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas visited the Wonderland vaccine site and praised the city and Mayor Ron Nirenberg for being a model for the country.

In Bexar County, 72.6 percent of eligible residents have gotten at least one shot; 57.7 percent are fully vaccinated.

On ExpressNews.com: Homeland Security Secretary visits Wonderland of Americas vaccine site

COVID-19 vaccines are available on a walk-in basis at all of the health systems outpatient pharmacies, including the pharmacy on the Robert B. Green Campus, west of downtown at 903 W. Martin St.

University Health encourages anyone 12 years and older to walk in from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday to receive the vaccine. There is no charge for parking at the Robert B. Green campus.

The site will be open Monday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.  special hours because of the July Fourth holiday.

Phillips said while medical providers are allowed to ask for proof of health insurance in order to charge an administrative fee, University Health never did.

The hospital also doesnt ask for proof of U.S. citizenship or Bexar County residency.

This was free to anyone who wanted it, Phillips said. We had a calling to do this, and we felt it was in our mission to stand up and be a vaccine hub for the community.

Public health officials in San Antonio are urging people who have not gotten the vaccine or only received one of two doses to get protected against the virus as a more infectious variant is already circulating within the city.

The delta variant, first identified in India and later spread to more than 85 countries, now accounts for an estimated 1 in 4 infections in the United States.

On ExpressNews.com: Delta variant of coronavirus has reached San Antonio, and it's spreading

Three vaccines have been approved on an emergency basis by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and are widely available at local pharmacies and pop-up sites throughout San Antonio.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines both require two doses administered several weeks apart, while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires one shot and provides full protection two weeks later.

Scientists say these vaccines are all effective against preventing hospitalization and death from the more contagious delta variant. New findings suggest boosters, or any extra dose, wont be necessary  at least for now.

laura.garcia@express-news.net
2 1 of 2 Diaz & Diaz Photography Show More Show Less 2 of 2 Paul Stephen /Staff file photo Show More Show Less



San Antonio chef Tim McDiarmid, owner of The Good Kind restaurant and curator/caterer of the swanky Southtown space Ivy Hall, is set to make her national television debut on arguably one of the most diabolical cooking shows so far hosted by a legend of the competitive food world.

McDiarmid will appear on Food Networks Chopped: Altons Maniacal Baskets, in which the celebrated food personality challenges cooks to prepare dishes with a wide range of improbably ingredients selected in part by his social media followers in a five-part tournament. At one point in a promotional video for the show, McDiarmid can be spotted saying, human dog food, while carrying a mysterious can across the kitchen.
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  The number of people missing in the Florida condominium collapse fell Friday following a new review, but fears of another potentially catastrophic failure deepened after engineers found unsafe conditions in a different tower and ordered the entire building evacuated.

The nearby city of North Miami Beach announced that an audit prompted by the deadly collapse of Champlain Towers found the 156-unit Crestview Towers building structurally and electrically unsafe.

In an abundance of caution, the City ordered the building closed immediately and the residents evacuated for their protection, while a full structural assessment is conducted and next steps are determined, City Manager Arthur H. Sorey III said a news release.

The evacuation comes as municipal officials in South Florida and statewide are scrutinizing older high-rises in the wake of the collapse to ensure that serious structural problems are not being ignored.

Crestview Towers residents could be seen Friday evening hauling suitcases and packing items into cars outside the building, which was constructed in 1972. City officials were trying to help residents find places to go.

Meanwhile, authorities in Surfside said four more bodies had emerged from the rubble, including the 7-year-old daughter of a Miami firefighter, bringing the confirmed death toll to 22.

But there was also relief. Closer inspection of missing persons list reduced the number from 145 to 126 after duplicate names were eliminated and some residents reported missing turned up safe, officials said.

So this is very, very good news, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said. She said the numbers were expected to keep changing because detectives are continually reviewing the list and verifying reports.

In some cases, when detectives were able to contact people who had been reported as potentially missing, they found that not only were they safe, but other members of their families were safe too. That pushed the list of people who have been accounted for up to 188 and cut the number of missing, she said.

Detectives have worked around the clock to contact relatives and others. In some cases, English and Hebrew names have been offered for the same missing relative, officials have said.

The 7-year-old who perished in the collapse was "a member of our fire family, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said.

The discovery of the girl's remains was especially hard on rescuers, Levine Cava said.

It was truly different and more difficult for our first responders. These men and woman are paying an enormous human toll each and every day, and I ask that all of you please keep them in your thoughts and prayers, she said at a news conference.

The mayor also said she signed an emergency order to demolish the remaining part of the building once engineers have signed off on it. She said the order was signed now so that the demolition can move quickly once a date is set. It will likely be weeks before the demolition is scheduled, officials said.

Our top priority is search and rescue. We will take no action that will jeopardize our search-and-rescue efforts, Levine Cava said. The building poses a threat to public health and safety.

No one has been rescued since the first hours after the June 24 collapse.

During a meeting Friday with relatives of the missing, Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah said that only one voice has been heard during the entire search. A womans voice was detected until about 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. on the morning of the collapse, which happened around 1:30 a.m. Rescuers were unable to reach her, and he said no other voices or human sounds have been heard since.

"Most of the victims have been deceased in their bedroom indicating they were asleep, he said.

Jadallah also prepared the families for a possible suspension of the search if Hurricane Elsa  now in the eastern Caribbean  brings strong winds to South Florida that would make the work too dangerous. Search efforts have been stopped briefly several times because of inclement weather.

We will try to go as long as we can, but you can see from different periods of inclement weather weve had, we have stopped, Miami-Dade Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said.

Some rescue workers who are now staying in tents will be moved to cruise ships, which can stay safe during a tropical storm, Jadallah said.

About 600 first responders will stay on the Royal Caribbean ship Explorer of the Seas, the cruise line said. The ship, which can accommodate more than 3,000 passengers, began housing rescue teams Thursday and likely will continue for the next month.

Fridays announcements came the day after concerns about the structures instability prompted a 15-hour halt to the search for survivors. Crews noticed widening cracks and up to a foot of movement in a large column.

The cause of the collapse is under investigation. A 2018 engineering report found that the building's ground-floor pool deck was resting on a concrete slab that had major structural damage and needed extensive repairs. The report also found abundant cracking of concrete columns, beams and walls in the parking garage.

Just two months before the building came down, the president of its board wrote a letter to residents saying that structural problems identified in the 2018 inspection had gotten significantly worse and that major repairs would cost at least $15.5 million. With bids for the work still pending, the building suddenly collapsed last Thursday.

___

Associated Press Writer Bobby Caina Calvan contributed to this report from Tallahassee, Florida.
BUCHAREST (AP)  An explosion at Romania's largest oil refinery outside the port city of Constanta on Friday killed one person and injured at least four, authorities said.

Plumes of black smoke could be seen rising from the Navodari Petromidia plant next to the Black Sea, as emergency services airlifted the injured people away for treatment, according to officials.

The refinery operator, Rompetrol Rafinare, said the blaze was later isolated and stabilized.

"Internal and external teams are making efforts to put it out in the shortest time, the company said in a social media post.

The cause of the blast was not immediately clear, but Rompetrol Rafinares general manager Felix Crudu Tesloveanu told media that early investigations suggest a cracked pipe may have caused the blast.

An Interior Ministry statement urged residents at the nearby town of Navodari and other areas in the vicinity to close their windows because of the billowing smoke.

Environment Minister Barna Tanczos wrote online that The explosion can have extremely serious environmental consequences, and that he has cancelled a working trip in order to assist authorities deal with the blast.

"The direction of the smoke is in the opposite direction to the beach and the city  which is why the citizens are safe, the ministry statement said. However, we ask the population to take protective measures by closing (their) windows.

Octavian Berceanu, the head of Romanias Environmental Guard, a government environmental protection agency, told The Associated Press that the environmental fallout from the incident is being monitored.

We dont have proper data right now, Berceanu told the AP. "The smoke is going offshore, and some ... is going to the beach but its not populated there.

Romania's environment ministry said Friday that specialists from the Constanta Environmental Protection Agency have continuously monitored the volatile organic compounds on the site.

The oil refinery is about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from Constanta.
A beach vacation turned tragic this week when a San Antonio father tried to save his teenage son from rough waters off Port Aransas and both of them drowned.

Nicholas Austin Mireles, 19, went missing Wednesday morning while swimming in the Gulf of Mexico.

His father, Richard Allen Mireles Jr., 47, went into the water to rescue him and began to struggle himself, according to the Port Aransas South Jetty newspaper.

The father was pulled from the water by Port Aransas Surf Rescue. Life-saving measures were unsuccessful, and he later was pronounced dead at a hospital in Corpus Christi.

Police recovered the sons body around 2:50 a.m. Friday, in the surf about 10 feet from shore.

Nicholas Mireles was a 2020 graduate of Sandra Day OConnor High School in Helotes. He played on the schools varsity football team as a defensive back during the 2019 season.

Our hearts go out to the Mireles family, said Robert Martinez, principal of the high school.

The family was in Port Aransas Wednesday morning when the ocean became treacherous.

Water conditions changed quickly and several swimmers started to struggle, the family said in a statement.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio father and son drown in Port Aransas

The beach didnt have flags or warnings to indicate rough waters, and the men did not swim past barriers or buoys, the family said.

Nicholas made sure his sisters were safe but then he was pulled in by the current, the family said.

The waves were too much, the family said.

Eva Mireles, Nicholas mother and Richards wife, works at an elementary school in the Northside Independent School District.

A GoFundMe was set up to help the family pay medical bills, funeral costs and other expenses. As of Friday afternoon, $5,675 had been raised toward a goal of $50,000.

The family asked that community members make donations to Life Restored Church in lieu of sending flowers.

Port Aransas City Manager David Parsons said the beach averages about one drowning a year and did not have any in 2020.

People just have to be cautious when theyre going into the water, depending on their swimming capability and the conditions of the surf, he said.

liz.hardaway@hearst.com | Twitter: @liz_hardaway
Matthew Busch /Contributor

Jeanette Ball, the superintendent of Judson Independent School District, was named the Region 20 superintendent of the year on Thursday.

A regional selection committee nominated Ball for her leadership skills, her commitment to improving the quality of education at Judson, student performance and her ability to build effective relationships with employees, according to the Texas Association of School Boards, which sponsors the award.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Friday acknowledged putting pressure on the states history museum to shut down a virtual discussion of Forget the Alamo, a book that critically re-examines the storied history of the Texas landmark.

As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it, the Republican and former conservative radio host wrote on Twitter.

Patrick said that this fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @BullockMuseum.

On Thursday, with little explanation, the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin abruptly pulled out of an event scheduled for that night on Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, which was published last month.

The authors decried the move as state censorship.

The Bullock museum is operated by the State Preservation Board, which is chaired by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, serve as co-chairs.

Marvin Pfeiffer /Staff Photographer

FOR BACKGROUND: Texas history museum pulls out of event on book re-examining Alamo myth

Patrick thinks he has the right to force his myths on others and cant handle the truth, Chris Tomlinson, one of the books authors and a columnist for the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, said in a tweet. Historians have been teaching these facts for a decade.

The controversy appears to have sparked greater interest in the book, as it rose to the 28th best-selling book on Amazon as of Saturday morning; Tomlinson said its previous high ranking was 168th.

Penguin Press-handout /

Tomlinson and one of his two co-authors, Bryan Burrough, were to discuss their book in an online Craft of Writing event moderated by Becka Oliver, executive director of the Writers League of Texas.

Margaret Koch, director of the Bullock, said Friday that the authors could have gone ahead with the event but decided not to.

The museums role was primarily that of co-host, Koch said in a statement. Although the Bullock withdrew from the event and notified the 198 pre-registered participants, the Writers League of Texas was prepared to continue the event on their own platform and gave the books authors the opportunity to do so. The authors declined to continue, and because they did so, the Writers League of Texas canceled the event.

Tomlinson said they had no choice but to cancel because the event was organized using the Bullocks online platform. We did not have time to readvertise the event to move to another platform, Tomlinson wrote in a Facebook post.

De-platforming is what conservatives cry about when white supremacist groups are kicked off social media. They say its un-American. Well, that is precisely what they did to us, he wrote.

Burrough said in a tweet Friday: Ive worked all over the world for 35-plus years and I had to return to Texas to get my first government censorship and actual death threats.

In the book, Tomlinson, Burrough and Jason Stanford assert that the common narrative about the Battle of the Alamo  that 180 Texan rebels died defending the state in its war for independence from Mexico  overlooks the fact that it was waged in part to preserve slavery.

Patrick and other Texas Republicans disagree with that premise and have described it as an attempt to politicize the states history.

The book has also riled conservatives by questioning the authenticity of Alamo artifacts collected by rock star Phil Collins.

Collins donated the items to the state in 2014, providing an early impetus for an ambitious plan to renovate Alamo Plaza to enhance its appeal as a tourist attraction. State officials agreed to build a museum at the site to showcase the Collins collection.

The new book says documentation is lacking to show that many of the items Collins acquired, including a knife supposedly owned by Alamo defender Jim Bowie, played any role in the 1836 battle or were ever at the site.

The public-private project to renovate Alamo Plaza also envisioned relocating the Cenotaph, a 1930s monument to the Alamo defenders. It would have been moved a few hundred feet south of its current location in the plaza.

When the proposal went before the Texas Historical Commission last year, Patrick spoke forcefully against it, and the commission denied a permit for the relocation.

Patrick also took issue with elements of the Alamo project that sought to call attention to earlier phases of the sites history and the imprint left by indigenous peoples. He said the project would erase history and that the primary focus should be on the 1836 battle  the most important 13 days in the history of Texas and Western civilization.

More recently, Patrick has derided the proposed relocation of the Cenotaph as an instance of cancel culture.

The irony was not lost on Patricks critics, who noted that the lieutenant governor has supported a social media censorship bill.

Senate Bill 12, sponsored by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, would have required tech companies to disclose their policies for removing content and to allow appeals of those decisions. The bill passed the Senate but died in the House.

Patrick had identified it as a priority bill last session, and Abbott has said he will again put it on the agenda for the special legislative session set to begin July 8.

About an hour before the scheduled start of the Forget the Alamo event, Patrick sent out an email in support of the bill with the subject line: In Texas, we treasure our right to free speech.

jeremy.blackman@chron.com

taylor.goldenstein@chron.com
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin vowed Friday to work with Congress to remove commanders from prosecution decisions on sexual assaults and related crimes, domestic violence, child abuse and retaliation  delivering a huge victory to critics who had called the military legal system ineffective against those crimes.

Commanders since the American Revolution have decided which criminal cases to prosecute, but Austin said he wants to set up special offices in each service branch to prosecute sexual assaults and related crimes.

He also directed the Pentagon to seek Congressional support for adding sexual harassment to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Currently, sexual harassment is prosecuted under a catchall offense covering behavior that goes against good order or that brings discredit to the armed forces.

Two bills now pending in Congress would change the military justice system in ways generally in line with Austins stated goals, though they differ in details. One of them would go farther, removing most felonies from commanders discretion to prosecute.

Austin followed the recommendations of a panel he created, the Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment, whose full report also was released Friday.

President Joe Biden said he strongly supported Austin in his pursuit of the commissions core recommendations, calling it among the most significant reforms to our military undertaken in recent history.

Sexual assault is an abuse of power and an affront to our shared humanity. And sexual assault in the military is doubly damaging because it also shreds the unity and cohesion that is essential to the functioning of the U.S. military and to our national defense, Biden said.

The commission made more than 80 recommendations and found that the military justice system is ill-equipped to respond properly to crimes involving special victims, particularly victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. In speaking with hundreds of those service members, panelists learned that many of them had dreamt their entire lives of a career in the military; in fact, they loved being in the military and did not want to leave, even after experiencing sexual assault or sexual harassment.

But because their experience in the aftermath of the assault was handled so ineptly or met with hostility and retaliation, the report added, many felt they had no choice but to separate.

Commanders in the U.S. military have always decided whether to order trials for their troops. Their role as the court-martial convening authority for sexual assault and many other felonies, and for sexual harassment cases, would be removed and given to military prosecutors under a bill being pushed by U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y..

Defenders of the tradition say commanders ability to order trials (which until recently came with the power to set aside verdicts) is crucial to maintaining good order and discipline.

But commanders weigh other considerations besides impartial justice, and the resulting rarity of prosecutions and trials in a long parade of sexual assault and harassment cases likely contributed to the high-profile disappearance and death of Pfc. Vanessa Guillen at Fort Hood last year, critics of the system say.

On ExpressNews.com: So outrageous: Vanessa Guillens murder has made a key military justice reform more likely

Guillen, 20, of Houston, had told her family about being sexually harassed. Subsequent investigations found she had tried to report it, despite initial Army denials  but that the person she had complained about was not the man who killed her.

When she disappeared from her workplace on the post, social media erupted with testimonials from former service members who described sexual harassment and assaults. The case brought weeks of intense scrutiny of the Armys inability to combat sex offenses even before Guillens remains were found June 30 and Spc. Aaron David Robinson, her accused killer, shot himself as police closed in on him.

Advocates, lawmakers and lawyers on all sides of the debate agreed there was a good chance commanders would lose their convening authority over sex crimes this year, thanks in part to an annual Defense Department report required by law that has documented how few of those accused are convicted by the military justice system.

The Pentagon said 6,236 sexual assault and harassment reports were filed by service members in fiscal year 2019, a 3 percent increase over the previous year. The report said 1,630 sexual assault cases resulted in discipline, including 795 court-martial charges. Of those, 363 went to trial and 264 ended in convictions.

Pentagon data also shows an estimated 13,382 servicewomen, 6.2 percent of the force, were sexually assaulted in 2018, up from 9,834 in 2014.

On ExpressNews.com: New study: Sex assault risk for Army women is highest at Fort Hood

Under Gillibrands bill, serious felonies would be sent to military prosecutors called judge advocates with a rank of colonel or higher who are outside the accuseds chain of command. Commanders still would be able to dispense justice for military-specific crimes, such as desertion, or lesser crimes with a maximum sentence of a year in prison.

Austins recommendations continue to add momentum to efforts to reform the military justice system, Gillibrand said in a statement.

U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., sponsored the I Am Vanessa Guillen Act last year but was unable to bring it to a floor vote. She submitted it again this year. It would create a chief prosecutor within each military service branch to focus on sex-related offenses and establish a monetary claims process in cases of negligence in failing to prevent such crimes or respond to them.

Speier also is sponsoring the House version of Gillibrands bill  and it, too, is named for Guillen.

When asked about Bidens support for military justice reforms being limited to sexual assault and child abuse cases, rather than the wider range of offenses in Gillibrands measure, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki quoted Bidens statement about the damage sexual assault does to the military.

Advocates for change want all non-military felonies to be removed from commanders control, but Austins decision was a major victory, said Don Christensen, president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for military sexual assault victims.

This is a great starting point. Its an acknowledgement that commanders arent qualified to make these decisions. Thats the first time theyve ever said that, so this is a momentous occasion, he said.

Supporters of the current system say it is part of the relationship between commanders and soldiers. Retired Army Lt. Col. Dru Brenner-Beck, who was one of the first women to run an infantry brigade before she became a military lawyer, warned in an interview this year that decoupling commanders from disciplining their troops would be a mistake and the beginning of the end for a separate military justice system.

At a background briefing to reporters Thursday at the White House, a transcript of which was embargoed to coincide with Austins announcement Friday, a senior administration official said President Biden believes the changes will improve both the response to and prevention of sexual assault and sexual harassment in the military.

Another senior administration official, noting one of the major themes in the indepdent review commissions report, said there was a troubling gap between what senior leaders say about this problem and how junior enlisted members experience the problem.

We have heard for many years that there is no tolerance for sexual harassment and sexual assault, but we learned that, in practice, there is quite a lot of tolerance, the officials said.

sigc@express-news.net
A man and a woman were indicted for their alleged roles in an accident on the East Side in March that killed an elderly man and left a 2-year-old girl partially paralyzed.

Daniel Reynaldo Telles, 24, and Selena Marie Hernandez, 20, were named among 242 felony indictments returned by two Bexar County grand juries completing their terms this week, according to the District Attorneys Office.

Telles and Hernandez were each charged with assault causing serious bodily injury by omission to a child. Telles also faces a charge of manslaughter and two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

On ExpressNews.com: Protester sues city, claiming SAPD officer injured him with paintball gun during George Floyd march

The charges stem from a March 31 accident in which Telles was driving a Dodge Avenger and crashed into a 2001 Chevrolet Cavalier driven by Antonio Martinez, 80.

Martinez had been turning at the intersection of Rigsby Avenue and Covington Road when Telles car struck his drivers side door at a calculated 83 mph in a 40 mph zone, investigators said.

The crash left Martinezs vehicle with a 2 1/2-foot intrusion and the engine of Telles car in flames, an affidavit states. Martinez died at the scene.

Hernandez was in the passenger seat of Telles Dodge and her 2-year-old girl was in the back, next to Telles cousin.

Witnesses told police that Telles, Hernandez and the cousin escaped, leaving the child inside the burning truck. Bystanders pulled the unconcious toddler from the wreckage. All four were taken to University Hospital with varying injuries.

Tellez admitted to smoking marijuana about three hours before the crash, but said he wasn't intoxicated, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. He also did not have a driver's license and his Texas ID card had been revoked for his failure to appear in court for a traffic citation.

Hernandezs daughter, who was not properly restrained in a car seat, suffered multiple spinal and lumbar fractures, which left her partially paralyzed on the left side of her body, court records said.

Hernandez had multiple broken ribs, a lumbar fracture, and a laceration to her right knee. Telles cousin had multiple broken ribs.

Telles is still at the Bexar County Jail, his bail set at $200,000. Hernandez was released after posting a $20,000 bond in May.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio father and son drown in Port Aransas

The assault charge is a first degree felony punishable by 5 to 99 years or life in prison. The other charges against Telles are second degree felonies punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison.

In a separate case, Sergio Vasquez, 51, was indicted on an intoxication manslaughter charge, accused of being drunk when he ran a red light Nov. 29 and crashed into Wayne Willett, 50, who was in a crosswalk at the intersection of Nacogdoches Road and El Charro Street. Willet died at a hospital, a police report states.

Intoxication manslaughter is a second degree felony punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison. Vasquez is free on a $75,000 bond.

JBeltran@express-news.net
A 33-year-old man was fatally shot this week at a Northeast Side hotel, according to San Antonio police

Police responded about 5:30 a.m. Wednesday to a call about a shooting at the Days Inn hotel on Interstate 35 North near the interchange with Loop 410, police said.

Police said they found the man on the ground next to a vehicle with gunshot wounds. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Express Briefing: Get the morning headlines in your inbox

According to police, an 18-year-old shot the 33-year-old while trying to protect two others from him.

The investigation is ongoing.

gabriella.ybarra@express-news.net
A 33-year-old man fatally shot at a Northeast Side hotel has been identified, according to the Bexar County Medical Examiners Office

Johnny Campos was found on the ground next to a vehicle with gunshot wounds at the Days Inn hotel on Interstate 35 North near the interchange with Loop 410 around 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, San Antonio police said.
A 24-year-old man who took part in last years racial justice protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd has sued the city of San Antonio, contending that a police officer used excessive force when he shot him with a paintball gun.

According to the lawsuit, the officer shot Alexander Lance twice  once each in the arm and leg  after Lance told him that the rifle he was carrying better have the safety on.

Lance spent three days in a hospital being treated for his injuries, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in state district court in Bexar County.

The suit names as defendants the city and the police officer, identified only as John Doe. It seeks unspecified monetary damages.

Floyd, who was Black, was killed by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, after a routine arrest on May 25, 2020. Chauvin was convicted in April of second-degree murder and other crimes. Last month, a judge sentenced him to 22  years in prison.

In a scene captured on cell-phone video and viewed by millions, Chauvin kneeled on Floyds neck for more than nine minutes while the handcuffed suspect lay on the pavement, crying out repeatedly: I cant breathe.

The killing ignited demonstrations across the country and reenergized the national dialogue over police use of force against minorities.

Lance, then 23, and two of his friends joined one such protest in downtown San Antonio on Saturday, May 30, 2020. That night, an estimated 5,000 mostly peaceful demonstrators marched through the streets. They were greeted by a massive police presence, including officers in riot gear.

According to Lances lawsuit, he saw the unnamed SAPD officer standing with a rifle and made the comment about how the safety had better be on. The officer then rushed over and shot Lance twice at point-blank range with the paintball gun, the suit says. The SAPD uses such non-lethal projectiles for crowd control.

On ExpressNews.com: George Floyd protest in S.A. starts peacefully, turns ugly

Other officers rushed over to the scene, the lawsuit states. Not to provide medical attention to the badly injured Plaintiff, but to surround the Defendant and use flashlights in an attempt to blind the cell phones of other citizens recording the aggravated assault.

The lawsuit alleges that the city failed to train its officers adequately in the constitutional right of peaceful assembly and protest. It also asserts that the city failed to take disciplinary action against the officer.

City officials did not respond to a request for comment.

eeaton@express-news.net
A call for food on social media mobilized San Antonians to donate and deliver hundreds of dollars worth of meals to immigrants at the San Antonio International Airport.

After visiting the airport Monday night, Martha Sanchez, the co-owner of El Remedio food truck, asked her followers and locals to join her on this cause.

"I was dropping off my mom, and someone heard me speaking Spanish and asked if I could help them with printing out their ticket," Sanchez said.

On ExpressNews.com: Interfaith Welcome Coalition in San Antonio volunteers help immigrants seeking asylum reach final destinations

She said there were about 60 immigrants at the airport that night, waiting to board their flights. After talking with more of the immigrants, Sanchez said she realized some couldn't afford to buy food and other supplies and would be there for a while.

"If their flight doesn't leave until Friday, then they're there until Friday, and most of them don't have money with them," Sanchez said.

Sanchez, with the help of others, gathered and delivered canned goods, homemade meals and food from local restaurants. Some who couldn't help in-person, donated funds or spread the word on social media.

Alex Serna, whose Instagram handle is @SanAntonioMunchies, said it was only right for him to use his platform to help feed those in need.

"I know whenever the immigration conversation comes up, it can be a really politically charged one," he said. "This isn't a political issue, it's about people who are hungry."

Large numbers of immigrants at the airport isn't anything new, says Barbara Edens, team leader of the Interfaith Welcome Coalition. Edens has been helping immigrants at the airport navigate their flights for over five years.

"We usually try to have a presence about every day, usually in the morning, to see if anyone's going to come," she said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection releases immigrants from detention centers on a weekly basis, Edens said. The coalition is well-funded and has been able to provide each person with a boxed lunch, water and toiletries, she said.

"The main thing we're looking for is volunteers, particularly those who can speak Spanish," she said.

The coalition communicates with the airport for the best time to be available for the immigrants, but there are times when the organization misses people who arrive late.

"A lot of them may come at night and spend the night at the airport, and would need food," she said. Some immigrants may be released near the border and make the long trip to San Antonio, she said.

A CBP spokesperson said detention, prosecution and removal remain tools utilized to address illegal border crossings between ports of entry.

"At times when Border Patrol encounters exceed ICEs ability to accept transfers, Border Patrol may release non-criminal, processed migrants directly from our facilities in coordination with local officials and nongovernmental organizations with a notice to appear at immigration proceedings or a notice to report to ICE for further processing," a statement from CBP said.

Malak.Silmi@express-news.net
We have much to celebrate on our nations birthday, but not when it comes to supporting the American military service members and veterans whose sacrifice protects our freedom.

During testimony Tuesday before the House Armed Services Committee, newly confirmed Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth was questioned about systemic racism and suicide prevention, the handling of sexual assault crimes, poor housing conditions, food insecurity and lack of health care for military families. All are profoundly complicated, sad issues worthy of intense focus  but the most critical is suicide prevention.

Congress members took turns discussing military suicides, one calling them the next epidemic and asking for more studies  wanting to know the number of suicides at each base around the world. Wormuth said she would get the numbers, and shared this startling fact: I have been in the job four weeks, she said. I get emails every week more than once, telling me that one of our soliders has committed suicide, and its extremely diseartening and tragic and we need to focus on it more.

And then there is this grim figure: While an estimated 7,057 service members have died during military operations since 9/11, suicides among active duty personnel and veterans of those conflicts have reached 30,177, according to a 35-page Brown University study released June 21.

This is not a new problem. When will we see progress?

Help is available: The National Suicide Prevention and Military Crisis Line is available 24 hours at 800-273-8255, www.MilitaryCrisisLine.net, or by sending a text message to the number, 838255. See More Collapse

On ExpressNews.com: Preyor-Johnson: For a better future, teach a full history

In his June 23 remarks to the House Armed Services Committee, Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the pace of training and deployments has affected the rate of suicide among troops.

Its a big concern, he told the committee. Operational tempo impacts troops in a variety of ways, including suicide, he said.

War deployments, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental health conditions are among the many factors cited for military suicides over the past 20 years, but suicides not only persist, they have increased.

During the Tuesday hearing, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, referenced two recent suicides at Fort Bliss, asking Wormuth: What in your view is happening? What is going on where we have not done well enough and what are the first steps to doing better?

Wormuth said the Army has been trying evidence-based suicide prevention programs, but cautioned that making progress will take year-after-year focus and effort.

Express-News reporter Sig Christenson has written several stories about military suicide over the years. In April, he wrote of a record-setting 571 deaths in 2020, explaining that leaders arent attributing the spike to the pandemic.

Just what is behind the steady rise during years of Defense Department efforts to reduce self-inflicted deaths baffles experts, he wrote. It is a mystery nowhere near to being solved.

How can this be? Why is one of our militarys most menacing threats themselves?

There is deep concern and ongoing prevention efforts, including hundreds of studies, new policies and treatments that try to predict and prevent suicides among service members and veterans. Suicide prevention is just as important as national security  keeping our warriors alive must be prioritized.

Our military is the strongest in the world  leaders must continue to develop strategies for how they can remedy pervasive cultural, infrastructure deficits and provide wraparound support for military members and veterans that saves lives.

When Escobar asked if the Department of Defense is looking at other institutions for best practices, Wormuth pointed to pilot programs and agreed: We absolutely should be looking to every possible source of good ideas outside of the Army and the Department of Defense.

America must do better. Enough with the record-breaking reports. Our country needs a solution, so military service members and veterans can keep celebrating Americas birthdays  and more importantly  their own.

Nancy.Preyor-Johnson@express-news.net
Texas dogs, and the people who love them, deserve more than lawmakers who make decisions that prioritize political posturing over animal cruelty prevention. Since 2015, dozens of stakeholder associations and countless Texans have been working to pass a bill clarifying the existing outdoor restraint statute, which is so vague that it is completely unenforceable.

The Texas Legislature meets every other year, and each session for the last six years, animal advocates, law enforcement officers and supporters have traveled to Austin to testify at hearings, write letters to their elected officials and sign petitions in support of a bill most recently known as Senate Bill 474, the Safe Outdoor Dogs Act.

San Antonio Assistant Shelter Director Shannon Sims carried a heavy chain with him to six years of hearings to demonstrate the living reality of countless dogs across our state. The goal of all these actions? To allow law enforcement and animal control officers to intervene and help suffering dogs before they die a preventable death.

Opponents of bills like the Safe Outdoor Dogs Act include dog fighters and unscrupulous breeders who have long claimed Texas has sufficient animal cruelty laws. But under current law, animal cruelty can only be prosecuted after the fact. Clarifying the existing outdoor restraint statute would allow action to be taken before a chained dog  suffering without shelter or water  dies or suffers abject cruelty.

Texas has the full gamut of extreme weather from freezing winds in the northern Panhandle to sweltering heat across the Rio Grande Valley.

On ExpressNews.com: Texans respond with #BetoLovesDogs, #AbbottHatesDogs after dog bill veto

In 2021, during Februarys extreme winter storm, the Texas Humane Legislation Network was inundated with hundreds of calls per day from sheriffs, police chiefs and advocates trying to save dogs left to freeze outdoors without shelter. Many of those dogs ultimately suffered terrible fates because the current broken statute prevented intervention.

The outlook was brighter during the 87th Texas Legislature after finally getting this bill passed. Years of work and negotiations with legislators who had questions or concerns resulted in a carefully crafted bill that was acceptable to those representing many diverse interests across the state. And most importantly, SB 474 would effectively protect Texas dogs.

The bill passed the Senate and House, shepherded by sponsors state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. and Rep. Nicole Collier, chair of the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. It had the support of Republicans and Democrats, as well as lawmakers from rural, urban and suburban districts. After more than six years of advocacy, outside dogs would have the basic protections they deserved.

After all of that, Gov. Greg Abbott vetoed the bill. All the elements he cited as micromanagement were actually already part of the current statute or carefully negotiated compromises that addressed concerns from lawmakers in both parties to strike the right balance for our state.

The governor was right about this: Texans do love their dogs. Thats why thousands of them supported the Safe Outdoor Dogs Act. And it is why front-line animal rescuers, prosecutors and law enforcement officers spoke out repeatedly about the need for this bill: to allow them to take action to save dogs before the dog dies a preventable death  before the situation becomes an animal cruelty case instead of an animal rescue.

Ultimately, Abbott will have to be a part of the solution, and it is our hope he will reconsider his position when a future version of this bill is on his desk.

Steve Hurst serves as board president of the Texas Humane Legislation Network.
In a year of uncertainty, when we have all re-evaluated the ways we live, work, learn and move in the world, there have been moments of absolute clarity, where purpose, mission and humanity shine bright and provide assurance for a brighter future.

The Alamo Colleges District, a family of five colleges in Americas most impoverished big city that serves a 75 percent minority student population, has had numerous illuminating moments in the last year. There were flickers of light when dedicated faculty and staff transitioned nearly 68,000 students to remote learning during the pandemic, providing proof of our student success.

We were affirmed to hear from students who stayed with us despite financial hardships. Alejandra Gomez was nearly homeless as a result of the pandemic, but with support from our advocacy services, faculty and staff, she was able to graduate and pursue her bachelors degree. Mathew Ramos, a recent high school graduate and new father, enrolled in St. Philips College thanks to our free college program, Alamo Promise.

When the winter storm struck, we were empowered by the story of Kaysia Williams, a single mother and student at San Antonio College, who lost her familys food and other resources, but was able to get assistance and continue her education, thanks to the community support of our Winter Weather Student Relief Fund.

Each of those sparks contribute to our districts moonshot: ending poverty through education. But no single contributor has shone a more focused spotlight on the need for education and empowerment for minority communities than MacKenzie Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett. Their infusions of support are enabling change from a grassroots level.

Their $20 million gift to Palo Alto College, or PAC, in December, the largest one-time donation in the colleges history, is and will continue to be a game-changer. The South Side community is an area with a concentration of poverty, but also a people-rich wealth of talent that will be nurtured thanks to this donation.

Their contribution of $15 million to San Antonio College, or SAC, will provide continued support to local graduating high school seniors to attend college free through Alamo Promise. Their gift also will contribute to the SAC Womens Empowerment Center for non-traditional students, DREAMers and the GED-to-College program. These are just a few ways these philanthropists are changing lives by supporting institutions such as our colleges.

Their reach extends across all five of our colleges. As a 2018 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winner, we will use the Baldrige model and our experience to bring to scale the programs and plans PAC and SAC have put into place as a result of Scotts and Jewetts contributions.

These gifts will allow more individuals to realize their full potential. Graduating from any of the Alamo Colleges means an additional $9,400 a year in earnings, compared to someone with a high school diploma; thats nearly half a million dollars in a graduates lifetime. It also means a larger pipeline of skilled workers, driving economic development and building social and economic mobility for families.

The $35 million these generous donors have infused into our community, along with millions more to our partners has transformational power. It will allow the city to shed its label as the poorest in the nation and spotlight its greatest resource  its people  who have shown repeatedly that they will excel, given the access and resources. On behalf of the Alamo Colleges family along with all of San Antonios local, state and national leaders  we thank Scott and Jewett, and say may your light continue to shine.

Wolff is Bexar County judge. Nirenberg is mayor of San Antonio. Sprague is chair of the Alamo Colleges Board of Trustees and Flores is chancellor of the Alamo Colleges District.
One of the questions Im asked most is: How do I talk to those on the other side of Americas political and cultural abyss? What can I say to my brother/aunt/friend who thinks Joe Biden is a socialist with dementia who stole the election?

Ive wondered about persuasion strategies, too, because I have friends who have their pro-Trump or anti-vaccine biases validated every evening by Tucker Carlson. So I reached out to an expert at changing minds.

Daryl Davis, 63, is a Black musician with an unusual calling: He hangs out with Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis and chips away at their racism. He has evidence of great success: a collection of KKK robes and hoods given to him by people whom he persuaded to abandon the Klan.

His odyssey arose from curiosity about racism, including about an attack he suffered. When Davis was 10 years old, he says, a group of white people hurled bottles, soda cans and rocks at him.

I was incredulous, Davis recalled. My 10-year-old brain could not process the idea that someone who had never seen me, who had never spoken to me, who knew nothing about me, would want to inflict pain upon me for no other reason than the color of my skin.

On ExpressNews.com: Kristof: The biggest threat to America is America itself

How can you hate me, he remembers wondering, when you dont even know me?

Davis began to work on answers after he graduated from Howard University and joined a band that sometimes played in a Maryland bar that attracted white racists. Davis struck up a friendship with a KKK member, each fascinated by the other, and the man eventually left the KKK, Davis said.

One of Davis methods  and theres research from social psychology to confirm the effectiveness of this approach  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.

In one case, Davis said, he listened as a KKK district leader brought up crime by African Americans and told him that Black people are genetically wired to be violent. Davis responded by acknowledging that many crimes are committed by Black people but then noted that almost all well-known serial killers have been white and mused that white people must have a gene to be serial killers.

When the KKK leader sputtered that this was ridiculous, Davis agreed: Its silly to say that white people are predisposed to be serial killers, just as its ridiculous to say that Black people have crime genes.

The man went silent, Davis said, and about five months later quit the KKK.

Davis claims to have persuaded some 200 white supremacists to leave the Klan and other extremist groups. Its impossible to confirm that number, but his work has been well documented for decades in articles, videos, books and a TED Talk. He also has a podcast called Changing Minds With Daryl Davis.

Daryl saved my life, said Scott Shepherd, a former grand dragon of the KKK. Daryl extended his hand and actually just extended his heart, too, and we became brothers. Shepherd ended up leaving the Klan and gave his robes to Davis.

Davis approach seems out of step with modern sensibilities. Today the more common impulse is to decry from a distance.

On ExpressNews.com: Kristof: Don't turn away from these images and these crimes

The preference for safe spaces over dialogue arises in part from a reasonable concern that engaging extremists legitimizes them. In any case, society can hardly ask Black people to reach out to racists, gay people to sit down with homophobes, immigrants to win over xenophobes, women to try to reform misogynists, and so on. Victims of discrimination have endured enough without being called upon to redeem their tormentors.

Yet I do think that we Americans dont engage enough with people we fundamentally disagree with. Theres something to be said for the basic Davis inclination toward dialogue, even with unreasonable antagonists. If were all stuck in the same boat, we should talk to each other.

Theres a reason we try to solve even intractable wars by getting the parties to sit in the same room: It beats war. If we believe in engagement with North Koreans and Iranians, then why not with fellow Americans?

At a time when America is so polarized and political space is so toxic, we, of course, have to stand up for what we think is right. But it may also help to sit down with those we believe are wrong.

If I can sit down and talk to KKK members and neo-Nazis and get them to give me their robes and hoods and swastika flags and all that kind of crazy stuff, Davis said, theres no reason why somebody cant sit down at a dinner table and talk to their family member.
For the second time in as many years, U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw has joined with Democrats to support removing the statues of Confederate leaders from the U.S. Capitol.

Crenshaw, of Houston, was among 67 House Republicans, including five from Texas, who voted in favor of a bill that would remove all statues of individuals who voluntarily served the Confederate States of America from display in the United States Capitol, and for other purposes. All Democrats in Congress voted for the bill, which passed 285 to 120.

Statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders would be among those removed if the U.S. Senate follows the Houses action.

Its not a surprise that Crenshaw would be among the Texas Republicans calling for the statues to come down. After voting for the legislation last year, he explained that those statues were largely of figures who were in the Democratic Party.

Im glad to help them confront that racist past & voted to remove these Democrat statues from positions of prominence, Crenshaw wrote on Twitter and Facebook last year. Republicans won the Civil War. Thats our history. Democrats have a long list of segregationists & KKK members. Thats their history.

While the Democratic Party did include many segregationists through the 1960s, Democratic leaders have been more closely associated with civil rights for the past half century. President Lyndon Johnson successfully pushed for passage of civil and voting rights legislation in the '60s, and more recently Democrats have sought to expand opportunities for Black and Latino voters as Republicans at the state level have pushed controversial election restrictions that some believe are aimed at suppressing that vote. Republicans maintain they're trying to reduce voter fraud.

NEWSLETTERS Join the conversation with HouWeAre We want to foster conversation and highlight the intersection of race, identity and culture in one of America's most diverse cities. Sign up for the HouWeAre newsletter here.

Each state has been given two statues in the U.S. Capitol to display. While states like California have Ronald Reagan and Virginia has George Washington, Mississippis two statues are of Davis and Confederate General James Z. George. Other states have already started recalling their statues of Confederate leaders. Virginia, for instance, recently recalled its statue of General Robert E. Lee, who led the Confederate States Army during the Civil War.

Texas would be unaffected by the removal of Confederates since its two statues are of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston.

This year, the legislation also calls for removing a bust of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the landmark Dred Scott v. Sandford decision denying citizenship rights for African Americans. The Democrat-led House wants the bust replaced with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice.

Symbols of hate and division have no place in the halls of Congress, said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Maryland.

Besides Crenshaw, the Texas Republicans who voted for removing the statues included Reps. Michael Burgess of Pilot Point; Tony Gonzales of San Antonio; Van Taylor of Plano, and Michael McCaul, of Austin, whose district includes parts of northwest Harris County.

Eight Texas Republicans missed the vote and were with former President Donald Trump on Wednesday at the Texas border. Trump has defended memorials and institutions named for Confederate figures, and last year vetoed a military spending bill because of language that would have renamed military bases named for Confederate military leaders. Congress overrode the veto.

jeremy.wallace@chron.com
AUSTIN  The Texas history museum on Thursday abruptly pulled out of an event scheduled for that night on a new book that re-examines the story of The Alamo, prompting claims of state censorship from its authors.

The authors of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, had planned to participate in the online discussion, co-hosted by the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum and the Writers League of Texas.

Around 4 p.m., they were told the museum had backed out under pressure from its board of directors and conservatives who have taken issue with the books findings.

The board of directors includes Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Speaker Dade Phelan, all Republicans.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Phil Collins' $15 million collection of Alamo artifacts is flashy, but how much of it is real?

The Writers League of Texas offered to press on with the event, but with most of the registration handled through the Bullocks website, the authors said they were forced to reschedule.

I think were being censored, which is a shame because the mission of the Texas history museum is to promote examining our past, said Chris Tomlinson, one of the authors and a columnist at the Houston Chronicle. Weve done more than a dozen events, and this is the first time weve been shut down like this.

In the book, which was published last month, Tomlinson and co-authors Bryan Burrough and Jason Stanford assert that the common narrative about the Battle of the Alamo  that 180 Texan rebels died defending the state in its war for independence from Mexico  overlooks the fact that it was waged in part to ensure slavery would be preserved.

The story of the Alamo has been central to the whole Texas creation myth, Burrough said in a recent interview with NPR, adding that its past time to look critically at the heroic Anglo narrative associated with the site.

Several prominent state Republicans have taken issue with the thesis, including former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, who oversaw the site while in office. In a post this week, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, called the book a radical reinterpretation of history.

The book is an effort to diminish the great figures of history and place slavery at the center of every story, the foundation wrote, likening it to the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, which re-examined the role that slavery played in the countrys founding.

Representatives for the foundation, as well as Abbott and Patrick, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday evening. Officials at the Bullock also did not immediately respond. Phelans spokesman Enrique Marquez said the office was not advised as to the events that led to the cancellation.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Forget the Alamo? Old stories die hard, but authors do their best to bust the myth.

Our understanding of history changes over time as the historical record is revealed through new research and insight, but our relationship to history remains complex and often very personal, the museums director, Margaret Koch, said in an online post last week promoting the event. This program explores the world of writing about our past through the eyes of Texas authors wishing to reveal that complexity.

In a note to the museums members, a Bullock spokeswoman said only that it was no longer co-hosting the event. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your support, it said. We look forward to seeing you at future programs.

Tomlinson said the museum had reportedly been under pressure from conservatives for several days, but had reassured them that they would proceed with the event regardless.

Were hoping to reschedule the event with the Writers League and hope the Bullock will reconsider, he said.

Becka Oliver, the executive director of the Writers League, had planned to moderate the discussion. The reality is, if the authors had wanted an event to happen tonight, we would have been happy to do it, she said.

The Bullocks decision comes amid a national campaign by Republicans to counter claims that systemic racism and other forms of historic discrimination persist today. Last month, Abbott signed a bill creating the The 1836 Project, creating an advisory committee that will advocate for patriotic education of the states history, its name a play on the 1619 Project.

The committee, whose members will be appointed by the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker, will mainly produce a pamphlet that explains the significance of policy decisions made by this state that promote liberty and freedom for businesses and families and will be handed out to people receiving their drivers license.

To keep Texas the best state in the United States of America, we must never forget why Texas became so exceptional in the first place, Abbott said in a video he posted on Twitter of him signing the bill.

Also during the recent session, lawmakers passed legislation banning critical race theory from classrooms and setting new guidelines for Texas educators on how American and Texas history can be taught.

jeremy.blackman@chron.com

taylor.goldenstein@chron.com
DANBURY - The CityCenter Danbury Farmers Market has launched a new season with 15 vendors and a promotion to encourage vaccinations that will award a $10 voucher for participants.

The farmers market, which runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays through October at the Danbury Railway Museum, is now in its 11th year.
NEW YORK (AP)  While some professional journalists faced hostility and attack while covering the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, the grand irony is that so many people involved in the insurrection were doing their jobs for them.

That's evident with The New York Times' release of Day of Rage, a 40-minute video investigation that painstakingly examines the events of the day. The Times' team collected thousands of videos, starting the afternoon of Jan. 6, many of them posted on social media by the rioters themselves, said Malachy Browne, senior producer on the Times' visual investigations team.

As the realization set in among many of the participants about what they had done, and the implications of it, much of it was deleted, Browne said.

Too late. The Times had already protected its own copies.

The day had been tough for some of the journalists who covered the attack. Photojournalists for The Associated Press and Times were roughed up, and some AP equipment used to document the event was damaged.

In Day of Rage, the newspaper used the collected footage, as well as other material like police bodycam film and archived audio from police communications, to recreate the event from many angles. Through the use of time stamps and knowledge of where people were located, for example, the Times tracked down footage from a freelance videographer who hadn't realized he had captured the attack that led to Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick's death, Browne said. Sicknick collapsed and later died after engaging with the protesters. He was sprayed with chemical irritants, but a medical examiner determined he died of natural causes.

The Times was able to determine that rioters breached the Capitol at eight separate locations.

Elsewhere, the footage laid bare the intent of many rioters, like when former President Donald Trump's speech at the pre-riot rally were juxtaposed with what was said in his audience as he spoke.

The Times' probe concludes that the House's delay in shutting off debate on election certification until rioters had appeared outside the chamber contributed to the shooting by police of Ashli Babbitt, a California woman who had joined the crowd that breached the building.

The project depicts law enforcement as overwhelmed, partly due to lack of preparation by their superiors. The footage, some of it seen in other venues over the past months, contains startling moments: a police officer goading a rioter to move in one direction while senators slip to safety in the background, a House employee barricaded in an office whispering to a colleague while a door is being pounded from the outside.

While the footage spots efforts by members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, showing their body armor, weapons, radio communication and organized movements, the Times concludes that the majority of rioters were Trump supporters caught up in the frenzy of the action.

For many in the crowd, they felt they were carrying out some duty to defend democracy as they see it, Browne said.

The Times' story had nine bylines, but Browne estimated some 15 to 20 journalists participated in its preparation. Even before the documentary's release late Wednesday, the findings contributed to the newspaper's reporting about the incident over the past few months.

Browne, who also narrates the video, minces no words in telling viewers what was concluded.

Our reconstruction show the Capitol riot for what it was  a violent assault, encouraged by the president, on a seat of democracy that he vowed to protect, he says in the documentary.

The film also shows a congressman likening the rioters to tourists. A tourist visit this was not, Browne narrates, and the proof is in the footage.

The Times' investigation could take on added importance given the stalled government effort to thoroughly investigate what happened that day.

I think recent events have made a presentation like this more valuable, he said. Maybe it will create pressure for the investigation. I don't know. Our intention is not to influence policy or politicians, but to really show the public what happened in the fullest way possible.
HONOLULU (AP)  Two pilots told air traffic controllers that their engine had cut out and they needed help moments before crashing their cargo plane into the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii on Friday.

It doesnt look good out here, one of the pilots said before the Boeing 737 broke apart as it entered the water.

Both pilots, the only people aboard, were seriously injured but survived the crash. An hour later, rescuers found the two clinging to packages and parts of the plane in about 150 feet (46 meters) of water several miles off Oahu, authorities said.

One was on the tail and the other clinging to packages, Coast Guard Lt. Commander Karin Evelyn wrote in an email to The Associated Press. As an agency helicopter got close, the airplane began to sink putting the individual on the tail in the water. The crews hoisted them safely on the aircraft. The rescue swimmer then assisted the other individual.

The pilots of Transair Flight 810 heading from Honolulu to Maui reported engine trouble and were trying to return to Honolulu, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

Weve lost No. 1 engine, and were coming straight to the airport," one of the pilots said in air traffic control communications. Were going to need the fire department. Theres a chance were going to lose the other engine, too, its running very hot. Were very low on speed.

The pilot said they werent carrying hazardous materials and had two hours worth of fuel. They asked the tower to advise the Coast Guard, then asked if there was a closer airport than Honolulu.

After a stretch of silence, the controller asks if the pilot is still there. There was no response.

Looks like they went down in the water, the tower says.

Later, a rescuer aboard a Coast Guard helicopter sent to search for the pilots tells air traffic control: We do have an aircraft in the water ... were currently overhead (the) debris field.

Minutes later: We have zero, two souls in sight in the water.

The tower responded, OK, so you have both guys, both souls in sight?

Both souls in sight, yes, sir, the rescuers responded.

The pilots, whose identities were not immediately released, were taken to a hospital. Officials at Queens Medical Center said a 58-year-old was in critical condition, Hawaii News Now reported. The other pilot, a 50-year-old, was in serious condition with a head injury and multiple lacerations, the TV station reported.

The Coast Guard reported flying over the crash site off Oahu to evaluate for pollution after the sun came up in the morning. Debris and fuel remained in the water.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. The NTSB said in a tweet that it will send a team of 10 investigators.

The plane is a 46-year-old Boeing 737-200, a much earlier version of the 737 than the Max, and one that U.S. airlines no longer use for passenger flights. There are fewer than 60 737-200s still flying worldwide, according to aviation-data researcher Cirium.

The Boeing 737 first flew in the late 1960s and is the most popular airline plane still in production. Boeing has delivered more than 10,500 of them and has unfilled orders for about 4,000 more, almost all of those for the latest version of the plane, the 737 Max.

Over the years, about 200 737s have been destroyed in crashes and several hundred others have been involved in less serious accidents and incidents, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.

For a jet that has been in production for so long and is being used so extensively, 203 hull-loss accidents can be considered a very good safety record, said Harro Ranter, who runs the database.

He said the planes accident rate improved dramatically from the first models to more recent ones that preceded the Max.

Boeing said in a statement: We are aware of the reports out of Honolulu, Hawaii and are closely monitoring the situation. We are in contact with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and are working to gather more information.

There have been some water landings over the years in which people survived, the most famous being the 2009 crash of a US Airways flight in New York's Hudson River where all 155 people on board survived.

All four people on board survived a cargo plane crash into water short of a runway in Gabon in 2011.

In other cases, some passengers and crew survived but some died, including a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines plane that ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean in 1996, a Tunisian airliner that went down off the coast of Sicily in 2005, and an Indonesian airliner that landed in a river during a thunderstorm in 2002.

___

Koenig reported from Dallas. Monroe reported from Phoenix.
(The Center Square)  The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld an Arizona law that bans ballot harvesting and disallows votes from being counted that were cast in the wrong precinct.

The ruling was heralded as a major victory for Republican-led states that have passed several laws restricting controversial voting practices  such as allowing political operatives and other third parties to collect mail-in ballots and turn them in to polling stations, a practice known as ballot harvesting  to strengthen election integrity in the aftermath of last years election.

The court was split on ideological lines in the 6-3 decision, with conservative justices in the majority.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, found that the state of Arizonas voting laws had no intent of discrimination and did not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In light of the principles set out above, neither Arizonas out-of-precinct rule nor its ballot-collection law violates ... the VRA, Alito said. Having to identify ones own polling place and then travel there to vote does not exceed the usual burdens of voting.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined in the majority opinion.

Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, in an opinion written by Kagan.

In the dissent, Kagan expressed disappointment with the majority opinions ruling on the powers of section two of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That section outlines that any voting law discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or language is illegal. Kagan argued this ruling severely weakened the law.

The majority today lessens the law  cuts Section 2 down to its own preferred size, Kagan said. The majority creates a set of extra-textual exceptions and considerations to sap the Acts strength, and to save laws like Arizonas. No matter what Congress wanted, the majority has other ideas.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who was the plaintiff in this case, celebrated the decision in a statement Thursday.

Today is a win for election integrity safeguards in Arizona and across the country, Brnovich said. Fair elections are the cornerstone of our republic, and they start with rational laws that protect both the right to vote and the accuracy of the results.

President Joe Biden, who has advocated for legislation making ballot harvesting legal nationwide among other measures, criticized the ruling in a statement.

I am deeply disappointed in todays decision by the United States Supreme Court that undercuts the Voting Rights Act, and upholds what Justice Kagan called 'a significant race-based disparity in voting opportunities,'" Biden said.

Biden also called for the passing of legislation like the For the People Act in the statement, saying democracy is on the line. The For the People Act, which was filibustered last week in the Senate, would federalize several aspects of election law, which have typically been left to states and local governments.

As Biden and Democrats see this ruling as a major step back for their voting law initiatives, Republicans see the decision as a major step in the right direction for protecting the integrity of elections.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel issued a message of approval while touting the Republican platform on election laws in a statement.

Today's United States Supreme Court ruling is a resounding victory for election integrity and the rule of law, McDaniel said. The RNC is proud to have worked closely with the Arizona GOP to support this historic victory, and we will continue our comprehensive efforts to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.
(The Center Square) - One of the nations top labor and teachers unions is debating whether to call for the mandatory vaccination of all children before returning to school. The organization already this week has agreed to support and lead campaigns to advance critical race theory.

The National Education Association, the largest labor union in the country with 3 million members, is holding its annual meeting this week. One of the most controversial topics up for debate is whether the organization will demand that all students be vaccinated before returning to school this fall.

According to the groups meeting agenda, up for debate is whether the NEA will call for mandatory safe and effective COVID-19 vaccinations and testing for all students and staff before returning to face-to-face instruction in the fall, subject to medical exceptions in accordance with existing law, and will widely publicize this position via social media. We will further call for and publicize that safety measures such as social distancing, masking, and proper ventilation be mandatory for all.

The agenda item was submitted by 50 delegates for debate to increase educator voice, influence, and professional authority and enhance organizational capacity.

COVID-19 has already killed over 600,000 people, the agenda says. Black and Latinx communities have suffered twice the deaths, and this inequality will deepen as variants spread. The pandemic respects no boundaries. We must fight for a policy that puts human life first.

News of the potential stance sparked backlash among critics.

At this point, in terms of the science and the medical aspect it's not appropriate, said Edmund Haislmaier, a health care policy expert at the Heritage Foundation. We don't have vaccines approved even under emergency use authorization for children under 12. In terms of people being at risk of the illness, [children are] about as low on the priority list as you can get. This is clearly a case where, at the moment at least, any potential risk from being vaccinated is greater than the risk of serious complications from contracting the illness.

Haislmaier pointed to health complications many are having from the vaccine and said people should be asked to consult their physician, not submit to blanket mandates.

Until such time as they sort that out there are people who are at low risk of having a severe event if they contract the virus, and therefore the risk of some kind of severe event caused by something in the vaccine would suggest that those people are better off not getting vaccinated at the moment until that is cleared up, he said.

The NEA has already adopted new provisions that support critical race theory, a controversial school of thought that emphasizes racism in American history and maintains that it is systemic in U.S. law and institutions.

According to the NEA measure, the organization has now agreed to lead and support campaigns that result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic (Native people, Asian, Black, Latin(o/a/x), Middle Eastern, North African, and Pacific Islander) Studies curriculum in pre- K-12 and higher education.

Teachers unions in the U.S. have taken fire for their handling of the COVID pandemic, especially around their advocacy for delaying the reopening of schools. They grabbed headlines earlier this year after reports that teachers unions gave millions to Democratic causes in the 2020 election before advising the Biden administration on CDC guidance for schools.

Both the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers donated to Democratic-tied causes before emails surfaced showing their heavy involvement in CDC guidance around schools reopening.

AFT President Randi Weingarten defended the unions actions after the controversy surfaced.

The AFT represents 1.7 million educators, healthcare professionals and public employees who spent the last 14 months serving on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, Weingarten said. "So naturally, we have been in regular touch with the agencies setting policy that affect their work and lives, including the CDC. We appreciate that under Dr. Walenskys leadership, the CDC welcomes stakeholder feedback, as opposed to ignoring it.

The NEA also plans to debate gender identity provisions this week, including a proposal to codify current practice that the Association not deny membership to individuals on the basis of gender identity/ expression.
Marks & Spencer has announced that it will only stock RSPCA Assured higher welfare chicken across its fresh produce range from next autumn.

The supermarket chain has become the first major retailer to exclusively stock slower-growing, higher welfare chicken across its fresh produce range.

All M&S fresh chicken will also be labelled RSPCA Assured - the charity's dedicated farm animal welfare assurance scheme.

The decision follows the launch of the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), urging retailers to procure all their chicken to a selection of higher welfare criteria by 2026.

RSPCA chief executive Chris Sherwood said: "We are delighted that M&S has made this fantastic commitment to animal welfare, which will make them the leading retailer in the UK on chicken welfare.

"The most commonly used breeds of meat or broiler chickens have been specially bred and genetically selected over the years to grow very fast in a short space of time.

"Many often struggle to walk or stand, and can suffer from severe heart and circulatory issues, as well as usually not being given enough space to easily move around and be active.

"By simply switching to using only slower growing, higher welfare breeds of chicken, retailers can make an enormous difference to the lives and welfare of millions of chickens reared in this country every year for their meat."

M&S food managing director, Stuart Machin said the announcement would lead to a step-change in UK farming standards.

"M&S has a long history of leading on animal welfare standards, working with our M&S Select farmers we know and trust," he said.

"We were the first retailer to sign up to the Better Chicken Commitment, the first major retailer to move to 100% Free Range eggs and all our pork is 100% outdoor bred."
After falling sharply from a high in the final week of April, prime cattle prices in Scotland have shown some modest recovery over the past fortnight.

This is according to the latest market commentary from Quality Meat Scotland (QMS) noting that despite the increase, current prices stand some 4.5% below the spring peak. They are, however, still 7-8% higher than a year ago.

QMS chief economist, Stuart Ashworth said that the volume of prime cattle reaching price reporting abattoirs continues to run below last years level.

This is a trend that has seen slaughter volumes of prime cattle between January and May 2021 3.5% lower than the same period last year.

"Indications from price reporting abattoirs show supplies reaching abattoirs have tightened further as June progressed.

Steer and heifer volumes have been significantly lower during the year but an increase in young bull slaughterings in May helped to offset this shortfall.

Prime cattle carcase weights have edged higher during April and May.

Combined with a higher cow kill during May, this has led to an increase in the volume of beef produced in UK abattoirs during this time, such that it was 1% higher than a year ago and offers some explanation for the fall in farmgate price during May, said Mr Ashworth.

As experienced in 2020, the dual disruptions of Brexit and Covid-19 pandemic continue to impact the UK beef market.

Although recovering slowly, UK beef exports to the EU over the first four months of the year have been down over 40%," Mr Ashworth said.

"Although, April data suggest the decline was only 10% during that month. However, April 2020 was already low because of Covid inspired trade disruptions.

Similarly, EU imports have been down 30% over the first four months of the year alone more than offsetting the fall in exports, although the gap had narrowed to less than 10% during April.

This changing balance of trade left the UK market tightly supplied over the first third of the year.

Mr Ashworth observed that farm gate prices across Europe and in Ireland did not see the decline during May that occurred in the UK.

Average prime cattle prices across Europe are currently around 8% higher than a year ago and over 15% higher in Ireland.

"Like Scotland, Irish abattoirs are facing lower supplies of cattle than a year ago, handling around 5% fewer animals since the start of the year but with a shortfall of around 10% in prime cattle availability in recent weeks.

Looking further afield, farmgate prices are also firm in many other parts of the world.

Australia, for example, has seen prices climb, as the effects of recent droughts impact on supplies, to stand some 10% higher than a year ago taking them slightly ahead of the EU average but still 10% lower than the Scottish price, said Mr Ashworth.

Prices have also climbed steeply over the past year in Brazil where heavy slaughterings to meet Chinese demand over the past couple of years has led to tight supplies currently and farmgate prices are around 50% higher than a year ago.

Australia and Brazil are the two largest traders of beef in the world and high prices there help to underpin the global beef market," Mr Ashworth said.

"The other significant global player, the USA, has also seen farmgate prices climb over the past six months to stand 30% higher than a year ago, but have only recently moved ahead of the five year average."

Meanwhile, back in Great Britain, cattle population data suggests little capacity to increase prime stock availability in the short term.

With the UK introducing the next stage of Brexit import controls on the 1 October, which are likely to increase the administrative cost of importing beef, the under-pinning of the current firmness of the farmgate price remains in place.
The RSPCA has called on the UK governments to follow suit as the European Commission pledges to phase out cage systems for a variety of livestock.

The Commission has announced their response to the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) End the Cage Age which saw backing from more than 1.4m citizens, including over 54,000 from the UK.

The ECI urged the Commission to propose legislation to prohibit the use of cages for a host of farm animals, and highlighted how "cruel and unnecessary" cages can inflict "suffering on enormous numbers of farm animals every year".

In their response, the Commission has proposed to phase out the use of cage systems for laying hens, sows, calves, rabbits, pullets, broiler breeders, layer breeders, quail, ducks and geese by 2023.

It hopes to ensure any produce imported into the EU under future Free Trade Agreements meets the same standards.

The RSPCA has called on the UK government in England, and Welsh government in Wales, to follow Europes lead and end cage systems for animals in the UK.

Chief executive Chris Sherwood said: "This is a landmark day for European animal welfare - with the Commission supportive of this ECI, which paves the way for ending the use of cages in farm systems across the European Union.

"The public spoke so forcefully via a European Citizens' Initiative, with over one million citizens - including over 54,000 from the UK - making it clear that they won't stand for this.

"We must now see the UK and Welsh governments act too, to ensure we do not fall behind. Sadly, we know laying hens, game birds and rabbits are among the millions of animals still cramped in farm cages, or so-called enriched cages.

"While Brexit has created opportunities for animal welfare, it has also posed challenges - and standards in England and Wales cannot fall behind the EU after this groundbreaking announcement from the Commission, which is simply incredible news for all farm animals currently reared in cages across the bloc."

The European Commission has said that funding from the Common Agricultural Policy is expected to be used to support phasing out cages in farming.

The RSPCA has already welcomed Englands agreement last year to fund schemes from their farm support programme - including helping farmers to phase out cages for more humane methods of production.

The charity is calling upon Wales, presently considering their farm support policy, to make similar pledges.

Polling for 'End the Cage Age' has found more than 16 million farm animals in the UK live in caged systems - and only 66% of farm animals that could be caged across the UK are presently reared in cage-free conditions.

In both England and Wales, farrowing crates are permitted - while many laying hens are confined to so-called enriched cages, which can still compromise welfare, according to the RSPCA.

Game birds and rabbits are among the other species still farmed in cages in England and Wales.

An ECI is a mechanism which allows EU citizens to sign a petition calling on the Commission to act - and the Commission must respond if more than one million nationals from a significant number of EU member states submit a proposal.

'End the Cage Age' is the sixth ECI to have passed the required threshold - highlighting the strength of public feeling which exists for farm animal welfare across the bloc.
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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.
MnDOT partners with NASA to plan for future of aviation and advanced air mobility
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Mira Rajput loves to share everything about her life on social media. Right from her game night with her family  husband Shahid Kapoor, brother-in-law Ishaan Khatter and mother-in-law Neelima Azim, to sharing pictures of what helps her during midnight-cravings.

Last night she shared a picture of a yummy looking cinnamon roll. She captioned it saying, Thanks @ananyapanday (heart emoji) Nothing like midnight cinnamon rolls. Well, we all know that Ananya Panday and Ishaan Khatter are close friends and it looks like Ananya is close to Ishaans family too. We wonder if Shahid too took a bit out of the roll.

A few days back Mira Rajput had shared an amazing click of herself hugging her brother-in-law Ishaan and captioned it saying, Playgroup. Soon Ishaan had captioned the picture saying Bhabhidoll. Cute!

Ishaan and Ananyas have worked together in Khaali Peeli and since then they have remained best friends. Earlier this year they even holidayed together in Maldives and the pictures were proof of what a lovely vacation it was for the girl.
SHANGHAI, China, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Junshi Biosciences (HKEX: 1877; SSE: 688180), a leading innovation-driven biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialization of novel therapies, announced today that the company has appointed Mr. Wei Qian as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). Mr. Qian will be responsible for the company's commercialization planning and operations.



"We are delighted to have Wei join Junshi's senior leadership team," said Mr. Jun Xiong, Chairman of Junshi Biosciences. "Wei has over two decades of pharmaceutical sales and marketing experience. We believe he will lead Junshi Biosciences' commercialization to our next great milestone. By leveraging a differentiation strategy, he will advance the company to meet the unmet needs of patients in China and the world."

"At present, the development of China's emerging biopharma has entered its golden age, and Junshi Biosciences is a classic example of this vigorous growth," said Mr. Wei Qian, CCO of Junshi Biosciences. "I feel excited and encouraged to join Junshi Biosciences in such a critical growth period. I also look forward to bringing more new drugs and indications to patients through competitive commercialization strategies."

Prior to joining Junshi Biosciences, Mr. Qian served as Vice President, BUO1 at Roche China for over five years, where he was responsible for the successful commercial launch of two blockbuster cancer drugs for the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer in China. From 2006 to 2016, Mr. Qian held a variety of senior positions at AstraZeneca in China, with his most recent position as Vice President of GAA Business Unit, covering gastrointestinal system, anesthesia and anti-infection.

About Junshi Biosciences

Founded in December 2012, Junshi Biosciences is an innovation-driven biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics. The company has established a diversified R & D pipeline comprising 28 innovative drug candidates and 2 biosimilars, with five therapeutic focus areas covering cancer, autoimmune, metabolic, neurological, and infectious diseases. Junshi Biosciences was the first Chinese pharmaceutical company that obtained marketing approval for anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody in China. Its first-in-human anti-BTLA antibody for solid tumors was the first in the world to be approved for clinical trials by the FDA and NMPA and its anti-PCSK9 monoclonal antibody was the first in China to be approved for clinical trials by the NMPA. In early 2020, Junshi Biosciences joined forces with the Institute of Microbiology Chinese Academy of Science and Eli Lilly to co-develop JS016 (etesevimab), China's first neutralizing fully human monoclonal antibody against SARS-CoV-2. JS016 administered with bamlanivimab has received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the US FDA in February 2021 for the treatment of recently diagnosed, mild to moderate COVID-19 in patients who are at a high risk of progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization. The JS016 program is a part of our continuous innovation for disease control and prevention of the global pandemic. Junshi Biosciences has over 2,000 employees in the United States (San Francisco and Maryland) and China (Shanghai, Suzhou, Beijing and Guangzhou). For more information, please visit: http://junshipharma.com.

Contact Information

IR Team:

Junshi Biosciences

info@junshipharma.com

+ 86 021-2250 0300

Solebury Trout

Bob Ai

bai@soleburytrout.com

+ 1 646-389-6658

PR Team:

Junshi Biosciences

Zhi Li

zhi_li@junshipharma.com

+ 86 021-6105 8800


NEW BRUNSWICK (dpa-AFX) - Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) said data showed that its single-shot COVID-19 vaccine generated strong, persistent activity against the rapidly spreading Delta variant and other highly prevalent SARS-CoV-2 viral variants.



The data also showed that the durability of the immune response lasted through at least eight months.



A preprint submitted by the company Thursday to bioRxiv contains a new analysis from blood samples obtained from a subset of participants (n=8) in the Phase 3 ENSEMBLE study.



The data showed that the Johnson & Johnson single-shot COVID-19 vaccine elicited neutralizing antibody activity against the Delta variant at an even higher level than what was recently observed for the Beta (B.1.351) variant in South Africa where high efficacy against severe/critical disease was demonstrated.



In the ENSEMBLE trial, Johnson & Johnson's single-dose COVID-19 vaccine was 85 percent effective against severe/critical disease and demonstrated protection against hospitalization and death.



The Janssen COVID-19 vaccine is authorized for use in the U.S. under an Emergency Use Authorization for active immunization to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 18 years of age and older.



The COVID-19 vaccine received Emergency Use Authorization in the United States on February 27 and Conditional Marketing Authorization by the European Commission on March 11, 2021. The World Health Organization (WHO) issued Emergency Use Listing on March 12, 2021 and the Company received an interim recommendation by the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization for the WHO on March 17, 2021. Many more authorizations have been granted in countries worldwide, and regulatory submissions are ongoing.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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Black Diamond Capital Management, L.L.C. ("Black Diamond") is pleased to announce a transaction involving one of its portfolio companies, Speciality Chemicals International Limited, a holding company of the Polynt-Reichhold group (the "Company") in which the Company agreed to repurchase Investindustrial's shares in the Company (the "Transaction"). Following the completion of the Transaction, Black Diamond will become the Company's controlling shareholder.

Black Diamond and Investindustrial became partners in Polynt-Reichhold after the successful merger of Polynt and Reichhold in May 2017. In the years following the merger, the combined company's performance has substantially improved. The Transaction, together with the refinancing of the existing debt, will be financed by approximately 1.3 billion (equivalent) of new senior secured and unsecured debt facilities expected to be issued by the Company in the public debt capital markets. Affiliates of JP Morgan and certain funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Capital Management, L.P., have provided a commitment for the debt financing and funds managed by Black Diamond have provided an equity commitment.

"We are extremely pleased with what management has been able to achieve with Polynt-Reichhold thus far and are looking forward to supporting them for the next phase of growth," said Steve Deckoff, Black Diamond's Managing Principal.

The Transaction is expected to close within six months from the date hereof, subject to receiving all necessary regulatory approvals.

Morgan Stanley Co. International plc is acting as the Company's exclusive financial advisor and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher Flom LLP is acting as the Company's legal advisor. Slaughter and May and Chiomenti Studio Legale are acting as legal advisors to Global Chemicals S.a r.l., an independently-managed investment subsidiary of Investindustrial V L.P. Morgan Lewis is acting as legal advisor to Black Diamond.

About Polynt-Reichhold

Polynt-Reichhold is a leading vertically-integrated global specialty chemical manufacturer, generating 2 billion in annual sales. Headquartered in the UK, Polynt-Reichhold Group manages operations through two regional centres located in Italy (Scanzorosciate, Polynt's historical headquarter) and in the US (Carpentersville, Illinois).The Group operates 36 manufacturing facilities worldwide and several R&D centres, with a total workforce of approximately 3,100 employees.

Additional information on Polynt-Reichhold is available at www.polynt.com www.reichhold.com.

About Black Diamond

Black Diamond Capital Management, L.L.C. (together with its affiliates, "Black Diamond") is a leading alternative investment firm with over $8 billion in assets across four core platforms: (i) control distressed and special situations private equity funds; (ii) hedge funds; (iii) non-control stressed and distressed closed-ended funds; and (iv) collateralized loan obligations and structured products. Black Diamond has over 25 years of experience in underwriting, trading, restructuring and managing performing, stressed, distressed and private equity investments through multiple market cycles. Black Diamond is an SEC-registered Investment Adviser with over 80 employees operating from offices in Stamford, CT, London, UK and St. Thomas, VI.

Additional information on Black Diamond is available at www.bdcm.com.

This press release is for information purposes only and does not constitute any offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security in the United States or in any other jurisdiction.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210701005971/en/

Contacts:

Black Diamond Investor Relations

Office: +1 (203) 552-0888

Email: investorrelations@bdcm.com
Regulatory News:

Advicenne (Euronext: ADVIC), a specialty pharmaceutical company dedicated to developing and commercializing innovative treatments for those suffering from rare renal diseases, is pleased to announce that the Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has today granted marketing authorisation for Sibnayal (ADV7103) in the UK, for the treatment of distal renal tubular acidosis (dRTA).

With this authorization, and following the recent approval by the European Commission to market Sibnayal for the treatment of dRTA in the European Union, Advicenne is now able to bring to market in the EU and the UK the first and only label-approved drug for the treatment of dRTA in adults, adolescents and children aged one year and older. Advicenne now has the opportunity to make a significant difference to patients suffering from dRTA, classified as an orphan condition in Europe.

Didier Laurens, Chief Executive Officer of Advicenne said: "We welcome the approval by the MHRA of Sibnayal which enables us to provide a much needed treatment to patients in the United Kingdon affected by dRTA. With this approval, and following the marketing authorization by the European Commission earlier this year, we are now able to make a difference to the lives of the thousands of people affected by this rare disease. Our first priority is now to finalize a distribution agreement for Sibnayal in Europe."

Sibnayal is a multi-particulate formulation in 2mm granules, a novel pioneering delivery technology created by Advicenne that contains two active pharmaceutical ingredients. This approach not only has led to an excellent effectiveness in controlling metabolic acidosis, but also to ease the administration and aid compliance and quality of life in patients of all ages.

About dRTA

Distal renal tubular acidosis (dRTA) is an orphan disease characterized by a failure in the renal excretion of acids generated through metabolism and for which there is no approved treatment. The excess of acids thus accumulated in the blood leads to an imbalance in pH (acidosis) as well as multiple other complications such as growth retardation and rickets (a disease affecting bone development) in children, and a series of metabolic disorders such as low potassium levels, elevated calcium in the urine resulting in kidney stones, the formation of calcium deposits in the kidneys (calcinosis) as well as possible kidney failure.

Whether genetic or acquired as a consequence of an immune disease, dRTA affects an estimated 30,000 patients in Europe and approximately 20,000 in the United States.

About Advicenne

Advicenne (Euronext: ADVIC) is a pharmaceutical company founded in 2007, specializing in the development of innovative treatments in Nephrology. Its lead drug candidate is currently in late-stage clinical trials for two kidney diseases: distal renal tubular acidosis and cystinuria. ADV7103 has just received a positive CHMP opinion for the treatment of dRTA. Headquartered in Paris, Advicenne has been listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange since 2017 and was cross-listed on the Euronext Brussels stock exchange in 2019.

For additional information see: https://advicenne.com/

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements relating to the business of Advicenne, which shall not be considered per se as historical facts. Such statements include projections and estimates, and the hypotheses on which these are based, as well as observations relating to operations, ongoing projects, objectives, the development of products and their future performance, and expectations regarding financial results.

In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as "could," "should," "may," "expects," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "aims," "targets" or similar words. Although the management of Advicenne believes that these forward-looking statements are reasonably made, investors should be aware that they are subject to a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. In particular, the expectations of Advicenne could be affected by, among other things, uncertainties involved in the placing on the market and commercialization of Advicenne products or any other risks and uncertainties developed or identified in any public documents filed by Advicenne with the French Financial Markets Authority (Autorite des marches financiers (AMF)), including those listed in Chapter 4, "Risk Factors," of its universal registration document, filed with the latter on December 22, 2020. Notwithstanding the compliance with article 223-1 of the General Regulation of the AMF (the information disclosed must be "accurate, precise and fairly presented"), Advicenne disclaims any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210701005917/en/

Contacts:

Advicenne

David Solomon, Chairman

Didier Laurens, CEO

+33 (0)4 66 05 54 20

Email: investors@advicenne.com

Consilium Strategic Communications

Mary-Jane Elliott, Ashley Tapp, Davide Salvi

+44 (0)20 3709 5700

Email: advicenne@consilium-comms.com

Ulysse Communication

Media relations

Bruno Arabian

+33 (0)6 87 88 47 26

Email: advicenne@ulysse-communication.com
Regulatory News:

TheraVet (ISIN: BE0974387194 ticker: ALVET), a biotechnology company specialising in osteoarticular treatments for animals, today announces a new use of BIOCERA-VET in a multidisciplinary approach to the treatment of osteosarcoma in dogs.

In addition to its ongoing clinical trial in appendicular osteosarcoma as a palliative alternative to limb amputation in dogs, TheraVet is currently evaluating the use of BIOCERA-VET as part of a comprehensive, multidisciplinary and curative approach to the treatment of osteosarcoma in dogs. This innovative treatment consists of a combination of tumour removal, reinforcement of the affected bone by cementoplasty and treatment of the cancer by immunochemical therapy, thus avoiding amputation.

In this context, TheraVet participated in the treatment of Flash, a 10 year old Rottweiler cross with a stage 1 osteosarcoma of the distal radius1, by a multidisciplinary team from the Occitanie veterinary clinic and the National Veterinary School of Toulouse, supervised by Dr. Vet David Sayag, European specialist in pet oncology (ONCOnseil -Unite d'expertise en oncologie, Toulouse, France). In order to preserve his quality of life and avoid amputation, Flash's bone tumour was destroyed by image-guided microwave ablation followed by consolidation of the affected bone by cementoplasty using the BIOCERA-VET product according to a procedure developed by Olivier Gauthier, Professor of Small Animal Surgery and Veterinary Dentistry at the National Veterinary School Oniris (Nantes, France). Thanks to the care of the veterinarians and the properties of BIOCERA-VET, Flash was walking normally the day after his operation and had an excellent quality of life two weeks after the operation.

The patient is now undergoing immuno-chemotherapy with no side effects. One month after the surgical treatment and the implementation of adjuvant treatments, Flash's quality of life has been maintained and he has resumed normal activity.

The management of animals with osteosarcoma through a comprehensive approach such as the one proposed by Dr Sayag is a very high potential alternative to amputation. TheraVet is proud of the use of BIOCERA-VET in this innovative treatment which marks a new milestone in veterinary oncology.

"When planning microwave ablation of a bone tumour, the risk of pathological fracture is greatly increased. In order to minimise this risk, image-guided sequential cementoplasty is a standard in interventional radiology. Bone healing with the BIOCERA-VET has been an asset in the consolidation and improvement of Flash's quality of life, and we now hope to strengthen our multimodal management of osteosarcoma with this new approach," comments Dr David Sayag

About TheraVet SA

TheraVet is a veterinary biotechnology company specialising in osteoarticular treatments for animals. The Company develops targeted, safe and effective treatments to improve the quality of life of pets suffering from osteoarticular diseases. For pet owners, the health of their pets is a major concern and TheraVet's mission is to address the need for innovative and curative treatments. TheraVet works closely with international opinion leaders in order to provide a more effective response to ever-growing needs in the field of veterinary medicine. TheraVet is listed on Euronext Growth Paris et Brussels, its head office is in Jumet, Belgium, and it has a subsidiary in the US.

For more information, visit www.thera.vet

1 According to the WHO classification

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210701005842/en/

Contacts:

TheraVet

Sabrina Ena

Chief Operating Officer

sabrina.ena@thera.vet

Tel: +32 (0) 71 18 32 49

Julie Winand

Chief Corporate Officer

julie.winand@thera.vet

Tel: +32 (0) 71 18 32 49

NewCap

Investor Relations and Financial Communications

Louis Tilquin Olivier Bricaud

theravet@newcap.eu

Tel: +33 (0)1 44 71 94 94

Press Relations

Arthur Rouille Ambre Delval

theravet@newcap.eu

Tel: +33 (0)1 44 71 00 15
LONDON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- During an exclusive interview with Sky News, Dominica's Director of Tourism, Colin Piper, spoke on the UK's recent decision to add the island to the travel green list. The update allows British visitors to travel to the island without the need to quarantine on their return. Piper highlighted that Dominica's safe processes and protocols are why the island has reported such low cases. Since the onset of the pandemic, the Caribbean nation has recorded zero deaths due to the government's efficient management of the virus.

Dominica opened its borders last summer to international visitors and implemented programmes and initiatives to ensure that both citizens and travellers are kept safe whilst still encouraging tourism. This includes the "Safe in Nature" campaign, which provides a managed tourism experience committed to following strict guidelines that protect visitors.

Piper noted that the tourism sector makes up a significant portion of Dominica's economy: "It is definitely one of the productive sectors, and we consider it the engine of growth because of the foreign exchange that it brings in and the trickle-down impact that it has within the economy so that the ordinary man can continue to earn a livelihood," Piper said. The director also highlighted the country's future plans for tourism, including building infrastructure, hotels, and an international airport.

Known as the 'Nature Isle of the Caribbean', those who travel to Dominica can experience a wide array of unique experiences which champion the natural environment. From the world's second-largest boiling lake to a river for each day of the year and several national parks, Dominica differs vastly from the typical sun, sea and sand Caribbean holiday.

"Dominica is quickly becoming a popular destination for eco-conscious travellers, particularly those that may want to have a luxury experience but not at the cost of the environment. In recent years, we've welcomed internationally renowned hoteliers to Dominica such as Marriott, Hilton and Kempinski to build eco-friendly resorts on the island. We advocate for sustainability in all our operations because the environment is our number one priority," the Minister of Tourism, Denise Charles, told CS Global Partners.

Visitors who want to make their stay in Dominica more permanent can do so through its popular Citizenship by Investment (CBI) Programme. Established in 1993, the programme has invited foreign investors and their families to become citizens of the nation once making an economic contribution to either a government fund or through pre-approved real estate options. After making the qualifying investment and undergoing the necessary security checks, applicants gain receipt of citizenship along with a multitude of benefits. These include increased travel freedom to over 140 countries and territories, the right to live, work and study in the nation, and most importantly, lifelong citizenship with the ability to pass down for generations to come.

+447867942505, pr@csglobalpartners.com, www.csglobalpartners.com
DUBLIN, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Proof of Trust & Assurance, the world's first globally patented smart contract validation and automated dispute resolution platform, today announces the appointment of Johan van den Arend Schmidt as Chief Technical Architect and the sixth member of The Proof of Trust's Advisory Board.

Van den Arend Schmidt joins The Proof of Trust from IBM where he created and led the European Blockchain Innovation Unit. He has extensive international technology and digital transformation experience including as CEO of CapGemini Consulting, as Partner at PwC, and from his 11 years at The Boston Consulting Group. He was also an executive committee member of a FTSE 100 company.

Van den Arend Schmidt will be integral in supporting The Proof of Trust as it continues to commercialise its ground-breaking, patented protocol, which is designed to change the way business is conducted and provide relief to dispute resolution centres around the world.

Johan van den Arend Schmidt, said: "The Proof of Trust is a company that I believe will truly change the world. It brings reality and trust to digital transactions. No company previously had the vision to think through where you go in a digital world when things go wrong, but The Proof of Trust did. I am keen to support a company that is going to change how businesses and governments operate. The Proof of Trust provides a solution that is the quantum leap we need to bring mature services into the digital age."

Damien O'Brien, Executive Chairman and co-founder at The Proof of Trust, said: "Johan has extensive experience of building, managing and growing technology businesses as well as expertise in helping lead a successful listed business. This will be invaluable to us as we continue to develop commercial partnerships across the globe and deliver our innovative IBM backed protocol. We have worked with Johan for several years and are delighted to have him directly involved in our future success."

The formation of the Advisory Board was announced in May 2021, which included the appointment of Lord Hill of Oareford, who led the UK Listings Review and the appointment of former European Commissioner for Trade, Phil Hogan. The Company continues to roll out its ground-breaking protocol through partnerships with governments and major corporate institutions across the globe.

For further information, visit www.theproofoftrust.com or contact info@theproofoftrust.com
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.
Tokyo and London, July 2, 2021 - (JCN Newswire) - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced that Northgate Public Services (NPS) has a new name and will now be known as NEC Software Solutions UK Limited.Since being acquired by the NEC Group in 2018, NEC Software Solutions' customers have benefited from the parent company's expertise in cutting edge developments such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition. Furthermore, almost -100 million has been invested in developing NEC Software Solutions' products and services to help its customers meet the challenges they face in the years ahead.Under the global NEC brand, NEC Software Solutions will continue to reinforce its standing as innovators in the development of technology for health, housing, police and local government across the UK and internationally.Tina Whitley, CEO of NEC Software Solutions, said: "With our new name, we have become closer to an organisation that has a long history of bringing pioneering technology from concept to reality. The NEC Group has already invested more than EUR50 million in our product development and EUR47 million on acquisitions, both of which have strengthened our presence in the markets we serve."We wanted a legacy for this important time in our business so we are creating five new apprenticeships in addition to our annual investment to give more young people the opportunity to work at the centre of a business that is pushing the boundaries of technology across the world. As NEC Software Solutions, we can take our place on the global stage and will drive further innovation."NEC Software Solutions will continue to build on the successes it has achieved in the last three years. This includes its innovative work in health, such as The Spinal Improvement Partnership which brings together the clinical excellence of The Walton Centre NHS Improvement Trust with the data collection and reporting expertise of NEC Software Solutions to deliver detailed insight on the long-term effectiveness of spinal surgeries and implants. More recently, the acquisition of Vantage Health paves the way for healthcare providers to be able to use the latest technology to reduce patient waiting times and cope with increased demand. And in 2021, the company is celebrating 10 years of screening babies to check for hearing loss in Ireland.In housing, a partnership with Colchester Borough Council and Colchester Borough Homes saw NEC Software Solutions' housing management system, NEC Housing, go live in just over 11 months, despite the project being managed remotely due to the pandemic.In policing, the company's core policing platform Connect provides the backbone of Athena, one of the largest-ever joint police information sharing projects. The contract was recently extended by the nine forces involved until the year 2029.And in local government, switching to NEC Revenues & Benefits solutions is enabling Buckinghamshire Council to consolidate its IT systems, freeing staff from routine tasks and enabling the council to better serve the community."In this new and important chapter in our company's history, we have the expertise of a world leading technology innovator supporting us as we continue to enhance our products and services for the future. We look forward with great anticipation to our ongoing success," said Tina Whitley, CEO of NEC Software Solutions.Naoki Yoshida, senior vice president at NEC Corporation, said: "We regard NEC Software Solutions as an integral part of our global business. We are proud of the company's success and excited for the future as we continue to work with the team to drive innovation across the sector under the new company name."NEC Software Solutions will remain a separate limited company and will continue to operate from its offices in the UK, India, Australia and Canada.Legal name changesThe following changes of company name will take place.- Northgate Public Services (UK) Limited will be re-named NEC Software Solutions UK Limited- Northgate Public Services (Canada) Limited will be re-named NEC Software Solutions Canada Limited- Northgate Public Services Pty Limited will be re-named NEC Software Solutions ANZ Pty Limited- Rave Technologies (India) Pvt Limited will be re-named NEC Software Solutions India Private Limited- APD Communications and i2n will be renamed NEC Software Solutions UK Limited- NEC Software Solutions is a wholly owned NEC Corporation subsidiary.About Northgate Public ServicesNorthgate Public Services (NPS) has a proven history of developing game changing software for the public sector. Our ability to put vital information into the hands of those that need it is the reason why more than 50% of local authorities use us to collect revenues and administer benefits. It's why 16 different police forces, comprising more than 60% of the UK's police officers, have chosen NPS' CONNECT software to improve decision making at the frontline, why over 150 housing providers use NPS systems to manage their two million homes efficiently and why the NHS choose our technology to help them screen ten million babies for hearing loss. Based in the UK and working around the world, NPS' 2,300 employees help improve the services that matter most. NPS is part of the NEC Corporation ("NEC", TSE: 6701), a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people worldwide. For more information, visit necsws.com.About NEC CorporationNEC Corporation has established itself as a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies while promoting the brand statement of "Orchestrating a brighter world." NEC enables businesses and communities to adapt to rapid changes taking place in both society and the market as it provides for the social values of safety, security, fairness and efficiency to promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. For more information, visit NEC at https://www.nec.com.Source: NEC CorporationCopyright 2021 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.


CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - The U.S. dollar was higher against its major counterparts in the Asian session on Friday, as investors look forward to U.S. nonfarm payrolls data due later in the day for more clues on the Fed's QE tapering and a rate hike move.



The jobs report is forecast to show an increase of 690,000 jobs in June from 559,000 jobs in May. The jobless rate is expected to fall to 5.7 percent from 5.8 percent in the previous month.



The International Monetary Fund raised U.S. growth forecasts for this year and next due to receding COVID-19 cases and the unprecedented fiscal and monetary support.



The agency said that the Federal Reserve would likely need to start scaling back the asset purchase program in the first half of 2022 and raise policy rates in late-2022 or early-2023.



Overnight data showing a drop in jobless claims and a continued expansion in the manufacturing activity indicated that economic recovery is gathering pace.



In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Patrick Harker said on Thursday that he favours slowing down the pace of its asset purchase program later this year.



The greenback climbed to 111.66 against the yen, its strongest level since March 2020, and held steady thereafter. If the greenback rises further, 113 is possibly seen as its next resistance level.



The greenback rose to 0.9265 against the franc from Thursday's close of 0.9253. The greenback is likely to find resistance around the 0.94 area.



The greenback hit nearly a 3-month high of 1.1835 against the euro, up from yesterday's close of 1.1848. The greenback is seen finding resistance around the 1.16 area.



The greenback edged up to 1.2445 against the loonie and a session's high of 1.3752 against the pound, compared to yesterday's closing values of 1.2429 and 1.3757, respectively. The next possible resistance for the greenback is seen around 1.26 against the loonie and 1.34 against the pound.



The greenback spiked higher to 0.7456 per aussie, a level not seen so far this year. The greenback is poised to find resistance around the 0.72 mark.



The greenback touched 0.6957 against the kiwi, setting an 11-day high. The greenback may locate resistance around the 0.68 level.



Looking ahead, Eurozone PPI for May is due in the European session.



U.S. jobs data for June, U.S. and Canadian trade data, Canada building permits and U.S. factory orders, all for May, will be released in the New York session.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
Images highlight important role of tech in connecting the players to the fans during 2021 Tour, the most connected yet

LONDON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Vodafone, Lead Partner of the British and Irish Lions Tour to South Africa, has released powerful images of ambassadors, Maro Itoje and first-time Lions Hamish Watson and Louis Rees-Zammit, ahead of the first match of the Tour against the Emirates Lions in South Africa tomorrow, Saturday 3rd July.

The images see emotive and personal social media messages of support from Lions fans projected onto each of the star rugby players who have all been named in tomorrow's starting line-up.

Vodafone and the British and Irish Lions are brands united by a shared commitment to connect people to each other and the things they love. The new imagery is a powerful demonstration of how Vodafone is bringing fans closer to the 2021 Tour and the squad than ever before through its digital-first campaign.

The messages of encouragement from fans have been released to help to motivate players - letting them know that the four nations are behind them on Tour, despite fans being unable to travel to South Africa this Summer. The imagery shows how the power of the connectivity can bring players and fans together, which is more important than ever with no travelling fans.

Max Taylor, Consumer Director at Vodafone UK, said: "We are excited to be able to give Lions fans and players an opportunity to unite and connect ahead of the upcoming Tour. This is more important now than it has ever been. We hope these messages will show the players that even though British & Irish Lions fans can't be there, they're still very much cheering them on".

Maro Itoje said: "Fans are such an important part of any sport and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, reason why most of us play. With no fans there is an evident missing piece. It's incredible seeing how much support we have as a team and it is a huge boost for the whole squad."

Hamish Watson said: "Being able to receive these incredible fan messages has been a great boost. It has spurred me and the team on even more to do them proud. We love to the see the messages so please keep the support coming while we are on tour."



Louis Rees-Zammit said: "It's been a tough year not being able to connect with fans physically. So, we are grateful for the power of technology and social media that has allowed us to stay connected and motivate us for this upcoming tour. This is my first Lions Tour and the support so far has been overwhelming."

Maro Itoje, Hamish Watson and Louis Rees-Zammit are official Vodafone ambassadors for the 2021 British & Irish Lions Tour. Download the official Lions app, powered by Vodafone.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556339/Maro_Itoje.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556337/Hamish_Watsonur.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556338/Louis_Rees_Zammit.jpg
Janus Henderson Group plc (NYSE/ASX: JHG) will announce its second quarter 2021 results on Thursday 29 July 2021 at 4am EDT, 9am BST, 6pm AEST. A conference call and webcast to discuss the results will be held at 8am EDT, 1pm BST, 10pm AEST.

Those wishing to participate in the conference call should call the applicable number below and reference the Janus Henderson Results Briefing (Conference ID: 10157508):

From: United Kingdom 0800 279 9489 (toll free) United States 866 270 1533 (toll free) Australia 1 800 121 301 (toll free) All other countries +1 412 317 0797 (this is not toll free)

In order to eliminate wait times, conference call participants may pre-register at https://dpregister.com/sreg/10157508/e9730f729c. After registering, a confirmation will be sent via email and will include dial-in details and a unique PIN code for direct entry to the call.

Access to the live webcast and accompanying slides will be available via the investor relations section of Janus Henderson's website (ir.janushenderson.com). A webcast replay will be available for a period of at least two weeks following the call.

About Janus Henderson

Janus Henderson Group is a leading global active asset manager dedicated to helping investors achieve long-term financial goals through a broad range of investment solutions, including equities, fixed income, quantitative equities, multi-asset and alternative asset class strategies.

At 31 March 2021, Janus Henderson had approximately US$405 billion in assets under management, more than 2,000 employees, and offices in 25 cities worldwide. Headquartered in London, the company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005010/en/

Contacts:

Investor enquiries:

Jim Kurtz

Co-Head Investor Relations (US)

+1 (303) 336 4529

jim.kurtz@janushenderson.com



Melanie Horton

Co-Head Investor Relations (Non-US)

+44 (0) 20 7818 2905

melanie.horton@janushenderson.com



Press enquiries:

Stephen Sobey

Head of Media Relations

+44 (0) 20 7818 2523

stephen.sobey@janushenderson.com
NANJING, China, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Suning.com ("the Company"; 002024.SZ), China's leading smart retail service provider and a Fortune Global 500 company owned by Suning Group, has successfully boosted the sales of high-quality agricultural products and brought a change to local agricultural brands with its industry-leading strengths in supply chain, logistics and retail sales, as the Company wrapped up its 618 shopping festival campaign.

During the 618 promotion, one of the largest of the year, Suning.com has made agricultural products one of the key focuses, in addition to cosmetics, home appliances and other consumer-electronic items.

Specifically, Suning.com has made efforts in promoting Wuchang rice under the Sutian brand name, as part of the Company's tailored marketing strategy to boost and support agricultural products from rural areas. During the promotion, Sutian's rice sold about 40 tons a day, reflecting Suning.com's ongoing efforts to brand and promote these types of agricultural products.

The Sutian brand marks another successful attempt for Suning.com in helping agricultural brands to jump on the e-commerce bandwagon. Since 2019, Suning.com has actively identified quality agricultural products in a bid to help local farmers directly bring their products to more consumers across the country and in turn help consumers receive products directly from the source. Such a farm-to-table approach has been well received and recognized by both farmers and consumers alike, as it reduces costs for farmers and offers cheaper prices for consumers.

China's Wuchang rice has been dubbed one of the best rice products in China with its annual production reaching about 500,000 tons. However, there has been knock-off Wuchang rice available on the market that uses Wuchang branding. Suning.com has joined forces with Wuchang Shanxiang Rice, a local rice farming company, to rebrand the local company's old "Gu Uncle" brand and re-branded its Wuchang rice under the brand name of Sutian, so that consumers would no longer need to worry about counterfeits.

To ensure the best quality of Sutian rice, Suning.com fully participates in the operations of the product, including research, farming, packaging, marketing and sales on all the Company's online and offline marketplaces. Suning.com even promoted the product through livestreaming sales.

Zhang Kui, president of Suning Social E-Commerce, said that the Sutian rice brand is a perfect example that showcases Suning.com's goal of boosting the local agriculture industry, creating a more enhanced ecosystem and facilitating an industry upgrade.

A manager in charge of Wuchang Shanxiang Rice said that "we have not only obtained the brand endorsement with Suning's support, but also optimized our operations to serve customers, which has led to a significant rise in sales volume and repurchases."

On June 1 alone, such Sutian rice sold 40 tons. To date, Sutian rice, supported by Suning, has a total farming area of over 300,000 mu (about 49400 acres), which can produce about 120,000 tons of rice. Since last December when Sutian rice was put onto the Suning marketplace, it has sold about 5 million kilograms.

About Suning Group

Founded in 1990, Suning Group has two listed subsidiaries at home and abroad and more than 300,000 employees around the world, ranking third in the Chinese private sector. Being committed to its mission of Leading the Industrial Advancements in Creating a Higher Quality of Life for All, it provides quality products and services to more than 700 million customers worldwide and its business scope covers three main sectors: Retail, Real Estate, and Financial Service. Suning.com, the main subsidiary is a leading O2O smart retail service provider in China. In 2020, Suning.com maintained its position among the Fortune Global 500 and topped the 2020 List of China's 500 Most Valuable Brands with a brand value of RMB 296.815 billion.
BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - At 5.00 am ET Friday, Eurostat releases euro area producer price data for May. Producer prices are forecast to climb 9.5 percent on a yearly basis, faster than the 7.6 percent increase seen in April. Ahead of the data, the euro weakened against its major rivals. The euro was worth 131.83 against the yen, 1.0956 against the franc, 0.8600 against the pound and 1.1829 against the greenback as of 4:55 am ET. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / Gabriel Resources Ltd. (TSXV trading symbol GBU - "Gabriel" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the repayment of the outstanding $90,862,000 convertible unsecured notes ("Notes"), including accrued interest, following maturity on June 30, 2021, and to provide an update on securities currently in issue.

Convertible Note Repayment

As previously announced, the Company has exercised its option ("Common Share Repayment Right") to repay all of the principal amount of Notes outstanding by issuing common shares ("Common Shares") of the Company to holders of the Notes ("Noteholders"). In aggregate, approximately 313.6m Common Shares have been issued pursuant to the Common Share Repayment Right, calculated on the basis of the 'Current Market Price' of $0.28975, being the price equal to 95% of the volume weighted average trading price of a Common Share over a 20 trading day period to June 23, 2021 ("Note Repayment Price").

The Notes were convertible at the option of the Noteholders into Common Shares at a price of $0.3105 per share ("Conversion Price"). As the Note Repayment Price is lower than the Conversion Price, approximately 21m more Common Shares have been issued than would have been the case upon conversion by Noteholders at the Conversion Price.

The repayment of the Notes through exercise of the Common Share Repayment Right is subject to the final approval of the TSX Venture Exchange ("Exchange"). The Common Shares have been issued as repayment of the Notes in reliance on applicable prospectus and registration exemptions and will (subject to compliance with applicable securities laws) be freely tradeable on the Exchange and not subject to any statutory hold period following issuance.

Expiry of Warrants

Further to private placements of the Company completed in 2014 and 2016, 111,536,250 Common Share purchase warrants ("Warrants") were issued, each such Warrant entitling the holder to acquire one Common Share at an exercise price of $0.46, at any time prior to June 30, 2021.

As previously disclosed, in June 2020 7,668,430 Warrants were exercised. No Warrants have been exercised prior to or since that date and all 103,867,820 remaining Warrants have therefore expired.

Securities in Issue

As a result of the issue of Common Shares in repayment of the Notes, and expiry of the Warrants, the Company has the following securities in issue:

967,540,188 Common Shares;

11,792,086 Common Share purchase warrants which are exercisable at a price of $0.39 at any time prior to December 18, 2023;

80,702,475 Common Share purchase warrants which are exercisable at a price of $0.49 at any time prior to December 21, 2023;

871,400 Common Share purchase warrants which are exercisable at a price of $0.39 at any time prior to December 23, 2023;

25,723,372 Common Share purchase warrants which are exercisable at a price of $0.49 at any time prior to January 15, 2024;

76,504,263 Common Share purchase warrants which are exercisable at a price of $0.645 at any time prior to August 23, 2024;

5,225,970 Common Share purchase warrants which are exercisable at a price of $0.645 at any time prior to September 13, 2024; and

95,625 arbitration value rights (" AVRs "), comprising: 55,000 AVRs entitling the holders to a pro rata share of 7.5% of any proceeds arising from any monies received by the Company and/or any of its affiliates pursuant to any settlement or arbitral awards irrevocably made in its favour in relation to the ICSID Arbitration (" ICSID Award "), subject to a maximum aggregate entitlement of $175 million among all holders of such AVRs; and 40,625 AVRs entitling the holders to a pro rata share of 5.54% of any proceeds arising from any ICSID Award, subject to a maximum aggregate entitlement of $129.3 million among all holders of such AVRs.

"), comprising:

The securities described herein have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and accordingly may not be offered or sold within the United States or to "U.S. persons", as such term is defined in Regulation S promulgated under the U.S. Securities Act ("U.S. Persons"), except in compliance with the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities requirements or pursuant to exemptions therefrom. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the Company's securities to, or for the account of benefit of, persons in the United States or U.S. Persons.

Insiders of the Company

Based on the exercise of the Common Share Repayment Right, recent issues of Common Shares in fundraising by Gabriel, publicly-disclosed information and/or information furnished by shareholders, no person or company beneficially owns, or controls or directs, directly or indirectly, voting securities of the Company carrying 10% or more of the voting rights attached to any class of voting securities of the Company, other than as set out below:

Number of % of Outstanding Name and Address Shares Shares(1) Electrum(2) 127,917,939 13.2% 535 Madison Avenue, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10022 Tenor Capital Management, LLC(3) 163,346,869 16.9% 810 7th Avenue, Suite 1905 New York, NY 10019 Kopernik Global Investors, LLC 165,194,833 17.1% Two Harbour Place, 302 Knights Run Avenue, Suite 1225 Tampa, Florida 33602 The Baupost Group, LLC (4) 104,306,371 10.8% 10 St. James Avenue, Suite 1700, Boston, MA 02116 Paulson & Co. Inc. (5) 97,646,625 10.1% 1133 Avenue of the Americas, Floor 33 New York, NY, 10036

Notes:

Percentage is based on 967,540,188 Common Shares issued and outstanding. The number of Common Shares indicated includes (i) 123,917,939 Common Shares owned by Electrum Global Holdings L.P. ("EGH") and (ii) 4,000,000 Common Shares owned by GRAT Holdings LLC. EGH is the owner of, and has control over, Leopard Holdings LLC, which, in turn, has direct and/or indirect control over TEG Global GP Ltd., the sole general partner of EGH, and The Electrum Group LLC ("TEG Services"), the investment adviser to EGH. TEG Services possesses voting and investment discretion with respect to the securities held by EGH. The number of Common Shares indicated includes (i) 155,668,366 Common Shares owned by Enescu Investments Inc. ("Enescu") and (ii) 7,678,503 Common Shares owned by Tenor Opportunity Associates LLC ("TOA"). Tenor Capital Management, LLC, has direct and/or indirect control over, or voting and investment discretion with respect to, the securities held by Enescu and TOA. The Baupost Group, L.L.C. ("Baupost") is an investment adviser registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The Common Shares referenced above reflect Common Shares purchased on behalf of various investment limited partnerships managed by Baupost. Paulson & Co Inc. ("Paulson") became an insider on the repayment of the Notes. The press release dated May 27, 2021 announcing the private placement described therein and related material change report noted that 19,768,194 Common Shares were subscribed for by insiders and incorrectly included in such figure shares subscribed for by Paulson, which was not an insider at that time.

For information on this press release, please contact:

Dragos Tanase

President & CEO

Phone: +40 730 399 019

dt@gabrielresources.com Richard Brown

Chief Financial Officer

Mobile: +44 7748 760276

richard.brown@gabrielresources.com

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Further Information

About Gabriel

Gabriel is a Canadian resource company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. The Company's principal focus has been the exploration and development of the Ro?ia Montana gold and silver project in Romania. The Rosia Montana Project, one of the largest undeveloped gold deposits in Europe, is situated in the South Apuseni Mountains of Transylvania, Romania, an historic and prolific mining district that since pre-Roman times has been mined intermittently for over 2,000 years. The exploitation license for the Rosia Montana Project is held by Ro?ia Montana Gold Corporation S.A., a Romanian company in which Gabriel owns an 80.69% equity interest, with the 19.31% balance held by Minvest Ro?ia Montana S.A., a Romanian state-owned mining company.

Upon obtaining the License in June 1999, the Group focused substantially all of their management and financial resources on the exploration, feasibility and subsequent development of the Rosia Montana Project. Despite the Company's fulfilment of its legal obligations and its development of the Rosia Montana Project as a high-quality, sustainable and environmentally-responsible mining project, using best available techniques, Romania has blocked and prevented implementation of the Rosia Montana Project without due process and without compensation. Accordingly, the Company's current core focus is the ICSID Arbitration. For more information please visit the Company's website at www.gabrielresources.com.

Forward-looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking information" (also referred to as "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements are provided for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans and allowing investors and others to get a better understanding of the Company's operating environment. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements.

In this press release, forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Company at this time, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies that may cause the Company's actual financial results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied herein. Some of the material factors or assumptions used to develop forward-looking statements include, without limitation, the uncertainties associated with: the ICSID Arbitration, actions by the Romanian Government, conditions or events impacting the Company's ability to fund its operations (including but not limited to the completion of further funding noted above) or service its debt, exploration, development and operation of mining properties and the overall impact of misjudgments made in good faith in the course of preparing forward-looking information.

Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors including those set out below, that may never materialize, prove incorrect or materialize other than as currently contemplated which could cause the Company's results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Any statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, identified by words or phrases such as "expects", "is expected", "is of the view", "anticipates", "believes", "plans", "projects", "estimates", "assumes", "intends", "strategy", "goals", "objectives", "potential", "possible" or variations thereof or stating that certain actions, events, conditions or results "may", "could", "would", "should", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved, or the negative of any of these terms and similar expressions) are not statements of fact and may be forward-looking statements.

Numerous factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements, including without limitation:

the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) may affect the Company's operations and/or the anticipated timeline for the ICSID Arbitration;

the duration, required disclosure, costs, process and outcome of the ICSID Arbitration;

the advancement of Romania's nomination of the "Rosia Montana Mining Landscape" as a UNESCO World Heritage site;

changes in the liquidity and capital resources of Gabriel, and/or the group of companies of which it is directly or indirectly parent;

access to funding to support the Group's continued ICSID Arbitration and/or operating activities in the future;

equity dilution resulting from the conversion or exercise of new or existing securities in part or in whole to Common Shares;

the ability of the Company to maintain a continued listing on the TSX Venture Exchange or any regulated public market for trading securities;

the impact on business strategy and its implementation in Romania of: any allegations of historic acts of corruption, uncertain fiscal investigations; uncertain legal enforcement both for and against the Group and political and social instability;

regulatory, political and economic risks associated with operating in a foreign jurisdiction including changes in laws, governments and legal regimes and interpretation of existing and future fiscal and other legislation;

volatility of currency exchange rates; and

the availability and continued participation in operational or other matters pertaining to the Group of certain key employees and consultants.

This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect any of the Company's forward-looking statements.

Investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and investors should not infer that there has been no change in the Company's affairs since the date of this press release that would warrant any modification of any forward-looking statement made in this document, other documents periodically filed with or furnished to the relevant securities regulators or documents presented on the Company's website. All subsequent written and oral forward-looking statements attributable to the Company or persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by this notice. The Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly or otherwise revise any forward-looking statements or the foregoing list of assumptions or factors, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, subject to the Company's disclosure obligations under applicable Canadian securities regulations. Investors are urged to read the Company's filings with Canadian securities regulatory agencies which can be viewed online at www.sedar.com.

ENDS

SOURCE: Gabriel Resources Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/654025/Gabriel-Resources-Ltd-Repayment-of-Convertible-Notes-Update-on-Securities-in-Issue
Following on the heels of its $22 million Series A funding, the digital asset custodian announces a new Managing Director as Chief Compliance Officer, a Chief Technology Officer, and a Chief Security Officer

Finoa (https://www.finoa.io), one of Europe's leading digital asset custodians, announced today that it is adding three new executives to its management team. Following its recent $22 million Series A investment round, the company is entering its next phase of growth and adding senior talents with vast experience in the financial industry to scale the organization for its next chapter.

Finoa offers simple, secure, and regulated access to crypto for institutional investors. The company provides access to a variety of digital assets and tokens and also to novel financial products and services. Finoa has built its own interface and platform to make it easier for institutional investors to access and manage digital assets. It holds a preliminary crypto custody license (64y KWG) from the German Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin and is on the path to become a fully regulated crypto custodian in Germany, a prerequisite for many institutional clients.

To further drive this regulatory path, Michael Heinks -- who has extensive experience in the field of regulations in the financial sector -- is being brought on as Finoa's Chief Compliance Officer (CCO). He has served on the board of several banks -- including biw AG and flatex Bank AG -- and has worked for many years with AXA/AXA Bank. Heinks will help Finoa develop a sustainable compliance risk strategy, particularly with regard to preparing the organization for further regulatory licensing. Heinks will also serve as Finoa's third Managing Director, subject to BaFin approval.

Henrik Jondell will be Finoa's new Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and will lead tech strategy, tech architecture, and associated organization and processes. Jondell brings an impressive background of more than 30 years in building large and small tech organizations and will spearhead efforts to scale up Finoa's tech operations as the company grows. He will also coordinate the teams and processes necessary for Finoa to grow successfully. Jondell recently served as CTO at Penta, where he tripled the size of the tech team. Prior to that, he served as Vice President IT for Arvato Financial Solutions.

Chris Sutherland joins Finoa as Chief Security Officer (CSO), a new internal position responsible for security architecture, risk assessment and mitigation, and cyber and physical security. Sutherland brings a vast experience in security. He has a PhD in cryptography relevant for cybersecurity, with 20+ years of experience in the cyber industry. Sutherland also brings experience in the banking sector, having worked on the security leadership team at both ING and Bank of Montreal.

"Finoa is at an exciting and pivotal point," said Henrik Gebbing, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Finoa. "We are making great strides in the crypto custodial space, and we're on the cusp of growing into the company I always knew we were meant to be."

"The experience that these three bring to the table is truly remarkable and we are proud to have been able to bring all of them on board," said Christopher May, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Finoa. "Chris's experience in the security industry, Michael's know-how on financial regulations, and Henrik's ability to help companies scale up their tech development will enable Finoa to reach new heights."

The three will be based out of Finoa's Berlin headquarters.

For more information about Finoa, visit: https://www.finoa.io/

About Finoa

Founded in 2018, Finoa is the gateway for institutional investors and corporations to interact with digital assets. Custody is at the core of what Finoa does for its customers, meaning safe and secure handling of assets. In less than two years, Finoa has emerged as one of the leading digital asset platforms in Europe with several hundreds of B2B customers. In April 2021, Finoa raised $22 million in Series A funding from Balderton Capital, Coparion, Venture Stars, Signature Ventures, and an undisclosed investor.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005118/en/

Contacts:

Finoa Media Contact

Lauren Perry

SlicedBrand for Finoa

lauren@slicedbrand.com
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / Legend Power Systems (TSXV:LPS)(OTCQB:LPSIF), a global leader in commercial electrical system solutions, today announced that it has granted stock options to acquire up to a total of 300,000 common shares to a director and an officer. The stock options are exercisable for a five-year term, expiring on July 2, 2026 at a price of $0.75 per common share. The options are subject to vesting provisions, with one-sixth vesting six months from the date of grant, and one-sixth vesting and becoming exercisable every six months thereafter. The stock options are non-transferable.

The Company also announces that it has renewed its agreement with Sophic Capital Inc. ("Sophic") to act as its Investor Relations firm. Sophic will be paid $7,000 per month for a term of 12 months and has been granted 300,000 stock options at a price of $0.75 per share. The stock options are subject to vesting provisions, with 25% vesting three months from the date of grant and 25% vesting every three months thereafter. The options are exercisable until 5:00 PM (ET) on the earlier of (i) ninety days after termination of the agreement or (ii) June 30, 2024, being the date that is three years from the date the agreement was signed by the Company. Sophic currently holds 749,500 Common Shares and 500,000 stock options in the capital of the Company.

About SmartGATE

SmartGATE is an industry-leading, turnkey solution which identifies and fixes underperformance and waste in the electrical system of a commercial building. These performance issues often impact key areas of commercial real estate metrics including occupant safety and satisfaction as well as financial performance. This waste can also lead to higher operating costs, lower net operating income and other potential financial risks to the building owner, including adverse tenant experiences.

About Legend Power Systems Inc.

Legend Power Systems Inc. (www.legendpower.com) provides an intelligent energy management platform that analyzes and improves building energy challenges, significantly impacting asset management and corporate performance. Legend's proven solutions support proactive executive decision-making in a complex and volatile business and energy environment.

For further information, please contact:

Steve Vanry, CFO

+ 1 604 671 9522

svanry@legendpower.com

Sean Peasgood, Investor Relations

+ 1 647 503 1054

sean@sophiccapital.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This Press Release may contain statements which constitute "forward-looking information", including statements regarding the plans, intentions, beliefs and current expectations of the Company, its directors, or its officers with respect to the future business activities and operating performance of the Company. The words "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect" and similar expressions, as they relate to the Company, or its management, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future business activities or performance and involve risks and uncertainties, and that the Company's future business activities may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. Such risks, uncertainties and factors are described in the periodic filings with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities, including the Company's quarterly and annual Management's Discussion & Analysis, which may be viewed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein as intended, planned, anticipated, believed, estimated or expected. Although the Company has attempted to identify important risks, uncertainties and factors which could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be others that cause results to not be as anticipated, estimated or intended. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements other than as may be required by applicable law.

SOURCE: Legend Power Systems Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653804/Legend-Power-Extends-Capital-Markets-Advisory-Contract-and-Grants-Incentive-Stock-Options
Strong Results of Mapping and Sampling Program To Guide Accelerated Exploration Plan for Smokey Lithium

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / Victory Resources Corporation (CSE:VR)(FRA:VR61)(OTC PINK:VRCFF) ("Victory" or the "Company") is excited to announce strong initial results of its previously announced extensive sampling program on its Smokey Lithium property in Esmeralda County, Nevada.

Highlights of the Smokey Lithium Mapping and Sampling Program

Sampling indicates several areas of high Li values in the claystones up to 1500 ppm Li

The southwest area of the Smokey Lithium property showed values well over 1000 ppm, Li sampling in this area revealed a highly anomalous zone approximately 1.5 km across

The central area also features elevated Li values and may be related to the high Li zone on the adjacent Jindalee Property

"These results are significant, validating Smokey Lithium and providing a focal point for Victory's exploration team, whom have been extremely active in Nevada over the last few months advancing our properties at a rapid pace," said Victory President and CEO, Mr. Mark Ireton.

Victory's exploration team completed the mapping and sampling program in June 2021 using both a Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) Analyzer* and the collection of claystone samples, to complete the planned program announced on June 15th. Claystone samples have been submitted to ALS Labs in Tucson to further validate results.

Victory's Smokey Lithium project is a clay lithium property that lies approximately 20 miles north of Clayton Valley, and 20 miles west of American Lithium's flagship lithium project. Smokey Lithium is located 25 km northwest of Noram's Zeus Li Project and 35 km southwest of American Lithium Corporation's Tonopah Lithium Claims Property in southwest Nevada. Esmeralda County Nevada is a prolific region for lithium clay deposits, (Noram, Cypress, American Lithium, Spearmint, Enertopia, Jindalee).

Scientific and technical information contained in this press release was reviewed and approved by Mr. Helgi Sigurgeirson, Victory Geologist, and a "qualified person" under NI 43-101.

* Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) is a rapid chemical analysis tool that is used to detect and characterize materials. Focusing a powerful laser pulse onto the surface of solid, liquid or even gaseous matter is analyzed to determine the elemental composition of the sample.

For further information, please contact:

Mark Ireton, President

Telephone: +1 (236) 317 2822 or TOLL FREE 1 (855) 665-GOLD (4653)

E-mail: IR@victoryresourcescorp.com

About Victory Resources Corporation

VICTORY RESOURCES CORPORATION (CSE:VR) is a publicly traded diversified investment corporation with mineral interests in North America. The company is also actively seeking other exploration opportunities.

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 Statements

Certain information set forth in this news release may contain forward-looking statements that involve substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding future financial position, business strategy, use of proceeds, corporate vision, proposed acquisitions, partnerships, joint-ventures and strategic alliances and co-operations, budgets, cost and plans and objectives of or involving the Company. Such forward-looking information reflects management's current beliefs and is based on information currently available to management. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "predicts", "intends", "targets", "aims", "anticipates" or "believes" or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases or may be identified by statements to the effect that certain actions "may", "could", "should", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. A number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors may cause the actual results or performance to materially differ from any future results or performance expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the control of the Company including, but not limited to, the impact of general economic conditions, industry conditions and dependence upon regulatory approvals. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. The Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by securities laws.

SOURCE: Victory Resources Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653982/Victory-Sampling-Program-Reveals-Highly-Anomalous-Zone-With-Readings-Up-to-1500-ppm-Li-at-Smokey-Lithium
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - July 2, 2021) - S2 Minerals Inc. (CSE: STWO) (the "Company" or "S2") announces that Carmelo Marrelli has been appointed as the Company's Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Marrelli will succeed Paul Murphy, who has retired from the position. The Board of Directors wishes to thank Mr. Murphy for his services to the Company.

Mr. Marrelli is the principal of The Marrelli Group of Companies. He is a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA, CA, CGA) and a member of the Chartered Governance Institute of Canada, a professional body that certifies corporate secretaries. He has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Toronto.

Mr. Marrelli acts as the Chief Financial Officer to various issuers listed on the TSX, TSX Venture Exchange, and CSE, as well as non-listed companies, and as a director of select issuers.

About S2 Minerals Inc.

S2 Minerals Inc. is a Canadian mineral exploration company and holds the Sandy Lake project in Ontario. The Sandy Lake project comprises approximately 167,000 acres of contiguous mineral claims in the Sandy Lake Archean Greenstone Belt, located approximately 140 miles north of Red Lake, Ontario. S2 beneficially holds a 100% interest in the mineral rights to approximately 137,000 acres, and holds a 50.1% interest in the approximately 15,000 acres of the "Weebigee Joint Venture" claims and a 50% interest in a further 15,000 acres of the Southern Block claims in joint ventures with Goldeye Explorations Limited, now part of Treasury Metals Inc.

The Company has 25,311,334 common shares outstanding on a fully diluted basis; and raised $1.2 million from the recently completed rights offering.

It is expected that over time, S2 may add new Canadian-focused exploration stage projects to its portfolio.

All scientific and technical information in this news release has been prepared under the supervision of Dan Noone (CEO of S2 Minerals Inc.), a "qualified person" within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Noone (B.Sc. Geology, MBA) is a Member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists.

For further information please contact:

Dan Noone

CEO

+1.416.628.5904

Email: info@s2minerals.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this document may include forward-looking statements. While these statements reflect management's current plans, projections and intents, by their nature, forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond the control of the Company. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on these forward-looking statements. There is no assurance the transactions noted above will be completed on the terms as contemplated, or at all. The Company's actual results, programs, activities and financial position could differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these forward-looking statements.

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 and / or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/89239
TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / Murchison Minerals Ltd. ("Murchison" or the "Company") (TSXV:MUR) is pleased to welcome Mr. Cory Belyk as a new strategic advisor to its Board of Directors.

Mr. Belyk has earned his reputation as a seasoned uranium geologist with nearly 30 years of experience involving grassroots, brownfield and advanced exploration, mining operations, project evaluation, business development, and domestic and international executive roles. His track record includes a significant uranium discovery in the Athabasca Basin area. Mr. Belyk has served on the Board of Directors of Cameco Mongolia LLC and Cameco Australia Pty Ltd when employed as Director, Exploration International and Agreements with Cameco Corporation. More recently, Mr. Belyk's focus has been on multiple stages of project evaluation and junior-exploration marketing and financing. He currently holds the position of Executive VP and CEO for CanAlaska Uranium Ltd (TSXV:CVV), a uranium, nickel, copper and diamond explorer.

President and CEO of Murchison JC Potvin commented: "We are excited to have Cory join our team and we strongly believe his understanding of the region and his well-connected business network will contribute to the success of Murchison, reinforcing our commitment to making the Company part of the Canadian green energy revolution."

Murchison also announces that it has granted Mr. Cory Belyk 200,000 options to purchase common shares of the Company exercisable at a price of $0.095 per share for a period of five years that vest immediately, in accordance with the terms of the Company's stock option plan.

About Murchison Minerals Ltd. (TSXV:MUR)

Murchison is a Canadian-based exploration company focused on the exploration and development of the 100% owned Brabant Lake zinc-copper-silver project in north-central Saskatchewan. The Company also owns 100% of the HPM nickel-copper-cobalt project in Quebec and holds an option to earn 100% interest in the Barraute VMS exploration project also located in Quebec, north of Val d'Or. Murchison currently has 108.9 million shares issued and outstanding.

Additional information about Murchison and its exploration projects can be found on the Company's website at www.murchisonminerals.com. For further information, please contact:

Jean-Charles (JC) Potvin, President and CEO

jcpotvin@murchisonminerals.com

Erik H Martin, CFO

Tel: (416) 350-3776

info@murchisonminerals.com

CHF Capital Markets

Thomas Do, IR Manager

Tel: (416) 868-1079 x 232

thomas@chfir.com

Forward-Looking Information

Certain information set forth in this news release may contain forward-looking information that involves substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties. This forward-looking information is subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the control of the Company, including, but not limited to, the impact of general economic conditions, industry conditions, and dependence upon regulatory approvals. 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 information. The parties undertake no obligation to update forward-looking information except as otherwise may be required by applicable securities law.

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.

SOURCE: Murchison Minerals Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/654009/Murchison-Minerals-Announces-the-Appointment-of-Cory-Belyk-as-a-New-Strategic-Advisor-to-the-Board
Calgary, Alberta--(Newsfile Corp. - July 2, 2021) - Lifestyle Global Brands Limited (TSXV: GBE) ("Lifestyle Global" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that that it has entered into an agreement with Connection Services Group Inc. ("CSG") dated June 19, 2021 ("LOI") for a business combination between the Hong Kong holding corporation and CSG (the "Proposed Transaction").

CSG is an arm's length privately held company, incorporated under the laws of the Province of British Columbia. Lifestyle Global will spin out its existing assets via a plan of arrangement and continue its business and its listing on the TSXV. In connection with the business combination with CSG, the Hong Kong holding corporation will be delisted and will apply to relist on the TSXV.

The LOI sets forth, in general terms, the basic terms and conditions upon which Lifestyle Global and CSG will combine their business operations resulting in a reverse takeover (RTO) of Lifestyle Global by CSG and its shareholders.

In a separate agreement (details below) CSG has entered into a 4G LTE mobile telecommunications venture to acquire a 70% equity interest to buildout and operate a mobile network operator in West Africa. CSG intends to pursue similar opportunities elsewhere in fast-growing markets in Africa.

Sammy Boakye, President & Director of CSG highlighted the growth opportunity offered in West Africa's telecoms sector: "West Africa is a prosperous region with fast-growing consumer demand for mobile telephony and data services. Sierra Leone in particular is a peaceful democratic country with a positive economic trajectory. CSG has its eyes on similar growth opportunities in West Africa. We are excited to work with Lifestyle Global on the transaction and the proposed listing of our telecoms venture on the TSX Venture."

James Varanese, Chairman of Lifestyle Global commented: "We are pleased to work with the team at CSG to bring this telecoms opportunity to the market by the proposed listing on the TSX Venture. Our prior experience in West Africa has made us aware of its attractive combination of stability and economic growth. Since 2002 Sierra Leone's economy has grown steadily, with annual rates of real GDP growth between 4% and 7%. After a relatively mild covid contraction in 2020, Sierra Leone is poised to continue to prosper."

Connection Services Group Transaction in West Africa

Connection Services Group Inc. has entered into definitive share purchase agreement ("DSPA") with Blue Ribbon Solutions Limited ("BlueRibbon") on May 14, 2021. BlueRibbon is a corporation incorporated under the Companies Act 2009 of the Republic of Sierra Leone, located in West Africa. Subject to terms of the DSPA, CSG will acquire 70% of the issued and outstanding common shares of BlueRibbon (the "BlueRibbon Shares").

BlueRibbon is a 4G LTE Mobile Network Operator based in Sierra Leone. BlueRibbon is building and will be operating a mobile network to provide mobile voice and data services, residential and business broadband, and video on demand services (the "Business") throughout Sierra Leone, West Africa.

Terms of Sale of the Hong Kong Holding Corporation and its Application to Relist

As described in the LOI, it is intended that CSG and Lifestyle Global will enter into a business combination by way of a share exchange, merger, amalgamation, arrangement, or other similar form of transaction (collectively, the forgoing with any related transaction, the "Transaction") which will result in CSG and all of its subsidiaries and affiliates becoming directly or indirectly wholly owned subsidiaries of Lifestyle Global.

Subject to the completion of satisfactory mutual due diligence by Lifestyle Global and CSG, and pursuant to the terms and conditions of the LOI, Lifestyle Global and CSG will enter into a definitive agreement (the "Definitive Agreement").

The Company and CSG agree, however, that the final structure of the business combination is subject to receipt by the parties of tax, corporate, and securities law advice. The business combination will result in a reverse takeover of Lifestyle Global by CSG and its shareholders. The issuer resulting from the Transaction will carry on the business currently carried on by CSG.

Lifestyle Global and CSG have agreed to work to achieve a closing of the Transaction on or before August 31, 2021, or such other date as mutually agreed by both parties.

The shareholders of Lifestyle Global have approved the continued listing of its mineral exploration assets on the TSX.V in parallel with the Transaction.

The LOI was approved by the Board of Directors of Lifestyle Global and approved by the Board of Directors of CSG.

If and when a Definitive Agreement between Lifestyle Global and CSG is executed, Lifestyle Global will issue a subsequent press release containing the details of the definitive agreement and additional terms of the Transaction.

Completion of the Transaction is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to, receiving all required shareholder, regulatory, and other approvals. There can be no assurance that the Transaction will be completed as proposed or at all.

Further Information

Lifestyle Global will provide further details in respect of the Transaction in due course by way of press release. Lifestyle Global will make available all information including financial information as required by applicable regulatory authorities and will provide, in a press release to be disseminated at a later date, the required disclosure.

All information contained in this press release with respect to CSG and Lifestyle Global was supplied by the parties respectively, for inclusion herein, without independent review by the other party, and each party and its directors and officers have relied on the other party for any information concerning the other party.

About Connections Services Group

Connection Services Group is a telecom management company with extensive experience in the development and provision of mobile voice and broadband data services, including the acquisition and distribution of media and applications.

The CSG team is comprised of senior-level professionals, who for many years have demonstrated their ability to create and operate successful enterprises in the cellular, satellite, cable, and wireless industries. The increase in connectivity within Africa is being driven by mobile broadband services that is presenting a vast market opportunity for CSG.

Connection Services Group is acquiring majority ownership of Blue Ribbon Solutions Limited, a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) awarded a national telecom license to provide Voice and Broadband Internet Services throughout the Republic of Sierra Leone.

About Lifestyle Global

Lifestyle Global is incorporated in Hong Kong as a public company. The Company focusses on mineral exploration in West Africa. The Company's common shares are listed for trading on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "GBE.V". Lifestyle Global is a reporting issuer in the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario.

This press release is not an offer of the securities for sale in the United States. The securities may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an available exemption from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") and applicable U.S. state securities laws. Lifestyle Global will not make any public offering of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act.

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 jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange, Inc. nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the polices of the TSX Venture Exchange) has in any way passed upon the merits of the Acquisition and associated transactions and neither of the foregoing entities has in any way approved or disapproved of the contents of this press release.

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.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

For further information please contact:

Lifestyle Global Brands Limited

Ian Harris, CEO and Director

Telephone: +1 303.956.2944

Connection Services Group Inc.

Sammy Boakye, President & CEO

Telephone: +1 682.465.1788

Email: sammyb@connectionsg.com

Cautionary Statements

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", an 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 relate, among other things, to the terms and conditions of the Proposed Transaction, the plan of arrangement/spinout, the listings of CSG and Lifestyle Global, the execution and timing of a definitive agreement, the CSG Transaction and the business and operations of Lifestyle Global, CSG, and BlueRibbon, as the case may be. This forward-looking information reflects the Company's current beliefs and is based on information currently available to the Company and on assumptions the Company believes are reasonable. These assumptions include but are not limited to, the ability of Lifestyle Global and CSG to complete the CSG Transaction, the ability of the existing business to remain listed on the TSXV and meet the continued listing requirements, the ability of Lifestyle Global to rely on prior approvals for the spinout transaction, the ability for CSG to raise capital, BlueRibbon Transaction in a timely manner; the completion of satisfactory due diligence by the Company in relation to the Proposed Transaction; the satisfactory fulfilment of all of the condition's precedent to the Proposed Transaction; the receipt of all required approvals for the Proposed Transaction; market acceptance of the Proposed Transaction. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance, or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Such risks and other factors may include, but are not limited to, general business, economic, competitive, political, and social uncertainties; general capital market conditions and market price for securities; and the delay or failure to receive board, shareholder, court, or regulatory approvals. A description of additional risk factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking information can be found in the Company's disclosure documents on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release. Except as required by law neither Lifestyle Global, CSG, nor BlueRibbon assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change.

/NOT FOR DISSEMINATION DIRECTLY, OR INDIRECTLY IN THE UNITED STATES/

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/89291
MONTREAL, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bombardier Inc. ("Bombardier" or the "Corporation") announced today that its cash tender offer previously announced on June 3, 2021 (as amended by the Corporation's press release dated June 17, 2021 and as further amended by the Corporation's press release dated June 25, 2021, the "Tender Offer") to purchase for cash up to US$1,000,000,000 aggregate purchase price (exclusive of Accrued Interest) (the "Aggregate Maximum Purchase Amount") of three series of its outstanding senior notes (collectively, "Notes") due 2022 and 2023 as identified in the Offer to Purchase (as defined below), expired at the Expiration Date, 11:59 P.M., New York City time, on July 1, 2021. Capitalized terms used but not defined herein shall have the meanings assigned to such terms in the Offer to Purchase dated June 3, 2021 (as amended by the Corporation's press release dated June 17, 2021 and as further amended by the Corporation's press release dated June 25, 2021, the "Offer to Purchase") with respect to the Tender Offer.



On the Early Settlement Date, June 18, 2021, the Company accepted for purchase and purchased, US$88,364,000.00 aggregate principal amount of the 5.750% Senior Notes due 2022 (48.77%), US$210,183,000.00 aggregate principal amount of the 6.000% Senior Notes due 2022 (17.52%) and US$489,937,000.00 aggregate principal amount of the 6.125% Senior Notes due 2023 (47.85%).

After the Early Tender Date, but at or prior to the Expiration Date for the Tender Offer, an additional US$939,000.00 aggregate principal amount of 5.750% Senior Notes due 2022 were validly tendered and not validly withdrawn, and an additional US$434,000.00 aggregate principal amount of 6.000% Senior Notes due 2022 were validly tendered and not validly withdrawn.

In accordance with the terms of the Tender Offer as set forth in the Offer to Purchase and as permitted by applicable law, all additional Notes that were validly tendered after the Early Tender Date, but at or prior to the Expiration Date, will be accepted for purchase by Bombardier, upon the terms and conditions contained in the Offer to Purchase, on the Final Settlement Date.

All such Notes that are being accepted for purchase by the Corporation will be settled on the Final Settlement Date in accordance with the terms of the Tender Offer as set forth in the Offer to Purchase. Bombardier expects such Final Settlement Date to be July 6, 2021.

This announcement does not constitute an offer to buy or sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell or buy any securities.

Certain statements in this announcement are forward-looking statements based on current expectations. By their nature, forward-looking statements require us to make assumptions and are subject to important known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which may cause our actual results in future periods to differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. For additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties, and the assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements, please refer to the Offer to Purchase.

For information
TIANJIN, China, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In September 2020, Zhang Boli was awarded with the national honorary title "the People's Hero" by the Chinese central government for his outstanding contribution to the country's fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The decision was made to commend people who have made outstanding contributions in the fight, and carry forward their dedication and other noble qualities.

This short documentary was produced by Tianjin Haihe Media Group, which told Dr. Zhang's story of his battle against COVID-19 during the pandemic. In 2020, Zhang Boli, 72, helped the medical community recognize the value of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) by leading an expert team to treat COVID-19 infections in Wuhan, China's frontline in the battle against the novel coronavirus disease.

As head of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Zhang arrived in Wuhan, capital of central China'sHubei Province, on January 27, the third day of China's Lunar New Year and the fifth day into the megacity's lockdown for pandemic control.

Zhang Boli and over 300 other doctors formed a TCM medical team. They were stationed at a makeshift hospital in Wuhan's Jiangxia district using TCM decoctions with other treatments such as massage, acupuncture, and physical exercises from Tai Chi and Baduanjin, a traditional aerobics form, to treat COVID-19 patients.

With Zhang's pioneering practices, TCM treatment has been given to 90 percent of COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, helping to relieve symptoms, slowing disease progression, and boosting recovery.

Video - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556230/Tianjin_Haihe_Media_Group.mp4

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556228/Tianjin_Haihe_Media_Group_Logo.jpg

Contact:

Jane Cheng

Tel.: +8610-68996566

E-mail: 1163514639@qq.com

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/-ODsnxuR-VQ
LONDON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Clarivate Plc (NYSE: CLVT), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, announced today it will report its financial results for the second quarter 2021 before the market opens on Thursday, July 29. The press release and earnings supplement, with accompanying financial information, will be posted on the Clarivate investor website at https://ir.clarivate.com. The Company will host a conference call and webcast on Thursday, July 29 at 8:00 AM Eastern Time to review the results.

The live webcast of the call will be accessible through the investor relations section of the Company's website. To join the webcast please visit https://services.choruscall.com/links/clvt210729.html. A replay will also be available on the investor relations section of the Company's website.

Interested parties may access the live audio broadcast by dialing (888) 317-6003 (in the United States), 412-317-6061 (International) and 866-284-3684 (Canada). The conference ID number is 5985185.

An audio replay will be available approximately two hours after the completion of the call at 877-344-7529 (in the US), 412-371-0088 (International) and 855-669-9658 (Canada). The replay access code is 10153162. The recording will be available for replay through August 12, 2021.

About Clarivate

Clarivate is a global leader in providing solutions to accelerate the lifecycle of innovation. Our bold mission is to help customers solve some of the world's most complex problems by providing actionable information and insights that reduce the time from new ideas to life-changing inventions in the areas of science and intellectual property. We help customers discover, protect and commercialize their inventions using our trusted subscription and technology-based solutions coupled with deep domain expertise. For more information, please visit clarivate.com.

Category: Earnings

Source: Clarivate Plc

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1159266/Clarivate_Logo.jpg
BEIJING, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- 2020 was undoubtedly the year of Covid-19 but in the same year, it is also the year of China's eradication of absolute poverty in rural areas. And key to this has been China's formula to focus on a collective effort where the urban and rural areas work together to achieve shared prosperity.

But could rural areas fall back into poverty? Do people still need to be supported from here and onwards? And how do you prevent people from falling back into poverty? China's answer is 'rural revitalization'. China Matters reveals the effort of a Chinese village in preventing falling back into poverty.

A year on, in 2021, as part of this strategy, rural areas like Sanjianxi village in Shandong province's capital of Jinan, are kicking on and not looking back. Sanjianxi is now looking to tap into its own resources to further develop. It is aiming to become self-reliant by developing its own local tourism sites, creating its own industrial business zone and putting together sustainable agriculture that's greener.

But how do you bring all these aspects together to make it work? And how do these benefit the village? British host Josh Arslan from China Matters goes to find out. He speaks to one lady who is behind Sanjianxi's transformation as well as the lives of many in the village. And more importantly, Josh asks if this is a 'pilot project' whereby if successful, which can be replicated across other rural areas in China? And whether it could go as long as in narrowing the country's longstanding rural-urban gap to bring up the living standards of rural residents to the level of their urban counterparts?

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/Lh-Ikbaw0w8

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh-Ikbaw0w8

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1515102/China_Matters_Logo.jpg

Contact: Li Siwei

Tel:008610-68996566

E-mail:lisiwei5125@gmail.com
Premiere Empire Energy Provides EV Charging Management Solutions Including Customer Services Issues

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / Green Stream Holdings Inc. (OTC PINK:GSFI) ("the Company") (http://www.GreenRainSolar.com ), an emerging leader in the solar utility and finance space, today announced that it has entered into a joint venture with Premiere Empire Energy, LLC, ("Premiere") to provide electric charging stations to both company's clients.

Premiere provides EV charging management solutions made easy with premium customer service to its clients. It allows their customers to take advantage of valuable rebates available under federal and state sustainability programs; to control access, set pricing and review real-time data on station usage and performance; and to get help when needed, day or night, with 24/7 support for their customers and their drivers/customers.

James DiPrima, Chief Executive Officer of Green Stream Holdings stated, "This JV should be a substantial revenue driver for both companies. We will build solar and now electric car charging stations collaborating with Premier and our mutual clients. All the while we will be helping to reduce their carbon foot print. We will split net profits on a 50/50 basis. Our plan is to deploy this model nationwide giving consumers energy saving options and helping gas stations reduce their carbon foot print."

About Premiere Empire Energy:

Premier Empire Energy is a leading New York Energy Supply Company (ESCO). Premier Empire Energy, provides energy services to small business, commercial, and residential customers in deregulated energy markets. We strive to provide our customers with the most competitive electricity and natural gas rates, in an effort to become New York's favorite energy supplier!?? ?

We look forward to providing our clients with our most competitive electric and natural gas rates, and becoming their favorite commercial energy supplier!

An Energy Service Company, commonly referred to as ESCO, is a licensed company that can purchase electricity and natural gas for customers. ESCOs, also referred to as third party supplier, operate in deregulated markets. ESCOs take over the Supply section of a customer's utility bill. Our customers will still be a customer of their Utility, as the utility will be in charge of the delivery of energy and maintenance of the customer's meter and wires.

At Premier Empire Energy, we pride ourselves on providing outstanding customer service with an honest, educational, and transparent approach to energy sales. We are committed to providing you with the information your home and business needs to make informed, efficient decisions about energy products and services. It is our goal to foster long term customer relationships that are maintained by open communication and flexibility.

About Chuck's Vintage:

Chuck's Vintage, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company, 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: greenrainsolar.com

Instagram: chucksvintage original

Phone number: (646) 669-7007

SOURCE: Green Stream Holdings Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/654008/Green-Stream-Holdings-Inc-Announces-Joint-Venture-with-Premiere-Empire-Energy-to-Install-Electronic-Charging-Stations
LONDON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Fresha was rated as 2021's top salon software by Capterra, a Gartner Inc. company. The platform came out on top in all three rating categories for salon software; most popular, most affordable and most user-friendly salon software.

"We love Fresha it is a no-brainer. It has all the features you need to run your salon and you save money with a free business software and by paying less for card payment processing, It's the best salon sotware in the industry," said Ross Kernick, H & Co Hair Salon.

Fresha allows consumers to discover, book and pay for Salon and Spa appointments with local beauty businesses via its marketplace, while salons, spas and barbershops can leverage Fresha to manage their operations with its intuitive, subscription-free business software. The Fresha software removes the critical pain points that service-based businesses often encounter by seamlessly facilitating the acceptance of online appointment bookings, processing of card payments and management of customer records, along with automations for marketing, staffing, product inventory and accounting, all in one place. In addition to its free salon software offering, Fresha Plus provides partners with additional advanced features; rather than a traditional subscription model, the company collects fees on the usage of features for card payment processing and online bookings.

Over 80% of our barbershop appointments are booked online directly by clients on Fresha Marketplace. It's the best appointment booking software and POS in the world. We run our whole business on the Fresha platform. The system is very easy to use, our team and clients love it!' says Leith Matthews, owner of Akin Barber & Shop.

Fresha has amassed an extensive base of approximately 50,000 partner venues primarily spanning the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. In April 2021 alone, the company added over 4,000 new venues. The Fresha platform is used in 120 countries globally, and each month, customers book tens of millions of appointments on the platform, processing nearly $12 billion in value to date. Fresha's focus on building easy-to-use, free software and offering business tools without any subscription fees, underpinned by a strong word-of-mouth effect, has helped the company build a loyal following and customer base. Fresha's partner businesses rely on the platform for its ease of use, time-saving benefits and embedded features to grow sales, while end consumers enjoy a premium booking and payment experience.

The company recently announced a $100 million Series C investment led by General Atlantic, a leading global growth equity firm, with strategic participation from Huda Kattan of HB Investments and the founder of Huda Beauty. The latest investment brings the company's total fundraising to $132 million to date. Fresha will leverage the new funds to further broaden its global community of partner salons and spas, scale product development, deepen its marketplace appointment bookings and pursue strategic M&A. Huda Kattan, founder of self-made cosmetics empire Huda Beauty's recent backing of Fresha marks a powerful joining of forces between Fresha the beauty industry's leading salon software platform and one of the world's most successful beauty entrepreneurs. Huda Kattan, built a multi-billion-dollar cosmetics brand by candidly sharing her passion for beauty via her Instagram account - now 48 million followers strong - saw vast potential for Fresha. "I've witnessed first-hand the positive impact Fresha has for beauty entrepreneurs with their free salon salon software. The company is a force for good in the growing community of salons and beauty professionals around the globe, who are increasingly adopting a self-employed approach. By making top business software accessible without any subscription fees, Fresha lets professionals focus on what they do best - offering great experiences for their salon customers," said Huda Kattan.

Fresha also offers mobile apps for salon clients and real-time booking integrations to Instagram, Facebook and Google. The platform comes with world leading integrated card payment processing to protect against no-shows and late cancellations. "We believe Fresha outpaces the competition by combining a superior product-market fit with outstanding execution capabilities," said Philippe Collombel, General Partner at Partech. "William and Nick superbly steered Fresha during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have continued to innovate, accelerate signups of new salons, and boost revenues, whilst supporting new venues and small businesses in navigating the crisis. We can't wait to see Fresha's continued growth after this new funding round," he said.

"At Fresha we're incorporating intelligent features for our online booking system to help salons grow revenues. For example, smartly displaying price and availability options, based on the client's purchase history and the salon's projected schedule. Our salon system system analyses client preferences and the business's activity, providing an unbeatable appointment booking experience. This frees up salon staff to do what they do best and spend more face time with clients," says CEO and co-founder William Zeqiri. A growing number of consumers expect to be able to book services online and this trend will continue to increase as younger, tech-savvy clients take over the market. Some 40% of online bookings are made outside of normal business hours. This relieves pressure on salon staff having to push pre-booking, or answer as many calls from clients asking to book. Fresha was formerly known as Shedul.com.

About Fresha

Fresha is a leading global beauty and wellness platform. Each month, tens of millions of appointments are discovered, booked and paid with partner salons, spas and barbershops on Fresha. 50,000 partner venues in over 120 countries use the platform to manage their operations with Fresha's intuitive, full-spectrum, subscription-free business software. Fresha transforms beauty and wellness business operations by enabling the acceptance of online appointment bookings, processing of card payments and managing customer records, along with automations for marketing, staffing, product inventory and accounting, all in one place. Launched in 2015 originally under the name Shedul , the company rebranded to Fresha in 2020. For more information, visit www.fresha.com , download Fresha on the App Store and Google Play or follow Fresha on Facebook and Instagram .

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556621/Fresha.jpg
BARCELONA, Spain, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The GTI Online Summit 2021, with the theme of "5G Reshape Industries", was held on 30th June during MWC Barcelona 2021. High-level speakers from international organizations, operators and vertical industry partners shared their insights into the current status, cooperative practices and challenges of global 5G toB commercialization, and accelerated 5G integration with all walks of life to create new business opportunities and new digital value.

Mr. Craig Ehrlich, Chairman of GTI, delivered the welcome note. He said, "We are seeing rising awareness about the significance of digital transformation and a key role that 5G will play in accelerating this process to support economic recovery and sustainable development on a global scale. GTI has been cooperating with over 300 partners and made notable achievements in defining requirements, lowering application barriers as well as expanding the application scale."

Mr. Zhao Houlin, Secretary General of ITU, stated, "I highlighted my 4Is strategy: Infrastructure, Investments, Innovations, and Inclusiveness. I call on all of you to increase investment in ICT infrastructure, and ICT innovations, to bring ICT to all people in our planet, leave no one behind."

Mr. Gao Tongqing, Executive Vice President of China Mobile, remarked, "This June marks the second anniversary of China's 5G commercial license issuance. The rapid development of 5G industry is attributable to the joint promotion and efforts of global industry partners. While industry innovations brought by any new technology will not be accomplished at one stroke, the journey of integrating 5G into all industries is not always so smooth either."

Mr. Alex Sinclair, CTO of GSMA, pointed out, "The dawn of the 5G era has also seen a marked change in the way that we collaborate and whom we collaborate with. Suffice it to say 5G networks are here, the interest of demand from the verticals is clearly here as well."

Dr. Soo-Jung Shin, SEVP & Head of Enterprise Group of KT, commented in his keynote speech, "There are difficulties that need to be overcome for full scale activation of 5G B2B, such as clear customer value is not provided, the slow development of devices and application services, many companies perceive 5G as a simple network rather than a platform."

Mr. Liu Jian, General Manager of Enterprise Division of China Mobile, emphasized that the application of 5G in industries has accelerated the in-depth integration of OT, IT, and CT. It not only reshaped the industry structure, but also provided new opportunities for operators' transformation and upgrading.

Mrs. Chen Lan, President & CEO of DOCOMO Beijing Labs, noted, "We are further exploring possibilities in 5G to realize the digitalization of industries, new customer-relation and work-style reform, and investigating 6G and IOWN technologies for the further realization of a wellbeing society."

Dr. Andreas Mueller, General Chair of 5G-ACIA, commented that the biggest benefit maybe that 5G may bring is that it has the potential to become a one size fits all solution, at least for wireless connectivity in a factory. 5G is the only solution we currently see that is capable enough to support really a wide variety of different use cases, sometimes very diverse requirements at the same time.

Mr. Maxime Flament, CTO of 5GAA, noted in his keynote speech, "To make advanced safety and automated driving a reality, we need to go one step further, and the next step is 5G. 5G-V2X will make the road safer and greener for all."

Other industry players and vertical partners also spoke out at the summit about the industry progress and provided many cooperation practices and use cases.

Mr. Liu Yingshang, Deputy Chief Engineer of China Southern Power Grid, emphasized that cutting-edge 5G technology will provide strong support to a new electric power system mainly driven by new energy so as to reach peak emissions and achieve carbon neutrality.

Mr. Dai Qinghua, SVP of SANY Group, pointed out, "5G technologies, cloud computing and industrial technologies are indispensable for the development of the digital economy."

Mr. Jonas Larsson, VP and Head of Business Area Connected Products of AFRY, mentioned that the most interesting aspects of the true smart factory set up is not how digitalized and how Smart it is in absolute terms day one, but to what level it is enabling learning and development in the future iterations. Then true 5G connectivity is an important platform and enabler.

To watch video playback of this summit, please visit https://www.c114.com.cn/live/t91.html.

About GTI

GTI is an international platform of industry cooperation. It was kicked off in 2011 by China Mobile, SoftBank, Vodafone and a few of other operators. After ten years of joint efforts, GTI has developed 140 operators and 248 venders. In 2016, GTI 2.0 was officially launched in 2016, aiming to further promote 4G evolution, promote 5G development and cross-industry innovation.

To learn more about GTI, please visit www.gtigroup.org.
AM Best has assigned a Financial Strength Rating of B++ (Good) and a Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating of "bbb+" (Good) to Gar-Bo Forsakring AB (Gar-Bo) (Sweden). The outlook assigned to these Credit Ratings (ratings) is stable.

The ratings reflect Gar-Bo's balance sheet strength, which AM Best assesses as strong, as well as its strong operating performance, limited business profile and appropriate enterprise risk management.

Gar-Bo's risk-adjusted capitalisation, as measured by Best's Capital Adequacy Ratio (BCAR), is categorised as very strong. AM Best expects Gar-Bo's risk-adjusted capitalisation to be maintained at the very strong level over the medium term, supported by strong internal capital generation.

The company's balance sheet strength also benefits from a good liquidity profile and prudent reserving practices. A partly offsetting factor is the company's moderate reinsurance dependence, although the associated risk is mitigated somewhat by the use of a well-diversified panel of reinsurance counterparties of good credit quality. Additionally, the company's relatively high allocations to equities and non-rated bonds expose it to elevated investment risk, which increases the potential for volatility in risk-adjusted capitalisation.

Gar-Bo has a track record of strong operating performance, as evidenced by a five-year weighted average return on equity of 25% (2016-2020), as calculated by AM Best, with good contributions from both technical and investment income. In 2020, the company reported a strong combined ratio of 82% (2019: 90%), largely reflecting benign claims development in markets where it is expanding (predominantly Denmark, but also Norway).

Gar-Bo is a niche insurer in the Nordic market that underwrites construction-related long-duration and surety products, primarily in Sweden. Gross written premiums increased to SEK 317 million (EUR: 31.3 million) in 2020 from SEK 183 million (EUR 18.0 million) in the prior year. In AM Best's view, the specialist construction services that the company provides largely to mid-market construction and building clients affords a competitive advantage in its domestic market. A partly offsetting factor is heightened regulatory risk due to the company's lines of business that it offers, as well as its geographic concentration in Sweden.

This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on AM Best's website. For all rating information relating to the release and pertinent disclosures, including details of the office responsible for issuing each of the individual ratings referenced in this release, please see AM Best's Recent Rating Activity web page. For additional information regarding the use and limitations of Credit Rating opinions, please view Guide to Best's Credit Ratings. For information on the proper media use of Best's Credit Ratings and AM Best press releases, please view Guide for Media Proper Use of Best's Credit Ratings and AM Best Rating Action Press Releases.

AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specialising in the insurance industry. Headquartered in the United States, the company does business in over 100 countries with regional offices in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. For more information, visit www.ambest.com.

Copyright 2021 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005217/en/

Contacts:

Lucio Savastano

Associate Financial Analyst

+31 20 308 5420

lucio.savastano@ambest.com

Christopher Sharkey

Manager, Public Relations

+1 908 439 2200, ext. 5159

christopher.sharkey@ambest.com

Angela Yeo

Senior Director, Analytics

+31 20 308 5421

angela.yeo@ambest.com

Jim Peavy

Director, Communications

+1 908 439 2200, ext. 5644

james.peavy@ambest.com
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - July 2, 2021) - Lorne Park Capital Partners Inc. (TSXV: LPC) ("LPCP") is pleased to announce that its Board of Directors has approved the declaration of a cash dividend of $0.005 per common share, payable on July 30, 2021 to the shareholders of record as of July 16, 2021.

The dividend payments qualify as eligible dividends for Canadian income tax purposes. The declaration, amount and payment of future cash dividends are subject to the Board of Directors' continuing determination that the payment of dividends is in the best interests of the Company, its shareholders and is in compliance with all laws and agreements of the Company applicable to the declaration and payment of cash dividends. The ability of the Company to pay future dividends will be reviewed on a quarterly basis taking into consideration actual and forecasted cash flows and the macroeconomic outlook at that point in time.

About Lorne Park Capital Partners Inc.

LPCP was created to bring together boutique investment management and wealth advisory firms in order to deliver robust, cost effective investment solutions to affluent investors, foundations, estates and trusts. LPCP's unique strategy creates better alignment between investment managers and wealth advisors while providing them with additional resources to accelerate their growth.

For further information, please contact:

Robert Sewell

Chief Executive Officer

Lorne Park Capital Partners Inc.

investor.relations@lpcp.ca

(905) 337-2227

Cautionary Notes

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 contains statements which constitute "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information may be identified by such terms as "believes", "anticipates", "expects", "estimates", "may", "could", "would", "will", "plan", and other similar expressions. Forward-looking information in this news release includes, without limitation, LPCP's objectives, goals and future plans. Forward-looking information addresses possible future events, conditions and financial performance based upon management's current expectations, estimates, projections and assumptions. In particular, the forward-looking information contained in this news release reflects assumptions about the timing and results of the amalgamation and regulatory approvals. Management of LPCP considers the assumptions on which the forward-looking information contained herein are based to be reasonable. However, by its very nature, forward-looking information inherently involves known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such information. Such risks include, without limitation, changes in economic conditions, applicable laws or regulations. Accordingly, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. LPCP 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.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION IN THE UNITED STATES, ANY FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH THIS RESTRICTION MAY CONSTITUTE A VIOLATION OF U.S. SECURITIES LAW

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88929
Berwyn, Pennsylvania--(Newsfile Corp. - July 2, 2021) - Annovis Bio, Inc. (NYSE American: ANVS), ("Annovis" or the "Company"), a clinical-stage drug platform company addressing Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD) and other neurodegenerative diseases, with data from two phase 2 studies showing its lead compound improves cognition in AD patients and motor function in PD patients, today announced that its abstract has been accepted at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC), which will be held online and in-person July 26-30, 2021.

Annovis Bio's lead drug candidate, ANVS401, will be featured in a poster presentation: Positive Clinical Outcomes in Two Phase 2a Studies: ADAS-Cog in Alzheimer's and MDS-UPDRS in Parkinson's patients plus Markers of Toxic Cascade that Leads to Nerve Cell Death.

Previously, Annovis Bio reported that AD patients treated with ANVS401 for 25 days showed statistically significant cognitive improvement as measured by the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive Subscale 11 (ADAS-Cog11); PD patients treated with ANVS401 showed statistically significant motor function improvement as measure by the MDS-UPDRS. Additionally, in a test that measures speed and accuracy, AD and PD patients both responded with a statistically significant increase in correctly coded fields. The company also measured inflammatory factors and found statistically significant lowering of these factors. These tests were part of the Company's ongoing Phase 2a study in AD and PD patients.

In addition to its presentation, Annovis Bio is a platinum sponsor of AAIC and will host a panel discussion and a dinner. Annovis' presentation and panel discussion will be available for 30 days on the AAIC conference website.

About Annovis Bio Inc.

Headquartered in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, Annovis Bio, Inc. (Annovis) is a clinical-stage, drug platform company addressing neurodegeneration, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD) and Alzheimer's in Down Syndrome (AD-DS). We believe that we are the only company developing a drug for AD, PD and AD-DS that inhibits more than one neurotoxic protein and, thereby, improves the information highway of the nerve cell, known as axonal transport. When this information flow is impaired, the nerve cell gets sick and dies. We have two ongoing Phase 2 studies: one in AD patients and one in both AD and PD patients. In the AD/ PD study our drug improves memory loss and dementia associated with AD, as well as body and brain function in PD. For more information on Annovis, please visit the company's website: www.annovisbio.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements in this press release contain "forward-looking statements" that are subject to substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release may be identified by the use of words such as "anticipate," "expect," "believe," "will," "may," "should," "estimate," "project," "outlook," "forecast" or other similar words, and include, without limitation, statements regarding the timing, effectiveness, and anticipated results of ANVS401 clinical trials. Forward-looking statements are based on Annovis Bio, Inc.'s current expectations and are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Further, certain forward-looking statements are based on assumptions as to future events that may not prove to be accurate. These and other risks and uncertainties are described more fully in the section titled "Risk Factors" in the Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements contained in this announcement are made as of this date, and Annovis Bio, Inc. undertakes no duty to update such information except as required under applicable law.

Investor Relations:

Dave Gentry, CEO

RedChip Companies Inc.

407-491-4498

Dave@redchip.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/89292
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Reflecting the gradual reopening of the economy, the Labor Department released a report on Friday showing a continued reacceleration in the pace of U.S. job growth in the month of June. The report showed non-farm payroll employment spiked by 850,000 jobs in June after surging by an upwardly revised 583,000 jobs in May. Economists had expected employment to jump by about 700,000 jobs compared to the addition of 559,000 jobs originally reported for the previous month. Meanwhile, the Labor Department said the unemployment rate unexpectedly inched up to 5.9 percent in June from 5.8 percent in May. The unexpectedly rate was expected to edge down to 5.7 percent. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
LONDON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new market research report "Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market by Charging Type (Level 1, Level 2, DCFC), Connection Type (Pantograph, Connector, Wireless), Component (Hardware, Software, Services), Mounting Type (Wall, Pedestal, and Ceiling), Vehicle Type, End User, and Geography - Global Forecast to 2028", published by Meticulous Research, the electric vehicle charging stations market is expected to reach a value of $103.6 billion by 2028, at a CAGR of 26.4% during the forecast period of 2021-2028. By volume, the electric vehicle charging stations market is expected to reach 11,647.5 thousand units by 2028, at a CAGR of 31.1% from 2021.

Download Free Sample Report Now @ https://www.meticulousresearch.com/download-sample-report/cp_id=5078

Electric vehicle charging stations are defined as a site where one or more EVSEs are installed. These sites can be residential, non-residential, or commercial. Electrical energy is supplied through special connectors that conform to the variety of electric charging connector standards for the recharging of plug-in electric vehicles-including electric cars, electric buses, and special-purpose electric vehicles.

The growth of the overall electric vehicle charging stations market is mainly attributed to factors such as government initiatives to drive the adoption of electric vehicles and associated infrastructure, rising demand for electric vehicle fast-charging infrastructure, increasing prevalence of range anxiety, and increasing deployment of EVs by shared mobility operators. However, the high initial cost of installation is likely to hinder the market's growth. Increasing R&D in V2G technology, increasing adoption of electric mobility in emerging economies, and growing deployment of charging stations by retail MNCs are projected to provide significant growth opportunities for vendors operating in this market.

The overall electric vehicle charging stations market is segmented based on charging type, connection type, vehicle type, mounting type, component, end user, and geography.

Based on charging type, the electric vehicle charging stations market is segmented into Level 1, Level 2, and DC fast charging. In 2021, the Level 2 segment is estimated to command the largest share of the overall electric vehicle charging stations market. The large share of this segment is mainly attributed to government funding and incentives for the installation of Level 2 charging stations, lower installation cost compared to DC fast-charging stations, and greater efficiency in terms of less charging time than Level 1 charging stations. However, the DC fast-charging stations segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

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Based on connection type, the electric vehicle charging stations market is segmented into pantograph, connectors, and wireless charging. In 2021, the connector segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the overall electric vehicle charging stations market. The large share of this segment is mainly attributed to government initiatives to expand the DC fast-charging station infrastructure and increasing investment by stakeholders of electric mobility in emerging economies for developing EV charging infrastructure.

Based on vehicle type, the electric vehicle charging stations market is segmented into passenger cars, heavy commercial vehicles, light commercial vehicles, and two-wheelers & scooters. In 2021, the passenger vehicles segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the overall electric vehicle charging stations market. The segment's growth is attributed to the favourable government policies and subsidies for promoting the adoption of electric vehicles, growing awareness regarding the role of electric vehicles in reducing emissions, increasing fuel prices, and proactive participation by automotive OEMs in producing electric passenger vehicles.

Based on mounting type, the electric vehicle charging stations market is segmented into wall mount, pedestal mount, and ceiling mount. In 2021, the wall mount segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the overall electric vehicle charging stations market. The large share of this segment is mainly attributed to the cost-effectiveness of the wall mount chargers, easy installation process, and various fiscal and non-fiscal incentives to private property owners and management companies for the development of EV charging infrastructure.

Based on component, the electric vehicle charging stations market is segmented into hardware, software, and services. In 2021, the hardware segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the overall electric vehicle charging stations market. The growth of this segment is attributed to infrastructural developments for supporting the transition to electric mobility, increasing demand for EV charging stations in developing and developed economies, and attractive fiscal and non-fiscal incentive plans for setting up manufacturing units of EV charging stations and related components.

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Based on end user, the electric vehicle charging stations market is segmented into commercial EV charging stations and residential EV charging stations. In 2021, the commercial EV charging stations segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the overall electric vehicle charging stations market. The growth of this segment is attributed to the growing number of installations of EV charging stations in public places like shopping malls, restaurants, commercial buildings, parking areas, railway stations, and airports; and government initiatives for the installation of publicly accessible charging stations.

Geographically, the electric vehicle charging stations market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. In 2021, Asia-Pacific region is estimated to command the largest share of the global electric vehicle charging stations market, followed by Europe and North America. The large share of this region is mainly attributed to the growing demand for electric vehicles in countries such as China and Japan and rising government initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which, in turn, is poised to increase the adoption of electric vehicles.

However, Europe is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The high growth of electric vehicle charging stations market in this region is primarily attributed to government initiatives to develop charging infrastructure across the region. Countries like France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, and the U.K. are five front-runner countries for electric vehicles and charging points across the region.

Some of the key players operating in the global electric vehicle charging stations market are Webasto Group, EVBox Group, Electrify America LLC., BP plc., Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Evgo Services LLC., Connected Kerb Limited, Wanbang Xingxing Charging Technology Co., Ltd., Electricite de France, Tesla, Inc., Hangzhou AoNeng Power Supply Equipment Co., Ltd., EV Charging Installers of America LLC, Addenergie Technologies, Inc., EV Connect, Inc., and ChargePoint Holdings, Inc. among others.

To gain more insights into the market with a detailed table of content and figures, click here: https://www.meticulousresearch.com/product/electric-vehicle-charging-stations-market-5078

Scope of the Report

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market, by Charging Type

Level 2

Level 1

DC Fast charging

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market, by Connection Type

Connectors

Pantograph

Wireless EV charging

Static wireless EV charging



Dynamic wireless EV charging

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market, by Component

Hardware

Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE)



Electrical Distribution Systems



Cable Management Systems

Software

Charging Station Management Systems (CSMS)



Interoperability Solutions



Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP)



Smartphone Applications

Services

Maintenance Services



Systems Integration & Installation Services

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market, by Mounting Type

Wall Mount

Pedestal Mount

Ceiling Mount

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market, by Vehicle Type

Passenger Cars

Heavy Commercial Vehicles

Light Commercial Vehicles

Two-wheelers & Scooters

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market, by End User

Commercial EV Charging Stations

Commercial Public EV Charging Stations



On-Road Charging





Parking Spaces





Destination Chargers



Commercial Private EV Charging Stations



Fleet Charging





Captive Charging



Residential EV Charging Stations

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market, by Geography

Asia-Pacific (APAC)

(APAC) China



Japan



South Korea



India



Australia



New Zealand



Rest of Asia-Pacific (RoAPAC)

(RoAPAC) Europe

Germany



France



U.K.



Italy



Spain



Netherlands



Sweden



Norway



Denmark



Rest of Europe (RoE)

(RoE) North America

U.S.



Canada

Latin America

Middle East & Africa

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Meticulous Research was founded in 2010 and incorporated as Meticulous Market Research Pvt. Ltd. in 2013 as a private limited company under the Companies Act, 1956. Since its incorporation, the company has become the leading provider of premium market intelligence in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.

The name of our company defines our services, strengths, and values. Since the inception, we have only thrived to research, analyze, and present the critical market data with great attention to details. With the meticulous primary and secondary research techniques, we have built strong capabilities in data collection, interpretation, and analysis of data including qualitative and quantitative research with the finest team of analysts. We design our meticulously analyzed intelligent and value-driven syndicate market research reports, custom studies, quick turnaround research, and consulting solutions to address business challenges of sustainable growth.

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Content Source: https://www.meticulousresearch.com/pressrelease/243/electric-vehicle-charging-stations-market-2028

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fortuna Silver Mines Inc. ("Fortuna") (NYSE: FSM | TSX: FVI) and Roxgold Inc. ("Roxgold") (TSX: ROXG | OTCQX: ROGFF) are pleased to announce the completion of the previously announced business combination between Fortuna and Roxgold (the "Transaction") to create a global premier growth-oriented intermediate gold and silver producer. For additional details related to the Transaction, please refer to the joint news release dated April 26, 2021, "Fortuna And Roxgold Agree To Business Combination Creating A Low-Cost Intermediate Global Precious Metals Producer (https://fortunasilver.com/site/assets/files/5731/fortuna_and_roxgold_agree_to_business_combinatio.pdf)".



Jorge A. Ganoza, President and CEO of Fortuna, commented, "The successfully completed business combination creates a low-cost intermediate gold and silver producer with four operating mines and a permitted development project. The company will benefit from a robust exploration pipeline and expanded presence in the Americas and West Africa, two of the fastest growing precious metals producing regions in the world." Mr. Ganoza added, "We look forward to a successful integration and to continue building the business in West Africa on the solid foundations cemented by Roxgold."

John Dorward, President and Chief Executive Officer of Roxgold, commented, "I would like to thank the Roxgold shareholders for their support. I am very proud of the Roxgold team and what we accomplished together and believe Fortuna is now positioned with one of the best organic growth pipelines among any of the intermediate precious metal producers, supported by peer-leading free cash flow generation, increased scale and diversification, and a lower cost of capital."

The Transaction was completed by way of a court-approved plan of arrangement (the "Arrangement") under the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia) pursuant to the arrangement agreement between Fortuna and Roxgold dated effective April 26, 2021. Under the terms of the Transaction, Fortuna acquired all the issued and outstanding common shares ("Roxgold Shares") of Roxgold in exchange for 0.283 of a common share of Fortuna (a "Fortuna Share") and C$0.001 in cash for each Roxgold Share held. Upon completion of the Transaction, Roxgold is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fortuna.

The Transaction was approved by Roxgold shareholders at a special shareholder meeting held on June 28, 2021 and the issuance of Fortuna Shares under the terms of the Transaction was approved by Fortuna shareholders at Fortuna's annual and special meeting held on June 28, 2021. Following the shareholder meetings, the British Columbia Supreme Court granted a final order on June 30, 2021 approving the Arrangement.

Addition to Fortuna's Board of Directors

Upon completion of the Transaction, Kate Harcourt, a member of the board of directors of Roxgold, was appointed to the board of directors of Fortuna.

Information for former Roxgold Shareholders

Fortuna will continue under the name "Fortuna Silver Mines Inc." with the ticker symbol "FVI" on the Toronto Stock Exchange and "FSM" on the New York Stock Exchange. The Roxgold Shares are expected to be delisted from the TSX and OTCQX two to three trading days following closing and an application will be made to have Roxgold cease to be a reporting issuer.

In order to receive the Fortuna Shares and cash consideration under the Arrangement, registered Roxgold shareholders who hold physical share certificates or DRS Statements must submit a letter of transmittal to Computershare Investor Services Inc. A copy of the letter of transmittal is available on Roxgold's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com (http://www.sedar.com). Roxgold shareholders who hold their Roxgold Shares though a broker or other intermediary should follow the instructions provided by such broker or other intermediary.

Advisors and Counsel

INFOR Financial Inc. acted as financial advisor to Fortuna in connection with the Transaction. Scotiabank acted as financial advisor to the Fortuna Board of Directors in connection with the Transaction. Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP and Paul Weiss LLP acted as Fortuna's Canadian and United States legal advisors, respectively.

BMO Capital Markets acted as financial advisor to Roxgold in connection with the Transaction. Canaccord Genuity Corp. acted as financial advisor to the Roxgold special committee and Board of Directors in connection with the Transaction. Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP acted as Roxgold's legal advisor.

About Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

Fortuna Silver Mines Inc. is a Canadian precious metals mining company with four operating mines and a development project in Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Cote d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso. Sustainability is integral to all of Fortuna's operations and relationships. Fortuna produces gold and silver and generates shared value over the long-term for its shareholders and stakeholders through efficient production, environmental protection, and social responsibility. For more information, please visit Fortuna's website (http://www.fortunasilver.com).

For information about Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

Carlos Baca

Director, Investor Relations

E: info@fortunasilver.com (mailto:info@fortunasilver.com)

The Toronto Stock Exchange has neither reviewed nor accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

Forward-looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements which constitute "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (collectively, "Forward-looking Statements"). All statements included, other than statements of historical fact, which address activities, events or developments that Fortuna or Roxgold expects or anticipates may or will occur in the future, are forward-looking information.

The Forward-looking Statements in this news release may include, without limitation, statements about Fortuna and Roxgold's current expectations, anticipated synergies and benefits of the Transaction, statements with respect to the trading of the Fortuna shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange, and the de-listing of the Roxgold Shares. Readers are also cautioned that such additional information is not exhaustive. Often, but not always, these Forward-looking Statements can be identified by the use of words such as "anticipated", "estimated", "expected", "potential", "future", "assumed", "projected", "planned", "to be", "will" or statements that events, "could" or "should" occur or be achieved and similar expressions, including negative variations.

The impact of any one risk, uncertainty or factor on a particular forward-looking statement is not determinable with certainty as these factors are independent and management's future course of action would depend on its assessment of all information at that time. Readers are urged to consult the disclosure provided under the heading "Risk Factors" in each of Fortuna's and Roxgold's annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2020 which has been filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com (http://www.sedar.com) for further information regarding the risks and other factors applicable to the Arrangement.

Although Fortuna and Roxgold believe that the expectations conveyed by the Forward-looking Statements are reasonable based on information available at the date of preparation, no assurances can be given as to future results, levels of activity and achievements. Fortuna and Roxgold disclaim any obligation to update any Forward-looking Statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by law. There can be no assurance that these Forward-looking Statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, investors should not place undue reliance on Forward-looking Statements.
Not for distribution to the United States news wire services or for dissemination in the United States

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / Lithoquest Resources Inc. (TSXV:LDI) ("Lithoquest" or the "Company") today announced that it has closed the Company's non-brokered private placement, previously announced on May 31, 2021 and updated on June 18, 2021 (the "Offering"). The closing is subject to final acceptance of the TSX Venture Exchange.

Pursuant to the Offering, the Company has issued 18,095,000 units (the "Units") at a price of $0.10 per Unit and 5,480,000 flow-through shares of the Company (the "FT Shares") for aggregate gross proceeds of $2,494,500. Each Unit consists of one common share of the Company and one-half warrant (a "Warrant") each whole Warrant entitling the holder thereof to acquire an additional common share (the "Warrant Share") of the Company at an exercise price of $0.15 per Warrant Share for a period of 24 months from the date of issuance.

In connection with the closing of the Offering, Lithoquest has paid aggregate cash finders' fees of $60,075 to arm's length finders, representing 6% of the proceeds raised from subscriptions by certain placees introduced by the finders. The Company has issued to the finders share purchase warrants (the "Finder's Warrants") entitling the purchase of an aggregate 795,300 common shares, on the same terms as the Warrants.

The shares acquired by the placees under the Offering, and any shares which may be acquired upon the exercise of the Warrants and the Finder's Warrants, are subject to a hold period until October 31, 2021, in accordance with applicable Canadian securities legislation.

The proceeds from the Offering will be used to advance the Company's gold and base metal properties in northern Ontario and for general working capital purposes.

Four related parties (as such term is defined in Multilateral Instrument 61-101 -Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101")) participated in the Offering and acquired an aggregate of 250,000 Units and 400,000 FT Shares. This portion of the Offering constituted a related party transaction for the purposes of TSX Venture Exchange Policy 5.9 and MI 61-101. The Company relied on Section 5.5(a) of MI 61-101 for an exemption from the formal valuation requirement and Section 5.7(1)(a) of MI 61-101 for an exemption from the minority shareholder approval requirement of MI 61-101 as the fair market value of the transaction insofar as the transaction involved interested parties did not exceed 25% of the Company's market capitalization.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) has reviewed or accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD LOOKING INFORMATION

This news release includes certain information that may constitute "forward-looking information" under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, completion of the Offering. Forward-looking information is 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 information, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange of the Offering and the ability of the Company to locate suitable purchasers for the Offering. 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. 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, except as required by law.

For further information, please contact:

Lithoquest Resources Inc.

+1 (604) 506-2804

info@lithoquest.com

SOURCE: Lithoquest Resources Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/654014/Lithoquest-Resources-Closes-Non-Brokered-Private-Placement
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / NV Gold Corporation (TSXV:NVX)(OTCQB:NVGLF)(FSE:8NV) ("NV Gold" or the "Company") announces that, after five years of service to NV Gold Corporation, with the last two as CEO, Mr. Peter A. Ball has resigned from his positions as President and CEO and a Director of NV Gold to pursue new opportunities.

During his time with the Company, Peter has overseen and been part of many changes. Under his leadership, our exploration portfolio has grown and new programs have been instituted.

"We are grateful for Mr. Ball's efforts on behalf of NV Gold and wish him great success in all his ventures going forward", said John Watson, Chairman and CEO of the Company. "I continue to serve as Chairman of the Board and have been asked to serve as Interim CEO as our Board of Directors begins the process of permanently filling the position. Mr. Ball has built a solid team at NVX, and I have great confidence in our staff's ability to make this a smooth transition and look forward to a successful exploration program in 2021."

Mr. Ball has agreed to continue as an advisor to the Company to assist with the transition in CEO to John Watson.

About NV Gold Corporation

NV Gold (TSXV:NVX)(OTCQB:NVGLF)(FSE:8NV) is a well-financed exploration company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Reno, Nevada and is focused on delivering value through mineral discoveries in Nevada, USA. Leveraging its expansive property portfolio, its highly experienced in-house technical team, and its extensive geological data library, 2021 will be NV Gold's busiest exploration year in its corporate history.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

John Watson

Chairman & CEO

For further information, visit the Company's website at www.nvgoldcorp.com or contact:

John Watson, Chairman & CEO

Phone: 1-303-674-9400

Email: john@watson-assoc.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE: NV Gold Corporation

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653986/NV-Gold-Appoints-John-Watson-as-CEO
SINGAPORE / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw, founder of GCG Asia has been awarded the Innovative Asian Fintech Companies Business Award for 2021.

"GCG Asia is rewriting the history of humanity right now, with an entrepreneurial journey at the speed of light and a high degree of creativity. They are pushing the limits of what we believed was possible, and they represent a success model that improves the world," said Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw, founder and CEO of GCG Asia.

Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw of GCG Asia accepted the award yesterday evening and stated, "We are celebrating our 5th anniversary this year. Over the years, we have experienced innumerable highs, found innovative solutions to various difficulties, and have always stayed loyal to our goal." GCG Asia's Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw also added, "This award not only feeds our entrepreneurial spirit, but it also encourages future generations to take chances and pursue their own dreams."

The Innovative Asian Fintech Companies Business Award is awarded to entrepreneurs who have demonstrated a strong entrepreneurial spirit and whose activities have contributed significantly to the development and expansion of fintech businesses in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia. The Innovative Asian Fintech Companies Committee selected Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw of GCG Asia for this prestigious award.

Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw started GCG Asia in 2016. Since then GCG Asia has been publishing its highly regarded financial technology magazines across South East Asia. The GCG Asia titles, both online and in print, are targeted towards financial technology entrepreneurs and business owners in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand. The weekly publications were picked up quickly and received reception from e-commerce industries in Asia for its informative and transparent nature.

Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw added: "GCG Asia magazine is the world's most influential independent voice in Financial Technology. I'm proud that GCG Asia has diversified and currently spreads our distinctive voice throughout all of its digital media, maintaining and engaging a growing community of fintech enthusiasts in Asia and around the world, covering all elements of financial technology in print and digital publications."

GCG Asia is a leading provider of Financial Technology digital publications, and latest news and updates. Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw's GCG Asia is now a diversified group encompassing media publishing, a start-up incubator and a fintech fund, GCG 2020. "GCG Asia is dedicated to helping Asian communities create a better, more inventive future. As we expand we will always be focussed on this mission, " said Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw.

"We've always pushed ourselves to be a digital pioneer in our industry as a tiny independent publisher. We also provide our readers with the option to attend live and virtual events, as well as listen to podcasts with some of the greatest names in Financial Technology," said GCG Asia founder Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw.

GCG Founder Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw also added: "Financial Technology is becoming increasingly popular. We are on track to accumulate 100 million monthly views across our online platforms."

In Asia, the Innovative Asian Fintech Companies has been awarding the IAFC Business Award since 2010. The prize was first given out in Singapore in 2010. The award has been known as the IAFC Business Award since 2010, and it is given in the South East Asian region. IAFC had the honor of meeting and working with some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs during the year. This has provided a thorough understanding of this dynamic population, which is characterized by similar behavior patterns and attitudes regardless of sector or background.

Dato Sri Dr Darren Yaw is now eligible for consideration for the Entrepreneur of The Year 2021 ASEAN program. At the Entrepreneur of The Year 2021 ASEAN Awards ceremony in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, originally scheduled to take place in January, 2022, award winners in many categories, as well as the winner of the Entrepreneur of The Year 2021 ASEAN Award, will be revealed.

Company Information

GCG Asia is a leading provider of Financial Technology training resources, digital publications, and news.

For more information

Visit cgexperience

Address: Wan Chai, Hong Kong, SAR

Email: cgexperience@emailme.cloud

SOURCE: GCG Asia

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/654011/GCG-Asias-Dato-Sri-Dr-Darren-Yaw-awarded-the-IAFC-Business-Award-2021
KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / The Grassroots Centre for Clean Corporate Governance Asia (GCG Asia) announced a GCG Asia Scam Index Malaysia in a tie-up with data company Guardian Capital Analytics to track the prevalence of fraud in the country.

GCG Asia's CEO Julie Chen said that GCG Asia's Malaysia Scam Index is part of its mission to combat fraud and scams by providing the public with information and tools that can be used to track and assess the seriousness of the problem in Malaysia. "The Grassroots Centre Grassroots Centre for Clean Corporate Governance Asia (GCG Asia) combats scams and fraud through its advocacy work on behalf of the Malaysian public. The GCG Asia Malaysia Scam Index will be a tool towards fighting this very serious crime that is plaguing the country," said GCG Asia's CEO Julie Chen in an official announcement.

Data company Guardian Capital Analytics, a data and artificial intelligence company that uses proprietary algorithms to extract trends and patterns in the social environment, said that it was proud to use its expertise towards public service. "We are excited about this collaboration with an organisation that has such a noble cause. Working on GCG Asia's Malaysia Scam Index will offer a tool for policy makers, the public and other stakeholders to better examine, analyse and devise ways to fight fraud," said Guardian Capital Analytics CEO Mark Lucas.

Malaysia has seen an enormous rise in various scams such as so-called boiler room scams, investment scams, Macau scams, money games and Ponzi schemes said GCG Asia's CEO Julie Chen. "According to GCG Asia's review, scams in Malaysia have always been a concern, but with the acceleration of technology available to scammers, scams are now more prevalent than ever as can be seen by latest news reports and daily headlines. Economic conditions are making scammers more desperate which is exacerbating the problem. Hence, GCG Asia's Malaysia Scam Index is timely," explained CEO Julie Chen.

She added that GCG Asia counterparts in Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia and other countries across South-East Asia and in Japan are also experiencing increases in reports of scams and fraud. "Therefore, we hope that GCG Asia's Malaysia Scam Index can be replicated to other countries in the region in order to expand the reach of the tool," said GCG Asia CEO Julie Chen.

GCG Asia's scams in Malaysia latest research emphasises how these scams operate and the significance of educating customers, especially those who may be vulnerable to a particular scam. "Our research explains how these scams operate and emphasizes the necessity of educating older persons and others who may be vulnerable to them. Anyone could fall victim to these con artists because they are so skilled at what they do,' said GCG Asia Malaysia Scam Index Research Lead Michael Raj.

Julie Chen also explained that Malaysia is prone to scams in forex brokerages and cautioned traders and investors to be alert and on the lookout for potential fraud. " Millions of ringgit is lost each year in Malaysia to scams. We advise the public to always conduct due diligence in any personal or business arrangement. For example, investors should check if your broker is legitimate. Scammers are out to exploit any loopholes, so before trading, be alert for scams," said GCG Asia's Malaysia Scam Research Lead Index Michael Raj.

Since 2019, Grassroots Centre for Clean Corporate Governance Asia (GCG Asia) has mooted the idea of developing an algorithm for tracking an index for fraud but it wasn't until Guardian Capital Analytics came on board that the GCG Asia Malaysia Scam Index seemed possible. With pooled resources the two organisations began actively collaborating on the project at the end of 2020. The results of the GCG Asia Malaysia Scam Index is due to be unveiled in latter half of 2021, said GCG Asia's Malaysia Scam Research Lead Index Michael Raj.

Company Information

Grassroots Centre for Clean Corporate Governance Asia (GCG Asia) is a Malaysia-based non-governmental organization advocating for the public on financial fraud.

For more information:

Website: Rev Access

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Email: ?revaccess@emailme.cloud

SOURCE: Grassroots Centre for Clean Corporates Asia (GCG Asia)

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/654012/Grassroots-Centre-for-Clean-Corporates-Asia-GCG-Asia-Commissions-Scam-Index-in-Malaysia-to-Track-the-Prevalence-of-Fraud
Cryptology Asset Group PLC Sliema/Malta

To the Shareholders of Cryptology Asset Group PLC NOTICE TO CONVENE CRYPTOLOGY ASSET GROUP PLC'S

EXTRAORDINARY GENERAL MEETING (EGM) OF SHAREHOLDERS

Notice to shareholders is hereby being given in terms of Articles 164 and 165 of the Articles of Association of an Extraordinary General Meeting ('EGM') of Cryptology Asset Group PLC (C-84355), to be held at: 66/67, Beatrice, Amery Street, Sliema SLM 1707 Malta on Tuesday 20th day of July 2021 at 11:00am (CET). In order to limit the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic, the Company's Board of Directors has decided to adopt the exceptional meeting procedure provided for in the Companies Act (Public Companies - Annual General Meetings) Regulations, 2020, (specifically Article 5) which temporarily deviates from some of the provisions of the Maltese Companies Act, Cap. 386 of the Laws of Malta. The Board of Directors has decided to take the measures permitted by the temporary legislation in order to hold the General Meeting in a predicable manner whilst also taking into account the health and safety of its shareholders, personnel and other stakeholders. It will not be possible to participate in the meeting 'in person', and no video link to the meeting venue will be provided. Only the Company's Board of Directors, CFO & Company Secretary will be present at the meeting venue. The Company's shareholders can participate in the meeting and exercise their rights as per instructions for shareholders as provided below in Section 3(Instructions for the Participants in the General Meeting of the Shareholders).

Wednesday, 23rd day of June 2021 By order of the Board of Directors

1. Matters on the Agenda of the General Meeting of the Shareholders. At the General Meeting of the Shareholders, the following matters will be considered: I. Opening of the Meeting. II. Calling the Meeting to Order. III. Nomination and Appointment of a Chairman. Mr. Patrick Lowry (CEO) will serve as Chairperson of the General Meeting. If Mr. Lowry is prevented from serving as the chairperson for a weighty reason, the Board of Directors will appoint a person they deem most suitable to serve as the Chairperson. IV. Confirmation of Quorum (not less than 51% of the members holding an equivalent paid-up voting share capital of the company). V. Recording the Attendance at the Meeting and Adoption of the List of Votes. Shareholders who have voted in advance within the advance voting period and who are entitled to participate in the General Meeting will be deemed shareholders participating in the meeting. VI. Election of one or two persons to verify the minutes. During the Meeting, a person will be chosen to scrutinise the minutes. VII. Extraordinary Resolution - Waiver of Notice Period from 21 days to 14 days. The Board of Directors proposes that Pursuant to Clause 60(i) of the Articles of Association, authorisation will be granted to reduce the notice period from twenty-one (21) days' to fourteen (14) days' having obtained approval by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the shares having voting rights or the issued share capital represented at the meeting. The notice shall be exclusive of the day on which it is served or deemed to be served and of the day for which it was given. VIII. Extraordinary Resolution - Share Capital Alteration. As per Articles 64, the Board of Directors proposes a 'share-split' of 20:1, meaning every single share of stock would be split into twenty shares with a nominal value of 0.05 EUR per share. The purpose and scope of this 'share split' is to lower the price per share and make Cryptology Asset Group Ltd.'s equity more liquid to trade. Pursuant to Article 51(c) of the Company's Articles of Association, it is being proposed: 'that the Authorised share capital of the Company be and is hereby re-denominated from 3,200,000 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 1 per share ('the current nominal value') into 64,000,000 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 0.05 per share ('the new nominal value'). 'that the Issued Share Capital of the Company be and is hereby re-denominated from 2,853,375 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 1 per share ('the current nominal value') into 57,067,500 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 0.05 per share' ('the new nominal value'). Subject to the passing of the above, that the Memorandum and Article of Association of the Company be amended such that Clause 7 of the Memorandum shall read as follows: 7. Share Capital. a. Authorised. The Authorised share capital of the Company is three million and two hundred thousand euros (EUR 3,200,000) divided into sixty-four million (64,000,000) Ordinary Shares having a nominal value of EUR 0.05 each. b. Issued The Issued Share Capital of the Company is two million and eight hundred and fifty-three thousand and three-hundred and seventy-five euros (EUR 2,853,375) divided into fifty-seven million and sixty-seven thousand and five hundred (57,067,500) Ordinary Shares having a nominal value of 0.05 EUR each, being 100% paid-up by the undemoted: Shareholder/s Number of Ordinary Shares MALTA STOCK EXCHANGE PLC

REGISTRATION NO: C 42525

AS CUSTODIAN OF CLEARSTREAM

BANKING AG - CUSTOMERS ACCOUNT

GARRISON CHAPEL,

CASTILLE PLACE,

VALLETTA VLT 1063, MALTA 53,956,000 STEPHEN EDWARD RUBENS

HOLDER OF BRITISH PASSPORT

NUMBER: 526377164

9, HEATH CLOSE,

HAMPSTEAD WAY,

LONDON NW117DS,

UNITED KINGDOM 80,000 N-CONCERTA LLC

AMERICAN COMPANY REGISTRATION

NUMBER: 6033086

251,

LITTLE FALLS DRIVE,

WILMINGTON, NEW CASTLE,

DELAWARE,

UNITED STATES 134,000 MARC THOMAS FORSTER

HOLDER OF SWISS PASSPORT

NUMBER: X2957024

16633,

VENTURA BOULEVARD,

ENRICO CA91434,

UNITED STATES 40,000 WEINTRAUB AS

NORWEGIAN COMPANY NUMBER:

988898759

C/O KIPPERBERG BOGAFJELLBAKKEN 157,

4324 SANDNES,

SANDNES 1102,

NORWAY 340,000 LAURENTIUS HARRER

HOLDER OF AMERICAN PASSPORT

NUMBER: 561318636

2127, LINDEN AVENUE,

VENICE, CALIFORNIA,

CA 90291, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 50,000 JAMES BREWSTER WEINSTOCK

HOLDER OF AMERICAN PASSPORT

NUMBER: 566529303

5416 SHERIER PL NW,

WASHINGTON, DC 20016,

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 50,000 KARL-PHILLIP SCHLOSSSTEIN

HOLDER OF GERMAN PASSPORT

NUMBER: C7LZG7GHK

UNIT S302, 45 TANAGER WAY,

WEST BAY, GRAND CAYMAN,

CAYMAN ISLANDS 50,000 SMALL & MID CAP INVESTMENTBANK AG

REGISTRATION NUMBER: HRB 193714

BARER STRASSE, 7,

MUNICH 80333,

GERMANY 2,367,500 IX. Any other matters arising. X. Closing of the Meeting.

Wednesday, 23rd day of June 2021 By Order of the Board of Directors



Dr. Michael Calleja

Company Secretary

2. MEETING MATERIALS. The minutes of the meeting will be made available on Cryptology Asset Group PLC's website by not later than the 27th day of July 2021 under the section Investor Relations. 3. INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE GENERAL MEETING OF SHAREHOLDERS. A shareholder may participate in the General Meeting and exercise his/her rights at the meeting only voting in advance in accordance with the instructions provided below (as per Legal Notice 288 of 2020). A. Record Date. For shareholders, their shares are maintained in a collective securities account via the Malta Stock Exchange Clearstream: Only those shareholders are entitled to exercise their voting rights who have sent the proxy form (above) by submitting proof of their shareholding. Proof of entitlement to participate in the General Meeting and to exercise voting rights must be provided in the form of a written proof of share ownership of an institution admitted to the custody of securities; this proof must be in German or English. The evidence must refer to the beginning of the 14th day prior to the Annual General Meeting, i.e. 5th day of July 2021 (CEST) ("record date"). The Company is entitled to demand further suitable evidence in case of doubt as to the correctness or authenticity of the evidence. If this proof is not provided or not provided in a proper form, the Company may reject the shareholder. For shareholders, whose shares are not maintained in a collective securities account via the Malta Stock Exchange Clearstream: These shareholders are entitled to exercise their voting rights, who are registered at the 5th day of July 2021 0.00 a.m. (CEST) in the company register. B. Participation and voting by Members. A shareholder may participate and vote at the meeting by submitting a proxy form to the company. Proxy templates are herein annexed & marked Annex 'A'. In virtue of Article 5(2)(b) of Legal Notice 288 of 2020, shareholders shall only be able to appoint the Chairman of the meeting as their proxy and may indicate on the form of proxy how the Chairman as such proxy is to vote on each resolution put to the meeting. In terms of Clause 96 of the Articles of Association, a Member may participate by proxy by completing and signing the proxy form dispatched to all Members together with this notice and sending same to the Office of the Company Secretary not less than 24 hours before the time appointed for the meeting. If a shareholder participates in the General Meeting of Shareholders by means of several proxy representatives representing the shareholder with shares in different securities accounts, the shares by which each proxy representative represents the shareholder must be identified in connection with the registration for the General Meeting of Shareholders. A proxy form may be sent to the Company either: (a) by mail to The Company Secretary (Registered Office Address); or

(b) by electronic means to: calleja@drwerner.com In case of proxies sent by email to the email address above set out, the email should have attached thereto a copy of the relevant Proxy Form duly completed and signed by the shareholder or a duly authorised person on behalf of a corporate/institutional Member. C. Completing the Proxy Form A Member wishing to participate at the meeting by proxy is to complete all details required on the proxy form fully, clearly and accurately. This includes: (a) Nomination and Appointment of the Chairman as proxy to the meeting. (b) Indicating whether the Member wishes the proxy to vote as the appointed proxy wishes or whether the Member wishes to instruct the proxy how to vote. In either case a mark ought to be made in the appropriate box indicated in the proxy form. In the event that no indication is made it shall be deemed that the Member authorises the proxy to vote as the proxy wishes, unless the Member indicates how he/she wishes the shares held to be voted by inserting the number of shares or another appropriate mark against the relevant resolutions, in which case the proxy shall be deemed authorised to vote only as indicated by the Member in the proxy form; (c) Where a Member wishes to have his/her proxy vote in a particular manner then he/she should indicate his/her voting preference appropriately against each resolution. The procedure for voting is established and governed in terms of Clause E of this Notice accordingly. Any resolution remaining unmarked on the ballot paper will be treated as authorizing the appointed proxy to vote as he/she wishes. D. Participation and Voting. A Member wishing to participate simply by having their votes taken into account at the meeting should fill in the proxy form in favour of the Chairman of the meeting and then proceed to instruct the Chairman how to vote on each resolution to be taken at the meeting by completing the proxy form accordingly. E. Draft Resolutions and Documents The draft resolutions to be considered and voted upon at the meeting are included as an integral part of this notice. The full unabridged text of any documents submitted to the meeting shall, unless dispatched to shareholders, be available at the registered office of the Company and on cryptology-ag.com. F. Right to ask questions. As per clause 5(2)(c) of Legal Notice 288 of 2020, sufficient time must be allowed for shareholders to ask questions which are pertinent and related to the items on the agenda of the meeting in advance, whether by electronic means or by letter addressed to the company. Such questions will be answered by the directors or by such person as the directors may delegate for that purpose. In this connection, all shareholders shall be allowed time to submit such questions via electronic format up to forty-eight (48) hours prior to the meeting. The company shall provide an answer to the questions on its website within forty-eight (48) hours from the termination of the meeting. Provided that the company may provide an overall answer to questions having the same content and that the company may take reasonable measures to ensure the identification of the shareholder or the proxy. To ensure efficient proceedings at the meeting the directors invite Members to submit in writing any questions related to the resolutions to be sent to the Company Secretary by mail to the Company Secretary on calleja@drwerner.com

by not later than 48 hours before the meeting. Whilst the Directors shall endeavour to reply to all questions that may be raised at the meeting only questions that shall have been submitted to them as aforesaid shall be entitled to a reply, provided that any questions raised for the first time at the meeting and to which the directors are not able to provide an immediate reply, shall, subsequent to the meeting be answered by the directors by posting a reply on the Company's website by not later than the 12th day of July 2021.

In Sliema on the 23rd day of June 2021 Cryptology Asset Group PLC



Board of Directors

ANNEX A - PROXY FORM 1 FORM OF PROXY VOTING PREFERENCES

As a Shareholder of Cryptology Asset Group PLC (C 84355), I hereby appoint the duly appointed Chairman of the AGM as my proxy to vote on my behalf, at the Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) and at any adjournment thereof:

Date _____________ Name of Shareholder ___________________________



Signature of Shareholder__________________________________________

FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES THE CHAIRMAN IS AUTHORISED TO VOTE AS HE DEEMS FIT [ ] THE CHAIRMAN WILL VOTE AS INDICATED IN THE HEREUNDER RESOLUTIONS PANEL [ ] PROXY FORM BY ELECTRONIC MEANS VOTING PREFERENCES

To be completed when sending Proxy Form by electronic means

Name of Shareholder___________________________________________



Signature of Shareholder_________________________________________



Telephone/Mobile Phone Number __________________________________



E-mail address _________________________________________________

A proxy form sent by electronic means is only valid upon confirmation by the Company Secretary.

EXTRAORDINARY RESOLUTION VOTING PREFERENCES FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN The Board of Directors proposes that Pursuant to Clause 60(i) of the Articles of Association, authorisation will be granted to reduce the notice period from twenty-one (21) days' to fourteen (14) days' having obtained approval by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the shares having voting rights or the issued share capital represented at the meeting. The notice shall be exclusive of the day on which it is served or deemed to be served and of the day for which it was given. [ ] [ ] [ ] EXTRAORDINARY RESOLUTION VOTING PREFERENCES FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN That the Authorised Share Capital of the Company be and is hereby re-denominated from 3,200,000 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 1 per share ('the current nominal value') into 64,000,000 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 0.05 per share ('the new nominal value'). [ ] [ ] [ ] That the Issued Share Capital of the Company be and is hereby re-denominated from 2,853,375 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 1 per share ('the current nominal value') into 57,067,500 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 0.05 per share' ('the new nominal value'). [ ] [ ] [ ] ANNEX B - PROXY FORM 2 Where a Member holds Shares for and on behalf of third parties, such Member is entitled to grant a proxy to each such third party or other persons designated by the third party, and the instrument appointing the proxies shall, to permit votes attaching to Shares to be cast differently than others, be in the following form or in a form as near thereto as circumstances permit: FORM OF PROXY VOTING PREFERENCES

As a Member holding Shares for and on behalf of third parties in Cryptology Asset Group PLC (C 84355), I hereby appoint the duly appointed Chairman of the AGM as my proxy to vote on my behalf, at the Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) and at any adjournment thereof:

Date _____________ Name of Shareholder ___________________________



Signature of Shareholder__________________________________________

FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES THE CHAIRMAN IS AUTHORISED TO VOTE AS HE DEEMS FIT [ ] THE CHAIRMAN WILL VOTE AS INDICATED IN THE HEREUNDER RESOLUTIONS PANEL [ ] PROXY FORM BY ELECTRONIC MEANS VOTING PREFERENCES

To be completed when sending Proxy Form by electronic means

Name of Shareholder____________________________________________



Signature of Shareholder_________________________________________



Telephone/Mobile Phone Number __________________________________



E-mail address _________________________________________________

A proxy form sent by electronic means is only valid upon confirmation by the Company Secretary.

EXTRAORDINARY RESOLUTION VOTING PREFERENCES FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN The Board of Directors proposes that Pursuant to Clause 60(i) of the Articles of Association, authorisation will be granted to reduce the notice period from twenty-one (21) days' to fourteen (14) days' having obtained approval by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the shares having voting rights or the issued share capital represented at the meeting. The notice shall be exclusive of the day on which it is served or deemed to be served and of the day for which it was given. [ ] [ ] [ ] EXTRAORDINARY RESOLUTION VOTING PREFERENCES FILL IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN That the Authorised Share Capital of the Company be and is hereby re-denominated from 3,200,000 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 1 per share ('the current nominal value') into 64,000,000 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 0.05 per share ('the new nominal value'). [ ] [ ] [ ] That the Issued Share Capital of the Company be and is hereby re-denominated from 2,853,375 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 1 per share ('the current nominal value') into 57,067,500 Ordinary Shares of a nominal value of EUR 0.05 per share' ('the new nominal value'). [ ] [ ] [ ]


PARIS (dpa-AFX) - European stocks are modestly higher on Friday as investors continue to bet on optimism about strong global economic recovery.



Data showing a bigger than expected addition of jobs in the U.S. in the month of June is aiding sentiment.



Markets are also weighing in developments on the delta variant spread and measures initiated in the European region to tighten curbs, delay relaxations and hasten vaccinations amidst comments from World Health Organization's Europe Chief that the decline in European Covid cases had come to an end.



The pan European Stoxx 600 is climbing up nearly 0.4%. The U.K.'s FTSE 100 is up 0.23%, Germany's DAX is rising 0.56% and France's CAC 40 is up 0.14%, while Switzerland's SMI is flat, having given up early gains.



In the UK market, Informa is gaining 3.2%. Anglo American Plc, Rolls-Royce Holdings, Entain, Evraz, Land Securities, Aveva Group, British Land, Taylor Wimpey, United Utilities, Smith (DS), Hikma Pharmaceuticals, Severn Trent and Royal Mail are up 1.2 to 2.5%.



In the German market, Deliver Hero is up more than 4%. Infineon Technologies, rebounding from recent losses, is gaining about 1.3%. Thyssenkrupp, Deutsche Post, Beiersdorf, Vonovia, Adidas, BASF and Continental are also up with notable gains.



Fresenius Medical Care shares are down by about 1.25%. HeidelbergCement, Bayer and Deutsche Bank are also weak, albeit with less pronounced losses.



In France, STMicroElectronics, Sodexo, Airbus Gruop, Atos, Michelin and Veolia are gaining 1.3 to 2.5%. Bank stocks Societe Generale and BNP Paribas are modestly lower.



In eurozone economic news, producer prices in Eurozone increased at a faster pace in May driven by a surge in energy cost, data from Eurostat showed.



The report said industrial producer prices were up 9.6% year-on-year, following a 7.6% rise in April. Economists had forecast an annual increase of 9.5%. On a monthly basis, producer prices climbed 1.3%, faster than April's 0.9% rise and economists' forecast of 1.2%.



Producer prices in the EU27 increased 1.4% on month in May, taking the annual growth to 9.6%.



Spain's unemployment logged its biggest fall on record in June, data from labor ministry showed. The number of registered unemployment decreased by 166,911 in June after falling 129,378 in May. This was the fourth consecutive decrease.



The U.S. Labor Department's report showed a continued reacceleration in the pace of U.S. job growth in the month of June. The report showed non-farm payroll employment spiked by 850,000 jobs in June after surging by an upwardly revised 583,000 jobs in May.



Economists had expected employment to jump by about 700,000 jobs compared to the addition of 559,000 jobs originally reported for the previous month.



Meanwhile, the Labor Department said the unemployment rate unexpectedly inched up to 5.9% in June from 5.8% in May. The unemployment rate was expected to edge down to 5.7%.



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FAIRFIELD (dpa-AFX) - Dominion Energy South Carolina or DESC, a subsidiary of Dominion Energy Inc. (D), together with the South Carolina Office of Regulatory Staff or ORS, said that it submitted a comprehensive settlement in the pending general electric rate case for approval by the Public Service Commission of South Carolina.



The settlement, which requires Commission approval, provide significant customer benefits: Starting September 1, typical residential customer monthly bills would increase by a net 1.46% driven in part by an acceleration of return of excess deferred income taxes.



It will initiate a stakeholder process to propose an electricity affordability program for low-income customers.



In addition, per the settlement agreement and contingent upon Commission approval, Dominion Energy South Carolina has agreed to commit up to $15 million in shareholder funds to forgive past due balances of more than 60 days, as of May 31, 2021. Customer credits would take place within 90 days of a final Commission order.



Dominion Energy South Carolina has agreed to allocate $15 million in shareholder funds to energy efficiency upgrades and critical health and safety repairs to customer homes, which will allow those homes to participate in money-saving efficiency programs.



Dominion Energy South Carolina has agreed to ouble the annual commitment to EnergyShare, the company's year-round assistance program, to $1.5 million in each of the next two years. This includes $500,000 for small business customers to participate in the program, a new benefit.



There is no change to Dominion Energy's existing financial guidance. Dominion Energy South Carolina has agreed to not file an electric general rate case prior to July 1, 2023.



The parties have proposed using the hearing currently scheduled for July 12, 2021, to provide the Commission opportunity to question the parties with regard to the settlement. A final decision by the Commission is expected later this summer.



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A 500 kW solar project by the side of the Bada Talab in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, uses 1,540 PV panels supported through cantilever frame. The installation runs 1.2 km.From pv magazine India The Indian State of Madhya Pradesh hosts a 500 kW solar project by the side of a lake without using any foundation for the PV panels. The project at Bada Talab in Bhopal uses cantilever (a beam anchored at only one end to vertical support) frame to support the panels on the retaining wall of the lake. The project uses 1,540 solar panels running for 1.2 km by the side of the lake. "The project illustrates that ...

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.
BOSTON and DURHAM, N.C., July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Parexel, a leading global clinical research organization (CRO) focused on development and delivery of innovative new therapies to advance patient health, today announced the execution of a definitive merger agreement under which it will be acquired by EQT IX fund ("EQT Private Equity") and the Private Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management ("Goldman Sachs") from Pamplona Capital Management LP for $8.5 billion.



"Over the past 18 months Parexel has continued its strong growth trajectory delivering on its patients-first focus and accelerating new therapies to patients in need around the world," said Parexel CEO Jamie Macdonald. "With the market for outsourced clinical research services anticipated to grow at a conservative CAGR of 8 to 9 percent, our focus remains on advancing and innovating Parexel to meet our customers' needs across the evolving clinical development landscape. EQT and Goldman Sachs support this vision and are committed to investing in Parexel and our people to capitalize on this exciting market opportunity and make a difference for patients."

Eric Liu, Partner and Global Co-Head of Healthcare at EQT, commented, "We have followed Parexel closely during the past few years and have been impressed by the company's development and trajectory. Our investment in Parexel reflects EQT's thematic focus on the life sciences industry, as well as our commitment to partner with businesses that have a positive impact on society. We are excited to partner with Goldman Sachs for the next stage of Parexel's journey, and to back Jamie, who prior to his role at Parexel had been a long-time senior advisor to EQT, as well as the rest of the Parexel team."

Jo Natauri, Partner and Global Head of Private Healthcare Investing within Goldman Sachs Asset Management, commented, "We are thrilled to partner with Jamie Macdonald, the entire Parexel management team and EQT to support Parexel, which has a distinguished track record of delivering clinical excellence to their large pharma and biotech customers globally. We believe this investment will accelerate Parexel's growth as it builds on the company's global footprint, strong operational capabilities and expansive healthcare network."

John Halsted, Managing Partner, Pamplona Capital Management, commented, "We're very proud of Parexel's progress over the past four years and the important work they do in helping bring exciting new therapies to patients in need. In particular, they successfully adapted the business to work in the midst of a global pandemic, and supported the development of therapies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic itself. We wish them every success in their next phase of growth."

"We have enjoyed our partnership with Pamplona, and thank them for their leadership and support in helping to transform Parexel under their ownership," concluded Mr. Macdonald. "Over the past months, our ability to pivot and adapt have fostered new ways of working while developing a strong track record of quality and delivery for customers around the world. As we continue in this new era of clinical development and focus aggressively on meeting our customers' needs for innovation in such areas as Real World Evidence, Decentralized Clinical Trials, Biostatistics and Data Management - and in key regions such as Asia/Pacific where we're among the largest and longest-tenured CROs - we're excited to be partnering with EQT and Goldman Sachs. We look forward to benefitting from their strong industry experience and to further accelerating Parexel as one of the world's leading and fastest-growing CROs."

The transaction is subject to customary conditions, including receipt of applicable regulatory approvals. Evercore acted as the financial advisor to Parexel, and Kirkland & Ellis LLP provided legal counsel in connection with the transaction. Goldman Sachs and Jefferies LLC acted as financial advisors to EQT Private Equity and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP provided legal counsel in connection with the transaction.

About Parexel

Parexel supports the development of innovative new medicines to improve the health of patients. We provide services to help life sciences and biopharmaceutical clients everywhere transform scientific discoveries into new treatments. From decentralized clinical trials to regulatory consulting services to leveraging real world insights, our therapeutic, technical, and functional ability is underpinned by a deep conviction in what we do. Parexel was named "Best Contract Research Organization" in December 2020 by an independent panel for Informa Pharma Intelligence. For more information, visit parexel.comand follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter , and Instagram.

About EQT

EQT 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. For more information, visit www.eqtgroup.comor follow EQT on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTubeand Instagram.

About Goldman Sachs Asset Management Private Equity

Bringing together traditional and alternative investments, Goldman Sachs Asset Management provides clients around the world with a dedicated partnership and focus on long-term performance. As the primary investing area within Goldman Sachs.

About Pamplona Capital Management

Pamplona Capital Management is a specialist investment manager established in 2005 that provides an alternative investment platform across private equity and other diversified strategies. With offices in New York, London, Madrid, and Malta, Pamplona manages over $11 billion in assets for a variety of clients including public pension funds, international wealth managers, multinational corporations, family offices, and funds of hedge funds. Pamplona invests long-term capital across the capital structure of its portfolio companies in both public and private market situations.

CONTACTS

For Parexel:

Lori Dorer

Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications

+1 513 496 8121

Lindsay LeCain

Real Chemistry

+ 1 508 259 9521

For EQT:

Daniel Yunger, Kekst CNC, + 1 917 574 8582

EQT Press Office, press@eqtpartners.com, +46 8 506 55 334

For Goldman Sachs:

Leslie Shribman

+1 212 902 5400

For Pamplona Capital Management:

Ed Orlebar, TB Cardew

ed.orlebar@tbcardew.com

+44 (0)7738724630
QINGDAO, China, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TUV Rheinland Greater China (TUV Rheinland) granted the ETSI EN 303 645 (IoT) product cybersecurity and privacy protection standard certification to VIDAA 72671 platform smart TV of Hisense Visual Technology Co., Ltd on June 25th, 2021. Hisense became the world's first TV brand to receive the certificate. Dr Chen Weikang, Vice President of Business Stream Industrial Services & Cybersecurity at TUV Rheinland Greater China and Senior Engineer; Zhao Bin, General Manager of TUV Rheinland Greater China Industrial Services & Cybersecurity; Yu Zhitao, Hisense Group Holdings Co., Ltd. Vice President and Liu Yong, Assistant Vice President of Hisense International and other members attended the Strategy Cooperation Agreement Signing Ceremony.

"TUV Rheinland and Hisense have always been tacit partners in the field of cybersecurity and privacy protection. By granting TUV Rheinland's worlds' first ETSI EN 303 645 certificate demonstrates both parties' unremitting pursuit for technology breakthrough and higher quality standards," said Dr Chen.

In June 2020, The European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) with relevant product manufacturers, academia and governments, officially released the new standard ETSI EN 303 645, which regulates the cybersecurity baseline requirements for consumer IoT products such as user privacy protection, primary network attacks prevention and so on. ETSI EN 202 645 Standard provides a practical evaluation method to limit cybercriminals from controlling global devices, launching DDoS attacks, mining cryptocurrency, or peeping at users. It also reduces the risk of personal data leakage. The standard evaluates products from two aspects: cybersecurity provisions and data privacy protection provisions, focusing on technical control measures and organizational measures to combat cybersecurity defects and solve primary network attacks against cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

In this certification, TUV Rheinland evaluated Hisense's product performance according to the cybersecurity regulations and privacy protection requirements of ETSI EN 303 645 standards. In addition, TUV Rheinland has carried out a comprehensive evaluation of the product utilizing a comprehensive design evaluation audit and security-related verification. The European market has always been an essential part of Hisense's globalization strategy. As the official sponsor of EURO 2016 and EURO 2020, Hisense understands the needs of the European market and consumers and always committed to improving product privacy protection and data security in the European market through technology research and development, implementation of localization strategies and sponsoring the top sporting event. As the world's leading TV brand, Hisense will focus on research and development investment and pay attention to data protection and finally become the most reliable brand in the world!

Media Contact:

Lori Luo (Ogilvy PR Team)

Tel: +86-135-1278-4739

Email: lori.luo@ogilvy.com / HisenseGlobal@ogilvy.com

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NEW YORK CITY (dpa-AFX) - EQT IX fund and the Private Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management have agreed to acquire Parexel, a clinical research organization from Pamplona Capital Management, for an enterprise value of $8.5 billion. Parexel was founded in 1982 and is co-headquartered in Durham, NC and Newton, MA, USA. The Company has significant expertise across the drug development and commercialization continuum, offering a comprehensive suite of outsourced clinical research services, as well as regulatory, market access, and strategy consulting services. Parexel employs more than 17,000 people and conducts clinical trials in more than 95 different countries. The transaction is subject to customary conditions, including receipt of applicable regulatory approvals. 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.
UK MORTGAGES LIMITED

(a closed-ended investment company incorporated with limited liability under the laws of

Guernsey with registered number 60440)

LEI: 549300388LT7VTHCIT59

Change in ownership of Portfolio Manager

The Board of UK Mortgages Limited ("the Company") are pleased to provide information about a transaction (of which the Company has been notified), in respect of the ownership of the Portfolio Manager - TwentyFour Asset Management, which manages the assets of the Company.

In the spring of 2015, the partners of TwentyFour Asset Management (TwentyFour) sold a 60% stake in its business to Vontobel Asset Management (Vontobel), the purpose of which, the Company understands, was to help bring the products of TwentyFour Asset Management to a global buyer base. The Company was notified at the time that it was the intention of Vontobel to acquire the remaining 40% stake in TwentyFour in two tranches in 2021 and 2023.

We understand that the parties agreed to bring this transaction forward, and the Company has been notified that the entire sale was completed in a single transfer on 30 June 2021.

The Board of the Company are supportive of this change in ownership, which was due to take effect in 2023, being accelerated and taking effect in 2021.

The Company has been assured that TwentyFour will remain operationally independent and will continue to service its clients from offices in London and New York. The Company has been informed that the senior management team and portfolio management teams at TwentyFour remain unchanged, and long term incentive plans for key people are in place. The Company understands that both parties were of the view, that given the success of the relationship, bringing the transaction forward would give clients, such as the Company, clarity and would ensure focus remained on delivering outstanding performance and client service for the long term.

Enquiries:

Northern Trust International Fund Administration Services (Guernsey) Limited

Company Secretary

Tel: 01481 745001
TWENTYFOUR SELECT MONTHLY INCOME FUND LIMITED

(a non-cellular company limited by shares incorporated in the Island of Guernsey under the Companies (Guernsey) Law 2008, as amended, with registered number 57985 and registered as a Registered Closed-ended Collective Investment Scheme with the Guernsey Financial Services Commission. Legal entity identifier: 549300P9Q5O2B3RDNF78)



Change in ownership of Portfolio Manager

The Board of TwentyFour Select Monthly Income Fund Limited ("the Company") are pleased to provide information about a transaction (of which the Company has been notified), in respect of the ownership of the Portfolio Manager - TwentyFour Asset Management, which manages the assets of the Company.

In the spring of 2015, the partners of TwentyFour Asset Management (TwentyFour) sold a 60% stake in its business to Vontobel Asset Management (Vontobel), the purpose of which, the Company understands, was to help bring the products of TwentyFour Asset Management to a global buyer base. The Company was notified at the time that it was the intention of Vontobel to acquire the remaining 40% stake in TwentyFour in two tranches in 2021 and 2023.

We understand that the parties agreed to bring this transaction forward, and the Company has been notified that the entire sale was completed in a single transfer on 30 June 2021.

The Board of the Company are supportive of this change in ownership, which was due to take effect in 2023, being accelerated and taking effect in 2021.

The Company has been assured that TwentyFour will remain operationally independent and will continue to service its clients from offices in London and New York. The Company has been informed that the senior management team and portfolio management teams at TwentyFour remain unchanged, and long term incentive plans for key people are in place. The Company understands that both parties were of the view, that given the success of the relationship, bringing the transaction forward would give clients, such as the Company, clarity and would ensure focus remained on delivering outstanding performance and client service for the long term.



For further information, please contact:



Numis Securities Limited:

Nathan Brown +44 (0)20 7260 1000

Hugh Jonathan



TwentyFour Select Monthly Income Fund Limited:

John Magrath +44 (0)20 7015 8900

Alistair Wilson


The photovoltaic systems installed in Germany produced almost eight terawatt-hours of solar power in June alone. The previous record had been set in June 2019. Solar covered around 20.6 percent of the country's electricity demand last month.From pv magazine Germany All PV systems connected to the grid in Germany generated around 7.99 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in June alone, setting a new record for solar power generation. According to the Energy Charts published by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunofer ISE), the previous record had been set in June 2020 with 7.3 ...

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.
DGAP-News: Steinhoff International Holdings N.V. / Key word(s): Miscellaneous

Steinhoff International Holdings N.V.: UPDATE ON SECTION 45 APPLICATION



02.07.2021 / 17:20

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.





STEINHOFF INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS N.V. - UPDATE ON TREVO'S SECTION 45 APPLICATION

Steinhoff International Holdings N.V. ("SIHNV" or the "Company", together with its subsidiaries, "Steinhoff" or the "Steinhoff Group") provides the following update.

As described in the Company's announcement on 16 February 2021, Trevo Capital Ltd ("Trevo") brought an application in the Western Cape High Court seeking a declaratory Order that, amongst other things, the Steinhoff International Holdings Proprietary Limited ("SIHPL") contingent payment undertaking between SIHPL and Global Loan Agency Services Limited dated 12 August 2019 (the "SIHPL CPU"), is void pursuant to section 45 of the South African Companies Act. Hamilton B.V. and Hamilton 2 B.V. also joined the application as the second and third applicants respectively.

Today the Court released its judgment granting an order declaring the SIHPL CPU and SIHPL's board resolution authorising entry into the SIHPL CPU are void in terms of section 45 of the South African Companies Act.

SIHPL and the Company are considering the implications of the judgment, including for SIHPL's proposed section 155 proposal, and will provide an update in due course.

The Company has a primary listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and a secondary listing on the JSE Limited.

Stellenbosch, South Africa

2 July 2021
LIMASSOL, Cyprus, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- International financial services provider Orbex has been awarded the "Decade of Excellence" title by Global Banking & Finance Review Magazine.

The broker took home the category for both the European and MENA regions.

The established magazine is renowned for providing members of the financial sector with up-to-date industry news, in-depth information and reviews.

The award ceremony comes as part of the magazine's annual tradition to recognize the industry's finest financial institutions and acknowledge their exceptional service.

"To receive this award in tandem with our 10th anniversary is a great honor. It not only commemorates the legacy we have worked so hard to achieve as a company but validates our status as a reliable and respected broker among the best within the financial community," said Managing Director, Mohammed Yaghi.

This award comes after three consecutive "Best Forex Broker" titles Orbex has received in the last 3 years, one of which was obtained at the Global Banking & Finance Review awards last year.

Orbex has undergone a significant revamp of its services as of late. The company offers highly competitive trading conditions including spreads as low as zero, negative balance protection and speedy execution of an average of 0.03 seconds per trading order. Orbex has also recently added 200 more of the hottest stock CFDs to its asset repertoire.

"The world has changed a lot over the last year and a half, but this award is proof that with history and strong values comes resilience and excellence. We thank Global Banking & Finance Review for acknowledging the work we put into serving our traders responsibly. And to our clients we say: we will continue to put our ethics and our dedication to their success first, so that despite all the uncertainty in the world, they know that they can place their trust in us," Yaghi added.

About Orbex

Orbex Limited is an award-winning global forex broker, fully licensed and regulated by CySEC. Headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus, Orbex specializes in the provision of access to the world's largest and most liquid financial markets.

Orbex Global Limited is fully licensed and regulated by FSC Mauritius and headquartered in Ebene, Mauritius.

The companies offer multiple asset trading including forex, indices, commodities and metals. With a focus on research, analysis and enhanced security of client funds, Orbex upholds a reputation of seasoned expertise within the industry.

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CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - The U.S. dollar fell against its major counterparts in the European session on Friday, as an unexpected rise in the nation's jobless rate for June reduced hopes for an early monetary policy tightening by the Federal Reserve.



Data from the Labor Department showed that non-farm payroll employment spiked by 850,000 jobs in June after surging by an upwardly revised 583,000 jobs in May.



Economists had expected employment to jump by about 700,000 jobs compared to the addition of 559,000 jobs originally reported for the previous month.



Meanwhile, the unemployment rate unexpectedly inched up to 5.9 percent in June from 5.8 percent in May. The unexpectedly rate was expected to edge down to 5.7 percent.



In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Patrick Harker said on Thursday that he favors slowing down the pace of its asset purchase program later this year.



Harker added that the tapering process is likely to start sooner rather than later.



The greenback showed mixed performance against its major peers in the Asian session. While it held steady against the euro, it rose against the yen and the franc. Versus the pound, it dropped.



The greenback dropped to 111.15 against the yen, after touching 111.66 in the Asian session, which was its strongest level since March 2020. The pair was worth 111.51 when it ended deals on Thursday. Should the greenback slides further, 110 is possibly seen as its next support level.



The greenback slipped to a 2-day low of 0.9223 against the franc, from nearly a 3-month high of 0.9275 seen at 3:45 am ET. At Thursday's close, the pair was valued at 0.9253. The greenback is likely to find support around the 0.90 area.



The greenback edged down to 1.1859 against the euro, after having risen to nearly a 3-month high of 1.1807 at 8:30 am ET. The pair had closed Thursday's deals at 1.1848. Next likely support for the greenback is seen around the 1.20 level.



Data from Eurostat showed that Eurozone producer prices increased at a faster pace in May driven by a surge in energy cost.



Industrial producer prices were up 9.6 percent year-on-year, following a 7.6 percent rise in April. Economists had forecast an annual increase of 9.5 percent.



The greenback eased to 1.3791 against the pound, following a 2-1/2-month high of 1.3731 it reached at 8:30 am ET. The pound-greenback pair had finished yesterday's trading session at 1.3757. Immediate support for the greenback is likely located around the 1.41 level.



The greenback declined to 1.2364 against the loonie, after an 11-day rise to 1.2450 at 3:00 am ET. The greenback was trading at 1.2429 per loonie at yesterday's close. The greenback is seen facing support around the 1.21 level.



The greenback pulled back from its prior 11-day high of 0.6947 against the kiwi, with the pair worth 0.7005. At yesterday's trading close, the pair was quoted at 0.6964. The greenback may locate support around the 0.72 level.



Survey data from ANZ showed that New Zealand consumer confidence remained broadly unchanged in June.



The consumer sentiment index came in at 114.1 in July versus 114.0 in the previous month.



The greenback was down at 0.7498 versus the aussie, reversing from nearly a 7-month high of 0.7444 set at 8:30 am ET. The aussie-greenback pair was worth 0.7468 at Thursday's close. Further fall in the greenback may find support around the 0.77 mark.



Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that Australia's new housing loan commitments increased to a new high in May.



New housing loan commitments rose 4.9 percent in May to a new high of A$32.6 billion, driven by investor housing loan commitments.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
Article L. 238-8-II of the French commercial Code and article 223-16 of the AMF (French Financial Markets Authority) general regulation

Regulatory News:

Veolia Environnement (Paris:VIE):

Corporate name of the issuer:

Veolia Environnement

21 rue La Boetie

75008 PARIS

FRANCE

(ISIN code: FR0000124141-VIE)

Information closing date Total number of shares

forming the share capital Total number of voting rights June 30, 2021 579,583,189 Total number of theoretical voting rights (1): 618,470,363 Total number of voting rights that may be exercised (2): 606,089,491

Inclusion in the Veolia Environnement Articles of Association of a clause requiring a reporting obligation of the declaration of crossing a shareholding threshold, complementary to the one relating to the thresholds provided by the French law and the regulations in force (article 8).

(1) Number of theoretical voting rights after taking into account the number of shares with double voting rights as of June 30, 2021 (38,887,174 shares) and the number of treasury shares held as of June 30, 2021 (12,380,872 shares).

(2) Number of voting rights that may be exercised number of theoretical voting rights (or total number of voting rights attached to shares) shares without voting rights (number of treasury shares held as of June 30, 2021).

Veolia Environnement

Siege social/head office: 21, rue La Boetie 75008 PARIS France

Adresse postale/Correspondence address: 30, rue Madeleine Vionnet 93300 AUBERVILLIERS France

tel.: +33 (0)1 85 57 70 00 Fax: +33 (0)1 71 75 10 45

www.veolia.com

A Public Limited Company (Societe Anonyme) with a share capital of 2,897,915,945 euros

403 210 032 RCS PARIS

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005333/en/

Contacts:

Veolia Environnement
Leader in the prime segment of the Parisian commercial real estate market, Societe Fonciere Lyonnaise stands out for the quality of its property portfolio, which is valued at 7.5 billion and is focused on the Central Business District of Paris (cloud.paris, Edouard VII, Washington Plaza, etc.), and for the quality of its client portfolio, which is composed of prestigious companies in the consulting, media, digital, luxury, finance and insurance sectors. As France's oldest property company, SFL demonstrates year after year an unwavering commitment to its strategy focused on creating a high value in use for users and, ultimately, substantial appraisal values for its properties.

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.
Getir's first acquisition will make the brand imminently operational in seven markets across Europe

ISTANBUL, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Getir, the pioneer of ultrafast grocery delivery, has today announced it has acquired the online grocery startup BLOK, further cementing its leadership position and making Getir operational in seven of the largest markets across Europe.

This is Getir's first M&A since the tech company was founded six years ago and marks the next chapter for the brand as they continue their global expansion. The addition of BLOK, founded by Vishal Verma, Hunab Moreno and Varun Kapoor in February 2021 and currently operating across several cities in Southern Europe including Madrid, Barcelona and Milan, will provide Getir immediate access into Spain and Italy, with Portugal soon to follow. Getir will also take on board BLOK's existing team of more than 120 ambitious employees.

Getir was founded in 2015 as the world's first ultrafast grocery delivery service in Istanbul and has grown rapidly in recent years. After their successful market entry in London in January 2021 and in Amsterdam in May 2021, Getir has continued its success story in Europe with recent launches in Berlin and Paris in June 2021.

Getir's most recent Series D funding round valued the company at more than 7.5 billion dollars, and following its rapid growth in Europe, Getir is gearing up to launch across several cities within the United States by the end of the year. The entrepreneurial team at BLOK will add to Getir's unrivaled experience, further establishing it as as the benchmark brand in the global on-demand delivery space.

"As a business we have always strived to work with the people, and to innovate what we do to make the market a stronger and more successful place. Bringing in BLOK, who have had a monumental year since launching in February, is an exciting opportunity and one that compliments our business approach and belief that speed is our currency. BLOK is our first acquisition and we wanted to make sure that whoever we brought onboard was the right cultural and ethical fit for Getir" says Nazim Salur, founder of Getir. "We strongly believe that BLOK, with their local knowledge and ongoing success in Spain and Italy, will allow us to become a part of these local communities and ensure best-in class service across Southern Europe."

"We are very excited to join hands with the pioneers of ultrafast delivery on our shared goal to lead the on-demand grocery market in Southern Europe. This acquisition allows us to leverage Getir's deep industry know-how, relationships and technology, while combining that with our world class team and execution capabilities to create a formidable leader in this part of the world. We've had a great response from all our launches in Spain and Italy and can't wait to double down on our efforts alongside Getir," also commented Vishal Verma, co-founder of BLOK.

A selection of images can be found and downloaded here.

About Getir

Getir is the ultrafast delivery pioneer. The tech company, based in Istanbul, has revolutionized last-mile delivery with its 10-minute grocery delivery proposition offering a selection of thousands of everyday items to its customers in minutes, 7 days a week, day and night. Getir is now operating in 33 cities in Turkey and has launched operations in the UK in January, in the Netherlands in May 2021, and Berlin and Paris in June 2021. Getir also has associated businesses available in Turkey - GetirFood, GetirMore, GetirWater and GetirLocals.

Getir is, first and foremost, a technology company, founded in 2015 by Nazim Salur (founder of BiTaksi, Turkey's leading taxi app), Serkan Borancili (founder of GittiGidiyor.com, an e-shopping marketplace) and Tuncay Tutek (former Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo executive in Europe & the Middle East).

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Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1526012/Getir_Logo.jpg
Prescription medicine sold online in 47 out of the 96 countries that have ePharmacies

Increase in visits represents a whooping 43% year-over-year growth rate

New research reveals significant opportunity for the Consumer Healthcare Industry to shift consumers' mindsets around OTC, Rx FMCG online sales

Consumers and patients globally have turned to digital platforms to purchase their prescription (Rx), non-prescription (OTC) medication and parapharmacy products with more than 2.7 billion online visits to leading ePharmacies across 96 countries in Q1'21. This represents an astonishing 43% growth rate compared to Q1'20. The details of this global research have been published online at epharmacydata.com

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210701005087/en/

ePharmacies Visits Growth in Q1 of 2021 Across the World (Graphic: Business Wire)

The study highlights the unique opportunity for Consumer Healthcare Retailers and Manufacturers to address the new habits of consumers and patients purchasing their prescription (Rx) and non-prescription (OTC) medicine and parapharmacy products online. Out of the 96 countries having at least 1 online pharmacy, consumers can order their prescription drugs onlinein 47 countries. The COVID-19 pandemic, wide adoption of electronic prescription,and themodernisation of last mile logistics have worked wonders towards allowing the sale of prescription drugs through eCommerce in the last yearsomething that was unimaginable 5 years ago in most of the 47 countries. For example, in April 2020 the State Duma of the Russian Federation legalized within days, after years of deliberation, the online sales of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, with the exception of narcotic and psychotropic drugs.

Online Pharmacies are one of the fastest rising eCommerce sectors in the world:

Amazon invested heavily in the industry with the acquisition of PillPack in 2020.

JD Health, a unit of JD.com Inc., increased its revenue, jumping to a +76% year-over-year growth to $1.34 billion, in the first six months of 2020.

Alibaba-backed Alibaba Health posted a +74% revenue increase over the March to September 2020 period.

While brick and mortar pharmacy chains such as CVS Walgreens in the USA surpass 100 million online visits and Boots averages 20 million online visits, pure ecommerce players such as 1mg in India, Consultaremedios in Brazil and Apteka in Russia have been growing extremely fast, with more than 20 million visits per month on average for the last 6 months, disrupting global markets with services such as doctors appointments booking, marketplace capabilities and online consultations.

The research was performed by Convert Group, the leading global ePharmacy Data firm that Consumer Healthcare FMCG Manufacturers such as Bayer, GSK, J&J, L'Oreal, Nestle, P&G, Perrigo, Pierre Fabre, Reckitt Benckiser, Roche, Unilever, and others trust for their data-driven strategy and sell-out insights on the eCommerce channel. Traffic data was drawn with permission from Similarweb, the global leading provider of digital market intelligence, for 3.478 Online Pharmacies in 96 Countries across all continents.

Key findings include:

47 in 96 countries allow the online ordering of prescription medicine (Rx)

88 in 96 countries allow the online ordering of non-prescription medicine (OTC). The only countries prohibiting it are Algeria, Cyprus, Greece, Morocco and Turkey.

North America was the region with the highest growth, with online visits increasing by +114%. Online visits increased by +80% in South America and +78% in Northern Africa

Sweden was the leading country with 18,001 visits to online pharmacies per 1,000 residents, followed by 13,208 visits per 1,000 residents in Bulgaria, 10,418 visits per 1,000 residents in Lithuania, and x 9,739 visits per 1,000 residents in the UK.

Brazil has the most tier1 online pharmacies (pharmacies with more than 5M visits per average month in Q1'21) with 6 total, followed by Russia with 4, and the U.S., UK and India with 3 each.

Panayotis Gezerlis, CEO of Convert Group, commented: "During the first lockdown we saw the majority of patients consumers across countries adopting online purchase habits from ePharmacies with tremendous speed. Many of the newcomers were also supported by ePrescription legislation being adopted across a number of countries, beside the current global eCommerce hype. In some countries more than 20% of Consumer Healthcare revenues are now originating online. We feel that, with the current growth trends, it is likely that by 2035 more than half of the total sales of Rx, OTC and parapharmacy products will be happening online, in the majority of global markets."

The results of the study are now published on the newly-launched epharmacydata.com and will be distributed at the 2021 Global ePharmacy Summit on September 22 24, 2021, hosted by Convert Group. epharmacydata.com will be updated monthly to offer the global Consumer Healthcare community insights and data on one of the fastest rising sectors of global eCommerce.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210701005087/en/

Contacts:

Labrini Bena

Marketing Communications Manager

+30 215 215 0532

E: lbena@convertgroup.com
NOT FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES OR FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / Medaro Mining Corp. (CSE:MEDA) ("Medaro" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it intends to complete a non-brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") of up to 3,076,923 units (each, a "Unit") of the Company at a price of $0.65 per Unit, for gross proceeds of up to $2,000,000. Each Unit will consist of one (1) common share and one half of one (1/2) common share purchase warrant, each warrant being exercisable at a price of $0.85 for twenty-four (24) months from issuance. The Company intends to use the proceeds of the Private Placement for exploration expenditures, working capital and to fund its recently announced joint venture to develop a new lithium extraction technology.

The Company may pay finder's fees to eligible parties who introduce subscribers to the Private Placement. All securities issued in connection with the Private Placement will be subject to a four-month and one-day statutory hold period in accordance with applicable securities laws.

The securities to be issued under the Private Placement have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements. 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 the securities in the United States or in any other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

About the Company

The Company is a lithium exploration company based in Vancouver, BC and holds options over the Superb Lake lithium property located in Thunder Bay, Ontario and the CYR South lithium property located in James Bay, Quebec.

For more information, investors should review the Company's filings that are available at www.sedar.com.

Forward Looking Statements

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements that are "forward looking information" 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, including statements regarding the Private Placement, the intended use of proceeds therefrom and the payment of finders' fees in connection therewith, are "forward-looking information". These forward-looking statements reflect the expectations or beliefs of management of the Company based on information currently available to it. 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.

Contact Information

Faizaan Lalani

Director and CFO

Telephone: 604 602 0001

Email: info@medaromining.com

SOURCE: Medaro Mining Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/654077/Medaro-Mining-Announces-Private-Placement
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2021 / Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. (TSX:NDM)(NYSE American:NAK) ("Northern Dynasty" or the "Company") announces the voting results from its 2021 Annual General Meeting held on June 30, 2021 in Vancouver, British Columbia (the "Meeting").

At the Meeting, a total of 211,163,589 common shares were voted, representing 41.17% of the votes attached to all outstanding common shares of record. Shareholders voted in favour of all items of business before the Meeting, which included the election of the following directors:

DIRECTOR % of Votes in Favour Desmond Balakrishnan 56.58% Steven Decker 97.60% Robert Dickinson 92.15% Gordon Keep 56.61% Wayne Kirk 97.46% David Laing 87.65% Christian Milau 97.61% Kenneth Pickering 87.99% Ronald Thiessen 97.94% Detailed voting results for the Meeting are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Detailed voting results for the Meeting are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

About Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd.

Northern Dynasty is a mineral exploration and development company based in Vancouver, Canada. Northern Dynasty's principal asset, owned through its wholly owned, Alaska-based U.S. subsidiary, the Pebble Limited Partnership ("PLP"), is a 100% interest in a contiguous block of 2,402 mineral claims in southwest Alaska, including the Pebble deposit, located 200 miles from Anchorage and 125 miles from Bristol Bay. PLP is the proponent of the Pebble Project, an initiative to develop one of the world's most important mineral resources.

For further details on Northern Dynasty and the Pebble Project, please visit the Company's website at www.northerndynasty.com or contact Investor services at (604) 684-6365 or within North America at 1-800-667-2114. Review Canadian public filings at www.sedar.com and U.S. public filings at www.sec.gov.

Trevor Thomas

Secretary

SOURCE: Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/654078/Northern-Dynasty-Reports-Annual-General-Meeting-Results
CPP Global is a leader in developing sustainable packaging solutions for the personal care, beauty, and other FMCG markets

Westfall Technik, Inc. ("Westfall", the "Company"), a global holding company that provides superior manufacturing solutions for the production of plastic parts in the medical, packaging, and consumer goods industries, announced today the acquisition of Carolina Precision Plastics, LLC (d/b/a "CPP Global" or "CPP") and its wholly owned subsidiaries.

The deal greatly strengthens Westfall's geographic footprint by adding its first plants in the southeastern United States, specifically in Mocksville and Asheboro, NC, as well in Kaiping, China, in Guangdong Province. "This provides a further supply-chain advantage to Westfall when it comes to serving key customers in both the packaging and healthcare sectors," said Merritt Williams, the firm's Chief Commercial Officer. "CPP's North Carolina plants are ideally located to serve the multitude of brand owners with a manufacturing presence in the surrounding area."

CPP, which runs about 100 injection molding machines in its three facilities, also brings expertise in vital secondary services, such as high-volume, fully automated assembly and sophisticated decorating capabilities. In total, CPP's three plants cover some 335,000 square feet of manufacturing space.

"This is just the next step in creating a truly world-class molding and tooling business that is built on a strong culture and unquestionable customer service," according to Westfall CEO and founder Brian Jones.

A leader in North America in the injection molding of heavy-wall PET jars, CPP also operates an innovative, collaborative design center and has a strong sustainability profile. The firm is a significant user of recycled resins and biopolymers in its products.

"This highly strategic, synergistic deal greatly strengthens our presence in the fast-moving consumer goods segment," said Mark Gomulka, Westfall's Chief Operating Officer. "CPP Global is a valued packaging supplier to several leading personal care and beauty companies, such as L'Oreal (serving their L'Oreal Paris and Kiehl's brands), Estee Lauder, and Burt's Bees, among others."

For CPP Chief Executive Officer Brian Tauber, the partnership with Westfall offers a clear path forward for continuing the upward growth trend that CPP Global is experiencing right now. "I'm thrilled to combine our strengths with the breadth and depth of Westfall's capabilities to enhance our ability to provide our employees, customers, and other stakeholders with more opportunities to grow together," said Tauber.

The terms of the investment were not disclosed. Westfall was represented by Morrison Cohen LLP as legal counsel. CPP Global was represented by Sheppard, Mullin, Richter Hampton LLP as legal counsel and Stifel as financial advisor.

About Carolina Precision Plastics, LLC

Carolina Precision Plastics is a global plastic injection molder in the beauty care, cosmetics, beverage and consumer goods markets, providing its customers molding, assembly and decorating capabilities built on a foundation of an industry-leading lean culture. Its global manufacturing presence and commitment to a more sustainable packaging future afford customers the most efficient and environmentally responsible options for their packaging needs. Central to its Lean North Stars, CPP's journey focuses on providing value to its customers and ensuring a safe, satisfying work environment to its entire team. For more, visit www.cppglobal.com.

About Westfall Technik, Inc.

Westfall Technik is a global holding company that provides highly productive plastics manufacturing solutions to the medical, consumer packaging and consumer goods industries. Since its founding in Las Vegas in October 2017, the company has acquired or launched at least 19 businesses across North America. Westfall Technik's competitive advantages include modern automated systems, correlative molding processes, and effective industry 4.0 concepts. Brand owners can expect high quality products at an excellent value, a fast response for decreased time-to-market, 100% inspection and traceability from pellet to pallet, supply-chain security compliance, and reliability from a trustworthy team. For more, visit www.westfall-technik.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005408/en/

Contacts:

Merritt Williams, Chief Commercial Officer:

Merritt.Williams@Westfall-Technik.com or (502) 386-1399
LONDON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

THIS IS AN ANNOUNCEMENT AND NOT A CIRCULAR, PROSPECTUS OR EQUIVALENT DOCUMENT. A CIRCULAR IN RELATION TO THE TRANSACTION AND THE PROSPECTUS DESCRIBED IN THIS ANNOUNCEMENT WILL BE PUBLISHED IN DUE COURSE

NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN, INTO OR FROM ANY JURISDICTION WHERE TO DO SO WOULD CONSTITUTE A VIOLATION OF THE RELEVANT LAWS OF SUCH JURISDICTION

This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of article 7 of the Market Abuse Regulations (EU) 596/2014 as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.

The Board of Esken Limited (Esken or the Company) announces that it has signed an agreement with CGIOF River S.a r.l. (the Lender and, following Conversion (as defined below), the CGI Shareholder), a special purpose vehicle which is controlled by Carlyle Global Infrastructure Opportunity Fund, L.P. (CGI), on the terms of a proposed investment by CGI through a 125 million senior loan facility (the Loan) to be provided by the Lender to, and which is convertible into 29.999 per cent. of the entire issued share capital of, London Southend Airport Company Limited (the Borrower) (which shall be increased to 30 per cent. following receipt of approval from the Office of Rail and Road), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Company (the Transaction).

The Transaction constitutes a class 1 transaction for the purposes of the Listing Rules. Accordingly, completion of the Transaction is conditional on the approval of Shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting (the General Meeting). A circular to Shareholders (the Circular) in respect of the Transaction, the notice of the General Meeting and matters related thereto is expected to be issued to Shareholders by the end of July 2021, with a view to convening the General Meeting to approve the Transaction in mid-August 2021.

The directors of Esken consider the Transaction to be in the best interests of Esken and its Shareholders as a whole and intend to include in the Circular a recommendation that Shareholders vote in favour of the Transaction at the General Meeting, as the directors intend to do in respect of their own individual holdings.

Key points

Signing of an agreement with CGI for a conditional investment of 125 million through a senior loan facility which is convertible into 29.999 per cent. stake in London Southend Airport ( LSA )

) The Transaction provides funding for Esken of approximately 100 million (after 20 million of funding for LSA by way of the Pari Passu Loan, as further detailed below).

This funding together with the expected net proceeds of the Proposed Equity Raise and Proposed New Facility (each as defined below), will enable the Company to repay the outstanding amounts payable under the Existing Facility (as defined below), which totalled 95 million as at 30 June.

As a result, following the Draw-Down Date, this would reduce Esken's overall bank debt, allow it to meet certain of its residual legacy obligations and underpin the business plan for the Group.

20 million of funding is ring fenced by the Borrower Group to provide support to LSA for a forecast period of three years. Any additional capital investment required in the medium to long term by the Borrower is expected to be raised as debt funding by the Borrower Group, ring fenced from the rest of Esken.

In addition to the funding being provided, CGI brings significant expertise in investing in and developing airports around the world. This, together with the experienced operational team at LSA will enhance Esken's offering for existing and prospective airline and logistics partners.

A combination of Esken's proven operational ability at LSA and a strong strategic financial partner in

CGI will position LSA for a recovery in passenger demand and activity levels.

David Shearer - Executive Chairman, Esken said

"CGI represents a true strategic development partner that will enable us to realise the full potential of LSA. Carlyle is a global investment firm with $260 billion under management.

The combination of the proven operational capability of the LSA management along with the airport development experience of CGI and its financial strength will provide a strong platform as we rebuild our commercial relationships with our airline and other partners into the recovery.

We aim to work closely together to develop a truly exciting London airport proposition. This transaction is structured to release 20 million of funding into LSA to support its recovery and development while providing 100 million of liquidity to the rest of Esken.

We also intend to finalise a new 20 million working capital facility and undertake a documented equity raise of around 40 million. When complete these actions will allow us to emerge from the pandemic positioned strongly for recovery."

Richard Hoskins - Managing Director, Carlyle Global Infrastructure said

"We are delighted to partner with Esken Limited to support their vision for London Southend Airport. As one of London's favourite airports, London Southend is attractive for airlines due to its cost-efficient operations base as well as to passengers for the experience and convenience. We look forward to working with Esken and the team at London Southend to realise the airport's full potential."

Background to and reasons for the Transaction

A combination of factors has accelerated the need for a refinancing and additional liquidity is required both to fund Esken's short-term requirements and to enable it to build a strong foundation from which it can return the business to growth and deliver on its longer-term strategic ambitions for Esken's core operations: Energy and Aviation. Following the liquidation of Stobart Air announced on 12 June 2021, Esken now owns and operates two core businesses, being Stobart Energy and its aviation business comprising London Southend Airport as well as Stobart Aviation Services. Whilst the Board believes that these operations have the potential to generate significant value for Shareholders in a post-COVID environment, the recovery will need time and therefore require funding to underpin the business plans through the recovery period. The Board has concluded that while it was originally intended to monetise the Stobart Energy business within the two-year period following the 2020 Capital Raise, this is not the right answer from a shareholder value perspective.

London Southend Airport remains a key strategic asset in the globally important London airport market. That market is expected to recover over the next two to three years and capacity constraints will again become an issue for airlines. It has also developed a strong logistics operation which contributed meaningful revenues throughout the pandemic and this offers scope for further development and value creation. The airport will take longer to fulfil its full potential and will need further investment to capitalise on the long-term opportunity. Discussions with strategic aviation partners have taken place over the last two years, but the uncertainty created by the pandemic meant that Esken had been unable to structure a transaction until now.

Over the last nine months Esken has been in discussions with CGI in relation to the development of LSA as aviation recovers from the pandemic. These discussions were first announced on 14 June 2021.

Information on the Borrower Group

The Borrower Group comprises London Southend Airport Company Limited and each of Thames Gateway Airport Limited, Stobart Solar Limited and Stobart Jet Centre Limited.

The Borrower operates the award-winning London Southend Airport serving London and the South East, and includes its own rail station. The airport has become renowned for its exceptional customer service, the close proximity of the terminal to the car parks and rail station and the resulting low transit time from aircraft to car and train. The airport is currently served by Ryanair and Wizz Air, amongst others, and in 2020 served up to 40 destinations across Europe and the United Kingdom with passenger numbers of 2.14 million in the year ending 29 February 2020 .

and the South East, and includes its own rail station. The airport has become renowned for its exceptional customer service, the close proximity of the terminal to the car parks and rail station and the resulting low transit time from aircraft to car and train. The airport is currently served by Ryanair and Wizz Air, amongst others, and in 2020 served up to 40 destinations across and the with passenger numbers of 2.14 million in the year ending . Stobart Jet Centre Limited (the Jet Centre ) provides handling services to the private aviation market through its first-class lounge reception and complementary aircraft hangarage facilities. The Jet Centre offers a 24-hour operation with exceptional customer service and has developed a global network of operators since its launch in 2018.

) provides handling services to the private aviation market through its first-class lounge reception and complementary aircraft hangarage facilities. The Jet Centre offers a 24-hour operation with exceptional customer service and has developed a global network of operators since its launch in 2018. Since 2016, Stobart Solar Limited has operated a 3.2 hectare solar farm at London Southend Airport providing the airport with renewable electricity and helping to reduce its carbon footprint.

Thames Gateway Airport Limited operates one of the UK's highest rated Holiday Inn Hotels. The hotel has consistently outperformed its competitors through its modern bedrooms, exceptional event function facilities and its award-winning rooftop restaurant with views over London Southend Airport.

London Southend Airport has a strong and differentiated commercial passenger proposition and allows airlines to generate similar yields to other London airports but at a lower cost per passenger. The Company believes that this low-cost proposition will appeal to cost conscious airlines as the aviation sector recovers from the pandemic.

Lockdown restrictions curtailed much of the commercial passenger operations at London Southend Airport during 2020 and 2021 as evolving quarantine arrangements and late changes to travel corridors eroded passenger confidence when restrictions were lifted. As a result, 147,000 passengers flew through London Southend Airport in the financial year ending 28 February 2021 compared to 2.1 million in the prior year. Of those 147,000 passengers, 68,000 flew in March 2020 before travel restrictions really took hold. Though some flying resumed in June 2021, we do not envisage this to restart in earnest until much later in 2021.

In response to this trading environment, management took a range of decisive actions to greatly reduce London Southend Airport's cash burn, including extensive use of the UK Government's furlough scheme. London Southend Airport benefitted from continued operations and income from its global logistics operation throughout the year. However, movements reduced during January and February 2021 due to Brexit uncertainty and seasonal variances. While the logistics operations involved five daily rotations pre-Brexit, it returned to three daily rotations in March 2021.

The Borrower Group is included in the Company's consolidated accounts. The gross assets of the Borrower Group at the financial year ending 28 February 2021 is 162,240,000, and the Borrower Group has a loss before tax for the financial year ending 28 February 2021, of 14,161,000 in each case excluding consolidation and fair value adjustments.

Background to Carlyle

Carlyle is a global investment firm with deep industry expertise that deploys private capital across three business segments: Global Private Equity, Global Credit and Investment Solutions. With $260 billion of assets under management as of 31 March 2021, Carlyle's purpose is to invest wisely and create value on behalf of its investors, portfolio companies and the communities in which they live and invest. Carlyle employs more than 1,800 people in 29 offices across five continents.

CGI is managed and advised by members of Carlyle, and is investing in the Borrower in collaboration with CAG Holdings LLC (CAG), a portfolio company of Carlyle which is a U.S. based investment platform for airport infrastructure investment opportunities globally. CAG has extensive experience in the aviation sector and is led by an experienced management team with a deep, localised understanding of the U.S. airport market. CAG's operating expertise helps create value for Carlyle investments, such as what is intended with LSA.

Principal terms and conditions of the Transaction

Under the terms of the Transaction, which is subject to certain additional conditions and terms, the Borrower and Stobart Aviation Limited (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Company and the direct shareholder of the Borrower) (the Esken Shareholder) will enter into the Loan Agreement for the Borrower to borrow the Loan to be made available to it by the Lender. The principal amount of the Loan (being 125 million) will be advanced, net of the Lender's transaction costs, to the Borrower on the draw-down date for the Loan (Draw-Down Date). The Loan will entitle the Lender to convert, at any time following the Draw-Down Date, its interest in the Loan (including all outstanding principal and any accrued but unpaid interest) into ordinary shares issued by the Borrower representing 29.999 per cent. of the entire issued share capital of the Borrower (which shall be increased to 30 per cent. of such share capital following receipt of approval from the Office of Rail and Road) at any time before the Loan matures (Conversion). The Borrower is obliged to repay the Loan in full seven years from the Draw-Down Date unless Conversion occurs prior to the Draw-Down Date.

The net proceeds of the Loan will be applied in repayment of existing intercompany loans owed by the Borrower to the Company and the Esken Shareholder. The Esken Shareholder (acting as Pari Passu Lender) will then advance a 20 million loan (the Pari Passu Loan) to the Borrower under an intercompany loan agreement which will rank pari passu with the Loan (the Pari Passu Loan Agreement).

The Borrower will grant first ranking fixed and floating security over substantially all of its assets in support of its obligations under the Loan and the Pari Passu Loan. In addition, the Borrower and, each of Thames Gateway Airport Limited, Stobart Solar Limited and Stobart Jet Centre Limited (the Borrower Group) will give a guarantee in respect of the Borrower's obligations under the Loan and the Pari Passu Loan and will grant fixed and floating security over all or substantially all of their respective assets in support of such guarantees. Interest shall accrue on the outstanding principal amount of the Loan at a rate of 2 per cent. per annum to be paid in kind (the PIK Interest) and 8 per cent. per annum to be paid in cash (the Cash Interest), but on the basis that such Cash Interest is only payable if the Borrower has generated sufficient revenues during the previous year so as to pay such Cash Interest and meet a liquidity headroom test following payment of such amount, otherwise it is to be paid in kind as well. Interest payment dates will be the fifth Business Day following the end of each interest period, which shall be the last day of February of each year (following the Draw-Down Date).

In connection with the Transaction, each member of the Borrower Group, the Lender, the Pari Passu Lender and a security agent, amongst others, shall enter into an intercreditor agreement (the Intercreditor Agreement) which shall set out, amongst other things, the relative ranking of debt incurred by the Borrower Group and when enforcement action can be taken in respect of the security granted by the Borrower Group.

In the event that the Lender does not exercise its rights of Conversion prior to the maturity date of the Loan, and in certain other circumstances (including following the occurrence of an event of default and on the final maturity date of the Loan), the Loan shall be repayable at the greater of: (i) an amount that achieves a 10 per cent. Internal Rate of Return for the Lender for the period from the Draw-Down Date to such repayment date (taking into account any Cash Interest paid during such period) and (ii) 193,750,000 less any Cash Interest paid during such period.

The Transaction remains subject to the conditions set out in the Loan Agreement and a separate implementation agreement which governs the terms of certain commitments made by the Company, the Borrower, the Esken Shareholder and the Lender in connection with Closing under the Loan Agreement (the Implementation Agreement), including, amongst other things: the Proposed Equity Raise having completed and the net proceeds of the Proposed Equity Raise (being a minimum of 40 million) having been received, the Proposed New Facility having been entered into and all conditions precedent to the Proposed New Facility having been satisfied, delivery of an initial business plan and annual budget for the Borrower Group agreed between the Esken Shareholder and the Lender, Shareholder approval of the Transaction, and completion of a corporate reorganisation to create the Borrower Group in accordance with a reorganisation steps plan agreed between the Company and CGI (the Reorganisation). The Implementation Agreement will also require the payment of certain fees for CGI's ongoing commitment between the signing of the Loan Agreement and the Draw-Down Date and in the event that the Transaction is not concluded in certain circumstances.

The Company will also be giving certain indemnities in a separate deed of indemnity (the Indemnity Deed) in favour of the Borrower Group and, in some instances, the Lender and certain of its affiliates. These indemnities include obligations of the Company to indemnify the Borrower Group and/or the Lender (as applicable) against losses resulting from the Reorganisation, losses arising from secondary tax liabilities or "secondary" pension liabilities arising in connection with the Wider Group (being Esken and its subsidiary undertakings, excluding the Borrower Group), losses arising from certain noise litigation proceedings and certain other matters.

Following Closing, the Borrower Group will be subject to certain customary restrictive covenants such that if the Borrower Group needs or wishes to undertake certain actions, it would be required to seek approval from the Lender. In addition, there are certain performance related triggers such that, in the event of underperformance in terms of passenger numbers using London Southend Airport and/or the Borrower Group's profitability which are not cured within prescribed timeframes, it will be subject to certain tighter restrictions and the Lender will have certain enhanced rights and powers, including restricting incurrence of further indebtedness by the Borrower Group or the payment of dividends to the Wider Group. In addition, with effect from the Draw-Down Date, the Lender will have certain rights to participate in the management of the Borrower Group.

On and from Conversion, the CGI Shareholder will be provided, pursuant to a shareholders' agreement (the Shareholders' Agreement) to be entered into on the Draw-Down Date between the Esken Shareholder and the Lender, with certain additional rights representative of a 30 per cent. minority interest in the Borrower, including the right to appoint two out of seven directors to the board of the Borrower and representation on its operating committee, and certain reserved matters such that the Borrower Group would need to seek consent from the CGI Shareholder or its representatives on the board of directors of the Borrower if it intended to take any action which is a reserved matter under the Shareholders' Agreement (such as entering into certain material contracts or contracts with the Wider Group). In the event of a takeover of Esken , the Lender will receive an effective veto right over the Borrower's business plan and budget following that takeover.

Under the terms of the Transaction, the Company has committed to a "no-shop" undertaking from it and its connected persons prohibiting the Company from soliciting an offer from, or participating in discussions with, another party to acquire or create security over the Borrower Group or issuing any debt which is convertible into shares in the Borrower or any other arrangements which would preclude or frustrate the implementation of the Transaction or would be an alternative to the financing provided pursuant to the Loan Agreement, in each case until (and including) the earlier of (i) utilisation of the Loan by the Borrower on the Draw-Down Date; (ii) the date of the General Meeting if the Transaction is not approved at the General Meeting, and (iii) termination of the Implementation Agreement.

The full details of the Transaction, including a summary of the key documents relating to the Transaction and the rights available to the Lender and the CGI Shareholder under the Loan Agreement and Shareholders' Agreement prior to and following any Conversion will be set out in the Circular.

Further Financing

As announced by the Company on 30 June, the Company is targeting an equity raise of around 40 million by way of a documented prospectus offering (the Proposed Equity Raise). The terms of the Proposed Equity Raise will be set out in a prospectus which is expected to be published together with the Circular towards the end of July.

The Company also announced on 30 June that it expects to conclude discussions on a new 18 month 20 million working capital facility to support treasury management in the coming weeks (the Proposed New Facility).

The strategic funding in relation to the Borrower together with a successful completion of the Proposed New Facility and the Proposed Equity Raise, would enable Esken to repay all outstanding bank debt, meet its ongoing working capital requirements, underpin its business plan going forward and meet certain of its legacy obligations.

Esken nevertheless cautions that no guarantees can be given at this stage that the discussions with its banks or in respect of an equity raise will result in agreement or a transaction being concluded.

Use of proceeds

The Transaction is expected to raise 125 million in gross proceeds and approximately 120 million net of lender costs. After other Transaction costs, the net proceeds will be available for Esken, with 20 million of the net proceeds providing funding for London Southend Airport to cover all anticipated expenditure of the Borrower Group for the period through to the end of February 2024, other than amounts funded from operating cash flows, which will be made available to the Borrower by loan from the Esken Shareholder under the Pari Passu Loan.

Esken has in place an 80 million revolving credit facility (Facility A) and a 40 million revolving credit facility (Facility B) until 31 January 2022 (together the Existing Facility), which are drawn down to 80 million and 15 million, respectively, as at 30 June 2021. The balance of the net proceeds after the funds are advanced under the Pari Passu Loan totalling 100 million will be used to repay the amounts drawn down under Facility A and Facility B. Following repayment of outstanding drawings under the Existing Facility and release of all associated security, Esken intends to use the net proceeds of the Proposed Equity Raise and the Proposed New Facility together with the anticipated Esken cash balance of 7.5 million as at the date of this announcement, subject to meeting certain drawdown conditions, for its working capital requirements, including to meet certain of the residual legacy obligations under Stobart Air (and its liquidation) and Propius and underpin the business plan for the Group, with LSA receiving 20m via a ringfenced Pari Passu Loan. Esken intends to draw down such funds under the Proposed New Facility as and when they are needed for its working capital requirements.

As announced by the Company on 30 June, Toscafund, the Company's largest shareholder with 28.66 per cent. of the Company's issued share capital, has communicated to the Company that it sees significant value in the equity of Esken and intends to support the Proposed Equity Raise pro rata with its shareholding. All directors of Esken have also indicated their intention to participate in the Proposed Equity Raise.

Recommendations to Shareholders

The directors of Esken consider the Transaction to be in the best interests of Esken and its Shareholders as a whole. Accordingly, the directors intend to include in the Circular a recommendation that Shareholders vote in favour of the Transaction to be proposed at the General Meeting, as all directors who hold Shares intend to do in respect of their own interests.

Enquiries:

Esken Limited

C/o Tulchan

Charlie Geller, Communications Director

Tulchan

Olivia Peters

T: +44 (0)20 7353 4200

E: opeters@tulchangoup.com

David Allchurch

T: +44 (0)20 7353 4200

E: dallchurch@tulchangroup.com

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

This announcement is for informational purposes only and does not constitute or form part of any invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity, nor does it constitute an offer or invitation to buy any securities, in any jurisdiction including the United States, or a recommendation in respect of buying, holding or selling any securities.

Neither this announcement nor any copy of it may be taken or transmitted directly or indirectly into or from any jurisdiction where to do so would constitute a violation of the relevant laws or regulations of such jurisdiction. Any failure to comply with this restriction may constitute a violation of such laws or regulations. Persons into whose possession this announcement or other information referred to herein should inform themselves about, and observe, any restrictions in such laws or regulations.

The release, publication or distribution of this announcement in jurisdictions other than the United Kingdom may be restricted by law and therefore any persons who are subject to the laws of any jurisdiction other than the United Kingdom should inform themselves about, and observe, any applicable requirements. This announcement has been prepared for the purposes of complying with the Listing Rules and the information disclosed may not be the same as that which would have been disclosed if this announcement had been prepared in accordance with laws and regulations of any jurisdiction outside of England.

Forward Looking Statements

This announcement includes certain forward looking statements, forecasts, estimates, projections and opinions (Forward Looking Statements). When used in this announcement, the words "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "forecast", "expect", "intend", "plan", "project", "may", will" or "should" or, in each case, their negative or other variations or similar expressions, as they relate to the Company, its management or third parties, may identify Forward Looking Statements. Forward Looking Statements include statements regarding the Company's business strategy, objectives, financial condition, results of operations and market data, as well as any other statements that are not historical facts. These statements reflect beliefs of the Company's directors (including based on their expectations arising from pursuit of the Company's strategy), as well as assumptions made by the directors and information currently available to the Company.

Although the Company considers that these beliefs and assumptions are reasonable, by their nature, Forward Looking Statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the future whether or not outside the control of the Company. These factors, risks, uncertainties and assumptions could cause actual outcomes and results to be materially different from those projected. Past performance cannot be relied upon as a guide to future performance and should not be taken as a representation that trends or activities underlying past performance will continue in the future. No representation is made or will be made that any Forward Looking Statements will be achieved or will prove to be correct. These factors, risks, assumptions and uncertainties expressly qualify all subsequent oral and written Forward Looking Statements attributable to the Company or persons acting on its behalf.

Neither the Company, the directors nor the Company's advisers assume any obligation to update any Forward Looking Statement and disclaims any obligation to update its view of any risks or uncertainties described herein or to publicly announce the result of any revisions to the Forward Looking Statements made in this announcement, except as required by law (including, for the avoidance of doubt, the Prospectus Regulation Rules, the Listing Rules and the Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules).

In addition, this announcement contains information concerning the Company's industry and its market and business segments generally, which is forward looking in nature and is based on a variety of assumptions regarding the ways in which the industry, and the Company's market and business segments, will develop. These assumptions are based on information currently available to the Company. If any one or more of these assumptions turn out to be incorrect, actual market results may differ from those predicted. While the Company does not know what effect any such differences may have on its business, if there are such differences, they could have a material adverse effect on its future results of operations and financial condition.

No profit forecasts or estimates

No statement in this announcement is intended as a profit forecast or a profit estimate and no statement in this announcement should be interpreted to mean that earnings per Esken share for the current or future financial years will necessarily match or exceed the historical published earnings per Esken share.

Publication on website

A copy of this announcement will be available for inspection on the Company's website at: www.esken.com. For the avoidance of doubt, the contents of this website are not incorporated into and do not form part of this announcement.
Victoria, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - July 2, 2021) - Plurilock Security Inc. (TSXV: PLUR) (OTCQB: PLCKF) and related subsidiaries ("Plurilock" or the "Company"), an identity-centric cybersecurity solutions provider for workforces, is pleased to announce that during its Annual General Meeting (the "Meeting") of shareholders held on July 2nd, 2021, each of the six nominees listed below, described further in Plurilock's management information circular dated May 18th, 2021 ("Circular"), were elected as Directors.

The detailed results of the voting by proxy for each nominee are as follows:

Nominee Votes For (#) Votes For (%) Robert Kiesman 6,897,630 96.89 Ian L. Paterson 6,895,280 96.86 Barry Carlson 7,118,901 100.00 Mike McConnell 7,114,901 99.94 Molly Falconer de Ramel 7,112,821 99.91 Ed Hammersla 7,113,921 99.93

At the Meeting, Plurilock's shareholders also voted in favour of the appointment of Plurilock's auditor, adoption of the Company's Share Option Plan ("SOP"), ratification of grants of share options issued under the SOP since September 17, 2020, and the alteration of the articles of the Company to include advance notice provisions, all as described in the Circular.

A total of 8,845,214 shares were represented at the Meeting, representing 15.07% of the Company's issued and outstanding common shares.

About Plurilock

Plurilock provides identity-centric cybersecurity for today's workforces. The Plurilock family of companies enables organizations to operate safely and securely while reducing cybersecurity friction. Plurilock offers world-class IT and cybersecurity solutions through its Solutions Division, paired with proprietary, AI-driven and cloud-friendly security through its Technology Division. Together, the Plurilock family of companies delivers persistent identity assurance with unmatched ease of use.

For more information, visit https://www.plurilock.com or contact:

Ian L. Paterson

Chief Executive Officer

ian@plurilock.com

416.800.1566

Roland Sartorius

Chief Financial Officer

roland.sartorius@plurilock.com

Prit Singh

Investor Relations

prit.singh@plurilock.com

905.510.7636

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain certain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") related to future events or Plurilock's future business, operations, and financial performance and condition. Forward-looking statements normally contain words like "will", "intend", "anticipate", "could", "should", "may", "might", "expect", "estimate", "forecast", "plan", "potential", "project", "assume", "contemplate", "believe", "shall", "scheduled", and similar terms. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, actions, or developments and are based on expectations, assumptions, and other factors that management currently believes are relevant, reasonable, and appropriate in the circumstances. Although management believes that the forward-looking statements herein are reasonable, actual results could be substantially different due to the risks and uncertainties associated with and inherent to Plurilock's business. Additional material risks and uncertainties applicable to the forward-looking statements herein include, without limitation, the impact of general economic conditions, the success of the Company in obtaining new or extended contracts or orders; the Company's ability to maintain existing customers or develop new customers; the Company's ability to successfully integrate acquisitions of other businesses and/or companies or to realize on the anticipated benefits thereof; and unforeseen events, developments, or factors causing any of the aforesaid expectations, assumptions, and other factors ultimately being inaccurate or irrelevant. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect the Company's forward-looking statements. Many of these factors are beyond the control of Plurilock. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by these cautionary statements. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as at the date hereof, and Plurilock undertakes no obligation to update publicly or to revise any of the included forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required by applicable securities laws. Risks and uncertainties about the Company's business are more fully discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" in its most recent Annual Information Form. They are otherwise disclosed in its filings with securities regulatory authorities available on SEDAR at www.sedar.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.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/89324
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Crude oil futures settled marginally down on Friday, as markets looked ahead to the outcome of the meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies. The OPEC+ was originally scheduled to discuss and announce its plans about increasing crude output on Thursday (July 1). However, the group announced yesterday that it will meet on Friday to discuss plans about easing production curbs. West Texas Intermediate Crude oil futures for August ended down by $0.07 or about 0.1% at $75.16 a barrel. The OPEC had earlier agreed in principle to increase crude output by 400,000 barrels per day from August through December, to cater to rising demand. Saudi Arabia and Russia are said to have proposed extending the duration of cuts till the end of next year, while the United Arab Emirates reportedly wants to change the baseline used to determine its output level. Meanwhile, a report from Baker Hughes showed U.S. energy firms added oil and natural gas rigs for a third time in four weeks. The report said the oil and gas rig count in the U.S. went up by 5 to 475 in the week ended July 2. This is the highest count since April 2020. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
SINGAPUR (dpa-AFX) - The Federal Trade Commission has charged Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) with 'illegally monopolizing markets for semiconductor components'. The regulator has also ordered Broadcom, a supplier for tech giant Apple Inc. (AAPL), to stop requiring its customers to source components from Broadcom on an exclusive or near exclusive basis. The charges are specifically related to Broadcom chips used in set-top boxes and broadband internet devices. 'Today's complaint reflects the Commission's commitment to enforcing the antitrust laws against monopolists, including in high-technology industries,' said FTC Bureau of Competition Acting Director Holly Vedova. 'America has a monopoly problem. Today's action is a step toward addressing that problem by pushing back against strong-arm tactics by a monopolist in important markets for key broadband components. There is much more work to be done and we need the tools and resources to do it. But I have full confidence in FTC staff's commitment to this effort.' The FTC charge alleges several findings with the key one being Broadcom being a monopolist in the sale of three types of semiconductor components, or chips, used in devices that deliver television and broadband internet services. Broadcom is also one of the few significant suppliers of five related types of chips. These chips include the core circuitry for streaming set top boxes and cable broadband devices, along with Wi-Fi chips and 'front-end' chips for both set top boxes and broadband devices. Front-end chips convert incoming analog signals to digital signals, the FTC said. 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.
Transaction size: 27.3 million after total exercise of the extension clause 23.7 million capital increase 3.6 million of shares sold by existing shareholders following the total exercise of the extension clause 1

Transaction size potentially rising to 31.4 million if the over-allotment option is fully exercised 2

IPO price set at 6.53 per share

Overall demand of 35.8 million, offer oversubscribed almost 1.5 times

Market capitalization of around 118.7 million (after the capital increase)

Trading on Euronext Growth will start in Paris on July 7, 2021 (ISIN: FR00140043Y1 ticker: ALSPT)

Regulatory News:

Spartoo (the "Company"), one of the leading online retailers for fashion items in Europe, announces the successful launch of its initial public offering ("IPO") on the Euronext Growth multilateral trading facility in Paris (ISIN: FR00140043Y1 ticker: ALSPT).

Boris Saragaglia, Spartoo's co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said: "We have today reached a major milestone in Spartoo's history and we look forward to taking advantage of the benefits that come with this stockmarket listing, which will act as a unique catalyst for our development. We would like to offer our sincere thanks to all of our shareholders, both long-standing and new, for the trust they have placed in us. With the new financial resources we have obtained, we will strengthen our product range, raise our profile through advertising, and further build up our B2B service offering. This fundraising will enable us to achieve our clearly established strategic objectives and bolster our position as a leading player in online footwear and fashion retailing, a fast-growing sector in which customers are increasingly demanding in terms of service quality and exclusivity. Spartoo meets those demands very effectively, as shown by our Trustpilot rating, among the highest in the industry, and by the uninterrupted growth in our net GMV3, which has risen by 23% per year on average since 2008. We are proud of the progress we have made, with the support of all of our staff, since the Group was created 15 years ago. We will continue to capitalize on Spartoo's recent success while remaining true, more than ever, to our pioneering approach to social commitment and our customer-centric approach: we have one of the largest online fashion ranges in Europe, including a set of exclusive proprietary brands and an advanced phygital experience that helps us generate customer loyalty, as well as extensive in-house control over the e-commerce value chain."

Offering price

The Board of Directors of the Company has today set the IPO price at 6.53 per share (the "Offering Price").

Reminder of the reasons for the offering:

accelerate the development of the online and offline business

as well as the service offering for professionals

up to 50-60% of the funds raised will be used to improve the offering by investing in new product inventory, developing the range related to interior decoration and acquiring new brands;

up to 35-45% of the funds will be used to strengthen brand awareness by acquiring more expensive customers through investments in traditional and online media and by developing its stores; and

up to 10-15% of the funds will be allocated to develop the services for third parties.

Size of the Offering

Through the IPO, the Company carried out a capital increase of 23.7 million via the issue of 3,636,363 new ordinary shares.

Taking into account the total exercise of the extension clause, the Divesting Shareholders sold 545,454 ordinary shares, taking the size of the Offering (as defined below) to 27.3 million.

The size of the Offering may rise to 31.4 million if the over-allotment option is fully exercised.

With demand amounting to 35.8 million based on the Offering Price, the Offering was 1.5 times oversubscribed.

The number of ordinary shares allotted as part of the Offering breaks down as follows:

3,691,635 ordinary shares allotted as part of the Global Placement, representing 24.1 million or 88.3% of the total number of shares allotted;

490,182 ordinary shares allotted as part of the French Public Offering (the "OPO" and, together with the International Offering, the "Offering"), representing 3.2 million or 11.7% of the total number of shares allotted. Under the OPO, A1 orders (from 1 share up to and including 200 shares) and A2 orders (more than 200 shares) will be fully satisfied.

Based on the Offering Price and the issue of 3,636,363 new ordinary shares, Spartoo's market capitalization will amount to around 118.7 million after the Offer. The free float represents 21% of the Company's capital and may be increased to approximately 24% of the share capital if the over-allotment option is fully exercised (on a diluted basis).

Over-allotment option

The over-allotment option granted by the Divesting Financial Shareholders relates to a maximum of approximately 4.1 million euros, i.e. a maximum of 627,272 additional shares that may be sold by the Divesting Financial Shareholders in the context of the Offer, which would bring the amount of the Offer to approximately 31.4 million euros (the "Over-allotment Option"). The Over-Allotment Option is exercisable by Natixis, as stabilizing agent (the "Stabilizing Agent"). The deadline for the exercise of the Over-Allotment Option by the Stabilizing Agent is 6 August 2021, the end of the stabilization period.

Abstention commitment by the Company

The Company has made an abstention commitment (from the time the placement agreement is signed) for a period of 180 calendar days following the Offering's settlement-delivery date, subject to certain usual exceptions.

Lock-up commitments

Boris Saragaglia, Jeremie Touchard and Paul Lorne, the Company's Founding Shareholders, have made a lock-up commitment (from the time the placement agreement is signed) for a period of 360 calendar days following the Offering's settlement-delivery date, subject to certain usual exceptions.

The Divesting Financial Shareholders and the Business Angels have made a lock-up commitment (from the time the placement agreement is signed) for a period of 180 calendar days following the Offering's settlement-delivery date, subject to certain usual exceptions.

Certain other managers (Jean-Francois Clei, Aymeric Moser and Francois Bordet) have made a lock-up commitment for a period of 180 days following the Offering's settlement-delivery date, subject to certain usual exceptions.

Ownership of shares and voting rights

The following table shows the Company's share capital and voting rights before the Offering and after completion of the Offering (after the total exercise of the extension clause):

Shareholders4 Before the Offering After the Offering Number of shares % of capital and

voting rights Number of shares % of capital and

voting rights Boris Saragaglia 1,931,145 11.6% 1,790,450 8.8% Jeremie Touchard 843,215 5.1% 781,782 3.9% Paul Lorne 1,231,230 7.4% 1,141,528 5.6% Total Founding Shareholders 4,005,590 24.0% 3,713,760 18.3% Total Employees (excluding the founders) 535,560 3.2% 535,560 2.6% Total Business Angels 336,475 2.0% 311,959 1.5% A Plus Finance 1,208,035 7.3% 1,184,489 5.8% Highland 3,053,945 18.3% 2,994,420 14.8% Endeavour II LP 1,309,245 7.9% 1,283,726 6.3% Sofina 2,571,385 15.4% 2,521,266 12.4% Trocadero 1,103,300 6.6% 1,081,796 5.3% LBO France5 2,508,655 15.1% 2,459,760 12.1% Total Divesting Financial Shareholders Business Angels 12,091,040 72.6% 11,837,416 58.3% Treasury shares 26,450 0.2% 26,450 0.1% Free float 4,181,817 20.6% TOTAL 16,658,640 100.00% 20,295,003 100.0%

Next steps

July 6, 2021 Settlement-delivery of shares issued under the OPO and International Offering July 7, 2021 Start of trading in the Company's shares on Euronext Growthon a trading line entitled "ALSPT" Start of any stabilization period August 6, 2021 Deadline for exercise of the Over-Allotment Option End of any stabilization period

Eligibility of the Offering to French PEA-PME

The Company confirms that it meets the PEA-PME eligibility criteria set out in the French implementing order of 4 March 2014 (decree no. 2014-283). Accordingly, the Company's shares may be held within PEA-PME accounts, which have the same tax benefits as standard PEA plans6

Spartoo share identification codes

Name: Spartoo

ISIN: FR00140043Y1

Ticker: ALSPT

Compartment: Euronext Paris

Business segment: E-commerce

Financial intermediaries

Natixis

Global Coordinator and Associate Bookrunner

TP ICAP

Global Coordinator and Associate Bookrunner

Availability of the prospectus

Copies of the prospectus, which was approved by the AMF on June 17, 2021, under number 21-233, composed of the document d'enregistrement filed on June 4, 2021 under number I. 21-028, the supplement to the document d'enregistrement approved on June 17, 2021 and a securities note (including a summary of the prospectus), may be obtained free of charge and upon request from Spartoo, 16 rue Henri Barbusse, 38100 Grenoble, and from the websites of Spartoo (www.spartoo-finance.com) and the AMF (www.amf-france.org).

About Spartoo

With 8,000 brands and 700,000 items, Spartoo offers one of the widest selections of fashion items (shoes, ready-to-wear, bags) in more than 30 countries in Europe, thanks to its team of more than 400 employees of nearly 30 different nationalities. In 2020, the Group generated sales of 134 million, corresponding to a GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) of 194 million, 39% of which was generated internationally. With an integrated logistics platform and after-sales service, Spartoo stands out for its customer-centric approach, as evidenced by a very high customer satisfaction rate. The strategy is based on the strong synergies between the online sales model and the advantages of physical stores, which support loyalty and brand awareness. Capitalizing on its e-commerce know-how, Spartoo has also developed a complete range of services for professionals.

Disclaimer

No communication and no information in respect of the offering by Spartoo of the shares (the "Shares") may be distributed to the public in any jurisdiction where a registration or approval is required. No steps have been or will be taken outside of France in any jurisdiction where such steps would be required. The offering and subscription of the Shares may be subject to specific legal or regulatory restrictions in certain jurisdictions. Spartoo assumes no responsibility for any violation of any such restrictions by any person.

This announcement is not a prospectus within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 of the European Parliament and the Council of June 14th, 2017, as amended (the "Prospectus Regulation

With respect to the member States of the European Economic Area other than France (each, a "relevant member State") no action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make an offer to the public of the securities requiring a publication of a prospectus in any relevant member State. As a result, the Shares can only be offered and will only be offered in relevant member States (a) to legal entities that are qualified investors as defined in the Prospectus Regulation or (b) in accordance with the other exemptions of Article 1(4) of the Prospectus Regulation.

For the purposes of this paragraph, the notion of an "offer to the public of Shares" in each of the relevant member States, means any communication to persons in any form and by any means, presenting sufficient information on the terms of the offer and the Shares to be offered, so as to enable an investor to decide to purchase or subscribe for those securities.

This selling restriction comes in addition to the other selling restrictions applicable in the other member States.

This press release and the information it contains are being distributed to and are only intended for persons who are (x) outside the United Kingdom or (y) in the United Kingdom who are qualified investors (as defined in the Prospectus Regulation as it forms part of domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018) and are (i) investment professionals falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005, as amended (the "Order"), (ii) high net worth entities and other such persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order ("high net worth companies", "unincorporated associations", etc.) or (iii) other persons to whom an invitation or inducement to participate in investment activity (within the meaning of Section 21 of the Financial Services and Market Act 2000) may otherwise lawfully be communicated or caused to be communicated (all such persons in (y)(i), (y)(ii) and (y)(iii) together being referred to as "Relevant Persons"). Any invitation, offer or agreement to subscribe, purchase or otherwise acquire securities to which this press release relates will only be engaged with Relevant Persons. Any person who is not a Relevant Person should not act or rely on this press release or any of its contents.

This press release does not constitute or form a part of any offer or solicitation to purchase or subscribe for securities nor of any offer or solicitation to sell securities in the United States. The securities mentioned herein have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), and may not be offered or sold, directly or indirectly, within the United States except pursuant to an exemption from or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the Securities Act. Spartoo does not intend to register any portion of the proposed offering in the United States nor to conduct a public offering of securities in the United States.

The distribution of this document in certain countries may constitute a breach of applicable law. The information contained in this document does not constitute an offer of securities for sale in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan.

This press release may not be published, forwarded or distributed, directly or indirectly, in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan.

The prospectus approved by the Autorite des marches financiers contains forward-looking statements. No guarantee is given as to these forecasts being achieved, which are subject to risks, including those described in the prospectus, and to the development of economic conditions, the financial markets and the markets in which Spartoo operates.

In case of exercise of the over-allotment option, Natixis (or any entity acting on its behalf), acting as a stabilizing agent in the name and on behalf of all global coordinating institutions and associated book runners, may, without being bound and having the right to terminate at any time, during a period of 30 days following the start of trading of the Company's shares on Euronext Growth in Paris, i.e., according to the indicative timetable, from July 7, 2021 up to and including August 6, 2021, carry out transactions with a view to maintaining the market price of Spartoo shares in a manner consistent with applicable laws and regulations and, in particular, Regulation (EU) No. 596/2014 of the European Parliament and of Council of April 16, 2014 supplemented by Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1052 of March 8, 2016. Any stabilizing action aims to support the market price of Spartoo shares and may affect the share price.

MiFID II Product governance target market: According to the product governance requirements contained within: (a) EU Directive 2014/65/EU on markets in financial instruments, as amended ("MiFID II"); (b) Articles 9 and 10 of Commission Delegated Directive (EU) 2017/593 supplementing MiFID II; and (c) local implementing measures, the target market assessment in respect of the shares offered in the global offering (the "Offered Shares") has led to the conclusion that: (i) the target market of the Offered Shares is eligible counterparties, professional clients and retail clients, each as defined in MiFID II; and (ii) all channels for distribution of the Offered Shares are appropriate (the "Target Market Assessment"). Any person subsequently offering, selling or recommending the Offered Shares (a "distributor") should take into consideration the manufacturers' Target Market Assessment; however, a distributor subject to MiFID II is responsible for undertaking its own target market assessment in respect of the Offered Shares (by either adopting or refining the manufacturers' Target Market Assessment) and determining appropriate distribution channels.

The Target Market Assessment is conducted solely for the purposes of the manufacturer's product approval process and neither constitutes an assessment for any particular client of suitability or appropriateness for the purposes of MiFID II nor a recommendation to invest in, or purchase, or take any other action whatsoever with respect to the Offered Shares.

Notwithstanding the Target Market Assessment, the attention of distributors is drawn to the fact that: the price of the Offered Shares may decline and investors could lose all or part of their investment; the Offered Shares offer no guaranteed income and no capital protection; and that an investment in the Offered Shares is compatible only with investors who do not need a guaranteed income or capital protection, who are capable (either alone or in conjunction with an appropriate financial or other adviser) of evaluating the merits and risks of such an investment and have sufficient resources to be able to bear any losses that may result therefrom.

1 Sale by Sofina, A PLUS Finance, Highland Capital Partners, Endeavour II LP, Trocadero 2015 LP, FIPS Tech Growth Secondary, DES Holding V LLC (the "Divesting Financial Shareholders"), Mr Denis Chavanis, DCH Invest, Mrs Florence Pierre (the "Business Angels"), Mr Boris Saragaglia, Mr Jeremie Touchard and Mr Paul Lorne (the "Founding Shareholders" and, together with the Divesting Financial Shareholders and Business Angels, the "Divesting Shareholders")

2 Sale by the Divesting Financial Shareholders only

3 Gross Merchandise Value: total sales of products (including VAT) and services, net of returns

4 On a diluted basis

5 Via FIPS Tech Growth Secondary and DES Holdings V

6 These plans are subject to conditions and limits. Those interested should contact their financial advisor.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005440/en/

Contacts:

Spartoo

04 58 00 16 84

investors@spartoo.com

NewCap

Louis-Victor Delouvrier

Nicolas Fossiez

Investor Relations

spartoo@newcap.eu

01 44 71 94 94

NewCap

Nicolas Merigeau

Media Relations

spartoo@newcap.eu

01 44 71 94 98
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - July 2, 2021) - Lobe Sciences Ltd. (CSE: LOBE) (OTC Pink: GTSIF) ("Lobe" or the "Company") today announced that it became aware of certain promotional activities concerning its common stock on June 10, 2021. Issuer Services at OTC Markets Group (OTC Markets) notified the Company and supplied one (1) electronic newsletter (the "Newsletter") prepared by a third party - HotOtc as an example of such promotion. The Company was not aware of such Newsletter before receiving the copy from the OTC Markets.

The Company has no knowledge or opinion about whether the Newsletter affected trading activity. Specific claims in the Newsletter concerning the Company's stock and its upside are highly speculative and should be carefully evaluated based on the Company's latest filings on sedar.com.

Based on the internal inquiry, neither the Company nor its management, directors, control persons, and any service providers, were involved, directly or indirectly, with the creation, distribution, or payment of the Newsletter, nor did they have notice of or editorial control over the content of the Newsletter.

To the best of the Company's knowledge, no other officers, directors, controlling shareholders, or existing third-party service providers have sold or purchased the Company's securities within the past 90 days. The Company routinely communicates with stockholders, potential investors, and investment analysts, and generates its own press releases. As such, the Company urges persons interested in the Company, whether or not they are currently stockholders of the Company, to review its filings at sedar.com and visit the Company's website and only to rely on information about the Company and about the industry sectors in which it operates that are released by the Company.

About Lobe Sciences Ltd.

Lobe Sciences is a life sciences company focused on psychedelic medicines. The Company, through collaborations with industry leading partners, is engaged in drug research and development using psychedelic compounds and the development of innovative devices and delivery mechanisms to improve mental health and wellness.

For further information please contact:

Lobe Sciences Ltd.

Philip J Young, CEO

info@lobesciences.com

Tel: (949) 505-5623

THE CSE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR ADEQUACY OF THIS RELEASE.

Disclaimer for Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the future operations of the Company and other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as "will", "may", "should", "anticipate", "expects" and similar expressions. All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this release, including statements regarding the future plans and objectives of the Company, progression with nasal mist device engineering and commercialization, the pursuit of M&A initiatives, development of effective delivery methods and commercialization potential of the nasal mist device, research and development using NAC and psilocybin and growth of the business, are forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations are risks detailed from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulations. Readers are cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of the forward-looking statements may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company, including changes to the regulatory environment; and that the current Board and management may not be able to attain the Company's corporate goals and objectives. As a result, the Company cannot guarantee that any forward-looking statement will materialize and the reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made only as of the date of this news release and the Company does not intend to update any of the included forward-looking statements except as expressly required by applicable Canadian securities laws.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/89330
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - July 2, 2021) - Gratomic Inc. (TSXV: GRAT) (OTCQX: CBULF) (FSE: CB82) ("Gratomic", "GRAT" or "The Company") is pleased to announce that the Company has entered into a share purchase agreement for facilities in Windhoek Namibia and real estate at the Port of Luderitz Bay in Namibia. The Windhoek facilities will be used as an office, and for lodging for executives when travelling to Namibia. The Luderitz property is to be developed into a second graphite processing and warehousing facility.

Gratomic's graphite finishing process will be separated into two separate facilities with one housing the micronization and spheronization equipment and the second housing the patented ALD (Atomic Layer Deposition) equipment supplied by Forge Nano (review details here in press release dated March 31, 2021). This strategic asset development will provide the Company the opportunity to customize product output adhering to end-user specifications and requirements, allowing Gratomic to better serve a broader range of manufacturers and OEMs. This investment also supports a significant increase in output potential of product generation to support any additional growth in demand as predicted by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, among others, see link here.

The benefits of the agreement are further supported by the Company's acquisition of permanent office spaces in Windhoek, which will better accommodate the growth and development of the Namibian team and Aukam Graphite Project. The ownership of permanent facilities will reduce overall operational costs through the elimination of office rental and other expenses.

The facilities and the real estate are being purchased for the equivalent of $1,436,500 and will be satisfied by the issuance of 1,072,015 common shares (the "Considerations Shares") of the Company (Issued at a per share price of $1.34). Closing of the share purchase agreement and issuance of the Consideration Shares is subject to the fulfillment of standard closing conditions and the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange.

Arno Brand, CEO and President, stated, "The Company recognizes the requirement for additional industrial space for the purpose of future added value processing and to accommodate the predicted upswing in market demand."

About Gratomic Inc.

Gratomic is focused on introducing an exceptional anode material to the global electric vehicle and energy storage supply chains. The Company aims to achieve full operational capabilities in 2021, with further plans to take its Aukam Graphite Project fully solar by 2022. Large quantities of its naturally high-quality graphite have been shipped for testing to confirm its viability as an anode material. Gratomic is confident that the results will provide a unique competitive advantage in its desired target markets.

The Company's recent collaboration agreement with Forge Nano has advanced the developments on its graphite finalization phase for the micronization, spheronization, and the patented ALD coating of its Aukam vein graphite for use in lithium-ion batteries. Forge Nano is a global leader in surface engineering and precision nano-coating technology, using Atomic Layer Deposition.

GRAT has two outstanding off-take purchase agreements with TODAQ and Phu Sumika with contract fulfillment slated to begin in 2021. Gratomic plans to deliver mine-to-market traceability through its partnership with deeptech company TODAQ by providing documented tracking on all graphite generated at its flagship Aukam Graphite Project.

For more information: visit the website at www.gratomic.ca or contact:

Arno Brand at abrand@gratomic.ca or 416 561-4095

Subscribe at gratomic.ca/contact/ to be added to our email list.

"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 Statements:

This news release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. Investors are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those expected. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and, except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. All of the forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements and by those made in our filings with SEDAR in Canada (available at www.sedar.com )

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/89331
Nabis, a San Francisco, California-based licensed cannabis wholesale marketplace platform, raised $23m in Series B funding.

Backers included FJ Labs, Artemis Growth Partners, Silverleaf Venture Partners, Liquid 2 Ventures and Stanley Tang (Co-Founder, DoorDash). Investors in the $5m Series A raise, which closed less than a year ago, included Y Combinator and Babel Ventures.

The company intends to use the funds to grow its licensed wholesaling platform, and scale its value-added services, which include Nabis Capital and Nabis Analytics.

Founded in 2017 by software engineers Vince C. Ning and Jun S. Lee, Nabis is a licensed wholesaling platform supporting over 100 brands and supplying the entire network of California dispensaries with top-tier products. The company offers clients fulfillment, warehousing, payment processing, financing, data analytics, and sales and marketing services to enable brands and retailers to innovate, launch, and scale. It works directly with its partners to streamline the regulated cannabis wholesaling process by leveraging actionable, sales data and insights to help brands and retailers scale strategically.

The company represents a portfolio of over 100 top-tier brands distributing more than $350m worth of cannabis products per year.

FinSMEs

02/07/2021
PechaKucha, a Chicago, IL- Tokyo, Japan-based social storytelling platform, raised $2.7m in seed funding.

The round was led by Muneaki Masuda, the founder and CEO of Culture Convenience Club Company, Limited (CCC), with participation from Lofty Ventures and Nameless Ventures and angel investors Jimmy Chamberlin (CEO of Blue J Strategies), 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.

The company intends to use the funds 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.

Founded in 2003 by Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, PechaKucha provides a Japanese-inspired virtual storytelling platform that allows users to produce and share recorded content, host live events online and offline, and build communities about popular and niche topics. 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. Community organizers host live events in more than 1,250 cities in 140 countries, with thousands of individual creators using the social storytelling platform for digital talks, sessions and chats.

FinSMEs

02/07/2021
Tampa, FL (33646)

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Syringes with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine are placed on a tray as vaccinations are administered on the UNLV campus on January 12, 2021, in Las Vegas. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images/TNS)
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Ontario International Airport (ONT) officials are celebrating the launch of Avianca Airlines service to El Salvador -- the first of its kind from the Inland Empire to Central America.
Paxton, IL (60957)

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Mainly sunny to start, then a few afternoon clouds. High 87F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph..

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Smoke billows from a wildfire Sunday, Sept. 30, 2018 that briefly trapped eight hikes and a sheriff's deputy at the top of the Lamoille Canyon about 12 miles southeast of Elko, Nevada. (AP Photo/Ross Andreson)
FILE - In this Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2020 file photo, Tarana Burke, founder and leader of the #MeToo movement, stands for a portrait in her home in Baltimore. For Burke, her first reaction to the Wednesday, June 30, 2021, Pennsylvania court decision on Bill Cosby's release was shock, definitely shock. And as the shock settled in and I started seeing some of the (social media) commentary coming in  we, folks who do this work across the field, started huddling together to talk about what our response would be, Burke said in an interview. It was just real concern for survivors. Were going to have a hard time sleeping. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark, File)
Canopy by Hilton Says Hello to Portland, Maine

Canopy Portland Waterfront - located in the heart of Portland, Maines Old Port Neighborhood - is Hiltons first lifestyle hotel in New England

July 02, 2021 // Franchising.com // PORTLAND, ME and MCLEAN, Va. - Hilton (NYSE: HLT) announced the opening of Canopy by Hilton Portland Waterfront, the first Hilton lifestyle hotel to open in the New England region. Located on the corner of Center and Commercial Streets in the Old Port neighborhood, the waterfront hotel is owned and managed by Fathom Companies.

The property is home to Luna, the first indoor/outdoor rooftop bar overlooking Casco Bay, and Salt Yard, a cafe and restaurant that pays homage to Portlands pottery history and Old Port building icon, E. Swasey & Co.

We are proud to provide an energizing, inviting place for both visitors and our local community, said Ginny Petrovek, general manager, Canopy Portland Waterfront. Were also excited to share a new, unique Portland experience just as summer kicks off. As downtown activities get into full swing, guests and locals alike can truly feel this neighborhoods energy from Canopy Portland Waterfront - an especially enjoyable experience with a refreshment in hand on the rooftop at Luna!

Canopy Portland Waterfront is home to 135 guestrooms, all of which are designed for ease and comfort by architect and design agencies Baskervill and HKS. Portland-based interior design firm Ealain Studios created a memorable experience that highlights local touchpoints.

Were thrilled to continue to expand the Canopy footprint in the U.S., with our first lifestyle hotel in Maine and the New England region, said Harald Han, director of brand management, Canopy by Hilton. We look forward to welcoming guests to Canopy Portland Waterfront, which was created as a natural extension of the neighborhood to help visitors relax, recharge and experience the city like a local.

Eat. Drink. Smile.

Luna Rooftop Bar brings new meaning to point of view with its sixth-floor waterfront panoramas over Commercial Street to the South Portland bridge. Add in the lighting, music, salty air and alluring starry night vibes, Luna is perfect for after-work get-togethers or starlit date nights. Cocktails with a playful nod to constellations, a raw bar and snack menu with Maine classics like Crab Roll, Lobster Roll, New England Clam Dip and modern twists on Red Snapper Corn Dogs and Duck Wings, along with a sweets menu that features light and irresistible Ricotta Lavender Fritters - Luna is destined to be a beacon for Portland gatherings.

Salt Yard Cafe + Bar, whose name gives a nod to the famous salt-glazed earthenware that was made in the E. Swasey Pottery building next door, was designed with todays Portland residents and guests in mind. This street-level eatery has floor-to-ceiling windows for easy people-watching and features expert coffee, barista-made beverages, grab-and-go breakfast and lunch options. Its dinner fare puts a fun twist on traditional favorites like New England Fish Chowder and Masala Baked Beans. The menu is notably simple and fresh with plant-forward options like Honey Ginger Cauliflower, Roasted Mushroom Salad and Sweet Potato Bravas for small plates, and choices of flatbreads or pastas for main courses that feature seafood, meats and vegetables.

Locally Inspired Design

The Canopy Portland Waterfront team is proud to support local businesses, while also providing an authentic, hyperlocal experience for visitors.

Art curator and advisor Erin Hutton, founder of Erin Hutton Projects, assembled photography, pottery, ceramics, woodwork, fabric textiles and other works from the Maine community. The hotel features unique art from more than 20 Portland-area creators. Contributors include:

Ryan Adams , a painter and muralist, created a bold, brightly colored geometric Positively Yours wall mural for the team members lounge

, a painter and muralist, created a bold, brightly colored geometric Positively Yours wall mural for the team members lounge Jasmine Clayton , a leather artist, made a felt and leather piece for Luna that is found across from the bar, as well as the flower lapel pins worn by the Welcome team

, a leather artist, made a felt and leather piece for Luna that is found across from the bar, as well as the flower lapel pins worn by the Welcome team Matt Hutton , a furniture maker and designer, made custom furniture and carpet designs for the property, including the reception desk

, a furniture maker and designer, made custom furniture and carpet designs for the property, including the reception desk Adrian King , a potter/ceramicist, designed kitchenware for the Salt Yard cafe

, a potter/ceramicist, designed kitchenware for the Salt Yard cafe Jenny McGee Dougherty , a visual artist and designer, created eight custom framed artworks for the meeting rooms

, a visual artist and designer, created eight custom framed artworks for the meeting rooms Karina Steele , a sculpture artist specializing in large scale, one-of-a-kind pieces for commercial spaces, created a wall-sized installation for Salt Yard Cafe + Bar made of hundreds of bent ash wood, dyed in indigo dye. The placement and design emphasize the coast of Maine's rugged coastline and natural materials.

, a sculpture artist specializing in large scale, one-of-a-kind pieces for commercial spaces, created a wall-sized installation for Salt Yard Cafe + Bar made of hundreds of bent ash wood, dyed in indigo dye. The placement and design emphasize the coast of Maine's rugged coastline and natural materials. Nicole Wolf, a photographer has three framed photographs of water splashing from a moving boat off the coast of Maine on display in the hotel lobby

Additional local companies and small businesses that Canopy Portland Waterfront is proud to partner with include Rwanda Bean Coffee, Abura Skincare, AngelRox/Suger, Cuddledown, Evangeline Linen, Emmy + Olly, Huston & Company, I Before E Design, La Maree Art, L.L. Bean, Animal Refuge League of Greater Portland and Might & Main.

Weve Got You Covered

Whether exploring the neighborhood or recharging in their room, Canopy Portland Waterfront guests enjoy authentic experiences and amenities both inside and outside the hotel, such as:

Signature Canopy beds outfitted with Cuddledown bedding and Evangeline Linen blankets

A retail shop featuring curated products from Maine artisans and makers

Mobile check-in and complimentary Wi-Fi

A welcome gift upon arrival and coffee each morning at Salt Yard

Over 3,000 square feet of meeting space

Complimentary Canopy Bikes for exploring the city

A 24-hour fitness center featuring Peloton bikes and Technogym equipment

Wellness Suites that include Peloton bikes and strength training in select guest rooms

A pet-friendly program, Canopys Paws in the Neighborhood, which provides a pup-friendly guide to Portland, as well as special dog treats and a Just-Right L.L. Bean dog bed for those traveling with their four-legged family members

Canopy by Hilton Portland Waterfront is part of Hilton Honors, the award-winning guest-loyalty program for Hilton's 18 distinct hotel brands. Members who book directly have access to instant benefits, including a flexible payment slider that allows members to choose nearly any combination of Points and money to book a stay, an exclusive member discount, free standard Wi-Fi and access to the industry-leading Hilton Honors mobile app.

SOURCE Canopy by Hilton

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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)

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Partly cloudy with afternoon showers or thunderstorms. High 86F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

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Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Low around 80F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%.
Peter Davis is chief of the Galveston Island Beach Patrol. The views in this column are Davis and do not necessarily represent those of the Beach Patrol, Galveston Park Board of Trustees or any other entity.
Cambridge, UK  July 2nd 2021  Leading Polish games studio Flying Wild Hog has today released details of its latest game Space Punks, the first title to be released by Jagexs third-party publishing division  Jagex Partners.



A top-down looter shooter, Space Punks features crazy, over-the-top action in a unique, irreverent sci-fi setting. Players are given the chance to blast their way to fame, glory and wealth by taking on lucrative contracts on far-flung planets against impossible odds.



Space Punks is designed to be a living, breathing, and ever-changing gameworld - a true living game built in line with Flying Wild Hogs creative mission to make action-packed, fast-paced, and wholeheartedly unique titles that transport players into unexpected and exciting new worlds.



You can see the first trailer for Space Punks here: https://youtu.be/3a6yQj7KrHc

Space Punks will be in Early Access on PC from July 14th, with an Open Beta planned for winter 2021 and a console release in 2022.



Sign up to hear more about Space Punks at www.playspacepunks.com



For more information about Flying Wild Hog go to www.flyingwildhog.com



For more information about Jagex Partners go to www.jagex.com/partners





-Ends-
Gabe Shepherd, Ward 4: I'm sad to see Ed go. His perspective and tireless work to advance health care for all Oregonians will be missed. Indiana will be gaining an excellent public servant.

Laurie Chaplen, Ward 6: I have not gotten to know Councilor Junkins as well as I have wanted to, given the remote council meetings and being a new councilor. Having only a couple of brief meetings with him, I found him to be a wonderful person who is very thoughtful and was a great team member. He is a compassionate person devoted to heath care, diversity and other issues and brought much to the city as a counselor. I liked his perspectives and the way he synthesized issues.

Junkins ran unopposed for the northwest Corvallis seat in November of 2018 but took office immediately because his predecessor, Mark Page, had moved out of the district. Junkins also ran unopposed in his 2020 re-election bid.

Junkins is a pediatrician with experience in public health and academia. Most recently he has served as senior associate dean for assessment and outcomes and as a professor of pediatrics at the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific Northwest (COMP-Northwest) in Lebanon.

Junkins issued a statement on his departure, which included the following:
Gillette, WY (82718)

Today

Mixed clouds and sun this morning. Scattered thunderstorms developing this afternoon. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. High 89F. NNW winds at 5 to 10 mph, increasing to 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 58F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph.
UofG researchers to play a key role in major EU arthritis research project

Researchers at the University of Glasgow will play a key role in the major new EU research project, HIPPOCRATES, which will promote the early identification of and improve outcomes for patients with psoriatic arthritis.

Launched today, HIPPOCRATES is a collaboration between European research partners, pharmaceutical companies, SMEs and patient organisations, who have all joined forces as partners to develop innovative, personalised treatment options for people affected by psoriatic arthritis. It is hoped the project will revolutionise treatment and deliver profound patient benefits.

By looking into psoriatic arthritis disease mechanisms, the 26 European partners aim to improve diagnostic and therapeutic options for patients living with this condition. The project aims to gain a better understanding of the complex interplay between clinical and environmental factors, as well as genotype and molecular pathways, to enable earlier diagnosis and a more accurate prediction of disease progression.

One of the aims of HIPPOCRATES is to identify biomarkers that help predict response to treatment. Professor Stefan Siebert and Professor Carl Goodyear from the University of Glasgows Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation, are co-leading the project arm addressing this important area. Their team will use state of the art technologies to identify biomarkers that will help inform a move to a more targeted approach for the treatment of this condition.

Professor Siebert, who also runs a specialist psoriatic arthritis clinic in Glasgow, said: Having biomarkers to predict which therapy is most likely to work in a patient with psoriatic arthritis would avoid the current largely trial-and-error approach and would lead to significant improvements in patients quality of life.

HIPPOCRATES also aims to promote early diagnosis and improve the management of people with psoriatic arthritis. Professor Frances Mair, from the University of Glasgows Institute of Health and Wellbeing, who leads the project arm promoting communication, dissemination & sustainability, said: Our project aims to ensure that any biomarkers found to help identify patients developing psoriatic arthritis  and any algorithms that may be produced to support clinicians to make appropriate diagnoses earlier  are implementable in practice, so that they can transform the management of psoriatic arthritis.

The project will run for a period of five years, with a total budget of 21million provided by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI 2), a Joint Undertaking of the European Union and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). Of the total budget, 50% are contributed by the EFPIA partners (Novartis [EFPIA lead], UCB [EFPIA Co-lead], Pfizer and BMS) and 50% by the EU.

Psoriatic arthritis is a chronic immune-mediated inflammatory disease that affects joints and other components of the musculoskeletal system, together with skin involvement, in an estimated 5-10 million individuals in the EU. The symptoms of the disease, including pain, joint stiffness and fatigue, can impact on many aspects of life including function and productivity.

Overall, it is increasingly recognised that Psoriatic arthritis is associated with multiple comorbidities, particularly those affecting mental health such as depression and those which promote the development of accelerated atherosclerosis and contribute to the observed increase in cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Psoriatic arthritis most commonly develops on a background of established skin and/or nail psoriasis, however it can be difficult to diagnose as there are no diagnostic criteria or laboratory tests available. This can contribute to diagnostic delay and poor outcomes.

Psoriatic arthritis is characterised by considerable heterogeneity with regards to clinical features, disease progression and response to targeted therapies. Future treatments will need to focus on earlier disease stages and be selected on the basis of detailed patient molecular profiling so as to limit poor long-term outcomes and possibly prevent the development of Psoriatic arthritis altogether.

We anticipate that the advances provided by HIPPOCRATES will result in significant new developments that improve patients quality of life says Prof. Oliver FitzGerald, Newman Clinical Research Professor at University College Dublin, Conway Institute for Biomedical and Biomolecular Research, Ireland coordinator of the HIPPOCRATES consortium.

Co-coordinator, Prof. Stephen Pennington, Professor of Proteomics at University College Dublin and also in the Conway Institute notes: The advances will include the identification of sub-populations and endotypes, the validation of existing and identification of new biomarkers, improved imaging options and the development of a sustainable infrastructure for future PsA research.

"HIPPOCRATES offers the great promise of powerful new tools to advance both early diagnosis and treatment of patients with PsA. Additionally, and to further its effectiveness, HIPPOCRATES retains the focus on the patient, involving Patient Research Partners within all aspects of the project," adds Denis OSullivan (Patient Representative Arm of GRAPPA-EU).

This public-private partnership is a great opportunity to decipher this highly heterogenous disease, and to enable the development of novel PsA therapies and treatment strategies including precision medicine approaches adds Dr. Christine Huppertz, Senior Principal Scientist in the Disease Area Autoimmunity, Transplantation and Inflammation at Novartis, and EFPIA lead of the consortium.

In order to achieve its goals, the HIPPOCRATES project will set up a single integrated database combining the cohorts and datasets of the most important European PsA studies and establish a Europe-wide library of relevant clinical biosamples. HIPPOCRATES will also establish a large, prospective, observational study of 25,000 patients with psoriasis who will be recruited and followed on-line for development of PsA, with patient-centric blood sampling at defined intervals.

Furthermore, the team of experts will evaluate and validate newly discovered biomarker signatures for the early diagnosis of PsA, for the identification of psoriasis patients at risk of developing PsA, for the identification of PsA patients at highest risk of damage progression and for personalised or stratified treatment strategies so as to maximise treatment response. Overall, HIPPOCRATES places particular emphasis on the involvement of patients, clinicians, primary care practitioners, regulators, SMEs (ATTUROS Limited, Oxford Biodynamics Limited and NEOTERYX Limited) and relevant large industry to meet the needs of all stakeholders and to maximise the projects impact.

Formed as a transdisciplinary consortium, the project team comprises 26 partner institutions from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Led by University College Dublin, the partners contribute a diverse range of backgrounds including clinical, scientific, data analytics, ethics, patient participation as well as SME and pharmaceutical industry expertise in pursuit of the ambitious goals set for the HIPPPOCRATES project.

Enquiries: ali.howard@glasgow.ac.uk or elizabeth.mcmeekin@glasgow.ac.uk / 0141 330 6557 or 0141 330 4831
Advicenne Receives MHRA Approval to Market Sibnayal (ADV7103) in the UK for the Treatment of dRTA







Paris, France, 2nd July 2021  7 am CEST  Advicenne (Euronext: ADVIC), a specialty pharmaceutical company dedicated to developing and commercializing innovative treatments for those suffering from rare renal diseases, is pleased to announce that the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has today granted marketing authorisation for Sibnayal (ADV7103) in the UK, for the treatment of distal renal tubular acidosis (dRTA).

With this authorization, and following the recent approval by the European Commission to market Sibnayal for the treatment of dRTA in the European Union, Advicenne is now able to bring to market in the EU and the UK the first and only label-approved drug for the treatment of dRTA in adults, adolescents and children aged one year and older. Advicenne now has the opportunity to make a significant difference to patients suffering from dRTA, classified as an orphan condition in Europe.

Didier Laurens, Chief Executive Officer of Advicenne said: We welcome the approval by the MHRA of Sibnayal which enables us to provide a much needed treatment to patients in the United Kingdon affected by dRTA. With this approval, and following the marketing authorization by the European Commission earlier this year, we are now able to make a difference to the lives of the thousands of people affected by this rare disease. Our first priority is now to finalize a distribution agreement for Sibnayal in Europe.

Sibnayal is a multi-particulate formulation in 2mm granules, a novel pioneering delivery technology created by Advicenne that contains two active pharmaceutical ingredients. This approach not only has led to an excellent effectiveness in controlling metabolic acidosis, but also to ease the administration and aid compliance and quality of life in patients of all ages.

About dRTA

Distal renal tubular acidosis (dRTA) is an orphan disease characterized by a failure in the renal excretion of acids generated through metabolism and for which there is no approved treatment. The excess of acids thus accumulated in the blood leads to an imbalance in pH (acidosis) as well as multiple other complications such as growth retardation and rickets (a disease affecting bone development) in children, and a series of metabolic disorders such as low potassium levels, elevated calcium in the urine resulting in kidney stones, the formation of calcium deposits in the kidneys (calcinosis) as well as possible kidney failure.

Whether genetic or acquired as a consequence of an immune disease, dRTA affects an estimated 30,000 patients in Europe and approximately 20,000 in the United States.

About Advicenne

Advicenne (Euronext: ADVIC) is a pharmaceutical company founded in 2007, specializing in the development of innovative treatments in Nephrology. Its lead drug candidate is currently in late-stage clinical trials for two kidney diseases: distal renal tubular acidosis and cystinuria. ADV7103 has just received a positive CHMP opinion for the treatment of dRTA. Headquartered in Paris, Advicenne has been listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange since 2017 and was cross-listed on the Euronext Brussels stock exchange in 2019.

For additional information see: https://advicenne.com/

CONTACTS

Advicenne

David Solomon, Chairman

Didier Laurens, CEO

+33 (0)4 66 05 54 20

Email: investors@advicenne.com Ulysse Communication

Media relations

Bruno Arabian

+33 (0)6 87 88 47 26

Email: advicenne@ulysse-communication.com



Consilium Strategic Communications

Mary-Jane Elliott, Ashley Tapp, Davide Salvi

+44 (0)20 3709 5700

Email: advicenne@consilium-comms.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements relating to the business of Advicenne, which shall not be considered per se as historical facts. Such statements include projections and estimates, and the hypotheses on which these are based, as well as observations relating to operations, ongoing projects, objectives, the development of products and their future performance, and expectations regarding financial results.

In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as "could," "should," "may," "expects," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "aims," "targets" or similar words. Although the management of Advicenne believes that these forward-looking statements are reasonably made, investors should be aware that they are subject to a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. In particular, the expectations of Advicenne could be affected by, among other things, uncertainties involved in the placing on the market and commercialization of Advicenne products or any other risks and uncertainties developed or identified in any public documents filed by Advicenne with the French Financial Markets Authority (Autorite des marches financiers (AMF)), including those listed in Chapter 4, Risk Factors, of its universal registration document, filed with the latter on December 22, 2020. Notwithstanding the compliance with article 223-1 of the General Regulation of the AMF (the information disclosed must be accurate, precise and fairly presented), Advicenne disclaims any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Dublin, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Genetic Testing Market 2020-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The global genetic testing market is growing at a significant CAGR during the forecast period. The genetic disorder can be occurred by a change in one gene (monogenic disorder), by changes in multiple genes by a combination of environmental factors, and gene mutations, or by the destruction of chromosomes. Genetic testing is a medical test that is used for the identification of mutations in genes or chromosomes. The key benefit of genetic testing is the chance to know the risk for a certain disease that possibly can be prevented, identify the disease or a type of disease, identify the cause of a disease, to determine options for a disease. The disease that can be identified by genetic testing includes, breast and ovarian cancer, Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD), bipolar disorder, Parkinson's disease, celiac disease, and psoriasis.



The global genetic testing market is projected to considerably grow in the upcoming year due to the prevalence of genetic disorders, cancer, and chronic disease. Moreover, continuous advancement by the medical companies in the genetic diagnostic field is also augmenting the market growth. These companies are finding new and better tests for the accurate diagnosis of the most prevalent as well as rare diseases. Besides, the increase in awareness between people about health and the increased mortality rate due to genetic diseases across the globe is also a major factor increasing the need for demand for genetic testing.



Moreover, The adoption of (DTC) direct-to-consumer genetic testing kits in countries such as the US, China, and Japan, is increasing rapidly. With growing technological acceptances, awareness programs, and a drop in costs, the market for DTC-GT kits is likely to witness a significant boost over the forecast period. However, the lack of diagnostic infrastructure in emerging economies is a challenging factor for market growth.



Segmental Outlook



The global genetic testing market is segmented by technology, type, and disease. By technology, the market is segmented into polymerase chain reaction, DNA sequencing, cytogenetics (karyotyping and fish), microarrays, and gene expression profiling. By type, the market is divided into prenatal and newborn genetic testing, predictive testing, diagnostic testing, carrier testing, and others. Moreover, by disease type, the market is sub-segmented into cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, Fanconi anemia, sickle cell anemia, cardiovascular diseases, and others.



Global Genetic Testing Market Share by Disease, 2020 (%)



Based on disease type, cancer segment is expected to hold a major market share during the forecast period. The need for accurate testing for cancer at the early stages and prediagnostic testing are some of the major factors for the significant market share of the segment. It is since the number of the cancer patient are very high, government and companies are trying to increase the 5-year survival rate of fatal cancers. Genetic testing aids in estimate a person's chance of developing cancer in a lifetime. Genetic tests are available for some types of cancer. These include breast cancer, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, thyroid cancer, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, sarcoma, kidney cancer, and stomach cancer.



Regional Outlooks



The global genetic testing market is analyzed on the basis of the geographical regions that are contributing significantly to the growth of the market. The market report covers the analysis of four major regions into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Rest of the World. North America is estimated to contribute a significant share in the global genetic testing market due to the high awareness among the people about advanced treatment for healthcare, well-developed healthcare infrastructure, presence of key players, and availability of drugs. Moreover, an increase in government initiatives for the enhancement of healthcare facilities and funding in research in the region is also a major factor for the significant market share of the region. In the US under the US CDC EGAPP, inventiveness has been taken by the government such as the Evaluation of Genomic Applications in Practice and Prevention which is also motivating the market growth. One of the key goals of the initiative is to timely, offer objectively, and credible information that is linked to available scientific evidence. These statistics will allow healthcare workers and payers, customers, policymakers, and others to differentiate genetic tests that are safe and useful.



Global Genetic Testing Market Growth, by Region 2020-2026



Asia-Pacific will have considerable growth in the global Genetic Testing Market

In Asia Pacific, the market is increasing due to government initiatives in research and the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases. Apart from cancer, genetic testing processes have also come in easy reach for the diagnosis of inherited cardiovascular diseases such as cardiac amyloidosis, Brugada syndrome, and familial dilated cardiomyopathy. As the region has a high incidence of cardiovascular diseases, significant scope for genetic testing can be witnessed in the region during the forecast period.



Market Players Outlook



The report covers the analysis of various players operating in the global genetic testing market. Some of the major players covered in the report include Abbott Laboratories, Myriad Genetics, Inc., F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Illumina, Inc., and Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. To survive in the market, these players adopt different marketing strategies such as mergers and acquisitions, product launches, and geographical expansion.



Recent Activity

In August 2020, Roche announced the US FDA clearance of FoundationOne Liquid CDx, it's a comprehensive pan-tumor liquid biopsy test, Liquid CDx analyses more than 300 cancer-related genes and multiple genomic signatures to benefit inform treatment decisions for all solid tumor cancers.

In May 2020, Myriad Genetics, Inc. announced the US FDA approval of my choice CDx for the treatment of patients having Advanced Ovarian Cancer. MyChoice CDx uses as a companion diagnostic to identify women with advanced ovarian cancer.

The Report Covers

Market value data analysis of 2020 and forecast to 2027.

Annualized market revenues ($ million) for each market segment.

Country-wise analysis of major geographical regions.

Key companies operating in the global female infertility diagnosis and treatment market. Based on the availability of data, information related to new product launches, and relevant news is also available in the report.

Analysis of business strategies by identifying the key market segments positioned for strong growth in the future.

Analysis of market entry and market expansion strategies.

Competitive strategies by identifying 'who-stands-where' in the market.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Report Summary



2. Market Overview and Insights



3. Competitive Landscape

3.1. Company Share Analysis

3.2. Key Strategy Analysis

3.3. Key Company Analysis

3.3.1. Key Companyanalysis

3.3.1.1. Overview

3.3.1.2. Financial Analysis

3.3.1.3. SWOT Analysis

3.3.1.4. Recent Developments

3.3.2. Key Strategy Analysis



4. Market Determinants

4.1. Motivators

4.2. Restraints

4.3. Opportunities



5. Market Segmentation

5.1. Global Genetic Testing Market by Technology

5.1.1. Polymerase Chain Reaction

5.1.2. DNA Sequencing

5.1.3. Cytogenetics (Karyotyping and FISH)

5.1.4. Microarrays

5.1.5. Gene Expression Profiling

5.2. Global Genetic Testing Market by Type

5.2.1. Prenatal and New-Born Genetic Testing

5.2.2. Predictive Testing

5.2.3. Diagnostic Testing

5.2.4. Carrier Testing

5.2.5. Other (Forensic Testing, Pre-Implantation Testing)

5.3. Global Genetic Testing Market by Disease

5.3.1. Cancer

5.3.2. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's

5.3.3. Sickle Cell Anaemia

5.3.4. Fanconi Anaemia

5.3.5. Cardiovascular Disease

5.3.6. Others (Cystic Fibrosis, Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy)



6. Regional Analysis

6.2. North America

6.2.1. United States

6.2.2. Canada

6.3. Europe

6.3.1. UK

6.3.2. Germany

6.3.3. Italy

6.3.4. Spain

6.3.5. France

6.3.6. Rest of Europe

6.4. Asia-Pacific

6.4.1. China

6.4.2. India

6.4.3. Japan

6.4.4. Rest of Asia-Pacific

6.5. Rest of the World



7. Company Profiles

7.1. 23Andme, Inc.

7.2. Abbott Laboratories

7.3. AutoGenomics, Inc.

7.4. Biocartis SA

7.5. Biomerieux SA

7.6. Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc.

7.7. Cepheid, Inc.

7.8. Elitech Group

7.9. Eurofins Scientific SE

7.10. F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.

7.11. Foundation Medicine, Inc.

7.12. Genomictree Inc.

7.13. Illumina, Inc.

7.14. Luminex Corp.

7.15. MedGenome, Inc.

7.16. Myriad Genetics, Inc.

7.17. NeoGenomics Laboratories, Inc.

7.18. Opko Health Inc.

7.19. PerkinElmer, Inc.

7.20. 7.19. Qiagen N.V.

7.21. 7.20. Quest Diagnostics, Inc.

7.22. Takara Bio, Inc.

7.23. Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/76mae8
Dublin, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "B2B Legal Services Global Market Report 2021: COVID-19 Impact and Recovery to 2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



Major players in the B2B legal services market are Arps; Slate, Meagher & Flom; Clifford Chance; Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer; Linklaters, Skadden; Allen & Overy; Kirkland & Ellis LLP; and Latham & Watkins LLP.



The global b2b legal services market is expected to grow from $390.62 billion in 2020 to $402.15 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3%.

The growth is mainly due to the companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the COVID-19 impact, which had earlier led to restrictive containment measures involving social distancing, remote working, and the closure of commercial activities that resulted in operational challenges.

The market is expected to reach $494.87 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 5.3%.



The B2B legal services market consists of the sales of law-related services by entities (organizations, sole traders, and partnerships) that advise corporate clients on the body of law that governs disputes between businesses and represent corporate clients in civil or criminal cases, business transactions and other matters in which legal advice and other assistance are sought.

This segment excludes legal services offered during disputes between businesses and individuals. B2B legal services are usually provided by commercial law firms. Clients of commercial law firms include listed corporations, government institutions, small and medium-sized enterprises, and high net worth individuals. Only goods and services traded between entities or sold to end consumers are included.



Legal service firms are using blockchain to provide a secure way to make transactions and record that transparently. Blockchain is open, distributed ledger that record transactions between the two association or companies efficiently and permanent way.

According to the law firm's survey in 2018, 53% of the legal service providing firms are researching blockchain solutions, and only 3% have implemented it. Smart contracts are created digitally and verifiable since they are on the blockchain. Smart contracts help lawyers spend more time on legal advising instead of drafting legal documents.

For instance, Chainlink is a start-up that developed technology that relies on data from multiple sources and makes smart contracts more attractive. Blockchain and smart contracts offer several advantages such as secure transactions, transparent records, less paperwork, and more time for advising clients.



The B2B legal services market covered in the report is segmented by service type into civil or criminal; mergers and acquisitions; business transactions; others and by end-user into listed corporations; government institutions; small and medium-sized enterprises; high net worth individuals; others.



In January 2020, UK based law firm DWF acquired Chicago-based managed services business Mindcrest for a deal amount of $18.5 million. DWF gets a readymade low-cost legal center through this acquisition that will bolt on to the existing managed legal services capabilities. Mindcrest provides litigation support, contracts, compliance, and legal analytics for corporate clients.



An Increase in the number of mergers and acquisitions contributed to the growth of the B2B legal services market. For completing mergers and acquisitions transactions, the companies require to consult legal firms for finalizing the deal. According to the JPMorgan report on the 2020 Global M&A Outlook, the number of M&A deals in 2018 were 41, and in 2019 were 47 worldwide. The increase in the number of mergers and acquisitions drove the B2B legal services market.



The shortage of skilled workforce in the industry is expected to limit the B2B legal services market. The effects of skilled workforce shortage are high turnover rate, ineffective staff management, increased business expenses, and loss of customers.

According to research by Robert Half Legal, 91% of lawyers said that finding skilled legal professionals is challenging. Around 80% of lawyers responded about being concerned on losing top performers to other opportunities. The shortage of qualified workforce reduces the effectiveness of the firms output and negatively affects B2B legal services market.



Key Topics Covered:



1. Executive Summary



2. B2B Legal Services Market Characteristics



3. B2B Legal Services Market Trends and Strategies



4. Impact of COVID-19 on B2B Legal Services



5. B2B Legal Services Market Size and Growth

5.1. Global B2B Legal Services Historic Market, 2015-2020, $ Billion

5.1.1. Drivers of the Market

5.1.2. Restraints on the Market

5.2. Global B2B Legal Services Forecast Market, 2020-2025F, 2030F, $ Billion

5.2.1. Drivers of the Market

5.2.2. Restraints on the Market



6. B2B Legal Services Market Segmentation

6.1. Global B2B Legal Services Market, Segmentation by Service Type, Historic and Forecast, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F, $ Billion

Civil or Criminal

Mergers and Acquisitions

Business Transactions

Others

6.2. Global B2B Legal Services Market, Segmentation by End-user, Historic and Forecast, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F, $ Billion

Listed Corporations

Government Institutions

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

High Net worth Individuals

Others

6.3. Global B2B Legal Services Market, Segmentation by Size of Law Firm, Historic and Forecast, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F, $ Billion

Large law firms

SME law firms

7. B2B Legal Services Market Regional and Country Analysis

7.1. Global B2B Legal Services Market, Split by Region, Historic and Forecast, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F, $ Billion

7.2. Global B2B Legal Services Market, Split by Country, Historic and Forecast, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F, $ Billion



Companies Mentioned

Arps

Slate

Meagher & Flom

Clifford Chance

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

Linklaters

Skadden

Allen & Overy

Kirkland & Ellis LLP

Latham & Watkins LLP

Baker & McKenzie

DLA Piper and Skadden

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/jxddjs
Linthicum, Maryland, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NFM Lending is pleased to once again honor Sergeant Eric Houck as the NFM Salute for July 2021. Houck was previously profiled as the NFM Salute in February 2020.

Houck was originally from Perry Hall, Maryland. At just 22 years old and following the birth of his first child, Houck joined the U.S. Army in 2013. While stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he received his first overseas deployment to Afghanistan to support Operation Freedom's Sentinel as a forward observer in the 101st Airborne Division. On June 10, 2017, at 25 years old, Houck was one of three American soldiers tragically killed by an enemy combatant in Peka Valley, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan. Houck was only two months away from returning home. He left behind his wife Samantha and their young children, EJ and Violet.

He posthumously received the Bronze Star Medal, Purple Heart, Combat Action Badge, and Army Commendation Medal with a second oak leaf cluster for his bravery in battle. In April 2021, the Perry Hall community dedicated a bridge to Houck and another fallen soldier from the area. Houck's father Mike said, "That to me is the greatest honor that they could bestow. It's just so important to us, just for him to be remembered by people in the community."

Four years after losing their beloved son, the Houck family still feels his absence but keeps his memory alive through their stories. "Obviously, it's something you never get over. Maybe the emotions don't come to the surface as much as they had previously. We've come to terms with the situation," said Mike Houck. "It's part of our life. It's part of who we are. I am more than happy to talk to anybody who will listen about Eric. I mean, he's my son, but he was a tremendous man."

NFM Salute is an initiative in which one military member or Veteran is chosen each month to be honored as the "Salute of the Month." Salutes are chosen from nominations on the NFM Salute website, www.nfmsalute.com. The "Salute of the Month" will be featured on the website with a biography and information about their service. Additionally, NFM Lending will donate to a non-profit in the Salute's name. NFM Lending is proud to donate $2,500 to Mission 22 on behalf of Eric and the Houck family. NFM looks forward to the opportunity to continue to honor military members and Veterans through the NFM Salute initiative.

About NFM Lending



NFM Lending is a mortgage lending company currently licensed in 42 states in the U.S. The company was founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 1998. They attribute their success in the mortgage industry to their steadfast commitment to customers and the community. For more information about NFM Lending, visit www.nfmlending.com, like our Facebook page, or follow us on Instagram.

NFM Lending T: 18882330092




BANGOR, MAINE, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hannaford Supermarkets and Husson University are working together to help Hannafords employees earn professional certificates, undergraduate degrees and graduate degrees. Students have the choice of taking courses online or attending classes at Husson Universitys Bangor, Maine campus.

With more than 180 stores and nearly 30,000 associates located in Maine, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, Hannaford employees are spread out over a sizeable geographic area, said Marie Hansen, JD, PhD, SHRM-SCP, dean of the College of Business and the New England School of Communications (NESCom) at Husson University. Our robust online capabilities and our Bangor, Maine campus are ideally suited to help these busy professionals successfully access the kinds of advanced education that can lead to career success.

Hussons online undergraduate degree offerings include programs in accounting, business administration, marketing, psychology, legal studies, and criminal justice, to name a few. The University also offers a variety of graduate degree programs online. These degree programs include masters degrees in business administration with concentrations in risk management, entrepreneurship, healthcare and business analytics. For a full list of Husson Universitys online degree programs visit https://www.husson.edu/online/online-degrees/.

Husson University is helping Hannaford provide a cost-effective option for our associates to pursue higher education and skill development, said Matthew Rothman, manager of early talent development at Hannaford. Partnering locally and extending advancement opportunities to our associates is another example of how Hannaford shows care for our associates and our community.

Any Hannaford employee who meets the companys employment requirements, and who then successfully applies to Husson University and is enrolled in a non-capped undergraduate or graduate degree program, can receive a 15% discount on tuition. This includes Husson Universitys popular Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. More students in Maine choose to get their MBA from Husson University than any other college or university in the state.

Hannaford employees who are interested in earning a pharmacy graduate degree will be eligible to receive a 10% discount, provided they meet Hannafords employment requirements and are accepted into the program, after successfully applying to Husson University.

In addition to these discounts, Hannaford employees will be eligible to have their application fee waived if they follow Hussons admission procedures and agree to become a continuing education undergraduate or graduate student at the University.

Those Hannaford employees who have already completed a bachelors degree from a recognized, accredited institution are welcome to apply to Hussons graduate degree programs. As an added benefit to students pursuing an MBA, Husson University will offer a leveling course that can be taken online. This will provide students, who have a degree in a discipline other than business, with the background education theyll need to successfully complete their MBA studies.

Hannaford employees that have completed some college coursework have the opportunity to reduce the cost of their education further by applying for transfer credit. Individuals interested in applying for undergraduate transfer credits should contact Transfer Admissions by calling 207.941.7024 or emailing Stephanie Cadwell, the associate director of transfer admissions at cadwells@husson.edu. Individuals interested in applying transfer credit to their MBA program should contact Husson University Graduate Admissions by calling them at 207.404.5661 or emailing them at graduateschool@husson.edu. Undergraduate and Graduate Admissions are more than happy to answer any questions individuals may have about the admissions process.

Husson University is the home of Maines largest College of Business, with over 1,400 students enrolled in our business programs. Weve been providing business education for over 123 years, continued Hansen. In addition to offering a high quality education, Husson University degrees are affordable. Thats makes Husson University an incredible value and the smart choice for business education.

Qualifying Hannaford employees can also enroll in any of Hussons 48 undergraduate degree1 and 45 certificate programs available at the Universitys Bangor, Maine campus. This includes all of the programs offered through Hussons College of Business, College of Health and Pharmacy, College of Science and Humanities and the New England School of Communications (NESCom). A complete list of Husson Universitys undergraduate and graduate degree programs can be found at https://www.husson.edu/academics/degrees/.

More about Hannaford Supermarkets:

Hannaford Supermarkets, based in Scarborough, Maine, operates 184 stores in the Northeast. Stores are located in Maine, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Hannaford employs nearly 30,000 associates. Additional information can be found at Hannaford.com.

More about Husson University:

For more than 120 years, Husson University has shown its adaptability and strength in delivering educational programs that prepare future leaders to handle the challenges of tomorrow through innovative undergraduate and graduate degrees. With a commitment to delivering affordable classroom, online and experiential learning opportunities, Husson University has come to represent a superior value in higher education. The hallmarks of a Husson education include advanced knowledge delivered through quality educational programs in business; health and education; pharmacy studies; science and humanities; as well as communication. According to a recent analysis of tuition and fees by U.S. News & World Report, Husson University is one of the most affordable private colleges in New England. For more information about educational opportunities that can lead to personal and professional success, visit Husson.edu.

# # #





1 Includes variations in concentrations

Attachments
Staten Island, NY, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In observance of Independence Day, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation has paid off the mortgages on the homes of 19 fallen first responders and handed over the keys to a brand new mortgage-free smart home to U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Austin Reese.

The 20 homes are located in 15 states:

Special Agent Daniel Alfin, FBI - Florida

Special Agent Laura Schwartzenberger, FBI - Florida

Master Police Officer Jesse Madsen, Tampa Police Department - Florida

Deputy Sheriff Michael Magli, Pinellas County Sheriffs Office - Florida

Sergeant Damon Gutzwiller, Santa Cruz County Sheriffs Office - California

Police Officer Vu Nguyen, Cleveland Division of Police - Ohio

Police Officer Craig Comstock, Bellefontaine Police Department - Ohio

Deputy Commander Patrick Carothers, U.S. Marshals Service - Georgia

Corporal Stephen Ballard, Delaware State Police Department - Delaware

Firefighter James Woods, Jersey City Fire Department - New Jersey

Trooper Joseph Gallagher, New York State Police - New York

Patrolman Troy Jacobson, Momence Police Department - Illinois

Fire Chief Darin Sabine, Newington Fire Department - New Hampshire

Trooper II Nathan-Michael Smith, Virginia State Police - Virginia

Corporal Shane Totty, Baton Rouge Police Department - Louisiana

Detective Curt Holland, Commerce City Police Department - Colorado

Detective James Kirk, Stanton Police Department - Kentucky

Police Officer Kejuane Bates, Vidalia Police Department - Arkansas

Deputy Sheriff Mason Moore, Broadwater County Sheriffs Office - Montana

Senior Chief Petty Officer Austin Reese, U.S. Navy - Montana



FBI Special Agent Daniel Alfin and FBI Special Agent Laura Schwartzenberger were killed in the line of duty on February 2, 2021, while serving a federal search warrant in a crimes against children investigation.

Having my home paid off is a big relief. It will allow me some sense of security that we will be able to stay in the neighborhood and community that has provided us so much support, especially since it is the neighborhood Daniel and I picked together, said Special Agent Alfins widow.

For Special Agent Schwartzenbergers husband, the Foundation's support has allowed him to focus on their children. It is like a huge weight has been lifted off of my shoulders knowing that I can focus on taking care of our boys and having a home that is fully ours. To have our mortgage paid off on Independence Day is truly amazing as we can celebrate our beautiful country knowing that there is so much kindness out there supporting first responders and their families.

Tampa Police Master Police Officer Jesse Madsen was killed on March 9, 2021, when he intentionally drove into the path of the wrong-way driver and laid down his life to save the lives of others.

He left behind his wife Danyelle, who is also a police officer, and their three children.

After hearing the news about my husband, everything was upside down and surreal. In the days that followed, one of my worries was having to move from the house that our family made our home. How do I return to my job as a police officer to pay a mortgage with my kids begging me not to return for fear of losing another parent? Your foundation has restored a huge part of my sense of security and I can never thank you all enough, said Danyelle Madsen.

Broadwater County Sheriffs Deputy Mason Moore was shot and killed while involved in a high-speed pursuit. He left behind his wife, Jodi, twin sons and a daughter.

Jodi said Tunnel to Towers support would have meant so much to her husband. Providing a roof over a familys head is a huge gift and blessing. This is the first time in a long time that I have felt that I might survive this. I am fighting hard to make Mason proud with my choices and take care of our kids. Thank you for helping me with that."

The Tunnel to Towers Fallen First Responder Home Program pays off the mortgages for the families of law enforcement officers and firefighters who are killed in the line of duty with young children.

This Independence Day, Tunnel to Towers is delivering financial independence to the families of fallen first responders by paying off the mortgages on the homes of these heroes. We cannot replace the loss of a husband and father but we can make sure these families can stay in the place they called home, said Tunnel to Towers Chairman and CEO Frank Siller.

The Tunnel to Towers Smart Home Program custom builds specially adapted mortgage-free smart homes that help our most catastrophically injured veterans reclaim their day-to-day independence.

On July 1, in Whitefish, Montana, U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Austin Reese and his family was welcomed into his brand new mortgage-free smart home.

SCPO Reese, a Senior Chief Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician served 13 years with the U.S. Navys Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit and deployed to Iraq three times.

In September 2013, during a routine jump at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story, SCPO Reece made a miscalculation of his altitude and hit the ground at 65 miles per hour. He suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed. SCPO Reese, his wife, Charity, and their daughters were overwhelmed when they saw their new smart home for the first time.

This house is going to allow me to regain a lot of my independence, allow me to help be a part of my family again, help with cooking and the cleaning, and just normal daily life and daily chores. I just cannot thank everybody enough for this gift to my family and myself, said SCPO Reese.

This year is the Tunnel to Towers Foundations 20th Anniversary, and to mark 20 years of DOING GOOD the Foundation has promised to deliver 200 mortgage payoffs or mortgage-free homes across the country by the end of the year.

For more information on Tunnel to Towers mission to support Americas veterans, fallen first responders and Gold Star families, please go to T2T.org and consider donating just $11 per month.

For more information about Tunnel to Towers events to mark the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks visit T2T.org/20-Anniversary/.

About the Tunnel to Towers Foundation

The Tunnel to Towers Foundation is dedicated to honoring the sacrifice of FDNY Firefighter Stephen Siller, who laid down his life to save others on September 11, 2001. For 20 years the Foundation has supported our nations first responders, veterans, and their families by providing these heroes and the families they leave behind with mortgage-free homes. For more about the Tunnel to Towers Foundation and its commitment to DO GOOD, please visit T2T.org.

Follow Tunnel to Towers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at @Tunnel2Towers.

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TORONTO, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The tragic loss of Detective Constable Jeffrey Northrup is undeniably heartbreaking. The Toronto Police Association sends our deepest condolences to the family, friends and fellow police officers of Jeffrey Northrup, a hardworking, dedicated family man with a long line of service.



While they are often unsung heroes, Toronto Police Officers are the backbone of community safety and their role as officers comes at a heavy price. At any given moment, a police officers day could turn fatal as was the case with Detective Constable Jeffrey Northrup.

Today, the City of Toronto takes a pause and recognizes the sacrifice that this officer made for the citizens of Toronto. We also recognize police officers everywhere who demonstrate unmatched bravery - even under the most life-threatening circumstances.

As we all grapple with this tragedy, the Toronto Police Association will be providing its full support to the family and to all of our members, including mental health resources, grief counselling, and outreach programs.

Detective Constable Jeffrey Northrup will be remembered as a devoted police officer who made the ultimate sacrifice while serving and protecting our community.

Toronto Police Association

The Toronto Police Association represents approximately 8,000 full-time and part-time uniform and civilian members of the Toronto Police Service. Our members include frontline police officers, criminal investigators, community response officers, parking enforcement officers, communications operators, court officers, civilian specialists and support staff.

Please visit our website for more information.

https://www.tpa.ca

For Media Inquiries:

Laura Silver, External Communications

647-984-6136
ROCK HILL, N.Y., July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Patrick H. Dollard, CEO of The Center for Discovery (TCFD, The Center) and Dr. Theresa Hamlin, President, will be joined by US Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and other state and local dignitaries in Rock Hill, New York, on Friday, July 2, 2021, to break ground on a first-of-its kind Childrens Specialty Hospital for those with complex conditions like autism.



The hospital is a dream-come-true for The Center and hundreds of families across the state. It will provide the first comprehensive place of diagnosis, clinical assessment, crisis evaluation, and evidence-based, targeted treatment for medical, physiological, and behavioral issues related to complex conditions.

Senator Schumer, a tireless advocate for children with complex conditions, has played a pivotal role in supporting the development of the hospital. In the midst of a global pandemic, he advocated for and secured an unprecedented $35 million low interest loan through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of Rural Development Community Facilities Program, facilitating meetings and connections with various federal agencies to keep the project on track during the pandemic allowing for this groundbreaking event with USDA officials.

I have worked with The Center for Discovery for years to make sure they had all the federal resources necessary to provide high-quality care for their vulnerable patients with complex disabilities, said Senator Schumer. As a lead negotiator for last years COVID relief bills, and as Majority Leader this year, I have fought tooth and nail to make sure that The Center has all of the tools needed to rebuild and recover from the pandemic. Thats why after years of tireless advocacy, Im proud to attend todays groundbreaking ceremony for the Childrens Specialty Hospital.

Schumer continued, This first-of-its-kind hospital will support our most vulnerable New Yorkers and their families while creating over 400 new jobs in Sullivan County. I will continue my support for the essential role carried out by The Center for Discovery as both a health care provider and the largest employer in Sullivan County, and I will not rest until the last stone has been placed and they have all the federal resources they need to continue their service for all of Upstate New York."

We have been envisioning this hospital and working toward this day for over a decade, said Patrick H. Dollard, with a growing staff of more than 1,700, 300 residents, and over 100 community students, and over 40-years of experience in the field, we are firsthand witnesses to the great need for this kind of care not only in our community, but indeed  the rest of the country. Our model of care has become a benchmark for so many others. We are incredibly grateful to Senator Schumer for his vision and leadership and for being a longtime champion for our community. Thank you, also, to the USDA for their support and collaboration. We look forward to helping many other families find answers they have so desperately been searching for.

Improving health and wellness, educating families and school districts when applicable, and ultimately keeping children and adolescents together with their families and out of long-term residential care, is the goal of The Childrens Specialty Hospital. It is estimated it will save New York State millions of dollars.

The hospital building will also include the state-of-the-art Alemany Learning Center to expand the education of professionals in this field, and expanded office and research space for The Centers already robust research and development arms.

Our success here at The Center is because we lead with compassion and we act as a team. Imagine having hundreds of professionals in your corner at once, and every one of them adding their expertise in medicine, clinical services, the arts, recreation, and nutrition. This kind of care is transformative, added Patrick H. Dollard.

Other guests for the groundbreaking include: NY State Senator Mike Martucci (R-NY); NY Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther (D-NY); Brian Murray, USDA Acting NYS Director; Josephine Finn, Vice Chancellor NYS Board of Regents; Jeffrey Kraut, Executive VP for Strategy and Analytics at Northwell Health; Ed Sweeney, TCFD Board Chairman; Bill Rieber, Town of Thompson Supervisor; Jay Quaintance, President of SUNY Sullivan; George Cooke, Sullivan County Commissioner of Jurors.

About The Center for Discovery:

The Center for Discovery (TCFD) is a leading provider of healthcare and education services for more than 1,200 children and adults with complex conditions, medical frailties and Autism Spectrum Disorders, located 90 miles northwest of New York City. Named a Center of Excellence in 2016, TCFD has long been a leader in developing new models of care for individuals with complex conditions. Located on 1,500 acres of land in Sullivan County, TCFD houses school campuses, residences, medical and research facilities, organic and biodynamic farmland, and leased private businesses offering meaningful employment opportunities. Deeply focused on an individuals personal potential and possibilities, rather than a disability, TCFD strives to create better care and unique and challenging opportunities for the most vulnerable populations. For more information about TCFD, please visit www.tcfd.org.

Contact:

The Center for Discovery

Michael Rosen

Executive VP of Marketing and Strategic Communications

(845) 707-8997

mrosen@tcfd.org
Los Angeles, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dr. Michele Nealon, president of The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, says the only way we can solve the nation's homeless crisis is through a highly concentrated and coordinated effort involving public and private sectors. This process is already helping a variety of communities start to manage the crisis but Dr. Nealon, who is a licensed clinical psychologist, says this effort must be sustained and it must be replicated across the country.

People become homeless for many reasons and those reasons are usually beyond their control. Psychology, healthcare and policy professionals can work together to stop the vicious cycles of economic inequality, systemic racism, soaring real estate costs, substance abuse, and domestic violence that have left so many people marginalized from society and unable to find a way back, Dr. Nealon explains.

The United States now has more than half a million homeless people, and unless federal dollars are put into housing subsidies for people who will face eviction after losing their income during the pandemic, homelessness is projected to grow by 50% or more this year.

No matter the cause of homelessness, there must be a support structure in place that helps people lift themselves out of it. That means a coordinated effort across many public agencies and privately funded organizations. It means channeling money into more preventative measures, more investments in programs that take into account psychological concerns and produce social returns, and more expansions to the national level, of practices that have worked at the local level.

Drawing on her experience as well as interviews with people who have experienced and who are experiencing homelessness, case workers, and advocates for the homeless, Dr. Nealon is in the process of writing Home for Good: How America can and must solve the homeless crisis before its too late, a book that offers a blueprint of policies, therapies, and practices that work.

She emphasizes that the solution is more than just creating enough affordable housing. Living without a permanent roof causes stresses on the body and mind, so that many need rehabilitation before they can function in a job or a home. Society, too, suffers both economically and psychologically. By creating a system around the premise that housing is a basic right and therefore includes social justice measures, safety nets, health care, and treatment for mental illness and addiction, we can end the crisis.

For resources on mental and behavioral health, go to http://www.thechicagoschool.edu/insight/.

About Michele Nealon, Psy.D.

Dr. Michele Nealon is president of The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, one of the most successful non-profit professional graduate and undergraduate universities in the nation with campuses across the country. The Chicago School trains nearly 6,000 students every year from more than 30 countries in the fields of psychology, health sciences, and nursing. Dr. Nealon has spent her career ensuring that underserved populations receive the mental health care they need. Her clinical experience includes work with diverse groups of people in a variety of settings including inpatient, outpatient, community mental health, forensic, and academic. Under Dr. Nealons direction, The Chicago School has taken a leadership position to tackle some of the most distressing and challenging issues of today, including homelessness, adolescent suicide, and healthcare disparity.

About The Chicago School of Professional Psychology

Integrating theory with hands-on experience, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology provides education rooted in a commitment to innovation, service, and community for thousands of diverse students across the United States and globally. Founded in 1979, the nonprofit, regionally accredited university now features campuses in iconic locations across the country (Chicago, Southern California, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Dallas) and online. To spark positive change in the world where it matters most, The Chicago School has continued to expand its educational offerings beyond the field of psychology to offer more than 35 degrees and certificates in the professional fields of health services, nursing, education, counseling, business, and more. Through its engaged professional model of education, commitment to diversity and inclusion, and an extensive network of domestic and international professional partnerships, The Chicago Schools students receive real-world training opportunities that reflect their future careers. The Chicago School is also a proud affiliate of TCS, a nonprofit system of colleges advancing student success and community impact. To learn more, visit www.thechicagoschool.edu.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Evolving Gold Corp. (the Company) announces that its Board of Directors has approved a consolidation of the Companys issued share capital on the basis of ten (10) common shares for one (1) new share of the Company. The Company currently has 22,569,994 common shares outstanding and will have 2,256,999 common shares outstanding after completion of the consolidation, subject to rounding and the elimination of any fractional shares resulting from the share consolidation. The number of outstanding stock options and warrants of the Company will similarly be adjusted by the consolidation ratio, and the exercise prices adjusted accordingly.



The share consolidation is subject to the acceptance of the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE). The Company will also be seeking CSE acceptance to maintain its existing name and trading symbol in conjunction with the proposed consolidation.

About Evolving Gold Corp.

Evolving Gold Corp. is a Canadian-based gold exploration company engaged in the acquisition, exploration and development of natural resource properties. The Companys focus was Canadian based mineral exploration properties, however the Company is currently evaluating its projects and seeking opportunities.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

EVOLVING GOLD CORP.

Charles Jenkins

Director and Acting CEO

Email: info@evolvinggold.com

Web: www.evolvinggold.com

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange 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.
Houston, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Taylor Recovery, a Houston, Texas based drug rehabilitation center, would like to reach out to local residents who may be in need of help with drug addiction and rehabilitation. The rehab center uses tried and tested methods under the guidance of highly trained professionals to help those who may be struggling with addiction beat their vices and return to a healthy, productive lifestyle free of drugs. The Houston rehab provides treatment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which means that an individual can always get the help they need. Learn more here: Taylor Recovery Rehab.



From the first day of treatment to the last day, Taylor Recovery offers what they call a full continuum of care. Their programs are designed to meet the needs of each individual patient instead of simply applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Patients undergo a detox program, residential treatment program or the outpatient and sober living program, receiving a number of different therapies and treatments depending on their needs and preferences.



The detox program offers individualized care for patients based on the kind of drug they were using and how long they used it. When the patient first arrives, they go through an extensive intake process, during which a team of medical professionals and doctors evaluate them and come up with a customized treatment plan aimed specifically at treating their specific issues.



Following the detox program, patients go into the residential treatment program. Taylor Recovery says, After the patient has completed their stay in our medical detox center, they will be transferred into our residential treatment program at the same location. Once here, they will be assigned a primary therapist who will help construct a treatment plan specifically tailored for them. They will attend both daily group and individual sessions, meet with a psychiatrist and work through the causes of their addiction.



The third and final stage of any patients treatment is outpatient and sober living in said patients Houston sober living apartment. Taylor Recoverys sober living community is a large, luxurious living area located on the east side of Houston. Built over 22,000 square feet, the newly renovated facility welcomes anyone that wishes to be free of alcohol and drug addiction to spend time there and learn what it is to lead a sober lifestyle. Patients continue with the therapy process until they develop the skills and coping mechanisms needed to ensure that their chances of achieving and maintaining sobriety remain high.



Taylor Recovery is unique in that it is a rehab that allow dogs and cats. Pets are not able to disguise or hide their emotions, and they openly react to humans emotions, the rehab center says. As such, pets provide a great mirror for their human companions behavior. Pets also set an example for how to display emotional honesty. This is critical during the recovery process as our clients learn to experience and display emotional honesty and as our clients learn to recognize the effects of their behavior on those around them. Pets are also a great way to practice emotional and financial responsibility, as they need cared for no matter what. As our clients learn to protect their health and take better care of themselves, they also practice this by caring for their pets, who are entirely dependent on them.



The loss or disruption of personal relationships is something that many who go through rehab have to face. Being away from friends and family for months can put a great deal of strain on an individuals connections to these people, not to mention the damage that heavy alcohol and drug abuse can do to their relationships. One of the most important parts of rehabilitation is rebuilding core relationships and forming new ones, a slow and intimidating but absolutely necessary process. Pets love unconditionally, however, and people in recovery need such love in order to make it through what is, for many, one of the hardest things they will ever do in their lives.



For more information on Taylor Recovery, visit their YouTube channel and their website. Kristi Taylor of Taylor Rehab may be reached for further details as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2rVg5x9X8c&list=PL6IoYsrrOQhkgpRi1AhpZgnN0wWPOkg7t&index=2

###

For more information about Taylor Recovery, contact the company here:



Taylor Recovery

Kristi Taylor

7135578573

info@taylorrecovery.com

5711 Lavender St, Houston, TX 77026
NEW WESTMINSTER, British Columbia, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- UFCW 1518 is calling on Interior Health to re-examine its decision of reducing care times and to change its scheduling program to ensure home support workers can provide the critical care that clients need.



After reading an article published on Kamloops This Week about Carrie McAstocker, a 59-year-old quadriplegic woman who missed home support visits to help her get to bed and prepare her meals, UFCW 1518 union members are angry, but not surprised. These are the types of stories that have been shared by UFCW 1518 members to Interior Health in the hopes that changes can be made to ensure clients get the proper care they need.

However, no action has been taken; instead, changes to home support workers schedules have exacerbated this issue.

Kamloops-based Union Representative, Ed Cabral, describes how Interior Health has worsened conditions of health care shortages and has made the work less appealing for home support workers. There is very little to almost no full-time work for home support workers at Interior Health and it has implemented a new change in scheduling. Part-time home support workers used to have set days where they are able to take on additional part-time work during their off days, which gives them the ability to make ends meet. With the new rotating schedules, workers no longer have set days, so they are unable to take on another job.

To make matters worse, many home support workers, who are predominately women of colour, are struggling to find childcare to ensure their own children are being looked after while they work. Unfortunately, there arent a lot of daycare centres that can accommodate rotating schedules, Ed Cabral adds. So, once again, these workers are burdened with trying to figure out how to make ends meet while trying to find the support they need for their own kids.

Meeting the needs of clients has been challenging as the province deals with health care worker shortages. Many workers who have taken on the burden from these shortages have expressed feeling burnt out and underappreciated.

Care times have also been reduced for each client, causing a decline in care. Home support workers are puzzled as to how Interior Health came up with the decision to reduce care times considering the work involved has not changed. With shorter care times, home support workers are rushing, which can lead to hazards and risks for both clients and workers.

Home support work used to be a good, respected job. Ive been at this job for years. Now, many dont want to stay at this job, (name withheld) a home support worker stated.

Interior Health has the ability to change the allotment of care times and its scheduling program. While Vancouver Island Health Authority has the same staff shortage and scheduling issues of its own, home support workers within that jurisdiction do not have to deal with rotational scheduling.



UFCW 1518s request is not just for home support workers; this request ensures that clients, like Carrie McAstocker, receive the proper care they need, especially at a time when people are dealing with a brutal heat wave. As explained by a UFCW 1518 member, Interior Health needs to be client-centred, not Interior Health-centred.

By listening and working with its employees, Interior Health has the opportunity to create a workplace where it can retain home support workers who are passionate about their jobs. And with the shortage of health care workers across the province, it would be unwise not to.

You can read UFCW 1518s letter to Interior Health here (https://www.ufcw1518.com/assets/media/2021June30_Letter-to-Interior-Health-re-scheduling-and-shortage-of-healthcare-workers.pdf).



UFCW Local 1518 represents more than 26,000 union members working in the community health, hospitality, retail, cannabis, industrial, and professional sectors across British Columbia.





CONTACT INFORMATION:



Lou Villahermosa, Press Secretary

UFCW 1518

604.786.0376 | communications@ufcw1518.com

www.ufcw1518.com
GOSHEN [mdash] Thomas went to be with his Lord and Saviour early July 2. He was born to John W and Elizabeth (McNeilly) Detwiler on Jan. 14, 1949. He married D Sue (Shaum) on Nov. 27, 1969. He is survived by his wife, three children Thomas Edward (Wendy), Audra J (Scott) Hoover, and Anthony 
U.S. Interior Secretary Joins Governor Northam, Senator Kaine to Announce New Actions to Advance Offshore Wind in Virginia

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to initiate environmental review for Virginias large-scale commercial offshore wind project

NORFOLKGovernor Ralph Northam today welcomed U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to the Commonwealth to tour The Port of Virginia and discuss offshore wind industry supply chain opportunities together with U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, and other federal, state, and local officials. During the visit, Secretary Haaland announced that Interiors Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will initiate its environmental review for Dominion Energys Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind commercial project located 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach. The issuance of a Notice of Intent (NOI) from BOEM marks the first major milestone in the federal permitting of the 2.6-gigawatt large-scale commercial wind project.

The demand for offshore wind energy has never been greater. Meanwhile, recent technological advances, falling costs, and tremendous economic potential make offshore wind a promising avenue for diversifying our national energy portfolio, creating good-paying union jobs, and tackling climate change, said Secretary Deb Haaland. Todays tour and meetings were a great chance to learn about the Commonwealths continued leadership role in developing the offshore wind industry and attracting and supporting the domestic supply chain.

Virginia is all in on offshore wind. We are developing the infrastructure, workforce, supply chain, and manufacturing capabilities needed to capture the many benefits of this emerging industry, said Governor Northam. This announcement puts our Commonwealth on a path to harnessing the power of wind to produce affordable and reliable renewable energy, create thousands of new jobs, and meet our ambitious climate goals. We are grateful for the federal governments partnership as we work to advance our clean energy future with this large-scale commercial wind project along Virginias coast.

Todays announcement follows a recent agreement between BOEM and the North Atlantic Division of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) that will give the federal agencies additional scientific and technical resources to evaluate offshore wind projects. The initiative, which was developed in partnership with Old Dominion University and facilitated by the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy (DMME), is critical to ensuring new offshore wind leases are approved in a timely manner. Virginias offshore wind project will be among the first in the nation to undergo this new federal permitting process designed to accelerate offshore wind development in the United States.

Investing in clean energy is an invaluable investment in our future, said Senator Kaine. I was so glad to join Governor Northam today in welcoming Secretary Haaland on her tour of the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project in Hampton Roadsamong the first in the nation to use the new federal permitting initiative. Virginia is grateful for the Secretarys announcement, and I will continue to support Virginias growing offshore wind industry to protect the environment, create jobs, and strengthen our clean energy economy.

More information about the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind commercial (CVOW-C) project, the BOEMs environmental review process, and the virtual public meetings can be found at boem.gov/CVOW-C.

Building a domestic offshore wind supply chain is a key step needed to meet this administrations goal of 30 gigawatts by 2030, said BOEM Director Amanda Lefton. If approved, the CVOW-C project will represent another step forward to help the United States leverage existing manufacturing and workforce capabilities to grow a network of domestic suppliers.

Virginia is home to the largest maritime industrial base in the United States with existing infrastructure and a port already designed to support the offshore wind supply chain. Two six-megawatt Siemens Gamesa wind turbines were installed by Dominion and rsted in 2020, making it the first offshore wind project in federal waters. It is the first and only research lease in the country where technologies can be tested, providing critical information to the offshore wind industry to help reduce the cost of energy.

In 2020, Governor Northam and the General Assembly set a target for Virginia to generate 5.2 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2034 with a new law that creates a path for the development of at least two offshore wind projects that are currently planned to interconnect into Virginia. This legislation will also provide certainty to the offshore wind industry by creating a pathway for project developers to recover their costs, while containing costs and protecting low-income Virginians. These measures will help to ensure healthy competition in the procurement of offshore wind projects, bringing diverse offshore wind companies to Virginia to compete in the market and lower costs for Virginia consumers. The Commonwealth also created its first-ever Division of Offshore Wind within DMME, which will drive statewide policy to support offshore wind, work with stakeholders, and coordinate economic development opportunities to help grow the offshore wind industry in an equitable manner.

We are honored that Secretary Haaland and Director Lefton recognize our commitment to the development of offshore wind and are here to see the assets that could serve this cutting-edge industry, which will have a transformational impact on Virginias clean energy economy, said Secretary of Commerce and Trade Brian Ball. The Commonwealths offshore wind industry has built a lot of momentum during the Northam Administration, and todays visit shows that this is just the beginning.

Secretary Haaland, Governor Northam, and federal, state, and local officials toured The Port of Virginia, one of the nations world-class maritime facilities. Located just 30 nautical miles from the project, the port is undergoing significant upgrades to accommodate the heavy load capacity necessary in the construction of offshore wind projects in the Mid-Atlantic region.

The leaders also discussed the workforce needs of the fast-growing offshore wind industry, which could create nearly 80,000 jobs nationwide by 2030. Governor Northam highlighted the Mid-Atlantic Wind Training Alliance, Virginias first offshore and onshore wind workforce training collaborative. This program will offer industry-required certifications that are critical to the operations and long-term maintenance of wind projects.

The Commonwealth has partnered with states along the East Coast to encourage policy and practices that will demonstrate that the United States is open for offshore wind development. In May, Virginia was one of nine states that sent a letter to President Biden encouraging the Biden-Harris Administration to continue prioritizing offshore wind.

Photos from todays visit are available below.

# # #
Lewis Hamilton has topped the second practice session ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix, with Valtteri Bottas completing a Mercedes one-two. Max Verstappen rounded out the top three and was just 0.217 seconds behind his title rival. The session saw plenty of surprises on the leaderboard, with the midfield turned upside down.

In this session, each team had to complete at least 12 timed laps on the Pirelli prototype tyre which they hope to introduce in a couple of weeks time following the tyre failures during the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Pirelli requested these test tyre laps to ran under low fuel levels, medium fuel levels and a full tank.

The hour-long event saw plenty of different drivers challenge for the top five places. With the track being short, very little time separated the field. The race simulations took place in the final 20 minutes in very light rain conditions.

Christian Horner suggested that Mercedes had increased their engine modes for their fastest run in the qualifying simulations, but it looks as if Mercedes have either made performance gains during the week, or the track conditions better suit them. The conditions were cooler than last week, and the Pirelli tyres are a step softer. Four of the top five cars were running with a Mercedes engine as Aston Martin filled P4 and P5.

Busy start

With the Pirelli laps to complete and three drivers starting their first session of the weekend, the track became busy very quickly. There was also a threat of rain at the start of the session, which Carlos Sainz raised on the Ferrari radio.

After the first flurry of laps, Verstappen led the way with a 1:05.773 using the test tyre. Under the medium tyre for this weekend, Bottas went fastest by 0.107 seconds. At this point, AlphaTauri looked strong again around the Red Bull Ring with both drivers inside the top five.

Midfield upside down

Ferrari looked strong in the early part of the session whilst their McLaren rivals could only just climb into the top 15. However, this performance wasn't sustained as other drivers posted their laps. McLaren never troubled the top of the timesheets either.

As the works Ferrari struggled, the Alfa Romeo customer team looked stronger. Kimi Raikkonen and Antonio Giovinazzi sat comfortably inside the top 10 after the first 20 minutes which the Italian driver was able to sustain. After 25 minutes, Verstappen and Perez sat at the top of the timesheets.

Furthers surprises were found in the Aston Martin garage. On the soft tyres, Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll were also able to move up into the top five. Perez, who also ran on the soft tyres, was slower. The AlphaTauri drivers also look to continue their impressive qualifying pace in the Styrian Grand Prix, with both Tsunoda and Gasly inside the top 10.

Mercedes take it up a gear

Bottas was the first driver on the soft tyres for the qualifying simulations. He went fastest by almost half a second. Both Verstappen and Hamilton completed their soft tyre qualifying run within a few seconds of each other. Hamilton came out on top by 0.217 seconds over his rival, though Verstappen ran wide.

More raindrops fell in the second half of the session. It didn't trouble the slick tyre running, though drivers reported a slippy circuit. Verstappen's engineer explained how these conditions could be replicated during Sunday's Grand Prix. The session was completed with drivers running their race simulations.
The Formula 1 teams were able to test the new rear tyre during the first two free practice sessions of the Austrian Grand Prix. The new tyre is designed to prevent the kind of tyre blow-out experienced in Azerbaijan.

At the Baku GP, Max Verstappen led for laps but was forced to retire at the end of the race due to a sudden tyre blowout. Lance Stroll also suffered the problem earlier in the race, putting pressure on the Italian tyre supplier. The new rear tyre is said to be more robust, so the problem should not occur again.

It was wait and see for Pirelli what the teams would think of the new tyre, but according to Mario Isola, there has been a lot of positive feedback so far. "I haven't noticed any resistance and haven't even heard a negative comment. Actually, there is no reason not to introduce this tyre at Silverstone," he told Motorsport.com.

Pirelli to make decision on Saturday

Pirelli's F1 chief, however, does not yet dare to say for sure. "Now we will take some time to analyse everything and to collect feedback from teams who will drive it tomorrow morning. But again: I see no reason not to use this tyre. In any case, on Saturday the decision will follow."
Grand Haven, MI (49417)

Today

Mostly sunny early with isolated thunderstorms developing this afternoon. High 81F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Scattered showers and thunderstorms, especially during the evening. Low 69F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
Charles Leclerc says Ferrari's all-new car for 2022 "feels very different".

He was speaking in Austria, having recently tried a virtual version of next year's red car in the Ferrari simulator at Maranello.

"It feels very different. It's a very different project," said the Monaco-born driver.

Ferrari was one of the first teams to announce that the vast bulk of its focus this year was on designing and developing a car for the next set of regulations.

Former F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, however, thinks the team's founder Enzo Ferrari would not have accepted a slide into the midfield.

"It's sad to see this happen to the biggest car brand in racing," he told Blick newspaper.

"In the past, Mr Ferrari would not have accepted these results from his cars. He would have fired people, changed everything, tried to change the rules.

"Personalities like that are missing in the sport today," the 90-year-old said.

However, Ferrari has high hopes for the 2022 project, even if Leclerc insists it is too early to assess how well his car for next year handles.

"It's still very early, so nobody knows where it is compared to the other teams," said the 23-year-old. "It's a big question mark for everyone whether we are doing well with the development or not.

"For now it's just numbers and predictions, but as drivers we can give our opinion - especially in the simulator.

"We have a very good simulator, we can try so many different things, and what the driver can contribute is very important," Leclerc added.

"We can only try our best to eradicate the mistakes in this year's car, even if it is a completely different project."

As for Ecclestone, he also hopes Ferrari can return to top form as soon as possible.

"For the audience, it's important that Max Verstappen doesn't start to dominate as much as Lewis Hamilton has until now," he said.

"It is time for Ferrari to finally be able to compete at the top again."

(GMM)
F1's governing body has neutralised a risk that up to three teams could have sat out practice sessions ahead of the British GP.

After Sunday's race in Austria, Formula 1 moves onto Silverstone - where the trial of the new 'sprint qualifying' weekend format will begin.

But Aston Martin, Alpine and McLaren had all reportedly warned that with parc ferme pushed forward to Friday, their clutch designs would not cope with having to last an entire race weekend.

"If the FIA doesn't give in, we might have to skip a practice session, which I can't imagine was the intention of the regulator," Alpine's sporting director Alan Permane warned.

According to Aston Martin boss Otmar Szafnauer, the FIA did indeed relent.

"We have to present the replacement clutch with the machined carbon discs to the FIA before the weekend," he is quoted by Auto Motor und Sport.

"When we get the first clutch out of the car, it will be checked to see whether it is identical in structure to the spare part. It will be handled like car damage after an accident," Szafnauer revealed.

The rule modification is effective only for the rest of 2021.

(GMM)
Nissan unveiled Nissan EV36Zero, a 1-billion flagship Electric Vehicle (EV) Hub an EV manufacturing ecosystemcentered around its plant in Sunderland, UK. The project has been launched with an initial 1-billion (US$1.4-billion) investment by Nissan and its partners battery-maker Envision AESC and Sunderland City Council.

Comprising three interconnected initiatives, Nissan EV36Zero brings together electric vehicles, renewable energy and battery production.

New-generation electric crossover. As part of the 1-billion announcement, Nissan will invest up to 423 million to produce a new-generation all-electric vehicle in the UK. Building on Nissans expertise in crossovers and the worldwide success of the Nissan LEAF, it promises next-generation vehicle styling, efficiency and battery technology.

Designed for global markets, UK production will be exported to the European markets traditionally served by Nissans Sunderland plant. The new crossover will be built on the Alliance CMF-EV platform, with a forecasted production capacity of up to 100,000 units to be installed.

Production in Sunderland will create 909 new jobs at the plant, and more than 4,500 in the UK supply chain, while safeguarding a further 75 R&D jobs. The transformational project takes the total capital investment by Nissan into the plant past 5bn, and also includes:

R&D at Nissans European Technical Centre in Cranfield, Bedfordshire

Support for UK suppliers to transition to electric vehicles

Plant competitiveness and environmental improvements

Skills development in the Nissan workforce for future technologies

Other production locations have not yet been confirmed. More details about the new vehicle, including pricing and technology, will be released closer to the car's sales launch.

Next-generation EV batteries. Envision AESC already owns and operates Europes first battery plant in Sunderland, established in 2012 for the localization of Nissan LEAF battery production. The factorys UK team has nine years expertise from supplying batteries to the Nissan LEAF and eNV200, having produced enough cells, modules and packs to power more than 180,000 electric vehicles in 44 countries, meeting global benchmark levels of quality, performance, safety, reliability and cost.

Supporting this new model allocation, Envision AESC will invest 450 million (US$621 million) to build the UKs first gigafactory on the International Advanced Manufacturing Park (IAMP), adjacent to the Nissan plant, powered by renewable energy.

The formal planning process is about to begin for the new gigafactory, which represents an initial 9 GWh plant, with potential future-phase investment of 1.8 billion (US$2.5 billion) by Envision AESC, generating up to 25 GWh and creating 4,500 new jobs in the region by 2030, with potential on site for up to 35 GWh.

The new plant will increase the cost-competitiveness of EV batteries produced in the UK, including through a new Gen5 battery cell with 30% more energy density which improves range and efficiency.

This commitment will power Nissans new vehicles, supporting the continued localization of vehicle parts and components with advanced technology. This will make batteries cheaper and EVs more accessible to a growing number of customers in the future.

Zero Emission Manufacturing. Sunderland City Council is leading a project that aims to deliver a 100% renewable electricity Microgrid. With the ability to incorporate the existing Nissan wind and solar farms, initial plans suggest there could be as many as ten solar farms created, with an anticipated 132 MW generation, and with a direct connection to renewable energy from the UK grid for firm supply to Nissan and automotive companies located on the adjacent International Advanced Manufacturing Park (IAMP).

Plans will continue to be developed in close discussion with potential private sector green investors.

This project is estimated to be an 80-million (US$110-million) investment and also includes plans for a 1 MW battery storage system using second-life Nissan EV/Envision AESC batteries, which will also allow for excess energy generated during daylight hours to be captured and used at another time, helping to balance demand on the grid. Additional infrastructure projects enabling the creation of the new EV Hub take the total initial investment above 1 billion.
Hyundai Hydrogen Mobilitys fleet of XCIENT Fuel Cell trucks has collectively exceeded 1 million kilometers of driving in 11 months of service in Switzerland. During that time, the fleet has reduced CO 2 emissions by more than an estimated 630 tons, compared to diesel-powered vehicles.

Since rolling onto Swiss roads last October, the fleet of now 46 hydrogen fuel cell trucks have been able to reach this milestone in the service of 25 Swiss companies in logistics, distribution and supermarket fulfilment.





Hyundai shares this achievement with customers that have integrated the worlds first mass-provided heavy-duty fuel cell trucks in their business operations, replacing regular diesel trucks. Customers in Switzerland have expressed their satisfaction with the performance of the XCIENT Fuel Cell trucks so far, noting eco-friendliness, short refueling times, and a long range as the top benefits.

Swiss transport and logistics companies are convinced that hydrogen fuel cell commercial vehicles have the greatest potential among various alternative energy vehicles. The member companies do not stop at simply introducing hydrogen fuel cell trucks. They have high expectations for the hydrogen energy source that holds great potential for the future and believe that hydrogen will be the key for transitioning to eco-friendly energy. Specifically, the biggest advantage of hydrogen energy is its excellent storability. This suggests that hydrogen will play an important role in the era of eco-friendly energy. Many distribution companies are already experiencing the benefits directly by using the XCIENT fuel cell trucks, and I think that if summer operation is completed successfully, the demand for the XCIENT fuel cell trucks will increase even more. Jorg Ackermann, Chairman of the H2 Mobility Switzerland Association

After initially launching the model in 2019, Hyundai revealed the 2021 XCIENT Fuel Cell heavy-duty truck last month. (Earlier post.) The next generation of trucks features a bold grille design as well as updates to improve its performance. The new trucks come available in a 4x2 or 6x2 rigid body configuration.

A total of 140 units of the 2021 model will be shipped to Switzerland by the end of this year. Taking this eco-friendly shift even further, the fleet will grow to 1,600 hydrogen-electric trucks by 2025.

In 2019, Hyundai Motor Company started a joint venture with Swiss company H2 Energy to create Hyundai Hydrogen Mobility (HHM). Based in Switzerland, HHM leases the XCIENT Fuel Cell trucks to commercial truck operators on a pay-per-use basis with includes the hydrogen supply as well. The benefit for commercial fleet customers is that there is no initial investment.

HHM plans to go into other European countries next year. Germany and the Netherlands are the most likely, and there is also strong interest for our vehicles from nearly every other European country. Hyundais latest push will put more pressure on local players, which are developing their own hydrogen plans. Mark Freymuller, CEO of Hyundai Hydrogen Mobility

Hyundai Motor Company has set an annual sales goal of 110,000 fuel cell electric vehicles worldwide by 2025, under its Strategy 2025 plan. Meanwhile, the wider Hyundai Motor Group plans to ramp up production capacity for hydrogen-powered vehicles to 500,000 units by 2030. One of the ways Hyundai plans on achieving this is by bringing its fuel cell electric vehicle technology to the commercial vehicle market.

Hyundai has also announced plans to expand into truck tractors. The company is considering North America as the first market in which the products will be tested and launched. With a hold in two of the worlds strongest industrial markets, Hyundai aims to set an example with its hydrogen-powered trucks.
Residents throughout the county have heard rumors regarding a warehouse operated by Amazon being established in Rock Springs -- rumors that may hold little truth to them.

Both Green River City Councilman Gary Killpack and Rock Springs City Councilman David Halter both said they were told the e-commerce giant was looking to expand into Rock Springs, with Killpack saying the rumor he heard focused on the company using the former Halliburton building on Blairtown Road as its warehouse. Laura Leigh, the Rock Springs City Planner, said she had heard rumors as well, but had not seen anything sub...
RIVERTON  Originally charged with stealing more than $34,000 from the Town of Pavillion, the municipalitys former clerk was charged again last week, after more unexplained expenditures were discovered.

The newly discovered bank account charges date back to 2013 and appear to have funded a wedding in Kentucky.

Rebecca Irene Milleson, a 48-year-old Riverton woman also known as Rebecca Hatcher, now faces an additional count of felony larceny. The charge in worst-case scenarios could be punishable by up to a decade in prison and $10,000 in fines.

According to court documents, weeks bef...
Wealthy conservative donor Susan Gore was a key financier of a years-long effort to spy on Wyoming Democrats and Republicans, an article published Friday by the New York Times revealed, shining a light on the lengths to which the Gore-Tex heiress and Wyoming Liberty Group founder has gone to influence the states politics.

The report alleges Gore helped finance the infiltration of numerous political organizations in the state by a pair of spies tied to the right-wing group Project Veritas. Their targets were varied, according to the investigation, ranging from liberal advocacy group...
Spies in Wyoming -- it has to be the ludicrous plot of a poorly-written novel, right?

No dear reader, it isnt. Proving truth to be stranger than fiction, the New York Times broke news last week that a spy ring had operated in Wyoming and focused on gathering information about political operations in the state. These spies mostly focused on Wyoming Democrats, the Wyoming Investor Network and Better Wyoming, a left-leaning group seeking to change the conservative narrative in Wyomings politics, as well as moderate Republicans. The Times also reports they attempted to gather information...
GREENWICH  One of the central office administrators is taking on a slightly expanded role with the Greenwich Public Schools.

Come July 1st, I'll change my call sign to Director of Curriculum and Leadership K-8, administrator Marc DAmico tweeted earlier this week. I am honored for the opportunity to support our three middle school leaders and their teachers in 2021-2022.

Since July 2020, DAmico has been the districts director of curriculum for K-8 and head of K-5 leadership; while deputy superintendent Ann Carabillo was responsible for all high school curriculum and leadership, as well as middle school leadership. Both work directly with Superintendent of Schools Toni Jones.

The change is operational, according to the districts Director of Communications Sasha Houlihan.

Dr. Jones shared that leadership refers to the oversight and development of the leadership teams (principals) at those grade levels, Houlihan said. This change was made to align all of both K-8 curriculum and leadership under Marc, and all of (grades) 9 through 12 under Ann, instead of sharing middle school duties of Marc with curriculum and Ann with leadership; now K-8 will all be Marc.

Before joining the superintendents cabinet in 2020, DAmico was principal at Glenville School, a position he held for 15 years.

Houlihan said the Board of Education was notified of the shift in central office assignments months ago. But Carol Sutton, who this week ended her term as president of the Greenwich Education Association  the union representing Greenwich teachers  said teachers were not officially notified of DAmicos new role.

GEA is concerned that major announcements are made through tweets and not necessarily followed up through email and other official channels, Sutton said.

Houlihan said district leadership was informed of the decision in March and that GEA was informed of the role shift at a meeting, though she did not say when the meeting occurred.

As this was not a new position, there was not a large-scale announcement, Houlihan said. Marc has been working directly with principals and has connected with teacher groups as well.

Despite the alleged failure to communicate the change, Sutton said teachers would generally welcome the reassignment.

Were not surprised with the change because having the middle school leadership under the deputy superintendent (Carabillo) and curriculum under DAmico, didnt really make sense to begin with, Sutton said. We see the logic in the change. It should be consistent and now it is.

justin.papp@scni.com; @justinjpapp1; 203-842-2586
NEW YORK (AP)  Jessica Stern, soon to become the State Department's special diplomatic envoy for LGBTQ rights, sees a mix of promising news and worrisome developments almost everywhere she looks, both at home and abroad.

In the United States, Sterns admiration for President Joe Bidens moves supporting LGBTQ rights is offset by her dismay at other developments. These include persisting violence against transgender women of color and a wave of legislation in Republican-governed states seeking to limit sports participation and medical options for trans youth.

I dont think theres a country or region thats all good or all bad, she told The Associated Press on Friday. When you look around the world, you see progress and danger simultaneously.

Stern, whose new post was announced by Biden last week, has served since 2012 as executive director of New York-based OutRight Action International, which works globally to prevent abuses of LGBTQ people and strengthen their civil rights. She expects to start the State Department job in September.

From her vantage point at OutRight, shes been monitoring far-flung threats to LGBTQ people: recent mass arrests in African countries such as Ghana and Uganda, three killings within a week in Guatemala, and legislation in Hungary that has been assailed by many European leaders and human rights activists as denigrating LGBTQ people.

Stern is also worried that LGBTQ people in Myanmar are suffering disproportionately amid the militarys violent suppression of demonstrators and opposition groups.

Regarding the United States, she said, LGBTQ developments this year have reflected deep-seated contradictions.

She hailed Biden for moving to bolster transgender rights, including lifting a Trump administration ban that blocked trans people from joining the military. And she welcomed the ground-breaking appointments of LGBTQ people to important administration posts - including Pete Buttigieg, who is gay, as transportation secretary, and Dr. Rachel Levine, who is transgender, as assistant secretary of health.

At the same time, the work in the U.S. for the safety and security of transgender Americans is far from complete, said Stern. She urged Congress to pass the Equality Act, a bill that would extend federal civil rights protections to LGBTQ people. The bill is stalled in the Senate for lack of Republican support.

Theres no country that has gotten this right, she said. We all have work to do to ensure we are free from discrimination and violence. ... Were all in this together.

She does see reasons for optimism, even in Africa, where South Africa is the only one of 54 nations to have legalized same-sex marriage.

In Nigeria, for example, she said a recent poll showed 25% of the public opposes discrimination against LGBTQ people -- a substantial increase from a few years ago,

Theres no doubt its a slower journey for LGBTQI rights in any place where conservative religions play a dominant role, but progress is happening, she said.

Every day I get an email from a new organization -- maybe starting a film festival or an arts festival, she said. As long as LGBTQI civil society is strong, its only a matter of time before we see a change in attitudes and even in law and policy.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Nearly 20 years after invading Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and hunt down al-Qaida, the U.S. military has vacated its biggest airfield in the country, advancing a final withdrawal that the Pentagon on Friday said will be completed by the end of August.

President Joe Biden had instructed the Pentagon to complete the military withdrawal by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, but the Pentagon now says it can finish the drawdown a little earlier. In fact, the drawdown is already largely completed and officials had said it could be wrapped up this weekend. But a number of related issues need to be worked out in coming weeks, including a new U.S. military command structure in Kabul and talks with Turkey on an arrangement for maintaining security at the Kabul airport, and so an official end to the pullout will not be announced soon.

A safe, orderly drawdown enables us to maintain an ongoing diplomatic presence, support the Afghan people and the government, and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for terrorists that threatens our homeland, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said.

The administration is meanwhile narrowing options for ensuring the safety of thousands of Afghans whose applications for special visas to come to the United States have yet to be approved. The administration has already said its willing to evacuate them to third countries pending their visa approvals but has yet to determine where. Officials said Friday that one possibility is to relocate them to neighboring countries in Central Asia where they could be protected from possible retaliation by the Taliban or other groups.

The White House and State Department have declined to comment on the numbers to be relocated or where they might go, but the foreign ministers of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were both in Washington this week and the subject of Afghan security was raised in meetings they held with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Kirby said that Austin on Friday approved a new command structure in Afghanistan to transition the U.S. military mission from warfighting to two new objectives  protecting a continuing U.S. diplomatic presence in Kabul and maintaining liaison with the Afghan military.

Austin's plan calls for the top commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Scott Miller, to transfer his combat authorities to the Florida-based head of U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, before relinquishing his command this month. Also, a two-star Navy admiral will head a U.S. Embassy-based military office, dubbed U.S. Forces Afghanistan-Forward, to oversee the new mission of providing security for the embassy and its diplomats.

A satellite military office based in Qatar and headed by a U.S. one-star general will be established to administer U.S. financial support for the Afghan military and police, plus maintenance support provided for Afghan aircraft from outside Afghanistan.

Kirby said Miller, who already is the longest-serving commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in the 20 years of warfare, will remain in command for a couple of weeks longer but was not more specific. He said Miller will be preparing for and completing the turnover of his duties to McKenzie and also will be traveling inside and beyond Afghanistan.

Miller met Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Friday and, according to a Dari-language tweet by the presidential palace, the two discussed continued U.S. assistance and cooperation with Afghanistan, particularly in supporting the defense and security forces.

Bagram Airfield has been the epicenter of the war to oust the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. At its peak in and around 2012, Bagram Airfield saw more than 100,000 U.S. troops pass through the massive compound barely an hours drive north of Kabul.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan's district administrator for Bagram, Darwaish Raufi, said the American departure was done overnight without any coordination with local officials, and as a result early Friday, dozens of local looters stormed through the unprotected gates before Afghan forces regained control.

They were stopped and some have been arrested and the rest have been cleared from the base, Raufi told The Associated Press, adding that the looters ransacked several buildings before being arrested and the Afghan forces took control.

However, U.S. military spokesman Col. Sonny Leggett said the handover was an extensive process that spanned several weeks and began soon after Biden's mid-April announcement that America was withdrawing the last of its forces.

All handovers of Resolute Support bases and facilities, to include Bagram Airfield, have been closely coordinated, both with senior leaders from the government and with our Afghan partners in the security forces, including leadership of the locally based units respective to each base, said Col. Leggett.

The Taliban welcomed the American withdrawal from Bagram Airfield. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid tweeted that Friday's departure was a positive step," urging for the withdrawal of foreign forces from all parts of the country.

As of this week, most other NATO soldiers have already quietly exited Afghanistan. Announcements from several countries analyzed by the AP show that a majority of European troops has left with little ceremony  a stark contrast to the dramatic and public show of force and unity when NATO allies lined up to back the U.S. invasion in 2001.

The U.S. has refused to say when the last American soldier would leave Afghanistan, citing security concerns, but also future security and protection for Kabul International Airport is still being negotiated. Turkish and U.S. soldiers are currently protecting the airport, still under Resolute Support Mission, which is the military mission being wound down.

Until a new agreement for the airport is struck by Turkey and the Afghan government, and possibly the United States, it appears the Resolute Support mission would to have to continue to be in charge of the facility.

___

Gannon reported from Kabul. Associated Press writers Lolita Baldor and Matthew Lee in Washington, Farid Tanha, in Bagram, Afghanistan, and Rahim Faiez in Kabul, contributed to this report.
File / Erik Trautmann / Hearst Connecticut Media

The special election to fill Alex Kassers seat in the state Senate is set for Aug. 17, Gov. Ned Lamont announced Friday.

Kasser, who unexpectedly resigned from the seat last month, represented the 36th District, which includes all of Greenwich and portions of Stamford and New Canaan. So far, all of the candidates for the seat are Greenwich residents.
DEEP RIVER  A local woman who spent more than a decade as a hairstylist at a Clinton salon and was the wife of a Branford police captain is being remembered for her positive attitude after she was killed in an accident last weekend.

Angela M. Watrous, of Deep River, died last Sunday in a tragic accident in upstate New York, according to her obituary.

New York State Police said Watrous, 46, died after being thrown from a utility terrain vehicle in Lyme, N.Y., which is roughly two hours north of Syracuse on Lake Ontario.

State police said the preliminary investigation indicated the UTV driver, a 53-year-old man from Cahumont, N.Y., was headed south on Cheever Road when he lost control. State police said he went off the road, the UTV rolled over and ejected the driver and Watrous.

Watrous, the wife of Branford Police Capt. Gregory Watrous, was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver was flown to a hospital with serious leg and face injuries, state police said. The crash remains under investigation.

In her obituary, Watrous was remembered as someone who loved to make friends and conversation wherever she was.

Her positive attitude and high energy made everyone feel special, the obituary said. Angela will never be forgotten and will be deeply missed by all she touched.

Gregory and Angela Watrous had been together for 26 years, married for 20, her obituary said. In addition to her husband, she is survived by her two children, Alisha M. Watrous, and Garrhett L. Watrous; three sisters; and many nieces and nephews.

Her obituary said she was a talented hairstylist for over 25 years, having worked at the Spazzo Salon in Clinton for the last 14 years. She was cherished by her many clients and co-workers, her obituary said.

Her beautiful shining light was a gigantic part of Spazzo and our lives for the past 15 years, Spazzo Salon posted on its Facebook page. She effortlessly found a home in every heart she touched with her smile and genuine truth. Angela will always be a part of Spazzo and of this realm as her spirit continues to live on in each one of us.

Calling hours were held Friday at the W. S. Clancy Memorial Funeral Home in Branford. Funeral services will be held at 10 a.m. Sunday at the Deep River Congregational Church on Church Street in Deep River. Burial will follow at Winthrop Cemetery in Deep River.

In lieu of flowers, family asked for donations be made in Watrous memory to the Branford Police Benevolent Association at 33 Laurel St. in Branford.
Photo: Eduardo MunozAlvarez/VIEW press/Corbis via Getty Images

The Small Business Administrations Restaurant Revitalization Fund was supposed to be a lifeline for pandemic-ravaged restaurants. Part of the Biden administrations $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the fund set aside $28.6 billion in grant money to keep restaurants afloat. Independent restaurants lobbied hard for targeted economic relief, the Washington Post announced in March. Now, theyre finally getting it.

But new reports indicate that, in fact, more than 250,000 restaurants that applied for relief did not receive it, and now the fund is shutting down because its out of money.

So, what went wrong?

The problems are twofold. The first is obvious: $28.6 billion, while a stunning figure, was never going to be enough to go around. The New York Times breaks down the numbers: More than 370,000 business owners applied for funds. Had they all gotten in, the total bill would have topped $75 billion  almost three times the available amount. So, they didnt. Less than a third of applicants  105,000 restaurants  were approved for grants, averaging a little over $272,000 per restaurant.

Okay, so there wasnt enough money to go around  what else is new?Well, then it got more complicated. Originally, Congress had ordered the SBA to prioritize funding for businesses owned by women, people of color, and military veterans. But, as Eater reports, within weeks, the agency was already flooded with applications  303,000 business owners had applied as of May 18, and total requests for funding exceeded $69 billion. More than half of those applicants  57 percent  were members of priority groups. The SBA also said it had already approved about 38,000 applications, allocating $6 billion in funds. All of the initial grant recipients belonged to priority groups.

Is that bad?

According to the restaurant owners filing lawsuits, yes. It was now even clearer that there would not be enough money to go around, and some restaurant owners  who did not qualify for prioritization  began to argue that the system for allocating resources was discriminatory. An owner of a bar and grill in Tennessee, for example, told the Times that because hes white and male, hed been pushed to the back of the line. A Texas lawsuit  filed by a right-wing advocacy group founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller and ex-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows  alleged the government was actively and invidiously discriminating against American citizens solely based upon their race and sex. The lawsuits worked. Federal judges ruled that the aggrieved owners were likely to successfully prove that the SBAs policy indeed violated the Constitutions equal-protection clause, the Times explains, and so the SBA dropped the policy.

Going forward, you mean?

No. The Times reports the SBA also rescinded the awards of nearly 3,000 priority applicants who had been told they would receive grants.

One of those people was Bob Freeman, who owns Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco and applied as a veteran. His grant was approved on May 28. Then, on June 12, he got an email that actually, it wasnt. The SBA is not able to pay 2,965 priority applicants  including yourself  who were previously approved and notified of their approval, the email said. SBA will not pay these claims because the legal conclusions in these court rulings would preclude payment. Freeman told Eater he wondered if hed have been better off in the end had he not applied as a priority applicant  although, as Eater points out, its not clear that would have helped: Fundamentally, there still isnt enough money.

Is that it?

No. The abrupt end of the prioritization policy has led to what the Times says is an unknown number of grants having been pulled because of bureaucratic errors, which now cant be corrected because the policy has changed.

One New Orleans bar owner who talked to the Times said her grant had been revoked because her bank had rejected the deposit, claiming it had been improperly coded as being for a savings account, when her business only had checking. She filed a correction, but when the SBA eventually responded, it was to say that because of the lawsuit, the money would not be redistributed at this time.

The owner of a pair of Brooklyn cafes reported a similar experience: She was approved for grants for both of her locations, and while one came through, the other did not. When she called, she was reassured the money was delayed but would arrive. Then, she, too, got the email: Her grant had been revoked because her application had an invalid industry flag and would now be canceled because of the lawsuits.

So what happens now?

For owners who were expecting funds that arent coming, the situation is bleak: Im not sure I can continue without this money, said the New Orleans bar owner. Capacity limits may be lifting, but without more funding, owners worry they may not be able to hire enough staff to keep up.

In mid-June, the same bipartisan group that pushed for the initial Restaurant Revitalization Fund introduced legislation for another $60 billion round of funding  enough to fund all the restaurants that initially applied. Whether it will pass, though, remains unclear. In the meantime, many restaurant owners will be left to continue on as they have been throughout the pandemic, wondering how their government failed them in so many new and different ways.
Weekly poll results: the OnePlus Nord CE is not the new king of the mid-range, but may edge out the original
Next year's iPhone will use a 4nm chipset, the iPad Pros will get more advanced 3nm chips

The current Apple A14 and M1 chipsets are both fabbed on the same 5nm TSMC node, but the two product lines are set to diverge next year  the iPhone 14 chipset will be manufactured on a 4nm node, while the next major M-series chip release will be based on the more advanced 3 nm node, according to Nikkei Asia.

For context, lets look at what is coming later this year. The A15 chipset for the iPhone 13 is being manufactured on the revamped N5P node at TSMC, which offers a 5% increase in clock speed or a 10% reduction in power compared to N5. The M1X is also expected to use N5P. Apple will unveil the iPhone 13 later this year, new MacBook Pros are on track for a September launch too.

TSMC managed to finish development of the 4nm (N4) process ahead of schedule and MediaTek will be the first to release a 4nm chipset either at the end of this year or in early 2022. In the later half of 2022 much of the manufacturing capacity will be focused on chips for the iPhone 14. The performance benefits of N4 are still to be announced.

The 3nm (N3) node is where things start to get interesting, however. TSMC has already signed on two major clients  Apple and Intel.

The first devices with 3nm chips to hit the market will probably be iPads, according to insiders. Presumably, this means new iPad Pros with new M2 chipsets.

Intel has reportedly ordered laptop and server chips to be built on the 3nm node and has even secured a higher volume than Apple. Intels foundries have been struggling for years with its 10nm node, which also delayed its future nodes too, the 7nm one isnt expected until 2023. This lead the tech giant to outsource part of its chip production to TSMC.

Compared to the current N5 node, N3 is expected to offer a 10-15% increase in performance or 25-30% reduction in power usage.

Interestingly, Nvidia is moving into the server CPU business using the ARM architecture. The first chip (Grace) is coming in 2023 and will use TSMCs current 5 nm node (which should be cheap by then and with a high yield rate). The company also has a 5 nm GPU (Hopper) in the works as well

Source | Via
Last year Samsung published an 8K video from the Arctic Circle shot on a Galaxy S20+. However, the phone stayed above the freezing waters. This year the company partnered with National Geographic Traveller India to do the opposite  capture 8K footage beneath the warm waters of the Maldives.

The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra was in the hands of NatGeo Explorer Malaika Vaz, who traveled to Fuvahmulah Island, aka Shark Island. The phone was used to shoot 8K footage and photos, which were used in the video below.

A few things to know before you attempt such a dive. First, Vaz is a professional with a lot of experience filming wildlife. Second, the phones IP68 water resistance rating is for fresh water only (and then only up to 1.5m depth). As you can see in the video, for going deep into salt water, youll need a case.

Anyway, most phones allow you to snap photos while recording video, but having 8K footage makes things easier, since you can do it after the fact  a single frame of 8K video has 32MP resolution, making it a high resolution photo in its own right.

And you can see Vaz making use of that option in the video, as well as just snapping a few stills. NatGeo Traveller posted some of the photos (though, unfortunately, not at full resolution):



Photos shot with Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra's 108 MP camera



Stills taken from 8K video recorded with the Galaxy S21 Ultra

While filming underwater in the Maldives, I was surrounded by tiger sharks, Hawksbill turtles, schools of fish, and coral, and I was able to capture super-high-resolution video footage of these species almost effortlessly. The 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 filming with the Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G has been beyond special, said Malaika Vaz.

Source 1 | Source 2
Sony announced pre-orders for its Mark III flagships in Europe last week, but it was a false start and pre-orders were taken down a few days later. Now, they are back on again and we have some bad news.

Some good news first. The Sony Xperia 1 III will become available for pre-order in Germany on July 15 and should start shipping on August 31. At least thats when the pre-order bonus ends, the press release doesnt actually name a shipping date (originally, the 1 III was planned to ship on August 6). The phone will cost 1,300 and youll get a free pair of WH-1000XM3 noise canceling headphones, a three month Tidal subscription and Joyn Plus+ (though that last bit seems specific to Germany) with a total value of 450.

In the UK there will be no pre-order, the Xperia 1 III will be available to purchase from August 19. The price is set at 1,200 and those that buy at launch will receive the Wh-1000XM3 headphones that are worth 330 (maybe when they were new), but no streaming subscriptions.



Sony Xperia 1 III, available in August  Sony Xperia 5 III, available in September

Now, the bad news  the Sony Xperia 5 III launch has been pushed back to September. The German and UK press releases agree on that time frame. The phone will cost 1,000 and 900, respectively, with no bonus in Germany and a free pair of Sony WH-H910N h.ear on 3 wireless ANC headphones worth 250 (were not sure if they were ever worth that and they certainly arent now, let alone in September).

The 5 III was originally scheduled to ship alongside its bigger sibling on August 6, but instead it will arrive half a year after it was first unveiled.

In Norway, the Xperia 1 III will go on pre-order on July 5 and sales will begin on August 10 at NOK 12,800 with a free pair of over-ear 1000XM3 attached. Theres no mention of the 5 III. The same goes for Denmark where the 1 III will cost DKK 10,000.

Source Germany | UK | Norway | Denmark




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Haiti - News : Zapping...





10 people shot dead every day

Thursday, July 1, 2021, in its report the Fondasyon "Je Klere" (FJKL), Human rights organization reveals that from June 25 to 30, around sixty people were shot dead in Cite Soleil, rue Magloire Ambroise, in Delmas and Petion-Ville a non-exhaustive assessment



The USA is working with Haiti to deliver vaccines

"Given our commitment to donate safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines around the world https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-34046-haiti-flash-the-usa-will-donate-vaccines-to-haiti.html The Biden Administration is working with the Government of Haiti on how to get vaccines to Haiti as soon as possible. We will share more info on our commitment to Haiti shortly," the US Embassy in Haiti said on the 28th.



Towards the implementation of the new Penal Code

Thursday, Rockefeller Vincent had an excellent preparatory work session by Visio conference with members of the Advisory Commission, as part of the preparations related to the implementation of the new Penal Code.



Cartography : Donation of powerful computers

Following training activities on the Geographic Information System (GIS) applied to multi-risk mapping (funded by the Delegation of the European Union in Haiti), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) donated to the municipal engineering services of the 13 town halls of the North West department and the Gros Morne district, with high-performance desktop computers.



Violence : Canada wants immediate action

Canada joins the international community in insisting that immediate measures be taken to respond to the current violence which is having disastrous consequences on the Haitian population.



Validation of the National Pediatric Cancer Plan 2021-2026

The Cancer Department of the Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP), with technical support from the office of the Pan American Health Organization / World Health Organization (PAHO / WHO) in Haiti, has just validated its National Operational Plan for Pediatric Cancer 2021-2026.



HL/ HaitiLibre


















By William Schwartz | Published on 2021/07/01

The international streaming market has given new life to the South Korean drama market, and nowhere is this more clear than with the upcoming slate of dramas that have all been produced with big budgets. From "Jirisan" with a thirty million dollar budget to "Ask the Stars" with a forty million dollar budget to "Moving" with a fifty million dollar budget no expense is being spared to create a new round of blockbuster dramas. But many unknowns yet remain with these series.

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"Jirisan" for example, will be airing on the Chinese streaming service iQiyi internationally. In a bold move, iQiyi purchased international streaming rights for "Jirisan" outside of South Korea and China for some twenty million dollars. Having recently premiered their first South Korean drama "My Roommate Is a Gumiho" iQiyi is confident that the Jun Ji-hyun headlined mystery can attract viewers throughout their target Asian markets.

The supernatural drama "Moving" is based on the Kang Full drama of the same name, and has been confirmed for Disney+. While Disney+ has yet to launch in the South Korean market, "Moving" is a clear attempt to define the Disney+ brand in South Korea around supernatural storylines, complimenting their known reputation for Marvel superhero films. But like iQiyi, Disney+ will be competing in an already crowded market.

Netflix remains the service to beat in South Korea, even as their subscriber numbers have continued to slip. Their distribution deal with Studio Dragon has allowed them much success with dramas like "The King: Eternal Monarch" and "Vincenzo" among many others. South Korean dramas are second only to American dramas in their ability to capture the top spot on Netflix charts in international markets.

Written by William Schwartz
Published on 2021/07/01 | Source

The craze for younger guys, is blowing again; from rising stars to the younger guy. Actors who will captivate their fans meet with older actresses and herald chemistry. As romance genres have been on the decline recently, broadcasters are hoping that the younger male craze will lead to a pleasant warm breeze.

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First of all, Ji Hyun-woo overcomes the 33-year-old age gap and performs a strong melodramatic performance. The movie "Everglow" which will be released on the 30th, is about the special love between Jin-ok (Go Doo-shim), a Jeju diver, and producer Kyeong-hoon (Ji Hyun-woo), who films a documentary starring her. Attention was drawn to the return of Ji Hyun-woo, who was described as a national junior in the drama "Old Miss Diary - Drama". In the film, Ji Hyun-woo overcame the age gap with Go Doo-shim and expressed deep emotional performance, which received critical acclaim. It is rumored that Ji Hyun-woo created a masculine image considering weight loss in order to revive the image of a younger man.

JTBC's new drama "No Longer Human" which will air in the second half of the year, tells the story of ordinary people who have been walking to the light as best as they can, suddenly realizing that they have been nothing. The story of Bu-jeong (Jeon Do-yeon), a woman who loses her way without being anything, Kang-jae (Ryu Jun-yeol), a man at the end of his youth who is afraid of being nothing, and the heartbreaking healing and empathy of the two men and women in front of intense darkness are densely depicted. Jeon Do-yeon and Ryu Jun-yeol portray melodrama with sincere acting.

SBS' new drama "Now, We Are Breaking Up" which will be broadcast at the same time, also features romance between two people with an age gap. A full-fledged romance genre has been heralded in that it is writer Je In's latest and participated by Kang Eun-kyeong, the creator of "Misty" and "The World of the Married". In particular, Jang Ki-yong and Song Hye-kyo's acting as lovers is the main focus. Jang Ki-yong is expected to show his unique chemistry with Song Hye-kyo by choosing "Now, We Are Breaking Up" as his last work before joining the military.

Lim Soo-jung and Lee Do-hyun are considering appearing in tvN's new drama "Melancholia". "Melancholia" is a work of confusion that occurs at a prestigious private high school due to the 'sexual' scandal involving teachers and students. Earlier, it was reported that Lim Soo-jung was discussing her appearance as Ji Yoon-soo, a math teacher, raising expectations. As a result, drama fans are curious about what chemistry the two would show as teacher and student.

Recently, romance genres have lost its effect. Recent dramas that focus on love between men and women, such as "Doom at Your Service" and "My Roommate Is a Gumiho" have been evaluated as unsuccessful. "Nevertheless" which depicts Song Kang and Han So-hee's dangerous love, is still struggling in the 2% range. Unlike "Crash Landing on You" and "It's Okay to Not Be Okay", the genre has been sluggish because their narrative is no longer new to viewers.

At this point, the age gap romance once again heralds a romantic frenzy, carrying the glory of the past. As the trend of the times changes, active female characters are receiving great support. In addition, the female-centered narrative in the work determines the popularity. In line with this, Jeon Do-yeon, Song Hye-kyo, and Lim Soo-jung lead the younger men to make a series of appearances.

It remains to be seen whether their meeting will bring new fun to viewers who are tired of boring romance.
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Press release

Montana Legal Services Association, in partnership with the Justice for Montanans AmeriCorps Project and the Court Help Program, has announced a new service to make free legal help available to residents of Havre.

Thanks to funding from the Legal Services Corporation the Court Help Program has deployed 11 Court Help Connect workstations throughout Montana, including in Havre at the Havre-Hill County Library.

The Court Help Connect workstations include a laptop, printer, headset and videoconferencing software to allow someone in Havre to video chat with a Justice for Montanans AmeriCorps Member located at the State Law Library who can answer basic questions about civil court forms and procedures.

Prior to this project, residents of Havre had to schedule an appointment during the Court Help Programs travel circuit or conduct an appointment over the phone which doesnt allow people representing themselves to show their legal documents to the person helping them. Court Help Connect allows residents of Havre to get timely legal assistance with their civil court documents, without needing to spend time and money traveling to a large city.

The Court Help Program assists with common, yet high-stakes legal cases that impact peoples safety, housing, family stability, and economic security. In its 2017 Justice Gap Report, LSC estimated that 75 percent of rural households had at least one civil legal problem in the past year. Unfortunately, there are few legal resources available to assist with these types of cases, especially in rural Montana. The Court Help Program and Justice for Montanans AmeriCorps Project help fill this gap by providing free legal assistance with questions about court forms and procedures. Court forms are the entry point to accessing Americas civil justice, however, they can also stand as a barrier since they are unfamiliar to most people. The new Court Help Connect workstations expand the availability of this free service to residents of Havre.

Residents of Havre needing assistance with a civil legal matter can schedule a free Court Help Connect appointment at the Havre-Hill County Library by calling the State Law Library during regular business hours at 406-444-9300. There are no income limits, however, you must have a civil, non-criminal legal matter. The most common legal problems Court Help Connect assists with are family law, housing and consumer debts.

The Court Help Program, an initiative of the Montana Supreme Court, provides free civil  non-criminal  legal help to Montanans representing themselves in court. The goal of the Court Help Program is to provide information people need to understand their legal rights and responsibilities and to help Montanans resolve their legal problems on their own.

Montana Legal Services Association is a non-profit statewide law firm that empowers low-income people by providing legal information, advice, and other services free of charge. Civil legal aid from MLSA assures fairness for all in the justice system, regardless of ones income or zip code, and helps Montanans protect their livelihoods, their health, and their families.
From Montana State University-Northern

This summer, Montana State University-Northern has launched a new program to help meet the growing need for industrial technology teachers in Montana.

The program is designed to help teachers who are teaching under a temporary teaching license to get the courses they need to become a fully licensed teacher.

Teachers who teach specific skills like welding, automotive, carpentry, plumbing, drafting, machining and electrical need specific endorsements to prove they have the knowledge and skills needed to teach those courses.

This is a very exciting opportunity that MSU-Northern has to meet the educational needs of Montana, Northern College of Technical Sciences Dean Dave Krueger said. This is our first year to run this summer program. We currently have 10 highly motivated and talented teachers who are enjoying the program. It is important to note that teachers can enter the program at any time, so we are hoping that this program will continue to grow into a very popular and dynamic feeder for industrial technology training in Montana.

Montana, like many states, suffers from a shortage of qualified industrial technology educators, he added. Institutions like Montana State University-Northern must work closely with our states secondary schools to provide appropriate educational training for teachers in order to prepare the next generation of a skilled Montana workforce.

Northerns program features a three-year course rotation that is specifically designed for current industrial technology educators who need to work on appropriate Montana secondary teacher licensure, renewal, or for those who just need to brush up on the latest technologies used in their industry. All courses will be offered over two weeks each year sometime in the early summer and will have components of online learning and hands-on labs.

This summer, teachers are learning the fundamentals of electrical and welding. Next summer, they will have classes in basic rigging, carpentry, machining, lab management and CAD. The third and final year in the rotation will focus on automotive engine repair, CAD/CAM applications, industry foundations and teaching methods.

To earn a Montana teaching credential, people must complete the required amount of undergraduate coursework from an accredited college or university, pass the standardized tests and pass an accredited certification program. Montana has two main types of certifications for classroom teachers: the Class 2 Standard Certificate for beginning teachers with a bachelors degree who have completed an accredited teacher preparation program, and the Class 1 Professional Certificate, which requires three years of successful K-12 teaching experience and a masters degree. Both certificates are renewable every five years.

Montana also offers a Class 5 alternative license, which lasts for three years while a candidate completes a valid teacher preparation program and or the requisite coursework. These are available for candidates who might meet some, but not all, of the requirements for other licenses.

People with a Class 5 License sign a plan of professional intent, agreeing to complete their deficient requirements within three years. Class 5 licenses cannot be renewed or reinstated and students are restricted to one Class 5 license in their lifetime. The licenses are most typically used when someone has a bachelors degree in an endorsed area and needs to complete a teacher prep program or does not complete renewal requirements.

Northerns Industrial Technology program is a dual track degree for people seeking employment in the technical fields of industry or for people pursuing teacher licenses in industrial technology education.

Students will enroll in either the industrial technology track with a major in industrial technology and a minor in a field of their choice or enroll in the technology education track, which prepares the graduate for teacher licensure. The teacher education student takes the necessary education courses in lieu of a minor.

For more information or to learn more about Northerns College of Technical Science, people can visit http://msun.edu .
North Central Senior Citizens Center

July 5-July 9

Senior Center to open Tuesday

Header Menu

Monday  Holiday

Tuesday  Salad, meatloaf, au gratin potatoes, winter-mix veggies, rolls, cake

Wednesday  Swiss steak/peppers/onions/tomatoes, mashed potatoes, Riviera veggies and pudding

Thursday  Salad, beef tips, buttered noodles, Tollhouse crumbcake

Friday  Soup, salad bar, chefs choice, dessert.

Center reopening

The Senior Centers doors are going to open to the public Tuesday, July 7. We will be providing our meals in the dining room. Marci wants everyone to remember to make an appointment if you need help from her. Also everyone must be wearing a mask. We are still providing limited services by phone with individuals bringing their paperwork down to the center only if they have an appointment. Help is also being given over the phone whenever possible. For people still a little worried about eating out, our grab-and-go bags are still available. Remember to call for the to-go bags before 10 a.m. that morning.

With the increase of COVID-19 cases in Hill County, we have delayed our reopening of the center until now. The reopening plan has been taken to the commissioners and they agree it is now time to open our doors. When we open, many things will have to change. The center will be open to the public from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. only. Upon entering the building, you will have to wear a mask and your temperature will be taken at the door. The number of occupants in the building will have to be limited. We will be seating only four guests to a table. When you come in you will keep mask on until we begin eating. Meals will be served to you at your table. Our new hours for the Senior Center will now be 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The Senior Center will provide senior transportation Monday through Thursday 9 a m to 3 p.m. Friday is for medical only and you must give 24 hour notice. Shopping trips, call ahead for a trip to Walmart the first Thursday of the month from 1:30-3:30 p.m.

There will be no more grocery delivery.

Silver Sneaker Membership

The Hill County Counsel on Aging, also known as the North Central Senior Citizens Center, is excited to say we are working with Physical Therapy Down Under and Fitness Center for the seniors and sponsoring a total of 20 Silver Sneaker memberships at Down Under for July.

At this time, 10 of these memberships are for new members to the program and 10 are for people currently attending their Silver Sneaker program. The classes are at 10 a.m. Monday and Wednesday and 2 p.m. Wednesday.

At this point in time, the Wednesday classes will be limited to 10 participants with all COVID-19 safety precautions in place.

As a senior wishing to participate, contact Down Under at 406-265-4805 and request the Silver Sneaker membership being sponsored by the North Central Senior Citizens Center.

We hope you will enjoy this opportunity to work on your agility and healthy movement. This is an activity that will continue if the community uses the opportunity to attend the Silver Sneakers program and shows support.

Please call Down Under at 406-265-4805 and schedule your time while requesting one of the memberships.

Important phone numbers:

 Montana Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

 RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673

 Tumbleweed Runaway and Family Crisis Program: 259-2558 (local) 1-888-816-4702 (toll free)

 Friendship Line by Institute on Aging  The Friendship Line is both a crisis intervention hotline and a warm-line for non-emergency emotional support calls. It is a 24-hour toll-free line and the only accredited crisis line in the country for people aged 60 years and older, and adults living with disabilities. Toll-Free Line: (800) 971-0016

 For seniors getting frustrated with staying home and needing someone to talk to you can call 1-877-688-3377 for Montanas Warm Line.

Medicare open enrollment has come to an end. However, if you are having problems with prescriptions you can call Marci and see if she can help you. For those on Medicaid and Big Sky she can still make changes. For an appointment Call Marci at 265-5464.

Improving care through telehealth: Technology can be especially valuable for people in remote areas or places with few medical professionals. Using portable devices, health care providers can test and treat patients without them coming into the office. This practice is called telehealth. A doctor in a rural area can consult on a patients scan with a specialist in another state if need be. Someone with diabetes can monitor their blood sugar in real-time and have the data sent to their health care provider. Wearable sensors can alert a caregiver if a person with dementia leaves the house. These are all examples of how telehealth is changing medical care. Researchers are developing new ways to analyze blood samples for patients at home. Through advances like this, telehealth is helping medical professionals deliver effective, long-distance care.
During its business meeting Thursday, the Hill County Commission approved the creation of a part-time seasonal Beaver Creek Park deputy warden position for the busy summer months in the park, which cabin owner Lou Hagener said he appreciated.

I think thats long-overdue to support activities that are going on in the park, Hagener said.

The commission also approved a right-of-way-lease for Mount Royal in the Sweet Grass Hills that site owners in the area would need in order to use the private road to access to Mount Royal.

Hagener did not take issue with the right-of-way-lease, but did criticize the commission because it was listed in the agenda as a right-of-way-lease for Mount Otis in the Bear Paw Mountains, which he had to call around about only to find that it doesnt exist.

He also took issue with an agenda sent to the Havre Daily News indicating that a meeting of the Hill County Park Board would take place Monday, which he said prompted phone calls to him from people wanting to know what happened, despite the meeting not being held.

He said hes concerned that so many mistakes are making it into public announcements like this and said it seems to be becoming more and more common.

Id ask for a little more diligence in reviewing and proofreading news releases that go from the commission to the newspaper, he said.

The commission also approved contracts with aging services and approved working on surveillance-related issues at the Hill County Detention Center and Hill County Courthouse.

The first of the contracts was with Missoula Aging Services, which agreed to continue its efforts to educate and empower seniors to resist health care fraud, by trying to heighten awareness about the issue and provide prevention training.

The second was a contract between the Hill County Council on Aging and the Rocky Boys Indian Reservations Senior Program, a contract that will continue the organizations efforts to provide nutrition services to the elderly on the reservation with a cost limit of $36,000 over the next year.

The renewal of both contracts was unanimously approved.

Its important that we do what we can for our senior citizens whether they live in the city of Havre, our rural communities or the reservation, said Hill County Commissioner Mark Peterson.

Hill County Commissioner Diane McLean said the Council on Aging does good work in all three of those communities and the commission will continue to support their efforts.

The commissioners also heard a request from Hill County Sheriff Jamie Ross for the installation of more cameras in the Hill County Detention Center.

His request said everyone is grateful for the ongoing upgrades to the buildings security but there are still a few gaps in their surveillance he would like to see patched.

The commission unanimously approved this request as well, with Hill County Commissioner Jake Strissel saying that increased coverage will help ensure the safety of inmates and staff.

After being briefly interrupted by a fire drill, the commission also discussed new signs for the Hill County Courthouse, signs notifying the public that the building has its own surveillance.

Peterson suggested the commission look at the legal requirements for where and how many signs are needed before proceeding and the issue was subsequently tabled.

The commissioners also voted unanimously to take under advisement a bid from James Carney Construction in Malta to crush and stockpile approximately 21,000 tons of gravel to be used for maintaining western Hill County roads.

The bid was for a total of $77,000 and was given to Hill County Road Supervisor Jim Bedwell for review.

The commission also discussed a bid it received for the media cart that they have been working to put together, featuring a smart TV and computer which Peterson said can be used for trainings and virtual meetings.

The commission also mentioned that a number of positions on local boards remain open, including two on the Zoning Board of Adjustments, one on the Mount Royal TV Board, Council on Aging Advisory Board, Great Northern Fair Board, Compensation Board and Cemetery Board, as well as three on the City-County Planning Board, four on the Unified Refuse Disposal Board, five on the Hill County Planning Board and Mosquito District Board, and six on the H. Earl Clack Memorial Museum Board.
I just spent a week on a tractor cleaning my corrals and doing some dirt work, which gave my brain far too much time to get lost in philosophical contemplation, and this week my brain settled in to ponder the Law of Unintended Consequences. I know, that sounds intriguing, right?

Most of us are familiar with Murphys Law  Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong  but Unintended Consequences is like Murphys intellectually deeper and marginally more optimistic cousin. First notably written about by English philosopher John Locke in the late 1600s, Unintended Consequences is a sociological idea literally about consequences one does not intend to occur. It is broken into three categories: perverse results, unexpected drawbacks and unexpected benefits.

Perverse results are unintended consequence that actually make the situation worse.

I created perverse results a year ago when I rented the small tractor the first time to clean my horse pens. This project was a first for me, having never kept my horses in pens before, so I rented a small tractor and I cleaned the bejeepers outta those pens. Im not going to say you could eat off that ground because, well, even I have higher hygiene standards than that, but you get what I mean relatively speaking.

The perverse result was that I pulled the manure out to make the ground healthier, scraping the earth down to the clean hard pan. But along with the manure I took out soft dirt, so the horses got feet sore and some scrapes and raw patches from laying on the hard ground until I could rustle up some bedding. Not the healthy environment as I was working toward. Lesson learned.

This year I cleaned without scouring the entire three acres into a moonscape. And just in case I couldnt contain myself, I already had a large, soft bed of straw out for the horses.

This brings us to unexpected drawback, which is an unrelated detriment that comes along with the benefit. Or as I came to think of it: creating an annoyance by ridding myself of an annoyance.

A few years back, we hauled in a large pile of gravel to use as needed around the shop, but when I put the fences up for the pens, that pile was right in the middle of one fence line, exactly where a post needed to go. But, we said, maybe well put a large gate in that gap, and left the gravel where it sat. I hung a temporary, heavy-duty pipe in the gap that allowed for the pile of gravel underneath but still kept the horses where they were supposed to be.

With that gravel pile in the way, it was the one spot along the fence that my overly tall horse couldnt reach over to eat grass  stretching the wire like its a bit of decorative string I tied between posts for her amusement  it still bothered me, though, that the fence was unfinished in that spot.

This week, I figured out a use for the gravel pile and hauled it out of there. Even with just the pipe there, it looks nicer. I can see a finished fence in the near future.

But also, now that the gravel isnt blocking the way, my horse gigantor is leaning into the pipe, threatening to bend it with her mass  or push over the two posts holding the pipe, which has no give like the wire does.

Yeah, sitting there on the idling tractor, watching that horse stretch her long neck over the pipe and press her weight into the barrier is what got me contemplating the Law of Unintended Consequences to begin with.

But its not all negative, right? We did have an unexpected benefit  and when I say we, I mean someone else benefited off our work.

Last years composted manure pile was ready to be moved to where it could be mixed with some dirt, and, since it was easy and mindless work, we used that project to fill short bits of work time, or when we were too tired to operate machinery in tight quarters. So there was a definite benefit for us to be able to take our time with this piece of the project, but it was a bigger help to a cottontail rabbit.

I was working on the composted pile early morning on day 2, a simple project while I was waking up, and spied a cottontail hanging out at the pile while I was working, then it dawned on me that the rabbit wasnt just being brave or super chill.

During the cover of night, that ninja rabbit had dug a hole in the compost mound and she was in the process of padding a little nest in there for birthing some babies.

Despite all intentions to get that project done, one-quarter of the mound remains, waiting until the rabbit and babies are gone  and, frankly, until we get the tractor again next year.

Im not going to evict an expectant mother from her newly developed home, and Montana probably has some sort of laws on squatters rights anyway. So, state law or philosophical law, the mound stays and she stays.

Why not? The horse benefited unexpectedly from the law. And my pens look great perversely because I messed up last year. Well just call the week a philosophical experiment to prove John Locke right.



Besides, its better than proving Murphy to be the better philosopher, right? At http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .)
Cooper visits plant that makes super-cold freezers that store Covid vax

Gov. Roy Cooper visited Thermo Fisher Scientific in Asheville Friday, where the company set up an on-site vaccine clinic for employees to receive their ovid-19 shot in partnership with the Buncombe County Department of Health and Human Services.



It takes all of us working together to beat this pandemic and Im grateful for employers like Thermo Fisher that are stepping up to make it easier for their employees to get vaccinated, Cooper said.

The Asheville Thermo Fisher site helped manufacture ultra-cold storage refrigerators and freezers to store vaccine doses. In addition to helping providers across North Carolina administer vaccines, their products were shipped and distributed worldwide. Pardee UNC Health Care bought one early on and used it store the first Covid vaccines to reach Henderson County last December.

We are proud of our Asheville sites contribution to support the critical need for ultra-low temperature freezers that are helping to protect and store Covid-19 vaccines around the world, said Michael Meguiar, vice president of operations, lab products at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Todays clinic, organized in partnership with Buncombe County Health and Human Services, underscores our commitment to provide access to the vaccine, our effort to promote heightened immunity in our local community and support the health of our workforce in North Carolina.

Over 53 percent of our total population in Buncombe County has received at least one dose of vaccine and over 50% are now fully vaccinated, said Stacie Saunders, Buncombe County Public Health Director. Please continue to honor the work of those helping with the response, our essential workers, first responders, and public health by getting one of the safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines if you havent already.

On Monday, Governor Cooper announced the first winners of the Your Shot at a Million Summer Cash and College Tuition drawings. The next drawing will take place on Wednesday, July 7. North Carolinians who have received at least one dose of the vaccine are automatically entered to win the $1 million prize.

As the highly contagious Delta variant of Covid-19 continues to spread across the country, Cooper is urging people to get their vaccine. To date, North Carolina has administered nearly 8.9 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, with 53 percent of the adult population fully vaccinated. Fifty-six percent of adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine, including 82 percent of people 65 and over.
First claim for compensation is filed in Ecusta Trail railbanking

The conversion of the Hendersonville-to-Brevard rail corridor to the Ecusta Trail edged close to a certainty when a federal agency issued a Notice of Interim Trail Use or Abandonment on Monday.



The order allows Blue Ridge Southern Railroad, the owner of the line, to complete the sale of the property to Conserving Carolina. The land conservancy has agreed to purchase the greenway, using money from the state NCDOT grant, while Henderson County and the city of Brevard have agreed to lead the construction phase.

At the same time, this order constitutes for many folks a taking of their reversionary rights and under the Fifth Amendment they are allowed to file a claim for compensation, said Lindsay S. Brinton, an attorney with Lewis Rice, one of several law firms that representing landowners who are expected to file claims for the land taken for the bicycle-pedestrian trail.

The day after the Surface Transportation Boards action, Austin v. United States became the first claim of whats expected to be several hundred lawsuits seeking compensation. The case, brought by Denise and Donald Austin of Penrose with land along the railroad track, was filed by Brintons firm.

But for the STB invoking section 8(d) of the Trails Act, these North Carolina landowners would have held and enjoyed unencumbered title and these owners would have had exclusive right to possess their property free of any easement for recreational trail use or railbanking, the lawsuit said.

Brinton said her firm expects to add around 125 more claimants in an amended complaint they plan to file on July 16.

Its important that we filed it so we can start the process, she said. She said the total amount of money the property owners are seeking wont be known until appraisals are completed in about a year from now.

Its a variety, she said of the firms clients. Some are small residential, some are commercial. We have a lot of agricultural property. We have claims all along the corridor.  We have some that are pro-trail and some that are anti-trail so we really represent both sides the aisle. What they have in common, she said, is their land was taken and they want to see compensation.

She said most claims for compensation in railbanking situation are resolved in about two years.

Also this week, an attorney for Blue Ridge Southern Railroad notified the Surface Transportation Board that it had reached a trails-use agreement with Ecusta Rails2Trails LLC, a non-profit formed by Conserving Carolina.
The partnership between Afghanistan and the United States is not ending.

That was President Joe Bidens declaration of support as he met on June 25 with Afghanistan leaders Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah.

The U.S. is committed to withdrawing military forces by Sept. 11, 2021, but other aid will continue. That symbolic date is the 20th anniversary of the al Qaeda terrorist attacks, followed by international military invasion and occupation of the country.

The extreme fundamentalist Taliban regime that sheltered al Qaeda terrorists was overthrown. Ever since, the international community has worked to create a strong central government and representative political system.

Ghani and Abdullah are an odd couple, bitter rivals who wrestled for power following the disputed 2019 presidential election. Ghani won the election by over ten percentage points, but Abdullah contested the outcome. Now, they cooperate.

The two leaders worked out a shared governance arrangement that so far has functioned effectively. Their collaboration is one promising sign amid the uncertainty facing their nation after the withdrawal.

Serious negotiations aimed at bringing peace to Afghanistan have now reached and surpassed the nine-month mark. Many knowledgeable observers are surprised, in some cases amazed, that the discussions have taken place at all.

Representatives of the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban movement continue their direct peace negotiations in Doha, capital of the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The two sides have persevered, impressively, since last September.

In February 2020, after nearly two decades of occupation, the U.S. government and the Taliban signed a formal agreement for the phased withdrawal of international troops. The accord includes detailed stipulations to help protect the population and discourage the return of terrorists.

Context is important. Afghanistan has no established history of formal representative elections, Western-style rule of law, or effective national government. Powerful local tribal leaders are primary. They establish the rules, maintain social order, command exceptionally lethal warriors.

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At the same time, the Taliban today experiences limitations. The movement remains markedly unpopular with the population at large. Islamic extremism lacks international strength.

The Soviet Union, after years of de facto control over the national government in Kabul, in 1979 launched a massive military invasion. A decade of unconventional warfare followed before Moscow finally accepted defeat and withdrew.

President Jimmy Carter demonstrated aggressive, effective leadership in supplying weapons and related support for the Mujahideen warriors who fought the Soviet military. President Ronald Reagan expanded aid to include vital Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

The frustrating aspects of Afghanistan today can mask positive changes such as reasonably honest elections, and rapidly expanding political participation of women. Technology spreads steadily even to remote rural areas. Cellphones, the Internet, and traditional television are in even isolated communities.

Wider historical and political context is important, especially for Americans who characteristically are impatient and present-focused. Youssef Aboul-Enein, a U.S. Navy officer, is one talented scholar and analyst who provides such context.

Major East-West trade routes traverse the region since ancient times. Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, leased from Britain in 1966, contains major American military facilities.

Great Britains long-term approach is a good guide. Historically, in South Asia as elsewhere, they combined economic and political with military tools. They emphasize human intelligence, in contrast to American preference for technology. Above all, we must be uncharacteristically patient.

Ultimately, the Afghan people are responsible for their own political future.

Learn more: Youssef H. Aboul-Enein, Militant Islamist Ideology (Naval Institute Press)
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Hundreds of North Americans fatalities have been recorded due to heat-related illness in the course of the past week following a heat wave that hit the US Pacific Northwest US and far southwest Canada. It is believed to be the most fatal weather event yet for the region. The poster town of this devastating episode is Lytton, British Columbia. It broke Canada's all-time national high temperature of 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) with a high of 46.6C (116F) on Sunday. Monday brought 47.9C (118.2F) and Tuesday had an appalling 49.6C (121F).

Meghan Fandrich went for a midnight walk on Tuesday in Lytton, BC. What she witnessed made her wish she had stayed indoors: the red flames and ballooning smoke of an uncontrollable, 350-hectare wildfire raging just south of the town.

Intense Heat Warnings

Extreme hot weather continues to prevail in much of the Prairies as a heat dome moves east. Extreme heat warnings were in place for Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, and BC Northwestern Ontario on Canada Day.

According to the local MP, a wildfire has ravaged 90% of the village that reported Canada's highest temperature. The fire resulted in enormous damage to Lytton and critical infrastructure around it, reported BBC.

The whole village of Lytton in the province of BC was evacuated following a wildfire quickly taking over the small town on Wednesday. In his evacuation order, Jan Polderman, the village mayor, described fire in the village that threatened the safety of residents and structures, reported NPR.

Read Also: Canadian Company Behind Keystone XL Oil Pipeline Calls It Quits, Project Has Been Halted Since January

On Wednesday, wildfires mushroomed across the area and the intense heat flash-dried the forested landscape. Provincial authorities stated that houses in Lytton have been destroyed.

First, there was intense heat; then there happened wildfires. This cascade of climate-change disasters are what scientists have been cautioning about for years.

Fandrich also said it had been very dry in Lytton, which is about a three-hour drive northeast of Vancouver.

Numerous locations through western Canada broke temperature records on Wednesday. Environment and Climate Change Canada meteorologist Shannon Moodie stated that it is possibly because of climate change.

According to Moodie, "Are we feeling that we're starting to see the impacts? Of course. This is an extended period of extreme heat. We saw Lytton, BC, broke Canada's all-time hottest record three days in a row, so I mean, this is quite substantial," reported CBC.

The mayor of Lytton remarked he was lucky to get out with his own life. He added that there would not be very much left of Lytton as there was fire everywhere.

An estimated 250 people reside in the town around 150 miles northeast of Vancouver.

The fire took around 15 minutes to engulf the whole town not long following his release of the evacuation order at 6 PM on Wednesday.

Related Article: Pope Francis Expresses Pain Over Deaths of 215 Children in Canada but Stops Short of Apology, Abuse Rampant in Schools

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President Joe Biden spoke with his son's rich business associates about a "flipping gigantic" business transaction, based on the fresh information obtained from Hunter Biden's infamous laptop.

In 2014, the then-vice president entertained Hunter Biden's business partners in the vice president's office at the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. The meeting was attended by Mexican billionaires Carlos Slim and Miguel Aleman Velasco. Hunter Biden and his then-business partner Jeff Cooper were reportedly flown to Mexico City on Air Force 2 by Joe Biden in 2016. They discussed a "flipping gigantic" business arrangement with Aleman's son.

Evidence revealed Joe Biden met Hunter's billionaire business partners

According to the NY Post, Joe Biden claims he did not know about Hunter's lucrative agreements in countries where he had clout as vice president. However, evidence of Joe's participation abounds on Hunter's abandoned laptop.

Joe Biden hosted breakfast meetings for Hunter's foreign associates at his vice presidential house and in his White House office, as per the information from the laptop. He flew his son to places where Hunter was doing business, and on at least one occasion, he brought along one of Hunter's business associates.

Hunter and his wife Kathleen had been at Velasco's son Miguel Aleman Magnani's Acapulco house in March, and he is the founder of budget airline Interjet. Along with Hunter, Jeff Cooper, a longtime Biden family benefactor who managed Illinois-based SimmonsCooper, one of the country's major asbestos lawsuit companies, makes an appearance.

The photos were taken in the living room of the Vice President's residence and featured distinctive paintings by Vermont artist Wolf Kahn on loan from Addison/Ripley Fine Art in Georgetown, which was painted at the time in a daffodil yellow chosen by Jill Biden. These artworks are visible on the wall behind the men. Two floral chairs and a pink-toned silk rug in the photos match the decor of the living room at the time. In the background of one photo, a piano and family photographs can be seen in front of a bay window.

Read Also: New Book Unfolds Donald Trump's Response to Capitol Riot and How He Lashes Out at Rivals

Hunter Biden's laptop

Former Steve Bannon podcast co-host Jack Maxey provided DailyMail.com with a copy of Hunter's laptop hard drive. In September of last year, John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the computer business where Hunter left his laptop, sent a copy of its hard drive to Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani allegedly released documents and images from the drive to the New York Post, as well as giving Trump's former adviser Steve Bannon and his podcast co-host Jack Maxey a full copy of the drive.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Hunter Biden may have paid a Russian prostitute $25,000 from an account tied to his father, according to text messages found on his laptop. On April 16, 2015, it was reported that the president met with his son's Ukrainian, Russian, and Kazakhstani business partners in a private dining area at the luxurious Cafe Milano.

Per The Sun, Hunter apparently used a racial slur about dating an Asian lady in a text message conversation with his cousin Caroline Biden in 2019. Hunter is alleged to have left three Apple laptops at The Mac Shop in April 2019 but never picked them up or paid the $85 charge for data recovery.

Related Article: Hunter Biden Has Explosive Revelations in His Memoir "Beautiful Things"

@YouTube

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Trump and his organization are facing charges of allegedly running a 15-year scheme that supported its executives to avoid taxes by paying them with lucrative amounts that were kept secret from authorities.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance and New York State Attorney General Letitia James' offices obtained the grand jury indictments. Officials accuse the Republican businessman's organization of wrongdoing with Allen Weisselberg as an accomplice in a scheme to avoid paying taxes on certain compensations, said James.

Trump Organization's Illegal Scheme

Authorities said investigations into the matter would continue after the indictment and will follow the evidence and uphold the law wherever possible. On Thursday, officials escorted Weisselberg, who was handcuffed alongside his attorney and was escorted into a courtroom. The executive's passport was held as part of the terms of his release that he surrendered to investigators.

While authorities are not exactly restricting Weisselberg from traveling internationally, he has to ask the court's permission when he wants to do so. His next court appearance was scheduled for Sept. 20, 2021, at 9:30 a.m.

Court documents showed that Vance's office was responsible for investigating the company's criminal conduct, which includes falsifying business records, insurance fraud, and tax fraud. The Trump Organization had its headquarters in New York City, which is the jurisdiction of Vance's office, MSN reported.

In March, it was reported that Vance's office was investigating whether employees of the Trump Organization, including Weisselberg, were able to evade taxes in exchange for fringe benefits, which include apartments.

Carey Dunne, general counsel for the Manhattan district attorney, called the organization's actions an "illegal payments scheme." He said executives deliberately underreported their income and received secret benefits that were not shown in tax documents.

Read Also: Eviction Moratorium Ends July 31. Here's Biden Administration's Solution and Who Will Qualify for Financial Assistance.

Hidden Financial Benefits

The indictment noted that Weisselberg's benefits were kept off the official records and stored in an internal spreadsheet. The indictment is the latest in a long-running legal battle against the Trump Organization by the district attorney's office.

While the indictment focused primarily on the tax scheme, it would allow prosecutors to conduct wider investigations in the future, which could focus on former President Donald Trump himself.

Investigators continued to pressure Weisselberg for months to get any information regarding the inquiry. Prosecutors had previously subpoenaed Weisselberg's personal tax returns and bank records. They also reviewed his financial endeavors and questioned his ex-daughter-in-law. Authorities conducted all of these to try and get the executive's cooperation regarding the case.

Authorities are continuing to pressure Weisselberg, where he could now face more than a decade in jail if he is convicted of the crimes, the New York Times reported.

The indictment alleged that Weisselberg was able to avoid $1.76 million in taxes from his income since 2005. Documents also claimed he kept his New York residency a secret to authorities to avoid city income taxes.

Prosecutors believe he was able to avoid more than $900,000 in federal, state, and city taxes using the illegal endeavors. The indictment also claimed Weisselberg received a total of $133,124 in state tax refunds which he was not supposed to receive, CNN reported.



Related Article: Russia Plans to Vaccinate Citizens Yearly Despite Guatemala's Plea to Return Money Over COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery Failure

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A Columbia University professor who thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for dismissing the likelihood that COVID-19 was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has strong connections to China, including Communist Party members.

Who is the Colombian Profesor Who Thanked Fauci?

In a recently published article in FOX News, last year, Walter Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiology professor known as a "virus hunter," praised Dr. Anthony Fauci for publicly rejecting claims that the virus originated and spread from the Wuhan facility.

Lipkin wrote to Fauci on May 5, 2020, just one day after Fauci cast doubt on the lab leak theory that they appreciate their efforts in steering and messaging. Lipkin's communication to Fauci seems to include a Chinese government official among the "we."

Meanwhile, Lipkin sent an email from Chen Zhu, China's former Minister of Health and current vice-chairperson of the National People's Congress's Standing Committee, as part of the message. That governmental organization is chaired by Li Zhanshu, a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party and a major adviser to Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to a report published in Yahoo Finance.

Read Also: Donald Trump Reacts Strongly to Interviews of Dr Birx and Fauci

Ties Between Lipkin and Zhu

Lipkin and Zhu have known each other since the early 2000s as the two worked together on the SARS outbreak. Lipkin was acting as an intermediary for the World Health Organization and the Chinese government at the time.

In addition to his official connections, Zhu is the head of the Chinese Red Cross Society, which professes to be independent of the government. The Chinese government, on the other hand, funds and directs the Red Cross in China, as per Newstral.

Lipkin returned to China in late January 2020 to investigate the coronavirus pandemic. Just two weeks after reentering China, Lipkin debunked the lab leak hypothesis.

Lipkin said they looked at the idea that the virus might have originated in a biocontainment facility or could be a biologically defined weapon, as some have proposed. They, however, discovered no proof of this.

Chinese Consulate of New York Presented a Medal to Lipkin

In early January of this year, Lipkin was presented with a medal at the Chinese Consulate of New York. China's Central Government, Central Military Commission, and State Council awarded the accolade.

Despite reports that the Chinese government was involved in a cover-up, Lipkin commended China's early reaction and openness to the coronavirus pandemic. When reporters approached Lipkin for a remark, he did not react.

Media and Other Skeptics Now Push for Further Investigations

The media and other skeptics have reversed their positions and now believe that the lab leak hypothesis merits further study. According to reports, China had complete control over an on-site World Health Organization inspection, including who the researchers talked with in the lab.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., raised measured concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the start of the pandemic, which sparked outrage from Democrats and several media outlets, who dismissed them as "fringe conspiracy theories."

It can also be remembered that former President Trump questioned if the virus escaped from the lab, leading left-wing media and political leaders to dismiss the lab breach as a hoax.

Related Article: Fauci Says COVID-19 Came from Miners in 2012, While Chinese Whistleblower Claims It's 'Unrestricted Bioweapon'



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A First Nations community discovered the bodies of nearly 200 children in a mass grave at a Canadian school several weeks after authorities announced 1,000 unmarked graves were found in two different areas.

Using ground-penetrating radar, Lower Kootenay Bank said they found 182 bodies at St. Eugene's Mission school near Cranbrook, British Columbia. Officials said some of the children's bodies were placed in shallow graves not even three to four feet deep.

In a statement, the Lower Kootenay band said authorities believe the bodies of the nearly 200 children were members of the Ktunaxa Nation, which neighbored First Nations communities and Aq'am.

Indigenous Children Forced Into Schools

From the 19th century until the late 1900s, more than 150,000 indigenous children became victims of being forced into state schools. The discovery comes a week after the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan discovered 571 unmarked graves.

The Tk'emlups te Secwepemc said they discovered 215 children's bodies in June. In Canada, many know about the circumstances that led to the death of indigenous people forced into educational facilities. However, very few actually talk about the issue in public or on television, The Sun reported.

The tragic discovery of the hundreds of graves coincided with the eve of Canada Day, the founding holiday that marked the time in 1867 when three British colonies joined to create the Dominion of Canada. Many indigenous people have refused to recognize the holiday, a sentiment that has grown in recent weeks after the discovery of multiple gravesites.

Celebrations across Canada have been canceled by several municipalities. Many indigenous residents have also resorted to vandalizing or removing statues of figures involved with residential schools throughout the nation.

Read Also: Supreme Court Rejects Claims of Arizona Voting Laws Discriminate Against Minorities

Chief Jason Louie of the Lower Kootenay Band said no one could have fully prepared themselves for such a discovery. The discoveries of the graves also come amid a national soul-searching of Canada's legacy of residential schools.

Mass Graves of Children

In Kamloops, British Columbia, the bodies of 215 indigenous children were discovered in unmarked graves in May. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday that the discoveries of the mass graves have forced officials to reflect on the country's history and the effects that past administrations have on today's society, BBC reported.

Trudeau previously announced that he requested the national flag on the Peace Tower to remain at half-mast for Canada Day to honor Indigenous children who were found in the mass graves. A group of indigenous leaders will visit the Vatican later this year to demand a papal apology for the Roman Catholic Church's role in the residential schools, and subsequently, the deaths of the hundreds of children.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops announced indigenous leaders will go to the Vatican and stay from December 17 to 20. They will be scheduled to meet with Pope Francis to discuss the issue and foster meaningful encounters of dialogue and reconciliation.

The pope expressed his sympathies to the victims after the discovery of the graves in Kamloops. He then proceeded to press religious and political authorities to clarify the tragic circumstances of the incident, NPR reported.



Related Article: New York City Mayoral Race Count Voided After 'Test' Ballots Included in Tally; Board of Elections Says It Is a 'Discrepancy'

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A Houston family was attacked by a gunman who shot and killed three members of the household, leaving a 10-year-old girl with a gunshot wound on her arm, who was able to survive by clenching his baby brother close and pretending to be dead.

Later on, the young survivor FactTimed her grandmother to get help after the incident. Family members quickly went to where the girl was and discovered the other victims, 35-year-old Gregory Carhee, 29-year-old Donyavia Lagway, and their 6-year-old daughter Harmony Carhee dead with gunshot wounds on their bodies.

10-Year-Old Girl Played Dead

Relatives quickly rushed the 10-year-old survivor to a nearby hospital to be treated for a gunshot wound on her arm. Doctors later announced she was in stable condition and announced that her one-year-old brother was unharmed. Another brother of the victim, who was eight years old, was away from home and was staying with his uncle. The incident came as their mother just recently found out she was pregnant with her fifth child.

Police said they believed the suspect was a man in his 20s. They revealed he wore a surgical mask when he knocked on the family's front door just after 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday. The father of the family was the one who went to see who it was and the suspect quickly barged in and snatched the infant Gregory was carrying in his arms, Crime Online reported.

Read Also: Georgia Fulton County Election Takeover Planned Following Controversy of Electoral Irregularities

Authorities said the 10-year-old revealed the suspect lined her family up on the couch. He then proceeded to shoot each of them one by one in the head, the girl said. The victim did not reveal how the infant was able to avoid being shot or how she was only shot in the arm and not in the head.

The young girl said that when she called her grandma, she told her a man came into the house and shot dead her entire family, her father, mother, and sister. It was revealed that the survivor had to stayed and waited inside the residence for 15 minutes before her relatives came to rescue her.

Not a Home Invasion

Assistant Police Chief Patricia Cantu said the incident was a very tragic incident and expressed her sympathies to the families. She noted the crime was a very difficult scene for both the authorities and the family. The department sent out requests for anyone who could have information regarding the identity and location of the killer, NBC2 reported.

Another family member named Tamera Denton said the 10-year-old survivor called her grandmother online and showed her the scene inside the house. The elderly then immediately called 911 to report the incident.

While the police department said they did not yet have information regarding the identity of the suspect or his motives, they believe he may have known the victims and did not forcefully break into the home. Cantu said they did not believe the crime was a home invasion because there was no damage to the entrance of the home. She added that they were continuing investigations of the scene to discover any potential evidence, ABC13 reported.



Related Article: Vladimir Putin Commands Russia's Invincible Hypersonic Nuclear Missile on Indefinite Standby

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Satellite images show China is building more than 100 new missile silos in the northwest desert, sparking worries of the incredible growth of its nuclear weapons. According to experts from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies' James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the satellites picked up building activities at Yumen, including underground bunkers, cable tunnels, roadways, and a small military base.

The silos appear to be replicas of China's current launch sites for nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. The acquisition of more than 100 additional silos would mark a significant change for China, which was previously considered to have just a small nuclear arsenal of 250 to 350 missiles, much fewer than the US and Russia.

China's nuclear expansion is concerning

Analysts warned that the growth was an "alarming phenomenon" but cautioned against "worst-case thinking," citing tensions between major nuclear countries over disarmament as an example. The locations were discovered by fellow researcher Decker Eveleth, who was tasked with detecting patterns from similar missile silos China has erected in Inner Mongolia, according to Jeffrey Lewis, head of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at CNS.

China might be engaging in a "shell game," according to Lewis, referring to a technique used by the United States during the Cold War. It entails shuttling a smaller number of missiles amid a larger number of silos to hide the real location and size of one's nuclear arsenal, Newsweek via MSN reported.

Lewis wrote in Foreign Policy on Thursday that the images, which were provided by private satellite company Planet, revealed that an array of under-construction ICBM silos sprawled across 700 square miles of desert was "jaw-dropping." He believes the silos, which are roughly 2 miles apart and have a potential range of 9,300 miles, are most likely for China's newest DF-41s. The People's Liberation Army Rocket Force's intercontinental ballistic missiles were unveiled at China's National Day parade in 2019.

Read Also: Biden Orders Airstrike Against Iran-Backed Militia Groups in Iraq, Syria Border

The US urged China to cooperate

Per Yahoo News, China's buildup had grown more difficult to conceal, and it looked that it was departing from decades of nuclear policy focused on limited deterrence, according to State Department spokesman Ned Price, who spoke at a regular press conference on Thursday. Price was replying to a question on a report in the Washington Post claiming that China has started construction on more than 100 new missile silos in a desert area in the country's west.

Washington had taken note of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's remarks at a ceremony on Thursday, marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party Foundation, Price said. However, he refused to give specific details.

Foreign forces seeking to coerce China would "have their heads bashed," according to Xi, who also promised to strengthen China's military. He also pledged to "reunify" Taiwan and stated that social stability in Hong Kong would be maintained as China's security and sovereignty were protected.

Beijing claims that its arsenal is dwarfed by that of the US and Russia and that it is willing to engage in bilateral strategic security discussions "based on equality and mutual respect." The Pentagon forecasts China's nuclear weapon stockpile to be in the "low 200s" in a 2020 report to Congress and believes it will at least quadruple in size as Beijing develops and modifies its troops.

Price said the People's Republic of China appears to be departing from decades of "minimum deterrence" policy. He also called China's nuclear development "concerning." He urged China to cooperate with the US to minimize the "risks of destabilizing arms races," as per Daily Express.

As China recovers quickly from the COVID-19 pandemic and asserts itself more aggressively on the world scene, Xi Jinping and the party are riding high. Beijing, on the other hand, is facing international condemnation for its crackdown in Hong Kong and treatment of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, as well as a deteriorating demographic outlook that threatens long-term economic development.

Related Article: US, Japan Elevate Military Exercises as Japanese Official Warns of Potential Surprise Attack From Russia and China



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In a small laboratory study of protection against the Delta variant spreading across the United States and other nations, Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine showed significant results. According to J&J, the COVID-19 vaccine produced high levels of neutralizing antibodies in blood samples collected from eight persons who had been vaccinated.

The good results add to a growing body of data that presently approved COVID-19 vaccinations can protect against the Delta variant, which looks to be more infectious than other strains. The Johnson & Johnson vaccination gives considerable protection against serious infection and hospitalization, according to data provided by the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC).

J&J COVID-19 vaccine manifest significant efficacy

After being infected with COVID-19, 94% of healthcare workers immunized as part of the Sisonke Phase 3b study with the J&J vaccine showed mild symptoms. Approximately 479,768 healthcare professionals were vaccinated against COVID-19 with the J&J vaccine as part of the Sisonke implementation trial.

The vaccination provided considerable protection to healthcare workers with breakthrough infections, according to data from the SAMRC and Sisonke. COVID-19 positive cases that arise 28 days after the vaccination are considered breakthrough infections, as per News24.

Professor Glenda Gray, the CEO of SAMRC, was addressing during a virtual media briefing on the country's pandemic response. She said that J&J's vaccine against Beta and Delta variants works efficiently and assures the public there is no need for a booster. However, researchers need to follow participants to identify the durability of their immune response.

Researchers examined the blood of ten patients who had been vaccinated with the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine and tested it against several serious variants, including Delta, in a lab trial. Dr. Dan Barouch, head of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's Center for Virology and Vaccine Research, who assisted with the research, told ABC News, "I would say it's reassuring. We found the J&J vaccine induces neutralizing antibodies."

In fact, according to Barouch, another encouraging result of the trial was that those who had the Johnson & Johnson shot had a robust immune system response up to eight months later. COVID-19 vaccines may provide longer-lasting protection than some scientists predicted, according to a growing body of research. This is because memory B cells, which are part of the immune system, continue to grow over time and preserve their ability to fight infection.

Read Also: FDA Announces Nationwide Recall of Frozen Shrimp Due to Salmonella Contamination

COVID-19 vaccines vs. Delta variant

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Delta was projected to become the prevalent strain in the United States in the following weeks. The J&J vaccine offers less immediate protection than the messenger RNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna; and scientists are debating whether some people may require repeat doses to keep the virus at bay in the long run.

Scientists and certain vaccine makers have been working on new versions of their vaccines to specifically target the developing variants, which have shown to be far more transmissible than the original virus that first appeared in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.

The firm said more robust data will be published on bioRxiv, an online research repository. Antibody levels, known as titers, were significantly greater in reaction to the Delta variant than the Beta variant initially discovered in South Africa, according to data given by the firm.

Per the SCMP, the second dosage of J&J's vaccine has been shown to boost a person's antibody level. Van Hoof said the business intends to provide efficacy data from a late-stage trial of a two-shot regimen by the end of August.

The business is also looking at the vaccine's capacity to generate T cells, which is another indicator of its effectiveness. According to Van Hoof, the injection increased T cell immunity against the virus and its variants for eight months.

J&J's COVID-19 vaccine has struggled to gain momentum due to manufacturing issues and a temporary halt in usage as regulators examined allegations that some patients received it and developed severe blood clots. On April 23, the hold was removed after ten days.

Related Article: New Study: Pfizer, Moderna COVID-19 Vaccines Could Provide 'Years' of Protection Against the Existing Coronavirus Variants

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After losing her effort to keep her documents sealed, Ghislaine Maxwell's financial records, including suspected links to the Clinton Foundation, are due to be revealed. Maxwell argued that disclosing the material would jeopardize her future criminal trial and make her a tabloid target; but a New York judge ruled against her on Thursday.

The records were initially submitted in conjunction with the case against Maxwell on behalf of claimed Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre. The defamation case was resolved in 2015, but Giuffre's attorneys have been fighting for years to get access to papers that might contain claims against other members of Epstein's exclusive social circle.

Dozens of Ghislaine Maxwell's documents will be revealed

Giuffre's legal team sought Maxwell's tax returns, balance sheets, and financial documents for companies she controlled. Maxwell's lawyers sought in the civil trial to limit any disclosure of her finances to just her net worth, saying the "scope of requests are overly broad and intended to harass and embarrass Maxwell," as per Daily Mail.

Judge Preska said she was not persuaded by Ghislaine Maxwell's claim that continued unsealing of these documents implicates her right to a fair trial in her ongoing criminal prosecution, which is set to begin in November, at a hearing in federal court in New York. A petition for a protective order filed by Maxwell's attorneys to restrict the information about her finances they had to send up will be among the documents that were made public.

Giuffre's attorneys wanted this information so they might be better prepared if the lawsuit was settled, which it was. Maxwell's tax returns, balance sheets for firms she owned, and financial statements for companies she managed were among the documents requested by Giuffre's attorneys.

While it is unknown whether the Clintons will be included in the records that will be made public, there has been a lot of back and forth; and dozens of documents will be released on this issue. When the financier was arrested in July 2019, Bill Clinton's ties with Epstein and Maxwell came under heavy investigation.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Maxwell was facing criminal charges for allegedly recruiting young girls for Epstein to abuse. She was ordered to be held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn until her trial. She has pleaded not guilty and has filed five appeals to be freed from jail pending trial; all of which have been denied, as per NY Post.

Read Also: Britney Spears Demands End of 13-Year 'Abusive' Conservatorship; Justin Timberlake and Others Voice Support

Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyer hopes to have the same judgment as Bill Cosby

Meanwhile, according to her lawyer, the lawsuit against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell should be dismissed; and she should be released on the same grounds as Bill Cosby, which arises from a sweetheart deal struck with Epstein more than a decade ago.

David Oscar Markus, Maxwell's appellate lawyer, was alluding to a 2007 plea agreement Epstein struck with federal prosecutors in which they agreed not to prosecute his co-conspirators. Prosecutors claim that because the agreement was reached in Florida it does not apply to Maxwell.

Bill Cosby was freed from jail on Wednesday when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed his sexual assault conviction, ruling that the prosecutor who filed the case was bound by his predecessor's agreement not to charge him. In New York, Maxwell is facing federal charges while Cosby was found guilty on state charges.

In 2005, Bruce Castor, the Montgomery district attorney said that Cosby would not be charged because of a lack of evidence. In a 79-page ruling, the court found that District Attorney Kevin Steele, the prosecutor who initiated the case against Cosby, violated an agreement he had with Castor, although the arrangement had seemingly never been written down.

Related Article: Ghislaine Maxwell's Lawyers Laid Complaints Over Treatment in Jail, Days After Court Denies Bail Request



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Multimedia Video Journalist

Buffalo native trying to get her news on! Im a Multimedia Journalist here at Your Hometown Stations and I love what I do. Have a cool story idea? Im in! Just email me at ashelton@wlio.com or message my Facebook page.
Now Open

2 July 2021

Bordering on 1.5 million acres of Santa Fe National Forest, Bishop's Lodge, Auberge Resorts Collection opens its doors and begins welcoming guests today, just minutes from the city's historic plaza. Dating back to the 1860s, when Santa Fe's first archbishop built a chapel and lodge on the property, the resort pays homage to the past, while celebrating Santa Fe's vibrant cultural, art and culinary scenes and the spirit of adventure that epitomizes the Rocky Mountains. The first luxury offering of its kind in Santa Fe, Bishop's Lodge provides state-of-the-art accommodations, a destination restaurant conceived by Chef Dean Fearing, an array of outdoor adventures and transformative wellness experiences set against one of the most starkly beautiful backdrops in the Southwest.

Inspired by the notion of community, the resort unfolds much like a village, with its ranch-inspired structures - some restored, some new - overlooking sweeping lawns, a stream, horse pastures and forest-cloaked mesas. The Lodge stands at the heart of the property beside the restored chapel and The Hall, while the Turquesa Healing Arts Studio rests in a peaceful, shaded spot alongside the fitness center and the main swimming pool. Guests can stay in 100 guest rooms, suites and stand-alone accommodations and enjoy a host of outdoor activities, including mountain biking, fly fishing, hiking and horseback riding. Bishop's Lodge, Auberge Resorts Collection offers a pristine natural setting with panoramic views located only four miles from the rich cultural attractions of a UNESCO world heritage city.

A Santa Fe Landmark Reimagined

Settled more than 150 years ago by Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy, the storied property once served as the western home to the Pulitzer family and hosted several United States presidents over the years. In collaboration with Dallas-based Nunzio Marc DeSantis Architects and the Hospitality Interiors Studio of global design firm HKS, Bishop's Lodge, Auberge Resorts Collection has been transformed for today's modern travelers through a $75 million renovation and restoration.

The resort's one-of-a-kind adobe structures are designed to flow with the land's contours in an organic interplay of buildings and nature. Following the sun's arc, their earthy hues complement indigenous vegetation, planted areas, creeks, fieldstone textures, natural juniper and pine treescapes.

The guest rooms, suites and casitas at Bishop's Lodge, Auberge Resorts Collection have a distinct yet modern Santa Fe aesthetic. Each of the resort's 83 guest rooms has its own private terrace and Kiva fireplace, as do the freestanding suites. These include six junior suites, three one-bedroom suites, one two-bedroom suite and three signature Kiva Suites. The latter is located atop one of the most scenic overlooks on the property and features outdoor soaking tubs, stone rain showers and indoor and outdoor kiva fireplaces. The Casitas are three- and four-bedroom abodes with ensuite bathrooms, living and dining rooms, a full kitchen and an expansive patio with an outdoor grill and lounge seating.

The 12-bedroom Bunkhouse is crafted from reclaimed New Mexican barnwood with vaulted 36-foot ceilings, and provides a one-of-a-kind experience for large families, multigenerational travelers, wedding parties and intimate groups. Featuring an expansive great room with an oversized two-story stone fireplace, this unique retreat is inspired by cowboy culture, featuring Western tack and images by Jim Arndt whose iconic photography tells the story of the American West.

The resort's distinctive 2,000-square-foot Chapel House is designed for smaller parties with one master suite, one king room and a double queen suite. Spacious indoor living areas open onto ample private outdoor living spaces and a private lawn with a view of the historic chapel.
Rebranding

2 July 2021

A place with plenty of stories to tell. The Hotel Europaischer Hof in Baden-Baden, which has a unique history stretching back for 180 years and which occupies an unencumbered location within the direct vicinity of the city's historic assembly rooms and spa, its Europe-wide renowned Casino and old quarter, will be operated as a Steigenberger Icon in future. Albert Steigenberger laid the foundations for Steigenberger Hotels AG when he acquired the building housing the Europaischer Hof in 1930. The company he started has now gone on to become Deutsche Hospitality, which manages 160 hotels across three continents.

The history of the Europaischer Hof as a luxury hotel extends back all the way to the year 1840, when a new build called the "Hotel de l'Europe" opened its doors for business. The upscale furnishings and fittings attracted a highly discerning clientele from the very outset. Heads of state, artists and world stars of sport and music have stayed here on a regular basis over the years. Guests have ranged from Empress Sisi of Austria to Muhammad Ali.

The renovation of the Europaischer Hof in Baden-Baden is intended to provide a modern interpretation of the historic hotel behind the preserved facade under the Steigenberger Icon luxury brand. With a new building wing that blends in well with the cityscape, the Europaischer Hof Baden-Baden will delight with a mix of visible historically valuable monuments and modern new building elements.

The reopening of the luxury hotel with an integrated spa, a shopping mall with retail shops, as well as a large rooftop terrace with views over the entire city, is planned for 2024.
Appointment

2 July 2021

Responding to the challenges of a vastly changing business world, Teneo Hospitality Group, the premier group representation firm, has appointed seasoned meetings and hotel industry leader, Gary Murakami, GTP, GLP, CMP, CMM, DES, as Vice President of Sales and Industry Relations. In this newly created role, Mr. Murakami will be responsible for building awareness of Teneo's transformative plans for the future across the global meetings, events and travel industries. Based in San Francisco, Murakami will develop and leverage his extensive corporate, association and intermediary/third party relationships from the West Coast and international markets, as Teneo continues its global growth initiatives. Mr. Murakami will assume primary responsibility for sales originating from the West Coast markets.

Known for his innovation, industry expertise and negotiating skills, Gary Murakami brings over two decades of experience within the hotel, convention and meetings management industries in a variety of professional sales and sales leadership roles. His experience spans the corporate business travel, leisure travel, associations and group meetings and events markets with such prominent hotel brands as The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, and Hyatt Hotels & Resorts. Most recently, Mr. Murakami was Director of Global Sales at MGM Resorts International, working with an international portfolio of destination resort properties, including the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, Aria at City Center and The Mirage.

Throughout his distinguished career, Gary Murakami has held a variety of important leadership and committee roles with several industry associations both locally and nationally. He currently serves on the PCMA Foundation Board of Trustees following his service on the PCMA Board of Directors, and has been a past chapter president of the PCMA Northern CA Chapter. Mr. Murakami has also served as President of the Board of Directors for the MPI Northern California Chapter. He has been an active member of the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) and has been involved with its GBTA Meetings & Events Committee for the past several years. Murakami has also served on the board for the Bay Area Business Travel Association (BABTA), a chapter of GBTA for almost twenty years, including two terms as President.

Mr. Murakami was recognized by Meeting Professionals International in 2019 with the prestigious RISE "Meeting Industry Leadership" award for his contributions to advance the global meetings and events industries and for his work on the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion committee. Other professional organizations benefitting from his commitment to the industry include the Events Industry Council's Equity Task Force, and the Events Industry Council APEX Commission where he served as Chair.

Among many other involvements, Gary Murakami is an Executive Board member for the LGBT Meeting Professionals Association, and continues to articulate and bring visibility for the professional development of the LGBTQIA+ community within the meetings and events industries.

Gary Murakami is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles. He maintains several industry-recognized certifications and designations including the Certified Meeting Professional (CMP) certification from the Events Industry Council (EIC), in addition to the Global Travel Professional (GTP) certification and Global Leadership Professional (GLP) designation and certification from Global Business Travel Association (GBTA). Mr. Murakami received his Certificate in Meeting Management (CMM) offered through Meeting Professionals International (MPI) and his Digital Event Strategist (DES) certification from PCMA.
Industry Update

Appointment

2 July 2021

Donnie Morgan

Promoted Regional Vice President of Operations

At McKibbon Hospitality in Tampa - FL, USA

Donnie Morgan has also been promoted to the role of Regional Vice President of Operations. A nearly 30-year hospitality veteran and long-time McKibbon leader, Morgan most recently served as Cluster General Manager overseeing McKibbon's Residence Inn Savannah Downtown/Historic District, while also providing support and strategic leadership to McKibbon's two additional Savannah properties.

McKibbon Hospitality Headquartered in Tampa, FL and Gainesville, Ga., McKibbon Hospitality creates memorable hospitality experiences that inspire brand and property loyalty. It's how we've grown into one of the largest (and most awarded) hotel development and management companies in the country. more information

Recent Appointments at McKibbon Terry McBride - Regional Director of Engineering 2 July 2021  Terry McBride joins McKibbon as Regional Director of Engineering from Concord Hospitality Enterprises, where he served as Corporate Regional Facilities Director responsible for preventative maintenance, equipment standards, and expenditures for upwards of 60 hotels. read more

Michael Herr - Regional Revenue Manager 2 July 2021  Michael Herr brings nearly 15 years of revenue management experience to his new role as Regional Revenue Manager. Most recently, Herr worked as the Task Force Director of Revenue Management for HEI Hotels and Resorts, implementing sales and revenue management strategies for assets and special projects across multiple brands and markets, while also overseeing digital marketing campaigns. read more
Appointment

2 July 2021

Ventana Big Sur is pleased to announce the appointment of Anthony Duggan as area vice president and general manager. Duggan brings an impressive resume of roles with some of the most beloved and respected luxury hospitality brands in the country, from AMAN to L'Auberge, to Ventana Big Sur.

With over 20 years of luxury hospitality experience, Duggan's collaborative approach and a proven track record for driving revenue, improving operational performance, increasing market share, guest satisfaction and staff engagement will undoubtedly continue to elevate the guest experience.

Prior to joining Ventana Big Sur, he served as area vice president and general manager at Miraval Austin Wellness Resort & Spa, along with other notable properties including L'Auberge de Sedona, Westin Washington DC, and the iconic Amangiri by AMAN. Duggan has also held hotel management and operations roles at The St. Regis San Francisco and the Fairmont Kea Lani in Hawaii, as well as the brand's Chicago property.
Supplier News

2 July 2021

The two tech companies join forces to combine the strategic vision of Juyo with the operational vision of Beonprice within one integrated solution.

The new reporting feature gives Beonprices customers access to easy, agile and personalized data visualization that allows hotels to better identify opportunities in their data and adapt strategies.

MADRID - Beonprice, the global leader of revenue optimization based on artificial intelligence to maximise hotel revenues, has signed a strategic agreement with Juyo Analytics, the most advanced hotel analytics and data visualization platform in the market, to provide its customers with a more strategic view of their business.

This alliance makes it possible to offer an integrated solution to Hotels that drives better results to hotel customers through the possibility of exploring and cross referencing hotel data, visualizing key performance indicators, and identifying market trends to build and adapt strategies ahead of time.

Juyo Analytics is a data visualization platform designed for hoteliers by hoteliers, that provides easy to use and understandable dashboards and analytics, with the agility to compare historical and future looking data.

In the words of Vassilis Syropoulos, founder and CEO at Juyo Analytics, we lack cooperation amongst tech companies in hospitality.When Emilio reached out to talk about the possibilities of working together it was a no-brainer. Combine the best of two worlds, add more combined value to hotels especially in these difficult times and hopefully set the example for more cooperation in hospitality tech, he says.

With this new partnership, Beonprice will be able to provide their customers with an advanced reporting functionality, with 365 days performance, budget and forecast data. They will be able to analyse at segment, sales channel, room type and room plan, levels, as well strategise by nationality, MLOS and lead time.

The objective of this strategic alliance is not only the technical integration between both technological solutions, but also to take advantage of joint actions and technology development that add more value to their clients.

Emilio Galan, co-founder and CTO at Beonprice, highlights the opportunity that joining forces between the two companies provides for customers to have a more complete view of the business. Beonprice and Juyo working together will allow hotel companies to drive more profit, as they combine the strategic vision of data analysis, with the operative vision of forecasting, and revenue management automation such as making and sending price and inventory recommendations, he states.

About Beonprice

Beonprice's RMS technology is based on the HQI (Hotel Quality Index) as a disruptive element in its artificial intelligence technology to simulate the behaviour of each person, taking into account the price and quality of the property and the competitive set mainly in the recommendations to maximise the RevPAR of the hotel chain.

Founded in 2012, Beonprice works with over 2,000 properties in more than 30 countries, including international hotel brands such as Catalonia, Hotelatelier, Iberostar, RIU, Labranda Hotels & Resorts, HM Resorts, Park Royal, Dreamplace, Hospes and Room Mate, among others.

Learn more at beonprice.com / Linkedin: Beonprice
Press Release

2 July 2021

Virginia Messina, Senior Vice President WTTC, said: WTTC is confident the EU Digital COVID Certificate will boost consumer confidence and the wider Travel & Tourism sector across Europe, which has been in a fight for survival for over a year.

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The certificate is a great example and should aid the return of safe international travel; help recover jobs and signal the revival of a sector which will be critical to the economic recovery across the continent.

Wed like to commend the EU Commission and institutions for adopting this swiftly, however, EU Member States must take a coordinated and harmonised approach, aligning policies to avoid fragmentation and confusion among holidaymakers who needs easy to understand rules and regulations to make travel seamless during this difficult time.

The devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global Travel & Tourism sector has wiped out millions of jobs and seen its contribution to GDP plummet. The lives of the millions of people who rely on the sector have also been turned upside down by the pandemic, causing huge stress and concern.

We are hopeful the new Digital COVID Certificate will play a major role in safely reopening a sector that will be critical to saving jobs, livelihoods and economies around the world.
Press Release

2 July 2021

Wrapping up the keynote speaker slots for IBTM Wired was Stephen Attenborough, Commercial Director, Virgin Galactic, who inspired us all to reach for the stars  literally - and dream big with a discussion about the very real possibility of sending people into space on Virgin Galactics commercial spacecraft.

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To date fewer than 600 people have actually been into space. Attenborough says that although most people would like to experience space for themselves, the number of people who expect to experience it is almost no one, and yet, he suggests that it is within our grasp. Were standing at the dawn of a new space age, he says. This will transform our business and personal lives.

December 2018 was the first time that a crewed vehicle built for commercial use put people into space and brought them back safely. Were not just looking to take a few people into space, were looking to take thousands of people, said Attenborough.

This is not space for someone else, this is space for us, he asserts. Although the cost for entry is high - at present a ticket costs $250,000 - Attenborough points out that this cost should come down over time as more competition enters the market. This opens up lots of exciting possibilities for the events and incentives market and certainly provides food for thought as we consider how to re-imagine the events experience for the future.

In the final Trends Watch session of IBTM Wired, Ali Turner, MD Eight PR & Marketing spoke with Ben Goedegebuure, Global General Manager EMEA, Maritz Global Events to gauge his opinion of what the future holds for Europes events market.

Summarising the past 15 months for Europes event industry, Ben commented that the region has been through a huge process of adjustment. The industry has had to learn quickly and during this time, and indeed to some extent still now, there has been only one constant, which was that change might change again.

Looking forward to recovery, Ben believes things are looking positive, but the industry needs to brace itself for a complex period with small setbacks. Bens feeling is that over the next six months therell be real confidence coming back into the market  across Europe its already a fact that there are very high numbers of RFPs being shared, so its a pretty optimistic outlook in which flexibility and agility will be key.

Ben points to a recent survey by the Strategic Alliance of European Convention Bureaux, titled the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which surmises that the levels of people that will be attending events will be lower because some might not be confident to travel, or businesses might not have the financial resources to do that travel. Delegates will be much more conscious of choice in terms of whether they go to an event and how they spend their money which makes the importance of experience all the more important. Overall the survey suggests that across Europe, visits will recover by 2024 but convention and events spending wont recover until 2026.

The discussion moved to the European Unions digital covid certificate, which 16 countries are already using. According to Ben, this kind of collaboration is really important and the only way of any sort of future. Countries need to work together and its important theres something similar from an international point of view at some point.

On a city level, Ben highlights the fact that conversations that the industry has been having for years have now been accelerated, for example, when it comes to sustainability, how do you travel to a destination and what is the environmental impact of doing that? What experience will delegates have at an event in that city and is it worth going to an event for three days if the content is not valuable.

The big learning the industry needs to have will be about the experience, the individual choice to attend in-person - or not! Now there will have to be an additional reason for delegates to attend, as it cant just be about the travel and the content. Education is easily had through digital events  in the future it will have to be about the way in which we design the experience for anyone wanting to go to an event and cities need to be very mindful of that.

Its really important that we focus on innovation, says Ben. Its important our industry continues to innovate and think about its relevance into the future and learn from the period weve had now. Weve all experienced digital events, but we havent done enough on the experience of those yet. This collaboration of organisations in the industry to innovate together is very important.

Im positive well reopen in a way weve seen in the past, but I think the one thing collectively weve learnt is that we need to look at the future with the ability to be more agile in how we approach business and problems. I dont know what the timeframe for recovery is, but I am optimistic.

Matt Davies, Senior Account Manager, Cvent shared some valuable insights into the question on everyones lips - how we go from virtual to hybrid to live and how to keep up with the shifting demands of events.

We shouldnt go back to limiting the number of people who can experience our events, reflected Davies, who noted that the switch to online formats has created massive opportunities for event planners and marketers. Technology now gives us an unparalleled insight into attendee behaviour, and with the right tools in place we can turn this data into actionable leads.

The aim is not to replace that personalised experience, rather to create tools that enrich the experience. The more that attendees interact with the technology, the better understanding event planners have to enable a post-event follow up. We need to take a data-first mentality to all our events. In doing so we can create alignment across all teams.

Davies raised the issue of training to help achieve this: We need to prepare ourselves and our teams: do the teams need training, is content optimised, is the right tech in place to deliver the experience, is someone managing the process of change, does the business understand why its doing this? His advice was to identify and tackle these roadblocks upfront.

With delegates increasingly expecting interactive experiences across all three event types - virtual, hybrid and live, event planners need to approach their events strategy with a view to creating a total events programme. This is more than just improving one part of the event, commented Davies, its about enriching all aspects of the event experience, and ultimately creating a more robust event strategy for the future.

About IBTM

IBTM is a world-leading showcase for the meetings and events industry with a portfolio of events and products offering business solutions across five continents. The portfolio includes IBTM World, IBTM Africa, IBTM Americas, IBTM Asia Pacific, IBTM Wired and IBTM Connect.

www.ibtmevents.com



IBTM Wired

is the newest addition to IBTMs global portfolio of events and intelligence for the meetings, incentives, conferences and events industry. The event takes place annually online and unites thousands of industry professionals from around the world for four days of one-to-one business meetings, sparking new connections and renewing existing ones and a programme of live and on-demand education sessions.

https://www.ibtmwired.com/en-gb.html

About RX

RX (Reed Exhibitions) is in the business of building businesses for individuals, communities and organisations. We elevate the power of face-to-face events by combining data and digital products to help customers learn about markets, source products and complete transactions at over 400 events in 22 countries across 43 industry sectors.

RX is passionate about making a positive impact on society and is fully committed to creating an inclusive work environment for all our people. RX is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. www.rxglobal.com

About RELX

RELX is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. The Group serves customers in more than 180 countries and has offices in about 40 countries. It employs over 33,000 people, of whom almost half are in North America. The shares of RELX PLC, the parent company, are traded on the London, Amsterdam and New York Stock Exchanges using the following ticker symbols: London: REL; Amsterdam: REN; New York: RELX. The market capitalisation is approximately 36.6bn, 42.4bn, $51.5bn.*

*Note: Current market capitalisation can be found at http://www.relx.com/investors
Immigrants not only lost jobs and businesses during the pandemic, but were also initially overlooked by federal relief programs and financial institutions that provided support to other segments of the population, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Some 879,000 citizens and immigrants living and working legally in Texas were excluded from pandemic relief through the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion pandemic relief law passed by Congress in March 2020, according to the Dallas Fed. Those benefits included an additional $600 a week in supplemental unemployment benefits and stimulus checks of $1,200 per taxpayer.

These immigrants were left out because of provision in the CARES Act that excluded households in which a member used an individual taxpayer identification number in place of a Social Security number when filing a joint tax return. People without Social Security numbers use individual taxpayer identification number to file taxes, and immigrants working illegally tend to use an individual taxpayer identification number to pay federal taxes.

The relief package approved by Congress in December s retroactively granted those stimulus payments to immigrant families retroactively, but that delayed aid was not reflected in the data for 2020, so was not considered in the study.

The damage, however, was already done by the time Congress acted, said Guadalupe Fernandez, a policy and advocacy manager, at the Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit in western Houston, serving women immigrants fleeing violence.

Both immigrants, and undocumented folks didn't have access to things like federal stimulus or federal support, Fernandez said. And that left our communities precarious and being forced to work even when it wasn't safe to do so.

The states immigrant workers account for 22 percent of the labor force and 24 percent of essential workers, according to the Dallas Fed report. Texas had a population of 4.9 million foreign-born individuals, and the state ranked second among states in the number of foreign-born residents 2018, according to the Dallas Fed report.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Texas families drain savings, struggle to pay bills while waiting for federal support

Many were employed in public facing industries such has hotels and restaurants, which largely shutdown at the onset of the pandemic and laid-off most of their staffs.

In addition to getting bypassed by federal funding, immigrants also had more difficulty getting bank loans. In communities in which immigrants made up at least 39 percent the population, only 68 percent of people took out consumer loans, compared to 76 percent in communities with smaller immigrant populations, according to the Dallas Fed report.

Immigrants tend to have difficulties obtaining loans because they have short credit histories in the United States, making them more likely to fall into the subprime categories. Banks became less likely to make loans to such customers as credit standards tightened during the pandemic recession.

The report cited other reasons why high-immigrant communities received fewer consumer loans. In Texas, for instance, about 37 percent of immigrants have no health insurance, and unpaid medical bills can damage credit scores.

Since immigrants were unable to find help from the federal government or banks, the responsibility fell on localities. For instance, the Harris County COVID-19 Relief Fund distributed millions of dollars to help families with housing, electricity, food, childcare, and other essential needs.

The fund provided more than $25 million of assistance to about 20,000 households as of October 2020. But with programs like these, funding is limited, Fernandez said.

The big point is that at the federal and state level, immigrants had been left out, Fernandez said. Its been up to the localities, and what if youre in a community that isnt as welcoming of immigrants?

becca.carballo@chron.com
Global trade in liquefied natural gas in 2020 was nearly flat compared with 2019, despite the COVID-19 pandemic that reduced global natural gas demand, according to the Energy Department.

LNG global trade averaged 46.9 billion cubic feet per day last year compared with 46.7 billion cubic feet per day in 2019.

LNG exports in 2020 increased from only two countries. U.S. exports rose by 1.5 billion cubic feet per day and Australia's increased by 300 million cubic feet per day compared with 2019, according to the EIA.

TELLURIAN LNG: Tellurian extends Driftwood lease, forges ahead as natural gas deficit swells

LNG production in the U.S. got a boost last year as the final liquefaction units at several export facilities, including Kinder Morgan's Elba Island LNG in Chatham County, Ga., Cameron LNG in Louisiana, and Freeport LNG and Corpus Christi LNG in Texas.

But the nation's LNG exports significantly declined in June and July last year after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. They gradually recovered in the months that followed, setting new record highs in November and December, the EIA said, when supplies tightened and prices rose with a colder than normal winter in some parts of the world.

Australia in 2020 became the worlds largest LNG exporter for the first time, overtaking Qatar, with exports averaging 10.2 billion cubic feet per day, a 3 percent increase from the year before.

Exports from Qatar in 2020 declined by 1 percent, while exports from all other countries remained flat or declined, amounting to a combined 1.6 billion cubic feet per day decrease compared with 2019, according to the EIA.
The U.S. Department of Justice has withdrawn from a November settlement agreement reached with the National Association of Realtors in which the trade group agreed to change its rules governing commissions.

In response to the federal antitrust suit, the association said it would change its commission system rules to make it clear that agency services provided to homebuyers are not free and to make it easier to for the public to see what commissions agents are being paid, among other changes.

In its suit, the department alleged that the associations rules on commissions artificially inflated fees paid to real estate agents by homeowners. The association denied the characterization of its rules, but agreed to make changes to its policies.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Realtors agree to change rules governing agent commissions

The department determined that the settlement will not adequately protect the departments rights to investigate other conduct by NAR that could impact competition in the real estate market and may harm home sellers and home buyers, the department said in announcing its withdrawal from the settlement agreement. The department is taking this action to permit a broader investigation of NARs rules and conduct to proceed without restriction.

According to the statement from the Justice Department, the deal fell apart because it wanted to modify the settlement to adequately protect and preserve the departments rights to investigate and challenge additional conduct by NAR, but could not reach an agreement with the Realtors group.

In a statement, the association lashed out of the Justice Departments decision.

This is a complete, unprecedented breach of agreement by the Department of Justice to withdraw its consent from a fully negotiated settlement that had been approved by the head of the Antitrust Division and we had begun to implement, it said, in part. NAR has fulfilled all of our obligations under the settlement agreement and now DOJ is inexplicably backing out.

If the changes sought by the government succeed in lowering fees, as the Department of Justice argued, they could result in the savings of thousands of dollars in commissions. That, in turn, would also cut into the earnings of roughly 1.4 million real estate agents across the country  including some 37,000 in the Houston area  and put more pressure on traditional brokerages, already contending with a host of discount and online competitors.

Includes previous reporting by R.A. Schuetz
The year was 1969 and Percy Frenchy Creuzot had a problem. He and his wife Sallie, recent transplants from New Orleans, had opened Frenchys Po-Boy stand on Scott Street in Third Ward and were running out of sausage.

But not just any sausage. One of the most popular po-boy sandwiches featured a spicy Creole sausage known as chaurice. Creuzot could only source so much from the expatriate Creoles of the area, so he had to get creative.

One thing was for sure: there was plenty of chaurice in New Orleans. But he didnt have enough money to pay a shipping company to send it by refrigerated truck. So he did the next best thing: he paid friends in New Orleans to buy a Greyhound Bus ticket, pack the sausages in ice, put them in suitcases and travel with them to Houston where hed pick them up at the bus station and send them back for more.

That moment of entrepreneurial genius allowed Creuzot to build a loyal following at his po-boy stand where he added fried chicken, gumbo, and other Creole and Cajun specialties to the menu. Eventually he spun off the fried chicken menu into one of Houstons most recognizable food brands: Frenchys Chicken.

Burns Original BBQ 8307 De Priest, 281-999-5559 Frenchy's Sausage can also be found at most local H-E-B supermarkets. See More Collapse

But he still needed lots of sausage for the po-boy stand. He found a warehouse near the Heights where an Italian-American businessman had started a business making Italian sausage, but the venture closed. Creuzot bought the warehouse and all its sausage-making equipment and started making his own. He established Frenchys Sausage Company thats still located on Pinemont Drive.

Though Creuzots son, Percy King Creuzot, had helped to establish the business, the elder Creuzot wanted his son to go to college. King graduated from Texas Southern University and went to work for the Ford Motor Company from 1972-1977.

During that time, Frenchys business continued to grow and the elder Creuzot needed help. He placed a call to his son, that King remembers vividly to this day.

I know you love your job, said Creuzot to his son at the time, But you will never own Ford Motor Company. I want you to come and work for me in the sausage business.

He was right, says King today, So I turned in my resignation that day and started working for the family business. King Creuzot now oversees the Frenchys businesses in Houston.

The Creuzots got to work expanding the sausage-making business. Theyd occasionally have leftover link meat, or meat trimmings used to make sausage. They sold that to the bustling barbecue joints in Third Ward. Visiting places like Lotts, Murphys and Greens, the Creuzots noticed a specific type of sausage made by the African American pitmasters of the neighborhood known as homemade links or juicy links that originated in Beaumont.

Over the years, the term homemade link became a generic name for this type of sausage, even though it technically wasnt made on-site at many restaurants.

The Creuzots started making a version of that sausage they called Old Fashioned Barbecue Links and marketed it to smaller barbecue joints around Houston.

One of those places was Burns BBQ, opened by Roy Burns Sr. in Acres Homes in 1973. In addition to the Old Fashioned link, the Creuzots took some chaurice sausage with them on a sales call to Burns. When Roy Burns tasted them side-by-side, he decided to serve the spicier chaurice sausage, though he kept the more familiar and traditional homemade link moniker.

With Burns leading the way, the chaurice sausage became a standard item on many barbecue menus starting in the 1970s and 80s, bringing an unmistakable Creole flavor to Houston barbecue.

Burns Original BBQ is the biggest restaurant purveyor of the Frenchys chaurice sausage (still called homemade links on the menu), selling over 1,200 pounds of the spicy Louisiana creation this past Memorial Day weekend.

jcreid@jcreidtx.com

twitter.com/jcreidtx
Walk into Houston Zoo today and you wont see any lions, tigers or bears  not immediately, anyway.

The current entrance is a diffused experience, admits Lee Ehmke, president and CEO of Houston Zoo. Visitors, especially first-timers, are often unsure which way to go. They look around and wonder, Where are the animals?

Thats about to change. Starting next year, not only will ticket-holders and zoo members catch glimpses of water and motion from the front-gate turnstiles, theyll likely hear sea lions barking from their new, state-of-the-art swimming pool, too.

When Galapagos Islands opens in 2022 as part of Houston Zoos centennial master plan, the 2.5-acre addition vows to make a big first impression. The countdown is on until guests entering from McGovern Plaza will be greeted by Sea Lion Coast, a wave-tossed volcanic shoreline dotted by cacti, lava cliffs and sun-bathing California sea lions.

Its a theory some exhibit designers came up with, that nothing is going to be absorbed by people until they see that first animal, Ehmke explains. So were creating that immediate sense of Hey, were at the zoo.

Immersion was top of mind for architects and engineers who designed Galapagos Islands, a new exhibition and crown jewel of the zoos Keeping Our World Wild centennial capital campaign to celebrate its 100-year anniversary. The six-year, multi-phase project features a series of transformative exhibits, public amenity upgrades and enhanced public spaces.

The total cost is an estimated $150 million with $70 million earmarked for Galapagos Islands alone. Its a substantial price tag, albeit one with major bragging rights. No other zoo has done a major exhibit on it, Ehmke says. This differentiates us from any other zoo in the country or the world.

Courtesy of Houston Zoo

First of its kind

Upon completion, Galapagos Islands becomes the first showcase of its kind to capture the archipelagos distinct landscapes, oceanic habitats and species. More than 97-percent of reptiles and land mammals living on the Islands  which straddle the equator some 500 miles of the coast of Ecuador  are endemic, meaning theyre found nowhere else on Earth.

Giant tortoises are one of the Islands best-known creatures. Theyve inhabited the Galapagos for more than one million years and can live until the age of 150. At Houston Zoo, giant tortoises and two Caribbean Blue Iguanas will be next-door neighbors; a viewing pond connects their future homes.

Also in the works is a split-level, wave-sculpted sea cave to house Sally Lightfoot crabs. Nearby, an underwater, 40-ft. long acrylic tunnel leads to One Ocean Gallery where sea turtles, sharks, rays and fish will take shelter inside a 190,000-gallon aquarium.

Submerged molten lava tunnels and giant sea horses, sea stars and sea cucumbers are next. Then, one of the exhibitions most alluring attractions: Flightless Perfection, Houston Zoos first-ever penguin habitat which can hold between 10-15 Humboldt penguins vulnerable to extinction.

MORE PENGUIN NEWS: South American penguins coming to Houston Zoo in fall 2022

There was a field trip that some of us took to the Galapagos. We went swimming with the sea lions and the penguins. While youre snorkeling and looking at the caves there are dozens of these beautiful, huge starfish that make constellations on the ground, Ehmke shares. Theres an artist here at the zoo who can recreate them. Attention to detail is something thats really important to me and everyone else  to get it right, that fine-tuning.

Sophia Darling, sea lion supervisor of Houston Zoo, is counting down the days until her animals move into their new, 255,000-gallon pool.

Its between three and four times the current volume of water that we have now, she says. The sea lions current habitat was built in the 1930s. One of the biggest benefits of the Galapagos exhibit will be the increase in options. Marine mammals spend most of their time in water, but sleep on land. Theyre very curious animals. Adding in the volume and variability will be so much.

She oversees the care and training of five California sea lions; three more will join her crew by the time Galapagos Island opens. Darling notes that each of the new additions have unique rescue stories and were deemed un-releasable by the U.S. government.

Theres very strict criteria that goes into making sure these animals are better off with people, she explains. Some were separated from their mothers as pups. One was injured by fishing gear and sustained injuries. Shes blind in one eye and wasnt able to survive on her own.

Courtesy of Houston Zoo

Animal ambassadors

The idea is for California sea lions to act as ambassadors for endangered Galapagos sea lions. Darling compares them to close relatives with a similar look and size.

Its all part of the centennial master plans underlying initiatives: conservation and education. The Galapagos Island exit gallery, Saving Our Shared Ocean, zeroes in on the threats marine wildlife face.

Some are hard, like the invasive goats, which are similar to feral hogs here in Texas. And theres real focus on plastic waste in the ocean, Ehmke says. One of the (gallerys) three columns is this floor-to-ceiling cylinder filled with plastic cups, bags and straws. Another, with jellyfish, is back-lit and mesmerizing  it explains how in the wild, thats one of the sea turtles favorite food. But they cant see the difference in the dark between floating bags and jellyfish.

Over-fishing, he adds, is another issue. Houston consumer can reduce their impact by purchasing seafood sourced from U.S. waters.

Or, contribute directly to the Keep Our World Wild campaign. Fundraisers have committed $5 million for conservation efforts, though theyre currently $15 million short of the overall $150 million goal.

Ehmke isnt worried. He still has a year left to open some hearts and wallets.

Neither is Darling. Shes already picked out her spot for the big day. Theres a little beach adjacent to the sea cave, she says. Thats where you can find me when Galapagos opens.

amber.elliott@chron.com
League City is slated to be home to a new Amazon delivery station.

The 180,000-square-foot Amazon Logistics facility is expected to speed deliveries to customers in Galveston County. Amazons delivery stations are the last mile stop before orders get shipped to customers.

Between 200 and 250 workers to be hired

Projected to be completed in 2022, the planned site at 2455 Tuscan Lakes Blvd. is expected to create employment opportunities in the region, with Amazon Logistics projected to hire between 200 and 250 employees to work there.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Amazon brings hundreds of jobs, faster delivery to Galveston County with La Marque facility

Were excited to continue our investment in South Texas with a new delivery station in League City to provide fast and efficient delivery for customers and great pay, benefits and a safe work environment for the talented local workforce, Daniel Martin, a spokesperson for Amazon, said in a city of League City press release.

League City Manager John Baumgartner said the city played a role in the Amazon decision.

Amazon Logistics facility What: Amazon is planning to operate a 180,000-square-foot Amazon Logistics facility to enhance service to customers in Galveston County Address: 2455 Tuscan Lakes Blvd. Estimated completion date: 2022 Number of jobs created: 200-250 Employment information:https://bit.ly/3hcAeYm See More Collapse

As we work to attract more commercial development and diversify our tax base, I am thrilled that League City staff members were able to attract Amazon to our community, he said in the release. League City is a great place to live, work, and play, and we hope to attract more companies like Amazon to our area in the future.

Positive thing for the region

The facility will be a boost to employment as many people continue to recover from the fallout of the pandemic, League City Mayor Pat Hallisey said.

We certainly have people who could use the work, theres no doubt about that, said Hallisey, who adds that Amazon will pay taxes on the property. Everybody is working to get back on their feet after the last year. This is a positive thing for the region and especially for League City.

Citing projections that say more than 300 malls are expected to go out of business in the next year, Hallisey said that Amazon is part of a trend representing changes in consumers habits..

When Im home, I see (Amazon) Prime trucks up and down my street and so what Im starting to understand is that buying patterns are changing, he said. People are buying online and having it delivered in a day or two, and I think this (delivery station) is great for the people who live here and in the region.

League City Regional Chamber of Commerce President Dewan Clayborn said he looks forward to the role the station will play in the community and local economy.

I speak for many of our members when I say that Amazon plays a major role in the delivery of a variety of goods and products, Clayborn said in an email message. The chamber is dedicated to economic prosperity and this station brings the opportunity for employment as the station will need workers.

Hallisey said he isnt worried that companies like Amazon will hurt businesses in the community. The two can coexist, he said.

People are still going to go to brick-and-mortar businesses on the ground, Hallisey said.

He noted that Baybrook Mall has strengthened its retail base by expanding in the last few years andthat he expects that as the pandemic recedes, consumers will return to shopping and support the local brick-and-mortar business.

According to Amazon, the starting wage for employees is $15 per hour, with full-time employees receiving comprehensive benefits, including full medical, vision, dental insurance and a 401(k) with 50 percent company match.

The company said it supports employees with paid leave so they can take time off without missing a paycheck and offers up to 20 weeks of maternal and parental paid leave. In addition, Amazon offers other benefits, like Leave Share and Ramp Back, which provide work flexibility to new parents.

I buy online but also try to support everybody locally, Hallisey said. We see those buying patterns changing and were trying to adapt to that.

yorozco@hcnonline.com
Februarys historic freeze caught Texas off guard. The states power grid largely failed. Residents died. The fallout has resulted in some changes in Texas energy systems.

State Rep. Ron Reynolds (D-District 27) serves on the Energy Resources Committee and recently gave an update on energy developments in the Texas Legislature during a webinar hosted by the Fort Bend Chamber of Commerce.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Fort Bend County offers Sugar Land Skeeters tickets for COVID vaccines

Reynolds said the brutal winter storm was Texas costliest disaster ever, even exceeding Hurricane Harvey.

The most troubling aspect of it, on top of the economic losses, was the casualties and the human loss, said Reynolds.

A Houston Chronicle analysis showed nearly 200 Texas deaths could be attributed to the freeze and the blackouts that resulted. Fort Bend County saw three Sugar Land children and their grandmother die in a fire while trying to stay warm after their power went out.

After Gov. Greg Abbott declared an emergency, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan called a hearing to examine what caused massive power outages across the state.

The Energy Resources Committee and the State Affairs Committee oversaw the investigation, hearing from stakeholders such as the Public Utility Commission of Texas, the Railroad Commission of Texas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, NRG Energy, Reliant Energy and CenterPoint Energy. ERCOT is the independent agency that runs the Texas power grid, which operates independently from the national grid.

Reynolds said the storm shed light on a range of weaknesses in governance, administration and infrastructure of the Texas electric grid. The two committees met to study how to prevent winter storms or extreme summer temperatures from throwing off the grid in the future.

Some Texans were angered to learn that members of the ERCOT board were not required to be Texas residents. Senate Bill 2 restructured the board and required all members to live in Texas. The bill requires board members be selected based on areas of expertise including finance, business, engineering, risk management, law and electric market design.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Festival in Sugar Land attracts theater children from across nation

In other words, we wanted to make sure that ERCOT was being ran by a board that was competent, capable and qualified based upon their experience, Reynolds explained.

Going forward, board members may not have a financial interest in ERCOTs operating market to prevent conflicts of interest. No more than two may work for institutions of higher learning, and a board member must wait two years after leaving the board to register as a lobbyist. A new board selection committee will choose the members, as well as the boards chair and vice chair. SB 2 also requires that the PUC approve any major market changes.

Since the winter storm, most of the ERCOT board members resigned, making way for a better qualified team of Texas residents, Reynolds said.

SB 3 focused on improving the stability of the power grid to ensure continuity of service during future emergency events. Reynolds said hours of testimony showed lack of oversight and failures in communication and organization between state agencies like ERCOT, PUC and the railroad commission contributed to the widespread blackouts.

Reynolds cited a lack of communication as media notified residents of rolling blackouts that ended up lasting days for many. So people stayed home and hunkered down, rather than seeking warmer shelter elsewhere, he said. An energy emergency alert system is designed to let people know when energy demand might exceed supply. And the Texas Division of Emergency Management will start classifying winter storms similarly to hurricanes, with alert text messages sent to residents.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Lamar CISD trustee joins Gulf Coast Workforce Board

The Texas Electricity Supply Chain Security and Mapping Committee was launched to map the electricity supply chain and pinpoint critical infrastructure sources by September 2022. SB 3 also requires critical power generation, natural gas and transmission facilities to be weatherized. Reynolds said the last big winter storm in 2011 showed a need for better weatherization, but little was done to address the issues because the freeze was considered a 100-year event unlikely to happen again anytime soon. He added that climate change is redefining those classifications.

On top of power outages, many Texans experienced burst pipes in their homes and lost access to clean drinking water. SB 3 sets requirements for weatherizing water utilities.

So, in a nutshell, this was an omnibus bill to address many of the deficiencies that we uncovered throughout our investigation, throughout our joint hearings, from industry experts and leaders in the field, Reynolds said.

He also brought up missed opportunities in the legislative session which included building a greater emphasis on energy efficiency, starting a grant program to assist Texas residents who were faced with huge energy bills following the February storm and studying how climate change is impacting the states weather extremes.

Abbott is planning for a special session of the Legislature beginning Thursday, July 8. He has the authority to set what is discussed. Reynolds hopes he will look deeper into the reliability of the power grid, particularly after Texas residents received notices in June to conserve energy during an early heat wave.

We need to be able to make sure that we have a resilient, robust energy industry using all of the technology and innovation to ensure that we can meet that demand, Reynolds said.

tracy.maness@hcnonline.com
BOISE, Idaho (AP)  Anti-government activist and agitator Ammon Bundy has been found guilty of misdemeanor trespassing and misdemeanor resisting or obstructing officers.

Bundy was found guilty Thursday evening after a four-day jury trial and brief jury deliberations, the Idaho Statesman reported.

Bundy was sentenced to three days in jail. But with credit for time served, he will serve no additional jail time. Magistrate Judge David Manweiler also imposed 48 hours of community service and a $750 fine for Bundy.

A co-defendant, Aaron Von Schmidt, was found guilty of misdemeanor trespassing. He was sentenced to three days in jail as well, but also got credit for time served, and a $500 fine.

Both men were arrested Aug. 25, 2020, and charged with trespassing when they refused to leave a Statehouse auditorium after officials ordered it to be cleared. Bundy was also charged with resisting and obstructing officers after police said he went limp and refused to stand up and put his hands behind his back. Officers ultimately wheeled him out of the Capitol building on a swivel chair.

Bundy, who is best known for leading a group of armed activists in the occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016 to protest the federal control of public lands, has tried to frame his arrest as oppression from political opponents.

What it does show is that they are afraid of me. And they should be, because when I'm governor, I will not allow the state to use resources to attack innocent people, he said in the June 27 video.

Bundy filed documents to run for Idaho governor in May, though he acknowledged during the trial that he isn't registered to vote in the state. Bundy moved to Idaho several years ago.

Ada County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Whitney Welsh said at the start of the trial that Bundy and Schmidt decided that the rules just don't apply to them.

There are rules for a democracy and rules are, in fact, what makes our democracy work, Welsh said.

Bundy's attorney Sam Bishop, meanwhile, framed the events that led to his arrest as a legal, peaceful protest of legislation that he opposed.

It was just a really unsexy bill about liability, Bishop said. But Ammon didn't agree with that bill. And he did the one thing you can do when you don't agree with a bill.

Prosecutors countered that the appropriate way to protest a bill is to testify during a committee meeting, which they said Bundy had done the day before, rather than to ignore police orders to vacate a room that the Speaker of the House has ordered closed.

Bundy testified on his own behalf, saying he didn't want to be at the Statehouse that day but showed up because he felt it was crucial that I make some kind of stand." Bundy also said he would make the same decision again, even knowing the consequences.

I was definitely thinking that what was happening here was inappropriate  the show of force was immense," Bundy said. ... And it was in my opinion designed to chill the people from being at the Capitol building.

Idaho State Police Sgt. Blake Higley testified that the large police presence was there because the previous day six officers had been outnumbered by a crowd of people, angry over coronavirus-related social distancing rules, forced their way past officers and into a House gallery, breaking a door in the process.

It was chaos, Higley said, saying that the six officers were pushed, shoved and battered by the crowd. Bundy was part of the crowd, which also included several members of his People's Rights grassroots organization, but jurors weren't told that information out of concern that it could unfairly prejudice them against Bundy as they decided if his actions the following day were criminal.

Von Schmidt, who represented himself in the case, focused much of his time attempting to show the jurors that he may not have been in the Statehouse auditorium when law enforcement officers gave the order to clear it. But a law enforcement officer testified that he gave the order multiple times, including to Von Schmidt.

Under the Legislature's rules, the Speaker of the House is in control of many parts of the building and can order rooms to be cleared in cases of disturbances or disorderly conduct.

Bundy maintains that he wasn't being disorderly and should have been allowed to sit peacefully in the room until the the entire building closed to the public, which is typically at 7 p.m.

But Speaker of the House Scott Bedke testified that committee rooms, including the auditorium, are open to the public when legislative business is being done, but may be closed and locked at other times.

During closing arguments on Thursday, Bishop told the jurors that they might not agree with Bundy's approach, but he asked the jurors to stand up for people who have a different opinion.

Walsh said that not believing in a law or rule doesn't give someone the right to violate it. She said that during his testimony, Bundy admitted refusing to leave the auditorium and passively resisting his arrest  the very same things that he was charged with misdemeanors for doing.

Bundy garnered international attention when in 2016 he led a group of armed activists in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest the federal control of public lands. He and others were eventually arrested, ending the 41-day occupation. But Bundy was acquitted of all federal charges in that case by an Oregon jury.

In 2014, Bundy, several brothers and his father led an armed standoff in Nevada with Bureau of Land Management agents who attempted to confiscate his fathers cattle for grazing on public land without a permit. He spent almost two years in federal custody before the judge later declared a mistrial.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Belarus' authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed Friday that his government has thwarted a series of purported Western-backed plots, and ordered the border with Ukraine fully closed over alleged weapons smuggling.

Lukashenko claimed that Western-backed saboteurs had allegedly plotted to blow up a Russian military communications facility in Vileyka, 100 kilometers (60 miles) northwest of the Belarusian capital of Minsk, but their plans were derailed by the Belarusian authorities. He said that he discussed the purported plot with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Lukashenko, who has faced months of domestic protests against his rule, also claimed that his foes were allegedly planning to commit acts of arson and purportedly to mutilate or kill a pro-government TV journalist. He claimed that weapons and other materials for the alleged acts of sabotage were smuggled in from Ukraine.

Lukashenko, 66, charged that Germany, the United States, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania were involved in the plot. He didnt provide any substantiation for that claim, but said he'd give details later.

Belarus has been shaken by protests fueled by Lukashenkos reelection to a sixth term in an August 2020 election that was widely seen as rigged. Authorities responded to the demonstrations with a massive crackdown that saw more than 35,000 people arrested and thousands beaten by police.

Lukashenko, who has ruled the ex-Soviet nation of 9.5 million with an iron fist for 27 years, has repeatedly accused the West of fomenting the protests and harboring plots to oust him.

Lukashenkos statement followed a set of new bruising sanctions the EU slapped on Belarus over last months diversion of a passenger jet to arrest a dissident journalist. The sanctions announced last week target the countrys top export items, including potash  a common fertilizer ingredient, petroleum products and tobacco industry exports.

Ukraine has joined the West in strongly criticizing Belarusian authorities over the May 23 incident when they diverted a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania and ordered it to land in Minsk where journalist Raman Pratasevich and his Russian girlfriend were arrested. Ukrainian authorities have also joined some of the EU sanctions, cutting air links with Belarus after the flights diversion.

Lukashenko on Friday charged that the border with Ukraine has become a conduit for weapons being smuggled into Belarus for use in the alleged sabotage plots.

An enormous amount of weapons flows to Belarus from Ukraine, he said in a speech televised live. That is why I have ordered the border guards to fully close the border with Ukraine.

Lukashenko charged that another alleged plot envisaged setting forestry equipment on fire in a show of strength.

The goal was to set fire to a column of lumber vehicles at night and post images on the Web to show: We are alive and fighting to oust that regime, Lukashenko said, adding that a woman accused of involvement in the plot was arrested on June 8.

Yet another alleged plot was to kidnap a pro-government TV journalist, Grigory Azarenok, drive him to a forest and cut his tongue with scissors, Lukashenko claimed. He said a suspect who allegedly tried to abduct the journalist was arrested Thursday.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) 

The U.S. Supreme Court decided on Friday that it will hear a case brought by families from Maine who want to use a state tuition program to send their children to religious schools.

At the heart of the case is a Maine Department of Education rule that allows families who live in towns that dont have public schools to receive public tuition dollars to send their children to the public or private school of their choosing. That program excludes religious schools.

Families who want to send their children to Christian schools in Bangor and Waterville sued to try to change that, but have been denied in lower federal courts. They appealed to the high court, and the Supreme Court's order list said on Friday that it's taking up the case.

The libertarian public interest firm Institute For Justice, which is representing the families, described the case as a potentially landmark case in a statement on Friday. Michael Bindas, the lead attorney in the case, said by singling out religion  and only religion  for exclusion from its tuition assistance program," Maine has limited the rights of the families.

Thats unconstitutional and were confident that the Supreme Court is going to hold as much, Bindas said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Maine has successfully defended its rule through every step of the court process. Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey said in a statement that religious schools are excluded from the program because the education they provide is not equivalent to public education.

Parents are free to send their children to such schools if they choose, but not with public dollars. I am confident that the Supreme Court will recognize that nothing in the Constitution requires Maine to include religious schools in its public education system," Frey said.

The lawsuit was filed in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that a Missouri program was wrong to deny a grant to a religious school for playground resurfacing. That ruling opened the door for more challenges to rules about religious schools and public funding.

In one high-profile case, the Supreme Court ruled in a Montana case last year that states have to give religious schools the same access to public money that other private schools benefit from. Similar issues have also been raised in other states, such as Vermont and New Hampshire.

The Maine case has the potential to have major ramifications for school choice advocates, said Jamie Gass, director of education policy at Boston-based Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research, a free market policy group that cheered the Montana ruling.

Now, the Courts willingness to hear this Maine case, which centers around the state discriminating against parents who want to access the states tuition-assistance program to send their children to local, religiously-affiliated schools, holds the promise of further restoring our framers original vision of schooling firmly grounded in religious liberty, Gass said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maine has filed court papers in support of Maines rules that exclude religious schools from the tuition program. ACLU of Maine legal director Zachary Heiden said he's confident court will again uphold Maine's rules.

Every court, state and federal, that has reviewed Maine's tuitioning law has found it to be constitutional, Heiden said. We hope that the U.S. Supreme Court will agree.
A man was convicted of capital murder this week in the robbery and beating death of an Army veteran in 2015 in his Houston home, prosecutors said.

A jury convicted Josue Angel Leal, 26, on Thursday after 23 minutes of deliberating, according to the Harris County district attorney's office. Leal had been accused of beating Kevin Bartelt, 43, at his home in December 2015. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Melissa Phillip, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month issued guidance on myocarditis, which causes inflammation of the heart muscle that has developed among a small portion of vaccinated people, typically after their second dose.

The CDC said they have received reports of more than 1,000 cases of inflammation since April, with most cases involving men under the age of 30. Those with preexisting conditions or who had recently had other medial procedures were also more likely to develop myocarditis, according to the CDC.
At 17, Jose Mejia has mapped out a plan for his life.

When Mejia graduates from Alief Elsik High School next June, he plans to take a two-year gap and work full-time before starting college nearby  perhaps Texas A&M University, or the University of Houston, where his brother is finishing his bachelors degree in business. He wants to work as a diesel mechanic for 30, maybe 40, years then purchase a big rig to start a second career as a trucker.

A recent text from Harris County Public Health may fast-track his dreams. In early June, Mejia found out from his brother Seguis Lopez, 30, that he had won $5,000 in the countys first scholarship lottery for teens who receive a COVID-19 vaccine, part of a program to motivate youth to sign up for a shot.

I thought he was joking, Mejia said.

At first glance, the text looked like a scam: Congratulations!! You are a winner of Harris Countys Vaccine Incentive Scholarship drawing!!

NEW STRAIN: Several Houston-area kids infected with COVID Delta variant, hospitals say

If it hadnt come straight from the same phone number that had sent the whole family confirmation of their NRG Park vaccine sign-ups and second appointment reminders, Lopez and Mejia wouldve been more doubtful.

We dont have good luck with winning, Lopez said as the family erupted in laughter in the living room of their west Houston apartment.

Cash for shots

As the rate of immunizations slowed in May, the county looked to incentives such as Jose Altuve bobbleheads and gift cards to galvanize interest in vaccines. Harris County Commissioners Court approved up to $250,000 in vaccine incentives in late April.

And in early June, Harris County Public Health announced it would award $5,000 scholarships for college, vocational or trade schools. Anyone who is 18 or younger and received their COVID-19 shots from a county vaccination site is automatically entered.

Lina Hidalgo, the Harris County Judge, saw what her counterparts across the country were doing  the mayor of Lancaster, Calif. launched a $10,000 scholarship raffle, and Ohio debuted a Vax-a-Million lottery  and suggested local leaders do the same.

Experts cant say definitively whether the vaccine incentives boost the rates of people signing up for a shot, but Hidalgo said there are no comparisons to what would have happened if the county hadnt piloted the program.

Does this effort in itself solve the problem? No, Hidalgo said. But we have to try because we have a solution to get ourselves out of this pandemic and literally save lives.

The program also fits with Hidalgos mission of increasing educational opportunities for youth.

The money will be sent directly to the institution, although the date of disbursement has not been set, said Jennifer Kiger, a COVID-19 incident commander for Harris County Public Health. Each scholarship comes out of the Commissioners Court vaccine incentive budget.

Two other teens have won cash in Harris County Public Healths student vaccine lottery draw. Ten winners will be selected, one per week through the second week of August.

In addition to the vaccine scholarship raffle, there are also giveaways for Travis Scott concert tickets and gift cards worth as much as $1,000. There may be additional vaccine incentives after the scholarship drawings end, Kiger said.

Teens and the vaccine

In Texas, clinicians have vaccinated 14.6 million people with at least one dose of the COVID-19 shot. About 23 percent of Harris County kids between 12 and 18 have been vaccinated against COVID-19, Kiger said.

When Mejia signed up for a vaccine in May, he wasnt doing it for the promise of $5,000. It was because of his older brothers pending nuptials.

Seguis Lopez and Nima Vadgama were forced to postpone their wedding by a year and shrink the 300-plus guest list down to 50 friends and immediate family members. While the pair had a courthouse wedding in 2020, they still had plans for a reception at the Hilton Post Oak in July. Every guest who is eligible for a shot must be fully vaccinated by their wedding, and only two more people need to receive the second vaccine dose, Vadgama said.

The couple thinks that making vaccines a requirement to receive an invitation helped pressure their hesitant loved ones into receiving a shot.

News of Mejia winning the scholarship has also forced some friends to reconsider their stance on the vaccine. Of the five other teens in his closest friend group, three had already been vaccinated. Two were still on the fence when he won the cash.

Its funny cause my friends were on Twitter and the county posted on Twitter, and one of my friends asked if I really won a scholarship, and I said yeah, apparently, Mejia said. He sent it to the group chat. Some of my friends werent vaccinated yet, seeing the tweet made them want the vaccine.

Multi-pronged approaches are necessary to encourage vaccination rates, public health officials said. With the Delta variant arriving this summer (the new strain makes up an estimated one in four new infections are the Delta variant), kids and other unvaccinated people are at highest risk for catching severe illness.

We saw more success during the school year when Harris County Public Health was able to partner with the independent school districts, charter schools and private schools to offer vaccinations on site, Kiger said.

EMERGING FROM THE PANDEMIC: Benefits, building expansions, virtual care dominate Houston top hospitals post-pandemic plans

Now, the department is bringing shots to restaurants, houses of worship, libraries, food bank outposts, apartment complexes and senior centers around the region in hopes of reaching people where they would find it most convenient.

Not the plan

Mejias mother, Graciela Lopez, teared up when she found out about her second youngest sons win. The mother of seven does not speak English, but emphasized the importance of education to her sons and daughters, who in turn worked to put themselves through college.

I feel very grateful for the chance for my kid to do more in school, Graciela Lopez said through her sons.

Now, instead of delaying plans for a bachelors degree, Mejia will follow in his siblings footsteps and go straight to college after he graduates high school in 2022. He plans to use the scholarship money at Houston Community College before transferring to a larger college or university.

Its a little different from the gap year plan Mejia used to lay out every time someone asks him what he wants to do for a career, but thats fine. Hed rather have the $5,000 boost for school than thousands of dollars in student debt.

This is a really big deal for people who struggle with money, Mejia said.

gwendolyn.wu@chron.com

twitter.com/gwendolynawu
The arrival of drinking water to homes in the rural village of El Zamorano in Honduras was a huge event.

Juana Martinez, a retired elementary school teacher, remembers following the water along its new course. The 61-year-old community leader recalled that she and two other women drove from the 62,000-gallon tank the villagers built on an hill on the outskirts of town, passing the pipes laid on their way to hamlets and checking the arrival of running water in every home.

We were driving along the houses saying, Open the taps, the water is coming! And everyone would come out to the streets jumping and shouting, Its here! The water is here! People were so happy! Martinez recalled.

When we finished the construction of the clean water system, in April 2018, turning on the pump and opening the valves was something extraordinary, Martinez said.

El senor Cody is so generous, she added, referring to Houston philanthropist Cody Nath, who financed the project.

Some of the locals in the poor, agricultural town in the southern part of the Central American country describe the event as a miracle of God delivered by a Houston resident.

Nath, the CEO of Houston-based Refined Technologies Inc. (which provides services for refining and petrochemical industries) is among the top donors to the nonprofit humanitarian organization World Vision. He has helped fund programs in Central America that mitigate key drivers of migration such as poverty, lack of economic opportunities and violence.

According to the global organization, headquartered in Seattle, the Nath family and Refined Technologies have funded millions of dollars in initiatives to create sustainable economic opportunities that encourage families in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador  known as the Northern Triangle  to remain in their home countries. Thousands of people from the triangle countries have migrated or tried to migrate to the U.S.

Almost 40 percent of the 172,000 border patrol encounters with migrants coming to the southwest border in May were with individuals from the Northern Triangle, many of whom turn themselves in to authorities to request asylum.

Already an impoverished region impacted by the aftermath of civil wars with U.S. interventions, the area has endured further hardships, including two devastating hurricanes at the end of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, significant increases in unemployment and food insecurity, and reductions in American foreign aid.

President Joe Biden has pledged to invest $4 billion in direct foreign assistance in Central America within four years with a plan to tackle the migration drivers, contingent on concrete actions from the regional governments to combat rampant public corruption and criminality.

But experts say that assistance from the U.S. government alone is not enough to transform the region.

To truly move the needle, more investment would be needed, not just from the U.S. government, but also (from) philanthropy and social impact investors, said Richard Kiy, president & CEO of the Institute of the Americas, an advocacy organization promoting development and integration in the hemisphere with private sector participation.

Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Kansas childhood

Born in Wichita, Kan., to a family of business owners, Nath grew up in a little bit of a bubble, he said.

But his parents instilled Christian values, he said, and were involved in charitable causes with World Vision. He and his siblings began sponsoring children struck by famine in Somalia and other African countries.

He remembers his first mission trip abroad to Mexico with his father Bill Nath when he was 14. They worked with a program that helped get homeless kids off the streets. That trip started his lifelong relationship with World Vision. He was impressed by the caring way in which the staff treated the children while dealing with a really complex issue. He gained an appreciation for prevention programs when he saw the effectiveness of micro-loan programs.

Micro-loans took Nath later on another trip, this time to Honduras, where he took his then fiance on a charity date.

What a romantic thing to do, right? he said. That was 12 years ago. He and Christine now have two children and he said she is a rock in their mission work.

That was the trip where he saw the water in El Zamorano and the nearby Sartenejas.

The well used was a corner, essentially, that had water within, and (they) bathe and wash dishes and do everything there, and the animals too. And that was what their families were drinking. They were all sick, he said.

Martinez, the local leader, said a typical sight was mothers walking kilometers every day with their kids carrying as many plastic bottles as they could to fill them with the contaminated waters of the Hato River, the closest source.

You would also see kids going to the only school in town, each one carrying their little bottle with brown water, Martinez said.

But kids were missing school all the time because they were sick with parasites from the river, which she said carried pesticides from the Jamastran Valley, known for its tobacco plantations. Children suffered from malnourishment, hepatitis A and even cholera.

Seeing that was a pivotal moment in my life, Nath said. Something as simple as clean water, something that we take for granted here (in the U.S.), they dont have it in many rural communities.

Since then, Nath has been a major contributor to the World Vision WASH program, which provides money, engineering know-how and educational tools for communities to build and run their own clean water systems and to teach hygienic principles and habits to break the sickness cycles.

Nath said hes learned from his time time in Central America that people there would prefer to stay in their home communities. However, they have to have the health and the opportunity to do that for them and their kids, he said. I mean, if youre a dad or a mom, you want your family to be fed and secure and healthy. Right? This is basic human things for everybody.

Working to fill basic needs

The water program has made a dramatic difference, he said.

About 600 families benefited from the water project in El Zamorano and Sartenejas, which was celebrated with a big party with local food and music, Martinez said. She gave credit to Nath for not stepping on my foot while dancing to the (local) marimba rhythm.

Since then, Nath has funded WASH projects in several communities, bringing clean water to around 250,000 people, according to World Vision executives.

The humanitarian organization said communities served by the program in Honduras have seen a reduction of people emigrating by up to 33 percent.

Nath also helped World Vision launch the THRIVE program, a six-year economic empowerment and educational project to help 14,000 farmers sustainably provide for approximately 70,000 household members.

Another problem that drives people to migrate is gang violence. Many migrants coming to the U.S. cite direct violence victimization as the principal reason for requesting asylum. The Youth Ready program works with young people to develop job skills and career plans to avoid recruitment from gangs.

Nath thinks the work comes full circle.

You may not be able to bring clean water to 200,000 people, but you can certainly do it for one, said Nath. Its the same story. Opportunity, hope. We all need that.

olivia.tallet@chron.com

Twitter.com/oliviaptallet
A Houston man accused in a nightclub abduction that led to the discovery of a stash house admitted Friday to aiding in human trafficking.

Victor Martinez, a Mexican national, appeared before U.S. District Judge Charles Eskridge via Zoom in a bright orange jail shirt and blue face mask. The 27-year-old with a short buzz cut raised a cuffed hand and swore to tell the truth.

After first rebuffing the governments account of what happened, Martinez reconsidered. He then agreed to a statement read by prosecutor Richard W. Bennett that pegged him as the man some hostages identified as the boss of the operation. He was the man who had held eight people from four countries for days in a ramshackle north Houston, who showed off his loaded gun and rarely gave the detainees anything to eat as he hustled their relatives for additional funds.

Martinez pleaded guilty to two of the five counts against him  that hed conspired with others to harbor undocumented immigrants and was himself an undocumented immigrant illegally in possession of firearm. Eskridge set his sentencing hearing for Sept. 17. Harris County prosecutors dismissed state charges against Martinez when the feds took the case. He has previous convictions on state charges.

An associate in the scheme, Eneas Ramos, 20, pleaded guilty in June to conspiring to harbor undocumented immigrants at the same location in the 1700 block of Warwick. He will be sentenced Aug. 18.

A third defendant, Demetrio Martinez-Bucio, remains at large.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Womans abduction at Houston nightclub leads police to smuggling operation

Local police happened upon the operation after a woman reported she had been abducted at gunpoint March 16, 2020, at an after-hours club and driven by her kidnapper to the house in a black Dodge Charger. The woman, Liliana Romero, told officials she refused go to inside the house. The man drove on, she said, and she escaped and managed to get a cellphone image of his license plate.

Martinez was walking out of the house as police arrived. Inside the Charger officers found a loaded Ruger .40 caliber pistol. They then checked the house.

Department of Homeland Security officials got involved after it became clear to police that strongmen had been holding several immigrants hostage, depriving them of food, water and bathroom breaks. Their captives had traveled thousands of miles and invested thousands of dollars to make it to the U.S. Three had traveled from Sri Lanka, two from Mexico and one from Honduras.

The house had minimal furniture and one visible air mattress, according to authorities. Two armed guards kept them locked in a room and routinely threatened to kill them if they didnt hand over additional money. All told agents theyd endured many travails before arriving at the stash house.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Extortion, death threats among tactics used by human traffickers in Houston

A Sri Lankan couple and a third man had traveled by plane to South America. The woman told a Homeland Security official shed flown to Ecuador, took a bus to Colombia, walked to Panama and then handlers guided her through Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Guatemala. She floated across to Mexico on inner tubes and then came to a halt. She was held for 25 days at a camp in Chiapas, Mexico. Smugglers moved her to an armed stash house and said she needed another $10,000 to continue north.

An aunt sold some properties to bail her out. Then she spent a month captive in a stash house in Reynosa until she could come up with $4,000. In McAllen, smugglers extorted her for more money over 15 days until shed made the journey to Houston and her fourth hostage situation. The man who took her was driving a black Dodge Charger.

A compatriot said hed been imprisoned, beaten and harassed by government officials in Sri Lanka. His cellphone and money were stolen in Panama. Armed bandits threatened to kill him on a mountain trail if he didnt give them cash. He had spent more than eight months traveling when officials found him at the Warwick house.

Federal officials said immigrants held in the stash house were allowed to remain in the U.S. under deferred action due to circumstances they endured.

gabrielle.banks@chron.com
Independence Day is on Sunday, replete with barbecues, holiday vacations, cautiously used fireworks and complex feelings on what the commemoration of this nations freedom really means  especially for historic Indigenous, Black, immigrant and other marginalized peoples who have fought and died for, built and thrived in America, while also struggling with systemic discrimination, oppressive policies and, at times, death.

The HouWeAre team has been thinking about how we celebrate Fourth of July and this metaphysical bridge between Juneteenth becoming a national holiday of liberation and Americas symbolic commemoration of its freedom from the British monarchy.

For me, growing up, the Fourth of July drew excitement mostly because our families who lived in Dallas, Houston, Colorado and Connecticut would come back to Midland. Those days were filled with good food, laughter, games  and lots of terse warnings about playing with forbidden fireworks. We were told my grandfather lost his eye while playing with them and was terrified of the same happening to us.

One visit in particular stands out. I was about 11, sitting alone on the porch of my paternal grandparents home, something I often did to enjoy West Texas sunsets. My uncle, a history buff, came out and sat next to me in a chair. We were quiet for a while, but this uncle liked to pick my brain.

What year was the Declaration of Independence adopted? he asked. That one was easy. 1776.

What about the Indian Removal Act? I perked up. I knew that one too. 1830. That started the Trail of Tears.

Godofredo A. Vasquez, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

He chuckled. Then he asked, And what year were slaves freed? Another easy one: 1863; and also Juneteenth.

JUNETEENTH: The beginning of freedom for Black Texans

Silence again. And then, a hand on my shoulder: Youre a smart girl. Think about time when you think about freedom.

Nearly a decade later, I learned from that same uncle that the reason we werent allowed to play with fireworks wasnt because of how my grandfather lost his eye. When he was young, my grandfathers eye had been dislodged by a police officers baton for reckless eyeballing  otherwise known in the Jim Crow era as improperly looking at a white woman.

That forever changed how I view Fourth of July celebrations.

Needless to say, I was curious about the experiences of Ashleigh Wilson and Monique Welch, HouWeAres deputy editor and contributing editor, respectively.

Our discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

NEWSLETTERS Join the conversation with HouWeAre We want to foster conversation and highlight the intersection of race, identity and culture in one of America's most diverse cities. Sign up for the HouWeAre newsletter here.

Q: Where are you from and where did you grow up?

Ashleigh Wilson: I am a proud native of the Washington metropolitan area, or the DMV area, as it is more commonly known as. I grew up within the suburban neighborhoods of Fairfax County in Northern Virginia.

Monique Welch: I was born and raised in Baltimore and recently lived in Tampa, Fla., for just over five years.

Q: Did you grow up celebrating July Fourth? What about Juneteenth? If so, what did celebrations usually entail?

Wilson: Living only 15-20 minutes (barring traffic, of course) outside of the nations capital, the Fourth of July has always been a large celebration in my community. Growing up, a large portion of my Independence Day festivities included spending time with my neighbors at their cookouts or attending large dinner parties with family in Arlington, VA and still being able to watch the National Mall fireworks from across the Potomac River.

I, disappointingly, must admit that the extent of my knowledge of Juneteenth was limited to being aware that there was a day in history when enslaved Blacks in Texas, finally, learned of their freedom  which was a four-year delay from the initial proclamation. Despite Virginias historic hand in having a major slave trade hub in Richmond, lessons about Juneteenth werent taught in the public school system. It wasnt until I attended North Carolina A&T State University, which is an HBCU, and took an African American history course that I learned about the impact of Juneteenth and why its a true celebration of freedom.

'A CUSTODIAN OF THEIR LEGACY': Descendants of the emancipated reflect on Juneteenth

Welch: Growing up we always celebrated Fourth of July. Unfortunately, I was completely ignorant of the Juneteenth holiday. It was never taught in schools nor was it a conversation for me at home. My mom who also grew up in Baltimore told me that she, too, never learned about it in school. She said at the time they couldnt even celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.s birthday, so she wasnt surprised that she knew nothing about Juneteenth in her adult years. So we celebrated every year because it was all we knew.

We typically celebrated with a cookout whether it was the one held every year in the parking lot of my church, in our backyard, or at a family members house  hamburgers, hot dogs and corn on the cob were always on the grill. And then at night, we would travel to different displays across town to watch fireworks. I wasnt made aware of Juneteenth until a couple of years ago. But even still, it wasnt a prominent conversation within my circles of influence, yet alone a celebration, until the racial reckoning the world witnessed after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.

Michael Wyke / Contributor

Q: In our exchanges with each other, it seems as though we were taught different ways or views on celebrating growing up. Share any stories that stand out as to why.

Wilson: Across the nation, families and friends annually gather to commemorate the United States independence from Britain, and the history of our countrys freedom from the monarch is institutionalized in school systems. What is commonly left out of many lessons, and more specifically, who is left out of the narrative was a poignant detail that my mother flagged to me during my childhood.

While the U.S. celebrates its freedom from an oppressive government since 1776, my mother gave a clear reason why we (Black people) shouldnt get carried away: Our people were not free on the Fourth of July. At a young age, my mothers message went right over my head, but as I got older and paid closer attention to Americas celebrations of freedom  Independence Day (1776), the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and even Juneteenth (1865)  it took over 80 years for people, who look like me, to only begin to understand and experience what it felt like to be free.

Welch: Well, I actually did grow up celebrating Fourth of July. I think I only recently lost my July Fourth Old Navy tank top that was red with an American flag on it. My older sister and I actually had matching ones and routinely wore it to Fourth of July activities.  (This discussion) has also made me realize how whitewashed I grew up.

Q: As youve grown up, what opinions have you formed around the Fourth of July and the concept of freedom?

Wilson: I am only one generation descended from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which means only in the last 50 years has our country committed to outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion sex or nationality, and I believe that my mothers verbal asterisk on Independence Day celebrations is needed. As we continue to evolve as a country, when we journey down the milestones that shaped the nation, we must also recognize the marginalized groups; we should not be so quick to gloss over the ramifications of their neglect.

On Independence Day, America rejoiced in its freedom from Britain while continuing to expand the enslavement of millions of Africans as well as Native Americans. So instead of being defensive and refusing to recognize institutionalized or socioeconomic challenges, true freedom could be achieved if our society works toward equity. If the end goal is for everyone to learn how to roller skate  and some people dont have roller skates, others have missing wheels or shoelaces, and others have had roller skates in their family for generations  lets extend some grace. To uplift a person does not necessarily mean that you are taking away from someone else.

Welch: As Ive grown up, I find myself side-eyeing everyone that has told me in the past that the Fourth of July celebrates the countrys freedom and independence because when I look up the definition of freedom, what do I see? From Oxford: the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.

So if slavery had not ended yet, then how can the country, as a whole, claim freedom? Now, I realize that this freedom declared on July 4, 1776, wasnt mine to claim, as my ancestors werent technically free until June 19, 1865.

Laurie Skrivan, MBI / Associated Press

Q: Bringing the gap between Juneteenth, now a national holiday, and the Fourth of July, what do you see as the trajectory of this nation?

Wilson: Especially on the heels of the recent recognition of Juneteenth as a national holiday, my hope is that the observance of the Fourth of July and all historical commemorations is done in the spirit of learning, and most importantly, listening. Maya Angelou captured this sentiment perfectly: If you dont know where youve come from, you dont know where youre going.

It is important that we, as a nation, remain conscious of the errors of the past so that we dont commit future offenses. America won its battle for independence in 1776. We should continue the fight to ensure that those liberties are accessible to all Americans.

Welch: I think the nation is taking strides at reckoning its racist past and that is evident through the recent declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday, but there is definitely a long road ahead. I would like to see the nation get to a comfortable place of not shying away from its history, even the ugly parts, and take strides toward including critical race theory in education so that my future children dont grow up as ignorant about their history as I did.

Jaundrea Clay is the editor of HouWeAre; Ashleigh Wilson is deputy editor and Monique Welch is contributing editor. HouWeAre is a newsletter examining race, identity and culture in the nations most diverse region.
With Texas lawmakers poised to push for new voting restrictions in a special session next week, the states congressional Democrats are urging U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Texas existing voting laws.

In a letter to Garland on Thursday, the Democrats  led by U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio and Marc Veasey of Fort Worth  urged the U.S. Department of Justice to examine what they called unconstitutional voter suppression in Texas. They pointed to a number of existing practices that they say disproportionately affect Black and Latino voters, including the closure of polling sites across the state, reports of voter intimidation and a lack of Spanish-language voting materials.

They also reminded Garland that Republicans are likely to bring back a revised version of a controversial elections bill as early as next week, asking that federal officials keep a close eye on any changes.

The Department of Justice must protect voting rights for all Texans, wrote the group of 12 lawmakers, which includes all of the states Democratic members of Congress except U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo. I am requesting that the DOJ Civil Rights Division focus its investigative powers in key areas reported over the last several elections that present a pattern of racially discriminatory voting practices in Texas.

Garland announced last month that DOJs civil rights division is beefing up its staff and pursuing legal action against states that aim to restrict voting access. The department filed suit against Georgia last week, taking aim at voting restrictions approved after the 2020 elections.

Democrat Joe Biden narrowly won the traditionally red state last November, and voters then elected two Democratic U.S. senators in special elections early this year, giving the party control of the chamber.

The Biden administration alleges that Georgia Republicans sought to deny or abridge the rights of Black residents to vote by passing the new restrictions in March, including new limits on mail-in ballots. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, shot back that the lawsuit was born out of the lies and misinformation the Biden administration has pushed against Georgias Election Integrity Act from the start.

The department's lawsuit is the clearest avenue for federal officials to potentially override state voting laws after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 ended a key requirement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The provision had mandated that states with a past history of discrimination, such as Texas, get preclearance for any changes in voting laws.

Texas officials quickly moved to enact a voter identification law following the ruling. The high court said at the time that allegedly discriminatory voting laws could be challenged after they were put in place.

Its unclear how the Georgia lawsuit will fare in the courts, especially after the high court on Thursday upheld a pair of Arizona election laws that Democrats said discriminated against voters of color.

Advocacy groups, already discouraged by Congress failure to pass federal voting rights legislation last month, decried the ruling.

A disappointing, and dangerous, decision that furthers the ever-decreasing protections under current federal law, combined with the ever-increasing efforts of lawmakers in Texas to attack the right to vote, the Texas Civil Rights Project tweeted after the Supreme Courts 6-3 decision was released.

Ian McVea /Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Republicans, meanwhile, said the ruling supports the legal basis for their election reform initiatives. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said the decision makes clear that nothing prevents states from prohibiting schemes like ballot harvesting, which invite fraud and corruption to our election process.

Democrats have said a federal bill is likely the only way to override state-led efforts to curb voting access, while Republicans have countered that such a measure would be government overreach.

A Republican package of voting restrictions in Texas failed in late May after House Democrats staged a dramatic walkout, breaking quorum and running out the clock on the measure before a key deadline to pass legislation at the end of the regular session. The measure, Senate Bill 7, would have touched nearly every facet of election law in Texas, and much of it is likely to return in a special session set to begin July 8.

The legislations most controversial provisions included language that would have made it easier to overturn elections and limit Sunday morning voting. Both measures will either be revised or removed when lawmakers introduce the final version of the bill, Republicans have said.

Other parts of the bill would have outlawed voting methods piloted in Harris County last fall, including 24-hour polling sites and drive-thru voting. And it would have regulated where voting sites can be set up in large counties; removed restrictions for partisan poll watchers; cut voting hours in big cities but expanded them in less-populated areas; created an online tracker for ballots; and prohibited local elections officials from sending unsolicited mail-in ballot applications.

Republicans say the measures are necessary to prevent ballot fraud and promote confidence in the elections process. We will continue to make it easy to vote but hard to cheat, Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted last week.

Republicans have not provided evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state.

Texas Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to rob minorities in our state of their sacred right to vote, Veasey said in a statement. There is too much at stake, which is exactly why Democrats in the Texas State Legislature used every tool available to them to stop these harmful voter suppression efforts in the state of Texas. We must follow their lead and fight back against rampant voter suppression attempts with all that weve got.

cayla.harris@express-news.net
A petition filed in April by a group seeking to give City Council members the ability to place items on their weekly meeting agenda contained enough valid signatures to put a charter referendum before Houston voters, the city secretary reported Friday.

In a letter to Mayor Sylvester Turner and council members, City Secretary Pat Daniel said her office verified that 20,482 petition signatures contained the name, signature and other required information of registered voters who live in Houston. The legal requirement to get a referendum on the ballot is at least 20,000 valid signatures.

The city secretarys office counted 31,448 of the nearly 40,000 signatures submitted by the Houston Charter Amendment Petition Coalition, the group behind the petition drive, according to Daniel.

The referendum, if approved by voters, would amend Houstons charter to allow any three council members to place an item on the councils weekly agenda. For now, the mayor wields almost full control of the agenda, including the ability to block any measures, under the citys strong-mayor form of government.

The charter already allows three council members to call a special meeting and set the agenda, but the maneuver rarely attracts a required quorum of council members.

The Houston Charter Amendment Petition Coalition  a politically diverse mix of groups that includes the Houston fire union, the Harris County Republican Party, the conservative group Urban Reform, Indivisible Houston and the Houston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America  has said it intends to place the measure on this years November ballot. City Council has until Aug. 16 to approve the referendum ahead of the Nov. 2 election.

HCAP came together because we recognized the need to decentralize authority in the city of Houston, the coalition said in a statement Friday. The goal was simple: to enable any three Houston City Council members to be able to collectively voice the needs of the people and place an item on the citys weekly agenda. Clearly, many Houstonians agreed.

Turner said Friday he was conferring with the citys legal department and had not yet decided when to seek a council vote to create the ballot measure. However, he suggested it would not happen this year, and said the city also is awaiting the results of a separate petition drive by the fire union, which is seeking a charter amendment that would require binding arbitration when the city and union reach an impasse in contract talks.

There is no obligation, I think, on our part to put anything on the ballot for this year, Turner said. There may be other referendums, petitions that may come either this year, next year, whenever. I know there is one out there right now. But again, Ill defer to legal.

City Council is required by state law to place verified petitions before voters, though it does not outline a specific timeline for to do so. When council members do pass an ordinance ordering the referendum, they have two options for setting the date. The first choice: the next uniform election date, November 2021 in this case. The second option: the next municipal election or the next presidential election, whichever is earlier. In this case, the upcoming November 2023 city election falls before the next presidential election in 2024.

Under state law, the referendum may not take place during an election that begins less than 30 days after City Council orders the referendum. Turner must call the council vote no later than Aug. 16 for the referendum to make it on the ballot this year.

At-Large Councilmember Michael Kubosh, who is supporting the charter amendment effort, said he believes the referendum should be placed on the November 2021 ballot.

The two most sacred things about a democracy under the Constitution is our right to petition our government, and our right to vote, Kubosh said. Delaying a vote, I believe, is wrong. I believe that once the petitions have been gathered, and once the city secretary has verified that there is a sufficient number, then it should immediately go on the next ballot.

In July 2017, the fire union submitted petition signatures for a charter amendment mandating equal pay between firefighters and police officers of similar rank and status, in the hopes of placing it on the November ballot that year. The city secretary did not validate the signatures in time for that election or the May election the following year, prompting a lawsuit from the fire union. The city secretary verified the signatures in May 2018 under order from a state district judge, and City Council placed the amendment  known as Proposition B  on the November ballot that year.

The measure passed by a wide margin, but later was struck down by a state district judge. The fire union has appealed the ruling.

jasper.scherer@chron.com
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Friday acknowledged putting pressure on the states history museum to shut down a virtual discussion of Forget the Alamo, a book that critically re-examines the storied history of the Texas landmark.

As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it, the Republican and former conservative radio host wrote on Twitter.

Patrick said that this fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @BullockMuseum.

On Thursday, with little explanation, the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin abruptly pulled out of an event scheduled for that night on Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, which was published last month.

The authors decried the move as state censorship.

The Bullock museum is operated by the State Preservation Board, which is chaired by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, serve as co-chairs.

Patrick thinks he has the right to force his myths on others and cant handle the truth, Chris Tomlinson, one of the books authors and a columnist for the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, said in a tweet. Historians have been teaching these facts for a decade.

The controversy appears to have sparked greater interest in the book, as it rose to the 28th best-selling book on Amazon as of Saturday morning; Tomlinson said its previous high ranking was 168th.

Tomlinson and one of his two co-authors, Bryan Burrough, were to discuss their book in an online Craft of Writing event moderated by Becka Oliver, executive director of the Writers League of Texas.

FOR BACKGROUND: Texas history museum pulls out of event on book re-examining Alamo myth

Margaret Koch, director of the Bullock, said Friday that the authors could have gone ahead with the event but decided not to.

The museums role was primarily that of co-host, Koch said in a statement. Although the Bullock withdrew from the event and notified the 198 pre-registered participants, the Writers League of Texas was prepared to continue the event on their own platform and gave the books authors the opportunity to do so. The authors declined to continue, and because they did so, the Writers League of Texas canceled the event.

Tomlinson said they had no choice but to cancel because the event was organized using the Bullocks online platform. We did not have time to readvertise the event to move to another platform, Tomlinson wrote in a Facebook post.

De-platforming is what conservatives cry about when white supremacist groups are kicked off social media. They say its un-American. Well, that is precisely what they did to us, he wrote.

Burrough said in a tweet Friday: Ive worked all over the world for 35-plus years and I had to return to Texas to get my first government censorship and actual death threats.

In the book, Tomlinson, Burrough and Jason Stanford assert that the common narrative about the Battle of the Alamo  that 180 Texan rebels died defending the state in its war for independence from Mexico  overlooks the fact that it was waged in part to preserve slavery.

Patrick and other Texas Republicans disagree with that premise and have described it as an attempt to politicize the states history.

The book has also riled conservatives by questioning the authenticity of Alamo artifacts collected by rock star Phil Collins.

Collins donated the items to the state in 2014, providing an early impetus for an ambitious plan to renovate Alamo Plaza to enhance its appeal as a tourist attraction. State officials agreed to build a museum at the site to showcase the Collins collection.

The new book says documentation is lacking to show that many of the items Collins acquired, including a knife supposedly owned by Alamo defender Jim Bowie, played any role in the 1836 battle or were ever at the site.

The public-private project to renovate Alamo Plaza also envisioned relocating the Cenotaph, a 1930s monument to the Alamo defenders. It would have been moved a few hundred feet south of its current location in the plaza.

When the proposal went before the Texas Historical Commission last year, Patrick spoke forcefully against it, and the commission denied a permit for the relocation.

Patrick also took issue with elements of the Alamo project that sought to call attention to earlier phases of the sites history and the imprint left by indigenous peoples. He said the project would erase history and that the primary focus should be on the 1836 battle  the most important 13 days in the history of Texas and Western civilization.

More recently, Patrick has derided the proposed relocation of the Cenotaph as an instance of cancel culture.

The irony was not lost on Patricks critics, who noted that the lieutenant governor has supported a social media censorship bill.

Senate Bill 12, sponsored by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, would have required tech companies to disclose their policies for removing content and to allow appeals of those decisions. The bill passed the Senate but died in the House.

Patrick had identified it as a priority bill last session, and Abbott has said he will again put it on the agenda for the special legislative session set to begin July 8.

About an hour before the scheduled start of the Forget the Alamo event, Patrick sent out an email in support of the bill with the subject line: In Texas, we treasure our right to free speech.

jeremy.blackman@chron.com

taylor.goldenstein@chron.com
Houston, MO (65483)

Today

Sunshine and clouds mixed. High 88F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly clear. Low around 65F. Winds light and variable.
Houston, MO (65483)

Today

A mix of clouds and sun. High 88F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear. Low around 65F. Winds light and variable.
State Rep. Sarah Unsicker, D-Shrewsbury, said I am very concerned about losing our Medicaid funding and we are here to protect our Medicaid funding, during a House Budget Committee hearing on reimbursement allowance taxes.
Pope Francis meets Spider-Man, who presents him with his mask, at the end of his weekly general audience with a limited number of faithful in the San Damaso Courtyard at the Vatican, Wednesday, June 23, 2021. The masked man works with sick children in hospitals.
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Kenya Ports Authority set to commence construction of Shimoni Fishing Port

by Hussein Abdullahi

July 02,2021 | Source: KNA

The Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) is ready to commence construction of the much awaited Shimoni Fishing Port in Kwale County.



KPA contends the port will be a pioneer fishing harbour in the country and is expected to have a positive impact on trade and economic growth in the coastal region.



The proposed industrial fishing port infrastructure will include a multipurpose berth that will incorporate fish and conventional cargo handling and cold storage facilities besides a fish processing plant.



KPA General Manager for Infrastructure Development, Eng. Vincent Sidai, announced during a stakeholders forum that construction of phase 1 of the project will begin July 2021.



Eng. Sidai said all mandatory requirements including but not limited to feasibility studies and environmental impact assessments have been met in readiness for the project which is estimated to be complete in the next 24 months.



The works are expected to start any time this month and will be ready for commercial operations in 24 months time, Eng Sidai said.



Eng. Sidai disclosed that at least 16 firms have expressed interest in the construction of the project at the tendering stage.



He at the same time informed the forum that KPA has plans to construct a modern fish market to serve the needs of local fisher folks.



Eng. Sidai said the existing Shimoni jetty will be rehabilitated by the Authority so as to continue serving the local folks and support tourism activities.



The KPA official said the new facility would enable large-scale exploitation of the fishing industry, bolstered by a ready market and value addition, which will spur the creation of a special economic zone.



He said KPA will ensure that the new port will provide a comfortable, convenient and clean environment for the fishing communities.



Speaking during the same meeting, Coast Regional Commissioner (RC), John Elungata, assured the area residents of the governments commitment to ensure the successful completion of the project on time.



Elungata urged the local community to embrace the project, saying it would come with many and diverse job opportunities for their benefit.



We expect this project to be alive by August 2022 and when it starts we will ensure the locals are given priority during recruitment of workers, he said.



Lunga Lunga Member of Parliament (MP), Khatib Mwashetani, expressed delight with the progress of the project, saying it was gratifying to note that the government had prioritized it with clear timelines.



The MP asked the government to also factor provision of modern fishing gear for the local residents to enjoy maximum benefits of commercialized fishing.



We want our fishermen to be empowered to be able to harvest fish from the deepest channels of the ocean, said the MP.



Kwale Governor, Salim Mvurya, reiterated his support for the Shimoni Port project, saying his Administration will continue working closely with the KPA management to ensure the project is successfully completed on time.



Mvurya noted that the new fishing port will transform the lives of those making a living off the sea besides playing a pivotal role in the local economy.



Governor Mvurya announced that as part of the County governments efforts to ensure the success of the project, it will invest in modern fishing gear, including boats for the benefit of the local fishermen.



He added that the Kwale County Government had set aside Sh10 million for improvement of water situation in areas bordering the fishing port this coming Financial Year.



Since the Port will require more water, we are also calling upon KPA and other stakeholders to partner with us to ensure we have adequate water in this area, said Mvurya.



The County Boss said as the multibillion Lamu Port begins working he has been looking forward to having the Shimoni Port initial works kick-off as soon as possible.



The fishing sector can play a significant role in the development of ocean frontier counties such as Kwale but due to underdevelopment of fisheries infrastructure, utilization of marine resources has not been optimal he said.

 Kenya News Agency

Theme(s): Fisheries Development and Aquaculture.
Canada announces widespread commercial fishing closures

by Brian Hagenbuch

July 02,2021 | Source: SeafoodSource

Canadas government announced this week it would drastically cut back on commercial fishing pressure for the 2021 season, shutting down 79 of the countrys 138 fisheries in an effort to save dwindling Pacific salmon runs.



The new reduction plan is part of the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative (PSSI), a USD 520 million (EUR 440 million) investment announced earlier this month to help preserve salmon runs in Canada.The PSSI plan represents the largest investment in salmon restoration in Canadas history, and stems from an alarming drop in salmon runs in the country. Canadian Minister of Fisheries, Oceans, and the Canadian Coast Guard Bernadette Jordan said in a press release dwindling stocks have led to tough decisions for those who manage Canadas fisheries.



"What cannot be debated is that most wild Pacific salmon stocks continue to decline at unprecedented rates. We are pulling the emergency break to give these salmon populations the best chance at survival. The decisions to implement new long-term closures and permanently remove effort from the commercial salmon fishery were not easy, as they impact people, communities, and livelihoods. But with fewer and fewer returning every year  disappearing before our eyes  we have to act now. We will continue working closely with industry, Indigenous communities, and partners as we move forward with these initiatives and do everything in our collective power to save pacific salmon and ensure a sustainable future. Together, we will turn the corner, Jordan said.



The commercial closures come with a fishing license buyback program, which is expected to launch in the fall of 2021. The buyback initiative is a response to many years of requests for assistance from fishermen, according to the government. Fisheries officials hope a smaller nationwide fishery will make it more sustainable long term.



The government will also be working with First Nations in British Columbia and Yukon to address economic and cultural impacts on coastal communities from declining salmon runs.



According to data from the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC), last year was Canadas worst salmon season since 1982. A recent report from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) found that many Pacific salmon stocks have dropped to historic lows, with around 50 runs under consideration to be designated as at-risk. A news release from the Canadian government said decades-long declines are due to a complex combination of climate change, habitat degradation, and harvesting impacts, and bold action is needed now to stabilize and rebuild the stocks before it is too late.

 2021 Diversified Communications. All rights reserved.

Theme(s): Fisheries Development and Aquaculture.
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Much of WA will be blanketed in heavy smoke this weekend due to massive Canadian wildfire
Julian Assange has been detained in the UK since April 2019, after seven years he spent in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The Australian journalist, WikiLeaks founder and IFJ press card holder was charged in the United States under the Espionage Act for WikiLeaks' 2010 publications of classified documents, notably on the US crimes during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If convicted of espionage, Julian Assange faces 175 years in prison, but he continues to deny the charges.

In 2019, the United States requested his extradition. But on 4 January 2021, the British court decided not to extradite the journalist, arguing it would be oppressive for his mental health.

Journalist Tim Dawson reported on the extradition hearings and on behalf of the NUJ and the IFJ.

The British judiciary then refused to release Julian Assange, fearing that he would flee. On 15 January 2021, the United States appealed against the decision not to extradite him, an appeal that was upheld by Joe Biden's government a few days later. Since then, the journalist and father of two children has remained in prison, awaiting the appeal hearing for his extradition. There is currently no date for the new hearing.

According to his partner, lawyer Stella Morris, Julian Assange is in poor health. He is held under tight security with almost no access to visitors, and faces even greater isolation due to the pandemic. According to his lawyer and many press freedom and human rights organisations, he is not getting a fair trial either.

IFJ General Secretary Anthony Bellanger said: "We condemn once again the detention and prosecution of journalist and IFJ press card holder Julian Assange. Convicting Assange would set a precedent that would seriously undermine freedom of speech and the right to information. We call on the UK courts to immediately release Julian Assange and block his extradition to the US, where his life would be at serious risk.
Federal Covid-19 relief programs may be winding down or--in the case of the Paycheck Protection Program--over, but chances are, your business might still need aid.

Half of the country's smallest businesses continue to struggle with the economic impacts of the pandemic, according to a June report by Yahoo Small Business. The survey also found that just 38 percent of microbusinesses--defined as those with fewer than five employees--received government support during the pandemic, with 85 percent saying they relied on community assistance to keep them afloat.

If your company still needs financial support, consider tapping state and local small-business relief programs. Many of these programs were launched early in the pandemic, but they still have funds available. The American Rescue Plan Act, which President Biden signed into law on March 11, 2021, allocates $350 billion to states, localities, territories, and tribal governments to help eligible residents. Of that, $195.3 billion is going straight to the states.

According to the National League of Cities, an advocacy group for municipalities, the funds for local governments will remain available through December 31, 2026, but may only offset costs incurred by December 31, 2024. While states can elect to deploy the money in different ways, approximately 30 states, including Utah and Georgia, are using it to fuel small-business relief efforts, mostly in the form of loans or grants. Some states also offer to connect founders with resources or mentorship.

Wolf's Ridge Brewing, a pub and restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, was approved for a $10,000 grant through the state's Bar and Restaurant Assistance Fund in November 2020 after the company was forced to lay off most of its 77-person staff. Co-founder Bob Szuter says the assistance program, which ended in January 2021, was not small change. "The total amount was not significant relative to the size of our business, but it certainly helped during a difficult period of 2020 when we did not know when and if there would be additional federal support," says Szuter.

Different States, Different Rules

Every state and local program is unique--proffering different eligibility requirements, potential awards, and revenue-loss floors. Some programs require businesses to show certain revenue-loss thresholds or proof of having to close up shop. For example, businesses in Grand Junction, Colorado, can access up to $7,500 in grants, but must demonstrate that the business was compelled to close or substantially limit operations because of the pandemic. New York awards grants based on an entity's annual gross receipts for 2019, with a maximum of $50,000. Connecticut supplies one-time grants of $5,000 to businesses with fewer than 20 employees or a 2019 payroll of less than $1.5 million.

Other states offer both grant and low-interest loan programs--typically defined as loans with interest charges of less than 5 percent. Arizona's Small Business Success Loan program offers loans of up to $75,000 with repayment terms ranging from six months to five years. Similarly, the Illinois Small Business Emergency Loan Fund provides businesses with fewer than 50 workers and less than $3 million in revenue low-interest loans of up to $50,000. At least 50 percent of a loan's proceeds has to be applied toward payroll or other eligible compensation, including salaries, wages, tips, paid leave, and group health care benefits.

No Assurances

While these programs may still have plenty of funds available--some don't even have an application deadline--you'd better act fast. Many programs are accepting applications on a rolling basis until the funds are gone. That's why it's best to get your applications in as soon as possible, says Tom Sullivan, vice president of small-business policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been following state programs throughout the pandemic. But track them, he says. While all 50 states are due some portion of the funding from the Rescue Plan, the timing of the disbursements may be different in each state.

To wit, the timing of the second tranche of funding provided to states through the Rescue Plan is contingent on the local unemployment rate. According to the Treasury Department, states that have experienced a net increase in the unemployment rate of more than 2 percentage points from February 2020 to the latest available date of certification will receive their full allocation of remaining funds in a single payment on or around May 2022. Other states will receive funds in two separate, equal tranches.

With that, some states, counties, and cities may choose to establish new programs in the near future, says Sullivan. Governments have to apply through Treasury, and those applications are getting processed now, he says. He recommends first getting in touch with your local chamber or local economic development center, as these institutions may be paying close attention to the deployment of funds.
The killing of elephants in eastern India has reached crisis proportions, magnified by the Covid lockdown, conservationists say.

In the past two years, 160 of the endangered wild animals have been wiped out in the state of Odisha, at least 40 of them in the past five months alone.

Many are deliberately electrocuted or poisoned by people who have taken forest land for farming, according to the Voice for Asian Elephants Society (VfAES).

The felling of forests for mining and other human activity also shrinks their natural habitats.

And poachers wanting tusks for ivory have been emboldened by an absence of forest patrols, which have been cut back during the coronavirus pandemic.

The VfAES accused authorities of using Covid as a shield to avoid their responsibilities in carrying out patrols and cracking down on corruption.

Sangita Iyer, a biologist and the organisations founder, said: There is a silent catastrophe unfolding across India.

The situation in Odisha is dire. Apathy, complacency, dereliction of duty and a significant lack of accountability by certain forest officials are some of the core issues on the ground.

Ms Iyer accused ministers of failing to investigate the problems behind the senseless and preventable deaths.

She said elephant tusks have been seized from the homes of corrupt officers who know where elephants can be found and tip off poachers.

What chance do these animals have if the very people entrusted to care for them actually end up betraying these voiceless animals? she said.

Records show at least 82 Odisha forest officials have been accused of corruption in five years, according to the Hindustan Times.

There are 40,000 Asian elephants in the world, officially classed as endangered, 60 per cent of them in India.

But activists say a burgeoning human population, causing reckless land use, such as mining and agriculture expansion, and railways and roads cutting through habitats is killing the creatures.

According to a report by Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring charity, during the pandemic the poaching of large mammals in India has increased by 44 per cent, and that of other small mammals by 25 per cent.

Its feared the official elephant death tally is an underestimate because villagers who normally find carcasses have been out less.

In 2012, the Odisha government announced that every unnatural death would be investigated, but Ms Iyer claimed ministers have not questioned or reprimanded any officials for failing to prevent deaths.

And she called on the government to launch a thorough investigation into the deaths.

In the longer term, underpasses and overpasses should be built for railway tracks and roads to prevent elephant deaths, she said, and drivers flouting the traffic laws should be suspended.

The consequences of the disappearance of Asian elephants would be colossal to the forest ecosystems, not only in India, but around the world, as elephants play a vital role in climate mitigation. Their decimation simply cannot be underestimated, she added.

Maria Mossman, founder of Action for Elephants UK, said: This kind of mistreatment of elephants in a state that houses Indias fifth-largest population will tarnish Odishas reputation around the world.

Odisha government has not responded to requests from The Independent for comment by the time of publication.
In sizzling heat on the outskirts of San Diego, the new recruits to Californias largest firefighting agency are learning a sombre but essential skill: what to do if they find themselves surrounded by flames with no way out.

Crews can have just seconds to deploy fire shelters  resembling oversized, silver sleeping bags  then lie down and cover themselves before burying their faces into the earth. For about a minute, these shelters can shield them from a blaze reaching more than 1,000C.

Its the last line of defence if youre impinged by fire and cannot get to a safety zone, Captain Frank LoCoco tells The Independent. Its the final option if you cannot get out.

With each passing year, Californias firefighters face an onslaught of ever more extreme wildfires  and this last resort is becoming increasingly necessary. Last September, 14 firefighters deployed their shelters after being overtaken by flames on Big Sur during the North Complex fire that burned more than 300,000 acres and killed 16 people. The firefighters suffered burns and smoke inhalation, with some needing hospital treatment, but all survived.

Follow heatwave 2021  live: Northwest temperatures soar towards 50C as wildfires rage

President Biden has acknowledged that more resources must be made available to give support those on the wildfire frontline. Pledging to act now and act fast, he has committed to hiring more federal firefighters  and immediately raised their pay  and reiterated the importance of a year-round workforce to combat the growing threat.

Because of climate change, wildland firefighting is no longer a seasonal endeavour, the White House said in a statement. With fire seasons turning into fire years, it is imperative to have a year-round workforce that is available to respond at any time, that is supported and equitably compensated and is available to undertake preventive actions.

In 2020, California, Oregon and Colorado saw fires on a level never seen before, and the pace of the spread is now even worse. California had its first recorded gigafire  the August Complex  which burned through 1 million acres along the Pacific coastline. Overall, 4.3 million acres and 10,000 buildings in California were destroyed, killing 33  including four firefighters. The National Weather Service issued whats believed to have been the first ever warning for fire tornados  a phenomenon caused by intense heat from flames pushing hot air upwards  for an area near Loyalton, northeastern California.

Funded by our Supporter Programme, The Independent travelled the length of California as the state braced for even more destruction, speaking to those whose lives have been ruined by wildfires  and the people preparing to face this inevitable disaster head-on.

We havent had half the rain were supposed to get

California has always burned. But, since 1970, the scale of destruction has hugely accelerated. The amount of land covered by the fires has increased fivefold, while wildfire season itself is lasting longer too, stretching on for at least two additional months.

The larger, more intense fires are being fuelled by extreme heat and drought. These conditions are linked to the climate crisis, caused largely by greenhouse gas emissions from decades of burning fossil fuels.

In California, average temperatures have risen around 1C in the past century. Since records began in the 1880s, the hottest years have been the past seven  2020 was highest, joint with 2016.

This month, before summer even began, a heat dome formed over the desert in the southwest, sending temperatures to around 100F (37.8C). Fifty million Americans were placed under a dangerous heat warning, and temperature records were broken across states.

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At the same time, Californias rainfall has become less frequent in autumn and spring, while winter storms have become more volatile. California is historically prone to long periods of drought, but these are expected to increase with global heating and less reliable rainfall. As the state heats up further, moisture evaporates from the vegetation and the soil, leaving it primed for burning.

The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which supplies California with water via a network of aqueducts, has become smaller with each decade. In 2021, the snowpack melted two months earlier than expected. A megadrought has reached its worst point in 20 years and is expected to persist through September, leaving Californias reservoirs 50 per cent lower than usual and states of emergency in 41 of 58 counties.

One stress point is Lake Oroville in northern California. The lake is currently at about 37 per cent capacity, a worryingly low level for a water resource that helps irrigate 25 per cent of all US crops and powers major hydroelectric plants.

Tony Davis, manager at Lake Orovilles marina, which saw boats being removed by the dozen last month, calls the impact of the climate crisis pretty undeniable.

Rescue workers sift through the remains of a building in Paradise, California (AFP/Getty)

We havent had half the rain were supposed to get, and half the snowpack. It makes it really hard when we dont have water, he tells The Independent.

On top of the drought, add to the mix the Santa Ana winds in southern California  dry, powerful gusts which can reach up to 70mph in autumn when the fire risk is highest, dancing embers across treetops and fanning flames down mountainsides. In the north, the Diablo winds create similarly dangerous conditions.

To really understand what has driven Californias mammoth wildfires requires a look backwards. Indigenous people across the world, including tribes in California, have for millennia used deliberate, controlled fires to regenerate land, prevent overgrowth, and support the lifecycles of species.

But for more than 100 years, the US government instead followed a path of fire suppression to protect timber supplies and communities. Federal policy ignored the vital ecological role that good fire has played in North American forests for thousands of years. And so the forest floors became carpeted with vegetation, waiting for a spark.

Its too traumatising, every time the wind blows

All but three of Californias 20 largest recorded fires have occurred in the last 20 years. Six took place in 2020. The deadliest of them all was Camp Fire in 2018, which killed 85 people and destroyed 95 per cent of the town of Paradise in northern California.

My wife and I became separated, we lost cell phone communication early on. We sat in gridlocked traffic with flames on either side for four or five hours, Woody Culleton, whose family barely escaped, tells The Independent.

The whole town was catching on fire. At 9am, it was like midnight because the smoke was so black. Embers were blowing across [the road]. It was just frightening.

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Initially we were in shock. We lost our home and our stuff. But its really about the people, routines and community. Thats the greatest thing that we lost. The fire made me realise how absolutely fragile life is.

That wildfire was ignited by a utility provider, Pacific Gas and Electric, which had failed to maintain its faulty electrical grid despite the surrounding area being heavily forested and prone to high temperatures and strong winds. While the blame for starting that fire lies squarely with PG&E, the role of the climate crisis on its spread did not go unnoticed.

Firefighters are living climate change, its staring them in the face every day, Paradise firefighter John Singler said in Rebuilding Paradise, a documentary made following the disaster. He described the conditions in the run-up to Camp Fire as a perfect storm.

Smoke plumes from the Camp Fire tower over homes in Paradise (AFP/Getty)

Last year, signs of another monster fire sent panic through the town once more, and residents fled. The devastating Bear Fire did not reach the town, but struck about 40 miles away in the towns of Berry Creek and Feather Falls, killing three people.

The terror of wildfire leaves communities traumatised. Paradise has shrunk from a town of around 26,000 people to 6,000  in part because rebuilding efforts have been hampered by red tape, the pandemic, and expensive building supplies, but also because, for many, it has been impossible to return.

I know friends that have not been back to town since the day of the fire. Its too traumatising, every time the wind blows. Many of us dont sleep hardly at all any more, Culleton says.

Prolonged wildfire seasons also bring health concerns. Fires create pollution in the form of tiny particles suspended in the air. These particles, no larger than one-third of the diameter of a hair follicle, can lodge deep in the lungs, causing asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes, according to the American Lung Association. Studies of children in California found that those who breathed the smoky air during wildfires experienced more coughing, wheezing, bronchitis and colds. Doctors have warned that an hour exposed to wildfire smoke is equivalent to 60 minutes continuously smoking cigarettes.

Air pollution is not just a problem around the fires themselves: satellite data last year revealed that wildfire smoke from the West Coast had spread to eastern Canada, and went as far as the UK and other parts of northern Europe.

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Then there is the environmental cost. The California wildfires in 2020 spewed more than 91 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the Global Fire Emissions Database reported. That amounted to about 25 per cent more than Californias annual emissions from fossil fuels.

This year looks set to see another prolonged fire season. Up to this week, 3,539 fires have been reported in California, compared with 2,875 last year over the same period. The number of acres burned has jumped 58 per cent year on year.

As more fires ignite and the demand for firefighters increases, the US National Interagency Fire Centre last week raised the national preparedness to level four on its scale, on which the maximum is five. Its the fourth time in the last 20 years that it has hit that level in June. Around 9,000 firefighters are already on the ground, battling blazes.

Playing by a whole new set of rules

Its a new paradigm, says Captain Eric Just, from Cal Fires forestry unit in San Diego. There are signs of another really challenging fire season and everyone right now is training up, getting ready.

San Diego is employing a further 300 people at the Firefighter 1 level of proficiency  a seasonal role that typically starts in late spring and lasts for as long as the major wildfires do. The US fights wildfires using a network of state fire departments, such as Cal Fire, and local and federal agencies.

In training, a stack of shipping containers is used to recreate the conditions of a burning building. Using the carcass of a school bus, recruits learn how to perform extrication with power tools. Fire crews must also be skilled in how to handle, clamp and extend an engine hose line at speed, pull colleagues and themselves through tight, awkward spaces, and perform emergency medical interventions.

Its continuous education and training to stay sharp. Adaptation is paramount, says Captain LoCoco.

Firefighters training in San Diego use shipping containers to mimic burning buildings (Louise Boyle)

In March, California governor Gavin Newsom announced emergency authorisation of $81m for an additional 1,400 firefighters in the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (the state agency Cal Fires official title) to ramp up its wildfire response.

California is expected to have the largest firefighting force ever, heading into peak fire season. We arent just waiting for the next crisis to hit  this funding will support our heroic firefighters to save lives as they work to prevent and tackle destructive wildfires, the governor said.

The state is also racing against the clock to cull heavy fuel loads, firefighter lingo for the dried-out vegetation across the state.

In the past 30 years, millions of Californians have moved further out of developed areas into whats known as the wildland urban interface (WUI) zone, due to the dwindling housing and exorbitant property prices spurred by the Silicon Valley tech boom. The WUI (pronounced woo-ee) is land where homes butt up against forests and grassland, making them more susceptible to fire.

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in 1964, when the Hanly Fire struck Sonoma County, at the heart of California wine country, it destroyed about 100 homes. The 2017 Tubbs Fire blazed across nearly the same footprint in a fraction of the time, razing 5,636 structures and killing 22 people.

While Governor Newsom has also called for an unheard-of $2bn for wildfire preparedness, on the ground crews are already hard at work.

Captain Justs unit maintains around 25 fuel breaks  continuous gaps in vegetation to ideally prevent fire or, at least, slow it down. Cal Fire works closely with Fire Safe Councils (FSCs), a network of about 140 community-led groups that minimise threats in neighbourhoods using techniques such as fuel breaks.

Steve Kerrin is president of Deer Springs FSC, which undertakes projects over a 47 sq m area in San Diegos inland North County. It includes the community of Hidden Meadows, a neighbourhood of about 1,800 properties dotted across canyons on the WUI. Three years ago, the council received a state fire prevention grant to clear a five-mile fuel break below peoples homes.

In addition to protecting the immediate residents, this could also be a path for a fire to progress into [the cities of] Escondido, San Marcos and Vista, Mr Kerrin says.

Fires seem to be playing by a whole new set of rules now.

Fuel breaks can make a big difference. During the 2017 Creek Fire near Los Angeles, only five out of 1,400 homes within the fire perimeter burned, thanks to a well-placed fuel break, according to ecologists.

California and the US Forest Service have agreed to ramp up the treatment of forests and woodlands to 1 million acres by 2025, but still have a long way to go to reach this goal.

While mitigation is a perennial process, California also has to tackle blazes head-on. Cal Fire already has the largest firefighting air force in the world, with about 60 planes, air tankers and helicopters spread across dozens of bases, but additional aircraft are expected in the next few years.

A plane drops fire retardant on the Glass Fire last September (Getty)

Battalion chief Nick Brown oversees the aviation program from a base in Ramona. He says that, while the aviation fleets priority is to box in the fire when it covers 10 acres or less, he also acts as eyes in the sky for crews on the ground.

Depending on the topography at ground level you might be unable to see past ridge lines, assess the fires acreage, or see if its burning heavier on one flank or the other, Captain LoCoco explains. [Aviation crews] give us a pretty good painting from above and suggest augments to response, whether adding more engines and/or more aircraft. Its a very integral position.

Among the fleet are S-2T airtankers  anti-submarine warfare planes from the navy that have been stripped of machine gun turrets, armour and ejection seats, then loaded with 1,200 gallons of fire retardant for tackling raging wildland fires.

The reddish-pink waves of retardant dont extinguish wildfires, but they buy time for crews on the ground. Captain Nick Clement, who leads a helicopter crew at a base in El Cajon, recalls seeing trees burst into flames during missions in northern California last year.

I remember thinking how timber is not supposed to burn like that, Captain Clements says. It wasnt even a wind-driven fire. It was just fuel loads were so dry and there was so much of it.

Flying up and down the state, its all brown, and not in the desert [but] on the mountain ranges.

Everybody has a trigger

As the ferocity of wildfire season grows by the year, so too does the impact on the firefighters themselves. With the danger, the mental and physical toll increases as well, while longer seasons mean less and less time to recover.

Everybodys got a breaking point, notes Captain Clement.

Captain LoCoco adds: We all worked 45-day stretches last year while the state burned [and] have spent 48 hours straight on a fire waiting for resources. The biggest challenge for most is disengaging, especially during fire season. Were always in work mode, and all have pride in what we do, but its hard. Your family has to be on board with a job like this.

He says that the fire service has vastly improved its mental health support in the last few decades, with counsellors a phone call away. Following traumatic events, reviews and debriefs are commonplace.

We see hundreds of times more death and destruction than the average person, and you still have to go to the next call, he says. Everybody has a trigger. For me, and for anybody I know, its any child-related fatality. At the same time, you still have a job to do.

If last years mammoth blazes laid bare how stretched firefighting ranks had become, they also revealed how dismally some firefighters were being compensated for work that is increasingly perilous, more physically demanding, and lasts for many more weeks.

President Joe Biden last week expressed shock at the $13 hourly wage paid to many federal firefighters, calling it a ridiculously low salary and promising to rectify it while he is in office.

A car burning outside Vacaville, California, during the Lightning Complex fire (AFP/Getty)

Officials at the National Interagency Fire Centre recently said they face a potential shortage of firefighters in 2021 because the starting salary doesnt cut it.

While the 2020 California wildfire season was compounded by the constraints and anxiety of rising Covid-19 rates, it also meant a decline in prison inmate firefighters, as outbreaks disrupted training programmes that the state had relied on for decades as a primary line of defence.

These firefighters are typically hand crews doing precarious work with chainsaws and tools to establish crucial firelines around communities. They are also integral to the gruelling clean-up operation once a fire has been extinguished.

Cal Fire director Thom Porter said in April that he was concerned about the wildfire readiness of the agency. The number of prison crews available has dropped from 190 to fewer than 70. The operational concerns that I have are really in boots on the ground, he said.

At one point last September, more than 30,000 firefighters were on the ground in western states. But so many blazes were burning at the same time, agencies scrambled to shift resources from place to place and werent always able to send help where it was needed.

Crews were drafted in from around the US, while countries including Mexico, Israel and Australia sent firefighters to help.

Those in specialised positions, such as aviation crews, are in particularly high demand during peak season.

The firefighters just kept going and going, Captain Clements says. [I was] passing people at Sacramento airport and finding out what fires they were going to.

As soon as one fire [is over], its on to the next one.
 Close Satellite video of 'firestorm' over Canada cause 700,000 lightning strikes in one night

A town in British Columbia which experienced record-high temperatures earlier this week has been largely destroyed by wildfire, with at least two deaths reported.

Lytton endured highs of 49.6 C on Tuesday, the day before 1,000 residents from the area were forced to flee their homes because of the encroaching flames.

A couple in their 60s who took cover from the fire died after a power pole collapsed and fell onto them, according to the Vancouver Sun.

By Thursday afternoon, most homes and buildings in Lytton were ruined, said Mike Farnworth, British Columbias safety minister.

The British Columbia Wildfire Service reported that the Lytton wildfire was burning out of control over an area of approximately 30 square miles.

Referring to the damage wrought by the flames, John Haugen, acting chief of Lytton First Nation, said: It was like a war zone last night.

The wildfires were sparked by an unprecedented heatwave across western Canada and the US, which is believed to have killed hundreds of people in British Columbia and the American states of Oregon and Washington.
Mr Singh sleeps fitfully in a small room with no windows somewhere in Kabul or the surrounding countryside. The moment he awakes, a fearful question pops into his head. It is a thought that haunts him constantly during the month he is held captive. All days, in my mind: now my killing? he says. In Afghanistan, death is not important; bullet is important.

More than two decades later, Mr Singhs life no longer involves kidnap, torture and ransom. Gone is the fear of being imminently murdered. In fact his routine in 2021 is blissfully mundane  pandemic excepted. Most days he can be found behind the counter of the discount store he runs in Alton, a sleepy market town in north Hampshire.

Mr Singh came to this country seeking asylum. Hes gone on to make a good life here. Talking to him has reminded me of something that I frequently lose sight of: that on the whole to be born in the UK, or in any liberal democracy, is to win the lottery of life. I take for granted the freedoms and protections we enjoy. The man behind the counter at the budget shop in Alton does not. Like many other refugees, he has endured hardship and faced danger in his country of origin. And like many other refugees, he has a story to tell. This is it.
In the decades before the Stonewall uprising in 1969, an LGBT+ community took shape among New Yorkers on a remote Fire Island hamlet known as Cherry Grove.

There, visitors spent summer weekends sunbathing and partying, forming one of the countrys first gay beach towns when being openly gay could result in ostracism or imprisonment. Only in 1980 did New York state eliminate most of its laws against sodomy.

A new outdoor exhibition in the courtyard of the New-York Historical Society, on view through 11 October, features dozens of enlarged photographs that document this history, illustrating how the hamlet allowed visitors to become their real selves, rather than who they thought they were supposed to be, according to Susan Kravitz, one of the curators. The images in Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove come from the Cherry Grove Archives Collection, a volunteer organisation formed in 2011, about 40 years after community archivist Harold Seeley began assembling records.

Some of the photographs show the quotidian ease and enjoyment that came with expressing outlawed sexuality in a safe space: In one, a pair of men kiss at a house party; in another, two women sit close together on the beach. Other images capture moments from campy costume parties and theatrical performances. Many of the photos were found in the trash after residents died and their homes were emptied.

Residents of Cherry Grove werent immune from police raids and assaults from drunken visitors. Still, gay men and lesbians flocked there each summer, including photographer Richard Avedon and writers Tennessee Williams, Patricia Highsmith and Truman Capote.

While the photographers behind the images remain mostly unknown, many were likely the gay white men who first began to infiltrate the island in the late 1940s and 1950s, followed by lesbians. The images themselves, then, represent an enduring act of resistance, likely recorded by those who shaped this little-known history.

Mainstream America wasnt really documenting us or telling our stories, said Parker Sargent, who curated the exhibit with Ms Kravitz and Brian Clark.

Ms Kravitz, who has been visiting the Grove for 40 years, counts herself among the photographers. Two of her images show how, following the civil rights movement, Cherry Grove became more welcoming to black people and Latinas from the LGBT+ community.

That acceptance  and the joy characteristic of the place  foretold the flourishing of gay and lesbian life in New York City and beyond, she said. The seeds were planted in Cherry Grove.

The New York Times
Richard Branson aims to beat Amazon founder Jeff Bezos into space when he is onboard a Virgin Galactic test flight later this month.

The British entrepreneur will be on his space tourism companys 11 July flight, after bringing forward his participation.

Mr Branson had not been due to ride on VSS Unity for test flights, but Virgin Galactic confirmed his participation has been expedited.

This had been the subject of intense speculation since Mr Bezos announced he would be onboard his company Blue Origins flight on 20 July.

Mr Branson will now be testing the private astronaut experience alongside four mission specialists and two pilots.

Ive always been a dreamer. My mum taught me to never give up and to reach for the stars. On 11 July, its time to turn that dream into a reality aboard the next @VirginGalactic spaceflight, tweeted Mr Branson.

It will be Virgin Galactics fourth crewed test flight using VSS Unity, a spaceplane that is dropped from a carrier in mid-air before shooting up to the very edge of space.

Those onboard will experience two minutes of weightlessness before returning to the companys New Mexico launch headquarters.

The flight will be the first to carry a full crew of two pilots and four mission specialists in the cabin, including the companys founder, Sir Richard Branson, who will be testing the private astronaut experience, Virgin Galactic said in a statement.

The release of VSS Unity from VMS Eve over Spaceport America in New Mexico (AP)

Mr Bezos will fly onboard Blue Origins New Shepard suborbital rocket along with legendary aviator Wally Funk, her brother and an unnamed passenger who bid $28m in an auction.

Ms Funk, 82, was a member of the Mercury 13 Women in Space Program, but after completing her training it was cancelled and she never went into space.

She also holds a ticket to travel on a Virgin Galactic flight.

In May the companys third test flight reached a height of 89.2km, or 293,000ft.

US officials consider anyone who has flown above 80km to be an astronaut, while outer space starts at the Karman Line, 100km above the Earths surface.
Three of the six police officers who stopped, searched and handcuffed athlete Bianca Williams and her partner are under investigation for gross misconduct.

The British sprinter and her partner, the Portuguese sprinter Ricardo dos Santos, were searched last July on suspicion of having drugs and weapons while driving through west London with their three-month-old son in the back seat.

No drugs or weapons were found and an investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) for potential misconduct, which started last October, found that the Metropolitan Police put their three-month-old son on a database that stores information on children known to the police.

Ms Williams, 27, accused officers of racial profiling and suggested she and her partner were pulled over for a weapons search because they were black and driving a Mercedes.

The three police officers are now subject to a gross misconduct investigation over potential breaches of police standards of professional behaviour, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has said.

At the time, Met police commissioner, Cressida Dick, defended the officers in question, stating: any officer worth their salt would have stopped that car.

Investigators have since reviewed video from the police vehicle, body camera footage from the officers and data from both vehicles.

Ms Williams told said she does not believe the problem of racism in the Metropolitan police will not be addressed or tackled under this commissioner.

It felt like there was a campaign led by the police commissioner to discredit us and shut down our complaint, she told The Guardian.

A statement from the IOPC said: Three Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) officers are now subject to a gross misconduct investigation for potential breaches of police standards of professional behaviour.

The three officers were already subject to a misconduct investigation for various potential breaches of police standards of professional behaviour relating to the use of force; duties and responsibilities; and authority, respect and courtesy.

After reviewing a range of new evidence, they were informed they are now subject to an investigation for potential breaches of the police standards of professional behaviour relating to equality and diversity, which requires officers to act with fairness and impartiality and not to discriminate unlawfully or unfairly.

It added that two of the three officers are also being investigated for potential breaches of the standards relating to honesty and integrity.

Collectively, these alleged breaches amount to potential gross misconduct, it said.

An additional fourth officer is being investigated for potential breaches of the standards relating to equality and diversity, and duties and responsibilities and two others are also being investigated for potential breaches of police standards of professional behaviour relating to use of force; duties and responsibilities; and authority, respect and courtesy.

The Met Police told The Independent: We are aware three MPS officers are subject to a gross misconduct investigation by the IOPC in relation to this matter.

Another three officers are being investigated for misconduct for potential breaches of standards of professional standards.

The MPS continues to fully co-operate with the IOPC investigation.

No officer is suspended or subject to restricted duties.
An arrest warrant has been issued for To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen after he failed to appear in court.

The warrant announced on Thursday was issued in Michigan and comes after authorities say Mr Hansen ignored a subpoena in relation to a police sting operation conducted in October 2020. Mr Hansen had been called to testify about the operation.

Mr Hansen said on Instagram late on Thursday that the issue stemmed from miscommunication about a hearing.

The court matter in Shiawassee County, Michigan today resulted from a predator investigation there. Defence lawyers for accused predator Michael Lott had requested video from the investigation. There was a miscommunication about a hearing today on the issue. The matter is currently being resolved! Mr Hansen wrote on the social media platform.

The sting in the investigation resulted in the arrest of three men who allegedly had planned to meet underage girls for sex.

Shiawassee County Prosecuting Attorney Scott Koerner confirmed that a bench warrant has been issued for Mr Hansen, WEYI reported.

According to Mr Koerner, Mr Hansen was supposed to present records related to the Shiawassee County sting operation that the TV star was involved in.

NBCs To Catch a Predator ended in 2007.

Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson invited Mr Hansen to take part in a press conference about the police operation in October.

We worked with Chris Hansen to use his platform to reignite the awareness and the enforcement of whats happening here and to duplicate it around the nation, Mr Swanson told NBC 25 at the time.

Shiawassee County Sheriff Brian BeGole said they used undercover online chat rooms to pose as underage girls to catch predators. They communicated with 171 people  three of which tried to set up meetings.

The three men appeared at an Owosso hotel northwest of Detriot believing that they were going to have sex with girls aged between 13 and 15 years old.

There were no weapons, no drugs, but there were suckers, there were energy drinks, there were clothing that was used by one of the individuals who has a fetish. These are all things that are very normal, Mr Swanson said in October.

Police said the ages of the men were 18, 32, and 45.

Mr Hansen was arrested in Stamford, Connecticut in 2019 for larceny after buying items worth almost $13,000 in 2017 and failing to pay, providing two checks that later bounced, TMZ reported at the time.

Stamford Police said he purchased 355 mugs, 288 T-shirts, and 650 vinyl decals for marketing events.
A mother has been charged with murder after her five-year-old daughter died in a hot bedroom.

Police officers were called to a house in Las Vegas and found two girls locked in a room without air-conditioning on Monday, when temperatures exceeded 40C.

The eldest daughter was unresponsive and was then pronounced dead. Officers believe that the heat was the cause of the girls death.

Kemaya Taylor, 23, was arrested after the incident. She was charged with murder and two counts of child abuse at Las Vegas Justice Court on Thursday. She did not appear at the hearing as she had refused to leave her jail cell, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Inmate records show that her preliminary hearing is now scheduled for July 15.

In court, Clark County prosecutor Steven Rose said that the air-conditioning was not on in the familys home, but he did not have information as to whether it was turned off or disconnected. It was also not yet confirmed whether the death was caused by heat exhaustion.

The Clark County coroners office is investigating both the cause and manner of death.

Ms Taylors landlord, who asked not to be named, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the suspect was having financial problems and that she was struggling without her family nearby.

The landlord said: [The neighbors] saw her out front, all her clothes out in the driveway.

She had one of her babies in her arms in that heat with blankets covering her baby in a fetal position... She got up and started smashing windows of cars around here.

The childrens grandmother Marisa Brown told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that her son was very involved in bringing up the children and that Ms Taylor had all the help she needed.

Ms Taylors youngest child, a daughter aged two, has been handed over to social services.
The same official who allegedly said Champlain Towers were in very good shape three years ago also inspected a building that collapsed in 1997.

In 2018, Ross Prieto was the chief building official in Surfside, Florida , where he allegedly delivered a glowing report on the doomed condos condition. But before that, The New York Times has revealed, he was the assistant director of building and zoning for Miami Shores, where another disaster occurred decades ago.

According to the Times, Mr Prieto made multiple visits to the Biscayne Kennel Club as it was being demolished by an unlicensed, uninsured and unregistered subcontractor. In May 1997, the structure unexpectedly came crashing down, killing two people and injuring three.

Just after the collapse, Mr Prieto told the Associated Press that his inspectors had found nothing wrong at the site.

Everything was going according to plan, Mr Prieto said at the time. From what I hear, this is just a construction accident. Accidents can happen.

Twenty-four years later, that incident is facing new scrutiny as investigators look into the history of Champlain Towers, which collapsed last week and left at least 20 people dead.

Mr Prieto is part of that history. According to documents unearthed by NPR , he reported on the building at a meeting of the Champlain Tower South Condominium Association in 2018.

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 and noted abundant cracking in concrete beams and walls.

Mr Prieto has said he doesnt remember the report.

I dont know anything about it, he told the Miami Herald . Thats 2018.

He declined to comment further, citing his lawyers advice.

The Miami condos collapse is being investigated, and its cause is still unknown. It remains possible that the disaster happened for reasons unrelated to the buildings condition or any of the work Mr Prieto was involved in.

In the meantime, however, Mr Prieto has reportedly been put on leave from his current job. Until recently, he was working for the contractor CAP Government in Doral, Florida . But according to the city, Mr Prieto is no longer on duty.

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, Doral spokesperson Maggie Santos said in a statement.

The company has not said whether this leave is related to the collapse of Champlain Towers.

The Independent has reached out to CAP Government for comment, but has not yet heard back.
A conservative YouTuber who joined the Capitol riot also accompanied Republican members of Congress on a trip to the southern border.

An ally of Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene, Anthony Aguero, joined the Tuesday night trip, at times performing the role of translator, CNN reported. He can be seen in videos and images from the trip along a part of the border often used by migrants.

It has been previously reported that Aguero participated in the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January and justified the break-in.

He livestreamed the visit to the border, speaking to Representatives Tom Tiffany, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, Chris Jacobs, Michael Cloud, John Rose, Ronny Jackson, and Mary Miller.

Aguero told viewers of his livestream that Border Patrol was herding migrants towards a spot where they would be able to intercept them.

Were about to catch them all as they basically come out of the woodworks, he said.

He told CNN in a statement: I appreciate the Congressmen and Congresswomen that went out of their way to come to the border to see the crisis for themselves.

He has not been charged for unlawful entry at the Capitol. He chanted heave-ho as people were trying to break in, entered the rotunda, and later chanted our house on the Capitol steps.

In a livestream on the day after the Capitol riot, Aguero slammed those who condemned the storming of the building. The FBI has previously declined to comment on whether they are investigating the YouTuber, according to CNN.

The Republican Study Committee organised the trip to La Joya in Texas. The Representatives were there in the lead up to a visit by former President Donald Trump. Aguero sat in the audience behind Mr Trump as he spoke to Sean Hannity of Fox News.

The RSCs deputy communications director Buckley Carlson said Agueros presence at the border was purely incidental.

Chairman [Jim] Banks never spoke to the individual in question, the Republican Study Committee was unaware of his identity and whereabouts on January 6, and he did not travel with our group to the border, the spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.

Aguero told members that he was there as an independent journalist from Border Network News.

In the YouTube livestream, he can be seen sometimes translating conversations with migrants for the members, including Reps Boebert, Tiffany, August Pfluger, and Randy Weber.

Come right in the front, Congressman, Aguero told Mr Weber as they rode in Agueros vehicle together after Mr Weber missed his van. You can ride in the front with me.

At the end of the stream, Aguero posed for a photo with Ms Boebert.

Aguero ran in the Republican primary for a House seat in El Paso, Texas in 2020. He often films migrants along the border as well as the actions of far-right groups.

In a clip from 2019, Aguero can be heard screaming at migrants crossing the border and he can be seen shining a light in their faces. He tells a group of migrants in the clip that they come out like roaches, out of everywhere. He later deleted the clip from Facebook, according to PBS.

Online court records show that he has a history of violent crime, pleading guilty to a misdemeanour family violence assault causing serious bodily injury in 2010. He was also sentenced to two years in prison in 2015 following a conviction for felony vehicular assault while intoxicated.
President Joe Biden cut off reporters on Friday after being questioned about the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, saying he would rather talk about happy things.

The president had sought to tout a strong employment report released on Friday, but instead faced questions on fears that the situation in Afghanistan could unravel into civil war amid the exit of American troops.

Mr Biden, who met with Afghan leaders last week, said he did not want to take negative questions and would rather focus on the Fourth of July weekend.

I want to talk about happy things, man he said after being asked repeatedly about Afghanistan during a press conference to celebrate last months job growth.

Asked a fourth time about Afghanistan, Mr Biden said: Im not gonna answer any more questions on Afghanistan... its Fourth of July [weekend].

The president said he would answer questions on less happy affairs next week.

You guys are asking me questions that Ill answer next week. But this is a holiday weekend he said. Im going to celebrate it. Theres great things happening.

Touting Junes job growth, Mr Biden said: The economys growing faster than anytime in 40 years, weve got a record number of new jobs.

He also noted that Covid deaths are down 90%, while wages are up faster than anytime in 15 years.

Were bringing out our bring our troops home, we have all across America people are going to ballgames and doing good things, he said.

The president said he would answer all of your negative questions, not negative - your legitimate questions next week after the Fourth of July weekend.

Mr Biden had announced plans in April for US troops to be out of Afghanistan before the 20th anniversary of the US invasion following the 9/11 terror attacks.

However, as US troops move out, the Taliban has claimed to have captured more than 100 of over 400 districts across the country.

Mr Biden said on Friday that he believes Afghanistan will be able to sustain a government in the event of a heightened Taliban assault after US troops exit.

Asked about the US Air Force supporting Afghanistan, he said we can be value-added but the Afghans are going to have to be able to do it themselves with the air force they have.
Plans to force multinational companies to pay fairer tax by setting a global minimum have taken a step forward with the backing of 130 countries and jurisdictions, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development announced on Thursday.

The US-backed deal sets a corporation tax rate of no less than 15 per cent in a bid to discourage companies from moving from one country to another to exploit lower rates.

G7 leaders gave their approval at the summit in Cornwall last month. Collectively, countries that have agreed to the plan represent more than 90 per cent of the worlds GDP.

Today is an historic day for economic diplomacy, treasury secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.

For decades, the United States has participated in a self-defeating international tax competition, lowering our corporate tax rates only to watch other nations lower theirs in response. The result was a global race to the bottom: Who could lower their corporate rate further and faster?

She added that the agreement showed that the race to the bottom is one step closer to coming to an end. In its place, America will enter a competition that we can win; one judged on the skill of our workers and the strength of our infrastructure.

We have a chance now to build a global and domestic tax system that lets American workers and businesses compete and win in the world economy. President Biden has spoken about a foreign policy for the middle class, and todays agreement is what that looks like in practice, she added.

Ireland, Barbados, Hungary, and Estonia are among the OECD members who have not yet agreed to the deal.

The OECD said the new plan updates key elements of the century-old international tax system that is no longer fit for purpose in todays global and digital economy.

The framework was decided over negotiations for much of the last decade and would ensure that global corporations pay tax where they operate and earn profits. The OECD said that this would add much-needed certainty and stability to the international tax system.

The first pillar of the plan will ensure a fairer distribution of profits and taxing rights among countries concerning large international companies, including digital ones.

This part of the plan is also meant to reallocate some taxing rights over multinational enterprises from their home countries to the markets where they have business activities and earn profits, regardless of whether firms have a physical presence there.

The second pillar seeks to put a floor on competition over corporate income tax, through the introduction of a global minimum corporate tax rate.

The OECD said countries can use the minimum rate to protect their tax bases. The organisation said the new framework would help countries repair their budgets and their balance sheets as they try to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Taxing rights on more than $100bn worth of profits will be reallocated to market jurisdictions every year. The minimum global corporate income tax rate of at least 15 per cent is estimated to generate around $150bn in additional global tax revenue each year.

After years of intense work and negotiations, this historic package will ensure that large multinational companies pay their fair share of tax everywhere, OECD secretary general Mathias Cormann said.

This package does not eliminate tax competition, as it should not, but it does set multilaterally agreed limitations on it. It also accommodates the various interests across the negotiating table, including those of small economies and developing jurisdictions. It is in everyones interest that we reach a final agreement among all Inclusive Framework Members as scheduled later this year, he added.

The deadline for finalising the remaining technical work on the two-pillar approach is set for October of this year and the new systems implementation is scheduled for 2023.

Each country that has agreed to the new framework will have to implement their own policies in their home countries, which might become an issue in the US as some Republicans have indicated that theyre not happy with this new development.

The ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee, Texas Republican Rep Kevin Brady, said in a statement: In negotiations with the OECD, the Biden Administration has already given up significant US ground.

He said the new framework would give a leg up to companies with headquarters outside of the US.

This is a dangerous economic surrender that sends US jobs overseas, undermines our economy, and strips away our US tax base, he added.
Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz has said that hes certainly looking at a 2024 run for the White House.

Im certainly looking at it ... 2016 was the most fun Ive ever had in my life. We came incredibly close, he told Newsmax on Thursday.

Mr Cruz said his 2016 campaign had an incredible grassroots army  326,000 volunteers nationwide.

Whether it is in the Senate or in a presidential campaign, Im committed to fighting to defend free enterprise, to defend freedom and to defend the constitution and the bill of rights, he added.

Right now, the battleground is the US Senate. Right now, the battleground is fighting back on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the incredible threat theyre posing to our liberty. Im proud to be leading that fight right now in the US Senate, Mr Cruz said.

Mr Cruz suspended his last presidential campaign on 3 May 2016, over a year after he announced his candidacy in March 2015.

He won 11 contests and 551 delegates in the 2016 Republican primaries. Out of the 17 major candidates, Mr Cruz came in second after Donald Trump, who won 41 contests and garnered 1,441 delegates.

Would he choose to run again, former President Trump would be the overwhelming favourite to win the Republican nomination in 2024.

Mr Trump told Sean Hannity of Fox News on Wednesday that he has made up his mind on whether he will run again, but without indicating what the decision was.

You are not going to answer, but I have to ask, where are you in the process, Mr Hannity asked Mr Trump. Let me ask you this, without giving the answer, what the answer is, have you made up your mind?

Yes, Mr Trump replied. While some possible candidates have indicated that they wouldnt run if Mr Trump entered the contest, its possible that the 2024 Republican primary field would still be crowded.

If you move forward, you know how difficult it is, but you seem ready to reengage in that battle, Mr Hannity said later in his conversation with the former president.

Its not that I want to, Mr Trump said. The country needs it. We have to take care of this country. I dont want to, is this fun? Fighting constantly? Fighting always? I mean, the country, what we have done is so important.

Other possible Republican contenders include former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Vice President Mike Pence, and the governor of Florida Ron DeSantis.

On the Democratic side, President Joe Biden has said that he expects to run for reelection, despite concerns about his age. Hes 78 years old and would be 86 when leaving office at the end of a possible second term.
Donald Trump Jr has compared the criminal charges against his fathers business to Vladimir Putins persecution of Alexei Navalny.

The Russian anti-corruption activist was poisoned with Novichok nerve gas by Russian security forces and is now serving a three-year prison sentence, which he has protested with a hunger strike.

But Mr Trumps eldest son went on Fox News and attacked the indictment brought against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg for alleged tax evasion

This is the political persecution of a political enemy, he said, before getting the Russian opposition leaders name wrong.

This is what Vladimir Putin does. Just ask Navatny.

He then branded the charges brought by the Manhattan District Attorneys office on Thursday as banana republic stuff.

Mr Weisselberg, who has worked for the Trump family since 1973, pleaded not guilty when arraigned on the 15-count indictment.

Prosecutors allege that the Trump Organization and Mr Weisselberg carried out a 15-year tax fraud scheme to funnel more than $1.7m in untaxed indirect employee compensation to the executive.

Mr Trumps company is accused of failing to make US tax authorities aware of the payments.

It was orchestrated by the most senior executives, who were financially benefiting themselves and the company, by getting secret pay raises at the expense of state and federal taxpayers, Carey Dunne, an assistant district attorney, told the judge at the hearing.

Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, the former presidents second son, both helped run the company during their fathers time in the White House.

No charges have been brought against Mr Trump or any of his children, although the investigation is still underway.

Mr Trump has described it as a politically motivated witch hunt at a damaging his reputation and business.

Mr Weisselberg was released after surrendering his passport and is due back in court again in September.

German doctors concluded that Mr Navalny was likely poisoned after he fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow, and he was eventually transferred out of the country for treatment.
In a warning to Australians about the importance of getting vaccinated, the government says a large majority of guests at a recent birthday party in New South Wales got infected with Covid  while those who had their jabs remained safe.

The party that took place on 19 June in West Hoxton, Sydney has been dubbed a super-spreader event after testing showed 24 unvaccinated guests contracted the Delta variant of the virus.

Australia still has low rates of vaccination, with only about 5 per cent of the population fully protected with two doses. The party was attended by six healthcare workers  all of whom were fully vaccinated  who did not become infected.

One other guest  a care worker who was partially vaccinated  also tested negative for the virus.

Brad Hazzard, the health minister for New South Wales state, told reporters the incident demonstrates just how important vaccinations are.

The care worker was elderly and despite only having received one dose by the time of the party, did not contract Covid-19, according to Mr Hazzard.

He said that the situation was still unfolding and that early and strong indication from that party is that if youre vaccinated you are much more likely to not be infected with Covid-19.

Dr Kerry Chant, the states chief health officer, told 7 News that an asymptomatic guest unknowingly spread the virus throughout the party. She added that had the six guests not been vaccinated, its possible that the infection rate at the party could have been 100 per cent.

An additional seven cases have been linked to this party, according to news channel ABC.

Dr Chant said the infected guests were isolated. We got to this group very quickly. He added that they likely had only 24 hours during which they could have spread the virus in the community.

In an attempt to curb the spread, New South Wales is under a stay-at-home order. The 31 cases linked to the birthday party are just one cluster in the outbreak affecting Sydney. There are currently 170 active cases in the state.

Australia was among the best in the world in controlling the pandemic within its borders in the first year of the outbreak, but was later criticised for not acquiring vaccines quickly. The highly contagious Delta variant is driving the countrys recent outbreak, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

There have been fewer than 31,000 cases and 910 deaths across the country.

WGN TV reported that in a bid to jumpstart vaccination numbers, the government has agreed to offer the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Megan Phelps-Roper has an interesting past. Granddaughter of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church preacher Fred Phelps and former spokesperson for the organization, she is now a political activist who works to promote understanding between extremists. The Westboro Baptist Church are best known for standing on public sidewalks holding protest signs saying that God Hates F**s and celebrating the tragedies of others as righteous judgments of an angry God. Phelps-Roper grew up on their compound in Kansas and was pictured as a child wearing offensive T-shirts and standing proudly alongside placards that also included the statements God Hates Jews and America is Doomed.

When Phelps-Roper turned to Twitter to preach on the platform, people listened, and challenged her way of thinking. It was the beginning of an unraveling that she details in her book Unfollow: A Journey From Hatred to Hope.

The interesting thing is that I didnt view our worldview or our actions [in the Westboro Baptist Church] as hateful; I believed it was the opposite, and didnt feel motivated by hate, she told me. Over time, it became clear to me that the doctrines I had been taught were wrong, that the arguments were circular, and that we were unnecessarily hurting people.

It also became clear to Phelps-Roper that the problems within her church were common in American society: I used to think most people werent like Westboro, but its become more and more apparent to me that these problems  tribalism, confirmation bias, scapegoating, the flattening of complex situations into black-and-white moral pronouncements  are not Westboro problems.

Because that kind of thinking has become the norm, she continued, staying silent is now its own form of violence: Looking away or staying silent  particularly when so many people are doing so  gives the illusion that we approve of that violence, and that the people engaging in crime and slandering innocent people are free to continue their activities without obstacle.

Phelps-Roper changed, but most in her position dont. Hate is taught as a belief system to children and hating becomes a way to be part of the group identity of a family. Often those who hate dont really understand why they are hating, explained Erica Komisar, the psychoanalyst and parent guidance expert.

The issue of religious hate and its effects is close to my heart. In 1989, three of my family members were hurt in a terrorist attack in Israel. My uncle, aunt and cousin were on a bus when Abed al-Hadi Ghanem, a member of a group named Palestinian Islamic Jihad, attacked the bus driver and sent the bus careening 400 feet down the mountain, one of the highest points on the drive from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. He meticulously planned the attack on his own, riding bus number 405, which left from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, several times as he wanted to determine the most lethal place to act.

Sixteen people died in the attack and many were wounded. My family survived because they were thrown out the windows of the bus as it tumbled down the mountain. Young Jewish religious students at a nearby school ran to rescue people and dragged them to safety.

My aunt, Pella Fingersh, told me, My son survived because at the last second, he was thrown from the bus window before it burst into flames. As opposed to the perceived notion of some who are ignorant to the facts, the terrorist was treated in a private room, next door to my sons at Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. He received the same medical attention by the same doctors and nurses who treated his victims. He survived, while some of his victims did not. Forty-two people boarded that bus in Tel- Aviv and by the time it was over 16 people were dead.

My family members were all hospitalized; my 25-year-old cousin underwent emergency surgeries and has had to deal with lifelong health issues.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Ghanem believed he was acting on behalf of a friend of his who had been injured during the First Intifada.

Antisemitism has marked my familys movements round the globe. In Germany, my paternal grandfather was a World War I war hero who received the Ernst Ludwig Award for Bravery and the Iron Cross for Bravery in 1917. Yet he was forced to flee to Rhodesia in 1938 because of Hitler and the rise of Nazism.

Years later, in 1995, I moved to New York City with no job, no friends and no money, but with a goal to work in broadcast news. I stayed with my sisters best friend from college, Chris and his roommate, Hassan Wahla, who was from Pakistan.

Hassan and I had divergent views  especially on Israel-Palestine  but developed a deep friendship based on mutual respect. He showed me his passport, which did not allow him to go to Israel, as well as an ornate box presented to his father, a general in the Pakistani Army, from Yasser Arafat. I recounted happy childhood memories in Israel and time spent with my grandfather who was born in Palestine and fought in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.

Hassan and I listened, argued and disagreed about nearly everything political, but kept talking.

Long after Id moved out, I stopped by to see Hassan. He handed me a brochure about Columbia Universitys School of International and Public Affairs and said I should apply. Two days later, I came by to thank him and tell him I was going to get an application. He smiled and said, Here  they accidentally sent me two applications. Have the other one.

Masada and her friend Hassan at graduation together (Masada Siegel)

We both were accepted, and our friendship has been enduring. During the Trump administration, when so many Muslims felt justifiably threatened by the former presidents policies and his often hateful speech, I reached out again to Hassan, asking, How can I help? Im here if you need anything. I knew how he felt, because antisemitism was also on the rise. A recent survey by the Pew Center indicated more than nine out of ten American Jews say there is at least some antisemitism in the US and that 75 percent believe there is more antisemitism in the US than there was five years ago. It also discovered that more than half of the Jewish people surveyed say they personally felt less safe in the US than they did just five years prior.

Ive often thought that if the son of a Pakistani general and the granddaughter of a Zionist fighter can be firm friends  and have one anothers back in the tough times  then anything is possible. Megan Phelps-Ropers turn toward compassion and tolerance from extremism and hate is another example of how even a small amount of exposure to opposite views can be transformative. Yet a Reuters poll (Dunsmuir, 2013) found that white Americans are far less likely to have friends of another race than non-white Americans, with about 40 percent of white Americans having only white friends, while about 25 percent of non-white Americans also only socialize with people of their own race. Another study using egocentric network analysis designed to assess the scope of diversity of Americans social networks found that those networks primarily comprise people from the same racial or ethnic background, especially when it comes to white Americans. Among white Americans, 91 percent of the people in their social networks were white. Among Black Americans, 83 percent percent of people in their social networks were Black. And among Hispanic Americans, 64 percent of the people in their social networks were also Hispanic (Pubic Religion Research Center (PRRC), 2013). Its clear that to achieve a truly diverse network, its necessary to actively put in the effort.

When I asked Hassan recently about his experience of coming to New York and meeting me, he said, Growing up in Pakistan, it was easy to buy into the narrative against our enemies, India and Israel. However, going to university in the US and then living in New York allowed me to interact and build personal connections and friendships with Indians and Israelis. I realized we have more in common than I thought.
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There seems to be no relief in sight from the monster second Covid-19 wave as it continues to wreak havoc for over two months now.

The Centre rushed Covid-19 control teams to six states facing a high turnout of cases. The teams were sent for urgent control and containment measures of the coronavirus cases in these states, an official release stated. The six states are -- Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Manipur.

A doctor attends to a baby who tested positive for Covid-19 coronavirus at a hospital | Photo: AFP/Representational image

Responsibility of control teams

The two-member high-level team sent to these states consist of a clinician and a public health expert. The teams have been dispatched to the states on an immediate basis. They are expected to monitor the overall implementation of Covid-19 management, especially in testing, surveillance, and containment operations.



The teams will also ensure Covid-19 appropriate behaviour and its enforcement, the availability of hospital beds, sufficient logistics, including ambulances, ventilators, and medical oxygen, as well as Covid-19 vaccination progress. On monitoring the situation, the teams will also suggest remedial actions. on public health activities to the respective state governments.



AFP

These central teams will be interacting with the state authorities and get a first-hand understanding of the challenges and issues faced in order to contain the spread in Covid-19 cases, according to an official release.

The teams will be supporting the regional administration in their efforts for targeted Covid-19 response and management, while effectively tackling the pandemic, the official release said.



Reuters

COVID-19 situation in India

With 853 deaths in the last 24 hours, India on Friday became the third country in the world to witness a total of over 4 lakh deaths due to Covid-19 after the USA and Brazil. The country's total death toll stands at 4,00,312 behind the USA's 6.05 lakh and Brazil's 5.2 lakh.

India has registered 46,617 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours, informed the Union health ministry on Friday. A total of 59,384 patients recovered during the same time.

BCCL

The Centre on Friday deputed multi-disciplinary teams to Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Manipur in a similar fashion it had done earlier in April during the second wave.

In April, Centre had constituted 50 high level multi-disciplinary public health teams and deployed them to 50 districts across Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Punjab as the daily cases surged.


While hundreds of IITians land high-paying jobs in coveted international companies every year, this year has dampened the job-landing spree.

The class of 2021 has received fewer international offers: less than 200 IITians across the country have landed an overseas job.

According to a report by The Times of India, some of the older campuses have seen a substantial reduction in job opportunities, younget IITs have seen a marginal drop.

PTI

Along with a drop in offers, the compensation packages have also shrunk.

At IIT Bombay, international placements for this years graduating class stood at 58, down from 59 last year. Numbers at IIT Kanpur have halved.

At IIT Delhi, they are down from a maximum of 45-plus in 2019.

Representational Image

As for compensation packages, at IIT Roorkee it plummeted from Rs 153.97 lakh per annum to Rs 69.05 lakh a year. At IIT-B, the highest international annual compensation in 2019 and 2020 was constant at US$ 1.64 lakh. This year, it was recorded at Euro 1.57 lakh per annum.
Pulwama martyr Kaushal Kumar Rawat's wife Mamta Rawat has launched an indefinite strike with her two sons alleging callous delay in ensuring relief for her family, reports TOI. Kaushal Rawat was a CRPF jawan killed in Pulwama terror attack on February 14, 2019.

In June, Mamata had written to PM Narendra Modi and UP CM Yogi Adityanath over delay in aid. And now, braving searing heat, the family sat on a durrie right beneath a statue of the jawan -- erected on their family's plot -- that has been awaiting unveiling by the officials for over a year now.

AFP/ File

No land named in their name

The family alleged that no road or school has been named after the jawan and no land has been provided to them, as promised earlier. They, however, said they had received relief of Rs 60 lakh initially.

The 45-year-old widow alleged that the district magistrate transferred Rs 65.57 lakh collected by the teachers of the basic education department by contributing Rs 1,000 each from their salaries, for the welfare of her family, to the chief ministers relief fund.



Agra DM Prabhu Nath Singh, however, clarified that the move is purely technical.



TOI

DM alleges monetary aid given

Sufficient monetary assistance has been provided to the family of the CRPF jawan killed in Pulwama attack. Private welfare funds in any of the departments accounts go to the CMs relief fund first and are redirected towards the intended beneficiary. We will look into the demands of the family. Suitable action will be taken as per the norms, the DM told The Times of India.



A resident of Kehrai village under Sadar sub-division, Mamta Rawat said, I have been making rounds of the government offices for over a year. After the death of my husband, the state authorities had promised to provide us with some land near the village. But nothing has happened so far."



TOI

Abhishek Rawat, son of the slain CRPF jawan, said, We have made several rounds to the office and residence of chief minister Yogi Adityanath. Officials there took our complaint letters, but no action was taken."


The bond between humans and pets is unshakable, and there's is something indescribable and unique about it.



If anyone needed any more proof of the undying loyalty, this should serve as one of the biggest examples. A man in US' Oklahoma attempted to rescue his pet cat after the animal got stuck in a tree. Unfortunately, the rescue act didn't go as per the plan and the man found himself as stuck as his bewildered pet atop the tree.

Screengrab/Facebook

In response to the situation, someone called the Tulsa Fire Department for help in getting both the man and his cat down from the tree.



The department posted about the incident on its Facebook page, explaining that a crew had to be sent out to a neighbourhood in Tulsa. According to the department, a cat owner had become stuck in a tree while trying to rescue his pet.



"Around 3:45 pm, Captain Alan Hancock and his Engine 27 A Platoon crew responded to a rescue near S. 94th E. Avenue and E. 27th Street. Apparently, a cat climbed high up into a tree. Its owner was so concerned for the feline that he climbed up to attempt a rescue. Unfortunately, they both found themselves in a dangerous predicament high above the ground, unable to get down safely. When Captain Hancock and crew arrived and accessed the scene, they requested that Captain Jacob Inbody and the Ladder 27 crew respond to utilize their aerial device. Acting FEO Brett Allen positioned the aerial so Firefighter Jayme Brooks could ascend and perform a safe rescue," the caption said on Facebook.



In the video shared by the department of the rescue operation, it shows the firefighters using a ladder up to a section of the tree that appears to be about two stories off the ground.

Tulsa Fire Department

A rescue worker can be seen guiding the cats owner down the ladder and safely on the ground. While the cat was also safely rescued and seemingly carried out of the tree in a backpack.



Reacting to the video, several users were all praising the fire department.

"Good people doing good things," one comment read.

"Thank you, Tulsa FD. My heroes," another comment read.
Parliament sessions are known for their snarky remarks between the ruling party and the opposition. And it was no different when during a feisty exchange in Parliament during Question Time, New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern nailed an argument against her Opposition leader.

The Prime Minister did not hold herself back from speaking her mind.

Twitter

During a debate about the country's proposal hate speech laws, Ardern cleared the air on whether you would be sent to jail for calling someone a 'Karen' online.

The term 'Karen' became popular after an internet meme that went viral last year. Generally, believed to be an insult, 'Karen' refers to an entitled White woman who unabashedly use her privilege to make unreasonable demands.

While the whole conversation seems outrageous to begin with, New Zealand's Opposition leader Judith Collins expressed concern about the possibility and took to Twitter to say the same.

"Will calling a middle-aged white woman a 'Karen' now be a crime under Jacinda Ardern's law?" wrote Collins on the microblogging website.

Will calling a middle-aged white woman a Karen now be a crime under Jacinda Arderns law? https://t.co/nDiMOU7NLB  Judith Collins (@JudithCollinsMP) June 29, 2021

Ardern's Labor government has been setting up new and increasing punishments for people who incite or normalise hate speech, which was a recommendation from the Royal Commission after the Christchurch terror attack.

While most of the people welcomed the stricter penalties for online trolls who encourage hatred, Collins was worried about where the limit will be drawn and whether people could be punished with a fine or in jail for a minor insult.

When the same was discussed during Question Times, Ardern swiftly cleared out any misunderstandings and said that people would still be able to use the Karen slur without consequences. However, she also took a subtle dig at Collins.

Twitter

"I also disagree with that statement, and I also, as it happens, disagree with the Member's statement on Twitter that somehow it will become illegal to call someone a 'Karen'," the Prime Minister said in Parliament.

"That is absolutely incorrect and I apologise. That means these laws will not protect that Member from such a claim."

Is Jacinda giving us a pass to call Judith Collins Karen? pic.twitter.com/oUIHX9d5j7  Shaneel Lal (They/Them) (@shaneellall) June 30, 2021

The Parliament witnessed laughter from the members and Collins had to take a back seat for a moment. She said she wanted another chance to take a dig at Ardern. However, she held herself back as she believed it was "too cruel".
The Indian national flag flutters over the dome of Rashtrapati Bhavan as seen from Mughal Gardens, in New Delhi, India on Feb. 11, 2021. (Mayank Makhija/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Social justice attorney Janani Ramachandran advanced in the June 29 primary to run in the special runoff election for Assembly District 18 Aug. 31. Im running to lift up the voices of unheard people in our community, including South Asians, Ramachandran told India-West in an earlier interview. (photo courtesy of Janani Ramachandran)
People gather to get registered for the COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, July 1. The U.S. House June 30 passed a resolution recognizing the devastating impact of COVID-19 in India. Im pleased that my colleagues and I were able to pass H.Res.402 to express our nations need to support countries like India, which have been significantly impacted by devasting COVID-19 case rates, Indian American Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi said in a statement. (ANI photo)
Virginia's COVID-19 state of emergency officially ended this week after 15 1/2 months, but the number of new cases of the virus statewide is actually on the rise again, as vaccinations slow significantly.

Health officials have generally attributed the latest increases to spread of the Delta variant, which is more contagious than other variants, although vaccines are reported to be effective against it.

That can be seen generally in the data. Northern Virginia, for example, which has some of the highest vaccination rates in the state, is still maintaining relatively low numbers of new cases, while cases are increasing elsewhere in the state.

The end of Virginia's state of emergency at midnight Wednesday, June 30, has little practical effect, as all of the state's COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in late May. However, it does mean that the Virginia Department of Health has stopped reporting details of COVID-19 outbreaks at schools, nursing homes and other public facilities. That detailed reporting was required by legislation passed by the General Assembly last fall, but it applied only during a state of emergency.

The health department also issued a reminder Thursday that although wearing a mask to hide one's identity is now illegal again in Virginia, since the state of emergency ended, there is no legal barrier to wearing masks to protect oneself and others from the COVID-19 virus.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends wearing a mask in indoor public places for anyone aged 2 or older who is not fully vaccinated, and for anyone with a weakened immune system regardless of vaccination status. The health department said that although it is not generally necessary to wear masks outside, people who are not fully vaccinated should continue to wear masks in crowded settings, particularly in areas with high numbers of cases.

Statewide, new reported cases have increased about 30% in the past week and now stand at an average of 181.7 per day, the highest since June 10. They are still at the lowest levels since the early weeks of the pandemic, however.

Northern Virginia has generally fared better, with a seven-day average of 29.3 cases a day, nearly the same as a week earlier. The region's number fell as low as 16.9 a day on June 15 before ticking up a bit.

The state began tracking the new Delta variant (B.1.617.2) two weeks ago and has reported 67 cases through Friday, including 17 in the Northern region. Not all positive samples are tested for variants, so the actual number of cases is probably higher.

Hospitalizations for treatment of the virus hit a new low of 231 as of Monday, according to the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association, which has been providing the data since early April 2020. They stood at 247 as of Friday. In Northern Virginia, just 46 patients were being treated in hospitals as of Wednesday, the latest date that information was available. The region's hospitalizations peaked at 818 on April 30, 2020.

The number of deaths statewide from COVID-19 has continued to decline, with just 34 reported this week. That's the lowest number since the week ended April 2, 2020, although deaths tend to be a lagging indicator and can often take several weeks to verify and report.

Meanwhile, the average positivity rate of diagnostic COVID-19 tests has increased a bit statewide over the past week - as would be expected with the increase in cases - rates in Northern Virginia have remained relatively stable. The Fairfax Health District, the state's largest, even hit a new low rate of 0.7% on Thursday and Friday.

The state is still reporting the results of over 50,000 diagnostic tests per week, although that's down from over 200,000 a week during the height of the pandemic in late December and January.

Meanwhile, the seven-day average of vaccine doses administered statewide has fallen to 16,900 as of Thursday, about a fifth of its peak of over 80,000 in late March and early April. Over 71.2% of Virginia adults have now received at least one dose of a vaccine.

Overall, more than 9.07 million vaccine doses have been administered statewide, and 50.8% of the population -- 61.8% of the adult population -- is fully vaccinated, according to the Virginia Department of Health's vaccine dashboard.

LATEST COVID-19 DATA

New Cases/Deaths (Seven days ending Friday, July 2)

Northern Virginia: 205 new cases (down from 206 prior week); 8 new deaths (same as prior week)

Statewide: 1,272 new cases (up from 966 prior week), 34 new deaths (down from 47 prior week)

Statewide Testing: 59,029 PCR diagnostic test results (down from 56,317 prior week)

Overall Totals

Northern Virginia: 184,816 cases, 2,392 deaths

Statewide: 680,744 cases, 11,423 deaths

Statewide Testing: 7.71 million PCR diagnostic tests (10.24 million when including antibody and antigen tests)

Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) cases: 76 (including 14 in Fairfax, 10 in Prince William, two in Loudoun and Alexandria and one in Arlington).

*Provided by Virginia Department of Health. The health department's COVID-19 data is updated each morning by 10 a.m. and includes reports by local health agencies before 5 p.m. the previous day.

Statewide Hospital and Nursing Home Data

Hospitalizations: 247 (down from 250 on June 25)

Peak Hospitalizations: 3,209 reached Jan. 13

Patients in ICU: 61 (up from 60 on June 25)

Patients Discharged: 57,234

*Provided by Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association

For updated national and international COVID-19 data, visit the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus dashboard.

Editor's note: InsideNoVa is providing regular COVID-19 updates every Friday. For daily reports, visit the Virginia Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard.
For new Prince William County Public Schools Superintendent LaTanya McDade, the first few months on the job will be all about listening.

McDade began her tenure Thursday, taking over for Steven Walts to lead the states second-largest school district, with over 90,000 students. She comes from Chicago Public Schools, where she worked for over 20 years, starting as a middle school teacher and most recently serving as chief education officer.

In a statement Thursday, McDade said she plans to spend her first 100 days as superintendent listening and gathering information from students, staff members and teachers.

I am honored today to begin my tenure as your superintendent," she said. "I look forward to working alongside our students, families, communities, and staff to recover, accelerate and re-engage to build an equitable, inclusive and transparent culture that supports the growth and development of our brightest minds."

McDade has been touted by colleagues for making more challenging advanced courses available for a wide range of students in Chicago. When she was announced in March as Prince Williams next superintendent, she talked about the diversity of Chicagos school district, the third biggest in the country with 638 schools and over 340,000 students.

During her tenure, the districts graduation rates and college enrollment increased while dropout, suspension and expulsion rates dropped. At the same time, the district built the biggest international baccalaureate curriculum in the country. In March, she spoke about the value of challenging all students.

The daughter of immigrants from Belize, she said a priority would be to meet the individual needs of students coming from very different backgrounds. McDade is the first Black person and first woman to serve as superintendent for the countys schools.

Chicago is one of the [most] diverse cities in the nation, and we have schools where in one school over 36 languages are spoken, and thats similar to what were seeing right here in Prince William, she said in March. What it boils down to is that every single school has to have the support, resources and the staff to meet the needs of every individual student  at the local level; thats where the work really happens. The magic happens in the classroom.

Per the plan laid out by Walts, students will be back in classrooms five days per week in the fall, with an option for students to remain virtual if their families decide to do so. With most students remaining online for all of the 2020-2021 school year and the pandemic upending family life for many, grades and reading assessments showed significant drops.

Coming off a once-in-a-century pandemic, the last 16 months have been challenging for us all, and the herculean efforts of our teachers and staff have made a difference in the lives of our young people in profound ways that will serve many of them well into adulthood, McDade said in the statement.

McDade will earn a starting annual salary of $310,000, according to her four-year contract agreement with the school board. Starting later this month, shell begin working with the school board to lay out goals and objectives for the division, with the board assessing the divisions progress toward those goals as well as her job as superintendent every year.
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.
Pointillism and the Pear, by Sue Zywokarte, is among works done by Pathway Homes residents that will be on display through July 29, 2021, in Vienna.
With a major research university right in our backyard, a strong military presence and innovative companies throughout the metro region, theres often a plethora of interesting science and technology news to be found in Southern Arizona. Heres a breakdown of the most interesting recent deve
The New Hampshire Insurance Department has announced that it investigated and submitted for criminal prosecution a total of 18 insurance fraud cases over the past twelve months.

The cases varied in nature, but included false claims related to food poisoning, disability claims, workers compensation claims, buying policies after the losses and misrepresenting the date and time to get coverage, mysterious disappearance of jewelry and fake medical records.

The primary mission of the New Hampshire Insurance Department is to protect consumers and enforce the insurance laws of the state of New Hampshire, said Deputy Commissioner D.J. Bettencourt in a New Hampshire Insurance Department press release. Insurance fraud is not only against the law, but it hurts consumers when fraudulent claims result in increased premiums.

Insurance fraud occurs when a person attempts to obtain a benefit they are not entitled to or when an insurer knowingly denies someones legitimate claim, the department said in the release. The insurance department is typically made aware of insurance fraud against consumers when the victim contacts the Consumer Services Division. Once the department has been notified and the online consumer complaint form has been filed, the investigation begins.

Insurance companies and producers are required by law to report suspicious claims to the Insurance Fraud Unit. The Consumer Services Division (CSD) works to educate residents about insurance products, companies and producers, assist residents who request help navigating the insurance industry and work with other department staff to investigate customer grievances to ensure that licensees, including companies and producers, comply with New Hampshire insurance laws and rules.

Even with the overwhelming obstacles like COVID, these investigators found ways to collect all the required evidence and navigate their investigations bringing many fraudsters to justice, said Acting Fraud Director Brendhan Harris in the release. Oftentimes, the cases are voluminous, and we appreciate the prosecuting agencies for all their dedication and hard work.

Source: New Hampshire Insurance Department

Topics Fraud
Medical marijuana patients can continue to get a three months supply at a time, rather than one months, under revisions to the Pennsylvania program signed into law Wednesday by Governor Tom Wolf.

The bill makes it easier for producers to remove contaminants such as yeast and mold from medical marijuana, to turn it into products that are topical in form, not to be inhaled or ingested.

Growers are saying, We have adequate supply, we have a way to safely remediate it,' said Rep. Paul Schemel, R-Franklin, the bills prime sponsor. This simply gives them a mechanism by which they can do that.

Chris Goldstein, a Pennsylvania regional organizer for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said the legislation moved quickly and there were no hearings to gather input from patients and their caregivers.

The bill actually has a lot of provisions that are industry friendly, and most controversial is to allow remediation of mold in cannabis flowers by extracting it into new products, Goldstein said. I think thats where patient voices could have been heard.

A proposal to allow patients to grow their own marijuana was defeated.

Goldstein said permitting patients to grow plants at home would have helped those who have difficulty affording the drug at dispensary prices. He said he hopes lawmakers will reconsider permitting it.

Prices for medical cannabis in Pennsylvania remain some of the highest in the country, Goldstein said. And right now theres no real price relief. No insurance covers it  its all cash out of pocket.

Other changes include permanently allowing curbside dispensing, a change that, like the 90-day supply, was adopted in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The new law adds to the list of serious medical conditions for which medical marijuana can be dispensed to include cancer remission therapy and neuropathies of the central nervous system.

The legislation gives the state agriculture secretary a month to make public the list of pesticides that grower-producers can use, a list that will be updated annually.

The new law expands the number of research facilities that are studying patient response to the drug, and allows caregivers to obtain the drug on behalf of more than one patient. Goldstein said the caregivers provision will effectively expand deliveries by dispensaries.

It contains explicit language to state that Pennsylvanias medical marijuana program will continue even if the federal government were to reclassify it or remove it from the schedule of federally controlled or prohibited substances.

The bill passed the House Friday, 165-38, with only one Democratic no vote, and was approved by the Senate, 47-3. Most of its provisions take effect immediately.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Pennsylvania
These International People Moves include appointments at AXIS Re, Zurich Insurance Group and MS Amlin.

Details of these new hires follows.

AXIS Re, the reinsurance business segment of AXIS Capital Holdings Ltd., announced that Nicole Hanhart has joined AXIS Re as Property Underwriter, EMEA & Latin America, effective July 1.

In this role, Hanhart will be responsible for underwriting a property treaty portfolio for Latin America. She will work in partnership with the underwriting team responsible for this region.

Hanhart joins AXIS Re following over 20 years with Partner Re, where she was most recently a senior underwriter with the Global Catastrophe team. Hanharts underwriting experience includes assignments in Chile, Miami and Zurich and stretches across Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe.

Hanhart will be based in Zurich and report directly to Gino Smith, head of Property, EMEA & Latin America.

***

Zurich Insurance Group has appointed Frank Verkerk to the new role of group chief platform officer to accelerate the development of digital services to meet rapidly changing customer needs.

He joins Zurich on Aug. 16, 2021 from ABN Amro, where he was chief digital officer and responsible for digital transformation. In his new role, Verkerk will focus on enabling open platforms with third parties for Zurich businesses to quickly develop and integrate next generation insurance-as-a-service solutions.

Verkerk will work closely with Zurichs Global Business Platforms business unit, under the leadership of Jack Howell, to accelerate development of digital and modular services. He will be based in Zurich, Switzerland, and report to Ericson Chan, group chief information and digital officer.

During his time at ABN Amro, the banks digital share of total sales grew rapidly and it became a market leader in video enabled advisory services for customers. In addition, Verkerk initiated and chaired ABN Amros Corporate Venture Capital fund, AA Ventures, specializing in fintech. Earlier in his career, he founded various digital companies, including MoneYou, a challenger digital bank, which was launched in four European countries, and the P2P payment platform Tikkie, one of the largest B2B2C platforms in The Netherlands.

***

MS Amlin Underwriting Ltd. (MS AUL), the Lloyds specialty re/insurer, announced it has appointed James Maxwell as interim chief risk officer (CRO), subject to regulatory approval.

Maxwell will take up the role on July 5, 2021, following the departure of CRO Vishal Desai, who is leaving the company for personal reasons.

Maxwell brings more than 25 years of experience in financial, operational and enterprise risk management. He joins MS AUL from PwC where he served as a partner in its Assurance Division and led PwCs risk, governance and controls proposition for insurance.

Prior to joining PwC, Maxwell was the CRO at FTSE100 Oil & Gas company BG Group. He also worked in EYs Financial Services Risk Management Team for many years in both London and Sydney, and has also worked in South Africa, Switzerland and the United States.

Vishal Desai has made the difficult decision to step down from his role as chief risk officer (CRO) following changes in his personal family circumstances. In the short time Vishal has been with us he has proved himself to be a valuable member of the executive team and we will be sorry to see him leave. We wish him the very best for the future, commented Johan Slabbert, CEO of MS AUL.

Topics Mergers Mississippi
A company whose northern Illinois chemical plant was heavily damaged in a fire defended its use of firefighting foam containing toxic chemicals, saying crews had taken steps to contain the material.

An industrial team hired by Lubrizol Inc., parent company of Chemtool, used foam containing PFAS compounds June 15 before switching to another foam without them on orders of the fire chief in Rockton, a town near the Wisconsin border.

State and federal regulators had raised concerns with the company about the PFAS-containing foam. It is legal in most of the U.S. but generally used only for highly flammable or combustible fires involving gas tankers and oil refineries, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The foam was used in the early stages of firefighting efforts for a limited time given the heightened risk of letting the fire burn and spread, Lubrizol said in a statement. Fluorinated foam is twice as effective as non-fluorinated foam in suppressing a fire like the one we experienced and offered the best chance to control the fire in the shortest amount of time. 

The company said the foam was sprayed on one portion of the site. Before it was applied, Lubrizol and the contractor, U.S. Fire Pumps, dug trenches around the property. The foam and water in which it was diluted were vacuumed up and stored in tanks for appropriate disposal, the statement said.

We continue to run tests of the soil and water to further validate the effectiveness of the containment measures, Lubrizol said.

PFAS chemicals belong to a group known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which are used in a wide variety of industrial and household products. They have been linked to numerous health problems including cancer and damage to organs including the liver, kidneys and thyroid gland.

They are described as forever chemicals because they dont degrade in the environment or the human body.

Louisiana-based U.S. Fire Pump used about 3,200 gallons of the PFAS-containing foam mixed with 71,000 gallons of water, according to the Illinois EPA.

State officials did not respond to messages seeking comment. The U.S. EPA said it stood by its earlier statement of concern about use of the foam.

The fire sent thick black smoke thousands of feet in the air and caused debris to rain onto nearby yards. About 1,000 residents were evacuated for four days.

Lubrizol said experts were continuing to monitor air quality in the area of the plant, which manufactured lubricants, grease products and other fluids. No negative effects have been detected aside from the short-term irritation one would normally experience in the presence of smoke, the company said.

Debris is being removed and properties cleaned, Lubrizol said. The debris will be sent to an EPA- approved facility for disposal.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Illinois Chemicals
Omaha National Insurance Company has added Jim Hempel as general counsel and David Bird vice president, accounting. Additionally, Derrald Farnsworth-Livingston has been promoted to vice president, IT infrastructure.

Hempel joins Omaha National from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska, where he was associate general counsel for more than 13 years.

Bird has more than 20 years of experience in the accounting and finance field, most recently holding leadership positions at publicly traded companies in the Omaha area. He started his career in public accounting at Deloitte, where he spent more than eight years in their audit and assurance group working on mid-market and large SEC-reporting clients.

Farnsworth-Livingston joined Omaha National in 2019 as director of information technology, where his role includes service desk operations, server and network implementation and support, and information security. Before joining Omaha National, Farnsworth-Livingston had 20 years of experience in crafting and implementing IT strategies, architecting large-scale resilient systems, and managing technical teams that deliver exceptional customer service.

Omaha National is a provider of workers compensation and payroll services, currently offering coverage in more than a dozen states including California and Illinois, and working with over 8,500 agencies nationwide.

Topics Nebraska
The Biden administration said Wednesday it is hiring more federal firefighters  and immediately raising their pay  as officials ramp up response efforts in the face of a severe drought that is setting the stage for another destructive summer of intense wildfires across the West.

President Joe Biden announced the moves during a virtual meeting with governors from Western states and as a huge swath of the Pacific Northwest endures one of the worst heat waves in recent memory. Temperatures in Portland, Oregon, soared to a record 116 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, a fact Biden cited as a wake-up call to the rest of the public about the realities of climate change.

The truth is were playing catch-up on preparing for extreme heat and wildfires, Biden said, calling federal efforts under-resourced compared with the deadly threat posed by climate change and extreme drought.

Thats going to change and we have to do it,? Biden told the governors. We cant cut corners when it comes to managing our wildfires or supporting our firefighters. Right now we have to act and act fast.?

Recalling horrific scenes from wildfires in California and other states last year, Biden said, Orange skies look like end-of-days smoke and ash.?

Severe Drought

Bidens plan would ensure that no one fighting wildland fires is making less than $15 per hour and would add or convert to full-time nearly 1,000 firefighters across a host of agencies.

Because of climate change, wildland firefighting is no longer a seasonal endeavor, the White House said in a statement. With fire seasons turning into fire years, it is imperative to have a year-round workforce that is available to respond at any time  and is available to undertake preventive actions such as cutting down small trees and brush that serve as fuel to fires that are increasing in size and intensity.

Western states have been parched by severe drought and record heat that has burned more than 2,300 square miles (5,900 square kilometers) this year. Thats ahead of the pace in 2020, which saw a near-record 15,000 square miles (40,000 square kilometers) burned, killing dozens of people and destroying more than 17,000 homes and other structures.

Climate change is driving a dangerous confluence of extreme heat and prolonged drought, Biden said. Were seeing wildfires of greater intensity that move with more speed.

Biden has expressed dismay at the starting pay for federal firefighters, which is significantly lower than at many local and state fire agencies. Pay for new federal firefighters typically starts at $13 per hour.

The pay raise will come in the form of retention incentives and by providing additional bonuses to those working on the front lines. More experienced permanent firefighters could also be eligible for a 10% retention incentive. Temporary firefighters will be eligible to receive some incentive pay under the plan.

Wednesdays meeting included eight Western governors, including six Democrats and two Republicans.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said he was pleased to be working with the White House, rather than as sparring partners, as he described his states relationship with the Trump administration. We were debating raking policies in forests, Newsom said, referring to comments by then-President Donald Trump that the state should rake its forests to reduce the risk of wildfires.

With climate change, the wildfire seasons are only to get worse, Newsom and other governors said. The hots are getting hotter, the dries are getting drier, Newsom said.

Three Republican governors, Greg Gianforte of Montana, Brad Little of Idaho and Doug Ducey of Arizona, said they were disappointed at their exclusion from the White House meeting.

It is critical to engage governors fully and directly to have a productive discussion about how the federal government can improve its wildfire response and prevention efforts, Gianforte and Little wrote in a letter to Biden.

A White House spokesman said the invited governors represented a cross-section of states impacted by wildfires and said Biden will continue to work with governors from both parties on the issue.

The meeting with the governors came as the White House released a memo confirming its commitment to a clean energy standard, tax credits and 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles, among other climate goals as officials pursue a two-track approach on infrastructure.

A memo by climate adviser Gina McCarthy and White House senior adviser Anita Dunn also pledges at least $10 billion to conserve and restore public lands and waters, address environmental injustice and create a Civilian Climate Corps to complete projects related to climate change and clean energy.

The memo responds to criticism from environmental groups and other progressives who are frustrated that many climate-related initiatives were cut out of a bipartisan infrastructure plan announced last week.

We know more work needs to be done, which is why President Biden will continue championing the nearly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and a separate, larger plan Biden and fellow Democrats aim to approve along party lines, the memo said.

On wildfires, administration officials have pledged to work with Congress to find a permanent fix to increase firefighter pay and convert more seasonal wildland firefighters to year-round workers.

The U.S. Forest Service and Interior Department combine to employ about 15,000 firefighters. Roughly 70% are full-time and 30% are seasonal. Those figures used to be reversed, but have changed as fire seasons have grown longer and more severe.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat who has pushed the administration to ramp up its wildfire response, said Congress can and should bolster these efforts with legislation to lift a cap on overtime pay, create a permanent firefighting workforce and expand work to remove hazardous fuels to lessen fire risk.

The ongoing infrastructure debate in Congress gives us an essential chance to get this and other wildfire prevention efforts done, Wyden said.

The meeting with governors came as Arizona marked the eighth anniversary of a 2013 wildfire that killed 19 members of an elite firefighting team. First lady Jill Biden, visiting a middle school in Phoenix, said her heart, her husbands heart and I know all of your hearts are with the surviving families.

Associated Press writers Keith Ridler in Boise, Idaho, Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, and Darlene Superville in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Climate Change
As the next digital pandemic, cyber risks are increasingly becoming a problem for insurers themselves, according to an industry expert.

With a lack of controls at [an] insurer, [you] could have catastrophic damages to an entire portfolio, said Jack Kudale, founder and CEO of Cowbell Cyber, an insurtech and managing general agency (MGA) that provides cyber insurance and related services to small and medium-sized businesses.

Kudale, speaking during a CEO panel discussion at the 2021 Global Insurance Symposium in Des Moines on June 29, referred to cyber risks as the next digital pandemic, and said insurers must protect both their customers and themselves with equal measure.

In other words, insurers themselves are now targets.

It is imperative that not only we protect with modern technology and innovation needed in this market, but you also protect your own infrastructure, because cyber criminals are looking for crown jewels, and where else would you go if not an insurer itself that is insuring cyber risks, Kudale added.

Panelist Jessica Snyder, president and CEO of GuideOne Insurance, agreed.

We just went through our own internal cyber risk internal assessment, Snyder said. [Ransomware criminals] can take over data centers and encrypt how to get to backups  This is a real issue our industry needs to be concerned about.

Snyder said that GuideOne, a specialty insurer for churches, spends about 6 percent of its total budget on cyber issues, focused on areas such as general protection, dual authentication and other related employee training. But these efforts, she said, are just table stakes. Insurers dont understand at this point the true costs behind cyber risk, she added.

We are insuring parts where we truly dont understand what the cost is, Snyder said. This is a huge issue we CEOs need to be on top of, to be aware of what is out there and what the threats are.

Both executives comments come in the wake of a massive ransomware attack against Chicago-based insurer CNA earlier this year. The company reportedly paid a $40 million ransom to end the incident.

Colonial Pipeline also was slammed with a massive ransomware attack in May, impairing oil deliveries on much of the U.S. East Coast. The company paid a $4.4 million ransom to get the pipeline operating again, according to reports.

Supply Line Ransomware Targets

Kudale said that ransomware threats will stay with the insurance industry for a long time, though he admitted that frequency and severity will be very different as we make progress.

He agrees that third-party or supply chain risks for businesses are the next big cyber risk. The critical issue, he said, is how to proactively patrol to ensure cyber security but also understand the nature of those risks.

Prevention detection remains the most important action, he said.

Republished from CarrierMaagement.com.

Topics Carriers Cyber Fraud
The nations largest property/casualty insurance organization is defending ransom payment reimbursements by insurers in a new set of principles stressing that the insurance industry wants to partner with government and business to improve cybersecurity.

The insurers say they must be permitted to provide reimbursement coverage for the policyholders payment of ransom for cyber extortion, subject to applicable sanction and other laws.

This principle is consistent with the long-standing approach to the parallel issue of crime or kidnap & ransom coverages, which are allowed by regulators so long as those payments do not violate sanctions laws, the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) said in releasing its Cyber Extortion/Ransomware Guiding Principles.

Recent ransomware attacks on Colonial Pipeline, beef producer JBS USA, and CNA Insurance among others have re-ignited a debate over whether victims of attacks should pay ransom, and whether doing so encourages more attacks.

Public-Private Partners The APCIAs principles stress the view that the ransomware problem cannot be resolved with insurance-centric policy changes: Insurance can play a role in enhancing resiliency, but ultimately cannot cure the criminal behavior that perpetuates the ransomware problem. For this reason, there must be a holistic approach that focuses on the core drivers of the criminal behavior utilizing the expertise of all stakeholders. Government should not rely on insurers as its due diligence mechanism for monitoring business compliance and implementation of security measures, the group says in its principles. APCIA members include many of the nations best-known P/C insurance companies; all told its members represent nearly 60% of the nations property/casualty market share. Some of the APCIA guiding principles on dealing with ransomware attacks include: The insurance industry wants to partner with government and policyholders to help drive policy objectives that will increase cyber resiliency and support competition.

Creating greater cyber resiliency is a societal obligation achievable with the involvement of both the public and private sectors coming together to identify the core drivers of ransomware incidents, and cyber threats generally.

Cyber threat information sharing by government and impacted businesses with strong liability protections can increase timely detection, response, and deterrence measures.

Subject to applicable sanction and other laws, insurers must be permitted to provide reimbursement coverage for the policyholders payment of ransom for cyber extortion. This principle is consistent with the long-standing approach to the parallel issue of crime or kidnap & ransom coverages, which are allowed by regulators so long as those payments do not violate sanctions laws.

Insurance is an important economic recovery resource for victims of ransomware attacks. Prohibitions on the reimbursement of legal ransom payments presents potential unintended consequence such as eliminating a meaningful risk management resource.

The ransomware problem cannot be resolved with insurance-centric policy changes. Insurance can play a role in enhancing resiliency, but ultimately cannot cure the criminal behavior that perpetuates the ransomware problem. For this reason, there must be a holistic approach that focuses on the core drivers of the criminal behavior utilizing the expertise of all stakeholders.

Government should not rely on insurers as its due diligence mechanism for monitoring business compliance and implementation of security measures.

APCIA is worried that prohibitions on the reimbursement of ransom payments present potential unintended consequences such as eliminating a meaningful risk management resource.

Some have argued that businesses sometimes have no option except to meet the ransom demands, while stressing that the insured, not insurer, makes the call. Many businesses purchase cyber insurance because it offers ransom payment coverage and if that is not allowed, smaller businesses that could not afford the payments without insurance would be harmed far more than larger business that can pay, they contend.

Pipeline Ransomware Attack Stirs Debate on Whether Insurance Attracts Hackers

R.J. Lehmann, senior fellow at the think tank International Center for Law & Economics, says he does not think a ban would work and could encourage more attacks on high-value targets.

The urge to ban ransom payments is understandable and, in an ideal world where it could be enforced nearly all of the time, perhaps it would even be a good idea. But in the real world, so long as the damage inflicted by a cyber attack is greater than the cost of the ransom, we can predict that ransoms would be paid surreptitiously. Rather than taking away the incentive to engage in such attacks, a ban on ransom payments would be likely to shift hackers focus to the highest value targets where an interruption would do the most damage to society, Lehmann told Insurance Journal.

Others question the idea that criminals choose their victims because of the presence of insurance. Adam Lantrip, with insurance broker CAC Specialty, told Bloomberg recently that criminals are more likely to target firms with system vulnerabilities.

I dont think its as binary of a process of saying, This company buys cyber insurance and so Im going to go after them,' said Lantrip, the cyber practice leader at CAC. He said it is more likely that the attackers are looking at who is showing the world a particular piece of technology that they know they can exploit. Thats how they narrow their target list.

However, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and others in government have warned against businesses paying ransom out of concern it encourages more attacks.

It is our policy, it is our guidance from the FBI, that companies should not pay the ransom, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress recently.

The National Security Council has said private companies should not pay ransom, not only because doing so enriches malicious actors, but also because there is no guarantee companies get their data back.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has signaled that a ban on ransomware payments might be a good idea. We need to send this strong message that paying of ransomware only exacerbates and accelerates this problem. You are encouraging the bad actors when that happens, she told NBC news.

The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) this week issued new guidance on preventing ransomware attacks. DFS said that it is joining the FBI in recommending that companies avoid making ransomware payments if their networks are compromised, maintaining that larger extortion payments have financed the development of more effective hacking and ransomware tools and added more hackers to their ranks.

As reported, cybercriminals are not only extorting individual companies but also jeopardizing the stability of the financial services industry. We must all do our part to prevent ransomware incidents, stated DFS Superintendent Linda Lacewell.

One global insurance company, AXA, announced in May it will stop writing cyber insurance coverage in France that reimburses customers for extortion payments made to ransomware criminals.

Analysts at AM Best have reported the escalation in ransomware attacks is forcing insurers to re-think their approach to cyber.

As the ransomware demands and cyber claims costs continue to rise, more insurers may stop offering coverage, according to panelists at a Reuters conference. Meredith Schnur, a cyber brokerage leader at insurer brokers Marsh, said some insurers are not writing coverage, calling this is a hard market.

Others see the ransom payments as inviting their own unintended consequences.

Cyber recovery experts at Coveware contend that paying criminals offers few benefits to businesses. [V]ictims of data exfiltration extortion have very little to gain by paying a cyber criminal, and despite the increase in demands, and higher prevalence of data theft, we are encouraged that a growing number of victims are not paying. Over hundreds of cases, we have yet to encounter an example where paying a cyber criminal to suppress stolen data helped the victim mitigate liability or avoid business / brand damage. On the contrary, paying creates a false sense of security, unintended consequences and future liabilities, the company wrote in its blog.

Cyber insurance policies typically cover more than ransoms, including costs of restoring systems, business interruption losses, and reputational damage.

Insurers want to be partners with business leaders and policymakers in finding meaningful solutions for addressing the proliferation of ransomware attacks, said David A. Sampson, APCIA president and CEO.

AM Best Says Pipeline Attack Shines Spotlight on Cyber Insurance How Cyber Insurance Supports the Fight AGAINST Ransomware: Marsh As Ransomware Criminals Get More Ruthless, Experts Call for Multi-Pronged Response Putting Municipal Ransomware Attacks and Cyber Insurance in Context

Singling out insurance as a reason for increased attacks negates the holistic benefit of cyber insurance and takes a simplistic approach to a complex problem. We all have a role in this fight and insurers are ready to participate.

Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber Anne Neuberger agrees with the need for a private and public partnership. In an open letter to private companies, she called for cohesive and consistent policies towards ransom payments but stopped short of support for a ban.

The U.S. Government is working with countries around the world to hold ransomware actors and the countries who harbor them accountable, but we cannot fight the threat posed by ransomware alone. The private sector has a distinct and key responsibility, she wrote.

Joshua Motta, co-founder and CEO of Coalition, a cyber insurance managing general agency and security company, spoke up in support of the APCIAs guiding principles.

There is literally no industry better positioned to fight cybercrime than the insurance industry. Insurers have one thing in common that others (including cybersecurity companies) do not: a direct financial incentive to protect insured clients and prevent financial loss, Motta stated.

It is impossible to imagine how much worse the world would be without insurance. While some insurers are pulling back on coverage, and even eliminating it, and while there is chatter of public policy efforts to render extortion uninsurable, or otherwise prevent extortion payments from being made, it would be a tremendous disservice to the organizations impacted by these attacks to prevent the insurance industry from continuing to innovate to fight cybercrime. Not only do insurance companies provide a tremendously valuable service, they have a unique ability to encourage  even enforce  the basic cybersecurity hygiene that is so desperately needed. They can also do so at a considerably lower cost than organizations can do themselves.

Topics Carriers Cyber Property Casualty
Numerous measures relating to the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association were filed in the Texas Legislature in 2021 and four made it to Gov. Greg Abbotts desk.

One, House Bill 769, has only two provisions.

Authored by Rep. Mayes Middleton and Sen. Larry Taylor  both are coastal-area legislators  HB 769 prevents TWIAs board of directors from voting on a rate increase if there is a vacancy on the board that has existed for 60 days or more. HB 769 also prohibits TWIA from purchasing reinsurance from a broker or insurance company involved in the execution of a catastrophe model the association uses to determine the probable maximum loss (PML) applicable for the period covered by the reinsurance.

The bill, which has been signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, is effective Sept. 1.

Senate Bill 1448, among other things, requires that a vote by the board to raise TWIA premium rates must pass by at least a two-thirds majority. As to rate filings, according to the legislative analysis of the bill, it authorizes TWIA to enact a filed rate without prior approval of the state insurance commissioner if the filed rate does not exceed the rate, rather than does not exceed 105 percent of the rate, in effect on the date on which the filing is made; and the commissioner has not disapproved the filing in writing, advising of the reasons for the disapproval and the criteria TWIA is required to meet to obtain approval.

SB 1448 was signed by the governor on May 26 and goes into effect Sept. 1.

House Bill 2920 allows for a grace period of 10 days for payment of premiums on insurance policies renewed by TWIA. Signed by the governor on June 7, the effective date for HB 2920 is Sept. 1.

House Bill 3564 prohibits the Texas Department of Insurance from rescinding a certificate of compliance for a completed or ongoing improvement for purposes of coverage under a TWIA policy after a certificate has been issued. That prohibition applies to certificates that are in effect or issued on or after the bills effective date.

HB 3564 was signed by Gov. Abbott on June 14 and became effective on that date.

2021 Hurricane Season

TWIA has said it has access $4.03 billion in funding for the 2021 season, less the $4.2 billion that was available to the insurer in 2019 and 2020.

While various weather research organizations have predicted an average to above average hurricane season for 2021, none are projecting a season like 2020 with its record-breaking 30 named storms, 11 of which made landfall in the continental U.S.

Still, the 2021 season for tropical weather systems is off and running. Tropical Storm Ana jumped the gun on the traditional June 1 start of the Atlantic hurricane season when it became a named storm on May 23. And Tropical Storm Claudette dumped heavy rains on Southeast Louisiana before it quickly moved eastward on June 10.

History

Though it is not a state agency, TWIA was created in 1971 by the Texas Legislature to provide wind and hail coverage for properties unable to obtain such insurance in the private insurance market. The association does not receive funds from the state and is reliant on premiums, as well as other mechanisms, including assessments of member insurance companies, if necessary, to fund its operations and pay claims.

TWIA provides coverage for 14 first tier and 14 second tier coastal counties. In the five decades of its existence, TWIA has paid a total of $5.9 billion in claims, according to its annual report and catastrophe plan dated June 1, 2021.

The association was established in response to Hurricane Celia, which hit the Texas Gulf Coast in August 1970 as a Category 4 storm. Following Celia, which resulted in $390 million in insured losses, more than a half a billion dollars in total losses, and 16 deaths, private insurers began to pull out of the states coastal property market.

Topics Carriers Catastrophe Natural Disasters Texas Windstorm
A 15-year plan to abate the opioid crisis in a West Virginia community will cost local officials $2.5 billion, a forensic economist has testified.

George Barrett testified Tuesday that Cabell County and the city of Huntington would need to spend $144 million to implement the plan and the annual cost would rise to $197 million by the 15th year, The Herald-Dispatch reported. The governments have combined annual budgets of less than $87 million.

The testimony came in the seventh week of a landmark civil trial against three large opioid distributors. A lawsuit filed by Cabell County and the city of Huntington accuses drug distributors AmerisourceBergen Drug Co., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. of fueling the U.S. crisis. The plaintiffs argue that the companies created a public nuisance by flooding the area with tens of millions of opioid doses over eight years and ignoring the signs that the small community along the Ohio River was being ravaged by addiction.

The companies, in turn, say poor communication and pill quotas set by federal agents are to blame, along with a rise in prescriptions written by doctors.

Testimony this week has focused on the drug abatement plan and its cost.

Barretts findings were based on the report of Caleb Alexander, a pharmacoepidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Alexander came up with an abatement plan for the community he said could reduce overdoses, overdose deaths and the number of people with opioid use disorder by half.

McKesson attorney Timothy Hester questioned Barretts qualifications in coming up with the estimate, which he called inflated.

He said Barret is not an expert in healthcare economics and had estimated it would cost $12 million to run the harm reduction program, but another witness testified she was able to run such a program with $60,000 a year.

The Cabell-Huntington Health Department spent about $225,000 on its harm reduction program in 2019, but the abatement plan calls for expanding the program.

Hester also said the majority of medical claims are paid through Medicaid, not city and county officials. He asked that the judge to toss the testimony, but the judge did not immediately rule.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Virginia West Virginia
Pacific Gas & Electric asked regulators Wednesday to grant a $3.6 billion rate hike to help it pay for hardening its power systems to prevent deadly wildfires.

The nations largest electric utility requested the hike beginning in 2023, with half of the increase devoted to wildfire safety, spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo told the Sacramento Bee.

The hike would increase the average residential bill by $36 a month for gas and electric service, although the states Public Utilities Commission typically only grants a portion of any requested rate increase, the Bee said.

PG&E, which has some 16 million customers in central and Northern California, sought the hike as the state prepares to enter the hot summer months amid warnings that the state is likely to face one of its earliest and most dangerous wildfire seasons yet.

Much of the state already is in a drought and experts are predicting hotter, larger and fiercer blazes both in California and throughout the West.

The Biden administration said Wednesday it is hiring more federal firefighters, and immediately raising their pay as the summer looms.

The truth is were playing catch-up on preparing for extreme heat and wildfires, Biden said, calling federal efforts under-resourced compared with the deadly threat posed by climate change and extreme drought.

In Northern California, thousands of people were under evacuation orders because of a fire burning about 250 miles north of San Francisco.

PG&E equipment has been blamed for sparking some of the states deadliest wildfires in recent years, most notably in 2017 and 2018 when a series of wildfires burned down more than 28,000 buildings and killed more than 100 people.

The devastation prompted PG&E to spend 17 months in bankruptcy court, where it negotiated a $13.5 billion settlement with some wildfire victims. It also resulted in the company pleading guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in Butte County, where the town of Paradise was wiped out by the Camp Fire in 2018.

State investigators also have linked PG&E equipment to a 2019 fire in Sonoma County that forced nearly 200,000 people from their homes and a Shasta County blaze last year that left four people dead. The utility has estimated those disasters could cost shareholders more than $600 million in damages.

PG&E emerged from bankruptcy last summer but also has run into criticism for shutting off power to thousands in rotating blackouts during some dangerous fire conditions in an effort to prevent power lines from falling or being fouled by tree branches and sparking fires during high winds.

PG&E said it has been spending money to better forecast the weather, quickly detect downed lines and install self-contained power systems to supply electricity when safety blackouts are called.

However, the utilitys rate hike request was angrily condemned by The Utility Reform Network, a San Francisco-based consumer group.

This mind-boggling PG&E increase is a slap in the face to millions of California residents still hurting economically from the pandemic and struggling to get back on their feet, Mark Toney, the groups executive director, said in a statement.

Related:

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Catastrophe California Natural Disasters Wildfire Pricing Trends
Those aged between 18 and 34 years will have the choice to opt-in for a Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccine.

The Health Minister confirmed this morning that in an effort to speed up the Covid-19 vaccine rollout adults under 34 years will have the option to choose between the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) or the viral vector vaccines (Johnson & Johnson/Janssen and AstraZeneca).

Stephen Donnelly said this will allow people in that age group to receive their vaccine up to two months earlier.

The vaccine rollout among this age group will run on a two-track system running through pharmacies and through the vaccine portal.

From next Monday, July 5, around 750 pharmacies around the country will begin administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to those the 18-34 age group who have registered with their local pharmacy.

He said: "Next Monday pharmacies will begin administering Janssen to people aged 18 to 34, who have contacted their pharmacy registered with their pharmacy and said: 'I'd like to be vaccinated, I appreciate that I will be getting an mRNA vaccine in the future, but I want to get vaccinated earlier'."

Significant acceleration of our vaccine programme:



* 18-34-year-olds can begin to access Janssen vaccine in pharmacies from Monday. pic.twitter.com/Yhu5k7c4Xc  Stephen Donnelly (@DonnellyStephen) July 2, 2021

Mr Donnelly warned that supplies will be limited but the HSE say 53,000 J&J vaccines are available at pharmacies nationally with an additional 70,000 doses available at short notice "if needed".

Through July, it is estimated there will be between 205,000 and 210,000 J&J vaccines with more arriving next month.

From July 12, the 18-34 cohort will be able to go to the online portal to register for the viral vector vaccines.

At this time, people in older groups who have previously registered for an mRNA vaccine can, at that point, amend their record to opt in for an earlier J&J or AstraZeneca vaccine at a vaccination centre if they wish.

Those who choose opt for a viral vector vaccine through the vaccination centres will largely receive AstraZeneca, according to Mr Donnelly.

Asked whether there would be confusion about the new two-track approach, Mr Donnelly said the supporting IT systems were in place and that the vaccine system will record each persons details, including what vaccine they received and where and when they were given it.

Following a significant delivery of AstraZeneca this week, Mr Donnelly said the plan is to accelerate the end of the second doses for those aged 60 to 69 years and for all other cohorts who have received their first dose of AstraZeneca.

"Our intention is that in the next 10 or 11 days, everyone who has had their first dose of AstraZeneca - if they haven't already had it - will have their second dose," said Mr Donnelly.

Asked about people under 18 and the threat the Delta variant has on students returning to school, Mr Donnelly said: "For younger people from 12 to 15 the EMA has authorized the use of Pfizer.

"NIAC is looking at that right now, what I want to prioritise is 12 to 15-year-olds with underlying conditions.

"So, there's a huge amount of work going on to make sure that the return to education is safe and is safe for onsite learning," he told RTE's Morning Ireland.

Ireland has fourth highest incidence rate in Europe

Last night, 448 new cases of Covid-19 were confirmed here and the reproduction number of the virus has risen above 1.

A public health expert says Ireland has among the highest daily case numbers in Europe.

The Republic has the fourth highest 14-day incidence rate in the EU behind Cyprus, Portugal and Spain.

Buncrana in Donegal has the highest incidence rate of Covid-19 in the country.

The local electoral area's 14-day rate is 608 - which is over six times the national average.

The second highest is Dungarvan in Waterford, at 600 and Carndonagh, also in Donegal, is the next worst with a rate of 489.

Areas of Limerick and Dublin also have high incidence rates.

Last night, 448 new cases of Covid-19 were confirmed here and the reproduction number of the virus has risen above 1.

Trinity College Dublin School of Biochemistry Associate Professor Tomas Ryan says Ireland compares poorly to the rest of Europe with the Delta variant surging.

"Most of continental Europe is in a comparatively stable situation. We are not, our case numbers are growing and the Delta variant is becoming dominant in the Irish population," said Prof Ryan.

"For this reason, our experience of the pandemic right now is very different to what is going on in Europe."

The proportion of the Delta strain in new cases is estimated to be as high as 70%.

The National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) is predicting significant transmission of the virus in the coming months, with a possible peak of hospital admissions due to the spread of the variant in September.

It said cases are mainly being seen in unvaccinated and partially vaccinated people.

Over 23,000 people arrived into Dublin Airport last week

Scenes at Dublin Airport last week. Picture: Stephen Collins/ Collins Photos

The number of passengers who arrived into Dublin Airport increased by 15% last week.

Over 23,000 people flew into the facility - nearly 3,000 more than the previous week.

Over 13,000 Irish residents returned from abroad and nearly 10,000 foreign residents flew in.

The numbers are expected to rise sharply from July 19, when Ireland's due to opt into the EU's digital Covid cert.

Over 200 million people have signed up to get an EU digital Covid cert for travel so far.

The system went live yesterday but Ireland is the only country not able to comply with the regulation.

The cert proves someone has been vaccinated, had the virus or recently tested negative.
The Lithuanian getaway driver for a gang that terrorised a man into handing over 50,000 from the safe at his home in Midleton, Co Cork, is to be freed from prison to fly home  and not return for at least 14 years.

Defence barrister Donal OSullivan applied to have the case re-entered at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.

He submitted that the case was finalised last month with a three-year jail sentence but that certain key information was not put before the sentencing judge.

The re-entry was allowed and evidence was then presented that the victim in the case wanted the accused to leave the country and that he was terrified of the accused.

Garda David OShea agreed that this was so and that the victim was terrified of the accused.

Judge Sean O Donnabhain directed that the accused should be taken from prison by gardai for a flight from Dublin to Lithuania.

He said the balance of the three-year sentence imposed last month should be suspended on condition that the accused would not return to Ireland for at least 14 years.

The background to the case was that an armed gang broke into a house in Midleton, forced the owner to the floor, put a jacket over his head, barricaded him into a bathroom and snatched 50,000 in cash from a safe.

Raimondas Rapolavicius, of no fixed address, was arrested in Lithuania on a European arrest warrant and brought back to Cork last July and had been remanded in custody since then pending sentencing last month. The sentence was backdated to July 2020.

Guilty plea

He pleaded guilty to a charge of burglary on December 12, 2015, at Carrig Liath, Castleredmond, Midleton, Co Cork.

The judge was told that the accused had no convictions in Europe or internationally, was involved in this crime at a very low level and was very helpful to gardai.

The 38-year-old was using heroin at the time and was to have been paid in drugs rather than monetarily for his involvement.

Detective Garda Kieran Crowley said that on the night of December 12, 2015, three men entered the home at the address in Midleton, carrying hand guns and a Taser and forced the young man living there to the floor. They put a jacket over his head and took 50,000 in cash from a safe.

The three males placed the young man in a downstairs bathroom and barricaded the door and left in the vehicle which was nearby. The accused was the getaway driver.

The accused had the least part compared to others, the detective said.
Burma Almost 100 Myanmar Border Police Infected With COVID-19 in Rakhine State

Maungdaw border guard police / Min Aung Khine

Nearly 100 border guard police in Maungdaw Township, Rakhine State have contracted COVID-19, with the toll of coronavirus cases in the western Myanmar border town reaching 139 on Thursday.

Locals are concerned about a COVID-19 outbreak in Maungdaw, which borders Bangladesh, and some are now not sending their children to school.

People are worried as cases are increasing. Previously, people didnt wear masks outside. But they are wearing them now and some parents are not sending their children to school, Maungdaw resident Ko Maung Ko Latt told The Irrawaddy.

The infected police were recently transferred to Border Guard Police Battalion 5 in Maungdaw from central Myanmar. They were placed under quarantine upon their arrival in Maungdaw and tested for coronavirus. 96 of them were found to have caught the virus.

They are all in good condition. The only symptom is that they have lost their sense of smell, Dr. Nu Cathie San, the medical superintendent of Maungdaw Hospital, told The Irrawaddy.

Until the border guard police cluster was discovered, 43 cases had been reported in Maungdaw, with five patients discharged from hospital and the rest still receiving treatment.

Some of them dont have symptoms. The infections were only detected when we tested the contacts of other infected patients, said Dr. Nu Cathie San.

Former Rakhine State lawmaker and Maungdaw resident U Tun Hla Sein said locals are not following COVID-19 health guidelines.

People say they are worried, but they dont follow the health regulations. And the authorities cant effectively enforce them. They can only drive around the town and shout do this and dont do that with a loudspeaker. There wouldnt have been large numbers of cases if they had controlled the contacts earlier, he said.

Authorities said that people who fail to wear a mask outside of their houses will be fined as of Thursday.

In Thandwe Township, 31 COVID-19 patients are receiving treatment at hospital, said Ko Thet Lwin Phyo from a civil society organization helping coronavirus patients in Thandwe.

There will be more cases. There are people in quarantine centers who have not yet been tested and there are also the contacts of the infected persons. So there will probably be more cases when they are tested, he told The Irrawaddy.

A further spike in coronavirus cases will have a negative impact on Thandwes economy, he said.

Some patients are placed under home quarantine. They are wage earners who have to work every day to support their families. They are struggling to make ends meet now, said Ko Thet Lwin Phyo.

The economy of our town is mainly based on tourism and fishing. If there are more cases and bus services have to be suspended, it will disrupt the transportation of fish and prawns. That will affect the whole township, he added.

Nearby Ngapali Beach and its hotels are currently open to visitors, but there are hardly any travelers due to the post-coup upheavals, said residents.

Some schools in Thandwe have been temporarily closed after a school teacher tested positive for coronavirus on June 25. COVID-19 cases were reported among her contacts and other residents without recent travel histories.

Over 20 COVID-19 patients are also receiving treatment in the Rakhine State capital Sittwe. We are planning to raise awareness due to coronavirus spikes, said Dr. Kyi Lwin, the Sittwe Hospital medical superintendent.

The virus is believed to have spread from Bangladesh as the first cases were reported among cargo vessel crew who returned to Sittwe from Bangladesh.

On Thursday, 9,457 coronavirus tests were carried out nationwide, with 2,070 confirmed cases and 13 deaths recorded, according to the junta-controlled Ministry of Health and Sports.



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Burma Four Myanmar Civilians Tortured to Death in Junta Custody

Ko Nge Lay from Monywa, National League for Democracy member Ko Soe San of Wundwin and Mg Aung Aung Lwin of Shwedaung.

At least four civilians, including a young man and National League for Democracy (NLD) member, have been killed under interrogation by Myanmars regime this week.

The families of the four were informed about the deaths on Thursday.

Mg Aung Aung Lwin, 22, from Shwedaung in Pyay District, Bago Region, was detained on Saturday night after an alleged military collaborator, who recently moved near his home, told the authorities that he cursed coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

His sister said their parents knelt and begged for their son when soldiers took him away. The family was told that he would be released on Friday but on Thursday they were informed of his death.

The regime burned the body without the familys consent and only the ashes were handed back.

How can we believe this? his tearful sister told The Irrawaddy. My mother lost her mind while looking for him. How can they kill a young man for cursing Min Aung Hlaing?

The regime forces told the family that Mg Aung Aung Lwin died of internal bleeding.

His sister said some residents saw him being heavily beaten by soldiers on the way to a military base in the city.

In the same district, Ko Soe Min, 35, a father of two, was detained at his home in Pyay Township on Tuesday night after a collaborator alleged that he destroyed a public building.

The regime did not tell the family where he was being held and on Thursday told them to retrieve his body from Pyay Hospital, according to a resident. She said the whole body had torture marks and bruises while his chest had been stitched together. The regime said he died of an epileptic seizure.

U Soe San, 44, an NLD village tract chair in Wundwin Township, Mandalay Region, was detained on Tuesday. The family was informed on Thursday that he died of COVID-19 and told to attend his funeral.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) reported that U Soe San had been beaten by soldiers.

Ko Nge Lay in Monywa, Sagaing Region, was also killed in detention. The father of two was known as an active philanthropist who reportedly died a few hours after being detained under suspicion of involvement in an explosion in an industrial zone in the town.

He was reportedly helping those wounded in the blast when he was detained on Thursday. The family was informed of his death that night.

His family retrieved the body on Friday morning. His head and neck were blood-soaked and his face looked like it had been dragged along a floor, a neighbor told The Irrawaddy.

More than 20 people have allegedly been detained after the explosion following a junta raid.

According to the AAPP, at least 885 have been killed by the regime since the February coup and more than 6,400 have been detained. The activist group said the actual number of fatalities is likely to be much higher.



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Burma Myanmar Junta Invites Bids for New Solar Power Projects

A solar power plant in Myanmar.

The military regime is seeking tenders to implement 12 solar power projects to raise foreign currency, with some 40 firms including Thai and Chinese companies planning to make bids.

Bids for the 12 solar power projects were invited on May 24 and tenders are to be submitted by August 11. The projects are planned to be built in Mandalay, Bago, Magwe and Sagaing Regions and Shan State, with each one expected to generate between 20 to 40 megawatts of electricity.

Many of the companies that are planning to bid have no experience in solar power production. But experienced companies are not bidding because they doubt the economic feasibility of the projects, said a director of a local energy company which has previously bid for solar power projects.

The majority of domestic energy firms are not interested in the tender as the price of raw materials is soaring in the global market, while domestic electricity demand is unlikely to increase significantly as Myanmar is barely receiving new foreign investment.

Five Chinese firms: Union Resources & Engineering, State Grid Corporation of China, Huaneng Lancang River Hydropower Inc, China CAME Engineering, Power China Hydropower Development Group, and four Thai firms: Pro Engineering Co, SS Alliance, PCS Machine Group and Future Energy, have expressed interest in the project.

Among the local companies planning to bid are Myanmar Thilawa SEZ Holdings, a listed firm on the Yangon Stock Exchange, IGE Power Co, which is owned by a son of U Aung Thaung who served as Industry Minister for the junta that ruled before 2010, Creation Myanmar Group of Companies, which operate the Orange supermarket chain, and Ayeyar Hinthar Holdings, an agricultural firm which also owns Victoria Hospital.

Other companies interested include the Malaysian-owned Muhibbah Myanmar, RJE Myanmar, an Australian-owned engineering and construction company, hydropower companies and international firms.

When tenders were invited for the first time last year for 30 solar power projects under the National League for Democracy government, 52 companies submitted bids. Most were Chinese, with others from Japan, Singapore, Korea, Thailand, India, as well as western countries and local joint ventures.

Most of the tenders were won by Chinese firms.



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Burma Myanmar Regime Orders Citywide Lockdown in Mandalay

Mandalay during a COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020 / The Irrawaddy

Myanmars military regime has locked down the countrys second-largest city, Mandalay, due to a spike in coronavirus infections in the city of more than 1 million people.

Residents of the citys seven townships were ordered to stay at home starting from dawn on Friday, in an announcement made by the regimes Health Ministry on Thursday, when the country reported 2,070 positive cases with 13 deathsthe highest in both categories since the onset of the countrys third wave of infections in late May.

The townships reported a total of 68 positive cases on Thursday, according to the ministry.

The virus was first detected in the Southeast Asian country in late March last year. As of Thursday, more than 150,000 people had been infected with more than 3,300 deaths.

On Thursday, two more townships in Bago Region were also put under stay-at-home orders.

So far, 20 townships in five states and regions of Chin, Shan, Sagaing, Mandalay and Bago have been placed under lockdown in little over a month.

A local emergency team leader in Mandalay said the situation is now quite serious in the city.

Just today, we sent six bodies to cemeteries. All died of COVID-19. [They were] middle-aged to elderly persons, said U Khin Maung Tint, the head of the Parahita Min Khaung emergency team, on Friday. That was just the number available from one emergency team; the total death toll for the day could be higher, as there are other volunteer emergency teams across the city.

He added that patients were suffering more this time due to symptoms such as serious drops in blood oxygen levels. As a result, the city is facing a shortage of oxygen cylinders.

We have to keep oxygen cylinders on board our ambulances for the patients on their way to hospital, he said, adding that he had never experienced this before.

The regimes Health Ministry announced last month that new, more deadly coronavirus variantsthe same as those found in India and elsewherehave been detected in the country, warning that this would lead to a higher number of hospital admissions and an increase in deaths.

Despite the lockdown, however, it seemed to be business as usual in Mandalay, with schools and markets still open. According to the Health Ministrys announcement, people (workers and staff excluded) in locked down areas are supposed to stay indoors. One person per family is allowed to go out to buy necessities. In case of an emergency health issue, only two persons and a driver are allowed out together.

Its just a so-called lockdown. People are still out in the streets, said another resident.

Since late May, Myanmar has seen a rapid rise in new COVID-19 cases, after the junta relaxed restrictions and allowed pagodas, beaches and other public venues to reopen following their closure in April 2020.

The military regime also reopened public schools on June 1, after they were closed for more than a year due to the pandemic.



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Burma Parent of Telenor Myanmar Weighing Options Amid Reports It Plans to Sell

A Telenor outlet in Yangon / The Irrawaddy

The Norwegian parent company of telecoms operator Telenor Myanmar said Friday it was continuing to weigh its options in the country, a day after an industry publication reported the firm was planning to sell its local unit and had hired global banking giant Citi to handle the divestment.

Telenor launched its operation in Myanmar in 2014. As of 2020, it had 16.243 million subscribers and was one of the biggest foreign investors in the country.

In a statement issued Friday, the Norwegian company said, Telenor Group is in the process of evaluating various options with regards to its presence in [Myanmar]. The evaluations are ongoing, and Telenor Group will not make any further comments.

Industry publication TMT Finance reported on Thursday that Chinese buyers had been invited to bid on Telenor Myanmar, and that Ooredoo of Qatar, which already operates in Myanmar, had also expressed interest.

Telenor has been dealt a serious blow by the Feb. 1 coup, in which the Myanmar military seized power from the countrys elected government and jailed its leaders. Since then it has been forced to deal with internet restrictions imposed by the junta, as well as the human rights implications of continuing to do business in the country. In May, Telenor Group was forced to write off the value of its operations in Myanmar, recording a US$780-million impairment charge.

In yesterdays statement, Telenor did not respond directly to the reports of its planned sale of the Myanmar unit, and simply repeated its reasons for Mays write-off, which it said were due to the worsening economic and business environment outlook and a deteriorating security and human rights situation, with limited prospects of improvement.

It reiterated that its future presence would depend on the developments in the country and the ability to contribute positively to the people of Myanmar.



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Burma Seven-Year-Old Son of Detained Myanmar Health Official Still in Prison

Maung Aung Thukhamein Lin

Myanmars junta continues to detain the 7-year-old son of the former head of the countrys COVID-19 vaccination program, despite recently releasing more than 2,200 political detainees including 5-year-old Ma Su Thet Wyne, the countrys youngest detainee at the time of her release.

Maung Aung Thukhamein Lin, 7, was arrested by junta forces along with his mother, Daw Htar Htar Lin, the national immunization director at the Ministry of Health and Sports, and father, U Nyi Nyi Aung, at their home in Yangon on June 10.

During the arrest, Dr. Aye Aye Nyein, who is a friend of the national immunization director, and her daughter were also taken into custody.

On June 12, junta-controlled media said Dr. Htar Htar Lin formed the Civil Disobedience Movements (CDM) core group and assisted the National Unity Government (NUG), which has been designated a terrorist group by the junta.

The junta also said the doctor would be prosecuted under Article 17 of the Unlawful Association Act and Article 505(a) of the Penal Code for communicating with the terrorist organization and working with Dr. Zaw Wai Soe, who is in hiding and serves as the acting health minister in the NUG.

The military regime on Wednesday released more than 2,200 political detainees including Ma Su Thet Wyne, who was detained with her mother and sister as hostages after junta forces failed to find her father, Ko Soe Htay, a leader of anti-regime protests in Mandalay Regions Mogoke town.

However, the whereabouts of Dr. Htar Htar Lins family and her friends family are still unknown. The 7-year-old son of the doctor has not been released yet.

A doctor who is close with Dr. Htar Htar Lin said, The boy is very clever. His pet dog is also detained with him. This is unacceptable, as it has been 21 days. I pray for the urgent release of the boy.

Another friend of Dr. Htar Htar Lin said, Detaining the innocent boy means that the military regime is committing a worse crime. Please, speak out for the immediate release of the boy.

The friend added, He has been in custody for three weeks. How many of this childs rights have been violated? We dont dare imagine the boys trauma.

Meanwhile, the youngest detainee, Ma Su Htet Wyne, who was released on Wednesday, has been traumatized by her arrest, her father Ko Soe Htay said on his Facebook account on Thursday.

On Thursday, the girl and her father had to move to another location as the juntas forces are hunting them.

Ko Soe Htay said, She told me she had not had enough meals in custody and that she had to bathe in toilet water.

The 5-year-old girl was detained for more than two weeks with her mother and sister.

Junta forces abducted them as hostages after failing to find Ko Soe Htay at their home.

The father is on a list of those for whom arrest warrants have been issued by the junta on incitement charges for organizing anti-regime demonstrations.



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People released from Insein Prison on Wednesday. / The Irrawaddy

The United Nations has repeated its call for the release of all political prisoners in Myanmar, including President U Win Myint and State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, following the regimes prison release this week.

The regime on Wednesday released 2,296 people, including journalists, who were largely detained at anti-regime protests from February to June. Many of them were charged with incitement.

The regime had detained 6,421 people by Tuesday, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) human rights group. Despite the release on Wednesday, more than 4,000 political prisoners remain in detention, including National League for Democracy (NLD) MPs, protest leaders and striking government employees.

Eri Kaneko, a spokeswoman for the UN secretary-general, said on Thursday the UN was aware of the releases and remained deeply concerned at the continued violence and intimidation, including arbitrary arrests by the security forces.

We reiterate our call for the immediate release of all of those arbitrarily detained and that includes President U Win Myint and State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, she said.

The juntas arrests continue, forcing thousands of activists, politicians and striking government employees into hiding.

This illegitimate junta is not making positive changes, it is only trying to make the case to be given credentials at the UN in September, said the AAPP after Wednesdays releases.

They were arrested unfairly. If the release is really aimed at actual reform, all the detainees, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, must be released. Violence must end and those who committed torture and murder must be brought to justice, said AAPP joint secretary U Bo Kyi.

The international community must not view the release as a relaxation in juntas repression, said the AAPP. It called for practical pressure on the regime to stop violence and release all political prisoners.

People are overwhelmed by fear in Myanmar and [the release of prisoners] is like moving from a small prison into a big one. They are not free though they are freed. Whats more, their releases are conditional, said U Aung Myo Min, the human rights affairs minister in the shadow, civilian National Unity Government (NUG).

The NUG was formed by the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), a body formed mainly by elected NLD lawmakers from the 2020 general election.

The regime has declared the CRPH and NUG to be unlawful associations and terrorist organizations and labeled their supporters as terrorists.

Since the coup, the military regime has targeted NLD members, striking government employees, including doctors, journalists and activists to suppress the anti-regime movement. Dozens have been tortured to death in military custody.

Some detainees were badly injured during interrogation and are facing incitement charges inside prison, according to their relatives and those who were freed.

According to the AAPP, 884 people died in junta crackdowns from February to June 30.



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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk mentioned that the company is losing money making the current Starlink terminals in his virtual interview at the Mobile World Congress 2021 in Barcelona, Spain. Starlink has ways to go before hitting profitability, but that's not stopping SpaceX from going full speed ahead with global coverage operations beginning in August.

Starlink Satellite Broadband Service

The Starlink service is a subsidiary engineered by SpaceX. The service offers high-speed, low latency broadband internet with the help of low-earth-orbit satellites.

SpaceX and Starlink's goal is to launch a "constellation" of 42,000 satellites into lower-earth orbit by mid-2027 to provide Internet access all over the world, especially in underserved communities and remote areas normally not serviced by broadband providers.

Starlink is not positioned as a competitor of 5G and fiber but rather sits in the middle, filling in the gaps between the two.

Looks like a thin, flat, round UFO on a stick. Starlink Terminal has motors to self-adjust optimal angle to view sky. Instructions are simply:

- Plug in socket

- Point at sky

These instructions work in either order. No training required.  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2020

Musk told the audience in the MWC it's currently delivering initial beta service domestically and internationally to 12 countries including the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe. They plan to add more countries every month.

Originally, SpaceX president Gwynn Shotwell said that global coverage is possible by September, but Musk said it could actually begin service a month early.

A monthly subscription to Starlink currently costs $99. But if you want to purchase the kit, which includes a tripod, Wi-Fi router, and terminal to connect to the satellites, that would cost $499.

Losing Money in Starlink Terminal Production

Also during the virtual interview, Musk mentioned how Starlink loses money producing the current terminals, Business Insider noted. It costs $1,000 to make a terminal but it is currently being sold globally for $499, on top of the $99 subscription.

The company is currently subsidizing the costs and they are looking into building new internet terminals that will cost less to manufacture. Musk added: "We are working on next-generation terminals that provide the same level of capability, roughly the same level of capability, but costs a lot less. So that's one area of development for us."

UFO on a stick aka Starlink user terminal looks beautiful pic.twitter.com/1aog0FS1jq  Viv  (@flcnhvy) July 14, 2020

In turn, the reduced cost of producing the terminals should eventually decrease the cost for the customers as well. From the $499 price tag, it could go down to $300 or even $250.

Musk takes pride in Starlink's phase-array technology, allowing for quick switches between one satellite to another even when it's moving rapidly overhead. There is no latency or jitters from one satellite to another, he says.

However, there are also areas of improvement for the terminals, Ars Technica added. This includes being more heat-resistant as some terminals were hitting "thermal shutdown" in areas with higher temperatures, like Arizona when they hit 122 degrees Fahrenheit, causing users to lose internet service for several hours.

It also does not have enough capacity to serve a huge number of customers in high-density areas. Musk stated that they're well-suited to low- and medium-density areas.

Read Also: Starlink Stocks for Sale? Elon Musk Plans to Go Public But Not Soon, Tesla Investors to Get Preference

Starlink Hitting 'Strategically Notable'Number of Active Users

Starlink was able to meet a "strategically important threshold" last week as well. The subsidiary now has 69,420 active users and it could be more since the time Musk posted the tweet last week.

All 72 orbital planes activate in August, plus many other improvements, enabling global coverage, except for polar regions, which will take another 6 months  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2021

There is currently a pending application from Starlink asking the Federal Communications Commission to allow it to deploy up to 5 million user terminals in the US, Ars Technica added. Musk pointed out they are expecting about half a million active users within the next 12 months.

The company needs a bit more time before it can be profitable, with Musk estimating that it would cost $5 billion to $10 billion to deploy the whole high-speed internet service. Musk also mentioned listing for an initial public offering when Starlink cash flow is more predictable. He added he will give priority to long-term Tesla investors.

There are also agreements and partnerships in store for Starlink, including two "quite significant partnerships" with major telecoms companies.

Starlink has not announced when it will be exiting beta, even after announcements of global coverage in a few weeks. Ars Technica did note that SpaceX said it will deliver the Starlink preorders in the second half of 2021.

Related Article: SpaceX Starlink Available in August: Elon Musk Expects to Service Half a Million Customers Within a Year
Are you still waiting on your stimulus money? Many Americans continue to wait for their money from stimulus checks, plus-up payments and child tax credit. If you are eligible and none of these payments have reached you, then you might have problems with your registered bank address. Luckily, the IRS opened up a new online portal where you could update your bank account information instantly.

The government continues to send out financial aid to eligible individuals who need help in the recent crisis. In particular, they are sending out:

The IRS takes your information and eligibility from your 2020 Tax Returns, and the money is sent to your registered bank account by direct deposit. If the account bank is experiencing problems, then the IRS sends you the money by paper check to your registered home address,

Child Tax Credit Bank Account Information

Problems with your bank account that usually prevents you from receiving your stimulus money include these kinds of situations:

Wrong bank account registered: This happens when you provide an incorrect bank account number or register an entirely different bank from your current one.

Closed bank account: Your bank account might have been closed without your awareness. This happens when you have an unpaid debt, your account has declined, or you got involved with legal transgressions.

No registered bank account: You might have forgotten to include your bank information when filing your 2020 tax returns.

If you experience any of these circumstances, then you should immediately update your bank account information. Remember that paper checks have a longer processing and delivery time compared to direct deposit. If you want to get your stimulus money earlier, provide your current bank's correct details in the Child Tax Credit Portal.

Read Also: Child Tax Credit Tracker: Online Calculator and 2 Tools to Check Eligibility, Monitor $3,600 Payment

How to Update Your Bank Account for Your Child Tax Credit

Journal of Accountancy reported that the new Child Tax Credit Update Portal lets you update your bank account information online. However, any update made before August 2 will be reflected on August 13.

The new Child Tax Credit Portal also has a lot of other uses. You can use it to declare any important changes in your family, like the number of dependents or babies expected to come out this year.

You can also use the new tool to receive advance payments or unenroll from the Child Tax Credit monthly payment.

Child Tax Credit $300 Monthly Payments

IRS is scheduled to deliver the first wave of Child Tax Credit payment on July 15. Eligible families can expect $300 monthly payments until December. The second half of the $3600 budget for Child Tax Credits will be delivered after 2021 tax returns have been filed.

Eligible recipients can also opt out of these monthly payments in favor of receiving the money in one lump sum. More details are available in this article.



Related Article: Fourth Stimulus Check Tracker: $600 Payments Approved in California [Eligibility Requirements and How to Monitor]
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 
Macquarie Telecom amplifies network services for Perth disabilities provider Rocky Bay through mobile, SD-WAN, and NBN connectivity. Thanks to Macquaries assistance, Rocky Bay was able to conduct 2,903 tele-therapy sessions.

Macquarie Telecom is supporting Rocky Bay to improve its efficiencies, digitise traditional manual processes, and pioneer neuro rehabilitation assistive technologies by leveraging mobile, SD-WAN, and NBN connectivity.

Macquaries support enhances Rocky Bays mobile communication between staff and its transition of therapy appointments online. Macquaries assistive technology is designed to assist people living with paralysis and loss of speech to regain their independence.

In response to COVID-19, Macquarie has also launched updates to workplace processes at Rocky Bay. This includes the enhancement of mobile communication to automate shift covering and switching between staff who can now also exchange urgent information about customers, as well as a transition from in-person therapy to a virtual, tele-therapy format.

According to Rocky Bay chief financial officer Adam Maxwell, between April 2020 and May 2021, they have conducted 2,903 tele-therapy sessions. The new format, he says, has garnered positive feedback from customers.

We would not be able to pioneer emerging care technologies and make this kind of transition without Macquaries services, expertise and support, Maxwell says.

Macquarie says Rocky Bay became the first provider in Western Australia (WA) to offer the NeuroNode Trilogy system.

The NeuroNode is a small, non-invasive wireless electromyography (EMG) sensor grafted on the skin over the muscle. When a person attempts to move that muscle, the NeuroNode detects their EMG signals and uses them to allow control of a computer or communication device.

The NeuroNode Trilogy system also allows people to use eye-gaze control technology to operate devices. It uses infrared dual lights which shine on the eyeballs and triangulate the data to predict where someone is looking to locate a cursor.

The user can use one of these methods or both together by moving a cursor with their eyes and selecting or clicking using the NeuroNode switch. Along with this system, Rocky Bay also has various eye gaze devices that can be trialled and used by customers.

A Rocky Bay customer was quoted about the improved efficiencies that tele-therapy has provided her and her daughter.

The customer recalls: Prior to COVID-19 we had only attended therapy sporadically during the school holidays, so that my daughter wouldnt miss out on school. The transition to completing occupational therapy and speech pathology sessions online was scary at first, but we have had a lot of success with the format.

She adds: We have continued with tele-therapy even now that lockdowns have eased, and complete weekly sessions that do not interrupt her schooling at all.

The process upgrades and innovations are improving the lives of customers and staff at Rocky Bay, claims Maxwell.

The NeuroNode and eye-gaze control technology sound incredibly futuristic, but they are already here in WA and making such a difference in the lives of our customers and their families. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the capabilities of assistive technology, he notes.

Macquarie Telecom group executive Luke Clifton describes Rocky Bays work as nothing short of remarkable.

Since 1938, it [Rocky Bay] has made such a difference in the lives of Western Australias most vulnerable and their loved ones, and its constantly looking for ways to expand its capabilities and help more people, he says.

It has been a privilege to work alongside the organisation and play a small part in enriching the lives of so many, Clifton concludes.

Rocky Bay will continue working with Macquarie Telecom to roll out a number of other technologies to assist people with disabilities.

These will include artificial intelligence (AI) to predict when certain customer behaviours will arise, such as seizures, and initiate contact with a carer ahead of events, as well as virtual reality in customer homes.
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A mix of clouds and sun. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 89F. Winds light and variable..

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A funeral service for George Zickuhr, of Brownsboro formerly of Jacksonville, is scheduled at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, July 6, 2021 at Autry Funeral Home Chapel in Jacksonville. He will be laid to rest at Cathedral in the Pines in Tyler. George passed away on June 27, 2021. Arrangements by Autry 




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Tom Hallberg covers a little bit of everything, from skiing to long-form feature stories. A Teton Valley, Idaho, transplant by way of Portland and Bend, Oregon, he spends his time outside work writing fiction, splitboarding and climbing.
Teton County Reporter

Previously the Scene editor, Billy Arnold made the switch to the county beat where he's interested in exploring Teton County as a model for the rest of the West. When he can, he still writes about art, music and whatever else suits his fancy.
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Piney Grove Freewill Baptist Church has selected Dexter Brummitt, shown with and his wife, Phyllis, to serve as its new pastor. The church is located at 1004 E. Lakeview Drive in Johnson City.
FILE- In this Sunday, May 24, 2020 file photo crowds of people gather at Coconuts Caribbean Beach Bar & Grill in Gravois Mills, Mo. Several counties in southern Missouri are seeing a big rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. Those areas include Branson and Lake of the Ozarks, which are popular among tourists.
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Susan covers the towns of Somers and Ellington. She joined the JI in May 2021 and graduated from Skidmore College. She recently completed docent training for the Wadsworth Atheneum and hopes to start giving tours some time next year.
In a 45-minute summary of the judgment read out in court, judges sentenced on June 30 former head of Serbian state security Jovica Stanisic and his subordinate Franko Frenki Simatovic both to 12 years in jail. They were found guilty on five counts for aiding and abetting the commission of crimes in Bosanski Samac in Bosnia. The pair were not held responsible for crimes charged by the prosecutor in four other Bosnian municipalities and several towns and villages in Croatia.

Their conviction marks the first time Serbian state officials have been found guilty of war crimes committed in neighbouring Bosnia during the 1990s conflicts that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. But judges did not follow the prosecutions case theory which cast Stanisic and Simatovic as puppet masters pulling the strings of paramilitary units  including some of the most notorious Serb militias operating in Bosnia and Croatia between 1991 and 1995, the Scorpions and the Tigers.

The UN judges did rule that a joint criminal enterprise existed which aimed to drive out the majority of the non-Serb population from Serb-claimed areas of Bosnia and Croatia. More importantly, it found the purpose of the criminal enterprise was shared by certain senior political, military, and police leadership in Serbia, and that there was a link between the regime of Serbian president at the time Slobodan Milosevic and ethnic cleansing campaigns on the ground in Bosnia.

Milosevic himself died in a UN cell before judges could hand down a ruling on his alleged role in the 1991-95 war in Croatia, the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict.

Practical assistance

However, with regard to Stanisic and Simatovic the judges said it could not be established beyond a reasonable doubt that they were part of that joint criminal enterprise. Judges did not convict them of bankrolling and organizing a variety of paramilitary units operating in Bosnia and Croatia.

In the end the only units to whose crimes they were linked were those committed by the State, known as Frenkis men, Red Berets or simply The Unit. Members of these units trained a group of 18 men from the city of Bosanski Samac in north eastern Bosnia on the border with Croatia. In 1992, when Serbs took over Bosanski Samac, these men would go on to kill, torture and rape Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. Judges deemed there was not enough evidence to say Stanisic and Simatovic had authority over them while they committed crimes, but they did find that their practical assistance through training these men had a substantial effect on the crimes.

A cynical compromise

The trial chamber came up with a decision which leaves absolutely everyone dissatisfied, said University of Utrecht historian Iva Vukusic, who specializes in Serb paramilitaries during the Balkan wars.

The prosecution said they would carefully read the verdict to see if there were grounds for appeal, especially with regard to the charges the judges did not find proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Still, prosecutor Serge Brammertz said the convictions were a step forward in ensuring accountability for crimes in the former Yugoslavia. As senior officials in the state security service of the republic of Serbia, Stanisic and Simatovic contributed to the commission of crimes by paramilitary forces and other armed groups in furtherance of ethnic cleansing campaigns against non-Serbs, he stressed in a statement.

Stanisics lawyer Wayne Jordash announced he would appeal and slammed the conviction. They found one incident in one municipality and the evidence of that was weak, he told journalists outside the court. To me it looks like a cynical compromise that we have to find some way to convict him (Stanisic) to justify why they put a man on trial for eighteen years.

Longest running Yugoslav case

The case against these men is the longest running Yugoslav war crimes trial before UN judges. Stanisic and Simatovic were first charged and arrested in 2003 and went on trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In 2013, they were acquitted.

The judges ruled that the crimes charged in the indictment did happen. However, they said Stanisic and Simatovic could not be held legally responsible for them because there was no evidence that the orders they issued were specifically directed at aiding the commission of the crimes. On appeal in 2015, judges rejected this legal reasoning. Instead of making their own ruling, they ordered a retrial, even though the ICTY was shutting up shop.

The retrial opened before the ICTYs successor institution, the International Residual Mechanism. It has been going on, with stops and starts, for almost four years. Stanisic and Simatovic were largely absent in court, having been granted provisional release with their attendance waived for most of the proceedings. The pair was in court Wednesday, but if they had any reaction to their conviction it was not visible behind the medical face masks they wore in court as part of anti-coronavirus measures.

They have both spent considerable time in detention  some five years for Stanisic and eight years for Simatovic. That, coupled with tribunal custom of releasing convicts when they have served two- thirds of their sentence, means Simatovic is expected to be released soon. Stanisic may have to stay in prison another three years, but he was previously released on health grounds and could put in a similar request.

Outsourcing violence

In Wednesdays verdict the judges only linked Stanisic and Simatovic to their own secret police units but did not find they could be held responsible for crimes committed by other paramilitary groups in Bosnia.

Vukusic said the trial and the conviction highlighted the difficulties of a case based on paramilitaries who are operating across a border and are seemingly independent actors. This is a pattern that is seen in many conflicts today and will likely generate the same problems for prosecutors if those conflicts ever end up before an international court.

It is actually very difficult to get convictions for crimes when they are tied to units across a border, when there is no de jure chain of command and its kind of blurry because they are formally in a different territory, she said.

According to Vukusic, the tactic was used by Serbia during the 1990s wars. You create plausible deniability, this idea that you outsource violence to actors that are seemingly independent in order to stay far away from it and say: we have nothing to do with it, she explained. Its useful for states and as long as they get away with stuff because they outsource this violence, I think states are going to continue doing that, she added.

The Stanisic and Simatovic judgment was one of the last left over from the wars that tore apart Yugoslavia after the fall of communism, after former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic had his life sentence for genocide upheld earlier in June.
There was no formal cover up. It was just a social habit, that you did not touch in depth the issue of what happened in the colonies, says Maarten Hidskes, author of Thuis gelooft niemand mij [At home nobody believes me] and researcher into the crimes committed by Dutch Special Forces in Indonesia during the war of independence during the 1940s.

Its more than 75 years since Indonesia declared itself independent from the Netherlands, but still, everyone has his own family story, connected to the colony, he says. Hidskes own father was one of the young guys, twenty-three or four years old who volunteered to join the special troops to put down what was seen as a rebellion on the island of Sulawesi. Their commander Raymond Westerling became later notorious for his lack of remorse for executing criminals, and  according to some accounts  for having warned the recruits all about the bloody nature of the job they would be expected to do. The military actions only lasted twelve weeks, but the numbers of deaths over this whole period are striking. Official estimates are that 150,000 Indonesians and 5,000 Dutch died in the independence wars.

Violence was a policy, for the colonial power

In recent years, Dutch lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld took the state to court to demand reparations for 431 men killed by Dutch soldiers in a massacre in the village of Rawagede in December 1947. In 2011 the government finally settled the case, and villagers were compensated. First the Dutch state tried to say we were too late, but when the court rejected that argument, they started to contest all the facts we presented, she recalls. As the cases  because there were dozens of colonial crimes cases filed  dragged through the court system, the public debate around them began to change. The cases were kind of the starting point, for a change in public perception, Zegveld says, which had a knock-on effect on the attitude of the Dutch state which stopped contesting every little detail.

Swiss-Dutch historian Remy Limpach followed up with De brandende kampongs van generaal Spoor [The burning villages of general Spoor] in 2016, which showed that Dutch troops systematically used excessive force. For the really first time, his conclusion is that the violence of the colonial power was structural. It was policy, notes Frederiek de Vlaming, director of the Nuhanovic Foundation. In 2020, the Dutch King apologised for the Dutch forces killings at the time. And in February 2022, the results will be presented of a big research programme backed by the Dutch authorities called Independence, decolonisation, violence and war in Indonesia 1945-1950  the end of its colonial period in Indonesia.

The Dutch are most proud of their former empire

Will more facts from researchers change the ways that the Dutch public see what happened, and acknowledge the reality of the war crimes? Hidskes has more faith in the power of a recent fictional film De Oost [The East], proving highly popular, for which he helped with the scenario. He says the massive exposure of the movie and the presentation of the violence forces the main general public to at least discuss the matter. He points to online forums where people are saying to each other, hey, you have to see the movie. Its about your family, you know, see the movie.

Opinion polls though suggest that changing attitudes is an uphill battle. A 2020 YouGov poll showed that The Dutch are most proud of their former empire, even more than the British. Half of Dutch people say the old empire  of which Indonesia and part of South Africa were the most significant territories  is something to be more proud of than ashamed of, with another 37% saying they are neither proud nor ashamed. Only 6% believe the empire is something to be more ashamed of than proud.

Dutch museums contested heritage

Dutch museums are grappling with changing attitudes and how to present what they call contested heritage. At the Amsterdam Museum, artistic director Margiet Schavemaker had to deal with what she calls possibly the most contested piece of heritage: the iconic Golden Carriage, a ceremonial horse-drawn carriage with images celebrating the Netherlands former rule, traditionally used by the Dutch royal family on state occasions.

The gilded wooden carriage was built in 1898 and is decorated on one side with a panel called Tribute of the Colonies, which shows Black and Asian subjects bringing offerings to a white woman on a throne representing the Netherlands. It has been undergoing restorations since 2015 and the public debate around glorifying the colonial past is making its future as a royal mode of transport uncertain.

The Amsterdam Museum has taken care to present the carriage in context and not shy away from the controversy. Schavemaker, who is also professor of media and art in museum practice at the University of Amsterdam, says she hopes the decision to exhibit it would prove that showing this controversial piece will not cause bigger polarisation but that it can be situated so people come together and have a dialogue.

It has taken a long time for the Netherlands to face the possible downsides of colonialism, she says. We are a country with a national identity based on the idea that we are very tolerant and very open, she explains. At the same time, we do not want to acknowledge there is racism and there is structural inequity. She hopes museums can be agents of change and foster dialogue.

At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a new exhibition features objects from the collection, re-examined to tell the history of empire, trade and slavery. Dutch tentacles as slave traders and colonists spread far during the 14th and 15th century. One striking room in the exhibition chronicles the persons given the Dutch name van Bengalen  taken from the Bay of Bengal  trafficked to South Africa, Surinam, Brazil, the Netherlands, for labour.

Reparations for slavery: not that simple

The four largest cities in the Netherlands  The Hague joined in only this week  have called on the government to support research into their connections to the slave trade. They want a national day of remembrance. July 1 is being suggested. 2023 will mark 150 years since abolition.

Between the 15th and 19th century European slave traders transported some 12 million slaves across the Atlantic Ocean including some 600,000 on Dutch ships, according to the Dutch states official historical canon of facts to teach schoolchildren. In the 17th century the Dutch republic was briefly the largest slave trader. And while the republics involvement decreased later, slavery was still an important economic driver. Some 19 percent of imported goods were made by enslaved people and an estimated 5 percent of the national economy around 1770 was taken up by slave-related activity.

Zegveld is looking into potential cases for reparations for Dutch responsibility for slavery, but a ready-made case, if such a thing ever exists, is not there yet, she says. She notes the contrast that a public debate around reparations already exists, even without court cases, rather than the way Indonesian colonial cases helped to force open the issue.

Another comparison is with Zegvelds work on compensation for Holocaust survivors, where a lot of evidence remained of how the Dutch train company forced victims to pay for the train fare to be brought to detention camps and later concentration camps. With slavery you are taking about descendants who have generational suffering, but the specific damage they have from slavery is hard to establish in a tangible way, Zegveld explains. How a court can quantify psychological suffering and the impact of social position and extreme poverty would be one of many factors that would come into play. If It was simple somebody would have come forward with a case, she says.

Hidskes is working with Indonesian counterparts to research further and understand the stories  what he calls multiple histories  of those who experienced colonial rule: these stories are completely unknown in the Netherlands, he says. He recalls that in the 90s he felt shocked, insulted even, by those criticising the colonial army. But now, I try not to condemn my father, not to convict him, but also not to defend him.
Former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo flew into the Democratic Republic of Congo on Friday to attend a wedding bash thrown by his former jail-mate at the International Criminal Court, a source told AFP.

Just two weeks after returning to Ivory Coast after almost 10 years in detention, Gbagbo flew into Kinshasa and met Congolese politician and strongman Jean-Pierre Bemba as part of a strictly private visit, a person close to Bemba said.

Gbagbo will attend the wedding of Bembas daughter this weekend, the person said on condition of anonymity.

Gbagbo had recently said he had made friends with Bemba as both men were being prosecuted for different war crimes at the ICC. Both were initially convicted and later exonerated on appeal.

Gbagbo returned to Abidjan on June 17 after being acquitted of crimes against humanity by the ICC in March.

He was arrested in April 2011 after his refusal to accept electoral defeat sparked a conflict that claimed thousands of lives.
After the Trump administration executed a record number of people, the Justice Department will review their necessity and use, and federal executions will cease.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he will suspend the execution of federal executions from Thursday night and said the department will review its policies and procedures.

4 Attorney General Merrick Garland (Merrick Garland) said that the Justice Department will review federal enforcement procedures under the Trump administration Credit: Environmental Protection Agency

4 Trump executed 13 people within six months of presidency, hitting a record high Credit: Associated Press

The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system not only obtains the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and laws, but also receives fair and humane treatment, Garland said. This obligation has a special effect in death penalty cases.

Garland was referring to the procedures established by former Attorney General William Barr.

During the Trump administration, the Justice Department, which operated under Barrs leadership, executed 13 people in six months, setting a record high.

A federal lawsuit was recently filed against the agreement implemented by Barr, which included pain and distress risks associated with the lethal injection of pentobarbital.

4 There are differences in executions, such as witnesses claiming that Dustin Higgs was trembling during the death penalty shot

4 Joe Biden says he is working to prevent federal executions Credit: Associated Press

The Trump administration marks the first time in 17 years that someone has died in a federal execution.

In 120 years, no other president has overseen so many executions.

Trumps most notorious execution was Dustin Higgs, who was killed less than a week before Trump left office.

The main concern of investigators came from the different statements made by the executioners and witnesses.

The executioners of the 13 murdered prisoners compared the death penalty to falling asleep and a slight snoring.

However, media reports and other witnesses described how prisoners stomachs tumbling, trembling, and trembling from the injection, including Higgs, who was executed in Indiana.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on how it obtained pentobarbital for lethal injection.

Joe Biden himself stated that he opposes the death penalty and is working hard to implement policies to stop executions during his tenure.
A human resources consultant claimed that she did not take any action after she discovered that she had been bullied at the nuclear power plant, hoping to receive 1.17 million pounds in compensation.

Alison McDermott, 56, said that her contract with Sellafield was terminated in October 2018 after she reported despicable allegations of homophobic abuse and sexual harassment.

1 After she claimed that the owner of the Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant ignored bullying claims, the HR consultant hoped to receive 1.7 million in compensation Credit: Getty Images-Getty

Her claim was equivalent to 56,000 for each of the 21 days she was in control of the Cumbria Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

James Arnold of Ms. McDermotts company Interim Diversity of Ilkley, West Yorks told the Leeds Employment Tribunal: She raised concerns and she was brave to do so.

But Sellafield and its head of human resources, Heather Roberts, said the transaction was terminated due to deficiencies in Ms. McDermotts work on equality, diversity and inclusion.

Deshpal Panesar QC, representing Sellafield and Ms. Roberts, said: Even before she filed a claim, the claimant sought a settlement of millions of pounds from the NDA.

He told Leeds at the hearing that Ms. McDermott was prepared to ruin the careers of people she worked with.

The verdict follows.
Two U.S. officials said on Friday that nearly 20 years later, the U.S. military left Bagram Airport, the center of its war, aimed at expelling the Taliban and hunting down the al-Qaeda perpetrators who attacked the United States on September 11.

The airport has all been handed over to the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces, and they stated that their identities are unknown because they have no right to release it to the media.

One of the officials also stated that General Austin S. Miller, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, still retains all the capabilities and powers to protect the force.
According to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling, Philadelphia landlords who want to evict tenants who do not pay rent will have to continue to participate in the diversion plan first for most of the summer.

The eviction transfer program was created by the Philadelphia City Council at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.In a way, this is a response to the city Landlord and Tenant Court closed. It also aims to avoid a surge in the number of homeless people due to overcrowding People who lost their jobs during the pandemic.

The plan was extended to August 31.It requires landlords and tenants to mediate and apply for rent assistance to help them recover lost fundsThen wait 45 days before filing an eviction petition in court.

Judge Max Baer granted in an order issued on Wednesday Philadelphia City Courts Request Expansion of the deportation transfer plan, the local judge has said that the plan helps protect the resources of the municipal court system, while it continues to operate under judicial emergencies.

The Philadelphia eviction transfer program has been extended several times during the pandemic, the most recent being in April, and it will expire at the end of June.in Request extension, Judge Patrick F. Dugan, President of the Philadelphia City Court, also pointed out that Eviction transfer plan It has succeeded and promoted the judicial management of landlord and tenant cases.

Dugan said that as of Wednesday, the court had approved more than 2,000 work stoppages, and when the applicable expulsion ban was lifted, there were more than 900 outstanding work stoppages coming soon.Philadelphia suspends evictions Expires on Wednesday. last Thursday, The ban from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Extend to July 31.

Dugan later added: It is expected that the court will be overwhelmed by an eviction case due to non-payment of rent. The continuation of the Philadelphia City Court Transfer Program will enable the court to manage the backlog of evictions and anticipated use by landlords and tenants. At that time, a claim for possession based on unpaid rent was filed.

As of Wednesday, the city has received more than 33,000 Rent assistance applicationAccording to Dugan, he told the court that there are approximately 25,000 applications awaiting review, and $100,000,000 in federal rental assistance funds are still available.

Since the creation of the Philadelphia Eviction and Transfer Program, more than 2,300 pairs of landlords and tenants have met with mediators and housing consultants. As of Friday, about 57% of landlords and tenants have reached an agreement or agreed to continue negotiations. Inquirer.

The U.S. Department of Justice cited Philadelphias plan in a letter last week. State Supreme Court Judges across the country, Urged the implementation of similar strategies across the country to prevent large-scale deportations.
Experts say that the stubborn Prince William and Prince Harry and Princess Diana jointly declared that they have taken an important step in healing the rift

Prince William and Prince Harry issued a joint statement to pay tribute to their late mother Princess Diana, who unveiled her special statue in London today.

A royal expert said that their unified message implies that they have taken an important step in healing the rift.

Expert Duncan Larcomb told Fabulous: In the weeks before the event, the palace was really worried that they would make their own statement, just like they did when the Duke of Edinburgh died.

For most of their adult lives, William and Harry always made joint statements on all matters related to their mothers. Thats why William and Harry issued a joint statement last month after investigating the BBCs Diana interview. The reason they were so shocked by their own different statements.

The conditions of William and Harry are so bad that they cannot even make a joint statement on such an important occasion. This has always been unthinkable. However, by paying tribute to their mother and celebrating her 60th birthday side by side, William and Harry are healing them Its an important step forward in terms of the rift in the country.
Canadians wear traditional red and white clothing on Canadas National Day, wear orange, build monuments and participate in activities as part of the nations reckoning of the terrible legacy of aboriginal boarding schools.

After boarding schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan found what appeared to be human remains, many special events usually associated with Canada Day were either cancelled or curtailed.

Cowessess First Nation said last week that ground-penetrating radar found 751 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Boarding School shortly after the remains of 215 children believed to be found in Kamloops, British Columbia.

Then on Wednesday, Lower Kootenay Band stated that a search using ground penetrating radar found 182 human remains in an unmarked grave near a former boarding school in Cranbrook, British Columbia.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in his speech on Canadas National Day that the terrible discovery of the former boarding school site naturally forces us to reflect on our countrys historical failures and the injustices that still exist for many people.

Watch | Trudeau celebrates Canada Day this year:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau shared their thoughts on celebrating Canada Day this year and how they talked about indigenous issues with their children. 2:54

Trudeau said: Although we cannot change the past, we must firmly face these truths in order to plan a new and better path forward. We work together to solve problems with the indigenous people, and there is still much A long way to go, he spent the day with his family.

The slogan Dont be proud of genocide ranges from about 200 people wearing orange clothes in the rain in St. Johns to an estimated 3,000 marching on Capitol Hill, where there is a temporary shoe monument symbolizing the passing of young lives .

In Montreal, marchers held banners that read Take our children home, marchers in Edmonton and other places wore shirts that said Every child is important, and the flag on the top of the Peace Tower was at half mast. , To commemorate the boarding school.

Sheena Ballantyne, who participated in the Edmonton parade, said: We are not asking for the cancellation of every Canada Day. This is a day of the year to commemorate these babies who were found to have never returned home. .

People marched for boarding school children at the Anti-Canada Day rally in Edmonton on Thursday. (Jason Franson/Canada Press)

In downtown Halifax, a group of 15 people read the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the history and legacy of boarding schools, and actions that could promote reconciliation.

In his Canada Day address, Perry Bellegarde, National Chief of the Aboriginal Congress, called for changes in the lives of Aboriginal people, including justice for boarding school survivors and the provision of clean drinking water for Aboriginal communities And healthy family.

Governments at all levels have the opportunity to take action on the priorities of the indigenous peoples, Bellegarde said in a video message. There is a solid foundation for continued progress, but there is still a lot of work to be done before all of us. We cannot lose motivation.

Jane Kigutaq, a kindergarten teacher from Arctic Bay, who now lives in Ottawa, protested on Parliament Hill when she found an unmarked indigenous grave in a boarding school on Thursday. (Patrick Doyle/Canada Press)

New opinion polls show that Canadians are rethinking the mainstream view that European settlers have discovered that Canada is making way for the First Nations of the land. A poll from Leger and the Canadian Research Association found that one in two respondents said that Aboriginal people discovered Canada, while one third said it was Jacques Cartier.

The same poll found that about six out of ten respondents had a positive attitude towards Sir John MacDonald, the first prime minister of Canada. Because of his role in establishing the boarding school system, his portrait has been displayed from various public displays. Deleted.

Jack Jedwab, the chairman of the association, said of the results: People clearly know what happened, about the terrible tragedy of the boarding school. But I think its with Sir John A. MacDonald. There are not as many people connecting as we thought.

Watch | Hundreds gathered in Montreal to denounce boarding school:

Hundreds of people gathered at Jeanne-Mance Park in Montreal on Thursday, not to celebrate Canada Day, but to condemn the countrys boarding school tradition. 1:00

Between June 18 and 20, the online panel surveyed 1,542 Canadians, but could not assign margins of error because the online panel was not considered a truly random sample.

Conservative Party leader Irene OToole stated in a statement on Canadas National Day that reconciliation must be the central focus of the future, but the work must first build the nations people, not demolish Canada.

We can celebrate the country we are now and the country we aspire to be, he said.

On behalf of the Conservative Party of Canada, I wish Canadians across the country and around the world a Happy Canada Day. pic.twitter.com/7VaPLqKZyU @erinotoole

As the marchers passed through downtown Ottawa, they passed a demonstration in the Supreme Court of Canada building. According to police estimates, there were about 300 people. They sometimes condemned the cancellation of Canada Day celebrations and public health restrictions, lockdowns and wear. The mask regulations accompany the COVID-19 pandemic.

The same sentiment prompted Calgary protesters to flock to the Canadian National Day parade to insult Albertas Minister of Health Taylor Sandro, his wife and two young boys. Others published in him. A short speech thanking the people of Alberta for being vaccinated against COVID-19.

In an interview with CBC News during a visit to the Ottawa Farmers Market, Trudeau said that he had spoken to people who were not sure whether to get vaccinated, and then they realized they could do this to help their neighbors and communities get rid of the pandemic.

A lot of Canadians understand that this is the way forward, Trudeau said in the interview. But at the same time, there are a lot of elbow bumps, which are still masks. Be careful because we can do more and more things.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Yangon on Thursday, the fifth month since the coup in the country.

The UN spokesperson said that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the Myanmar military to now release Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, which is five months after the coup detat and thousands of other detainees. The day after his release.

Since the army came to power on February 1 and overthrew Aung San Suu Kyis democratically elected government, Myanmar has been in turmoil.

We once again call for the immediate release of all those who have been arbitrarily detained, including President Win Myint and State Councilor Aung San Suu Kyi, Guterres deputy spokesperson Eri Kaneko said on Thursday.

Myanmar released more than 2,000 detainees on WednesdayAccording to local media reports, including reporters and other military figures, they were charged with incitement to incitement for participating in protests.

According to a law that criminalizes speech that may cause fear or spread false information, many opponents of the military have been imprisoned and some have been convicted. Aung San Suu Kyi is being tried for similar crimes and other charges and is still in custody.

Kaneko said: We are still deeply concerned about the continued violence and intimidation of security forces, including arbitrary arrests.

Burning military uniforms

Commemorating the fifth month after the coupOn Thursday, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Yangon, the countrys largest city, set fire to military uniforms and chanted democracy.

The protest is one of the biggest protests in Yangon in recent weeks, even though there are daily demonstrations against the military in many parts of the Southeast Asian country.

What do we want? Democracy! Democracy! the protesters chanted as they crossed the street in colorful smoke bombs.

For the people! Serving the people, they shouted in a video posted by Reuters.

They lit a set of military uniforms before dispersing.

Reuters could not immediately reach a military spokesperson for comment.

Since the coup, the Burmese army has been working hard to exercise power. It faces protests, strikes have paralyzed the public and private sectors, and conflicts in the border areas have returned.

The military authorities refer to their opponents as terrorists. On Wednesday, it released more than 2,000 prisoners, most of whom have been detained since the coup.

The Political Prisoners militant organization Aid Association stated that more than 6,400 people have been arrested since the coup. The death toll exceeds 880, and the military says this number is exaggerated.

The military stated that its takeover is constitutional. It accused of fraud in an election swept by Aung San Suu Kyis party in November. The former Election Commission rejected its allegations.

Simultaneously, Detained American journalist Daniel Finster His lawyer said he appeared to have lost weight, but said on Thursday that he was fine because his incitement allegation case was postponed to July 15 in a Myanmar court.

Fenster, 37, was detained at the main international airport in May while preparing to leave the country.

Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch Asia, said that Fensters continued detention was heinous and unacceptable and that he should be released.

Independent reporting of local events in Myanmar should not be considered a crime, he said in a statement.
The one-hundred-year history of the Communist Party of China is not only a history of revolution and revival, but also a cruel history.

From Mao Zedongs Cultural Revolution to Deng Xiaopings Tiananmen repression and Xi Jinpings anti-corruption campaign, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party did not hesitate to take whatever measures they deem necessary to ensure and continue to hold power.

This is most obvious in the case of party members being purged.

From general Peng Dehuai, who was tortured for opposing Mao Zedongs disastrous economic policies, to Premier Zhao Ziyang, who was erased by history for seeking to compromise with protesters when Deng supported guns and tanks, and Zhou Yongkang, the former security minister who reportedly threatened Xi Jinping Promoted but imprisoned for corruptionpolitical cleansing is a long-standing tradition of the CCP.

Here are some of the most famous people who have been cleansed:

Peng Dehuai

As one of Chinas greatest military leaders, Peng fell out of favor when criticizing Mao Zedongs Great Leap Forward, an economic plan in the late 1950s that tried to push China into the country through collectivization of agriculture and steelmaking in the backyard furnace. In the industrial age, as many as 30 million people died of starvation in the end.

Peng, who led the Chinese army in the Korean War and signed an armistice agreement to end hostilities, was appointed Minister of Defense in 1954. But he was dismissed after he called the policy of the Great Leap Forward unrealistic.

He was also one of the first victims of the Cultural Revolution, an extreme violent movement that began in 1966 when the fanatical Red Guards loyal to Mao Zedong began to destroy all the remains of Chinese feudal culture and eradicate the enemy in the eyes of the chairman.

According to the Peoples Daily, Peng was arrested in 1966, imprisoned and tortured, and the Red Guards beat him until he fractured his back. He died in solitary confinement in 1974.

Liu Shaoqi

From left: Zhou Enlai, the top leader of the Communist Party of China, from the founding of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 to his death, Chinese Premier Chen Yun, Chinese President Liu Shaoqi, and Chinas leading theorist Mao Zedong during the Communist Partys Central Committee meeting in Beijing in 1962. The communist revolution, The Chairman of the Communist Party of China and the Chairman of the Republic had a conversation with the modernizer Deng [Xinhua/AFP]

Liu, once regarded as Maos heir, is another famous victim of the Cultural Revolution.

Liu, who succeeded Mao as the head of state of China in 1959, was condemned by the Red Guards as a traitor, traitor, and worker and a capitalist roader who tried to defeat the communist revolution. He was removed from office and expelled from the party in 1968.

He died in 1969, but his death was not announced until 1974.

Deng Xiaoping

People walk past the posters of the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who launched the Reform and Opening program in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China on December 13, 2018 [File: Thomas Peter/Reuters]

As the founding revolutionary of the Communist Party, Deng was eliminated from the party twice during the Mao Zedong era (1949-1976).

During the Cultural Revolution, Dengs economic pragmatism and relationship with Maos opponents in the Communist leadership, including Liu Shaoqi, caused him to lose his party position. Subsequently, he was sent to work in a tractor factory.

In 1973, Mao Zedong returned Deng Xiaoping to the leadership, appointed him the deputy prime minister, and gave him day-to-day control of the government. But only four years later, Mao Zedong purged Deng Xiaoping again, this time because Mao was worried that Deng Xiaoping would change some of his radical policies.

After Mao Zedongs death, Deng became Chinas supreme leadereven though he did not hold the highest position in the CCPand remained the most powerful person in China until his death in 1997.

Lin Biao

In 1959, Chinese Marshal Lin Biao succeeded Peng Dehuai as Chinas Minister of Defense.

He played a key role in the Cultural Revolution and was later considered Mao Zedongs successor.

But according to Edward JM Rhoads, a professor of history at the University of Texas, by 1971, Lin Hes army had accumulated political authority beyond Mao Zedongs imagination. To avoid being purged, Lin desperately planned a coup but failed. The Chinese government later stated that Lin was killed in a plane crash in Mongolia on September 13, 1971 while fleeing to the Soviet Union.

Jiang Qing

On Friday, December 5, 1980, Chairman Mao Zedongs widow Jiang Qing appeared at the opening of the Beijing Supreme Peoples Court Special Court [File: AP]

Maos third wife Jiang Qing and her three aides were expelled from the party after Mao died in 1976.

As part of the Gang of Four, Jiang was arrested for his role in the Cultural Revolution and tried for treason and other crimes against the state. The organization was blamed for causing 34,375 deaths and persecution of hundreds of thousands.

According to reports, Jiang said during the trial: I am Chairman Maos dog. I will bite whoever he tells me to bite.

Jiang was sentenced to a suspended death sentence, which was later reduced to life imprisonment.

She committed suicide in 1991.

Chen wedding

As Mao Zedongs political secretary, Chen was the main translator of revolutionary leadership thought.

He was sentenced to 18 years in prison for crimes committed during the Cultural Revolution.

Hu Yaobang

On March 25, 1987, Hu Yaobang, the former general secretary of the Communist Party of China, had not appeared in public since December last year. He stepped down from an important position in January and reappeared in Beijing on March 25, 1987.Post when students demand democracy [Neal Ulevich/AP Photo]

Once a right-hand man of Deng Xiaoping, Hu served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1980-87.

In early 1997, after weeks of student demonstrations demanding greater political freedom, Hu was removed from the partys top position and was marginalized for tolerating bourgeois liberalization or the influence of Western democracy.

It was Hus death in 1989 that triggered a student-led democratic protest in Beijings Tiananmen Square. Hu is also believed to have helped correct the political fate of Xi Jinpings father, Xi Zhongxun, who was sentenced to prison during the Mao Zedong era.

Hu Yaobang ended President Xis 16-year party cleansing and restored his party status in Guangdong. This paved the way for the continuation of President Xis power and influence, and also paved the way for Xis rise to ultimate power in China today. the way. , China observer Bonnie Girard said in an article published in The Diplomat magazine in 2018.

Zhao Ziyang

In the early morning of May 19, 1989, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Zhao Ziyang went to Tiananmen Square to call on the students to go on a hunger strike [AP Photo/Xinhua]

In 1989, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Zhao, a reformist leader, was purged for refusing to declare martial law and sending troops to suppress the democratic protests in Tiananmen Square that year.

He later wrote in his memoirs: I told myself that no matter what, I would not become the general secretary of mobilizing the army to suppress students. In the early morning of May 19, 1989, Zhao even went to the square to beg the students to leave the school. area.The next day, Beijing declared martial law, two weeks later, soldiers entered the square and Fire, Killing hundreds of people, if not thousands.

Zhao was placed under house arrest and never appeared in public again.

Since then, his name has been mostly deleted from Chinese news media, history and websites.

When he died in 2005, the official obituary only referred to him as a comrade, and did not mention that he had helped lead the country for nearly 10 years.

Zhou Yongkang

In 2015, Zhou, the former head of Chinas security department, was sentenced to life imprisonment for taking bribes, corruption, and abuse of power.

He is the highest-ranking figure in Xi Jinpings comprehensive fight against corruption.

Zhous son and wife were also jailed for corruption in 2016. Reuters reported that the Chinese authorities seized $14.5 billion from the Zhou family and arrested or interrogated more than 300 relatives, political allies, protectors and political allies of the Zhou family.

This screenshot taken from a closed-circuit television screen shows Zhou Yongkang, the former head of security in China, who was tried by the Tianjin Intermediate Peoples Court on June 11, 2015 [CCTV/AFP] On October 15, 2007, Zhou Yongkang, then Minister of Public Security, attended the opening ceremony of the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing [File: Jason Lee/ Reuters]

A senior CCP official later stated at the 2017 party congress that Zhou and five others conspired to seize power from Xi Jinping. They are the famous politician Bo Xilai, the Politburo member Sun Zhengcai, the former assistant to the president Ling Jihua, the late army general Xu Caihou and the former general Guo Boxiong.

Bo Xilai was the General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee in Chongqing and was expelled from the party in 2012. Dramatic scandal His wife was accused of murdering a British businessman. The following year, he was sentenced to prison for corruption, bribery and abuse of power.

Caihou died during a corruption investigation, and the remaining three suspected of anti-Xi were also imprisoned for corruption.

Sun Zhengcai

Sun Zhengcai, a former Chinese political star and a competitor for the Chinese president [File: Wei Yao/AFP]

As a former Politburo member, Sun was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018 for taking bribes.

He was once considered a competitor for the partys top leadership.

A senior CCP official said at the partys 2017 congress that Sun and five others conspired to seize power from Xi Jinping.

Ling Jihua

As a former senior aide to former Chinese President Hu Jintao, Ling was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2016 for taking bribes, abusing his power, and illegally obtaining state secrets.

His wife testified in a trial against him.

In the same year, Lings younger brother Ling Qi was also sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison for accepting bribes.

A senior CCP official said at the partys 2017 congress that Ling Jihua was one of six people conspiring to usurp Xi Jinpings power.

Xu Caihou

On March 14, 2012, Xu Caihou, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China, which controls the Chinese army, and Bo Xilai, secretary of the Chongqing Municipal Party Committee, attended the closing meeting of the National Peoples Congress held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China [File: Vincent Thian/AP]

Xu, a former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China, was expelled from the Communist Party of China in 2014 on suspicion of taking bribes. The following year, he died of bladder cancer.

When announcing his death, the Chinese military said that Xus tragic and shameful life was over.

A senior CCP official stated at the partys 2017 congress that Xu was one of six people who conspired to usurp Xi Jinpings power.

Guo Boxiong

Guo, a former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2016 for taking bribes.

A senior CCP official stated at the partys 2017 congress that Guo was one of six people conspiring to usurp Xi Jinpings power.
San Diego (CNS)-Police are looking for an armed gunman who fired several shots into the air on Friday morning while escaping from police officers, then broke into an apartment in Normal Heights and stole a residents mobile phone.

The incident occurred shortly after 1:10 in the morning. San Diego police officer Tony Martinez said that at the time the police received a report that a car was in a parking lot on Adams Avenue near 34th Street. Loud music sounds.

Martinez said the person who called 911 also reported that the parking lot may be selling marijuana.

The official said that when the police arrived, a man ran out of the car and fired several shots with a pistol into the air while escaping.

Martinez said the man eventually reached an apartment building on Hawley Avenue, between Monroe Avenue and Madison Avenue, where he broke into one of the units and stole a residents house. Cell phone, and then flee on foot again. There were no reports of injuries.

He said that the police searched the car in the parking lot of Adams Avenue and found an AR-15 inside.

A detailed description of the suspect could not be obtained immediately.

Copyright 2021, City News Service, Inc.
Forget that Mathunjwa is mourning. She was also trapped.

Her nephew, Sicelo Mathunjwa, 35, was shot in the head on Tuesday night when Eswatini police used gunfire to disperse the crowd in Matsapha, a small industrial center about 35 kilometers (21 miles) from the capital Mbabane. .

Sicelo is dead. He died on the spot, Mathunjwa told Al Jazeera. She said that she could not leave her village of Mazombiswe to the village of Hosea of ??her nephew about 30 kilometers (18 miles) away, and because of the small inland country formerly known as Swazi Lans tension.

For several days, Eswatini, Africas last autocratic monarchy, has been shaken by the largest democratic protests in years. Security forces have fought on the streets with most young demonstrators who ignored the curfew.

Mathunjwa said that when the police opened fire on the protesters, her nephew, a garment factory worker, was a bystander. The protesters set fire to a building owned by Eswatini Beverages, which was partly owned by King Mswati III.

He was near the Matsapha brewery that night, the 59-year-old said in a telephone interview. My children went to the morgue to identify the dead body, and they saw a hole in the back of his head.

Activists of the two political movements, the Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) and the Peoples United Democracy Movement (PUDEMO), told Al Jazeera that at least 40 people were killed during the crackdown.

But in a statement issued on Thursday, the office of Acting Prime Minister Themba Masuku stated that no official report of the alleged death has been received. We will investigate these allegations.

Call for Political pluralism, accountability

Although protests calling for political reforms are rare, they are nothing new in Swaziland.

Tensions have been brewing for several months in this mountainous kingdom, where the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated socioeconomic dissatisfaction, and its monarch and his close circle have been criticized for living a prosperous life. Most of the population lives in extreme poverty.

The current protests are triggered by a decree issued by the king on June 24, which prohibits citizens from sending petitions to parliamentarians for democratic reforms. Previously, the public strongly protested that the police killed Thabani Nkomonye, ??a law student, in May.

Matsaphas businesses were looted and burned by protesters, but the presence of security forces on the streets made citizens vulnerable to the use of force.

Eswatini continues to have dangerous civil strife, including the use of lethal force by security forces, the US embassy in the country said in a statement. statement This week, noticed a communication interruption.

At the same time, a strict curfew has emptied the streets, and the airport and public transportation system have been closed. CPS stated that 13 of its members have been detained.

We are not surprised by the regimes strong reaction, PUDEMO leader Mlungisi Makhanya told Al Jazeera. We, the people, say we need to open up the constitutional space let people make their own choices about the way they want to govern, he said.

He told Al Jazeera: We need to transition to a new system where there is political pluralism and a leadership that is responsible to the people, not people who are hard-hearted against the monarchy.

Although this small kingdom with a population of 1.2 million supports monarchy, Mahania warned that Mswatis continued authoritarianism may intensify the call for republic.

Mswati became the regent at the age of 18 and inherited the throne from his father, King Sobza II, who banned party registration in 1973.

On the contrary, the countrys system allows candidates to stand for parliamentary seats alone, leaving no room for political parties to occupy a majority of seats in the parliament. The prime minister is appointed by the king who has all administrative powers.

The king has not resolved the protests all week-observers say this strategy is in line with the monarchys modus operandi when it is in trouble.

Eswatinis democratic sentiment is nothing new. Signal Risk senior political and country risk analyst Menzi Ndhlovu said that people have been holding this sentiment for decades, and the monarchy has been able to adopt the stick and carrot mechanism. To get through the difficulties. tell Al Jazeeras inside story show on Thursday.

In turbulent situations, the monarchy tends to remain silent until things are in order. Not surprisingly, the king remained silent while his generals and his police officers were doing work, to appease the people, and then when things were a little calmer. , He might come out to talk.

Acting Prime Ministers Statement: July 1, 2021 pic.twitter.com/f5hJYSKdTn -Eswatini Government (@???????1) July 2, 2021

Earlier this week, Acting Prime Minister Masuku dispelled speculation that Mswati had left the country. He continued to describe the protests as disturbing and shocking and told people to convey their concerns to the government via email.

He also maintains the deployment of security forces to ensure order.

The government has strengthened security measures to restore the rule of law, peace, and protect all emaSwati. We will continue to not tolerate robbery, arson, violence and all other forms of crime against businesses and peoples property, he said on Thursday. Said in.

A fire broke out on a road in Mbabane, the capital of Eswatini, on Tuesday. [AFP]

Call for dialogue

Lawyer and activist Thabani Maseko said the growing dissatisfaction with Mswatis repression of citizens could turn into a crisis of legality. During his imprisonment for criticizing the judicial system in 2015, Maseko wrote an open letter to former US President Barack Obama, begging him to persuade other world leaders to lobby for changes to the constitution.

However, Maseko believes that the only way out of complete chaos is through dialogue.

We are trying to reach a consensus with all stakeholders in civil society, trade unions, youth groups, businesses, and churches. We are trying to create a platform for negotiations with the government, but it is difficult due to the interruption of communication lines and difficulty in action. ,He says.

The only way to end this tension is if the government believes that dialogue is necessary to find a way forward, he said.

However, for exiled politicians like CPS Secretary-General Kenneth Kunene, the first condition for dialogue is the lifting of the political party ban.

Unable to return to Eswatini for fear of persecution, Cunene and dozens of members of his party found refuge in neighboring South Africa.

On Thursday, South Africa, a heavyweight in the region, expressed very concern about the behavior of the security forces and called on them to complete restraint and protect the lives and property of the people.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Clayson Monilla said: We are particularly concerned about reports of casualties and property damage.

Returning to Mazombiswe, Mathunjwa mourned the loss of his nephew and father of three children.

His father died a long time ago, and he had to take on this role, she said. He is the only boy in my brothers family, he is the only boy in the homestead, and now his sisters will have to take care of the family, Mathunjwa added.

We will remember that he is a caring person and communicator who unites the whole family. This is really painful for us.
Belgium 0-2 Italy

44. Italy has a second, what a good second!

Lorenzo Insigne showed how he likes to pass and shoot with his right foot in this tournament, and he is unlikely to execute it better than this.

The Naples man took charge in the center line and exploded forward. He skipped Youri Tielemans and then played with two backing Belgians as he approached the penalty area.

When Insigne flew up, there was no room for error, but it was absolutely perfect when it surpassed Thibaut Courtoiss outstretched arm and entered the corner.

Italy is completely in control.
The Boy Scouts of America reached a $850 million US agreement with lawyers representing approximately 60,000 child sexual abuse victims, and this may be a critical moment in the organizations bankruptcy.

The agreement submitted by the BSA lawyers in court on Thursday night will be one of the largest cases involving sexual abuse in American history. The document, known as the Reorganization Support Agreement, includes the BSA, the abuse victim, the local Boy Scout committee, and the lawyers appointed to represent the victims who may make future claims.

After months of intense negotiations, the debtor has reached a settlement with every official and major creditor constituency, the BSA lawyer wrote.

The Boy Scouts of America sought bankruptcy protection in February 2020 to stop hundreds of lawsuits against men who were harassed by Boy Scouts or other leaders when they were young decades ago. The document aims to try to reach a global solution to abuse claims and to establish a compensation fund for victims.

But attorneys for BSA, based in Irvine, Texas, have been unable to reach an agreement with the victim, the local Boy Scout committee, and the insurance company on how to allow the 111-year-old organization to continue operating while compensating the victim.

Thursdays agreement shows that BSA acknowledges that there are still disagreements between lawyers representing abuse victims and lawyers representing the BSA insurance company.

In a court document filed earlier on Thursday, lawyers from certain insurance companies accused BSA of allowing lawyers who abuse victims to rewrite BSAs restructuring plan to benefit their clients.

The insurance company wrote: Since only foxes guard the chicken coop, the result is completely inconsistent with what BSA claims is necessary for a verifiable plan and permitted by the bankruptcy law.

The insurance companys lawyers seem to worry that, among other things, decisions about insurance coverage will be made without their opinion.

The previous settlement with the insurance company

At the same time, the Boy Scouts lawyers also asked the U.S. bankruptcy judge Laurie Selber Silverstein to declare that they were not obliged to seek court approval for the previously announced agreement with BSAs insurance company Hartford. A settlement agreement reached by Germany.

Hartford agreed to pay $650 million to the victims trust in exchange for any further obligations under the 1971 policy.

The Hartford settlement was severely criticized by lawyers for abuse victims, who estimated that the insurance companys liability risk was billions of dollars. They made it clear that the victims would not support any plan including the Hartford settlement.

The Boy Scouts stated that victims of abuse may receive between US$2.4 billion and US$7.1 billion, including insurance rights. The lawyers of the committee, which acted as the trusted representative of all victims in bankruptcy cases, estimate that approximately 82,500 sexual abuse claims are worth approximately $103 billion.

Matthew Sturdevant, spokesperson for The Hartford, said that the agreement between the company and the Boy Scouts is a key component that drives this bankruptcy case to an end.

Studwant said in an e-mail: We are disappointed that the Boy Scouts of America chose to ignore the organizations creed of keeping its promises and try to abandon the deliberate and mutually agreed agreement that appropriately values ??Hartfords obligations. 

Exempt from liability

In a joint statement, representatives of victims and representatives of future claimants stated that the reorganization support agreement will free the Boy Scouts from bankruptcy, at the same time provide meaningful compensation to the victims and enable the Boy Scouts insurance company to comply with the bankruptcy protection order. Terms. Insurance policies purchased by the Boy Scouts and their affiliates for decades.

In the revised plan submitted two weeks ago, BSA proposed to issue a US $80 million promissory note to the abuse victims trust fund. It also proposed measures to provide up to $50 million in additional cash to abuse survivors. The proposed changes will increase BSAs proposed donation to approximately $250 million, more than double the previous plan.

According to a new plan that is expected to be submitted on Friday, BSAs more than 250 local councils will donate US$600 million to the abuse victims fund, doubling the bid earlier this year. According to the plan, BSA and local councils will be exempted from liability in exchange for their contribution to the Victim Fund.

A hearing on this case is scheduled for July 20th.
India has reached the grim milestone of 400,000 deaths due to the coronavirus, half of which have overwhelmed the health care system and crematorium in the second wave of the epidemic in the past few months.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic last year, India has recorded 30.45 million cases, making it the second most affected country after the United States, which has 33 million cases.

At least 604,000 people have died in the United States, and approximately 518,000 people have died in Brazil.

According to data released by the Ministry of Health on Friday, India is the second most populous country in the world, with 853 deaths in the past 24 hours. According to Reuters statistics, this makes it exceed the 400,000 mark, and the last 100,000 have increased in just 39 days.

However, health experts believe that India may seriously underestimate the number of deaths, and the actual number may reach one million or more.

In May, at the peak of the second wave, people struggled to keep up with the pace of death and cremation, and dozens of bodies washed up on the Ganges in northern India.

Underestimation of death toll has occurred in every state, mainly because the system is lagging, so this means we will never really understand how many people we lost in the second wave, said Riccio M. John, a professor at American University. Rajagiri College of Social Sciences in the southern city of Kochi.

Last month, Bihar, one of Indias poorest states, revised its total number of deaths from COVID-19 from 5,424 to 9,429 after the local court issued an order.

As of the end of April, there were 200,000 deaths in India, but it took only 28 days to reach 300,000.

During the second wave of epidemics in April and May, the hospital ran out of beds and life-saving oxygen, and people died in the parking lot and at home outside the hospital.

Since its peak in May, the number of cases has been steadily declining, but government officials and experts have warned that with the countrys slow reopening and a new variant called Delta Plus locally, the third wave is coming.

Shivaji Veer, 51, was a school bus driver who was blind due to mucormycosis. After receiving follow-up consultation at the hospital, he waited to take a taxi home [Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters]

Black fungus takes away some of the eyesight

The family of Saheb Rao Shinde believes that when the 65-year-old recovered from COVID-19 at his home in western India last month, the worst had passed. But a few weeks later, one eye of the income stamp duty supplier went blind.

During the disastrous second wave of COVID-19, thousands of people infected with the virus also suffered from a rare fungal disease called Mucormycosis, or black fungus.

To date, India has reported more than 40,845 cases of mucormycosis.

Saw a patient with black fungus in the hospital ward in Ahmedabad [Amit Dave/Reuters]

Many people like Shinde may never recover their vision after contracting fungal diseases, which can cause the nose to turn black or discolored, blurred or double vision, chest pain, difficulty breathing, and coughing up blood.

Father is healthy and doesnt want to eat anymore said the daughter, who asked not to be named. His tooth was also pulled out, very sad.

His daughter told Reuters in Mumbai that Sind is from Malaswada, Maharashtra, a dry region in western India, and he will return to work after he recovers.

Adesh Kumar, a 39-year-old farmer in northern Uttar Pradesh, is blind in his left eye. He had to borrow money to buy medicine, using some of his land as collateral.

India ordered stricter surveillance for mucormycosis in May because it poses challenges for COVID-19 patients, especially those receiving steroid therapy and diabetes.

Experts say that excessive use of certain drugs that suppress the immune system may cause a surge in fungal infections.

Charuta Mandke, Department of Ophthalmology, RN Cooper City General Hospital in Mumbai, said: We have seen many cases of mucormycosis after COVID because it is well known that COVID itself reduces immunity.
Maritime authorities stated that Libyan ships endangered the lives of migrants during the chase in the Mediterranean.

The Libyan maritime authorities admitted that a Libyan Coast Guard ship fired warnings at a migrant ship it was chasing in the Mediterranean, apparently to prevent it from crossing into Europe.

The Libyan Navy issued a statement late on Thursday, condemning any violation of local and international standards and laws and promised to hold responsible persons accountable. It added that Libyan ships endangered the lives of migrants during the hunt.

On Thursday, German NGOs Shots released by Marine Observation The video taken from the plane shows that the Libyan Coast Guard is chasing a blue wooden boat equipped with a small engine at high speed with at least two dozen people on board.

During the hunt in the international waters of the Malta Search and Rescue Responsibility Zone, men in uniform on the Libyan ship could be seen shooting at the ship at least twice and the bullet hit the nearby waters.

The Libyan Coast Guard nearly hit the ship several times.

Request for explanation

On Friday, European Commission spokesperson Peter Stano condemned the incident as worrying and added that the commission had asked the Libyan government to provide an explanation.

Stano said: We are checking the facts and circumstances behind the incident. Of course, we will follow up the matter very closely and ask for an explanation, and we will also investigate what happened.

The European Union trains, equips and supports the Libyan Coast Guard to intercept people trying to cross the central Mediterranean to Europe. So far this year, at least 723 people have died or disappeared on this route due to unseaworthy ships.

From the beginning of the year to June 26, nearly 15,000 men, women and children were intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard and returned to the Libyan coast, a record number.

The Libyan Navy also pledged in its statement to fulfil its duty of saving lives at sea and protecting the coast of Libya in accordance with local and international laws and humanitarian standards.
The prolonged drought in two-thirds of Mexico is likely to worsen in the coming weeks, and warnings of high temperatures, crop damage and water shortages are expected to emerge, including the densely populated capital of Mexico City.

Experts warned that after the temperature reached 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in parts of northern Mexico (including the main agricultural areas) on June 30, dry crops could reduce yields.

In some states, irrigation is actually disappearing due to lack of precipitation, said Rafael Sanchez Bravo, a water resource expert at the Autonomous University of Chapingo, who pointed out that low reservoirs have reduced water delivery to farms.

The drought in Mexico is similar to the drought in the western United States and Canada, where crop yields are threatened and water distribution is implemented under extreme heat. global climate change.

Due to record temperatures, nearly 500 people have died in western Canada in the past week Life-threatening situation For the elderly and disadvantaged groups. In the United States, high temperatures caused highways to collapse, public transportation in trouble, and rotating power outages.

A report by the US government last month showed that although the rainfall in Mexico as a whole last year was 3% below average, domestic demand increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, which intensified the pressure on water reserves.

A boat is parked on the dry land of the Sanalona Reservoir. Due to the long-term drought in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico, the water level of the reservoir is very low. [Jesus Bustamante/Reuters]

Hope to complement Mexicos Dry reservoir It now depends on the traditional rainy season, officially called the North American monsoon, which is currently underway.

Andreas Prein, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said: The next three months will be critical to the outcome of this drought.

Between July and September, most of Mexicos annual rainfall accounts for 50% to 80% of its annual rainfall.

According to data from scientists and the Mexican Federal Water Commission CONAGUA, water shortages are common in parts of Mexico, but due to extreme high temperatures caused by climate change, water shortages have worsened.

Approximately 70% of Mexico is affected by drought, up from approximately half in December. Approximately one-fifth of the country is experiencing extreme drought, and since 2012, this percentage has been less than 5% each year.

Experts worry that the drought will affect the 22 million residents of the Mexico City metropolitan area, which has been flooded by a network of reservoirs. Some areas have no running water at the best time.

Wildfires destroyed 90% of evacuated towns in Canada

I have no doubt that there will be a crisis by 2022, Sanchez said, and he anticipated social unrest. The reservoir is completely depleted.

Sanchez encouraged local authorities to invest in collecting rainwater for household use.

According to CONAGUA data, as of the end of June, Vila Victoria, an important water source in Mexico City, was 77 out of 210 major reservoirs with a capacity of less than 25%. Cracked lake beds can be seen in other places around the city.

Images taken by the European Commission satellite show that on June 15 this year, the Victoria Villa was significantly depleted, and on June 30 last year, it was half empty.

At this time last year, there were 56 reservoirs with a capacity of less than 25%. Two years ago, there were only 40.

According to reports, the drought prompted the government to plant seeds with silver iodide in three northern agricultural statesSinaloa, Sonora, and Chihuahuain the next three months, with the help of specially equipped Air Force aircraft. Causes rain. Statement from the Ministry of Agriculture.

But this years 28 million tons of corn production target is still at risk.

The situation is pessimistic, and we cannot deny that we are worried, said a senior Ministry of Agriculture official who asked not to be named.

It may be difficult for scientists to attribute any single event to climate change, But more extreme droughts indicate a rise in global temperatures, which researchers say is due to greenhouse gas emissions, Plein said.

Heat absorbs moisture from the soil.

This is a big deal. If you are already in a very dry area like western Mexico, if you raise the temperature, you will lose a lot of water due to evaporation, Prein added.
A political scientist who studies the provinces oil sector said that the offshore oil subsidies funded by the federal government of Newfoundland and Labrador are abusive of funds and are another step in the wrong direction for the provinces economy.

Angela Carter, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, said that it is increasingly difficult to see the government provide hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to oil companies without taking effective measures to build an oil-independent economy.

What oil producers are trying to do is get everything they can from the remaining reserves, Carter, author of this book in 2020 Fossils: The Environmental Policy of the Canadian Petroleum Said in a recent interview.

They rely on troubled governments like Newfoundland and Labrador [] Get support or bailout for the last few drops. This is not done for the benefit of the government, but for the benefit of private individuals. 

She worries that the latest offer-$205 million in cash and $300 million in royalties for Terra Nova field owners-will encourage other oil companies to seek similar treatment.

Since December 2020, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador has provided more than $280 million in funding to oil companies to restart projects at risk or keep them running.

The funding comes from a 320 million Canadian dollar fund provided by Ottawa to the province, which is dedicated to the safety improvement, maintenance and upgrade of oil industry facilities, research and development, and clean technology.

This is about our provinces work, Federal Minister of Natural Resources Seamus ORegan told reporters when announcing the grant in September last year. This is related to the future of our industry.

The royalty breakthrough sets a precedent: consultants

Until the tentative agreement was announced on June 16, the province had been preparing to abandon the aging Terra Nova oil field.

By providing rest time to its owners, the government will charge 35 million US dollars in royalties-about one-tenth of the total expected amount of the remaining 80 million barrels of the oil field.

Governor Andrew Fury and Secretary of Energy Andrew Parsons stated that if the project is not carried out, there will be no royalties at all. They said that because the funds came from Ottawa, the move did not cost Newfoundland and Labrador a penny, nor could it be used elsewhere.

We will recover funds from indirect work and the resulting direct work, Parsons told reporters in mid-June. I think this is a very good move for this province [] We have protected the future, saved jobs, and we are using resources for the best interests of the province. 

In October last year, Terra Nova FPSO anchored in Concept Bay in the Netherlands. (Paul Daley/Canada Press)

Rob Strong is a consultant for St. Johns and has decades of experience in the industry. Like Carter, he believes that the government provided Terra Nova with a $300 million royalty reduction, which is a precedent.

If I were an oil company, I would look for the same deal, he said in an interview this week.

Strong said he was worried that Newfoundland and Labradors negotiating position is not as good as we were led to believe.

He said that other jurisdictions, such as Guyana, produce the same light sweet crude oil, but with similar emissions but lower prices.

Layoffs in the oil sector

Carter questioned whether the government should provide public funds to oil companies, especially based on promises of stability and employment.

The industry is interested in mining profits, but we were told [] This is related to employment, she said. This is a double blow to the oil industry. 

She pointed out that a January 2021 study by Jim Stanford, an economist at the Center for Future Work, showed that despite the increase in production, the Canadian petroleum industry has been layoffs since 2014. According to the report, the petroleum industry is not a reliable source of future employment.

According to the welfare report submitted by the operator, in Newfoundland and Labrador, direct employment in offshore projects dropped from nearly 13,750 positions in 2014 to approximately 4,500 in 2019. This decline was mainly due to the end of construction of the Hebron project, which started pumping oil in 2017.

According to a report from the provincial offshore regulatory agency, as of May 2021, the provinces production level is the highest level in a decade.

A lot of (petroleum) jobs are construction jobs, and they are temporary, said Chris Severson-Baker, the Alberta Regional Director of the National Energy Think Tank Pembina Institute.

He said in an interview that once the construction is completed, the company will increasingly turn to automation and artificial intelligence to lay off employees.

They are cutting costs everywhere, he said. And this is before any real decrease in global demand. This is a response to the competitive price environment that has been around for some time for oil and gas.

The province says it is undergoing a green transformation

In Newfoundland and Labrador, these jobs are particularly unstable, and the government has not made meaningful efforts to build new industries for workers to turn to when the fields are exhausted, oras in the case of Terra Novawhen progress stops, Because the owner wanted to quit, Carter said.

She said that the government chose to hand over federal funds to oil companies instead of directly supporting laid-off workers through retraining or retirement plans. This is an abuse of funds.

Furey must create a [team]And let the people in the room figure out what will happen next, she said. We have provided a lot of public support and research funding to find out how to join this oil boom. So, now the same thing, we need to do it again. 

Fureys spokesperson Meghan McCabe said that the green transition is underway.

She said in a statement on Tuesday: We are developing a renewable energy plan for our province with a clear and sustainable long-term vision.
The coalition said that a drone flying toward the Khamis Mushait area in the southwest was shot down by Saudi air defense forces.

The Saudi-led Yemen coalition said it had intercepted and destroyed a bomb-laden drone launched by the Houthi rebels into the kingdom on Friday, the third such attack in 48 hours.

A coalition statement cited by the Saudi National News Agency SPA stated that a drone flying to the Khamis Mushait area in the southwest was shot down by its air defense system.

The statement added: Houthi militias continue to target civilians and civilian objects, and the coalition is taking action to protect civilians and respond to imminent threats.

The Houthis have not yet commented on the coalitions statement.

On Thursday, the US State Department stated that the USs Houthi attacks on Yemen have had enough, adding that these attacks are exacerbating the countrys humanitarian crisis.

According to a Yemeni government official, the Houthi armed forces fired two missiles into the Yemeni government-controlled city of Malibu, killing at least three people, including a child, and then made a comment.

Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia

In recent weeks, the Saudi-led coalition announced that it has intercepted dozens of drones launched by Houthi rebels into Saudi territory.

According to Liz Srossel, spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, since the beginning of this year, the Houthi rebels have launched 128 drone attacks and 31 ballistic missile attacks against Saudi Arabia.

The Houthis, which is allied with Iran, said the drone attack was in response to the Saudi-led coalitions attack on Yemen.

Since the Houthis occupied most of the country in 2014, Yemen has been plagued by violence and chaos, including the capital Sanaa.

The crisis escalated in 2015, when the Saudi-led coalition launched a devastating air strike aimed at reclaiming the Houthis territorial gains.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the conflict has caused more than 233,000 deaths.
Scottus News

after Amy How





11:04 am

Just before the summer recess, the judges added 10 new cases to the file for their next term on Friday, including a high-profile dispute involving public funding for private schools that provide religious education.

Busy Order In some ways, it is the epitome of the entire 2020-21 semester. Although the decision to hear the school funding case indicated that the court as a whole will continue to move to the right, the judge rejected another request to weigh the interaction between religious rights and the law protecting LGBTQ people, indicating that the court may not behave like some judges. Move to the right as you want.

New cases of public funding and religious education

Last year, at Espinosa v. Montana Department of RevenueThe Supreme Court ruled that although states do not need to subsidize private education, states that choose to do so cannot exclude religious schools from receiving funding just because they are religious schools.in Carson v. Makin, The judges will discuss the issues they have not resolved Espinosa: When a state implements a plan to provide students with funds to go to private schools but prohibits them from going to schools that provide religious education, does it violate the Constitution?

The court raised this issue in a Maine case in which more than half of the school districts do not operate their own high schools, but instead pay students to attend public or private schools in and out of the state. However, the Tuition Assistance Program only allows funds to be used for non-denominational schools. The challengers in this case are two groups of parents, David and Amy Carson and Troy and Angela Nelson, who hope to use the funds of the program to send their children to private Christian schools marked by the country as denominational so that the families are not eligible for funding. (Parents take Cardigan Hill School, a private boys school in New Hampshire, as an example of a school where the son of Chief Justice John Roberts attended, as an example of a nominal religion school that was allowed to participate in the program.)

The parents went to federal court, where they argued that their exclusion from the program violated their constitutional rights, including their right to exercise their religious beliefs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit supported the plan on the grounds that the exclusion of religious schools depends on whether the funds are used for religious teaching and preaching, not just whether the school has religious beliefs. The parents came to the Supreme Court in February and asked the justice to weigh, and the justice agreed to do so on Friday. The case will be debated sometime next fall.

End of the road Arlenes Flower

Three years from the Supreme Court Make narrow rulings In support of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, he refused to customize cakes for same-sex weddings because he believed that doing so would violate his religious beliefs. The judge on Friday refused to weigh the questions left by the Phillips case. Unanswered: When the state requires Does the artist violate the rights of the First Amendment when creating custom art for celebrating same-sex weddings?This time the problem is in court The case of Baronel Stuzman, A Washington flower shop and devout Christian, he believes in the traditional concept of marriage.

The incident that led to this case began in 2013, when Stutzmans long-time client Robert Ingersoll (Robert Ingersoll) asked Stutzman to design flower arrangements for his same-sex wedding. Stutzman refused, telling him that she could not participate in his activities because of her relationship with Jesus Christ. After Washingtons attorney general learned of Stuzmans refusal, he sued her for violating the states anti-discrimination laws, as did Ingersoll and his husband.

The Washington Supreme Court ruled for the state and rejected Stutzmans argument that requiring her to provide custom flowers for same-sex weddings would violate her right to exercise religious beliefs and free expression under the First Amendment. Stutzman came to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017, but the judges sent the case back for retrial after making a ruling. Masterpiece Cake Shop, The Colorado case. When her case returned to the Washington Supreme Court, Stuzman argued that the state court order would require her to attend a same-sex wedding, which would violate her religious beliefs, and the attorney general listed her separately as punishment for her religious beliefs. At the same time, it failed to sanction a gay man who drove a group of Christians out of a coffee shop he owned.

The Washington Supreme Court once again made a ruling for the state, prompting Stuzman to return to the Supreme Court of the United States.She asked the judges to weigh the pros and cons, to ensure that believers have the freedom to live according to their beliefs about marriage, and prohibit the government from mandating which sacred activities are worth celebrating. After four consecutive meetings last winter to consider the case, The judges put the case on hold, presumably until they were Fulton v Philadelphia, The city refused to challenge the referral to the Catholic Ministry of Social Services because the faith agency would not prove same-sex couples as potential adoptive parents. On Friday, the judges dismissed Stutzmans case, and the three judges  Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch  stated in a brief statement that they would approve Stutzman Request for review. Because the court will approve the review application with four votes, the fact that the three judges publicly announced that they will hear the case means that none of the remaining six judges voted for the review.

Please check back later for more analysis on Fridays order list.

This article is Originally published in Howe on the Court.
Beirut, Lebanon -A Lebanese Air Force helicopter flies over a blurred green field and snow-capped mountains, allowing visitors to overlook the Levantine country from above.

The photo posted on the armed forces website did not capture the seaside, was poorly shot, and failed to capture the vast beauty of the small Mediterranean country. However, at such a desperate moment, this idea is very clever and urgently needed.

Each ride is only 150 US dollars, but must be paid in cash. Since the economic crisis intensified in 2019, the countrys reserves are rapidly depleting, so the U.S. dollar is scarce.

The money is to help this financially-strapped institution pay the salaries of soldiers, while civilians are in poverty and cannot make ends meet.

Due to the collapse of Lebanons currency, which depreciated by 95% last month, the Lebanese Armed Forces were also affected.

The agency employs approximately 80,000 men, most of whom earn the equivalent of US$800 per month, but now earn between US$70-90. This is far from what they need to buy food, pay for commuting, educate their children and health care.

Sami Nader, a political analyst in Lebanon, said that if these forces are not immediately helped, jungle law will prevail.

They only make 2 to 3 dollars a day, and the soldiers cant pay for transportation. How do they guard the border and keep internal peace? Nader asked. All the elements of civil strife are there. If we dont have a functioning army, it will be chaos.

Moral authority

Since the end of the 15-year bloody civil war in 1990, the Lebanese Armed Forces have moved cautiously and effectively among the countrys many sects, maintaining internal peace.

Since the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah (an anti-Israel militia supported by Iran), they have remained calm on the turbulent border with Israel. They must also maintain a power balance with Hezbollah, which is often seen as their challenger.

They protect Lebanons borders from the armed group Islamic State (ISIS) because it expanded in neighboring countries and contained the threat of the Nusra Front-former al-Qaeda affiliates emerged in the Syrian conflict.

Moreover, it is the only institution in Lebanon that is respected by the Lebanese people and exerts a certain moral authority when the political class is deeply despised by its corruption and inefficiency.

A big hole in their pocket caused panic at the highest level. They worried about how to feed their men and their families so that they could continue to guard the countrys many troubled borders.

The Chief of Staff of the Lebanese Army, Joseph Aoun, warned in a video posted on Twitter that if there is no support, the armed forces may collapse. How can a soldier feed a family whose salary does not exceed $90? he asked.

Where are we going? What are you waiting for? What are you planning to do? We have warned of the danger of this situation more than once, Aoun advised the political class to abandon its indifference to the peoples plight and put forward a plan.

Possible disintegration

However, the ruling elites turned a deaf ear to the position of the cabinet and continued to quarrel over the cabinet position and were unable to form the government needed to negotiate a rescue plan with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). At the end of last month, Aoun rushed to France to win the support of the international community and rescue the armed forces.

The Chief of Staff of the Lebanese Army informed us of this issue, and we are very worried that the Lebanese Army may disintegrate, a French diplomatic source told Al Jazeera.

France has begun to provide assistance with food rations, medicines and basic equipment, but more is needed. We are trying to mobilize international partners in the meeting.

More than 20 countries participated in the meeting held in Paris in mid-June, but they did not disclose the details of how they plan to support the Lebanese Armed Forces.

The international community is worried that if the armed forces disintegrate, local sectarian militias will rise in a mature country and fall into complete chaos.

Lebanon has always been an oasis of stability in the region to deal with countless conflicts, and it is also the last outpost for refugees fleeing war-torn countries to Europe.

The survival of the Lebanese army is critical to avoiding another wave of immigration to Europe and any future bastions of confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel.

We need cash

Elias Farhat, a retired Lebanese general, said the army needs cash support, not just aid. Paris didnt mention cash. They dont allow cash to be provided in foreign aid, only supplies-ammunition, etc., the general said.

What we need is cash. If a soldier earns 70 or 80 or 90 dollars, what is his morality? If you can add 100-200 dollars to his salary so that he can at least survive, that would be great Many. There are about 80,000 soldiers in our army, and they almost all went bankrupt. They need at least one soldier in cash assistance of $100 a month.

Otherwise, he warned that most soldiers might leave the army. Many people are thinking about finding another job to earn a living. Others want to leave the country.

At the beginning of this year, this number dropped sharply, at least 3,000 fewer than previously reported.

After Chief Aoun met with senior State Department officials and Defense Department officials in May, the United States has provided an additional $15 million in aid to the Lebanese Army in 2021. But this is still a small part of the billions of dollars that the United States provides to Israel each year.

The Lebanese Armed Forces have sent a distress signal to the worlds major powers-Help us before it is too late.
Winnipeg Police Chief Danny Smyth (Danny Smyth) is expected to have the head of the Queen Victoria statue in the Manitoba Legislature removed and thrown into the Assiniboine River at 1pm Central Time The media gave a speech.

On July 1, at the end of the Every Child Is Important walk, the crowd pulled him down and overturned a smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth, which was further damaged.

The Canada Day parade was held to protest the countrys treatment of indigenous peoples under the colonial systemespecially the system of forcing children to leave their families and go to boarding schools, where abuse is common and many people die.

The statue of Victoria first appeared in 1904, covered with a Canadian flag with the words We Are Children written in black markers, referring to children who died in boarding schools.

Sometime between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, the head of the Victoria statue was removed and thrown into the river.

In front of the Manitoba Provincial Assembly, the statue of Queen Victoria fell to the ground and the head was removed. The head was thrown into the Assiniboine River. (Justin Fraser/Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

Police said on Friday that a man had been arrested and charged for causing damage to the legislature.

CBC News reporters saw that a man was electrocuted by the police with a stun gun before being arrested, while some bystanders threw objects and shouted swear words at the police.

The crowd was basically calm before the arrest, but the police had to push the crowd back to detain the man.

The head of a statue of Queen Victoria that once stood outside the legislature of Manitoba was thrown into the Assiniboine River. (Tyson Kosik/Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

Governor Brian Pallister severely condemned those who demolished the statue in a statement on Friday, calling it a major setback for the reconciliation.

It is unacceptable for individuals to destroy the public property of the Manitoba Legislative Building on July 1. For those who are struggling to achieve true reconciliation without taking any steps to advance this important goal, this is a major issue. Frustration, he said.

Those who commit acts of violence will be actively pursued in court. All leaders in Manitoba must strongly condemn violence and vandalism, and at the same time, we must unite and effectively advance reconciliation.

Response from the person in charge of Pimicikamak

On Thursday, the chief of Pimicikamak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba called for understanding after the crowd sprayed paint and knocked down the statue.

Members of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO) said that although they did not tolerate violence, they understood why the statue was demolished and the tension between the people participating in the rally and the police.

A slogan leaned on the pedestal where the statue of Queen Victoria stood, and read: We were once children. Take them home. (Travis Golby/CBC)

I will not condemn people because they are hurt mentally and emotionally, because the truth revealed is hurtful and destructive, Pimikamak Chief David Monias (David Monias) Speaking at the MKO press conference on Friday.

Compared with the deliberate destruction of life and culture, the destruction of matter is nothing Matter can be replaced, but life is not.

Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak is one of the few organizations involved in different walking activities that started at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights and ended in the urban reserve of Peguis First Nation on Portage Avenue, Dominion Street. According to the news released by MKO, the participants who participated in the walk called No Pride in Genocide did not participate in the demolition of the statue of the Manitoba legislature.

People celebrated after the statue of Queen Victoria was overthrown on the legislative grounds in Winnipeg on Thursday. (Travis Golby/CBC)

The first treaty country is composed of seven aboriginal people who signed the first treaty. They also participated in the organization of Wuao in the genocide, keeping their distance from the events of the legislature.

We are committed to holding peaceful demonstrations and actions, and we thank all participants for their cooperation and participation in this important walk. [Indian residential school] Awareness, the organization said in a press release.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnsons deputy spokesperson said that the British government condemned the destruction of the Queens statue.

After these tragic discoveries, we are with the Canadian indigenous communities, we pay close attention to these issues, and continue to engage with the Canadian government on indigenous affairs, he said.

Buckingham Palace said it would not comment.

CBC News asked the provincial government to comment and was told that a statement was about to be issued.
Lake Charles- SOWELA Technical Community College will host a Culinary Arts Informational Session on Tuesday, July 13, 2021, at 10 a.m. on the Main Campus in the Sycamore Student Center. The event provides prospective Culinary Arts students with the opportunity to meet faculty and staff, learn about the program, explore financial aid and scholarship opportunities, apply and more.

To register for the informational session, visit www.sowela.edu/culinary-arts. The informational session is free and open to the public. For questions, please contact Culinary Arts Program Coordinator Chef Jerry Sonnier at jerry.sonnier@sowela.edu.

The Culinary Arts program prepares students to work in service, production, and baking areas of the food service industry. Program content includes American Culinary Federation guidelines for approved chef training, accreditation, and National Restaurant Association Pro Management Certification. Students also learn the business side of Culinary Arts such as managing a budget and more.

SOWELAs Culinary Arts program is also available 100% online and is the oldest online Culinary Arts associate of applied science degree program in the U.S.

In 2019, SOWELA broke ground on its new $10.2 million state-of-the-art Culinary, Gaming and Hospitality Building at its Lake Charles Campus. The 28,000 square-feet building will provide education and training for students seeking jobs and careers in Louisianas hospitality industry. Once constructed, the building will include new culinary training facilities and the campus first-ever gaming and hospitality training environments. Construction of the building is scheduled to be completed in March 2022.

SOWELA also recently announced a $60,000 donation from Mr. and Mrs. Donna Richard to name the facilitys lobby in memory of Mr. Brent Lumpkin for promoting the Quality of Life and the spirit of tourism in Southwest Louisiana and fund the William Brent Lumpkin Culinary Arts Endowed Scholarship.
The right to a speedy trial was suspended in Kansas earlier this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The above graphic details important information about the change.
The Harrisonville School Board has terminated a teacher after accusations were leveled that he used a racial slur in class.
INDEPENDENCE, MO (KCTV) -- The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum is now transformed, and its opening to the public Friday with a new look.

The $29 multi-million dollar project has been years in the making. The museum will take about an hour or so to get through. Its filled with many artifacts and activities that will teach you things you may not know about Truman.

Truman Presidential Library reopens after $29 million transformation Tickets for the transformed Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum go on sale Monday.

Its a wonderful opportunity for people to learn in a very personal way, said Kelly Anders, the librarys deputy director.

Visitors start their journey with a short film setting the tone.

And then you go on a linear way through President Trumans life from his boyhood through his time in World War II in Kansas City in politics and finally his presidency and beyond when he returned to Independence, Anders said.

Along the way you can get involved and connect with the history of Trumans life. Its thanks to many interactive elements.

One of my absolute favorites is the 14-foot globe thats in the middle that talks about the hard problems of peace. And in that section, you see basically the world was severely fractured after World War II, Anders said.

Anders says this new and improved version of the library was a long time coming.

We closed in July of 2019 to start the renovation, but this project has been going on for about five years, she said.

Anders says its an experience for all ages and shines a refreshing light not only on Trumans life but also on the legacy of the Missouri town he called home.

President Truman used to often say Independence is the center of the world, and this library supports that, Anders said.

This is one of 15 presidential libraries throughout the country, and Anders says this one will put Independence on the map.

Advance reservations are required. General admission is $12. Click here to purchase tickets. Current hours are 93 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; 12-5 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday and Tuesday.
Viewers got to see the two ships sailing in My Roommate is a Gumiho episode 12!

Will Kang Han Na and Kim Do Wan make their relationship official? Continue reading to know more!

Lee Dam Dreams of Her Future with Gye Sun Woo

The mountain spirit (Go Kyung Pyo) warned Shin Woo Yeo (Jang Ki Yong) and Lee Dam (Hyeri) about the fate that awaits both of them in the future. But when Lee Dam finally woke up from her dream, where she saw her future with Gye Sun Woo (Bae In Hyuk), she assured the male gumiho that the red thread that connects her to Gye Sun Woo would not affect her feelings for her beau.

Despite this, the male gumiho became worried about their relationship as the deity keeps on playing with their fate.

Lee Dam was about to make kimchi at home when Shin Woo Yeo appeared and used his power to help her carry all the boxes of ingredients inside the house. They ended up working together to make lots of kimchi, and Lee Dam rewarded the male gumiho with a meal. She also gave Shin Woo Yeo some of her childhood photos as a gift.

Shin Woo Yeo continues to get jealous over Gye Sun Woo and wants Lee Dam to always stay close to him, but he doesn't want to be selfish. Everytime he is with Lee Dam, the male gumiho becomes more clingy and sweet.

Gye Sun Woo Continues to Pursue Lee Dam

Even though he just wants to help Lee Dam, Gye Sun Woo keeps getting ignored by the lady. He knows that Lee Dam already has a boyfriend but he can't help but be honest about his unrequited feelings.

When they had to go on a trip for their school activity, Gye Sun Woo saved Lee Dam from a running vehicle about to hit her. Knowing that it was all because of the red thread, Lee Dam tried to still distance herself from Gye Sun Woo.



During the night, Lee Dam saw Gye Sun Woo crying as she went to him but she ended up hearing Gye Sun Woo's confession, saying that he likes her.

The red string appeared again signaling that it was their fate to become closer.

Do Jae Jin Confesses to Yang Hye Sun

The last time they had their date, Do Jae Jin (Kim Do Wan) crossed paths with his ex-girlfriend, and he then became emotional again. Fortunately, Yang Hye Sun (Kang Han Na) was with him and comforted him.

Yang Hye Sun and Do Jae Jin also participated in the school activity with Lee Dam. This time, Do Jae Jin realized his true feelings for Yang Hye Sun. He appreciates all the small and kind gestures she has done to him the past few weeks.



He even made a plan on how they can spend their next date, but before that, while they were on a trip, Do Jae Jin grabbed the opportunity to express his true intentions to Yang Hye Sun. He doesn't want to have a fake relationship with her anymore, that's why he finally confessed that he likes her.

Will Yang Hye Sun admit her feelings to Do Jae Jin too? Let's all find out in the upcoming "My Roommate is a Gumiho" episodes!

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: 'My Roommate is a Gumiho' Spoiler: Kim Do Wan and Kang Han Na Reveal They Have More Romantic Scenes Coming

What are your thoughts about the latest My Roommate is a Gumiho episode? Share it with us in the comments!

For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news and updates, keep your tabs open here at Kdramastars.

Kdramastars owns this article.

Written by Shai Collins
New York prosecutors on Thursday charged the Trump Organization, Trump Payroll Corporation and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg with 15 felony counts in connection with an alleged tax scheme stretching back to 2005, in an extraordinary legal development against the former President's namesake company.

Prosecutors in court said the counts include a scheme to defraud, conspiracy, criminal tax fraud, offering a false instrument for filing and falsifying business records.

The indictment also alleges Weisselberg evaded $1.76 million in taxes over the period beginning in 2005 and that he concealed for years that he was a resident of New York City, thereby avoiding paying city income taxes. Weisselberg pleaded not guilty Thursday afternoon.

RELATED: Indictments of firm and top executive test Trump's charmed life

Prosecutors say they have digital drives with grand jury testimony, bookkeeping records, tax records, statements of potential witnesses.

Weisselberg attempted to conceal his participation in the scheme with the knowledge of the company, prosecutors said.

"Even now there's been no attempt to impose discipline on members of the company," Manhattan prosecutor Carey Dunne said. "There is no clearer example of a company that should be held (responsible)."

Trump himself was not charged.

The indictment of the Trump Organization is the product of more than two years of investigation by the district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., a probe that began with questions about accounting practices tied to hush-money payments made by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and eventually led to a Supreme Court fight over a subpoena for Trump's tax documents.

It is rare, according to lawyers who specialize in tax evasion cases, for prosecutors to bring charges solely related to fringe benefits provided by a company, and in recent weeks, lawyers for the Trump Organization met with prosecutors in Vance's office, hoping to persuade them not to bring the case.

The Trump Organization released a statement Thursday saying that Weisselberg is being used by Manhattan prosecutors "as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former President."

"The District Attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution involving employee benefits that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would ever think of bringing. This is not justice; this is politics," said the statement, attributed to a spokesperson from the Trump Organization.

Over the course of the probe, prosecutors have examined a wide array of possible violations, including whether the real-estate company misled lenders and insurers or committed tax fraud, even adding a special prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, to aid in the expansive inquiry. But in recent months, the focus has narrowed to taxes on benefits.

In particular, it came to center on Trump's longtime lieutenant Weisselberg, a top company executive who has worked for him since 1973.

Beginning late last year, prosecutors gathered evidence on Weisselberg with the cooperation of his former daughter-in-law, Jennifer Weisselberg. In the months since she began speaking to authorities, she has turned over boxes of financial records and has met with investigators multiple times, her lawyer told CNN.

Documents from Jennifer Weisselberg's divorce from Allen Weisselberg's son Barry show thousands of dollars in payments for cars, rent, tuition, medical bills and more going from Allen Weisselberg to his son's family.

An indictment of Weisselberg would intensify the pressure for him to cooperate with prosecutors in their wide-ranging investigation of Trump, the company and its executives, an outcome prosecutors have been seeking for months but which his lawyers have told authorities he has rejected.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

The-CNN-Wire

 &  2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.
Bill Cosby, who has been accused of misconduct by 60 women, was released from prison Wednesday after Pennsylvania's Supreme Court overturned his sexual assault conviction. That he is a free man today sends a profoundly disturbing message to women who survive sexual assault: that if they come forward they will confront all but insurmountable hurdles as they pursue justice.

In 2018, Cosby was convicted by a jury of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman in 2004, but the court ruled that a deal he struck with a prosecutor to avoid prosecution in exchange for a deposition in a civil case had been improperly used against him, and that he should not have been charged in the criminal case.

Recall that Cosby has been accused of misconduct by 60 different women. "I have always maintained my innocence," he tweeted on Wednesday.

Of course, Cosby is an octogenarian who played a TV dad back in the 1980's and early 1990's. Modern celebrities, on the other hand, live on the Internet and in what we may like to believe are more enlightened times. In fact it might be tempting to think that things have changed since 16 years ago, when Cosby was alleged to have committed the sexual assault for which he was convicted. Since then, we've seen lots of women come forward to share their stories of sexual harassment, assault and violence as part of the #MeToo movement.

Some may therefore perceive that norms have changed and men know that they can't get away with this kind of behavior anymore because women are speaking out.

But that is untrue.

If anything, since Cosby's time, the world has become less safe for women -- thanks to the very place the #MeToo movement originated. While researching a book about women and the Internet, I have discovered that sexual violence against women is regularly enabled online in new and ever more dangerous ways.

Cosby is alleged to have met his victims in person. Today, there are many tools that match sexual offenders with women, making it even easier for perpetrators to find victims.

They're called dating apps.

In 2019, Columbia Journalism Investigations conducted a survey -- which it warned wasn't scientific -- of 1,200 women in America who said they had used dating apps. More than a third of the women said they were sexually assaulted by someone they met through one of these apps. This figure is staggering. If it's anything close to accurate, sexual violence is becoming astonishingly commonplace.

In fact, a spokesperson for The Match Group, a Dallas-based company that owns dozens of dating companies, told the investigative reporters that "there are definitely registered sex offenders on our free products."

The Match Group checks Match.com users against sex offender databases, but doesn't do so on Tinder, PlentyofFish or OkCupid, according to the CJI report, which was co-published with ProPublica and Buzzfeed. ( "A Match Group spokesperson contends that background checks do little more than create what she calls 'a false sense of security' among users," because government databases may be incomplete or inaccurate, the report said. Users can also, of course, use fake identities).

However, in March, Tinder announced that it would roll out an in-app background check feature at a later date this year, according to a report on BBC.com, that would allow users to view public records information of prospective dates using their name or mobile number.

Obviously, dating apps should be required by law to conduct background checks on their users. But this wouldn't come close to solving the problem, because there is evidence that the ease with which apps match perpetrators with victims appears to be encouraging more people to perpetrate sexual crimes for the first time.

The UK National Crime Agency's Serious Crime Analysis Section warned in a 2016 report that online dating sites appear to be creating "a new kind of sexual offender," who is "less likely to have criminal convictions, but instead exploit[s] the ease of access and arm-chair approach to dating websites." According to the report, while 84% of people who rape strangers have prior convictions, just 49% of those who commit sexual crimes through online dating sites have previous convictions.

Aside from dating apps, another problem, according to Nancy Jo Sales' just-published book Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno, is that the proliferation of online porn, which often depicts violence against women, has made real-life sex more violent. A 2010 study of porn videos--cited in a New York Times article about how online porn is shaping young people's views about sex--found that 88% depict aggression.

Now, some men are copying these activities when they have sex with women in real life. A 2019 study found that more than 23% of women said they had become scared during sex as a result of something done to them. Choking, for instance, has become alarmingly common.

Clearly, the culture change we need hasn't begun to happen as part of the #MeToo movement. Indeed, a lot of women and parents of young girls may not even be aware of how dramatically the Internet is facilitating sexual crimes.

As one part of the solution, it's clear that kids need to be educated about why porn is different from sex in real life (though, as Peggy Orenstein pointed out in a commentary earlier this month, when schools attempt to do this, parents freak out.)

The Cosby outcome also makes clear that victims need far more support than they're currently getting, including help documenting evidence and building strong legal cases. They also need help rebuilding their lives after they become victimized -- from mental health services to assistance finding new jobs after leaving abusive employers. On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said President Joe Biden "will continue to" fight violence against women. He should back that up by providing funding for more programs to provide this kind of support to victims.

Let's be clear: Bill Cosby can't be dismissed as an anachronism. In fact, since the period during which he was alleged to have assaulted women, the Internet appears to have only deepened the dangers of sexual assault for women. In this sense, it's bitterly fitting that an actor accused over and over again of sexual assault is still called by some "America's dad." Sexual violence has become a pervasive American problem.

The-CNN-Wire

 &  2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.
GRAND RONDE, Ore.  Investigators are still working to identify a child whose body was discovered near a rest area in Lincoln County last year, and DNA evidence may hold the key for gathering enough identifying features to figure out who she was.

Oregon State Police launched an investigation on December 10 after recovering the girl's remains next to a rest area in the H.B. Van Duzer Forest State Scenic Corridor. Her body was inside of a duffle bag secreted within the woods.

Because of the condition of the girl's remains, little was known about her race, appearance, or other features, though investigators released an approximate image in January. OSP and the state Medical Examiner's Office contracted with a specialty lab, Parabon Nanolabs, to get more information from the girl's DNA.

The Virginia-based Parabon Nanolabs recently helped investigators identify the body of a boy found dead in the mountains east of Ashland back in 1963, and has also been enlisted to help with the case of an as-yet unidentified victim of the Almeda Fire in September.

OSP said that the DNA extraction done by Parabon helped find some additional details about the girl, and the agency has decided to release the following new details in hopes that the public can help:

Age: 7  9

Eye color: Hazel / Brown

Hair color: Brown / Black

Skin color: Light Brown / Fair with no freckles

Race: She has been identified as mostly Caucasian with some Central American ancestry

She was wearing a pull-up diaper

Investigators have been working with the the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) since the discovery of the childs remains. Over the past six months, OSP said, detectives have definitively ruled out more than 60 potentially missing kids between NCMEC and tips from the public.

"While investigators continue to work in partnership with NCMEC, there is a strong likelihood this child has not been reported missing," OSP said in a statement. "Investigators would like the public to know, we are already considering all children listed on the NCMEC website and therefore, there is no need to contact the Oregon State Police to highlight those names."

This child would likely not have been seen since November 2020. Anyone with information that might help investigators in identifying her should call 800-442-0776 or *OSP (*677).
MACDOEL, Calif.  Growth on the Tennant Fire south of Macdoel has started to slow as fire crews increasingly get a handle on the Lava Fire's smaller neighbor. The fire is now estimated at 9,836 acres burned with containment still at 6 percent.

Fire officials said on Friday morning that crews on the western flank of the fire are now into mop-up procedures thanks to effective suppression efforts earlier this week. The fire remains active on the eastern side, and aircraft have been ordered to help keep the fire inside of established lines.

"Throughout [Thursday], the fire displayed behavior including uphill runs, single tree torching, and wind driven runs. Smoke production from the Lava and Salt Fires south of the Tennant Fire are overcasting the Tennant, allowing for fire activity to increase when the smoke lifts," officials said.

Fire activity decreased overnight thanks to cooler temperatures, allowing crews to gain greater control along the northern edge of the fire. Crews are now focusing on containment of the fire's southeastern edge.

California Incident Management Team 15 gas invited residents impacted by the Tennant Fire to attend a meeting on Saturday at 6 p.m., held at the Butte Valley Community Center in Dorris. The event will also be live-streamed.

Evacuation orders remain in place for Bray, south of MacDoel including East and West Ball Mountain Road, Old State Highway, and Juanita Lake.

An evacuation warning is in place for the Macdoel area, bordered by Sheep Mountain Road to the north, the Red Rock Road area to the east and homes within a mile to the west of Macdoel. On Tuesday morning, officials added a warning for residents living on West Ball Mountain-Little Shasta Road, up to Cook Campbell Road, all of Meiss Lake Road, and over to Forest Service Road 3.

An interactive map of current evacuation areas on both the Tennant and Lava fires can be viewed here.

Officials from the Klamath National Forest first reported the Tennant Fire on Monday evening, soon placing its size between 200 and 300 acres. It started near the junction of Highway 97 and Tennant Road.
SALEM, Ore.  Two teams of firefighters from northwest Oregon will be stationed in Klamath County over the weekend as a precautionary measure while the area is under a Red Flag Warning with the possibility of thunderstorms, the Oregon State Fire Marshal's office announced on Friday.

The two task forces hail from Clatsop and Clackamas counties. They'll be initially deployed in Klamath County for 72 hours, with the potential for an extended stay if they are needed.

"This is a proactive move for the region to be better prepared and bolster any initial fire attack," the Office of the Oregon State Fire Marshal said in a statement. "These firefighters are not assigned to a specific incident but will be an added resource and increase the states readiness if there is a fire."

The Oregon legislature allocated extra funding to the OSFM for pre-positioning resources around the state ahead of potentially dangerous fire conditions, just one of several ways that the agency said it is working to be "response ready" for wildfires.

"The OSFM encourages all Oregonians to be aware of the dry conditions and take the necessary precautions to avoid sparking a fire," the agency said.
SALEM, Ore.  70 percent of Oregon adults have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, two days after Governor Kate Brown lifted the vast majority of the state's COVID-19 restrictions and just before the Independence Day weekend.

The 70% adult vaccination goal means we have a better chance to sustain a safe reopening. The safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines continue to drive down new cases, hospitalizations and deaths in our state. Thank you to everyone whos been vaccinated and everyone who helped administer these life-saving vaccines, said Patrick Allen, Director of the Oregon Health Authority. But COVID-19 hasnt gone away. Its our goal to vaccinate eight in 10 people across Oregon, particularly adults in communities of color and other under-vaccinated groups.

More than nine of every 10 recent cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in Oregon were among those who were unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated, according to the OHA.

The agency said that CDC showed 2,343,617 Oregonian adults having received at least one dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines or the single-shot Johnson & Johnson as of Thursday. That number left Oregon just over 2,000 doses short of the 70 percent goal, but backlogged reports from pharmacies have since come in  in addition to new doses performed Friday  making up the difference.

In May, Brown set the 70 percent benchmark as a requirement for the state reopening. But by then, Oregon's daily rate of vaccine doses administered had already peaked, and it started to drop gradually the week after Brown's announcement. At the end of June, Oregon was incredibly close to the goal but daily vaccinations had slowed to a trickle. Brown then announced that restrictions would end June 30 regardless of the vaccination rate.

Oregon now sits at 18th in the nation for percentage of total population vaccinated. There have been at least 660 sites administering vaccines across the state since the first doses arrived.

"With adult vaccination rate now more than 70% and the lifting of statewide protections, the state will continue to support vaccination efforts in communities across Oregon," the OHA said. "However, local health authorities will be responsible for managing outbreaks of COVID-19 at the local level."
SALEM, Ore.  Reports of hate crimes and bias incidents rose in 2020 over the year prior, according to data from the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) delivered this week to state Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum.

Hate crime and bias incident reports made through the Oregon DOJ Bias Response Hotline increased 134 percent in the second half of 2020, for a total of 1,101 reports over the year. Oregon law enforcement agencies received 377 bias crime reports, a 38 percent increase over 2019.

Reports primarily related to race-based targeting, and overwhelmingly of Black and African-American people, though reports of anti-Asian bias also increased. Frequency surged around the time when the COVID-19 pandemic began, coinciding with the George Floyd protests, and around the November election.

RELATED: California men charged in Ashland hate crime assault on Black gas station attendant

Though Rosenblum's office highlighted a surge of bias crime reporting in 2020, particularly over the second half of the year, it's difficult to draw many conclusions from the data. The CJC report is in its second year and 2020 data can only be compared to 2019, when some aspects of the program were still in their infancy.

We are grateful to the CJC for this report which gives us a better understanding of the hate crimes and bias incidents Oregonians are experiencing throughout the state, said Attorney General Rosenblum. By having stronger data about these incidents, we are able to better respond and support victims of hate and bias. We know there are parts of Oregon with significant barriers to getting support--and we are on a mission to change that in those communities.

Under the 2019 retooling of Oregon's hate crime laws, the CJC must deliver a report on bias crime data to the legislature and Attorney General by July 1 of each year. The data itself comes from the Oregon DOJ's hotline, Oregon State Police, three district attorneys' offices, the Law Enforcement Data System (LEDS), and Oregon eCourt data system.

Though there were 377 bias crime reports to law enforcement in 2020, data from LEDS indicated that only 78 arrests were made on bias crime charges. Throughout the year, 18 defendants were convicted of a bias crime, and just one received a prison sentence. The remainder received probation.

CJC's report recommended increased staffing for the DOJ's hotline, more training for law enforcement to ensure that bias crimes are properly handled, and further efforts to educate the community on Oregon's bias crime laws and the resources available to victims.

Any victim or witness of a bias incident or a hate crime can visit www.StandAgainstHate.Oregon.Gov or call Oregon DOJs Bias Response Hotline at 1-844-924-BIAS (2427). The Hotline accepts all Relay calls and has access to 240+ interpreters) to report an incident and talk with trained staff.
The last person who asked me that is still missing.

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We were just very happy, very surprised. Lim said. Our area was able to produce more.

Paulette Garin, a Kenosha piano teacher and also a member of KRMTA, said she was impressed by the students efforts.

Our students rose to a level of excellence we would have been proud of in any prior year, Garin said.

Anna Kojovic-Frodl, district chair of WMTA, praised the work of the music teachers to overcome the personal, technological, and financial hurdles that the pandemic brought.

This past year has shown what a local treasure we have in the amazing group of music professionals, Kojovic-Frodl said. This is without a doubt a valiant effort to be recognized and celebrated.

Lim said the transition online for music education during the pandemic was difficult at times, but offered unique learning opportunities for students.

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My students became more independent in their learning because I wasnt there to spoon-feed them, Lim joked.

In past Badger competitions, students would perform their pieces live in front of judges. This year, they had to send in a recording of their performance.
SALEM, Ore. -- A bill allowing college athletes to receive compensation for their name, image, and likeness is now in effect as of Thursday morning.

RELATED: GOV. BROWN SIGNS BILL ALLOWING COLLEGE ATHLETES IN OREGON TO EARN COMPENSATION

Oregon Senate Bill 5 means players in the state now have free rein to get paid for endorsements and sponsorships for the first time in the history of the NCAA.

Gary Martin has two daughters that do track and field at the collegiate level. For him, this decision is a no-brainer.

"I think it's a great opportunity for collegiate athletes to be rewarded for their efforts," Martin said.

He also owns Martials Arts America in Junction City. He said he will consider hiring college athletes to promote his services. He believes other businesses will follow suit.

"I could see a lot of medium to large size businesses jumping at an opportunity to align with some of the more well-known athletes at these universities," Martin said.

The NCAA also lifted its league-wide restrictions, which means players nationwide can enjoy these same freedoms.
By Ritah Kemigisa

The ministry of health has resounded a warning to members of the public against administering oxygen to covid-19 patients while at home.

This comes as the country continues to face an oxygen crisis arising from the surging covid19 cases.

Updating the nation on the covid-19 situation in Uganda, the health minister Dr Ruth Aceng reveals that not all covid-19 patients require oxygen therapy.

She says Oxygen use in homes and other undesignated places is not only dangerous to the lives of patients but also puts the household at risk since its highly flammable and can cause explosions.

Dr Aceng adds that oxygen is a class A, medical supply that requires monitoring and regulation by a trained health worker upon proper prescription by a qualified medical worker.

Aceng meanwhile warns that unregulated use of oxygen can cause further complications to the patient among them brain damage as she explains.
By Anthony Wesaka

Former Ministry of Public Service principal accountant in the pensions department, Mr Christopher Obey has died.

He died today. He had a history of pneumonia which has been disturbing him. It worsened yesterday (Thursday) and we rushed him to Mulago National Referral Hospital. He was put on oxygen but he, unfortunately, died today, Uganda prisons spokesperson, Mr Frank Baine confirmed.

Mr Obey was in 2016 convicted with several officials at the same ministry in connection to forgery of a judicial document in order to siphon over Shs88.2 billion pension cash.

Other convicts in the multi-billion public service pension scandal included former Director of Research and Development, Stephen Kiwanuka Kunsa and Jimmy Lwamafa, the former permanent secretary. Mr Obey was handed a 10-year jail term which he has been serving.

Additionally, Mr Obey was in July 2017 also convicted with other two officials at the public service ministry in connection to the forgery of a judicial document in order to siphon over Shs15.4 billion pension cash.

*Details to follow
By Dorothy Nakaweesi

Kenya Airways has joined other airlines in cutting flights destined to Entebbe as Covid-19 third wave takes toll on Uganda.

In June, Emirates Airline suspended passenger flights from Uganda to Dubai until further notice, responding to a UAE government directive which stopped Ugandans traveling to the region.

Later, Rwanda Air too suspended flights to and from Entebbe International Airport.

Kenya Airways and the other airlines are citing high cases of Covid-19 in Uganda and strict government containment measures, which have reduced demand on the route, as causes for the reduction on the flights.

However, when contacted on Kenyas decision, the head of Communication at the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority (UCAA), Mr Vianney Luggya said: We are yet to get an official communication about Kenyas decision to cut flights.

Luggya added that in order to curb further spread of the new coronavirus wave, UCAA restricted flights from India.
Kilgore, TX (75662)

Today

Sunshine and clouds mixed. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 91F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. Winds light and variable.
Here's what made the front page of the Kilkenny People 50 years ago this week - July 2, 1917

A rent and rates strike by Corporation tenants on differential rents is looming in Kilkenny.

On Wednesday next, the tenants will meet in St Patricks Hall to decide whether or not they should implement the strike. And, at the time of going to press, it seemed certain that a decision to withhold rent and rates would be carried by a big majority.

Tenants throughout the city, and particularly those in the 90 house Larchfield estate, the first complete scherne in the city to come under the differential rents system, have been protesting for some time because their rents are being assessed on gross incomes, including overtime and bonuses, and not on take-home pay.

Recently, the central committee of the Kilkenny Corporation Tenants Association met and agreed that any decision to strike should be the decision of the tenants themselves.

But they also agreed to back any action that the tenants decided upon.

If they decide to strike, the Association will arrange for the collection of all rents and rates and have them lodged every week in a special account in the bank.

Kilkenny Corporation will be informed of the exact sum of each weeks collection.

But if the Corporation decided to take legal action against any of the striking tenants, the tenants legal expenses will be paid for from the rents and rates collected.

In this way, the Association maintain, no action can be taken by the Corporation when the strike is over to recover the outstanding amounts from specific tenants.

Tenants Association Secretary, Charles Smyth, says that many tenants are both disturbed andaggrived by the injustices of the differential rents system and it is generally agreed that bonuses and overtime should not be included in the assessment of rents.

It is also felt that income tax deductions should be taken into consideration.

OUTSTANDING JOURNALISM

Sean Hurley, a senior journalist on the staff of the Kilkenny People, has won an award for the outstanding provincial press story of 1970.

The award was made for his campaigning series for the alleviation of social problems in Kilkenny.

The articles outlined the deplorable conditions under which some people have to live in in flats in the city and the injustice of some money lending schemes and the hardships they cause. The series also exposed the growing problem of drug abuse in Kilkenny.

At a dinner in the Royal Hibernian Hotel, Dublin on Monday night, Mr Hurley was presented with a trophy and 200 cheque by Mr ALK Liddle, general manager of Gallaher (Dublin) Ltd, whose firm sponsor the awards.

By happy coincidence, Monday was also his birthday and wedding anniversary.

Five awards were presented at the dinner, and Mr Hurley was the sole winner outside Dublin. The Irish Times won two awards and one award each went to the Irish Independent and to This Week magazine.

Mr Raymond Smith, the Irish Independent News Features Editor, won the outstanding national press news report with his coverage of Northern Ireland Westminster Elections. Mr Richard Grogan, a science graduate of UCD won the outstanding national press feature award for his series on drug abuse in Ireland which appeared in This Week.

Speaking at the presentation, Mr Liddle said he didnt think a week passed during which somebody did not publicly question the role of the media in society.

But that in itself was a healthy thing provided the comment was reasonably balanced and informed. Referring to television, he said he disagreed with the opinion that it led to passive acceptance. On the contrary, he believed it stimulated interest in subjects.

However, because television was an instant communication, the need for the type of informed retrospective comment which only newspapers and journals could provide was paramount.

The importance of the press is increased rather, than diminished, by the advent of television, he said. If the awards serve to accentuate that importance they are fulfilling a very useful purpose.
A High Court judge has rejected an application for leave to appeal against the proposed new Glanbia cheese making facility in Belview, South Kilkenny.

Fianna Fail MEP Billy Kelleher has welcomed the decision, describing it as 'a victory for common sense'.

This planning application has been granted by both Kilkenny County Council and An Bord Pleanala. It has now been tested twice in the High Court - enough is enough; it is time to get it built," he said.

From the outset, I believed An Taisces case was weak. They were attempting to use the planning system to change government policy. Ive no issue with NGOs articulating and campaigning for changes in policy. It just shouldnt be done through the planning system."

The proposed Belview plant was approved by Kilkenny County Council in 2019. Following an appeal by An Taisce against that decision, An Bord Pleanala granted final permission on June 30, 2020. An Taisce then sought a Judicial Review of that decision.

What now must happen is that the company is let build the facility," said MEP Kelleher.

"Dairy farmers were facing significant financial losses if this facility was not given the go ahead as many had invested in increasing their dairy herd to meet the production requirements of this new facility.

This is a good day for rural Ireland. Jobs will be created in the construction and operation of this facility and thousands of dairy farmers have been given predictability and certainty in terms of their contracts."
An Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Leo Varadkar TD and trailblazing Jockey Rachael Blackmore joined with Design & Crafts Council Ireland (DCCI) Chair Andrew Bradley in launching the second annual #MADELOCAL.

Following the enormous success of last years inaugural campaign, Made Local, a nationwide initiative developed by DCCI, will run throughout the summer and aims to once again spotlight some of Irelands most talented craftspeople, while boosting sales and driving revenue for makers and retailers alike.

Here in Kilkenny, the master craftsmen at Jerpoint Glass Studio have designed and created Irish handmade glass for your home since 1979.

Drawing on 2000 years of glass blowing tradition, the skilled Glass makers individually create each piece in the Jerpoint collection.

Jerpoint Glass with its distinctive style combines the beautiful and the functional to bring you the best in contemporary Irish Glass.

Commenting on the Made Local campaign, Rachael Blackmore said, I am so proud to be part of the #MADELOCAL 2021 initiative. Its incredible to see so many talented Irish makers who have spent decades honing their crafts, creating everything from timeless pieces and heirlooms to treasured gifts and home comforts.

"The time for supporting local makers has never been more critical with so many struggling to persevere in their craft. DCCI has undoubtedly supported many through these challenging times and so this second annual campaign is full of perseverance and hope. I have discovered some amazing Irish designers through the #MADELOCAL initiative and will continue to buy from Irish designers whenever I can.

Commenting on the importance of Irish craft and design, Andrew Bradley, Chair, DCCI, said, "Irish craft and design is an inherent part of the Irish identity. Over the past year, our studies have shown an increased desire from Irish consumers to choose quality products created by designers and craftspeople in their local communities."

For more information on Irish craft and design and where to shop products that are Made Local, please visit: www.dcci.ie or join the conversation by following #MADELOCAL.
Four Fine Gael TDs and two Senators have described todays High Court decision to dismiss An Taisces application to apply to the Court of Appeal against a 140m cheese plant investment as a positive day for rural Ireland.

Kilkenny/ Carlow's Deputy John Paul Phelan is joined by Senators John Cummins (Waterford) and Garret Ahearn (Tipperary) along with Deputies Charlie Flanagan (Laois/Offaly), Paul Kehoe (Wexford) and David Stanton (Cork East) welcomed the decision to dismiss the leave to appeal case taken by An Taisce challenging the investment of 140m in a continental cheese plant by Glanbia at Waterford Port in Belview.

The six Fine Gael representatives described the news as "a win for ordinary farming families and a positive day for rural Ireland.

Last month, following the decision of An Taisce to challenge the decision of the High Court, the six stated, This notice to appeal the decision made by Kilkenny County Council, An Bord Pleanala and now the High Court doesnt cast Ireland in a good light locally, regionally or internationally  particularly at a time when we urgently need Foreign Direct Investment and sustainable, well-paying jobs in our rural economy.

Speaking today, following the failed High Court challenge by An Taisce, the Fine Gael representatives said: This decision is a positive decision for rural Ireland and a win for ordinary farming families across our constituencies. We welcome and respect the judgement and call on An Taisce to do likewise.

It is time now for meaningful engagement between all parties. This can and should be done outside of the court room and we would ask An Taisce to engage with Glanbia and farming organisations, who represent farming families across this country, to address the any concerns which they have.

In taking any further action, An Taisce would further alienate the main group involved in environmental protection across Ireland  our farmers and their families. An Bord Pleanala, the High Court and Mr Justice Humphreys have all now determined that the awarding of permission for this cheese plant which is a key element of diversification post Brexit is lawful and should proceed.

This plant will support the lives and livelihoods of 4,500 farm families across the South East and beyond and create hundreds of jobs during construction. Our farmers are the custodians of our environment and they are constantly working to protect it and improve sustainability.

The project has been given approval by the local authority, Kilkenny County Council, An Bord Pleanala, and the High Court.
OSAGE, Iowa - Thursday marked the start of some new laws in Iowa, including the ability to carry a handgun without needing to have a permit.

Back in April, Governor Kim Reynolds signed into law House File 756, which removes the requirement for residents to apply and carry a permit to carry or purchase a handgun. If you're purchasing a handgun through a federal firearms licensee without presenting a permit to acquire or carry, you'll still have to undergo a check through the federal NICS system for each purchase.



Even with the change, Mitchell County Sheriff Greg Beaver still encourages residents to apply for or renew a permit.

"If you, for example, buy two or three firearms throughout a year, and you're charged at each point of sale a NICS fee, it's probably going to be cheaper to get the permit and pay the one time fee and it's good for five years."

Also, anyone already barred from owning a gun, including those with felony convictions, are still unable to legally buy or carry firearms in the state. Beaver emphasizes that those found in violation will be prosecuted.

"If you're under a court order for some reason that prevents you from carrying a firearm, the fact that you no longer need a permit does not allow you to carry a firearm if you were previously prohibited."

Because each state has different laws regarding carrying firearms, Beaver advises travelers to be familiar with the laws in the state you're traveling to. Many states honor Iowa permits; however, Minnesota, for example, does not.

For more information about the law, including a list of frequently asked questions, click here.
ALBERT LEA, Minn.- Thursday was homecoming for Marion Ross. The actress best known for playing Mrs. Cunningham on the sitcom "Happy Days" returned to her hometown of Albert Lea to make a special event in her honor.

Ross is back in Minnesota ahead of her statue unveiling. She is receiving the special honor because of her support for the community. During the press conference, the actress spoke about how to get into show business and playing Marion Cunningham on"Happy Days."

"I really was like a mother to those boys. It was a wonderful family. Jerry Paris was a producer and Garry Marshall was our director and they were so smart."

She also discussed growing up in Albert Lea.

"It was very important to grow up here. You had the weather and these long cold winters. I slept in the basement by this long stove and everything I wanted was in the future."

The actress spoke with the press, friends, and members of the Marion Ross Statue Committee at Country Inn& Suites. The committee spent two years fundraising for the landmark.

Ross's statue will be unveiled tomorrow in front of Marion Ross Performing Arts Center. The event is open to the public. Ross is also scheduled to make an appearance in Albert Lea's 3rd of July Parade as the grand marshal.
ROCHESTER, Minn. - After going into overtime negotiating the state's next biennial budget, Minnesota lawmakers agree compromise was key in reaching an agreement.

As the only state in the nation with a divided legislature, the balance of political leverage made bridging ideological gaps between the two parties even more difficult. While differences between them are abound, both sides agree they had to let go of some priorities to bring a budget to life.

"We tried to navigate through extremely difficult situations," Minnesota Senate Leader Paul Gazelka told reporters. "[House Speaker Melissa Hortman] represents and is a liberal, and I'm conservative, and for those two sides to come together and just barely touch, close a deal, and get done is way harder than you can imagine."

Speaker Hortman echoed the sentiment, sharing in part, "While this agreement does not contain everything we would have liked, we worked together and achieved a compromise that is in the best interests of Minnesotans."

Governor Walz says the budget agreement shows lawmakers can overcome political difference to do what's right for the North Star State.

Minnesotans got through this pandemic the way we get through all hardships in lifewith grit and resilience. We banded together and looked out for one another. Together, we made it through this pandemic, we got the vaccine, and now, with Minnesotas COVID-19 Recovery Budget, we are on our way back, stronger than ever, Walz said.
Julie Keown-Bomar of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, is the executive director of Wisconsin Farmers Union, a member-driven organization committed to enhancing the quality of life for family farmers, rural communities and all people. Visit www.wisconsinfarmersunion.com for more information.
Lynn Grooms writes about the diversity of agriculture, including the industrys newest ideas, research and technologies as a staff reporter for Agri-View based in Wisconsin.
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Flames are shown coming from the attic and roof on a house that was in the process of being renovated in the area of North and Washington streets around 11 p.m. Wednesday.
California Governor Gavin Newsom talks during a news conference at Universal Studios in Universal City, Calif., on Tuesday, June 15, 2021. Newsom is at risk of being on the recall ballot without his party ID  Democrat  next to his name. Newsom's campaign is suing the Secretary of State, whom he appointed, after they failed to file paperwork on time.
Here's what you need to know: Friday, July 2
All US forces have left Bagram Air Base, as US withdrawal from Afghanistan nears completion. This image shows the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, June 25.
Citigroup's logo is displayed at the headquarters of Citibank Korea in Seoul in this file photo taken on April 27. Yonhap





By Lee Min-hyung







None of the nation's major commercial banks have expressed an intention to take over Citibank's Southeast Asian consumer banking business, as they did not feel any "immediate need" to do so at a time when most Korean lenders are focusing more on enhancing their own brand value, officials from the banking industry said Friday.







Last month, Citigroup apparently contacted a group of Korean banks operating in Southeast Asia asking if they would consider taking over Citibank's consumer banking operations in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines.







Citi asked potential investors to submit letters of intent by the end of June to buy the regional retail banking business. But Korea's four major banking groups  KB, Shinhan, Hana and Woori  did not submit an LOI by the deadline.







"Citigroup wants to sign a deal to sell the regional business as a whole, which still comes as a burden for potential investors here," an official from a major lender said. "It is realistically impossible for us to push ahead with the deal without obtaining a license to operate a bank business in all of the countries, as Citi prefers to reach a purchase of assets and assumption of liabilities (P&A) deal."







Another financial industry source here said chances are low for major Korean banks to jump into the race to acquire Citi's Southeast Asian retail business as most of them want to concentrate on enhancing their own brand identities in Asia, which still shows huge growth potential.







"Korean banks' overseas presence remains weak compared to other major global banking groups, but the former are still sticking to a strategy of gradually expanding their profile there by enhancing their brand value," the official said. "They will not take risks for the deal simply to expand their business, and will likely focus on steady yet balanced growth here and abroad."






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The United States has again shortlisted North Korea as a nation complicit in human trafficking and forced labor, an annual U.S. report said Thursday.



The North Korean regime is one of 11 governments with a "policy or pattern" of human trafficking, according to the Trafficking in Persons Report.



North Korea was put on the shortlist of 12 countries in 2020 and again this year with 11 nations.



"The 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report includes the following 11 governments with a documented 'policy or pattern' of human trafficking, trafficking in government-funded programs, forced labor in government-affiliated medical services or other sectors, sexual slavery in government camps, or the employment or recruitment of child soldiers," said the report.



The 11 governments include those of Afghanistan, Burma, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, Russia, South Sudan, Syria and Turkmenistan.



"This year's report focuses on state sponsors of human trafficking. We documented 11 countries where the government itself is the trafficker," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a press conference.



"Governments should protect and serve their citizens, not terrorize and subjugate them for profit," he added.



The report noted most of the state sponsors of human trafficking, along with many others such as Kenya, Malaysia and Thailand, also harbored North Korean workers forced into free labor by the North Korean government.



"The government of Russia had a government policy or pattern of trafficking. The government was actively complicit in the forced labor of North Korean workers," it said.



The report said China also failed to undertake efforts to identify trafficking victims from what it called a "highly vulnerable North Korean migrant population."



"Many North Korean refugees and asylum-seekers living irregularly in the PRC are particularly vulnerable to trafficking," it added, referring to China by its official name, the People's Republic of China.



A State Department official expressed concerns over North Korean defectors in China being returned to their homeland where they are said to face severe punishment.



"We have long noted concerns in the TIP Report in both the China and the North Korea narrative for many years  our concerns about defectors or other North Korean nationals being returned to North Korea and the risk that they face to forced labor, other forms of trafficking and other human rights abuses," the senior official said in a telephonic briefing while speaking on condition of anonymity.



"We have included a recommendation in the China narrative for many years and have raised this issue with the Chinese government. We encourage them not to return people back to North Korea, particularly without screening for human trafficking, since we know this is a population that's particularly vulnerable to human trafficking," the official added.



North Korea also remains on the lowest Tier 3 in this year's human trafficking report.



"The government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and, even considering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, if any, on its anti-trafficking capacity, is not making significant efforts to do so; therefore North Korea remained on Tier 3," said the report.



It marks the 19th consecutive year that the North is placed on Tier 3 since the U.S. began publishing the annual report in 2001.



The report said women and children in North Korea are often exploited in sex trafficking while forced labor there remains part of an "established system of political repression and a pillar of the economic system."



While Blinken said human trafficking is an appalling crime that is an "affront to human rights" and "human dignity," he insisted the U.S. report was not merely aimed at calling out others, noting this year's report evaluates conditions in 188 countries, including the United States.



"I often talked about how the most urgent challenges facing our world cannot be solved by any one country acting alone. That's true for stopping COVID. It's true for dealing with the climate crisis. It's true for the fight against human trafficking," said the top U.S. diplomat.



"We need to work together, share information, hold each other accountable. That's how we'll create a world where no one is exploited by trafficking, and everyone is able to live in safety and in dignity," he added. (Yonhap)


In this June 7, 2017, file photo, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) headquarters is pictured in Paris. Some 130 countries have backed a global minimum tax as part of a worldwide effort to keep multinational firms from dodging taxes by shifting their profits to countries with low rates. AP-Yonhap



A total of 130 countries have agreed a global tax reform ensuring that multinationals pay their fair share wherever they operate, the OECD said on Thursday, but some EU states refused to sign up.



The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said in a statement that global companies, including U.S. behemoths Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple would be taxed at a rate of at least 15 percent once the deal is implemented.



The new tax regime is to add some $150 billion to government coffers globally once it comes into force, which the OECD said it hoped would be in 2023.



"The framework updates key elements of the century-old international tax system, which is no longer fit for purpose in a globalized and digitalized 21st century economy," the OECD said.



The formal agreement follows an endorsement by the G7 group of wealthy nations last month, and negotiations now move to a meeting of the G20 group of developed and emerging economies on July 9-10 in Venice, Italy.



U.S. President Joe Biden said the latest deal "puts us in striking distance of full global agreement to halt the race to the bottom for corporate taxes."



U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellet called it "historic".



Germany, another backer of the tax reform, hailed it has a "colossal step towards tax justice", and France said it was "the most important tax agreement in a century".



British finance minister Rishi Sunak, whose country holds the G7 presidency, said "the fact that 130 countries across the world, including all of the G20, are now on board, marks a further step in our mission to reform global tax".





Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe, right, and Greek Finance Minister Christos Staikouras attend a Euro zone finance ministers meeting in Brussels, Dec. 4, 2019. On Thursday, Donohoe said Ireland still "broadly supports" the deal, but not the 15-percent tax floor. Reuters-Yonhap
Butler, IN (46721)

Today

Mainly sunny to start, then a few afternoon clouds. High near 90F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.
Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Sunny to partly cloudy. High 89F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

A few passing clouds, otherwise generally clear. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph.
An Ammon man has been arrested after police say he threatened to shoot another man with a crossbow and lit a fire on the outside of a house. Read more
BILLINGS - While many who've battled a form of cancer would call themselves survivors, Theresa Lutgen says she doesn't consider herself one.

I consider myself a fighter, I dont consider myself a survivor. To me survivor means Im a victim of something, and Im not. I just happen to be the one in eight women who get breast cancer, Lutgen explained.

When she found a lump in her breast in 2018, doctors in Alabama told her it wasnt anything to be concerned about. However, after her family moved to Billings, during her 2020 yearly exam, a doctor recommended she get a mammogram.

So I went in, and stage 2, and lymph nodes and yeah, it was pretty You know, that night I kind of sat there and was like, 'well, it could be a death sentence,' or, 'be positive,' and thats just what I did, she said.

Through 14 rounds of chemo, a double mastectomy and completing radiation treatments, Lutgen remained optimistic, not only for herself, but for her family too.

She says the past year has been a difficult time for her husband.

I dont think that we think about our partners or our family members because they go through their own struggle as well, and they have to be strong for you. He was amazing and has been amazing everyday, she said.

While Lutgen underwent treatments for breast cancer, she didnt put her life on pause. She continued to go into work everyday.

I knew if I didnt do something then I would think about it more and probably not stay as healthy as I did through the whole thing," she said.

A year after being told she had Stage 2 breast cancer, Lutgen has finished all her radiation treatments. She says shes not cancer free, but her bright outlook isnt wavering.

I kept wanting my oncologist just to say - okay, tell me, tell me the words - and theyre like, 'we wish we could but we cant say youre cancer free.' The cancer I have, I have a chance of it reoccurring in the next five years, but Im not going to focus on that," Lutgen said.

What she is focused on is spreading hope and raising awareness of the importance of early detection.

Listen to your body. Our bodies tell us when something is wrong. Do it. Just go get that mammogram, go get whatever you need to get just because I dont want anyone to have to go through this," she said. "If I can save just one person from having to go through this... Just one.

Lutgen says she's thankful to the doctors and nurse at St. Vincent Healthcare, and her coworkers for being her cheerleaders throughout her treatment.

Friday, July 2, is also "Purple Friday". Relay for Life is asking everyone to wear purple as a way to honor and support those who are battling or have battled cancer.

Relay for Life is next Friday, July 9, at 6 p.m.
LIVINGSTON, Mont.  Louis Armentaro could take up an entire day talking about his life lessons and stories from his time as a World War II combat veteran and Guinness World Record parade announcer for the Livingston Rodeo Parade.

The 97-year-old parade announcer will be riding in his red "roadster" for the 72nd year in a row for the Livingston Chamber of Commerce Parade starting at 3 p.m. on July 2.

Armentaro won't be doing the parade announcing this year, but when you hear his voice you can understand why he holds the Guinness World Record for the "Most Durable Rodeo Parade Announcer."

Not long before Louis started doing his parade announcing, the Armentaro family would immigrated from Italy and put six sons into the U.S. military.

Louis sister had three sons and three grandsons who would go into the military, and Louis himself would marry his wife Donna who would see a grandson go into the U.S. Marine Corps.

Louis would begin his journey in the military training and graduating with the U.S. Army 88th Infantry Battalion in 1944 at Camp Roberts, Calif. before heading to the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Armentaro fought in the Battle of Mindoro, Battle of Mindanao, Battle of Leyte and was part of a train trip where he hauled cargo to Okayama, Kumamoto and the Kure Naval Base in Japan before observing the devastation of bombing raids on Tokyo and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Here I am on the boat coming home, there I am right there," Armentaro said pointing at his picture of him at 22 years old coming back from Japan on Aug. 10, 1946, to a port in Seattle, Wash.

I swore to myself when I got on that boat to come home, the folks were never going to recognize me for what I was when I left, I was going to be a different person and I got very aggressive, I got involved in everything I could, Armentaro said.

Louis would get involved in the American Legion, commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 903 in Bozeman, be a councilman for the city of Livingston, and a foster care parent of more than 25 kids both short-term and long-term care while being the golden voice of the Livingston Rodeo Parade.

Im going to stay in my own hometown here and thats the way I want to wind up staying in that, and I call it in emphasis my town.

More information on the Livingston Roundup Rodeo can be found here.
MONTANA - Some Montana cities are going ahead with Fourth of July fireworks in 2021.

The following are fireworks events happening during the Fourth of July weekend:

Billings

MetraPark in Billings will show a 35 minute fireworks display July 4. The event begins at 7 p.m. with food trucks and live music and ends after dark.

Fireworks will set off in the upper parking lot of MetraPark--no parking nor spectating will be allowed in the upper lot.

Laurel

The City of Laurel will launch fireworks during their Fourth of July celebration at Thompson Park. Events and activities kick off at 7 a.m. and fireworks begin at dusk.

Lewistown

The City of Lewistown is launching Fourth of July fireworks at dusk following a parade, Montana Trail Duster's car show and a concert.

Great Falls

The Celebrate Great Falls Foundation will launch fireworks on Fourth of July at Turner Farm Park. Gates open at 6 p.m.

In Black Eagle, fireworks will launch after a screening of the Sandlot movie which begins at 8 p.m. at the Black Eagle Community Center.

Helena

The annual Prickly Pear Community Firework Celebration is happening in Helena on Fourth of July. Shellie's Country Cafe, located at 3122 U.S. Highway 12 E #2, is hosting the event

Troy

Troy's Old Fashioned 4th of July will launch fireworks at 11 p.m. at the Roosevelt Park on the Kootenai River.

Polson

The City of Polson will host an extended fireworks display this year with launch time happening at dusk.

Missoula

The annual Fourth Fest at Southgate Mall in Missoula is beginning at 6 p.m. in the Bed Bath & Beyond parking lot. The event is free and fireworks begin at 10:30 p.m. with accompanied music streaming on Mountain 102.5 Radio.

Butte

The Butte America Foundation is organizing their annual Big Bang Firework Show July 3 at Chester Steele Park. Fireworks launch at 10:30 p.m.
UPDATE: JULY 3 AT 2:32 P.M.

Information from the FAA identifies the plane as a Cessna 172R fixed-wing single-engine aircraft.

The FAA also identifies the non-profit Valley Fliers as the owner of the plane.

UPDATE: JULY 2 AT 9:44 P.M.

The Sheriff and Coroner TJ McDermott released the names of those who died as a result of a plane crash near Missoula on Thursday, July 1.

The husband and wife are identified as 42-year-old Brian J. Makar and 43-year-old Carrie R. Makar, both of Burien, Washington.

Missoula County Sheriffs Office will continue to assist the National Transportation Safety Board as requested with their investigation.

The cause of the crash remains under investigation.

In a release, the Missoula County Sheriff's Office wrote, "Our heartfelt condolences go out to family and friends during this extremely difficult time."

MISSOULA, Mont. - Two people are confirmed dead after a small aircraft reportedly went down southwest of Missoula.

At approximately 2:30 p.m. the Missoula County Sheriffs Office was notified by Montana Aeronautics of a downed aircraft southwest of Missoula.

Missoula County Search and Rescue responded and Two Bear Air was requested to assist in the search for the aircraft, according to a release.

With the assistance of Two Bear Air, Deputies were able to locate the downed aircraft and secure the scene.

Two people are confirmed dead.

Missoula County Sheriffs office will continue to assist the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) with their investigation.
FOGGIA, JUL 2 - A 14-year-old girl was attacked in the centre of a Puglia town Wednesday night after defending a friend of hers being targeted by a gang of youths, the girl's mother said Thursday. The woman said her daughter and three classmates were walking in the street in Cerignola when two boys started insulting a friend of their, calling him gay and fat. "At that point my daughter asked the two to stop insulting the boy. All she got in reply was to be shoved to the ground and attacked with kicks and slaps". Carabinieri are viewing CCTV footage to see what happened. They have yet to receive a formal complaint. (ANSA).
ROME, JUL 2 - A man was shot in the leg after reacting to an attempted robbery in an estate agent's on the outskirts of Rome Friday. The masked man tried to hold up the realtor's and shot the employee when he resisted the attempted heist in Via di Casal Selce, police said. The would-be robber fled after shooting the man, an accomplice driving him away form the scene. The man is not in a life-threatening condition, medical sources said. (ANSA).
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Boeing confirmed this morning that one of their F-15 aircraft went supersonic on Wednesday rattling Lake of the Ozarks.

The sonic boom shook houses and started a firestorm of online speculation.

Several news outlets incorrectly reported the sonic boom came from a plane from Whiteman Airforce Base. This unverified information reverberated through social media.

Whiteman Air Force Base said, Whiteman AFB was not flyover around the Lake of the Ozarks area today, in an email from a Whiteman spokeswoman.

Boeing, which also occasionally does flights over Lake of the Ozarks, said in an email from a spokesman: "The sonic booms were likely the result of a normal customer acceptance flight of an F-15 aircraft operated by a Boeing aircrew, as required by customer contract."

Although LakeExpo asked Boeing about the incident on Wednesday, it took until Friday morning for the aerospace company to issue the official response.
Lancaster Farmings National Hemp Tour kicked off Monday with a gathering at Penn States Lancaster County research farm.

This is a very surreal yet wonderful day, said Eric Hurlock, producer of the Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast and star of the six-week road trip across America.

Surrounded by hemp supporters  more than a few of them past guests on the podcast  Hurlock led a discussion of the developing hemp industry in a pole barn at the research farm, not far from test plots of hemp.

Just outside the barn was the Sunseeker RV that will carry Hurlock, his wife, Heather, and their daughters, Iris and Hazel, on their epic journey.

The vehicle was emblazoned with the logos of Lancaster Farming and the tour sponsors  not to mention a stylized picture of Hurlock himself.

Ag Secretary Russell Redding dubbed the journey a tour of discovery, a reference to Lewis and Clarks Corps of Discovery, which set out from the East to chart the little-known West.

Were going to send Eric across the nation to map this hemp industry, Redding said.

As he conducts the National Hemp Tour, Hurlock will pass through hemp hotbeds such as Kentucky and Colorado, and travel as far west as Oregon and Montana, home to tour and podcast sponsor IND HEMP.

Hurlock will meet with hemp farmers and innovators, focusing on grain and fiber. He will document his travels with podcasts, news articles and social media posts.

We all believe the same thing, that agriculture is important, Hurlock said. Its got to be part of the solution for the future that we want to build, and hemp is just a really elegant solution for a lot of our issues.

Hurlocks involvement in hemp has grown from a modest project to become one of the most ambitious undertakings in Lancaster Farmings history.

Hurlock launched the podcast in 2018 and planned to talk about hemp for a couple episodes before moving on to some other topic.

Instead, he kept making contact with interesting people, and the podcast has swelled to 140 episodes and counting. The program has built a national audience and picked up state and international recognition.

Resetting the Conversation on Hemp

The national tour will draw together many strands in the hemp industry, said Erica Stark, executive director of both the tour sponsor National Hemp Association and the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council.

The hemp industry includes both independent entrepreneurs and people who are collaborating on projects. As with other crops, there are regional differences based on the climate and the products that locals are focusing on, Stark said.

Alyssa Collins, director of the Penn State research farm, said the Industrial Hemp Podcast has given her a lot of ideas that can contribute to her work with hemp.

As an academic, she is used to people looking to her for answers. But that isnt what has happened with hemp, and she welcomes that change.

Were all learning together, Collins said. People in this room  so many of the people in this room  have been the people that I have been learning from.

Redding sees twin goals for the tour  gathering best practices from around the country and spreading the word about what Pennsylvania is doing in the hemp industry.

These are the opportunities of a generation, Redding said. How often do you get a chance to reset the conversation about a crop that was instrumental to the building of our nation?

Redding said he thinks Pennsylvania is currently one of the top two or three states for the hemp industry.

He cited the state being one of the first to submit its regulatory framework to USDA for approval, being home to some of the top hemp advocates in the country, hosting hemp research and having historical ties to hemp production.

When it comes to hemp, Stark agreed, Pennsylvania is living up to its reputation as the Keystone State.

I think we have a very important role to play, she said, not only because of our history with the plant, the length of time that weve had it legal here and that weve been experimenting with it, but also our geographic location and our, just, importance in agriculture in general.

So what happens here in Pennsylvania helps make it more real across the country.

At times, the success of the young industry has seemed more chimerical than concrete.

After the 2018 Farm Bill reopened hemp to commercial production, much of the enthusiasm went to CBD, a hemp extract with reputed health benefits.

But the CBD bubble soon burst, leaving some farmers without a market for their product. Many in the industry, including Hurlock, now see the most promise for the industry in hemp grain  for human and animal food  and hemp fiber, which can be used in everything from plastics to construction materials.

We continue to figure out how we can keep (hemp) at the forefront and look at this journey as the next link in the chain, said Mark Lowery, director of commercial marketing at New Holland Agriculture, a hemp tour sponsor.

At the same time, the regulatory environment for hemp has been maturing.

The National Hemp Association is pushing for hemp food safety standards, legalization of hemp as a pet food ingredient, and a role for hemp in the Biden administrations climate change plans.

Geoff Whaling, chairman of the National Hemp Association and president of the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council, has also been encouraging investment in hemp processing.

Farmers are not going to grow hemp unless they know that theres a market, and end users are not going to look towards hemp, even for research purposes, unless there is that supply coming in to them, he said.

To end the kickoff, Hurlock held a toast with his family, Redding, visitors and Lancaster Farming staff. They raised cans of hemp tea supplied by Wild Fox Provisions and shouted Hemp hemp hooray, an award-winning Lancaster Farming headline.

Then Hurlock and his family got into the RV and drove off past the research centers white bank barn and on to the open road. After stopping at home, the family headed to North Carolina this week for the first leg of the journey.

Follow Hurlocks adventures at lancasterfarming.com/hemptour or using the social media tag #HempTour.
The Pennsylvania Ag Department recent budget hearing featured questions and pushback from representatives on how the department was navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on farming.
The long-serving chief financial officer of former President Donald J. Trump, Allen H. Weisselberg, surrendered on Thursday to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office to face charges in relation to a tax investigation filed against him and the Trump Organization, people familiar with the matter stated.

The exact charges that Weisselberg and the Trump Organization would be facing were not yet revealed. Prosecutors were expected to unseal the indictment within the day against Weisselberg and the organization that catapulted Trump not only into tabloids but also in the White House.

According to The New York Times, Mary E. Mulligan, the lawyer of Trump's Chief Financial Officer Allen H. Weisselberg accompanied her client to walk into the Lower Manhattan building at around 6:20 a.m. The building houses the criminal courts and the district attorney's office. Weisselberg is expected to appear in court in the afternoon alongside Trump Organization's representatives.

The sweeping inquiry into the business practices of Trump and his company conducted by the district attorneys resulted in charges against the Trump Organization where Weisselberg worked as the CFO.

Prosecutors in the office of the district attorney led by Cyrus R. Vance Jr. had been examining if Weisselberg failed to pay taxes on valuable benefits that he received from Trump. Weisselberg and his family received from Trump private school tuition for at least one of his grandchildren, free apartments, and leased cars, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Lawyers from the office of the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, worked alongside prosecutors in investigating the Trump Organization. They checked whether the organization failed to pay payroll taxes on what should have been taxable income.

When asked about any information regarding the reason behind his client's surrender, Mulligan declined to answer.

However, in a statement issued by the Trump Organization, Weisselberg was being used as a pawn in an attempt to harm Donald Trump. The statement also mentioned that the district attorney brought prosecutors everything that they could to uncover any flaw. The statement emphasized that it is no longer justice, it's already politics.

ALSO READ: NY Prosecutors in Donald Trump's Case Convene Grand Jury To Hear Evidence in Criminal Investigation

Impact on Trump

Former President Donald Trump was not expected to face charges Thursday but an indictment of the company under his name would hurt the former president's image. The current issue would also be used against him if he would mount another presidential campaign.

The charges also could strain the company's relationship with business partners who stood by the organization despite the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The Capitol riot prompted a backlash against the former president.

During a Fox News town hall appearance Wednesday, Trump mentioned the investigation only in passing DAs he listed in his history of legal battles. Trump stated that New York radical left prosecutors come after him. However, Trump stated that he has to fight always.

There is still a continuing investigation into Trump and his company's business practices. The prosecutors have been investigating whether the former president and the Trump Organization manipulated the values of the properties that they had to obtain loans and tax benefits.

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump Organization Gets Examined by NY Prosecutors Over Cash Bonuses

WATCH: Trump Organization CFO surrenders to authorities, reports NBC News - CNBC News
A group of illegal immigrants had broken inside a Texas ranch house near the U.S.-Mexico border. The group had also stolen weapons, ammunition, and food.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a press release that border agents responded to the ranch house in Sierra Blanca, Hudspeth County. They encountered three armed illegal immigrants, according to a Fox News report.

Border Patrol agents said that they searched the three migrants and discovered two loaded handguns, ammunition, as well as food, and clothing. All were stolen from the ranch house.

The three migrants were held in the Hudspeth County Sheriff's Office for more investigation. They could face state charges for trespassing and theft of property.

Big Bend Sector Chief Patrol Agent Sean L. McGoffin said that with the presence of weapons in the wrong hands, the situations could have been violent.

McGoffin added that their agents were able to control the situation and bring a peaceful resolution, according to a Daily Mail report.

The illegal border crossing had peaked by 674 percent in a year, with 180,034 recorded in May.

READ MORE: Guatemala President Blames Joe Biden's Policies for Border Crisis, but Kamala Harris Says Climate Change Drives Increased Migration

Illegal Border Crossings

The surge in migrant crossings prompted U.S. President Joe Biden to tap Vice President Kamala Harris to oversee and manage the administration's response on the matter.

White House immigration policy adviser Tyler Moran said that border metrics do not tell the whole story, according to a Voice of America News report.

Moran added that the number goes up and down for several different reasons, citing violence, political instability, and natural disasters. He also said that the legal immigration system of the United States is out of date.

Meanwhile, Republican critics noted the complexity of the situation, while also saying that it was the president's rhetoric that sent the message.

Biden had canceled certain restrictive immigration policies that were implemented during the term of former U.S. President Donald Trump.

The majority of border-crossers continue to come from Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries namely, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Harris had recently visited Guatemala, with a message cautioning would-be migrants in Guatemala not to try to enter the United States illegally, according to a BBC News report.

Harris warned people that they would be turned back at the border.

Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei defended his government's own record of fighting corruption, noting that the fight against drug trafficking should be a key part of tackling the matter.

During the meeting, Harris also said that the U.S. would send 500,000 coronavirus vaccines to Guatemala and provide $26 million in funding to fight the pandemic in the country.

On the other hand, Harris's trip to Mexico focused on her touring immigration facilities and met with young women.

Harris acknowledged the lack of economic opportunity, violence, corruption, and food insecurity. She also said that the root cause of migration in Mexico includes fear of cartels and gang violence. According to a CNBC report.

Meanwhile, her recent visit to the U.S.-Mexico border was full of criticisms, with former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Ron Vitiello saying that Harris visited a not-so-busy area as compared to the area where Trump and Texas Gov. Abbott were scheduled to visit.

READ NEXT: Biden Administration Owes More Than $200,000 to a Texas Hospital Treating Migrant Children

WATCH: Illegal immigrants burglarize Texas ranch house - Nine Plus News






Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson was scheduled to have his spaceflight on July 11 for an up and down test flight. Onboard his VSS Unity rocketplane, CBS News reported that Richard Branson would fly nine days ahead of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' flight into space that will take place on July 20.

Branson's company announced it on Thursday evening, July 1. The said spaceflight will mark the company's fourth piloted launch into space, which were all test missions. The event would also mark VSS Unity's 22nd flight overall.

READ NEXT: Mexican Billionaire Carlos Slim to Pay for the Reconstruction of Collapsed Mexico City Subway Train Overpass

The Guardian reported that the Virgin Galactic founder would be among the six people on board the company's spacecraft.

Richard Branson will be joined by pilots Dave MacKay and Michael Masucci, operations engineer Colin Bennett, Virgin's chief astronaut instructor Beth Moses, and Virgin's vice president for government affairs and research operations Sirisha Bandla.

Virgin Galactic's spaceflight is geared to evaluate the seat comfort, weightless experience, and views of the Earth.

"After more than 16 years of research, engineering, and testing, Virgin Galactic stands at the vanguard of a new commercial space industry," Branson said, adding that new industry would open space to "humankind and change the world for good."

The VSS Unity rocketplane that Richard Branson would ride to space will launch in New Mexico after the Federal Aviation Administration allowed Virgin to take paying customers in late June. The company gained permission after a successful test flight that happened in May.

Wally Funk to Join Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos in Space

The announcement of Virgin Galactic's flight on July 11 came as Blue origin also announced that Wally Funk would join Jeff Bezos in space on July 20.

Funk is an 82-year-old NASA trainee who was denied being a U.S. astronaut despite successfully completing her program, Daily Caller reported.

Citing CNN, Daily Caller noted that the 82-year-old outperformed astronaut John Glenn as she spent 10 hours and 35 minutes inside a sensory deprivation tank, which was one of the tests during her training.

"I'll love every second of it. I can hardly wait," Funk said in Bezo's Instagram video.

Blue Origin was reported to carry out 15 unpiloted test flights of its New Shepherd rocket and capsule. Jeff Bezos planned to take off on July 20, which is the 52nd anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon.

Furthermore, Jeff Bezos would blast into space from West Texas with his brother on board the Blue Origin rocket.

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin on Space Tourism

CBS News noted that both Virgin Galactic and Bezo's Blue Origin are competing in the emerging marketplace of space tourism.

Both of the companies would offer short spaceflights just above "discernible atmosphere." The trip would offer a few minutes of weightlessness and views before returning to Earth.

Virgin Galactic and Blue origin have not yet revealed the price for a space flight. However, it was expected to cost around $250,00 and $500,000.

Despite the price, some enthusiasts made deposits for flights on Richard Branson's company, which was expected to begin in 2022.

READ MORE: Teenage Entrepreneur, Marcus Pereira Earns Fortune Through Dropshipping Business

WATCH: Richard Branson to Fly on Virgin Galactic Unity 22 on July 11! Meet the Crew - From VideoFromSpace
A federal judge ordered on Thursday to unseal dozens of documents about the personal affairs of Jeffrey Epstein's pal, Ghislaine Maxwell, including some that could reveal her relationship to the Clintons.

Judge Loretta Preska said unsealing the documents in the next two weeks would not have any effect on Maxwell's right to a fair trial, according to a Daily Mail report. Ghislaine Maxwell is an accused child sex trafficker who was the associate of alleged sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Preska noted that it is not the court's job to police press coverage. She added that tabloid fodder does not diminish the importance of materials that could reasonably affect the court's decision on a motion, The Daily Wire reported.

Among the documents to be made public were the socialite's efforts to quash requests from Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who sued Maxwell for defamation in 2016 for calling her a liar, to obtain her financial records.

It also includes documents from Maxwell that will show funding received from the Clinton Global Initiative, the Clinton Foundation or the Bill, Hilary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, and the Clinton Foundation Climate Change Initiative.

Documents regarding a request from Giuffre for email accounts that the socialite allegedly kept secret from the court will also be included. The New York's federal court believes that these documents could also provide an insight into powerful men that Ghislaine Maxwell knew, like Prince Andrew.

RELATED ARTICLE: Ghislaine Maxwell Seen With 'Black Eye' in First Pic From Prison

Virginia Roberts Giuffre Defamation Case Against Ghislaine Maxwell

Virginia Roberts Giuffre claimed that Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her when she was 16 and took her to Jeffrey Epstein to be repeatedly raped and abused. She named Prince Andrew as one of her abusers, which the Duke of York denies.

Giuffre's lawyers sought information about Maxwell's finances so they would be better informed if the case went to a settlement, which it did.

They sought the socialite's tax returns, balance sheets and financial statements for Maxwell-controlled companies, among other materials. Virginia Roberts Giuffre made her allegations in a court in Florida in January 2015.

Former president Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell was scrutinized when the financier was arrested in July 2019.

Bill Clinton was reported to have flown on Epstein's plane dozens of times. He was also shown in photographs receiving a neck massage from Chauntae Davies, one of Epstein's victims who worked as a flight attendant on his private jet.

Emails that have already been made public in the case revealed Ghislaine Maxwell talking to the sex offender about personal matters.

Epstein reportedly told Ghislaine Maxwell to keep her head up and stop acting like an escaping convict. The convicted sex offender told the socialite that she had done nothing wrong and she should start acting like it.

Well-Known Personalities Connected To Jeffrey Epstein

CEO Les Wexner is Jeffrey Epstein's only confirmed client. It was reported that Wexner allowed Epstein to take an active role in L Brands, which owns Bath & Body Works, Express, and Victoria's Secret.

L Brands spokesperson said in July 2019 that Wexner later fired Epstein as his money manager more than a decade ago, Business Insider reported.

Former President Donald Trump once claimed in 2002 that he had a long friendship with Epstein, saying that he was a "lot of fun" to be with. Amid the controversy, then-counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway said that Trump has not talked to Epstein in 10 or 15 years.

Prince Andrew, son of the United Kingdom's Queen Elizabeth II, who was also linked to Epstein, was criticized for frequently taking flights on taxpayer's money while serving as the country's special representative for international trade. This earned him the moniker "Airmiles Andy."

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton spokesperson Angel Urena earlier said that the former president had not spoken to Jeffrey Epstein in well over a decade and knows nothing about the crimes.

Ghislaine Maxwell is due to go on trial for sex trafficking conspiracy and perjury, among other charges. The 59-year-old socialite has pleaded not guilty to all the allegations.

READ MORE: Bill Gates Turned a Blind Eye to Jeffrey Epstein's Reputation for a Nobel Peace Prize

WATCH: Documents Detail Sex Abuse Allegations Against Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein - From CBS News






The Boy Scouts of America have reached an $850 million agreement with some 60,000 victims of child sex abuse.

USA Today reported that the Boy Scouts of America had doubled their initial offer for the compensation to sexually abused Scouts late Thursday, July 1.

Ken Rothweiler, a lawyer representing a group of victims, said the Boy Scouts of America's $850 million settlement is the "largest settlement" of sexual abuse claims in the United States history.

READ NEXT: Dodgers' Coach Dave Roberts Comments on Trevor Bauer's Sexual Assault Allegations: Confirms Bauer's Appearance on Sunday's Game

Boy Scouts of America to Offer $850M Compensation

The compensation offer of the organization came after the non-profit group filed for bankruptcy. The Boy Scouts of America, based in Irving, Texas, is facing at least 275 abuse lawsuits and 1,400 potential claims.

The Boy Scouts of America sought bankruptcy protection in February 2020. According to an agreement filed in bankruptcy court on Thursday, July 1, the councils will shoulder the largest share, amounting to $600 million, the Associated Press reported.

The Boy Scouts of America called the settlement a significant step, NBC News reported.

"This agreement will help local councils make their contributions to the Trust without additional drain on their assets," the nonprofit group said in a statement.

The Boy Scouts further noted that the agreement would also allow local councils to "move forward" with the national organization "toward emergence from bankruptcy." The organization added that they are committed to working toward a "global resolution."

Rothweiler lauded the Boy Scouts of America and their local councils for stepping up to compensate the survivors. However, Paul Mones, another attorney representing survivors, said he expects the amount of the settlement to go up to over $1 billion with insurance contributions.

"What we attempted to do in this negotiation was, under the circumstances, and with all of the various competing interests, the best deal possible," Mones said.

But he added that there would never be an agreement that any survivor would be happy about. The amount proposed would provide roughly $10,000 to each claimant, which will be given at different time periods.

The Boy Scouts of America has also agreed to provide non-monetary compensation like insurance rights and protective measures in current organization programs. It also agreed to give the Settlement Trust access to all records related to abuse.

Thousands Emerge as Boy Scouts Sexual Abuse Victims

Since November in the previous year, USA Today reported that the claims of sexual abuse rose to nearly 90,000. The number made the case one of the largest sex abuse cases against a single national organization.

NBC News noted that the non-profit organization was plagued by claims of abuse since the 1960s. Rothweiler said most of his clients are in their 60s and 70s, and they alleged that the abuse happened while they were teens.

Boy Scouts said they were "devastated" by the number of people that underwent the sexual abuse yet moved by the bravery of those who rose as victims.

"We are heartbroken that we cannot undo their pain," the Boy Scouts earlier said in a statement.

Despite the number of sexual abuse victims, the Boy Scouts' leadership has insisted that scouting is "safer" in the present time than before. They added that 90 percent of the claims against the group happened more than 30 years ago.

READ MORE: Marilyn Manson's Ex Sues Rocker for Rape and Unlawful Imprisonment

WATCH: Can the Boy Scouts Survive a Flood of Sexual Abuse Claims? - From PBS NewsHour
A 10-year-old Houston girl survived a family massacre when she played dead after a gunman lined them up and fatally shot them.

The Houston girl's family said the kid saw her parents and her six-year-old sister shot and killed. They said the girl waited until the gunman left before she contacted her grandmother, The Blaze reported.

The Houston girl called her grandmother through the FaceTime video app and told her that someone came in and shot her and her mom, dad, and sister, adding that her loved ones were all dead.

Assistant Police Chief Patricia Cantu said the grandmother called 911 after learning about the shooting from the girl. She noted that the shooting had occurred in the living room of the apartment in Houston, Texas.

Cantu said the Houston girl was in the house for about 15 minutes with the bodies until they got in the place. She said the girl was shot in the arm and now in the hospital.

Cantu noted that this was "a very tragic and just a horrible scene," The Kansas City Star reported. The assistant police chief said it was possible that the family knew the shooter since the home had no signs of forced entry.

Detectives had in custody the surveillance video that could help in the investigation, according to the police. No one had been arrested yet. But detectives said they believe that they already knew the identity of the gunman.

READ MORE: Texas Father Shoots 'Peeping Tom' Looking in 10-Year-Old Daughter's Window

The Family Massacre in Texas

A relative said that the girl told them that a masked man knocked on their door and grabbed her one-year-old baby brother out of the arms of her father.

The shooter then tossed him onto the couch and started shooting them. She said she pretended that she had been killed. The Houston girl noted that she locked the door, grabbed her surviving brother, and called her grandmother.

Police said they are looking for a suspect they described only as a black man in his 20s. The officials working on the case said they believed that the man knew the victims as there was also no evidence that it was a robbery.

The slain couple has four kids: the 10-year-old girl, the killed six-year-old girl, and the one-year-old boy, who was uninjured. There was also an eight-year-old boy, who was with his uncle at the time of the shooting, ABC 13 News reported. Relatives also said that the mother was pregnant.

Crime Stoppers is now offering a $5,000 reward. The family had no knowledge of who could have done the crime, adding that the couple just moved to the apartment from Spring a couple of months ago.

The mother's cousin said that whoever did the crime meant to do this, adding that he did not want to leave any witnesses. The relative also said that he did not shoot the one-year-old boy because he cannot talk.

Cantu said they are sending out prayers and hope that anybody has any information about the crime, Crime Online reported.

READ MORE: Texas Man Arrested After Running Over Pregnant Wife, Killing Unborn Child

WATCH: Houston Family Killed in Shooting: 10-Year-Old Survivor Held Baby Sibling & Played Dead - From KHOU 11






Amber Heard celebrated being a mom with the birth of her baby girl, Oonagh Paige, via a surrogate - a few months after her former husband Johnny Depp lost his libel case involving her.

The actress took to Instagram to announce to her nearly 4 million fans the arrival of her baby daughter, saying she's "the beginning of the rest of my life."

Amber Heard shared the news about her baby on Thursday, July 1, by posting a photo of her and Oonagh Paige on her chest. The actress said she was "very excited" to share the news about her baby girl.

READ NEXT: Britney Spears' Request to Remove Her Father From Conservatorship Denied by Judge

Amber Heard Loves Her Baby Girl Oonagh Paige

Amber Heard's friends told Page Six that the actress had her daughter through a surrogate after being told that she cannot have her own baby.

An unnamed source also told the outlet that Amber Heard was "beyond in love" with her baby girl named after the actress' late mother, Paige. A source close to the actress described Oonagh Paige as "gorgeous," and the actress is obsessed with her.

The source noted that the actress "always knew that she wanted to be a mom, and this is her greatest wish come true."

"There are so many women who feel they can't talk about their fertility and are worried and embarrassed... Amber wants them to feel supported and realize that there are a multitude of ways to have a baby even if you have fertility issues," the source added.

Amber Heard said in her photo caption that she hopes that one day it would be normal to "not want a ring in order to have a crib." She added that she has decided to have a child four years ago on her own terms.

Johnny Depp Lost to the Libel Case Involving Amber Heard

Oonagh Paige came to Heard's life months after the actress got involved with the libel case of her former husband, Johnny Depp, against a British newspaper.

It can be recalled that Johnny Depp sued "The Sun" and its executive editor, Dan Wootton, after he was labeled as a "wife-beater" in the paper's 2018 headline.

During a trial, Johnny Depp accused Amber Heard of being the "abusive one," arguing that the actress faked photos to make it look like he injured his ex-wife.

Johnny Depp further noted that the actress came into his life and took everything that "worth taking" and allegedly destroyed what was remained in his life.

Despite his claims, the actor lost to the libel case, and the judge concluded that the Hollywood superstar "regularly beat" her ex-wife Amber Heard.

"I accept her evidence of the nature of the assaults he [Johnny Depp] committed against her," said London High Court Judge Andrew Nicol, adding that the actor put Heard in "fear for her life" a few times.

Nicol also did not but to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" star's alibi claiming that Heard was a "gold digger" and lied in donating millions of their divorce settlement to charity.

As Johnny Depp lost to his libel case, the actor's legal team labeled London's judge decision as perverse and bewildering.

READ MORE: HBO's 'The Last of Us' Star Pedro Pascal Reacts on Nico Parker's Casting

WATCH: Amber Heard Is a Mom, Welcomes Baby Girl "On Her Own Terms" - From E! News
The Texas law enforcement was disturbed recently not only about the rise of fentanyl in the area but also because producers were processing the drugs into pills to look like prescription medicine, officials stated.

Based on the law enforcement officials, the seizures of fentanyl continue to rise in Texas, and at the Texas-Mexico border, officials say.

The trend is that Mexican drug cartels process the often-deadly substance into pills, making it look like any other prescription medications that can be bought in pharmacies.

According to KXAN, Tarrant County Sheriff Bill E. Waybourn stated that a year ago, fentanyl was barely on their radar, but apparently, based on the intelligence that he had, fentanyl has already flooded their area.

Waybourn was in South Texas on Wednesday after Gov. Greg Abbott and former President Donald Trump toured on the unfinished border wall.

The former president railed against the threat posed to the state and the country by illegal immigration. He made several claims regarding the ongoing immigration and drug trafficking.

The Tarrant County Sheriff only supported Trump's claim regarding the seizures of synthetic drugs linked to thousands of fatal overdoses in the United States. He also added that it has been rapidly increasing at both the state and federal levels.

Moreover, Waybourn, whose Fort Worth office is located 500 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, stated that what is going on in his county, especially this yea,r shows the harmful reach of the drug cartels into middle America.

The Tarrant County Sheriff added that even low-level dealers have large quantities of fentanyl. Waybourn also shared that the producers were not only making it look like a safe drug but also laced it with other prohibited drugs like heroin and meth. The sheriff also mentioned that the price of fentanyl in his county has dropped from $50 to $15-$20 per gram since January.

Also, Waybourn mentioned that fentanyl came from Mexico and stated that drug cartels call it "the No. 1 enemy of American law enforcement." The sheriff also urged parents to help contain the opioid overdose epidemic in the country. The overdose claims 70,000 American lives every year.

ALSO READ: 4-Month-Old Baby Dies From Cocaine Ingestion; Authorities Arrest Parents After Cocaine Found on Baby's Feeding Bottles

4000% Increase in 3 Years

Based on the latest numbers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, their reports show an eight-fold increase in fentanyl seizures from January to April 2021 compared to the same time frame in 2020.

Furthermore, the U.S. Border Patrol's El Paso Sector also reported a 355 percent surge in fentanyl seizures this year compared to last year. If compared to the numbers in 2018, it would be a 4,000 percent-plus increase.

El Paso Chief Patrol Agent Gloria I. Chavez stated that cartels already found their ways not only to intimidate migrants but also to have them illegally transport the narcotics, NBC News reported. The Mexican drug cartels usually forced migrants into bringing the drugs into the United States.

RELATED ARTICLE: San Diego Fentanyl Overdose Deaths Spike; Death Balloons to 200% Increase During Pandemic

WATCH: Fentanyl trafficking on the rise in Texas Panhandle -ABC 7 Amarillo
A few days ahead of the Fourth of July celebrations, health officials expressed concerns about the possible spike of COVID-19 and its new variants.

Independence Day celebrations in 2021 are very different from what happened in 2020. Despite the fact that there is still the threat of COVID-19, this year's Fourth of July weekend is open to more gatherings, including the opening of swimming pools and organized firework displays.

In a statement with the University of Kansas Health System, Liberty hospital's chief medical officer, Dr. Raghu Adiga, said that the festivities that will happen on the Fourth of July raise concerns. However, he also added that it is a small advantage that the festivities are happening outdoors.

According to KSN, Missouri is currently a hotspot for COVID-19 cases in the United States. Kansas City and St. Louis are currently facing increasing cases but Springfield has seen a very dangerous surge.

The spike in cases in the state has caused concerns in state leaders. Many are worried that the surge in the number of cases along with the number of people who will be joining the celebrations for the weekend will amplify the spread of COVID-19.

On Thursday, Governor Laura Kelly of Kansas shared a tweet reminding everyone that a new strain of COVID-19 is spreading and to be careful over the Fourth of July celebrations. She also shared a new PSA campaign reminding people to get vaccinated.

This 4th of July holiday, please remember, a new, more contagious strain of COVID is rapidly spreading. The best way to stay healthy is to get vaccinated. If you choose not to be vaccinated, please be responsible around others. Our PSA w/ @RepDavids: https://t.co/vVv7wJ4wiR  Governor Laura Kelly (@GovLauraKelly) June 30, 2021

ALSO READ: Fentanyl Producers Make Drugs Look Harmless; Texas Law Enforcement Alarmed About Drug Pressed into Pills

Fourth of July 2021: Officials Urge Residents to Remain Cautious

On the other hand, with millions of people expected to travel for the Independence Day weekend, health officials from Orange County California have encouraged people to remain careful amid the festivities.

According to Spectrum News, health officials and scientists are deeply concerned about the Delta variant of COVID-19. The said variant, which is a mutation of SARS-CoV-2, is said to be more contagious than any COVID-19 strains.

Deputy county health officer Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong of Range County Health Care Agency stated that the Delta variant has presented an increasing portion of the COVID-19 cases in the US in recent weeks.

However, she also emphasized that getting vaccinated is crucial to protecting oneself since vaccines manufactured by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson are found effective against COVID-19 strains, including the Delta variant.

Warnings from health officials in Orange County come as they reported that 70% of county residents ages 18 and above have already received at least their first dose of the vaccine before the Fourth of July weekend.

In a report by USA Today, at least 67% of adult Americans and more than 50% of all U.S. citizens have received at least their first jab of the COVID-19 vaccine.

White House coronavirus response coordinator, Jeff Zients, considers the vaccination effort a success despite falling short of their initial goal of giving jabs to at least 70% of all Americans by the Fourth of July.

At least 47 million Americans are expected to travel during the Independence Day weekend, which is the second-highest travel volume for the Fourth of July, trailing behind 2019, AAA reported.

RELATED ARTICLE: Pres. Joe Biden Voices 'Serious Concern' Over Delta COVID Variant, Says More Americans Will Die From It

WATCH: 4th of July travel rush begins l GMA - Good Morning America
Elk Point, SD (57025)

Today

Sunshine and a few clouds. High 96F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 70F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph.
Elk Point, SD (57025)

Today

Mainly sunny to start, then a few afternoon clouds. High 97F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph.
A High Court rejection of an appeal against huge new Glanbia chees plant is a "win for ordinary farming families", according to Laois Offaly Fine Gael TD Charlie Flanagn.

He is one of four TDs and two Senators from who his party who have issued a joint statement in response to the High Court decision to dismiss An Taisces application to apply to the Court of Appeal against the 140m cheese plant.

An Taisce says it works to promote environmental awareness and action in the context of the climate and biodiversity emergencies. It has said that it is not against farming but opposes the development because of the climate impacts or environmental consequences.

Dep Flanagan and the other politicians said court's decision the continental cheese plant by Glanbia at Waterford Port in Belview, Co Kilkenny was a win for ordinary farming families and a positive day for rural Ireland.

They said previously that An Taisce's attempt to block decisions made by Kilkenny County Council, An Bord Pleanala and now the High Court doesnt cast Ireland in a good light when Foreign Direct Investment and jobs are needed in rural areas.

The Fine Gael representatives issued a joint statement following the failed High Court challenge by An Taisce, t

This decision is a positive decision for rural Ireland and a win for ordinary farming families across our constituencies. We welcome and respect the judgement and call on An Taisce to do likewise.

It is time now for meaningful engagement between all parties. This can and should be done outside of the court room and we would ask An Taisce to engage with Glanbia and farming organisations, who represent farming families across this country, to address the any concerns which they have.

In taking any further action, An Taisce would further alienate the main group involved in environmental protection across Ireland  our farmers and their families. An Bord Pleanala, the High Court and Mr Justice Humphreys have all now determined that the awarding of permission for this cheese plant which is a key element of diversification post Brexit is lawful and should proceed.

This plant will support the lives and livelihoods of 4,500 farm families across the South East and beyond and create hundreds of jobs during construction. Our farmers are the custodians of our environment and they are constantly working to protect it and improve sustainability.

The other FG representatives to support the court decision are Senators John Cummins (Waterford) and Garret Ahearn (Tipperary) Deputies Paul Kehoe (Wexford), John Paul Phelan (Carlow/Kilkenny) and David Stanton (Cork East). More below link.

An Taisce issued a detailed statement in May as to why it opposed the project. It insists that its priority is viability.

"Very little of that comment has addressed the substantive issue - the sustainability of an industry that everybody acknowledges as being of great importance and value to Ireland and Irish life. The arguments have been based solely on the need to maintain jobs and increase growth often without reference to the climate impacts or environmental consequences.

"The request for a judicial review and the subsequent request for an appeal is not a case taken against farmers - it was a case taken for the environment and for the future viability of Irish farming which is currently endangered by planning decisions that are not compliant with our environmental legal obligations.

"Contrary to the thrust of some recent public commentary, An Taisce cares deeply about the viability of Irish rural life. We want Irelands agriculture and food sector to be strong and assured long into the future, as the anchor for a vibrant rural economy and society based around family farms that are sustainable and profitable in the medium term.

"In our understanding and judgement of what is possible however, the continued expansion of intensive dairying of the type that is embodied in the proposal for this factory presents an existential threat to that possibility. In that scenario there will be some (short-term) winners  mainly industrial-scale producers and food processors  and many losers in both the short and the longer term.

"Decision makers and commercial interests in the agriculture and food production sectors must recognise the urgent need to bring Ireland into compliance with its binding national and European legal obligations and frame policy and investment for the future in that context.

"We recognise that we are holding a position that differs from strong and vocal lobby groups who see themselves as having a primary obligation to shareholder and contractual partners. Science supports our position, and we believe that it would lead also to better long-term outcomes for all other partners also," they said.
A drawn out disputed housing development in Laois planned by a local doctor has finally concluded with the GP finding a cure to the opposition at An Bord Pleanla.

Ireland's planning appeals board has ruled in favour of Dr David Booth who lodged an application with Laois County Council at the end of 2019 to build new homes around the Cedar Clinic on the town's Mountmellick Road.

Dr Booth, who shares a practice with a number of GPs, originally applied to build 55 houses and apartments on a 1.85 hectare vacant infilled and overgrown site to the side and rear of the medical centre and pharmacy. The proposed development included three three-storey apartment blocks. The doctor had also planned to provide access to the new homes via the existing roundabout along the N80.

However, there were many objections. Laois County Council planners received more than 50 submissions and representations throughout the process.

Residents and residents associations opposed the development. A number of letters were submitted by Beechlawn Residents Association, Elm Lawn Residents Association along with many from individuals.

Fianna Fail's Portlaoise councillor, Cllr Catherine Fitzgerald also made a representations. She questioned several issues including the proposed housing density on the site. She said all town sites should not be treated in a 'broad brush manner'.

She said the development was 'totally out of keeping' with nearby bungalow estates while adding that it was 'totally unjust and unfair' that existing homes would be overlooked by new apartments.

During the planning process, Dr Booth compromised on the height of the apartment blocks and revised down the number of new homes to 50.

Laois County Council granted permission in the autumn of 2020 but this was appealed to An Bord Pleanala last October by a small number of individuals and the Beechlawn Residents Association. Despite the scaling back of the apartments, the issue of houses being overlooked was one of the grounds of appeals lodged by those affected by the new homes. MORE BELOW LINK.

However, the planning appeals board ultimately ruled in favour of Dr Booth's amended plans as approved by the council.

It did so on the back of a report by one of its Inspectors. The planners reported recommended approval saying the site was located in a area zoned for residential use in an established urban area within walking distance of Portlaoise town.

The Inspector did not share the concerns around for density problems and found that the development as amended is in line with proper planning and sustainable development.

"The proposed development would not seriously injure the residential or visual amenity of the area," said the report. MORE BELOW LINK.

The report found that the new houses would make a "positive contribution to the character of the neighbourhood which is dominated by detached medium density family homes".

The Inspector also said the new development would "provide improved security" to the residents of Elm Lawn and Beechlawn because the rear of their premises currently borders onto "unkempt wastleland".

No overspill of carparking into adjoining estates was foreseen by the Inspector from the new homes or the medical centre.

The Inspector added that the site already had permission for 46 new homes in 2006.
All good things must come to an end and unfortunately for that's the case with the latest spell of weather which Met Eireann is forecasting is about to be coming to an end with a week of wet 'fresher weather to come.

Ireland's meteorologists at forecasting HQ in Glasnevin expect expect the dry, warm and sunny spell to end on Friday with widespread heavy slow moving showers are in the forecast for Sunday.

The outlook is that after patchy rain on Friday night into Saturday it will become more humid and showery for the weekend and early days of next week.

There are going to be spells of wet and breezy weather next week with conditions not picking up until the second half of the week.

The forecaster has even borrowed a line from the ad before the RTE forecasts which has the unforgettable line 'heavy downpours expected'.

Met Eireann's farming section sums up what we can expect in Ireland when it comes to rain over the next week.

"Over the coming 7 days, more unsettled weather is expected with heavy or thundery downpours or longer spells of rain. As a result, rainfall totals will vary a lot with some places potentially averaging out 2 to 3 times wetter than normal, while local averages will vary most places will see at least near or above normal values for the time of year," says the forecaster. MORE DETAILS BELOW TWEET.

What's in store the rest of this week?



A lot of dry warm weather for the rest of the week, with hazy sunshine at times and just a few showers



Turning more unsettled from the southwest later Friday and over the weekend with some heavy downpours expected pic.twitter.com/tHxnPOIHui  Met Eireann (@MetEireann) June 30, 2021

NATIONAL FORECAST issued at 5.34 pm on July 1

FRIDAY

Mist and fog will clear most areas during Friday morning. Dry at first, with well scattered showers developing towards the afternoon, and more persistent rain moving into the southwest later in the afternoon. Warm spells of hazy sunshine too at times, in just light southerly breezes. Highest temperatures of 18 to 22 degrees generally, though slightly cooler under cloudier skies in the southwest.

Patchy outbreaks of rain will move up across much of the country overnight, however it Ulster will remain mostly dry. Remaining mild and muggy overnight with lowest temperatures of 12 to 14 degrees, in mostly light to moderate southeast breeze.

SATURDAY: Overall cloudy with scattered outbreaks of rain mostly in Muster and Leinster during the morning. Sunny spells and slow moving thundery showers will spread from the southwest during the afternoon leading to spot flooding in places. Highest temperatures of 17 to 20 degrees, in a light to moderate easterly breezes veering southerly during the afternoon and evening.

Very mild and humid with some further showery rain at times. Mist, hill and coastal fog in parts too. Lowest temperatures of 13 to 15 degrees, in just light southerly breezes.

SUNDAY: Widespread heavy slow moving showers will develop once more, especially in north and east during the afternoon and evening with thundery downpours leading to spot flooding. Humid and rather warm with highest temperatures of 16 to 20 degrees Celsius, in a light to moderate southerly breeze.

Scattered showers will continue, mixed with some clear spells. Lowest temperatures of 12 to 14 degrees, in light to moderate southerly breezes. Mist and hill fog in parts too.

MONDAY: Further heavy showers will develop on Monday mixed with sunny spells.

Remaining humid with highs of 17 to 20 degrees generally, holding a little cooler in the southwest as mostly moderate southwesterly winds become fresh at times along southwestern and western coasts.

Further Outlook: Low pressure will move up across Ireland on Monday night with spells of wet and breezy weather. Fresher, showery conditions will follow on Tuesday and Wednesday with temperatures gradually recovering as the week progresses.
A group of Newbridge pals have taken on a mammoth challenge for the third year in a row to conquer four of Ireland's highest peaks hiking a massive 55kms over four days.

Having raised 5,500 for Aware on their first two endeavours, the hikers decided this year to donate the proceeds to LauraLynn  Ireland's children's hospice.

It's such a great cause. We are already up to 1,200 and our target is 2,000 so that's brilliant, said Mark McGuire, who will be joined by Richard Kelly, David Keane, Jamie O Rourke, Eoin Rowley and Jamie Quinn.

The team all hail from the Newbridge/Curragh area. Mark explains how they took up hiking as it was a good way to look after their mental health and well being.

It's no small feat. We will burn about 8,000 calories over the four days. It's going to be tough but its for a good cause and it's going to be fun as well, says the psychotherapist.

The challenge will begin on Thursday July 22 when the team take on Lugnaquilla in Co. Wicklow, followed by a long drive up to Donegal where they will face Mount Errigal the next morning.

Monasterevin Motors has kindly provided a vehicle for the challenge, so the group can travel together.

The hikers had planned to sumit Slieve Donard in County Down but had to change the destination due to uncertainty over Covid restrictions in the North.

Following the Donegal hike, they depart for Mayo where they aim to take on Mweelrea. Finally on July 25, the highest mountain in Ireland  Carrauntoohil  awaits the Kildare men.

Having met up sporadically because of Covid lockdowns, the team have been out on hikes and runs on their own in preparation. Their 2020 charity challenge had to be postponed until September last year because of the pandemic. The weather was colder and the days were shorter compared to the summer, but they were thrilled to complete the task.

It's an amazing trip. You see the most beautiful parts of the country. The scenery is fantastic, says Mark.

He points out it takes a real toll on the body, often only getting back to normal after a couple of weeks rest.

It's a joyful kind of pain. You feel great when you get to the end of it, he added.

If you would like to donate log on to https://www.idonate.ie/4x4Challenge2021

Anyone who donates more than 10 will be entered into a raffle. All money raised will be going straight to LauraLynn.

The top prize is a Canon camera and photography workshop donated by Niall Munnelly Counselling and Ronan HD Photography. Other prizes include a 100 voucher donated by Wholesome Kitchen in Mullingar, one month membership to Industrial Fitness Newbridge, a cordless drill donated Kildare Engineering Supplies Ltd and three childrens novels themed on the president of Ireland donated by The Family Edit.

For updates on the raffle check out Mark's instagram account
A man who falsely claimed over 100,000 in social welfare payments while continuing to work has been jailed for one year.

Frank O'Donnell (56) claimed the money using his own name while being paid for construction work under the name Martin O'Donnell.

O'Donnell of Belgard Park, Cookstown Road, Tallaght, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to thefts of Disability Allowance at various locations in Tallaght on dates between September 3, 2004 and September 11, 2011.

He also pleaded guilty to possession of a false instrument to wit a safe pass in the name Martin O'Donnell at ESB, Fleet Street, Dublin City centre, on November 9, 2017. He has 11 previous convictions, including five convictions for possession of counterfeit notes.

Detective Garda Anna Matheson told Kieran Kelly BL, prosecuting, that the offending came to light in 2017 when the accused's niece was being interviewed by an officer from the Department of Social Protection.

Det Gda Matheson said that as part of this interview, the accused's niece provided bank statements which showed payments in the name of Martin O'Donnell going into her bank account. She explained that her uncle used her account as he did not have his own.

Further investigation established that Martin O'Donnell was working with a construction firm and the investigating officer received a copy of this man's safe pass. The picture on this safe pass was in fact of the accused.

O'Donnell had been in receipt of disability allowance beginning in 2002, but was employed for various periods of time between June 2004 and November 2017. During these periods he falsely claimed a total of 100,469.10.

Det Gda Matheson agreed with Ian Woodland BL, defending, that there were no trappings of wealth in his client's home. She agreed his client is making repayments of 30 a week which comes from his social welfare and that around 3,500 has been repaid to date.

The detective agreed that O'Donnell is genuinely remorseful for what he has done.

Mr Woodland submitted that the impetus behind his client's offending behaviour is his addiction to alcohol and cocaine, which he currently seems to be overcoming.

Judge Melanie Greally said it seemed the detection of these offences prompted a sea change in O'Donnell's approach to his addiction and mental health and he has made large strides.

Judge Greally said the accused committed these offences over a very extended period of time. She said it seems clear that if he was not detected, he would have continued to claim while working for as long as he was able to do that.

She said analysis of his urine has been clear of any illicit substances. She said a doctor's report before the court states that if the accused can continue his engagement with mental health and addiction therapy, then his risk of reoffending is at a low level.

Judge Greally sentenced O'Donnell to two-and-a-half years imprisonment, but suspended the final 18 months of the sentence on strict conditions.
Carrick-on-Shannon District Court heard the case of a young man who attacked a house in Mohill at 10am in the morning, breaking a window with an iron bar while three children and their mother were inside.

Mark Charles Reynolds, Derrywillow, Aughamore, Carrick-on-Shannon was charged with criminal damage at O'Carolan Court, Mohill on July 25, 2018.

Solicitor John Anderson said his client was pleading guilty and had 100 compensation in court.

Gardai outlined that on July 25, 2018 Mrs Annie Lupton called Mohill Gardai and reported that people arrived at her house at 10am and one broke her window with an iron bar. He shouted Mick you knacker in reference to her partner.

There were three children in the house at the time. The damage to the window was 100.

Gardai found a blood trail from the house which led to 23 OCarolan Court. Data from the forensic lab showed the blood DNA matched with Mark Reynolds. Mr Reynolds had previous convictions.

Mr Anderson said his 22 -year-old client doesnt recall the incident as he had substances on board. The solicitor said his client was led by others who were involved in the incident.

Mr Reynolds told the court he was sorry for everything and that he is now working in Greystones as a digger driver.

Judge Kevin Kilrane queried the small compensation of 100 after three years. Mr Anderson said his client is more than happy to give money to charity.

Judge Kilrane asked the defendant why did you attack the house? Mr Reynolds replied I dont know. The judge stated Mr Reynolds attacked a private house with an iron bar while children were inside and warned him Castlerea beckons. He gave the defendant a few minutes to compose himself.

When he returned to the stand, Mr Reynolds said there was a row going on and he foolishly got involved. He said he didn't know there were children in the house.

Judge Kilrane said he believed there was a drug fuelled party and the defendant set off to teach some one a lesson.

Mr Anderson said his client has moved away from the area and has changed his life.

Judge Kilrane commented a person who attacks a house with an iron bar should go to prison. He noted that children have a right to feel safe in their own home. He surmised that prison could harm or destroy this man's life.

He convicted and fined him 300 and ordered him pay 100 compensation to Mrs Lupton, 500 to Mohill Tidy Towns and 500 to St Vincent De Paul.
A local environmental group has taken a High Court case aimed at quashing a licence for a forestry project in Co Leitrim involving planting 12 hectares with the alien species of Sitka Spruce.

Save Leitrim Environmental and Biodiversity Group CLG says it is concerned about the detrimental impact of forestry and the monocultural planting of Sitka Spruce on the local communities.

It claims such projects completely obliterate" the landscape over a very wide area and remove entirely the cultural landscape that had evolved over many centuries, if not millennia.

Such planting has resulted in the displacement of large number of the rural population who cannot comfortably live with large tracts of afforested land which are dark and foreboding, eliminate all life on the forest floor and create a damp and depressing atmosphere within the overall area, it claims.

The social interaction necessary to sustain a rural population is impossible in view of the physical and psychological impact of this planting, it is argued. For reasons including forest lands comprise a higher commercial return than agricultural land, local people cannot compete with forestry when it comes to building up sustainable farm sizes which could provide a reasonable standard of living, it is claimed.

The group is also concerned about the impact on existing wildlife and ecosystems in the area which contains some of the most important ecosystems anywhere within the EU.

Those are now under threat by the introduction of an alien species, Sitka Spruce, it is claimed. The boundary of the Boleybrack Mountain Special Area of Conservation (SAC) is less than 1km from the proposed development while the Lough Gill SAC is located some 3.5km from the lands and is connected to them via the Scardan River into which the development lands will drain, it is claimed.

Evan ODonnell BL, instructed by OConnell Clarke Solicitors, for the group, secured leave this week from Ms Justice Niamh Hyland to bring judicial review proceedings concerning the licence issued to Barry OHagan for an afforestation project on a 13.34 hectare site at Meenimore, Dromahair, Co Leitrim.

The project proposes planting Sitka Spruce trees on 12 hectares, with an additional 0.5 hectares to be planted with Birch and other broad-leaved trees. The area around the dwelling house on the site will not be planted.

The proceedings are against the Forestry Appeals Committee, Ireland and the Attorney General, with Mr OHagan as a notice party.

The respondents, who were last year put on notice of the application, did not oppose the granting of leave and a hearing date for the full action will be fixed later.

In the action, the group wants orders quashing the committees confirmation of the Ministers decision of May 14th 2020 to issue the licence.

The ground of challenge include claims the committee failed to comply with obligations under the Habitats Directive, including to carry out an adequate Stage 1 screening and a State 1 screening assessment in respect of the development.

The State respondents, it is claimed, failed to comply with obligations under European law to make regulations concerning provision of adequate and appropriate public notice, information, consultation with prescribed bodies and procedures for assessment. Those alleged failures, it is argued, mean there has not been appropriate transposition of the obligations of the Habitatas and Environmental Impact Assessment Directives.
BOOKS of evidence have been served on a number of serving Limerick gardai and a retired garda superintendent who are accused of attempting to pervert the course of justice over a three-year period.

The defendants were charged in April following a two-year investigation which was led by members of the Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

This morning, Detective Chief Superintendent Walter O'Sullivan of GNBCI gave evidence, at Limerick District Court, of formally serving copies of the book of evidence on four of the five accused.

In each case solicitor Liam Sheridan, representing the Director of Public Prosecutions, said there was consent for the matter to proceed on indictment before the present sittings of Limerick Circuit Court.

The five accused, who all have served in the Limerick garda division, are retired superintendent Eamon O'Neill, aged 54, who has an address in County Clare; Sergeant Anne Marie Hassett, aged 36, who has an address in County Clare; Sergeant Michelle Leahy, aged 45, who has an address in County Limerick; Garda Tom McGlinchey, aged 48, who has an address in County Tipperary and Garda Colm Geary, aged 34, who has an address in County Clare.

The alleged offences occurred on dates between October 9, 2016 and September 6, 2019 and all relate to detections for road traffic offences such as speeding, holding a mobile phone while driving, driving without insurance and not wearing a seatbelt.

During this Friday's procedural hearing, Judge Patricia Harney noted that copies of the book of evidence had been served on four of the five defendants and, having issued the 'alibi warning' in each case, she formally sent the matter forward to the circuit court.

Garda Geary and Garda McGlinchey were granted legal aid while Mr O'Neill and Sgt Leahy did not make such an application.

Judge Harney refused an application, made by solicitor Dan O'Gorman, not to send the case of Mr O'Neill forward for trial. Mr O'Gorman had asked for some time to allow him to "consider" the contents of the book evidence in order to establish if his client has been prejudiced.

Eamon O'Neill faces a total of 30 charges, Tom McGlinchey faces four charges, Anne Marie Hassett faces three charges, Colm Geary faces three charges and Michelle Leahy faces two charges.

The four defendants who were present in court this Friday were remanded on continuing bail and only spoke to confirm their signatures on their bail bonds.

A medical certificate was submitted on behalf of Sgt Hassett and her case was adjourned to later this month.
A SHANAGOLDEN man who was reported to be acting suspiciously in the Kilfinane area and who was in breach of Covid-19 restrictions in May of last year was fined 100 at Kilmallock court.

John Lane of Clounties, Shanagolden was outside his 5km limit on May 13 last year, Inspector Pat Brennan said but did not pay the fixed penalty notice issued under the Covid-19 Emergency Powers Act.

Mr Lane had no insurance for his vehicle on that date, the court heard.

The court also heard that shortly before 6pm last September 1, Mr Lane was seen by gardai driving a VW Passat on its rim on the outskirts of Hospital.

A tyre had been punctured and he was heading to a garage. Mr Lane admitted having no insurance and signed a disclaimer allowing the gardai to seize the vehicle.

Inspector Brennan told the court that Mr Lane had three previous convictions for no insurance.

Solicitor Kevin Power said the manner of his clients driving was inexcusable but said he had not come to notice since last October.

He is a good fellow to work, he submitted.

I think he has reached the end of the road, Judge Patricia Harney commented.

She fined him 100 for breaching the Covid-19 regulations and further fined him 500 and disqualified him from driving for ten years for driving without insurance on the same date.

She fined him 250 for driving without a licence, 100 for failing to give his name and address, and 50 each for having no tax and no valid NCT displayed.

Charges of failing to produce licence, insurance and NCT were taken into consideration.

The judge sentenced Mr Lane to three months imprisonment for driving without insurance at Hospital last September 1, fined him 750 and disqualified him from driving for three months. She fined him a further 250 for driving without a licence.

Recognisance with leave to appeal was fixed.
Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has this morning confirmed that those aged between 18-34 will have access to Janssen Covid-19 vaccines from Monday. The roll out will see pharmacies deliver the vaccines, as the nation looks to battle the new 'Delta variant' of the virus which has been prevalent in recent weeks.

The minister also confirmed that while 18-34 year olds will be able to seek an appointment for a J&J in a participating pharmacy, from this Monday, pending supply, - The following week, starting July 12, 18-34-year-olds will be able to register on the online portal for an AstraZeneca or J&J vaccine.

Mr Donnelly also told the Dail that the government has line of sight on around 100,000 AZ doses that can be used for younger age groups - separate to the amount kept aside for second doses for older groups - and there is also likely to be 205-210k J&J doses available.

To arrange a vaccine, people aged 18-34 can contact a participating pharmacy to book an appointment. The HSE is asking that people book in advance so pharmacies will be able to plan accordingly and reduce the risk of any wastage.

Vaccination centres will also begin vaccinating younger age groups from mid-July in line with the current age-based rollout plan.

Vaccination centres will administer AstraZeneca and Janssen, as well as continuing to administer mRNA vaccines.

Consent mechanisms will be put in place by the HSE to ensure that anyone under 35 years of age wishing to avail of earlier access to vaccination through the administration of an AstraZeneca or Janssen vaccine is appropriately informed of the rare side-effects associated with the adenoviral vector vaccines. People in this group will also be advised about the probable timing of the availability of mRNA vaccine for their age group when considering this accelerated option.

As a response to rising concerns with regard to the Delta variant, this recommendation is being implemented in partnership between the HSE and the Irish Pharmacy Union, with the availability of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 18-34 in over 700 pharmacies nationwide.



Furthermore, those aged 18-34 opting for an accelerated vaccination will also be able to register from Monday July 12 for an appointment during July for a Janssen or AstraZeneca vaccine through Vaccination Centres.



Registration for an mRNA vaccine for those aged 30-34 will begin on Friday 9th July, starting with those aged 34 on that day, 33-year-olds on Saturday 10th July, and so on.



Minister Donnelly said; Its been a tough week for us all, especially with the greater awareness of the Delta variant and the possible impact of this strain on our communities. But its been a particularly tough week for the younger people of this country, who have yet to be offered a vaccine.

I asked the CMO and NIAC to look at the possibility of offering all vaccine types, including AstraZeneca and Janssen, to our younger population and today we are announcing how this approach will be implemented. Younger people who wish to opt for earlier vaccination can be offered a Janssen vaccine in their local participating pharmacy subject to their informed consent.

COVID-19 has been particularly hard for younger people in Ireland. While their own health has been threatened to a much lesser degree, they have carried a lot of responsibility in protecting vulnerable members of their homes and communities. I hope that todays announcement and the acceleration of our Vaccination Programme will help to bring hope to these young people.

A list of participating pharmacies will be available on HSE.ie and people are asked to contact their local participating pharmacy from Monday to book an appointment for the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine.
A DELEGATION from Limerick is to fly out to Belgium later this month to the burial site of Patrick Sarsfield.

Newly-elected mayor Daniel Buter, council manager Dr Pat Daly, Civic Trust manager David OBrien and Dr Loic Guyon, the honorary consul of France in Limerick are to head to Europe, after a major breakthrough was made earlier this year in their bid to locate the remains.

The group will be in both Ville de Huy and Landen in Belgium at the invitation of the mayors of both these cities.

This trip will notably be an opportunity to progress the application to @AWaP_Patrimoine to obtain permission to conduct an archeological dig of what used to be the interior of St Martins Church in Huy. Tune in here on 19 & 20 July for images and details of the trip!!! 3/3 July 2, 2021

Following a reception at the town hall of Huy, the delegation from Limerick will be visiting the site where they believe Sarsfield to be buried. The following day, the delegation will be received in Landen and taken for a tour of the battlefield where Sarsfield was wounded.

Dr Guyon confirmed the trip today, and said: I am absolutely thrilled to be travelling to Huy and Landen with the mayor and chief executive of Limerick and with my project partner David OBrien, to see those two places about which I have read so much on various historical documents over the past few months and to get to meet the people with whom I have been exchanging during that time. I believe it is the first time an official delegation from Limerick will be visiting Huy and it is a great opportunity for us to honour the memory of Patrick Sarsfield.

The visit was meant to take place earlier this year, but was put back to this month to coincide with the re-opening of non-essential international travel.

All this comes following the Sarsfield Homecoming Project was launched with the aim of locating and repatriating the remains of one of the citys most famous figures.

To this end, Dr Guyon wrote to the mayor of Huy to seek his assistance in trying to locate the ancient burial ground where the iconic figure is believed to be laid to rest.

Sarsfield was wounded in the service of France at the Battle of Neerwinden, now in Belgium, and historians believe he is interred at St Martins Church in Huy. Nothing but a wall is left of that church nowadays, and the exact location of his grave was unknown up to now.

However, Huy City Council has replied to Dr Guyon with 28 documents, including an 18th century map of the area, and references to the exact location of the graves of two French officers who, according to some records, were buried in the church around the same time as Patrick Sarsfield.

It will likely be Mayor Butlers first trip abroad as Limericks first citizen.
There will be Fourth of July Parades this year
Zurich: Credit Suisse is paying out a further $750 million to investors in its Greensill-linked supply chain finance funds, its asset management arm told investors on Friday.

It has recovered some $6.1 billion of the $10 billion in funds backed by insolvent supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital, it said on Friday, a slight increase over the $5.9 billion through late May.

The collapse of the funds in March kicked off a tumultuous period for the bank, culminating with a multi-billion dollar loss related to family office Archegos in a raft of executive oustings and an impending overhaul as top management fight to keep the bank intact.

The new repayments, planned for the week of July 5, will bring the total it has paid out to investors in the liquidation proceeds to $5.6 billion.

"Further liquidation proceeds are expected to be paid out to investors as soon as practicable in future installments," Credit Suisse said in the note. "Concrete timing on the next cash payouts cannot be provided at this moment."

Credit Suisse is focusing on some $2.3 billion in loans provided by Greensill to three single counterparties, the biggest of them Sanjeev Gupta's GFG Alliance, which are experiencing repayment issues.

On Friday, it said roughly $2.3 billion in late payments had accumulated as of June 29, approximately $1.8 billion of which were related to so-called "focus areas" comprised of these three groups, while a further $500 million was related to single-counterparty exposures.

The group is in deep discussions with mining magnate Gupta over the $1.2 billion exposure its funds hold to his wholly-owned GFG Alliance, representing the fund's single biggest pool of at-risk assets.

In late June, the two groups reached a six-week standstill agreement on GFG'S Australian steel and coal mining assets, which they hope will allow GFG to refinance the operations.

Credit Suisse has also held discussion with Softbank-backed construction startup Katerra over a $440 million exposure, and with West Virginia governor Jim Justice's coal company Bluestone Resources over a $690 million exposure.

Katerra in June filed for insolvency, estimating liabilities of $1 billion to $10 billion and assets of $500 million to $1 billion.

On some of these exposures, Credit Suisse expects insurance to kick in if repayments are not made, and the bank is looking to related insurance, primarily from Japanese group Tokio Marine .

Bond and Credit Company (BCC), a Tokio Marine unit, had provided $4.6 billion of coverage to Greensill credit notes, indirectly covering some of the Credit Suisse funds as a so-called "loss payee".

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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Nine European countries said that they will allow Indian travellers inoculated with Serum Institute of Indias Covishield vaccine to enter their territory without facing mandatory quarantine, a person familiar with the development said.

One of the nineEstoniasaid it will recognize all the vaccines that the government of India considers valid for travel by Indians, including the Russian Sputnik and the USs Moderna covid vaccine, the person said on condition of anonymity on Thursday.

Austria, Germany, Iceland, Greece, Slovenia, Ireland, Spain and Switzerland also said they will permit Indians inoculated with Covishield to travel to their countries.

This comes on the day that the European Union (EU) Digital Covid Certificate framework to facilitate free movement during the covid pandemic comes into effect.

Most of the travel till now was taking place between countries through so-called bubbles" where two countries agreed to open borders on a bilateral basis. This was aimed at restarting commercial passenger services when regular international flights were suspended because of covid. Indias aviation ministry website lists almost 30 countries with which India had such arrangements after the first pandemics first wave receded. However, with a devastating second wave hitting the country in April-May, many countries suspended travel from India.

With inoculations picking up276 million Indians have received at least one dose of a vaccineNew Delhi is hopeful that its vaccinated people will be able to travel without restrictions like those from other countries.

The European Parliament last month mandated that all member states must accept vaccination certificates issued in other EU countries for vaccines authorized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Presently, these include those vaccines manufactured by Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson. The Oxford-AstraZeneca developed Covishield, manufactured in India by Serum Institute, and Indias Covaxin are yet to get the EMA clearance.

According to a second person familiar with the matter, New Delhi is hopeful that France, considered a key strategic partner within Europe, will also give its green signal to vaccinated Indians to enter without restrictions. The EMAs approval for Covishield was expected, the second person said.

On Thursday, India requested countries in the EU to allow those Indian travellers who produce a vaccination certificate issued by the Indian governments CoWIN portal to be exempted from restrictions like mandatory quarantine or self-isolation after arriving at their destination.

Under this (EU Digital Covid Certificate) framework, people vaccinated with vaccines authorized by the EMA will be exempt from travel restrictions within the EU. Individual member states have the flexibility to also accept vaccines that have been authorized at the national level or by the World Health Organization," the second person cited above had said on Thursday.

India has requested EU member states to individually consider extending similar exemptions to those who have taken covid-19 vaccines in India, i.e. Covishield and Covaxin, and accept the vaccination certificate issued through the CoWIN portal," the person said. The genuineness of such vaccination certification can be authenticated on the CoWin portal," the second person had said.

We have also conveyed to the EU member states that India will institute a reciprocal policy for recognition of the EU Digital Covid Certificate. Upon notification of Covishield and Covaxin for inclusion in the EU Digital Covid Certificate and recognition of Indian CoWIN vaccination certificates, Indian health authorities would reciprocally exempt the concerned EU member state for exemption from mandatory quarantine all those persons carrying EU Digital Covid Certificate," the second person had added.

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Barrels from the medieval era that functioned as latrines were recently unearthed in the Danish city of Odense.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, Shakespeare wrote in "Hamlet." Archaeologists working at a Danish site might agree with the Bard, after discovering barrels from a latrine that dates back to the 14th century.

And yes, poop still stinks, even after 700 years.

The researchers working on the site found that the wooden barrels  and their malodorous contents  remain in excellent shape, and can reveal much about life in northern European villages in the 1300s. [Through the Years: A Gallery of the World's Toilets]

The archaeological dig is located in Odense, the birthplace of famed author Hans Christian Andersen.

"The excavation is characterized by great conditions for preservation and is located on a medieval site that has been found to contain brick houses, half-timbered houses and stables," lead archaeologist Maria Elisabeth Lauridsen told Discovery News.

Among other revelations, the latrine barrels have shown researchers what folks ate in that era: in a word, berries. "Preliminary results of analysis show that raspberries were popular in Odense in the 1300s," Lauridsen said.

And in case you're wondering what people used before the invention of toilet paper, here's your answer: "The contents also contain small pieces of moss, leather and fabric, which were used as toilet paper," Lauridsen added.

Digging for clues

The Danish research team isn't the first to find clues to medieval life in bathroom waste. A 2013 study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology found evidence of health problems in samples from latrines used by Crusaders traveling through Cyprus.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge dug into a pit of dried-out waste under a latrine in the remains of the castle known as Saranda Kolones at Paphos, a city at the southwestern tip of Cyprus and a UNESCO World Heritage site .

Under a microscope, the researchers saw that the waste samples contained the eggs of two of the world's most common intestinal parasites: whipworms (Trichuris trichiura), which cause the infection known as trichocephalus, and giant roundworms (Ascaris lumbricoides), the largest of the nematodes found in human intestines.

"In these circumstances, [it] is quite likely that medieval soldiers with a heavy parasite load would have been at increased risk of death from starvation during famine episodes such as long sieges or expeditions when supplies ran out," the researchers wrote. "This is because they would have had to share the limited available food with their parasites."

Reusing barrels

The Danish researchers found that barrels on the site probably had been reused  they apparently were originally used to store and transport fish and other goods before serving as toilets.

Researchers found other barrels stacked on top of one another in an underground well. "This well has probably been a part of beer brewing," Lauridsen said. "We have excavated nearby a stock of partially germinated barley, which is commonly used in the brewing process.

"We are finding new and exciting information about the life that was lived in Odense during the 14th century," Lauridsen said.

Follow Marc Lallanilla on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.
This radio band composite image of Arp 187, obtained by the VLA and ALMA telescopes (blue: VLA 4.86 GHz, green: VLA 8.44 GHz, red: ALMA 133 GHz), shows clear bimodal jet lobes. But the central nucleus (center of the image) is dark.

At the dark hearts of galaxies like the Milky Way lie supermassive black holes , with millions or even billions of times the sun's mass.

Some of those supermassive black holes are what scientists call active galactic nuclei (AGN), which spew out copious amounts of radiation like X-rays and radio waves. AGN are responsible for the twin jets of ionized gas you see shooting away in pictures of many galaxies .

As all things must pass, so too must every AGN one day shut off. But scientists have never quite understood how or when that happens. Now, researchers led by Kohei Ichikawa, an astronomer at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, may have found a clue. Looking at the distant galaxy Arp 187, those researchers have seen what they think is an AGN in its very last days.

Related: Black holes of the universe (images)

Ichikawa and his colleagues observed Arp 187 with the radio telescopes at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array ( ALMA ) in northern Chile and the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. They spotted twin jet lobes, a telltale sign of an AGN. But they couldn't detect radio waves, which also should have been coming from an active nucleus.

The observational difference between a standard AGN (left) and a dying AGN (right) discovered by Ichikawa et al. In the dying AGN, the nucleus is very faint in all wavelength bands because AGN activity is already dead, while the extended ionized region is still visible for about 3,000 light-years since it takes about 3,000 years for the light to cross the extended region. (Image credit: Ichikawa et al.)

So, the researchers took a second look at Arp 187's core with NASA's NuSTAR ("Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array") X-ray satellite. AGN normally produce X-rays in abundance, but no such signal emerges in the NuSTAR data, the team reported in a study presented earlier this month at the 238th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which was held virtually.

The researchers therefore think that, sometime in the past several thousand years (as observed from Earth), Arp 187's AGN has gone dark.

This observation is possible because an AGN's jets are colossal. Arp 187's stretch out for 3,000 light-years, meaning that you can see their matter stream away for millennia after the AGN core "dies." Astronomers call this mourning period a "light echo." It's like watching smoke from a newly extinguished fire.

The researchers have called their discovery "serendipitous." Arp 187 could be a stepping stone to learning more about what happens at the end of an AGN's life, study team members said.

"We will search for more dying AGN using a similar method as this study," Ichikawa said in a statement . "We will also obtain the high spatial resolution follow-up observations to investigate the gas inflows and outflows, which might clarify how the shutdown of AGN activity has occurred."

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An ancient carving depicting a naked "mystery horseman" discovered at Vindolanda, a Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall , might be a depiction of a god, archeologists said.

The carving shows a man without clothes (except a hat) who is holding a spear and standing in front of either a horse or donkey . This roughly 6-inch-wide by 12-inch-long (16 by 31.5 centimeters) stone would have fit into a recess at the fort, according to archaeologists at Vindolanda Charitable Trust in the United Kingdom.

"The nakedness of the man means he is probably a god, rather than a mere cavalryman," Marta Alberti, one of the archaeologists overseeing the excavations at Vindolanda, said in a statement released June 28. "He is also carrying a spear in his left arm, a common attribute of the god of war  Mars. However when you look at his head, the two almost circular features could be identified as wings: a common attribute of Mercury  god of travel. Horses and donkeys are also often associated with Mercury as a protector of travelers."

Related: Julius Caesar's Invasion of Britain (Photos)

Two volunteer excavators from Newcastle found the carved sandstone relief at the fort in Northumberland, a historic county in northeast England, on May 20. The volunteers, Richie Milor and David Goldwater, have taken part in annual excavations at Vindolanda for the last 15 years. This year, they were asked to unearth a flagged floor  a floor covered with stone flagstones, or pavers  within a fourth-century building at the fort. They found the unique carving a few inches below the topsoil, laying amongst the larger flagstones, they said.

"I saw one of the legs of the horse first and then the pointed top of the relief," Goldwater said in the statement. Milor added, "We are just absolutely elated, very proud to be part of this discovery, it was actually very emotional. 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."

Volunteer excavators Richie Milor and David Goldwater hold the carved stone they found at Vindolanda. (Image credit: The Vindolanda Trust)

The finding is the first stone relief of its kind found at Vindolanda. In archaic and classical Greek sculpture, which the Romans drew on, "nudity characterizes figures who otherwise embody more-than-mortal size, might, and blessed arete [excellence]," and it often signifies heroism, according to a 2007 study in the American Journal of Archaeology .

The stone relief would have fit into a recess at the fort. (Image credit: The Vindolanda Trust)

While the carving doesn't have an inscription, its location of discovery is an important clue; the floor was close to a fourth-century cavalry barrack. Perhaps the forces living in the barrack had their own ways of interpreting Mars, Mercury or a supernatural variation who possessed qualities of both gods, the archaeologists said.

"This interesting relief may represent something we have not only never seen before but something we may never see again," Alberti said.

The stone carving is now on display for the remainder of the 2021 season at the Vindolanda museum. Excavations at the fort will continue until Sept. 24.

Originally published on Live Science.
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Actor Jessica Joan had a long-awaited moment of closure when she read her victims statement at the June 30 sentencing hearing for Allison Mack, the Smallville star who became a leader of the sex cult tied to the now-convicted Keith Raniere and his NXIVM organization.

Joan was the NXIVM victim previously identified in court documents only as Jay. Joan decided to reveal her identity as part of Macks sentencing in an effort to move on to the next chapter of her life. She recently launched a podcast, The Untouchable Jessica Joan and has a book by the same name due out next month.

Im extremely strong person, Joan told Variety, hours after she spoke in the Brooklyn courtroom of U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis. I think there is a reason why I was put in this situation to handle it in the way that I have. It took an emotional toll. At the same time Im trying to put my life back together and make sense of everything.

An actor and poet, Joan has spent the past three years-plus being on call for the FBI and federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York as they built the case against Raniere, who was sentenced to 120 years in prison last year on sex trafficking, racketeering, fraud and conspiracy charges. Mack, who cooperated with prosecutors, received a three-year sentence.

Joan was recruited by Mack into the group that purported to be a womens empowerment initiative, alternately known as DOS or The Vow, but turned out to be a vehicle to recruit sex partners for Raniere. The group revolved around twisted master and slave relationships among various women. In her role as a leader, Mack directed Joan to attempt to seduce and have sex with Raniere, in part as a means to help Joan recover from childhood and sexual abuse traumas suffered in her youth.

Macks instruction to have sex with Raniere was the shock that Joan needed to break away from the NXIVM organization. She had been living with the group at its compound in upstate New York, but she fled to her native Hawaii. She was not among the group members who endured the human branding ritual that left them with a symbol that incorporated Ranieres initials in the pelvic area. Nor did she have sex with Raniere.

Joan, who now lives in Los Angeles, has had a long journey through the legal system and her own emotional roller-coaster. The chance to speak out and look Mack in the eye at the sentencing while Joan described the pain that Mack inflicted was daunting but necessary, she said.

Having all eyes on you and feeling all of the energy in the room is something thats hard to explain, Joan said. There was a lot of adrenaline going through my body. It was exciting and intense but it also felt like a sense of closure and Im grateful for that.

Joan also has high praise and deep appreciation for the work done by FBI investigators and the Eastern District prosecutors. That (U.S. Attorneys) office is filled with incredibly unsung heroes who have become like family to me, she said. They are truly beautiful people dedicated to justice.

The work that Joan has put in to the case has meant sacrifices. Joan told the judge in her remarks that she used the last of her unemployment checks to help cover the cost of her trip to New York from Los Angeles to speak at Macks hearing.

Mack and Raniere were arrested in early 2018. Some months later, Joan received a letter of apology from Mack that she found disingenuous.

It didnt feel like there was any real sense of feeling or remorse. It was a bunch of empty words, Joan said. When she made eye contact with Mack in court, the look in her eyes was just empty. There was no feeling  just complete disconnection, she said.

In Joans view, Mack should have received a long sentence given the severity of her actions with Raniere. Joan said she was livid last week when she read reports of Mack requesting no jail time from the judge because she was engaged in studies at UC Berkeley and has turned her life around, according to the defenses sentencing memo.

The judge himself expressed that he was grappling with his own inner turmoil, Joan said. He feels the gravity of the abuse and the pain the victims went through but in the same breath he considers Allison to be a victim of Keith, which is also true.

Joan has spent a lot of time trying to understand how Raniere and some of those around him at NXIVM could recruit intelligent and accomplished people into an organization that was clearly a cult of personality. That introspection has led her to realize how insidious the psychological manipulation was that Raniere exerted on hundreds of followers.

It attracted good people who had colorful histories who wanted to heal and help others, Joan said. They blanketed that in a personal development program based in humanities and ethics. They focused on people who wanted to be successful and wanted to get past their own limitations and in that way serve the greater good. Thats what makes it so evil. If youre joining the Mafia or a gang, you know what youre getting into.

The process of breaking away from a cult-like experience is exhausting, Joan said. The only way for people to be OK with this is to do the inner work and accept the things that happened. And to have forgiveness for yourself.

Joans credits as an actor include the 2013 IFC feature Contracted and web series This Indie Thing and Run DMZ. Now that the Mack prosecution is complete, Joan is turning her focus to ramping up her acting work in addition to being an advocate for victims of mental and physical abuse.

I went public with the intention of using my story to help other people, Joan said. Im not held down by trauma and baggage anymore. Im free for a future that looks very bright.

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Channel 4 and Sky in the U.K. have extended their pre-existing, long-term commercial partnership in a new multi-year agreement which, according to the companies, will facilitate greater opportunity for collaboration, commercial growth and innovation as broadcasting evolves going forward.

Under the terms of the new deal, Sky customers will have access to even more Channel 4 content as more than 1000 hours of All 4  Channel 4s VoD platform  exclusives are integrated into Skys current and future TV products. Channel 4 will benefit from under the new terms by opening avenues to new digital ad revenue streams which can support its Future4 strategy.

When we set out our Future4 strategy last year, we made clear that securing strategic distribution partnerships would be a vital part of ensuring we can maximize our reach and impact with viewers in a digital age, grow our revenues and compete more effectively for the future, said Alex Mahon, chief executive at Channel 4.

This brings Sky customers more of what they want and supports Channel 4 to deliver on their key priorities, all while providing both parties with long-term confidence in the strategic partnership. The expansion of Channel 4s content, alongside Skys existing partnerships, and the impressive slate of Sky Originals planned for this year, makes it even easier for Sky customers to access everything they love, in one place, added Stephen van Rooyen, executive VP and chief executive at Sky.

BLOCKCHAIN

Production company American Zoetrope will preview plans for its blockchain-based, nonprofit Decentralized Pictures (DCP) in a fireside chat hosted by DCP co-founders Roman Coppola and Leo Matchett on Monday, July 12 at Cannes Marche du Film. The DCP financing app is a talent-sourcing platform which uses the advantages of blockchain to empower community members to better fund underserved filmmakers. Artists will be able to submit proposals via the app, which are then voted on by the platforms community of users, with standout projects then directed to financing and support from DCPs network of industry partners. DCP will launch its betanet soon and the full DCP financing app shortly after.

EXECUTIVE

All3Media-owned New Pictures co-founder Charlie Pattinson will step down from his CEO role to become non-executive chair. His co-CEO Willow Grylls is now in charge alongside Elaine Pyke as creative director.

Pattinson will continue as an executive producer on a slate of projects including the upcoming second series of Cobra for Sky One and Champion, an original drama series from Candice Carty-Williams for BBC One with Balloon Entertainment.

Pattinson co-founded New Pictures alongside Grylls and Pyke in 2013, with Grylls becoming joint CEO in May 2020. Together they have executive produced all New Pictures output over the last eight years including Catherine the Great for Sky Atlantic/HBO which garnered a Golden Globe nomination for Helen Mirren; The Missing and The Missing II for BBC One/STARZ; The Innocents for Netflix and Indian Summers for Channel 4.

Recent successes include Cobra, starring Robert Carlyle; White House Farm for ITV/HBO Max; The Spanish Princess for STARZ; and ITV/Sundance drama Des starring David Tennant  which became the biggest new drama launch on British television in 2020.

FESTIVALS

MyFrenchFilmFestival (MFFF), the primary online initiative of Unifrance  the biggest national film promotion board in the world  has dropped a trailer and the complete lineup for its Cannes Special Edition, running July 6-17. 12 features and 12 shorts from previous editions of MFFF will be free to stream worldwide on MyFrenchFilmFestival.com as well as UniFrances social media profiles.

FEATURES

Mr leos caraX (Tessa Louise-Salome)

Dear Prudence (Rebecca Zlotowski)

Leader-Sheep (Christian Rouaud)

Augustine (Alice Winocour)

Maddened by his Absence (Sandrine Bonnaire)

The Rendez-Vous of Deja vu (Antonin Peretjatko)

Hippocrates (Thomas Lilti)

Ava (Lea Mysius)

Swagger (Olivier Babinet)

Willy the 1st (Ludovic Boukherma, Zoran Boukherma, Marielle Gautier, Hugo P. Thomas)

Sauvage (Camille Vidal-Naquet)

The Swallows of Kabul (Zabou Breitman, Elea Gobbe-Mevellec)

SHORTS

Its Free For Girls (Marie Amachoukelim, Claire Burger)

Mans Best Friend (Vincent Mariette)

The Little Tailor (Louis Garrel)

Its Not a Cowboy Movie (Benjamin Parent)

Aissa (Clement Trehin-Lalanne)

Guy Moquet (Demis Herenger)

Monsters Turn Into Lovers (Yann Delattre)

Sunday Lunch (Celine Devaux)

The Dragons Demise (Marina Diaby)

Birth of a Leader (Antoine de Bary)

Chasse Royale (Lise Akoka, Romane Gueret)

The Night of the Plastic Bags (Gabriel Harel)

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Chile presents four powerful documentaries at Cannes Docs Docs in Progress: Showcase Chile this year, which will screen online on Wednesday July 7 and on-site on July 10 at the hybrid Cannes Marche du Film.

Most of them reflect the deep trauma the country suffered under the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1970-1990).

Indeed, the Pinochet dictatorship has left a very deep mark on Chilean society and today it is the daughters and sons, even the granddaughters and grandsons of those who lived and suffered at that time, who raise their voices to expose these traumas and the repercussions that they have had in their own generations, says Chiledoc director Paula Ossandon, pointing to the social unrest that broke out from October 2019 as one of the signs. Everything that happens to us is related to our previous history and that resonates in cinema; They are the new generations revisiting the past to understand, she added.

As exemplified by Maite Alberdi, whose The Mole Agent clinched Chiles first documentary Oscar nomination, the countrys new generation of doc filmmakers are creating films that dwell on science, human rights, generational identity, indigenous stories and personal experience at a time when the country voted to reject its Pinochet-era constitution and herald a new era.

I believe that The Mole Agents greatest contribution to Chilean cinema was to awaken the massive interest of the audience, to demolish the preconceptions and prejudices that often exist around the documentary, Ossandon asserted

The real success was that it became a topic of conversation at home, that people wanted to see it, that they knew that it existed and were amazed that a documentary could be funny, capable of putting issues that matter on the table, and that those topics  old age, abandonment- were finally the ones that both the media and the public were talking about, she continued, adding that interest in docu-fiction hybrids and finding new, non-traditional forms of examining reality are also in vogue.

Despite the pandemic, the country expects to release at least 10 docs next year, slightly less than the average annual yield of 15. However, 2023 could see fewer films as production has either stalled or slowed down since last year.

Chiles institutional funding has also been impacted by the global health crisis but for this year, state support adds up to a total of $22.5 million between the funds available for television (CNTV), audiovisual promotion and an additional emergency fund for audiovisual projects, according to the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage.

CANNES DOCS: DOCS IN PROGRESS  SHOWCASE CHILE

Bajo Sospecha

Director: Daniel Diaz Oyarzun

Producer: Pejeperro Films

Narrated by Oyarzun in the Mapuzugan language, his docu dwells on the arrest of his uncle, an artist, who was detained ostensibly for his indigenous looks. The arrest spurs his uncle, Bernardo Oyarzun, to portray himself as a delinquent, highlighting his indigenous identity and the racial stigma he has experienced through his art. Inspired by his uncle whom he works for as an apprentice, Daniel decides to become a filmmaker. Through his film, he examines his uncles artistic career and his own ancestors past as he questions his own identity and the challenges of being a Mapuche in a city.

Bastardo, la Herencia de un Genocida

Director: Pepe Rovano

Producer: Totoral Films, Media Lab

When I found my father, I also found his crimes, Pepe Rovano relates. He grew up not knowing who his father was but while working on a human rights documentary, he found his biological father  who also turned out to be involved in the notorious Las Coimas killings where communist party leaders were rounded up and executed when Pinochet came into power. He reunites with his dying father but when the father finds out he is gay, he rejects him. Pepe connects with the children of his fathers victims and decides to unite with them in their struggle for truth, memory and justice.

EDITA

Director: Pamela Pollak

Producers: Pollak Films and Austral Content

A visit from her uncle Jarda, now in the eighties, who brings with him a VHS camera and the ashes of his mother, Pollaks great aunt Edita, triggers an exploration by Pollak of her fascinating great aunt. Employing voiceover, screenshots, home videos and other documentary devices, Pollak examines the life of Edita who her family alleges was a Trotskyist and a Bauhaus art student when living in Prague where she witnessed and experienced the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. The question lingers on whether Edita had lost her mind.

Punto de Encuentro

Director: Roberto Baeza

Producer: La Toma Prods.

Two filmmakers attempt to reconstruct the memory of their respective fathers, revolutionary leftists who were seized when they themselves were only babies. Both fathers were taken to torture prisons where one survived and the other vanished. As they recreate the scenes in the actual places of torture with actors and involve even the grandchildren in the staging of the incidents, one of them wonders if shes doing harm to her father, the survivor, as he recovers gaps in his memory. The filmmakers grapple with doubts on whether they can truly evoke something so unbelievable. The experience proves painful but cathartic for all three generations.

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MK2, the venerable family-owned film group which operates a leading arthouse multiplex chain in France and Spain, is emerging from the pandemic stronger, cooler and more ambitious than ever.

Nathanael and Elisha Karmitz, who succeeded their father Marin at the helm of the company in 2005, have galvanized the MK2 brand with activities ranging from films, art, publishing, technology and lifestyle. The common threads between all these ventures are a taste for singularity, curation and a socially-minded approach.

After scoring big at Cannes in 2019 with Mati Diops Atlantics and Celine Sciammas Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which competed and won prizes, MK2 Films will again boast a fairly large presence for the festivals comeback edition with nine films across several selections, including the competition with Joachim Triers The Worst Person in the World, the new Cannes Premiere section with Andrea Arnolds Cow, Un Certain Regard with Aleksey German Jr.s House Arrest and Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakovas Women Do Cry; and Directors Fortnight with Jonas Carpignanos A Chiara and Anais Volpes The Brave. The company also has Rahul Jains documentary Invisible Demons, co-repped with Participant in the cinema for the climate section, and two films at Cannes Classics, Krzysztof Kieslowskis The Double Life of Veronique, and Emir Kusturicas Black Cat, White Cat.

Under the leadership of Nathanael Karmitz and managing director Fionnuala Jamison, an Irish-born executive who took over from Juliette Schrameck last year, MK2 Films is now about to expand with more acquisitions, including English-language titles, more co-productions and additional hires. The current team includes Olivier Barbier, head of acquisitions and Camille Dupeuble, SVP of international sales, who joined MK2 from Wild Bunch and Studiocanal, respectively; along with Quentin Bohanna, international sales executive; Elise Cochin, in charge of library sales worldwide; and Ching-Lo Hsu, international sales and coordination executive.

The companys slate of new acquisitions include Mikhael Hers Night Birds with a female-driven cast led by Charlotte Gainsbourg (Melancholia), rising star Noee Abita (Slalom) and Emmanuelle Beart (8 Women). Night Birds, the helmers follow-up to the Venice-premiering Amanda, portrays a divorcee raising her children alone and working at a late-night radio show in the 1980s.

MK2 Films has also boarded Mars Express, Jeremie Perrins stylish animated film noir set in a near future. Mars Express follows a private detective and her android partner who are hired by a wealthy businessman to track down a notorious hacker. Their investigation leads them to Mars where they uncover a darker story of brain farms, corruption and a missing girl.

Jamison said the feature will combine 2D and 3D animation and will include a healthy dose of humor and action scenes. The executive said Mars Express was also in line with the companys other upscale animated projects, notably Alex Helfrechts A Winters Journey, which is being made by the creative teams behind Despicable Me and Loving Vincent; and The Inventor, written and directed by Jim Capobianco, the Oscar-nominated scribe of Ratatouille.

Slated for a delivery in 2022, Mars Express is produced by Everybody on Deck and is being created by Je Suis Bien Content, a well-known studio whose track record includes The Day of the Crows and Persepolis. Gebeka will distribute the film in France. MK2 Films will show a demo reel of the project at Cannes.

As it strives to nurture a young generation of filmmakers, MK2 Films has also acquired international sales rights to Mother and Son, the sophomore outing of Leonor Serraille who won Cannes Golden Camera with Jeune Fille in 2017. The film opens in the 1980s and spans 30 years into the life of Rose, who moved from Africa to the Paris suburbs with her two young sons. Produced by Blue Monday Productions, the film stars Annabelle Lengronne, Stephane Bak, Ahmed Sylla and Kenzo Sambin. It will be released in France by Diaphana.

In previous years, we were handling 10 to 15 films per year, and now were aiming to handle between 15 and 20 with a desire to have a balance between established filmmakers and emerging talents, many of whom are women, says Karmitz.

The company Cannes lineup is dominated again this year by female directors, but Karmitz says it has nothing to do with affirmative action. Its happening in a very natural way through the choices we make, and its a reflection of todays world but in reality female directors have always played a pivotal role in the history of cinema since its creation, says Karmitz.

Jamison concurs, We are happy to be working with a young generation of directors, and we are seeing every year that an increasingly number of them are directed by women, like Leonore Seraille, who lend a different tone and voice to the stories they tell. I think we all need this new gaze.

Jamison said that although the market was highly competitive with distributors mainly focusing on established directors, there is still room for gems from lesser-known directors as long as they stand out for their subjects, characters or points of view.

All the films on our lineup say something about our world and are very politically-minded; if you take the two films in Un Certain Regard for instance, each represent a very particular chapter in history that resonates today, says Karmitz.

MK2 has always been driven by the desire to look for stories about particular situations that can strike a universal chord, adds Karmitz, who added that political engagement has always been at the roots of MK2 since its founding by Marin Karmitz in 1974.

MK2 Films will also be ramping up its input in co-production. In the current post-Covid film landscape, the company feels a duty to be more involved with filmmakers and encourage them to continue making singular, original movies that will be discovered in theaters, says Karmitz.

With its international outlook, the company is also well positioned to ensure that projects it boards will travel overseas. 100% our lineup travels, and on each title we have at least 25 territories sold, says Jamison.

The executive, who played an active role in securing worldwide sales rights to Arnolds Cow, said the outfit was interesting in repping more films from Anglo-Saxon industries, including the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.

Another key aspect of MK2 is its love for heritage movies and its impressive library of 600 films, including classics from Charles Chaplin to Claude Chabrol, David Lynch and Abbas Kiarostami. Rosalie Varda, the daughter of the late New Wave legend Agnes Varda, joined MK2 Films as senior consultant for the companys library activities. Within the last year, MK2 has hosted several events, including an homage to Chabrol with a program of five iconic movies restored in 4K labeled Suspense in the Female Form; and a large-scale retrospective and exhibition of the work of Kiarostami; and the 100-year anniversary of The Kid, Charlie Chaplins first film.

The brothers latest venture is Hotel Paradiso, a hip and chic cinephile haven located in Paris. The four-star venue boasts 34 rooms, which are tastefully decorated by Alix Thomsen and boast laser projectors as well as giant screens; while two suites even boast private state-of-the-art screening rooms. The hotel is also meant to be a Parisian hotspot with a karaoke lounge, podcast studio and an open-air cinema roof terrace with unobstructed views of Paris. Due to the large success of the venue since its launch a few months ago, Karmitz said the company is now considering opening another Paradiso hotel in Paris.

MK2 is also big on curated digital initiatives. In 2020, the company created Festival a la Maison, an online festival, and launched MK2 Curiosity, an AVod platform dedicated to rare arthouse films. The brothers love for high-art and films are also on display in their Cinema Paradiso festival which is currently being hosted by Le Louvre Museum and offers open-air free screenings of cult films and anticipated ones like Netflixs How I Became a Superhero by Douglas Attal.

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ShaCarri Richardson, the 21-year-old who qualified for the 2020 Olympics after running a 100-meter race in 10.86 seconds last month, has been suspended after testing positive for THC.

Dont judge me because I am human. Im you. I just happen to run a little faster, Richardson said on the Today show Friday morning. The athlete revealed that she used marijuana after finding out about the death of her biological mother from a reporter in Oregon, a state where the drug is legal.

The 30-day suspension, which ends on July 27, has provoked a number of celebrities to speak out against the ruling. Seth Rogen, the actor and comedian known for his love of marijuana, said Team USAs decision is something they should be ashamed of.

The notion that weed is a problematic drug is rooted in racism, Rogen tweeted. Its insane that Team USA would disqualify one of this countrys most talented athletes over thinking thats rooted in hatred. Its something they should be ashamed of.

He added, Also if weed made you fast, Id be FloJo, referencing Florence Joyner, the 80s Olympian and world record holder as the fastest woman in the 100-meter and 200-meter races.

The notion that weed is a problematic drug is rooted in racism. Its insane that Team USA would disqualify one of this countrys most talented athletes over thinking thats rooted in hatred. Its something they should be ashamed of. Also if weed made you fast, Id be FloJo. https://t.co/swDLNoVcV3  Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) July 2, 2021

British American freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy added, Marijuana is NOT a performance enhancing drug.

marijuana is NOT a performance enhancing drug  Gus Kenworthy (@guskenworthy) July 2, 2021

Adam Rippon, a former American figure skater wrote, My heart is broken for @itskerrii. I think she is an amazing athlete and her personality is superstar level. Marijuana being a banned substance in competition seems outdated???? And unfair.

My heart is broken for @itskerrii. I think she is an amazing athlete and her personality is superstar level. Marijuana being a banned substance in competition seems outdated???? And unfair.  Adam Rippon (@AdamRippon) July 2, 2021

To punish this incredible athlete for cannabis?? This prohibition has fucked up so many peoples lives I just cant even, wrote Jonathan Van Ness, star of Netflixs Queer Eye. We love you @itskerrii.

To punish this incredible athlete for cannabis?? This prohibition has fucked up so many peoples lives I just cant even. We love you @itskerrii https://t.co/mzxrySbAyM  Jonathan Van Ness (@jvn) July 2, 2021

Read more reactions below.

This is bull Shxttbh  Odell Beckham Jr (@obj) July 2, 2021

But majority of yall rule makers smoke and probably are investors in THC companies. Lets stop playing these games https://t.co/hT3H6kw45T  DWade (@DwyaneWade) July 2, 2021

There is no need for ShaCarri to apologize. We need to get rid of archaic rules for a substance that is fully legal in 19 states plus DC. And we need to legalize it at the federal level. https://t.co/Ws0n8ykKIP  Congressman Jamaal Bowman (@RepBowman) July 2, 2021

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Courtesy /U.S. Border Patrol

A man used a stolen trailer to transport more than 40 migrants, according to an arrest affidavit.

Alberto Martinez Jr. was arrested and charged with transport, attempt to transport and conspire to transport migrants who had crossed the border illegally.
After several hours of interviews, deliberation and discussion, the Laredo College Board of Trustees approved the approval of an interim president by unanimous decision during a special call meeting on Thursday evening.

Former Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs Dr. Marisela Rodriguez-Tijerina was approved by the board and will serve in the position throughout the ongoing process of finding the next permanent leader of the college, replacing the departing president Dr. Ricardo Solis. She will begin her duties starting July 9.

I feel very honored, and I truly thank the board of trustees for having the confidence and trust in me in this interim period, she said. Laredo College is something I am very passionate for, and definitely my mission is to continue with serving the students and our community, all revolving around the mission of our college, which revolves around student success.

According to her LC biography, Rodriguez-Tijerina served as the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Laredo College for several years. Her most notable contributions at LC have been as Project Director for U.S. Department of Education - Minorities in Sciences and Engineering Improvement Program as well as the Principal Investigator for National Science Foundation S-STEM Program.

She obtained her Bachelor of Science degree in biology in 2001 and Master of Science degree in biology with a concentration in neurobiology in 2004 from the University of Texas at San Antonio. And in 2016, she received an doctorate of education in Educational Leadership in Higher Education Administration from Texas A&M University-Kingsville.

Rodriguez-Tijerina applied along with three other LC members, all of which were strong candidates.

It is imperative that our college continues to sustain the efficiency and innovation that has always characterized this organization. Dr. Rodriguez Tijerina recognizes that LC is a world-class institution with a rich tradition of excellence and innovation, LC Board President Lupita Zepeda said. The board is confident in her ability to lead the college, and we have entrusted her with this important task because of the vast knowledge and experience she possesses.

Trustee Esteban Rangel added that he was impressed with each candidate, with board members echoing similar sentiments.

In looking into our own family members for interim president, it was really interesting to hear from the point of view from the applicant, Trustee Jackie Leven-Ramos said. So I am very proud of those members who decided to apply, but moreso I am proud you are my family  that you are my family as a Laredo College board member and as a member of this institution  that will continue to work diligently to assist every individual to make this college a continued success.

The college has already formed an Ad Hoc Executive Search Committee that will start looking for its eighth president. This committee will be responsible for the recruiting, interviewing, screening and employment of the new president.

It is an honor, and I am humbled to have been selected as acting interim president while the search for the next college president continues. I am fully committed to our college and looking forward to working with all departments to achieve a collective vision for this institution, Tijerina stated. I can ensure that while I am acting interim president, I will continue to focus on our institutional core values to achieve educational growth and continue transforming many students lives.

The next LC board meeting is slated for Thursday, July 29 at 6 p.m.

cocampo@lmtonline.com
U.S. Customs and Border Protection arrested a woman accused of smuggling $1.3 million in brown heroin, according to court documents.

Drug smugglers will go to extreme lengths to ensure their illegal contraband avoids detection, said Port Director Alberto Flores, Laredo Port of Entry. Fortunately, our frontline officers employ an array of high-tech tools, canines and inspections experience which helps CBP interdict dangerous drugs and aids in the prosecution of drug traffickers.

Maria de la Luz Sosa, a 27-year-old U.S. citizen, was arrested and charged with import and conspire to import a controlled substance.

Sosa arrived at the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge driving a gray 2009 Toyota Camry on June 27. Sosa stated to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer that she did not have any items to declare and was referred to a secondary inspection due to travel inconsistencies, according to court documents.

A K-9 inspection of the vehicle resulted in a positive alert for the presence of a narcotic odor, states the affidavit. CBP officers escorted the vehicle for an X-ray scan, where authorities discovered anomalies in the gas tank area. Further inspection of the vehicle yielded 49 bundles of brown heroin.

The contraband weighed 58.06 pounds and had an estimated street value of $1,317,000.

Sosa allegedly agreed to a post-arrest interview with Homeland Security Investigations special agents. She stated she traveled to Monterrey to visit her fiancee.

When confronted with inconsistencies of the timeline of her story, Sosa recanted. Sosa stated that two male subjects, possible relatives of her fiancee, used her car during the three days she claimed she was in Mexico, and at times, they would borrow the car between 4 to 5 hours a day, states the affidavit.

Sosa added that the two men asked her what she did for a living and where she lived. The two men also instructed her to call them once she made it safely where she resided, according to court documents.
The City of Laredo announced on Thursday one of its worst weeks for COVID-19 results in months. Yet it simultaneously stated it would be taking steps to once again cut back on providing updates.

A total of 135 positives and one death were added to the areas total, giving it 44,612 positives and 847 deaths since the pandemic emerged locally in March of 2020. Hospitalizations also reached 20, their highest point since April 24.

The positives are the most of any single week since Laredos COVID updates moved to weekly on March 27 announcing 46 positives over the prior six days and following it up with the first full week of results in a weekly briefing with 50 positives on June 3. These totals drove active cases in the area diving down to only 41 on the latter day  the fewest since the first 16 days of the pandemic from March 16-31, 2020.

But figures have started climbing once again, reaching 80 positives in three straight weeks before jumping up to over 135 this week  the fourth-highest week of cases since March 6 and the most in the past nine weeks. And with it, active cases have now gone all the way up to 134  the most reported in one day since May 6.

The city previously stated that its Levels of Communication criteria would determine how many COVID updates the area would have going forward, with the area in Level I  one public update per week and two media briefings per month due to having over 50 active cases and a positivity and hospitalization rate above 2.5%. However, the area has been quickly heading back toward Level II  three public updates per week and a media briefing per week  which is defined by simultaneously having over 100 active cases and a positivity and hospitalization rate above 5%.

After last weeks briefing, Laredo was quickly approaching Level II. Active cases hit 95, positivity rate was all the way at 9.7% and hospitalization rate was the only one still lower at 2.8%.

However, despite Laredo going well above the active cases and hospitalization reported at their highest point in months, the city made some changes announced Thursday that would make it more difficult to get to Level II. It also canceled its previously scheduled media briefing and said that going forward media briefings would only be held as needed.

The city announced that active cases and positivity rate have been completely dropped from the criteria to determine COVID updates going forward. It stated that hospitalization rate would be the only metric that would now determine COVID update frequency, and officials also increased that benchmark from 5% up to 7.5% for Level II.

To put that in perspective, Laredo hasnt had a hospitalization rate above 7.5% since March 1 when it reported 38 individuals hospitalized. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, Laredo had a 3.9% hospitalization rate corresponding to Wednesday  it reached 4.9% Monday  while the DSHS added that the area has not had any ICU space remaining over the past eight days.

According to a press release, officials stated they dropped positivity rate as a useful metric in the battle against COVID-19 due to seeing a significant drop in local tests administered. They attribute that to less people seeking testing due to a high number of vaccinations in the community, and with less people seeking testing, an artificial increase could be seen.

Over the last 12 weeks, the city said it has seen a drastic 71.95% drop in the number of COVID-19 tests administered in the community.

However, the timing for the message is a bit off as the citys testing this week was significantly elevated. In fact, the rolling seven-day positivity rate actually fell five points down to 4.7% Thursday due to so many of them being administered in the area. The 2,868 tests reported are the most in a single week since the last week of April.

The latest death reported Thursday was of a female in her early 70s and occurred on Wednesday, June 30.

In total, 463 men and 382 women have died from COVID-19 in Laredo. Those in their 70s make up the largest group of deaths with 216 ahead of individuals in their 60s (184), 80s (173), 50s (109) and 90s (73).

Of the current 134 active cases, 72 were reported between the ages of 20-49. Meanwhile, 91 of those active cases occurred in individuals who were not vaccinated, with 18 reported as breakthrough cases which infected the individual despite being vaccinated. Of the latter group, three have been hospitalized.

A total of 354,203 tests have been administered during the pandemic. A total of 43,631 persons are estimated to have recovered from a previous infection.

COVID vaccinations continue in the area as the main weapon against the virus, with now 69.7% of the eligible population over 12 years of age, or 150,440 people, fully vaccinated.

Meanwhile, nearly 13.9% of the additional population, or 29,975 people, have received only one dose, giving the area a total of 83.6% of the eligible population having received one or two doses. In the population over 65 years of age, more than 91.8%, or 24,724 people, have received at least one dose.

Vaccinations will be a bit harder to find in the coming month as the city announced last week that Curative would be halting all future vaccinations after next month, downscaling sites until concluding all operations by July 30. The city stated its health department would instead be providing the vaccinations going forward.
Hundreds of prisoners at Wellington Correctional Center in Australia's New South Wales state are being forced to move out of the facility as officials scramble to repair the damage caused by mice chomping through cables, scurrying across ceiling panels and embedding in the building's walls.

Corrective Services New South Wales Commissioner Peter Severin confirmed that "vital remediation work" needed to be carried out at the jail, which is located about four hours from Sydney, along with a thorough cleaning and review of the prison's infrastructure.

"The health, safety and well-being of staff and inmates is our number one priority so it's important for us to act now," he said, as an estimated 420 male and female prisoners geared up to be relocated over the next 10 days, along with at least 200 staff members.

The facility could not be reached for further comment.

Pest control services have been summoned to remove the dead creatures from the walls, which authorities say is sending a potent stench into the air.

Australia has a mouse problem. A plague, in fact. A mass invasion occurs every decade or so, wreaking havoc across communities and destroying the crops and stock of farmers who are worried about what the future holds for their livelihoods.

Untold numbers of the critters are running rampant along the country's Eastern grain belt, demolishing crops, sabotaging homes and forcing concerned farmers to create makeshift traps to slow down the rodents, which are able to reproduce at an alarming rate.

Some farmers say they have caught between 500 to 1,000 of the creatures in one night.

Residents told The Washington Post in recent weeks that the mice are dying in the walls and that the stench is widespread.

Kevin Corcoran, the assistant commissioner of custodial corrections, said officials would also use the time to examine how best to protect the jail from future rodent invasions.

While staff members will be stationed at other prisons in the surrounding area until the building is in better condition, some Australians told local media they didn't believe prisoners should be moved while a deep clean takes place.

"It's not a holiday resort, they're in there for a reason," one man told Prime7 News, while others highlighted the infestation poses a health risk.

And the mice have indeed been linked to health issues.

Earlier this year, hospitals in New South Wales reported infestations, with several patients being attacked by the mice, forcing them to seek (more) medical treatment. At the time, a NSW health spokesperson told ABC News that "reports of residents or patients receiving minor bites" had been made.

Officials have also identified a rare but infectious illness known as lymphocytic choriomeningitis in the region and linked it to the influx of mice, which are able to carry and pass on the virus. Symptoms of the disease include fever, bodily aches and vomiting.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who are bitten by mice, handle them or are exposed to their droppings are more likely to contract the illness, which is described as being "rodent-borne."
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  Rescue efforts at the site of a partially collapsed Florida condominium building resumed Thursday evening after a 15-hour pause for safety concerns, and officials said they had started planning for the likely demolition of the remaining structure.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the decision about the demolition needs to be made extremely carefully and methodically, considering the potential impact on the pile of debris and the effect on the search-and-rescue operations. An engineer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would likely be weeks before officials schedule the demolition.

The rescue work was halted shortly after 2 a.m. amid concerns about the stability of the part of the tower that still stands. Crews noticed widening cracks and up to a foot of movement in a large column.

Work resumed shortly before 5 p.m. after the site was evaluated by structural engineers, Cava said, describing firefighters as really, really excited out there."

We will continue to search feverishly, as we have done all along in the parts of the collapse that we currently have access to, she said.

Scott Nacheman, a FEMA structures specialist, said operations were paused after sensors detected movement. It was later determined that the building itself had not moved, but there was movement in the debris pile below and in debris on the building of significant size," Nacheman said Thursday.

Nacheman said additional sensors were added to the site.

Right now, were in a position where we feel it is safe to continue operations. Weve done so, and monitoring will continue indefinitely until the operations are complete, he said.

The stoppage had threatened to dim hopes for finding anyone alive in the debris a week after the tower came down. Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said the halt was worrisome since minutes and hours matter, lives are at stake.

The rescue operations unfolded on the same day that President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited the devastated community.

The collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South beachfront condominium killed at least 18 people and left 145 missing. No one has been rescued since the first hours after the collapse.

This is life and death, Biden said during a briefing. We can do it, just the simple act of everyone doing what needs to be done, makes a difference.

Theres gonna be a lot of pain and anxiety and suffering and even the need for psychological help in the days and months that follow," he said. "And so, were not going anywhere.

Crews noticed several expansions in cracks they had been monitoring. They also observed 6 to 12 inches of movement in a large column hanging from the structure that could fall and cause damage to support columns" in the underground parking garage, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Chief Alan Cominsky said.

Heavy equipment in the rubble pile caused vibrations, according to Nacheman. Rain has also been entering exposed parts of the building, saturating items and adding weight to the floors.

Peter Milian is a cousin of Marcus Guara, who died along with his wife, Anaely Rodriguez, and their two children, 10-year-old Lucia Guara and 4-year-old Emma Guara. Milian said he understood why the rescue work had to be temporarily halted.

I mean, theyve done everything they can. But we trust the people that are on the ground. And obviously, theyve got to do whats best for their people, right? Because it is a dangerous situation, he said.

During a private meeting with family members, Biden drew on his own experiences with grief to try to comfort them. Biden lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash and decades later lost an adult son to brain cancer.

I just wish there was something I could do to ease the pain, he said in a video posted on Instagram by Jacqueline Patoka, a woman who was close to a couple and their daughter who are still missing.

Biden spoke of wanting to switch places with a lost or missing loved one. The waiting, the waiting is unbearable, he said.

The cause of the collapse is under investigation. A 2018 engineering report found that the building's ground-floor pool deck was resting on a concrete slab that had major structural damage and needed extensive repairs. The report also found abundant cracking" of concrete columns, beams and walls in the parking garage.

Just two months before the building came down, the president of its board wrote a letter to residents saying that structural problems identified in the 2018 inspection had gotten significantly worse and that major repairs would cost at least $15.5 million. With bids for the work still pending, the building suddenly collapsed last Thursday.

___

Associated Press writers Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale and Mark Kennedy in New York contributed to this report.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)  The mother of a Black man fatally shot by a white former Nashville officer sobbed, screamed and knocked over a courtroom lectern Friday as she begged a judge not to accept a plea deal she says was struck in secret without her knowledge, a chaotic scene that briefly delayed the hearing before the judge accepted the agreement.

Former officer Andrew Delke pleaded guilty to manslaughter over the death of Daniel Hambrick, 25, in 2018 as part of an agreement with prosecutors.

Delke will serve a three-year prison sentence. As part of the agreement, he won't pursue parole or appeal the case. However, Delke's defense team said he will likely serve a year and a half in jail with standard credits.

The hearing turned volatile as Hambricks mother, Vickie, gave a lengthy statement as family members and others applauded. Other supporters, outside the courtroom in the hallway, banged on the door in support. Delke's family sat on the other side of the courtroom with security guards.

I hate you, Vickie Hambrick screamed over and over again, while also yelling out profanities, directing some at Delke and prosecutors.

In a particularly chaotic moment, the mother knocked over the lectern and a computer monitor and family members rushed to her side. Delke and Judge Monte Watkins were briefly ushered out of the courtroom.

Delke was about to face trial for a first-degree murder charge, but on Thursday, his attorney announced he had agreed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter.

I hope this case can contribute positively about the much needed discussion about how police officers are trained and how we as a community want police officers to interact with citizens. I am deeply sorry for the harm my actions caused, Delke said shortly after entering his plea, his voice cracking at times.

A group of roughly two dozen protesters gathered outside the courthouse, chanting no racist police to show their opposition to Delkes plea deal. Others wore shirts noting that police officers and white people receive lighter penalties for committing the same crimes as Black and brown people.

Hambricks family said they were not contacted or consulted and did not know about the plea deal until after it was done.

I have contempt for this system. I have contempt for this plea. I have contempt for the (Fraternal Order of Police). And I have a special contempt for Andrew Delke. May you all rot in hell, said attorney Joy Kimbrough, who read the statement of Vickie Hambrick as she wept behind her.

District Attorney Glenn Funk told reporters afterward that he informed Hambrick's family attorney of the deal Wednesday and met with Vickie Hambrick on Thursday. He said has been in contact with them for three years, knew Vickie Hambrick wanted Delke to be convicted of murder and sentenced to prison for life, and he had to decide what was in the best interest for the state.

He said there was a very large percentage chance that the case would have ended in a hung jury, which he said would have meant the emotion seen in the courtroom Friday would have been played out 100-fold. Funk also called it significant progress that "tonight will be the first night Nashville has had a police officer in jail for shooting a Black man on duty."

I was not willing to risk not having a felony conviction, not having him off the force, not having him incarcerated, not having him be able to make a guilty plea where he conceded that he did in fact use deadly force that was not reasonably necessary, Funk said.

Delke, 27, submitted his resignation Thursday. He had been decommissioned, which means he had to turn over his gun but was able to work a desk job and still get paid.

After COVID-19 delays and pretrial back-and-forth, jury selection was slated to start next week . The trial was going to center on a handgun Hambrick was holding that Delke claims was pointed at him for a moment, which prosecutors dispute and video footage does not show.

Prosecutors focused on surveillance footage that captured the shooting, in which Delke stops chasing and shoots the fleeing man. Defense attorneys have contended there was a 36-foot (11-meter) blindspot and plenty could have happened there. There were dozens of cameras, and defense attorneys contended that it was possible that more footage was caught of that blindspot, but wasn't reviewed by investigators before it was automatically overwritten on the system.

The month after the shooting, Funk released surveillance footage of the shooting publicly, sparking wider attention and outcry. Delke was charged in September 2018, and the shooting caused enough backlash that voters that November installed a community oversight board for Nashvilles police department.

Since 2005, there have been 143 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers with arrest powers arrested for murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting throughout the U.S., with only 45 convicted of a crime resulting from the on-duty shooting, according to a tally by Bowling Green State University criminal justice professor Philip Stinson before Delke's plea. Another 45 of the cases are still pending, according to the findings.

Delkes attorneys argued the officer followed his training and Tennessee law in response to an armed suspect who ignored repeated orders to drop his gun. Funk argued Delke had other alternatives, adding that the officer could have stopped, sought cover and called for help.

Nashvilles Metro Council has approved a $2.25 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit by Hambricks family.

For Vickie Hambrick, who is legally blind, the loss of her only child will forever haunt her.

My son was my eyes, Kimbrough said, reading Vickie Hambrick's statement. Since hes been gone, things have not been the same and they never will be.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  Mexicans living abroad sent home a record amount of money in May, topping $4.5 billion in a month for the first time, Mexicos central bank said Thursday.

Just a year ago, it was considered a record when migrants' money, known as remittances, broke the $4 billion per month mark in March 2020.

They now regularly send more than $4 billion. Only January and February, traditionally slow months for remittances, fell below that mark this year, with March, April and May setting new records. May is a traditionally high month because of Mothers Day.

The $19.2 billion sent home in the first five months of 2021 is 21.7% more than during the same period of 2020.

If the pace keeps up, Mexico could be on track to top $45 billion in remittances for the full year in 2021.

As a source of foreign income, remittances earn Mexico more money than oil exports or tourism and are exceeded only by manufacturing exports.

BBVA bank said in an analysis report that the rapid U.S. economic recovery and shortages of workers in some sectors may have helped migrants send more money home. Most Mexican migrants live and work in the United States, where employment opportunities have surged as the coronavirus pandemic eases.

Remittances in Mexico have now set records for five straight years. The $40.6 billion that migrants sent to Mexico in 2020 was equivalent to the combined budgets of the Mexican governments education, health, labor, welfare and culture departments.

About 98.5% of Mexicos remittances are sent from the United States, almost all by bank or wire transfers.

Despite a controversial proposal to require the central bank buy all cash dollars that wind up in Mexican banks  a move that would supposedly help migrants  only about 0.7% of remittances enter the country as cash.
MOSCOW (AP)  Russian authorities reported a record-breaking 679 new coronavirus deaths on Friday, a fourth day in a row with the highest daily death toll in the pandemic.

No plans for a lockdown are being discussed, however, the Kremlin insisted.

The previous record, of 672 deaths, was registered on Thursday. Russia has struggled to cope with a surge in infections and deaths in recent weeks that comes amid slow vaccination rates.

Daily new infections have more than doubled over the past month, soaring from around 9,000 in early June to over 20,000 this week. On Friday, Russia's state coronavirus task force reported 23,218 new contagions. Moscow, its outlying region and St. Petersburg account for nearly half of all new cases.

Yet the authorities are not discussing a lockdown, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday. No one wants any lockdowns, Peskov told reporters during a daily conference call, admitting that the situation with coronavirus in a number of Russian regions is tense.

In order for it to continue not being discussed, we all need to get vaccinated as soon as possible.

Russian officials have blamed the rise in cases on Russians lax attitude toward taking precautions, the growing prevalence of more infectious variants and slow vaccination rates. Although Russia was among the first countries to announce and deploy a coronavirus vaccine, just over 23 million people  or 15% of its 146 million population  have received at least one shot.

Experts have attributed the comparatively low vaccine uptake to widespread vaccine hesitancy and limited production capacity. Only 36.7 million sets of the four domestically developed vaccines have been released into circulation so far. Nevertheless, this week Russian health authorities gave a go-ahead to booster coronavirus vaccinations for people immunized more than six months ago.

Amid the latest surge of cases, about 20 Russian regions  from Moscow and St. Petersburg to the remote far-eastern region of Sakhalin  have made vaccinations mandatory last month for employees in certain sectors. The move seemingly helped ramp up the immunization drive in recent weeks but also elicited some pushback. Small protests against mandatory vaccinations erupted in Moscow and the Sakhalin region this week.

As of Monday, restaurants, bars and cafes in Moscow can only admit customers who have been vaccinated, have recovered from COVID-19 in the past six months or can provide a negative test in the previous 72 hours. Customers must visit a government website and get a QR code  a digital pattern designed to be read by a scanner.

Moscow authorities on Friday said that everyone with symptoms of a respiratory infection should self-isolate at least until they get a negative coronavirus test. Starting from today, we will view all cases of acute respiratory infections as, highly likely, coronavirus infection, Deputy Mayor Anastasia Rakova said.

Russias coronavirus task force has reported more than 5.5 million confirmed coronavirus cases in the pandemic and 136,565 deaths.

Russia had only one, six-week nationwide lockdown last spring, and the authorities have largely shunned tough restrictions that would require shutting down businesses ever since. Only one Russian region  the Siberian republic of Buryatia  has since had two local lockdowns, with the latest one in effect since Sunday.
JOHANNESBURG (AP)  The South African government has urged calm and restraint in Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, which has been engulfed by pro-democracy protests this week amid growing reports of state violence against demonstrators.

Protesters are demanding democratic reforms and accuse King Mswati III, who has ruled the tiny mountain kingdom for more than 30 years as an absolute monarch, of repression.

Rights groups accuse the royal family, including the king's 15 wives, of enjoying a lavish lifestyle while many of the countrys 1.1 million people live in poverty.

Mbabane, the capital, and Mazini, the largest city, have reportedly been the most affected by the protests, which have seen demonstrators barricading roads and setting fires, often at businesses owned or linked to the royal family.

Businesses, factories and trucks have also been reportedly burned in the industrial town of Matsapha.

The Eswatini government has imposed a nightly curfew from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. to try to quell the demonstrations.

Photographs and videos on social media show soldiers assaulting people believed to be protesters.

Activists have alleged that soldiers and police have killed more than 20 protesters since the protests began this week, but this has not been confirmed by police, government officials or health workers.

Acting prime minister Themba Masuku claimed that the legitimate protests had been hijacked by criminal elements.

In a statement on Thursday, South Africas department of international relations and cooperation said it noted with great concern the ongoing political and security situation in Eswatini.

We are particularly concerned by reports of loss of life and destruction of properties. The right to peaceful protest is universally recognized, said spokesman Clayson Monyela.

He called on Eswatini's security forces to exercise total restraint and protect the lives and property of the people.

The protesters are demanding reforms that include lifting bans on opposition political parties, which have been outlawed since 1973.

Sonke Dube, president of the Swaziland Youth Congress which is involved in the demonstrations, called on the United Nations, the 16-nation Southern Africa Development Community and the African Union to intervene.

We urge you to call Mswati to order. Isolate him from the community of peace-loving nations. Impose sanctions on him and his immediate family and cronies until we have a peoples government in Swaziland, Dube said in a statement.

South Africas ruling African National Congress, which has historical ties to Swaziland stretching from that countrys support for its liberation struggle, has criticized the government for violence against demonstrators.

"The use of security forces to quell political dissent and the failure to address legitimate civilian concerns complicates the conflict and adds fuel to the fire, said ANC head of international relations Lindiwe Zulu.

The U.S. State Department on Thursday upgraded its travel alert for Eswatini to warn Americans against any travel to the country and announced it would allow non-essential America diplomats and their families to leave due to the deteriorating security situation there.

Eswatini is experiencing dangerous civil unrest and protests across the country, the department said, noting the imposition of a curfew, the closure of the international airport and communications disruptions.

A day earlier, the department had urged Eswatini authorities to exercise restraint and also maintain the utmost respect for human rights.

As the situation continues to unfold, the United States urges all stakeholders in this situation to not only remain calm but also remain peaceful, deputy spokeswoman Jalina Porter told reporters on Wednesday.
Cuate Santos / Laredo Morning Times file

Laredo homeowners were highlighted in a letter and a proposal from Chairman of the Defense and Veterans Affairs Committee Richard Pena Raymond, who asked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to add a $5 billion property tax cut proposal to the July special session agenda.

The special session will begin on July 8 and will allow Texans to vote on a residential school property tax cut in November. Raymond writes that the funds can be allocated through the Rainy Day fund and still leave $6.5 billion left over.
A Laredo federal jury has convicted a 64-year-old man for attempting to export firearms, firearm magazines and thousands of rounds of ammunition to Mexico, announced Acting U.S. Attorney Jennifer B. Lowery.

The jury deliberated for less than six hours before convicting Jose Rafael Vasquez, of Dallas, following a two-day trial.

On Oct. 15, 2020, Vasquez attempted to exit the United States into Mexico through the Laredo Port of Entry. The jury heard that he was driving a tan 2007 Chevrolet Suburban. During initial inspection, law enforcement discovered suspicious bundles zip-tied to the undercarriage of the vehicle. They appeared to contain ammunition.

A further inspection revealed three AK-47 rifles, eight semi-automatic handguns of various calibers, 16 handgun magazines and approximately 4,714 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition hidden inside his vehicle. Several of the handguns had decorative handles. The jury heard testimony that these weapons were expensive and highly prized by senior members of criminal organizations in Mexico.

The weapons and ammunition had an approximate street value of $25,000. The defense attempted to convince the jury Vasquez did not know about the items inside the vehicle. They did not believe his claims and found him guilty as charged.

U.S. District Judge Diana Saldana presided over trial and will set sentencing for a later date. At that time, Vasquez faces up to 10 years in federal prison and a possible $250,000 maximum fine.

Previously released on bond, Vasquez was taken into custody following the sentencing today where he will remain pending sentencing.

Homeland Security Investigations and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives conducted the investigation along with Customs and Border Protection. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Francisco J. Rodriguez and David Fawcett are prosecuting the case.


Photo, Ian Anderson.

More than 60 people turned up to a meeting to establish a new heritage and culture group earlier this month, filling to capacity the back bar at the Bridgehouse.

Organiser Dave Parker says he was astounded at the response.

Two members of Heritage New Zealand (formerly the NZ Heritage Places Trust) spoke to attendees via Zoom, and Mr Parker says the new group will seek that organisations advice when it comes to registering places of historic value.

During the meeting, 15 people volunteered to serve on the committee for the new group, which will be known as the Mahurangi Heritage and Culture Group.

The 15 will be supported by a further 12 area representatives, who will advise on heritage issues related to their particular area.

In addition to the main committee, a number of sub-committees are planned. The first was formed on the night and was designed to protect the weir that crosses that Mahurangi River at Warkworth.

Auckland Council plans to remove the weir and Mr Parker said one of the first tasks of the new group is to work with Heritage New Zealand to ensure it achieves heritage status and is retained.

Mr Parker asked for a show of hands for who supported retention of the weir and says every hand in the room went up.

After the meeting, Mr Parker said Warkworths Wilson Cement Works  the first place to manufacture cement in the southern hemisphere  was an example of another historic site that needed protection and restoration.

Mr Parker said many who volunteered to serve on the groups committee were direct descendants of pioneering families in the area.

These were hardworking families who laid the foundation for where we live. People dont want to see things destroyed, because its destroying part of their history and part of their family heritage, he said.

Mr Parker will chair the new committee. Deputy chair is Noelene Quigley-Price, secretary is Sara Napier and treasurer is Maxine Hatful.

Info: dh.parker@xtra.co.nz
Lockport, NY (14094)

Today

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy this afternoon. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 88F. Winds SW at 15 to 25 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early followed by scattered thunderstorms overnight. Low 73F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
The beginning of the school year when you got to show off your new duds, new cars, new looks!

Sports! Playing, cheering, watching high school athletics.

The arts: Dramatic arts, musical groups and shows, graphic arts groups, debate, etc.

The prom! No dancing the night away or punch bowl antics.

The daily interactions. Just being with the group, hanging with friends and classmates.

Access to college recruiters and advisors  its harder to line up higher education.

Walking onstage to get a diploma while all the family is watching with everyone elses family.

Vote

View Results
Irish Water, working in partnership with Longford County Council, have carried out repairs to a burst water main supplying the Smear Water Treatment Plant. Crews repaired the burst in line with current Government and HSE COVID-19 guidance.

Water supply has returned but customers in the following locations may experience temporary discoloured water, low water pressure and air locks today Friday, 2 July; Smear, Crott, Birrinagh, Moyne, Farmullagh, Ballyduff, Drumury, Fihoragh, Leggagh, Carrickmaguirk, Aghamore Lower, Annaghdaniel, Cloonback, Drumard, Edenmore, Glenmore, Aghadowry, Tawnagh, Derrynacross, Cornafunshin, Kilmahon, Letterggeeragh, Lettergullion, Crowdrumman, Brocklagh, Monaduff, Gaigue, Derawley, Dooroc, Cartrongolan, Drumlish area (not village), Sliabh Cairbe Estate Drumlish Village, Cairn Hill View Estate Drumlish Village, Cairn Hill View estate, Lettergonnell, Carrickateane, Derreenavoggy, Aghamore Upper, Aghacordrinan, Molly, Gelshagh, Lislea, Aghakilmore, Soran Road, Drumnacooha, Esker South, Clontumpher, Aghaboy and Enybegs. Information on water discolouration and how to check for and clear airlocks can be found on the Irish Water website at www.water.ie/water-supply/ supply-issues/discoloured- water/ and www.water.ie/help/supply/ airlocks/.

Irish Water would like to remind customers it is important to continue to follow the HSE guidance on hand hygiene.

Irish Water is encouraging customers to conserve water at this time. There are ways to conserve water that will not impact on hygiene or handwashing. Simple water conservation efforts can have a big impact on reducing demand on the supply such as not running taps needlessly, taking showers instead of baths and to postpone using dishwashers and washing machines where possible. We are also reminding people with responsibility for properties that are currently unoccupied to check for leaks and turn off water where it is not required. There are lots more tips on how to conserve water in your home on our website at https://www.water.ie/ conservation/

Speaking about the repair works, Paraic Joyce, Irish Water said, Irish Water understands the inconvenience caused when a burst occurs and thanks customers for their patience while we worked to repair the burst and restore normal supply to impacted customers as quickly and as safely as possible. Irish Water and Longford County Council regrets any inconvenience caused.

Irish Water is working at this time, with our Local Authority partners, contractors and others to safeguard the health and well-being of both staff and the public and to ensure the continuity of critical drinking water and wastewater services.

Our customer care helpline is open 24/7 on 1800 278 278 and customers can also contact us on Twitter @IWCare with any queries. For updates please see the water supply and services section of our website.
Ensure you get a print copy of the Loudoun Times-Mirror delivered weekly to your home or business!

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(Alliance News) - FTSE 250-listed Grafton Group PLC on Friday completed its acquisition of Finnish wholesaler Isojoen Konehalli Oy and Jokapaikka Oy.

The Dublin-based building materials distributor and DIY retailer announced the EUR199.3 million acquisition last Tuesday.

IKH is among the largest distributor and wholesaler of workwear, personal protective equipment and tools in Finland, Grafton noted.

According to IKH's website it primarily imports: "tools, machines, tractor spare parts, accessories, work clothing and protective gear, fasteners, tyres for agricultural machines and batteries from over 30 different countries."

Chief executive of Grafton, Gavin Slark, said: "We are delighted to announce completion of the IKH acquisition, a business that has an over 50-year heritage in the Finnish market. We believe that IKH is a very good strategic and cultural fit for Grafton and we welcome our new colleagues in Finland to the group."

Shares in Grafton Group were trading up 0.7% at 1,223.98 pence each in London on Friday morning.

On Thursday, Grafton announced the sale of its traditional UK merchanting business to focus on international expansion.

Grafton sold its Grafton's Buildbase, Timber Group and NDI brands among others for GBP520 million to builders merchants Huws Gray. The company expects the sale to be completed in the first quarter of 2022.

By Scarlett Butler; scarlettbutler@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Rockhopper Exploration PLC - oil & gas company with interests in the North Falkland Basin and Greater Mediterranean regions - Continues to believe it has "strong prospects of recovering very significant monetary damages" against Italy in relation to the Ombrina Mare field.

Notes international arbitration tribunal says: "The tribunal has made significant progress and confirms that it should be in a position to complete its work in the course of July."

Company maintains Italy's breached Energy Charter Treaty.

On May 14, had said it expects tribunal award in July.

Current stock price: 9.72 pence

Year-to-date change: up 57%

By Paul McGowan; paulmcgowan@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
(Sharecast News) - Stocks are being called to start the session higher ahead of the release of the monthly US non-farm payrolls report.



As of 0713 BST, futures on the FTSE 100 were adding 22.50 points to 7,073.50.



Consensus is for the jobs report, which is due out at 1330 BST, to show an increase in hiring from May's 559,000 to 700,000 people in June.



Economists at Unicredit however are calling for a slightly larger jump in job creation, arguing that the "likely temporary" factors dragging on labour supply probably eased somewhat last month.



Some of those factors included fear of infection if workers returned to work, childcare constraints and enhanced unemployment benefits.



Overnight, the International Monetary Fund projected that the Federal Reserve, America's central bank, would likely need to start hiking interest rates in late 2022 or early 2023.



The so-called 'tapering' of the Fed's asset purchases meanwhile was seen kicking off in the front half of next year.



As an aside, also overnight, investors were cheered by news from America's Johnson&Johnson that its Covid-19 vaccine was capable of neutralising the fast-spreading delta variant.



Data on US durable goods orders in May and foreign trade figures for that same month were also due out, at 1330 BST and 1500 BST, respectively.



No major economic reports are scheduled for release in the UK on Friday.



On the broker front, analysts at Berenberg have upgraded their recommendation for shares of Informa from 'hold' to 'buy'.



Grafton completes purchase of Finland's IKH



Building materials distributor and retailer Grafton Group has completed the acquisition of Isojoen Konehalli Oy and Jokapaikka Oy, or 'IKH', it announced on Friday. It said IKH is one of the largest workwear, personal protective equipment (PPE), tools, spare parts and accessories technical wholesalers and distributors in Finland.



QinetiQ Group on Friday said David Smith will be retiring as chief financial officer and stepping down from the board on November 30 to be replaced by Lightsource CFO Carol Borg. Smith joined Qinetiq in January 2017. Borg will start work on October 11 "to enable a smooth transition period", the company said in a statement.
(Alliance News) - Moody's Investors Service on Friday upped its outlook for GlaxoSmithKline PLC, after the pharmaceutical firm laid out its strategic vision last week.

The ratings agency now has a stable outlook for GSK, raised from negative. It affirms its A2 long-term senior unsecured rating.

"Today's outlook change follows announcements made by the company at its recent investor event, confirming our assumptions of around GBP8 billion expected proceeds from the de-merger of the Consumer Healthcare unit in mid-2022 and a material dividend cut from next year," said Frederic Duranson, Moody's senior analyst and lead analyst for GSK.

"In addition, the outlook change reflects GSK's intention to retain part of its stake in the Consumer Healthcare business, which would bring additional proceeds that would be used to reduce gross debt and fund the pension deficit, thereby supporting deleveraging down to at least 3.0x on a Moody's adjusted basis in the next 18 to 24 months."

The Brentford, England-based company said that, between 2021 and 2026, it expects a compound annual growth rate, at constant exchange rates, of 5% for sales and 10% for adjusted operating profit.

The firm said it expects cash generated from operations to exceed GBP10 billion by 2026, with plans to hit over GBP33 billion in sales by 2031.

On the separation of its Consumer Healthcare arm, it plans to do this via a demerger of at least 80% of GSK's 68% holding in the business to GSK shareholders, with the new Consumer Healthcare company shares expected to attain a premium listing on the London Stock Exchange and ADRs to be listed in the US.

GSK added it will retain a 20% stake in its upcoming Consumer Healthcare spin-out, a "short-term financial investment, which it intends to monetise in a timely manner".

However, Moody's added that while it expects a reduction in debt, it does not anticipate any large improvements in the gross debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization ratio. This is because the spin-off is expected to hit GSK's Ebitda by about GBP2.6 billion to GBP2.8 billion, Moody's explained.

The pharmaceutical firm is forging its plans for the future amid a backdrop of activist investor pressure, with Elliot Management Corp snapping up a stake in the company.

On Friday, GSK said Chief Executive Emma Walmsley is the right leader for the core pharmaceutical and vaccines business after the consumer division gets spun off, in response to a scathing open letter from Elliott.

On Thursday, the investor said it had built a significant stake in the London-based company, which has failed to realise its value after years of poor performance.

Without naming Walmsley, Elliott called for pharmaceutical and scientific experts to pick the "right leadership" for New GSK from internal and external candidates. Walmsley's background is in consumer business, and she spent 17 years at L'Oreal SA before leading GSK's consumer business and then being promoted to group CEO in 2017.

Glaxo shares closed largely flat at 1,437.80 pence each in London on Friday.

By Eric Cunha; ericcunha@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
The bizarre clip, which was posted on Wednesday (30Jun21), prompted the Last Day In rapper to deactivate his account after fans called him out for the crazy stunt, with one Twitter using noting that the money, estimated to be as much as $100,000 (73,000), "coulda gone to better use almost anywhere else."

Another devotee tweeted, "Hes from one of the poorest places in Florida and yet he rather impress people for views instead of giving that money to black poverty stricken families. This could be one of the saddest and out of touch videos I've ever seen (sic)."

It's not the first, or even the second time the rapper has deleted his Instagram account. He previously deleted his account in 2017 after criticising black female celebrities, including Keke Palmer.
This year, partly due to COVID-19s effect on last years legislature, dozens of criminal justice bills were passed by the Tennessee legislature. Some increase penalties for crimes. Others give victims more protection. And others change criminal procedure for those in the system.

Gov. Bill Lee pushed three big criminal justice laws this year.

A police reform bill, based on recommendations of a task force appointed last summer amid national uproar over policing tactics, bans no-knock warrants. It also puts limitations on chokeholds and requires law enforcement agencies to enact policies regarding de-escalation and a use-of-force reporting system.

House Majority Leader Rep. William Lamberth, R-Portland, sponsored two other criminal justice packages for Lee.

The Re-entry Success Act and Alternatives to Incarceration Act make more people eligible for special courts, provide monetary incentives for prisons to offer programming for inmates, ease consequences for technical probation violations and require one year of mandatory supervision after release.

(These bills) changed the way that we treat and help people that are either incarcerated or on probation and try to make sure that we are using the time that we have them within the system wisely so that hopefully they dont recommit a crime when they get out, Lamberth said.

Other laws that have the potential to help those who have been incarcerated include one that requires a judge to explain which offenses are eligible for expungements and one that allows expungements of nonviolent offenses committed before 1980.

Sen. Brenda Gilmore, D-Nashville, who sponsored an expunctions bill, said Tennessee needs to continue to work on making it more viable for felonies to be expunged.

I think the impression from the community is that these are deadbeat people who dont want to work, but they want to work, but because you have a felony on your record, its a challenge to find meaningful employment, she said.

However, many of these laws also increase penalties or create felonies. In an aim to stop porch pirates, mail theft is now a Class E felony. Threatening to commit violence at a school is now a Class A misdemeanor.

The highly touted constitutional carry law, which allows Tennesseans to carry a handgun without a permit, also creates increased penalties for unlawful possession of a firearm.

New laws also protect victims of crimes, especially children. Starting today, there is no longer a statute of limitations for the crime of sex trafficking. Convicted sex traffickers will not be able to get a commercial drivers license. People convicted of facilitating rape will have to serve 100% of their sentence.

Some laws have been made with specific victims in mind. The Spencer Bristol Act, named after a Hendersonville police officer killed on duty, increases the penalty for injuring or killing a police officer while evading arrest. A law filed by Gilmore that gives nurses protections against assault was made at the request of dozens of nurses over the past few years who shared how theyve been attacked physically and verbally.

With more penalties and more programming comes more money needed in the budget. Lamberth is confident it is a cost that Tennessee can handle.

The amount of money that we allocate toward criminal justice programs, much of it will actually save money in the long run, he said.

While most criminal justice bills had bipartisan support, there were some sticking points, such as a bill that creates a Class E felony for certain rioters.

Gilmore said she thinks the law will disproportionately affect young people.

It was primarily young people that were down in the streets protesting this time, and I hate to see them be saddled with felonies because that will impact them getting into schools of their choices, she said.

Next session, Lamberth wants to completely revamp the sentencing code, something that hasnt been changed since 1989. He said hes confident the legislature can accomplish this task next session.

Gilmore wants to help the young people of Tennessee. She is expecting the fallout from the pandemic to be harmful for young people who are involved in crime.

Gilmore also wants to work on lowering the amount of felonies in Tennessee. According to the Sentencing Project, over 450,000 Tennesseans have felony convictions.

I think the number of crimes that we have and we put felonies on, thats something that really needs to be looked at, she said.
At one of the four stops on her summer camp bus tour on Wednesday, Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, right, was confronted by about 40 protesters at a school in Gallatin. The protesters oppose the Wit & Wisdom literature curriculum, which they say introduces content about racism and sex to children too young for those discussions.
BENZONIA  The History of Land Preservation in Benzie County will be presented by Glen Chown, executive director of the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy, as the next Academy Lecture event.

The virtual event will be at 7 p.m. on Thursday on Zoom. To learn more about the Zoom lecture, visit the Benzie Area Historical Society's Facebook page, their website (benziemuseum.org) or call the Benzie Area Historical Museum at 231-882-5539.
Although France looked set to progress to the Euro 2020 quarter-finals when Paul Pogba curled home an unstoppable effort to give his side a 3-1 lead against Switzerland, their evening rapidly descended into a nightmare.

Not only did Switzerland force extra-time before going on to win on penalties, but infighting amongst the families of certain France players, as well as players on the pitch, also took place.

Now, the details of the clash between captain Raphael Varane and Benjamin Pavard have emerged, with Pavard criticising Paul Pogba.

Varane: "Benji [Benjamin Pavard], seriously, be careful. You are not dealing with the long balls well."

Pavard: "But it's also [Paul] Pogba's fault."

Varane: What?

Pavard: Pogba is not getting back, he is leaving us for sh*t."

Varane: "I will talk to him."
Residents of at least five Buckhead neighborhoods have reported spotting vultures in the area and are raising concerns about them.
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Jul. 1Fred Veeder, a Dodgen Middle School teacher who was named the Cobb County School District Teacher of the Year in 2018, has died, according to an obituary. He was 65. Veeder, an Atlanta resident, was surrounded by family when he "died peacefully" on June 23 while in hospice care, his obituary states. "His love for life was shared as a light in the lives of all who knew him and impacted ...
"Emerging data from real world evidence are showing that two doses of vaccines are protective against the Delta variant."Lab tests also showed that antibodies from the vaccines were able to neutralise Delta "so these are very reassuring news."While the EU has been increasing its vaccination programme, the WHO warned that cases are again increasing after two months of decline.Delta variant was overtaking the original Alpha variant that emerged in Britain "very quickly".The EMA's Cavaleri said the regulator urged manufacturers to keep checking that their jabs were effective against all new variants of the disease including the so-called 'Delta Plus'."There are a number of variants that have been emerging over the last months, and we expect more to come over," Cavaleri said."Now there is the so-called Delta Plus variant, which is the Delta variant with an additional mutation in the spike protein, that is also important and we need to check that as well."Source: Medindia
In another disheartening case of animal cruelty, a black Labrador dog succumbed to death after two minor boys at Adimalathura beach in Kerala on Monday allegedly killed the dog.



Now, the disturbing video of the same has been surfacing on social media. The video showcases the canine being severely thrashed by two boys.

Bruno was taken care of by eight siblings. Christuraj, one of the siblings shared the video on Facebook in which Bruno is seen tied by his neck to a boat and being mercilessly beaten by the three youngsters.

The clip has now surfaced on the internet and people are demanding #JusticeForBruno.

 Unsplash

Now, Christurajs sister Sony P has lodged a complaint with the police regarding the same.



Sony expressed that Bruno had recently started going to the beach and he would usually return back by noon, but one day he didnt return.

After this, her brother-in-law Andrew went out to look for Bruno, however, failed to find him. And then he reached the beach and witnessed three youngsters brutally thrashing their pets.

According to TedTheStoner, a verified Instagram account with 1.6 million followers, the dog was beaten to death just for sleeping under the boat of the accused.

According to TOI, Sony Said, We came to know that they will bring the matter with the help of one of their relatives employed at the coastal police station nearby. We felt we wouldnt get justice and we took to Facebook so that everyone would know what happened to our Bruno.

 Unsplash

A police officer said that a case has been registered under relevant sections. She said, However, we have not taken the accused into custody yet as it turns out the offenders who are seen in the video are all under the age of 18.



Heres what people have to say about this 

Scary visuals..Disheartened beyond words..its end of humanity..

Appeal strong laws against animal brutality..

Deep condolences to Bruno..Peace in soul..#JusticeForBruno pic.twitter.com/u3IkrQbeeJ  Ashish Gaur (@Ashu123gaur) July 2, 2021

This is heartbreaking!

Wishing the same should happen to these cruel peoples.



#JusticeForBruno pic.twitter.com/W5jr09Mvi2  Arjun Ragav (@ArjunRagav5) July 2, 2021

I dont have a heart to watch the video and I fail to understand how people can be so cruel #JusticeForBruno pic.twitter.com/3E9WrG0Wfr  Saru Maini (@Saru_Maini) July 1, 2021

This is coming from state which has highest literacy rate Keralas youths in a self destructive mode.#JusticeForBruno pic.twitter.com/CaZHLG8281  Priyansh_gupta (@Priyans14959761) July 1, 2021

Not sharing the video as its really gruesome. The perpetrators of this heinous crime shouldn't go scot free. All animal lovers share this news to put the perpetrators behind bars #JusticeForBruno pic.twitter.com/hhwA6ggXei  Subhadeep Dutta  (@subho87reddevil) July 1, 2021

This is heartbreaking!

Wishing for same death penalty for this all mf's.

#JusticeForBruno pic.twitter.com/d62syDlVGg  Baisakh Kumar Das (@DasBaisakh) July 1, 2021

Curse these monsters to die with the more pain & suffering than the poor soul had gone through..its tearing my heart apart seeing this video..Are we really going to have Strict laws for Animal Cruelty??? #JusticeForBruno https://t.co/ywv7z81yLn  Devoleena Bhattacharjee (@Devoleena_23) July 1, 2021

#JusticeForBruno

What on the earth, God! It just feel so cruel to call us as human sometimes. How could someone... pic.twitter.com/BiGiJoNDZ1  DV7 (@DevanshiVerma7) July 1, 2021

This horrifying video only goes on to prove that pure evil exists in this world.
If either of India or Pakistan had two bullets and were locked in a room with one another along with the duo of Hitler and Bin Laden, we know exactly who'd be shot twice. (America loses anyhow.)



We know India and Pakistan, despite being neighbors, haven't really the best of friends and their relationship isn't going to get any better with China continuing to maintain a weird relationship with Islamabad.

 iStock

Well, as if things hadn't really been hard enough for us Indians, with COVID and last year's long India-China stand-off in eastern Ladakh, now Pakistan is trying to fire cheap shots at our nation.



In what is the latest occurrence of Pakistani drone activity within India, a small hexacopter drone belonging to Pakistan was seen trying to cross over to the Indian border on Friday (July 02).

 iStock

As per reports, the surveillance drone was marauding around the Arnia sector in Jammu in the wee mornings before it was spotted by the Indian troops.



Well, obviously, like all of us, the Indian troops sure had it enough with these 'Nadaan Parindas' trying to sneak into our territory, and they gave it a perfect welcome. By firing right at it.

"A drone from Pakistan entered the Indian territory at the International Border (IB) in the Arnia area of Jammu district on Friday morning, said the Border Security Force (BSF). After BSF jawans opened fire, they flew back into Pakistani territory," said officials.

The drone, which was probably on its usual stroll miles into the neighboring country's border, resorted by flying for its life and by now, must be gasping for some breath on the desk of a Pakistani tech official.

"Due to the firing, it returned immediately. It was meant for carrying out surveillance of the area," the BSF officials said.

Since the last week, there have been at least five drone activities that have been reported across Jammu.

On the night of June 27, two drone activities were successfully thwarted by Indian troops near the Ratnuchak-Kaluchak Military Station along the Jammu-Pathankot national highway.

Last Sunday, there had been two blasts that had been carried out by drones in the technical area of Jammu Air Force Station.

 Reuters

Well, with the recent showing, it looks like India has had enough of Pakistani drones and their flying bull****.


Chinese state media outlets have been celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its achievements this week. With the celebrations, the Chinese state media showcased video packages of a fighter plane boasting the progress of the J-10 fighter plane.

Whats odd is that the video package showed a video that was taken from the Tejas trials. The video was also manipulated with a filter where the video was cooler or had a bluish tint than the original Tejas trial footage.

 Twitter/IndoPac_Info

Having said that, Indian Twitter users were quick to catch the similarities between the two videos and came to the conclusion that the video shared by CGTN, was indeed the trial footage of the Tejas fighter.



CGTN shared a video profiling Fei Dong, a pilot of the People's Liberation Army Air Force, who flies the J-10 fighter. It is considered to be one of the most important fighters of the PLAAF fleet. In fact, Chinese experts have also used the progress of the J-10 to ridicule the development progress of Indias Tejas fighter craft.

The video, in question, shows the aircraft dropping a laser-guided bomb which was suspiciously similar to the Tejas trial video. It has now been confirmed that CGTN used a trial video of the Tejas fighter from 2013 during an exercise at Pokhran. Both videos showed the identical position of the laser-guided bomb and the pylon on which it was being held.



According to The Week the clip also showed the Israeli origin Litening laser designator pod, which the Tejas was using during the trial. It is worth pointing out that China does not use the same designator pod on any of its fighter aircraft as of now.

 Wikimedia Commons

If you want to check out the two videos for yourself, here are the two videos for comparison. CGTN deleted the video as soon as the plagiarism was found, however somebody downloaded the video before it was taken down.



CGTN Video:

Original Tejas Trial Video:

This is not the first time the Chinese military has used borrowed video clips for its own propaganda videos. Last year, it was found that the PLAAF was found using clips from Hollywood movies including The Hurt Locker, The Rock and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in its propaganda videos.

Source: The Week
Meridian, MS (39302)

Today

Mostly sunny skies this morning. Scattered showers and thunderstorms developing during the afternoon. High 91F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph.
Meridian, MS (39302)

Today

Sunny skies this morning. Scattered showers and thunderstorms developing during the afternoon. High near 90F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. 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
There was a transaction confirmed for an August-shipment cargo at $484 per tonne cfr southern Vietnam, against offers at $490-500 per tonne cfr Vietnam.Bids were at $480 per tonne cfr Vietnam."It is very, very quiet this week because of the large bid-offer spread between buyers and sellers," a seller source in Vietnam told Fastmarkets on Friday July 2.

Bulk Japanese shredded scrap was offered at $560 per tonne cfr Vietnam, although buyers said they were not willing to...
Prices for seaborne pulverized coal injection (PCI) slipped slightly in the cfr market in the week to July 2 due to weak demand for imported Russian PCI. The fob market rose due to the upward trend in the coking coal market and continuous tightness in the spot market, market sources told Fastmakets. Premium hard coking coal, fob DBCT : $200.06 per tonne, up $8.26 per tonne

Premium hard coking coal, cfr Jingtang : $307.58 per tonne, up $0.99 per tonne Hard coking coal, fob DBCT : $168.42 per tonne, up $5 per tonne

Hard coking coal, cfr Jingtang : $265.89 per tonne, down $0.32 per tonneCoking coal marketThe fob coking coal market continued its upward trend on Friday with few offers and bids submitted. Rising prices are largely due to supply tightness from Australia, sources said.The offer for Australia premium low-vol hard coking coal remained unchanged at $210 per tonne fob Australia while the bids inched higher day on day, market sources said.A few traders said the bids from some Asian mills increased from $175 to $185 per tonne fob Australia, but they remain lower than offers on the Global Coal platform.A 750,000-tonnevolume of Australia premium low-volatility hard coking coal was heard traded at $198.5 per tonne fob Australia on July 2, with an August laycan.Market chatter was heard about production activities at Chinese mines this week.Some mines closed for the whole of July while others have resumed production but it is uncertain whether they are at at full operational rates or not - we have to wait for a turning point in the next week, a Hebei-based trader noted.A Beijing-based trader said some mills and coke producers in north China had not fully resumed production by July 2, creating the weak procurement demand for seaborne coking coal.The PCI market in China in the week to July 2 remained quiet due to weak supply and demand ahead of Chinas 100-year celebration for Communist Party on July 1, market sources said.Offers for Russia low-volatility PCI are about $170 per tonne cfr China yet buying interests from both end-users and traders are limited, sources said.There aren't decent reselling margins [for Russia PCI], so we aren't very active in buying cargoes, a Xiamen-based trader source said.Another trader source from Beijing mentioned a lack of active offers from suppliers or other traders and the difficulty in finding end-users.The expectation from end-users is negative; they are waiting for domestic supply to return, the same source added.Fastmarkets index for PCI, low-vol, cfr Jingtang was $171.64 per dry metric tonne on July 2, down by $0.39 per tonne on a weekly basis.The fob PCI market climbed up, following trends in the coking coal market, in the week to July 2. There are still limited tradable resources of both PCI and semi-soft in the spot market, market sources said.Its difficult to access PCI or semi-soft cargoes in the spot market because most of them are long-term cargoes, a Singapore-based trader said.Another mill source from India said the current PCI price level is relatively high and they are not keen to procure now.No deals of Australia PCI were reported over the week.Fastmarkets index for PCI, low-vol, fob DBCT was $144.90 per dmt on July 2, up by $3.28 per tonne on a weekly basis.The most-traded September coking coal futures contract closed at 1,942.5 yuan ($300.27) per tonne on July 2, up by 32.50 yuan per tonne day on day.The most-traded September coke contract closed at 2,641 yuan per tonne on July 2, up by 68 yuan per tonne day on day.Join our industry experts for an exciting forward look into Asia's evolving steel market at the Singapore Steel Forum on July 14. Register today
KABUL  Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has regretfully learned that two Afghan nationals were detained in connection with the murder of a 13 years old girl in Austria.

The Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in Vienna will fully cooperate with the relevant authorities to proceed the investigation process.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs once again expresses its deepest sympathies and condolences to the Austrian government and family of the victim, and emphasizes empathy and solidarity between the people of the two countries.

The Consular staff of the Afghan Embassy in Vienna are working closely with the Austrian government officials to identify the suspects and provide necessary legal assistance to Afghan nationals.
AG Nessel Responds to Boy Scouts Settlement Offer

AG Nessel Responds to Boy Scouts of America's Settlement Offer

Lynsey Mukomel 517-599-2746 Attorney General

July 2, 2021

LANSING - Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel released the following statement in response to the $850 million civil settlement announced Thursday between the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) and more than 60,000 individuals who sued the organization over alleged sexual abuse:

"This historic settlement is an acknowledgement from the Boy Scouts of America of the pain inflicted on thousands of scouts across the country. While this may bring resolution for those involved in the civil litigation, our criminal work is just beginning in Michigan. We must ensure abusers never again have an opportunity to prey on others, and the best way to achieve that is through a criminal investigation. I continue to encourage people with information related to sexual abuse perpetrated in our state to contact the Department of Attorney General's Boy Scouts of America investigation hotline. It is our job to secure additional justice for survivors, which in turn will better protect society from criminals who hide behind their positions of authority to abuse others. It doesn't matter if it occurred last month or years ago-you deserve to be heard and we're here to listen."

Last month, Nessel released a public service announcement (PSA) focused on the new joint investigation between the Michigan Department of Attorney General and Michigan State Police, urging abuse survivors to share their stories in order to pursue criminal charges.

The agencies first announced the investigation at the beginning of June.

In January, Nessel learned 1,700 sex-abuse claims filed in BSA's ongoing bankruptcy case were in Michigan. The Department now believes there may be as many as 3,000 victims.

If you have information about the Boy Scouts of America that you think would help, please call the investigation hotline at 844-324-3374 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Tips can be left anonymously.

Portions of this project are funded in part by Grant No. WE AX 0030 awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this publication/program/exhibition are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women.
Attorney General Nessel Joins Multistate Efforts

Attorney General Nessel Joins Multistate Efforts

Lynsey Mukomel 517-599-2746 Attorney General

July 2, 2021

LANSING - Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has joined attorneys general from around the nation in a number of multistate efforts in the last several weeks, including the following:

Supreme Court Brief Supporting CDC Eviction Ban PLEASE NOTE: On June 29, 2021, the Supreme Court denied the plaintiffs' motion to vacate the stay, allowing the CDC's eviction moratorium to remain in place through July 31, 2021, at which point the CDC plans to lift it. On June 11, Nessel joined a coalition of 23 attorneys general in filing a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the order by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that prohibits evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic to help stop the spread of the disease. In an amicus brief filed in Alabama Assoc. of Realtors v. HHS, which is an emergency application to the Supreme Court, the attorneys general argue that the CDC's eviction moratorium should remain in place and states would face potentially catastrophic harm if it is suddenly vacated. Specifically, the coalition argues that without the moratorium in place, millions of vulnerable individuals would be unsafely forced from their homes and into streets, crowded shelters, and others' homes across state lines, risking spreading COVID-19. With only about half of Americans fully vaccinated, such action could jeopardize the United States' fragile health and economic recovery. Numerous jurisdictions passed their own local moratorium on evictions, but the CDC's Order is critical to prevent the spread of COVID-19 across state lines.

"As Michigan continues to vaccinate residents against this deadly virus, it remains imperative to keep in place programs that provide financial support to those most affected by the pandemic," Nessel said. "We signed this brief because I remain committed to protecting this state's residents. And ensuring that our most vulnerable Michiganders maintain a roof over their heads as the economic recovery gets underway is an important piece of that commitment."

In 2020, Congress passed COVID-19 relief legislation, which included a 120-day eviction moratorium for certain rental properties. When that legislation expired in July 2020, the CDC issued its own eviction moratorium order under its authority to protect public health. The CDC order protects certain tenants who aren't able to pay full rent because of a loss of income or medical expenses from being evicted at residential properties nationwide. The order was originally set to expire on December 31, 2020, but was extended by Congress through January 31, 2021, and has been further extended by the CDC. It is currently set to run through June 30, 2021 and could be extended again.

The eviction ban was challenged by property owners, managers, and trade associations that want to resume evictions. The lower court in this case ruled that the CDC does not have the authority to order a nation-wide eviction ban, but granted the government's request to stay the court's decision pending appeal. After the court of appeals denied plaintiffs' motion to vacate the stay, the plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court, asking for the stay to be vacated.

Letter Urging NHTSA to Repeal Trump-era Attack on California Authority to Set Clean Car Standards

On June 11, Nessel joined a coalition of 22 states and four cities in urging the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) to repeal a Trump-era rule, known as the "Preemption Rule," that purported to preempt California's greenhouse gas and zero-emission-vehicles (ZEV) standards. California's standards have been adopted by states representing more than one-third of the U.S. automobile market and have resulted in emissions reductions of hundreds of thousands of tons annually.

In their letter, the coalition argues that NHTSA lacked authority under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act to promulgate the Preemption Rule and that the rule must be repealed.

"In the face of a worsening climate crisis, these standards are important now more than ever and a necessary tool in limiting greenhouse gas emissions," said Nessel. "I join this coalition in urging the NHTSA to repeal this damaging rule so that states can enact policies to combat climate change and protect the public health."

California's greenhouse gas and ZEV standards are critical to the fight against climate change, for improving air quality and protecting public health, and for driving technological innovation. Fifty years of experience has shown that the adoption of vehicle emissions standards not only reduces vehicular pollution in the present but drives the development and deployment of technologies that enable further cost-effective emission reductions in the future.

In the comment letter, the coalition argues that NHTSA must repeal the Preemption Rule because NHTSA lacked authority to promulgate it in the first place and should do so for the additional reason that the rule was an unprecedented and unwarranted attack on longstanding state laws central to states' efforts to protect their residents from the harmful effects of air pollution and climate change.

Letter Calling on SEC to Require U.S. Companies to Disclose Financial Risk from Climate Change

On June 14, Nessel joined a coalition of attorneys general in urging the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to require U.S. companies to provide detailed and accurate information about the financial risks they face from climate change. The need to mandate such disclosures is urgent and falls squarely within existing SEC authority. In the past five years alone, climate change-related weather events cost U.S. companies more than $600 billion in direct economic damages. Mandatory climate change-related disclosures are essential to insulate U.S. and global financial systems from systemic risk associated with climate change and to protect investors, including the many ordinary Americans whose retirement savings are largely investment-based.

Climate change is a concrete threat, and one that will have significant impact to the U.S. economy and its financial system. Rising temperatures are expected to decrease the United States' annual gross domestic product between 1.9% and 10.5%, and the economy is more likely to experience systemic shocks from climate-related events when financial markets lack sufficient, accurate information to price in climate risk. Demand from institutional and retail investors for U.S. companies to respond to the impacts of climate change have grown significantly, as evidenced by the recent election of three new members to Exxon's board who intend to push the company to address climate change, as well as the overwhelming passage of a shareholder resolution demanding that Chevron reduce its carbon emissions.

Currently, the majority of U.S. companies do not make any climate change-related disclosures, and the disclosures that companies do make are often boilerplate, suggesting that the companies are not thoroughly evaluating or disclosing their exposure to climate change-related risks. In the letter, the attorneys general urge the SEC to mandate that companies, both public and private, assess climate change-related risks affecting their businesses and disclose that information to investors, arguing that the current disclosure requirements the SEC has in place are insufficient.

Letter Urging Congress to Provide States with Same Antitrust Venue Rights as Federal Enforcers

On June 18, Nessel joined a coalition of 52 attorneys general in sending a letter urging Congress to pass the State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act of 2021. The legislation would provide states with the same venue selection rights as federal enforcers by prohibiting the transfer of state antitrust actions into multidistrict litigation.

State attorneys general pursue antitrust enforcement actions on behalf of consumers and the economies in their states and territories. Under current law, these law enforcement actions may be subject to transfer to multidistrict litigation. In many actions, cases are then postponed, transferred to other federal courts, or joined with other lawsuits brought by private plaintiffs.

Enforcement actions filed by the federal government on behalf of the United States, however, cannot be transferred to multidistrict litigation. By providing states with the same venue selection rights as the federal government, states would be entitled to select and remain in their preferred venue without the inefficiencies that typically occur with multidistrict litigation.

Letter Calling for Passage of the Federal Equality Act

On June 24, Nessel joined a coalition of 25 attorneys general to call on the U.S. Senate to pass legislation that protects individuals from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The coalition issued a letter to Senate leadership urging the chamber to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act would strengthen federal legal protections for LGBTQ Americans by clarifying and modernizing federal civil rights law and would prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in employment, education, federally-funded programs, housing, public accommodations, credit and jury service. The attorneys general argue that updates to the nation's civil rights laws are long overdue.

In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees who are fired for being gay or transgender. The court determined that employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is discrimination on the basis of sex, which is prohibited by Title VII. In their letter today, the coalition points out that despite the court's decision, the absence of explicit federal prohibitions on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity leave many LGBTQ Americans vulnerable to experiencing discrimination in education, housing, credit, and health care. The coalition also points out that federal law does not currently prohibit sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in other areas, such as federally-funded programs and the jury system. As a result, individuals who do experience such discrimination are left without legal recourse.

The Equality Act addresses these gaps by clarifying that existing protections under federal civil rights law include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The changes will create and expand protections for LGBTQ Americans facing discrimination in education, employment, housing, credit and public facilities. The legislation will also prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity, in sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibit discrimination in public accommodations and federal funding. In addition, the legislation expands the definition of public accommodations to expressly prohibit sex discrimination, such as denying services to people because they are pregnant or breastfeeding, or denying transgender individuals access to sex-specific restrooms corresponding to their gender identities. The legislation further clarifies that the U.S. attorney general may intervene in federal court actions alleging denial of equal protection of the laws based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The coalition states that the Equality Act is needed to create a national standard, expanding civil rights protections beyond the existing patchwork of state laws.

Letter Urging Congress to Provide FTC with Much-Needed Tools to Protect Consumers

On June 28, Nessel joined a coalition of 29 attorneys general in taking action to support the ability of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to successfully combat fraudulent and anticompetitive conduct. In a letter to congressional leaders, the coalition expressed their strong support for the Consumer Protection and Recovery Act (H.R. 2668), which would ensure the ability of the FTC to obtain equitable monetary relief, including restitution for consumers and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, after a U.S. Supreme Court decision changed established practice earlier this year.

For 40 years, the FTC was able to obtain equitable monetary relief by suing wrongdoers in district court. In fact, in the last five years alone, the FTC successfully recovered over $11.2 billion in refunds for consumers through court actions. But this changed with the Supreme Court's April 2021 decision in AMG Capital Management, LLC, et al. v. Federal Trade Commission, which limited the ability of the FTC to recover money for injured consumers.

The FTC is an important partner to states as they police anticompetitive, unfair, and deceptive trade practices. The lack of authority to seek equitable monetary relief - directly in court proceedings - undermines the FTC's efforts to combat unfair and deceptive practices. This, in turn, forces states to divert resources away from other consumer protection efforts and perform duties that were previously fulfilled by the FTC.

Unfair and deceptive trade practices are a serious problem in the United States and the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an uptick in consumer complaints. Likewise, unfair competitive practices have dire and adverse impacts on consumers and businesses. Monopolization, collusion, and other unlawful conduct threaten the proper functioning of the American marketplace and cost consumers and responsible businesses billions of dollars each year. Curtailing the remedies available to the FTC enables bad actors to prey on consumers.

Letter Urging FERC to Curb Needless Incentives for Transmission Developers

On June 28, Nessel joined a coalition of attorneys general and state ratepayer advocates in reiterating a call to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to reject unnecessary and unjust incentive payments to transmission developers.

On April 15, 2021 FERC issued a draft rule, revisiting a proposal issued during the Trump Administration that provides a series of generous new transmission incentives, including extra payments to transmission developers to join regional transmission organizations - something developers generally have to do anyway. In its new April 2021 rulemaking, FERC invited comments on the incentive to join regional transmission organizations. The multistate coalition comments oppose overgenerous incentives for participation by transmission utilities in Regional Transmission Organizations ("RTOs") and Independent System Operators ("ISOs"), particularly if such participation is mandatory. The comments support reforms designed to limit any such incentives to the minimum amount necessary to encourage the desired goal of least cost to ratepayers. The comments reiterate a previous call to FERC made under the previous Administration.

The coalition agrees with FERC Chairman Richard Glick, who stated in his dissent to the current rule: "Incentives must actually incentivize something. A payment that does not incentivize anything is a handout, not an incentive. Handing out customers' money to transmission owners without a strong belief that that money will induce beneficial conduct is unjust and unreasonable and inconsistent with the Congress."

The savings to ratepayers from ending this incentive will be substantial. The evidence submitted to FERC shows that this incentive costs consumers up to $400 each year nationally. A copy of the letter is available here.
Michigan electricity providers demonstrate sufficient capacity to serve customers reliably through 2024-2025

Michigan electricity providers demonstrate sufficient capacity to serve customers reliably through 2024-2025

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 2, 2021

Media Contact: Matt Helms 517-284-8300

Customer Assistance: 800-292-9555

Michigan.gov/MPSC

Twitter

The Michigan Public Service Commission today accepted the Capacity Demonstration Results Reports from Michigan's electricity providers for the 2024-25 planning year, finding that all will meet reliability requirements established under the 2016 updates to Michigan's energy laws (Case No. U-20886).

The reports cover capacity demonstrations from investor-owned electric utilities, alternative electric suppliers (AESs), rural electric cooperatives, and municipally owned electric utilities to meet obligations set by regional transmission operators (RTOs). Michigan is served by two RTOs: Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which covers most of the state, and PJM Interconnection, which covers a portion of the southwestern Lower Peninsula.

Michigan is the only state in the MISO territory to require electricity providers to demonstrate four years in advance that they will be able to meet peak customer demand through their own generation facilities or contracts with other suppliers. MISO requires that electricity providers plan only one year in advance and offers a capacity market for those who still need to procure capacity for the current year. Michigan's longer-term view allows providers more time to build or buy resources to serve customers and helps to avert widespread outages and rolling blackouts. Having sufficient supply helps keep electricity prices down by limiting price spikes caused by expensive last-minute purchases when supplies are tight - an issue that became critical in Texas this winter as a lack of capacity during severe winter storms led to blackouts and skyrocketing prices.

The Commission established a new docket (Case No. U-21099) for MPSC-regulated electric utilities to file capacity demonstrations for the 2025-26 planning year by 5 p.m. on Dec. 1, 2021, and all other providers by 5 p.m. Feb. 9, 2022, including resource data for the current planning year and the interim years.

MPSC Staff must file its report analyzing the sufficiency of the 2025-26 capacity demonstrations by March 25, 2022.

For more information about capacity demonstrations, see the MPSC's issue brief on the state's resource adequacy law.

MPSC REQUESTS COMMENT ON PROPOSED FUNDING FACTOR FOR LOW-INCOME ENERGY ASSISTANCE FUND

The MPSC today asked for comments on its proposal to set the funding factor for Michigan's Low-Income Energy Assistance Fund at 87 cents (Case No. U-17377), a decrease of 4 cents from the previous year. The MPSC sets the funding factor each year, capped at $1, and it is collected monthly from each retail billing meter from participating investor-owned utilities, municipally owned electric utilities or rural cooperative electric utilities - no more than one meter per household - to raise a maximum of $50 million per year. This money is distributed through the Michigan Energy Assistance Program, or MEAP, which provides energy assistance payments and self-sufficiency services to tens of thousands of qualifying households each year. Comments must be received by 5 p.m. July 9, 2021. Written comments may be mailed to Executive Secretary, Michigan Public Service Commission, P.O. Box 30221, Lansing, MI 48909. Electronic comments may be emailed to mpscedockets@michigan.gov. All comments should reference Case No. U-17377.

MPSC SEEKS INPUT ON PROPOSED COMPETITIVE BIDDING GUIDELINES

The MPSC is seeking comments from stakeholders as the agency moves forward with updating competitive bidding guidelines as part of the Commission's MI Power Grid initiative (Case No. U-20852). MPSC Staff on June 22 filed its Competitive Procurement report with draft guidelines for rateregulated electric utilities, not involving compliance with the federal Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), and for rateregulated electric utilities for PURPA avoided cost and capacity determinations. The MPSC asks stakeholders to provide comments on potential adoption of the draft competitive procurement guidelines, initiation of a rulemaking proceeding and other possible next steps. Comments must be received by 5 p.m. July 30, 2021. Written comments may be mailed to Executive Secretary, Michigan Public Service Commission, P.O. Box 30221, Lansing, MI 48909. Electronic comments may be emailed to mpscedockets@michigan.gov. All comments should reference Case No. U-20852.

MPSC ADOPTS PROCESS FOR REVIEWING DISPUTES INVOLVING PURPA IN WAKE OF FERC ORDER 872

The MPSC in October 2020 sought input from electric providers and stakeholders on the impact of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Order 872 on the implementation of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA), the federal law enacted amid the energy crisis and aimed at encouraging competition, conservation, reliability and efficiency in generating and delivering electricity (Case No. U-20905 et al). In response to the input received, the MPSC today detailed expedited, more cost-effective review proceedings to settle disputes over legally enforceable obligations (LEOs) involving qualifying facilities (QFs). The Commission directed Consumers Energy Co., Upper Peninsula Power Co., Upper Michigan Energy Resources Corp. and Indiana Michigan Power Co. to file an application containing their LEO criteria by 5 p.m. Sept. 1, 2021. Alpena Power Co. was directed to file the same application as part of its next biennial avoided cost review. The Commission also directed MPSC Staff to develop and publish on the agency's website by Sept. 1, 2021, a standardized LEO review request form for initiating a review proceeding.

MPSC OKs ALPENA POWER HYDROELECTRIC CONTRACTS

The MPSC has approved power purchase agreements between Alpena Power Co. and Thunder Bay Power Co. for the output of four hydroelectric generating facilities on the Thunder Bay River (Case No. U-21094). The contracts are for nearly 8 megawatts (MW) of electricity from facilities known as Hillman (.25 MW), Norway Point (4 MW), Four Mile (2.4 MW) and Ninth Street (1.2 MW) from July 1, 2021, to Dec. 31, 2024, using previously approved avoided cost rates, and after Jan. 1, 2025, at new avoided cost rates. The contracts automatically renew on Dec. 31, 2024, although both companies having the right to terminate the agreement with 90 days' notice after that date. The contracts will not impact customer rates.

To look up cases from today's meeting, access the MPSC's E-Dockets filing system.

Watch recordings of the MPSC's meetings on the MPSC's YouTube channel.

For information about the MPSC, visit www.Michigan.gov/MPSC, sign up for its monthly newsletter or other listservs, or follow the Commission on Twitter or LinkedIn.

DISCLAIMER: This document was prepared to aid the public's understanding of certain matters before the Commission and is not intended to modify, supplement, or be a substitute for the Commission's orders. The Commission's orders are the official action of the Commission.

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Michigan's Food & Agriculture Border Gateway Summit

The Southeast Michigan / Canadian border area is an important economic center and a hub for movement of people, food and agricultural products, and other critical infrastructure activities. At the seminar, attendees received updates on current initiatives including threats to the sector, regulatory changes in both the U.S. and Canada, traceability, food safety, animal health, transportation, and issues involving importing and exporting food and agricultural products.

The Michigan Food & Agriculture Border Gateway Summit V was held on November 13, 2019 at the VistaTech Center in Livonia Michigan. We had over 115 people register, of those 80 were able to attend. The feedback from the seminar was very positive. Overall, attendees enjoyed the interesting topics, the diverse speakers, and the ability to network with various government officials.

Michigan Food & Agriculture Border Gateway Summit 2019 Agenda

Michigan Food & Agriculture Border Gateway Summit 2019 Feedback Results

The Food and Agriculture Border Gateway Summit is held every few years to focus on the unique issues that come with moving food and agricultural products in both directions across the border. It is part of our longstanding public-private partnership, the Food and Agriculture Protection and Defense Working Group. Click here to sign up for notifications about these kinds of issues.
Increasing vaccination rate, lower COVID prevalence prompts MDHHS to roll back mandatory testing for agricultural and food processing employees

Increasing vaccination rate, lower COVID prevalence prompts MDHHS to roll back mandatory testing for agricultural and food processing employees

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 2, 2021

Contact: Lynn Sutfin, 517-241-2112

LANSING, Mich. - The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) has rescinded its order requiring COVID-19 testing for agricultural employees. This change is being made in light of increasing vaccination rates; declining COVID-19 cases; expanded access to testing and vaccinations; and enhanced housing and worker protections currently in effect to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

"With COVID-19 transmission numbers low and increasing vaccination rates, we are removing the requirement for testing for these workers," said Elizabeth Hertel, MDHHS director. "The most important tool we have is the safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine and we encourage everyone to join the nearly 62% of Michiganders who have already been vaccinated as soon as possible."

MDHHS recently awarded six contracts totaling nearly $60 million to the help improve COVID-19 vaccination access for high-risk populations and settings across Michigan, including for seasonal agricultural workers. In addition, partnerships have been created with Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers, employers and communities to meet workers where they are and provide vaccination, testing and support to keep workers and families safe. This includes vaccinations offered by the Michigan Primary Care Association (MPCA).

"The Michigan Primary Care Association in partnership with our member Health Centers have built a successful partnership with the state, farm operators, local health departments, workers and communities to meet workers where they are and provide vaccination and testing," said Dennis Litos, MPCA interim chief executive. "Health Centers are proud to provide health care to farm workers at the Health Center location or at the mobile unit's location to deliver the safe and effective vaccination right at the farm."

As part of protecting the state's workforce from COVID-19, the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) issued updated emergency rules on June 22 that align with federal guidance. These rules allow employers to use their best judgment in determining whether to maintain daily health screenings, face covering requirements and social distancing requirements. A process for workers to report health and safety concerns in the workplace also exists, with additional information available at Michigan.gov/MIOSHAcomplaint.

"We have made great progress in containing COVID-19 in our state and we continue to provide critical workplace protections more focused on areas of increased COVID-19 risk," said Michigan COVID-19 Workplace Safety Director Sean Egan. "In non-health care settings, it's important that all employers recognize that they have a general duty to provide a safe workplace."

Finally, other protections for agricultural workers remain in effect. The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development's February 25, 2021, emergency rules continues to require that agricultural laborer housing camps establish COVID-19 preparedness and response plans, and provide quarantine housing for workers who were exposed to COVID-19, among other protections.

"I am thankful for the steps taken by our food and agriculture community to safeguard the health of this vital workforce throughout the course of the pandemic," said MDARD Director Gary McDowell. "Keeping the established response plan requirements for this growing season provides our growers and processors guidance should a positive employee be identified."

Additional guidance is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for Agriculture Workers and Employers as well as information on Vaccinating Migrant/Migratory and Seasonal Food and Agriculture Workers.

The latest information about COVID-19 is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

# # #
What do you get if you take a pile of shaved corned beef, pile on some Swiss cheese and sauerkraut and sandwich it between two pieces of rustic marbled rye bread grilled to perfection? This weeks featured meal for Grabbing Grub with Nunn.

Continuing down the path of delicious dining in Huron County, I ventured to the tip of the Thumb and the beautiful town of Port Austin.

I have visited Port Austin many times, but I havent taken the opportunity to dine there, so getting the chance to do so on the bosss dime seemed like the perfect time.

Now, some of the restaurants that have piqued my interest in the past arent open for lunch, limiting some of my options, but one place I have been dying to try was The Bank 1884 Food & Spirits. I even wrote about my interest in visiting the establishment a little more than a year when the governor rolled back some orders.

The theme of The Bank is just that, a bank. You walk in the and apart from the mock teller window facade, it feels a bit like you are walking back in time because of the brick walls, high ceiling and rich woodwork.

Without knowing anything about the business or building, I had a feeling like the owners of this establishment loved the community and the communities surrounding because of the historical images lining the walls. These images depicted some of the roots of the communities in Huron County.

After opting for an inside seat, I found myself staring out at a beautiful patio that for the remainder of lunch made me question my inside dining decision.

Before I even grabbed the menu I knew I had a hankering for a sandwich, but when making important choices like what to have for lunch, I believe being thorough is key.

The lunch menu at The Bank starts with appetizers like the cheese curds, onion petals, artichoke dip, and avocado hummus. After the appetizers are soups and some very unique sounding salads  like the Maurice, which features iceberg lettuce, ham, turkey, Swiss, green olives, gherkin pickles and a hard boiled egg  along with traditionals like a chicken Caesar.

I flipped the menu to find the section that I was looking for  sandwiches and burgers.

Now, you all know I am a sucker for a hamburger, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the last item on the menu, the Ultimate Burger. The Ultimate Burger features a half pound of Angus on a brioche bun with peanut butter, bacon and cheddar cheese. I had never heard of such a thing, and while it was tempting, I couldnt bring myself to leap.

I also was considering the Dilly Turkey Melt, which promised thin sliced turkey, Swiss, dill pickle chips and Santa Fe sauce on rye bread. This was an extremely temping option, but during my look down the list, I saw something else I have been wanting since St. Pattys Day  a good Reuben sandwich. The Reuben sandwich is perhaps the third best use of corned beef, only falling slightly behind a homemade corned beef hash, and the best part about a Reuben for me is the combo of rye and kraut.

Almost every Reuben I have ever ordered comes with thousand island dressing, so I was thrilled to see The Bank shook it up a bit, serving the sandwich instead with the signature Vault sauce. I recognized the name of this sauce from the order of onion petals I snuck in, and while I found it much more enjoyable than the usual thousand island, I still opted for my Reuben to be served naked.

The onions inside the petals were deliciously sweet, and when combined with the battered outside, they had a great combination of flavor. The Vault sauce was good, it had a bit of sweetness and might have had some heat, but if it did I didnt pick up on it.

Shortly after placing my order, I glanced over at a nearby table and saw the drink menu. The drink menu obviously advertised the drinks, but what drew my attention was actually the four placards that talked about some notable times in Huron Countys history. The topics told stories related to prohibition, lumbering, and shipping.

My first impressions of the Reuben were made as I bit through the perfectly crisp slices of rye bread. I cant put my finger on the exact difference with the bread, but the best I can describe is it was a bit more airy and had more texture than your usual off-the-shelf marble rye. My next bite I hit a perfect stack of rye, beef, kraut and cheese and it delivered the exact flavor I was anticipating. While this sandwich was an improvement over a more traditional diner Reuben, it also offered enough familiarity to qualify as comfort food. Each bite offered the same pleasure as the first and it didnt take long to plow through the first half of the sandwich. I was impressed when I picked up my second half of the sandwich and found the bread was still crisp and able to support the weight.

Accompanying my sandwich, in addition to the fried onion petals I ordered, was a nice handful of house-made potato chips. I certainly didnt need to eat the chips, but I am doing this for you, so I felt like I should. The chips were thin, crisp and had a great potato flavor. They werent overly salty, which is a challenge I have seen other establishments struggle with in the past.

I happily finished my sandwich, but despite my efforts I wasnt able to finish the chips or petals, so I asked for a to-go container for later.

Between the food, the service and the setting at The Bank, it certainly makes me curious about the dinner options.

Name: The Bank 1884 Food & Spirits

Location: 8646 Lake St, Port Austin, MI 48467

Phone: 989-738-5353

Meal: Money Reuben  corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, marble rye bread  with onion petals for an appetizer and a Coke to drink.

Total cost excluding gratuity: $27.80
Beavertons Ross Lake is closed for swimming resulting from high bacteria levels among the Fourth of July holiday, like the 2019 event when the same thing happened.

Well, this is not good, said Glenda Foss of Gladwin on Friday, noting that the single warning sign isnt obvious there is an issue.

I think most people will walk right by it, she said of the sign posted on June 30 by the Michigan Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.

While swimming might be deterred, there is a splash park near the beach in Ross Lake Park with safe water.

Beaverton City Administrator Heath Kaplan said earlier that EGLE posts the signs, and the city has nothing to do with that. Yet, he noted one of the benefits of the splash park is that children can cool off and have fun in the water if they are discouraged from going in the lake.

Dan Ray, of Beaverton, said he doesnt think most with bother reading it and if they do, they will dismiss it.

Its been like this for years, he said. One day the bacteria is too high, another day its not.

Children played in Ross Lake Friday afternoon. Its unknown if their guardians saw the sign highlighting that the bacteria in the water exceeded the limit for safe swimming. The threat also didnt prevent those on jet skis, kayakers and boaters from taking to the lake Friday.

Alison Fegan, an environmental health supervisor with the Central Michigan District Health Department, said Friday that Ross Lake tested over the daily limit of 300 E.coli colonies.

"The beach will remain closed over the holiday weekend and we are scheduled to resample on Wednesday, July 7th, and we will have results on Thursday, July 8th," Fegan said.

Ross Lake is one of nine beaches closed in the state.
The Midland Brewing Company has created the Sanford Station Seltzer to honor the village of Sanford after the May 2020 flood.

The seltzer project began late last summer. Throughout the fall and winter season, the company worked on test batches to prepare for the seltzer launch. Just one month ago, the first seltzer batch entered the local market at some restaurants, party stores and battle shop stores in the area.

Just recently, Midland Brewing Company donated $1,000 from its profits to the local nonprofit, Sanford Strong.

I believe the efforts we are making will play a part in eventually getting Sanford back to where it once was, fingers crossed, we can be a part of making it better than before, said Clark Bickham, the marketing communications leader with the Midland Brewing Company. Being located in a city doesnt make you a part of a community, doing things to make a difference is what makes you a part of a community, so were making sure were doing just that.

Teresa Quintana said with the help of friends, she created Sanford Strong to financially help the community. She said in recent efforts, the group has helped thousands of families recover from the flood.

(The donation) made me feel prideful, Quintana said. It made me feel like we were still on the map. We feel honored that we got our own thing and it's a pretty cool product that a lot of people will enjoy. It felt good to just have a local company  it kind of feels like they invested in us.

Quintana said Sanford Strong is working on dispersing grants to homeowners who have signed up for financial help. In addition, she said the group is planning on supplementing purchasing materials for individuals seeking help with home repairs.

Were entering a different phase of flood recovery and so, what Midland Brewing Company did was they decided to create Sanford Station Seltzer and a portion of those proceeds, they are using for the rebuild of Sanford, she said.

Midland Brewing Companys Sales Manager Evan Westervelt said the seltzer is cocktail inspired, the current flavors are Moscow Mule and Watermelon Cucumber Lime, after a cocktail called a firecracker.

Westervelt said new flavors are in the works, but for now, the Midland Brewing Company is working with Fabiano Brothers Inc. to further distribute the product. He said if a store or restaurant is interested in purchasing the Sanford seltzer, the process can be handled through a local Fabiano Brothers representative or himself at evan@midlandbrewing.com.

Bickham said the next batch of the Sanford Station Seltzer will be headed out to local distributors in the coming weeks. He said the business plans on donating a portion of proceeds to other Sanford area nonprofits in the future.
HOUSTON (AP)  A grand jury on Wednesday declined to indict a former Houston-area health department doctor who was accused of stealing nine doses of coronavirus vaccine from a damaged vial and administering them to family and friends.

Prosecutors had alleged that Dr. Hasan Gokal, who worked for Harris County Public Health, stole a vial of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine while working at a vaccination site at a suburban Houston park on Dec. 29. His attorney said Gokal was only trying to save lives by using doses that would have been thrown away.

But grand jurors in Harris County, where Houston is located, decided no criminal charges were warranted. The grand jurys decision comes after a judge in January dismissed a theft charge prosecutors had filed against Gokal.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Gokal, 48, said when he was confronted with the possibility that a life saving vaccine could be lost, he made the decision to find eligible people late at night who could be given the expiring doses.

I came as a practicing ER doctor into public health and as an ER doctor, I err on the side of life and thats how I chose to make my decision," he said. It was the right thing to do and it meant saving more lives."

Paul Doyle, Gokals attorney, criticized the decision by prosecutors to pursue charges, saying Gokal's supervisor had approved his plan for the leftover vaccine doses.

There is no other case that I know of in the country where a doctor went above and beyond and was persecuted for it," Doyle said.

Doyle said hundreds of medical professionals and others had written letters, sent emails and made phone calls in support of Gokal's actions.

We respect the decision of the grand jury in this and every case. Evidence, not public opinion, is the guiding principle of our work, the Harris County District Attorneys Office said in a statement.

Harris County Public Health, Gokal's former employer, declined to comment, referring all questions to the district attorney's office.

In January, prosecutors filed a misdemeanor theft charge against Gokal, who was fired after the health department conducted an internal investigation.

A judge later dismissed the theft charge, ruling there was no probable cause in the case. Harris County Court-At-Law Judge Franklin Bynum criticized prosecutors, saying their probable cause complaint was riddled with sloppiness and errors.

After the dismissal, prosecutors presented the case to the grand jury.

While he felt relief and happiness after learning about the grand jurys decision, Gokal said the ordeal has taken a toll on his family, as his wife's health has been impacted and his children's grades suffered.

Gokal said he would still like to work in some capacity in public health but worries the theft accusation has put this in danger. Since he was fired by the county health department, he has worked part time in the emergency departments at two Houston hospitals.

For the time being, Im not going hungry and my family is doing OK," he said.

Gokal said he and his family, including his two daughters and son, have been grateful for the outpouring of support they have received.

So many people reached out, helped in different ways, from GoFundMe (donations) to prayers and messages. Ive been so overwhelmed by that," he said.

In March, the Texas Medical Board dismissed an investigation against Gokal, saying he appeared to have administered doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to patients that were properly consented, in the eligible patient category, and they were given doses that would have otherwise been wasted.

The board also found there were no protocols for Gokal to follow and he relied on state guidance to not waste the vaccine.

In Wisconsin, a former pharmacist who purposefully ruined more than 500 doses of COVID-19 vaccine was sentenced to three years in prison on June 8.

___

Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70
Sixteen Ubly High School students passed their final assessments for an industry-backed certificate in a field of their interest.

Students in the Ubly Agriscience Program can complete the iCEV training on topics ranging from veterinary science to botany.

Agriscience teacher Melissa Kramer said the training and certificate provides students with additional knowledge within the agricultural industry.

The certificates can make them more employable, but it also makes them more knowledgeable and more career-ready, Kramer said.

Students can include the certificate on scholarships, resumes and college applications, Kramer said.

This is the first year Ubly schools has officially ran the program and partnered with iCEV for the certificates  though the program was introduced to Ubly last year in the midst of the pandemic.

When COVID hit, that messed everything up because students weren't able to take their final test since it needs to be proctored, Kramer said. I think we had two students that did it last year, and they literally came to my house (to be proctored) and took their tests because they really wanted it.

The trainings induction at Ubly was made possible by the Huron County Tech Center, which ensures that the countys ag programs have access to iCEV programs.

In addition to offering industry certificates for students, iCEV creates supplementary resources for curriculum in agricultural science.

Kramer said shes proud of her students' work, and she plans on keeping the training and certificate tests around.

Now that we've been through the certification test, I actually have a better idea of what questions they ask to better help my students in the future, Kramer said. It's one of those things that once you take it, you know how to prep for it better, so this group was kind of my guinea pigs for future certifications.
hartfordphoto/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Almost 100 new laws came into effect in Connecticut on July 1. Among these laws are the legalization of recreational marijuana as well as a statewide ban on plastic bags.

While some laws will affect residents lives starting now, others won't be enacted until a future date. Tristan's law for ice cream truck safety, for example, has given truck drivers a deadline of May 2022 to make safety changes to their vehicles.
SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP)  Cale McWilliams doesnt like traditional classrooms.

Instead, the May 2021 Sioux City East High School graduate prefers working with his hands.

This willingness for hands-on learning proved to be beneficial since McWilliams was offered full-time employment while many of his classmates were still pondering their post-high school lives.

McWilliams accepted the job of prefabricator for Thompson Electric, following a semester-long internship with the Sioux City business.

As part of the Sioux City Community School Districts Career Academy, McWilliams previously enrolled in a Western Iowa Tech Community College electrician course. That way, he could apply classroom study with on-the-job training.

Thompson Electric electrical construction president Barney Pottebaum told the Sioux City Journal that such job training programs are a win for students, but they are also a win for local employers.

There are plenty of kids who dont know what to do after school and the program gives kids one more choice to consider, he said. Employers like the program because it provides an engaged workforce of young people.

According to Career Academy principal Katie Towler, the school district partners with several area businesses while offering a variety of internships.

Our aim is to allow students to experience a career path that interests them, she said. An internship in a particular field may be a perfect fit for the student and thats fine. Or it may turn out to be something that gives them second thoughts. Finding out a career pathway isnt the right fit saves our students both time and money down the road.

After discussing the internship program with McWilliams, teacher Anthony Gaul discovered his student had a mind for mechanics.

I knew Cale had the ambition and a strong work ethic, Gaul said. Becoming a prefabricator turned out to be something that Cale really wanted to do.

Thompson Electric prefabrication manager Corey Floyd nodded his head in agreement.

During the school semester, I worked out a schedule that fit with Cales school schedule, he said. Cale would come to the shop and learn through experience what a prefabricator does.

Floyd said this isnt a new effort by Thompson Electric.

Each semester for the past few years, weve brought on one or two high school students to learn a new trade, he said, noting that such internships are offered for other area school districts in addition to Sioux City.

There are more electricians who are nearing retirement than there are ones entering the workforce, Floyd added. This helps us to bring in the next generation of electrical workers, Floyd added.

That becomes more important in the current job market, where many industries are experiencing difficulties finding workers.

Many of our interns arent ready for college or they want some hands-on experience before continuing school, Pottebaum said. We want them to realize that the electrical field is one that offers plenty of career advancement.

Which is exactly what McWilliams wanted for himself.

I dont want to do the same thing, over and over again, he said. As a prefabricator, every day will be different at this job. That is what I was looking for all along.
RENO, Nev. (AP)  Northern Nevadas Washoe County has confirmed its first death related to the COVID-19 Delta variant, which was the most common variant among samples collected at the state public health lab last month and is accounting for one in four new cases reported nationally, the health district said Thursday.

The Delta variant has become the most common COVID-19 variant in Washoe County over the last two weeks and is extremely contagious, Washoe County Health District Officer Kevin Dick said.

The woman in her 40s who died from the Delta variant first identified in India had not received the COVID-19 vaccination, had no underlying conditions and had been hospitalized in the Reno-Sparks area, the county health district said Thursday.

It wasnt immediately clear if the variant has been tied to any other Nevada deaths, but a health official confirmed Thursday there have been none in the Las Vegas area.

Its the first in Washoe County blamed on the variant among 685 overall COVID-19 deaths reported in the county that includes Reno and Sparks since March 2020, the district said.

The county on Thursday reported 34 additional cases of the Delta variant, for a total of 51. Nevada's first case of the variant was confirmed in the county June 15.

Most of the 51 cases involved people who had not been vaccinated. Nine were fully vaccinated. None of the fully vaccinated who contracted the variant has been hospitalized, the district said.

The Nevada State Public Health Laboratory reported earlier this week that only 10 of the 81 statewide samples they have confirmed as the Delta variant through sequencing have been outside Washoe or Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.

The Southern Nevada Health District for Las Vegas and surrounding areas hasnt reported any deaths related to the Delta variant, district public information officer Jennifer Sizemore told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The Nevada State Public Health Laboratory reported June 28 that it has identified a total of 81 cases of the Delta variant during sequencing of samples  41 in Clark County, 30 in Washoe County, four in Mineral County and three each in Carson and Elko counties.

Among samples collected and sequenced from June 1-25, the lab said 39% were the B.1.617.2 Delta variant and 34% were the B.1.1.7 variant believed to have originated in the United Kingdom.
MIDDLETOWN  With the Community Health Center mass vaccination sites no longer open, the city is offering several pop-up clinics and walk-in locations for people to get the COVID vaccine.

A declining demand is causing other health agencies to follow suit, as well the drop in the states coronavirus positivity rate, which has remained below 1 percent in recent weeks.

In Middletown, rates have declined significantly during the last three weeks. The week of June 20, there were eight cases recorded; June 13 had six; and June 6, nine. Thats compared to Middletowns highest recorded case count during the week of Jan. 3 when there were 267 positive results, according to the COVID-19 summary posted on the city website.

The Community Health Center, which closed its mass vaccination clinic near Wesleyan University, and in East Hartford, Danbury and Stamford this week, will offer pop-up sites throughout the state, including New Britain.

The CHC is offering vaccinations to the public on a walk-in basis at all of its fixed locations, Vice President of Communications Leslie Gianelli said Thursday. The full list is posted online.

Griffin Health will also hold a clinic on Fridays at the Middletown Farmers Market on the South Green from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. through Aug. 27, Middletown Acting Health Director Kevin Elak said.

There is one standing clinic Tuesdays at Cross Street AME Zion Church, 440 West St. Initial doses are administered between 1 and 4 p.m., and second shots from 9 a.m. to noon.

The state has also scaled back its vaccine appointment line.

FEMA, which deployed federal staff to four community vaccination centers in Middletown, and Providence and Cranston, R.I., and the Hynes Convention Center in Boston during the pandemic, said it has administered more than 26,000 vaccines as of June 23.
Venice, FL (34285)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this morning. Thunderstorms likely during the afternoon. High around 90F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

Tropical storm conditions possible. Thunderstorms likely this evening. Then a chance of scattered thunderstorms overnight. Low around 75F. Winds E at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP)  A voter-approved expansion of Medicaid took effect Thursday in Oklahoma after a decade of Republican resistance in a state that has become emblematic of the political struggle to extend the federal health insurance program in conservative strongholds.

Oklahoma moved ahead with its expansion at a time when Democrats in Washington and across the states are pressing to complete the work of the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, recently upheld by the Supreme Court for the third time in a decade. So far, 38 states and Washington, D.C., have expanded Medicaid, and expansion in a dozen mostly Southern states may be the biggest piece of unfinished business.

Anyone banking on the idea that Obamacare was just going to be struck down  the Supreme Court has moved past that, said Cindy Mann, who served as federal Medicaid chief during the Barack Obama administration.

All of the states that are still debating the issue are constantly looking at other states experience to get a sense of what they can expect, added Mann, now with the Manatt Health consultancy. Having Oklahoma  a very red state  moving forward judiciously and with very strong enrollment is showing that this is a sensible path to go.

More than 123,000 low-income people already have been approved for Medicaid coverage in Oklahoma, a state where nearly 15% of the population has been uninsured  the highest rate in the nation behind Texas, according to the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation. State Medicaid officials say they expect that number to increase to more than 200,000 as more people get approved.

Danielle Gaddis of Oklahoma City is 26 and preparing to begin medical school. She has been without private health insurance since her mother, whose health plan she was on, retired two years ago.

When Gaddis began running a fever over the winter, she couldnt afford to see a doctor and instead spent two weeks trying to recover on her own. That will change since she's been approved for Medicaid thanks to the expansion.

Just the financial worry is gone," Gaddis said. It's nice to know that's something I don't have to worry about."

Oklahoma voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment last year to expand eligibility for benefits. Now, an individual who earns up to $17,796 annually, or $36,588 for a family of four, qualifies for Medicaid health care coverage. By contrast, the median income limit for parents in states that didn't expand their program is about $8,905 for a family of three, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

I want to congratulate Oklahoma on joining the ranks of states that are bringing quality health coverage to our neighbors and families," said U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who visited Oklahoma Thursday to discuss the significance of Medicaid expansion.

Medicaid started out in the 1960s as a federal-state health insurance program for severely disabled people and low-income families on welfare, but it now covers nearly 74 million people, or more than one in five Americans. The program expansion under Obama brought in some 12 million low-income people, mostly low-wage workers.

The states most closely watching Oklahoma are Missouri  where voters approved an expansion but GOP legislators balked at funding it  as well as Kansas, where Medicaid expansion has been actively debated. In Missouri, a judge recently ruled that the ballot question there was unconstitutional.

In South Dakota, several major health care systems last month announced plans to begin gathering signatures for a ballot measure to expand Medicaid there.

Opponents of expansion argue that the costs to the states are excessive. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has described the expansion as a massive tax increase that Missourians cannot afford. Oklahoma helped offset the costs by increasing a fee that hospitals must pay.

President Joe Bidens coronavirus relief law dangles a significant financial bonus in front of states that expand their programs now. Oklahoma is the first to qualify.

Under the Biden legislation, states newly expanding will receive a two-year, 5-percentage-point bump up in federal matching funds for their regular Medicaid programs. Thats on top of a 90% federal match for the costs of covering the newly insured through the expansion. Manatt estimates the bonus alone would work out to $786 million for Oklahoma, but bigger states like Texas and Florida would reap much more.

More than 2 million low-income uninsured people remain in a coverage gap as long as Medicaid expansion is unfinished. They make too much to qualify for Medicaid under their individual states rules, but not enough to qualify for Obamacares subsidized private insurance.

Right now, millions of Americans do not have health care coverage through no fault of their own because their states havent expanded their Medicaid programs, said Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., chair of the U.S. House committee that oversees Medicaid.

In Washington, theres a growing demand among Democrats for the federal government to step in and take direct action if states continue to hold out. Its seen as a health equity issue, since many of the uninsured people in the coverage gap are racial and ethnic minorities.

Having Oklahoma and Missouri going in two different directions really illustrates the need for the federal government to do something, said Jesse Cross-Call, a health policy expert with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, which advocates for low-income people. There continue to be states that are going to throw up roadblocks and resist this no matter what you put in front of them.

James Capretta, a health policy expert with the business-oriented American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said theres also been a reluctance among Democrats to compromise, since they reject ideas that would alter the basic terms of the Obama health law.

Nonetheless, there ought to be a bipartisan consensus here, since there really is no alternative to Medicaid as the safety net health insurance program, Capretta added. We already have a program. And there is still a gap population. The logical thing to do is find some way to make sure these people are at least being helped.
HARTFORD  Described as a survivor and crusader, Tracey Motuzick of Torrington was honored Friday in Hartford by a statewide coalition for her decades of support for victims of domestic violence.

The awards ceremony, sponsored by the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, presented Motuzick with the Coalition Crusader Award. The program booklet notes that she was honored for her experience and action (which) forever changed the landscape of domestic violence laws in Connecticut and the nation.

Motuzicks last name was Thurman when she came to national prominence in 1983 for her successful civil rights lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the domestic violence meted out by her estranged husband, Charles Buck Thurman Sr.

His final brutal attack left Motuzick partially paralyzed and hospitalized for eight months, she said on Friday. Once she was released, Motuzick said she had to use a wheelchair for a year. She now relies on a wheeled walker.

I would not be here without your support, Motuzick said in her remarks to the audience. I will speak about this so others can be helped.

I wish when I went through this in 1983, there was a group like Susan B. Anthony (Project) , Motuzick said in her presentation speech.

The Torrington-based nonprofit organization, which supports survivors of domestic abuse, was a nascent group, with just one part-time organizer, when the domestic violence against Motuzick began.

The Susan B. Anthony Project now provides services to residents in 20 communities in Litchfield County.

We pay homage to the survivors for all the years youve endured, Jeanne Fusco, the organizations executive director, told the assembled group.

This event is for the thousands whove come before, Fusco said. Many police departments changed their policies and regulations based on the countless organizations who emulated Traceys advocacy.

Those changes stemmed from a civil rights lawsuit Motuzicks attorneys filed in 1984 against the Torrington Police Department for the nonperformance or malperformance of official duties by the defendant police officers, according to court records.

Court documents state that between early October 1982 and June 10, 1983, the plaintiff, Tracey Thurman, a woman living in the City of Torrington, and others on her behalf, notified the defendant City through the defendant police officers of the City of repeated threats upon her life and the life of her child, the plaintiff Charles J. Thurman, Jr., made by her estranged husband, Charles Thurman.

The record continues, Attempts to file complaints by plaintiff Tracey Thurman against her estranged husband in response to his threats of death and maiming were ignored or rejected by the named defendants and the defendant City.

Motuzick said on Friday that her ex-husband was only jailed for eight years, despite the repeated attempts on her life and that of their son.

The lack of response by the citys police department in 1983 would not and could not occur now. In 1986, the state enacted a comprehensive family violence act, which sets standards for police officers and the courts on how to respond to domestic violence cases.

There is an evolution of training in police academies, Fusco said after the awards event. Experts in domestic violence are invited into the academys classes to discuss the crime, she said.

A spokesman for the Torrington Police Department could not be reached for comment late Friday afternoon. However, police Lt. Michael Emanuel, who is now retired, previously discussed the evolution an interview with the Register Citizen . We follow the law (the family violence act) by the letter, he said.

The change in survivor support is rewarding, Motuzick said. Advocates work day in and day out.

She said her role is a personal one Ill talk to survivors anytime they ask me. Ill talk to someone in the grocery store if they ask me.

Motuzick remarried 33 years ago to Michael Motuzick. He said they met because his brother married her best friend.

I was the best man and Tracey was supposed to be the maid of honor, but she was in the hospital, Michael Motuzick said. Everyone says shes lucky to have me. But, Im the one who is lucky.
Thousands of service members across all branches have been separated involuntarily from the military after misconduct that resulted in an administrative separation or court-martial. Many of them are denied benefits as a result of the alleged misconduct and their so-called "bad paper" discharge.

But a prior service member, regardless of the classification of service or the nature of their discharge, never should give up hope. The record can be corrected to allow them to obtain life-changing benefits. Some benefits require an honorable discharge (i.e., educational benefits), while others require only an under honorable conditions (general) discharge (i.e., VA service-connected compensation payments). A properly prepared application can have odds of success higher than 80% at certain boards.

Record Corrections

You have as many as three "bites" at the apple before having to decide whether to file suit to correct the record in federal court. National Guard members may need to first request relief through their state's National Guard to ensure that they have exhausted all administrative remedies. You are not required to get a decision, only to show proof that you requested the relief. Service members who have no duty or have exhausted their duty to file with the state should consider these three options:

Discharge Review Board (DRB)

The first bite at the apple is often the one with the highest chance of success. A separated service member may apply to the DRB for their specific branch within 15 years of separation. Applicants should file the appropriate document (DD Form 293) with a well-written legal brief and supporting evidence outlining their legal arguments and any procedural or regulatory errors that occurred during their separation proceedings.

The standard for this board is that a service member proves an inequity or impropriety. Service members will have an opportunity to have their case adjudicated on the written record first and then an opportunity to appear personally at a hearing in Crystal City, Virginia, if they make the request within the strict 15-year window.

Boards for Correction of Military Records (BCMR)

The next bite at the apple is usually the Board for Correction of Military Records for that specific military branch. If the service member is requesting a discharge upgrade within 15 years of the discharge, there must first be an attempt in most cases to exhaust administrative remedies by filing an application at the DRB before moving on to the BCMR. Record corrections not involving a discharge upgrade should be filed directly with the BCMR in most cases.

Service members generally have three years to submit the appropriate form (DD Form 149) and a well-written legal brief with supporting documentation to support the argument for a record correction and discharge upgrade, but the board usually will consider the application in the interests of justice if there is new and material evidence that has not yet been considered by the board.

The standard for this board is that the service member proves that an error or injustice occurred. A request for reconsideration of a prior BCMR decision now can be filed at the BCMR at any time if the service member can provide new and material evidence to support the request.

Discharge Upgrades at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

A far-too-often overlooked step in the battle for benefits is the request to have the VA upgrade the classification to something other than dishonorable for VA purposes only. There are two main benefits veterans take advantage of. The VA requires an honorable discharge for education benefits (i.e., GI Bill), but only requires an under honorable conditions (general) discharge for medical benefits and monthly compensation. The VA considers anything below a general discharge to be dishonorable, which bars the former service member from obtaining benefits.

A service member may file an application with the VA requesting a review of their service to determine whether the VA will consider their service to be something other than dishonorable for VA purposes only. Often, service members have a period of honorable service that can qualify them for benefits, or the VA will upgrade their classification based on their service prior to the conduct that resulted in separation.

A service member needs only to obtain a victory at one of the three (four if you count the National Guard) bites at the apple outlined above to obtain service-connected compensation and possibly education benefits if the upgrade is made to honorable. The service member should consider filing at the DRB or BCMR and at the VA in parallel filings to benefit from whichever agency returns the quickest favorable decision. The key is to be persistent and aggressive with filings until you have accomplished your goals or exhausted all avenues.

-- Anthony Kuhn is a managing partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has deployed a mobile counseling center to Surfside, Florida, to provide therapy and support for the community affected by the catastrophic collapse of an oceanfront condominium.

The VA and Vet Centers -- counseling centers and mobile crews that provide a range of services for combat veterans and military trauma victims -- maintain a robust relief system for disaster response and will treat "anyone who comes" to the mobile center in Surfside, according to VA Secretary Denis McDonough.

"We have seen veterans, we've seen first responders and we've seen non-veterans. I'm really proud of the work of the team," McDonough said during a news conference Wednesday.

The deployment comes as a community struggles with the enormity of loss, including 18 confirmed deaths and 145 who have been missing since last Thursday.

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Among the missing is Dr. Gary Cohen, a physician at the Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center in Alabama. Cohen is missing, along with his brother, Dr. Brad Cohen, who owns a condo in the Champlain Towers South building.

"Our prayers go out today to him, his family and our team in Tuscaloosa," McDonough said.

Cohen was in Florida to visit his terminally ill father, Brad's wife, Soriya Cohen, told ABC News. She said she had lost hope.

"Who is going to survive that rubble?" she asked ABC, pointing to the building.

Cohen earned his degree in osteopathic medicine from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1989 and served his residency at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in New York City.

He is a physiatrist, specializing in rehabilitation and physical therapy and training. He has practiced medicine in Alabama since 2006.

"Dr. Gary Cohen is one of our physicians and has worked many years providing care to our Veterans. He is part of the Tuscaloosa VAMC family and our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family during this incredibly difficult time," Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center Director John Merkle said in a statement.

The VA Mobile Vet Center has set up services at St. Joseph Catholic Church, about eight blocks from the condominium.

The team has extensive experience in disaster response, according to Jessica Schiefer, the public affairs officer for VA's Readjustment Counseling Service. Among the four members are a licensed social worker who responded to the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17; an outreach specialist who is a combat veteran; a former emergency room social worker; and a clinical psychologist who responded to the mass shootings in Parkland and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which killed 49 in 2016, as well as Hurricane Maria four years ago.

"Many Vet Center staff are also veterans and can often relate to managing through grief, trauma and transition," Schiefer said. "It's important for us to take care of each other in the communities we are in and ensure no one ever feels like they have to go through it alone."

McDonough said VA continues its response to another national disaster -- the COVID-19 pandemic -- by providing services and outreach to Louisianans who remain homeless after back-to-back hurricanes last year and providing vaccines to people in the Pacific northwest who are flocking to cooling centers to escape the unprecedented heat.

"We have a dedicated team with the capability to deploy around the country, a capability that is undergirding a lot of our mobile vaccination units ... the Vet Centers have their own independent capability to provide mental health services, and they provide services to hundreds of communities across the country,"

In February, VA deployed two mobile Vet Centers to the U.S. Capitol to ensure that National Guard members, Capitol Police, congressional staff and others had access to no-cost mental- health services after the Jan. 6 riot.

"Should anyone outside of the veteran and military community reach out or come by looking for our support, our team will listen, seek to understand their concerns and offer community resources that are available to them," Schiefer said. "If an individual is in crisis, our team will ensure the proper support and assistance is provided.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime.

Related: VA Calls on Female Veterans to Enroll in World's Largest Medical Research Biobank
The U.S. Air Force has awarded Raytheon Technologies $2 billion to develop the Pentagon's new air launched nuclear cruise missile.

Raytheon is helping to design and develop the Long Range Stand Off weapon, known as LRSO, the Defense Department announced in awarding the contract Thursday. The work is expected to be completed in February 2027 at which time it would transition into production.

The LRSO program will replace the 1980s-era AGM-86B Air Launched Cruise Missile, known as ALCM, providing an air-launched capability as part of the nuclear triad.

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The weapon is planned for the B-52 Stratofortress, as well as the B-2 Spirit and the future B-21 Long-Range Strike Bomber. Unlike weapon systems that can be upgraded later on after being delivered to the services, LRSO -- projected to have a range beyond 1,500 miles -- needs to meet all the requirements and certifications from the beginning because of its nuclear capability.

In 2017, the service awarded contracts to Lockheed and Raytheon to begin preliminary work on LRSO. The agreements were valued at $900 million each and were to last almost five years "to mature design concepts and prove developmental technologies," the Air Force said at the time.

Last year, the service selected Raytheon's design for LRSO over Lockheed Martin Corp., a move that wasn't expected until fiscal 2022.

The latest award is just one small piece of the broader overhaul of the total nuclear arsenal.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will cost taxpayers $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years to modernize the entire nuclear arsenal, including equipment within each leg of the triad -- lCBMs, strategic bombers and submarine-launched ballistic missiles -- and crucial communications.

In recent months, the Pentagon has faced increased scrutiny over efforts to develop next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles to replace the nation's aging Minuteman IIIs.

Experts say the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD, program, overseen by the Air Force, could cost $85 billion to $100 billion for the ICBM infrastructure alone. The service in September awarded Northrop Grumman a $13.3 billion contract for the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase for GBSD.

As a result, some progressive lawmakers have suggested relying solely on submarines and bombers to act as America's nuclear deterrent, according to a report from Defense News.

Top military officials have argued that an increased reliance on submarines and bombers would exhaust the force.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oriana0214.

Related: In Surprise, Air Force Picks Raytheon to Build New Cruise Missile
Marine Gunnery Sgt. Mario Madera-Rodriguez was convicted Thursday night of involuntary manslaughter and other charges in the choking death of a Green Beret in Mali during an attempted hazing and sexual assault.

In addition to involuntary manslaughter, Madera-Rodriguez was found guilty of conspiracy to commit assault and battery, conspiracy to obstruct justice, hazing and making false official statements, the Navy said in a Friday news release.

Madera-Rodriguez, a Marine Raider, was found not guilty of felony murder. He also was found not guilty of burglary but convicted of housebreaking, a lesser offense.

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Madera-Rodriguezs case was the last of four special operations troops to be decided in the June 4, 2017, death of Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar during a deployment in Bamako, Mali.

One of his co-conspirators -- Marine Raider Staff Sgt. Kevin Maxwell, who previously pleaded guilty to charges connected to Melgars death and was sentenced to four years in prison  admitted to being involved in a plot to haze and humiliate Melgar, that resulted in his death.

In a written statement reported by the Washington Post in 2019, Maxwell told authorities that he, Madera-Rodriguez and two SEALs, Chief Special Warfare Operator Anthony DeDolph and Chief Special Warfare Operator Adam Matthews, planned to break into Melgars bedroom with a sledgehammer at about 5 a.m., after a night of heavy drinking.

The four planned to choke Melgar into unconsciousness, tie him up, and have a Malian security guard sexually assault him while a British man videotaped the assault on a cell phone, Maxwell said in the statement. Marine Corps Times reported that DeDolph and the others disliked Melgar and felt he had slighted them, seeking to embarrass him through hazing.

But when DeDolph bound Melgar with duct tape and put him in a chokehold, he accidentally strangled him to death.

Madera-Rodriguezs acquittal on the felony murder charge will let him avoid the most severe penalty of life imprisonment without possibility of parole. The Navy said sentencing began Friday morning and likely will continue next week, with the involuntary manslaughter conviction carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

DeDolph pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, obstruction of justice and hazing in January, and he was sentenced to 10 years of confinement and an involuntary discharge. Matthews also pleaded guilty to charges in Melgars death and sentenced to one year in prison.

Madera-Rodriguezs court-martial took place at Naval Station Norfolk, and began June 7. He chose to be tried by a panel of eight service members.

-- Stephen Losey can be reached at stephen.losey@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StephenLosey.

Related: Court-Martial Begins for Marine Raider Accused of Helping Murder Green Beret in Mali
The Navy has announced that it is pulling funds from the much-hyped electromagnetic railgun in order to shift those monetary resources to hypersonic missiles and other high-tech weapons.

The program, which began in 2005, was supposed to use magnetic fields instead of gunpowder to fire rounds at speeds of up to Mach 7 and ranges of up to 100 nautical miles.

However, despite the more than 15 years that program has spent in development, it never was fielded. Navy officials continued to insist that it saw a future for the $500 million experiment as late as 2018.

Given fiscal constraints, combat system integration challenges and the prospective technology maturation of other weapon concepts, the Navy decided to pause research and development of the Electromagnetic Railgun [EMRG] at the end of 2021, the statement from the Navy said.

The railgun will now join the ranks of other costly, yet never implemented weapons programs like the Future Combat Systems, Comanche helicopter, and Next Generation Cruiser projects.

The end of the railgun program was foreshadowed last month when a White House fiscal budget for 2022 revealed the Navy pulled funding for the Gun-Launched Guided Projectile -- a meter-long projectile first developed exclusively as a round for the experimental railgun.

The decision to pause the EMRG program is consistent with department-wide reform initiatives to free up resources in support of other Navy priorities [and] to include improving offensive and defensive capabilities such as directed energy, hypersonic missiles and electronic warfare systems, the Navys statement said.

However, funding was not the only issue plaguing the futuristic weapon.

In 2018, then-chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson told Congress that the weapon had yet to reach its promised range.

"That involves a number of technologies," he said. "The barrel itself is probably the limiting case, the engineering on that, the materials required to sustain that power pulse, and the heat and pressure that's involved in launching those projectiles."

Another unresolved issue was a power source for the gun. Only the Navys three-ship Zumwalt class destroyers reportedly were capable of supplying the electricity needed to operate the gun.

-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.toropin@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @ktoropin.

Related: It May Be the End of the Line for the Navy's Hypervelocity Projectile
A Pentagon commission has recommended major changes to how sexual assaults and related crimes are prosecuted in the military that would take effect in 2023.

In the report submitted to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last week and released publicly Friday, the Independent Review Commission advised that the Pentagon work with Congress to pass changes to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) this year. The commission recommended taking decisions on whether to prosecute sexual assault, sexual harassment and other special victim crimes out of the hands of commanders, and putting a new independent prosecution system in charge of those cases.

But while the commission is recommending fast movement on passing changes to the UCMJ as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, a senior administration official said in a conference call with reporters Thursday that the changes should not take effect until 2023. The delay would give the military enough time to build the new special victims prosecution system properly, the official said.

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This is not an area for quick wins or quick fixes, but rather a plan that will result in sustained change over time, the official, who spoke with reporters on condition of anonymity, said. We think that investment of time is what will lead to results. We think thats what will really move the needle.

Austin generally has accepted all the commissions recommendations. In the coming months, the White House and Pentagon plan to work together to figure out how to put these recommendations into practice and work with Congress to update the UCMJ where it is necessary.

The changes to the prosecution process could run into opposition from some lawmakers  and some of Austins own top generals. Last week, Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, released letters from seven top generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, opposing a bill from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., that would take prosecutions of all major crimes out of commanders hands.

However some generals, including Milley, said they were open to a limited revamp of the military justice system, in which only sexual assault prosecutions were taken out of commanders hands.

Last week, Austin released a statement supporting the commissions recommendations, including placing domestic violence and other special victims crimes in the proposed independent prosecution system. Austin said there is a strong correlation between those crimes and the prevalence of sexual assault.

The military has struggled for years to stem the prevalence of sexual assault and sexual harassment in its ranks, and the problem was brought into renewed focus last year after the murder of Spc. Vanessa Guillen, who had been sexually harassed by another soldier before her death.

The kidnapping, murder and dismemberment of Guillen last year at Fort Hood, Texas, shocked and outraged the military community and accelerated calls to do more to fight sexual harassment in the ranks. After Guillens death, allegedly at the hands of a fellow soldier who killed himself as law enforcement closed in, investigations found that she had been sexually harassed by a member of her unit -- although not the soldier suspected of killing her -- before her murder, and that Fort Hood had a command climate that was permissive of sexual harassment and assault.

Despite efforts to improve existing support systems for victims, thousands of troops report being sexually assaulted each year, with the services receiving 6,290 such reports in fiscal 2020, up 1% from the previous year.

In an Associated Press interview in May, Milley acknowledged, I havent seen the needle move on sexual assault despite years of effort.

The Pentagon in February created the commission, ordered by President Joe Biden, and put leading activist Lynn Rosenthal in charge.

The commission met with more than 600 survivors of sexual assault and harassment, researchers, former service members, commanders, enlisted troops and advocates, and asked troops -- particularly junior enlisted service members -- to submit their experiences and ideas anonymously to the commission online.

The official said there is a troubling gap between what senior leaders say about sexual harassment and assault, and what junior enlisted troops have experienced.

We have heard for many years that there is no tolerance for sexual harassment and sexual assault, the official said. But we learned that in practice, there is quite a lot of tolerance.

The commission made 28 main recommendations, and 54 sub-recommendations, to fix the problem.

All services have serious shortcomings in their workforces when it comes to sexual harassment and assault prevention, the official said, and there is in particular a lack of experience and specialization.

We often hear that prevention is the key to solving this problem, the official said. But we learned that there arent actually prevention specialists working across the services to make that happen.

Among the other suggestions for how to improve how the military cares for and supports victims is to shift sexual assault response coordinators and victim advocates out of the command structure but did not specify to whom victims advocates would report to. The commission also suggested largely eliminating part-time and collateral duty victim advocates, and taking other steps to professionalize the sexual assault response workforce.

The commission also recommended the Defense Department conduct a manpower study on the victim advocacy workforce within three months, and to put changes in effect for victim advocates within six months.

And the commission recommended the military make it easier for sexual assault victims to get help from sexual assault prevention and response programs, as the Army already does. The Defense Department also needs to set up a structure to help services better address sexual harassment.

The military justice system isnt set up to handle sexual assault, sexual harassment, domestic violence and other sensitive cases effectively, the official said, and there is a strong link between poor unit climate and sexual harassment and assault.

Above all, the official said, better leadership is needed in the military if it hopes to fix all these problems.

Commanders are the key to improving unit climate, to changing the culture, and to protecting victims from negative consequences related to reporting sexual assault, the official said. Indeed, commanders are the key to making it safe for victims to come forward at all.

The commission made several recommendations for improving units climate, including better ways to select, develop and evaluate leaders, better climate survey processes to include more on-the-ground information about sexual harassment, and increased transparency about disciplinary actions.

The commission wants the military to use narrative and qualitative data to select and evaluate commanders, to have a clearer picture of how they are addressing climate issues.

The official emphatically rejected suggestions that moving legal prosecution decisions away from commanders diminishes commanders role. To the contrary, she said, it enhances their role by putting them in charge of taking care of their people and creating climates that have zero tolerance for sexual assault, sexual harassment and other related crimes.

The commander is responsible for making sure that victims are protected from retaliation, bullying, all of that that can happen after a report, the official said.

-- Stephen Losey can be reached at stephen.losey@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StephenLosey.

Related: Amid Pushback from Joint Chiefs, SecDef Backs Changes to Military Sexual Prosecutions
Did you do a Personally Procured Move, also known as a PPM or DITY move, in 2020? If so, be sure that you have the special travel W-2 when you complete your 2020 income tax return.

Many military families are eager to file their tax returns when the IRS opens the filing season on Feb. 12, 2021, especially when they are expecting a refund. Having this special W-2 is an important part of having an accurate income tax return filing.

Reimbursements for PPM moves are taxable income to the military service member. As such, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service issues a W-2 for that money. It's found on MyPay, in the tax document section, under Travel/Miscellaneous Tax Statement (W-2).

Thankfully, that money isn't always taxable, or at least not all of it. Active-duty military service members moving on Permanent Change of Station orders are the only group of U.S. taxpayers who are still eligible to deduct moving expenses from their income tax calculations.

You'll use the information on the travel W-2 to calculate your deductible moving expenses on IRS Form 3903, Moving Expenses. The IRS has pretty specific rules on which moving expenses can be deducted. If you're unsure what you can include in your calculations, consider getting free assistance from your installation's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program, or get advice from the Military OneSource MilTax program.

If you've been reimbursed more than your actual expenses, you must include the excess as income on Line 1 of your 1040 tax form. This may increase your tax liability for the year, which means you'll either get a smaller refund or owe a larger payment.

If qualified service members moving on PCS orders have actual moving expenses that exceed their reimbursement, they can deduct the excess costs on Line 13 of the 1040 tax form. This may decrease your tax liability for the year, which means you'll either get a larger refund or owe a smaller payment.

Either way, it's important that you report the income listed on your travel W-2. It has been reported to the IRS, and not showing it on your tax return may cause it to be flagged for review or even audit. Plus, if your expenses exceed your reimbursement, you want to get the benefit of that moving expense deduction.

If you don't know that it exists, it's easy to miss the travel W-2. The first time I saw one, I had no idea what it was or what to do with it. We ended up just adding it to our taxable income and paying full taxes on it. Be smarter than me, and calculate your actual moving expenses so that your tax return will be as accurate as possible, and you won't have to pay taxes on the full amount of your reimbursement.

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The state of Utah has become the latest to stop taxing military retired pay.

On March 11, 2021, Gov. Spencer J. Cox signed Senate Bill 11 into law, providing an average annual tax savings to military retirees and their survivors of $1,315, according to the states budget office.

Utah joins 21 other states in exempting all military retirement income from state taxes, 13 states offer partial exemptions of military retirement pay from taxation and nine states do not tax any earned income. That means that only six states, plus the District of Columbia, still fully tax military retirement pay.

See: Military Retirement and State Income Tax

The new law exempts military retirement pay as well as Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP) payments that are paid to some surviving dependents of military retirees.

The change, which is effective for the tax year beginning Jan. 1, 2021, also exempts some Social Security payments from income tax. However, military retirees can claim only one new income exemption per tax return.

Retirees with multiple sources of income will be allowed to exempt their military retirement payments from their total income when filing their taxes, thereby reducing their Utah tax bill.

Active duty, reserve and National Guard pay remains taxable for Utah residents unless they are serving in a designated combat zone.

Related: State Tax Information for Military Members and Retirees

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The deadline for filing 2020 tax returns has been extended to May 17, 2021, the Treasury Department and IRS announced Wednesday.

Normally taxes are due on April 15, but this year due to exceptional circumstances, the federal government has pushed back the deadline. Since May 15 falls on a Saturday, the due date was moved to the next business day, Monday, May 17. Taxpayers do not have to file any special forms or request this extension; it is automatic for everyone.

The IRS says that any tax payments normally due on April 15 must be submitted by May 17. That means those who owe income taxes for 2020 will have an extra month to pay Uncle Sam without any penalties or interest.

However, self-employed workers and others who make quarterly estimated tax payments will still have to make those payments on April 15, as normally scheduled.

If you are due to receive a tax refund, you should file your tax return as soon as possible to get that money back.

Military Personnel Stationed Outside the U.S.

Military personnel assigned outside the U.S. or Puerto Rico normally receive a two-month filing extension. There has been no guidance from the IRS yet regarding how this new one-month blanket extension affects the military community.

However, the normal two-month military extension only grants an extension on the filing of taxes, not paying them. So in a normal year, a military member deployed OCONUS must pay any taxes due by the regular filing date of April 15, even though they don't need to submit a return until two months after that time.

This year, military members will have to pay any taxes due to the government by May 17. However, those stationed overseas may have the two-month filing extension added to the one-month blanket extension, depending on how the IRS rules.

Military personnel serving in a designated combat zone are granted a 180-day extension on the filing and paying of their taxes.

To be safe, however, military members should check with their command's tax officer for individual guidance.

State Taxes

This extension only applies to federal tax liability, not state taxes. Some states already have announced they will follow the federal government's lead and grant extensions for filing and paying taxes this year. Check with your individual state to determine your situation.

States Affected By Natural Disasters

Taxpayers in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas will have until June 15, 2021, to file and pay their taxes due to the federally declared disaster related to the winter storms those states experienced in February.

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Chances are, youve gotten your third stimulus check by now, but you may still be waiting on that other chunk of change the IRS owes you: your tax refund.

The IRS is sitting on a backlog of 29 million returns that require manual processing, which basically means that a human needs to review it.

To be clear, most taxpayers who e-file have their returns processed and receive their refunds within 21 days, according to the IRS. But if youre still waiting and wondering where is my tax refund? heres whats going on and how you can track it.

Why You Havent Received Your Tax Refund

The 2020 tax season has been an especially complicated one for IRS staff and accountants.

As of March, the IRS still had a backlog of more than 2 million returns from 2019. Most of them are leftover returns filed by mail that piled up last year when most IRS offices were shuttered temporarily due to COVID-19.

But on top of that, there are a number of complexities created by the three stimulus bills, the most recent of which passed in the middle of tax season. On top of the usual tax season mayhem, the IRS was tasked with delivering the third stimulus check. Plus, tax season started 16 days later than usual this year. These challenges prompted the IRS to extend the tax deadline to May 17.

For example, people who typically qualify for the earned income tax credit, a credit for low- and middle-income working families, may not have been eligible in 2020 due to expanded unemployment benefits. The $900 billion stimulus package that passed in December changed the rules to allow families to use 2019 income to qualify instead of 2020 income.

However, the IRS didnt have time to update its programs to reflect this change, so if youre seeking the earned income tax credit based on 2019s income, an IRS employee will need to review it manually.

The same applies if you qualify for stimulus money from the first two checks based on your 2020 return that you didnt qualify for based on your 2019 or 2018 return. For example, if your 2019 income was higher than your 2020 income, you may qualify for more stimulus money. Or if you had a child in 2020, youd get stimulus credits on their behalf. These situations also require a manual review.

But your tax refund also could be delayed for all the reasons that would apply in a normal year. For example, if your refund was sent to a bank account that youve since closed, the IRS eventually will cut you a paper check, but that adds to the wait time. If someone fraudulently filed a tax return in your name to steal your refund, the IRS will think that youve already filed and reject it. Your refund also will be delayed if you made an error or your return was incomplete.

If you owe certain types of debt, such as child support or back taxes, the IRS could take your refund and use it to offset what you owe.

Paper returns require manual processing, so if youve filed by paper, expect a long wait, even if there are no issues with your return. The IRS is urging taxpayers who have yet to submit their returns to file online instead of by mail.

If you made an error that requires an amended return, your tax season will be even more prolonged. The IRS will notify you of the error by mail, and youll have to send in Form 1040X. Theres only one way to do this: by mail. Then, your amended return will be added to the 29 million-plus unprocessed returns.

What to Do if Youre Still Waiting

The first step is to make sure the IRS actually has received your return.

You can track your return using the Wheres My Refund feature on the IRS website or the IRS2Go app. Youll need to provide your Social Security number, filing status and your exact refund amount.

But these tools have limited usefulness. If your return has been processed, they tell you when your refund is scheduled for deposit, but they dont provide information about why a return still is being processed or whether you need to provide additional information, which prompted recent criticism from the Taxpayer Advocate Service.

If you filed electronically, you should be able to see whether the IRS has accepted your return within 24 hours. If the IRS has accepted your return, that just means it has confirmed it received it. The IRS still has to process it.

If you sent a paper return, you can expect a long wait before you can confirm that the IRS even has your return. Even in normal circumstances, tracking a paper return can take about four weeks.

The IRS says its staff will help you research the status of your refund only if you filed electronically more than three weeks ago or sent it by mail at least six weeks ago, or if Wheres My Refund tells you to get in touch.

Considering that the IRS has only answered about 7% of individual taxpayer phone calls to date, its pretty tough to talk to a human. Even if youre one of the lucky ones who gets through, they probably wont be able to give you much information. The IRS systems dont tell employees who handle phone calls why a return required manual processing. But if you want to try, the number for checking the status of a refund is 800-829-1954.

This article was originally published by The Penny Hoarder.

What to Do if You Havent Filed Yet

The big takeaway if you havent filed yet: Filing electronically is the way to go. There are plenty of easy-to-use tax software options, many of which have free versions.

Not only will you get your refund faster, but youre also less likely to make errors that could result in further delays because the software is doing the math for you. Additionally, filing electronically is more secure than putting all that personal information in an envelope.

And of course, the sooner you file, the better. It usually takes longer to get your refund as Tax Day approaches, so stop delaying and block off time for a date with your tax software of choice.
Tax time is fast approaching and you find yourself searching frantically for your paperwork. If you are having a hard time finding your military or retirement W-2 or 1099R don't worry, they are always available online on the Defense Finance and Accounting Service's (DFAS) website.

DFAS has created a website that lets both active duty members and retirees request and/or print out copies of their earnings statements for tax purposes.

Active Duty W-2 Earnings Statements

Active duty members can visit the DFAS tax statement website at: https://www.dfas.mil/MilitaryMembers/taxinfo/taxstatements/ to request or view their tax statements. Those with limited internet access can call DFAS at 800-321-1080 M-F, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET to have a paper copy of their active duty W-2 reissued to them.

Retirees and Survivors

Retirees and survivors must visit a different website to get their replacement tax documents. There is a form available at https://corpweb1.dfas.mil/askDFAS/ticketInput.action?subCategoryID=9725.

If that link is unavailable the retiree pay section of the DFAS website has detailed information on how to request replacement documents.

Also, for those with limited internet access can contact DFAS via telephone at 888-332-7411 for personal assistance.

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The coveted security clearance might be the closest many Americans ever will come to knowing what its like to be an immigrant in the United States.

It not only gives them the opportunity for a stable, high-paying job; it requires a bureaucratic U.S. government stamp of approval, one that they cant get on their own and need a sponsor even to start. Its also a process that lasts for an indeterminate period of time and, once denied, has no course for appeal.

Unlike a green card, theres no deportation penalty for being denied a security clearance, just the unrelenting wonder of what might have been. So before you go filing your SF-86 (the form you fill out to start the clearance process), make sure you have all your documentation and get these six areas together before they start investigating you.

In all of these cases, lawyers are available to help guide you through the process -- if the process is that important to your future.

1. Financial Health

Depending on your security clearance level and the state of your financial affairs, the investigating agency might find financial issues you didnt know you had. Its not uncommon for people to report finding out about forgotten fees, payments and collections that got crossed in the mail during a clearance investigation.

Of course, a leftover balance on a car or credit card isnt going to tank your clearance. The government is looking for areas of extreme debt that might make you susceptible to bribes or influence by a foreign power. If you worry that this describes you, have a plan of action to tackle or consolidate your debt and implement it before applying for a clearance.

2. Drug and Alcohol Abuse

This is probably one of the most asked-about and troublesome areas of the security clearance process. When it comes to alcohol, investigators only would be able to determine you have a problem in two ways. The first is through your personal contacts (more on that later). The second is through your alcohol-related incidents.

To mitigate any alcohol-related issues with your security clearance, you can provide a statement of reasoning to the form, showing youve taken appropriate steps to handle your issues. All the mitigating circumstances surrounding alcohol issues can be found on the Department of State website.

When it comes to illicit drug use, first-time applicants are always unsure about acknowledging marijuana experimentation as a youth. Everyone wants to be honest, but everyone is afraid of being denied a top-secret clearance because they caved to peer pressure as a teen. The truth is that its worse to lie on an SF-86 than to admit you experimented in high school.

Investigators are more concerned with your judgment being impaired by drug use, the potential for someone to use your addiction as leverage against you and the kind of people you have to associate with regularly to buy illegal drugs. Like being caught in alcohol-related incidents, including a statement of reasoning that explains what youve done to mitigate that risk will help secure your clearance in spite of drug-related incidents.

3. Why You Left Previous Jobs

Adjudicators checking into your work history arent looking to check the references on your resume -- not necessarily, anyway. Theyre going back at least 10 years and talking to your bosses and even other employees to talk about what kind of employee you were and why you left the jobs you held.

For those who left civilian jobs to join the military or those who went to college or elsewhere to learn a different profession, this may be no sweat. But if someone had to leave their job because they committed a crime in the course of their work -- be it theft, embezzlement, destruction of property or anything at all -- this could be a killer.

4. Character References

The SF-86 will ask you to list non-family members as character references, ones to whom the investigators most certainly will talk. Its important to consider who you list. This means not just considering who you list, but their associations as well.

In talking to these references, you not only will be considered based on who they are and their references, but what they say about you as well. The questions asked might surprise you. They want to know what kind of person you are, what kinds of things you have done in the past (this is where they might find out you experimented with dope after all) and what kind of temperament you have, even under pressure.

5. Weddings/Divorces

Just being divorced isnt going to wreck your chances of getting approved for a security clearance. Going into massive debt because of a divorce and not having a plan to pay it off or get out of debt might wreck those chances. Even if you arent in debt, too many divorces and weddings might hurt your chances.

Security clearance adjudicators are going to look into the circumstances surrounding your weddings and divorces. If you had extramarital affairs (or a string of them), it could make you susceptible to foreign influence, through blackmail or otherwise. Affairs with foreign nationals will make investigators think twice, even if it was a one-night stand. Allegations of domestic abuse in regard to divorce also are taken very seriously.

With weddings, its important to know who youre marrying. Marrying a foreign national or an undocumented national will hurt your chances. When it comes to your personal relationships, remember to disclose everything on the SF-86.

6. Your Family

Finally, your family could torpedo your chances of a security clearance. This is not only because they know so much about you, but also they have lives and connections of their own, ones you may not even know about. In fact, what they have done can sink your clearance. Guilt by association is alive and well in security clearance investigations.

Unless youre a member of a mafia family, its OK to have black sheep, small-time tax cheats or even some people struggling with an addiction in your family. Those are automatic disqualifiers, but distancing yourself from those people (if you know who they are) is a good idea.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.

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3:33 pm: Pittsburgh has officially selected Difo and placed Gonzalez on the 10-day IL. Righty Trevor Cahill was transferred from the 10-day to the 60-day IL to clear 40-man roster space for Difo. Cahill went on the IL with a left calf strain on June 12 thatll apparently require an extended absence. Hes out for 60 days from the date of his original placement, so he wont return until at least mid-August.

2:49 pm: The Pirates are planning to select the contract of Wilmer Difo, manager Derek Shelton told reporters (including Mike Persak of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Fellow utilityman Erik Gonzalez is going on the 10-day injured list. A corresponding 40-man roster move to accommodate Difos selection is forthcoming.

Difo signed a minor league deal with Pittsburgh over the winter and earned a spot on the big league roster when KeBryan Hayes landed on the injured list in early April. He wound tallying 87 plate appearances over the next couple months, hitting .244/.287/.366 while lining up at five defensive positions (including mop-up work as a pitcher). Thats right in line with the switch-hitters body of work as a depth option with the Nationals between 2015-20.

Gonzalez has also bounced around the diamond this season, including picking up some extended run at third when Hayes was out of action. Hes not offered much at the plate, though, hitting just .232/.258/.300 over 229 trips to the dish before leaving yesterdays game against the Brewers with right side discomfort.
The Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) stayed an order issued by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to ban Vivek Kudva, head of Asia Pacific distribution, Franklin Templeton and his wife Roopa Kudva (managing director, Omidyar Network Ltd) from accessing the capital market for one year. Vivek Kudva challenged the SEBI order saying the market regulator had overstepped its powers in taking the decision.

While granting interim relief, SAT directed the Kudvas to retain the entire disgorgement amount in an escrow account and also deposit 50% of the penalty amount within three weeks.

In an appeal heard by SAT, Kudva argued that he acted only on public information. SEBI objected to his position, but the SAT judges decided to put the ban on hold while his appeal is heard. However, SAT said that Kudva would still need to deposit half of the penalty imposed on him.

Kudva contended that Indian law prohibits unfair trade practices, but mutual fund redemptions were not a trade and were akin to withdrawing ones own money from a bank.

SEBI had overstepped its authority and misused the discretion while passing its order and there was no reasoning in the regulators decision to justify the draconian directions and restrictions, Kudvas appeal asserted.

Last month, SEBI had imposed a one-year market ban on Kudva and his wife (Roopa Kudva) and imposed a total penalty of Rs 7 crore on them. It said it was not fair conduct as Kudva was privy to non-public information.

On 19 March 2020, FT-AMC had shared the information on negative return of the six debt schemes with Mr Kudva. Subsequently, Mr Kudva and his mother started redeeming their investments from debt schemes from 20 March 2020.

On 23 March 2020, Mr Kudva's wife redeemed all her investments from FI-STIP and a portion of her investments from FI-IOF. Further, on 24 March 2020, Kudva's wife and mother redeemed all their remaining investments from FI-IOF.

SEBI had also alleged that Vivek Kudva passed on material non- public information to his wife, using which she also redeemed her mutual fund units in an unfair manner.

They had cumulatively redeemed units amounting to Rs30 crore in the six wound- up debt plans while in possession of material non- public information, which SEBI held as unfair trade practice.

The Kudvas were also asked to deposit an amount of Rs22.64 crore in an escrow account to the SEBI, which will be released to them along with the cash being disbursed to other investors. This is the amount they received on redemption before the six schemes of Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund were shut last year.

Last week SAT granted interim relief to Franklin Templeton with respect to the SEBI order restraining Frankin from launching any new debt scheme for the next two years. The tribunal also cut down the penalty amount of Rs512 crore to less than half (Rs250 crore) to be deposited within three weeks in an escrow.

SAT has now listed both the appeals of Franklin Templeton and the Kudvas against the SEBI orders for final hearing on 30th August.

In April 2020, Franklin Templeton India announced that it was closing six of its credit schemes due to liquidity issues amid the coronavirus crisis. The schemes which have been shut are Low Duration Fund, Ultra Short Bond Fund, Short Term Income Plan, Credit Risk Fund, Dynamic Accrual Fund, Income Opportunities Fund.
Shivanand Dwivedi, a resident of village Kaytha in Madhya Pradesh, would never have imagined that his right to information (RTI) application requesting information on the affidavit of candidates contesting panchayat elections would be the trigger for a landmark order by the tenacious information commissioner Rahul Singh.

Not only did he address Mr Dwivedis second appeal under Section 19 of the RTI Act but the information commissioner also conducted an inquiry under Section 18 to discover that, despite gazette notifications by the state election commission to upload information in the public domain of affidavits of candidates on the district web page and on the election commissions website, all the district administrations of the state as well as the state election commission had failed to do so.

His probe also revealed that the gazette notification of the state election commission also mandates displaying candidates affidavits on the notice board at the returning officers office.

Mr Singh, with the bold stroke of his order, has directed the secretary of the state election commission to upload the affidavits of panchayat elections candidates on the state election commissions website whenever local panchayat elections take place in future.

He has also directed the collector of Rewa and all other collectors of Madhya Pradesh to do the same. Hailing the order, former central information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi tweeted This is a landmark order which recognises and implements democracy and citizens right to information to the village level. My salute to Rahul Singh for this fantastic order.



@rahulreports This is a landmark order which recognizes and implements democracy and citizens right to information to the village level. My salute to Rahul Singh for this fantastic order. https://t.co/Taj29kTEz6  Shailesh Gandhi (@shaileshgan) July 1, 2021

Mr Singh, when contacted by Moneylife, stated, There are around 23,176 panchayats including janpad (village blocks) panchayats and district panchayats. In all there would be 2,31,760 elected representatives. During elections, four to five lakh people file for nominations. I had discussed informally with other bureaucrats and office colleagues regarding transparency for the benefit of the citizens who would be voting but they were not that encouraging. They were shying away from the sheer numbers it would target.

However, states Mr Singh, citing the reason why he gave this order, An informed citizen or voter is the life-line of our democracy. Democracy cannot survive without having free and fair elections and informed voters. Information related to credentials and affidavits of candidates of Panchayat elections is also a fundamental right of voters under Article 19(1) (a). The Panchayati Raj system, which ensures participatory democracy, would reduce to a farce if we allow any hindrance in the free flow of information related to antecedents of candidates in panchayat elections.

Regarding the uploading of such information, observes Mr Singh in his order, Voters should be aware of the credentials of their candidates, their criminal records if any, assets and liabilities and educational qualifications and it should be made available suo motu on websites under section 4 of RTI so that the public, without resorting to RTI, can access all information, to be able to make an informed decision during the polls.

He also observes, The election commission of India, in furtherance of the judgment of Union of India versus Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), was positively obligated to display affidavits of the prospective candidates on a public platform. It has been doing so by posting affidavits of candidates contesting elections for the Parliament and the state assemblies on their website. Therefore, an application of this judgment would also compel the state election commission of Madhya Pradesh too, to publish the candidates affidavit on their websites as they have similar powers and hence, similar obligations.

Furthermore, it must be noted that the state election commission has an obligation to post the affidavits of candidates on a public platform. Authority for this fact that derived from the judgment of the Supreme Court from Kishansing Tomar versus Municipal Corporation of Ahmedabad AIR 2007, SC 269 where, the court said the following in the domain of elections to the Panchayats and the municipal bodies under the Part IX and Part IX A for the conduct of the elections to these bodies, the state election commission enjoys the same status as the election commission of India and that the powers of the state election commission are no less than those of the election commission of India in their respected allotted domains.

In this RTI application Mr Dwivedi was denied information by the public information officer (PIO) stating that the affidavits of the panchayat poll candidates are under sealed cover but Singh busted that lie and has directed PIOs of the Rewa district as well the PIOs across the state to provide information of affidavit or abstract sheet within 30 days as per Section 7 of the RTI act in case any RTI is filed seeking such information.

It is so heartening to see an information commissioner keeping up the sanctity of the RTI Act. Could we have more such information commissioners with a spine, please?
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Marciana Lazaro says it was difficult during the worst of the pandemic juggling work, Covid precautions and parenting. Many fellow farmworkers couldnt afford face masks, and she handed them out in the fields as she was able.
With the new year upon us and a legislative session (under way), let us resolve to be the bright light that shines through the darkest night for the smallest and most vulnerable of angels.
July 02, 2021 Why China Needs More Nukes China is adding more intercontinental nuclear missiles (ICBM) to the meager 200+ nuclear weapons it currently deploys: China has begun construction of what independent experts say are more than 100 new silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles in a desert near the northwestern city of Yumen, a building spree that could signal a major expansion of Beijings nuclear capabilities.

...

The acquisition of more than 100 new missile silos, if completed, would represent a historic shift for China, a country that is believed to possess a relatively modest stockpile of 250 to 350 nuclear weapons. The actual number of new missiles intended for those silos is unknown but could be much smaller. China has deployed decoy silos in the past.

bigger The minimum distance between the silos in the picture is about two 2 miles. In the 1970s the U.S. developed an idea called the ICBM shell game and made a helpful video to explain that concept. To protect missiles from a decapitating first strike a lot of the silos would be kept empty and a few missiles would be shuffled between them. To attack that new 119 holes missile field in China the U.S. would have to fire at least 119 nuclear war heads at them to be sure that no missile is left to fire back at it. If China would add some missile defense to the field the U.S. would have to fire about three times as many war heads to be sure that every silo gets destroyed. All this for probably just a handful of weapons. That number game adds up to soon become very expensive. [Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on Chinas nuclear arsenal and part of a team that analyzed the suspicious sites,] said the silos are probably intended for a Chinese ICBM known as the DF-41, which can carry multiple warheads and reach targets as far away as 9,300 miles, potentially putting the U.S. mainland within its reach. Major excavation work on the sites began early this year, although preparations were probably underway for months, Lewis said. The editors of the Chinese Global Times take issue with the Lewis' statement on the DF-41 and show that they do not know the technical side of the strategic nuclear weapon field. It's editor in chief Hu Xijin writes: It's unknown if the construction sites mentioned by the Washington Post are really silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles. But I must say that Lewis is an amateur. In reality, DF-41 is solid-fueled road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile and one of its biggest advantages is its mobility and vitality. There is no point to put it inside a silo. Lewis may not understand the basic features of DF-41 before shooting off his mouth at the media. That is so wrong that it hurts. For one Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is THE Arms Control Wonk and director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, part of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He has likely forgotten more about missiles than Hu Xijin will ever know. The difference between solid fueled and liquid fueled missiles is the reaction time. The U.S. has some 450 silo based ICBMs. Those missiles were named 'Minuteman' because they are solid fueled and can therefore be fired at a minutes notice. Liquid fueled missiles take time to prepare as the fuel is filled up only shortly before a launch. They are quite dangerous for their crews as the liquid fuels tend to be quite corrosive and explosive. That does not matter much for space operations but is very inconvenient for any military application. A second strike force must be ready to launch the moment an incoming hostile first strike is detected. There might otherwise be no one left to launch it. Lewis sees sound reasons for China to expand its arsenal: We believe China is expanding its nuclear forces in part to maintain a deterrent that can survive a U.S. first strike in sufficient numbers to defeat U.S. missile defenses. A Global Times editorial agrees with that reasoning: The US wants China to stick to the line based around minimal deterrence. It's true that China has said it keeps its nuclear capabilities at the minimum level required for national security. But the minimum level would change as China's security situation changes. China has been defined as the top strategic competitor by the US and the US military pressure on China has continued to increase. Therefore, China must quicken the increase of its nuclear deterrence to curb the US strategic impulse. We must build credible nuclear second-strike capability, which needs to be guaranteed by enough nuclear warheads. It then adds a remark that points to potential real life scenario: China's security situation is changing rapidly. The US has the strategic ambition to subdue China. Once a military confrontation between China and the US over the Taiwan question breaks out, if China has enough nuclear capacity to deter the US, that will serve as the foundation of China's national will. We are facing different environments and risks from the past. The calculation methods for the minimum level must also be different. Regardless of what the US says, China must be sober and firm about what it should do. If the U.S. sends ships to prevent China from reintegrating Taiwan it might try to stop China from attacking them by threatening a nuclear attack. If China has a credible second strike capability that U.S. threat would be empty. No U.S. president will risk New York over Taipei City. The construction of the new missile silo field was launched only at the beginning of this year and has been continued at a fast pace. China seems to feel that there is no time to lose before the U.S. takes the next steps to push for Taiwan's independence. That would immediately become a military problem. The new missile field may help to alter U.S. plans. Posted by b on July 2, 2021 at 17:55 UTC | Permalink Comments next page  next page 
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Footage obtained from the City of Sheffield Lake shows former Sheffield Lake Police Chief Anthony Campo placing a note with the words "Ku Klux Klan" onto the raincoat of a black officer on June 25. Following a complaint from the department's union, Campo subsequently retired on June 30.
Georgia South Family Medicine Residency Program graduated its third class of residents on June 26 at Colquitt County Arts Center. Pictured, from left, are Georgia South Program Director Kirby Smith, DO; class of 2021 graduates Robert Jeter, MD, Giselle Pineiro, DO, Kayla Batchelor, DO, and Madison Lamar Hill, DO; and Associate Program Director Woodwin Weeks, DO.
Moultrie, GA (31768)

Today

Cloudy skies this morning followed by thunderstorms during the afternoon. High 82F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, then cloudy skies after midnight. Low 71F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
Fueled by resurgent oil demand and concerns about supplies, crude prices rose above the $75 level this week, the first time prices have reached that level since 2018.

West Texas Intermediate on the New York Mercantile Exchange overcame a $1.14 drop Monday to post three days of gains, including a $1.76 or 2.4 percent jump Thursday that put prices above $75 a barrel. WTI ended the week slipping 7 cents to close at $75.16. The posted price ended the week at $71.64, according to Plains All-American.

The contracts 1.7 percent weekly gain marked the sixth consecutive weekly gain, the longest streak since December, according to Bloomberg.

Natural gas remained a hot commodity, rising all five trading days this week, beginning with an 11-cent jump Monday. Natural gas on the NYMEX added 4 cents Friday to end the week at $3.70 per Mcf.

Fasken has been encouraged by the rapid return in demand for crude oil along with the current low COVID-19 infection rates, Tommy Taylor, assistant general manager and director of oil and gas development at Fasken Oil and Ranch Ltd., told the Reporter-Telegram by email.

The $75 oil price reflects the strength in the oil market demand, he continued. Americans are returning to more normal summer travel patterns and are flying and driving on long awaited vacations and family trips. The rig count seems to be leveling off, which indicates that drillers are showing restraint and are not interested in oversupplying the oil market at this time.

Bloomberg reported a standoff between ministers of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and their allies is delaying the alliances talk on output levels. According to Bloomberg, most members of the alliance backed a proposal to increase supply and extend the deal into later next year, but United Arab Emirates remains opposed, according to delegates. The ongoing dispute leaves open the possibility of a supply deficit in the global oil market over the second half of the year.

Demand is continuously outstripping supply, even if you do get the gradual increase, demand will come on a lot faster, a lot stronger than they can raise output, Phil Streible, chief market strategist at Blue Line Futures LLC in Chicago, told Bloomberg.

Oil jumped more than 10% last month with the summer driving season boosting demand for U.S. crude and gasoline, according to Bloomberg.

The White House is also concerned about gasoline prices, but believes there is enough spare oil production capacity globally, said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Friday, Bloomberg reported.

The price at the pump for U.S. consumers as we enter summer travel season, were in the middle of it now, is a real inhibitor, Gary Cunningham, director of market research at Tradition Energy, told Bloomberg.

According to Bloomberg, crude prices saw the best first half of a year since 2009.
The Midland Health Department reported Friday the first case of the highly contagious COVID-19 delta variant has been confirmed in Midland.

And on Friday evening, Midland Memorial Hospitals Chief Medical Officer Dr. Larry Wilson told the Reporter-Telegram that three additional patients have tested positive for the delta variant.

The first confirmed patient was tested at Midland Memorial Hospital, according to a city spokesperson. That individual was symptomatic and had traveled outside of Texas.

Wilson said he was notified by the health department last week that the first patients coronavirus test was positive for the delta variant. He said the individual was not admitted as in-patient to the hospital.

Those who are tested at the hospital have their tests sent to the state to identify any coronavirus variants, Wilson said. He said it takes one to two weeks to find out if someone tested positive for a variant.

Wilson said the delta variant, which was first identified in India, is more contagious than the original strain of COVID-19 and any other variants.

There's no question about that, its significantly more contagious, he said. So, if you're exposed to it, and you're susceptible, you will likely have a higher chance of getting it than you would have with the original, and probably even with any of the other variants. Its the most contagious one that's out there right now.

However, its too early to say if the variant carries a higher risk of hospitalization, Wilson said. He said the delta variant is spreading rapidly among young people because they have the lowest rates of vaccinations. But because young people have a lower risk of serious COVID-19 complications, its difficult to know if the variant is more dangerous.

The best way to prevent the spread of the delta variant and to prevent new variants from forming is to get vaccinated, Wilson said.

I think it's valuable for people to be vaccinated, not just from the standpoint of protecting themselves against getting sick, but also stopping the replication of the virus in the community, he said. Because anybody who gets the virus, it has to reproduce in their bodies, and that increases the likelihood we're going to develop a new variant.

Preliminary studies of the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have indicated theyre effective against all known variants, including the delta variant.

Data provided by the Texas Department of State Health Services shows that about 41 percent of those eligible in Midland County have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Thats below the state average of 58 percent and the national average of 67 percent.

Of Texas counties with a population over 100,000 people, Midland is fifth from the bottom for the percentage of residents with at least a first dose. Ector County is in second-to-last place with 40 percent of eligible residents having received at least one vaccine dose.

It was a little bit frustrating working in the emergency department yesterday and seeing persons come in really ill, in respiratory failure, Wilson said. If you ask them about vaccinations, they tell you about how they're afraid of the vaccine.

He said there were five people admitted to the hospital Friday for complications of COVID-19, and there have not been any cases of someone who was fully vaccinated admitted to the hospital.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP)  Imtiaz Mohmand, just 19, makes a living selling melons out of a crate perched on his three-wheel motorcycle in the Afghan capitals Kart-e-Now neighborhood. He only managed to finish grade 7 before being sent to work to help support a family of 13. He has been robbed twice. Both times, his mobile phone was taken, along with his meager earnings of the day.

In four days, he and four friends will leave Afghanistan. They have paid a smuggler to sneak them across the border to Iran and into Turkey.

Theres no job, no security here. There are thieves everywhere. I tried to make a living but I cant, said Mohmand, who has seven friends already on their way to Turkey.

Mohmands frustration and anxieties run like a theme through most conversations in todays Afghanistan as Afghans witness the final withdrawal of the U.S. military and its NATO allies.

President Joe Biden has said that America did what it came to Afghanistan to do  hunt down and punish the al-Qaida terrorist network that carried out the 9/11 attacks. After nearly 20 years, Biden said it was time to end Americas forever war.

Afghans, however, say international forces are leaving a country deeply impoverished, on the brink of another civil war and with worsening lawlessness that terrifies some more than the advancing Taliban. The warlords with whom the U.S.-led coalition partnered to oust the Taliban are resurrecting militias with a history of devastating violence to fight the insurgents, who have made gains even in the warlords northern strongholds.

So significant is the danger that Washingtons top general in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, warned this week in Kabul at what had all the hallmarks of a farewell press briefing that escalating violence risked a civil war that should be a concern to the world.

Outside the Turkish Visa Center in Kabuls city center, the road is crowded with four-wheel drive vehicles and new Toyota Corollas belonging to the wealthier who are looking for visas to leave. Since the announcement of the final withdrawal, thousands of visa applications have inundated the Turkish Embassy in Kabul. Other embassies have also reported a dramatic increase.

Our people are thinking maybe a civil war will start and that is the main problem why people want to go abroad, said Abdullah Saeed, a lecturer at Kabuls Polytechnic University. He was applying for a visa to attend a conference. Our political parties are all getting weapons. Everyone has weapons here, so that is why people are frightened.

The closure of some Western embassies and warnings by others for their citizens to leave only deepen the sense of dread. While some Afghans choose to leave, legally or illegally, others settle their families abroad then continue to work in Afghanistan.

Afghans are lining up by the thousands at the Afghan Passport Office to get new passports, possibly to leave, uncertain what tomorrow will bring.

Salia Siddiqi sat under a tree with three of her seven children, one of thousands of people at the passport office. She was waiting to submit her papers for her familys passports, though she wasnt sure whether shed be able to travel or how even to afford it.

There is no security anywhere. You cant travel to the provinces, she said. Its not about me but what about my children? I dont know if they will have a future here. We think there will be violence, it will be a dark time.

Our biggest enemy is uncertainty, said Tamim Asey, founder and executive chairman of the Kabul-based Institute of War and Peace Studies. It is not that we dont have hope ... Its not that we dont have the capability to formulate or create a vision for the country in the absence of the international community. Its that dark cloud of uncertainty looming.

Afghanistan looks significantly different than in 2001. There is internet, most people have mobile phones, women are in the workforce and schools for boys and girls are open, though most Afghans, who can afford only public schools, complain of the lack of qualified teachers, supplies and even buildings.

Even the Taliban have sought to encourage Afghans to stay in the country, promising they have nothing to fear from them. The Taliban have sent some of their senior council members from their political headquarters in the Middle Eastern state of Qatar to assure minority ethnic groups that they can live safely under the Pashtun-dominated movement.

Still, many Afghans say after 20 years and billions of dollars their future seems bleak. Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International. Its political leadership is deeply divided, squabbling over almost everything, even the presidency. Last year, there were briefly two presidents.

Many of Afghanistans elite and political leadership have a passport other than Afghan, and often their families live abroad. They are dual citizens. They do their business here, whether its in government, outside of the government, said Asey. They are not invested in blood and treasure in this country.

The jobless rate is officially at 35%, though likely higher. Asey says barely 13% of the hundreds of thousands of new university graduates every year find jobs. According to the World Bank, 54% of the population is below the poverty line, making less than $1.90 a day.

The melon seller Imtiaz Mohmand earns roughly 300 Afghanis a day, around $3, but theres days he doesnt make a sale, like Thursday, when he had to pay 400 Afghanis out of pocket to his supplier. Nearby, Azizullah Rahman makes 200 Afghanis ($2.50) a day selling car-cleaning cloths. Hes single but back home in Logar province, and he has more than a dozen people relying on his income. Across from the grand Eid Gah Mosque, Dost Mohammad, who drives a communal taxi on the route to the eastern city to Jalalabad, hasnt had a fare in two days.

Yet since 2002, the United States has spent more than $144 billion on reconstruction and development -- more than $17 billion just to assist Afghan government ministries, according to Washingtons own watchdog monitoring U.S. tax dollar spending on Afghan reconstruction. Billions more have been spent on security.

Gen. Dawlat Waziri, a former Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, complained that the international community didnt create lasting jobs or hand off skills and industries to Afghans to become self-sufficient.

For example, every bullet had to come from America, he said. Why werent we making them here?

But most Afghans blame corrupt politicians and officials, many of whom live in Kabuls luxurious Shairpur neighborhood. There, five- and six-story marble mansions jostle for space, many protected by barricade and heavily armed guards. For decades, the district was home to some of the citys poorest, living in homes of sun-baked mud or rough-hewn bricks, until they were pushed out by the rich.

At his small family woodworking shop, Ghulam Farooq complained that all the foreign cash ended up going to warlords.

For every regime we had hope and every regime disappointed us, even the foreigners," he said. "Now people are escaping through every border ... Only those who have no money and no means will stay here as they always have. And they will suffer.
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP)  Crowding and unsanitary conditions are getting worse at informal camps set up in northern Mexico by asylum seekers waiting to make asylum claims in the United States.

U.S. President Joe Biden has abandoned some of former president Donald Trumps hardline policies, most notably one that forced asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration court. Biden has also partly eased a pandemic-related ban on seeking legal asylum.

But more asylum seekers are heading to the border, and many of them still cant cross. They have wound up at impromptu camps like the one in El Chaparral, near Tijuana, amid filth and a lack of services. The camp blocks pedestrian paths near one of the border crossings between Tijuana and San Diego.

Hundreds of families are living under plastic tarps, without bathrooms and at the mercy of the elements and the vicious gangs that roam the area.

The children are getting sick with diarrhea, they're getting fevers and infections because there are a lot of flies around, said Karitina Hernandez, 63. Hernandez's entire family  six adults and three children  fled the southern state of Guerrero because of violence there.

They have been living for weeks in a tent in El Chaparral, along with about 2,000 migrants from Mexico, Haiti and Central America.

There is no sanitation, there is garbage around, excrement, urine, Hernandez, who fled her home after a gang killed one of her sons and threatened her. I came blindly, fleeing what had happened to me.

Mexico's governmental National Human Rights Commission issued a warning weeks ago about the conditions at the camps. Municipal authorities in Tijuana say they want to close it down, but many of the migrants and asylum-seekers fear if they go somewhere else, they might lose their chance at getting into the United States.

Biden has abandoned a policy that forced asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration court. He has also eased a pandemic-related ban on seeking legal asylum.

Shortly after taking office, Biden exempted unaccompanied children from Title 42, named for a section of an obscure 1944 public health law that allows authorities to deny entry to prevent the spread of disease.

The big camp of asylum seekers that once existed farther east along the border in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, was dismantled in March.

But amid a fresh rush of people to the border, local shelters in places like Tijuana ran out of room.

Armando Hernandez, a bricklayer who fled the violence-plagued state of Michoacan with his two sons, aged 16 and 17, wonders how they will ever get across.

What proof do I need? To come here with my guts shot out? said Hernandez, who is not related to Karitina.

Nicole Ramos, an activist with the migrant-aid group "Al Otro Lado, says asylum seekers and migrants at such camps are vulnerable to kidnapping and extortion by criminal gangs.

The United States says its laws and programs are there to protect the migrant community from traffickers, but now they are doing even more business, Ramos said.
More than half of all U.S. states have enacted police reforms in the 13 months since George Floyd's death, but critics contend a Missouri measure would go the other way by reducing police accountability while increasing criminal penalties for some protest activities.

Senate Bill 26, sometimes referred to as the police bill of rights," was approved by Missouri lawmakers in May and is awaiting the signature of Republican Gov. Mike Parson, a former sheriff. His spokeswoman said Parson is still reviewing the bill. If signed, it would become law Aug. 28.

George Floyds death in May 2020 prompted soul-searching in many states. Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced last week to 22 1/2 years in prison after being convicted of murder in Floyd's death.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, around 30 states have passed police reform legislation since Floyd was killed. Among the new laws: Nine states and the District of Columbia banned chokeholds, while 12 states and the District of Columbia updated or changed their use of force policies.

My impression is that Missouri is tone deaf to the real reforms that are necessary, said Rod Chapel Jr., president of the Missouri NAACP. Missouri just turned its back on it.

Missouri isnt alone in its approach. In April, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a law providing new protections for police and increasing penalties for protesters involved in property damage or violence.

In Iowa, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill last month that makes it easier for police to charge activists for public disorder, obstructing a roadway and engaging in unlawful assembly. That bill also adds protections for police, such as restricting circumstances in which an officer may be discharged or disciplined.

The Missouri bill's sponsor, Republican state Sen. Bill Eigel of St. Charles County, said it takes necessary steps to protect police and the public.

One provision addresses the so-called defund the police movement. It prohibits decreasing the budget for a policing agency by more than 12% compared to the jurisdictions other departments over a five-year period.

The bill comes as some progressives in St. Louis and Kansas City want to reduce police budgets and use the money for things such as mental health services and addiction treatment.

Weve seen both of those large urban areas take steps to slowly move dollars away from their police force, which is absolutely the wrong direction to go," Eigel said. "Ultimately it comes back to supporting law enforcement, which was the original intent of the bill.

Another provision spells out procedures for disciplining police, which Eigel calls the police bill of rights. Among other things, it requires records of any administrative investigation to be confidential and not subject to disclosure under Sunshine Law, except by subpoena or court order. The Sunshine Law is Missouris open records law.

The Missouri bill also puts limits on investigations of officers and provides protection against civil claims unless the officer is criminally convicted.

This gives due process rights for discipline, which was sorely needed, said Kevin Ahlbrand, legislative director for the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police. There is still a process for disciplining an officer. It doesnt protect bad officers.

The bill upgrades the charge from a misdemeanor to a felony if someone vandalizes any public monument or structure on public property. Public structures such as police stations have sometimes been targeted by racial injustice protesters, as have monuments including those honoring the Confederacy. The upgraded charge means, potentially, more jail time and a higher fine.

Another provision creates a new class D misdemeanor for anyone who willfully or recklessly interferes with an ambulance. Racial injustice protesters often march or gather on streets, roads and highways, which authorities say risks blocking access for ambulances and other first responders.

We can absolutely preserve the right of free speech without putting each other in danger, Eigel said.

St. Louis activist Darryl Gray called it an anti-Democracy bill that seeks to threaten and intimidate racial injustice protesters.

It pushes people away from exercising their First Amendment rights, Gray said. We find it all as an assault on democracy and assault on our freedom of speech and our right to peacefully assemble.

A provision in another Missouri bill this session would have allowed use of deadly force against protesters on private property and given immunity to people who run over demonstrators blocking traffic. That proposal was later dropped.
HONG KONG (AP)  A Hong Kong police officer who was stabbed in the back has been moved from critical to serious condition, officials said Friday, indicating a likely recovery from the incident in which the assailant later stabbed himself and died.

Authorities were still looking into the motivation behind Thursday night's attack, which followed annual commemorations of Hong Kongs handover from British to Chinese control in 1997, as well as the centenary of the founding of Chinas ruling Communist Party.

The attack comes amid a sweeping crackdown on political dissent, with authorities banning large-scale demonstrations and arresting scores of pro-democracy activists over the past year.

Authorities said that the assailant was a 50-year-old man, but did not identify him. He allegedly stabbed the police officer in the back with a knife, and then turned the knife on himself.

Hong Kong Security Secretary Chris Tang said it appeared to be a terrorist act committed by a single individual that he described as a lone wolf," but said others were guilty of egging-on such violence.

I would like to state that it was not just the assailant who was responsible. There are also many people who have encouraged violence and incited hatred toward society and the country, and have beautified these violent acts, he said Friday.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said it was very regrettable that this has come at a time when everyone in Hong Kong sets great store by the peaceful situation we have achieved."

The officer was attacked outside the Sogo department store in the busy Causeway Bay shopping district where police were standing guard to prevent demonstrations.

Michael Gazeley, a Hong Kong resident who was at the scene when the attack happened, said that there was heavy police presence in the shopping district and that the situation seemed peaceful before the attack happened.

As soon as the attack happened, a mass of police ran to help their colleague, said Gazeley.

Hong Kong's hospital authority on Friday confirmed the improvement in the condition of officer, who has not been identified apart from that he was a 28-year-old member of the elite Police Tactical Unit.

Hong Kong has protected the identities of police officers since the onset of increasingly violent demonstrations in 2019 led by pro-democracy protestors opposed to the semi-autonomous region's Beijing-backed government.

Demonstrations largely ended after opposition figures won big in elections for local councilors, but the central government swiftly moved punish those behind the protests and stamp out any challenges to its authority.

That was spearheaded by the imposition last year of a sweeping national security law and followed this year by alternations to representation in the city's Legislative Council to ensure a strong pro-Beijing majority. Both measures were enacted by China's ceremonial legislature, the National People's Congress, without Hong Kong voters being given a say.

On Friday, pro-democracy activist Chow Hang Tung  known for helping to organize the annual June 4 candlelight vigils in commemoration of the 1989 crackdown in Beijings Tiananmen Square  was charged in court for inciting others to join an unauthorized assembly.

Chow was first arrested on June 4 and then released on bail, but was rearrested this week a day ahead of the handover anniversary. She was not given bail on Friday.

Large-scale independent political gatherings have been banned and most opposition figures have been imprisoned, intimidated into silence or fled abroad.

Last month, police arrested seven journalists and executives of the now-defunct Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper that was a vocal critic of Hong Kong and Chinas governments. Authorities also froze $2.3 million in assets linked to Apple Daily, forcing it to cease operations last week.

___

Associated Press news assistant Matthew Cheng contributed to this report.
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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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Jacksonville School District 117 school board approved a $13 million bond sale Wednesday during a special session meeting, finalizing the bond perimeters.

The renovation projects can be completed because of the online sales tax of the bond that the district is going to be able to sell generating potentially up to $13 million, he said. The district is anticipating getting around $12.1 to 12.7 million.

It will completely pay for the Washington project and then provide extra money that we can use on a second facility, Ptacek said.

$8 million will go toward Washington. The district will also be using $3.5 million out of federal stimulus money known as ESSER funds to provide for HVAC costs in the renovation.

A couple of months ago, the districts sales tax revenue had greatly increased compared to other years and from that Steve Ptacek, District 117 superintendent, said it was from the online sales tax starting Jan. 1 was being distributed back to the local communities, one cent sales tax that was passed in November 2014 was now generating revenue from online sales.

The January sales tax was distributed to the district until April where Ptacek met with the municipal advisor where they did an analysis of the online sales tax situation where the district realized that they could sell another bond to generate money to complete more renovations of the districts schools. It would not cost tax payers anything, he added, because its an online sales tax thats already being collected. It does not come out of property tax with no further increase to any sales tax.

Ptacek said he gave the school board a presentation a couple months ago about the possibilities they could do with the money. The school board had already approved the renovation on Washington Elementary School. That would includes an expansion and complete renovation to the school.

The district is looking into phase three of the Vision 117 plan, which is how to address Murrayville-Woodson Elementary school and the district is doing that through a community engagement process.

The community engagement process looks at options such as either renovating Murrayville-Woodson, building an expansion on South Jacksonville Elementary school, or closing Murrayville-Woodson school.

The second facility will be decided from the community engagement piece, he said, which could be either to expand on South Jacksonville Elementary, renovate or close Murrayville-Woodson Elementary school.

The community engagement process and the first initial meeting should begin end of July or early August. The committee is currently being developed by Ptacek.

The original goal was to have a decision by the committee in December but it could take longer into next year, he said. There will be multiple engagement events throughout the fall to allow the District 117 community give their input on which direction the district should go. A lot of data will be presented to the community and the school board.

The extra $4.1 million to $4.7 million out of the bond proceeds will be used towards paying for the final plan from the community engagement process, Ptacek said.

We hope to have the bonds being sold by the end of July, he said. The goal is to have a bond sale July 27 with the district receiving bond proceeds sometime in mid-August.
Jacksonville Police

VANDALISM

 A vehicle sustained minor damage when something was thrown at it about 10:42 p.m. Wednesday at South Diamond Street and West Morton Avenue.

 A tire was damaged on a car parked in the 200 block of West Morgan Street about 10:17 p.m. Wednesday.



Jersey County

Sheriff

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Nathaniel E. Higuera, 36, of Jerseyville was arrested June 25 on charges of possession of a weapon by a felon, possession of methamphetamine, and possession of a controlled substance.

 Robert Earl Williams Jr., 40, of Jefferson City, Missouri, was arrested June 21 on charges of possession of a weapon by a felon, possession of a controlled substance and possession of cannabis.

 Anthony J. Gettings, 29, of Jerseyville was arrested June 21 on charges of aggravated battery and domestic battery. He was accused of striking a police officer and punching a girlfriend in the face.

 Staci M. Pillman, 35, of Dow was arrested June 21 on charges of possession of methamphetamine and possession of drug paraphernalia.

 Bethany N. Vahle, 41, homeless, was arrested June 25 on charges of theft and possession of methamphetamine. She is accused of taking a 2016 Toyota Tundra from Fergusons Auto Body at 26354 Sunderland Road.

 Brian C. Wock, 43, of Jerseyville was arrested June 20 on a disorderly conduct charge after being accused of making a false 911 call and screaming into the phone.

Compiled by David C.L. Bauer and Scott Cousins
The Biden administration recently released its recommendations to follow through on the presidents pledge to conserve 30% of Americas land and waters by 2030. The bold initiative, known as America the Beautiful, seeks to mitigate climate change and stem ecological degradation by more than doubling the amount of conservation lands in the United States.

While the lack of details around how the new administration will achieve its eco-moonshot continues to make some suspicious, last years passage of the Great American Outdoors Act demonstrated the broad, bipartisan, cross-cultural support for conservation in our country. For the initiative to unite Americans in a similar way, it will be crucial to get the details right. While the recently released recommendations voice the right sentiments, everything from who will guide the initiative to where ideas to implement it will be drawn from will be critical to its success.

The Biden administration started off in the right direction by recognizing the critical role farmers, ranchers and the lands they steward play in safeguarding our environmental quality. A focus group of ranchers in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem convened by the Property and Environment Research Center in late 2019 revealed that the lack of public recognition for ranchers role in conservation was a sore point among participants. For all ranchers do to sequester carbon, maintain wildlife habitat, filter water and provide other ecosystem services, they have too often been cast as environmental villains or outright ignored in conservation efforts.

The America the Beautiful initiative is sending a clear signal that farmers and ranchers stand alongside hunters, hikers and Indigenous people 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.

The administration can relax fears by consistently engaging the local communities, sectors, Indigenous peoples, conservationists, and environmentally conscious investors who will make the America the Beautiful initiative a success. At the highest levels, a new federal advisory committee made up of representatives from these constituencies could achieve this. Closer to the ground, the federal government should host regular town halls and listening sessions to collect input on how well the initiative is working at local levels, what could work better, and what adjustments might be made to keep the plan on track and Americans working together.

Finally, the administration should begin implementing the initiative by looking outside Washington, D.C., at the ways Americans are already working together to conserve the land they love. Multitudes of innovative models and practices already exist, such as the habitat leasing agreements to maintain wildlife migration corridors.

Under these kinds of agreements, conservation groups pay ranchers and other landowners a fee to help offset the property, forage, and other damages wildlife can cause while present on private lands. In return landowners agree not to haze the animals, thereby maintaining natural migratory paths. Private and local programs like these are ripe for encouragement and replication by federal agencies.

Every American depends on a healthy environment for their well-being. In an era where there is much disagreement and acrimony, the desire to conserve our countrys natural wonders, sacred spaces, and working lands is a point of consensus.

President Bidens America the Beautiful initiative is an opportunity for all of us to work together to achieve this common goal.

Catherine E. Semcer is a research fellow with the Property and Environment Research Institute and member of the Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.
Multiple videos emerged on social media recently of another confrontation between Black Americans and police officers. Just exactly what was the ruckus about? Several teenagers  all 18 or older  were vaping on the Ocean City, Maryland, boardwalk.

Whats the issue? For one, smoking and vaping are prohibited on the boardwalk. The Ocean City Councils top priority in 2014 was banning smoking and use of e-cigarettes there, except in designated smoking areas. The policy went into effect May 1, 2015.

At the time that the ban began, former city manager David Recor commented the city would not haul people off to jail for smoking on the boardwalk and that the city didnt expect to take a heavy hand, but expect visitors to self-police themselves.

The opposite happened on June 12, when four teens from Pennsylvania were arrested after vaping on the boardwalk. Initially, police confronted the teens and informed them of the smoking and vaping ban. But the teens continued to vape. What began as a small public nuisance matter became a violent altercation, with police eventually arresting the offenders for disorderly conduct, assault and resisting arrest. Videos of the incident have gone viral and the Ocean City Police Department is reviewing its policy.

This isnt the first instance of people being arrested on the boardwalk after being initially cited for violating the smoking prohibition. In fact, exactly one year prior to the latest incident, three people were arrested after police cited a Maryland man for smoking a cigar on the boardwalk. As the officer was attempting to write up a smoking citation  several disorderly subjects started to gather and interfered. Three people were eventually arrested for disorderly conduct and other charges, and one man was pepper-sprayed.

We can argue all day about whether the police or the teens in the recent incident were in the wrong. But that doesnt address the underlying issue of well-intended government policies inflicting damage. When arguing the merits of the ban in 2014, Mayor Rick Meehan remarked it was the right thing to do, and that Ocean City must always be cognizant of the health, safety, and welfare of [the] community and [its] residents.

While protecting beachgoers from secondhand smoke is laudable, there was always an issue with enforcing the ban, as noted in 2014 by the Ocean City Beach Patrol. Further, a violation of the smoking ordinance is supposed to result in a fine, not arrest. But such petty offenses can lead to drastic confrontations.

American policing is facing heightened tensions and the most minute interaction can lead to deadly consequences. We have seen this time and time again when it comes to tobacco products. In 2014, Eric Garner was killed by police after being accused of selling untaxed cigarettes in New York City. It is home to most expensive cigarettes in the nation, and the Empire State has an expansive black market of untaxed cigarettes.

But instead of looking at instances of police interaction concerning tobacco products, lawmakers are proposing more bans and more taxes. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is working on proposed rulemaking that would forbid tobacco manufacturers from selling menthol cigarettes and tobacco products. Lawmakers in the House and Senate have introduced a federal cigarette tax increase, as well as introducing a new federal tax on e-cigarettes.

Those proposals will undoubtedly lead to more police interactions as criminal enterprises fulfill demand in the wake of a menthol ban and smokers seeks cheaper tobacco products. After all, it will be the police who enforce such bans and policies. Its not like the FDA has its own police force.

In a video from the latest altercation, the poster noted that this is all over a vape, and it is rather ludicrous that one 19-year olds vaping led to four arrests. It is also prime evidence of the consequences of prohibitions and other government actions that drive people to seek out illicit products or illegal behavior. Lawmakers should look at this instance, and the others before it, when arguing in favor of such policies.

Lindsey Stroud is a policy analyst with Taxpayers Protection Alliance, manager, and creator of Tobacco Harm Reduction 101 (thr101.org) and a board director with the Smoke-Free Alternatives Trade Association. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.
Watertown, SD (57201)

Today

Mostly sunny skies this morning will become overcast during the afternoon. High 94F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy skies with periods of rain late. Low near 65F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch.
Watertown, SD (57201)

Today

A mix of clouds and sun early followed by cloudy skies this afternoon. High 94F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Showers developing late tonight with the possibility of a thunderstorm. Low around 65F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Canada hunts for survivors of fire that destroyed small town View Photo

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP)  Officials on Friday hunted for any missing residents of a British Columbia town destroyed by wildfire as the Canadian provinces chief coroner said reports suggest two people have died as a result of blaze.

Lisa Lapointe told a news conference Friday that a team is standing by to conduct an investigation in order to confirm the deaths, but its not yet safe to enter the area.

The roughly 1,000 residents of Lytton had to abandon their homes with just a few minutes notice Wednesday evening after suffering the previous day under a record high of 121.2 Fahrenheit (49.6 Celsius).

Officials said it was unclear whether anyone remained in the village 95 miles (150 kilometers) northeast of Vancouver due to a lack of cell service and because it wasnt safe to enter most of the area.

We do know there are some people who are unaccounted for, said Mike Farnworth, the provinces public safety minister, though he said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Red Cross were working to locate people.

Those who escaped the fire scattered to evacuation centers across the province.

Tony Sam said it was chaotic driving through thick smoke to Meritt, B.C., about 36 miles (58 kilometers) southeast of Lytton.

You could barely see driving through the smoke, he told Global TV.

Both his house and his mothers home were destroyed.

Its gone, he said. Nothing left of it.

Noeleen McQuary-Budde didnt even have time to grab her shoes before piling into a truck with her husband an 11 other people to escape the flames.

The whole village of Lytton went up in I would say 10 minutes, she said. We were watching it burn and just thanking Creator that we got out.

In Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged that the federal government will help rebuild and help people come through this.

Trudeau said he had spoken with British Columbia Premier John Horgan and John Haugen, acting chief of the of Lytton First Nation and planned to convene an emergency response group.

Another wildfire threat at Kamloops, 220 miles (355 kilometers) northeast of Vancouver, forced an evacuation of about 200 people Thursday night, but officials said they could return Friday.

Kamloops also recorded a record his temperature this week of 117 Fahrenheit, (47.3 Celsius) but it had cooled down to around 90 (32) on Friday.

I cant imagine what the firefighters are going through working in these conditions, said Noelle Kekula, a fire information officer for the British Columbia Wildfire Service. We are up for a real battle.

The Wildfire Service said at least 106 fires were burning across the province, including dozens that started within just the past two days.

By JIM MORRIS

Associated Press
Mexican migrants sent home a record $4.5 billion in May View Photo

MEXICO CITY (AP)  Mexicans living abroad sent home a record amount of money in May, topping $4.5 billion in a month for the first time, Mexicos central bank said Thursday.

Just a year ago, it was considered a record when migrants money, known as remittances, broke the $4 billion per month mark in March 2020.

They now regularly send more than $4 billion. Only January and February, traditionally slow months for remittances, fell below that mark this year, with March, April and May setting new records. May is a traditionally high month because of Mothers Day.

The $19.2 billion sent home in the first five months of 2021 is 21.7% more than during the same period of 2020.

If the pace keeps up, Mexico could be on track to top $45 billion in remittances for the full year in 2021.

As a source of foreign income, remittances earn Mexico more money than oil exports or tourism and are exceeded only by manufacturing exports.

BBVA bank said in an analysis report that the rapid U.S. economic recovery and shortages of workers in some sectors may have helped migrants send more money home. Most Mexican migrants live and work in the United States, where employment opportunities have surged as the coronavirus pandemic eases.

Remittances in Mexico have now set records for five straight years. The $40.6 billion that migrants sent to Mexico in 2020 was equivalent to the combined budgets of the Mexican governments education, health, labor, welfare and culture departments.

About 98.5% of Mexicos remittances are sent from the United States, almost all by bank or wire transfers.

Despite a controversial proposal to require the central bank buy all cash dollars that wind up in Mexican banks  a move that would supposedly help migrants  only about 0.7% of remittances enter the country as cash.
Graffiti tagged on the Subway sandwich shop in downtown Sonora View Photos

Sonora, CA  The pictures in the image box show several buildings in downtown Sonora that were hit by vandals.

Sonora Police detailed that sometime overnight, black spray paint was used to tag walls and a garage door at several locations along Washington and Stewart streets. One of the tags was right on the side of the Subway sandwich shop at the corner of Restano Way and South Washington Street.

Additionally, on Monday just after 1 p.m., police dispatch received a report of graffiti scribbled across the front door of the former Bourbon Barrel/Armory bar located at 208 South Green Street, off Stockton Street. It was vandalized with red paint. The image box pictures show that while it had already been removed there were still visible traces of the paint. There is no word on what that writing said.

It is also unclear what the latest graffiti says/means or symbolizes. No suspects are in custody but police relay they are actively investigating these crimes and need help from the community identifying the person or persons responsible. They ask that anyone with information regarding the vandals, call 209-532-8141.
Turkey officially withdraws from treaty protecting women View Photo

ISTANBUL (AP)  Turkey formally withdrew Thursday from a landmark international treaty protecting women from violence, and signed in its own city of Istanbul, though President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insisted it wont be a step backward for women.

Hundreds of women demonstrated in Istanbul later Thursday, holding banners that said they wont give up on the Council of Europes Istanbul Convention. Its not over for us, one read. Similar protests were held in other Turkish cities.

Erdogan ended the countrys participation in the convention with a surprise overnight decree in March, prompting condemnation from womens rights groups and Western countries. A court appeal to stop the withdrawal was rejected this week.

Erdogan announced his Action Plan for Combating Violence against Women on Thursday, which includes goals such as reviewing judicial processes, improving protection services and gathering data on violence.

Some groups are trying to present our official withdrawal from the Istanbul convention on July 1st as going backwards, he said. Just like our fight against violence towards women did not start with the Istanbul Convention, it wont end with our withdrawal.

In March, the Turkish Presidencys Directorate of Communications issued a statement saying the Istanbul Convention was hijacked by those attempting to normalize homosexuality  which is incompatible with Turkeys social and family values.

Erdogan emphasized traditional family and gender values Thursday, saying combating violence against women was also a fight to protect the rights and the honor of our mothers, wives, daughters.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price tweeted that Turkeys withdrawal was deeply disappointing and a step backward for the international effort to end violence against women.

Women, LGBT groups and others have been protesting the decision. They say the conventions pillars of prevention, protection, criminal prosecution and policy coordination, as well as its identification of gender-based violence, are crucial to protecting women in Turkey.

Hundreds of women gathered Thursday amid a heavy police presence in Istanbuls main pedestrian thoroughfare. Protesters held colorful banners, feminist and rainbow flags, played music, whistled, and shouted slogans. Police closed off the area but later briefly removed barricades to allow a short march.

Amnesty Internationals Turkey campaigner Milena Buyum tweeted from the protest after police re-closed the avenue with barricades: The irony of hundreds of women & LGBTI+ rights defenders being blocked by a huge number of predominantly male police officers is not lost. The rights groups observers said police used tear gas after they told demonstrators to disperse.

On Saturday, police dispersed LGBT demonstrators with tear gas and detained dozens, who were later released.

Data by the We Will Stop Femicide group show that 189 women have been murdered so far in 2021 in the country, and 409 last year.

Earlier, Amnesty International called Turkeys withdrawal shameful in a statement.

At the stroke of midnight today, Turkey turned its back on the gold standard for the safety of women and girls. The withdrawal sends a reckless and dangerous message to perpetrators who abuse, maim and kill: That they can carry on doing so with impunity, said Amnesty Internationals Secretary General, Agnes Callamard.

__

Mehmet Guzel in Istanbul and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this story.

By ZEYNEP BILGINSOY

Associated Press
As troops leave, US to keep airstrike option in Afghanistan View Photo

WASHINGTON (AP)  The U.S. military will remain involved in the Afghanistan war into September, keeping the option of launching airstrikes against the Taliban to defend Afghan forces, U.S. officials said Thursday, even as the final combat troops prepare to leave the country in coming days.

For weeks, officials have said the withdrawal of the main U.S. military force and its equipment from Afghanistan would be largely completed by this weekend, well ahead of the Sept. 11 deadline set by President Joe Biden. Army Gen. Scott Miller, the top U.S. commander there, would then leave, marking a significant turning point in the U.S. mission. But a range of complicating factors means that will not end Americas involvement in the 20-year war.

Officials said when Miller flies out, his combat role, including authority to carry out strikes on the Taliban and to conduct counterterror operations against al-Qaida or other groups, will be taken over by Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, who is based in Florida. Officials said there have been several U.S. airstrikes in support of the Afghans in recent weeks, using warplanes based outside of Afghanistan, and those strikes will continue.

The new U.S. commander inside Afghanistan will be Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, who will head the security mission at the U.S. Embassy. He is already in Kabul, working with Miller on a transition, said the officials, who discussed new details of the withdrawal on condition of anonymity.

Vasely will have 650 U.S. troops in the country, based largely at the embassy to secure the diplomatic mission, a force that will remain indefinitely. In addition, until September, McKenzie will have the authority to keep up to 300 more troops in Afghanistan to help with security, including at the airport, said the officials.

The Pentagon and other U.S. leaders  from the White House to Capitol Hill  have expressed alarm about a recent surge in violence in Afghanistan, amid fears that it will lead to a widespread civil war and the collapse of the Afghan government and its military.

During his final press conference in Kabul earlier this week, Miller painted a grim picture of the security situation. He noted the rapid loss of districts around the country to the Taliban and warned that 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.

The U.S., meanwhile, is also scrambling to develop a plan to get some of the thousands of Afghan interpreters and others who aided the U.S.-led coalition out of the country. While the U.S. military is not expected to play a major role in the evacuation, troops may be needed to ensure security for the departures.

Thus, while the military has hastened its exit, security requires that the September deadline remain the final goal.

We remain on the timeline that the president announced just a few weeks ago, which is to get our troops out of Afghanistan, while having a remaining diplomatic presence on the ground, by September, said White House press secretary Jen Psaki this week.

Officials have repeatedly stressed that security at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul is a critical requirement for keeping any U.S. diplomatic staff in Afghanistan. While Turkey has agreed to continue that mission, agreements with the Afghans and the U.S. have not been finalized.

As part of the agreement with Turkey, the U.S. would keep a C-RAM  or Counter-Rocket, Artillery, Mortar system  at the airport, as well as troops to operate it. The U.S. also plans to leave aircrew for helicopter support at the airport.

It is unclear exactly when Miller will board a plane and depart with his staff and security, but it is expected soon. Once he leaves and the equipment withdrawal is complete, the U.S. will shift its focus to two missions  protecting the diplomats and providing financial and logistical support to the Afghan government from outside the country.

That withdrawal essentially fulfills an agreement made when the Trump administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020. The deal called for the withdrawal of U.S. forces by May 2021, and in exchange, the Taliban vowed to cut ties with al-Qaida and ensure that Afghanistan would not again become a safe haven for militants seeking to attack the U.S. After taking office, Biden moved the withdrawal deadline to Sept. 11.

The U.S. has also made it clear that it will continue to monitor terror groups operating in Afghanistan, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. And the U.S. maintains its authority to strike any militants that pose a threat to the American homeland.

Bagram Airfield, a massive complex north of Kabul that has long been the heart of American military power in Afghanistan, is to be turned over to the Afghans any day now.

NATO agreed in April to pull out its roughly 7,000 non-American forces, and as of this week 19 nations had announced troop withdrawals totaling more then 4,800. Germany and Italy declared their missions in Afghanistan over on Wednesday and Polands last troops have returned home.

____ Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.

By LOLITA C. BALDOR and ROBERT BURNS

Associated Press
Woman: Officers didnt ID selves in fatal Minnesota shooting View Photo

MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The woman who was with a St. Paul man when he was fatally shot by members of a U.S. Marshals Service task force during an arrest attempt in Minneapolis said through her attorneys Thursday that the law enforcement officers were not in uniform and did not identify themselves as authorities when they surrounded the SUV with their guns drawn.

Norhan Askar was on a date with Winston Boogie Smith Jr. and was sitting in an SUV in a Minneapolis parking ramp on June 3 when Smith, who was Black, was fatally shot as authorities tried to arrest him on a weapons violation. Authorities have said Smith showed a handgun, and that evidence shows he fired it. Askars attorneys said previously that she never saw a gun on Smith or in his vehicle.

Askars attorneys reiterated that Thursday, and released additional information in advance of a lawsuit that they say will allege Askars civil rights were violated. Askar did not appear at a news conference with her attorneys, Christopher Nguyen and Racey Rodne, but they released a statement on her behalf.

The attorneys said Askar met Smith, 32, through mutual friends and they had been dating for several weeks. They went to a restaurant for lunch and drinks, walked back to Smiths SUV, got inside, and were suddenly surrounded by unmarked cars and people with guns.

These people were dressed in neither sheriff nor peace officer uniforms. They yelled commands and did not announce themselves as law enforcement of any kind, the attorneys said. While yelling commands for them to put their hands up, multiple armed people targeted their weapons upon her and Mr. Smith.

Askars attorneys said that she was scared for her life and complied, and that Smith had a mobile phone and began to record for Facebook Live.

As he raised the phone all she could hear was gunfire and saw Winston Smith slump over, the attorneys said. When asked if they were suggesting that law enforcement mistook the phone for a gun, Nguyen said: I think thats a logical inference.

When asked whether task force officers are supposed to identify themselves as law enforcement, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service said he could not comment due to the ongoing investigation. A spokeswoman with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension also had no additional comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

The attorneys said Askar was pulled out of the SUV, handcuffed and put in the back of an unmarked car. She stayed in handcuffs until paramedics gave her medical attention. The attorneys said an officer later asked her how her date was.

Askar experienced trauma from seeing Smith killed next to her, and she is still healing from injuries she received when she was sprayed by broken glass, her attorneys said.

Nguyen said that Askar knew Smith for more than six months, and at some point, someone suggested he had a warrant. When she asked him about it, Smith told Askar he had gotten into some trouble but the case had been dismissed. According to court records, Smith was wanted for allegedly being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Authorities were trying to arrest him when a Ramsey County sheriffs deputy and a Hennepin County sheriffs deputy who were members of the task force fired their weapons. Both deputies were working in an undercover capacity so their names are barred from being released under state law, state investigators have said.

State investigators have also said they are unaware of any video of the incident. Investigators said there is no body camera or squad camera footage, and they are unaware of surveillance video. It was not immediately clear if Smith recorded any Facebook video before he was shot.

Local officials have said the deputies were assigned body cameras, but were told by the U.S. Marshals Service that they could not use them, despite an October change in Justice Department policy that would have allowed them to be used. The lack of body camera footage has raised questions, as Smiths family members and activists continue to demand transparency.

Askars attorneys also called for transparency. They said the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension told them they failed to take gunshot residue samples from Smiths body, which was washed by the medical examiner. They said such evidence would exonerate Smith.

The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said its lab doesnt do gunshot residue testing because it doesnt provide conclusive evidence about whether or when someone fired or handled a gun. Spokeswoman Jill Oliveira said in an email; In a situation like this where guns were fired from inside and outside the vehicle in close proximity we would not be able to determine which gun the GSR (gunshot residue) came from.

She said the BCA did not request gunshot residue testing from the medical examiner. She added that the BCA is conducting DNA testing and other examinations on the guns. Search warrant affidavits say authorities found a pistol and six cartridge casings inside Smiths vehicle.

Activists said they believe Askar, and again decried the lack of body camera videos and transparency. They said they do not trust the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate shootings involving police.

We want answers in this case. We demand accountability in this case. We demand transparency in this case, Nekima Levy Armstrong, an activist and civil rights attorney, said.

Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said of Askar: She has the truth in her eyes she has the truth in her mouth.

Smith was shot as Minneapolis was already on edge since the death of George Floyd over a year ago, and the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright by an officer in nearby Brooklyn Center in April.

By AMY FORLITI and MOHAMED IBRAHIM

Associated Press
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (AP)  Tennessee officials on Thursday suspended the license of a Chattanooga shelter for immigrant children after one of the employees was arrested following abuse allegations.

The move comes as Tennessees top Republican leaders have called for more scrutiny surrounding the shelter. They allege the federal government has not been transparent when pressed about immigrant children moving through the state.

That rhetoric only intensified after Department of Childrens Services Commissioner Jennifer Nichols told lawmakers that in early June during an unannounced inspection of a Chattanooga shelter, a young boy reported he had witnessed an act that, in our policy, would substantiate and require an investigation while at the facility.

In a news release, Nichols on Thursday cited the abuse allegation and other issues that had plagued the shelter over the past month as reasons for the suspension.

According to the suspension summary, the department was alerted on June 15 that a 16-year-old boy had absconded from the shelter. A week later, the department was told all the youth had been moved from the facility. On Wednesday, the Chattanooga Police Department announced that a staff member had been arrested and faced criminal charges.

Police officials say 35-year-old Randi Duarte faces charges of sexual battery by an authority figure, coercion of a witness and tampering with evidence. Police received a complaint in late May and worked with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and the Hamilton County District Attorneys office to investigate the allegation.

Police did not provide any additional information about the abuse claim. Its unknown if the arrest is related to the abuse allegation cited by Nichols in June. The department says one of the youths housed at the shelter said he had witnessed a staff member kissing another youth.

The shelter is run by the Baptiste Group, which began operating last year under then-President Donald Trumps administration after receiving a conditional license by the department. The shelter has a federal contract with the Office of Refugee Resettlement to temporarily house unaccompanied migrant minors.

Baptiste Group did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. It was not clear whether Duarte has an attorney who could comment on his behalf.

Unaccompanied children who are taken into custody by Customs and Border Protection are transferred to the federal Department of Health and Human Services, which shelters them until they are placed with sponsors, usually a relative.

Meanwhile, a group of Republican state lawmakers have been tasked by Senate Speaker Randy McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton to investigate refugee and immigration settlement in Tennessee. The group was formed after a local television station aired footage of children arriving at a Chattanooga airport and boarding buses in the middle of the night.

Lawmakers had demanded representatives from Baptiste Group testify and answer questions about their operation at their next July 13 meeting.
Tennessees transgender bathroom sign law challenged again View Photo

Tennessees first-of-its-kind law that requires businesses and government facilities to post signs if they let transgender people use multiperson public bathrooms of their choice has been hit with another legal challenge.

Mike Curb, founder of Curb Records in Nashville and Californias former lieutenant governor, filed the federal lawsuit Wednesday. In the complaint, Curb argues that the law violates his First Amendment rights because he is being forced to use the states discriminatory message.

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a separate lawsuit arguing similarly that the law illegally requires businesses to communicate a misleading and controversial government-mandated message that they would not otherwise display.

The ACLU suit names the state fire marshal, state codes enforcement director and two district attorneys as defendants. Meanwhile, Curbs suit names Gov. Bill Lee, Attorney General Herbert Slatery and Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk.

A spokesperson for Slatery said his office will represent the state but declined to comment further.

Funk, who is also named in the ACLU lawsuit, has said his office will not promote hate and wont enforce the law.

With the threat of misdemeanor penalties, the law requires that the following sign be posted in bold, uppercase letters outside public multiperson bathrooms, locker rooms or changing rooms wherever transgender people are not prevented from using the facilities of their choice: This facility maintains a policy of allowing the use of restrooms by either biological sex, regardless of the designation on the restroom. Its one of five new Tennessee laws this year that have drawn backlash from LGBTQ advocates.

The law went into effect Thursday. However, its unclear if and how it will be implemented throughout Tennessee. In June, Republican Senate Speaker Randy McNally told reporters he doesnt think the requirement will be enforced.

The enforcement of that will be at the local level. Well watch and see how that goes, Lee, a Republican, told reporters this week.

By KIMBERLEE KRUESI

Associated Press
Zebra murders convict dies in California medical prison View Photo

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  A man convicted along with three others in the racially motivated killing spree that terrorized San Francisco in the 1970s died in a prison cell while on hospice care, officials announced Thursday.

Jessie Lee Cooks, 76, was found dead Wednesday in his bed at the California Medical Facility, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said. The cause of death will be determined by the Solano County Coroner, officials said.

Cooks was sentenced in San Francisco County on March 29, 1976, to serve life with the possibility of parole for first-degree murder, kidnapping and first-degree robbery.

Cooks, Manuel More, J.C.X. Simon and Larry C. Green were convicted of targeting white victims between October 1973 and April 1974 in a rampage that terrorized San Francisco and left 14 people dead.

The murder victims included a woman who was beheaded with a machete, an 81-year-old man and a 19-year-old college student carrying a teddy bear as a Christmas present.

The attacks were known as the Zebra murders because investigators communicated their information in the case over the police broadcast band Z. The wounded included Art Agnos, who would go on to serve as San Franciscos mayor.

The mayor at the time, Joseph L. Alioto, ordered a citywide dragnet to catch the killers. Police officers stopped and questioned nearly every young Black man they encountered between the ages of 20 and 30 who were 6 feet tall or a few inches shorter. Those questioned and cleared were given a card to show other officers who might detain them for questioning.

J.C.X. Simon passed away at San Quentin State Prison in 2015 at age 69. Manuel Moore passed away at California Health Care Facility in Stockton in 2017. He was 73.

Larry C. Green, 69, is incarcerated at California State Prison-Solano in Vacaville.
PHILADELPHIA (AP)  The seven justices who reversed Bill Cosbys conviction this week spent months debating whether he had a secret agreement with a prosecutor that tainted his 2018 criminal sexual assault conviction.

In the end, Pennsylvanias highest court ruled that a district attorney had induced Cosby to give incriminating testimony in 2005 for a lawsuit, with the promise that no criminal charges would be filed. Then, a decade later, another prosecutor used it against him  a fundamental violation of his Fifth Amendment rights. Americas Dad walked out of prison Wednesday and won't face any further trials in the case.

The public outcry over Cosbys sudden release three years into a potential 10-year sentence was swift, with #MeToo activists worried it would have a chilling effect on survivors. And lawyers for another high-profile man convicted of sexual assault, Harvey Weinstein, praised the decision.

But criminal law experts believe the court acted reasonably in finding that a prosecutors word should be honored, even by a successor. One called the ruling a wakeup call for prosecutors who might try to quietly resolve a case without a paper trail, or make a deal over a handshake.

It probably would have been much better lawyering to get it all in writing, Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, a former prosecutor, said of the hidden deal in the Cosby case. Its a teachable moment, I think, for prosecutors across the nation. Its a big lesson.

Levenson, too, fears the quick takeaway is that another celebrity gets away with a crime. More deeply, she said, the case illustrates the need for legal agreements that are open, fair and transparent.

For survivors of sexual assault, its got to be another incredibly upsetting, frustrating moment, she said. So (there are) good lessons for prosecutors and hard lessons for survivors.

The court heard arguments in December. On Wednesday, a majority of the justices, 6-1, found Cosbys case should be overturned. But the justices split 4-2 on whether he should go free or face a third trial. The two dissenting justices questioned if Cosby had ever really been promised immunity  or whether an abuse of power led to former Montgomery County prosecutor Bruce Castors odd and ever-shifting explanations of his promise to Cosby.

They urged their colleagues to condemn the tactics, lest others follow suit and make promises that later entrap defendants who agree to talk.

We should reject Castors misguided notion outright and declare that district attorneys do not possess this effective pardon power, Justice Kevin Dougherty wrote in a partial dissent.

Castor, testifying for the defense soon after Cosbys arrest in late 2015, said he had promised Cosby's lawyer in 2005 that the actor would never be charged over his encounter with Andrea Constand, in part so that he could help her wage a lawsuit against Cosby.

No legal documents were drafted. No immunity agreements went before a judge. Even Castors top assistant, who had led the initial investigation, said she knew nothing about it. Neither did Constands lawyer, according to testimony at the sometimes surreal preliminary hearing in February 2016.

Castor said he discussed the agreement with a Cosby lawyer who had since died. And he said he issued a signed press release to announce the end of the investigation. Several courts have since parsed the wording of that press release, which opines that both parties in the case could be seen in a less than flattering light, and cautions that Castor would reconsider this decision should the need arise.

Constand, in the wake of that decision, sued Cosby in federal court.

In the depositions that followed, the trailblazing actor made lurid admissions about his sexual encounters with a string of young women. He acknowledged giving them drugs or alcohol beforehand, while he stayed sober and in control. The list included Constand, who said she took what she thought were herbal products at Cosbys direction, only to find herself semiconscious on his couch.

Cosby, in the deposition, famously said he ventured into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection as Constand lay still.

Neither he nor his lawyers ever asserted his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself during four days of sworn testimony.

Cosby wouldve had to have been nuts to say those things if there was any chance he couldve been prosecuted, Castor testified at the 2016 hearing. He said his goal in steering the case to civil court was to find Constand an alternate form of justice.

I was hopeful that I had made Ms. Constand a millionaire, said Castor, who later represented former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, where he was acquitted of inciting the violent mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

In 2015, a federal judge unsealed some of Cosby's testimony upon a request from The Associated Press, and Castors successor reopened the case. Judge Steven ONeill allowed some of the statements to be used at trial.

It was that unusual sequence of events that troubled the Pennsylvania high court  even though ONeill and a lower appeals courts had found Castors talk of a non-prosecution agreement not credible.

Whatever their view of such blanket promises, the Supreme Court justices found that Cosby and his lawyers relied on it in giving the deposition.

Therefore, the principle of fundamental fairness that undergirds due process of law in our criminal justice system demands that the promise be enforced, Justice David N. Wecht wrote for the four-person majority, which included all three of the high courts female judges.

The panel avoided ruling on the thorny issue of how many witnesses should be allowed to testify about a defendant's prior bad acts in a criminal case  an issue many lawyers hoped they would clarify.

ONeill had allowed just one other accuser to testify at Cosbys first trial in 2017, but upped the number to five at the retrial the following year, when Cosby was convicted.

Everyone was watching this case for the other evidence ruling. This (ruling) came out of the blue, said Jules Epstein, a Temple University law professor.

At least one justice, Thomas Saylor, would have sent the case back for a new trial over the other accuser issue, according to his solo opinion. But it become moot when the majority agreed to bar any future prosecutions in the case.

Washington lawyer Joseph Cammarata represented several accusers in defamation suits filed against Cosby, which his insurer settled after the 2018 conviction. He regrets that some people see the ruling as a vindication of the actor.

They havent rejected the allegations of the 60-plus people who asserted that Cosby assaulted them. They havent rejected the five people that testified. Nor have they rejected the jurys verdict that Cosby was guilty of sexual assault-related charges," Cammarata said.

___

Follow Maryclaire Dale on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Maryclairedale
The Ogallala Aquifer is an essential water supply for communities in the Great Plains; however, since 1988, the natural resource has seen a significant decline in water-levels.

To address this problem and discuss alternative water management practices, Ogallala Commons held a Stewarding Our Aquifer Day for producers, extension agents, educators and curious community members at Jeffs Restaurant in Kress on Wednesday.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the aquifer underlines about 112 million acres reaching across Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota. It is one of the worlds largest underground water source, and several farmers in the area rely on it for crop irrigation.

With hopes of decreasing that dependence, OC, a nonprofit dedicated to providing educational and leadership opportunities to communities in the Great Plains, hosts three Stewarding Our Aquifer Field Days throughout the region.

OC Director Darryl Birkenfeld said the field days highlight agriculturalists who have adapted farming practices that help steward the resource while encouraging other producers to take part in these practices, too.

There are people who have learned how we can recharge the aquifer along with others who have maximized the little water they do have, Birkenfeld said. As available water decreases, there are ways to continue some type of agriculture, but its really going to be a transition from the irrigation we knew to what I would call rainfed practices now.

Guest speaker Katie Lewis, an associate professor in the Texas Techs Plant and Soil Sciences Department, discussed the importance of building soil health to increase drought resistance through enabling the soil to better absorb rainfall. Texas Alliance for Water Conservations project director Rick Kellison also provided an overview of the organizations efforts to promote water conservation.

Additionally, Kress native and third-generation farmer, Barry Evans provided a closer look to dryland farming, an agriculture technique where regions are cultivated with limited or no use of additional irrigation during dry seasons.

In his presentation, Evans said some practices he uses include crop rotations of half cotton and half grain sorghum and planting cotton in between milo rows using a tractor with GPS, allowing Evans to maximize his water supply.

While intense technology practices can improve efficiency, Evans said the main priority should be collecting and conserving as much rainfall as possible.

Water is an input like seed, Evans said. I can always go out and buy more seed, but when I input water, its gone forever. So, every drop, even if its just a tenth of an inch, matters.
BEIRUT (AP)  The Lebanese judge leading the investigation into last years massive explosion at Beiruts port announced Friday he intends to pursue senior politicians and former and current security chiefs in the case, and requested permission for their prosecution, state media reported.

The move  two days before the 11-month anniversary of the horrific blast  was praised by families of the victims and survivors as a bold step by Bitar, whose predecessor was removed following legal challenges by two former ministers he had accused of negligence that led to the explosion.

Judge Tarek Bitar confirmed charges filed by his predecessor against outgoing Prime Minister Hassan Diab and summoned him for questioning, National News Agency reported. He did not set a date.

Bitar also asked the government and the interior ministry for permission to question two of Lebanons most prominent security chiefs  the head of General Security Directorate, Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, and the head of State Security, Maj. Gen. Tony Saliba.

Separately, he asked parliament to lift immunity for two legislators who were charged by his predecessor, and a former interior minister. Bitar also filed charges against former army commander Gen. Jean Kahwaji and former head of military intelligence Brig. Gen. Kameel Daher, as well as two other retired intelligence generals, and said he will also be pursuing judges.

Nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate, a highly explosive material used in fertilizers that had been improperly stored in the port for years, exploded on Aug. 4, killing 211 people, injuring more than 6,000 and devastating nearby neighborhoods.

The blast was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded and was the most destructive single incident in Lebanon's troubled history.

William Noon, whose brother, Joe, a firefighter, was killed while extinguishing the massive fire that led to the port blast, said Bitar was starting to deliver on his promises.

Today I felt that there is hope and that we are going somewhere, he told The Associated Press, adding that the charges filed by Bitar were similar to those of his predecessor, an indication that those persons were apparently to blame.

Noon, however, said he expected interference from politicians, adding that the families plan to take to the streets if Bitar is not allowed to carry on with his work.

Judge Tarek Bitar has taken a very courageous decision, wrote Lebanese lawyer and activist Nizar Saghieh on Twitter. He is opening again the battle of (lifting) immunities against influential people.

It was not immediately clear if Diab would accept to be questioned by Bitar, after declining to be interrogated by the former prosecutor, Fadi Sawwan, last December. In an interview with the AP late last year, Diab, who had resigned following the explosion, said he was being singled out and charged while others knew more, calling it diabolical.

He formally asked parliament to lift immunity of three lawmakers: former Finance Minster Ali Hassan Khalil, former Minister of Public Works Ghazi Zeiter and former Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk. He also asked the bar association for permission to question former Public Works Minister Youssef Fenianos.

NNA said they will be questioned over possible intentional crimes of killing and negligence. Families of the victims and survivors of the blast have accused the ruling political class of corruption and negligence that led to the explosion of ammonium nitrates,

Khalil and Zeiter are members of the bloc of Lebanons powerful Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, and along with Fenianos are strong allies of the group Hezbollah.

Khalil and Zeiter issued a joint statement later Friday saying they heard about the request by the judge through the media, adding that they are both ready for questioning. They said they are willing to be questioned  even before permission is issued by parliament and their immunity lifted  in order to help in reaching the truth and specify responsibilities regarding this crime.

Bitar was named to lead the investigation in February after Sawwan was removed following legal challenges by senior officials he had accused of negligence that led to the blast.

In mid-April, Bitar ordered the release of six people, including security officers, who had been detained for months. Among those released was an officer who had written a detailed warning to top officials prior to the explosion about the dangers of the material stored at the port.
Donald Trumps company and his longtime finance chief have been indicted on charges stemming from a New York investigation into the former presidents business dealings, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

The charges against the Trump Organization and the companys chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, remained sealed Wednesday night, but were expected to involve alleged tax violations related to benefits the company gave to top executives, possibly including use of apartments, cars and school tuition, people familiar with the case said.

The people were not authorized to speak about an ongoing investigation and did so on condition of anonymity. The Wall Street Journal was first to report that charges were expected Thursday.

The company and Weisselberg were expected to make their first court appearance Thursday.

The charges against Weisselberg and the Trump Organization would be the first criminal cases to arise from the two-year probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., a Democrat who leaves office at the end of the year.

Prosecutors have been scrutinizing Trumps tax records, subpoenaing documents and interviewing witnesses, including Trump insiders and company executives.

A grand jury was recently empaneled to weigh evidence and 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.

Messages seeking comment were left with a spokesperson and lawyers for the Trump Organization. Weisselberg's lawyer, Mary Mulligan, declined to comment. The Manhattan district attorney's office declined to comment.

Trumps spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Jason Miller, a longtime former senior adviser to the Republican, spun the looming charges as politically terrible for the Democrats.

They told their crazies and their supplicants in the mainstream media this was about President Trump. Instead, their Witch Hunt is persecuting an innocent 80 year-old man for maybe taking free parking! Miller tweeted, apparently referring to Weisselberg, who is 73.

Trump, whos been critical of President Joe Bidens immigration policies, was in Texas visiting the U.S.-Mexico border on Wednesday. He did not respond to shouted questions about the charges as he participated in a briefing with state officials.

Trump had blasted the investigation in a statement Monday, deriding Vances office as rude, nasty, and totally biased in their treatment of Trump company lawyers, representatives, and long-term employees.

Trump, in the statement, said the companys actions were things that are standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime and that Vances probe was an investigation was in search of a crime.

Trump Organization lawyers met virtually with Manhattan prosecutors last week in a last-ditch attempt to dissuade them from charging the company. Prosecutors gave the lawyers a Monday deadline to make the case that criminal charges shouldnt be filed.

Ron Fischetti, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, told the AP this week that there was no indication Trump himself was included in the first batch of charges.

There is no indictment coming down this week against the former president, Fischetti said. I cant say hes out of the woods yet completely.

Weisselberg, a loyal lieutenant to Trump and his real estate-developer father, Fred, came under scrutiny, in part, because of questions about his sons use of a Trump apartment at little or no cost.

Barry Weisselberg managed a Trump-operated ice rink in Central Park.

Barrys ex-wife, Jen Weisselberg, has been cooperating with the investigation and turned over reams of tax records and other documents to investigators.

We have been working with prosecutors for many months now as part of this tax and financial investigation and have provided a large volume of evidence that allowed them to bring these charges, Jen Weisselberg's lawyer, Duncan Levin, said Wednesday. We are gratified to hear that the DAs office is moving forward with a criminal case.

Allen Weisselberg has worked for the Trump Organization since 1973. The case against him could give prosecutors the means to pressure the executive into cooperating and telling them what he knows about Trumps business dealings.

Prosecutors subpoenaed another long-time Trump finance executive, senior vice president and controller Jeffrey McConney, to testify in front of the grand jury in the spring. Under New York law, grand jury witnesses are granted immunity and can not be charged for conduct they testify about.

Prosecutors probing untaxed benefits to Trump executives have also been looking at Matthew Calamari, a former Trump bodyguard turned chief operating officer, and his son, the companys corporate director of security. However, a lawyer for the Calamaris said Wednesday that he didnt expect them to be charged.

Although the DAs investigation obviously is ongoing, I do not expect charges to be filed against either of my clients at this time, said the lawyer, Nicholas Gravante.

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in Weslaco, Texas, and Bernard Condon in New York contributed to this report.

___

On Twitter, follow Michael Sisak at twitter.com/mikesisak
National and global chains are moving into San Antonio, but there's still plenty of space for local talents to stretch their legs.

Despite a trying year for business with setbacks brought on by the pandemic, at least 16 local restaurants have managed to grow their footprint in the San Antonio market. For some, like Wayne's Wings and Comfort Cafe, the openings marks a milestone for growth. Others, like Project Pollo and Burger Boy, seem be announcing new locations every other month.

Whether its wings or birria tacos, the following new or upcoming locations give residents more opportunities to try some of the best food in Texas.

Wayne's Wings

The restaurant, owned by Dwayne Price, officially opened its second location at 11600 Bandera Road on June 11. Price's wings have been named Texas' best by Delish.com. The Northwest Side wing spot joined the 4453 Walzem Road location.

Mike Sutter /Staff file photo

San Antonio's authority for birria tacos and mariscos unveiled a third taco truck recently. The expansion will debut at El Camino, a new food truck park and bar, Fourth of July weekend.

Stout House

The bar expanded to four locations in June. The latest addition is at 22810 U.S. Highway 281. Stout House owners are also working on opening Stetson Dance Hall, which will replace Cooter Browns, on the far Westside.

Courtesy, Project Pollo

The vegan chain opened in September 2020, during the height of pandemic-related business woes. So far, San Antonio has five Project Pollo restaurants. Austin will have three. Dallas, Katy, Boerne, and Waco are all going to be home to a Project Pollo, too. Owner Lucas Bradbury expects to have 14 locations open before the end of the year.

Mike Sutter /Staff

The pay-what-you-can, volunteer-based restaurant, which benefits a community of recovering addicts, has quickly become a foodie favorite throughout San Antonio. The eatery opened a second location at Los Patios, at at 5616 Bandera Road, in June. The restaurant nabbed Yelp's top U.S. brunch spot in May.

Courtesy, GiantNoise

The Caribbean-inspired restaurant expanded to the Pearl's Bottling Department food hall with the opening of Mi Roti in July 2020. Chef-owner Nicola Blaque is also readying Jerk Shack locations at 10234 State Highwy 151 and Hemisfair.

Courtesy, Burger Boy

The San Antonio favorite will debut its sixth location early next year. The Live Oak outpost marks the chain's first outside of San Antonio proper. The business started expanding from the St. Mary's Street flagship in 2018. A year later, the second location opened at 9334 Potranco Road. A restaurant at 151 West Bitters Road opened in May. Burger Boy also has a spot at Southcross in the works.

Mike Sutter /Staff

Pollos Asados' second location, which boasts more parking and a drive-thru, opened at 403 Culebra Road in April. The addition is less than a mile away from the original at 547 Culebra Road.

Courtesy, La Panaderia

The La Cantera Heights addition to the chain, which features boozy coffee drinks, opened in March. It marks the first expansion into the Northwest side for the 7-year-old bakery and cafe business owned by brothers Jose and David Caceres.

Rock and Rye

The cocktail bar opened at The Rim in March. It's the new venture of Don Marsh, who also owns Southtown staple Bar 1919.

Mike Sutter /Staff

Southerleigh's offshoot, casual restaurant at The Rim celebrated a grand opening in September 2020. A third restaurant is planned for Brooks on the Southside.

Laguna Madre

The seafood restaurant chain, which is owned by Bill Miller BBQ, shared the news of the sixth upcoming location in February. The new location will be at 1227 N.E. Loop 410.

Mike Sutter /Staff file photo

Sichuan House owner Kristina Zhao is expanding her local footprint with the opening of Chinese restaurant Dashi Sichuan Kitchen & Bar on Thousand Oaks Drive at Jones Maltsberger Road this summer.

Mike Sutter /Staff

The Thai and Japanese spot, which originally started in 2018 at the Dominion Ridge shopping center, opened a second restaurant at 17306 Bulverde Road in February.

Courtesy, Emily Carpenter

The sophisticated sister of Little Em's Oyster Bar is in the works in Southtown. Owners Houston and Emily Carpenter announced the extension, which will focus on steak and sushi, in February. The new restaurant is expected to open this fall at 1024 South Alamo.

Paul Stephen /Staff

Less than three years after opening in their first brick-and-mortar location downtown, Andrew Ho and Sean Wen of Pinch Boil House announced expansion plans to take their Southeast Asian flavors to the Stewart Center at 5120 Broadway in May. An opening date has not been set, but permitting is in the works. The owners also partnered with Andrew Samia of South BBQ & Kitchen to open Curry Boys on the St. Mary's Strip last fall.

Mike Sutter /Staff

The taste San Antonio came to know from pop-ups at farmers markets and an Olmos Park trailer found brick-and-mortar space near the Pearl last summer.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP)  Democrat Charles Booker launched another campaign for the U.S. Senate on Thursday, reprising his hood to the holler theme in hopes of forging an urban-rural coalition powerful enough to unseat Republican incumbent Rand Paul next year in Kentucky.

Booker, a Black former state lawmaker, rose to prominence in 2020 by touting racial and economic justice themes that coincided with protests that erupted in Louisville and elsewhere nationwide over the deaths of Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans in encounters with police.

Republicans quickly portrayed Booker as a proud socialist out of step with the state's electorate, pointing to his support for a Green New Deal in coal-producing Kentucky. Paul criticized Booker's stance on policing issues and predicted Kentuckians will reject it. The senator, an ardent free-market advocate, rails against socialism, saying "nothing in life is really free.

Booker narrowly lost last year's Democratic primary to an establishment-backed rival, who was trounced by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in the general election in GOP-leaning Kentucky. Booker, who served one term in the legislature, is promoting the same unabashedly progressive agenda in his latest campaign against the libertarian-leaning Paul.

This really is going to be a conversation about the challenges Kentuckians are facing, and how we push for structural change so that we can heal our commonwealth, Booker said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.

Republicans predicted that Booker's plans for change would fall flat with the state's voters.

Kentuckians reject far-left ideas like these every chance they get, and Charles Bookers campaign for the U.S. Senate will be no different, state GOP Chairman Mac Brown said.

Booker formally launched his candidacy in a social media announcement. He stressed his social and economic justice message, saying: We can make freedom mean that every community across Kentucky is thriving with good-paying union jobs. That we're not just working to struggle less, but that we're owning, we're creating, we're building pathways to wealth all over Kentucky.

This time, Booker starts with broader name recognition and a more established fundraising network, the product of a late-surging campaign in 2020 that nearly wrested the Democratic nomination away from former fighter pilot Amy McGrath.

But Booker enters the race as a decided underdog against Paul, who is seeking a third term representing a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since Wendell Ford in 1992.

Booker, who grew up poor in an inner-city Louisville neighborhood, touts Medicare for all, anti-poverty programs, a clean-energy agenda and criminal justice changes. Booker injects his own life struggles into his speeches, talking about having to ration his insulin in the past. His trademark slogan from the hood to the holler is based on the notion that poor rural whites face many of the same generational economic challenges he did.

In portraying Paul as out of touch, Booker said: Hes an eye doctor but he doesnt see us.

He treats Kentucky as his own step-stool as hes climbing his way to cozy up with his wealthy friends and these big corporations that are exploiting us," Booker said. "Whenever we need leadership, he is never there. And when he does open his mouth to talk ... hes embarrassing us.

Paul, once a presidential campaign rival of Donald Trump, became an ally of the former president. First elected to the Senate in the tea party-driven wave of 2010, Paul rails against socialism and big-government programs he says encroach on individual liberties and drive up the nation's debt. He embraces a more restrained foreign policy and is a frequent critic of foreign aid he says is wasteful.

Republicans contrasted Paul's record with Booker's aspirations for change.

Booker is too liberal for Kentucky, and his socialist manifesto has no place in the Senate, said Katharine Cooksey, spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "Charles Booker, Bernie Sanders and their socialist allies are no match for conservative Senator Rand Paul, who proves each and every day that he will stand up for Kentuckians and Kentucky values.

Pauls campaign had more than $3 million in the bank at the end of March. Booker aides say he raised more than $500,000 in the initial weeks after forming an exploratory committee in the spring.

Paul has routinely reached out to Black Kentuckians during his Senate tenure. He has made numerous visits to predominantly Black neighborhoods in Louisville, the state's largest city, to discuss criminal justice and anti-poverty issues. Last year, Paul spoke out against the use of no-knock search warrants and the militarization of police departments.

Blacks make up about 8% of Kentucky's population, but Bluegrass state voters have elected two Black candidates  both Republicans  to statewide office in recent years. In 2019, Daniel Cameron was elected the state's attorney general, and in 2015, Jenean Hampton was elected lieutenant governor on a ticket with former Gov. Matt Bevin.

Another Democrat this week announced her candidacy for the Kentucky Senate seat. Educator Ruth Gao said on social media shes running to confront the uphill climb people face due to unaffordable housing, low-paying jobs and student loan debt.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Biden administration on Thursday designated 17 countries as not doing enough to combat human trafficking and warned them of potential U.S. sanctions. The administration also called out several U.S. allies and friends, including Israel, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal and Turkey, for backsliding in their efforts.

The designations came in the State Departments annual Trafficking in Persons report, which cited the coronavirus pandemic as a cause for a surge in human slavery between 2020 and 2021. The report covering 188 nations and territories said the outbreak had put millions more people at risk for exploitation and distracted some governments from efforts to stem human trafficking.

The report classified the 17 mostly authoritarian nations as Tier 3 for failing to meet minimal standards to stop what Secretary of State Antony Blinken called an inhumane cycle of discrimination and injustices. The designation means that without a presidential waiver those countries could lose some U.S. assistance, although decisions on such penalties will not be made until later this year.

Its a global crisis, its an enormous source of human suffering, Blinken said, citing estimates that almost 25 million people, many of them women and children, are victims. This crime is an affront to human rights. It's an affront to human dignity."

Newcomers to the Tier 3 category are Malaysia and Guinea-Bissau, both of which had been on a watchlist for a downgrade for three years and were ineligible to avoid the designation because they had failed to take steps to improve their anti-human trafficking efforts.

They join Afghanistan, Algeria, Burma, China, Comoros, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, South Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan and Venezuela in the worst offender category. Most of those countries are already subject to U.S. sanctions for other reasons.

Meanwhile, six valued U.S. partners and friends  Cyprus, Israel, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland  were downgraded from the top Tier 1 category to Tier 2. That means they don't meet international standards for fighting trafficking but are making significant efforts to do so. No penalties are attached to a Tier 2 designation,

Israel was cited for backsliding on serious and sustained initiatives to combat trafficking, including a decrease in investigations and prosecutions of perpetrators, and severe understaffing at its only authority directly charged with dealing with the matter.

The report cited U.S. treaty ally New Zealand for not initiating any prosecutions for labor trafficking and weak prison sentences for child sex traffickers that significantly weakened deterrence, undercut efforts to hold traffickers accountable, and did not adequately address the nature of the crime.

The report criticized NATO ally Norway for not prosecuting any human trafficking cases during the reporting period and charging people suspected of the crime with lesser offenses. Fellow NATO member Portugal was hit for failing to improve victim identification and lacking legal safeguards to protect trafficking victims.

And, in the first such criticism of a NATO ally, Turkey was specifically cited for providing operational, equipment, and financial support to an armed militia in Syria that recruits child soldiers. Turkey and 14 other nations, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, were hit with the same designation, which can result in the loss of U.S. military training assistance.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The woman who was with a St. Paul man when he was fatally shot by members of a U.S. Marshals Service task force during an arrest attempt in Minneapolis said through her attorneys Thursday that the law enforcement officers were not in uniform and did not identify themselves as authorities when they surrounded the SUV with their guns drawn.

Norhan Askar was on a date with Winston Boogie Smith Jr. and was sitting in an SUV in a Minneapolis parking ramp on June 3 when Smith, who was Black, was fatally shot as authorities tried to arrest him on a weapons violation. Authorities have said Smith showed a handgun, and that evidence shows he fired it. Askar's attorneys said previously that she never saw a gun on Smith or in his vehicle.

Askar's attorneys reiterated that Thursday, and released additional information in advance of a lawsuit that they say will allege Askar's civil rights were violated. Askar did not appear at a news conference with her attorneys, Christopher Nguyen and Racey Rodne, but they released a statement on her behalf.

The attorneys said Askar met Smith, 32, through mutual friends and they had been dating for several weeks. They went to a restaurant for lunch and drinks, walked back to Smith's SUV, got inside, and were suddenly surrounded by unmarked cars and people with guns.

These people were dressed in neither sheriff nor peace officer uniforms. They yelled commands and did not announce themselves as law enforcement of any kind, the attorneys said. While yelling commands for them to put their hands up, multiple armed people targeted their weapons upon her and Mr. Smith.

Askar's attorneys said that she was scared for her life and complied, and that Smith had a mobile phone and began to record for Facebook Live.

As he raised the phone all she could hear was gunfire and saw Winston Smith slump over, the attorneys said. When asked if they were suggesting that law enforcement mistook the phone for a gun, Nguyen said: I think that's a logical inference.

When asked whether task force officers are supposed to identify themselves as law enforcement, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service said he could not comment due to the ongoing investigation. A spokeswoman with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension also had no additional comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

The attorneys said Askar was pulled out of the SUV, handcuffed and put in the back of an unmarked car. She stayed in handcuffs until paramedics gave her medical attention. The attorneys said an officer later asked her how her date was.

Askar experienced trauma from seeing Smith killed next to her, and she is still healing from injuries she received when she was sprayed by broken glass, her attorneys said.

Nguyen said that Askar knew Smith for more than six months, and at some point, someone suggested he had a warrant. When she asked him about it, Smith told Askar he had gotten into some trouble but the case had been dismissed. According to court records, Smith was wanted for allegedly being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Authorities were trying to arrest him when a Ramsey County sheriff's deputy and a Hennepin County sheriff's deputy who were members of the task force fired their weapons. Both deputies were working in an undercover capacity so their names are barred from being released under state law, state investigators have said.

State investigators have also said they are unaware of any video of the incident. Investigators said there is no body camera or squad camera footage, and they are unaware of surveillance video. It was not immediately clear if Smith recorded any Facebook video before he was shot.

Local officials have said the deputies were assigned body cameras, but were told by the U.S. Marshals Service that they could not use them, despite an October change in Justice Department policy that would have allowed them to be used. The lack of body camera footage has raised questions, as Smiths family members and activists continue to demand transparency.

Askars attorneys also called for transparency. They said the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension told them they failed to take gunshot residue samples from Smith's body, which was washed by the medical examiner. They said such evidence would exonerate Smith.

The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said its lab doesnt do gunshot residue testing because it doesn't provide conclusive evidence about whether or when someone fired or handled a gun. Spokeswoman Jill Oliveira said in an email; In a situation like this where guns were fired from inside and outside the vehicle in close proximity we would not be able to determine which gun the GSR (gunshot residue) came from.

She said the BCA did not request gunshot residue testing from the medical examiner. She added that the BCA is conducting DNA testing and other examinations on the guns. Search warrant affidavits say authorities found a pistol and six cartridge casings inside Smiths vehicle.

Activists said they believe Askar, and again decried the lack of body camera videos and transparency. They said they do not trust the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate shootings involving police.

We want answers in this case. We demand accountability in this case. We demand transparency in this case, Nekima Levy Armstrong, an activist and civil rights attorney, said.

Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said of Askar: She has the truth in her eyes she has the truth in her mouth.

Smith was shot as Minneapolis was already on edge since the death of George Floyd over a year ago, and the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright by an officer in nearby Brooklyn Center in April.
Courtesy of Texas Parks and Wildlife Department

A beloved 35-year-old teacher from Austin died while hiking in the Franklin Mountains in El Paso on Monday, according to the El Paso Fire Department.

KVUE TV Station reports Christina Garcia-Mata was swept away by water and fell down the mountain, injuring herself. Authorities found her body before 6 p.m. near the 1100 block of Thunderbird Drive in West El Paso. The station states heavy rainfall passed through the area and caused flash flooding in creeks and streams.
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for goop

The Fillmore corridor in Pacific Heights is known for high-end, luxury shopping, but even a shop that sold $1,000 dresses and $75 bottles of olive oil couldnt make it through the pandemic.

The Goop Lab at 2121 Fillmore St. will not reopen after remaining closed since the store first shuttered under the initial shelter-in-place order back in March 2020. Gwyneth Paltrows oft-criticized brand had hosted two pop-up stores in San Francisco before the Pac Heights store debuted in November 2019.
A promotional event for a book examining the role slavery played leading up to the Battle of the Alamo that was scheduled at the Bullock Texas State History Museum on Thursday evening was abruptly canceled three and a half hours before it was scheduled to begin.

Authors of the book, titled Forget the Alamo, and the publisher, Penguin Random House, say the cancellation of the event, which had 300 RSVPs, amounts to censorship from Republican elected leaders and an overreaction to the books examination of racism in Texas history.

The Bullock was receiving increased pressure on social media about hosting the event, as well as to the museums board of directors (Gov Abbott being one of them) and decided to pull out as a co-host all together, Penguin Random House said in a statement.

Gov. Greg Abbott and the museum have not responded to the Tribunes requests for comment. But Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick confirmed he called for the event to be canceled. Abbott, Patrick and other GOP leaders are board members of the State Preservation Board, which oversees the Bullock museum.

As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it, he wrote on Twitter. This fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @BullockMuseum.

Chris Tomlinson, one of the books three authors, shot back on Twitter.

Lt. Gov, Dan Patrick takes credit for oppressing free speech and policing thought in Texas, he wrote. @BullockMuseum proves it is a propaganda outlet. As for his fact-free comment, well, a dozen people professional historians disagree.

The museum's director responded to the firestorm in a statement Friday afternoon, but did not provide an explanation for why the event was canceled.

"The Bullock Museum's role in the Craft of Writing virtual event, originally planned with the Writers League of Texas around the book, Forget the Alamo was primarily that of co-host," said Margaret Koch, the Bullock Museum director. "Although the Bullock withdrew from the event and notified the 198 pre-registered participants, the Writers League of Texas was prepared to continue the event on their own platform and gave the book's authors the opportunity to do so. The authors declined to continue, and because they did so, the Writers League of Texas cancelled the event."

The cancellation comes amid a statewide and national firestorm surrounding critical race theory and how citizens should understand, teach and learn how racism has shaped American history. Abbott and other GOP state officials have pushed back against emphasizing the role of race in schools.

At issue is the books challenge of traditional historical tenets surrounding the Battle for the Alamo, Texas independence from Mexico and its origins related to preserving slavery.

Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of TejanosTexans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebelsscrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexicos push to abolish slavery papered over, reads a description of the book by its publisher. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness.

The book, written by Bryan Burrough, Jason Stanford and Tomlinson, also raises questions about the wisdom of the military strategy of the Texans continuing with the early 1836 siege, and the backgrounds of the leaders of the Alamo  James Bowie and William B. Travis  while examining the buildings place in politics and history after Texas independence.



If the state history museum isnt the right place to talk about state history, then I dont know what to do, Stanford said in an interview.

The book received mostly positive reviews, including from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, with a consensus that it builds on widely accepted academic research.

Last month, lawmakers passed a bill that restricts how teachers can discuss current events in the classroom and limits how they can discuss the role of race in Americas history and present.

Abbott said later that more must be done to abolish critical race theory in Texas and said he would ask the Legislature to address the issue further during the special legislative session beginning July 8.

Lawmakers also created the 1836 Project, establishing an advisory committee meant to promote a patriotic education to the states residents. Lawmakers positioned the project in opposition to efforts like The New York Times 1619 Project, which examines the role of slavery in U.S. history, and instead promised to affirm the states exceptionalism.

Stanford called the cancellation the first test case of the 1836 Project and what the state means by a patriotic education.

Theyre insisting so vehemently on a version of the past that never existed, he said.

He said that conservative critics of the book accuse it of unfairly trying to put slavery at the center of everything, when the goal is to recognize the truth of what has happened in the past  including slavery, the cause that no one ever wants to talk about.

Theres no reason conservatives cant accept the past with open arms and say, thats where we started, heres where were going, he said. Theres no reason they cant tell the story of Texas as a redemption story, and that were still an imperfect union ever becoming more perfect.

Former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said he has doubts about several claims the authors make. The Texas General Land Office that he once ran has jurisdiction over the Alamo site in San Antonio.

But instead of supporting the events cancellation, Patterson said he was looking forward to the authors facing tough questions about their sourcing and accuracy.

It would have been better if they had been asked hard, specific questions and been forced to answer them. And in that case, they should have been allowed to be at the Bullock, Patterson said.

Land commissioner George P. Bush, who oversees the Alamo, responded to the book on Fox News last week and said that "woke culture has arrived to the shores of Texas."

"I stand with Alamo descendants," he said. "I stand with other Texans that believe that the revolutionaries fought and gave that last ultimate measure on the grounds of the Alamo for the idea of liberty  to liberate the republic of Texas from a fierce and vicious tyranny in the government of Mexico."

Disclosure: The Bullock Texas State History Museum, the State Preservation Board and The New York Times have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribunes journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans  and engages with them  about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Yves apologizes for the dearth of original posts. Rehab, her mother in the hospital, and Naked Capitalism add up to 36 hours a day with 24 available, and something had to give. lambert

Single bee is making an immortal clone army thanks to a genetic fluke Live Science

City of Bees Plough

No One Imagined Giant Lizard Nests Would Be This Weird The Atlantic

Farmland Investing: Impact Beyond Returns Worth

COVID Delta variant worries bubble to the surface in some asset prices Reuters

How Last Centurys Oil Wells Are Messing With Texas Right Now Bloomberg

Fire clouds spark 710,117 lightning strikes in western Canada in 15 hours San Francisco Chronicle. Handy diagram:

Wildfires can generate self-amplifying weather. If enough heat and smoke rise rapidly into the atmosphere, they form massive, tempestuous pyrocumulonimbus clouds that shoot lightning and scatter embers, igniting even more fires. This is happening right now in British Columbia. pic.twitter.com/HFmxBvCey8  Ferris Jabr (@ferrisjabr) July 1, 2021

#COVID19

China?

Private Equity Gears Up for the Siege of Japan Inc. WSJ

MOH to stop giving details of Covid-19 community cases and Living normally, with Covid-19: Task force ministers on how Spore is drawing road map for new normal Straits Times

Covid: How Delta exposed Australias pandemic weaknesses BBC. Once again, international air travel was the vector.

Myanmar

How palm oil became the worlds most hated, most used fat source The Counter

The Koreas

Kims reshuffles serve to keep North Korea elite in line as crises mount The Rappler

Dont Allow Another U.S.-NATO Libya in the Horn of Africa Black Agenda Report (Re Silc).

New Cold War

Why Ostpolitik with Russia runs along East-West Euro divide Responsible Statecraft

Biden Administration

Trump Legacy

Health Care

Our Famously Free Press

Is your friend an extremist? Facebook is asking some users about exposure to content. USA Today. You may have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently. Extremist is such a useful word. So is exposed. Categorizing political differences in terms of contamination and disease always ends well. Anyhow, as long as Facebook can roll out functionality like this, its monopoly is surely safe. So theres a bright side. A new form of the revolving door: She was an intelligence analyst at the CIA. Now she writes about the dangers of fake news.  New column by @alanmillerNLP via @Poynter https://t.co/fgoufPjnEE   Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) July 1, 2021 Sort of amazing, but not, that Sullivan presents this without comment, but that is where we are. What happens in Vegas is not covered in Vegas: As hospitals in Las Vegas full up with COVID patients again, and the area leads the nation in cases, COVID is completely absent from the front page of the states biggest newspaper. Its barely mentioned on TV news. No wonder elected officials are doing nothing: zero pressure pic.twitter.com/yuY22gEMjy  TVMoJoe (@TVMoJoe) June 30, 2021

Big Brother Is Watching You Watch

A trade show of hidden cameras and hidden camera detectors. Audio, too: Ok my expectations were rock-bottom and Id love to drag Xiaomi on this becauseI meancome on, its like a BLM exhibit by Taser, but anyway, they actually did a really good job on this booth, very engaging. Check out the video.#OPSEC #Infosec https://t.co/E07pNZrbWR  Naomi Wu  (@RealSexyCyborg) July 1, 2021 If you stay in hotels a lot, one of those detectors might come in handy. Sounds like an arms race, though.

Guillotine Watch

Realignment and Legitimacy

Class Warfare

A Homeless Amazon Warehouse Worker in New York City Tells Her Story Vice

Moving beyond induction and deduction Lars P. Syll

Facebook is Other People Kevin Munger

Antidote du Jour (TK):

TK writes: This is Puff, the yard patrol officer on my brothers farm in Iowa. Dont be fooled, hes ferocious. Ferocious, besides being cool.

See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Yves here. While this post provides an important example about how water is becoming a political, and even a geopolitical flash point, it fails to mention the big reason the US is making such heavy demands on the Colorado River: often profligate water use by the California agriculture industry. California grows almonds, even though the water cost of a single almond is a gallon. Other nuts require similar high water rations, but almonds are far and away the most popular.

Astonishingly, California produces 17 varieties of rice. Avocados and bananas are also water hogs.

By Robert Gabriel Varady, Research Professor of Environmental Policy, University of Arizona; Andrea K. Gerlak, Professor, School of Geography, Development and Environment, University of Arizona; and Stephen Paul Mumme, Professor of Political Science, Colorado State University. Originally published at The Conversation

The United States and Mexico are tussling over their dwindling shared water supplies after years of unprecedented heat and insufficient rainfall.

Sustained drought on the middle-lower Rio Grande since the mid-1990s means less Mexican water flows to the U.S. The Colorado River Basin, which supplies seven U.S. states and two Mexican states, is also at record low levels.

A 1944 treaty between the U.S. and Mexico governs water relations between the two neighbors. The International Boundary and Water Commission it established to manage the 450,000-square-mile Colorado and Rio Grande basins has done so adroitly, according to our research.

That able management kept U.S.-Mexico water relations mostly conflict-free. But it masked some well-known underlying stresses: a population boom on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, climate change and aging waterworks.

1944 to 2021

The mostly semiarid U.S.-Mexico border region receives less than 18 inches of annual rainfall, with large areas getting under 12 inches. Thats less than half the average annual rainfall in the U.S., which is mainly temperate.

The 1940s, however, were a time of unusual water abundance on the treaty rivers. When American and Mexican engineers drafted the 1944 water treaty, they did not foresee todays prolonged megadrought.

Nor did they anticipate the regions rapid growth. Since 1940 the population of the 10 largest pairs of cities that straddle the U.S.-Mexico border has mushroomed nearly twentyfold, from 560,000 people to some 10 million today.

This growth is powered by a booming, water-dependent manufacturing industry in Mexico that exports products to U.S. markets. Irrigated agriculture, ranching and mining compete with growing cities and expanding industry for scarce water.

Today, theres simply not enough of it to meet demand in the border areas governed by the 1944 treaty.

Three times since 1992 Mexico has fallen short of its five-year commitment to send 1.75 million acre-feet of water across the border to the U.S. Each acre-foot can supply a U.S. family of four for one year.

Water Conflicts

In the fall of 2020, crisis erupted in the Rio Grande Valley after years of rising tensions and sustained drought that endanger crops and livestock in both the U.S. and Mexico.

In September 2020, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared that Mexico owes Texas a years worth of Rio Grande water. The next month, workers in Mexico released water from a dammed portion of Mexicos Rio Conchos destined to flow across the border to partially repay Mexicos 345,600-acre-foot water debt to the U.S.

Frustrated farmers and protesters in the Mexican state of Chihuahua clashed with Mexican soldiers sent to protect the workers. A 35-year-old farmers wife and mother of three was killed.

Mexico also agreed to transfer its stored water at Amistad Dam to the U.S., fulfilling its obligation just three days before its Oct. 25, 2020, deadline. That decision satisfied its water debt to the U.S. under the 1944 treaty but jeopardized the supply of more than a million Mexicans living downstream of Amistad Dam in the Mexican states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas.

The U.S. and Mexico pledged to revisit the treatys Rio Grande water rules in 2023.

The drought dilemma on the Colorado River is similarly dire. The water level at Lake Mead, a major reservoir for communities in the lower Colorado River Basin, has dropped nearly 70% over 20 years, threatening the water supply of Arizona, California and Nevada.

In 2017, the U.S. and Mexico signed a temporary shortage-sharing solution. That agreement, forged under the authority of the 1944 treaty, allowed Mexico to store part of its treaty water in U.S. reservoirs upstream.

Saving a Strained Treaty

Water shortages along the U.S.-Mexico border also threaten the natural environment. As water is channeled to farms and cities, rivers are deprived of the flow necessary to support habitats, fish populations and overall river health.

The 1944 water treaty was silent on conservation. For all its strengths, it simply allocates the water of the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers. It does not contemplate the environmental side of water use.

But the treaty is reasonably elastic, so its members can update it as conditions change. In recent years, conservation organizations and scientists have promoted the environmental and human benefits of restoration. New Colorado River agreements now recognize ecological restoration as part of treaty-based water management.

Environmental projects are underway in the lower Colorado River to help restore the rivers delta, emphasizing native vegetation like willows and cottonwoods. These trees provide habitat for such at-risk birds as the yellow-billed cuckoo and the Yuma clapper rail, and for numerous species that migrate along this desolate stretch of the Pacific Flyway.

U.S. Geological Survey

Currently, no such environmental improvements are planned for the Rio Grande.

But other lessons learned on the Colorado are now being applied to the Rio Grande. Recently, Mexico and the U.S. created a permanent binational advisory body for the Rio Grande similar to the one established in 2010 to oversee the health and ecology of the Colorado.

Another recent agreement permits each country to monitor the others use of Rio Grande water using common diagnostics like Riverware, a dynamic modeling tool for monitoring water storage and flows. Mexico also has agreed to try to use water more efficiently, allowing more of it to flow to the U.S.

Newly created joint teams of experts will study treaty compliance and recommend further changes needed to manage climate-threatened waters along the U.S.-Mexico border sustainably and cooperatively.

Incremental treaty modifications like these could palpably reduce the past years tensions and revitalize a landmark U.S.-Mexico treaty thats buckling under the enormous strain of climate change.
Yves here. On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party does deserve a lot of credit for the simply remarkable rise in living standards in China. I dont know if this factoid is still true, but as of about ten years ago, Jospeh Stiglitz pointed out that all of the reduction in poverty in developing economies was due to the rise of China. Other low income countries, on average, had stood still as China marched ahead.

On the other, the Chinese Communist Partys apparent success was due in large measure to China being allowed to enter the WTO despite not meeting its entry conditions. The US was particularly keen to see China join, since the belief was that a more prosperous China would become more democratic and therefore aligned with the West. That movie didnt work out according to script.

Finally, I wonder what readers make of the closing jibe about Taiwan. I must confess to not knowing much about its founding period, but I would assume that the Chinese who fled were not peasants. If true, having a high or even moderate skill level in population would seem to confer considerable advantage.

By Barkley Rosser, Professor of Economics at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Originally published at EconoSpeak

July 1, 2021 is now over in China but for a few more moments it is still the centennial of the Chinese Communist Party where I am. Just a couple of observations. This is partly driven by seeing multiple posts on Econbrowser by ltr praising the Chinese Communist Party and not allowing for even a hint of crirticism.

So indeed there is much to praise in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) today, with indeed by and large the CCP able to take credit for leading to these outcomes. These include such widely publicized matters as apparently eliminating deep poverty, having a successful space program that is matching achievements made by the US in the past and is moving into new ones in the future such as a joint moon base with Russia. It also includes developing a substantial solar energy industry, and getting the largest real economy in the world according to PPP GDP measure. There is much more, a lot more.

Of course, most critics note current problems that are being either ignored or lied about, with the treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang at the top of the list. But policy in other minority areas such as Tibet, suppression of liberties in Hong Kong, aggressive policies towards many neighbors, and suppression of efforts to determine the origin of the Covid-19 virus.

However, I think the Chinese Communist Party should be willing to admit some past disasters, especially as they can argue they have moved beyond them, overcome them. At the top of this list is the massive famine in which millions died that accompanied the Great Leap Forward. There is also the horrible mistreatment of many people during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. These were excesses of Maoism. But they were overcome by following the Dengist reforms later, with Deng Xiaoping labeling the Mao legacy ad 70% good and 30% bad.

More deeply there is the problem that if one compares the PRC to the ROC, the government on Taiwan, which predated the Chinese Communist Party, its record is simply far superior. Aside from things that can be achieved by a very large country, Taiwan has a superior performance on pretty much all economic, social, and political measures. The latter not only is a functioning two party democracy, but it has a far higher real per capita income, as well as much greater income equality.

The Chinese Communist Party could have done a lot better.
I began my journalism career in Nashville in 1990, with my current position with Nashville Post having evolved since October 2000 (when I was with the now-defunct The City Paper, a sister publication of the Post starting in 2008).

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(Natural News) An adviser to the Pentagons Counter-Extremism Working Group (CEWG) is warning the Biden administrations efforts to purge the military of extremists could violate individual First Amendment rights.

(Article by Kristina Wong republished from Breitbart.com)

Mike Berry, general counsel for First Liberty Institute and Marine Corps reservist, first sounded the alarm in a recent op-ed that said the CEWG is looking to formulate a new definition of extremism that could include constitutionally protected speech. He wrote in the Washington Examiner on June 19:

Instead of monitoring external threats, the Pentagon is on a mission to identify and remove whomever it labels as extremists from Americas armed forces. Ironically, the CEWG has yet to define what it means by extremism. Extremism is usually defined as the threat or use of violence to achieve an ideological agenda. But the Pentagon is now poised to expand upon that definition to include constitutionally protected speech. In other words, sticks and stones may break our bones, but words are the biggest threat.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin set up the Counter-Extremism Working Group (CEWG) in April after vowing to root out extremists and ordering the entire military force to spend a day discussing extremism. Since there is no Pentagon definition for extremism, Austin tasked the CEWG, led by Bishop Garrison, to come up with a definition and to define activities that would be considered extremist.

Berry, who is part of an outside group of experts appointed to help the CEWG, told Breitbart News in a recent phone interview some of the things the group discussed on a recent hour-long conference call were eyebrow raising or alarming. He said members of the advisory group are bound by Chatham House rules in where they can discuss what was said on the call, but not who said it.

Berry said he asked the CEWG how it intended to define extremism and the answer he got was something to the effect of: Were still working on that, well probably take the existing definition and expand it. Berry said that response was problematic.

Democrats are celebrating Big Tech's destruction of free speech and cheering on permanent censorship of conservatives. https://t.co/EMiEokcZ2h  Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) January 10, 2021

The existing definition  which has been around for years and has developed really through a law enforcement perspective  it seems to be pretty adequate, he said. It sufficiently captures what needs to be captured. And if they want to expand it, theyre really going to expand it to things that have been traditionally protected by the Constitution.

As Breitbart News recently reported, a senior Biden administration official said on a background conference call with reporters that the Pentagon was working quite hard to come up with a definition that ratchets up the protections but also respects expression and association protections.

Berry said he was also alarmed by what sounds like a plan to monitor service members social media accounts for signs of extremism  which he feels crosses the line between defining extremism by ones actions  which the Pentagon has said it would stick to  and defining extremism by ones thoughts or beliefs.

I just dont know how you can reconcile the Constitution with trying to criminalize someones thoughts and beliefs, he said. Berry added questions were raised about it and there was no adequate answer.

When somebody asked how does DOD intend to reconcile the social media monitoring with First Amendment issues, the response was, Yeah, we need to figure that out, its really complicated. So then why are you looking to do it when you havent even figured it out, the legality of it? Berry said.

He said he does not know about any current effort to monitor social media posts and that the group just discussed future plans to do so.

The Intercept recently reported the Pentagon was considering using private contractors to monitor service members social media accounts to circumvent First Amendment concerns, but the Pentagon denied the report was true.

In addition, Berry said monitoring social media accounts sounds like an intelligence collection type activity, which is problematic since the Defense Department cannot conduct intelligence collection on U.S. citizens.

He revealed one hypothetical discussed on the call for how social media information could be used  if a service member was found to have an 88 tattoo  which could potentially stand for Heil Hitler, since h is the 8th letter of the alphabet, or refer to something benign, such as someones birth year.

Participants speculated that if the service member denied it was linked to white supremacy, social media could be used to cross-reference the claim. Berry said the notion that a service member would have to effectively prove his or her innocence was odd.

The social media monitoring thing really reminds me of what China does with its social credit system, he said.

Google has removed social media platform Parler from its Play Store for Android devices, stating the app will remain suspended until it implements "robust" moderation policies that crack down on free speech. https://t.co/8oe4iMe85I  Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) January 10, 2021

Berry said he was also alarmed that a number of questions raised by some of the participants showed they had preconceived notions of who extremists were  namely, white people.

They would phrase their questions such as, Well, how is this working group going to eliminate white supremacists and white extremists from the military? Isnt that why were really here?' he said.

Berry said statistics did not show that extremism was a widespread issue in the military:

If you look at the data, over the last five years there have been 21 service members who have been separated for extremist activity. Twenty-one over five years, and yet thats what they want to focus on. And you have the president saying that white supremacy is the No. 1 threat to national security whenI think we should be focusing our attention and our resources and our energy on China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. Those are quaint old-fashioned ideas now.

We really need to focus on what unites us, he said. True extremists have no place in the military, but its fewer than one percent, according to the defense secretary.

He said the group also discussed the need for more data collection and the creation of a reporting mechanism for extremism cases in the military.

Even for members of the advisory group, details of the inner workings of the CEWG are scarce. Berry said the members of the advisory group do not even know who is on the CEWG, other than Garrison.

Berry said he is not sure how he came to be appointed to the advisory group, and that he did not even know he had been appointed until a reporter called him to ask about it. He also said it seemed he was the only conservative in the advisory group, and one of few who had military experience. He also acknowledged in his recent op-ed that speaking out could result in his removal from the group.

But, he wrote, I love my country too much not to sound the alarm. And if my love of America is what leads to my removal, then so be it, as long as my discharge papers state discharged for love of country.'

Asked what advice he would give service members given what he has heard so far, he said would tell them to be on guard.

Watch your back, he said.

Read more at: Breitbart.com and Extremism.news.
(Natural News) Mainstream media outlets in the United Kingdom are attempting to convince people that, even though most recent Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in the country are from fully or partially vaccinated people, the vaccines are effective and imperfect.

In an article published in The Guardian, English statisticians David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters recently attempted to argue that the vaccines are supposedly working even though many vaccinated people in the U.K. are dying from COVID-19. (Related: Coronavirus cases in surge across the UK, even though 8 in 10 adults have received the vaccine.)

Spiegelhalter and Masters cited recent reports that showed a large percentage of recent COVID-19 deaths in the U.K. were vaccinated individuals. Public Health Englands (PHE) technical briefing on June 25 showed that 43 percent of recent deaths in the country were fully vaccinated persons. Sixty percent of the people who died received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

It could sound worrying that the majority of people dying in England with the now-dominant Delta (B.1.617.2) variant have been vaccinated, they wrote. Does this mean the vaccines are ineffective? Far from it, its what we would expect from an effective but imperfect vaccine, a risk profile that varies hugely by age and the way the vaccines have been rolled out.

The two statisticians further argue that the PHEs data shows the risk of dying from COVID-19  even when fully vaccinated  is dependent on a persons age. But they still recognize that fully vaccinated individuals still have a chance of dying from the virus.

This means that someone aged 80 who is fully vaccinated essentially takes on the risk of an unvaccinated person of around 50  much lower, but still not nothing, and so we can expect some deaths, they wrote.

People cannot feel safe just because they had the two doses. They still need to protect themselves, said Dr. Mariangela Simao, assistant director general for access to medicines and health products at the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO added that even fully vaccinated individuals should continue following public health measures supposedly put in place to curb the spread of the virus. This includes obeying mask mandates and social distancing protocols.

At the end of their article, Spiegelhalter and Masters dismissed the concerns of many people regarding the vaccinated people who died from COVID-19. It is better to look at cool analysis by analysts, rather than hot takes on social and other media, they wrote derisively.

British official argues vaccines saved lives and prevented hospitalizations

Another way the British government is attempting to justify the continued use of vaccines is with theoretical arguments on how these could have prevented deaths and hospitalizations.

Undersecretary of State for COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment Nadhim Zahawi said the U.K.s vaccination rollout could have saved more than 14,000 lives and prevented 44,500 hospital admissions in England alone, including over 2,500 hospitalizations in the middle of June.

Zahawi made this theoretical prediction during a press conference regarding the coronavirus held on June 23. Despite the vaccinated deaths, he argued that the nations mass vaccination program is working and making the country a little bit safer every day.

The vaccines are our way out of the pandemic, said Zahawi. When you look into the makeup of hospital admissions, you can clearly see our vaccination program is working.

Zahawi made this statement as around 82 percent of British adults have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. The National Health Service (NHS) is also preparing to mount a last-ditch mass vaccination campaign to get more people in the country vaccinated.

Dr. Nikki Kanani, medical director of primary care for NHS England, said the latest campaign will focus on getting the vaccines to Englands ethnic minority communities. These communities include British Africans and British Pakistanis.

Zahawi said what the U.K. needs right now is to keep going at pace to vaccinate as many adults as we can to make sure that by [July 19th]  and I am confident of this  that we will have 66 percent of the adult population with the protection of two jabs by that date the prime minister has set us.

Learn more about how governments justify the continued administration of coronavirus vaccines at Vaccines.news.

Sources include:

SHTFPlan.com

TheGuardian.com

BusinessInsider.com

LBC.co.uk
(Natural News) A senior official of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has threatened historians attempting to study and document Chinas early response to the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19). This official has advised them not to take the wrong side and to downplay Beijings disastrous pandemic policies.

The comments were made by Wang Binglin, an official from the Ministry of Education, during a closed-door meeting with more than 100 government workers and scholars. The meeting was convened to discuss the centenary of the establishment of the CCP.

Wang went through what topics the CCP will most likely mark as classified and banned from study. For example, Wang said the scholars in the room should avoid talking about the partys violent land redistribution campaign in the 1950s. This campaign claimed the lives of millions of landlords, whose property was redistributed by Mao Zedong.

Playing up [the attack on landlords] is historical nihilism, said Wang. He used a term popularized by President Xi Jinping to criticize anyone who deviated from the party-approved historical narrative.

Making such information public is of little help for you historians and will also be bad for the party, said Wang. By studying or writing about this [period], you will be taking the wrong side. Thats why we ban the study and publication of such material.

Among the materials the CCP has banned includes the Wuhan Diary, a novel written by the author Wang Fang, who used the pen name Fang Fang.

This online novel talks about daily life in Wuhan while it was regarded as ground zero for the emerging coronavirus between Jan. to March 2020. It chronicles the catastrophic strain the disease was placing on the regions healthcare system. It also talks about the death of pandemic whistleblower Dr. Li Wengliang and ridicules Beijings initial attempts to cover up the outbreak.

Fangs novel became an international hit. An English translation of it was even published. But Fang received intense national backlash for months after its publication. (Related: HUH? China says Wuhan lab should be given the Nobel Prize for Medicine for its work on the coronavirus.)

You wont become a good researcher if you dont follow [the] party, warned Wang.

China pushed propaganda during early days of the pandemic

Terminus2049 is an online archive created by computer coders Chen Mei and Cai Wei. Like the Wuhan Diary, it goes into detail about the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020. The archive focuses on the whistleblowing doctors and journalists who risked their lives to warn the world about the coronavirus.

The reward for their courage was censorship, wrote Los Angeles Times science and medicine editor Karen Kaplan. [Xi] pushed for propaganda that extolled heroes, not stories that shed light on human suffering.

Both Chen and Cai understood that Beijing might not be too happy about the archive they were building.

Ten years ago, this wouldnt be a problem, said Chens older brother. You wouldnt be detained for just archiving information. At most, theyd threaten you and have tea.'

To have tea is a euphemism for inviting a person of interest to a disciplinary meeting with the authorities.

We didnt realize that in 2019 and 2020, he continued. Chinas internet control became much stricter than in the past.

Unfortunately, both Chen and Cai were held in detention for more than a year. Their trial was held in May in Beijing. They were accused of picking quarrels and provoking troubles. This is notably the same crime used to silence Chinese citizens who attempt to raise awareness about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the subsequent massacre of hundreds or thousands of peaceful pro-democracy protesters.

Chen and Cais family members were not allowed to visit them. The pair were not even allowed to hire lawyers to defend them or to examine the case the CCP built against them.

The trial against Chen and Cai is ongoing. A verdict is expected sometime in late July or early August. If they are found guilty, they could face up to five years in prison.

Chen and Cais case is not unique. There are more than 600 cases so far of people being punished for speaking up about COVID-19 and Beijings lackluster response to it.

Experts have noted this to be a statewide attempt at revising history. One recent book that was released for the CCPs centennial devoted five pages to the successful handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also praised Xi and the party for supposedly putting the people first.

What theyre doing is to control every Chinese persons thinking and erase every persons history, said Dong Zehua, who spent seven months in jail for trying to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. They want to write history themselves.

Learn more about how China is attempting to control the narrative regarding COVID-19 by visiting Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

BusinessInsider.com

FT.com

LATimes.com
(Natural News) Top Chinese virus expert Shi Zhengli has found herself once again at the center of clashing narratives about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic because of her extensive work on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), according to a report from The New York Times.

In 2020, former President Donald Trump and several officials within his administration entertained the possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.

Scientists dismissed the idea, dubbed the lab leak theory, as implausible due to lack of evidence. But scrutiny from the Biden administration and calls for a proper investigation from scientists brought it back to the fore.

Chinese virus expert denies accusations that SARS-CoV-2 escaped her laboratory

There is still no direct evidence to support the lab leak theory due to Chinas refusal to allow an investigation of the WIV. However, more scientists now believe that the theory was dismissed too hastily last year.

Experts are now calling into question why Shi was studying bat coronaviruses in the first place, especially since some of her previously published scientific papers made mention of strains of bat coronaviruses that resembled SARS-CoV-2 several years prior.

Others think Shi experimenting with the viruses was risky, citing a recently declassified intelligence report that revealed three scientists working at the WIV became sick and developed symptoms that were consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness in November 2019, just one month before the first known case of COVID-19 was detected in Wuhan.

In January, the World Health Organization (WHO) sent a team of scientists to Wuhan to look into the WIV. Shi told those scientists that staff in her laboratory tested negative for COVID-19 antibodies. She also said there was no staff turnover on the coronavirus team.

Shi has repeatedly denied the accusations that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from her laboratory and defended its reputation.

In a phone interview with The New York Times, Shi said she preferred not to speak directly with reporters, citing WIV policies. But it was evident she could barely contain her frustration over the lab leak theory.

How on earth can I offer up evidence for something where there is no evidence? Shi said. She later sent a text message saying she doesnt know why the world has resorted to pouring filth on an innocent scientist.

In an email, Shi said the suspicions were baseless and slammed the allegations that some of her colleagues at the WIV became ill just before the outbreak emerged. Shi also denied that her laboratory had samples of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak emerged.

Im sure that I did nothing wrong, Shi wrote to The New York Times. So I have nothing to fear.

However, Chinas staunch refusal to allow independent investigations into the WIV has made it incredibly difficult to validate Shis claims. In fact, it has only fueled suspicions about the possible roles that the WIV, Shi, her colleagues and, ultimately, China, may have played in bringing about the pandemic. (Related: Health experts call for intensive investigations into coronavirus lab-leak theory.)

The Chinese government has shown no signs of holding Shi under suspicion despite international scrutiny. Shi seems to have been able to continue her work at the WIV and give lectures there as well.

Previous studies show WIV scientists knew of a coronavirus that was similar to SARS-CoV-2

Shi has been studying coronaviruses for more than a decade. Her work began in 2004, when she sought to look for the source of a 2002 outbreak of the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus. The outbreak was first identified in the city of Foshan in Southern China.

The outbreak resulted in the deaths of 774 people worldwide, prompting experts to investigate its origins. They found that the novel coronavirus spread from bats to civets to humans.

In 2004, Shi joined an international team of researchers to collect samples from bats in Southern China. Those samples were sent to the WIV for further analysis.

In 2005, Shi and her colleagues published an article establishing that bats were natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses. From 2007 to 2012, Shi and her colleagues conducted several experiments on coronaviruses funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

From 2011 to 2012, in particular, they conducted a study on horseshoe bats in Shitou Cave in Yunnan Province. In 2012, six miners entered a mineshaft in Yunnan, about 200 miles away from Shitou Cave, to remove bat dung. They all became seriously ill with a pneumonia-like disease. Three of them eventually died.

All of the reports at the time stated that the mineshaft was abandoned. But none of the reports mentioned why the miners were there to clean the mineshaft in the first place. Since Shi and her colleagues were working in the same province, they collected samples from the bats in the abandoned mineshaft.

A virus believed to have come from one of those samples was later revealed to be the closest match to SARS-CoV-2. They named the virus RaBtCoV/4991.

In a 2016 article, they acknowledged that they were working on coronaviruses sampled from bats in the now-abandoned mineshaft from 2012 to 2013. They also said they obtained RaBtCoV/4991 from 276 bat fecal probes sampled in that mineshaft.

Shi eventually renamed this virus RaTG13 in February 2020, when she and her colleagues published an article stating that WIV scientists had a close match of the virus that causes COVID-19. They identified it as RaTG13, a name that hasnt appeared in any of their previously published articles on bat coronaviruses. They were also vague about the viruss origins, saying they detected it in horseshoe bats from Yunnan Province.

By looking at genome sequences of coronaviruses from Chinese databases, independent scientists found out that RaTG13 was actually RaBtCoV/4991.

In their February article, Shi and her colleagues also said the outbreak started from a local seafood market. Overall, Shis previously published articles detailing her years-long work on bat coronaviruses make it clear that she has, at the very least, quietly kept the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 in her laboratory for years and has yet to address the true origins of that virus.

Pandemic.news has more articles on the theories surrounding the origins of COVID-19.

Sources include:

TheEpochTimes.com

NBCNews.com

NYTimes.com

WSJ.com
(Natural News) Costa Ricas Rincon de la Vieja volcano erupted on Monday, June 28, spewing a column of ash two kilometers (1.3 miles) above the crater. The eruption, which began at 5:42 a.m., is the volcanos largest eruption in many months.

The volcano, situated in a national park some 200 km (124 miles) from the capital city of San Jose, spewed volcanic material into surrounding areas, possibly affecting nearby roads and bridges. That said, the powerful eruption caused no injuries or damage to properties.

Maarten de Moor, a volcano scientist at the Volcanological and Seismological Observatory of Costa Rica, (OVSICORI), said Mondays eruption was pretty energetic.

Rincon de la Vieja erupts frequently but rarely with such force. In fact, it had around 1,400 eruptions in 2020. De Moor believes Mondays eruption is the volcanos largest one since the 1990s.

The National Commission for Risk Prevention and Emergency Management of the National Emergency Commission (CNE) said it already deployed a team to evaluate the situation. A CNE engineer was also deployed on Tuesday, June 29, to assess infrastructure potentially affected by the volcanic eruption.

The Municipal Emergency Committee also met with those living near the volcano to ask them not to approach the site.

Moreover, the National Animal Health Service (SENASA) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG) said on Tuesday that theyll conduct inspections to assess the eruptions impact on agriculture.

The CNE, the OVSICORI and the National Seismological Network (RSN), will also continue monitoring Rincon de la Vieja in case of more eruptions in the near future.

Notable eruptions around the globe in 2021

Other countries and continents are also seeing many active volcanic eruptions recently. In Iceland, its already been three months since an effusive volcanic eruption began in the Geldingadalir valley at the Fagradalsfjall mountain on the Reykjanes peninsula. But experts say it could take years or even decades before it stops.

The eruptions slow and steady lava flow could eventually form a shield volcano, which is known for its gentle slopes. The eruption has also piqued experts interests because the magma feeding it is coming from the Earths mantle. Its been 7,000 years since such an eruption occurred on the Reykjanes peninsula.

Other notable volcanic activities this year include the eruptions of Italys Mt. Etna and Indonesias Mt. Merapi.

Mt. Etna, Europes tallest active volcano, has erupted frequently over the past 500,000 years. In February, the volcano belched smoke and ashes in a new eruption, but Italian authorities said it posed no real danger to surrounding villages. Experts said theyve seen worse and that the eruption was not at all worrying.

Images that circulated online at the time showed a spectacular rose-colored plume of ashes above the volcano. The plume had largely dissipated by nightfall but the lava continued to glow.

Mt. Etna remained fairly active until June when it erupted again and spewed a fountain of lava twice. Balls of orange lava were seen shooting into the air. Volcano scientists recorded gas bubbles with strong explosions that could be heard up to 45 km away. But its unlikely that volcanic activities in Mt. Etna will stop soon. (Related: Banana plantations buried in ash in Ecuador as volcano erupts.)

Meanwhile, Mt. Merapi, Indonesias most volatile active volcano, erupted Friday, June 25. It released a plume of ash high into the air and sent streams of lava flowing down its slopes at least six times. The volcano continued to groan and rumble after the eruption.

No casualties were reported, but several villages and nearby towns ended up being covered in ash.

Follow Disaster.news for more stories about recent volcanic eruptions worldwide.

Sources include:

France24.com

TicoTimes.net

IcelandReview.com

FirstPost.com

VolcanoDiscovery.com

USNews.com
(Natural News) Dr. Peter McCullough, professor of medicine at Texas A&M, warns against vaccinating pregnant women for covid-19. He said the covid vaccines are completely unnecessary for pregnant women and are directly killing babies in the first trimester.

Dr. McCullough was recently interviewed by Mike Adams on Brighteon Conversations. He discussed effective prophylactics, nutraceuticals, treatments and antibody infusions for covid-19. He iterated that these approaches are successful for the elderly and at-risk populations. And for the majority of people under age 50, he said getting over covid-19 is a breeze.

Common sense: Pregnant women and babies should never get covid vaccines

Most importantly, pregnant women and their developing fetuses should not be subjected to repeated medical experimentation all because they might get a potential infection that they can readily overcome.

Pregnant women can breeze right through covid-19, said Dr. McCullough. No woman should ever take the risk with the covid-19 vaccine during pregnancy, period. He said treatments like hydroxychloroquine, zinc and prednisone are safe for pregnant women, but the covid-19 vaccines were never tested on pregnant women in the clinical studies because it is unethical to put pregnant women through such abuse. Therefore, the study designs did not test for mutagenic or reproductive defects.

A new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, corroborates Dr. McCulloughs common sense claims. The study, Preliminary Findings of mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine Safety in Pregnant Persons finds that covid vaccines cause spontaneous abortions in 104 out of 127 pregnant women! This means that the vaccine is disrupting critical stages of early prenatal development, and is killing four out of five babies in the first 20 weeks of gestation.

The CDCs Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continue to recommend that pregnant women have access to COVID-19 vaccines. These authoritative, vaccine-worshiping organizations refuse to rescind their recommendations, even though preliminary evidence shows that these experimental vaccines cause an 82 percent spontaneous abortion rate.

Once upon a time, there was a certain level of common sense in the medical community on the issue of protecting pregnant women from potentially harmful substances. Fetal development is a critical and delicate process, especially in the first trimester, when vital organs and physiological functions are taking form.

Infertility from covid-19 vaccines is not a conspiracy theory; its a plausible outcome

With the number of spontaneous abortions climbing, it has become apparent that the lab engineered spike protein was designed to depopulate the human race. Infertility caused by covid-19 vaccines is not a conspiracy theory. Its a macabre experiment initiating a scientific process that exploits human physiology. The covid-19 vaccines are translating spike proteins in human cells, and delivering this foreign lab-made toxin into the bloodstream, where they can accumulate in reproductive organs. These spike proteins are attacking blood vessels and causing severe inflammation in the heart. Dr. McCullough says these systemic vaccine injuries are atrocities that we now know a great deal about.

Furthermore, as the immune system detects the presence of spike proteins in the blood, immune responsive cells will attack them (a process that was anticipated in accordance with traditional vaccine science). These spike proteins contain a homologous form of syncytin-1, which resembles a natural protein in humans. If the immune cells are trained to attack the syncytin-1 spike proteins, they could attack the natural form as well, a protein that is created from human endogenous retroviruses and is responsible for the placenta development in humans. If the human body begins to attack its own placenta cells, then females will have another serious obstacle to overcome when attempting to conceive.



Sources include:

Brighteon.com

PubMed.gov

CDC.gov

ACOG.org

2020News.de [PDF]
(Natural News) Japan announced the establishment of a research laboratory dedicated to unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and other unexplained phenomena. The International UFO Laboratory (IUL) opened on June 24 some distance away from the site of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. The opening of the IUL, which sought to unravel the enigma of UFOs, came amid renewed interest in the objects.

According to a report by Japanese news outlet The Mainichi, the IUL was opened on the grounds of the UFO Interactive Hall in the prefecture. It also named Takeharu Mikami, editor-in-chief of the monthly occult magazine Mu, as the facilitys director.

Mikami said: Until now, even if UFOs were discovered, the information was shared only on an individual level. I hope the research lab will serve as a base receiving information and lead to new discoveries. Id like to get to the bottom of their identity.

The new lab was opened at what was formerly the town of Iino, located northwest of Okuma town where the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant once stood. Fukushima City, the prefectures eponymous capital, eventually incorporated Iino into its territory in 2008.

Dubbed the hometown of UFOs, Iino became host to a number of UFO sightings  including one light-emitting cone-shaped object spotted near the areas Mount Senganmori. This sighting, which happened in the 1970s, subsequently became known as the Mount Senganmori incident. Iino officials then started to promote the regions link to the space objects.

As part of these efforts, the UFO Interactive Hall was built in 1992 as a central facility. The hall boasted of a collection of about 3,000 materials related to UFOS, donated by the late researcher Kinichi Arai. It frequently had a yearly visitor count of around 30,000 people coming from the prefecture and other areas.

The IUL currently focuses on collecting, analyzing and disclosing witness information concerning UFO sightings worldwide. It is also investigating and researching on the Mount Senganmori incident that put Iino on the map. Aside from these, the IUL is also making attempts to encounter other UFOs. It is looking for members who will conduct internet-based research, with applications continuing through the end of December 2021. (Related: Massive temple spotted on Mars identical to an ancient Japanese tomb.)

Military pilots have had close encounters with UFOs for some time now

The IULs opening came almost a year after the Japanese Ministry of Defense said it would draw up a plan for pilots to report UFOs. A May 2020 Nippon.com report said the ministry considered protocols on how Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) ought to respond to, record and report encounters with the objects.

Former Defense Minister Taro Kono said that time that while JASDF pilots have never encountered UFOs before, the proposed steps will cover the possibility. Meanwhile, the ministry said JASDF fighter jets are scrambled to monitor and identify unknown aircraft. It continued that the jets come from seven bases spread out from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south.

While the JASDF pilots have not encountered UFOs, U.S. Air Force (USAF) aviators have done so multiple times  and even recorded 11 incidents of near-misses with the objects. A report by the U.S. Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI) and the U.S. Department of Defenses Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force elaborated on these incidents. The report was released on June 25  a day after the IUL opened  and submitted to the U.S. Congress.

Based on the report, there were 11 recorded instances of near-misses from the 144 rereports of UFO sightings the U.S. government received. It noted that pilots are required to report concerns such as UFOs whenever they encounter safety hazards. Depending on the location, volume and behavior of hazards during incursions on ranges, pilots may cease their tests and/or training and land their aircraft, the report continued.

The ODNI report said UFOs pose a hazard to safety of flight. It added that the objects could post a broader danger if in case they happened to be surveillance tools by a foreign government or a breakthrough technology by a potential enemy. While the report said there is a lack of data to conclude either of the two possibilities, it reiterated that monitoring efforts are currently underway  given that some UFOs were spotted near military facilities. (Related: Former US military officer claims UFOs shut down nuclear missiles.)

Visit UFOs.news to read more stories about the interest in UFOs in both the U.S. and Japan.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

Mainichi.jp

Nippon.com

DNI.gov [PDF]

TheEpochTimes.com
(Natural News) Bill Maher slammed Big Tech on Fridays episode of his show, Real Time with Bill Maher, criticizing Facebook and Google for censoring content discussing the COVID-19 lab-leak theory.

(Article by Tyler Durden republished from ZeroHedge.com)

I find this outrageous. Facebook banned any post for four months about COVID coming from a lab, said Maher, adding Now, even the Biden administration is looking into it.

Outrageous. @BillMaher railed against Facebook and Google for banning and suppressing content about lab leak. You were wrong, Google and Facebook.The CDCs been wrong about a lot shit, this is outrageous that I cant look this information up. #RealTime pic.twitter.com/28dwaQGz9W  Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) June 26, 2021

As the Daily Callers Andrew Jose notes:

Facebook revised its ban on such posts in late May, stating, In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. The ban put into effect Apr. 16, 2020, deemed allegations of lab leak or deliberate development of the COVID-19 as misinformation alongside claims of vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against, its safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine, and, vaccines are toxic, dangerous, or cause autism.

Last month, social media giants were similarly slammed over lab-leak theory censorship, after Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that its a possibility.

Fauci was also asked by Katie Sanders of Politifact if he thought COVID-19 had developed naturally. Fauci responded by suggesting other causes are a possibility.

I am not convinced about that, I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened, replied the good doctor.

Faucis comments came after a report by the Wall Street Journal that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became so sick in November 2019 that they required hospital treatment. Two months later and China was still telling the WHO that there was zero human to human transmission of the virus.

Politifact, meanwhile, was forced to retract a fact check that claimed it had debunked the lab leak origin theory of COVID-19.

All of this, because the left hates Donald Trump

Here is President Trump in April 2020 telling the world the virus likely came out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology pic.twitter.com/p7q0kQQdrv  Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) May 23, 2021

Read more at: ZeroHedge.com and Censorship.news.
(Natural News) One of the reasons why transgenderism has become something of an accepted fad in modern American culture is because LGBTQ pseudoscientists have aggressively pushed the idea that hormone therapy and surgeries are necessary in order to prevent gender dysphoric people from killing themselves. Well, that claim has now been officially debunked by real science.

The Center for Bioethics and Culture has released a new documentary film Trans Mission: Whats the Rush to Reassign Gender? that dives deep into the transgender movement, picking apart many of the gimmicks that are used to not only mainstream the LGBTQ agenda but also convince young people that they need to get a sex change or take hormone pills in order to feel comfortable within their own skin.

These and other extreme recruitment tactics center around a marketing scheme that promises normalcy and acceptance to anyone who goes under the knife or takes a pharmaceutical pill. You will never feel normal, they often say to children, unless you cut off your body parts  and many children seem to be falling for it.

It is false advertising at its finest, and the LGBTQ industry has yet to be held accountable for committing these serious crimes against humanity, which end up leaving many children worse off in the end. Rather than provide real therapy for the mental issues that often lead to feelings of transgenderism, the industry focuses on fast-tracking children straight into the gender clinic for reassignment.

In the end, the suicide rate only goes up as children who fall for the lies end up regretting their decision, only to learn that it is all but impossible to reassign back, especially if they already removed body parts.

Transgender activists continue to pressure parents and politicians with the threat of suicide should young people who claim to be transgender not receive total affirmation of their new identity, reports Breitbart News.

Significant research and study, however, has found that transgender medical interventions, such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and sex transition surgeries do not prevent suicide or improve mental health in gender dysphoric young people, reports Breitbart News.

Affirming transgenderism is hate, not love

In the documentary film, one woman explains how LGBTQ-affirmative doctors pressured her into letting her daughter get a sex change by warning her that the girl might commit suicide if she refused. Not wanting her daughter to die, the mother agreed.

This type of thing happens more often than many people realize, with trans industry doctors basically scaring parents into letting their children permanently destroy their bodies so they can be themselves.

Theres a very good reason to be concerned about the outcome specifically, that some of the largest studies that have been done with the longest follow-up have shown that suicide rates remain markedly elevated after you undergo these affirmation interventions, warns Dr. Paul Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist.

The cancer industry does much the same thing, scaring people into taking dangerous and highly expensive chemotherapy or radiation treatments under the threat of death if they refuse.

You must burn your body with radiation or destroy your immune system with poison, they say, or else you might die from cancer. This is often followed by the cancer patient dying from cancer treatment, which is then blamed on the cancer anyway.

The LGBTQ industry is doing the same thing to children and their parents, playing on the heart strings of loved ones who would never otherwise harm their babies, but who are being lied to about the severity of gender reassignment.

Back in 2019, a study out of Sweden tried to assert that people who claim to be transgender are much better off mentally after they get reassigned. That study was recently given a correction by the American Journal of Psychiatry, which determined that the studys conclusion is false.

Quite the contrary, people who are tricked into believing that they are some other gender than the sex that God assigned them at birth are more often than not regretful that they ever fell for the sham. And those who are still in denial about it will likely have a change of heart eventually.

It is all fun and games when the media is praising you and your friends are putting up hideous multi-colored flags in your honor. But once you are stuck with a mish-mash of male and female body parts growing old, it is not so much fun anymore to be trans.

After reviewing the Swedish study, adolescent psychiatrist Sven Roman, along with his colleagues, determined that neither gender-affirming hormone treatment nor gender-affirming surgery decrease the need for mental health services among those who claim to be transgender.

Those who claim it does are distort[ing] gender dysphoria, these researchers now admit.

More related news about the LGBTQ industrys continued targeting of children for recruitment can be found at Gender.news.

Sources for this article include:

Breitbart.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) A divided federal appeals court ruled on June 24 that an aerial surveillance program used as a crime-fighting tool by the Baltimore Police Department was unconstitutional.

In its ruling, the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said the police must stop using any data obtained through the now-defunct program. The appeals court said the use of a plane equipped with wide-angle high-tech cameras to monitor the city amounted to a warrantless search and violated the Fourth Amendment.

The AIR [Aerial Investigation Research] program records the movements of a city. With analysis, it can reveal where individuals come and go over an extended period. Because the AIR program enables police to deduce from the whole of individuals movements, we hold that accessing its data is a search, and its warrantless operation violates the Fourth Amendment, Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote for the majority in the tight 8-7 ruling.

Ruling prohibits police from accessing data collected through the surveillance program

The city and the police department argued that the lawsuit was now moot as the program ended in February. The surveillance flights actually stopped in October last year, but the police continued to process the data generated by the surveillance plane. Some of the 950,000 images taken have already been entered as evidence in criminal cases.

The courts ruling means the police department will be prohibited from accessing data collected through the program.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Maryland sued in federal court on behalf of a group of Black activist leaders in Baltimore, arguing that the program jeopardized the privacy rights of residents. A judge rejected a request for an injunction to temporarily block the program.

In November last year, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit upheld the lower court ruling, finding that the program was carefully designed to slow the recurrent increases in violent crime in Baltimore and was merely a tool used to track short-term movements in public, where the expectation of privacy is lessened. The ACLU appealed that ruling to the full court, which reversed the panels ruling.

The real crux of this case was the constitutional question: Is this allowable? Putting an entire city under permanent video surveillance during all the daylight hours and tracking the movement of the entire population of the city and storing that information to create a virtual time machine, and the court said no, said David Rocah, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III said the majority opinion failed to balance recognition of both public needs and privacy concerns under the Fourth Amendment. He cited the number of people murdered in Baltimore  335 in 2020 and 348 in 2019.

One would think from reading the majoritys opinion that all is well in Baltimore, Wilkinson wrote. These numbers make Baltimore one of the most dangerous cities in America. Yet somehow the majority sees over-surveillance as Baltimores big problem  and it ventures on a crusade to eradicate it.

Surveillance plane tantamount to forcing Baltimore residents to wearing a tracking device

Cameras on the surveillance plane captured the movement of residents in large swaths of the city during daylight hours.

Investigators would then view the video to turn back the clock on crimes they learned about later. They used the video to investigate violent crimes including murders, non-fatal shootings, carjacking incidents and armed robberies. (Related: AI-enabled cameras said to predict crime before it happens are precrime arrests next?)

The residents of Baltimore were being treated as enemy combatants by their own police department, Rocah said. They said it was the equivalent of everyone in Baltimore being forced to wear a tracking device every time they walk out the door.

The ACLU believes the court decision will deter other cities from considering this type of surveillance program. Its a victory for the people of Baltimore. Its a victory, frankly, for anyone in the entire country who cares about maintaining a zone of privacy in the face of ever more powerful government tracking devices, Rocah said.

Supporters of the program argued that the images depicted people as dots that couldnt be identified. But the court disagreed.

The court rejects that characterization because that data, combined with other technologies, which when all put together, clearly identifies people and their movement, said Michelle Gilman, a University of Baltimore law professor.

In a statement sent to 11 News, Baltimore City Solicitor Jim Shea said: Although Baltimore is not, and has not been for many months, operating any form of aerial surveillance, we were disappointed to learn of the Fourth Circuits closely divided opinion and will be evaluating our options.

Follow PrivacyWatch.news for more news and information related to government surveillance programs.

Sources include:

Baltimore.CBSLocal.com

SeattleTimes.com

WBALTV.com
(Natural News) Flooding in India has uncovered the shallow graves of hundreds of Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) victims who were hastily buried by the Ganges, Indias most sacred river.

The monsoon season in India has begun, and with it comes seasonal flooding. This means that the currents in the 1,550-mile-long Ganges have picked up and dislodged many bodies buried in shallow sand graves along its banks.

Hindu families usually cremate the bodies of their deceased. But in April and May, at the height of the countrys coronavirus crisis, many families in the countrys north and east were forced to bury their loved ones in shallow graves along the Ganges. Reports noted that these families were unable to afford the cost of funeral pyres for the cremation. (Related: Indian coronavirus victims relatives throw his body into river.)

Instead of getting the bodies cremated, they would submerge the bodies or conduct water burials as part of their religious traditions. This is considered a normal occurrence in non-pandemic times. Especially destitute families would have to settle for burying the bodies of their loved ones in shallow graves.

Locals said the funeral ceremonies can cost more than 7,000 rupees ($100). This added to the hardships of families already struggling to make ends meet as the Indian economy is still attempting to recover from the economic lockdowns.

Most of the bodies came from the city of Allahabad in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Allahabad is one of the holiest cities in Hinduism and where millions go each year to perform funeral rites.

From Allahabad, the bodies were discovered downstream in the nearby town of Phaphamau on the northern banks of the Ganges. Many of the corpses were discovered still wrapped in the saffron cloth they were buried with.

In the past three weeks, Allahabad officials said they have cremated around 150 bodies that were dislodged from their shallow graves.

Many other villages and cities lining the Ganges have shallow graves and human mounds. This includes the religious hub of Varanasi, which also reported experiencing similar problems to Allahabad, with bodies being washed away by the currents.

If the bodies are not recovered, they could turn the Ganges toxic

Indian health officials have estimated that up to 600 bodies were buried in sand graves alongside the Ganges in Allahabad. But locals believe this is just a fraction of the real figures. They fear that more corpses could be dislodged from the banks of the Ganges if the rapid currents continue in the coming weeks.

Sonu Chandel, a boatman who works for a crematorium along the Ganges, said he was shaken by the sight of dozens of families burying their dead two months ago. His sense of uneasiness with the entire situation heightened as soon as the rivers water level rose.

It was really sad to see poor people burying their loved ones in an undignified manner, Chandel said in an interview with AFP. 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.

Uttar Pradesh locals like Chandel are worried that if the hundreds of corpses are not removed, it could risk further contaminating what is already considered to be one of the worlds most polluted rivers.

This  could cause dangerous diseases, said Dipin Kumar, a resident of Allahabad who lives in a neighborhood right next to the Ganges. The government must think this over and only they can make a plan.

Indian police, with the help of disaster crews, have begun patrolling the river looking for bodies. Authorities in Uttar Pradesh said they have stationed two boats along the banks of the Ganges to retrieve the bodies but have had little success in the past few days.

The flow [of the river] is very fast and it is a challenge to fish out bodies now, said one police officer.

Learn more about the effects of the coronavirus pandemic in India and other parts of the world by reading the latest articles at Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

NYPost.com
(Natural News) California has entered another drought, one that experts think is more severe than its last one. Worse, the heat is so severe that its making tap water in some places, including Sacramento, taste like dirt.

Last month, the City of Sacramento issued a statement saying it has received complaints from residents about the taste of their tap water. Officials said blue-green algae, which produce toxins linked to diseases in animals and humans, are whats causing some residents tap water to take on an earth-like taste and smell.

Despite their name, blue-green algae are not algae but cyanobacteria. When conditions are right, they grow quickly and form whats known as blooms. They also produce a relatively non-toxic taste and odor compounds, such as geosmin. Geosmin is a bacterial product that makes soil smell the way it does. Its also responsible for the earthy taste and smell of beetroot peels.

Geosmin is completely harmless but it makes water unpleasant to drink, a huge annoyance as people drink more water to beat the extreme heat.

Most of the drinking water in Sacramento comes from rivers. More organic material is present in the water during hot summer months. Water treatment plants can remove algae from the water but not geosmin. Unfortunately, humans are sensitive to the compound and can detect even low concentrations of it.

Sacramento officials said theres nothing they can do to improve the taste and smell of the tap water in the city, suggesting that residents just add lemon to their tap water or chill it before drinking.

Geosmin outbreaks dont occur until late summer. The compound showed up quite early this year because of the drought. Scientists arent sure whether more algae and geosmin will form in the Sacramento rivers. But because they are continuing to dry up, geosmin concentrations in tap water are likely to rise as a result.

California is suffering a megadrought

Droughts are common occurrences in California, which is why some researchers believe the state is really over two decades into a megadrought. (Related: Drought could force California power plant to shut down at hottest time of the year.)

According to Park Williams, a climate expert and associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the drought may be attributed to rising global temperatures. This means that Californians have not seen the worst of it.

Williams led a study published last year in Science in which he and his colleagues looked at the ring records of thousands of trees across western North America to reconstruct soil moisture over the last 1,200 years.

Their findings indicated that 2000 to 2018 was the second-driest period in that region, which was only eclipsed by a megadrought in the late 1500s.

Other scientists agree that warming temperatures do seem to be making recent droughts worse. However, many remain skeptical, saying that while the Colorado Basin is facing megadrought conditions, the same cant be said for California just yet.

Summers are usually very dry in California. But that hasnt been a problem because water supplies are usually replenished in the winter and spring by snowmelt and rain, respectively. However, experts find that wet periods are becoming more sporadic and intense, while the dry periods in between are becoming longer, drier and more severe in recent years.

CaliforniaCollapse.news has more articles with updates on the heatewave behind Californias megadrought.

Sources include:

TheWashingtonStandard.com

SacramentoCityExpress.com

LATimes.com
(Natural News) At-home DNA testing kits have become all the rage as people seek to identify their ancestry. The only problem is that many of these companies are Chinese fronts that collect peoples genetic blueprints and use them for unknown purposes.

During a recent hearing, Dr. Steven Quay explained how the process typically works. What people receive in the mail and use to swab their DNA is then sent off to companies that in many cases are based in China.

So if you go on the internet and want to do a DNA test for almost anything on the internet as a consumer  and you dont even need a doctor to sign  and you do a scrape, the specimen will very often go to a laboratory here, Dr. Quay stated.

But then it gets shipped to BGI, which bought more Illumina sequencing machines than any other place in the world.

Illumina sequencing machines, by the way, are used to process microarrays. These are what supposedly determine a persons lineage going back to the early days of the family tree.

And so they will do the sequence there and theyll send it back to the company, but guess what? Theyll keep a copy, Dr. Quay further warned.

And thats what hes talking about. So every time an American  not always, but many times  you will do what you think is a U.S. address and then it gets shipped to BGI.

Obama, Biden responsible for bring Chinese DNA harvesters onto American soil

The BGI that Dr. Quay is referring to is BGI Genomics, a Chinese-owned corporation that Barack Hussein Obama allowed to establish a presence here in America as a DNA testing company.

Both Obama and Joe Biden gave approval to BGI to set up shop here in the U.S., where it operates as a go-between for getting American DNA into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

As sinister as it sounds, this is exactly how it all happened, which is one of the reasons why many refer to Biden as Beijing Biden or China Joe. Hunters dad is continuing Obamas legacy currently by allowing Chinese corporations to continue stealing Americans DNA.

As we recently reported, these DNA testing kits appear to be bunk in the first place, showing Jewish ancestry for lizards, as one example.

It is highly suspect that these at-home testing kits started to become popular just prior to the release of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), which then legitimized the use of swabs to collect peoples DNA in the name of fighting a virus.

Perhaps not enough people prior to this were voluntarily agreeing to swab their membranes to ship off to companies like BGI that the CCP devised a plot to force more people into doing it to supposedly look for genetically modified (GMO) bat coronaviruses.

Whatever the case may be, we now know without a doubt that at-home DNA testing is a farce being used by foreign enemies to profile Americans and possibly also to develop more biological weapons that will soon be unleashed upon the world.

I never understood how people could be so short-sighted about those DNA tests, wrote one commenter at Citizen Free Press. How could they not have considered that this is where it would end up?

It has nothing to do with clones, wrote another. This is laying the groundwork of social control. Whatever mechanism the CCP comes up with, will be fringe this decade, accepted viable policy solution next decade.

More related news about Chinas aggression against the West can be found at Tyranny.news.

Sources for this article include:

CitizenFreePress.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) American Marxists are not much different than Western Marxists in that they, too, seek to tear down our existing republican-style democracy and replace it with their much more authoritarian model of government.

But instead of strictly following Karl Marxs model of dividing populations by class, American Marxists are using our multiracial, multicultural society to divide us  after telling us for decades that multiculturalism is our strength.

And in particular, they push the lie that the problem with America is the majority white population through the teaching of critical race theory, which Scott Greer, author of No Campus for White Men, says is the cultural battle of our time.

State legislatures across the country are seeking to ban it, parents battle with school boards over it, and several Republican politicians look to make a name for themselves as the ultimate opponent of CRT, he writes in a column at American Greatness.

Greer credited investigator Christopher Rufo with blowing the whistle on the spread of CRT, which began in Corporate America and spread to federal agencies and the nations public school systems. Rufo first made his revelations on Fox News host Tucker Carlsons program more than a year ago and has provided several updates since. In fact, Rufo has been credited with alerting then-President Donald Trump to the destructive curriculum, leading him to ban it throughout the federal government  though Joe Biden and his handlers are reinstating it.

The battle against CRT is a positive development for the American Right and Rufo deserves credit for revealing these insidious practices to the public. But the mainstream anti-CRT movement has serious limitations, the most damaging of which is the hesitancy of its members to stress the primary target of CRT, which, of course, is white people, Greer notes further.

The author went on to gently push back on Rufo somewhat, however, noting that while he does describe CRT as being anti-white, he always does so using qualifiers.

But it is also anti-Asian, anti-rational, and anti-democratic. I think it is [a] much deeper problemanti-whiteness is merely one element, Rufo told Revolver News.

Yeah, but, as Greer correctly points out, its mostly anti-white.

He notes:

School children are not taught to check their democratic privilege. These lesson plans dont say that all rational people are racist from birth. We are not told to repeat that our nation was founded on Asian supremacy. All of these efforts are directed against whites. 

Whites are the ones demonized and white society is seen as the great enemy to social justice.

Greer adds that whiteness is actually treated as a pathogen in CRT, and he provides examples.

White identitarianism is seen as the great villain of all these institutions yet has no power within our society. You can fantasize about murdering whites and be applauded at Yale University, but can find yourself jailed and forever unemployable if you place an Its OK to Be White sticker anywhere on Yales campus, Greer notes (yes, the same Yale that discriminates against whites and Asians and gets away with it).

Its unclear how CRT harms nonwhites. Nonwhites are placed at the top of the moral hierarchy while whites are placed at the bottom. CRT teaches that whites owe reparations to nonwhites and that nonwhites are free from the sins carried by all whites, Greer continues.

The bottom line is this, though: If this kind of curriculum were being pushed by white people and demonizing Americans of color, the left would lose their collective minds and one federal court after another would be ruling in favor of minority plaintiffs.

But because CRT is aimed at whites specifically, as Greer points out, its deemed as acceptable by the side of the political aisle that wants to destroy our country.

The fact of the matter is, our multiethnic country cannot and will not survive this kind of division. Hide and watch.

Sources include:

AmericanGreatness.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) The main media outlets in Denmark announced on Monday, June 28, that they are banding together to collectively negotiate copyright payments for news content used by Big Tech companies such as Google and Facebook.

Reuters reported that 29 Danish media companies will meet on Friday, July 2, for their first general assembly and official launching as a collective bargaining organization in a pioneering move they hope can provide inspiration for other countries in Europe and beyond.

Negotiations with Google and Facebook will begin after the organizations first meeting followed by conversations with other Big Tech companies.

EU copyright directive establishes related rights

In 2019, a European Union copyright directive established the so-called related rights in favor of publishers and news agencies. It gave them the right to be compensated for links to their content by tech giants in order to ensure better compensation for creators of news content.

According to the EU copyright directive, sharing platforms such as Google and Facebook will have to set filters to prevent users from uploading copyrighted material such as news.

This is not content created for free use. Its a certain misunderstanding on the part of Californians, said Anders Crab-Johansen, CEO of Denmarks oldest continually operating newspaper Berlingske and co-founder of the new organization. He referred to the people of Big Tech companies as Californians because they are mostly based in California.

Krab-Johansen told the Financial Times that the cooperation among Danish media companies meant tech giants would not be able to divide and conquer us as usual. He noted that Google and Facebook normally negotiate particular deals with one or a few dominant media companies. They set the standard and the rest has to follow.

We would rather have a collective bargaining power, which gives us some size, Krab-Johansen said.

France was the first to incorporate the copyright directive into national law. The countrys news industry negotiated a framework agreement with Google last year but concluded payment terms bilaterally. The approach shrouded the deals in secrecy and divided the media industry. Magazines are seeking to negotiate with Google and Facebook separately as a collective.

In Denmark, nearly all media including the public TV stations have joined together to negotiate collectively. (Related: FACT: Big media and Big Tech stole the 2020 election.)

The impetus for this initiative came in part from the music industry, said Stig Orskov, CEO of JP-Politikens Hus, the leading Danish print media group.

Musicians collectively negotiate rights with music streaming platforms such as Spotify.

Media companies have transferred their mandate to the organization. This is an approach that is well known and proven in Denmark, and we hope that in this way we will get the best results, without necessarily being related to a specific information product, said Orskov.

The collective bargaining organization can give the Danish media industry bigger bargaining power. Often the big techs sign non-transparent separate agreements, they use a divide and conquer strategy and what we hope to achieve is a collective agreement that will be beneficial for the whole industry.

Orskov said he expected negotiations to begin soon as informal contacts with Google have already taken place. Our main request is for big tech companies to pay a fair share (of the cost) of the news content created by Danish media they use and take advantage of, said Orskov.

The goal is to achieve greater negotiating power at a time when press groups deplore some non-transparent agreements among GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) and some media, Orskov added.

Big Tech tried to fight creation of related rights in Europe

Google and Facebook fought the creation of related rights in Europe, saying the use of snippets of news stories on search results and news pages helped send readers to the sites of media outlets.

News media, on the other hand, said Google and Facebook had sucked most ads away from them, and that they received no compensation for the use of the snippets although tech platforms generated advertising revenue by using them.

Google told AFP it would respect the decision of Danish media to negotiate collectively. Interestingly, AFP is also in negotiation with Google over related rights.

We will respect the way that Danish publishers choose to negotiate, and have already offered to start discussions with them, with the goal of reaching fair and reasonable agreements in line with the law, Google said.

On the other hand, Facebook has sought to minimize its liability by stripping back the content posted when users share hyperlinks. In countries applying the EU copyright law, publishers permission is required for anything more than the basic link to appear on the platform.

Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook are allocating hundreds of millions a year to pay for news around the world. But the funding is negotiated with publishers on a one-to-one basis and tied to specific news products so Big Tech companies can avoid systematic copyright charges for using snippets of content on their platforms. (Related: Tech giants, mainstream media have all adopted a code of censorship to eliminate information they dont want the public to see.)

Follow TechGiants.news for more news and information related to Big Tech companies.

Sources include:

News.Yahoo.com

FT.com

World-Today-News.com
(Natural News) The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis heard testimony from four expert witnesses who say that it was highly likely that the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) is man-made.

The three-hour hearing before Republican lawmakers included statements about the various theories concerning the origin of the Chinese Virus. The original claim is that it transferred from bats to humans at a wet market in Wuhan, China, but that was later debunked after it was revealed that bats have not been sold at Chinese wet markets for at least the past two years.

Now, some are suggesting that Tony Fauci funded the manufacture of the Wuhan Flu using taxpayer dollars at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), home to Chinas only known level-four biosafety laboratory.

Dr. David Asher, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who specializes in U.S. foreign policy in Asia, stated that researchers at the WIV have quite publicly been using revolutionary technology as part of a program related to synthetic biology and gain-of-function.

This could have resulted in a weapons-like release, Ashe believes.

Whether they deliberately did it, I have very little sense they did, he added. But were they deliberately working on developing the capability to use advanced pathogen genetic capabilities for war in a way that no one has seen ever employed? Yeah, they were. Of course they are.

Did the Chinese Virus come from a lab?

Dr. Brett Giroir, a former four-star admiral at the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, also testified, as did Dr. Richard Muller, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California Berkeley, and Dr. Steven Quay, founder of Atossa Therapeutics.

Quay explained that he has his own reasons for believing that the Fauci Flu was man-made, revealing that a bat coronavirus could not feasibly jump from animals to humans very well without some tinkering.

It was human-to-human from the get-go, he insists.

Muller offered up similar sentiments, suggesting that the presence of gain of function technology is proof all on its own that someone manufactured this thing synthetically.

Theres no way that we know that could happen [naturally], he explained about the virtual impossibility of the Chinese Virus jumping from a bat to a human all on its own.

This P3CO board, as they are calling it, was first formed back in 2017 under Donald Trumps Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Its purpose is to decide whether grants involving gain of function research, which enhances dangerous pathogens like coronaviruses, involve proper safeguards and are worth the risks.

According to the board, it was never told about any gain of function research occurring on bat coronaviruses and thus had no say in funding any of it.

A spokesperson from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has apparently confirmed that the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance was granted money from Fauci to collaborate with scientists in Wuhan to study how bat coronaviruses might be able to jump from bats to humans.

If you look at the abstract from the latest grant that was done to EcoHealth, it talks about using protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments, Giroir noted.

This is all gain-of-function. How this could not get into the P3 process is unbelievable.

The conversation then deviated towards complaints made by supporters of Trump that the issue of the Wuhan Flus possible lab origin was ignored or mocked simply because the former president suggested it as a possibility.

At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump, says Alina Chan, a genetic engineering specialist and postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University.

More related news about the Chinese Virus can be found at Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

LifeSiteNews.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) California Senior District Judge Susan Illston has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Childrens Health Defense (CHD) against Facebook, delivering another authoritarian victory to the tech giant.

CHD alleges that Facebook is in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments by labeling CHDs content False Information, and taking other steps to effectively to [sic] censor or block content from users, the ruling reads.

At issue is Facebooks ongoing silencing of users and pages that promote content deemed to interfere with the governments pro-vaccine agenda.

CHD, as you probably know, has been on the front lines warning parents about the dangers of childhood vaccination, and more recently about the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccines from the governments Operation Warp Speed program.

Facebook holds to the premise that all vaccines are safe and effective, and believes that nobody else should ever be allowed to challenge that premise with freedom of speech. Illston apparently agrees with this, as she sided with Facebook in her ruling.

CHD does not allege that (Adam) Schiff (or anyone from the government) directed Facebook or Zuckerberg to take any specific action with regard to CHD or its Facebook page, the ruling further explains.

Instead, CHD alleges that Schiff pressured Facebook to remove vaccine misinformation and later told reporters that if the social media companies cant exercise a proper standard of care when it comes to a whole variety of fraudulent or illicit content, then we have to think about whether [Section 230] immunity still makes sense.

Adam Schiff, Facebook both depriving CHD of its Fifth Amendment rights

The CHD lawsuit pegged Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, for interfering with the First Amendment by contacting Facebook and Google directly to coerce them into censoring all vaccine misinformation from their platforms.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a private corporation, also collaborated at length with Facebook to suppress vaccine safety speech with a warning label and other notices that appear to flag disinformation, but in reality censor valid and truthful speech, including speech critical of those agencies and their policies, the lawsuit claims.

In Illstons opinion, Facebook did not violate the Fifth Amendment, specifically as it pertains to the takings clause, even though it permanently disabled the donate button on CHDs Facebook page.

CHD still needs to establish sufficient government action to assert a takings claim, Illston ruled, suggesting that CHD could still do more to prove that Schiff and the corrupt deep state deprived it of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law by having Facebook remove CHDs ability to communicate to its supporters and raise funding.

Founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD has been at the forefront of the fight against dangerous and ineffective vaccines. On its website, the group explains that:

 vaccines can and do cause injuries including autism and many other adverse health outcomes, as well as claiming that 5G technology poses health risks, encourages debris-generating satellite collisions, causes depletion of the ozone layer by the huge number of launches and is a major factor in the weaponization of space.

Oddly enough, Newsbusters takes issue with these claims and has dubbed Kennedy a leftist for calling out the vaccine racket. This news outlet apparently supports vaccines and thinks that only left-wing people oppose them, which is hardly the case.

As we have been reporting for years  and we are hardly a left-wing news outlet  vaccines are dangerous and ineffective, and have nothing to do with politics. Both the left and the right are guilty of pushing them on people due to influence from Big Pharma  and now Big Tech as well.

The latest news about Big Tech censorship of vaccine truth can be found at Censorship.news.

Sources for this article include:

Newsbusters.org

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, held a meeting the other day at the Federal Courthouse in Milwaukee to address the wave of injuries and deaths resulting from Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccination.

At this meeting, Sen. Johnson allowed people from all across the country to tell their stories about how Chinese Virus injections harmed either themselves or someone they know. One person who spoke is the mother of a 12-year-old girl who is now wheelchair-bound thanks to the jab.

Stephanie de Garay claims that her daughter Maddie was perfectly healthy before she and her brothers were enrolled in a Pfizer trial for children back in January. After receiving her second injection, young Maddie came down with a laundry list of horrific symptoms that have left her on an NG feeding tube.

Why is she not back to normal? Stephanie asked as her daughter sat next to her and listened quietly.

12-year-old Maddie was enrolled in the #Pfizer #COVID19 #vaccine clinical trial. She's now in a wheelchair, has an NG tube, and is suffering from severe memory loss, along with many other issues. Read more  https://t.co/V3D2qCaFCI pic.twitter.com/3O3r99GQIf  GreatGameIndia (@GreatGameIndia) June 30, 2021

As you will notice in the above video clip, Maddies facial reactions do not seem to align with what her mother is saying, suggesting that the child is now suffering from some kind of brain damage.

Stephanie confirmed this, also indicating that Maddie now has irregular menstrual cycles and can no longer feel any body parts below her waist, hence why she is now bound to a wheelchair.

For the past five months, Maddie has been to the ER nine times, and has been hospitalized three times, for a total of two months in the hospital, Stephanie added. She was totally fine before this. She did the right thing trying to help everybody else and theyre not helping her.

How many need to become paralyzed or die before the covid vaccine campaign finally ends?

Another individual named Candace Hayden explained how she developed severe paresthesia and became partially paralyzed from the chest down  this is similar to what happened to Maddie  after receiving her experimental injection for the Fauci Flu.

Brianne Dressen, one of the other six people who spoke at the meeting, says she lost control of both of her legs, along with her bladder and dignity, as a result of getting injected for the Chinese Virus.

On Jan. 14, I received the Moderna vaccine, stated Sheryl Ruetgers, yet another vaccine-injured person who came to tell her story. The next morning, I woke up with severely swollen lymph nodes in my neck.

While Sen. Johnson says he still supports vaccines, including those marketed as a cure for Chinese Germs, he warns that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other health authorities are not being transparent about the serious adverse reactions that could occur.

Nobody wants to admit that there may be some problems, he stated. I think the American public should be able to have informed consent when deciding whether or not to take an experimental vaccine one way or the other.

As for Maddie, her mother is desperate for answers and some kind of help. Maddie may never be the same, and yet nobody seems to be at all concerned about her and the many other children in a similar position whose lives are now forever ruined.

That small minority that are suffering severe symptoms, they want to deny that reality, Sen. Johnson says about those in charge who are burying their heads in the sand about all of this.

I am not advocating anything other than to listen to these people and to take them seriously.

You can watch the full press conference with Sen. Johnson below:

The latest news about injuries and deaths arising from Wuhan Flu shots can be found at ChemicalViolence.com.

Sources for this article include:

GreatGameIndia.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) held a panel in Milwaukee recently where families from all across the country gathered to talk about how Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccines seriously injured or killed one or more of their family members.

One mother in particular had a powerful story to tell about how her young daughter, formerly healthy, is now bound to a wheelchair on breathing tubes.

While this case is just one of many, many more just like it, the tears coming from the mothers eyes are powerful and deserve your attention. Watch below starting at around the 31:40 mark to hear it for yourself:

The mothers name is Stephanie de Garay, and you can feel her pain watching the tears pour from her eyes. Young Maddie, Stephanies daughter, has basically had her life taken away from her by Big Pharma, Operation Warp Speed, and everyone who is involved with perpetuating this sham.

On Jan. 20, Maddie received her second dose of the Pfizer covid vaccine as a participant in the clinical trial for 12- to 15-year-olds. All three of our kids volunteered and were excited to participate in the trial as a way to help us all return to normal life, Stephanie explains.

My husband works in the medical field and I have a degree in electrical engineering. We are pro-vaccine and pro-science, which is why we agreed to let Maddie and her two older brothers volunteer for the trial.

Maddie: It feels like my heart is being ripped out through my neck

Immediately upon receiving her second dose of the Pfizer injection, Maddies arm swelled up and she developed severe abdominal and chest pain. Maddie described the feeling as her heart being ripped out through my neck.

Stephanie was advised to take Maddie to the emergency room to have her checked out. Maddie was evaluated for appendicitis, which she did not have, and given an IV with pharmaceuticals before being sent home.

Upon further investigation, Maddies discharge papers revealed that the childrens hospital where she was sent marked her condition as adverse effect of vaccine, initial encounter.

Over the next two-and-a-half months, her abdominal muscle and nerve pain became unbearable, Stephanie says about what came next.

She developed additional symptoms that included gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure and heart rate, memory loss  she mixes up words  brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting  she fell and hit her head  and then seizures.

Young Maddie then started to develop verbal motor tics, loss of feeling from the waist down, and muscle weakness, drastic changes in her vision, urinary retention and loss of bladder control, severe and heavy menstrual cycles, followed by having to have a feeding tube put in her mouth.

All of these symptoms are still here today, Stephanie says.

When Maddie was brought back to the hospital for a follow-up, doctors tried to say that she had a mental issue or was merely suffering from anxiety. Clearly her condition is a whole lot worse than that, based on the list of symptoms.

Over the past five months, Maddie has been to the ER nine times and has been hospitalized three times for a total of two months in the hospital, Stephanie further explained, noting that there are still no solutions and nobody even seems to be looking for any.

All Stephanie and her daughter want are answers, and for someone to help them figure out how to get Maddie back to as close to normal as possible. We hope for the same.

The latest news stories about Chinese Virus injection-caused injuries and deaths can be found at ChemicalViolence.com.

The CovidVaccineReactions.com website also has the latest data and information about Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccine injuries.

Sources for this article include:

HumansAreFree.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Richard Frye, a common pleas judge in Franklin County, Ohio, has ruled in his three most recent cases that Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccination will now be mandatory as a condition of probation for defendants.

In each of these cases, Frye openly discussed the topic of Chinese Virus injection with the defendants, explaining to them that he believes it is a reasonable condition of probation that they roll up their sleeves and alter their DNA.

It occurred to me that at least some of these folks need to be encouraged not to procrastinate, Frye told the Columbus Dispatch. I think its a reasonable condition when were telling people to get employed and be out in the community.

Even though Wuhan Flu shots admittedly do not stop the spread, nor do they prevent infection  Fauci Flu shots are also spreading more disease  Frye personally believes that requiring them is normal and acceptable in the land of the free.

In one of the cases, a man named Cameron Stringer entered a guilty plea for one charge of improperly handling firearms in a motor vehicle, for which he was sentenced to two years of probation. In order to receive probation, however, Stringer had to have his genes modified with Trump Vaccine.

To assist with his ability to gain employment, court documents show about Stringers case, Defendant must get the COVID 19 vaccine within 30 days and provide proof to Probation Department.

Just say no to experimental drugs from the government and Big Pharma

Fryes ruling in this case along with the others amounts to forced medical experimentation, much like what fascist dictators in the past did to concentration camp prisoners.

The only difference today is that America has become one giant concentration camp where everyone is being told they must get injected in order to flatten the curve, or whatever other mindless catch phrase is being thrown around on any given day.

Now we are having to contend with something that the mainstream media and government are calling the delta variant, which is supposedly some mutation of the Chinese Virus that originated in India.

Next it will be something else, and so on and so forth, until everyone is goaded in one way or another  or forced, in the case of the Franklin County legal system  to get injected for Chinese Germs.

This type of thing has happened many times in the past, but usually it was done under the pretext of war. In this case, the government has decided to pretend as though medical fascism is a form of public health, and that this is all for our own good.

A much more thorough breakdown of Americas extensive history of medical experimentation on people can be found at this link.

Frye, it turns out, is a Beijing Biden supporter who is just doing his part to help Hunters dad try to achieve his goal of injecting at least 70 percent of America by Independence Day.

This plan is failing miserably as those Americans who are currently unvaccinated have chosen to remain that way. They are not hesitant and are merely exercising their right to just say no to drugs, especially the experimental kind that were hatched in communist Chinese laboratories.

A phallic object forcibly penetrating your body and injecting foreign substances into you against your will: sounds a lot like rape! wrote one Breitbart News commenter about the Fauci Ouchie needles.

What ever happened to my body, my choice? Is pro-choice only for murdering helpless children?

To learn more about how the medical fascists are stopping at nothing to push Chinese Virus jabs, visit ChemicalViolence.com.

Sources for this article include:

Breitbart.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Algorithms played a part in the massive growth of online retail giant Amazon. Its CEO, Jeff Bezos, defended the use of machines and algorithms by saying they decide more quickly and accurately than actual human beings. As a result, the company relied on software to oversee workers at its warehouse and track drivers delivering products to customers. However, the same machines Amazon trusted for its human resources operations terminated employees for small slip-ups beyond their control.

BloombergQuint interviewed three former Amazon employees who received the dreaded two words  youre fired  from an automated system.

Stephen Normandin

Sixty-three-year-old Army veteran Stephen Normandin spent almost four years delivering packages as a contract driver for Amazon Flex. The Arizona native banked on his previous experience delivering newspapers in the morning and pizzas at night for his Amazon stint. Given his experience, Normandin already knew all the shortcuts to take and traffic choke points to avoid. The veteran enjoyed stellar ratings  owing to his systematic method of sorting packages before leaving.

However, a string of setbacks hit Normandin starting August 2020. These included deliveries to still-locked apartment complexes and an Amazon locker that could not be opened. Two months later, Normandin was unable to log on to the Amazon Flex platform. He then checked his email and saw a generic email from Gangardhar M. informing him of his termination.

The veteran engaged in a back-and-forth exchange of emails with Amazon to appeal his termination, but in vain. Normandin, who prided himself on a strong work ethic, said he took the termination hard. Im an old-school kind of guy and I give every job 110 percent. This really upset me because were talking about my reputation. They say I didnt do the job when I know damn well I did.

Ryan Cope

Drivers who sign up for the Amazon Flex program are considered independent contractors. As a result, they have little recourse when they believe the algorithm deactivated them unfairly. While drivers can pay $200 to take the dispute to arbitration, only a few did so as they see it as a waste of time and money.

Twenty-nine-year-old Ryan Cope was among drivers unfairly deactivated in 2019. But he did not bother arguing or shelling out the money for arbitration. By the time he was deactivated, Cope had already made up his mind that there was no way he could meet the algorithms demands. Whenever theres an issue, theres no support. Its you against the machine, so you dont even try, he lamented.

Whenever he drove along roads outside Denver in the snow, Cope often shook his head in disbelief that Amazon expected the customer to get their package within two hours. He said: Amazon doesnt care. [It knows] most people will get their packages, and the two or three percent who dont will get something eventually.

Neddra Lira

Forty-two-year-old school bus driver Neddra Lira first signed up for Amazon Flex in 2017. The mother of three took the side gig during holiday breaks and summers to earn extra money. Lira tuned to the platform full-time when the pandemic caused schools to be closed. She remembered delivering about 8,000 packages and getting a great performance rating most of the time.

Lira said she sometimes had to wait for an hour due to the number of drivers queued outside the delivery station. When she spotted a nail in her tire, Amazon told her to return the packages assigned to her to the station  at the cost of her driver rating. Despite this, she received emails time and time again that said her rating was fine.

But an email sent by Bhanu Prakash informed her that she violated Amazon Flexs terms of service  which disqualified her from further participating in the program. She then appealed the termination, but only received automated replies. The final email Lira received affirmed her firing and wished her success in future endeavors.

Liras termination carried serious consequences. She stopped paying her mortgage and her vehicle was repossessed in December 2020. She was forced to go on welfare to pay her bills. Eventually, Lira resumed her bus driver stint and used most of a pandemic stimulus check to get her car back. It just wasnt fair. I nearly lost my house, she lamented.

Amazon engineers failed to consider the human factor

Company spokeswoman Kate Kudrna called drivers claims of unfair termination and poor treatment as anecdotal in a statement. She added that the single stories do not represent the experience of the majority of Amazon 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, Kudrna said.

A former Amazon engineer said the program is considered a great success internally, with benefits far outweighing the collateral damage. But former managers expressed a different view, saying the largely automated system fails to consider the real-world challenges drivers face every day.

They added that Amazon knew delegating work to machines would lead to mistakes and damaging headlines. But ultimately, company management decided it was cheaper to trust the algorithms than pay for investigations on mistaken terminations  so long as drivers could be replaced easily.

Referring to the computer engineers who designed the algorithms that tracked, rated and fired him, Normandin said: It seems they dont have any common sense about how the real world works.

JeffBezosWatch.com has more stories about Amazons unfair treatment of its employees.

Sources include:

BloombergQuint.com

TheSun.co.uk
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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.
Amesbury - Lorraine I. (Eaton-Clark) Short (95) died at Vero Health Nursing Home in Amesbury on June 23, 2021. She was born in Newburyport on January 13th 1926. She was the daughter of Samuel and Alberta Eaton of Amesbury and the sister of Shirley Webber of Newburyport. She leaves three chil
By PTI

NEW DELHI: India has initiated a probe into alleged dumping of electrogalvanized steel, used in auto and electronics industries, from Korea, Japan, Singapore following a complaint by a domestic company.

American Precoat Speciality Pvt Ltd has filed an application before the Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) for investigation of anti-dumping duty concerning the imports of electrogalvanized steel from the three countries.

The directorate, under the Commerce Ministry, will see whether the product is being dumped by firms of these nations in India and if it is impacting the domestic industry.

If it is established in the probe that the dumping is denting margins of the domestic firm, the DGTR would recommend anti-dumping duty with a view to guard local industry from cheap imports.

"The authority, hereby, initiates an investigation to determine the existence, degree and effect of any alleged dumping in respect of the subject goods originating in or exported from the subject countries and to recommend the amount of anti-dumping duty, which if levied, would be adequate to remove the injury to the domestic industry," it has said.

The DGTR is also probing a similar case on imports of Clear Float Glass from Bangladesh and Thailand.

Asahi India Glass Ltd, Gold Plus Glass Industry, Sisecam Flat Glass India, and Saint-Gobain India have filed the application for the probe and imposition of the duty.

The product finds major uses in construction, refrigeration, mirror and solar energy industries etc.

It is a superior quality of glass.

Further the directorate has initiated a sunset-review investigation concerning imports of jute products from Bangladesh and Nepal.

Indian Jute Mills Association has alleged likelihood of continuation or recurrence of dumping of the goods from these two neighbouring countries if the existing duty would be ended.

"The authority hereby initiates sunset review investigation to review the need for continued imposition of the duties in force in respect of subject goods (jute products), originating in or exported from the subject countries and to determine whether expiry of existing anti-dumping duty is likely to lead to continuation or recurrence of dumping and consequent injury to the domestic industry," it added.

Countries carry out anti-dumping probes to determine if their domestic industries have been hurt because of a surge in below-cost imports.

As a counter-measure, they impose duties under the multilateral regime of the World Trade Organization.

The duty is also aimed at ensuring fair trading practises and creating a level-playing field for domestic producers with regard to foreign producers and exporters.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: A day after joining the OECD-G20 framework for global minimum tax, the Finance Ministry on Friday said some significant issues including share of profit allocation and scope of subject to tax rules are yet to be addressed and a 'consensus agreement' is expected by October after working out the technical details of the proposal.

Total 130 countries on Thursday agreed to an overhaul of global tax norms to ensure that multinational firms pay taxes wherever they operate and at a minimum 15 per cent rate.

India is in favour of a consensus solution that is simple to implement and simple to comply with.

At the same time, the solution should result in the allocation of meaningful and sustainable revenue to market jurisdictions, particularly for developing and emerging economies, the Ministry said.

In a statement, the Finance Ministry said a majority of members of the OECD-G20 Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (including India) adopted on Thursday, a high-level statement containing an outline of a consensus solution to address the tax challenges arising from the digitalisation of the economy.

The proposed solution consists of two components -- Pillar One, which is about reallocation of an additional share of profit to the market jurisdictions and Pillar Two consisting of minimum tax and subject to tax rules.

"Some significant issues including share of profit allocation and scope of subject to tax rules, remain open and need to be addressed.

Further, the technical details of the proposal will be worked out in the coming months and a consensus agreement is expected by October," the Ministry said.

The principles underlying the solution vindicates India's stand for a greater share of profits for the markets, consideration of demand-side factors in profit allocation, the need to seriously address the issue of cross border profit shifting and the need for subject to tax rule to stop treaty shopping.

"India is in favour of a consensus solution which is simple to implement and simple to comply.

At the same time, the solution should result in the allocation of meaningful and sustainable revenue to market jurisdictions, particularly for developing and emerging economies.

"India will continue to be constructively engaged for reaching a consensus-based, ready-to-implement solution with Pillar one and Pillar two as a package by October and contribute positively for the advancement of the international tax agenda," the ministry added.

Last month, a group of seven developed (G-7) countries, comprising the US, UK, Germany, France, Canada, Italy and Japan, had reached a landmark deal on taxing multinational companies as per which the minimum global tax rate would be at least 15 per cent.

They also agreed to put in place measures to ensure businesses pay taxes in the countries where they operate, a move aimed at plugging loopholes in cross-border taxation.

Following this, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on Thursday hosted talks on cross-border taxation of MNCs in which majority of the countries, except Ireland and Hungary, agreed to sign the deal.

The G20 group of developed and emerging economies will discuss this on July 9-10 in Venice, Italy.

Deloitte India Partner Sumit Singhania said the consensus reached by OECD Inclusive Framework will accelerate the ongoing efforts to reset nearly a century-old international tax rules enshrined in bilateral tax treaties.

"Latest agreement on Pillar 1 solution provides an objective in-scope definition for largest (sales more than 20 billion Euros) and most profitable (more than 10 per cent global profitability) MNEs to be subject to new nexus and profit allocation rules. A 20 to 30 per cent allocation of supernormal profits to market jurisdictions is definitely a decent bargain for a large number of source jurisdictions," he added.

The finality dawning on multilateral negotiations will also pave the way for phasing out of unilateral measures like digital service tax and any like measure such as equalisation levy in India context.

Moreover, Pillar one will drive simpler cross border tax compliances as taxes are to be allocated amongst jurisdictions through central allocation formula, Singhania added.

"On the flip side, timelines for both Pillars to come into effect from 2023, does appear a touch ambitious and within that, multinational enterprises (MNEs) will have a lot of work to do to gear up to the new global tax rules," he said.
Harish Murali By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: The Madras High Court on Friday wondered why it should not order the Justice Arumugasamy Commission, investigating the demise of former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, to file its report within three months.

The petitioner Thondan Subramani had urged the court to direct the authorities to wind up the commission, saying it is defunct and public money is being spent on it.

The petitioner said as per the government order dated August 25, 2017, the commission was supposed to complete its inquiry and submit a report in both English and Tamil in three months from the date of notification of the order. However, the term of the commission was extended from time to time.

ALSO READ: Right to practise religion can take backseat when right to life is under threat, says Madras HC

Meanwhile, the management of Apollo Hospitals, where Jayalalithaa died, approached the Supreme Court regarding the correctness of the commissions probe, particularly into the adequacy of the medical treatment provided to her.

There was no progress in the proceedings of the commission for the past two years. But taxpayers money is still being spent on the commission which is defunct now, the advocate M Gnanasekar representing the petitioner said.

He added that neither the state government nor the commission had moved the apex court to take steps to vacate the interim stay.

The government advocate P Muthukumar submitted that there is a Special Leave Petition (SLP) pending at the Supreme Court since 2019.

The first bench comprising Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy admitted the plea and ordered notice to the state to file a detailed report in six weeks.

On this, the bench ordered the state to indicate in the report as to why the commission should not be directed to file its final report and wind up its business within the next three months.

The court adjourned the plea to September for the state to make its submissions.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: Those breaching traffic rules in Anna Nagar will now get an e-challan sent to their mobile number. The new facility is the result of the integration of Traffic Regulation Observed Zone (TROZ) with National Informatics Centre (NIC). Traffic-rule violators are identified with the help of advanced-surveillance cameras that capture number plates of their motor vehicles, sources said.

Since the e-challan is uploaded to the government database, the traffic-rule violators will have to pay it if caught by police anywhere or during any transaction with government transport department.

Police Commissioner Shankar Jiwal introduced the system on a trial basis in Anna Nagar and Thirumangalam areas and said it would be extended to other parts of the city.

The integration of TROZ, NIC and Vahan was underway for over two years. The Centre recently approved it, he said, after inaugurating the Upgraded Automated Regulation Observation Zone Control Room.

Began in 2019 when AK Viswanathan was the police commissioner, the TROZ system was integrated with NIC to provide enhanced road safety and traffic management.

Hyundai Motor India Foundation (HMIF) invested Rs 3.18 Cr in the surveillance system project and installed 63 sophisticated cameras and a fully equipped monitoring room to strengthen road discipline and reduce the offence rate.

The system has now been upgraded to automatically generate e-challans to motorists violating traffic rules like signal jumps, crossing the stoplines, driving on the wrong side and over-speeding. The cameras would click an image of the vehicle and, after reading the number plate, would find the owner of the vehicle through the integrated system as it contains details from the transport department and vehicle registration office.

After identifying the motorist, an e-challan generated by the machine would be sent to the motorists mobile number; a notice would be sent home. In the manual system, traffic police used to book 200-250 cases a day within police station limits. The trial run of the new system may lead to booking of 90,000-1,00,000 cases a day. The enforcement level may increase by 300 times. This is a pilot project here. We are planning to extend across the city, said Shankar Jiwal.

He added that the city police is planning to upgrade the system to capture helmet-rule violation and triple riding. He also said that the police department would welcome any corporate company ready to sponsor installation of CCTV or any other surveillance cameras in the city.

Ganesh Mani S, Trustee  Hyundai Motor India Foundation, said: Integration of Traffic Regulation Observed Zone with National Informatics Centre will support the Traffic authorities and will be beneficial to the society at large. After TROZ was launched in Anna Nagar, traffic-rule violations were slashed by over 50 per cent right after implementation, and stopline violations reduced by over 90 per cent.
By Express News Service

KOCHI: A 22-year-old woman has been subjected to brutal physical assault and mental torture by her husband and mother-in-law several times since her marriage on October 22 last year demanding more dowry. Her two sisters-in-law allegedly extended all support to the duo in the harassment, as per the complaint lodged by Nehelath, a native of Alangad, with the Aluva West police.

The police registered a case against five persons including her husband Mohammed Ali Jowhar, 28, and mother-in-law Subaida, 55, on Thursday. Besides, sisters-in-law Shebeena and Shereena and Jowhars friend Muhtas also were booked in the case registered under Sections 498 (A) (husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and 324 (voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or other means) of the Indian Penal Code.

As per the complaint, the woman had been harassed by her husband and mother-in-law demanding more dowry. The duo even used to complain her complexion.The woman is four-and-a-half months pregnant. Police visited the hospital at Aluva where the woman is admitted after she complained of the assault. Jowhar is yet to be traced.

The assault came to light after Salim, father of the victim, arrived at the house of Nehalath and Jowhar at South Mariyapadi around 3.30pm on Wednesday. Jowhar hit the victim on her face and kicked her stomach. On seeing this, Salim intervened, but he was also beaten up by Jowhar. Jowhar hit his forehead using a stick. His mother and friend Muhtas also assaulted Salim, said an officer. Salim has also been admitted at the hospital along with the victim.

It is learnt that the victims family had already given the accused a sum of Rs 10 lakh as dowry, but he had been demanding more money. Of late, Jowhar started torturing her also demanding the sale of the house bought with the dowry money. Ramla, mother of the victim, said Jowhar had been torturing her daughter along with his mother and sisters.

Police said a report will be submitted to the Ernakulam Rural SP after a preliminary inquiry and the arrest of the accused will be recorded soon. The Kerala State Womens Commission has directed the police to file a report within a week on the incident and carry out a probe. The woman approached the Ernakulam Rural Police womens cell with a complaint on Wednesday, which was later handed over to Aluva West police.
By Express News Service

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Congress has decided to intensify protest against the Centre and state government on fuel price hike. As per the directive of the central Congress leadership, the state Congress will be holding their next round of protest during July 7 - 17 at the block, district and state levels.

State Congress president K Sudhakaran said apart from holding state-level protest, a cycle rally at the district level and a mass signature drive will be held near petrol pumps. The respective district committees will organise a mass signature campaign and hand it over to the state Congress leadership. Opposition Leader, MPs, MLAs, leaders of feeder organisations like Youth Congress, Mahila Congress and KSU will also take part in the statewide protest.
By PTI

KOLKATA: Actors have always been the prime target of online trolls for reasons ranging from weight, outfit, personal life to even complexion. While some respond on social media, others choose to ignore them.

Bengali TV actor Shruti Das, often targeted for her dusky skin tone, however, could not take it lying down anymore and filed a cyber complaint with the Kolkata Police on Thursday.

Das, who debuted in 2019 in Bengali soap 'Trinayani', said she had been shamed for her skin tone for the last two years but it reached a point where she could not take it anymore as the attacks were becoming more and more personal.

"Initially, everyone around asked me to ignore the trolls, and so did I. But it only got more vicious with time. I am in a steady relationship with the director of my first TV serial 'Trinayani', and the hate brigade, after getting to know that, has been making distasteful remarks, questioning my character and my talent.

"I thought if I take it lying down any further, it would only give them more reasons to continue with this hatred," the 25-year-old woman, who now plays the lead in 'Desher Maati', told PTI. The actor, who tagged the Kolkata Police on Facebook to draw attention to the nasty comments targeted at her, was told to email the details to its cyber cell.

A senior police officer said the matter was being looked into. "The cyber cell of the Kolkata Police has received an email from actor Shruti Das regarding the online abuse that she had been facing because of her dusky skin tone. "The actor, in her complaint, has said she had been receiving such hatred since 2019. She has also attached screenshots of the social media comments," the officer said.

Das noted that many in the industry, too, had made her skin tone a topic of discussion, with some from the production units having said that she wouldn't have got her second gig, if she wasn't given the right kind of makeup and presentation in the first soap.

She further pointed out that she wasn't the first actor to have faced the brunt for her skin colour. "Some of my seniors, who are now household names, have gone through similar predicaments for their complexion," Das maintained.

Film and TV actor Parno Mitra, when approached, said that it was a matter of shame that people get targeted for their skin tone in a country like India, where most of the people are brown. "With the advertising world, media and film industries having glorified light skin colour for so long, it is but natural that this prejudice against skin colour still exists. Often, we are told to put on makeup in a way that would make our skin tone a few shades lighter. I usually avoid too much makeup," Mitra said.

Das's beau and director Swarnendu Samaddar said he had tried to shut the trolls on social media from time to time, but that barely helped. "Looks alone cannot ensure success in the industry. Talent matters more than anything else. Not just Shruti, there are several others who have made a name for themselves by sheer dint of talent. Trolls keep making offensive remarks with no regard for an individual's sentiments. Strong action should be initiated against them," he said.

Echoing him, Leena Gangopadhyay, scriptwriter and chairperson of the West Bengal Commission for Women, said trolls and memes are welcome as long as they don't get personal or spew hatred. "Such vicious attacks should be stopped before things get out of control. Exemplary punishment should be meted out to people who make such offensive remarks. We will speak to cyber cell officers in this matter," Gangopadhyay told PTI.

Cyber law expert Bivas Chatterjee said legislations involving online crime and bullying need to be strengthened in the country. "Almost 98 per cent of online crimes go unreported. I am glad Shruti Das spoke about it and filed a complaint. Action could be taken against her trolls if they have made obscene comments, the law provides for that," he added.
Sumi Sukanya Dutta By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Conceding that the projection of 216 crore Covid vaccine doses between August and December this year was aspirational, the government on Friday conceded that the figure revised to 135 crore doses in the Supreme Court may be more realistic.

In a press conference on Covid status in the country by the Union ministry of health and family welfare, senior authorities said that these projections should be seen in the "right context.

In May, the government had projected 216 crore Covid19 vaccine doses for India in the last five months this year but in a submission before the apex court on June 26, the target figure was lowered to 135 crore.

The earlier estimate of 216 crore vaccine doses between August and December 2021 was an aspirational or optimistic one, said VK Paul, member (health), Niti Aayog and chairman of the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for Covid.

The figures should be seen in the right context as this is a dynamic situation.

Paul further added that when the government proposed the estimate of 216 crore vaccines between August and December this year, it had collated the figures provided by vaccine makers, through their responsible, optimistic and aspirational roadmap.

ALSO READ | Now, pregnant women too can take Covid vaccine, says Centre

The private sector is very influential in India; they have such a major contribution to the GDP. They are reputed vaccine-maker conglomerates. We collated what they showed," he said.

The official added that in its earlier estimate of 216 crore vaccine doses, the government had taken into account the future availability of Biological E, Zydus Cadilas DNA vaccine, Novavax and Bharat Biotech's nasal vaccines.

But as far as the main vaccine makers - Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech -- are concerned, at present 90 crore vaccine doses are estimated from each and this can also go up, he said.

As per the affidavit filed in the court, the Centre has now projected availability of 50 crore doses of Covishield and 40 crore doses of Covaxin between August-December. In addition, 30 crore doses of vaccine by Bio E, 10 crore doses of Sputnik V and 5 crore doses of vaccine by Zydus Cadila are also slated to be available.

The government also claimed that the vaccination drive will get a further boost if it succeeds in its attempts to procure vaccines available outside India such as vaccines of Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna.

It is submitted that for the purpose of procurement of these vaccines from abroad, efforts are ongoing at the level of the highest political executive in the country and also at the highest diplomatic level, read the affidavit.

The Centre had maintained that since these efforts are at a very advanced stage, it is not possible to give comprehensive details but as and when these efforts materialise, the speed of vaccination will be further augmented and enhanced.
By PTI

KOLKATA: Taking note of an interim report of an NHRC committee ordered by it to probe post-poll violence in West Bengal, the Calcutta High Court on Friday directed a second autopsy of a BJP labour wing leader and issued a show- cause notice to a deputy commissioner of the Kolkata Police as to why contempt proceedings will not be initiated against him.

The BJP trade union leader was allegedly killed in the post-poll violence in Kolkata.

A five-judge bench hearing a bunch of PILs alleging atrocities in post-poll violence in the state, accepted a request by the committee for further time to carry out investigation, while maintaining that early action in the matter is expected as delay may result in destruction of evidence.

"Let a notice be issued to Rashid Munir Khan, Deputy Commissioner of Police, South Suburban Division, Kolkata to show cause as to why proceedings for contempt be not initiated against him for violation of the order passed by this court on June 18, 2021," the bench ordered.

The interim report mentioned that Atif Rasheed, a member of the committee was obstructed from discharging his duty when he and his team members were attacked by goons on June 29 in Jadavpur area which falls under the city police's South Suburban Division, the court noted.

The high court on June 18 directed the NHRC to set up a committee to examine all cases with regard to alleged human rights violations during post-poll violence in West Bengal.

The court directed the state government to provide all logistic support to the committee wherever and whenever they wish to visit any place and to ensure there is no obstruction of any kind in this process.

"Such obstruction will be viewed seriously, which may entail action under the Contempt of Courts Act besides others," the bench said in its order.

The bench, comprising Acting Chief Justice Rajesh Bindal and justices I P Mukerji, Harish Tandon, Soumen Sen and Subrata Talukdar directed the police to register cases in all matters which have either been reported to it or have been placed before the NHRC or any other authority.

The court directed that steps be taken to get the statements of the victims recorded under Section 164 CrPC immediately, as per law.

It ordered a second autopsy of Abhijit Sarkar, vice president of Bharatiya Mazdoor Trade Union Council in Kolkata, whose body is lying in the mortuary of a hospital, by a team of doctors to be constituted by the head of the Command Hospital here.

The family of Sarkar demanded a second autopsy, which was not acceded to by the police and the administration.

The state was directed to make all arrangements for medical treatment of all who have been injured in the violence, post assembly elections.

The bench ordered that the information asked for by the committee from different authorities of the state, be supplied immediately, maintaining that any delay may call for adverse inference.

"From a perusal of the report prima facie stand taken by the petitioners is established that there had been post- poll violence and the state was found on a wrong foot, where throughout it was on a denial mode," the bench observed.

The committee filed an initial report in a sealed cover before the court on June 30 as per its direction.

The bench said that a perusal of the report established the allegations of the petitioners in the PIL that a number of persons were killed in violence and many suffered sexual violence and grievous injuries, including minor girls who were "brutally assaulted sexually".

A bunch of PILs filed before the high court had alleged displacement of people from their residences, physical assault, destruction of property and ransacking of places of business owing to post-poll violence in the state.

The five-judge bench had directed that the committee will examine all the cases, the complaints of which have already been received by the NHRC or which may be received, and "may be by visiting the affected areas" submit a comprehensive report before it about the present situation.

The committee would also suggest the steps to be taken to ensure confidence of the people and so that they can peacefully live in their houses and also carry on their occupation or business to earn their livelihood, the bench directed.
By PTI

KOLKATA: In an unprecedented development, Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar was on Friday forced to cut short his inaugural address at the newly formed assembly amid ruckus by opposition BJP MLAs who took offence after finding "no mention" of post-poll violence in the speech.

Dhankhar, who arrived at the assembly in the afternoon to deliver the inaugural address, could barely speak for four minutes as BJP MLAs, carrying posters and pictures of alleged victims of post-poll violence, rushed to the well of the House to stage a protest.

According to assembly sources, the governor began his speech at 2 pm and ended it at 2.04 pm, as his voice became inaudible amid the ongoing commotion.

He then tabled the speech and left for the day.

Dhankhar was escorted to his car by Speaker Biman Banerjee and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari, while talking to reporters, said BJP legislators "had no option but to stage a protest after finding no mention of post-poll violence in the governor's speech", copies of which were circulated among the legislators.

"The speech, drafted by the TMC dispensation, said there has been no case of any violence, rape or attack on women after the party formed its new government in the state.

"All incidents of violence, according to the speech, took place before the new government was sworn in. We had to protest against this blatant lie," Adhikari maintained.

Lauding the governor for raising his voice against cases of post-poll violence in the state over the past one month, the BJP leader claimed that the TMC government was "trying to suppress the truth".

"We don't blame the governor. He was forced to read out the speech prepared by the state government," Adhikari said, adding that his party wants to hold day-long discussions in the House on post-poll violence and the recently held fake vaccination drive in the city.

"During an all-party meeting, we had put forth these demands, but none of them was addressed. We will continue to hold protests if our demand for discussion is not met with," he said.

Reacting to BJP's protest, the TMC said the saffron party has set a "new precedence in anarchy".

"What they (BJP MLAs) did today is unprecedented and unacceptable in a parliamentary democracy," TMC chief whip Nirmal Ghosh pointed out.

According to Raj Bhavan sources, Dhankar had raised a few questions over the inaugural speech, to which Banerjee said that the state cabinet has approved the draft.

Dhankar, who has, on occasions, criticised the TMC government over post-poll violence, also sought the inclusion of the matter in the speech, but his request was apparently turned down.

The business of the House, which began with the governor's address on Friday, will continue till July 8.

The state budget for 2021-22 is likely to be placed in the House on July 7.

The assembly's inaugural session during the day also saw the chief minister and her bete noire Adhikari coming face-to-face for the first time since the elections.

In the March-April hustings, The TMC pocketed 213 seats and the BJP 77.

One seat was bagged by newly formed ISF.

Once considered a protege of Banerjee, Adhikari switched over to the BJP ahead of the assembly polls and defeated the chief minister from the high-profile Nandigram seat by a slender margin.

Banerjee has, however, moved the court challenging the election result in Nandigram.
By ANI

DEHRADUN: Uttarakhand government cancelled the annual Kanwar Yatra to Haridwar in the month of Sawan due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

State government spokesperson Subodh Uniyal said the government has decided to cancel the Kanwar Yatra as a precautionary measure. Last year too, the yatra was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The 'Kanwar Yatra' is an annual pilgrimage of Lord Shiva's devotees.

This time every year during the Hindu calendar month of 'Saavan', thousands of devotees from across India, undertake the pilgrimage called 'Kanwar Yatra'.

These pilgrims visit Haridwar, Gaumukh, and Gangotri in Uttarakhand and Sultanganj in Bihar to fetch the waters of river Ganga, which is is dispensed as offerings to Lord Shiva in temples.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: A drone was spotted over the Indian High Commission complex in Islamabad late last week, prompting India to lodge a strong protest with Pakistan over the incident, people familiar with the development said on Friday.

They said India considered the incident as a breach of security that triggered concerns in the mission.

The Indian mission has already taken up the issue strongly with the Pakistani authorities through a note verbale.

There was no official comment on the incident yet that came to light amid growing concerns in the security establishment in India after explosives-laden drones were used to carry out an attack on the Jammu Air Force station on June 27.

ALSO READ: Border Security Force opens fire after Pakistani drone spotted on IB in Jammu

According to security officials, it was the first instance of suspected Pakistan-based terrorists deploying unmanned aerial vehicles to strike at vital installations in India.

Army Chief Gen MM Naravane on Thursday said that the easy availability of drones has increased the complexity of security challenges from both state and state-sponsored actors.

A day after the attack on the Air Force station attempts to target the Ratnuchak-Kaluchak military station in Jammu with drones was thwarted by soldiers.
Harpreeet Bajwa By

Express News Service

CHANDIGARH: Former Haryana chief minister and Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) chief Om Prakash Chautala, jailed in connection with a teacher recruitment scam, walked out of Delhis Tihar Jail on Friday after serving his sentence. The 86-year-old Jat leaders release could change the way politics plays out in the state, especially at this juncture when the farm agitation is building up again and panchayat polls are scheduled soon.

Chautalas release appears to have infused a new energy in his party workers and supporters. Hundreds of them gathered at Delhi-Gurugram border to welcome their leader and started beating drums, raising slogans and showering flower petals as soon as his cavalcade arrived.

The INLD veteran said he would continue to fight or the poor and the farmers.

The biggest challenge for Chautala will be to regain the lost ground, with the upcoming panchayat polls being his first test. He is faced with the task of consolidating his Jat vote bank again and re-building the party from the grassroots.

During his incarceration, the INLD suffered a major setback as a family feud broke up the party and JJP was formed in December 2018.The JJP won 10 seats in the 2019 assembly polls and Chautalas grandson Dushyant Chautala becoming Deputy CM as the JJP joined hands with the BJP to form government.

The INLDs lone MLA, Chautalas elder son Abhay Chautala, resigned from the assembly in January in solidarity with the protesting farmers. In Chautalas absence, former CM and Congress leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda had assumed the Jat leadership. But with the BJP coming into power and M L Khattar becoming CM, Jat dominance in power was weakened.
Sumi Sukanya Dutta By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Senior government officials on Friday said both doses of vaccines provide at least 98% protection from Covid-19 death, citing a study carried out by the PGIMER, Chandigarh, in association with the Punjab government.

This real-life study has been carried out among police personnel of the state.

The researcher showed that 15 deaths were reported among 4,868 non-vaccinated persons while this figure fell to 9 among 35,856 people who had received one dose.

The number of deaths fell to only 2 among 42,720 individuals who had received both their doses, said VK Paul, member (health), Niti Aayog, and chairman of the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for Covid.

ALSO READ | Now, pregnant women too can take Covid vaccine, says Centre

In other words, while the incidence of death was 3.08 per thousand population in the unvaccinated, it was 0.25 per thousand in those with partial vaccination and 0.005 per thousand in those fully vaccinated.

In relative terms, this study showed that partial vaccination offered 92 % protection from death due to Covid19 in those with one dose of vaccination and 98 % protection from death in those who were fully vaccinated.

Last month, citing the first studies from India from healthcare workers, Paul had underlined that Covid19 vaccines offer substantial risk reduction against hospitalisation, ICU care, and the need for oxygen.

These studies had come out from PGI, Chandigarh, and Christian Medical College, Vellore, and showed that vaccination offered a 75-80 % risk reduction against hospitalisation from infection in vaccinated individuals, as compared to those unvaccinated.

The government is repeatedly citing the findings from such studies to give an impetus to its ongoing Covid vaccination drive and remove the vaccine hesitancy from a section of people.

ALSO WATCH | How Mumbai, India's most crowded city, beat the odds, and the coronavirus:
By Express News Service

KOLKATA: The Governor-West Bengal government conflict hit a new low on Thursday. Trinamool Congress saw mystery behind the death of Surendra Kumar Jain, a key accused in the Jain hawala case, two days after CM Mamata Banerjee branded Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar a corrupt man, claiming his name was mentioned in hawala charge sheet.

The main accused died. Now the question is  is this death normal or is there something else behind it? It should be investigated. The name Dhankar is linked with the incident involving the protection of the country, the protection of the people. Is this man the Governor of Bengal? Our Governor is still not giving any answer, asked TMC Rajya Sabha MP Sukhendu Sekhar Roy.

The hawala shadow of the 90s cast its shadow on the Bengal politics after Mamata hit out at the Governor shortly after his north Bengal visit. Incidentally, after the arrest of Hizbul militant Ashfaq Hussain Lone from Kashmir in 1991, it was learnt that the fund came into the account of the terrorist outfit through hawala and the money came through a businessman identified as Surendra Kumar Jain.

During searches, two diaries and two notebooks of Jains were recovered. The documents revealed a list of recipients mentioning a name, Dhankhar. The same day, the TMC released a picture of Arvind Vaidya, the security guard of a fake IAS officer, who was arrested for running a fake vaccination camp. In this picture, Vaidya is seen with Dhankhar.

Gifts and envelopes were delivered to the palace (Raj Bhavan) through the security guard, Roy alleged.

In his response on the day Mamata attacked him, Dhankhar said her allegation came minutes after he asked her to make changes in the draft of his Assembly speech to be delivered on July 2.

Post-poll violence: SC notice to Centre, Bengal



The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice on a plea seeking for an inquiry into the post-poll violence in Bengal. A bench headed by Justice Vineet Saran issued notice to the Centre, Bengal, and the EC. The plea submits that thousands of residents are being terrorised, penalized and tortured by workers of the Trinamool for supporting the BJP. The plea submits that TMC supporters and workers started creating chaos, unrest and set the house and properties of Hindus on fire for supporting BJP.
By ANI

NEW DELHI: India on Friday said that it is closely monitoring legal proceedings against fugitive businessmen Mehul Choksi, and Nirav Modi.

In a media briefing, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said, "We are of course closely monitoring the ongoing legal proceedings in both cases," when asked about the latest update on Mehul and Nirav.

Choksi, who is currently in Dominica facing trial, went missing from Antigua on May 23 and was caught in Dominica. He was charged with illegal entry into Dominica by police after he allegedly fled Antigua and Barbuda in a possible attempt to avoid extradition to India. The 62-year-old fugitive is wanted in India in connection with the Rs 13,500 crore fraud in Punjab National Bank.

ALSO READ | 'Total nonsense': Dominica PM on claims that his govt was involved in Mehul Choksi's abduction

Meanwhile, Nirav Modi is currently held at Wandsworth prison in South London where he has been lodged since his arrest in London in March 2019 in connection with the largest bank fraud perpetrated in India.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday transferred seized assets worth Rs 9,371.17 crore in cases related to Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, and Choksi, to public sector banks and the central government. Assets worth Rs 18,170.02 crore have so far been seized by the ED.

Further, Bagchi also answered on the Indian objections on social media posts that targeted the Indian diplomats in Male.

He said, "Maldives Foreign Ministry today issued a statement on the matter. The Maldivian Democratic Party has also issued a statement. I think that answers the question."

Maldives Foreign Ministry has requested local media to work in such a way that the country's diplomatic relations with other countries are not affected. The Foreign Ministry made the request while the Indian High Commission in the Maldives has requested the ministry to take action against local media that publish content that criticizes India, reported AVAS.

A statement issued by the Foreign Ministry on Friday said recurring content recently published by some local media have targeted foreign ambassadors to the Maldives, diplomatic missions, and the member of the missions, and that such malicious content massacre the dignity of said individuals.

Such actions will affect the age-old relationships the Maldives enjoys with its bilateral partners and will create enmity and hatred in the hearts of Maldivian citizens towards its diplomatic partners.

Such actions will also endanger the diplomats and puts them at risk, while also affecting their performance and efficiency, said the statement.

The statement also referred to article 29 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which states that the receiving state of any diplomatic state must treat the agent with due respect, and take all appropriate steps to prevent any attack on his person, freedom, and dignity.

Therefore, all media are encouraged to work within the boundaries set by the international convention and in such a way that bilateral relations with foreign countries are not affected, said the statement.

AVAS has seen a copy of the written request sent to the Foreign Ministry by the Indian High Commission requesting to take action against local media.

The letter expressed concern over some articles published by local media and how they portrayed the neighbouring country in an unpleasant light.

It also said the High Commission's work was being hindered due to the articles, and that it attacked the dignity of the Indian High Commissioner to the Maldives, Sanjay Sudhir. Therefore, action must be taken against media that publish such content, the letter said, reported AVAS.
Vineet Upadhyay By

Express News Service

DEHRADUN: While whispers of various kinds are rife regarding Uttarakhand Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat's visit to Delhi to meet Bharatiya Janata Party's central leadership for by-elections, legal experts are divided on the situation.

Sources from the party told that most likely the CM was called to discuss his by-elections. Chief Minister who is MP from Pauri Lok Sabha seat was sworn in on March 10, 2021, has to enter the state assembly before September 10, 2021.

While no difference of opinion is there on the issue of CM's mandatory entry into the state assembly, whether by-elections can take place in the state has left legal experts divided.

Dr. Kartikey Hari Gupta, who holds a doctorate in law and practices in Uttarakhand Hugh Court as well as the Supreme Court told TNIE, "As per Article 164 (4) a minister who for any period of six consecutive months is not a member of the legislature of the state shall at the expiration of that period cease to be a minister. For this six months limitation, the Constitution does not differentiate between a minister and a Chief Minister hence this six months election requirement equally applies on the CM of the state."

Gupta further added that Section 150 of the Representation of Peoples Act 1951, in case of a vacancy in state legislative assembly makes it mandatory fot the Election Commission to call upon the assembly constituency concerned to elect a person for the purpose of filling the vacancy.

"It is a mandatory statutory function and there is no unlimited discretion provided to the Election Commission for not holding an Election. For the abovementioned mandatory duty, the only limitation is u/s 151 (A) which was inserted by a later amendment in the year 1996," elaborated Dr. Gupta.

The tenure of the present legislative assembly of the state of Uttarakhand comes to an end in March 2022.

Presently, the remainder of the term of two vacant assembly seats- Gangotri and Haldwani.

In both the cases, as per provision (a) Section  151 (A) time limitation shall not apply and as per the mandate of Section  150, the Election Commission is statutorily duty-bound to hold Election on the two vacant seats already.

Interestingly, only one such precedent exists in the history of independent India, said Gupta.

"The Case of SR Chaudhury Vs State of Punjab, the Supreme Court of India has interpreted this Article by saying that if a Minister fails to be elected to the legislature within the period of six months, he ceases to be such Minister and cannot be reappointed as Minister during the life of the same Legislature unless he has been elected to that Legislature. In this case, reappointment has been declared illegal by the Supreme Court of India," added Gupta.

Commenting on the issue, Avtar Singh Rawat, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court who also practices in the Uttarakhand High Court said, "If the vacant seat has a tenure of less than a year, the section 151a of the Act unambiguously states that the vacancy to the legislative assembly can be filled only in a case where the vacancy has arisen prior to the expiry of one year."

Further elaborating on the situation, Rawat added, "As of today, there are no vacant constituencies in the state with over 12 months of duration. There seems to be no other way to dissolve the assembly and announce elections."
Mayank Singh By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: A few days after a drone attack on the Indian Air Force base near Jammu, Army Chief General MM Naravane said that these will be used more often in future.

Drones will be increasingly used in all sorts of combat in the future, both by the state and non-state actors and we will have to factor this in all our future plans, General Naravane said on Thursday.

On June 27, in a first of its kind incident, two drones dropped payload on a building in the air base.

Talking about challenges, the General said easy availability of drones increases the complexity and challenges the armed forces have to face.

The Army has planned measures to handle this. All our troops on ground have been sensitised to this evolving threat and we are developing capabilities to deal with it, both in the kinetic and non-kinetic realms, said General Naravane.

Talking about the situation in Kashmir and along the Line of Control, the Army Chief said things have got better.

Ever since the ceasefire understanding between the two DGMOs in February this year, the situation in J&K has seen a marked improvement.

There has been little or no infiltration from across the Line of Control and the number of terror-related incidents in the Valley has also seen a considerable decline, General Naravane said.

I am sure some inimical elements would not like peace to prevail in the Valley.

Asked about the situation along the Line of Actual control in Eastern Ladakh, the Army Chief expressed hope that all issues will get resolved.

The situation on LAC has been normal for quite some time, ever since the disengagement took place in February this year from the northern and southern banks of Pangong Tso and as well as the Kailash Ranges. Since then, both sides have strictly adhered to the disengagement in letter and spirit.

In February this year, troops from both sides had moved back along with their tanks, artillery and men and had dismantled structures created during the standoff period.

India and China are engaging at various political and diplomatic levels and also engaging military to military talks at various levels.

There are more than 50,000 troops deployed along the LAC in the Eastern Ladakh, with ongoing standoffs at the Gogra, Hot spring and Depsang.

Talks between us are going on. This has helped build trust between the two sides and going ahead, we are sure that we will be able to resolve all remaining issues, said General Naravane.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The NIA on Friday claimed to have arrested two terrorists of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba for their alleged involvement in the Darbhanga railway station blast case.

Mohammad Salim Ahmed and Kafil, both residents of Kairana in Shamli district of Uttar Pradesh, would be produced before a special NIA court in Patna after obtaining a transit remand from the competent court of UP, an official of the premier investigation agency said.

The case was originally registered last month at Bihar's Darbhanga relating to an explosion in a parcel on platform number one of Darbhanga railway station.

The parcel had arrived in Darbhanga aboard Secunderabad-Darbhanga express.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) re-registered the case and arrested two accused -- Mohammad Nasir Khan and Imran Malik -- on June 30.

Salim and Kafil are key conspirators in the case.

They met at the residence of Salim in February and finalised the plan of planting an IED in a moving train so that casualties and extensive damage to property could be caused, the NIA official said.

Salim, a close associate of Pakistan-based LeT operative Iqbal Kana, was acting as a key intermediary between Kana and all the arrested accused.

He was also involved in channelling funds sent by Kana that were used in executing the terror act, the official said, adding that further investigation to unearth the complete conspiracy is underway.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: As farmers' protest against the new farm laws entered eighth month, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday appealed to protesting farmers to end their agitation and return home.

He said Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar has also appealed to farmers to end the protest while stating that the government is ready to resume talks on the provisions of the three farm legislations.

"I will request that farmers return to their homes. The law is pro-farmer and farmers across the country have welcomed it," Goyal told reporters here.

ALSO READ | Centre ready to talk to protesting farmers, but not on repeal of three agri laws: Narendra Singh Tomar

He added that protesting farmers can give their suggestions.

The government and farmer unions have held 11 rounds of talks so far, the last being on January 22, to break the deadlock and end the farmers' protest.

Talks have not resumed following widespread violence during a tractor rally by protesting farmers on January 26.

Farmers, mainly from Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, have been camping at Delhi's borders for seven months now in protest against the three new farm laws that they say will end state procurement of crops at minimum support price.
By PTI

KOLKATA: A private security guard was arrested from near Kolkata in connection with the dubious COVID vaccination camps case, police said on Friday.

Officers of the Special Investigation Team of the Kolkata Police's Detective Department arrested him from his house in Sonarpur in the South 24 Parganas district on Thursday night, they said.

With this arrest, total eight persons have been nabbed in connection with the case so far, a senior police officer said.

"He was the personal security guard of fake IAS officer Debanjan Deb. He was involved in several illegal activities of Deb and has admitted this," he added.

Deb was arrested last week for masquerading as the joint commissioner of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and operating dubious immunisation camps in the city.

Six of his associates were arrested later as police included the charge of an attempt to murder along with other sections of the IPC against them.
Vineet Upadhyay By

Express News Service

DEHRADUN: Embattled Uttarakhand Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat late on Friday night submitted his resignation letter to Governor Baby Rani Maurya, marking the end of his rather short tenure.Confirming his resignation, Rawat later said, I resigned to avoid a Constitutional crisis that arises due to Sections 164 and 151 of the Representation of the People Act 1951.

The crisis he was referring to was about the technical problem in his getting elected to the Assembly before September 10. But another section of the law says bypoll can be held only if the elected person can hold office for at least a year. The term of the current Assembly will end on March 23 next.

Uttarakhand BJP president Madan Kaushik said, The next leader will be chosen in the party legislature meet tomorrow from among the MLAs. Union agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar is likely to oversee the selection process. Responding to queries about why he did not contest the April by-elections for the Salt Assembly seat in Almora district, Rawat said, I was down with Covid-19 then.

Soon after his resignation, names of many leaders aspiring to step into his shoes started doing the rounds. They included those of Satpal Maharaj, Shan Singh Rawat, Bishan Singh Chuphal and Kaushik.Before Rawat met the Governor, he addressed a drab press conference, where he rattled out his performance report during his brief tenure.In the morning, Rawat went into a huddle with BJP president J P Nadda for over 50 minutes in Delhi, during which time he reportedly offered to step down.

He also wrote to the Election Commision of India requesting it to announce by-elections dates for the state. Party insiders said that was his last ditch attempt to save his chair.Rawats departure means the state would get its third chief minister in less than four months. Rawat, a Lok Sabha MP from Pauri, had taken oath of office as chief minister on March 10.Apart from the legal hassle, party insiders said his resignation was due to difficulty in getting him elected to the state Assembly.

It was after Rawat got into the saddle that the Maha Kumbh became a spectacle despite the second Covid wave creating a tsunami of sorts and turning the pilgrimage into a super spreader event. His off-the-cuff comments on ripped jeans and free rations had already made him a punching bag.
Sugata Srinivasaraju By

In the final week of June each year, since 1977, a ritual remembrance of the Emergency takes place. There is great political symbolism to this act of recall. This June 25 too, there was some aggressive messaging from the nations two top leadersPrime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

Modi had three tweets related to democracy on June 25. Two of them carried the #DarkDaysOfEmergency hashtag. The third told us about the strength of democracy in the context of his meeting with leaders from Jammu and Kashmir the previous day. In tweets where there was a direct reference to the Emergency, he said the years between 1975 and 1977 saw a systematic destruction of institutions. He also spoke about how the Congress had trampled over our democratic ethos.

In a piece that Shah wrote to mark the occasion, he was far more strident in his targeting of the Congress. He said the Emergency was an ugly spectacle of authoritarian arrogance and it represented the natural instincts of the Congresss dynastic politics. He also made a bombastic claim that Indias ancient history as well as the Vedic period was replete with examples of flourishing democratic governance systems that the Congress had demolished in 1975, and signs of this tragedys imminent arrival were known the day Jawaharlal Nehru took over the reins. Figures of speech in general, and irony particularly, are known to continuously conjure methods to paradoxically end their own existence and perhaps Shahs assertions were one such illustration.

Whatever the views that turn out to be new measurements of vengeful enthusiasm, there is one larger issue that needs to be pointed out here: Emergency anniversaries have seldom led to a reflection on the health of our democracy but have often ended up being a blame game. None have shown the enterprise to convert it into a solemn day when a state-of-our-democracy review is presented to the nation. This is because the Emergency has been viewed as an event and an aberration. An event that happened under somebody elses charge in the receding past and has nothing to do with the present. It is also a clever way of fixing the responsibility of this past occurrence and future possibility to just one political partythe Congress.

When transition was happening between former US President Donald Trump and current head Joe Biden in January 2021, after the Capitol attack, prominent voices there spoke about the fragility of democracy and the need to keep permanent vigil. There is no such institutionalising in our context. There is only blame. Despite Indira Gandhi herself realising the Emergency was a mistake and Rahul Gandhi openly stating that it was a mistake as recently as March 2021, the Congress has not figured out a bold way to convert the June anniversary into a day of warning about the dangers to democracy. On the contrary, it seeks to differentiate the situation then and now. Rahul Gandhi said what happened in 1975 was wrong but it was fundamentally different now when the RSS has penetrated every institution including judiciary, bureaucracy, Election Commission and the press.

This caveating may not be a good strategy because it essentially reads like a cussed, bitter response to the 1975 charge, even though it isnt. Indirectly, it helps the Congresss political opponents establish the Emergency as a one-off episode that was made possible by one political dynasty. It is marketed as a second freedom struggle because the RSS is anyway given credit for building a pan-India network to resist the Emergency. The recent book by Christophe Jaffrelot and Partinav Anil, Indias First DictatorshipThe Emergency, 1975-77, which is encyclopedic in its detailing and resonant in its narrative, says: There was nevertheless enough convergence between the JP [Jayaprakash Narayan] Movement and the Hindu nationalist organisations for Narayan to remark in 1975 that the Bihar movement and RSSs work are fundamentally the same. Broadly, their worldviews converged  Certainly, Narayan let on that he was not particularly hung up on the Sangh Parivar. In his overtures to the CPI(M), for instance, he said to Jyoti Basu in 1974, if you join the movement these fellows [i.e. the RSS] will run away; Narayan suggested that he had taken them on board only on sufferance, for our party is not there [sic], nothing is there, and they have an organisation. It is likely that these were but superficial extenuations that Narayan cared little about so long as they served his purposes  The Left could be jettisoned with no love lost, but the relationship between the JP Movement and the Hindu nationalists was another matter. The book recalls that when the RSS chief Balasaheb Deoras declared the JP Movement as a force for the good of the society, Narayan reciprocated the encomium by telling an RSS crowd in March 1975 that if you are a fascist, then I too am a fascist.

The other aspect in the Jaffrelot and Anil book that makes it possible for us to understand that the Emergency need not be an event in the contemporary past is when it discusses how the 1975-77 period was not only Indias first dictatorship but also a constitutional dictatorship. That is, how authoritarian intent can be forwarded by rigging the Constitution and making everything sound legitimate with sophistry. The authors write: For political parties had not been banned, even if many of their leaders were behind bars ... Parliament remained functional, despite many MPs wasting away in jail  Mrs Gandhi had made certain not to step outside the boundaries of the Constitution  the law was used to, as it were, undermine the law  Old institutions remained, but they did so under novel pressures. In essence, an Emergency can be slipped in without making it appear like major works in the nations firmament. That is, the spirit may be killed, but a ventilator can keep extending life.

Sugata Srinivasaraju

Senior journalist and author

(sugata@sugataraju.in)
Four lakh Covid-19 deaths and counting. For the families of all of them, the Supreme Court ruling ordering the government to pay ex gratia to them and telling the National Disaster Management Authority to frame guidelines should come as some relief in these emotionally exacting and financially debilitating times. The apex court has rightly rejected the governments rather specious argument that the Covid-19 pandemic cannot be termed a disaster under the Disaster Management Act, 2005. The argument was that disasters are a one-time or at best a recurring incident, not a long-term event such as the ongoing health crisis. The governments contention was also that its coffers were stretched as it was still fighting the pandemic, straining its financial resources. But the court rejected all of that. It noted that in March 2020 as the pandemic began to spread, the government itself had described the pandemic as a notified disaster. In effect, the government was contradicting itself in an effort to abdicate its responsibility towards its citizens.

But having ordered the government to pay ex gratia, the trickier part is the payment of the compensation in a fair manner. It is common knowledge that getting financial relief can sometimes be a Herculean task. Many families are often forced to make several rounds of government offices, bribe officials or worse still, fight cases in courts to get what is due to them. It is shameful that even 35 years after the Bhopal gas tragedy, one of the worlds biggest industrial accidents, several families have had to knock at the Supreme Courts door as they have either got a pittance as aid or nothing at all. This is largely because the number of victims of the gas tragedy were not carefully tabulated, leaving out many in the cold. Perhaps to rule out such a hitch, the apex court has ordered all pandemic victims, including those who died of comorbidities, to be counted as Covid deaths. The ball is now in the NDMAs court. The challenge before the authority is to devise guidelines that will ensure a fair, watertight and speedy compensation for all future disasters, man-made or otherwise. One hopes it doesnt disappoint.
By ANI

AMARAVATI: In the continuing row between the state governments of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana over the hydel project on the Krishna River, Andhra Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy sought the intervention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat.

The Andhra cabinet had on Wednesday strongly condemned the attitude of the Telangana government regarding the usage of the Krishna river water for hydropower generation.

While speaking to the media after the cabinet meeting, the state's Water Resources and Irrigation Minister P Anil Kumar also criticised Telangana Ministers for using provocative language and verbally attacking former Chief Minister YS Rajashekar Reddy.

"Power generation is based on irrigation demands and Telangana is committing a vicious act by generating hydroelectricity even after objection by the Krishna River Management Board (KRMB). The state cabinet has condemned this act and would retaliate to their actions by all means," the minister said.

Assuring that the AP government is ready to bring projects under KRMB if required, Kumar said, "Telangana has been extending various projects like Palamuru, Dindi, Nettempadu without permission. AP government will write a letter to the KRMB on how Telangana is generating power illegally and would request them to cut down the wastage of water in 299 TMC of water allocated to them."

Kumar also said that the state government has been constructing irrigation projects as per the regulations and is using the water allocated to the state.

The minister said, "Full capacity of 44,000 cusecs of water from Pothireddypadu can be drawn only if water level reaches 881 ft in Srisailam. The water level should reach 854 ft at least to draw 5,000-6,000 cusecs."

He also said that Telangana can draw 6 thousand million cubic feet (TMC) of water at 800 ft level.

"Andhra Pradesh has been not able to draw Krishna flood water as water will be touching 881ft-885ft only for 15-20 days and to draw water at full capacity in less time, capacity should be increased by setting up lifts at 800ft level," he added.

Earlier, the Telangana government had condemned the Andhra Pradesh government for "illegal projects" on the Krishna river. They even said that the Andhra government was not paying heed to the instructions given by the NGT and the Centre, and the had decided to launch a campaign among the people about the heavy losses that the irrigation sector in the state would incur due to the projects.

According to the statement issued by the Chief Minister's Office (CMO), the State cabinet resented the Andhara Pradesh state government's illegal construction of the Rayalaseema Lift Irrigation Scheme and Rajoli Banda Diversion Scheme's right canal.

The irrigation department officials informed the Telangana state government that they have already approached the National Green Tribunal on the illegal Andhra Pradesh Projects matter and cases are also filed in the Supreme Court. The Cabinet severely condemned the Andhra Pradesh government for not paying heed to the instructions given by the NGT and the Centre, it added. (ANI)
By Express News Service

VIJAYAWADA: Governor Biswabhusan Harichandan and president of Indian Red Cross Societys state branch formally handed over 100 oxygen concentrators, and 48,000 Covid testing vials received from Singapore Red Cross Society to Dr A. Sridhar Reddy and AK Parida, chairperson and general secretary of the IRCS state branch, at a programme held at Raj Bhavan here on Thursday.

Singapore Red Cross Society had donated medical equipment worth Rs 4.5 crore to the state branch.

Dr Sridhar Reddy briefed Governor Harichandan about the assistance received in the shape of medical equipment from several NRI organisations, including 300 oxygen concentrators from American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPIO), 85 oxygen concentrators and 1400 pulse oximetres from North American Telugu Association (NATA), 20,000 medicine kits and 100 oxygen Concentrators from Telugu Association of North America (TANA), 5,000 medicine kits from Telugu Association of Malaysia, VOIP Office Communications provided free helpline to Red Cross to counsel Covid-19 patients in home isolation. The governor thanked Singapore Red Cross Society and NRI associations.
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa, challenged by opponents in the past few weeks, plans to turn the tables on them by using people power. He will tour the state, even though the Zilla Panchayat polls -- earlier scheduled for May -- are due by the year-end, depending on the Covid scenario.

Yediyurappas political secretary M P Renukacharya said he will tour all 31 districts of the state, and has already started with Tumakuru. His aim is to visit all the important taluks first, to strengthen the party and also to ensure that the grievances of the people are redressed.

His supporters said this would be his strategy to overcome the challenges thrown at him by his own party leaders, and simultaneously prepare for the 2023 polls, firmly at the helm. Many MLAs had openly complained that development funds for essential works for their constituencies had been cut, and the CM is expected to redress these issues while on the tour. With the Covid second wave exposing the states health sector shortcomings, Yediyurappa is also looking to address the issue.

Sources told TNIE that the CMs tour of all the important areas -- Kalyana Karnataka, Bombay Karnataka, Central Karnataka, Coastal Karnataka and Old Mysuru -- will be spread over many months. Renukacharya said that each one of the MLAs will have to participate in the tour, and any form of sulking and refusal to participate can be taken up by the party.

Yediyurappas supporters are happy that the tour will put him on the front foot, and his opponents on the backfoot. One source close to Yediyurappa said he is used to going to the people, which he was not able to do due to Covid, but now, with the numbers declining, he may like to do something he does best -- harness peoples goodwill.
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: KPCC President DK Shivakumar on Thursday raised the Chamarajanagar hospital tragedy to pin down the government. He alleged that the those who had died due to oxygen shortage had been murdered by the system, but no one was officially held responsible for the tragedy.

Speaking at a press conference here, he questioned, Why hasnt the CM or ministers visited the hospital? If you are not guilty, why dont you visit the families? He also said that compensation has been paid to families of only 24 of the 36 dead, although the Supreme Court has said they must be compensated in 6 months. He also said that while the government website lists the number of dead due to Covid as 3,27,985 till June 13, the government officially claims that just 30,000 have died.

He alleged that everyone, right from the minister to officers, had information about oxygen shortage, yet measures were not taken to rectify the situation. He said he had visited the families, and one of the victims was the mother of a national level shooter. He was traumatised after he saw his mother passing away before his eyes. They tried to shift the bodies from there to cover up, he alleged.

Among the dead, 80% were less than 40 years old, and one of the victims was a mere 3-month-old infant, while another was married for just three months. I will take up these issues in the assembly, he said.

Shivakumar alleged that there was also a mix-up and one of the victims bodies was handed over to the wrong family. The victims families were also denied death certificates, which is why they are not getting compensation. The government has murdered people and is now trying to certify some of them as natural deaths, he said. Shivakumar distributed Rs 1 lakh to each family on behalf of the party.
P Ramdas By

Express News Service

KOCHI: In a new twist to the 1994 ISRO espionage case, Siby Mathews, who headed the special investigation team that probed the case, has claimed that Intelligence Bureau officials pressured the probe team and senior police officials in Kerala to arrest scientist Nambi Narayanan and IPS officer Raman Srivastava, stating that the matter was related to the security of the nation.

In his anticipatory bail petition filed before the Sessions Court in Thiruvananthapuram on June 24, Siby Mathews said there were media reports stating that Srivastava had connections with Mariam Rasheeda  a Maldivian involved in the case  and she had met him on several occasions.

Mathews is the fourth accused in the latest case registered by the CBI probing the conspiracy behind wrongful arrest, custodial torture and unjustified incarceration of Nambi Narayanan and others in connection with the ISRO espionage case. In the bail plea, Mathews said, if there was any conspiracy or bad faith on the part of the petitioner, he would not have recommended that the investigation be transferred to another agency  CBI.

The crime was registered following the arrest of Mariam Rasheeda for overstaying in the country and on the apprehension that she had some suspicious and undesirable connections with some scientists in ISRO. The Central Intelligence Wing (IB) and Research and Analysis Wing, which have been given powers of Superintendent of Police, passed on the information to the Special Branch of Kerala Police about the suspects and their suspicious activities which led to the registration of the case.

In fact, the then Thiruvananthapuram city police commissioner has made it clear in his report that the case was registered and Mariam Rasheeda was arrested based on the instructions of R B Sreekumar, then Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Wing. It was also stated that Mariam Rasheeda and Fousiya Hassan  another Maldivian  have connections with a senior scientist in ISRO, the petition stated.

The bail petition stated that on custodial questioning, Mariam Rasheeda revealed the involvement of Russian Space Agency Glavkosmos India representative Chandrasekhar, former ISRO scientist Sasikumar and Fousiya Hassan.

The arrest and questioning of Sasikumar and Chandrasekharan revealed further information strengthening and corroborating the statement of the Maldivian women. This further strengthened the involvement of Nambi Narayanan in the case and, by this time the IB officials were putting pressure on the probe team and senior police officials in the joint conferences to arrest Raman Srivastava and Nambi Narayanan, stating that the matter is related to the security of the nation and positions of such persons shall not be a hindrance for stern action against them, stated the bail petition.

When Fousiya was questioned, a spy network linking Columbo-Chennai-Thiruvananthapuram and Maldives was revealed, submitted Mathews. By this time, the arrest of Mariam Rasheeda and connected developments were taken up by media and political parties. It also became a political controversy centering the late K Karunakaran, the then Chief Minister of Kerala, where it was alleged that he was trying to protect Raman Srivastava as he was linked to the espionage network, stated the bail petition.

The plea further stated that the disclosure statement of the accused persons revealed their connections with some high-profile businessmen who were enjoying close nexus with a few top politicians in power.The bail petition is pending before the court.

Accused had links with high-profile people

The plea further stated that the disclosure statement of the accused persons revealed their connections with some high-profile businessmen enjoying close nexus with a few top politicians
By Express News Service

KOZHIKODE: A 55-year-old man who was part of a team to assist fire and rescue service personnel to recover the body of a drowned youth from the Chalippuzha river in Kozhikode district died after he collapsed during the search efforts.

Police said the man, identified as Jayaprakash, a native of Kodencherry in Kozhikode, was rushed to a private hospital near Omassery in Kozhikode district on Friday, but his life could not be saved.

The search operation, which began on Thursday to recover the bodies of two people who drowned in the Chalippuzha river, succeeded in recovering the body of a woman. The team continued the efforts on Friday to recover the second persons body. It was during this attempt that Jayaprakash collapsed and died. Incidentally, Jayaprakash was the first person to inform fire officials about the drowning incident at Chalippuzha on Thursday.

The two people who drowned in the river were identified as Ayisha Nishla (20) and her husbands cousin Anzar Mohammed (27). Along with her husband Irshad, Aisha, Anzar and other family members were at Chalippuzha river near the Chembukadavu area for a pleasure trip to the eco-tourism spot. Though the rescue teams carried out an intensive search for Anzar on Thursday, they could not locate him due to the adverse weather condition and poor light in the area. Hence the decision was made to resume the rescue operation on Friday.

Even though Jayaprakash was immediately taken to hospital after he collapsed, the rescue operation to recover the body of Anzar continued and by around 9 am on Friday the body was recovered, police officials said.
By Express News Service

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Seven women, including six foreigners, have complained of being at the receiving end of sexual harassment in two separate incidents at Varkala, a tourist destination known for its captivating beaches and backwaters, in the last one week.

The Varkala police said two incidents of misconduct were reported within a week and they have arrested a person, Mahesh, in connection with a case registered on Wednesday. The harassment of tourists, at a time when the state government is planning to reopen tourist centres, could have serious implications.

Varkala police Station House Officer S Dwijesh said the 28-year-old person from Edava was arrested for misbehaving with the tourists. The complaint was filed by five women, who said the accused used expletives and sexual innuendos against them and when they questioned his behaviour, he raced on his two-wheeler to them in an aggressive manner.

There were five women in that group. Four of them are from the United Kingdom and France, while the remaining one is from Mumbai. They lodged a complaint and the accused was booked, he said. The other disgraceful incident occurred near Thiruvambadi beach on Monday.

Two foreigners  one from the UK and the other from France  were walking through a pocket road at night when an unidentified man flashed his private parts at them. The terrified women managed to flee the place and later reported the matter to the cops. The police said they have launched a hunt for the suspect.

Meanwhile, the incidents have sent a chill down the spine of those engaged in tourism. Varkala has been hit hard by the lockdown and the tourism sector crippled due to dearth of international tourist arrivals. Travel Agents Federation of India Kerala chairman Paulose K Mathew said such incidents could create a bad impression about Kerala among international tourists.

These incidents are surely going to be reported to the respective embassies and their countries. In that scenario, there are chances of those countries issuing travel advisories. France and Britain account for most of our foreign tourists and if they take any strong action, it would affect the tourism sector badly, he said.
By Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: The BJD and Congress targeted the BJP over the State-wide agitation launched by it on farmers issues and demanded that the party should first increase the minimum support price (MSP) of paddy by 50 per cent as it had promised in its 2019 election manifesto.

Stating that the agitation launched by the BJP is only meant to divert attention from farmers agitation in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, BJD spokesperson Lenin Mohanty said the party should address the problems of farmers and stop shedding crocodile tears.

Mohanty demanded that the State BJP should persuade the Centre to release Rs 6,620 crore subsidy money to Odisha and rescind the decision not to lift more than 10 lakh tonne paddy from the State. President of the Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee (OPCC) Niranjan Patnaik said that it does not suit the party to launch an agitation in Odisha when the Centre had passed three black Acts against the farmers. He also criticised the Centre for enhancing paddy MSP only by Rs 72 per quintal.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: Former AIADMK minister M Manikandan, who was arrested on charges of rape, on Thursday sought bail from the Madras High Court. In his plea, he asserted that the victim, a Malaysian national, wasnt a rustic illiterate not to know the consequences of having a sexual relationship with a married man. Manikandan also pointed to a recent Supreme Court judgment saying, ....making a false promise to marry is wrong. But that does not mean, in a prolonged relationship sexual intercourse would be categorised as rape.

The petitioner added that even having a sexual relationship on the promise of marrying the woman after divorcing his wife would not amount to rape.

He said the abortion was carried out only after it was agreed that he would marry complainant and have a child after divorcing his wife. The petitioner said Section 375 of IPC wouldnt be applicable here as it amounts to sexual intercourse between two consenting adults, and added that all the complainants allegations are false.
By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: The Prohibition and Excise Department on Thursday nabbed two persons, including a Yemen national, for allegedly peddling illegal drugs. Acting on a reliable tip, the team raided a house in Noornagar, Banjara Hills and seized ecstasy pills, cocaine, MDMA and charas from their possession.The offenders Abdurabu Mohammed, 31, and Solomon Susairaj, 28  had reportedly conspired to sell drugs. The investigation revealed that the foreigner Abdurabu was previously arrested over a similar case in the year 2019.

Abdurabu had moved to India for studies and joined a college in Pune, but later dropped out. He joined Nizam College in 2013. He started consuming and selling drugs, but was caught by the Excise team in 2019. He moved to Bengaluru after his release and carried out his activities in Hyderabad through his aides.The police seized 17 gm of cocaine, 8 gm of MDMA, 73 ecstasy pills, 15 gm of charas, two mobile phones, one digital weighing machine and Rs 80,000 in cash.
By Associated Press

BEIJING: As the World Health Organization draws up plans for the next phase of its probe of how the coronavirus pandemic started, an increasing number of scientists say the U.N. agency it isnt up to the task and shouldnt be the one to investigate.

Numerous experts, some with strong ties to WHO, say that political tensions between the U.S. and China make it impossible for an investigation by the agency to find credible answers.

They say whats needed is a broad, independent analysis closer to what happened in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

The first part of a joint WHO-China study of how COVID-19 started concluded in March that the virus probably jumped to humans from animals and that a lab leak was extremely unlikely. The next phase might try to examine the first human cases in more detail or pinpoint the animals responsible  possibly bats, perhaps by way of some intermediate creature.

ALSO READ | WHO chief calls for vaccinating at least 10 per cent of population of every country by September

But the idea that the pandemic somehow started in a laboratory  and perhaps involved an engineered virus  has gained traction recently, with President Joe Biden ordering a review of U.S. intelligence within 90 days to assess the possibility.

Earlier this month, WHOs emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan, said that the agency was working out the final details of the next phase of its probe and that because WHO works by persuasion, it lacks the power to compel China to cooperate.

Some said that is precisely why a WHO-led examination is doomed to fail.

We will never find the origins relying on the World Health Organization, said Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights at Georgetown University. For a year and a half, they have been stonewalled by China, and its very clear they wont get to the bottom of it.

Gostin said the U.S. and other countries can either try to piece together what intelligence they have, revise international health laws to give WHO the powers it needs, or create some new entity to investigate.

The first phase of WHOs mission required getting Chinas approval not only for the experts who traveled there but for their entire agenda and the report they ultimately produced.

Peter Ben Embarek of the World Health Organization team holds up a chart showing pathways of transmission of the virus | AP

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, called it a farce and said that determining whether the virus jumped from animals or escaped from a lab is more than a scientific question and has political dimensions beyond WHOs expertise.

The closest genetic relative to COVID-19 was previously discovered in a 2012 outbreak, after six miners fell sick with pneumonia after being exposed to infected bats in China's Mojiang mine. In the past year, however, Chinese authorities sealed off the mine and confiscated samples from scientists while ordering locals not to talk to visiting journalists.

Although China initially pushed hard to look for the coronaviruss origins, it pulled back abruptly in early 2020 as the virus overtook the globe. An Associated Press investigation last December found Beijing imposed restrictions on the publication of COVID-19 research, including mandatory review by central government officials.

Jamie Metzl, who sits on a WHO advisory group, has suggested along with colleagues the possibility of an alternative investigation set up by the Group of Seven industrialized nations.

Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University, said the U.S. must be willing to subject its own scientists to a rigorous examination and recognize that they might be just as culpable as China.

The U.S. was deeply involved in research at the laboratories in Wuhan, Sachs said, referring to U.S. funding of controversial experiments and the search for animal viruses capable of triggering outbreaks.

The idea that China was behaving badly is already the wrong premise for this investigation to start, he said. If lab work was somehow responsible (for the pandemic), the likelihood that it was both the U.S. and China working together on a scientific initiative is very high.
By ANI

NEW JERSEY: Johnson & Johnson on Thursday (local time) announced that its single-shot COVID-19 vaccine showed promising signs of protection against the Delta variant rapidly spreading across the US and other countries, in a small laboratory study.

According to the company report, the vaccine generated strong, persistent activity against the rapidly spreading Delta variant and other highly prevalent SARS-CoV-2 viral variants. In addition, the data showed that the durability of the immune response lasted through at least eight months, the length of time evaluated to date. The two preprint study summaries have been submitted today to bioRxiv, a non-profit preprint server for the life sciences.

The single-dose vaccine, elicited neutralising antibody activity against the Delta variant at an even higher level than what was recently observed for the Beta (B.1.351) variant in South Africa, the report stated.

In the ensemble trial, Johnson & Johnson's vaccine was 85 per cent effective against severe/critical disease and demonstrated protection against hospitalisation and death. The vaccine was consistently effective across all regions studied globally, including in South Africa and Brazil, where there was a high prevalence of rapidly emerging Beta and Zeta variants during the study period.

ALSO READ | Zydus seeks nod for its Covid vaccine ZyCoV-D, claims 66.6% efficacy against symptomatic infection

"Today's newly announced studies reinforce the ability of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine to help protect the health of people globally," said Paul Stoffels, MD, Vice Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Scientific Officer at Johnson & Johnson.

"We believe that our vaccine offers durable protection against COVID-19 and elicits neutralizing activity against the Delta variant. This adds to the robust body of clinical data supporting our single-shot vaccine's ability to protect against multiple variants of concern," Stoffels added.

Mathai Mammen, MD, PhD, Global Head, Janssen Research & Development, Johnson & Johnson, said: "Current data for the eight months studied so far show that the single-shot Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine generates a strong neutralizing antibody response that does not wane; rather, we observe an improvement over time. In addition, we observe a persistent and particularly robust, durable cellular immune response."

"With each new dataset, we build on our solid foundation of evidence that our single-shot COVID-19 vaccine plays a critical role in ending the pandemic, which continues to evolve and pose new challenges to global health," Mammen said.

The data showed that humoral and cellular immune responses generated by the Johnson & Johnson single-shot COVID-19 vaccine lasted through at least eight months, the latest timepoint recorded in the study thus far.

The vaccine is now available in many regions and countries on a not-for-profit basis during the emergency pandemic period. It received emergency use authorisation (EUA) in the United States on February 27 and Conditional Marketing Authorization (CMA) by the European Commission on March 11.

ALSO WATCH:
By AFP

MOSCOW: Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko on Friday claimed authorities had exposed "terrorist sleeper cells" that he alleged were linked to Germany, the United States, Ukraine and other countries.

"Today terrorist 'sleeper' cells have been exposed, so-called self-defence units," Lukashenko said at a ceremony marking 30 years of independence of post-Soviet Belarus.

"The goal of these cells is forcible regime change on day X. They themselves so far do not know when this day X comes: it is necessary to lead our people to it," Lukashenko said in remarks released by his office.

He alleged that Germany, Ukraine, the US Poland and Lithuania were involved in their work.

"Today we completed a large-scale anti-terror operation," Lukashenko said, adding that Belarusian authorities would confront German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Lukashenko also claimed the "sleeper" cells tried to target a Russian naval communication centre near the Belarusian town of Vileyka located around 100 kilometres (60 miles) northwest of the capital Minsk and he discussed the incident with President Vladimir Putin.

"We've discussed this problem in the most serious manner," the Belarus leader said.

"You understand the result of this discussion. All participants of the terror act -- including those who organised and carried it out -- were found and arrested within two days."

The 66-year-old leader also said he ordered officials to seal the country's border with pro-Western Ukraine to prevent "a huge amount of arms" coming into Belarus.

Since an election last August, Belarus has been in the grip of a historic political crisis that erupted after Lukashenko secured a sixth term as president.

The opposition says the election was rigged but authorities imposed an intense crackdown in which several people died and thousands were arrested.

Lukashenko sparked international outrage by dispatching a fighter jet in May to intercept a Ryanair plane flying from Greece to Lithuania.

When the plane was forced to land in Minsk, Belarus arrested dissident journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend on board.

In June, the West imposed sanctions on key sectors of the Belarus economy, ratcheting up pressure on Lukashenko's regime.

In response, Minsk said it was suspending its participation in the Eastern Partnership, an initiative to boost ties between the EU and its ex-Soviet neighbours.
By PTI

PESHAWAR: Three children were killed on Friday when an abandoned hand grenade they were playing with exploded in Pakistan's troubled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, the second such incident in the province within a month.

The incident happened in the remote Nasran district when the children found the hand grenade in an open area and brought it home taking it to be a toy bomb and later started playing with it, a senior police official said.

He said a police team has been sent to the site to collect evidence. Mehmud Khan, the Chief Minister of KPK, has expressed profound grief and sorrow over the death of the children.

He expressed prayer for the eternal peace of the departed souls. Such incidents have occurred quite often in the last couple of years in restive tribal districts of Pakistan where unattended and unexploded explosive materials are usually found in orchards and open fields.

On June 3, a similar incident occurred where three children were killed in South Waziristan after a grenade exploded while they were playing with it after finding it in an open field and considering it to be a kind of toy.
By PTI

SINGAPORE: Two Indian nationals, who are also permanent residents in Singapore, were charged by a court here on Friday for breaching the government set conditions of the Stay-Home Notices that was served to them when they arrived in the country in March.

Suresh Naidu Bojanki, 37, and Bharati Tulshiram Choudhari, 47, were charged for acting in a manner likely to spread the contagious coronavirus, The Straits Times newspaper reported.

The two had met on a flight to Singapore but allegedly breached the conditions of their Stay-Home Notices (SHN) at Oasia Hotel to meet in one of their rooms after midnight, the report said.

Bojanki is also facing an additional charge of failing to wear a mask outside his place of residence. He is alleged to have left his hotel room between 12.30am and 1.21 am on March 20 to go to Bharati's room on the same floor.

He purportedly did not wear a mask at the time, the report said. Bharati is alleged to have conspired with him to breach his SHN and allowed him into her room. In a release on Friday, the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) said the duo had met on an inbound flight on March 14 and were each served with a 14-day SHN. They were taken to Oasia Hotel to serve out their SHN in different rooms.

"To safeguard our community's health and safety, everyone needs to play their part and comply with the SHN requirements if they are subject to one," the ICA said. Both of the accused are out on bail for 5,000 Singapore dollars each.

If convicted, they may be jailed for up to six months and fined up to 10,000 Singapore dollars for each charge. They are expected to be back in court on August 17, according to the report.

The ICA warned that foreigners who are convicted may face further action from the authorities, such as the revoking or shortening of the validity of permits and passes to remain and work in Singapore.
By Associated Press

VANCOUVER: Officials on Friday hunted for any missing residents of a British Columbia town destroyed by wildfire as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered federal assistance.

The roughly 1,000 residents of Lytton had to abandon their homes with just a few minutes notice Wednesday evening after suffering the previous day under a record high of 121.2 Fahrenheit (49.6 Celsius).

Officials said it was unclear whether anyone remained in the village 95 miles (150 kilometers) northeast of Vancouver due to a lack of cell service and because it wasn't safe to enter most of the area.

ALSO READ | Global warming knocking at the door? UN confirms 18.3 degree Celsius record heat in Antarctica

"We do know there are some people who are unaccounted for," said Mike Farnworth, the province's public safety minister, though he said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Red Cross were working to locate people.

In Ottawa, Trudeau pledged that the federal government will "help rebuild and help people come through this."

Trudeau said he had spoken with British Columbia Premier John Horgan and John Haugen, acting chief of the of Lytton First Nation and planned to convene an emergency response group.

Another wildfire threat at Kamloops, 220 miles (355 kilometers) northeast of Vancouver, forced an evacuation of about 200 people Thursday night, but officials said they could return Friday.

Kamloops also recorded a record his temperature this week of 117 Fahrenheit, (47.3 Celsius) but it had cooled down to around 90 (32) on Friday.

"I can't imagine what the firefighters are going through working in these conditions," said Noelle Kekula, a fire information officer for the British Columbia Wildfire Service.

"We are up for a real battle."

The Wildfire Service said at least 106 fires were burning across the province, including dozens that started within just the past two days.

ALSO WATCH:
By PTI

WASHINGTON: The US has added Pakistan along with 14 other countries in a list of Child Soldiers Prevention Act which identifies foreign governments having government-supported armed groups that recruit or use child soldiers, a designation that could result in restrictions on certain security assistance and commercial licensing of military equipment.

The US Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA) requires publication in the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report a list of foreign governments that have recruited or used child soldiers during the previous year (April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021).

The countries which have been added to the annual TIP list of the US State Department are Pakistan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

According to the State Department, the governments identified on the list are subject to restrictions, in the following fiscal year, on certain security assistance and commercial licensing of military equipment.

The term "child soldier" means any person under 18 years of age who takes a direct part in hostilities or who has been compulsorily recruited into governmental armed forces, police, or other security forces.

It also means any person under 15 years of age who has been voluntarily recruited into governmental armed forces, police, or other security forces or any person under 18 years of age who has been recruited or used in hostilities by armed forces distinct from the armed forces of a state.

It also includes any such person who is serving in any capacity, including in a support role, such as a "cook, porter, messenger, medic, guard or sex slave."

The CSPA prohibits assistance to governments that are identified in the list under the following authorities: International Military Education and Training, Foreign Military Financing, Excess Defence Articles, and Peacekeeping Operations, with exceptions for some programmes undertaken pursuant to the Peacekeeping Operations authority.

It also prohibits the issuance of licenses for direct commercial sales of military equipment to such governments.

Beginning October 1, 2021, and effective throughout fiscal year 2022, these restrictions will apply to the listed countries, absent a presidential waiver, applicable exception, or reinstatement of assistance pursuant to the terms of the CSPA.

The determination to include a government in the CSPA list is informed by a range of sources, including first-hand observation by the US government personnel and research and credible reporting from various UN entities, international organisations, local and international NGOs, and international and domestic media outlets.

However, Pakistan on Friday categorically rejected its unsubstantiated and baseless inclusion in the CSPA list by the US.

"We categorically reject the unsubstantiated and baseless inclusion of Pakistan in the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA) List'," Foreign Office said.

It said Pakistan does not support any non-state armed group, nor any entity recruiting or using child soldiers.

Pakistan's efforts in fighting non-state armed groups including terrorist entities are well recognised.

The inclusion of Pakistan in the "CSPA List" depicts a factual error and lack of understanding because no State institution was consulted by the US prior to the publication of the report, it said.

"Nor were any details provided of the basis on which the conclusion was reached," according to FO.

Pakistan has been voluntarily submitting information for the TIP Report to the US Government since 2007 and has actively worked on implementing the practicable recommendations of these reports, said FO.

Pakistan called upon the authorities concerned in the US to review the baseless assertions made in the TIP Report, especially with regard to the unwarranted inclusion of Pakistan in the "CSPA List."

It asked the US to share "credible information" on cases involving Trafficking in Persons as well as on allegations pertaining to support to armed groups using child soldiers.

FO said Pakistan's views and perspective on the subject have been conveyed to the US side.
WARREN TWP.  With all students in the grades K-8 school district set to return to full-day, in-person learning in the fall, Superintendent of
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Deborah Rose /Hearst Connecticut /

NEW MILFORD  The New Milford Public Library Board of Trustees has appointed a former library director in Monroe, Lorna Rhyins, as the new library director here.

Rhyins, who joined the NMPL on June 21, came to the community from the Edith Wheeler Memorial Library in Monroe, where she served as library director for three years. During that time, she managed a building renovation project, bringing a new maker space, self-service cafe and an updated teen space that opened in November 2019, an announcement said.
The Transportation Department will propose that airlines be required to refund fees on checked baggage if the bags aren't delivered to passengers quickly enough.

The proposal, if made final after a lengthy regulation-writing process, would also require prompt refunds for fees on extras such as internet access if the airline fails to provide the service during the flight.

A department official said the agency will issue the proposal in the next several days, and it could take effect by next summer.

The proposal will require refunds if airlines fail to deliver a bag within 12 hours of the passenger's U.S. flight touching down or within 25 hours after an international flight.

Current regulations require refunds only if bags are lost, although airlines must compensate passengers for reasonable incidental expenses incurred while their bags are delayed. The government does not know how often airlines keep fees even when bags are significantly delayed.

The bag-fee proposal is the first of several airline-consumer regulations coming from the Biden administration under an executive order that the president will soon sign, according to a senior Transportation Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a proposal that hasnt been made public. The order will be designed to boost competition and give consumers more power, the official said.

Kurt Ebenhoch, executive director of Travel Fairness Now, an airline consumer organization, called the bag-fees refund one consumer-friendly item in a long list requiring DOT action. He said top priorities include refunds for pandemic-related cancellations, stronger rules to let families with small children sit together without paying extra, and more transparency in flight schedules and fares.

John Breyault, a vice president with the National Consumer League, said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg seems to be paying more attention to consumer issues than did Elaine Chao, who held the job during the Trump administration. But he said he would like the Biden administration to act more quickly.

The proof will be in the pudding whether this DOT will make consumer protection a real priority after four years of benign neglect, at best, and active regulatory sabotage at worst, Breyault said.

Last year, more than 100,000 consumers complained to the government about airline service. Refunds were the biggest gripe, although most claimed airlines refused to give refunds to consumers who canceled trips because of the pandemic. The Transportation Department is seeking a $25.5 million fine against Air Canada, but has not taken action against other carriers over refunds for canceled flights.

In 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, passengers paid U.S. airlines $5.76 billion in fees on checked bags, according to the Transportation Department. That dropped to $2.84 billion last year, when travel slumped because of the pandemic. The figures do not include fees for carry-on bags.

For many years, customers could check one or two bags on almost any airline without paying a fee. That began to change during a travel slump caused by the financial crisis of 2008. Now, most U.S. airlines other than Southwest charge even for a single bag, although fees are usually waived for customers who buy high-fare tickets or carry the airline's credit card.

American Airlines generated $2 billion from checked-bag fees over the past two years, followed by Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, each around $1.5 billion. Because of their smaller size, discount airlines including Spirit and Frontier reap less money but get a higher percentage of revenue from the fees.

___

David Koenig can be reached at www.twitter.com/airlinewriter
The US Supreme Court on Friday declined to take up an appeal from a Washington state florist who refused to make an arrangement for a same-sex couple out of religious concerns regarding same-sex marriage.

The Washington state Supreme Court in June had ruled against the florist, Barronelle Stutzman, who declined to make a floral arrangement in 2013 for long-time client Robert Ingersoll's same-sex wedding.

The court said Stutzman's refusal violated a state anti-discrimination law that bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It said the law was "neutral" and served the states' interest in eradicating discrimination in public accommodations.

In a statement Friday, Stuzman's lawyer Kristen Waggoner called the outcome of the case "tragic" and said "the critical work of protecting the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans must continue."

"No one should be forced to express a message or celebrate an event they disagree with," she added.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union praised the Supreme Court on Friday for staying out of the dispute.

"Today the Supreme Court confirmed that LGBTQ people should receive equal service when they walk into a store," said Ria Tabacco Mar, director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project.

Ingersoll said in a statement, "We hope this decision sends a message to other LGBTQ people that no one should have to experience the hurt that we did."

The court's move comes after it ruled unanimously this term in favor of a Catholic Foster Care agency that declined to work with same-sex couples as potential parents.

"The Court's decision to leave the lower-court ruling intact sends a couple of different messages," said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. "On one hand, the Court is refusing to go any further than it went in the Catholic Social Services decision from last week, and is thereby siding with the State of Washington's enforcement of its antidiscrimination laws over religious objections."

"On the other hand, it's going to remain more than a little unclear when states can and cannot require secular businesses to provide services to those whose practices offend the owners' religious beliefs. The Court isn't willing to take that up now, but it's surely going to have to sooner rather than later," Vladeck added.

Two years ago, the court had sided with a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. That ruling, however, was carefully tailored to the case at hand and was not a broad nationwide verdict on whether businesses could decline services to same-sex couples based on religious objections to same-sex marriage.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch indicated that they would have taken up the dispute for next term.

Court declines reconsidering major property rights precedent

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The Supreme Court on Friday rejected reconsidering a major property rights precedent, over the dissent of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Thomas and Gorsuch.

The precedent stemmed from a controversial 2005 opinion -- Kelo v. New London -- that allowed the government to seize the house of a resident and transfer it to another private owner as a part of an economic revitalization plan of the Connecticut city.

In dissent Friday, Thomas said his colleagues should have moved to "correct the mistake" it made in the 2005 decision.

"That decision was wrong the day it was decided," he said, "and it remains wrong today."

At issue in the case was the scope of the Fifth Amendment's takings clause that says that private property shall not be taken for public use, without "just compensation."

Lawyers for New London resident Suzette Kelo argued back then that taking the property to sell it to private developers to further economic development did not fall into the category of "public use."

On Friday, Thomas said that "taking land from one private party to give to another rarely will be for 'public use.'"

"The majority in Kelo strayed from the Constitution to diminish the right to be free from private takings," he added.

In the end, the town of New London never went forward with the development, leaving the land vacant.

The new case that the court declined to take up on Friday was brought by Fred Eychaner, who owned property in Chicago that was condemned. A lower court held that the land could be taken "to prevent future blight and to promote economic development."

This story has been updated with additional details and reaction.

The-CNN-Wire

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Since Bill Cosby walked out of prison a free man after a court overturned his sexual assault conviction, observers have found themselves wondering: Could Harvey Weinstein be next?

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania tossed out Cosby's conviction Wednesday, three years after he was imprisoned for assaulting a Temple University employee. In the #MeToo era his case has often been compared to that of Weinstein, who is serving a 23-year prison sentence in upstate New York for sexual assault and rape.

Both men were powerful Hollywood figures accused of exploiting their fame and influence to sexually assault dozens of women. Both their trials featured accusers who testified about "prior bad acts" -- other sex crimes beyond the ones Cosby and Weinstein were charged with -- to show the two men had a pattern of predatory behavior.

And attorneys for Weinstein, like those for Cosby, have filed an appeal asking his convictions be thrown out.

So what does the Cosby decision mean for Weinstein's case? Here's what legal experts say.

Weinstein's reps say they are encouraged by the Cosby ruling

Cosby was sentenced to three to 10 years in a Pennsylvania prison for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home nearly two decades ago.

"In reversing the conviction of Bill Cosby, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has demonstrated, once again, that no matter who a defendant may be and no matter the nature of the alleged crime, courts can be relied upon to follow the law and come to the correct decision," said Juda Engelmayer, a spokesperson for Weinstein, in a statement.

"This decision also reaffirms our confidence that the Appellate Division in New York will reach the similarly correct decision in Harvey Weinstein's appeal, considering the abundance of issues that cry out for a reversal."

One of Weinstein's lawyers, Duncan Levin, also applauded the overturning of Cosby's conviction, citing the "prior bad acts" accusers.

"Vague evidence about uncharged conduct has no place in a courtroom," Levin told CNN.

"There is nothing more important to our system of justice than the presumption of innocence," he added. "The rules of evidence exist so that testimony never turns into unfounded attacks on a defendant's character, and that appears to be exactly what happened here."

The two men's legal appeals have some similarities -- and differences

In Cosby's case, his attorneys appealed his conviction on two issues: The "prior bad acts" witnesses who testified about alleged assaults that were not part of the charges, and an agreement between Cosby and a prior prosecutor.

In overturning Cosby's conviction, Pennsylvania's highest court cited an agreement Cosby had with a prior prosecutor a decade before that prevented him from criminal charges in the case if he sat down for a civil deposition. That evidence was ultimately used against him in his criminal trial, violating Cosby's due process rights, the state high court ruled.

The Pennsylvania court's decision didn't focus on the merits of the "prior bad acts" evidence, said Randy Zelin, a professor at Cornell Law School and former defense attorney in New York.

"The basis for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision was that Cosby had a binding and enforceable non-prosecution agreement. He should have never been prosecuted," Zelin said. "Weinstein has never claimed to have such an agreement."

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Like Cosby's, Weinstein's appeal maintains jurors shouldn't have been allowed to hear from "prior bad acts" witnesses who testified against him. His attorneys also argue that his trial was tainted on several levels, including a biased judge and juror.

During trial proceedings in early 2020 attorneys for Weinstein repeatedly pursued legal avenues for a mistrial, including claims that the judge showed hostility towards Weinstein. Weinstein's lawyers had asked Justice James Burke to recuse himself after the judge threatened Weinstein with jail time for repeatedly using a cell phone in court.

Weinstein's appeal also claims a seated juror violated the movie mogul's right to a fair and impartial jury. Weinstein's attorneys argued Juror No. 11 was biased against Weinstein because she was not forthcoming during jury selection about writing a partly autobiographical novel about "predatory" older men and their relationships with younger women.

So could the Cosby ruling affect Weinstein's appeal?

Probably not, said Michelle Madden Dempsey, a former Illinois prosecutor and law professor at Villanova University.

"There's no interesting takeaway message from Cosby's case as it relates to either Weinstein or the #MeToo movement," Dempsey said.

She said Cosby's conviction was overturned because of one specific aspect of the case -- Cosby waiving his right against self-incrimination and testifying in a previous civil case, believing he had been granted immunity.

"It's based on that ... extremely unusual fact," Dempsey said. "It's the kind of case that law schools will study and teach about for years."

Dempsey said the Cosby ruling had nothing to do with the evidence against him and should not be construed as supporting his claims of innocence.

"It does not change the credibility of Andrea Constand and other victims of sexual abuse," she said. "I don't think the case should be understood as having any other implications to other cases. And it's not relevant to Weinstein's litigation."

Zelin, the Cornell law professor, said Weinstein also is not helped by the fact that Cosby's case occurred in Pennsylvania, not New York.

"It's a decision from another jurisdiction. It's difficult for a lawyer in New York state to cite a decision from Pennsylvania in state court," he told CNN. "The New York court is going to say, 'Wait a minute, give us something in our jurisdiction.' It only becomes a good idea if a New York court has never tackled such a case before."

Even if Weinstein's lawyers are successful on appeal in New York, his legal troubles would not be over.

Weinstein also faces 11 counts of sexual assault, involving five women, in Los Angeles County. The charges include four counts of forcible rape, four counts of forcible oral copulation, two counts of sexual battery by restraint, and one count of sexual penetration by use of force. The alleged assaults took place between 2004 and 2013.

A judge in New York has approved Weinstein's extradition to California, as early as this month, to face those additional charges.

The-CNN-Wire

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As rescuers sift through the rubble of a South Florida condo building, investigators have been searching for answers as to what triggered the collapse.

Officials have confirmed 22 deaths, and dozens more remain unaccounted for.

As families mourn and worry for their loved ones, residents and officials are criticizing the management of the building, saying more should have been done to prevent the tower from crashing down in the middle of the night last week.

Officials say they still haven't found what triggered the collapse, but engineers have told CNN it is likely the product of multiple factors rather than a single failing.

From an early construction halt to assurances that the building was fine, here is what we know so far about the damage and repairs to the building.

1980s construction halt

Before Champlain Towers South and one of its sister buildings opened, there was controversy around their construction, which violated local regulations, documents show.

"You are instructed to immediately cease any further construction on any penthouses at either of the Champlain Towers buildings," Surfside's acting town manager at the time, George Curti, told the tower's contractor in a December 2, 1980, letter.

Surfside's attorney had determined the penthouse violated town code, Curti wrote.

The following week, the Town Council granted an exception, allowing the penthouse construction to go forward, Curti wrote in a follow-up letter.

The issue was over the buildings' height: The penthouses had not been in the original plans and they brought both buildings above the town's 12-story height limit, The Wall Street Journal reported.

October 2018 report

Maryland-based Morabito Consultants performed a structural analysis as part of Champlain Towers South's 40-year recertification effort -- a stringent process for updates and improvements enacted after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

The structural field survey highlighted "abundant cracking and spalling" in concrete columns and walls, "exposed, deteriorating rebar" and failing waterproofing beneath the pool deck and entrance drive that was causing "major structural damage" to the concrete structural slab. It warned of rapid deterioration if it wasn't promptly replaced, according to the report.

"Morabito Consultants provided the Champlain Towers South Condominium Association with detailed findings and recommendations nearly three years ago regarding the structural repairs that were needed on the building to ensure the safety of the residents and the public," a Morabito statement said this week.

November 2018 meeting

Then-Surfside building official Rosendo Prieto appeared not to stress the damage in a 2018 meeting, according to the meeting's minutes.

Noting he had reviewed the Morabito report, Prieto said the "necessary data" had been collected for the recertification process "and it appears the building is in very good shape," the minutes say.

Prieto no long works for Surfside. He is on a leave of absence with his current employer, CAP Government, Inc., according to the city of Doral, which said it is reviewing eight projects to which CAP Government assigned Prieto. He has not responded to CNN's requests for comment.

Surfside Commissioner Eliana Salzhauer doesn't believe the condo association responded adequately to the Morabito report, she said. The association should have made concerns more clear to residents, she added.

"In hindsight, they should have made more noise," she said. "They had a report. It said very clearly, 'Your building is in bad shape.'"

The condo association declined to comment on specifics, but the association's surviving members released a statement Friday, saying, "We know that answers will take time as part of a comprehensive investigation and we will continue to work with city, state, local, and federal officials in their rescue efforts, and to understand the causes of this tragedy."

October letter

A nine-page October letter from Morabito Consultants to association board president Jean Wodnicki provided the scope of some of the damage in the pool area and the work being done to address it.

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Loose concrete around the perimeter of the pool pump room that showed signs of cracking, spalling and deterioration -- presenting a "fall hazard" -- had been removed, the summary said.

Morabito Consultants noted it could not perform all of the repair work in the pool area because of concerns about stability. The firm also needed access to the inside of the pool but had been told it needed to remain open during the work, the letter delivered last year said.

There is currently no indication that the concrete deterioration was a contributing factor to the collapse, but it does highlight major repair work needed at the Champlain Towers South condominium complex.

2021 photograph comparison

Engineers and experts compared a 2021 photo of concrete in the pool equipment room, published in the Miami Herald, to a 2018 photo of the same area and told CNN the condition appears worse in the more recent picture. The cause of the deterioration is not clear.

The equipment room is in the same area -- below the pool deck -- where Morabito had warned in 2018 of failed waterproofing and concrete deterioration.

The progression seen in the crack portrayed in the two images could be the result of the waterproofing problem, or concrete could have fallen off in the three years following the 2018 photo, revealing a deeper fissure, experts told CNN.

"Once deterioration like this starts, it's insidious. It just continues. Unless you do something about it, the whole thing is going to fall apart. All of the concrete is going to fall apart," said Matthys Levy, a consulting engineer and author of "Why Buildings Fall Down."

While stopping short of saying that the deterioration in the pool area could have caused the building's collapse, many engineers said the damage was likely indicative of poor maintenance throughout the building.

"It just generally shows what a crappy condition the concrete was in. You can draw whatever conclusions you want -- that maybe the rest of the concrete was just as bad," Levy said.

April letter to owners

A letter sent earlier this year to the building residents said the "exponential" concrete deterioration had taken place between 2018 and 2021.

"The concrete deterioration is accelerating," Wodnicki wrote. "The observable damage such as in the garage has gotten significantly worse since the initial (2018) inspection."

While the estimate for repairs stood at roughly $9 million in 2018, the price had risen to about $15 million by April, the letter noted.

Disputes over the lackluster response in tackling the repairs led to five of the seven board members resigning in 2019, The Washington Post reported, citing board meeting minutes and a resignation letter from Wodnicki's predecessor. Some of the members later returned to the board, The Post reported.

Efforts to reach almost everyone who had served on the board since 2018 were unsuccessful, the newspaper said.

Max Friedman, who served on the board from 2011 to 2016, told CNN the board had been plagued by infighting and the resignations made it difficult to get the necessary repairs started.

"I would never quit a board -- I think that's terrible," said Friedman, who lives in Manhattan. When asked about the general sentiment among residents, he said, "there was confusion," and he personally felt the resignations of board members were "inappropriate."

Friedman was careful to note that he didn't think the board could have possibly known that the building was in immediate danger.

"The township didn't tell us," he said.

Following Wodnicki's letter, the condo board association approved the $15 million in repairs, costs slated to be paid by the residents.

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A recent Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety called for an urgent overhaul of Australia's aged care system. The Head of QUT's School of Design says the focus needs to be on healthy aging and incorporate the fields of health, humanities, economics and the arts and design.

Professor Lisa Scharoun is editor and co-author of 'Cross-Cultural Design for Healthy Ageing' (Intellect Books) which reports on a series of multidisciplinary, cross-cultural workshops involving university students and academics from Australia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

Case studies highlight how 'design thinking' can be part of long-term solutions for better aged care and taught in preregistration nursing. The Singapore workshops were followed by a public exhibition and some of the concepts are now being trialled at Nanyang Polytechnic there.

"The United Nations population projections show that many countries, especially those classified as middle and high income, are entering a period where people aged over 65 may be in the majority," said Professor Scharoun.

"The impact of this in Australia and elsewhere will pose big social, cultural, economic and environmental challenges for contemporary society. Among other things, a longer life span equals an increased burden on the health system and housing.

"A 'one size fits all' point of view around aging is completely inadequate. Such a major global challenge cannot be tackled from the perspective of a single discipline.

"At its core, aging is a social issue and should be considered within the framework of sustainable development under which falls social, economic and environmental issues."

Professor Scharoun said the study of human aging was not exclusive to gerontology but should integrate information across a broad range of fields including sociology, psychology, public policy, biology, health services, humanities, economics, and the arts and design disciplines.

"A common perception in the countries we studied is that aging is a process of progressive deterioration," she said.

"We have instead focussed on 'healthy aging'; the importance of working towards supporting and maintaining the functional and mental abilities of individuals to enable well-being into older age.

"This involves reflecting on and influencing the design of environments, experiences, products and services that can best allow people to live an independent and fulfilling life well into advanced age.

"We don't assume healthy aging is about eradicating chronic disease and mobility issues. Instead, it focuses on how we might support and create conditions to better support people with a variety of complex needs.

"By engaging in cross-cultural collaboration among students in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan between 2015 and 2018, we discovered such an approach offers innovative new ways of looking at and addressing the needs of the growing aging market. It also fostered empathy and cultural intelligence."

Professor Scharoun said the 2017 and 2018 'Inspired by Singapore: Design for Healthy Ageing' workshops, for example, brought together students from graphic design, industrial design, web design, film, media and nursing.

"We had 175 students participate in these workshops from major urban centres of Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane," she said.

"They worked in partnership with residents in care homes, community housing, and hospitals across Singapore to co-design projects, services and campaigns that would assist healthy aging.

"Each team member represented a different discipline and/or culture which encouraged the sharing of knowledge and a think 'outside the square' approach to problem solving.

"Students were also presented with artificial handicaps like glasses with blurred lenses or tight gloves and mobility aids like wheelchairs, crutches, and walking frames to simulate the experience of an aged person."

Professor Scharoun said that while designers frequently collaborated across design disciplines and other areas such as business, communication, engineering, and the arts, it was less common and more challenging for clinicians to feel they have a role in contributing to the design of products, services and systems that promote dignity and enhance quality of life for consumers in care.
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), continues to spread globally. As of July 1, 2021, over 182 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported worldwide, which has led to the deaths of almost 4 million.

As vaccination efforts commenced in most countries, new variants threaten the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. For example, SARS-CoV-2 variants with mutations in their spike (S) protein may increase infectivity, heightened risk of death, and immune escape.

Study: SARS-CoV-2 Variants are Selecting for Spike Protein Mutations that Increase Protein Stability. Image Credit: Design_Cells / Shutterstock.com

A team of researchers at the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at the University College London demonstrated that mutations in the S protein of SARS-CoV-2 select for amino acid changes that result in a more stable protein than would otherwise be expected.

Based on calculating all possible protein mutations in the S protein of SARS-CoV-2, the researchers show that vast numbers of variants are more stable than expected compared to the background. The study, posted to the bioRxiv* pre-print server, highlights the importance of protein stability in understanding SARS-CoV-2 evolution.

SARS-CoV-2 mutations

Currently, new variants of concern (VOCs) threaten vaccine effectiveness, as they may evade the body's immune response. Also, these variants are easily transmitted from one person to another. Previous studies have also shown that these variants might increase the risk of severe illness and death among vulnerable populations.

Many of the SARS-CoV-2 VOCs contain mutations in the S protein that confer an advantage to the virus. The virus may have increased angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE-2) receptor binding, cleavage site alterations, and immune system evasion. The mutations may also have enhanced protein stability.

Structure of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. A) Full structure of COVID spike protein structure (PDBID 6XVV), subunits are coloured blue, orange, and grey. B) Single subunit of spike protein with residues from the "Alpha" variant coloured red and labelled.

Shedding light on these properties can help determine the differences of mutations, including increased infectivity or vaccine resistance. To this end, the researchers of the current study utilized protein folding calculations as a tool to detect potentially advantageous mutations of SARS-CoV-2.

An overview of Gibbs Free Energy

Protein folding is governed by the thermodynamic principle of Gibbs Free Energy (G), which states that the amino acid sequence of a protein determines its native structure. This native structure has the minimum G.

When a mutation in the amino acid sequence of a protein occurs, changes in G will also follow. In protein engineering and design, the prediction of changes in G is routinely used for enzyme optimization or stability of protein complexes. The researchers of the current study recently demonstrated that this could function as a predictor of mutations that cause destabilization or damage to a protein in a cancer context.

G in SARS-CoV-2 mutations determines protein stability

While the stability of mutations in the S protein of SARS-CoV-2 has been assessed in previous studies, variant analyses have not yet been conducted. SARS-CoV-2 S protein mutations are likely to improve binding to other molecules, as well as provide a longer lifespan before thermal unfolding.

Protein structural information, which has been published recently for the S protein of the SARS-CoV-2, is necessary for calculating predictions of G values.

In their work, the researchers calculate the G for every possible missense mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 S protein, which amounted to a total of 19,440 mutations. This information was subsequently described as the "background" mutation rate, which shows that emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants exhibit lower G and a higher proportion of stabilizing mutations than expected.

This finding suggests that protein stability, while rare, plays a vital role in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. Furthermore, the combination of mutations may result in synergistic changes to increase stability, revealing possible evolutionary orders for mutation.

How G relates to SARS-CoV-2 VOCs

Taking their research one step further, the researchers compared the background mutational distribution between VOCs and SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Interest (VOIs). Both SARS-CoV-2 VOIs and VOCs were found to exhibit significantly lower G values as compared to the bulk population, thereby indicating that these variants likely have been evolutionarily selected for stabilizing or non-destabilizing mutations.

Notably, none of the VOCs were found to contain mutations that were strongly destabilizing, which was defined as G values greater than 2.5 Kcal/mol. Overall, the researchers concluded that a statistical enrichment exists for SARS-CoV-2 mutations that stabilize the S protein as compared to the background.

Conclusion

"This work highlights those mutations with a stabilizing effect on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein are one of the key drivers of the evolution of the virus and contributing to the increased transmissibility of emerging variants."

Further investigation is needed to study the stability of the SARS-CoV-2 S protein. The team suggests that folding simulations of newly sequenced variants may provide an affordable and modern method to highlight advantageous mutations. Additionally, a prospective simulation of further mutation may help predict future variants to emerge.

*Important Notice

bioRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information.
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted scientists at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center to pivot their suicide prevention research efforts with a focus on telehealth. They received a five-year research award totaling almost $8 million from Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to explore treatment options for adolescents with suicidal thoughts. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among adolescents in the United States. The pandemic has shifted much of medicine to telehealth, including psychiatric services.

The timeliness of this research is based on the need for telehealth due to the pandemic; the mental health crisis in the adolescent population; and the dependence on technology." Drew Barzman, MD, Director of the Child and Adolescent Forensic Research Program at Cincinnati Children's

Barzman is the principal investigator of the project.

This multi-site study will compare the outcomes of psychiatric treatment of suicidal adolescents in different treatment settings. Researchers aim to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of suicide prevention treatment delivered by telehealth during the pandemic.

"Being that we're able to now look at the impact of COVID on mental health issues, it's helpful for us to share this information with the mental health community at large," says Jennifer Combs, senior research clinical coordinator and study project manager in the Division of Child Psychiatry at Cincinnati Children's.

The research team is enrolling teens who come to the Emergency Department for a suicidal event. They are followed in three different treatment groups: inpatient care, outpatient in-person, or outpatient telehealth. The team will assess how well each treatment setting reduces the risk of suicidal events.

"What we're really wanting to take a look at is how patients are doing three months and six months out after they receive these initial services and seeing if there's a clinically significant difference among the different treatment options that are available to the teens who are experiencing suicidal thoughts," Combs says.

"But even looking at outcomes two weeks after acute treatment in the hospital or clinic will be important since this transition period can be a high risk period of time for adolescents with suicidal thoughts," Barzman added.

Their long-term goal is to dramatically improve outcomes among adolescents with suicidal thoughts. Study participants and their guardians complete surveys every two weeks based on a suicide severity rating scale. Participants also answer treatment and life satisfaction surveys following the crisis.

"Working with suicidal adolescents is a difficult group to work with because there's a lot of risk associated with it. Our study team has done a lot of work on identifying new safety protocols and follow ups with families. They're getting real time safety information about how their child is doing," Barzman says. "It's a safety net, providing that needed extra support by monitoring the suicidal events, monitoring symptoms, and also alerting the parent when there is a safety concern in real time."
In Canada, low-income hospital patients under palliative care are less likely to receive medical assistance in dying compared to those who are high income, according to a study published in British Medical Journal Open (BMJ Open).

Medical assistance in dying (MAID) is legal and free under Medicare, Canada's universal health care system. Patients with low socioeconomic status (SES), however, generally tend to experience less access to medical care compared to their high SES counterparts.

Eldar Shafir, professor of psychology and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, along with a team of researchers from Sunnybrook Hospital in Ontario, investigated whether this trend of decreased care for low-income patients includes medical assistance in dying.

I have long been interested in SES influences on decision-making. I often discuss with my friend and collaborator, Dr. Redelmeier, ways to illustrate some of our findings in the medical realm, especially, when possible, among experts. ... In this case MAID was a really interesting domain, since it's a 'big' decision, and finances are not an issue." Eldar Shafir, professor of psychology and public affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

Medical assistance in dying was ruled legal in Canada in February 2015 and officially implemented and covered under Medicare by June 2016. To be considered, a patient must have a grievous and irremediable medical condition, such as metastatic cancer, that causes unbearable suffering where death is foreseeable, according to the Government of Canada.

However, one's socioeconomic status can influence how medical care is administered and received by a patient in several ways. "People can be easily susceptible to pitfalls and biases in reasoning," Shafir said.

Low-income patients, for example, may feel less equipped to advocate for their care and to convey dissatisfaction. Clinicians can also succumb to the "thick-skin fallacy," or the harmful perception that low-income people are used to hardship and therefore less impacted by it.

The team explored the association between socioeconomic status and medical assistance in dying by identifying hospital patients aged 65 and older in Ontario, Canada between June 2016 and 2019. At the time of their death, all patients, all of whom had serious medical conditions, were under palliative care, receiving pain-relieving treatment for symptoms. They were then divided into groups based on socioeconomic status, which was calculated using an official algorithm created by Statistics Canada based on home neighborhood location, and whether they received medical assistance in dying.

During the three years, 50,096 patients were given palliative care in their last month of life. Among them, 920 received medical assistance in dying. Only 1.5% of low-income patients identified were given MAID, compared to 2.4% of high-income patients -- a 39% decreased likelihood for those with low socioeconomic status. This disparity in care was found consistently across a variety of patient subgroups that varied in age, sex, home location, type of cancer, health care utilization, and general frailty. It was even replicated with patients treated by the same responsible physician.

The study's results support past findings by other countries about the relationship between medical assistance in dying and patients' socioeconomic status. In countries like the United States, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium, people who received MAID or MAID equivalents tended to be highly educated, financially secure, or live in wealthy neighborhoods.

The researchers, however, suspect that this difference in patient care may be influenced by factors that exist outside of financial capabilities. "I suspect most of what happens here is a function of the doctor-patient interaction," explained Shafir. "I think, all else equal, that doctors might see low-SES patients as less in urgent need of MAID."

Certain study limitations, such as biased and imperfect socioeconomic status measures, warrant further research exploring the link between social class and medically assisted death. "Both perspectives, the doctors' and the patients', need to be better understood by the medical community in order to provide low-SES patients with same care afforded those of higher SES," said Shafir.

The observations made by Shafir and his team address an earlier misconception in Canada that medical assistance in dying may harmfully target low-income individuals. The researchers are optimistic that their findings may help promote greater patient-clinician communication and engagement.
Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and colleagues have demonstrated that variants in the SPTBN1 gene can alter neuronal architecture, dramatically affecting their function and leading to a rare, newly defined neurodevelopmental syndrome in children.

Damaris Lorenzo, PhD, assistant professor in the UNC Department of Cell Biology and member of the UNC Neuroscience Center at the UNC School of Medicine, led this research, which was published today in the journal Nature Genetics. Lorenzo, who is also a member of the UNC Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC) at the UNC School of Medicine, is the senior author.

The gene SPTBN1 instructs neurons and other cell types how to make II-spectrin, a protein with multiple functions in the nervous system. Children carrying these variants can suffer from speech and motor delays, as well as intellectual disability. Some patients have received additional diagnosis, such as autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and epilepsy. Identification of the genetic variants that cause this broad spectrum of disabilities is the first important milestone to finding treatments for this syndrome.

Lorenzo first learned about patients with complex neurodevelopmental presentations carrying SPTBN1 variants from Queenie Tan, MD, PhD, a medical geneticist, and Becky Spillmann, MS, a genetic counselor - both members of the NIH-funded Undiagnosed Disease Network (UDN) site at Duke University and co-authors of the Nature Genetics paper. They connected with Margot Cousin, PhD, a geneticist associated with the UDN site at the Mayo Clinic and co-first author or the study. Cousin had also collected clinical information from SPTBN1 variant carriers. Other clinical genetics teams learned about these efforts and joined the study.

The cohort of individuals affected by SPTBN1 variants continues to grow. Lorenzo and colleagues have been contacted about new cases after they published a preprint of their initial findings last summer. Identifying the genetic cause of rare diseases such as the SPTBN1 syndrome requires pooling knowledge from several patients to establish common clinical and biological patterns.

"Fortunately, the advent of affordable gene sequencing technology, together with the creation of databases and networks to facilitate the sharing of information among clinicians and investigators, has vastly accelerated the diagnosis of rare diseases," Lorenzo said. "To put our case in historical perspective, II-spectrin was co-discovered 40 years ago through pioneering work that involved my UNC colleagues Keith Burridge, PhD, and Richard Cheney, PhD, as well as my postdoctoral mentor Vann Bennett, PhD, at Duke. However, its association with disease eluded us until now."

II-spectrin is tightly associated with the neuronal cytoskeleton - a complex network of filamentous proteins that spans the neuron and plays pivotal roles in their growth, shape, and plasticity. II-spectrin forms an extended scaffolding network that provides mechanical integrity to membranes and helps to orchestrate the correct positioning of molecular complexes throughout the neuron. Through research published in PNAS in 2019, Lorenzo found that II-spectrin is essential for normal brain wiring in mice and for proper transport of organelles and vesicles in axons - the long extensions that carry signals from neurons to other neurons. II-spectrin is an integral part of the process that enables normal development, maintenance, and function of neurons.

In this new study, Lorenzo's research team showed that, at the biochemical level, the genetic variants identified in patients are sufficient to cause protein aggregation, aberrant association of II-spectrin with the cytoskeleton, impair axonal organelle transport and growth, and change the morphology of neurons. These deficiencies can permanently alter how neurons connect and communicate with each other, which is thought to contribute to the etiology of neurodevelopmental disorders. The team showed that reduction of II-spectrin levels only in neurons disrupts structural connectivity between cortical areas in mutant mice, a deficit also observed in brain MRIs of some patients.

In collaboration with Sheryl Moy, PhD, professor in the UNC Department of Psychiatry and director of the Mouse Behavioral Phenotyping (MBP) Core of the UNC IDDRC, the researchers found that these mice have developmental and behavioral deficits consistent with presentations observed in humans.

Now that we've established the methods to assign likelihood of pathogenicity to SPTBN1 variants and to determine how they alter neurons, our immediate goal is to learn more about the affected molecular and cellular mechanisms and brain circuits, and evaluate strategies for potential clinical interventions." Damaris Lorenzo, PhD, Assistant Professor, UNC Department of Cell Biology

To this end, her team will collaborate with Adriana Beltran, PhD, assistant professor in the UNC Department of Genetics and director of the UNC Human Pluripotent Cell Core, to use neurons differentiated from patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells. And the research team will continue to tap into molecular modeling predictions in collaboration with Brenda Temple, PhD, professor in the UNC Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and director of the UNC Structural Bioinformatics Core, both co-authors on the Nature Genetics paper.

"As a basic science investigator, it's so satisfying to use knowledge and tools to provide answers to patients," Lorenzo said. "I first witnessed this thrill of scientific discovery and collaborative work as a graduate student 15 years ago when our lab identified the genetic cause of the first spectrinopathy affecting the nervous system, and it has been a powerful motivator since."

That work was the discovery of variants in a different spectrin gene as the cause of spinocebellar ataxia type 5 (SCA5), led by Laura Ranum, PhD, who at the time was at the University of Minnesota. In follow up work, as part of that team, Lorenzo contributed insights into the pathogenic mechanism of SCA5.

"Aside from the immediate relevance to affected patients, insights from our work on SPTNB1 syndrome will inform discoveries in other complex disorders with overlapping pathologies," Lorenzo said. "It is exciting to be part of such important work with a team of dedicated scientists and clinicians."

Members of the Lorenzo lab who are co-authors in the Nature Genetics paper are co-first author Blake Creighton, lab research technician in the Lorenzo lab; Reggie Edwards, graduate student; Keith Breau, graduate student at the time of this research; Deepa Ajit, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow; Sruthi Dontu, Simone Afriyie, and Julia Bay, all undergraduates at UNC-Chapel Hill; and Liset Falcon, lab research technician at the time of this research. Other UNC-Chapel Hill collaborators and co-authors in the paper are Kathryn Harper, PhD, project manager in the MBP Core; and Lorena Munoz and Alvaro Beltran, both research associates in the hHPSC.
While vaccines are doing a remarkable job of slowing the COVID-19 pandemic, infected people can still die from severe illness and new medications to treat them have been slow to arise. What kills these patients in the end doesn't seem to be the virus itself, but an over-reaction of their immune system that leads to massive inflammation and tissue damage.

By studying a type of immune cells called T cells, a team of Gladstone scientists has uncovered fundamental differences between patients who overcome severe COVID-19 and those who succumb to it. The team, working together with researchers from UC San Francisco and Emory University, also found that dying patients harbor relatively large numbers of T cells able to infiltrate the lung, which may contribute to the extensive lung deterioration that is a hallmark of fatal COVID-19.

The findings, published in the scientific journal Cell Reports, could pave the way for new treatments. Currently, patients who are hospitalized for severe COVID-19 mostly receive dexamethasone, a drug used to reduce inflammation.

Dexamethasone has been a life saver for many patients. But it is not always sufficient. Our study suggests that it may also be beneficial to directly prevent excess immune cells, including inflammatory T cells, from entering the lung and causing further damage. This approach could be a good complement to anti-inflammatory treatments for COVID-19 patients in the intensive care unit." Nadia Roan, PhD, Gladstone Associate Investigator, Senior and Corresponding Author of the Study

The work could also help with disease prognosis.

"Some patients can fall seriously ill from the virus," says Warner Greene, MD, PhD, senior investigator at Gladstone and co-senior author of the study. "We are in dire need for effective ways to anticipate the course of disease, as well as to alleviate lung damage in people with severe COVID-19."

An Imbalance of T Cells

T cells are a crucial component of a successful immune response to many viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And they are markedly depleted from the blood during severe COVID-19.

To characterize the features of the T cells that remain, the scientists obtained blood samples that had been collected from COVID-19 patients in an intensive care unit (ICU). While about half of these patients eventually recovered, the other half died of the disease. By examining samples taken at different times during the patients' stay in the ICU, the scientists were able to discern trends that they could relate to the disease outcome.

Much has already been learned about the immune response of COVID-19 patients during active infection or after convalescence. For example, studies from convalescent individuals, including Roan's own previous work, reveal how the immune system may provide long-term immunity. Less clear, however, is how the immune system may protect from severe illness or, conversely, contribute to its worsening and to death. To understand the cause of fatalities, the researchers needed to compare fatal to non-fatal severe cases.

Using CyTOF, a technique implemented in Roan's lab that distinguishes the many types of T cells circulating in the body, the scientists found profound differences between the ICU patients' T-cell response to the virus.

"The T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2 increased in patients who were eventually discharged from the ICU and recovered," says Roan, who is also an associate professor of urology at UC San Francisco. "But in patients who eventually died, we sometimes could not detect any T-cell response, or their response decreased over time."

Differences also extended to the composition of the patients' T cells that recognize the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In particular, patients who survived harbored a growing number of T cells called Th1, which are known as important fighters of viral infection. Roan's team found molecular features on the Th1 cells that may explain why they were able to multiply in these patients.

By contrast, they found that patients who died had an elevated number of T cells secreting an inflammatory molecule that would contribute to a worsening of their lung condition. These patients also held more regulatory T cells recognizing the virus. Regulatory T cells normally help quiet down the immune response once infection subsides.

"Perhaps in these patients, regulatory T cells were activated too early and prevented effector T cells from ever mounting an adequate immune response to SARS-CoV-2," says Roan. "This could help explain the patients' paltry response to the virus."

Based on these findings, doctors might be able to predict the course of illness from the relative abundance of Th1 and regulatory T cells that recognize SARS-CoV-2 in a patient's blood.

Roan cautions, however, "Our findings show correlations, not causes. The immune system is complex, with many moving parts and possible interactions between them. Proving the cause of fatality will require further studies."

Stemming the flow of lung-homing cells

Another potential cause of fatality that the team discovered was a surge in T cells able to infiltrate the lungs of dying patients. By contrast, these cells decreased over time in the patients who recovered.

The scientists call these lung-homing cells "bystander T cells," because they are T cells that do not directly recognize the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

"Our study suggests that during severe COVID-19, bystander T cells are recruited from the blood into the lung, where they may contribute to immune-mediated pathology," says Roan.

What triggers the surge of bystander T cells in severe COVID-19 cases remains unclear, but may be in part mediated by proteins secreted by the lung that recruit these cells. Regardless, stemming their flow into the lung may help reduce lung damage and accelerate the recovery of patients with severe illness.

This approach is particularly promising, as drugs that antagonize a molecule found on the surface of the bystander T cells are already approved for the treatment of metastatic cancer.

"Our next step is to test these drugs in a mouse model of severe COVID-19," says Roan. "We hope that after further scrutiny, such drugs could rapidly be tested as adjunctive treatment for COVID-19."
Vaccines are largely recognized to be the most effective way out of the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). By inducing protective neutralizing responses to the virus, vaccines will hopefully allow life to return to a semblance of normality, saving many lives in the process.

Some groups of patients on immunosuppressive drugs are, however, likely to respond suboptimally to vaccines. A new preprint, available on the medRxiv* server, describes such altered responses to the use of the highly effective messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna in patients with multiple sclerosis on anti-CD20 (MS-aCD20) monotherapy.

These findings bring some clarity to the vaccine response in this group of patients, as well as others on aCD20, and may help in better clinical decisions, as well as public health strategies to protect such patient groups.

Background

The two mRNA vaccines that have been approved under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the FDA in the US are the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna) vaccines. These have proved very effective in advanced clinical trials, but unfortunately, such experiments excluded patients on immunosuppressive therapies.

One such formulation is aCD20, meant to deplete B lymphocytes and used in blood cancers and many autoimmune disorders. B cells differentiate into antibody-generating plasmablasts as well as memory B cells, preserving the epitope memory against a repeat exposure.

Memory B cells formed in response to exposure to specific antigens are central to long-term immunity, since they give rise to new antibody-secreting cells. This triggers affinity maturation and improved specificity of the antibodies in the germinal center, leading to the eventual selection of potent neutralizing antibodies.

B cells may also serve as antigen-presenting cells along with dendritic cells.

This function is especially prominent when they interact with T cells recognizing the same epitope. Thus, aCD20 treatment may affect B cell functions in all these areas, depending on the extent to which they are sensitive to the antibody.

B cell depletion

Patients with B cell depletion, such as MS aCD20 patients, have shown a reduced response to mRNA vaccines based on the SARS-CoV-2 spike, with both anti-spike binding and neutralizing antibody titers. Antibodies were detected in only one-third of such patients after two doses of the vaccine.

B cells may not be essential for COVID-19 vaccination to be effective, since T cell responses have been shown to protect against severe disease, especially in patients with B cell depletion. Even in healthy individuals, a single dose of an mRNA vaccine rapidly elicits CD4+ T cells specific to the spike, which proceed to produce a well-rounded immune response after two doses.

T cells also recognize a wider range of epitopes outside the antibody binding sites that are susceptible to mutational escape. Thus, T cells specifically targeting this virus are fitted to provide broader immunity.

What were the findings?

In the current study, the researchers found that spike binding antibodies were detected in 85% of vaccine recipients and antibodies directed against the receptor-binding domain (RBD) in half the cohort. Despite this, the titer was lower, and the appearance delayed compared to healthy controls, showing that aCD20 caused a weakened antibody response to vaccination.

Spike- and RBD-targeting memory B cells were also found in only a few vaccinated MS aCD20 patients, at low frequencies.

With increased B cells in circulation, the antibody titers following vaccination became more similar to that of healthy controls, showing that these cells are functionally intact. The greater antibody response compared to memory B cell response could be because functional B cells re-enter lymphoid tissues as the aCD20 effect wears off, allowing antibody production even before B cells re-enter the circulation.

Strong T cell responses

Robust CD4+ T cell responses directed to the spike were detected in all vaccine recipients despite their being on aCD20, though the peak was lower compared to healthy controls. With CD8+ T cells, however, these patients showed stronger antigen-specific activation responses to vaccination, especially after the second dose, than healthy controls.

The immune response also showed a change in immune coordination following mRNA vaccination. Patients who failed to generate anti-RBD antibodies showed lower complementary T follicular helper cell (cTfh) and CD4+ T cell responses following vaccination, with a corresponding rise in CD8+ T cells.

In other words, the lack of an antibody response to the viral RBD, the CD4+ T cell response was weaker, while CD8+ T cell responses were more similar to those in healthy controls. Thus, B cell function depends on Tfh cells, and vice versa, for optimal response. However, Th1 cells were primed as expected, so that these patients had antiviral CD8 and Th1 CD4 responses.

The strong CD8+ T cell responses could be due to the increased antigen levels in the absence of antibodies, driving CD8+ T cell activation and proliferation. Another possibility is that even while B cells promote the priming of CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cell responses are directly weakened by regulatory B cells primed by one dose of the vaccine. Further research will help tell these roles apart.

Finally, antibodies or immune complexes may bind to the inhibitory FcRIIB on dendritic cells or CD8+ T cells in healthy controls. Since this is absent in the aCD20 cohort, the CD8+ T cell responses are enhanced.

What are the implications?

These data demonstrate the efficient induction of T cell immunity in MS-aCD20 patients following SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination even in the absence of antibody induction.

These findings indicate that the B cell response to the vaccine spike antigen was weaker. However, a few patients without detectable circulating B cells did show antibody responses to the spike antigen. This may be due to early repopulation of the lymphoid tissues by B cells, perhaps proportional to the time elapsed since the last aCD20 treatment.

The researchers feel, however, that the presence of circulating B cells is a more accurate marker of the ability to mount a humoral response to the vaccine than the duration since aCD20 treatment, since the former seemed to be linked to stronger antibody responses to the spike and RBD. This may help determine the optimal time for vaccination in these patients.

All MS aCD20 patients showed strong CD4+ and CD8+ T cells responses to the vaccine despite the poor antibody response, indicating that they are protected to some extent by the vaccine. Nonetheless, the antigen-specific cTfh cell response was defective, especially in those patients who did not produce RBD-specific antibodies.

In the absence of anti-RBD antibodies, patients on aCD20 treatment showed the largest deficit in cTfh responses, but the strongest CD8+ T cell responses. In contrast, those who did have detectable RBD antibodies showed T cell responses that were similar to those in healthy controls.

The poor humoral response may, however, prevent sterilizing immunity and predispose these patients to a state of chronic infection before the virus is cleared, with a higher risk of transmission and the emergence of escape mutations.

The study, therefore, adds to the sum of knowledge on immune responses in individuals with weakened immunity, allowing for better recommendations on their vaccination and clinical care in the context of COVID-19 and other infections.

*Important notice

medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information.
In his multiple attempts to overcome a methamphetamine addiction that ground through two decades of his life, Tyrone Clifford Jr. remembers well the closest he came. "The most success I had," he said, "is when my dealer was in jail."

Then Clifford walked into a rehab clinic in San Francisco called PROP, the Positive Reinforcement Opportunity Project. There, he encountered an approach so simple he sounds slightly bemused explaining it. The secret? The program paid him to show up and stay clean.

"It wasn't much money  very little, in fact, and I didn't really need it," said Clifford, 52. "But I did need the support. I did need the connection. I was doing something positive for the first time in a long, long time, and it changed my outlook."

The concept of a reward for sobriety  known as contingency management  lies at the heart of many an addiction therapy success story. Research showing it's a highly effective tool for managing substance use disorder, especially for stimulants, goes back decades.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has long employed the therapy, providing it to more than 5,600 veterans. Some 92% of the 72,000 urine samples collected during treatment tested negative for the targeted drug, said Dominick DePhilippis, a clinical psychologist and researcher who helped launch the VA's program in 2011.

But outside of the VA? "It is used almost zero," said Richard Rawson, a professor emeritus at UCLA who has researched the therapy for nearly 30 years. Providers worry that by paying patients they'll violate anti-kickback regulations and thus jeopardize their federal funding through Medicaid.

But California appears poised to challenge the regulations. On June 1, the state Senate unanimously passed SB 110, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), which declares contingency management (CM) a legal practice and authorizes its funding by adding it to the list of drug treatment services offered through Medi-Cal, the state's version of Medicaid. The price tag for the bill depends on how many patients use the therapy, but it would cost only about $179,000 a year to include the approach in treatment for 1,000 people trying to kick stimulant use, according to a financial analysis.

California's latest budget, still being hammered out, may include money for a CM pilot program for next year. Wiener's bill would provide permanent funding  if, that is, Medi-Cal can get federal signoff on the practice.

The federal anti-kickback statute prohibits offering an inducement to a patient to choose a specific program or type of treatment. The Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Inspector General has to this point agreed with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that a violation would occur at any monetary incentive beyond $75 a year, which contingency management experts say isn't enough to get results.

More than a dozen organizations have written to the Department of Health and Human Services to ask for a waiver of the anti-kickback statute as it pertains to the therapy. A group led by Dr. Westley Clark, former director of the federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, is asking Congress to instruct HHS to allow the treatment in Medicaid programs.

In response to questions from KHN, a spokesman for the HHS Office of the Inspector General declined to comment on "any regulations or waivers in development," but said the OIG "recognizes that contingency management interventions are the most effective currently available treatment for stimulant use disorders." Any CM program put in place would be evaluated on a case by case basis, he said, and going over the $75 annual limit "does not mean that such incentive automatically violates the statute and is illegal."

The VA can ignore the rule altogether because the department's budget covers all its costs. "VA is in many ways the ideal setting for [the therapy's] implementation," said DePhilippis. "We're not subject to the funding concerns that I hear expressed by my colleagues in programs outside of the VA."

As the name implies, patients in a CM program are rewarded on a contingency basis for modifying their behavior  specifically, by not missing recovery meetings or failing a drug test. While the approach can be employed to treat any type of substance addiction, it's been especially useful for stimulants like meth and cocaine, for which there is no well-established addiction-combating medication, such as methadone for an addiction to opioids.

Patients at VA recovery sessions draw from a plastic fishbowl that holds 500 slips of paper. Half of those slips contain positive messages: "Good job." "Way to go." Another 209 slips are worth $1, while 40 are worth $20 and one "jumbo" prize of $100 lurks in every bowl. As patients continue to stay clean, the number of slips they get to draw increases, to a maximum of eight. If they skip meetings or test positive, they go back to drawing a single slip. The money is paid in the form of vouchers that can be used through the VA's canteen system to buy food and other items, but not alcohol or tobacco.

In other programs that employ the approach, including the one Tyrone Clifford found in San Francisco in 2011, patients receive gift cards worth $300 to $400 over 12 weeks in exchange for regularly attending meetings and producing clean tests. Most of the incentive programs are designed to end after three months, on the theory that patients have used the time to regularly attend counseling and therapy sessions and kick-start their recoveries.

That is what happened to Clifford, who fell into meth use after learning he was HIV-positive at age 21. He and his partner (now husband) soon moved from Georgia to San Francisco, where his use spiraled out of control until he was advised to visit PROP, administered through the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

"The money wasn't the main thing for me  but it is for some of the guys who come in here," Clifford said. "They may need that small amount to keep a cellphone bill paid. They may need that for a doctor. I hear people say, 'Why should we pay a drug user to stop using drugs?' My answer is that it works. You keep coming in, week after week, and pretty soon you're back on your feet."

Some critics have moral qualms about paying a patient for good behavior, and therapists are sometimes wary of the approach. But effective approaches are needed. In San Francisco, the meth overdose death rate has increased more than 500% since 2008, and half of all psychiatric emergency room admissions at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital are now meth-related.

"As a gay man in San Francisco, my community has been deeply affected by meth use," said Wiener. Meth use spiked 20% nationally among those tested in the early months of the pandemic.

Those who've seen the approach used successfully in treating meth addiction are befuddled by its unavailability, especially now that states offer everything from marijuana to Yankees tickets to persuade people to get vaccinated against covid-19.

Still, Rawson said he doubts California's bill can override the HHS restrictions as currently written. Wiener, on the other hand, doesn't believe the use of therapy was ever in violation of anti-kickback statutes.

Tyrone Clifford simply knows it works.

"I see it now from the other side," said Clifford, who is 10 years sober and now counsels those trying to kick meth addiction through the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. "Guys keep coming back. You can see it building every week."

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.
Terrorism, climate change and now a pandemic - worries and fears shape the everyday lives of many people. The latest issue of the Science Magazine BfR2GO from the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) is dedicated to fear, while at the same time embarking on a search for confidence. Scientists from many spheres have their chance to speak and categorize the concepts in a clear way.

Fear is vital for survival; it warns us about hazards. But we all tend to overestimate risks in a state of fear. Crises require solution-orientated decisions instead of those driven by fear." Dr. Andreas Hensel, Professor and President, BfR Federal Institute for Risk Assessment

Regular surveys, such as the BfR Corona Monitor, help to include the population's concerns in research and communication. It is not just coronaviruses that cause fear: one topic that concerns many of us is, for example, plant protection products. Some fear that the products could drift from the field and damage our health. Experts explain how this is assessed from a scientific point of view in the new BfR2GO.

Our society has been in a kind of permanent state of alert since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. The BfR uses this exceptional situation as an opportunity to discuss how risks and their perception control certain areas of our lives.

On the one hand, fear is considered to be an innate survival system that warns humans and animals of acute hazards. On the other hand, fear is not a good advisor: it should not be the only basis for making decisions. Experts from the fields of psychology, sociology and philosophy show individual and societal ways of dealing with fear, providing scope for confidence.

Professor Dr. Maren Urner, media psychologist at the University of Applied Sciences for Media, Communication and Economics in Cologne, explains in an interview in the Science Magazine BfR2GO how media can provide solutions in crises without resorting to pessimism.

Another topic in the eighth issue of BfR2GO: allergies. They are a growing health problem, especially in industrialised countries. Allergenic substances in everyday products are abundant and the mechanisms in the body complex. The article on this explains the diverse reactions of the immune system and sheds light on the challenges for science.

Also in the new BfR2GO: where listeria hides in food, what coronaviruses have in common with microplastics, what consumers should pay attention to when it comes to their iodine supply and how "organoids" just a few millimetres in size can help replace animal experiments.

Compact and packed to the brim with knowledge, the BfR2GO science magazine provides up-to-date and well-founded information about research and the assessment of this research in consumer health protection and about the protection of laboratory animals. Each issue presents a topic focusing on one of the BfR's current fields of work. Moreover, there are reports, interviews and information from all areas of the BfR's work.
The number of people who live past the age of 100 has been on the rise for decades, up to nearly half a million people worldwide.

There are, however, far fewer "supercentenarians," people who live to age 110 or even longer. The oldest living person, Jeanne Calment of France, was 122 when she died in 1997; currently, the world's oldest person is 118-year-old Kane Tanaka of Japan.

Such extreme longevity, according to new research by the University of Washington, likely will continue to rise slowly by the end of this century, and estimates show that a lifespan of 125 years, or even 130 years, is possible.

People are fascinated by the extremes of humanity, whether it's going to the moon, how fast someone can run in the Olympics, or even how long someone can live. With this work, we quantify how likely we believe it is that some individual will reach various extreme ages this century." Michael Pearce, Study Lead Author and Doctoral Student in Statistics, University of Washington

Longevity has ramifications for government and economic policies, as well as individuals' own health care and lifestyle decisions, rendering what's probable, or even possible, relevant at all levels of society.

The new study, published June 30 in Demographic Research, uses statistical modeling to examine the extremes of human life. With ongoing research into aging, the prospects of future medical and scientific discoveries and the relatively small number of people to have verifiably reached age 110 or older, experts have debated the possible limits to what is referred to as the maximum reported age at death. While some scientists argue that disease and basic cell deterioration lead to a natural limit on human lifespan, others maintain there is no cap, as evidenced by record-breaking supercentenarians.

Pearce and Adrian Raftery, a professor of sociology and of statistics at the UW, took a different approach. They asked what the longest individual human lifespan could be anywhere in the world by the year 2100. Using Bayesian statistics, a common tool in modern statistics, the researchers estimated that the world record of 122 years almost certainly will be broken, with a strong likelihood of at least one person living to anywhere between 125 and 132 years.

To calculate the probability of living past 110 -- and to what age -- Raftery and Pearce turned to the most recent iteration of the International Database on Longevity, created by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. That database tracks supercentenarians from 10 European countries, plus Canada, Japan and the United States.

Using a Bayesian approach to estimate probability, the UW team created projections for the maximum reported age at death in all 13 countries from 2020 through 2100.

Among their findings:

Researchers estimated near 100% probability that the current record of maximum reported age at death -- Calment's 122 years, 164 days -- will be broken;

The probability remains strong of a person living longer, to 124 years old (99% probability) and even to 127 years old (68% probability);

An even longer lifespan is possible but much less likely, with a 13% probability of someone living to age 130;

It is "extremely unlikely" that someone would live to 135 in this century.

As it is, supercentenarians are outliers, and the likelihood of breaking the current age record increases only if the number of supercentenarians grows significantly. With a continually expanding global population, that's not impossible, researchers say.

People who achieve extreme longevity are still rare enough that they represent a select population, Raftery said. Even with population growth and advances in health care, there is a flattening of the mortality rate after a certain age. In other words, someone who lives to be 110 has about the same probability of living another year as, say, someone who lives to 114, which is about one-half.

"It doesn't matter how old they are, once they reach 110, they still die at the same rate," Raftery said. "They've gotten past all the various things life throws at you, such as disease. They die for reasons that are somewhat independent of what affects younger people.

"This is a very select group of very robust people."
Flinders University sleep experts are becoming embedded in a new trial to help people with their individual sleep disorders - via tests on a new mattress sensor.

Image Credit: Flinders University

The sleep disorder diagnosis and monitoring trial will be conducted using invisible sensor technology, REMi  developed by RMIT University for Melbourne-based R&D company Sleeptite  to investigate its capability as a validation tool for sleep disorders.

Flinders University project lead, Associate Professor Andrew Vakulin, said the research aimed to develop and validate sleep measurement metrics and algorithms using the REMi sensors, and to further enhance their capability to provide informative data.

Sleep, exercise and healthy eating are essential for a healthy life, and missing out on sleep  including with an untreated sleep disorder  can have serious long and short-term health consequences, Associate Professor Vakulin says.

Our research aims to prove that the Sleeptite REMi sensors give a reliable measure of sleep quality and sleep disorders, which will ultimately lead to new apps to help consumers improve their sleep health. Andrew Vakulin, Associate Professor, Flinders University

The trial was made possible due to funding received from the CRC for Alertness, Safety and Productivity.

REMi is the result of an Australian Government Cooperative Research Centers  Project (CRC-P) grant, which saw fundamental research taken from RMIT labs and translated into a commercial outcome.

Launched in March, the technology is designed to non-intrusively monitor aged care residents.

Sensors on the surface of a mattress provide real-time insights into residents position, posture and sleep health status.

Sleeptite CEO Cameron van den Dungen says the new research harnessed REMis potential to provide sleep diagnostic information outside of an aged care setting.

With a recent report from the Sleep Health Foundation and Deloitte showing 1 in 10 Australians suffer from a sleep disorder, at a national economic cost of $14.4 billion, there has never been a greater need for research in this space, Mr van den Dungen says.

I am so excited to see further scientific research show how the Sleeptite REMi platform can be used as a sleep diagnostic tool to determine sleep disorders such as sleep apnea. Cameron van den Dungen, CEO, Sleeptite

The technology will be put to the test by experts from the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute Sleep Health team at Flinders University in collaboration with at RMIT.

Group co-leader, Professor Madhu Bhaskaran, from the Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group at RMIT, says the team was excited to take their collaboration with Sleeptite into important new areas of research.

The flexible and stretchable sensors developed at RMIT are part of what makes REMi unique  and its this nearable and unfeelable technology that will enable sleep studies to be carried out in far more natural settings, he says.

We look forward to discovering new avenues of partnership for this platform technology, and the opportunity to build deep collaborations to take this world-first system beyond aged care.

The REMi Sleep Diagnosis Evaluation Trial at Flinders is expected to last six months and include further sensor capability testing of the REMi sensors; identifying key sleep-related parameters; establishing relationships between sensor signals and sleep measurements; and developing an algorithm that will recognize sleep quality.

The REMi Sleep Diagnosis Evaluation Trial will involve 30 participants and will be evaluated against polysomnography (PSG) results, which are considered the industry gold standard.

Facts about sleep disorders and sleep health
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and Pathnova Laboratories, a medical diagnostic company backed by Temasek Life Sciences Accelerator and headquartered in Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, is contributing to Singapore's COVID-19 diagnostic capability through its partnership in a new clinical diagnostic laboratory.

Amid the ongoing global COVID-19 situation, the lab plans to tap advanced technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analytics to innovate, boosting the country's future pandemic response.

Situated at NTU Singapore's Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine) Novena Campus, the NTU Clinical Diagnostic Laboratory was set up in April 2020 by a team of academic researchers, in support of the national effort to increase diagnostic testing capacity and commenced Covid-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing on 1 July 2020.

The partnership between NTU and Pathnova commenced on 1 March 2021, with Pathnova running the operations and NTU continuing to support and host the lab. Since then, the lab now known as Pathnova Laboratories @ LKCMedicine, has scaled up its operations and been engaged by the Singapore Ministry of Health in testing swabs from over 120,000 individuals, including routine rostered testing for residents of foreign worker dormitories.

With a testing capacity of 2,000 tests per day, the lab has been preparing for large-scale testing and faster turnaround times with automation and increasing the types of SARS-CoV-2 assays available.

Given its focus on serology, Pathnova has also extended its capabilities into COVID-19 serology testing at the diagnostic lab. Such tests are intended for detecting past infections or assessing an individual's antibody response post vaccination.

Preparing for future pandemics

As the lab inevitably transitions out of COVID-19, the vision is to use the lessons learnt from pandemic testing to reimagine a new genre of lab which is flexible and scalable through open-source robotics and software automation.

Such a lab will be scalable yet adaptable, for instance in using smart digital processes to ensure quality and productivity of daily testing, while allowing scientific experts to make innovations and improvements on lab workflows.

Mr Peter Chia, Chief Executive Officer, Temasek Life Sciences Accelerator, said, "We are pleased to work with a world-renowned health institution like LKCMedicine. It is our belief that such collaborative partnerships stem from quality science and passionate people working together, capitalising on the momentum from the international scientific community's response to this crisis, to bring innovative solutions for public good.

I would like to congratulate LKCMedicine and Pathnova for this partnership. We look forward to seeing more innovative solutions from them to benefit communities in Singapore and the region."

NTU Senior Vice President (Research) Professor Lam Khin Yong, said: "NTU's collaboration with Pathnova Laboratories will allow our scientists to leverage their expertise in Artificial Intelligence technologies to tackle future pandemic challenges. We look forward to how this synergy between academia and industry will bring about meaningful results that contribute to the greater national effort in safeguarding population health."

Exploring accelerated detection and diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2

Supported by experts in the fields of genomics, computer science and bioengineering, the Pathnova Laboratories @ LKCMedicine lab will explore ways to simplify and shorten complex protocols. Creating a new kind of molecular laboratory, it will run on open-source hardware and software, be fully integrated, reconfigurable, and resistant to supply chain bottlenecks.

For example, the lab will look at using advanced technology to accelerate innovation through data analytics and AI automation, activating robotics and mathematical algorithms to raise efficiency and lower operational costs.

NTU Senior Vice President (Health and Life Sciences) and Dean NTU Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine), Distinguished University Professor Joseph Sung said, "As we have seen and experienced with coronavirus, viruses mutate and diseases evolve but fortunately, technology also evolves - often in our favour. By leveraging technology in molecular virology and partnering with the industry, we can work together towards strengthening Singapore's future pandemic preparedness."

Being the only diagnostic service lab set up by an Institute of Higher Learning as a rapid response to the national exigency, the lab brings together two excellent experts in the field.

It is co-led by Associate Professor Eric Yap from LKCMedicine, who is the Medical Director of the new lab, and Dr Ian Cheong, Chief Scientific Officer, and co-founder of Pathnova Laboratories.

NTU and Pathnova share a similar spirit. We build things leanly and from first principles, with a view to scalable and consistent performance when used in the real world. Our partnership was catalysed in the crucible of COVID-19. We are glad for the meaningful opportunity to contribute to Singapore's safe reopening together." Dr Ian Cheong, Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder, Pathnova Laboratories

Assoc Prof Yap, who worked as a medical doctor and defence scientist, studies the patterns and effects of genetic variation in human, bacterial and viral genomes, exploiting these differences for more accurate and rapid disease diagnosis.

In April 2020, Assoc Prof Yap and his team of researchers devised a way to speed up the COVID-19 PCR test, yielding results in just 36 minutes with limited equipment and capabilities. Their direct PCR test is used to look for COVID-19 genetic sequences in crude samples without the need for lengthy and manual RNA purification steps, which are needed in current PCR tests.

Dr Ian Cheong, who is trained as both a lawyer and scientist, has a background in experimental therapeutics and diagnostics for cancer. In 2017, with support from Temasek Life Sciences Accelerator (TLA), he co-founded Pathnova Laboratories with Emeritus Professor Chan Soh Ha and Mr. Jason Foo to develop scalable detection of nasopharyngeal cancer and autoimmune diseases through serological detection, accelerated with machine learning.
CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, will spearhead a $1.7 million project to identify new treatments for COVID-19, including 'long-COVID'.

An image of the corona virus responsible for causing the disease COVID-19. Image Credit: CSIRO

Scientists will develop a faster, smarter way of rapidly screening existing drugs and advancing those that can be used to treat COVID-19 and aim to have identified thee suitable TGA- or FDA-approved drug candidates to progress to phase 2-3 human clinical trials within a year.

Led by researchers at CSIRO's Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness in Geelong, the project received $1 million in funding from the Australian Governments Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), with the remaining contributed by CSIRO.

CSIRO scientist and project leader, Dr S.S. Vasan, said in addition to vaccines, there was an urgent need for safe, effective and affordable COVID-19 treatments that specifically targeted the virus.

A great strategy to find potential COVID-19 treatments is to repurpose drugs already approved for other diseases, but the current methods to do this are expensive, time-consuming and not fit-for-purpose, Dr Vasan said.

The MRFF funding will enable us to develop a multi-tissue drug screening tool, tailored for infections by SARS-CoV-2 and all its variants of concern, which could help fast-track drugs for phase 2-3 human clinical trials and minimize the need for animal trials. Dr S.S. Vasan, Scientist and Project Leader, CSIRO

The scientists will use four types of clinically-relevant human tissues  lower respiratory tract, lung, neural and cardiac tissues  specifically selected based on how SARS-CoV-2 infects people.

Barwon Health's Director of Infectious Diseases and project collaborator, Professor Eugene Athan, said the lower respiratory tract and lung models are appropriate because they play a key role in severe infections.

The neural and cardiac tissues are highly relevant because this disease is now known to cause neurologic disorders, heart dysfunction and damage in some patients, Professor Athan said.

The scientists will use novel systems biology (a biomedical approach to understand the bigger picture) and machine learning methods to differentiate between healthy and diseased states of key human tissues, which will enable additional ways to determine if a drug is able to reliably restore a diseased tissue to a healthier state.

This initiative builds on an ongoing systems biology collaboration on the long-term impacts of COVID-19 through the Geelong Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases, comprising Barwon Health, CSIRO and Deakin University.
Chances are, every one of us has been affected by cancer in one way or another. Unlike some other deadly diseases, cancer can take many forms inside the human body, so learning more about a single enzyme linked to many types of this disease could lead to more effective treatments.

Researchers using the powerful X-ray beams generated at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory, have determined the structure of just such an enzyme: Taspase1, which plays an integral role in the production of cancer cells in humans.

Taspase1 instigates the growth and spread of cancer cells in multiple forms of the disease, from childhood leukemia to colon cancer, breast cancer and glioblastoma, which is an aggressive form of brain or spinal cord cancer. With this new information about the structure of Taspase1 come insights into how the enzyme may be a target for future cancer treatments.

The importance of this region of Taspase1 makes it a prime target for designing inhibitors for anti-cancer therapy." Jose M. Martin-Garcia, Rocasolano Institute of Physical Chemistry

The research team, led by current and former Arizona State University scientists, performed this work at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and National Cancer Institute Structural Biology Facility (GM/CA) at the APS. The resulting paper was published in Structure.

"We have reported the importance of a previously unobserved fragment of Taspase1 which can be used as an attractive target to inhibit its function," said lead researcher Jose M. Martin-Garcia, currently of the Rocasolano Institute of Physical Chemistry in Madrid, Spain. At the time of this research, Martin-Garcia worked in the laboratory of Petra Fromme, professor at Arizona State and a co-author on the paper.

Taspase1 is a type of enzyme that is initially created in an inactive proenzyme form, and then sliced into parts to generate its active form under the right circumstances.

"This general type of activation takes place in other biological functions, such as in digestion and in blood clotting," explained Michael Becker, a protein crystallographer in the X-ray Sciences Division at Argonne.

For Taspase1, this slicing or cleaving process results in two fragments. Prior to this research, only portions of the structure of Taspase1 and these fragments had been determined. That is, until Martin-Garcia's team figured out that they could modify the enzyme slightly to join these fragments, creating a loop that allowed for the whole functional molecule to be crystallized.

The project was not without challenges, however, as Robert Fischetti, life science advisor to the APS director and group leader at the Advanced Photon Source, explained. Fischetti led the design, construction and operation of the suite of beamlines, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that were used for this research into the structure of Taspase1.

"Determining the structures of these crystals can be quite challenging," Fischetti said. "The capabilities we have developed at GM/CA made it possible to collect data of sufficient quality for this research."

The results were illuminating. The research team discovered that one region of Taspase1 forms a long spiral-shaped structure that is vital for its functioning.

"The crystal structure reported in our article is the first to illustrate Taspase1 in its functionally active state, and highlights the crucial importance of this spiral-shaped fragment," said Martin-Garcia. "The importance of this region of Taspase1 makes it a prime target for designing inhibitors for anti-cancer therapy."

Martin-Garcia's research and the insights into Taspase1 gleaned through Argonne's APS will assist scientists designing new treatments directed at Taspase1's unique structural feature in the fight against cancer.
Cash in on the kids' inheritance and spend up big on the retirement plans - that's the message coming from the University of South Australia as new research reveals that older people are keen to spend their well-earned savings, rather than passing them on to their kids.

And while it may seem like bad news for the younger generation, the research also confirms that the kids are just fine with this scenario, claiming that no one owes anyone anything.

The surprising findings are part of a new study that explores contemporary attitudes towards wealth transfer taxation in Australia, finding that public resistance to inheritance and estate taxes may have declined in the 40 years since they were abolished in Australia.

Inheritance is the only major form of income that is untaxed in Australia - a person who works for their income pays tax on it while someone who receives a bequest is not even liable for capital gains tax.

Social policy expert, Dr Veronica Coram from UniSA's Australian Alliance for Social Enterprise says the apparent decline in the bequest motive presents a significant opportunity for Australian tax reform, and a valuable chance to address social inequalities.

There's nothing more certain than death and taxes. But while people generally assume the combination is notoriously unpopular, our research suggests otherwise." Dr Veronica Coram, Australian Alliance for Social Enterprise, University of South Australia

"We talked to young adults and senior Australians and two thirds of them thought Australia should consider reintroducing taxes on estates worth more than $3m, while only one in ten were definitely opposed.

"The lack of interest in giving or receiving inheritances meant that most participants saw no reason to object to estates being taxed, which opens potential opportunities for much-needed tax reform.

"Inheritances generally go to people who are already well-off and don't need them; they encourage inequality and inhibit social mobility.

"The Australian government needs to find ways to raise revenue to support increased spending demands generated by COVID-19, an ageing population, pressure on health systems and increasing environmental disasters.

"Reintroducing inheritance or estate taxation is a way of increasing government revenue, while reducing a key driver of inequality at the same time."

While politicians and policymakers may be wary of making moves, Dr Coram says the findings reflect changes to social norms in Australia and other OECD countries.

"Historically, inheritance taxes have been considered 'political suicide'. But perhaps their time has come, ironically due to a growing individualism and associated decline in the assumption that family members should provide for one another," Dr Coram says.

"More research on changing views towards redistributive policy is required, but the results of our study suggest that if governments are considering tax reform, they should not assume that Australians are vehemently opposed to wealth transfer taxation."
A new report finds that 509,025 (9.17%) public high school students in 24 states experienced homelessness in spring 2019 -- three times the number recognized by the states' education agencies. This under-recognition creates gaps in funding and services needed by this vulnerable population.

Researchers from Nemours Children's Health and the University of Pennsylvania analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for public schools across 24 states and 12 school districts. During spring 2019, more than 9% of public high school students experienced homelessness during a 30-day period in the 24 states. The rate was even higher in the 12 school districts, analyzed separately, where nearly 14% of students reported homelessness.

The report's authors believe the discrepancy between the CDC's data, collected through the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS), and the state and local school agency homelessness estimates is likely due to the more comprehensive nature and complex sampling design of the YRBSS. The YRBSS is an anonymous set of surveys conducted in public high schools every two years. The report analyzed data from all states and school districts that opted to ask about student housing and homelessness for the 2019 YRBSS.

Homelessness was more likely among students who were male, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, or Native American/Hawaiian. Students who experienced homelessness reported higher rates of sexual victimization, physical victimization, and having been bullied. Even when controlling for other risk factors, students who experienced homelessness reported higher rates of severe suicidality, hard drug use, alcohol abuse, risky sexual behavior, and poor grades.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw high rates of homelessness in public high school students and strong links between homelessness and other harmful experiences. The pandemic's impact on financial and housing stability will have even broader, ripple effects on mental health and academic functioning -- effects that will continue to disproportionately harm students of color." Danielle Hatchimonji PhD, Study Lead Author, Nemours' Center for Healthcare Delivery Science

Dan Treglia, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania, a co-author on the report and a homelessness expert, explained, "The CDC housing data let us fully recognize the magnitude and depth of youth homelessness in the United States. By acknowledging its extent, we can begin to address the underlying problems and continue to improve systems to identify and serve these students across local school districts and states."

The report makes several recommendations, including prioritizing funding for the federal McKinney-Vento education programs designed to identify and address student homelessness and better sharing of information across service sectors, including housing, education, substance abuse, and mental health. The report also emphasizes the need to reduce poverty and systemic racism and heterosexism, which place students from marginalized groups at higher risk of homelessness.

Hatchimonji added, "That any student experiences homelessness is unacceptable. That homelessness is so much more common among students of color and LGBT students underscores our shared obligation to promote equity and safety, especially for basic needs and human rights."

"We know from other studies that many students who experience homelessness show resilience," said senior author J. J. Cutuli, PhD, of Nemours' Center for Healthcare Delivery Science. "We also know that resilience happens because of relationships and other supports in their lives. Promoting resilience means supporting families, educators, and others in the lives of teens who make sure homelessness does not get in the way."
Near-death experiences are known from all parts of the world, various times and numerous cultural backgrounds. This universality suggests they may have a biological origin and purpose, but exactly what this could be has been largely unexplored.

A new study conducted jointly by the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and the University of Liege (Belgium) and published in Brain Communications shows how near-death experiences in humans may have arisen from evolutionary mechanisms.

Adhering to a preregistered protocol, we investigated the hypothesis that thanatosis is the evolutionary origin of near-death experiences." Daniel Kondziella, Neurologist from Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen University Hospital

When attacked by a predator, as a last resort defense mechanism, animals can feign death to improve their chances of survival, one example being the opossum. This phenomenon is termed thanatosis, also known as death-feigning or tonic immobility. "As a survival strategy," Daniel Kondziella adds, "thanatosis is probably as old as the fight-or-flight response."

Charlotte Martial, neuropsychologist from the Coma Science Group at ULiege explains: "We first show that thanatosis is a highly preserved survival strategy occurring at all major nodes in a cladogram ranging from insects to fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, including humans.

We then show that humans under attack by big animals such as lions or grizzly bears, human predators such as sexual offenders, and 'modern' predators such as cars in traffic accidents can experience both thanatosis and near-death experiences. Furthermore, we show that the phenomenology and the effects of thanatosis and near-death experiences overlap."

Steven Laureys, neurologist and head of GIGA Consciousness research unit and Centre du Cerveau (ULiege, CHU Liege) is excited: "In this paper, we build a line of evidence suggesting that thanatosis is the evolutionary foundation of near-death experiences and that their shared biological purpose is the benefit of survival."

The authors propose that the acquisition of language enabled humans to transform these events from relatively stereotyped death-feigning under predatory attacks into the rich perceptions that form near-death experiences and extend to non-predatory situations.

"Of note, the proposed cerebral mechanisms behind death-feigning are not unlike those that have been suggested to induce near-death experiences, including intrusion of rapid eye movement sleep into wakefulness," Daniel Kondziella explains. "This further strengthens the idea that evolutionary mechanisms are an important piece of information needed to develop a complete biological framework for near-death experiences."

No previous work has tried to provide such a phylogenetic basis. Steven Laureys concludes, "this may also be the first time we can assign a biological purpose to near-death experiences, which would be the benefit of survival."

And Daniel Kondziella adds, "after all, near-death experiences are by definition events that are always survived, without exception."
India had a shockingly large second wave of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in 2021. In addition to the spread of the virus into the hinterlands, largely unserved by large hospitals with intensive care facilities, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) appears to have acquired new characteristics that contributed largely to its rapid and devastating spread across the country.

A detailed report, available on the preprint server medRxiv*, describes the various facets of the second wave that set it apart from the first. The report also contains the findings of an extended SIR model that explored the potential effects of intervention at various time points in the second wave.

We argue that enhanced genomic surveillance along with constant assessment of risk associated with increased transmission is critical for pandemic responsiveness, write the reports authors.

Story of the second wave

Soon after the first detection of the virus in India, within just two weeks of the official declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), a national lockdown was declared that lasted for over two months. At that point, there were just over 500 cases in the whole country, with a population of over 1.3 billion.

After June 1, 2020, a phased relaxation of the lockdown was implemented, though with wide local variations from state to state. However, case counts continued to rise till the peak on September 16, but the doubling time declined dramatically, as did the case fatality rate.

Once the peak was passed, case incidence went down to below 10,000 new cases a day by February 2021. However, many seroprevalence studies indicate this to be a massive under-ascertainment on the order of 6% of total cases.

Around this time, political rallies, electioneering crowds, religious festivals, and some social events were held, reflecting the gung-ho mood among the top officials who claimed that the pandemic was in its end-game. While both the Oxford-AstraZeneca and the indigenous Covaxin vaccines were being put through their clinical trials, operational guidelines were being discussed to implement vaccination on a national basis.

With the healthcare workers being the first group to receive the vaccine, the campaign was flagged off on January 16. Still, the pace was slow, covering less than 1% of the country over the next month (note: this means approximately 8.7 million doses), and by April 1, 2021, over 5% of the population, with one dose.

In February 2021, however, Maharashtra, Chattisgarh and Punjab noted a sharp increase in cases, and the reproduction number for the whole country went above 1, indicating a burgeoning pandemic on the fourteenth of the same month. No national-level lockdown was mandated until April 14.

By this time, India had undergone a trial by fire, with acute oxygen shortages, no hospital beds, and deaths exceeding the capacity of the system to decently dispose of the corpses. Though the official toll is horrifying enough, many sources suggest that it is a gross undercount, and the actual numbers may never be known.

Multiple circulating variants

At the same time, the emergence of multiple variants became obvious, just as in the world over the winter of 2020. The Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genome Sequencing Consortia (INSACOG) was set up in December 2020, though its initial efforts were hampered by a lack of reagents and equipment.

However, early sequencing reflected the presence of global variants of concern, namely, B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and P.1 (the alpha, beta and gamma VOCs, respectively). In the period between December 2020 and February 2021, the delta and kappa variants (B.1.617.2 and B.1.617.1, respectively) comprised 60% of sequences from Maharashtra, with the former being labeled a VOC by the WHO in India.

Other important variants include the B.1.36 lineage, making up 44% of cases in Bengaluru, the information technology hub in Karnataka. The alpha variant made up 80% of Punjab cases, while B.1.618 is coming to the fore in West Bengal.

Higher case and death numbers in second wave

The ratio of standardized daily case rates in every state and union territory in India shows a value above 1, and a median value of 3.8, indicating that wave 2 hit the country much harder than wave 1. The highest ratios were in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, followed by Punjab and Gujarat.

When it comes to the ratio of standardized death rates, the same trend prevails, with only two states reporting a ratio below 1, while the death rates were significantly higher in the second wave for all other regions  the median ratio being 3.2. However, the worst-hit states have a ratio of 6.6 to 8.4.

The peak distribution of cases also varied in the first wave from that seen in the second wave. In the former, the earliest peak was towards the end of July 2020, for the southern state of Tamil Nadu, while Himachal Pradesh recorded the latest, on November 29.

For wave 2, the Himalayan territory of Ladakh recorded its peak on April 17, 2021, while Mizoram peaked on May 30. The majority of states had many more cases and deaths in the second wave, while peak deaths in wave 2 were four times that of the first wave.

Deadly delta variant

About the beginning of the second wave, many VOCs were found to have been introduced into the country. The delta variant became the dominant strain, making up over 99% of all sequenced genomes by the end of April 2021. It is associated with resistance to antibody-mediated neutralization, similar to the beta variant B.1.351.

The delta variant is also likely to be more transmissible than the alpha variant B.1.1.7. In Maharashtra, where the caseload has been the highest and where an abundance of data is available, this VOC rose from forming 1.5% of the total to 87% over February to May 2021.

Using a two-strain model, the researchers combined mortality data with genomic distribution data downloaded from the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) database. Despite the vast scale of uncertainty about the infection fatality ratio (IFR), the model suggests that if only 50% of deaths are assumed to have been missed, according to them a very conservative assumption, and if the IFR is assumed to be 0.25%, the number of deaths due to the delta variant increased from 15% to 83% from April 1 to May 15, 2021.

Overall, during this period, 55% of deaths were caused by this VOC. The scientists concluded that the delta strain is much more transmissible than any other previous lineage. Therefore, this supports the idea that the size of the second wave is not only because of waning immunity or relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) but the change in virus transmissibility and susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies.

Lockdown could have prevented thousands of deaths

the scientists suggest that an early lockdown, around March 15-30, 2021, might have prevented approximately 92% of cases through the following month. This would have resulted in a peak of between 20,000 to 49,000 cases a day rather than over 410,000, as actually happened.

A later lockdown up to April 15 would still have induced a reduction, but the effect is not certain, while after that, the second wave would have peaked and be on the wane already.

However, the results also show that healthcare capacity is of the greatest importance since it determines the case fatality ratio. With a low CFR, lockdown timing and intensity are much less significant, with consistently marked reductions in deaths from a lockdown. That is, a March 15 lockdown would reduce deaths by 98.5%, but an April 15 lockdown would still reduce 92% of deaths by May 15.

What are the implications?

Despite the obvious limitations of the study, such as the absence of strong data on cases and deaths, whether in general or by age, and the failure to incorporate vaccine roll-out.

Also, the number of circulating variants in India is high at present, and the researchers chose to use Maharashtra statistics, both because of its major share in the case and mortality burden, and its implementation of lockdown first of all. Thus, the continued transmission of the virus lends strength to the theory that the delta virus is epidemiologically fitted to spread fast and wide, overcoming pre-existing immune barriers.

Nonetheless, vaccination appears to be the most effective way forward to prevent still more cases and deaths. This is despite the fact that, as the researchers point out, the B.1.617 variant reduces antibody neutralization by 50% and 67% among those with a history of natural infection and vaccination, respectively.

Since vaccination of the entire population will necessarily take a while, and given current severe vaccine shortages worldwide, the scientists also conclude that non-pharmaceutical public health interventions, applied in a timely manner, will continue to be the key to containing COVID-19 in India.

To summarize, had action taken place at any time in March, it is plausible that more than 90% of observed cases and deaths between March 1-May 15 could potentially be avoided under both strong and moderate intervention scenarios.

Meticulous and large-scale genomic and viral surveillance will be all the more necessary to forecast and prepare for future waves by building infrastructure, training staff, and collecting and using data properly.

Prioritizing sequencing of reinfections, as well as vaccine breakthrough infections, is necessary to understand vaccine effectiveness and development needs against emerging Variants of Concern, conclude the authors.

*Important notice

medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information.
The journey so far

Almost a decade ago the ONeill Review on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) set in motion a process aimed at raising the profile of antimicrobial resistance and how best to manage it. The subsequent series of reports published between 2014 and 2016 during the life of this Review clearly laid out the enormous anticipated global impacts and costs of what is now being called both the the next pandemic and the silent pandemic.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com/Mikhail Grachikov

Progress has been made on some fronts in the battle against AMR since the Reviews final report (ONeill, 2016) was released. AMR and the forces driving it are now recognised more broadly across the globe. Programmes are being set up to track antibiotic use and development of resistance, and the impact of antibiotics on the environment and in agriculture is increasingly being recognised in a One Health Approach (WHO, 2017).

Action on other recommendations aimed at reducing the demand for use of antimicrobials, however, continues to lag. Availability of rapid diagnostics that can steer antibiotic selection and prescription is one such example.

A role for rapid diagnostics

Streamlining antibiotic prescription by reducing the inappropriate and excessive prescription of these precariously placed drugs was one of the recommendations of the final ONeill report on how best to tackle an imminent AMR crisis.

The development of new, rapid diagnostic measures was recommended as one of the key ways to do this by providing clinicians with new, accurate, accessible, acceptable, and affordable ways to quickly identify whether an infectious agent was bacterial or viral in nature and to prescribe an appropriate treatment.

Five years later, a need still remains for improved diagnostic tools that can guide appropriate antibiotic prescribing (Davies, 2019). Initiatives such as the Longitude Prize go some way towards meeting this need. Commercialisation gaps are beyond the scope of such R&D-focused initiatives and it is these gaps that are currently one of the bigger barriers to uptake of rapid diagnostics to counter AMR.

Practical realities of antibiotic prescribing in primary care

Whilst a broader awareness now exists of how antibiotic prescription influences AMR across the globe, practical implementation of only prescribing the right antibiotic to the right patient at the right time for the right length of time remains a challenge to implement in practice. The ONeill (2016) report recommendations remain aspirational in this regard, even though an official UK AMR strategy has set a target to have a diagnostic test or decision support tool available for use by clinicians by 2024 (Featherstone, 2021).

Despite AMR now being globally addressed through national strategies to improve diagnostics, develop new antimicrobials and promote improved antimicrobial stewardship, patients who attend general practice with symptoms of respiratory tract infections (RTIs) are still normally assessed by a form of clinical decision rule (CDR) without a diagnostics test.

Antibiotic prescribing patterns  a UK case study

In the UK approximately 80% of antibiotics are currently prescribed in community settings (Hayward and Turner, 2021). RTIs are among the most common acute conditions where antibiotics are prescribed by general practitioners (GP), even though 70% of cases are viral, and many others are minor self-limiting bacterial infections (Drug.Ther.Bull, 2016; Zumla, et al, 2014).

Around 50% of all GP consultations in the UK for RTIs result in an antibiotic prescription, but actual prescribing rates vary dramatically across practices, ranging from 20% to 80% (Guildford, et al, 2014). In contrast, in the Netherlands only 22.5% of RTI episodes in 2010 were treated with antibiotics (van den Broek, et al, 2014). It is well-established that, in the absence of rapid diagnostics, prescribing is often done empirically, contributing to AMR development.

Availability of rapid diagnostics

Few rapid diagnostic tests are available for use at POC and in community settings (Zumla, et al, 2014). Those that are available require invasive sampling, expensive equipment, and personnel with specialist training for operation and test interpretation.

More accessible options are, however, beginning to emerge. Point-of-care (POC) tests are increasingly recognised as an important tool that can bring an accurate diagnosis quickly, enabling the opportunity for faster diagnosis and therefore approporiate treatment. Timely and reliable results empower physicians to employ antibiotic stewardship principles and prescribe more judiciously where they can have a notable impact.

C-Reactive Protein as an indicator of RTI

C-Reactive Protein (CRP) is widely used as a biomarker for systemic inflammation and tissue injury in such things as heart attacks, cancers, and infections. These feature in an ever-growing number of studies showing that fewer antibacterials are prescribed to patients presenting with RTI symptoms when CRP tests are used. Publications show that GPs and patients both report good acceptability for these tests. CRP-POC tests have been adopted by Public Health England (PHE) (Public Health England, 2017) and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) (NICE, 2019). However, in clinical practice, there has been little adoption of the recommendations.

Molecular- and antigen-based tests

Medical diagnostics companies are playing their part in the fight against AMR related to RTIs. POC diagnostic devices using molecular-based polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests to test for viral or bacterial pathogens are starting to be available for POC use rather than only in a traditional molecular laboratory. This trend has grown as the COVID-19 pandemic has progressed. These PCR tests can identify a specific bacterium or DNA virus. Multiplexed PCR testing can differentiate between respiratory viruses.

SME companies are also breaking into the health and life sciences sector with novel technologies that have the potential diagnostics power to identify and differentiate between bacterial and viral infections rapidly at POC. Portable, real-time PCR-based DNA sequencing capabilities are being transformed from laboratory-based research use only devices to devices with regulatory-certified diagnostic functionality.

Academic institutions are adding know-how across diagnostic device development with a view to reducing antibiotic prescribing in primary care through the use of rapid microbiological POC testing to diagnose respiratory infections. Rapid antigen testing to identify Streptococcus A throat infection is also under consideration in commercial pharmacy settings.

Breath analysis as an emerging alternative

Image credit: Shutterstock.com/Mikhail Grachikov

An emerging alternative approach being applied by many researchers and SMEs is to undertake diagnostics via breath analysis. This approach meets stipulated criteria for rapid RTI diagnostics (Zumla, 2014).

This analysis is of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the breath, which contain metabolites of disease or infection and reflects the metabolomic state of the body. Some research is still in its fundamental stages and analysis is laboratory-based only. A few companies are starting to move towards carrying out breath analysis at POC, with results delivered within minutes. Many of these use sensor arrays for the detection of VOCs, but currently, none of these technologies have CE marking for RTI diagnostics.

Imspex Medical, a division of Imspex Diagnostics Ltd, brings a different approach to rapid diagnostics in the form of its proprietary VOC breath analysis platform technology.

Breathspec, its proprietary breath analyser, is based on combined gas chromatography  ion mobility spectrometry (GC-IMS). Its ultrahigh sensitivity means that it can detect even trace amounts of chemicals in breath and it can be used at POC with results in less than 15 minutes.

The Breathspec device has been developed as a new, rapid diagnostic measure for RTI to provide clinicians with rapid, accurate, accessible, acceptable, and affordable diagnostics to quickly identify whether an infectious agent is bacterial or viral in nature and to prescribe the appropriate treatment. It has already been trialed successfully in primary and secondary care settings, emergency departments, and within communities across Europe, the US, and the far East for respiratory infection. It is in the final phases of CE marking preparations.

BreathSpec is a growing platform, with proven capability to accommodate new disease applications as its VOC database expands.

Taking rapid RTI diagnostics to market

No new rapid diagnostics have been brought to market since the ONeill report recommendations were made in 2016. This is due to a combination of high development costs, high regulatory hurdles, severely constrained reimbursement possibilities, and convoluted market access possibilities.

Adoption and uptake of new diagnostics into clinical practice in public health services such as the NHS remains challenging. Expectation gaps both on the supply side and on the demand side (Featherstone, 2021) often scupper effective communication between diagnostic developers and purchasers. Sufficient cost-effectiveness detail needs to be provided by innovators to comply with NICEs Diagnostics Assessment Programme. Insufficient detail translates into limited support by clinical commissioners for a given new technology. From the demand side, a lack of clarity about the correct point of contact within the health service, health service procurement policies, and technology adoption requirements also prevents new and effective diagnostic technologies from being adopted.

For new RTI diagnostics, tests need to be quick, accurate, and well-evidenced to ensure clinicians are confident to use them. Results should guide antibiotic selection and be easy to integrate with other patient data, and procurement and maintenance arrangements should be acceptable to clinicians and end-users (Hayward and Turner, 2021). From a national health service perspective, new rapid diagnostics tests need to show clear patient benefit, market value and be cost-effective.

In particular, this combination of requirements can become a significant barrier in funding systems that have different budget holders for therapeutics and diagnostics. A diagnostics-focused approach could potentially reduce the levels of inappropriate prescribing, but who pays  and therefore whose budget impact is improved - is an ongoing question. POC diagnostics are used routinely in other fields, but there is no disguising the fact that antibiotics are a very cheap generic drug whereas a rapid diagnostic test tends to be much more expensive. The UK is a case in point where existing antibiotic therapies are funded centrally whilst any diagnostic tests, their consumables, and maintenance costs are borne by individual general practice surgeries.

There are conflicting arguments around the health economic benefits of RTI POC tests, as this depends on how a countrys health system assesses the cost burden of infectious diseases. Some evidence shows there is significant cost-effectiveness of testing over existing RTI management in primary care, but only when looking at the full patient journey including secondary care admissions. In a standalone general practice scenario, however, where a course of antibiotics can cost less than 50 pence, budget impact models show POC testing to be more expensive than usual care.

Research has shown that confirmed costs and lack of central government funding are as important, if not more so, than physical and operational constraints barriers, even in the presence of advanced training and local AMR champions as enablers. Without systemic changes that avoid penalising local primary care clinicians for using POC tests, there may well be a reluctance to new adopt new practices.

Looking ahead

With the rapid development of AI, patients are expecting greater precision in diagnosing and managing their illnesses. Adopting systems that markedly reduce antibiotic consumption would be a win-win-win solution for governments and health systems that are struggling to address the rise in AMR and for patients. Irrespective of the cost implications, using a POC test optimises antibiotic choice, safeguards our current stores, and reduces the longer-term impacts associated with further antibiotic resistance. A more focused prescribing method will take us towards better patient outcomes, which ultimately saves lives now and will save even more in the future.

Challenge or chasm?

How we navigate the gap between economic models, clinician experience, patient expectations and antimicrobial stewardship requirements for RTIs is an imminent challenge. This could be seen as an insurmountable chasm. It could also be a starting point to achieve a milestone in containing, controlling, and mitigating RTI-related AMR. Taking up the challenge of crossing the chasm is an opportunity not to be missed for those of us with an interest in powering up primary care as an essential resource.

References

Davies, S. (2019) in Holly, E. UK medical chief: we are in an arms race against microbes, Nature, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01409-x.

Drug.Ther.Bull (2016) Point-of-care CRP testing in the diagnosis of pneumonia in adults, Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin, 54 (10):11720.

Featherstone, J. (17 June 2021) Q&A with Jeff Featherstone, Head of AMR at the NHS https://longitudeprize.org/blog/qa-jeff-featherstone-head-of-amr-nhs.

Gulliford MC, Dregan A, Moore MV, et al. Continued high rates of antibiotic prescribing to adults with respiratory tract infection: Survey of 568 UK general practices. BMJ Open 2014;4:e006245.

Hayward, G. and Turner, P. (28 April 2021) Vanguard Report: Antimicrobial resistance and the future of diagnostic testing, British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, https://bsac.org.uk/vanguard-report-amr-and-the-future-of-diagnostic-testing.

National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Pneumonia in adults: diagnosis and management, 2019. Available: www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg191.

ONeill, J. (May 2016) Tackling drug-resistant infections globally: Final report and recommendations, HM Government, London.

Public Health England. Management and treatment of common infections antibiotic guidance for primary care: for consultation and local adaptation. London: Public Health England, 2017.

Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, https://amr-review.org/Publications.html.

van den Broek, D.J., Verheij, T.J.M., Numans ME, et al. (2014) Antibiotic use in Dutch primary care: relation between diagnosis, consultation and treatment, Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, 69:17017.

WHO One Health (2017), www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/one-health.

Zumla, A., Al-Tawfiq, J. A., Enne, V., et al (2014) Rapid point of care diagnostic tests for viral and bacterial respiratory tract infectionsneeds, advances, and future prospects, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(14)70827-8/fulltext.

About Imspex Medical

Imspex Medical brings the combined power of gas chromatography and Ion Mobility Spectrometry to bear on volatile organic compound analysis as a non-invasive, ultra-sensitive, rapid and reliable way of detecting and diagnosing a wide range of infectious and inflammatory disease states at point-of-need.

At Imspex Medical, we know the value of identifying disease states early. Our objective is to make regular, non-invasive volatile organic compound screening accessible and affordable to maximise individuals health, wellbeing and opportunities for economic prosperity.
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
Tara Bryant, front, records on her cell phone as protesters demonstrate in front of the Clark County Building in July 2020. Bryants son, Malcolm Williams, was shot and killed during a traffic stop by an Indiana State Police officer in April 2020. A federal lawsuit by his estate against the Indiana State trooper who shot him was filed in April, and ISP has filed its response this week.
(Newser)  Kohei Jinno is among the minority in Japan who feel this summer's Olympic Games should go on. Otherwise, it would mean he was booted from his home of a half-century for nothing. The 87-year-old and his wife, Yasuko, were one of some 200 families forced out of a public housing complex to allow for a rebuild of Tokyo's National Stadium, initially built for the 1964 Olympics. For Jinno, it was a replay of the events of 50 years ago, when his family was evicted from their home to allow for the stadium and a surrounding park to be built. "The site of their home was paved over" while a nearby river was "buried in concrete," reports Reuters. Half a century later, in 2013, officials announced the rebuilding of the stadium, requiring the clear-out of the housing complex in its shadow.

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"It was so hard to leave. It was the place I'd lived the longest in my life," says Jinno, who moved to the housing complex in 1965 and moved out in 2016. He received the equivalent of $1,500 for his troublesa city official tells Reuters that is standard paymentthough costs to move to another housing complex were $9,000. "I just had to laugh," he says. Making things tougher, his wife died in 2018. She'd been "lonely, depressed," he says. The evictions, construction using wood sourced from rainforests, and new anti-terrorism initiatives, combined with the coronavirus pandemic, have soured many Japanese on the Olympics, per Teen Vogue. For Jinno, now living with a son, returning to his old neighborhood brings "a sad, lonely feeling." Still, he hopes the Olympics are a success. (Read more Tokyo Olympics stories.)
(Newser)  Rescue crews at the collapsed condo building in Florida resumed operations late Thursday afternoon, after pausing when piles of shifting debris caused concerns. Work was stopped for about 15 hours, the Washington Post reports. "Our firefighters looked really, really excited to get back there," Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said, per CNN. The announcement was made after President Biden and first lady Jill Biden had visited the site in Surfside earlier in the day. In other developments:

Officials plan to bring down the rest of the Champlain Towers condo building without interrupting the rescue operation, after determining the demolition can be carried out safely. A final decision hasn't been made, and that could take weeks, but the Florida fire marshal said leaving the remaining structure up poses "too much of a risk" to rescue crews.

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A judge said the $48 million in insurance coverage the building is thought to have "will obviously be inadequate to compensate everyone fully to the extent of their harms," adding, "and that's unfortunate." The judge is considering one of five civil cases filed against the condo association since the building collapsed a week ago.

The next of kin of 17 of the 18 victims have been notified, the mayor said. The missing number about 145.

City officials and structural engineers said construction near Champlain Towers could have contributed to the collapse. A neighboring 18-story condo building has been under construction since 2015. A Champlain Towers board member had expressed concern to the city about the project in January 2019, per ABC, but got nowhere. "A critical flaw or damage must have already existed in the Champlain towers," a structural engineer said, but neighboring new construction" might have been the last straw.

So many contractors and residents complained about Surfside's building department that the town manager put the office under administrative review, per CNN. The town manager at the time said that he was swamped with "complaints about plans taking too long and inspections taking too long."

(Read more Florida condo collapse stories.)
(Newser)  A woman seen on video tackling a Black teenager she had falsely accused of stealing her iPhone has now been charged with a felony hate crime in addition to other charges relating to the Dec. 26 confrontation at a New York City hotel. California resident Miya Ponsetto, 22, has been indicted on four new charges, including two counts of second-degree unlawful imprisonment as a hate crime, CNN reports. She appeared via videolink in a Manhattan courtroom Wednesday, where her lawyer entered a not guilty plea. In January, she was arrested on charges including assault and attempted robbery. Ponsetto is on supervised release and her next court date will be in October.

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In the confrontation at the Arlo Hotel, Ponsetto accused the 14-year-old son of jazz musician Keyon Harrold of stealing her phone, which she had actually left in an Uber. Harrold said he was scratched in a scuffle when Ponsetto tackled his son and tried to look in his pockets. He tells the New York Times that months later, the incident still brings back strong emotions. "Our life changed because somebody having the entitlement and idea that just because of the way my son looked he was the one who stole her property, which is so ridiculous," he says. Ponsetto has argued that she can't be racist because she is of Puerto Rican descent. Her lawyer calls the new charges an "absurd" overreach. (In January, Ponsetto backtracked on her apology.)
(Newser)  The gunman who shot up a Southern California bar and grill in 2018, leaving a dozen people dead, hated college students, police say. The Ventura County Sheriff's Office released an extensive report on the shooting at Thousand Oaks' Borderline Bar & Grill Wednesday revealing a possible motive of Ian David Long, who killed 11 patrons and himself. (He also shot a police officer who was ultimately killed by friendly fire in the chaos.) Long, a Marine Corps veteran, attended California State University, Northridge, after completing his military service, and the report says he felt his fellow students disrespected him due to his service, NBC News reports.

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Long, the report says, came to believe college students "were entitled, liberal civilians who literally had no knowledge, understanding, or comprehension of what he had experienced in war," and that they should be "wiped off the map." He also felt disdain toward civilians in general, the AP reports. Borderline, a bar known for country music and dancing, was hosting a "Country College Night" when Long committed the mass shooting, and seven of those killed were college students. Authorities say Long visited the establishment five times in less than a year prior to the shooting and likely knew the bar and dance floor would be crowded with college students at the time. (A former coach says warnings about Long were ignored.)
(Newser)  One of a pair who tried to kill a classmate to appease fictional horror character Slender Man will soon go free. A Wisconsin judge on Thursday ordered the release of 19-year-old Anissa Weier, who's been at a state mental health facility since pleading guilty to attempted second-degree intentional homicide in 2017. She was sentenced to 25 years at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute but petitioned for conditional release in March, saying she was no longer a threat to anyone and had completed all available treatments offered by Winnebago, per the AP. Weier and Morgan Geyser were convicted of luring Payton Leutner into the woods at a Waukesha park in May 2014. Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times as Weier urged her on. The pair later said they believed Slender Man would otherwise hurt them or their families, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. All three girls were 12 at the time.

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Prosecutors argued Weier remains susceptible to bad influences, noting she attracts people with "myriad psychological issues." They added there was no certainty she wouldn't attack someone again. But Waukesha County Judge Michael Bohren said there was no "clear and convincing evidence that the defendant poses a substantial risk of harm to others, herself, or serious property damage." He said reports from the facility showed she understood her crime, was cooperative with treatment, hadn't shown any dangerous behavior, and hadn't received any psychotic medication. Bohren gave state officials 60 days to come up with a conditional release plan; Weier was returned to Winnebago pending another hearing in September. Upon release, she is to be monitored for the full length of her sentence, until the age of 37. (Geyser was sentenced 40 years in a mental hospital. Read how Leutner's doing lately.)
(Newser)  The World Health Organization said Thursday that any COVID-19 vaccines it has authorized for emergency use should be recognized by countries as they open up their borders to inoculated travelers. The move could challenge Western countries to broaden their acceptance of two apparently less effective Chinese vaccines, which the UN health agency has licensed but most European and North American countries have not, the AP reports. In addition to vaccines by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson, the WHO has also given the green light to the two Chinese jabs, made by Sinovac and Sinopharm.

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"Any measure that only allows people protected by a subset of WHO-approved vaccines to benefit from the reopening of travel ... would effectively create a two-tier system, further widening the global vaccine divide," a WHO statement said Thursday. The two Chinese shots are "inactivated" vaccines, made with killed coronavirus, whereas the Western-made shots are made with newer technologies that target the spike protein that coats the surface of the coronavirus. In its reviews of the two Chinese vaccines, the WHO said both were found to significantly reduce the risk of hospitalizations and death, although the head of Chinas Center for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged earlier this year that the effectiveness of its home-grown shots was low. (Read more coronavirus stories.)
Sha'Carri Richardson is seen at the US Olympic Track and Field Trials on June 19, 2021, in Eugene, Ore. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

Sha'Carri Richardson is seen at the US Olympic Track and Field Trials on June 19, 2021, in Eugene, Ore. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
(Newser)  A former Virginia police officer charged in the Capitol attack was ordered not to possess any weaponswhich is why authorities were alarmed to find an email receipt showing he'd ordered 34 guns. Thomas Robertson, fired by the Rocky Mount Police Department shortly after his Jan. 13 arrest, was released from custody on several conditions, including that he relocate all firearms from his home within 48 hours. Yet "four days later, while executing a search warrant at the defendants house in connection with the Capitol riots charges, law enforcement discovered and seized eight firearms from the home," prosecutors write in court documents filed Wednesday, per BuzzFeed. Another search came Tuesday after FBI agents claimed to have found emails showing Robertson had ordered 34 guns, which were to be picked up from a broker, per the Washington Post.

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Inside Robertson's home, agents allegedly found a loaded M4 rifle, lots of ammunition, and a partial pipe bomb inside a box whose label mentioned "booby trap," per BuzzFeed. It was "a metal pipe with two ends caps, with a fuse inserted into a hole that had been drilled into the device," prosecutors write in a motion calling to void Robertson's release order so he can be jailed until his trial. "Although this device did not contain explosive powder, such powder was found nearby," they add, "this conduct, coupled with his calls for future violence, shows that no condition or combination of conditions can adequately protect the public from the defendant." Robertson, who's pleaded not guilty, described an unfolding revolution on Facebook in the days after the attack. "Peace is done. Now is the time for all the braggart 'Patriots' to buckle armor," read one post. (Read more Capitol attack stories.)
(Newser)  Thursday was Canada Daybut after a series of horrific finds at former residential schools for Indigenous children, many were in no mood to celebrate. In Winnipeg, an "Every Child Matters" march ended at the Manitoba Legislature, where protesters toppled a statue of Queen Victoria erected in 1904, the BBC reports. Video showed protesters cheering as the large statue of the monarchCanada's head of state at the time treaties were negotiated with Indigenous people and the residential schools policy was introducedwas pulled down with ropes. A smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth II, Canada's current head of state, was also toppled. In recent weeks, hundreds of bodies have been found in unmarked graves on the grounds of former residential schools, where Indigenous children were taken as part of a policy of forced assimilation that lasted more than a century.

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Many of the schools were run by the Catholic church, and protesters Thursday called for an apology from church leaders and for the Canadian government to recognize the schools' policy as genocide. "People belittle it and say, oh, they died of TB, they died of measles," Indigenous woman Lucy Antsanen tells the Winnipeg Free Press. "In the first place, should the kids even be there, taken away from their families, their language, their culture?" she said. "Our souls are hungry, and we have to speak up." Catholic churches across the country have also been targeted, with several on Indigenous land burned to the ground. A century-old Catholic church in Alberta was burned Wednesday, and police say a Thursday fire at a church in Yellowknife, Yukon Territory, appears suspicious, the CBC reports. (Read more Canada stories.)
(Newser)  A driver's brand-new six-figure Tesla gave him quite the scare this week in Pennsylvania, and his lawyers say he's lucky to be alive. Mark Geragos and Jason Setchen, attorneys said to be representing the owner of the vehicle, a Tesla Model S Plaid, tell the Washington Post their client was driving the electric sedan around 9pm on Tuesday in Haverford when he saw and smelled smoke, then saw flames overtaking the car's cabin. The lawyers say he pulled over and tried to escape, but the vehicle's electronics glitched, rendering the door handles useless. "He was pushing the door frantically and it would not engage," Setchen says, adding that his client was eventually able to get out of the car by throwing his weight against the door until it opened. Per CNBC, the car started moving after the man got out and was subsequently consumed by the fire.

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A Lower Merion Township Fire Department official confirmed it took about two hours to douse the fire. The Verge notes no injuries were reported. According to the man's legal team, he'd received his car just days earlier, among the first batch of Model S Plaid models delivered in June. CNBC notes that deliveries of the new sedan were originally supposed to start in February, but in April, Tesla CEO Elon Musk conceded there were "more challenges than expected" and that "it took quite a bit of development" to ensure the car's battery was safe. While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating this incident, the driver's lawyers are calling for Tesla to "sideline" the Model S Plaid, which is available at a base price of $130,000. "Our client was trapped & could have died," a third attorney, Ben Meiselas, wrote on Twitter. (Read more Tesla Model S stories.)
(Newser)  A cargo plane was forced to make an emergency landing in the ocean off Hawaii under cover of darkness Friday. The only two occupants of the Boeing 737 were rescued, per CNN, though ABC News' Alex Stone tweeted that one of the pilots was critically injured. The plane had taken off from Honolulu's Daniel K. Inouye International Airport at 1:33am, bound for Kahului, before reporting engine trouble, per Reuters. The pilots were "attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to land the aircraft in the water," the FAA said in a statement. They splashed down just 36 minutes after takeoff.

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The pilots signaled that they would try to land at nearby Kalaeloa Airport before landing in the ocean about two nautical miles south of their destination. "Paramedics treated a 50-year old patient for a head injury and transported him to a trauma emergency room in serious condition with the injury and multiple lacerations," a Honolulu Emergency Services Department rep tells the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, adding one person was airlifted "directly to an emergency room." The cargo plane, built in 1975, belonged to air cargo and charter services company Transair, whose five Boeing 737 planes make daily flights throughout the Hawaiian island chain. (Read more emergency landing stories.)
(Newser)  White House staff members, past associates, and even former President Bill Clinton have come to the defense of Vice President Kamala Harris and her chief of staff after reports that the two run a dysfunctional office. "It's a whisper campaign designed to sabotage" Harris, said Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser to President Biden. Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, issued a statement saying, "The President's trust and confidence in her is obvious when you see them in the Oval Office together," Axios reports. Tina Flournoy, Harris' chief of staff, ran Clinton's office after he left the presidency. "She has a unique ability to focus on the big picture and adapt to changing conditions," he said in a statement, per CNBC. "And she does it all with a great sense of humor." Clinton added that he was fortunate to have had Flournoy as his chief of staff, saying, "Shes an extraordinary person."

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Matt McKenna, who was a spokesperson for Clinton during part of that period, said Flournoy improved the operation by bringing structure to it. But other former Clinton aides spoke differently about her tenure, saying she yelled at people who asked for favors from Clinton and his wife, Hillary. "It was shocking," said one person who claimed to be a recipient. A former chief of staff to Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell defended Flournoy on Twitter, dismissing complaints about how hard it is to get time with Harris. "Welcome to the White House," Steven Law tweeted. A veteran aide to Biden said Flournoy has a difficult job, per the Hill: "I don't think people realize how tough it is to manage a demanding principal who doesn't want to make mistakes and a young staff with very little executive branch experience." (Read more Kamala Harris stories.)
And it's tough work - jobs the industry has relied on foreign workers to carry out for years. Before COVID-19, workers largely from eastern Europe made up 20 percent of the workforce.

In a move to please officials last year, many Kiwi companies promised to reel in more local workers.

"Well, it hasn't succeeded as the industry would have hoped," Parker continued. "They have made some efforts.

Parker says some companies are making more of an effort than others, adding it's hard for the industry to transition from where it's found itself.

He believes New Zealanders aren't afraid of hard work.

The industry won't go that far - but suggests Kiwis do find it tough.

"People are away from their friends and family for long periods, people get seasick. So despite the excellent pay and at sea conditions, some Kiwis aren't just cut out for it," Seafood NZ CEO Jeremy Helsen told Newshub.

Helsen rejects any suggestion foreign workers are hired because it's cheap - and easier. He said Seafood NZ is actively trying to hire locals for available positions.

"We've put some recruitment campaigns out in the public arena, we're helping fund people through industry training."

The minister said it won't be an easy task, but the industry has to be attractive for Kiwi workers. The inquiry will report back to him by the end of October.
Boxes packed with cheap cigarettes are hidden among other cargo - such as a shipment of foot stools from China.

"It's a lucrative market that's attracting the attention of organised crime," Customs NZ investigations manager Bruce Berry told Newshub.

"So we've got credible information that large scale, commercial-grade cigarette smuggling operators have repositioned themselves into New Zealand to facilitate importations into New Zealand and Australia.

"We've got anecdotal information that the profit margin from tobacco is eight times that of cocaine."

Australia has a dedicated illicit tobacco law enforcement group, which has made similar estimates of profit margins through black market sales.

Two weeks ago, four-and-a-half tonnes of cigarettes and tobacco, valued at $42 million, were seized in Queensland.

In 2018, Customs seized 1.8 million cigarettes smuggled inside sea containers. Last year, 2.2 million cigarettes were seized in a separate operation.

"There are significant profits to be made. We do have the most expensive cigarettes in the world for legal purchase," Deborah Hart, the director of Action for Smokefree 2025 (ASH) New Zealand, told Newshub.

Customs is seizing 125,000 illegal cigarettes and 155 kilograms of loose tobacco every month.

Seizures happen every day at the international mail centre, and weekly in air cargo. "Significant quantities" are found in sea cargo five to six times a year.

Some are even manufacturing fake versions of popular illegal imports - like the Double Happiness brand from China.

"This person who was importing low-quality tobacco was manufacturing this particular brand of cigarette in his garage," Berry said.

Hart says the most important thing is to reduce demand for tobacco - but she'd also like to see more resources, like X-ray machines, to help target the illicit trade.

"We've got three [machines] in the country to X-ray containers. There just needs to be a whole lot more resources put into countering the illicit trade."

Customs says the three X-ray machines used at the country's ports are just part of how they tackle the illegal trade.

Customs also use mobile units and operate by making risk assessments and gathering intelligence.

Customs Minister Meka Whaitiri admitted to Newshub preventing large-scale tobacco smuggling is a "challenging" problem.

However, Whaitiri had "no comment" when asked if New Zealand needs a dedicated illicit tobacco task force, like the one in Australia.
The Government is considering buying "one or two" of the hotels currently being used as managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities for the long-term.

COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins says it's likely we'll need MIQ facilities "over the medium to longer-term", with experts saying COVID-19 is probably here to stay.

"It might not be at the scale that we have now, but I think we are likely to still need to have that ability to do that," he told Newshub Nation on Saturday.

New Zealand currently has about 30 MIQ facilities, mostly hotels that would otherwise be empty thanks to the border restrictions.
There are 31 new cases of COVID-19 in New South Wales while three new cases have been detected in Queensland.

Two new cases have been found in South Australia, including a baby.

As a result of the Queensland cases, which includes a mother and child who have been out in the community, the lockdown is being extended for 24 hours in Brisbane, while it will lift in some other areas, including Noosa, the Sunshine Coast, and Townsville.

Of the 31 cases in New South Wales, Premier Gladys Berejiklian said there were 76,000 tests in the past 24 hours to 8pm. Twenty-seven have been linked to previously confirmed cases.

It means the state has recorded 226 community cases since the Bondi cluster emerged on June 16. Of these, 188 are connected to other cases. There are three cases in ICU, but none require ventilation.
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Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Mostly cloudy skies. High near 80F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, then off and on rain showers overnight. Low 56F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
In with the new: Greely conducts change of command
Pilots and crew members of the Alaska Army National Guard's 1st Battalion, 207th Aviation Regiment, fly ground search and rescue teams with Alaska Mountain Rescue Group and MAT+SAR Search & Rescue to locations on Pioneer Peak near Palmer, Alaska, to search for a missing hiker June 15, 2021.
Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this morning will become overcast during the afternoon. High near 80F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, then off and on rain showers overnight. Low 56F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
State funding for programs including Head Start has been completely cut through Gov. Dunleavy's budget vetoes. ThrivAlaska and the local Head Start Birth to Five programs are located at the Carol H. Brice Family Center seen Monday afternoon, July 1, 2019.
Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this morning will become overcast during the afternoon. High near 80F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy skies this evening. A few showers developing late. Low 56F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa pledged yesterday to continue investing in Bahrains youth development initiatives to encourage innovation, creative thinking and boost Bahrains development drive.

This would help Bahrain continue on its development path and attain the desired progress in all areas in line with the sustainable development goals, said the Crown Prince and Prime Minister.

Investing in youth initiatives will open up quality opportunities and new horizons for Bahraini youth to achieve their goals and support the development drive of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, added HRH Prince Salman.

His Royal Highness was speaking during a virtual session with the winners of the twenty-second batch of the Crown Princes International Scholarship Programme.

Shaikh Mohammed bin Essa Al Khalifa, the Advisor for Political and Economic Affairs at the Court of the Crown Prince and Head of the Financial and Administrative Committee of the CPISP, and members of the Board of Directors of the Scholarship Programme were present.

Congratulating the students on their selection to this year programme, His Royal Highness praised them for passing the assessment tests with flying colours.

The Crown Prince and Prime Minister highlighted the success achieved by the programme, since its inception, in empowering young people, refining their skills, and helping them attain top positions in serving the nation.

This years programme had 358 Bahraini applicants who underwent a comprehensive assessment test to determine their eligibility.

The evaluation process also considered their Grade Point Average, IELTS score, SAT score, leadership training, and a critical thinking course by the CPISP as part of the candidacy training.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Interior Ministry yesterday rejected reports by the Qatari Al Jazeera channel against reform and rehabilitation centre as misleading and desperate attempts to tarnish Bahrains national and civilised accomplishments. Interior Ministry said that Bahrains human rights institutions are in the league of professional rights institutions in the World, and attempts to tarnish its reputation is unacceptable.

Al Jazeera, the ministry said, is broadcasting programmes with the help of suspicious organisations claiming to be in the field of rights and several others funded by external parties. These systematic and deliberate attempts, which included many fallacies, represents a continuation of the aggressive approach against Bahrain and politicisation of media content against the Kingdom and its people, the statement said. The Interior Ministry points out that a report by Police Media Centre reveals the depth and dimensions of the channels incendiary approach during the past ten years. The channel, the ministry said, not even aired a piece of single positive news about Bahrain during this period, contradicting the standards of media professionalism.

The ministry said that an analysis of the channels content points out that it is targetting Bahrain with fabricated and false information to create chaos and destabilise the Kingdom.

They seldom understand the principles of good neighbourliness and the outcomes of the Al-Ula Summit.

Fair trial ensured

The Interior Ministry also clarified that those serving their terms in the Correction and Rehabilitation centres are convicted in various criminal and terrorist cases and reached there after exhausting all legal options. They all underwent a fair trial with legal bodies to defend them and in the presence of representatives of civil society organisations and Bahraini human rights institutions, the ministry said.

Speakers of the Al Jazeera programme accuses Bahrain of misconduct without providing any material evidence, the ministry said. Such programmes are not unusual for the channel which specialises in interfering in the affairs of others by repeating false allegations that has absolutely nothing to do with the established rules of law and criminal justice. What a fugitive speaker mentioned through the channel about his father, who is serving life in prison, and claims of torture denies the truth and reality. The health conditions of the person in question are stable, and he is under regular monitoring.

Interior Ministry said that it would continue its approach based on law enforcement and the promotion of human rights. The incitements campaigns, the ministry said, would only increase its adherence and commitment to preserving the security and safety of citizens and residents.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Capital police yesterday arrested four women for running an illegal massage centre in violation of coronavirus (COVID-19) preventing measures.

The suspects of Asian and African nationalities were taken into custody in a joint operation by the Capital Governorate Police Directorate, Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Industry.

The arrest followed a tipoff received on the illegal activities practised by the suspects. An investigation was quickly opened, which resulted in the identification and arrest of the suspects.

Officers found the suspects were practising various massage services flouting all coronavirus restrictions. The case is now with the Public Prosecution.

Salon closed Separately, the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism announced closing a mens salon in the northern governorate for violating COVID-19 restrictions.

During an inspection, officers spotted several customers inside the salon flouting social distancing and other mandatory restrictions.


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Details remain under wraps about whether teachers from one Connecticut school district were initially passed over for COVID-19 vaccines earlier this year.

However, the Region 14 Board of Education has rescinded a future contract for embattled Superintendent Joseph Olzacki and are considering terminating his employment.

Olzacki was placed on paid administrative leave in February amid the boards investigation into teachers accusations that administrators, central office staff, and school board members and their spouses were prioritized over other educators for the COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic in Southbury in January. This was before most people were eligible for the vaccine.

That investigation has been completed, but the board is mum on the findings. The districts COVID-19 officer was fired.

Its sensitive in that there is personnel involved, said George Bauer, chairman of the school board for the district that covers Bethlehem and Woodbury. Right now, its still protected by attorney-client privilege.

A law firm investigated the accusations from the teachers union and gave the findings to the boards attorney, who then presented it to the board during executive session.

Bauer said hes not sure when the results will be made public.

It depends on the next steps taken in the process of working with the superintendent termination proceedings, he said.

Olzacki directed questions to his attorney, who could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Firing process

The board voted unanimously last week to void Olzackis contract that would have taken effect Thursday and run through June 30, 2024. However, a contract in effect from July 1, 2019 through June 30, 2022 remains in effect.

The board agreed to consider terminating Olzackis employment under a process laid out in the existing contract.

The first step is to provide the superintendent with written notice that the board wants to terminate him and why. Bauer said hes still working on that letter.

Within 15 days of receiving the letter, the superintendent may file a written request for a hearing with the board in the next 30 days, according to the contract.

The board must decide whether to fire him within 15 days of the hearing. The superintendent is permitted legal counsel at his own expense. Both parties may agree to waive these timelines.

If the process continues beyond the current contracts expiration on June 30, 2022, Olzacki would effectively be out of the job.

If there is not another contract in place, then hes no longer employed with the district, Bauer said.

Under Olzackis contract, the board may terminate him for (1) inefficiency, incompetence, or ineffectiveness; (2) insubordination against reasonable rules of the board; (3) moral misconduct; (4) disability as shown by competent medical advice; (5) other due and sufficient cause.

Vaccine rollout

In January, educators were not yet eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine when the Pomperaug Health Department held its clinic at Pomperaug High School in Southbury. But the clinic had been organized before Connecticut officials clarified that educators were not eligible, so the state allowed it to continue.

Other clinics for the educators were canceled, so not all teachers from Region 14, Region 15 and Oxford school districts received vaccines.

This frustrated Region 14 teachers, who said the process was unfair and claimed administrators, central office staff, and school board members and their spouses received doses ahead of them.

Those who got vaccinated were the lucky ones to schedule appointments on the first day of what was meant to be multiple clinics, Olzacki told Hearst Connecticut Media in February.

Board members who signed up for the vaccine registered in the same way as educators and had been told they would not be taking doses from others in Region 14, Bauer said at the time.

Chris York, president of the Nonnewaug Teachers Association, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Wayne McAllister, who was the districts finance director for several years, remains as interim superintendent. Bauer said McAllister has done a fantastic job since taking over for Olzacki in February.

Hes staying on until things get resolved, Bauer said. Were happy he can help out.
RIDGEFIELD  The towns affordable housing committee is interested in establishing a trust fund for the development of affordable housing.

Affordable housing trust funds are allowable under state law, letting towns create a trust fund that can be used to increase affordable housing in that community. Additional building fees, for example, can be tacked onto projects with money from those fees going toward the fund.

Committee Chairman Dave Goldenberg shared the idea with the Board of Selectmen during a meeting last week. The committees next step is to develop a proposal for the Board of Selectmen and Planning and Zoning Department.

Goldenberg anticipates theyre a couple of months away from having that plan drawn up.

The committee must consider how it plans to raise money for the fund and how to eventually spend it.

Some proposed ways of raising money for the fund include accepting donations, obtaining grants or potentially charging builders a fee for developing or permits. But perhaps the most interesting of mechanisms is via a fee in lieu.

You could require a set-aside or a fee in lieu, which means the developer can make some units affordable or make a contribution for each unit theyre supposed to build, Goldenberg said.

Similarly, money from the trust can be spent on more than just building new, affordable housing.

For example, the money can be used to pay landowners a property fee for a deed restriction in return or to give out rehabilitation loans so individuals can renovate a unit to make it affordable.

Karen McLean, chairwoman of the social work department at Western Connecticut State University, said a loan program can help prospective homeowners buy a blighted property to make it affordable. The rehab loan program, as McLean referred to it, can produce housing and improve local aesthetics, and spur a community effect too.

When one house is rehabbed, others may take an interest and decide to do the same, she said.

A lot of these programs provide opportunities for people with limited resources or incomes so they can have quality affordable housing, she said.

It can provide a lot of resources so everyone gets to participate in different levels of the housing market, she added.

McLeans concern however, is about whether the funding will be used to maintain existing public housing structures and if poorer individuals would be segregated.

She said theres stigmatization that comes with affordable housing and communities need to be conscious of how the affordable units are built and the potential for those residents to be pigeonholed because they live in one of few affordably designated locations.

Despite that concern, McLean thinks an affordable housing trust fund is something that should be done because it can provide housing and resources to those who need it while diversifying a municipalitys stock.

Few towns in Connecticut have devised affordable housing trusts, but Ridgefield is hoping to become one. Goldenberg said the committee has been gauging input from other towns that have or are considering trusts.

Greenwich, for example, is seeking to start a trust funded entirely by private donations and controlled by a resident board with town officials. Stamford approved a trust in 2020 that the city funds with fee-in-lieu payments and commercial linkage fees.

While First Selectman Rudy Marconi concurred that its not a bad idea, he also said a trust fund is not the panacea it sounds like.

You just need so much funding, I dont know if a housing trust fund is really going to generate. We dont have that much building going on in this town, he said. It would take years to build it up where it has any kind of an impact on affordability, but its still an idea and worth pursuing.

Goldenberg said although the trust fund is a small part of making Ridgefield more affordable, it is an important component.

Data he presented to the selectmen indicated that 42 percent of renters and 29 percent of homeowners in Ridgefield are cost-burdened. Of the 9,645 units in town, only about three percent are categorized as affordable housing.

There really is an enormous need, he said.
NEW MILFORD  Lifelong New Milford resident Ted Hine will be running for mayor of New Milford in November on the Democratic ticket.

The self-described hometown boy from one of the towns oldest founding families said he wants to give back to the town that has given him so much.

Ive been watching town politics for a very long time, he said. My family [has] always been involved in town politics, but on the Republican side.

Hine, 56, said hes been watching what worked and didnt work in town politics since Pat Murphy was in office from 2003 to 2013.

H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media

With his official paperwork already filed, the Democratic Town Comittee will be endorsing Hine as their official candidate, according to Mary Jane Lundgren, committee chair and current town council member.

Im just totally delighted that hes going to run, Lundgren said.

Since 2017, the town has been under the leadership of Mayor Pete Bass, a Republican, who has served two terms thus far after unseating incumbent Democrat David Gronbach. Bass said he plans to run for a third term, but declined to comment on Hines candidacy.

Specifically, Hine is running on the idea of creating an even-keeled budget, that doesnt result in a surplus as seen this year and last year and that strengthens New Milfords school system.

The town council cut the board of educations initial budget request by $1 million in 2020 which resulted in spending cuts across the board.

For a town to be viable you have to have a good education system, said Hine.

Hine was also opposed to the town councils recent plan to spend the towns roughly $2.2 million budget surplus on capital items, which they approved on Monday night. He said that should a surplus occur, the townspeople should have more say in where that money goes and what its spent on.

Hine also said hes committed to providing transparency and unity among New Milfordites.

Lundgren said Hine has shown an ability to bring people together, and work on issues from many different sides. Shes also supportive of the candidates business background.

Hine brings with him more than three decades of experience in information technology management, having worked at G.E. Capital the financial services division of General Electric for 23 years. Before retiring at 54, he held roles that included chief information officer, IT production and control manager, and global IT project management. Hine said the budgets he has worked with in his career resemble the towns.

While Hine has never served in any official capacity in the town, he said hes been on a number of boards and is a longtime supporter of nonprofits and specifically those related to the arts. Hine served as president of the towns historical society from 2015 to 2018.

On July 7, Hine is expected to officially announce his candidacy at the Homestead Inn, where he said he used to deliver the News-Times on his afternoon paper route growing up. The Democratic committee will be following up with their official endorsement on July 21, Lundgren said.

Hine has already met with some executive members of the committee to talk about his candidacy, according to Lundgren.

Theresa McSpedon, who is also on the Democratic committee, called him smart, involved, caring, [and] well educated, with impeccable corporate experience at managing large operations. She also noted that he is devoted to maintaining and improving New Milfords quality of education for all of New Milfords families.

Hine said he feels confident that his background and the issues he cares about will help him garner support from residents of all political parties and unaffiliated voters.
Amid the cabinet reshuffle buzz with PM Narendra Modi holding frequent meetings with party stalwarts at his residence last month, the sources reported that reshuffle and possible expansion of Modis cabinet is expected in a day or two. Currently the Union Cabinet has 53 ministers. However the new cabinet may have 81 members meaning induction of possible 28 new ministers. This is the first reshuffle-cum-expansion since PM Modi returned to power in 2019. This may be noted that there are several ministers who are holding multiple portfolios and some ministers have succumbed to Covid. Reports suggest new faces could be given the responsibility of such ministries.

The rejig is likely to reward Jyotiraditya Scindia, whose defection from the Congress last year helped the BJP take back Madhya Pradesh; and Sarbananda Sonowal, who made way for Himanta Biswa Sarma as Assam Chief Minister after the BJP won a second term. From Uttar Pradesh (set for Assembly Elections next year), Anupriya Patel, who leads BJPs alliance partner Apna Dal, is among the probables. BJP MPs Varun Gandhi and Rita Bahuguna Joshi could also be included in the Cabinet.

As a result of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumars June 22 visit to New Delhi, speculation circulated about his Janata Dal (United) joining the Modi government and receiving ministerial berths. Among those who could be included in the expansion and reshuffle of the Union Cabinet are former Bihar deputy chief minister Sushil Modi, BJP general secretary Bhupender Yadav (Rajasthan), and former Maharashtra CM Narayan Rane.

The reshuffle is being prompted by some vacancies caused by deaths of ministers, such as Ram Vilas Paswan and Suresh Angadi, and the resignation of Akali Dal and Shiv Sena leaders. The sources say that last month PM Modi met with Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP chief JP Nadda over a series of review meetings to zero in on the possible names. The exercise promises to be a carefully calibrated one, with sharp focus on the next Lok Sabha election. The performance of all ministries was extensively reviewed, particularly how they fared in the devastating second wave of Covid.
The incident is conceived as a direct breach of Geneva Convention; hence, New Delhi has raised security concerns and objections to the snooping action of the drone in a strongly worded note verbale which has been shared with Pakistans Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

A drone was spotted prying inside the Indian High Commission in Islamabad on the night of June 26. The incident has raised alertness as it happened hours before the Jammu Indian Air Force Base drone attack later on Sunday in which two Indian Air Force personnel were injured and a building damaged. The matter has been raised by the Indian side with Pakistan.

On Saturday at about 22:15 hours while we had a function underway, we saw a drone hovering over us which came in twice, a top diplomat told. This is the first time such an incident involving a drone being spotted inside the Indian mission in Pakistan has happened. The use of drones is seen as a low-cost way of using technology to inflict damage and surveillance as well. The incident is conceived as a direct breach of Geneva Convention; hence, New Delhi has raised security concerns and objections to the snooping action of the drone in a strongly worded note verbale which has been shared with Pakistans Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The incident was immediately reported to New Delhi on the midnight of June 26. However, at early hours on Sunday June 27, drone bombings took place inside Indian Air Force base in Jammu which is merely 13.8 kilometers away from the International Border with Pakistan. NIA is currently investigating the Jammu IAF base attack and preliminary investigations have revealed that two drones flew from Pakistan inside India for the attack. Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba may have been involved in the attack.

The matter of the use of drones by terrorists has been pointed out by India at the United Nation as well. Highlighting the matter at United Nations General Assembly, V.S.K. Kaumudi, Special Secretary (Internal Security), Ministry of Home Affairs pointed out, The possibility of the use of weaponized drones for terrorist purposes against strategic and commercial assets call for serious attention by the member states, adding, We have witnessed terrorists using UAS to smuggle weapons across borders.

Meanwhile, in a separate incident reported on Friday morning, alert BSF troops fired at a small quadcopter belonging to Pakistan at about 0425 hrs as it was trying to cross International Border in Arnia sector. Due to this firing the drone returned back immediately to Pakistan.
HAMDEN  They design and sell apparel, run their own businesses and invest in the stock market.

Last month, they published a book.

At ages 11 and 12, respectively, cousins Kaydence Caporale of North Branford and Caron Hannans of Hamden are quite accomplished for students who have not even begun high school yet.

It amazes me how they balance it all, said Tonia Holland, the cousins grandmother, who has helped them launch and run the businesses.

Though she is the younger cousin, Kaydence will tell you she was the first cousin to pursue entrepreneurship.

I started my business last year, she said.

During quarantine, Kaydence was feeling bored, she said. When a teacher asked what she was doing to stay busy, she did not have an answer.

Kaydence said she went to her grandmother, who helped her come up with the idea to start a business.

Contributed photo / Sammeisha Caporale

Lip gloss became her first product, and later she started selling shirts and bucket hats, Kaydence said.

It was really cool and exciting, she said.

Her brand is called Glitzy by Kay.

Glitzy means bold, glittery, Kaydence said.

As he saw his cousin turn entrepreneurial, Caron, then a seventh-grader at Hamden Middle School, decided he wanted in.

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

Last fall, he started making masks, and then progressed to designing hats, clothes and sneakers, he said.

Right now, his favorite products are two pairs of sneakers he designed. The first, called Hoopers, are high-top shoes, mostly Army green but with bright-red soles.

The second sneaker design boasts a combination of yellow, gray and red sections, with a patterned gray toe.

The apparel bears the brand name Snoopy Fly Guy, Snoopy being the nickname that Carons grandmother Tonia Holland gave him, he said.

His mother, Christina Holland, does his sales and marketing. She also buys clothes designed by her son and niece; one of her T-Shirts features both the logos for Snoopy Fly Guy and Glitzy by Kay.

I am very excited. Im also very proud of him, Holland said of her sons business. I get to watch him flourish in many ways as a parent.

The kids endeavors were inspired by Tonia Holland, who is a CFO.

Business is my thing, she said. Because of that we kind of eat and breathe business.

Tonia Holland sought to teach the children that just because youre young doesnt mean you cant start thinking about your career path now, she said. Its building a foundation to sustain growth and wealth.

She remembered how, one day, her grandchildren started asking her excitedly about the stock market.

They learned how to invest, and each chose their own stock they were interested in, Holland said, adding that they keep an eye on the stocks themselves and can talk to others about how to invest.

But its not just about money. Holland also hopes her grandchildren learn how to give back to the community in any way they can, she said.

Thats part of why they wrote a book.

Titled Talking Business with Snoopy & Kaydence, the cover features cartoon versions of Caron and Kaydence standing in front of a bar graph.

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

Kaydence hopes the book shows people how you can change the world.

Caron wants readers to learn how you can do anything you want to in life, he said. Aint nothin that can stop you.

A book-signing in the backyard quickly cleared them out of their supply, according to Christina Holland.

She said theyve already sold more than 90 copies and are awaiting more from the printer.

meghan.friedmann@hearstmediact.com
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)  In a 1970 Beetle Bailey comic strip, the character known as Sarge berates his uniform-wearing dog, Otto, for a paperwork mistake.

Think, Otto, think!! Sarge says.

We can't all be Snoopy, a dejected Otto replies.

This confluence of two iconic comic strip dogs is on exhibit along with dozens of other images at the world's largest cartoon museum as part of a new presentation of the history of canines in the world of cartooning.

The Dog Show: Two Centuries of Canine Cartoons at Ohio State Universitys Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is running through October.

The genesis for the exhibit came when the late Brad Anderson, the creator of Marmaduke, donated his collection in 2018, including 16,000 original Marmaduke cartoons from 1954 to 2010, other original art, business correspondence, fan mail and books. That began a conversation about plumbing the depths of the museum's extensive collection for dog-related images, according to museum coordinator Anne Drozd.

There were so many comic strips and magazine cartoons and comic books, and so many different examples that have dogs in them, Drozd said. It seemed like a no brainer to bring everything together in one theme that so many people can relate to and love.

There are plenty of scene-stealing cats in cartoons, including Jim Davis' Garfield and the stuffed tiger that comes to life in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes.

But dogs' personalities make them a perfect fit for the comic strip form, said exhibit curator Brian Walker.

Dogs have that eagerness, they aim to please, so they actually make really good cartoon characters, said Walker, a cartoonist and cartoon historian and the son of Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey.

Though Otto first appeared in Beetle Bailey in 1956, he was a regular four-legged dog until around 1970 when Mort Walker anthropomorphized him, providing Otto his own uniform and desk, likely thanks to the influence of Snoopy in Charles Schutz' Peanuts strip, Brian Walker said.

The oldest image in the exhibit is a reprint of British artist George Cruikshank's illustration of weather so bad it's raining cats and dogs.

Moving through the years, the exhibit includes well-known dogs like Sandy from Little Orphan Annie, Daisy from Blondie and Dogbert from Scott Adams' Dilbert strip. George Booth's scraggly New Yorker magazine cartoon dogs show up, as well as images by alternative newspaper cartoonist Lynda Barry, and Shary Flenniken's Trots and Bonnie, about a girl and her talking dog that appeared in National Lampoon from 1972 to 1990.

There are well-known characters like Dog Man from the book series by cartoonist Dave Pilkey, but also lesser known mutts, including six strips from a 1940s Dick Tracy series featuring the appearance of a Boxer named Mugg that the famous detective temporarily takes ownership of.

The exhibit also includes a video highlighting animated dogs such as Scooby-Doo, Huckleberry Hound, Underdog, Disney's Pluto and Goofy, Slinky the Dog from the Toy Story movies, and even Santa's Little Helper from The Simpsons.

Brian Walker said his favorite image in the exhibit comes from the classic Disney movie Lady and the Tramp, showing the scene where the dogs eat at an Italian restaurant.

Theyre both eating the same piece of spaghetti and their lips kind of come together and they fall in love, Walker said. It doesnt get much better than that.
REDDING, Calif. (AP)  Firefighters were making progress Friday against Northern California forest fires that burned several homes and forced thousands to flee communities even as authorities prepared for a hot, crowded Fourth of July weekend that could bring the threat of new blazes.

Three wildfires near the towering Mount Shasta volcano an hour's drive from the Oregon border have burned around 60 square miles (155 square kilometers) of brush and timber.

Property damage was evident at the Salt Fire, which broke out Wednesday near Interstate 5 and prompted evacuations for some roads in Lakehead, an unincorporated community of around 700 people north of the city of Redding.

About a dozen destroyed buildings could be seen in just one area of the community.

The Salt Fire covered nearly 8 square miles (21 square kilometers), and was 5% contained, said Adrienne Freeman, a spokeswoman for Shasta-Trinity National Forest. She said official damage assessments will be made by local authorities.

To the northeast, the Tennant Fire in the Klamath National Forest had burned five buildings, including two homes, and threatened several hundred more. It grew slightly to more than 15 square miles (40 square kilometers) but progress was also reported there. Mop-up began on the western flank while the east side remained active. Evacuation orders and warnings continued in nearby areas.

To the north, the Lava Fire burning partly on the flanks of Mount Shasta covered more than 37 square miles (96 square kilometers) but was 27% contained. Several thousand residents of Lake Shastina were allowed to return home late Thursday.

The blazes erupted during an extreme heat wave in the U.S. West. The heat has since moderated but temperatures in the Mount Shasta area were still expected to reach nearly 100 degrees (38 Celsius) over the weekend.

Arizona, New Mexico and Utah have been forced to battle wildfires and California is bracing for what some experts fear will be one of its worst fire seasons yet.

Last year, California wildfires scorched more than 6,562 square miles (17,000 square kilometers) of land, the most in its recorded history. And just three years ago, a fire in Butte County in Northern California killed 85 people and largely destroyed the town of Paradise.

This year, many of Californias national parks have restrictions on campfires, cooking and smoking because of fire risks in the hot, dry summer. The parks are bracing for large crowds over the holiday weekend.

Fire authorities throughout California also have stepped up campaigns urging people not to use fireworks to celebrate the Fourth of July, citing both the explosive dangers and the threat of wildfires in the withering conditions.

___

Antczak reported from Los Angeles.
LONDON (AP)  Police in London said Friday that a 23-year-old man has been charged with the common assault of Englands chief medical officer in a park in central London.

The Metropolitan Police said Lewis Hughes was charged with common assault on Thursday evening and will appear at Westminster Magistrates Court on July 30.

An investigation was launched after Prof. Chris Whitty, one of the most high-profile scientists during the coronavirus pandemic, was accosted by two men in St. Jamess Park on Sunday evening.

The incident, which was captured in video footage and shared on social media, showed Whitty struggling to get away from the pair, who appeared to be manhandling him while trying to take a selfie.

The incident was widely condemned, including by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who described the pair as thugs.

It is not the first time Whitty has been forced to endure public harassment during the pandemic.

Whitty has had a leading role in devising lockdown restrictions and has regularly appeared alongside Johnson and the governments chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, in coronavirus-related press briefings.

While he has undoubtedly become one of the most trusted voices, he has faced the fury of lockdown skeptics.

Last 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.

Worries about his security have led to calls for Whitty, and others, to receive police protection.
NEW HAVEN  The International Festival of Arts & Ideas is investigating the alleged unprofessional and harmful treatment of Black musicians at its initial June 18 show, according to the organization.

In a letter posted on the festivals website and interview Thursday, Executive Director Shelley Quiala said, among other issues, she was told the production crew was unprepared for soundchecks, leaving artists waiting or without the opportunity for a soundcheck, and did not welcome or respond to the direct questions of the performers.

Local musician Ruth Onyirimba, who performs under the name Ro Godwynn, and was part of the opening night, shared her concerns in a letter to the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, calling for removal of the crew and for compensation.

Onyirimba said the crew made it very clear that we were not wanted, or even tolerated in that space and that (l)eaving Black professionals to navigate this hostility is irresponsible.

I went on stage feeling incredibly distressed not only because I didnt get a soundcheck, but because of how I had been treated minutes before my performance, Onyirimba said in the letter.

Oftentimes, when organizations such as the International Festival of Arts & Ideas claim to commit to diversity, the assumption is that the job is done once more (or any) Black performers have been booked, Onyirimba said. Unfortunately, its not that easy, particularly since diversity doesnt automatically mean inclusion.

Quiala, who did not witness the incidents, said she recognizes, respects and validates the concerns raised.

Its not helpful, when someone says, you hurt me, to say, I didnt mean to, said Quiala.

She said the predominantly-white production crew had demonstrated an avoidance of engagement with the artists. That was out of step with the festivals mission, which includes being fully ready to receive artists, she said.

The organization announced it had suspended an employee, with further steps possible, and hired an outside consultant to review our HR policies and practices. The employee who was suspended was not named.

Quiala Thursday said in an interview the specifics of the employees actions remained under investigation, but that was the individual identified by name as involved. As a matter of protocol, the organization suspends an employee when opening a formal investigation, she said.

The worker was a festival employee in a temporary position, Quiala said.

She said they have a mix of temporary positions for the Festival that are returning from previous years and new to the Festival, but she didnt know whether this person had been employed by them previously.

Quiala said the festival had worked to inform other artists of the matter in real time, and she had reached out to the artists with a personal apology.

The festival is committed to antiracism work and social justice, she said  that chance is part of why she came to the organization from Minnesota. People may err, she said  the organization, historically white-led, is attempting to change.

There will be times we screw up, said Quiala. (Addressing that) is what we have to do to live our commitment. Thats what we have to do to live our values.

In addition to the steps immediately after the incident, the organization began reviewing its human resource policies, hiring practices and wage scale in January, with an eye toward increasing equity. Quiala said she also hoped all artists would be paid moving forward.

Quiala said she was trying to remain open in the wake of the incident. Instead of going into a defensive mode, she said she was trying to make a more human response.

They had sought to share information online to create a system of accountability, she said.

The artists had taken a brave stance in sharing their concerns, she said. The response to address them, she said, was the organizations responsibility.

Thats our work to fix, said Quiala.

william.lambert@hearstmediact.com
When she became a nurse 10 years ago, Sara Keiling never expected that shed be wearing a pink hard hat and a life jacket and climbing a steep, 30-foot ladder to vaccinate her patients in a global pandemic.

But thats what she and other nurses from the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center in New Haven have been doing since May to administer the COVID-19 vaccine to more than 90 crew members on oil tankers that regularly arrive in the port. The nurses provide the shots on board the ships because many of the crew members lack valid visas.

The crew members are among 200,000 merchant seafarers worldwide who have been unable to leave their ships in many ports due to strict COVID-19 restrictions. Some have been at sea for more than 18 months, and getting vaccinated means they can finally take shore leave or go home, said David Heindel, chairman of the seafarers section of the International Transport Workers Federation.

At the height of the pandemic, about 400,000 seafarers were stranded on ships worldwide due to COVID restrictions. At least 20,000 crew members have now been vaccinated in 72 American cities, Heindel said.

Keiling said the climb up the ship is sometimes daunting, but its worth it to see the relief from the crew members, who hail from India, Japan, Croatia and Poland.

Theyre very grateful, she said. Lots of them take selfies with us or with their vaccination card. Its such a good feeling.

The health center is providing the free vaccinations through a partnership with Moran Shipping Agencies of West Haven. Realizing the plight of the seafarers, the company asked the state Department of Public Health for help, and the Hill Health Center responded. Moran officials declined to comment.

As soon as we heard their story, we knew we needed to go out there and help, Keiling, an advanced practice registered nurse, said. To be able to reunite them with their families, its an easy win for us.

Michael R. Taylor, the health centers CEO, said his agency has administered 40,000 vaccines throughout the city and New Haven County, including going door-to-door, to soup kitchens, homeless shelters, churches and community centers. While he called Keilings team members fearless for climbing on the ships, he added that its typical of his staffs willingness to help anyone in need.

We serve all comers, he said. Were trying to vaccinate as many people as we can, as long as we can, to safeguard our community.

Keilings team usually consists of a patient registrar and two or three nurses who vaccinate 8 to 20 or more crew members at a time. They have to create a patient record for each crew member even though theyll likely never see the seafarer again, Keiling said.

The single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine works best, rather than the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, because of the unpredictable lives of the crew members.

Theyre really in port for maybe 24 hours and then theyre right back out to sea, she said.

Heindels federation is working to have more seafarers vaccinated and given priority as front-line workers, but progress is slow in many countries.

Seafarers are sort of a hidden group that no one gives consideration to, he said.

In another effort that started in May, Ruth Setaro, the port chaplain in New Haven for Seafarers International House, has driven about 40 crew members who have valid U.S. visas and shore passes to local pharmacies to get vaccinated.

From Russia, Ukraine, the Philippines, Myanmar and India, the crew members have told her about their plight.

Theyve been so isolated, but theyre also worried that if they left the ships, they might get COVID and get sick and die, Setaro said. Once theyre vaccinated, they may be able to finally go home.

This story was reported under a partnership with the Connecticut Health I-Team ( c-hit.org ), a nonprofit news organization dedicated to health reporting.
DANBURY  An attempted motor vehicle stop by police Wednesday morning ended with a crash that shut down an intersection for hours and sent two people to the hospital, according to an accident report.

The crash happened at the intersection of Hayestown and Tamarack avenues around 7:15 a.m. when a 2007 Ford Fusion struck the rear of a 2013 Honda CR-V stopped at a traffic light in the eastbound lane of Hayestown Avenue, the report stated.
Kristen H. Emes, 73, of Niagara Falls, NY, passed from this life on June 25, 2021. Born on May 8, 1948 in Niagara Falls, NY, she was the daughter of the late Harry and Helen Elizabeth "Betty" (nee Long) Emes. Kristen was a lifelong resident of Niagara Falls, NY, and graduated from Stella Nia
The Department of State Security Service has agreed to allow the leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu ...

The Department of State Security Service has agreed to allow the leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu to meet with his lawyers.

This was disclosed by Nnamdi Kanus counsel, Ifeanyi Ejiofor through his Twitter handle on Friday.

Update, Thankfully Our effort is yielding the desired result, We have just received a communication approving Our visit to Our Client- Mazi Nnamdi Kanu. Shall keep the World posted on the outcome, immediately after the meeting, later in the Day. God is with Us, Ejiofor tweeted.

Kanu has been in the custody of the Nigerian Secret Police since he was arrested and repatriated from Kenya to Nigeria on Sunday to face trial after jumping bail in 2017 for charges bothering on terrorism, treasonable felony, illegal possession of arms among others, levied against him.

The IPOB leader has been scheduled to appear before the Abuja Federal High Court for the continuation of his trial from the 26-27 July 2021.
The Department of State Services has confirmed that its operative killed aides to activist, Sunday Adeniyi Adeyemo AKA Igbohos at his resid...





The Department of State Services has confirmed that its operative killed aides to activist, Sunday Adeniyi Adeyemo AKA Igbohos at his residence in Ibadan, Oyo State.

Recall that in the early hours of Thursday, Igbohos residence located at Soka area of Ibadan was invaded by some gunmen suspected to be security agents.

DSS, also confirmed that it arrested 11 men and a woman after the fierce battle.

The Public Relations Officer of the DSS, Dr. Peter Afunanya on Thursday night said that the raid was based on intelligence that Igboho had stockpiled arms in the place.

On approach to the residence, the team came under heavy gun attack by nine (9) men, suspected to be Igbohos guards. Six (6) of them were armed with AK-47 gun and three (3) others, with Pump-Action riffles.

Afunanya disclosed that two of Igbohos aides were killed.

In the course of the exchange, two (2) of Igbohos armed men were gunned down while the rest were subdued and arrested. Only one operative who was shot by the assailants on his right hand sustained injury. He has, however, received medical attention and is very stable.

Afterwards, the team procedurally searched the house and subsequently recovered the following among others:

This is to inform Nigerians and the world that Sunday Igboho and his group, in the guise of campaign for self-determination, have become well-armed and determined to undermine public order. This, the arrests and seizures are, no doubt, a confirmation of a grand plan by IGBOHO and his cohorts to wage a violent insurrection against the Nigerian State.

Alert foreign missions and licencing authorities within and outside Nigeria about this development and the possibility that IGBOHO could declare some of his personal permit and identity cards missing in order to seek their replacement.

Apprise stakeholders that the Five (5) AK-47 assault rifles recovered from the building are suspected to be those collected by IGBOHOs men from Nigerian Customs and Immigration personnel at Idi Iroko, Ogun State.

He, therefore, urged Igboho to surrender himself to the nearest security agency, adding that those arrested will be charged to court.

The gun duel which lasted for an hour offered IGBOHO the chance to escape. Sunday ADEYEMO a.k.a Sunday IGBOHO is now on the run. IGBOHO may run as far as he can. He may hide as long as he wants. He might have attacked security operatives as his strength carried him. But this will be the end of his shenanigans. Soon, he will not have a hiding place. His strength will sure fail him. And the law will catch up with him. The law may be slow. But it will be steady.

Consequently, ADEYEMO/IGBOHO is advised to turn himself in to the nearest security agency. Those cheering and eulogising him may appeal to or advise him to do the needful. He should surrender himself to the appropriate authorities. He or anyone can never be above the law.

Meanwhile, those arrested will be charged accordingly.
Popular Hausa movie actress, Zainab Musa Booth is dead. She has been promptly buried in Kano. The death of the veteran actress was announced...





Popular Hausa movie actress, Zainab Musa Booth is dead. She has been promptly buried in Kano.

The death of the veteran actress was announced by her colleague Ali Nuhu via an Instagram post.

The deceaseds daughter, Mariam also confirmed the report on Friday as the detail of how she died was not revealed.

She simply revealed that her mother died Thursday night in Kano.

Booth was popular in the Hausa movie industry for portraying motherly roles.

The veteran actress left behind four children and two grandchildren.

Fans and colleague have continued to pay tribute to the late movie star.

Ali Nuhu who broke the news of her death prayed that Allah have mercy on her soul and make paradise her final abode.

Uzee Usman, another Hausa filmmaker mourned the late actress with a crying emoji and prayed God forgives her shortcomings.

Movie star, Belinda Effah also took to the comment section of Maryams announcement to pray that the deceased soul Rest In Peace.
The Adamawa State Police Command has nabbed an 18-year-old housewife for allegedly pressing a hot iron around the private part of her five-y...

The Adamawa State Police Command has nabbed an 18-year-old housewife for allegedly pressing a hot iron around the private part of her five-year-old step-daughter.

The police said the housewife did this because the stepdaughter urinated in her bed.

The police said the suspect, Aisha Muhammed, a resident of Wuro Patuji village in Mubi South Local Government Area, committed the crime on Thursday.

The child has reportedly been under the care of the suspect after the babys mother was divorced by her father.

Investigation revealed that the suspect, who is the second wife to the victims father, committed the offence by using a hot iron on the girls privates, tortured and inflicted injury on the baby, the state Police Public Relations Officer, DSP Suleiman Ngutoje, said in a statement.

He added, The wicked stepmother was arrested by the Police in Mubi South local government area following a report received from Aisha Abdullahi, the mother of the victim and Barrister Khadija Nasir, a female lawyer.

He said the Commissioner of Police, CP Aliyu Adamu, commended FIDA and the officers for the role they played in bringing the matter to the public.

He added that the police commissioner has directed discreet investigations and subsequent prosecution as the victim continues receiving medical attention.
Bello Matawalle, governor of Zamfara, says he believes the issue of insecurity in the state will be effectively dealt with now that he has...

Bello Matawalle, governor of Zamfara, says he believes the issue of insecurity in the state will be effectively dealt with now that he has joined the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Matawalle defected to the APC on Tuesday.

Speaking on the Osasu Show programme on Friday, Matawalle noted that with his defection to the ruling party, the state will enjoy the dividends of democracy.

The governor also said his defection from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the APC is nothing out of the ordinary, adding that Zamfara will experience growth as a result of his decision.

The issue of security is not just for APC or PDP. We have to put all hands on deck so that we can solve that problem, he said,

Politics is about interest and confidence. Many of the politicians have changed from one party to another, so it is not a new thing and I decided to change so that I can bring more peace to my state.

We have achieved tremendous successes, particularly on the issue of banditry where we used kinetic and non-kinetic approaches. These approaches we used, in particular  dialogue  it worked but you know that even with the approach of dialogue, we have to bring a political solution to it.

So, I want to make sure that during this my tenure, Ill bring everybody in the state together under one basket; that we should forget our political differences, work together, try to bring more peace to the state.

This is a ruling party where we have the senate, members of the house of representatives. We are stronger and I believe people will benefit more than before. Where my hand does not reach before, now I can get what I want.

I believe with this coming together, Im going to work hard with my other colleagues so that we can get more from the federal government, particularly on the issue of insecurity. Even before I decamped, I knew the arrangement Mr president had made to bring more equipment to our security agencies to fight the criminality in the northern region.

I believe we will get more troops to come and flush out the criminals. I assure you that youll see a lot of changes, because we will get more improvement on each facility that we have.

He also expressed hope that within the next three months, Zamfara would have undergone a lot of tremendous changes.
Rumour mill was activated in Osogbo on Friday morning as residents woke up with the news of a planned attack by Fulani Herdsmen. The source ...





Rumour mill was activated in Osogbo on Friday morning as residents woke up with the news of a planned attack by Fulani Herdsmen.

The source of the news could not be established at press time, but it spread rapidly like wildfire and generated palpable tension in the area.

Once the information about the impending attack started spreading, it forced the city into a sleeping mode. Frightened parents rushed to withdraw their wards from schools, most of which had poor security networks.

Similarly, most shops and offices were closed as traders and civil servants generally remained indoors for fear of being caught up in the attacks.

Worried by the development, the state government n a statement debunked the rumour and assured people of their safety and protection.

Mrs Funke Egbemode, the Commissioner for Information, urged people to go about their normal businesses without fear.

She noted that government has appropriate measures to guarantee the security of lives and property in the affected areas.
The Police in Lagos State led a show of force on Friday to declare readiness for the Yoruba Nation rally on Saturday. The demonstration w...

The Police in Lagos State led a show of force on Friday to declare readiness for the Yoruba Nation rally on Saturday.

The demonstration was held in conjunction with Nigerian Army, Department of State Services (DSS), Nigeria Security and Civil Defense Corps (NSCDC) and Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC).

Police spokesman, Muyiwa Adejobi said measures are in place to prevent any act of lawlessness, oppression and intimidation.

Lagos cannot afford to record another violence orchestrated by some individuals during the 2020 End SARS protest that led to massive destruction of lives and properties in the state, he said.

The security agencies warned organisers of the mega rally and others planning to stage the procession to stay away.

Adejobi said the Police and Lagos government had cautioned them against the rally scheduled for Gani Fawehinmi Freedom Park in Ojota, after intelligence indicated a possible breakdown of law and order.

The command reiterated its stance that anyone caught participating or facilitating the so-called mega rally in Lagos will be dealt with within the ambits of the law.
Former presidential aide, Reno Omokri has described the Yoruba activist, Sunday Adeyemo popularly known as Sunday Igboho as a hero. ...

Former presidential aide, Reno Omokri has described the Yoruba activist, Sunday Adeyemo popularly known as Sunday Igboho as a hero.

Reno who took to his Facebook page on Friday to express disappointment over the invasion of Igbohos residence by the Department of State Security Services, DSS, also described President Muhammadu Buhari and the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai as terror enablers for rehabilitating repented Boko Haram members an arresting alleged innocent citizens.

Recall that the DSS on Wednesday night raided the residence of the Yoruba Nation agitator while two of his allies were gunned down.

Reno in his reaction urged President Buhari to leave Igboho and face the terror sympathisers and enablers.

The post reads, Sunday Igboho is a hero Gumi is a terror sympathiser, Pantami is a terror sympathiser, Buhari is a terror enabler for rehabilitating Boko Haram, Masari is a terror enabler, El-Rufai is a terror enabler

Leave Igboho and face the terror sympathisers and enablers.

What moral authority does a government that held a graduation party for terrorists, that sewed new clothes for them, that bought shoes and socks for them, that bought food and drinks for their party, have for arresting Sunday Igboho, a man who helps us fight killer herdsmen?
Barcelonas contract negotiations with Lionel Messi are progressing as expected, club president Joan Laporta told Spanish public televis...

Barcelonas contract negotiations with Lionel Messi are progressing as expected, club president Joan Laporta told Spanish public television on Friday.

The Argentine superstar, who is currently at the Copa America, became a free agent on Thursday when his last contract with Barcelona expired.

We want him to stay, Leo wants to stay and we are looking for the best formula, said Laporta.

We would like it to be concluded as quickly as possible but we know it will take time.

Messi, 34, joined Barcelona as a 13-year-old but tried to leave last August, citing a clause in his contract and a club that had had no project or anything for a long time.

He has inevitably been linked with a series of possible moves, from Manchester City and Paris St-Germain to David Beckhams Inter Miami.

AFP
Barely six months after his inauguration on January 20, 2021, the United States President, Joe Biden says his administration has created t...

Barely six months after his inauguration on January 20, 2021, the United States President, Joe Biden says his administration has created three million jobs in the country.

Biden who made this known on Friday via a post on his verified Facebook page expressed excitement that his administrations economic plan is working.

In two different posts, the president said, 3 million jobs since we took office. Our economic plan is working.

As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day, todays job news brought us something else to celebrate.

The United States will on Sunday mark its Independence Day which was declared on July 4, 1774.

Joe Buden became the 45th US President after defeating his predecessor, Donald Trump during the November 2020 presidential election.
The whereabouts of Yoruba activist Sunday Adeyemo also known as Sunday Igboho is unknown. It was gathered from a source close to his c...

The whereabouts of Yoruba activist Sunday Adeyemo also known as Sunday Igboho is unknown.

It was gathered from a source close to his camp that he had gone into hiding.

He is no longer in Oyo State, I spoke with his people. Expectedly, they didnt disclose the location.

The federal government turned the heat on Igboho to stop the July 3 rally. This has been well established, he said.

Igboho has cancelled the demonstration scheduled to hold in Lagos on Saturday.

The vocal agitator has been leading processions to demand the break out of the South-West from Nigeria.

Yoruba Nation rallies have already been held in other states in the region. It is believed Igboho eventually backed down to avoid arrest.

His fears reportedly heightened after Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) was apprehended.

In the wee hours of Thursday, Nigerian forces stormed Igbohos home in Ibadan, Oyo State Nigeria.

Igboho told BBC Pidgin that two people died and several others were still missing after the raid in the Soka area.

I dey my house around 1:30am. I just hear gunshot for front of my house and shout say, we be DSS, we be soja, Sunday Igboho come out

Wetin I dey do na to fight for my pipo, my rally dey peaceful. I fight for my family (Yoruba) becos Fulani bandits kill, rape dem. Goment refuse to do di right tin, dat na why I come out, he said.
Watertown, NY (13601)

Today

Sunshine and a few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 83F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Low 72F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Watertown, NY (13601)

Today

Mostly sunny. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 84F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Low 72F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Watertown, NY (13601)

Today

Sunny to partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 84F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Thunderstorms likely. Low 72F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
The viral video that emerged last week of rats scurrying across the counter of a French Quarter restaurant at night served as a stark reminder, on the off chance anyone needed it: We may like rodents in our animated films and research labs, but wed rather not see them grooming themselves on the cutting board of the neighborhood oyster bar.

The video, shot by someone passing the window of the French Market Restaurant & Bar on Decatur Street, was quickly posted on Facebook.

Media pounced, viewers shuddered and Anthony Marullo, the establishments chastened owner, closed his doors for a few days of repairs, despite a public declaration that our food service areas are 100 percent clean and safe at all times.

It can happen to any restaurant here, a bartender from across the street said in a televised interview  a consolation to Marullo, if no one else.

And on Thursday, public rodent control workers fanned out across the Vieux Carre to lower poisoned bait into the sewers, an offensive that city officials insisted had been scheduled for that day all along.

Asked at a news conference if New Orleans is the rattiest city in America, as a national survey on pest sightings suggested in 2015, city Mosquito, Termite and Rodent Control Board Director Claudia Riegel said that dubious distinction is out of line with observable reality.

Were just not, she said.

The local board handles rats out of doors and in public buildings and spaces, while the state Department of Health is responsible for the regulation and inspection of businesses.

A review of 2017 data from the state shows that 53 establishments that sell food in the city were found to have rodents on-site, about 1.7 percent of all the addresses checked out by inspectors last year.

Those businesses were almost all restaurants  as opposed to groceries or other places that sell food  and were concentrated in the French Quarter and other neighborhoods near the river.

In many cases, inspection reports cite the presence of droppings or rodents in traps as evidence. But at Cleos, a now-shuttered Central Business District eatery, the timing left less room for doubt. Large rodent ran across (the) floor during inspection, the report notes.

Michael Vidrine, who oversees health inspections for the department, said Louisiana will inspect an establishment unannounced anywhere from one to four times a year, with more frequent visits likely depending on the population served (the sick or elderly) and the food offered (raw meat or oysters).

He said evidence of the presence of rodents is a critical violation that triggers a reinspection within three to seven days, and that businesses tend to bring themselves back into compliance.

Closures are rare, and Health Department spokesman Robert Johannessen said even the most high-profile local closure  of the McKenzies Bakery chain in 2000  was done voluntarily. He noted, however, that the department had already put inspectors at the chain's Desire Parkway plant around the clock and had begun the process of shutting it down.

Louisiana has been compared unfavorably to other states or cities that are quicker to shut down restaurants at the first sight of a pest infestation, but the state contends its goal is to keep restaurants clean and open.

Vidrine said that while he understands the latest video was shocking, he has full confidence in the states inspection system overall.

Our system follows the FDA Food Code and has shown that it works, he said. When youre doing the number of inspections we do, there are going to be some things that will not be perfect. But our goal is to work with these guys and protect public health, not shut people down just to say we did it.

The rats people see in the French Quarter and throughout the city tend to be one of two varieties: roof rats or Norway rats, said Tulane University ecologist Michael Blum, who has been trapping and studying rats for 10 years as head of the universitys New Orleans Rat Project.

Roof rats are smaller, have narrower features and live in trees, typically coming into homes from above. Norway rats are the larger, burrowing rats that live along the banks of the Mississippi River and tend to raid nearby population centers in search of food.

Both types breed prolifically  Blum said an adult female is almost always pregnant  and the French Quarter, with its old buildings, high concentration of restaurants, regular accumulation of street trash and proximity to the river, is especially susceptible to rodent infestation.

Tim Kraus, owner of Signature Pest Control, said the key to rodent control in buildings is physical exclusion  sealing up holes in walls and under doors to keep them out. But this is difficult, considering that a rodent can squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter and a mouse can get through a hole the size of a dime.

Restaurants need regular inspections by a pest control company, he said. Its not something you can do once and forget about.

Kraus said that while vigilant businesses can stay ahead of the problem, rats will find the weak links in the chain in a neighborhood full of restaurants and old buildings.

How can you block every hole or crack that is the size of a dime in the French Quarter? he said. Youre not going to do it.

Riegel, the director of the city's rodent control board, said the city baits the sewers in the French Quarter with poison at least four times a year and Thursdays initiative was part of its usual early summer regimen. She said the poison, a blood anticoagulant that causes organ failure in rats that have eaten it, is suspended out of reach of people and pets and out of the water in the storm drains.

Workers monitor the baits to see which ones are being eaten and will tend to them in the coming weeks.

While videos like the one last week and national surveys of dubious methodology might focus public attention on rats in New Orleans, Riegel said the city manages the population with its periodic treatments citywide.

New Orleans doesnt have high levels of rat-borne illnesses, she said.

But while the city can knock back the rodent population, businesses and residents are on the front lines of the fight and can do simple things like keeping pet food inside and secure, sealing up holes and keeping lids on trash cans closed. Even cleaning up pet waste and not letting fruit trees grow rampant and drop fruit in yards helps, Riegel said.

Sanitation is the No. 1 rule for rodent control, she said.

The French Market Restaurant video was not the first time the citys popularity with rats grabbed the public spotlight.

In 2014, comedian Hannibal Buress went on "The Tonight Show" and recounted a stand-off he had with a large rat in the restroom at Coops Place, just down the street from the French Market Restaurant. He joked about the reaction of the waiter, who he said put him on the defensive with a rat speech.

He said, Man, we are right by the Mississippi River, these buildings are 200, 300 years old, they got rats everywhere. Even five-star restaurants have rats,  Buress riffed in a bit that has been viewed almost 2 million times on YouTube. Somehow he made me feel like the weirdo for bringing up rats in a restaurant. I dont know what type of Jedi mind trick this was  cuz I still ended up ordering food there.

Before that, a 2012 news report said a customer complained to state authorities that rats the size of beer cans fell through the back dining-room ceiling at Frankie & Johnnys restaurant Uptown, sending customers and staff scrambling in terror.

Blum, of Tulane, agreed that while people try hard, and largely succeed, at keeping rats out of view in their day-to-day lives, those moments when the two worlds collide are unavoidable and memorable.

When something like this video comes up, there is some traction because it resonates; it is a common shared experience, he said. Everybody has a rat story.

Staff writer Jeff Adelson contributed to this article.
Actor and producer Will Smith is gifting New Orleans with a Fourth of July fireworks display this weekend, according to city officials, bringing back the annual celebration on the Mississippi River after it was canceled last year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a press release Friday, the Cantrell administration said that the annual "Go 4th on the River" display will take place on the riverfront at 9 p.m. on Sunday, July 4th.

"The gift of city fireworks was made possible by actor and producer Will Smith, along with his company," said the prepared statement from City Hall.

Will Smith film 'Emancipation' moving to New Orleans from Georgia due to voting law A film starring Will Smith set to be filmed in Georgia that was pulled over concerns about a controversial new voting law there will instead b

Smith is in town working on the production of his latest feature film, "Emancipation," which will tell the story of Whipped Peter, an enslaved man who escapes terrible conditions on a Louisiana plantation. Peter was a key figure in exposing the brutality of slavery and served as a solder in the Civil War.

Smith chose to move production of the film from Georgia to Louisiana in early April over concerns of a controversial voting law.

The display comes as many towns and cities are holding celebrations this year after canceling the annual shows in 2020 to try and prevent large gatherings. In addition to the fireworks along the river, New Orleans City Park will be hosting a fireworks display on July 3 at 9 p.m., and a number of other events will be held throughout the New Orleans area.

In anticipation of large crowds, the city said there will be an increased presence of local, state and federal public safety agencies.

The press release also included the following information on street closures and parking information:

To ensure the safety of pedestrians, the NOPD will restrict traffic, with no vehicles allowed on the following streets:

Bourbon Street from Canal to St. Ann streets from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.

The 700 and 800 blocks of Iberville, Bienville, Conti, St. Louis, Toulouse, St. Peter, Orleans and St. Ann streets from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Decatur Street from Canal to Dumaine streets from 6:30 p.m. (or until crowd size warrants) and until crowds disperse.

No-parking zones will be in effect on the following streets:

Bourbon Street from Canal to St. Ann streets from 12 p.m. to 12 a.m.

The 700 and 800 blocks of Iberville, Bienville, Conti, St. Louis, Toulouse, St. Peter, Orleans and St. Ann streets from 12 p.m. to 12 a.m.

Decatur Street from Canal to Dumaine streets from 12 p.m. to 12 a.m.

Louisiana extras wanted for new Will Smith movie 'Emancipation'; see details Extras are needed in the New Orleans area this summer for a new film starring Will Smith.

Jackson Square will close early at 5 p.m. Crescent Park will extend its hours to 10 p.m. to accommodate fireworks viewers.

The City of New Orleans encourages everyone to be vaccinated before they join in on holiday plans.
Since December, people with ties to the National Federation of the Blind have formally submitted 69 complaints alleging sexual misconduct within the organization, according to an internal report sent to NFB members Thursday. The complaints included allegations against 16 people at the Louisiana Center for the Blind in Ruston.

The findings of the 60-page preliminary report were the result of a committee of four longstanding NFB leaders, Denise Avant, Tim Elder, Ronza Othman and Sharon Krevor-Weisbaum, made to conduct an internal investigation into sexual misconduct complaints within the organization and how leadership handled them.

The committee contracted with Baltimore law firm Kramon & Graham to interview survivors. As of June 19, the committee had interviewed 56 people and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents provided by witnesses.

The only individual with allegations of sexual misconduct against them that the committee names in its report is Fred Schroeder, who was involved in the organization for decades and previously held several leadership roles.

+12 Former students allege 'toxic culture' of racism, abuse and assault at Louisiana Center for the Blind The Louisiana Center for the Blind was supposed to help blind people learn vital life skills. But many students say there was a 'toxic culture' of abuse, racism and assault.

Given Dr. Schroeders prominence within the organization and the number of allegations about his misconduct over the course of many years, it is not possible to conduct an objective investigation of sexual misconduct within the NFB without addressing the subject of Fred Schroeder, the report reads. The Schroeder matter has been described, figuratively, as the elephant in the room.

According to the report, complaints involving Schroeder spanned nearly 40 years, and that the way the NFB previously responded to the complaints against him is what people described in interviews as a factor contributing to their mistrust of the organizations assertion that it wants to improve the ways in which it responds to these issues.

In early June, the NFB suspended Schroeder from the organization for five years, and on June 13, Schroeder resigned from his position at the World Blind Union due to personal circumstances that prevent him from carrying out his role, according to a statement from the WBU.

But leadership within the NFB knew about allegations against Schroeder since at least 2002, according to the committees report. And though in 2014, he resigned from his leadership roles on the NFB board and as president of the Virginia affiliate, he was allowed to continue to be a member and speak at NFB events.

Former Louisiana Center for the Blind employee indicted on 18 counts of molestation of a minor A Ruston grand jury last week voted to indict Michael Ausbun, a former employee of the Louisiana Center for the Blind, on 18 counts of molesta

Of the 16 separate incidents occurring at the LCB, five have been resolved, with two claims finding a Code of Conduct violation. A separate complaint made before December involved a minor, and a committee found there to be a violation of the code in that case. The rest of the complaints are still pending.

The report details several recommendations of changes the NFB should adopt permanently including continuing the use of an external investigator to investigate Code of Conduct complaints that it began using in December and adding failure to report an allegation of sexual misconduct as a violation of its Code of Conduct.

The committee plans to release a final report in the fall, as investigations into many allegations are still ongoing.
Local developer Anthony Marullo has begun purchasing properties using a $100 million "war chest" he has raised to buy commercial premises that have run into cash flow problems because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Marullo, who is the third generation of the family that has owned the French Market Restaurant & Bar on Decatur Street since 1965, and who has owned other French Quarter bars and restaurants himself, has over the last couple of decades built up a portfolio in the city of about 600 multifamily dwellings along with his real estate partners.

The strategy of the new company  which he has called the "Louisiana Revitalization Fund"  is to target a mix of real-estate opportunities. Some real-estate purchases will focus on successful firms that have existing, high-traffic retail operations. Other purchases will target properties whose businesses suffered a big slump during the pandemic, such as restaurants.

The idea is that the stronger business properties will bolster the portfolio so as to attract banks and other lenders.

Marullo started the new venture with purchases of two properties that he said have strong businesses: the Meineke Car Care Center at 4243 Canal St. and Gulf Coast Spirits liquor and convenience store on Florida Street in Mandeville.

The 4,000-square-foot Canal Street building was owned by a company controlled by Barry Kern, who owns Mardi Gras World, and former energy executive Michael B. White. It was valued in 2020 by the Orleans Parish tax assessor at $400,000, though Marullo didn't disclose what he paid for it.

"Barry and his partner had been great landlords throughout our project and Im sure Anthony is going to be the same," said John Womack, owner of the Meineke franchise.

When it comes to the distressed businesses, Marullo says, "We're trying to find good operators who maybe own a property and find themselves in a situation where they've used their liquidity from the (federal Paycheck Protection Program relief fund), the pandemic has hit them really hard, and they're trying to make a decision, 'Should I stay or should I go?'"

The deal on offer for those distressed firms will be that Marullo will buy the property and lease it back to the operators so that they can keep going, but as tenants rather than owners.

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Marullo said he's raised $20 million of equity from his own funds as well as three local investors he declined to name. That is being combined with borrowing from local lender BankPlus, and he expects other lenders to join the project.

Marullo is on the board of directors of American Bank & Trust, a small community bank run by Alton Mcree. He was appointed a year ago to the board of the Louisiana Housing Corporation, reflecting his work developing affordable housing.

He said his experience being on the bank board and watching his family restaurant navigate the pandemic led him to the idea of finding companies that needed to use their property assets in a way that will allow them to keep going.

"Last year was extremely challenging and it was getting to the situation where the PPP was running out (for the French Market Restaurant), and if we didn't have alternative sources of funding it could have been much, much worse," Marullo said, adding that the restaurant is now doing better than it was before the pandemic since the vaccination rollout has unleashed pent-up demand.

The distressed business property fund is expected to close deals on properties in Shreveport as well as the New Orleans area, Marullo said.

Tim Thompson at Urban Properties said his firm is "identifying markets and selecting assets within them," in partnership with Marullo. Urban Properties will be underwriting and will be broker for the transactions, he said.

Separately, Marullo Property Inc., Marullo's main real estate investment company, bought a 14,000-square-foot office block at 4401 Veterans Memorial Blvd. as he expanded into commercial real estate last September. Tenants there include Nola Dermatology and Axis Realty Group.

Marullo's biggest residential development to date was the Gilmore Park apartment complex in Algiers, on which he spent more than $1 million to upgrade two years ago with partner Brad Jongbloed.

The complex, near Behrman Park, was built in the 1960s as family housing for the U.S. Navy. The developers targeted half the 82 rental units to qualify as affordable housing for people on qualifying incomes.
In December 2011, Louis Dabdoub Jr., then the chief investigator for the 22nd Judicial District Attorneys Office in St. Tammany and Washington parishes, swore out an arrest warrant for felony theft and damage to property, plunging restaurateur Ricky Cambre into a two-year legal nightmare.

But on Tuesday, Dabdoub was himself charged with a crime stemming from that same warrant. A St. Tammany Parish grand jury indicted him on a single count of false swearing for the purpose of violating public health or safety.

State Assistant Attorney General David Caldwell sought the charge, saying Dabdoub made a false statement to get Cambre arrested in an attempt to help a close personal friend and supporter of the District Attorneys Office who was suing Cambre.

That friend was Barbara Marullo, who owned the Covington building that housed Cambres Ground Pati restaurant. Her husband, Anthony Marullo, had served on the New Orleans Police Department with Dabdoub as well as former District Attorney Walter Reed and Sam Gebbia, another investigator for the district attorney.

Its a very egregious abuse of power when you cause someone to be arrested and you lie in an affidavit, Caldwell said, saying such actions cause people to lose confidence in the justice system.

Caldwell said he does not believe that Reed, who was DA at the time, knew anything about the case and that Reeds office ultimately dropped the charges and paid a settlement of about $40,000 to the falsely accused man.

But he said the Cambre case is just one aspect of an ongoing investigation into the abuses of power by certain individuals in the former (Reed) administration.

The Attorney Generals Office is working with the FBI and the state Inspector Generals Office on other cases that have been brought to light mainly by the Metropolitan Crime Commission. Caldwell said he could not comment on the facts or targets of those investigations but that the files will be complete in mid- to late December and will be presented to a grand jury shortly thereafter.

Dabdoub left the District Attorneys Office before Warren Montgomery was sworn into office early this year, succeeding Reed. But while Dabdoub was still chief investigator, he claimed in a sworn affidavit that Cambre had told Barbara Marullo he took parts from a restaurant cooler and filled in a drain with cement.

In a sworn deposition in her civil suit, however, Marullo denied ever telling anyone that Cambre had admitted to anything. In an interview with Dabdoub and Gebbia, she said she had never even spoken to Cambre.

The problems in the criminal case were spelled out in a memo obtained by The New Orleans Advocate. Jack Hoffstadt, the assistant district attorney who was assigned the case, said in the memo, dated July 24, 2013, that the Sheriffs Office had found insufficient evidence to charge Cambre and that the alleged victim herself contradicted the account in the affidavit for Cambres arrest. He also said the investigators never provided him with a written report and tape that they said would back up their story.

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I do not believe this is a case that should be tried, he concluded. The District Attorneys Office dropped the case that same day.

Hoffstadt, who has since left the office, testified before the grand jury Tuesday.

Gordon Herrin, who represented Cambre in the criminal case, described his client as a Boy Scout, an upstanding businessman who plays by the rules.

Hes the last person youd accuse of taking copper tubing to sell for scrap, Herrin said.

Cambre was arrested in Lafayette, where he now lives, in February 2012 and was taken to St. Tammany Parish, where he was locked up, Herrin said. He had to make frequent trips to St. Tammany after that and faced two years of legal bills.

Cambres dispute with the Marullos was over rental payments and was not a criminal matter, Herrin said, and he brought the arrest and the false information on which it was based to the attention of the Marullos civil attorney, who wrote a letter to the District Attorneys Office in April 2012. But the case wasnt dropped until July 24 of that year.

Herrin said he had a face-to-face conversation with Dabdoub in late spring 2012 in which the investigator said the charges would be dropped if Mr. Cambre signed a waiver of liability against the DAs Office.

Herrin said he replied that he would see Dabdoub in court.

He called the case shocking, saying every District Attorneys Office hes dealt with has played by the rules. This was clearly a case where the arrest should never have taken place, he said.

Dabdoubs attorney could not be reached for comment.

Follow Sara Pagones on Twitter, @spagonesadvocat.
A 35-year-old man was booked into the Orleans Parish Justice Center Wednesday after he was accused of running over his baby's mother with his car and taking custody of their child without permission, police said.

NOPD and U.S. Marshals arrested Jamel Clark on counts of attempted first-degree murder, domestic abuse battery, battery on a dating partner and unauthorized use of a moveable.

His 6-month-old daughter was with him at the time of his arrest but was later picked up by the victim's mother, who is the baby's maternal grandmother, according to a family friend, who posted an update of his arrest on Facebook.

Police said Clark took the baby from her mother's home without her permission on June 8 in the area of Elysian Fields and North Derbigny Street in the 7th Ward.

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When the victim ran after him for their baby, Clark drove into her. She landed on the hood of his car, police said. Clark drove off at high speed and threw her off the car's hood, running her over multiple times before driving away, the NOPD said.

+2 In Harvey killing of ex-girlfriend's mother, suspect fired 'indiscriminately': JPSO The suspect who allegedly gunned down his former girlfriend's mother in Harvey before leading authorities on high-speed chase across the West 

The victim survived, according to a friend, though her exact condition is unknown.

NOPD and U.S. Marshals arrested Clark at a house in Kenner after obtaining a warrant.

NOPD asked anyone with additional information on this case to call detectives at 504-658-6050.
MOBILE, Ala.  Trucking officials are unhappy after the Alabama Department of Transportation moved with little notice to divert trucks from the Interstate 10 tunnel in Mobile.

The state announced Thursday that trucks had to detour from noon to 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday to try reduce traffic on I-10 before the July 4 holiday.

Traffic commonly backs up for miles on I-10 through Mobile as tourists make their way to and from Gulf of Mexico beaches. There are sharp curves at each end of the George Wallace Tunnel and eastbound I-10 narrows to two lanes as it prepares to plunge under the Mobile River. The worst backups are usually on Saturdays.

Were anticipating 90,000 to 100,000 vehicles per day traveling through the Wallace Tunnel this weekend. Its just to help maintain the speeds through the tunnel and move more passenger vehicles, Alabama Department of Transportation engineer Matt Ericksen told WPMI-TV.

+31 Behind Bay St. Louis' rise as the artsy, relaxed beach town drawing New Orleanians in droves An enthusiastic Helloooo! rings out through the afternoon sunshine. I feel like we always run into you in the bay these days! This is our h

Trucks are being rerouted to the north to the Cochrane Africatown USA Bridge, the route that's already required for hazardous material carriers.

It's the first time outside of a hurricane evacuation that Alabama has routed truck traffic away from the tunnel.

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Mark Colson, president and CEO of the Alabama Trucking Association, said state officials have botched the move, not notifying trucking groups in advance, requiring trucks to quickly exit, and placing an officer in the middle of the highway to flag down trucks that missed the notification.

The decision that was made was implemented very poorly and created some serious safety hazards, one of which was an officer standing in the middle of two lanes of the interstate, which was not safe for him or surrounding motorists and caused unnecessary and unsafe backups, Colson told AL.com.

Should Fido go with you on the family vacation? Here are some things to consider The summer is in full swing and people are ready for vacation. Many families became first-time pet owners during the pandemic, so now there's

Mobile Public Safety Director Lawrence Battiste said the city did not learn of the decision until after state officials made it. Tunnel traffic spills into city streets as motorists try to drive north to the bridge or use the older Bankhead Tunnel in downtown Mobile.

Alabama is considering a $725 million truck-only bridge over the Mobile River to relieve congestion after a plan for a larger $2.1 billion bridge collapsed over opposition to projected tolls. The truck bridge would be finance by a $10 to $15 toll on trucks. Colson opposes the bridge, saying it's unfair to toll only trucks.

Trucks are just 10% of the traffic. As you can see now, if you just remove less than 10% of the traffic on a holiday weekend like this, it doesnt solve the congestion problem, and neither will a truck-only toll bridge, Colson said.
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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.
Harrisburg, Pa. -- "In the name of transparency," the Pennsylvania Department of Education posted a spreadsheet showing education funding allocations in the state budget for each school district on Wednesday.

The latest approved budget includes the largest state funding increase for public schools in Pennsylvania history, with a $416 million increase and the new Level Up initiative, which will distribute an additional $100 million to the 100 lowest-wealth school districts.

The latest budget includes the following investments:

$200 million increase in the Fair Funding Formula

$100 million to support underfunded school districts through the new Level Up initiative

$50 million in special education funding

$30 million for early education

$20 million for Ready to Learn

$11 million for preschool Early Intervention

$5 million for community colleges

According to Secretary Noe Ortega, The state budget invests in the places we know resources are needed the most - to help our school communities mitigate learning gaps, break down barriers, build equitable learning environments, and move forward stronger and together.

This budget - combined with federal funding - creates opportunities to invite our entire educational ecosystem to the table to collaboratively and inclusively problem solve, address disparities, and develop solutions that will serve our students, our future, he said.

Visit education.pa.gov/budget to access the chart of allocations.
Springfield, Va. -- The tradition of naming boats started over a thousand years ago, when sailors named vessels after gods, goddesses, or saints hoping to bring good fortune to their travels. The tradition continues even today.

The names of boats, however, are a reflection of the times in which we live. For example, "Social Distancing" has taken the Number Two spot on the list of the top ten boat names in 2021.

The top ten list was determined by BoatUS with a tally of names that have been requested through BoatUS's graphics service.

2021's Top Boat Names

#1: Andiamo

An Italian word meaning "Let's Go," this name has been in the top ten list on occasion in past years, but this is the first time that it has seized the number one spot.

#2: Social Distancing

A term that we're all tired of hearing, recycled for a more joyous purpose. Physical distancing is a lot more fun when you're out on the water, and boating gives people space to rejuvenate during a wild few years.

#3: Grace

An elegant, refined, and timeless name. This owner may have chosen a vessel with the classic lines  a bit of tumblehome, a raked stern and overhanging bow. There may even be Grey Poupon aboard.

#4: Shenanigans

Moving up from Number Seven last year, owners choosing this name are definitely up to something! Boats neighboring with Shenanigans might be subject to playful pranks. Make sure your binoculars don't have charcoal smudged along the eyepieces' edge before you use them!

Tips for naming a boat DiscoverBoating.com offers these seven tips for naming a boat: 1. Keep it short -- 1, 2, or at the most 3 words is all you need 2. Name it after a loved one (or a long-running flame) 3. Choose something that reflects your profession or hobby 4. Clever puns and double meanings get bonus points 5. A boat name should both reflect the identity of the owner, and the type of vessel 6. Songs, movies, or cultural arts are acceptable inspiration 7. Be funny! Get a laugh.

#5: Cool Change

Moving up from Number Eight last year, this term refers to the change from a hot summer day to a cool afternoon breeze with thunderstorms ahead. The term originated in Australia and is the subject of a pop song by Little River Band.

#6: Island Time

Knocked down from the Number Two spot last year, you know that the owner of this boat is here to chill. The owner of this boat is literally on Island Time!

#7: Knot on Call

Moving up from Number Nine last year, this name is typically chosen by medical professionals, though it may also be used by workers who are always available to the office thanks to modern technology.

#8: Mojo

Got yours back yet? Boating regains this owners energy and enthusiasm.

#9: Freedom

This name first appeared on the Top Ten list after 9/11 and has remained a mainstay ever since.

#10: Serenity

An all-time favorite that took the top spot last year, this name may indicate the owners need to find time away from a high-stress job (or family). Its often a name found on sailing vessels.

To view this and past Top Ten lists, visit BoatUS's Top Ten list archive.
Williamsport, Pa.  After witnessing several sales and speaking with an informant, authorities allege that two people ran a drug dealing business from a home located on Cherry Street in Williamsport.

Tiffany Harman, 42, and Bruce Junior Perry, 60, both of Williamsport, face several felonies stemming from the operation police said they uncovered.

According to Detective Michael Caschera of the Lycoming County District Attorneys Officer, he observed a several people enter the residence and leave within a few minutes. Caschera said this is a common practice in a base of operations for selling narcotics.

Authorities were tipped off to the home by an informant who told officers he bought crack from people at the residence more than 100 times. The informant admitted this to officers after he was observed leaving the residence and then being stopped with $80 worth of crack.

A warrant was approved based on the informants information and Cascheras observations from outside the residence. The search warrant was executed. Officers said they discovered both Bruce and Harman inside the master bedroom with cocaine, heroin, and cash.

A search of the residence turned up eight grams of cocaine, three grams of heroin, and approximately 135 pills of oxycodone along with $4,000 in cash. Officers said the pills were located inside a black bag that contained Harmans Pennsylvania ID card.

Harman was charged with manufacture, delivery, or possession with intent to manufacture or deliver and conspiracy. Both felonies. She was also charged with third-degree felony criminal use of a facility.

Harman is being held at the Lycoming County Prison in lieu of $35,000 monetary bail as she awaits a preliminary hearing scheduled for July 13.

Perry was charged with both felonies, but because officers said Harman set up the initial drug deal with her phone she was also charged with the third-degree felony.

Perry is free on $25,000 monetary bail after a bondsman posted it on June 3. Perry is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on July 27 with Judge Christian Frey.
Harrisburg, Pa. -- Fire and emergency medical service companies across the Commonwealth, including many in northcentral Pa., will soon receive their grant allocations from the Fire Company and Emergency Medical Service Grant Program, distributed annually by the Office of the State Fire Commissioner.

The money can be used for construction, repairs, or renovations of facilities; to purchase new equipment; for training, recruitment, and retention; and covering lost income from COVID-19 interfering with fundraisers.

Grant recipients include:

Athens Township Fire Co.

Diahoga Hose Co. #6

Engine Co. #1, Sayre

Greater Valley EMS

H.O.P.S. EMS

Herrick Township Volunteer Fire Co.

Howard Elmer Hose Co. #4

J.E. Wheelock Hose Co. #5

LeRaysville Pike Volunteer Fire Department

Litchfield Township Volunteer Fire Co.

Monroe Hose Co.

New Albany Volunteer Fire Co.

North Towanda Fire and Rescue Volunteers

Oscoluwa Engine and Hose Co.

Protection Hose Co. #1

Smithfield Twp. Volunteer Fire Department

South Creek Ambulance Association

South Creek Volunteer Fire Co.

South Waverly Volunteer Fire Department #1

Towanda Fire Department

Tri Township Ambulance Association

Ulster Sheshequin Fire Association

Warren Twp. Volunteer Fire Department

Western Alliance EMS

Wilmot Fire Co.

Windham Twp. Volunteer Fire Co.

Wysox Volunteer Fire Co.

Antes Fort Volunteer Fire Co.

Citizens Hose Co. of Jersey Shore

Clinton Twp. Volunteer Fire Co. #1

DuBoistown Fire Department

DuBoistown Ambulance Service

Eldred Twp. Volunteer Fire Co.

Hepburn Twp. Volunteer Fire Co.

Hughesville Volunteer Fire Department

Independent Hose Co. #1

Lairdsville Community Volunteer Fire Co.

Loyalsock Volunteer Fire Co. #1

Montgomery Volunteer Fire Co.

Muncy Area Volunteer Fire Co.

Muncy Township Volunteer Fire CPNY

Hope Fire Co. #2

Moshannon Valley EMS

Mountain Top Fire Co.

Reliance Volunteer Fire Co.

We are blessed to have a number of highly skilled and dedicated individuals in our area who volunteer their time and efforts to protect our communities, Senator Gene Yaw commented on this year's grants. These grant disbursements will help alleviate some of the burden faced by these organizations on a day to day basis.

State Representative Scott Conklin added: Our fire and EMS companies have always been there to answer the call, and that includes during the pandemic, which certainly took a tough toll on the men and women who serve as our first line of defense. My hope is these funds will help these companies continue to help those in need and keep their doors open.
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Lonie Adcock of Rome is a retired Rome Police Department lieutenant. His latest book is Fact or Fiction.
Linda Andrick-Shade and her dog Cookie sit inside their fireworks tent at Andricks Flea Market on South Commerce Avenue in Front Royal. Andrick-Shade, owner of the flea market, will have her fireworks stand open through the July 4th weekend. Virginia outlaws the use of fireworks that leave the ground unless operated by a certified professional.
Toms Brook resident Lisa Currie is a professor of English as another language and an adviser at the Lord Fairfax Community College in Middletown. She has worked at The Shenandoah Valley Herald and various other newspapers in Virginia.
Franciscan Health is moving its COVID-19 vaccine clinics out of its hospitals.

The Mishawaka-based Catholic nonprofit health care provider has provided coronavirus vaccines for free to the public at its hospitals in Hammond, Crown Point and Michigan City since December. So far, Franciscan Health clinics have administered more than 158,950 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines in Indiana and Illinois.

Franciscan Health Hammond closed its COVID-19 vaccine clinic in downtown Hammond on June 11. Franciscan Health Crown Point and Franciscan Health Michigan City ended their COVID-19 clinics this week. The health care system also stopped offering drive-through COVID-19 testing at Franciscan Health Munster on Wednesday.

Starting on July 6, Franciscan Health will open new COVID-19 vaccination clinics at Franciscan WorkingWell at 8345 Wicker Ave. in St. John and Franciscan Physician Network Coolspring Health Center at 1225 E. Coolspring Ave. in Michigan City. The St. John site will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday while the Michigan City clinic will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursdays.

Walk-ins will be accepted at both locations.
"Happenings in Chesterton" were in the spotlight during Thursday's "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."

Now that live shows with actual audiences are once again being taped, "The Late Show" is bringing back some of its popular features.

"I love the small towns of America," Colbert said. "That's why we have a segment called Community Calendar where our guests talk about actual events that are actually happening in the guest's actual small hometown."

When Colbert announced that the town to be featured Thursday night was Chesterton, that was Jim Gaffigan's cue to step on stage and ask, "Did someone say "Chesterton, Indiana?"

Colbert told Chesterton native Gaffigan it wasn't just a "coincidence" that Chesterton was being featured when he was on the show. It was a "happy accident."

The two funny men then listed some of the upcoming events in the town and the greater Duneland area, all the while offering comical asides, comments and explanations.

"You know what we say in Chesterton, it's a Chester ton of fun," Gaffigan joked.
A museum in Beverly Shores will showcase the work of a local artist inspired by primitive rock painting, ancient visions and dramatic landscapes of the American Southwest.

Dorothy Graden's "Liminal Spaces" opens between 5 and 7 p.m. July 9 at The Depot Museum and Art Gallery in the Beverly Shores Train Station at 525 S. Broadway.

"Inspired by the presence of ancient petroglyphs and prehistoric rock paintings throughout the American Southwest, Dorothy Graden returns to her studio and creates works of art inviting us to look beyond what we see and to celebrate and explore our imagination," the museum said in a press release. "Ms. Graden has developed an innovative artistic style through years of historic research, observation and investigation. The inspiration for her work is the result of hundreds of miles of hiking throughout the mountains and deserts of the American Southwest studying ancient petroglyphs and prehistoric rock paintings."

Graden puts a contemporary spin on prehistoric art of the Americas with watercolor, ink and pastels. In addition to painting, she has given presentations on ancient rock art dating back 30,000 years all over the world, including at universities in Russia, Ireland and Austria.
Walters said camps like this are often hosted in Illinois or Indianapolis and are much more expensive, so she was ecstatic to have an option close to home.

The camp has 40 riders that come each day for 75-minute sessions. They all started on the same level, using a bike with special equipment where the back tire would be, called a "roller," to help with balance. As the riders progress, they reach different levels with different rollers. There's also a tandem bike that a camper can ride with an iCan Shine worker to better determine where they are with pedaling, balancing and navigating the bike.

Once the rider reaches a certain level with the special equipment, they are ready to get a two-wheeler by themselves. By Wednesday, about seven of the 40 campers made it to this stage. For Wolstenholme and Splant, it's hard to put into words what it means to see the kids gain that freedom and independence.

Tears welled in Wolstenholme's eyes as she talked about watching Charlie ride a two-wheeler on his own Wednesday. She has been planning this camp since August 2020, so it was emotional for her to see her son reach his goal. For Charlie, the experience was "amazing."
"Apart from his very high-level involvement, Mayor Snyder had nothing to do with the eventual specifications, nor did he play any role in influencing who the lowest qualified bidder would be," his legal team argues.

"Mr. Snyder is devoutly religious and family oriented," the defense said. "In addition to payment of taxes on the $13,000 sum the government claims is a bribe, upon receipt of the check from the Buhas (then-owners of Great Lakes Peterbilt) he immediately tithed a portion of those proceeds to his church."

The defense argues Snyder should be acquitted of that charge or at least given a new and third trial.

It also challenges the government's claims that Snyder "betrayed the public's trust" as mayor by committing these offenses.

"There is no claim that Mr. Snyder took for his own benefit funds entrusted to the government by taxpayers," the defense says. "Nor did Mr. Snyder corrupt or distort governmental processes by doling out favors based on which company gave him political donations or money."

"The prosecution has provided no explanation for why Mr. Snyders case should be lumped in with news articles reciting the longest sentences it could find issued in public corruption cases," the defense memorandum says.
CROWN POINT  A Lake Criminal Court jury deliberated for about four hours Wednesday before finding a Hammond man not guilty of eight counts linked to a shooting that wounded a 15-year-old boy.

Steven L. Fortunato, 40, was convicted of one count of misdemeanor invasion of privacy, said Thomas Vanes, assistant chief public defender.

The jury found Fortunato not guilty of seven felony counts and a misdemeanor charge.

Judge Samuel Cappas found Fortunato already had served his sentence for misdemeanor invasion of privacy, Vanes said.

Fortunato was represented at trial by attorney Michael Lambert.

Fortunato was accused of forcing his way into a family's mobile home Dec. 10, shooting a 15-year-old boy in the thigh, attempting to shoot the boy's mother and threatening to shoot another child in the home.

Fortunato had been in a relationship with the children's mother, according to court records.

Fortunato remains charged in a previous case, in which he's accused of threatening to kill the woman in January 2020 and holding her against her will inside his apartment in Hammond's Robertsdale neighborhood.
CROWN POINT  A Chicago man pleaded guilty Thursday to robbing an East Chicago cellphone store in January 2020.

Anthony D. Coats, 25, would face a three-year sentence if Lake Criminal Court Judge Samuel Cappas accepts his plea agreement.

If Coats qualifies for the Lake County Community Corrections alternative placement program, he would be ordered to serve 18 months in the program. The final 18 months of his sentence would be suspended in favor of probation, Cappas said.

Coats was among three men accused in a Jan. 6, 2020, robbery at the T-Mobile store at 4601 Indianapolis Blvd. in East Chicago.

According to court records, two suspects entered the store, and one of them struck a customer in the back of the head with a gun.

An employee placed phones and a tracking device that looked like a phone in a bag, records state. After the suspects left the store, Hammond police located the tracker and began chasing the suspects.

Coats and Maurice D. Brown, of Country Club Hills, Illinois, eventually were identified as suspects and charged.

Brown, who has pleaded not guilty, is next scheduled to appear in court July 29.

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CROWN POINT  A Gary man made his first appearance Thursday before a Lake Criminal Court judge on charges alleging he led police on chases twice in May with children in his vehicle.

Gage C. Brown, 21, was arrested June 24 after Gary police responded to a report of a robbery and battery involving a mother and child, police said.

Brown retreated into an apartment in the 3800 block of Jackson Street, but he surrendered after a SWAT team surrounded the building, police said. Brown has not been charged in the June 24 alleged events.

Brown appeared Thursday before Judge Samuel Cappas on two cases, one linked to a May 5 pursuit where he's accused of stealing a Lake Station squad car and another chase May 27 where he suffered burns to his leg in a fiery crash.

Brown's attorney, Shontrai D. Irving, asked Cappas to affirm Brown's not guilty pleas in both cases.

Brown's first run-in with Region police occurred May 5, when he allegedly led Lake Station police on a chase with a woman and two children, ages 1 and 3, in his car without car seats.

Brown is accused of blasting through a toll gate on Interstate 90, exiting south on Broadway and running several red lights before an officer struck his car and stopped it.
CROWN POINT  A Lake Criminal Court judge reluctantly agreed Thursday to reschedule a trial for January for a man accused of fatally shooting three family members and setting their Gary home ablaze in 2019.

Reginald J. Carter, 31, told Judge Salvador Vasquez he agreed to the delay.

Carter has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and one count of arson in connection with the shooting deaths of his girlfriend, Yoasha Carter; her aunt Nefretiri Jones, 51; and her cousin Dwayne Jones, 33.

Police allege Carter killed the family members Oct. 25, 2019, and set fire to the house he shared with them in the 3500 block of West 20th Avenue in Garys Tolleston section.

During his initial hearing in October 2019, Carter gave his relative's Chicago address and said his house had been burnt down.

Carter's attorney, John Cantrell, requested to continue the trial, which had been set to begin Aug. 2.

Cantrell said the coronavirus pandemic contributed to a backlog of cases, and he has not had enough time to prepare for trial.
"He was just always honest, and always upbeat, and always would do the right thing, even though it wasn't necessarily the easiest thing to do," Myers said. "He got along with everybody, and everybody looked up to him because of that."

Myers added: "It was always nice to talk to Moos because he told you what he thought, but he was never abrasive about it and always positive about things. We need more of those kind of people in politics, I think."

About two weeks ago, Myers visited Moos in the hospital, who even then maintained his positive attitude.

"As I was leaving I said, 'You know John, we did some great things during that 2003/2004 time frame,'" Myers said.

"He said, 'Jonny, we still got more to do.' That just tells you his positive attitude. Here he was, near death at the time, and is just like, 'No, we still have more work to do, and we'll get on it as soon as I get out of here.'"
AAA forecasts more than 47.7 million Americans will make at least one road trip this weekend. That's up 40% as compared to 2020 and down just 2.5% as compared to the previous record set in 2019.
But residents still were not allowed to return home until after 9 p.m. Thursday. An earlier order was to end at 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Tracey Steffes, chief of the Morris Fire Protection and Ambulance District, said Thursday afternoon that he still wasn't sure when the evacuation order will be withdrawn.

Crews have used concrete to try to smother the batteries and a construction crew is digging a trench to capture any water runoff, Steffes said.

We are doing everything we can, but we are not going to move people back into an area that is not safe, he said.

Lithium batteries have exploded inside the building and fire officials have said they decided to let the blaze burn out because they fear trying to extinguish it could trigger more explosions.

The building  to the surprise of the fire department and other city agencies  was being used to store nearly 100 tons of lithium batteries ranging in size from cellphone batteries to large car batteries.
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP)  An 1854 letter hinting at Abraham Lincoln's transition from prairie legislator to political powerhouse, donated to the state of Illinois, was unveiled Thursday at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

The short missive, which a scholar once labeled in a sense, the most interesting document Lincoln ever wrote, explains his decision not to return to the Illinois House of Representatives so that he could remain viable for the U.S. Senate. The choice opened the door to the White House and Lincoln's preservation of the nation during the Civil War.

Lincoln wrote it at a pivotal time in his life. Would he focus on the law or make a return to politics?" Lincoln library and museum executive director Christina Shutt said. "His decision changed history, so its appropriate for this letter to find a home at the library and museum dedicated to telling the story of Lincolns impact on the world.

On Nov. 27, 1854, the circuit-riding attorney wrote friend and Peoria attorney Elihu N. Powell: Acting on your advice, and my own judgment, I have declined accepting the office of Representative of this county. He was responding to Powell's earlier reminder that service in the state House would prohibit an 1855 Senate run.
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.
Since Bill Cosby left prison this week after three years of incarceration, flashing a defiant V-sign as he returned a free man to his home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, the talk of his inner circle has been celebratory, as those close to him described his first meal of fish and pizza and his determination to rehabilitate his legacy.

His spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, described the court ruling that freed him as a victory for Black America and, somewhat incongruously, for women, and ticked off the projects with which Mr. Cosby would now be involved.

Mr. Wyatt said Mr. Cosby plans to write a book in collaboration with him, and that Mr. Cosby is working with a production company on a five-part documentary about his life and legacy. He said Mr. Cosby, 83, also intends to return to the stage at some point and that he had been fielding calls from promoters.

People want to hear and see this guy, Mr. Wyatt said. He can sell out shows. People want to hear Mr. Cosby. He is loved by millions.
The world seems to have embraced the notion that rose is meant to wear only the palest shade of pink.

That is not remotely true. Pale roses may be the most fashionable wines among the Yes Way, Rose enthusiasts. But rose encompasses an entire spectrum of hues and colors, from a barely discernible tinge of amber to translucent ruby.

This month were going to examine the darker side of rose. Partly, this is because heading in the opposite direction of the crowd is often an excellent strategy for finding value in wine. But mostly because dark roses can be astoundingly good.

Two of my absolute favorite roses, Domaine Ilarrias Irouleguy Rose and Chateau Simones Palette Rose, are decidedly dark. These are gorgeous wines and age beautifully, contrary to the notion that roses wither and die after Labor Day.
But the vaccines approvals remain conditional, and the urgency of full approvals cannot be overstated.

Vaccination rates in the United States have hit a plateau, dropping to fewer than one million shots per day in recent weeks. That rate has persisted despite the approval of the vaccines for children ages 12 to 15 and an array of incentives and strategies to promote immunizations. More than 54 percent of Americans have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and 96 percent of those have been the mRNA variety.

Still, that leaves almost half of Americans without protection. Some people who understand that the E in E.U.A. stands for emergency are waiting for full F.D.A. approval before they receive a shot. Others may not get immunized unless their employers require it, and many organizations  including, reportedly, the military  are waiting for the vaccines to be fully approved before instituting such mandates.

In theory, full approval should be imminent, since Pfizer applied for full approval in early May, and Moderna asked for full approval on June 1. This process is often long, requiring the agency to inspect manufacturing plants and review considerable amounts of documentation for vaccine production. But in this case, because of the urgency of the pandemic, the vaccine makers began to submit this material, called a biologics licensing application, in late 2020, and theyve continued to submit more information. The F.D.A. has already reviewed some of the submissions and has provided feedback to the manufacturers. The emergency authorizations were granted more than six months ago. Thats more than ample time for the agency to conduct plant inspections and review the applications.

The stakes could not be higher.

The Delta variant, which appears to be 40 percent more transmissible than the Alpha variant, is now responsible for 30 percent of Covid-19 cases in the United States. The Delta variants prevalence is accelerating quickly, and its likely to become dominant in the United States in the coming weeks. This variant has already swept through India, Britain, Russia, Indonesia and other countries, triggering abrupt rises in infections in all of them and hospitalizations and deaths in countries with low vaccination rates and in people who are not vaccinated.
Today many of us feel that America is suffering an epistemic crisis. We dont see the same reality. People say that they often assume the problem is intellectual. Our system of producing propositional knowledge is breaking down. Why cant those people fact-check themselves?

But Donald Trump doesnt get away with lies because his followers flunked Epistemology 101. He gets away with his lies because he tells stories of dispossession that feel true to many of them. Some students at elite schools arent censorious and intolerant because they lack analytic skills. They feel entrapped by a moral order that feels unsafe and unjust.

The collapse of trust, the rise of animosity  these are emotional, not intellectual problems. The real problem is in our system of producing shared stories. If a country cant tell narratives in which everybody finds an honorable place, then righteous rage will drive people toward tribal narratives that tear it apart.

Part of the blame goes to conservatives who try to whitewash history. Part goes to progressives who tell such a negative version of history that it destroys patriotism. But the core problem is our failure to understand what education is.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, David Hume wrote. Once you realize that people are primarily desiring creatures, not rational creatures, you realize that one of the great projects of schooling and culture is to educate the passions. It is to help people learn to feel the proper kind of outrage at injustice, the proper form of reverence before sacrifice, the proper swelling of civic pride, the proper affection for our fellows. This knowledge is conveyed not through facts but through emotional experiences  stories.

Over the past decades, we cut education in half. We focused on reason and critical thinking skills  the core of the second reservoir of knowledge. The ability to tell complex stories about ourselves has atrophied. This is the ability to tell stories in which opposing characters can each possess pieces of the truth, stories in which all characters are embedded in time, at one point in their process of growth, stories rooted in the complexity of real life and not the dogma of ideological abstraction.



Now as we watch state legislatures try to enforce what history gets taught and not taught, as we watch partisans introduce ideological curriculums, we see how debauched and brutalized our historical storytelling skills have become.

It is unfashionable to say so, but America has the greatest story to tell about itself, if we have the maturity to tell it honestly. The Fourth of July weekend seems like a decent time to start.
I wrote a few days ago about how ignorance  ignorance about history, about science, about economics and more  has become a core conservative value. This exaltation of ignorance naturally goes hand in hand with disdain for expertise: A vast majority of scientists may agree that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, but hey, its all just a gigantic hoax.

But wait, theres more. On the right, expertise isnt just considered worthless, its viewed as disqualifying. People with actual knowledge of a policy area  certainly those with any kind of professional reputation  are often excluded from any role in shaping policy. Preference is given to the incompetent  often the luridly incompetent.

Im currently reading Nightmare Scenario, an account by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Trump administrations catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. Much of what they report falls into the category of shocking but not surprising. One thing I didnt know about, however, was the special destructive role played by Stephen Moore, an outside economic adviser.

It was Moore, the authors report, who walked into Donald Trumps office just days after America went into lockdown to urge reopening by Easter. While an immediate lifting of pandemic restrictions didnt happen, Trumps growing insistence that the pandemic was no big deal helped inspire armed protests against social distancing and mask-wearing, and it contributed to a public health disaster that has so far claimed 600,000 American lives  with 95 percent of the deaths happening after Easter 2020.
Seeking to upstage Jeff Bezos as the first rocket company owner to go to space, Richard Branson, the British billionaire who founded a galaxy of Virgin companies, announced on Thursday night that he would be a member of the crew on the next test flight of the Virgin Galactic space plane.

That flight is scheduled to take off on July 11 from Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The team was ready, so they asked Richard if he was ready to go, said Aleanna Crane, vice president of communications for Virgin Galactic. Its a big day. Its a very exciting day.

Mr. Branson will be in a position to claim bragging rights in a growing business of spaceflight for private citizens. Companies including Virgin Galactic and Mr. Bezoss Blue Origin are competing to launch paying passengers on suborbital and orbital trips in the coming years. Although the first trips will be expensive, the expectation is that ticket prices will come down over time as the market grows.

Mr. Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 to provide short space tourist flights to the edge of space, and he has long said he will be a passenger on the first commercial flight. But development of the SpaceShipTwo  a winged rocket that flies to an altitude of more than 50 miles  has taken years longer than Mr. Branson expected. The setbacks included the crash of the first SpaceShipTwo plane, V.S.S. Enterprise, in October 2014 during a test flight, which killed one of the two pilots.
Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, responded angrily to Ms. Cheneys decision to accept the post, calling it shocking and implying that she could lose her seat on the Armed Services Committee as payback.

I dont know in history where someone would get their committee assignments from the speaker and then expect to get them from the conference as well, Mr. McCarthy said.

Should he follow through with the threat, it would be a striking move for Mr. McCarthy, who has declined to penalize Republicans who have made anti-Semitic comments, called for the imprisoning of their Democratic colleagues or spread false conspiracy theories about the origins of the assault on the Capitol.

It would also be the second time in two months that Mr. McCarthy punished Ms. Cheney for insisting that Congress should scrutinize the attack and Mr. Trumps role in spreading the falsehoods about voting fraud that inspired it. In May, Mr. McCarthy led the charge to oust Ms. Cheney from her post as the No. 3 House Republican, saying her criticisms of Mr. Trump and efforts to sound the alarm about the riot were undermining party unity and hurting its chances of reclaiming the House in the 2022 elections.

My oath, my duty is to the Constitution, and that will always be above politics, Ms. Cheney told reporters in the Capitol on Thursday, appearing alongside the seven Democrats Ms. Pelosi had selected for the 13-member panel.
SURFSIDE, Fla.  President Biden spent three hours Thursday consoling the families of those who died or were still missing under the rubble of a collapsed condominium building near Miami Beach, saying the waiting is unbearable for agonized relatives as crews halted a desperate search for much of the day out of concern that the rest of the complex could also fall.

In remarks after the private meeting, which was held in a hotel ballroom, Mr. Biden said the families were going through hell. Many have been waiting for more than a week for word about whether anyone might still be alive under the concrete and steel.

I sat with one woman who had just lost her husband and her little baby boy, didnt know what to do, the president said. I sat with another family that lost almost the entire family, cousins, brothers, sisters. And to watch them, and theyre praying and pleading and God let there be a miracle.

For Mr. Biden, confronting the largest national tragedy since he took office was complicated by the fact that he could not eulogize those who were still unaccounted for, or hold out much hope for the missing. They know that the chances are, as each day goes by, diminished slightly, the president said. But at a minimum, at a minimum, they want to recover the bodies. They want to recover the bodies.
The Department of Veterans Affairs struck a deal this week with the employee union to offer workers four hours of paid administrative leave if they prove that they have been fully vaccinated. It would be negligent to not be considering the full range of opportunities that we have to ensure that were taking every step possible to protect our vets, Mr. McDonough said.

Mr. Biden set a goal of having 70 percent of adults at least partly vaccinated by July 4, but officials concede they will fall short as demand stagnates. With vaccines available across the country, the suffering and loss we are now seeing is nearly entirely avoidable, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Thursday.

The military has worked hard to combat vaccine misinformation in its ranks since the shots first became available. More than 80 percent of active-duty service members are under 35, a group that often views itself as impervious to coronavirus infections. Many worry that the vaccines are unsafe, were developed too quickly or will affect fertility.

Among active-duty members in the Navy, 77 percent have had at least one shot, Pentagon officials said; in the Army, the figure is 70 percent, well above civilian rates. In the Air Force, 61 percent of service members have had at least one dose, and in the Marine Corps, it is 58 percent, barely more than it was at the beginning of the year, when shots became available.

Military leaders have long insisted that they cannot require coronavirus vaccinations  as they do for myriad other inoculations  because each type is being administered under an emergency use authorization and has yet to receive formal approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
Mr. Prieto has not spoken publicly since the Champlain Towers South failure and did not respond to repeated requests for comment or a note left at his door.

Mr. Prieto, 54, who has a masters degree in construction management, has more than 25 years of experience as a building and roofing inspector in at least six South Florida cities, including Miami, Miami Beach and Hialeah.

In 1997, he was the assistant director of building and zoning for Miami Shores, where the dog track was located. He had visited the site four times before the collapse, he said at the time, telling The Miami Herald that his job was to make sure that the work was done according to schedule, not that workers were using proper procedures, The Herald paraphrased him saying.

Everything was going according to plan, The Associated Press quoted Mr. Prieto saying. From what I hear, this is just a construction accident. Accidents can happen, he said.

For more than seven years, Mr. Prieto was the chief building official in Surfside. Emails released by the city show that Mr. Prieto had been made aware of a critical engineering report that warned in 2018 of damage to the concrete and steel reinforcements in the building that in some places could have threatened its structural integrity. When he attended a meeting of the condo association board that November, he reassured residents that the tower appeared to be in good shape, according to minutes of the meeting.

Later, when a resident of Champlain Towers South wrote to the city expressing concern that blasting and other activity during construction on a neighboring site raised concerns regarding the structure of our building, Mr. Prieto declined to send someone out to check, according to emails released by the city.

There is nothing for me to check, he replied in another email.

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 as they are the closest to the construction, Mr. Prieto wrote. No engineering records have emerged publicly that would suggest a connection between the construction and damage at Champlain Towers.
A Wisconsin judge on Thursday ordered a 19-year-old woman released from a psychiatric hospital where she has been held for more than three years for her role in the nearly fatal stabbing of a friend, a crime she said was carried out to gain the favor of a sinister fictional character called Slender Man.

The 2014 attack, involving a pair of 12-year-old girls from Waukesha, Wis., who lured a 12-year-old friend to a park and stabbed her 19 times, shocked parents in the upper-middle-class suburb of Milwaukee.

In 2017 the woman, Anissa Weier, pleaded guilty to being a party to attempted second-degree intentional homicide and was sentenced to 25 years in the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. In March, she asked the court to release her from the institution.

At a hearing on Thursday, Judge Michael O. Bohren of Waukesha County Circuit Court granted Ms. Weiers request, agreeing with recommendations from three doctors who evaluated her and said that she did not pose a threat to herself or others.
He played on that idea, producing paintings in 2015 that were copies of the royal portraits  but he carefully cut out the white faces. In their place, he painted masks of Kuba kings. He called the series, Kuba in the Skin of Someone Else.

The idea was to find another way to create our own story by using the story of Europe, said Balu, who is 29, and counts as an inspiration Kehinde Wiley, who has questioned the scarcity of Black people in Western art.

Balu lives here in Kinshasa, which was the home of world-renowned musicians such as Papa Wemba, nicknamed the king of rumba rock. The city also produced the artist Alfred Liyolo, known for his curvy bronze sculptures, one of which is on display at the Vatican.

But for other yet-to-be-famous artists living in the sprawling city of an estimated 17 million people, the struggle to make a living in their craft can be a challenge. For them, government funding from the Democratic Republic of Congo for the arts seems nearly impossible to secure. Daily life can be difficult in the capital, where only a few lights twinkle across the lush hills beyond the city center at nightfall  much of the city is without electricity  and the main form of public transit is a set of dented, rusty yellow vans nicknamed Spirit of Death for their propensity to get into fatal accidents.
What was an evening event is now an afternoon one. Degas and van Gogh are now 20th-century Modernists. Six-figure prices are few and far between.

This new reality was clear during Sothebys and Christies marquee summer live-streamed evening auctions of modern and contemporary art in post-Brexit London, which this year started at 2 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday to make sure wealthy bidders in Asia were awake.

We live in a world thats more global than ever, said Melanie Clore, co-founder of the London-based art advisory company Clore Wyndham.

There is big growth in Hong Kong, said Clore, who once served as a chairwoman of Sothebys Impressionist and modern art department in London. There is a new wave of young people in Asia who have a lot of disposable money. Tastes have changed.
The actress and thriller writer Catherine Steadman visits the podcast this week to talk about The Disappearing Act, her new suspense novel about the absurdities of Hollywood. Steadman was drawn to the idea of setting a story during pilot season, when actors from all over the world descend on Los Angeles once a year and compete for lead roles in new TV series.

Its a sort of competitive world where friendships are made really quickly, and people will find their nemesis  someone who looks just like them who keeps snatching away parts from them, she says. Its a very strange atmosphere but its very fun. Its kind of like the Vegas of the acting world. You go there, you cash your chips and you have a roll on the table and see what happens. Theres all these strangers with the same desires and goals, in the same environment, and they really are up against each other. Its kind of a Hunger Games situation.

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Michael Dobbs visits the podcast to talk about his new book, King Richard, which finds fresh things to say about President Richard Nixon and Watergate. Dobbs discusses writing about a story thats been told many times, all in the shadow of perhaps the best-known Watergate book, All the Presidents Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
1. The U.S. ended major military operations in Afghanistan after nearly two decades.

American troops and their Western allies departed Bagram Air Base, once the militarys nerve center. It was handed over to the Afghans with little fanfare as the Taliban sweeps through the countrys northern provinces.

The departure comes at a perilous time for Afghanistan. Some U.S. intelligence estimates predict that Kabul could fall to the Taliban in six months to two years. A return to the fractious era of warlords has long been feared. More than a quarter of the countrys 421 districts have been seized by the Taliban since early May.
Send questions about the office, money, careers and work-life balance to workfriend@nytimes.com. Include your name and location, or a request to remain anonymous. Letters may be edited.

Dreaming of an Office Door

Im a communications professional interviewing for new jobs. My greatest hope for my next position is that it will not be remote and that I will be provided with a private office, or at least a substantial cubicle. Im nervous that bringing this up during the interview process will make me seem high maintenance. But honestly, I would trade a desk and a door for a higher salary. I have been provided with my own office for most of my career. However, in my last position, I had only a chair at a long table I shared with about 10 other people. This is a common setup in Bay Area offices and is ostensibly meant to encourage collaboration. I found it to be impossible! I was constantly distracted. Is simply requesting my own work space too highfalutin these days.  Anonymous, San Francisco Bay Area

Open offices are seemingly all the rage. Some people love them, but most people, myself included, hate them. Working out in the open, especially at those long tables, is way too much exposure. How do you make phone calls? How do you take a moment for yourself? How do you get anything done? Cubicles are something of an improvement, I suppose. At least you have two or three walls to shield you from your co-workers but you are still too exposed. You have every right to want an office with a door that closes.

That desire, in and of itself, doesnt make you too high maintenance. Unfortunately, most of us dont have any say in our work space accommodations. Do not bring up that you want an office during the interview process. That will not be a good look. There is always a moment during a job interview where an employer asks if you have any questions. You can use that as an opportunity to ask what the physical office environment is like so you have the necessary information to decide if a position is a good fit. When you get a job, you can probably even make a request for an office, but only if other people at your level have similar accommodations.

Grieving Within Bounds

My current workplace has a great office culture. Recently, a longtime and beloved co-worker took their life. It was unexpected, although many of us knew the co-worker struggled with depression. Since our co-workers passing, many of us have had difficulty coping. We have struggled with focus, sadness, confusion and anger. It has affected productivity and the office environment. I have also been struggling with our leaderships response. The office sent out an email announcing that our co-worker passed away, with no additional information. A link to individual bereavement counseling was provided. The leadership decided to respect the familys wishes to keep the cause of death private. While my co-workers are allowed to discuss losing our friend and the manner of death, our managers are not. I find this information vacuum problematic for several reasons. Lack of acknowledgment that suicide occurred can endorse the stigma associated with suicide and mental health struggles. It leaves people to speculate about the circumstances of the death. And respecting this wish by the family limits how the company can help employees cope. For example, we have asked for group sessions or guidance on coping with the loss of someone to suicide. Our employer is not providing these resources, as the company is not able to discuss the cause of death. My co-workers and I are still struggling, and we are looking for additional support from leadership. Am I wrong to expect more? What is acceptable to expect from an employer when the family does not want the cause of death shared? I am willing to concede that I am being unreasonable.  Anonymous

I am so sorry for the loss you and your co-workers are experiencing. The unexpected death of someone you respect and love is painful. When they die by suicide you are often left with many questions for which you will never find answers. I also understand your frustrations toward your employer. You want information they wont provide, but the key thing here is that they are respecting the familys wishes. You have every right to want more information, clarity and support, but you are not entitled to it. The familys wishes supersede yours whether you agree with those wishes or not.
The future was Amazon

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon 27 years ago. He steps down as C.E.O. two days from now. His successor, Andy Jassy, will take over the e-commerce giant on July 5.

Its obvious to say that Americas economy and society  how we shop, how we communicate, what we watch and the technology we use to do all that  is vastly different than it was in 1994 when Bezos started Amazon. Few other business leaders  Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs  have played as prominent a role in reshaping the economy as Bezos. That sort of influence comes with costs, and raises many important questions.

Back in 2017, on the 20-year anniversary of Amazon going public, Andrew wrote about how Bezos has an authentic, legitimate claim on having changed the way we live. He continued:

As an author, Im supposed to hate Mr. Bezos. After all, he has pressured publishers, cut their margins and practically put old-school bookstores out of business. As if to rub it in, hes now introducing bricks-and-mortar Amazon bookstores. But to take that view would be to misunderstand what innovation looks like. It upends industries  witness the current carnage in the retail industry, which has been outmoded by Amazon and all the companies trying to copy it. Amazon is not happening to book selling, Mr. Bezos explained, defending his role in a 2013 interview with Charlie Rose. The future is happening to book selling.

After Bezos, whats the future for Amazon? The founders grand vision, for Amazon to become the everything store, has been achieved. Now, its not just that Bezos is stepping back: The Timess Karen Weise reports that over the past 18 months there has been unusually high turnover in Amazons executive ranks. And all that change is coming as the powers that want to rein in Amazon appear to be growing more powerful:

Amazon was sued in May by the Washington, D.C., district attorney for acting as a monopoly, adding to the federal and state-level inquiries into the companys business practices.

The Teamsters initiated a dedicated effort to unionize Amazons workers last month.

Lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have made Amazon a poster child for the need for corporate tax reform.

Taking risks is harder for new leaders. One of the oft-cited reasons for Bezoss success was his willingness to experiment  and fail. He was able to see 10 steps ahead of where Amazon was at in a given moment. His successor is taking over a time when those steps are getting harder to take.

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HERES WHATS HAPPENING

The push to overhaul the global tax system gains momentum. More than 130 countries  including China, India and Russia  signed onto a plan that included measures like a 15 percent minimum corporate tax rate. Now comes the hard part of working out the details, and getting tax havens like Ireland and Caribbean nations on board.
The fact that employment is rebounding more strongly for a demographic group that is often at a labor market disadvantage, paired with rising wages, helps support the White Houses view that President Bidens policies and the healing economy are giving people more power over their economic fates.

Todays job news brought us something else to celebrate, Mr. Biden said during remarks at the White House after the data were released.

That kind of competition in the market doesnt just give workers more ability to earn higher wages, he said. It gives them the power to demand to be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace. More jobs, better wages. Thats a good combination.

The jobs numbers were also a welcome reprieve for an administration that has been surprised by, and criticized for, weak job gains in previous months. Job gains fell short of analyst expectations in May and April, prompting criticism from Republicans, who said the $1.9 trillion economic aid bill the president signed in March was holding back the recovery  by extending supplemental benefits for unemployed workers through September, which some businesses blame for difficulties hiring workers  and stoking rapid inflation.

On Thursday, Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee taunted Mr. Biden in advance, in a news release headlined: After two underwhelming jobs reports, President Bidens June report is make or break.

The reports details supported the idea that workers have more bargaining power. Average hourly earnings climbed by 0.3 percent between May and June, matching what economists in a Bloomberg survey had expected. Coming on the heels of two even stronger months, the gain signaled that companies are paying up to hire.

Some reopening-affected sectors showed an especially strong performance: Workers in leisure and hospitality jobs who are not supervisors saw pay pop by a striking 2.3 percent between May and June. Those data confirm other evidence that workers have the upper hand in the reopening economy. The Conference Boards index showing that jobs are plentiful has soared higher in recent months, people are quitting at higher rates, and people report looking for higher wages before accepting a position.
Federal prosecutors have opened an inquiry into business matters at Lordstown Motors, the embattled electric truck manufacturer that was already being investigated by securities regulators and recently turned over its top management team, according to two people briefed on the matter.

It was not clear what issues the prosecutors, with the U.S. attorneys office in Manhattan, are looking into. The investigation is in its early stages and began recently, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

In February, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into claims that Lordstown had made about the number of orders from commercial buyers for its electric truck, which the Ohio company has said it expects to begin manufacturing and selling later this year.

The company had disclosed previously that it had received two subpoenas from the S.E.C. seeking information about those pre-order claims and some aspects of its merger last year with DiamondPeak Holdings, a special purpose acquisition company put together by David Hamamoto, a real estate investor.
The chairman of a House subcommittee is demanding that executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Shell, Chevron and other major oil and gas companies testify before Congress about the industrys decades-long effort to wage disinformation campaigns around climate change.

Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said Friday he was prepared to use subpoena power to compel the companies to appear before lawmakers if they dont do so voluntarily.

The move comes a day after a secretive video recording was made public in which a senior Exxon lobbyist said the energy giant had fought climate science through shadow groups and had targeted influential senators in an effort to weaken President Bidens climate agenda. Several of those senators said this week that the lobbyist exaggerated their relationship or that they had no dealings with him.

The video was appalling, Mr. Khanna said in an interview on Friday. He called it the latest evidence of the fossil fuel industrys efforts to engage in climate denialism and to manipulate public opinion and to exert undue influence in shaping policy in Congress.
Along the Chesapeake Bay shore in Maryland, Bobby Jones has two restaurants known for the magic they work with jumbo lump Chesapeake blue crab. But because of a recent surge in prices, he has had to start the crucial summertime season without his states signature dish: crab cakes.

Its not coming down at all, Mr. Jones, the chef and co-owner of Ketch 22 and the Point Crab House & Grill, said of crab prices, which forced him to temporarily take the cakes off his menu. Were not seeing a change, and Im not going to buy a lower-quality ingredient, so Im just riding it out.

As the pandemic has waned in the Mid-Atlantic States and more people feel safe eating out again, a sudden demand for crab has hit the market at the worst time. Its driving up prices, and making it impossible for some restaurants to break even on their crab dishes. Many are turning to other types of seafood.

When it rains, it pours, said Zack Mills, the chef at True Chesapeake Oyster Company in Baltimore, where the price surge prompted him to reduce an entire section of his menu dedicated to blue crab to a handful of favorites. He has raised the price of his crab cake sandwich to $24, from $19.
Mr. Adams, who won every borough but Manhattan in the first round, is likely to benefit from absentee ballots cast by Black homeowners in Southeast Queens, who tend to be more moderate. Ms. Wiley, who came in second place in Queens in the first round, was strong in Western Queens in particular, where many younger left-wing voters live; Ms. Garcia did well in places that are home to many white voters with more moderate views.

Here is where ranked-choice voting may come into play.

Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate who has since dropped out of the race, did especially well in Asian American neighborhoods in Queens and elsewhere in the city. He spent the last days of the race campaigning with Ms. Garcia  but some voters may have cast their absentee ballots before that apparent alliance was struck.

In Wednesdays tally of ranked-choice voting, Ms. Garcia took slightly more of Mr. Yangs redistributed votes than Mr. Adams. Ms. Garcia also took the vast majority of Ms. Wileys voters when her votes were reallocated.

If those circumstances play out again, does that help Ms. Garcia significantly in Queens as well as in Brooklyn, where many absentee ballots are outstanding and where Ms. Wiley came out ahead of Ms. Garcia on the tally of first-place votes?

Queens seems to favor Adams, Manhattan favors Garcia  we dont know who that balance is going to ultimately benefit, Mr. Gyory said, allowing for the possibility that Ms. Wiley could pull ahead, too. Until the absentee ballots are processed, opened and fully counted, I dont think anybody should presume how theyre going to vote, he added.

Charlie Smart, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.
[Read more about the tentative revival in Queens.]

Heres a rundown of whats happening as the area picks itself up again:

The residents who are out of work

Aureliano Mendoza, who became a street vendor after losing his job, told my colleague that he and his wife had to get by, at one point, on $60 a month. Both battled Covid-19 for weeks but avoided the hospital, though he nearly died. Then a sister in Mexico succumbed to the illness.

Many residents now work as food vendors after losing steady income. Jenny Escobar, who once worked as a babysitter, now spends her days sitting on 82nd Street beside a cooler filled with homemade ice pops, which she sells for $2 apiece.

Ms. Escobar, who is from Colombia, said whatever she earns goes toward paying back rent, and she feared what might happen to her and her fellow vendors if they lose this lifeline. Many are afraid of losing their housing, protected only by an eviction moratorium that is set to expire Aug. 31.

The businesses that are reopening

Though several businesses closed, most shops and restaurants stayed open. Some ZIP codes in the area even added more new businesses last year than in 2019.

Still, the local economy is far from operating normally. Sonia Izurragas salon, Peruvian Connection, is up and running in Jackson Heights. But Ms. Izurraga said she fell three months behind on the rent and could not access the federal Paycheck Protection Program or other aid for small businesses because of her immigration status.

Several business owners are surviving only because the moratorium on evictions also covered their leases, said Leslie Ramos, the executive director of the 82nd Street Partnership.

If you walk here, you would not know that the businesses are struggling. Our streets are busy, very busy. But we know the reality is quite different, Ms. Ramos said.
Mr. Bragg said repeatedly during the campaign that he had sued Mr. Trump or his administration more than 100 times during his tenure at the attorney generals office. He also said he expected to be attacked by Mr. Trump, who said this week that the investigation was a form of political persecution being led by New York radical-left prosecutors.

Mr. Vance, who did not seek re-election, is coordinating his efforts with Letitia James, New Yorks attorney general.

Preet Bharara, a former United States attorney in Manhattan who supervised Mr. Bragg and endorsed his candidacy, said Mr. Bragg had varied experience as a prosecutor, and that his work on white-collar crime and public corruption cases could come into play in the investigation into Mr. Trump and the case against Mr. Weisselberg and Mr. Trumps business.

He can handle this, Mr. Bharara said.

For much of the primary, Mr. Bragg was thought to be trailing Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, another former federal prosecutor who also served as counsel to the former U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, and the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez. She dominated the fund-raising battle and gave her own campaign $8.2 million, more than three times as much money as anyone else raised overall, and led in most polls.

But a late resistance to her candidacy grew, in part because of the money she spent on the race. On Primary Day, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who did not endorse a candidate, discouraged voters from supporting Ms. Farhadian Weinstein during a radio interview, and cited Mr. Bragg and another contender, Tahanie Aboushi, as better choices.

Ms. Farhadian Weinstein said in a brief interview on Friday that she would continue to be an advocate for issues she focused on during the campaign, particularly violence against women, which she said was startlingly common and underreported.

Mr. Bragg will face Thomas Kenniff, the Republican candidate, in November. Mr. Kenniff, a former state prosecutor in Westchester County, N.Y., a member of the Army Judge Advocate Generals Corps and an Iraq War veteran, has said the Manhattan district attorney should be focused on law and order. In recent weeks, he had begun to attack Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, but then switched to criticizing Mr. Bragg.
If you stayed in New York through the duration of the pandemic, you may remember the past year unfolding not in months but in chapters. There was the Incessant Sirens chapter. The Banging Pots and Pans Out the Window at 7 p.m. chapter. The Fireworks Every Night chapter. And, of course, the (sadly now ended) Strolling the Boulevard With a To-Go Cocktail chapter.

Theres also a bewildering, magical chapter that began sometime last summer. After the initial terrifying pandemic wave had crested, New York was left eerily quiet, nearly emptied of tourists, and re-emerging residents could experience our city in a way that most of us have never been able to before and probably never will again.

For an all-too-brief window, New York belonged to New Yorkers.

That chapter, too, is coming to an end. Last week, NYC & Co., the citys tourism promotion agency, announced a $30 million ad campaign to lure tourists back. In 2019, tourism to New York hit a record high with over 66 million visits by domestic and international tourists. For context, thats double the numbers of tourists in the early 2000s, when the city attracted only 30 million visitors a year.

This tourism boom was no accident: It was driven in part by the citys refurbished image around the world; in part by a dogged sales effort led by NYC & Co., an agency turbocharged under Michael Bloomberg as mayor; and in part by that self-perpetuating phenomenon by which the more visitors flock to a place, the more the place slowly and inevitably reorients itself toward attracting and accommodating visitors.
This article originally appeared in the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

America used to be a young country. And in its youth, it changed as it grew, the idea of what was American as malleable as the idea of what was America. The country expanded its borders, abolished slavery, broadened the franchise; waves of immigrants reshaped and revised Americas character; the government added and dropped functions, amending the Constitution to fit the times. It was a restless experiment.

That restless spirit was reflected in the countrys pomp and pageantry, too. For more than 150 years, the United States had no official national anthem. The Star-Spangled Banner shuffled among Hail, Columbia and America (My Country, Tis of Thee); the design of the flag shifted with the states and with fashion.

But America is not young anymore. Whereas it was once spry and excitable, it is now creaky and soft. The country that passed Prohibition and created Social Security now spends decades dithering over how large a role the government should play in health care. The country that went to the moon shrinks at the challenges presented by climate change. Its bold and expansive political imagination has atrophied.
Is Mr. DeSantis afraid of Mr. Trump? Probably. Most Republican officials are. The more pertinent question is whether Mr. Trump is at all afraid of Mr. DeSantis. If not, maybe he should be.

Obviously the governor isnt a natural showman like Mr. Trump. Few are. That said, Mr. DeSantis has proved a solid practitioner of Trumpian theater. His cheeky campaign ad from 2018 in which he urges his young daughter to build the wall with cardboard bricks was a classic own-the-libs provocation. More recently, in praising the state law targeting social media companies, Mr. DeSantis accused Big Tech of treating Mr. Trump as a bigger villain than Irans Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But Florida isnt a red enough state for its governor to completely write off nonconservatives. So when the occasion suits him, Mr. DeSantis employs a slightly lighter touch. Early in his tenure, he made some moderate appointments to his administration and supported policies that didnt fit the MAGA mold. His first week in office, he rolled out a plan to clean up Floridas waters and address the effects of climate change.

Even when catering to the right, he doesnt always go the Full Trump. The governor aggressively touted the states new anti-protester law, even as he drew a clear distinction between peaceful protesters and violent rioters. The Atlantics David Frum put it this way: DeSantis practices a form of political judo that works by employing judicious but limited provocation, followed by a deft, just-in-time retreat to the center, converting the opponents strength and energy into a resource for DeSantis.

Mr. Trump cannot fail to have noticed all the fuss. He has on a couple of occasions been asked if he would consider Mr. De Santis as a running mate in 2024. Both times he responded positively. This allows Mr. Trump to acknowledge the governors popularity but also assert his own status as top banana. Ron? Great guy! But strictly No. 2 material.

Mr. DeSantis is maintaining friendly relations with parts of Trumpworld. Notably, he has connected with Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff. Mr. Meadows accompanied the governor on a recent fund-raising trip out West. In April, the governor introduced Mr. Trump at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago hosted by the Conservative Partnership Institute, of which Mr. Meadows is a senior partner. The dinner kicked off a two-day summit focused on building a massive dark-money machine to aid conservative candidates  a useful project for Mr. DeSantis.

It serves Mr. DeSantis well that the former president apparently still sees him as a Trump creation  more of an indentured servant than a serious rival. I endorsed Ron, and after I endorsed him he took off like a rocket ship, the former president boasted to Fox Businesss Maria Bartiromo in April, when she asked about Mr. DeSantis as a running mate. I was at the beginning of Ron, Mr. Trump told the networks Stuart Varney last month, in response to a similar question.
jeff tweedy

Lets see.

ezra klein

Im Ezra Klein. And this is The Ezra Klein Show. There are these ideas about creativity that Ive always been suspicious of  for instance, that making art requires immense suffering. Ive been depressed. It never seems to me that the optimal mindstate for difficult acts of creation is I cant get out of bed. But you know your mileage may vary. But the idea that art comes from somewhere mystical, that it is the product of profound and ineffable talent and inspiration, I dont want to believe that one. But at the same time, Ive seen what happens when I try and draw. And I know people who are great artists. And so it lurks for me. And in some ways, it intimidates me. I cant do what they can do. So why do any of it at all? Recently, and pretty randomly, I picked up Jeff Tweedys book, How to Write One Song. If you dont know Jeff Tweedy, he is the frontman for the Grammy Award-winning band Wilco, which is a band I love and have loved for years. Hes played in Uncle Tupelo, released a bunch of solo albums, produced other peoples great records. Its what got me to pick up the book. But I really didnt expect it to be such a delight. I really didnt. Tweedys just simple joy in the creative process is infectious. Hes got this insistence that it can and should just be part of a balanced life, just part of a balance day. And hes specific on what that means. For him, it really is a process, a set of practices, a way you can spend your time with no expectation of judgment or riches that will just be nice, just nicer than other ways you could spend your time. I loved it. And one thing that was striking to me about it, Tweedy has spoken publicly, and it is part of his public mythos, about his struggles with mental illness and addiction. And so Id always chalked up at least some of his music to being the product of agony and suffering. But he really doesnt see it that way. And in How to Write One Song, and then also in his memoir, Lets Go (So We Can Get Back), he really makes a case, and makes it convincingly, that it is gentler motivations and conditions  a love of wordplay, a good nights sleep, a regular space on the schedule  that really foster creation, particularly sustained creation. How to Write One Song is not actually a self-help book. That is not where youll find it in a bookstore. Thats not how it is written. But I will say, it is my favorite self-help book I have read in a long time. So I asked Jeff Tweedy to come on the show, talk about how he creates something every day and how the rest of us can too. Ill say as a preview here, this actually did get me to go and write some poetry. And no, you will never, ever hear it. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Jeff Tweedy, welcome to the show.

jeff tweedy

Thank you for having me.

ezra klein

So theres a line in your book that I just loved. You say that, quote, disappearing is the most sustaining part of what I do. Tell me about that.

jeff tweedy

Yeah. I think its kind of what everybody wants all the time, is to be free from worry, unburdened by a sense of self. Thats what I think of as disappearing. I think people do it a lot of different ways that I dont think are particularly creative or productive, and I would argue maybe not as good for you. I think people disappear when they play games on their phone and do things like watch sporting events. And I think thats good. I think everybody kind of needs to check out a little bit. But I think its kind of incredible when you can do that and somehow be present at the same time, which is what I think happens when you create.

ezra klein

What makes it more or less likely for you that during a creative session youll be able to disappear?

jeff tweedy

I think its really when Im asking the least of it. I think if Im putting really high demands on what I want to come out of myself or when Im just coming at it wanting to get something out of it  basically, I guess, thinking, oh, Im going to get a song out of this. I feel like Im aiming at the wrong thing. But when I allow myself to just discover, looking forward, focusing my eyes more on just the act of what Im playing around with  I guess its just a difference between play, I guess, and some sort of mistaken notion that you can kind of direct your creativity all the time.

ezra klein

I thought this was a pretty interesting tension, at least for me in your book, which is, there are a lot of things where we get into it because it starts as play. That was true for me in writing. And then over time, it becomes a job. It becomes a career. It becomes an identity. And you have, throughout the book, this very intense focus on the play, the process as the point. But on the other hand, youve got a band. Youve got a label. Youve finish songs. You have Grammys. I mean, theres got to be some work that went into that. So Im really curious how you manage that tension between it works best when you ask the least of it, but when it works it begins to ask more of you.

jeff tweedy

Well, all of that other stuff is work. And I enjoy it too. I dont disappear in it the way I disappear in the creative side of things as much. But I do think that you can look at a lot of those aspects of it being a business with creativity also. You can figure out a way to put your records out that feels of a piece with what your art is. I think that you can organize your touring organization, or your crew, or youre the way you do things  theres some aspect of creativity that can be incorporated in all of those decisions. When I was younger I think a lot of bands looked at it as being uncool to actually be even aware of a lot of the commerce side of things or thinking of it as a business. And I always thought that that was sort of just pretending to be dumb or something. I think it was worn as a badge of authenticity or something that you didnt care about those things. I think that theyre afraid of those things sometimes, and afraid that it is going to get somehow mixed up in the stew of this beautiful thing that they get to do, and that was discovered through play, and through just exploring. And yeah, I think people get worried that its going to poison it. But I think its much, much simpler to look at them as a part of the same type of creativity, and at the same time keep them somewhat separate in that  its not that hard to distinguish what things are running a business and what things are making something up.

ezra klein

I hear what youre saying, that it can be done creatively. But maybe Im just speaking too much of my own experience here, but I have certainly found that as the structure around the core creative work expands, it can be pretty overwhelming. Have there been times for you when it has stopped feeling like play and begun feeling like work? And if so, how did you get back from that?

jeff tweedy

Well, I think the number one job of anybody that ends up being in a position where theyre making music and putting it out into the world, and it does become somewhat of a business, and you have a band to run, and all those things, I think its something that you have to consciously be aware of  protecting your inspiration. Thats actually part of the job, I think. And to do that, you have to relieve yourself of those burdens in whatever way you can. For us, over the years, weve never toured more than a few weeks at a time. Weve really made a point of trying to have lives and not go out on tour for six months. Thats a pretty simple decision. And its not a good financial decision because it costs more money to start up each time you start a tour. But it was a good decision, in the long run, to protect the feeling of being excited to play music. Same thing for writing music  I dont like to feel like Im under the gun. So I do it all the time. And I have amassed so many songs that I never really worry that I am going to need a bolt of lightning right now to get a song done. And so thats just like being kind of prepared, but also just making time for it as a practice. Thats been my strategy as a way to protect this side of what I do that I find really gratifying.

ezra klein

I want to talk a bit about how you make time for it as a practice. But before we get kind of into the strategies, I want to talk about the kind of mystical nature of it, because when you describe your creative state, its very similar, the way you talk about it, to these various traditions that are about getting a couple layers down into intuition and associational thinking, sort of Freudianism and Zen. And it had a lot of resonance to that for me. And so I was curious about that, if some of those are actually influences. I mean, a lot of the way you talk about songwriting actually remind me of the way people talk in therapy. Is that something that has taught you about tapping into these parts of you?

jeff tweedy

Yeah. Im really fascinated with consciousness. Im fascinated with a lot of big ideas that I dont completely comprehend. Ive never been  Im an autodidact. I have never really been successful in an academic environment. But Ive read and probably misread tons of psychology and philosophy of all kinds. And I love thinking about things. And I love thinking about how I think about things. So its something that I think has always been an inclination of mine, to kind of live inwardly. And I spend a lot of time in my head. And so I think its all of that must inform some of what I wrote about in my book. And its definitely informed how I think about what I do, and how I think about other people doing what I do. But theyre jumping-off points. I find myself reading a lot of books like that and skimming over dozens of pages, really, kind of only entertaining my own thoughts.

ezra klein

Well, let me look at this in your book, because one of the striking things to me was that its really practical. I mean, youre talking about something that it sometimes feels mystical. But then you have pretty rigorous processes for getting at it. So could you describe one of the practices you use to kind of tap into that more associational consciousness. And maybe whats a song that emerged out of that that you could play.

jeff tweedy

Oh, sure. Like all types of writers  poets, authors, songwriters  I do rely upon a certain amount of freewriting, and empty yourself with regularity, like as a daily practice. So I would start there for anybody wanting to do this. Just exercise the muscle that pushes the ego out of the way. And that, to me, is just getting better and better at writing without judgment, without direction, without trying to steer your mind to the specific things that make you feel good about yourself, or make you think youre smart, or make you think youre writing well. But if thats hard, there are also things that just are purely process driven that I think usually end up in me freeing myself into something more exciting, and that has the element of discovery. And something like that would be the word ladders I describe in the book, where you maybe imagine all of the verbs associated with the profession, like a baseball player. And you write down the verbs, like swing, slide, spit  whatever. Theres a lot of different things you can put in the other column of  say you put 10 verbs on one side, and you put 10 nouns that are maybe randomly chosen. Or maybe you could just pull the nouns out of a paragraph in the newspaper in front of you. And then I just stare at the page and think, well, how does this verb work against this noun? And I start to draw lines between  not directly across, but looking at the 10 words on each side of the page, thinking, OK, how is the star spitting? How did I slide into love? When you kind of dismantle all of the ways we kind of simplify language for ourselves, we tend to group verbs with nouns. We tend to think of certain adjectives and certain adverbs in more compartmentalized chunks that makes language a little flat. And for me, when I start to look at how different verbs work on different nouns that shouldnt go together, it just unlocks a world of thought, and a world of  a story emerges sometimes, or just at the very least, images that I never anticipated. And before you know it, youre daydreaming. If Im going to play a song that kind of illustrates this  its is not exactly the same as what I just described in a word ladder, but I think I started this song with the idea of somebody trying to talk to a cop with a plastic beer cup in their teeth. And that emerged through some of these same types of exercise. This song also has the lyric about the sun coming up like a trombone  a big trombone. Or later in the song, the sun comes up like a piece of toast. And those are all things that, if I sat down to try and think of something that made me smile or laugh, probably wouldnt have happened. But they were discovered through not asking that of myself, but just playing with language. And do you want me to play this song?

ezra klein

Yeah, thatd be great.

jeff tweedy

Sure.

jeff tweedy (singing)

Gwendolyn, when she starts to speak to a county police with a plastic cup between her teeth. The sun coming up like a big trombone. Thats right when I started missing home. She holds my hand between her knees. Its like a dream. I never know what it means. I only know Im feeling alone. Thats right when I start missing home.

ezra klein

So what I love about that  sun coming up like a big trombone. So Im a writer. I write a lot of words. Theyre mostly about politics. But theyre really linear for me, like every word is a brick in an argument. And so Im also pushing for clarity. But you use them really differently. You have a lot of fun with them. You have this other one you talk about in the book that I remember from the song where you talk about assassinating down the street. And thats somehow truer than the sentence I would use. Right? Like, it doesnt work. My editor  and I love you, Aaron  my editor would cut that out of my column because thats not what the word assassinating means. But how would you describe that, that role where words begin to say something that they dont mean, but that is still right?

jeff tweedy

Well, I mean, Im aiming at a different truth than you are, I think. Im aiming at things that feel true. And youre aiming at things that are factually true. So thats the magic of language, I mean, is that it can get at different layers of emotion with very slight manipulation. Its less manipulative than, I think, some of the ways that prose is written a lot of times. I think its less reliant upon logos and really kind of surrendering to our mythmaking abilities, and our abilities to see what isnt being said, and the way haiku works, where you use a very, very sparse amount of syllables and you end up seeing the entire scene, including things that are not explicitly stated. Thats why poetry exists. Thats why songs exist. They say things that we cant say with linear language, the way you described it. Its just using the texture and the feel of language to reach parts of who we are that our intellects dont really have much control over.

ezra klein

Id like to take a look at one of your songs that Ive always loved and just ask you to break it down a little bit for us so we can see how it came to be. So I was wondering if you wouldnt mind playing a verse of Impossible Germany.

jeff tweedy

Sure.

jeff tweedy (singing)

Impossible Germany, unlikely Japan, wherever you go, wherever you land, Ill say what this means to me. Ill do what I can  Impossible Germany, unlikely Japan. The fundamental problem we all need to face  this is important, but I know youre not listening. Now I know youre not listening

ezra klein

Where did the phrase impossible Germany, unlikely Japan come from?

jeff tweedy

I dont remember exactly. But I think its in something by William H. Gass. It might have been The Tunnel because that book is really related to the history of the Third Reich and weird meta version of a historian just digging himself deeper into himself. I think there is the phrase, an unlikely Germany. So this happens a lot when I read. And it usually becomes like a cognitive loop. Ill read something that just feels  not like, oh, wow, I could write a song around that. But it just becomes, unlikely Germany, wow. Thats amazing. And Ill myself 10 pages later still thinking, unlikely Germany, man. I got to think about that. What does that mean?  and just being so moved by how much is contained in just two words being put together, and how much it can evoke. So I think it definitely grew out of that feeling.

ezra klein

Its funny because, for me, that song  and I dont  I mean, I think its clear how I started getting it here in my head. But it became a song I loved listening to when I traveled. That song feels like the whole mood of the movie Lost in Translation to me. Its like that kind of weirdness of being in other places and communicating. And then when I actually listened to the lyrics, I wasnt sure that thats what it was about at all, actually. And I was curious, for you, if its  do you feel like you understand when you write these what ends up on the other side of the relationship, of the interpretive relationship? Or, is it just, it means something to you and other things to other people, and you just sort of let it loose to have that life?

jeff tweedy

Well, its hard to  I mean, people really want to know what things mean. And Im no different. I rely upon my brain really craving meaning. But in the case of some of these lyrics that I write that tend to be more abstract, what they mean to me is the feeling, the shock of mystery that happens when I say them out loud or when I sing them. And thats what it means to me. It becomes this thing thats much more  like, again, what we were talking about earlier, it has this flexibility to feel very specifically about a different thing on any given night. I have elaborated in the past, and I have told different versions, probably, of what I think the lyrics to that song mean to me in a more didactic or storytelling sense. But I think if Im being completely honest, its just I always want a song to sing  I always want a new song to sing. And what I think of as a song to sing is something that makes me feel like Ive been electrocuted a little bit when I say it out loud or when I put it  when its attached to a melody. And it doesnt just work with any two words. You can put any two words together, and Im pretty confident that its going  if you look at them long enough, they contain worlds. And you can find a million different meanings for lots of different combinations that are unnatural or maybe shocking in a way. But they dont all do that thing when you sing them. And those lyrics did, for me, this thing that Im always looking for, whether its the direct lyric, like please be patient with me. That definitely has that  even just saying that phrase out loud to you just now, I still feel like, oh, OK, I mean that. And I mean impossible Germany, unlikely Japan. I dont know how. But I mean it.

ezra klein

I love that. And in some ways, Im happy to not know quite what it didactically meant, because it allows me to mean it too. But I also love how in the exercise you described, but also a bunch of them, this idea that youre pulling apart the patterns weve gotten used to in our own language. I did a conversation once with a science-fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, whos amazing. And I hope Im not going to misremember the term he used. But he talks about he talks about science-fiction as creating cognitive alienation from the world youre in. Its like your world. But its unlike your world. And so the normal ways that you would absorb patterns and gestalts begins to erode. And you can see the same things anew. And interesting idea that thats what youre doing with language, that I think even those of us, maybe, who think of ourselves as pretty facile with it, that in some ways the process of becoming good at language is a process of getting yourself baked into patterns, of knowing what goes with what, and that we begin to lose that playfulness, and that its worth creating a practice about getting it back.

jeff tweedy

And people get good at bullshitting by being good at that.

ezra klein

That is for sure.

jeff tweedy

Thats my experience of watching lots of Ted Talks. And theyre like  this person really sounds like they know what theyre talking about. But if I think about it a whole lot more than just listening to the structure of how theyre putting their words together, I dont think theyre saying that much a lot of times. Or, its like, oh, I get what theyre saying. Thats common sense, I suppose  or something. But yeah, I think in science-fiction, its sees around the form of a novel. It sees around the artifice of it in a really kind of poignant way that a lot of novels dont even attempt. There are all these constructs with the way we encounter fiction that rely upon us just pouring into the story our own experience. And thats the way filmmaking works a lot of times. Theres the language of cinema where, OK, they get in the car. Now you know theyre somewhere else. But you dont see them go over the bridge to where theyre going. We fill in the gaps all the time. I was really thinking about this a lot because of that movie, The Room  that terrible movie.

ezra klein

The terrible, amazing movie, The Room.

jeff tweedy

Terrible, amazing movie  and thats one of the most beautiful things about that movie, is that it just completely turns all of that cinematic language on its head. They get in the car, you see them on the bridge, and then theyre still in the same room in the next scene. I love that.

ezra klein

The way you put that, about science-fiction subverting the novel, is really interesting. It makes me think  so Ive been reading  Ive just read like 1,000 pages of this great sci-fi writer, Adrian Tchaikovsky. But his work got recommended to me by a listener of the show. And it was a real trip moving over to it, given that I normally read about politics, or I read novels about this family  I grew up in it, but its unhappy. And hes just like, what if civilization, but it was entirely spiders? What if all of civilization were built around spiders, and spider aptitudes, and spider biology? And its like, wow, that is a really different place to put your brain for a while? Like, it really blows up some of what you take for granted. I just loved it. So let me ask you little bit about this as a practice? Because I was saying a minute or two ago that often getting good at something, it can create a lock into patterns. But it can also create something you talk about in the book, which is a fear of feeling bad at that thing or at other things. And Ill use myself as an example here. Im a skilled writer. I get paid to write words for The New York Times. And partially because Im a skilled writer, Ive been trying to read a lot more poetry over the past year and a half. And sometimes I will sit down to try to write poetry. And I cant get over how bad it feels to me, how bad it feels to be so bad at it. And then to look, Ill be like, this is child  this is ridiculous. Or Im like this with drawing too. And you talk a lot about this feeling of like, theres a  you can take a joy in being bad at things. How do you get to that point?

jeff tweedy

Well, I mean, let me just help you out here for a second.

ezra klein

Please. Put me on the couch.

jeff tweedy

How much different would it feel if you were setting out to write the worst poem you could think of? Would you feel good if you succeeded at writing a poem that you thought was terrible? Its all so subjective and strange to even want to do. But I like to do that sometimes. I think a lot of the things that I think I do to avoid writers block is I write through songs that I dont like. I get an idea for a song, I just go ahead and do it, even though I dont think Im going to like it. And I feel like that frees me up to go to the next song. And so youve identified one of the main things, I think, that keeps people from doing creative things, is this idea that its bad or that theyre not going to be good at it. And its going to hurt to not be good at something. Even today after writing thousands of songs, maybe  I dont know, at least hundreds of songs  I know that I still have to go through being bad to get to something good. And I think people have this mistaken notion that people that do it in a way that they admire from the outside, theyve somehow sidestepped that part of how it works. And I dont think you ever really do. I think that you always have the potential to make something good or bad. But I think that thats an example  what youre describing is an example of asking way too much of something that should be fulfilling in your being able to get lost in it and disappear. It doesnt sound like youre really getting to the point where you disappear. Otherwise, you wouldnt really care if its good or bad when youre done, Does it feel good while youre doing it?

ezra klein

I mean, I dont do that often, in part it in part for these reasons. I chase the feeling of flow, which I think is sort of similar to your feeling of disappearing. And it is harder the more I cant turn off the part of my brain that is critical. But as Ive gotten older, I think that part has gotten bigger. I think when I was young, one of the things that felt really good was feeling like I was attaining a bit of mastery over something. I wasnt good at anything. So the idea of getting good at anything was amazing. But then you become a little bit more used to that feeling, to knowing whats going on, to having a certain level facility. And then it becomes very hard to do the other thing because that begins to feel alien. You spend so much time in the things you now know how to do that going back to be Zen about it, going back to beginners mind, its a pretty different way to think. And I will say that I always have a little bit of skepticism when I hear from great writers or a great songwriter, like you, well, we all go through the part where the draft is bad, because I dont think that youre bad and my bad are the same on this. Your bad is still, youre to sing into an iPhone. And I wouldnt. And thats a thing that quieting a self-conscious part of your brain  do you do things youre really bad at? Things like  not like, youre a songwriter and you write some songs you dont like, but stuff you just truly have no facility at.

jeff tweedy

Of course. I think one of the daily reminders I have that I can be better is trying to learn  for me, its trying to learn really hard guitar parts. Ive never really had the aptitude that I wish I had for playing guitar. And so there are these moments where I remind myself of that striving to get good at it. And its, a lot of the time for lyric writing, its through reading really great books that remind me where the bar is for really great writing, or listening to great records and thinking about where that bar is that Im aiming for. But striving, god, its a really rewarding part of it too if youre willing to accept that you may never get there. And I think that most of the people I know that have become really accomplished at certain things, its that way because they continuously strive for a better  excuse me while we let the ambulance pass. My rides here. Im sorry. I got to go. Sorry, thats my old joke. Anyway, I think that striving really never stops. It doesnt sound like you really want to be a great poet.

ezra klein

No.

jeff tweedy

So I dont know, maybe its not something you can fake. But I bet you if you really wanted to be a great poet, you would be willing to put yourself through some of the discomfort of striving to get better at it.

ezra klein

Yeah. That motivation part, I think, is really important. And not that I dont want to be a good poet or do you want to be. Its more that I actually have been, more recently, trying to rebuild just a kind of outside of work creative practice. A theme of this in your book actually got me thinking about this question, which is, there are certain kinds of hobbies practices pursuits where we have a cultural sense that youre good or bad at them and we impose that on people and then sort of ones that we dont. So you never hear somebody  you never say to somebody whos going to play Frisbee in the park, I dont play Frisbee. Im terrible at Frisbee. No, everybodys terrible at Frisbee.

jeff tweedy

Right.

ezra klein

Through first approximation, you just  thats the point. You go throw it around. Or, I watch TV. And youre like, well, Im just terrible at TV. I never have good critical thoughts about the office. No. You watch TV, you chill. And then we have, particularly in creative pursuits, writing, and poetry, and music making, and art  there actually is a lot of judgment. And Im curious where you think that comes from, because its not there in everything we do.

jeff tweedy

Yeah, I think I talk about it in the book a little bit. It doesnt stop people from playing softball.

ezra klein

Right. Maybe this is your idea that Im sending back to you actually.

jeff tweedy

Yeah, I think it might be in there. But I dont remember exactly what the analogy is. But yeah, people give themselves the freedom to be bad at sports and a lot of other things. We create a lot of latitude for ourselves in some things and not in others. And the initial feeling I have is that it might have something to do with an anti-intellectualism that is pretty provincial in a lot of places. I know where I grew up, the idea that you were going to be a writer or a poet or something like that is just asking people to beat you up. And I think its just like, you think youre better than me? Youre going to write words? Book learning  I dont know.

ezra klein

But you had you had a fair amount of that around you. I mean, you have a very moving story about your dad, who you describe that hed get upset and then I go down to the basement. And Im quoting you here, that hed sit and write a poem and then come upstairs half drunk and read a simplistic, heavily rhyming, but not entirely artless poem about the Alton & Southern Railway, or our neighbor who died, or something else that hed been stewing about. Thats a kind of interesting and really productive way of dealing with a bad mood. Can you just tell me a bit about that?

jeff tweedy

Yeah, its just kind of re-centering a creative act as having a function other than art for arts sake, that maybe thats where some of the distaste of those endeavors comes from, is this idea that its frivolous and you better be really, really good at it before you rub my face in this thing that you have deemed valuable. Thats a reminder that it can be a natural impulse. And it can have a really direct, natural function in someones life. And my dad just accepted that as being a part of how he coped. And I would argue that thats probably close to how all of this stuff originated. Certainly poetry originates from storytelling and wanting to get things off of someones chest and make sure that people know how theyre feeling somewhere, generations to come  oversimplifying, obviously. But yeah, I think that was a really great lesson my dad taught me without trying to.

ezra klein

You had a lot of people in your family, as I read your memoirs, who had very deep personal creative practices. Your dad and his poetry, your brother who wrote novels that he wasnt able to finish. But they were never able to make that creative practice the center of their lives. So how do you process having the ability, or even the luxury, to be able to make that kind of creative work the center of yours.

jeff tweedy

I probably have survivors guilt for a lot of reasons other than what I ended up being able to do in my life and where I ended up career-wise. For me, personally, just being one of the lucky few thats been able to get help for some of the addiction problems and mental health issues Ive had in my life, that creates a sense of that survivors guilt that I cant really separate from my good fortune outside of that. Its not just random. My brother and other people in my family have had choices  not necessarily the choice to become a successful recording artist or someone thats able to put their work into the world, but theyve had choices to maybe take better care of themselves. And that to me has been probably my saving grace, my main focus. And the things that I did before I was able to manage those issues in my life, I look at those things as being created in spite of. And thats more of an anomaly to me than where I ended up through the work Ive done to take care of myself.

ezra klein

You have very little patience in the book for the idea that its through suffering that great art is created. Could you talk a bit about that?

jeff tweedy

Yeah. I think its a horrible copout. And its a pervasive myth. And I understand how it gets proliferated. And I think that there is some therapeutic effect from writing, and creating, and art that makes sense to me that someone suffering would turn to it. And its kind of like along with what I describe is disappearing. Its really helpful to disappear when youre suffering. And so it doesnt surprise me that a lot of art gets made by people that are experiencing profound discomfort in their own skin. But if that was all it took, thered be so much more great art. Thered be so much more of it. And also, it just belittles, to me, the idea that everyone struggles. Its part of the condition of life. And most peoples lives are touched by some type of suffering or some type of struggle. Its almost impossible to live a full life without having that experience. But I do think that there are people that think, well, I could write. But Id have to be messed up like that guy. Or I could do  I think theres a little simplicity to that idea. But I do think its true to some degree that people like that myth for the built-in excuse it provides to not challenge themselves to dig deeper into their own thoughts and who they are.

ezra klein

I think its a really interesting thought that that instead of the suffering being the driver of art, that the art is self-medication for the suffering. Ive never heard it put like that.

jeff tweedy

Thats something I notice in my own life. I tend to create a lot more when Im struggling a little bit with my own issues or with  for the last five years or so, the world at large has been so discomforting that I almost cant keep up with the amount of energy I have for writing. It is like a healthy addiction to me. It is like an obsessive behavior that is benign compared to other maladaptive choices Ive made in the past. I mean, I do  Im able to look at it as somewhat of a habit.

ezra klein

One of the things you say in one of the books is that something thats really helped you as a songwriter is this bone-crushing sincerity, this ability to be vulnerable in a way that others arent. And Im curious to hear a little about that, because I do think its a block for a lot of people  the unwillingness to say what it is theyre really feeling. Are you like that in your normal life and its just true in your songwriting too? Or, is it something thats true in your songwriting that is not true if I were just talking to you on the street.

jeff tweedy

Ive always really wanted to think of myself as an honest person and have always struggled with the idea that I was capable of dishonesty and capable of things that I didnt like. And I wasnt able to make myself be the person that I thought I wanted to be. But one of the areas where I was able to start making progress towards that idea of myself was to really  I dont know, like in interviews when somebody asks me a question, I always try and answer it.

ezra klein

Thank you. I really appreciate that.

jeff tweedy

I do. I think that, oh god, somebody is interested enough to  I mean, theres a people-pleasing aspect to who I am that has always been there. And that it has a relationship to being very dependent upon my mother as a child, and my mother maybe having some unhealthy boundaries about having me as her pal. And before I was able to form an autonomous identity, I did have this sense that I was making someone else happy. That was my responsibility, even, to make someone else happy. And along with that comes my mothers interest in basically anything that I would say, or do, or think about. So sharing all of those details kind of is this hybrid mom-boy thing. Im sure that theres psychoanalysis to accompany all of these notions. But I think that did give me a sense that I wasnt just myself, and that everybody must like hearing all of this stuff, and that everybody must feel these things that are unsavory, or things that we maybe wish we didnt think, or things that we  I would see other people being embarrassed about.

ezra klein

One, I think we had very similar relationships with our mothers. And now youre making me wonder if this is why Im a podcast host who thinks people would like to hear what I think all the time.

jeff tweedy

Everybody that does something similar to what we do, I think, has been indulged in some way.

ezra klein

Its a very interesting point. But I really do kind of admire the sincerity. Ill note something, even before I make this request, which is that  so one of the songs of yours that I love and that I listen to a lot is Please Be Patient With Me. And I wanted to get you to play a bit of it because I wanted to talk about it. But its such an intensely sincere song that it almost feels like too much to say that I like it and want to hear it played. Do you know what I mean? I wonder how you walk around with these songs out there. Do they feel like you have revealed all this? Or, do you have separation from them?

jeff tweedy

Well, I mean, I feel like other people listening to it, oddly enough, gives me some cover, because if it resonates with someone else then it wasnt something worth concealing. It wasnt something that was so aberrant that you should be ashamed of it.

ezra klein

Do you mind playing a verse from that song?

jeff tweedy (singing)

I should warn you when Im not well, I cant tell. Theres nothing I can do to make this easier for you. Youre going to need  see, I cant remember that part.

ezra klein

Its funny because I can. Is that strange to have people who remember your songs better than you do?

jeff tweedy

No, I dont think thats strange at all. I mean, I would be able to remember it if I wanted to play it for an audience. And it wouldnt take very long at all. Im sorry. Do you want me to try and remember it a little better?

ezra klein

No, no, no. That was beautiful. That was great. Because that song has a directness to it, I was curious how the writing of it differs from some of the songs that are more associational, right? Thats a song that it feels like youre communicating something really, really specific, not like a word ladder. Is that a different process?

jeff tweedy

Its hard to say. A lot of the songs Ive written I dont entirely feel equipped to talk about their genesis, precisely because I was able to disappear and come back with something that felt worth singing. Mostly, I just want another song to sing. And sometimes, it does come out as having a much more direct feel. But a lot of times, the actual process isnt that different. I might have stumbled upon that song, for all I know, just obsessing about the phrase, please be patient with me. I might have been in a doctors office or a lobby where  say, pardon our dust or something  like, please be patient with us. We have a trainee. It was unrelated, but it made me probably disappear into some associations on my end. And then there was, like, Im this apple, Im this stone, or something. There are some lyrics in there that are very oblique, I think, because getting more direct than what it already was felt less honest. Songs need to be adaptable, not just to other peoples consciousnesses, but your own consciousness as it changes and travels through time. And so I think maybe this is more in the realm of craft than a lot of the creativity discussion weve been having. But I do think that I consciously try and leave some room for me to grow and change in my lyrics. And by doing that, I think it allows a listener to maybe color it in with themselves a little bit more. It just becomes a vessel for someone else to pour themselves into because you havent written them out of it.

ezra klein

One of the things I was thinking about while I was reading your book is that you have a very light touch when you talk about yourself as a songwriter. And its something you believe sort of anybody can do. But theres this whole other part of it, which is  maybe its not quite craft, but it is the process and the consistency that you bring to it. And it made me think of idea I heard from Natasha Lyonne, who is a creator of the great Netflix show, Russian Doll, among bunches of other things. But she talked about this idea of having the talent to use your talent. That there is the talent to do the direct thing  screenwriting, or songwriting, or comedy, or whatever it might be  and all these things around it that allow you to use that, and that often what is not there for people is the talent use the talent. And Id be curious if you have reflections on that part of your work, that kind of stick-to-itiveness, that ability to create structure in every day, because thats actually in some ways I think more rare than a lot of people give it credit for.

jeff tweedy

Oh, well, I mean, that would have to be the case, because I think Ive maybe made more of a career for myself than a lot of songwriters and artists that are far beyond what Im able to do. So some of that has to come from an aptitude at the craft side of things and the ability to kind of  I wouldnt say promote myself, but to be confident in sharing what Ive made. And looking at it as a gift, the notion of a gift implies some responsibility to not squander it, not take it for granted. But I like the idea of having the talent to use your talent. I dont think that theres a quality to my songs necessarily across the board that someone else couldnt do. But theres a certain me-ness to what Im putting out into the world that is something you have to be somewhat focused on and willing to share.

ezra klein

And willing to share. And then also willing to not take it too hard when its pushed back at you. I mean, something that I thought of reading the book was that youre pretty good at handling disappointment and rejection. Youve got some real stories about that in there around  I think the famous one is around Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and your label. But there are others too. And I know I a lot of writers. And Ive known a lot coming up who I think are just extraordinary writers. But its very hard for them, one, to get it out because they really want it to be perfect. And then if the reaction to that isnt what they hope it is, its really gutting. I mean, thats part of the problem with doing something where youre putting so much of yourself, your me-ness out there, because then its like if people say, no, I dont like it, they dont like you. Thats how it can often feel. And so you seem to have both a lot of sincerity in putting yourself out there, but a little bit of a lighter sense of what it means if others dont like it. Is that natural? Or, is that cultivated?

jeff tweedy

Well, I mean, I dont think that I am just my art. I mean, I dont think that Im just the things that I put out into the world. And Im certainly not just the products that I have put into the world for people to consume. So thats been fairly easy to navigate because I dont look at it that way. I like the way it makes me feel when people like the things I make. And Im OK with it when people hate it because I can do something with that. I think that energizes me. The thing that is much more difficult to handle and cope with is indifference. Thats intolerable in a lot of cases. I mean, its obviously tolerable because I keep doing it. And no matter what you do or who you are in this world, there are a fair amount of people that are going to meet it, not with just pure dismissal, but with indifference. And theyre not going to accept it in the spirit that it was intended. And that is much more troublesome. But the idea of somebody hating it, all you have to do is think about how much stuff that other people love that you hate and realize that theres room for a lot of opinion about almost any work of art. I mean, one of my favorite bedside books is this book of all the reviews written of, like, Mozart, and Beethoven, and Charlie Parker  its compendium, or whatever, of these different dismissals of incredible canonic works of art that were written contemporaneously with the release of the record or with the first performance of an opera or something like that. And thats just an invaluable thing to be reminded of.

ezra klein

Well, let me ask something thats related to it, because weve been talking here about the things you do. But are there things that you dont do? For instance, I think social media has become really tough on a lot of writers I know, because then youve got this incredibly intense rush of feedback of how people receive what you do. Are there things you try to shut yourself off from or dont let into your airspace so that youre able to maintain a kind of middle approach to this?

jeff tweedy

No. I feel like I should be able to take it. I think that a lot of things like social media, me trying to imagine what people are saying sometimes could probably be worse than what theyre really saying. So I dont really have any hard and fast rules about it. I do feel a responsibility to kind of check in with some things. If like theres some problem with ticketing for a Wilco show and people are really pissed off, I want to know about it because there might be something we can do to sidestep that before it becomes this pervasive thing. But things personally, people talk about your weight and things like that. I mean, it makes me sad, not necessarily for myself. But I just cant imagine how painful it must be to need to do that. I guess its funny to some people sometimes to make a joke about someones appearance. And Im certainly not above it, I guess. But I dont know if I would share it with the world. But as far as  thats where I would stop, just kind of checking in, just kind of being aware of it. And I dont spend that much time with it. And I definitely dont ever engage, even when somebody maybe says something that really pisses me off. I have one tweet loaded that I have never used, that Im just waiting for the right time. Just basically going to say, I took the time to search my name on Twitter. The least you can do is fuck off.

ezra klein

Thats very, very funny. You have a great riff on a Chuck Close quote. And you say that I think its my job to be inspired. And so I want to talk about that other side of it. Weve been talking about the creation side of it. But theres also what you pull in that leads to the creation. And you seem to treat that pretty systematically too. So tell me a bit about what it means to do a good job at being inspired.

jeff tweedy

Oh, I think its just finding some balance between not overwhelming yourself with other peoples work and art and feeling like its a job to consume all of it, but just kind of faithfully understanding that when I need inspiration, its really never that far. We have such an immediate availability for discovering new music, discovering new authors, discovering poems. I mean, its just easier than its ever been  certainly than its ever been in my life. And I think even if it wasnt easy, even before it was easy, I looked at it as like, thats kind of how I keep growing and keep going. Thats how I feel like doing what I do, is just being reminded, like I said before, of where the bar is. And I dont think its my responsibility to listen to every record that comes out. But I like trying to. And I really do. And I think, inevitably, I am challenged by something I didnt think I would like, or I discover something I really, really love, or Im led back to some other artist through the cross-referencing where this music that I hadnt heard before came from. Its just impossible to get to the bottom of it. Youre not going to ever get to the bottom of it  and the same with literature. And my natural reaction to this has usually been, in my entire life, has been to kind of get excited somehow through this exploration of other peoples work up until the point I just cant take it anymore and I want to do something, I want to make something. And it works every time. It just  it just always works. I always feel better. I always feel inspired, because you just cant  Im enthusiastic about it. And I always have been. And I feel like I still am as much as I ever was. And at the same time Im old enough now to know that sometimes youre just exhausted. And sometimes theres just nothing anybody can do to make you feel inspired. And those are the times where you listen to your body and go to sleep and relax. And maybe I wasnt able to do that when I was younger. So there was much more of a risk of burnout or something at an earlier stage of my life. But now I think its generally pretty balanced.

ezra klein

You were talking a minute ago about how easy it is now to listen to everything, to read everything. Do you think anything is lost in that? You write in the book a lot about growing up in a record store culture and having a track down an album. And I remember doing that too. And I feel like I listened to things differently when I had to put some effort into getting them and I wasnt going to have all that many, whereas now its like, if the first five seconds of a song dont do it to me, unless Im really being intentional about it, its like, welp, onto the next 52 five-second snippets until I find what Im looking for. Do you think we listen differently in ways that affect what people end up liking, or creating, or making.

jeff tweedy

I think we value things differently. I dont know if we listen differently. I think in some ways you could argue that maybe we listen better, because I do think that we bought records when we were younger and we had sunk cost into them psychologically. And for a lot of us, that forced us to find some way to value it and not feel like we got screwed. We werent taken advantage of by a bad record and being out that amount of money. But I also think there are maybe other organic ways to do that outside of commerce if you just try a little harder to come at things with a little bit more of an open mind and willing to accept that your first impression might not be correct. But it is interesting. You and I have straddled this weird time in history where theres almost complete opposite experience with how we consume music in general.

ezra klein

I mean, everything, right? I remember getting a personal computer in my household. I remember before we had a computer at home. I remember before we had the internet at home. And I feel like my son is going to treat that the way I would treat somebody talking about, like, oh I remember when electricity came to the town. Its a real, pretty big thing to live through.

jeff tweedy

Yeah. Well, yeah  like cable TV, too. I remember not having cable.

ezra klein

Yeah.

jeff tweedy

I think the other thing that could teach someone is that when you  for us, when we were younger, say you have this sunk cost evaluation of something that you bought that is art  its someone elses creative output. And because of that, you take the time, and maybe in some cases, you take enough time for it to actually become a really powerful, important piece of your life in terms of  it just becomes indispensable as a record that you own, and basically almost like a friendship emerges with this piece of art. But the weird thing about that is is that there was so few things to go look for and with so much  you had limited amount of money, most people, to go to the record store and find that little bit of inspiration and make that friendship or make that relationship occur. That says to me, at this point in my life, that there is almost an equal amount of yearning from the listener to find something that will do that as there is a possibility that some great work of art has been bestowed upon the world. In other words, I think if you need it, there is a deep desire to find it. And thats what makes me value people making art more than any one work of art.

ezra klein

Yeah, I think thats a good way of putting it. I mean, my intuition about this, and Im not sure its true, is that the trade off here is you can sample more things, but that the relationship with things that are difficult is going to be more tenuous, that things that are more challenging to listen to or read  I think I have gotten worse at that. Its actually something Ive been trying to rebuild over the past couple of years, where before if I got something  not before, but when I was younger  I gave it a chance, I think, because, as you say, I couldnt buy endless CDs. I couldnt get every book I wanted in the world. So if I took a flyer on something, I was invested enough to try it, whereas now I think that Im way better at finding things that I like. And now there are all these algorithms that are trying to tell me what Im going to like. But in terms of learning how to like something that Im not instantly attracted to, I think that is a muscle that is withering a little bit. And Im not saying like  I dont want to be the old guy being like, end  the world is going to  I dont know. Maybe its totally fine. Maybe theres a cost, but theres a benefit on the other side. I dont know how to weigh it. I just think that its true.

jeff tweedy

Well, I dont know. What I do is I fuck with the algorithm. I think that music streaming algorithms are pretty easy to confuse. So I will spend a week just listening to like grindcore heavy metal. And it throws everything into total disarray. And then Im much more likely to have something weird come over the transom. Its actually kind of a fun challenge to make those algorithms not work the way theyre supposed to. But its also just  thats only one way that we experience music. You still have friends telling you about things. You still probably see reviews of things in the paper. One thing thats taken out of it quite a bit lately, I think, is that album art probably doesnt have as much of an impact as it once did in terms of what youre willing to give a listen to. And albums themselves arent really the same thing as they used to be. Everythings much more single driven and playlists driven. Its definitely different than the experience we had growing up.

ezra klein

All right, so lets say youre listening to this and youre persuaded, you want to have a creative practice, maybe a songwriting one. Where do you start? What is the minimum viable practice that you would recommend to somebody where you think they could start feeling some like generative gains from it.

jeff tweedy

Oh, I think you would feel generative gains from it immediately if youre in the right mindset. I think if you come at it with an open mind and an open heart and just look at it almost like a detox or something, youre just flushing some thoughts out of your system  do some freewriting. I think thats enough to be  not necessarily writing songs even, but just having a daily habit of just thinking with a pencil or thinking with some meditative intent is really beneficial.

ezra klein

And so when you talk about freewriting, youre just saying, put aside 10, 15 minutes a day and just sit and write whatever comes into your head, sort of like Morning Pages or one of those practices?

jeff tweedy

Yeah. before you get out of bed, everybody picks up their phone and tries to figure out what kind of horrible thing happened before they woke up. Instead of doing 

ezra klein

Stop watching what I do before I get out of bed.

jeff tweedy

Well, I mean, I think thats a pretty shared experience for a lot of people. But I started kind of rewarding myself with getting to see the horrors of the world only after I was able to just allow myself to remain in a dream state and write for a little while. Outrage is a drug, obviously. We are incapable of resisting it. And youre better to just kind of go through it than try and imagine that youre above it. But I would kind of ration out the outrage by making myself write a little bit before I got to the deep sweet feelings of fury.

ezra klein

But lets say that your brain is broken by neoliberalism.

jeff tweedy

Yeah.

ezra klein

And so maybe youve tried Morning Pages  and Im not going to name any names here or any podcast hosts  and that you did it as a practice, and that you find yourself repeatedly accidentally writing up to-do lists as you, in your nonjudgmental way, try to write through your subconscious. And so youre so used to using that part of your brain  that highly logical, highly systematized  that its hard to get out of it. Do you have a prompt that you recommend people use? How do you get into that space where youre actually using the associational part, as opposed to the, ah, shit, I got to take the dog to the vet, and if I dont get this piece in today, and Ive got  the endodontist keeps sending me a bill and I keep forgetting to pay it. Thats always, my morning pages problem. It doesnt end up feeling creative it feels like an immersion in everything thats coming down on me during the rest of the day. How do you get away from that?

jeff tweedy

I dont know. My first thought about a lot of things like this is that sounds like youre discomforted by the way your mind normally behaves. And my inclination when thats the case is usually to not fight it. So maybe theres a way to transform it from being practical list to maybe make a list of wishes. Or if you like the idea, the feeling of making some to do-list, make a to-do list for the universe. I dont know. Theres a million ways to just kind of go with it. But also, just let it not knock you down into some sort of judgment about that being the wrong way to think about freewriting. I would advise you to accept it as being something your mind really likes and has habitually been drawn to, and still see if theres some way to work within that in a more ambiguous and imaginative way.

ezra klein

Let me end us here, which is always the last question of the show, which is, what are three books youve read that have meant something to you that you would recommend to the audience?

jeff tweedy

Well, the book that I feel embarrassed to say it, again, because I almost always  its almost always the book that comes to mind is Don Quixote. I just think that it explains a lot about the world, I think, in ways that are kind of life affirming and sad at the same time, and that things havent changed all that much. I think if you look at it solipsistically, I used to believe that you could perfectly transpose the life of a rock musician over the story of Don Quixote. But over time, its just become something I see that really is easily overlaid over a lot of different types of lives and experiences. William H. Gass  I like a lot of his writing on writing, his books of literary criticism. Theres a compilation of forwards to peoples books and writings about other peoples work called Temple of Texts that I like a lot. I kind of like all of his work. But its a good entry point because its a little bit more straightforward.

ezra klein

Jeff Tweedy, thank you very much.

jeff tweedy

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

jeff tweedy (singing)

Gwendolyn, when she starts to speak to a county police with a plastic cup between her teeth.

ezra klein

The Ezra Klein Show production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Gelt, Roje Karma, and Annie Galvin, fact-checking by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones, and mixing by Jeff Gelt.

jeff tweedy (singing)
The evidentiary void around J.&J. seemed to grow more frightening with the spread of the Delta variant. Previously, data from Britain had shown that a single dose of either Pfizer or AstraZeneca provided pretty good protection against Covid infection. With Delta, single-dose protection went way down, to around 35 percent.

For weeks, no one knew what that meant for the J.&J. vaccine. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, had the Johnson & Johnson shot, and has been hearing from people whod also gotten it and were scared.

I really dont blame people  they keep hearing all this stuff about two shots, two shots, Delta, you need to be fully vaccinated, she told me earlier this week. And nobodys really saying anything about Johnson & Johnson. Many people, she said, feel that theyve been left behind because there really isnt any new information coming out about it.

On June 21, Rasmussen decided to get a Pfizer booster. At around the same time, Michael Z. Lin, a neurobiologist and bioengineer at Stanford, wrote a Twitter thread arguing that the C.D.C. should issue guidance on mRNA boosters for people whod received J.&J. A couple of days later, Andy Slavitt, until recently a senior adviser to Joe Bidens pandemic response team, put out an episode of his podcast titled, The Delta Variant Question No One Will Answer, addressing those whod received Johnson & Johnson and were wondering about getting another shot. He was equivocal: either wait for the data, or go ahead and take a Pfizer or Moderna shot.

I wish Id heard these voices earlier, because by then Id already gotten two Pfizer shots. When the clinic scheduled my second appointment, I wasnt sure whether to return for it. Im still not sure why I did. Mostly, at a time when no one was talking about J.&J. boosters, I didnt want to be an anomaly. I wanted the full Pfizer course because I didnt want to worry about whether new findings about mRNA effectiveness against the variants applied to me.

Nothing bad happened, but the experts I spoke to said the third shot was unnecessary, and that theres a point after which too much immune stimulation can be harmful. Theres no pressing reason to go beyond a single RNA booster, Lin told me.

Indeed, there may be no reason to get a booster at all. On Thursday evening, with discussion of boosting J.&J. all over the media, Johnson & Johnson released data showing that its vaccine retains most of its effectiveness against the Delta variant. Booster shots seem unnecessary, at least for now, The New York Times reported.
The Corcoran Groups report showed a similar increase in sales. A year and a half after the pandemic began, its safe to say that New York City has its mojo back, Pamela Liebman, Corcorans president and chief executive, said in a statement.

Buyers over the last few months gravitated toward co-ops, a housing type that had seemed to lose some favor in recent years. Co-ops accounted for 49 percent of all deals, versus 37 percent for existing condos, according to Corcoran. And in the frenzy of the post-pandemic market, downtown seems to have benefited at the expense of uptown, according to Compass, which reported that neighborhoods like Chelsea, SoHo and the East Village accounted for 31 percent of all deals.

For Elizabeth Stribling-Kivlan, a senior managing director at Compass, one of the springs most heartening developments was improvement in the financial district, a neighborhood that became a veritable ghost town during the pandemic with the emptying out of office buildings. Median prices there soared 33 percent in a year, the largest increase of any neighborhood, she said.

Yes, shuttered stores, sleepy business districts and gun violence make Manhattan feel different than before, she said. But with more workers expected to return to offices this fall and beyond, the borough should soon start to resemble its old self.

People are feeling like they want to come back there, they want to see what will come out of this, she said. Its a new era for us.

Prices, though, may have a ways to go. The price per square foot for resale apartments, which is a useful indicator because it controls for the apartment size, Mr. Miller said, actually declined this spring over a year ago, to $1,408 from $1,461, or 3.6 percent.

Prices are still not at parity with a year ago, he said. The overall discount that buyers are paying on list prices is at 6.4 percent, which is better than 2020 but still higher than the decade average of 4.9 percent. There still is a Covid discount out there, Mr. Miller said, but its easing.
The voyager Hui Te Rangiora, the story goes, had sailed his vessel south in the early seventh century in search of new lands when something alien appeared on the horizon. He saw enormous, barren summits jutting out of the sea and into the sky. He saw unfamiliar shapes in the waves: tresses waving at the surface, animals that dove to great depths and seas of pia, the Polynesian name for the white tuber called arrowroot. Hui Te Rangiora had sailed his vessel from the tropics to Antarctica.

The ethnologist Stephenson Percy Smith reached this conclusion in 1899, when he wrote about this Polynesian narrative in a history of the Maori people, the early Polynesian settlers of New Zealand. Mr. Smith identified the bare rocks as icebergs, the wavy tresses as brown strands of bull kelp and the deep-diving animal as a sea lion or walrus. Perhaps the most convincing shred of evidence is the narratives term for the frozen ocean: Te tai-uka-a-pia, in which tai means sea, uka means ice, and a-pia means in the manner of arrowroot. When scraped, arrowroot flesh looks uncannily like snow. So from Hui Te Rangioras perspective, icebergs might have resembled mounds of powdered pia.

Its fascinating to imagine what it must have been like to see those things, to try to make them familiar to us, said Krushil Watene, a Maori expert on Indigenous philosophies at Massey University in Auckland. Dr. Watene is an author on two studies published recently, with Priscilla Wehi, a conservation biologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, that explore the historical and future links between Indigenous peoples and Antarctica.

The first study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, plumbed literary, oral and artistic archives for historical accounts of Maori in Antarctic and subantarctic regions. The second, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, looks ahead, proposing an Indigenous framework to manage and conserve the southernmost continent.
A friendship lasting a decade, a first kiss in the ocean, and a post-wedding photo shoot attended by a pod of seals. Chelsea Bruck and Cyril Bennounas love story reads much like a fairy-tale romance, with a modern twist.

The couple first met as teenagers at New Rochelle High School in New Rochelle, N.Y., when Mr. Bennouna randomly sat behind Ms. Bruck in an art history class. While it was not love at first sight, the two hit it off and became fast friends.

I always saw Cyril as this incredible person, Ms. Bruck said, and while life would take them in different directions, the two kept in touch as they lived what Ms. Bruck described as parallel lives.

Both moved to the Midwest for college, and then abroad. Mr. Bennouna, 31, graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2011 before moving to Morocco, where his father is originally from, to trace his roots and prepare for his fathers semiretirement. By that point Ms. Bruck, 33, had already graduated from Northwestern University and was living in South Korea teaching English. Both kept blogs that inspired one another, prompting Mr. Bennouna to reach out to Ms. Bruck one day.
James Wilt, razor-sharp in a jet-black suit, stood between his two daughters: Melinda Stone on his left, beaming in a white, floor-length gown, and Mary Wilt to his right, in a sparkly knee-length dress.

Ms. Stone, 56, and Ms. Wilt, 51, each held their 79-year-old fathers hands, and all three began moving forward as Mendelssohns Wedding March began playing. The two sisters were celebrating both their weddings in one single ceremony on May 29 at Frisco Commons Park in Frisco, Texas, about 30 miles north of Dallas.

Father and daughters were soon on a stage in full view of their combined 80 guests, where they met their soon-to-be husbands: Calvin Hodges, 59, whom Ms. Stone had met 14 months earlier at a supermarket in Plano, Texas; and Rob Andrews, 51, Ms. Wilts high school sweetheart.

Seated in the front row were Cathy Lavallee, the mother of the brides, Abbie Wilt, their stepmother, and Dolores Hodges, Mr. Hodgess mother.
Some of those changes are beginning to look like they may become permanent, because consumers arent letting go of their newfound fondness for getting food delivered to their front doors. In a recent JD Power survey, 71 percent of consumers said they would continue to order delivery as much as or more than they had during the pandemic.

In markets that reopened earlier than most places, like Florida and Texas, as well as Australia, DoorDashs order volume slipped about 20 percent from the height of the pandemic, the company said. Uber Eats also had dips as communities reopened, but its revenue still grew 230 percent annually in the first quarter of this year  a welcome respite from Ubers slumping ride-hailing business.

Something similar is happening in places like San Francisco. As lockdown orders eased this spring, Laurie Thomas, a co-owner of two restaurants in the city, said deliveries declined. But as San Francisco began to more fully reopen in June, Ms. Thomass DoorDash orders climbed back up, and were just slightly lower than they had been during the pandemic.

Delivery became a huge part of life during the pandemic, said Ben Bleiman, the leader of the San Francisco Bar Owner Alliance. The question is how much of that is here to stay and how much is going to leave.
Kira Segal is a supremely organized traveler, regularly making lists of must-brings and to-dos for vacations with her husband and four children, whose ages range from almost six months to seven years old. In March, after the grown-ups got their second shots, Ms. Segal assembled what shed need to get to Anguilla, including virus tests and passports for her two youngest children. But she forgot her kids sunblock, hats and rash guards.

Its like I completely forgot that we were going to a Caribbean island, said Ms. Segal, 35, a New Yorker who is about to start law school. Usually I would have a full bag  the spray, the stick, the lip balm. Now, as far as safety for my children goes, Covid and masks are much more at the forefront than sunblock. 

As inoculations rise, parts of the world open up and travelers endeavor to regain their sea legs  a collective young Bambi, relearning to walk  theyre fumbling and stumbling in ways large and small, usually while laughing about it. In a new digital campaign from Accor, one of the largest hotel companies in the world, the actor Neil Patrick Harris captures the sentiment, opening a 90-second etiquette lesson about packing by saying: Its been a while since we left the house. So the idea of packing for a trip might seem a little unfamiliar.

Because of this interruption thats lasted over one year, the things that we are usually so familiar with  the things we usually take for granted for, the things we can just automatically perform  have been disrupted, said Qi Wang, a Cornell University professor of Human Development who studies memory.
Since Monday, Mr. Kunene said, his hospital has taken in four people who were mortally wounded, 15 who were shot but lived and four others who suffered severe injuries, including two who appeared to have been bashed in the head by police batons.

Some victims said they were shot while protesting or vandalizing properties, Mr. Kunene said, while others reported being hit by stray bullets or being shot at simply for being out past the 6 p.m. curfew.

In his two decades working at the hospital, Mr. Kunene said he had never seen this volume of gunshot patients.

Nurses at three other hospitals said their facilities also treated gunshot victims in numbers they had never seen before.

The army and the police are everywhere, and the situation is so tense, Thulani Maseko, a human rights lawyer in Mbabane, said by phone on Wednesday. People are being shot at, people are being detained, people are being hurt. Its not safe to be out in the streets.

Messages left for a government spokesman and for Themba Masuku, the acting prime minister, were not returned.

But in a statement released this week, Mr. Masuku, who serves at the pleasure of King Mswati III, stressed the importance of rooting out all violence and vandalism.
The Boy Scouts of America reached an $850 million settlement agreement on Thursday with tens of thousands of people who said they were sexually abused by scout leaders or members over several decades.

Kenneth M. Rothweiler, the lawyer who represents the largest group of claimants  about 16,800  said in a statement that the agreement would be the largest settlement of child sexual abuse claims in United States history.

In an interview on Friday, he added that the claimants could expect billions more in payouts from insurance companies and organizations that have sponsored the Boy Scouts.

It really is the tip of the iceberg, Mr. Rothweiler said of the $850 million. Its really just a small down payment on what we will ultimately be able to deliver to the survivors.
WASHINGTON  Federal regulators on Friday cleared a batch of vaccine that could furnish up to 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnsons one-shot coronavirus vaccine, deciding they can be safely distributed despite production failures at the factory that ruined 75 million other doses.

The move brings the total number of Johnson & Johnson doses made at the Baltimore facility and cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for distribution in the United States to roughly 40 million. But Johnson & Johnson remains far short of its commitment to deliver 100 million doses to the federal government by the end of June. European Union officials have said the company is missing its delivery targets there, as well.

The vaccine cleared on Friday is not yet bottled, and the Biden administrations plans for it remain unclear. But with new coronavirus cases dropping and the country awash in vaccines from two other authorized manufacturers, most new Johnson & Johnson doses produced in the United States are likely destined for export.

Johnson & Johnson has been unable to produce much of its vaccine since April, when regulators shut down the Baltimore factory, operated by Emergent BioSolutions, because of major production errors. Johnson & Johnson had been relying on Emergent, its subcontractor, to produce vaccine for use in the United States as well as to meet its commitments overseas while it expanded its own plant in Leiden, the Netherlands.
The police did not identify the girl but confirmed the deaths of Bonnie Epstein, 56, and the married couple Maria Obias-Bonnefoy, 69, and Claudio Bonnefoy, 85, raising the known death toll to 22. As many as 126 people are still unaccounted for, a number that was revised down after officials determined that some people included in the tally had been located.

Rescuers and emergency medical workers refused to abandon hope, even as they acknowledged that it dwindled with each day. People have survived for many days after building collapses elsewhere, as seen after earthquakes in Haiti and Mexico. Additional urban search-and-rescue teams, activated by FEMA this week, headed down to Surfside to help assist with the search efforts and preparations for the incoming hurricane.

Im not going here right now with the hopes of finding victims  were going down there with the goal of finding survivors, Ken Pagurek, the leader of Pennsylvania Task Force 1, said as he drove down to Florida on Thursday with more than 70 engineers, doctors, logistics experts and other specialists, and five dogs. I still think theres a slim chance. A slim chance is better than no chance.

Yuval Klein, 42, an officer with the rescue unit sent by the Israel Defense Forces, added: The chances are very low, but at the same time, theres always hope  weve seen miracles. We dont want to close that option.

Battling intense Florida heat and thunderstorms, teams of structural engineers, logistics experts, firefighters and reserve specialists have manned the site, combing the rubble in front of the remaining structure.

They have recovered fragments of individual lives  a suitcase, stuffed animals  from underneath the slabs of concrete, which are layered on top of one another and difficult to move.

Others have painstakingly interviewed families, coaxing them into remembering the specific details that could prove crucial to identifying places in the wreckage: the location of the bedroom, the color of the carpets, where the bed was positioned. That information has been used to reconstruct an internal map of the building and help navigate the rubble.
We may lose a generation of professionalism and expertise in election administration, he said. Its hard to measure the impact.

In interviews, some election officials said they also worried that a flood of departures in the next two years could drain elections of nonpartisan expertise at a hinge moment for American democracy  or worse, encourage partisans to fill the vacuum. They cite moves by partisans alleging that the last election was stolen in Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere to run for statewide offices that control election administration.

That may be less likely at the local level, but the pain is no less acute. Were losing awesome election administrators who have tenure and know what theyre doing, said Michelle Wilcox, the director of the Auglaize County Board of Elections in Wapakoneta, Ohio.

The 2020 election was brutal for election officials by any measure. Beyond the added burden of a record turnout, many effectively found themselves conducting two votes  the one they had traditionally overseen at polling places, and a second mail-in vote that dwarfed that of past elections. The pandemic led to shortages of poll workers and money for masks and other protection equipment and vastly complicated voting preparations.

Atop that, baseless claims of rigged voting and vote-counting by President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans elevated once-obscure auditors and clerks to public figures. And it made them targets for vilification by Trump supporters.

A report issued last week by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University underscored the consequences: In a survey of election officials, one in three said they felt unsafe in the jobs. One in five said they were concerned about death threats.
WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would not hear an appeal from a florist in Washington State who said she had a constitutional right to refuse to create a floral arrangement for a same-sex wedding. The move left open a question the court last considered in 2018, when a similar dispute between a Colorado baker and a gay couple failed to yield a definitive ruling.

As is its custom, the court did not give reasons for declining to hear the case, which social conservatives had hoped the justices would use to make a clearer statement favoring religious beliefs over gay rights. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch said they would have granted the florists petition seeking Supreme Court review.

Lower courts have generally sided with gay and lesbian couples who were refused service, ruling that they are entitled to equal treatment, at least in parts of the country with laws forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The owners of businesses challenging those laws have argued that the government should not force them to choose between the requirements of their faiths and their livelihoods, citing constitutional protections for free speech and religious liberty.
But the Montana decision turned on the schools religious status rather than their curriculums. There may be a difference, Chief Justice Roberts said, between an institutions religious identity and its conduct.

We acknowledge the point, he wrote, but need not examine it here.

In urging the Supreme Court to hear the case from Maine, two families that send or want to send their children to religious schools, represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group, asked the justices to resolve the open question and do away with the distinction.

Such a state of affairs  in which a state cannot deny a benefit to a student because she wishes to attend a school that is religious, but can deny it because the school does religious things  is unstable and untenable, the families brief said.

Maine requires rural communities without public secondary schools to arrange for their young residents educations in one of two ways. They can sign contracts with schools elsewhere, or they can pay tuition at public or private schools chosen by parents so long as they are, in the words of state law, a nonsectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

In opposing Supreme Court review, officials in Maine argued that the schools students attend under the program should mirror the teaching offered at public schools.
WASHINGTON  Two justices on Friday called for the Supreme Court to reconsider New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 ruling interpreting the First Amendment to make it hard for public officials to prevail in libel suits.

One of them, Justice Clarence Thomas, repeated views he had expressed in a 2019 opinion. The other, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, offered fresh support for the view that the Sullivan decision and rulings extending it warranted a reassessment.

They made their comments in dissents from the courts decision not to take up a libel case brought by the son of a former prime minister of Albania.

Both justices said the modern news media landscape played a role in their thinking about the actual malice doctrine announced in the Sullivan case. That doctrine required a public official suing for libel to prove that the offending statements were made with the knowledge they were false or with serious subjective doubt about their truth  a stricter standard than is applied to cases brought by ordinary people. The doctrine was expanded in later court rulings to cover public figures, not just public officials.
KABUL, Afghanistan  American troops and their Western allies have departed the U.S. military base that coordinated the sprawling war in Afghanistan, officials said on Friday, effectively ending major U.S. military operations in the country after nearly two decades.

For generations of American service members, the military hub, Bagram Air Base, was a gateway to and from a war that cut across constant changes on the battlefield and in presidential administrations. But the final withdrawal overnight on Thursday occurred with little fanfare and no public ceremony, and in an atmosphere of grave concern over the Afghan security forces ability to hold off Taliban advances across the country.

The American exit was completed quickly enough that some looters managed to get into the base before being arrested, Afghan officials said.

The quiet leave-taking from the base weeks before the planned withdrawal of American troops in mid July, and months ahead of Presidents Biden announced Sept. 11 departure, highlights Washingtons efforts to signal two different messages: one to the U.S. public that its longest foreign war is ending, and another to the Afghan government that the United States is not abandoning the country in the middle of a Taliban offensive, and would retain some ability to conduct airstrikes if need be.
Researchers in the United States have identified the construction of 119 new intercontinental ballistic missile silos in a desert in northwestern China, indicating that the country is carrying out plans to strengthen its strategic nuclear capability.

The researchers spotted the construction in commercial satellite images of remote areas west and southwest of the city of Yumen, on the edge of the Gobi Desert in Gansu Province.

The images show circular excavations, long trenches for communications and surface structures consistent with control centers and silos at other launch sites in China, according to Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on Chinas nuclear program with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif.

It was a recognizable design, he said in a telephone interview. Its hard to imagine its anything else.
As Professor Stuart Turville, a virologist from the Kirby Institute, told the ABC, the Delta variant is both more contagious and not nearly as deadly.

Looking at the 28-day follow-up after infection, the death rate for the original variants was 1.9 percent mortality, he said. So far, the Delta variant is showing 0.3 percent mortality.

Over time, there is more room for confidence. Peter Collignon, a physician and microbiology professor at the Australian National University, whom I often talk to about the pandemic, reminded me this week that Australia is better off now than it was a year ago because even though the vaccine rollout has been slow, more than 7 million jabs have already been given.

And the people with the highest rates of vaccination, he noted, are the most vulnerable people  Australians older than 70.

In the next three months, if more vaccine supplies reach Australia as scheduled, the likelihood of death and hospitalization will continue to go down because more people will be protected by vaccines. And then, as the prime minister announced today, everyone will have been offered a vaccine, and life will start to return to some semblance of normal. Well probably still have to get a Covid test before traveling internationally, but hey, at least well be traveling.

Is it all too slow? Yes. Is that rage-inducing? Absolutely, and even more so if youve been paying attention. People like Mr. Collignon and Mr. Holden, for example, warned months ago that this winter would be bad if the vaccine rollout wasnt up to speed. And they were right.

But at the same time, finally, there is an endpoint in sight  a horizon, as government officials have called it. And so that anger might as well be leavened with longing and hope.
SYDNEY, Australia  Three days after the emergence of a rare Covid-19 case in Sydney, around 40 friends gathered for a birthday party. Along with cake and laughter, there was a hidden threat: One of the guests had unknowingly crossed paths with that single Covid case, an airport driver who had caught the Delta variant from an American aircrew.

Two weeks later, 27 people from the party have tested positive, including a 2-year-old child, along with 14 close contacts. And the seven people at the gathering who were not infected? They were all vaccinated.

The party points to the immense challenge Australia now faces to its wildly successful policy of total Covid suppression. In a simple suburban setting, the vaccines and the highly contagious Delta variant went head-to-head, and because too few Australians have been immunized, the virus spread.

For Australia and every other nation pursuing a so-called Covid zero approach, including China and New Zealand, the gathering in western Sydney amounts to a warning: Absent blanket vaccinations, the fortress cannot hold without ever more painful restrictions.
ATHENS  Greek authorities have arrested a convicted member of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party after nine months on the run, a government minister said on Friday.

Christos Pappas, the partys deputy leader, was taken into custody late Thursday in Athens. He is among six former lawmakers sentenced to 13 years in prison after a landmark trial in October that found that Golden Dawn had operated as a criminal organization, systematically carrying out violent attacks on leftist critics and migrants.

He absconded shortly before the sentences were announced in mid-October, but will now join the rest of the organizations leadership in prison.

Golden Dawns decline was as dramatic as its rise, prompted by the murder of the leftist musician Pavlos Fyssas in 2013 by one of its members, Giorgos Roupakias. The murder led to the arrest of the party leadership and a five-year trial that put most of its politicians and dozens of its supporters in jail.
In addition, Judge Bitar asked the caretaker interior minister for permission to question as a suspect Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, the head of Lebanons General Security agency and one of the countrys most powerful figures. The judge also summoned for questioning other security and military figures, including Gen. Jean Qahwaji, the former head of the Lebanese Army.

On Friday, Mohammed Fahmi, the caretaker interior minister, said he would allow the judge to question General Ibrahim, but how the other parties, especially Parliament, would respond remained unclear.

At stake, legal experts said, is a political culture that has long protected powerful officials from legal scrutiny.

There is no shortage of allegations of corruption and human rights violations against high level officials in Lebanon, but there has been a culture of impunity that has allowed to them to escape accountability for their actions, and this is manifest in what Lebanon has become today, said Aya Majzoub, a Lebanon researcher with Human Rights Watch.

Judge Bitars efforts to lift the immunity of powerful figures is going to test the limits of this unaccountable system, she said.
When the fire alarm went off at a hotel in central Taiwan on Wednesday evening, Chen Chien-kuang, a 59-year-old missionary, immediately thought of escaping. But he was one of 29 people in coronavirus quarantine inside the hotel and worried about breaking the rules, which required those in quarantine to stay inside their rooms.

I dont know whether I can go out or not. Im afraid that we will be fined if we go out, Mr. Chen said in a video he took and sent to his son, which was released by the local news media and confirmed by his wifes brother, Chen Yi-sa. But if we dont go, will we die in the fire, he said.

Mr. Chen was among four people who died  three guests in quarantine and one firefighter  in the blaze, which has renewed concerns over the safety of Taiwans quarantine facilities and the wisdom of using hotels for the purpose. More than 20 people were injured.

The owner and manager of the Passion Fruit Hotel, which occupied three floors of a 15-story building in the central city of Changhua, told people to remain inside their rooms when the alarm sounded. At first he said that it was a false alarm, according to the video sent by Mr. Chen.
Helmsley saw the fund as a way to magnify its donations: Its money was paired with other donations to the T1D Fund and leveraged again when the fund brought in venture capital partners.

It became clear if we got involved in the fund that we could raise three to five times as much money, said David Panzirer, a Helmsley trustee. What the fund is doing is very complementary to what weve done and what were doing going forward. We have partnered with companies along with JDRF and others to accelerate things.

The fund has also attracted donors eager to have a more direct connection to the recipients of their money.

Coming from a tech background, Ive seen how impactful venture capital can be. said Mike Fisher, the chief technology officer of Etsy and the parent of a child with Type 1 diabetes. I spent years working with the local board here in Cleveland, helping them on marketing and organizing walks to raise money. The whole time I was thinking what they need is V.C. backing.

Mr. Fisher said he had donated more than $1 million to the T1D Fund. Theyve had success, he said.

Others, like David Nelms, a former chief executive of Discover Financial, said the fund provided a different way to approach Type 1 diabetes. He said he and his wife, Daryl, would continue to donate to JDRF in support of its scientists and the research they are doing. But they have also been giving to the T1D Fund  over $3 million so far  because they feel more involved in the investment process.

Its gratifying to feel like you see some of the specific things that theyre doing with the money, Mr. Nelms said. Its a little bit more like an endowment at a university, where you give money upfront and hope it can become self-supporting over time.
Funerals can be expensive. The median cost of an adult funeral  including a coffin, a viewing of the body, a ceremony and burial, was $7,640 in 2019, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. (Updated data is expected this summer.)

Cremations have been increasingly popular in recent years and are typically less expensive. The median cost of a direct cremation, with a container provided by the family, was $2,395 in 2019. (In a direct cremation, the body is cremated shortly after death without services like embalming or visiting hours.)

Here are some questions and answers about funerals and FEMAs aid program:

How do I apply for funeral help from FEMA?

Applicants should call the agencys help line at 844-684-6333. According to FEMAs website, no online applications will be accepted. Applicants must provide the name of the deceased person, the date of the funeral and documentation of the expenses. Documents can be uploaded onto a special website or sent by fax or mail, according to the help line.

Many funeral homes are making families aware of the federal program, but funeral directors cannot apply for aid on their behalf, said Randy Anderson, president-elect of the National Funeral Directors Association, an industry group. Directors can, however, help provide the documentation of costs and copies of death certificates.

More details are available on the agencys website.

What costs does FEMAs funeral aid program cover?

Eligible costs include transportation for up to two people to identify the deceased person, a coffin or an urn, a burial plot and headstone, arrangement of the funeral ceremony, and cremation or burial costs.

Where can I find information about arranging a funeral?

Advice is available online from the Federal Trade Commission; the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit group; and the National Funeral Directors Association.

State regulators also offer online information, but most do a lackluster job of giving consumers information about their rights when arranging funerals and related services, a new report finds.
Canadian tattoo artist Luke Cormier has a very distinct art style  he creates colorful tattoos that look like stickers you can peel off of your skin.

Featuring all sorts of popular cartoon and video game characters, from Super Mario to the Powerpuff Girls or Rick and Morty, Luke Cormiers tattoos are some of the most adorable weve ever seen. But what really makes his designs stand out is the sticker treatment. Complete with a white line, clever shading and realistic-looking creases, they look like actual stickers ready to peel off, even though they are inked with a tattoo gun.

Photo: Luke Cormier/Instagram

Everyone said my tattoos looked like stickers, Cormier, who also goes by the name Mr. Sticker, told My Modern Met. So it just made sense to add a white background and make them look like actual real stickers.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Luke Cormier (@mr.sticker.tattoo)

Luke Cormiers sticker tattoos remind me of another unique style I posted about a few years back, that of Brazilian artist Eduardo Duda Lozano, who specializes in colorful tattoos that look like patches stitched directly onto the skin.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Luke Cormier (@mr.sticker.tattoo)

Interestingly, Cormier became a tattoo artist somewhat by mistake, as he always dreamed of becoming a piercer. perhaps its for the best that things happened this way, otherwise we wouldnt have these amazing tattoos.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Luke Cormier (@mr.sticker.tattoo)

Im not too sure, to be honest, how the tattoo appeared in my life, everyone just had tattoos where I grew up, it was a pretty normal thing and then I fell into tattooing by accident. I wanted to be a piercer but ended up tattooing, the artist told Bored Panda.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Luke Cormier (@mr.sticker.tattoo)

For more of Luke Cormiers amazing sticker tattoos, check out his Instagram and his TikTok, where he is constantly adding new content.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Luke Cormier (@mr.sticker.tattoo)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Luke Cormier (@mr.sticker.tattoo)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Luke Cormier (@mr.sticker.tattoo)
Minami-daitojima, a small Japanese island surrounded by raised coral reef, has no beaches or docks, so the only way for people or boats to make it on the island is to be flung through the air by large industrial cranes.

A round uplifted coral island in the Okinawa archipelago, Minami-daitojima, aka Daito Island, has been using cranes to get people and small boats on and off for the last 50 years. Because of the coral reefs surrounding it, ships can only moor up to 4 to 6 meters away, so this method is the safest and fastest to reach or leave the island. Boats are secures with straps and chains, while people have to get in an elevator-like cage, fasten the door and then get flung through the air by an industrial crane on the island. The experience has been described both as terrifying and as fun as an amusement park ride.

Daito Kaiun, the company in charge of operating the crane, apparently inherited this ingenious method from another company that went bankrupt decades ago. Mr. Tomonori Miura, who runs operations on Daito Island, told Japanese website J-Town that building a sturdy dock would be expensive and difficult, so this unusual method is preferable.

Miura said that his company uses two types of cages to hoist people on and off the island  one without a roof for fair weather, and a completely closed one for rainy and stormy days.

I was surprised that the speed was faster than I expected. I had more fun than fear, but I think people who are not good at high places would be pretty scared, Mr. Tanuki Neko, who recently went to Daito, told J-Town.

Luckily for people too scared to use the crane system, Minami-daitojima is also accessible by plane, although only 1-2 flights are usually available per week, due to unpredictable weather.
Impatience is growing in Offaly with the Just Transition process, because it is too slow to deliver and is not producing significant job growth in the county.

During last week's Offaly County Council meeting, a number of councillors said they are becoming irritated with the European scheme and want it significantly sped up.

Earlier that morning a Council working group, the CPG (Corporate Policy Group), met with a number of politicians including an MEP and Oireachtas members, during which they discussed a Territorial Plan for job development, in the region affected by the winding down of Bord na Mona's peat production, and the funding that would be required to implement that Territorial Plan.

Chief Executive Anna Marie Delaney said it was a very good meeting, which we will follow up with further correspondence with the Oireachtas members.

Stephane Duclot, Director of Services, admitted that the response to the need for jobs hasn't been as successful as was hoped. Only a small number of projects which sought funding have so far received funding. He said all the projects had to be up and running by the end of 2023. He said a number of projects are finding it difficult to get the matching funding. Without securing that matching funding then the projects can't go ahead, he said.

Mr Duclot added that discussions are ongoing with Offaly Council to take over the administration of the Just Transition fund because it's the county most affected. It's planned to switch the admin of Just Transition from the government department to the County Council. This will be a very big increase in Offaly County Council's workload and we should be taking over in late 2021."

The Just Transition funding is coming from Europe. It's 77 million for many different job creation projects throughout the midlands, who are asked to provide 50% in matching funding.

Ireland is preparing a Territorial Just Transition Plan," continued Mr Duclot, "which will be submitted to Europe in September 2021.

While the County Council will take over the administration of Just Transition, the actual allocation of the funds will still be decided by the governmental department.

Cllr Eamon Dooley commented that the Just Transition is proving to be something of a disaster for Offaly. The MRTT (Midlands Regional Transition Team) has been working hard, but really the whole thing should have moved up another couple of gears by now.

In May, Minister Eamon Ryan said the Government is committed to a just transition in the Midlands region and has dedicated significant funding to supporting workers, companies and communities affected by the closure of the peat-fired power stations and the end of peat harvesting by Bord na Mona.

The Just Transition Fund was established in 2020 to support innovative projects that contribute to the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the wider Midlands region and which have employment and enterprise potential.

The Department held a call for applications to this Fund, which closed on 17 July 2020, in response to which over 100 applications were received. 16 'Strand 1' projects, said Minister Ryan, announced in September 2020, have concluded grant agreements with the Department, to a total value of 1.2m.

Provisional offers have been issued to a further 47 successful applicants through Strand 2, with a funding provisional value of 27.8m. There have been no pre-funding or drawdown requests made for strand 2 projects as the Department is currently in the process of finalising grant agreements with these projects. Another 11 million has been allocated to the Fund. I expect, continued the Minister, that a significant quantity of funding will issue to projects towards late 2021 and early 2022 as projects incur spend and seek reimbursement. Allocations in future years will depend on the total funding requirements for all projects that conclude grant agreements with my Department.

Cllr Dooley in last week's Council meeting pointed out that The spin from the Department is that Just Transition is the best thing since sliced bread. However, he admitted that the morning's meeting between the CPG and the MEP and Oireachtas members had been a positive one.

The fact that Offaly County Council is now going to be the headquarters for the administering of the Just Transition fund is a significant step forward. This is only right as the greatest job losses have been in Offaly.

Cllr John Leahy said he too felt positive after the morning's meeting. I was delighted to hear that Offaly will be the epicentre of the administering of the Just Transition Fund.

He said finding the matching finance could be very difficult for some. The local authority will also not be able to administer the matching funding. A project in Ferbane is looking for 200,000 but I don't think they will be able to find 50%.

We need to get this right, commented Cllr Danny Owens, and present the best Territorial Plan we can to Europe.

He too highlighted the high matching funding as being a big stumbling block. We need to make it far less or else a lot of the proposed projects won't be able to get off the ground at all. Cllr John Clendennen agreed and asked how many jobs will be created as a result of Just Transition. We need to have monthly updates on job creation. It's all about jobs.

The last 12 months, remarked Cllr Peter Ormond, we have been focussed on securing the funding, but now we are realising that the matching funding could be a stumbling block. In fact it will be very hard for many of the applicants to reach the matching funding required. We need to greatly reduce it as swiftly as possible.

It is good news that we will be doing the admin for the Just Transition funding but we will need to be resourced properly.

Cllr Ken Smollen agreed that it's all about creating new jobs. 77 million is in fact a small figure and you wonder how many jobs will be created from that. But you know I wonder when I see that there are quite a few power plants being built around the world and yet here we are in Ireland about to demolish a 17 year old, 240 million power station. It looks like we are being the fall guys again. Offaly is the second poorest county in the country. How then are homeowners going to find the matching funding for retrofitting?

Meanwhile lignite briquettes are being imported into Ireland while our peat production has basically stopped.

Cllr Tony McCormack agreed. A lot of the people behind the proposed projects simply won't be able to find the matching funding. I think Bord na Mona is being let off the hook here and it should be encouraged to do more, a lot more here. At the end it's all about creating jobs. It's time for Bord na Mona to give something back.

What is the big rush to demolish Shannonbridge Power Station? asked Cllr Noel Cribbin. Isn't there nine months left on the station's planning application?

Ten years ago, said Cllr Declan Harvey, everyone was talking about natural gas, but in fact not many houses in Tullamore have gas connectors. He didn't think retrofits were going to work for many. People can't afford these things. The EU has to come up with something better.

Anna Marie Delaney admitted that a lot of the groups seeking Just Transition funding are finding the process very onerous." She added that the ESB has sought repayment of the 5 million which they gave to the Just Transition scheme through their PSO levy.

Mr Duclot said that as of May, twenty-eight jobs and 175 indirect jobs have been created through Strand 1.

Cllr Dooley said the low number of jobs speaks for itself. He added that most of the Strand 1 jobs which have been created are jobs in Research. He doubted that as many as 28 jobs have been created. I would question that very strongly.

Cllr Fitzpatrick said the support which should be coming through for the people of Offaly is simply not happening.

Cllr Smollen pointed out that many families are wondering how they will heat their homes in the future with the phasing out of fossil fuels. They are thinking will they have to install wood pellet stoves as their chief source of home heating?

We have been very patient so far, remarked Cllr Clendennen. Now we want to see results. We want to see Just Transition delivering.

The councillors proposed and seconded a proposal to seek a meeting with the ESB about the future of Shannonbridge Power Station.

Cllr John Carroll said a lot of good work is going on behind the scenes.
On a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon the Lemanaghan Community gathered outdoors, on the Banagher Line in Leamonaghan Bog, to form a committee to oppose the proposed wind turbine development by Bord na Mona.

A large crowd gathered, and over 30 people from areas across Leamonaghan Bog formed a committee.

Cllr Ken Smollen attended the event to show his support for the residents.

The committee's first objective is to have the draft county development plan changed, removing Leamonaghan Bog as an area open to consideration to wind energy.

The committee believes that the Lemanaghan Conservation Plan, written by the Heritage Council, should be adhered to by Offaly County Council.

The Conservation Plan recommends "actions to maintain the layers of significance embodied in the place, within the context of the delicate physical state of buildings and archaeology and the strong local traditions of continued devotion."

The Conservation Plan also states that "it is important that the options considered for the post-industrial use of the bog are sympathetic to the significance of the site."

The Conservation Plan which was supported by Offaly County Council was done to "provide a framework for decision-making on future developments to infrastructure and land use."

"There is absolutely nothing sympathetic about large wind turbines," commented Aoife Phelan of the Lemanaghan committee, and they will negatively affect the visual amenities of the entire area.

"We are simply asking Offaly County Council to follow the guidance outlined in the conservation plan, which was written by a team of experts. "Leamonaghan Bog is documented as one of the richest archaeological wetlands in the world, archaeological heritage is a non-renewable resource, the people of Leamonaghan want to protect this and all of the flora and fauna in the area, creating a sustainable tourism industry which could generate employment would be welcome in the area.

"We are asking absolutely everyone, all over Ireland, to send in submissions as part of the public consultation process on the draft county development plan in Offaly County Council to have Leamonaghan Bog removed as an area open to consideration to wind energy by writing to Forward Planning Section, Offaly County Council, Aras an Chontae, Tullamore, Co. Offaly before 4pm on Friday 16th July and referencing, Leamonaghan Bog Area 5: MA436 & MA443 in your submission. The submission should not have any identifying information, but your name and address should be attached to a separate page."




I experienced a lot of pain, I think about my brother every day. I wake up in the middle of the night just wondering, what did he do that was so terrible that he had to lose his life? said Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd, an African-American man whose death at the hands of a law enforcement official in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, in May 2020, sparked worldwide mobilization against racism and police brutality.

There is no reason that [people of colour] should be met with police brutality. They should be met with support, dignity and understanding, just like anybody else who they will want to pull over, he added. Your skin colour should never be [seen as] a weapon.

Since his brothers murder, Floyd has become a frontline advocate for racial justice and equality, speaking at an intergovernmental body for the first time in June 2020, during the Urgent debate on systemic racism and police brutality in the United States at the Human Rights Council.

Following the debate, the Council 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, accountability and redress, and Government responses to anti-racism peaceful protests.

Over 190 deaths with striking similarities in the past decade

For the preparation of the report, UN human Rights received information concerning over 190 deaths of Africans and people of African descent in contact with law enforcement officials mainly in Europe, Latin America and North America, and mostly in the past ten years. Most were men, the report stated  particularly young men from impoverished communities and men with psychosocial disabilities. Approximately 16 per cent were women, 11 per cent children and 4 per cent LGBTI people.

UN Human Rights analysis of these incidents suggests that over 85 per cent of deaths at the hands of law enforcement officials happened in three contexts: first, during the policing of minor offences, traffic stops and stops-and-searches, as in the case of George Floyd. The second context is when law enforcement acted as first responders in mental health crises, as in the case of Kevin Clarke in the United Kingdom. The third is during special police operations, as in the case of Breonna Taylor in the United States and the case of Joao Pedro Matos Pinto in Brazil killed during the so called war on drugs operations, and Janner Garcia Palomino in Colombia also killed during a gang-related intervention.

The report highlights the emblematic case of Adama Traore who died on his 24th birthday in July 2016 in France. Traore appears to have ran away after witnessing his brothers arrest and refusing an identity check by the police. Traore was pursued and eventually found, restrained and arrested by law enforcement officers in an apartment. During the car journey to the police station, Traore reportedly felt unwell and, upon arrival, the law enforcement officials placed him handcuffed in the yard where they called emergency services. Despite attempts to revive Traore, he died that evening.

Traores older sister, Assa Traore has been campaigning for the truth and justice for her brother.

What is most painful is the lack of consideration by the State when there is a death in the family, and the fact that the dead can be turned into media fodder and criminalized, Assa Traore said.

When my brother died, I thought the police officers would be sentenced and sent to prison, she added. I never thought the struggle would be easy but I did not think it would take five years either. But the longer it took, the harder it became and I realised that we could not take justice for granted, that justice was not a right for us but rather that we had to fight to claim that right.

Many of the families who shared having lost loved-ones as a result of an encounter with law enforcement expressed similar pain and feeling of injustice.

Luana Barbosa dos Reis Santos, was killed by military police in Ribeirao Preto, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2016 at the age of 34. Barbosa dos Reis Santos was taking her son to class when they stopped on the way to greet friends in a bar. That is when they were approached by police.

My sister was a black woman, lesbian, living in the suburbs - reason enough in Brazil to be stopped, Roseli Barbosa said. She refused to be searched by a police officer.

Dos Reis Santos reportedly resisted being searched by a man, upon which three policemen allegedly beat her. Barbosa and her mother were called to the scene.

We hid my sister for fear the police would come look for her and kill her, as they had said they would, Barbosa said. The next day we took her to the emergency hospital in Ribeirao Preto and, on 13 April 2016, Luana passed away.

The death of Luana Barbosa dos Reis Santos was investigated by the Brazilian Civil Police, who requested the arrest of the Military Police officials who assaulted her.

Everything in Brazil has been much slower, much more difficult. There could have been a virtual hearing to appeal the case, but there was no appeal, it was denied. So there was no justice, Roseli Barbosa lamented.

Black communities feel threatened  not protected

In many of the incidents reviewed by UN Human Rights, the report states, the victims did not appear to pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury that would justify the level of force used. Further, racial bias and stereotypes associating people of African descent with dangerousness and criminality and racial profiling appear to play a recurrent role, shaping interactions of people of African descent with law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

These claims are confirmed by data that indicate, for example, that while in 2019 African-Americans comprised only 13 per cent of the US population, they accounted for 26 per cent of total arrests. In Canada, between 2013 and 2017, a Black person in Toronto was nearly 20 times more likely than a White person to be involved in a fatal shooting by the Toronto Police Service. Statistics by the UK Ministry of Justice revealed that between April 2019 and March 2020 there were six stops and searches for every 1,000 White people, compared with 54 for every 1,000 Black people. In Brazil, in 2019, people of African descent reportedly represented 79 per cent of deaths during police interventions.

These figures support the concerns, raised during consultations for the preparation of the High Commissioners report, on the excessive policing of Black bodies that make communities feel more threatened than protected.

The report highlights further that law enforcement officials are seldom held accountable for the crimes and human rights violations they commit against people of African descent, in part due to deficient investigations, a lack of independent and robust oversight, complaint and accountability mechanisms, and a widespread presumption of guilt against people of African descent.

A path to ending impunity for violations by law enforcement

In her report, UN Human Rights Chief, Michelle Bachelet, proposes a way forward to end impunity for human rights violations by law enforcement and closing trust gaps.

This would entail, among other steps, adopting a human rights-based approach to policing and an institutional culture that is fully free from racism. States should undertake profound introspections and encourage the participation and engagement of people of African descent and affected communities in order to reimagine policing and reform the criminal justice system, the report states.

Bachelet further recommends that use of force policies and regulations of law enforcement be aligned with international human rights law, and robust measures taken to ensure accountability and redress for victims and their families. This requires effective, impartial and timely investigations of allegations of unlawful use of force or other violations by law enforcement officials, with a specific focus on the possible role that racial discrimination may have played in the violation; imposing commensurate punishments; and providing guarantees of non-repetition.

States are also called upon to introduce alternative methods to policing to respond especially to educational settings and as respondents to mental health crises and manage migration and borders. States should also collect and make publicly available comprehensive data disaggregated by race or ethnic origin, as well as by sex and other factors, with strict safeguards and in accordance with international human rights law.

States must show stronger political will to accelerate action for racial justice, redress and equality through specific, time-bound commitments to achieve results, Bachelet said.

2 July 2021

This story is the second in a four-part series presenting UN High Commissioner Bachelets 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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REDDING, Calif. (AP)  Hundreds of firefighters worked Thursday in high heat to beat back three large wildfires in the forests of far Northern California, where the flames destroyed several homes and forced some communities to evacuate.

Mount Shasta, the volcano that towers over the region, was shrouded in a haze from smoke plumes that could be seen in images from weather satellites in space.

The scene was ominously reminiscent of last year's California wildfire season, which scorched more than 6,562 square miles (17,000 square kilometers) of land, the most in the state's recorded history.

An extraordinary Pacific Northwest heat wave that extended into the upper reaches of California was slowly receding, but it was only expected to cool off slightly before temperatures trend back up heading into the Fourth of July weekend, forecasters said.

It is very hot and dry, said Suzi Johnson, a Shasta-Trinity National Forest spokeswoman for the Salt Fire, which broke out Wednesday and grew to 7 square miles (18 square kilometers), shutting several lanes of Interstate 5 and prompting evacuation orders for some roads in Lakehead, an unincorporated community of around 700 people.

A reporter for the Redding Record Searchlight saw at least a dozen buildings destroyed south of Lakehead, including homes, garages and outbuildings, the paper reported.

Johnson told the paper that investigators were trying to locate a car that may have started the fire Wednesday afternoon near Interstate 5 when hot pieces or parts apparently flew off and ignited dry brush.

About 300 firefighters battled the blaze but were hampered by hot weather and challenging terrain, officials said.

The fire was a threat to homes around Shasta Lake north of the city of Redding, more than 200 miles (322 kilometers) north of San Francisco. The huge lake is popular with vacationers, but its water level is dramatically low because of the drought.

No building damage was reported from two other northern fires, which erupted as California and the rest of the U.S. West was mired in a historic drought tied to climate change.

To the north, the Lava Fire burning partly on the flanks of Mount Shasta grew to nearly 31 square miles (80 square kilometers) and was 25% contained. Evacuation orders for communities near the city of Weed were still in effect.

The steep, rocky terrain challenged nearly 1,300 firefighters battling the blaze, which was ignited by lightning last week.

To the northeast, the Tennant Fire that broke out Monday in the Klamath National Forest and forced evacuations grew to about 15 square miles (38 square kilometers). The fire was expected to advance north toward Oregon, and its cause was being investigated.

Many of California's national parks have restrictions on campfires, cooking and smoking because of fire risks in the hot, dry summer. The parks are bracing for large crowds over the holiday weekend.

Fire authorities throughout California also have stepped up campaigns urging people not to use fireworks to celebrate the Fourth of July, citing both the explosive dangers and the threat of wildfires in the withering conditions.

The fuels are bone dry, Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby said at a news conference. We are extremely concerned about the use of fireworks of all kinds.

___

Antczak reported from Los Angeles.
Following a two-year absence, CTE Summer Camp roared back to a record enrollment and rave reviews.

For several years, the camp, put on by the staff of Clare-Gladwin Career & Technical Education, had been a summer mainstay. But unavoidable site logistics and COVID-19 left local kids camp-less the past two summers. This year, the infusion of another summer program drove the number of participants to triple digits.

"The camp was phenomenal," stated CTE Director Eric Johnson. "We had 106 kids participate; previously, we never had more than 35 or 40. The turnout was up, the kids were excited and the staff did a great job demonstrating what CTE is all about."

At the camp, held June 21-23, students had the opportunity to get hands-on in any of seven different career fields, including agricultural science, automotive technology, construction trades, criminal justice, culinary arts, digital media and education occupations (aka babysitting boot camp).

"We had kids learning how to change a tire, and swing a hammer, and drive a tractor," Johnson said. "We taught them the essentials of babysitting, the ins and outs of law enforcement, the principles of design and safety in the kitchen. We had something for everybody."

CTE is a vocational program under the auspices of Clare-Gladwin Regional Education Service District. This year, another CGRESD entity - the SPARKS program, which provides after-school and summer programming for kids in Beaverton, Clare, Farwell, Gladwin and Harrison - encouraged dozens of its students to attend the camp.

"Bringing in students from SPARKS was a real boost for our enrollment," Johnson said. "With help from SPARKS, we were fully staffed to handle the larger numbers and their involvement made the camp even better. The kids had fun, and they learned something as well."

In their written evaluation of the camp, the kids agreed, with all seven classes getting high marks and positive comments, including praise for the hands-on activities, teachers, outdoors, working with tools, and joy of learning while making friends.

 "Make the camp longer."
PARIS (AP)  Paris airport workers protesting pay cuts on Friday blocked a busy terminal at a Charles de Gaulle Airport and skirmished with police, prompting flight delays and causing travel chaos and confusion among passengers.

Police fired pepper spray to try to disperse the protesters at the 2E terminal, primarily used for international travel. An Associated Press reporter at the scene saw passengers wiping their stinging eyes and children frightened.
We need more Bob Chitesters in this world.

The man who created the PBS series, Free To Choose, with Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, and the book that followed by the same name spent much of his life advocating for personal, political, and economic freedom. Chitester, who recently lost his seven-year battle with cancer, was a man whose passions combined his many skills  as a media sciences and communications expert beginning with his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Michigan, his establishment of the state of Michigans most advanced audio/visual program of its time (early1960s) at Saginaw Buena Vista High School, his time as a tenured professor at Edinboro State Teachers College, founder and longtime general manager for WQLM  Erie, Pennsylvanias PBS Station, and his life since as a prolific entrepreneur.

One of Chitesters favorite quotes was from Bernhard Haisch: Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers.

How many of us are quick to answer questions, yet not question answers? Our country in general, and the media in particular, would benefit greatly from the presence of more Bob Chitesters  open-minded individuals who mindfully respected the profession of broadcast and print journalism and the fundamental responsibility to be transparent, balanced, accurate and fair when reporting on a story or issue, letting the viewer and reader make up his or her own mind.

Sadly, too much of our media consumption (traditional and social) today has been hijacked by partisan advocates who at times present incomplete or distorted viewpoints (or ignore a topic altogether) to further the agenda of a particular party or issue, drowning out the diversity of thought that has led to so many watershed moments in our history.

One such moment occurred in 1976, when noted Harvard Keynesian economist, John Kenneth Galbraith published his popular book, The Age of Uncertainty, which was his call for European-style political and economic socialism in the United States. The book was made into a 15-part video series by the BBC, CBC and PBS.

Chitester saw no balance to that program and that same year, he approached W. Allen Wallis, the Nixon-appointed chair of the corporation for public broadcasting (PBS) with his desire to produce a video series that would counter The Age of Uncertainty. Wallis introduced Chitester to Milton Friedman, who later that year would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Chitester convinced a reluctant Friedman and his economist wife Rose, to create Free To Choose and a life-long friendship began.

When the Free To Choose videos were completed, the Friedmans so loved the project that the release was delayed until January 1980 to give them time to finish writing a companion book. The book became an international bestseller, and it is estimated the Free To Choose television series had an initial viewership of more than 15 million people. The book changed the world by introducing Friedmans free-market principles of personal, economic and political freedom and individual responsibility. Former Warsaw Pact countries used the book to establish new governments, and economics students around the globe studied the series and book to gain an understanding of how the free market engenders prosperity. In fact, President Reagan would pay the Friedmans and Chitester perhaps the highest tribute of their professional careers when he said, Free To Choose...is a survival kit for America and freedom. While British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who, like Reagan was featured in Free To Choose, would say, Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty when it had been all but forgotten.

Later, Chitester established the Free To Choose Network, which continues to produce public television documentaries advancing the ideas of freedom, but also houses the impressive Idea Channel  recordings of more than 200 intellectual discussions including programs with 16 Nobel Prize recipients. Most recently FTCN produced and distributed Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World, hosted by Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow and The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board M ember Jason Riley. Other Chitester ventures include Stossel in the Classroom and izzit.org, the latter which produces video-based teaching materials provided at no cost to educators. More than 400,000 educators have proactively signed up for accounts with www.izzit.org, reaching over 72 million student impressions so far.

Arguably, the most powerful watershed moment of the 20th century occurred nearly 34 years ago, when President Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. On an overcast June day, he acknowledged the Soviet Union was coming to understand the importance of freedom and economic enterprise. His speech is best remembered when he declared, Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! He went on to remind the audience that capitalism and freedom has, achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind  too little food.

In the years following President Reagans speech, socialist regimes collapsed and examples like the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, once again reminded us that socialism has failed in every country in which it has been tried. Yet, even with this evidence of failure, some people remain smitten with socialist principles, including placing greater economic decision-making in the hands of the government.

A misguided and dangerous move toward a socialist agenda is currently being promoted by a vocal and growing liberal minority in the United States. As Americans, we must stand as did individuals like Chitester, who fought for diversity of thought in an open, balanced, accurate and fair forum, while also remembering the words of Margaret Thatcher: The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples money.

Dr. Kent D. MacDonald is president of Northwood University, and Dr. Timothy G. Nash is director of the McNair Center for the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at Northwood University.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - Libya and Malta have agreed to resume flights between the two countries, after establishing safety and executive arrangements, in accordance with the relevant laws of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO)
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The Libyan Coast Guard and Port Security Command Friday condemned an incident in which one of its patrol boats chased a boat carrying illegal migrants in the Mediterranean Sea without following maritime safety procedures and contrary to local and international norms and laws
LOS ANGELES (AP)  Amber Heard says she has become a mom and did it on my own terms, as a single parent.

In an Instagram post, the actor said she welcomed daughter Oonagh Paige Heard on April 8. A photo of Heard with the baby nestled against her accompanied Thursday's announcement.

I now appreciate how radical it is for us as women to think about one of the most fundamental parts of our destinies in this way, Heard said in the post. I hope we arrive at a point in which its normalized to not want a ring in order to have a crib.

She wrote that a part of me wants to uphold that my private life is none of anyones business, but added the nature of her job compels me to take control of this by revealing the birth.

Shes the beginning of the rest of my life, Heard said.

The actor has faced a tumultuous period of her life, with her 2015 to 2017 marriage to Johnny Depp involving a spate of legal actions.

Last year, Depp lost a libel case against a British newspaper that accused him of domestic violence, with a judge ruling the allegations were substantially correct. In March, a British court refused Depp permission to appeal the ruling that he assaulted Heard, saying his attempt to overturn the decision had no real prospect of success.

Depp also is suing Heard for $50 million in Virginia over a Washington Post op-ed essay that she wrote about domestic violence. The trial in that case was recently delayed until April 2022.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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The earliest Christians were common-ists. No, not communists  not modern atheistic Marxists  but followers of Jesus who sought to practice his teachings by sharing everything in common." They would sell their property and possessions to give to anyone who had need No one claimed private ownership of any of their possessions, but everything they owned was held in common (Acts 2:44,45; 4:23).

One reason Christian believers in Jerusalem could observe so communal and socialistic a practice was their conviction that the return of Jesus was going to take place within a very short time, bringing the blessings of Gods Kingdom to all the earth. As the years wore on, however, and Jesus immediate return failed to materialize, churches founded in Asia Minor, Greece and Italy relaxed such stringent requirements for membership.

Still, as late as a quarter century after Jesus crucifixion, the Apostle Paul, writing to the Christians in Corinth, could assure them that the present form of the world is passing away and the return of Jesus was now so very near, he said, that they might want to consider abstaining from sex within marriage and even from marrying itself (!) in order to prepare themselves spiritually for Jesus imminent return. (1st Corinthians chapter 7; Pauls certainty about the nearness of Jesus return can probably be attributed to a statement by Jesus that not all his original followers would die before he came back: Mark 9:1; compare Matthew 16:28).

Of course, Jesus could be exceedingly demanding and envisioned an imminent godly Kingdom on earth in which there would be neither wealth nor poverty (Luke 6:20-26) and in which no one would attempt to rule over or take advantage of others, but all would strive toward being loving servants, even slaves, of one another, as he himself felt tasked to be, even to the point of dying for the sake of the vast many (Mark 10:42-45; Isaiah 53:11-12).

In the political turmoil of today, it is regrettable that so many who claim allegiance to Jesus adamantly oppose any form of common-ism, even when practiced by democratic societies. It is disheartening to have to admit that several nations in our world today are far more responsive to Jesus communal teachings than are many American politicians who seem hell-bent on creating a government dedicated to pursuing the selfish greed they wish to impose on all the rest of us.

Boswell, a retired pastor of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) living in Normal, may be reached through Jesus Laid Bare at youtube.com.

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BLOOMINGTON  A Bloomington man on Friday was sentenced to five years in prison for aggravated criminal sexual abuse of a minor.

Eddie S. Creator, 49, pleaded guilty Friday to the accusation while appearing in McLean County court for a scheduled bench trial.

In a factual basis statement, McLean County Assistant States Attorney Mary Lawson said the preteen girl told a legal guardian that Creator had touched her inappropriately the previous night, in the early morning of Sept. 27.

He was ordered to have no contact with the victim while he is in custody or during his one year on mandatory supervised release. He also must register as a sex offender for the remainder of his life.

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Creator was given credit for 246 days stayed in the McLean County jail, as he had remained jailed in lieu of posting $15,035.

The class 2 felony charge carries a minimum of three years and a maximum of seven years in the Illinois Department of Corrections, and up to a $25,000 fine.

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SPRINGFIELD  A retired Bloomington attorney and Lincoln scholar, Guy Fraker was finally able to read two pieces of history together: a letter penned by the 16th president and one sent to him before he made it to the national stage.

Those of us who have been lucky enough to serve as caretakers for Lincoln letters and artifacts have an obligation to ensure they will be shared with the public for generations to come, Fraker said. This letter belongs in Illinois at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

The letter, which was sent from Springfield on Nov. 27, 1854, joined the museums collection Thursday morning upon Frakers donation. It will be displayed in the Treasures Gallery for one month, beginning July 7, when the current display of the Emancipation Proclamation ends.

Christina Shutt, executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, said the museum was honored Fraker believes so strongly in the ALPLMs mission that he is willing to donate this treasure.

"Mr. Fraker's gift to the library, where people will be able to see this letter and learn from it for many generations, is an act of public service very much in keeping with this Lincoln tradition," she said.

The letter was addressed to Lincolns friend Elihu N. Powell, an attorney from Peoria, as a response to an earlier note from Powell that reminded Lincoln that serving in the Illinois House would make him ineligible to run for the U.S. Senate in 1855.

Lincoln wrote, Acting on your advice, and my own judgment, I have declined accepting the office of Representative of this county.

Lincoln wrote it at a pivotal time in his life, Shutt said. Would he focus on the law or make a return to politics? His decision changed history, so its appropriate for this letter to find a home at the library and museum dedicated to telling the story of Lincolns impact on the world.

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Shutt noted this letter captures Lincoln weighing his future.

"We don't see this confident man of destiny we still often picture," she said. "This letter helps us to understand Abraham Lincoln as a man, not a myth or monument."

Fraker said he was given the letter by Marilyn Townley, widow of Judge Wayne Townley Jr., who presided over court in the McLean County courthouse.

I was ecstatic about my acquisition, he said. These things are never owned. I felt like I was a caretaker and I was entrusted with this document. So today, to have this privilege to unload that responsibility is a privilege.

Fraker said his decision to donate the letter was largely because of the help that Acquisitions Chief Ian Hunt provided in tracking down the related letter at the Library of Congress, adding he can't think of a better place for this document than the greatest Lincoln institution in the country.

Historian Paul Angle once called the letter containing Lincoln's decision to decline the Illinois House seat as in a sense, the most interesting document Lincoln ever wrote, because it sent him in the direction of the U.S. Senate, running as a Whig in 1855.

According to the museum, Lincoln withdrew from that race and gave his support to another candidate, who shared his views on restricting the spread of slavery.

Lincoln ran for the Senate seat again in 1858 as a Republican. He lost that race to Stephen Douglas but drew national attention, placing him on the path to the White House.

Contact Kelsey Watznauer at (309) 820-3254. Follow her on Twitter: @kwatznauer.

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PHILADELPHIA (AP)  The seven justices who reversed Bill Cosbys conviction this week spent months debating whether he had a secret agreement with a prosecutor that tainted his 2018 criminal sexual assault conviction.

In the end, Pennsylvanias highest court ruled that a district attorney had induced Cosby to give incriminating testimony in 2005 for a lawsuit, with the promise that no criminal charges would be filed. Then, a decade later, another prosecutor used it against him  a fundamental violation of his Fifth Amendment rights. Americas Dad walked out of prison Wednesday and won't face any further trials in the case.

The public outcry over Cosbys sudden release three years into a potential 10-year sentence was swift, with #MeToo activists worried it would have a chilling effect on survivors. And lawyers for another high-profile man convicted of sexual assault, Harvey Weinstein, praised the decision.

But criminal law experts believe the court acted reasonably in finding that a prosecutors word should be honored, even by a successor. One called the ruling a wakeup call for prosecutors who might try to quietly resolve a case without a paper trail, or make a deal over a handshake.

It probably would have been much better lawyering to get it all in writing, Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, a former prosecutor, said of the hidden deal in the Cosby case. Its a teachable moment, I think, for prosecutors across the nation. Its a big lesson.

Levenson, too, fears the quick takeaway is that another celebrity gets away with a crime. More deeply, she said, the case illustrates the need for legal agreements that are open, fair and transparent.

For survivors of sexual assault, its got to be another incredibly upsetting, frustrating moment, she said. So (there are) good lessons for prosecutors and hard lessons for survivors.

The court heard arguments in December. On Wednesday, a majority of the justices, 6-1, found Cosbys case should be overturned. But the justices split 4-2 on whether he should go free or face a third trial. The two dissenting justices questioned if Cosby had ever really been promised immunity  or whether an abuse of power led to former Montgomery County prosecutor Bruce Castors odd and ever-shifting explanations of his promise to Cosby.

They urged their colleagues to condemn the tactics, lest others follow suit and make promises that later entrap defendants who agree to talk.

We should reject Castors misguided notion outright and declare that district attorneys do not possess this effective pardon power, Justice Kevin Dougherty wrote in a partial dissent.

Castor, testifying for the defense soon after Cosbys arrest in late 2015, said he had promised Cosby's lawyer in 2005 that the actor would never be charged over his encounter with Andrea Constand, in part so that he could help her wage a lawsuit against Cosby.

No legal documents were drafted. No immunity agreements went before a judge. Even Castors top assistant, who had led the initial investigation, said she knew nothing about it. Neither did Constands lawyer, according to testimony at the sometimes surreal preliminary hearing in February 2016.

Castor said he discussed the agreement with a Cosby lawyer who had since died. And he said he issued a signed press release to announce the end of the investigation. Several courts have since parsed the wording of that press release, which opines that both parties in the case could be seen in a less than flattering light, and cautions that Castor would reconsider this decision should the need arise.

Constand, in the wake of that decision, sued Cosby in federal court.

In the depositions that followed, the trailblazing actor made lurid admissions about his sexual encounters with a string of young women. He acknowledged giving them drugs or alcohol beforehand, while he stayed sober and in control. The list included Constand, who said she took what she thought were herbal products at Cosbys direction, only to find herself semiconscious on his couch.

Cosby, in the deposition, famously said he ventured into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection as Constand lay still.

Neither he nor his lawyers ever asserted his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself during four days of sworn testimony.

Cosby wouldve had to have been nuts to say those things if there was any chance he couldve been prosecuted, Castor testified at the 2016 hearing. He said his goal in steering the case to civil court was to find Constand an alternate form of justice.

I was hopeful that I had made Ms. Constand a millionaire, said Castor, who later represented former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, where he was acquitted of inciting the violent mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

In 2015, a federal judge unsealed some of Cosby's testimony upon a request from The Associated Press, and Castors successor reopened the case. Judge Steven ONeill allowed some of the statements to be used at trial.

It was that unusual sequence of events that troubled the Pennsylvania high court  even though ONeill and a lower appeals courts had found Castors talk of a non-prosecution agreement not credible.

Whatever their view of such blanket promises, the Supreme Court justices found that Cosby and his lawyers relied on it in giving the deposition.

Therefore, the principle of fundamental fairness that undergirds due process of law in our criminal justice system demands that the promise be enforced, Justice David N. Wecht wrote for the four-person majority, which included all three of the high courts female judges.

The panel avoided ruling on the thorny issue of how many witnesses should be allowed to testify about a defendant's prior bad acts in a criminal case  an issue many lawyers hoped they would clarify.

ONeill had allowed just one other accuser to testify at Cosbys first trial in 2017, but upped the number to five at the retrial the following year, when Cosby was convicted.

Everyone was watching this case for the other evidence ruling. This (ruling) came out of the blue, said Jules Epstein, a Temple University law professor.

At least one justice, Thomas Saylor, would have sent the case back for a new trial over the other accuser issue, according to his solo opinion. But it become moot when the majority agreed to bar any future prosecutions in the case.

Washington lawyer Joseph Cammarata represented several accusers in defamation suits filed against Cosby, which his insurer settled after the 2018 conviction. He regrets that some people see the ruling as a vindication of the actor.

They havent rejected the allegations of the 60-plus people who asserted that Cosby assaulted them. They havent rejected the five people that testified. Nor have they rejected the jurys verdict that Cosby was guilty of sexual assault-related charges," Cammarata said.



Follow Maryclaire Dale on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Maryclairedale

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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In the days after a TV station aired disturbing video of police barging into Anjanette Youngs home and handcuffing her while she was naked, Mayor Lori Lightfoot emailed Law Department staff urging them to show more empathy to victims.

Damage has been done, confidence shattered and the disclosures over the week have caused anger, confusion, and hurt. This goes way beyond any single case because important trust has been lost. People are hurting, Lightfoot wrote in the Dec. 17 email obtained through an open records request.

The challenges have been exacerbated by the Law Departments handling of this matter over the last few days. I know you all work hard, but I fear some important values have been lost. We can never lose sight of the people who are alleging being victimized by city actors.

But while Lightfoot personally apologized to Young for the errant raid and has vowed to resolve her lawsuit against the city, records and interviews suggest her administration has continued to play hardball in defending the police departments actions.

Its a pattern that began with the Lightfoot administrations decision to deny Youngs request for access to police footage from the wrongful 2019 raid on her Near West Side home and continued last month with the mayors lawyers moving to dismiss Youngs case.

Legal documents filed by the city in June show Lightfoot officials have downplayed one of the more horrifying elements of the bungled raid, how long Young was left exposed as officers swarmed her home while acting on a bad tip about a felon with a gun.

In handling Youngs case, Lightfoot faces a challenging political and legal dynamic. She wants to show empathy toward Young while also overseeing a Law Department charged with mounting a defense in a case that could cost the city millions of dollars.

But some wonder why the administration isnt doing more to live up to the mayors promises.

Whats morally and (ethically) right or appropriate shouldnt be at odds with any actions our city is taking in order to protect itself, said Far North Side Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, who has pushed an ordinance to impose tighter restrictions on search warrants that is opposed by Lightfoot.

Can we do both? I think we can, Hadden said. I think folks with maybe more legal experience and more legal practice are so used to finding loopholes or fine print or utilizing every particular legal tool in order to obfuscate whats really happening or have as small a liability as possible. That may be what theyre trained to do but  maybe its not the way we should act.

For her part, Lightfoot recently said she wasnt responsible for the failure to reach a settlement agreement with Young and instead cast blame on the other side.

You cant settle with someone who doesnt want to settle, she said after a heated City Council meeting in late June.

In response to questions about how it handled the case, Lightfoots Law Department released a statement this week saying the administration is dedicated to bringing the litigation in this matter to an equitable and expeditious resolution so that Ms. Young can continue her process of healing and move forward.

However, the city also said that Youngs attorney walked away from a mediation that would have fairly addressed Ms. Youngs traumatic experience, but also (been) fair to the taxpayers.

Lightfoot administration lawyers have repeatedly minimized the harm Young experienced during the raid, even as Lightfoot publicly condemned the incident.

The citys recently filed motion to dismiss the fact Young was handcuffed while naked and said she was escorted to her bedroom to get fully dressed about 10 minutes after officers determined their target wasnt present.

Though (police) attempted to cover her with a nearby blanket seconds after handcuffing her, the blanket did not stay fully closed in front, city lawyers noted.

City lawyers also said in the motion that Youngs lawsuit failed to establish a legal wrong.

Lightfoot lawyers argued in December that they withheld the video from Young because they believed it was an attempt to provide the media with the body worn camera to paint an inaccurate picture of what happened during the subject search warrant.

Lightfoots former corporation counsel, Mark Flessner, shrugged off the incident during a staff call with Lightfoot the morning after CBS-2 first aired disturbing footage from the raid last December, sources told the Tribune.

After a staffer asked about the case, Flessner said it wasnt a big deal and noted officers let Young get dressed after she was handcuffed without any clothes on, sources said.

Lightfoot kept Flessner on board for days after the remark, which has not been previously reported, but accepted his resignation the following weekend as the scandal snowballed. Flessner this week declined to comment.

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Youngs video became national news in large part because Lightfoot officials sought an order to prevent CBS-2 from airing the footage and requested sanctions against the plaintiff, Young, for sharing video of the raid with media. Lightfoot lawyers later said they only wanted sanctions against Youngs lawyer but dropped the request altogether as the scandal spiraled.

Previously unreported emails obtained by the Tribune through open records requests show Lightfoot was deeply involved in the citys public response to the botched police raid, urging her staff to come up with a social media plan, drafting statements and asking to be booked on a Black radio station to mitigate the fallout.

A day after Lightfoots lawyers filed the motion, a CBS producer emailed Lightfoots then-deputy press secretary, Pat Mullane, to request an interview with Lightfoot. In the email, the producer said CBS planned to ask questions about this last minute court action to keep the video concealed and the city denying Youngs FOIA for her video.

These actions raise serious questions about transparency, the producer wrote.

Mullane also said in the emails to staff that he would tell the producer they cant accommodate an interview since this is ongoing litigation.

Mullane sent an email to fellow staff members saying Heres what I think the mayor should say. The rest of that email is redacted. Former Law Department spokeswoman Kathleen Fieweger responded by copying two other city lawyers, Caryn Jacobs and Victoria Benson, for their views on talking to them even (off the record).

As the day unfolded, Lightfoots press team worked to understand and contain the situation. Former Lightfoot communications director Michael Crowley emailed colleagues, Were working with Law on a detailed ticktock to make sure were all on the same page about the actual details here.

By early afternoon, Fieweger and a city lawyer had assembled a timeline and a litigation history, though the city redacted those emails.

At an unrelated news conference, Lightfoot said she couldnt comment on her administrations request for sanctions over the release of the video by Youngs team.

A federal judge put rules in place, Lightfoot said. Its for that judge to determine whether or not that was appropriate.

The mayor also noted the raid took place weeks before she was elected, though it was her administration that tried to keep the video from being made public. Later, Lightfoot released a statement saying she had no knowledge of the matter involving Young before CBS aired video of the errant raid.

That statement wasnt true, however. Lightfoot later acknowledged that she had been informed about the botched raid in 2019, though she downplayed what she was told.

The next morning, Lightfoot circled back to ask if the statements went out and added, We need to put together a social media response as well.

But as the story continued to unfold that week, Lightfoot worked to stem the public relations hit by emailing top staffers a long statement she wanted them to distribute.

If anyone has any questions or revisions then we should do a call, Lightfoot wrote.

Before her customary post- City Council news conference, Lightfoot emailed her then-chief of staff, top city lawyers and communications staffers, political strategist Joanna Klonsky and her pollster, Jason McGrath, with a statement she planned to give.

Here is the statement that I intend to give at the 2:00 presser, Lightfoot said. Sorry for the short turn around, but I want only red flags.

Classen, her chief of staff, responded, No flags. Looks good. The pollster, McGrath, said he wouldnt change a word.

At the news conference, Lightfoot apologized to Young and said she couldve been a victim of the same mistreatment by police. But the news conference turned into a disaster after she falsely denied that her administration withheld the video from Young, setting off another round of negative media coverage.

Lightfoot emailed Flessner and other staffers to request half an hour the next morning to address all of the law department lawyers who handle any cases involving the police department.

Just before 10:30 p.m., Lightfoot emailed Flessner and other staffers to request half an hour the next morning to address all of the law department lawyers who handle any cases involving the police department.

That evening, Lightfoot emailed staffers to ask for time on WVONs morning show and asked a staffer to set up a call with the black faith community so that they can hear from me tomorrow.

By the time Lightfoot next addressed a news conference, she was completely apologetic  even apologizing to a Tribune reporter for attacking his credibility.

Lightfoot also made waves internally when she didnt endorse Flessner after she was asked about potential resignations in the Law Department. A reporter tweeted her noncommittal answer, which Flessner sent to Lightfoot in an email with a question mark in the subject line, records show.

That Sunday, Flessner submitted his resignation to Lightfoot in an email signed Your friend.

Days later, the immediate crisis began to pass as Lightfoot apologized to Young during a face-to-face meeting. Afterward, the mayor and Young released a joint statement pledging to work together on bringing change to the police department.

But even as Lightfoot continued her public relations effort, her pick to replace Flessner, Celia Meza, revised the joint statement with Young to say problematic issues led to the errant raid, rather than systemic problems, as Youngs attorney proposed.

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Businesses and labor unions joined forces Thursday in saying negotiations over clean-energy legislation that would result in the largest rate hike in Illinois history must slow down and become more transparent.

The coalition, which included the Illinois Manufacturers' Association, Illinois Retail Merchants Association and representatives of trade unions and agriculture, said the as-yet unfinalized bill would impose a minimum of $700 million in annual energy rate increases and unnecessarily jeopardize thousands of good-paying jobs.

"This massive electric rate hike couldn't come at a worse time for Illinois businesses and families, who will be asked to pay significantly higher monthly electrical bills," said Mark Denzler, president and chief executive officer of the manufacturers' association.

They used a Statehouse news conference to criticize what they believe are details of a bill backed by Gov. JB Pritzker and being negotiated with General Assembly lawmakers to promote alternative energy sources and reduce fossil-fuel emissions by eventually requiring the closure of all coal-fired plants in the next 14 to 24 years.

Supporters of an energy bill, including environmental groups, want legislation to force reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions and other pollutants, promote transitions to wind, solar and other alternative forms of energy and preserve jobs at money-losing Exelon nuclear power plants in northern Illinois.

Denzler said business groups that have heard details of issues discussed in negotiations over an energy bill fear the legislation would result in large surcharges on electric bills to help pay for the legislation's programs and requirements.

Small commercial users, such as hardware stores and restaurants, could see electric bills rise almost 8% annually as a result, Denzler said.

Large commercial users such as grocery and big-box retail stores could see rates rise 10%, and large industrial users could see annual increases of between 10.5 and 12%, he said.

Central and southern Illinois residential customers could see their monthly electric bills rise about $7 per month, while average residential bills in the Chicago area could rise between $7 and $10 per month, Denzler said.

"Because this proposal is being drafted in secret, there's no telling what the final price tag will be," he said.

Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh said in an emailed statement after the news conference: "Bipartisan working groups have met dozens of times over the last year and convened key stakeholders to negotiate the various proposals made in the current draft of the energy bill. The governor has been clear that any energy legislation must address climate change by making meaningful progress toward moving Illinois to a renewable energy future while also protecting consumers, particularly low-income consumers."

Abudayyeh said Illinois on Thursday was named "the No. 1 most sustainable state in the nation" by Site Selection magazine.

"This distinction is an important selling point to potential businesses looking to put roots down in a state that demonstrates its commitment to the environment and provides them opportunities to contribute to a clean-energy future," she said.

John Patterson, spokesman for Illinois Senate President Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, said in a written statement, "We look forward to continued discussions as we work to find the proper balance for a reliable, renewable and affordable energy future in Illinois."

The state Senate and House adjourned their spring session in June without taking any votes on a final energy bill.

Pritzker said in mid-June he hoped to call lawmakers back to Springfield within a month for a special session to finalize an energy bill he would be willing to sign into law.

It's unclear when or whether a special session on energy legislation will take place.

Chad Goldschmidt, vice president of the Southwestern Illinois Building Trades Council, said more than 2,000 working families depend on union jobs connected with City Water, Light and Power's coal-fired units in Springfield and at the coal-fired Prairie State Energy Campus in southern Illinois' Washington County.

The plants already are working to reduce their carbon emissions and shouldn't have to close as early as 2035 under a proposal being considered for the bill, Goldschmidt said.

Pritzker has proposed a compromise that would allow CWLP and Prairie Energy to keep operating their coal-fired units until 2045 if they adopted technologies that remove 90% of carbon emissions by late 2034.

Rick Terven, legislative and political director of the Illinois Pipe Trades Association, said almost 30,000 union members work at and help maintain fossil-fuel plants around the state that would be forced to close under the bill.

"We know the energy sector is rapidly changing and understand the need to transition to cleaner power in Illinois," he said. "However, our concern is the current proposal is so aggressive and unrealistic in forcing plant closures that it will cause unnecessary pain for many workers, businesses and communities across the state."

Terven said he has been told lawmakers want to provide a "just transition" for fossil-fuel workers to other jobs or retirement. "Unfortunately, we think the current proposal falls very short of this goal," he said.

"We are asking the negotiators of the legislation to more fully acknowledge the effect the bill will have on working families," Terven said. "This is such a massive issue. It's not one we can just wing it and go back later and fix the mistakes. He have to get it right the first time."

Jeff Dorries, chief financial officer of Alton Steel, an employee-owned steel mill with more than 250 workers, said the energy bill would threaten the company's ability to grow. The proposal would cost the company at least $500,000 more for electricity on an annual basis, he said.

"It is important that any bill does not take away one of the biggest competitive advantages that Illinois manufacturers have," Dorries said.

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Illinois officials will pick the first $1 million winner in its COVID-19 vaccine lottery on July 8. Three $150,000 college scholarship winners also will be drawn that day.

The $10 million vaccine promotion in Illinois, called "All In For The Win," is designed to thank people who already have received at least one dose of vaccine and as an incentive for people who have not gotten a shot to get one, according to Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

"It's our way of saying to those who haven't been vaccinated, 'Please join us,'" the governor said in mid-June. "Vaccines are incredibly effective, and they keep you protected, but they also make your community safer. It's great that your grandma or grandpa has been vaccinated, but you can make them even safer by getting vaccinated, too."

The Illinois Lottery will handle the drawings, which will continue throughout the summer. All Illinois residents who have been vaccinated are automatically entered to win.

The prize money will be paid from federal grants Illinois has received to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

The $1 million drawing on July 8 will be among three $1 million jackpots and 40 $100,000 cash prizes. After July 8, three winners of $100,000 cash prizes will be chosen every Monday between July 12 and Aug. 16 from a statewide pool.

On Aug. 12, 22 winners from regional drawings will be picked. Two winners will be drawn from each of the 11 regions in Pritzker's Restore Illinois reopening plan.

Two $1 million cash prizes will be drawn Aug. 26 from a statewide pool.

Three $150,000 scholarship winners will be drawn from a statewide pool July 8.

On Aug. 26, 17 Illinois students ages 12 to 17, one from each Restore Illinois region and six additional students from a statewide pool, will receive $150,000 scholarships. The students can use the scholarships at public and private four- and two-year colleges, vocational and technical schools across the United States and some schools abroad.

Scholarship awards must be used before a student turns 26, and can't be used for K-12 educational expenses.

You must be an Illinois resident 18 or older to receive cash prizes and between 12 and 17 for scholarship awards.

You must have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in Illinois, except for vaccines administered at certain federal facilities. People who received vaccine at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs facilities will be included in the lottery.

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Eligibility doesn't depend on immigration status.

People who are incarcerated in Illinois Department of Corrections facilities who have been vaccinated are eligible for the lottery.

Employees of the governor's office, lieutenant governor's office, Illinois Lottery, designated employees of the Illinois Department of Public Health and employees of designated state vendors aren't eligible to win.

About 7.5 million Illinoisans have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. That represents 59% of the state's total population.

Among the population 18 and older, 7.06 million Illinoisans, or 71.7% of the adult population, have received at least one dose.

About 440,000 Illinoisans between 12 and 17 have received at least one dose.

Entries for people who get their first shot after July 1 will be added to the pool for drawings.

Winners who don't wish to accept a prize may decline when they are contacted by the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Winners can choose to remain anonymous. For winners from communities with populations of 20,000 or more, the locations of winners' hometowns will be published. For winners from smaller communities, only the winners' home counties will be published.

Taxes will automatically be deducted from winnings. Outstanding obligations to the state and child support commitments will be deducted from prizes if winners owe any such debts.

Illinois Isn't the only state to offer incentives. Illinois' promotions have included thousands of free tickets to Six Flags and free target rounds at the World Shooting and Recreational Complex in Sparta. It's unclear how successful these incentives have been in leading to more vaccinations.

The Associated Press reported recently that Ohio's vaccine lottery, worth millions in incentives, came to a close in June while the state struggled to meet 50% vaccinated despite early success.

Incentive programs also fell short of their goals in West Virginia and Colorado, while other states including Oregon and California have seen some success.

West Virginia included pickup trucks and hunting rifles in its giveaways.
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield has acquired an 1854 letter handwritten by Lincoln to a Peoria attorney showing he had his eyes set on bigger political prizes much earlier than historians believed.

ALPLM officials announced the acquisition of the letter from Bloomington attorney, author and Lincoln collector Guy Fraker at a ceremony at the library Thursday.

"Those of us who have been lucky enough to serve as caretakers for Lincoln letters and artifacts have an obligation to ensure they will be shared with the public for generations to come," Fraker said. "This letter belongs in Illinois at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum."

Fraker, 82, was joined at the ceremony by his wife, Ruth Ann; his son, Matthew, a Bloomington veterinarian; three of his grandchildren and family friend Kathryn Harris, who retired as division manager for library services at the presidential library in 2015.

The Lincoln letter, dated Nov. 27, 1854, has been authenticated by several sources and was part of the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln which was printed in the 1950s, ALPLM officials said.

"It is the real deal," ALPLM acquisitions chief Ian Hunt said.

The letter is an answer to a Nov. 16, 1854, letter to Lincoln from Elihu N. Powell, who Lincoln knew from traveling on the Eighth Judicial Circuit in central Illinois where Lincoln practiced law.

Lincoln had been elected to the Illinois State Legislature on Nov. 7, 1854, but Powell, in the letter, reminded Lincoln that serving in the House would make him ineligible to run for an open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in early 1855.

U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures until 1913.

Lincoln, , may have been informed about the decision earlier, but Powell in his letter to Lincoln cited the Illinois Constitution about the matter.

"Powell lays it out in detail that this is not going to fly," Hunt said.

Lincoln responded to Powell: "Acting on your advice, and my own judgment, I have declined accepting the office of Representative of this county."

Lincoln added he had run for the legislative seat as a favor to a political ally, Richard Yates, the one-time governor of Illinois who served in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.

"This is a fascinating letter, an important letter," said Christian McWhirter, ALPLM's Lincoln historian. "It captures Lincoln at a critical moment in his political evolution. It's Lincoln rolling up his shirt sleeves and wading into Illinois politics."

Christina Shutt, executive director of the ALPLM, said the letter helped the public "understand Abraham Lincoln as a man, not a myth or a monument" and weighing his options as a public servant.

Hunt said the passage earlier in 1854 of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which basically allowed territories to determine whether they wanted to enter the union as slave states or free states, infuriated Lincoln and led to a number of speeches by him across the state, including one in Springfield.

Whether Lincoln was a front runner for the Senate seat in 1855 "depends on who you talk to," Hunt said. On the first ballot, Lincoln, running a member of the Whig Party, had the most votes, Hunt added, but Lincoln never secured a majority and Lyman Trumball was eventually elected on the 10th ballot.

"It's a setback for him, but he begins embracing the new Republican party," Hunt said of Lincoln. "He's re-gearing, re-vamping."

Lincoln ran again for a U.S. Senate seat in 1858 and lost to Stephen A. Douglas, but the high profile campaign, including a series of debates, vaulted Lincoln to the presidency two years later.

Hunt said the ALPLM has about 1,700 original manuscripts written by Lincoln, but that there are "a lot of Lincoln documents out there still in private hands. They're all over and they turn up in the darnedest places."

That made Fraker's gift all the more special, Schutt said.

"We are honored that Mr. Fraker believes so strongly in the ALPLM's mission that he is willing to donate this treasure," she added. "It is a generous act."

Fraker, the author of "Lincoln's Ladder to the Presidency: The Eighth Judicial Circuit," purchased the letter from Marilyn Townley, the daughter-in-law of the late Wayne C. Townley Sr., who originally had the letter.

Fraker said he didn't know where Wayne C. Townley, also a Bloomington attorney, got the letter.

Fraker kept the letter at home kept tucked away with other documents and not on display.

Fraker has two pleadings, one from Champaign County and and the other from Tazewell County, signed by Lincoln.

The letter, Fraker said, has "never gotten the recognition by historians that I thought it should."

Lincoln author and Illinois State Historian Paul Angle noted in an accompanying letter Fraker donated to the ALPLM it was "in a sense, the most interesting document Lincoln ever wrote."

"We knew nearly a century ago how incredibly important this letter was," Hunt said, "and now it's coming home to where it belongs."

"These things are never owned," Fraker said of the Lincoln letter. "It was rare privilege to become its caretaker."

The letter will go on display in the museum's Treasures Gallery for one month starting Wednesday.

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In the 2020 election, I almost voted for a candidate from Oregon's Progressive Party. It was my first time voting since coming of age, and I was severely disheartened by the experience, if not all that surprised.

You see, my Progressive candidate in all honesty had no chance of winning in the general election because independent and third-party candidates are suppressed by the Democratic and Republican parties. It often feels like the country is divided into Democratic and Republican sections with a tiny percent of voters in the middle that can't decide. At least, that's the narrative that I've been taught my whole life. But it couldn't be more wrong.

Democrats and Republicans have a monopoly  or more like a duopoly  on politics. These two monolithic parties shut out independent voters and other parties in uncompetitive ways. Their most blatant strategy of maintaining control over the government is through closed primaries.

Forty percent of the country. That's roughly how many Americans identify as neither Democratic nor Republican. On the other hand, about 30 percent of Americans identify as a Democrat and another 30 percent identify as a Republican, according to FiveThirtyEight. But when you look at national and local governments, Democrats and Republicans consistently dominate 100 percent of the seats.

No wonder I was disheartened about voting for an independent or third-party candidate. For voters like me, it's an uphill battle to elect leaders from different parties even if they have popular support, simply because of the way our elections are run.

Independent and third-party voters are shut out in closed primaries, which are often the elections that really matter. That's why every election year, the Democratic and Republican parties tell these voters to join their party if they want a say.

But independents and third-party voters don't want to join a major party in order to vote. Why should they? These are taxpayer-funded elections after all. The fact that independent voters continue to grow in number every year is testament to the fact that their strategy isn't working, it is just plunging us deeper into political dysfunction.

We often underestimate the impact that primaries have on the political playing field, but as the country becomes more and more polarized and sinks deeper and deeper into its liberal or conservative communities, many cities and counties that lean left or right practically guarantee that whoever wins their primary election will win in the general election. That means that while third-party and unaffiliated voters might feel as though their vote counts in the general election, the truth is that the winning candidate was already decided in the primary election.

To me, the single most frustrating thing about a two-party, closed primary government is what it does to our elected leaders. It reinforces the "us vs. them" mentality and encourages radicalization. I've seen our political leaders cater to their polarized voters, as these voters are the most likely to donate and show up to the polls. Once these far right and far left leaders are put in the same building, compromising on policy becomes practically impossible.

Moreover, independent candidates and third parties face a nearly impossible battle of competing with Republicans and Democrats for a variety of reasons, including the spoiler effect. This is when voters don't vote for their preferred candidate, and instead vote for a less preferred but more mainstream candidate simply to prevent their least preferred candidate from winning.

Instead, we should have one big open primary where all parties and voters could give their input, instead of just the 60 percent of voters who are either Republican or Democratic.

That could be coming sooner than you think. More and more young Americans are registering as independents than ever before. We are tired of thinking only left and right. We think left, right, forward, backward, down and up. With open primaries and ranked-choice voting campaigns sprouting up, we are approaching a more representative democracy that benefits everyone, not just the political duopolies.

Jared Garson is a student at Willamette University and the Oregon student ambassador for Students for Open Primaries.

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Chicago voters knew they were getting someone tough in Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor and early 2018 entrant to the mayors race.

She yearned to take on Rahm Emanuel  his record, his backers, his money, his power. It wasnt until he made the surprise announcement he would not seek reelection that the field of candidates blew open with the less brave  a half-dozen other mayoral hopefuls who jumped in only when the well-financed incumbent jumped out.

What voters didnt know is that they also were getting in Lori Lightfoot someone with a tendency toward the thin-skinned, the defensive, the short-tempered. And no, those arent personality quirks assigned to female leaders that would be treasured in a man. They are traits that interfere with advancing the goals of any politician, boss, CEO.

Lightfoot would have more wins on her policy agenda if she could better manage relationships. Instead, she battles with those from whom she needs support  from Chicago aldermen to state lawmakers to her own staff and even rank-and-file police officers, a constituency she desperately needs to help keep the city safe but for whom she offers little public support.

This is not a recipe for success. Halfway through her term, Chicagoans deserve better.

A recent City Council meeting, which had to be adjourned, once again put Lightfoots flare for the defensive on display. As aldermen maneuvered to stall her appointment of corporation counsel in an obvious attempt to yank her chain, she took the bait and got into a public argument with Alderman Jeanette Taylor, 20th.

Later during a radio interview, Taylor said she told the mayor to get your hand out of my face and lower your voice. Taylor said she told her: You know what? You are the problem. Ever since COVID, you lost your mind. You dont want to work with nobody. You dont know how to talk to people. Every time we try to do something for Black people on this council, you block it.

Lightfoot started out as the outspoken, independent leader voters wanted. She pushed for the removal of Alderman Edward Burke, 14th, as the influential Finance Committee chairman and shook up other positions on the council. She was such a political novice, she was uncomfortable in her first budget negotiation horse-trading with aldermen over projects, money and attention. I dont buy votes, she said at the time.

She managed an unruly Chicago Teachers Union strike, albeit clumsily; beat back attempts by the CTU to prioritize nonschool issues on its agenda; and handled a scandal under former police Superintendent Eddie Johnson by firing him.

But by the following year during budget talks, she reportedly told aldermen who were opposing her spending plan dont come to me for (expletive) for the next three years.

When she grew frustrated at past-deadline memos sent to her by staff, she ripped one up, took a photo of the shards of paper, and sent it back.

Heres my new practice for memos that come at the last minute, she emailed the memo writer. As I noted, I want decisions memos no later than 48 hours before the decision is needed and I have directed (staff) to reject all efforts to bring things to me directly that skirt these rules. I have asked nicely, now I am done.

To reporters, she used the anniversary of her second year in office to grant interviews only to Black and brown reporters, which attracted national scrutiny and for which she is now being sued  and taxpayers covering the costs.

She said she dropped her Chicago Tribune subscription due to what she considered unfair coverage. She has ranted at reporters and editors in private venting sessions; Emanuel did that too.

She has been inconsistent with her expectations of the Police Department: The city hasnt kept up with reforms mandated under a federal consent decree; she was late pushing a policy change on foot pursuits until two police fatal shootings; she called for firing police officers who gave middle fingers to unruly, shouting protesters last summer  but she also told spewed at epithet at President Donald Trump during a partisan fight over COVID-19 protocols; and now due to violent crime unfolding across the city, her police officers are working 12-hour shifts, no time off  and retiring in record numbers that could further destabilize the citys safety.

Her Springfield legislative record suffers from a lack of relationship-building. She was unable to stop bills empowering the strike capability of CTU, enhancing firefighter pensions, and instituting an elected school board. Under her watch, Chicagos mayor is about to lose control of the school system, a setup in place for some 26 years.

If Lightfoot wants to improve Chicago by implementing her agenda, shes going to need another term as mayor. And if she wants another term as mayor, shes going to have to tone down the impulses that make her difficult to work with.

There is a line between being principled, which shed say she is, and being impractical.

Lightfoot routinely crosses it  to the detriment of the city shes been hired to serve.

Chicago Tribune

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Photo: (Photo : Noberto Duarte/Getty Images)

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has updated the guidelines for getting a COVID-19 vaccine while pregnant or breastfeeding amid reports that these contain "toxic" spike proteins which could get into the bloodstream or breastmilk and passed onto the babies.

The agency believes that vaccination is still recommended for pregnant or breastfeeding moms to prevent severe COVID-19 infection. Based on how vaccines work, the CDC said that these are unlikely to trigger a dangerous side effect on mothers and their children.

However, the CDC also said that data regarding the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine while pregnant or breastfeeding is limited. The center updated its guidelines to state that clinical trials for pregnant or breastfeeding moms are either "underway or planned" with various vaccine manufacturers.

Read: Pregnant Doctor Explains Reason Why She's Getting the COVID Vaccine

The CDC also revealed that vaccine studies on pregnant animals and their babies resulted in no safety concerns. The test subjects received three brands of vaccines: Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.

mRNA Vaccines a Big Mistake?

It comes as a virus immunologist in Canada sounded off an alarm to suggest that experts might have made a mistake with the spike proteins in mRNA vaccines like Moderna and Pfizer. Byram Bridle of University of Guelph's Ontario Veterinary College said in a radio interview that while spike proteins target antigen to kill the virus, it's also a pathogenic protein.

Bridle's statements were picked up by various anti-vaccine organizations across the globe. However, many experts have debunked his claims saying that there is no data suggesting spike proteins are toxic. Other scientists also said that Bridle might have misinterpreted recently published studies on vaccines.

Jason McLellan, a biologist at the University of Texas at Austin said that Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson have encoded spike proteins that are "tethered to the surface of the cell."

"It is not secreted and thus does not float through the body," he added.

The CDC also stated that Moderna and Pfizer vaccines cannot enter the cells, which means it doesn't flow through the bloodstream. On the other hand, the Johnson & Johnson is a viral vector vaccine that delivers instructions to the cells in the body. In other parts of the world, many pregnant women have been inoculated with this vaccine without any negative outcomes to the mother or the baby.

Discuss Options with Your Doctor

Mothers planning to get the COVID-19 vaccine while pregnant or breastfeeding are advised to discuss their options with their health care provider to be better informed. The CDC said that getting a jab is still a personal choice but having discussions with a doctor could help with their decision.

Related Article: COVID Vaccine During Pregnancy Does Not Lead to Infertility, Says Doctors

Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health announced that it will begin the MOMI-VAX trial involving pregnant and postpartum mothers given the lack of large-scale studies in this area. NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. said that this trial will fill the gaps on getting a vaccine while pregnant or breastfeeding. The trial will be conducted across 20 clinical research sites in the U.S. for 12 months.
Photo: (Photo : Ronald Plett/Pixabay)

A teenager, who was convicted of stabbing her friend in the shocking Slender Man case from 2014, has been ordered for release from the mental hospital after she petitioned the Wisconsin court to let her return to society since she has been making progress with her treatment.

Anissa Weier, now 19, has been granted a conditional release by Waukesha County Judge Michael Bohren on July 1, after she told the court in March that she was ready to "become a productive member of society." The teenager also said that she has "exhausted all the resources" she could benefit from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute to make her better.

However, the judge said that Weier will still remain at the mental institution for the next 60 days as he ordered state officials to devise her release plan. Weier was asked to return to court in September to hear the conditions of her release.

What is the Slender Man Case?

In 2014, Weier and her friend, Morgan Geyser, tricked another friend, Payton Leutner, into joining them at a slumber party in the forest. They were all 12 years old at that time.

Read Also: North Carolina Teen Pleads Guilty in Stabbing Older Sister

In the woods, Weier and Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times and left her to bleed out in the open field. Leutner tried to crawl by the roadside and was discovered by a cyclist. She recovered from her wounds after a week of treatments in the hospital.

According to reports, Weier and Geyser were obsessed with a creepy internet sensation called the Slender Man and they stabbed their friend to appease this fictional character, which first appeared as an internet meme in 2009. During their trial in 2017, Weier said that they believed the Slender Man would attack them or their loved ones if they didn't kill Leutner.

Weier was sentenced to 25 years at an institution after she entered a plea of guilty to second-degree intentional homicide. Medical experts also testified that the teenager suffered from auditory and visual hallucinations. On the other hand, Geyser received a minimum of a 40-year sentence in a mental health facility.

An Immature Mind

Despite her impending release, state prosecutors believe that Weier is still a danger to society and should serve the remainder of the sentence in an institution as her "mind is still immature." The prosecutors also said that Weier could still be easily influenced.

In 2019, Leutner spoke with ABC after five years of keeping quiet and said that she treated Geyser as her best friend but didn't like Weier because she was cruel. However, Leutner tried to stick the friendship out with Weier since she became close to Geyser.

Related Article: Teens Participate in "George Floyd Challenge": Police Investigates Posts, Treats Them As Hate Crime

Leutner believes it was Weier who convinced Geyser about "appeasing" the Slender Man. The victim reflected that Weier and Geyser together are a "toxic combination." However, she also said that has made her peace with what happened to her and that her scars will "fade eventually."

In her appeal to the judge, Weier said she deeply regrets causing Leutner agony, fear and pain. She also said that she will make sure not to get ill again and will be responsible for her actions when she re-enters society.
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A rather surprising report has surfaced stating that Qualcomm Inc's new chief thinks that by next year his company will have just the chip for laptop makers wondering how they can compete with Apple, which last year introduced laptops using a custom-designed central processor chip that boasts longer battery life.

Longtime processor suppliers Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices have no chips as energy efficient as Apple's. Qualcomm Chief Executive Cristiano Amon told Reuters late yesterday that he believes his company can have the best chip on the market, with help from a team of chip architects who formerly worked on the Apple chip but now work at Qualcomm.

Now, as Qualcomm looks to push 5G connectivity into laptops, it is pairing modems with a powerful central processor unit, or CPU, Amon said. Instead of using computing core blueprints from longtime partner Arm Ltd, as it now does for smartphones, Qualcomm concluded it needed custom-designed chips if its customers were to rival new laptops from Apple.

As head of Qualcomm's chip division, Amon this year led the $1.4 billion acquisition of startup Nuvia, whose ex-Apple founders help design some those Apple laptop chips before leaving to form the startup. Qualcomm will start selling Nuvia-based laptop chips next year.

"We needed to have the leading performance for a battery-powered device," Amon said. "If Arm, which we've had a relationship with for years, eventually develops a CPU that's better than what we can build ourselves, then we always have the option to license from Arm."

Arm is in the midst of being purchased by Nvidia Corp for $40 billion, a merger that Qualcomm has objected to with regulators. For more on this, read the full Reuters report on Yahoo! Finance.

In December 2019 Patently Apple posted a report titled "Apple Sued former A-Chip Architect Williams III for Breach of Contract relating to an IP Agreement to not Compete with Apple." Williams III was a co-founder of Nuvia. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Mark Pierce had ruled in January 2020 that Apple was able take its breach-of-contract lawsuit against Gerard Williams III to trial.

Whether Apple will be able to stop or delay a Qualcomm chip designed by Nuvia's team from coming to the PC market next year is unknown at this time.
Payson, AZ (85541)

Today

Cloudy this morning followed by isolated thunderstorms this afternoon. High 89F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Some clouds. Low 68F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph.
We already know that Windows 11 Home will require a Microsoft account (MSA) at the beginning of the installation process. What Microsoft hasnt publicized is whether its possible to log in with just a local account. It is, but only with Windows 11 Pro.

A source close to Microsoft has now told us that the only way to avoid using an MSA is with Windows 11 Pro. According to our source, users who buy or own a PC with Windows 11 Pro may choose to use either a local account or an MSA from the very beginning of the installation process.

The Windows 11 Home MSA requirement isnt permanent, just unavoidable. Microsoft will allow the user to transition to a local account once the Windows 11 Home installation process has completed. Retail versions of Windows 11 Home will offer the same experience.

Our source told us that local account users will not have a diminished or limited experience, though they wont be able to sync content or use Windows 11s ability to sync or recommend content from other devices. That contentwhich could include documents or webpages that a user had viewed on another PCis typically synced to the users MSA account.

Mark Hachman / IDG Microsoft and Windows used to be much friendlier to local accounts.

Microsofts waning support for local accounts

Microsoft has no incentive to encourage local accounts. The company would prefer to use your MSA in a give-and-take relationship: Microsoft offers synchronized supplementary services, like OneDrive cloud storage and Office apps on the web, and in return the company quietly takes data about how you use Windows and Microsoft services. Privacy concerns flared in 2015 with the advent of Windows 10 and its telemetry, then faded. Microsoft does allow you many, many options to guard your privacy within Windows 10but its also betting you wont bother.

Local accounts have been seen as one way around that. Microsoft may be able to watch what you do on the web (anonymously), but it wont be able to match up your actions if you move to another PC.

At the same time, Microsoft has changed up the ways in which it allows you to create a local account. In 2019 Microsoft began phasing out the option to ue a local account during setup unless Internet access was unavailable. Even then, the OOBE experience often casually asked you to connect to the Internet before asking you to sign in. That led to bizarre scenarios where users who wanted to sign in with a local account needed to turn off their Wi-Fi before setting up Windows 10.

Mentioned in this article Microsoft Windows 10 Pro | Download MSRP $199.99 See it

Microsoft has apparently closed that loophole entirely now. That leaves users with an expensive alternative: Windows 10 Pro (and, we expect, Windows 11 Pro) costs $199.99 for a standalone license, versus $139.00 for Windows 10 Home. (Amazon offers a discount on Windows 10 Pro, which weve shown above.)

Microsoft does offer some premium apps and functions on Windows 10 Pro devices that it doesnt on Windows 10 Home, though many arent of direct use to consumers. (One exception is Windows Sandbox, which is quite useful.) If you already own Windows 10 Pro, you can upgrade to Windows 11 Pro for free.

Microsoft used to offer Surface devices with Windows 10 Pro installed, but thats changed, too. The most recent versions of the Surface Pro tablets ship with Windows 10 Home, and only the more expensive Surface Pro for Business tablets include Windows 10 Pro.

For many users watching the Windows 11 launch, the MSA requirement cant help but feel like another kick in the ribs. Confusion over Windows 11s hardware requirements and the need for a TPM have overshadowed the numerous Windows 11 features that Microsoft has added.

Will Microsoft backtrack? It certainly could. The opinion of one ex-Microsoft security analyst is that it could only happen if users kicked up a fuss.
To mark UN Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Day and the vital role that they play in post-pandemic recovery, Emirates is empowering small and medium sized enterprises to get back into the skies and turn their travel budgets into rewards by debuting a Business Rewards incentive for new members who sign up for the programme. Small and medium sized businesses who sign up for an account to Emirates' Business Rewards corporate loyalty programme from today, 27 June to 27 July 2021 will receive a bonus of 10,000 Business Reward Points, the equivalent of one Economy Class return ticket to selected destinations in Europe.



Emirates currently has over 20,000 small and medium sized businesses enrolled in its Business Rewards programme, and is providing a gamut of benefits including simplified enrolment, easier earning and redemptions, greater flexibility on retaining and using points as well as upgrade opportunities, even on last minute bookings.



With countries easing their entry restrictions, business travel has begun accelerating, and small and medium size enterprises have become key drivers of demand with the flexibility to make travel plans quickly as new opportunities emerge.



Emirates has been supporting small and medium sized business hit by the pandemic. Emirates Business Rewards programme members are taking advantage of the airline'sflexible booking policies, which are among the most generous in the industry for stress-free travel planning, in addition to its multi-risk insurance cover. Since the outset of the pandemic, Business Rewards programme members were provided additional reassurance with extensions on their points' validity if travel plans needed to be adjusted.



Knowing their travel plans are protected, top destinations for Business Rewards programme members have been frequenting during the pandemic include London, Manila, Paris, Cairo, Milan and Beirut. Dubai also continues to be a key destination regularly visited by Business Rewards members, mainly due to its open business environment throughout the pandemic, world-class infrastructure and thriving start-up ecosystem.



The airline continues to work hard to restore its network and schedules to enable small and medium sized businesses to visit clients and ramp up their business development activities as cities around the world gradually ease travel restrictions.



Businesses of all sizes can also ensure their health and safety expectations are taken care of throughout their journey. Emirates has lead the industry with clear, consistent and properly implemented safety measures at every touchpoint, including a contactless travel journey and digital verification solutions such as the IATA Travel Pass to ensure it remains the preferred airline for business travellers.



Emirates has a long track record of supporting small and medium sized businesses, not only through its Business Rewards programme, but also through its procurement of products and services across the business. Hundreds of small and medium sized businesses in a range of industries from around the world have benefitted from showcasing their products to a global travel audience, providing a boost to their growth plans.



In the UAE, Emirates prioritises SMEs as part of its tendering process, and is actively committed to work with government stakeholders like Dubai SME in identifying businesses and evaluating the performance of active suppliers on a regular basis. As a result, according to the Dubai SME report 2020, which summarises support provided to SMEs, Emirates ranked first among semi-governmental organisations, investing in procurement contracts worth over AED 79 million. It also ranked among the top five organisations supporting small to medium size businesses in Dubai.





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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Wilmar, one of the leading manufacturers of household consumer products in Ghana has today inaugurated a first of its kind Detergent Manufacturing Plant at its factory in Tema.



The US$30 million Detergent Plant has the capacity to produce up to 24,000MT metric tons of detergent which is enough to meet the countrys total demand for detergent.



In addition, the opening of Wilmars state of the art Detergent Plant in Tema today makes it the only company in Ghana which is currently able to locally produce detergent from raw material state to the finished product.



Speaking during the inauguration ceremony of the Detergent Plant, Minister of Trade and Industry, Honourable Alan Kyeremanteng said The establishment of this state-of-the-art factory underscores the importance of such a strategic partnership between the Private Sector and Government in pursuit of our common goal of creating jobs and bringing prosperity to our people.



He added, This new detergent manufacturing plant is going to provide direct employment for about 220 people which will improve their livelihoods and that of their dependents. In addition, the establishment of the company will boost the Governments strategic effort aimed at import substitution, especially in sectors where there is local capacity for value addition



On his part, Mr. Kwame Wiafe, General Manager, Wilmar stated that the investment represents the companys long-standing commitment to the country and its way of advancing the Build Ghana Buy Ghana agenda while impacting households with its reliable products.



Over the years, we have worked tirelessly to make Wilmar products the choice brands in every home. The opening of the Detergent Plant today demonstrates our commitment to invest even more in our business so we can meet our customers expectations, said Mr. Kwame Wiafe.



With the opening of the new Detergent Plant, Wilmar Africa will now be producing its much loved Jamaa powdered soap from start to finish  a great move compared to other similar competing products which are imported and bagged in Ghana.



Commenting on the opening of the Detergent Plant in Ghana, Mr. Santosh Pillai, Chief Executive Officer for Africa - Wilmar International said: We are delighted to open this landmark manufacturing plant in the country. Its our vision to ensure that we become the lead manufacturer of household consumer products and todays milestone is a clear testament of Ghanas strong position in Wilmar Africas footprint.



Wilmars vision is to be the company that understands and satisfies the everyday household needs in our markets  thus become the leading consumer products company in Ghana, he added.



We are excited by the Government of Ghanas renewed support for the manufacturing sector. We stand ready to explore opportunities presented by government for the benefit of companies like Wilmar Africa, he noted.



Wilmar Africa Limited is one of the leading fast-moving consumer goods companies (FMCG) committed to the processing, packaging, and distribution of a wide variety of consumer products and brands such as Frytol, Fortune, Viking, Alife, and Jamaa for local and international markets.

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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.

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The New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament (MP) for New Juaben South in the Eastern Region, Mr Michael Okyere Kofi Baafi, has cautioned residents of the area to desist from making Koforidua filthy or face prosecution.



He said all those found not to be keeping their environment clean would be notified in writing and subsequently prosecuted if they persisted in keeping their surroundings untidy.



Mr Baafi gave the admonition when he, together with the Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) for New Juaben South, Mr Isaac Appaw-Gyasi, led some residents to desilt choked drains in some parts of the Koforidua township last week Tuesday.



The two-day exercise was organised by the Office of the MP in collaboration with the New Juaben South Municipal Assembly with support from Zoomlion Company Limited to clean the municipality to reduce the effects of flooding during torrential rains.



Flooding



According to the MP, the exercise was undertaken as a way of mitigating the effects of flooding.



"We are creating awareness for people to know that throwing refuse and plastic materials as well as polythene bags into drains will choke them, and that will lead to flooding anytime it rains heavily," Mr Baafi stated.



Mr Baafi, who also led the participants to fill potholes as well as undertake rehabilitation works in some parts of the area, called for support from residents to help make the Koforidua township clean to befit its status as the capital of the municipality and the region.



The MP said all house owners who would make the drains in front of their houses choke would not be spared.



Warning



Mr Appaw-Gyasi said the MP and himself had to mobilise the people for the exercise, which, according to him, had paid off.



He warned that all shop owners who would make the gutters and drains in front of their shops choked would be dealt with.



Mr Appaw-Gyasi added that the assembly's by-laws on sanitation would be applied to prosecute offenders.#GraphicCleanGH







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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Atik Mohammed has taken a swipe at the ''Fix the Country'' campaigners over their claims that an activist, Ibrahim Mohammed, who was murdered at Ejura is a member of their movement.



Ibrahim Mohammed's death was reportedly caused by a mob that assaulted him for his vehement activism on social media.



Before he passed away, Mohammed was said to have received threats from unknown persons warning him to stop his activism.



The ''Fix the Country'' campaigners claim the deceased was one of them and purported his death had something to do with him exposing the poor governance of the President, hence supposedly accusing the government of masterminding the assault.



Speaking to host Kwami Sefa Kayi on Peace FM's ''Kokrokoo'', Atik Mohammed blasted the campagniers for taking advantage of the Ejura situation.



"The things we say here in Accra, how many people have been killed in Accra here?," he questioned the campaigners.



He blamed them for the violence following Ibrahim's death which resulted in the killing of two protesters and four others seriously injured when a joint team of the Military and Police went to Ejura and shot into a crowd of protesters.



"This (Accra) is where the real action takes place. So, people are not killed for expressing their views in Accra, is it in Ejura that the President and his officials will feel so offended by the activities of a party man? . . . and that the President has sleepless nights because of the social advocacy of this man to the extent that he will commission, I mean, sometimes thinking about some of these things is terrible. And it is simply because this group called 'Fix the Country', in fact they started this rumour-mill and it gained currency for us to now reach where we have reached today."



"So, what has been done to those in Accra saying fix the country? Nobody has even laid a finger on you, much less someone residing in Ejura," he further rebuked the campaigners.





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 casket with the body of Zambia's first President Kenneth Kaunda has been driven in to the venue in the capital, Lusaka, for the state funeral service.



The country's founding father died last month at the age of 97.



Leaders from across the continent have come to pay their last respects.



There was also a 21-gun salute and from this picture you can see in the background people waving white handkerchiefs in tribute to the former leader who was rarely seen without one.



The South African president's office has tweeted pictures of Cyril Ramaphosa signing the condolence book in Lusaka:









HE President @CyrilRamaphosa signs the condolences book on arrival at the Lusaka Show Grounds where the State Funeral Service of the Republic of Zambia's founding President Dr Kenneth Kaunda is taking place. President Kaunda passed away on Thursday, 17 June 2021, aged 97. #RIPKK pic.twitter.com/O64EpISHFK

 Presidency | South Africa  (@PresidencyZA) July 2, 2021

Source: BBC









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Toyota Tsusho Manufacturing Company Limited has announced to set up a Suzuki Swift car assembly plant in Ghana.



The assembly plant is expected to be in place next year, 2022.



This was revealed during an onsite ceremony held at Tema on Tuesday, June 29, 2021 in which the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo commissioned a Toyota assembly plant in Ghana.



The assembly plant by the Toyota Tsusho Manufacturing Company Limited is located in the Freezones Enclave in Tema.



President Akufo-Addo, commissioning the plant, said, "Government will continue to create the enabling environment to boost the profitability of the emerging automobile sector in Ghana."



Also at the ceremony, Toyota Tsusho President & CEO, Ichiro Kashitani stated via a video message that, our African business has a history of more than 90 years. Based on our philosophy of WITH AFRICA FOR AFRICA, we seek to contribute to African society and the economy of Africa while further reinforcing and expanding our business foundations. Starting today through this project, we will go on to deliver the production of happiness for all to the people of Ghana, as well.



Toyota Tsusho COO for Africa Division, Shinichiro Otsuka, also stated, to contribute to the social and economic development of Ghana, we will promote the production of high-quality cars that are made in Ghana. In addition, by providing high-quality sales and after-sales service at our distributors, we will continuously support the safe and secure lives and businesses of the people of Ghana.



The planned production of the Suzuki Swift compact car is based on "a collaboration agreement concluded between Toyota and Suzuki in March 2019. It is planned as part of strengthening and expanding the alliance between Toyota Tsusho, which received the full transfer of sales and marketing operations in Africa from Toyota in January 2019, and Suzuki".



Read full statement below:





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Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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The Minister for Works and Housing, Francis Asenso-Boakye has disclosed that Ghana has been ranked highly among African countries most exposed to risks from multiple weather-related hazards.



In the past three decades, the country has experienced seven major floods  the devastating flood event in the Odaw Drainage Catchment on 3rd June 2015 led to an unfortunate loss of about 150 lives and about 50,000 people were directly affected to varying degrees.



Speaking in parliament today, the minister stated that, the World Bank estimated that $3.2 billion (4.45% of GDP) worth of economic assets are at risk of flooding in the Greater Accra Region alone and this figure is expected to quadruple by 2050 without urgent action.



Causes of Flooding



Mr. Asenso-Boakye stated that the causes of flooding in the country are multi-faceted  and they include inefficient drains, undersized culverts and uncontrolled development in flood plains, wetlands and waterways.



Additionally, indiscriminate dumping of solid waste into drains by households contribute significantly to urban flooding  and across the country, the new developments and buildings springing up in waterways and flood plains are (buffer zones) blocking the flow of storm water and worsening the risk of flooding.



Kumasi Flooding



On the recent flooding in Kumasi in the Ashanti Region  Mr. Asenso-Boakye stressed that on 24 and 25 June 2021, several areas in Kumasi experienced severe and devastating flooding and this affected commercial areas such as the new Kejetia market, Central market, Asafo market and Bantama High Street  with shops and homes experienced flooding and goods worth millions of Ghana Cedis were destroyed.



He said similar reports have been received from Koforidua and Takoradi and indeed other parts of the country  and following his visit to the affected areas in Kumasi on Monday 28 June 2021, the increasing risk of flooding associated with climate change is clear and as a nation need to take bold steps to tackle this challenge holistically.



Governments efforts



He stressed that as part of efforts to tackle the flooding issues in the country, President Akufo-Addo since taking office in January 2017 has invested about GH450 million in the National Flood Control and Priority Drainage Programme compared to the GH88 million invested by the previous government between 2011 and 2016.



He said,  this level of commitment to tackling the problem which has resulted in a reduction of flooding incidents in the past few years is unprecedented and commendable.



The minister further divulged that the government is also collaborating with the World Bank to invest more than $200 million to address solid waste and flood risk challenges in the Odaw Drainage Basin.



He believes this project will also see the development and implementation of a Flood Early Warning System to enhance community safety and resilience.



Speaking in parliament today, the minister stated that, the World Bank estimated that $3.2 billion (4.45% of GDP) worth of economic assets are at risk of flooding in the Greater Accra Region alone and this figure is expected to quadruple by 2050 without urgent action.



Causes of Flooding



Mr. Asenso-Boakye stated that the causes of flooding in the country are multi-faceted  and they include inefficient drains, undersized culverts and uncontrolled development in flood plains, wetlands and waterways.



Additionally, indiscriminate dumping of solid waste into drains by households contribute significantly to urban flooding  and across the country, the new developments and buildings springing up in waterways and flood plains are (buffer zones) blocking the flow of storm water and worsening the risk of flooding.



Kumasi Flooding



On the recent flooding in Kumasi in the Ashanti Region  Mr. Asenso-Boakye stressed that on 24 and 25 June 2021, several areas in Kumasi experienced severe and devastating flooding and this affected commercial areas such as the new Kejetia market, Central market, Asafo market and Bantama High Street  with shops and homes experienced flooding and goods worth millions of Ghana Cedis were destroyed.



He said similar reports have been received from Koforidua and Takoradi and indeed other parts of the country  and following his visit to the affected areas in Kumasi on Monday 28 June 2021, the increasing risk of flooding associated with climate change is clear and as a nation need to take bold steps to tackle this challenge holistically.



Governments efforts



He stressed that as part of efforts to tackle the flooding issues in the country, President Akufo-Addo since taking office in January 2017 has invested about GH450 million in the National Flood Control and Priority Drainage Programme compared to the GH88 million invested by the previous government between 2011 and 2016.



He said,  this level of commitment to tackling the problem which has resulted in a reduction of flooding incidents in the past few years is unprecedented and commendable.



The minister further divulged that the government is also collaborating with the World Bank to invest more than $200 million to address solid waste and flood risk challenges in the Odaw Drainage Basin.



He believes this project will also see the development and implementation of a Flood Early Warning System to enhance community safety and resilience.















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 Ekumfi Fruits and Juices Limited in the Central Region is producing at half capacity.

This is due to inadequate raw materials to feed the factory, resulting from climate change induced prolonged drought in the crop production areas, which has hugely affected the size of the pineapple fruit.





The Director of Operations of the company, Mr Frederick Kobbyna Acquaah, explained that the company had not shut down its operations.



It is untrue that the company had shut down its operations as has been widely spread across the country. What the company experienced recently was a reduction in production due to severe drought which affected its raw material supply, he stated.



Tour





Mr Acquaah was speaking in an interview with the media during a tour of the factory and its farms by officials of the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB), some distributors of their products and a team of reporters last Wednesday.



He said that there was no doubt that Ghanaians had accepted their products which had increased demand for their various product variants, and that the company was putting in place pragmatic measures to meet the market demand.



I, therefore, urge the media not to be overly interested in throwing out negatives about. They should rather join hands with the company in its quest to produce natural fruit juice locally to meet international standards Mr Acquaah said.



1D1F



The Ekumfi Fruits and Juices Ltd is the first factory to be constructed under the government's One-district, One-factory (1D1F) initiative after President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on August 28, 2017 cut the sod for the construction of the factory .



The Ghana Exim Bank supported the construction of the factory with a GH60 million loan facility which fast-tracked its completion and subsequent production of natural fruit juices for the Ghanaian market.



Also, the ADB has provided another facility to the factory to expand its farms to be able to undertake an all year production to meet the demand of the ever-growing market.



When the team of reporters got to the factory, it was observed that production of the various products was ongoing as the workers were busily packing them for onward transportation to distributors.



Be circumspect



Mr Acquaah appealed to the media to be circumspect in their reportage about the factory and desist from publications that tended to run the factory down, saying it is a very worrying development that a section of the media reported that the factory had shut down its operations.



I wish to urge the media to reach out to the company at all times instead of churning out falsehoods which had the tendency of derailing the companys efforts to become the biggest indigenous fruit juice manufacturing company.



Expansion of farms



Mr Acquaah said that the factory was currently undertaking massive expansion of its farms with a loan facility from ADB so as to position the company to have the needed raw material for processing.





He explained that about 6,000 acres had been cultivated at all the 21 sites of the factory so that enough raw materials could be produced to feed the factory.



I can assure you that we are working towards expanding it further to 9,000 acres so that the raw material base could be increased to sustain the operations of the factory, Mr Acquaah said.



Financial support



For his part, the Head of Agric Value Chain Finance Department of the ADB, Mr Lawrence Dankyi-Ansong, said that the bank was pleased to offer the financial facility to take care of some of the capital expenditure of the factory.













Source: Graphiconline.com









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Mr Dominic Nitiwul, the Minister of Defence has assured Ghanaians of a safe environment and asked the public not to panic under the current happenings of military misconduct.



He said what happened in Ejura leading to fatalities will never be covered while the Upper West military brutalities on civilians will be professionally handled to serve as a disincentive to others.



Mr Nitiwul told the GNA in an interview that he was disturbed about the unfortunate events saying, "No one can take the law into his own hands and misbehave. We are all equal before the law and there are no separate citizens who can use the law in their favour".



He said Ghana was one but not two and stressed the need for the security apparatus to always exhibit high professionalism in dealing with the public to ensure that Ghana remained a haven to live to attract more investments.



"Normally, we don't discuss security matters outside and that is why some members of the public might think wrongly that nothing is being done about military brutalities. We will ensure that all those who are personnel and misbehaved are punished" he said.



Mr Nitiwul said, currently there was a high powered military delegation to the Upper West Region concerning a video of military brutalities in circulation and that the President wants to see all brutalities investigated and perpetrators punished in this country.



"I assure Ghanaians that their safety is of paramount importance to the president and the country. We will make sure that personnel who misbehaved are punished to serve as a deterrent to others".



He appealed to the public especially those in Wa, Ejura and other places that suffered or lived under dangerous security to remain calm since the government was not sleeping on the issues.



He said the public will soon appreciate the punitive measures that will be taken by the military high command against the erring personnel.



Meanwhile, Naa Fuseini Seidu Pelpuo IV, the overlord of the Waala Traditional Area, has appealed to the government to provide a compensation package for victims of the military brutalities of the military in Wa to alleviate their plight and to help settle their hospital bills.



He said the atrocities meted out to the people ought to be a concern to well-meaning citizens, and called for immediate and severe punishment for perpetrators of the atrocities.



Naa Pelpuo IV said this in Wa on Friday when a high powered delegation from the military headquarters in Accra led by Major-General Thomas Oppong Peprah, the Chief of Army Staff called on him.

Source: GNA









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Scrap dealers at Agbogbloshie in Accra are resisting the decongestion exercise by the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council.



The scrap dealers and onion traders at Agbogbloshie are being relocated to Adjen Kotoku to help free the congestion in the central business district (CBD) of Accra as part of the agenda "Make Accra work" initiated by the Greater Accra Regional Minister, Mr Henry Quartey.



The decongestion exercise started Thursday morning was moving smoothly until the team arrived at the scrap dealers section.



The dealers set spent vehicle tyres ablaze in protest against their removal from the spot, claiming they were served no eviction notice.



According to our reporter, they were throwing stones at the security personnel who in turn fired shots to disperse.



"They also started burning tyres", he added.



He said the exercise aimed at removing onion traders and scrap dealers to Adjen Kotoku was peaceful until they reached the scrapyard.



The scrap dealers argued that they were not served any notice to vacate the place.



"So the military had to intervene by firing warning shots to disperse them," he added.<iframe width="470" height="322" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s6JfJIQ79O4" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>





Source: graphiconline.com









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Scrap dealers at Agbogbloshie in Accra are resisting the decongestion exercise by the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council.



The scrap dealers and onion traders at Agbogbloshie are being relocated to Adjen Kotoku to help free the congestion in the central business district (CBD) of Accra as part of the agenda "Make Accra work" initiated by the Greater Accra Regional Minister, Mr Henry Quartey.



Graphic Online's reporter Joshua Bediako Koomson who is with the team undertaking the exercise reports that the decongestion exercise started Thursday morning was moving smoothly until the team arrived at the scrap dealers section.



The dealers set spent vehicle tyres ablaze in protest against their removal from the spot, claiming they were served no eviction notice.



According to our reporter, they were throwing stones at the security personnel who in turn fired shots to disperse.



"They also started burning tyres", he added.



He said the exercise aimed at removing onion traders and scrap dealers to Adjen Kotoku was peaceful until they reached the scrapyard.



The scrap dealers argued that they were not served any notice to vacate the place.



"So the military had to intervene by firing warning shots to disperse them," he added.

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 Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) says it has instituted disciplinary measures to deal with its officers who will be found culpable of assaulting civilians in Wa, the regional capital of the Upper West Region on Thursday, July 1, 2021.



This follows the circulation of a viral video that captured some soldiers based in Wa assaulting some residents of the city without any provocation.



The GAF in a press release issued today, Friday, July 2, 2021, said the "unprofessional conduct" took place when the Commanding Officer of the soldiers and the Chairman of the Regional Security Council were both out of town on official engagements.



"Internal disciplinary measures have been instituted to deal with all those who will be found culpable in this unprofessional conduct by the soldiers.



"In view of the seriousness of the matter, the Chief of the Army Staff is leading a high powered military delegation to Wa to meet the traditional and opinion leaders to find an amicable way of resolving this unfortunate incident. The delegation will also explore means to assuage the anger of the people and promote good neighbourliness".



Reasons for assault



Some eyewitnesses said the soldiers claimed they were searching for a stolen mobile phone.



They recounted how the officers who could not be immediately identified, stopped tricycles and brutalized particularly young men.





Read the entire release below;The attention of the Military High Command has been drawn to a video which has gone viral. In this video some soldiers based in Wa the regional capital of the Upper West Region are seen molesting civilians in the city without any provocation.This unprofessional conduct took place on Thursday, 1 July 2021 and at a time when the Commanding Officer of the soldiers, and the Chairman of the Regional Security Council were both out of town on official engagements.Internal disciplinary measures have been instituted to deal with all those who will be found culpable in this unprofessional conduct by the soldiers.In view of the seriousness of the matter, the Chief of the Army Staff is leading a high powered military delegation to Wa to meet the traditional and opinion leaders to find an amicable way of resolving this unfortunate incident. The delegation will also explore means to assuage the anger of the people and promote good neighbourliness.The Ghana Armed Forces once again wishes to assure the people of Wa and the general public that their safety is paramount at all times, as such would not condone any unprofessional conduct by any member of the force.SIGNEDE AGGREY-QUASHIEColonelDirector Public Relations

Source: Graphiconline.com









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The Management of the Fantasy Dome at the Ghana International Trade Fair Centre has filed a motion at the Accra Circuit Court for the reopening of the facility and other third party lockdown equipment.



The Police have locked up the Fantasy Dome at the Trade Fair Centre in Accra, following reports that the youth wing of the Christ Embassy Church held a mammoth event at the venue on Friday, April 30, 2021, where COVID-19 protocols were flagrantly breached.



Mr Lord Delvin Essandoh, holding brief for Mr Jerry Avenorgbo, Counsel for Mr Edmond Dapaah, the Facility Manager, who is also the fourth accused person, said the instruments and equipment locked up belonged to third parties.



He said the facility, which served as a source of livelihoods for the fourth accused person and other employees, had since April 30, 2021, been closed to the public and it also served as a recording studio, where other economic activities took place.



Currently, there is pressure on the Management of the facility from third party companies because of the instruments and equipment, which were hired for the programme, he said.



Mr Essandoh prayed the Court for an order to reopen the Dome and release the instruments and equipment to restore the livelihoods of the people at the facility.



Chief Inspector Simon Apiorsornu, the prosecutor, indicated that the State was not opposed to the motion.



The Court has since deferred ruling on the motion to July 15, 2021.



The State in the substantive case amended the charge sheet of four persons arraigned for their involvement in the breach of the COVID-19 protocols during the Pneumatic Night all-night Service held by the youth wing of the Christ Embassy Church.



The accused persons - Alex Asomani, Wilson Delali Agyemang, Kumi Nutifafa, all members of the Church, were charged for conspiracy to commit crime and three counts of failing to comply with the restrictions imposed on religious bodies.



Also in the dock was Mr Edmond Dapaah, the Facility Manager at the Fantasy Dome of the International Trade Fair Centre, who has been charged for abetment of crime.



They pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

The accused persons will rely on their previous bail granted them in the sum of GH80,000 each with two sureties.



The prosecution, led by Chief Inspector Simon Apiorsornu, told the court that on May 4, 2021, the Police gathered intelligence that the Youth Wing of Christ Embassy Church, Ghana had organized an all-night service dubbed Pneumatic Night at the Fantasy Dome within the Trade Fair Centre without obeying COVID-19 safety protocols.



He said video footage of the said church service was also cited on various social media platforms and in the video, it was observed that the congregants were not wearing face or nose masks.



Upon the intelligence gathered, the Police proceeded to the Trade Fair Center, where the Head of Security of the Centre in the person of Justice Tuuru Konlan was met, he said.



The Prosecution said the Head of Security confirmed to the Police that the Christ Embassy Church organized the said programme on April 30, 2021, at about 2000 hours at the Fantasy Dome within the Trade Fair Center and closed on May 1, 2021, in the morning.



He said Mr Konlan added that the Management of the Fantasy Dome did not officially inform the Management of the Trade Fair Centre about the said programme.



Chief Inspector Apiorsornu said the Police conducted an inspection within the Fantasy Dome as well as the Round Pavilion and upon measuring the intervals between the arranged chairs, it was observed that the one-meter rule of social distancing between congregants was not observed.



Also, there was no fresh air ventilation and that the Church relied on air conditioners.



He said further enquiries revealed that the programme exceeded the maximum two-hour duration.



The prosecution said on May 6, 2021, Master Asomani, a National Service Person, Mr Agyeman an Entrepreneur, Mr Kumi, a Businessman, who were the organizers of the all-night church service, were arrested by the Police.



He said Mr Dapaah, was also arrested by the Police for questioning and in their investigation cautioned statements, they could not give any tangible reasons for flouting the COVID-19 protocols.



After investigations, the accused persons were charged with the offences as stated on the charge sheet and arranged for court.



The Court has ordered the Prosecution to make disclosures on documents they intended to rely on during the trial

Source: GNA









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Major General Thomas Oppong-Peprah, the Chief of Army Staff, (COAS) has apologised to Wa Naa Fuseini Seidu Pelpuo IV, the overlord of the Waala Traditional Area and the people of Wa over the military brutalities in the Upper West capital of Wa, on Thursday, July 1.



Major - Gen Oppong-Peprah condemned the actions of the rampaging military men saying, We will not allow a few of the men to destroy the golden relationship that exists between the good people of this area and the military.



The COAS rendered the apology in Wa, on Friday, when he led a delegation from the Military High Command to pay a courtesy call on Wa Naa Pelpuo, as part of a one-day working visit to Wa in relation to the incident.



"I want to assure you that we are going to fish out, today, all those who were involved in this and exert the maximum punishment according to our code of service discipline, he said.



He said they deemed it imperative to apologise to the chiefs and people of the Region, as the cooperation of the people was necessary for them to achieve their mandate of securing the country, particularly at a time the country was facing a new form of threat from terrorists in neighbouring Burkina Faso.



Major-Gen Oppong-Peprah said the Government invested a lot of resources to establish a regiment in the Region to help consolidate the peace the area was enjoying and gave the assurance that those military men would not go unpunished.



Some military personnel allegedly attacked and molested civilians in Wa on Thursday, July 1, 2021, over the alleged stealing of their colleagues mobile phone.



Naa Pelpuo said the atrocities meted out to the people ought to be a concern to well-meaning citizens and called for an immediate and severe punishment for the perpetrators of the atrocities.



He described the act as dastardly and unacceptable since Wa wass a charitable beacon of peace in the country.



However, it was thrown into a state of panic as the rampaging men in uniform pounced on unarmed and unsuspecting civilians.



Naa Pelpuo appealed to the government to provide a compensation package to the victims of the military brutalities to alleviate their plight and to take care of their hospital bills.



Anyone within the operational zone of the men we pay to protect us could have fallen victim to their senseless and bestial brutalities A group of men in uniform chased some people into the house of one of my revered Chiefs, the Guli-Naa, who is also a former Member of the Council of State, Naa Pelpuo said.



Meanwhile, Chief Inspector Gideon Ohene Boateng, the Upper West Regional Public Relations Officer of the Ghana Police Service, said the police also spotted the viral video on social media and the Regional Commander, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Mr Francis Aboagye Nyarko, together with his team decided to find out whether the video was indeed credible.



He said after ascertaining the credibility of the video, the Regional Commander instructed the Crime Officer to immediately commence investigation into the issue so that perpetrators could be brought to book.



Mr Cletus Awuni, the Public Relations Officer of the Upper West Regional Coordinating Council, who was also a victim, said he received calls from media practitioners about the issue and wanted to follow up to validate the information.



Upon getting to the main traffic, I saw the military men beating people any how and ordered some to roll on the ground, he said.



He said when he questioned one of them over their action but he did not mind him.

Consequently, he proceeded to take a video of the action, which resulted in the brutality meted out to him.



He has since been treated at the Regional Hospital and discharged.

Meanwhile, authorities of the Wa Municipal Hospital reported that three casualties of the military brutalities were admitted to the hospital out of which two were treated and discharged.



The remaining one who had a fracture on his leg was referred to the Regional Hospital for specialist attention.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Minister of Tourism Arts and Culture, Dr. Mohammed Ibrahim Awal, and officials of the ministry and the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) have visited some tourist sites in Accra to acquaint themselves with the operations of these sites and to enquire about infrastructural deficits in the sector and how to solve them.



The tour which took place on Monday June 28, 2021, brings to 10, the number of regions the Minister had visited to have first-hand information of the sites and work towards making them attractive to both local and international tourists. Dr Awal said plans are in place to visit all the 16 regions of Ghana to enquire sites that needed to be developed and upgraded into acceptable standards. The sites visited include the National Museum, James Town light House and Receptive Facility, Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, and Labadi Pleasure Beach.



Addressing the media after the visit, Dr Awal said: governments objectives of the sector is to at least develop two iconic sites in each of the 16 regions to improve the countrys tourism ranking in West Africa where it currently sits number three to Senegal and Gambia. By the end of 2024, we want Ghana to be the most attractive tourist destination in West Africa. At the National Museum in Adabraka, Dr. Awal promised to provide an amount of GH800,000 as a grant to complete renovation works at the museums main gallery. The facility, upon completion, is expected to be opened to the public by December this year.



At the La Pleasure Beach, Akwasi Agyemang, Chief Executive Officer of GTA, said the Ministry had sourced funding, under the Ghana Cares Programme to develop some model beaches and the starting point would be the La Pleasure Beach. He said guidelines in the new Legislative Instrument for the sector would have to be followed, with a master plan drafted as early as possible to embark on these projects.



This is to make sure that the issue of employment, tenancy agreements, everything must be properly done including environmental and safety issues. The funding is ready and the Ministry is ready to develop the beach and many others. Mr. Agyemang also assured that the Minister was making a case for the beaches to be reopened to the public, a suggestion, he said, has attracted some discussions for safe reopening. Once these guidelines and protocols are put in place, we would engage to discuss these rules and new protocols because this would be the model beach which others would emulate, he added.



At the James Fort and Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum, the Minister assured that the Ministry would upgrade the two facilities to meet international standards to attract both local and international visitors. He urged the directors of these facilities to support the President and the Ministrys agenda of placing tourism at its rightful place in the economy.





Source: Thebftonline.com









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Former President John Dramani Mahama and two political parties have called for calm in the Ejura town following the death of two persons and injuries to four others in clashes between the youth and security agencies.



They have also called for thorough investigations into the incident leading to the murder of the youth activist, Ibrahim Mohammed, also known as Macho Kaaka, and the shooting of two persons by the security agencies.



The parties are the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the Progressive Peoples Party (PPP) and the Minority Caucus in Parliament.



In his statement, Mr Mahama called on President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to take steps to de-escalate the situation in Ejura.



There must be a very thorough investigation of both the murder of the youth activist and the security rules of engagement, which resulted in the shooting to death of the two others, he stated.



Minority



At a press conference addressed by the Minority Leader, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, the Minority Caucus called on the youth not to allow the Ejura violence degenerate into an alarming situation, reports Nana Kunadu Agyeman.



He also called on the President to establish a commission of enquiry within the meaning of Article 278 of the Constitution to make the recommendations of such commission more acceptable.



The Presidents instruction is for a ministerial commission of enquiry but we reject it; that is not good enough. We want a commission of enquiry within the meaning of article 278 of the 1992 Constitution, it said.



We want to see the President appoint a justice of the superior court or a retired Justice of the Supreme Court to lead this process because ultimately we will accept recommendations that call for reforms, he said.



NDC



In a statement signed by its Director of Communications, Mr Kakra Essamuah, the NDC called on the security agencies to be measured in the way and manner in which they handle citizens who are exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to demonstrate to protect the lives of innocent citizens.



It said the partys national chairman, Mr Samuel Ofosu Ampofo, and the General Secretary, Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketiah, who were currently participating in a workshop at Ada were proceeding back to Accra to take charge of developments.



PPP



The PPP, for its part, condemned, in no uncertain terms, the shooting and killing of the two persons at Ejura and called for a special investigation into the matter and those responsible brought to book expeditiously.



A statement signed by its Ashanti Regional Chairman, Mr Simon Quansah, said the party was expecting the President to condemn the acts of brutalities meted out to citizens by the security forces.



It also called on Parliament to set up a committee of enquiry to look into the matter to establish the circumstances that led to such unfortunate happenings in order to avoid any possible cover-ups.



While we call for calm in the Ejura town and its surroundings, we urge the people/youth of Ghana to stand up and defend their constitutional rights to demonstrate and demand accountability from their elected officers, it said.



The statement urged the President to visit Ejura to help restore calm and confidence among the people.









Source: graphiconline.com









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Former President John Mahama has said a video circulating of my visit to injured persons in a hospital is an old one and has no link to current developments in Ejura.



Prior to the circulation of the video, the former flag bearer of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) had said: I urgently call on President Nana Akufo-Addo to initiate an immediate de-escalation of the situation in Ejura, where two protesters were killed by a combined police and military team as they marched in anger a day after the mob killing of local social media activist Ibrahim Kaaka Mohammed.



Four other protesters also got injured in the clash between the demonstrators and the security personnel.



In a statement issued on Tuesday, 29 June 2021, the former president said: There must be a very thorough investigation of both the murder of the youth activist and the security rules of engagement, which resulted in the shooting to death of the two others.



Mr Mahama said: I add my voice to calls for calm following the shooting to death of two persons and the injury to many in Ejura today.



I have just seen a video of the firing of live ammunition into a crowd by persons wearing military attire, after the burial of the murdered youth activist, he observed.



My thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims and the Ejura community.



Meanwhile, the Ashanti regional police command has commenced investigations to establish the circumstances surrounding the violent clash.



In a statement, the police said its preliminary investigation shows that following the burial of Ibrahim Mohammed aka Kaaka at Mempeasem cemetery at Ejura on Tuesday, some irate youth blocked the main Ejura Atebubu road, thus, impeding traffic flow.



The police moved in with military reinforcement to quell the situation but the irate youth charged on the security officers with all manner of implements including firearms, clubs, machetes and stones.



The security officials fired into the crowd to disperse the angry mob, who failed to retreat but rather massed up in all corners.



The death and injuries were recorded in the process.



The security situation as of 3:30 pm, according to the police, is calm.



However, security has been reinforced to ensure total stability.



The regional command has also taken over the investigation into the murder of Kaaka and has appealed to anyone who has credible information to share with the command at the Central Police Station, Kumasi or call 0299207770.



The strictest confidentially is assured, the police said.



The command also appealed to everyone, especially the youth of Ejura, to remain calm and also called on the traditional and opinion leaders to call for restraint to avert an escalation.





Source: classfmonline.com









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Audio Attachment: Listen to Sam Pyne on Peace FM's 'kokrokoo' programme

Ashanti Regional Secretary of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Sam Pyne, has corroborated claims by some Officers of the largest opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) that an activist, Ibrahim Mohammed alias 'Kaaka', who was murdered at Ejura is a member of the ruling party.



Ibrahim Mohammed was killed last Friday for being vocal about issues affecting Ghana, particularly the Ejura area.



The Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) of Ejura is accused of masterminding the murder following reports that he and the latter had a hostile relationship.



The NDC Communications Officer, Sammy Gyamfi, addressing the issue in an interview on Okay FM, has blamed the NPP for the activist's death saying, there is hardship in the country and people are afraid to talk because they are afraid for their lives. Today, they have killed Kaaka. NPP killed Kaaka. Kaaka stays in Ejura and has been on this #fixthecountry campaign. He has been talking about abandoned projects. Before he was attacked by a mob, he announced that he has been threatened by the known NPP members. He even published the threats. He was beaten by a mob.



Speaking on Peace FM's morning show 'Kokrokoo', Sam Pyne revealed that the deceased was indeed a member of the ruling NPP.



He also confirmed his uncordial relationship with the MCE.



He, however, shared limited information on whether or not the MCE had a hand in Kaaka's death.



Sam Pyne also refuted claims that the NPP is behind the killing and stressed the Police should be allowed to do their thorough investigations.



Confirming to host Kwami Sefa Kayi, he said, ''I know him. He is an NPP activist. I've sent him on occasions. The time we allowed the MCE to go unopposed, one of the guys who was opposing it, he was one of them; so there is the history that he and the MCE have uncordial relationship."





National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament(MP) 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.But speaking in an interview onmorning 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.

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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President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has instructed the Interior Minister, Ambrose Dery to conduct a public inquiry into the killing of three persons at Ejura.



The unfortunate occurrences at Ejura have caused a stir in the nation and to bring closure to the situation, the President has given 10 days to Minister to provide a detailed report on the incident.



"The Interior Minister is to provide a detailed report from the Inquiry, with recommendations for appropriate action, within ten days, i.e., by 9th July 2021, to President Akufo-Addo," a statement issued by the President's Communications Director read.



As a result of the President's directive, a three-member Committee is to be set up to hold a probe into the issue.



Speaking on Peace FM's ''Kokrokoo'' today, the Ashanti Regional Secretary of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Sam Pyne has urged the members of the Committee to be objective in the inquiry.



He asked them not to be moved by their biases or seek their own interest but rather establish the truth about what led to the killings of the three persons, Ibrahim Mohammed, alias Kaaka, Abdul Nasir Yussif and Murtala Mohammed.



''The Committee members should let truth prevail...A painful thing in the world is for you to be charged falsely; as for this, the Committee members should let it be far from them'', he advised.





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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Former PNC General Secretary, Atik Mohammed has taken a swipe at the National Democratic Congress for opposing the establishment of a Public Inquiry Committee into the unfortunate situation at Ejura days ago.



President Nana Akufo-Addo has directed the Interior Minister to undertake a public inquiry into the shooting and killing incident at Ejura.



The Minister is to provide a detailed report with recommendations on the incident.



"The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has instructed the Minister for the Interior, Hon. Ambrose Dery, MP, to conduct, forthwith, a Public Inquiry into the circumstances that led to the unfortunate occurrences of Tuesday, 29th June 2021.



"The Interior Minister is to provide a detailed report from the Inquiry, with recommendations for appropriate action, within ten days, i.e., by 9th July 2021, to President Akufo-Addo," a statement issued by the President's Communications Director stated.



In response to the President's directive, a three-member Committee is to be set up to probe the issue but the Minority have reportedly objected to the initiative.



Reacting to the issue, Atik wondered what the NDC seeks to achieve by opposing the Committee.



"So, we should leave the issue unresolved, unanswered or what?", he asked, stressing, "the essence of opposition is to keep government in range but not to misdirect and mislead government. That is not the idea because what they're saying is the government shouldn't do anything. That we don't deserve to know what happened; that we shouldn't know the truth. If this is the mindset of the opposition, then are we ruling the country?"



He shared a strong opinion that the NDC's opposition is only aimed at making the Akufo-Addo administration unpopular to the Ghanaian populace so the NDC will come back to power.



This mindset by the oppostion party, he noted, is nation-wrecking.



"My suspicion is that the reason why they don't want the public inquriy to be conducted, as it stands now, the accusation is that the government orchestrated the killing of him because he was expressing his mind on things affecting Ghana, particularly the Ejura community. So, without public inquiry to expose the truth, this narrative stays and this is not the kind of narrative any government likes.



"So, it is in the interest of the opposition to maintain the status quo so that everybody will scold the government. So, it is in their interest to say that don't do the public inquiry for us to unearth the truth so that we will continue to accuse you as killers and so on and so forth, but Ghana is bigger than any opposition party," he told Kwami Sefa Kayi on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo'.









Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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Ghanaian Dancehall music superstar and president of the Shatta Movement Empire, Shatta Wale has urged his fans and the youth of Ghana to stop putting their hopes in the government for an improved life.



Shatta Wale born Charles Nii Armah Mensah sent this message via his Twitter page in reaction to the recent unrest in the country following military killings of two young men who part of an irate group of aggrieved youth who stormed the street to demonstrate over the death of one the residents of community, Macho Kaaka who was a social activist.



As disappointed as he is just like almost every other Ghanaian, Shatta Wale although he did not mention specifically the opposition partys name, National Democratic Congress (NDC), it was clear he was referring to the party and its leader, former president, John Mahama when he said that after four year, his brother will come and do the same and even do worse than President Akufo Addo.



The Melissa hitmaker pointed to the fact that aggrieved Ghanaians can fight but they can lose their lives in the process and in the end, they will win nothing and quizzed if his fans want to die young.



Shatta Wale further urged his fans and followers to start winning for themselves now because they have the strength and mind.







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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A headless statue of Queen Victoria is seen overturned and vandalized at the provincial legislature in Winnipeg, Friday, July 2, 2021. The statue and a statue of Queen Elizabeth were toppled on Canada Day during demonstrations concerning Indigenous children who died at residential schools. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kelly Geraldine Malone
Peru, IN (46970)

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Virginia Barnes "Ginna" Kniesly, age 99, Logansport, passed away at 10:10 a.m. on Thursday, June 24, 2021, at Miller's Merry Manor. God Bless the Angels at Millers Merry Manor, every one of whom treated Ginna as their own. The youngest of eight daughters born in Logansport, Indiana, to Emily
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A healthcare worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at Boston Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., on Thursday, June 17, 2021. The first pandemic surge flooded Boston Medical Center with coronavirus patients: 229 at last springs peak, filling nearly two-thirds of its beds. This week, the Covid-19 count hit zero. Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Summer can be a fun time in Arizona. Given the heat, it can also be a challenging season to navigate.
One of the most consistent crushers of the last fifteen years has been Shannon "Aulophobia" Shorr, who tops the Alabama all-time earnings list on Hendon Mob, with nearly $8.6 million in recording earnings. Shorr, who recently announced that he and his wife Joy are expecting their first child, is in action today and will be looking for more success on the virtual felt after some early success on the live felt this year.

Shorr, who had six cashes in last year's WSOP.com Online Bracelet series, but has yet to win a WSOP Gold Bracelet, found his first victory of the year in Event #28: $5,000 No Limit Hold'em Deep Stack, and for besting a 287-entrant field, Shorr added a healthy $296,535 to his bankroll. Shorr has also found a quartet of cashes in PokerGO branded events, including a fourth-place performance at the $10,000 NLH High Roller at The Venetian, good for $77,000.

With another full summer of bracelet events on the docket, will this be the year that Shorr breaks through for a WSOP Gold Bracelet to add another accolade to an already illustrious career? We'll be watching his status all summer long as "Aulophobia" shoots for the stars.
State health officials are encouraging the responsible use of fireworks and COVID-19 safety measures during Fourth of July weekend.

In addition to practicing firework safety, the the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control advises South Carolinians to maintain COVID-19 safety measures over the weekend.

"During a time as celebratory as Fourth of July weekend, its easy to get lost in the excitement and forget to use appropriate safety measures," according to a news release from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. "Thats why S.C. DHEC is urging residents to stay safe when using fireworks this upcoming weekend."

The release states fireworks start more than 19,500 fires each year, including 1,300 structure fires and 300 vehicle fires, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

In addition, the organization says burns account for 44% of injuries treated in emergency rooms in the month surrounding July 4; children are largely affected, with 36% of victims being under the age of 15, according to the release.

Too often, the usage of fireworks is not taken as seriously as it should be, said Dr. Virginie Daguise, bureau director of Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention, in the release. The fact is, they can cause severe injuries and burns, and some cases are even fatal. We want people to have fun during the Fourth of July weekend, but we also want them to be careful. That means following safety guidelines on the firework labels, paying attention to your surroundings, and keeping others at a safe distance.

Tips for the safe use of fireworks include:

 Spectators should keep a safe distance from the person lighting the fireworks, and the person lighting should wear safety glasses. Always move to a safe distance immediately after lighting fireworks.

 Point fireworks away from homes, and keep away from brush, leaves and other flammable substances.

 Do not allow young children to play with or ignite fireworks, including sparklers. Sparklers burn at temperatures of about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit  hot enough to melt some metals.

 Never try to relight or handle malfunctioning fireworks. Soak them with water and throw them away.

 Soak all fireworks in a bucket of water before throwing them in the trash because they may still be ignited.

 The safest approach is to leave fireworks to the professionals. Many communities and organizations across South Carolina are having free fireworks shows this holiday weekend.

For more tips, visit DHECs fireworks safety page or the NFPA webpage.

The health agency recommends unvaccinated individuals should wear masks in public and physically distance from others.

"The pandemic is ongoing, and disease transmission can easily occur in group settings where individuals are not fully vaccinated," according to the release. "... The CDC considers attending a crowded, outdoor event one of the least safe activities for unvaccinated individuals. However, for those who are fully vaccinated, this type of gathering is considered safe."

Those who have not yet been vaccinated are encouraged to do so as soon as possible. Safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines are available for those aged 12 and older.

For more information, visit DHECs vaccination page, and the agencys locator page to find a nearby vaccination site.
COLUMBIA  A state grand jury has slapped longtime Republican political consultant Richard Quinn Sr. with a new round of criminal charges, signaling South Carolinas yearslong investigation into Statehouse corruption still has gas left in the tank.

The new 38-page indictment charges Quinn with 12 counts of perjury and two counts of obstruction of justice. Most of the charges accuse the longtime Statehouse power broker of lying to the state grand jury in order to cover up potential wrongdoing by his Columbia-based political operation.

The new indictment is nearly identical to the one issued against Quinn in April 2019 when the state grand jury was led by former Statehouse corruption prosecutor David Pascoe.

But this fresh round of charges, guided by new special prosecutor Barry Barnette, include an additional accusation that Quinn lied to the grand jury about his business arrangement with S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson.

The charges became public the same week another defendant in the corruption probe, former House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Harrison, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for lying to the grand jury and misconduct in office.

The grand jury issued the indictment against Quinn on May 20 but never publicized them. The Post and Courier obtained a copy July 2 after the news was first reported by The State newspaper.

Reached by phone Friday morning, Quinn said he had no idea about the new indictment and declined to comment further until he could look into it.

"This is news to me," Quinn said. "Of course, it's not the first time I've heard about things in the newspaper."

For decades, Quinn advised dozens of South Carolinas most powerful Republican lawmakers, congressmen and statewide officials, including Gov. Henry McMaster, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Wilson.

At the same time, his firm, Richard Quinn and Associates, earned millions of dollars advising special interests that regularly lobby the Statehouse, from telecom and health insurance giants to electric utilities and the University of South Carolina.

That messy intersection of business and politics has become a major focus of the Statehouse corruption investigation, which began in 2012 and has so far resulted in charges against a half dozen now-former lawmakers, including Quinns son, ex-House Majority Leader Rick Quinn.

Almost all were longtime associates or clients of Richard Quinn Sr.s political firm.

A grand jury previously indicted Quinn in October 2017 on charges of criminal conspiracy and failure to register as a lobbyist. Two months later, his firm and his son pleaded guilty as part of a deal that required Quinn to testify truthfully before the grand jury.

But prosecutors say Quinn lied during his two appearances before the grand jury in April and May 2018.

Among the lies the indictment alleges:

Quinn told the grand jury that Harrison, the former House Judiciary Committee chairman, was paid by his firm to help run political campaigns across the state. In reality, witnesses testified, Harrison did little or no campaign work for Richard Quinn and Associates. Instead, Quinns firm paid Harrison some $900,000 over the course of 12 years, and the lawmaker proposed and voted for legislation that benefited Quinns corporate clients.

Quinn denied he participated in a kickback scheme with one of his clients, former Senate Education Committee Chairman John Courson. Courson ultimately resigned, pleaded guilty to misconduct in office, and admitted to pocketing more than $133,000 in campaign cash through the scheme.

Quinn denied paying his son, Rick Quinn, while he worked as a legislator and voted on matters pertaining to clients of Richard Quinn Sr.s firm.

Quinn twice testified that Wilson didnt pay him for crafting Wilsons press releases, letters and other statements. In reality, Wilsons financial reports show the attorney general paid Quinn about $400,000 from September 2009 to June 2017.

Wilson's office declined to comment on the indictment.

This Office wants to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, which is why we handed this case off to other solicitors," Wilson spokesman Robert Kittle wrote. "Since our office is not involved in this case, it would be inappropriate for us to comment.

In 2018, a state grand jury report accused Wilson of undermining the corruption probe while he continued to work with the elder Quinn, one of its chief targets. The grand jury described the attorney generals relationship with the Quinns as problematic.

Wilson and his allies were quick to dismiss the report as a political hit-job on the eve of state elections.

Richard Quinn Sr. revealed to the grand jury earlier that year that he discussed the investigation with Wilson almost every day probably up until the time I was indicted and shortly before that.

Quinn also testified that Wilson viewed him as a second father, and that Wilson assured him everything would be fine. Quinn said that Wilson didnt believe the Quinns had done anything wrong.

Wilson voluntarily testified before the grand jury after learning he was going to be subpoenaed, the report stated, and he insisted he never shared legal privileged materials with the Quinns. His actions, he testified, were designed to protect the constitutional authority of his office, not his friends.

Barnette, the special prosecutor, declined to comment Friday.
Dominion Energy and a state agency have settled a contested case that clears the way for the company to increase its electricity rates in South Carolina  but by a far slimmer margin than it had requested last year.

The deal, struck after six months of private negotiations, was announced July 2.

Under the terms of the settlement with the S.C Office of Regulatory Staff, the utility's power bills for residential customers in the Palmetto State will rise by 1.37 percent effective Sept. 1, or about $1.81 a month for a typical household.

When Dominion formally filed for its increase in August, it asked for a 7.7 percent hike to recoup billions of dollars that the company and its predecessor had invested over the previous eight years.

The figure reached under the settlement is expected to generate an additional $35.6 million in annual revenue, compared to $178 million under the original proposal.

The increases for commercial customers, depending on their size, will range from 1.08 percent to 2.06 percent, down from 7.2 percent to 8.68 percent.

The overall average works out to 1.46 percent.

Frank Knapp Jr., CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce, who intervened in the case as a Dominion customer, called the agreement "the best outcome possible" and "the biggest reduction in a utility rate hike request that I have seen in the last 20 years."

The deal also prohibits the Richmond, Va.-based company from seeking another electric rate hike in South Carolina before July 1, 2023, "absent unforeseen extraordinary economic or financial conditions that may include changes in corporate tax rates."

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In addition, the energy giant is committing up to $30 million in shareholder funds to help vulnerable and economically distressed customers.

The settlement still requires a formal review by the S.C. Public Service Commission, which is likely to approve it.

The increase is the first in the state for Dominion since its acquisition of South Carolina Electric & Gas in early 2019, after the Cayce-based utility was hobbled financially by the failed expansion of the V.C. Summer nuclear plant.

The company's roughly 700,000 customers are scattered around the Columbia, Charleston, Orangeburg and Beaufort areas.

Earlier this year, Dominion came under fire for taking its rate case before state regulators during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company and the Office of Regulatory Staff, which represents utility customers, agreed to a six-month "pause" in January in an effort to reach a compromise out of the public eye.

We believe the negotiations led to a well-rounded, creative resolution containing consumer-friendly measures that otherwise would not be available through a formal proceeding, said Carri Grube Lybarker, administrator with the S.C. Department of Consumer Affairs.

Other groups involved in the settlement included AARP, the Sierra Club, the Coastal Conservation League and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Rodney Blevins, president of Dominion Energy South Carolina, said the company was "grateful to all parties for the spirit of cooperation, patience, and compromise that they brought to these negotiations."

"We're pleased to support the filed settlement and move forward," he said. "We're focused on continuing to provide exceptional value and reliability to our customers, meet 100 percent of our merger commitments, and promote the future prosperity of South Carolina."
Scene SC, a music blog founded in 2008 by Columbia's David Stringer, celebrates 13 years with another compilation of unreleased indie music from across the state.

It's an annual tradition for the publication, which also handles the videography aspect of Free Times' 1 or 2 Sessions, a performance series fledged in the midst of the pandemic in partnership with One Columbia and Richland Library.

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This year's edition of the Scene SC sampler features 30 tracks from artists who cover a variety of genres, from pop to electronic to folk to soul to hip-hop.

It's the 11th rendition of the project, after a gap year in 2020. Past artists featured include Shovels & Rope, All Get Out and Susto's precursor Sequoyah Prep School.

Among the list of this year's artists are Charleston's Human Resources, Cole Collins, Kelly Morris, Mechanical River, Rowan Oak, Orange Doors, Canopy Hands, Short Division, Invisible Low End Power and Persona La Ave.

Stringer's goal from the start has been to showcase the depth and breadth of indie music talent from the state of South Carolina.

"We are creating this site because we believe that the current talent level in SC is incredible and we are trying to do our part in spreading the word," the first post on the web page read in 2008.

Now, more than a decade later, that goal remains the same. The sampler features a significant portion of new and under-the-radar musicians that live across the state, from Charleston to Columbia to Florence to Greenville.

More than 70 submissions were narrowed down to 30 tracks, and a listening team was assembled to help make final selections.

"Is the process of it all perfect?" wrote Stringer. "No. Will it ever be? No. Do we try hard and care deeply? Absolutely."

If nothing else, the sampler showcases a true taste of the current South Carolina music scene. And, if you ask me, it's one that deserves a listen.

For more information on Scene SC, visit scenesc.com, and to listen to all of the previous samplers, head to scenesc.bandcamp.com.
COLUMBIA  A COVID-19 testing worker at the University of South Carolina said she sounded the alarm about an exposure to the deadly virus for employees and hundreds coming in for testing. Days later, she was fired.

Now, the former employee has filed suit against the states largest university, citing retaliation and unlawful termination.

The university declined an interview, saying it does not comment on pending litigation.

Kaye Merck, an X-ray technician with 38 years experience, said in court documents that she found out Jan. 6 from co-workers that another employee at the schools test site had tested positive for COVID-19. Though she and others had been exposed, they were not notified or told to quarantine, even after she raised the issue with a supervisor.

The exposure happened Jan. 4-5, a week before students returned to campus following winter break, according to the suit.

At this time, USC was requiring students to receive a negative COVID-19 test before returning to class, as it had the prior semester. The Board of Trustees also had mandated monthly testing for the remainder of the spring semester. The school threatened fines of up to $250 and suspension to anyone who failed to meet these requirements, all in an effort to avoid a surge similar to the one experienced earlier in the fall that had amounted to one of the nations worst COVID-19 outbreaks on a college campus.

While exact testing numbers for January are no longer available on the schools website, at the end of April the on-campus site was testing around 350 to 450 people every three days.

Merck, who had previous experience running a testing site in Virginia, had been coordinating the schools saliva tests and managing the student workers for four months.

After finding out about the exposure, Merck said in court documents she had asked her supervisor what to do. Her supervisor responded that she did not know and to do whatever made Merck comfortable.

Merck emailed her second level supervisor who referred her to Student Health Services.

She reported her exposure Jan. 8 and was told to quarantine until her negative results came back on Jan. 11. According to court documents, Student Health Services also asked for the names of other employees who had contact with the COVID-19 positive worker.

At noon Jan. 12, the day she returned to work, Merck was called into a meeting with her second level supervisor and told she was fired.

When she asked why, her lawyer Paul Porter told The Post and Courier, she was told volume of testing had decreased. Then the supervisor told Merck she had run a sample incorrectly.

Merck said she never received a write-up for anything prior to her termination.

Porter said his client had liked her job at the university and wishes none of this had ever happened.

She was very disappointed when she was fired for raising reasonable concerns about testing site employees potentially exposing test subjects and whether the Universitys protocol had been followed, Porter said.

Merck is asking a jury trial be held, court documents say. She is seeking compensation for lost wages, attorney's fees and other damages.

Merck's lawsuit joins another coronavirus-related class-action suit filed against the university. USC graduate and former Miss South Carolina Davia Bunch sued in an effort to force the university to issue tuition refunds after the virus forced the closure of all on-campus events and moved classes online in Spring 2020.

That case is still pending in Richland County.

This suit is one of about 50 COVID-19 related lawsuits filed in the Palmetto State since the start of the pandemic, according to an online tally collected by law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth.
COLUMBIA  The University of South Carolina needs to change how it handles reports of sexual misconduct involving staff and faculty by revising policies, training requirements and reporting procedures, according to a report issued July 1.

The Title IX Task Force report, developed by a group of university faculty and staff, comes months after a number of lawsuits filed by women who say USC mishandled their reports of sexual assault and harassment at the hands of faculty and staff.

While this review was being conducted, one of the men named in complaints has resigned.

In the coming months, the university will look at overhauling handling of sexual misconduct cases related to Title IX, the federal law which prohibits discrimination based on sex in education.

Notably, the task force found inconsistencies in the discipline of faculty and staff for sexual harassment and assault. And other than termination, there is no policy for punishing behavior that may not constitute a violation but is nonetheless inappropriate.

"Few reported cases are formally investigated, with a large proportion of complainants opting out," the task force report read. "Further, cases against faculty are less likely to result in a reasonable cause finding than those against students and staff."

As a result, a special committee of faculty, staff and students has been convened to advise the Faculty Senate as it rewrites the faculty handbook to address shortfalls, said Audrey Korsgaard, incoming senate chairwoman and task force co-chairwoman.

In the meantime, of the employees recently accused of misconduct, two men  art professor David Voros and theater professor Robert Richmond  remain barred from campus but continue administrative duties, while another  IT professional Michael Dollar  has continued his employment, and a third  history professor David Snyder  has resigned from the university, USC spokesman Larry Thomas said.

Lawsuits are still pending against three of the men.

In addition to the task force report, there was an audit of the cases against the four men. That audit found the university followed all procedures in the handling of those cases in which a formal complaint was filed.

However, the report said there are opportunities for improvement.

More must be done to enhance the processes associated with managing reports of sexual harassment, sexual assault and interpersonal violence, interim USC President Harris Pastides said in a letter. This brings us to a very important moment in our responsibility and commitment to improve. We turn now from a focus on internal review and introspection to a period of purposeful and deliberate action.

Pastides then called for expanded training beginning in the fall for everyone attending or working for the university.

The task force recommended this include recurring annual training, as well as targeted training for staff who interact directly with those involved in cases of sexual violence, said co-chairwoman Kristen Kennedy, associate vice president of student housing.

Pastides also wants expedited hiring of a new director to head the office of Equal Opportunity Programs currently served by an interim director, as well as a separate coordinator to run the Title IX office, and the publishing of current data surrounding incidents of sexual violence and harassment.

A new soft-landings process for reporting abuse, which focuses on trauma support when helping a victim decide whether they wish to make a formal or informal complaint, is being developed.

"This important change addresses the intimidating and potentially re-traumatizing experience of reporting," the task force wrote.

Some other recommendations include Title IX liaisons for each school as a way to prevent instances of assault or harassment not making it to the proper channels and exit interviews at the end of each case as a way to identify problems or improvements.

Philadelphia-headquartered Cozen OConnor, an external firm hired by USC to advise on policies and procedures surrounding federal Title IX law, will continue to aid the school and faculty as it considers changes.
Charleston, SC (29403)

Today

A mix of clouds and sun. High 86F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 72F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph.
GEORGETOWN  Totaling $3.8 million, five state earmarks Gov. Henry McMaster originally vetoed for Georgetown County were overridden by South Carolina State Legislature June 29.

Out of the five requested, one project requested by Rep. Lee Hewitt totals $2 million for the dredging of Murrells Inlet.

Hewitt said while this project would focus on the inlet as a whole, areas such as the MarshWalk, Parsonage Creek and channels to Sunnyside Plantation would especially see work.

Dredging the inlet, Hewitt said, will, among other things, help preserve its oyster beds and natural shoreline. He also cited heavy development in the area as a reason the inlet needs attention now more than ever.

"From a water quality standpoint... we're looking at things like silt traps, filtration systems to filter the water before it gets to the inlet, road run off, bacteria and things like that that come with heavy development (to make sure they) don't make it to the inlet," Hewitt said.

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Hewitt said as the only public access point with a public boat landing and parking between Little River and Georgetown, Murrells Inlet serves a major economic purpose. Right now, for a few hours a day during low tide, Hewitt said boats are unable to access the otherwise jam-packed landing, and that dredging the inlet could help alleviate that problem.

"It's a long process, but we met with a couple engineers a couple weeks ago and he said 'Let's say there's 11 steps, we've completed five of the 11 steps,' " Hewitt said.

This project is going to require some local buy-ins from Georgetown and Horry counties, though those amounts are not known at this time. Hewitt hopes a complete project plan with full funding and permitting will be ready by 2025.
SURFSIDE BEACH  With calls from far away as Brazil, Surfside, S.C., authorities say hundreds of people have reached out about the Surfside, Fla., condominium collapse over the last week, some offering donations while others were trying to get word on loved ones.

Even national news outlets and some military officials have reached out to the fire department in a town with the same name 675 miles away from the disaster.

The calls to the South Carolina town south of Myrtle Beach started coming into the fire station almost immediately after news broke of the collapse on June 24, Acting Fire Chief Larry Carter Jr. said. So far 20 people have been confirmed dead from the collapse with another 128 still unaccounted for, according to the Associated Press as of the evening of July 2.

Some of the calls to the Surfside Beach, S.C., fire station were heart-breaking.

"One individual was trying to find his parents, and could not get an answer on their cell phone," Carter said.

The station was quickly able to collect resources for donations and get updates on condo residents to give people who mistakenly called, Carter said.

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"If it did happen here, we'd have had so much help," he said. "Everybody was calling in to help."

The Surfside Beach Fire Department often gets other mistaken calls. The station will get calls meant for Surfside Beach, Texas, near Houston, especially during Gulf hurricanes.

While the situation in Florida is tragic, Surfside Beach Town Administrator William Shanahan Jr. said the collapse is a reminder why governments need to check building safety and they must do the same for public projects.

"We're building a pier, we're building a bridge, we've got buildings coming up and people get mad because we've got this international code of building we have to follow," Shanahan said. "This is an example of what happens when you don't make them do it right, so to me it reinforces that we're doing the right thing by making our citizens, whether they like it or not, follow the rules to keep them safe."

Carter said people seeking information about their loved ones who were in the Champlain Towers South building in Surfside, Fla., should call Miami-Dade Emergency Operations at (786) 331-5000.

For those who wish to donate, The Miami Herald suggested visiting Support Surfside and The Miami Foundation.
Anderson County's library system is now fine-free.

On July 1, it joined other library systems around the state and nation that have removed financial barriers on library materials. Among Upstate systems, Spartanburg County also does not impose late fees. Spartanburg made the change last year.

Anderson County will no longer charge fines for materials returned after the due date, with the exception of South Carolina State Park passes and Children's Museum of the Upstate passes. Materials not returned after 60 days will be considered lost and users charged for the cost of the item.

All current unpaid, overdue fines are forgiven.

When Anderson's libraries closed to the public last March, they granted amnesty for overdue fines. When its nine branches and bookmobile reopened, they continued to forgive most fees. Conversations to make the policy permanent began this spring under the system's former director Faith Line. After the library Board of Trustees approved the change, new director Annie Sutton implemented it.

"The main factor for us is really improving access to the library for everyone," Anderson County library communications manager Brianna McDonell said. "We just want it to be a more pleasant experience for everyone coming to the library, to not be afraid of coming to the library."

Dropping fines is a growing trend.

On July 1, 2020, Spartanburg County Public Libraries stopped charging late fees on overdue items and extended due dates as an initial response to the pandemic. In mid-summer, Spartanburg County made the change permanent.

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"Our hope is that without the pressure of late fees, patrons will be encouraged to utilize our services, returning their items without penalty," Director of Circulation Services Christina Calitri wrote in the Spartanburg system's quarterly magazine.

Pickens County Public Library charges 10 cents daily for late books with other materials potentially incurring different overdue charges. After three months, a book is deemed "lost" and the library system will charge for it.

Director of the Pickens County Library System Stephanie Howard applauded Anderson and all libraries that have moved to fine-free or partial fine-free models.

"We are definitely investigating this and looking at options for the Pickens County Library System," Howard wrote in an email. "I hope to continue the conversation with our Library Board of Trustees to discuss and develop a fine free model that would work for Pickens County."

Greenville County also charges fines for overdue materials. Late fees vary based on material type. Print and audiovisual materials incur a daily fine of 20 cents. The maximum fine for items returned after the due date is $6.

In June 2018, Charleston County Library System did away with fines on overdue books. On June 1, 2021, the library system removed all fines for non-book related materials, including DVDs, CDs and Chromebooks.

The fine-free movement has increased in popularity over the past few years, according to Director of Communications Curtis Rodgers with the Urban Library Council, an association of more than 150 North American public library systems.

Approximately 330 library systems in the United States have implemented fine-free policies. ULC tracks public library systems in North America that have adopted variations of fine-free policies on a crowdsourced map.
A state Administrative Law Court judge denied a motion to reconsider his ruling after he found Greenville County Councilman Ennis Fant owed nearly $56,000 in taxes for an Anderson lake house.

The judge ruled the councilman falsely claimed the house as a permanent residence. In an order dated May 27, Administrative Law Judge Phillip Lenski determined Fant had simultaneously claimed a house near Hartwell Lake as his domicile for 10 years while he also claimed homes in Greenville as his primary residences  including while he ran for Greenville County Council.

The court ordered Fant to pay the difference on the Anderson County property between the 4 percent tax rate for residences and the 6 percent rate for all other property.

Fant made eight arguments in his motion to reconsider but Lenski wrote that each of the arguments had either not been raised in the case, or that the court had not overlooked or misapprehended the issues raised.

Fant said he expected his motion to reconsider to be denied. He said he plans to appeal the decision.

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The issue arose in 2019 when the Anderson County Tax Assessor received a tip from a resident who asked how Fant could legally claim his home on Gareloch Lane in Anderson County as his residence while he ran for County Council in Greenville.

Fant bought the Anderson County home in 1999. The court found he couldnt show he had lived there as his primary residence beyond 2008, though he never filed a document with Anderson County to alert them he switched his primary residence to Greenville. Fant had a Greenville County address listed on his drivers license, filed income taxes from a Greenville address and paid his vehicle taxes in Greenville, the court found.

Fant has already paid $16,000 in penalties to Anderson County in the case. The court ruled he didnt owe an additional $8,000 in late fees the county had also charged.

He has since put the home into a family trust.
Nearly 100 new confirmed cases of the coronavirus were reported on July 1 by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Five more deaths were also reported in the state.

DHEC is encouraging South Carolinians to get vaccinated against the virus as the more-transmissible Delta variant is now spreading in the state. Six more cases of the variant have been confirmed in South Carolina as of June 28.

Vaccination locations can be found online at vaxlocator.dhec.sc.gov.

Statewide numbers

New cases reported: 99 confirmed, 89 probable.

Total cases in S.C.: 493,199 confirmed, 103,822 probable.

Percent positive: 3 percent.

New deaths reported: 5 confirmed, 2 probable.

Total deaths in S.C.: 8,644 confirmed, 1,182 probable.

Percent of ICU beds filled: 65.3 percent.

S.C. residents vaccinated

DHEC's vaccine dashboard shows that 48.5 percent of the state's residents have received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine.

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Hardest-hit areas

In the total number of newly confirmed cases, Greenville County (10), Horry County (13) and York County (11) saw the highest totals.

What about tri-county?

Charleston County had 5 new cases on July 1, while Berkeley County had 4 and Dorchester County had 3.

Deaths

One of the deaths from COVID-19 confirmed July 1 was an individual age 35 to 64. Four were patients age 65 or older.

Hospitalizations

Of the 124 COVID-19 patients hospitalized as of Jul 1, 37 were in the ICU and 16 were using ventilators.

What do experts say?

DHEC is offering the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines ahead of Independence Day weekend at the Mexican Consulate on Wheels at 1115 Pelham Road in Greenville. Vaccinations will be given from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 1-2.

No appointment, insurance or ID is required.

People ages 12 and older can receive the Pfizer vaccine. The Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are available for people 18 and older.
The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control is asking S.C. residents to maintain COVID-19 safety measures over the holiday weekend.

Disease transmission can easily occur in group settings that include people who are not fully vaccinated, the agency said in a news release.

Those who are unvaccinated should wear masks in public and physically distance themselves from others.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, attending a crowded, outdoor event is one of the least safe activities for unvaccinated people. Those who are vaccinated are safe in these environments.

DHEC said only 48.6 percent of the state's residents have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Ahead of the holiday weekend, close to 140 new cases of the coronavirus were reported in the state on July 2.

The agency will not release a COVID-19 data report on July 5 because of the Independence Day holiday; since DHEC does not release the data on weekends, its next report will be on July 6.

Statewide numbers

New cases reported: 139 confirmed, 85 probable.

Total cases in S.C.: 493,316 confirmed, 103,945 probable.

Percent positive: 2.8 percent.

New deaths reported: 4 confirmed, 0 probable.

Total deaths in S.C.: 8,648 confirmed, 1,182 probable.

Percent of ICU beds filled: 65.3 percent.

S.C. residents vaccinated

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DHEC's vaccine dashboard shows that 48.6 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, Richland County (38), Horry County (15) and Greenville County (13) saw the highest totals.

What about tri-county?

Charleston County had seven new cases on July 2, while Berkeley County had eight and Dorchester County had five.

Deaths

Three of the deaths from COVID-19 confirmed July 2 were people 65 and older. One was a patient age 17 or younger.

Hospitalizations

Of the 124 COVID-19 patients hospitalized as of July 2, 37 were in the ICU and 16 were using ventilators.

What do experts say?

According to the CDC, people who are fully vaccinated can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing, except where required by law, rules or regulations, including in local businesses.

The center has compiled a list online of the safest activities for unvaccinated individuals.

Because of the continued rise in the spread of the Delta variant, DHEC said it is more important than ever for people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

People ages 12 and older can receive the Pfizer vaccine. The Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are available for people 18 and older. Go to vaxlocator.dhec.sc.gov to find a nearby vaccine provider.
Charleston officials are bracing for flooding as forecasters warn that showers and severe thunderstorms could drop several inches of rain by nightfall.

Heavy rain is expected between 3 and 8 p.m. July 2. Most of the rain will fall in a three-hour period, which could result in flooding in low-lying areas and poor drainage areas, according to the National Weather Service.

Thunderstorms and showers are expected to drop 1 to 3 inches of rain across Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester and Colleton counties. Isolated severe thunderstorms could also produce wind gusts in excess of 60 mph, the weather service warned.

Emily McGraw, a meteorologist for the weather service's Charleston office, said the next high tide is about 3 p.m., so coastal flooding is not expected. The forecast for the tide is 5.2 feet.

Charleston Harbor reaches minor flood stage at 7 feet, moderate at 7.5 feet and major at 8 feet, the weather service said.

McGraw said the local thunderstorms are unrelated to Hurricane Elsa, which is moving through the Caribbean Sea.

City crews are preparing for potential storm impacts by setting up pumps in areas known to flood and clearing debris from storm drains. The Fire Department has activated its high-water team to perform rescues, and police are monitoring the city's roadways and will barricade streets as necessary.

The Emergency Management Division's Public Safety Operations Center will open at 3 p.m. and remain activated to manage the city's response throughout the storm.

Shannon Scaff, the city's emergency management director, said residents should take the normal precautions: monitor local media for the latest weather forecast, use caution when traveling and never drive through standing water.

"As always, the safety of our citizens is our number one priority, so city crews stand ready to respond to any impacts the storm may bring," Scaff said.
Elsa has strengthened into the first hurricane of the 2021 Atlantic season, the National Weather Service reported on July 2.

As of 8 p.m., Elsa was moving through the eastern Caribbean Sea and a hurricane watch had been issued for eastern Cuba, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Its maximum sustained winds maintained at 85 mph  a Category 1 hurricane  and the storm was located about 475 miles east-southeast of Isla Beata in the Dominican Republic, the Hurricane Center said. Elsa was moving west-northwest at 30 mph.

Westward motion was expected to continue through Saturday before Elsa pivots west-northwest and slows a little Saturday night and Sunday, the Hurricane Center said. That will be followed by a northwest turn Sunday night or Monday.

"On the forecast track, Elsa will move across the eastern Caribbean Sea tonight and move near the southern coast of Hispaniola late Saturday or Saturday night," the Hurricane Center said. "By Sunday, Elsa is forecast to move near Jamaica and portions of eastern Cuba, and move near portions of central and western Cuba Sunday night and Monday."

Forecasters don't expect Elsa to gain much strength through Saturday and slow weakening is expected to begin Saturday night or Sunday as the storm passes near or over the Greater Antilles, the Hurricane Center said.

As of July 2, forecasters expected Elsa to move across Cuba and over the eastern Gulf of Mexico or the Florida peninsula before moving into the southeastern U.S., but, "there is still enough spread in the potential tracks that this part of the forecast remains low confidence," the Hurricane Center said.

"The forecast uncertainty remains larger than usual due to Elsa's potential interaction with the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba this weekend," the Hurricane Center said.

Whether the storm will have major impacts on South Carolina remains uncertain.

Charleston County Emergency Management has encouraged residents to pay attention to the forecast as the storm develops.

Elsa is the fifth named tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season when it formed July 1 off the coast of the Windward Islands of the Caribbean. It was the earliest-known fifth named storm on record for the Atlantic region since 1966, according to the Hurricane Center.
One person was killed and a second injured in a July 1 shooting on Charleston's East Side.

Charleston police officers were dispatched to Harris and Hanover streets about 9:20 p.m. for reports of shots fired in the area, according to an incident report. Officers met with a 28-year-old woman who had been shot.

Once there, officers learned a 31-year-old man with a gunshot wound was at a Jackson Street residence.

Both victims were transported to an area hospital, where the man was pronounced dead.

The Charleston County Coroner's Office identified the deceased as Dominique Lewis of Charleston. He died at 9:43 p.m. July 1 at Medical University Hospital.

No information was provided about who may have shot the two, but police said the investigation is ongoing.

Anyone with information can call 843-743-7200 for the on-duty detective.
The State Law Enforcement Division has opened an investigation into the findings of a new forensic audit of Allendale County that revealed severe accounting deficiencies, including undocumented cash withdrawals and thousands of dollars in unreported bonuses, an agency spokesman confirmed.

Duffie Stone, 14th Circuit solicitor, requested the investigation, SLED spokesman Tommy Crosby confirmed to The Post and Courier.

"No additional information is available at this time as we begin our active investigation," Crosby added.

Stone did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The forensic audit, released June 29, cited a range of accounting deficiencies that left the county at serious risk of fraud. County officials lack checks and balances in their accounting practices, have issued payments without invoices and havent kept a general ledger for at least 13 years, among problems the auditors found.

For instance, the sheriff withdrew thousands in cash with no explanation. The clerk of court paid thousands in Christmas bonuses to staff, including herself, without reporting them. And the rural county has at least 45 bank accounts, some in individuals names, the audit says.

Allendale County Council members sought the audit after complaining that the county treasurer, who is elected, was not providing them basic information about revenue, among other concerns, to no avail.

Council Chairman Rick Gooding, who took the helm in January, said the forensic audit revealed alarming problems that must be addressed.

Its appalling to me and troubling, he said. It paints a bad picture for Allendale County. It really does. But County Council is going to fully cooperate with SLED.

He added that the audit also gave the council a good road map. Weve just got to put one foot in front of the other.

The treasurer, Gerzell Chaney, resigned several weeks ago, citing talks with her attorney. It came just days after state Sens. Brad Hutto and Margie Bright Matthews wrote to the governor urging him to take action because Chaney's "failures have placed Allendale County, and its school district, in financial peril."

Meanwhile, Sheriff Tom Carter had taken out an account named "drug money" in his personal name and did not disclose it to the county administrator. In 2020, more than $11,000 was deposited into that account, including a single deposit for $10,565 labeled simply drug money." Yet, the deposit wasnt linked to any court proceedings, the audit found.

Carter also personally withdrew thousands of dollars from the account. He took out nine cash withdrawals totaling $5,095 but provided no explanation of why he was withdrawing $3,695 of that money, the audit says.

There was no approval process for these cash withdrawals, no dual control, and no reporting to the County Administrator, the auditors wrote. This is a material weakness and creates the potential for fraud.

Carter did not respond to a request for comment.

The audits revelations come amid a decadelong parade of scandals involving South Carolina sheriffs. And beyond sheriffs, a lack of scrutiny and financial controls has led to myriad allegations of all kinds of mismanagement  or worse  committed by public officials, from judges to superintendents. The Post and Courier is investigating them this year in its Uncovered series.

In rural Allendale County, which sits on the Georgia border, the audit's findings didn't surprise residents who have watched their county struggle with poverty, low-performing schools and public corruption. Over the past five years alone, the state has taken over its school district for the second time while three of Allendales public officials went to jail on embezzlement charges.

Now, the forensic audit shows far-reaching financial risks to the county, given a major lack of checks and balances and questionable accounting practices. For example, officials kept no master list of capital assets, and payments for jail renovations were made without invoices.

The county clerk, Elaine Sabb, has nine bank accounts and is the sole person receiving and distributing money in them, the audit says.

She paid $13,195 in Christmas bonuses to her staff, including herself, out of a discretionary fund in 2020. The bonus checks ranged from $3,720 to $1,295, but Sabb didnt account for them in the county payroll system or report them to the IRS on W-2s, the audit says.

Sabb did not respond to a request for comment.

Many local residents hope the forensic audit and SLED investigation finally will bring answers to a community rife with concerns over the handling of taxes paid by residents, many of whom are elderly and living in poverty.

Angel Brabham recently created the Facebook page Concerned Citizens of Allendale County to press for transparency from county officials.

"I pray they get a grip on things," she said, "and real consequences happen for those who are truly guilty."
Syndicated and guest columns represent the personal views of the writers, not necessarily those of the editorial staff. The editorial department operates entirely independently of the news department and is not involved in newsroom operations.
Charleston's main civic intersection, Broad and Meeting streets, is known as the Four Corners of Law. Some are concerned about a new city plan that changes this area's designation from "city center" to "neighborhood." Above, a flag above the federal building with St. Michael's Church in the background. File/Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
On Tuesday, the S.C. Senate voted 43-0 to confirm Peter McCoy as Gov. Henry McMasters second pick to oversee the Santee Cooper board  two years after the body refused to even take a vote on his first pick.

Senators then voted 43-0 to confirm Mr. McMasters new Commerce secretary, just 12 days after he nominated Harry Lightsey III for the job.

And then after a brief discussion led by Republican Sen. Katrina Shealy, a longtime volunteer at the agency, the Senate voted 34-4 to express its deep concerns over the dangerous conditions at the Department of Juvenile Justice and declare that it has no confidence that the current leadership of the Department, including Director Freddie B. Pough, is capable of rectifying the situation.

Unlike the confirmations, the Senate vote on the embattled director of the youth corrections agency was purely symbolic. But several of the governors closest allies in the Senate voted for the motion, and although a few didnt vote, not a single Republican voted against it.

In other words, this extraordinary no-confidence vote cannot be dismissed as an attempt to thwart the governors authority over the executive branch or to undermine his agenda or to make him look bad; it certainly cant be called a partisan attack, since most of the senators voting for it were Republicans and all of the no votes came from Democrats.

Mr. McMaster responded by pointing to work underway to address the problems continuing to support Mr. Pough.

Just as he did when the state Legislative Audit Council released a scathing report in April that said DJJ doesnt have enough security officers to keep the juveniles or staff safe, the level of experience has dropped and the number of violent incidents has skyrocketed.

Just as he did when an auditor testified that Mr. Pough had ordered staffers to report any interactions with auditors, which the auditor said was interpreted by staffers as a threat.

Just as he did in early June when two dozen employees walked off the job, complaining that they were being forced to work 24- and even 48-hour shifts and being increasingly subjected to attacks from juveniles.

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Frankly, we dont know whether forcing Mr. Pough to leave would be the worst thing the governor could do or the best thing or something in between. But we know the governor is right when he notes that overseeing incarcerated youth is a tough job, and its tough all around the country. And we know that simply replacing Mr. Pough would not solve the problems that have plagued DJJ for years. After all, Mr. Pough got the job when the previous director, facing a scathing LAC audit and increased violence and employee morale problems, was forced out.

Sen. Shealy and others were right to raise the profile of the problems plaguing DJJ, which most people would rather ignore, just as theyd rather ignore problems at adult prisons. They were right to send a strong message to the governor.

But the four senators who voted no also were right when they said simply sending a message as the Legislature was wrapping up its routine business for the year wouldnt fix anything. As Sen. John Scott told his colleagues: Weve seen director after director after director, and the results are the same. So, the governor finds someone else, and the agency is still broken.

The staff shortages and increasing violence have to be dealt with, and the Legislature has to provide the resources to make that happen, and Mr. McMaster has to ensure that those resources are used appropriately toward that end  something the audit suggested hasnt been happening.

Those problems, though, are symptoms of a larger problem: Our state is not sufficiently committed to ensuring that the Department of Juvenile Justice is a place young people who have broken the law go to get their lives turned around.

Yes, we have to keep certain children locked down and insist that they follow the rules, but we have a legal, moral and frankly pragmatic obligation to ensure that they receive the appropriate psychiatric and psychological care, education, direction and support and are safe from other youths who could harm them.

Legislators need to enact reforms designed to keep more young people out of detention centers to begin with and to ensure their safety and rehabilitation once theyre in there.

And Mr. McMaster needs to take seriously the Senates no-confidence vote, which indicates either that the progress he keeps telling us is being made isnt sufficient or else that he has a problem he needs to fix in communicating with state senators.

Its worth noting that the Senate vote came the same day that Mr. McMaster and other state leaders approved spending $6 million to settle lawsuits stemming from a 2018 prison riot  the deadliest explosion of U.S. prison violence in 25 years.

Our juvenile prisons will probably never experience anything like that. But the failures of that system can have a cumulative effect that is just as devastating, since every additional day the young people locked inside don't receive the direction they need to set their lives straight increases the chance that they will graduate into our adult prisons.
The Sunday Post and Courier article about safely storing food during power outages contained considerable useful information, but I believe some important advice was omitted.

Those of us who live in the Lowcountry know we are in a hurricane zone.

My wife and I have lived in our new home on Johns Island for barely more than two years, but we have already experienced several power outages.

The worst one was a result of Hurricane Dorian. The outage lasted five days. Without standby power, we would have lost all of our valuable frozen and refrigerated food.

When we lived on an Alabama farm many years ago, a severe ice storm took out our power for nearly a week, but our small, portable generator enabled us to preserve a recently purchased side of frozen beef and other food that was far more valuable than the cost of our generator.

While living in our home in central New Jersey, we experienced multiple storm-related power outages.

After New Jersey was devastated by Hurricane Sandy, our longest outage lasted nearly two weeks. Without standby power, we would have had a flooded basement, no running water from our well and the loss of all of our frozen and refrigerated food.

After those experiences, I made sure that when we had our new home built on Johns Island, it would have a generator hookup. However, heavy-duty No. 12 extension cords from a generator running outside connected to a household refrigerator and freezer can work well in a pinch.

The time to buy a generator is not after a hurricane warning or a power outage. I believe its smarter to follow the Boy Scout motto, Be Prepared.

A portable generator with enough power to keep a refrigerator and freezer going, supply some lighting and keep cellphones charged is available locally for less than $300.

What are your perishable food and peace of mind worth?

LEWIS A. EDGE JR.

Dry Street

Johns Island

Vaccine risk low

A June 23 letter to the editor stated that a few young men and some young women have suffered severe reactions presumably related to receiving the COVID-19 vaccination.

To put that into perspective, lets consider relative risks.

An analysis by the CDC, which can be found at bit.ly/3dwfCI7, shows that for every 1 million second doses of mRNA vaccine administered to 17- to 30-year-old males, there will be 101 to 125 cases of myocarditis.

To date, most cases of post-vaccination myocarditis have been mild and no deaths have been reported.

Meanwhile, those 1 million second vaccine doses will have prevented 27,000 young men from getting infected by COVID-19, resulting in 1,466 hospitalizations avoided, 26 deaths prevented and 27,000 potential cases of long COVID avoided.

These numbers were compiled before the emergence of the delta variant, which is much more transmissible but against which the vaccine is very effective.

Australia, which has been enormously successful in controlling the pandemic, has just seen such a rapid spread of the delta variant that the government is now shutting down parts of Sydney. This pandemic is not over.

It seems clear that the risk of the vaccine is vastly lower than the risk of remaining unvaccinated.

Certainly, as the letter writer stated, the decision to vaccinate should be made by the individual in consultation with his or her medical provider.

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I hope they choose wisely for themselves and for everyone they come in contact with.

PETER STEELE

Battalion Drive

Charleston

Street flooding idea

Would you go down a flooded street if you knew how deep the water was?

The city of Charleston needs water depth gauges posted.

To save costs, these gauges could be added to street signs, light posts or other existing vertical objects.

The 4- to 5-foot measuring post could be placed in areas that frequently have the greatest street flooding.

Water measured at more than 2 feet is a great danger. At this level, cars will flood out and stall.

People want to get from point A to point B, but it should not be at the expense of being stuck in the middle of a flooded street.

Even emergency vehicles need to know the depth of the water.

Lets come up with a plan for this. There are several areas in the tri-county area that could use a water depth gauge.

MICHAEL RODGERS

Vinca Drive

Goose Creek

Farewell, Raskin

I hated to read Wednesday that food editor and critic Hanna Raskin is leaving The Post and Courier.

I did not always agree with her restaurant reviews. However, she certainly covered a lot of related areas in our local food scene and was informative about our greater food industry.

I will miss her.

ELTON CARRIER

King Street

Mount Pleasant
COLUMBIA  A state grand jury has slapped longtime Republican political consultant Richard Quinn Sr. with a new round of criminal charges, signaling South Carolinas yearslong investigation into Statehouse corruption still has gas left in the tank.

The new 38-page indictment charges Quinn with 12 counts of perjury and two counts of obstruction of justice. Most of the charges accuse the longtime Statehouse power broker of lying to the state grand jury in order to cover up potential wrongdoing by his Columbia-based political operation.

The new indictment is nearly identical to the one issued against Quinn in April 2019 when the state grand jury was led by former Statehouse corruption prosecutor David Pascoe.

But this fresh round of charges, guided by new special prosecutor Barry Barnette, include an additional accusation that Quinn lied to the grand jury about his business arrangement with S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson.

The charges became public the same week another defendant in the corruption probe, former House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Harrison, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for lying to the grand jury and misconduct in office.

The grand jury issued the indictment against Quinn on May 20 but never publicized them. The Post and Courier obtained a copy July 2 after the news was first reported by The State newspaper.

Reached by phone Friday morning, Quinn said he had no idea about the new indictment and declined to comment further until he could look into it.

"This is news to me," Quinn said. "Of course, it's not the first time I've heard about things in the newspaper."

For decades, Quinn advised dozens of South Carolinas most powerful Republican lawmakers, congressmen and statewide officials, including Gov. Henry McMaster, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Wilson.

At the same time, his firm, Richard Quinn and Associates, earned millions of dollars advising special interests that regularly lobby the Statehouse, from telecom and health insurance giants to electric utilities and the University of South Carolina.

That messy intersection of business and politics has become a major focus of the Statehouse corruption investigation, which began in 2012 and has so far resulted in charges against a half dozen now-former lawmakers, including Quinns son, ex-House Majority Leader Rick Quinn.

Almost all were longtime associates or clients of Richard Quinn Sr.s political firm.

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A grand jury previously indicted Quinn in October 2017 on charges of criminal conspiracy and failure to register as a lobbyist. Two months later, his firm and his son pleaded guilty as part of a deal that required Quinn to testify truthfully before the grand jury.

But prosecutors say Quinn lied during his two appearances before the grand jury in April and May 2018.

Among the lies the indictment alleges:

Quinn told the grand jury that Harrison, the former House Judiciary Committee chairman, was paid by his firm to help run political campaigns across the state. In reality, witnesses testified, Harrison did little or no campaign work for Richard Quinn and Associates. Instead, Quinns firm paid Harrison some $900,000 over the course of 12 years, and the lawmaker proposed and voted for legislation that benefited Quinns corporate clients.

Quinn denied he participated in a kickback scheme with one of his clients, former Senate Education Committee Chairman John Courson. Courson ultimately resigned, pleaded guilty to misconduct in office, and admitted to pocketing more than $133,000 in campaign cash through the scheme.

Quinn denied paying his son, Rick Quinn, while he worked as a legislator and voted on matters pertaining to clients of Richard Quinn Sr.s firm.

Quinn twice testified that Wilson didnt pay him for crafting Wilsons press releases, letters and other statements. In reality, Wilsons financial reports show the attorney general paid Quinn about $400,000 from September 2009 to June 2017.

Wilson's office declined to comment on the indictment.

This Office wants to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, which is why we handed this case off to other solicitors," Wilson spokesman Robert Kittle wrote. "Since our office is not involved in this case, it would be inappropriate for us to comment.

In 2018, a state grand jury report accused Wilson of undermining the corruption probe while he continued to work with the elder Quinn, one of its chief targets. The grand jury described the attorney generals relationship with the Quinns as problematic.

Wilson and his allies were quick to dismiss the report as a political hit-job on the eve of state elections.

Richard Quinn Sr. revealed to the grand jury earlier that year that he discussed the investigation with Wilson almost every day probably up until the time I was indicted and shortly before that.

Quinn also testified that Wilson viewed him as a second father, and that Wilson assured him everything would be fine. Quinn said that Wilson didnt believe the Quinns had done anything wrong.

Wilson voluntarily testified before the grand jury after learning he was going to be subpoenaed, the report stated, and he insisted he never shared legal privileged materials with the Quinns. His actions, he testified, were designed to protect the constitutional authority of his office, not his friends.

Barnette, the special prosecutor, declined to comment Friday.
SPARTANBURG  Converse University sophomore Aaliyah Love has embraced change over the past year.

Love, 19, is a child and family studies major from York who found the university appealing when she first stepped on campus. She wasn't sure what to think when, in February 2020, the Converse Board of Trustees announced that Converse College would become Converse University. The change would happen in the summer of 2021, and the private Spartanburg institution would be co-ed, beginning in the fall of 2020.

"I wasn't sure at first why they were changing the name, but when I found out more about the programs we offer, it made a little more sense," Love said. "I am really excited about the transition and I know a lot of people are excited about being co-ed."

As of July 1, the co-educational, undergraduate residential program and the Converse College for Women are now under the umbrella of Converse University. Converse students Angela Brobson, 19, and Keyanna Williams, 20, said they support the name change. They walked in front of Wilson Hall expressing excitement about a new beginning under the Converse University banner.

Brobson is a math and German studies major from Spartanburg. She said the name change allows the public to have a better understanding of the broad educational opportunities Converse offers students.

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"I always knew Converse was a great school," Brobson said. "I feel like, for me personally, I don't have a strong feeling about it but I know some do have strong attachment to words. We will still have strong resources as a university."

For Williams, the name change brought more prestige to Converse. She is a senior studying history.

"University has a tone to it that college doesn't," Williams said. "Personally, I didn't come here because of the women's college. I just fell in love with the community."

Prior to the February 2020 announcement, The Converse Board of Trustees formed an ad hoc committee to study and review the option to change the name. Studies showed adding a co-ed component to Converse would help drive enrollment growth similar to other former women's colleges in the country. Town halls and surveys were part of the review process.

"For more than 130 years, Converse has held true to its mission to empower its students to become transformative leaders who see clearly, decide wisely and act justly," Converse University President Krista Newkirk said in a statement. "Just as when Converse was founded, South Carolina and the nation today need transformational leadership to take us into the future.

"As we become Converse University, we have never been in a better position to lead the charge for educational and economic excellence in our region and beyond."
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Carl Hessler Jr. is a multi-media reporter who writes about crime and justice from the Montgomery County Courthouse for 21st Century Media Newspapers Greater Philadelphia area publications. Follow Carl on Twitter: @MontcoCourtNews
In my view, there are five teams left at Euro 2020 with a realistic chance of winning the tournament. (Full disclosure: I never imagined that Greece could win Euro 2004 until the Greeks made it to the final and even then I doubted their chances). The five teams, in no special order, are England, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Denmark.

England has been the best defensive team at the Euros. The English have yet to concede a goal. The center back pairing of Harry McGuire (Manchester United) and John Stones (ex-Everton, now Manchester City) has been solid and fullback Kyle Walker (Manchester City) has the pace to help cover for the pair, especially when he joins them in a back three.

Goals have been hard to come by for England, but the team scored two against Germany. Harry Kane, who led the EPL in goals and assists this past season, finally got his first goal. If hes back in form, England, with a favorable path to the finals and the home field advantage if they get there, has as good a chance to win this tournament as any team. In fact, England is the current betting favorite.

Spain has probably been the best offensive team on display. No team dominates possession like the Spaniards with their short passing game. And when Croatia played a high line in the round of 16, Spain showed it attack more directly, as well.

The Spanish have scored ten goals in their past two matches. Sure, this was against mediocre opposition. But if Alvaro Morata, who like Kane has finally started scoring, can put away his chances, Spain has a shot at winning the whole thing.

Italy has been the most balanced team in the tournament and probably the strongest, as well. There are no apparent weaknesses in the starting 11, although pace might be an issue for the veteran center backs.

But Italy struggled against a previously unimpressive Austrian side. The team seems to be regressing as the tournament goes on. In addition, Italys path to finals requires beating Belgium and probably Spain.

The good news is that center back Giorgio Chiellini is back just in time to battle Belgiums powerful striker Romelu Lukuku (ex-Everton). This is the renewal of a Serie A duel between the annoying Juventus defender and the Inter Milan forward. Lukaku is a handful, but Chiellini usually has the upper hand in that duel.

Belgium is the most talented of the remaining teams at Euro 2020, in my estimation. But thats only when its star players are available and fit.

Two of Belgiums three biggest stars, Eden Hazard and Kevin De Bruyne (Manchester City), have battled injuries throughout the tournament. Both left the round of 16 game against Portugal, which Belgium narrowly won, with injuries. The status of both for the quarterfinal clash against Italy is uncertain.

With De Bruyne and Hazard, Belgium has a shot at winning the whole thing despite the difficult path the draw has created. Without them, or at least one of the two playing at or near his best, they are more likely than not to lose to Italy.

Denmark seems like the most inspired team in the tournament. Finland upset the Danes in their first game, in which team captain Christian Eriksen nearly died of cardiac arrest.

Since then Denmark has been on a mission. After a narrow loss to Belgium, the Danes put four goals past Slovakia and Wales.

Denmark is solid at the back and strong in central midfield with Thomas Delaney and Pierre-Emile Hjbjerg (Tottenham Hotspur). Unheralded wingback Joakim Maehle has been outstanding. Mikkel Damsgaard has filled in well for Eriksen.

Up front, the Danes lack a goal scorer remotely as lethal as Kane, Morata, Lukaku, or Ciro Immobile of Italy. But Yussaf Paulsen and Martin Braithwaite have chipped in with three goals (combined) in four matches.

No one will relish playing a Danish team inspired by their ailing but recovering captain.

Of the three other quarterfinalists  Ukraine, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic  the Ukrainians look like the weakest. They were mediocre at best in the group stage and probably would have been eliminated in the round of 16 had not a Swedish center back been sent off with a red card in the second half. Even with a man advantage, Ukraine made very hard work of prevailing in extra time.

Switzerland is a decent side. The Swiss sent the vaunted French home on penalty kicks after coming from two goals down late in the match. However, its hard to see Switzerland getting beyond the semifinals and even that would require another upset victory (this one against Spain). Remember, the Swiss lost 3-0 to Italy and could only get a draw against Wales.

The Czech team outplayed a good Dutch team in the round of 16. These guys arent mugs.

However, they didnt impress much in the group stage. Against England, it seemed like they could have played another 90 minutes and still not scored. This, despite the presence of a very good center forward in Patrik Schick.

The Czechs have a shot against Denmark in the quarterfinals. But a spot in the semifinals is probably the best they realistically can hope for.

Here are the quarterfinal matchups:

Friday:

Switzerland vs. Spain

Belgium vs. Italy

Saturday:

Czech Republic vs. Denmark

England vs Ukraine
There is a lot of judicial news today. This one is hot off the press: a judge of the Hennepin County District Court has granted a motion for a writ of mandamus against the City of Minneapolis, ordering the city to immediately take any and all necessary action to increase the size of the Minneapolis Police Department. The case was brought by residents of crime-ridden North Minneapolis, represented by the Upper Midwest Law Center, on whose board I serve.

The petition for a writ of mandamus was predicated on a provision of the Minneapolis City Charter that requires the city to maintain a police force of at least 0.0017 employees per resident. The petitioners argued that the Citys force has fallen below that requirement and is projected to continue falling farther behind over the next year.

There were various technical issues in the case, e.g., do you count all employees of the Police Department, or only sworn officers? Do you count officers who are on long-term leave? And what years population census or estimate applies to the calculation? The court resolved these issues largely in the plaintiffs favor, and found that the Minneapolis Police Department is short approximately 80 sworn officers. The Court ordered the City to take immediate action to increase the size of the force, and set a date no later than June 2022, by which the City must be in full compliance based on the most recent census data.

James Dickey of the Upper Midwest Law Center deposed Mayor Jacob Frey, among others, in the course of discovery. The court relied in part on Freys testimony in finding that the plaintiffs had suffered injury in the form of increased exposure to crime as a result of the decline of the Minneapolis Police Department, and therefore have standing:

59. Mayor Frey also states that the number of sworn, available officers is 200 less than two years ago [a]t the same time weve seen crime numbers rise. Mayor Frey confirmed this information in his deposition. Later in his deposition, Mayor Frey does not deny that precincts 3 and 4, in which the Petitioners live, are experiencing a large impact from the lack of police protection in the City. Specifically, Mayor Frey stated, I am aware that those precincts have experienced very significant upticks in violent crime. 60. To summarize, Mayor Frey acknowledges that the uptick in violence we are seeing is because police officers are needed. The Court finds that the reverse would be true, too. When the police force is adequately funded and staffed, violence decreases.

This decision is a significant win for the citizens of Minneapolis. Further, it is hard to imagine a more pointed rebuke to the defund the police movement that now seems to be in full retreat.

Judge Jamie Andersons opinion is embedded below.
Yes, no matter what

Yes, but it depends on variety

No, for medical reasons, uncertainty

No, principle

Vote

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The Kannywood actress, Zainab Booth, who died on Thursday, has been buried.

The 61-year-old actress was buried in Kano on Friday.

Hundreds of her colleagues in the industry and well-wishers attended the funeral including Ali Nuhu, Falalu orayi, and Yakubu Mohammed.

PREMIUM TIMES reported her death from a brief illness.

In memory of the late actress, many Kannywood actors and actresses shared her picture on their social media pages.

Her nephew, Ramadan Booth, also prayed for Allahs mercy on his late aunty.

Late Booth is survived by four children: two boys and two girls. One of her daughters is the popular Maryam Booth, an actress.

In an interview with PREMIUM TIMES in 2020, Maryam said that her mother was her pride and inspiration in the movie industry.

I grew up seeing my mother acting and I quickly and quietly followed suit, Maryam said.

Maryam was the lead actress in the film, Gani Ga Ka, and also featured in the movie, Sons of the Caliphate.

Zainab Booth is popular in the Hausa movie industry for the motherly roles she plays in movies. Some of her movies include Mazan fama, Albashi, Rabuwa and Jarumai.
A Nigerian actress, Damilola Adekoya, popularly known as Princess, has lashed at a veteran actress, Idowu Phillips (Iya Rainbow), over her recent interview with BBC Yoruba.

During an impromptu Instagram live video, Princess said she regretted regarding the 76-year-old actress as a mother.

She also claimed Iya Rainbow did not pay her a visit, despite promising her.

PREMIUM TIMES previously reported Iya Rainbow as saying that she tried to pacify Princess for four days to drop the case against Omiyinka Olanrewaju (Baba Ijesha).

The 78-year old actress said she did everything humanly possible to get Princess not to escalate the case but she did not succumb.

Princess opened up on the alleged rape case involving Baba Ijesha for the first time on April 29 during an Instagram Live chat with her colleague, Iyabo Ojo.

She said I watched Baba Ijesha molest and lick my daughter non-stop for 30 minutes on CCTV.

Princess also mentioned that Baba Ijesha confessed to committing the crime because he was sexually impotent.

The comedienne made the shocking revelations hours after she and Iyabo stormed State Criminal Investigation Department, Panti, where the alleged perpetrator was being held at the time.

Phone call

While countering Iya Rainbows claims during her Instagram video chat, Princess said, You called me to pretend you were devastated by the issue. After pouring out my heart to you, you were shouting Jesus! you immediately asked for my address.

You said and I quote, My dear I am coming to see you, this is too much for you to bear. Did you come? No. I did not complain because my focus is on my CHILD. Then two and a half months later you say this and you expect me to play dumb.

Princess also said the actress called her just once and instructed her to go and release the embattled actor.

She said, You were instructing me and I never disrespected you. On the third day, you called me saying what I disclosed to you hurt you and that you could tell I wasnt okay, that I was crying and I wasnt myself.

You asked for my house address so you would come and see me. I sent you the address, you never came. You didnt come because it didnt affect you. You felt like I wasnt your child.

I was crying that day. I wasnt happy. I explained everything to you. You were now pretending like you were a good mother.

Princess also accused the veteran actress of lying that she (Princess) looked reluctant when she appeared at Baba Ijeshas court.

The latter was recently tried at the Special Offences Court in Lagos on charges of sexual assault, indecent treatment of a child, and sexual assault by penetration.

She said, Have you called me since then to even check up on me? You are now saying while in court, I was looking for a way to sneak out. You are an elder! What your eyes did not see you are not supposed to say.

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I did not expect this from you at all. You came and you were so insensitive to say you called me and were pleading for the case not to be escalated. How can you say such a thing? Dont ever! Anything that concerns me please just stay away from it because I used to respect you up until this evening. It is a shame.

She also announced that she will stand and fight for her foster daughters rights. Princess also challenged Iya Rainbow to be a role model as the elderly woman that she is.

The alleged rape case, since it hit the public glare, had ripped apart the union of theatre arts practitioners in Nigeria.
Nigerias Minister of State for Health, Olorunnimbe Mamora, on Thursday said adequate family planning has the capacity to reduce maternal deaths in the country by at least 30 per cent.

Mr Mamora, who spoke at the media launch of the National Family Planning Campaign by the Rotary Action Group for Reproductive, Maternal and Child Health (RMCH), said Nigeria is still leading in maternal deaths globally.

He said 512 women die for every 100,000 live births in the country, the statistics he said is unacceptable

Family planning is an important intervention for promoting proper timing and spacing of pregnancies as well as assisting to achieve pregnancies where challenges exist.

It also promotes maternal and child survival with a potential for reducing maternal and child mortality and morbidity by 30 per cent, he said.

Major impediments

Mamora said several challenges are significantly impeding progress towards the achievement of Nigerias modern Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) of 27 per cent by year 2024.

He said the most glaring of the challenges is poor funding for family planning.

He said; Some of the challenges include inadequate financing for family planning at all levels or delayed release of Federal Government of Nigerias counterpart funds for the procurement of contraceptive commodities, inadequate funding for Monitoring and Supportive Supervision activities as well as poor state commitment and support for last mile distribution of Family Planning commodities.

Other challenges include myths and misconceptions and inadequate male involvement in family planning activities.

High level awareness

Speaking at the launch, the national coordinator, RMCH project, Emmanuel Lufadeju, said Nigerias population is 200 million and by 2050, the population will double.

Mr Lufadeju said 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 25 years. Only 5 per cent is above 60 years of age.

He said over 90 per cent of women of child bearing age is aware of the use of contraceptives, unfortunately only 15 per cent of them is using it.

So our campaign is directed to how to convince women of child bearing age to space their children, make them enjoy better quality by avoiding risky pregnancies, he said.

Mr Lufadeju explained that most poor countries in the world are the ones having high population hence the need for Nigeria to rusticate itself from this group.

We must create a high public awareness campaign to be able to convince our people that there is nothing wrong with contraceptives.

They are approved and used all over the world, he said.

The national coordinator also said there is a need to promote access to contraceptives because there are many hard to reach communities in Nigeria.

Similarly, Mr Mamora said the ministry is collaborating with development partners to build synergy towards provision of quality family planning information services for prevention of unintended pregnancies as well as for the prevention of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV/AIDS.

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He also said the media must get more deeply involved in disseminating accurate information on family planning issues to rapidly address the barriers to access to family planning information and services.

Hence, the Family Planning Media Campaign Launch could not have come at a better time as the country faces challenges that threaten the health and social well-being of women, children, adolescent boys and girls and the vulnerable groups, he said.
Different forces within the All Progressives Congress (APC) closed ranks to oust a common enemy in Kwara State in 2019. But two years after achieving this feat, the structure is gradually collapsing.

O to ge, a moniker from the Yoruba translation of Enough is Enough, was formed in 2019, ahead of the general election, to dethrone the Saraki dynasty in the state. The dynasty was founded by the Second Republic Senate Leader, Olusola Saraki, and sustained by his son, former Senate President Bukola Saraki.

The four main groups that formed the coalition were: Legacy group led by the minister of information, Lai Mohammed; Akogun group led by a former Chairman of the PDP, Iyiola Oyedepo; Gbemi group, named after the minister of state for transportation, Gbemisola Saraki, and the AA group championed by Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq.

The clan led by the late Olusola Saraki had dominated the states affairs for over a decade.

The late Sarakis son, Bukola, served as the governor of the state for two terms between 2003 and 2011. He was succeeded by Abdulfatah Ahmed, a loyal supporter of the dynasty.

To underscore the influence of the Sarakis beyond party politics, Mr Ahmed won the first governorship election under the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) but was re-elected under the APC after the Saraki team formally moved to the APC.

Nevertheless, the O to ge movement pulled a game-changer in the 2019 election.

The coalition led to the victory of Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, defeating Mr Sarakis anointed candidate, Rasaq Atunwa, by a landslide.

Needless to state that most candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party fielded for elective positions in the state, including Mr Saraki, who participated in the senatorial contest, lost by a wide margin.

But shortly after the APC coasted home to victory, a crisis, an offshoot of its governorship primaries, brewed.

Controversial primaries

Prior to the election, the movement had skirmishes regarding the emergence of Mr AbdulRazaq in the primaries.

It was believed that the governors group influenced the conduct of the direct primaries and the disqualification of some contestants.

In fact, the National Working Committee (NWC) of the APC had to apologise to two of the partys governorship aspirants, Saliu Mustapha and Moshood Mustapha, over the erroneous announcement of their disqualification during the direct primary.

The party, according to its erstwhile chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, regretted the embarrassing mischief directed at the governorship aspirants.

Interestingly, none of the aggrieved parties challenged the outcome of the primaries. We believed that it was not healthy for the group. We needed to be united to achieve the major goal, Mr Oyedepo recently told PREMIUM TIMES.

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Appointment without the partys input

For six months after the election, Mr AbdulRazaq ran the affairs of the state without a cabinet. He was criticised by some people while others felt he was taking his time to make the right decisions.

However, when he named his cabinet members, he was openly criticised by members of the party including the suspended party chairman, Bashir Bolarinwa, for not consulting the party.

The other three pivotal groups have since then withdrawn their support from the governor.

But the governor, on the other hand, objected to their claims, insisting that the party stalwarts wanted him to play the puppet and lavish funds based on party affiliations.

The appointments, according to him, were in the best interest of Kwara.

Controversial removal of Bolarinwa

The ruckus within the Kwara APC was, however, heightened by the removal of Mr Bolarinwa as the caretaker chairman of the party in the state.

Mr Bolarinwa was replaced with Abdullahi Samari by the Mai Mala Buni-led APC Caretaker Committee.

Although Mr AbdulRazaq said it was a decision from the national body, observers and members of the party see his hands in it.

The removal divided the party across two lines  one for the governor and another against him.

Although the national body and executives of the North Central zone of the party have intervened in the matter, they have yet to achieve reconciliation of the warring members.

Meanwhile, Mr Bolarinwa, when contacted through his media aide, insisted that he occupies the office of the state chairman of the APC.

Revalidation exercise turns sour

While the furore surrounding the removal of Mr Bolarinwa was yet to be resolved, the partys nationwide registration and revalidation exercise began but ended in a fiasco in Kwara.

A meeting scheduled ahead of the exercise was violently disrupted after supporters of Mr AbdulRazaq clashed with those of Mr Bolarinwa.

In the heat of the crisis, the information minister, Mr Mohammed, demanded the cancellation of the membership registration exercise.

Mr Mohammed, who addressed a press conference at his hometown, Oro, said the committee in charge violated the procedure of the party, adding that some guidelines regarding the distribution of materials were flouted.

Commenting on the crisis rocking the state chapter of the party, he alleged that the registration and revalidation committee sidelined major stakeholders who worked for the election of Mr AbdulRazaq.

Instead of membership registers, conniving registration officials were using exercise books or foolscap sheets to register members, he said.

However, PREMIUM TIMES independently gathered that even some lawmakers and the governors aides were made to write their details in the exercise books or foolscap sheets, in clear violation of the guidelines.

Interference in local government administration lack of transparency

The AbdulRazaq-led administration, two years into office, has been accused of some of the infractions that the O to ge movement typically said enough is enough to.

One is the failure to conduct local government elections, which has been seen as an opportunity for the governor to usurp power at the local level.

A Kwara government official, who does not want to be quoted, said the election of the local council chairpersons is stalled by a pending lawsuit regarding the constitution of the Kwara State Electoral Commission (KWASEC). But the critics countered that the government could have found a way to resolve it as it did by going ahead with the recruitment of teachers despite a suit challenging the constitution of the Kwara State Education Board.

Also, PREMIUM TIMES reliably gathered from official sources that the federal allocations for the 16 local governments are pulled together for payment of local government workers.

As such, the local governments have no influence on how the funds are spent. This, critics say, negates the promise of local government autonomy promised by the movement at inception.

Recall that after one year in office, Aishat Pategi, who at the inception of the administration served as Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs but was redeployed to the Ministry of Special Duties, resigned.

PREMIUM TIMES learnt that her resignation was connected to a face-off with the Commissioner for Finance, Olasumbo Oyeyemi, over control of local government finances.

Ms Pategi claimed that N300 million was diverted from the states local government fund, an allegation the state government denied vehemently.

In place of substantive chairpersons, Governor AbdulRazaqs government has started the process of appointment of local government transition committees in the 16 councils.

Recently, a group under the auspices of Concerned APC Youths in Kwara petitioned the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation over the appointment of local government transition committees by Mr AbdulRazaq.

They condemned the recent constitution of the Transition Implementation Committee (TIC) for the 16 local government councils in the state.

They described the TIC as illegal and unconstitutional and called for the intervention of the AGF, Abubakar Malami, in the matter.

The document, signed by 36 youth drawn from the 16 local government areas of the state, declared that Mr AbdulRazaq acted illegally in the constitution of the TIC.

According to the petition, there were judgments of the Supreme Court against the appointment of TIC in local governments.

President Muhammadu Buhari had on several occasions lamented the usurpation of local government powers by state governments, noting its inimical effects on the development at the grassroots.

Tinderbox

Political watchers believe that the crisis in the party, if not resolved by the national body of the APC, may escalate further and spell doom for the party in forthcoming polls in the state.

Also, the gale of defection that has begun to rock APC Kwara poses a serious danger to the reelection of Mr AbdulRazaq. Recently, some aggrieved members of the party left to form a new political group known as the Third Force.

Even the governor cannot be sure of a second term, said Mr Oyedepo.

He warned that the national body does not have the luxury of time to address the lingering issues, urging it to intervene as a matter of urgency.

The national headquarters does not have beyond this year to intervene. By the middle of next year, primaries will start, he further said.

He said the governor should be the one to initiate reconciliations as the leader of the party.

Asked if some members of the party might go back to the ousted PDP, he responded; Well, there is that danger. Politics in Nigeria is seen as too broad. It is a possibility. That is if the national does not act. I still cannot see anything in the PDP that is so attractive. Many people are criticising our party but they have not forgotten 16 years of PDP in Kwara.

But the spokesperson of the party who is also a special adviser to the governor, Tajudeen Aro, described the defection as insignificant, promising that the crisis will be laid to rest shortly.

Its a minor slug. Their number (the defectors) is insignificant. We shall come out of the crisis very soon. We are working on it, said Mr Aro.

At the just concluded Democracy Day here in Kwara, our world-acclaimed performing governor and leader, Governor AbdulRahaman AbdulRazaq, received over 3000 PDP decampees from across the state to APC, Bashir Adigun, an aide to the governor countered the defectors.

Mr Adigun announced the governors readiness to call a truce.

Governor is the leader of all. He is open and ready for resolution of disagreement within the party. I am sure all issues will soon be resolved.

Also hopeful of a peaceful resolution is a former governorship aspirant in the state and an aspiring National Chairman of APC, Saliu Mustapha.

The Oto ge struggle was a battle cry of the people of Kwara State. It was a revolution that saw the light of the day. It was an unusual collaboration between the elite and the masses that produced results beyond imagination.

Mr Mustapha said although the crisis is unfortunate, it was blown out of proportion by the media and a few political hangers-on, on both sides of the divide.

It is not a crisis that is beyond the collective capacity of the stakeholders to resolve. It will only take good political sportsmanship and understanding. Where we need to forgive, we forgive. Where we need to forgo, we forgo. Where we need to forget, we forget. It boils down to a genuine willingness to give and take; a willingness to admit that everyone matters in the party and should be accorded deserved respect, he said, assuring that efforts are underway to settle the crises.
A former Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), Bello Adoke, has petitioned the Italian Ministry of Justice against two public prosecutors for their alleged forgery and other forms of professional misconduct in their handling of the Malabu case in Milan.

Mr Adoke, in his complaint letter dated July 1, 2021, accused the duo of Fabio De Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro, who are public prosecutors in the criminal prosecution of ENI/Shell and others on allegations of corruption and money laundering, of threatening his life.

Two oil giants, Eni and Shell, were accused of paying bribes to Nigerian officials in respect of the OPL 245 oil block.

However, the Milanese trial court of had acquitted Eni and Shell in March 2021.

In the letter of complaint issued by Femi Oboro of Gromyko Amedu Solicitors on behalf of Mr Adoke, the ex-Nigerian official said the two public prosecutors allegedly forged documents with an intent to rope him into the matter even when he was not a defendant in the suit.

Mr Adoke has similarly sent a petition to the Nigerian police accusing a Nigerian anti-corruption activist, Lanre Suraju, who is the chairman of the Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA), of forgery.

He also claimed in his petition that he suspected Mr Suraju of being the one behind the circulation of a fake tape of an interview he purportedly granted an Italian journalist admitting that the Malabu transaction was a scam.

Meanwhile, Mr Suraju has denied the allegations, describing his interrogation by the police over the matter as a case of corruption fighting back.

The ex-AGF, who levelled similar allegations against Fabio De Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro, urged the Italian authorities to have the conduct of these prosecutors investigated and that they be held accountable for their professional misconduct.

His petition addressed to the Italian Ministry of Justice was copied to the General Prosecution Office at the Italian Supreme Court and the Public Prosecutor at the Court of Milan.

PREMIUM TIMES obtained the email address of Mr Pasquale on Friday, but he has yet to respond to our reporters request for his comment on the petition.

Procurement of forged documents/evidence

The former AGF lamented that the Italian public prosecutors engaged in deliberate falsehood by withholding material evidence from the court and guiding it to arrive at a predetermined outcome.

It should be noted that the unethical conducts of the prosecutors were not isolated acts, but a carefully orchestrated plan by the public prosecutors acting in concert with other interested parties to negatively influence the Court to make adverse findings against our client with a view to influencing the ongoing criminal trial in Nigeria, his petition stated.

Prosecutors involved in misconducts  Adoke

It added that despite the fact that Mr Adoke was not on trial at the Milanese court, the Italian prosecutors went to unimaginable length to illegally procure forged evidence, engaged in deliberate suppression of exculpating evidence and continuously misled the court with a view to painting him with the tar of corruption.

This has caused our client his reputation globally, destroyed his source of livelihood and damaged his family life.

Our client will rely on the entire records of the proceeding before the Milanese Court which x-rays the totality of the Public Prosecutors unethical and professional misconducts called into question in paragraphs 6  8 above.

It is, therefore, our clients prayer that the conduct of these Prosecutors be investigated and that they be held accountable for their professional misconduct, the petition added.

It further stated that both the phoney telephone interview recording and the email of June 21, 2011, purported to have been granted by Mr Adoke were forged with the unlawful intent to interfere with the course of justice/law or subverting the wheel of justice at the criminal trial at the Court of Milan in connection with the OPL 245 settlement agreement 0f 2011, and by extension, the criminal proceedings pending in Nigeria.

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The injured party in the criminal trial was stated to be the Federal Republic of Nigeria. During the criminal trial before the Court of Milan, the Public Prosecutor unlawfully engaged in acts of forgery of documents or evidence in aid of the prosecutions case with several allegations of fact made against our client (Mr Adoke) which were unsubstantiated at the trial, the petition added.

Cleared of allegations, Adoke says

In the letter titled, Re: Mohammed Bello Adoke, SAN Complaint of Acts of Forgery and Professional Misconduct Against Fabio De Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro, Public Prosecutors Before the Court of Milan, Mr Adoke referenced a subsisting judgment of the Federal High Court in Abuja which cleared him of any collusion in the alleged Malabu fraud.

The legality of the actions of our client in respect of the OPL 245 Settlement Agreement of 2011 has been confirmed by a valid and subsisting judgment of Honourable Justice B.F.M Nyako of the Federal High Court Abuja dated 07 April 2018 in Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/446/2017 between Mohammed Bello Adoke vs Attorney General of the Federation to the effect that, our client was only carrying out the lawful directives/approvals of the President and cannot be held personally liable.

The court affirmed that our clients roles in the implementation of OPL 245 Settlement Agreement of 2011 were based on the lawful directives/approvals of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in the exercise of his powers under Sections 5 and 148 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic Nigeria 1999.

The Public Prosecutors (Dr Sergio Spadaro) sought to mislead the Milanese court with his closing remarks by deliberately concealing the existence and effect of the judgment of the Federal High Court referred to above from the Milanese court.

Background

The Malabu scandal involved the transfer of about $1.1 billion by Shell and ENI through the Nigerian government to accounts controlled by a former Nigerian petroleum minister, Dan Etete.

From accounts controlled by Mr Etete, about half the money ($520 million) went to accounts of companies controlled by Aliyu Abubakar, popularly known in Nigeria as the owner of AA oil.

Anti-corruption investigators and activists suspect he fronted for top officials of the Goodluck Jonathan administration, under whom Mr Adoke served, as well as officials of Shell and ENI.

The transaction was authorised in 2011 by Mr Jonathan through some of his cabinet ministers and the money was payment for OPL 245, one of Nigerias richest oil blocks.

The oil resources of the OPL 245 license have remained undeveloped since the controversies began.

Eni initiated international arbitration proceedings against Nigeria in September, alleging the government has breached its obligations by refusing to let the firm develop the license, which has now expired this May.

In March, PREMIUM TIMES reported how an Italian court declared Shell, Eni and their managers acquitted in the Malabu scandal.

They were all acquitted by the court in a trial that saw officials of the oil giants battle to prove their innocence. Several former executives of the companies were also cleared of wrongdoing, including Malcolm Brinded and Paolo Scaroni.
The Chairman of the Nigeria Governors Forum, and Governor of Ekiti State, Kayode Fayemi, has called on Nigerians to rise to the defence of democracy in Nigeria with a view to advancing the development of the country.

Mr Fayemi made the call Tuesday in Abuja when he visited the Canadian Ambassador to Nigeria, Nicolas Simard, at his residence.

The visit by the NGF Chairman was part of the Chairmans shuttle diplomacy to representatives of the diplomatic corps in Nigeria, which is one of the initiatives of the Nigeria Governors Forums secretariat towards engendering inter-governmental synergy between global governments at the subnational level.

Mr Fayemis visits on Monday took him to the residence of the Canadian ambassador to Nigeria, and the embassy of the Peoples Republic of China and ended at the embassy of the Republic of South Africa.

At all the three meetings, Governor Fayemi discussed issues of bilateral importance between the countries and their governments at the subnational level, including citizens engagements, economic progress of the federating states, youth mobilization and organisation, and womens empowerment.

Other issues discussed include revenue generation, the economy, education, infrastructure development among many others.

Both the NGF Chairman and the Canadian ambassador agreed that organisations like the NGF are the best platforms for healthy debates with the central governments on issues like restructuring, citizens engagement and internal and external security.

Mr Fayemi said to advance development, it is always better to engage countries of interest and their diplomatic representatives to share their understanding of events in their host countries and learn from the experiences of their past.

Specifically, the NGF Chairman told the Canadian ambassador that Nigeria has made remarkable strides in gender equality with the Nigeria Governors Wives in the forefront and their husbands, the Governors, as cheer-leaders.

Mr Fayemi disclosed that 27 states including those that were hitherto considered conservative, have signed the VAP Act, as evidence of their commitment to mitigating violence against women in our societies.

Mr Simard, who told Mr Fayemi that he has only been in Nigeria for six months, said there are 12000 Nigerians in Canada, 5000 0f whom are students adding that there is a $12m trade relations between the two countries.

Mr Simard disclosed that there are remarkable similarities between Canada and Nigeria and that Canada also experienced calls by secessionists that Nigeria is currently experiencing, and expressed willingness to help Nigeria in understanding how to find solutions to them.

At the embassy of the Peoples Republic of China, where he spoke with the ambassador, Cui Jian Chun, the NGF chairman criticised the death-trap diplomacy that has been wrapped around the conversation in most African countries when it comes to their relationship with China.

He assured the ambassador of the full cooperation of Nigerian governments at the subnational level.

Mr Fayemi also praised the vaccine diplomacy of the Chinese government while welcoming any support that will help Nigeria to develop its own vaccines to help raise the ratio of vaccinated people for Nigeria to achieve herd immunity.

When he visited the South African embassy, the conversation revolved around the ENDSARS movement and the help the South African people could give Nigerian youths to be able to articulate their grievances in a non-violent manner towards achieving results.

Both leaders advised Nigerian youths to organise and not agonise.

The ambassador of the Republic of South Africa to Nigeria, Thamsanqa Dennis Mseleku, discussed three key issues including xenophobia, trade and youth dialogue.

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Ambassador Dennis Mseleku argued that the NGF is strategic to such conversations.
Farmers in Taraba State are accusing politicians and officials of the state ministry of agriculture and natural resources of diversion of farm inputs provided by the state government for distribution to farmers.

But the state The government has said it was monitoring the process and has not noticed any malpractice.

As part of the state governments efforts to boost production in the sector, Governor Darius Ishaku approved the release of N200 million for the procurement of farm inputs, including seeds and chemicals.

However, the officials distributing the items are allegedly diverting them to the black market with the connivance of some politicians.

The governor had directed that the items be distributed to the farmers free, with special consideration to areas affected by ethnic crises.

But despite the directive, officials of the ministry of agriculture and natural resources and the politicians have diverted the commodity to the black market where a kit is sold at between N12,000 and N13,000.

According to an insider, the initiative is a complete failure as those targeted end up buying the products instead.

The pattern of distribution is faulty. No individual farmer accessed the items directly. Representatives of the state Assembly, state executive council and religious bodies collected them on behalf of the farmers.

The source, who declined to be named for fear of victimisation, said the items were given to the politicians and religious leaders to deliver them to farmers in their constituencies but they ended up diverting them.

Some politicians, religious leaders and staff of the ministry, who are vested with the responsibility of ensuring effective and transparent distribution of the commodities to real farmers, have hijacked the benefits. They either resell or give them to their close allies who in turn sell to the farmers at high rates.

And since there is no data to track the records as to how many farmers accessed the items, it is very easy to divert them.

However, when contacted for his comment, the state commissioner of agriculture and natural resources, David Kassa, described the allegation as untrue.

So far, we have not received any report of diversion and if you are aware of any case, please let me know, he said to our reporter.

Mr Kassa said the government awarded the contract for the procurement of farm inputs, which include Soya beans, maize, rice and herbicides, to a contractor at the sum of N220 million.

He said the items, which came in a kit of four-in-one, were delivered to the ministry by the contractor and distributed, based on the governors directive.

He said the governor had directed that the items be distributed to farmers across the state through divisional agricultural officers and be monitored by stakeholders, with special priority to areas affected by crises like Sekondi, Bandawa, Takum and Gassol.

He said so far all these areas and all the local government areas in the Southern part of the state have received the kits.

Though we are already behind schedule, we have already distributed the seeds to Karim Lamido, Wukari, Ibi, Takum, Gassol and many other places. You can confirm from those areas.

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He, however, acknowledged that institutions like members of the state executive council, state assembly and religious groups like the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and the Muslim council were also considered.

Asked about the the mechanism put in place to ensure the items reach the target beneficiaries, the commissioner said, We asked them to give us lists and phone numbers of all those that benefited. That is the basic information.

Mr Kassa said apart from requesting the information, traditional rulers and officials of the local government areas under the direct supervision of the chairpersons are also involved in the distribution process.

Asked about the delay in the distribution of fertiliser for this years farming season in the state, the commissioner said the removal of fertilizer subsidy and the high cost of the foreign exchange resulted in scarcity and price hike of the commodity.

He said out of the 100 trucks ordered by the state government, fewer than five trucks were received.

We ordered for 100 trucks since last year, around this period, but till now we have not gotten up to five trucks.

When there was subsidy, it cost us N5500 per bag. With the removal of the subsidy and high cost of exchange rate, it is now between N9000 and N10,000 at company rate.

He said the government was waiting for the delivery of the fertiliser before reviewing how to give subsidy.

We cannot subsidise when the commodity is yet to be delivered, he concluded.
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A company has seized 15 vehicles of the Taraba State government following a court order over a debt owed the company.

The company, Waterwells N.A International, obtained the order at the Federal High Court in Jalingo, the state capital.

The court also issued a writ of attachment and sale of goods order against the Attorney-General of the state to implement a judgment given by the court on June 10, 2020 over a N550 million debt.

The debt is with respect to a contract the government awarded the company for the satellite survey and analysis of the territory of hydrocarbon feed stock deposit of Benue valley territory of the state.

In the event of the government defaulting to pay the debt, the court allowed the company to take control by sale of goods and chattels of the defendant, wheresoever they may be found within the federal high courts jurisdiction.

A copy of the court order was made available to PREMIUM TIMES by the company.

A writ of order is a document issued by a court for the purpose of effecting court judgment on a debtors property. It is also the legal instrument by which the asset of a judgment debtor may be seized.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered that it was in compliance with the judgment that some vehicles belonging to the state government were seized and kept in the custody of the court.

When PREMIUM TIMES reporter visited the court, he saw a Toyota Coaster bus, a Toyota bus ambulance, 5 Toyota Hilux and a Land Cruiser SUV, all belonging to the state Government House and a Toyota Sienna belonging to the state television service.

Our correspondent gathered that there are also about 10 other vehicles kept in an undisclosed location due to lack of space in the court premises.
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A former governor of Lagos State, Bola Tinubu, has described his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) as one founded on democratic ideals, adding that it was the basis for the recent wave of defection from opposition party governors.

Mr Tinubu, the national leader of the APC, spoke in a statement welcoming Governor Bello Matawalle of Zamfara State to the APC.

Mr Tinubus statement by his media aide, Tunde Rahman, said the move by Mr Matawalle showed that he was dedicated to bringing good governance to his state.

Along with all other APC members, I heartily welcome Matawalle into the APC.

The move by Matawalle is the best way to ensure good governance in the state by being a member of the party that was founded on democratic ideals, he said.

Mr Matawalle formally joined the APC on June 29, after months of speculation and denial.

Other Peoples Democratic Party governors such as David Umahi and Ben Ayade of Ebonyi and Cross River states, respectively, had also recently defected to the APC.

While Mr Umahi joined in November last year, Mr Ayade defected to the ruling party last May.

The PDP described the governors defection as an effort by the ruling party to rig the 2023 general elections.

Mr Tinubu, in his statement, urged the Zamfara governor to work more closely with President Muhammadu Buhari to help realise his progressive mandate and tackle challenges.

He said APCs doors were open to those who wanted democracy to flourish.

The entry of governors Matawalle, David Umahi of Ebonyi, and Ben Ayade of Cross River into the party demonstrates that the APC umbrella is succinctly broad to accommodate all those with valuable ideas and contributions to the party and our country, he added.

(NAN)
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The Nigerian Naval Ship (NNS) BEECROFT said it arrested 97 stoaways in the last 12 months who were handed over to the Nigeria Immigration Services (NIS).

This is contained in a statement signed on Friday in Lagos by NNS BEECROFTs Information Officer, Veronica Effiong.

Ms Effiong said that the arrests were made as part of efforts by the Nigerian Navy to rid the nations maritime space of all illegalities, including human trafficking.

Nigerian Naval Ship BEECROFT through robust patrols in the last 12 months arrested 97 stowaways in the Lagos waters all of which have been handed over to the NIS.

Last Saturday, the base patrol team arrested three suspected stowaways onboard MT SCF ALPHINE around the Lagos anchorage.

Preliminary investigations by the base reveal that all the stowaways accessed the vessel with the intention of illegally migrating to Europe, she said.

According to her, the Commander, NNS BEECROFT, Bashir Mohammed, reiterated the commitment of the Base to secure Nigerias territorial waters.

She said that the commitment was in line with the Chief of the Naval Staff (CNS), Awwal Gambos Strategic Directive of 2021-5.

I urge members of the public, especially our host communities, to kindly furnish the base with credible information to assist it in curbing the activities of criminal elements and economic saboteurs, the officer said. (NAN)
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Nigeria recorded another death from the coronavirus complications on Thursday as 74 new cases of the disease were reported in nine states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), authorities said.

The Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) disclosed this in an update on its official Facebook handle Thursday morning, noting that the fatality toll from the disease is now 2,121.

The agency said the 74 new cases raised the total infections in the country to 167,692.

Specifics

Again, with 49 cases, Lagos has more than half of the 74 new infections recorded on Thursday while Ondo State reported 13, even as Oyo and Rivers States reported three each.

Kaduna State recorded two cases as Ekiti, Gombe, Jigawa, Ogun and the FCT reported one infection each.

According to the NCDC data, a total of 164,273 people have been discharged in hospitals across Nigeria after treatment.

The NCDC data showed that over 1,300 active COVID-19 cases are still in the country.

Nigeria has tested a total of over 2.3 million samples from its roughly 200 million population.
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The Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ), through its Natural Resources Programme (NAREP), is pleased to invite journalists, media professionals, researchers and analysts for its inaugural climate change media fellowship across west Africa.

NAREP aims to strengthen the capacity of media and civil society to carry out deep and impactful reporting as well as advocacy around issues relating to natural resources, extractives and climate change.

According to Akintunde Babatunde, Program Manager of the programme, Climate change is one of the defining issues of this century. Its impacts are already being felt across West Africa and that is why we decided to launch this fellowship to interrogate the impacts of climate change in West Africa while producing knowledge products to impact climate mitigation policies.

Through this fellowship, NAREP aims to raise public awareness by shedding light on important climate change issues in West Africa including evidence of, and solutions to the crises.

Who can apply?

The fellowship which will last for three months is open to journalists, policy analysts and researchers working around climate change-related issues in any of these English-speaking West African countries: Ghana, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria.

Benefits

Training and mentorship opportunities for fellows

Monthly stipend and data allowance

Media appearances on topical climate change issues

Application Guidelines

Please note the following Guidelines:

Pitches/research proposals must be centred around climate change in West Africa (you can focus on a country)

Applicants must have relevant experience in investigative reporting, research, or policy analysis.

Female journalists/researchers are encouraged to apply.

Applicants living with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted.

Click here to apply.

The deadline for submission is 16th July 2021.
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The Federal High Court in Abuja on Friday fixed September 20 for judgement on an application filed by former Abia State governor, Orji Kalu, challenging his retrial by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for money laundering.

The Lagos Division of the court had on December 5, 2019, convicted and sentenced Mr Kalu to 12 years imprisonment, and his co-defendant, Udeh Udeogu, to 10 years in jail, for diverting Abia States funds to the tune of N7.1 billion.

However, citing technical grounds, the Supreme Court on May 8, 2020, set aside the conviction and sentence, and ordered that the defendants be tried afresh.

Before they could be re-arraigned, however, Mr Kalu, the incumbent Chief Whip of the Nigerian Senate, filed an application to stop his retrial.

At Fridays hearing, lawyers representing the different parties respectively adopted the processes they had all filed and exchanged.

Subsequently, the judge, Inyang Ekwo, gave a tentative date of September 20, for the verdict.

He said the court would notify parties in the suit of change in date if the judgment would not be ready before then.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the EFCC, Abdulrasheed Bawa, was seen conferring with Rotimi Jacobs, shortly after the suit was adjourned.

Mr Jacobs is the prosecuting lawyer in Mr Kalus matter.

Details later
Many Nigerians and major groups in the Southwest region of the country have reacted to the admittance by the State Security Service (SSS) that its operatives invaded the home of a leader of a group clamouring for a Yoruba nation, Sunday Adeyemo (also known as Sunday Igboho), in a bid to effect his arrest.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how Mr Igbohos house, located in Soka, Ibadan, capital of Oyo State was invaded around 1:00 a.m. on Thursday.

His vehicles, including his G-wagon, Prado Jeep, and some valuable properties including furniture, and windows were reportedly destroyed.

The attack occurred barely 72 hours before the planned rally in Lagos by Mr Igboho and others to further canvas a Yoruba nation.

The spokesperson of SSS, Peter Afunaya, who confirmed the raid in a press conference in Abuja said a total of seven AK 47 rifles were recovered, alongside pump action guns and 5,000 rounds of ammunition including other weapons.

He said security operatives recovered the weapons after a hot gun duel between them and Igbohos guards.

The SSS also admitted that two of Igbohos men were killed in the process while a security agent was shot on the right hand and is currently responding to treatment.

Reactions

This development has, however, triggered reactions from major groups and individuals in the Southwest. A Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, said the invasion of Mr Igbohos house is a sad indicator that we are fast returning to the era of the late Sani Abacha when anyone who expressed opinions contrary to the governments position would be fatally attacked.

The group, in a statement by its spokesperson, Jare Ajayi, said it found no wrong in canvassing for self-determination so long as such agitation is devoid of violence.

The constitution the country is running guarantees the right of every Nigerian to express an opinion and even carry out rallies as long as such is done without violence. To the best of our knowledge, none of the rallies that Sunday Igboho has led in his campaign for the Yoruba nation could be said to be violent nor was he implicated in illegal activities. Why then should he be subjected to the kind of treatment his household received on Thursday morning?

Another body of Yoruba self-determination groups, Ilana Omo Oodua (IOO), in a statement by its leader, Banji Akintoye, said the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration has declared war against the peace-loving people of Yoruba Land.

We have been peaceful from the inception of this struggle. We have adhered with both the Nigerian and International Laws guiding the agitation for Self-Determination. All our agitations have been peaceful, orderly, and lawfully executed. We have commended the officers of the Nigerian Police many times for being professional in their modus of operations in relating to our protests and rallies for Self-Determination in Yoruba cities.

Therefore, I say on behalf of the Yoruba people that this attack on Chief Ighohos house was unnecessary, unfortunate, wicked, callous, cruel, irresponsible, illegal, and atrocious. We are holding the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration responsible for this barbaric attack. This is a declaration of war against peace-loving people.

Mr Akintoye said that despite the warning by the police in Lagos, the Yoruba nation rally would hold on Saturday.

The Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG) also condemned the invasion and described it as callous, barbaric, and worrisome.

The leader of the group, Wale Oshun, said: We condemn it in a very strong term. There is no record that Igboho was invited by the police to report. The use of the military for (a) purely civil issue is bound to escalate tension.

Government and security services should recall how Boko Haram started. It started, following the unlawful killing of their leader, who was under arrest by the police. He did not resist arrest. But, he was killed. It is improper to invade the house of Igboho.

Police should have gone to his house with a warrant. That was what was done under the military. The military are meant to protect the territorial integrity, and not to meddle in civil affairs. Their work is to fight terrorism and demonstrate effectiveness in restoring security. Even, during the military rule, under Gen. Sani Abacha, the military were not directly involved in civil matters. It was the police and SSS that were arresting people, not soldiers. This should end.

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On its part, Odua Peoples Congress (OPC) leader, Gani Adams, said killing Igboho could lead to another bloodbath and war akin to the Boko Haram insurgency in the Northeast.

The attack on Sunday Igbohos house is most unfortunate. It is a reflection of the fact that our lives as Nigerians are of no value to the government. And the truth is that nobody is safe in this country.

Other reactions

Former aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode, said Mr Igboho is being trailed for protecting his people in the South-west.

He has also shown the greatest respect to all the Yoruba elders, traditional rulers and leaders and has refused to allow his supporters to terrorise and attack non-Yorubas. The only enemies he and the Yoruba people have are the foreign Fulani terrorists that are in our forests and that are kidnapping and killing our people.

And whether Sunday is alive or dead, those terrorists will still be our enemies and we shall still resist them in our land with all our might. I consider all this and I ask myself whether all those that said we were wasting our time building bridges were right. Despite all, I do not believe they were right and I still believe we must tread that path. These efforts at establishing peace and unity will and must continue because we have no other choice. War is not an option for the Nigerian people and we must NEVER be pushed into it, he wrote in a statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES.

If he is wanted by the security agents all they need to do is to invite him. They do not need to raid his home in the middle of the night, kill his people, steal his things, terrorise his supporters and attempt to kill him. They do not need to invoke the wrath of the Yoruba nation and attempt to manage the consequences of such a reckless and unpredictable course.

PREMIUM TIMES interviewed some citizens who expressed missed feelings over the invasion of Mr Igbohos residence.

A taxi driver in Ibadan, Rotimi Olayemi, said the Yoruba nation agitator is a necessary evil in Nigeria.

I cannot support Sunday Igboho but I see him as contributing his part to secure his region. The federal and state governments have failed in their responsibilities of ensuring safety of lives and properties. The failure of those in power created the vacuum that people like Sunday are trying to fill. It is a bad thing to have people like him amidst citizens. Imagine the weapons in his house. Thats barbaric.

Now that he has been declared wanted, the government must be willing to secure lives of citizens. Let them declare leaders of bandits wanted too, so that we can have peaceful country.

Suliat Lawani, a social commentator, urged the government to hold round table discussions with citizens considered to be aggrieved with the country.

The truth is that some people are aggrieved with authorities. Rather than going hard on them, it is better they call them for a round table discussion, retrieve their weapons, and agree to work for the progress of the nation. Igbohos death will be another war in Nigeria.

A lecturer at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Kehinde Ayoola said Sunday is too naive to confront Federal Government. He has apparently been watching too much African magic movies. Why didnt they go ahead with their planned Saturday rally? The two testes of the Nigerian economy are in the Niger Delta and Lagos.

Just as no man would allow its scrotum to secede, Nigeria will certainly not allow Yorubas to go away with Lagos. When it comes to violence, Yorubas are no match for the Fulanis. Why embark on ethnic suicide over nothing! Is it not the Yorubas that put Buhari there in 2015? If they play their cards right, will the North not cede power to them in 2023?

Yoruba nation agitations

Mr Igboho has led rallies in Ondo, Ekiti, Osun, Oyo, and Ogun states. He threatened to hold the rally in Lagos on July 3 but his home was invaded barely 72 hours to the planned date.

He has in the past also called for the eviction of Fulanis in South-west states, an action that was condemned by federal and state authorities.

Yoruba Nation agitation is a political ideology to realise the independence and sovereign country for the Yoruba race in Nigeria but many political leaders in the region have rejected and kicked against the idea.

Former Governor of Lagos, Bola Tinubu, alongside Speaker of the House of Representatives Femi Gbajabiamila, Bisi Akande, and all leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the South-West, in a meeting in Lagos last month, opposed the agitation.

They called for ethnic and religious unity instead of a divided nation.
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The Nigerian government says it has paid $218 million of the total $1.2 billion for the construction of a railway to link Kano and Kaduna.

The Minister of Transportation, Chibuike Amaechi, announced the project to link the two North-west states in May, saying construction would start in July as the Lagos-Ibadan railway had been completed.

He told reporters on Friday in Abuja that funding for the new project will come from the federal budget while Chinese financing is awaited. He said $218 million has been paid and another further $100 million will be added in the coming weeks, and funding may rise to $600 million by the end of the year.

Mr Amaechi said he is adopting a model that can help minimise external borrowing.

Nigeria owed China $3.4 billion as of March 31, according to the Debt Management Office. The amount covers 11 loan facilities from the China Exim Bank since 2010.

The government has also said it is seeking funding from Standard Chartered Plc for other rail projects.

He also spoke about other rail projects, including Port Harcourt  Maiduguri, Ibadan to Kano and Lagos  Calabar.

Read the ministers remarks to journalists at the State House:

I dont think it should bother you anywhere we get money from. As a Christian, the only person I cannot borrow money from is Satan. But it is also not true that these are funds that Chinese has not given to us, the only loan we have negotiated with Chinese government or China Exim bank that is yet to come is the Ibadan to Kano. Port Harcourt- Maiduguri went to Chinese company but we were yet to apply for a loan when we discovered that Europe has opened doors. Europe is ready to allow us borrow from them so, we quickly went to Standard Chartered Bank, you are right and that is $3.020 billion. And my position now is that whatever that is in my budget, can I start funding?

Whatever I have, can I start funding from my budget? At any point in time they get the loan, then you will deduct what I have put in, so that Nigeria does not need to bear all the cost from loan. The way I am pursuing Port Harcourt  Maiduguri, Kano  Kaduna, and I am doing it like a native man, I think I have paid about N13 billion for Port Harcourt  Maiduguri and I am about to pay another N10 billion.

If I get it to N50 billion, I am using the black-market rate, I dont know what they pay at CBN. Is it not $100million? So, it will now be $2.9billion and no longer $3.020billion. And I will continue to do that until we finish the construction.

Take Kano  Kaduna, that is $1.2 billion, I have paid $218 million already. If I pay $218 million, how much is remaining? What will be remaining will be about $900million. If I pay another $100 million in the next few weeks and continue like that by the end of this year and early next year, we will probably pay between $500 million to $600 million. So, what you would likely be borrowing is about $500 million or $600 million.

That is I am doing to make sure that we dont leave too much debt behind. If we can have the money, discipline ourselves to spend what we have. So, we are waiting for the Chinese for only Ibadan to Kano. That is the big question we need to ask ourselves.

If the Chinese dont turn up in the next few months, why shouldnt we approach the European banks to fund Ibadan to Kano? I will put that before the minister of finance. The Standard Chattered Bank has agreed to fund Lagos  Calabar, we are negotiating with them. We are negotiating Port Harcourt  Maiduguri. Kano  Maradi is funded by Pedy-Swiss. We would look for money from everybody.
A judge in Akwa Ibom State is to determine whether a disgraced university professor deserves to be granted post-conviction bail.

Peter Ogban, a professor of soil science at the University of Calabar, was sentenced to three years in prison in March, after the court found him guilty of fraudulent manipulation of election results, publishing and announcing of false results during a 2019 senatorial election in Akwa Ibom, Nigerias South-south region.

He was prosecuted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Mr Ogban, 65, was an ad-hoc official of INEC and the returning officer in the election which was contested by a former Minority Leader of the Nigerian Senate, Godswill Akpabio.

Justice Pius Idiong of the state High Court, Ikot Ekpene, fixed July 12 for ruling on Mr Ogbans bail application after listening on Thursday to the argument from his lawyer, Kanu Agabi, (SAN) and the INEC lawyer, Clement Onwuenwunor.

Mr Agabi submitted a 16-page affidavit with three documents as exhibits to support the bail application on health grounds and pending appeal.

He stated that according to order 17 rule 13 of the Appeal Court, the court can grant bail to a convict relying on its discretion and the inherent powers vested on it.

But the INEC lawyer, Mr Onwuenwunor told the court that the professor, having been convicted, had lost his constitutional rights to bail.

Mr Ogbans appeal against his conviction was yet to be heard at the Court of Appeal, Calabar, as at the time of filing this report.

The professor is believed to have worked for Mr Akpabios interest in the election, although the former senator disowned him a few days after the court judgement.

Mr Akpabio, a former governor of Akwa Ibom, was appointed Minister of Niger Delta Affairs after he lost the election.

Mr Ogban, before he was sentenced, pleaded for mercy. He told the judge he had learnt his lesson.

When next I am given a responsibility, I will be extra careful. All that glitters is not gold. Everyone is a persona. The way they look is not the way they are. I will be very careful in dealing with people, he had said before the court.

Conflict of interest?

Mr Ogbans lawyer, Mr Agabi, was a lawyer in 2019 to Chris Ekpenyong, the man who defeated Mr Akpabio in the election.

Besides defending Mr Ekpenyongs victory at that time, Mr Agabi had attacked Mr Akpabios petition at the tribunal as being founded on illegal and unlawful allocation of votes, apparently referring to Mr Ogbans fraudulent allocation of fake votes to Mr Akpabio.

Two senior lawyers in Uyo who are familiar with the case told PREMIUM TIMES it was unethical for Mr Agabi to defend the jailed professor.

He is setting a bad precedent for younger lawyers, one of the lawyers said.

Mr Agabi did not respond to calls and a text message seeking his comment for the report.

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The Federal Government is scaling up its National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) with 5 million additional pupils to the 9 million it is currently feeding.

Sadiya Farouk, Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Social Development, disclosed this when she led a team on a courtesy visit to Ahmed Matane, Secretary to the Niger State Government in Minna on Friday.

Ms Farouk, who was represented by Hezekiah Sunday, Assistant Director in the Ministry, said the team was in the state to enumerate beneficiaries and scale up the school feeding programme.

She said over 9 million pupils were currently benefitting from one free nutritious meal nationwide and the ministry had been mandated to reach an additional 5 million pupils by 2023.

She noted that the school feeding programme had employed over 100,000 cooks and more than 100,000 smallholder farmers were participating in the value chain.

Responding, Mr Matane gave assurance that the state government would continue to give the necessary support for the successes of the programme.

He lauded the ministry for its continuous partnership and support to the state through the provision of relief materials to internally displaced persons and flood victims.

Me Matane called on the ministry to extend the school feeding programme to primary four to six pupils in order to motivate children to come to school and stay.

Feeding some pupils and leaving others out can create demotivation and create issues among the pupils, let the programme be redesigned in a way that every primary pupil will be part of it, he said.

Also, Amina Guar, Focal Person on NHGSFP, disclosed that about 2,087 schools in the state were currently participating in the school feeding out of 3,038 schools.

She said the team were to evaluate the programme and see how to address the issue of schools not captured in the scheme.

(NAN)
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The organisers of the Yoruba Nation rally have vowed to go ahead with a planned protest despite a police warning again such a gathering.

Sunday Igboho, a campaigner for Yoruba self-determination and one of the organisers, said they are unmoved by the police threat.

Speaking through his aide, Olayemi Koiki, Mr Igboho, who is reportedly on the run, after his home was invaded by the secret police, said although he would not be physically present at the venue, his supporters would proceed with the event.

PREMIUM TIMES reported that the Lagos State Police Command said it would not allow any form of rally hold in the state on July 3 by agitators of the Oodua Republic and Yoruba Nation.

The police spokesperson, Muyiwa Adejobi, in a statement warned the organisers and their followers against staging the planned rally and stay clear of the streets of Lagos for the interest of the State and the general public as anyone caught participating or facilitating the rally will be dealt with within the ambits of the law.

But Mr Koiki in a post on Facebook on Friday noted that Mr Igbohos withdrawal from the rally is due to the invasion of his house by security operatives on Thursday in a bid to arrest him.

I heard that the commissioner of police said no rally will hold, tell them to expect us. We will know who owns Lagos on Saturday between Yoruba people or Sanwo-Olu or police. We will all meet on Saturday during the rally.

If everything will be ruined, let it be on Saturday. They have the choice of letting us have our protest peacefully or causing violent (sic). Police should be held responsible for any violence. Let us take all our grievances to Ojota at 9 am on Saturday, Mr Koiki said.

It would be recalled that an umbrella body of Yoruba self-determination groups, Ilana Omo Oodua, led by Banji Akintoye, on Thursday evening insisted that the Yoruba Nation rally will hold as scheduled.

Yoruba Nation agitation is a political ideology to realise the independence and sovereign country for the Yoruba race in Nigeria but many political leaders in the region have rejected the idea.

Before now, the rally held in Ondo, Ekiti, Osun, Oyo, and Ogun states.

However, former Governor of Lagos, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, alongside Speaker of the House of Representatives Femi Gbajabiamila, Bisi Akande and all leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the South-west, in a meeting in Lagos last month, opposed the agitation.
Sunday Adeyemo, a self-styled Yoruba activist also known as Sunday Igboho, has tackled Nigerias secret police, the State Security Service (SSS), over the invasion of his home in a bid to effect his arrest.

Mr Igboho also said the security operatives planted ammunition in his house in order to persecute him. The Yoruba nation agitator made this known in a statement by his spokesperson, Olayemi Koiki, on Friday.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how Mr Igbohos house, located in Soka, Ibadan, capital of Oyo State was invaded around 1:00 a.m. on Thursday.

His vehicles, including his G-wagon, Prado Jeep, and some valuable properties including furniture and windows were reportedly destroyed.

The attack occurred barely 72 hours before the planned rally in Lagos by Mr Igboho and others to further canvas a Yoruba nation.

The spokesperson of SSS, Peter Afunaya, who confirmed the raid in a press conference in Abuja said a total of seven AK 47 rifles were recovered, alongside pump action guns and 5,000 rounds of ammunition including other weapons.

He said security operatives recovered the weapons after a hot gun duel between them and Igbohos guards.

The SSS also admitted that two of Mr Igbohos men were killed in the process while a security agent was shot on the right hand and is currently responding to treatment.

Mr Igboho was also declared wanted by the secret police. Many Nigerians including prominent groups have reacted to the development.

Despite a warning by the police in Lagos, organisers of the Yoruba Nation rally vowed to go ahead with their event on Saturday.

I am being persecuted  Igboho

Meanwhile, Mr Igboho said he is being persecuted by the federal government for his resistance to the incessant killings, raping and kidnapping of my people in South-west Nigeria by armed Fulani herdsmen.

The failure of President Muhammadu Buhari and his government to curb the criminal activities of the murderous herdsmen necessitated my intervention.

I ordinarily would not have intervened if the government had lived up to its responsibility of securing the Southwest and Nigeria at large from the criminal activities of the Presidents ethnic men.

Of public knowledge, my intervention has not let to any loss of life or bloodshed. My means of curbing criminality is to chase the criminal Fulani herdsmen out of their hideouts in company of the people of the affected communities.

It is because of the foreseen government persecution that videos of such interventions were transmitted live on social media. Nigerians, the security operatives, and the presidency are aware that I have never moved against the peaceful Fulanis and other tribes living peacefully in the Southwest. My unjust persecution  for defending my people and community  is therefore surprising and unwarranted.

Arms planted in my house

Mr Igboho further said the security operatives who invaded his home either planted the ammunitions being paraded in the media in my home or harvested them from their armoury to frame me. The arms paraded are not mine, they are government magic. I protect myself with traditional powers, not with guns.

Federal government framed me up and the sequence of events brings the truth bare. Why would the security agents invade my home at night and destroy my surveillance cameras before carrying out their operation if not that they had an ulterior motive?

In this modern age of technological advancement, why did the security operatives not put on body cameras to record their activities from the point of entry to their time of exit? Their action is a testament that the Buhari regime is incapable of using desperate approaches to silence peaceful social interventions.

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Mr Igboho described himself as a law-abiding citizen without blemish.

I advise President Buhari to, in the interest of Nigerians that voted him to power, order his henchmen to desist from using falsehood and unholy tactics to soil my name. Such energy should be devoted to taming the herdsmen and bandits freely committing heinous crimes across Nigeria with impunity because their kinsman is in power.

Yoruba people would not be demanding for a nation if the government had lived up to its responsibilities. Self-determination is not a crime and all efforts to silence us and acquire our ancestral land for local and foreign criminal herdsmen will fail.
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Two natives of Tamborong village in Ganawuri, Riyom Local Government Area of Plateau State, have been killed by suspected cattle herders.

The coordinator of Emancipation Centre for Crisis Victims in Nigeria (ECCVN), a Plateau-based NGO, Solomon Dalyop, said the attack occurred at about 6 p.m. on Wednesday.

According to the youth leader of the village, John Giwa, the victims were ambushed on their way from the Ganawuri market.

They were returning from Ganawuri market, unknown to us that the attackers whom we suspect as armed Fulani militias ambushed three persons.

Those involved were identified as Danlami Musa, Sunday Dogo and Joshu Usman. However, only Mr Musa narrowly escaped, PREMIUM TIMES gathered.

Sunday Dogo, 42, left behind three wives and 10 children while Joshua Usman, 30, left behind his wife and 4 children, Mr Giwa said.

The youth leader added that the Operation Safe Havens personnel of the military rushed to the scene and helped with the evacuation of the corpses.

The spokesperson of the state command of the police, Gabriel Ubah, was yet to respond to PREMIUM TIMESs enquiries as of press time. He promised to get back to our correspondent.

This is the fourth violent attack reported in different parts of the state in the past one week.

Herder attacks across 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 attacks on innocent citizens.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on Friday urged the Federal High Court in Abuja to dismiss an application filed the former governor of Abia State, Orji Kalu, to stop his retrial.

EFCCs lawyer, Rotimi Jacobs, scoffed at the seeming irony in the application suggesting that Mr Kalu was trying to take benefit of the Supreme Court judgement which nullified his earlier trial, and simultaneously trying to avoid the burden of retrial also ordered in the same apex courts verdict.

The plaintiff (Orji Kalu) and his co-defendant are enjoying the benefit of the Supreme Court judgement, but they are avoiding the burden that comes with it.

The Supreme Court ordered that plaintiff and his co-defendant be tried denovo (afresh). So, there must be a conviction or an acquittal by a competent court, Mr Jacobs said.

The Lagos Division of the court had on December 5, 2019, convicted and sentenced Mr Kalu, currently Chief Whip of the Senate, to 12 years imprisonment, and his co-defendant, Udeh Udeogu, to 10 years in jail for diverting Abia States funds to the tune of N7.1 billion.

However, citing technical grounds, the Supreme Court on May 8, 2020, set side the conviction and sentence, and ordered that the defendants be tried afresh.

Before they could be re-arraigned, however, Mr Kalu, the incumbent Chief Whip of the Nigerian Senate, filed an application to stop his retrial.

At the hearing of Mr Kalus application Inyang Ekwo of the Federal High Court, Abuja, on Friday, the prosecuting lawyer, Mr Jacobs, in an impassioned submission, took the court through the tortuous journey of prosecuting Mr Kalu and his co-defendant.

The trial lasted 12 years before their convictions were upturned by the apex court.

We cannot continue like that; everybody must be ready to bear the consequences of their actions. Filing a case to terminate the lifespan of another case is an abuse of court process.

In 2007, we (the EFCC) filed a charge against the defendants. It was fraught with series of preliminary objections that went up to the Supreme Court until 2016 and they were all dismissed, Mr Jacobs noted.

While closing his final argument on Friday, Mr Jacobs urged the judge to discountenance the argument of the former governors lead lawyer, Awa Kalu, that his client had spent five months in prison after a protracted trial, and that a retrial would amount to a double-jeopardy.

My lord, because he (Mr Kalu) has spent five months in prison, therefore his retrial should be aborted,? Mr Jacobs queried.

Kalus argument

While adopting his final written addresses, the plaintiffs lawyer, Awa Kalu, said the Supreme Court never ordered the retrial of the erstwhile governor of Abia State as he was not a party in the matter that nullified the entire proceedings at the trial court.

The Supreme Court never ordered the retrial of the plaintiff (Mr Kalu). Our application is anchored on the fact that my client was tried, convicted and sentenced. He spent five months in prison. Therefore, a retrial will amount to double-jeopardy.

The plaintiff stood trial for 12 years. His trial terminated in 2019. I urge the court to grant our application, he said.

Date for ruling

After listening to the lawyers representing the parties on Friday, the judge, Mr Ekwo, gave a tentative date of September 20, for the verdict.

He said the court would notify parties in the suit of change in date if the judgment would not be ready before then.

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Meanwhile, the chairman of the EFCC, Abdulrasheed Bawa, was seen conferring with Rotimi Jacobs, shortly after the suit was adjourned.

Convicted and subsequen release

Mr Kalu was tried based on amended 39 counts in which they were accused of stealing and mismanaging funds belonging to Abia State during his days as governor between 1999 and 2007.

He was tried alongside his company, Slok Nigeria Limited, and Udeh Udeogu, who was Director of Finance and Accounts at the Abia State Government House during Mr Kalus tenure as governor.

In December 2019, Mohammed Idris, then a judge of the Federal High Court in Lagos, (now a Justice of the Court of Appeal) sentenced Mr Kalu, to 12 years in prison for N7.65 billion fraud.

Mr Udeogu was jailed 10 years.

The court also ordered Slok Nigeria Limited to be wound up and its assets forfeited to the federal government.

But the Supreme Court on May 8, 2020, set side the conviction and sentence, on the grounds that the judgment of the trial court delivered by Mr Idris after he had been elevated to the Court of Appeal bench, was unconstitutional.

Ejembi Eko, a Supreme Court judge, who delivered the lead verdict, held that a Justice of the Court of Appeal cannot operate as a judge of the Federal High Court.

He ruled that section 396 (7) of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA), 2015, on which the then president of the Court of Appeal, Zainab Bulkachuwa, relied on to authorise the trial judge to return to the high court to conclude the trial was unconstitutional.

He then ordered the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court to reassign the case to another judge of the court for retrial.

Following the nullification of his conviction by the Supreme Court, the former governor filed an application at the federal court seeking an order for his release from the custody of the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCS), Kuje, Abuja.

A judge, Mohammed Liman, in June 2020, granted the application and ordered the immediate release of Mr Kalu from custody.
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Her performance on the MDGs was so spectacular that when the then United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, was looking for someone to transition the world from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), he appointed her as Special Adviser in 2012, with the responsibility for post-2015 development planning.

Last week, friends and associates of the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), Amina Mohammed, gave her a befitting celebration as she turned sixty. The timing was perfect as her boss had just won a second term in office and has offered her the opportunity to continue the journey with him, of carrying out the onerous job of the UN in keeping international peace and security, while promoting social progress, which is today encapsulated in advancing the agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Clearly, Antonio Guterres, the ninth Secretary-General of the UN believes they are a winning team, which is why he rushed to reappoint her, although the second term will only start in January next year.

All the Presidents in Nigerias Fourth Republic have worked with her and were well pleased with her output, but above all, the great results came through with the massive results of the positive outcomes she produced in the critical field of addressing poverty, inequality and social provisioning for the down trodden. She was the Senior Special Assistant on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) to President Olusegun Obasanjo, and worked with Presidents YarAdua and Jonathan in the same capacity. She was appointed by President Buhari as Minister of Environment of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which mandated her to steer the countrys efforts on the climate action and to protect the natural environment, at the critical period of agenda setting for the Paris Summit.

Her performance on the MDGs was so spectacular that when the then United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, was looking for someone to transition the world from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), he appointed her as Special Adviser in 2012, with the responsibility for post-2015 development planning. She led the process that resulted in the global agreement around the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Hajia Amina Mohammed began her career working on the design of schools and clinics in Nigeria. For most of her life, she has been an advocate focused on increasing access to education, health and other social services, before moving into the public sector, where she rose to the position of adviser to four successive Nigerian Presidents.

The keynote speaker was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former Liberian President She had worked closely with Amina Mohammed in developing the SDGs and described the celebrant, as many others did, as a force of nature with the uncanny ability to always stay focused in achieving objectives set out.

The theme of the Amina @ 60 Celebration Symposium was Overcoming the Challenges of Africas Transformation. The keynote speaker was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former Liberian President. She gave a very thoughtful presentation of the challenges of keeping focus on serving the needs of the people in a context in which power tends to alienate people who exercise it from the grassroots. She had the grace of posing the question whether she herself had done all she could for the people when she was in power and urged all those currently in power to continuously ask themselves the question. She had worked closely with Amina Mohammed in developing the SDGs and described the celebrant, as many others did, as a force of nature with the uncanny ability to always stay focused in achieving objectives set out.

During the symposium, there was a lot of friendly banter between Inuwa Yahaya, governor of Gombe State and Nasir El Rufai, governor of Kaduna State, with each claiming Amina as their own  by blood or by residency, and President Sirleaf had a direct question for them. Rather than fight to be associated with the glory that Amina Mohammed has become, should they not pose the question of why none of Nigerias great women has ever succeeded in becoming a State governor, not to talk of President of the country? More importantly, she added, what are they currently doing to support Nigerias large pool of competent women in accessing political power as 2023 approaches? I feel this is a great question, as Amina Mohammed has already created her own pathway to success and the important issue for Nigeria is to create pathways for other women, and indeed men also, with zeal and competence to get opportunities to make their own contributions in advancing the development potential of our country.

What Amina Mohammed did was to set up a team of competent civil society organisations to work with private sector consultants to ensure that every kobo was properly spent on projects that were useful to peoples lives. She basically reinvented monitoring and evaluation in Nigerias public sector

I worked closely with Amina Mohammed when she was appointed the Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on the MDGs in 2005. It was a completely unscripted job. She was charged with the coordination of Nigerias debt relief funds toward the achievement of the MDGs. Her mandate included designing a Virtual Poverty Fund, with innovative approaches to poverty reduction, budget coordination and monitoring, as well as providing advice on pertinent issues regarding poverty, public sector reform and sustainable development. There was no precedent for the job description in Nigerias public service. It would be recalled that Nigeria had signed up to the MDGs in 2000 and no mechanism for implementation was set in place, until the debt relief issue came up and development partners were asking questions of what will happen to the gains of debt relief, which was $1 billion annually. It was this amount that Amina was charged with using to advance the fight against poverty and the provision of social services in the country. That was the promise that cleared the hurdle for lifting Nigerias crushing debt burden of about $35.9 billion, with over 85 per cent owed to the Paris Club. President Olusegun Obasanjo and his Finance Minister, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala negotiated with the Paris Club and just before the G8 meeting in 2005, the Paris Club granted a debt relief to Nigeria, canceling $18 billion of the debt but requiring Nigeria to pay $12 billion in six months and comply with the agreement on the Virtual Poverty Fund.

What Amina Mohammed did was to set up a team of competent civil society organisations to work with private sector consultants to ensure that every kobo was properly spent on projects that were useful to peoples lives. She basically reinvented monitoring and evaluation in Nigerias public sector  letting public officials and political appointees know that the eyes of the nation were on them and projects must be completed in conformity with design and conditions, and above all, that the projects must serve the communities that were targeted. I led the civil society component of the work and what I found most satisfying was engaging with communities to know what was being built, by whom and according to what time frame. Success, Amina always told us, is when the communities themselves realise these projects were for their benefit and they themselves become active as beneficiaries keen on monitoring and evaluating that these projects were indeed for their benefit; so they had a stake as citizens. Keep the flag flying dear Amina.

A professor of Political Science and development consultant/expert, Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Democracy and Development, and Chair of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.
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Todays setbacks are not conclusive evidence of our inability to live together, but challenges we must overcome, as even the most advanced countries of the world such as United States of America, United Kingdom, Spain, and France still grapple with issues of identity.

In the contest for power and resources in history, people always try to outdo each other by creating divisions around race, ethnicity, or faith. People do this to enlist group support for otherwise private agenda or to whip support for personal disappointment or loss, as it presently is. Sometimes when faith and ethnicity are the same, demagogues explore doctrinaire differences, as it was in Europe in the 17th century, when European kings fought a 30-year war dividing themselves into Catholics or protestants, between 1618 and 1648.

Europe never emerged significantly as a powerhouse until it overcame that era of darkness, and only then was it able to march into Renaissance (Enlightenment), the Industrial Revolution and democracy. Ethnically and religiously homogeneous Somalia, whose war lords divided it along clans, is yet to escape from the ruins and darkness of its own division. Rwanda, to the contrary, is marching forward, having buried the ghost of hatred in its past, while presently making development its focus.

When I was a young student, both at the A levels and in the University, it was our aspiration to seek the unity of all of Africa into one country in the manner of America, as espoused by Kwame Nkrumah (the first Prime Minister of Ghana), and Sekou Toure (the first President of Guinea), and other great nationalists. Some of our mentors in Nigeria, such as Alao-Aka Bashorun, worked as a Pan Africanist in drafting the constitutions of many newly independent African countries, in a clime when Nigerias Justice Akinola Aguda served as Chief Justice of Botswana. We saw all Africans as the same, and we perceived any attack on any group of Africans as an attack on the rest of us. It was in that spirit that on January 6, 1988, Rotimi Ewebiyi, Olaitan Oyerinde, Chris Ayaze, Sylvester Odion and my humble self  all students of the University of Lagos  were arrested and detained after the massive protest we staged, alongside Nigerian workers and students, following Prime Minister Thatcher of Britains visit. We were protesting in Nigeria against her pro-apartheid policy in South Africa.

Where we are coming from is, of course, very far from where we are now; such that it is incredible that some people are demonstrating for the break up of Nigeria. In the days of yore, it was unimaginable to us that a time would come when the advocacy that we break Nigeria into separate countries will be fervent. Then we considered Nigeria as one of the 52 states of Africa, which is just the size of California in the United States of America. Everything from farming practices, including pastoralism versus crop farming, differences in dressing, and the relation to the climate and the land are all being thrown into the discussion, to magnify our differences.

Nigeria may have diverse languages, but the cultures of most Nigerian ethnic groups are the same, pointing to the same roots in distant history, and here is why. The cosmogony, religious rights, histories and cultures of most Nigerians (the pre-colonial and pre-Arabic influence) are largely the same, despite the diversity of languages that is available in the country.

The methods employed are even regrettably pedestrian, in what seems to be an argument that it is needless to save the unity of the country. Tragically, those who have held high offices in Nigeria at one point or the other are also stoking the current embers of disunity. The truth, the very stubborn truth, is that we are mainly the same people, in more ways than what the magnifying glasses of separatists want us to see.

Nigeria may have diverse languages, but the cultures of most Nigerian ethnic groups are the same, pointing to the same roots in distant history, and here is why. The cosmogony, religious rights, histories and cultures of most Nigerians (the pre-colonial and pre-Arabic influence) are largely the same, despite the diversity of languages that is available in the country. The African American scholar, Chancellor Williams has already done justice to this question in his seminar work, The Destruction of African Civilization: Great Issue of a Race. Williams explains that two major factors account for why Africa, though accounting for less than 3 per cent of global trade, is home to the highest numbers of languages and dialects in the world, but the same culture. These factors are first, the migration that occurred in prehistoric times because of the drying up (desertification) of parts of the Sahara, which was home to a previously thriving culture and life.

The second was the forced migrations, owing to various wars of conquest. When people flee, they go in small bands in different directions, carrying with them the memory of their cultures and cosmogony, but often losing their original languages as they travel farther. In Nigeria, it is possible to decipher a definite relationship in the pre-colonial and pre-Arabic cultures of Western and Northern Nigeria. These are presumed to be cultures whose ruling classes migrated from Meroitic Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt. The same practices in the Hausa Bori cult of worship, exists in the Sango (Yoruba) cult of worship. Similarly, the same practices are found in the Amadioha worship circle amongst the Igbos, who, though, are associated with the Bantustan stock. The details of these assumptions should have by now been the subject of a comprehensive study across archaeology, history, and linguistics, using the modern technology of historical reconstruction.

Cheikh Anta Diop, who I consider the most outstanding African scholar (an historian, physicist, archaeologist and chemist) has done some pioneering work on this subject and created a perspective for the historical reconstruction of Africa cultures, which establishes that Africans are essentially the same, not different people, and they can live together and must refrain from being sliced into tiny groups for easy conquest. This was his preoccupation in his books, Cultural Unity of Africa, Africa Pre-colonial, The African Origin of Civilisation, Myth or Reality, Civilization or Barbarism, and The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated African State. I recommend these important works to advocates of separatism, who constantly repeat the false doctrine that We are different people. We cannot live together. Let everyone go their separate ways.

Nigerians can live together peacefully and in prosperity once we regain our minds to do some of the right things, including decentralising more powers to the states and local governments; electing focused leaders with clear visions for economic and social development, and who the character and antecedents that show they can deliver on promises

Africans everywhere are of the same ancestry. All human beings are of the same ancestry, and so says the Bible in Act of Apostle, 17:26; And hath made of one blood all nations of men for dwelling on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation. Let us resolve our economic and political challenges in Nigeria in the political turf. Let us keep ethnic divisions and religious bigotry out of it. Ethno-religious confrontations are conflicts that no one can ever win, as all are always losers in that field.

Nigeria is a beautiful country, and the most formidable promise of the African people. It started well at independence and its people had learnt to live together peacefully, until the setback of the civil war, triggered by the 1966 military coup. The fantastic testament of our peaceful co-existence and integration includes such occasions as when the mainly Christian voters of Gboko elected a Kanuri Muslim man, Abubakar Imam, to represent them in the Northern State Assembly. It includes when Chief Obafemi Awolowo campaigned for Ernest Ikoli, an Ijaw man in the Lagos election, against a fellow Ijebu man, Samuel Akinsanya. In the early 1960s, right to the 70s, Easterners like Kalu Anya served in the Borno Judiciary, as well as justice Olagunju, a Yoruba man from Offa, who trained many Jurists in the Sokoto Division.

Todays setbacks are not conclusive evidence of our inability to live together, but challenges we must overcome, as even the most advanced countries of the world such as United States of America, United Kingdom, Spain, and France still grapple with issues of identity.

Nigerians, up till today, are still more tolerant of each other than the separatists propaganda want us to believe. Even as I write, the only seat allocated to Kebbi State at the Supreme Court is occupied by a jurist originally from Delta State, who practiced in the old Sokoto State and married from Argungu, Justice Amina Adamu Augie. Kebbi people do not regard her as a foreigner but a loyal daughter of Kebbi. It is time to talk a little more about the prime points in our journey to national integration, rather than our low points. Nigerians can live together peacefully and in prosperity once we regain our minds to do some of the right things, including decentralising more powers to the states and local governments; electing focused leaders with clear visions for economic and social development, and who the character and antecedents that show they can deliver on promises; and embarking immediately on a policy of national reconciliation and inclusiveness. These are what Nigeria needs, not division!

Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, a businessman, politician and former presidential candidate, wrote from Abuja.
During the war, then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote: In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity, In Peace: Good Will. The Versailles Peace Treaty came at a cost of 75 million lives. But has humanity learnt useful lessons from it?

In victory, be magnanimous. When the three-year Nigerian Civil War ended in January 1970, the then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, announced that there was: No Victor, No Vanquished.

He told Nigerians that there was no need for celebration, as the erstwhile rebels were our brothers and sisters who need urgent help and rehabilitation. As an immediate follow-up, he announced a programme of The three Rs: Rehabilitation, Reconstruction and Reintegration.

It was the subsequent mismanagement of this process, followed by years of misrule by rudderless, greedy and ethno-religious military coup plotters and politicians that has led the country once again to the brink.

The basic wisdom that the then 36-year-old Nigerian soldier displayed was what was lacking amongst European leaders: David Lloyd George of Britain, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France, and the President of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson in 1919, when after the First World War, they drew up what they called a Peace Treaty.

That bloody peace effort was documented in the Treaty of Versailles, which derived its name from the French Palace in Versailles, in the Ile-de-France Province, where it was signed. It was an imposed treaty between defeated Germany and its victorious cousins. Its 102nd commemoration on Monday June 28, reminded humanity once again that being greedy and vengeful can be calamitous.

The attempt by the victors to have their pound of flesh, pulverise Germany and steal its colonies, led to a more calamitous and cataclysmic war, which claimed over 75 million lives thereafter! The second European war of the 20th Century, disguised as a World War, was really an avoidable one. The First World War had resulted in 19.7 million deaths, and 21 million people injured.

The Germans suffered 1,773,700 deaths, with 4,216,058 injured and 1,152,8000 held as prisoners, leading to a total 7,142,558 casualties or 54.6 per cent of their military. However, the victorious countries did not think that Germany had suffered enough, hence they imposed the 15-part treaty, 13 of which were to punish defeated Germany.

reparations, assessed in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks (then $31.4 billion or equivalent to US$442 billion in 2021) were imposed on Germany. These were so high that war-ravaged and broken Germany had no chance of paying them. It appeared the Germans were being set up to violate the terms of the treaty and be further punished for it.

In its first part, the treaty set out deceptively to build a multilateral world body called the League of Nations, dedicated to preventing war and settling disputes through negotiation and diplomacy. But the punishment of Germany and its allies negated these ideals. The thirteenth part established the International Labour Organisation (ILO) for universal peace, on the basis of social justice.

In the treaty, the victors made the loser sign that: Germany accept(s) the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage in that war.

So reparations, assessed in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks (then $31.4 billion or equivalent to US$442 billion in 2021) were imposed on Germany. These were so high that war-ravaged and broken Germany had no chance of paying them. It appeared the Germans were being set up to violate the terms of the treaty and be further punished for it. Simultaneously, Germany was also forced to cede the output of its Saar coalmines to France.

Germany was further stripped of 65,000 square kilometres of territory inhabited by seven million people, which was awarded to other countries. It was likewise made to accept the independence of the current Czeh and Slovakia Republics, which were under Austrian control.

Europeans had seized many parts of the world, which they called colonies. They saw the German ones as war booty and under Article 119 of the treaty, shared them. In Africa, Burundi and Rwanda were given to Belgium, Northern Mozambique to Portugal, Tanzania to Britain, Togo and Cameroun to France, and Namibia to South Africa. German Shandong, China, was given to Japan; Samoa to New Zealand; and all German possessions in the Pacific north and south of the equator to Australia.

Germany, which had a pre-war army of 14 million men was ordered to reduce it to a maximum 100,000 soldiers and former officers were banned from attending military exercises. The maximum size of its Navy allowed was 15,000 men. In addition, it was forced to surrender 16 battleships and light cruisers, 50 torpedo boats and 42 destroyers, while 32 auxiliary ships were converted to merchant use. The German Air Force was disbanded and its weapons and equipment confiscated.

While many of the victorious world leaders were ecstatic, a lone voice could be heard warning that Germany should not be made to sign a treaty at the point of the bayonet. This was General Jan Christian Smuts, the father of Apartheid in South Africa. In the First World War, he was a British General who fought the Germans in East Africa.

In 1933, the Nazis came to power, tore the treaty to bits, re-armed Germany, re-built its military and began to retake the territories seized from it. This led to the Second World War; the most calamitous and destructive conflict in human history.

A staunch supporter of racial Zionism, he had an unusual mind; strongly supporting human rights internationally, but violently violating human rights in South Africa. At the treaty negotiations as part of the British team, he wrote Lloyd-George, the leader of the delegation, on the draconian conditions being imposed on Germany, asking: Are we in our sober senses or suffering from shellshock?

Twenty six days before the treaty was signed, Smuts wrote: At the vital moment there seems to be a failure of leadership, and also a failure of the general human spirit among the peoples. I hope I am wrong, but I have a sense of impending calamity, a fear that the war was only the vanguard of calamity  I cannot look at that draft treaty without a sense of grief and shame.

He was to be proved right about the impending calamity. History was to record that at that critical point, the most sensible man amongst the world leaders at Versailles was General Jan Smuts, an unstable racist bigot.

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The treaty was a bitter pill for Germany to swallow and angry Germans assassinated officials they think were responsible for this calamity. Germany was weighed down by all these, including the payment of reparations when the American stock market crashed in October 1929, wiping out millions in investments leading to the Great Depression. These led to the collapse of the German economy.

All these resulted in the phenomenal rise of the fascist National Socialist German Workers Party, famously known as the Nazi Party, which had been established in 1919. The Nazis, led by war veteran, Adolf Hitler, campaigned for the rejection of the treaty and restoration of German sovereignty.

In 1933, the Nazis came to power, tore the treaty to bits, re-armed Germany, re-built its military and began to retake the territories seized from it. This led to the Second World War; the most calamitous and destructive conflict in human history.

During the war, then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote: In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity, In Peace: Good Will. The Versailles Peace Treaty came at a cost of 75 million lives. But has humanity learnt useful lessons from it?

Owei Lakemfa, a former secretary general of African workers, is a human rights activist, journalist and author.
Africa Advancement Forum is a forum dedicated to enhancing and promoting conversations on public private Partnerships devoted to Improving Africas Economic Prosperity. The Forum runs as an Africa focused platform that creates space for the discussion of key prospects and strategies that aims at influencing positive growth, perception, and advancement of the continent.

Following the call for nomination for the 2021 African advancement Forums Global Recognition which forms part of the activities for the 2021 Africa Advancement Forums Summit, Top African Change makers from different parts of Africa made the nomination lists.

Prominent amongst the Top-ranking nominees on the list includes the Former President of Nigeria; Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, President of Ghana; Nana Akufo-Addo, Strive Masiyiwa; Founder and Executive Chairman Econet Group, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Director General of the World Trade Organization, H.E Ellen Johnson Sirleaf; former President of Liberia, Sibongile Sambo; CEO, SRS Aviation, Njeri Rionge; Founder & CEO ignite consulting and many other great achievers.

Africa Advancement forum was birthed to contemplate and proffer solutions to the numerous challenges facing Africa through the promotion of social transformational conversations on public private partnership dedicated to the improvement of Africas economy, quality of leadership and perception globally. Whiles the conversations are the major focus of the forum, showcasing and celebrating the outstanding and exemplary work of individuals and organizations has become an essential pathway to reinforcing possibilities that abound on the continent.

This year, we have carefully chosen a theme that resonates with the unique realities of the burden of governance facing Africa due to the impact of COVID 19 and other attendant Security related challenges with the theme;

THE AFRICA WE WANT

The multiple interventions and different responses of African countries to the COVID-19 pandemic, coordination of medical provision and knowledge-sharing networks, underscored the continued commitment of African countries need for regional collaboration and integration. As humanity comes under the most devastating scourge of a virus in modern lifetime, it has become necessary to review the collective and shared intentions for the great continent of Africa. This summit presents an opportunity to further the conversations and network around the shared values of progress, development, and advancement for our continent. The theme will be discussed by a group of speakers and panelists with cognate experience from various sectors across the continent. This Years summit like others will attract select heads of States, governors, prime ministers and top business leaders from across the African Continent. Details of event are as follows;

BREAKDOWN OF EVENTS

WELCOME/REGISTRATION OF DELEGATES

19th August 2021

Kempinski Hotel, Gold City, Accra

AFRICA ADVANCEMENT SUMMIT

Date: 20th August 2021

Venue: Accra International Conference Center

Time: 9am-2pm

Africa Investment Forum (2pm-3pm)

Diplomatic Session (3pm-4pm)

AFRICA ADVANCEMENT AWARDS

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20th August 2021  Award Gala Dinner (6pm-9pm)

Kempinski Hotel, Gold City, Accra

Africa Advancement Forum is an Initiative of Foundation for Economic Advancement Advocacy, a non-governmental organization that specializes in organizing top notch events locally and internationally that seeks to map new transformations, enable ongoing dialogue, and support the search for solutions to pressing issues on the continent, as well as charting new economic possibilities for economies of nations, particularly in Africa. We provide safe spaces for discussion of key local and national issues with captain of industries, NGOs, the Media, Government agencies, International Organizations, Civil society groups and stake holders in the various sectors of the economy.

Foundation for Economic Advancement Advocacy promotes excellence and sustainable development across the continent and globally. Our shared value of excellence is a reputation we cherish, protect and promote. We are determined to continue our partnership with the public and private sectors while prioritizing and fast tracking excellent service delivery across the continent.

For participation/sponsorship kindly visit www.advancementforum.org, email info@advancementforum.org and africaadvancementforum@gmail.com or call the following numbers; kindly contact us on +447786445714 | +2348033167827, +2347014440000 | + 447539079529.

Signed

Mudiaga Akakabota

Director, Global Operations & Partnerships.

Foundation for Economic Advancement Advocacy.

DAVID JAMES EGWU

Managing Director, West Africa Region

& Member, Managing Board, Africa Advancement Forum.
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President Muhammadu Buhari has expressed sadness over the death of a Zamfara State lawmaker, Muhammad Ahmad, who was killed by gunmen while driving to Kano along Shema-Funtua road, Katsina State.

The president made his feelings known in a condolence message by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, on Thursday in Abuja.

He said: I am deeply shocked by the tragic circumstances in which the lawmaker died while driving his son to Kano to board a flight.

Mr Buhari reiterated his directive to law-enforcement agencies and the military to deal sternly with anti-social elements bent on harming innocent citizens and creating fear and uncertainties under whatever guise.

May Allah forgive the soul of the deceased and grant his family the fortitude to bear this irreparable loss, the president prayed.

(NAN)
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The police in Edo State on Friday said they have arrested a 22-year-old suspected kidnap kingpin in the state.

The police spokesperson in the state, Kontongs Bello, said in a statement in Benin that the suspect was arrested through hi-tech tracking and intelligence on Thursday in Benin.

The suspect, whose name has not been revealed by the police, is said to be the leader of a gang that has been terrorising Benin-Auchi Road and its environs.

The police said the suspect has been on their wanted list for armed robbery and kidnapping in the state.

The suspect is the leader of a gang of four kidnappers that kidnapped one Lucky Ojezele at Idumwengie Community along Benin-Auchi Road on January 1, and fled.

The operatives of the Anti-Kidnapping and Cyber Crime Unit of the Command through Hi-tech tracking/intelligence arrested him at old road in Aduwawa, Benin City.

One of his gang members had earlier been arrested by the operatives and had since been charged to court.

On interrogation, the arrested suspect confessed to the crimes of kidnapping and armed robbery.

Efforts are on top gear to arrest the remaining two suspects, said Mr Bello, a superintendent of police.

The police spokesperson said the Commissioner of Police in Edo, Philip Ogbadu, enjoined the residents of the state to go about their lawful businesses.

He said the command would not relent in its efforts to protect lives and property of residents in the state.

(NAN)
The Federal Government on Friday said it would shut the Ijora ramp of Eko Bridge from midnight, to be able to fix a major expansion joint undergoing rehabilitation.

The Federal Controller of Works in Lagos, Olukayode Popoola, said this during an inspection of the bridge.

He said that construction works on the Costain section of the bridge had been completed, while the entire project was 35 per cent complete.

Mr Popoola said that it was time to continue work on a major expansion joint where traffic coming from Apongbon and the one from Ijora merged around Iponri section on the Eko Bridge.

The controller said in order to remove and replace the expansion joint where traffic merged, the Ijora ramp of the bridge must be shut.

He said construction work was progressing fast because of the clemency of weather, projecting that the project would be delivered ahead of the August 3 scheduled date.

What we are doing is still the same 10 weeks programme of rehabilitation of Eko Bridge.

Vehicles that are coming from Ijora end and the ones coming from Apongbon, the two bridges merge at a point.

At that point where they merge, all the vehicles will now use one lane, so, that is the lane where we want to now change the expansion joint.

We were working on Apongbon, Iponri, Alaka-bound lane. Now, we want to work on the same lane which is between Costain and Alaka.

Where we are now is Iponri, but all the vehicles that are coming from Ijora, they meet at a point with the vehicles coming from Apongbon, so, the expansion joint is what we want to now replace.

As a result of that, the two bridges will now be affected, he said.

Mr Popoola said vehicles coming from both Ijora and Apongbon could use the Costain ramp as alternative route to go through Breweries to Abebe Village, Eric Moore to either link Surulere, Funsho Williams Avenue, Stadium or Ikorodu Road.

The point where we want to work now connects the two bridges together.

For us to be able to remove the expansion joint, we have to close the two sides of the bridges, otherwise, we will not be able to remove and replace the expansion joint.

We plan to close the Ijora ramp this night, the controller said.

He decried activities of commercial motorcycle operators who usually came in large numbers at night to remove barricades around the construction zones.

Mr Popoola said the motorcycle operators popularly referred to as Okada riders usually carried out their actions whenever they noticed the Police patrol was not within the area.

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He warned the riders to desist from the act as any of them caught would be apprehended and prosecuted.

We have barricaded the construction zone so that no traffic would move on the bridge but we are surprised that we wake up in the morning and they would have opened the place.

We now found out that, say between 20 and 30 people come together and push the barrier, and then the Okada riders will be using the bridge.

I am appealing to them to desist from these criminal activities, he said.

Mr Popoola said the Federal Government was spending so much money to fix the bridge and Okada riders should not delay the contractors work.

He said that four bearings had been replaced and the fourth expansion joint was in the process of being removed for replacement.

The controller said work was ongoing under the bridge deck, which was sitting on reinforcements on jerks.

Conducting journalists around the various construction zones, he gave technical details as well as the difference between types of expansion joints being used.

Kaadi Ghassan, Project Manager, Buildwell Plants and Equipment Industries Ltd, contractors on the project, gave additional information on the technicalities on the portions under repairs.

Earlier, he presented pictures of tens of commercial motorcycle operators taken on his phone to the controller, expressing worry over the menace.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Eko Bridge was shut on June 4, with traffic diverted for the second phase of the rehabilitation of the Costain-bound section of the bridge.

(NAN)
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The Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) in Edo State on Friday announced the arrest of four suspects with adulterated petroleum products.

Aniekan Udoeyop, state commandant of the corps, disclosed this at a news briefing in his office in Benin.

Mr Udoeyop said the suspects, including the man who claimed ownership of the product, were arrested on Thursday, by the anti-vandal unit of the corps on the Benin-Sapele Road.

He said the petroleum product, suspected to be adulterated AGO, otherwise known as diesel, was concealed in 420 jerry cans of 25 litres each, which is approximately 10,500 litres.

The suspects had made useful information to the corps, and would soon be arraigned on completion of investigation, he said.

Mr Udoeyop said this would serve as a deterrent to other criminally-minded persons in the state, to desist from criminality and seek genuine and legal means of livelihood.

ALSO READ: Three suspected drug traffickers arrested in Edo

He added that the corps would work with sister security agencies to ensure that the state was rid of criminals.

The man, who claimed ownership of the product, who was among the suspects, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that he bought the product from the iron market in Warri, Delta State.

He also told NAN that they were taking the product to the By-pass in Benin before they were apprehended by operatives of the NSCDC.

(NAN)
PHOTO PROVIDEDKay Olan appeared in the Iroquois segment of the documentary How the West Was Lost which aired on The Discovery Channel. She researched and documented Indian artifacts found in the Champlain Valley for the Clinton County Historical Society. Ms. Olan has worked as a consultant for the Iroquois Indian Museum. In 2009, The Indigenous Womens Initiatives presented her with a Jigonsaseh Women of Peace award. She was honored in 2010 by the Association of Native Americans in the Hudson Valley for providing cultural bridges between Native and non-Native communities through her storytelling and cultural presentations
EQT Private Equity sells Iver, one of the leading Nordic managed IT services providers with a multi-cloud offering and complete IT outsourcing capabilities, to ICG

EQT Private Equity founded Iver through the merger of Candidator and DGC IT Services with the aim to create a platform for consolidation of the highly polarized and fragmented Nordic market, and has since then completed 10 additional strategic add-ons in Sweden and Norway

and Under EQT Private Equity's ownership, Iver has more than tripled revenues, while achieving industry low churn and top ranked customer satisfaction

STOCKHOLM, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- EQT is pleased to announce that the EQT Mid Market Europe fund ("EQT Private Equity") has agreed to sell Iver Holding AB ("Iver" or the "Company") to Intermediate Capital Group plc ("ICG"), a UK-based global alternative asset manager.

Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Iver offers full IT-outsourcing capabilities and focuses on high-growth areas such as multi-cloud, digital transformation, cybersecurity and DevOps-services. Iver is the preferred partner for customers with complex IT needs, such as demanding digital infrastructure, security, and regulatory compliance requirements. As part of its multi-cloud offering, Iver partners with major public cloud vendors, such as Amazon and Microsoft, while offering a proprietary European public cloud alternative, compliant to all industry, regulatory, and security requirements. Iver employs more than 1,300 people across its 25 local offices in Sweden and Norway.

Iver was founded in May 2018 through the merger of EQT portfolio companies Candidator and DGC IT Services, which were acquired in February 2018 and May 2018, respectively. The two companies' strategically complementary characteristics, along with the market fragmentation, brought unique opportunities to build a platform for industry consolidation.

Since then, EQT Private Equity has supported Iver's ambitious M&A agenda, and in addition to delivering strong organic growth, the Company has completed 10 strategic add-ons in Sweden and Norway. Iver has transformed into an integrated Nordic industry leader with deep capabilities in high growth areas. The Company has more than tripled revenues over the last three years and generated SEK 2.5 billion in 2020. With support from EQT and the board, Iver has increased its focus on ESG and is measuring, analyzing and following-up on its climate impact and CO2 emissions throughout the Company's entire supply chain. In addition to complying to multiple ISO certifications, the Company's datacenters are fully powered by renewable energy.

Albert Gustafsson, Partner within EQT Private Equity's Advisory Team, commented, "We are grateful to have worked alongside Iver's entrepreneurial and visionary management team and employees, who have driven the transformation from an industry challenger into a Nordic leader. Iver is uniquely positioned and is supported by strong structural trends, such as the increasing pace of outsourced IT services and growing demand for IT security. We are confident in management's ability to continue the successful path with Iver's new owner."

Carl-Magnus Mansson, CEO of Iver, said, "Modern digital infrastructure is a fundament for accelerating digital innovation and protecting digital values. We are on an exciting journey, the support from the EQT has significantly contributed to helping us transform the business and accelerate growth by making substantial investments. We would like to thank the EQT team, as well as the Iver board, for their support and we look forward to the next phase in our development together with ICG".

The transaction is subject to customary conditions and approvals and is expected to close in August 2021. The parties have agreed not to disclose the transaction value.

EQT Private Equity was advised by EY (financial and tax) and White & Case (legal).

Contact

EQT Press Office, press@eqtpartners.com, +46 8 506 55 334

About EQT

EQT 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.com

Follow EQT on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram

About Iver

Iver develops, packages, and provides IT services that offer digital competitive advantages and enable innovation. We guide our clients through an ever-changing IT landscape and make it easy for them to adopt new technologies and modern methodologies. Our client base spans every sector, and we provide services for medium- and large-sized companies, organisations, and the public sector. Iver's registered office is in Stockholm, but we operate throughout the Nordic region, where our agenda is one of continued expansion while remaining, at all times, close to our clients. Iver has a turnover of just over SEK 2.5 billion and approximately 1,300 employees who work at one of our 25 offices in Sweden and Norway. We are big, but we are close to our clients, both geographically and at heart.

More info: www.iver.com

Contact

EQT Press Office, press@eqtpartners.com, +46 8 506 55 334

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/87/3378495/1439921.pdf EQT Private Equity to sell Iver, one of the leading Nordic managed IT services providers https://mb.cision.com/Public/87/3378495/abb616c318653660_org.jpg EQT-Iver

SOURCE EQT
International guests who have been dreaming of visiting Phuket for the last 15 months will soon be able to return to the "Pearl of the Andaman" following the launch of the "Phuket Sandbox" program. Under this important initiative by the Government, overseas travelers can fly direct to Phuket, stay quarantine-free in world-class hotels and resorts, and soak up the blissful ambiance.

Under the "Summer Dreaming" offer, travelers who book at any participating Marriott Bonvoy property in Phuket will enjoy preferential rates, complimentary breakfast for two, and THB 1,000 (approximately USD 32) of hotel credit per room per night, which can be redeemed for memorable meals at the resorts' restaurants, sunset drinks at the bars, soothing spa treatments and more. So the longer you stay, the more rewarding your stay becomes!

To offer extra flexibility to guests, all bookings can be cancelled without charge up to 24 hours before the check-in date, and Marriott Bonvoy members will receive 5,000 bonus points. Signing up as a Marriott Bonvoy member is complimentary.

For truly blissful beachfront breaks, guests who book seven nights or longer under the Summer Dreaming promotion will be treated to a complimentary room upgrade and late 4pm check-out[2], ensuring that every couple or family can maximize their time in paradise.

From activity-packed resorts to exclusive island retreats, every guest can discover their own tropical idyll across the nine Marriott Bonvoy properties. The brand-new Courtyard by Marriott Phuket Town, which opens in August 2021, will allow guests to immerse themselves in Phuket's cultural heritage, surrounded by classical architecture, museums and markets.

Under the Tourism Authority of Thailand's (TAT) newly-introduced Amazing Thailand Safety & Health Administration (SHA) Plus[3] certification system, inbound visitors to Phuket will be required to stay at a hotel in which at least 70% of staff members have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Guests can rest assured that all of Marriott Bonvoy's properties in Phuket have achieved SHA Plus certificates.

Marriott Bonvoy properties across the world upholds the highest standards of health and safety under the company's "Commitment to Clean". The Marriott Cleanliness Council is redefining cleaning and safety standards, including enhanced cleaning technologies, adhering to social distancing protocols, food safety and more. To learn about how Marriott is keeping its guests safe, please visit clean.marriott.com.

The Thai government's "Phuket Sandbox" program, which comes into effect on 1 July 2021, allows international travelers who have received two COVID-19 vaccinations to fly directly to Phuket without the need to quarantine upon arrival, as long as they show proof of booking at an SHA Plus-certified hotel and when applying for their Certificate of Entry (CoE). For more information, please click here. As one of the largest hospitality companies in Thailand, Marriott International is fully supportive of this initiative and can't wait to welcome overseas visitors back to Phuket.

The Summer Dreaming promotion is valid for bookings made between 1 June and 31 August 2021, for stays taken between 1 July 2021 and 31 March 2022. Reservations must be made direct via https://hotel-deals.marriott.com/summer-dreaming-thailand-en/phuket/ using the promotional code A1764.

[1] Marriott Bonvoy Portfolio taking part in the "Summer Dreaming" promotion include Four Points by Sheraton Phuket Patong Beach Resort; Renaissance Phuket Resort & Spa; The Westin Siray Bay Resort & Spa, Phuket; Le Meridien Phuket Beach Resort; Phuket Marriott Resort & Spa, Merlin Beach; Phuket Marriott Resort and Spa, Nai Yang Beach; JW Marriott Phuket Resort & Spa; The Naka Island, a Luxury Collection Resort & Spa, Phuket; and Courtyard by Marriott Phuket Town (opening in August 2021)

[2] Upon availability, terms and conditions apply

[3] Reference: https://www.tatnews.org/2021/06/phuket-introduces-amazing-thailand-sha-plus-certification/

About Marriott Bonvoy

Marriott Bonvoy is the award-winning travel program for Marriott International's portfolio of 30 hotel brands, vacation home rental offering, all-inclusive resorts and hundreds of thousands of experiences. Members can earn and redeem points for stays and more, accelerating the points they earn with co-branded credit cards. When members book direct on Marriott.com they receive perks including free and enhanced Wi-Fi and exclusive member-only rates, and on the Marriott app mobile check-in and checkout, Mobile Requests and, wherever available, Mobile Key. To enroll for free or for more information about Marriott Bonvoy, visit MarriottBonvoy.com. To download the Marriott app, go here. Travelers can also connect with Marriott Bonvoy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1538729/Naka_Island_Luxury_Collection__2.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1538730/Relaxing_on_the_hammock.jpg

SOURCE Marriott International Inc.
The established magazine is renowned for providing members of the financial sector with up-to-date industry news, in-depth information and reviews.

The award ceremony comes as part of the magazine's annual tradition to recognize the industry's finest financial institutions and acknowledge their exceptional service.

"To receive this award in tandem with our 10th anniversary is a great honor. It not only commemorates the legacy we have worked so hard to achieve as a company but validates our status as a reliable and respected broker among the best within the financial community," said Managing Director, Mohammed Yaghi.

This award comes after three consecutive "Best Forex Broker" titles Orbex has received in the last 3 years, one of which was obtained at the Global Banking & Finance Review awards last year.

Orbex has undergone a significant revamp of its services as of late. The company offers highly competitive trading conditions including spreads as low as zero, negative balance protection and speedy execution of an average of 0.03 seconds per trading order. Orbex has also recently added 200 more of the hottest stock CFDs to its asset repertoire.

"The world has changed a lot over the last year and a half, but this award is proof that with history and strong values comes resilience and excellence. We thank Global Banking & Finance Review for acknowledging the work we put into serving our traders responsibly. And to our clients we say: we will continue to put our ethics and our dedication to their success first, so that despite all the uncertainty in the world, they know that they can place their trust in us," Yaghi added.

About Orbex

Orbex Limited is an award-winning global forex broker, fully licensed and regulated by CySEC. Headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus, Orbex specializes in the provision of access to the world's largest and most liquid financial markets.

Orbex Global Limited is fully licensed and regulated by FSC Mauritius and headquartered in Ebene, Mauritius.

The companies offer multiple asset trading including forex, indices, commodities and metals. With a focus on research, analysis and enhanced security of client funds, Orbex upholds a reputation of seasoned expertise within the industry.

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556757/Orbex_Excellence_Award.jpg

SOURCE Orbex
Ramesh is a seasoned leader in the healthcare industry with over 25 years of global senior management experience in the pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and medical devices sectors. He currently serves on the Board of Directors at Healthium, a fast-growing global medical devices company, while also managing his own advisory firm Alchemy Advisors, which helps global clients optimise their growth strategies and organisation models to deliver superior performance. In his new role as a member of the Board at Everlife, Ramesh will work closely with the company's Board, CEO, and leadership team to support the development of the company's strategic plan including defining the key growth levers, acquisitions, digital footprint, and organisational construct in order to extend Everlife's current leadership position in the markets and product segments in which it operates.

Prior to joining Everlife, Ramesh was the President of International Operations for Acelity, a global leader in wound care owned by Apax Partners, until its US$6.7 billion acquisition by 3M in November 2019. Prior to Acelity, Ramesh served as International Group President at Stryker - one of the world's leading medical technology companies, from 2011 to 2016. He led the transformation of the European business, developed an aggressive growth strategy for the emerging markets, and completed the company's first major acquisition outside the US in 2013, the market-leading orthopedic business in China. Prior to joining Stryker, Ramesh led Merck's APAC pharma business between 2006-2011 and held multiple leadership roles in the US, Europe, and Asia with Sanofi and its erstwhile companies between 1993-2006.



Besides leading many multi-billion international businesses, Ramesh also served as Chairman of PhRMA's Asia Committee and was a founding Board member of the Asia Pacific Medical Technology Association ("APACMed")  the first and only regional association to provide a unified voice for the medical technology industry in the Asia Pacific, of which Everlife is also a member.

Dr. Arjun Oberoi, Executive Chairman, Everlife, commented: "We are delighted to announce the appointment of Ramesh to our Board. Having worked under Ramesh at Stryker, I am very confident of the immense value that he will bring to the leadership team in helping shape and refine our strategic and digital roadmap while building our future organisation model as we look to integrating multiple acquisitions over the next 12-18 months. Ramesh's deep operating experience and strategic agility will help accelerate Everlife's journey to becoming the leading medical device platform in South East Asia and India."

Everlife currently operates in 6 countries through its investments in CPC Diagnostics, an India based manufacturer and marketer of in-vitro diagnostic products; Chemopharm Group, a leading provider of products and solutions to laboratory, research, and medical facilities in Malaysia and across South-East Asia; DV Medika, a leading manufacturer and distributor of hospital furniture, imaging systems, and critical care equipment in Indonesia and Lifeline Diagnostics, the leading distributor of in-vitro diagnostics and life science products in the Philippines.

About Everlife

Everlife Group is one of Asia's leading and most trusted market access and distribution platforms for medical devices and laboratory equipment and supplies. By combining our expertise in healthcare and Asia with a passionate and results-driven approach to business, we aim to improve health outcomes for patients and improve business performance for customers and principals. Everlife companies represent over 200 principals and a team of 800 employees that operate across 6 countries. Everlife is part of the Everstone Group and Cure Capital is a minority investor. To learn more, visit www.everlifeasia.com or visit us on LinkedIn .

About Everstone Group

Everstone is a premier investment group focused on India and South East Asia, with assets in excess of US$6 billion across private equity, real estate, credit, infrastructure, and venture capital. Everstone has a significant resource base across its seven offices in Singapore, India (Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore), London, New York, and Mauritius, comprising best-of-breed investing, operations, and strategic resources with significant experience and skills. For more information, visit www.everstonecapital.com

For inquiries, please contact:

Chermayn Chan

chermayn.chan@everlifeasia.com

Karan Anand

kanand@everstonecapital.com

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556517/Everlife_Logo.jpg

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556518/Ramesh_Subrahmanian.jpg

SOURCE Everlife Holdings Pte. Ltd.
Vodafone and the British and Irish Lions are brands united by a shared commitment to connect people to each other and the things they love. The new imagery is a powerful demonstration of how Vodafone is bringing fans closer to the 2021 Tour and the squad than ever before through its digital-first campaign.

The messages of encouragement from fans have been released to help to motivate players  letting them know that the four nations are behind them on Tour, despite fans being unable to travel to South Africa this Summer. The imagery shows how the power of the connectivity can bring players and fans together, which is more important than ever with no travelling fans.

Max Taylor, Consumer Director at Vodafone UK, said: "We are excited to be able to give Lions fans and players an opportunity to unite and connect ahead of the upcoming Tour. This is more important now than it has ever been. We hope these messages will show the players that even though British & Irish Lions fans can't be there, they're still very much cheering them on".

Maro Itoje said: "Fans are such an important part of any sport and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, reason why most of us play. With no fans there is an evident missing piece. It's incredible seeing how much support we have as a team and it is a huge boost for the whole squad."

Hamish Watson said: "Being able to receive these incredible fan messages has been a great boost. It has spurred me and the team on even more to do them proud. We love to the see the messages so please keep the support coming while we are on tour."



Louis Rees-Zammit said: "It's been a tough year not being able to connect with fans physically. So, we are grateful for the power of technology and social media that has allowed us to stay connected and motivate us for this upcoming tour. This is my first Lions Tour and the support so far has been overwhelming."

Maro Itoje, Hamish Watson and Louis Rees-Zammit are official Vodafone ambassadors for the 2021 British & Irish Lions Tour. Download the official Lions app, powered by Vodafone.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556339/Maro_Itoje.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556337/Hamish_Watsonur.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1556338/Louis_Rees_Zammit.jpg

SOURCE Vodafone UK
Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, vowed that the CPC will lead the Chinese people to strive for better lives and national rejuvenation.

Founded in July 1921 with just over 50 members, the CPC has grown into the world's largest political party with more than 95 million members.

The Party had set two centenary goals: The first was to build a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2021 when the CPC celebrates its centenary, and the second is to build China into a great modern socialist country in all respects by the middle of the century to celebrate the centenary of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

From humiliation to 'Xiaokang'

Xi reviewed the historical background of the CPC's creation and explained the role it played in the nation's efforts to realize rejuvenation.

After the Opium War in the 1840s, China gradually became a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society and endured intense humiliation and the people suffered great pain, Xi noted. "Since that time, national rejuvenation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation."

After a series of attempts to "save the nation" failed, the CPC was created when the country urgently needed new ideas and a new organization to lead the movement, he said.

"Since the very day of its founding, the Party has made seeking happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation its aspiration and mission," he said.

Xi summarized the Party's efforts and successes in leading a series of revolutions and the country's modernization, particularly in pursuing reform and opening-up since 1978, which he called a "crucial move in making China what it is today."

China, a relatively poor country decades ago, has become the world's second largest economy with its gross domestic product (GDP) exceeding 100 trillion yuan (about $15 trillion) and per capita GDP over $10,000. It declared the victory in eradicating absolute poverty nationwide by the end of 2020.

Highlighting the fulfillment of building a "Xiaokang" society and other achievements, Xi said the Party and the people have shown the world that "China's national rejuvenation has become a historical inevitability."

CPC's close ties with the people

Xi underscored the close relations between the CPC and the people, stressing that the Party "has always represented the fundamental interests of all Chinese people."

"Any attempt to divide the Party from the Chinese people or to set the people against the Party is bound to fail," he warned.

As China embarks on a new journey toward socialist modernization, he vowed that the CPC will continue to practice a people-centered philosophy of development, address the people's concerns and promote common prosperity for all.

"On the journey ahead, we must rely closely on the people to create history," he said.

The people-centered philosophy of development was raised by Xi at the fifth plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee in October 2015. The philosophy stresses that China's development must be for the people and by the people, and its fruits shared among the people.

The philosophy has been emphasized again in China's latest development blueprint  the Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035. The document vows to further improve people's livelihoods by pursuing more balanced, higher-quality development.

China's commitment to peaceful development

Xi also expounded on the main principles of China's foreign policy and vision on international relations. He reiterated the call for building a community with a shared future for humanity and stressed the country's commitment to peace.

"The Chinese nation does not carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes," Xi said. "China has always worked to safeguard world peace, contribute to global development and preserve international order."

China will stay committed to the path of peaceful development, he said. It will "promote high-quality development of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through joint efforts and use China's new achievements in development to provide the world with new opportunities," he added.

Proposed by Xi in 2013, the BRI which comprises the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, aims to build trade and infrastructure networks connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along and beyond the ancient Silk Road routes.

A total of 140 countries and regions have signed cooperation agreements with China under the BRI over the past eight years. The aggregated trade volume between China and its BRI cooperative partners has exceeded $9.2 trillion, and Chinese companies have made direct investments totaling over $130 billion in countries along the Belt and Road.

Meanwhile, Xi said China will continue to champion cooperation over confrontation and oppose hegemony and power politics.

The Chinese people have a strong sense of pride and confidence and will not be intimidated by threats of force, he stressed.

"We have never bullied, oppressed or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will," he said. "By the same token, we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress or subjugate us."

Xi reiterated the Party's stance on Hong Kong, Macao and the Taiwan region. "We will ensure that the central government exercises overall jurisdiction over Hong Kong and Macao, and implement legal systems and enforcement mechanisms for the two special administrative regions to safeguard national security," he said.

He described resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China's complete reunification as a "historic mission and an unshakable commitment" of the CPC, calling for resolute action to defeat any attempt toward "Taiwan independence."

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-07-01/With-Xiaokang-achieved-CPC-vows-to-lead-people-toward-better-life-11xvkhxk5pe/index.html

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViJ8Ba1uhoA

Related Links

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SOURCE CGTN
DUBLIN and SANTIAGO, Chile, July 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global wind and solar company, Mainstream Renewable Power ("Mainstream" or "The Company"), has achieved financial close for the third and final phase of its "Andes Renovables" wind and solar platform in Chile. The c. US$182 million in debt raised will be used to build the "Copihue" phase which consists of one wind farm, named Caman, located in central Chile.

The project, which will commence operations in 2022, initially had an installed capacity of 100 MW but has since increased to 148.5 MW following the signing of an additional long-term, bilateral Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with a strategic partner.

The senior debt financing comes from KfW IPEX-Bank, DNB, CaixaBank and the VAT financing comes from Scotiabank Chile.

With the financial close announced today, Mainstream completes an investment of more than US$1.8 billion to build its entire Andes Renovables platform, which is expected to be fully operational by 2022 and will provide around 20% of power for regulated customers in Chile using renewable energy.

Sacyr will be the Balance of Plant contractor for the Caman wind farm and they will carry out the electrical connection works. The main transformer will be supplied by ABB.

Mary Quaney, Mainstream's Group Chief Executive said:

"Net zero commitments across the world require systemic decarbonisation of power  our presence and work with partners in both mature and emerging markets demonstrates the scalability and success of our project development model to support this transition.

"Andes Renovables is one of the largest renewable energy platforms in Latin America which will have an installed capacity of 1.35 GW of clean energy, generating around 3,100 jobs during its construction.

"It showcases our industry-leading expertise in structuring hybrid projects with the combination of ten wind and solar generation profiles in order to meet our commitments to deliver firm power at scale over a twenty-year period.

"It reflects our commitment to, and experience in Chile, which is one of the world's most progressive renewable energy markets, and further solidifies our leadership position in-country, where we will soon be supplying the equivalent of one in five Chilean homes with power from our facilities."

Manuel Tagle, Mainstream's General Manager for Latin America said:

"Andes Renovables will power the equivalent of more than 1.7 million Chilean homes and avoid the emission of more than 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 per annum, the same as that produced by approximately 350,000 cars each year. The ten wind and solar farms that make up the platform are located between the regions of Antofagasta and Los Lagos. It is precisely this geographical and technological diversification that will allow for a more secure and constant electricity supply.

"We are pleased to have increased the Copihue portfolio size by 50% by adding a bilateral PPA in addition to the existing regulated PPA, which demonstrates our standing in the market.

"And it doesn't stop there. We are using our platform in renewables and experience as a market leader to pioneer new developments in emerging technologies to complement existing capacity and ensure we are on the cutting edge of cleantech. In parallel to the Andes Renovables platform we are also investing in a new large-scale renewable platform, Nazca Renovables, and in the last few months we have signed four new energy supply contracts with private customers. We look forward to sharing more updates on both portfolios as they progress through development."

Notes to Editors:

About Mainstream Renewable Power in Chile

In 2016, Mainstream was the biggest winner in Chile's largest ever technology-neutral electricity auction, taking 27% of the total allocated capacity. Chile's National Energy Commission awarded Mainstream a 20-year index-linked, US dollar denominated contract, to supply 3,366 Gigawatt Hours of firm power starting in 2021. Mainstream has also delivered an additional 332 MW of wind generation in Chile via the Aela Platform with its joint venture partner Actis, delivering its first wind farm into commercial operation in 2014. Mainstream has an additional 2,700 MW of wind and solar PV generation assets under development in Chile.

Andes Renovables Projects

Phase Portfolio Financial Close MW wind projects MW solar projects 1 Condor November 2019 3 project (426MW) 1 project (145MW) 2 Huemul September 2020 3 project (425 MW) 2 project (205 MW) 3 Copihue June 2021 1 project (148,5 MW) ---

Contact:

Emmet Curley, Head of Communications & Positioning

Phone: +353 86 2411 690

Email: [email protected]

Caroline Cutlet | Ojasvi Goel, FTI Consulting

Phone: +44 20 3727 1000

Email: [email protected]

About Mainstream

Mainstream Renewable Power is a leading pure-play renewable energy company with a global footprint. The company is focused on expanding its high-quality pipeline of more than 13 Gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar assets across Latin America, Africa, Asia Pacific as well as the global offshore wind sector. In May 2021, it closed an agreement for Aker Horizons to take a 75% equity stake in the company, enabling Mainstream to accelerate its global expansion plan to bring 5.5 GW of assets to financial close by 2023 ahead of a planned IPO.

Mainstream has delivered more than 6.5 GW of wind and solar assets to financial close, and currently has over 1.4 GW (net) in construction across Latin America and Africa. In Chile, Mainstream's wholly-owned 1.35 GW of fully contracted wind and solar assets are on track to reach commercial operation from 2021. In Africa, the company has delivered 842 MW of wind and solar assets into commercial operation in South Africa, and further, through its Lekela Power joint venture has 410 MW of wind assets in construction in Senegal and Egypt.

Mainstream is the most successful independent developer of offshore wind at scale globally. It has successfully consented Hornsea One (1.2 GW), the largest operational offshore wind plant in the world today; and developed the Hornsea 2 project (1.4 GW) before selling these projects and the entire Zone in 2015. Overall, it has developed and later divested projects representing 22% of the UK's offshore wind capacity either in operation or under construction. Mainstream fully consented the Neart na Gaoithe offshore wind project in Scotland, 450 MW, currently under construction. Mainstream's Soc Trang 1.4 GW offshore wind development in Vietnam is one of South East Asia's largest renewable energy developments.

Mainstream has raised more than EUR3.0bn in project finance to date and employs more than 340 staff across five continents.

www.mainstreamrp.com

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/686512/Mainstream_Renewable_Power_Logo.jpg

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SOURCE Mainstream Renewable Power
SOUTH WINDSOR, Conn., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Capewell, a global leader in engineering aviation and life support solutions, announced Patrick J. McCarthy, CFA, has joined the corporation as its Chief Strategy Officer.

McCarthy brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in the defense, aerospace and intelligence industries, having worked extensively with both public and private entities in New York and Washington, D.C. Prior to joining Capewell, McCarthy was the Senior Managing Director at the D.C.-based investment bank, FBR Capital Markets, where he supervised coverage of the aerospace, defense and government service industries, and managed a team that covered five industry verticals and more than 70 companies. Most recently, McCarty served as Principal at Neptune Holding, a Washington, D.C.-based strategy, consulting, advisory and private investment firm, which primarily focuses on US defense acquisition, policy and strategy.

"We are delighted to have Patrick join Capewell and build upon his impressive successes as a defense industry leader," said Gregory Bloom, Capewell President and Chief Executive Officer. "Patrick's expertise, outstanding reputation, and mission focus will serve Capewell and its customers well as he leads our strategy and customer engagement efforts. His proven experience and leadership will be key components for our team as we identify future opportunities and secure long-term success."

"I am honored to join Greg and the talented men and women of Capewell who are uniformly passionate about providing mission-critical solutions for those who put themselves at risk to protect and serve others," McCarthy said. "I look forward to working with the highly competent team at Capewell, and building upon the company's leadership in supplying Life Support & Safety Products, Aerial Delivery Systems & Parachute Related Products, Timers & Sensors, and Technical Services."

McCarthy is a member of the Board of Directors for The Military Wellness Initiative, a non-profit organization focused on improving the health of military members and veterans. He is also active in defense industry organizations, including the National Defense Industry Association and the Washington Industrial Round Table.

McCarthy is a graduate of Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, and has been a Chartered Financial Analyst since 2001.

About Capewell Aerial Systems:

Founded in 1881, Capewell is a leading designer and manufacturer of safety, tactical, parachute, and aerial delivery solutions for the aerospace and defense industry. Operating out of Meadow of Dan, Virginia and South Windsor, Connecticut, the company offers four core product segments of mission-critical components and systems: Life Support & Safety Systems, Aerial Delivery Systems & Parachute Related, Timers & Sensors, and Technical Services. The Company maintains strong relationships with the United States Department of Defense and its large prime contractors and is viewed as a vital part of the defense industrial base. https://capewellaerialsystems.com

SOURCE Capewell

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NEW YORK, July 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CI&T , a digital specialist for global brands, today announced the acquisition of Dextra , a Brazilian based software development company that creates end-to-end digital products. This acquisition is part of CI&T's ongoing effort to amplify its capabilities and build a stronger global market presence.

Dextra has over 1,200 experienced digital professionals, top-tier clients in Brazil and the U.S., and has developed a similar culture to CI&T focused on being lean, agile and providing full digital solutions. Dextra creates end-to-end digital products, from innovation and design to running secure and scalable software, which complements CI&T's current offering.

"We are thrilled about the opportunity to grow and expand our operations together with Dextra, a company that we have always admired and respected. The market demand is very high and together our offering is even stronger," celebrated Cesar Gon, CI&T's founder and CEO.

This acquisition further cements CI&T's market leader position in Brazil, increases the potential for nearshore opportunities, and will offer more comprehensive and robust solutions for both client portfolios. As both companies share similar cultural building blocks, incorporating the CI&T framework of an adhocratic management system with independent and decentralized decision-making will facilitate a seamless transition and help generate fast and relevant business impact for clients.

"Our success at Dextra has the potential to be exponential and global, and we are looking forward to starting our next chapter with CI&T. We are very excited about this new phase for the company," explained Eduardo Coppo, founder and CEO of Dextra.

CI&T will add Dextra's experienced tech professionals, seasoned group of founders and senior management to its global employee base of over 4,000 digital specialists, and clients such as Alelo, Solvay, Serasa Experian and McDonald's, among others. On top of providing a wider range of services to the market, this merger will strengthen CI&T's technical expertise.

The deal is subject to regulatory approval.

About Dextra

Dextra is an expert in combining design methodologies, agile development and data science to deliver digital products that boost our customers' businesses. We are a team of more than 1,200 people developing digital transformation projects in leading companies in their sectors in Brazil and the US. Since 2013 we are proud to be recognized among the 10 best IT & Telecom companies to work for by GPTW, in addition to several awards received from our clients for excellence in delivery and innovation.

About CI&T

CI&T is a digital specialist, a partner in end-to-end digital transformation. As digital natives, we bring a 26-year track record of accelerating business impact through complete and scalable digital solutions. With a global presence of 4,000 professionals in strategy, research, data science, design, and engineering, we unlock top-line growth, improve customer experience and drive operational efficiency.

CONTACT: [email protected]

SOURCE CI&T

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LUXEMBOURG, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Consolidated Energy Finance S.A. (the "Company") announced today that $309,010,000 of its outstanding Floating Rate Notes due 2022 (the "Notes") were validly tendered by holders of the Notes at or prior to the early tender deadline of 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on July 1, 2021 (the "Early Tender Deadline"), pursuant to the Company's previously announced cash tender offer (the "Tender Offer") to purchase up to $210,000,000 aggregate principal amount (the "Notes Maximum Tender Amount") of its Notes. The Tender Offer is being made pursuant to the offer to purchase dated June 17, 2021, as supplemented by the release dated June 18, 2021 and this release (the "Offer to Purchase").

Since the aggregate principal amount of the Notes validly tendered and not validly withdrawn exceeded the Notes Maximum Tender Amount, the Company will only accept for purchase Notes up to the Notes Maximum Tender Amount. The Company will prorate the Notes accepted for purchase using a proration factor of approximately 67.40. If after proration is applied and proration causes the returned Notes to fall below the minimum denomination of $150,000, the returned Notes would be accepted in full.

The following table summarizes the early tender results as of the Early Tender Deadline and the aggregate principal amount of Notes that the Company has accepted for purchase:

Title of Security

CUSIP / ISIN

Outstanding

Aggregate

Principal Amount

Total

Consideration(1)(2)

Principal Amount

Tendered at Early

Tender Deadline

Principal Amount

Accepted for

Purchase at Early

Tender Deadline Senior Floating

Rate Notes due

2022

Reg S:

L1957QAC4 /

USL1957QAC44

Rule 144A:

20914UAC0 /

US20914UAC09

$425,000,000

$1,000

$309,010,000

$209,999,000

_____________________

(1) Per $1,000 principal amount of Notes validly tendered and accepted for payment. (2) Includes the Early Tender Payment of $30 per $1,000 principal amount of Notes.

The Company has accepted for purchase $209,999,000 aggregate principal amount of its Notes validly tendered prior and not withdrawn to the Early Tender Deadline. The early settlement date on which the Company will make payment for such Notes accepted in the Tender Offer is expected to be on July 6, 2021 (the "Early Settlement Date").

The Tender Offer is subject to the satisfaction or waiver of certain conditions as described in the Offer to Purchase in relation to the Tender Offer that is being sent to holders of the Notes, including (1) the successful drawings of amounts in respect of an incremental term loan provided in accordance with a credit facility agreement entered into, among others, Consolidated Energy AG as the parent guarantor, Consolidated Energy Finance S.A. as a term facility borrower and a revolving facility borrower and Methanol Holdings (Delaware) LLC ("MHTL (Delaware)") as a term facility borrower ("CEL Facility Agreement") and/or the revolving credit facility provided in accordance with the CEL Facility Agreement, and (2) certain general conditions, in each case as described in more detail in the Offer to Purchase. If any of the conditions are not satisfied, the Company may terminate the Tender Offer and return tendered Notes, may waive unsatisfied conditions and accept for payment and purchase all validly tendered Notes.

Holders of Notes that validly tendered their Notes on or prior to the Early Tender Deadline and whose Notes have been accepted for purchase are entitled to receive the "Total Consideration" for each $1,000 principal amount of Notes validly tendered and accepted for purchase pursuant to the Tender Offer in an amount equal to $1,000, which includes an "Early Tender Payment" of $30 per $1,000 principal amount of Notes. Holders of Notes who validly tendered their Notes on or prior to the Early Tender Deadline and whose Notes have been accepted for purchase will also receive accrued and unpaid interest on their accepted Notes from the last interest payment date to, but not including, the Early Settlement Date.

All Notes purchased pursuant to the Tender Offer will be cancelled.

The Tender Offer will expire at 11:59 p.m., New York City time, on July 16, 2021, unless extended or earlier terminated by the Company. Because the Tender Offer has been fully subscribed as of the Early Tender Deadline, holders of Notes who tender Notes after the Early Tender Deadline will not have any of their Notes accepted for purchase. Any Notes tendered after the Early Tender Deadline, together with tendered Notes that are not accepted for purchase due to proration, will be promptly returned or credited to the holders thereof as described in the Offer to Purchase.

The complete terms and conditions of the Tender Offer are set forth in the Offer to Purchase. Holders are urged to read the Offer to Purchase carefully.

The Company has engaged Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC to act as dealer manager (the "Dealer Manager") for the Tender Offer. Persons with questions regarding the Tender Offer should contact Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC toll-free at (800) 624-1808 or collect at (212) 761-1057. Requests for documents should be directed to D.F. King & Co., Inc., acting as tender and information agent (the "Tender and Information Agent") for the Tender Offer, at (212) 269-5550 (for banks and brokers) or (800) 591-8263 (for noteholders) or by email at [email protected].

This press release is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to purchase or a solicitation of an offer to purchase with respect to any of the Notes. The Tender Offer is being made pursuant to the Tender Offer documents, including the Offer to Purchase that the Company is distributing to holders of the Notes. The Tender Offer is not being made to holders of Notes in any jurisdiction in which the making or acceptance thereof would not be in compliance with the securities or other laws of such jurisdiction. None of the Company, the Dealer Manager, the Tender and Information Agent or their respective affiliates is making any recommendation as to whether or not holders should tender all or any portion of their Notes in the Tender Offer.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements made in this news release which describe the Company's intentions, expectations, beliefs or predictions may be forward-looking statements within the meaning of securities laws. Forward-looking statements include statements preceded by, followed by, or including the words "believes," "expects," "anticipates," "plans," "estimates," "projects," "forecasts," or similar expressions. Examples of forward looking statements in this news release are statements about the expected size and timing of the Tender Offer. The Company cautions that, by their nature, forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainty and the Company's actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. The Company does not intend, and the Company disclaims any obligation, to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE Consolidated Energy Finance S.A.
PLANTATION, Fla., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Debbie's Dream Foundation: Curing Stomach Cancer (DDF) and the Korean Cancer Association (KCA) hosted a record high 935 virtual attendees during the International Gastric Cancer Educational Symposium on Thursday, June 17, 2021. Approximately 50 countries were represented by attendees, making this symposium the conference with the highest number of registrants for DDF. Participants tuned in to presentations by medical experts from Korea, China, Japan, and the United States to help bridge the gap on early detection issues and highlight the differences in treatment options between the western and eastern world.

Led by Dr. Han- Kwang Yang, Director and Professor of Surgery at the Seoul National University Hospital in Seoul, Korea, and Chairman of the Board of Directors for KCA, the program was hosted via Zoom and was simultaneously translated into four different languages: English, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. Topics highlighted include early screening and how it can be improved worldwide, advantages and disadvantages of varying surgery techniques, understanding systemic treatment, and new clinical trial options for gastric cancer patients. Registrants were also allowed to participate in the live Q&A during the patient panel discussions, allowing them to have their most pressing questions answered by patients and medical experts.

"The 2021 International Gastric Cancer Educational Symposium has had the most registrants to date," said Andrea Eidelman, Chief Executive Officer of DDF. "Having partnered with KCA and other Asian organizations, we reached far and wide to help bring this impertinent information to the stomach cancer community abroad. We are incredibly grateful to all of our partners for helping to make this event a huge success, and we look forward to hosting another conference like this soon."

Other Symposium partners included the Korean Gastric Cancer Association, Chinese Anti-Cancer Association, and Japanese Gastric Cancer Association. Supporters for this event include Platinum Sponsors Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck, Silver Sponsor Astellas, and Bronze Sponsor Zymeworks. All video presentations from the symposium will be available for viewing in DDF's lecture library at https:debbiesdream.org/lecture-library/. In addition, DDF and KCA look forward to hosting an in-person or hybrid symposium in the fall. For more information, visit www.DebbiesDream.org.

About Debbie's Dream Foundation: Curing Stomach Cancer

DDF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about gastric cancer, advancing funding for research, and providing education and support internationally to patients, families, and caregivers. DDF seeks as its ultimate goal to make the cure for stomach cancer a reality.

DDF was founded in 2009 by Debbie Zelman after she was diagnosed with stage IV incurable gastric cancer in 2008 and given only weeks to live. Debbie is considered a pioneer by many for bringing awareness to the plight of stomach cancer patients worldwide, as well as to the lack of federal funding for stomach cancer research. She did all of this while receiving hundreds of rounds of chemo, in addition to daily oral treatments. Debbie passed away on December 23, 2017, at the age of 50, almost a decade later. As a result of her leadership, DDF now has a Scientific and Medical Advisory Board of world-renowned doctors and chapters throughout the United States and in Canada and Germany. DDF strives to continue Debbie's mission and to make her dream a reality. To learn more about DDF, please visit us at www.DebbiesDream.org .

About the Korean Cancer Association

Korean Cancer Association (KCA) aims to prevent and control cancer, host meetings and lectures, issue reports and related publications, support cancer research, and cooperate with other related societies. The organization was formerly Korean Cancer Research Association and became KCA in 1974.

Media Contact:

Brittnay Starks Communications Coordinator

Debbie's Dream Foundation: Curing Stomach Cancer (954) 475-1200

[email protected]

www.DebbiesDream.org

SOURCE Debbie's Dream Foundation: Curing Stomach Cancer

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JACKSON, Miss., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- EastGroup Properties (NYSE:EGP) announced today that it will hold its Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call and Webcast on Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 11:00 A.M. Eastern Time. On the call, Marshall Loeb, CEO, and Brent Wood, CFO, will review the second quarter results and discuss EastGroup's current operations.

EastGroup plans to release financial results for the quarter after the market closes on July 27, 2021. The earnings release and supplemental information package will be posted on the Company's website, www.eastgroup.net, at that time.

A live broadcast of the conference call is available by dialing 1-877-240-5772 (conference ID EastGroup) or by webcast through a link on the Company's website at www.eastgroup.net. If you are unable to listen to the live conference call, a telephone and webcast replay will be available on Wednesday, July 28, 2021. The telephone replay will be available until Wednesday, August 4, 2021, and can be accessed by dialing 1-877-344-7529 (access code 10158233). The replay of the webcast can be accessed through a link on the Company's website at www.eastgroup.net and will be available until Wednesday, August 4, 2021.

EastGroup Properties, Inc. (NYSE: EGP), an S&P MidCap 400 company, is a self-administered equity real estate investment trust focused on the development, acquisition and operation of industrial properties in major Sunbelt markets throughout the United States with an emphasis in the states of Florida, Texas, Arizona, California and North Carolina. The Company's goal is to maximize shareholder value by being a leading provider in its markets of functional, flexible and quality business distribution space for location sensitive customers (primarily in the 15,000 to 70,000 square foot range). The Company's strategy for growth is based on ownership of premier distribution facilities generally clustered near major transportation features in supply-constrained submarkets. EastGroup's portfolio, including development projects and value-add acquisitions in lease-up and under construction, currently includes approximately 48.5 million square feet.

EastGroup Properties, Inc. press releases are available at www.eastgroup.net .

SOURCE EastGroup Properties

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MIAMI, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In collaboration with the Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM), Royal Caribbean Group docked Royal Caribbean International's Explorer of the Seas today at PortMiami to provide free housing and support for the tireless efforts of search and rescue teams working at the Surfside condo collapse.

"I want to thank Royal Caribbean for prioritizing the safety and well-being of our first responders at the Surfside Building Collapse," said FDEM Director Kevin Guthrie. "This resource will ensure our search and rescue teams have a quiet space to recover their mental and physical well-being as they work 12-hour shifts."

Explorer will host approximately 600 emergency workers from around the world, providing a respite from their difficult shifts. Search and rescue teams  including their dogs  will arrive in groups of 80 at a time to the ship. Onboard, they will receive individual staterooms, hot meals, laundry service and WIFI.

"This tragedy in our own backyard is heart-wrenching," said Richard Fain, Royal Caribbean Group's chairman and CEO. "Our thoughts are with the families and our whole community, and our thanks go out to the hardworking search and rescue teams. Providing them shelter is a small way to show our support."

In order to accomplish this effort, the Royal Caribbean Group team and the ship's leadership worked hand-in-hand with the Governor's office, Miami-Dade County, FDEM, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to receive the necessary approvals within 24 hours.

"This incredible act of kindness and generosity from our friends at Royal Caribbean is deeply appreciated by our entire community. Over the past nine days, our first responders have been working under dangerous, stressful conditions to move our Search and Rescue mission forward through so many unprecedented challenges. These accommodations will provide them with a much-needed respite and opportunity to rest and recharge for their next shift and are yet another example of how our local and global community has come together in the aftermath of tragedy," Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said.

"It's been truly incredible. Our people have worked very hard to get everything organized and coordinated, in just a matter of hours, to be able to house so many workers," said Fain. "We are here for our community  all of us."

Explorer of the Seas began housing rescue teams yesterday and likely will continue for the next month. The ship will be docked at Terminal F at PortMiami.

About Royal Caribbean Group

Royal Caribbean Group is the operating business name for Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. Royal Caribbean Group is the owner and operator of three global cruise vacation brands: Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, and Silversea Cruises. Royal Caribbean Group is also a 50% owner of a joint venture that operates TUI Cruises and Hapag-Lloyd Cruises. Together, the brands operate 59 ships with an additional 15 on order as of March 15, 2021. Learn more at www.royalcaribbeangroup.com or www.rclinvestor.com.

SOURCE Royal Caribbean Group

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NEW YORK, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GCN is a government technology news website that delivers technology assessments to support Public Sector IT managers. According to a new GCN report, insider threats rank among the most challenging risks governments face. Trusted insiders under financial pressure, holding a grievance, or motivated by other factors, can intentionally damage an agency. The results range from information leakage and national security breaches to workplace violence and even reputational damage. Insiders' unintentional actions can be equally damaging. Clearly, a robust insider threat program that protects government resources, employees, and contractors can deliver significant value and reduce associated risks.

Because a complete picture may not always be available, organizations are increasingly turning to publicly available information -- one of the most complex and information-rich sources of data. While PAI represents a significant opportunity to deliver the exact information that investigators may need, the challenge they face is that the depth and breadth of PAI are exploding exponentially.

The massive amounts of data that must be analyzed with a zero margin of error can potentially overwhelm officials and subject employees under consideration to unwarranted scrutiny. In addition, organizations implementing a solution at scale to analyze PAI face other challenges such as false positives, errant signals, and the time and expense of corroborating information.

Sluggish adoption

Adoption of open-source information at scale to address insider threat risks has been slow for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, attribution or accuracy of information presented on social channels, as well as the deep and dark web, is a key concern. Fraudsters or nation-state and non-nation-state actors with ulterior objectives could take over legitimate social assets. For example, foreign intelligence organizations may potentially take control of government or contractor employee social media accounts and post potentially damaging information that includes both disinformation and misinformation.

Secondly, employees' privacy and freedom of speech are critical issues for agencies considering the systematic usage of open-source information.

With attribution a concern, the use of social channels' information must be consistent with privacy guidelines and include opportunities for candidates to address any concerns.

Finally, agencies must consider the effort and risk of scaling the use of PAI from the social channels of a single person to potentially millions of government and contractor personnel.

Technical assistance

Technological advancements, such as artificial intelligence and identity resolution, combined with operational best practices and training, have also made it easier to use publicly available data to better understand the authenticity and risk of a post.

AI can combine information from a variety of different sources to instantly analyze data at a volume and generate intelligent insights derived from those sources. Identity resolution is the process of attributing a person's behavior and interactions - across multiple platforms or channels -- to a single unified profile.

Combined, AI and identity resolution can derive more accurate and meaningful insights from PAI. Potential benefits to agencies include fewer false positives and the ability to identify undisclosed information that could pose a risk to government personnel, facilities, or networks.

In addition, subject matter and operational expertise for using the deep and dark web is an integral component of any potential application dealing with open-source information. For example, any signals generated from a deep or dark web inquiry will require manual reviews and an understanding of how information is posted in these locations before it can be accurately attributed to a person.

Making open-source work

Using open-source information at scale can be a game-changer. Success, however, will require government and industry working together strategically to update policies for collecting and using open-source data. It is also incumbent upon the industry to engage government officials and provide updates about the latest technologies and best practices. At the tactical level, government and the vendor community can work together to identify and adopt the tools and processes for including PAI into a systematic insider threat risk management program.

To do this, government agencies need an approach, ideally fortified via AI and identity resolution, for gathering large data pools and specific insights. A set of thoughtfully constructed review guidelines, supported by human oversight, will help agencies rapidly verify the data. They also need the ability to swiftly identify attribution and create intelligence-rich reports for use in cases requiring prosecution or disciplinary action.

Ultimately, the goal is to confidently match a digital communication to its owner and assess the risk represented. Success will enrich the vetting process, reduce risk -- whether intentional or from poor cyber hygiene -- deter the insider threat and reduce the overall risk to the government.

About the Author

Paul Norton is the federal sales manager at Cobwebs Technologies.

[email protected]

Related Images

insider-threat-intelligence.jpg

Insider Threat Intelligence

SOURCE GCN
Lytham Partners to Provide Investor Relations Services

TORONTO, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Khiron Life Sciences Corp. ("Khiron" or the "Company") (TSXV: KHRN)(OTCQX: KHRNF)(Frankfurt: A2JMZC), a vertically integrated medical cannabis leader with core operations in Latin America and Europe, announces the results of its 2021 Annual General Meeting of shareholders ("AGM") held on June 30, 2021.

Shareholders approved the resolutions detailed in the management information circular of the Company dated May 25, 2021, namely:

Setting the number of directors of the Company at six;

Electing all six management nominees to the Board of Directors of the Company, including Juan Carlos Echeverry , Vicente Fox , Christopher Naprawa , Deborah Rosati , Alvaro Torres and Alvaro Yanez ; and

, , , , and ; and Re-appointing BDO Canada LLP as auditors of the Company for the ensuing year and authorizing the directors to determine the remuneration of the auditors.

The number of shares represented at the meeting was 52,591,833, or 34.89% of the issued and outstanding shares of the Company as of the record date.

Khiron engages Lytham Partners, LLC to provide Investor Relations Services

The Company is also pleased to announce that it has retained Lytham Partners, LLC ("Lytham") to provide investor relations services on a month-to-month basis. Lytham is a leading US-based investor relations firm with more than two decades of experience and a specialization in connecting small cap companies with high-quality and focused institutional investors. The services will include support for investment community outreach and corporate communications. As consideration for the services, Lytham will receive US$6,500 per month. At the time of this agreement, neither Lytham nor its principals have any direct or indirect interest in the Company's securities. The engagement of Lytham remains subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange.

About Khiron Life Sciences Corp.

Khiron is a leading vertically integrated medical cannabis company with core operations in Latin America and Europe. Leveraging wholly-owned medical health centres and proprietary telemedicine platforms, Khiron combines a patient-oriented approach, physician education programs, scientific expertise, product innovation, and agricultural infrastructure to drive prescriptions and brand loyalty with patients worldwide. The Company has a sales presence in Colombia, Peru, Germany and the UK, and is positioned to commence sales in Mexico and Brazil in 2021. The Company is led by Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Alvaro Torres, together with an experienced and diverse executive team and Board of Directors.

Visit Khiron online at investors.khiron.ca and on Instagram @khironlife.

Cautionary Notes

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. All information contained herein that is not historical in nature may constitute forward-looking information. Khiron undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of Khiron, its securities, or financial or operating results (as applicable). Although Khiron believes that the expectations reflected in forward-looking statements in this press release are reasonable, such forward-looking statement has been based on expectations, factors and assumptions concerning future events which may prove to be inaccurate and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond Khiron's control, including the risk factors discussed in Khiron's Annual Information Form which is available on Khiron's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and is made as of the date hereof. Khiron disclaims any intention and has no obligation or responsibility, except as required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

SOURCE Khiron Life Sciences Corp.

Related Links

https://khiron.ca/


LIMA, Peru, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Minsur S.A. announced today that US$263,577,000 aggregate principal amount, or approximately 58.57% (the "Tendered Notes"), of its outstanding 6.250% Senior Notes due 2024 (the "Notes") were validly tendered and not withdrawn by 5:00 p.m., New York City time (4:00 p.m., Lima time), on July 1, 2021 (the "Expiration Date") in accordance with Minsur's Offer to Purchase dated May 19, 2021 (the "Offer to Purchase") pursuant to which the tender offer was made.

Holders that validly tendered prior to 5:00 p.m., New York City time (4:00 p.m., Lima time), on June 2, 2021 (the "Early Tender Deadline"), and whose Tendered Notes were accepted, will be eligible to receive a total consideration of US$1,085 per US$1,000 principal amount of Tendered Notes, which includes an early tender premium of US$50 per US$1,000 principal amount of Tendered Notes. Holders that validly tendered after the Early Tender Deadline and prior to or at the Expiration Date, and whose Notes were accepted, will be eligible to receive the tender consideration of US$1,035 per US$1,000 principal amount of Tendered Notes. Accrued and unpaid interest will be paid on all Notes validly tendered and accepted for purchase from the last interest payment date up to, but not including, the settlement date, which is expected to be on July 6, 2021 (the "Settlement Date").

Minsur's obligation to accept for purchase and to pay for the Tendered Notes was subject to the satisfaction or waiver of certain conditions, which are more fully described in the Offer to Purchase. These conditions include Minsur having obtained sufficient gross proceeds from a debt financing, which has been satisfied.

Minsur will purchase all Notes that have been validly tendered and not validly withdrawn at or prior to the Expiration Date. Tenders of Notes submitted after the Expiration Date will not be valid.

Minsur has retained BofA Securities, Inc. and Santander Investment Securities Inc. as Dealer Managers for the tender offer. D.F. King & Co., Inc. is the Tender and Information Agent for the tender offer.

This press release is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to purchase securities or a solicitation of an offer to sell any securities or an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities nor does it constitute an offer or solicitation in any jurisdiction in which such offer or solicitation is unlawful.

Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements contained in this press release constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent Minsur's expectations or beliefs concerning future events, and it is possible that the results described in this press release will not be achieved. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside of Minsur's control, that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements.

Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which such statement is made, and, except as required by law, Minsur does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. New factors emerge from time to time and it is not possible for management to predict all such factors. No assurance can be given that the transactions described in this press release will be consummated or as to the ultimate terms of any such transactions.

Contacts:

Minsur S.A., Jr. Bernini 149, 501-A

San Borja  Lima

Peru

+(511) 215-8330

SOURCE Minsur S.A.
The survey serves as a barometer of how people worldwide view China. It asked them to choose the China-related topics they are most interested in.

The participating overseas media organizations, including Russia's Sputnik News Agency, Belarus's Telegraph Agency, Kazakhstan's DKN World News and Mongolia's Montsame News Agency, published the questionnaire online to collect responses from their readers.

In the survey, 21.6 percent of the respondents said China's battle against COVID-19 was the topic they were most interested in, followed by China's economic development (20.7 percent), poverty alleviation (18.4 percent), foreign policy and foreign affairs (16.8 percent).

As this year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, how the CPC works was also another topic of interest. According to the survey, many readers want to know more about the Party's vision and management.

Other topics on the questionnaire included science, culture and education, and infrastructure construction.

Apart from the online questionnaire, global media organizations also submitted written statements, which indicated the media industry has areas of interest in common.

Kamila Sagyntkan from Business Kazakhstan and the DKNews Agency said China's success in combating the COVID-19 pandemic has offered practical ways to respond to the health emergency.

Ibrahim Kamal Malas, editor for Abu Dhab's Al-Ain News, described China as the engine of the world's industry. "With its embrace of emerging new technology, from hydrogen fuel cars to bio-technology and medical engineering, China gained the confidence of the world after it was able to control the COVID-19 in a record time."

The global media community is also closely watching China's economic development and poverty alleviation.

Victoria Polikarpova from Russia's Sputnik News Agency expected China to finance plans to deepen economic reforms, with a focus on research.

Nithini Yuthara, from the Sri Lanka online news portal Sri Lanka Mirror, acknowledged China's importance in trade as China has heavily invested in development projects under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which could enhance Sri Lanka's connectivity to Central Asia.

Aliza Anees from Pakistan's Dawn.com said he was impressed by the significant progress China has made in poverty reduction over the past 40 years and expressed his hope that his country can learn from China's experience.

A collaborative video project invited foreign reporters to ask questions. China Daily reporters in Beijing asked top experts to give their answers in a video series, which are available for viewing on the China Daily website and app.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202107/01/WS60ddcc7ba310efa1bd65f428.html

SOURCE chinadaily.com.cn
NEW YORK, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

If you own J. Alexander's shares and wish to discuss this investigation or have any questions concerning this notice or your rights or interests, visit our website:

https://www.weisslaw.co/news-and-cases/jax

Or please contact:

Joshua Rubin, Esq.

WeissLaw LLP

1500 Broadway, 16th Floor

New York, NY 10036

(212) 682-3025

(888) 593-4771

[email protected]

WeissLaw LLP is investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of law by the board of directors of J. Alexander's Holdings, Inc. ("J. Alexander's" or the "Company") (NYSE: JAX) in connection with the proposed acquisition of the Company by SPB Hospitality LLC. Under the terms of the merger agreement, the Company's shareholders will receive $14.00 per share in cash for each share of J. Alexander's common stock that they hold. The transaction is valued at approximately $220 million.

WeissLaw LLP is investigating whether (i) J. Alexander's board of directors acted in the best interests of Company shareholders in agreeing to the proposed transaction, (ii) the $14.00 per-share merger consideration adequately compensates J. Alexander's shareholders, and (iii) all information regarding the sales process and valuation of the transaction will be fully and fairly disclosed.

WeissLaw LLP has litigated hundreds of stockholder class and derivative actions for violations of corporate and fiduciary duties. We have recovered over a billion dollars for defrauded clients and obtained important corporate governance relief in many of these cases. If you have information or would like legal advice concerning possible corporate wrongdoing (including insider trading, waste of corporate assets, accounting fraud, or materially misleading information), consumer fraud (including false advertising, defective products, or other deceptive business practices), or anti-trust violations, please email us at [email protected]

SOURCE WeissLaw LLP

Related Links

http://weisslawllp.com


EIGHTY FOUR, Pa., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- 84 Lumber, the nation's largest privately held building materials supplier, is launching a recruitment effort to fill immediate openings in the greater Baltimore area. The company will host a Hiring Event on July 8th from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the company's Joppa location (12400 Pulaski Highway, Joppa, MD 21085).

At the event, job seekers will learn more about the company culture and get the opportunity to be interviewed for open positions in the area that include manager trainee (MT), warehouse associate, field operations trainee, and door manufacturer. Qualified job seekers may receive an offer of employment during the event. Candidates who attend the event and then get hired as a result of it are eligible for a one-time $840 signing bonus.

"84 Lumber is seeking to fill more than 15 open positions at five different locations in the region. We're growing along with the growth in the construction industry  here in the Baltimore area and across the nation. We're looking for people seeking a fresh start," said Rob Woodrow, divisional vice president at 84 Lumber.

Woodrow went on to detail the available positions:

Manager trainees (MTs) hired by 84 Lumber enter an intensive, one-on-one, on-the-job training program that teaches them about the company's business and puts them on a path to become a future leader within the enterprise. Starting compensation for manager trainees is $41,000 per year.

hired by 84 Lumber enter an intensive, one-on-one, on-the-job training program that teaches them about the company's business and puts them on a path to become a future leader within the enterprise. Starting compensation for manager trainees is per year. Field operations trainees are part of the company's field operations team, which provide support to stores. These individuals assist with operations projects at various locations. Starting pay is up to $51,000 per year.

are part of the company's field operations team, which provide support to stores. These individuals assist with operations projects at various locations. Starting pay is up to per year. Lumber yard, warehouse, and door shop associates need no prior experience and perform essential functions behind the scenes  from management of supply shipments to operation of heavy equipment. These associates can expect starting pay of $10 to $15 per hour based on experience.

Woodrow added that 84 Lumber expects it might find the right fit from all types of candidates  an individual with no construction experience, military veterans ready to embark on their next career challenge, or people with some previous work experience who seek to redirect their career.

"We are a family-owned company, which means we are committed to helping our employees build and cultivate a career with us. In fact, 95% of our store managers started in our manager trainee program," Woodrow said. "As we see it, 84 Lumber recruits individuals with a can-do attitude, a willingness to work hard, and a desire to learn. Once we find these people and they join the company, we teach and train them and find ways for them to grow with us."

Candidates interested in participating in the Hiring Event are asked to pre-register. To sign up, go to 84 Lumber's Hiring Page and complete the form. Once you are registered, you will receive an email from 84 Lumber with the link to apply for the desired position. To save time, candidates are strongly encouraged to apply for positions online before they attend the event.

NOTE: 84 Lumber continues to follow CDC safety guidelines with regard to COVID-19. We ask that those attendees who are not yet fully vaccinated wear a mask and maintain social distancing. In addition, candidates will be required to undergo a background check and drug screening prior to receiving an offer of employment.

To learn more about 84 Lumber, follow the company on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

ABOUT 84 LUMBER

Founded in 1956 and headquartered in Eighty Four, Pennsylvania, 84 Lumber Company is the nation's largest privately held supplier of building materials, manufactured components and industry-leading services for single- and multi-family residences and commercial buildings. The company operates nearly 250 stores, component manufacturing plants, custom door shops, custom millwork shops and engineered wood product centers in more than 30 states. 84 Lumber also offers turnkey installation services for a variety of products, including framing, insulation, siding, windows, roofing, decking and drywall. A certified national women's business enterprise owned by Maggie Hardy Knox, 84 Lumber was named by Forbes as one of America's Largest Private Companies in 2018 and one of America's Best Large Employers in 2019. For more information, visit 84lumber.com or join us at Facebook.com/84lumber and linkedin.com/company/84-lumber .

Contact: Jeff Donaldson, BLD Marketing

Email: [email protected]

Phone: (412) 347-8039

Photos: http://www.bldpressroom.com/84lumber/joppa-hiring-event

SOURCE 84 Lumber

Related Links

http://84lumber.com


LOS ANGELES, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Allen Media, LLC and Allen Media Co-Issuer, Inc. (collectively, "AMG") announced today that they have commenced a solicitation of consents (the "Consent Solicitation") from holders of their 10.500% Senior Notes due 2028 (the "Notes").

AMG is planning to acquire television stations in 10 markets from several parties for approximately $500 million cash in aggregate, transfer broadcast television station KITV to the restricted group and refinance related debt outstanding. The purpose of the Consent Solicitation is to obtain approval to amend and modify the indenture governing the Notes and the other related documents to the extent necessary. The proposed amendments would (1) permit the incurrence of additional secured and unsecured indebtedness up to $550.0 million in the aggregate, $210 million of which is expected to be secured indebtedness, and (2) increase the size of AMG's senior credit facilities in connection with the proposed acquisitions, including increasing AMG's existing revolving credit facility from $60 million to $100 million in the aggregate. Adoption of the proposed amendments requires the receipt of valid and unrevoked consents from holders of not less than a majority in aggregate principal amount of the Notes (the "Requisite Consents").

The Consent Solicitation will expire at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on July 12, 2021, unless otherwise extended (such time and date, as may be extended, the "Expiration Date"). A consent can be revoked prior to the earlier of the receipt of the Requisite Consents or the Expiration Date, unless otherwise extended (such time and date, as may be extended, the "Revocation Deadline"). The record date for the Consent Solicitation is 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on July 1, 2021.

Subject to the terms and conditions of the Consent Solicitation, AMG expects to pay to each holder of Notes that consents to the amendments proposed by the Consent Solicitation, on or prior to the Expiration Date and which consent is not revoked prior to the Revocation Deadline, a fee equal to $60 in cash for each $1,000 in principal amount of the Notes for which consent is received (the "Consent Fee"). Payment of the Consent Fee is conditioned on (1) the receipt of the Requisite Consents, (2) the effectiveness of the related amendments to the senior credit facilities to effect the transactions and (3) the closing of certain of the proposed acquisitions.

The Consent Solicitation is being made pursuant to a Consent Solicitation Statement, dated July 2, 2021. RBC Capital Markets, LLC is serving as solicitation agent and Ipreo LLC is serving as tabulation agent in connection with the Consent Solicitation. Requests for assistance in delivering consents or for additional copies of the Consent Solicitation Statement should be directed to Ipreo at (866) 406-2283 (toll free) or by email to [email protected] or to RBC Capital Markets, LLC at (877) 381-2099 (toll free) or (212) 618-7843 (collect) or by e-mail at [email protected]. This press release is not an offer to sell securities and it is not soliciting an offer to buy securities.

About Allen Media Group

Chairman and CEO Byron Allen founded Allen Media Group in 1993. Headquartered in Los Angeles, it has offices in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Raleigh. Pro forma for the transaction, Allen Media Group will own 25 ABC-NBC-CBS-FOX network affiliate broadcast television stations and ten 24-hour HD television networks serving over 190 million subscribers: THE WEATHER CHANNEL, PETS.TV, COMEDY.TV, RECIPE.TV, CARS.TV, ES.TV, MYDESTINATION.TV, JUSTICE CENTRAL.TV, THEGRIO.TV, and THIS TV. Allen Media Group will add its eleventh network, THE WEATHER CHANNEL EN ESPANOL in 2022. Allen Media Group also produces, distributes, and sells advertising for 67 television programs, making it one of the largest independent producers/distributors of first-run syndicated television programming for broadcast television stations. With a library of over 5,000 hours of owned content across multiple genres, Allen Media Group provides video content to broadcast television stations, cable television networks, mobile devices, multimedia platforms, and the World Wide Web. Our mission is to provide excellent programming to our viewers, online users, and Fortune 500 advertising partners.

Forward Looking Statements

Some statements in this press release are known as "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements about AMG's plans, objectives, expectations and intentions and other statements contained in this press release that are not historical facts. When used in this press release, the words "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "believes," "seeks," "estimates" and similar expressions are generally intended to identify forward-looking statements. Because these forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, there are important factors that could cause actual results, events or developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements, including AMG's plans, objectives, expectations and intentions and other factors. You should not place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which are based on the information currently available to AMG and speak only as of the date of this press release. AMG undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. However, your attention is directed to any further disclosures made on related subjects in subsequent periodic reports filed with the U.S. Bank National Association, as trustee under the indenture governing the Notes, or posted on the Intralinks website.

SOURCE Allen Media Group
ROLLING MEADOWS, Ill., July 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. today announced that it has purchased the remaining shares of Edelweiss Gallagher Insurance Brokers Limited from Edelweiss Financial Services Limited, following a minority investment in 2019. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The deal is subject to approval by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India.

Headquartered in Mumbai, with branches in Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore, Edelweiss Gallagher Insurance Brokers Limited is an insurance/reinsurance broker offering general insurance solutions to clients across India within four business lines  corporate, affinity & association, reinsurance & global, and digital solutions. Key industry niches include cement, retail, pharmaceuticals & life sciences, jewellery, financial services, property, construction and infrastructure.

"Our partnership with Edelweiss has delivered strong results and this new step provides an exciting opportunity to establish a broader Gallagher footprint in India," said J. Patrick Gallagher, Jr., Chairman, President and CEO. "We are very pleased to welcome Edelweiss Gallagher Insurance Brokers Limited as a fully-fledged part of Gallagher and to increase our reach in this important market."

Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (NYSE:AJG), a global insurance brokerage, risk management and consulting services firm, is headquartered in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. The company has operations in 56 countries and offers client service capabilities in more than 150 countries around the world through a network of correspondent brokers and consultants.

Investors: Ray Iardella Media: Linda J. Collins VP  Investor Relations VP  Corporate Communications 630-285-3661/ [email protected] 630-285-4009/ [email protected]

SOURCE Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.

Related Links

http://www.ajg.com


PHILADELPHIA and CLEVELAND, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The investment fraud lawyers at Goldman Scarlato & Penny, PC law firm ("GSP") are evaluating potential claims for compensation on behalf of investors who lost money invested with the former LPL broker James Couture following securities fraud allegations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and his criminal indictment for fraud.

In a recent press release, the Commission announced the filing of a securities fraud enforcement action against James Kenneth Couture, a previously registered broker and investment adviser with offices in Worcester, Massachusetts, for allegedly defrauding his advisory clients of $2.9 million. In connection to the same alleged misconduct, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts announced parallel criminal charges against the former broker. Couture is allegedly facing three counts of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.

Couture investors should note that according to his FINRA Brokercheck Report, one year ago James Couture was discharged by LPL for, among others, altering identifying information, account balances and distributions in a customer's account statement. His termination prompted a FINRA investigation that concluded with Couture agreeing to being barred from associating with a FINRA-regulated securities brokerage firm in any capacities, without admitting or denying FINRA's findings.

What James Couture Investors May Do

Investment fraud attorneys Alan Rosca and Paul Scarlato have been investigating this matter and are evaluating certain potential recovery options for James Couture investors. Concerned Couture investors may contact attorneys Alan Rosca or Paul Scarlato for a free, no-obligation evaluation of their options at 888-998-0530, [email protected] or by leaving a message on https://investorlawyers.org/james-couture-investor-center/.

The GSP investment fraud attorneys have decades of combined experience representing investors who lost money as a result of investment fraud. They are evaluating potential options on behalf of victimized James Couture investors. They take most cases of this type on a contingency fee basis and advance the case costs. There are no fees or costs if no recovery.

Visit https://investorlawyers.org for more information about the firm and GSP attorneys' background and admissions to practice law. This release may be deemed to include Attorney Advertising. There has been no finding of liability as to the allegations herein.  GSP 2021.

SOURCE Goldman Scarlato & Penny, P.C.

Related Links

http://www.investorlawyers.org


BEIJING, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Autohome Inc. (NYSE: ATHM; HKEX: 2518) ("Autohome" or the "Company"), the leading online destination for automobile consumers in China, today announced that Mr. Jun Zou has notified the Company that he intends to resign as chief financial officer due to his other personal commitments. The effective date of Mr. Zou's resignation will be July 9, 2021.

Concurrently, Ms. Hong Jiang, financial director, will report directly to Mr. Quan Long, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of Autohome on an interim basis. Ms. Hong Jiang is currently in charge of financial operations, financial reporting and related matters of the Company. Ms. Jiang has extensive experience in financial management and previously held a number of senior positions at listed internet companies.

Mr. Quan Long, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of Autohome, stated, "On behalf of Autohome, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Jun for his dedication and valuable contribution to Autohome during his tenure as CFO. Jun has played a crucial role in enhancing the financial management efficiency and elevating Autohome's performance in the capital markets as we achieved important milestones. We respect his decision and sincerely wish Jun continued success in all his future endeavors."

In the meantime, the Company has initiated a search for suitable candidate and intends to appoint a new chief financial officer in due course.

About Autohome Inc.

Autohome Inc. (NYSE: ATHM; HKEX: 2518) is the leading online destination for automobile consumers in China. Its mission is to engage, educate and inform consumers about everything auto. Autohome provides original generated content, professionally generated content, user-generated content, and AI-generated content, a comprehensive automobile library, and extensive automobile listing information to automobile consumers, covering the entire car purchase and ownership cycle. The ability to reach a large and engaged user base of automobile consumers has made Autohome a preferred platform for automakers and dealers to conduct their advertising campaigns. Further, the Company's dealer subscription and advertising services allow dealers to market their inventory and services through Autohome's platform, extending the reach of their physical showrooms to potentially millions of internet users in China and generating sales leads for them. The Company offers sales leads, data analysis, and marketing services to assist automakers and dealers with improving their efficiency and facilitating transactions. Autohome operates its "Autohome Mall," a full-service online transaction platform, to facilitate transactions for automakers and dealers. Further, through its websites and mobile applications, it also provides other value-added services, including auto financing, auto insurance, used car transactions, and aftermarket services. For further information, please visit www.autohome.com.cn.

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains statements that may constitute "forward-looking" statements pursuant to the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will", "expects", "anticipates", "future", "intends", "plans", "believes", "estimates" and similar statements. Among other things, Autohome's business outlook, Autohome's strategic and operational plans and quotations from management in this announcement contain forward-looking statements. Autohome may also make written or oral forward-looking statements in its periodic reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), in announcements made on the website of The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited (the "Hong Kong Stock Exchange"), in its annual report to shareholders, in press releases and other written materials and in oral statements made by its officers, directors or employees to third parties. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about Autohome's beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement, including but not limited to the following: Autohome's goals and strategies; Autohome's future business development, results of operations and financial condition; the expected growth of the online automobile advertising market in China; Autohome's ability to attract and retain users and advertisers and further enhance its brand recognition; Autohome's expectations regarding demand for and market acceptance of its products and services; competition in the online automobile advertising industry; fluctuations in general economic and business conditions in China and assumptions underlying or related to any of the foregoing. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in Autohome's filings with the SEC and announcements on the website of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. All information provided in this press release is as of the date of this press release, and Autohome does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law.

For investor and media inquiries, please contact:

In China:

Autohome Inc.

Investor Relations

Tel: +86-10-5985-7483

E-mail: [email protected]

The Piacente Group, Inc.

Jenny Cai

Tel: +86-10-6508-0677

E-mail: [email protected]

In the United States:

The Piacente Group, Inc.

Brandi Piacente

Tel: +1-212-481-2050

E-mail: [email protected]

SOURCE Autohome Inc.

Related Links

http://www.autohome.com.cn


The growing awareness of safety concerns and animal allergies is identified as one of the major factors driving the growth of the market. Pet animals, including cats, are carriers of harmful bacteria such as Campylobacter jejuni and diseases such as cryptosporidiosis as they are more likely to be exposed to several kinds of pollutants. Also, furry animals such as cats can cause allergies such as dander in humans. Similarly, fleas, flu, ticks, and kennel coughs in cats increase the risk of allergies and asthma in people with weak immune systems. Hence, pet users are increasingly adopting automatic litter boxes that clean the litter without requiring human effort and eliminate the foul smell that can cause diseases. With growing awareness, the demand for automatic self-cleaning cat litter boxes is expected to increase during the forecast period.

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=IRTNTR43943

As per Technavio, the increase in the working population segment will have a positive impact on the market and contribute to its growth significantly over the forecast period. This research report also analyzes other significant trends and market drivers that will influence market growth over 2021-2025.

Automatic Self-cleaning Cat Litter Box Market: Increase in working population segment

The growth of various industries such as software, retailing, and manufacturing has increased the number of working individuals worldwide. This is increasing the purchasing power parity, which is boosting the adoption of pets and pet care products, including automatic self-cleaning cat-littering boxes. Also, a majority of the working population in developed countries such as the US, the UK, and Germany own pets such as cats. Consumers in these countries prefer more advanced pet care products such as automatic self-cleaning littering boxes. Therefore, the increase in the working population worldwide is expected to have a positive impact on the growth of the global automatic self-cleaning cat-littering box market during the forecast period.

"Increase in elderly cats with cognitive problems and the increase in pet ownership will further boost market growth during the forecast period", says a senior analyst at Technavio.

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Automatic Self-cleaning Cat Litter Box Market: Segmentation Analysis

This market research report segments the automatic self-cleaning cat litter box market by product (single-cat and multi-cat), distribution channel (offline and online), and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA).

The North American region led the automatic self-cleaning cat litter box market in 2021, followed by Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA respectively. During the forecast period, North America is expected to register the highest incremental growth due to the growth of the pet industry, the pet food industry, and the pet insurance industry in the region.

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Global Pet Accessories Market  Global pet accessories market is segmented by product (pet toys and others), end-user (dogs, cats, and others), distribution channel (offline and online), and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA).

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Global Pet Care Market  Global pet care market is segmented by application (dogs, cats, and others), product (food, accessories, and grooming), and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, the Middle East and Africa, and South America).

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Some of the key topics covered in the report include:

Market Drivers

Market Challenges

Market Trends

Vendor Landscape

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Competitive scenario

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

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Jesse Maida

Media & Marketing Executive

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UK: +44 203 893 3200

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.technavio.com/

Report: www.technavio.com/report/automatic-self-cleaning-cat-litter-box-market-industry-analysis

SOURCE Technavio
MIAMI, FL, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Cansortium Inc. (CSE:TIUM.U) (OTCQB: CNTMF) ("Cansortium" or the "Company"), a vertically-integrated cannabis company operating under the Fluent brand, today announced that it has exercised its right under the convertible promissory notes (the "Notes") initially issued in the aggregate principal amount of US$10 million in February 2019 (as amended in August 2020, February 2021 and May 2021) to force the conversion of the Notes into common shares of the Company. US$5 million of the Notes were previously redeemed with cash on May 5, 2021. As a result, all obligations under the Notes have been satisfied and are thus canceled.

Under the terms of the Notes, the Company had the right to force the conversion of all amounts outstanding thereunder upon the Company share price closing at $0.96 or greater for thirty consecutive trading days with an average trading volume over that period of at least 100,000 shares. As a result of the conversion, 8,426,574 common shares have been issued. Per the terms of the Notes, the remaining aggregate principal amount of each Note was converted into common shares at $0.60 and the accrued but unpaid interest under each Note was converted into common shares at $1.01, representing the closing price of the common shares on the trading day prior to the conversion.

Cansortium CEO Robert Beasley commented: "We have worked diligently over the past several months to simplify our capital structure and materially improve our balance sheet. With this redemption, we have eliminated all convertible notes from our cap table. We would like to thank our convertible noteholders for their support of the Company over these past two years."

In addition, Cansortium has recently engaged Elevate IR to expand their investor relations program, which will include consulting services for corporate messaging, investor outreach and capital markets advisory. Elevate IR is a strategic financial communications firm with deep experience in creating and deploying effective investor relations strategies for companies that operate across a broad range of industries, including Health & Wellness, Consumer, Technology and Business Services, among others.

About Cansortium Inc.

Cansortium is a vertically-integrated cannabis company with licenses and operations in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Texas. The Company operates under the Fluent brand and is dedicated to being one of the highest quality cannabis companies for the communities it serves. This is driven by Cansortium's unrelenting commitment to operational excellence in cultivation, production, distribution and retail. The Company is headquartered in Miami, Florida.

Cansortium Inc.'s common shares trade on the CSE under the symbol "TIUM.U" and on the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol "CNTMF." For more information about the Company, please visit www.getfluent.com.

Forward-Looking Information

Certain information in this news release may constitute forward-looking information. In some cases, but not necessarily in all cases, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "targets", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "an opportunity exists", "is positioned", "estimates", "intends", "assumes", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate" or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "will" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". In addition, any statements that refer to expectations, projections, or other characterizations of future events or circumstances contain forward-looking information. Statements containing forward-looking information are not historical facts but instead represent management's expectations, estimates, and projections regarding future events.

Forward-looking information is necessarily based on many opinions, assumptions, and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the Company as of the date of this news release, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to the factors described in the public documents of the Company available at www.sedar.com. These factors are not intended to represent a complete list of the factors that could affect the Company; however, these factors should be considered carefully. There can be no assurance that such estimates and assumptions will prove to be correct. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release, and the Company expressly disclaims any obligation to update or alter statements containing any forward-looking information, or the factors or assumptions underlying them, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

SOURCE Cansortium Inc

Related Links

www.cansortium.com


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Read the 120-page report with TOC on "Commercial Aircraft Avionic Systems Market Analysis Report by Distribution Channel (Line fit and Aftermarket), Application (FCS, CN and S, FMS, and AHMS), Geography (North America, Europe, APAC, MEA, and South America), and the Segment Forecasts, 2021-2025".

The market is driven by the increasing demand for commercial aircraft. In addition, the development of technologically advanced next-generation aircraft components is anticipated to boost the growth of the commercial aircraft avionic systems market.

The growth of the per capita income of individuals has been increasing the number of air travelers worldwide. The growth in the number of people traveling by air is encouraging airline operators to revamp their fleet to meet the growing demand. For instance, in March 2019, CASC signed an agreement with Airbus to purchase 290 A320s and 10 A350 XWB jets. Similarly, in February 2019, Emirates, a Dubai-based airline, signed an agreement with Airbus to purchase 40 A330-900 aircraft and 30 A350-900 aircraft. The growing adoption of new aircraft by airline operators is increasing the demand for various aircraft components, including commercial aircraft avionic systems, which is driving the growth of the market.

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Major Five Commercial Aircraft Avionic Systems Companies:

Cobham Plc

The company offers Aircraft Audio and Radio Management Systems and Airborne Servers and Routers.

Curtiss-Wright Corp.

The company offers solutions for airborne recording, air data computing, flight test, and space data handling systems.

Elbit Systems Ltd.

The company offerings range from complete integrated glass-cockpit suites to sophisticated Enhanced Vision Systems (EVS), and head-up displays (HUD). The company also provides other avionics systems and products such as flight management systems, digital map systems, and multifunction displays.

General Electric Co.

The company repairs and provides spares on equipment for a wide range of aircraft platforms, including widebody, narrowbody, and business jets.

Honeywell International Inc.

The company offers Navigation, Safety and Surveillance Solutions, Flight Management Systems, Flight Controls and Synthetic Vision Display Technologies, and other services.

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Commercial Aircraft Avionic Systems Market Distribution Channel Outlook (Revenue, USD bn, 2020-2025)

Line fit - size and forecast 2020-2025

Aftermarket - size and forecast 2020-2025

Commercial Aircraft Avionic Systems Market Application Outlook (Revenue, USD bn, 2020-2025)

FCS - size and forecast 2020-2025

CN and S - size and forecast 2020-2025

FMS - size and forecast 2020-2025

AHMS - size and forecast 2020-2025

Commercial Aircraft Avionic Systems Market Geography Outlook (Revenue, USD bn, 2020-2025)

North America - size and forecast 2020-2025

- size and forecast 2020-2025 Europe - size and forecast 2020-2025

- size and forecast 2020-2025 APAC - size and forecast 2020-2025

MEA - size and forecast 2020-2025

South America - size and forecast 2020-2025

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Related Reports on Industrials Include:

Global Commercial Aircraft Interface Device Market  Global commercial aircraft interface device market is segmented by aircraft fitment (retrofit and linefit), application (narrow-body, wide-body, and regional jet), and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA).

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Global Aircraft Engine MRO Market  Global aircraft engine MRO market is segmented by type (turbofan and turbojet and turboprop) and geography (APAC, Europe, MEA, North America, and South America).

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About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

Contacts

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/commercial-aircraft-avionic-systems-market-industry-analysis

Newsroom: newsroom.technavio.com/news/commercial-aircraft-avionic-systemsmarket

SOURCE Technavio
Over the past century, the CPC has grown from just a few dozen members to the largest political party in the world, profoundly transforming China and influencing the world.

Back in 1916, Li Dazhao, who had just returned from Waseda University in Japan, felt lost at a crossroads.

At that time, the Chinese people had suffered for more than half a century due to the decadence of Qing Dynasty's imperial rule and foreign aggression. From the Hundred Days of Reform in 1898 to the 1911 Revolution, countless experiments failed to bring China the national independence and modernization it desired. In 1917, the October Revolution was launched in Russia, offering hope to Li Dazhao and other revolutionaries.

With preparations in place, the CPC was founded in July 1921. The new proletarian party then led the Chinese people to establish the People's Republic of China 28 years later, completely ending the Chinese nation's "century of humiliation."

Fast forward to the summer of 1977.

Hu Fuming, a teacher at Nanjing University, brought some classic works of Marxism and Leninism with him when he accompanied his sick wife in the hospital. There, he finished writing the outline of an article titled "Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth," which was published in May 1978. With the support of Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping, the editorial gave rise to heated discussions on the standards for judging truth.

After then, the CPC re-established the guiding principles of "emancipating the mind and seeking truth from facts," and made the decision to pursue reform and opening up, thus helping China embark on a journey of rapid development and deep integration with the world.

By the end of 2020, China, home to one-fifth of the world's population, completely eliminated extreme poverty thanks to targeted poverty alleviation strategies, making a significant contribution to global poverty reduction. The dedication of countless Party members and officials in the fight against poverty has shown that the CPC has always been committed to its original aspiration of serving the people over the past century.

Under the CPC's leadership, China has created one miracle after another, from being bullied to becoming the world's second largest economy, growing from scratch to become a smart manufacturing powerhouse, from having little say on the international stage to being an important promoter of world peace and development. Going forward, it is believed that the CPC will continue to remain true to its original aspiration, keep the mission well in mind, and lead the people of all ethnic groups across the country on a new journey to achieve the dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

China Mosaic

http://www.china.org.cn/video/node_7230027.htm

CPC centenary: Drawing strength from a glorious history

http://www.china.org.cn/video/2021-07/02/content_77602012.htm

SOURCE China.org.cn
SAN DIEGO, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Shareholder Rights Law Firm Johnson Fistel, LLP, is investigating potential claims against DiDi Global Inc. ("DiDi" or the "Company") (NYSE: DIDI) for violations of federal securities laws.

On or about June 30, 2021, DiDi sold about 317 million shares of stock in its initial public stock offering (the "IPO") at $14 a share, raising nearly $4.5 billion in new capital.

Then on July 2, 2021, China's cyberspace administration reported it had launched an investigation into Didi to protect national security and public interest. China's Cyberspace Administration also said it had asked Didi to stop new user registrations during its investigation to prevent national data security risks, maintain national security protection and protect the public interest.

Specifically, Johnson Fistel's investigation seeks to determine whether the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with its June 2021 IPO and subsequent investor communications contained untrue statements of material facts or omitted to state other facts necessary to make the statements made therein not misleading concerning the Company's business, and operations.

If you have information that could assist in this investigation, or if you are a DiDi shareholder and are interested in learning more about the investigation, please contact Jim Baker ( [email protected] ) at 619-814-4471. If emailing, please include a phone number.

Additionally, you can [Click here to join this action]. There is no cost or obligation to you.

About Johnson Fistel, LLP:

Johnson Fistel, LLP is a nationally recognized shareholder rights law firm with offices in California, New York and Georgia. The firm represents individual and institutional investors in shareholder derivative and securities class action lawsuits. For more information about the firm and its attorneys, please visit http://www.johnsonfistel.com. Attorney advertising. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.

Contact:

Johnson Fistel, LLP

Jim Baker, 619-814-4471

[email protected]

[Click here to join this action]

SOURCE Johnson Fistel, LLP

Related Links

http://www.johnsonfistel.com


BOGOTA, Colombia, July 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Ecopetrol S.A. (BVC: ECOPETROL;NYSE: EC) informs that it has concluded the incorporation of Ecopetrol Singapore Pte Ltd., a company in which it will directly own 100% of its share capital. In turn, the aforementioned company will own 100% of the share capital of Ecopetrol Trading Asia Pte Ltd., whose main purpose will be the international commercialization of crude and refined products of the Ecopetrol Group and of third parties in Asia. Both companies will be domiciled in Singapore.

The two companies will be part of the Ecopetrol Group and will have paid-in share capital in accordance with the regulatory requirements of their jurisdiction of incorporation. Ecopetrol Trading Asia Pte Ltd. will be incorporated days after the establishment of Ecopetrol Singapore Pte Ltd. and it is expected to start operations in the first quarter of 2022, after completing the pre-operational stage.

With the incorporation of these new subsidiaries, Ecopetrol aims to strengthen its presence in the Asian market, which is a fast-growing market globally, seeking to increase competitiveness to the Ecopetrol Group's heavy crude and products in the new energy transition environment.

Ecopetrol is the largest company in Colombia and one of the main integrated oil and gas conglomerates in Latin America, with more than 13,000 employees. It accounts for more than 60% of the hydrocarbon production in Colombia, and it owns the largest refineries and most of the country's oil-pipelines and multi-purpose pipelines network. It also participates in the commercialization of energy and in the distribution of gas. At the international level, Ecopetrol focuses on strategic basins on the American continent, with E&P operations in the United States (the Permian basin and the Gulf of Mexico), Brazil and Mexico. This press release contains statements relating to business prospects, estimates of operating and financial results, and Ecopetrol's growth prospects. All are projections, and therefore are based solely on management's expectations of the company's future and its continuous access to capital to finance its sales plan. Achieving these estimates in the future depends on its performance under given market conditions, regulations, competition, the performance of the Colombian economy and industry, and other factors; therefore, they are subject to change without prior notice.

For further details, please contact:

Head of Capital Markets

Tatiana Uribe Benninghoff

Phone: +571-234-5190

Email: [email protected]

Media Engagement (Colombia)

Jorge Mauricio Tellez

Phone: +571-234-4329

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Ecopetrol S.A.

Related Links

http://www.ecopetrol.com.co


HOUSTON, July 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Element Markets announced today the hiring of Quentin Hicks as the Company's new Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Hicks is an experienced energy finance executive with expertise in the capital markets, mergers and acquisitions, accounting, and financial planning. He will be based in Houston at the Company's corporate headquarters.

"Quentin brings the financial acumen and capital markets expertise that is imperative to achieving our growth objectives. His strategic leadership skills will be an invaluable asset to our management team," commented Angela Schwarz, Co-President and CEO of Element Markets.

Prior to joining Element Markets, Mr. Hicks served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Gulfport Energy Corp., a publicly-traded natural gas-focused exploration and production company. Prior to Gulfport he was Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer for Halcon Resources Corporation. Before becoming CFO, Mr. Hicks worked in a variety of finance and investor relations roles at Halcon Resources and also at Georesources, Inc., a publicly-traded oil and gas firm that was acquired by Halcon Resources in 2012. He started his career in public accounting with Ernst and Young, LLP before moving into investment banking and working for Bear Stearns, Sanders Morris Harris and, most recently, Madison Williams, where he was a director in the energy investment banking practice.

Mr. Hicks is assuming the CFO role as long-time Element Markets executive, Leslie Ward, steps back from the Company following a distinguished 13-year tenure.

"Since joining Element in 2008, Leslie has been an essential member of the Executive Team having served as both CFO and COO. Her business expertise and dedication to the success of Element Markets has been invaluable as the Company has grown and evolved over the past decade, and Leslie played a key role in The Rise Fund's recent investment in Element Markets. She will serve as CFO Emeritus for the remainder of 2021," said Ms. Schwarz. "I am deeply grateful for Leslie's career contributions and friendship, and her counsel will be missed."

Mr. Hicks remarked, "I am excited to join Element Markets as they are at an inflection point in their life cycle. Element is an industry leader in the growing and evolving carbon credit marketplace as well as the renewable natural gas sector with a demonstrated history of success and exceptional client relationships. With the recent financial backing of TPG's The Rise Fund, Element is poised for significant growth and value creation, and I look forward to bringing my background and experience to bear in these efforts."

Mr. Hicks graduated from Texas A&M University with a Bachelor of Business Administration and a Master of Science degree in Accounting. In addition, Mr. Hicks holds a Master of Business Administration degree in Finance from Vanderbilt University and a Certified Public Accountant license from the State of Texas.

About Element Markets

Element Markets is a leading renewable natural gas marketing and environmental commodities company that applies its diverse expertise to provide structured environmental compliance and optimization services to corporate and institutional clients. The company has a successful track record within the renewable natural gas, low carbon fuels, emissions, carbon, and renewable energy credit markets. Founded in 2005, Element Markets LLC is headquartered in Houston, Texas, and is majority-owned by The Rise Fund, TPG's global impact investing fund.

Media Contact:

Alison Greene | Director, Marketing | [email protected]



SOURCE Element Markets
STOCKHOLM, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The process following the acquisition of the remaining 25% of the shares of ABIGO Medical AB is completed and the company is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Essity. As per the terms of the transaction, ABIGO Medicals pharma business has been divested and sold to the company's founder Jan G. Smith.

ABIGO Medical is a Swedish medical solutions company with its head office in Gothenburg, Sweden. The company has about 170 employees. Essity acquired 75% of ABIGO Medical in February 2020. ABIGO Medical develops, manufactures and markets products including the Sorbact technology, which is a clinically established innovation for advanced wound care. In the first quarter of 2021, Essity's organic net sales in wound care increased 2.1%.

For further information, please contact:

Per Lorentz, Vice President Corporate Communications, +46 8 788 52 51, [email protected]

Johan Karlsson, Vice President Investor Relations, +46 8 788 51 30, [email protected]

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/essity/r/essity-s-acquisition-of-abigo-medical-is-completed,c3378323

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/15798/3378323/1439761.pdf 20210702 Press release

SOURCE Essity
''Unwrap a Fairer Future" is a specially commissioned campaign film designed to show how choosing Fairtrade chocolate can change the lives of cocoa farmers. Produced by Fairtrade in collaboration with Niels Hoebers, the stop-motion animation tells the story of two bespoke bars of chocolate. At first glance, both look good enough to eat, but once unwrapped, the bars tell two vastly different stories.

The bitter bar shows the cocoa lands of West Africa, where uncertified cocoa farmers who are unable to grow their crop on Fairtrade terms face injustice and low prices, leading to poverty and deforestation that holds farming communities back. The film also depicts a sweeter side: Fairtrade-certified cocoa farmers benefit from rigorous independent standards receive support to adapt their farming practices to meet those standards, earning fair prices for their cocoa.

"We're making the bitter cost of each non-certified chocolate bar instantly apparent," said Nilufar Verjee, Fairtrade's director of public engagement and global cocoa campaign lead. "This is a captivating and shareable way to discover why cocoa farmers who grow the cocoa in our favourite chocolate bars deserve better incomes."

Fairtrade advocate and "Bridgerton" actress Adjoa Andoh shared: "Every Fairtrade bar of chocolate that you buy, every cocoa bean, means decent healthcare, education, and a collective voice all the way through the supply chain. Make the choice for hope, a future and joy, through the delicious medium of chocolate. Happy Fairtrade World Chocolate Day!"

Bitter Sweet launched with cocoa farmers sharing their own personal experiences. In the days following, 22 Fairtrade global regions are sharing information on social media about Fairtrade's impact, where to buy Fairtrade chocolate and how consumers can help by sharing with a friend. The campaign will culminate with the debut of the "Unwrap a Fairer Future" animation on World Chocolate Day, July 7, 2021.

Download press assets at: https://bit.ly/2SLXfrB

Media contact: [email protected] | +44 (0)7886 301486.

SOURCE Fairtrade International

Related Links

https://www.fairtrade.net


rock chip assays for 173 samples from 45 gold prospects yield gold grades including 54 g/t Au

grid based soil sampling of 2515 samples covering 10.5 km2 completed

68 drill hole program designed based on these fieldwork results

With results received from this fieldwork, a drill program has been designed to test multiple high priority targets within the Beechworth Gold Project.

Rock chip assays for 173 samples from 45 gold prospects have yielded gold grades that included 54 g/t Au. Samples were collected along lines of workings of quartz and dump material (mullock).

Grid based soil sampling of 2515 samples has covered 10.5km2 of the total 22.7km2 of EL4697. All samples have been analysed by portable XRF for arsenic, antimony, and other base metals. Of these samples 1227 samples have been analysed for gold with a 1ppb detection limit. Gold assays from this soil sampling range up to 521 ppb Au (0.52 g/t Au) with most of the gold assays arriving this week.

These results have generated Au-As anomalous geochemical targets associated with old workings on approximately 20 separate subparallel structures. The soil sampling has been used as a means of focusing on the better and broader mineralised targets amongst the plethora of old workings.

Apart from the current drill program at Hillsborough on the Taff and Bon Accord Prospects, two separate LIEP (Low Impact Exploration Permit) drill permit programs are proposed consisting of 68 drill holes within 8 separate sites. First pass drilling would amount to 4200m, with provisions for using the same drill pads to drill deeper by either RC or diamond drilling during a second phase follow up.

It is targeted that the first permits for this additional drilling will arrive in mid to late July which will allow drilling to follow on from the current drill program at the Bon Accord and Taff Reefs targets at Beechworth, where permits have already been received.

The 68 drill holes planned are mainly focused on the Birthday, Perfect Cure, Von Moltke Reefs and Perseverance Reefs. The Birthday Reef is at Hillsborough and is reported to have produced 2425 tons for 1638 oz. Extensive workings occur on the lengthy structure at Perfect Cure but production records are not available.

A separate drill program is also being submitted for approximately 20 additional drill holes at various prospects due to different land status classification.

The Beechworth Gold Project

The Beechworth Gold Project is a drill ready high-grade gold project to the north-east of the Company's extensive land package in the state of Victoria. The Beechworth Gold Project consists of one granted exploration license (Beechworth license) and three tenement applications (Myrtleford, Harrietville and Lady Jane) covering an area of 459 km2. A large number of prospects were mined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Geologically the entire Beechworth Gold Project lies within the Tabberabbera Zone on the eastern margin with the Omeo Zones of the Lachlan Fold Belt in Victoria. The host rocks are Lower Ordovician marine sediments of the Pinnak Sandstone Formation comprising sandstone, siltstone, and shale. The Hillsborough goldfield occurs in the hanging wall of the major regional Sawpit Gully Fault Zone which separates the Tabberabbera Zone from the Omeo Zone. Mineralisation is typical of orogenic gold deposits. The gold deposits are characteristically associated with deformed (compressed, folded and faulted) and metamorphosed (chemically or thermally altered) mid-crustal blocks, particularly in proximity to major crustal structures (such as major faults or basement shear zones). Mineralised fault zones generally strike north to north-westerly with occasional breccia pipes developed at the intersection of anastomosing fault zones.

Beechworth License

Several key gold prospects and associated fault structures have been identified within the Beechworth license based upon extensive geochemical sampling, geological & LIDAR mapping and very minor previous drilling. These include various historical producing mines located within the Hurdle Flat goldfield (21,715 ounces of production at 15.32 g/t Au) and Hillsborough goldfield (47,492 ounces of production at 17.48 g/t Au).

Within the Hurdle Flat goldfield, at the Wallaby prospect, the existing adit accesses 200m below surface workings including an old open cut. The historically worked mineralized bodies are large subvertical tabular and pipe like structures. The largest historical mineralized shoot had a strike length of 145m, vertical extent of at least 170m, width of 13m, and an average grade of 15 - 20g/t Au. Repetitions of these ore shoots occur along strike and probably at depth.

Extensive channel sampling by previous explorers has occurred on the some prospects at the Beechworth license as follows:

Wallaby Prospect. 25 metres at 7.05 g/t gold; and 5 m at 25.9 g/t gold.





25 metres at 7.05 g/t gold; and 5 m at 25.9 g/t gold. Bon Accord Prospect. 10 metres at 23.7 g/t gold





10 metres at 23.7 g/t gold Kingston Prospect. 10 metres at 7.16 g/t gold.

Previous drilling for depth continuations around these old working has yielded significant intercepts at relatively shallow depths and include:

Kingston Prospect. W03: 8m @ 8.88 g/t Au from 18m





W03: 8m @ 8.88 g/t Au from 18m Hope Prospect. W06: 4m @ 22.0 g/t Au from 38m of downhole intervals.





W06: 4m @ 22.0 g/t Au from 38m of downhole intervals. Homeward Bound Prospect. HB04: 1.2m @132 g/t from 154.3m and HB09: 1.25m @ 31.5 g/t Au from 145.6m.

Myrtleford, Harrietville and Lady Jane Tenement Applications

Fosterville South's Harrietville tenement application consists of 247km2 and is located 33 km south of the Beechworth license. Several key gold prospects have been identified within the Harrietville tenement application based upon previous gold production. No modern exploration has taken place at any of these prospects. The only exploration drilling that has been carried out was by BHP Minerals searching for alluvial gold deposits with 20 cable tool drillholes completed in the Smoko area. Minor geochemical sampling, as stream sediments, has previously taken place. Historical production from these key mines was 11,836 ounces at 17.68 g/t Au.

The Myrtleford tenement application consists of 118km2. The area is east and south of the Beechworth license and is in part contiguous with the Beechworth granted licence and the Myrtleford Property owned by E79 Resources Inc.* Several key gold prospects have been identified within the Myrtleford based upon previous gold production. No modern exploration or drilling has taken place at any of these prospects. Minor geochemical stream sediments sampling has occurred. Historical production resulted in 24,745 ounces produced at 15.14g/t Au.

* Mineralization at the Myrtleford Property owned by E79 Resources Inc. is not necessarily indicative of mineralization at the Beechworth license and Myrtleford and Lady Jane tenement applications owned by Fosterville South.

The Lady Jane tenement application consists of 58km2. The area is west of and is in part contiguous with the Harrietville application and the Myrtleford Property owned by E79 Resources Inc.* Several key gold prospects have been identified within the Lady Jane based upon previous gold production. No modern exploration or drilling has taken place at any of these prospects. Minor geochemical stream sediments sampling has occurred.

The geological setting of these tenement applications is similar to the Beechworth licence and host rocks are the same Lower Ordovician Pinnak Sandstone Formation with north-westerly striking mineralized fault zones.

About Fosterville South Exploration Ltd.

Fosterville South began with two, 100% owned, high-grade gold projects called the Lauriston and Golden Mountain Projects, and has since acquired a large area of granted and application tenements containing further epizonal (low-temperature) high-grade gold mineralisation called the Providence Project and a large group of recently consolidated license tenement applications called the Walhalla Belt Project, which contain a variety of epizonal and intrusion related style gold mineralisation, all in the state of Victoria, Australia. The Fosterville South land package, assembled over a multi-year period, notably includes a 600 sq. km property immediately to the south of and within the same geological framework that hosts Kirkland Lake Gold's Fosterville epizonal gold tenements. Additionally, Fosterville South has gold-focused projects called the Moormbool and Beechworth, which are also located in the state of Victoria, Australia. Moormbool project has epizonal style gold mineralisation and Beechworth has mesozonal and intrusion relation gold mineralisation.

All of Fosterville South's properties, with the possible exception of Moormbool, have had historical gold production from hard rock sources despite limited modern exploration and drilling.

Qualified Person

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed, verified and approved by Rex Motton, AusIMM (CP), COO and Director of Fosterville South, a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101. Historical records were verified by reviewing annual and quarterly reports from government records by the Qualified Person.

On behalf of the Company

Rex Motton

Chief Operating Officer and Director

Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. Fosterville South cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by many material factors, many of which are beyond their respective control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to Fosterville South's limited operating history, its exploration and development activities on the Lauriston, Golden Mountain and Beechworth Properties and the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward-looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, Fosterville South does not undertake to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE Fosterville South Exploration Ltd.
Fresha allows consumers to discover, book and pay for Salon and Spa appointments with local beauty businesses via its marketplace, while salons, spas and barbershops can leverage Fresha to manage their operations with its intuitive, subscription-free business software. The Fresha software removes the critical pain points that service-based businesses often encounter by seamlessly facilitating the acceptance of online appointment bookings, processing of card payments and management of customer records, along with automations for marketing, staffing, product inventory and accounting, all in one place. In addition to its free salon software offering, Fresha Plus provides partners with additional advanced features; rather than a traditional subscription model, the company collects fees on the usage of features for card payment processing and online bookings.

Over 80% of our barbershop appointments are booked online directly by clients on Fresha Marketplace. It's the best appointment booking software and POS in the world. We run our whole business on the Fresha platform. The system is very easy to use, our team and clients love it!' says Leith Matthews, owner of Akin Barber & Shop.

Fresha has amassed an extensive base of approximately 50,000 partner venues primarily spanning the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. In April 2021 alone, the company added over 4,000 new venues. The Fresha platform is used in 120 countries globally, and each month, customers book tens of millions of appointments on the platform, processing nearly $12 billion in value to date. Fresha's focus on building easy-to-use, free software and offering business tools without any subscription fees, underpinned by a strong word-of-mouth effect, has helped the company build a loyal following and customer base. Fresha's partner businesses rely on the platform for its ease of use, time-saving benefits and embedded features to grow sales, while end consumers enjoy a premium booking and payment experience.

The company recently announced a $100 million Series C investment led by General Atlantic, a leading global growth equity firm, with strategic participation from Huda Kattan of HB Investments and the founder of Huda Beauty. The latest investment brings the company's total fundraising to $132 million to date. Fresha will leverage the new funds to further broaden its global community of partner salons and spas, scale product development, deepen its marketplace appointment bookings and pursue strategic M&A. Huda Kattan, founder of self-made cosmetics empire Huda Beauty's recent backing of Fresha marks a powerful joining of forces between Fresha the beauty industry's leading salon software platform and one of the world's most successful beauty entrepreneurs. Huda Kattan, built a multi-billion-dollar cosmetics brand by candidly sharing her passion for beauty via her Instagram account  now 48 million followers strong  saw vast potential for Fresha. "I've witnessed first-hand the positive impact Fresha has for beauty entrepreneurs with their free salon salon software. The company is a force for good in the growing community of salons and beauty professionals around the globe, who are increasingly adopting a self-employed approach. By making top business software accessible without any subscription fees, Fresha lets professionals focus on what they do best  offering great experiences for their salon customers," said Huda Kattan.

Fresha also offers mobile apps for salon clients and real-time booking integrations to Instagram, Facebook and Google. The platform comes with world leading integrated card payment processing to protect against no-shows and late cancellations. "We believe Fresha outpaces the competition by combining a superior product-market fit with outstanding execution capabilities," said Philippe Collombel, General Partner at Partech. "William and Nick superbly steered Fresha during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have continued to innovate, accelerate signups of new salons, and boost revenues, whilst supporting new venues and small businesses in navigating the crisis. We can't wait to see Fresha's continued growth after this new funding round," he said.

"At Fresha we're incorporating intelligent features for our online booking system to help salons grow revenues. For example, smartly displaying price and availability options, based on the client's purchase history and the salon's projected schedule. Our salon system system analyses client preferences and the business's activity, providing an unbeatable appointment booking experience. This frees up salon staff to do what they do best and spend more face time with clients," says CEO and co-founder William Zeqiri. A growing number of consumers expect to be able to book services online and this trend will continue to increase as younger, tech-savvy clients take over the market. Some 40% of online bookings are made outside of normal business hours. This relieves pressure on salon staff having to push pre-booking, or answer as many calls from clients asking to book. Fresha was formerly known as Shedul.com.

About Fresha

Fresha is a leading global beauty and wellness platform. Each month, tens of millions of appointments are discovered, booked and paid with partner salons, spas and barbershops on Fresha. 50,000 partner venues in over 120 countries use the platform to manage their operations with Fresha's intuitive, full-spectrum, subscription-free business software. Fresha transforms beauty and wellness business operations by enabling the acceptance of online appointment bookings, processing of card payments and managing customer records, along with automations for marketing, staffing, product inventory and accounting, all in one place. Launched in 2015 originally under the name Shedul , the company rebranded to Fresha in 2020. For more information, visit www.fresha.com , download Fresha on the App Store and Google Play or follow Fresha on Facebook and Instagram .

SOURCE Fresha
HONG KONG, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Starting with the UK earlier this year, as COVID-19 vaccines are actively rolling out across the world, the debate over whether to develop and introduce vaccine passports is getting even more intensified. Meanwhile, a South Korean company turns heads with an unusual decision to open the source code and intellectual property rights of its already developed mobile digital pass solution to the public free of charge for the greater good of humanity and to support the international cooperation to return to normal.

While vaccine passports were on the agenda at the G7 summit, the U.S. President Biden, on his arrival in the UK for the G7 summit, announced U.S. commitment to procure and distribute 500 million Pfizer vaccine doses to developing countries for free.

GG56 , a South Korean blockchain company, has already developed its own COVID-19 digital pass, 'Pass&Go', to speed up the process of going back to our normal lives by lifting the prolonged restrictions such as lockdowns and social distancing schemes that had been imposed worldwide. And now, GG56, for the public interest and international cooperation, announced that they will release the source code and intellectual property rights of Pass&Go to the public for free.

Pass&Go , a blockchain-based vaccination and COVID-19 test result verification app, unlike many other vaccine passports, authenticates not only those who have been vaccinated, but also those who have tested negative on a diagnostic test as well as those who have recovered from COVID-19 and developed antibodies against the virus. Then the app issues temporary digital passes for those by using blockchain technology which makes tampering with the information almost impossible.

Pass&Go verifies COVID-19 infection tests received from certified medical institutions such as hospitals and public health centers, alongside self-diagnosis results from home-testing kits. As people receiving COVID-19 tests are usually notified of the test results via SMS messages, Pass&Go automatically recognizes when users receive a SMS message stating the diagnosis result is negative, and creates a certificate that validates they are not infected with COVID-19. The encrypted hash code is attached to the text sent from the SMS text transmission server of the medical institution, and Pass&Go checks the integrity of it and creates the certificate if nothing unusual is detected.

Therefore, even if any sort of tampering with the information happens, it is not authenticated unless a normal encryption code is inserted, thus neutralizing the risk of false authentication due to forgery, and greatly improving the convenience and credibility of using the app. In addition, considering that 70% of the COVID-19 results notifications are made through SMS messages around the world, it is fascinating that Pass&Go can be put in place and operated in the same way at this moment anywhere, even overseas. Major intellectual property rights related to this system are patented by GG56.

Pass&Go also provides a strong privacy protection system that is incomparable to the DID method, which is authenticated through a central server. Pass&Go is a completely decentralized authentication system where it requires only three types of informationUUID (Universally Unique Identifier), test date, and test result, all of which in hash code-encrypted on the blockchain, and thus data forgery is virtually impossible. Because of minimal information required and information encrypting process, there is little risk of sensitive information such as personal data or medical history being leaked.

Pass&Go is the only authentication system that does not use a central server among other major authentication systems in the world. Almost all existing authentication systems classified as Vaccine Passport, such as Israel's Green Pass and Korea's COOV, are centralized authentication systems that encrypt people's personal and medical information which are imported from a central server. These authentication systems using the data of the central server cannot be free of problems such as the government's information monopoly and Big Brother.

With Pass&Go, users can resume their basic socio-economic activities such as commuting to work or school, as well as access to restaurants, tourist sites, hotels, stadiums, and concert halls, and even overseas travel. We will be able to enjoy our daily lives once again, just as we did prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

GG56 also announced that it has signed business agreements with 8 major Korean testing kit companies, including Seegene and PCL. By collaborating with these companies, GG56 is promoting the synergies between the digital technology and biotech industries and strengthening the competitiveness of Korean diagnostic kit manufactures as well.

Han Seung-soo, founder of GG56, former Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea and President of the 56th Session of the UN General Assembly, said, "The COVID-19 pandemic is a case of external diseconomy of global scale. We cannot overcome this without stronger international cooperation. The unprecedented crisis has not only infected 182 million and taken over 3.9 million of lives (as date of July 1st) but caused a severe blow to the global economy and completely disrupted everyone's daily lives. In order to cope with this crisis, we have to make full use of core digital technology, the flower of the 4th industrial revolution."

Recalling a two-day U.N. General Assembly meeting in June 2002 which he hosted to bridge the digital divide between developed and developing countries, he stressed that he was determined to make contributions so that there should be no digital divide during the period of COVID-19. Therefore, GG56 is to distribute and disclose it for free to all countries, institutions, and organizations for the sake of public interest. GG56 will disclose the main technology and source code of Pass&Go through blockchain open-source forums such as Git hub or smart contracts, and grant permission to use the patents.

In addition to that, as Pass&Go issues digital passes to those who tested negative for COVID-19 as well as those who have been vaccinated, it can also solve the problems of inequality and reverse discrimination that have been raised around the introduction of vaccine passports. Pass&Go is also under progress expanding its service to issue digital certificates for vaccinations not only against COVID-19 but other infectious diseases such as HIV, malaria, yellow fever, and others.

GG56 is a big data and blockchain platform that aims to serve for Global Good. The word GG56 stands for Global Good 5 Oceans and 6 Continents. GG is derived from Han Seung-soo, Here for Global Good (YBM, Seoul 2015).

For more information, visit:

GG56  Global Good 5 Oceans 6 Continents : www.gg56.com

Pass&Go: www.passngo.kr

Twitter: http://twitter.com/PassGo11

Email: [email protected]

The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. Do your own research before making a financial decision related to any crypto company or asset.

SOURCE GG56 Ltd.
DUBLIN, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Brewing Ingredients Market Forecast to 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The brewing ingredients market was valued at USD 34.5 billion in 2021 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 6.8%, to reach USD 47.9 billion by 2026.

The rise in global population and increasing disposable income in developing economies are creating new avenues for alcoholic beverages.



According to the Brewers Association, the total value of the beer market was USD 94.1 billion in 2020, whereas the total craft beer market was estimated at USD 22.2 billion. The data provided by the Kirin Beer University Report shows that the global beer consumption stood at approximately 188.79 million kiloliters in 2018, up by 0.8% from the previous year, which is about 1,540,000 kiloliters, equivalent to approximately 2.4 billion 633 ml bottles. China remained the largest beer-consuming country in the world for the 16th consecutive year in 2018.



Malt extract is estimated to account for the largest share in 2021 for brewing ingredients based on the source segment



Standard malt has enough enzymatic activity, notably diastatic power, to ensure that starch conversion occurs during mashing. It usually accounts for the largest percentage of malt in a beer recipe (anywhere from 60% to 100%).



The remaining percentage may be made up of specialty malts, unmalted grains, or adjuncts that may not have enough enzymes to convert their own starches to sugars during mashing. Brewing-grade malt extracts are made with the highest-quality brewing malts and get additional colors and flavors from using specialty malts. This gives beer the unique character and flavor desired for the particular style brew. These malts often have a longer time in the kiln, at higher temperatures, or get roasted to add depth, complexity, and flavor to the resulting beer.



The macro brewery category of the material type will hold the largest share in the brewing ingredients market, while craft brewery with growing at one of the fastest rates



Macro brew is a mass-produced beer brewed in very large quantities, due to which it is generally sold for a cheaper price than craft beer. Beers produced on a large scale in macro breweries are typically monotone in flavor and go through a standardized process of production, including filtration and pasteurization. According to the Brewers Association, an American craft brewer is a small and independent brewer, where small breweries have an annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less.



The craft brewing industry contributed USD 82.9 billion to the US economy in 2019, with more than 580,000 employees. The average alcohol by volume (ABV) content of a craft beer is 5% to 10%, but some of the most popular craft beers have an ABV of as high as 40%. On the other hand, beer produced in bulk by macro breweries has an ABV of 4% to 6% and as little as 2%.



Craft breweries offer different flavors, which allow consumers with different tastes to cater to their preferences. These factors are driving the growth of the craft brewery segment in the global brewing ingredients market.



Asia Pacific is expected to hold a significant share in the brewing ingredients market globally



The Asia Pacific region is estimated to account for the largest share in the dairy beverage market. The demand for different beers with various flavors and different ABV is driven by economic growth, drinking culture in countries such as Vietnam and South Korea, urbanization, and the rise in the purchasing power of consumers.



The growth in the brewing ingredients market in the region is majorly driven by the following factors such as increasing population in several countries leading to the rising demand for different beers, urbanization and increase in disposable income, rising consumption of low- or zero-alcohol content beers, and increase in investments from leading players in beer and brewing ingredients markets

Premium Insights

Increasing Demand for Craft Beers is Projected to Drive the Brewing Ingredients Market

Malt Extract Segment Dominated the Asia-Pacific Market in 2020

Macro Brewery Segment Dominated the Market Across Regions in 2020

Asia-Pacific Projected to Dominate the Brewing Ingredients Market Across Regions by 2026 (USD Million)

China to be the Most Lucrative Market for Brewing Ingredients

Market Overview

Macroeconomic Indicators

Increasing Global Population

Rapid Urbanization

Market Dynamics

Drivers

Rising Beer Consumption in Emerging Economies

Increasing Demand for Low- or Zero-Alcohol Content Beer

Restraints

Stringent Regulations in the Beer Industry

Opportunities

Introduction of New Flavors in Beer

Increase in Demand for Organic and Clean Label Beers

Challenges

Consumer Shift to Alternative Beverages in North America

Fluctuations in the Production of Raw Materials for Brewing Ingredients

Impact of COVID-19 on the Market Dynamics



Industry Trends

Ecosystem Map

Raw Material Suppliers

Manufacturers

End-User Companies

Supply Chain Analysis

Raw Material Sourcing

Manufacturing

Distribution, Marketing & Sales

Trade Analysis of the Brewing Industry as a Commodity Across Major Countries



Technology Analysis

Development of Cavitation as a Brewing Process

Use of Advanced Centrifuge Technology

Application of Boom Algae for Brewing

Artificial Intelligence Imbibed Real-Time Brewing System

Patent Analysis

Porter's Five Forces Analysis

Pricing Analysis

Case Study Analysis

Boortmalt: Use of Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS)

Malteurop Groupe: Adoption of High Corrosion Resistance Equipment

Viking Malt: Installation of Sensor-Equipped Fans

Company Profiles

Key Players

Cargill, Incorporated

Angel Yeast Co. Ltd.

Boortmalt

Malteurop Groupe

Rahr Corporation

Lallemand Inc.

Viking Malt

Lesaffre

Maltexco S.A.

Simpsons Malt

Others

Pure Malt Products Ltd

Ireks GmbH

Leiber GmbH

Imperial Malts Ltd.

Holland Malt

Imperial Yeast

Mahalaxmi Malt Products Private Limited

PMV Maltings Pvt. Ltd.

Cereal and Malt-Extracts (Pty) Ltd.

Cereal Food Manufacturing Company

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/uilnio

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]

For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1904

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com


TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V): GRG

Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FSE): G6A

OTCQB Venture Market (OTCQB): GARWF

VANCOUVER, BC, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Golden Arrow Resources Corporation (TSXV: GRG) (FSE: G6A) (OTCQB: GARWF), ("Golden Arrow" or the "Company") announces that at the Annual General Meeting of shareholders held on June 30, 2021, each of the 6 nominees listed in the management information circular filed on June 2, 2021 with regulatory authorities were elected as directors of the Company. 25,321,568 shares were voted representing 21.76% of the outstanding shares of the Company.

The Company is pleased to announce all resolutions received support from our shareholders at the meeting. Incumbent directors Joseph Grosso, Nikolaos Cacos, David Terry, John Gammon, Louis Salley and Alfred Hills were re-elected to the Board of Directors of the Company.

The Company also announces that it received shareholder approval for its New Stock Option Plan at the Annual General & Special Meeting of shareholders held on September 17, 2020. As it is a Fixed Plan, annual shareholder approval was not required.

About Golden Arrow:

Golden Arrow Resources Corporation is a mining exploration company with a successful track record of creating value by making precious and base metal discoveries and advancing them into exceptional deposits. The Company is well leveraged to the price of gold, having monetized its Chinchillas silver discovery into a significant holding in precious metals producer SSR Mining Inc.

Golden Arrow is actively exploring a portfolio that includes a new epithermal gold project in Argentina, a districtscale frontier gold opportunity in Paraguay, a base-metal project in the heart of a leading mining district in Chile and more than 180,000 hectares of properties in Argentina.

The Company is a member of the Grosso Group, a resource management group that has pioneered exploration in Argentina since 1993.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Joseph Grosso"

_______________________________

Mr. Joseph Grosso,

Executive Chairman, President and CEO

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.

SOURCE Golden Arrow Resources Corporation
GREENVILLE, S.C., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GrandSouth Bancorporation (GRRB:OTCQX) (the "Company"), the holding company for GrandSouth Bank ("GrandSouth", or the "Bank"), would like to congratulate LeeAnn Weber on being elected to the board of directors at the Company's 2021 annual meeting of shareholders. Mrs. Weber is the CFO, Executive Secretary, and Treasurer of Strange Bros. Grading Co. Inc. Strange Bros. Grading was founded in 1954 and is one of the leading site development contractors in the Upstate. Mrs. Weber joined the company in 1984 after attending Lees-McRae College and has extensive experience in the commercial construction industry. She is active with NAWIC (National Women in Construction) and currently volunteers with Meals on Wheels, Saint Francis Foundation, Pearls and Pumps (fundraiser for Breast Health), Taylors Free Medical Clinic, and The American Heart Association.
DRESDEN, N.Y., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Greenidge Generation Holdings, Inc. announced today that it plans to develop its next bitcoin mining operation in South Carolina. Consistent with Greenidge's longstanding commitment to environmental leadership in power generation and cryptocurrency operations, the Spartanburg facility will be fully carbon neutral. Greenidge expects to commence mining operations in Spartanburg in late 2021 or early 2022.

Greenidge has signed a Letter of Intent with LSC Communications, an Atlas Holdings' portfolio company, to execute a 10-year lease for Greenidge to utilize a portion of the property owned by LSC. The site, a retired printing plant, previously drew approximately 80MW of power and has expansion potential beyond that capacity. Greenidge plans to make use of existing electrical infrastructure at the location, with opportunities for continued growth.

Approximately two thirds of the electricity at the site is sourced from zero carbon sources such as nuclear power, making it an attractive location for Greenidge. Greenidge has committed to offsetting the operation's remaining carbon footprint, building on its record in New York State of operating a fully carbon neutral mining business. Greenidge also announced earlier this year that it will invest a portion of its mining profits in renewable energy projects across the country.

"This is an important step in Greenidge's strategy to build upon our unique expertise in environmentally sound bitcoin mining at additional locations across the country," said Jeff Kirt, Chief Executive Officer of Greenidge. "We have a superior team with proven expertise in this emerging field. LSC's Spartanburg site, with its favorable energy mix, capacity potential and business-friendly climate, is the ideal next location for us. The site's existing electrical infrastructure should allow us to commence our data mining buildout almost immediately."

About Greenidge Generation Holdings, Inc.

Greenidge Generation Holdings, Inc. ("Greenidge") is a vertically integrated bitcoin mining and power generation company. Greenidge currently operates one facility in Upstate New York, with plans to expand to a second location in South Carolina in the upcoming months. Greenidge's New York facility is an environmentally sound operation that has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years and employs dozens of skilled associates, creating attractive new blockchain jobs and serving as an anchor for the local economy.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act, and Section 21E of the Exchange Act, as amended. These forward-looking statements are typically identified by terms and phrases such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "plan," "predict," "project," "should," "will," or similar expressions.

These forward-looking statements include references to assumptions and relate to the future prospects, developments, and business strategies of Greenidge. These forward-looking statements are largely based on the current expectations and projections about future events and trends that are expected to affect the financial condition, results of operations, business strategy, and short-term and long-term business operations and objectives of Greenidge. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements concerning the current and future build out and acquisition plans of Greenidge.

Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements include but are not limited to: (i) the ability to recognize the anticipated objectives and benefits, including tax benefits, of the proposed transaction; (ii) changes in applicable laws, regulations or permits affecting Greenidge's operations or the industries in which it operates, including regulation of the energy industry or regarding cryptocurrency; (iii) risks related to failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms with regard to growth strategies or operations; (iv) fluctuations in the market pricing of cryptocurrencies; (v) loss of public confidence in cryptocurrencies; (vi) the potential of cybercrime, money laundering, malware infections and phishing, and the costs associated with such issues; (vii) the potential of cryptocurrency market manipulation; (viii) the economics of mining cryptocurrency, including as to variables or factors affecting the cost, efficiency and profitability of mining; (ix) the availability, delivery schedule and cost of equipment necessary to maintain and grow the business and operations of Greenidge, including mining equipment, (x) the possibility that Greenidge may be adversely affected by other economic, business or competitive factors, including factors affecting the industries in which it operates or upon which it relies and is dependent; (xi) an inability to expand successfully to other facilities, mine other cryptocurrencies or otherwise expand the business; (xii) any potential litigation involving either or both of Greenidge or Support.com, Inc. ("Support.com") in connection with their pending previously announced merger transaction (the "proposed merger"); (xiii) costs and expenses relating to cryptocurrency transaction fees and fluctuation in cryptocurrency transaction fees; (xiv) Greenidge's single operating facility may realize material, if not total, loss and interference as a result of equipment malfunction or break-down, physical disaster, data security breach, computer malfunction or sabotage; (xv) other risks and uncertainties related to the business plan, business strategy, acquisition strategy and buildout strategy of Greenidge; (xvi) the potential economic fallout resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak. The actual results, performance, or achievements of Greenidge could differ materially from the results expressed in, or implied by, any forward-looking statements.

Greenidge does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, the occurrence of future events, changes in assumptions or otherwise, after the date of this press release.

Participants in the Solicitation

Support.com and its directors, executive officers, other members of management and employees may be deemed participants in the solicitation of proxies from Support.com's stockholders with respect to the proposed merger. A list of the names of those directors and executive officers and a description of their interests in Support.com will be included in the proxy statement/prospectus for the proposed merger (as further described below) and will be available at www.sec.gov. Additional information regarding the interests of such participants will be contained in the proxy statement/prospectus for the proposed merger when available.

Greenidge and its directors, executive officers, other members of management and employees may also be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from the shareholders of Support.com in connection with the proposed merger. A list of the names of such directors and executive officers and information regarding their interests in the proposed merger will be included in the proxy statement/prospectus for the proposed merger when filed with the SEC.

No Offer or Solicitation

This press release is not and shall not constitute a solicitation of a proxy, consent, or authorization with respect to any securities or in respect of the proposed merger. This press release shall also not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any states or jurisdictions in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. No offering of securities shall be made except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of Section 10 of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or an exemption therefrom. This press release is not for release, publication or distribution, in whole or in part, in or into, directly or indirectly, any jurisdiction in which such release, publication or distribution would be unlawful.

Additional Information, Disclaimer and Where to Find More Information

In connection with the proposed merger, Greenidge has filed with the SEC a registration statement on Form S-4 (the "Registration Statement"), which includes a preliminary proxy statement of Support.com and a prospectus in connection with the proposed merger. The definitive proxy statement/prospectus and other relevant documents will be mailed to shareholders of Support.com as of a record date to be established for voting on the proposed merger. Stockholders of Support.com and other interested persons are advised to read the preliminary proxy statement/prospectus, and amendments thereto, the definitive proxy statement/prospectus in connection with Support.com's solicitation of proxies for the special meeting to be held to approve the proposed merger, and other documents filed with the SEC by Greenidge and Support.com, because these documents will contain important information about Support.com, Greenidge, and the proposed merger. Stockholders will also be able to obtain copies of the Registration Statement and the proxy statement/prospectus, without charge, by directing a request to: Support.Com, Inc., 1521 Concord Pike (US 202), Suite 301, Wilmington, DE 19803. These documents, once available, and Support.com's annual and other reports and proxy statements filed with the SEC can also be obtained, without charge, at the SEC's internet site (http://www.sec.gov).

SOURCE Greenidge Generation Holdings Inc.
ROTTERDAM, Netherlands, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PaperChainManagement BV (PCM) and its sister company, PrintMediaServices BV (PMS), has been acquired by HH Global in a deal agreed on 30 June 2021.

Located in Haarlem, the Netherlands, PCM and PMS support both its domestic and international clients with procurement and supply chain optimisation services across print, POS and packaging. Existing PCM clients include flagship European brands across a range of sectors including retail, telecommunications and automotive.

The acquisition will deliver significant value to existing PCM and PMS clients, while increasing the scale and depth of the HH Global Benelux business through the onboarding of new clients and experienced employees. The deal will also provide legacy PCM and PMS clients with a more extensive supply chain that will enable them to benefit from a wider range of solutions.

In total, over 40 existing PCM and PMS clients will transition to HH Global, providing them with access to widened expertise, technology and strategic sourcing capabilities.

Piet Jorritsma, Managing Director at PCM and PMS, said: "This cooperation creates new opportunities to broaden our range of services to our customers. HH Global is a solid partner that gives us access to new markets and expansion opportunities. In addition to continuity, this cooperation strengthens our position in the European market. We look forward to adding our knowledge and skills to the HH Global organisation."

Michael Keen, CEO - Europe at HH Global, said: "This acquisition will allow us to further improve our talent and client base within the Netherlands, which continues to be a strategic growth market for us. Legacy PCM and PMS clients include market-leading brands, spanning a broad range of sectors, which will diversify our account portfolio. Furthermore, the transition of employees from PCM and PMS will introduce improved expertise across printed materials, paper, consultancy and logistics. We are excited to bring forward the benefits of this acquisition to existing HH Global, PCM and PMS clients."

About HH Global

Founded in 1991, HH Global is a global outsourced marketing execution provider. Applying proven processes, industry-leading technology, and the deep expertise of our employees, we develop innovative solutions that drive down the cost of our clients' physical marketing procurement and content development, while improving quality, sustainability, and speed to market.

HH Global has a presence in more than 50 locations across Europe, North and Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We work with some of the largest, exciting and most progressive global brands. These contracts involve dealing with multiple stakeholders from different regions, coordinating high-profile, business-critical print, POS (temporary and permanent), promotional merchandise, luxury packaging and creative projects.

SOURCE HH Global

Related Links

http://www.hhglobal.com


DUBLIN, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Pump Market in India - Industry Outlook and Forecast 2021-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The pump market in India by revenue is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 7% during the period 2021-2026.



The demand for pumps is expected to grow at a steady rate due to the increased application of pumps in several end-user sectors. Pump manufacturers in India have focused solely on the agriculture and construction services sectors.



The increasing oil demand and expanded investments in water and wastewater treatment activities are likely to affect the pump market substantially. The domestic demand is also majorly met by local vendors, with the industry having robust capabilities to meet the demand.

India's pump market is likely to witness the emergence of intelligent pump systems and micro disc pump technology in the next few years. Intelligent systems are expected to control and regulate the fluid's flow or pressure and adjust to process changes and have a fault-tolerant design. The market contributes significantly to the country's GDP as these devices play a major role in the agriculture and infrastructure sector.



Pump Market In India Segmentation



This research report includes a detailed segmentation by product type, end-user type, geography. The centrifugal pump market in India is expected to be competitive, with several established vendors expanding their product portfolio. Centrifugal is best suited for non-air or vapor-containing liquids with low viscosity.

Technology capabilities of centrifugal, particularly submersible pumps, are a key driver for increased demand from India's agricultural sector. The single-stage and submersible are major centrifugal devices used in India. Agriculture and infrastructure projects account for the major application.



Industrial pumps are witnessing a high demand from cement, steel, oil & gas, water & wastewater sectors. The increased oil and gas demand and high investments in water and wastewater treatment activities are projected to increase sales substantially. The industrial pump market in India is expected to reach over $2 billion by 2026.

Water & wastewater, chemical, pharmaceutical, construction, food and beverage, and mining are the major end-users in India. Factors such as the increased focus on energy-efficient products in the water and wastewater industry, the development of generic pharmaceutical production, rapid urbanization, and the rise in massive housing schemes and expansion in infrastructural projects are likely to influence the growth of industrial pumps in India.

INSIGHTS BY GEOGRAPHY

By revenue, Southern India is expected to lead the pump market in India. The region is likely to register a revenue of over 1.1 billion by 2026. Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh are projected to emerge as the major contributors to the market revenue. The increasing awareness of energy star ratings among consumers is expected to drive the market toward energy efficiency.

The continuous decrease in groundwater levels is increasing the demand for submersible pumps among farmers. With the Karnataka government offering electricity to farmers at subsidized rates, there has been a high demand for pumps from the industrial sector, which is expected to augur well for pumps' growth, especially agricultural ones.

The rise of the automobile, agricultural, aerospace, textile & garment, biotech & heavy engineering industries is expected to significantly influence the market. Tamil Nadu has built a base of over 2 hundred thousand agricultural devices, among the largest in India.

INSIGHTS BY VENDORS

India's pump market is highly fragmented, with small, medium, and large vendors operating across the country. Customers have long-term contracts or tenders with vendors, and they tend to work with vendors with engineering expertise and are manufacturing pumps for a long time. Also, customers look for vendors providing after-sales services, one of the key competitive factors in the market.

There is a high competition for small vendors from large vendors or vendors having a diversified product portfolio and large R&D platform.

Crompton, Flowserve Corporation, Jyoti Group, Kirloskar Brothers, KSB, Roto Pumps, Shakti Pumps, and WPIL are the prominent players in the market.

Market Dynamics

Market Opportunities & Trends

Demand For Energy Efficient Pumps

Demand For Solar Pump

Increasing Export Of Centrifugal Pumps

Market Growth Enablers

Infrastructure Expansion

Deteriorating Groundwater Level

Growing Agricultural Sector

Market Restraints

Rising Raw Material Cost

Poor Electricity Supply

International Competition

Prominent Vendors

Crompton

Flowserve

Jyoti Group

Kirloskar Brothers

KSB

Roto Pumps

Shakti Pumps

WPIL

Other Prominent Vendors

Aqua Group

Best Engineers Pumps

Commitment Reliability Innovation (C.R.I)

CNP Pumps

Deccan

Duke Plasto Technique

ELLEN

Endura Pumps

Falcon Pumps

Grundfos

Jasco

Kishor Pumps

Lubi Pumps

Mahendra Pumps

MAK

MAXWELL

MBH Pumps

Oswal Pumps

Protecto Engineering

Sabar

Sam Turbo Industry

Swastik Engineers

Suguna

Texmo Industries

V-Guard

Waterman Industries

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/sg9qb8

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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DUBLIN, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Fetal Bovine Serum Market 2020-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global market for fetal bovine serum is projected to have a considerable CAGR during the forecast period. Fetal bovine serum (FBS) is the liquid fraction of clotted blood from fetal calves, depleted of cells, fibrin, and clotting factors, but containing a large number of nutritional and macro-molecular factors essential for cell growth. Bovine serum albumin is the major component of FBS. Growth factors in FBS are essential for the maintenance and growth of cultured cells. FBS also contains a variety of small molecules such as amino acids, sugars, lipids, and hormones.



The market growth is driven by extensive demand for fetal bovine serum in drug discovery and R&D, from basic research to specialty assays. Besides, its significant demand in cell culture as an ideal cell growth supplement and growing preference over other types of cell culture sera is also fueling the growth of the market. There are a variety of fetal bovine serum grades including standard and specialty grades available in the market based on application. The increasing R&D activities for novel drugs, expansion of bio-pharmaceutical industries, and increase in investment and funding from the government also play a significant role in the growth of the fetal bovine serum market.



However, the ethical and scientific concerns associated with the potential misuse of biotechnology research practices and the shortfall of skilled personnel hinder the fetal bovine serum market. The rapid advancement in R&D activities and new drug developments by private and government sectors are expected to offer lucrative growth opportunities in the global fetal bovine serum market.



Segmental Outlook



The global Fetal Bovine Serum market is segmented into product type and end-user. On the basis of product type, the market is sub-segmented into charcoal-stripped, chromatographic, dialyzed FBS, stem cell, and others. Among these, the stem cell segment is expected to grow significantly owing to the adoption of these stem cells in various animal cell cultures. Based on end-user, the market is classified into bioproduct & pharmaceutical companies, research laboratories, academic institutes, and others. Similarly, by application, the fetal bovine serum market is categorized into industrial research and scientific research.



Global Fetal Bovine Serum Market Share by Application, 2020(%)



The Cell Culture Maintenance Sub-Segment dominated the Fetal Bovine Serum Market.



Among, application, the cell culture maintenance sub-segment in scientific research held the major market share in 2020, and it is also expected to maintain its dominance in terms of growth during the forecast period. It is most widely used as a supplement during cell culture media exceeds cell culture testing standards to identify growth factors responsible for cultured cells. Thus, the use of fetal bovine serum in cell culture due to its high quantity of hormones, carrier proteins, and macro-molecular proteins to promote growth medium will lead to the growth of this segment which, in turn, further drives the market growth.



Regional Outlook



Geographically, the global Fetal Bovine Serum market is classified into four major regions including North America (the US and Canada), Europe (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific (India, China, Japan, South Korea, ASEAN and Rest of Asia-Pacific), and Rest of the World (Latin America and the Middle East and Africa (MEA)).



Asia-Pacific is anticipated to grow at the highest CAGR owing to the growing demand for advanced healthcare facilities in emerging economies of the region. Additionally, the increasing focus of major market players towards the development of innovative products by collaborating with other market players in the region further provide ample opportunity to market.



Moreover, the increasing interest of the government and regulatory bodies towards stem cell research and development activities in emerging economies such as India and China are some other factors that are contributing to the growth of the fetal bovine serum market in Asia-Pacific. Apart from this, the infrastructural development and rise in outsourcing of research activities to the contract research organizations (CRO) coupled with low-cost fuels the market growth.



Geographically, North America dominated the fetal bovine serum market in 2020, and is expected to grow continuously during the forecast period. The factors that drive the growth of the fetal bovine serum market in the region include the growing awareness about fetal bovine serums among the population and rising funding for R&D activities. North America has a well-developed healthcare infrastructure, owing to which, the companies invest largely in the development of an innovative platform for cell culture systems. North America is the largest market for manufacturing bio-pharmaceutical and laboratory products, hence create enormous opportunities for the fetal bovine serum market that drives the market in the region.



Market Players Outlook



Some of the key players in the fetal bovine serum market contributing significantly by providing different types of products and increasing their geographical presence across the globe. The key players of the market are Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc, General Electric, Merck KGaA, PAN-Biotech GmbH, HiMedia Laboratories, TCS Biosciences Ltd., Corning Inc., among others. To survive in the market, these market players adopt different marketing strategies such as mergers & acquisitions, R&D, product launches, and geographical expansions so on. For instance, in January 2019, Bio-Tech Corp., acquired Atlanta Biologicals based in Georgia specialized in the making of bovine-derived serum that promotes cell growth during the biotech experiment. With this acquisition, Bio-Tech Corp. has expanded its product portfolio in tissue-culture reagents with cell culture and tissue regeneration capabilities of Atlanta Biologicals in fetal bovine serum.



The Report Covers

Market value data analysis of 2020 and forecast to 2027.

Annualized market revenues ($ million) for each market segment.

Country-wise analysis of major geographical regions.

Key companies operating in the global Fetal Bovine Serum market. Based on the availability of data, information related to pipeline products, and relevant news is also available in the report.

Analysis of business strategies by identifying the key market segments positioned for strong growth in the future.

Analysis of market entry and market expansion strategies.

Competitive strategies by identifying 'who-stands-where' in the market.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Report Summary

2. Market Overview and Insights



3. Competitive Landscape

3.1. Key Company Analysis

3.1.1. Overview

3.1.2. Financial Analysis

3.1.3. SWOT Analysis

3.1.4. Recent Developments

3.2. Key Strategy Analysis



4. Market Determinants

4.1. Motivators

4.2. Restraints

4.3. Opportunities



5. Market Segmentation

5.1. Global Fetal Bovine Serum Market By Product Type

5.1.1. Charcoal Stripped

5.1.2. Chromatographic

5.1.3. Dialyzed FBS

5.1.4. Stem Cell

5.1.5. Others (Exosome Depleted)

5.2. Global Fetal Bovine Serum Market By End-User

5.2.1. Bioproduct & Pharmaceutical Company

5.2.2. Research Laboratory

5.2.3. Academic Institute

5.2.4. Others (Cell Bank)

5.3. Global Fetal Bovine Serum Market, By Application

5.3.1. Industrial Research

5.3.1.1. Antibody Production

5.3.1.2. Veterinary Applications

5.3.2. Scientific Research

5.3.2.1. Cell Culture Maintenance

5.3.2.2. Exosome Research

5.3.2.3. Immunoassays Methods



6. Regional Analysis

6.1. North America

6.1.1. United States

6.1.2. Canada

6.2. Europe

6.2.1. UK

6.2.2. Germany

6.2.3. Italy

6.2.4. Spain

6.2.5. France

6.2.6. Rest of Europe

6.3. Asia-Pacific

6.3.1. China

6.3.2. India

6.3.3. Japan

6.3.4. South Korean

6.3.5. ASEAN

6.3.6. Rest of Asia-Pacific

6.4. Rest of the World

6.4.1. Latin America

6.4.2. Middle East Africa



7. Company Profiles

7.1. Access Biologicals LLC

7.2. Animal Technologies, Inc.

7.3. Atlanta Biologicals (R&D Systems, Inc.)

7.4. Axil Scientific Pte Ltd

7.5. Biological Industries Ltd.

7.6. Biowest SAS

7.7. Bovogen Biologicals Pty Ltd.

7.8. Corning Inc.

7.9. Cytiva

7.10. ExCell Biotech Co., Ltd.

7.11. General Electric Co.

7.12. HiMedia Laboratories

7.13. Life Technologies (India) Pvt Ltd

7.14. Merck KGaA

7.15. Moregate Biotech

7.16. Nucleus Biologics

7.17. PAN-Biotech GmbH

7.18. Rocky Mountain Biologicals, Inc.

7.19. Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.

7.20. Tissue Culture Biologicals

7.21. TCS Biosciences Ltd.

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/el5skq

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

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SANDVIKEN, Sweden, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sandvik will publish its second quarter results on Friday, 16 July 2021 at approximately 11.30 CEST.

A combined webcast and conference call for investors, analysts and financial media will be held at 13.00 CEST.

The report will be presented in a webcast and conference call by Stefan Widing, President and CEO as well as by Tomas Eliasson, CFO.

The presentation will be broadcasted live on our website home.sandvik

Dial-in details for the conference call:

SE: +46 8 505 583 53

UK: +44 333 300 9264

US: +1 833 526 8395

From about 12.00 CEST presentation slides will be available on our website home.sandvik

Sandvik AB

For further information, contact Louise Tjeder, Vice President Investor Relations, phone: +46 70 782 6374 or Johannes Hellstrom, Press and Media Relations Manager, phone: +46 70 721 1008.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/sandvik/r/invitation---presentation-of-sandvik-s-report-of-the-second-quarter-2021,c3378862

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/208/3378862/1440188.pdf Invitation - presentation of Sandvikas report of the second quarter 2021

SOURCE Sandvik
Leading into the Fourth of July holiday, the Jeep brand has been recognized for the 19th consecutive year as America's "Most Patriotic Brand" in the annual Brand Keys 50 Most Patriotic Brands survey, in which nearly 6,000 Americans participated.



"The Jeep community is like no other," said Olivier Francois, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Stellantis. "With the Jeep brand's recognition as America's 'Most Patriotic Brand,' we see that there is no other automotive brand that is so instantly recognizable and none whose freedom proposition is cemented into the history of its home nation like the Jeep brand, and protected with such passion by its owners and enthusiasts not only in America but around the world."



"Independence Day is an appropriate time to acknowledge the history and value of patriotism," said Robert Passikoff, President of Brand Keys. "And those who have contributed to it. 'Patriotism' is one of the most powerful values a brand can own, and the Jeep brand has led the brand patriotism-parade since the Most Patriotic Brand in America survey was created. A brand like Jeep that can literally own a value as strong as patriotism is able to emotionally differentiate themselves from the competition and engage customers. The Jeep brand track record proves that, and we are proud to congratulate them again this year for their extraordinary accomplishment."



"It was 80 years ago this year that the Jeep brand first forged its reputation of American might during World War II," said Jim Morrison, Vice President, Jeep Brand North America. "The brand's recognition as 'America's Most Patriotic Brand' for the 19th consecutive year is both a testament to the Jeep community and to the people who since 1941 have dedicated themselves to building iconic SUVs known around the world for outdoor adventure, freedom and off-road capability."



As a tribute to U.S. military members, the Jeep brand offers special-edition Freedom models across the entire lineup for the 2021 model year. These Jeep brand Freedom models feature military-themed exterior and interior design cues, such as the large "Oscar Mike" military star decal on the hood, matte black/Satin Carbon wheels and accents and an American flag decal along the side of each vehicle. For Wrangler and Gladiator, this also includes an "Oscar Mike" decal on the rear tailgate. As part of its long-standing relationship with the United Service Organizations, the Jeep brand will make a $250 donation to the USO with every 2021 Freedom edition sold.



All active and recently retired service members also qualify for $500 Military Bonus Cash across the Jeep 4x4 lineup.



Additionally, as the Jeep brand prepares for the arrival of the all-new 2021 Grand Cherokee L and the all-new 2022 Grand Wagoneer, both of which include the American flag on their flanks, the brand will show off the 2022 Grand Wagoneer on the exterior of the company's tower at the Auburn Hills, Michigan, complex.



View this post on Instagram.

Fans can visit the Jeep Store by Amazon for patriotic merchandise celebrating the upcoming holiday.



Brand Keys Survey

A national sample of 5,804 consumers, 16 to 65 years of age, balanced for gender and political affiliation, were drawn from the nine U.S. Census Regions. Consumers assessed 1,172 brands in 131 B2C and B2B categories as to their resonance for the single value  "patriotism." Brand Keys assessments have been independently validated to correlate with positive consumer behavior in the marketplace at levels of 0.80+ making them some of the most accurate brand measures possible.



Jeep Brand

Built on 80 years of legendary heritage, Jeep is the authentic SUV with capability, craftsmanship and versatility for people who seek extraordinary journeys. The Jeep brand delivers an open invitation to live life to the fullest by offering a full line of vehicles that continue to provide owners with a sense of security to handle any journey with confidence. Jeep Wave, a premium owner loyalty and customer care program that is available to the entire Jeep lineup, is filled with benefits and exclusive perks to deliver Jeep owners the utmost care and dedicated 24/7 support.



The Jeep vehicle lineup consists of the Cherokee, Compass, Gladiator, Grand Cherokee, Renegade and Wrangler. To meet consumer demand around the world, all Jeep models sold outside North America are available in both left- and right-hand drive configurations and with gasoline and diesel powertrain options. Jeep is part of the portfolio of brands offered by leading global automaker and mobility provider Stellantis. For more information regarding Stellantis (NYSE: STLA), please visit www.stellantis.com.

Follow Jeep and company news and video on:

Company blog: http://blog.stellantisnorthamerica.com

Media website: http://media.stellantisnorthamerica.com

Jeep brand: www.jeep.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/jeep

Instagram: www.instagram.com/jeep

Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeep

YouTube: www.youtube.com/thejeepchannel or https://www.youtube.com/StellantisNA

SOURCE Stellantis
With over 200 million people, Brazil is Latin Americas largest addressable medical cannabis market, with the potential to reach USD$1.4 billion in annual revenue (Source: New Frontier Data)

is Latin Americas largest addressable medical cannabis market, with the potential to reach in annual revenue (Source: New Frontier Data) In partnership with leading medical cannabis patient association in Brazil , a child with epilepsy becomes first Brazilian patient to receive Khiron medical cannabis product

, a child with epilepsy becomes first Brazilian patient to receive Khiron medical cannabis product Khiron plans to expand Zerenia vertically integrated clinic model into Brazil , increasing patient access to affordable, high-quality medical cannabis products

TORONTO, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Khiron Life Sciences Corp. ("Khiron" or the "Company") (TSXV: KHRN) (OTCQX: KHRNF)(Frankfurt: A2JMZC), a vertically integrated medical cannabis leader with core operations in Latin America and Europe, is pleased to announce it has successfully completed its first sale of medical cannabis product in Brazil. Leveraging production, distribution, and clinical assets in Latin America, along with marketing agreements with leading pharmaceutical distributors, Khiron plans to expand its presence in Brazil, a market of over 200 million people.

"Our initial export to the Brazilian market represents an important first step toward opening a large, underserved market where patients face high barriers to access. By providing patients with affordable high-quality products, and an unparalleled patient experience, we see an opportunity to disrupt the Brazilian market and deliver on our mission of improving patients lives. Khiron is already treating thousands of patients in Colombia, Peru, UK and Germany, with positive outcomes. In due course, we plan to bring our successful Zerenia clinic model to Brazil, as we have done in Peru and Colombia," comments Alvaro Torres, CEO and Director.

Through the Companys strategic alliance with CANNAB, a patient association that connects physicians, patients, academic institutions, and suppliers, a three-year old child from Salvador de Bahia suffering from epilepsy has received six units of Khiron high-CBD 100mg/50ml extract. The importation of Khiron's medical cannabis on behalf of the patient was authorized by ANVISA (the Brazilian National Health Surveillance Agency). The Company plans to collaborate with CANNAB to continue offering its medical products to many more patients. CANNAB expects to help over 1,200 new patients gain access to medical cannabis products during 2021. According to Prohibition Partners, the Brazilian medical cannabis user base could reach close to 3 million people in the next few years.

The Company has also established two partnerships in Brazil to increase product awareness and medical cannabis education for health care providers across the country. As previously announced, Khiron has an exclusive agreement with Medlive, a pharmaceutical and health products distributor with a network of over 3,000 clinics and hospitals in southern Brazil. In addition, the Company has signed a marketing contract with TAIMIN, a leading medical distributor focused on Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and northern Brazil. Together, the two agreements provide broad regional coverage across Brazil and are intended to drive sales by expanding Khiron's network of prescribing physicians. The Company is also in discussion with several medical clinics as it seeks to expand its clinic model into Brazil.

About Khiron Life Sciences Corp.

Khiron is a leading vertically integrated medical cannabis company with core operations in Latin America and Europe. Leveraging wholly-owned medical health centres and proprietary telemedicine platforms, Khiron combines a patient-oriented approach, physician education programs, scientific expertise, product innovation, and agricultural infrastructure to drive prescriptions and brand loyalty with patients worldwide. The Company has a sales presence in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Germany and the UK, and is positioned to commence sales in Mexico in 2021. The Company is led by Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Alvaro Torres, together with an experienced and diverse executive team and Board of Directors.

Visit Khiron online at investors.khiron.ca and on Instagram @khironlife.

Cautionary Notes

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. All information contained herein that is not historical in nature may constitute forward-looking information. Khiron undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of Khiron, its securities, or financial or operating results (as applicable). Although Khiron believes that the expectations reflected in forward-looking statements in this press release are reasonable, such forward-looking statement has been based on expectations, factors and assumptions concerning future events which may prove to be inaccurate and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond Khiron's control, including the risk factors discussed in Khiron's Annual Information Form which is available on Khiron's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and is made as of the date hereof. Khiron disclaims any intention and has no obligation or responsibility, except as required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

SOURCE Khiron Life Sciences Corp.

Related Links

https://khiron.ca/


DALLAS, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Kimberly-Clark announced today that it was named one of the 2021 Best Companies for Multicultural Women by Seramount (formerly Working Mother Media). The award recognizes companies that create and use best practices in hiring, retaining, and promoting multicultural women in the United States.

"Kimberly-Clark's path to growth and prosperity rests on building a more inclusive and diverse organization," said Sandi Karrmann, Senior Vice President & Chief Human Resources Officer at Kimberly-Clark. "Employing people with different backgrounds and experiences amplifies our ability to gather insights, foster innovation, and meet the diverse needs of the consumers we serve around the world."

Since 2003, Seramount's Best Companies for Multicultural Women list has tracked corporations' progress in creating cultures that encourage multicultural women to join and rise through the ranks. Companies are selected based on their responses to more than 250 questions on representation, hiring, attrition and promotion rates, recruitment, retention and advancement programs, and workplace culture.



"The increased participation in this initiative confirms that the importance of retaining and advancing multicultural women is not lost on corporate America," said Subha V. Barry, CEO of Seramount. "By offering programs and implementing policies instrumental to their success, whether it's sponsorship and mentoring programs or tying managers' compensation to diversity goals, our Best Companies for Multicultural Women continue to demonstrate their commitment to this critical talent pool."



Advancing inclusion and diversity is a key business objective for Kimberly-Clark that is embraced and driven by its global leadership. The company has strengthened its recruitment and retention initiatives to build a more diverse talent pipeline and provides inclusive leadership training to help team leaders foster a work environment that welcomes, respects, and values diverse voices and ideas.

Kimberly-Clark elevates this commitment across the organization through ongoing 'Caring Conversations' and an annual Global Inclusion Week  a series of leadership panels, workshops, and small group discussions that are all centered on helping its employees to better understand and activate a culture of inclusion.

"Kimberly-Clark is committed to building a company where all are included and inspired to do their best work  where differences are not only valued, but essential for success," said Karrmann. "Diverse teams achieve better business outcomes and will inspire the innovation that we need to deliver our purpose and help more consumers live better lives."

In addition to being named one of the Best Companies for Multicultural Women, Kimberly-Clark has earned recognition on Forbes' 2021 list of America's Best Employers for Diversity as well as the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE) 2020+ Top Companies for Executive Women list and the 2020 Diversity Best Practices Inclusion Index.

The full list of the 2021 Best Companies for Multicultural Women can be found here .

About Seramount

Seramount is a strategic professional services firm dedicated to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Over four decades, partnering with some of the most iconic companies in the world, we've built a deep data-driven understanding of the employee experience which lays the groundwork for everything we do. Our comprehensive DE&I toolkit includes actionable research and insights, membership, strategic guidance and consulting, and inspiring events, meeting each client's needs no matter where they are on their journey, and guiding them along an ever-changing landscape. Seramount has empowered over 450 organizations to realize the business benefits of diversity, equity and inclusion. Learn more at seramount.com .

About Kimberly-Clark

Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB) and its trusted brands are an indispensable part of life for people in more than 175 countries. Fueled by ingenuity, creativity, and an understanding of people's most essential needs, we create products that help individuals experience more of what's important to them. Our portfolio of brands, including Huggies, Kleenex, Scott, Kotex, Cottonelle, Poise, Depend, Andrex, Pull-Ups, GoodNites, Intimus, Neve, Plenitud, Sweety, Softex, Viva and WypAll, hold the No. 1 or No. 2 share position in 80 countries. We use sustainable practices that support a healthy planet, build stronger communities, and ensure our business thrives for decades to come. To keep up with the latest news and to learn more about the company's nearly 150-year history of innovation, visit kimberly-clark.com.

[KMB-C]

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/648588/Kimberly_Clark_RGB_Blue_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Kimberly-Clark Corporation

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SHENZHEN, China, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Kingdee Software Group Company Limited (the "Kingdee International", "Kingdee" or "Company", together with its subsidiaries, collectively referred to as the "Group"; Stock Code: 0268.HK) announced that Kingdee Software (China) Co., Ltd. (the "Kingdee", "Kingdee China") and Shenzhen BGI Gene Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "BGI") signed a strategic cooperation agreement in Shenzhen. Ma Xingwang, vice president of Kingdee China and general manager of Shenzhen Branch, Wang Qiong, general manager of HR Solution Division of Kingdee China, Lu Jun, executive director and COO of BGI, Shao Xuling, head of the Information Center of BGI, and Liu Xiao, director of Human Resources Guarantee Center of BGI, attended the signing ceremony.

Founded in 1999, BGI is the largest genomics research and development organization in the world, which applies cutting-edge multi-omics scientific research results to fields including medical health, agricultural breeding and resource conservation, so as to promote the transformation of genetic technology achievements, thereby realizing genetic technology to benefit mankind. During the COVID-19 pandemic, BGI made major contributions to nucleic acid testing and epidemic prevention and control on behalf of Chinese companies. Up to now, BGI's business covers more than 100 countries and regions around the world.

"The organizational structure and business of the BGI are complex, and hence difficult for management. We expect to empower the employees through digital transformation, and help reduce their burdens. Meanwhile the system transformation is also required. The cross-category and cross-border management in BGI should rely on human management, hence the transformation of human resource management and talent development are necessary. We hope that this cooperation will lay a good foundation for the future. After all, people are the most precious wealth and the most important cornerstone for enterprise development." said Lu Jun, executive director and COO of BGI.

Two parties will give full play to their respective advantages in this strategic cooperation: BGI will build the human resources digital system, quickly improve the integrated talent management structure through Kingdee s-HR information solutions, and reconstruct the digital combat capability of BGI's human resources starting from the talent development system, the organization management and control system and the full-staff service system.

Kingdee also stated that BGI always had the grand vision of "being healthy and beautiful, and the leader in the age of life". Through this cooperation, it also hopes to help BGI continue to lead in the life science industry and jointly build a new era of the digitalization of life sciences.

It is known that the cooperation between the two parties actually started five years ago. At that time, Kingdee had already assisted BGI to use mobile, social, and big data to reconstruct the relationships among people in the enterprise, and on the basis of communication and mutual trust, break the corporate structure, release the shackles of the organization on individuals, and activate each employee's creativity to work together for greater value.

During the 28 years since its establishment, Kingdee has provided cloud management products and services to more than 6.8 million enterprises and government organizations. Today, the further cooperation between the two parties will deepen their strategic cooperation, and build a community of shared future. The two parties will carry out advantages and complementary cooperation in product integration and innovation, program design and other aspects, and build a unified HR digital platform driven by digital construction of human resources, achieving the management improvement goals of BGI in optimizing the talent structure and improving HR efficiency.

About Kingdee International Software Group Company Limited

Kingdee International Software Group Company Limited ("Kingdee International" or "Kingdee") was established in 1993. It is listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (stock code: 0268.HK) and headquartered in Shenzhen, the PRC. Adhering to the core values of "Acting in all Conscience, with Integrity and Righteousness", the Company is committed to helping businesses achieve their growth targets and let the sun shine on every company through dedicated services. It strives to provide them with the most trusted enterprise service platform.

Through persistent efforts to explore China's Cloud enterprise service market, according to IDC, Kingdee has retained the largest share in the enterprise application software sector for fast-growing enterprises for 16 consecutive years, and has grasped the biggest share in the enterprise-grade ERM SaaS (as known as Cloud ERP) and financial Cloud services industry for the forth consecutive year. Kingdee is currently the only SaaS cloud service provider of Chinese enterprises selected into Gartner's global market guide, and has become the only Chinese SaaS company winning the 2020 IDC SaaS Customer Satisfaction Award.

Kingdee's diverse Cloud services and products are the preferred choices of leading enterprises. They include "Kingdee Cloud Cosmic" (digitalization and ecosystem platform for large enterprises), "Kingdee Cloud Galaxy" (intelligent growth service platform for medium-sized enterprises), "Kingdee Cloud Stellar" (intelligent growth service platform for micro and small-sized enterprises), "Cloud-Hub" (intelligent Cloud office), "Guanyi Cloud" (Cloud services for E-commerce operators), "Cargeer" (Cloud services for auto dealers) and "Wojia Cloud"(Cloud services for Property Industry). With its strengths in management software and Cloud services, Kingdee provides services and products to more than 6.8 million enterprises, government agencies and other organizations around the world.

SOURCE Kingdee
DEERFIELD, Ill., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Meridian Group International, the global leader in IBM Power advisory, deployment, and managed services, announces a strategic partnership with Skytap, the global leader in enabling IBM Power workloads in the cloud. The partnership enables customers to more rapidly migrate their IBM Power workloads from on-prem to the cloud to facilitate modern development practices and integrate new cloud architectures.

Meridian's certified IBM Power and cloud architects consult with customers to design a cloud architecture that works best for the customer's unique workloads and business requirements. Skytap's unrivaled technology provides high-performance IBM Power infrastructure, combined with the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud.

With Meridian and Skytap, businesses are able to migrate their traditional IBM Power, IBM i (AS/400), and AIX workloads running on IBM Power to run natively on the public cloud. Meridian has been architecting, deploying, and managing IBM Power environments globally since 1992, and supporting cloud deployments since 2010. This offering allows customers to quickly modify memory and CPW or have it added dynamically with zero disruption to their business. Meridian's services provide customers cost-effective monitoring and management of their cloud workloads and gets customers out of the inflexible capital expense model of buying and managing hardware so they can focus on strategic functions.

"We are excited to partner with Skytap to bring these offerings to our clients globally," says Tim DeLisle, President Meridian IT North America and Meridian's Global Programs leader . "Skytap provides the capability to leverage IBM Power compute resources just as if they were on-prem, but with the scalability and flexibility of the public cloud. Due to Meridian's expertise in IBM Power, coupled with our experience migrating more IBM workloads to Azure than any other global system integrator, customers now have a one stop shop for cloud infrastructure and all things related to IBM Power."

"For the many organizations that rely on IBM Power for mission critical workloads, having a simpler, faster and less risky path to the public cloud is a compelling proposition," said John Wrobel, Skytap Chief Revenue Officer. "By combining the respective expertise of Skytap and Meridian, we can smooth the transition and better help our customers reap the benefits of cloud migration."

Meridian's migration services for Skytap on Azure are developed around proven methodologies developed from over 30+ years of IBM Power expertise. Today, Skytap and Meridian partner to help customers overcome their challenges with legacy technology and bring them the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud and the expertise and support from the leading Managed Services provider.

About Skytap

Skytap is a cloud service purpose-built to natively run traditional systems in Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud. As the best cloud service to support AIX, IBM i and Linux on IBM Power together with x86, Skytap makes it easy to evolve traditional workloads by rapidly migrating them to the cloud. Enterprises around the world like IBM, Honeywell, CA Technologies and Okta use Skytap for production workloads, disaster recovery, virtual training labs and application development. Skytap's cloud environment simplifies management, reduces IT costs, speeds up application development and allows organizations of all sizes to modernize at the pace of their business. www.skytap.com . Contact Austin Williams, Voxus PR at [email protected] for inquiries.

About Meridian

Meridian Group International is a leading global information technology services and equipment leasing company that focuses on delivering significantly improved results for its clients by unlocking the promise of technology. Meridian combines deep global business process and technical expertise with the world's leading technologies to deliver creative solutions that fuel better business results. From ideation and requirements definition, to planning, implementation, management, and financing, Meridian helps its clients solve complex business, technology, and finance challenges. To unlock the power of technology visit www.themeridian.com.

SOURCE Meridian Group International
MIDDLETOWN, N.J., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Camperdown Group team, comprising Robert Territo and Melissa Territo, has joined Woodward Realty Group's Middletown, NJ office. The father-in-law, daughter-in-law duo are long-time residents of the town and quickly growing deep roots in the real estate community, with mentorship from Woodward's Founder and Broker, Gloria Woodward, a real estate veteran of over 40 years.

Middletown Family Real Estate Team Launches The Camperdown Group

The Camperdown Group's new website launch coincides well with New Jersey's governor's recent lift of health emergency restrictions. "With the state reopening, homeowners who have been hesitant about selling are beginning to schedule new listing appointments. For a while, homeowners were understandably nervous about having people in their homes. Now, with almost half New Jersey's population vaccinated, we have been preparing for an increase in sellers to meet the buyer demand in Monmouth and Ocean counties. If you've been thinking about moving, this could be the moment you've been waiting for," said Robert Territo.

According to Melissa Territo, "We've had over 70 sign-ups to our email list within a few days of our soft-launch. People have been calling and setting appointments. It's an exciting time to be in the real estate business."

Melissa and Robert enlisted Cyentist , a Manhattan-based real estate brand marketing agency , to create their team's brand, website, and marketing plan. The Camperdown Group's namesake refers to a tree that grows strong in the Territo's backyard, emblematic of the attributes The Camperdown Group represents - family, character, perseverance, and strength. The new website offers helpful resources for home buyers and sellers, including a local area business guide and a home walkthrough guide, both available at https://thecamperdowngroup.com .

The Camperdown Group is the Middletown, NJ real estate team of Melissa Territo and Robert Territo, REALTOR associates with Woodward Realty Group. Woodward Realty Group is a New Jersey licensed real estate broker. The Camperdown Group team represents buyers and sellers in Monmouth and Ocean counties, specializing in their hometown of Middletown, NJ.

Contact:

Melissa Territo | The Camperdown Group

[email protected]

732-966-5503

SOURCE The Camperdown Group
WASHINGTON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The center of Hurricane Elsa has formed to the east of the Windward and southern Leeward islands and is expected to bring heavy rainfall to those areas over the weekend, according to an update Friday from the National Hurricane Center.

The storm is moving toward the west-northwest at almost 30 miles an hour, and its forecast track could bring it to the Florida Keys early next week.

June 1 marked the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ends Nov. 30. After 2020 brought a record number of named storms in the Atlantic basin, NASA is once again prepared to help understand and monitor these storms from the unique vantage of space with experts available to provide insights on hurricanes and other extreme weather events.

Using data from its 20-plus Earth-observing satellites, NASA plays a foundational role in the science of hurricanes. For operational forecasting, the agency's main role is through its crucial partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NASA designs, builds, and launches NOAA's suite of satellites that provide the data that specifically feed numerical weather prediction models. Scientists from NASA and NOAA also collaborate to continuously improve these models.

Climate change is increasing the heat in the ocean basins and making it more likely that storms will intensify faster and become stronger, a phenomenon NASA scientists continue to study.

"As climate change intensifies and makes natural hazards like hurricanes more damaging, NASA is more committed than ever to innovative Earth science research," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "Our next-generation Earth System Observatory will build on NASA's existing capabilities to provide an unprecedented understanding of the Earth from bedrock to atmosphere, so we are better prepared to protect our communities from hurricanes and other extreme weather events."

NASA's goal for disaster preparedness, response, mitigation, and recovery is bridging the gap between data and the people who need it. Before, during, and after a hurricane or tropical storm makes landfall, NASA satellites are in prime position to identify impacts.

NASA works with local officials and first responders, federal agencies such as FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and infrastructure experts to determine what information they need and to supply it in usable formats in real time. Examples include information on infrastructure failures and disruptions, contaminated water supplies, and other hotspots for urgent response needs.

NASA welcomes media inquiries about its role in studying and understanding hurricanes. NASA scientists and experts, who represent a cross-section of expertise in hurricane science, such as atmospheric science, oceanography and modeling, as well as NASA's disaster response, are available for media interviews, as schedules allow.

To inquire about interview availability with these scientists, please contact Jacob Richmond at: [email protected].

For general NASA hurricane science reference material, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/nasa-and-hurricanes-five-fast-facts

and

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/news/index.html

The following are some of NASA's most popular public-domain, open-source imagery products:

The record-breaking 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, visualized with overlaid tracks:



https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4884





NASA Disasters Mapping Portal, provides near-real time data on current events



https://maps.disasters.nasa.gov





Satellite data showing 3D view of Hurricane Zeta's intense rainfall:



https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4870





Latest precipitation analysis and animation of the past seven days (auto-updates):



https://gpm.nasa.gov/data/imerg





NASA "night lights" data shows Puerto Rico's power outages after Hurricane Maria:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZkwASBe2zo





power outages after Hurricane Maria: The 2017 hurricane season, visualized by the movement of dust, smoke and sea salt:



https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12772

All NASA-created content is in the public domain and free for media usage.

For other Earth science videos, visit:

https://www.youtube.com/NASAGoddard

For all NASA scientific data visualizations and animations, visit:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/

SOURCE NASA

Related Links

http://www.nasa.gov


RISMedia announced several executive appointments and strategic hires to help better serve the real estate industry. Tweet this

"This is about building a stronger infrastructure and increasing resources to support the key initiatives we embarked on last year that are fueling RISMedia's growth," Featherston added. "The skilled professionals we have added to our team, along with those we plan to add later this year, will help us better serve the entire real estate industry."

Executive Promotions

Beth McGuire has been promoted to Vice President, Online Editorial where she will expand her oversight of the company's digital content. With the company for more than 21 years, McGuire most recently served as Online Managing Editor.

Kelli McKenna has been promoted to Senior Vice President, Creative Services & Marketing. McKenna has been with the company for more than 18 years and has guided the creative direction of RISMedia's print and digital products, live and virtual events, marketing campaigns and recent brand refresh.

Brett Johnson has been promoted to Vice President, Client Experience. Johnson will lead the company's Client Services & Events team. With RISMedia for nearly 10 years, Johnson was previously a senior salesperson and customer service representative.

New Team Members

Caysey Welton joins as Content Director. Welton will head up the launch of several new content initiatives and lend his well-established publishing expertise to existing programs. Welton gained nearly a decade of experience in B2B media publishing during his tenure at Access Intelligence.

Jordan Grice also joins as Associate Online Editor, covering breaking news and industry trends. Previously a business journalist with Hearst Connecticut Media Group, Grice brings five years of experience in content development across print, digital, broadcast and radio mediums.

Philip Lodato joins as Marketing Director where he will play a key role in corporate campaign development and digital strategy. Lodato will also work closely with clients to maximize reach and engagement. He brings more than 10 years of expertise in developing sales and marketing strategies as chief marketing officer for the Connecticut-based United House Wrecking.

Kal Salim joins as Senior Software Engineer. Salim will lead the implementation of a new framework for RISmedia's web applications. He brings more than 20 years of development experience, and most recently as a Senior Software Engineer at Datto Inc.'s Research Lab.

For more information, please visit www.rismedia.com.

Contact:

Kelli McKenna

401-529-5676

[email protected]

SOURCE RISMedia

Related Links

www.rismedia.com


Since the announcement on Detroit local news last week, CURE has already seen a tremendous response from the public. The very first bound policies were for a mother and son in Pontiac, Michigan, who were previously paying $3,600 per year and now with CURE, their rate dropped to $1,820. However, the savings weren't limited to suburbanites. "My policy was up for renewal and after hearing about CURE, I decided to check. The quote was way cheaper," said Patrick Palmer, a 52-year-old Detroit manager, who had been paying 55% more with his previous car insurance company.

The CURE expansion has been taking shape for more than two years, since Governor Whitmer and the legislature enacted meaningful reforms.

"We could not be happier to make this announcement which has been years in the making," says Chief Executive Officer Eric S. Poe, Esq. CPA, who set his sights on this expansion back in May 2019, when the no-fault and personal injury protection (PIP) reform bills were first signed into law. "We want to thank the Michigan Department of Insurance and Financial Services (DIFS) for its thorough review of our application, as well as the Governor's and Legislature's relentless mission to stop the abuse plaguing Michigan car insurers for over four decades." Equity is a driving force within the CURE business principles, and for over 15 years, Poe has personally crusaded to create a nationwide ban on the discriminatory use of income proxies such as education, occupation and credit score in setting rates. Excited about the opportunity to provide auto insurance in Michigan, Poe adds, "We look forward to joining and working together with the business community in Michigan and making a difference in the lives of residents statewide."

Headquartered in Princeton, N.J., CURE auto insurance is a not-for-profit insurer founded in 1990 by former New Jersey Insurance Commissioner James J. Sheeran and award-winning insurance expert Dr. Lena Chang. Originally heralded as the "cure" for the auto insurance crisis in New Jersey, the CURE business model is different from most insurance companies in many ways. The insurer prioritizes how a person drives versus social or economic status. This unique approach is shaped by the philosophies of its founders and current leadership.

More information can be found at cure.com or by calling 800-535-CURE.

CONTACT: Glori Gayster, [email protected]

SOURCE CURE Auto Insurance

Related Links

https://www.cure.com


ENGLEWOOD, Colo., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ONEflight International Private Jets, a charter brokerage based in Englewood, Colorado, has secured the designation of being the second US Wyvern Certified Broker, and third in the world, by completing a successful audit. While all Wyvern brokers promise to abide by Wyvern's professional codes of practice, only Wyvern Certified Brokers are thoroughly vetted by an experienced, professional and internationally accredited aviation safety auditor. Wyvern CEO Sonnie Bates adds, "We are proud to announce that ONEflight International is a Certified Broker. Conforming to the Wyvern air charter broker standards is a testament to ONEflight's culture and commitment to safety."

ceo

Certification supports the mission to elevate safety and security worldwide. The program provides a clear, highly focused pathway for organizations to achieve their goals related to safety risk management, compliance with national regulations, international standards and industry best practices. In order to be recognized as a Certified Broker, ONEflight underwent an extensive audit determining the degree to which it conformed to the stringent ethical and legal standards as well as compliance with applicable rules, regulations, and customer-dictated preferences including fiscal integrity and appropriate transparency throughout the transaction. Once conformity was ensured, the organization was formally recognized by Wyvern for its achievement.

President and CEO of ONEflight, Ferren Rajput says, "While economics and convenience are at the forefront of most who charter private jets, it is our responsibility to maintain their safety. Delivering peace of mind to our clients is a mandate for all our employees. It is why we go to extreme measures to protect their safety while providing our clients with a great experience on every flight. We have now achieved another layer at the highest level of recognition in safety, quality and aviation business ethics. I am very proud of our team." Additionally, ONEflight is also an ARG/US Certified Broker, the only certification fully endorsed by the Air Charter Association. Both of these accomplishments combined not only reflect the level of importance placed on safety, but this also makes ONEflight International the ONLY broker worldwide to carry both certifications.

Corporate Contact:

Mark Dismuke

Vice President of Strategic Growth

720.684.5650

[email protected]

ONEflight.net

BAJit.com

Related Images

g5.jpg

g5

ceo

SOURCE ONEflight International
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., July 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) (the Company) today announced data that demonstrated its single-shot COVID-19 vaccine generated strong, persistent activity against the rapidly spreading Delta variant and other highly prevalent SARS-CoV-2 viral variants. In addition, the data showed that the durability of the immune response lasted through at least eight months, the length of time evaluated to date. The two preprint study summaries have been submitted today to bioRxiv.

"Today's newly announced studies reinforce the ability of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine to help protect the health of people globally," said Paul Stoffels, M.D., Vice Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Scientific Officer at Johnson & Johnson. "We believe that our vaccine offers durable protection against COVID-19 and elicits neutralizing activity against the Delta variant. This adds to the robust body of clinical data supporting our single-shot vaccine's ability to protect against multiple variants of concern."

"Current data for the eight months studied so far show that the single-shot Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine generates a strong neutralizing antibody response that does not wane; rather, we observe an improvement over time. In addition, we observe a persistent and particularly robust, durable cellular immune response," said Mathai Mammen, M.D., Ph.D., Global Head, Janssen Research & Development, Johnson & Johnson. "With each new dataset, we build on our solid foundation of evidence that our single-shot COVID-19 vaccine plays a critical role in ending the pandemic, which continues to evolve and pose new challenges to global health."

Demonstrated strong neutralizing antibody activity against the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant

A preprint submitted by the Company today to bioRxiv contains a new analysis from blood samples obtained from a subset of participants (n=8) in the Phase 3 ENSEMBLE study. These data showed that the Johnson & Johnson single-shot COVID-19 vaccine elicited neutralizing antibody activity against the Delta variant at an even higher level than what was recently observed for the Beta (B.1.351) variant in South Africa where high efficacy against severe/critical disease was demonstrated.

In the ENSEMBLE trial, Johnson & Johnson's single-dose COVID-19 vaccine was 85 percent effective against severe/critical disease and demonstrated protection against hospitalization and death. The vaccine was consistently effective across all regions studied globally, including in South Africa and Brazil, where there was a high prevalence of rapidly emerging Beta and Zeta (P.2) variants during the study period.

Immune responses persisted through at least eight months

Data submitted by Dan Barouch, M.D., Ph.D., of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center et al., to bioRxiv from a sub-study of the Johnson & Johnson Phase 1/2a COVID-19 vaccine study (n=20) showed that humoral and cellular immune responses generated by the Johnson & Johnson single-shot COVID-19 vaccine lasted through at least eight months, the latest timepoint recorded in the study thus far. Data showed that T-cell responses  including CD8+ T-cells that seek out and destroy infected cells  persisted over the eight-month timeframe examined.

A single dose of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine generated neutralizing antibodies against a range of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, which increased over time (the average neutralizing titer at eight months exceeded that average at 29 days), including against the increasingly prevalent and more transmissible Delta (B.1.617.2) variant, the partially neutralization-resistant Beta (B.1.351), the Gamma (P.1) variants and others, including the Alpha (B.1.1.7), Epsilon (B.1.429), Kappa (B.1.617.1) and D614G variants, as well as the original SARS-CoV-2 strain (WA1/2020).

Johnson & Johnson's single-dose COVID-19 vaccine is now available in many regions and countries on a not-for-profit basis during the emergency pandemic period

The vaccine received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in the United States on February 27 and Conditional Marketing Authorization (CMA) by the European Commission on March 11, 2021. The World Health Organization (WHO) issued Emergency Use Listing on March 12, 2021 and the Company received an interim recommendation by the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization for the WHO on March 17, 2021. Many more authorizations have been granted in countries worldwide, and regulatory submissions are ongoing.

Research and development activities for the Company's COVID-19 vaccine, including the ENSEMBLE clinical trial and the delivery of doses for the U.S., have been funded in part with federal funds from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), under Contract No. HHSO100201700018C, and in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Johnson & Johnson has worked with BARDA since 2015 on innovative solutions for influenza, chemical, biological, radiation and nuclear threats and emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola.

Storage and Distribution

The Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 single-dose vaccine is compatible with standard vaccine storage and distribution channels with ease of delivery to remote areas. The vaccine is estimated to remain stable for two years at -4F (-20C), and a maximum of 4.5 months at routine refrigeration temperatures of 36 to 46F (2 to 8C). The Company will ship the vaccine using the same cold chain technologies it uses today to transport other medicines. The COVID-19 vaccine should not be re-frozen if distributed at temperatures of 36F to 46F (2-8C).

For more information on the Company's multi-pronged approach to helping combat the pandemic, visit: www.jnj.com/covid-19.

Authorized Use

The Janssen COVID-19 vaccine is authorized for use in the U.S. under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for active immunization to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 18 years of age and older.

Important Safety Information

WHAT SHOULD YOU MENTION TO YOUR VACCINATION PROVIDER BEFORE YOU GET THE JANSSEN COVID-19 VACCINE?



Tell the vaccination provider about all of your medical conditions, including if you:

have any allergies

have a fever

have a bleeding disorder or are on a blood thinner

are immunocompromised or are on a medicine that affects your immune system

are pregnant or plan to become pregnant

are breastfeeding

have received another COVID-19 vaccine

WHO SHOULD NOT GET THE JANSSEN COVID-19 VACCINE?



You should not get the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine if you:

had a severe allergic reaction to any ingredient of this vaccine.

HOW IS THE JANSSEN COVID-19 VACCINE GIVEN?



The Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine will be given to you as an injection into the muscle. The Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine vaccination schedule is a single dose.

WHAT ARE THE RISKS OF THE JANSSEN COVID-19 VACCINE?

Side effects that have been reported with the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine include:

Injection site reactions: pain, redness of the skin, and swelling.

General side effects: headache, feeling very tired, muscle aches, nausea, fever.

There is a remote chance that the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine could cause a severe allergic reaction. A severe allergic reaction would usually occur within a few minutes to one hour after getting a dose of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine. For this reason, your vaccination provider may ask you to stay at the place where you received your vaccine for monitoring after vaccination. Signs of a severe allergic reaction can include:

Difficulty breathing

Swelling of your face and throat

A fast heartbeat

A bad rash all over your body

Dizziness and weakness

Blood clots involving blood vessels in the brain, abdomen, and legs along with low levels of platelets (blood cells that help your body stop bleeding), have occurred in some people who have received the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine. In people who developed these blood clots and low levels of platelets, symptoms began approximately one to two-weeks following vaccination. Most people who developed these blood clots and low levels of platelets were females ages 18 through 49 years. The chance of having this occur is remote. You should seek medical attention right away if you have any of the following symptoms after receiving Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine:

Shortness of breath,

Chest pain,

Leg swelling,

Persistent abdominal pain,

Severe or persistent headaches or blurred vision,

Easy bruising or tiny blood spots under the skin beyond the site of the injection.

These may not be all the possible side effects of the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine. Serious and unexpected effects may occur. The Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine is still being studied in clinical trials.

WHAT SHOULD I DO ABOUT SIDE EFFECTS?

If you experience a severe allergic reaction, call 9-1-1, or go to the nearest hospital.

Call the vaccination provider or your healthcare provider if you have any side effects that bother you or do not go away.

Report vaccine side effects to FDA/CDC Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The VAERS toll-free number is 1-800-822-7967 or report online to https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html . Please include "Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine EUA" in the first line of box #18 of the report form. In addition, you can report side effects to Janssen Biotech, Inc. at 1-800-565-4008.

The FDA EUA Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers Administering Vaccine (Vaccination Providers) and full EUA Prescribing Information are available at: www.janssenlabels.com/emergency-use-authorization/Janssen+COVID-19+Vaccine-HCP-fact-sheet.pdf .

About Johnson & Johnson

At Johnson & Johnson, we believe good health is the foundation of vibrant lives, thriving communities and forward progress. That's why for more than 130 years, we have aimed to keep people well at every age and every stage of life. Today, as the world's largest and most broadly-based healthcare company, we are committed to using our reach and size for good. We strive to improve access and affordability, create healthier communities, and put a healthy mind, body and environment within reach of everyone, everywhere. We are blending our heart, science and ingenuity to profoundly change the trajectory of health for humanity. Learn more at www.jnj.com. Follow us at @JNJNews.

About the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson

At Janssen, we're creating a future where disease is a thing of the past. We're the Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, working tirelessly to make that future a reality for patients everywhere by fighting sickness with science, improving access with ingenuity, and healing hopelessness with heart. We focus on areas of medicine where we can make the biggest difference: Cardiovascular & Metabolism, Immunology, Infectious Diseases & Vaccines, Neuroscience, Oncology, and Pulmonary Hypertension. Learn more at www.janssen.com. Follow us at @JanssenGlobal.

Cautions Concerning Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding development of a potential preventive vaccine for COVID-19. The reader is cautioned not to rely on these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations of future events. If underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or known or unknown risks or uncertainties materialize, actual results could vary materially from the expectations and projections of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, and/or Johnson & Johnson. Risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: challenges and uncertainties inherent in product research and development, including the uncertainty of clinical success and of obtaining regulatory approvals; uncertainty of commercial success; manufacturing difficulties and delays; competition, including technological advances, new products and patents attained by competitors; challenges to patents; product efficacy or safety concerns resulting in product recalls or regulatory action; changes in behavior and spending patterns of purchasers of health care products and services; changes to applicable laws and regulations, including global health care reforms; and trends toward health care cost containment. A further list and descriptions of these risks, uncertainties and other factors can be found in Johnson & Johnson's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 3, 2021, including in the sections captioned "Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements" and "Item 1A. Risk Factors," and in the company's most recently filed Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and the company's subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Copies of these filings are available online at www.sec.gov, www.jnj.com or on request from Johnson & Johnson. None of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies nor Johnson & Johnson undertakes to update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information or future events or developments.

SOURCE Johnson & Johnson

Related Links

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PURCHASE, N.Y., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Quorum Federal Credit Union's Board of Directors has appointed Jeffrey Pachter, currently President, as the Credit Union's next President and CEO, effective February 1, 2022. Pachter succeeds Bruno Sementilli who announced his retirement after 38 years with the Credit Union. Mr. Sementilli will assist with the transition until his retirement in 2022.

Jeffrey Pachter named the next President of Quorum Federal Credit Union. Tweet this Bruno Sementilli Jeff Pachter

"Leading Quorum into the financial services company we are today has been one of the greatest honors of my life, and I know the company is in great hands," Sementilli said. "After nearly 39 years, I'm proud of the company we've built, humbled by the amazing people I've had the pleasure of working with, and pleased that the accomplishments we've achieved have helped to improve the lives of our members."

"Jeff's leadership, business and financial acumen, and proven performance at Quorum make him the natural choice to succeed me as CEO," Sementilli continued. "The company is well-positioned for future profitable growth, and I have full confidence that Jeff will continue to advance our success."

"This leadership transition comes at the right time for Quorum," said Mark Werner, Quorum's Chairman of the Board. "This year marks the 88th year we've been serving our members. Our history has been built by focusing on delivering the right products to the right customers at the right time and we've experienced significant growth and positive momentum with this strategy across the company."

"As Bruno shared his overall retirement plans with us, we employed our succession planning process to consider and think about the leadership that would drive Quorum's success in the future," said Werner. "That led us to the selection of Jeff Pachter. Bruno and Jeff have worked closely together for the past eight years and will continue over the next several months ensuring an effective leadership transition. Jeff is a seasoned executive who knows our business. He brings a relentless focus on success for our stakeholders including members, partners, investors and employees, a strong track record of driving growth and innovation, and proven transformational leadership, all of which position him well for positive results. Our Board of Directors is confident that Jeff is the right leader to guide Quorum into the next era of growth as the company continues its transformation," Werner stated.

"I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to succeed Bruno and lead Quorum into the future," said Jeff Pachter. "Together with the Quorum Senior Leadership team and all our employees, I will work to build on the strong foundation that Bruno has put in place. I am excited and confident about our company's future and look forward to further accelerating the value we bring to all of our stakeholders."

Sementilli joined Quorum as a loan officer in November of 1983. He later became a branch manager with responsibilities that included almost every department in the company. He held positions as Vice President of Lending, other executive positions in Operations and Marketing, as well as serving in the capacity of Senior Vice President for many years before being named Quorum's CEO in December 2004. During his tenure at Quorum, he held Board and Officer positions at a number of non-profits, like New York Credit Union Association, CUC Mortgage Corporation, and Junior Achievement of Westchester. He is an ardent supporter of U.S. veterans and led charitable drives for both James J. Peters VA Medical Center, and the Disabled American Veterans Charity.

"On behalf of Quorum and the Board, I would like to thank Bruno for his outstanding leadership and deep commitment to the company. During his tenure, Quorum has transformed from a small credit union with less than 30 employees and less than 1,000 members to an almost $1B financial institution serving over 75,000 members and employing almost 150 employees nationwide," concluded Werner.

Pachter joined Quorum in 2014 as Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operations Officer. In this role, he oversaw all operations of the Credit Union, including Lending, Marketing, Operations, Information Technology, Finance/Accounting, Compliance and Facilities. Under his leadership, the organization significantly grew annual revenues and improved profitability and productivity through strategic transformation initiatives, restructuring and developing core strengths. In 2019, Pachter was appointed President maintaining oversight of all operations. In this role, he increased baseline ROA while managing multiple disruptions, a business model shift, and substantial investment in projects. He positioned the organization to outperform the peer group due to strong loan operations and guided the launch of the organization's multi-year strategy to focus on business transformation. Prior to joining Quorum, Pachter held senior executive positions with Time, Inc./Reader's Digest Association and Gartner.

Quorum Federal Credit Union (www.quorumfcu.org) is an online credit union headquartered at 2500 Westchester Avenue, Suite 411, Purchase, NY 10577. Founded in 1934 as the exclusive credit union for Kraft Foods employees, today the Credit Union serves over 50 companies nationwide including Ogilvy, Avon, Mondelez International, Philip Morris International, Altria, and Kraft Heinz and has members living in all 50 states. Quorum is committed to delivering banking that's focused on its members, and how its products and services can help them live life as they choose. Its mission is to do good by them and for them, by returning profits in the form of competitive rates, low fees, simple rules, clear communication, frictionless delivery, and unbiased advice. It's called: Banking That's Good. For You.



SOURCE Quorum Federal Credit Union

Related Links

http://www.quorumfcu.org


OTTAWA, ON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - It is important to note that travel restrictions remain in place for all foreign nationals, including U.S. citizens, seeking to travel to Canada for discretionary (non-essential) travel  such as tourism and recreation.

Examples of non-essential travel include, but are not limited to: camping, hiking, social events, boating across the border, picking up a pet, and visiting or checking on a cottage.

U.S. citizens without a right of entry to Canada or who are not otherwise eligible to enter Canada under the travel restrictions, attempting to visit Canada for a non-essential reason will be turned away at the border, even if they are fully vaccinated.

Before heading to the border, U.S travellers should be informed and know their obligations. The Government of Canada has a website to assist travellers in finding out if they can enter Canada and, if able to enter, what their public health obligations are: Find out if you can enter Canada.

The Government of Canada's response to the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to prioritize the health and safety of Canadians. The Government of Canada will continue to monitor its vaccination, case counts and hospitalization rates which will help inform measures at the borderand when to lift or adjust themto keep Canadians safe and support our economy.



Associated Links

SOURCE Canada Border Services Agency

Related Links

http://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/


CUPERTINO, Calif., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- San Francisco-based Starrz Dance Academy of Performing Arts welcomes on board internationally recognized Bharatnatyam Artist Sanjana Mahindrakar.

Starrz Dance Academy of Performing Arts (SDAPA) is a Bollywood Dance company dedicated to inspire the young souls to love the art of dance. We believe that dance keeps a soul happy. Our focus is on tapping the interest in each and everyone who comes to us, from an adult to a child who is as young as 3, and fostering a true love in them in this form of art. We give our best dance training in a fun and creative way!

Starrz Dance Academy productions, for which Ms. Sanjana Mahindrakar will join as a Choreographer or Dancer, include a number of projects and albums:

Classical Dance Album - Ms. Sanjana Mahindrakar will be recording dance choreography for this project.

Dance Production  Choreographing, coordinating group dancers, creative movement and actions for different clients on a regular basis.

Bharatnatyam Intensive Program  Ms. Sanjana Mahindrakar will oversee a number of critical roles in this project, including composition, choreographing and dancers arrangements, and dance production for the singles produced in the series.

Spectacularrz Dance Show  A number of roles in production and performance, including composition, choreographing and dancers arrangements, and dance productions, creative movements and actions.

A Bharatnatyam performer, understanding the aesthetic value of traditional culture as also the beauty of the contemporary sensibilities, Sanjana Mahindrakar is a young talented lady with a passion for dance. Full of enthusiasm and love for the art, she started learning Bharatanatyam at a very young age of eight years and successfully completed her Arangetram under the able guidance of Guru Smt. Charmaine Ann Lazarus in the year 2014. Her zealousness took her a long way ahead wherein she completed her training not only in Bharatnatyam as a dance form but also mastered the different aspects of Bharatanatyam including Nattuvangam and Singing with the support and encouragement of her guru, Smt. Charmaine Ann Lazarus. From participating in local competitions to proudly representing her county, India at the global level and for numerous international dance festivals, she has won many accolades along the journey. In spite of being an active performer at multiple events of national and international level she has been very humble and down to earth and believes that practice and hard work are the only things that can do good to any artist. She has strived to preserve and promote Bharatanatyam with our future budding students.

Media Contact:

Guru Savale

408-597-7991

[email protected]

www.starrzdance.com

SOURCE Starrz Dance Academy of Performing Arts

Related Links

http://www.starrzdance.com


DALLAS, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc. (NYSE: SC) ("SC" or the "Company"), today announced that it has received a non-binding proposal (the "Proposal") from its majority shareholder, Santander Holdings USA, Inc. ("SHUSA"), to acquire all of the outstanding common shares of SC that are not currently owned by SHUSA. SHUSA has proposed a purchase price of $39.00 per share in cash, subject to the conditions set forth in the letter below to the SC Board of Directors.

Consistent with its fiduciary duties, the Board of Directors has formed an independent special committee, composed of William Rainer, William Muir and Robert McCarthy, and elected William Rainer as its chairperson, to consider the Proposal. The Special Committee has engaged Piper Sandler & Co. as its independent financial advisor and Covington & Burling LLP as independent legal counsel to assist in its evaluation of the Proposal.

The full text of the letter received from SHUSA is set forth below:

July 1, 2021

Chairman of the Board of Directors

Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc.

1601 Elm Street, Suite 800

Dallas, Texas 75201

Dear Bill,

Santander Holdings USA, Inc. ("SHUSA") is pleased to submit this proposal to acquire all of the outstanding shares of common stock of Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc. (the "Company" or "SC") that are not currently owned by SHUSA, for a purchase price of $39.00 per share, in cash (our "Proposal").

We believe that our Proposal reflects an attractive value to SC's public shareholders. Specifically, $39.00 per share represents a premium of 7.4% to yesterday's closing price of $36.32. This premium is on top of the Company's strong share price gains since the beginning of the year, including relative to its peers, and reflects a 30.4% premium to SC's average share price since January 1, 2021.

As you know, we currently beneficially own shares representing approximately 80% of the outstanding shares. Given our knowledge of the Company, we are in a position to proceed with the proposed transaction in an expedited manner.

Our Proposal is subject to the approval of the Company's Board of Directors and the negotiation and execution of mutually acceptable definitive transaction documentation. We understand that a special committee of independent and disinterested directors (the "Special Committee") of the Company's Board of Directors (the "Board") will consider our Proposal and make a recommendation to the Board.

In considering our Proposal, you should know that, in our capacity as a shareholder of the Company, we are interested only in acquiring the shares not already owned by us and that in such capacity we have no interest in selling any of the shares owned by us nor would we expect, in our capacity as a shareholder, to vote in favor of any alternative sale, merger or similar transaction involving the Company.

Please be aware that we reserve the right to withdraw or modify our Proposal in any manner at any time. No legal obligation with respect to the Proposal or any other transaction shall arise unless and until execution of mutually acceptable definitive transaction documentation between us and the Company.

In connection with our Proposal, we have engaged J.P. Morgan Securities LLC as our financial advisor and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz as our legal advisor. We assume that the Special Committee will retain its own independent legal and financial advisors to assist in its review of our Proposal. We and our advisors look forward to working with the Special Committee and its advisors to expeditiously negotiate and consummate a mutually acceptable transaction. We are available at your convenience to discuss any aspects of our Proposal and this important transaction.

Sincerely,

SANTANDER HOLDINGS USA, INC.

/s/ T. Timothy Ryan, Jr.

T. Timothy Ryan, Jr.

Chairman of the Board

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements about the Company's expectations, beliefs, plans, or future events are not historical facts and may be forward-looking. These statements are often, but not always, made through the use of words or phrases such as "anticipates," "believes," "can," "could," "may," "predicts," "potential," "should," "will," "looking forward," "would," "hopes," "assumes," "estimates," "plans," "projects," "continuing," "ongoing," "expects," "intends," and similar words or phrases. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable as of the date on which the statements are made, these statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are subject to change based on various important factors and assumptions, some of which are beyond the Company's control. Among the factors that could cause actual results to differ from those reflected in forward-looking statements include, without limitation, the risks and uncertainties described in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for the Company to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward-looking statements contained in this press release. In light of the significant uncertainties inherent in the forward-looking information included herein, the inclusion of such information should not be regarded as a representation by the Company or any other person that the Company's expectations, objectives or plans will be achieved in the timeframe anticipated or at all. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the Company's forward-looking statements, and the Company 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 required by law. Any forward-looking statements only speak as of the date of this press release, and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking information or statements, whether written or oral, to reflect any change, except as required by law. All forward-looking statements attributable to us are expressly qualified by these cautionary statements.

About Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc.

SC, headquartered in Dallas, is a full-service consumer finance company focused on vehicle finance, third-party servicing and delivering superior service to our more than 3.1 million customers across the full credit spectrum. SC, which began originating retail installment contracts in 1997, had an average managed asset portfolio of approximately $64 billion (for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021). (www.santanderconsumerusa.com)

SOURCE Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc.
AUBAGNE, France, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sartorius Stedim Biotech, a leading international partner of the biopharmaceutical industry, has acquired a majority stake in the reagent manufacturer CellGenix GmbH. The company based in Freiburg, Germany, and with a sales subsidiary near the biotechnology hub in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, produces and markets cell culture components, such as growth factors, cytokines and media in GMP quality for manufacturing cell and gene therapy products.

Sartorius Stedim Biotech has initially acquired 51 percent of this company, which has been privately owned until now, for around 100 million euros in cash. At the beginning of 2023 and 2026, Sartorius Stedim Biotech plans to acquire the remaining shares of CellGenix. Founded in 1994 at the University Medical Center of Freiburg, CellGenix currently employs some 70 people and generated sales of more than 20 million euros in 2020, achieving a very significant double-digit EBITDA margin.

"CellGenix has an excellent reputation on the market and brings in high technological expertise and considerable regulatory experience in one of the fastest-growing fields of the biopharma sector. Together, we will support our customers even better in fast-tracking their drug candidates efficiently through the various steps in the development of medicines so that innovative therapies can reach patients faster," said Rene Faber, member of the Board of Directors of Sartorius Stedim Biotech.

"For us, Sartorius Stedim Biotech is an ideal partner with a highly complementary product portfolio that will accelerate our development with its global sales team, enabling us to usher in our next phase of growth," added Felicia Rosenthal, CEO and co-founder of CellGenix.

Sartorius Stedim Biotech plans to expand the Freiburg site substantially and to establish it as a center of excellence within the group in the areas of development and manufacture of quality critical raw materials for the cell and gene therapy market.

This press release contains forward-looking statements about the future development of the Sartorius Stedim Biotech Group. Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Sartorius Stedim Biotech assumes no liability for updating such statements in light of new information or future events. This is a translation of the original French-language press release. Sartorius Stedim Biotech shall not assume any liability for the correctness of this translation. The original French press release is the legally binding version.

A profile of Sartorius Stedim Biotech

Sartorius Stedim Biotech is a leading international partner of the biopharmaceutical industry. As a total solutions provider, the company helps its customers to manufacture biotech medications safely, rapidly and economically. Headquartered in Aubagne, France, Sartorius Stedim Biotech is quoted on the Eurolist of Euronext Paris. With its own manufacturing and R&D sites in Europe, North America and Asia and an international network of sales companies, Sartorius Stedim Biotech has a global reach. The Group has been annually growing by double digits on average and has been regularly expanding its portfolio by acquisitions of complementary technologies. In 2020, the company employed more than 7,500 people, and earned sales revenue of 1,910 million euros.

Contact

Petra Kirchhoff

Corporate Communications & Investor Relations

+49 (0)551.308.1686

[email protected]

sartorius.com

Follow Sartorius on Twitter @Sartorius_Group and on LinkedIn.

SOURCE Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A.
HAMILTON, Bermuda, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Seadrill Limited ("Seadrill" or the "Company") (OSE: SDRL) (OTCPK: SDRLF) and the Issuer announce that, further to the announcement made by Seadrill and the Issuer on June 18, 2021, the Issuer and certain of its subsidiaries have today agreed key commercial terms for a comprehensive restructuring of the Issuer and entered into a restructuring support agreement ("RSA") with approximately 79 per cent. in value of the holders of the Issuer's 12.0% senior secured notes due 2025 (the "Notes") pursuant to which the parties thereto have agreed to the terms of the restructuring. Under the RSA, the parties have also reached agreement on the terms of a restructuring proposal in relation to the business and assets of SeaMex Ltd (in provisional liquidation) ("SeaMex"), a 50/50 joint venture entered into by one of the Issuer's subsidiaries, Seadrill JU Newco Bermuda Ltd. Seadrill and the Issuer also announce herein a proposed consent solicitation process to amend certain provisions of the indenture governing the Notes.

Restructuring of the Issuer

The key terms of the restructuring are described in the commercial term sheet exhibited below and include:

the release by the holders of the Notes (the "Noteholders") of all existing guarantees and security and claims with respect to Seadrill and its subsidiaries (excluding the Issuer and its subsidiaries);

the Noteholders receiving 65% of pro forma equity in the Issuer, with Seadrill Investment Holding Company (a subsidiary of Seadrill) retaining the remaining 35% of pro forma equity in the Issuer (with voting rights and other detailed arrangements between shareholders to be agreed), which shall effect a separation of the Issuer and its subsidiaries (including the Seabras Sapura assets and SeaMex assets) from the consolidated Seadrill group;

the Noteholders will have appointment rights in respect of 4 out of 5 of the Issuer's directors on the board of the restructured Issuer's group, with the remaining director to be appointed by Seadrill;

the Notes will remain in place, on amended terms including:

maturity date: July 15 , 2026

, 2026

interest: either (a) 9.0%, consisting of (i) 3.00% cash interest plus (ii) 6.00% PIK interest, or (b) 10.0% PIK, in each case payable quarterly



call protection: redemption price on or after:



July 15, 2021 : 105%

: 105%



July 15, 2022 : 102%

: 102%



July 15, 2023 and thereafter: 100%

and thereafter: 100% the Noteholders will have a first priority right to fund any additional liquidity needs of the Issuer or its affiliates (including working capital support, including up to $15 million of new super senior debt to provide further funding to the SeaMex business if required).

Seadrill will continue to provide management services to the Issuer's group, and operate the SeaMex assets (with resolution and commercial agreement on payment of historic and go forward management fees). The restructuring of the Issuer may be implemented out of court or through a court supervised process, the latter likely involving a pre-packaged Chapter 11 process.

The Issuer and the consenting Noteholders intend to engage with other Noteholders in order to invite them to execute the RSA and support the restructuring. This will allow those Noteholders who enter into the RSA to participate in the next stage of the restructuring process, and in the event that sufficient Noteholders enter into the RSA, will enable the restructuring to be implemented through an out of court process that should reduce the time and costs that would otherwise be involved in a court supervised process.

Pursuant to the RSA, the consenting Noteholders have also agreed to forbear from exercising enforcement rights or otherwise take actions against the Issuer and any subsidiary of the Issuer which is an obligor under the Notes in respect of certain events of default that may arise under the Notes, including in respect of the Issuer not making the semi-annual cash interest payments due to the Noteholders on 15 January 2021 and 15 July 2021, until the earlier of the completion of the restructuring transactions described therein and termination of the RSA.

As of 28 June, 2021 the Issuer's cash balance was approximately $50.5 million.

SeaMex restructuring

As described in the June 18 announcement, on June 18, 2021, John C. McKenna of Finance & Risk Services Ltd and Simon Appell of AlixPartners UK LLP (the "JPLs") were appointed as joint provisional liquidators over SeaMex by an order of the Supreme Court of Bermuda. Furthermore, on June 18 2021, the joint venture agreement governing the SeaMex joint venture was terminated with immediate effect. Pursuant to the RSA, the parties thereto have agreed to the terms of a restructuring proposal in respect of the business and assets of SeaMex. The key terms of the proposal include:

a refinancing of the SeaMex senior secured bank debt by the issuance of new senior secured notes on the terms set out in the commercial term sheet exhibited below (the "New SeaMex Notes"); and

an offer to purchase the assets of SeaMex out of provisional liquidation, in exchange for the release of all or substantially all of the subordinated debt owed by SeaMex and certain of its subsidiaries to the Issuer and certain subsidiaries of the Issuer, and a novation of SeaMex's guarantee of the senior bank debt.

The JPLs are not party to the RSA, and the RSA does not bind the JPLs to accept the proposal. An independent valuation of the SeaMex group has been obtained and the JPLs are conducting an accelerated market testing process in respect of SeaMex, to ensure that any proposed transaction maximises value for creditors as a whole when compared to alternative options that may be capable of implementation.

Further to the June 18 announcement, certain Noteholders are now the holders of the entire senior secured bank debt borrowed by certain subsidiaries of SeaMex, and the RSA also provides for their support in that capacity, for the restructuring of SeaMex and the Issuer. The Issuer intends to continue to engage in a constructive dialogue with SeaMex's key customer, Pemex Exploracion y Produccion ("Pemex") in relation to the recovery of historic unpaid invoices (including approximately $245 million which have been issued but remain unpaid (Copades)), and potential amendments to the terms of SeaMex's contracts with Pemex. The existing drilling contracts with Pemex have contract terms until between October 2024 and November 2026 assuming that they run to full term. In the meantime, pursuant to the RSA, the Issuer has obtained the requisite agreement from Noteholders to obtain access to funds in the Issuer's mandatory offer holding account as may be required to ensure that the SeaMex group has continued access to funding, and is proposing to launch a consent solicitation process to formalise the requisite amendments to the indenture governing the Notes (see further detail below).

Restructuring support agreement

The RSA contains certain covenants on the part of the Issuer and certain of its subsidiaries and the consenting Noteholders, including commitments by the consenting Noteholders to support the restructuring on the terms outlined in the commercial term sheet, and on the parties to negotiate in good faith to finalise the documents and agreements governing the restructuring. The RSA also provides for certain conditions to the obligations of the parties and for termination upon the occurrence of certain events, including without limitation the failure to achieve certain milestones and certain breaches by the parties under the RSA. In particular, the RSA anticipates that the restructuring of the Issuer will be launched by August 6, 2021, and consummated as soon as reasonably practicable thereafter, with a long-stop date of September 30, 2021, in each case unless such dates are otherwise extended by the Issuer and the requisite percentage of Noteholders that are party to the RSA.

Proposed consent solicitation

Seadrill and the Issuer also announce a proposed consent solicitation (the "Consent Solicitation"), to be launched in the near term, to amend certain provisions of the indenture dated as of July 2, 2018 governing the Notes, as amended and supplemented by that certain first supplemental indenture dated as of March 11, 2019 (together, the "Indenture").

The proposed amendment amends certain terms and covenants of the Indenture to allow the Issuer to use Net Realization Proceeds (as defined in the Indenture) as of the date of the proposed amendment to the Indenture that have not previously been deemed to constitute "Excess Proceeds." The funds will be used for reorganization expenses of the Issuer and to advance funds by way of loans to SeaMex and its successors and its and their respective subsidiaries to meet their ongoing operating and administrative needs, including operating disbursements, personnel costs, personnel taxes, direct and indirect taxes, debt service, and other costs and expenses.

The required majority of Noteholders representing greater than 50% of the aggregate principal amount outstanding have, pursuant to the RSA, agreed to provide consent to the proposed amendment.

Seabras Sapura

Also exhibited below are cleansing materials in relation to Seabras Sapura. Seabras Sapura is a group of related companies that own and operate six pipe-laying service vessels in Brazil. The Issuer has a 50% ownership stake in each of these companies, with the remaining 50% interest owned by Sapura Energy Berhad.

Seadrill does not undertake any obligation to publicly update the information contained in the cleansing materials to reflect circumstances existing after the date of this release or to reflect the occurrence of future events, even in the event that any or all of the assumptions underlying the information are shown to be in error.

RSA Accession

Noteholders wishing to accede to the RSA are invited to contact the Issuer's counsel, Slaughter and May at [email protected] Subject to Noteholders providing satisfactory evidence of their holdings of Notes and entering into a non-disclosure agreement with the Issuer, Noteholders will be provided with a copy of the RSA and invited to accede as a consenting Noteholder.

About Seadrill

Seadrill is a leading offshore drilling contractor utilizing advanced technology to unlock oil and gas resources for clients across harsh and benign locations across the globe. Seadrill's high quality, technologically advanced fleet spans all asset classes allowing its experienced crews to conduct its operations from shallow to ultra-deep-water environments. The company operates 43 rigs, which includes drillships, jack-ups and semi-submersibles.

Seadrill is listed on the Oslo Brs and OTC Pink markets. For more information, visit https://www.seadrill.com/.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release includes forward looking statements. Such statements are generally not historical in nature, and specifically include statements about the Company's plans, strategies, business prospects, changes and trends in its business, the markets in which it operates and its restructuring efforts. These statements are made based upon management's current plans, expectations, assumptions and beliefs concerning future events impacting the Company and therefore involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this news release. Consequently, no forward-looking statement can be guaranteed. When considering these forward-looking statements, you should keep in mind the risks described from time to time in the Company's regulatory filings and periodical reporting. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for the Company to predict all of these factors. Further, the Company cannot assess the impact of each such factor on its business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to be materially different from those contained in any forward looking statement.

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.

Documents

Commercial Term Sheet

Seabras Sapura - Cleansing Materials

CONTACT:

[email protected]

020 3745 4960

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Public/18925/3378488/b18594d3e342d04d.pdf Commercial Term Sheet https://mb.cision.com/Public/18925/3378488/b289b7cd14a4c0ad.pdf Seabras Sapura Cleansing Materials

SOURCE Seadrill Limited
DENVER, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The poem "The American Spirit" by Hank Jaeckal, a 93-year-old resident at Brookdale Tamarac Square, was selected as the grand champion in Brookdale's Second Annual National Poetry Challenge. More than 103 poems from Brookdale communities across the country were entered in the contest.

He competed in last year's competition and enjoys writing poetry, he writes poetry and short stories as a hobby. Friends and family often receive his poems in birthday cards.

Hank Jaeckal, a 93-year-old resident at Brookdale Tamarac Square, was selected as the grand champion in Brookdales Second Annual National Poetry Challenge.

The poetry contest was launched in 2020 to celebrate and acknowledge the creative expressions and talents of Brookdale residents across the country. For 2021, the Company decided on the theme, The American Spirit, and encouraged writers to reflect on what it means to be an American in their poetry. The poets could capture thoughts on the spirit of America, what America is and where is has been and/or where it is going.

Poems were reviewed by members of Brookdale's resident engagement team, then submitted for final judging to company leaders.

"Poetry is a powerful expression of language and feelings," said Charles Richardson, senior director of resident programs. "We wanted to focus our residents' creative thoughts on a theme this year. We know they've seen and felt so much, and we're honored to be able read their thoughts on what America is, has been and what it could be."

The American Spirit

America is an experiment.

Our founding fathers knew that.

We continue to make changes for the better,

But sometimes we do fall flat.

Too many are in poverty.

Too many are killed by guns.

Too many breathe polluted air.

Some throw trash where water runs.

Still we can be thankful,

We don't have cruel dictators.

But, we do have pretty birds and bees,

Who serve as pollinators.

We can vote for our leaders

Of country, state, and nation.

We need to do that wisely 

It's our moral obligation.

It's pretty easy to be discouraged,

Due to issues like pollution,

Or climate change and corruption,

But hard work can find the solution.

Just think of all of America's pluses.

There are schools where we can learn.

There are hospitals to care for the sick,

And there are jobs for money we can earn.

There are parks all filled with nature's beauty.

And roads to take us there.

The potential certainly is here.

Look around  it's everywhere.

So America IS beautiful

With clouds and spacious skies.

America is where I want to be.

It's where the future lies.

About Brookdale

Brookdale Senior Living Inc., the nation's premier operator of senior living communities, is committed to its mission of enriching the lives of the people it serves with compassion, respect, excellence and integrity. The Company operates independent living, assisted living, Alzheimer's and dementia care communities and, through its comprehensive network of services, Brookdale helps to provide seniors with care and services to support their lifestyle in an environment that feels like home. The Company's expertise in healthcare, hospitality and real estate provides our residents with opportunities to improve wellness, pursue passions and stay connected with friends and loved ones. The Company operates and manages 695 communities in 42 states as of March 31, 2021, with the ability to serve approximately 60,000 residents and 16,000 patients. For more Brookdale news, go to brookdalenews.com

Contact: Media Relations, 615-564-8666, [email protected]

SOURCE Brookdale Senior Living

Related Links

http://brookdalenews.com


NEW YORK, July 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Churchill Capital Corporation IV ("Churchill" or the "Company") (NYSE: CCIV). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980.

The investigation concerns whether Churchill and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

On February 22, 2021, a long-anticipated merger between CCIV and Lucid Motors, Inc. ("Lucid") was announced. Shortly thereafter on that same date, Lucid's Chief Executive Officer announced that production of its debut car would be delayed until at least the second half of 2021, with no definite date for set for actual delivery of an actual vehicle. Details of the merger also disclosed that Lucid was projecting the production of only 557 vehicles in 2021, instead of the 6,000 it had been touting in the run-up to the merger announcement.

On this news, CCIV's stock price fell $22.16 per share, or 38.63%, to close at $35.21 per share on February 23, 2021.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP

Related Links

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SHENZHEN, China, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Kingdee Software Group Company Limited ("Kingdee International", "Kingdee" or the "Company"), together with its subsidiaries, collectively referred to as the "Group"; stock code: 0268.HK) and Jiangsu Shagang Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Shagang Group") officially signed a contract and held a project kick-off meeting in Zhangjiagang. Shagang Group, founded in 1975, is one of the world's leading iron and steel material manufacturers and integrated service providers. It has ranked top 500 among the world for 12 consecutive years, ranked third in China's iron and steel industry, and ranked first in private iron and steel enterprises in China. Shagang Group has five manufacturing bases, and its products are exported to more than 100 countries and regions in the world.

As the cooperation is the core content of the digital transformation plan in the 14th Five Year Plan of Shagang Group, the senior management of both sides has attached great importance to their cooperation. The senior management teams of both sides who have attended this contract signing ceremony including: Shen Bin, standing executive director of the board of directors and Party committee secretary of Shagang Group, Chen Shaohui, standing executive director and standing executive vice president of Shagang Group, Qian Wangping, chairman of Jiangsu Shagang Hi-Tech, Zhang Yong, rotating president of Kingdee China, Xu Jiaqi, general manager of Kingdee Suzhou Branch, Zhu Ning, assistant president and general manager of management department of Kingdee China, and Chen Baosheng, general manager of iron and steel industry division of Kingdee China.

Digital transformation driven by carbon neutral goal

During the 14th Five-year Plan Period, China will fully implement ultra-low emissions in the steel industry, expand new ways of energy conservation and emission reduction, and achieve green and sustainable development in the iron and steel industry. The extensive development model that previously relied on resource input and scale expansion will be difficult to sustain. Digital transformation has become one of the development strategies of iron and steel enterprises.

Shen Bin, standing executive director of the board of directors and Party committee secretary of Shagang Group, said, "during the process of achieving carbon neutral, Shagang first bears the brunt, and we are the main force to achieve carbon neutral, which brings us both pressure and opportunity. The solution of these two major challenges is inseparable from digital transformation. The digital transformation of the iron and steel industry should go fast, well, steadily and accurately, in order to remain invincible in the future development."

Shagang has completed the digitalization of its business very early, but switching and alternation of this kind of information system with long-time accumulated is the common problem of digital transformation faced by the iron and steel industry: the application of a single system that enterprises have invested in for a long time in the past is deep-rooted, but most of them are departmental systems, which is not able to support the digital strategy of enterprises.

In the future, the manufacturing industry will accelerate to digitization, information networking and intelligence, and the industry will obviously be oriented to data-driven, gain platform support, have value-added services and intelligence orientation. The purpose of this upgrade is to enhance the security, stability and agility of the business structure, so as to better support the complex digital strategic transformation of enterprises.

Zhang Yong, rotating president of Kingdee China, said, "the digital transformation of Shagang is a huge issue, involving all aspects of the enterprise. Since its establishment 46 years ago, Shagang has accumulated a number of application scenarios and internal management requirements. We will be customer-centered, striver-oriented, integrate internal and external resources, and will achieve business and financial integration of Shagang, and spare no effort to build a "Digital Shagang."

The cooperation is not only a platform project of "integration of business and finance", but also an integration of "industry, property, tax, capital, purchase and sales, and platform". The project between Shagang and Kingdee is the core basic platform of Shagang's digital transformation in the future, and will also be the booster of Shagang's management reform.

Developing an industry benchmark with great significance in demonstration

Shagang and Kingdee have reached consensus to develop this project into a benchmark sample and play a demonstration effect in the industry. Shen Bin said, "Shagang has diverse sectors with complex business. We hope that through the cooperation, we can create the application results with scientific and technological contents, and change management philosophy. We believe that the operation efficiency and management process improvement of Shagang will be significantly enhanced. Shagang will take the cosmic platform as the core platform to build "Digital Shagang" and support the strategic realization of "Century Shagang" to help Shagang Group achieve high-quality development. For Kingdee, developing such a model provides it benchmarking significance with demonstration effect in the iron and steel industry."

It is reported that this project is the most widely covered project in the current iron and steel enterprises, from the scope of finance to business, which has causes high degree of concern in the industry. Both parties of the project will together mobilize all internal and external resources to develop a benchmark for the digital transformation of the iron and steel industry in the new era.

As one of the world's top 500 enterprises, Shagang is standing at the forefront of the era, not only considering its own 5-10-year strategy, but also providing benchmarking and demonstration for the digital development of the industry. It is also the sense of social responsibility of leading enterprises with the vision of "Century Shagang".

In fact, the cooperation between Shagang and Kingdee was established ten years ago. Since 2010, Kingdee has been involved in the digital upgrade of Shagang's core business from the aspect of HR system, which has also witnessed the process of building a "Digital Shagang". Through the comprehensive upgrade of the cooperation, Kingdee and Shagang will jointly explore digital transformation in the iron and steel industry, and developing Shagang Group into a benchmark for digital transformation of China's iron and steel industry.

Following the cooperation with Hesteel Group, Delong Steel, Tianjin Rockcheck Steel and many other large iron and steel enterprises, Shagang has also gained Kingdee's benchmark position for continuous and deep digitalization of the iron and steel industry. With the formal signing of large projects such as Shagang and BGI, as well as the continuous and smooth progress of large projects such as Huawei and Yunnan Tobacco, the concept of EBC (Enterprise Business Capability), Chinese management model, and enterprise level PaaS platform + SaaS solution promoted by Kingdee are not only widely recognized by large-scale leading enterprises, but also fully implemented in various industries.

In the future, together with Shagang Hi-tech, a digital subsidiary of Shagang, Kingdee will build a digital platform for iron and steel industry with Shagang features based on Kingdee  Cosmic PaaS Platform to help Shagang Group achieve comprehensive digital transformation. As an ecological partner of Kingdee, Shagang Hi-tech will work with Kingdee to export Shagang Group's digital transformation experience and solutions to the industry, so that China's iron and steel industry and manufacturing industry can maintain leading advantages in the world.

About Kingdee International Software Group Company Limited

Kingdee International Software Group Company Limited ("Kingdee International" or "Kingdee") was established in 1993. It is listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (stock code: 0268.HK) and headquartered in Shenzhen, the PRC. Adhering to the core values of "Acting in all Conscience, with Integrity and Righteousness", the Company is committed to helping businesses achieve their growth targets and let the sun shine on every company through dedicated services. It strives to provide them with the most trusted enterprise service platform.

Through persistent efforts to explore China's Cloud enterprise service market, according to IDC, Kingdee has retained the largest share in the enterprise application software sector for fast-growing enterprises for 16 consecutive years, and has grasped the largest share in the enterprise-grade ERM SaaS (as known as Cloud ERP) and financial Cloud services industry for four consecutive year. Kingdee is currently the only SaaS cloud service provider of Chinese enterprises selected into Gartner's Global Market Guide, and has become the only Chinese company winning the 2020 IDC SaaS Customer Satisfaction Award.

Many cloud service products of Kingdee have won the favor of benchmark enterprises, including Kingdee Cloud Cosmic (provides group enterprise cloud-end ERP solution), Kingdee Cloud Galaxy (digital innovation and cloud service platform for growth enterprises), Kingdee Cloud Star (SaaS solution for medium enterprises), Kingdee Cloud Star (SaaS solution for small and micro enterprises). Kingdee has provided software management and cloud services for more than 6.8 million enterprises, governments and other organizations worldwide.

SOURCE Kingdee
NOIDA, India, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A comprehensive overview of the smart inhalers market is recently added by UnivDatos Market Insights to its humongous database. The smart inhalers market report has been aggregated by collecting informative data of various dynamics such as market drivers, restraints, and opportunities. This innovative report makes use of several analyses to get a closer outlook on the smart inhalers market. The smart inhalers market report offers a detailed analysis of the latest industry developments and trending factors in the market that are influencing the market growth. Furthermore, this statistical market research repository examines and estimates the smart inhalers market at the global and regional levels. Smart Inhalers market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20.5% from 2021-2028 to exceed US$ 1.75 billion by 2028.

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Market Overview

The global smart inhalers market is experiencing significant growth on account of increasing patient pool and higher mortality rate due to respiratory diseases all over the world. For instance, According to World Health Organization, Asthma affects an estimated 300 million individuals worldwide. Annually, WHO has estimated that 15 million disability-adjusted life-years are lost and 250,000 asthma deaths are reported worldwide. Owing to these alarming facts, worldwide demand for smart inhalers is rising as they focus on preventing a wide range of illnesses related to the lungs and respiratory tract along with addressing other unmet patient needs via connected inhaler solutions.

Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the way healthcare is delivered due to the worldwide adoption of social distancing and quarantining norms which eventually discourage regular visits to hospitals and clinics. However, there are people whose physiological vital needs still require routine monitoring for improved healthy living. Therefore, for more healthy living and early detection of deadly respiratory diseases people are adopting digital inhalers augmenting the growth of the smart inhalers market.

Additionally, the growth of the smart inhalers market is also attributable to the growing penetration of smartphone and internet users coupled with the numerous healthcare applications available across different platforms. For instance, there are currently 3.5 billion smartphone users worldwide (Statista, 2019). Considering the total number of people using phones globally is at 4.8 billion, that means that nearly 73 percent of them are users of smartphones. In addition to this, according to Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, Approximately 64% of adults in the United States regularly use an application to measure their health metrics.

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Global smart inhaler market report is studied thoroughly with several aspects that would help stakeholders in making their decisions more curated.

By Product, the market is primarily segmented into

Inhaler

Dry Powder Inhaler (DPI)



Metered Dose Inhaler (MDI)

Nebulizers

Amongst products, inhalers and nebulizers are the key products. The inhalers are further segmented into Metered Dose Inhalers (MDI) and Dry Powder Inhalers (DPI). The inhaler segment of the global smart inhaler market was valued at USD XX billion in 2020 and is likely to reach USD XX billion by 2028 growing at a CAGR of XX% from 2021-2028. The high growth rate of this segment is attributable to the regular use of inhalers that enables patients, caregivers, and doctors to keep track of the patient's dosage and usage of inhalers.

By Indication, the market is primarily fragmented into

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)

Asthma

By indication, the asthma segment dominated the global smart inhalers market and will row at xx% CAGR to reach US$ xx billion by the year 2028. However, the COPD segment is also likely to see notable growth owing to the rapidly increasing COPD incidences all over the world. For instance, According to the American Lung Association, In 2018, 16.4 million people, or 6.6% of adults, reported a diagnosis of any type of COPD (chronic bronchitis, emphysema, or COPD).

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By Distribution Channel, the market is primarily segmented into

Hospital Pharmacies

Retail Pharmacies

Online Channel

Amongst distribution channels, the hospital pharmacies segment accounted for the largest market share in 2020 is likely to maintain its dominance during the projected timeframe owing to the easy availability of smart inhalers at hospital pharmacies. However, the online channels are also expected to grow at XX% CAGR to reach US $ XX billion by 2028.

By End-User, the market is primarily fragmented into

Hospitals & Clinics

Respiratory Care Centre

Others

On the basis of end-user, the global smart inhalers market is segmented into hospitals & clinics, respiratory care centers, and others. In 2020, the hospital & clinics category accounted for the largest market share of USD XX million attributable to the steadily growing demand and the awareness related to the benefits of smart inhalers. However, However, the respiratory care center is further expected to witness a CAGR growth of XX% during the analyzed time period (2021-2028).

Smart Inhaler Market Geographical Segmentation Includes:

North America ( United States , Canada )

( , ) Europe ( Germany , United Kingdom , Italy , France , Spain , and Rest of Europe )

( , , , , , and Rest of ) Asia-Pacific ( China , Japan , India , Australia , South Korea , and Rest of Asia-Pacific )

( , , , , , and Rest of ) Rest of the World

Geographically, the North American region dominated the global smart inhalers market with almost US$ xx billion revenue in 2020 owing to the increasing disposable income of the consumers and the number of key players in the region such as Johnson & Johnson, Cohera Medical Inc., Covidien Plc, and others. In addition to this, the rising geriatric population count and the surging prevalence of chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma and COPD, are few factors, among others, expected to further augment the global smart inhalers market. Furthermore, Asia- Pacific is also predicted to grow at an exponential rate with a CAGR of X% over the forecast period.

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The major players targeting the market includes

Boehringer Ingelheim

Cohero Health, Inc.

Novartis

AstraZeneca

Omron Corporation

Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd.

Vectura Group

GlaxoSmithKline

Adherium Limited

3M

Competitive Landscape

The degree of competition among prominent global companies has been elaborated by analyzing several leading key players operating worldwide. The specialist team of research analysts sheds light on various traits such as global market competition, market share, most recent industry advancements, innovative product launches, partnerships, mergers, or acquisitions by leading companies in the smart inhaler market. The major players have been analyzed by using research methodologies for getting insight views on global competition.

Key questions resolved through this analytical market research report include:

What are the latest trends, new patterns, and technological advancements in the smart inhaler market?

Which factors are influencing the smart inhaler market over the forecast period?

What are the global challenges, threats, and risks in the smart inhaler market?

Which factors are propelling and restraining the smart inhaler market?

What are the demanding global regions of the smart inhaler market?

What will be the global market size in the upcoming years?

What are the crucial market acquisition strategies and policies applied by global companies?

We understand the requirement of different businesses, regions, and countries, we offer customized reports as per your requirements of business nature and geography. Please let us know If you have any custom needs.

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About UnivDatos Market Insights

UnivDatos Market Insights (UMI) is a passionate market research firm and a subsidiary of Universal Data Solutions. We believe in delivering insights through Market Intelligence Reports, Customized Business Research, and Primary Research. Our research studies are spread across topics across the world, we cover markets in over 100 countries using smart research techniques and agile methodologies. We offer in-depth studies, detailed analysis, and customized reports that help shape winning business strategies for our clients.

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Website: https://univdatos.com/

SOURCE UnivDatos Market Insights
J. Alexander's Holdings, Inc. operates 47 upscale restaurants with award-winning brands including J. Alexander's, Stoney River Steakhouse and Grill, Redlands Grill, Overland Park Grill and Merus Grill. For more than 30 years, J. Alexander's guests have enjoyed a contemporary American menu and unparalleled polished service.

"We are honored to acquire these storied brands and look forward to welcoming this experienced team into the SPB family," said SPB Hospitality Chief Executive Officer Jim Mazany. "This acquisition advances our vision to become the industry leader and a pioneer of hospitality, while developing our portfolio of brands and delivering best-in-class returns, one great restaurant at a time."

Morgan McClure, President of SPB Hospitality and Managing Director at Fortress Investment Group, stated, "We have enormous confidence in SPB leadership and their vision for building a true industry leader in the hospitality space. J. Alexander's exceptional team and established brands mark an important addition to the SPB family and a significant step forward in achieving SPB's vision."

J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Configure Partners LLC served as financial advisors and Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP served as legal counsel to SPB Hospitality and Fortress Investment Group. Piper Sandler & Co. served as financial advisor to J. Alexander's Holdings Inc. and Bass, Berry & Sims PLC acted as the company's legal counsel.

About SPB Hospitality

SPB Hospitality is a leading operator and franchisor of full-service dining restaurants, spanning a national footprint of hundreds of restaurants and breweries in 38 states and the District of Columbia. Based in Houston, the company's diverse portfolio of restaurant brands includes Logan's Roadhouse, Old Chicago Pizza & Taproom, Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery, Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant, and a collection of specialty restaurant concepts. For more information about SPB Hospitality, visit spbhospitality.com.

About J. Alexander's Holdings, Inc

J. Alexander's Holdings, Inc. is a collection of restaurants that focus on providing high-quality food, outstanding professional service and an attractive ambiance. The Company presently operates 47 restaurants in 16 states. For additional information, visit JAlexandersHoldings.com.

SOURCE SPB Hospitality

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BANGALORE, India, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Spices and Seasonings Market is Segmented by Type (Salt & Salt Substitutes, Hot Spices, Aromatic Spices, Others), by Application (Food Processing Industry, Catering Industry, Household, Others). The report covers global and regional opportunity analysis and industry forecasts from 2021 to 2027. It is published on Valuates Reports in the Food & Beverages Category.

The global Spices and Seasonings market size is estimated to grow from USD 18190 Million in 2020 to USD 24380 Million by 2027, it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.0% during the forecast period 2021-2027.

The production of Spices and Seasonings increased from 743564 MT in 2012 to 1006435 MT in 2017, with a CAGR of 6.24%.

Key Drivers of Spice and Seasoning Market are:

Buyers' willingness to pay a premium for new flavors and ethnic tastes has fueled the market's growth.

Seasoning and spices medicinal properties, such as cumin seeds antiseptic & immunity boosting characteristics, and turmeric's rich source of antioxidants are further fuelling the spice and seasoning market size.

Rising demand for ready-to-use spice mixes and awareness of harmful effects of chemical preservatives

Browse the Table of Contents and List of figures at: https://reports.valuates.com/reports/QYRE-Auto-5Q755/global-spices-and-seasonings

TRENDS INFLUENCING THE GROWTH OF SPICE AND SEASONING MARKET

Increased consumer understanding of the harmful effects of chemical preservatives has resulted in a rise in demand for natural preservation, such as spices for meat and poultry. Thus, the rise in awareness along with the nutritional benefits of various spices have contributed to the growth of the Spices and Seasonings Market.

Furthermore, the Spices and Seasonings Market growth is expected to be augmented by help from an increasing trend of integrating spices into ready-to-eat and ready-to-drink foods and beverages.

Increasing awareness amongst the masses regarding the medicinal properties of spices is expected to increase the growth of the Spices and Seasonings Market. Many spices have antioxidant properties and can be used to treat a variety of diseases and health issues. Turmeric, for example, is high in antioxidants and can help prevent diseases like Alzheimer's, joint inflammation, and cancer. Cumin seeds, on the other hand, have antiseptic properties and aid in immune system support.

Rising Salt Consumption is expected to have a considerable impact on the spice and seasoning market growth. Because of the increasing demand for packaged and convenience foods in a number of countries, food processors' salt consumption will continue to rise. The table salt manufacturing industry has a high concentration of market share.

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Based on type, the spice segment is expected to be the most lucrative during the forecast period.

This is due to the increasing consumer understanding of the health benefits and properties of various spices.

Based on region, Europe held the largest revenue market share accounting for about 21.89% of market share in 2016.

It was followed by China in second place, with a market share of 21.04 in 2016, and is expected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period. The region's largest market is China, which is followed by India. The climate in the area is ideal for the growth of a variety of spices and seasonings. As a result, the Asia-Pacific produces the highest-quality spices, attracting major players to the region.

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Leading Players in the Spices and Seasonings Industry

McCormick

Unilever

Ajinomoto

Ariake

Kerry Plc. ( Ireland )

) Olam International

Everest Spices

Zhumadian Wang Shouyi

MDH Spices

Catch(DS )

Nestle

Brucefoods

Sensient Technologies (U.S.)

Ankee Food

Haitian

Others

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SIMILAR REPORTS

- The global Spices market size was valued at USD 7413.6 Million in 2019 and is expected to reach USD 8295.3 Million by the end of 2026, growing at a CAGR of 1.6% during 2021-2026.

- Food Coating Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth, Industry Analysis, Forecast 2021 to 2026. The Report contains segmentation By Type (Cocoa & chocolate, Fats & oils, Flours, Breeders, Batter Sugars & syrups, Salts, spices, and seasonings), By Application (Confectionery products, Bakery products, Snacks, Meat & seafood products, Breakfast cereal, Other) .

- Food Coating Ingredients Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth, Industry Analysis, Forecast 2021 to 2026. The Report contains segmentation By Type (Cocoa, Chocolate, Fat, Oil, Salt, Spices), By Application (Bakery, Confectionery, Cereal, Dairy, Snacks, Fruit) and Regional Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast.

- Seafood Seasoning Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth, Industry Analysis, Forecast 2021 to 2026. The Report contains segmentation By Type (Seafood Powder, Seafood Pastes, Seafood Liquid, Other), By Application (Restaurant, Home Cooking, Food Processing Industry) and Regional Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast.

- The global Organic Spices Market size was valued at USD 272.8 Million in 2018 and is projected to reach USD 406.6 Million by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 5.1% from 2019 to 2026.

- Dried Herbs & Spices Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth, Industry Analysis, Forecast 2021 to 2026. The Report contains segmentation By Type (Natural, Organic), By Application (Food, Medical) and Regional Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast.

- Meat Seasoning Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth, Industry Analysis, Forecast 2021 to 2026. The Report contains segmentation By Type (Pepper, Ginger, Cumin, Others), By Application (Supermarket, Convenience Store, Online Store)

- Oregano Seasoning Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth, Industry Analysis, Forecast 2021 to 2026. The Report contains segmentation By Type (Powder, Leaves, Others), By Application (Restaurants and Hotels, Enterprises and Institutions, Households, Others)

To see the full list of related reports on the Spices and Seasonings

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MIAMI, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The notice sent by the Liquidators indicates they have taken the position that investors of variable policies, have segregated funds, and investors of fixed products, do not have segregated funds. What that would mean in practice is that investors with variable products would likely receive more, but not all, of the amount they invested back, whereas investors with fixed products would recover even less.

However, ultimately the Liquidators do not get to decide the legal classification of these funds as either segregated or not. That decision is up to the Supreme Court of Bermuda. As a result, we expect this issue will be heavily contested and litigated in the Bermuda courts. The process will likely take a few years. It is highly unlikely any group will recover all or most of their money. Courts tend not to favor one group dramatically over the other. If the variable funds were truly segregated, investors would have access to the funds now.

Litigation against the financial institutions that recommended these products can run concurrently with the Northstar Liquidation process. There is no need to wait for an outcome from the Courts in Bermuda, especially if there are Statutes of Limitations issues.

Northstar Financial Services (Bermuda) products have proved to be the opposite of secure even though financial advisors touted these fixed- and variable-rate annuity and investment products as CD-like and stable. Clearly, there were misrepresentations and omissions made.

Our firm has already filed several cases against various financial institutions for their unsuitable recommendations. Our team of experienced securities fraud attorneys is concentrating their attention and resources on fighting for our clients, including those who live abroad, that were unsuitably recommended these investments by US-based firms. We have a Spanish speaking attorney and team members to assist both our Latin American and Asian clients.

Shepherd Smith Edwards and Kantas offers free and confidential consultations. We feel strongly about these cases and offer a contingency agreement; if we are unsuccessful, the client owes no fees or expenses. At the end of the process, the investor will still hold the Northstar product, and will be entitled to whatever the Liquidator returns. We do NOT charge a fee on anything the liquidator returns to the investor.

For more information visit our Northstar Financial Services (Bermuda) FAQs page.

Contact:

Patty Ayala

[email protected]

US Toll Free: (800) 259-9010

Internationally via WhatsApp (Text only): 713-227-2400

Mexico Toll Free: (800)-283-3403

SOURCE Shepherd Smith Edwards & Kantas LLP

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NANJING, China, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Suning.com ("the Company"; 002024.SZ), China's leading smart retail service provider and a Fortune Global 500 company owned by Suning Group, has successfully boosted the sales of high-quality agricultural products and brought a change to local agricultural brands with its industry-leading strengths in supply chain, logistics and retail sales, as the Company wrapped up its 618 shopping festival campaign.

During the 618 promotion, one of the largest of the year, Suning.com has made agricultural products one of the key focuses, in addition to cosmetics, home appliances and other consumer-electronic items.

Specifically, Suning.com has made efforts in promoting Wuchang rice under the Sutian brand name, as part of the Company's tailored marketing strategy to boost and support agricultural products from rural areas. During the promotion, Sutian's rice sold about 40 tons a day, reflecting Suning.com's ongoing efforts to brand and promote these types of agricultural products.

The Sutian brand marks another successful attempt for Suning.com in helping agricultural brands to jump on the e-commerce bandwagon. Since 2019, Suning.com has actively identified quality agricultural products in a bid to help local farmers directly bring their products to more consumers across the country and in turn help consumers receive products directly from the source. Such a farm-to-table approach has been well received and recognized by both farmers and consumers alike, as it reduces costs for farmers and offers cheaper prices for consumers.

China's Wuchang rice has been dubbed one of the best rice products in China with its annual production reaching about 500,000 tons. However, there has been knock-off Wuchang rice available on the market that uses Wuchang branding. Suning.com has joined forces with Wuchang Shanxiang Rice, a local rice farming company, to rebrand the local company's old "Gu Uncle" brand and re-branded its Wuchang rice under the brand name of Sutian, so that consumers would no longer need to worry about counterfeits.

To ensure the best quality of Sutian rice, Suning.com fully participates in the operations of the product, including research, farming, packaging, marketing and sales on all the Company's online and offline marketplaces. Suning.com even promoted the product through livestreaming sales.

Zhang Kui, president of Suning Social E-Commerce, said that the Sutian rice brand is a perfect example that showcases Suning.com's goal of boosting the local agriculture industry, creating a more enhanced ecosystem and facilitating an industry upgrade.

A manager in charge of Wuchang Shanxiang Rice said that "we have not only obtained the brand endorsement with Suning's support, but also optimized our operations to serve customers, which has led to a significant rise in sales volume and repurchases."

On June 1 alone, such Sutian rice sold 40 tons. To date, Sutian rice, supported by Suning, has a total farming area of over 300,000 mu (about 49400 acres), which can produce about 120,000 tons of rice. Since last December when Sutian rice was put onto the Suning marketplace, it has sold about 5 million kilograms.

About Suning Group

Founded in 1990, Suning Group has two listed subsidiaries at home and abroad and more than 300,000 employees around the world, ranking third in the Chinese private sector. Being committed to its mission of Leading the Industrial Advancements in Creating a Higher Quality of Life for All, it provides quality products and services to more than 700 million customers worldwide and its business scope covers three main sectors: Retail, Real Estate, and Financial Service. Suning.com, the main subsidiary is a leading O2O smart retail service provider in China. In 2020, Suning.com maintained its position among the Fortune Global 500 and topped the 2020 List of China's 500 Most Valuable Brands with a brand value of RMB 296.815 billion.

SOURCE Suning Group
OAKTON, Va., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Our Military Kids (OMK), a national 501(c)(3), today revealed research results that identify the significant and positive impact of extracurricular activities on military children whose parent(s) are either deployed with the National Guard or Reserve or severely injured. The study concluded that military families are better able to cope with stressors unique to military life when they are acknowledged for their sacrifices and can derive meaning from their situations.

According to the study, which surveyed families whose children received grants from Our Military Kids during 2020, more than two-thirds of children with a severely injured or deployed parent experience at least one symptom of psychological stress. Research concluded that building a sense of community through extracurricular participation is one of the major ways military families experience overall improvements in wellbeing.

"It has been repeatedly shown that extracurricular activity improves children's lives academically, socially, and psychologically," said OMK Executive Director and U.S. Navy Veteran Kara Dallman. "Now, we know to what extent that is true particularly for military families."

Our Military Kids programs are funded through corporate and individual donations. In 2020, OMK provided $1 million in grants to help supplement the cost of activities such as sports, music lessons, and STEM enrichment. The majority of grant recipients are National Guard and Reserve families who often do not have the same access to resources as active-duty service members.

The Villarreal family is one of the many who have experienced the life-changing benefit of an OMK grant. U.S. Marine Corps Veteran Geronima "Lani" Villarreal was injured in Iraq. Her son Isaiah, 15, was nominated by a teacher and awarded an OMK Courageous Kids 2020 honor. The Villarreal's story, seen here in a video produced by the Emmy-winning PenFed Digital team, highlights the positive impact of extracurriculars and the role organizations like OMK have on improving the quality of life for the Nation's National Guard and Reserve members and their families. To see photos of military kids participating in extracurriculars funded by OMK, as well as survey results please click here.

Our Military Kids' goal is to increase both the grant award amount and the number of families they are able to support. Our Military Kids is a GuideStar Platinum Participant and a Charity Navigator four-star charity. Tax-deductible donations can be made at www.ourmilitarykids.org/donate.

Our Military Kids, Inc. supports military children (ages 3-18) by funding sports, arts, tutoring, and other enrichment activities while a parent is deployed overseas with the National Guard, deployed with the Reserve, or recovering from severe combat-related injuries sustained in a post-9/11 mission. Participation in these activities has been proven to help children cope with stress and build self-confidence during an otherwise difficult time in their lives. For more information, please visit www.ourmilitarykids.org or contact Michelle Criqui at [email protected].

SOURCE PenFed Credit Union

Related Links

http://www.PenFed.org


Top-notch vendors in Taiwan are active in their respective Open RAN development. As CY Feng, GM of BU6 at Pegatron Corporation stated, "with the virtualization of software structure, it makes system white box feasible. There definitely will be traction." It is also backed by Matt Roman, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management, Edgecore Networks Corporation that he is expecting "steep growth in open network solutions driven by trials and activities in the ecosystem, and another driver for this growth is fully validated solutions from the software ecosystem."

Furthermore, Horen Chen, CTO of Wistron NeWeb Corporation shared the company has "developed RU, worked with other partners to enable DU, CU and intended to use open architecture in our private networks for manufacturing sites." Aaron Chuang, Senior Director of Compal Electronics also shared that they've seen "clients asking for all-in-one or open fronthaul products for flexible and large-scale deployment."

Interoperability and performance tests are key to accelerate time to market in Open RAN

As the first cellular operator in Indonesia that has conducted Open RAN field trials in Maluku region, Indonesia, Kees Van Peer, Senior Vice President, Head of Technology Strategy & Partnership of Indosat Ooredoo shared the positive results, and that "the reason for us to pursue this openness in networks is because we'd like to push more innovation and quality improvement coming from the technology ecosystem and also being adaptive to any new technology development which enable customer experience enhancement."

While open RAN tackles the challenges of more complex and flexible 5G networks, as panelists have shared, one of the biggest inhibitors for acceptance and roll-out of open network technology is to prove that it is interoperable with multiple vendors. Furthermore, once all the components are integrated, vendors will have to find out if the end-to-end (E2E) performance can achieve parity with the traditional close proprietary system.

Taiwan as the newest addition to TIP's Community Lab to contribute to the global community

As the home of the largest ICT suppliers in the world, Taiwan launched its first "5G Open Network Lab" in August 2020 with support from Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). It is a platform where vendors can access an open networking environment for testing, in hopes to offer operators the confidence that tested products can be integrated without a large overhead.

Taiwan's 5G Open Network Lab further expands to include more carrier-grade cores to support qualified 5G products to the global market by joining forces with TIP to become the newest addition as a Community Lab in Asia.

As David Hutton, Chief Engineer of Telecom Infra Project (TIP) said, "it's important to have a local lab environment for all the technology suppliers to utilize and be recognized by the TIP community, which is why we're very pleased to have ITRI [supported by Industrial Development Bureau, MOEA] being approved as a TIP community lab."

To view the full program on "ACCELERATING DEVELOPMENT OF 5G OPEN NETWORKING," please see here

About Industrial Development Bureau (IDB)

Industrial Development Bureau (IDB) is the administrative agency of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan. IDB serves the role to formulate industrial policies, and to oversee various industries including metal & mechanical, information technology, consumer goods & chemical, knowledge services, as well as sustainable development in Taiwan. In the past years, IDB has also been strongly supportive to the Taiwan Pavilion at global trade shows (such as MWC Barcelona), and for Taiwan's vendors to demonstrate the capabilities of Taiwan ICT supply chain in the global marketplace.

SOURCE Communications Industry Development Project Office delegated by Industrial Development Bureau (IDB), MOEA
ELK CITY, Idaho, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Therapeutic Solutions International, Inc., (OTC Markets: TSOI), announced today medical implementation of its Campbell Score blood-based suicide prediction marker in collaboration with the premiere San Diego personalized health center, Concierge Medical & Wellness Inc.

The Campbell Score was subject of a clinical trial1 which demonstrated patients with suicidal tendencies have a higher rating on the novel scale2. To the knowledge of the Company, the Campbell Score is the only subjective instrument in development capable of assisting psychiatrists in guiding frequency and intensity of their interventions.

"The Campbell Score is named after my mother, Kathleen Campbell, who was a victim of suicide. The goal of our Company is to create a world without suicide. The first step in this is quantifying risk of suicide in a scientific and objective manner," said Kalina O'Connor, President and CEO of Campbell Neurosciences. "We are extremely grateful that Chief Medical Officer, Dr. James Veltmeyer, volunteered for us to use his medical practice as the original launching pad for the Campbell Score. Through initial implementation on a pilot basis, we can work on kinks in a real-life environment while we are concurrently working on launching a pivotal trial to apply for FDA clearance and eventual insurance reimbursement."

"Kalina O'Connor is a true inspiration. It is extremely rare to work with someone who can translate the suffering of a personal tragedy into a company that has a real shot at changing the way suicide is perceived by the medical community," said Dr. James Veltmeyer, Chief Medical Officer of the Company and Owner of California Concierge Medical & Wellness Inc. "I am proud to put my name and reputation behind this completely revolutionary approach to a terrible epidemic which is the number two cause of death in young people."

"At the end of the day, we are all in the field of biomedical sciences because we want to advance science and save lives," said Timothy Dixon, President and CEO of Therapeutic Solutions International and Chairman of Campbell Neurosciences. "It brings great joy to me and our shareholders that this new tool developed by our spin-off company is entering medical practice. I applaud Ms. O'Connor for her perseverance and leadership skills in taking this small step with Dr. Veltmeyer that we hope will be the basis for seeing suicide as a disease and not a choice."

About Therapeutic Solutions International, Inc.

Therapeutic Solutions International is focused on immune modulation for the treatment of several specific diseases. The Company's corporate website is www.therapeuticsolutionsint.com, and our public forum is https://board.therapeuticsolutionsint.com/

1 Correlation of Campbell Score With Suicidal Ideation - Full Text View - ClinicalTrials.gov

2 Therapeutic Solutions International Spin-Off Campbell Neurosciences Announces Positive Clinical Trial Results for Campbell Score Blood Based Suicide Prediction | BioSpace

[email protected]

SOURCE Therapeutic Solutions International

Related Links

therapeuticsolutionsint.com


ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Texas-New Mexico Power Company (TNMP), the Texas utility subsidiary of PNM Resources, Inc. (NYSE: PNM), filed a settlement in its application to amend its Distribution Cost Recovery Factor to recover nearly $105 million in net distribution infrastructure investments made during 2020 to reliably serve customers' power needs.

The unanimous settlement with parties calls for increased annual revenues of $13.5 million and reflects 98% of the company's filed revenue requirement. The settlement is subject to approval from the Public Utility Commission of Texas and is expected to be implemented September 1, 2021.

PNM Resources to Announce Q2 2021 Earnings Results

PNM Resources will announce 2021 second quarter financial results prior to the market opening on Friday, July 30, 2021. The earnings news release will be issued at 6:30 a.m. Eastern.

In light of the previously announced merger transaction with AVANGRID, the company will not host a conference call. Additional information on the company's financial results and the pending merger transaction can be found on the company's website at www.PNMResources.com.

Background:

PNM Resources (NYSE: PNM) is an energy holding company based in Albuquerque, N.M., with 2020 consolidated operating revenues of $1.5 billion. Through its regulated utilities, PNM and TNMP, PNM Resources provides electricity to approximately 800,000 homes and businesses in New Mexico and Texas. PNM serves its customers with a diverse mix of generation and purchased power resources totaling 3.0 gigawatts of capacity, with a goal to achieve 100% emissions-free energy by 2040. For more information, visit the company's website at www.PNMResources.com.

CONTACTS:



Analysts Media

Lisa Goodman Ray Sandoval

(505) 241-2160 (505) 241-2782

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995

Statements made in this news release for PNM Resources, Inc. ("PNMR"), Public Service Company of New Mexico ("PNM"), or Texas-New Mexico Power Company ("TNMP") (collectively, the "Company") that relate to future events or expectations, projections, estimates, intentions, goals, targets, and strategies are made pursuant to the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Readers are cautioned that all forward-looking statements are based upon current expectations and estimates. PNMR, PNM, and TNMP assume no obligation to update this information. Because actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements, PNMR, PNM, and TNMP caution readers not to place undue reliance on these statements. PNMR's, PNM's, and TNMP's business, financial condition, cash flow, and operating results are influenced by many factors, which are often beyond their control, that can cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Additionally, there are risks and uncertainties in connection with the proposed acquisition of us by AVANGRID which may adversely affect our business, future opportunities, employees and common stock, including without limitation, (i) the expected timing and likelihood of completion of the pending Merger, including the timing, receipt and terms and conditions of any required governmental and regulatory approvals of the pending Merger that could reduce anticipated benefits or cause the parties to abandon the transaction, (ii) the failure by AVANGRID to obtain the necessary financing arrangement set forth in commitment letter received in connection with the Merger, (iii) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstances that could give rise to the termination of the Merger Agreement, (iv) the risk that the parties may not be able to satisfy the conditions to the proposed Merger in a timely manner or at all, , and (v) the risk that the proposed transaction could have an adverse effect on the ability of PNMR to retain and hire key personnel and maintain relationships with its customers and suppliers, and on its operating results and businesses generally. For a discussion of risk factors and other important factors affecting forward-looking statements, please see the Company's Form 10-K, Form 10-Q filings and the information included in the Company's Forms 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which factors are specifically incorporated by reference herein.

SOURCE PNM Resources, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.pnmresources.com


CLEWISTON, Fla., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. Sugar's family of farmers is kicking the COVID pandemic together. The company hosted a Kickin' COVID Together Contest that gave workers the chance to win amazing prizes for receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. Among the prizes were five ThinkPad laptops, an Rtic 65 QT Cooler, a Traeger Timberline Grill and a 2021 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 Truck.

"U.S. Sugar understands that getting vaccinated is a personal choice. So, we wanted to incentivize the process in an effort to protect families, fellow workers, and our local communities by working together and doing our part to help stop the spread of COVID-19," said Carl Stringer, Vice President of Information Technology and Employee Benefits.

Employees had until 8 a.m. Wednesday, June 30th to enter the contest. As a result, approximately 60% of employees have chosen to become vaccinated and each will be awarded $100 for participating. Winners were randomly drawn by Toni Pavey-McDaniel, a nurse practitioner and licensed risk manager with Hendry Regional Medical Center/Corporate Health, partners in COVID-19 testing and vaccine programs with U.S. Sugar. Winners received their prizes on Thursday, July 1st at 11 a.m. at U.S. Sugar's headquarters in Clewiston.

"It is a blessing to work for a company that genuinely cares about the health of its people," said Eneyda Rios, winner of the 2021 Chevy Silverado. "I can't believe I won a new pick-up truck, just for taking advantage of an opportunity to participate in a program that was designed to truly benefit my family and all those around me."

Other contest winners include: J Reyes Santiago, Porfirio Diaz Garcia, Robert Jamerson, Irma Pacheco, Daniel Rifa, Noe Augustin, Lanzet Richards, and Orlando Cornejo who work across the numerous job sectors U.S. Sugar has to offer.

The people of U.S. Sugar provide American food for American families. The majority of the company's employees live in the communities near Lake Okeechobee and in the surrounding South Florida region. The Kickin' COVID Together initiative is yet another example of U.S. Sugar's long-held commitment to being active and engaged community partners.

For more information about U.S. Sugar, click here.

Package Link:

SOURCE U.S. Sugar

Related Links

https://www.ussugar.com/


PITTSBURGH, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The United Steelworkers union (USW) today announced that it reached a final agreement with Viatris over the effects of the company's decision to close its formerly Mylan-owned pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Morgantown, W. Va.

The union has been bargaining with Viatris since March on behalf of 850 members of Local 8-957. Last month, members visited the West Virginia Capitol to raise awareness about the impacts of the closure.

"Closing this plant is a tragic decision, and we fought hard to get these hard workers an agreement that reflects their years of dedication and service," said USW Vice President of Human Affairs Fred Redmond, who also leads the union's health care bargaining. "We will continue fighting for these members and their community and do everything we can to ease the burden of this transition."

The agreement includes both severance pay and other benefits for workers who will lose their jobs July 31, when the facility is set to close. Viatris announced the closure last December.

The USW represents 850,000 workers employed in metals, mining, pulp and paper, rubber, chemicals, glass, auto supply and the energy-producing industries, along with a growing number of workers in health care, public sector, higher education, tech and service occupations.

SOURCE United Steelworkers (USW)

Related Links

http://www.usw.org


HONOLULU, July 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The state is finalizing preparations for the July 8 launch of the State of Hawaii's vaccination exception program for domestic, Hawaii-bound travelers vaccinated in the United States or U.S Territories. The program allows these travelers to bypass the state's quarantine requirement with proof of vaccination.

Travelers vaccinated in the U.S. or U.S. Territories may participate in the exception program starting on the 15th day after their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine -- or starting the 15th day after they've received a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

In addition, Hawaii-bound travelers should:

Upload one of three vaccination documents to their Safe Travels Hawaii account, prior to traveling to Hawai'i. One of the following documents must be uploaded:

to traveling to Hawai'i. One of the following documents must be uploaded: A CDC COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card



VAMS (Vaccination Administration Management System) printout OR



DOD DD Form 2766C

The Safe Travels digital platform is now allowing vaccine document uploads for trips arriving in Hawaii on July 8 and beyond.

Sign the online legal attestations on Safe Travels Hawaii, confirming the uploaded documentation is true and accurate.

Bring a hard copy of their vaccination documentation to show screeners at the gate prior to boarding and/or upon arrival in Hawaii . Screeners will review/verify the vaccination documents, match photo IDs, name and DOB as well as confirm that the attestations are signed.

NOTE: Children under 5 years old are not required to test and will not be quarantined if traveling with an adult who has a pre-travel test exception or a vaccination exception. Children 5 years and older who have not been vaccinated must participate in the Pre-Travel Testing Program and test with a Trusted Testing Partner to bypass the mandatory 10-day quarantine.

The state successfully launched the vaccination exception program for travelers vaccinated in the State of Hawaii, on June 15.

This program does not cover international travelers.

SOURCE Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau
LONGVIEW, Texas, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global legal Guide, IAM Patent 1000  The World's Leading Patent Professionals 2021 has recognized East Texas law firm Ward, Smith & Hill for its highly successful trial litigation.

Firm partners Johnny Ward, Wesley Hill and Chad Everingham are also honored for their work in patent litigation.

Described by the international legal guide as "a force to be reckoned with in the Eastern District of Texas" the firm is "feared by many of the leading patent litigation firms in the United States."

The guide highlighted the work of former Eastern District magistrate judge Chad Everingham for his "unique insight into what does and doesn't work in this patent litigation hotspot."

To learn more about Ward, Smith & Hill's patent litigation practice, visit https://wsfirm.com/practice-areas/patent-litigation/.

Selections for the IAM Patent 1000 guide are based on an extensive research process that includes interviews with attorneys and in-house counsel to identify potential firm and individual honorees. The guide is distributed through intellectual property management magazine IAM (Intellectual Asset Management).

Ward, Smith & Hill is known for high-stakes intellectual property trials. The firm's recent successes include serving as local counsel on a trial team that secured a $502.8 million patent infringement win against tech giant Apple Inc. for infringing on VirnetX's patents. The firm also helped secure a $62.7 million award for Ireland-based Solas OLED Ltd. based on a finding that Samsung Display Company Ltd. willfully infringed on screen display patents in Samsung Galaxy phones.

Longview, Texas-based Ward, Smith & Hill, PLLC, has tried more than 350 cases to verdict, earning a national reputation in high-stakes disputes involving complex commercial litigation, intellectual property law, oil and gas matters, bad faith insurance claims, and serious personal injury claims. The firm frequently assists lawyers nationwide in complex cases before Texas juries. To learn more about the firm, visit http://www.wsfirm.com.

Media Contact:

Sophia Reza

214-559-4630

[email protected]

SOURCE Ward, Smith & Hill, PLLC

Related Links

http://www.wsfirm.com


DUBLIN, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Clinical Laboratory Services Market 2020-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global clinical laboratory services market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 6.4% during the forecast period. The major factor that is augmenting the growth of the market includes improved healthcare infrastructure in emerging economies. The government policies and regulations are also playing an integral role in the growth of the market. With the pandemic ongoing, the demand for more accurate healthcare systems is resulting in an increased market for clinical laboratory services. However, there are certain factors that are hindering the market growth such as high-cost treatment, the low accuracy rate of the treatment, and stringent FDA policies implemented by several countries across the globe.



Further, drug testing is also one of the verticals that have been giving rise to the clinical laboratory services market. Drug testing has become common practice in business, schools, military, retail, and on the streets. Drug abuse testing equipment has positively rewarded individuals and society with the power of regulation and a drug-free healthy environment. Several schools and workplaces have made drug tests mandatory, owing to the familiarity of adverse effects of drugs and alcohol consumption. Universities, schools, and social service groups conduct awareness & seminars about the dangerous effects of drugs. Organizations and workplaces are conducting employee assistance programs (EAPs) to help employees deal with personal and work-related issues, which can affect their work performance. Government initiatives for R&D of drug testing devices and initiatives to tackle illegal drug trafficking further boost the clinical laboratory services market growth.



Segmental Outlook



The market is segmented on the basis of type and service provider. By type, the market is segmented into clinical chemistry, medical microbiology & cytology, human & tumor genetics, Immunology testing, genetic testing, and others. Based on the service provider, the market is segmented into hospital-based laboratories, stand-alone laboratories, clinical-based laboratories, and others. Among types, the clinical chemistry segment is one of the leading segments in 2019. The clinical chemistry market growth is driven by the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases such as diabetes. Further, the significant launch of new kits is expected to contribute to the market growth. The rise in the geriatric population and initiatives from the government for in-vitro diagnostics will further contribute to the growth of the clinical laboratory services market.



Regional Outlook



The global clinical laboratory services market is analyzed on the basis of the geographical regions that are contributing significantly towards the growth of the market. On the basis of geography, the market is bifurcated into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Rest of the World. North America is estimated to be the leading region in the global clinical services market due to the COVID-19 impact and the abundant number of cases in countries such as the US. North America is also expected to record high growth during the forecast period owing to a large number of chronic disease incidences. While, Asia-Pacific is expected to record the fastest growth rate during the forecast period, due to a very large patient pool.



Global Clinical Laboratory Services Market Growth by Region, 2020-2026



The clinical laboratory services market will have considerable growth in Asia-Pacific due to the increasing demand for laboratory services in developing economies such as India and China. In addition, an abundant populace is also expected to set the tone for the market, during the forecast period. Furthermore, cohesive government policies, increasing expenditure in infrastructure and technologies could enhance the growth of the clinical laboratory services market in Asia-Pacific.



Market Players Outlook



Key players in the clinical laboratory services market include Abbott Laboratories Inc., Quest Diagnostics Inc., LabCorp, F. Hoffmann La Roche Ltd., Sonic Healthcare Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Charles River Laboratories International Inc., and more. These players have adopted different strategies such as mergers, acquisitions, product launches, geographical expansion, and more, to gain ground in an increasingly competitive market. For instance, in July 2020, Thermo Fisher Scientific, an American provisioner of scientific instrumentation, reagents, and consumables, and software and services broadcasted the launch of cGMP-compatible CTS Series laboratory equipment.



The Report Covers

Market value data analysis of 2019 and forecast to 2026.

Annualized market revenues ($ million) for each market segment.

Country-wise analysis of major geographical regions.

Key companies operating in the global female infertility diagnosis and treatment market. Based on the availability of data, information related to new product launches, and relevant news is also available in the report.

Analysis of business strategies by identifying the key market segments positioned for strong growth in the future.

Analysis of market-entry and market expansion strategies.

Competitive strategies by identifying 'who-stands-where' in the market.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Report Summary



2. Market Overview and Insights



3. Competitive Landscape

3.1. Key Company Analysis

3.1.1. Abbot Laboratories Inc.

3.1.1.1. Overview

3.1.1.2. Financial Analysis

3.1.1.3. SWOT Analysis

3.1.1.4. Recent Developments

3.1.2. Sonic Healthcare Ltd.

3.1.2.1. Overview

3.1.2.2. Financial Analysis

3.1.2.3. SWOT Analysis

3.1.2.4. Recent Developments

3.1.3. Quest Diagnostic Inc.

3.1.3.1. Overview

3.1.3.2. Financial Analysis

3.1.3.3. SWOT Analysis

3.1.3.4. Recent Developments

3.1.4. LabCorp.

3.1.4.1. Overview

3.1.4.2. Financial Analysis

3.1.4.3. SWOT Analysis

3.1.4.4. Recent Developments

3.1.5. F Hoffmann La Roche Ltd.

3.1.5.1. Overview

3.1.5.2. Financial Analysis

3.1.5.3. SWOT Analysis

3.1.5.4. Recent Developments

3.2. Key Strategy Analysis



4. Market Determinants

4.1. Motivators

4.2. Restraints

4.3. Opportunities



5. Market Segmentation

5.1. Global Clinical Laboratory Market by Type

5.1.1. Clinical Chemistry

5.1.2. Medical Microbiology & Cytology

5.1.3. Human & Tumor Genetics

5.1.4. Immunology Testing

5.1.5. Genetic Testing

5.1.6. Other

5.2. Global Clinical Laboratory Market by Service Provider

5.2.1. Hospital-Based Laboratories

5.2.2. Stand-Alone Laboratories

5.2.3. Clinic-Based Laboratories

5.2.4. Others



6. Regional Analysis

6.1. North America

6.1.1. US

6.1.2. Canada

6.2. Europe

6.2.1. UK

6.2.2. Germany

6.2.3. Italy

6.2.4. Spain

6.2.5. France

6.2.6. Rest of Europe

6.3. Asia-Pacific

6.3.1. China

6.3.2. India

6.3.3. Japan

6.3.4. Rest of Asia-Pacific

6.4. Rest of the World



7. Company Profiles

7.1. Abbot Laboratories Inc.

7.2. ACM Medical Laboratory

7.3. Almac Group

7.4. Arup Laboratories

7.5. Bio-Reference Laboratories

7.6. Bioscientia Healthcare

7.7. Charles River Laboratories.

7.8. DaVita

7.9. Eurofins Scientific

7.10. Healthscope LTD.

7.11. Intertek

7.12. LabCorp

7.13. Mayo Medical Laboratories

7.14. NeoGenomicsLaboratories, Inc.

7.15. QiagenNV

7.16. Quest Diagnostics, INC.

7.17. Sanofi SA

7.18. Sonic Healthcare Ltd.

7.19. Synlab Group

7.20. Unilabs

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/xpafb2

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



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U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

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DUBLIN, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Pain Management Devices Market 2020-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global pain management devices market is growing at a considerable CAGR of 7.3% during the forecast period (2021-2027). The increasing prevalence of chronic diseases along with the easy availability of technically advanced pain management devices in the market are the key factors to drive the growth of the global pain management devices market. Supportive reimbursement policies and adverse effects of pain medications are some other factors that are contributing to the growth of the market.



However, certain factors are affecting the growth of the market. The high cost of pain management devices, lack of awareness regarding the availability of pain management devices, insufficiency of a pain specialist in underdeveloped and some emerging economies are some key factors that may restrain the growth of the pain management devices market globally. New product development is a prevalent trend in the pain management devices market. For instance, In November 2019, NEVRO CORP. notified that it had obtained FDA approval for its Senza Omnia Spinal cord Stimulation System. This senza Omnia will provide HF10 therapy along with SCS frequencies as it is the first and only SCS system designed. The system could last for over 10 years with the full-body MRI approval along with the newly developed programmer that will support the physicians to provide a wider range of waveforms.



COVID-19 Impact on the Global Pain Management Devices Market

The pain management devices market is negatively impacted by the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 due to lockdown in major economies such as China, UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, and India. The global healthcare industry has been fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic and hence most of the care facilities were completely dedicated to COVID-19 patients. Further, lack of people visiting healthcare facilities/pain management clinics for pain management procedures in fear of infection, and on the other hand, social isolation has declined the demand for pain management devices across the globe.



Segmental Outlook



The market is segmented based on applications and device type. Based on applications, the market is segmented into cancer pain, neuropathic pain, musculoskeletal pain, facial and migraine pain, other (Trauma). Further, based on the device type, the market is segmented into neurostimulators devices, analgesic infusion pumps, and ablation devices.



Global Pain Management Devices Market Share by Application, 2020 (%)



Based on application, the application of pain management devices to alleviate cancer-related pain is higher. The high prevalence of cancer across the globe along with its associated pain creates demand for such devices for pain alleviation. To reduce the pain which is generated due to nerve compression mainly due to the tumor compressing which had led to the increase in demand for devices related to pain management.



Regional Outlooks



The global pain management devices market is analyzed based on the geographical regions that are contributing significantly towards the growth of the market. Based on the geography, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Rest of the World. North America held a major market share in the global pain management market in 2020. The high presence of the geriatric population which is more prone to such chronic pain related to chronic diseases, high adoption of pain management devices, easy accessibility to well-developed infrastructure for health, and favorable reimbursement policies of the region are the key contributors to the high share of the regional market.



Asia-Pacific region is expected to witness significant growth in the market during the forecast period (2021-2027). The growing development related to improvement in health care infrastructure, growing reforms in healthcare along increase adoption of products related to pain management devices. Further, investment in R&D for new advanced technology development, the presence of a large patient pool, and increasing healthcare expenditure among others are some potential factors to drive the growth of the regional market.



Market Players Outlook



Abbott Laboratories, B. Braun Melsungen AG, Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc., Medtronic, NEVRO Corp., and Pfizer Inc. are some key players operating the global pain management devices market. To survive in the market, these players adopt different marketing strategies such as product launches.

In August 2020 , Medtronic PLC had received US FDA approval for Inter Stim Micro neurostimulator for sacral neuromodulation (SNM) therapy in the US. The first patient implant in the US was done by Cleveland clinic with the support of a new device. The SNM therapy provides control of symptoms through direct modulation of nerve activity along with communication in a normal manner between the bladder and the brain.

, Medtronic PLC had received US FDA approval for Inter Stim Micro neurostimulator for sacral neuromodulation (SNM) therapy in the US. The first patient implant in the US was done by clinic with the support of a new device. The SNM therapy provides control of symptoms through direct modulation of nerve activity along with communication in a normal manner between the bladder and the brain. In June 2020 , Mainstay Medical had received FDA approval for bringing of its ReActiv8 neurostimulator for conveying the causes of back pain. The ReActiv8 stimulates the multifidus muscles that lie next to the spine and it supports in stabilizing the nearby joints, as due to injury or diseases its control is often lost. With this, it helps in reactivating the muscle through an approach that will strengthen the muscles along with supporting the spine and reducing the pain. Further, this therapy could be taken by the patients themselves at home, and over a period it strengthens the multifidus muscle and the closed-loop of injury-causing muscle weakness, and then injury is broken.

The Report Covers

Market value data analysis of 2020 and forecast to 2027.

Annualized market revenues ($ million) for each market segment.

Country-wise analysis of major geographical regions.

Key companies operating in the global pain management devices market. Based on the availability of data, information related to new product launches, and relevant news is also available in the report.

Analysis of business strategies by identifying the key market segments positioned for strong growth in the future.

Analysis of market-entry and market expansion strategies.

Competitive strategies by identifying 'who-stands-where in the market.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Report Summary



2. Market Overview and Insights

2.1. Scope of the Report

2.2. Analyst Insight & Current Market Trends

2.2.1. Key Findings

2.2.2. Recommendations

2.2.3. Conclusion



3. Competitive Landscape

3.1. Key Company Analysis

3.1.1. Overview

3.1.2. Financial Analysis

3.1.3. SWOT Analysis

3.1.4. Recent Developments

3.2. Key Strategy Analysis

3.3. Impact of COVID-19 on Key Players



4. Market Determinants

4.1. Motivators

4.2. Restraints

4.3. Opportunities



5. Market Segmentation

5.1. Global Pain Management Devices Market by Application

5.1.1. Cancer Pain

5.1.2. Neuropathic Pain

5.1.3. Musculoskeletal Pain

5.1.4. Facial and Migraine Pain

5.1.5. Others (Trauma)

5.2. Global Pain Management Devices Market by Device Type

5.2.1. Neurostimulators Devices

5.2.1.1. Spinal cord stimulators

5.2.1.2. Sacral nerve stimulators

5.2.1.3. Deep brain stimulators

5.2.1.4. TENS

5.2.2. Analgesic Infusion Pumps

5.2.3. Ablation Devices

5.2.3.1. Radiofrequency ablation devices

5.2.3.2. Cryoablation devices



6. Regional Analysis

6.1. North America

6.1.1. United States

6.1.2. Canada

6.2. Europe

6.2.1. UK

6.2.2. Germany

6.2.3. Italy

6.2.4. Spain

6.2.5. France

6.2.6. Rest of Europe

6.3. Asia-Pacific

6.3.1. China

6.3.2. India

6.3.3. Japan

6.3.4. South Korea

6.3.5. Rest of Asia-Pacific

6.4. Rest of the World



7. Company Profiles

7.1. B. Braun Melsungen AG

7.2. Baxter International Inc.

7.3. Becton, Dickinson, and Co.

7.4. Bio-Medical Research Ltd.

7.5. Boston Scientific Corp.

7.6. Codman & Shurtleff, Inc.

7.7. DJO Global LLC

7.8. Halyard Health Inc. (Avanos Corp.)

7.9. Medtronic PLC

7.10. Pain Management Technologies Inc. (MeyerDC).

7.11. Smiths Medical, Inc.

7.12. St. Jude Medical, Inc.

7.13. Stryker Corp.

7.14. Theragen LLC

7.15. Nevro Corp.

7.16. Bio Electronic Corp.

7.17. ICU Medical

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/beh0sc

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]

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Dr Alistair Cowden has exercised 625,000 listed options with a total value of A$93,750 and this follows on-market purchases by other company directors.

The company is well funded to deliver on its growth and development strategy.

( ) chairman Dr Alistair Cowden has shown his commitment to the companys growth strategy through the early exercise of 625,000 listed options.

On July 1, 2021, the chairman boosted his holding of fully paid ordinary shares in the company on exercising the A$0.15 options that were due to expire on October 17, 2021.

This transaction valued at A$93,750 has increased his holding in the company in direct and indirect interests to 6.875 million shares.

On-market purchases

It follows on-market purchases this week by three other directors - Mike Anderson, Brendan Borg and Brett Fraser.

READ: Firefinch directors demonstrate confidence in gold and lithium strategy with on-market purchases

Managing director Anderson acquired 250,000 shares valued at $98,750 in an indirect interest and now holds 1.25 million shares in that interest.

Non-executive director Borg acquired 150,000 shares valued at $59,000 in an indirect interest, increasing the total number of securities held in that interest to 12.65 million.

Fellow non-executive director Brett Fraser made his first purchase of fully paid ordinary shares.

He acquired 250,000 shares valued at $98,750 for two indirect interests with 100,000 in one interest and 150,000 in another.

Committed to growth

These four transactions demonstrate that the directors are committed to the growth and development of the company during a new transitional phase.

Firefinch has been attracting strong interest as it increases production at the Morila Gold Project as well as accelerating exploration, resource and reserve development at the operation in Mali, West Africa.

Another development that is progressing for the company is the demerger of the Goulamina Lithium Project also in Mali into a separate ASX listed entity.

Shares higher

On the back of strong newsflow, the company's share price has been moving up.

From 21 cents on April 1, 2021, shares have risen to 57 cents last month, a new high of more than three years.

Today securities have been more than 3% higher to 40.2 cents and the market cap pre-open was approximately A$306.4 million.

Well-funded

The company is well-funded to realise its growth strategy after completing an equity raising placement last month, bringing in $47 million.

With the placement proceeds and a major debt facility likely, Firefinch hopes to grow annual gold production at Morila the Gorilla to 200,000 ounces a year by 2024 and gain value from its Goulamina lithium asset.
Paris, July 2 : Tech firms like Twitter, Google, Facebook and TikTok have committed to tackle online abuse and enhance security for women on their respective platforms.

The pledge came after consultations with the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF).

"During our consultations on online gender-based violence and abuse, women expressed a need for greater control over who can comment or reply to their posts, as well as more choice over what they see online, when they see it and how they see it," the WWWF said in a statement on Thursday.

"Women also repeatedly highlighted the need for improved reporting systems, so they can be better supported when they do receive violent or abusive content".

The tech companies took the pledge at the UN Generation Equality Forum in Paris on Thursday.

"With their resources and reach, these four companies have the power to curb this abuse and improve online experiences for hundreds of millions of women and girls," said Azmina Dhrodia, Senior Policy Manager at Web Foundation.

"The commitments they've made today should be celebrated as a major win and act as a springboard for companies to tackle abuse against women as a top priority," Dhrodia added.

The statistics are stark: 38 per cent of women globally have directly experienced abuse online, rising to 45 per cent for Gen Zs and Millennials. For women of colour, for Black women in particular, for women from the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalised groups - the abuse is often far worse.

According to the WWWF, the tech firms have pledged to "build better ways for women to curate their safety online" by offering more granular settings.

The settings are like who can see, share, comment or reply to their posts, using more simple and accessible language throughout the user experience, providing easy navigation and access to safety tools and reducing the burden on women by proactively reducing the amount of abuse they see.

"Over the coming months, we'll begin to develop and test a number of potential product changes to our platform that address these priorities and help make TikTok an ever safer place for women," said Tara Wadhwa, director of policy for TikTok US.

Companies have committed to exploring and testing the prototypes and solutions including features that let women better manage who can engage with their posts and more options to filter certain types of content, as well as strengthening reporting systems so users can track and manage reports of abuse.

"The companies will also ensure that solutions are addressed within a set and clear time frame and will regularly publish and share meaningful data and insights on their progress in implementing these commitments," said the WWWF.

The Web Foundation said it will report annually on how tech companies have progressed in achieving these commitments.
Jammu, July 2 : The Border Security Force (BSF) have fired at a quad copter from Pakistan to repulse it from crossing the International Border (IB) in the Arnia sector of Jammu, officials said.

"Alert BSF troops fired at a small quad copter belonging to Pakistan today morning at about 4.25 a.m. as it was trying to cross IB in Arnia sector," BSF said.

"Due to this firing it returned back immediately. It was meant for carrying out surveillance of the area." Jammu is witnessing heightened drone activity.

On June 29, drone activities were thwarted by the army at Ratnachuk-Kaluchak military area in Jammu.

On June 27, there were two bomb blasts at the Jammu airforce station which security agencies suspect were carried out using drones.
Chandigarh, July 2 : Facing severe electricity crisis, the Punjab government has curtailed timings of government offices from Friday, and cutting down of power supply to high energy consuming industries with immediate effect to save crops and ease the domestic power situation.

Chief Minister Amarinder Singh has appealed to all government offices to make judicious use of electricity in government offices, adding that the situation was dire as the peak demand in the state had touched a whopping 14,500 MW.

A government spokesperson told IANS that no decision on ban on use of ACs in government offices, which will function from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. till further orders, has been taken.

The Chief Minister urged the agitating Power Department employees to call off their stir, which has aggravated the crisis, with complaints of breakdowns resulting from overloading of feeders and sub-stations not being addressed promptly.

The Chief Minister urged the employees to withdraw their agitation in the interest of the state's agriculture and industry, as well as the domestic consumers who were facing a difficult time due to prolonged power outages amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

State-owned Punjab State Power Corporation Ltd (PSPCL) on Thursday announced a two-day off for industrial consumers, barring essential service providers, with immediate effect.

Punjab has its own generation of 5,500 MW from various sources, including solar, and purchases around 7,300 MW from the northern grid.

Currently, the demand is reaching over 14,000 MW against the supply of 12,842 MW, leaving a gap of 1,300 MW, an official told IANS.

Industrial units located in Ludhiana, Mandi Gobindgarh, Khanna, Jalandhar, and Phagwara have been the worst hit, owing to compulsory power shutdown till 2 p.m. on Saturday.
Beirut, July 2 : The Unicef has said that more than 30 per cent of the children in Lebanon went to bed hungry and skipped meals in the past month.

In Lebanon, one in 10 children have been sent to work, 40 per cent of children are from families where no one has work and 77 per cent of them are from families that do not receive any social assistance, Xinhua news agency reported citing a Unicef survey published on Thursday.

The survey also found that 15 per cent of the Lebanese families stopped their children's education, while 80 per cent of caregivers said their children had difficulties concentrating on their studies at home, which might mean hunger or mental distress.

It also revealed that 60 per cent of households have to buy food on credit or borrow money.

"With no improvement in sight, more children than ever before are going to bed hungry in Lebanon," said Yukie Mokuo, Unicef representative in Lebanon.

"Children's health, education and their very futures are affected as prices are skyrocketing and unemployment continues to increase," Mokuo added.

The protracted economic depression is just one of the compounding crises in Lebanon, which is reeling from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the massive August 2020 Beirut Port explosions, as well as the persistent political instability, said the Unicef survey.

While the 1.5 million Syrian refugees are the most hard-hit, the number of Lebanese people in need of support is growing rapidly.

"The World Bank has described what is happening in Lebanon as possibly one of the top three economic collapses seen since the mid 19th Century.

"What the Unicef survey shows is that children are bearing the brunt of this escalating catastrophe," Mokuo added.
Canberra, July 2 : The head of Australia's vaccine panel said that the younger population in the country should consider getting the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine only in "pressing" circumstances.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison had said on Monday that people under 40 could consult their doctor "if they wish to go and speak to their doctor and have access to the AstraZeneca vaccine", reports Xinhua news agency The announcement came weeks after the government restricted access to the vaccine to only over-60s on the advice of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (ATAGI).

ATAGI Co-chair Christopher Blyth said on Thursday that younger people should consider getting the AstraZeneca vaccine only in "pressing" circumstances.

"There are some situations where that would be warranted, but they are quite small," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio.

"The ATAGI advice is that Pfizer is our preference for those under the age of 60 years." The Australian government acquired 53.8 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine - 50 million of which will be manufactured domestically while supplies of Pfizer vaccine remain tight.

According to a statement on Thursday, the ATAGI said it examined estimates of risk of Thrombosis and Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (TTS) by age group in Australia and "note that there have been 69 cases of confirmed or probable TTS (41 confirmed cases; 28 probable cases) in around 4.8 million doses of Covid-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca given up to June 15, 2021".

Australia has so far reported 30,643 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Australia, with 910 deaths, according to the latest figures from the Department of Health.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
San Francisco, July 2 : Some Facebook users in the US are being served a prompt that asks if they are worried that someone they know might be becoming an extremist via suspicious online posts or activities, as the social network aims to tackle extremism on its platform.

Other users are being notified that they may have been exposed to extremist content.

It is part of a test the social media company is running that stems from its 'Redirect Initiative', which aims to combat violent extremism, Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, told CNN.

"This test is part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk," Stone was quoted as saying in the report on Thursday.

"We are partnering with NGOs and academic experts in this space and hope to have more to share in the future," Stone added.

One of the alerts, a screengrab of which made the rounds on social media, asks users, "Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?" "We care about preventing extremism on Facebook," explained that alert, according to a screengrab posted on social media.

"Others in your situation have received confidential support." The alert then redirects the user to a support page.

"Violent groups try to manipulate your anger and disappointment," another alert reads.

"You can take action now to protect yourself and others." That alert also redirects the user to a support page.

The Facebook spokesperson said the company is directing users to a variety of resources, including Life After Hate, an advocacy group that helps people leave violent far-right movements.
Tripoli, July 2 : The Unicef has expressed concerns over the safety of school children in Libya due to armed clashes.

"On June 26, two children were confirmed injured, one in critical condition. These two children with their 239 schoolmates in school, in El-Jadida Municipality, Zwara, west of Tripoli were subjected to fear and distress due to shooting as a result of a quarrel between gunmen outside their school," the Unicef said in a statement on Thursday.

The UN agency said it was deeply concerned about such incidents "where individuals/civilians and possibly children continue to be caught in crossfire in times of peace in Libya", Xinhua news agency reported.

Uniced reiterated its call to the Libyan authorities and armed groups to strictly abide by the ceasefire agreement signed in October 2020 and work towards long-lasting peace.

"Schools should be safe places, a sanctuary where children can learn, grow, play and be safe. Violence has a profound and long-lasting impact on children," it added.

Due to the protracted armed conflict, political and economic crises and the coronavirus pandemic, nearly 1.3 million people, including 468,000 children, require humanitarian assistance in Libya, according to the Unicef.

Children and families are experiencing a rapid deterioration in public services, particularly education and health services, higher food and fuel prices due to cuts in state subsidies, loss of shelter and livelihoods, and significant protection challenges.

Unicef and partners require $60.5 million to spearhead emergency preparedness and response in Libya in 2021.
Brussels, July 2 : The 19-member eurozone's unemployment rate fell to 7.9 per cent in May from 8.1 per cent in April, the European Union's (EU) statistical bureau Eurostat said.

In the EU, the unemployment rate was 7.3 per cent in May, declining 0.1 percentage point over a month, Xinhua news agency quoted the bureau as saying on Thursday.

About 15,278 million people were unemployed in the EU in May, 382,000 less than in April. In the eurozone, 12,792 million people were unemployed in May, a decrease of 306,000 from April.

For both the eurozone and the EU, the rates were still higher than a year ago.

In May 2020, the unemployment rate in the eurozone stood at 7.5 per cent and in the EU at 6.9 per cent.

Greece and Spain were the countries most affected by unemployment in May, with rates reaching 15.4 per cent and 15.3 per cent, respectively.

While Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Malta, the Netherlands and Hungary all registered unemployment rates below 4 per cent.

The overall evolution of the unemployment rate in the eurozone and the EU has followed the development of the economic changes induced by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unemployment rose sharply in the second quarter of 2020, when hard lockdowns were implemented.

It decreased in summer last year, as economies reopened partially; rose again in autumn during the second Covid-19 wave; and stabilised in the winter.

The decrease in unemployment in May this year corresponded to the reopening of economies as the vaccination campaigns across Europe were well underway.
Chennai, July 2 : The Tamil Nadu Health Department is keen on implementing stringent measures including wearing of masks, social distancing, and increasing the volume of tests, besides massive vaccination drives as 15 districts show fresh spike in Covid-19 cases.

On Thursday, fresh cases reported from these 15 districts showed varied increase of upto 54 cases.

Thanjavur reported 248 new cases which are 51 more than that reported on Wednesday. Madurai too, reported a slight hike cases. Tiruvannamalai, Kallakurichi, Perambalur, Villupuram, Nilgiris, Sivaganga, and Tirupathur also showed increase in cases on Thursday.

The state health department has already called upon the district administrations to immediately focus on the clusters or areas that are contributing to the new cases.

While the state has been witnessing a steady decline in Covid cases -- both active and fresh cases -- the government has been on a massive vaccination drive across the state. The slight increase in fresh cases have led the health department to send riders to the government for implementing stringent measures again.

State Health Secretary J. Radhakrishnan told IANS: "As our neighbouring states like Maharashtra and Kerala are showing a slight increase in cases, Tamil Nadu goes for focused disease containment." Epidemiologists have already recommended focused and intensified testing as any fallout of relaxations would only reflect after a few days.

The focus is on workplace intervention strategies -- testing, screening and identification of clusters.

Suchithra V. Menon, an epidemiologist working with a research centre in Chennai told IANS: "Focus should be on clusters, whether small or big and intensified and focused testing must be conducted. The state can use antigen testing methods also to increase the speed of the results." The state health, police, and revenue departments have geared up together to ensure that people follow Covid protocols as doctors recommend that the basic principles have to be adhered to.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New York, July 2 : Legal threats have moved closer to former US President Donald Trump with the prosecution of his companies and a top official in his inner circle currently face charges of tax fraud.

The case filed in a local court by a city prosecutor on Thursday alleges that the Trump Organization hid payments of perks worth $1.7 million over a 15-year period to the company's Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg who evaded taxes on them.

Trump is himself not personally charged but the chargesheet said that an "unindicted co-conspirator" was also involved.

An unindicted co-conspirator is usually someone prosecutors believe is guilty but do not have enough information to charge the person who could later be named and added to the case if they can build the case.

Weisselberg is accused of evading taxes on $1.7 million he received in perks that included school fees for his grandchildren and car payments and flat rent, as well as furniture and TV sets for his home.

"This was a sweeping and audacious illegal payments scheme," Carey Dunne, who appeared for the prosecution, told the court.

After two years of investigations into the businesses of Trump, state and city officials built their case with the help of Weisselberg's former daughter-in-law, Jennifer, who had financial records allegedly showing the perks that he had not reported.

She is involved in a court battle with her former husband over the custody of their children following their divorce.

Weisselberg, who surrendered to authorities, was brought into court in handcuffs to face 15 charges including tax fraud and grand larceny (property theft) for which he could face prison terms of at least 15 years if convicted.

Trump's companies could be hit with huge fines if found guilty and their hotel and hospitality could suffer a blow by losing their liquor licences.

A common tactic used by US prosecutors is to prosecute a person who may be able to provide evidence against their principal quarry in hopes that person would turn approver or agree to help the prosecution in return for leniency.

Weisselberg has so far stood firm unlike Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen who has cooperated with prosecutors after being prosecuted in connection with hush money paid to a porn star and a former adult film star who said they had affairs with Trump.

Cohen was convicted of tax fraud and election finance law violations and sentenced to three years.

The charges against the Trump Organization and its official came a week after the defeated President began holding public appearances, a visit to the border with Mexico to highlight the illegal immigration problem and a rally in Ohio.

Prosecutors in New York State are elected and Cyrus Vance, the prosecutor for Manhattan in New York City, won the election as a Democrat.

During Trump's presidency, his opposition looked to Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James, another elected Democrat, to investigate and prosecute him.

Federal prosecutors are appointed by the President.

Reacting to Weisselberg's prosecution, Trump said in a statement: "Do people see the Radical Left prosecutors, and what they are trying to do to 75 million plus Voters and Patriots, for what it is?" "If the name of the company was something else, I don't think these charges would have been brought," Trump Organization lawyer Alan Futerfas said.

James said that the New York State investigations into Trump and his organisation would continue.

State prosecutors were reportedly investigating whether Trump and his organisation had illegally inflated the value of some of the properties to get loans.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed @arulouis)
Kolkata, July 2 : With the mercury level between Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar and the Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal rising high, all focus will be on the inaugural address after the election by the constitutional head of the state in the Assembly on Friday.

Dhankhar will start reading out the speech at 2 p.m. He has already objected to certain portions of the speech and wanted discussion with the Chief Minister regarding that.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, on the other hand, had conveyed to the Governor that the speech has been approved by the cabinet and cannot be changed. Now it is to be seen whether the Governor sticks to the speech prepared by the state or deviates from it.

The tension between the Trinamool Congress government and the Governor escalated after Mamata Banerjee alleged that the 'Governor is corrupt' and that 'he has been named in the Jain Hawala case'.

Dhankhar countered immediately alleging that the allegation was a result of her impulse reaction to his (Dhankhar's) objection to certain portions of the speech to be read by him in the assembly.

"I found that no one will believe some portions of the speech I was supposed to deliver on the first day of the Budget Session. I wrote a letter to the chief minister asking her to give some time 'tomorrow' so that we can have a deliberation on the speech. She called me immediately after that and said that the speech was approved by the cabinet. I asked her for a deliberation. She told me that she would get back to me," Dhankhar said.

Experts well aware of the situation believe that while the Governor must attend the Assembly's special session, there is no explicit rule that says he cannot speak of his own free will. "Article 176 speaks about the special address by the Governor at the commencement of the first session after election to the legislative assembly. There is no hard and fast rule that he has to read out the speech approved by the state," a senior lawyer of Calcutta High Court said.

In support of Dhankhar, former Tripura Governor and BJP leader Tathagata Roy said there are no laid down rules that the Governor's speech at the Assembly has to be exactly as drafted by the state government. "There is not even any well-established convention (on this). Guv Dharam Vira deviated from it in the West Bengal Assembly, and I did so in Tripura. Some MLAs yelled. Who cares?" he tweeted.

Apart from the Governor-Trinamool face-off, there are other issues also which will be very minutely observed in the Assembly on Friday. It is also to be seen what seat veteran leader Mukul Roy, who won the March-April Assembly polls on a BJP ticket, but later switched over to the Trinamool last month, gets in the House. Roy changed camps but is yet to resign as saffron party MLA.

Suvendu Adhikari and Mamata Banerjee will, for the first time, face each other on the Assembly floor. Once considered a protege of Banerjee, Adhikari switched over to the BJP ahead of the Assembly polls and defeated the Chief Minister from the high-profile Nandigram seat by a slender margin. The election result has been challenged by Banerjee in the court.

The Business of the House, which will begin on July 2 with the Governor's address, will continue till July 8. The state Budget for 2021-22 will be placed on July 7. Apart from placing the state Budget next week, the Trinamool Congress government will also table the ad-hoc committee report to examine the recommendation for creating a Legislative Council for discussion in the forthcoming session.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Kolkata, July 2 : Students For Free Tibet (SFT), a leading hardline Tibetan group, has tied up to pro-democracy groups in Myanmar, extending their anti-China campaign to new areas in Asia.

SFT's Campaign Director Pema Doma told IANS they have linked up up the Burmese democracy movement because China's repression in Tibet and its firm backing of the oppressive Myanmar military junta are but "two sides of the same coin".

"In June, we saw an unprecedented collaboration between pro-democracy groups across Asia. SFT worked to further develop our key alliances with pro-democracy and human rights groups in Myanmar, Thailand, and other Milk Tea Alliance countries. We organised and participated in virtual and in-person events which have furthered democracy and self-determination in Asia," Doma added.

Doma said Tibetan activists will henceforth strongly support the Burmese pro-democracy movement and appeal worldwide to force the military junta to force an end to the massacre of innocent civilians.

She said SFT staff also spoke at the Hong Kong movement's 6/12 rally to commemorate the second anniversary of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, a Milk Tea alliance rally in Washington D.C., and a Thai rally in Washington Square Park.

Later in the month, Doma spoke at RightsCon, joining fellow Tibet advocates from around the world to discuss the intersection of technology and the Tibetan Resistance.

Wrapping up the month on June 23, International Olympics Day, SFT took a lead role in organising the Global Day of Action against the 2022 Beijing Olympics, with 50+ protests and actions in more than 25 countries around the world, she said.

From New York to Melbourne, Toronto to Paris, hundreds of Tibetan advocates marched alongside coalitions of Uighurs, Hong Kongers, Southern Mongolians, Taiwanese, and allies to speak out against what SFT describes as the 'Genocide Games'.

Doma claimed the "day was a huge success" and said they will pursue a strong global campaign to stop the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
Dubai, July 2 : UAE authorities have prohibited Emiratis from travelling to 14 countries, including India, amidst fears of the highly infectious Delta coronavirus variant.

Other countries in the list are Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria.

The directive was issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation (MoFAIC) and the National Emergency, Crisis and Disasters Management Authority (NCEMA).

UAE diplomatic missions in all these countries, official delegations and previously authorised business and technical delegates were exempt from the decision.

The authorities have also permitted travel for emergency treatment cases, with India being one of the most popular destinations among Emiratis for medical purpose.

While the Covid-19 infection numbers continue to be under control in the UAE, one out of three new cases were the Delta variant.

On Thursday, 1,675 new cases were reported, with 1,556 recoveries and eight deaths.

With school year ending in the UAE in the first week of July, it is the peak travel time as many citizens and expats head out to escape the heat.

In a joint statement, both authorities stressed on the need for citizens to comply with all Covid-related precautionary protocols, not just at home, but also at the destination country.

The statement said that Emiratis infected abroad will be allowed to return after getting the necessary approvals from the relevant authorities in the host country as well as the UAE.

Meanwhile, Air India announced that its offer for a free date change for cancelled flights from India will be extended until July 21.

In a statement posted on its website, Air India said: "Restrictions imposed by the UAE Government banning entry into UAE other than UAE Nationals and exempted category between 25th April 2021 up to 04th May 2021.

"In view of the same, one free date change to passengers holding 098 documents for sector India-UAE-India, during the period of ban will be allowed. Difference in fare, if applicable, will be charged. In case passenger wants to cancel the ticket, NIL cancellation charges will apply." Air India is currently operating around 100 flights weekly to the UAE under the air bubble agreement after travel restrictions were implemented by the UAE government.

These flights can only accept passengers eligible for travel to the UAE under exempted categories.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Delhi, July 2 : In an ode to the medical professionals who sacrificed their comforts and lives in serving humanity through one of the toughest health emergencies ever witnessed, many thanked doctors and healthcare staff on the occasion of Doctors' Day this week.

Through a song conceived especially in honour of the thousands of medical practitioners and healthcare workers who have put their lives on the line during the pandemic, two enterprising musicians cum doctors have come together to launch a music single titled 'Bloody White Coat' to shed light on healthcare workers being subjected to violence and abuse as they try to contain the virus.

This motivational Hindi track is produced by The Spindoctor (Sanjay Meriya) in collaboration with rapper G-Doc (Gshaan Mukharjee) who have been working tirelessly helping those affected ever since the pandemic broke out as frontline healthcare workers.

The Spindoctor explains, "Please let this track which is the collective voice of the healthcare fraternity across India, serve as a wakeup call to condemn violence on doctors. Today patients approach doctors not with faith but fear, not with hope but hostility. When you become a doctor, you know there's a risk of contracting infection and we are mentally prepared for that since it's an occupational hazard. But getting beaten up and called names, that isn't something we signed up for. Violence against doctors in India is a developing epidemic in itself and there needs to be stringent laws and strict law enforcement to ensure an optimum working environment for healthcare professionals in our country. It is truly disheartening to see Indian doctors on the brink of a major silent crisis, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, and this is detrimental for the furtherance of a happy and healthy society." Cancer care centre Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute & Research Centre (RGCIRC) marked the completion of 25 years with the unveiling of an MRI centre and facilities that improve accessibility of all. A ceremony organised by them on Doctors' Day thanked medical professionals for their relentless and selfless efforts. Rakesh Chopra, Chairman Governing Council of RGCIRC says: "RGCIRC today is a manifestation of a dream envisioned by few selfless philanthropists with frugal resources but strong determination to help provide qualitative, affordable cancer care with easy access to a large number of people suffering from cancer. It is the epic saga of toil, struggle and selfless service that has led RGCIRC to what it is today." As the world faced pandemic, our lives took a backseat but the responsibility fell on the shoulders of our frontline workers. Our doctors have been tirelessly and wholeheartedly working to save us, our people and nation, recognises incense brand Zed Black, which underwent a packaging change to honour frontline workers and Covid warriors.

"One of the most popular communities on our platform is on Health and during the pandemic, we saw interest in it increase even more, with doctors turning into first-time content creators to give public access to the right and credible information. We also saw amazing content coming from nurses, sanitation workers, ASHA workers, ambulance drivers, Covid survivors and more people," says Tamseel Hussain, Founder & CEO -- pluc.tv, a creator economy platform.

"The idea was always to disseminate accurate information even from a remote part of the country where I am located. I was so glad that my content was able to help patients be well informed, even if in a small way so that they don't believe on Whatsapp forwards and look for reliable information," says Abhishek Tandon, one of the active content creators on pluc.tv.

(Siddhi Jain can be contacted at siddhi.j@ians.in)
New Delhi, July 2 : The Supreme Court on Friday declined to entertain a PIL for issuing specific directions to prepare norms for nominations of Maharashtra Legislative Council by the Governor.

A bench headed by Chief Justice N.V. Ramana told the petitioner's counsel, "The Governor is bound by the advice of Council of Ministers. We are not here to advise the Governor".

The bench also comprising Justices A.S. Bopanna and Hrishikesh Roy rejected contention of a Latur-based headmaster, Dr Jagannath Shamrao Patil that due to lack of specific norms or criteria, several eligible and deserving personalities were deprived from consideration of names for the purpose of their nominations as members of Maharashtra Legislative Council.

The petitioner contended that the Governor must have discretion to choose people from specified fields to avoid the party in power making recommendations for it. The bench said, "There is a separate provision for what you want, you want us to amend the Constitution?" After a brief hearing in the matter, the bench declined to entertain the plea.

The plea argued that the top court should direct Maharashtra's Maha Vikas Aghadi government led by Uddhav Thackeray not to intervene in the process of nomination. The plea added that this will avoid the practice of nomination under political considerations.

The plea also brought the court's attention to clause 5 of Article 171. Clause 5 of the Article 171 of the Constitution has given mandate to the Governor that the nomination shall consist of "persons having special knowledge or practical experience in respect of such matters as literature, science, art, co-operative movement and social service." The petitioner submitted that no norms have been framed or finalised so far, for the purpose of making the nominations from the five prescribed categories. "Thus, the political parties who are in governance are taking the undue advantage of this loophole and are making the recommendations of the names of the persons who are not from the prescribed category but who are either powerful in politics or to whom the political parties want to make powerful by way of such nomination," said the plea filed on behalf of advocate R.R. Deshpande and Associates.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Mumbai, July 2 : Days after Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari's letter -- rooting for certain issues raised by the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) -- addressed to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, the latter has penned a polite rebuff, here on Friday.

Responding to the Governor's one-page letter of June 24 -- which was released on June 30 -- Thackeray has sent a 3-pager, explaining in detail the points raised by the Leader of Opposition Devendra Fadnavis which were put forth by Koshyari for the government's consideration.

The CM has said that the decision to hold a brief two-day Monsoon Session was taken by the Business Advisory Committee of the Legislature taking into consideration the prevailing Covid-19 situation in the state and experts' advice on the same.

Similarly, he added that the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government was very keen to hold the election for the post of Speaker -- lying vacant since February 2021 -- but it could not be done on account of the pandemic situation, and the (Speaker's) duties are being handled by Deputy Speaker Narhari Zirwal.

Thackeray also sought the Governor's help on resolving the pending sensitive issue of the OBC quotas with the Centre, to enable the Maharashtra government initiate appropriate steps in the matter.

Leading a BJP delegation to Raj Bhawan on June 23, Fadnavis had sought: Extending the Legislature's Monsoon Session duration, steps to fill up Assembly Speaker's post, and postponing the local bodies' elections due to the pending OBC reservations matter.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, July 2 : The Centre has decided on regular multi-level monitoring of infrastructure projects that are critical to the economic growth and employment generation in the country.

As part of the drive, Minister of Commerce and Industry, Railways and Consumer Affairs, Piyush Goyal chaired a meeting for the review of 20 large-scale infrastructure projects with issues enlisted for resolution, with the Project Monitoring Group on the June 29.

Som Prakash, Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, Secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Chief Secretaries of Governments of Bihar, Haryana and Tamil Nadu, and Additional Chief Secretary, Industries of Government of Maharashtra participated in the meeting through Video Conference.

Senior officials of key Central Ministries, including Railways, Petroleum and Natural Gas, Road Transport and Highways, Environment, Forest and Climate Change were also present to discuss issues affecting the progress of work and timely completion of these critical projects.

Goyal reviewed 59 issues in 20 critical infrastructure projects with anticipated investment value of nearly Rs 2.7 lakh crore. This includes 11 projects previously reviewed under PRAGATI by the Prime Minister.

Among the projects reviewed, Dedicated Freight Corridors along eastern and western routes will augment capacity of rail freight transportation and establish industrial zones at junction points.

Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial Corridor traverses through seven states and facilitate development of industrial manufacturing in the influence region of the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor.

The minister issued directions and timelines to ensure expeditious resolution of pending issues for timely commissioning of projects.
Chennai, July 2 : Vipin Puthiyedathveetil, an Assistant Professor of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, has resigned from the premier institute citing caste discrimination.

He has sent the resignation letter by mail to the authorities. Vipin hails from Payyannnur in North Kerala and has been teaching at the IIT Madras since March 2019.

The letter which he posted on social media platforms has gone viral. Vipin in the letter said that he had faced caste discrimination even in his department of Humanities and that OBC's and SC/ST teachers are facing huge discrimination at the premier institute.

Vipin Puthiyedathuveetil, who was an Economics faculty in the Humanities department, in the letter said, "There were multiple instances of discrimination and I shall be pursuing appropriate actions to address the matter." He also said, "Individuals in position of power irrespective of their claimed political affiliation and gender were involved in discrimination." The Assistant Professor in his mail has encouraged people in the institution to step up and raise complaints with the grievances committee at the institute and even with the courts.

In the resignation letter, he suggested that the institute sets up a committee to study the experience of the SC and OBC faculty. The letter also suggested that this committee should have members from the SC/ST commission, OBC Commission and psychologists.

People across the various spectrum, including writers, opinion makers, and students have commented on the shocking mail of the Assistant professor which has gone viral.

Writer and Poet Sabin Iqbal, who has authored Cliffhangers and Shamal Days, told IANS, "This is shocking. Action has to be taken in this and youths cutting across caste, creed, religion, and politics should be provided equal opportunity in all areas in this country and our constitution guarantees that. Then why people are discriminating against a bright young educated professor in a premier institution of this country. A commission comprising OBC, SC/ST academics, and lawmakers must be set up and a proper study is conducted on this." It may be noted that Fathima Latheef, a student of Humanities at IIT Madras had committed suicide in her hostel room alleging that she was discriminated by the college due to her religion. In her suicide note, she had named a professor of IIT Madras regarding discrimination. A CBI investigation is taking place on her suicide.

Vipin Putheyedathveetil was not available for comments as also the IIT Madras.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
July 02 : Before becoming an actor, Shefali Shah wanted to become an air hostess, but unfortunately her application was rejected by an airline.

As a Friday flashback, Shefali shared a throwback picture of herself and said that she had sent the same picture along with an application for the job of an air hostess. In the picture, a young Shefali can be seen, posing for the camera in a printed midi-dress. The actress revealed that she had sent the same picture to Cathay Pacific airlines, who rejected her application. "The picture Id submitted for the Cathay pacific application I got rejected#FlashbackFriday." Shefali captioned the picture.

Taking to the comments section, several celebrities and her fans dropped comments. Divya Dutta wrote, Alley mere baby!! Our gain! Sandhya Mridul wrote, Whaaat did not know! I got accepted but didnt take it and well here we are. Makeup artist Pallavi Symons said, Thank God you got rejected! Look how you're flying now! Bidita Bag commented, "Yasss. Our gain." Amruta Khanvilkar wrote, "Ohhhh godddd such a cutie."

Fans also showered Shefali with love and dropped heart emojis. One fan wrote, "Cathay be more pacific about their requirements? Coz ur looking so cute here...! Lol." Another commented, "That's great ma'am.....but you r flying high with God grace ..touchwood."

Shefali was recently seen in the Netflix's anthology film Ajeeb Daastaans, in Kayoze Irani's segment Ankahi. She was much praised in the International Emmy Award winning Netflix series Delhi Crime (2019). The actress will be again seen in the second season of the show. Shefali is also a part of a medical thriller web series Human. The actress has completed her portions of shootings for the film Doctor G alongside Ayusmann Khurrana. She will soon start shooting for Shah Rukh Khan's home production Darlings, alongside Alia Bhatt.
Chennai, July 2 : Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi of Tamil Nadu which is part of the ruling DMK alliance and works mainly for upliftment of Dalits and downtrodden plans massive movement across the state to retrieve lands belonging to the Dalits encroached upon by others.

The land popularly known as Panchami land was gifted by the British to the Dalits of the state and according to a Madras High court judgment 12 lakh acres were given. However state government records show only 1.09 lakh acres of land under the Panchami lands, of which 17,159 acres was encroached by people of other communities.

Thol Thirumavalavan, President of VCK and Member of Parliament has already met the Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on June 25 and handed over a representation requesting Stalin to intervene in the matter and to provide justice to the Dalit community.

The VCK has already formed a committee to chalk out future action plans including massive agitations and protest marches across the state even as the party is part of the ruling alliance.

The party will commence the movement to retrieve the Panchami lands in the budget session of the assembly with the VCK floor leader Sinthanai Selvan already having sent questions regarding the land and its present occupants.

The VCK leader told IANS: "I have already sent questions and is expecting a reply on the floor of the house during the budget discussions and we will commence the official movement for restoring the lost Panchami land hereon." The BJP is also upping its ante regarding the lost Panchami lands and party national executive committee member, Tada Periyasamy, who is working on the issue for several years is following up the matter.

Periyasamy told IANS: "The government of Tamil Nadu had three commissions studying the issue and had given report but nothing much was achieved.

"The 2011 state government data has revealed that 17,159 acres of Dalit land are encroached upon in Tamil Nadu and successive governments have not done anything for that."
Tel Aviv, July 2 : Israel's Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has said that his country is determined "to prevent Iran from having nuclear military capabilities".

Bennett made the remarks during a meeting with visiting German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday, during which they discussed the "Iranian nuclear threat", Xinhua news agency reported.

During a meeting held earlier the day, Israel's President Reuven Rivlin praised Steinmeier as "a strong partner in the uncompromising fight against antisemitism", saying the German President has stood with Israel against "the forces of terror who seek to wipe us off the map".

Steinmeier reiterated Germany's view that the two-state solution is the only way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, adding that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Steinmeier arrived in Israel on Wednesday for a visit aiming to further strengthen the "close and unique relations" between the two allies.

Earlier 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".

He added that Iran must not possess nuclear weapons and this is the "clear and consistent position of Israel".

Like his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu, Bennett is an opponent of the renewal of the nuclear deal between the world powers and Iran.

In his first address to Parliament on June 14, Bennett, a nationalist leader of an eight-party diverse coalition, said that the emerging deal is a "mistake" and that his country "will not allow Iran to achieve nuclear weapons".
New Delhi, July 2 : In a shocking revelation, it has come to notice that the government is forking out Rs 2 lakh on the treatment of an oral cancer patient who gets the disease due to consumption of gutkha that can be bought at Rs 2 and if the same treatment is availed at any private hospital, it would cost around Rs 6 lakh.

Similarly, a gutkha ingredient supplier Vijay Tiwari has exposed the 'dirty' tobacco business by revealing the fact that the claims of manufacturers of adding kesar, rose, elaichi, etc., in gutkha are baseless as manufacturers are using cancer causing floured chemicals in these products.

Citing the findings of a latest study conducted by Tata Memorial Centre on the 'Cost of Illness of Oral Cancer in India' renowned oncologist Dr Pankaj Chaturvedi said, "The unit cost of treating advanced stages of oral cancer is Rs 2,02,892 which is 42 per cent greater than early stages as it cost Rs 1,17,135." Most of those who do receive some forms of treatment are left unemployed and become an economic burden on their friends and family, Dr Chaturvedi said while speaking at a webinar on "Increasing risk of Oral cancer and how tobacco laws can prevent". Dr Chaturvedi is head neck cancer surgeon at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai and Deputy Director at Center for Cancer Epidemiology.

A gutkha industry supplier reveals the truth While sharing his experiences, oral cancer survivor Tiwari said, "Gutkha manufacturers are adding poisonous chemicals into tobacco products which are imported from foreign countries. The cost of one kg kesar is about Rs 1 lakh and rose is also very costly, then how can they (manufacturers) add kesar in a pouch which is being sold in the market at Rs 2 or above." Tiwari, who was an ingredient supplier in the tobacco industry, said, "A pouch of gutkha was available at Re 1 or Rs 2 even two decades ago and at present also it's available in the same price range. How can it be possible when the cost of materials has gone up?" Renowned oncologist Dr. Chaturvedi said, "Centre and state governments are yet to formulate a foolproof policy to prevent tobacco deaths as it did in controlling the Covid-19 deaths in the country. As of now, about 4 lakh people have died due to Covid-19 and the government instantly used lockdown as a treatment strategy, but no strong action has yet been taken to prevent 13 lakh annual deaths happening due to tobacco.

Dr. Chaturvedi further said, "Out of about 60,000 cancer patients visiting Tata Memorial Hospital for treatment every year, about 20 per cent of them are of oral cancer. In India, about one lakh cases of oral cancer is diagnosed every year and out of that about 50,000 patients die every year." "It's a fact that 27 crore people in India are consuming tobacco and as per Global Adult Survey, 96 per cent of people are aware of the fact that consumption of tobacco is injurious to health. Even though, we discuss its control and prevention just because it's an addictive product," he said, adding that 90 per cent oral cancer cases are caused due to consumption of tobacco, supari and alcohol.

On the proposed amendments in the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003 (COTPA), the noted oncologist said, "This law was enacted in 2003 and the tobacco industry has mutated like a virus and has become much more potent. Therefore, our laws need to be synced with the designs of the tobacco industry and that's why COTPA amendment is very important." "We just need a commitment to decide a date from when it would not be legal and it would be a classified product which people will buy on prescription or restrictions," he stressed.

Blaming the reluctant approach of policymakers in enacting a robust mechanism to deal with the tobacco menace, senior journalist, Narendra Nath Mishra said, "Industry lobby is so powerful that stringent norms in the draft rules get diluted when the final law gets approved. It's not that only the ruling party is responsible for weaker laws on tobacco prevention, even opposition parties are not showing any commitment towards saving the lives of people dying due to tobacco consumption."
New Delhi, July 2: Australia has announced that three of its leading universities will collaborate with their American counterparts to explore the use of trusted autonomous systems for cyber security as part of the Next Generation Technologies Fund's (NGTF) Australia-US Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (AUSMURI) program.

The country's Department of Defence said that the aim of the joint project - led in Australia by the University of Melbourne and the University of Wisconsin in the US - will be to develop autonomous cyber security systems through robust and effective teaming of bots and humans.

It will also explore how cyber bots can learn and form teams, either amongst themselves or with humans, to counter cyber threats.

"Improved security through cyber autonomy is critical for Defence's future in highly challenging and adverse environments," said David Kershaw, chief of the Science Engagement and Impact Division.

For Australia, cyberspace and critical technology is now a foreign policy priority. The Oz, who have made it clear that it will affect all aspects of international relations, also continue to strengthen its cooperation with India.

The Scott Morrison government had entered into a landmark, cooperative arrangement with India on cyber affairs and critical technology during the Leaders' Virtual Summit between the two Prime Ministers, last year.

The four-year $12.7 million partnership aimed at creating a research and development fund for Indian and Australian businesses and researchers, and support other countries to improve their cyber resilience.

A steady progress has been witnessed in the bilateral relations between both the countries after the elevation of the relationship to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP).

New Delhi and Canberra are gradually working towards enhancing their partnership with the private sector and academia to work together in skill and knowledge development besides strengthening cooperation in the multilateral fora.

Both countries, with their technical expertise and engaged user base, are key players in the global development of critical and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), next generation telecommunications (5G/6G), Internet of Things (IoT), quantum computing, synthetic biology, blockchain and big data.

In April this year, the Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne had announced the funding of three successful projects in Round 1 of the Australia-India Cyber and Critical Technology Partnership (AICCTP).

The grants program exists to enhance practical cooperation and collaboration between the two countries on cyber and critical technology issues, which will help shape a global technology environment that meets Australia and India's shared vision of an open, free, rules-based Indo-Pacific region.

The three projects which were awarded funding in the first round are: - The Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney and the Observer Research Foundation, to develop ethical frameworks and best practices for emerging quantum technologies

- La Trobe University, in partnership with the Indian Institutes of Technology in Kanpur and Gandhinagar, to operationalise ethical frameworks in the critical technology supply chains of global companies

- And, the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney, in partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Reliance Jio and the University of New South Wales, to address privacy and security challenges in next generation telecommunications networks.

At the same time, India and Australia also continue to share cyber security threat assessments as well as information on legislation and national cyber strategies.

Earlier this month, in the first meeting of the Joint Working Group (JWG) on Cyber Security Cooperation between India and Australia, both countries noted the need to strengthen security of critical information infrastructure as well as 5G technology and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The JWG on Cyber Security Cooperation is a mechanism established under the Framework Arrangement on the Cyber and Cyber-enabled Critical Technology Cooperation between India and government of Australia to implement the 2020-25 Plan of Action. It brings together policy makers and working level experts in the area to strengthen bilateral cooperation.

The two countries have also time and again reaffirmed their commitment to work together in the areas of digital economy, cyber security and critical and emerging technologies as identified by the Framework Arrangement on Cyber and Cyber-Enabled Critical Technology Cooperation.

As the world witnesses an increasing number of security threats emanating from cyberspace, India realises the challenges posed by cyberspace and the significance of cyber security.

"We are witnessing a sophisticated use of cyberspace by terrorists around the world to broaden their appeal, spread virulent propaganda, incite hatred and violence, recruit youth and raise funds. Terrorists have also used social media for planning and executing their terror attacks and wreaking havoc," said Harsh Vardhan Shringla, India's Foreign Secretary during his address to the UN Security Council Open Debate on 'Maintenance of International Peace and Security: Cyber Security', earlier this week.

"As a victim of terrorism, India has always underlined the need for Member States to address and tackle the implications of terrorist exploitation of the cyber domain more strategically," he added.

(This content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative/
Moscow, July 2 : The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is purposefully destabilising the situation along Russia's border with the Sea Breeze 2021 military exercises, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said.

With the involvement of more than 30 countries and 5,000 military personnel, these exercises cannot be called "friendly" or considered regular drills but are clearly politically driven, Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said at a briefing on THursday.

"The Black Sea space is consistently being transformed by Washington and its allies from an area of cooperation into an area of violent confrontation," Xinhua news agency quoted the spokesperson as saying.

While discussing the recent incidents in the Black Sea with British and Dutch warships, Zakharova explained that these activities were clearly coordinated.

"This demonstrates NATO's aggressive course towards Russia. The North Atlantic bloc is purposefully destabilising the situation along the perimeter of our borders and increasing the risk of armed incidents," she said.
San Francisco, July 2 : Apple is likely to release a 10.86-inch OLED iPad in 2022 and two new 120Hz OLED iPads in 2023, the media reported.

The report goes into some specifics. For example, the 2022 iPad will have a 10.86-inch screen, which is coincidentally the same size as the current iPad Air, citing The Elec, GSMArena reported.

This might mean that the report is referring to the next-generation iPad Air. Apple would use Thin-Film Encapsulation (TFE) method to protect the OLED panel from moisture and oxygen since the tech is pretty sensitive in this regard.

The 2023 iPads, on the other hand, will go for 120Hz LTPO panels coming in 12.9-inch and 11.0-inch flavours. The LTPO tech is supposed to reduce power consumption at a higher refresh rate.

A recent report said that, 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.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Panaji, July 2 : The representatives of 26 Village Panchayats from the mining areas of Goa have made an appeal to the apex court of India, to take the matter of Goa Mining resumption on urgent basis and provide the much needed relief to the Goa mining dependents.

The representatives of the village panchayats from affected villages due to Mining stoppage, claim that the Goa Mining industry has been consistently misrepresented in various government departments and the judiciary. These representatives earlier filed a representation to the Supreme Court of India demanding a solution to the grave situation witnessed by people of Goa since past 40 months. They further explained that immediate resumption of mining is the only tangible solution to the devastating effects of Goa Mining Stoppage disrupting over 3 lakh livelihoods followed by the hard hitting impacts due to COVID pandemic on Tourism sector which further added to the sufferings of Goans.

Jayashree Devanand Parab, Sarpanch Village Panchayat, Pissurlem Village mentioned, "Village Sarpanchs, Workers' Associations and representatives of various Truck Associations and other ancillary bodies have come together to discuss the gravity of the situation. The morbid condition of the people and business owners post the Mining stoppage is getting scary affecting the basic needs of famiies. The picture of AatmaNirbhar Bharat painted by the Prime Minister seems to have become a non-starter in Goa since people have no business to run and the two biggest job providing sectors are at the lowest point. The first Covid wave had ruined the Tourism industry which with time was crawling to stand up again but the second wave completely tarnished it. The socio-economic thread of the mining belt is in its worst state and we hope that the 3rd wave do not strike as it will completely destroys our village economy leaving us helpless without mining income. We are praying to the Supreme Court to take a lenient view on mining in Goa and give direction favourable to revive the livelihood through mining. It will be devastating if mining does not start in coming season." The mining stalemate in Goa has completed its third year due to the Policy paralysis, with no concrete solution in the site for the stalemate. There is an utter need to immediately resume mining in the state to mete out the disparity prevailed due to the policy misinterpretation & Legal flaws. The stoppage of mining in Goa has not only brought economic instability in the mining belt of the state but also wrenched off confidence of people for planning to educate their children. There is a rise in the number of domestic violence cases in local households. Our trucks and machineries are lying idle from past 3.5 years and the debts are increasing manifold leading tension in the households. The long time idling of trucks and machineries is causing rusting of valuable infrastructure and who will give us money or loans to repair or replace this machinery when mining resumes again. The delay in restarting mining is affecting common mining dependent people because there is no other alternate livelihood to compensate the mining earnings. The situation is that the state Government looks totally lost on the matter of loss of livelihood, so the panchayats are approaching the court begging for our livelihood as a last resort " added Swati Tilve, Sarpanch, Village Panchayat Dharbandoda.

According to a report submitted by State's Tourism Ministry in December 2020, Goan Tourism has suffered losses to the tune of Rs 7,000/- crore; with recorded job losses in the range of 35 per cent. With the second wave of pandemic the entire structure of the state's economy and livelihood of the people has fallen apart, Considering the situation of Grave concern in the state, immediate Resumption of Goa Mining will help in bringing back the state on the track.
New Delhi, July 2 : Indian Sellers Collective organized a virtually panel discussion to deliberate on various challenges faced by small retailers/merchants in the wake of the Covid pandemic, policy loopholes, and unfair business practices of e-commerce firms that are creating livelihood challenges for them.

The panel delved into the proposed amendments in Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 to understand its efficacy in addressing various issues faced by small merchants from the large e-commerce players.

Some key takeaways of the panel discussion were that the government has the intent to address the genuine concerns of consumers and small retailers and towards this, it has put in place laws to regulate e-commerce players in India which needs to be implemented in the right earnest. The panel concluded that the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has a big role to play in protecting the interests of consumers and sellers alike and what is required is the strict adherence to e-commerce policies for both international and domestic online marketplaces.

The panel pressed on the need for education and empowerment of consumers and sellers/small businesses on competition laws so that they can exercise the competition laws thereby checking the instances of exploitation of policy loopholes. It expressed satisfaction with the investigation against the malpractice of firms like Amazons, Flipkart, etc. and demanded implementation of anti-trust laws in India that are in line with the global trend. It called for nailing down errant e-commerce firms completely through a comprehensive policy framework and advocated business-friendly policies to support MSMEs that are the real growth engine of the economy and can provide solutions to the employment and livelihood challenges faced by the country.

The panelists were unanimous in their view that the Covid-19 pandemic has added to the financial woes of small retailers in India who are already facing unfair competition from large e-commerce players. These e-commerce players are using their financial muscle and exploiting policy loopholes to capture market share thereby driving small retailers/merchants out of business and destroying their livelihoods.

Expressing shock and concern about the little awareness about the competition laws in the country among small retailers and consumers, M.M. Sharma, Competition Law Expert and Head Practice Vaish Associates and Advocates commented, "E-commerce laws in the country are not clear but competition laws which apply to every business, irrespective of size and nature, are clear and can be used to rein in e-commerce firms flouting the rules. CCI is the only regulator in the country that can set e-commerce firms right. The competition body is now actively investigating complaints against e-commerce companies as the sector has gained rapid market share amid pandemic restrictions. It is a matter of time when these firms are going to lose this battle and all the small retailers/merchants need to do is to come together to demand stronger rules and fight strategically." He said that small retailers/traders who need visibility generally get into e-commerce platforms. These sellers are often exploited by large e-commerce firms that indulge in preferential selling and exclusive arrangements. These firms indulge in deep discounting, predatory pricing, etc., using their deep pockets and technology to hook the customers. He noted that the new e-commerce bill is silent on the issue of predatory pricing and this needs to be changed by bringing in new provisions.

Expressing his viewpoint on the livelihood challenges faced by small merchants and retailers Abhay Raj Mishra, President of Public Response Against Helplessness and Action for Redressal (PRAHAR) stated," Covid-19 related restrictions and unfair business practices of large e-commerce firms have put the livelihood of millions of small retailers and merchants at risk. This makes it important to render urgent support to MSMEs and plug the policy loopholes for their protection and development. We are not against technology or e-commerce but expect more action by the government against online marketplaces that violate the spirit of the law for market dominance." Elaborating on the lack of comprehensive e-commerce laws in the country, AIOVA spokesperson stated, "India has only one law related to e-commerce, and it is only concerned with foreign investment laws. Our concern is that the government is not bringing any blanket law for e-commerce as a general activity in the country. This creates a situation where there are no applicable laws to regulate Indian e-commerce players who may flout the rules in future." Talking about the malpractices of foreign e-commerce companies and new e-commerce guidelines he added, "Foreign e-commerce players are indulging in predatory pricing. It is high time that the government understands their business model as such companies are indulging in business malpractices all over the world and are being investigated for their business conduct including in their home country. The new e-commerce guidelines touch upon various consumer concerns, but it is silent on the implementation part of it including high penalties and discontinuation of business which are a must to rein in these large e-commerce firms." Sharing his perspective on the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on the livelihood of FMCG traders and retailers, and the respite they need to be provided, Dhairyashil Patil, National President of All India Consumer Products Distributors Federation (AICPDF) said, "The government is vocal about protecting the interests of small businesses, but it has not walked the talk. It has not imposed any strict action on the errant e-commerce platforms to date impacting the livelihood of 2-3 lakh traders. As far as new e-commerce guidelines are concerned, we have been advising government on the drafting of the new e-commerce guidelines and will be more than satisfied if the entire e-commerce guidelines are implemented. It is consumer-focused and takes care of all aspects that are hurting India customers including traders as a trader is also a consumer." He added that e-commerce is not at all a legitimate business and the sole objective of foreign e-commerce players is to capture the market by leveraging their deep pockets and luring consumers with deep discounts. These firms are mostly creating fewer low-end jobs and are causing 200 per cent more job losses than the number of jobs they are creating. AICPDF is committed to make these firms accountable to the law of the land and follow ethical business practices. It has launched Bharat e-market, a competitive platform to give all the facilities of an e-commerce portal for small traders at no cost.

Talking about the stress faced by small traders/businesses due to capital investments and the need for the government to lend them a helping hand, Dr. P.M. Ganeshraam, Chief Founder Patron of AICPDF said, "Capital raised by small traders from banks against their personal property has been lying unused due to Covid restrictions. The government has not done anything yet to waive off interest on such capital raised. This is causing a lot of stress among small traders and is eroding the capital. This is the case all throughout the country and I wish the government will do something urgently to address the situation." On the provision of high penalty in case of delay in filing of returns, he stressed the need to waive such charges amid pandemic to give small merchants cushion to invest further. He added that families of at least one crore small businesses/ merchants have gone into poverty amid pandemic and harsh regulations.

Sharing his views on the challenges ahead of small retailers in fighting large e-commerce players, C.H. Krishna, President of Federation of All India Distributors Association (FAIDA) highlighted, "Our lawyers and courts are facing challenges in understanding the business practice of discriminatory and predatory pricing followed by e-commerce companies, and mal-practices by large brick and mortar retailers who indulge in B2C selling under the garb of B2B selling. Also, small retailers do not have the wherewithal to match these retailers in terms of resources to offer deep discounts and even fight them in the court of law. These companies are even trying to bypass the existing banking system of the country by setting their own payment systems which is dangerous for the country." Addressing a query on the revival of livelihood of small traders in India Shriram Baxi, General Secretary, Federation of All India Distributors Associations (FAIDA) opined, "We cannot stop e-commerce as the buying habits of people have changed considerably in the last few years. The firms are destroying more jobs than they are creating by removing various layers in the business. Government must ensure that various layers in the business right from farming to the point of sale do not get destroyed so that people remain employed. It must ensure Minimum Operating Price (MOP) for small retailers and businesses to ensure their survival and put in place a vigilance mechanism to ensure the same."

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Ankara, July 2 : Turkish women held protests in cities across the country to denounce the country's withdrawal from an international treaty designated to combat gender violence.

Turkey on Thursday formally pulled out from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, also known as Istanbul Convention, under a presidential decree issued in March, reports Xinhua news agency.

In the country's biggest city Istanbul, women protesters gathered on the bustling Istiklal Avenue, carrying banners and chanting slogans "We will not be silenced, we will not fear, we will not bow down".

The police fired tear gas to disperse the protesters, preventing them from marching through the avenue and proceeding toward the iconic Taksim square.

During the rallies in several other big cities, including the capital of Ankara and Izmir, women demonstrators called on the government to retrieve the decision and strictly apply the convention's articles to curb the growing violence against women in the country.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country's domestic regulations are sufficient to combat violence against women.

Erdogan on Thursday announced a new action plan for combating violence against women.

"Just like our fight against violence toward women did not start with the Istanbul Convention, it will not end by withdrawing from this convention," he said.
Srinagar, July 2 : Indian army deployed women soldiers on Friday at various checkpoints in J&K's Ganderbal district in order to bridge the gap between locals and the security forces.

Colonel R.S. Karakoti, commanding officer of 34 Assam Rifles said the Rifle women of Assam Rifles have been deployed at mobile vehicle check posts in Ganderbal district.

Women soldiers are also known as Rifle women in the area. They were first deployed in Kupwara district in August 2020 after intelligence reports that militants were employing women handlers for narco and weapon smuggling.

Colonel Karakoti said the Rifle women have been a force multiplier and they have become the bridge between the locals and the security forces.

"We deploy them during other operations as well. They have been able to develop a special relationship between the locals and the security forces," the officer said.
United Nations, July 2 : Ethiopia's conflict-hit Tigray region is isolated and unpredictable with no flights or road transportation in or out and electricity and telecommunications cut, UN humanitarians said.

"Major towns, including Mekelle, Adigrat, Adwa, Axum and Shire, remain calm, but there are unconfirmed reports of clashes in the southern and northwestern zones," the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.

"Despite this, humanitarian partners continue to operate, in line with humanitarian principles," it added.

"The UN Migration Agency delivered fuel to operate water pumps, as well as firewood for cooking in a few displacement sites in the Mekelle area, benefiting several thousand people," said Eri Kaneko, associate spokeswoman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

"The UN and its humanitarian partners continue to bring water into Shire and displacement sites in Mekelle," she told reporters at a regular briefing.

An international non-governmental organization provides medical services in Samre town, in the southeastern zone.

Correspondents asked her about reports on the destruction of a critical bridge over the Tekeze River, confounding plans for distribution of aid and also on efforts to establish an air bridge to fly in relief supplies.

"Our understanding is that the airports are still closed," she replied.

"So, we have not been able to get staff or supplies in or out." Kaneko heard the bridge reports but had no information on them.

As for UN staffing, the spokeswoman said the world organization still has 419 staff members supporting the humanitarian response in Tigray, adding that most of the staff members are in Mekelle and Shire.

The UN and humanitarian partners urgently assess access along main roads to get additional staff and supplies into Tigray for relief operations, she said.

The goal is to restore electricity and telecommunications and ensure that cash and fuel are available throughout the region.

On Monday, the Ethiopian government announced the unilateral ceasefire, saying the move followed a request by the Tigray regional state interim administration that was assigned by the federal government after the ouster of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which used to rule the region.

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 November 4, 2020, the Ethiopian government launched military operations against the TLPF after the latter rejected political reforms and captured army bases.

The fierce fighting between the two sides has left thousands of people dead.

More than two million have been displaced and 350,000 pushed towards famine.
Mumbai, July 2 : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has asked Bollywood actor Yami Gautam to record her statement with the agency on July 7 in connection with an alleged violation of Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) case, officials said.

An ED official related to probe told IANS: "The agency has summoned Gautam to appear before it on July 7 to record her statement." He said that she was summoned as it was found that she had received Rs 1.5 crore in her bank account from foreign countries.

This is the second summon to the actor by the ED.

Gautam had tied knot with Uri Director Aditya Dhar last month.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Chennai, July 2 : The NewSpace India Ltd, the commercial arm of Department of Space (DOS) apart from buying satellites from Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) can also lease assets from the latter, said K. Sivan, Secretary, DOS.

Sivan, also the Chairman of ISRO told IANS: "NSIL will acquire three communication satellites- GSAT 20, GSAT 22 and GSAT 24- made by ISRO. The company will be the owner and operator of the satellites." Queried about transferring ISRO's other satellites to NSIL, Sivan said: "We are thinking about asset transfer on lease basis. Plans are there." Presently there are about 17 communication satellites, eight navigation satellites (six under operation, two in messaging services) and 17 earth observation satellites of ISRO under operation.

According to Sivan, the GSAT 24 satellite will be launched by Ariane rocket belonging to European space agency Arianespace.

"The GSAT 24 will be ready for launch by this November/December or next January. The other two satellites GSAT 20 and GSAT 22 are under production," Sivan added.

The GSAT 20 to be launched by Indian rocket Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III (GSLV Mk III) will be fully propelled by electric power. The satellite will move from the geostationary transfer orbit to geosynchronous orbit with electric propulsion.

Incorporated in 2019, the NSIL's broad mandate includes owning earth observation and communication satellites, providing space based earth observation and communication services, building and launching satellites as per demand, building rockets through Indian industries, providing launch services and technology transfer to Indian industries.

Sivan said NSIL is also working towards transfer of Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) to the private sector.

The NSIL has issued the Request for Proposal manufacture of PSLV rocket to short listed companies.

The company has also signed 13 Technology Transfer Agreements till date for transferring ISRO developed technologies to industry.

(Venkatachari Jagannathan can be contacted at v.jagannathan@ians.in)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Kolkata, July 2 : The Calcutta High Court on Friday issued a show cause notice for contempt of court proceedings against Deputy Commissioner of Police of South Kolkata Rashid Munir Khan for failing to prevent obstruction to the team of National Human Rights Commission which was visiting Jadavpur to examine allegations of post-poll violence. It also directed the state government to provide relief to the victims.

The court was referring to the incident when the fact-finding team of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) constituted by the Calcutta High Court to probe into the allegations of post-poll violence was allegedly attacked by some people in the Jadavpur area. The committee submitted its interim report to the court on June 30.

Taking a strong stance against the state on post-poll violence, the five-member bench of the Calcutta High Court directed the state government to treat all complaints regarding the post-poll violence as FIR and arrange for ration and medical treatment to all those persons who were injured.

In addition to this, the Court also ordered a second post mortem to be conducted with respect to BJP worker Avijit Sarkar, who was allegedly killed by a mob in the wake of the post-poll violence in the State. The post mortem will have to be done at Alipore Command hospital, the court directed.

Advocate General Kishore Datta informed the Bench that the Supreme Court has taken cognizance of Abhijit Sarkar's alleged killing. However, the Bench clarified that it is not passing any directions in the case and has merely ordered a second autopsy.

A 5-judge Bench of ACJ Rajesh Bindal and Justices I.P. Mukerji, Harish Tandon, Soumen Sen and Subrata Talukdar, has directed the local police authorities to register cases based on the recommendations made by a Committee of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). The Bench has also issued notice to the District Magistrates and Superintendents of Police of certain areas, to show cause why contempt should not be initiated against them for failing to prevent the violence The report was filed in a sealed envelope and the court has refused to disclose the contents thereof, or to share a copy of the same with the State counsel. It clarified that the State will be granted an opportunity to make its submissions, after filing of the final report of the Committee on July 13.

Earlier, the High Court had constituted a committee composed of members nominated by NHRC, SHRC and SLSA to coordinate rehabilitation of the displaced persons of Entally constituency. It had also directed the State Legal Services Authority to look into complaints of displaced persons who are being prevented from returning to their homes and take necessary steps for their rehabilitation.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Lucknow, July 2 : A four-day crucial meeting of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh will be held in Chitrakoot from July 9.

Though the meeting of the Sangh is an annual event, it is being considered significant in the wake of upcoming assembly elections and need for course correction by the BJP government in the state.

Senior functionaries believe that crucial decisions regarding the responsibilities of top functionaries can be taken at the meeting, regarding coordination with BJP on the election eve.

"Till now Krishna Gopal ji has been coordinating between Sangh and the BJP. At the meeting we will decide if more people are required for coordination at various levels," said a functionary.

The four-day meet is likely to discuss the situation in Uttar Pradesh and also draft a roadmap for the next year.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New York, July 2 : Covid-19 likely contributed to 216.4 million excess doses of antibiotics for adults, suggesting that the drug was used by almost everyone to treat mild and moderate cases of coronavirus infection in the country, claims a research pointing out Covid guidelines were not followed.

The study led by researchers at the Barnes-Jewish Hospital in Missouri, US, showed a total of 16.29 billion doses of antibiotics were sold in India in 2020.

Adult dose usage increased from 72.6 per cent in 2018 and 72.5 per cent in 2019 to 76.8 per cent in 2020.

In addition, sales of azithromycin, used for treating typhoid fever, non-typhoidal Salmonella and traveller's diarrhoea, for adults in India increased from 4 per cent in 2018 and 4.5 per cent in 2019 to 5.9 per cent in 2020.

The study, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, also showed notable increases in the sales of doxycycline and faropenem, two antibiotics commonly used to treat respiratory infections.

"Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to global public health. Overuse of antibiotics lessens their ability to effectively treat minor injuries and common infections such as pneumonia, which means that these conditions can become serious and deadly. Bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics don't have boundaries.

"They can spread to any person in any country," said infectious diseases specialist Sumanth Gandra, Associate Professor of medicine and an associate hospital epidemiologist at the Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

"Our results indicate that almost everybody who was diagnosed with Covid-19 received an antibiotic in India," he added.

On the other hand, in high-income countries such as the US, UK and Canada, overall antibiotic use plunged in 2020, even during Covid-19 peaks, revealed the study.

"This is because physicians in high-income countries generally did not prescribe antibiotics for mild and moderate Covid-19 cases. The uptick in India indicates that Covid-19 guidelines were not followed," Gandra said.

In India, an unregulated private sector accounts for 75 per cent of healthcare and 90 per cent of antibiotic sales, allowing for antibiotic overprescription.

Antibiotics should only be given to patients who develop secondary bacterial illnesses, but Gandra said that "this was not the case, indicating the need for policy changes in India, especially in light of the current crisis and the possibility of a devastating third wave".

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Delhi, July 2 : Former Haryana Chief Minister O.P. Chautala, who was serving a 10-year prison term in a teacher recruitment scam case, was released from the Tihar Jail here on Friday after completing due formalities, prison officials said.

According to the jail officials, Chautala, who was already out on parole, reached the Tihar jail premises on Friday morning to complete formalities after which he was released from jail.

Sandeep Goel, Director General (Delhi Prisons), said that Chautala was released after completing necessary formalities.

The Delhi government last month had passed an order granting a six-month special remission to those who have served nine-and-half years of their 10-year prison sentence to decongest jails in view of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Following Chautala's release, thousands of his supporters spilled over the Delhi-Gurugram border on the Delhi-Jaipur expressway to celebrate.

The supporters were seen carrying photos of Chautala and party flags and sang and danced. To express support for the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) supremo, several party workers travelled from across the Haryana state. Party workers also came from Mewat to join Chautala's release celebration.

Family members of the senior politician expressed happiness and said Chautala has finished his jail-term and his release will be beneficial for the party. It is a great relief not only for Chutala's family but all supporters of the INLD, they said.

Chautala was sent to jail in 2013 in connection with the teacher recruitment scam case.

Chautala, his son Ajay Chautala, and 53 others were convicted and sentenced in the case of illegal recruitment of 3,206 junior basic teachers in 2000 in Haryana. They all were sentenced to jail terms of different tenure by a special CBI court in January 2013.
Manila, July 2 : Evacuations of families living close to an island volcano in the Philippines' Batangas province were underway on Friday, a day after phreatomagmatic eruptions sent "a dark grayish plume" above the sky.

"Evacuation activities in high-risk villages as well as in other nearby municipalities in the province are ongoing," presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said in a statement.

Roque said that the government has deployed military and police forces and vehicles to help move the affected residents away from the danger zone, reports Xinhua news agency.

"We ask residents in the areas surrounding the volcano lake to remain vigilant, take precautionary measures, cooperate with their local authorities should the need for evacuation arise," Roque added.

Mark Timbal, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council spokesperson, said nearly 1,400 villagers in several towns have been evacuated since Thursday.

The number of affected villagers could rise if unrest intensifies.

Thursday's explosions of the Taal volcano occurred while villagers were still recovering from the January 2020 eruption that blanketed the province and nearby areas with ash.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) raised the alert level to 3 on a scale of 5 on Thursday after "a short-lived phreatomagmatic eruption occurred at the main crater" ejecting "a dark grayish plume that rose 1,000 meters".

The institute recorded four more "short phreatomagmatic bursts" on Thursday night, ejecting "short jetted plumes that rose 200 metres above the main crater lake.

"We expect a similar style of eruptions, but it is also possible that a larger explosion can happen, larger than Thursday," Phivolcs Director Renato Solidum said.

Solidum said the institute is closely monitoring if new magma will ascend from below, triggering "very explosive eruptions" similar to last year.

A phreatomagmatic eruption happens when magma and cooler water interact, triggering an explosion.

Since Thursday's eruptions, the institute also monitored several volcanic earthquakes and high levels of sulfur dioxide gas emissions and steam-rich plumes that rose as much as 3,000 metres high.

"Magma extruding from the main crater could drive explosive eruption," the institute warned.

In January 2020, the eruption of the Taal volcano affected over 500,000 people and caused billions of dollars in direct damage to infrastructure and agriculture in the provinces of Cavite, Laguna, Rizal and Batangas.

Taal is one of the 24 active volcanos that dot the Philippine archipelago.

Located along the "Pacific Ring of Fire" and the Pacific Cyclone Belt, at least 60 per cent of the Philippines' total land area is exposed to multiple hazards such as frequent earthquakes, floods, tsunami, landslides, volcanic eruptions, cyclones and annual monsoons.
Canberra, July 2 : Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Friday described the country's coronavirus vaccine rollout as a "phenomenal failure of public administration".

Turnbull, who served as Prime Minister from 2015 to 2018, said that Australia was "way behind" comparable countries, reports Xinhua news agency.

"I can't think of a bigger black and white failure of public administration than this," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

"Governments make lots of mistakes of course, as we all do, but this is something that was very doable." As of Friday, there had been 7.97 million coronavirus vaccines administered in Australia and about 8 per cent of the adult population had been fully vaccinated.

Despite the slow start to the rollout, the government insists that the program is on track and every adult who wants a vaccine will receive at least one dose by the end of 2021.

Turnbull, who retired from politics after being deposed by incumbent Prime Minister Scott Morrison in August 2018, also criticised the mixed messaging from federal and state governments around the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Health authorities have rejected Morrison's move to open the vaccine to anyone under the age of 40 against the advice of the expert panel on immunisations.

"It's mind-boggling. I mean, vaccine hesitancy is a problem everywhere and at every time, it is as though governments are trying to do their utmost to maximize it at the moment with all of the disagreements and confusion," Turnbull said.

"It's a mess. But the fact that you've got so many other premiers and chief medical officers disagreeing with it, and very vocally, obviously undermines confidence in the vaccine."

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Kabul, July 2 : Four policemen and 10 pro-government militiamen were killed in two separate Taliban-led attacks in northern Afghanistan, a local independent monitoring group said on Friday.

In Kunduz province, four policemen, including a police officer, were killed and five others captured in a Taliban attack on a security checkpoint in Tapa-e-Nasiri, an area in Police District 4 in the provincial capital Kunduz city, the group, Reduction in Violence (RiV) said on social media.

In the neighbouring Badakhshan province, 10 Public Uprising Forces, including two of the group divisional commanders, were killed when Taliban militants stormed their position in Yaftal district, Xinhua news agency quoted the RiV as saying.

The Public Uprising Forces, who are receiving support from Afghan security agencies, provide security and protect remote villages and districts around the country where the army and police have limited presence.

The northern Afghan provinces have been the scene of heavy clashes and battles in recent weeks as Taliban militants continue fighting against government forces and captured dozens of suburban districts, mostly in the northern region.

The fall of districts to the Taliban militants has sparked waves of criticism among locals, prompting thousands of people to take up arms and vow to fight alongside the security forces.
Tokyo, July 2 : Jail sentences of more than two are being sought by Japanese prosecutors for a US Army Special Forces veteran and his son who have admitted helping ousted Nissan Motor Co. Chairman Carlos Ghosn flee the country, media reports said on Friday.

According to the reports, a Tokyo court heard from the prosecutors they are seeking sentences of two years and 10 months for the former special forces veteran Michael Taylor, and two years and six months for his son Peter, reports Xinhua news agency.

The prosecutors' announcement followed the father-and-son pair on Tuesday telling the court they regretted helping Ghosn jump bail and flee Japan where the once-revered auto-tycoon was due to face charges of alleged financial misconduct.

The duo pleaded guilty in June to illegally aiding Ghosn's escape from Japan to Lebanon concealed in a large box aboard a private jet, which took off from an airport in western Japan.

One of the prosecutors on Friday described the Taylors' crime as "unprecedented" and "bold", according to the media reports, although the prison term sought was less than the maximum three years in jail that could have been appealed for.

Describing Ghosn's escape in December 2019 as a "sophisticated and bold crime", one of the prosecutors maintained that Michael Taylor played "a leading role" and that his responsibility is "extremely grave." "The case considerably infringed upon our country's criminal justice," the prosecutor was also quoted as saying.

At their first hearing on June 14, the two Americans pleaded guilty to helping Ghosn flee Japan while he was on bail pending his trial.

The Taylors had already admitted to the charges associated with Ghosn's audacious escape from Japan to avoid trial for charges of financial misconduct.

The prosecutors said the pair were paid $1.3 million to help Ghosn escape, which involved providing Ghosn illegal passage to Lebanon, one of three countries he is a national of, by smuggling him out of his residence in Tokyo and to Kansai International Airport via two hotels in late December 2019.

The father and son team, in full knowledge that Ghosn was prohibited from leaving Japan as part of his bail terms, hid him in a large box, which cleared Kansai airport security. Thereafter, the illicit cargo was flown to Turkey on a private jet.

At the request of Japanese prosecutors, the Taylors were arrested in Massachusetts in 2020 by US authorities.

They had fought extradition to Japan in US courts but ultimately lost their battle when their appeal was rejected by the US Supreme Court in February.

Once extradited, they were arrested and charged in Japan in March and have since been detained at the same jail in Tokyo where Ghosn was once held.

Ghosn, who holds Brazilian, French and Lebanese nationality, is accused of under-reporting his remuneration for years and for embezzling company funds.

He has denied all the charges, claiming company insiders conspired against him.

Japan has since been trying to detain him with the help of Interpol as Lebanon does not have an extradition treaty with Tokyo.

This means that Ghosn cannot be legally handed over to Japan without Lebanon first agreeing to it.
Chennai, July 2 : A timely signal from a distress alert transmitter (DAT) jointly developed by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Indian Coast Guard enabled the latter to save seven fishermen stranded in mid sea.

According to the Coast Guard, in a swift sea - air coordinated Search and Rescue Operation, it located and rescued the distressed fishing boat with seven crew onboard off Tillanchong Island, approximately 350 km south of Port Blair on Thursday.

The Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre (MRCC) Port Blair received an unregistered DAT alert at around 11.30 a.m. on June 30.

Since the alert was activated from an unregistered DAT, details of the boat and its owner were not available with the Coast Guard.

Soon it was gathered that the DAT was issued to fishing boat RSN-TWO and the boat with seven crew had left Port Blair on June 28 for fishing.

A co-ordinated search and rescue (SAR) operation was immediately launched and Coast Guard Ship C-422, Vishwast and Dornier aircraft were tasked for search in the area and the distressed boat was located off Tillanchong Island.

The fishing boat was towed by Coast Guard ship to Kamorta.

"The instant case has once again highlighted the importance of carriage of DATs by fishing boats and proved its efficacy in saving lives at sea in times of distress," Coast Guard said.

Developed jointly by ISRO and ICG, DAT is an indigenous, low cost and effective satellite transmitter built for fishermen which relays distress alerts to SAR authorities through INSAT satellites instantly with the press of a button.

Coast Guard, at various forums, has not only reiterated the importance of carriage of DAT by Indian fishermen but also emphasised on significance of DATs registration by fishermen for effecting timely SAR response.
Mumbai, July 2 : Opening up an exciting field of scientific study, a Mumbai-based scientist has formed a centre to study the mysteries and suspense shrouding Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) -- once sighted above Prime Minister Narendra Modi's residence in New Delhi -- to coincide with the World UFO Day-2021 (July 2), here on Friday.

It also marks the release of a major report in June 2021 by the US Department of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence, acknowledging the existence of UFOs, and how the Pentagon Report failed to explain 143 of the 144 UFOs sightings investigated in the past decade.

"Against this backdrop, the Indian Astrobiology Research Foundation has launched the 'IARF-Centre of Excellence for UFOs (ICEU)," IARF Head and scientist Pushkar G. Vaidya, told IANS.

To begin with, the ICEU will create an authentic, searchable database, cataloguing all UFOs sightings reported in the Indian media, and others that were ignored.

It will provide people a credible platform to submit their own UFO sightings which would be independently verified by the ICEU and its expert teams.

"The ICEU will conduct primary research and surveys on UFOs across the country and involve the people and international scientists on UFO discussions within the scientific parameters," explained Vaidya, 40, who is a scientist with over 25 years in astro-biology and related aspects.

Explaining the philosophy behind the ICEU, he said that UFOs have been spotted in Indian skies since long and recorded since the 1950s, though there have been no reports of genuine UFO landings or crashings, or alien creatures seen scurrying about anywhere.

Image Source: IANS News

"The World UFO Day is celebrated this day (July 02) to commemorate the controversially famed UFO crash on July 2, 1947 at Roswell, New Mexico in the USA Since then, UFOs have grabbed public imagination and led to lot of interest even among the global scientific communities," Vaidya said.

Although UFO sightings are being reported from various parts of India since 1954, the most famous one was in November 1996 when a group of aeronautical engineers witnessing UFOs for several days above the Kandivali suburb of north-west Mumbai.

"Interestingly, in June 2018, a UFO paid a visit to the PM's official residence in the capital, which was widely reported by the media and sent the Indian intelligence agencies into a tizzy," smiled Vaidya who authored a book "In Search Of Aliens" (1997) when he was 16 years old.

Prior to that, worried Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force brass wrote to the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2012, detailing over 100 UFO sightings near the famous Pangong Tso Lake in Ladakh.

"We plan to investigate in detail all such past and present events to get to the truth of the UFOs, their possible origins from alien civilisations, the implications for the country and humanity as a whole," Vaidya added.

Besides, there have been stray UFO sightings reported from Thane (adjoining Mumbai), Bengaluru, Kerala, Assam by individuals and now there are several amateur groups of 'UFO Hunters' in India who track and scout for such objects in space.

Image Source: IANS News

On the relevance of ICEU in the Indian context, Vaidya said: "The subject of UFO falls squarely within the stated definition of astro-biology which concerns the study of the origins, evolution and distribution of life in the universe, including the search for hitherto unknown or undetected intelligent extraterrestrial life." (Quaid Najmi can be contacted at: q.najmi@ians.in)

-- Syndicated from IANS
Islamabad, July 2 : In a bold decision, Pakistan has decided and announced that it will not provide any bases on its soil to the US to operate from, after its troops exit Afghanistan.

The decision came after the briefing of the National Security Committee, which was attended by senior members of the Parliament from both the government and opposition, along with the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), and the Directors General of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the Military Intelligence (MI).

The meeting continued for at least eight hours, where the committee members were given a detailed briefing on the security situation of the country and the region at large, the situation with India and the Kashmir issue, and Pakistan's role in the Afghan peace process, especially on the US demand to Pakistan for providing bases to operate after its withdrawal from Afghanistan.

During the all-important meeting, the members were informed that US seemed to be deliberately leaving a "mismanaged and unstable" Afghanistan as it wanted to undermine China, Pakistan and the region.

However, Pakistan has decided that it is ready to face any consequences of its decision to not provide any bases to the US.

"Pakistan is not going to give military bases to the US; we are not going to fight their proxy war. Nearly 70,000 people were martyred since the US did it the first time," said a member of the parliament, who was present during the briefing.

"The US is once again leaving behind an unfinished job," he added.

The parliamentarians were also informed that the reason why US has taken a quick decision to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan is because "it doesn't want to see peace in the region", said a parliamentarian.

Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and DG ISI, Lt Gen Faiz Hameed gave detailed presentations to the parliamentarians on what they called "Pakistan-sponsored and coordinated efforts for the Afghan peace process".

A senior lawmaker stated that Pakistan has tried its best to make the Taliban and Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani come to the table for talks. However, he added that since the US has announced its withdrawal date, the Taliban are not ready to sit down for talks.

"The US dream of introducing a democratic system could not be achieved as it is not acceptable to the Taliban, who wish to run the system based on Shariah," he added.
New Delhi, July 2 : Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit has said that his government's hands are clean with regard to the 'mysterious' arrival of fugitive Indian businessman Mehul Choksi, who is wanted in the Rs 13,500 crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case, to the Caribbean island nationon, local media reported.

According to Dominica News Online, Skerrit has labelled the claims of hatching a plot with the governments of Antigua and India as "total nonsense".

"To say that the government of Dominica and the government of Antigua along with India colluded in any way, give me a break, that's total nonsense. We don't get ourselves involved in those kinds of activities, those practices, not at all. I mean, that is absurd and we reject it and it is unfortunate that anybody would want to propagate this unsubstantiated claim by a gentleman who is before the courts," he contended.

Skerrit further vowed that his government will evenly apply the law irrespective of who is accused of committing crime.

He said that such was the case with the Iranian born, Dominican citizenship holder and diplomat, Alireza Zibahalat Monfared, who was wanted by the Iranian government for allegedly embezzling billions of dollars while the country evaded international oil sanctions.

Monfared was arrested in the Dominican Republic in 2017 following a lengthy international manhunt.

"You saw all this talk about Monfared. Had he stayed in Dominica at the time that the Iranian government had asked for him, we would have apprehended him," Skerrit stated, adding "There was a discussion and a decision to apprehend him so that the Iranian authorities could present to us the charges. Mr Monfared was a Dominican citizen but we hold a brief to the international law, our responsibilities and our obligations." Earlier, opposition leader from the United Workers Party (UWP), Lennox Linton, had alleged that the Dominican government was involved in a cover-up on behalf of the Iranian national and ex-Dominican diplomat, who was arrested on allegations of being involved in his country's biggest-ever corruption scandal.

He had claimed that the government of Dominica had refused to cooperate with the government of Iran on the extradition of Monfared to face trial.

Linton had alleged that the Iranian authorities had made their interest in Monfared known to the government of Dominica prior to January 20, 2016. He maintained that Monfared lived in Dominica until September 2016, months after January 20, 2016 on which date the government had said his diplomatic passport was revoked.

After the news of Monfared's arrest broke, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had released a statement on his status, saying that he became a citizen of Dominica, and eventually a diplomat, following a comprehensive due diligence investigation.

Skerrit went on to urge his political opponents, mainly the UWP supporters and its leader, to not be selective in matters they support, especially when it's of a similar nature.

"I'm hearing Dominicans, especially the opposition, talking about Mr Choksi. There's a young boy from Grand Bay facing extradition to the US, but we heard nothing from the opposition in that matter. So we cannot want to be treating different people differently depending on who they are or how much money they may have. All of us are subject to the law, irrespective of our position or how much money we have or we don't have," Skerrit argued.

The Prime Minister said that his government will allow the court to carry out its process with regard to Choksi and gave the assurance that his rights and obligations will be respected by Dominica.

Skerrit also expressed support for the government of Antigua in its move to revoke Choksi's citizenship.

Choksi, who is wanted in India by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED), had gone missing from Antigua on May 23, sparking a massive manhunt. He was later captured in Dominica.

His lawyers have contended that he was abducted forcibly, and was subjected to physical torture. Choksi is facing charges of entering Dominica illegally.

On June 25, during the hearing at the Magistrate's Court, Choksi was denied a 'doctor of his choice' as was requested by his legal team in Dominica.

Choksi had acquired Antiguan citizenship in 2017 through the investment programme. He had left India on January 4, 2018, days before the CBI registered a case into the PNB fraud case. He along with his nephew Nirav Modi is wanted in the case.
New Delhi, July 2 : The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHWF) partnered with Indic language social media platform, ShareChat and short video app Moj to organise a webinar to spread awareness about Covid appropriate behaviour and the world's largest vaccination drive.

The webinar aimed to make influencers act as catalysts, and to educate and share reliable information with their community of followers. It was held on the occasion of World Social Media Day, celebrated on June 30 each year.

During the webinar, an actionable Toolkit was also shared, which listed out the steps that social influencers can take to encourage Covid appropriate behaviour and taking the vaccine. The webinar encouraged the social influencers to act as advocates to amplify and share accurate and credible information on Covid-19, counter vaccine hesitancy and misinformation.

"As influencers, you represent the youth of this country, and we need your support to make an impact in disseminating factual and evidence-based information to reach people far and wide and help the country to come out of Covid-19 successfully," Joint Secretary, Health, Lav Agarwal, said.

ShareChat and Moj's Chief Commercial Officer Ajit Varghese said: "We are excited to work with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and play a part in their effort to fight Covid-19. The event was a massive success with 400+ influencers attending the webinar. We now hope the influencers with their massive reach on the platforms, will put in their efforts to fight Covid by driving home the importance of safety measures, drop vaccine hesitancy and misinformation." ShareChat, with over 160 million monthly active users in India, allows users to share their opinions, record their lives and make new friends - all within the comfort of their native language.

With the highest monthly active user base, Moj has emerged a market leader in the Indian short video space.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Mumbai, July 2 : Actor Priyank Sharma, who plays Rahat in the show "Puncch Beat 2", will be seen performing mixed martial arts (MMA) in the show, for which he attended special workshops.

"I hope people appreciate the hard work we are putting in. I am not just an actor, I have tried my level best to give way more than that even when fighting. This time we have included MMA, as you guys can see in the trailer," Priyank said.

The show, which streams on AltBalaji, also stars Siddharth Sharma.

"I believe this time it is not just about acting for me. It is about me evolving entirely as an actor, as somebody who can give much more than acting to a project. So I've given more than just acting to this project. I hope the audience appreciates it," Priyank added.
Srinagar, July 2 : Two more terrorists have been killed in an ongoing encounter between militants and security forces at the Hanjin Rajpora area in South Kashmir's Pulwama district on Friday, taking the toll of terrorists killed to five, officials said.

The district commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba and a foreign terrorist are among the five terrorists eliminated.

"The district commander of LeT, Nishaz Lone alias Khitab, and one Pakistani terrorist are among the five terrorists killed in the Pulwama encounter," the police said.

IGP Kashmir, Vijay Kumar, has termed the operation as a big success.

Earlier, the firefight between the terrorists and the security forces took place after a joint team of the police and the army cordoned off the area and launched a search operation on the basis of specific information about the presence of terrorists.

As the security forces zeroed in on the spot where the terrorists were hiding, they came under a heavy volume of fire that triggered the encounter.
Thiruvananthapuram, July 2 : The Mayor of Kerala's cultural capital Thrissur is peeved that police officials do not only salute him when he passes through the city in his official vehicle, but "also turn away".

Not one to lie low, M.K.Varghese, a former air force official, has taken his complaint to the new state police chief Anil Kant with a demand that orders be passed to rectify this "mistake".

"This salute is not for me, instead it is for the post that I occupy. In my defence career I have given and taken salutes. I have studied the protocols and it is very clear that in the Corporation area, according to the protocol, the Mayor is third in the list after the Governor and the Chief Minister," he said.

"What I have noticed is while the police officials here salute the legislators, MP and other police officials, who are all very lower in the list of protocol, the Mayor is being denied this. This is wrong and I have raised the issue with the new state police chief. Let us wait and see what happens," he added.

Varghese, who won the civic polls as a rebel Congress candidate, was a surprise choice for the Mayor as in the 54 divisions of the Corporation, the Left won in 24, the Congress in 23, and the BJP in six.

The Left offered Varghese the post of the Mayor for the first two years and he accepted it. In December, his first year will be over.
Kolkata, July 2 : Amid protests by BJP MLAs, West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar on Friday had to cut short his much-speculated maiden address in the Assembly after the state elections on the opening day of Budget Session, completing it in just four minutes.

The BJP MLAs protested because there was no mention of post-poll violence in Bengal in the Governor's speech.

Dhankhar came to the Assembly at 1.55 pm and entered the hall after offering floral tribute at the statue of B.R. Ambedkar. But as he started to read the speech prepared by the state government, the BJP MLAs started protesting, initially from their own seats before rushing to the well of the House with posters and placards in their hands.

Dhankhar, who was occasionally interrupted, was eventually forced to stop his speech after just five minutes of starting it.

Dhankhar then left the hall flanked by Speaker Biman Banerjee and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

The Governor, who recently had a controversial debate with Banerjee over the speech prepared for him for the opening day of the Assembly session, was seen speaking to the Chief Minister for 3-4 minutes.

BJP MLA and Leader of Opposition in the House, Suvendu Adhikari, said that the MLAs from the saffron camp protested during the Governor's speech because it was written by the state government without any mention of the post-poll violence in Bengal.

Interestingly, on the 13th page of the 14-page speech, there is a mention of some people who are termed as 'opportunists', and it has been said that 'some people of this kind' are trying to create disturbance.

"They are spreading fake news and fake videos and are trying to divide the society. The government will not accept this and strong action will be initiated against them," it is said.

"We have won 77 seats. We protested during the speech of the Governor because it has been written by the state government. It doesn't mention anything about the post-poll violence. We have shown pictures of 41 people who have been killed in the violence while many women have been raped, but there is no mention of that in the speech. We respect the Governor. He also protested against the post-poll violence and we respect his stand. But the speech that he delivered was prepared by the Cabinet of Mamata Banerjee. The Governor had no say in it," Adhikari said.

The speech had triggered controversy from the beginning. On Monday, Dhankhar had alleged that he wanted deliberations on certain portions of the speech with Banerjee, because the said portions won't be acceptable by the people.

However, Banerjee had rejected the proposal, saying that the speech cannot be changed because it has been approved by the Cabinet.

Sources close to the Governor indicated that Dhankhar also wanted the incidents of post-poll violence to be included in the speech, but the state government was strongly against it.

This triggered speculation whether Dhankhar would read the speech prepared by the state or deviate from the convention and read his own speech.
New Delhi, July 2 : Telugu filmmaker SS Rajamouli, who is currently shooting for his multi-lingual film "RRR", tweeted complaint about the state of affairs at Delhi airport.

The filmmaker landed in the Capital on Friday and wasn't pleased to see lack of facilities.

He tweeted: "Dear @DelhiAirport, arrived at 1am by lufthanasa flight. Forms were given to fill for the RT PcR test. All the passenges are sitting on the floors or propping against the walls to fill the forms. Not a pretty sight. Providing tables is a simple service." He further wrote: "And surprised to find so many stray dogs in the hangar outside the exit gate. Again not a great first impression of India for the foreigners. Please look into it. Thank you." The official Twitter handle of Delhi International airport replied to Rajamouli's tweet: "Dear Mr. Rajamouli, thank you for your valuable feedback and this provides us the opportunity for improvement. We have desks at the designated areas for RT-PCR-related purposes; however, increased number of desks and visibility at other locations will improve experience on arrival and our team is looking into this on an urgent basis." Rajamouli's "RRR" stars Ram Charan, JR NTR, Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn. Ahooting for the film resumed recently.
New Delhi, July 2 : The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday said that it has filed a supplementary charge sheet in connection with the Rose Valley chit fund scam against five people, including the company's then Chairman and Director Gautam Kundu.

The CBI said that the supplementary charge sheet was filed before the District and Sessions Judge in Tripura's Gomati district against Rose Valley Real Estates and Construction Ltd (RVRECL), Kundu, and former Directors Shibamoy Dutta, Ashok Kumar Saha, and Ram Lal Goswami.

A CBI spokesperson said that the investigation revealed that the accused had allegedly collected huge public funds amounting Rs 31.49 crore in the form of deposits by issuing certificates in the names of plot or land bookings, in violation of the Companies Act and SEBI regulations.

It was further alleged that the accused formed several other companies under the said Kolkata-based private company and became the Directors of these companies, the spokesperson added.

"The accused diverted the money in the group companies knowingly that these companies were loss-making entities and opened several bank accounts in the name of the company, became signatories of these bank accounts and transferred or diverted the fund as per their own interest," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said that probe also revealed that the accused used to publicise the "high profitability" of the group, contrary to the facts and viability of the business.

He said that they appointed huge number of agents, one above the other, and induced them to collect deposits by alluring them with high percentage of commissions and incentives in violation of Companies (Acceptance of Deposits) Rules.

"They used to run an illegal money circulation scheme which was banned under Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act. They also induced the investors in investing money in various schemes of the said private company," he said.

The CBI official said that the amount invested by the investors was diverted to loss making sister concerns of the group.

"The investors of accused company's Amarpur Branch, Tripura were cheated through non-refund of their investment and Rs 4.81 crore was allegedly misappropriated by the said accused," he said.

The CBI had registered the case on the orders of Tripura High Court.
San Francisco, July 2 : Tech giant Apple has released the first public beta of macOS Monterey, only a day after releasing the other public betas.

macOS Monterey is an update focused on making features work better together and streamlining workflows across the operating system.

The first public beta of macOS Monterey is likely identical to the second developer beta, AppleInsider reported.

The public builds can be acquired from the Apple Beta Software Programme web portal.

The new operating systems were announced during Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).

The new features focus on socialising, device customisation and Focus. The second developer beta unlocked SharePlay, a new feature in FaceTime that enables users to share video and music content during a call.

Testers running macOS Monterey can try out the Shortcuts app with Automator actions import and shell scripts.

Other new features include the ability to AirPlay content from an iPhone to the Mac and Live Text in Photos.
New Delhi, July 2 : The Supreme Court on Friday declined to stay the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) Bangalore's decision to horizontally reserve 25 percent of seats for students domiciled in Karnataka.

A bench of Justices L. Nageswara Rao and Ravindra Bhat refused the stay on NLSIU decision and listed the matter for further hearing on August 2.

The Karnataka government has moved the top court challenging the Karnataka High Court judgment which had struck down the 25 percent domicile reservation introduced at the university.

Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing for a petitioner, sought a stay on the NLSIU notification giving effect to the reservation policy. After hearing arguments in the matter, the bench refused to stay the notification. Senior advocate Sajan Poovayya represented NLSIU in the matter.

The university, earlier this week, announced the implementation of the domicile reservation from the academic year 2021-22, as part of its inclusion and expansion plan approved in April/May this year.

The Karnataka High Court, in September last year, had quashed the NLSIU Amendment Act, 2020, through which 25 percent reservation was introduced for students domiciled in the state, holding that it was ultra vires and contrary to the provisions of the parent NLSIU Act. The court had said that state government did not have the power to introduce domicile reservation at the university.

The state government has challenged this, claiming that the High Court erred in observing that NLSIU is not a state institution and thus, not within its control.
New Delhi, July 2 : Three Trinamool Congress MPs on Friday questioned the alleged meeting of Solicitor General Tushar Mehta with Leader of Opposition in West Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, who is facing probe in Narada case and Saradha chit fund scam, and asked Prime Minister to take necessary action to remove him from the post.

Mehta, however, denied having any meeting with Adhikari, but admitted that the Bengal lawmaker had come to his office-cum-residence unannounced at 3 p.m. on Thursday.

"Since I was already in a pre-scheduled meeting in my chamber, my staff requested him to sit in the waiting room of my office. When my meeting was over, my PPS informed me about his arrival. I requested my PPS to convey to Mr Adhikari my inability to meet him and apologise as he had to wait," he said.

Mehta added that Adhikari then left without insisting on meeting with him. "Question of my meeting with Adhikari therefore did not arise," he said.

In a joint letter, Trinamool MPs Derek O' Brien, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy and Mahua Moitra said Adhikari is an accused in various offences being investigated by the CBI and the ED and "such meeting between an accused in grave offences and with the Solicitor General who is advising such investigating agencies by whom the accused is investigated, is in direct conflict of interest with the statutory duties of Solicitor General of India".

The MPs alleged that Mehta providing an opportunity of audience to Adhikari "not only reeks of impropriety but also raises the question of integrity and taints the post occupied by the Solicitor General".
Hyderabad, July 2 : Actor Sundeep Kishan's recent Telugu film "A1 Express" was releases in Hindi on YouTube on Wednesday. Within two days of release, the film is trending in the top 10 list.

Besides India, Sundeep's film is trending in Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Within two days of release it had already received over 15 million views online.

"There is no better feeling than being celebrated for your art work as an artiste. I am nothing but grateful for all this love," Sundeep tells IANS.

Meanwhile, the actor is gearing up for his action film "Gully Rowdy", directed by G. Nageswara Reddy, to open.

Besides this, he has Vi Anand's Sci-fi film "SK28" and "Maayavan Reloaded" in the pipeline.
Mumbai, July 2 : Scientists at NMIMS University, Mumbai, have developed a battery-operated reusable mask that offers protection from airborne human pathogens.

While regular masks protect from aerogel and large dust particles, they do not protect against most human pathogens.

On the contrary, the new mask is four-layered cotton with a metallic mesh, which acts as an electrical filter. During inhaling and exhaling, the pathogens coming in contact with the mask get neutralised instantly, ensuring complete protection to the user.

The mask is reusable, self-sterilising, and environment-friendly. The battery lasts for more than six months, if used with proper care, and is replaceable. This mask replaces more than 240 regular masks reducing the environmental burden, and is thus eco-friendly.

"We have used a lithium button battery, which can be used and thrown away. It can last up to six to eight months," Neetin Desai, Dean of NMIMS' Sunandan Divatia School of Science in Mumbai, told IANS.

"Under laboratory conditions, when continuously used up to 72 hrs, the mask showed 99.9 per cent inhibition of bacterial and fungal growth," Desai added.

The masks will be commercially rolled out and marketed by pharma company Milton Group from next week. It will be priced between Rs 800 to Rs 1,000, he noted.
New Delhi, July 2: China has noticed with concern Indias test of its home-grown "aircraft- carrier killer "ballistic missile, Agni-P, which has left Beijing wondering whether New Delhi has found an equaliser to its once feared DF-21 D missile.

The Hong Kong based South China Morning Post (SCMP), while raising the question on whether India's nuclear capable Agni-P medium range ballistic missile test- fired from an island in the Bay of Bengal matches China's DF-21D "aircraft carrier killer" weapon, it has, nevertheless, also sought to underplay its significance.

The daily pointed out that the Agni-P would not be able to target major Chinese cities, Beijing or Shanghai. But citing Indian media reports, it said that the new weapons could, nevertheless, strike enemy armadas in the Indo-Pacific region.

Analysts point out that so far China has self-congratulated itself for developing two unrivalled "aircraft carrier killer" ballistic missiles-the DF-21D and DF-26B. The DF-26D, said to be the world's first anti-ship ballistic missile, can target aircraft carriers within a range of 1800 kilometres with conventional warheads. But the more potent DF-26 B, with a reach of around 5000 kilometres, can attack with atomic warheads. Not only can it target aircraft carrier task forces, it can also strike the US concentration of forces in the island of Guam. Netizens therefore also call the DF-26 B as "Guam killer" or "Guam Express".

But the testing of the Agni-P missile overturns the strategic equation. The Agni-P has a range of between 1,000 and 2,000km (621-1,242 miles). It can be transported on trucks or by rail, greatly increasing its mobility and response time.

The SCMP quoted former PLA instructor Song Zhongping, as saying that the Agni-P "probably does not aim at the big cities of China or Pakistan, but tactical targets like armoured vehicle clusters or airports, for which it could do a better job." Yet, he did not doubt India's will to turn the Agni-P into its full-fledged "carrier-killer" role. "Hitting a warship with a ballistic missile is a complex systematic project. It takes not only the missile itself, but also many other support systems - such as satellite navigation, terminal target identification, guidance and manoeuvring systems," he said. "I believe India has this demand and willingness to work hard towards this goal, but it will take time." China has developed the DF-21D and DF26-B to undermine the US domination in the Indo-Pacific region on account of its much larger fleet of aircraft carriers, which can carry out offensive missions and exercise "sea control" in the region.

Unsurprisingly, the US, with the support of Russia, wants these two weapons to be scrapped under a new Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) treaty, by drawing arms control commitments from China. The previous INF treaty, now defunct, was an arms control agreement between the US and Russia to eliminate all missiles below the range of 5000 kilometres. But with China now developing its own arsenal of intermediate missiles, and a new cold war on the horizon, the US insists that China should also be a party to a new INF treaty.

A conversation of a new INF treaty is likely to be a part of future talks between the US and Russia following last month's meeting between President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Geneva.

(This content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative/
New Delhi, July 2: The Government of India has constituted a high-powered composite committee to address the undercurrents of unrest in sections of the populations in Ladakh, comprising the Buddhist-dominated Leh district and the Muslim-dominated Kargil district, with regard to creation of the Union Territory (UT) out of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act in August 2019.

Creation of the UT, independent of the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir, was a long time demand of the majority of the population in Leh. Contrarily, a large number of the population in Kargil seemed to be in favour of continuation with J&K. Even after the UT of Ladakh was created, the people of Leh district demanded a Bodoland-type hill council with powers under the 6th schedule of the Constitution of India. Many of them were not satisfied with a UT without legislature.

For the first in the last about two years, the people of Kargil have agreed to be a part of Ladakh subject to the condition that the UT of Ladakh is upgraded to a separate State with its own Assembly on the pattern of Sikkim in 1975.

On an invitation from the Centre, an eleven-member delegation of the Kargil Democratic Council (KDC) met the Union Minister of State for Home, GK Reddy, in New Delhi on Thursday. According to the participants, all the issues were discussed threadbare and the Government of India constituted a high-powered panel, with representation from the Centre as well as Leh and Kargil districts, with the responsibility of finding a solution acceptable to the people of both the districts and both the religious communities.

The committee headed by the union MoS Home GK Reddy would include senior functionaries from the MHA, the UT administration of Ladakh, Chief Executive Councillors and Chairpersons of the Leh and Kargil hill councils, the representatives of the two political conglomerates from Leh and Kargil besides the Lok Sabha member from Ladakh.

Constitution of the committee was announced by Mr Reddy after a 150-minute long meeting with the 11-member KDA delegation in New Delhi on Thursday. Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla as well as the Additional and Joint Secretaries looking after the UTs of J&K and Ladakh, were also present. Well-placed authoritative sources said that Mr Reddy and his team would also have a discussion with the Leh conglomerate headed by Thupstan Chhewang. Chewang is a former member of Parliament and a former leader of the Ladakh Buddhist Association.

The KDA delegation included its co-chairpersons-Qamar Ali Akhoon (ex-Minister and the National Conference MLA from Kargil) and Asgar Ali Karbalai (ex-MLA of Congress from Kargil), former Minister and MLA from Zanaskar Feroz Khan, who is currently CEC and Chairman of Ladakh Area Hill Development Council Kargil, Sajad Kargili, the representative of Islamiya School Kargil (ISK), who had contested and lost the 2019 Lok Sabha election as an Independent candidate, Sheikh Bashir, the representative of Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust (IKMT), Aga Syed Mohammad, the representative of the Noorbakshia Shia group, Shah Nawaz, the representative of Ahle Sunnat Wa al-Jamaat, Zakir Hussain of Student Education Movement of Kargil, Haji Haniefa Jan, NC's District President of Kargil, Nasir Hussain Munshi, District President of Congress in Kargil and Syed Ahmad Rizvi of Anjuman-e-Sahib-uz-Zamaan.

"The discussions were free and frank and were held in a cordial atmosphere. This was for the first time that the leaders from Kargil got such an opportunity and passionate hearing at an all-important platform of the Government of India. All the invitees spoke their hearts and Mr Reddy as well as his team took necessary notes", one of the participants revealed. "The participants in one voice demanded a separate State with empowered Assembly for Ladakh on the pattern of Sikkim if reunification of the Kargil district, comprising Kargil and Zanskar Assembly segments of J&K's erstwhile Assembly, with J&K was not possible and restoration of Statehood and Articles 370 and 35-A was a problem for being sub judice or for other reasons".

The participant from Kargil said that KDA's demand of empowered Statehood and legislature for Ladakh was indigenous and independent of the politics associated with the same subject in Kashmir and Jammu. "When we demand restoration of 370 and 35-A, it is purely in the context of safeguards of our land, government jobs and culture and shouldn't be linked with any community or religion", he asserted.

"The UT without legislature means nothing. Fortunately the people of Leh have also begun to realise it, though late".

(This content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative/
Patna : National Investigation Agency (NIA) team arrives at Jai Prakash Narayan airport with Darbhanga parcel blast accused Salim, Md Nasir Khan, Imran Malik, before appearing in Civil Court, in Patna on Friday, July 02 2021. (Photo: AFTAB ALAM SIDDI Image Source: IANS News

Patna : National Investigation Agency (NIA) team arrives at Jai Prakash Narayan airport with Darbhanga parcel blast accused Salim, Md Nasir Khan, Imran Malik, before appearing in Civil Court, in Patna on Friday, July 02 2021. (Photo: AFTAB ALAM SIDDI Image Source: IANS News

Patna : National Investigation Agency (NIA) team arrives at Jai Prakash Narayan airport with Darbhanga parcel blast accused Salim, Md Nasir Khan, Imran Malik, before appearing in Civil Court, in Patna on Friday, July 02 2021. (Photo: AFTAB ALAM SIDDI Image Source: IANS News

New Delhi, July 2 : In another breakthrough in its probe in the June 17 explosion at Bihar's Darbhanga railway station, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has arrested two more people from Uttar Pradesh's Shamli district.

An NIA spokesperson told IANS: "We have arrested Mohammad Salim Ahmed aka Haji Salim and Kafil aka Kafeel, both residents of Kairana." The two were arrested in a joint operation with the Uttar Pradesh Police, after investigation revealed that they are key conspirators in the case.

The official said that arrested Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists, brothers Nisar Khan and Imran Malik had met at the residence of Ahmed in February 2021 and finalised the plan of planting an IED in a moving train so casualties and extensive damage to property can be caused.

Terming Ahmed a close associate of Pakistan-based LeT operative Iqbal Kana, the NIA official said: "Salim Ahmed was acting as a key intermediary between Iqbal Kana and arrested brothers Nasir and Imran. He was also involved in channelling funds sent by Iqbal Kana that were used in executing the terror act." A source said that Ahmed had visited Pakistan on a number of occasions, and the agency will also probe the hawala transaction dealings between the LeT handlers based in Pakistan and their members in India.

The source revealed that Ahmed has also been questioned by the team of Intelligence Bureau and several other agencies.

According to NIA sources, he had apparently recruited the brothers and paid Rs 1.6 lakh for making the bomb and planting it in the train from Secunderabad to Darbhanga.

Earlier in the day, NIA sources had said that several people from Shamli are on the list of suspects of the anti-terror probe agency as their links with the LeT has been found.

The NIA on June 30 arrested Khan and Malik from Hyderabad for their role in the blast, and recovered incriminating materials and multiple digital devices during the searches conducted at the premises of two.

An NIA official said that the items recovered from their premises included various documents pertaining to the procedure for fabrication of IEDs and materials used for making of IEDs.

Another source related to probe said that Khan was the person who made the liquid bomb used in the explosion at the Darbhanga railway station.

The NIA has claimed that Khan had travelled to Pakistan in 2012 and had received training from Lashkar handlers on manufacturing of IED from locally available chemicals. Khan was in constant touch with his handlers in Pakistan, the source said.

Highlighting the role of Malik, the source said that the LeT handlers had sent the video of making IED on his mobile. "Malik made the IED bomb after seeing the video which was sent to him by LeT handlers and then that bomb was kept in the Secunderabad-Darbhanga train," the source said.

Following the blast, a case was registered in Bihar's Muzaffarpur on June 17. The NIA had taken over the probe on June 24.

The agency had said on Wednesday that preliminary investigation has revealed a trans-national conspiracy hatched by top LeT operatives to execute terror acts across India and cause large scale damage to life and property.

It said that acting under directions of Pakistan-based handlers, Khan and Malik had fabricated an incendiary IED, packed it in a parcel of cloth, and booked it in a long-distance train from Secunderabad to Darbhanga. This, the NIA said, was aimed at causing explosion and fire in a running passenger train, resulting in huge loss of lives and property.
New Delhi, July 2 : Uttarakhand Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat is likely to resign as he is unable to get himself elected to the state Assembly within the stipulated six month period, sources said on Friday.

Sources said that Rawat, who was in Delhi where he had met BJP chief J.P. Nadda twice in three days, on Friday left for Dehra Dun and will submit his resignation to the Governor.

A BJP insider said that due to the constitutional crisis, the party has decided to replace Rawat with a sitting MLA and a legislature party meeting will be held soon for the election of the next Chief Minister after he submits his resignation to the Governor.

Rawat, who had met Nadda and Union Home Minister Amit Shah late on Wednesday night, is currently the MP from the Garhwal Lok Sabha seat, and as per the rules, needs to be sworn in as an elected MLA within six months of taking over as the Chief Minister.

Earlier in the day, Rawat met the BJP chief again to discuss the political situation and the need of his election to the state Assembly before September 10 to remain in office.

Before leaving for Uttarakhand capital, Rawat said that holding of bypolls will be decided by the Election Commission and he will follow whatever the Central leadership of the party decides.

BJP national General Secretary and Uttarakhand in-charge, Dushyant Gautam told IANS that there was no discussion of Uttarakhand by-polls held at the party level.

A party leader explained that after the meeting with the Central leadership, the indications are that it will be difficult for the Chief Minister to continue in the office.

Sources said that Nadda had explained to Rawat that Section 151 of Representation of the People Act, 1951 has created hindrance in his election to the Assembly.

"In an hour-long meeting on Wednesday night at Home Minister Amit Shah's residence, all the possibilities were discussed and Rawat was explained about exception provided under Section 151 of Act for not holding by-elections -- if the remainder of the term in relation to the vacancy is less than a year or if the Election Commission, in consultation with the Centre, certifies that it is difficult to hold the by-election within the said period," a party insider said.
Mumbai, July 2 : TV host and actor Vishal Malhotra has collaborated with artist Ishita Banerjee to release an Non Fungible Token (NFT). He is the first Indian actor to collaborate with an artist to do so. The art is a depiction of Vishal's 25 years in Bollywood and the most popular characters he has portrayed over these years. The NFT was sold for 2.5 ETH.

Non Fungible Token is a form on an online art gallery where sale happens through crypto currency.

The animated piece is knit with background music featuring Vishal's voice. The interest started coming in within 11 seconds and the first bid was made within 45 minutes after the auction went live. Along with the NFT, the buyer gets a live chat with Vishal and a possible Meet and Greet session, depending on the Covid situation.

"(I am) Excited to collaborate with an NFT artist as the first Indian actor, where I am the subject of the art piece that depicts the characters I have played in my journey as an actor. I have lent my voice in the background music of the artwork as well," Vishal tells IANS.

He is thrilled about meeting people who win the bid, for a live video chat session.

"What's interesting is that it also helps me connect with people who buy the collection. They get a chance for a Meet and Greet depending on the Covid situation or get an interaction live/online session. A bid that started at approx 0.5 eth (700 USD) finally sold within 24 hours for 2.5 eth (5500 USD) -- that's five times the listed price. The buzz around this historic NFT drop was so much that it created an intense bidding war. My next NFT drops early next week and I've already been getting messages with bids," he says.
Dharamsala, July 2 : Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has applauded the non-violent way of life propagated by the Jain tradition, one of India's ancient spiritual traditions.

"Your organisation has the potential to promote the principles of non-violence, including vegetarianism," said the Dalai Lama, adding the practitioners of Jainism must set a good example of promoting non-violence and compassion, including the promotion of vegetarianism in today's world.

Lamenting the exploitation and killing of animals by humans, the spiritual leader, in a special virtual message delivered to mark the 21st Biennial Jaina Convention, warned that if such practices continue in the long run, the ecology will inevitably suffer irreparable damage.

"It is up to an individual person to decide. However, in our monastic institutions we are serving complete vegetarian food," said the Dalai Lama while expressing his appreciation for the values propagated by the Jain tradition.
Bengaluru, July 2 : Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday ruled out any cut in excise duty levied on petroleum products for now.

Addressing a press conference here, she said that there is no such proposal at the present to reduce prices of petroleum.

"When the international price of crude oil is higher, we have to increase the prices and when the international price is lower, we have to decrease the prices here too. This is a market mechanism which is followed by oil marketing companies. We have given them the freedom," she said in response to a question.

Sitharaman added that the Centre is spending on providing free food grains to the poor besides spending money on vaccines and healthcare infrastructure. "So, state governments can give relief by reducing taxes or levies on petrol," she said.

She also said that petroleum can only be brought under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime only if the GST Council so decides.
New Delhi, July 2 : In a big embarrassment to the Enforcement Directorate (ED), the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said on Friday that it has arrested two officials of the financial probe agency from Gujarat in connection with an alleged graft case.

A CBI source told IANS, "Two officials of the ED have been arrested from Ahmedabad while accepting Rs 5 lakh as the first installment of a Rs 75 lakh bribe." The arrested officials have been identified as P.K. Singh, posted as Deputy Director, and Bhuvanesh Kumar, posted as Assistant Director with the ED.

It has been alleged that they had demanded Rs 75 lakh from the complainant to settle a bank fraud case.
Mumbai, July 2 : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has arrested a prominent Navi Mumbai builder in a case pertaining to money laundering of Rs 50 crore, officials said here on Friday.

Monarch Universal Group's Director Gopal Amarlal Thakur was nabbed on Thursday and produced before a Special PMLA Court which sent him to ED custody till July 8.

The ED probe came after the Maharashtra Police had lodged a case criminal against Thakur and the MUG for allegedly cheating and duping flat buyers.

As per the investigations, the builder collected the money from the flat buyers but did not register the same in their names even though a long time had elapsed.

Later, it transpired that the company had sold the same flats to multiple buyers without their knowledge.

It also emerged that the company mortgaged these flats and availed loans from a NBFC without the knowledge of the original flat buyers, after which the MUG diverted and siphoned off the funds from the project to various other persons/entities.

A probe is underway to track the funds trail and the proceeds of the crime besides the involvement of others in the scam.

The MUG - run by Thakur, his brother Hasmukh and others - has been engaged in several building construction projects in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai and Thane, and facing several other cases and litigation pertaining to alleged cheating and fraudulent practices against flat buyers, including some NRIs.
Chandigarh, July 2 : The British Deputy High Commissioner in Chandigarh, Caroline Rowett, on Friday called on Haryana Deputy Chief Minister, Dushyant Chautala, here and held discussions on a wide range of issues, including strengthening cooperation in the fields of electric vehicles, civil aviation and agritech.

Chautala apprised Rowett about the Haryana government's aim to ensure inclusive development, both in rural and urban areas. He said the state has a futuristic approach for growth and development and is working on drafting aerospace and e-vehicle policies, among others.

He said the draft policies have exciting prospects that cater to land and infrastructure subsidy benefit, pre and post-commencement approvals, power, property, tax and other fiscal benefits.

"Our government is committed to make Haryana an investment destination for which the government is making efforts. Through PPP (public-private partnership), many projects like flying training school are on the cards," an official statement said quoting Chautala.

"We are already one of the leading manufacturers in the automobile sector and now with these progressive policies, we will be leaders in other sectors as well," he added.

Rowett on her part assured extensive support for the upcoming projects, especially the e-vehicle policy, for which inputs will be shared before its final draft.

She said the futuristic approach of the Haryana government is impressive as she appreciated the drafted policies.

Rowett added that she is hopeful to see the changing face of the state with combined efforts.
Patna, July 2 : A journalist working with a private media organisation in Uttar Pradesh was set on fire in Bihar's Siwan district on Friday as the victim was in love with a girl whose parents disapproved of their relationship.

The victim has been identified as Ramu, a native of Orai in Uttar Pradesh's Jalaun district. He had gone to the Kanhauli village in Siwan district, which comes under the MH Nagar Hasanpura police station, to meet his girlfriend Poonam Kumari on Friday morning.

Jitendra Pandey, the Siwan block SDPO, said the victim was involved in a verbal duel with the family members of Poonam.

"The situation turned so ugly that Poonam's family members allegedly poured oil over him and set him on fire. When Poonam tried to save him, she also received burn injuries," Pandey said on the basis of Poonam's statement to Bihar police.

Both Ramu and Poonam have sustained severe burn injuries and are admitted to a primary health centre in Hasanpur.

Poonam has revealed that after setting Ramu on fire, the accused kept him in a room and fled from the spot after locking the door from outside.

Ramu and Poonam are in a relationship for the last two years and the former used to visit the latter's house to meet her. The family members of Poonam were not pleased with Ramu's visits to their house. Despite their displeasure, he used to regularly go there.

"We have recovered a press identity card from Ramu's pocket, which has been issued by the Uttar Pradesh Public Relations department," Pandey said.

"The accused are at large now. We have formed a team to nab them," he added.
Chennai, July 2 : The Madras High Court on Friday asked why it should not ask the single-member commission probing the death of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa to speed up its work as it heard a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) seeking its winding-up.

The Commission, headed by Justice (retd) A. Arumughaswamy, was constituted on August 25, 2017, and was supposed to complete its hearing within three months and submit a detailed report in both English and Tamil. However, the period of the commission's functioning was extended from time to time.

Thondan Subramani cited these extensions in his PIL, seeking that the court cease the operations of the Commission and prevent the huge loss of money for the state government.

A bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy, however, wondered as to why they should not direct the Justice Arumughaswamy Commission to complete the inquiry and to file a report in three months' time.

The management of the Apollo Hospital where the former Chief Minister died had approached the Supreme Court regarding the correctness of the commission's inquiry particularly the medical treatment provided to her. In 2019, the Supreme Court had stayed the entire proceedings of the commission following another petition moved by the Apollo hospital.

The petitioner, in his plea, said that there was no progress in the activities of the commission but the taxpayer's money was being spent. He also noed that neither the state government nor the commission had moved the Supreme Court to vacate the interim stay.

The court admitted the plea and directed the state government to file its report in six weeks' time on the PIL.
Hyderabad, July 2 : Stressing the need for conservation of endangered species, Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu on Friday called upon scientists at LaCONES here to develop assisted reproductive technologies for increasing population of hangul deer in Kashmir, wild buffaloes in Chhattisgarh and red pandas in Darjeeling.

He made the suggestion during a visit to LaCONES, a laboratory of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), for the conservation of endangered species.

Naidu noted that scientists at LaCONES have developed technologies for assisted reproduction and have successfully reproduced black buck, spotted deer and rock pigeon using these advanced technologies.

"In Nehru Zoological Park, endangered mouse deer have been successfully raised from a few individuals to more than 250. The deer have now been successfully released in the forests of Amarabad. Similar efforts should be extended for hangul deer in Kashmir, wild buffaloes in Chhattisgarh and Red Panda in Darjeeling," he said.

Naidu said that he was glad to learn that the National Wildlife Genetic Resource Bank at LaCONES is one among an exclusive league of 23 such labs in the world.

He was also pleased to note that the activities of LaCONES involving zoos have prompted the formation of a consortium involving five zoos from different parts of the country to promote bio-banking of endangered species. Terming it a timely initiative, he hoped that this consortium and others will take full advantage of this bio-banking facility.

"With the ongoing climate change, there is an undeniable impact on all life forms around us, including humans. India, as you all are aware, has some of the most bio-diverse regions and is home to a wide range of ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, wetlands, deserts and coastal and marine ecosystems. We not only need to protect and preserve our ecosystems but also make every effort for conservation of endangered species for the well-being of animals, plants and humans," he said.

The Vice President exuded confidence that the modern biotechnological tools will help in mitigating the adverse effects on wildlife and ecosystems.
Bengaluru, July 2 : The Indian Air Force (IAF), Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and the Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre (KSNMDC) have ruled out the possibility of a supersonic boom or earthquake behind the mysterious loud sound similar to an explosion that was heard across many southern parts of Bengaluru on Friday noon.

Several residents of the city took to Twitter to share that they have heard a loud 'thud' sound. As per the tweets, the sound was heard in the Sarjapur, J.P. Nagar, Benson Town, Ulsoor, ISRO Layout, H.S.R. Layout, South Bengaluru and East Bengaluru areas.

The Indian Air Force (IAF) denied that any flying activity or any known action its their side had caused the loud sound.

"None of the IAF bases or units, including the Aircraft and Systems Testing Establishment (ASTE), was flying any aircraft at that time," the IAF said in a statement.

The KSNMDC said in a statement that a loud sound was reported by the locals from Kengeri, Rajarajeswari Nagar and Vijayanagar areas between 12 noon and 12:45 pm.

"The data was closely analysed by our seismic observatory centre for any possible seismic signals of an earthquake. The earthquake data or the records analysed for the above duration show no signal of local tremor or earthquake," the statement read.

Bengaluru South division DCP, Harish Pande, said, "We don't have any clear information yet. But from past experience, I can say that it seems like a sonic boom." HAL spokesperson Gopal Sutar said that regular sorties of fighters and trainers take place at the HAL airport. "Today (Friday) too was no different. HAL can't comment on the loud noise reportedly heard on Friday in Bengaluru," he said.

In May last year, a mysterious loud noise was heard across Bengaluru, which had rattled many citizens as theories and rumours about the major boom spread like wildfire.

The Indian Air Force had revealed that it was an IAF test flight involving a supersonic profile had resulted in the sonic boom.
Chandigarh, July 2 : The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Friday held statewide protests before PSPCL offices in Punjab to highlight the plight of farmers, domestic consumers and industrialists who are suffering because the Congress government "deliberately" withheld eight-hour free supply to farmers besides imposing unscheduled power cuts in urban areas.

The SAD demanded a financial package for paddy farmers who were forced to use diesel generators, besides demanding an immediate reduction in VAT on diesel.

It said if these corrective measures were not taken along with restoration of regular supply of power to farmers as well as the domestic and industrial consumers, the party would 'gherao' the Chief Minister and ministers in the next phase of its agitation.

SAD President Sukhbir Singh Badal joined the protests at Lambi, Fazilka and Ghubaya during the course of which he held Chief Minister Amarinder Singh solely responsible for the plight of the people.

He said the Chief Minister had not taken a single review meeting of the power utility to ensure adequate supply of power to paddy farmers, alleging that this was done deliberately to keep the subsidy bill down.

"The Congress government does not want to provide free power to farmers and this is the reason why it is not supplying power when it is needed most." Standing amongst parched paddy fields in Fazilka, Badal said the government did not make any attempt to ensure timely maintenance of thermal plants which had let to the closure of the Lehra Mohabbat plant as well as closing down of one unit of the Talwandi Sabo plant.

He said in stark contrast during the SAD government tenure, farmers had always received eight hours uninterrupted power supply besides 24 hour supply to the domestic and industrial sectors.

Former minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal participated in sit-in protests in Bathinda city during the course of which she said how the previous SAD government had spent more than Rs 4,000 crore on upgrading the transmission and distribution system.

She also took on the Aam Aadmi Party, claiming that it had not given any practical relief to power consumers in Delhi and had only spent thousands of crores on advertisements.
New Delhi, July 2 : The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Pakistan has reported the theft of around 1,000 visa stickers from the Italian Embassy in Islamabad, SchengenVisaInfo reported.

Pakistan daily Dawn has reported that the Italian Embassy has informed the Foreign Ministry about the theft of visa stickers, which are valid for travelling to any of the 26 Schengen states in Europe. The region mostly functions as a single jurisdiction for international travel purposes with a common visa policy.

The Foreign Ministry requested the Interior Ministry and the FIA "to keep track of these visa stickers at all entry and exit points and report any seizure to this [foreign] ministry".

The Interior Ministry has referred the matter to the FIA headquarters, the report said.

Dawn said the sources did not rule out the involvement of an organised network of human traffickers in the theft since they sell the visa stickers.

An official working with a private overseas employment company has said that it is a multi-billion rupee scam because the price of a Schengen visa starts from Rs 2 million and some people may even be willing to pay up to Rs 4 million for it.

As per the report, an FIA official has said that there are organised rackets and small groups of people who smuggle thousands of desperate men, women and children abroad every year. The FIA Red Book lists around 112 "most wanted traffickers".

The Red Book contains the names of the most wanted terrorists and criminals involved in drug trade, fraud, money laundering, human trafficking and other such illegal activities.

Most of these wanted traffickers belong to Central Punjab, while a sizeable number of these criminals hail from Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and POK, the report added.

The sources expressed apprehensions that the traffickers may already have sent a number of aspirants to the Schengen states through stolen visa stickers.

According to Schengen Visa Statistics, Pakistan has been listed as the 11th country in the world with the highest rejected Schengen visa rates, following several African countries.

In 2021, the data revealed that 43.5 per cent of the visa applications from Pakistan had been rejected, the report said.

It added that the European Asylum Support Office's (EASO) May report had also revealed that Pakistan was among the top countries to have applied for asylum in the European member countries during March 2021.

EASO has reported a 17 per cent increase in first-time applications and a 31 per cent decline in repeated applications. The organisation said that 42,000 asylum applications were lodged in the EU countries in March 2021.

Last year, European Parliament member Dominique Bilde had said that Pakistan leads the fake passport and documents market.

"Should we be surprised about the Cypriot golden visas because the false accusation of passports or residence is only of use for nefarious means? We have seen that Pakistan is the leader in fake passports and fake documents. They have received over 4 billion euros in aid since 2014. We deplore the impacts," Bilde had said.

Bilde's statement followed a terrorist attack, which happened in Paris on September 25, where two persons were killed outside Charlie Hebdo's former office.

The French media had reported that the terrorist was a Pakistani citizen who had entered France illegally and applied for citizenship by falsifying his documents, the report said.

Fulvio Martusciello, Ryszard Czarnecki and Gianna Garcia, Bilde's counterparts, have also expressed their concerns on the matter in a letter that was later addressed to the French government and the EU in a bid to impose sanctions against repeated terrorist activities in Pakistan.
Jammu, July 2 : The Jammu and Kashmir police said on Friday that the involvement of Pakistan in the recent drone attack at an Air Force Station in Jammu city cannot be ruled out.

Speaking to the media on the sidelines of a passing out parade at the police training school in Kathua, J&K ploce DGP Dilbag Singh said, "We have strong suspicion about the involvement of Lashkar-e-Taiba in this attack. And since LeT is run by Pakistan, the involvement of Pakistan cannot be ruled out.

"To what extent Pakistani agencies are involved in this attack would be known as the investigation gets along in this case".

The DGP said the use of armed drones is a serious threat to the security system, adding that there is a need to have a relook at the security of vital persons and places.

The police chief also referred to the recovery of an improvised explosive device (IED) in Jammu and said, "They were planning to trigger an explosion at a crowded place with the objective of causing largest possible casualties.

"Luckily, we were able to intercept and capture the militant who gave certain leads following which we were able to recover the IED." The DGP said that it is premature to say whether there is a link between the recovery of the IED and the attack on the Air Force Station in Jammu.

"We are tying to confirm whether there is a link," the DGP said.

Singh said it is very much possible that the drone had come from across the border, but other angles would also not be ruled out.

The drone attack at the Air Force Station in Jammu city occurred on June 27. The National Investigation Agency has taken over the investigation into the attack.
Aizawl/Guwahati, July 2 : Amidst sporadic incidents and simmering tensions along the interstate borders of Assam, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Meghalaya, security has been further tightened and ministers and top officials visited the border areas to ensure there is no further escalation.

Officials in Aizawl said that Mizoram Chief Secretary Lalnunmawia Chuaungo and his Assam counterpart Jishnu Baruah would hold a meeting next week on the border issues.

Assam's Environment, Forest, Border Protection and Development Secretary Gyanendra Dev Tripathi, accompanied by district officials, on Thursday, visited the troubled areas along the border with Mizoram and talked to the local people.

Meanwhile, Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma said in Shillong that he would soon talk to his Assam counterpart Himanta Biswa Sarma on the border issue.

Meghalaya Health Minister Alexander Laloo Hek, who is one of the two BJP MLAs in the state, recently met Sarma in Guwahati and discussed the border issue.

An Assam government statement said that in view of border row leading to exacerbation of tension at Joyrampur-Chilonibasti close to the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh inter-state border, state Environment and Forest Minister Parimal Suklabaidya on Friday visited the areas and talked to the officials and local people to defuse the tension and to restore peace and normalcy.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah, while presiding over the North Eastern Council meeting in Shillong in January this year, had urged all the states in the region to solve their boundary disputes by August 15, 2022, when the country celebrates 75 years of Independence.

Assam shares borders with six other northeastern states - Nagaland (512.1 km), Arunachal Pradesh (804.1 km), Manipur (204.1 km), Mizoram (164.6 km), Tripura (46.3 km) and Meghalaya (884.9 km).

Encroachment in border areas, and various unlawful activities, including attacks and abductions, infrequently took place along the inter-state borders of the northeastern states leading to major incidents.

After District Magistrate-level talks between Mizoram and Assam on Wednesday, Mizoram's Kolasib Deputy Commissioner H. Lalthlangliana on Friday said that three makeshift camps were erected at the trouble-torn area by state police after mutual agreement but the Assam Police recently damaged two of these, leading to the tension. Security forces are deployed on both sides of the borders to prevent any fresh untoward incident.

Lalthlangliana said that tension also erupted last month after two farmhouses on the inter-state border were torched by unidentified people on June 5.

Since October last year, several inter-state border skirmishes have taken place along the Assam-Mizoram borders and over 50 people were injured and more than 25 houses and shops had been set on fire on the Assam side.

Following the intervention of the Union Home Minister, Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla, top Home Ministry officials and both Chief Ministers, central para-military troopers were deployed along the border to prevent fresh troubles after a series of clashes and blockades on the National Highway 306.

At the directive of Chief Minister Sarma, Suklabaidya on Friday visited areas on the border with Arunachal Pradesh, following reports of encroachment and destruction of forest from other side leading to tension.

Suklabaidya, who had visited the area last month too, said the people of both the neighbouring states would have to live in peace and harmony. "We must shun confrontation and resolve our problems in an amicable manner. And for that to happen we must restore peace and tranquility and live in peaceful coexistence," he said.

He appealed to the MLAs and the local people to prevent encroachments of forest land and ensure that trees were not felled and the environment is protected as "the brunt of deforestation has affected everyone".

Suklabaidya said the Assam government has been trying to resolve the border disputes with Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Mizoram. He said as the matter relating to border dispute with Arunachal Pradesh is pending in the Supreme Court, status quo has to be maintained.

"The present Government is not only trying to bring about a permanent solution to the border disputes with our neighbouring states at the highest level but also exploring ways for finding a solution by way of out of the court settlement," he added.
New Delhi, July 2 : As Uttarakhand Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat is all set to resign, names of Dhan Singh Rawat, Satpal Maharaj and some others started doing rounds as his possible successors.

Preparations for BJP's legislative party meeting are also on and MLAs have been asked to reach Dehradun.

Sources in the party said that a legislative party meeting will be called on Saturday to elect a new Chief Minister.

"We have learned that Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar will be coming as central observer of the legislative party meeting to elect a new Chief Minister. We have heard that a MLA will be elected for the post of Chief Minister to avoid any crisis like the current one," a Uttarakhand BJP leader said.

Rawat, who is to step down following his likely inability to become a member of the state Assembly by the deadline of September 10, as required, on Friday evening returned to Dehradun from New Delhi and is likely to submit his resignation to Governor Baby Rani Maurya.

Apart from Dhan Singh Rawat and Satpal Maharaj, the names of Pushkar Dhani and Ritu Khanduri are also doing the rounds.

Dhan Singh Rawat, a minister in Tirath Singh Rawat government, has emerged as front runner for the post. Close to RSS, he has worked as state Secretary of its student wing ABVP and also served as an RSS office-bearer. He unsuccessfully contested for the first time in 2012, but won in 2017 and currently is Education Minister.

After Dhan Singh, another prominent name doing the rounds is veteran Satpal Maharaj, also a minister in the current government. A former Congressman and Union Minister who joined the BJP in 2014, Satpal Maharaj has clearly shown his ambitions to become Chief Minister.

Another name doing rounds for the post is of Dhami, a MLA from the Khatima constituency in Udham Singh Nagar district.

Meanwhile, Khanduri is MLA from Yamkeshwar and President of the state BJP women wing.

"Our party always surprises everyone, like it had done in March by appointing Tirath Singh Rawat," another Uttarakhand BJP leader said.
New Delhi, July 2 : Outgoing Supreme Court judge, Justice Ashok Bhushan, on Friday said that justice must be tempered with mercy but justice cannot be substituted by mercy.

In his remarks at a virtual farewell function, organised by the Supreme Court Bar Association, from his home in Prayagraj, Justice Bhushan, who will retire on July 4, said he was proud to be part of the top court, which upheld the democracy and rule of law.

"I have been true to my oath and discharged my duty without fear and favour. Protection and enforcement of constitutional rights is both power and duty of the court," he said.

"Justice must be tempered with mercy but justice cannot be substituted by mercy," he said.

Justice Bhushan said he always endeavoured to enhance reputation the top court. "I thank the members of the Bar for always being kind and respectful inside and outside the court. The relationship I had with the Bar was not that of judge and advocate but an easy one," he added.

In his address, Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana cited a German saying: "Man's feelings are always the purest at the time of meeting and bidding farewell".

"Apart from being a great judge, he also has the distinction of being a fine gentleman. He is respected equally by both the Bar and the Bench, for the humility with which he conducts himself," he said.

The Chief Justice said Justice Bhushan's philosophy sets him apart from everyone else, and with his remarkable judgments, he has not only left an indelible mark in the history of the Indian judiciary, but by virtue of being a humanist judge, he has also left a mark in the minds and hearts of the people of India.

Attorney General K.K. Venugopal called Justice Bhushan a judge with compassion. "I remember long lines of children walking, with mothers carrying their children, they were migrants and tears would come to one's eye. Justice Bhushan and Supreme Court came to the rescue regarding the distribution of dry ration and running of community kitchens," he said.

He added that Justice Bhushan took a commendable step by taking suo motu cognizance of the migrant workers issue and directing distribution of food grains and community kitchens amongst them, till the pandemic continues.

Justice Bhushan has been a part of several landmark verdicts: the historic Ayodhya land dispute case, upholding the validity of biometric ID Aadhaar, and also the judgment which held the Chief Justice is the 'master of the roster' and has the prerogative to allocate cases.

Justice Bhushan was also part of a nine-judge Constitution bench, which in February last year, held that its five-judge bench can refer questions of law to a larger bench while exercising its limited power under review jurisdiction in the Sabarimala temple case.

He also headed a five-judge bench, which in May this year, refused to refer to a larger bench, the issue whether to revisit its 29-year-old Mandal verdict capping reservation at 50 per cent. Citing the violation of principle of right to equality, the bench also quashed a Maharashtra law granting reservations to Marathas in admissions and government jobs in the state.
New Delhi, July 2 : The All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA) on Friday reiterated its stand against the government's proposed privatisation of public sector banks.

The employees' union on Friday began a series of month-long national webinars to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of bank nationalisation.

Addressing the webinar, AIBEA President Rajen Nagar said that although the government is reducing the number of public sector banks on the grounds of bad banking operations in the sector, more than 73 per cent of bad loans are the result of corporates' faulty banking practices.

While highlighting the contribution of public sector banks towards the welfare of people, the seminar mentioned about the initiatives including Jan Dhan Yojana, and MNREGS wherein these banks have played a vital role in implementation through financial inclusion.

Stressing the necessity of nationalisation, Nagar said: "The only way to revolutionise the banking system in India is to nationalise banking system and run all the banks under the structure of public sector banking." He also urged all employees in the banking sector to raise the voice against the growing influence of corporates over banking sector in India.
New Delhi, July 2 : Four decades after the first wave of Afghan refugees fled in the face of Soviet invasion, and nearly 20 years after a US-led invasion transformed life in the country, humanitarian agencies say they are bracing for another round of displacement in Afghanistan as the Taliban gains territory and Western forces prepare to withdraw, Washington Post reported.

This week, the top US military commander in Afghanistan warned that chaos and civil war could be on the horizon.

US intelligence analysts fear the Afghan government could fall swiftly in the wake of US departure. While US President Joe Biden has sought to reassure Afghan leaders of Washington's "humanitarian commitment to the Afghan people", aid agencies say there's much to fear, the report said.

Afghans fleeing war and violence have long sought safety in Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Many Afghans in these countries remain mired in poverty, undocumented and subject to limits on work amid constant pressure to leave.

"It is the responsibility of all international actors to continue working with Afghanistan to secure a lasting peace and to continue supporting countries hosting Afghan refugees," Indrika Ratwatte, Asia-Pacific bureau director for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), had said last month.

Economic crises related to Covid-19 have compounded the burden for the "already beleaguered" host countries, Ratwatte said.

Unsafe and unstable conditions for Afghans in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and other nearby countries could push more people to try to make the dangerous trek to Europe, the report said.

Since the start of the year, some 200,000 Afghans have been internally displaced, said Ratwatte, on top of an additional 380,000 in 2020. Just since May, the Taliban has taken over 80 districts. Last week, Taliban fighters took control of the main border crossing with Tajikistan as scores of Afghan soldiers fled for safety, the report said.

A month since April, around 1,000 Afghans had flown into Tajikistan to seek asylum, according to Ratwatte. Countless more cannot afford flights and have resorted to smuggling routes to sneak into nearby countries or try to make it to Europe, he said.

Biden has pledged to relocate tens of thousands of Afghans who worked with US forces as drivers, interpreters and in other roles, which have made them Taliban targets.

The report said that for decades, Pakistan and Iran have hosted a majority of the millions of Afghans on the run from war and conflict, along with neighboring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and nearby Turkey.

Since 2002, after the fall of the Taliban, nearly 5.3 million Afghans have voluntarily returned through a UNHCR programme -- although the rates have significantly slowed in recent years, and some who returned have left again.

Instead, by the end of 2019, Afghans were the world's third-highest forcibly displaced people. They were also among the top nationalities seeking asylum in the European Union or caught by European authorities while trying to enter, the report said.

The coronavirus and resulting restrictions on movement have halted much of global migration, but experts predict that it will quickly pick up pace again.

Pakistan is home to about 3 million Afghans, around half of whom are registered as refugees with the United Nations, with the remainder either undocumented or in the country on other documents. Pakistan is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention and has urged the Afghans to return home.
New Delhi, July 2 : A day after Brazil decided to suspend the $320 million contract to procure 20 million doses of Bharat Biotech's Covaxin to probe allegations of irregularities in the deal, including the price of $15 per dose, the Congress on Friday demanded that the Centre, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan should break their silence on the issue.

Addressing a press conference at the party headquarters, Congress spokesperson Supriya Shrinate said: "Indians have the first right on vaccines being made and manufactured here and the government, which is buying vaccines at pre-determined prices from Serum Institute of India (SII) or Bharat Biotech, needs to answer the question of how some export deals still continue." Noting Indian vaccines are "at the centre of huge controversy", she cited the case of Covaxin in Brazil.

"We are perhaps staring at a cancellation of the contract, the Senate is probing into this, two criminal investigative agencies are now probing into this and the taint comes all the way to the ICMR also because it is a co-developer of the vaccine... it is not just Bharat Biotech, which is a private entity," Shrinate said.

She said that it is important to raise these questions, because Bharat Biotech may be a private entity, but "public fund was diverted for the development of this vaccine, tax payers money was put into this and which is why we have a right to question".

"What has happened with that money and why is the government conspicuously silent on it," she asked.

Shrinate noted that Bharat Biotech got into an agreement with Precisa Medicamentos of Brazil and they had signed a contract to supply 20 million doses, but then allegations of huge price rise arose. She said that media reports alleged that Bharat Biotech quoted a price of $1.34 per dose, which was jacked up to $15 per dose, and that is what the Brazilian opposition and the Senate are probing.

The Congress leader said that they are also probing an offshore possible fund diversion by an entity called Madison Biotech related to Bharat Biotech.

"Why is the government silent, when such serious allegations are being raised? The question also is that the ICMR was slated to get 5 per cent of the profit from the sale of Covaxin. But, allegations are that Bharat Biotech was selling to Madison Biotech at a lower price and Madison was garnering the lion's share of the profit," she said.

She said it was necessary to know the relationship between Madison Biotech and Bharat Biotech, because these allegations are of a very serious nature and if Bharat Biotech was selling, according to the allegations, at a lower price, then obviously ICMR's own proceeds get depressed.

She also said that there are allegations that a $45 million offshore payment was sought by Madison Biotech and the centre of the controversy is why this "partner" of Bharat Biotech was asking for this sort of money, which is illegal because it is not a part of the contract signed between Bharat Biotech, Precisa Medicamentos and the Brazilian government.

"Why is the Indian government and the Prime Minister silent on allegation of inflated prices by Bharat Biotech, by its partner - Singapore's Madison Biotech - which is at the heart of the criminal conspiracy and alleged allegations? "What is the nature of relationship between Bharat Biotech and Madison Biotech, because if fund diversions happen, this makes for a PMLA case, irregularities of lowering your profits, depressing your taxes is a case of SFIO?"

To a question about Union Health Minister slamming former Congress President Rahul Gandhi over his question asking where the vaccines were, Shrinate said: "Dr Harsh Vardhan should only reply why out of 140 crore people, only 6.6 crore people have been vaccinated." Noting that as per the government data, only 6.6 crore have got both doses of the Covid vaccination, which is just 4.3 per cent of the total population, she said that it does not good to play with the data while fighting the Covid pandemic.
Jaipur, July 2 : After a 22-year-old resignation letter penned by Rajasthan BJP President Satish Poonia went viral recently, a purported audio clip of Vasundhara Raje has gone viral on Friday, where the former Chief Minister can be heard recognising the members of 'Vasundhara Raje Samarthak Manch' as her own people.

In the clip, Raje can also be heard directing the forum's district president Tarachand Sharma to continue running the platform.

It needs to be mentioned here that the 'Vasundhara Raje Samarthak Manch' is a platform being run on social media since the past few months. The forum has been demanding Raje to be announced as the CM face for the next Assembly elections scheduled in 2023.

However, till date, only the followers of Raje were seen voicing their opinions on social media. But the latest audio clip has raised questions whether Raje herself is backing this platform.

Many eyebrows were raised at the start of the year when the list of presidents of this forum was announced for each district of the state, giving rise to speculation that Raje is floating her own political party.

But Raje's silence over the next few months has out an end to the discussions, while her followers still continue to declare her as the CM face for the 2023 elections.

Raje continued doing philanthropic work during the Covid-19 pandemic through this forum, running a parallel entity to the state BJP unit.

Now with the release of this audio clip, silent whispers in the political corridors are once again hinting at Raje planning to go solo in the upcoming Assembly elections.

However, there has been no response from the Raje camp till the filing of this report, while district president Tarachand Sharma has said that Raje was speaking about continuing the philanthropic work, and there is nothing more to it.

The audio clip has gone viral a few days after a three-page resignation letter written by Poonia 22 years back went viral on social media.

Factionism is running deep within the saffron party in Rajasthan ever since the appointment of Poonia as the state BJP President. Since then, Raje has been maintaining a distance with the party office, even staying away from the campaign for the recent bypolls.

Recently, her posters were removed from state BJP headquarters.

Poonia is presently in Delhi holding discussions with senior party leaders on a range of issues concerning the party in Rajasthan.
Bengaluru, July 2 : Karnataka Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Basavaraj Bommai on Friday sought the early release of pending compensation from the Goods and Service Tax Council.

Bommai, who represents Karnataka in the GST Council, met and submitted a detailed memorandum to Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who is on a two-day visit here.

He told reporters that she agreed, in principle, to release the state's pending compensation of Rs 11,800 crore at the earliest.

"Besides seeking early release of GST compensation, I have also requested her to release grants to revised schemes from the Union government," he said.

According to him, Sitharaman has assured him that in order to make up for losses arising out of the pandemic, the Centre has decided to borrow and pass it on as GST compensation to states just like the previous year.

During 2020-2021, the Centre had borrowed and passed on Rs 12,047 crore to Karnataka to offset losses arising out of the pandemic.
Gudur : , July 2 (IANS) The police in Andhra Pradesh's Nellore district are waiting to arrest a hospitalised jilted lover accused of murdering the girl he loved.

Venkateshwarlu (30), who works as a software engineer in Bengaluru, slashed the throat of Tejaswini (21), a final year engineering student at the a college in Gudur in Nellore district.

"Currently, he is undergoing treatment at a hospital in Nellore. We will arrest him once he is discharged," a police officer told IANS on Friday.

According to the police, Venkateshwarlu had entered Tejaswini's home on Thursday morning after ensuring that her teacher parents were off to work.

As per sources, both the girl and the boy were in a relationship for about four years but were estranged at the time of the crime.

Incidentally, both the families knew each other by virtue of the fathers working in the same school earlier. While Tejaswini's father taught English, Venkateshwarlu's father was a record assistant in the same school.

It is believed that Vekateshwarlu and Tejaswini knew each other from the time the latter was studying in the intermediate level.

"Both of them were in love and even thought of marrying. However, the wide age gap between the two came as a hindrance," said a source.

Consequently, since the past year, Tejaswini's family made sure that she cut off all ties with Venkateshwarlu, highlighting the almost 10-year age gap as one of the reasons for keeping Venkateshwarlu away.

After Tejaswini's father threatened that he will file a police case against Venkateshwarlu, the latter's father assured that he will send his son away to Bengaluru for job to settle the issue.

"Since the last one month, Venkateshwarlu was staying at home because of the Covid lockdown and was trying to contact the girl, leading to her changing her phone number," said the police officer.

After his attempts to procure Tejaswini's new phone number failed, he finally decided to go to her home and meet her in the absence of her parents.

Venkateshwarlu had shared the photograph and registration number of the vehicle of Tejaswini's parents with one of his friends so that the latter could inform him once they left their home.

Before his entry, he even sent his friends -- Prudhvi and Shiva -- to check the atmosphere inside Tejaswini's home and find out why she had changed her phone number.

Later, Venkateshwarlu stormed into her home, pushing aside her minor brother, and took her into the bedroom and locked it from inside before slashing her throat. He also throttled her with a bed sheet to ensure that she was dead.

Meanwhile, the neighbours and the police tried to break open the door to rescue the girl, which prompted him to attempt suicide with the help of a saree.

The police rushed the two to a nearby hospital where the girl was declared dead, while Venkateshwarlu is undergoing treatment.

A manhunt has been launched to nab his friends who helped him before the crime was committed.
Chennai, July 2 : The Tamil Nadu government is trying to rope in one of the major apparel manufacturing company based in Kerala which, after a major tiff with its home state's government, is planning to shift base.

One of Kerala's largest industrial groups, Kitex, which had announced the cancellation of its 3,500 crore investment in the state, has been given a red carpet welcome by the Tamil Nadu government.

Tamil Nadu Industries Department's Associate Vice President, Guidance Tamil Nadu, Gourav Gaga had sent the invitation to the Kitex group on behalf of the state Industries Minister.

However, the group is yet to decide whether it would shift its operations to Tamil Nadu or not.

Kitex Garments, the second-largest children's apparel manufacturer in the world, has announced the scrapping of the Rs 3,500 crore project for which it had signed a memorandum with the Kerala government at the "Ascend Global Investors Meet" in Kochi in January 2020. The project was to open an apparel park in Kochi and establish industrial parks in Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, and Palakkad.

Talking to IANS, Kitex Chairman, Sabu Jacob, said: "Six states in India have already invited us and I received calls from Chief Ministers, Industries Ministers, and Principal Secretaries of these states. However, not even a clerk called me from Kerala even after we announced that we are backing out from a mammoth investment of Rs 3,500 crore." "The offer given by the Tamil Nadu government is irresistible and I came to know that many facilities are being provided by our neighbouring state. However, a decision to shift from Kerala has to be taken after a lot of consultations with our team, our management... it will not happen in a day but we are seriously contemplating it." Jacob revealed said that Tamil Nadu offered him a 40 per cent subsidy, land at half the market value, 100 per cent relaxation on stamp duty, 5 per cent tax reduction for 6 years, 25 per cent subsidy for environmental protection infrastructure, 50 per cent subsidy for intellectual property, Rs 4,000 per month for the training of each employee for six months, electricity subsidy, and several other freebies.

"The Tamil Nadu government has also said that they are willing to provide anything over and above these offers." The noted industrialist said that the offer from Tamil Nadu is too good and that it has raised his morale which was low following the "victimisation" by the Kerala government.

He said that Kerala was not even providing any subsidy including for power, noting that it was all profit for the state government but even after this, there is no professional interest being envisaged by it.

"The attitude of the Kerala government is very important... I don't say that the present government, even the present opposition, when they were in power, was also having a similar attitude. As far as industries are concerned, we are at the mercy of the local level leaders of political parties and even an upper division clerk in the state can scuttle the prospects of an industrialist. Kerala is lagging behind in industrial growth and the attitude of the rulers and bureaucracy is the reason behind this." If the Rs 3,500 crore project announced by the Kitex group would have materialised, then it would have given direct jobs to 20,000 people in the state. The three industrial parks at Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, and Palakkad were designed to promote start-ups providing infrastructural facilities.

Kitex was on the wrong side of the political establishment of Kerala after Jacob floated a political outfit named "Twenty 20", which was earlier registered as a non profit organisation, and it wrested power in the Kizhakkambalam panchayat.

In the recent assembly elections, Twenty 20 contested in six seats but could not win any.

Jacob said: "I am fed up with Kerala and its administration... 11 teams of officers from various departments have raided the company in the past one month. Department of Labour, Factories, and Boilers conducted searches. Pollution control board officers also reached our factory premises and searched every nook and corner of the factory and grilled our employees for hours." "We have been functioning here for the past 26 years and employ 11,000 employees. The Kerala government is totally anti-industry and they treat us as bourgeoisie, exploiters, encroachers... even addressed as criminals and we are humiliated in public." Kerala Chamber of Commerce and Industry has already come out against the treatment meted out to Jacob and had called upon stringent action against the victimisation of industries and industrial groups.

Kerala Industries Minister P. Rajeev was not available for comment even after repeated attempts.
Srinagar, July 2 : In a major anti-terror operation, five terrorists, including a self-styled district commander of proscribed outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), were killed in an encounter between militants and security forces in the Hanjin Rajpora area in South Kashmir's Pulwama district, officials said on Friday.

The police said that during the intervening night of July 1/2, acting on a specific input regarding the presence of terrorists in the Hanjin Rajpora area, a joint cordon and search operation was launched by the police, the army and the CRPF.

"During the search operation, the civilians were evacuated to safer places. As the presence of terrorists got ascertained, they were given an opportunity to surrender. However, they fired indiscriminately upon the joint search party, which was retaliated leading to an encounter," the police said.

Due to darkness, the operation was suspended though the cordon remained intact throughout the night.

"On Friday morning, repeated announcements were made urging the hiding terrorists to surrender, but the terrorists again fired on the joint search party which was retaliated. In the initial exchange of fire, two army jawans received gunshot injuries and were rushed to the hospital. Unfortunately, one of them later attained martyrdom," the police said.

During the ensuing encounter, five terrorists were killed and their bodies were retrieved from the site of the gunfight.

The slain terrorists have been identified as Nishaz Hussain Lone alias Khitab (district commander LeT), a resident of Nageenpora Tral, Danish Manzoor Shiekh, a resident of Sathergund Kakapora, Amir Wagay, a resident of Hanjan Payeen, Mehran Manzoor, a resident of Jamalatoo Srinagar, and a foreign terrorist identified as Abu Rehan alias Tawheed, a resident of Pakistan.

"All the killed terrorists were linked to the proscribed terror outfit LeT," the police said.

As per records, all the killed terrorists were part of groups which were involved in many terror crime cases and civilian atrocities, the police said.

Arms, ammunition and other incriminating materials were recovered from the site of the encounter.

"One SLR rifle belonging to the J&K Police, which was snatched by terrorists in 2016, was also recovered from the encounter site," the police said.

Meanwhile, IGP Kashmir Vijay Kumar has congratulated the police and the security forces for successfully conducting the operation in a professional manner.
New Delhi, July 2 : In a fiasco which reached its crescendo in barely four months, Uttarakhand will get its third Chief Minister in one year.

The incumbent Chief Minister, Tirath Singh Rawat will meet Governor Baby Rani Maurya on Saturday at 11 a.m. and submit his resignation.

The BJP legislature party will meet at 3 p.m. on Saturday to choose a new leader for which sitting MLAs, Satpal Maharaj and Dhan Singh Rawat are said to be frontrunners. The two MLAS were called to Delhi on Friday by the BJP central leadership.

According to reports, Union Minister Narendra Singh Tomar will be the observer for the legislative party meeting to be held at Dehradun.

What is not clear is how did this present imbroglio precipitate when there must have been an inkling that Assembly by-elections may not be possible less than 10 months before the state goes to the polls next year.

The scenario may have been in the spreadsheets when Rawat was sworn in as Chief Minister in March, with just a year to the Uttarakhand election, amid infighting fierce dissent against then Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat.

Speculation about Rawat's imminent resignation has started last week with reports that the by-election would not take place.

To continue as Chief Minister, Rawat, who is an MP, needed to be elected to the Uttarakhand Assembly by September 10.

However, the Election Commission, which has faced criticism for holding elections in March-April amid the monstrous Covid second wave, which was said to be one reasons for it flaring up, was not too keen.

Rawat has been in the news for the wrong reasons most notably being his comment on women wearing ripped jeans. He had also said the US, not Britain, ruled India for 200 years.

Rawat, who returned to Dehradun on Friday evening after three days in Delhi, where he had meetings with BJP chief J.P. Nadda and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, addressed a press conference, where it was speculated he could announce his resignation. However, he only talked about his government's achievements in the state.
New Delhi, July 2 : The Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), General Bipin Rawat, said on Friday that the air force has to be there to assist the ground forces and will be part of theatre commands, even while maintaining its exclusive mandate.

He also said that for the time being, the Northern Command of the army will remain as it is while for China and Pakistan, there will be dedicated integrated commands.

These will have air force component integrated and will be separate from the 'Air Defence Command' which will be the exclusive mandate of the Indian Air Force, General Rawat said while addressing a webinar on Artificial Intelligence and other modern technologies, organised by the think-tank Global Counter-Terrorism Council.

The CDS also addressed the concerns of the air force on creation of theatre commands, saying: "As far as Indian Air Force is concerned, the entire airspace of the nation will be looked after by one air defence command." He said the air force has got another charter and that is to provide close air support to the land forces when they undertake operations and for offensive air operations in case one goes into the adversary's territory.

"The same is for the navy... they too require air support," General Rawat said.

The theatres with the northern and western adversary (China and Pakistan) will be land-based theatres, he said.

Offensive air support for these will be provided by the IAF whose commanders will be advisers to the western and northern theatre commanders.

On the Northern Command of the Indian Army, the CDS said that it is undergoing a different kind of situation, as terrorism and insurgencies are going on there.

The Northern Command is one command which looks after both the fronts, like the China front in Ladakh and the northern front in the Kargil sector. This is one area that could witness a two-front war.

On the recent drone attack in Jammu, General Rawat said, "We have mechanisms to counter drones. These have been deployed and are gradually coming in larger numbers. A very large number of counter-drone systems are needed to defend our nation's strategic assets." On India-China border standoff, he said the two nations understand that returning to the status quo is the best way of ensuring peace and tranquility.

"This will take time and happen in a gradual manner. We should be able to achieve the status quo," General Rawat said.
Thiruvananthapuram, July 2 : The Kerala Police on Friday reached state BJP President K. Surendran's residence and served notice to him to appear before the team probing the alleged hawala money that reached the state ahead of the April 6 Assembly polls.

He has been asked to come to the Thrissur Police Club at 10 a.m on Tuesday.

Surendran's driver and an aide has already been questioned by the police.

The BJP's Kerala unit was caught on the wrong foot when a person filed a complaint with the Thrissur rural police that an amount of Rs 25 lakh which he was carrying in his vehicle to pay advance money for a land transaction was robbed from him on the Thrissur-Kodakara highway in April.

Ever since this row broke out, the national leadership is peeved especially when reports surfaced that tribal leader C.K. Janu's party JRP received Rs 10 lakh from Surendran, for returning to the BJP-led NDA.

The revelation by JRP Treasurer Praseeda Azhikode was quickly denied by Surendran and Janu, who threatened to take legal steps against her.

The CPI-M's acting Secretary and convenor of the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF), A. Vijayaraghavan, then alleged that this money was "Hawala" money being used for the BJP to fund its electioneering and the money was meant for party candidates.

He also alleged that the BJP is responsible for "Hawala" network and added that this was the first time such a huge money transfer has taken place in the state.

Vijayaraghavan then alleged that an amount of Rs 3.5 crore was allegedly swindled and that senior state leaders of the BJP were behind the deal.

Soon the Kerala Police registered a case and by now, various lower and middle level leaders of the BJP have been questioned and let off.
New Delhi: A view of Rohingya muslims staying in dilapidated condition near Kalindi Kunj area in New Delhi on Sept 6, 2017. Rohingyas are stateless Indo-Aryan people from Rakhine State, Myanmar who have long suffered due to operations carried out by Image Source: IANS News

Agartala: Border Security Force troopers guard India's border with Bangladesh, ahead of the Independence Day 2018, in Agartala, on Aug 13, 2018. Indian authorities have asked security forces to increase vigil along the international borders with Ban Image Source: IANS News

Agartala, July 2 : Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, six border checkposts along the 4,096 km India-Bangladesh borders would remain open for three days a week for the movement of people between the two countries, officials said on Friday.

An Indian government official said that for people returning to Bangladesh from India, a no objection certificate (NOC), Covid negative report and a quick response code with 72-hour validity would be mandatorily required.

Both India and Bangladesh have restricted the normal movement of people between the two countries since March last year, but allowed the trade to continue as usual, adhering to the standard operating procedures (SOPs).

The official told IANS that the six border checkposts, which would be opened for three days a week (Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday) include the Petrapole-Benapole, Gede-Darshana, Mahadipur-Sona Masjid, Hili-Hili and Changrabandha-Burimari checkposts, all along the West Bengal border, along with the Agartala-Akhaura checkpost along Tripura.

"However, for training and medical treatment purposes, Bangladeshi nationals are being allowed to visit India following strict restrictions and protocols," the official said on condition of anonymity.

An official of the Agartala-based Bangladesh Assistant High Commission said that no foreigners would be allowed to visit Bangladesh as the land routes are currently closed by the government.

"The Bangladeshi nationals whose visa period would expire within 15 days have been advised to return to the country. The Bangladesh diplomatic missions in India would facilitate their return," the official told IANS.

He said that those Bangladeshi citizens, including students, who have a long-term visa can stay in India, following all the Covid safety guidelines.

The official said that the Bangladesh government had earlier prohibited travel of foreigners by air, waterways or rail to Bangladesh.

The four 'Border Haats' (markets) in Tripura and Meghalaya along the India-Bangladesh frontiers are also closed since March last year as a precautionary measure against Covid-19.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Visakhapatnam, July 2 : The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday registered a case against an Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer here for allegedly possessing disproportionate assets (DA).

As per a CBI media release, Dasi Sadhu Sunder Singh, Accountant Member, Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, Visakhapatnam, has been named accused in an FIR dated July 1.

Searches were conducted at the office and residential premises of the accused and his relatives in Visakhapatnam and Hyderabad, leading to the recovery of around Rs 4.42 lakh in cash along with certain incriminating documents. A sum of around Rs 3.70 lakh was also recovered during searches conducted at other places.

It has been alleged that said public servant had acquired assets to the tune of Rs 3.5 crore, which were disproportionate to his known sources of income. It was further alleged that during the period between April 2008 and October 2018, the accused had acquired immovable and movable assets amounting to around Rs 4.7 crore in his name and those of his family members.
Visakhapatnam, July 2 : In wake of the recent Jammu Airport drone attack, the Eastern Naval Command (ENC), headquartered in Andhra Pradesh's port city Visakhapatnam, on Friday designated an area of 3 km from the perimeter of naval installations as a "no fly zone".

"An area of 3 km from the perimeter of Indian Naval installations in Visakhapatnam is designated a 'no fly zone'. All individuals and civil agencies are prohibited from flying any non-conventional aerial objects including drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) within these zones," said a Navy official.

In the event of a violation, the Navy will destroy or confiscate the drone, UAV or unauthorised flying object, he said.

The violator will also be charged under the provisions of the Indian Penal Code.

The Navy official reminded that approval for flying drones by any civil or government agency is governed by the guidelines issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

"Further, approval from the Director General of Civil Aviation is to be obtained through Digi Sky Website and a copy of the approval letter is to be submitted to headquarters, ENC (command security officer) and the naval station concerned," he added.

This submission has to be done at least a week before the scheduled flying operation.
New Delhi, July 2 : In a fiasco which reached its crescendo in barely four months, Uttarakhand will get its third Chief Minister in one year.

The incumbent Chief Minister, Tirath Singh Rawat met Governor Baby Rani Maurya on late Friday night and submitted his resignation.

The BJP legislature party will meet at 3 p.m. on Saturday to choose a new leader for which sitting MLAs, Satpal Maharaj and Dhan Singh Rawat are said to be frontrunners. The two MLAS were called to Delhi on Friday by the BJP central leadership.

According to reports, Union Minister Narendra Singh Tomar will be the observer for the legislative party meeting to be held at Dehradun.

What is not clear is how did this present imbroglio precipitate when there must have been an inkling that Assembly by-elections may not be possible less than 10 months before the state goes to the polls next year.

The scenario may have been in the spreadsheets when Rawat was sworn in as Chief Minister in March, with just a year to the Uttarakhand election, amid infighting fierce dissent against then Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat.

Speculation about Rawat's imminent resignation has started last week with reports that the by-election would not take place.

To continue as Chief Minister, Rawat, who is an MP, needed to be elected to the Uttarakhand Assembly by September 10.

However, the Election Commission, which has faced criticism for holding elections in March-April amid the monstrous Covid second wave, which was said to be one reasons for it flaring up, was not too keen.

Rawat has been in the news for the wrong reasons most notably being his comment on women wearing ripped jeans. He had also said the US, not Britain, ruled India for 200 years.

Rawat, who returned to Dehradun on Friday evening after three days in Delhi, where he had meetings with BJP chief J.P. Nadda and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, addressed a press conference, where it was speculated he could announce his resignation. However, he only talked about his government's achievements in the state.

He was supposed to meet the Governor on Saturday morning to put in his papers, but did so late on Friday only.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Chennai, July 3 : The Tamil Nadu Public Health Department has planned a massive outreach programme involving volunteers, NGOs and other social organisations going door to door for pitch for Covid awareness and the necessity to wear masks, safe distancing, use of sanitisers, and vaccination.

The department formulated the new plan following reports of a slight increase in the number of active cases in 15 districts on Thursday. It has, according to sources, already approached NGOs and other social organisations including doctors bodies to help in the outreach programme.

According to a pilot study report of the Department, around 36,000 volunteers would be required for a door to door campaign and missives have already been sent to corporates and other companies to support the initiative through their CSR initiatives.

The Greater Chennai Corporation had, in the early days of the second wave, roped in several Tamil movie and television actors to create awareness videos and according to senior officials, it was a big hit with people sharing the awareness videos in large numbers.

The Public Health Department is planning such an initiative and roping in stars to create awareness on basic matters like wearing of masks, safe distancing, sanitising, and vaccinations through short videos.

Several Tamil film stars have already uploaded their videos calling upon the public to stay safe and not to venture out unless necessary.

Tamil Nadu Association of Small and Medium Industries Secretary, U. Mathivannan told IANS that the government must immediately step up the campaign as in villages and in small towns, people are not caring much and after the first dose of vaccination, the level of confidence has increased. "This will lead to disaster and unless government is strict on control measures, we may not find the graph coming down. For the industry to pick up, the disease must be banished from the country." State Health Secretary, J. Radhakrishnan told IANS that they were "taking certain measures so that there is no rise in Covid positive cases and we hope to contain this pandemic".
New Delhi, July 3 : Delhi government on Friday celebrated the third anniversary of its 'Happiness Curriculum' for the students of government-run schools across the national capital.

During the celebrations, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia interacted with the students and teachers from several schools under the Delhi government.

Sisodia, who also holds the education portfolio, said that it is a matter of joy to hear that the Happiness Curriculum has brought about a change in the lives of children, their families and also their teachers.

"In the coming 10 years, children will adopt happiness in their lives fully, which will grow to become an important component of their everyday life," Sisodia said.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi had introduced the Happiness Curriculum in government schools on July 2, 2018. The objective is to improve the mental well-being of students, and it teaches mindfulness, social-emotional learning, critical thinking, problem solving and relationship building.

Recently, the Directorate of Education (DoE) of the Delhi government had advised all the private schools in the national capital to adopt the Happiness Curriculum to release the anxiety, stress and depression that children may be facing due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Amaravati, July 3 : Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation Chairperson Roja Selvamani and Fisheries Minister Seediri Appala Raju on Friday called for an amicable solution to water disputes between the Telugu states of AP and Telangana.

"Without any political animosity, our share of water should be obtained amicably, that is why there was a comprehensive discussion in the Cabinet on this matter, including writing a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat," said Selvamani.

She requested Modi and Shekhawat to resolve the water controversy peacefully, ensuring the rightful share for each of the states without any scope for regional animosity.

She also said the state will not tolerate Telangana illegally producing electricity using water from the three reservoirs of Nagarjuna Sagar, Pulichintala and Srisailam.

"These actions are contrary to the Krishna River Management Board (KRMB) directions, that's why we peacefully wrote a letter to the Centre," she noted.

Similarly, Raju also wished for a peaceful settlement for the water dispute.

"By the grace of God, I wish for good to happen and the water dispute to be settled peacefully," he said.

The Minister said Andhra should respectfully receive its share of water and prayed for God's grace to this end as he emerged from the Tirupati temple.

On Thursday, Reddy wrote to Prime Minister Modi, urging him to rein in Telangana from "illegally" drawing water for power generation and to deploy Central forces at common reservoirs to protect the state's interests.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Patna, July 3 : Two residents of Patna's Patel Nagar area on Friday levelled a land grab allegation against Ravi Prasad, the brother of Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar, Renu Devi.

The owners of the said land, Brahmanand Singh and Shrawan Kumar, have written letters to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and other top officials of Bihar, including the Chief Secretary and the DGP, to intervene in the matter.

"Ravi Prasad alias Pinnu along with his associates grabbed my plot in Patel Nagar on June 21. They have even started the construction of a wall on the plot. When we objected to their forcible act, Prasad threatened me with dire consequences and asked his associates to take me and Sharawan to Deputy CM Renu Devi's official residence in Patna," Brahmanand Singh said.

"We have also met the Deputy CM to inform her about the criminal acts of her brother, but she said that she had no connection with her brother Ravi Prasad.

"The incident of land grab on June 21 was captured on CCTV camera. We have sent the footages to the Chief Minister and other top officials. When the incident took place on June 21, we immediately informed the Shastri Nagar police station but no one came to the spot," said Sharawan Kumar, adding that the market price of the land is Rs 6 crore.

Meanwhile, the JD-U has reacted sharply to the incident.

"The custodians of 'jungleraj' should speak on the 'goondaism' of the BJP. The brother of Deputy CM is grabbing land in broad daylight using firearms in Patna. The alleged persons are threatening the land owners to take them to the Deputy CM's residence," tweeted Tejashwi Yadav, the leader of opposition in Bihar Assembly.
Global law firm Greenberg Traurig, P.A. announced that 31 of its Florida attorneys have been recognized in The Legal 500 United States 2021 Guide (U.S. Guide).

Firmwide, The Legal 500 United States 2021 Guide recognized more than 160 attorneys and 39 practices. In addition, for the fifth consecutive year and seventh time overall, the firm was recognized as a Top Tier firm in its Real Estate category. The practice was previously recognized in the 2013-2014 and 2017-2020 guides.

The U.S. Guides acknowledgements recognize practice area teams and practitioners who are providing the most cutting edge and innovative advice to corporate counsel, according to the publisher. The recognitions are based on feedback from 300,000 clients worldwide, law firm submissions, and interviews with private practice lawyers, in addition to Legal 500s independent research in the legal market.

Client commentary published in the guide regarding Greenberg Traurig and its attorneys includes:



Greenberg Traurig represented me with a level of professionalism and care that made me feel like I was their only client.

The firm has mastered how to give their clients boutique service with the resources of a large firm.

GT always has the right expertise in-house to solve our needs.

They [are] instrumental in providing solutions to our complex legal challenges.

The team is exceptional, extremely customer-focused and attentive.

prompt, professional and pay close attention to our employees as clients.

Their attention to detail is to be commended.

The GT team has delivered without question, always ready to assist us as clients.

The Greenberg Traurig Florida lawyers listed below are recommended in The Legal 500 United States 2021 edition based on the guides industry or practice area designations as selected by researchers:

Fort Lauderdale

Stanley G. Jacobs, Jr. - M&A/Corporate and Commercial - Venture Capital and Emerging Companies

Joel D. Maser - Tax - US Taxes: Non-Contentious

David C. Peck - Healthcare: Advice to Health Insurers; Healthcare: Advice to Service Providers

Miami

Enjolique Aytch Lett - Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort and Class Action - Defense: Consumer Products (including Tobacco); Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort, and Class Action - Defense: Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices

Elisa H. Baca - Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort and Class Action - Defense: Consumer Products (including Tobacco)

Alexandra Bach Lagos - Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort and Class Action - Defense: Consumer Products (Including Tobacco); Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort, and Class Action - Defense: Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices

Kerri L. Barsh - Environmental: Litigation; Environmental: Regulatory

David A. Coulson - Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort and Class Action - Defense: Consumer Products (Including Tobacco)

Robert J. Downing - Energy: Renewable/Alternative Power

Jared E. Dwyer - Dispute Resolution - Corporate Investigations and White-Collar Criminal Defense: Advice to Corporates; Dispute Resolution - Corporate Investigations and White-Collar Criminal Defense: Advice to Individuals

Carl A. Fornaris - Media, Technology and Telecoms - Fintech

Richard J. Giusto - Real Estate - Real Estate; Real Estate - Real Estate Finance

Benjamin G. Greenberg - Dispute Resolution - Corporate Investigations and White-Collar Criminal Defense: Advice to Corporates; Dispute Resolution - Corporate Investigations and White-Collar Criminal Defense: Advice to

Individuals



Martin Kalb - Tax - US Taxes: Non-Contentious

Jared R. Kessler - Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort, and Class Action Defense: Consumer Products (Including Tobacco)

Mindy B. Leathe - Tax - US Taxes: Non-Contentious

Erika G. Litvak - Tax -- US Taxes: Non-Contentious

Rebecca A. Ocariz - Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort and Class Action - Defense: Consumer Products (Including Tobacco)

Elliot H. Scherker - Dispute Resolution - Appellate: Courts of Appeals; Dispute Resolution - Appellate: Supreme Courts (States and Federal); Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort and Class Action - Defense: Consumer Products (Including Tobacco)

William R. Siegel - Tax - US Taxes: Non-Contentious

Michael J. Thomas - Real Estate - Construction (Including Construction Litigation)

Tallahassee

Michael J. Cherniga - Healthcare: Advice to Service Providers

Barry Richard - Dispute Resolution - Appellate: Courts of Appeals; Dispute Resolution - Appellate: Supreme Courts (States and Federal)

Tampa

Ryan T. Hopper - Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort, and Class Action - Defense - Toxic Tort

Gregory W. Kehoe - Dispute Resolution - Corporate Investigations and White-Collar Criminal Defense: Advice to Individuals; Dispute Resolution - Corporate Investigations and White-Collar Criminal Defense: Advice to Corporates

James O. Lang - Tax - US Taxes: Non-Contentious

Richard C. McCrea Jr. - Intellectual Property - Trade Secrets (Litigation and Non-Contentious Matters); Labor and Employment - Labor and Employment Disputes (including Collective Actions): Defense

Christopher Torres - Environment: Litigation; Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort and Class Action - Defense - Toxic Tort

David B. Weinstein - Dispute Resolution - Appellate: Courts of Appeals; Dispute Resolution - Appellate: Supreme Courts (States and Federal); Dispute Resolution - Product Liability, Mass Tort, and Class Action - Defense - Toxic Tort; Environment: Litigation; Environment: Regulatory

West Palm Beach

Tracy L. Gerber - Dispute Resolution - Securities Litigation: Defense

Bradford D. Kaufman - Dispute Resolution - Securities Litigation: Defense

About Greenberg Traurig: Greenberg Traurig, LLP (GT) has approximately 2200 attorneys in 40 locations in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. GT has been recognized for its philanthropic giving, diversity, and innovation, and is consistently among the largest firms in the U.S. on the Law360 400 and among the Top 20 on the Am Law Global 100. The firm is net carbon neutral with respect to its office energy usage and Mansfield Rule 3.0 Certified. Web: http://www.gtlaw.com
Giving Thanks: a charming childrens story about appreciating what one has. Giving Thanks is the creation of published author Alyssa Wenkebach, a native of Southern California who has worked in the education field for twenty-five years. She is a devoted mother to a six-year-old son.

Wenkebach shares, Giving Thanks is a book about gratitude and prayer. My son and I pray every night, and he started asking me, Mommy, what should I pray for? I told him that he could talk to God about whatever he wanted but he should remember to be thankful. I wrote this book to help give children some ideas about gratitude and prayer. I wanted it to be something easy that parents could read to their children and children could read on their own.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Alyssa Wenkebachs new book is a sweet and simple story for early readers.

With a lyrical tone and colorful illustrations, this darling childrens tale is certain to engage a little ones imagination and offer an opportunity to discuss the importance of gratitude.

View a synopsis of Giving Thanks on YouTube.

Consumers can purchaseGiving Thanks at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Giving Thanks, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.


Spartan by Robert Liberace

Art Renewal Center (ARC), announced today a groundbreaking, first ever, online auction for Important 21st Century Realism hosted on Sothebys.com. Open for bidding online from July 16 - July 26, 2021, this sale entitled Contemporary Realism: Important 21st Century Works, consists of 28 lots featuring a carefully selected group of winners and high-ranking finalists from the largest competition in the world for Representational Art. ARC, a 501C3, non-profit educational foundation, and leader of the revival of Realism in Contemporary Art, received 4,941 entries from 83 countries and spanning six continents to their 15th International ARC Salon Competition. In person viewing will be available at Sothebys NY during these same dates in conjunction with the 15th International ARC Salon Exhibition; a total of 91 Contemporary Representational works to be on view. The public opening will be held on July 17, from 11am to 3pm. Please RSVP to attend this event. The works represent a diverse grouping of artists of different ethnicities, genders and backgrounds from around the world. Starting as only a murmur in the 1980s, the 21st Century Representational Art Movement has grown exponentially along with interest and demand. It is anticipated that this public sale for Important 21st Century Realism hosted by Sothebys will be the first of many.

The ARC has also partnered with Fashion Week San Diego (FWSD), Californias largest traditional fashion week, to present Art and Beauty Behind Fashion, on July 24th, where nine FWSD designers will debut their original couture outfits on live models, paired with and inspired by premier pieces from the 15th ARC Salon Competition. Tickets to Art & Beauty Behind Fashion will be an exclusive event requiring an RSVP to be made in advance at info@fashionweeksd.com.

After the show at Sothebys NY, the majority of works in the exhibition will be traveling on to the Museum of European Modern Art, (MEAM), in Barcelona, (October 8  December 12), joining additional works from the competition. Here it will hang alongside the MEAMs representational painting and sculpture competition, Figurativas. This awe-inspiring event will showcase the true international nature and collaborative spirit of this new wave in Contemporary Art.

Kara Lysandra Ross, ARC Co-Chair and COO states, 21st Century Representational Art cannot possibly be mistaken for any other period in fine art, as it is inherently an expression of todays society, communicating our shared humanity. For 100 years, artists have been deconstructing works of fine art, creating paintings that are visually flat, throwing paint, or even showing blank canvases. At the time this was new, exciting and shocking. Now, in the 21st century, thousands of artists and collectors alike, want to start reconstructing and reclaiming our universal visual language, like great theater, suspending disbelief, and expressing it all with beauty, poetry and grace.

About Art Renewal Center

Leading the revival of realism in the visual arts, the Art Renewal Center (ARC), a 501(c)(3), non-profit, educational foundation, hosts the largest online museum dedicated to representational art and includes works by the Old Masters, 19th Century, and 21st Century Artists as well as articles, letters and other online resources. The ARC is the foremost and only vetting service for representational art schools ensuring that the teaching curricula and quality of teacher and student work meet their strict standards to become ARC Approved. The ARC also runs the ARC Salon Competition, which is the largest and most prestigious competition in the world for realist artists painting, sculpting and drawing today with eleven categories and thousands of works competing, culminating in a traveling live exhibition of many of the winning works. The ARC works with other ARC Allied Organizations, artist groups, museums, and publications to become a central news hub for the 21st Century Representational Art Movement. For more information, visit http://www.artrenewal.org.

About Sothebys

Established in 1744, Sothebys is the worlds premier destination for art and luxury. Sothebys promotes access, connoisseurship and preservation of fine art and rare objects through auctions and buy-now channels including private sales, e-commerce and retail. Our trusted global marketplace is supported by an industry-leading technology platform and a network of specialists spanning 40 countries and 50 categories, which include Contemporary Art, Modern and Impressionist Art, Old Masters, Chinese Works of Art, Jewelry, Watches, Wine and Spirits, and Interiors, among many others.

About Fashion Week San Diego

Fashion Week San Diego (FWSD) is an annual bi-national event, comprised of a Fall Runway Show, and a series of exclusive events throughout San Diego County and New York. Launched by San Diego fashion Entrepreneur Allison Andrews in the fall of 2008 and operated by GFASH Designer Gwen Bates, FWSD is designed to grow the developing local retail industry and serve as a launching pad for emerging designers. FWSD breaks the traditional industry molds by connecting consumers directly with designers through annual events, social media and sales opportunities. For more information, visit http://www.fashionweeksd.com.
AssuredPartners logo We recognize the hard work that Southwest Insurance Brokers has done to create strong relationships with their clients and are excited to welcome this dedicated team to AssuredPartners, said AssuredPartners President, Sean Smith.

AssuredPartners, Inc. is proud to announce that Southwest Insurance Brokers, LLC (Southwest Insurance Brokers) of Phoenix, Arizona has joined AssuredPartners. The team of 5 will remain under the leadership of Jeff Lewis, President of Southwest Insurance Brokers. The agency currently reports $1 million in annualized revenues.

Jeff Lewis said, We recognize that our most valuable asset is the trust and confidence of our clients. We have always provided the highest quality products and first-class personalized service. With AssuredPartners we are looking forward to providing that same level of service and partnership our clients have always known.

Southwest Insurance Brokers decision to lead with their values has created a core client base that we are truly thrilled to welcome into our operations, said Dave Tacha, AssuredPartners Regional President.

We recognize the hard work that Southwest Insurance Brokers has done to create strong relationships with their clients and are excited to welcome this dedicated team to AssuredPartners, said AssuredPartners President, Sean Smith.

For more information on Southwest Insurance Brokers, LLC, please visit: https://southwestinsurancebrokers.com/

ABOUT ASSUREDPARTNERS, INC

Headquartered in Lake Mary, Florida, AssuredPartners is a full-service insurance broker providing commercial insurance, risk management, employee benefits and personal lines through consulting and services. With over 8,000 employees located in offices throughout North America, London, Belgium and Scotland, AssuredPartners is in the business of building relationships. While cementing powerful, lasting relationships built on trust earned from working openly and honestly with our partners. Thats what we call, Power through Partnership. For more information, visit http://www.assuredpartners.com.
Shaking Like a Leaf: A Triumphant Story of Overcoming Anxiety: a relatable, inspirational account of the authors journey with anxiety. Shaking Like a Leaf is the creation of published author Dina Comer, the co-lead pastor of Christian Life Fellowship.

Comer tells of her experience, There have definitely been incredibly scary days in my life when I have felt hard-pressed on every side, perplexed and struck down. It was in the thick of those days when I learned how to hold on to the treasure of Jesus Christ on the inside of me and realized I was really not crushed. I did not have to give into despair. As I wrestled with my heart, mind, and emotions, I discovered an incredible truth in a very personal way. Simply put, this once weak and feeble vessel was not abandoned. My God was with me.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Dina Comers new book discusses the all too common beast of anxiety and one persons journey to coping.

Having been well acquainted with panic, fear and anxiety for many years, Comer offers a personal perspective to finding Gods grace in her times of darkness. Sharing her lifes greatest battle, Comer hopes that her triumphant story will

bring great encouragement and hope while helping discover great inner spiritual

weapons so that life will no longer be as intimidating.

View a synopsis of Shaking Like a Leaf: A Triumphant Story of Overcoming Anxiety on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase Shaking Like a Leaf: A Triumphant Story of Overcoming Anxiety at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Shaking Like a Leaf: A Triumphant Story of Overcoming Anxiety, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
Dr. H.A. Morsi, founder of Interfaith Dialogue Committee, USA and former chairman of the Interfaith Dialogue Committee for the Parliament of World Religions who has arranged dozens of lectures, dialogues, and debates among the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam over the past twenty-five years, has completed his new book God Is One: Humanity Is One- Christianity and Islam: Where Do They Meet, and Where Do They Part Ways?: a thought-provoking exploration of the commonalities and differences.

Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad are the primary windows through which the children of Abraham see God, learn, and reflect. This is the theme of this book, with emphasis on Islam and Christianity, the worlds two largest religions who claim more than half of the world population as followers.

This book highlights the articles of faith and practices in both religions. It also explores points of agreement and disagreement on the concept of God, the nature of Jesus and Muhammad, and the concept of salvation.

With more than four billion people calling themselves Christians and Muslims today, the readers are encouraged to explore and contribute on how to reach better understanding and dialogue between these two great religions which, in the authors opinion, is needed for world peace.

Published by Page Publishing, Dr. H.A. Morsis engrossing book is an excellent choice for readers interested in exploring the intersection of the worlds two major religions.

Readers who wish to experience this engaging work can purchase God Is One: Humanity Is One- Christianity and Islam: Where Do They Meet, and Where Do They Part Ways? at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes Store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708.

About Page Publishing:

Page Publishing is a traditional, full-service publishing house that handles all the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing understands that authors should be free to create, not mired in logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and so on. Pages accomplished writers and publishing professionals allow authors to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues and focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.


"A return to the familiar, both personally and professionally, is great cause to celebrate this Independence Day." - Express CEO Bill Stoller

Last years Independence Day was not a typical celebration. Like most of America, my family and I watched virtual fireworks on television as major annual Fourth of July celebrations were canceled due to COVID-19. There were no group gatherings around the grill and no one was hanging out by the pool with friends from the neighborhood.

There really wasnt a lot to celebrate.

Fast forward to today. A sense of optimism and hope fills this great nation, and while the pandemic isnt over yet, there is so much to celebrate this Independence Day.

We have a greater appreciation for our health and that of our loved ones. Were grateful to be able to hug one another again and return a friendly smile with one of our own. But most of all, we are thankful to feel a return to normalcy.

For many, normal means getting back to work after being unemployed or the excitement of a new career path made possible by the changing workforce. For others, however, normal is still out of reach.

Over the past several months, Ive driven by many well-established restaurants and stores that are forced to close during peak hours because there are simply not enough workers to keep their doors open.

The employment landscape has indeed made major shifts, including some of the biggest that our Express Employment Professionals offices have ever seen. Employment went from hundreds of applicants applying for a single position in early 2020 to employers currently scrambling to find applicants to fill positions. In June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the U.S. added 850,00 jobs, better than the predicted 706,000.

This is undoubtedly a job seekers market. Businesses are now pulling out the stops to attract candidates, offering benefits such as sign-on bonuses, remote work opportunities and higher pay rates. Enhanced and extended unemployment benefits have ended in 25 states because jobs are plentiful.

Without a doubt, getting back to work and the ability to choose a career you love is one of the greatest freedoms we are afforded as Americans. Additionally, a job provides so much more than just a paycheck. Its a chance to be part of a work family where one can contribute to an overall cause. Its an opportunity to provide for your family and build a future for your children. It provides a way to grow, mentally and personally. Pandemic isolation took a toll on our nations mental health and with employees returning to the workplace, seeing familiar faces in the break room is a welcome sight.

So why arent there enough workers?

Extenuating circumstances play a role in preventing people from returning to work due to a lack of childcare, eldercare or susceptibility to COVID-19. For example, when child or eldercare facilities cant find employees, parents and caregivers cant return to the workforce.

There are jobs integral to our society  plumbers, machinists, electricians and more  that are facing a dire shortage unless action is taken soon. Businesses need to invest in training workers to compensate for the ever-widening skills gap. Every piece is interconnected in contributing to the labor shortage.

With competition for top talent heating up, businesses need to accept new wage realities, as they cant afford to pass on quality candidates. If an applicant is truly at the top of their field, its worth the investment to hire and retain them instead of continuing to throw money to the wind with constant turnover or vacant positions.

Americas economy is back on track to realize its full potential, but we arent there yet. COVID-19 allowed us to see what holes exist in the current workforce structure, and now is the time to plan for the workforce of the future! Looking ahead, I have high hopes we will continue to capitalize on economic opportunity in the wake of COVID-19, and celebrate a future filled with a more robust labor force and full freedom from the virus and its challenges.

A return to the familiar, both personally and professionally, is great cause to celebrate this Independence Day. And of course, backyard barbecues and fireworks in person!

***

About Bill Stoller

William H. "Bill" Stoller is chairman and chief executive officer of Express Employment Professionals. Headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the international staffing company has more than 830 franchises in the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Since inception, Express has put more than 9 million people to work worldwide.

About Express Employment Professionals

At Express Employment Professionals, were in the business of people. From job seekers to client companies, Express helps people thrive and businesses grow. Our international network of franchises offers localized staffing solutions to the communities they serve across the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, employing 526,000 people globally in 2020. For more information, visit http://www.ExpressPros.com.


Innormax and Century partner to bring payment processing directly into SAP B1. [Century's] insight into our business demands and the quality of their team resulted in a packaged offering that targets the key challenges facing value added resellers in our market space. --Tiran Mendis, Director of Consulting at Innormax.

Century Business Solutions is excited to announce its partnership with Innormax LLC, a consulting company that helps businesses succeed through ERP best practices, to allow credit card processing directly within SAP Business One.

Century Business Solutions development team has built a payment integration for SAP Business One that uses Centurys proprietary payment gateway, EBizCharge, to provide credit card processing for thousands of merchants across the country.

Centurys credit card integration allows merchants to process credit cards from directly within SAP Business One.

The powerful EBizCharge payment gateway is designed to lower processing fees by submitting line-item details directly to the bank. EBizCharge is fully PCI compliant and offers advanced data encryption and tokenization technology to ensure maximum transaction security within SAP Business One. EBizCharge is compatible with over 100 leading ERP and accounting systems and major online shopping carts and provides unlimited transaction and batch history for reporting purposes.

Through the entire process, we have been impressed with Century Business Solutionss offering, said Tiran Mendis, Director of Consulting at Innormax. Their insight into our business demands and the quality of their team resulted in a packaged offering that targets the key challenges facing value added resellers in our market space.

With EBizCharge, users can run custom reports, sort through transactions by category, and immediately release funds when issuing refunds.

The partnership between Innormax LLC and Century Business Solutions will help streamline workflow, eliminate double data entry, and make payment processing more efficient within SAP Business One.

About Century Business Solutions

Century Business Solutions is reinventing the way companies accept credit card payments with their all-in-one payment solution, EBizCharge. EBizCharge is one of the top payment gateway alternatives to its more expensive and inefficient counterparts and is specifically designed to reduce payment processing costs and inefficiencies. EBizCharge integrates seamlessly with over 100+ accounting, ERP, CRM, and shopping cart systems, including QuickBooks, Sage, SAP B1, Microsoft Dynamics, Acumatica, Magento, and WooCommerce. Century is partnered and certified with Microsoft Dynamics, Acumatica, SAP, Oracle, QuickBooks, WooCommerce, Magento, and many more. For more information, visit https://www.centurybizsolutions.net.

About Innormax LLC

Innormax is an SAP Certified Partner for SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign. Founded on the principle of delivering expert business know-how with unmatched insight and customer care, our consultants have a long track record of helping businesses of all shapes and sizes succeed. Innormax is committed to using our knowledge, experience, and vision to provide every client with real value and growth opportunities. We hold ourselves personally responsible for delivering on our values and commitments. For more information, visit https://innormax.com.
Nearly 2,400 years ago, the ancient philosopher Plato wrote the story of Atlantis, a compelling tale of an 11000-year-old island civilization that since captivated the imagination of poets, authors, and many scholars who over the centuries kept on unsuccessfully searching for the elusive island.

Never before has there been a real discovery where all the physical characteristics of a proposed location matched Plato's description of Atlantis. Not even the original Santorini hypothesis could sufficiently meet the given criteria. Never before, until now!

After years of extensive research, in conjunction with new archaeological evidence, and with the aid of satellite technology, Christos A. Djonis credibly reveals that Plato based his story of Atlantis on a real prehistoric setting. We now have a real discovery where all the physical characteristics, along with Plato's given chronology, flawlessly match, and they are precisely in the exact order as Plato depicted. Likewise, DNA and archaeological evidence of an advanced Neolithic civilization occupying the prehistoric sub-merged island, at around 9600 BC, further confirm a perfect case scenario.

About the Author

Christos A. Djonis can best be described as a serial entrepreneur, professional business owner, real estate investor, upscale home builder, and award-winning, best-selling author. In 2017, his book Uchronia Atlantis Revealed won the Silver Award from the New York City Big Book Awards. In 2018, his book Its the Economy, Stupid! won Gold Awards from both the Independent Press Awards and New York City Big Book Awards.

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR REVIEW COPIES, PLEASE CONTACT:

Leslie Garson/Garson & Wright Public Relations, Inc.

lesliegwpr@gmail.com/818-605-8197

Readers who wish to experience this inspiring work can purchase Atlantis: The Find of a Lifetime at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes Store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708.

About Page Publishing:

Page Publishing is a traditional, full-service publishing house that handles all the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create, not mired in logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and so on. Pages accomplished writers and publishing professionals allow authors to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues and focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.


"Were excited to fund VSH Media in its mission of successfully providing virtual staging as quickly as possible, with the lowest cost possible. Marc envisions being the Amazon of all real estate things, and were proud to help fuel his ambition." - Andrew DSouza, CEO and co-founder, Clearco

Clearco, the worlds largest e-commerce investor and the company revolutionizing the way founders grow their businesses, today announced the latest recipient of its ClearAngel funding, which provides early-stage founders access to revenue share capital, data-driven advice, and Clearcos extensive network of apps, agencies, and investors.

VSH Media, short for Virtual Staging House Media, was founded in 2013 by second-generation real estate broker Marc Avila. Avilas 15 years of real estate industry knowledge helped propel the creation of VSH Media. Recognizing the need to efficiently furnish his listings without breaking the bank, Avila pivoted towards virtual staging, which allowed him to save thousands over physical staging costs.

Were excited to fund VSH Media in its mission of successfully providing virtual staging as quickly as possible, with the lowest cost possible, said Andrew DSouza, CEO and co-founder, Clearco. Marc envisions being the Amazon of all real estate things, and were proud to help fuel his ambition.

In addition to $60,000 of flexible capital, VSH Media will also get access to a network of 500+ investors, growth teams, agencies, apps, lawyers, and buyers; and data-driven advice designed to help scale and hit new revenue milestones.

Im thrilled to be funded by ClearAngel, said Marc Avila, founder, VSH Media. Were faster and more affordably priced than other virtual staging solutions. Now, we have more capital to help garner more media attention, advertise more efficiently, invest in growth channels and launch new digital products.

ClearAngel is currently onboarding E-commerce and product companies, and has limited spots available for SaaS, Apps, marketplace and stealth companies. To learn more about applying, visit angel.clearbanc.com. To learn more about VSH Media, visit vshmedia.com.

About Clearco:

Co-founded as Clearbanc in 2015 by Michele Romanow from Canadas Shark Tank (Dragons Den), Andrew DSouza, Ivan Gritsiniak, Charlie Feng, and Tanay Delima, Clearco offers the most founder-friendly capital solutions for e-commerce, mobile apps, and SaaS founders as well as a full suite of products and access to a powerful global network, insights and data, and recommendations. Clearco has invested over $2 Billion in over 4,500 companies to date, including Leesa Sleep, fashion-rental service Le Tote, home goods company Public Goods, shirtmaker UNTUCKit, online speech therapy practice Expressable, and digital real estate marketplace SetSchedule. For more information visit clear.co and @getClearco.
I Am Your Friend: a faith-based childrens tale. I Am Your Friend is the creation of published author Debbie Wagenbach, a beloved daughter, sister, and friend who has returned to Christ. In life, she enjoyed bringing stories to life for children through work as a childrens librarian, as well as being a doting aunt to thirty-six nibblings and thirty-plus great-nibblings as they are affectionately known within the family.

Wagenbach shares, Who is the Good Shepherd? A young child may be curious and ask Who is the Good Shepherd or What does he do for us? With its easy-to-understand words, I Am Your Friend explains to a child how the Good Shepherd will always be your friend now and even when youre 102.

I was your friend before you were you.

Ill still be your friend at one hundred and two.

The words in this story bring to light how the Good Shepherd (Jesus) is always with us. Though pictures and story is created for children with rhyming words I Am Your Friend is an inspiring book for people of all ages.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Debbie Wagenbachs new book is presented in honor of the late author by her loving mother, Bonnie Wagenbach.

With a lyrical story and charming illustrations, readers will enjoy this uplifting tale of Gods love.

View a synopsis of I Am Your Friend on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase I Am Your Friend at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about I Am Your Friend, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
Developers at Halfpricesoft.com are inviting new business owners to download and test drive the in-house ezPaycheck software for easy paycheck processing, Developers at Halfpricesoft.com are inviting new business owners to download and test drive the in-house ezPaycheck software for easy paycheck processing.

Paying employees is easy and efficient with the new unique pay rate options included in the updated 2021 ezPaycheck payroll software from Halfpricesoft.com. ezPaycheck has made it easy to handle vacation, holiday and leave pay, effortlessly .

Developers at Halfpricesoft.com are inviting new business owners to download and test drive the in-house ezPaycheck software for easy paycheck processing, said Dr. Ge, the Founder of Halfpricesoft.com.

ezPaycheck software is designed to automate paycheck processing to reduce time spent running payroll. The softwares graphical interface leads users step-by-step through setting up employee information, importing data, calculating payroll - including calculation of federal, state and local taxes; deductions for Medicare, insurance and 401(k) plans; and printing paychecks. Potential customers can download and try this software for at no obligation or cost at https://www.halfpricesoft.com/index.asp.

Small businesses get unique features in the latest release of ezPaycheck payroll software:



Supports daily, weekly, biweekly, semimonthly and monthly payroll periods. Features report functions, print functions, and pay stub functions.

Automatically calculates Federal Withholding Tax, Social Security, Medicare Tax and Employer Unemployment Taxes.

Includes built-in tax tables for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Easily calculates differential pay

Prints miscellaneous checks as well as payroll calculation checks.

Prints payroll checks on blank computer checks or preprinted checks.

Creates and maintains payroll for multiple companies, and does it simultaneously.

Prints Tax Forms 940, 941, W2 and W3 (Please note, preprinted red forms required for Copy A W2 and W3).

Supports multiple accounts at no additional charge.

Supports network access (additional cost)

Priced at $109 per calendar year (single user version), ezPaycheck payroll software is affordable for any size business. Customers seeking a way to streamline in-house payroll with more accuracy are invited to begin the no obligation 30-day test drive at, https://www.halfpricesoft.com/index.asp.

About Halfpricesoft.com

Founded in 2003, Halfpricesoft.com has established itself as a leader in meeting and exceeding the software requirements of small businesses around the US. Halfpricesoft.com is a developer of small business software, including online and desktop payroll software, online employee attendance tracking software, accounting software, in-house business and personal check printing software, W2, software, 1099 software, Accounting software, 1095 ACA form software and ezACH direct deposit software. Software from halfpricesoft.com is trusted by thousands of customers and will help small business owners simplify payroll processing and streamline business management.
Brandon Bir "Nothings more satisfying on a hot, sunny day than a cooling, booze-free beverage. Enjoy these refreshing drinks on your patio, while out walking your dog, gathering with friends or even just driving around in your car. They travel well, so all you need is a to-go cup!" - Brandon Bir

Award-winning coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea is celebrating summer by sharing tips and recipes for nonalcoholic drinks.

Nothings more satisfying on a hot, sunny day than a cooling, booze-free beverage, said Sustainability Director Brandon Bir.

Enjoy these refreshing drinks on your patio, while out walking your dog, gathering with friends or even just driving around in your car. They travel well, so all you need is a to-go cup!

At Crimson Cup, Bir travels as much as 100,000 miles each year to discover exceptional coffees and teas. Its no wonder that many of my favorite beverages have a coffee or tea base.

He suggested prepping coffee and tea concentrates to keep on hand. Stored in airtight containers in your fridge for up to two weeks, concentrates can turn into delectable drinks whenever youre in the mood.

Creating a Tea Concentrate

Bir begins with a white floral tea from the companys flagship Crimson coffeehouse at Easton Town Center in Columbus.

Its important to start with terrific tea, he said. Its somewhat subjective, but you know it when you taste it.

To create the concentrate, put 15 to 20 grams of tea into a tea press. Add four hundred milliliters (about 13.5 ounces) of 160-degree water. Steep it for four minutes and then extract the tea.

Its really strong so that the flavor will come through when mixed with other ingredients, Bir said. Dont drink it straight!

Nonalcoholic Crimson Sunrise Tea Cocktail Recipe



Pour 1.5 ounces of cold tea concentrate into a mixing vessel.

Add 1.5 ounces of orange juice, or an ounce of lemon or lime juice.

Add two dashes cranberry, orange or grapefruit bitters.

Add a sweetener of your choice to taste. For cane sugar, start with  tsp.

Stir together and pour into a tall glass filled with ice.

Top the glass with fruit-flavored sparkling water.

Stir lightly and garnish with a slice of citrus.

Enjoy!

The result is a super fruit, light and floral beverage that takes the heat off the humid days of summer.

Creating a Coffee Concentrate

Bir likes to bloom the ground coffee with hot water, then add cold water and brew for two hours at room temperature.

He uses a ratio of one part coffee to 10 parts water. Use 40 grams of coffee ground to medium fine for 400 milliliters of water, he said. Again, you want to use a superb coffee, like one of Crimson Cups natural processed Peruvian coffees.

Put the fresh-ground coffee in a mason jar, and add just enough 200-degree hot water to allow it to bloom, which releases some of the flavor compounds.

Then, add the remaining cold water, put a lid loosely on the top and let it sit on the counter for two hours.

Do not screw the top on tightly! Bir cautioned. The coffee will release carbon dioxide, which could cause the glass to explode if theres nowhere for it to expand.

After two hours, stir the coffee and grounds together and then pour through a sieve or coffee filter into a container with an airtight lid.

Nonalcoholic Orange Coffee Dreamsicle Recipe



Pour 1.5 ounces of cold coffee concentrate or cold brew into a mixing vessel.

Add 1.5 ounces of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Use a sweet variety like Cara Cara or Blood Orange.

Add sweetener to taste. For cane sugar, start with  tsp.

Add 3 ounces of almond, soy, macadamia or other milk alternative.

Stir, then add two dashes of grapefruit or orange bitters.

Mix everything together, pour into a tall glass filled with ice, and garnish with an orange slice.

Delicious!

Drink this in the afternoon or as a nightcap, Bir said. It tastes like a creamy orange popsicle  super, super tasty. It has a bit of caffeine because of the coffee.

Beyond these recipes, Bir suggested experimenting at home or dropping into your local independent coffee house for inspiration.

About Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea

Columbus, Ohio coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea is celebrating 30 years of Coffee + Community. Since May 1991, Crimson Cup has roasted sustainably sourced craft coffee for consumers and wholesale coffee customers. It is a 2020 Good Food Award winner, 2019 Golden Bean Champion for Small Franchise/Chain Roaster and Roast magazines 2016 Macro Roaster of the Year.

Through its 7 Steps to Success coffee franchise alternative program, the company teaches entrepreneurs to run independent coffee houses in their local communities. By developing a coffee shop business plan, entrepreneurs gain insight into how much it costs to open a coffee shop.

Crimson Cup also supports life-enriching projects through its Friend2Farmer initiatives, promoting the education, health, sustainability and economic growth of small-plot coffee farmers and their communities.

Crimson Cup coffee is available through over 350 independent coffee houses, grocers, college and universities, restaurants and food service operations across 30 states, Guam and Bangladesh. The company also operates several Crimson Cup Coffee Houses and a new Crimson retail flagship store. To learn more, visit crimsoncup.com, or follow the company on Facebook and Instagram.
Zachary P. Rosenthal, an associate in global law firm Greenberg Traurigs Real Estate Practice, has been elected to the Harvard Club of Miami Board of Directors. As a board member, he will continue to develop the strong network of Harvard University alumni in South Florida and oversee the programming of its Young Professionals Committee.

The Harvard Club of Miami is a private organization established to encourage the social, intellectual and professional interests of its members, to promote the welfare of Harvard University, to assist Miami-area students with admissions and financial aid, and to foster the Harvard spirit in all members of the global Harvard community, according to the clubs website.

Rosenthal is an associate in the Miami Real Estate Practice. He practices in the areas of commercial real estate, hospitality, and corporate transactions, focusing on structuring and negotiating complex real estate joint ventures and investments, the offering of interests in pooled investment funds, and sophisticated debt, equity, and mezzanine financing transactions.

About Greenberg Traurig: Greenberg Traurig, LLP (GT) has approximately 2200 attorneys 40 locations in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. GT has been recognized for its philanthropic giving, diversity, and innovation, and is consistently among the largest firms in the U.S. on the Law360 400 and among the Top 20 on the Am Law Global 100. The firm is net carbon neutral with respect to its office energy usage and Mansfield Rule 3.0 Certified. Web:http://www.gtlaw.com


A 21-year-old Missouri soldier who died while serving in World War II is returning home to be laid to eternal rest in Springfield, accompanied by burial services provided by Greenlawn Funeral Homes.

U.S. Army Pvt. James J. Cansler was a recipient of the Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart. He was assigned to Company C, 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, 8th Infantry Division.

Cansler, born in Bolivar, MO, was reported missing in action on Dec. 19, 1944, after his unit was involved in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest in Vossenack, Germany. Cansler and other members of his company were working to secure a road and a section of the forest. He was last seen at the edge of the forest and was reported missing the next day.

After World War II, the American Graves Registration Command launched an investigation and search to track down the remains of American service members throughout Europe. They searched the Hurtgen area between 1946 and 1950 but did not locate Canslers remains. In 1951, Cansler was classified as non-recoverable. It was many years later when a historian working for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) realized a set of unidentified remains found in a minefield north of Vossenack in 1946 could belong to Cansler. These remains were buried in 1950 at Ardennes American Cemetery.

The remains were disinterred in June 2018 and taken to the DPAA Laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Scientists used dental and anthropological evidence, along with DNA evidence from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, to confirm Canslers identity on Jan. 29, 2020.

Because Canslers remains were not identified until 2020, his name was already listed on the Tablets of the Missing at the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten. Now that his remains have been accounted for, a rosette will be placed next to his name.

Cansler will be laid to eternal rest at the Missouri State Veterans Cemetery in Springfield on July 7, 2021. Greenlawn Funeral Homes will be hosting a ceremony for the burial. Anyone interested in joining the burial procession is asked to line up along West Battlefield Road near Kansas Expressway at 9:30 a.m. Attendees can also proceed directly to the Missouri State Veterans Cemetery at 5201 S. Southwood Rd. The service will begin at 10 a.m.

Anyone with questions about the procession or service is asked to call Greenlawn Funeral Homes at (417) 881-3000.
Allowing access to cryptocurrencies is not a controlled activity. However, these incidents highlight that while blockchain technology is decentralized and borderless, technologies developed for supporting public and open blockchain are not. The scenario is blurred from many angles.

The biggest crypto exchange of the world as per trading volumes, Binance, has been banned in the UK and it happens to be the latest sign of a crackdown developing on the crypto market from global regulators.

Failing to meet the anti-money laundering requirements of the Financial Conduct Authority of the UK, Britains FCA told Binance Markets Limited that they arent permitted to carry out any kind of regulated activity within the UK, and they also need to notify their UK users through their apps and website.



FCA Mandates:

As a financial regulatory authority in the United Kingdom; the FCA works independently of the UK Government. Lately, concerning the Binance ban, FCA clamped down on the derivatives as crypto trading doesn't fall under regulatory scope. According to FCA, crypto giant Binance can provide services of crypto trading through their website, despite the ban. While the extent of the prohibition is to separate legal existence from the biggest crypto exchange associated with the reported turnover -- the professionals of FCA specified that they need to notify it on their official website and apps as well.

Earlier in June, Japanese regulators warned Binance from working in Japan before being pulled out of Ontario after regulatory actions were taken against different exchanges. This move amounts to an administrative crackdown as far as the crypto sector is concerned.

Insights on Binances Ban From HashCashs Chief:

Allowing access to cryptocurrencies is not a controlled activity. However, these incidents highlight that while blockchain technology is decentralized and borderless, technologies developed for supporting public and open blockchain are not. The scenario is blurred from many angles, stated Raj Chowdhury, Founder of HashCash Consultants.

Crypto bulls ordinarily represent complicated legislative action dispensing a warning that the cryptocurrency market is developing, and managing the potential for a more effective security net can lure additional investors. Is this condition a net-negative concerning the cryptocurrency space? Certainly not! I think it bestows maturity, Chowdhury added.

Cryptocurrency markets do not happen to be big enough as far as posing a systemic threat in the existing situation is concerned, however, if they proceed to proliferate and develop, regulators might not be content on the front.

About Raj Chowdhury:

Raj Chowdhury is the CEO of HashCash Consultants and a Blockchain pioneer. Raj pioneered the first interbank Trade Finance and Remittance implementation of Blockchain Technology between two of the largest global banks. Raj is an eminent voice in the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency space and actively engages with policymakers in this area. He is a contributor to Economic Times, Business World, CNNMoney and advises industry leaders in the adoption of Blockchain. Raj had been a research associate at MITs Microsystems Technology Lab. He is a member of Asha Silicon Valley, a nonprofit committed to education for children in emerging countries. Author of the book 'The Dark Secret of the Silicon Valley', Raj is an investor in blockchain and cryptocurrency companies and an active member of the philanthropic community.
We welcome Patrick to the firm and look forward to serving clients across the state of Arkansas and beyond on all of their legal needs.

Hall Booth Smith, P.C. (HBS) is pleased to announce that Patrick B. Feilke is joining the firm as a Partner as the firm opens a new office in Little Rock, Arkansas to serve clients in the Southern United States.

The new office is located at 400 W. Capitol Ave., Suite 1720, Little Rock, AR, 72201.

This is HBSs first office in Arkansas and the ninth state where the firm operates as it expands to meet the changing needs of clients. With over 250 attorneys and nearly two dozen offices, HBS offers the full-service capabilities of a large firm and the personal relationships and efficiency of a local firm.

The new Little Rock office will be led by Feilke, who concentrates his practice on agricultural matters. He will work closely with Partner Joel McKie, who is based in Atlanta and leads the firms growing Agribusiness and Food practice group.

Feilke represents large and small landowners and related businesses in all aspects of agricultural law, and his legal counsel is informed by 115 years of family history in rice, soybean and corn farming in central Arkansas.

He protects the interests of his clients on contractual and legal matters related to federal farm programs, subsidy allocations, commodity contracts, agricultural and equipment financing, crop damage and other insurance coverage disputes, genetically modified crops, agricultural land leases, purchase and sale agreements, and business entity formation.

We welcome Patrick to the firm and look forward to serving clients across the state of Arkansas and beyond on all of their legal needs, said Alex Booth, Managing Partner of Hall Booth Smith.

Feilke also has extensive experience in oil and gas, including title examination, agreement drafting, drilling and division order title opinions for small and large operators, and complex oil and gas litigation. Clients rely on him to protect their interests and represent them on regulatory and administrative matters before the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission and the Arkansas Oil & Gas Commission.

Feilke earned a LL.M. degree in agricultural and food law from the University of Arkansas Robert A. Leflar School of Law, where he wrote his thesis on hydraulic fracking. He completed a J.D. at the University of Arkansas Robert A. Leflar School of Law, and a B.S. in agricultural business with a pre-law concentration from the University of Arkansas.

I am delighted to join a talented team of attorneys with extensive agricultural experience, and its an honor to contribute my knowledge and family farming history as we serve clients in Arkansas and across the region, Feilke said.

About Hall Booth Smith

Established in 1989, Hall Booth Smith, P.C. (HBS) is a full-service law firm with six regional offices strategically located throughout Georgia, as well as offices in Birmingham, Alabama; Charleston, South Carolina; Asheville and Charlotte, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Miami, Tallahassee, Tampa, St. Petersburg and West Palm Beach, Florida; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Little Rock, Arkansas; Saddle Brook, New Jersey; and New York City. Experienced across a wide range of legal disciplines, HBS attorneys pride themselves on providing knowledgeable, proactive, client-specific counsel to individuals, domestic and international corporations, state and federal agencies, and nonprofit organizations. The firms promise: Serving to Achieve Excellence." To learn more, please visit: http://www.hallboothsmith.com or connect with us on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/hall-booth-smith-p-c-
Drivers should consider the advantages and disadvantages of changing their current insurance provider, before making a decision., said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of Internet Marketing Company.

Changing their insurance provider is a move that drivers have to analyze it carefully. There are many reasons for drivers to change their insurance company, from unfair premiums, up to rude and unsatisfactory customer support. Drivers that want to switch their carriers should consider following these steps:



Deciding when to make the move. The ideal time for switching carriers is three to four weeks before policy renewal. This will guarantee the policyholders have enough time to find a policy and to qualify for an early shopper discount.

Buy a new policy before canceling the old one. Insurance gaps can be costly, not only when drivers have accidents, but also if their states laws penalize registered cars without continuous coverage.

Policyholders should consider the important life changes. Drivers can change their insurance carrier at any time, but some changes in their lives can make the switch to happen earlier. Important life events, like getting married, moving to a better neighborhood, or the purchase of a better safer vehicle can make the policyholders save money on their premiums.

Acknowledge the consequences. Some insurers will charge the policyholders an early cancelation fee. If they stayed with the same insurer for some years, and they decide to cancel their policy, drivers will lose their loyalty discount. Some insurance carriers will offer discounts for new drivers, and a part of the loses that are incurred by switching providers can be compensated.

Drivers should consider canceling their old policy in writing. Their old insurance company may ask for the new policy number so that the authorities will know they are continuously covered.

Confirm cancelation and ask for a refund. Policyholders should make sure their old insurance company confirms the cancelation. Otherwise, the old insurance company will automatically renew their policy and cancel them for nonpayment. Policyholders can get a refund for their unused premium if they cancel early.

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.
SMIB Management announced today that the Internal Revenue Service has begun a major increase in adding personnel with the hiring of thousands of new IRS auditors in the agencys efforts for a major tax-enforcement initiative.

According to a recent Bloomberg article, the IRS held a recent tax conference in which, IRS officials indicated the agency is adding nearly 2,000 new employees. Among these new positions 1,300 will be new IRS auditors added to the SBSE (Small Business Self Employed) Division along with over 500 new personnel being added to the IRS CID (Criminal Investigation Division). Details of the conference were contained in Bloombergs Laura Davison and Genevieve Douglas report.

James Harnsberger of SMIB Management, a tax consulting firm in San Diego that specializes in Crypto Currency Tax Consulting and Representation matters before the IRS, stated, These new hires and targeted enforcement efforts represent a major uptrend by the IRSthe largest we have seen in more than twenty years. These efforts will no doubt mean a significant increase in examination capacity for the IRS, with substantial resources aimed at the Crypto Currency space. As such, SMIB Management is leading the way in new processes for handling the new inflow of Crypto Currency clients that might need specialized care from a firm that can facilitate the demands of the increased auditing efforts.

The market activity surrounding Bitcoin and other crypto currency assets, along with significant increases in foreign activity surrounding these digital assets, presumably will be among the major focus of enforcement efforts by the Internal Revenue Service. Chief among these efforts will likely be non-reporting and under-reporting of crypto transactions and the non-disclosure of foreign accounts in which taxpayers may have used platforms in a foreign country and not known or understood the foreign disclosure requirements. Mr. Harnsberger added on that issue, The IRS has a safe-harbor against penalties for non-disclosure of foreign activity so long as a taxpayer comes forward to take corrective action in their reporting and disclosure obligations BEFORE the IRS begins an audit or investigation on the taxpayer.

Mr. Harnsberger further stated, The IRS will undoubtedly be poised for the expected funding increase by Congress of nearly $2.0 billion. We believe much of the focus will be directed at unreported crypto currency transactions and unmet foreign disclosure and reporting obligations under FBAR (Foreign Bank Account Reporting) and FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) requirements. We also see the potential for expanded civil fraud examinations coming from these efforts in 2022 to 2024.

SMIB Management, a tax consulting firm, is located in San Diego, CA. The firm specializes in audits, examinations and appeals focused on the crypto currency market space. Mr. Harnsberger is an Enrolled Agent admitted to practice before the IRS and holds an NTPI Fellowship and Paralegal Credential. He has specialized in Audit/Examination Appeals for over twenty years in his 30-plus year career.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT

James Harnsberger, Enrolled Agent

(619) 592-2708

James@SMIBManagement.com

http://www.SMIBManagement.com
California mental health attorney Kenneth Rosenfeld weighs in on Britney Spears's conservatorship There are a lot of important issues that are happening behind the scenes, Rosenfeld said. Its not as simple as Free Britney.

As Britney Spears prepared to speak openly in court for the first time regarding the conservatorship that has been imposed upon her since 2008, California mental health and criminal defense attorney Ken Rosenfeld of The Rosenfeld Law Firm appeared on Times Radio to speak with host Phil Williams about the issue. Rosenfeld shared legal commentary regarding Spearss motivation for the special hearing, how the appearance might impact the ruling on her conservatorship, and what future actions the pop star might take to secure the freedom she seeks.

Regarding what Spears hoped to gain by speaking out in courtto be liberated from her conservatorship without need of further evaluationRosenfeld, an expert mental health law commentator, described the unlikeliness of such a request being summarily granted in the case of a medical conservatorship such as Spearss. Instead, Rosenfeld explained, the input of medical experts will be required to demonstrate her ability to care for herself and her children.

There are a lot of important issues that are happening behind the scenes, Rosenfeld said. Its not as simple as Free Britney.

The conservatorship has remained in place for 13 years on the basis that medical professionals feel Spears is unable to care for herself without it; therefore, said Rosenfeld, a new medical assessment involving a licensed medical doctor verifying her as capable of operating without a conservatorship would be her best course of action going forward.

About The Rosenfeld Law Firm

With offices in Sacramento and San Jose, The Rosenfeld Law Firm provides aggressive defense of a wide range of high-profile criminal defense cases. California criminal defense attorney Ken Rosenfeld defends such cases as first-degree murder and sex offense cases, and also provides DUI defense. In addition to mental health criminal defense, The Rosenfeld Law Firm also practices federal criminal defense and juvenile defense, as well as appellate law and prison law. As a skilled criminal law commentator, Rosenfeld makes regular appearances on KTXL TV and FOX40's Ask An Attorney. Rosenfeld was named 2020 Litigator of the Year by the American Institute of Trial Lawyers. For more information, please contact Ken Rosenfeld directly at (916) 447-2070, or visit http://www.therosenfeldlawfirm.com.
We look forward to bringing the fintech community back together in May.

LendIt Fintech, the leading event series dedicated to financial services innovation, today announced that its flagship event, LendIt Fintech USA, will return to the New York Javits Center on May 25-26, 2022. Now in its tenth year, LendIt Fintech USA has grown from a small community event with 350 attendees in 2013 to over 5,000 people today. Taking place in the financial capital of the world, LendIt Fintech USA is New York Citys largest fintech event, and brings together banks, fintechs and investors seeking to learn and conduct business. Over 10,000 one-on-one meetings take place at LendIt Fintech USA every year, and many of these meetings are catalysts for deals and partnerships that emerge in the months following the event.

We are very excited to be returning to our home at the Javits Center in New York City for our milestone 10th annual event, said Bo Brustkern, LendIt Fintech Co-Founder and CEO. The cutting edge content and face-to-face meetings at our events are hugely important for the industry. This is where people come to solidify existing relationships, identify new partners, and get deals done, which is why our return to physical events is so crucial for the future of financial services. We look forward to bringing the fintech community back together in May.

At LendIt Fintech USA 2022 we will be bringing the leading thinkers in our industry together in person to discuss the most important topics of the day.

There will be a fresh take on popular themes like:



Banking Crosses into its Digital Future

SMB Fintech: New Solutions for Lending & Banking

Consumer Lending: BNPL, Cards and Personal Loans

Credit & Underwriting: AI, More Data and Better Tools

New topics for the 2022 edition include:



Crypto, DeFi & CBDCs: The Future of Money is Here

Fintech in 2027

Embedded Finance: Every Company Can Become a Fintech

Real Time Payments: How Fintech is Not Waiting for the Fed

Sponsorship opportunities are now open for leading solution providers, and speaker submissions are encouraged. For more information, please go to http://lendit.com/usa/2022.

About LendIt Fintech

LendIt Fintech is a leading fintech media company dedicated to innovation in financial services. Today we operate three major conferences annually for the US, European and Latin American markets, as well as the latest addition to our events calendar, Fintech Nexus. LendIt Fintech also provides daily news updates for the fintech community, amplifies industry announcements through its PR platform, Fintech Features, and helps connect employers and job seekers through the LendIt Fintech Job Board.

The LendIt Fintech team believes that there has never been a more exciting time to be in financial services. We immerse ourselves in all things fintech so we can be your guide on this journey.

###

Media Contact:

Caroline Hornby, Marketing Manager

LendIt Fintech

caroline@lendit.com
Lighthouse Health & Wellness Officer health and safety are top priority for The Payson Police Department. The department is always looking for the best ways to help employees manage the day-to-day challenges of the job and to truly thrive.

The Payson Police Department of Payson, Arizona has launched a custom health application, developed by Lighthouse Health & Wellness, designed to provide resources and support the wellbeing of first responders and their families.

Lighthouse Health & Wellness  Supporting First Responders Wellbeing

Lighthouse Health & Wellness is an in-hand, on-demand, 100% confidential health and wellness platform. The apps give public safety employees easy access to their agencys existing health and wellness programs, as well as to a growing library of the latest educational health and wellness information and toolsall tailored to the unique needs of those working in public safety. Custom mobile applications include direct access to the evolving Bulletproof library of educational content (developed and managed by the 100 Club of Arizona), the agency's existing wellness resources, a customizable event calendar, peer support toolbox, therapist locator, and more.

The Payson Police Department Prioritizes Officer Health

Officer health and safety are top priority for The Payson Police Department. The department is always looking for the best ways to help officers manage the day-to-day challenges of the job and to truly thrive. The custom Lighthouse app will make it easy for department employees to access vital information and make even better use of the resources they already have in place. Lighthouse Health and Wellness is confident that the launch of this custom application will play a key role in supporting the continued success of health and safety initiatives at the Payson Police Department.

Public Safety Officers Need Support  Now More Than Ever

With the overwhelming rise in job-related stress, growing media scrutiny, increased focus on public safety suicides, and the reality and fear of senseless line-of-duty deaths, it is more important than ever that all first responders have access to health and wellness resources. Lighthouse is accessible on the web as well as via iOS and Android applications. This puts the tools public safety officers need literally at their fingertips. If you or your organization would like to know how you can support wellness initiatives at the Payson Police Department or at your own local agency, we encourage you to reach out to us at https://www.lighthousehw.org/contact.

About Lighthouse Health & Wellness

Lighthouse Health & Wellness is a public benefit corporation with the stated mission of ensuring that every public safety agency in the nation can provide its employees and their families with confidential and anonymous access to health and wellness resources. Lighthouse H&W along with partner Apex Mobile accomplish this by providing mobile app and web portal platforms that provide our nations first responders private access to culturally competent, cutting edge health and wellness information and resources. For more information about Lighthouse Health & Wellness and their application platform call 949-305-7008 or go to http://www.lighthousehw.org.


John D. Stehmeyer, Founder of Pro Players Realty USA Partnering with Side will allow us to continue to provide the best possible service to our clients while expanding our reach.

Pro Players Realty USA today announced its partnership with Side, the only real estate technology company that exclusively partners with high-performing agents, teams, and independent brokerages to transform them into market-leading boutique brands and businesses. The collaboration will ensure that Pro Players Realty USA, a client-focused and results-driven firm, is powered by the industrys most advanced platform.

Since founding Pro Players Realty USA in 2005, founder John D. Stehmeyer has leveraged his decades of experience in construction and renovation to advise hundreds of clients and agents in Tallahassee and beyond. As a trained investor specialist, he has developed and deployed strategies for clients with a range of budgets, from under $1 million to well over $100 million. Stehmeyer ranks in the top five agents nationwide for real estate education and accreditation, with an extensive list of credentials including Certified Negotiations Expert (CNE), Property Management Expert (PME), and Certified Distressed Property Expert (CDPE).

The Pro Players Realty USA network  which includes more than 50 agents in the Tallahassee area alone  reliably produces high-value results as it advocates tirelessly for its clients best interests. The firm serves a range of buyers and sellers, including military personnel, move-up buyers, investors, and retirees, as well as real estate agents who wish to grow their careers with a firm long known for its integrity and distinction. Pro Players Realty USA helps clients at all stages of life achieve security, comfort, and generational wealth through strategic real estate investment.

Partnering with Side will ensure Pro Players Realty USA remains on the cutting edge of the evolving real estate market while continuing to deliver premium services to its clients. Side works behind the scenes, supporting Pro Players Realty USA with a one-of-a-kind brokerage platform that includes proprietary technology, transaction management, branding and marketing services, public relations, legal support, lead generation, vendor management, infrastructure solutions, and more. Additionally, Pro Players Realty USA will join an exclusive group of Side partners, tapping into an expansive network from coast to coast.

The decision to team up with Side was a relatively easy one, said Stehmeyer. Partnering with Side will allow us to continue to provide the best possible service to our clients while expanding our reach. Well be able to help more buyers and sellers improve their lives through real estate and support additional agents as we work toward our goal of developing 500 offices throughout North America.

Side is led by experienced industry professionals and world-class engineers who develop technology designed to improve agent productivity and enhance the client experience. Based on its belief that homeownership is a fundamental human right, Side is on a mission to improve the public good by providing top-performing real estate agents, teams, and indie brokerages with the best system, support, service, experience, and results.

About Pro Players Realty USA

Since 2005, Pro Players Realty USA has cultivated its reputation for client-focused, results-driven real estate excellence. The firm counsels buyers and sellers  including military personnel, move-ups, investors, retirees, and real estate agents as they improve their lives through real estate. Headquartered in Tallahassee, Florida, Pro Players Realty USA is rapidly growing, with plans to expand throughout North America. For more information, visit http://www.proplayersrealtyusa.com.

About Side

Side transforms high-performing agents, teams, and independent brokerages into successful businesses and boutique brands that are 100% agent-owned. Side exclusively partners with the best agents, empowering them with proprietary technology and a premier support team so they can be more productive, grow their business, and focus on serving their clients. Side is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit http://www.sideinc.com.
Viewpoint is proud to utilize its platform to bring additional awareness to the subject and to shed light on the influence the disorder has on countless lives.

Parent Trap star Dennis Quaid hosts the television segment Viewpoint, showcasing PTSD awareness. Subject matter for the segment is created for the program by experts in the field and vetted content providers. Leading experts at the forefront of PTSD treatments will be featured on the show to highlight the need for increased awareness of the ongoing issue.

June was PTSD awareness month. It's estimated that about 8 million people in the United States have some form or presenting symptoms of PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a mental health problem some people develop after witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, combat, sexual assault, or a car accident. While PTSD treatments work, many sufferers do not seek out treatment, or self-medicate to cope.

With treatment, trauma survivors can learn to feel safe in the world and live happy and productive lives. Trauma-focused psychotherapies are most commonly recommended for PTSD treatment. These treatments help the individual process the traumatic event, which can involve talking about, visualizing, or thinking about the traumatic memory. Further information will be provided in the Viewpoint segment.

PTSD is a widespread issue that impacts many. Viewpoint is proud to utilize its platform to bring additional awareness to the subject and to shed light on the influence the disorder has on countless lives. Dennis Quaid will introduce the upcoming segment.

The show Viewpoint is designed to educate viewers. Viewpoint has received multiple awards throughout its tenure and is made possible by a dedicated crew of creators and developers.
Martin Reed, CEO of RANDA Solutions recently appointed Kimberly Wilson Linson to the position of Director of Credential Ecosystems. By focusing on establishing initial networks for credential ecosystems, RANDA Solutions is providing publishing, consuming and verification solutions solving the cold start problem at each intersection of credentialing.

Reed said that Linsons expertise across the education sector is critical to helping nurture and mature fledgling ecosystems.

Kimberly has built a career of almost 30 years in multiple sectors within education. We look forward to this collaboration as we drive forward the development of standards, processes, and methods that deliver verifiable credentials supporting the lifelong learner in their education journey, he said.

Kimberly received a Masters in Education Policy from American University in 1998. She has been a leader in education for over 25 years impacting the lives of students, families, and educators. As Director of Learning Centers for Lindamood-Bell, she was responsible for managing all aspects of the learning center division comprised of 65 learning centers across the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. In 2017, she co-founded a professional learning company, Leaderally. As CEO, she led the team, creating an eLearning platform for classroom educators. The unique approach developed micro-content focused on the foundational leadership skills of communication, management, and strategy.

As a part of Kimberlys role as Director of Credential Ecosystems, she serves on several nonprofit working groups including: The Lifelong Learner Project, Velocity Career Network, Trust Over IP, and WC3 Credentials Community Group.

Linson said it is an honor to be asked to create this role within the cutting-edge credential technology ecosystem.

I feel so fortunate to be given the opportunity to work alongside the smartest minds, as we stand on the precipice of the next generation of digital identity. I look forward to contributing to a world where individuals have agency over not only credentials, but all the evidence of the vast learning and experience, we accumulate during our lives.

About RANDA

For 20 years, RANDA has provided teacher effectiveness systems to state level agencies. They continue to mature their platforms to meet the needs of modern education systems. Solutions include roster verification, student claiming, observation and evaluation, licensure, salary, and the creation of an overall teacher portfolio. Currently RANDA platforms impact approximately 10% of the teaching population in the United States. RANDA wants to grow its ability to solve teacher frustrations. We know teachers want to make a difference for as many students as possible. Providing this new functionality to existing platforms allows them to do just that, says Reed. http://www.randasolutions.com
Shango Springfield Now Open Nancy Price, President and CEO of Shango Springfield says, Shango believes in building strong relationships with our customers, our neighbors and the communities we call home.

Shango is ready to show Springfield how medical cannabis is done. The award-winning, multi-state cannabis brand opened its first Springfield dispensary in the Parkcrest Center at 3903 S. Campbell Ave. on Thursday, July 1st. Shango Springfield is the second Shango medical dispensary now open in the state of Missouri.

Seniors, active military and Veterans will get a 10 percent discount every day.

We want to show Springfield how we do business and how we treat our customers, says Shango CEO Brandon Rexroad. Our goal is to make Shango Springfield in the Parkcrest Center the best dispensary in the city and set the standard for excellence throughout Missouri.

Rexroad added that Shango Springfield will soon open a second location in the Plaza Center on Glenstone in Springfield, as well as a cannabis manufacturing facility in Stockton, Missouri, later this year.

Shango is one of the largest cannabis license holders in the United States and has earned numerous national and international accolades for its high-quality products, community partnerships and corporate philanthropy.

Nancy Price, President and CEO of Shango Springfield says, Shango believes in building strong relationships with our customers, our neighbors and the communities we call home. And well work hard to make significant, ongoing, positive contributions to the economic, social and cultural life of Springfield. We are majority locally owned and staffed, and Shango provides us with great nationally recognized expertise and experience.

Shango Springfield's regular dispensary hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am to 7 pm.

The phone number is (417) 986-3903. For more information, visit the Shango Missouri at Parkcrest location page at http://www.goshango.com.

About Shango

Shango is a well established vertically integrated cannabis brand offering a full range of award-winning products, including flower, extracts, concentrates and cannabis-infused edibles. The company has operations in Nevada, Oregon, Arizona, California, Michigan and Missouri.

The Shango brand has full-service recreational and medical cannabis dispensaries in Las Vegas, Nevada; Portland, Oregon; Moreno Valley, California; Lapeer, Bay City and Hazel Park, Michigan, and medical dispensaries in Joplin and Springfield, Missouri. The company will soon open a second dispensary in Springfield. Shango is building two extraction facilities, a commercial kitchen and an indoor cultivation facility in Michigan, as well as a cannabis manufacturing facility in Missouri. Shango also operates a state-of-the-art cannabis distribution operation in Southern California.

A recognized leader in the cannabis industry, Shango sets the standards for product quality, consistency and business conduct. Global Health & Pharma named Shango the Best Multi-State Medical Cannabis Dispensary in the U.S. in its 2020 Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Awards. Macias Gini & O'Connell named Shango to its 2021 Cannabis 50 list, recognizing companies that are reshaping and inspiring the continued growth of the cannabis and hemp industries. Shango is committed to cannabis education and is a fierce advocate of the safe and responsible use of cannabis products. For more information, visit http://www.goshango.com.
Big Ag is getting a big bad rep in the media in needing to break it up with antitrust law, researchers want to provide people with some context as to what antitrust policy was created to do and how it has been historically implemented.

In the new Applied Economics Perspectives & Policy article Should we use antitrust policies on big agriculture? Jason Winfree and Philip Watson from the University of Idaho discuss some of the potential problems of using antitrust law to break up big agriculture.

Watson says, The implications are that it would likely be counter productive to use antitrust law to break up big ag for the purposes of raising prices to protect small famers. Antitrust policy is specifically designed to protect consumers from high prices that can sometimes result from market power. However, there is little evidence that big ag is resulting in higher prices and there is more evidence to the contrary that big ag is resulting in lower prices. For some, this is the problem; that food prices are too low and this is hurting small producers. However, there are better policy tools to assist small farmers than using antitrust to break up big ag for the purpose of raising prices.

If you are interested in setting up an interview, please contact Allison Ware in the AAEA Business Office.

ABOUT AAEA: Established in 1910, the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) is the leading professional association for agricultural and applied economists, with 2,500 members in more than 60 countries. Members of the AAEA work in academic or government institutions as well as in industry and not-for-profit organizations, and engage in a variety of research, teaching, and outreach activities in the areas of agriculture, the environment, food, health, and international development. The AAEA publishes two journals, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and Applied Economic Perspectives & Policy, as well as the online magazine Choices and the online open access publication series Applied Economics Teaching Resources. To learn more, visit http://www.aaea.org.
Officer health and safety are top priority for the Stallion Springs Police Department. The department is always looking for the best ways to help employees manage the day-to-day challenges of the job and to truly thrive.

The Stallion Springs Police Department of Tehachapi, California has launched a custom application developed by Lighthouse Health & Wellness through a scholarship provided by NCPCV. The application is designed to provide health resources and support for first responders and their families.

The Stallion Springs Police Department Prioritizes Officer Health

Officer health and safety are top priority for the Stallion Springs Police Department. The department is always looking for the best ways to help employees manage the day-to-day challenges of the job and to truly thrive. The custom Lighthouse app will make it easy for department employees to access vital information and make even better use of the resources they already have in place. Lighthouse Health and Wellness is confident that the launch of this custom application will play a key role in supporting the continued success of health and safety initiatives at the Stallion Springs Police Department.

Scholarship Resources Provided by NCPCV

Stallion Springs Police Departments application was provided by a scholarship offered by The National Center for Prevention of Community Violence (NCPCV), covering a one-year subscription to a customized Lighthouse Health & Wellness mobile app and web-portal. NCPCV received a 2020 grant from Motorola Solutions Foundation in generous support of this project. Motorola Solutions Foundation awards grants each year to organizations, such as Destination Imagination, which support and advance public safety programs and technology and engineering education initiatives.

Lighthouse Health & Wellness  Supporting First Responders Wellbeing

Lighthouse Health & Wellness is an in-hand, on-demand, 100% confidential health and wellness platform. The apps give public safety employees easy access to their agencys existing health and wellness programs, as well as to a growing library of the latest educational health and wellness information and toolsall tailored to the unique needs of those working in public safety. Custom mobile applications include access to the evolving Lighthouse Library of educational content, the agency's existing wellness resources, a customizable event calendar, peer support toolbox, therapist locator, and more.

Public Safety Officers Need Support  Now More Than Ever

With the overwhelming rise in job-related stress, growing media scrutiny, increased focus on public safety suicides, and the reality and fear of senseless line-of-duty deaths, it is more important than ever that all first responders have access to health and wellness resources. Lighthouse is accessible on the web as well as via iOS and Android applications. This puts the tools public safety officers need literally at their fingertips. If you or your organization would like to know how you can support wellness initiatives at the Stallion Springs Police Department or at your own local agency, we encourage you to reach out to us at https://www.lighthousehw.org/contact.

About Lighthouse Health & Wellness

Lighthouse Health & Wellness is a public benefit corporation with the stated mission of ensuring that every public safety agency in the nation can provide its employees and their families with confidential and anonymous access to health and wellness resources. Lighthouse H&W accomplishes this through mobile app and web portal platforms, powered by Apex Mobile. This technology provides our nations first responders private access to culturally competent, cutting edge health and wellness information and resources. For more information about Lighthouse Health & Wellness and their first responder health and wellness programs call 949-305-7008 or go to https://www.lighthousehw.org.

About National Center For Prevention of Community Violence

The National Center For Prevention of Community Violence is a nonprofit with extensive experience providing evidence-based programming. NCPCVs AC4P-Policing program uses an innovative approach to providing comprehensive, culturally competent training and tools to foster wellness among public safety. For more information visit http://www.ncpcv.org.


Conversion API services By offering an environment to use the conversion API quickly and securely, transcosmos enables clients to optimize Facebook and Instagram ads even after they implement cookie rules whilst minimizing system related resources.

transcosmos inc. hereby announces that the company has launched the data marketing team that consists of selected members specifically for promoting the use of API connections to comply with the cookie laws and rules. As a first step, the company has released implementation services for the Facebook/Instagram Conversion API.

With this service, transcosmos helps clients build an environment where they can use the conversion API without any access to their own servers, together with a system designed for exporting conversion data. Ultimately, transcosmos provides clients with a system environment that allows them to use conversion API quickly and securely, and helps them optimize Facebook and Instagram ads performance whilst minimizing required resources. With the solutions offered by its new data marketing team that focuses on promoting the use of API connections, transcosmos continues to help clients drive their digital transformation initiatives that meet changing times.

 About Facebook/Instagram Conversion API implementation services

Given the accelerated move towards tightening cookie tracking (cookies) rules globally that are intended to protect personal information in recent years, it has become harder for businesses to deliver targeted ads. Against this backdrop, Facebook, Inc. has released a new feature called Conversion API (*1) that allows users to measure web data on their servers instead of using third party cookies. The feature is expected to enable users to complement and use alternative data required to optimize ad delivery, thereby achieving the optimum outcome.

However, despite it is generally considered urgent for businesses to implement the conversion API to address the stricter cookie rules and laws, many struggle to implement the API as planned due to technical and resource constrains for system implementation and maintenance.

Recognizing this, transcosmos has released the conversion API implementation services offered by the data marketing team - a team of experts who have acquired know-how in using data through working on ad delivery and website management. transcosmos will provide the system for exporting conversion data, which means that all clients need do is export required data items to the transcosmos system, no need to implement the conversion API on their side.

By offering an environment to use the conversion API quickly and securely, transcosmos enables clients to optimize Facebook and Instagram ads even after they implement cookie rules whilst minimizing system related resources.

 Service flow

 Client

(1) Collect data required to measure conversions on your website and servers.

(2) Convert the collected data items into a csv file.

(3) Export the csv file to the transcosmos server.

 transcosmos

(4) transcosmos server import the data to a designated platform via conversion API.

In addition to the service described above, the new data marketing team is working on projects including delivering ads that connect data offered by various platformers such as Google and Yahoo! and their own data.

transcosmos has a long-standing history in assisting clients' digital marketing activities. Building on its abundant record and expertise accumulated through serving clients, and the largest ad operations framework in Japan with seven centers and about 500 members for the service, transcosmos will help clients succeed in their various marketing activities in the market where demands for using data continue to grow.

*1: Conversion API

The Conversion API allows advertisers to send web events such as clicks and conversions on Facebook and Instagram ads accumulated on their own servers directly to Facebook. Server events are linked to a pixel and are processed like browser pixel events. This means that server events are used in measurement, reporting, and optimization in in the same way as browser pixel events.

*transcosmos is a trademark or registered trademark of transcosmos inc. in Japan and other countries.

*Other company names and product or service names used here are trademarks or registered trademarks of respective companies.

About transcosmos inc.

transcosmos launched its operations in 1966. Since then, we have combined superior "people" with up-to-date "technology" to enhance the competitive strength of our clients by providing them with superior and valuable services. transcosmos currently offers services that support clients' business processes focusing on both sales expansion and cost optimization through our 166 bases across 30 countries/regions with a focus on Asia, while continuously pursuing Operational Excellence. Furthermore, following the expansion of e-commerce market on the global scale, transcosmos provides a comprehensive One-Stop Global E-Commerce Services to deliver our clients' excellent products and services to consumers in 48 countries/regions around the globe. transcosmos aims to be the "Global Digital Transformation Partner" of our clients, supporting the clients' transformation by leveraging digital technology, responding to the ever-changing business environment. Visit us here https://www.trans-cosmos.co.jp/english/
Zebra Pen Embraces Different in Difference Makers Campaign with Social Entrepreneur Tiffany Yau

Zebra Pen Corp., a global leader in the writing instrument industry, launched the third installment of its Difference Makers campaign today, a program that highlights the next generation of thinkers and doers. This latest installment tells the story of Tiffany Yau, Founder and CEO of Fulphil, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to educating high school students on social entrepreneurship to impact local communities.

While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Tiffany was affected by the lack of entrepreneurship education accessible for students in under-resourced neighborhoods. She grew fascinated by how social entrepreneurship could help benefit underserved communitiesincluding the community of Philadelphia right next to her campus. This led her to launch Fulphil, a non-profit that helps make entrepreneurship education accessible and affordable to high school students.

[Through Fulphil,] we teach high school students the concept of social entrepreneurship with the goal of giving back to their local communities, explained Tiffany Yau. Often, the people closest to the problems are closest to the solutions.

Fulphil enables students to get involved in solving their local communities toughest social issues. The purpose of the program is to make entrepreneurship education widely accessible for students. The functionality of the program allows Fulphils students to choose their own paths and positively impact their local communities.

When Yau reflected on what led her to choose this unique path, she said, I choose different because I believe there's more than one way to make an impact.

Zebra Pen is passionate about their products, which are as unique as the people who choose them. As part of the companys Choose Different campaign, the Difference Makers program highlights three emerging entrepreneurs and self-starters who have chosen to take the path less traveled to deliver unique solutions for everyday people.

To hear more about Tiffany Yaus entrepreneurial story and how Zebra Pen is empowering others to embrace different, visit Difference Makers

About Zebra Pen Corporation

Zebra Pen Corporation was founded in New York in August 1982 as an independent corporation wholly owned by Zebra Co., Ltd., of Tokyo, Japan. A New Jersey-based writing instrument manufacturer, Zebra Pen Corporations mission is to distribute products that are of the highest quality, providing value to consumers and meeting their overall writing and creative needs with a wide variety of products. Zebra Pen Corporation offers a full line of writing and creative products, including ballpoint pens, gel pens, rollerball pens, mechanical pencils, highlighters, porous pens/markers and brush pens. Today, with over 35 years of excellence behind them, Zebra Pen Corporation is leading the way with a wide range of quality writing and creative products including the STEEL, Sarasa, Z-Grip, Zensations and Mildliner brands. For more information, visit zebrapen.com.
Explorations of class, race, and sexuality play into many of this falls notable fiction debuts, including a novel about a young Black woman working in financial services, a South Korean gay romance, and more.

Nawaaz Ahmed

Supersized and Fully Formed

In 1994, Nawaaz Ahmed left India for a graduate program in computer science at Cornell. I dont think in India you go around saying, I want to be a writer,  he says from his home in Brooklyn. Like his debut, Radiant Fugitives (Counterpoint, Aug.), which PW called dazzling in a starred review, the path to writing a novel was long and windy, and informed by his political consciousness as a gay Muslim immigrant.

Ahmed took a job in the Bay Area with Inktomi in 2000, touted at the time as the next Microsoft, he says. Two years later its stock plummeted from a peak of $241 to a quarter a share, and the company was sold to Yahoo. By 2007 hed become involved with book clubs and writing groups mainly comprising other South Asians and went part-time at Yahoo to focus on his writing. In 2009 he left for the University of Michigan, expecting to finish a book by the time his MFA scholarship support ran out. But it took 10 years, he adds, laughing.

The first drafts of Radiant Fugitives, about an Indian woman condemned by her father for being queer, were shorter and more focused on a family drama. But as Ahmed became galvanized by the uncertainty around the marriage equality fight during the early Obama years and the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment, after having already taken part in actions with Asian LGBTQ groups in the Bay Area, those issues began entering the book.

He says it was both exciting and scary to write explicitly about homosexuality, because of the small number of gay Muslim writers who were published. But I was like, how can you not? I have to take part in the struggle for visibility, he adds.

The draft Ahmed worked on with agent Anjali Singh sprawled to 800 pages, almost twice the length itd ultimately publish as. Dan Smetanka at Counterpoint read all of it. Its that moment when the lightning comes down and your hair is on fire and all of those terrible metaphors that editors use, he says. It was such an ambitious draft, supersized and fully formed.

Xavier Navarro Aquino

A Wicked Dew

Four days after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Xavier Navarro Aquino returned there from Lincoln, Nebr., where he was completing a PhD in English, to help his family. His mother lives in Vega Baja, where he was raised, and much of his family lives in various parts of the islands northern coast.

It wasnt easy for me to process and want to write about it, Aquino says from his home in Lincoln, where he is preparing to move to South Bend, Ind., to teach at Notre Dame. But from that experience came the idea for a story of a girl named Camila who finds her sister encased in a mudslide. It became the germ for Velorio (HarperVia, Jan. 2022), a polyphonic novel of Marias aftermath.

I used the framework of Lord of the Flies to imagine a society after the natural disaster because it wasnt far from reality, Aquino says. I saw how the rules and laws had degraded, and how degradation mixed with fears of abandonment, which had exacerbated a very fragile electric grid, economic system, and diaspora.

By then, Aquino already had an agent, Jin Auh, whom hed met at the Sewanee Writers Conference. During a residency at MacDowell in 2019, he wrote a full draft of Velorio in a fever pitch. I was very surprised with how it just fell into my imagination and the words would just flow, but it was a strange time, he says. I think I felt a little crazy, and told I friend I felt like I was hearing voices.

When Aquino met with Tara Parsons, editor and associate publisher at HarperVia, he was excited to hear that she understood what he was doing with the multitude of voices, and that she didnt want him to change itsomething Jin had warned him might happen with other editors. One of the most important voices was that of the complex character Urayoan, whom Aquino hesitatingly calls an antagonist, because Urayoan speaks to the effects of U.S. colonization, sometimes in ways that are not immediately coherent. I was sort of trying to draw from Derek Walcotts commentary on Caliban, Aquino says. In The Tempest, Caliban carries the most beautiful language but is often overlooked.

Natasha Brown

Everybody Hurts

I think STEM careers are really good options for a lot of people, says Natasha Brown, a writer from London who studied math at Cambridge and spent a decade working in financial services. They can really be good opportunities to buy yourself some time to produce creative work.

In 2019, after writing on the side and taking workshops, Brown received support from the London Writers Award and finished her first novel, Assembly (Little, Brown, Sept.), which PWs starred review called a stunning achievement of compressed narrative and fearless articulation.

Assembly follows a young Black woman working at an investment bank, whose visit to her white fiances family estate is dampened by her recent breast cancer diagnosis, and whose career success is met with blatant racism and sexism from bitter associates at her workplace. Clocking in at 112 pages with a small trim size, and punctuated by fragments of prose and verse along with references to theories from bell hooks and Claudia Rankine, its not a conventional novel, but it tells an age-old story.

Its like a to be or not to be story, but about race, says Jean Garnett, an editor at Little, Brown, who acquired the book during Frankfurt last year. You have a character whos thinking, is this worth enduring? Except Natashas character is way less whiny and indulgent than Hamlet.

Its a story thats more commonly told in white literary fiction. The stories Ive really enjoyed have been about middle-class lack of satisfaction, Brown says. But for people of color, for Black women specifically, if we do get a story about someone being successful, its always a story of being grateful. Its kind of limiting and a little bit dehumanizing to not recognize that everybody feels dissatisfied with their lives sometimes.

Reading Rankines Citizen and Dont Let Me Be Lonely helped show Brown new possibilities for writing about Black experiences, she says, and Lydia Daviss and Maggie Nelsons work opened up a sense of playfulness in mixing genres and weaving tangential threads.

As a result, Assembly sometimes has the feeling of an essay. The narrator looks out at the reader to say, I see you,  Garnett says. Im not encased in a fictional universe, Im here in the same world and were having a conversation about that world.

Ash Davidson

Paradise Lost

Ash Davidson was too young to remember her early few years in Klamath, Calif., but her parents stories formed a powerful mythology of a seaside idyll destroyed by logging. My parents were very clear that this was the most beautiful place theyd ever lived, she says. But the herbicides used by loggers poisoned their drinking water, prompting the family to develop a habit of never drinking from a tap, no matter where they are.

Davidsons novel, Damnation Spring (Scribner, Aug.), is set in a place similar to Klamath in the 1970s, where a logger buys a grove of redwoods to invest in his familys future. It explores the tension between a working-class communitys economic livelihood, the health risks posed by logging, and the environmentalists who spotlight its devastation. PW called it a heart-wrenching modern American tragedy.

To write the book, Davidson took a trip back to Klamath for research, hoping to talk to people who were affected by the pollution. I didnt know what the hell I was doing, and couldnt get people to speak with me, she says. Then, with her mother, she went to a community dinner. We walked in and you could just hear the heads turn.

After a woman recognized her mother, she introduced Davidson to a former logger. He told me hed actually been sprayed while he was working, and shared how it affected his eyes, his breathing, and his skin, she says. That was the moment that I realized: this persons family was drinking the water.

At that point, Davidson says, she was able to approach the characters with empathy.

The book took a decade to write, and her agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, helped her across the finish line. Theyd met when Davidson was working on short stories at the Iowa Writers Workshop and he suggested she write a novel. I sent him an email five years later saying, Hi, I dont know if you remember me, but you were right, and heres this novel, would you look at it?  she recalls.

He did, and when Parris-Lamb sent it to Kathy Belden, executive editor at Scribner, it didnt take long for her to respond. I like fiction that does societal work being done in service of the story, Belden says. It feels like an old-fashioned big American novel.

Jo Hamya

Do They Owe Us a Living?

When did it become ridiculous to think that a stable economy and a fair housing market were reasonable expectations? asks the unnamed narrator of Jo Hamyas Three Rooms (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Aug.). Its a spiky riff on Virginia Woolfs A Room of Ones Own, dialing into the dwindling prospects for university graduates in the U.K. and the conservative politics behind Brexit.

After taking an MA at Oxford, Hamya faced her share of precarity while working an unstable magazine job, which she ended up quitting because it didnt line up with her long-range goal to be a university lecturer. My protagonist is the sort of person I would hate to end up becoming, Hamya says. Shes very indecisive and ineffectual, and confined by circumstance.

The book developed after the Brexit referendum as Hamya and her friends began to feel that they would never be able to buy their own homes. Hamya is half Polish and grew up watching her parents achieve progressively better lives. They had kind of gotten the better deal out of Blairism and social mobility, she says, and I had maybe slightly naive expectations of how life should turn out.

Hamya finished the book in March 2020, a week or two before England went into lockdown. Id sent it to a handful of agents who hadnt responded, and so Id sort of given up, she says. But a few friends asked to read the manuscript, one of whom worked at Penguin, and though the friend said she wouldnt be able to do anything, the book got passed around. Two weeks later Hamya received a call from Ana Fletcher, senior editor at Jonathan Cape.

Sort of halfway through the conversation I began to clock that she was interested in acquiring it, Hamya says. Fletcher helped her connect with agent Harriet Moore to negotiate the deal, and by August, the North American rights were sold to HMH at auction.

Hamya says she wasnt sure how the book would be received in the U.S., given its focus on British politics, and was heartened to receive an enthusiastic letter from a bookseller in Alabama. Maybe its because there was this overlap of news feeds in 2016 and 2020, where we had Boris Johnson and you guys had Trump, she notes. Both sides of the Atlantic were melting.

Tracey Lange

Breaking the Bonds

In the opening scene of Tracey Langes We Are the Brennans (Celadon, Aug.), a young woman named Sunday Brennan drives into a Los Angeles freeway divider while drunk, prompting her bar-owner brother to bring her back home to New York City. With the crash, Sunday has reached the end of the line in an attempt to start a new life away from her Irish Catholic family.

I come from a big Irish Catholic crew, says Lange, who now lives in Oregon and was raised in an Upper West Side apartment building where her father worked as the super. My dad was one of 15 kids from Ireland, and I just loved being around that kind of clan feeling. Theres so much fodder to dig into.

The story isnt autobiographical, but Lange, like Sunday, also headed west once she came of age, settling first in Arizona, where, with her husband, she built and ran a business providing behavioral health services for 15 years. The focus was so much about the family, and what makes a family work and not work, she says.

Several years ago, Lange was able to focus solely on her writing, and completed the manuscript while enrolled in an online novel writing program at Stanford. The program came at a great time because I trying to wrap my mind around the novels multiple point of view, she says. In doing so, she was able to get underneath the surface of the guarded members of the Brennan clan.

Describing her own extended family, Lange says, Theres a great closeness, but theres also a lot of hiding flaws and a lot of shame, whether its mental illness issues, drug use, financial worries, or divorce. I felt very connected to Sunday, growing up in a family where theres a bit of keeping things on the down low.

Lange met agent Stephanie Cabot at a writers conference in Kauai, Hawaii. Cabot was impressed by her pitch and her professionalism, and saw how the book fit in her wheelhouse. Im always drawn to this idea that history is always with us, Cabot says. I think she pulled it off really well. Theres a lot of heart and emotion and compassion.

Claire Luchette

Out of the Habit

In summer 2016, Claire Luchette was in graduate school at the University of Oregon, broke and eating expired yogurt while working on short stories. She remembered something her nun macroeconomics teacher would always say at her Jesuit high school back in Chicago: Theres no such thing as a free lunch. The line inspired her to write the story New Bees, which was published in Ploughshares and became her meal ticket for a series of writing residencies.

The story also became her way into the novel Agatha of Little Neon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug.), which PW called a lovely story of... cross-cultural exchange. It takes place in a halfway house in Rhode Island, where a group of nuns explore their sense of agency as well as their sexuality.

I was wondering how nuns could live with the fact that in the eyes of the church theyre second-class citizens, Luchette says. At the time, Donald Trump was on the rise and she was thinking a lot about power and inequality. It stoked a lot of rage.

She also developed the theme of conviction. What if you revisited this thing you always assumed was true about yourself? she asks. Thats something the church doesnt really make possible. At the time, I was starting to ask questions about my own sexuality, and it seemed natural for the characters.

In 2018 Luchette finished what she calls a crappy first draft and sent it to agents. One of them was Julie Barer, whom she cold queried despite having a friend already represented by Barer. I was insistent on doing it myself and not have anyone, you know, introduce me and make it easier, she says.

Barer encouraged Luchette to coax out the themes of identity in the story, which Luchette thinks was the right move. I never wanted this to be a coming-out story, she says, but I did want it to ask some of the same questions, and she made that seem possible.

As early readers start to weigh in, Luchette finds the responses really moving, but she also continues to feel anxious. Im still not sure how to manage the fact that people will find in it what they will, she says. Its a really specific kind of vulnerability to share the last five years of ones life with complete strangers.

Wanda M. Morris

A New Kind of Legal Thriller

After I started this book 13 years ago, I put it down, says Wanda M. Morris, speaking of All Her Little Secrets (Morrow, Nov.). I convinced myself nobody was going to want to read a story about a 40-ish Black woman who has to bring down a group of awful people.

Morris continued her career as a corporate lawyer in Atlanta, where she has lived and worked for the past two decades, and where the book is set. It follows a woman named Ellice Littlejohn who has a corporate counsel job and discovers her bosss dead body, with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Ellice and her boss had been having an affair, and hed asked her to meet him that morning. As the plot unfolds, readers will be reminded of John Grishams The Firm for the way Ellice uncovers criminal activity at the company and confronts an ethical dilemma.

After a health scare several years ago, Morris realized it was time to finish the project. I thought, Im in this high-pressure job and I have a family and Im trying to do all these things and be all these things to everyone else, she recalls. And what am I doing for me?

Morriss longtime interest in writing was partly what made her want to become a lawyer. She reads widely, from biographies to poetry to literary fiction, but shes mainly drawn to mysteries. I like that whole figuring out the puzzle, she says. But she hungered for stories that featured smart Black female protagonists.

I like the idea of, you know, a Black woman chasing down bad guys in dark office towers, Morris says. But I just didnt see a lot of books like that on the shelf. I think Toni Morrison probably launched a lot of careers when she said, If theres a book that you want to read, but it hasnt been written yet, then you must write it. And so I did.

Sang Young Park

A Cosmopolitan Romance

Alexander Chee turned more than a few heads this past winter when he interviewed Korean writer Sang Young Park and announced on Twitter that Parks Love in the Big City (Grove, Nov.; trans. from the Korean by Anton Hur) was the first gay novel published in South Korea, where it appeared in 2019.

There are things that would be very relatable for American millennial readers, like an experience someone could be having in Brooklyn, says Peter Blackstock, editor at Grove. And then theres the dimension of mandatory military service.

Early on, the narrator recounts how he has a female friend send him love letters while in boot camp, so his fellow trainees wont think hes gay. Later, back in Seoul, he has a string of sexual encounters until he finds love.

For Park, Seoul loomed in his early years as a promise of liberation. I was raised in Daegu, he says via his translator, Hur, which is notorious for being conservative. Throughout my teenage years all I could dream of was escaping. After leaving to study at Sungkyunkwan University, he found in Seoul a good place for anyone in the minority to meet others anonymously and stay hidden in the crowds.

As a writer, Park was inspired by Han Kangs The Vegetarian, as well as by French writers such as Annie Ernaux and Margeurite Duras, and he also drew on Korean and American pop culture. His story Searching for Paris Hilton won him a debut writer prize. Maybe Paris Hilton herself was a deeply inspirational figure to me, he jokes.

He hopes American readers will dive into the Korean references in his work. I mention a lot of K-pop acts that are not BTS and Blackpink, who are already super famous in America, so I hope readers check them out, Park says.

Blackstock notes that Grove editorial assistant Yvonne Cha, who read the whole book in Korean, was instrumental to the acquisition, and says they hope to reach an audience of Korean American readers. It was really cool to have her make the case, he adds.

Javier Serena

Books Nobody Wants to Read

What if a blockbuster author of the Spanish-speaking world, whose stature reached mythic proportions just before he died, had toiled for years in obscurity because his early work wasnt all that great? Spanish writer Javier Serena explores this question in Last Words on Earth (Open Letter, Sept.; trans. from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore), about a Roberto Bolano-esque writer named Ricardo Funes.

Asked about how the book was received in Spain, where it was first published in 2017, Serena, who aspired to become a writer as Bolanos work began to make a splash in the late 1990s, says via Whittemore, Bolano is still a delicate topic among the Spanish literary elite. Hes still treated with kid gloves by the people who were close to him. Its not a topic that people just jump into.

At least not in Madrid, where Serena lives and works for Latin American cultural exchange program, or Barcelona, near where Bolano lived when he was in Spain. But Chad Post, publisher and editor at Open Letter, was more than happy to take it on. Its an incredibly moving book, says Post. I think it really hits home with people who work in creative fields where you dont know where your success and value is going to come from and at what point in time.

Post received a sample from Whittemore before the 2019 AWP conference in Portland, Ore., and then at the conference, Whittemore told him about Serenas other book, Atila, about the writer Aliocha Coll, and a third forthcoming in Spanish. So we started conceiving of this as a three-book project that groups together novels about the writing life and an unwavering commitment to your art and how that plays out for people, Post says.

Serena wants to make clear that his character Funes is not Bolano, but says he was inspired by the gulf between Bolanos day-to-day life and the image hed cultivated. We like to think of him as this sort of like punk hippie writer on the margins, but for a while, he was just like, dithering around this town and trying to write books that nobody wanted to read.
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For the second year in a row, the streets of San Diegos Gaslamp Quarter will be quiet this July. The immense pop culture carnival that is San Diego Comic-Con International (SDCC) is the biggest event of the year for comics publishingand a major event for media, video games, and collectibles. But in 2021, it has again been sidelined by the Covid-19 pandemic, like nearly every other major comics event. In its place, Comic-Con International (CCI), the nonprofit group that organizes SDCC, will once again present Comic-Con@Home, an online version of the panels, exhibit hall, and exclusives so beloved by veteran SDCC fans, which this year will run July 2325.

At the same time, with the world beginning to open up again and people tiring of endless Zoom meetings, the live, in-person convention business is slowly coming back, and CCI has plans for Comic-Con Special Edition, an in-person show to be held November 2628 at the San Diego Convention Center. Pop culture event organizers are adapting to a world that is still full of uncertainties about the who and the how of large public gatherings as pandemic-related restrictions in the U.S. continue to ease.

Nevertheless, the main event for CCI is Comic-Con@Home, which will include more interactive events than past iterations, including an online version of the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. The show will only offer three days of programmingdown from the traditional four days in 2020due to budget constraints.

Like many event companies, CCI was forced to make cuts last year that included layoffs, reduced salaries, and shortened work weeks. We had a large war chest, but its been depleted, explains David Glanzer, chief communications and strategy officer for CCI.

The organization learned that putting on an online event is easier in some ways than an in-person show (no need for a physical venue, no parking, no on-site security staff), but large-scale virtual events also bring on their own issues, including Zoom fatigue. Organizers are looking at using several platforms to host their panels, including YouTube and Discord, a voice, text, and video chat platform. One thing hasnt changed: programming remains under wraps until closer to the event, though Glanzer says the mix will be similar to what Comic-Con has always had.

Many fans and creators have been dismayed that Comic-Con Special Edition is set for Thanksgiving weekend, forcing them to choose between the beloved event and time with their loved onesespecially since many Thanksgiving gatherings were canceled last year. Glanzer acknowledges that complaints over the timing of Special Edition are valid, but the convention center is already gearing up for the return of live events. And with so many shows pushed back into the second half of the year, CCI was left with few options.

When we made the decision to do Comic-Con@Home, we really didnt know what July would look like, Glanzer says. Clearly, things have moved faster than a lot of people anticipated. But planning an in-person show in a short amount of time is just not feasible for us, so we decided to do @Home.

As venues began to open, Glanzer says, a fall slot originally looked realistic, but some open dates were unsuitable. Either the entire convention center was not available, or the event would have had to load in on a Friday and load out on a Sundaya logistical impossibility for a show SDCCs size. The only date that was really viable for us was this Thanksgiving weekend, he adds.

Glanzer is sympathetic to those who fear missing out but cautions that Special Edition will be a smaller showthough how much smaller is still to be determined. If people cant make it, we totally get that, he notes. But we wanted to offer an opportunity to have our community again.

Will this be a quiet collectors show, or will Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige take the stage in Hall H to talk about phase five of the MCU? Were still in the process of planning now, Glanzer says. California is opening up, and different exhibitors and different program participants are starting to weigh whether they can go out and meet the public. Well have a better idea as we get closer. But so far, people seem to be excited about it.

Despite the outcry from fans disappointed about the new shows timing, Glanzer points out that Thanksgiving cons have a long a tradition in the science fiction fandom events from which SDCC sprang 50 years ago. Some of the people on the CCI board remember when Thanksgiving was a great convention weekend, he says. When I was a kid, I would spend Thursday with my family and then couldnt wait to spend the rest of the weekend with my family of choice. 

In-person events return

CCI isnt the only show organizer gearing up for a return to live events. The pop culture event schedule is filling up as more people are getting vaccinated. New York Comic Con will take place in person at its customary time in October, as will Washington, D.C.s Awesome Con in August. Some FanExpo events, including MegaCon in Orlando in August (which is expected to draw some 100,000 fans, according to the shows website), will also be in person.

The rest of the once-booming pop culture convention industry is trying to reinvent itself after a year of layoffs and lockdowns. While many fans cant wait to hit the show floors again, some continue to be wary of the health risks, including those related to new coronavirus variants.

ReedPop v-p of new initiatives Mike Armstrong says that for the past 15 months, weve been trying to figure out what our business looks like, and what our business can be in the absence of events. ReedPop has expanded its presentations into a series of online events called the Metaverse, which includes traditional panels but also more interactive events and meetups. Its the result of a lot of user research.

Weve been doing our best to stay busy and talk to our fans, Armstrong says. All of that research and all the conversations weve had with partners have brought us to a place where we feel really good about what the future is going to bring.

ReedPops in-person schedule kicks off with Miamis Supercon in September, followed by New York Comic Con in October. Though NYCC is likely to have its capacity reduced somewhat, it will take place at a newly expanded Javits Center, where a long-wished-for new wing is finally open. Armstrong recently took a tour and says he was very impressed.

The stuff that were going to be able to do in there is going to be incredible, he notes. And the spacethe roof and meetings roomsis beautiful. Well finally have the infrastructure that weve wanted for so long to be able to do the show that weve always wanted to do.

But even as shows come back, questions remains about how they will evolve. Martha Donato, the owner of Mad Event Management, is on the board of several event organizers and runs a series of business and pop culture events, including the Long Beach Comic Con. Its an incredibly risky business to begin with, she points out. Many shows are now unable to get pandemic insurance, and that will make canceling shows even costlier should there be new outbreaks.

Even before the pandemic, many who attended cons were concerned about health issues. For years, wed all joke about what we affectionately called the con crud, Donato says. We all got sick after we went to big shows. We just accepted it as part of doing what we do for a living.

Some fans are going to be slow to venture back to crowded panel rooms. And having fewer fans on the floor will impact the overall con economy. I think were going to see probably a 50% reduction in our audiences, but were still going to have exhibitors who count on the circuit to sell, Donato predicts. Though vendors have pivoted to online sales, the face-to-face selling experience is important to them, she adds. Im already getting outreach from exhibitors in California wanting to know when are we going to start accepting exhibitor registration.

Donato worries that lower attendance will mean less money on the floor. What if we still have a lot of exhibitors, but we have fewer people? she asks. Whats our reset look like? You can call this a transition year, but it still feels like a pandemic year.

Hybrid shows and Zoom fatigue

After more than a year of online shows, hybrid events offering both online and in-person elements look to be a permanent part of the convention landscape. CCI found that online panels brought in a whole new audience. We discovered how many international people really loved the opportunity to see panels that they would only have seen in snippets or on television, Glanzer says. But if we do maintain an online element, it has to be something that isnt there just to be therefans need to engage with it.

The ReedPop Metaverse has developed membership tiers that allow fans to pay to see online portions of shows they cant attend in person, and gain access to tickets and show exclusives. Its part of a new reality in which in-person capacity will be limited.

Weve worked really hard to develop the concept of what does a convention look like when youre not physically there, ReedPops Armstrong says. Our research showed that somebody who has never attended New York Comic Con but is a big C2E2 fan will pay to engage in the New York Comic Con experience without being there. And we feel like we can deliver a lot of value.

Many smaller shows have committed to online-only events for the rest of the year. But everyone we spoke with noted that the problem of Zoom fatigue is real.

I think we all came to realize that a Zoom screen with five talking heads going back and forth and somebody being muted and someone else having tech issues was flawed, Armstrong says. It serves some people well, but its not the most engaging content.

For Metaverse, he hopes to create more interactive content, such as trivia games, checkbox games, and events with voice actors. In one Metaverse event, 2,000 She-Ra fans played a trivia game with show organizer and noted comics artist Noelle Stevensona much more satisfying encounter than a typical Zoom interview, Armstrong says. We hope we can give our fans a bit of engagement with talent as opposed to them just staring at a screen for a while. And the talent really likes it, too.

Online events also are hard to monetize, says Kuo-Yu Liang, a pop culture industry consultant who works with FanExpo, among other clients. I can go to YouTube anytime and find tons of content out there. I do appreciate these virtual event panels, and its good to know I can watch them later. But will I pay for them, or can the convention company monetize me watching the video by selling advertising?

Online events also lack the prized networking opportunities of real-life events. As a person in the industry, the main reason for me to go to conventions is to hang out with colleagues or randomly meet a new person, Liang says. He recalls many business deals that he saw begin as chance meetings at BarCon, as post-convention-hours socializing is known. What everyone is telling me is that its that chance encounter that is really missing, he notes.

Networking has been rough, Donato confirms. Weve all tried different iterations of that, and just keep trying to make it work. Its a big debate, because there are some companies who did quite well with virtual conferences in terms of reaching new audiences who wouldnt have otherwise traveled. But you have to get back to your live events.

One way that publishers and media companies are getting around the challenge of online fatigue is to throw their own branded events, which can offer more targeted fan experiences. Last year, Warner Bros. shook things up with FanDome, which showcased all things DC and wowed viewers with stars (from publishing, TV, and film) and high production values. Warner Bros. will hold a second FanDome on October 16.

Skybound, a studio imprint at Image Comics, which is owned by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, has organized its own event, the Skybound Xpo, a quarterly online gathering for fans. Xpo started as a replacement for last years SDCC, says Brian Huntington, v-p, online content for Skybound. Its evolved from simple Zoom-style panels to trying to open it up beyond that, he notes. What can we do with partners that we couldnt do at a physical convention? Past Xpos have seen interactive events such as custom role-playing sessions for Skybound-related video games.

While Skybound looks forward to getting back to in-person events, Huntington says Xpos have been educational for fans. A lot of people are learning more about other parts of Skybound beyond just comics or the Walking Dead, he explains. Theyre learning about other fandoms, and they get to hear about new projects directly from the people involved in making them. The last year has been a huge learning experience for Skybound, and were looking forward to learning even more and growing the virtual convention space in the years to come.

Whats ahead?

Everyone PW spoke with agrees that comics conventions will change to adapt to whatever the new new normal is, and they may include such accommodations as enhanced hygiene measures, limited attendance, wider aisles, temperature checks, and mask requirements.

CCI is working closely with San Diego authorities for Special Edition, Glanzer says. Were waiting for guidance from the convention center as well as from the state and city health departments, because things keep changing, he adds.

In another challenge, many of the venues that host comics conventions have been repurposed during the pandemic. Both the San Diego Convention Center and the Long Beach Convention Center were used as homeless shelters and are currently being used to house unaccompanied, undocumented immigrant children. Glanzer notes that in San Diego, the convention center has done a great job of making sure it is as disease free as it can be, and theyve learned a lot in terms of what to do and how to do it. Some of that stuff will stay around.

ReedPop is also adapting to the various local regulations in the places it operates, Armstrong says. Weve been having conversations weekly with the different cities that we do business in. ReedPop has to do some guesswork to imagine what New York City will allow in October. Were modifying our plans every couple of weeks, and hopefully increasing our capacity numbers every couple of weeks, he adds.

Somebody going from Connecticut to Florida might be in for a bit of culture shock, and vice versa, Armstrong notes. Most of our events are local, and we plan for the local audience. So hopefully they know what theyre getting into. And for those who are traveling, theyll do whatever they can to follow local guidelines.

Liang says that international travel is still restricted, and there are still quarantine procedures in place in countries where vaccination is not as widespread as it is in the U.S. And some corporations still have a travel ban, he adds. My perception is a lot of these things will change very soon, but its still being worked on.

The pandemic has also highlighted the natural dwindling of the boom in the growth of pop culture events all around the country, Donato says. Before the pandemic, she recalls, I felt like it was oversaturated as a market and we didnt have enough talent to support all the events that were happening. The pre-pandemic con market, she adds, was creating a bubble, which burst through the most unfortunate of circumstances.

Many of the shows that are back thus far are collector-based. The tried-and-the-true shows are going to survive, Donato says. And the bigger ones are institutions, so they will survive. But theres probably a lot of fallout at the bottom end and some fallout in the middle. This just accelerated what I thought was already on its way.

For San Diego, there is also the eternal question of whether the San Diego Convention Center will expand. Though a ballot measure in favor of its expansion was defeated in November despite getting 65% of the vote, a court recently ruled that a two-thirds supermajority was not needed to pass the measure.

Theres still a glimmer of hope there that we might be able to have a contiguous convention center expansion, Glanzer says. In the meantime, he adds, everybodys very busy and excited about CCIs upcoming shows. I always say that you can talk about Comic-Con, you can see pictures and videos, but nothing is like actually being there. While this will be a scaled-down version, we hope to have the best parts of Comic-Con at Special Edition.
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Echelon offers a line of connected fitness products  bikes, rowers, fitness mirrors and treadmills  and an app experience that allows its members to participate in both live and on-demand fitness classes. To bolster the production of classes from its own studios in the US, Echelon needed a UK-based studio that would extend its ability to create more fitness content around the clock for its global membership base. With multiple headend studios in London, The Switch was able to create a dedicated, full-time fitness suite from which Echelons trainers can present classes.

Helen Wilkinson, managing director, Echelon Fitness, commented: It was vitally important that we get up and running at a professional quality London studio. The Switch has made the process of setting up a London facility hassle-free, handling everything from the studios design and construction to the production and livestreaming logistics. Were incredibly happy with the outcome of the studio, and our fitness instructors have already been able to produce some incredibly engaging content for our innovative app. We look forward to continuing expanding our fitness content offering, drawing on the experience of The Switch.

The Switch reconfigured one of its London studios specifically for the needs of Echelon, building in fitness mirrors, staging, camera equipment, lighting and Echelon branding. This set-up provides the ideal setting for its fitness instructors to lead live exercise classes and record on-demand sessions, supported by The Switchs experienced producers in a dedicated control room. Echelon is also trialling The Switchs Cloud Video Services platform, MIMiC, in the recording of some live classes.

Nicholas Castaneda, senior vice-president of sales at The Switch, said: Working with Echelon, one of the fastest-growing brands in the connected fitness market, to help drive its international growth and deliver more content to its members worldwide is an exciting opportunity. As Echelon looked to produce fitness content beyond the US, our London studios seemed a natural base from which to deliver more classes to more time zones. Our modern facility and three-camera set-up provide Echelon with all the tools and crew needed to produce and deliver live and on-demand content to its global fitness-first membership. Were excited to continue working with Echelons UK management and fitness instructors to provide exceptional live content.

The Switch studios are located in Los Angeles, Burbank, New York and London. Echelons fitness instructors use the London studio each morning and evening to film live spinning classes, which are made available to anyone via the Echelon Fit app  amounting to a minimum of 25 classes per week.
Union Township

Man arrested in barn arson

Berks man is arrested on charges he set barn on fire on the property where his estranged wife lives
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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% in 1991 to 12.9% 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 U.S. 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 UN 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 UN 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 U.S. 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%, while the rest of the worlds had grown by 27.0%.

After 2002, non-Western emissions grew even faster. In the 12 years before 2002, non-Western emissions grew by 21.2%; and in the subsequent 12 years, by 76.8%. By 2014, with Western emissions broadly flat over the 24-year period, Western emissions had shrunk to 26% of the total, and the share of non-Western emissions had risen to 74%. 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% 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 UN process hardly constitutes leadership. Heeding Nordhauss advice and abandoning the UN process is something that only an American president can do. But that would be to assume that the purpose of the UN 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 UN 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 UN 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 UNs 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 UN 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 1.5C 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 U.S. 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.

Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Capitalism, Socialism and ESG.
As the U.S. transitions away from fossil fuels, its clear that solar power will play a key role in providing clean, renewable energy for the nation. However, Washington must decide whether solar power will come from American companies and workersor from China. Thats because years of subsidies and government support have enabled Chinas state-sponsored companies to dominate the global solar supply chain. This dominance even includes the repugnant use of forced labor in Xinjiang, which has helped China to produce much of the worlds polysiliconan essential input for solar cells.

Earlier this month, four U.S. Senators led by Georgias Jon Ossoff introduced legislation that would take a fundamentally different approach to Americas renewable energy sector. Sen. Ossoff and his colleagues are pressing for a comprehensive federal effort to ensure that Americas entire solar supply chain is based in the U.S.and is independent of China. Their Solar Energy Manufacturing for America Act would provide tax credits for every stage of the solar equipment supply chain, including modules, photovoltaic cells, solar ingots, wafers, and solar-grade polysilicon.

The new Senate legislation represents a long-overdue transition from current tax credits, which are given to consumers regardless of where their solar equipment is manufactured. Since China supplies roughly 75 percent of the worlds solar equipment, almost half of all federal investment now ends up going to China. This needs to change.

China also uses forced labor in the plants that manufacture polysilicon for solar cells. Turning silicon rocks into polysilicon is an energy-intensive process, and China has added 38 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants in the last year alone to support this process. Many of these coal plants are located in the Xinjiang region, where the CCP is committing genocide against ethnic Uyghurs. In fact, China has constructed about twice as much coal-fired power as the rest of the world has decommissioned. That means, despite earnest climate goals, the world actually added net coal-based power last year. Global climate goals also suffer from the ongoing use of cargo shipswhich burn the dirtiest form of fossil fuelto transport Chinas solar equipment to the U.S.

According to industry sources and our recent research at the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA), China has a 95 percent lock on the worldwide market for solar ingots and wafers, giving it a chokehold on the industry. Eight of the worlds top 10 producers of solar modules are Chinese companies. The solar tariffs imposed by the Trump administration have helped to boost U.S. solar module productionwith U.S. firms now supplying roughly 20 percent of the U.S. market. But tariffs alone are not sufficient to counter Chinas goal of dominating global industry.

Sen. Ossoffs bill would put federal support behind a program to rebuild every step in the U.S. solar equipment production process. This would make the U.S. more energy independent, and make America the worlds second-largest producer of solar power. It would also create thousands of good-paying jobs while encouraging U.S. solar manufacturers to invest in innovative R&D.

The Ossoff bill is not perfect. The tax credits it proposes are only usable by companies that make a profit and pay corporate tax. The Ossoff tax credit should be made refundable, so that start-up solar companies and struggling solar producers could also benefit from a stimulus to their research, production, and marketing efforts.

Additionally, the Ossoff bill should set a target for 30 GW of U.S. production throughout the supply chain by 2030. Today, U.S. industry produces around 5 GW of solar modules. An ambitious target of 30 GW, roughly 75 percent of domestic demand, would spell out a reasonable U.S. goal. This would also give Congress, voters, and companies a clear objective and metric for success.

Congress must support Americas solar industryand the support provided by Americas taxpayers deserves results. Passing the Solar Energy Manufacturing for America Act would be a great start in support of U.S. energy independence, domestic manufacturing, and the creation of good-paying clean-energy jobs.

Jeff Ferry is chief economist at the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA). Follow him at @menloferry.
Norway is paying the Central African country of Gabon $17 million to reduce deforestation. Its a transaction that exposes the fraud of carbon offsets, if not climate alarmism itself.

The notion of a carbon offset is simple. Nations, businesses, organizations and individuals who are concerned about their emissions from fossil fuel use can purchase carbon offsets from sellers who are in the business of storing carbon dioxide (CO2) underground.

The most common practice of storing CO2 by offset sellers is either tree planting or not cutting down trees. Certain agricultural and land use practices also qualify.

So Norway has paid Gabon for not cutting down trees and is taking credit for helping to save the planet. But theres more to the story.

A basic problem with carbon offsets is that purchasers are buying them for emissions being emitted now, but CO2 storage that would only happen much later because trees take a long time to grow. There is no offset that removes CO2 from the atmosphere as quickly as it is emitted.

Another offset problem is that the calculations of how much carbon is stored by various offset methods are just guesstimates that have never been verified or validated. Although the basic lifecycle of carbon is well understood, the actual quantities are not.

Yet another problem with offsets is whether stored CO2 actually stays underground. A farmers field left fallow for a year or so will soak up some amount of carbon, but as soon as it is tilled again much, if not all, of that stored CO2 will be lost again to the atmosphere thanks to microbiologic processes.

Norway has long positioned itself as green, even though it is one of worlds largest oil producers. Norway plans to increase its oil production by 40 percent by 2025 and is expanding its Arctic drilling program.

To maintain its green pose, Norway is buying offsets. Whats interesting about the Gabon offsets is that Norway is purchasing them for a mere $5 per ton of CO2 stored.

Keeping in mind that Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats want to spend trillions and trillions of dollars on climate, Norway seems to have found a solution it can sign on to  CO2 offsets at $5 per ton.

The U.S. consumption of energy produces about 5 billion tons pf CO2 per year. So at $5 per ton, the entire U.S. energy-related CO2 footprint could be offset Norway-style for mere $25 billion. That is a lot less than Bidens trillion and trillions of dollars.

If global energy-related emissions are on the order of 40 billion tons, then the for a mere $200 billion in CO2 offsets we could dispense with the supposed need to decarbonize our global economy.

At the 2015 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Al Gore proposed to spend $90 trillion rebuilding the words cities so that people will no longer need cars. But for a fraction of that, the world could adopt the Norway offset standard and, for $5 ton, solve the alleged climate problem.

Norways $5 per ton deal has all sorts of other ramifications. The European cap-and-trade system prices a ton of CO2 at about $55 per ton. The Norwegian solution is 90 percent less expensive.

The Biden administration wants to increase the dubious climate metric called the social cost of carbon from de minimis Trump era level of $1 to $6 per ton back to the Obama era of around $40 per ton. But Norway has priced carbon at a Trumpian level of about $5 per ton.

Iceland has a contraption to suck CO2 out of the air at a cost of $775 per ton. South Korea is building high speed rail to reduce CO2 emission at a cost of about $1,900 per ton. But the Norway-Gabon project has them all beat by a long shot.

So either carbon offsets are just a total fraud or the Biden climate plan is a total joke. Or worse, environmental extremist bureaucrats around the world have just been conning everyone for the past 50 years.

Maybe its all of the above.
This is Us actor Ron Cephas Jones and his daughter, Blindspotting star Jasmine Cephas Jones, are set to announce the names of this year's Emmy Award nominees during a virtual event on July 13.

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In 2020, the Cephas Joneses became the first father-daughter pair to win performance Emmys in the same year.

The Emmys honor excellence in television.

"It has been an extraordinary year in which television brought multigenerational families together in a shared love of their favorite programs," Television Academy Chairman and CEO Frank Scherma said in a statement Thursday.

"So it seems fitting that these two accomplished performers announce this year's Emmy nominees as we acknowledge and celebrate the exceptional programs and talent that are elevating and redefining television."

The actors will read the names of the nominees aloud, starting at 11:30 a.m. ET on Emmys.com

The winners will be revealed in a ceremony scheduled to air on CBS on Sept. 19.
Traverse City, MI (49684)

Today

Partial cloudiness early, with scattered showers and thunderstorms during the afternoon. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. High 89F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Low 67F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
Traverse City, MI (49684)

Today

Mixed clouds and sun this morning. Scattered thunderstorms developing this afternoon. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. High 89F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening. Partly cloudy skies after midnight. Low 67F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
This is the longest war Americas ever seen, so when President Joe Biden says well be out of Afghanistan by September 2021, dont blame me for not believing him.
When Jay Mathias  a University of Georgia alum and founder of Dawgs Demand Better, an online campaign advocating for racial justice at UGA  first learned that the University System of Georgia had created a committee to review building names on Georgias public college campuses during the summer of 2020, he felt change was on the way.

It seemed as though [USG was] taking it seriously. The members of the advisory board seem really well accomplished and well suited for those roles, Mathias said. I was optimistic.

During the widespread protests over racial justice and police brutality in 2020, college campuses across the nation, including those in Georgia, came under fire over buildings and schools bearing the names of figures associated with white supremacy.

In response to the criticism, USG formed the naming advisory group. The group was charged with reviewing the names of more than 3,000 buildings across USGs 26 institutions. USG also said they would be consulting Lisa Tendrich Frank, a historian specializing in the Civil War and the American South.

However, despite activists initial optimism, a year has passed since the advisory groups formation, and no buildings at UGA have been renamed. While students, faculty, families and alumni continue to push for change, the naming advisory groups silence has left them frustrated and wondering whats next.

A lack of transparency

Kimberly Davis, an alum of Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and co-founder of the Rename Grady task force, said she felt like the naming advisory group lacked transparency.

The last meeting that I know of where they even mentioned [the renaming effort] or had an update was I believe in October, November, Davis said. And we just havent heard anything since then.

The naming advisory group's last update was on March 3, stating that the group has been focused on thoroughly reviewing the information it has been provided,and that the renaming process may take a little longer. Prior to this, the group had released two other updates in September and August of 2020.

The last public meeting was held in September 2020. There was one previous meeting in July. While a form to submit comments on the renaming process remains open on USGs website, there are currently no public meetings scheduled.

Davis also said the Rename Grady task force was in contact with the group during the summer of 2020, and planned to present their petition to rename Grady College during a Board of Regents meeting in August. However, when members of the Rename Grady task force watched the meeting, Davis said their petition was not read. Despite emailing USG afterwards, they were never given a clear explanation as to why the petition wasnt presented.

The Red & Black reached out regarding the naming advisory group, but USG did not respond to requests for comment.

These incidents have disappointed both Mathias and Davis, and left them wanting for a more forthright renaming process.

I know everyone on the naming advisory board are working professionals, so obviously theyre busy and have other things going on, Mathias said. But if they are having regular meetings, at least provide updates following those meetings so we know exactly when decisions are taking place and what decisions are being made.

The prospect of future change

Despite promising to complete the review in early 2021, no report from the naming advisory committee has been released.

Even through the disappointment, Mathias says he still hopes something will come of the groups efforts.

I know there are good folks within the USG and specifically in the University of Georgia administration and community that want change, Mathias said. But at some point, decisions need to be made, and Im hoping that happens soon.

Davis was less optimistic. She said she feels that each time Black people make advances, a backlash occurs and hinders progress. Unless the naming advisory committee were to release a report tomorrow, she said, Davis feels doubtful anything will come of it.

Nevertheless, Davis said she still harbors a deep love for UGA and hopes things will improve for Black students and alumni.

I love the University of Georgia, I love being an alum of the University of Georgia, Davis said. Sometimes, I just feel that the University of Georgia doesnt love me or people who look like me.
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
BRATTLEBORO  Three days before his school was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Green Street School Principal Mark Speno was notified that he had been recognized as a National Distinguished 
General Assignment Reporter

Chris Mays is a general assignment reporter for the Brattleboro Reformer. He has been with New England Newspapers Inc. since 2012.
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Matt Krauss, of Stowe, is a happily retired state employee and a former Vermont legislator. The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of the Brattleboro Reformer.
After more than six weeks and dozens of witnesses, Huntington and Cabell County have finished presenting their arguments that drug distributors fueled the opioid crisis. Now, the companies will have their say.
WASHINGTON (AP)  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is acting swiftly to launch a new investigation of the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, choosing a diverse slate of eight lawmakers  one from the opposing party  to serve on a select committee with subpoena power.

Republicans have the chance to recommend five additional members, but it's unclear whether they will do so. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who could be called to testify about a conversation with former President Donald Trump as the attack unfolded, has not committed to any appointments.

All but two Republicans voted against creating the committee in a vote Wednesday. Pelosi made one of the two Republicans  Liz Cheney of Wyoming, an unsparing critic of Trump  one of her appointments to the panel.

A look at eight lawmakers who have been appointed to the committee so far:

REP. BENNIE THOMPSON, D-MISS.

Thompson is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and will be leading the Jan. 6 select committee. Serving his 14th full term in office, he is the only Democratic member of Mississippi's congressional delegation. He was a teacher before entering local politics, serving as a mayor and country supervisor, which served as a springboard to the House. He says the committee will focus on delivering a definitive accounting of the attack  an undertaking so vital to guarding against future attacks."

REP. ZOE LOFGREN, D-CALIF.

Lofgren is chairwoman of the Committee on House Administration, which has oversight of the U.S. Capitol Police. She has been a member of the House since 1995 and is an immigration attorney and immigration law professor who participated in the impeachment process for three presidents  Trump, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, the latter as a congressional staffer. She said making the Capitol safer is not a substitute for what happened on Jan. 6th: She said: Who paid for it? How was it organized? We need to find that out to keep the country safe."

REP. ADAM SCHIFF, D-CALIF.

Schiff is chairman of the House Intelligence committee and best known as the leader and public face of Trump's first impeachment for his actions involving Ukraine. He has served in the House for two decades and prior to entering Congress served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles and as a state senator. He expressed dismay on Twitter that only two House Republicans voted for the select committee: An attack on the Capitol. The Article I branch of our government. Our temple of democracy. If Republicans wont support that, what will they support? Only what Trump wants.

REP. LIZ CHENEY, R-WYO.

The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney is so far the lone Republican on the new committee. She is one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the insurrection at the Capitol, saying he lit the flame that ignited the attack. She has only amplified her criticism of Trump since then, angering colleagues who voted to remove her from a leadership position. She took time to visit law enforcement officers and families on Wednesday in the House galleries while lawmakers debated whether to form the committee. She says what happened on Jan. 6. can never be allowed to happen again. Those who are responsible for the attack need to be held accountable and this select committee will fulfill that responsibility in a professional, expeditious, and non-partisan manner."

REP. JAMIE RASKIN, D-MD.

Raskin is serving his third term representing a district adjacent to Washington. He served as a professor of constitutional law at American Universitys Washington College of Law for more than 25 years and was the lead prosecution lawyer in Trump's second impeachment trial. In a memorable presentation, he recalled for senators how he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his daughter and son-in-law when Trump supporters broke into the building. He fought back tears as he told senators how he had promised his daughter her next trip would be better and she replied: Dad, I dont want to come back to the Capitol." The siege of the Capitol came just days after Raskin's 25-year-old son, Tommy, took his own life.

REP. ELAINE LURIA, D-VA.

Luria has only been in Congress since 2019, but held many weighty responsibilities before then, serving two decades in the Navy and retiring at the rank of commander. She served at sea on six ships, deployed to the Middle East and culminated her career by commanding a combat-ready unit of 400 sailors. She represents a swing district with a large military and veterans population along the Virginia coast.

REP. PETE AGUILAR, D-CALIF.

Aguilar is serving his fourth term in the House and now holds the No. 6 position in House Democratic leadership. He is a former mayor who now serves on the House Administration and Appropriations committees. Everyone touched by Jan. 6 deserves to find the truth of what transpired, what led up to it, and how we can protect our democracy moving forward, Aguilar said Thursday.

REP. STEPHANIE MURPHY, D-FLA.

Murphy is a former national security specialist at the Defense Department now serving her third term in Congress. She worked on a wide range of security issues: counterterrorism, foreign military relations, strategic planning for the department and more. She is the first Vietnamese-American woman elected to Congress. After her appointment to the select committee, she recalled that her family fled Vietnam when she was a baby. We were rescued by the U.S. Navy and given refuge in America," she said. I love this country beyond words." She added: "To see the citadel of American democracy assaulted is a reminder that our democracy is not self-sustaining. It needs to be preserved and protected by American patriots of every political stripe.
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  Gov. Mike Dunleavy said Thursday he has vetoed from a state spending package this year's dividend check for residents, calling the amount a joke."

The budget lawmakers voted on last month proposed a roughly $1,100 dividend but tied part of the funding to reserve accounts that required three-fourths support in each the House and the Senate. But the vote failed, leaving the dividend at $525, the lowest since the mid-1980s.

Dunleavy said that is less than two days worth of per diem that lawmakers can collect. His office said he cut $2 million from the Legislatures budget, with the cut aimed at the $293-a-day allowance.

The move will not be appreciated by some lawmakers, Dunleavy said. But the budget sent him was incomplete, with funding for a number of other programs and projects also affected by the three-quarter vote failure, he said.

Lawmakers had acknowledged the funding holes, including the short-changed dividend, and said they planned to work toward a resolution. They ended their second special session Monday after meeting almost continuously since January.

Dunleavy, who has not yet announced his re-election plans for next year, is pushing for a dividend this year in the $2,300-range, along with a restructuring of the nest-egg oil-wealth fund, the Alaska Permanent Fund, and a proposal that would put a dividend formula in the state constitution.

The dividend, traditionally paid with permanent fund earnings, has become a time-consuming preoccupation for lawmakers, particularly as the state has come to rely on earnings from the fund to help pay for government as oil revenue has shrunk from what it was a decade ago.

While many lawmakers share Dunleavy's stated desire for a long-term solution to the dividend, there is no agreed-upon path and debate over the size of the check continues to be divisive and messy, even among political caucuses. The House earlier this week agreed to form a working group, with members from all four legislative caucuses, to make recommendations on a fiscal plan.

House Speaker Louise Stutes said Dunleavy's decision on the dividend and other damaging vetoes create uncertainty.

Alaskans should rest assured that we will continue our efforts to provide a healthy dividend and the services they deserve, the Kodiak Republican said.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Begich, an Anchorage Democrat, said the vetoes reflect the pettiness of Dunleavy's first year in office. Cuts proposed by Dunleavy that year fueled public outrage and a recall effort against him.

Dunleavy's office said he was committed to calling on legislators to pass a legitimate dividend. A special session is set for August, though the dividend was not on the original agenda. Dividend checks are usually paid in the early fall.

Dunleavy said a lot can be done in the next few weeks.

Were going to have to put Alaska first. Were going to have to put Alaskans first. Government is well-funded right now, but many Alaskans are still struggling" from the economic fallout from the pandemic, he said.

Some lawmakers had criticized the administration in May when it announced plans to stop participating in a federal program that provides an extra $300 a week in unemployment aid. The state labor commissioner said workers were needed for a wide range of available jobs.

Other vetoes announced Thursday include cuts to a school major maintenance fund and a community assistance program, cuts to which would hurt local governments, according to the Alaska Municipal League.

Dunleavy's budget office said federal recovery aid would offset the cut to community assistance, which the municipal league disputed.
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)  A sprawling New Mexico ranch belonging to deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is on the market for $27.5 million.

The 12-square-mile (30-square-kilometer) Zorro Ranch was put up for sale by Epstein's estate and includes a 26,700-square-foot (2,480-square-meter) mansion and a private airstrip with a hangar and helipad, according to the listing by Neil Lyon Group at Sothebys International Realty Santa Fe.

Epstein killed himself in jail in 2019 at age 66 while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking girls in New York and Florida.

The listing was reported Thursday by the Wall Street Journal, which said proceeds from the sale would go toward compensating those who filed claims against Epstein and paying taxes and creditors.

Epstein purchased the property in southern Santa Fe County in 1993. Besides the mansion, the ranch includes several other residences, including an off-the-grid cabin, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.

Local real estate professionals have said the highly publicized accusations against Epstein probably wont have much effect on what the ranch and its massive mansion ultimately fetch on the market, the New Mexican reported.

I think they priced it right, James Congdon of Santa Fe Properties said of the Epstein property. I think its appropriate. It could sell tomorrow, or it could take four or five years.

Epstein did not face any charges tied to New Mexico, but news reports have said court documents and civil cases accused him of sexually assaulting teenage girls and women at the property.

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The headline of this story has been corrected to show the property was listed for $27.5 million, not $27.7 million.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)  A historical plaque memorializing the dozens of Native American children who died while attending a boarding school in New Mexico more than a century ago has gone missing, sparking concern among Indigenous activists.

Members of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women are among those pushing the city of Albuquerque to investigate. The small plaque was in a park near the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center and the original site of the Albuquerque Indian School.

The plaque noted the site of a burial ground for students who attended the school between 1882 and 1933. They included children from the Navajo Nation, Zuni Pueblo and Apache tribes.

The removal of the plaque comes as the U.S. government embarks on a nationwide investigation aimed at uncovering the troubling history of boarding schools that sought to assimilate Indigenous youth into white society over many decades. U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the massive undertaking last month while addressing tribal leaders from across the nation.

Advocacy groups have praised the effort as a first step toward acknowledging what many have referred to as a dark history.

Coalition member Jovita Belgarde  who is Isleta, Ohkay Owingeh and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa  said the discovery of the missing plaque added insult to injury. Many Indigenous families have been reeling since hearing about the bodies of hundreds of children being uncovered at the sites of boarding schools in Canada. The launch of the Interior Department's investigation also has stirred unresolved feelings in the U.S.

Belgarde sees the recent taking of the plaque as a continuation of efforts to silence Indigenous voices and perpetuation of violence against Indigenous people.

These atrocities  people talk about them like theyre in the past. These are not the distant past, she told The Associated Press. These actions left deep scars for many of our elders, our families, our friends ... and many people have not had any support to heal that trauma and have had to live with this pain and silence for generations.

Albuquerque officials said Thursday they are working with tribal leaders, historical experts and others to determine the next steps with regard to the missing plaque. They also noted that a public art piece and a second plaque that references the history of the site are still at the park.

"As we continue to work with the respective leaders on this issue, we urge the public to respect the cultural and spiritual significance of this site, city parks director Dave Simon said in a statement.

With more light being shined on past boarding school policies, tribal governors from around New Mexico have advocated for accountability and justice.

All Pueblo Council of Governors Chairman Wilfred Herrera Jr., who is from Laguna Pueblo, said recounting what Pueblo parents and children experienced has been painful.

While some of our children endured years of abuse for speaking our languages, practicing our cultures, and maintaining our traditions, the unbearable truth is that many of our young never returned to their Pueblo homelands, ever, he said in a statement.

The Albuquerque Indian School was started in 1881 by the Presbyterian Church. It came under federal control a few years later and was among hundreds of known boarding schools across the country. The school closed in the 1980s, and the property was put into trust for New Mexico's 19 pueblos. The buildings eventually were torn down, and a tribal development corporation is working to make it a commercial hub.

Aside from determining the fate of the missing plaque, Belgarde said advocates want an investigation into the site overall in hopes of turning up more information about exactly how many children might have been buried there. She said the site demands more reverence, and city officials need to be transparent about how they proceed.
The same day Connecticuts eviction moratorium expired, Gov. New Lamont ordered new protections for tenants, including requiring landlords to apply for federal relief money before evicting someone over non-payment of rent.

In an executive order issued Wednesday, the governor is also giving tenants 30 days, as opposed to three, to appeal an eviction notice for nonpayment of rent. Lamonts order is in effect until July 20, which is when his pandemic-related emergency powers are set to expire.

The federal eviction ban is in place until the end of July. The Biden administration has directed states to require landlords to apply for rental assistance before filing an eviction notice over nonpayment of rent.

Housing advocates wrote to the governor, legislative leaders and judicial officials last month asking Lamont to extend the states ban to July 20, which would give people more time to apply for rental assistance, to prevent a large wave of evictions and homelessness.

It would be a tragedy and a failure of public policy if hundreds or thousands of families were evicted for non-payment of rent at the very time that millions of federal dollars in rental assistance are available to make such evictions unnecessary, they wrote.

More than $400 million in federal funding is available to help tenants and landlords pay for back rent through UniteCT, a program set up through the state Department of Housing.

As of Wednesday, more than $23 million and 3,000-plus cases had been approved. More than 10,700 fully submitted cases have been received, according to UniteCTs website.

Both landlords and tenants have described the application process, which must be done online, as cumbersome. Recent changes were made to the program to incentivize more landlords to participate, including increasing the amount of money available to eligible applicants from $10,000 to up to $15,000.

The program is now at a point at which it can overcome the obstacles that prevented greater participation, the housing advocates, including Connecticut Fair Housing Center and the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, wrote in their June 18 letter. In particular, it can provide assistance to fully compensate landlords for their lost rental income in most cases and can often pay three months or more of prospective rent.

John Souza, president of Connecticut Coalition of Property Owners, said while the changes to the program have made it more beneficial for landlords to participate, the money is still not being distributed fast enough and tenants and landlords have to jump through a lot of hoops to apply. Souza, a registered landlord in the state, said a handful of his tenants have applied to the program and had their applications accepted.

Its just one more burden placed on the landlords, Souza said of Lamonts executive order.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that 6 million people are behind on rent, with more than 40% saying they believe they will be evicted from their homes in the next two months.

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.

julia.bergman@hearstmediact.com
ISTANBUL (AP)  Turkeys defense minister said Friday that negotiations over his country's proposal to operate and secure the key international airport in Afghanistan are taking place.

Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said Turkey was discussing the plan with several countries. There must be some political decisions at the United Nations and NATO, and an agreement must be reached with the Afghan government, he said, adding that Turkey was seeking political, financial and logistical support from various countries.

He emphasized that a final decision had not yet been reached, but negotiations with the United States were continuing and the plan would be executed after the Turkish presidents approval.

Earlier this summer, Turkey proposed to operate and provide security for Kabuls Hamid Karzai International Airport in the aftermath of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed it with U.S. President Joe Biden at their first face-to-face meeting during the NATO summit in mid-June.

An agreement on the protection of the airport has become increasingly urgent as the final withdrawal of the remaining 2,500-3,500 U.S. troops and 76,000 allied NATO soldiers nears a conclusion. On Friday all U.S. troops left Bagram Airfield after 20 years. The airfield had been the epicenter of the countrywide military operation to defeat the Taliban and hunt down al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

NATO-member Turkey has over 500 troops in Afghanistan and already plays a significant role at the airport. Akar has previously said Turkey has no plans to deploy more troops.

The airport must be open and operate. If the airport doesnt work, embassies will pull out, and in such a situation, Afghanistan would become an isolated state, the defense minister said.

Without a separate agreement on the airport the current operations would have to be maintained under the Resolute Support Mission, which is the current U.S.-led military mission. Until there is an agreement it is not clear that the U.S. and NATO can declare their military mission in Afghanistan over.

We have stated our intent. We said we can stay if these conditions are realized, Akar said.

The minister's comments were carried by official Anadolu news agency.

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Associated Press Writer Kathy Gannon contributed from Kabul, Afghanistan
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP)  The largest Native American reservation in the U.S. includes parts of three Arizona counties, all of which had different approaches to precinct voting in the 2020 general election.

Voters in Apache County had to cast ballots at the polling location they were assigned. People registered in Navajo County could vote anywhere in the county. Coconino County used a hybrid model.

The Navajo Nation has long argued the approach is inconsistent and confusing, leading to ballots being rejected and tribal members being denied the same opportunity to vote as others in Arizona.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed on Thursday in a broader case over Arizona voting regulations, upholding a prohibition on counting ballots cast in the wrong precinct and returning early ballots for another person.

The ruling will reach broadly into tribal communities, particularly those where Indigenous people dont have residential mail service or must drive long distances to polling sites and the post office.

Native American voting rights advocates viewed it as another notch in a long history of voting discrimination but say they'll continue pushing for access and changes in laws.

I feel like its in our blood to be ready to counter and fight and stand strong, said Jaynie Parrish, who is Navajo and executive director of the Navajo County Democrats. Our organizers say all the time, If your vote didnt matter, why are they trying so hard to take it away.

The high courts conservative majority wrote that Arizonas interest in the integrity of elections justified the measures and said voters faced modest burdens at most. A lower court had found them discriminatory under the federal Voting Rights Act.

The court seemed to note the number of ways that people can vote without recognizing how those ways are limited in Indian Country, said Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, director of the Indian Legal Clinic at Arizona State Universitys law school and a citizen of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe in Louisiana. They are not a reality for reservation voters.

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said Thursday's decision does nothing to protect voting access for minorities, including Navajos.

The decision ignores the number of voters who didn't cast a ballot because they were told they weren't in the right precinct, as well as socioeconomic barriers such as poverty and the reservation's remoteness, said Ferguson-Bohnee.

Hardly anyone has a street address on the vast Navajo Nation. Tribal members are among rural residents who must draw a map in a small space on voter registration cards showing where they live, and it's up to county officials to place them in the right precinct.

In the 2020 election, more than 2,000 voters in Apache County were placed on a list because of questions surrounding their residency, the Navajo Nation noted in court documents. Neither the state nor the county had online options for voters to determine their polling location without a street address, tribal attorneys wrote.

There's no public transportation on the 27,000-square-mile (70,000-square-kilometer) Navajo Nation that's bigger than 10 U.S. states. It stretches into Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Many people rely on friends, family or strangers for rides.

Poor roads increase the difficulties of voting, the tribe said. More than four-fifths of the reservation's roads are unpaved. During elections, many Navajos tell politicians they want better roads.

Even just gravel, we'd be very grateful, said Tovina Yazzie, manager of the Sweetwater Chapter on the Navajo Nation.

Yazzie tries to impress upon tribal members that voting could result in more funding to the small community near the Arizona-Utah border. She also recognizes the obstacles.

We run into some people or community members who don't have vehicles, so it is a hindrance for our community to come in and vote, she said. And also, the weather has a role in it, if it's snowing or rainy or muddy.

Jennifer Begay, who works at the Red Mesa Chapter nearby, spent three hours in the 2016 election driving family and friends to polling locations, mindful of the toll the dirt roads would take on her car that doesn't have much ground clearance.

I was just really wanting people to vote, she said. They didn't have transportation.

Native Americans werent granted U.S. citizenship until 1924, and even then some states prohibited them from voting for decades if they lived on reservations or couldnt pass an English literacy test.

Native Americans and advocacy groups have won or settled much of the election-related lawsuits they've filed over the years, according to a report by the Native American Rights Fund.

Montanas legislature passed a bill earlier this year to prohibit the paid collection of absentee ballots and another to end Election Day voter registration. Tribes have brought state constitutional challenges to both laws, arguing they prevent Native Americans living on reservations from fully and equally participating in elections.

In Nevada, state lawmakers last year lifted limits on who could collect and return mail ballots on behalf of others. Teresa Melendez of the Nevada Native Vote Project said it's been incredibly helpful, especially for tribal members who must drive three hours roundtrip to the nearest polling place.

Arizona passed laws this year that Native Americans said will make voting more complicated but that Republicans defended in the name of election integrity. One bill codifies a practice of giving voters who didn't sign ballots until polls close on Election Day. Another could result in a purge of voters from the rolls who automatically get ballots by mail.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, said the state's ballot collection law ensures fairness in elections. The challenge that ended up before the Supreme Court was a desperate tactic by Democrats, he said.

This decision is a clear repudiation of those tactics, he said in a statement.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled the law was most likely to affect Native Americans who travel long distances to mail ballots.

However you can get your ballot to the ballot box, that should be primary, said Steve Begay, the vice chairman of the Apache County Democrats. If there are laws restricting that, that's probably not democratic.

President Joe Biden's administration favored a narrower ruling of the Supreme Court's decision that overturned the 9th Circuit. The decision came while the administration is seeking input from tribes across the country on barriers to voting.

A surge in voter turnout among tribal members helped lead Biden to victory in Arizona, a state that hadn't supported a Democrat in a White House contest since 1996.

Jacqueline De Leon, a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund and a member of Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico, said tribes have pushed for more voter registration opportunities with federal agencies and for a liaison in the U.S. Postal Service to increase residential mail delivery on tribal land, among other things.

Despite the obstacles for tribal members, she urged Native Americans and other minority communities to vote so their choices can help shape new laws.

There wouldn't be so much effort to disenfranchise voters if there wasn't power at stake, she said.

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Fonseca is a member of The Associated Press race and ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/FonsecaAP. Associated Press writers Mark Sherman in Washington, Amy B. Hanson in Helena, Montana, and Sam Metz in Carson City, Nevada, contributed to this story. Metz is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
ISTANBUL (AP)  Turkey formally withdrew Thursday from a landmark international treaty protecting women from violence, and signed in its own city of Istanbul, though President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insisted it wont be a step backward for women.

Hundreds of women demonstrated in Istanbul later Thursday, holding banners that said they won't give up on the Council of Europes Istanbul Convention. It's not over for us, one read. Similar protests were held in other Turkish cities.

Erdogan ended the countrys participation in the convention with a surprise overnight decree in March, prompting condemnation from womens rights groups and Western countries. A court appeal to stop the withdrawal was rejected this week.

Erdogan announced his Action Plan for Combating Violence against Women on Thursday, which includes goals such as reviewing judicial processes, improving protection services and gathering data on violence.

Some groups are trying to present our official withdrawal from the Istanbul convention on July 1st as going backwards," he said. "Just like our fight against violence towards women did not start with the Istanbul Convention, it wont end with our withdrawal.

In March, the Turkish Presidencys Directorate of Communications issued a statement saying the Istanbul Convention was hijacked by those attempting to normalize homosexuality  which is incompatible with Turkeys social and family values.

Erdogan emphasized traditional family and gender values Thursday, saying combating violence against women was also a fight to protect the rights and the honor of our mothers, wives, daughters.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price tweeted that Turkeys withdrawal was deeply disappointing and a step backward for the international effort to end violence against women.

Women, LGBT groups and others have been protesting the decision. They say the convention's pillars of prevention, protection, criminal prosecution and policy coordination, as well as its identification of gender-based violence, are crucial to protecting women in Turkey.

Hundreds of women gathered Thursday amid a heavy police presence in Istanbul's main pedestrian thoroughfare. Protesters held colorful banners, feminist and rainbow flags, played music, whistled, and shouted slogans. Police closed off the area but later briefly removed barricades to allow a short march.

Amnesty International's Turkey campaigner Milena Buyum tweeted from the protest after police re-closed the avenue with barricades: The irony of hundreds of women & LGBTI+ rights defenders being blocked by a huge number of predominantly male police officers is not lost." The rights group's observers said police used tear gas after they told demonstrators to disperse.

On Saturday, police dispersed LGBT demonstrators with tear gas and detained dozens, who were later released.

Data by the We Will Stop Femicide group show that 189 women have been murdered so far in 2021 in the country, and 409 last year.

Earlier, Amnesty International called Turkey's withdrawal shameful in a statement.

At the stroke of midnight today, Turkey turned its back on the gold standard for the safety of women and girls. The withdrawal sends a reckless and dangerous message to perpetrators who abuse, maim and kill: That they can carry on doing so with impunity, said Amnesty Internationals Secretary General, Agnes Callamard.

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Mehmet Guzel in Istanbul and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this story.
WOODBRIDGE  Police have arrested a Derby man in connection with the killing of Rondell Atkinson last month.

The body of the 33-year-old West Haven resident was found by a jogger at the Pease Road Playground in Woodbridge in early June. He had been shot multiple times, according to authorities. Atkinsons car was stolen, according to police.

On Thursday, police said they arrested Jordan Rudel, 24, of Derby, charging him with felony murder, murder, first-degree robbery and second-degree larceny.

Rudel was arrested by detectives from the Woodbridge Police Department and state police Central District Major Crimes Squad, Woodbridge police said in a release.

He was arraigned Thursday at Superior Court in New Haven and is being held in lieu of $2 million bail. The case was transferred to the Part A docket, were the most serious cases are heard, with Rudels next court date scheduled for July 13, according to the New Haven States Attorneys office.

Police said they could not release more information, citing the ongoing investigation.

New Haven States Attorney Patrick J. Griffin in a statement commended the investigative efforts of the Woodbridge Police Department and the State Police Central District Major Crimes Squad.

Those who knew Atkinson described him as a kind and loving man with a powerful singing voice and deep roots in the church.

Atkinson, who lived in West Haven, spent weekends traveling to several churches around the state  and even across state lines as recently as June 5  singing gospel music before congregations and worshiping with others, thise who knew him said.

This is a developing story, check back for updates.
COLCHESTER  An escalating series of complaints and conflicts between members of the towns police commission and the officers they oversee has reached a crescendo with the Board of Selectmen voting to indefinitely suspend the panel from its duties.

First Selectwoman Mary Bylone, who is also the towns police chief, called the situation a toxic work environment that included bullying and inappropriate behavior. Bylone said she investigated the matter herself and found evidence of these behaviors.

While Bylone did not name any specific allegations against the commissioners, her frustration appeared to be a reference to tensions between the commissions chair, James Stovola, and the vice chair, Carol Vaillancourt. Conflicts on the commission, she said, had reached a point where members are really unable to work together.

Vaillancourt has also been accused of feuding with members of the police department. It led to the police union declaring a vote of no confidence in Vaillancourt or the commission at a meeting in May. The union said its officers would no longer attend commission meetings or work with individual commissioners unless ordered to by a supervisor.

Among the issues at the center of the dispute between Vaillancourt and Stovola is an effort by school officials earlier this year to eliminate the school resource officer position at Colchester Public Schools through the budget process. That effort failed in the face of opposition from the police commission.

While Bylone, Stovola and Vaillancourt all said they opposed the elimination of the school resource officer, Vaillancourt accused the chair and first selectwoman of engaging in backroom deals, over the SRO question.

When I started calling people out on that, thats when everything hit the fan, Vaillancourt said in an interview Wednesday. Around the same time, Vaillancourt said she began questioning the departments crime statistics and changed her political affiliation from independent to Republican.

Bylone, a Democrat, could not be reached for comment Wednesday. A staffer in the first selectwomans office said she was away on vacation this week.

In an email Wednesday, Stovola said the selectmen had no choice but to suspend the commission due to Vaillancourts inappropriate actions, which he said included speaking on behalf of the entire commission without approval, and speaking to the media about an ongoing investigation of an officer. The reaction to those actions, he said, had effectively ground the commissions work to a halt prior to the Board of Selectmen voting 4-1 on June 17 to suspend the panel.

No police commission members, no police officers, the resident state trooper, or Colchester administrative sergeant will attend any police commission meetings until Commissioner Vaillancourt is removed from the police commission, Stovola said.

The investigation referenced by Stovola began in April, when Vaillancourt lodged a formal complaint against an officer who she said had made disparaging remarks about the commission during a public meeting that month. That prompted the union to file its own complaint against Vaillancourt after she spoke to a local media outlet about the matter.

Colchester, a town of about 15,000, has less than a dozen police officers as well as a resident state trooper. Bylone serves as the towns first selectwoman and police chief, with officers reporting to her and the resident trooper.

Sgt. Timothy Edwards, the highest-ranking officer in the police department, told the selectmen at the June meeting that rank-and-file officers had lost confidence in the commission as a result of the recent issues.

What we dont want to participate in is any unfair labor practices or defamation of character of police officers, Edwards said.

The only member of the Board of Selectmen to oppose the suspension of the police commission, Republican Taras Rudko, said the decision would leave the public without a voice in and oversight of the department.

I think we missed an opportunity to rectify the situation with bullying, and as a result, it continued, Rudko said. So shame on the Board of Selectmen for not taking action to rectify that.

Bylone said the decision to suspend the commission will affect the hiring process at the department, but the town otherwise has a structure to maintain the operations of the department with oversight.

The Board of Selectmen did not set a timetable for how long the commissions suspension would last. Bylone said removing the commission altogether would require a change to a local ordinance along with further meetings and a town meeting.
POTTSVILLE  For Alvernia University President John Loyack, moving to the city was like a homecoming.

Over 25 years ago, in 1995, we entered the region right here in downtown Pottsville in the Thompson Building, he said. Twenty-five years and hundreds of graduates later, we begin the process of coming back home.

Loyack and university leaders were joined by city, county and state officials at a press conference to formally announce its intention to open Pottsville CollegeTowne in the former Giant grocery store Thursday. The media event took place inside the vacant building at 500 Progress Ave., in which the Reading-based university signed an agreement to purchase last month. No sale price was available.

The 16,000-square-foot building will offer bachelors degrees, masters degrees and certificate programs, some of which are currently offered at the universitys Schuylkill Campus at the Cressona Mall, as well as college credit programs for high school students and a dual-enrollment program with the Joseph McCloskey School of Nursing. It will additionally house a business incubator, in which students partner with an entrepreneur on a business plan, and work with mentors at the building. It will include space for classrooms and labs.

Pottsville Area School District Superintendent Sarah Yoder, board member Pat Moran and Lehigh Valley Hospital-Schuylkill President William Bill Reppy were among those in attendance, along with Commissioner Gary Hess, and state Reps. Tim Twardzik, R-123, Butler Township, and Joe Kerwin, R-125.

Cynthia Mensch, the Schuylkill Campus director, began the media event with an invocation.

Loyack told members of the media at the event that being in Pottsville allows the university to spread our mission of transformative education. The CollegeTowne concept coming to the city is similar to one Alvernia launched in Reading in late 2019. Under it, university officials work with those in the city and economic development.

University officials talked about partnerships with area businesses, schools and nonprofit organizations. Rodney Ridley, a university vice president, interim dean of the College of STEAM and chief operating officer at the universitys OPake Institute for Economic Development & Entrepreneurship, said Alvernia made a bold statement that no business should fail when CollegeTowne came to Reading and the same thing will happen in Pottsville. He said plans are in place to bring students to the site in the next few weeks.

During the event, city, county and state officials gave remarks formally welcoming Alvernia to both Pottsville and Schuylkill County, and expressed enthusiasm for its arrival.

Mayor James T. Muldowney called Alvernias purchase of the former Giant grocery store one of the greatest things for our revitalization. Similarly, Schuylkill Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Robert S. Carl Jr. said Alvernias announcement was a great day in Schuylkill County and the City of Pottsville, pointing out that 40% of the adult learners already at the Schuylkill Campus are county residents.

State Sen. David G. Argall, R-29, Rush Township, said Alvernias presence in the county gives more people an opportunity to earn a four-year degree.

Alvernias purchase of the grocery store building comes nearly a year after Giant officials closed the store in July 2020, citing the stores underperformance as the reason for its shuttering.

County officials had expressed interest in purchasing it, with reports indicating either for a prison pre-release center or a warehouse, which drew the ire of city officials and business leaders.

Commissioners Chairman Barron L. Hetherington was among the speakers at the press event, but didnt mention the countys interest in it, instead stating he sees the purchase as helping revitalize Pottsville.

With the building purchase, Alvernia plans to move out of the North Manheim Township mall, which it has occupied space in for 12 of the 20 years of the campus existence.

Loyack said after the event that the university will formally close on the purchase in December, with the reconstruction process beginning in January. He anticipates classes will start in the building in fall 2022, by which time they will have moved out of the Cressona Mall completely.

It will be a slow migration (from the mall) to Giant, Loyack said.

While officials celebrated Alvernias announcement to open in downtown Pottsville, a maintenance technician at the Cressona Mall said it leaving wont be good for business.

Robin Swartz said students at the Schuylkill Center bring foot traffic not only to the mall, but to the nearby Burger King on Route 183.

Its really going to be a loss, he said, adding center staff are very nice people.

Swartz said the space Alvernia vacates will likely be another area that will go up for lease, but it will hurt the income of the malls owners, Namdar Realty Group, Cressona Realty LLC, Cressona CH LLC and Cressona Nassim LLC, the latter three entities, all in Great Neck, New York, purchased the property in fall 2019.

A representative from Namdar Realty Group said mall ownership has been working closely with Alvernia and reached an agreement with them on the location.

The person added that the university would no longer be moving out of the mall. Alvernia spokesman Kris Nolt said the university extended its lease agreement for a year, expiring in September 2022. He added that any one past that time would be explored in the future.

Loyack said classes for the upcoming school year will be held in the Cressona Mall.
POTTSVILLE  The Pottsville Kiwanis Clubs seventh annual blueberry sale is on this week to raise money for the organizations community and youth services.

Henry Beaver, the clubs treasurer, said the blueberry sale is an important fundraiser for the club, especially this year.

Because of the pandemic, we lost all of our fundraisers, with the exception of this blueberry sale, Beaver said. Were down to one fundraiser, so this is very important for us.

The club works to serve the local community, with an emphasis on children and youth. Beaver said the club provides scholarships, grants and awards throughout the year, including awards for music, scholastic achievement, community service, business and nursing.

The Kiwanis Club typically holds four fundraisers during the year to raise money for the scholarships and awards, but Beaver said the other three fundraisers had to be canceled due to the pandemic.

However, the blueberry sales have grown each year, which Beaver said provides something healthy for the buyers and helps the club continue its work in the community.

Its a win-win for everybody, Beaver said.

The blueberries will be picked the day before the sale and delivered fresh from New Jersey. Along with the 10-pound box of blueberries, Beaver said, the club includes instructions on how to freeze them.

The nice thing about blueberries compared to other things is that they can be frozen and enjoyed throughout the year, Beaver said.

He said the club has also compiled recipes that buyers have shared with them in the past to include with the orders.

Orders can be made through Tuesday, and pickup will be from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. July 10 at Boyers Food Market on West Market Street in Pottsville. Beaver said pickup will be done in a safe drive-thru method.

The 10-pound box of blueberries, or 14 pints, costs $32, and checks can be made payable to the Pottsville Kiwanis Foundation and mailed to Beaver at 1401 Mahantongo St., Pottsville PA 17901. Beaver said to include the name, address and email of the buyer.

Orders can also be placed over the phone by calling Beaver at 570-985-7262 or William Pugh, club secretary, at 570-573-1773. Beaver can also be reached by email at hbeaver@voicenet.com.

Beaver also said anyone interested in joining the Kiwanis Club can contact him.

Its difficult to get new, younger members, Beaver said. Weve been serving Pottsville for over 100 years. Were always looking for new members.

The Kiwanis Club celebrated its centennial in 2019, Beaver said, and they hope to continue despite the difficulties of the past year.

We want to keep doing all the fine things that we do for the community, Beaver said. Were not going to let the pandemic get us down.
To the Editor:

If they made a TV sitcom about how the Biden administration has performed to date, The Blunder Years would be an appropriate title.

The main character would be the president. Hes famous for holding pressers where only scripted questions are allowed. Reporters who are allowed to ask questions are pre-selected in advance. Viewers would be left to wonder why the president is going to get in trouble if he answers any questions that arent pre-scripted. Wow! Somebody can actually chastise the president for answering questions. That must be one powerful individual! Kind of like the boss in Charlies Angels. You never actually see that all-powerful person who has the ability to take the president of the United States to task, but you know that he or she exists.

In the pilot episode, the president tears down the wall at the southern border, kills the XL pipeline, signs a slew of executive orders, calls out the country for systemic racism and merrily goes about uniting the country. No one can quite figure out how the president plans to accomplish uniting a systemically racist country. Perhaps by putting the racists in federal prisons?

The supporting actress would be a vice president who said she went to the border but she didnt go to the border. Not that its relevant to anything, but she gleefully points out that shed never been to Europe, either. When asked a direct question, the audience would expect her to respond with her characteristic cackling laughter. Theyd also be scratching their heads, trying to figure out why she doesnt do what the president tells her to do.

In one episode, the secretary of Homeland Security announces that the border is closed and the vice president goes to South America to tell migrants not to come or theyll be sent back. The migrants know better and their response is solo uno broma  which means only kidding  as they continue to trek northward. Upstart Fox News has the audacity to film the illegal border crossings on a daily basis.

In another episode, the president states that climate change is the biggest threat that this country faces. Those who claim that the China, Russia, Iran triumvirate is actually a bigger threat are banished to the Democratic headquarters in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Thatll teach them! Then the president inexplicably allows Russia to complete construction of the Nord Stream oil pipeline from Russia to Germany. One cabinet member says Mr. President. I thought global warming is the biggest threat we face. Doesnt oil from Russia pollute as much or more than the XL pipeline oil would? The rest of the cabinet roars when the president yells One more for Dutch Harbor!

The press core is depicted as a bunch of people who trip over each other trying to ingratiate themselves to the president. One member wears an I Love To Circle Back T-shirt to impress Jen Psaki. Another has a Chocolate Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Is My Fav blazer. They constantly quibble over who has the best softball question for the president. In an effort to prove that her questions are the easiest, one reporter points out that she has been on the presidents call on this reporter list twice as much as anyone else.

I could go on in perpetuity but space is limited. This TV series might be humorous if only our country wouldnt suffer gravely because it really isnt all that fictional.

William C. Wagner

Frackville
We need a food store where that Giant was. Now they are going to put that college there. They are not going to pay property taxes. You wait and see all the high-paid people working there. We needed a food store. This is nonsense.

Pottsville

To Pottsville, you have a moral obligation as an American citizen to get the COVID shot so we can reach herd immunity. The drug companies have been working on the vaccine longer than five years. Think about this, if everybody acted this way with the polio and small pox vaccine, millions of lives would still be destroyed by this disease. Get over it and get the shot.

Pottsville

Sen. Argall, stop being a Trump toady. PA has had two bipartisan audits of the 2020 election and found nothing. Nothing. Period. Another audit will not restore faith in democracy. On the contrary, it will sow seeds of doubt where none should exist. Elected officials, like you, need to speak the truth. Biden won and Trump lost in a free and fair election. Thats how we restore faith in democracy. Stop the sham audit.

Mahanoy City

Front page Republican, another day, another protest by the Democrats. What will be next? What an unhappy group of people.

Auburn

To Pottsville, was Trump kidding when he said the election was rigged even though he lost by 4 million votes? Was he kidding when he urged the insurrection at the White House? I could go on and on but your pretzel logic can make anything seem like teasing.

Frackville

Liberals, how do you rate the job Biden and Harris are doing at the southern border?

McAdoo

I find it interesting that there are two Democrat senators who are refusing to help other Democrats get their agenda done and I have not heard of any death threats against them. On the other hand, there are numerous individuals on both sides who have been threatened because they refused to bow down to King Trump by his followers. You know, good, law-abiding Christian cop-lovers. Remember Jan. 6? It wont be forgotten.

Klingerstown

If someone called you stupid and corrupt, would you do them a major favor? David Argall should not do an audit of Pennsylvanias November election results for Trump. Two audits have already been completed. If Argall and his cronies proceed, they should pay for the cost, not us taxpayers.

Pottsville

A message to Sen. Argall: What did Donald Trump offer you or threaten you with to keep this audit going? Get with the other lawmakers and work to make this country better, not worse.

Cressona

This is to the self-centered person from Pottsville who doesnt want to get the COVID shot, thank God there are people who want to help mankind. Imagine where the world would be today if people didnt do extraordinary things for the world and the human race. You can tell what kind of person you are when the first thing you are worried about is can I sue. Weve got your number.

Barnesville
Last month, a video of an elderly man playing the violin in the streets of Kolkata had surfaced on social media. The clip of the violinist named Bhagwan Mali had gone viral on the internet and he was appreciated by netizens for his talent. Now, in a heartwarming gesture, Kolkata Police have lauded the talented artist and has gifted him a violin.

Kolkata Police gifts violin to musician

Taking to Twitter, Kolkata Police shared two pictures that featured the Kolkata Police Commissioner and Bhagwan Mali holding a violin in his hands. The police in the post praised the artist for his talented skills. They pointed out that the artist was playing the violin in the city streets some weeks back. The police department mentioned that the Community Police Wing had last week helped the artist financially. Now, Commissioner of Police, Soumen Mitra has gifted Bhagwan Mali a new violin.

Meet Mr. Bhagwan Mali, who is a very talented musician.Few weeks ago, a video of him playing his violin in the city streets, had gone viral on Social Media.Last week, he was financially assisted by our Community Policing Wing. Today, @CPkolkata gifted him a new violin. pic.twitter.com/750lYhZX0x  Kolkata Police (@KolkataPolice) June 28, 2021

Since shared, the post has garnered over 620 likes and several reactions. Netizens took to the comments section to praise the kind gesture of the police department. One user commented, "Fantastic This kind of things can make our society beautiful And congrats to Mr. Mali for such kind of gift from police family". Another user commented, "Good to see the human face of Kolkata Police! My Salute!". Another individual commented, "Really a great job done by KP. Thanks a lot."

Fantastic

This kind of things can make our society beautiful

And congrats to Mr. Mali for such kind of gift from police family  Somidh (@Somidh2) June 28, 2021

Good to see the human face of Kolkata Police!

My Salute!  Sultan Osman (@sultanosman2008) June 29, 2021

Excellent gesture.  Goutam Dass (@GoutamDass) June 29, 2021

Good attempt sir. Keep it up  Rabindra Kumar Nayak (@Rabindr24253100) June 29, 2021

Really a great job done by KP. Thanks a lot.  Asim Kumar Sanyal (@AsimSanyal) June 29, 2021

Recently, the video of violinist Bhagwan Mali playing a rendition of popular Hindi songs on a deserted street in the West Bengal capital had surfaced on social media. The melodies encompass Diwana Hua Baadal by Asha Bhosle and Mohammed Rafi, from the 1964 movie Kashmir ki Kali, followed by Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh by Lata Mangeshkar from the 1960 movie Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai amongst others. The clip also featured a female accomplice, possibly his wife, who was seen eagerly waiting for people.

This elderly man, who is playing the violin on the street of Kolkata, is an artist who is entertaining people during the lockdown.



Its true that lockdown played a key role in containing the spread of the virus but it has also created enormous difficulties for the people. pic.twitter.com/ckO9ozeDcl  Nishant Pitti (@nishantpitti) June 8, 2021

IMAGE: KolkataPolice/Twitter

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On July 2, a Pakistan drone was spotted entering the Indian territory at the International Border (IB) in the Arnia area of the Jammu district by the Border Security Force (BSF) troops. This comes after the twin blasts that took place at Jammu's Airbase on June 25, which is being investigated by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).

A drone was spotted in the early Friday morning at around 4.25 am. After 5-6 rounds of firing by the BSF troops, the drone's movement shifted towards Pakistan's territory.

Speaking to Republic TV, BSF troops said, "It was a surveillance drone. It was sent for the surveillance of the security area".

For the past week, a minimum of five drones are been spotted in Jammu.

J&K Police along with the BSF have initiated a search operation to ascertain that no explosive drones are flying in the sky.

Twin blasts in Jammu

On early Sunday morning, June 27, multiple blasts occurred in the premises of the technical area of the Jammu airport. Two blasts were heard within a gap of 5 minutes, the first blast sound is captured in the CCTV at 1.37 am while the second at 1.43 am.

On the same day of multiple blasts, a 5kg of IED was recovered from a Lashkar terrorist found around 2-3 km away from the Jammu airport. He was arrested after the security forces found him carrying the explosives.

It is suspected that the target was the aircraft parked in the dispersal area. The drone attacks are observed at the border since Pakistan had issued a warning on June 20 ahead of J&K all-party meeting and that stated it will oppose any move by India to "divide" or change the demography of Kashmir. Later, on June 23, two people were killed and 17 more injured in a blast that was reported in a residential area of Pakistan's Lahore, near Hafiz Saeed's residence.

On June 20, the Indian Army had deployed anti-drone measures to avoid further threats or attacks. According to reports, the new anti-drone system cuts off the signal from its parent control or operator and uses a laser to bring down drones at a distance of 1.5 kilometres by disrupting its communications system.

(Image credit: PTI/UNSPLASH/REPRESENTATIVEIMAGE)
The Ministry of External Affairs on Friday slammed Pakistan in the wake of the drone attack on Jammu Airbase and also the drone activity over the Indian High Commission in Islamabad. Speaking at the MEA briefing, spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said that Pakistan should take credible action against terrorist networks and proxies operating from its territories. The statement by MEA comes at a time when J&K DGP Dilbag Singh hinted that Pakistan-based terrorist organisation LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba) is behind the Jammu drone attack.

"All countries must take credible action against terrorism, including by putting an end to cross border movement of terrorists, ending terrorist safe havens and infrastructure and their financing channel. In this regard, we call upon Pakistan to take credible verifiable irreversible action against terrorist networks and proxies operating from territories under its control and to bring the perpetrators of terror attacks including the 26 Movember Mumbai attack and the Pathankot attack to justice," MEA spokesperson said.

Responding to media queries, he also gave elaborate details on the drone activity over the Indian High Commission in Islamabad and demanded Pakistan to conduct an investigation into it.

"A drone was spotted on June 26 over the Indian High Commission in Islamabad. This has been taken up officially with the Government of Pakistan. We expect Pakistan to investigate the incident and prevent recurrence of such breach of security," Bagchi said.

Drone attack on Jammu Airbase

Incidentally (or planned), the drone activity over Indian High Commission in Islamabad occurred hours before the twin blasts took place at Jammu Airbase which were carried out with the help of drones. On the intervening night of June 26 and 27, two blasts were heard within a gap of 5 minutes inflicting minor injuries on two Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel. The probe so far has called the attacks 'a well-planned conspiracy to target national aerial assets and challenge the national security' of the country. Although no damage has been caused to Indian aerial assets, Air Force personnel suffered minor injuries.

Moreover, sources have said that the drone sighting over the Indian High Commission in Islamabad was allegedly trying to capture the details of a diplomatic event held at the Indian High Commission.

Increase in drone sighting

After the Jammu airbase attacks, three more drone activities were reported in the UT on June 29-30 near vital security installations in Jammu. Another Pakistan drone was spotted entering the Indian territory at the International Border (IB) in the Arnia area of the Jammu district by the Border Security Force (BSF) troops on Friday. After 5-6 rounds of firing by the BSF troops, the drone's movement shifted towards Pakistan's territory.

To counter the Pakistani drone activities, the Indian Army has installed an electro-optic drone system in Poonch and Rajouri sectors near the LoC. As per reports, the new anti-drone system cuts off the signal from its parent control or operator and uses a laser to bring down drones at a distance of 1.5 kilometres by disrupting its communications system.
In a major development in connection with the Maldives, the High Commission of India in Male is upset with successive attacks in social media and local media attacking the Indian High Commission and its staff members. Last week, the Indian mission had sent a complaint letter to Maldives foreign ministry and requested to take steps to protect the high commissioner and diplomatic personnel from malicious articles in local media.

ANI sources were quoted saying, "Government of Maldives is fully supportive and recognizes that there is an issue about irresponsible and malicious reporting."

Another ANI source said, "India-Maldives developmental projects and other aspects of bilateral relations during President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih's time have been very successful. This is causing jitters to the opposition."

A mouthpiece of the opposition party (PPM and PNC) in the Maldives, 'Dhiyares' has allegedly launched a number of attacks on the Indian mission and its staff. India has complained to the Maldives about "motivated attacks, recurring articles and social media posts attacking the dignity of the High Commission, the Head of the Mission, and members of the diplomatic staff by certain sections of the local media".

The Maldives to reopen for Indian tourists from July 15

In other news, s, on Tuesday, the Maldives announced that it will open its borders to South Asian countries, including India from July 15. President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih announced at a press conference in the President's Office that the Maldives will resume issuing tourist VISAs to South Asian visitors on July 15. According to Maldives media, more information on this issue will be released soon. Additionally, from July 1, work visa holders will be able to re-enter the Maldives. A month ago, Maldives imposed restrictions on travellers from India as the restrictions were tightened due to a surge in the COVID-19 crisis.
A man was arrested in Madhya Pradesh's Rewa district on Thursday after he called his village Mini-Pakistan in a social media post. The man Abrar Khan (32) posted a picture on himself on his Facebook account with the caption See Amreti - a Mini Pakistan." Raising objections over his statements, several locals and politicians from adjourning villages filed a complaint and demanded action against him. After the social media post came to light, the Rewa Police took cognizance of the incident and booked the man under section 153 (wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot) of IPC and Section 66 of the Information Technology Act.

According to Rewa districts superintendent of police Rakesh Kumar Singh, the man intended his remark as a taunt towards other neighbouring villages. Amreti is said to be a Muslim-dominated region. During questioning, Khan said that his 'Mini-Pakistan' remark was meant as a causal statement. However, the police have issued a warning asking villagers to not use such statements which can cause inter-village enmity.

The accused who has been arrested had made this statement after he returned to his village in Madhya Pradesh a few months ago after weeks of lockdown. He was previously working in an oilfield in Oman. His passport has been seized by the police officials and the cybercrime department is investigating the matter. Rakesh Kumar Singh said the districts cyber cell is also looking into Abrar Khan's activities in Oman.

Man booked for 'Naya Pakistan' remark

Last month, a newly-appointed pradhan in Uttar Pradesh's Amethi was captured on camera promising 'Naya Pakistan' during his post-victory procession in the Ramganj area. Elected pradhan from Mangra village in the recently-held Uttar Pradesh Panchayat Elections, Imran Khan was seen carrying out a rally with dozens of bikes and four-wheelers in the area where he and his supporters played a song with the lyrics- 'Dekho Imran Khan aaya, Naya Pakistan laya'. Shortly after the incident, the locals reported the matter to the UP Police which quickly booked the Pradhan and 50 unidentified people under Section 153b (speaking and circulating words against national integration), 188, 269, 270, 171H and the Pandemic Act.
By Durba Ghosh Guwahati, Jul 2 (PTI) Peace talks with the banned ULFA (Independent) outfit can progress if it is prepared to discuss grievances and issues other than sovereignty, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said.

ULFA (I) Chief Paresh Barua insists that he will not discuss anything beyond sovereignty but I have taken an oath to protect sovereignty. These two are irreconcilable, the Chief Minister told PTI in an interview.

At the same time, if we can coin another term to discuss their grievances or various issues, then we can make some progress. There are many well-intended people who are working on the issue with the ULFA chief to convince him to discuss something substantial without insisting on (inclusion of) the word. Let us see what happens, Sarma said.

The word is not a terminology for us but is solemn and we take oath that it is our duty to protect our sovereignty and not cede an inch of our land. For him also there is a compulsion, so there is a need to arrive at a certain definition which can address the issues of both concerned, the chief minister said.

There is no immediate answer to the problem but it will evolve over time. I remain hopeful, though at the same time nothing can be predicted on these issues, he said.

The talks have made slow progress. The chief minister said the climate is positive but added that as talks progressed, sometimes it becomes entirely different. So one cannot be definite about it (solution through the talks) but we can hope and pray.

Sarma after taking oath on May 10 had appealed to the ULFA (I) to come forward for peace talks and resolve the more than three decade old insurgency problem in the state.

Asked about the current status of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), Sarma said that its State Coordinator has filed a petition in the Supreme Court for a re-verification and a re-look at the document.

It is now up to the Court to hear the petition. Maybe it has been delayed due to the prevailing COVID situation but as the petition has been filed, it will definitely come up for hearing, he added.

The final NRC, published on August 31, 2019, had excluded the names of over 19 lakh people. Many stakeholders, including the BJP government in the state, described it as a flawed document and have demanded a re-verification, particularly in districts bordering Bangladesh.

A number of communities have been demanding Scheduled Tribe status. The Chief Minister described the demand as a complex issue and felt a solution should emerge from among the tribal communities.

The moment a community is granted tribal status, other tribal communities start opposing it. I do not want a clash between them. We have to address these issues tactfully and not in a hurried manner, he said.

Six communities in Assam -- Moran, Motok, Tai Ahom, Chutiyas, Koch-Rajbongshis and the tea tribes or adivasis -- have been demanding ST status. Some of these communities are already categorized as Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Former Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal had formed a Group of Ministers, headed by Sarma, to prepare a report on the issue.

On the issue of coal mining in Tinsukia district, which had led to widespread protests by environmentalists and concerned citizens, the Chief Minister said that there is a need to protect the fragile biodiversity of the region but at the same time many livelihoods are dependent on mining.

Mining in the area was going on till last year from the early 1900s and since many livelihoods are dependent on it, we are of the view that wherever it is possible mining activities may continue without disturbing the biodiversity of the area,he said.

In Bongaigaon, NTPC had started a power generation project for which coal is to be transported from Margherita in Tinsukia district but there has been no supply for the last one year.

As a result, we are purchasing power at a very high price and who is paying for it? The common people of the state. We need to balance various approaches, but at the same time, we will not do anything that will affect the biodiversity of Upper Assam, he added.

There is, however, no proposal to start mining in the Joypur area, near the newly created Dehing-Patkai National Park in the state, Sarma asserted. PTI DG JRC JRC

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Seven years on from being damaged by the floods of 2014, a high tension power line in Jammu & Kashmir's Poonch district has finally been restored.

J&K: 132 KV high tension line in Poonch was restored yesterday, 7 years after it got damaged during floods in 2014



"Today, this line has started working once again. It will give reliable power supply to people in the district," said engineer Sadiq Azaad at Chandak grid station pic.twitter.com/z8KLYainEE  ANI (@ANI) July 1, 2021

Visuals of the restored grid show a large complex of towers nestled in the midst of lush mountains. Little evidence of the carnage of 2014 remains.

The 132 KV line was washed away during the havoc caused by the 2014 floods. Now, however, the electricity line in the Chandak power grid station has been reconnected and tested after seven years. The powerline supply is expected to serve more than two lakh residents in Poonch district.

Poonch locals hail restoration of power line

Sadiq Azaad at Chandak grid station, speaking to ANI, said, "It is a project of national importance. It was damaged by the 2014 devastating flood. The voltage will improve. Now with 132 KV, a reliable power supply will be there in the district. More than two lakh people will be benefited. The teams have worked day and night even during the pandemic to restore the powerline."

According to a local, Amit Kumar Gupta, the reinstallation of the 132 KV power line will enhance the economy of Poonch. Another local, Surinder Singh, talked about how the people in the district had been facing difficulties for the past seven years. He said, "Now, after the restoration of the power line, good voltage will be there. I thank the Jammu and Kashmir administration for the restoration of the project." "Earlier, households, businesses, students...everybody had to suffer due to the power cuts and low voltages. Now people of Poonch and adjoining areas will be benefited from the restoration of 132 KV powerline," he added.

The Kashmir Floods of 2014

The floods date back to September 2014, when torrential rains wreaked havoc across many of Kashmir's districts, causing devastation. These floods hit the erstwhile Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and the Pakistani-governed areas of Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), Gilgit-Baltistan, and Pakistan's Punjab province. The floods had killed roughly 277 people in India and about 280 people in Pakistan by September 24, 2014. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had then provided the state government 745 crore ($100 million) assistance, on top of the 1,100 crore ($150 million) previously set aside for the tragedy.

(Image: PTI/Representative)
Mumbai: COVID-19 Vaccination To Take Place Only For 3 Hours Today Owing To Jab Shortage

COVID-19 vaccination in Mumbai will only take place for three hours on Friday, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation announced amid a shortage of doses. This comes after Thursday witnessed no vaccination at BMC centers whereas 4 state government-run inoculation centers were operational due to limited vaccine stock. As per the civic body, people can get themselves vaccinated between 2 pm and 5 pm.

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Indian Navy Ship 'Sarvekshak' Completes 558-mile Survey Around Sunken MV Xpress Pearl

INS Sarvekshak, an Indian Navy hydrographic survey ship, completed a 558-mile side-scan sonar study around the MV Xpress Pearl, which sank in June. According to officials, the survey's analysis suggests a concentration of debris within three square miles of the crash, and it's being conducted simultaneously in three survey zones with integral sensors and two survey boats.

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Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Shows Strong Neutralisation On COVID Delta Variant, Says Company

In a boost for one-shot Johnson & Johnson's COVID vaccine (Janssen), the company announced on Thursday, that its vaccine generated strong, persistent activity against the rapidly spreading Delta variant and other highly prevalent COVID variants. The eight-month-long study which has been submitted to bioRxiv for review, showd that the single-shot vaccine has neutralizing antibody activity against the Delta variant at an even higher level than what was recently observed for the Beta (B.1.351) variant in South Africa.

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Mamata Banerjee 'likes To Politicise Every Issue' Says Adhikari Ahead Of WB Budget Session

After a meeting with Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, West Bengal Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Suvendu Adhikari on Thursday lambasted West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, accusing her of politicizing every issue and being abusive towards the Central Government. This came ahead of the budget session of the state assembly starting from July 2.

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Covishield Accepted By 9 European Countries Amid 'EU Green Pass' Exclusion Row: Sources

In a massive boost to Serum Institute of India (SII) on Thursday, sources report that Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, and Spain have accepted Covishield for the 'EU Green Pass', which comes into force from July 1. Sources further report that Switzerland and Estonia too have allowed Covishield for entering their respective nations.

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Ram Mandir Land Scam: VHP Claims 'Opposers Tarnishing Ram', Adds 'they Won't Go To Court'

Fuming over the Opposition's continued attack over the Ram Mandir alleged land scam, VHP Spokesperson Vinod Bansal on Friday, claimed that those who were levelling allegations will claim that agencies like ED, I-T, and police were under 'Yogi-Modi' rule. Claiming that the Opposition will not go to court, he alleged that those who used to ask for proof of Ram while backing Babri will now ask for proof from Ram Mandir's trust.

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US Accuses China Of Drafting Policies Favouring Trafficking, Forced Labour In Xinjiang

China has a government "policy or pattern" of human trafficking and widespread forced labour through the mass arbitrary detention of more than one million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgyz, and other Muslims in the Xinjiang, the US State Department said in a report released on Thursday.

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Rahul Gandhi Targets Centre, PM Modi Over LPG Price Hike, Calls It 'Modi Maya'

After oil marketing companies on Thursday hiked the price of domestic LPG cylinders by Rs 25.5 each per 14.2 kg cylinder, former Congress President Rahul Gandhi targetted the Centre and Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the price hike, calling it 'Modi Maya.' Rahul took to Twitter and said, "Such has been the effect of 'Modi Maya'. Only the rates of the 'jumlas' have fallen."

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TMC Claims Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar Involved In Kolkata Fake Vaccination Drive

On Thursday, July 1, Trinamool Congress leader Sukhendu Sekhar Roy accused that West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar might also be part of the fake vaccination camp scam. The case is related to the alleged Kolkata fake vaccination drive organized by the accused Debanjan Deb that administered doses of random drugs instead of the COVID vaccine.

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Bihar: BJP MLA Alleges Transfer-posting Scam, Avers '75-80% Of Party Ministers Took Bribe'

In an embarrassment for the Nitish Kumar-led government, Bihar BJP MLA Gyanendra Singh Gyanu accused Ministers of taking bribes to facilitate the transfer and posting of officials which took place on Wednesday. Training his guns on BJP in an exclusive interview with Republic TV a day earlier, he claimed, "I feel that 75-80% of BJP Ministers have taken bribes for the transfer and posting of officials.

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Hating PM Modi A Pre-requisite At New York Times? Bizarre Job Description Triggers Row

The New York Times has posted an entry-level job requirement on their website and on LinkedIn. The opening was for a South Asia Business Correspondent in New Delhi, but the NYT was very specific about the qualities it was looking for in the candidates - being anti-Hindu and anti-Modi. In their ad posted on Thursday, the New York Times seems to be appealing to candidates who can write against the democratically elected government of India and contribute to a discourse that raises questions about propagandist journalism.

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Pak Drone Spotted Over Indian Mission In Islamabad Tried To Shoot Meeting Details: Sources

In a major security breach, a Pakistani drone was spotted inside the premises of the Indian High Commission in Islamabad last week. Now, as per Republic TV sources, it has been revealed that the drone was allegedly trying to capture the details of a diplomatic event that was being held at the Indian High Commission. Notably, the drone was spotted hovering over the Indian mission in Islamabad hours before the twin explosions at the Jammu Air Force Station.

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India Asks Pakistan To Investigate Drone Activity Over High Commission In Islamabad

The Ministry of External Affairs on Friday slammed Pakistan in the wake of the drone attack on Jammu Airbase and also the drone activity over the Indian High Commission in Islamabad. Speaking at the MEA briefing, spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said that Pakistan should take credible action against terrorist networks and proxies operating from its territories. The statement by MEA comes at a time when J&K DGP Dilbag Singh hinted that Pakistan-based terrorist organisation LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba) is behind the Jammu drone attack.

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Centre Welcomes Sharad Pawar's Statement To 'amend Farm Laws Instead Of Complete Repeal'

Union Agricultural Minister Narendra Singh Tomar on Friday, July 2, said he welcomes Nationalist Congress Party Supremo Sharad Pawar over his recent statements partially backing the new farm laws. This comes after former Agricultural Minister Sharad Pawar, in a stark U-turn from his previous stand, said that certain amendments are needed in the new farm laws instead of the complete repeal of the farm laws.

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Uttarakhand CM Tirath Singh Rawat Resigns; Second Change Of Guard In A Year

In a massive development in Uttarakhand politics, CM Tirath Singh Rawat has offered his resignation as the Chief Minister of the State. This is the second time in a year that Uttarakhand is witnessing a change of Chief Minister which leads to a big churn in the Uttarakhand BJP. Tirath Singh Rawat had replaced Trivendra Singh Rawat in March 2021, a year before the latter completed his term as the Uttarakhand CM.

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Bengal Post-poll Violence: BJP Stages Walk Out On the First Day Of Budget Session

The first day of the budget session of the West Bengal legislature kickstarted with a high-voltage drama on Friday with the main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party staging a walkout as a sign of protest. The Governor of the State, Jagdeep Dhankhar, was addressing the legislature, with a focus on the violence that engulfed the State after the announcement of the election results when the Members of Legislature led by Suvendu Adhikari staged a walk.

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Day After Release, Akhil Gogoi Declares 'anti-CAA Movement Will Resume In Assam'

Activist-turned politician Akhil Gogoi declared on Friday that the mass movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which rocked Assam in 2019, will be revived soon. Speaking to reporters at Nagaon, Gogoi said the leaders of the anti-CAA movement betrayed the people of Assam while he was kept in jail. "Now that I am out, I want to assure the people that the anti-CAA movement will resume. No (illegal) foreigner will be allowed to stay in the state," he said on the way to his constituency Sivasagar, a day after being released from jail.

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COVID-19 Vaccination For Pregnant Women Now Allowed; Check Details Here

Acting on the recommendations of the National Immunization Technical Advisory Group (NTAGI) and National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19 (NEGVAC), the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) on Friday approved the vaccination of pregnant women against COVID-19. The approval now allows the women to either register on Co-WIN or walk in to the nearest COVID Vaccination Centre (CVC) to get themselves vaccinated, as per their choice.

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Over 34 Cr Vaccines Administered In India, 86% Drop In COVID Cases: Union Health Ministry

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government of India (GOI) has accelerated the pace, ramped up the production, and been expanding the scope of a liberalized and now universalized vaccine drive across the country. According to the latest press release by Health Ministry, GOI has administered more than 34 crore vaccine doses as of July 2, which is equivalent to the entire population of the US.

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COVID-19: Centre Rushes Teams To 6 States For COVID Control, Containment Measures

Strengthening India's fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centre rushed multiple teams to states that are reporting a high number of coronavirus cases with an objective to curb the further spread. On July 2, the Government of India (GOI) deputed multi-disciplinary teams to Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Manipur.

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Jammu and Kashmir DGP Dilbag Singh has revealed that the initial investigation hints that Pakistan-based terrorist organisation LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba) is behind the Jammu drone attack. On the intervening night of June 26-27, 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. Talking exclusively to Republic TV, DGP Dilbag Singh also revealed that suspicion of involvement of Pakistani agencies with LeT cannot be ruled out.

DGP Dilbag Singh on Jammu drone attack

Jammu and Kashmir police were probing the twin blast case that occurred in the technical area of the IAF airbase in Jammu before the case was handed over to the National Investigation Agency (NIA).

Talking about the primary investigation DGP Dilbag Singh revealed, "Primarily the suspicion was on Lashkar-e-Taiba which operates from Pakistan and the LeT has also been involved in similar kinds of incidents in the past. The day when this attack took place another IED was sent by the LeT through a drone. Jammu and Kashmir police was working along with other agencies on that incident. But they had inputs in advance so they played a trap in which the IED receiver who was directed to place the IED in a crowded place was arrested along with the receiver and placer.

"Apart from this, whosoever were involved in the network, some people of Kashmir were also involved they have also been nabbed and the Jammu and Kashmir Police are also questioning them parallelly. Such types of deeds have been done by the LeT in the past in which they use drones to smuggle weapons, explosive materials, and narcotics. Till now the strongest suspicion is on Lashkar-e-Taiba and the involvement of foreign agencies in the Jammu drone attack cannot be ruled out," added DGP Dilbag Singh.

Types of explosive used in Jammu drone attack

Talking more about the Jammu drone attack, Dilbag Singh said that the preliminary investigation had revealed that a mixture of RDX and TNT were used. Although the report has confirmed the presence of RDX, the confirmation of TNT will is pending till further report comes.

Dilbag Singh also said, "Drones have been used many times in the past 8 to 10 months. Many times BSF has noted this on the border and has also shot them down. Another instance was when a drone arrived from across the border but it fell down due to a technical problem." Jammu and Kashmir DGP also said that the agencies are on high alert and a security review has also been done in Srinagar.

Pakistani drone spotted near border: BSF opens fire

The BSF on Friday opened fire on a suspected Pakistani surveillance drone after it tried to venture into the Indian territory on the International Border here, officials said. The drone was spotted by the alert BSF personnel in the Arnia sector on the outskirts of Jammu around 4:25 am, they said. The officials said the suspected drone returned to the Pakistani side when the border guards fired half a dozen rounds to bring it down.

(Image Credits: ANI/Unsplash)
Five terrorists associated with terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba's (LeT) were neutralized by the security forces in the encounter that broke out between terrorists and security forces in the Hanjin Rajpora area of Pulwama district on Friday. As per the sources, one Army soldier was killed in the encounter and two jawans were injured. All the bodies have been recovered from the encounter spot along with the increment documents and arms & ammunition:

2 AK-47

1 SLR

2 Pistol

20 Hand Grenades

As per the sources, after receiving information about the presence of militants the security forces cordoned off the area and launched a massive search operation at Hanjin village in the Rajpora area of the district. The search operation turned into an encounter after terrorists opened fire on the forces. From the past few weeks, several terrorist attacks have been taking place in Jammu & Kashmir along with drone attacks, due to security has been heightened in the valley.

Indian Army Begins Counter-drone Training

On Thursday, the Indian Army began counter-drone training for the police in the border areas to carry out drone surveillance along the Line Of Control (LOC). The Jammu and Kashmir police are being trained to handle, identify and counter various types of drones that could bring threats.

NSG & CISF DGs Arrive At IAF's Jammu Airbase

Director General (DG) of the National Security Guard of India (NSG) M A Ganapathy and DG of Central Industrial Security Forces (CISF) SK Saxena on Wednesday arrived at the Indian Air Force's Jammu Airbase for the investigation of the Jammu Drone attack. After the attack, several massive steps have been taken in the entire bordering area of Pakistan in order to fight the drone menace. A ban has been imposed on the storage, sale, possession, use, and transport of flying machines in the Rajouri area of Jammu. The top brass went directly from the Airport to the police headquarters where a meeting was scheduled with the top officials of Jammu & Kashmir-- ADG Jammu Mukesh Singh along with SSP Chandan Kohli.

Jammu drone attack

On the intervening night of June 26-27, 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 occurred 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.

(Image Credits: ANI)
In the latest development in the ISRO spy case, scientist Nambi Narayanan has reportedly opposed the anticipatory bail plea filed by Kerala's ex-DGP Siby Mathews and told the court that he was tortured the most by the former cop. Siby Mathews, who has been named in the CBI's FIR, was granted interim bail by the Thiruvananthapuram Sessions Court last Friday and ordered not to leave the country without the permission of the court alongside cooperating in the investigation. As per local media reports, Nambi Narayanan moved as one of the respondents opposing the anticipatory bail plea filed by former DGP Siby Mathews in the Thiruvananthapuram district court. The matter is scheduled to be heard on July 7, reports added.

CBI records Nambi Narayanan's statement

Former ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan said on Thursday that he only told the truth and "nothing but the truth" to the CBI team which recorded his statement in connection with their probe into the conspiracy angle behind the 1994 espionage case. "I only told the truth and nothing but the truth," Narayanan told PTI but refused to say anything more on what he told the agency.

He said that the CBI recorded his statement on June 30, but not on July 1 and that he cannot say whether the agency will be recording his statement tomorrow or any date after that. "They took my statement yesterday. Today (July 1) they did not come to me. No idea if they will record my statement tomorrow," he said.

Republic accesses CBI's FIR in ISRO spy case

In the FIR accessed by Republic on Tuesday, the CBI quoted excerpts from the Justice DK Jain-headed enquiry committee including the confinement of Mariam Rasheeda without an FIR being lodged, suppression of materials and facts from official records of investigation, registration of cases under the Officials Secrets Act, 1923 without any basis to invoke the provisions, deliberate leaking of information to the media to create a narrative to implicate the scientists of LPSC amongst other persons.

Further, the FIR - quoting excerpts from the Justice DK Jain Committee - noted that Nambi Narayanan, K Chandrashekaran, SK Sharma were arrested without any material on record to show their involvement in the espionage case. It highlighted the torture of Nambi Narayanan and K Chandrashekaran by police officials while they were in custody. The FIR also noted that the Enquiry Committee, in its report, had mentioned representation submitted by Nambi Narayanan alleging that he was pressurised to falsely implicate his 'immediate bosses' Dr Mutthuyagnam and Prof UR Rao of the ISRO.

It was on Thursday that the CBI filed an FIR at the Thiruvananthapuram Chief Magistrate Court, naming 18 persons in the conspiracy including former deputy director of IB RB Sreekumar and SP KK Joshua. The CBI has named several former Kerala police officers namely- S Vijayan (Pettah Circle inspector), Thampi S Durgadath Pettah Sub-Inspector), V R Rajeevan (Trivandrum CP), and Siby Mathews (ex-DGP) as prime accused.

On April 15, the Supreme Court of India had ordered a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the 1994 espionage case against former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientist Nambi Narayanan and to file a report in 3 months. This transpired after an inquiry panel formed by the Supreme Court in 2018 submitted its report and the Centre pushed hard for action to be taken against those who framed Nambi. Narayanan, who had been acquitted in the case, was eventually awarded Rs 50 lakh as compensation by the Supreme Court in 2018.

What is the ISRO spy case?

The Kerala police had registered two cases in October 1994, after Maldivian national Rasheeda was arrested in Thiruvananthapuram for allegedly obtaining secret drawings of ISRO rocket engines to sell to Pakistan. Three individuals were arrested in connection with the case - then ISRO director Nambi Narayanan, then ISRO deputy director D Sasikumaran and Fousiya Hasan, a Maldivian friend of Rasheeda. Three months later i.e. in 1995, when Narayanan was released on bail, he had approached the National Human Rights Commission seeking compensation from the Kerala government, for the mental agony that he had suffered in the process. The CBI later dismissed the allegations against him as false.

However, the Supreme Court in 2018 termed the police action against the former ISRO scientist 'psycho-pathological treatment', and said his 'liberty and dignity', basic to his human rights, were jeopardised as he was taken into custody and, eventually, despite all the glory of the past, he was compelled to face 'cynical abhorrence'. The SC appointed a three-member panel headed by former judge D K Jain, while the Kerala government was directed to give Narayanan a compensation of Rs 50 lakh, as he underwent "immense humiliation.

Over a period of almost two-and-a-half years, the panel headed by Justice (retd) D K Jain examined the circumstances leading to the arrest. The 79-year-old former scientist, who was given a clean chit by the CBI, had earlier said that the Kerala police had 'fabricated' the case and the technology he was charged with having stolen and sold in the 1994 case did not even exist at that time.

Narayanan had approached the apex court against a Kerala High Court judgment that said no action needed to be taken against Mathews and two retired Superintendents of Police K K Joshua and S Vijayan, who were later held responsible by the CBI for the scientist's illegal arrest.
In a major development, National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Friday has arrested two more terror suspects-- Mohd. Salim and Mohd. Kafil in the connection with the Darbhanga railway station. Both the accused were in touch with the Pakistani ISI handlers.

NIA arrests 2 more LeT terrorists

As per the sources, Mohd. Salim is the crucial character in the entire module as he was responsible for the recruitment of the first two arrests that were done by the NIA on Wednesday. As per NIA, there could be a possibility that some of them might have traveled to Pakistan for arms training. NIA has further established a money trail as these accused received Rs 4.6 lakh from the Pakistani handlers to carry out an attack in India. So far, 4 LeT terrorists have been arrested in connection with the blast.

NIA team reaches Patna with 2 LeT terrorists

On Friday, NIA along with two LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba) terrorists-- Imran Khan and Mohd. Nasir Malik reached Patna, who were arrested from Hyderabad in connection with the Darbhanga railway station blast case that took place earlier this month in Bihar. Both the terrorists have been taken to Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) office in Patna and produced before a court where NIA has applied for 10 days remand of Nasir and Imran.

Bihar: NIA (National Investigation Agency) team arrives in Patna, along with two terrorists who were arrested from Hyderabad, in connection with the Darbhanga Station blast case. They are being taken to ATS (Anti Terrorist Squad). They will be produced before a court later. pic.twitter.com/yxb3uZPECc  ANI (@ANI) July 2, 2021

NIA arrests 2 LeT terrorists in Darbhanga Railway Station Blast case

On June 30, the NIA arrested two LeT terrorists in connection with Bihar's Darbhanga Railway Station blast case. Both the terrorists are residents of Nampally, Hyderabad, and originally hail from Uttar Pradesh's Shamli district.

According to the CCTV footage of Darbhanga station, on June 15, the two terrorists were seen getting out of a car with an IED parcel wrapped in clothes to place the explosive on the Secunderabad to Darbhangda train after which the blast took place on June 17. Sources have said, one of two terrorists sold clothes in Hyderabad for one and half years. These terrorists made entry into India through Nepal which acts as a safe passage for terrorists trained in Pakistan to enter India. The case was originally registered as an FIR at Railway Police Station Darbhanga District but later NIA re-registered the case and taken up the investigation.

NIA arrests 02 Lashkar-e-Taiba ( LeT) terrorists in Darbhanga, Bihar Railway Station Case pic.twitter.com/r13gHQtLIX  NIA India (@NIA_India) June 30, 2021

Arrested LeT Terrorist Met Hafiz Saeed, Tiger Memon

The NIA informed that one of the two LeT terrorists accused-- Mohd Nasir Khan had visited Pakistan in 2012 and received training from handlers of LeT in the fabrication of IED from locally available chemicals. During the visit, they have also met UN-designated terrorist Hafiz Saeed and the underworld don Tiger Memon. Imran Khan resided with his wife in Hyderabad. Whereas Mohammad Nasir has confessed that during his Pakistan visit he was trained there for four months at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. He specialised in IED blasts and timer devices.

The terrorist duo has also been a part of the syndicate that was involved in other terror operations in Gujarat's Ahmedabad, Nanded in Maharashtra where they have been involved in setting up IED devices, according to the sources.

(Image Credits: ANI)
In a massive development in the Sandesara scam, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has attached the properties of Sanjay Khan, Dino Morea, Aqeel Abdulkhalil Bachooali, and Irfan Ahmed Siddiqui under provisions of PMLA in the Sandesara Group case. Enforcement Directorate provisionally attached eight immovable properties, three vehicles, and several bank accounts, shares, mutual funds having a total value of Rs 8.79 crore on Friday, a release from the agency said.

ED attaches properties of Dino Morea, DJ Aqeel in Sandesara case

The attached assets belong to Sanjay Khan ( Rs. 3 Crore), Dino Morea ( Rs. 1.40 Crore), Aqeel Abdulkhalil Bachooali ( Rs. 1.98 Crore) and Irfan Ahmed Siddiqui ( Rs.2.41 Crore). Four separate provisional attachment orders under section 5 of PMLA have been issued in this regard. Enforcement Directorate initiated an investigation under PMLA on the basis of FIR registered by CBI, Delhi for cheating several public sector banks.

In a press release on Friday, ED said that an investigation had revealed that Sandesaras had diverted Proceeds of Crime of Rs 3 Crore, Rs 1.4 Crore, Rs 12.54 Crore & Rs 3.51 Crore to Sanjay Khan, Dino Morea, Aqeel Bachooali, and Irfan Ahmed Siddiqui respectively. Earlier, ED had attached movable and immovable properties worth Rs 14,513 Crore vide 08 Provisional attachment orders in relation to the case. With this attachment, the total attachment, in this case, reached Rs 14,521.80 Crore. The total Proceeds of Crime in the case is more than Rs 16000 Crore.

Enforcement Directorate has provisionally attached movable & immovable properties worth Rs. 8.79 Crore under PMLA in Sandesara Group case. With this attachment, the total attachment reached to Rs 14,521.80 Crore. pic.twitter.com/8SEPTxCRZf  ED (@dir_ed) July 2, 2021

What is the Sterling Biotec -Sandesaras scam?

As per reports, the Sterling Biotech Ltd promoters - Nitin Sandesara, Chetan Sandesara and Dipti Sandesara have cheated a consortium of banks led by Andhra Bank, UCO Bank, State Bank of India, Allahabad Bank and Bank of India, by availing loans of around Rs 9000 crores from the banks' foreign branches. The Sandesaras used overseas companies of the Sterling Biotech Ltd (SBL) group and diverted these funds for non-mandated purposes through domestic as well as offshore entities, as per reports. The ED has attached properties worth Rs 9778 crore of the SBL group in the same bank fraud case.

Where are the Sandesaras?

Reports further state that the Sandesaras have siphoned off money to fund their Nigerian oil business - Sterling Energy and Exploration Production Ltd (SEEPCO). All Sandesaras are reportedly in hiding in Nigeria and have been declared as wilful defaulters. The Central Bureau of Investigation recently sought information from Interpol Nigeria to verify Sandesaras' presence and to allow their extradition back to India.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government of India (GOI) has accelerated the pace, ramped up the production and been expanding the scope of a liberalised and now universalized vaccine drive across the country. According to the latest press release by Health Ministry, GOI has administered more than 34 crore vaccine doses as of July 2, which is equivalent to the entire population of the US.

While India's COVID-19 vaccine coverage figure tops the list the US ranked second by administering more than 32 crore vaccines. The universalization of COVID-19 vaccination policy commenced on June 21.

India's COVID-19 vaccination drive facts

Highlighting the attained milestones Health ministry's briefing apprised of other vaccination facts in the country; it notified that India has been vaccinating on an average of 50,00,000 individuals everyday since June 21 which is equivalent to vaccinating entire Norway, everyday.

Interestingly, 90.9 per cent of frontline workers in the country are jabbed with at least the first dose of the vaccine. While 1.74 crore doses have been administered to healthcare workers over 2.7 crore COVID-19 vaccine doses are given to frontline workers. 9.65 crore doses have been given to people in the age bracket of 18-44 years and 19.91 crore doses have been administered to people above 45 years.

The average daily vaccination against coronavirus had climbed to 39.89 lakh doses in June itself since the Centre took over COVID-19 vaccine procurement and supplies (free of charge) of 75 per cent of domestically produced COVID-19 vaccines.

"Furthermore, 44,90,000 vaccine doses are in the pipeline and will be received by the States/UTs within the next 3 days," Health Ministry stated.

July 1 was the 167th day since the commencement of COVID-19 vaccination in the country and out of total 42,64,123 COVID-19 vaccine doses that were given, 32,80,998 beneficiaries have been vaccinated for the first dose and 9,83,125 beneficiaries received the second dose. 89,027 vaccines that were given yesterday were second doses to the people.

Cumulatively, 9,41,03,985 persons in the age group 18-44 years across 37 States and Union Territories have received their first dose.

According to the ministry, it is imperative that vaccine against coronavirus exercise as a tool to protect the most vulnerable population groups in the country continues to be regularly reviewed and monitored at the highest level. In a significant achievement, over 42 lakh vaccine doses were administered in the last 24 hours.

COVID-19 situation in India

India reported 46,617 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours. While India's active caseload (5,09,637) declines by about 86% active cases constitute 1.67% of total cases. Total recoveries across the country stand at 2,95,48,302 with 59,384 patients recovered in the last 24 hours. The recovery rate climbed a mark of 97.01 per cent and weekly positivity rate remained below 5 per cent i.e. 2.57 per cent.

The concentrated efforts of Indian Council of Medical Research in augmenting and diversifying COVID-19 testing facilities have made it possible to prepared medical and healthcare infrastructure to function as per India's requirement. The testing capacity has ramped up too. ICMR has achieved the milestone of conducting 40 crores testing. According to ICMR, over 18,80,000 COVID-19 testing samples were conducted on July 1.
Chinas clampdown on the Muslim ethnic minority of Uyghurs has expanded to nearly 30 countries across the globe mostly because the governments of the host nations fear Beijings power and influence, a new report has claimed. A report compiled by the rights group Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs and the Uyghur Human Rights Project has stated that at least 28 nations across the world are complicit in Chinas broad harassment and intimidation of Uyghurs. Among these 28, the MIddle Eastern and North African nations are the worst offenders.

The report titled No Space Left to Run, China's Transnational Repression of Uyghurs released last month, argues that China uses a wide range of methods to intimidate Uyghurs finding solace abroad including the use of spyware and hacking, sending out red notices against the targetted people through Interpol.

Bradley Jardine, research director at Oxus Society and one of the authors of the report, as per news agency ANI, said, Since 2017, the most common method for silencing overseas dissent is to threaten an individual's relatives residing within China's borders with detention, and in some cases, have a target's close family issue public statements as part of government smear campaigns designed to undermine an activist's credibility.

Jardine reportedly also said that the most number of Uyghurs targetted outside China are located in Muslim-dominated nations including Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which have been termed the largest offenders of transnational repression of the Uyghurs. He reportedly said that some of the complicit nations have no legal protections for the vulnerable communities and the rule of law tends to be either weak or susceptible to political interference.

"This has made the Middle East fertile ground for China's campaign of global intimidation," Jardine added.

First such case dates back to 1997

ANI reported citing another media outlet that the first such case of oppression of Uyghurs outside China happened in Pakistan in 1997 when the government deported 14 Uyghurs to Beijing who were accused of being separatists. Reportedly, all of them were executed upon arrival in China. The report said, The Chinas Transnational Repression of Uyghurs Dataset examines 1,546 cases of detention and deportation from 1997 until March 2021 and offers critical insight into the scope and evolution of the Chinese governments efforts to control and repress Uyghurs across sovereign boundaries.

Elaborating that transnational oppression took place in three phases with the third one currently ongoing, the report said, In the first stage of Chinas evolving system of transnational repression, from 1997 to 2007, a total of 89 Uyghurs from 9 countries, mostly in South and Central Asia, were detained or sent to China.

In the second phase (20082013), 130 individuals from 15 countries were repressed. In the ongoing third phase (2014 to the end of our data collection in March 2021), a total of 1,327 individuals were detained or rendered from 20 countries, it added.

"Celebrating the Centenary of the CPC"



 Increasing transnational repression across borders

 Forcing deportation of Uyghurs back to China

 Imprisoning Uyghurs for communication abroad#NothingToCelebrate #CPC100 https://t.co/UPgU5zg1rj  Uyghur Human Rights Project (@UyghurProject) June 24, 2021

IMAGE: AP


In a bid to suppress the unrealistic beauty standards, and fake unattainable body measurements, Norway has passed the legislation that seeks to label all the photographs uploaded on social media that have been retouched, heavily edited, or have filters. Norway has made it illegal for influencers to post a photo without first acknowledging that the image has been edited, failing which, can lead to imprisonment. The legislation was introduced to address societal body pressure across the workplace, public spaces, at homes, and in various media, the Ministry of Children and Family Affairs said in a statement. Body pressure is always there, often imperceptibly, and is difficult to combat.

Passed by the 7215 vote last month by the Norwegian Parliament, the new regulation is an amendment to the 2009 Marketing Act. It was introduced by Norways Ministry of Children and Family Affairs calling for stricter measures to control the surreal body ideas propelled by the manipulated Instagram and other social media images, that negatively impact mental health by creating social comparison tendencies, mostly among young women. The new regulation seeks to push back against 'body dysmorphia', or the obsessive thinking about ones perceived defects or flaws in appearance, and curb the idealized looks and physiques, which otherwise are not real.

A requirement for retouched or otherwise manipulated advertising to be marked is one measure against body pressure (that) will hopefully make a useful and significant contribution to curbing the negative impact that such advertising has, especially on children and young people, Ministry of Children and Family Affairs stated.

Further in the proposal, the ministry said, Young people are exposed to a massive pressure to look good through, among other things, advertising and social media, and the models that are shown are often digitally retouched. This exposes young people to an ideal of beauty that is impossible to achieve.

Failing to declare the edited and retouched photos is punishable by law, and can lead to fines or imprisonment. The law applies across all social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter, and pertains to posts for advertising, marketing, and other promotional purposes. Norways law requires any post that may contain a body with modified size, shape, or skin, enlarged lips, pronounced muscles to carry a declaration of alteration. This includes both narrow waistlines, perfect body figures, or unusually perfect complexions achieved using either physical photographic equipment or methods prior to taking the photograph, or the digital editing tools, retouching reshaping, and filters used after the photograph was taken. All such images need to carry a label designed and provided by Norways government.

Law hailed as 'Progressive'

The rule has sparked widespread debate with some backing the legislation as positive towards maintaining realistic standards and combating the social insecurity and low self-esteem. Others, meanwhile argued that it would be tough enforcing the law as in case of violation it may be difficult to determine which of the photos have been altered. While Norways ministry called it not a simple job the move was hailed as progressive by the vast majority, including some of the influencers.
Israel's President Reuven Rivlin held a state reception for German President Frank Steinmeier on Thursday, and said the two nations were linked by "bonds of pain and hope".

"The terrible history of the Holocaust will forever be in our hearts and minds," Rivlin said during an official dinner in Jerusalem. "We will never forget the sacred duty to remember and to do everything, everything in our power to ensure that the past does not repeat itself."

Steinmeier reiterated Germany's strong support for Israel.

"No matter how fast the world may be turning, no matter who will be our next chancellor, we will do our best to live up to the unique friendship between Israel and Germany," he told his host.

Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered six million European Jews in the Holocaust.

But Israel and Germany have developed close ties in recent decades.

Steinmeier also held talks Thursday with Israel's new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Israeli officials said that Bennett and Steinmeier discussed Irans nuclear program, with Bennett restating Israels determination to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

IMAGE: AP

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In a big security breach, a Pakistani drone was spotted over the Indian High Commission in Islamabad last week. As per Republic TV sources, the Pakistan drone hovered over the Indian mission in Islamabad hours before the twin explosions at the Jammu Air Force Station. This breach is being seen as a direct intimidation tactic by Pakistan and a violation of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969. Diplomatic missions and air space above such regions are protected from any material breach under the Vienna Convention.

In a big diplomatic move, India has lodged a complaint with the Pakistani government over the drone sighting near the Indian Mission in Islamabad. An event is said to have been underway in the mission when the drones were sighted.

Reacting to the development, Major General G. D Bakshi (Retd.) said, "They don't have any drones of their own, they are getting them from China and Turkey. They are trying to repeat an Armenia and Azerbaijan conflict. They need a kick to wake them up. In Balakot we gave them a kick and they kept quiet. But they just refuse to learn. For 30 years they tried terrorist warfare and now they have come up with a cheap solution. How can we react to this defensively? We have to hit back. This nonsense has to be put to an end."

Several drones sighted near the India-Pak border

The drone sightings in the UT of J&K reached a crescendo on June 27 after multiple blasts occurred in the premises of the technical area of the Jammu airbase. Two blasts were heard within a gap of 5 minutes inflicting minor injuries on two Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel. The probe so far has called the attacks 'a well-planned conspiracy to target national aerial assets and challenge the national security' of the country.

After the Jammu airbase attacks, three more drone activities were reported in the UT on June 29-30 near vital security installations in Jammu. As per reports, the first drone was spotted by the Indian Army at 9.23 PM on Monday in the Kharian area of Miran Sahib followed by another one at 4.40 AM near the vital Indian Army installations in the Kaluchak area of Jammu. The third sighting was spotted near an important IAF installation at 4.52 AM.

On July 2, another Pakistan drone was spotted entering the Indian territory at the International Border (IB) in the Arnia area of the Jammu district by the Border Security Force (BSF) troops. After 5-6 rounds of firing by the BSF troops, the drone's movement shifted towards Pakistan's territory.

The increase in drone attacks come days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a high-level meeting with J&K's political parties and the Gupkar alliance, the first since the abrogation of Article 370.
Dhaka, Jul 2 (PTI) Bangladesh has recorded its highest single-day virus-related deaths at 143 on Thursday, according to media reports on Friday.

The Directorate General of Health Services, in its medical bulletin said 143 coronavirus-related deaths and 8,301 new cases were reported in the last 24 hours.

Now, the COVID-19 death toll stands at 14,646, The Daily Star newspaper reported.

Before Thursday, Bangladesh recorded the highest COVID-19-related deaths on June 27 at 119 fatalities. Since then, the daily death toll has exceeded 100 everyday, indicating increased transmission.

The first six months of this year have accounted for 47 per cent of the total coronavirus deaths, the Dhaka Tribune newspaper said.

From January 1 to June 30 this year, 6,944 coronavirus cases have ended in fatalities, and in the preceding ten months 7,702 deaths were reported. The first case of coronavirus was detected on March 8, 2020 in Bangladesh.

April recorded the maximum deaths at 2,404.

Bangladesh is currently in a national lockdown as health officials warned the COVID-19 outbreak could get worse in the coming weeks.

"All government, semi-public and private offices are to be shut during the duration of the lockdown. Regular road, rail and water travel service is suspended," according to a government statement.

It added that all shopping malls, tourist sites, resorts, community centres, social and religious events that draw crowds would come under the restriction.

The Army has been roped in to aid the civil administration to enforce the lockdown, which is set to end on July 7.

Officials said the latest waves of infections was due to the delta variant of coronavirus, which was first identified in India. The situation is critical in southwestern Khulna, northwestern Rajshahi districts and some central districts, including capital Dhaka. PTI IND IND

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Villagers living in Kalabogi, on Bangladesh's south coast, have spoken of their devastation at losing their homes and incomes due to rising sea levels.

British channel Sky News travelled to the disappearing village on the edge of the River Shibsa, and spoke to locals who have witnessed the area rapidly changing, wreaking havoc on their daily lives.

Rising sea levels in the Bay of Bengal mean that tidal river levels are going up.

This has accelerated river erosion and Kalabogi has been badly affected.

The area has always been vulnerable to cyclones, but rising sea levels are making the effects all the more overwhelming.

Most people who live by the river in Kalabogi reside in shack-like houses made from the local golpatta palm leaf, supported on six-feet (two metre) long bamboo stilts.

35-year-old Nur Mohammad lives by the river and already has had to move five times.

"My first home was over there, on the other side," he said.

"I saw my house washed away in front of me. I can't describe the pain of seeing that happen."

He makes a living from fishing and rice production, but because the land has literally been washed away he is no longer able to produce any rice.

Nur told Sky he was forced to be away from his family for part of the year to work in a factory.

"We have to do something to save the children that live here," added his mother, Hasina."We have to move to a new place, but with what money? We can't afford to leave."

Although there are many fishermen in the area, and it's a rich habitat for wildlife and shrimp, they are technically forbidden from trawling the waters.

Kalabogi is on the edge of the protected Sundarbans forest and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so it's illegal to fish there.

In spite of the ban, Sky saw dozens of fishermen in the waters at night.

Mohammad Nazrul Sheikh, one of the fishermen approached by Sky, told them that he has been forced to violate the ban as he has no other way of making money.

"Our lives and our families depend on this. If we don't catch enough, we can't pay for our boats, and everyone here has loans to repay," he said.

His desperation is representative of what many in the village are experiencing.

With more of the land at risk of vanishing at any moment, Bangladesh is calling on the world to take swift action to tackle climate change.

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Hundreds of turtles have reportedly washed ashore after Singapore-registered MV X-Press Pearl caught fire and sank off the west coast of Sri Lanka in June. A fire had erupted on the ship, which was carrying 1,486 containers, including 25 tonnes of nitric acid along with other chemicals and cosmetics. On July 1, the Russian captain of the ship appeared in court but has yet to be charged in a case environmental experts say is Sri Lankas worst man-made environmental disaster.

According to New York Times, the toxins released from the ship have killed 20 dolphins, 176 turtles and four whales. It is very obvious that the deaths of these sea animals are connected to the ship, said Dharshani Lahandapura, the chairperson of Sri Lankas Marine Environment Protection Authority. Lahandapura even went on to note that last year, during the same time period only two turtle deaths were reported.

There were more than 190 items of cargo (on the ship) and most of it was plastic-based, environment minister Mahinda Amaraweera told reporters.

He added, During the south-western monsoon season, sea creatures never die in this way. Most of these carcasses are found on the west coast directly affected by the shipwreck.

As per reports, the Sri Lankan government has named 15 people  including the captain, Tyutkalo Vitaly  as co-accused in cases over the damage caused. Last week, authorities said they had lifted a ban on fishing in parts of the affected coast, though experts say risks to marine life from the disaster remain. Kanchana Wijesekera, Sri Lankas state minister for fisheries, reportedly said that the ships operator was making a payment of $3.6 million to affected fishermen as part of the initial damage claim of $40 million made by the government for losses through June 3.

MV X-Press Pearl disaster

When the MV X-Press Pearl sank on June 3, Sri Lankan authorities hurried to coordinate a response to the worst-case scenario, which they thought might occur near the country's major port. The ship had roughly 300 tonnes of oil on board when it started burning on May 20, according to Sri Lankan authorities. The big fire that broke out, the origin of which is yet unknown, is thought to have burned the majority of the gasoline. The X-Press Pearl was carrying slightly under 1,500 containers, with 81 of them being labelled as "hazardous" goods.

The Sri Lankan Defence Secretary confirmed earlier this month that the Indian side was actively involved in deepening tight collaboration in both nations' defence and security domains. Sri Lankan officials recently praised the Indian Coast Guard vessels' quick response and assistance in extinguishing the fire that erupted on board the merchant's vessel X-Press Pearl. Aspects of the smooth operation of a long-running military training exchange between Sri Lanka and India have also been highlighted.

(Image: AP)
Colombo, Jul 2 (PTI) Sri Lanka has informed the EU about the progress in the reconciliation process and the ongoing efforts to review a controversial anti-terror law that gives police sweeping powers to arrest suspects without trial.

The move came after the 27 member-bloc threatened to withdraw trade concessions for Sri Lanka's exports over concerns that it violates human rights.

The Government of Sri Lanka apprised the European Union (EU) of progress in specific areas of reconciliation, as part of its regular engagement and dialogue with the organisation, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

In a resolution adopted on June 10, the European Parliament called for the repeal of Sri Lanka''s Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and consideration to temporarily withdraw its access to GSP+.

The EUs GSP+ trade concession allows Sri Lankan exports to Europe without taxation. This has been a big boost to Sri Lankas apparel and fishing industries.

The facility was restored in 2017 after it was suspended in 2010 based on the then governments failure to honour human and labour rights.

The resolution noted that Sri Lanka's GSP+ categorisation was conditional on the implementation of rules under international human rights treaties, in the aftermath of the 30-year-long civil war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the island nation.

In response, Sri Lanka's Foreign Ministry on June 25 informed the EU of action underway to revisit provisions of the PTA with the study of existing legislation, past practice, and international best practices, the report said.

The EU was informed of the decision made by the Cabinet on June 21 to appoint a Cabinet Sub-committee and an Officials Committee to assist the Cabinet Sub-Committee, to review the PTA, and to submit a report to the Cabinet within three months, the statement said.

The EU was also informed of the granting of pardon by the President to 16 former LTTE cadres convicted and serving sentences under the PTA.

To mark a Buddhist festival on June 24, the government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa pardoned 94 prisoners, including 16 people convicted under the PTA. The law allows authorities to arbitrarily detain individuals for up to 18 months without charge or trial.

The organisation was also apprised of the process that has been set in motion to release detainees who have been in judicial custody for a prolonged period, under the PTA.

Regarding progress in ongoing reconciliation mechanisms, the government informed the EU of the release of Rs 79 million to the Office of Reparations in June to settle 1,230 processed claims for reparation.

The main Tamil party, the TNA, has been pressing along with rights groups to seek the release of Tamil political prisoners, who have been held without charges for over 10-20 years.

TNA sources said nearly 100 Tamil political prisoners are being held without charges.

The LTTE ran a military campaign for a separate Tamil homeland in the northern and eastern provinces of the island nation for nearly 30 years before its collapse in 2009 after the Sri Lankan Army killed its supreme leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

The Sri Lankan government rejected the claim that the PTA has been systematically used for arbitrary arrests and the detention of the members of Tamil and Muslim minorities. PTI NSA NSA

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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday expressed confidence that the European Union (EU) would facilitate the clearance of Covishield, the India-made version of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines. The United Kingdoms medicines regulator has shared relevant data with its counterpart in the EU to approve the vaccines, being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII), the British government said.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) had approved the Serum Institute of India (SII) produced vaccines, but the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is yet to give its nod for the EU's 'Green Pass'. The delay in approval has led to concerns that Indians vaccinated with Covishield and thousands in Britain who received the jabs imported from India may face hurdles when travelling to Europe.

I am very confident that there will not prove to be a problem," UK PM Johnson told reporters at a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Downing Street when asked about the issue.

Five million Covishield doses were shipped from India as part of the UK's 100-million-doses deal with SII earlier this year. On being asked about travel-related concerns in Europe, Johnson said he saw "no reason at all" why MHRA-approved vaccines should not be used for vaccine passports.

Earlier in the day, a UK government official confirmed that the MHRA had shared its assessment of the vaccines with the EMA to assist the approvals process.

Covishield seeks EU 'green pass'

The EU is rolling out a Digital Covid Certificate so travellers can be exempted from quarantining when crossing an international border. Several European countries have separately already approved the Indian vaccine, including Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Greece, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, Iceland and Switzerland.

On Monday, SII CEO Poonawalla said he was in touch with EU regulators and at a diplomatic level with different countries to resolve Covishield's exclusion, while its British version -Vaxzevria was approved. In response, the EU pointed out that the European Medical Agency (EMA) has not received a request for Covishield to be approved. EU added that EMA does not investigate any drugs unless they are asked to do so by the companies and said that the member states of the EU have the option to accept vaccinations authorised by the WHO.

(With inputs from agency)
Secretary Antony Blinken welcomed Uzbekistan Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov to the Department of State on Thursday.

It was their first face-to-face meeting after videoconferences and phone calls.

"We have strong shared interests when it comes to security in the region, particularly with regard to Afghanistan," said Blinken.

"Uzbekistan has been a leader in bringing countries in the in the region together, particularly with regard to economic and infrastructure connectivity."

Foreign Minister Kamilov reaffirmed the two countries close relationship and said he expected them to cover a "broad agenda" during their visit and what their future relations would be.

IMAGE: AP

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A global minimum tax, backed by US President Joe Biden, has been agreed upon by 130 countries as part of a global attempt to prevent multinational corporations from avoiding taxes by moving earnings to countries with low rates. The deal unveiled on Thursday, July 1, is an attempt to solve the issues posed by a globalised and increasingly digital world economy in which profits may be moved across borders and corporations can make online profits in locations where they do not have taxable headquarters.

Countries back deal on global minimum tax for companies

The agreement calls for a worldwide minimum tax of at least 15%, a major component pushed by Biden as he seeks additional revenue to fund his infrastructure and clean energy initiatives. There are still technical elements to work out, and the deal would not go into effect until at least 2023. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently declared that portion of the income of the world's greatest corporations will be taxed in nations where they do business online but have no physical presence.

It was dubbed "the most important international tax accord in a century" by French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. Countries led by France have already begun levying unilateral digital taxes on US tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook; under the agreement, they would agree to abandon those charges, which the US regards as unfair trade practices, in favour of a global approach.

Under former US President Donald Trump, the French tax on internet firms prompted retaliatory tariffs, and France has praised the Biden administration's efforts to establish a worldwide agreement. "Online giants must pay their faire share of taxes where they have activities," he said. There is no reason a small or medium business should pay more taxes than an online giant simply because its physically present in the country where it carries out its activities."

It was a "historic day," said US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. She noted, "For decades, the United States has participated in a self-defeating international tax competition, lowering our corporate tax rates only to watch other nations lower theirs in response." Lower rates, according to Yellen, deprive countries of funds for infrastructure, education, and pandemic-fighting efforts. Although technical details remain to be worked out, Manal Corwin, a tax principal at professional services firm KPMG and a former Treasury Department official, said the pact put together "the big parts" of an overall agreement. She stated that what was accepted was "very much the US approach," and that it was "extremely crucial" for the US to get other countries to agree to stop imposing unilateral digital taxes.

Global minimum tax for companies

Nations could charge their companies' international earnings up to 15% if they go untaxed through subsidiaries in other countries under the agreement. Because profits would be taxed at home nonetheless, there would be no incentive to employ accounting and legal techniques to shift profits to low-tax countries where they conduct little or no business. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), tax avoidance activities cost countries between $100 billion and $240 billion in lost income each year.

The agreement was not signed by all 139 countries that participated in the talks. Ireland's finance minister claimed it had "wide support" for the agreement's strategy but couldn't agree on the 15% minimum. The country's 12.5 per cent tax, according to Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe, is a "reasonable rate." Ireland stated that it would constructively engage in future conversations. Signatories included tax havens Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, as well as major economic powers China and India.

More discussion is likely at the G-20 finance ministers' meeting in Venice next week, ahead of the full G-20 summit of country leaders' approval in October. The plan to tax corporations with revenue but no physical presence would necessitate countries signing up for a multilateral agreement, while the minimal corporate tax may be accepted by each country on a voluntary basis through national legislation.

According to tax experts, a voluntary approach could work if adopted by countries where many multinational companies have their headquarters, such as the United States and Europe, by making it clear to companies that even if they avoid tax by moving profits to overseas subsidiaries, those profits will be taxed at home up to the bare minimum. In the United States, Biden has recommended a minimum tax rate of 21% on large US corporations' overseas earnings to deter them from moving money to tax havens. Biden's US tax plan must first get through Congress, where the Democratic president only has a narrow majority.

(with inputs from AP)

Picture Credit: AP
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Khin Chumreoun was an elected official representing the people of Chbar Ampov district in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. As a member of the now-banned Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), he was arrested and detained in what authorities said was participation in a riot at Phnom Penhs Freedom Park in 2014. After a three-year stint in prison he was released, but agents of Hun Sens ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) threatened him and his family to force him to defect to the CPP.

After an attempt on his life, he moved his family to neighboring Thailand, where he continued his advocacy for Cambodian democracy. But Hun Sens agents attacked him in front of his Bangkok apartment in Dec. 2020. The UN then granted his family refugee status and he relocated to Finland. In an interview with Sek Bandith of RFAs Khmer Service, Khin Chumreoun talks about his persecution from his time as a political prisoner and an exiled activist, and how he will continue his advocacy for Cambodian democracy. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RFA: Please talk about the struggle of being a political prisoner for more than three years, and how do you compare the hardship you faced both in and out of prison in Cambodia with the time you were engaged in advocacy work outside the country in Thailand?

Khin Chumreoun: My life in prison and as a political refugee were very different. In the prison, at first I was badly treated by the prison guards. But after two or three months the situation got better, because the relationship between myself and the prison guards had improved. We understood each other better. So I knew that they were just doing their jobs, and they knew that were not criminals and they apologized to us.

A big problem in the prison cell was smoking. Each day the prisoners smoked no less than 10 packs in my cell. The prisoners are under constant stress, so they smoke. But the most difficult time for me and my fellow prisoners came as a result of radioactive exposure in the prison.

The Hun Sen regime accused us of clandestinely using cellular phones inside the prison to call the outside would. To try to find them, they often starved us and isolated us from others. They searched our cells, but they found no phones. This is why they installed radioactive equipment inside the prison, to prevent prisoners from using cellphones.

Exposure to the radiation really messed with my head. Before I was imprisoned, I could speak English and had good computer skills, but after I got out, I became forgetful because the equipment used to jam the phones was installed in the prison and affected my memory and brain. I had a headache, nasal inflammation, and a runny nose and flu, and I had to take medicine every day. LICADHO and other human rights organizations visited us in prison and gave us medicines.

Inside the prison, the visits from our families and the CNRP leadership kept our spirits strong. Also, the Cambodian Peoples Party sent its agents to try to persuade us to defect from the CNRP to join the CPP. We were told that we would be set free immediately if we agreed to join them. But I did not betray my people, who voted for me to be the council member representing Chbar Ampov district. I would not disappoint the people who voted me into office.

This dictatorial regime has relentlessly persecuted people, and my case underscores that. I was imprisoned twice. After I was released, I thought that I would be safe. But I was not. A car full of Hun Sens agents attempted to kill me by running me over, so I had to jump from my motorbike.

A few days later, a man came to tell me that I should flee for my own safety. He said, I feel pity for you, so you have to flee, because there was an order from high up to make you either a cripple for life or make you go to sleep inside a coffin.

RFA: You say that relentless threats and persecution were made not only against you, but also against your wife, so that made you decide to flee to Thailand. Tell me more about how they were threatening and persecuting her.

Khin Chumreoun: From the time I was in the prison in 2015, my wife and children were constantly pressured, and they threatened to hurt my family to get them to try to make me defect to the CCP. My wife and children were followed wherever they went. This made me very worried while I was in prison.

I can tell you that even though I was in prison for more than three years and lost all my property, and even though my family was subjected to constant persecution, despite all that, the regime still did not want me to live, or wanted me to live in misery or under its control. So that is why I decided to flee to Thailand.



Even in Thailand, the Hun Sen regime sent its agents to hunt me down. On Dec. 15, 2020, at around 05:30 PM, six unidentified men came to arrest me while I was walking down from my apartment. Security camera footage showed to me by my landlord showed there were six men hitting me from the back and the front. They crushed me against the columns of the apartment building while attempting to arrest me. I was struggling hard and managed to get away from them and ran up to my apartment. Because of this, the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] helped me leave Thailand to resettle in Finland.



RFA: Now that you are safe in a third country, how are you going to organize your political life, and what messages do you have for your friends and comrades who still live in politically unsafe places?

Khin Chumreoun: The government of Finland has been providing living assistance to my family for four years, to start with. Secondly, even though I am living here, it will not make me forget my people, my hardships, and the hardships of my people in Cambodia. I will continue to struggle to sacrifice my time and whatever I can to fight toward restoring democracy in Cambodia for the Khmer people. Lastly, I wish to send messages of encouragement to our activists in Thailand. You have to continue to struggle, and I am still with you. For the people in Cambodia, I want you know that I will not abandon you nor will I abandon my country. Thank you.

Reported by Sek Bandith for RFAs Khmer Service. Translated by Sok Ry Sum. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
Social media users report a marked increase in the deletion of posts and accounts by government censors in recent weeks.

Chorus members rehearse before the celebration marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, July 1, 2021.

A journalist who criticized the performance of a hand-picked youth representative at the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s centenary celebrations on Tiananmen Square has had her social media account deleted, RFA has learned.

The Weibo account of Song Shiting, a reporter for Sanlian Life Weekly, disappeared on Friday after she made fun of delegates representing the CCP's Youth League at the ceremony, who seemed to have been picked for their model-like looks.

Viewing a contribution by university student Feng Lin, whose appearance took Chinese social media by storm, Song wrote that the young women seemed to be "competing with each other to pay tribute" to the party.

"It was like a horror film, watching them lined up there competing with each other to pay tribute like that: it really made my flesh creep," Song wrote on her personal Weibo account after the ceremony was broadcast live to the nation.

Her comments sparked a deluge of pro-government abuse before her account was deleted.

Xian-based current affairs commentator Zhuang Zhi said Song's comments wouldn't have resulted in censorship in "a normal, free society."

"This is a further strengthening of ideological control, and controls are getting tighter and tighter," Zhuang said.

"This is very harmful to society."

State media named the youth representatives as Beijing primary school students Yao Muchen and Peng Youxin, representing the Chinese Young Pioneers, and university students Feng Lin and Zhao Jianming, for the Chinese Communist Youth League.

"The four students jointly delivered an affectionate ode to the party," the state-run China Daily newspaper reported.

"Today, we make a vow to the party: listen to the party's call, are grateful to the party and follow its lead," it quoted them as saying in unison, before repeating "Rest assured, CCP, we are ready to build a powerful China!" four times.

'Ticket to a brighter future'

Feng Chongyi, a professor of Chinese Studies at the Sydney University of Technology in Australia, said many young people in China see party membership as the main ticket to a brighter future.

"Now thousands of troops are trying to cross a single-plank bridge," he said of the current employment market. "They are all trying to squeeze into the civil service to find employment."

Feng said the CCP has little to do with ideology, and is more of a vehicle for economic advancement.

"The party itself has no soul ... and the privileges it gives access to come at the cost of enslavement and political risk," he said.

The closure of Song's account came as large numbers of WeChat accounts were shut down around the July 1 centenary, a Christian pastor in the eastern province of Shandong told RFA on Friday.

"A lot of public accounts belonging to our church members have been deleted, including my official account," he said. "Sometimes we can't post messages on WeChat, either."

"It has been pretty bad for some time now," he said.

A Beijing resident who gave only her surname, Wang, said posts are constantly being deleted from the WeChat groups she belongs to.

"Sometimes, posts I saw in the morning on a WeChat group will be gone by the afternoon," Wang said. "Sometimes, even by noon."

A resident of the southern province of Guangdong surnamed Chen said the deletion of WeChat posts is widespread now, and appears to be part of the government's "stability maintenance" tactics around the centenary.

"The authorities have achieved the ultimate in stability maintenance measures during this centenary," Chen said.

"After allowing the Chinese people to live relatively unfettered lives over the past 40 years or so, the authorities now seem in a hurry to take that away from them."



Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin and Cantonese Services. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
The report comes as Beijing steps up overseas influence campaigns in a bid to sell the ruling party's version of the 'international order.'

China's President Xi Jinping speaks at an event in Beijing celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, July 1, 2021.

As the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) marks its centenary amid a wave of state propaganda aimed at audiences at home and overseas, international public opinion of Beijing remains low, a new research report has found.

A Pew Research Center poll of 18,850 people across 17 developed economies earlier this year found that views of China "remain largely negative."

"Large majorities in most of the advanced economies surveyed have broadly negative views of China," the report found.

Negative opinions of China accounted for around 88 percent of respondents in Japan, 80 percent in Sweden, 78 percent in Australia, and 76 percent in the United States, the report said.

"Confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping remains at or near historic lows in most places surveyed," the report found.

"In all but one of the 17 publics surveyed, majorities say they have little or no confidence in him  including half or more in Australia, France, Sweden and Canada who say they have no confidence in him at all."

However, China did score more highly than the U.S. in one key area: its perceived handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Pew report author Laura Silver.

Large majorities of respondents in Sweden, the U.S., South Korea, Australia, and the Netherlands "believe that the Chinese government does not respect the personal freedom of Chinese people," the report said.

Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of respondents in Japan, Sweden, South Korea, the U.S., and Australia reported that they distrust Xi Jinping's governance.

Centenary celebration

The results were published on the eve of the CCP centenary on Thursday, at which Xi sought to present the ruling party as "concerned about the future and destiny of mankind."

"China has always been a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development, and a defender of international order!" he told a hand-picked crowd of tens of thousands on Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

But the CCP general secretary also warned foreign countries not to mess with China.

"We Chinese ... are not intimidated by threats of force," Xi said. "We will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us."

"Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people," he said, according to the official translation of his speech posted by state news agency Xinhua.

Xi's original speech in Chinese contained a four-character expression that referred to the hypothetical foreigners having their skulls smashed and their blood running everywhere after running into the Great Wall of iron and steel forged by 1.4 billion Chinese people.

Mistrust, isolation

Current affairs commentator Chen Pokong said he wasn't surprised at the results of the survey.

"The actions of Xi Jinping and the CCP in recent years have resulted in unprecedented international isolation for China," Chen said.

"Those scenes of the leader [addressing the crowd], the singing and dancing, the colors and tableaus we saw on Tiananmen Square: those are the indicators of an isolated and closed nation," he said.

Chen said the low approval ratings for Xi and the CCP were likely linked to China's mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in "re-education camps," its imposition of authoritarian rule on Hong Kong, and its attempt to cover up the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan in late 2019.

"All the countries in the free world are well aware that, far from maintaining any so-called international order, the CCP is creating a new set of 'international norms' of its own that cares nothing for human rights and doesn't respect freedom or democracy," Democracy activist and Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) consultant Joey Siu told RFA.

"But it seems that however much the CCP tries to package this, it's not changing China's image [for the better] internationally very much," she said.

A recent report by the U.S.-based Rand Corporation found that China derives most of its international influence from the attractiveness of its economy.

Many of the specific leaders, elites, and influencers in countries targeted by the CCP are generally motivated by economic incentives, it found.

It called on Washington to counter China's overseas influence campaign with financial assistance and investment products specifically designed to replace Chinese lending.



Reported by Jane Tang, Gigi Lee and Matt Chan for RFA's Mandarin and Cantonese Services. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
A local media report says he left a suicide note hitting out at the national security law and criticizing police conduct.

The scene of a knife attack against a Hong Kong police officer and suicide of the attacker is shown in a July 1, 2021 photo.

A 50-year-old man who died Thursday night after stabbing himself in the chest and a police officer in the back left a suicide note criticizing a draconian national security law imposed on Hong Kong a year earlier by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to a local media report.

Government broadcaster RTHK said the man had knifed himself immediately after stabbing a 28-year-old officer in Causeway Bay. He was later pronounced dead at hospital. The officer is currently in hospital in a serious condition with a punctured lung.

"Sources said officers found a suicide note in a USB flash drive found on him, which explained his actions," RTHK reported.

"The note was critical of the police and contained views on how the national security law had undermined people's freedom," the station cited the sources as saying.

Photos posted to social media on Friday showed some people wearing black leaving flowers at the scene, with some of them stopped for ID checks by nearby police.

Initial investigations indicate that this is a lone wolf-style act of domestic terrorism, secretary for security Chris Tang told reporters, blaming "many people who incite hatred against this country."

Shih Chien-yu, a visiting professor at Taiwan's Tsinghua University, said Tang's description of the attack was a bid to implicate the whole of Hong Kong.

"For the ruling party to define this as a terrorist attack in a society that has already shown its dissatisfaction with the regime is tantamount to smearing the whole of Hong Kong," Shih told RFA.

"But his motivations aren't representative of the whole of Hong Kong society," he said.

Law widely criticized

China's imposition of the national security law on Hong Kong from July 1, 2020 has been widely criticized by foreign governments and rights organizations as a means for the authorities to roll back human rights protections that were promised to the city's seven million inhabitants under the terms of the 1997 handover.

The law criminalizes public dissent and publications critical of the government, and has led to an ever-widening crackdown on opposition lawmakers, rights activists, and journalists critical of Chinese and Hong Kong officials.

Defendants under the law are often denied bail, and cases brought under the law are heard by a panel of hand-picked judges, rather than by a jury, as was previously the norm in the Hong Kong legal system.

Hong Kong's police force were also strongly criticized for excessive use of force during the 2019 protest movement, and for curbing citizens' right to assemble and protest peacefully.

Activist denied bail

A Hong Kong court on Friday denied a bail application by rights activist and barrister Chow Hang-tung, who was recently arrested for "inciting others to knowingly take part in an illegal assembly," in connection with the now-banned candlelight vigil for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

Chow arrived by Correctional Services vehicle at West Kowloon Magistrates' Court, where the presiding judge denied her application, "owing to the seriousness of the case."

She was remanded in custody until July 30.

Richard Choi, chairman of vigil organizers the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Democratic Patriotic Movements of China, said Chow, 36, was being punished with "prison before trial."

The decision came after Chow's relatives posted an account in which she hit out at unnecessary physical touching during a body search in police custody.

"Another thing that's unreasonable is getting me to take off my trousers, pulling my shirt up, and touching my chest while searching me," she wrote in a comment posted to her Facebook account after the bail hearing on Friday.

"I only went to meet with my lawyer; did they think they were going to pass me something to hide in my bra?" Chow wrote. "But reason is no longer any use against such abuses of power in Hong Kong."



Reported by Lau Siu Fung for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
The State Departments Trafficking in Persons Report calls out China for its policy of Uyghur forced labor.

Kari Johnstone (L), acting director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, listens as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (R) delivers remarks on the release of the 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report at the State Department in Washington, July 1, 2021.

The U.S. State Department named China, North Korea, and Myanmar as state sponsors of the trafficking of persons for the second consecutive year in its annual report on human trafficking released on Thursday, citing the use of forced labor in the two East Asian countries and the recruitment and use of child soldiers in the Southeast Asian nation.

The annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report ranks 188 countries  rating them as Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 2 Watch List, or Tier 3  based on whether they meet the minimum standards set by U.S. law to eliminate human trafficking, as mandated by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA).

The minimum standards under the U.S. law include a governments prohibition of and punishment of severe forms of human trafficking, and serious and sustained efforts to eliminate such trafficking.

In remarks given at the launch of the TIP report on Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called out Chinas use of detained ethnic Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), as forced laborers to produce various Chinese-made goods.

The Chinese government has detained some 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in its extensive network of as many as 1,200 state-run internment camps, though it says the facilities are vocational training centers set up to combat religious extremism and terrorism.

Many detainees are subject to physical violence, sexual abuse, and torture to induce them to work, producing apparel, electronics, solar equipment, agricultural products, Blinken said. And while the practices are the most egregious in Xinjiang, this years report notes that China has subjected its citizens to coercive labor practices in other parts of the country as well.

Blinken noted that the U.S. government has taken measures to stop Chinese goods made with forced laboring from entering the U.S., citing the 2020 issuance of the Xinjiang Supply Chain Business Advisory to alert American companies about the economic, legal, and reputational risks associated with operations, supply chains, and laborers in the XUAR.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has issued several Withhold Release Orders to prevent goods suspected to have been made with forced labor from entering the United States.

Additionally, the U.S. and several other countries have imposed sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for various abuses against Uyghurs, as well as on Chinese government agencies and companies suspected of using Uyghur forced labor to make products such as cotton, wigs, and polysilicon for solar panels.

U.S lawmakers are also working on a Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which aims to address the systematic use for Uyghur forced labor in the XUAR and ensure that U.S. companies are not complicit.

Well continue to call on our partners around the world to join us in condemning Chinas genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and in taking steps to prevent goods made with forced labor from entering out supply chains, Blinken said.

Governments should protect and serve their citizens, not terrorize and subjugate them for profit, he added.

There was no immediate response by the Chinese government to Blinken's comments or about the TIP Report, as the country marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party on July 1.

The government is the trafficker

China, North Korea, and Myanmar were among 11 governments worldwide cited in the report as having a documented policy or pattern of human trafficking, trafficking in government-funded programs, forced labor in government-affiliated medical services or other sectors, sexual slavery in government camps, or the recruitment of child soldiers.

All three countries retained their Tier 3 positions in the 2021 TIP Report. They all also were listed among a dozen governments that had policies or patterns of trafficking in the 2020 report  the first time the U.S. State Department used the new category.

The 644-page report said that the Chinese government had taken some steps to address trafficking by continuing to prosecute and convict some traffickers and by maintaining consultative mechanisms with law enforcement counterparts in other countries, though the country used widespread forced labor.

The report noted Chinas campaign of mass detention and political indoctrination against Uyghurs and other Turkic groups in the XUAR and its use of surveillance technologies and trumped-up administrative and criminal charges to detain them in the internment camps in an effort to wipe out their ethnic and religious identities. It also said that those who have managed to avoid detention are at risk of state-sponsored forced labor and other abuses.

Forced labor is a central tactic used for this repression, the TIP Report said. In Xinjiang, the government is the trafficker.

In detailing the Chinese governments policy of widespread forced labor in other region, the report said that officials reportedly placed ethnic Tibetans in vocational training and manufacturing jobs as part of a purported poverty alleviation and labor transfer program that had coercive elements.

North Korea was cited for the governments mass mobilizations of adults and children in prison camps as part of a system of political repression, and in labor training centers. The report also pointed out the countrys imposition of forced labor conditions on its workers overseas.

The U.S report also noted that the government likely used the COVID-19 pandemic to increase the number of political prisoners, and thus its capacity to subject North Koreans to forced labor. North Korea used proceeds from state-sponsored forced labor to pay for government functions and illicit activities, and did not make any efforts to address human trafficking, it said.

Of the other countries covered by RFA, Laos remained a Tier 2 country on this years TIP Report, while Cambodia and Vietnam were still deemed Tier 2 Watch List countries that do not fully comply with the minimum standards set by U.S. law but are seen as making significant efforts to bring themselves in line.

The Lao government increased its overall efforts to combat trafficking, but it fell short by inconsistently using victim identification and screening procedures, inadequately identifying Lao and foreign victims of trafficking within the country, and failing to adequately address or investigate suspected perpetrators of sex trafficking in at-risk sectors, the report said.

The Cambodian government continued to investigate, prosecute, and convict traffickers, and to implement a national action plan to combat trafficking, but its efforts were hampered by endemic corruption and lack of political will, the TIP Report said.

Vietnam increased its prosecutions of traffickers, reported comprehensive data on trafficking cases, and revised a law governing contract-based Vietnamese overseas workers, the report said. But the government failed to systematically implement victim identification procedures or proactively identify trafficking victims among some vulnerable groups. It also reported a decline in investigations and convictions of traffickers.

The annual TIP Report is based on information from U.S. embassies, government officials, NGOs and international organizations, published reports, news articles, academic studies, research trips, and information submitted to the State Department.
Schools in North Korea shut down for the rest of 2021 due to quarantine emergency.

This picture taken on June 29, 2021 and released from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on June 30 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attending an enlarged meeting of the 2nd Political Bureau of the Party Central Committee at the 8th congress of the Workers' Party of Korea at the Party Central Committee Headquarters in Pyongyang.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un blamed senior ruling party officials for their failures in stopping the spread of COVID-19, days after local sources told RFA that authorities had closed all schools nationwide until the end of the year, despite claims that the country remains completely virus-free.

The remarks came during Tuesdays Second Enlarged Meeting of the Political Bureau of the Eighth Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party.

Senior officials in charge of important state affairs neglected the implementation of the important decisions of the Party and thus caused a crucial case of creating a great crisis and entailed grave consequences, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported Kim as saying.

He seriously pointed out that chronic irresponsibility and incompetence of cadres at present bring artificial difficulties to the implementation of the Party's policies, the report said.

Though Kim did not specifically mention which senior officials had failed or any specific consequences of their failure, several South-Korea-based experts told RFA that the meeting revealed that something is amiss in North Korea.

The purpose of this meeting is to shift the responsibility for the difficult economic situation on the party officials, Cho Han-bum, a senior Researcher at Korea Institute of National Unification, told RFA.

It can be seen as evidence that the task put forward by General Secretary Kim Jong Un is not being properly implemented, Kim In-tae of the Institute for National Security Strategy told RFA.

Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute told RFA, There is a possibility that there has been a major problem with the coronavirus quarantine in border areas between North Korea and China including Sinuiju and Hyesan.

A Washington-based expert told RFA that it was likely that COVID-19 had entered North Korea, but that Kim is handing out the blame preemptively in case there is a crisis later.

And what he is trying to do is sort of get ahead of it, start blaming people now, so if this does get worse [and] if he has to actually bring in the outside world for some sort of help if he has to basically grovel a little bit to the international community and show that he's not as self-reliant as he wants to be, he has a little bit of political cover to do that, said Harry Kazianis, Senior Director of Korean Studies at the Center for the National Interest.

Daniel Wertz of the National Committee on North Korea told RFA that because Kim was vague during the meeting, North Korea Watchers could only speculate as to how the senior officials failed.

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that there has been a major COVID outbreak in North Korea, or that Pyongyang is preparing to ask for international assistance, said Wertz.

I think the main audience for this message is a domestic one. Kim Jong Un is telling Party officials at all levels to stay vigilant and stay loyal, and warning of the consequences of what will happen if they don't, he said.

North Korea has not reported a single confirmed case of the virus to date, but its COVID-free status is widely doubted by outside experts, who point to Pyongyangs extensive measures to keep COVID-19 at bay, including sacrificing its economy by closing the border with China and suspending all trade.

Additionally, the government has locked down entire cities and counties where the virus was suspected to be spreading and cancelled major cultural events, and hospitals have been known to hastily cremate patients who died of flu-like symptoms.

Education on hold

The governments measures against coronavirus have also disrupted education. RFA reported in July 2020 that the government had ordered schools to break for summer vacation, even though they had opened only one month prior.

After several starts and stops, schools eventually did reopen for good in April 2021, but now they must shut down for the rest of the year.

The education ministry gave the order to stop classes in all schools from elementary school to university two days ago, a resident of the North Korean capital Pyongyang told RFAs Korean Service June 27.

I heard that the schools will be completely closed until December, said the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

The school closure is absolute nationwide and includes Pyongyang, which is often spared from policies that affect the rest of the country, according to the source.

Since the coronavirus is an urgent issue, schools are locking up all classrooms and prohibiting students from going to school in accordance with the order, said the source.

The order strongly instructs students not to engage in outside activities and to stay home while school is closed, the source said.

To enforce the order, educational authorities in each region of the country are assembling student patrols to make sure they dont gather in crowds in public squares and local markets, according to the source.

The school authorities repeatedly ordered schools to open and close because of the virus last year too but they reopened normally in April of this year. Even so, students were unable to have normal classes due to being mobilized, said the source, referring to the North Korean governments practice of using citizens as free labor for government projects like road maintenance or construction.

If schools are closed for such a long time like this again, are we entirely giving up on education for our students? said the source.

The source was critical of the government, pointing out that the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party had declared during Januarys Eighth Party Congress that it would increase the intensity of emergency quarantine measures and enter a long-term war against the virus.

Will this quarantine work properly if all were doing is closing schools and stopping people from moving around when we have no medical means to stop the coronavirus? he asked.

Another source, a resident of the northeastern province of North Hamgyong confirmed to RFA June 29 that schools were closing down for the year.

The residents are complaining, saying they barely reopened the schools at the end of April, and it was only two months before they closed them again. How are our students going to learn anything when school is closed until the end of this year? said the second source, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

They say the authorities are promoting that the whole world is envious of our great country and showering us with praise for protecting lives and ensuring the safety of our people in the midst of the turmoil caused by the pandemics rapid spread. But if that is the case, are other countries also closing their schools for half a year because of the coronavirus?

In Washington, D.C., where RFA is headquartered, public schools were shut down in the spring of 2020 and did not reopen for in-person learning for more than a year, though most students were able to participate in classes virtually. It was not immediately clear to RFA whether a similar at-home learning system would be in place in North Korea.

The second North Korean source continued, Residents are outraged at the long-term school closure because the authorities always emphasize how there has been no confirmed case of coronavirus in North Korea so far.

They spread propaganda that other countries should learn from virus-free socialist North Korea, a model country for the prevention of the spread of coronavirus, he said.

Reported by Jieun Kim, Yongjae Mok and Soyoung Kim for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Jinha Shin. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
They say armed conflict and political instability have contributed to the rise.

A girl stands in the yard of a IDP camp in the Sri Sri Moha Dev Bari Hindu Temple in Sittwe, western Myanmar's Rakhine state, Sept. 21, 2017.

The number of rape cases, including those involving children, has been on the rise in Myanmars western Rakhine state for the past few years amid armed conflict and ongoing political instability in the region, according to local aid groups.

Six child rape cases were reported in 2018, five in 2019, 20 in 2020, and five in the first half of 2021, according to Legal Clinic Myanmar, High Court lawyer Mya Thuzar from the Rakhine state branch office of the Legal Clinic Myanmar in Sittwe told RFA on Thursday.

More and more child rapes are occurring, and it is very troubling for children, said Oo Khin Thein of the Sittwe-based Rakhine Youth New Generation Network. We are worried because we are seeing a lot of fighting and political instability and, in the midst of it all, the complications of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Officials from the Legal Clinic Myanmar and the Rakhine Pioneer Womens Group, both based in Rakhines capital Sittwe, said military conflicts, political instability, and insecurity in refugee camps housing tens of thousands of displaced people have been factors in the growing number of sexual assaults involving women and children.

Civil society groups have expressed concern about the lack of security in the internally displaced persons (IDP) camps amid the ongoing political unrest. Children are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault because they can be easily approached by adults in the camps, Mya Thuzar said.

A lack of law enforcement in some areas of the state and a belief among some culprits that they will not be arrested if caught are other factors at play in the rise of numbers of sexual assaults, she said.

The main reason for these rape cases is due to the lack of respect for childrens rights, Mya Thuzar said.

Another is that children are easier to approach, and some people are not aware of the provisions of the law, she said. Furthermore, there are no [legal] protection mechanisms for children to prevent this from happening.

The minors who were sexually assaulted from 2017 onwards were all between the ages of 18 and 12, and those suspected of assaulting them have never been caught, she said. There were six cases in 2020 in which the suspects fled to avoid arrest.

Thein Kyaw Mya, director of the Pee Pin Yin IDP camp in Mrauk-U township, told RFA that a nine-year-old girl was raped there on June 4.

The little girl was asleep with another girl in our camp, he said. The father of the girl arrived at about 10 o'clock and took the visiting girl outside, but not his daughter. He offered her snacks and pocket money, and then took her to a field where he raped her.

Soldiers from the rebel Arakan Army arrested the man the following evening, though it is not yet known what action will be taken against him, Thein Kyaw Mya said.

In May a young ethnic Khami woman sheltering at the Gandhari IDP camp in Buthidaung township was reportedly raped when she and her mother went to clear an area of forest for farming about a mile west of the camp, Development Media Group (DMG) reported.

Authorities later detained Futu Ali, 54, from Ywamagonnar village at the Taungbazar police station, DMG said.

More than 40,000 women displaced by armed conflict between the AA and Myanmar military since 2018 still live in IDP camps in Rakhine state, according to the Rakhine Ethnics Congress, an NGO based in Sittwe that tallies IDPs.

Calls for action

The Arakanese Womens Association-USA issued a statement on June 9, calling for the Rakhine Peoples Authority  set up by the AA as a quasi-government in charge of judicial and administrative functions in the state  to take action against the perpetrators of the rape cases in Mrauk-U and Buthidaung townships.

The group said it was providing aid to the families of the two people who were allegedly assaulted.

Nearly 30 women had been raped in the state between this January and June, according to the Rakhaing Womens Initiative Organization (RWIO), a community group.

RWIO chairwoman Saw San Nyein Thu said authorities must arrest perpetrators quickly and take action to prevent further sexual assaults.

We are very worried about what might happen next, she said. The main thing is for the authorities to take really serious action against the perpetrators in a timely manner.

In addition, we, as a society, should all look after our women and act together so that perpetrators can be brought to justice, Saw San Nyein Thu added. There is a need for more public education to end violence against women.

Rakhine State Attorney General Hla Thein told RFA that authorities are investigating sexual assault cases that have been submitted to the court in accordance with the law and that perpetrators are being charged.

If we find child rapists, we prosecute them in accordance with the law, he said. Same thing with ordinary rape cases. The courts are meting out effective sentences.

The legal community is working together with the state and various law enforcement agencies to ensure the effective prosecution of cases of violence against women, he said.

Myanmar government statistics indicate there were 1,405 total rape cases in the country in 2017, up from 1,110 the year before, though Legal Clinic Myanmar director Hla Hla Yee suggested in an AFP report in March that the figures could be much higher in the country of 54 million people.

About two-thirds of the crimes were committed against children, the report said.

Civil society groups say that a significant number of sexual assaults likely are unreported, so that actual figures are much higher.

The rape of a woman outside of marriage carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in jail, while the rape of a girl under the age of 12 carries a sentence of 20 years to life in prison, though few offenders serve full terms, Hla Hla Yee told AFP.

The Myanmar parliament issued an updated draft of the National Prevention and Protection of Violence Against Women law in January after years of back-and-forth over the legislation.

The draft is still pending parliamentary adoption along with revisions to the Constitution and Penal Code recommended by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), according to a report issued to the U.N. Security Council in March.

CEDAW is the body of independent experts that monitors the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979.

Reported by RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
The assets of 22 individuals and four entities are frozen for ties to the oppressive regime.

A poster featuring Myanmar armed forces chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is displayed on a pole as protesters take part in a demonstration against the military coup in Dawei, May 1, 2021.

The U.S. government on Friday announced new sanctions targeting Myanmar nationals and entities with ties to the countrys military regime, which has violently suppressed protests in the wake of its February coup, and vowed to take additional actions unless the junta agrees to step down from power.

The Department of Treasury blocked the assets of 22 individuals connected to the regime, including three members of the junta, known as the State Administration Council (SAC), and four military-appointed cabinet members, as well as 15 adult children or spouses of previously designated military officials whose financial networks the State Department said in a statement had contributed to military officials ill-gotten gains.

Additionally, the Department of Commerce added Wanbao Mining, Ltd., two of its subsidiaries, and King Royal Technologies to its list of entities it says provide revenue and other support to Myanmars military. Wanbao and its subsidiaries have also been implicated in labor and human rights violations, including at the Letpadaung copper mine.

Todays measures further demonstrate that we will continue to take additional action against, and impose costs on, the military and its leaders until they reverse course and provide for a return to democracy, the State Department said.

The United States is committed to promoting accountability for the Burmese military, the SAC, and all those who have provided support for the military coup.

The State Department urged the junta to implement a five-point consensus agreed to by members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) during an emergency summit in April to end its campaign of violence in Myanmar and immediately restore the countrys path to democracy.

Fridays sanctions follow similar ones in May, in which the U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of 13 military regime figures, specifically citing the violence and repression against civilians in the western town of Mindat, where the army used heavy artillery and helicopter gunships against ethnic Chin militia fighters.

Myanmars military overthrew the countrys democratically elected civilian government on Feb. 1 and has violently cracked down on widespread protests. Military leaders say a landslide victory by the ousted National League for Democracy (NLD) in the countrys November 2020 elections was the result of widespread voter fraud but have yet to produce any evidence of their claims.

Security forces have killed at least 888 people and arrested, charged or sentenced 5,173 in the five months since the takeover, according to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association of Political Prisoners (AAPP).

The junta has also moved to assert control of the countrys remote ethnic regions, taking on a host of local Peoples Defense Force (PDF) militias with its own troops and the help of paramilitary groups that support its rule. Some 230,000 people have been displaced by the clashes, according to the United Nations and aid groups.

They join the more than 500,000 refugees from decades of military conflict between the government military and ethnic armies who were already counted as internally displaced persons at the end of 2020, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a Norwegian NGO.

Aung Zaw Myo in front of the local NLD office in Sagaing region's Monywa township, in an undated photo. Aung Zaw Myo's Facebook page Civilian deaths in custody

At least 28 civilians have been tortured to death by the authorities during interrogations in detention since the coup detat, according to investigations by RFAs Myanmar Servicethe latest of whom were two men in their 30s from the countrys Bago and Sagaing regions.

On Thursday, authorities informed the family of 34-year-old Soe Min from Bagos Pyay township of his death three days after his arrest for allegedly destroying a school, according to the mans friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing fear of reprisal.

When the body was brought home, several injuries were apparentlike those caused by being beaten with an iron rodand it looked like he had died days earlier, the friend said, adding that there was also a long incision that had been stitched up along the abdomen.

On Friday, police returned the dead body of 39-year-old Aung Zaw Myo from Sagaings Monywa township to his family following his detention in connection with a bomb blast at an industrial zone in the area a day earlier. Authorities told family members that Aung Zaw Myo, who had been healthy when he was arrested, died about five hours after being taken into custody.

An anti-junta activist told RFA that the military had likely tortured the detainees to death.

We feel sorry for our comrades. Many have died at their interrogation camps, said the activist, who also declined to be named.

These deaths should not have happened  They cant do this sort of thing within any legal framework. Its completely fascist.

Others who have died in police and military custody include former NLD officials and members, a poet, and several other civilians from around the country.

High Court lawyer Kyee Myint told RFA that the military has enjoyed total impunity since repealing basic protections for the countrys citizens in mid-February.

There is no longer any rule of law in the country  They can arrest you, hold you in a cell for more than 24 hours, kill youanything, he said.

Under the Citizens Protection Act, you could litigate against such unlawful arrests. You could sue a police commander if he refused to open a case. These kinds of laws have all been repealed. The military is ruling the country by amending laws however it wants. That is why the country is suffering.

Reported by Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
Photos by Lithuanian authorities capture the ongoing crisis on the country's border after Belarus ended cooperation with the European Union to stem illegal migration.

This is one of several images Lithuanias border police provided to RFE/RL illustrating the surge in illegal crossings into the European Union in recent days.

The migrant influx began after Belarus was hit with EU sanctions over the violent repression of anti-government protesters following a disputed presidential election claimed by longtime authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka in August. Further sanctions came after Belarus's diversion of an international flight and arrest of two of its passengers, a dissident Belarusian journalist and his Russian girlfriend, in May.

Belarus's Foreign Ministry responded to the sanctions by announcing on June 28 that it would suspend an agreement with the EU aimed at stemming illegal immigration. "Before, we stopped drugs and migrants. Now you will eat this and catch them yourself," Lukashenka said.

Lithuanias State Border Guard said 150 people were caught illegally crossing into Lithuania from Belarus on July 1 alone. That is more than the total number over the past two years combined.

So far in 2021, 822 illegal migrants have tried to enter Lithuania from Belarus.

Many of the recent detainees have no documentation, but 428 claim to be Iraqis. Fifty-one said they are from Iran and 45 from Syria. Belarusians, Turks, Russians, and others have also crossed into Lithuania illegally this year.

A spokesman for Lithuania's State Border Guard Service told RFE/RL that "most migrants we detained recently [crossing illegally into Lithuania] arrived [at] Belarus's Minsk airport via direct flights from Istanbul and Baghdad" and made their way to Lithuania's 680 kilometer-long border. The spokesman added: "Information regarding their travels from Minsk to the Lithuanian border is known to our intelligence and wont be disclosed due to the fact that this is part of [an ongoing] investigation."

Lithuania's border authorities say that, while they once cooperated closely with their Belarusian counterparts to stop illegal immigration into the EU, the agency currently "does not identify any interest of the competent authorities of the Republic of Belarus to act in this field."

Paval Latushka, a former Belarusian culture minister who is now a leading opposition figure, told Euronews he has "almost no doubts" the massive influx is being directly organized by Belarusian authorities.
More than 30 vessels from 32 nations -- including NATO members -- are taking part in military drills co-hosted by Ukraine and the United States on the Black Sea. The two-week Sea Breeze exercise comes after an incident involving Russia and a British warship off the coast of Crimea. There's a risk of more tension, some security analysts warn, as Russia looks to secure its dominance in the region by holding military drills of its own off of Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
WASHINGTON -- U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with the top diplomats of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on July 1, with Afghanistan high on the agenda as U.S. forces prepare to exit the war-torn country and Washington seeks Central Asian partners.

The meetings in Washington come as the Taliban has taken control of dozens of districts in recent weeks, raising concerns that the Western-backed government in Kabul and Afghan security forces may collapse.

The Taliban sweep across northern Afghanistan has put several districts bordering Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the militants' hands, presenting a possible security threat to the two Central Asian countries.

Tajik officials are preparing for a possible influx of refugees, while Uzbekistan last month announced military drills along the border.

We have strong shared interests when it comes to security in the region, particularly with regard to Afghanistan, Blinken said in brief remarks alongside Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov.

Kamilov said his discussions with Blinken would pay serious attention to the situation in the region.

Separately, in his meeting with Tajik Foreign Minister Sirojiddin Muhriddin, Blinken discussed Afghanistan and affirmed the U.S. commitment to Tajikistans security, stability, and territorial integrity, according to a State Department readout.

Even as U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the United States has vowed to continue to provide support to the Afghan government and security forces, including the option of launching air strikes against the Taliban using warplanes from outside the country.

When President Joe Biden earlier this year announced U.S. forces would exit Afghanistan by September, he said the United States would not take our eye off the terrorist threat in Afghanistan.

The United States will reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and assets in the region to prevent the reemergence of a terrorist threat in Afghanistan, he said.



In recent weeks, media reports, including from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have suggested U.S. officials are looking to reposition some forces in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in order to keep track of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, given the two countries proximity to Afghanistan.

Potential options, according to U.S. officials, include putting troops, drones, bombers, and intelligence assets at bases or facilities in the two Central Asian countries.

Other options under consideration are using U.S. forces in the Middle East and navy ships at sea.

The prospect of U.S. troops in Central Asia may come up against opposition from Russia and China, two U.S. rivals with influence in the region.

In addition to looking into options to deploy some forces in Central Asia, a U.S. media report said that Washington wants to temporarily house some 9,000 Afghan citizens who worked with U.S. forces in Afghanistan in three Central Asian countries.

Bloomberg quoted two people familiar with the talks as saying the United States has asked Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to take in the Afghans.

The State Department has declined to comment on the report.
SHYMKENT, Kazakhstan -- A group of activists detained in the Kazakh city of Shymkent while demanding the release of political prisoners and the reversal of court decisions banning two political groups have been sentenced to jail amid a crackdown on opposition and human rights activists as the country prepares to mark the 81st birthday of authoritarian former President Nursultan Nazarbaev.

A court in Shymkent on July 2 sentenced Erlan Faizullaev and Nurzhan Abildaev each to 15 days in jail and fined Ermek Qonyshbaev $340 after finding them guilty of violating the law on public gatherings. All three were on a hunger strike.

The court also sentenced Zhanmurat Ashtaev, a supporter of the hunger strikers, to 10 days in jail on the same charge.

The three activists started their hunger strike in Shymkent on May 24, joining dozens of other activists in Nur-Sultan and several other Kazakh cities who have been demanding the cancellation of court decisions labeling as extremist and banning the unregistered opposition Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) movement and its associated Koshe (Street) party.

In the oil-rich Central Asian nation's largest city, Almaty, police on July 1 detained without explanation noted opposition politician Zhasaral Quanyshalin near his home. They were forced to release him hours later after he was rushed to the hospital, where he was treated for a dislocated finger and high blood pressure.

Quanyshalin wrote on Facebook that he will reveal details of his detainment later.

The jailing of hunger strikers in Shymkent and Quanyshalin's detainment come as police in the tightly controlled former Soviet republic round up activists amid preparations to mark the day of the country's capital, Nur-Sultan, which is celebrated on July 6 each year to coincide with Nazarbaev's birthday.

Several activists have been handed jail terms of between 10 days and 20 days in recent weeks after Mukhtar Ablyazov, the DVK's leader, called on Kazakh citizens to stage a demonstration on July 6.

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.

Under President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, who was handpicked by Nazarbaev, Kazakhstan continues to clamp down on freedom of speech and to 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 Adil Soz, a local media watchdog.

With reporting by RFE/RL's correspondent Dilara Isa and Qazaq Times
BISHKEK -- A court has extended by two months the pretrial detention of Kyrgyz opposition politician Jenish Moldokmatov, an outspoken critic of President Sadyr Japarov.

The Birinchi Mai district court in Bishkek on July 2 ruled that Moldokmatov's pretrial detention will continue until September 6.

Moldokmatov's lawyer, Urmat Sadykov, said his client will appeal the court's ruling.

Moldokmatov was arrested in early May and charged with organizing "mass disorder" in October during anti-government rallies against the official results of parliamentary elections.

Moldokmatov has rejected the charge, calling it politically motivated.

Moldokmatov was one of the candidates to the Kyrgyz parliament in October who lost the election, according to official results.

He took part with thousands of others in the mass protests following the elections in Bishkek. The rallies led to the resignations of the government and then-President Sooronbai Jeenbekov.

Japarov was among several prominent politicians freed from prison by protesters during the unrest. He had been serving a 10-year prison sentence for hostage-taking during a protest against a mining operation in northeast Kyrgyzstan in October 2013. He maintains the charges against him were politically motivated.

Japarov easily won the January presidential election.

Moldokmatov's arrest came three days after Japarov signed into law constitutional amendments approved by a nationwide referendum in April that have been criticized by his opponents as a move to concentrate more powers in his hands.
Belaruss authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka says he ordered the full closure of the border with Ukraine, citing security reasons, and claimed the authorities had exposed Western-linked "terrorist" sleeper cells, as his regime faces growing international pressure over its brutal crackdown on dissent in the wake of last years disputed presidential election.



Lukashenkas allegations, which he did not substantiate with any evidence, come as his regime was hit by additional Western sanctions following last month's forced landing of a European passenger plane in Minsk and the arrest of an opposition blogger who was on board.



Speaking at an event marking 30 years of independence of post-Soviet Belarus, Lukashenka announced he had ordered officials to seal the country's border with pro-Western Ukraine to prevent a "huge amount" of weapons coming into Belarus.



In remarks released by his office, Lukashenka also alleged that "terrorist sleeper cells" linked to Germany, Lithuania, the United States, Poland, and Ukraine had been exposed in Belarus, and claimed that their goal was forcible regime change.



A Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman said that Ukraine has not interfered in its neighbor's internal affairs nor was it planning to do so.



"The Ukrainian side has not received official notification from Belarus on the border closure. It would primarily be the Belarusian people who would suffer from such a step," Oleh Nikolaenko said.

A senior U.S. administration official told Reuters it appeared that Lukashenka's regime "is once again seeking to deflect attention away from its campaign of repression against its people."



Washington will continue to stand with the Belarusian people and hold the regime accountable," the official added.



He said the alleged members of the cells tried to target a communication facility for the Russian Navy near the Belarusian town of Vileyka, adding that he discussed the incident with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Lukashenkas main international backer, "in the most serious manner."



Earlier on July 2, Lithuanian authorities said migrants continue to pour into the Baltic state across its border with Belarus, a situation it said Minsk was purposely organizing in retaliation for the West's sanctions.

The Lithuanian State Border Security Service said in a statement that 150 immigrants had been apprehended while trying to illegally cross the Belarusian-Lithuanian border in the previous 24 hours, almost twice the number detained along the border for all of 2020.



The total number of detained illegal immigrants, mainly from Iraq, who illegally entered Lithuania from Belarus since January now stands at 822, the statement added.

Vilnius contends that the migrants are moved to the border with Lithuania, where Belarusian border guards turn a blind eye as they cross into the European Union member state.



Lithuania has been one of the loudest critics of Lukashenka and advocates for his opponents since Belarus was thrown into turmoil last August when the 66-year-old strongman claimed a sixth presidential term, setting off unprecedented protests.

The opposition says that the election was rigged, and the West has refused to recognize the official results of the vote and does not consider Lukashenka to be the country's legitimate leader.



The Baltic state has offered refuge to Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who supporters say was the real winner of the vote, and to many others targeted in Lukashenka's violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists and opposition politicians.

Vilnius has become a center for Belarusians in exile, and the two countries have expelled a number of diplomats as ties have worsened in recent weeks.



Lithuania has requested aid from the EU's border guard service, Frontex, due to the influx of migrants.

A first Frontex team of six guards began working in Lithuania on July 2, the AFP news agency reported, adding that the number of guards deployed on the border with Belarus is expected to increase to 30 later this month.
At least one person was killed and five were injured in an explosion that occurred at Romania's Black Sea crude oil refinery Petromidia on July 2, authorities said.

The cause of the blast has yet to be determined, officials said.

The refinery is owned by Rompetrol Rafinare, part of Kazakhstan's KazMunayGas (KMG) International Group.

Rescue teams and firemen are working to isolate and put down the fire, said Silviu Cosa, the prefect of Constanta county where Petromidia is located, adding that the fire poses no risk of causing further blasts.

Prime Minister Florin Citu wrote on his Facebook page that he has instructed government officials to assess whether the evacuation of locals and tourists is needed.

Built during communism, Romania's largest refinery is located just several kilometers north of the Black Sea port of Constanta and in the immediate vicinity of Mamaia, the country's largest sea resort.

Environment Minister Barna Tancos told the media that while the explosion does not pose an immediate danger due to the direction of the wind, which carried the black smoke away toward the sea, the risk of a major environmental accident is still high.

In 2019, KMG said that it had invested some $1 billion in the modernization of Petromidia and in the increase of its refining capacity from 3.5 million to over 5 million tons of crude annually.

With reporting by Digi24.ro, Digi24HD TV, and hotnews.ro
The Tisza River, a major tributary of the Danube, flows from Ukraine into Hungary -- and brings with it thousands of tons of garbage each year. Hungary has urged Ukraine to deal with its trash before it becomes an international issue, but there's no easy solution in sight.
KYIV --The Supreme Court of Ukraine has rejected the appeal of Oleksiy Pukach, a former top police officer who was convicted in the murder of investigative journalist Heorhiy Gongadze.



The court handed down its ruling on July 2, saying the verdict and sentence for the former police general remains unchanged and that his request for a retrial was rejected.



The Pechera District Court in Kyiv sentenced Pukach, the Interior Ministry's former surveillance department chief, to life in prison in January 2013 after finding him guilty of personally strangling Gongadze to death.



Gongadze, who exposed high-level corruption, was kidnapped in September 2000 and his decapitated body was found outside Kyiv several months later.

Then-president Leonid Kuchma was accused of involvement in the murder based on audio recordings secretly made in his office in which he allegedly conspires against the journalist.



Prosecutors charged Kuchma with involvement in the case in 2011. However, a court dropped the charges later that year saying the main evidence against Kuchma had been obtained by illegal means and therefore could not serve as the basis for a criminal complaint.



Pukach was arrested in 2009. At his trial, he said Kuchma, his former chief of staff Volodymyr Lytvyn, and former Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, had ordered Gongadze's killing.



Kravchenko was found dead in his apartment near Kyiv in 2005. Official reports said Kravchenko committed suicide, but some Ukrainian media outlets claimed that he died of two gunshot wounds to his head.



In 2008, three former police officers were found guilty of taking part in Gongadze's killing and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
In March 2020, Uzbek President Shavkhat Mirziyoev launched a $1 billion fund to deal with the coronavirus crisis. By June 2021, the cost of fighting the pandemic had spiraled to $8 billion. An investigation by RFE/RL's Uzbek Service identified possible causes for some of the excess spending: no-bid government contracts for medical and quarantine facilities, granted to companies controlled by close allies of the president.
MANSFIELD -- Independence Day fireworks this weekend may not be a cause for celebration for your family dog.

In fact, the loud booms and bright lights may be a cause for terror.

"Fireworks can be incredibly scary and disorienting for them due to the loud noises and bright lights," Richland County Dog Warden Missy Houghton said Thursday.

Houghton said dog owners who know their pet is terrified of fireworks may want to call their veterinarian in advance to seek some form of anti-anxiety medication.

Houghton advised dog owners to close window blinds and curtains and to turn up the volume on TVs and radios to help muffle sounds coming from neighborhood firework shows.

"Please close windows and doors," she said. "We have seen cases where dogs jump out through open windows when they become panicked."

She urged pet owners to give their dogs a safe spot where they may feel better protected from sights and sounds associated with fireworks. Houghton said it's a natural fear for some dogs.

"If you heard random explosions and bright lights across the sky and had no idea what it was ... you would likely be panicked, too," she said.

"Fortunately, there are some dogs that don't care. Some, however, care a whole lot. Plan in advance to help those dogs," Houghton said.

The dog warden encouraged owners to make sure their dogs have a current ID collar with their license and also to be microchipped.

"All of that information is helpful in the event the dog flees and ends up with us so that we can get them back home safely," Houghton said.

Just because a dog has not shown fear in the past doesn't preclude it this year, Houghton said.

"As dogs grow older, sometimes they become more reactive to things that they did not react to in the past. Try to cushion them from this holiday as much as possible," she said.

The American Kennel Club, on its website, also offers advice for dog owners for this weekend:

1. Keep Your Dog Away From Fireworks

First of all, dont take your dogs to fireworks shows, says Dr. Judy Morgan, a vet in New Jersey. And dont leave them outside during fireworks. Keeping your dog inside in the evening on the Fourth of July is the best idea, especially if you fear they might not react well.

2. Create a Safe Haven For Your Dog

Morgan recommends creating a place where your dog will (hopefully) feel comfortable. You should get your pet used to a calming environment beforehand. Dogs are den animals  theyre looking for that cave to get away from it all.

Try setting up an area in a quiet space away from windows  such as a basement or a larger closet  so that they cant hear or see fireworks. Use a crate if thats where your dog feels safe, and make sure to provide your pup with familiar toys and treats.

3. Play White Noise

You can try leaving a fan, TV, or radio on to help mask the sounds of the fireworks. Theres some classical music called Through A Dogs Ear that has been shown to have calming effects for dogs, says Jenn Stanley, certified behavior consultant and professional dog trainer, and co-owner of Awesome Pawsabilities Pet Training & Behavior Consultations based in North Carolina.

4. Comfort Your Dog

If you can, try staying home with your dog or leaving them in the hands of a trusted person. One of Morgans relatives usually stays with her dog in the closet to help soothe the animal.

You absolutely can and should comfort your dog if hes afraid, said Stanley. The key here is in how you do so. Its important to remain calm and use a soothing, even tone. Petting them can be comforting  long, slow, firm strokes along the length of their body are typically very soothing.

The one thing to avoid? Seeming frantic in any way, says Stanley. Rapidly saying, Its OK, its OK, its OK in a higher-than-average pitch may make your dog think that there really is something to fear. Try your best to remain calm and reassuring to help your canine companion.

5. Walk Them Before the Fireworks Start

Head out for your long walk before the sun sets to increase the chances that youll avoid the sounds. When you do go out, youll want to ensure your dog is secure on a leash before your walk.
COLUMBUS -- The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio has granted Ohio Attorney General Dave Yosts request to permanently enjoin a law that sought to unconstitutionally restrict Ohios power to cut taxes.

The Biden administration reached too far, seized too much and got its hand slapped, Yost said in an emailed press release Friday.

This is a monumental win for the preservation of the U.S. Constitution - the separation of powers is real, and it exists for a reason," the attorney general said.

Yost sued in March to bar enforcement of President Bidens American Rescue Plan Acts Tax Mandate.

The American Rescue Plan Act offers Ohio $5.4 billion that it can use to help its economy recover from the effects of COVID-19. The Tax Mandate says that any State that accepts these funds accepts limitslimits the Tax Mandate never clarifieson its power to cut taxes.

The law put Ohio to a choice: it could have the badly needed funds, but only if it agreed to ambiguous limits on its taxing power, Yost said.

The courts ruling reaffirms state sovereignty as guaranteed in the Constitution, according to the attorney general.

American Democracy once again defeats an attempt to take away states rights, Yost said. This case is about the separation of power and I am pleased that the court agreed with our position that the Tax Mandate is out of bounds.

The District Court explained that the Tax Mandate is unconstitutional because it provides the state with no ability to understand what they can and cannot do:

It is almost as though Congress had written the Tax Mandate as follows: Each certifying State agrees that, if a State reduces any tax rate, on any tax, the Secretary may recoup ARPA funding to the extent that the Secretary determines, in her discretion, that the rate reduction resulted in the State losing tax revenues, and the Secretary further determines, in her discretion, that those losses were offset with ARPA funding.  That is the type of federal invasion of state sovereignty that [the Constitution] disfavors.

The decision was handed down by Judge Douglas R. Cole, who was nominated for the position in May 2019 by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate in December 2019.
MANSFIELD -- Anbria D. Murnahan, 25, has been charged with two felony counts after turning herself in to Mansfield Police, according to a press release from Capt. Shari Robertson on Thursday afternoon.

The incident took place on Sunday, June 27 in the 300 block of Bulkley Avenue, and drew citywide attention after a video was released of the suspect firing a gun. Afterward, Mansfield Police asked for the public's help in identifying and locating the suspect.

"The suspect in the Bulkley Avenue shooting incident from earlier this week, turned herself in and was incarcerated at the Richland County Jail on two felony charges," Robertson said in Thursday's press release. "She was identified through tips received from citizens who reached out to Major Crimes detectives.

"As part of the investigation, a search warrant was executed on June 30th, 2021 at her residence and items believed to be related to the crime, were recovered, including a firearm. It is unknown at this time if it is the same firearm involved in the shooting.

"We are pleased that Ms. Murnahan decided to turn herself in and we are asking that anyone who may have additional information concerning the incident, to please contact Major Crimes detectives at 419-755-9724."

In the original incident report, the Mansfield Division of Police responded to the 300 block of Bulkley Avenue in reference to a "Shots Fired" call at approximately 3:25 p.m. on Sunday June 27. A witness at the scene was able to capture an unknown White female firing two rounds from a semi-automatic handgun during an altercation.

The female suspect then fled in the gray colored vehicle which appeared to be a Dodge Journey.

This incident is especially alarming given the close proximity to Johns Park and the juveniles in the area at the time, police said.
MANSFIELD  Starting in May, things are slightly different at The Phoenix Brewing Company, which does not accept tips anymore.

There's no place on a credit card receipt to add a tip like a normal (receipt), co-founder Scott Cardwell said. When folks ask that question, we just say we're no longer a tipping establishment. So, there's no need to leave a tip.

All 14 employees, the majority of them work part-time, now are paid at a flat hourly wage based on the time they have been with the brewery, Cardwell said. It is a policy that better reflects all other tasks the staff has taken on besides working behind the bar, the co-owner added.

The owners understand some customers might need time to get comfortable with the new practice and still want to leave cash tips. It is appreciated, Cardwell said, but the money will be donated to a different organization each month.

The Phoenix has listed 12 establishments that will accept the cash tips, including the Domestic Violence Shelter, Mansfield Playhouse and Downtown Mansfield, Inc. Cardwell said the business has supported those organizations in the past.

It donated over $1,300 of tips to the Domestic Violence Shelter in May and has received a similar number of gratuities in June. The money will go to the Humane Society of Richland County this month.

As the owners predicted, some patrons are still trying to get used to the new policy.

My reaction was I hope the employees are getting what they deserve, Chad Eicher told Richland Source recently.

Eicher said he has gone to the Phoenix since it opened in 2014. While it has been almost two months, he still feels weird not leaving a tip.

Kristy Middleton, who said she is a generous tipper, can relate to that. However, she said she is OK with the practice now by understanding how much the bartenders earn would fluctuate on busy and slow days.

Ryan Nichols, one of the brewerys staff members, said the no-tipping policy seems appropriate and brings him a better wage when he brews the beer or shops supplies for the business besides bartending. He has worked at the Phoenix for five years.

I make a very fair wage all around hourly, Nichols said.

What he said was exactly why the Phoenix became a no-tipping establishment.

Cardwell said some employees have undertaken different works such as brewing the beer or making deliveries besides working behind the bar before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived last year.

When the pandemic forced the taproom to close, the owners started cross-training everyone to do many different things, including canning the beer and merchandising.

Because everybody is doing so many different jobs, it just makes sense that this was the right time to make the switch to non-tipped wage no matter where they work, Cardwell said.

No matter what job they (the staff) are doing, they're getting much, much higher than minimum wage."

Cardwell said a one-dollar-price-raise has applied to all beverage items and a few cents to slices of pizza to implement the new wage structure. Many of the beer prices stayed the same since the business opening.

The adjustment was to compensate for the loss from tips so the company can keep paying the employees what they earned before, he said. Customers do not pay more now because the tips have been eliminated.

The non-tipping policy has worked so well that all current employees can receive a raise starting this week, according to Cardwell.

Refocused on beer distribution amid the pandemic

The taproom did not generate much revenue for the Phoenix last year due to COVID-19, Cardwell said.

What we did was refocus on distributing, getting beer out places. Canning a lot more beer than we ever did before, he said.

While the Phoenix has provided kegs of beer for bars and restaurants, Cardwell said it distributed canned beer on a limited basis and only to Richland County, Mount Vernon and Ashland.

The pandemic pushed the brewery to can and distribute more beer to make up for the loss from the taproom, Cardwell said. It got to a point where the owners decided to install the first canning line in-house instead of using another companys service.

The Phoenix also brought in an employee to take charge of sales full time, Cardwell said. It now distributes the beer to the area enclosed by Cleveland, Akron, Lancaster and Sandusky.

Both kegged and canned beer distribution has increased since last year, the co-owner said, and has generated at least 30 percent of the revenue. Before the pandemic, that number was about 10 percent.

Cardwell said he is excited about the future.

We're hoping to continue down this path and not look backwards and get to a point where maybe we can add a couple more full-time staff, he said.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first of a series of solutions stories addressing food waste and food rescuers in Richland County and beyond.

BELLVILLE  Every week, volunteers from the Bellville Neighborhood Outreach Center (BNOC) rescue truckfuls of food from chain grocery stores around Richland County.

These businesses donate food that is still good but would normally get thrown out. Some products may have been overstocked, some may still be fresh but nearer to its expiration date.

Its an extensive amount of food, said Matt Merendino, a pastor and the president of the BNOC. It is enough food to fill our truck and then some. Thousands of pounds of food.

The BNOC collects food from retail partners on behalf of the Cleveland Food Bank, then divides it between its Bellville-based pantry and other organizations like Catholic Charities Mansfield location and Grace Episcopal Church.

Its been roughly four years or so. We partnered with Feeding America and the Walmart Corporation and they granted us a truck through the Cleveland Food Bank so that we could keep more of the food from Richland County in Richland County, Merendino said.

The practice of collecting excess food from retailers and producers is known as food rescue. Food rescue has benefits for donors and recipients alike, but it can also help fight hunger and food waste simultaneously.

Americans throw away a lot of food, from unharvested crops left to spoil in fields to unused or excess products in homes and grocery stores. The USDA estimates that between 30 and 40 percent of the American food supply goes to waste.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more food goes into landfills than any other type of municipal solid waste. Food made up 24 percent of municipal solid waste that ended up in landfills in 2018, compared to 11.78 percent paper products and 18.46 percent plastic.

Meanwhile, one in ten Americans faced food insecurity in 2019. Feeding America estimates that those numbers have grown slightly due to the pandemic, with one in seven Americans facing food insecurity in 2020 and one in eight in 2021.

BNOC volunteers visit retailers like Walmart, Sams Club, Aldi, Kroger and Panera Bread with their 16-foot refrigerated box truck multiple times each week. The Cleveland Food Bank sends another truck on the off days.

The BNOC isnt the only local pantry engaged in food rescue efforts. Matthew 25 Outreach Center also collects excess food from smaller chain stores across northeastern Ohio.

Every week, volunteers drive a 26-foot truck to sites in Wayne and Medina counties, the Akron and Canton areas and even downtown Cleveland.

Food rescue can be a win-win for pantries and store owners, who don't have to deal with the labor of hauling excess food and disposal fees at the dump.

When we do the recovery piece, it saves them all that expense so they're happy to give it to us," said Matthew 25 president Jeff Wright. "From a business perspective, they obviously receive some tax benefits as well, but they also know it's going to good use.

Matthew 25 only visits sites that arent currently working with the Cleveland Food Bank to avoid competing or duplicating efforts.

If you think about the big groceries, that's where the food bank would come into play; at the small satellites, that's where we come into play, said Wright.

The organization partners with five or six vendors for its food recovery efforts, Wright said. He estimated that about 30 percent of the food Matthew 25 distributes comes from food rescue; the rest is obtained through the Cleveland Food Bank and Akron-Canton Regional Food Bank.

Matthew 25 holds pop-up food distribution events in Richland and Ashland counties each month. Volunteers also deliver boxes of shelf-stable foods to nearly 1,600 seniors in Richland, Ashland, Wayne and Holmes counties.

While food rescue can be a great way to reduce commercial waste and stock the shelves at pantries, there are logistical challenges.

Coordinating routes and volunteers takes time and effort. Some food pantries like Last Mile Food Rescue in Cincinnati use an app to connect volunteers throughout the city with nearby donors and drop-off sites.

Merendino said storage is the biggest hurdle. Hed love to do more pickups, but his and other local pantries only have so much space.

Ultimately for us we would love to be able to make as much usage of that truck as we could, he said. It would be wonderful to see more people branch out and start food pantries.

Building collaborative relationships with retailers also takes time and effort.

Good partnerships. Thats a huge part," Merendino said.

NEXT IN THIS SERIES: How a non profit in Wayne County, Ohio fights hunger and waste by partnering with area farmers.
A former Rocky Mount assistant city manager who early last month was hired to become the new city manager in College Park, Md., is no longer e
A former Rocky Mount assistant city manager who was going to be the city manager in College Park, Md., is saying via the internet that she end
Danvers, MA (01923)

Today

Cloudy skies this morning will become partly cloudy this afternoon. High 73F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening followed by increasing clouds with showers developing after midnight. Low 67F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
North Conway - It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved Stacie L. Hampton, 45, of North Conway, N.H., on Thursday, July 1, 2021, in Albany, N.H., after an extended illness. Born in Newburyport, July 31, 1975, Stacie was the daughter of Paul F. Fougere and Michelle 
Sanford, NC (27330)

Today

Sunshine to start, then a few afternoon clouds. High 89F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Clear to partly cloudy. Low around 65F. Winds light and variable.
Sanford Police Department

Patrick Eugene Goldston, 30, of the 500 block of South Park Way, Sanford, was cited at 6:29 p.m. Wednesday in the 2500 block of South Horner Boulevard on misdemeanor charges of possessing marijuana, possessing marijuana drug paraphernalia and carrying a concealed weapon.

Jeremy Shane Gentry Jr., 26, of McDuffie Road, Cameron, was arrested at 2:18 p.m. Wednesday in the 3300 block of N.C. 87 on charges of possessing a controlled substance and misdemeanor offenses of possessing marijuana and possessing marijuana drug paraphernalia.

Latasha Victoria Bennett, 39, of the 1500 block of Westover Drive, Sanford, was arrested at 1 p.m. Wednesday at her residence on a misdemeanor charge of failing to appear in court.

Samuel Wayne Stone, 51, of the 100 block of Stone Hill Lane, Sanford, was arrested at 11:22 a.m. Wednesday in the 1400 block of South Horner Boulevard on a misdemeanor charge of failing to appear in court.

Theft of $215 reported at 1:37 p.m. Wednesday at Smoothie King, 2045 S. Horner Blvd.

Theft of loose change from vehicle reported at 9:13 a.m. Wednesday in the 800 block of Springmoore Court.

LEE COUNTY SHERIFFS OFFICE

Quincy Wayne Dowdy, 43, of the 2800 block of Eames Drive, Sanford, was booked into the Lee County Jail at 3:10 p.m. Wednesday on felony charges of possessing marijuana with intent to manufacture/sell/deliver and possessing marijuana and misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia.

HARNETT COUNTY SHERIFFS OFFICE

Jessica Haire, 27, of McDougal Road, Broadway, was arrested at 5:45 a.m. Wednesday in the 14000 block of N.C. 27 West, Sanford, on charges of failing to appear in court on felony and misdemeanor offenses.
Law enforcement wants to keep holiday fireworks off the roads this weekend by stepping up patrols for drunk driving.

The N.C. Highway Patrol and the Lee County Sheriffs Office will be out in full force this holiday weekend in an effort to keep impaired drivers off the roads.

As traffic is expected to increase this July Fourth weekend, so will the State Highway Patrols focus on traffic safety, spokesman First Sgt. Chris Knox said in a news release.

The Highway Patrol is joining with other law enforcement agencies, including the local Sheriffs Office, in working the Booze It & Lose It: Operation Fire Cracker, sponsored by the Governors Highway Safety Program, Knox said in the release.

Sheriff Tracy Carter is warning residents not to drink and drive during the holiday as his staff will be out in full force, he said in a post on the LCSO Facebook page.

Drinking and driving puts everything on the line: your freedom, your reputation, your bank account, your life  and the lives of others, Carter said.

Its against the law to drive with a blood alcohol content of 0.08% or higher, he said.

If youre under 21, driving with a BAC over 0.0%  thats ZERO  is an automatic DWI, Carter said.

Commercial drivers who register 0.04% BAC will find themselves in jail, he added.

The Highway Patrol wont confine its efforts just to impaired drivers, the release said. Troopers will enforce other motor vehicle violations including aggressive and distracted driving, speeding and seatbelt compliance.

Troopers responded to a total of 968 crashes in the state during the 2020 July 4 holiday, the release said, with 104 involving drunk driving. Injuries were reported in 260 of the crashes. Fourteen people were killed, the release said.

As we join in celebration of Independence Day, we must remember the key principles of safe driving as many will be taking to the road, Col. Freddy J. Johnson Jr., commander of the Highway Patrol, said in the release.

By making the conscious decision to follow the speed limit, avoid distractions and to not drive while impaired, you are doing your part to ensure this is a safe holiday weekend for yourself, your passengers and those sharing the roadway.
details

International Folk Art Market

Wednesday, July 7, through July 11, and July 14 through July 18

Wednesday Early Bird Markets (sold out), 7:30 to 10 a.m.

Thursday markets, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday markets, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Purchase two-hour time slots at folkartmarket.org/tickets

Tickets are $30 in advance and $40 at the door

International Folk Art Market, Milner Plaza on Museum Hill, 706 Camino Lejo

For information on parking, shuttles, additional IFAM events, and more, go to folkartmarket.org or call IFAM at 505-992-7600
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The member states have finally greenlit the construction of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Observatory, set to be the world's largest radio telescope, starting next month.

Following a council meeting of its sixteen member states including organizations from China, Japan, India, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States, the SKA Observatory Global Headquarters in UK made the announcement that it will soon begin the construction of two of its telescopes: the SKA-Low and SKA-Mid. These designations refer to the frequency ranges that will be covered by each of the telescope arrays.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Hunt for the First Supermassive Black Hole Has Begun

A Space Project 30 Years in the Making

The green light on the SKA Observatory construction closely follows the creation of its corresponding intergovernmental organization earlier this year. Seeing rapid development, the SKA Observatory organization also released two of its key documents: the Observatory's Construction Proposal and the Observatory Establishment and Delivery Plan.

The two documents have a total of 500 pages and collate hundreds of relevant documents detailing the design and engineering work done by more than 500 experts from its member states and more, in an undertaking that has taken more than seven years of intergovernmental and interdisciplinary effort. Furthermore, this includes more than 100 institutions  universities, research laboratories, private companies, government agencies  that designed all that went into what will be the SKA Observatory to be built in Australia and South Africa

"I am ecstatic. This moment has been 30 years in the making," said Prof. Philip Diamond, Director-General of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory and a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester in the UK, in a press release from the observatory. "Today, humankind is taking another giant leap by committing to build what will be the largest science facility of its kind on the planet; not just one but the two largest and most complex radio telescope networks, designed to unlock some of the most fascinating secrets of our Universe."

Additionally, Prof. Diamond extended his gratitude to everyone who helped make the project possible from all the past decades, from its inception to its design, and those who continued to labor on the SKA Observatory despite the global coronavirus pandemic.

The Benefits and the Purpose of the SKA Observatory

The SKA Observatory headquarters immediately touted the immediate benefits of member nations in terms of direct and indirect economic returns from the innovation and technological advancements involved in the project. From opening specialized jobs to a boost in industrial capacity, the benefits of pursuing the SKA Observatory are also detailed in its Construction Proposal.

Originally conceived in the 1990s, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory was designed to operate over a wider range of frequencies, making it about 50 times more sensitive than any other existing radio instrument. Additionally, should it be developed as originally intended, the SKA Observatory should be able to conduct astronomical surveys thousands of times faster than existing methods.

Prior to the construction of the SKA Observatory, four precursor operators are already operating in different parts of the world: the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) and the MeerKAT facilities in South Africa, and the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia.

RELATED ARTICLE: MeerKat Radio Telescope Discovers Eight New Millisecond Pulsars, Most Compact Stars Known

Check out more news and information on Telescopes in Science Times.
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Billionaire Jeff Bezos, announced earlier today that Wally Funk, one of the aviators of "Mercury 13" is joining him for a ride on his space company, Blue Origin's first crewed mission.

Funk, one of the aviators who fought to open the early astronaut program of NASA to women, a The Verge report said, is bringing the crew size for the debut flight of New Shepard, carrying humans later this month to four.

These passengers include Bezos, his brother Mark, and another tourist yet to be named, who paid $28 million for a space trip in an auction that closed last month.

The presence of Bezo on this initial flight, this report specified, is observed as a "show of confidence" in the safety of New Shepard.

ALSO READ: Blue Origin: Jeff Bezos to Auction off First Space Tourism Flight Aboard New Shepard for July

A Symbolic Move

The inclusion of Funk as an honored guest is the most recent symbolic move to launch the space tourism program of Blue Origin, the date, July 20, is the anniversary of the landing of the first US Moon, and the New Shepard capsule is named after first American astronaut, Alan Shepard.

On his Instagram account, Bezos wrote, Wally Funk was at the top of her class in 1961, of the Mercury 13 Woman in Space Program. Despite the completion of their training, added the company owner on his IG post, the program was cancelled and no one among the 13 members flew.

As part of his announcement, Bezos said "It's time". He also welcomed Funk to the crew, adding how excited he is to have the 82-year-old former pilot, fly with them on July 20, 2021, as their honored guest.

Wally Funk, An Iconic Aviator

Funk was an iconic aviator in the mid-20th century and among the 13 women who graduated from the privately funded Women in Space Program. Under this program, she went through rigorous astronaut training although, was eventually never able to go to space.

When in 1976, NASA opened its astronaut applications up to women, Funk applied three times but she was rejected each time.

The 82-year-old Mercury 13 pilot's space enthusiasm has not died. She booked a front-row seat as well, on the suborbital SpaceShipTwo plane from the space tourism firm Virgin Galactic of Richard Branson that competes with Blue Origin, as the Texas Monthly magazine reported.

Like New Shepard, SpaceShip Two is flying to edge space approximately 62 miles high, the internationally recognized marker designated for space.

The Mercury 13

A Space.com report said, with the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957, the first artificial satellite, the space race between the United States and USSR was officially in progress.

However, it was a question then of how to hire for a position no one else has ever held and before the US had even inaugurated an uncrewed satellite into space.

The Harvard Medicine magazine reported that the US officials turned to aerospace physician Dr. William Randolph "Randy" Lovelace, and NASA's committee on life science head, for guidance.

He was in charge of developing physical and mental tests to guarantee that astronauts could be able to manage the rigors of running in microgravity.

Such testing was exceptionally thorough in order to deal with all known and unknown challenges of space travel.

A related report is shown on CBSDFW's YouTube video below:

RELATED ARTICLE: Space Tourism on the Rise: Are Other Passengers of SpaceX Considered "Astronauts"?

Check out more news and information on Space on Science Times.
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Summer is a time for rest, reflection, and planning when youre in education. In leadership roles, school and district administrators have the opportunity to review data, programs, and plan for the future.

Thats especially important this summer, following a year of uncertainty, stress, and unprecedented challenges for students and school staff.

The San Diego County Office of Education has partnered with longtime educators and leadership development experts Dr. Angela Bass and Wendell Bass to provide a two-day learning session in August.

The informative and practical learning opportunity will help district and school leaders create a plan to meet and address the needs of all students and the adults that support them.

Returning to in-person instruction in the fall doesnt mean we should go back to the way we did things in 2019, explained Dr. Paul Gothold, San Diego County superintendent of schools. Our educators and students learned so many new tools and skills last year, and we saw inequities, such as food insecurity and access to the internet, widen for many of our families. This is an opportunity to better serve each and every student.

Register to join the live, virtual webinar Aug. 5 and 6 from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. for $60 per person.


Organizers from the Compassion Seattle charter amendment say they have gathered enough signatures from Seattle voters to get the initiative on the November 2021 ballot.

The amendment was introduced in April with the goal of creating an additional 2,000 units of emergency or permanent housing and expanding behavioral health services for mental health and substance use disorder to address homelessness in the city.

The group got approval to start collecting signatures in late May, and canvassers from the group have been seen in Capitol Hill and Green Lake in recent weeks. The organizers said they received 64,155 signatures, nearly double the amount required to make it on the ballot.

"Collecting more than 60,000 signatures in less than a month during challenging circumstances sends a clear message," said Downtown Seattle Association President & CEO Jon Scholes in a news release on Thursday. "Seattle voters want a plan to get our homeless neighbors inside and on a path to stability."

The ballot initiative is not without opposition in the city from housing advocates. Last month, the ACLU of Washington came out against the charter amendment, writing that the ballot initiative focused on "stopgap measures aimed at reducing the visibility of poverty" instead of long-term solutions, like increasing affordable permanent housing. The nonprofit also opposed the amendment's codification of encampment sweeps in the city's charter.

"The ACLU of Washington shares the concern of many Seattle residents that the housing crisis is an emergency that affects all of us and that the City must do everything in its power to redress our neighbors suffering. To that end, we support solutions that address the root causes of homelessness and do not punish people for trying to meet their basic life-sustaining needs like shelter, sleep and food," wrote the non-profit organization.

Compassion Seattle responded to the ACLU's claims, saying the amendment "does not promote sweeps, nor do we believe sweeps to be an effective practice to help those living unsheltered."

"Charter Amendment 29 does not criminalize homelessness; it says nothing about law enforcement. It does require expansion of diversion programs so police, prosecutors, defense attorneys and the courts can decide on a case-by-case basis whether treatment and other individualized services are better than arrest and prosecution," wrote Compassion Seattle in a statement to the SeattlePI.

Another opposition group, called House Our Neighbors, has also formed, echoing the claims of the ACLU that the amendment does not address the root causes of homelessness.

Despite the efforts against the ballot initiative, it has still managed to raise massive amounts in funding. According to the latest campaign finance disclosure reports from the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC), Compassion Seattle has raised $926,353 in funding, with the average contribution size equaling $3,140.

Many of the major donors represented real estate and business interests in the city. Two of the top donors, John Goodman and George Petrie, each donated $50,000 and work for the same real estate company, Goodman Real Estate. Vulcan Inc, Clise Properties, and the Downtown Seattle Association are also major contributors, according to filings.
The Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) announced a statewide burn ban will go into effect on July 2 following record-breaking heat and dry conditions in the state.

The order was signed by Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz on Thursday and bans outdoor burning, campfires, the use of charcoal briquettes, and prescribed burns on all forest lands within DNRs fire protection. The ban is expected to last through Sept. 30, but could be extended if this year's wildfire season lasts longer than usual as some climate experts expect.

So far this year, DNR has responded to 899 fires burning a total of 1,864 acres according to the most recent data. The majority of those fires  715  occurred in the eastern portion of the state.

Franz also joined the calls from public officials that residents should not light their own fireworks this year for the Fourth of July, and instead attend professional shows being held by several cities in Western Washington. Some cities have banned the use of fireworks, and all of King County will prohibit fireworks starting in 2022.

"The record-breaking temperatures we saw last weekend have left our state bone dry and the risks from fireworks and other holiday activities make the situation even more precarious," Franz in a news release on Thursday. "I am asking everyone in Washington to do their part to protect our firefighters and our communities this summer. Please do not start a fire outside, and please do not set off your own fireworks this weekend."

Along with the stint of hot weather this week, persistent drought conditions are also having an impact on the state's outlook for wildfire season. Much of the state is either classified as "abnormally dry" or in a "moderate to severe drought" according to the latest report from the U.S. Drought Monitor. However, much of the southeast portion of the state is in an "extreme drought."

The hot, dry weather could cause the state's wildfire season to start earlier than usual and may lead to another major smoke event choking the region.

"We're pretty confident that there will be large fires across the West this year, the question is, will the meteorological conditions bring that smoke from those fires into Western Washington. That is a bigger unknown," said NWS Warning Coordination Meteorologist Reid Wolcott. "It is not unreasonable to expect some sort of [smoke] event again this year."
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)  Ethiopias government on Friday rejected accusations that its trying to suffocate" the people of Tigray by denying them urgently needed food and other aid, as transport and communications links remained severed to the region that faces the world's worst famine crisis in a decade.

Foreign Minister Demeke Mekonnen spoke to reporters a day after a bridge thats crucial for accessing much of the region of 6 million people was destroyed and the United Nations indicated that special forces from the neighboring Amhara region were to blame. Amhara authorities have occupied western Tigray and forced out hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tigrayans.

The insinuation that we are trying to suffocate the Tigrayan people by denying humanitarian access and using hunger as a weapon of war is beyond the pale. There is absolutely no reason for us to do so. These are our people, Demeke said.

Ethiopia's government blamed Tigray forces for the bridge's destruction. But an aid worker who travelled to the site said area residents described to him how they saw Amhara special forces placing objects on the bridge and driving away after the blast. They still seemed in shock at what had happened, Roger Sandberg, vice president of field operations with Medical Teams International, told The Associated Press.

Sandberg said area residents also told him that there was no other way to cross, while Tigray forces conveyed to him that they wouldn't obstruct NGO access to the region.

The U.N. Security Council was meeting to discuss Tigray on Friday.

In a stunning turn earlier this week, Ethiopia declared a unilateral cease-fire on humanitarian grounds while retreating from Tigray forces. But the government faces growing international pressure as it continues to cut off the region from the rest of the world. Aid workers say fuel and other supplies are running low.

In a strikingly outspoken statement, the World Food Program said on Friday that a second key bridge leading into Tigray was destroyed on Thursday, while no WFP flights bringing in U.N. or other aid workers have been allowed by Ethiopia since June 22.

Even before the bridges were destroyed, at least 3,800 metric tons of food had been blocked from reaching parts of western Tigray, WFP emergency coordinator Tommy Thompson told reporters in Geneva. He warned that more people will die if access doesn't materialize, but added that an air bridge might be set up in coming days.

The U.N. agency said trucks are loaded and ready to replenish its nearly-exhausted food stocks inside Tigray, where 5.2 million people need emergency food aid. Well be out of food in the northwest by this weekend, Thompson said.

Up to 900,000 people in Tigray are facing famine conditions, the United States has said. A new U.N. humanitarian update issued late Thursday said that the blackout of electricity, telecommunications, and internet throughout Tigray region will only exacerbate the already dire humanitarian situation.

Ethiopias foreign minister said the government has a roadmap for dialogue to resolve the Tigray crisis that's expected to include rank and file members of the (Tigray People's Liberation Front) who show readiness to choose a peaceful path. But Tigray forces, recently designated by Ethiopia as a terrorist group, now control most of the region and have demanded that Ethiopia resumes basic services before any talks.

A cease-fire doesnt mean cutting a region off power or destroying critical infrastructure, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell tweeted on Friday. A credible cease-fire means doing everything possible so that aid reaches the millions of children, women and men who urgently need it.

The security situation in Tigray was generally calm after the retreat of Ethiopian forces and those of neighboring Eritrea, who have been accused by witnesses of some of the worst atrocities in the war. Officials with Eritrea, an enemy of Tigray leaders after a 1998-2000 war along their border, have not responded to requests for comment.

Amhara authorities have warned Tigray forces against trying to retake the regions western areas. But the Tigray forces spokesman told the AP this week they would liberate the region from enemies," and thousands of fighters were seen heading west.

Ethiopia's government has said the cease-fire will last only until the crucial farming season in Tigray is over, meaning September. But the WFP said farmers have already missed the peak planting month of June because of seed and fertilizer shortages.

___

Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed.
WASHINGTON (AP)  As the last U.S. combat troops prepare to leave Afghanistan, the question arises: When is the war really over?

For Afghans the answer is clear but grim: no time soon. An emboldened Taliban insurgency is making battlefield gains, and prospective peace talks are stalled. Some fear that once foreign forces are gone, Afghanistan will dive deeper into civil war. Though degraded, an Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State extremist network also lurks.

For the United States and its coalition partners, the endgame is murky. Although all combat troops and 20 years of accumulated war materiel will soon be gone, the head of U.S Central Command, Gen. Frank McKenzie, will have authority until at least September to defend Afghan forces against the Taliban. He can do so by ordering strikes with U.S. warplanes based outside of Afghanistan, according to defense officials who discussed details of military planning on condition of anonymity.

The Pentagon said Friday that the U.S. military has left Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years. The facility was the epicenter of the war, but its transfer to the Afghan government did not mark the U.S. military's final withdrawal from the country.

A look at the end of the war:

WHAT'S LEFT OF THE COMBAT MISSION?

Technically, U.S. forces haven't been engaged in ground combat in Afghanistan since 2014. But counterterrorism troops have been pursuing and hitting extremists since then, including with Afghanistan-based aircraft. Those strike aircraft are now gone and those strikes, along with any logistical support for Afghan forces, will be done from outside the country.

Inside Afghanistan, U.S. troops will no longer be there to train or advise Afghan forces. An unusually large U.S. security contingent of 650 troops, based at the U.S. Embassy compound, will protect American diplomats and potentially help secure the Kabul international airport. Turkey is expected to continue its current mission of providing airport security, but McKenzie will have authority to keep as many as 300 more troops to assist that mission until September.

It's also possible that the U.S. military may be asked to assist any large-scale evacuation of Afghans seeking Special Immigrant Visas, although the State Department-led effort envisions using commercially chartered aircraft and may not require a military airlift. The White House is concerned that Afghans who helped the U.S. war effort, and are thereby vulnerable to Taliban retribution, not be left behind.

When he decided in April to bring the U.S. war to a close, President Joe Biden gave the Pentagon until Sept. 11 to complete the withdrawal. On Friday, the Pentagon said it now plans to complete the pullout by the end of August. The Army general in charge in Kabul, Scott Miller, has essentially finished it already, with nearly all military equipment gone and few troops left.

The Pentagon said Miller is expected to remain in command for a couple more weeks. But will his departure this month constitute the end of the U.S. war? With as many as 950 U.S. troops in the country until September and the potential for continued airstrikes, the answer is probably not.

HOW WARS END

Unlike Afghanistan, some wars end with a flourish. World War I was over with the armistice signed with Germany on Nov. 11, 1918  a day now celebrated as a federal holiday in the U.S.  and the later signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

World War II saw dual celebrations in 1945 with Germany's surrender marking Victory in Europe (V-E Day) and Japan's surrender a few months later as Victory Over Japan (V-J Day) following the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Korea, an armistice signed in July 1953 ended the fighting, although technically the war was only suspended because no peace treaty was ever signed.

Other endings have been less clear-cut. The U.S. pulled troops out of Vietnam in 1973, in what many consider a failed war that ended with the fall of Saigon two years later. And when convoys of U.S. troops drove out of Iraq in 2011, a ceremony marked their final departure. But just three years later, American troops were back to rebuild Iraqi forces that collapsed under attacks by Islamic State militants.

VICTORY OR DEFEAT?

As America's war in Afghanistan draws to a close, there will be no surrender and no peace treaty, no final victory and no decisive defeat. Biden says it was enough that U.S. forces dismantled al-Qaida and killed Osama bin Laden, the group's leader considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Lately, violence in Afghanistan has escalated. Taliban attacks on Afghan forces and civilians have intensified and the group has taken control of more than 100 district centers. Pentagon leaders have said there is medium risk that the Afghan government and its security forces collapse within the next two years, if not sooner.

U.S. leaders insist the only path to peace in Afghanistan is through a negotiated settlement. The Trump administration signed a deal with the Taliban in February 2020 that said the U.S. would withdraw its troops by May 2021 in exchange for Taliban promises, including that it keep Afghanistan from again being a staging arena for attacks on America.

U.S. officials say the Taliban are not fully adhering to their part of the bargain, even as the U.S. continues its withdrawal.

NATO MISSION

The NATO Resolute Support mission to train, advise and assist the Afghan security forces began in 2015, when the U.S.-led combat mission was declared over. At that point the Afghans assumed full responsibility for their security, yet they remained dependent on billions of dollars a year in U.S. aid.

At the peak of the war, there were more than 130,000 troops in Afghanistan from 50 NATO nations and partner countries. That dwindled to about 10,000 troops from 36 nations for the Resolute Support mission, and as of this week most had withdrawn their troops.

Some may see the war ending when NATO's mission is declared over. But that may not happen for months.

According to officials, Turkey is negotiating a new bilateral agreement with Afghan leaders in order to remain at the airport to provide security. Until that agreement is completed, the legal authorities for Turkish troops staying in Afghanistan are under the auspices of the Resolute Support mission.

COUNTERTERROR MISSION

The U.S. troop withdrawal doesn't mean the end of the war on terrorism. The U.S. has made it clear that it retains the authority to conduct strikes against al-Qaida or other terrorist groups in Afghanistan if they threaten the U.S. homeland.

Because the U.S. has pulled its fighter and surveillance aircraft out of the country, it must now rely on manned and unmanned flights from ships at sea and air bases in the Gulf region, such as al-Dhafra air base in the United Arab Emirates. The Pentagon is looking for basing alternatives for surveillance aircraft and other assets in countries closer to Afghanistan. As yet, no agreements have been reached.

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Associated Press writer Kathy Gannon contributed to this report.
JERUSALEM (AP)  Israeli soldiers held an Associated Press photographer against his will during clashes in the occupied West Bank earlier this week, in a spot where Palestinian protesters were hurling stones and the troops were firing tear gas and rubber-coated bullets.

The Israeli military said the photographer interfered with an operation and was detained after ignoring soldiers requests to move. It said soldiers moved him behind a barrier to protect him from stones being thrown by the demonstrators.

AP photographer Majdi Mohammed was covering ongoing demonstrations in the town of Beita against a nearby Israeli settlement outpost on June 27. He was wearing a helmet and a protective vest that clearly identified him as a reporter.

He came across a group of soldiers on the edge of Beita, around 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the outpost, who were using a bulldozer to set up a roadblock. He said the soldiers told him he could take pictures. Mohammed has been an AP staff photographer since 2006, and has spent even longer covering conflict in the West Bank.

A short while later, protesters hurled a volley of stones at the soldiers. An Israeli officer ordered Mohammed to stay where he was and get down on the ground.

Mohammed said the officer told him he was being detained, and that the soldiers were keeping him there so the protesters would not throw rocks at them. Mohammed said he informed the officer that this was unlawful and amounted to using him as a human shield.

International law forbids forcibly placing civilians near military targets to deter attacks. In 2005, Israels Supreme Court outlawed the long-standing practice of using Palestinian civilians in military operations, including the neighbor procedure, whereby soldiers would send a Palestinian civilian to the home of a wanted militant to order him out. The Israeli rights group BTselem says soldiers have occasionally used such practices in the years since.

Mohammed said that stones rained down on the area where he was being held, with one striking his leg, as the soldiers fired tear gas and rubber-coated bullets. I was terrified because the stones were falling all around and the soldier was firing from a meter (yard) away, he said.

Mohammed called Oded Balilty, the APs chief photographer for Israel and the Palestinian territories, who spoke to the Israeli officer. The officer said Mohammed had been detained because he interfered in the soldiers work. Balilty asked the officer to release Mohammed, saying he would leave the area immediately. The officer told Balilty that Mohammed was safe and would be released soon.

About 15 minutes later, Mohammed again called Balilty, who asked the officer to release him. We dont work for you, well release him when were done, the officer said, according to Balilty.

Mohammed was detained for a total of about one hour, and the whole time there were stones being thrown and shots fired. Before releasing him, Mohammed says the officer demanded to see the pictures on his camera and ordered him to delete any showing the officers face, a violation of press freedom.

It is unacceptable that AP photographer Majdi Mohammed was held against his will under dangerous circumstances by Israeli soldiers while simply trying to do his job, said Ian Phillips, APs vice president and head of international news. The AP has submitted a detailed account of the incident and calls on the Israeli military to hold itself accountable.

In a statement released Thursday, the military said the photographer had been detained and moved behind the troops to a safer place after interfering with their work. It said Mohammed was certainly not asked, as alleged, to stand by the troops in order to serve as a shield.

It denied that Mohammed was asked to delete images. It said he was asked not to take pictures, saying the request was wrong, and this has since been made clear to the commanding officer. The military said it greatly respects the freedom of the press.
DUESSELDORF, Germany (AP)  As a child of the Cold War in West Germany, Armin Laschet remembers when then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan came to Berlin in 1987, stood at the barrier separating East from West, and said, Tear down this wall!

For many West Germans, that was a utopia that didnt seem realistic, but which fulfilled itself in the end, said Laschet, who is seeking to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor in the country's Sept. 26 election.

The 60-year-old governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, is still grateful that in his youth the Americans were reliable guarantors of peace and stability against the Soviet Union.

They were always there for us, they secured the freedom of Berlin, Laschet said in an interview this week with The Associated Press at his office in the western city of Duesseldorf.

For Laschet, close U.S. relations are of utmost importance as Merkel steps down after nearly 16 years in power. He hopes to advance progress on global challenges with the help of a new U.S. leader, President Joe Biden.

Recent polls give the Union bloc a 7-10 percentage-point lead over the environmentalist Greens, making Laschet a front-runner to become the leader of Germany, with Europes biggest economy. The bloc is made up of his Christian Democratic Union party and the Bavaria-only Christian Social Union party.

In his interview with AP, Laschet expressed relief that Biden has brought the U.S. back into the leadership of international challenges, such as global warming, after the Donald Trump administration.

It is good that the new American administration has returned to multilateral agreements and has rejoined the Paris climate accord, Laschet said. I have big hopes that under the leadership of the U.S., which has dedicated itself to this goal politically, economically and also financially, we will manage to bring about a big push forward.

He is more reserved about Biden's assertive stance on China, favoring Merkel's firm but not so confrontational approach.

China is a partner, but a systemic rival, and that means we have to keep our principles up, continue to remind China about them, but at the same time foster our economic relations to China," he said, adding that this is true of other countries that arent close Western allies.

Wherever countries have a model of society that is different from ours, we need to win them over to join us  whether it is Russia, China or the Arab world.

Like Merkel, Laschet is known as a centrist favoring integration over polarization. So far, he has been guarded in deviating from her successful middle-of-the-road path on domestic issues.

Currently, Laschet appears to all of us like a Merkel 2.0 light version, said Wolfgang Merkel, a political analyst at Berlin's Social Science Center and no relation to the chancellor. He has not distinguished himself as somebody who will do politics differently from Merkel. In many ways he is so much alike her that he cannot differentiate himself from her.

Laschet is somebody who can build bridges as a political leader, somebody who mediates, who can make compromises, he added. "He is not a macho politician.

So far, Laschet hasn't taken positions glaringly different from those of the outgoing chancellor.

I don't think he will really do that until the election, the analyst said. He's extremely careful. The slogan right now is: Don't make any mistakes now in the final spurt of the campaign.

Laschet is the son of a miner in Aachen, a university town on Germanys western border with Belgium and the Netherlands. A slim man with a shock of dark hair and a mischievous smile, he still speaks in the region's singsong dialect.

He married his childhood sweetheart, Susanne, and the devout Catholics have three adult children and still live in Aachen's Burtscheid district.

Growing up in the heart of the continent made him a true European, he says.

Many people live in one country and work in the other, for shopping one goes across the border ... and the idea of the classic nation-state has long been overcome because one knows that many problems can only be solved transnationally, Laschet said.

He earned a law degree and worked as a journalist before joining Germany's parliament as a lawmaker with the CDU in 1994. From 1999-2005, Laschet was a member of the European Parliament. He became governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, a center-left stronghold, in 2017.

Laschet has led his state in a coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats, a traditional CDU ally, but is considered capable of working with the more leftist Greens.

In the late 2000s, Laschet was his state's minister for the integration of immigrants. Well before other German states, he stressed the importance of language fluency, stronger women's rights in immigrant communities, an easier path to citizenship and a need to bring Islamic religious teaching out of storefront mosques and into classrooms, with teachers raised and educated in Germany.

The fight against growing antisemitism in Germany is also close to his heart. He strengthened high school exchanges between Germans and Israelis, and, like Merkel, is a strong supporter of Israel.

I think every young person should have visited Auschwitz once to get a sense of the place, of the horror that happened there, to understand what the Holocaust meant as a crime against humanity, he said.

Laschet worries about recent populist and autocratic tendencies in central and eastern Europe, but is very clear about his vision of the European Union.

We need all 27 member states, also Hungary and Poland, if we want to further develop Europe. At the same time, one needs to insist on the rule of law. Everybody who joined the EU has to accept the position of the European Court of Justice, and if somebody violates European law that will lead to sanctions and consequences, for example, when it comes to the allocation of funds, he warns.

The new chancellor must intensify the dialogue with the democracies of central and eastern Europe.

Sitting on the white couch in his office that overlooks the Rhine, Laschet remembered how a previous German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, initiated another key dialogue early in his career.

Kohl organized a meeting of young lawmakers with President Bill Clinton in 1997 to talk to him for 45 minutes about world politics.

"And that really impressed me, he said, leaping off the couch to grab a framed, yellowed photo of himself shaking hands with Clinton in the Oval Office.

-

Pietro DeCristofaro in Berlin contributed.
BAGHDAD (AP)  A widespread power outage hit Iraq on Friday as temperatures reached scorching levels, affecting millions of Iraqis, including those in affluent areas in the capital of Baghdad and stirring concerns of widespread unrest.

Iraq's grid was generating just over 4,000 megawatts, according to Ministry of Electricity data on Friday morning  significantly less than the 12,000-17,000 megawatts the grid generates on average. By midday, production had climbed to 8,000 MW.

The cuts have impacted Baghdad and southern provinces in particular. In the oil-rich southern city of Basra, which in the past has seen violent protests over chronic electricity cuts and poor public services, a group of protesters burned tires to block roads during a demonstration demanding the return of electricity.

The Electricity Ministry said power transmission lines have been routinely sabotaged by unknown groups in northern Iraq in recent weeks. One 400 kilovolt line from Kirkuk to Qayara was targeted Thursday, the ministry said in a statement. Another 132 kV line was hit in Salahhadin on the same day.

Local TV channels initially reported that the outage on Friday was due to the cutting of a major 400 kV line between Baghdad and the southern province of Babylon. The ministry has not confirmed the incident.

Total shutdowns can also occur when Iraq's electricity network is working at maximum capacity. Defects in the transmission network and distribution capacity also contribute to outages. High temperatures can also impact the distribution lines.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi formed a crisis cell to take immediate measures to address shortages, according to a statement from his office.

Temperatures in Baghdad and other governorates have been soaring above 48 degrees Celsius (118 Fahrenheit) in recent days. The government declared an official holiday in Baghdad on Thursday due to the scorching heatwave.

In the densely populated Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, Abu Yasar, 63, said he no choice but to soak his clothes in water and lie down on concrete floors at home for comfort.

I have asthma, I am suffering," he said.

The outage also struck wealthier neighborhoods of Baghdad, where some residents typically enjoy 24 hours of electricity. Water pumps, which rely on electricity, stopped working in many areas, impeding access to water.

Fatih Birol, executive director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, said the breakdown in Iraq's electricity grid leaves millions without power needed to cope with extreme temperatures.

We need to address the resilience of systems in a heating world, but today we must focus on averting a humanitarian catastrophe amplified by insecure energy supply, he tweeted.

Iraq-based researcher Sajad Jiyad tweeted: If this isn't resolved quickly it will have catastrophic effects as everything stops working.

Power outages routinely fuel protests in Iraq. Poor government service delivery and rampant corruption was a driver of mass anti-government demonstrations across Iraq in 2019.

Iran cut crucial electricity exports to Iraq this week, which can amount to nearly a third of Iraq's supply in the peak summer months. Iraq's Electricity Minister Majed Hantoush also recently resigned, citing political and popular pressure.

Iraq is capable of generating up to 20,000 MW, but the actual capacity  owing to technical losses and other issues  averages between 12,000-17,000 MW during the summer months.
Mapping The Tech Talent Shortage: How Security Businesses Can Bridge The Gap

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 prioritize 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 businessOf 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 worldwideCOVID-19 has only widened the talent gap. Many companies had to rapidly accelerate their digitization 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 program 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 program 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.
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Good morning, Bay Area. Its Friday, July 2, and dont put away some of your masks just yet  you may need them for wildfire smoke. Heres what you need to know to start your day.

In his continuing series on how the Bay Area is preparing  or not  for sea level rise, John King looks at Hayward, a city heavily at risk from rising waters driven by climate change. Its also the focus of the Bay Areas most far-reaching response yet to sea level rise  a recently approved 50-year plan that includes a once-unthinkable option.

Read more of this story exclusively for Chronicle print and digital subscribers.

Previously: Sea level rise in San Franciscos eastern shore and Foster City.

Pandemic impacts

In the before times, more than 90% of farmers market customers for Dirty Girl Produce used cash to buy its dry-farmed tomatoes, Little Gems lettuce and haricot vert beans. That switched totally during the pandemic, with 90% using cards or phones to pay.

While cash use at farmers markets has increased again as the state has reopened and vaccinations have increased, its still far short of where it used to be. Carolyn Said reports on whether a cashless economy or just less cash is the future.

 While rates are still considered low, COVID cases are up more than 20% in Bay Area and California since the June 15 reopening.

 BART will expand late-night service and increase train frequencies on weekdays.

Around the Bay

Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle

 Pier 24: Acclaimed S.F. photo gallery to reopen after fighting COVID and an eviction notice.

 Earthquake is primary concern: Could a building collapse like the Florida disaster happen in the Bay Area? More: Who pays when a building fails? Depends on timing and location.

 Just over two months to go: Newsom recall election set for Sept. 14.

 A preview: U.S. House passes a major infrastructure bill  but not the one youre thinking of.

 Wanting a Blank Space: Why did an Alameda County deputy play a Taylor Swift song while arguing with protesters?

 Speaking of pop stars: Kanye Wests team name-dropped world-famous Noma to get a last-minute table at an in-demand S.F. restaurant.

 2020 California crime report: Fewer rapes and robberies, but more homicides.

 New round of California stimulus checks coming: Heres what we know.

 Up the coast from Santa Cruz: Beer favorite Humble Sea introduces huge coastal Pacifica taproom.

Fire season

Sarahbeth Maney/Special to The Chronicle 2019

Since Californias recent pandemic reopening, many vaccinated residents have been shedding their masks. But in addition to rising concerns about the delta variant, there may be another good reason to hang onto them: wildfire smoke.

Masks became part of our daily apparel during the pandemic, but which of the face coverings we bought to help protect us from the coronavirus also shield us from the harmful effects of wildfire smoke?

 Three significant wildfires are collectively burning across nearly 32,000 acres of Northern California. Heres the latest information on each fire.

 Intense heat from Northern California fires has created pyrocumulus clouds.

 Scientists issue urgent plea for drought-stricken states such as California to skip the fireworks.

 Hitting the road for the Fourth? How to stay safe during fire season in California.

Bay Briefing is written by Taylor Kate Brown, Anna Buchmann and Kellie Hwang and sent to readers email inboxes on weekday mornings. Sign up for the newsletter here, and contact the writers at taylor.brown@sfchronicle.com, anna.buchmann@sfchronicle.com and kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com.
San Francisco police on Thursday asked for the publics help locating a second suspect in the slaying of Jace Young, a 6-year-old boy who was gunned down while watching Fourth of July fireworks last year.

Police said Deshaune Lumpkin is wanted on suspicion of killing Jace and carrying a loaded firearm in the Bayview neighborhood the night of July 4. The 18-year old suspect is considered armed and dangerous, the police said in a statement Thursday afternoon.

In January, police arrested James Harbor, also 18, in Jaces killing. Harbor was served search and arrest warrants at the 100 block of Font Boulevard in San Franciscos Parkmerced neighborhood.

Harbor and Lumpkin are the only suspects in the slaying, said Robert Rueca, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department.

I dont feel like the city has done enough to get this little boy and his family some justice, Jaces dad, Jason Young, said Thursday evening. This is one of the biggest murder cases in San Francisco in a number of years and a year later we still have suspects on the street.

Jaces family planned to honor the boy, whom they described as intelligent and empathetic beyond his years, by painting a giant street mural on Yosemite Avenue on Sunday, the one year anniversary of his killing.

In August, San Francisco police announced a $100,000 reward to anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of Jaces killer.

At 10:44 p.m. on July 4, San Francisco police were dispatched to a call of a shooting near the 1200 block of Ingalls Street, where they found Jace and a 39-year-old man suffering from gunshot wounds. The man was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

Police at the time said that they did not believe Jace or the man were the intended targets and that they were both innocent bystanders hit by gunfire.

Chronicle Staff Writer Megan Cassidy contributed to this report.

Nora Mishanec is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nora.mishanec@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NMishanec
The slow gray ships and the fast blue airplanes are coming back to San Francisco this fall as the popular Fleet Week celebration returns from its pandemic hiatus.

Were bringing ships, were bringing aircraft, were bringing equipment, were bringing bands, said rear admiral Wayne Baze, announcing the return of the 9-day festival on Thursday along the San Francisco Embarcadero.

The best thing were going to bring is young sailors, Marines and Coast Guard men and women to meet you, the admiral added. We could not be with you in 2020 but I do believe absence makes the heart grow fonder.

The annual celebration, to be held from October 3 to October 11, will likely feature a parade of ships both U.S. and foreign, along with open houses and tours of those ships, a lineup of concerts, a show featuring hero military dogs and an air show that includes the cacophonous, choreographed precision flying of the Blue Angels in their F-18 Super Hornet fighters. The schedule and the ships themselves have not yet been announced.

During Fleet Week, sailors from the U.S. and other nations wander around town, often on their best behavior. People who love the Blue Angels for their flying and people who detest the Blue Angels for their noise make themselves heard in roughly equal numbers.

Port director Elaine Forbes called Fleet Week a cornerstone event for the waterfrontand declared that summer on the waterfront is here.

Mayor London Breed, standing alongside the admiral, said the gradual reopening of San Francisco  including the reopening of cable car service in August  wouldnt be the same unless we had Fleet Week returning in October.

For those who cannot wait until October to board a ship, the World War II-vintage U.S. Jeremiah OBrien is reopening for visits on Friday, at $20 per visit, and Sausalito ferry service resumes on Saturday. Sausalito ferry tickets, normally $14 each way, will be free from Saturday through Monday, as will tickets on the Larkspur ferry.

An estimated 1 million people turn out for the annual Fleet Week celebration along the San Francisco waterfront, traditionally held during the second week of October.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF
When a buildings occupants are harmed because the structure was badly constructed, inspected or maintained, who is legally responsible?

It depends on where you live and the harm you suffered. But the short answer is that if an old building collapses and residents are injured or killed, the buildings developer and its designers, such as architects and structural engineers, can be sued in California  but probably not in Florida.

The reason is a law in nearly all states called the statute of repose, which sets a strict time limit on liability after construction  to give those taking part in the construction certainty, after some period of time, that they cannot be successfully sued, said Shanin Specter, a law professor at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

In California, a builder, architects and others involved in real estate construction cannot be sued for financial losses more than 10 years after the building is completed  but the limit does not apply to suits for physical injuries or deaths, which can be filed within two years of the date the harm was suffered.

In Florida, where the death toll is mounting daily from the June 24 collapse of a 40-year-old beachfront condominium near Miami, the time limit is 12 years, and it applies to all suits, for physical harm as well as economic losses. But some lawyers say the deadline may be less rigid in practice than it is on paper.

Since Florida courts look at limitations defenses unfavorably, applicability of the statute is sometimes successfully challenged based on the facts of each case, said Wes Pittman, a personal-injury lawyer in Panama City, Fla. The more grievous the injuries, the more likely a court will be to listen to arguments that the statute should not apply.

Statutes of repose raise significant issues of fairness because they deny access to the court system for innocent victims, said Specter, noting that the laws have been declared unconstitutional in a few states and interpreted flexibly in others.

And even if the builder is off the hook, others might not be  like the homeowners association that reportedly was warned of potentially serious structural problems at the Florida building in 2018 and was planning a repair project when the building crumbled.

Rarely is the problem caused by one person, said Robert Riggs, a lawyer for San Francisco condominium residents in a groundbreaking 2014 California Supreme Court case on responsibility for badly designed residential buildings. We have some mechanisms in California that are at least intended to make sure somebody looks at these buildings before they collapse.

Too often, those that hold the purse strings bury their heads in the sand, then try to run for cover when the foreseeable calamity occurs, said Frank Pitre, an attorney for occupants of Millennium Tower, the 58-story luxury condo that opened in downtown San Francisco in 2009 and was discovered seven years later to be leaning westward while sinking into the mud beneath its foundation.

The cost of repairs has been estimated at $100 million, including $30 million from taxpayer-funded agencies. Developers also reached a confidential settlement with the occupants.

Although most states have similar laws on responsibility for construction defects, California has been a judicial leader in applying that responsibility broadly. In 2014, the state Supreme Court said residents of a plush 595-unit San Francisco condominium who complained of overheating, water leaks and structural cracks could sue not only the developer but also the architectural firms that designed the building, near what is now Oracle Park.

The architects lawyers argued that they had only made recommendations to the builder. But in a unanimous ruling, the court said developers  and residents  rely on the competence of building designers, who were paid over $5 million for their work and must be held responsible for the consequences. Defendants in the suit later reached a confidential settlement with the Beacon Residential Community Association, representing the condos owners and residents.

The Beacon condo was less than 10 years old and therefore wasnt subject to Californias statute of repose. That law requires suits against builders and their associates for economic losses caused by negligence to be filed within 10 years if the defect was not obvious. If it was, the limit is four years. No time limit applies if the developer has engaged in willful misconduct or fraud.

That limit does not apply to physical injuries or deaths and would not have protected the builders of a fourth-floor apartment balcony in downtown Berkeley that collapsed in June 2015. Six students fell 50 feet to their deaths and seven were injured.

Investigators found that the balconys wooden support beams had been rotted by water damage, and the state later revoked the developers construction license, saying a properly built balcony could have supported 13 or more people. The builder ultimately reached a confidential multimillion-dollar settlement with the students and their families.

One common feature in construction cases, in California or any other state, is that once a court allows a suit against the builder or anyone else, other participants will soon be roped in, said John Foust, a San Francisco attorney who has represented building owners, developers and contractors.

The builder will pass the obligations ... to the contractor, then to the subcontractor, and theyll usually point the finger at the architect and the structural engineer, Foust said. Having more parties means having more wallets, more insurance carriers. ... Its easier to settle the case before going to trial.

Another lesson to be drawn from the cases is that people in the system dont seem to learn much from catastrophes, said Robert Bea, a longtime professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley. Collapsed buildings and dams, preventable floods, utility fires and explosions, these things happen over and over, he said.

We have disasters, get them fixed, want to return to our pleasant lives as quickly as possible, Bea said. We think we can afford it. They (the victims) cant.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
JASON ANDREW;Jason Andrew/New York Times

A Madera County man who federal authorities said was involved in the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol as a self-proclaimed member of the far-right Proud Boys group has been arrested by the FBI.

Officials identified Ricky Christopher Willden, 39, of Oakhurst in the San Joaquin Valley, through publicly available videos as one of the Capitol rioters who charged through police barricades as Congress was certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He was arrested on Wednesday.
Several roads near Grizzly Peak and Lake Merritt in Oakland will be closed during the Fourth of July holiday to reduce crowding and to allow emergency vehicles easier access to fire hazard zones in case flames spark from fireworks, according to the citys fire department.

Grizzly Peak Boulevard between Skyline Boulevard and Centennial Drive will be closed to all automobile traffic from Sunday at 5 a.m. to Monday at 5 a.m. in response to concerns about fire safety and emergency vehicle access during the celebrations, city officials said.

Access points to Grizzly Peak near very high fire hazard zones will be closed to reduce fire risks throughout the holiday weekend.

The decision to limit vehicle traffic along key corridors proved successful last year along Grizzly Peak where fire danger is extremely high and roads are narrow, and we expect similar results this year, said Oakland Fire Department Chief Reginald Freeman in a statement.

Electronic signs and city personnel will be present at these intersections to prevent traffic from entering: Grizzly Peak at Centennial Drive, Grizzly Peak at S. Park Drive, Grizzly Peak at Lomas Cantada, Grizzly Peak at Claremont Avenue, and Grizzly Peak at Skyline Boulevard.

Lakeshore Avenue along Lake Merritt will be partially closed to improve traffic safety and allow for greater park access for bicyclists and pedestrians, officials said.

Officials said several thousand people are expected to visit the Lake Merritt area during the holiday weekend. Cars are often seen double or even triple-parked from MacArthur Boulevard to E. 18th Avenue during the summer holidays, creating traffic jams and blocking roads, according to the fire department.

Road closures and parking restrictions around Lake Merritt will be in effect Saturday and Sunday from 4 a.m. to midnight.

Lakeshore Avenue will be closed between MacArthur Boulevard and East 18th Street. Intersections at Beacon Street, Boden Way, Brooklyn Avenue, Wayne Avenue, and Hanover Avenue will be closed. No parking will be allowed in these areas.

The Lakeshore Avenue exit on Interstate 580 west will be closed, but the Grand Avenue exit will remain open, officials said.

Grand Avenue at Lake Merritt between Macarthur Boulevard and Bellevue Avenue and the Bellevue Avenue Loop and its cross streets will be closed. The areas will only be open to local residents and those with tickets for the Childrens Fairyland. Parking will not be permitted in the area.

Vanessa Arredondo is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vanessa.arredondo@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @v_anana
On a recent afternoon, someone called San Francisco Thai destination Nari wanting a last-minute reservation for six people  its going to be a table of Noma people, the person said, according to restaurant owner Pim Techamuanvivit.

Techamuanvivits staffers thought maybe Danish chef and Noma owner Rene Redzepi, whose New Nordic restaurant has repeatedly been ranked the best restaurant on Earth on the Worlds 50 Best list, was in San Francisco. Fortunately, Naris semi-private dining room was open that night.

But it wasnt Redzepi who walked through the door. It was Kanye West.

Techamuanvivit, who was welcoming people at the door that night, didnt recognize the masked West at first. She was looking for a familiar Noma face instead. A woman asked for the most secluded table possible, according to Techamuanvivit. Regardless, the semi-private dining room was the only option.

Kimberley Hasselbrink/Special to The Chronicle 2020

A Nari manager was the first staffer to realize the rappers presence a few minutes after the Noma party was seated.

A couple (employees) were very, very fangirl-excited, Techamuanvivit said. Some of the cooks were definitely disappointed it wasnt Rene.

The group feasted on som tum mamuang, spicy mango salad with cashews; gaeng rawang muan, a crispy roulade of chicken in green curry; gaeng kua pla, black cod curry with grilled pineapple; and other dishes.

When Techamuanvivit dropped off food, she asked the table: So, who works for my friend Rene? The woman who previously requested Naris most private table smiled and said Hes not here, according to the Nari owner.

They were very normal, not loud, not demanding  just perfectly polite people happy to eat the food, Techamuanvivit said. Definitely not what you might think of as rockstar people.

Kimberley Hasselbrink/Special to The Chronicle 2020

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

Would West have snagged a coveted table at Nari if his team used Wests name instead of Nomas? Techamuanvivit said yes, simply because Nari happened to have that semi-private room available that night. When the restaurant is really busy, she cant create a table out of thin air, whether its for West, Madonna or Redzepi, Techamuanvivit said. Press representatives for West and Noma didnt immediately respond to requests for comment.

Celebrities arent an abnormal sight at Nari, so the restaurant has strict rules that staff cant post anything on social media while the famous person is dining  but afterwards is OK. Techamuanvivit declined to say exactly when West was at the restaurant to respect his privacy, though she posted on Twitter about the visit on Thursday.

I think if it was just Kanye coming in, I wouldnt have tweeted it, she said. It was funny that we were expecting Rene and it was Kanye.

Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker
As Bay Area residents prepare to celebrate Fourth of July weekend, San Francisco officials are advising people to stay on guard against the growing threat of the delta variant of the coronavirus and take precautions.

Its like COVID on steroids, Dr. Grant Colfax, director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said of the more contagious variant. Its about 30% of cases locally right now. Within just a few months, we expect it to be over 90% of our cases.

Even though nearly three-quarters of San Franciscos eligible population of people ages 12 and over are fully vaccinated, there are still thousands of residents who have not got their shots and remain far more vulnerable to infection. The delta variant, first reported in India, is estimated to be 75% more contagious than the original coronavirus.

This is not a good time to be unvaccinated in San Francisco, Colfax said. People may have the misperception that because our vaccine rates are high, even if theyre not vaccinated they are unlikely to catch the virus. I think delta has shifted the equation.

New coronavirus cases have jumped more than 20% in California and the Bay Area since the June 15 lifting of most pandemic restrictions, with the delta variant driving the largest proportion of new infections, according to data compiled by the state health department.

Although the increase in cases amounts to a relatively small number in San Francisco  with the average total of new daily infections jumping from 11 to 13  people who are unvaccinated are going to get much more severe infections, are much more likely to end up in the hospital and far more likely to die than those who are vaccinated, Colfax said.

With fireworks and Independence Day festivities set to return to the San Francisco waterfront over the weekend, the health department is reminding people that everyone must still wear masks in some situations regardless of vaccination status. Those settings include public transit, airplanes, health care facilities and shelters. Also, businesses are free to require everyone to wear masks.

People should also seek outdoor activities, according to guidance issued Friday by the health department.

Colfax said out-of-town visitors, tourists and business travelers coming into the city throughout the summer could also increase the risk for locals.

Los Angeles County health officials strongly recommended this week that all residents resume wearing masks in indoor public spaces. Colfax said his office is not ready to advise that just yet.

Were going to continue to watch what happens with delta, he said. Right now, were following state and (federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recommendations. We just want to ensure that people understand our ticket out is the vaccinations.

Even though the city shut down its high-volume vaccination site at City College this week, Moscone Center South will remain open for people wanting their shots through July 14. Officials said vaccinations are also widely available through drop-in community clinics, health care providers and major pharmacies like Walgreens, CVS and Safeway.

We are not out of the woods by any means, Colfax said. At the same time, we have these incredible tools to prevent the spread of COVID, including delta.

Aidin Vaziri is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com
Independence Day is just around the corner. Americans show their patriotism in various ways during the holiday. Some fly the American flag, others shoot off fireworks. Some attend parades and other celebrations. This Fourth of July, the most patriotic thing we can do is get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Not only does getting vaccinated protect oneself, but it also protects other Americans, including children under 12 years of age who are not yet eligible to get vaccinated. What is more patriotic than doing our part preventing other Americans from getting sick and dying?

David Eichar, Sonoma

Efforts to fix climate

Congratulations on a great and much needed article, Regenerative farms fight climate change (Front Page, June 30) by Tara Duggan. Duggan did a brilliant job. I hope The Chronicle will continue to publish lengthy articles on the climate crisis and the efforts that are being made on many fronts to deal with the crisis.

Joel Isaacson, Berkeley

More for you Opinion Here's how farmers are helping with climate change -...

Not a solution

As California reels from extreme drought, the agricultural industry is looking climate change square in the face. But every cattle producer paid to store carbon in the soil is also contributing methane to the environment, a potent greenhouse gas with 84 to 86 times the global warming potential of carbon.

Regenerative practices such as no-till, cover crops and increasing biodiversity are welcome strategies used for centuries.

But they are not a climate solution. In the largest meta-analysis of global food systems studying 38,000 farms in 119 countries, cattle and sheep are the most impactful foods we produce worse for the planet than the next 20 foods combined (Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek, Science, 2018).

The controversy over the Point Reyes National Seashore, where native wildlife are fenced out from water resources and thirsting to death so regenerative cattle producers can replenish cattle on public lands, points to greenwashing in the environmental claims by this industry.

While temperatures soar and watersheds dwindle, we need to produce the food that aligns with our environment. Water guzzling ruminants with a heavy climate impact dont align with that vision.

Jennifer Molidor, Petaluma

Much needed housing

With our joyous return to the hum of daily life, its time to roll up our sleeves and get serious about building housing. The pandemic simultaneously slowed our citys planning processes and showed us how vulnerable our residents are to displacement.

Housing is needed more than ever  in all neighborhoods, not just in the usual Chinatown-Mission-SoMa-Tenderloin neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Even efforts to fill in the pocket lots of upper-middle class neighborhoods with small numbers of affordable units will allow all districts to contribute to a solution.

Im ready, with a 13-unit building at 4512 23rd St. that includes three below-market rate apartments on the edge of Corona Heights and Twin Peaks, using the citys housing bonus regulations.

Alas, here, as in other well-heeled enclaves of the city, neighbors are deploying lawyers to block even this modest effort.

Weve had months of introspection and sobering loss of lives, livelihoods and homes to think about how we can make our communities work for everyone.

A return to life as we knew it should include welcoming housing. We owe it to our fellow San Franciscans, and not just the San Franciscans who can afford it.
SACRAMENTO  Firearm sales surged by 57% in California in 2020 to their highest level in five years.

Attorney General Rob Bonta reported Thursday that Californians legally bought 1,166,836 guns last year, the most since 2016, when 1,276,163 were purchased.

That total includes 686,435 handguns  the most in a single year since the state Department of Justice began tracking in 1996 and nearly 66% more than 2019  and 480,401 long guns, up about 46% from the prior year.

Bonta said many factors could have contributed to the skyrocketing sales, including the fear and uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic. He tied the wider availability of weapons to another trend that emerged last year: rising violence across the state, including massive increases in the number of homicides and domestic violence calls where a gun was involved.

We can safely say that the pandemic had a monumental impact on daily life here in California, Bonta said during a news conference. With more weapons, more economic stagnation, more desperation. I think those are all potential components and drivers of where we are today.

While the year began with gun sales slightly below the same period in 2019, according to state data, they spiked in March, as the state shut down to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and again in June, as protests against racism and police brutality swept the state.

Bonta joined at his news conference with Amanda Wilcox, a longtime activist with the gun safety organization Brady California, to promote use of gun violence restraining orders.

The so-called red flag law allows police, immediate family members, roommates, employers, co-workers and school officials to seek the removal of guns from someone they believe poses a danger to themselves or others. A judge can order the person to give up their guns for three weeks or, after a hearing, extend the ban up to five years. The person can then petition once a year to have the weapons returned.

Advocates argue the restraining orders are an effective tool to prevent not just mass shootings, but also suicides and domestic violence, which account for far more firearms deaths, by allowing officials to act on warning signs and seize weapons from people before they act.

Under a gun violence restraining order, you can always get a gun back. You cant get a life back, said Wilcox, whose teenage daughter was killed in 2001 while working as a receptionist at a local mental health services agency.

But implementation of the law remains regional, more than five years after it took effect. A Chronicle analysis found that nearly two-thirds of the gun violence restraining orders issued in 2020 came from just five counties.

Bonta said his office is working to raise awareness of the law and could take additional steps in the future to promote its use, particularly among law enforcement agencies, which seek the vast majority of orders each year.

Our goal is to increase their use on the ground, Bonta said. We will consider other options for how we can help to really move the needle here, including training, including issuing a bulletin.

Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff
In most ways, San Francisco felt quieter last year  but not when it came to fireworks. Whether because everything else was so subdued or because people were actually setting more fireworks off, the citys pyrotechnics generated nearly three times more complaints in 2020 than they did in 2019.

The Chronicle analyzed the San Francisco Police Departments calls for service data to determine how many fireworks-related calls the department received from 2018 through June 2021.

We found that people made 463 fireworks-related calls in 2020, up from just 158 in 2019. And while calls for all three complete years we examined were concentrated in the traditionally fireworks-heavy months of June and July, 2020 also had more fireworks complaints than 2019 and 2018 in most other months as well.

Unsurprisingly, the most common day for fireworks complaints is July 4. Thirty nine complaints were made on July 4, 2020, nearly twice as many as any other day that year. Complaints also spike slightly around the New Year. Of the top 30 days with the most fireworks-related calls over 2018, 2019 and 2020, Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 were the only days not in the months of June or July.

The call data also show that fireworks complains were particularly high in June 2020, near the beginning of the pandemic and during the protests following George Floyds death. In all the other years we looked at, complaints peaked in July. In 2020, they were highest in June.

With San Francisco fully reopened and Fourth of July on the horizon, complaints appear to be declining in 2021, though they are not back to pre-pandemic levels. Through June 19 of this year, people have made 105 fireworks-related calls to police  down from 136 by that date in 2020.

Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: susie.neilson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson

Data spotlight The Chronicle this year hired five journalists who will use data-driven techniques to cover news stories across the Bay Area. The teams work will appear in the newspaper on Sundays and Mondays. See more of their stories, analyses and interactive features at sfchronicle.com/data .
The Saloon in San Francisco can get so raucous that Cathy Lemons, singer for the Lucky Losers, would start her set by announcing, Weve got JoAnne behind the bar.

That was the signal for the crowd to take note of who was in charge of the old, wooden blues club in North Beach, no matter how rowdy it got.

JoAnne DeSantis took pride in that. I have seen her tougher than tough with people, Lemons said. Joanne could terrify an unruly drunk. She could terrify him right out the door.

But you dont last 32 years behind the plank on fear alone. DeSantis was hired help, and she was warm and friendly  right until the moment she needed to be cold and stern.

DeSantis worked Wednesday and Thursday nights and Saturday afternoons as the lone bartender, with only a barback to wash the glasses and keep the bottles stocked. Her arrival was usually a spectacle because she brought with her a display case of jewelry she made from sterling silver. Shed set it up at the end of the bar and sell earrings, bracelets and necklaces  at half price for musicians.

DeSantis always wore a black apron and never missed a shift, even when her knees went bad from all the standing. But just before the pandemic lockdown, Lemons came in for her regular Saturday set fronting the Dave Workman Band, and DeSantis was not there.

Lemons asked bar owner Myron Mu afterward and was told that DeSantis was in the hospital with a heart condition.

Lemons was hopeful, but when the Saloon finally reopened on June 19, DeSantis was still not there. She had died a day earlier at a hospice in Daly City. The cause of death has not been released by the coroner, but DeSantis suffered from congestive heart failure, said her niece Erin Mshar. She was 78.

She was always looking out for the bands, Lemons said. Thats why we loved her.

JoAnne DeSantis was born Dec. 1, 1942, in Youngstown, Ohio, where she grew up. Her mothers family owned a bar and an Italian restaurant. Long after shed moved to San Francisco, she would come home to Youngstown for Christmas and always make a big Italian dinner of spaghetti and meatballs.

After graduating from Ursuline High School in 1960, she attended Youngstown State University but left to attend Lewis Weinberger and Hill School of Cosmetology. She then moved to Boston and worked as a hairdresser before moving to San Francisco in 1970. She found work dressing hair, and on a trip to Barra de Navidad, Mexico, she learned to make jewelry out of sterling silver. She became a vendor working the art fair circuit.

She was bartending at the Lost and Found, a neighborhood bar on Grant Avenue, when Mu hired her on Halloween in 1987. That immediately advanced her to the loud give-and-take of a live music joint with no cover charge most nights and cash-only bar. Capacity is 49, and they are often packed wall to wall.

When the band would take a break, DeSantis would come around from behind the bar and go onstage to take the microphone and instruct the customers, often European blues tourists, how a bar economy worked.

Shed hold up the tip jar and say, The drinks are cheap and strong, but you have to tip the band so we can keep the drinks cheap and strong, Lemons said.

Among those who tipped was photographer Scott Palmer, who spent 17 years on the customer side of the bar while documenting the scene for his monograph Saloonatics, published in 2010.

It was touchy getting cooperation of people who dont necessarily want their image associated with a blues bar. But when he asked permission of DeSantis, she said, Sure, whatever, he said. We were friends after that.

DeSantis is one of 13 people photographed at the Saloon by Palmer who are now deceased, perhaps an indicator of the hard living inside an old wooden blues bar.

The thing I always enjoyed about the Saloon is it was more like a clubhouse than a bar, Palmer said. As evidence, DeSantis would host Thanksgiving dinner at her apartment on Telegraph Hill. All of the club members were invited, which meant anybody who didnt have family to visit instead. It was potluck, but DeSantis cooked the turkey for 20 or 30 guests pressed into a one-bedroom unit. At 8:30 p.m., theyd all walk down the hill to the Saloon, which opened at 8:30 p.m. with DeSantis behind the bar.

She was like the Saloon host, Lemons said. If there was a special occasion shed always bring a cake, and shed cut it and hand out the slices on paper plates.

On Saturday, July 31, a memorial will be held at the Saloon from 4 to 8 p.m., her usual shift behind the bar. Lemons will front the Lucky Losers band, with others sitting in.

It will be lonely for me because JoAnne was a great friend, Lemons said. You didnt break the rules with her. If you did, shed yell, Youre out of here buddy, with a thundering voice that could scare you to death.

DeSantis is survived by nieces Krista Craft, Erin Mshar and Anna Mshar of Youngstown, Ohio, and the Saloonatics at the corner of Grant Avenue and Fresno Street in North Beach.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@samwhitingsf
San Francisco Supervisor Gordon Mar always knew that building a low-income housing complex smack in the middle of the Sunset District would be a tough sell. But even he may have underestimated the vehemence and passion of the opposition.

That sentiment was on display Wednesday night as nearly 200 opponents of a 98-unit development proposed for the site of the Police Credit Union at 2550 Irving St. filled the social hall at St. Annes of the Sunset. The gathering amounted to a raucous open rebellion against a seven-story building residents say would block sunlight, stir up toxins, wipe out parking, snarl traffic and dwarf the single-family homes that run along the avenues behind the property.

The hall was festooned with signs, in both English and Chinese, with messages like Be Kind To The Adjacent Community, Tell the Supervisors To Stop Toxic Waste, and The Right To Light For All Neighborhoods. At several points during the night, those in attendance targeted Mar, a strong affordable housing proponent, chanting Recall Mar, Recall Mar to cheers.

Organizers said that the immediate purpose of the rally was to put pressure on the Board of Supervisors to reject a $14.7 million loan that would allow Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. to acquire the property, which is currently home to the San Francisco Police Credit Union. That vote on the loan is scheduled to take plan in July before the board goes on its August recess.

Flo Kimmerling, founder of the Mid-Sunset Neighborhood Association, urged the crowd to bombard Mar and the other supervisors with calls and letters expressing displeasure with the proposal.

Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle

Plead with them to say no, no no to the $14.7 million loan.  Once that land is sold, we have lost any leverage, she said. I want to hear your voice, which is the theme of today. Can we count on you?

The crowd roared in approval.

Despite the hostility of the crowd, Mar  who had to leave early to attend another meeting  thanked them for showing up and said, I hear your concerns tonight.

This is an example of what makes the Sunset great, he said. Its a deep passion and concern and commitment about our neighborhood. This is also fostering an important conversation in our neighborhood about how we address the affordability crisis.

The proposed development comes as Mayor London Breed is pushing to add housing on the west side of San Francisco, including the Sunset and Richmond districts, neighborhoods where residents have routinely blocked both affordable and market-rate housing. In addition to the Irving Street project, the city is going forward with a 100-unit affordable teachers housing development on 43rd Avenue and 98 units of low-income senior housing at 4200 Geary Blvd. There has never been an affordable project built in the Sunset.

If city officials were hopeful that residents would warm up to density on the west side, the crowd on Wednesday made it clear that is unlikely. Residents warned that redeveloping the property would endanger the health of neighbors because the soil beneath the current credit union building contained toxins from previous uses, which included a funeral home, gas station and dry cleaner. They repeatedly said that they would support a lower-density, four-story building with far more parking than the current iteration, which calls for a minimum of 11 spaces.

Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle

Joe Tam, a retired city social worker whose job included helping place families in affordable housing, said the project hurts our interests.

It blocks the sunshine for the neighboring residents, he said. We struggle for parking on a daily basis; with the construction of this building it will be worse. We will be struggling with parking every day.

Residents complained that the project price tag of $94 million  more than $900,000 a unit  was excessive. Attorney Joe Bravo, who was the MC for the meeting, urged residents to engage with all the members of the Board of Supervisors.

If you do not, the political wind in the city will make sure whoever is in office votes the way they think is convenient, he said. And what they think right now is San Francisco needs to build affordable housing. As we do, too. But at what cost and under what circumstances. And how are we going to do it to protect our environment and our health and our safety?

Missing from the meeting was any response from the nonprofit developer, TNDC, or the Mayors Office of Housing and Community Development, the agency that oversees affordable housing construction in the city. Bravo said he invited representatives from both organizations to speak, but, though they were in attendance, they declined to speak.

After the meeting Jackson Rabinowitsh, project manager from TNDC, said the invitation was last-minute and that he felt listening to residents grievances would be more productive than engaging in a tit for tat about the facts of the project.

He said that the concerns expressed reinforced what we had heard before. He said that lost in the debate about the cleanup of the site and the shadows the building might cast is the point of the project in the first place: San Francisco lacks affordable housing, and working-class families are increasingly being squeezed out of neighborhoods like the Sunset, where the average home costs $1.8 million and a two-bedroom apartment goes for $4,500 a month.

This project is an investment in working families, and its a direct response to a housing crisis brought on by decades of underdevelopment, he said. What we are talking about is housing people currently living in overcrowded or substandard housing, or having to leave the city altogether.

He said TNDC is looking at ways to increase the amount of parking and redesigning a ground floor to include a day care center, which is something residents have asked for.

MOHCD Director Eric Shaw said, It is unfortunate that this project has been largely misrepresented by a few select surrounding neighbors.

We remain confident that the proposed acquisition of 2550 Irving will provide the kind of housing needed in the Sunset to help stop the displacement of families who can no longer afford the high housing costs, he said, adding that the project is consistent with the priorities laid out by city policy leaders.

The crowd was made up mostly of longtime retired homeowners, most of whom said they had been in the neighborhood for three or four decades. Notably absent were younger renters like Andrew deCoriolis, who lives on 26th Avenue and can see the Irving Street parcel from his window. He is a supporter.

The big picture is that we need more housing  its not that complicated, he said. San Francisco needs hundreds of thousands of new units and every neighborhood is going to have to build. Do I want a big building on my block? Not necessarily, but we all need it. Its inevitable we are all going to have to allow some amount of change in our neighborhood.

J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen
Masaye Waugh was looking outside the window of Bootleg Bar & Kitchen when a horrible lightbulb went off over just how long it was going to take San Francisco to complete its first bus rapid transit project on Van Ness Avenue.

It was November 2017. Sales at Bootleg Bar on the corner of Van Ness and Green Street that Waugh co-owned had plummeted in the past month. The sidewalk outside the bar was ripped out as part of the Van Ness Improvement Project. Chain-link fencing and staging areas had been propped up outside the bar for months and made it appear as if it was closed for business. Actual construction work appeared at a standstill.

Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle 2018

I was standing there comparing our sales for the past month and looking out the window at that fence, and I realized we were f, said Waugh, who shut down the bar in October 2018.

City officials have repeatedly said that the perpetual delays on the Van Ness project, which will add rapid bus lanes and revitalize one of San Franciscos major corridors, were due to unexpected complications of doing construction work on a very old roadway with aging underground infrastructure.

But a new San Francisco civil grand jury report found that many of the projects setbacks were foreseeable and avoidable had the city done its homework before construction got underway.

The report found that the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the lead agency on the project, did not adequately assess the projects potential risks in working underground in the decade of planning and preconstruction before beginning construction work in 2016. It also found that the city partnered with a general contractor that had less technical expertise than another contractor in part because of a bid process that emphasized cost savings over experience.

Paul Chinn/The Chronicle 2020

The agency took action after it realized the underground utility maps used for the project were unreliable, but setbacks fractured its relationship with the general conractor, Walsh Construction, and some disputes over the project took years to resolve, according to the report.

The result: A major project aimed at improving transit reliability on one of the citys busiest roads is years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget, leaving years of traffic headaches and financial hardship for small business owners on Van Ness.

The ongoing delays on Van Ness threaten the publics trust in the city and SFMTA to be able to deliver on future projects, the report concluded.

The bus rapid transit project, which had an original completion date in 2019, is now expected to be finished by the end of the year, according to SFMTA officials.

SFMTA Director Jeffrey Tumlin said this week on Twitter that the projects surface work is accelerating and construction workers are almost done pouring red concrete on the Van Ness rapid bus lanes. Once completed, Muni buses driving through the red concrete center lanes on the 2-mile Van Ness corridor will be able to travel faster freed from congestion.

The agency has plans for a similar bus rapid transit project on Geary Boulevard, but paused work during the pandemic. Instead, the agency installed temporary transit-only lanes that run on side lanes as opposed to the center of the road. The smaller-scale efforts implemented during the pandemic have proved successful in speeding up bus transit, SFMTA officials said, and now the agency is considering going that route over another bus rapid transit project.

The civil grand jury report listed several recommendations for the city and SFMTA to implement. They include awarding construction contracts earlier in the project design stages, using exploratory potholing in major-corridor projects involving underground work to reduce risk of potential setbacks and cost overruns, and amending city rules that emphasize cost efficiency over technical quality in selecting contractors.

In a statement, SFMTA spokesperson Erica Kato said the agency appreciated the civil grand jurys report, though it does not properly reflect the roles and responsibilities of a construction management general contractor on a capital construction project as complex as the Van Ness Improvement Project.

Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle

The report highlighted issues identified in prior internal audits, Kato said in the statement, and we are actively working on incorporating lessons learned from those issues into successful projects throughout the city.

Simone Manganelli, a member of the 19-person civil grand jury, said many jurors are Muni riders whove been affected by the Van Ness delays. The jury decided to investigate the project because it wants to see the city succeed in its efforts to improve public transit.

We were really trying to tailor our recommendations so that it actually works for these agencies and helps them work well in the future, Manganelli said.

For many commuters and small businesses on Van Ness Avenue, the impact of the projects delays have been significant.

Waugh, the former Bootleg Bar & Kitchen owner, had reached out to the mayor and Supervisors Catherine Stefani and Aaron Peskin about relief for small businesses on Van Ness but got little response. Waugh said the project  and the citys response  was cruelly executed.

Haytham Hassan depleted $120,000 of his life savings when he closed Helmand Palace, the restaurant he owns on Van Ness near Green Street, for most of 2019 for renovations, thinking that construction would be finished by then and business would return to normal.

But when he reopened December of that year, the construction mess remained with little apparent progress. The pandemic hit soon after, and Hassan was left without his savings and mounting owed back rent. With business at the restaurant in peril, he got a job as a Muni operator to make ends meet.

Hassan hopes the city learns lessons from the Van Ness project, so that other small business owners dont have to go through his experience.

I have no savings. I have no business. I have nothing, Hassan said. Im dying, to be honest with you, from the construction.

Ricardo Cano is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ricardo.cano@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByRicardoCano
In the now-viral video, an activist and an Alameda County sheriff's deputy enter a tense discussion over a sign at a protest for Steven Taylor, a Black man shot and killed by a San Leandro police officer at a Walmart in 2020.

The protest took place Thursday in front of a hearing for Jason Fletcher, the officer charged with involuntary manslaughter for the shooting.

"You just said [the sign] was a tripping hazard," says the protester, James Burch with the Anti Police-Terror Project, to the officer.

"You can't keep twisting this ... let's go back to the beginning," says the officer, Sgt. D. Shelby. "[The sign] was on the walls, right, and you removed it from the walls."

As Burch responds to the deputy, Shelby pulls out his phone and taps the screen a few times.

Then, suddenly, a mechanical snare sound begins blaring from the deputy's cellphone. Taylor Swift's voices comes in, "Nice to meet you, where you been?"  the officer is playing Swift's Grammy-nominated smash "Blank Space."

"Are we having a dance party now?" Burch asks.

"You can record all you want, I just know that it can't be posted to YouTube," the deputy later responds.

The clip has received intense scrutiny since the Oakland-based police abolition group Anti Police-Terror Project posted the video to Twitter. KTVU reports that Shelby was reported internally and is being investigated. The practice was also condemned by an Alameda County sheriff's spokesman.

(Burch did not immediately provide comment to SFGATE.)

The strategy is increasingly being used by police departments and sheriff's offices nationwide to deter activist groups and civilians alike from sharing recordings of officers and other officials.

An incident went viral in February in which a Beverly Hills police officer blasted "Santeria" by the Southern California band Sublime. Another incident in March showed an Illinois sheriff's office worker playing a Blake Shelton song to work around being recorded.

And cases like these will likely just become more common, experts told SFGATE.

"Unfortunately, using copyright as a tool of censorship is a longstanding and effective technique," said Katharine Trendacosta of the San Francisco-based digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Its even easier to do on platforms like YouTube, which have employed automated filters which preemptively remove material when a match is detected. "

How  and why  are law enforcement officers turning to this? The tactic exploits YouTube, Instagram and other social media platforms' automatic filters, which take down videos containing copyrighted material, including pop songs.

"This is a crude exploit of automated content filtering systems and shows the real danger of so-called 'upload filters' that block content from appearing on websites with no human review or discretion," said Erik Stallman, an assistant clinical professor of law at UC Berkeley, in an email to SFGATE.

For instance, once YouTube's system (called Content ID) identifies that a song by Swift or another musician is being played, it will either take down the video without much possibility for recourse or mute or demonetize the video entirely.

This has stopped YouTube content creators and other influencers from featuring popular music in their videos lest they lose money or viewership. Music is uniquely susceptible to copyright claims, Trendacosta said, since "filters are oversensitive to it."

"It is so easy to just play a song when you see someone pointing a camera at you," she added.

And it's part of several algorithmic flaws on YouTube, such as videos of journalists and activists exposing hate speech being taken down for violating the site's anti-hate speech policies. YouTube has done little to rectify this, Stallman argues.

"Unfortunately, refinements to upload filters that make them harder to evade are also making them easier to abuse, as happened here," he said.

And while YouTube does offer an appeals process, it's more often than not time-consuming and not guaranteed to work, even in cases such as this, Stallman says.

But this sort of recording  a newsworthy event that arguably falls under fair use laws  should be protected and kept up, both experts tell SFGATE. And the algorithmic filters used by digital media companies aren't advanced enough to take fair use laws into consideration.

"Having them prevent video from being seen is a huge threat to legal expression online," Trendacosta said.

To be fair, as of Friday morning, the video remains live on the Anti Police-Terror Project's YouTube and Twitter accounts.

Still, copyright laws perhaps did not anticipate this consequence, that officials can use copyrighted media  especially music  to avoid having a light shone on public conflict shared online.

Both Stallman and Trendacosta argue that rather than addressing these issues, YouTube and other social media platforms are merely intensifying their copyright campaigns.

"Im especially concerned because we keep seeing calls for more of these filters, not fewer, and for them to be more restrictive, not less," Trendacosta said. "That would make them even easier to game by anyone trying to prevent well-earned criticism of their actions."
The San Francisco Police Department is seeking the public's assistance in locating a suspect in the Fourth of July shooting of a 6-year-old.

At about 10:44 pm on the Fourth of July last year, officers responded to a call on the unit block of Whitfield Court in the Bayview neighborhood. They found a 6-year-old victim, Jace Young, suffering from life-threatening injuries due to a gunshot wound.

Young was transported to the hospital where he later died.

On July 6, 2020, SFPD investigators arrested James Harbor of San Francisco in relation to the shooting. He was booked on charges of homicide, attempted homicide and carrying a loaded firearm with the intent to commit a felony.

Further investigation led SFPD to identify a second suspect, 18-year-old Deshaune Lumpkin of San Francisco. Police have a warrant for Lumpkin on suspicion of murder, attempted murder, carrying a loaded firearm with the intent to commit a felony and conspiracy. Lumpkin was 17 years old at the time of the crime.



Homicide investigators ask Lumpkin to turn himself in at any San Francisco police station.

The suspect has ties to the Bayview community, police said.

SFPD is also asking for the public's assistance in locating Lumpkin, who is considered "armed and dangerous." If you see Lumpkin, do not approach, but note his location, clothing and any vehicle description and call 911.

SFPD asks anyone with information regarding the investigation to contact San Francisco police homicide investigators via the SFPD 24-hour tip line at 415-575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411 and begin the message with "SFPD." The police department said tipsters may remain anonymous.
Stocks that traded heavily or had substantial price changes Friday:

Alector Inc., up $12.80 to $35.21.

The biotechnology company is collaborating with GlaxoSmithKline to develop treatments for diseases including Parkinsons disease and Alzheimers disease.

Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc., up $1.75 to $44.94.

The spaceflight company's next test flight is scheduled for July 11 and will include founder Richard Branson.

J. Alexanders Holdings Inc., up $1.54 to $13.80.

The upscale restaurant operator is being bought by SPB Hospitality for about $220 million.

Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals Inc., down $21.83 to $63.13.

The pharmaceutical company is pausing a study on a potential cystic fibrosis treatment.

Boeing Co., down $3.05 to $236.68.

One of the airplane maker's 737 cargo planes reportedly made an emergency landing in Hawaii because of engine trouble.

Citigroup Inc., down 60 cents to $70.41.

Banks were weighed down by falling bond yields, which they rely on to charge more lucrative interest on loans.

United Airlines Holdings Inc., down 31 cents to $52.77.

The Transportation Department will propose that airlines be required to refund fees on checked baggage if they arent delivered to passengers quickly enough.

Tesla Inc., up 98 cents to $678.90.

Tesla delivered 201,250 electric vehicles in the second quarter as it overcame a global computer chip shortage.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  MEXICO CITY  In The Forever Purge, the bloodbath lasts more than 12 hours and takes place on the border between Mexico and the United States. Mexican director Everardo Gout uses the strengths of fellow countrymen actors Ana de la Reguera and Tenoch Huerta in the film now in theaters.

The first film in the horror saga created by James DeMonaco was 2013's "The Purge.'' In this installment, De la Reguera plays Adela, who along with husband Juan (Huerta), tries to adapt as an immigrant recently arrived in the United States.

But when the time comes to fight the purge  an annual event where murders, rapes and all kinds of crimes are allowed it extends beyond the established 12 hours. Adela takes up arms and fights alongside the men.

Where are strong women in movies? said Gout in Spanish in a recent video call interview from New York about his choice of the Mexican actress for this character. Where are the women like my mother who raised me with my brothers? 40 years old, complex, complete, beautiful. I was very excited to be able to do that.

The filmmaker, who makes his debut as a Hollywood director with this film, said he always had Huerta in mind. The Mexican actor starred in his debut feature, Days of Grace (Dias de gracia) in 2011, and has been very vocal in his stance against the violation of immigrant rights and racism.

In The Forever Purge, Huerta plays a horse trainer with almost magical abilities to control animals but is nevertheless rejected by the prejudices of Dylan Tucker (Josh Lucas), the white son of the owner of the ranch where he works.

I knew he was the best actor for this role, so I stuck with my decision with the study saying I love Tenoch and Im not going to see anyone else until you show me that there is a better actor out there Gout said. That tape never came because there was no one better.

Unlike Adela, who strives to learn English, Juan does not want to forget his origins.

I think the authenticity that Tenoch gives it is very important and on the contrary, what I said to James (DeMonaco) was lets use his accent, lets use his imperfection of English, said the director.

When the purge spirals out of control, Mexicans and Americans alike seek refuge in Mexico.

It has a lot of ironies and a lot of messages that I think are important, Gout said. The movie never falls from its shell of being a horror movie and a thriller ... (but) with that shell the waves can be political, it can be racial, it can be anything because it is organic for the characters.

Though "The Purge'' saga is fictional, with the very real rising levels of divisiveness, intolerance and violence in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic could fiction become reality?

Obviously we shot it before all the disaster that happened in America in the last year, but I think thats the genius of James DeMonaco, who has the clairvoyance to see five minutes into the future, Gout said. It is a current film. If some aliens came to Earth, I think it would be one of the 10 films that represent who we are. 

And when it seems that the complicated relationship between Mexico and the United States has been introduced, the film reminds that long before the border issues, Native American people were in the region. In a prominent role, an indigenous ally (played by Gregory Zaragoza) who guides them through the desert points out that they have been fighting oppression and extermination for 500 years.

Behind the camera there is also a Mexican presence. Gout called on his friend Luis Sansans to be the director of photography: I needed my guardian.

For the director, the most difficult part of the production was to do everything that the apocalyptic script proposed  and stick to the budget.

You have to resort to Spielberg from Jaws, where the shark was broken all the time and thats why its so scary, because you dont see the damn shark until the end, he said. Although it looks very big, we did not have those conditions and that was the real challenge from start to finish.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  Two paramedics were murdered while transporting a patient in the violence-plagued northern Mexico state of Zacatecas, authorities said Thursday.

The paramedics were from the neighboring state of Jalisco and were assigned to transport a patient for treatment to a hospital in Zacatecas when they were killed Wednesday night. There was no immediate information on whether the patient was harmed.

Jalisco Gov. Enrique Alfaro said he deeply condemned and lamented the killings of the government health workers. Zacatecas has been the scene of bloody turf battles between a number of gangs, including the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels.

Attacks on ambulances in Mexico have sometimes occurred when cartel gunmen want to kill a patient, but paramedics are usually not targeted.

Zacatecas Gov. Alejandro Tello wrote in his social media accounts that the state has suffered a regrettable wave of violence between criminal groups.

The killings came amid a series of massacres and drug cartel battles this month that resembled scenes from the darkest days of Mexicos 2006-2012 drug war, when Zacatecas was dominated by the old Zetas cartel.

Last week, the bullet-ridden bodies of 18 men were discovered in a rural Zacatecas town after what appeared to have been a shootout between gang members. There was evidence the confrontation involved gunmen from the country's dominant Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, which are using alliances with local gangs to fight in many states.

Two days earlier, the bodies of two abducted police officers were found hanging from an overpass in the Zacatecas state capital and seven people were discovered shot to death in a neighboring city.

During the 2006-2012 drug war, cartels frequently spread terror by leaving heaps of bodies on roadsides or attacking the civilian population.
BOSTON (AP)  An eighth person has pleaded guilty in connection to an overtime fraud scheme at the Boston Police Department's evidence warehouse, federal prosecutors said.

Craig Smalls, 55, of Boston, pleaded guilty on Thursday to conspiracy to commit theft concerning programs receiving federal funds and embezzlement from an agency receiving federal funds, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office in Boston. Smalls was paid more than $16,000 in overtime to which he was not entitled between March 2015 and September 2016, prosecutors said.
ST. LOUIS (AP)  Anheuser-Busch is preparing to open its taps as the U.S. inches closer to a vaccine milestone.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the Budweiser brewer promised last month that once 70% of American adults are at least partially vaccinated against COVID-19, it would buy a beer for anyone 21 or older. The U.S. isn't yet there; 66.7% of adults had gotten at least one shot as of Friday.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden on Friday announced he's nominating University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann to serve as U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Gutmann has served since 2004 as president of the Ivy League university in Philadelphia where Biden had established a foreign policy center following his vice presidency.
The Boy Scouts of America reached an $850 million settlement Thursday with tens of thousands of people who say they were sexually abused when they were Scouts over decades and later sued in a case that rocked the historic institution.

The settlement, which came after the organization filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year while facing mounting legal costs over the abuse claims, is one of the largest of its kind in a child sexual abuse case in U.S. history. The lawsuit involved more than 84,000 people who claimed sexual abuse dating as far back as the 1960s.

The agreement - the first legal settlement in a litany of lawsuits against the Boy Scouts - is more than double the group's initial proposal to victims in March. The organization is facing roughly 275 abuse lawsuits and 1,400 potential claims.

The settlement notes that local councils are expected to contribute to the settlement fund, with court records showing that the groups are mandated to pay at least $300 million. The deal also calls for commitments to abuse victims that include youth protection measures, a reporting system and the formation of a Child Protection Committee.

The Boy Scouts said in a statement to The Washington Post that the settlement was an "encouraging and significant step forward" and reflected the institution's "ongoing efforts to reach a global resolution that will equitably compensate survivors and ensure Scouting's future by resolving past abuse cases for both the national organization and local councils."

Ken Rothweiler, an attorney for a group of survivors, championed the agreement as historic.

"I am pleased that both the BSA and their local councils have stepped up to be the first to compensate the survivors," Rothweiler said in a statement. "We will now negotiate with the insurers and sponsoring and chartering organizations who have billions of dollars in legal exposure, of which a substantial portion is necessary to fairly compensate the survivors."

But while the settlement was celebrated by some, other lawyers involved in the lawsuit said the deal would fall far short of what abuse survivors deserve. Tim Kosnoff, a lawyer who had partnered with Rothweiler's firm in the suit, said to NPR that the agreement, which is not yet finalized, was a "rotten, chump deal" and a "failure."

Jason Amala, a lawyer whose firm represents more than 1,000 men who say they were sexually abused by Boy Scouts leaders and volunteers, said he will object to the BSA's proposal.

"We're very concerned," Amala told The Post. "It equals less than $10,000 per survivor. They're not offering that much more than they were in the last proposal, and nobody's explaining why every survivor should be happy about this."

At issue, he said, is the lack of transparency around how much each of the Boy Scouts' nearly 300 local councils are worth and contributing to the settlement. Without that information, he said, there's no way of knowing whether survivors are getting a fair settlement.

Lawyer Irwin Zalkin, who also represents abuse survivors, agrees.

"A basic principle of bankruptcy is there must be transparency," Zalkin said. "If you want a release of all liability forever, you've got to show, to demonstrate that you're bankrupt or you're at serious risk. You've got to show us what you've got."

Amala and Zalkin said their firms, along with dozens of others representing survivors, will oppose what they say is a lack of transparency around the new proposal.

"This is not the end of the story," Zalkin told The Post.

Attorney Evan Smola, of Chicago-based Hurley McKenna and Mertz, who negotiated the settlement proposal, said he's confident details about the councils will be made public. The court filing states that each council's cash and property contributions should be detailed in the disclosure statement.

"It'll absolutely be disclosed and clear to abuse survivors," Smola said.

He also stressed that he sees the $850 million settlement as a "small piece of the puzzle," and not the end of the road for survivors.

"Negotiations will continue, but we think this is a productive and important first step," Smola said. "This is not perfect, but it's good. And it should, in our view, have the support of victims."

The Boy Scouts, based in Irving, Texas, had said its two goals during bankruptcy protection were to "equitably compensate victims who were harmed during their time in Scouting and continue carrying out its mission for years to come."

Both lawyers for the victims and the Boy Scouts' insurers said in March that they were unsatisfied with the organization's initial plan to compensate tens of thousands of former Scouts who allege they were sexually abused. The group's total assets, which are estimated at $1 billion and include four high-adventure bases, made the original plan look "woefully insufficient" amid the staggering number of claims, Michael Pfau, a lawyer who represents about 1,000 people who have filed abuse claims in bankruptcy court, previously told The Post.

In November, after a deadline passed for victims to file abuse claims in bankruptcy court, a lawyer representing the Boy Scouts of America said the organization needed to reach a settlement by this summer - or risk running out of the necessary cash to continue operating. The Boy Scouts told The Post on Friday that it aims to emerge from Chapter 11 proceedings by "late this year."

Attorneys for the Boy Scouts outlined a restructuring in the support agreement for survivors in court documents Thursday.

"After months of intensive negotiations, the debtors have reached resolution with every single official and major creditor constituency in these Chapter 11 cases," the organization's attorneys wrote.

But attorneys for some insurance companies also accused the Boy Scouts of bending to the attorneys of abuse victims so that the terms of the restructuring agreement were more favorable to the survivors.

"With only the fox guarding the henhouse, the outcome is utterly at odds with what BSA itself asserted was necessary for a confirmable plan and is permissible under the bankruptcy code," the insurers wrote in a Thursday filing.

A hearing in the case is scheduled for July 20.

The Boy Scouts said the group remains "wholeheartedly committed to working toward a global resolution" regarding those who were sexually abused as Scouts. A 65-year-old survivor living in New York told NBC News that he was "gratified that the Boy Scouts are taking responsibility for the sexual abuse that occurred to me and others that we have had to live with for decades."

"This acknowledgment by the Boy Scouts will start the process of healing for many of us who have suffered," he said.

- - -

The Washington Post's Samantha Schmidt contributed to this report.
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP)  A statewide burn ban in Washington starts Friday on all Department of Natural Resources forest land because of drought and elevated fire danger.

The order issued by Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz bans outdoor burning, campfires, the use of charcoal briquettes and prescribed burns on all forest lands within DNRs fire protection through Sept. 30.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP)  Elsa strengthened into the first hurricane of the Atlantic season on Friday as it blew off roofs, snapped trees and destroyed crops in the eastern Caribbean, where officials closed schools, businesses and airports. It appeared headed eventually in the general direction of Florida.

The Category 1 storm is the first hurricane to hit Barbados in more than 60 years, unleashing heavy rains and winds on the island and then on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which are struggling to recover from recent massive volcanic eruptions.

Elsa was centered about 395 miles (635 kilometers) east-southeast of Isla Beata in the Dominican Republic and was moving west-northwest at 29 mph (46 kph). It had maximum sustained winds of 80 mph (130 kph), according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

That level of sustained wind can blow down a lot of buildings and cause a lot of damage, said St. Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves. I am pleading with you. Let us not take this hurricane lightly. This is not the time to play the fool.

The long-term forecast track showed it heading toward Florida as a tropical storm by Tuesday morning, but some models would carry it into the Gulf or up the Atlantic Coast.

Authorities in Barbados said they received calls about families trapped in their homes, collapsed houses and power and water outages, but no reports of serious injuries or deaths. Wilfred Abrahams, minister of home affairs, information and public affairs, urged people to open their homes to those in need.

We are getting a lot of reports of damage, he said.

Meanwhile, officials in St. Lucia said that 90% of power customers were without electricity at the height of the storm. Landslides, flooding and damaged homes also were reported.

A hurricane warning was in effect for Jamaica and from the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince to Punta Palenque in the Dominican Republic. A hurricane watch was issued for the Cuban provinces of Camaguey, Granma, Guantanamo, Holguin, Las Tunas, and Santiago de Cuba.

The forecast track showed the fast-moving storm rolling toward Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as a hurricane before reaching Cuba and weakening back to tropical storm force.

Authorities opened dozens of shelters in St. Vincent and urged people to evacuate if they lived near a valley, given the threat of flash flooding, mudslides and lahars, especially in the northern part of the island where La Soufriere volcano is located.

Gonsalves said 94 shelters are open, a smaller number than in previous years because some 2,000 people remain in other shelters following massive volcanic eruptions that began in early April.

Elsa is the earliest fifth-named storm on record, beating out last years Eduardo which formed on July 6, according to Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. He also noted that it's the farthest east that a hurricane has formed this early in the tropical Atlantic since 1933. The 1991-2020 average date for the first Atlantic hurricane formation is mid-August.

The storm was forecast to bring 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) of rain with maximum totals of 15 inches (38 centimeters) inches on Friday across the Windward and southern Leeward Islands. The rain could unleash isolated flash flooding and mudslides.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP)  Officials on Friday hunted for any missing residents of a British Columbia town destroyed by wildfire as the Canadian province's chief coroner said reports suggest two people have died as a result of blaze.

Lisa Lapointe told a news conference Friday that a team is standing by to conduct an investigation in order to confirm the deaths, but its not yet safe to enter the area.

The roughly 1,000 residents of Lytton had to abandon their homes with just a few minutes notice Wednesday evening after suffering the previous day under a record high of 121.2 Fahrenheit (49.6 Celsius).

Officials said it was unclear whether anyone remained in the village 95 miles (150 kilometers) northeast of Vancouver due to a lack of cell service and because it wasnt safe to enter most of the area.

We do know there are some people who are unaccounted for, said Mike Farnworth, the provinces public safety minister, though he said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Red Cross were working to locate people.

Those who escaped the fire scattered to evacuation centers across the province.

Tony Sam said it was chaotic driving through thick smoke to Meritt, B.C., about 36 miles (58 kilometers) southeast of Lytton.

You could barely see driving through the smoke, he told Global TV.

Both his house and his mother's home were destroyed.

Its gone, he said. Nothing left of it.

Noeleen McQuary-Budde didnt even have time to grab her shoes before piling into a truck with her husband an 11 other people to escape the flames.

The whole village of Lytton went up in I would say 10 minutes," she said. We were watching it burn and just thanking Creator that we got out.

In Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged that the federal government will help rebuild and help people come through this.

Trudeau said he had spoken with British Columbia Premier John Horgan and John Haugen, acting chief of the of Lytton First Nation and planned to convene an emergency response group.

Another wildfire threat at Kamloops, 220 miles (355 kilometers) northeast of Vancouver, forced an evacuation of about 200 people Thursday night, but officials said they could return Friday.

Kamloops also recorded a record his temperature this week of 117 Fahrenheit, (47.3 Celsius) but it had cooled down to around 90 (32) on Friday.

I cant imagine what the firefighters are going through working in these conditions, said Noelle Kekula, a fire information officer for the British Columbia Wildfire Service. We are up for a real battle.

The Wildfire Service said at least 106 fires were burning across the province, including dozens that started within just the past two days.
GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP)  North Carolina environmental officials are warning that a chemical released from a Greensboro wastewater treatment plant may impact water intakes downstream in the next few days.

The Department of Environmental Quality said Thursday that Greensboro reported a discharge of 1,4 dioxane into South Buffalo Creek, a tributary of the Haw River, from the TZ Osborne Wastewater Treatment Plant. Municipalities with drinking water intakes downstream, including Pittsboro and Fayetteville, have been notified and additional sampling is underway at the Pittsboro raw water intake.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)  Extensive publicity about the December police killing of Andre Hill makes it impossible to convene a fair jury locally and so the trial should be moved, an attorney representing Adam Coy, the ex-Columbus officer charged in Hill's death, said in a court filing.

That publicity includes news coverage, posts on social media and billboards in Columbus calling for justice for Hill, said attorney Mark Collins.

Compiling an impartial jury in Franklin County would be impossible because potential jurors are not only exposed to the extensive news coverage but also to their fellow neighbors' opinions, Collins said in a filing late last month.

Hill, 47, who was Black, was fatally shot by Coy, who is white, on Dec. 22 as Hill emerged from a garage holding up a cellphone. Coy was fired and has pleaded not guilty to murder and reckless homicide charges. His trial is currently scheduled for July 21.

A message was left with the Franklin County Prosecutor's office seeking comment on the request to move the trial.

The shooting was recorded by Coy's body camera, but without sound because Coy hadn't activated the camera on what started as a nonemergency call. A 60-second look-back function on the camera captured the shooting.

Coy, who had a long history of complaints from citizens, was fired Dec. 28 for failing to activate his body camera and for not providing medical aid to Hill. He was initially charged for dereliction of duty for not activating the camera, but those charges were dropped.

Beyond an internal police investigation, the Ohio attorney general, the U.S. attorney for central Ohio and the FBI have begun their own probes into the shooting.

In May, the city reached a $10 million settlement with the family of Hill, the largest in Columbus history.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed legislation Friday that would have ended additional federal benefits created during the pandemic for North Carolinas unemployed before the program expires nationwide. His action counters trends by Republican governors to no longer accept the supplemental payments.

Cooper said he blocked the measure originating from the GOP-controlled legislature because rejecting these federal funds now hurts the state.

Unemployment is declining with more people getting vaccinated and into the workforce as North Carolina has strengthened work search requirements for those receiving benefits, Cooper said in a statement. The federal help that this bill cuts off will only last a few more weeks and it supplements North Carolinas state benefits, which are among the stingiest in the country. Prematurely stopping these benefits hurts our state by sending back money that could be injected into our economy with people using it for things like food and rent.

Cooper said he supports efforts to make more quality childcare available and give businesses funds for hiring bonuses and the bill fell short on both of those.

The legislation would have done away with the $300-a-week Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation benefit for at least 200,000 displaced workers in the state. Thats on top of their other state or federal aid. A $100-a-week additional payment for self-employed workers also would end if the bill became law.

The measure also contained $250 million in federal COVID-19 relief aid designed to eliminate the individual waiting list for government subsidies for child care. Inaccessibility to child care is considered an obstacle for women to return to work. The bill also would require unemployment benefit recipients to respond to interview requests and participate in order to retain weekly benefits.

Cooper had until late Sunday to veto the bill or sign it into law. Otherwise, it would have become law without his signature.

Sen. Chuck Edwards, a Henderson County Republican who helped shepherd the benefits bill, expressed his disappointment with Cooper's veto.

Its a shame to see Gov. Cooper incentivize people not to work instead of addressing our states severe labor shortage," Edwards said in a statement. "With the pandemic largely behind us, thousands of jobs are waiting to be filled but this veto ensures that Help Wanted signs will remain up for months to come and more jobs will be sent to other countries where our manufacturers can find the workforce they need.

Both benefit programs already are set to expire nationwide Sept. 4, and the North Carolina legislation directed the state to stop administering payments about 30 days after the bill became law. So only about a month of the enhanced benefits would be eliminated.

Governors in 26 states  all but one of them Republicans  have agreed to end the benefits early, affecting more than 4.7 million workers, according to the National Employment Law Project. In North Carolina, it was the Republican-controlled legislature that acted.

All Senate Democrats and all but three House Democrats voted against the measure. That signals enough support for Cooper to ensure his veto would be upheld.

Even if Republican could obtain the votes necessary for an override, any such action would not occur until at least the week of July 12, since lawmakers are not holding floor sessions next week for the July 4 holiday. So only two or three weeks of supplemental benefits would end up getting canceled.

GOP legislators who passed the bill last week said they were responding to business owners having a hard time filling vacancies, and consider the extra benefits a disincentive to return to the workforce. The North Carolina Chamber had urged Cooper to sign the bill.

Bill opponents said eliminating the benefits would harm people still struggling in a post-pandemic economy. The $300 benefit equates to at least $60 million entering the states economy each week.
CHINO, Calif. (AP)  The deaths of two men days apart at a California prison is under investigation by the San Bernardino County coroner's office, authorities said.

Rodney Hawkins, 32, died June 10 and Richard Holesapple, 30, died June 12 at the California Institution for Men in Chino, east of Los Angeles.
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP)  Some Venezuelans got a COVID-19 shot this week thanks to a donation of Cuban-developed vaccines, bringing relief to some residents desperate to protect themselves while simultaneously deepening the mystery around the countrys donation-dependent vaccination campaign.

Thirty-thousand shots of the three-dose Abdala vaccine entered Venezuelas inoculation effort just days after Nicolas Maduro's government and Cuban authorities reached an agreement under which Havana is expected to deliver 12 million doses in the following months. That deal follows vaccine-donation agreements with other allies, but it remains unclear what the terms of the arrangements are, how many people have received a shot and how well priority groups are being respected.

If we look at the promises with the Russian and Chinese vaccines, theres a lot of emphasis on the agreements and the numbers, and then the delivery of those vaccines and who gets what in Venezuela becomes much more mysterious, said Jacqueline Mazza, senior adjunct professor of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University. Simply put, the numbers just arent there. When we put it together, we are still in the same position we are with the handling of the coronavirus in Venezuela: Its all shrouded in mystery, and clearly, the figures that are not giving us the true story.

Venezuela began the first phase of its vaccination campaign in February by focusing on the health, law enforcement and education sectors. It expanded the effort in late May to anyone 60 years of age and older.

Since February 13, at least 380,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine have arrived in Venezuela, representing 3.8% of the 10 million initially agreed to in December. Venezuela in March also received a batch of 500,000 doses of the Vero Cell vaccine donated by the Chinese state company Sinopharm. Two months later, Maduro announced the arrival of 1.3 million vaccines from China without giving details.

Those shipments plus the one that arrived from Cuba mean the country has received at least 2,210,000 vaccines. It has only administered 1,466,988 of them and only 223,858 people  .8% of the population  are fully vaccinated, according to data gathered by Johns Hopkins University.

Maduro has said he is aiming to vaccinate at least 70% of the population by September. But health care workers and teachers are still waiting for their shots, and some Venezuelans have expressed reservations about the lack of information on the Abdala vaccine and the campaign.

I have not been vaccinated yet, said 32-year-old worker Edwin Quintana. I dont really know if the Cuban vaccine has gone through the verification processes of the World Health Organization.

Cuban officials last week said the vaccine has an efficiency of 92.28%. It has not been cleared by the WHO.

The union representing health care workers and the National Academy of Medicine of Venezuela this week expressed concerns about the vaccine, which the latter group described as products of doubtful scientific credibility and hoped that the WHO and the Pan American Health Organization would weigh in.

Beyond the doubts over Venezuelas agreements with allies, it is also unclear if Venezuela will receive vaccines through a United Nations-led effort. Through the COVAX mechanism, Venezuela expected to receive a supply of about 11.4 million doses from a pool of different vaccines. The government was able to make a down payment, but Maduro last month said $10 million that would have covered the amount required by COVAX was blocked because of international sanctions.

Mazza expects years to go by before Venezuela can vaccinate its roughly 30 million population.

How does a country with a collapsed distribution system and totally incapable bureaucracy now administer a vaccine? Theyre clearly not, in essence, ramping up to deliver on any scale, she said.

Venezuela has recorded more than 274,000 cases and over 3,100 deaths of COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins.

At a vaccination site Tuesday in the capital of Caracas, Yoleima Cartaya reasoned that a vaccine, regardless of brand, is better than no vaccine.

I think the best thing is to have it, Cartaya, 37, said after getting her first shot of the Abdala vaccine. I feel great.

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Garcia Cano reported from Mexico City.
Always game for a new challenge, Andrea Engfer began running with a friend in her small town of Orting, Washington. She liked it so much, she signed up for a 5K. Then another  and so on.

"I try to improve every time, even if it's by 10 seconds," she said. "That gets me going."

That competitive spirit served her well for the toughest challenge of her life: Recovering from a severe stroke five days after giving birth.

Andrea and her husband, Martin, were excited about the arrival of their first child last spring. The pregnancy was relatively uneventful until the last three weeks, when Andrea's blood pressure started to increase. She developed preeclampsia, a form of high blood pressure during pregnancy that affects the mother's liver and kidneys.

Her OB-GYN induced labor 12 days early. After two days of waiting for her daughter to arrive, Emma was delivered via cesarean section.

As typically happens with preeclampsia, Andrea's blood pressure went back to normal after she gave birth. Less than a week later, though, she woke up with a migraine. No matter what she tried, the headache worsened.

Worried, Martin drove her to urgent care. On the way, Andrea had the excruciating sensation that something burst in her head.

"On a scale of one to 10, the pain was a 10-plus," she said.

It's the last thing she remembers before losing consciousness.

The staff at urgent care took one look at Andrea and called 911. At the hospital, doctors determined she had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and arranged to transfer her to another facility better equipped to treat cases like hers.

Before they loaded her into the ambulance, a doctor told Martin that most people in her condition don't survive. Andrea was 34 years old at the time.

Doctors at the better-equipped hospital were able to surgically repair the damage in her brain. She was left in a medically induced coma to help her body heal from the trauma of the stroke and the operation. After 12 days, she regained consciousness.

When Andrea arrived at a rehabilitation hospital in Seattle, she couldn't sit up by herself. Speaking was extremely difficult. She couldn't read or write and struggled to identify everyday objects such as an apple. Many times, she couldn't remember if she had given birth to a boy or a girl.

"I cried a lot," she said.

Tears flowed, for example, when Andrea's doctor told the couple that if she ever got pregnant again, she might face the same sort of complications.

While the couple had intended to have one child, Andrea struggled with the fact "it had been decided for me."

"That was hard to hear," she said.

As difficult as things seemed, Andrea knew from her 5K training that small steps could make a big difference.

For instance, in learning to read again, she sounded out each word. She progressed from words to sentences. Then to entire books. She made the same sort of progress with using her arms and legs, speaking and writing.

There have been some bumps along the way.

Almost exactly on the one-year anniversary of her stroke, a seizure left her unable to speak. It hardly helped that doctors had warned she was at higher risk for seizures until her brain healed fully.

"I was freaking out, but it was just a setback," she said. "I still have difficulty at times, but I've come so far."

Indeed, when Andrea heard about a virtual 5K sponsored by the American Heart Association, she convinced Martin they should sign up.

"We ran the entire thing," she said.

Martin marvels at Andrea's recovery, knowing that her competitive spirit will push her to continue erasing her limitations.

"She's inspiring," he said.

Determined to make something positive out of her experience, Andrea gladly shares her story on local radio and TV spots as an AHA ambassador.

"My story could help another person," she said. "I want people to know that there's hope out there."

Stories From the Heart chronicles the inspiring journeys of heart disease and stroke survivors, caregivers and advocates.

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BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  Louisiana will shift up to $300 million in taxes charged annually on the sales of new cars and trucks to roadwork, under a bill Gov. John Bel Edwards announced Friday he signed into law, handing a victory to Senate leaders who pushed for the boosted transportation funding.

The dollars will be removed from the state general fund where they help to pay for health care, education, public safety services and other government operations. The shift will be phased in over two years starting in mid-2023, with some provisions for cutting the size of the transfer if the state faces budget gaps. A specific list of road and bridge work will be prioritized for the money.

Edwards' decision on the measure  which was passed on the final day of the regular session earlier this month  had been uncertain. The Democratic governor had expressed concern about creating budget gaps across state services by reshuffling the vehicle sales tax money to road and bridge work.

But Senate President Page Cortez and other GOP Senate leaders argued the state needed to do more to bolster transportation funding and chip away at a multibillion-dollar backlog of infrastructure work.

They initially proposed stripping the expiration date for a temporary state sales tax and sending the nearly $400 received annually from the 0.45% tax to roadwork, but that faced sizable opposition in the House and was unable to pass. So senators turned their focus to the existing vehicle sales tax and added that provision into an unrelated bill by Houma Rep. Tanner Magee, the House's second-ranking Republican who supported the rewrite.

The Senate unanimously supported the vehicle sales tax shift, while House lawmakers voted 88-13 for the measure.

While legislative leaders were pleased with Edwards' signature on the highly sought bill, that is not likely to end the drumbeat for a mid-July veto session for lawmakers to consider overturning the governors rejections of other measures that won strong bipartisan support.

Certain projects are specifically given priority for the new transportation funding, such as replacement of the Interstate 10 bridge in Calcasieu Parish, expansion of I-49 in the southern part of the state, a new Mississippi River bridge in Baton Rouge, widening of I-12 from Baton Rouge to the Mississippi state line, widening of I-10 in the New Orleans area and improvements around I-20.

Opponents argued that shifting existing tax collections, rather than raising new revenue, will put funding for public colleges and health care programs for the poor and disabled at risk. But supporters argued the state will see enough revenue growth to make up the difference. Plus, they said the state cant delay addressing crumbling roads and bridges and needed expansions any longer.

Adam Knapp, head of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, praised the bill signing as making Louisiana's first serious, long-term investment in its infrastructure in decades.

With this rededication of dollars, Louisiana can begin to build back its infrastructure to compete for the jobs and talent that depend on it, Knapp said in a statement.

The bill will move 30% of vehicle sales tax collections  an estimated $148 million  to transportation projects in the 2023-24 budget year. That will double to 60% in the following year and each year after that, with estimates that will steer $260 million to nearly $300 million annually to roadwork.

The fund shift will drop to $150 million if the state sees significant budget gaps.

In separate legislation, lawmakers also allocated $560 million in federal coronavirus aid to pay for infrastructure, including several phases of widening of Interstates 10, 12 and 20, port projects and work on I-49 South.

___

The bill is filed as House Bill 514.

___

Follow Melinda Deslatte on Twitter at http://twitter.com/melindadeslatte.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)  Three employees at the famous Voodoo Doughnut shop in Portland, Oregon, were reportedly fired this week after they walked out during the scorching Pacific Northwest heat wave.

The Oregonian/Oregon Live reported that some on-duty staff walked out of the downtown shop on Sunday afternoon and planned to return to work Tuesday, according to a statement from Doughnut Workers United, which had unsuccessfully attempted to unionize staff at the location earlier this year.

Not all staffers walked out, and the store remained open on Monday. Voodoo Doughnuts, known for its extravagant doughnuts with unusual toppings, is a popular tourist draw.

One of the employees who joined in the strike, Skyler Irvine, told the newspaper he felt close to passing out from the heat during a couple of his shifts last week. Workers said on one day they recorded a temperature of 96 degrees Fahrenheit (36 Celsius) inside the store. Portland set an all-time record high temperature on Monday when the mercury reached 116 F (47 C).

When Irvine returned to work Tuesday, he said the stores general manager called him into his office and fired him for an unexcused absence. Two other workers were fired for the same reason, according to the unions statement.

Voodoo Doughnut spokesperson Audrey Lincoff declined to discuss the firings but said the unionization effort was defeated in an election certified by the National Labor Relations Board last month and that the union was not recognized by the company.

The store is air-conditioned and we took measures to address warmer than normal conditions, including providing employees extended or additional breaks, and shifting production to early morning and late evening hours, she wrote. Employee and customer safety is our highest priority; if we felt either were at risk during this time, we would have adjusted operating hours and otherwise made sure everyone was safe.

Doughnut Workers United said in its statement it planned to respond to the firings with legal action and picket lines.
MORRIS, Ill. (AP)  Enough progress has been made on a fire at a northern Illinois building containing 100 tons of batteries that thousands of residents can finally return to their homes three days after they were evacuated, officials said Friday.

Firefighters in Morris poured 28 tons of cement on the burning batteries to smother hem, according to Chief Tracey Steffes, who previously warned that water or foam could cause the batteries to explode. He said the use of the cement  a tactic that, as far as he knew, had never been tried before  appeared to be working and that there was no longer any active burning at the building.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP)  The man who killed five people at a Maryland newspaper is autistic and has persecutory, delusional beliefs," a trial defense expert testified Friday  but a prosecutor criticized the doctor's findings, saying a report featured an error, omitted details and was overly dependent on what the gunman told him.

Dr. Thomas Hyde, a neurologist and neuroscientist retained by defense attorneys, testified on the fourth day of the trial of Jarrod Ramos. Ramos has pleaded guilty but not criminally responsible to killing Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters three years ago at the Capital Gazette newspaper.

The case will largely be a battle of mental health experts called by defense attorneys and prosecutors. Hyde was the first doctor who examined Ramos to testify in the case.

A jury is hearing evidence to decide whether Ramos is criminally responsible for the mass shooting and whether he should go to prison or a maximum-security mental health facility.

Hyde testified that Ramos suffers from autism spectrum disorder without intellectual impairment.

He falls in the milder to moderate spectrum of these problems," Hyde said, when asked by defense attorney Katy O'Donnell about the severity of Ramos' disorder regarding social communication and repetitive behaviors.

Hyde wrote two reports on Ramos, one in September 2019 and another on May 1.

Hyde also testified that Ramos suffers from depression and anxiety, as well as "persecutory delusional beliefs. Those beliefs relate to an article the newspaper wrote about him regarding a harassment case he pleaded guilty to in 2011 involving a former high school classmate.

He has a fixed belief that there is a formed conspiracy between the prosecutor and the staff at the Capital Gazette to exert judicial punishment on him," Hyde said, because he didnt receive jail time over the harassment case.

In his May report, Hyde said Ramos told him he was a victim of vigilante justice.'"

When alternative perspectives and explanations for the reporting by the Capital Gazette were offered to him by this examiner, he firmly rejected them," Hyde wrote.

The report also notes that other than paranoid delusions related to the Capital Gazette, Mr. Ramos denied other psychotic symptoms.

Under cross-examination, prosecutors said Hyde's first report on Ramos was only three pages long. Prosecutor David Russell also noted that the report said Ramos spent 18 months hiking the Appalachian Trail, when he only hiked it for nine months.

What else is wrong with this report? Russell asked.

The prosecutor also noted omissions. While Hyde wrote that Ramos was withdrawn and avoided social interaction, Russell said Ramos was in a chess club, as well as a running club in high school. Prosecutors have also noted that Ramos had social interactions when he hiked the Appalachian Trial, staying at peoples' houses along the way and dining with them.

Russell asked whether a test Hyde administered to Ramos included a feature to check if he was malingering, or not being honest with him, as other psychiatric tests do.

No, theres no built in check," Hyde said.

The prosecutor asked Hyde if he agreed that being on trial for a mass shooting could affect Ramos' honesty.

Its always something that you have to consider, yes," Hyde said.

Ramos, 41, had a well-documented history of harassing the newspapers journalists. He filed a lawsuit against the paper in 2012, alleging he was defamed in the article about his guilty plea in a criminal harassment case in 2011. The defamation suit was dismissed as groundless.
BEIJING (AP)  As the World Health Organization draws up plans for the next phase of its probe of how the coronavirus pandemic started, an increasing number of scientists say the U.N. agency it isnt up to the task and shouldnt be the one to investigate.

Numerous experts, some with strong ties to WHO, say that political tensions between the U.S. and China make it impossible for an investigation by the agency to find credible answers.

They say whats needed is a broad, independent analysis closer to what happened in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

The first part of a joint WHO-China study of how COVID-19 started concluded in March that the virus probably jumped to humans from animals and that a lab leak was extremely unlikely. The next phase might try to examine the first human cases in more detail or pinpoint the animals responsible  possibly bats, perhaps by way of some intermediate creature.

But the idea that the pandemic somehow started in a laboratory  and perhaps involved an engineered virus  has gained traction recently, with President Joe Biden ordering a review of U.S. intelligence within 90 days to assess the possibility.

Earlier this month, WHOs emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan, said that the agency was working out the final details of the next phase of its probe and that because WHO works by persuasion, it lacks the power to compel China to cooperate.

Some said that is precisely why a WHO-led examination is doomed to fail.

We will never find the origins relying on the World Health Organization, said Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights at Georgetown University. For a year and a half, they have been stonewalled by China, and its very clear they wont get to the bottom of it.

Gostin said the U.S. and other countries can either try to piece together what intelligence they have, revise international health laws to give WHO the powers it needs, or create some new entity to investigate.

The first phase of WHOs mission required getting Chinas approval not only for the experts who traveled there but for their entire agenda and the report they ultimately produced.

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, called it a farce and said that determining whether the virus jumped from animals or escaped from a lab is more than a scientific question and has political dimensions beyond WHOs expertise.

The closest genetic relative to COVID-19 was previously discovered in a 2012 outbreak, after six miners fell sick with pneumonia after being exposed to infected bats in China's Mojiang mine. In the past year, however, Chinese authorities sealed off the mine and confiscated samples from scientists while ordering locals not to talk to visiting journalists.

Although China initially pushed hard to look for the coronaviruss origins, it pulled back abruptly in early 2020 as the virus overtook the globe. An Associated Press investigation last December found Beijing imposed restrictions on the publication of COVID-19 research, including mandatory review by central government officials.

Jamie Metzl, who sits on a WHO advisory group, has suggested along with colleagues the possibility of an alternative investigation set up by the Group of Seven industrialized nations.

Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University, said the U.S. must be willing to subject its own scientists to a rigorous examination and recognize that they might be just as culpable as China.

The U.S. was deeply involved in research at the laboratories in Wuhan, Sachs said, referring to U.S. funding of controversial experiments and the search for animal viruses capable of triggering outbreaks.

The idea that China was behaving badly is already the wrong premise for this investigation to start, he said. If lab work was somehow responsible (for the pandemic), the likelihood that it was both the U.S. and China working together on a scientific initiative is very high.

____

Cheng reported from London.
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  The body of a Miami firefighter's 7-year-old daughter was recovered from the site of a South Florida condo collapse by the search and rescue team he had been assisting, officials said Friday.

The child was one of two victims found in the rubble of Champlain Towers South late Thursday, one week after the building partially collapsed. On Friday, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced the death toll now stands at 20, with 128 people still considered missing in the wreckage.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez confirmed that the child, whose name hasn't been released, was the daughter of a firefighter. He said the family had asked for privacy.

She was a member of our fire family, Suarez said, adding that the entire fire department is grieving.

The Miami Fire Department is part of Task Force 2, which has been assisting in the search since the collapse. The firefighter voluntarily joined the search, officials said, hoping he could help find his daughter and others still missing in the wreckage.

It goes without saying that every night since this last Thursday has been immensely difficult, particularly for the families that have been impacted," Levine Cava said during Friday morning's news conference. Last night was uniquely difficult. It was truly different and more difficult for our first responders. These men and woman are paying an enormous human toll each and every day, and I ask that all of you please keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden visited the area to offer profuse thanks to those who've worked around the clock since the collapse.

What youre doing here is incredible, having to deal with the uncertainty, Biden said.

Earlier this week, the search teams found the remains of Emma Guara, 4; her sister Lucia, 10; and their parents, Marcus and Anaely Guara, in the wreckage. The family had lived in Apartment 802.

Obviously, the firefighters are emotional, Miami-Dade County Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said. You know it takes a toll.
MACON, Ga. (AP)  A former deputy school superintendent in middle Georgia has been charged with murder in the 2019 death of his wife, with investigators suggesting he was somehow responsible for her drug overdose.

The Bibb County Sheriff's Office said Friday that deputies arrested Edward Judie on Thursday after interviewing him about the death of his wife.
DENVER (AP)  Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has signed off on the creation of a new taxing district to coordinate the creation of a Front Range passenger railway up and down the Interstate 25 corridor.

But dont make any travel plans yet. The state may have a powerful likely partner in Amtrak, but the first trains wont be ready to roll for at least a couple years, The Denver Post reports.

And the regional rail line faces potential political and cost hurdles.

The new Front Range Passenger Rail District, created by Senate Bill 238, will take shape early next year. It will cover all or parts of 13 counties near I-25 between the Wyoming and New Mexico state lines, including all of metro Denver.

The district and its appointed board will begin formalizing plans for the first stretches of the railway. Its likely to include a route north of Denver that goes through Boulder, with the district potentially coordinating with the Denver-based Regional Transportation District to share costs between the railway and RTDs unfinished northwest line.

Money will be scarce at first, however, since the district will need to seek approval from voters within its boundaries to collect any new sales tax.

But Polis signing of the legislation into law Wednesday, in a ceremony outside the Pueblo Union Depot in southern Colorado, marked a big milestone.

A dedicated railroad connecting communities from New Mexico to Colorado to Wyoming isnt just great for our environment but, as our history shows, it will spur innovation and move people, ideas and businesses, Polis, a Democrat, said in a statement provided by his office. Ive long supported Front Range Rail and am thrilled my administration is beginning to deliver on this promise.

The districts large board, which must begin meeting by mid-May next year, will include 17 voting members:

Six appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. One must live in an area that was promised rail service by RTDs FasTracks plan but has not yet received it.

10 appointed by regional transportation planning organizations for metro Denver; the Colorado Springs area; Pueblo; the northern Front Range, including parts of Larimer and Weld counties; and an organization representing Huerfano and Las Animas counties. These appointees also are subject to Senate confirmation.

One appointed by the executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation.

Several non-voting advisory members will represent the freight railroads, Amtrak and other organizations.

In supporting the railway, Amtrak envisions three round trips per day between Fort Collins and Pueblo along existing freight railroads, with one of them traveling farther north to Cheyenne, Wyoming. All would stop at Denvers Union Station.

Amtraks long-range expansion plans across the country would benefit from President Joe Bidens now-$1 trillion infrastructure package, but its executives say its involvement in Colorado doesnt hinge on that bill.

So far, its unclear how much of the costs would be covered by Amtrak, which is likely to operate the line, and how much by state money or a district sales tax. The new law requires a detailed services development plan, an operating plan and attempts to seek federal funding before the district can ask voters to approve a tax.

A recent state report estimated that initial Front Range service could cost as little as $2 billion. Costs for a full build-out, along dedicated double-track between Fort Collins and Pueblo, could soar to $14 billion. Theres also been discussion about linking the line farther south to Trinidad, which is along Amtraks Southwest Chief line.

Most but not all Republicans in the legislature opposed the bill over objections that include the potential railways costs and concerns about the potential use of eminent domain to acquire property. Commissioners in El Paso and Douglas counties also opposed the bill.

The new district will replace the Southwest Chief & Front Range Passenger Rail Commission, which for years has studied the potential for a north-south rail line.
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP)  Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday accused European leaders of acting like colonialists" in their criticism of a controversial law that's seen as limiting the rights of LGBT people in that country.

European Union leaders challenged Orban on the law at a summit in Brussels last week, with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte suggesting that the Hungarian leader should either uphold EU values or pull out of the 27-member bloc.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  Salma Luevano was arrested for publicly identifying herself as transgender in provincial Mexico in 1985. Now she is set to take office as a member of Congress.

It has been a long journey, but one that appears to be breaking through the rigid definitions of gender that long prevailed in Mexico. Luevano is one of two transgender federal legislators elected to the lower house in the countrys June 6 elections.

Luevano plans to lead a campaign to get gender equality written into the constitution and gain recognition nationwide for same-sex marriage and gender identity.

Luevano, a hair stylist who ran on the ticket of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's Morena party, is under no illusions about how hard the task still is.

The fact that I was able to get here doesn't mean they're going to roll out the red carpet for me, and everything is solved, Luevano said in an interview this week.

Lopez Obrador himself is socially conservative, and has not pushed gender issues.

What comes next is the struggle to try to convince 500 colleagues, but it is not impossible, Luevano said, referring to the number of seats in the lower house.

At the age of 17 in 1985, Luevano was surrounded by dozen of police in the central plaza of the provincial city of Aguascalientes and detained amid shoves and blows, accused of being a threat to public decency and morals.

That started Luevano on a three-decade struggle for equality, alongside Maria Clemente Garcia, the other transgender person elected to Congress this year.

One of their first efforts will be to get the national statistics institute to perform a census of LGBT people.

More than 100 candidates from the LGBT community ran in the June 6 elections, and more than 20 of them were transgender.

But on the other hand, 79 people from the LGBT community were murdered in 2020, 43 of them transgender, according to the activist group Letra S. That was a decline of about one-third from 2019, something that may be associated with the coronavirus pandemic.

But Mexico still holds second place in the world for murders of gay and transgender people between 2008 and 2020, trailing only Brazil, according to a study by Transgender Europe and the academic journal Liminalis.

Same sex marriage is recognized in 20 of Mexico's 32 states and only 13 have laws recognizing self-identified gender.

Society must turn its attention on us because it's not fair that we are getting killed, said Luevano, who identifies as female.

Rocio Suarez, a member of the activist group Support Center for Trans Identities, said the two legislators face a hard battle.

There are going to face a lot of inertia, but we trust that their ability to start a dialogue inside Congress will allow them to reach agreements and consensus, said Suarez. They are our hope.
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)  Federal relief funds will be used to offer back-to-work bonuses of up to $1,000 for New Mexico residents who find a job in the coming weeks and stop receiving unemployment insurance benefits, state labor officials announced Friday.

The program from Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is aimed at encouraging a return to work before federal unemployment supplements expire in early September.

The new support payments decline gradually from $1,000 to $400 by late July, providing a bigger payout the sooner a job is secured. The federal supplement provides an extra $300 a week on top of state unemployment benefits.

If we can make it even just one degree easier for someone to get back to work, helping offset transition costs, then weve got to do that," the governor said in a news release.

New Mexico isnt the only state that is dangling an incentive to lure the unemployed back to work. Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear last week announced a limited number of $1,500 bonuses to people who qualify and return to work by July 30, setting aside $22.5 million in federal relief funds.

Some businesses have complained that expanded federal aid to the unemployed  especially the $300-a-week supplemental benefit, intended to cushion the economic blow from the pandemic  has discouraged people from looking for a job. But other factors also are believed to have contributed to the shortage of people seeking work again, from difficulty arranging or affording child care to lingering fears of COVID-19.

Responding to the criticism about the duration of expanded jobless benefits, dozens of states began dropping the expanded federal aid in June. Most of those will also cut off unemployment assistance to the self-employed, gig workers and people who have been out of work for more than six months.

More than 70,000 residents of New Mexico are receiving unemployment insurance. On Thursday, state health officials lifted the last restrictions on business occupancy and public gatherings  throwing open the economy as vaccination rates surpass 62%.

The Department of Workforce Solutions says it expects up to 15,000 people will take advantage of the back-to-work program at a total cost of up to $10.1 million.

The program runs though Aug. 28, and people who claim the bonus must keep their new job at least that long.

It's the latest expenditure from New Mexico's $1.7 billion share of federal relief money approved by President Joe Biden in March.

About $600 million in federal relief will be dedicated to replenishing New Mexico's indebted unemployment insurance trust fund to stave off tax increase on businesses.

Separately, New Mexico's judiciary on Friday announced a return in-person attendance at a broad array of court hearings and trails. Masks and health screening questions continue to be required to enter state courts, along with physical distancing requirements indoors.

The state Supreme Court will begin holding oral arguments in person when all participants are vaccinated.

Presiding judges can still make special arrangements to safeguard people who may be especially vulnerable to COVID-19. About 76% of judges and state court employees have been vaccinated as of the end of June, according to the Administrative Office of the Courts.
CHESAPEAKE, Va. (AP)  A judge in Virginia swiftly rebuked a conservative groups effort Friday to remove a Black state senator from office over her role in a protest that ended with heavy damage to a Confederate monument.

Few expected the petition of 4,600 signatures gathered by members of the Virginia Tea Party to succeed against Sen. Louise Lucas, a longtime Democratic legislator and a key Statehouse power broker. The judge quickly ruled that, under Virginia's Constitution, only the state Senate can expel one of its members.

There is a process for that, Chesapeake Circuit Court Chief Judge John W. Brown said from the bench. This is not that process.

The courtroom briefly served as a battleground for the nation's culture wars over race, history and policing that intensified last year after George Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody.

Our country was under absolute siege by these angry mobs, Virginia Tea Party Chair Nelson Velez told The Associated Press before the hearing. "We had an elected official, a state senator orchestrate a riot.

But many saw the petition  as well as a failed criminal case against Lucas  as a vindictive political stunt against a powerful Black woman.

Im not going to accuse them necessarily of racism, said Don Scott, a Democratic member of the House of Delegates and a friend of Lucas'. But I will say this: Theyve only gone this aggressively after an African American woman  a strong African American woman who is at the pinnacle of her legislative career.

Lucas is the state Senates president pro tempore and represents parts of southeastern Virginia. The group's petition against her stems from a day last summer when protesters gathered to rally against the 56-foot-tall (17-meter-tall) Confederate monument in the majority Black city of Portsmouth.

The 19th century memorial was drawing heightened scorn at a time when many monuments to the Confederacy were being taken down, whether by demonstrators opposed to racial injustice or by authorities seeking to dismantle them through official channels. Such memorials have long been viewed by many as symbols of white supremacy. But they were drawing increasing attention after Floyd's death.

Portsmouth police would later claim that Lucas was with a group of people shaking up cans of spray paint and had told officers they were "going to put some paint on this thing, and yall cant arrest them.

(T)hey gonna do it, and you cant stop them  they got a right, go ahead!, police claim Lucas said.

Scott, who represented Lucas in the criminal case, said she left the protest hours before heads were ripped off some of the monument's statues and one statue was pulled down, critically injuring a demonstrator.

Two months later, Portsmouth police charged Lucas and several others with conspiracy to commit a felony and injury to a monument in excess of $1,000. The charges were filed without the local prosecutor's approval, sparking immediate criticism from many who said the charges were political.

Law professors also questioned the strength of the case, which was dismissed by a judge in November.

Velez, the Virginia Tea Party chairman, said Lucas still needed to be held accountable.

The only recourse is the people, he said. So the people went ahead and signed petitions.

The group filed its petition under a state law that allows someone to ask a circuit court judge to remove an official. The petitioner must gather a number of voter signatures that equals 10% of votes cast at the last election.

Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, said the attempt was a new and flawed front in Virginia's culture wars.

This is the latest step in the trench warfare over Virginias political culture, Farnsworth said. I would anticipate this process not being rewarded and not being repeated.

Lucas declined to comment after the hearing. As she walked out, one of the petitioners yelled at her that she had broken the law.

Anthony Troy, one of her lawyers, told reporters that the petition was time consuming and draining for the senator.

She's got a lot to do, he said. She's moving on.
GLENWOOD SPRINGS, Colo. (AP)  A Garfield County judge has dismissed a lawsuit by a Denver-based mining company that contended the county could not regulate its rock quarry mining operation near Glenwood Springs because the operation is on federal land.

Opponents of the mining operation hailed the ruling, saying a contrary decision could have eroded counties' ability to ensure that mining and other industrial activity on federal land meet local environmental standards.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP)  Rhode Island lawmakers approved a $13.1 billion state budget and a host of other bills as they recessed for the summer late Thursday.

The spending plan, which cleared the state Senate on a 30-7 vote, boosts support for affordable housing, social services and education  and without any broad-based tax increases.

This is a responsible budget that cares for Rhode Islanders today while investing in our collective future, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ryan Pearson, a Cumberland Democrat, said in a statement. The actions we are taking will reduce our structural deficit, invest in our infrastructure, repay the money we used from our rainy day fund, and use the federal funding appropriately for investments like technology throughout government.

The budget for the fiscal year that started July 1 represents $3.7 billion more in total spending than the prior year. It includes $15 million for a statewide police body camera program, adds $5.9 million beyond the governors proposal to help Rhode Island College address its financial difficulties, and allocates $7.7 million for the Rhode Island Promise program, which provides two years of free tuition at the Community College of Rhode Island for qualified high school graduates.

The Democrat-controlled General Assembly said their budget also creates a permanent funding stream for affordable housing creation by increasing the conveyance tax on high-end real estate. And it continues the phase-out of the car tax, which is on pace to be fully eliminated after the 2023 fiscal year.

House Republicans panned the spending plan for failing to address the state's structural budget deficits and doing nothing to alleviate or reduce the future tax burden on Rhode Islanders.

Some progressive Democrats in the Senate also voted against the budget, complaining that it did not increase taxes on wealthy residents and cut two state aid programs benefitting Providence, the state's capital and largest city.

The budget, which cleared the state House of Representatives last week, now heads to Democratic Gov. Dan McKee for his approval.

A raft of other bills passed by lawmakers during their annual flurry of late night votes are also heading to McKee. Among them:

 Banning guns on school grounds and preventing the straw purchase of guns by intermediaries on behalf of people banned from buying firearms.

 Prohibiting employers from reporting or threatening to report an employees immigration status for whistle-blowing.

 Banning the intentional, simultaneous releases of 10 or more balloons into the air.

 Prohibiting food service establishments from providing single-use plastic straws unless requested.

 Allowing commercial fishermen to be licensed to sell certain catch dockside from their vessel.

 Allowing restaurants and bars to take advantage of pandemic modifications, such as outdoor seating, without running afoul of local zoning laws, at least through next spring.
HAZELWOOD, Mo. (AP)  Prosecutors have charged a man with causing the death of another while driving drunk in suburban St. Louis last year.

Taron Murphy, 41, of Hazelwood, has been charged with DWI resulting in death for the early-morning crash Sept. 24 that killed 51-year-old Alean Williams, of Dellwood, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP)  Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said this week he intends to commute the sentence of a man who's been serving life in prison for robbing a taco shop in 1981 with a water pistol.

Hutchinson on Thursday announced he intended to make Rolf Kaestel immediately eligible for parole. There's a 30-day waiting period to receive public feedback before the governor's decision can become final.

Kaestel, 70, was convicted of aggravated robbery and sentenced to life in prison after he robbed a Fort Smith taco shop of $264. Kaestel was armed only with a water pistol at the time.

This was Kaestel's fifth request for clemency. In his latest application, he wrote that he may yet have a few reasonably energetic and productive years remaining to me in which I may still make a truly substantive contribution to society."

I believe that I have demonstrated that I deserve the chance to do so, and I appeal for your consideration and favorable action to allow me to begin a new life," he wrote. The ends of justice have been served with the unrelenting four decades of my incarceration to date."

Hutchinson noted there were no objections from law enforcement to Kaestel's request for clemency.

Kaestel's case and the sentence he'd received had received attention from criminal justice reform advocates. The taco shop employee who handed the money over to Kaestel during the robbery has also called for his release.
DAYTON, Ohio (AP)  A man who fatally shot the mother of his young son while the child watched has been convicted of murder.

A Montgomery County jury also found Gregory Blanton guilty of felonious assault and child endangerment in a verdict returned Thursday night. The 34-year-old Dayton man faces a potential life term when he's sentenced later this year.
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP)  One Missouri hospital official is telling anyone making disparaging remarks about the COVID-19 vaccine to Shut up as state officials ask for federal help dealing with a surge in cases that has some counties urging new precautions.

Deep vaccine resistance has allowed the delta variant, first identified India, to take hold in the state, straining hospitals, particularly in the Springfield area.

If you are making wildly disparaging comments about the vaccine, and have no public health expertise, you may be responsible for someones death. Shut up, tweeted Steve Edwards, who is the CEO of CoxHealth in Springfield.

CoxHealth and the city's other hospital, Mercy Springfield, were treating 168 COVID-19 patients Friday, up from 31 on May 24, before the surge began, said Aaron Schekorra, a spokesman for the Springfield-Greene County Health Department. He said that 36 of them were on ventilators.

Erik Frederick, the chief administrative officer of Mercy Springfield, also turned to Twitter in an effort to bolster vaccinations, noting that they prevent deaths.

So if youre vaccinated there is a light at the end of a tunnel, he said. If youre unvaccinated thats probably a train.

State data shows that 44.6% of residents have received at least one shot, far short of the 54.7% rate nationally. And in more than 60 Missouri counties, less than 30% of the population had received their first shot, according to state data.

The situation has grown so dire that Missouri health officials announced Thursday that they were asking for federal help from newly formed surge response teams.

Meanwhile, St. Louis and St. Louis County health departments along with health officials in Jefferson County begged even immunized people to resume mask-wearing in public, citing the threat of the delta variant.

The Jefferson County Health Departments advisory said children are being exposed to COVID-19 as they resume normal activities without protection. During the last two weeks, the number of new cases had increased 42%, with the highest number of cases among 10 to 19-year-olds.

This is concerning," the advisory said, since most of that age group is eligible for the vaccine, but only 10.82% have completed the full series of vaccination."

In the southeast part of the state, the Stoddard County Public Health Center this week asked residents to get vaccinated as officials grapple with climbing COVID-19 cases, including an outbreak at a nursing facility, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.

The center said Thursday it was monitoring 33 cases  up from the 5-10 weve been experiencing over the last few months. The health center said an outbreak at a nursing facility in Advance made up a large portion of cases, and that one resident who tested positive had died.
CROW AGENCY, Mont. (AP)  The warriors and their galloping horses kicked up dust as they circled the field to finish off the last of Gen. George Armstrong Custers men as onlookers watched during the Battle of Little Bighorn reenactment last week.

This has been one of our most successful days, it was a gift, organizer Jimmy Real Bird said in an interview with The Billings Gazette. The land brings people out, it is like a breath of fresh air to see its history.

The reenactment, which took place on the 145th anniversary of Custers Last Stand, is a part of the annual Crow Native Days, a celebration that attracts thousands of people from across the country to see rodeos, reenactment and more around Crow Agency.

The festival, sidelined last year due to COVID-19, is giving a much-needed boost to the morale and local economy of the area.

Today is a good day to be here; today is a good day to be Crow, Chairman Frank White Clay said during an address to veterans on June 25.

White Clay noted that the tribe has had struggles with the pandemic. It halted any chance of meeting in person for over a year while also killing tribal members at a higher rate than the Montana average. Those dark days, he said, have passed.

Crow Agency buzzed with food stands opening on Makawasha Avenue. Campers and trailers surrounded the rodeo grounds. At the Battle of Little Bighorn reenactment, also known as Custers Last Stand, hundreds of spectators filled the bleachers as more than 100 riders took their places to begin.

The warriors consisted of young Crow Tribe riders who played braves from the Crow, Sioux and Cheyenne tribes. They rode bareback at high speeds while wearing full war regalia. Real Bird noted that the warriors had to be qualified to take the field.

The cavalry riders trained at the U.S. Cavalry School in Helena. The program leader, Keith Harrin, said his group was energized by being here.

We have a strong love for the horses, the land and Montana, Harrin said.

The reenactment itself is not just Custers Last Stand, but also explains the culture of different tribes in the area, and the colonization of Europeans. At one point, organizers released a stampede of wild horses, which were then herded and forced to cross the river by the Native riders.

The horses are essential to the story, Real Bird, himself a horse rancher, said. The reason the Sioux could win the battle was their quality of horses. It is a game changer.

Real Bird opened up his reenactment 29 years ago after he grew sick of the version in Hardin that came from the perspective of the U.S. Government, which eventually closed in 2015. His story is from the narrative of Spotted Wolf, a prominent Northern Cheyenne warrior who fought in the battle.

His story was passed down to Real Birds grandfather, and now he and his family carry out the event at the bank of the Little Bighorn River, which is just south of the battlefield, which is now a national monument and cemetery.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  A streamlined permitting process for hog farmers who also want to convert methane from waste ponds into energy will begin after Gov. Roy Cooper signed the legislature's annual agriculture bill into law Friday.

The Democratic governor decided the measure will be enacted, despite dozens of environmental, civil rights and community groups urging him to veto the bill due to general permit language for biomass operations contained inside. Cooper had until July 11 to act on the measure or it would become law without him.

The farm measure was one of 11 that Cooper signed into law Friday, but he provided no statement on the measure with that announcement. He also vetoed a bill that would have ended additional federal unemployment benefits created during the pandemic.

The farm measure directs the Environmental Management Commission, a part of 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.

Until now, digester operators had to seek an individual permit, which can be time-consuming for the farmer and usually gives the public the chance to comment on the request at a hearing. The new law says environmental regulators must decide on a farm and biogas general permit application  expected to last five years  within 90 days, or it's otherwise considered approved.

The pork industry backed the change, saying biogas operations on farms are very similar in scope and the federal government has encouraged as a way to produce cleaner energy. 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.

Critics of the change said the new permit process would narrow the timeframe for input from farm neighbors and build more disincentives for farmers to move away from lagoon-and-sprayfield waste systems and toward environmentally superior waste disposal.

That technology is still considered by the industry as economically infeasible. But opponents of the measure said the lagoon disposal methods and resulting odors keep contributing to health troubles for people living near the farms and to pollution.

Eight Senate Democrats and 14 House Democrats had joined all Republicans present in voting for the final piece of legislation. The margins suggested there could have been enough votes to override a Cooper veto.

The North Carolina Farm Act of 2021 contains changes in a dozen categories, including increased punishments for stealing timber and clarified overtime compensation rules for state Forest Service firefighters.
SALEM, Ore. (AP)  If youre a black oystercatcher sitting on a nest of eggs, there is good reason to be concerned if a large, buzzing object flies directly at you.

Even if the object is just a drone, the small blackish birds with reddish-orange bills often scatter in fear, worried that the unmanned aircraft is actually a predator such as a bald eagle or falcon.

The scenario has become increasingly common over the past two years at the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the islands just off the coast that are critical for nesting shorebirds but also make for scenic drone videos.

When the birds fly away from their nest  to avoid getting eaten by what they think is a falcon  they leave their eggs or chicks vulnerable, exposing them to secondary predators like gulls, crows and vultures, which come in and eat up as much as they can, Dawn Harris of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the islands off the Oregon beach, told the Statesman Journal.

It can be a significant loss.

As the number of drone operators on the Oregon Coast rises, the number of black oystercatchers has declined. They were listed as a species of concern in 2021 as their numbers dropped to an estimated 500 animals, Harris said.

In response, the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department is planning to have new rules on where drones can take off and land on the coast  and all state parks  next summer.

Drone use is a persistent and growing problem for wildlife on Oregons coast, said Brent Lawrence, public affairs officer for USFWS.

Beautiful scenery, delicate ecosystem

Its not surprising that drone pilots choose the Oregon Coast and its many islands for flights. The footage is often spectacular, taking in the sweep of the rugged cliffs and islands such as Haystack Rock from a birds eye view.

But real birds are, in fact, nesting on just about every island or sea stack thats surrounded by water, Harris said. And summer is when they nest.

Previously, rangers and volunteers only saw a handful of drone operators flying near the islands, Harris said. But that number has jumped significantly, leading to more birds being stressed and driven off their nests.

For birds in decline  such as the black oystercatcher  that can have consequences.

Every baby and chick is important, Harris said, noting a situation in California where a drone forced about 3,000 adult elegant terns to abandon their nests, leaving 1,500 to 2,000 eggs behind. Other birds impacted by drones flying too close to the Oregon islands include the common murre, pigeon guillemot, tufted puffin and two types of cormorants.

Solutions include education, new rules

The concern, shared by multiple land agencies, is prompting a twofold response.

First, Harris said, rangers and volunteers are hoping to better educate drone pilots about the harm flying too close to the Oregon islands can cause. Most simply dont know, she said.

Second, Oregon is planning to have new rules governing where you can fly by summer 2022, via Senate Bill 109, which recently passed the state Legislature and is awaiting Gov. Kate Browns signature. The bill gives Oregon authority to draft rules regulating where pilots can take off and land with a drone on the ocean beaches, headlands and all other state parks.

Wed draft rules and then put them out for public comment, said Chris Havel, spokesman for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. Our hope is to get our recommendations back to the commission for approval by February or April so they can be in place for the 2022 season.

Havel said the rules would be drafted by a working group that includes members of the drone and wildlife community.

We know this is having a dramatic effect on survival of birds and chicks, he said. Thats why were trying to get on top of this as quickly as we can.

Current rules lack teeth

Currently, rules governing drones around the Oregon islands are flimsy.

Its recommended that operators keep unmanned aircraft at least 500 feet from any of the islands, but its difficult to enforce and doesnt have legal teeth.

It is not illegal to fly a drone over a wildlife refuge, Harris said. The 500-foot rule is just a recommendation. Flying over a wildlife refuge is legal.

However, it is illegal for the drone to disturb or harm a nesting bird in a wildlife refuge and a person can be fined.

Leading with education

Even so, its hard to enforce given the size of the coast, and the fact that most drone operators can launch from any public beach or wayside. And in most cases, Harris said, the disruption isnt intentional.

Almost universally, the people we approach have no idea about the rules or that they might be causing a disturbance, Harris said. When we tell them, theyre almost all open-minded and dont want to have a negative impact on the birds.

Harris had two pieces of advice. First, in a perfect world, drone operators wouldnt fly near the Oregon islands during nesting season. The best months to fly near the islands would be September, October and November, all the way into March 1, she said.

Failing that, she said, drone pilots should follow recommendations and stay at least 500 feet  if not more  from the islands during the summer nesting season. And if birds appear agitated by the drone, pilots should ground their aircraft.

We want people to get out and enjoy this hobby, Harris said. We just want them to know how important it is to stay away from the islands and nesting sites, because it can do real damage and I dont think anyone wants that.
TULE LAKE, Calif. (AP)  Ben DuVal knelt in a barren field near the California-Oregon border and scooped up a handful of parched soil as dust devils whirled around him and birds flitted between empty irrigation pipes.

DuVals family has farmed this land for three generations, and this summer, for the first time, he and hundreds of others who rely on a federally managed lake to quench their fields arent getting any water from it at all.

As the farmland goes fallow, Native American tribes along the 257-mile-long (407-kilometer) river that flows from the lake to the Pacific watch helplessly as fish that are inextricable from their culture hover closer to extinction.

This summer, a historic drought and its consequences are tearing communities apart and attracting outside attention to a water crisis years in the making. Competition over Klamath River water has always been intense, but now there is simply not enough, and all the stakeholders are suffering.

"Everybody depends on the water in the Klamath River for their livelihood. Thats the blood that ties us all together, DuVal said of the competing interests. Nobodys coming out ahead this year. Nobodys winning.

Those living the nightmare worry the extreme drought is a harbinger of global warming.

The system is crashing ... for people up and down the Klamath Basin, said Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, which is monitoring a massive fish kill on the river. Its heartbreaking.

Twenty years ago, when water feeding the irrigation system was drastically reduced amid another drought, the crisis became a national rallying cry for the political right, and some protesters opened the main irrigation canal in violation of federal orders.

This time, many irrigators reject the presence of anti-government activists. Farmers who need federal assistance to stay afloat fear ties to the far right could hurt them.

Meanwhile, toxic algae is blooming in the basins main lake, and two national wildlife refuges critical to migratory birds are drying out.

The conditions have exacerbated a water conflict that traces its roots back more than a century.

Beginning in 1906, the federal government reengineered a complex system of lakes, wetlands and rivers in the 10 million-acre (4 million-hectare) Klamath River Basin to create tens of thousands of acres of irrigated farmland.

The Klamath Reclamation Project draws its water from the 96-square-mile (248-square-kilometer) Upper Klamath Lake. But the lake is also home to suckerfish central to the Klamath Tribes culture and creation stories.

In 1988, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed two species of sucker fish as endangered. The federal government must keep the lake at a minimum depth to support the fish  but this year, amid exceptional drought, there was not enough water to do that and supply irrigators.

Agriculture should be based on whats sustainable. Theres too many people after too little water," said Don Gentry, the Klamath Tribes chairman.

With the Klamath Tribes enforcing their senior water rights to help suckerfish, there is also no extra water for downriver salmon.

The Karuk Tribe last month declared a state of emergency, citing climate change and the worst hydrologic conditions in the Klamath River Basin in modern history. Karuk tribal citizen Aaron Troy Hockaday Sr. is a fourth-generation fisherman but says he hasnt caught a fish in the river since the mid-1990s.

I got two grandsons that are 3 and 1 years old. Ive got a baby grandson coming this fall," he said. How can I teach them how to be fishermen if theres no fish?

The downstream tribes problems are compounded by hydroelectric dams that block the path of migrating salmon.

In most years, the tribes 200 miles (320 kilometers) to the southwest of the farmers, where the river reaches the ocean, ask the Bureau of Reclamation to release pulses of extra water from Upper Klamath Lake. The extra water mitigates outbreaks of a parasitic disease that proliferates when the river is low.

This year, the federal agency refused those requests.

Now, the parasite is killing thousands of juvenile salmon in the lower Klamath River, where the Karuk and Yurok tribes have coexisted with them for millennia. An average of 63% of fish caught last month in research traps near the rivers mouth were dead.

This is all unprecedented, said Jamie Holt, lead fisheries technician for the Yurok Tribe. Where do you go from here? When do you start having the larger conversation of complete unsustainability?

Near the rivers source, some of the farmers who are seeing their lives upended by the same drought say a guarantee of less water  but some water  each year would be better than the parched fields they have now. Some worry problems in the basin are being blamed on a way of life they also inherited.

I know turning off the project is easy, said Tricia Hill, a fourth-generation farmer. But sometimes the story that gets told ... doesnt represent how progressive we are here and how we do want to make things better for all species. This single-species management is not working for the fish  and its destroying our community and hurting our wildlife.

DuVals daughter dreams of taking over the family farm someday. But DuVal isnt sure he and his wife, Erika, can hang onto the land if things dont change.

We had a plan on how were going to grow our farm and to be able to send my daughters to a good college, said DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association. And that plan just unravels further and further with every bad water year.
LAMONI, Iowa (AP)  A well-known Omaha, Nebraska, businessman was one of two people killed in the crash of a small plane this week in south-central Iowa, according to the mans brother.

Dave Paladino, 54, was flying the single-engine Cirrus SR-22 that crashed Thursday near the Lamoni Municipal Airport, killing him and a young relative, Kevin Paladino told the Omaha World-Herald. Dave Paladino was the owner of Dino's Storage units across Omaha, known for their signs that carry Bible verses and religious messages. He also was a landlord of many properties around the city.
CORINNA, Maine (AP)  Two parents in Maine have been arrested after their 11-month-old baby overdosed on drugs in their home.

The two people were arrested in Corinna after officials received a call that the baby girl was in medical distress, the Bangor Daily News reported. The overdose happened on the morning of June 26.
MOBILE, Ala. (AP)  Police are investigating after about two dozen gunshots were fired into the house of an Alabama lawmaker who wasn't home at the time.

The Mobile Police Department tells local news outlets that the shooting happened around 5 a.m. Thursday at the home of state Sen. Vivian Davis Figures.
NORFOLK, Va. (AP)  Police in Virginia are investigating a shooting that has injured four children in the city of Norfolk.

The Virginian-Pilot reported Friday that a girl, 6, was taken to a hospital with serious injuries. Police said in a statement that she is in stable condition.
BOSTON (AP)  A man suspected of stabbing a rabbi several times near a Jewish day school in Boston was held without bail Friday at his arraignment pending a hearing to determine whether he is a danger to society.

Khaled Awad, 24, pleaded not guilty to assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon and assault and battery on a police officer in connection with the Thursday afternoon stabbing of Rabbi Shlomo Noginski in the citys Brighton neighborhood.

The attorney who represented Awad on Friday could not be reached for comment. A number for Awad, who's from Brighton, could not be found.

The hearing to determine whether he's a danger is scheduled for July 8. Awad has no record in Massachusetts but has faced charges of battery and theft in Florida and was sent to a mental health facility there, prosecutors said.

The motive for the stabbing remains unclear, and police are still investigating. District Attorney Rachael Rollins said at a vigil in support of Noginksi on Friday her office has opened a civil rights investigation to determine whether the stabbing is a hate crime.

We have to recognize that antisemitism is on the rise, and we need to hold people accountable when they do this, so that they are made an example of, Rollins said at the vigil not far from the stabbing site, attended by several hundred people.

The suspect approached the rabbi with a gun and a knife while he was talking on the phone, sitting on the steps of the school, according to prosecutors and Rabbi Dan Rodkin, executive director of Shaloh House. The suspect allegedly demanded the rabbis car keys, and Noginski ran across the street to a park where he was stabbed.

According to the court documents, when police located the suspect, he pointed what appeared to be a firearm at them. Three officers drew their firearms and ordered the suspect to drop his weapon multiple times, authorities said. The suspect then lowered his weapon and threw it to the ground.

The suspect kicked one of the officers in the stomach as he was being assisted into a transport vehicle for booking, police said.

As soon as the school became aware of the stabbing, the facility went into lockdown and no children were ever in danger, Rodkin said in a Facebook post.

Noginski is an Israeli citizen who came to the Boston area as an emissary to spread the Chabad message, Consul General of Israel to New England Meron Reuben told the Boston Herald.

We are horrified by what has happened, Reuben said.

Noginski, who spoke to Lubavitch.com from his hospital bed, has since been released from the hospital.

I am grateful to the Boston Police Department for their rapid response, and relieved that the perpetrator is in custody. I am looking forward to returning to my work as soon as possible, he said.

Some who attended Friday's vigil held in a steady rain think the stabbing was a hate crime.

I dont think theres a member of our Jewish community who did not hear about this stabbing and think to themselves, Oh my God, its happened here in Boston, said Marc Baker, president of Combined Jewish Philanthropies.

The attack on the rabbi was an attack on the entire city, acting Mayor Kim Janey said: I believe that an attack on any member of our community is an attack on all of us.
BOISE, Idaho (AP)  U.S. officials and a sheep industry group have filed notices to appeal a federal court ruling involving an eastern Idaho sheep research facility long targeted by environmental groups concerned about the potential harm to grizzly bears and other wildlife.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and American Sheep Industry Association filed the notices late last month to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A judges ruling in April prevents grazing in significant areas used by the Agriculture Departments U.S. Sheep Experiment Station.

Grazing was suspended in 2013 following previous lawsuits by environmental groups contending the areas contain key wildlife habitat that is a corridor for grizzly bears between Yellowstone National Park and Glacier National Park. Conservation groups contend grizzly bears have been killed because of sheep station activities.

The groups also say bighorn sheep, which can acquire deadly diseases from domestic sheep, and greater sage grouse use the area.

Grazing resumed following the release of a 2017 environmental impact statement considering the effects of sheep grazing on wildlife.

The Western Watersheds Project and two other groups filed a new lawsuit in early 2019 challenging the governments decision allowing sheep owned by the University of Idaho to graze in the Centennial Mountains of Idaho and Montana.

A federal judge in April agreed with the environmental groups that the government hadn't adequately examined all of the impacts with its 2017 environmental review.

It's really good news for wildlife that the sheep experimental station is basically down to its headquarters area, and they're not going to be grazing sheep in the Centennial Mountains, said Erik Molvar, the Western Watersheds Projects executive director.

The sheep station is operated by the Agriculture Department's Agricultural Research Service. The sheep station supports research using domestic sheep owned by the University of Idaho, some of it involving sheep grazing at higher altitudes.

Specifically, Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald E. Bush ruled the government hadn't sufficiently examined the project's potential effects on grizzly bears and bighorn sheep, and didn't objectively analyze alternatives.

Bush ruled the government did adequately examine the effects on sage grouse.

The sheep station uses grazing allotments not belonging to the Agricultural Research Service. Bush ruled that the government didn't adequately examine direct and indirect effects of sheep grazing on those allotments.

He said the government must review the project again in line with environmental laws, and until that review is complete, sheep grazing isn't allowed in those areas.

The Agriculture Department has said that the sheep station conducts research on lands ranging from about 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) to nearly 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) in elevation.

The lands contain subalpine meadow, foothill, sagebrush steppe, and desert shrubland ecosystems, the agency noted. This diversity provides unparalleled research opportunities.

The Sheep Experiment Station, based near Dubois, Idaho, has not only been targeted by environmental groups but has also been on the federal budget chopping block under the administrations of both President Barrack Obama and President Donald Trump.

Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, who represents the area, has played a crucial role in restoring funding.

We'd like to see the sheep station converted into a research station that focuses on native ecosystems, Molvar said.
A Michigan school district has reprimanded three employees after a 7-year-old girls hair was cut at her elementary school.

The Mount Pleasant Public Schools Board of Education said Friday in a news release that an independent third-party investigation determined that despite good intentions of the worker who cut the girls hair on March 26, doing so without permission from her parents and without the knowledge of district administrators violated school policy.

As a result of the districts investigation, the employee who cut the students hair will be placed on a last chance agreement during which time any future violations will likely result in termination, the school board said.

The other two employees were aware of the incident but didnt report it. All three employees have apologized, the board said.

Jimmy Hoffmeyer told The Associated Press in April that his daughter, Jurnee, arrived home from school with much of her hair on one side cut. She said a classmate used scissors to cut her hair on the school bus, Hoffmeyer said.

Two days later  after complaining to the principal and having Jurnees hair styled at a salon with an asymmetrical cut to make the differing lengths less obvious  Jurnee arrived home with the other side cut by a school employee to even it out.

Jurnee is biracial. The girl who cut Jurnees hair is white. The teacher who cut it also is white, said Hoffmeyer.

The school board said the independent investigation found no racial bias and included interviews with district personnel, students and families and a review of video and photos, including posts on social media. District administrators also performed an internal review of the incident.

They never questioned my daughter or me, Hoffmeyer said Friday. Who did they talk to? Did they really do an investigation?

Mount Pleasant is about 150 miles (241 kilometers) northwest of Detroit. About 4% of Mount Pleasants 25,000 residents are Black, according to the U.S. Census.

__

Williams reported from Southfield, Michigan.
SEATTLE (AP)  The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce is appealing the dismissal of its lawsuit against the citys new tax on high salaries at large corporations.

A King County judge dismissed the chambers lawsuit against the JumpStart tax last month, leading City Council members who passed the measure last year to declare victory.

On Friday, the chamber announced an appeal asking the Washington State Court of Appeals to overturn the decision, The Seattle Times reported.

The business group argues JumpStart is an illegal tax on employees and their right to make a living, while Seattles lawyers say the measure is tax on employers and their business activities.

Our success in this lawsuit wasnt in doubt, considering the Legislatures express authorization to impose a progressive tax like this, City Attorney Pete Holmes said last month after Judge Mary Roberts dismissed the lawsuit.

This is an important legal issue to resolve and this needs to be reviewed by the Court of Appeals, Chamber President Rachel Smith said Friday.

The tax took effect this year, with Mayor Jenny Durkan and the council relying on more than $200 million in expected proceeds to fill pandemic-related holes in Seattles 2021 budget and provide relief to residents. Starting in 2022, much of the money has been designated for affordable housing.

The measure taxes businesses with at least $7 million in annual payroll 0.7% to 2.4% on salaries paid to Seattle employees who make at least $150,000 per year. The top 2.4% rate, meant to apply to companies like Amazon, taxes salaries of at least $400,000 at companies with at least $1 billion in annual payroll.
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP)  A northern Nevada sheriff says security upgrades are in the works at the jail where two inmates recently escaped.

The inmates, 27-year-old Matthew Marizza and 29-year-old Cody Abernathy, were recaptured separately within days after escaping the evening of June 26 though an emergency exit in a loading dock area of the Carson City Jail.
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Friday turned down a petition from a Christian florist who refused to create flower arrangements for a same-sex couple, refusing for now to take another case asking when anti-discrimination laws must give way to religious convictions.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch indicated they would have accepted the case. But it requires four justices for a grant, and that means none of the court's other three conservatives were willing to go along.

A unanimous Washington state Supreme Court found that the florist, Barronelle Stutzman, violated the Washington Law Against Discrimination, a state civil rights law.

In 2013, Stutzman told a friend, Robert Ingersoll, that she would not create arrangements for his wedding to his longtime companion, Curt Freed. Stutzman said she held Ingersoll's hand and said she had to decline his request because of her "relationship with Jesus Christ."

She was fined for violating the state's law that prohibits businesses from discriminating because of sexual orientation. The conservative Alliance for Defending Freedom has been trying to get the Supreme Court to accept the case ever since.

It was seen as a natural follow-up to the court's 2018 decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court sided with a baker who would not create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple celebrating their union.

But the court's decision in that case was fact-specific: that commission members had been unfairly hostile to Jack Phillips's religious justifications for his actions. There was no such issue in Stutzman's case.

There are numerous lawsuits across the country concerning wedding vendors - photographers, videographers, calligraphers among them - who don't want to participate in a same-sex marriage.

In the term just completed, the Supreme Court again found a way to dispose of a case raising religious liberty and LBGTQ rights without answering the underlying question.

The justices ruled unanimously that the city of Philadelphia was wrong to end a Catholic group's contract to provide foster-care services because the organization refused to work with same-sex couples.

Chief Justice John Roberts reasoned that because Philadelphia theoretically allows some exceptions to its anti-discrimination policy, the city had violated the Constitution's guarantee of free exercise of religion by not extending one to Catholic Social Services, which screens potential foster-care parents.

Alliance Defending Freedom General Counsel Kristen Waggoner said it was "tragic" the court had passed up Stutzman's case.

"No one should be forced to express a message or celebrate an event they disagree with," Waggoner said in a statement. "A government that can crush someone like Barronelle, who kindly served her gay customer for nearly a decade but simply declined to create art celebrating one sacred ceremony, can use its power to crush any of us regardless of our political ideology or views on important issues like marriage."

Waggoner said she was "confident" the Supreme Court will eventually affirm "the constitutionally protected freedom of creative professionals to live and work consistently with their most deeply held beliefs."

The case is Arlene's Flowers v. Washington
A Tesla Model S Plaid erupted in flames as the owner was driving down the road on Tuesday, attorneys for the man said, briefly trapping him in the car after the electronically activated doors would not open.

It happened in outside Philadelphia days after the man took delivery of the model Tesla has hailed as the world's quickest production car. Tesla said it delivered the first 25 vehicles in June after Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a glitzy media event in Fremont, Calif.

Authorities from the Gladwyne Fire Department initially said they were investigating a fire involving a Tesla Model S, but by Thursday the news release had been taken down. The Lower Merion Township Fire Department, which responded to the fire, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The chief fire officer for the township's fire department confirmed to CNBC that a 2021 Model S Plaid caught fire on Tuesday night and said crews were on scene for more than three hours to deal with the aftermath.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it is gathering information on the incident.

"NHTSA is aware of the Tesla vehicle fire in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania; and the agency is in touch with relevant agencies and the manufacturer to gather information about the incident," spokeswoman Lucia Sanchez said. "If data or investigations show a defect or an inherent risk to safety exists, NHTSA will take action as appropriate to protect the public."

The agency is investigating alleged defects that can cause fires in Tesla sedans and SUVs, including older Model S and Model X vehicles, a probe that was opened in 2019.

The blaze bore a resemblance to previous Tesla fires, where there was an electrical or smoky smell followed by a pop, and the owner became trapped in the vehicle after its electronics malfunctioned. The Washington Post reported on a similar series of events in Frisco, Tex., in November.

Attorneys for the driver, who they declined to identify, shared photos of badging and documentation confirming the vehicle was a Model S Plaid and said it had been delivered the weekend before the incident.

Mark Geragos, of the law firm Geragos and Geragos, confirmed he is representing the owner and called for Tesla to take the vehicles off the road.

"This is a harrowing and frightening situation and an obvious major problem," Geragos said in a statement. "Our preliminary investigation is ongoing, but we call on Tesla to sideline these cars until a full investigation can occur."

Geragos is working with another attorney, Jason Setchen, who is representing the owner through his business Athlete Defender.

In an interview, Setchen said his client narrowly escaped catastrophe after the car caught fire and the door handles would not budge.

"He's in the car, he smells and sees the smoke, turns around and sees the smoke is filling up the cabin, then flames, and reacts almost immediately," Geragos said in an interview. "The door malfunctions, he gets out and somehow the car is still running [down the road] according to witnesses as he's trying to get away from the car. And within moments of him getting out of the car, the car is engulfed in flames."

Setchen said the owner had been driving the car around 8:55 p.m. Tuesday when the fire broke out.

"Once he saw the fire shoot out of the back, that's when he immediately pulled over to try to exit the vehicle," Setchen said. "He tried to get out of the vehicle; he was pushing the door frantically and it would not engage."

Finally, he said, the owner put the weight of his body against the door.

"He was able to push the button again and lean against the door very hard and that's when it opened up," he said.

The attorneys were continuing to investigate the incident and would review their options once the probe was complete. They planned to formally alert the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the problem in case it affected more vehicles.

Tesla hailed the vehicle as an engineering marvel, promising a 390-mile range and more than 1,000 horsepower, propelling the car to speeds up to 200 mph and logging 0-to-60 mile per hour times of below two seconds. The fire involving one of the few Plaid models already in the hands of customers raises questions about long-simmering concerns about Tesla's approach to electrification, which involves different battery chemistry from competitors and maximizing range and performance compared to rivals.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)  The captain of a commercial fishing vessel died and two other crew members apparently escaped uninjured when it sank in southwest Alaska, authorities said.

Lance Eric Norby, 45, of Texas, was identified as the captain, Alaska State Troopers said Friday. His remains were being sent to the State Medical Examiner in Anchorage.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  A top Republican political consultant in South Carolina faces 14 additional charges in a 7-year-old investigation into corruption among lawmakers.

The new indictments against Richard Quinn Sr. on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice were handed up May 20, but weren't announced publicly or even shared with Quinn's attorney, The State newspaper reported.

You would think the courteous thing to do would be to call the lawyer, attorney Rauch Wise told the newspaper. He said he had no comment on the new indictments.

The new indictments are similar to a 12-count indictment against Quinn issued in April 2019 with one big difference  an additional perjury charge says Quinn lied to a state grand jury about an email he sent Republican Attorney General Alan Wilson suggesting Wilson tell the special prosecutor overseeing the corruption case that he couldn't investigate Quinn's son, former state Rep. Richard Quinn Jr.

That special prosecutor, David Pascoe, stepped aside from Quinn Sr.'s case after the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled he exceeded his authority by continuing the investigation.

Wilson then handed the case to Solicitor Barry Barnette, who sought the May indictments.

The corruption probe began in 2014 as an investigation into ex-House Speaker Bobby Harrell, who pleaded guilty to spending campaign money on personal expenses. He was sentenced to probation.

Quinn Jr. also pleaded guilty and received probation for taking $4 million in money from lobbyists and doing their bidding for the Quinns consulting business.

Charges were dropped against his father as part of that deal as long as Quinn Sr. cooperated with investigators, but instead they said he lied to the state grand jury.

Barnette's office would not comment about the status of the investigation or why the new indictments weren't shared publicly or with Quinn's lawyer.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP)  Kansas' top court on Friday upheld the first-degree murder convictions of man sentenced to 150 years in prison over a triple homicide in Kansas City, Kansas, duplex.

The state Supreme Court unanimously rejected arguments from an attorney for MonDale Le'on Douglas that the judge gave flawed instructions to the jury in his trial and that a new trial was warranted because a prosecutor appeared during closing arguments to express a personal opinion that Douglas was the killer.
MOBILE, Ala. (AP)  Trucking officials are unhappy after the Alabama Department of Transportation moved with little notice to divert trucks from the Interstate 10 tunnel in Mobile.

The state announced Thursday that trucks had to detour from noon to 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday to try reduce traffic on I-10 before the July 4 holiday.

Traffic commonly backs up for miles on I-10 through Mobile as tourists make their way to and from Gulf of Mexico beaches. There are sharp curves at each end of the George Wallace Tunnel and eastbound I-10 narrows to two lanes as it prepares to plunge under the Mobile River. The worst backups are usually on Saturdays.

Were anticipating 90,000 to 100,000 vehicles per day traveling through the Wallace Tunnel this weekend. Its just to help maintain the speeds through the tunnel and move more passenger vehicles, Alabama Department of Transportation engineer Matt Ericksen told WPMI-TV.

Trucks are being rerouted to the north to the Cochrane Africatown USA Bridge, the route that's already required for hazardous material carriers.

It's the first time outside of a hurricane evacuation that Alabama has routed truck traffic away from the tunnel.

Mark Colson, president and CEO of the Alabama Trucking Association, said state officials have botched the move, not notifying trucking groups in advance, requiring trucks to quickly exit, and placing an officer in the middle of the highway to flag down trucks that missed the notification.

The decision that was made was implemented very poorly and created some serious safety hazards, one of which was an officer standing in the middle of two lanes of the interstate, which was not safe for him or surrounding motorists and caused unnecessary and unsafe backups, Colson told AL.com.

Mobile Public Safety Director Lawrence Battiste said the city did not learn of the decision until after state officials made it. Tunnel traffic spills into city streets as motorists try to drive north to the bridge or use the older Bankhead Tunnel in downtown Mobile.

Alabama is considering a $725 million truck-only bridge over the Mobile River to relieve congestion after a plan for a larger $2.1 billion bridge collapsed over opposition to projected tolls. The truck bridge would be finance by a $10 to $15 toll on trucks. Colson opposes the bridge, saying it's unfair to toll only trucks.

Trucks are just 10% of the traffic. As you can see now, if you just remove less than 10% of the traffic on a holiday weekend like this, it doesnt solve the congestion problem, and neither will a truck-only toll bridge, Colson said.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP)  Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday denounced the burning and vandalism of Catholic churches that has followed discovery of unmarked graves and former schools for Indigenous children.

Several Catholic churches have recently been vandalized or damaged in fires following the discovery of more than 1,100 unmarked graves at the sites of three former residential schools run by the church in British Columbia and Saskatchewan that generations of Indigenous children had been forced to attend .

The nation also saw a series of attacks Thursday  Canada Day  on statues of Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth and other historical figures.

Trudeau, himself a Catholic, said he understands the anger many people feel toward the federal government and Catholic church. The government has apologized for the schools and Trudeau has called on Pope Francis, too, to make a formal apology.

Its real and it is fully understandable given the shameful history we are all become more aware of, he told a news conference.

I cant help but think that burning down churches is actually depriving people who are in need of grieving and healing and mourning from places where they can grieve and reflect and look for support.

On Thursday, statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature were tied with ropes and pulled down by a crowd.

The statue of Queen Victoria was covered in red paint and its base had red handprints on it. On the steps behind the statue were hundreds of tiny shoes, placed there to recognize the children who went to residential schools.

Arlen Dumas, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, was at a separate event at the time but said he was shocked at what happened.

``I personally wouldnt have participated in that," he said, though he added, Mind you, it has been a very triggering time over the past few weeks.

``Its unfortunate that they chose to express themselves the way that they did. But its actually a symbol of the fact that there is a lot of hurt and that theres a lot of frustration and anger with just how things have happened," Dumas said.

Premier Brian Pallister called the vandalism a major setback for those who are working toward real reconciliation.

Those who commit acts of violence will be pursued actively in the courts. All leaders in Manitoba must strongly condemn acts of violence and vandalism, and at the same time, we must come together to meaningfully advance reconciliation," he said in a statement.

In other incidents on Canada Day, a statue of Queen Victoria in Kitchener, Ontario, was doused in red paint.

In Victoria, British Columbia, a statue of Captain James Cook was dismantled and thrown into the harbor. The statue was replaced with a wooden cutout of a red dress  a symbol representing murdered and missing Indigenous women  and its base was smeared with red handprints.

In St. Johns, Newfoundland and Labrador, two prominent buildings and a statue dedicated to the local police force were vandalized with bright red paint.

Earlier this week, a First Nations group in British Columbia said it had used ground-penetrating radar to find 182 human remains in unmarked graves at a site close to a former residential near Cranbrook, 525 miles (845 kilometers) east of Vancouver.

That followed reports of similar massive findings at two other such church-run schools, one of more than 600 unmarked graves in southern Saskatchewan and another of 215 bodies in British Columbia.

Some 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools, which operated for more than 120 years in Canada. More than 60% of the schools were run by the Catholic Church.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)  Following in the footsteps of Arizona's Senate Republicans, Pennsylvania's Republican-controlled Senate is considering an investigation into how last year's presidential election was conducted, a quest fueled by former President Donald Trump's baseless claims that fraud was behind his loss in the battleground state.

Any Senate-issued subpoenas for an Arizona-style election audit will face strident opposition from Democrats, legal questions and almost certainly challenges in Pennsylvania's courts, as battles over election laws rage through swing states and Congress, spurred on by Trump's falsehoods.

Senate Republicans have been mostly silent about their internal deliberations.

Sen. Doug Mastriano, a rising force in Pennsylvanias ultra-conservative circles who has talked of his desire to bring an Arizona-style audit to Pennsylvania, led a private briefing Wednesday for Republican senators on his plan.

In Arizona, the state Senate used its subpoena power to take possession of more than 2 million ballots and the machines that counted them, along with computer data.

Mastriano also solicited legal advice from a Philadelphia-based law firm about the Senate Republican caucus using private money to finance consultants and lawyers. The law firms response letter, dated Tuesday, was obtained by The Associated Press.

In the letter, the law firm discussed the legality of using money from a private, nonprofit organization to pay expenses for vendors, including a consultant and counsel as part of an oversight investigation" of the 2020 election led by the low-profile committee that Mastriano chairs.

While we cannot predict how the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would decide the issue, in our opinion, to a reasonable degree of legal certainty, Pennsylvania law does not prohibit the Caucus or Committee from accepting or benefiting from such financial support," lawyer Bruce S. Marks wrote.

The letter said the purpose of the investigation is to develop legislation which will enhance voter participation and election integrity.

Mastriano did not return phone calls. In a phone call Friday, Marks  who did legal work for the Trump campaign after the 2020 election  confirmed he wrote the letter, but otherwise declined comment.

Mastriano, who chairs the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, could theoretically issue subpoenas to counties with a majority vote of his committee. The Democratic bastions of Philadelphia and Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, could be prime targets.

Voting machines, ballots and other election records could be demanded. The process could cost millions of dollars. In Arizona, Senate Republicans kicked in $150,000 to help pay for the audit, but the lead contractor, Cyber Ninjas, and Republicans wont say who or what organizations are funding the rest of the operation or how much it is costing.

Mastriano, who has helped spread conspiracy theories about widespread fraud in the election, traveled to Arizona in June to see the audit there firsthand.

Well bring the information back to the Senate leadership, well back-brief them on the way ahead and then hopefully we can come up with an approach here to make sure every person in Pennsylvania can rest assured they have one vote and it counts, Mastriano told a radio host from WEEO-FM last month.

Republican consideration of an election audit in Pennsylvania comes as Trump supporters have pushed for audits and reviews of ballots in political battlegrounds in a bid to turn up evidence that Biden's victory was illegitimate.

No county election board, prosecutor or state official has raised a concern over any sort of widespread election fraud in Novembers election in Pennsylvania, a crucial state that Democrat Joe Biden won by more than 80,000 votes, or just over 1 percentage point.

Trumps efforts to overturn Bidens victory has been roundly rejected by courts at every level, including by judges appointed by the former president. Trumps attorney general has also said there was no widespread fraud in the U.S. that would have changed the results of the election.

Sen. Camera Bartolotta, R-Washington, said she tuned in for part of Mastriano's presentation Wednesday.

I dont know the ins and outs. I dont know whos going to pay for an audit. I dont know how extensive it might be, Bartolotta said. I do know that there are millions of Pennsylvanians who have questions and concerns and there is a lack of trust.

She said she was not sure what the next step might be. But, she said, she wanted to ensure the cost is not borne by state taxpayers.

I want to be absolutely certain that anything were doing  if anything gets done  is done in a legal way and is constitutional, Bartolotta said.

Critics say an election audit is duplicative, given the legal requirements for each county and the state to review election results for accuracy and investigate any discrepancies. Democrats, meanwhile, blame Trump and Republicans for spreading lies about the election that have sown distrust among voters.

The official rules of Pennsylvania's Senate grants its committees broad authority to issue subpoenas to any public agency in the state.

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Allegheny, said he was unaware of a Senate Republican plan, but questioned whether Mastriano's committee had authority over the subject matter of elections to legally issue such subpoenas. Traditionally, a different Senate committee has handled election issues.

Senate Democrats can challenge the subpoenas in the state Senate and in court, Costa said.

___

Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at www.twitter.com/timelywriter and Mark Scolforo at www.twitter.com/houseofbuddy
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Biden administration on Friday hit 22 senior Myanmar officials and family members with sanctions over the governments crackdown on democracy protests after the coup. The action was accompanied by the removal of sanctions on three Iranian industrial executives whom the Trump administration penalized for supporting Irans ballistic missile program.

Treasury announced the move against seven members of the Myanmar military and 15 spouses and adult children of previously sanctioned officials as part of the U.S. response to the February coup and subsequent violence against demonstrators in the country, also known as Burma.

The militarys suppression of democracy and campaign of brutal violence against the people of Burma are unacceptable, it said. "The United States will continue to impose increasing costs on Burmas military and promote accountability for those responsible for the military coup and ongoing violence, including by targeting sources of revenue for the military and its leaders.

Among the officials targeted are Minister for Information Chit Naing, Minister for Investment and Foreign Economic Relations Aung Naing Oo, Minister for Labor, Immigration and Population Myint Kyaing, Minister of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement Thet Thet Khine and three members of the State Administrative Council that the military set up after the coup.

The sanctions freeze any assets they or any companies they own may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar Americans from doing business with them.

Treasury offered no explanation for the lifting of sanctions on the three Iranians, but administration officials have said previous similar removals were based solely on the targets no longer meeting the criteria for the penalties and were unrelated to indirect negotiations on salvaging the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which that former President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018.

The Iranians  Behzad Daniel Ferdows, Behzad Daniel Ferdows and Mohammed Reza Dezfulian  were sanctioned by the Trump administration in September 2020 for their work with the Mammut Industrial Group and an affiliated company, Mammut Diesel, which Treasury said at the time were key producers and suppliers of military-grade, dual-use goods for Irans missile programs.

Also Friday, Treasury issued a final rule revoking Trump-era sanctions against International Criminal Court prosecutors and staff. The rule, which will take effect on July 6 after its publication in the Federal Register, completes President Joe Biden's April 1 revocation of Trump's authorization to impose sanctions on ICC officials involved in war crimes investigations into U.S. citizens.

That authority was the basis for former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hitting the now ex-chief ICC prosecutor and a top aide with sanctions. Current Secretary of State Antony Blinken had lifted those sanctions shortly after Biden's announcement and the publication of the final rule is mainly a housekeeping measure.

Although the United States continues to object to the ICCs assertions of jurisdiction over personnel of such non-States Parties as the United States and its allies absent their consent or referral by the United Nations Security Council, the threat and imposition of financial sanctions against the ICC, its personnel, and those who assist it are not an effective or appropriate strategy for addressing the United States concerns with the ICC, Treasury said.
DETROIT (AP)  Two water pumping stations in Detroit experienced power-related problems but did not fail during a heavy rainstorm last week that left basements, streets and even freeways flooded, the head of a regional water and wastewater agency said Friday.

Great Lakes Water Authority Chief Executive Sue McCormick told reporters that due to an electrical service issue only three of six pumps at one station were able to be brought online, while a power outage at a second station slowed efforts to turn three of its pumps on as the rain poured.

Eventually, five of the six pumps at the Connor Creek station were able to operate. Both Connor Creek and the nearby Freud stations serve Detroit's east side and several suburban communities. Designed to carry wastewater and excess storm water to treatment facilities, they were overwhelmed by the 7-8 inches of rain that fell in less than 19 hours between June 25-26, McCormick said.

Not only did we receive a large volume of precipitation, but it also fell in very intense bursts, she said. A review of the gauge data indicated the rain event was far beyond our designed standard.

We werent able to run everything that, in a perfect world, we would have been able to run," McCormick added.

The storm left thousands of basements flooded in the Detroit area and across parts of southeastern Michigan. Cars and SUVs stuck in high water were abandoned on flooded freeways and many streets were impassable.

McCormick said an after-event analysis will be performed and an internal investigation conducted of the water system's operations. The authoritys board has been asked to consider hiring an independent engineering expert to examine the water systems performance and the response to the problems, she said.

Candice Miller, public works commissioner in neighboring Macomb County, on Thursday called for an independent investigation. It appears there was a management failure at the Conner Creek pump station, she added.

Millers staff decided to release millions of gallons of treated water and waste to Lake St. Clair rather than risk sewage backups in Eastpointe and St. Clair Shores that hit basements in the Grosse Pointe communities, Detroit, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights in Wayne County.

Both Wayne and Macomb counties have representatives on the authoritys six-member board.
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.
Many technological advances in the world have stumped me over the past couple of decades. In each of the next few weeks, I will revisit some of the columns I wrote in the last 22 years where I shared my frustrations and will update you on how my techy skills have improved  or not.
Dont those cute tiny houses one sees posted on social media and niche real estate listings look heavenly? Especially one nestled snugly amidst Sequoia trees, sequestered far away from the maddening crowd?

Tiny House, Michael Gotchs new play kicking off Westport Country Playhouses virtual, 90th season, submits that the reality of living in such an attractive home is more than a tad more complicated than the photos suggest.

New homeowners Sam and Nick are the central characters in Gotchs Tiny House, which continues its virtual production, accessible on-demand through July 18. They have their reasons for abandoning the rat race in favor of a peaceful existence off the grid and forswear the strident excesses of their fortunes for natures tranquility.

Well, hardy-har-har! one can hear Ralph Kramden chuckling in the distance.

Splendidly directed by Playhouse artistic director Mark Lamos, Tiny House is about a long-overdue reckoning now at hand as Sam and Nick invite a disparate handful of family members and acquaintances to fete their new life together on the Fourth of July.

In a sense, experiencing the Playhouses virtual production may actually better serve Gotchs transcendental play than a traditional in-person, on stage production. Though grounded in the couples very concrete problems, much of the play defies naturalism or cute quirkiness. While the slick post-production work smooths out the overlapping dialogue and creates the illusion of multiple characters inhabiting the same space, there is no hiding the green screen effect. We recognize that the beautiful vistas are virtually imposed rather than real. They just might reflect how the characters idolize their new environment.

Each of Sam (Sara Bues) and Nicks (Denver Milord) five guests tilt towards archetypes or paranormal, starting with Sams mother Billie (Elizabeth Heflin). She redeems her stereotypical stage mother-monster in Act I with welcome depth of soul in Act II (theatergoers will doubtlessly sense Gotchs transition in tone and content from his brittle, at times unbearably blistering Act I, to his nakedly compassionate Act II). Her partner Larry (Lee E. Ernst), formerly her brother-in-law who, in the tradition of some ancient cultures, has replaced his absent brother as husband, initially strikes us as an over-the-top science nerd, only to reveal his own gentle humanity in a beautiful monologue.

Nearby couple Win (Stephen Pelinski) and Carol (Kathleen Pirkl-Tague) are tie-dyed in everything hippie, Renaissance Faire and sativa. Yet they prove more guardian angels than Woodstock relics, and Carol proves herself quite the sage.

Then theres Bernard (Hassan El-Amin), aptly described in Gotchs transcript as an enigma. More paramilitary than paranormal, Bernard seems to magically come and go without warning, armed to the teeth, to check up on his new neighbors lest they fail to acknowledge the inevitable fireworks at evenings end.

Editor Dan Scully and director of photography Lacey Erb provide a cutting-edge production that overcomes virtually all of the immutable annoyances of Zoom theater, from its inability to create the illusion of characters sharing a common space, to the lagging sound that ruins the desired crisp pace of comedy. Scully and Erb conquer these obstacles and allow Gotchs fast-paced script to come alive in naturalistic, entertaining fashion. The design team shares praise with the actors who initially performed the play two years ago on stage at Delawares Resident Ensemble Players. They relate with each other so genuinely that their performances look as organic as one could desire with in-person performances.

When Billie asks Sam why she dislikes fireworks, Sam answers in part by saying, They scare meThey don't feel like a celebration. They feel like bad surprises.

Tiny House showers surprises, both disturbing and cleansing, on its audience. Like Gotchs colorful characters, one would want to be sure that ones house is in order before the inevitable duck and cover warning call arrives.

Virtual tickets for Tiny House, starting at $25, are available at westportplayhouse.org, at 203-227-4177, or by email: boxoffice@westportplayhouse.org.

E. Kyle Minor is a freelance writer and theater critic.
BERLIN (AP)  Germany is recommending that all people who get a first shot of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine switch to a different type of vaccine for their second shot. The aim is to increase the speed and effectiveness of vaccinations as the more contagious delta variant spreads.

Health Minister Jens Spahn conferred with his colleagues from Germany's 16 states on Friday, the day after the country's standing committee on vaccination issued a draft recommendation. In a statement, the committee said that according to current study results, the immune response from a mixture of AstraZeneca with an mRNA vaccine was significantly superior to that from two doses of AstraZeneca.

It recommended that the second dose with an mRNA vaccine  Germany uses those made by BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna  be administered four weeks or more after the first AstraZeneca shot. That is much shorter than the nine to 12 weeks the committee recommends between two doses of AstraZeneca.

The committee, known by its German acronym STIKO, didn't detail what studies its conclusion was based on. Germany's disease control center noted that it was a draft, and that a final recommendation with more detail and sourcing will follow. Researchers have said that mixing vaccines is likely safe and effective, but are still gathering data to be sure.

German authorities already decided in April that under-60s who had received a first AstraZeneca shot should as a rule get a second shot of an mRNA vaccine. The decision came after the AstraZeneca vaccine was linked to extremely rare blood clots in younger people. Germany recommends that under-60s consult with a doctor before taking it.

Spahn said Friday that enough mRNA vaccine is available to implement the new recommendation quickly and that it makes the AstraZeneca vaccine more attractive, with large quantities now arriving and the prospect of a much shorter wait for the second shot.

He said the head of STIKO told ministers that the combination of AstraZeneca and BioNTech protects as least as well as BioNTech-BioNTech as a combination, in some cases even better. But he also stressed that two doses of AstraZeneca give good protection. BioNTech-Pfizer has been the mainstay of Germany's campaign, with AstraZeneca a distant second in terms of doses administered.

Germany is keen to keep upping the pace of its vaccination campaign even as new infections have sunk to their lowest level in months, pointing to the rise of the delta variant. Authorities believe it now accounts for more than half of new cases, and are keen to ensure that people get their second vaccine shots.

Only double-vaccinated protects well against delta, except in the case of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Spahn said.

As of Wednesday, Germany had given at least one shot to 55.1% of its population, and 37.3% were fully vaccinated. That's a good figure, but it's still not enough, Spahn said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is 66, recently received a second shot of Moderna's vaccine after taking a first shot of AstraZeneca. Her spokesman said that was a conscious effort to encourage people not to be afraid if they are advised to get a mix of shots.
Contributed photo / Contributed photo

SHELTON - Would-be Jedi Knights can begin their training right in the city next month.

The Shelton Library System will be offering a Jedi training session on July 24 as part of their Summer Reading Program. This program was made possible by a donation from the Friends of the Shelton Library.
BANGKOK (AP)  Health authorities in Thailand reported over 6,200 new COVID-19 cases on Saturday, setting a record for a third straight day, as concerns mounted over shortages of treatment facilities and vaccine supplies.

Officials also reported 41 deaths, bringing the total to 2,181.

Around 90% of Thailand's over 271,000 reported coronavirus cases and 95% of the deaths have been recorded during a surge that began in early April. There were 992 deaths in June, more than 15 times Thailands total for all of 2020.

The number of patients in ICUs and on ventilators has risen nationwide over the past two weeks.

The governments Center for COVID-19 Situation Administration said 39% of the new cases reported were in Bangkok, 25% in neighboring provinces and 36% in the other 71 provinces. Center deputy spokesperson Apisamai Srirangsan said Bangkok authorities must urgently set up isolation stations to separate infected people in their local communities and add beds for treatment of serious cases.

Critics since the beginning of the year have charged that the government of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has failed to secure timely and adequate vaccine supplies, and efforts to obtain more have proceeded slowly.

Experts at a Health Ministry briefing on Friday painted a grim picture of how to prioritize who gets vaccinated.

Epidemiologist Kamnuan Ungchoosak said the arrival of the delta variant of the virus, believed to be more contagious, could push the number of deaths up to 1,400 in July and more in coming months.

He said 80% of the deaths are among the elderly and people with chronic diseases, and if they are vaccinated it could significantly reduce the death rate while also lowering the demand for ICU beds. Around 10% of elderly and infirm patients die, while the rate for those age 20-40 is less than 0.1%, he said.

But at the same time, significant outbreaks are occurring among other groups, including people in construction worker camps and restaurant workers, who also need to be vaccinated, he said.

We currently have closed the camps and businesses, but the number of cases is not declining and the economy is bad. But if we focus on old people and those who have chronic diseases, we might not have to shut down the businesses and the bed demands from these two groups will also decline, Kamnuan said.

Prayuth has targeted mid-October for opening up the country to vaccinated visitors from abroad without quarantines.

Sopon Mekthon, chairman of the governments subcommittee on COVID-19 vaccine management, said only 2 million of about 16 million old and infirm people have received vaccines.

Nakorn Premsri, director of the National Vaccine Institute, said a Thai company, Siam BioScience, was supposed to provide the country with 10 million doses a month of the locally produced AstraZeneca vaccine, but that has been cut to 5-6 million doses. The company, owned by Thailand's king, reportedly has had production problems. It also has contracts to provide vaccines to other countries.

He said Thailand is trying to negotiate with other producers to fill the gap. So far, Thailand has only used vaccines from AstraZeneca and China's Sinovac and Sinopharm, although the government says it has agreements to also buy from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.
Ludington, MI (49431)

Today

Sunshine and a few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 76F. Winds SSW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening. Partly cloudy skies after midnight. Low near 65F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
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The COVID-19 pandemic upended workforce management. Some people are doing their jobs from home while others go into the office, and still others are on hybrid schedules. With many pandemic protocols still in place, a hurricane, tornado or wildfire could further scramble workforce management.

So how do HR professionals and other managers maintain some semblance of normalcy during both a pandemic and a natural disaster? Experts provide the following six tips.

1. Develop an emergency communication plan.

Hector Ruiz, founder and president of CorporateShields.com, an IT company in Windermere, Fla., relies on his company's emergency communication plan when a hurricane is bearing down on the Orlando area.



Your plan should tell employees how to keep in touch with their employer during a natural disaster, Ruiz said. For instance, who should employees contact when a disaster disperses the workforce? And if power, phone service or Internet service were to go down, what is the process to ensure workforce communication continues with as little interruption as possible?



"E-mail alone won't suffice, so make sure you have the ability to communicate via text, phone call, push notification and more," said Peter Steinfeld, senior vice president of safety solutions at AlertMedia, a provider of emergency communications software.

2. Assign tasks ahead of time.

Once a natural disaster strikes, it's too late to adequately map out a response. Start making your plans and coordinating your response team now, Ruiz said. Each member of this teamideally a manager or administratorshould be assigned certain roles and responsibilities.



Disaster preparedness expert Donna Childs, author of Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Small Businesses (Wiley, 2010), said one of those responsibilities should be proactively identifying employees with special needs to ensure they can be evacuated in the event of a disaster.

3. Be flexible and understanding.

Sara Bandurian is operations coordinator at Online Optimism, a marketing agency in New Orleans, a city that has seen its fair share of hurricanes. She said your company's disaster preparedness plan should incorporate flexibility and address the needs of office, remote and hybrid employees.



"It's worth remembering that  disasters can be distressing for anyone," Bandurian said. "Having remote capabilities is great because there is the option to work anywhere, but if there is a hurricane warning and our employees begin evacuation, they become scatterednot only physically from the office but also emotionally. No one does their best work when they're living out of a hotel room with half their things, so it's important to take those emotional needs into account."

4. Conduct emergency drills.

Remember those fire drills in school? Well, even as an adult, you should be participating in emergency drills at your workplace.



Childs said preparedness drillseven if they're just tabletop exercisescan keep people sharp when it comes to properly coping with a disaster.



"As disasters recede into memory, we become complacent, and it is best to make sure preparedness measures are top of mind," Childs said. "Remember that in a disaster, people will be stressed and not functioning at peak efficiency, so plan for that."

5. Evaluate your company's technology.

Technology can be a bond that helps keep your company connected before, during and after a natural disaster.



David Pearson, senior vice president of people and culture at ExtensisHR, a national HR outsourcing provider based in New Jersey, recommends that employers assess their servers, co-location facilities, Internet capabilities and other tech-related functions in advance of a disaster.



Childs added that laptops for employees working from home or for in-office employees who may need to evacuate in the event of a natural disaster should be company-issued and be reserved solely for business use. "This helps the employer protect confidential company data," she said, "and ensure appropriate cybersecurity protocols are followed."

6. Lift employees' spirits.

A natural disaster can wreak havoc in employees' work and personal lives. In light of that, Cecile Alper-Leroux, vice president of product and innovation at HR software provider UKG, suggests that managers regularly check in with their team members amid a disaster, whether that's through one-on-one meetings, employee surveys or other means.



Employers also can strengthen emotional ties with workers, both in-office and remote, by rallying them during a crisis, said Alper-Leroux, who works at UKG's office in hurricane-prone Weston, Fla. At UKG, employees consistently raise money for causes or donate to co-workers in the wake of a natural disaster or unexpected tragedy. UKG then matches 100 percent of employees' contributions.



"Proactively creating opportunities for emotional connection during a crisis helps strengthen the culture of an organization overall, regardless of whether employees are working from home, the office or some combination of the two," Alper-Leroux said.



John Egan is a freelance writer in Austin, Texas.


By Nick Simonson I cant help it. My mindset has already shifted toward hunting, despite only being a week removed from the summer solstice, the July Fourth holiday not here yet and there being nearly a full three months of the season remaining. It happens every year about this time. I know it shouldnt but...
It is a story of a young woman named Srishti Bakshi who embarks on a journey, walking almost 4,000 kilometres over 240 days, from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, along the way meeting and learning first-hand about the experiences of women in all corners of India.

The documentary explores the social and political issues faced by women of today's India.

Said Bakshi: "Violence against women and girls is a human rights violation, and since the outbreak of Covid-19 and the world locking down to live within four walls, emerging data and reports from those on the frontlines have shown that all types of violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, has only intensified. In this documentary we have celebrated ordinary women who've shown extraordinary courage to rise above their limitations and challenge deeply entrenched gender norms. We did this to unite the majority because what we discovered was that gender-based violence is a crime perpetrated by the minority but perpetuated by the silence of the majority."

Producer Apoorva Bakshi added: "We take great pride in presenting our film at IFFM as the opening night gala presentation and look forward to sharing it with audiences worldwide. This documentary not only presents facts but also highlights possible solutions which can be implemented today."

Mitu Bhowmick Lange, IFFM Director, said: "After the unprecedented challenges faced over the last 18 months, we are excited to bring the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne back to the big screen, while our digital platform will ensure viewers around Australia can access the Festival too. In 2021, IFFM pays tribute to not only the best of Indian cinema, but to many of our Covid-19 heroes, offering vital community support, connection and hope in these troubled times."

IFFM this year will take place both physically and virtually, with the physical festival running from August 12 to August 20 and the digital edition running from August 15 to August 30.

For more stories click here: Kollywood l Malayalam l Bollywood l Telugu
Bennett made the remarks during a meeting with visiting German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday, during which they discussed the "Iranian nuclear threat", Xinhua news agency reported.

Tel Aviv, July 2 (IANS) Israel's Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has said that his country is determined "to prevent Iran from having nuclear military capabilities".

During a meeting held earlier the day, Israel's President Reuven Rivlin praised Steinmeier as "a strong partner in the uncompromising fight against antisemitism", saying the German President has stood with Israel against "the forces of terror who seek to wipe us off the map".

Steinmeier reiterated Germany's view that the two-state solution is the only way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, adding that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Steinmeier arrived in Israel on Wednesday for a visit aiming to further strengthen the "close and unique relations" between the two allies.

Earlier 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".

He added that Iran must not possess nuclear weapons and this is the "clear and consistent position of Israel".

Like his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu, Bennett is an opponent of the renewal of the nuclear deal between the world powers and Iran.

In his first address to Parliament on June 14, Bennett, a nationalist leader of an eight-party diverse coalition, said that the emerging deal is a "mistake" and that his country "will not allow Iran to achieve nuclear weapons".

--IANS

ksk/
"We have directed the vice-chancellors of all the universities in the state to vaccinate their wards (students) by July 10 on priority to facilitate opening of physical classes in higher educational institutes, including colleges," Narayan said in a statement here.

Bengaluru: The Karnataka government has directed all the universities in the state to vaccinate their students on priority before offline classes begin for the 2021-22 academic year, Deputy Chief Minister C.N. Ashwath Narayan said on Thursday.

Narayan, a medical doctor by profession, holds the portfolios of higher education, IT, BT and science and technology in the BJP-led Karnataka government.

"As per the vaccination drive schedule, maximum number of students above 18 years will be administered the jab over the next 10 days across the state," he said after a virtual meet with the vice-chancellors.

As part of gradual lifting of the lockdown measures in the state, Narayan said the date of opening of colleges and universities would be decided on the success of the vaccination drive to protect the students from the pandemic.
New Delhi: Niti Aayog member, health, Dr VK Paul on Friday cautioned that the second wave of COVID-19 is not over yet even though India is seeing a decline in the number of fresh cases.



"The second wave of COVID-19 is not over yet and central teams have been sent to problem states. We are not safe until the entire nation is safe," Dr Paul said.

Expressing his views on the third wave of COVID-19, Dr Paul said, "That is not in our hands. We must have all the preparation regarding infrastructure in rural areas, arrangement for children, ICU beds, medicines, etc. But our attempt would be to stall any new outbreak. And if we are disciplined, then this wave will not come."

Dr Paul said a recent study from PGI Chandigarh on police personnel showed that vaccine efficacy in those with a single dose was 92 per cent and those with two doses was 98 per cent.

"The projection that 216 crore doses would be available, from August-December was an optimistic, aspirational projection based on what our manufacturers had told us," he said.

He further added that the cases of the 'Delta plus' variant of the coronavirus in the country have risen to 56 across the 12 states.

India saw a single-day rise of 46,617 new coronavirus infections, taking the tally of COVID-19 cases to 3,04,58,251, while the national recovery rate has crossed 97 per cent, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated on Friday.

The Centre on Friday sent multi-disciplinary teams to six states -- Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Manipur -- that are reporting a high number of cases. The two-member team comprised a clinician and a public health expert.
Sources said that Rawat, who was in Delhi where he had met BJP chief J.P. Nadda twice in three days, on Friday left for Dehra Dun and will submit his resignation to the Governor.

New Delhi: Uttarakhand Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat is likely to resign as he is unable to get himself elected to the state Assembly within the stipulated six-month period, sources said on Friday.

A BJP insider said that due to the constitutional crisis, the party has decided to replace Rawat with a sitting MLA and a legislature party meeting will be held soon for the election of the next Chief Minister after he submits his resignation to the Governor.

Rawat, who had met Nadda and Union Home Minister Amit Shah late on Wednesday night, is currently the MP from the Garhwal Lok Sabha seat, and as per the rules, needs to be sworn in as an elected MLA within six months of taking over as the Chief Minister.

Earlier in the day, Rawat met the BJP chief again to discuss the political situation and the need of his election to the state Assembly before September 10 to remain in office.

Before leaving for Uttarakhand capital, Rawat said that the decision of conducting bypolls lies with the Election Commission and he will follow whatever the Central leadership of the party decides.

BJP national General Secretary and Uttarakhand in-charge, Dushyant Gautam told IANS that there was no discussion of Uttarakhand by-polls held at the party level.

A party leader explained that after the meeting with the Central leadership, the indications are that it will be difficult for the Chief Minister to continue in the office.

Sources said that Nadda had explained to Rawat that Section 151 of Representation of the People Act, 1951 has created hindrance in his election to the Assembly.

"In an hour-long meeting on Wednesday night at Home Minister Amit Shah's residence, all the possibilities were discussed and Rawat was explained about exception provided under Section 151 of Act for not holding bypolls -- if the remainder of the term in relation to the vacancy is less than a year or if the Election Commission, in consultation with the Centre, certifies that it is difficult to hold the by-election within the said period," a party insider said.
Drugs typically used to treat prostate cancer could be a good treatment option for COVID-19, according to new research by the University of Essex and Imperial College London. The study, is part of ongoing research at Essex to find existing drugs which can reduce the ability of the virus to enter cells, therefore blocking it from infecting the body. COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, attacks various organs but is most destructive to the lungs. The scientists focused on one of the proteins the virus uses to enter lung cells - TMPRSS2. Reducing levels of this protein could be a treatment option for COVID-19. Male sex hormones, or androgens, are known to increase the levels of TMPRSS2 in several tissues, most notably in the prostate.

Research, co-led by Dr. Greg Brooke, from the School of Life Sciences at Essex, showed that treatment with the androgen-blocking drug enzalutamide  a well-tolerated drug widely used in advanced prostate cancer  reduced TMPRSS2 levels in lab cultures of human lung cells. Importantly, antiandrogens significantly reduced SARS-CoV-2 entry and infection in lung cells.

The researchers say their study adds to a growing body of evidence from groups around the world, supporting clinical trials to assess the efficacy of antiandrogens as a potential treatment option for COVID-19.

Dr. Brooke and Professor Charlotte Bevan, co-lead on the study from Imperial, have research groups at Essex and Imperial focusing on developing new treatment options for cancer. However, they have turned their attention to COVID-19, using their expertise and skills developed in the cancer field, to aid the global fight against this virus.

Dr Brooke explained: "Men are more likely to become seriously unwell and die from COVID-19 compared to women. This suggests the male sex hormone androgen may play a role in SARS-CoV-2 severity.  For many years I have been working on the role of androgens in cancer so was able to use this knowledge to investigate if antiandrogens, drugs used for the treatment of prostate cancer, reduce SARS-CoV-2 infection. We demonstrated that these drugs reduce the ability of the virus to enter the lungs and, therefore, our data supports clinical trials to investigate if antiandrogens can reduce COVID-19 severity in people infected with the virus."

Professor Bevan added: This study not only supports further clinical investigation of these prostate cancer drugs but suggests other drugs we can test that could be useful in the COVID-19 effort. As we have learnt from cancer, it is important to have a range of drugs available in the armoury. And drugs that are tried-and-tested and approved in other diseases have the advantage that they can be re-purposed in this way relatively quickly.

The collaborative team involved in the study includes Dr Damien Leach, Dr Laura Yates and Prof Wendy Barclay at Imperial, and Dr Andrea Mohr, Dr Stathis Giotis, Dr Ralf Zwacka, Emine Cil and Ana-Maria Isac at Essex.
The College of Anaesthesiologists, Academy of Medicine of Malaysia (CoA); the Malaysian Society of Anaesthesiologists (MSA) and the Malaysian Society of Intensive Care (MSIC) would like to collectively respond on the issues surrounding the junior contract medical officers (MOs) that drew attention and support from various organizations and groups.



Their frustrations are now expressed widely in the social media with threats of a strike by a group representing some of the junior doctors.

Firstly, we are of an opinion that now is not the time to call for a strike especially when our country is in turmoil facing this devastating pandemic.

We are aware that this issue is not recent and has been simmering for an exceedingly long time, adding to the frustration.

This strike may lead to complicating situations, worsening the dire conditions in combating COVID-19 specifically when there is a possibility of compromise in patient care.

We need an all-hands-on deck approach and owe it to the Malaysian public who have been steadfast in their support for all frontliners over the past one and a half years.

We take note of some of the pressure points being felt by our junior colleagues.

Their predicament started with the introduction of the contract system in 2016 as an initial solution to the delayed placement of house officers.

Upon joining the government service, the junior doctors were given a five-year contract package that consisted of a three-year contract with an option of a two-year extension.

In a reply to a query at the Dewan Negara on the 14th of September 20201, YB Menteri Kesihatan Datuk Seri Dr Adham Baba responded that the government was reviewing the assessment of Contract MOs to be promoted from Grade UD41 to Grade UD43. This promotion would be in line with the career development of permanently appointed MOs.

For career advancement and opportunities for further studies and specialty training, the Ministry of Health (MOH) was exploring the feasibility of granting a longer contract period.

Following a succession of press statements by various associations over the last week, Datuk Seri Dr Adham Baba released a press statement on the 23rd of June 2021.

He reported that 789 out of 2,544 (about 30%) MOs from the first cohort of 2016 and 2017 and some from the second cohort of 2017 were given permanent appointments.

Shockingly, he also informed that in the period between December 2016 and 31st May 2021, 23,077 UD41 MOs were appointed as contract doctors to undergo graduate training and compulsory service2.

It is no wonder we can witness the anxiety and the enormous dissatisfaction in our young colleagues.

In 2012, WHO reported3 that the MOH was able to fill only 64% of positions for doctors in 2009.

The MOH expected then that the shortages of doctors will continue through to 2020.

The deficit was addressed with increasing the number of graduates being produced with increasing availability of private medical colleges in the country and the return of medical graduates from overseas.

Unfortunately, on 22nd April 2015, Jabatan Perkhidmatan Awam (JPA) issued a directive to optimally utilize human resources, focusing on controlling the number of positions available and filling of vacant permanent posts in the public sector4.

As a consequence, Suruhanjaya Perkhidmatan Awam (SPA) had limited resources to hire new staff despite the assurances that critical sectors such as healthcare would not be affected.

The hiring of new healthcare personnel also did not increase in tandem with the requirements of our growing population.

To alleviate the reduction in the availability of permanent posts and the inability to match the surge of qualified medical graduates, the contract system was introduced.

The current pandemic exposed severely the shortage of human resources especially in the fields of anaesthesiology and critical care.

Doctors and nurses in these fields are experiencing burnt out and fatigue as their duties in managing critically ill patients and those requiring surgeries are stretched for long durations due to the inadequate number of staff.

In the Laporan Ketua Audit Negara Tahun 2018 Siri 1, the report highlighted significant manpower shortages that hampered the delivery of emergency services at the four hospitals which were audited5.

However, recruitment of staff was still subjected to approved appointment warrants, government capabilities and current policies in force. As the JPA's directive was still in effect to reduce government servants' number by 1%, new appointments could only be carried out on a rotating basis.

An appeal was made by the MOH to the JPA on the 1st of March 2019 for an exemption from the stipulation of the Human Resources Optimization Policy for the purpose of maintaining the continuity of service delivery in MOH.

In the same report, recommendations were made for the JPA to consider exempting MOH from the Human Resource Optimization Policy and allocate additional posts to overcome the shortage of health care workers including specialists.

In unity, we urge the relevant authorities especially from the Ministry of Finance and the JPA to take note of all these recommendations and expedite policy changes that can assist the MOH in alleviating the situation, top among which is to create more permanent posts.

Facing the future and what is the way forward.

Together, we are concerned of these developments but are aware of our roles.

Our goal is to offer our expertise and assistance in any form that is deemed necessary.

However, for manpower planning and training, we will need the full cooperation from the policy makers to work jointly with us to ensure the future availability of a competent workforce in providing anaesthesia and intensive care services.

However, whilst planning the future, the current acute problem faced by the junior doctors must be addressed appropriately.

Since 1984, our fraternity established a postgraduate training program offered by universities producing some world-renowned anaesthesiologists, critical care specialists and intensivists.

These achievements would not have been possible without the vision and foresight of our many leaders in healthcare, public administration and the political will of our leaders.

Our role as professional societies is to help train the next generation of anaesthesiologists, critical care physicians and intensivists.

In 2010, the total number of anaesthesiologists in Malaysia was 681 or one anaesthesiologist to every 42,000 people6.

For the country to achieve a target for a population of 32 million with one anaesthesiologist to every 9,000 people, we would need to have about 3,500 qualified anaesthesiologists, but at the moment as of 2019, we only have about 1,100 specialists.

We appreciate the limited numbers of training spots offered by the universities. Thus, to improve the ratio of anaesthesiologist to population, we need to have an alternative postgraduate training opportunity either locally or abroad.

As a result, a long-term solution was planned with a parallel pathway postgraduate program developed together with the College of Anaesthesiologists of Ireland allowing more training opportunities for our young doctors to specialize in our field.

We projected annually at least 100-150 qualified specialists will be produced from both postgraduate training pathways.

With the current situation afflicting our junior doctors, we are concerned that we may potentially lose some of our brightest talents when they decide to resign public service to join the private sector without specialization or even continue with the brain drain by applying for employment abroad which may offer certainty in career advancement.

As the postgraduate training program offered by universities are being awarded with Hadiah Latihan Persekutuan, which eligibility is only for permanent MOs, we foresee the trend of the parallel postgraduate program will be taken up by the contract MOs as it is self-funded.

As a result, they will be qualified contract specialists. We anticipate we will be losing some of these contract specialists to the private sector/overseas if they continue to be offered only contract positions.

All these uncertainties without a clear answer will only cause more confusion and resentment.

Furthermore, career advancement would be affected when one is on contract basis employment. Delay in appointment to permanent posts too will delay promotions.

In fact, a good leader may be overlooked for promotion just because he/she is in the contract category and not a specialist under the permanent category.

The nature of this dualistic approach towards specialist training will only split the workforce further, causing more anguish and demotivation as if it were designed to fail by default.

Finally, we are worried for the next generation of anaesthesiologists when in a decade or two, most of the current senior anaesthesiologists will be in their retirement.

We cannot afford to have the current dilemma remain without a clear solution.

Our vision to continue the current training plans may be hindered. Malaysia needs its brightest young talents to go the distance with us.

We need them as much as they need our voice now to champion their cause as we reach out in solidarity.

Clear, systematic transparent policies and strategies need to be enforced to mitigate this conundrum.

We will continue to support the government and MOH particularly in all areas of training to ensure the standards of anaesthesiologists, critical care physicians and intensivists will be at the highest levels for our rakyat.

We hope and pray that with good judgment and wisdom, we will find a solution for the plight faced by our junior contract doctors.

References:

1 Oral Answer from the Dewan Negara Hansard 14.9.2020

2 Press release by the YB Menteri Kesihatan on contract doctors' issues dated 22 June 2021.

3 Malaysia health system review. (Health Systems in Transition, Vol. 2 No. 1 2012) Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and World Health Organization Regional Office for the Western Pacific

4 Laporan Tahunan Suruhanjaya Perkhidmatan Awam 2016 page 40

5 Laporan Ketua Audit Negara Tahun 2018 Siri 1

6 National Healthcare Establishments & Workforce Statistics 2010: Chapter 7 Anaesthesiology Services in Malysian Hospitals.

(Professor Dr Marzida Mansor, President, Malaysian Society of Anaesthesiologists; Dato Dr Jahizah Hassan, President, College of Anaesthesiologists, AMM; Professor Dr Mohd Basri Mohd Nor, President, Malaysian Society of Intensive Care.)
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That employee was on a temporary contract through recruitment firm Hays, so there was little that could be done to protest the sacking. But after almost two years of a growing workload and shrinking deadlines, the officer was ready to leave.

It was too late to retrieve the money, so the officer recommended calling the Australian Financial Complaints Authority. The next day, the person was sacked.

Alarmed, the officer called the customer and quickly discovered it was textbook fraud. The woman had never used internet banking before but her account had been hacked after a stranger helped her set up an online account to buy shares over the phone.

Notes attached to the account revealed a previous investigation had determined there was nothing to see here and allowed the payments to continue.

The customers transaction history showed the woman had transferred between $550 and $39,000, amounting to more than $400,000, within a few months.

The officer opened the bank account and saw more than 20 transfers to Coinspot, an Australian cryptocurrency exchange.

Earlier this year in the National Australia Banks Docklands headquarters, a fraud officer noticed a suspicious pattern of transactions made by a 70-year-old woman.

So what is going on inside these big banks? And what needs to be done to fix the problem once and for all?

There are gigantic civil penalties coming through, Johnson says. But theres financial stability implications to this as well.

Senior Jefferies banking analyst Brian Johnson says failure to comply with these laws can strip banks of their licence to operate and plugging holes has become among the most costly and important tasks.

Now, the regulator has set its sights on the National Australia Bank, which has struggled to fix legacy problems with customer identification for years.

Systemic breaches of these laws have cost two of the countrys largest banks  Commonwealth Bank and Westpac  a combined $2 billion in recent years and toppled its top brass.

Whats emerged is an industry confronted with a fierce fight for talent that understands complex anti-money laundering laws at a time when compliance has never been more important and criminals have never been more sophisticated.

The Age and Herald have spoken to dozens of former and current workers from the frontlines of the fight against financial crime, working in both the major banks and the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), about the strengths and weaknesses of the system. None could be named because they were discussing sensitive information and were not authorised to speak publicly.

Those who have worked across banks say CBAs technology is by far the most advanced, with most systems working through one centralised, purpose-built platform  CommSee. You can pretty much do anything you want on that system, says one former employee .

CBA poured money into boosting its compliance processes and developed a rigorous training program for new recruits. Staff were fronted by chief executive Matt Comyn, of whom one recalls told the entire bank to take this stuff seriously.

CBA CEO Matt Comyn this week: "We are committed to making substantial investments in technology to maintain our leadership over time. Credit:Renee Nowytarger

The damning revelations came around the same time as the banking royal commission, where misconduct scandals at the countrys major financial institutions regularly made front page news.

By failing to implement a $10,000 cap on cash deposits through its ATMs, CBA allowed millions of dollars to be laundered through its machines by criminals, including those importing drugs and firearms. CBA apologised and was fined $700 million .

CBA was the first major bank to be burnt by AUSTRAC  a nimble and aggressive regulator that feeds intelligence from banks to law enforcement.

We [are] all afraid as [the manager] has said to others he can fire them without much thought, the email said. After a while coming into work would make me cry and I would feel so bad that I had no one to turn to.

Managers closely monitored the targets, which many say led to micro-managing or bullying, especially for those on insecure contracts. One email sent by a former contractor, obtained by this masthead, details bullying so severe the person was compelled to make a formal complaint.

In a few instances, staff were found copy and pasting information into reports sent to AUSTRAC and temporary contractors were threatened with termination if they missed targets that have been described as rough and numbers-driven.

While the targets were designed to encourage efficiency, staff say it caused standards to slide. They were just pumping out numbers, says one former analyst. If you are rushing, youre going to miss something.

AUSTRAC has strict requirements on how quickly suspicious activity must be flagged by banks. Each day, CBAs teams meet for a huddle where managers would set targets to encourage staff to work quickly. Teams competed against each other, and those who cleared the most alerts were rewarded with gift vouchers or free breakfasts.

But, as the countrys largest bank, its workload is also the largest. Amid what could be described as a battle for bodies, CBA has turned to labour hire firms to fill permanent roles with temporary contractors across its financial crime operations.

CBAs approach to technology has been described as proactive, rather than reactive, and the bank regularly innovates to improve systems and automate processes.

Westpac copped the largest civil penalty in Australian corporate history last year when it was fined $1.3 billion  the second major bank on AUSTRACs hit list.

And while training is essential for these staff, Flesch says risks remain as these teams are exposed to highly sensitive and confidential data and business intelligence. Those workforces that have access to such information need to be trusted personnel. Contractor status contradicts with this concept.

Digital consultancy Publicis Sapient director Adam Flesch says employing contractors is not necessarily good or bad, and can be used to avoid headcount restrictions where banks fund additional staff through project budgets.

CBA now circulates monthly internal emails to highlight the work of employees who contribute intelligence to AUSTRAC that is used in police investigations or results in arrests, with top performers paid bonuses. We have quality assurance teams to review the quality of the work thats actually being done, CBA chief risk officer Nigel Williams says.

The corner-cutting staff were sacked and CBA switched from rewarding quantity to quality, which is where theyre at today. The bank played a key role in Operation Ironside, the Australian Federal Police-led sting that led to more than 100 organised criminals being charged.

The regulators lawsuit detailed failures that led to Westpac processing funds for paedophiles and blamed an indifference among senior management towards compliance.

The allegations sent the bank, its customers, staff and shareholders into turmoil. Chief executive Brian Hartzer was axed, and his replacement took out full-page advertisements in major newspapers promising to do better.

While Westpacs reaction to the scandal was widely covered, CBAs was not. CBA quietly launched a secret internal project to weed out customers that could be suspected of paying for child exploitation material. A team of about 30 senior analysts worked for 72 hours to identify caucasian males, aged 40 years or over, sending between $500 to $1500 to south-east Asian countries, particularly the Philippines. These customers accounts were closed or referred to AUSTRAC. They didnt want any more fines, says one analyst on the team.

Westpac is one of many banks around the world to fall foul of anti-money laundering laws, but until recently that didnt mean much in Australia. Credit:Getty Images

Six months on, those on the frontlines say the change at Westpac is noticeable.

Westpac has sought to address the lack of accountability by becoming the only big four bank to create an executive role dedicated to financial crime, appointing Les Vance last May.

Insiders say this has tangibly changed the banks approach to risk, where concerns are taken seriously and escalated to the very top where necessary. When you have a higher seat at the table, you pretty much have full support from the board, says one manager working in financial crime.

Westpac says it does not rely on temporary contractors in its core financial crime team  something staff say prevents high turnover and creates a cohesive culture. Everyone comes in focused, has a sense of security. I think that definitely helps, says a Westpac employee currently working full-time in financial crime compliance.

I work at Westpac now, their technology compared to CBAs is medieval Westpac employee

And while the bank has made progress in updating its technology, the full scale of what is needed is still many years away. Westpac is in the business of poaching staff from CBA by offering more money or permanent contracts. But some who have made the jump say they regret it.

You have to leave CBA to understand how awesome their tech is, says one. I work at Westpac now, their technology compared to CBAs is medieval.

Westpac has many subsidiaries  St George, Bank of Melbourne, BT, Rams, Bank of South Australia  that have not been integrated into one system, meaning staff need to juggle multiple platforms to investigate cases that appear suspicious.

One employee with experience at both banks says this set-up means it takes between two and three times longer to complete the same task compared to CBA. Another said the cumbersome technology had made the job a nightmare.

I would love to go back to CBA. I feel like I have made a mistake.

Long rope

The 70-year-old customer who became a victim of cryptocurrency fraud is one very small part of NABs struggles with preventing financial crime.

As revealed in this masthead this month, NAB has launched a mammoth project dubbed Project Apollo to manually sift through hundreds of thousands of customer accounts to make sure they had valid and verified identification documents.

A backdated error in NABs processing meant a large portion of customers were not properly identified, hence they were incorrectly risk-rated and did not trigger the right alerts needed to file reports to AUSTRAC.

Fulfilling know your customer (KYC) requirements is the backbone of any anti-money laundering regime. Personal details need to be updated over the course of a customers lifecycle. Failure to do so leaves the door open for criminals to buy bank accounts on the black market, through which they can clean dirty money.

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NAB has struggled with getting its KYC process right for years. In 2018, the bank hired Sharon Campbell from Europe to sort it out once and for all.

Campbell had spent almost a decade at the UKs feared corporate cop  the Financial Services Authority  where she rose in the ranks to become the head of financial crime and intelligence.

Campbell was appointed NABs executive general manager of financial crime operations and transformation, a lengthy title for a challenging role. Arriving with a new strategy concocted with help from a big four accounting firm, she wasted little time in making her presence felt.

The changes Sharon Campbell brought in were extensive, vast and felt across the entire financial crime operations, says one former employee.

Campbell introduced new processes that increased the amount of customer information collected to paint a detailed picture of where money was coming from and going to. Some say this lifted standards, others say it blew out processing times to unsustainable levels.

To keep up, NAB went on a hiring spree that caused its financial crime team to swell by the hundreds.

While improving people and processes are just one part of the equation, arguably technology is the most important. Insiders say NABs patchwork of technology systems meant the root cause of its AML headaches was not being addressed and mistakes were repeated.

NAB has been accused of serious non-compliance issues with anti-money laundering laws. Credit:Pat Scala

AUSTRAC rejected multiple internal reviews of NABs KYC revamped policies. Extensions were granted but the regulators patience has now worn thin. This month, AUSTRAC sent a letter informing NAB the matter had been escalated to its enforcement team.

NAB has since pulled off a major victory in hiring former AUSTRAC boss Paul Jevtovic to join its ranks. It has invested $800 million since 2017 to improve its financial crime operations and staff in these teams have increased by six-fold.

Chief executive Ross McEwan is taking the challenge seriously. He inked a deal in April with the AFP to improve information sharing and meets regularly with AUSTRAC. We take the feedback. Were not perfect. They know that, McEwan told Senate estimates in April. I would consider the relationship is constructive. We have the same purpose in mind. But, as an organisation, we still have quite a bit to do and were putting in the resources and the technology to be better at it.

But some within the bank are concerned AUSTRAC has given NAB a long rope. Why is the regulator granting so many extensions? If there is no regulatory action, there is no motivation to fix it.

Friend or foe?

Much of AUSTRACs hot-headed reputation emerged under the leadership of Jevtovic, who was chief executive from 2014 to 2016.

Paul Jevtovic is highly regarded within the ranks at AUSTRAC and preceded current CEO Nicole Rose. Credit:Janie Barrett

Jevtovic had spent the first 28 years of his working life in the Australian Federal Police, working across drugs, fraud and serious crime. I most enjoyed working on organised crime, he says on LinkedIn.

When the Melbourne-educated executive joined AUSTRAC it was a sleepy, risk-averse regulator with a culture of comfort that mostly operated behind the scenes.

Those who worked with Jevtovic say he could be abrasive, didnt take excuses lightly and had a heavy-handed approach to the job.

But above all, Jevtovic was respected and widely recognised as transforming the regulator for the better, by tightening the relationship with law enforcement and scaling up its technology.

At the time, there was chatter in Canberra about merging AUSTRAC with other financial regulators like the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), and Jevtovic was determined to prove its worth as a standalone operator.

AUSTRAC is smaller by comparison to both APRA and ASIC in terms of revenue and staffing levels, which comes with its pros and cons. It is nimble and can make changes quickly, but resourcing limits the number of enforcement investigations that can be undertaken at any given time.

Jevtovic poured money into upgrading technology, ensuring processes were automated where possible and analysts had access to top of the range platforms. People were amazed by the speed he was running at. He gave the organisation the injection it needed, says one former senior AUSTRAC employee.

In 2017, AUSTRAC appointed Nicole Rose as chief executive, who had an expansive career in law enforcement that saw her win the Public Service Award for her services to policing in 2013.

Those who have worked under both bosses claim they have brought starkly different leadership styles to the role. Where Jevtovic was front of stage, Rose prefers to promote others and foster collaboration.

Roses leadership style has been described as second to none and was instrumental in the Westpac prosecution, but many say she is more cautious. Banking sources are fearful this will allow NAB to get off the hook lightly, compared to its rivals.

But the ability for AUSTRAC to do its job relies on striking a balance between acting as friend and foe. The regulator must be feared, so entities take the laws seriously, but also trusted, with many recent coups stemming from self-reported breaches.

Where Jevtovic was more willing to strike from behind, Rose is careful to walk entities through the process. You dont want a regulator to immediately slap you with a fine, escalate things to court. You have to demonstrate the response is warranted, says one AUSTRAC insider.

While many now believe the regulator is striking the right balance, the federal opposition thinks otherwise.

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Labor Senator Deborah ONeill successfully garnered enough votes last week to establish a Senate inquiry into the countrys anti-money laundering regime, after blaming AUSTRAC for being reactive and too reliant on the banks.

We need to look at the overarching regulatory regime, is it appropriate? Senator ONeill said.

Interview requests with Westpac and NAB were declined.

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Richard Branson plans to fly to space on July 11, days before a similar journey by fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos. The shares of Bransons Virgin Galactic Holdings surged.

The VSS Unity spacecraft will also carry three Virgin Galactic employees and two pilots from the launch site in New Mexico, according to a company statement on Thursday. Bezos is planning a trip to space July 20 from nearby West Texas aboard a rocket made by Blue Origin, the Amazon.com founders space company.

Richard Branson plans to blast into orbit to evaluate the private astronaut experience. Credit:PA

Bransons suborbital flight would fulfil a longtime goal for the British billionaire and Virgin Galactic, which he founded in 2004. The company recently completed data analysis from its last test flight on May 22, and concluded it was ready to evaluate the cabin experience, said chief executive officer Michael Colglazier. Branson had his pick of which of two planned flights this summer hed prefer to join.

The foundation of it is: Were ready, Colglazier said in an interview. There is nothing about a space race or Who goes first? that played into this. We do our test flights when were ready to fly them.
Pub baron Arthur Laundy, with consortium partners, has expanded the family empire with the purchase of the Springdale Heights Tavern in Albury, NSW, for $22 million.

The deal adds to other recent transactions by members of the consortium, which includes the OHara, Laundy and Cruikshank families and Martin Short, such as nearby Wagga Wagga hotels the Sportmans and Duke of Kent for a combined $15 million.

It follows a busy few months of pub sales in the Sydney metropolitan area and regions, with new buyers entering and established owner/operators expanding rapidly.

A consortium including the Laundy family has paid $22m for the Springdale Heights Tavern in Albury, NSW. Credit:

HTL Property director Blake Edwards, who advised on the most recent sale, said the sprawling 12,000 sq m Springdale hotel was sold after 25 years of ownership by private pub owner Graeme Bosse.
Grocery behemoth Coles has sold a $33.3 million supermarket in regional Victoria to Colin De Lutis, a savvy private investor whose DeGroup recently splashed out $136.5 million buying another shopping centre from Lendlease.

DeGroup has scooped up ASX-listed Coles 3780 square metre free-standing store in Woodend, north of Melbourne, paying a tight 4.31 per cent yield to snare the asset.

The Woodend store was one of the first freestanding supermarkets to transact this year. Credit:

The Woodend venue was one of the first freestanding supermarkets to transact this year, said Stonebridge Property Groups Justin Dowers and Kevin Tong. The pair acted as the sole agents for the groups development arm, Coles Group Property Developments, which built the store in late 2018.

It follows hard on the heels of another transaction in which Pace Development Group offloaded four strata tenancies in its Ascot Vale apartment development, including a Woolworths Metro, to a local investor.
A new Commonwealth scholarship program aims to help kickstart the legal careers of Aboriginal university students. Four students will be awarded the $200,000 scholarships, which involve working in four community legal centres (CLCs) where the students will be mentored and trained.

Attorney-General Mark Speakman said Legal Aid NSW would run the First Nations Cadetship Program, funded by the federal government.

The program is open to Aboriginal students in the final two years of a degree in law, social work, community development or communications. Credit:Damian White

The cadetships will offer crucial work experience for these promising young students, providing them with opportunities to kickstart their careers, Mr Speakman said. Strengthening the cultural understanding of CLCs will boost access to justice for First Nations people.

The one-off cadetship program is open to Aboriginal students in the final two years of a degree in law, social work, community development or communications.
PS can reveal there is a good reason why both the subject and the viewer do not see much of the paintings in progress. Do admitted he works on his portraits from photos he has studied in great detail well before his subjects enter the studio, and that while he aims to start with a fresh canvas for the filming, often he ends up presenting works he has already done  studies  as back-ups if hes having an off day while the cameras are rolling. It was Ryan who taught Do the impasto technique of using thick layers of paint trowled onto the canvas with a palette knife, a style also used by high-profile artists such as Ben Quilty. Ryan said he advised Do on the initial line drawings for the works, though Do played down his old friends contribution when PS called. I think he may be taking a bit too much credit, Do laughed, adding he seeks Ryans advice when unsure about where a work is heading, if Ive got the shape of a nose or face wrong, but was emphatic all the preliminary drawing and painting was exclusively his own work.

I read a lot before they come in. Sometimes there might be half an hour where they say nothing and Im deep into painting  that doesnt make good TV so we obviously have to edit, Do said. In reality, each portrait is at least a solid days work, sometimes longer, with Do revealing some sitters had asked him to fix a few things up after filming stopped. The sitters get to take their paintings home. Creative collaborations are not new for Do. A decade ago the Herald revealed a ghost-writer was hired to work on Dos bestselling memoir, The Happiest Refugee, which picked up three awards at the 2011 Australian Book Industry Awards. But publishers Allen and Unwin said Dos final book bore no resemblance to the original manuscript handed to them by the ghost-writer, former senior Herald journalist Michael Visontay. Do said he was unsure if there will be a seventh series of Brush With Fame, explaining he now has a publishing deal with Allen and Unwin to write a staggering 50 childrens books over the next three years.

Packers tender James Packer Credit:AAP While the pretty bikini-clad social media influencers posing for selfies on the deck of James Packers $200 million superyacht IJE off Mykonos have been drawing all the attention recently, a couple of crew members from the giant floating gin palace also made headlines when the boat cruised past Italy. Turns out one of IJEs tender boats, a sleek black vessel worth a couple of million dollars alone, somehow ran aground on a beach at Melito di Porto Salvo, at full pelt, and narrowly missed sunbathers who filmed the incident. According to local media, one of the two crew had to be taken to hospital but was later released with no major injuries. As for the boat? PS hears it sustained a few scratches but was soon back on its way to join the Packer flotilla en route to Greece.

Big money for Honey Birdette On Tuesday night, lingerie queen Eloise Monaghan was celebrating the sale of her Australian-grown Honey Birdette lingerie business to the iconic Playboy empire in the US for a staggering $443million. My business partner [retail billionaire] Brett Blundy called me and asked me how it feels to turn a $100,000 investment into a $443 million business in 15 years ... Im still pinching myself, she told PS between sips of champagne from her Los Angeles backyard, having relocated to California with her wife Natalie Monaghan to grow the business. Revved up: Honey Birdette founder Eloise Monaghan.

Its been a crazy 48 hours, but one moment really stands out for me. I lost my mum Cheryl suddenly last August, and just as the deal was being closed her favourite song came on Spotify ... Rod Stewarts Sailing. I took that as a sign, a good omen. Its been a long road. I had to take on Frank Lowy, who didnt want sex toys being sold in his malls, and we prevailed. Ive had everything thrown at me, but we still got here, and its only going to get bigger and better. In 2019, her former business partner Janelle Barboza unsuccessfully sued in the Queensland Supreme Court against Honey Birdette, Blundy, his investment firm BB Retail Capital, and the US clothing giant Hanesbrands, alleging breach of contract and unconscionable conduct after she sold out of the business. But for Monaghan, who retains equity in the business and will stay on as its creative director, the future only looks bright. She predicts Honey Birdette will top $2 billion in global retail sales in two years. As for her newfound wealth, Monaghan laughed: I have not big plans on how to spend it, but I did buy a pot plant today.

Royal lather A few noses have been put out of joint around the Park Street corridors of Australias largest magazine house, Are Media, following the launch of Australian Womens Weekly royal correspondent Juliet Riedens new podcast The Royal Record, which promises to separate royal fact from fiction. Hot topic: The royal family. Credit:PA The podcast is an independent venture and separate from Are Media, which also owns the Weekly. It is also being co-hosted by another former Park Street stalwart, ex-senior Weekly writer Bryce Corbett. Among the senior bosses at Are Media said to have been left cold by the new venture is Womans Day and New Idea high priestess Fiona Connolly, for whom the Windsors continue to provide a rich and often controversial seam of content.
Students will be tested on their digital and scientific literacy as well as their ability to think creatively and critically as part of a revamped NAPLAN test.

The expansion of standardised testing of Australian students aptitude follows multiple reviews of the controversial NAPLAN test, which has been attacked as no longer fit for purpose by the governments of Victoria, NSW and Queensland.

Education ministers have agreed to a series of changes to NAPLAN, including an option for schools to test students scientific and digital literacy. Credit:ninevms

Education unions have gone further and called for the incredibly flawed and damaging test to be scrapped entirely.

State, territory and federal education ministers agreed to a series of changes to NAPLAN on Friday and have also asked ACARA, the authority that administers NAPLAN, to assess the feasibility of further changes to the testing of English and maths.
I was recently at dinner with a group of loose acquaintances of a similar age to celebrate the birthday of a woman I had met 10 years earlier at university. She was turning 31. Also at the table were a divorcee, a single woman, a mother, a woman who had been dating her boyfriend for a few months, and a newlywed. The mood was flat.

The divorcee had been dating a new man for two years and didnt know where it was going. He doesnt understand the fertility issues I have. He says he wants a baby, but I try to talk to him about when and he says we dont have to talk about that yet.

Were not the first cohort to experience a crisis. To experience the passing of time. And by passing of time, I mean the dawning realisation that time is finite. Credit:Liz Rowland/illustrationroom.com.au

The single woman had gone to a cafe that morning to have breakfast with a guy she met on a dating app. He just didnt show up. I wasnt even that excited to meet him, but he couldnt even be bothered showing up. Breakfast was his idea, too. Its always something. I dont even really want a boyfriend, but what else should I be doing with my time?

The mothers lament was a classic. She had already drunk three glasses of wine to most of the tables one. I didnt appreciate what I had when I had it: the freedom, the lack of direction. I actually just want my lack of structure back. I dont think I thought enough about what having a child was going to be like.
Two cases of alleged serious criminal conduct have arisen from the defamation case launched by war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith, including the unlawful leaking of information from the military inspector-generals secret hearings into war crimes.

The allegations, detailed during the ongoing case before the Federal Court, also involve accusations of unlawful handling of classified information.

Ben Roberts-Smith arrives at the Federal Court last Thursday. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

The allegations put fresh pressure on the Australian Federal Police, which is separately investigating Mr Roberts-Smith over allegations he committed war crimes and intimidated war crimes witnesses.

The AFP said in a statement on Thursday it would not comment on matters that may be subject to investigation.
Theres a tale that always sticks with me about dogs and their sense of smell. Its from the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001. Canines were used to sniff out people trapped under the wreckage in Manhattan, saving more than a dozen lives. But they also uncovered human remains, day after day. And something happened. The dogs, unaccustomed to so much death, became depressed.

I thought of those dogs when I heard about a trial underway at the University of Adelaide, addressing the 9/11 of this era: the COVID-19 pandemic. The research project is one of many around the world training dogs to sniff out, not exactly the coronavirus itself, but the scent cocktail an infected person produces in their sweat.

Dogs have a sense of smell between 10,000 and 100,000 times more powerful than our own. Credit:Getty Images

Dr Anne-Lise Chaber, from the universitys School of Animal and Veterinary Science, contacted researchers in France already working with dogs to detect SARS-CoV-2 infections and decided to develop the same screening capability here. Chaber says she doesnt know exactly what her pooches are smelling, only that its specific to the infection, even in the asymptomatic incubation period  something no other diagnostic tool can do.

These 18 highly motivated doggo detectives  mostly Labradors, but also one springer spaniel  are exposed to sweat samples from positive individuals, then rewarded when they can correctly sniff out the same sample from many others. (Good dog!) The potential applications are obvious, from screening new airport arrivals to searching specific communities during outbreaks.
Jasmine has built a platform on fun, upbeat videos: there are skits set in a drive-through, filmed in her car, and at the window of her grandmothers shed; she dances with swagger to hits both old and new; holding a laptop in front of her, she recites lines in perfect synchrony with scenes from TV shows and films.

Before filming, Jasmine peruses the app for both content inspiration and to keep abreast of the trends du jour, be it a dance, a comedic sketch or a song. Ill usually spend at least an hour or so scrolling before making a skit video, she says, searching for the music or short sound clips to include in her sketch. Every day therell be new trending sounds that we had no idea about the day before. Its crazy because that often blows up [boosts the popularity of] different musicians songs.

Jasmine spends up to seven hours a day on her phone, a figure she both laments and seems resigned to. Theres time spent filming her own content, as well as videos for brands who pay her to advertise their products: collabs, as the influencer lingo goes. The lightning pace at which the popular becomes passe on TikTok makes it tricky to film videos more than one or two days ahead of time. Then there are the unglamorous hours spent editing videos, and more spent replying to comments and interacting with her followers on live streams.

For six years, Jasmine has been posting a mixture of dance videos, comedic skits and vlogs  video journals of her day  to TikTok. Since graduating from a communications degree at RMIT in 2019, being a TikToker has been a full-time job. Her videos on the platform have amassed more than 105 million likes and even more views. What started as a fun hobby with her sister Leila and best friend Olivia  the girls originally posted from a shared account  has turned into a living made through advertising deals and merchandise, including her own branded bubble tea kit. Her online shop sells hoodies, phone cases and tote bags emblazoned with her slogan, Spreading Smiles.

I meet Jasmine, who prefers not to go by her full name publicly, on a brisk autumn day at a cafe in Northcote, in Melbournes inner north. She is wearing sharp winged eyeliner, small hoop earrings, pale-pink nails and a black denim jacket over a tie-dye jumper. She has a huge grin and a wide-eyed warmth about her, exhibiting the same exuberance in person that she does in her online videos.

Like many young Australians, she lives with her parents and younger sister, Leila, in Melbournes northern suburbs. Unlike other 22-year-olds, though, one of her bedroom walls is papered with letters and illustrations she has received from some of the four million followers she has amassed as a content creator on the video-sharing app TikTok.

In many respects, JasmineTXO is an ordinary 22-year-old. She loves horror films and bubble tea and starting her morning at the gym. Public speaking is one of her biggest fears. Once a week, she teaches a hip-hop class to teenage dancers and, every Sunday, she works as a sales assistant in a pharmacy, a job shes had since she was 18. In January, Jasmine bought a red hoverboard  a two-wheeled scooter that looks like a Segway without handles  and has since mastered the art of gliding around the house on it.

TikTok Australia general manager Lee Hunter says the recommendation algorithm is unique to each user, taking into account factors such as the types of videos a person likes, shares and comments on: a whole range of things that give us a sense of who you are. The algorithm then delivers videos it believes to be uniquely interesting in broad verticals such as comedy, sport and DIY, he explains.

TikTok consists of videos typically between 15 seconds and a minute long (for some users, it has recently rolled out the ability to upload three-minute videos). First released in 2014, the app was originally known as Musical.ly and was rebranded in 2018 when the Chinese firm ByteDance acquired it. ByteDance has invested in artificial intelligence research for several years  and central to TikTok is the For You page, an endless scroll of videos powered by an algorithm that serves a curated mix of viral content and videos based on the users personal interests.

Overnight, in some cases, normal people living normal lives are plucked by TikToks discovery engine from relative obscurity and projected onto the screens of millions around the world. For young TikTokers who can sustain and monetise this attention, the opportunities seem limitless.

The apps surge in popularity has created a new breed of celebrity, who  to young audiences for whom free-to-air TV is outdated  are as recognisable as older stars of the small and silver screens. The platform has decentralised fame or, at least, changed the parameters of who can court attention.

Jasmine is one of a growing number of Australians earning a livelihood from the platform. As baking banana bread and jigsaw sales spiked during the lockdowns of 2020, so, too, did TikToks user base: it became the most downloaded app in the world last year. Though the platform doesnt disclose its user figures, an external estimate by Roy Morgan, as of last October, suggests at least 2.5 million Australians regularly use TikTok, a figure that rose by 52 per cent in the first half of 2020. Seventy per cent of users belong to Gen Z or younger.

When I ask about her audience, Jasmine opens the app to show me the geographical breakdown of her followers. Around 83 per cent of her audience is female, 42 per cent American. Some 320,000 people  only 8 per cent of her following  live in Australia. Though the platform doesnt provide an age breakdown of followers, judging by the commenters on her videos and the people who approach her in public, Jasmine assumes most of them are children or in their early teens. Like many TikTokers, Jasmines audience ballooned during the pandemic. In March 2020, she was at 500,000 followers; by the end of the year, she had an audience of 3.3 million.

TikTok is awash with users who have aspirations to be famous. Many list a numeric follower goal in their account bios and theres an entire subgenre of How to get TikTok famous instructional videos on the platform. To earn TikTok clout, some share traumatic stories or fake their videos entirely; others pull outrageous stunts. In December, a Melbourne teenager was banned from Qantas, Virgin and Jetstar flights after joking on TikTok about committing a terrorist attack as she boarded a flight.

I often found myself opening up TikTok to swipe through just a few videos and then looking up much later in a daze to find that an hour had passed. In acknowledgement of its own addictiveness, TikTok runs advisory videos encouraging users to take screen breaks. People are also able to set screen-time limits within the app, 40 minutes being the minimum. Though TikTok declines to provide official statistics, the average user reportedly spends 45 minutes per day on the app. Hoping to replicate TikToks success, Instagram and YouTube have both rolled out similar features, named Reels and Shorts respectively.

The videos werent always originals: often theyre repurposed from YouTube and given a new life on the app, as in the case of a haka performed at a New Zealand teenagers funeral, the boys brother breaking down halfway through.

I was breathless at a silly skit of a playground safety inspector aggressively throwing dolls around; at a man trying and failing to stop a moving ceiling fan with his hand; at a girl drowsily attempting to remove gauze from her mouth after having her wisdom teeth removed. I was moved by a mother reuniting with her daughter after a year separated by COVID-19, and by a class of university students who surprised their professor with heartfelt messages via Zoom.

Like many, I downloaded TikTok in 2020 while in lockdown in the UK. After several hours of scrolling, TikToks algorithm had carved out and finely honed an addictive niche for me: videos that captured or elicited extremes of emotion. I couldnt get enough, the app had decided, of videos that made me laugh or cry, but which were otherwise unrelated by content.

Over time, TikTok users have grouped together videos that share a theme. FoodTok, for example, comprises cooking videos rhythmically edited down for bite-size consumption; WitchTok features self-identifying witches purportedly casting spells and making content about the occult, which has undergone a renaissance in recent years; Queer TikTok is a trove of educational and supportive videos for LGBTQI+ users; CleanTok is home to oddly satisfying videos of domestic-cleaning hacks. The apps duet function allows anyone to film themselves alongside an existing TikTok video or to add themselves to a chain of videos, as was the case for the sea shanty Soon May the Wellerman Come, which became a viral sensation in January.

This is true of the two most-followed TikTokers in the world, 17-year-old Charli DAmelio (118 million followers) and 20-year-old Addison Rae Easterling (81 million followers), both dancers whose anodyne but astonishingly popular videos are perhaps explained by their youth and conventional beauty. The app has also been criticised for unequal treatment of creators of colour. At the height of the Black Lives Matter protests last year, TikTok apologised to black creators and vowed to make the platform more inclusive.

What were seeing, Jennings writes, is the lowest common denominator of what human beings want to look at, appealing to our most base impulses and exploiting existing biases toward thinness, whiteness and wealth.

Writ large , TikToks discovery algorithm can have a homogenising as Vox reporter Rebecca Jennings has described  particularly in the US, where the app has the largest number of users outside China. (In China, the app is called Douyin, and the content between Douyin and TikTok is kept separate. India had more users than the US, but the app was banned there in June 2020.)

Creativity is whats rewarded, not necessarily a follower count, says TikToks Lee Hunter. You dont need to have huge followings in order to see success on the platform.

This is a space where fame and virality [the tendency of content to be shared rapidly and widely on the internet] are channelled post first rather than persona first, says associate professor Crystal Abidin, an internet-culture researcher at Perths Curtin University. Things that go viral depend on the flavour of the day or maybe even the flavour of the hour. She has noticed many TikTokers  even those with a coherent brand identity  experiment with different content styles, memes and trends, in order to continually be seen on the platform and by the audiences that follow them.

Stella and I chat while they film. Jasmine is often recognised in public, but otherwise life has hardly changed, she says. Stella and her husband were struck, however, when Jasmine organised a meet-up for fans at a park in January 2020, with several other TikTok creators. A few hundred children and young teenagers showed up to the event. Seeing the reaction of these little kids just reminded me when I was a kid, fangirling over pop stars, says Stella. It was like, Oh my god, shes really something to them. To see your kid  your little kid  and all these other little kids want to be near her  its crazy.

I like her to keep her privacy as much as possible. You dont want super fame.

I hate filming in public, says Jasmine. But in front of millions of people is fine, says Stella, and they laugh at the irony. The girls film the dance a few times on some boulders, then shift to the middle of a footpath.

I catch up with Jasmine again on an overcast Saturday at a park in Melbournes Northcote. She has picked the location to film a dance to a song currently blowing up on TikTok: a 2017 reggae version of Iko Iko, which was first released in 1953. Jasmine and her friend Olivia have learnt the dance the night before, and show up in matching oversized retro shirts, straight-leg jeans and Nike Air Jordans. Jasmines sister Leila has come along to film them, and they are joined by Jasmines mum, Stella.

Jasmine, whose ancestry is half-Sudanese, half-Greek, says TikTok feels like a more inclusive space for body positivity. A few years ago, when Instagram still reigned supreme, she felt the attitude to someone like her was,  Oh, youre probably never going to make it: you dont fit the image,  she says. Now, its changed completely.

In Australia, at least, the app seems noticeably  and refreshingly polyphonic. The algorithm gives prominence to LGBTQI+, First Nations, disabled and other minority creators in a way that I havent encountered on other platforms. There is an explosion of diversity on the app, because its still working out what its vernacular visual genres are, says Abidin, unlike Instagram, where the go-to things are fashion, beauty and skinny white girls who look beautiful and are always a size six.

Despite Jasmines four million followers, Stella says her daughters renown is still relatively small in the grand scheme of TikTok fame: a manageable level that doesnt compromise the normality of their lives. I like her to keep her privacy as much as possible, she says. You dont want super fame.

Until recently, the most popular Australian on TikTok was 19-year-old Sarah Magusara, a Filipina-Australian who lives in Brisbane (at time of going to press, she has just been pipped by 20-year-old Perth dancer Hannah Balanay who hails from the Philippines). Magusara has amassed a following of more than 16 million, mainly through videos of herself dancing, and TikToks made with her one-year-old daughter, Zamira, often in matching outfits for fashion brands. Her audience on TikTok grew significantly, she tells me over the phone, when she announced her pregnancy on the app in 2019, when she was still a high-school student.

TikTok fame has forced Magusara to adjust to being a public figure. She says shes always recognised whenever she goes out and now runs her errands when shes less likely to get stopped; during school hours on weekdays, usually. If she does a grocery run after 3pm, shes sometimes mobbed by groups of schoolgirls. I usually make sure to be out for only a little bit because a lot of people just want to take photos of me and talk to me, which is amazing, but sometimes I need to get stuff and its really hard. Once, she says, her parents were on an outing alone with their granddaughter. They were approached by a group of girls, who asked whether the toddler was Zamira from TikTok.

With four million TikTok followers, 19-year-old Rory Eliza has already inked a slew of brand deals.

While being an influencer seems glamorous, TikTok fame can be both overwhelming and lonely at times, says 19-year-old Rory Eliza. Rory, who goes publicly by her first and middle name, has more than four million followers on the app. She started making videos as a 15-year-old when the platform was still Musical.ly. When a management company, Born Bred Talent, approached her, convincing her she could parlay her audience into a full-time job, she decided to drop out of school at 17 to pursue it as a career. Aside from a brief stint at McDonalds, she has never had any other job.

Like the others I speak to, Rory is often greeted by fans in public. Im so awkward to meet, she says. Im not an awkward person, but when someones crying because Im standing in front of them, its just crazy that you can have that sort of impact on somebodys life.

Outside of TikTok, Rory describes her life as quiet. She lives at home with her parents near Newcastle in NSW. She makes a point of starting her day by making her bed. She plays guitar, sings and roller-skates: hobbies which have recently begun to make their way into her videos. I got bullied at school for doing TikTok, she says. As her audience grew, she found her friendship circle shrinking. Ive only got, like, one friend left, she says.

As much as people know that they have to put an effort into creating their content, they try to also portray a more casual tone to things.

The first time Rory and I speak, via Zoom, shes sitting outside in the sun. With straight blonde hair, high cheekbones and full lips, she looks like the paragon of an Instagram influencer. (Her TikTok fame has translated into a following of 165,000 on that platform.) But based on Rorys TikTok feed, shes clearly unconcerned about looking perfect and readily pokes fun at herself for comedic value. In various videos, she appears without make-up, in pyjamas, with wet hair or forces a double chin. I find Instagram very dry  a little bit self-absorbed sometimes, she says. A lot of the photos are really edited and its like a fake life. TikTok is legit just people having fun.

She acknowledges that theres artifice on TikTok, too, but says content on the platform requires a bit more personality, rather than just a mirror selfie.

What aspiration is to Instagram, relatability is to TikTok. Users of the video-sharing app engage in what Abidin calls calibrated amateurism. As much as people know that they have to put an effort into creating their content, they try to also portray a more casual tone to things: allowing bloopers to be in there, showing a face without make-up, inviting people into [their] bedrooms, she says.

Brooke Styles wants her TikTok videos to be a groovy version of Better Homes and Gardens. Credit:

When I visit Brooke Styles, a 25-year-old TikToker at her family home in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, Im struck by a strange sense of familiarity. When I arrive, Brooke is sitting at her computer in her studio, a room I recognise from her videos: the curtains, a painted wall arch, desk, chair and sofa are all shades of pastel pink. The space, previously a garage, features a wall-mounted roll of pink (of course!) studio backdrop paper and is topped off by exposed wooden ceiling beams.

Brooke and her fiance, Jake, renovated the studio themselves. Theyve redone many of the rooms in the house, which they share with Brookes mum and sister, as well as her two young cousins, who moved in with them when her aunt passed away. Brooke has documented the renovations on TikTok as well as DIY projects, including building a backyard barbecue area and kitting out a yellow van for road trips. The goal for her content, she says, is to be a groovy version of Better Homes and Gardens.

Lifestyle videos are her mainstay, her account peppered with food and drink recipes, travel vlogs and styling videos. After we chat, Brooke shows me a stack of furniture she has been buying from op shops for a series of flips  transforming or upcycling them  for TikTok.

Brooke was an Instagrammer before she joined TikTok in 2019. I fell out of love with Instagram, she says. She had gained some weight and was struggling with her body image and mental health. It came to a point where it wasnt a creative thing any more for me; it was like a competition.

Initially, she felt like a baffled millennial on TikTok. These kids were doing crazy things, she says. I was like, This is really entertaining to watch, I really want to be a part of this.  After posting a few TikToks, one video of her dogs was viewed 20,000 times, and she was hooked. It had taken Brooke six years to build a following of 100,000 on Instagram. On TikTok, she gained the same audience in a month. It only took me a year to hit one million. It was just so quick and intense, she says.

At face value, being a famous TikToker might seem like a cushy career choice. But, says Clare Southerton, a technology and social media researcher at the University of NSW, it requires a significant input of creative labour. The reality is that people who work in social media, in content creation, are workers; theyre creating things that people enjoy, she says. Its like a lot of artistic careers  not everybody can be successful.

Even if I want to casually scroll social media, it turns into me thinking about work. There isnt really annual leave or holidays for me.

The downside of social media is that, much like the news cycle, it never switches off. I dont ever stop thinking about it, says Brooke, who works seven days a week. Even if I want to casually scroll social media, it turns into me thinking about work. Rory also feels pressure to post continually, although she tries to take weekends off to spend time with her family. There isnt really annual leave or holidays for me, she says.

TikToks ability to captivate and galvanise young audiences hasnt been overlooked as a powerful marketing tool. All the TikTokers I speak to are paid by a variety of brands to make advertising videos promoting products that span the gamut of fashion, beauty, fast food, music and more. Their fees are negotiated by their managers and, depending on the budget, they might be required to post one or a series of TikToks, as well as posts on Instagram or Instagram Stories, which disappear after 24 hours.

No one is keen to comment on the record about their salaries or individual brand deals, but Rory tells me that for TikTok influencers, who are in the millions of followers, their income is in the medium-to-high range of incomes in Australia. When I ask Rory about brand deals, she rattles off a pre-prepared list that includes Fanta, Sportsgirl, the NSW Department of Education, Nissan, Baby G and Milo.

On a good day, she says, she might get five new briefs. Ive never had so much work before, Brooke tells me; she now earns more than her mum, who works in childcare management. And Jasmine, who works at the pharmacy and as a dance teacher, has kept those jobs primarily because she enjoys their social aspects.

TikTok has had a particularly marked effect on the music industry. Jasmine, for instance, has worked with both Warner Music and Sony Music to promote certain songs in her videos. Increasingly, the platform has become a launch pad for new music, which is heavily pushed by record labels through paid campaigns and dance trends that seem all but engineered for virality.

For a while last year, choreographed dances to The Weeknds Blinding Lights and Drakes Toosie Slide were inescapable, while some musicians, like John Mayer and former One Direction member Niall Horan, post musical instrumentals to the platform, encouraging their fans to duet their videos.

The app has even become something of a hitmaker, starting with Lil Nas Xs Old Town Road in 2019. Theres now a significant overlap between the music thats trending on TikTok and the songs that are topping mainstream pop charts. Olivia Rodrigo, the 18-year-old American actor and singer, is arguably the biggest pop star in the world right now because of the platform. Her debut single, Drivers License, broke Spotifys record for the most streams in a single week when it was released in January. She broke her own record in May with another single, Good 4 U. Back home in Australia, the TikTok popularity of 24-year-old, Adelaide-born Shaylee Curnow, who performs under the moniker Peach PRC, eventually led to a record deal.

TikTok skews female: around 60 per cent of its user base, according to both Australian and American estimates. The apps biggest male stars in Australia tend to be older and have already established audiences on other platforms: these include YouTubers such as Mullen Slay (10.2 million followers) and 30-year-old JoshDub (8.4 million followers), who have gained an audience for their virtual reality gaming videos. Thirty-one-year-old JoelBergs (6.6 million followers), who largely posts comedic reactions to viral videos, is another: he was previously a popular creator on Vine, a now-defunct short-video platform which had similarities to TikTok.

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Male TikTokers who have grown large audiences primarily on the app include the baby-faced Bijay Baniya (9.7 million), 25, a choreographer and dancer, and Melburnian Caleb Finn (10.8 million), a former preschool teacher who, with his braces and drawn-on freckles, looks much younger than his 26 years.

TikToks vast audiences have also created celebrities out of certain professionals, such as health workers and teachers, who use their TikTok videos to entertain, educate or drum up business. In Australia, these include Dr Daniel Aronov, a Melbourne-based cosmetic surgeon; Sally Prosser, a voice coach in Brisbane; and Sticky, a rock candy shop owned by David King, a former lawyer.

As TikTok has grown in popularity, the platforms cultural dominance has begun to extend beyond the sphere of teenagers. The platform is ageing up, Hunter tells me, without sharing specific demographic details. Were seeing a lot of older users get on board, he says.

As well as the airing of a broader range of content. In May, Scattered, a series of 38 one-minute episodes co-created locally by Logan Mucha and Kate Derrigan, launched on the platform. A scripted and professionally shot madcap narrative detailing the exploits of three friends who steal their mates ashes then accidentally lose them, the project has brought a highly polished cinematic offering to TikTok and is the first project of its kind to receive funding from Screen Australia. Its like The Hangover for Gen Z, Screen Australias Lee Naimo told The Sydney Morning Herald. Theres a booming and growing audience [on the platform] looking for new things they cant get elsewhere.

For all generations, social-media platforms have an expiration date for when its cool to be on them.

A widening user base suggests the app might be around for the long haul, says Southerton, although TikToks longevity is far from guaranteed. To date, it has already survived the existential threat of a potential ban in the US  last year, Donald Trump signed an executive order effectively banning the platform, although the order was later rescinded.

Plus, as Abidin puts it, For all generations, social-media platforms have an expiration date for when its cool to be on them  youre probably not going to find many 18-year-olds who are voluntarily on Facebook, because its an old peoples platform [now].

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Then there are concerns  and an ongoing lawsuit in Europe  about how it collects data from users, particularly given that so many are so young. The data TikTok collects is fairly comparable to other social-media platforms, and less far-reaching than Facebooks policies, says Southerton. But, she says, there are valid privacy concerns about young people using the platform.

Any time a child or young people are filming themselves, thats always a risk: that they might film something that reveals where they live, or reveal something about them that is private, she says. Just as you would educate a child not to put their address on Twitter, you would teach them not to film something that would reveal their location.

If TikTok drops off the face of the earth, I will be quite lost, admits Rory, the next time I speak to her. Her blonde hair is now streaked with pink. I dont know anything else other than this and Maccas. I dont really have any experience in the world.

For more social interaction in her daily life, shes considering getting a part-time job. She has decided to revamp both her look and her TikTok content, spurred by a recent, disheartening drop in her viewing statistics. While she used to easily rack up nearly half a million likes on a sketch video, lately shes finding that shes lucky to get 20,000 likes. When you dont see the traction, it makes you nervous, she told fans in a live stream the week before our chat. This is my job. What happens if it all dies? Then what?

TikTok skews female: around 60 per cent of its user base, according to both Australian and American estimates. Credit:Tanya Cooper/Illustratonroom.com.au

Its a pertinent question: what happens when these young TikTokers have had their time in the sun? In the entertainment industries, the timespan separating the popular and the passe was never long to begin with, and it is rapidly shrinking in sync with online attention spans. From YouTubers to Instagrammers, burnout among online influencers is a common phenomenon, perhaps unsurprising given that always staying switched on is a requirement of the job  and that the job, to some extent, requires commodifying oneself.

Im not that worried if TikTok doesnt last forever, says Brooke. She feels she has mastered what types of content gain her traction online, and believes she could transfer such content to other platforms if need be.

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If social media didnt exist, Jasmine tells me, she would see herself working in the film and TV industry. I do have plans to continue, hopefully, doing this kind of work for as long as I can, she says. But yeah, I guess you can never know.

Later, Rory is more sanguine. This is my passion, she says. Im just so blessed to have the platform that I have. Feeling pressure to succeed and uncertainty about future career paths are, she recognises, common experiences. I dont think its just influencers, she says. That comes with any job.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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Asked what was the point of agreeing to use lockdowns as a last resort if the term was so subjective, Mr McGowan said he thought the plan as a whole was a good template for the countrys path out of the pandemic. Loading WAs latest outbreak was caused by a woman who had returned to the state from New South Wales where she caught the highly infectious Delta variant of the virus during an outbreak in Bondi. When she tested positive on June 27, WA implemented restrictions but did not enter a lockdown. However on June 28, when two more cases were recorded, Mr McGowan pulled the lockdown trigger. Phase two of the plan will begin when Australia hits a yet-to-be-determined level of vaccinations and there was an agreement lockdowns would only be used in extreme circumstances to prevent hospitalisations and fatalities. The third phase will see the virus managed like other infectious diseases.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the plan meant Australians would be able to live differently if they got vaccinated. Winning in the post-vaccination phase looks very different to winning in the phase were in now., he said. Winning now means we suppress the virus as best we can, which means that from time to time, such as were experiencing in NSW, we have to go through these experiences. As part of phase one, international arrivals into the country will also be halved from July 14, which Mr McGowan welcomed. WA had already halved its cap to 565 arrivals a week after an outbreak in April, so the cap will now reduce to 265.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian agreed to the reduction but earlier on Friday voiced her discontent that up until this point her state had done the heavy lifting with more than 3000 returning travellers each week. I am disappointed that every state hasnt done its fair share but I appreciate and have to respect the decision of national cabinet, she said. Mr McGowan wished the NSW Premier would stop saying that and claimed before WAs cap was halved the state was taking more returned travellers per capita than any other in Australia. WAs penchant for lockdowns WA has been one of the quickest jurisdictions to call snap lockdowns as a way of dealing with community outbreaks of COVID-19, with three in the past six months.

The first two were announced the same day the state government found out about instances of the COVID-19 Alpha variant being out in the community for about five days on both occasions. Loading Perth and Peels latest four-day lockdown was announced a day after it was revealed a woman had been infectious with the Delta variant for three days in the northern suburbs when two more cases were linked to her. The cluster has since grown to five, although the last two cases have been of people captured by the states contact tracing and testing regime who were not infectious while in the community. In all three lockdowns Mr McGowan and the WA Chief Health Officer Andy Robertson said the state needed a circuit-breaker to get on top of contact tracing and testing efforts.

WA only had 24 contact tracers working on Sunday when the first case was discovered but surged up to more than 300 in the following days. The number of tests conducted at private and public clinics quickly grew from 8398 on June 27 to a peak of 18,255 on June 29 with about 70,000 swabs taken by Friday. COVID-19 test results for close contacts have come back quickly in the current lockdown but it has taken longer for health authorities to find out whether casual contacts are infected or not. Results for about 60 per cent of the 2848 tests for casual contacts had come back as of Friday morning compared to 93 per cent of the 383 close contacts.

WA was also contending with an outbreak threat from returned mine workers from a gold operation in the Northern Territory although 165 of 177 close contacts to enter the state had tested negative as of Tuesday. While it took time for WA to surge its contact tracing efforts, Dr Robertson said it was not just about how many contact tracers were available when it came to a decision on whether or not to go into lockdown on Monday. Lockdown is around how do we stop the transmission of this disease within the society, he said. We knew it was there and certainly by the time we when we had three cases we knew that it wasnt just an isolated case and that we needed to stop the transmission chains that are occurring within society at that time.
From one initial case in the community, the latest COVID-19 strain jumped across Sydney through fleeting contact in shopping centres, at social gatherings and in cafes, restaurants and a hairdressing salon to infect more than 225 people in just over two weeks.

The Herald has tracked every single case to look at how the virus multiplied to lead to the first widespread lockdown since the national lockdown that began in March last year.

The data highlights a rapid chain of infection, with people who were unknowingly infectious in the community quickly seeding new clusters before they began to show symptoms or tested positive.

After the first case was confirmed in Sydneys eastern suburbs on June 16 this year, it began to spread across Greater Sydney within days. By June 19, a person who had picked it up at Westfield Bondi Junction had spent time in Wollongong while infectious.
The states health system is treating 172 COVID-19 cases, Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said on Friday, but only a fraction of those are in hospital or being treated in intensive care units.

Experts say the Delta variant, the strain behind Sydneys latest outbreak, is about twice as infectious as the original coronavirus Australians dealt with last year. But it is still not known whether it is more virulent, or if it will cause more severe disease or death.

Experts say the delta variant is about twice as infectious as the original variants Australians dealt with in 2020. Credit:Getty

Fourteen patients - about 8 per cent - are in hospital in NSW and three are in intensive care. None are ventilated.

Most of these cases are being treated and managed in non-acute out-of-hospital care, including returned travellers in special accommodation, said Dr Chant.
A handful of senior NSW Police officers are at the top of a list of possible contenders to replace Commissioner Mick Fuller when he steps down in early 2022 after five years leading the states 17,500-strong force.

The appointment is likely to come from within, with Mr Fuller, the state government, the opposition and the NSW Police officers union all supportive of an internal promotion rather than recruiting from interstate or overseas.

The top five candidates - Mel Lanyon, Mick Willing, Karen Webb, David Hudson and Gary Worboys Credit:Sydney Morning Herald

Mr Fuller, appointed commissioner in March 2017, announced on Friday he had decided against staying beyond his five-year term, saying it was time for a new job in the private sector and renewal of the police executive ranks.

While an exhaustive formal process to find the next commissioner will take place, and surprise contenders could emerge in the months ahead, the forces deputy commissioners loom as the frontrunners in the search for Mr Fullers replacement.
Were halfway through our two-week lockdown, so aside from praying for its end - how are you faring? Anxiously awaiting every news update, tracking infection numbers and wondering if youll ever go to a pub, concert or shopping centre again? Or ambivalent about another strange day in the time of COVID, enjoying couch-time and eagerly spending your spare cash on mid-year online sales and food delivery? I mean, the NSW economy needs us, right?

If youre anything like me, you probably oscillate between those extremes on a daily if not hourly basis. Providing our readers with news you can use as well as the important facts, figures and debates around this pandemic resurgence has been the highest priority for me and my team.

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Weve been especially mindful of the added burden placed on many families who have school-aged children - camps cancelled, regional or interstate vacations aborted, plus the stay-at-home-orders on top of the rainy, wintry weather. Its the stuff of parental nightmares!

To help those of you tearing your hair out, Julie Power wrote this fun story about how to keep the kids entertained during a rainy lockdown, and weve run a range of stories about how people are keeping themselves amused. Cooking? The Good Food team published a list of hearty and healthy options; although hard not to be tempted by Freds chef Danielle Alvarezs salted tahini and chocolate chip cookies. However, if youre too busy working and/or juggling the kids park runs, check out the fantastic top 10 Sydney restaurant takeaway options you might not have thought of.
A shop in the NSW Southern Highlands has posted footage of a customer and owner being violently arrested after they refused to comply with the states mandatory mask measures.

Police on Thursday issued 75 penalty infringement notices and 12 other notices to people for not complying with measures introduced to combat the growing COVID-19 outbreak that has locked down Greater Sydney.

The arrest at The Organic store Bowral. Credit:the_organic_store_bowral

They included PINs for a couple who left Sydney to travel along the NSW North Coast, then across to Lightning Ridge, through Inverell, and down to Dubbo where a visit to Western Plains Zoo drew the attention of police officers.

In Bowral, an incident unfolded at a business after the owner and a customer refused to comply with mandatory mask orders.
Off-contract NRL player Jamil Hopoate has been granted bail on a drug supply charge linked to the alleged importation of $154.2 million of cocaine after the prosecution changed its position overnight and consented to his release under strict conditions.

Justice Elizabeth Fullerton, in the NSW Supreme Court on Friday, said a pre-release condition was the $200,000 surety from his brother, Bulldogs star William Hopoate, to be deposited by one or more acceptable persons.

Jamil Hopoate, who appeared via video link, seemed confused by the sudden turn of events.

So whats happening? Is it granted? he said.

The 26-year-old has been charged with supplying more than a large commercial quantity of prohibited drugs, after he allegedly collected eight one-kilogram blocks of a substance from a truck in Sydneys south in May.
Brisbane and Moreton Bay will remain in lockdown for a fourth day, but there has been a reprieve for other Queensland local government areas, which will come out of lockdown as scheduled on Friday evening.

This is despite a third unlinked community case, on the Sunshine Coast, being revealed in an update just hours before residents in all other locked-down local government areas have the stay-at-home orders lifted at 6pm.

Restrictions in those local government areas will continue for the next two weeks, including mandatory mask wearing outside homes.

During the morning update, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said five new cases of COVID-19 were recorded in Queensland on Friday. Three were locally acquired and two were detected in hotel quarantine.
For our free coronavirus pandemic coverage, learn more here.

Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size For 17 months, the jurisdiction of Australias sickest people outmanoeuvred the worst pandemic in a century without a single case of community transmission. There have been no deaths in the Northern Territory and almost all its 186 COVID-19 cases have been in the Howard Springs quarantine facility, an unused workers village outside Darwin that only a few years ago was considered by some to be a $600 million white elephant. It is now so famous as to wear a grand rebadging: The Centre for National Resilience. Northern Territory member for Gwoja Chansey Paech with Kalkaringi elder Jimmy Wavehill. Southern tourists with money banked from evaporated overseas holidays found in the Territory a tropical safe haven seemingly beyond the reach of COVID and the bothersome restrictions of home. Accordingly, hotels and rentals filled up across the length of the Stuart Highway. Home prices, long in decline, jumped 20 per cent. Chief Minister Michael Gunner was fond of reminding voters the Territory was Australias comeback capital. But the NTs greatest pandemic feat since the virus landed on our tarmacs in January last year has been keeping COVID-19 from the remote communities, town camps and outstations that lend Australia its best and worst.

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It is in these places that Aboriginal families of the Territory speak the worlds most ancient languages and practise its oldest traditions. It is where they crowd two-dozen into government-owned shanties and die of Third World disease. On Saturday afternoon, Mr Gunner announced an emerging Territory situation that had the pandemic at the bushs doorstep. It wasnt Howard Springs that did Darwin in, but a hotel quarantine failure half a continent away in downtown Brisbane. Im very angry at the moment, said Leeanne Caton, chief executive of the Yilli Rreung Housing Aboriginal Corporation, which houses rough sleepers lured from remote communities to Darwin by grog, health appointments or family. Loading Firstly Im angry about the mine, secondly about the fact someone thinks theyre going into a safe environment ... they get infected and then theyre able to leave and come here and infect everyone. The mine is Newmont Corporations gold operation 550 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs in the Tanami Desert.

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The someone is a FIFO worker who flew from the regional Victorian city of Bendigo to Brisbane on June 17 before continuing to the Tanami the following day. Bendigo had not seen a COVID-19 case all year, but an ongoing outbreak in Melbourne, 150 kilometres away, was enough for Queensland health authorities to declare the entire state a hotspot. The mine worker was sent into hotel quarantine for his one-night stay. Neither Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk nor her Chief Health Officer, Jeannette Young, have fully explained what happened next or how, but the low-risk mine worker was put in the same hotel and on the same floor as high-risk international guests waiting out their 14 days. The Northern Territorys Chief Minister Michael Gunner Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Unsurprisingly, for it has happened more than two-dozen times in Australia, including in Brisbane, the virus circulating within the hotel infected an otherwise healthy guest.

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We try and split [low-risk and high-risk arrivals] but when youre just getting so many coming in, its difficult, Dr Young said, in response to questions from journalists this week. Regardless of pressure, national cabinet on Monday deemed the slip in standards so dangerous that domestic and international travellers should never mix so closely again. The newly infected FIFO mine worker unwittingly transported the Delta variant to the Northern Territory, which had no hotspot orders for regional Victoria or Brisbane at the time, and by Friday this week the outbreak was at 15. This included community transmission in Darwin and infected miners who returned to Queensland, South Australia and NSW before the danger became apparent. CEO of Yilli Rreung Housing Aboriginal Corporation Leeanne Caton getting vaccinated. The failure in Brisbane quarantine was the sole cause of the lockdowns in Darwin and Alice Springs. It was also a contributing factor in south-east Queenslands third circuit-breaker lockdown for the year, which has been extended in Brisbane and Moreton Bay until at least Saturday evening.

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Loading Announcing no new cases on Friday and the imminent reopening of the Territorys two biggest centres, albeit with severe restrictions, Mr Gunner fought tears of relief. Since the beginning of this pandemic, theres always been a nightmare scenario playing out in our heads, he said. One case is let loose in Darwin or Alice for a few days, two or three catch it, it reaches our Indigenous population, then its carried into remote community. There was time over the weekend where we thought that nightmare might become real. Ms Caton said every Darwin agency was in overdrive this week to eliminate the threat of undetected spread. Theres a huge potential there to basically wipe out communities, she said. More than 30 per cent of the population of the Northern Territory are Aboriginal people.

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Aboriginal man Raymond Noel Lindsay Thomas was on his way home from a supermarket trip to pick up a block of chocolate when police spotted his unregistered Holden Commodore and initiated a pursuit.

Raymond Noel, as his friends and family knew him, never made it home. He died following a 21-second police chase that should never have happened, the Coroners Court heard on Friday during closing submissions at the inquest into the 30-year-old mans death.

Victoria Police were heavily criticised in court by the counsel assisting the coroner for the events that took place on the streets of Northcote on the night of June 25, 2017, but also for what occurred outside the court this week.

Raymond Noels father, Raymond Thomas, takes part in a smoking ceremony outside the Coroners Court on Friday. Credit:Jason South

Two additional police officers were sent to the court on Wednesday due to the number of people attending the proceedings, Victoria Police said, but their presence was seen as a show of force by family members and supporters of Raymond Noel, who say it compounded their suffering.
The cost to the hospitality sector could run into the hundreds of millions after WA continued the majority of its strict lockdown measures for Perth and Peel residents, even if they travelled outside those regions for holidays.

West Australians in the twin areas were granted permission to travel throughout the state for school holidays after Premier Mark McGowan confirmed greater Perth would exit its four-day lockdown at midnight Friday.

Perth and Peel residents can travel to the regions from Friday but cant participate in experiences such as wine tasting until at least Tuesday.

The announcement comes after the northern suburbs cluster recorded one new case overnight, the 21-year-old partner of a man who previously contracted the virus at Indian Ocean Brewing.

But holidaymakers and hospitality businesses would take Friday afternoons news with a grain of salt after strict conditions were imposed.
Peter Doherty says the fight against HIV is informing the scientific battle against COVID-19, and vice versa. Credit:Luis Ascui The challenge in these kinds of epidemics is to win the confidence of the people, to co-operate with them. In many ways its more difficult with a situation like the present one, but I think if I have a criticism of the government its that its rather fallen down in getting the community behind its program. And for scientists on the front lines of the fight against both diseases, COVID-19 has provided a rare chance to apply the lessons of one epochal pandemic to a second one. Nobel laureate Professor Peter Doherty says the fight against HIV is informing the scientific battle against COVID-19, and vice versa. But he cautions that science can only do so much. The idea that theres always a technological fix, and we dont have to change behaviour or inconvenience ourselves in any way, is really not a helpful perception. As Director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Professor Sharon Lewin, puts it: Behavioural messaging is so important around stigma, because stigma cant be addressed scientifically. [In a] major public health crisis, there are lots of unknowns. When you have unknowns with infectious diseases, it often generates hysteria and misinformation and stigma.

Professor Ian Gust, who became Australias chief medical and scientific adviser on AIDS, recalls that HIV was at first a medical curiosity that would soon stun the scientific community. Everybody who got infected died, and their deaths were particularly horrible, he says. For those working in the front lines it was a totally new experience. As infectious diseases physicians whod been trained after the Second World War, we were used to saving most of the patients who had infections because we had vaccines and antibiotics. Here was an infectious disease like something from the 1800s, that you had no tools to protect against, and which was invariably fatal. And so you ended up seeing a lot of healthy young men die. And going to a lot of funerals. David Menadue and Phil Carswell both estimate they attended more than 100 funerals for people claimed by AIDS. Many died shunned by family and friends. It was seen as Gods wrath on the gay community and intravenous drug users, Gust says. And in the case of COVID, theres been the attempt to deflect responsibility to Chinese incompetence or malfeasance. There has always been the search for scapegoats.

That AIDS scapegoating happened against a backdrop of media hysteria and community fear as the virus infected the blood supply. A turning point was the deaths in 1984 of three babies who had been given blood transfusions in Queensland. The tragedy was announced in the final days of the 1984 federal election campaign. For the next half dozen years, [AIDS] very much dominated medical politics, Blewett says. His stewardship of the response is considered a model of how governments should respond to a public health crisis  with one exception. The Grim Reaper ad campaign  in which the Reaper knocked down people in a bowling alley  spread awareness but also fear, and at the cost of greater stigma for those suffering. One of the things  was learning what a deleterious impact it had on many of them. Thats a regret I have about it, Blewett says. But the key was to change behaviour: condoms then, masks now. There are major differences, of course. As Peter Doherty says, HIV was basically a matter of [changing] sexual behaviour. But with COVID, you cant decide not to breathe.

In 2020, Thorne Harbour Health (formerly the Victorian AIDS Council) did something to counter COVID-19 that it had not done even at the peak of the fight against AIDS: it urged people to stop having casual sex. In 40 years, the message had gone from safe sex to no sex. The state was talking about lockdowns, says Simon Ruth, the organisations chief executive. We just decided, all right, for the first time ever we need to say we have to have a break from sex to stop the spread [of COVID-19]. Now, eyes turn to the great white whale of HIV research, a vaccine and a cure. Pharmaceutical giant Moderna  which has developed a COVID-19 vaccine  has announced phase one trials of an HIV vaccine for later in 2021. Blewett says some in the field are optimistic. Im not saying theyre overconfident, but there is a degree of confidence that they will be able to get a vaccine within the next decade.
There is a power shift under way in Australia, from the Commonwealth to the states. No matter how hard Scott Morrison tries to resist it, the pandemic keeps forcing him to collaborate with the premiers  on their increasingly assertive terms.

On Friday we saw the clearest expression yet of this dynamic as the Labor states, led by Victoria, pulled rank on the Prime Minister and his most prominent state ally, NSW, to slash the number of international travellers to Australia.

Illustration: Simon Letch Credit:

The irony of the states deciding who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come, would not have been lost on the Prime Minister. They have had this right in a theoretical sense since March 2020, when the hotel quarantine system was first improvised in haste. But they only sought to exercise it on a national level this week, and only after they had lost control of the new, more infectious Delta strain of the coronavirus.

This is an important point to bear in mind before considering the Prime Ministers own failures this week. The virus stalks us now because NSW and Queensland  two of the most successful states in managing the pandemic last year  let it out into the community, not because the PM has bungled the vaccination rollout.
Australias pathway out of the pandemic relies heavily on the Pfizer vaccine, but the majority of the nations 40 million doses are at least three months away.

Those injured by vaccines will also be able to claim compensation without going through the courts in a significant update to the planned vaccine indemnity scheme.

The bulk of Australias COVID-19 doses are arriving in the last months of the year. Credit:Eddie Jim

The bulk of the countrys Pfizer doses, roughly 28 million of the 40 million ordered, are expected from October, and states and territories are set for a planning meeting with the head of the COVID taskforce to map out how those doses can be delivered into arms.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said there would be clear differences between the current pre-vaccination Australia and our post-vaccination reality.
The NSW Treasurer and the minister responsible for hotel quarantine are keen to join a trial of home quarantine for returning international vaccinated travellers, saying the focus must now fully be on managing the virus rather than eradicating it.

Tourism Minister Stuart Ayres said NSWs response to the pandemic needed to evolve, with Treasurer Dominic Perrottet insisting that the states metric for success also had to change as vaccination rates improved and the country moved from an elimination to a suppression strategy.

Treasurer Dominic Perrottet and Tourism Minister Stuart Ayres have shown support for trialling home quarantine. Credit:Rhett Wyman

Case numbers themselves should not be the sole measure of a successful pandemic response, Mr Perrottet told the Herald.

There are significant economic and social impacts that need to be considered and balanced going forward.
Istanbul: Women marched in Istanbul and other cities to protest Turkeys formal exit from a European treaty aimed at preventing violence against women, saying the move stripped them of critical protection at a time when femicides are on the rise.

Turkey signed the treaty, called the Istanbul Convention, in 2011. In March, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued an unexpected decree announcing Turkeys intention to withdraw from the treaty, which he and members of his Islamist party have framed as part of a Western plot aimed at harming conservative notions of family and encouraging homosexuality. Ankaras exit from the treaty took effect Thursday (Friday AEST).

A protester, left, confronts police officers preventing the group from marching against the governments decision to withdraw from Istanbul Convention, on Thursday, July 1, 2021. Credit:AP

The Council of Europe, the United States and the United Nations had appealed to Erdogans government to remain in the treaty, which sought in part to ensure equal legal protections against abuse for women across Europe. The decision, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to deepen the protection gap for women and girls during a time when gender-based violence against women is on the rise, the UN womens rights committee said in a statement Thursday.

Such an unprecedented act cannot, and does not, have a valid ground and justification, the statement said. Amnesty International said in a statement on Wednesday that the convention was the gold standard for the safety of women and girls and called Turkeys decision shameful.
Baghdad: When he heard on the news that Donald Rumsfeld had died, Ali Ridha al-Tamimi and his wife sat down with their four children and told them: This is the person who ruined our country.

He destroyed many families. And did it under the cover of liberation, Tamimi said. I will never forgive him for the pain he caused us.

The heated emotions are shared by many in Iraq, where the name Rumsfeld is synonymous with the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein  and deaths, arrests and torture that followed. The dark chapter in Iraqs history still echoes in the daily lives of Iraqis today.

The aftermath of a bomb attack in a busy Baghdad market, July 1, 2021. Credit:AP

Rumsfeld, the defence secretary for President George W Bush, was one of the architects of the invasion that ousted Saddam on what turned out to be baseless accusations he was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
Bill Cosby accuser Andrea Constand, left, embraces prosecutor Kristen Feden during a news conference after Cosby was found guilty in his sexual assault retrial in 2018. Credit:AP Cosby told police the sex was consensual and the Montgomery County district attorney at the time, Bruce Castor jnr, decided not to lay charges, citing insufficient credible and admissible evidence. More about the lawyer later. The accusation didnt go away. News of the rape complaint leaked to the tabloids. It wasnt the first sexual assault complaint filed about Cosby. Constand sued him for damages and her team found 12 other women willing to testify about his behaviour. The civil case was eventually settled, a non-disclosure agreement was signed, and Cosbys unsavoury reputation percolated in jokes and rumour files for the next decade.

In early July 2015, a judge made public a deposition Cosby gave the DA for the civil suit, after the Associated Press pushed for its release. In his statement, Cosby had admitted that he gave Quaalude sedatives to women he wanted to have sex with. It was a damning confession that made international headlines. Bill Cosby in a promotional shot for The Cosby Show, pictured here with screen wife Claire, played by Phylicia Rashad. At the end of the month, New York magazine published an edition in which 37 other women who said the comedian had assaulted them agreed to be named and photographed. On December 30, 2015, Cosby was arrested on charges of aggravated indecent assault, just before the 12-year statute of limitations ran out. On April 26, 2018, after one mistrial triggered by a deadlocked verdict, a second jury found Cosby guilty of three counts of sexual assault and he was later sentenced to three to 10 years in jail.

Why was his conviction overturned? Cosby has always maintained his innocence and was denied parole five weeks ago for refusing to attend a treatment program for sexual predators. His legal team took his appeal to Philadelphias high court, and on Wednesday, US time, six of the seven judges agreed to throw out Cosbys conviction and free him, also ruling out any possibility of a retrial. The court found Cosby was unfairly prosecuted because Castor, then district attorney, had promised the comedian back in 2005 that he wouldnt be charged. Loading

Sure enough, in a court hearing weeks after Cosbys arrest in 2015, Castor testified that he promised Cosby he wouldnt be prosecuted in the hopes that it would persuade the comedian to testify in Constands civil case and allow her to win damages. Castor acknowledged the only place the matter was put in writing was in a 2005 press release announcing his decision not to prosecute, but said his decision was meant to shield Cosby from prosecution for all time. Castor, by the way, is the lawyer whose long, rambling defence statement baffled Congress in February when he represented former president Donald Trump at his second impeachment. The prosecutor who had Cosby arrested and brought the charges in 2015, Kevin Steele, argued he wasnt bound by Castors agreement. But the court concluded Steele should have stuck to the non-prosecution agreement. The judges wrote that denying the defendant the benefit of that decision is an affront to fundamental fairness, particularly when it results in a criminal prosecution that was forgone for more than a decade. Why does it matter?

Some of the women who have accused Cosby of assaulting them say the ruling could deter victims of sexual assault from coming forward in future. Constand and her lawyers released a statement saying: We urge all victims to have their voices heard. Actor Eden Tirl, who says Cosby assaulted her in 1989, told NBC News the statute of limitations prevented police from investigating claims further in the past. The outdated laws are so clearly in place, protecting men in these cases, more often than not. However, legal experts said the Supreme Court had to uphold the fifth amendment of the US Constitution, which states the government cannot compel people to provide incriminating information about themselves. Because Cosby had been assured he wouldnt be charged, he could not plead the fifth when interviewed for the lawsuit and had to answer the questions. Other commentators celebrated Cosbys release as vindication for a black man jailed unfairly.

Loading Cosbys long-time co star and TV wife Phylicia Rashad was elated, tweeting FINALLY! A terrible wrong is being righted  a miscarriage of justice is corrected! Later, copping outrage from all fronts, she tried to walk back her statement, saying she supported sexual violence survivors and in no way intended to be insensitive to their truth. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong captured both responses in her reaction: Cosby is home now. A part of me smiled at the sight of him in that white Central High School T-shirt at the news conference outside his home. A black man had beaten a system that too often has left African Americans with a knee on their throats. But just as Im black, Im also a woman. Sisterhood is strong. I know his alleged victims are beside themselves with outrage. I feel for them, too.
~ Former Chairman of SBOD setting the records straight.~

PHILIPSBURG:--- The feud between members of the Supervisory Board of Directors (SBOD) of N.V GEBE continues, as former chairman Bienvenido Richardson penned a second letter to the Prime Minister of St. Maarten exposing the plot the chairman of the board had with their legal advisor.

Richardson also sent the Prime Minister the taped board meeting which he also sent to the Council of Ministers. The recording and letter that was sent to the Council of Ministers on July 1st 2021 was also sent to SMN News.

In recording the chairlady, was addressing the former Temporary Manager Sharine Daniel who raised concerns about the plans the SBOD members had to pay themselves the $100.000.00 that is budgeted for a new strategic plan. The chairlady said that she and the legal advisor put the strategic plan together to move the process further and faster because they do not know when the new management team would take office. The chairlady said the legal advisor is one that came up with the idea to put the two organs together. The intention was to involve the former Temporary Manager along with a few members of the SBOD and with one or two experts from outside.

Daniel in the recording said that there were a number of miscommunications, however, the chairlady said when she approached Daniel about the strategic plan she was hesitant in the beginning but later she agreed. Daniel then told the chairlady that she was never against having a strategic plan done for NV GEBE but in fact, she was against the manner in which the SBOD was doing it.

NV GEBE conducted a recruitment process that began over a year and a half ago, and while the Council of Ministers took a decision to appoint three of the candidates the process is yet to be completed.

A meeting with the SBOD and Shareholder is scheduled for today July 2nd however it is understood that some members of SBOD and the current Temporary Manager have decided that they will boycott the meeting that was called by the SBOD on the request of the shareholder. SMN News was also informed that some members of the SBOD have voted in favor of recommencing another recruitment process that will cost the company another $100,000.00.

Richardson also shared concerns about the excessive billing that is submitted to the company for legal advice to the SBOD.



Below is the letter sent to the Prime Minister of St. Maarten and the Council of Ministers by Bienvenido Richardson a member of the SBOD.

Good morning Honorable Prime Minister



I would like to confirm my attendance at today's shareholder meeting. I was not kept in the loop with regards to today's meeting since in our recent board meeting before my early departure.



I am looking forward to being heard today with regards to my letter that was sent to you, the shareholder.



Kind regard

On Thu, Jul 1, 2021 at 4:32 PM Bienvenido Richardson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ; wrote:

Dear Honorable Prime Minister,



Regarding my email correspondence of June 8th, 2021 to you, as a follow up I would like to further inform you of the sequence of events that took place thereafter.

The letter that was sent to you on June 8th, 2021 included solely the SBOD of NV GEBE.

As normal, the chairlady always forwards all incoming letters to the external counsel, Mr. Jairo Bloem, for his perusal.

I am of the opinion that Mr. Bloem allegedly leaked my letter intentionally to the media to discredit my letter that consists of nothing but truth and facts.

I took note of the two letters that were sent out to the media, one being by NV GEBE & SBOD and the other by Mr. Bloem's interview with St. Maarten news in which he refuted the allegations.

The SBOD &NV GEBE letter may have been signed by chairlady Nina Diaz and or Mr. Dembrook, however, it was written by Mr. Bloem himself who is at the center of the ongoing turmoil between myself and the board. This is a conflict.

In the Herald newspaper of June 21, 2021, I was described by Mr. Bloem as being a disgruntled board member who was removed as chairman by the SBOD due to various violations.

However the resolution dated December 7th, 2021 stated:

(iv) the Supervisory Board of Directors of NV GEBE values periodically rotating the functions of Chairman, vice chairman, to firstly allow members a chance to exercise one of these functions..

(V) that the Supervisory Board of Directors of NV GEBE enormously values the great dedication and extensive work of Mr. Bienvenido Richardson .

Therefore the statement made to the newspaper and St. Maarten news by Mr. Bloem on behalf of himself and NV GEBE is not correct.

During my 3.5 years, I served as chairman of NV GEBE SBOD, at no time did I commit any violations whatsoever.

The fact remains I was voted out in the board meeting dated December 7th, 2021 because one of the motions tabled by me was to vote on terminating Mr. Bloem's contract as I was concerned about the direction the SBOD was heading with his involvement.

On June 24, 2021, I was requested by the SBOD in particular chairlady Diaz to give reason and account to the members pertaining to my letter that I sent to you the shareholder.

I attended the meeting and was tricked by chairlady Diaz who first pretended to call Mr. Bloem on the phone to sit in via WhatsApp phone call in which I question the legality because he was not placed on the convocation as being an invitee.

However, while on the WhatsApp call, Mr. Bloem appeared in person into our board meeting in which I once again question Mr. Bloem's presence and in what capacity is his attendance.

Madam chairlady Diaz responded that she invited Mr. Bloem.

During the meeting, Mr. Bloem made lots of accusations towards me such as I was the one who leaked the letter to the blog who in return shared it with Mr. Rene Richardson whom he indicated also has proof thereof.

Please be reminded that this same friend, Mr. Rene Richardson is whom Mr. Bloem wanted and approach me as then former chairman and suggested to appoint him as Temporary Manager of NV GEBE instead of Dr. Daniel. .

This is the same friend that Mr. Bloem wanted the SBOD to engage services with the strategic plan along with three SBOD members including myself in which the money the former TM budgeted would have been split among Mr. Rene Richardson ,Mr Bloem and us members as an additional stipend and I declined.





I would like to point out that in the 19-page letter that was sent to you the Council of Ministers on June 29, 2021, was written by Mr. Bloem and only signed by Madam Chairlady Diaz.

I bienvenido Richardson, a member of the SBOD did not see, reviewed, or was allowed to provide feedback before it was sent to you the shareholder, and the Temporary Manager of NV GEBE.

On page 15 of Mr. Bloems letter, he acknowledges the violations of NV GEBE's article of incorporation and the Law towards me.

In Mr. Bloem's words: Subsequently, this may result in a violation of the NV GEBE articles of incorporation and the law. Madam Chairlady Diaz and the SBOD members is deliberately acting against the articles which warrant a dismissal.

I would also like to point out to you the shareholder that Mr. Bloem only mention the old invoices in his 19 page letter in which you were already in possession of. The big question is where are the new invoices from November 2020 up to the present? This should be a great concern for you the shareholder because Mr. Bloem continues to work almost daily for the SBOD and GEBE will have to bear the financial consequences.



Concerning the recruitment, Mr. Bloem did take the lead of the entire recruitment negotiations which can be confirmed by the two former candidates and the current Mr. Temmer. To add more, the calculations seem not to be correct in which Mr. Hato voiced his concerns and declined the offer the position twice in the first interview

In all email correspondences with regards to the negotiations, Mr. Bloem is copied in. Noteworthy, Mr. Serrant suddenly resigns from the position as chairman of the recruitment committee citing family problems, leaving the recruitment to be unattended as a replacement is sought.



I was discredited in the letter of June 8, 2020, addressed to you the shareholder.

However, after monitoring the constant manipulation of the minutes which differs from the recordings, I took it upon myself to record board meetings.

Since according to Mr. Bloem and Madam Chairlady Diaz that I am disgruntled and not being truthful, please listen carefully to the attached audio document which in return will answer your concern and parliament's concern regarding the illegal act of the strategic plan.

In addition, this also proves my statement of the young lady Dr. Daniel being forced to participate in this illegal act in a condescending manner.





I will end by saying there will be dark days ahead for GEBE under the leadership of the SBOD and the questionable motives of the temporary manager.

As you the Shareholder can attest to, all the concerns that I raised in my previous letter are coming to past or should I say being played out.



I rest my case.





Kind regard ,

Bienvenido C.Richardson

Member of Supervisory Board of Directors N.V. G.E.B.E
Royal Netherlands Navy vessel HNLMS Holland has intercepted the transport of a drug for the third time in a short period. The patrol vessel was on patrol in the Caribbean Sea when it stopped a fishing boat with 18 people on board. During the action, a shipment of cocaine was seized.

A maritime patrol aircraft of the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard had spotted the fishing boat with a fast drugs boat, known as a go-fast, attached to it. HNLMS Holland was notified, which subsequently deployed its two fast interception crafts (FRISCs) with onboard a combined team from the US Coast Guard and the Netherlands Marine Corps. The NH90 maritime combat helicopter was also activated.

As the various units approached the fishing vessel, the individuals on board released the empty go-fast as an attempted diversion. The American boarding team boarded the fishing boat and apprehended the eighteen people on board. The boat was sailing under the Venezuelan flag and sixteen people on board have Venezuelan nationality and two the Dominican Republic.

The suspects and the contraband were later handed over to a US Coast Guard vessel. A total of 325 kilos of drugs was seized.

Third time

HNLMS Holland returned to its post as a station ship in the Caribbean in May 2021 and combines counter-drug operations with lending support to the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard. Earlier this month the ship also intercepted two drugs means of transport.
SABA/THE HAGUE:--- The delegation of the Saba Island Council during the meetings in the Netherlands was able to point out the matters that are important to Saba, such as increasing the structural funding, establishing a social minimum, a better banking system, investments in education, social development and infrastructure.

Island Council Members Esmeralda Johnson, Carl Buncamper, Vito Charles, Eviton Heyliger and Hemmie van Xanten, and Island Council Registrar Akilah Levenstone visited the Netherlands from June 24 to July 2 during which the delegation attended two pieces of training and had a number of meetings with various organizations and members of the Permanent Committee for Kingdom Relations of the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament.

It was a successful visit and the general conclusion was that overall, the support for Saba is growing. It was a packed agenda, but it was definitely worth it. It is all about connecting, networking, and keeping up the relations. It is highly important for Saba to keep bringing up our issues and points of concern in the Netherlands, said Van Xanten.

The direly needed improvements to the banking system on Saba, which is deemed insufficiently accessible and too expensive, were discussed in meetings with the Dutch Central Bank (DNB), the Second Chamber, and the Council of State.

Same page

Basically, we are all on the same page on this issue. As Island Council, we keep striving to achieve improved banking services, to increase the accessibility of banking products for the Saba people. We need banking services and products that are up to standard. Everybody agrees that it needs to happen, said Buncamper.

High on the agenda of the delegation was Sabas dire financial situation due to the free allowance (vrije uitkering) which is too low to cover the operational, structural costs of the Public Entity Saba. We explained the stress that is caused by the long delay to structurally increase the free allowance. We pointed out in all meetings that much depends on the long-overdue increase of the free allowance, said Buncamper. We want the matter of structural funding arranged, and we no longer accept reasons for delay, said Van Xanten.

The parties we met with were well informed about Saba's position on the free allowance and the impact it has on government, its future planning and the salaries of civil servants. With such broad understanding and support it is important that we see some movement on this point as soon as there is a new cabinet, said Charles.

Long overdue

Another matter that has been long overdue is the implementation by the Dutch Government of a guaranteed minimum income so people can properly sustain themselves which helps to eradicate poverty, the so-called social minimum. The Island Council delegation once again stressed the need to secure this for once and for all.

All noses are facing the same direction, but still it doesnt get done. The current caretaker Dutch Government keeps saying it is up to the next government, said Van Xanten. The same goes for the raising of the free allowance. This is taking too long and the people are fed up. We have been stating the same for years. We are professional enough to run a business. Yet still, we are treated as less. It is a colonial way of keeping control, said Van Xanten.

Time to deliver

We have lived up to every benchmark that has been set. But when it is time to deliver, The Hague throws up another issue or comes up with an excuse. We keep seeing the dot on the horizon being pushed back further. Rather than seeing the social minimum established in an acceptable timeframe, it seems that the willpower is lacking on a ministerial level to fix this, said Buncamper.

Not having a social minimum 10 years after the constitutional change is unacceptable and the parties that we met expressed this sentiment as well. While the economic impact of an increase is an important consideration, having people continue to live in poverty while doing nothing about it for so long is a real shame, said Charles.

Positive way

The delegation met with representatives of six different political parties that are represented in the Second Chamber. They all expressed support for Saba and they gave us credit for the way we do things on Saba, said Van Xanten. He noted that Saba was mentioned in a positive way during a meeting earlier this week of the Permanent Committee for Kingdom Relations with State Secretary of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations Raymond Knops.

It was great to meet with the parliamentarians, especially with the new parties and the new members, as the formation process is ongoing. They heard directly from us what the issues are that are important to Saba. They are well-prepared and ready to get things done when there is a new government. Hopefully, this will mean good outcomes for the items on our agenda when that time comes, said Charles.

The training of the Seven Senses Foundation on citizen participation and the leadership training of the Ontwikkelhuis were an important component of the delegations visit to the Netherlands. The trainings were informative and we can use them to implement some changes, said Buncamper.

The delegation had a meeting behind closed doors with the Second Chambers Permanent Committee for Kingdom Relations. As WIPM party, the delegation also had individual meetings with members of said Committee, namely Jorien Wuite of the D66 party, Sylvana Simons of the BIJ1 party, Aukje de Vries of the VVD party and Joba van den Berg of the CDA party. It was agreed to have regular follow-up meetings in a digital setting to keep the Second Chamber informed of matters that are important to Saba. The delegation travelled back to Saba on Friday, July 2.
ACU Weather.

Hurricane Elsa formed over the waters of the Atlantic Ocean early Friday just west of the Caribbean island of Barbados, one day after the system became the fifth-named storm of 2021. AccuWeather forecasters, having expected the cyclone to reach hurricane force, continued monitoring Elsa and predict it will approach the United States next week after it unleashes heavy rain, strong winds, and stirs up dangerous seas around the Caribbean islands through this weekend.

Elsa was bringing hurricane conditions to the Windward Islands as it raced to the west-northwest at a speed of 29 mph Friday morning. The center of Elsa was passing near the islands of St. Vincent and St Lucia as of 11 a.m. EDT and the storm was about 675 miles east-southeast of Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic.

The system is expected to continue on a general west-northwest path over the Caribbean and is likely to remain a hurricane while approaching Hispaniola and Jamaica this weekend.

A hurricane warning is in effect for Barbados, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines, as well as St. Lucia, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said. A sustained wind of 74 mph and a gust up to 86 mph have already been reported on Barbados, the NHC said.

A hurricane watch is in effect for southern Haiti from Port Au Prince to the southern border with the Dominican Republic.

Elsa developed into a tropical storm about halfway between the Leeward Islands and the coast of Africa early Thursday morning, setting a new Atlantic record in the process. With its formation early in the morning of July 1, Elsa dethroned 2020's Tropical Storm Edouard as the earliest E-named storm in the Atlantic basin. Edouard formed July 6, 2020. The 2020 season went on to produce a record 30 named storms.

Conditions are expected to deteriorate over a large portion of the Windward Islands and the southern portion of the Leeward Islands on Friday with increasing rounds of downpours, thunderstorms, gusty winds with rough seas and surf, AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Adam Douty said.

"During Friday and Friday night, the heaviest rainfall totals of 2-4 inches with an AccuWeather Local StormMax of 8 inches will occur across the Windward Islands. Wind gusts of 60-70 mph with an AccuWeather Local StormMax of 90 mph will occur near the track of the storm -- likely across Barbados, Saint Vincent, and Saint Lucia," Douty explained. Power outages and flash flooding are anticipated.

As Elsa is forecast to maintain a steady west to northwest path through the eastern and then the central Caribbean this weekend, most of the impacts are likely to pass south of the U.S. and the British Virgin Islands with minimal impact along the southern shoreline of Puerto Rico. These areas could face rough seas and surf and the possibility of drenching showers and thunderstorms from the storm's outer bands.

However, this general, slightly north-of-west, the track will bring the system very close to the islands of Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Cuba as the weekend progresses with the likelihood of much more significant, damaging and dangerous impacts to these islands.

AccuWeather is anticipating that the RealImpact Scale for Hurricanes will be a 1 in the Caribbean. The RealImpact is a 6-point scale with ratings of less than one and 1 to 5. The rating is based on the anticipated isolated flooding, damaging winds, storm surge, and a number of other economic factors.

As Elsa strengthens and the forward speed of the storm slows, the output of rain and wind will increase. Since Elsa is forecast to approach and potentially track over parts of Hispaniola and Cuba as a hurricane, the impacts may be more significant compared to those experienced in the Windward Islands. Should Elsa strengthen more than currently anticipated prior to reaching the waters of Hispaniola and Cuba, the RealImpact rating could increase as well.

It is in this north-central portion of the Caribbean where the track becomes somewhat less certain. The track of Elsa is likely to be influenced by the strength of the tropical system itself as well as other non-tropical weather players, including the jet stream near North America, an area of high pressure over the western Atlantic and fronts that may stall over the southeastern U.S. later this weekend into next week.

If Elsa moves over one or both of the large, mountainous islands of Hispaniola and Cuba, then the system will likely weaken. Should it track in between or south of these islands, then Elsa could maintain strength or even strengthen further. Waters are sufficiently warm to maintain and feed a tropical system throughout the Caribbean. However, AccuWeather forecasters point out that other inhibiting factors, such as wind shear or a flow of dry air from South America, could keep Elsa's strength in check or cause it to weaken.

If Elsa manages to slide south of these Caribbean islands and enter the Gulf of Mexico largely unscathed, a more potent hurricane could evolve and potentially impact the U.S. A track into the eastern Gulf of Mexico appears most likely at this time, according to AccuWeather forecasters.

Even if Elsa's strength fluctuates, it does not necessarily mean it will dissipate entirely. Tropical systems that struggle for a time due to wind shear, dry air, and land interaction can rebound days later.

"Depending on the exact track, winds over parts of Hispaniola and Cuba may gust to over hurricane force (74-mph or greater maximum sustained winds) on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale," Douty said. Winds this strong can lead to widespread power outages. Torrential rain can lead to flash flooding and mudslides, especially in areas where there is deforestation.

Beyond that, there is still some uncertainty about where Elsa will head. Even though a track into the eastern Gulf is most likely, it could potentially track northward over the Florida Peninsula -- or even just to the east of the Sunshine State.

Residents of the southeastern U.S. as well as those farther north along the Atlantic coast in the U.S. are being put on alert for potential impacts from Elsa.

"Impacts to the contiguous United States would begin Monday night at the earliest after the system passes through the Caribbean. Residents, visitors, or those with interests from the central Gulf Coast, across Florida and to the Carolina coast should monitor the progress of Elsa," Douty said.

Even though the exact track for Elsa from late this weekend to next week is far from certain, there is the likelihood that some rain, building seas, and gusty thunderstorms are likely to spread northward over the Florida Peninsula early next week, either by direct or indirect means. How significant these conditions become could mark an end to search and recovery operations following the collapse of the Surfside condominium building near Miami.
Tourism in Aruba is picking up strongly and the economy is recovering better than expected. A new government should focus on reducing the public debt. To this end, the budget for the year 2022 should be in balance and that for 2023 should show a surplus of 1% of GDP. For now, it is mid-year and the budget for 2021 has still not been adopted. The Board of financial supervision Aruba (CAft) calls on Aruba to - still - do this as soon as possible, and to consider whether the expenditures can be reduced.

The corona crisis has hit Aruba hard. This year, for the period up to and including the third quarter, the Netherlands has provided AWG 489 million in liquidity support, in addition to the AWG 414 million that was already made available for Aruba last year. This money has been used to finance support measures to prevent bankruptcies and save jobs. The economy is now recovering smoothly, in line with the latest forecasts of the Aruba Tourism Authority (ATA). If this trend continues, tourism is expected to return to pre-coronavirus levels in the first quarter of 2022.

Adoption 2021 budget

The 2021 draft budget, which the CAft advised on in January, had a public sector deficit of almost 24% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The CAft has made several recommendations to reduce this deficit. The CAft regrets that the draft budget has not yet been discussed by Parliament and emphasizes the importance of an orderly budget process. The draft now needs to be adapted because of the positive effects of a faster recovery of tourism than was anticipated. Aruba has also been requested to critically review the expenditures in the budget. In view of the delay of the 2019 annual accounts and their impact on the 2020 annual accounts, the CAft once again emphasizes the importance of completing the accounting cycle in a timely manner.

As soon as possible working towards a surplus

Aruba has a strongly increasing debt. At the end of this year, the debt will be approximately 130% of GDP. Interest expenditure now exceeds 5% of GDP. A budget surplus is the only way to reduce Aruba's nominal debt. It is therefore particularly important that Aruba eliminates deficits and as quickly as possible draws up a budget with a surplus. To this effect the recommendation was made to achieve at least a balanced budget by 2022 and a budget surplus of 1% of GDP as of 2023, as was agreed with the Netherlands in the protocol. This could also be an important signal to (international) markets, also because then the refinancing agreements with the Netherlands will expire.

Tax reform

Aruba started the tax reform in 2019, whereby the system of levies and taxes is changed and simplified. So far, only part of the intended reforms has been implemented, so there is a risk that after all there will only be an increase in the tax burden. It is especially important that the tax reform is implemented comprehensively and in the short term. In that context, it is desirable to introduce VAT (BTW) for the indirect taxes.

The CAft visited Aruba yesterday and today. Meetings were held with, amongst others, the Governor, the Minister of Finance, Economic Affairs and Culture, the Council of Ministers and the Parliamentary Committee on Finance, Economic Affairs and Government Organization. In addition, the CAft paid visits to the ATA, the General Health Insurance Implementing Body (UOAZV) and the Dr. Horacio E. Oduber Hospital (HOH).
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:
Outgoing Rotary District Governor James Glass presents a banner to Mike Noftsger to hang for the the Somerset-Pulaski County Morning Rotary Club signifying that one of their own, Noftsger, is now serving in that district role. Noftsger's induction took place Thursday evening at the Citizens National Bank Pavilion in downtown Somerset.
In an increasingly sophisticated business environment, clients need law firms that have the experience and depth to handle significant matters. This law firm in California is staffed by attorneys who offer diverse legal, business and governmental backgrounds.

Its practice areas are focused on specific legal disciplines, but the firm also has teams that are equipped to address the needs of particular industries, including healthcare, banking and finance, gaming, environmental, manufacturing, governmental, and pharmaceutical, and telecommunications.

Ensuring continued protection

When the law firm relocated its corporate headquarters to a new building three years ago, founding partners knew they would need to invest in technology, education, and services to ensure top-tier security and security measures. It had previously worked in a space in which security was managed centrally across the building but now it had to develop its own program.

The management team quickly realised that they were not interested in building their own security team

Stakeholders were not only interested in managing access to the facility, it also wanted to ensure that alarms, video, and security operations were managed by experts to ensure continued protection across physical and network infrastructure. As they were evaluating options, the management team quickly realised that they were not interested in building their own security team from scratch. Rather, they wanted to work with an expert team that could quickly bring their security efforts up to par.

Security systems monitoring

The law firm connected with Ryan Schonfeld, Founder, and CEO of risk management services and operations firm RAS Watch. After speaking with Schonfeld and he provided an overview of what a robust security effort should entail, the firm quickly identified a plan.

RAS Watch provided us with the expertise we needed to quickly determine what our security efforts should entail, the founding partner said. The entire team are experts in what they do, they understand the changing risk landscape, are experienced and proactive, and therefore, were the ideal choice to support our efforts. The corporation contracted with RAS Watch to deliver a managed service security program that provides training, risk assessments, security systems monitoring, alarm management, and more.

Managed service operations

RAS Watch is a unique managed service operations and risk mitigation centre

RAS Watch is a unique managed service operations and risk mitigation centre, offering companies the opportunity to benefit from a mission-critical security program without investing significant capital, allocating real estate, administering technology, or managing a comprehensive operation. The RAS Watch suite of services uses state-of-the-art tools to protect a company's people, assets, and brand, providing actionable intelligence in real-time through a service-based security program model.

While RAS Watch offers a wide range of services and solutions, the organisation opted for a layered approach to security  one that incorporated monitoring services, crisis training, and remote SOC support. The training was rolled out in stages, first to the law firms leadership team and then to managers and employees. Employees continuously learn how to deal with potential security issues, de-escalation techniques, and how to respond in an active shooter incident.

Emergency mass communications

RAS Watch also operates as the legal teams security operations centre from a separate facility along with educating and training staff. The SOC is online 24/7, allowing operators to coordinate with the alarm company, provide information and assistance for any security concerns or questions, and handle emergency mass communications and responses for the firm.

In early 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic began to impact California, RAS Watch was also able to help address concerns about COVID-19. It offered the company ideas on integrating wellness protocols with existing security plans and taking advantage of technology to simplify processes. "RAS Watch has gone above and beyond to help us ensure the safety and security of our facility," the partner said. "We value their insight, ideas, and suggestions, and they have become an integral part of our business."
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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.
Bombs bursting in hair: The cost  in injuries and property damage  of fireworks in Minnesota
Dana Goldman is a professor of public policy, pharmacy and economics at the University of Southern California; John Rowe if a professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University, and Reginald Tucker-Seeley is a professor of gerentology at University of Southern California.
Phil Heim of Medford, husband of Gail, is the father of four adult children, a son-in-law, hope-to-be daughter-in-law, and grandpa to four grandchildren.
Medford, NJ (08055)

Today

Sunshine to start, then a few afternoon clouds. High 87F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Clear skies. Low near 70F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
On the series finale of The Bold Type, Jane turns down Jacquelines offer of editor in chief because she doesnt want to give up writing. Sutton and Richard get back together. Kat and Adena get back together and Kat takes the job of editor in chief. Jane announces that shes leaving.





Perfect person: Id like to take back everything I said last week about Jane and the editor in chief position. Yes, she wouldve done well, but she probably wouldnt have been happy in the long run. I was right when I said that it would cut back on her writing and that she probably hadnt realized that. I do think that was the major dealbreaker in this situation. She couldve lived with the rest (pressure, long hours) but Jane is a writer though and through. Kat, on the other hand, is a born leader and I cant believe I didnt see earlier how perfect shed be for this job. If Im not mistaken, she was already in charge of people back in season one. It sucks that we wont actually get to see her on the job. Did anyone else tear up when Jacqueline offered it to her? I was so proud to see her excel this week. And Im very happy to see her and Adena back together.





Kat has sort of been my favorite from the beginning. Aisha Dee was perfect for this role. It wouldnt have been the same if anyone else had played her. Im really going to miss these characters.

Not the ending I wouldve chosen: I was not surprised that Jane turned down Jacquelines offer, but I was surprised to learn she was leaving Scarlet. She went from interim-editor in chief to quitting. I get wanting to travel, wanting to take risks but this kind of came out of nowhere unless I missed some major signs. What about her Vertical, which only just started taking off. What about Addison? She just promised to be her mentor and guide her after Addison turned down a job elsewhere. Someone explain this to me because I dont think Im getting it. I did like the conversation with Ryan. Despite how badly things ended, Im glad theyre on better terms again. And I liked the bodyguard. But I just cant quite get over that ending.





That said, its been a wild ride with Jane. I feel like, out of our three main characters, Jane has come the furthest. Shes grown so much in confidence as a writer, conquering her fears (especially relating to her health). Im so glad I followed Katie Stevens from Faking It to this show.





Is this the right decision? Speaking of endings I cant get over, I dont know how to feel about Sutton and Richard getting back together. I loved them together, but after everything that happened last season I may have yelled idiots at my tv screen. How is this going to work? Richard is just going to forget that he wants kids? Yes, they have a happy ending now but what about ten or twenty years down the line? Wont he resent her for it? I mean, the man had already started the adoption procedure and he hadnt even been divorced yet. Am I wrong here, could this work?





Meghann Fahy was the only one of the three main actresses that I did not know beforehand and she really has wowed me with Sutton. I fell completely in love with this character. Shes the character I personally had the least in common with but all of her issues always felt so personal and relatable. I cant wait to see what she does next.





Ill miss it: I cant believe its over. That relatively unknown guilty pleasure show I picked up because I needed something to watch and review over the summer. It looked like fun and I was hooked from the start. I wasnt sure it was going to make it past its first season but that didnt stop me from enjoying it. And now its five seasons later. The show wasnt perfect, lets make that clear. The were storylines that I did not like (open relationship) and season four was a hot mess. I hate that this season only had six episodes to wrap things up which wasnt nearly enough. Its shouldve had sixteen, in my opinion, and anyone who knows me knows that I do not say that lightly (Im usually a fan of shorter seasons). But this season just felt rushed. I feel like Janes decision, Kats new job, Sutton and Richards reunion wouldve felt much more organic if there had been more time for us to gradually get there. Kat was literally hired back last week and is now running the place. There shouldve been more time in between. I blame Freeform for this. Everyone knows you cant wrap up a show in six episodes, just ask the Nikita writers.

However, those first few seasons were really great. This show handled storylines in a way I havent really seen before. I will forever marvel at the way Jacqueline was written. A female boss in the fashion industry, they couldve so easily turned her into a bitchy stereotype. Instead, shes this incredible mentor to all of them, even inspiring me. And the same goes for Oliver. His relationship with Sutton was one of the best parts of the show. And I wish we couldve gotten more of Sage, Andrew, and Alex (who I was missed in this finale). This show gave us so many incredible characters. Im going to miss each and every one of them.





Best quotes: Jane: I think Im just processing. And, I have like infinite emotions. And you know when that happens and you just feel like you have to scream.

Jacqueline: Jane has told you the news, Im sure. Kat: News? No. Sutton: What news? Jacqueline: Ladies, I would never expect her to keep a secret like this from family.

Jane: Im not taking the editor in chief job. Kat: What? Why. Jane: Because Im not the right person for it. Jacqueline: You are, Kat. Kat: Are you serious? Jacqueline: Oh, I am very serious. Kat: Is it okay if we sit down?

Jacqueline: I was trying to replace myself with someone that was, well, someone like me. But someone like me is not the future of Scarlet. You are, Kat. And Im sorry that it took me so long to see it.

Jane: So this is it. Sutton: No. Jane: So much change. Kat: But its good change, though. And we are gonna be okay. Sutton: Were gonna be better than okay. Jane: Cause we got each other, forever. Kat: Oh yeah, until we die.





Thats it for this show. Let me know in the comments what you thought of the series finale.




Madrid, 2 July 2021 (SPS) - The United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres dubbed Friday essential to revive the peace process in Western Sahara, at standstill since 2019, pointing out that efforts are made by the UN Organization to appoint a special envoy.



We are really making an effort so that we can finally have a special envoy to revive the peace process, said Guterres in a joint press conference with the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on the occasion of a visit to Madrid.



It is absolutely essential to restart the process of a political dialogue on Western Sahara because the current situation isnt sustainable and is a factor for instability in the region, added Guterres, cited by the Spanish news agency EFE.



We need to restart the political dialogue and it is essential that the two parties accept the envoy, he insisted, adding we had 13 candidates that were rejected by the parties.



The post of UN special envoy to Western Sahara is vacant since the resignation in May 2019 of former German president Horst Kohler. (SPS)



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WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden praised the ability of sports and athletes to bring a nation together in a time of crisis as he hosted the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers at the White House on Friday.

The Dodgers, who captured the title by defeating the Tampa Bay Rays last October, were the first team to be honored at the White House since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first since Biden took office.

I think what we discovered is that we need sports more than we ever realized, said Biden, who praised baseball in one of the most challenging years in the nations history.

The president saluted the team for using its stadium as a mass COVID-19 vaccination site.

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MORE ON THE PANDEMIC

 Lots of travelers expected in U.S. during July 4 holiday; Biden concerned about unvaccinated

 Thai virus surge prompts worries over ICU capacity, vaccine supply

 Vatican and World Medical Association seek all-out effort to combat vaccine hesitancy

 Womans crusade for international kids resumes after pandemic pause

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 Follow more of APs pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

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HERES WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

NICOSIA, Cyprus  Cyprus is offering a holiday stipend from mid-July to mid-August to anyone whos been vaccinated and will restrict access to soccer stadiums to those who have received their shots or have obtained a negative PCR or rapid antigen test 72 hours prior a match in a bid to encourage young people from getting inoculated against COVID-19.

The Cypriot government announced late Friday a string of incentives designed to spur a sizeable portion of the population that havent stepped up to be vaccinated. Officials say some 70% of those under 40 havent received their shots.

Other incentives include counting the day that government and private sector workers opt to get vaccinated as a bonus day off and offering an honorary five-day leave to army conscripts who choose to get the jab.

The government also decided to lessen the fun factor for those who arent vaccinated by requiring bar and restaurant patrons or anyone attending large gatherings such as weddings to display either a so-called Safepass indicating that theyre fully vaccinated, or to present a negative PCR or rapid antigen test taken 72 hours prior to the event.

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SPRINGFIELD, Mo.  One Missouri hospital official is telling anyone making disparaging remarks about the COVID-19 vaccine to Shut up as state officials ask for federal help dealing with a surge in cases that has some counties urging new precautions.

Deep vaccine resistance has allowed the delta variant, first identified in India, to take hold in the state, straining hospitals, particularly in the Springfield area.

If you are making wildly disparaging comments about the vaccine, and have no public health expertise, you may be responsible for someones death. Shut up, tweeted Steve Edwards, who is the CEO of CoxHealth in Springfield.

CoxHealth and the citys other hospital, Mercy Springfield, were treating 168 COVID-19 patients Friday, up from 31 on May 24, before the surge began, said Aaron Schekorra, a spokesman for the Springfield-Greene County Health Department. He said that 36 of them were on ventilators.

Erik Frederick, the chief administrative officer of the Mercy Springfield, also turned to Twitter in an effort to bolster vaccinations, noting that they prevent deaths.

So if youre vaccinated there is a light at the end of a tunnel, he said. If youre unvaccinated thats probably a train.

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PHOENIX  Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is rescinding a series of executive orders issued during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Republican governor says most are no longer needed because the Legislature put them into law in the session that ended this week.

Some of the orders would remain in place until legislation takes effect in 90 days. Those include orders preventing cities, towns and counties from issuing orders for businesses that are more stringent than those Ducey issues. Other orders ending after new legislation takes effect bar universities from requiring coronavirus vaccines or masks for unvaccinated students.

Republicans, who control the Legislature, were adamant that they would block any coronavirus-related actions they considered were restricting freedoms. They passed laws banning mask orders in K-12 schools and state universities and blocking some future health orders. Democrats called the moves short-sighted, saying they may be needed amid a new surge of virus cases.

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NEW YORK  Elissa Montantis Global Medical Relief Fund was thwarted by COVID-19 after more than two decades of beating the odds to obtain medical care for children injured in war and crises around the world.

The pandemic put a hold on international travel and services to the more than 450 kids who have passed through her care. Prosthetics needed fitting. Surgeries required scheduling. Now the New York woman is reviving her charity. Shes recruiting volunteers and professionals, bringing children to the U.S. again for medical care.

Montanti started the charity in 1997 in the wake of the sudden deaths of her grandmother, mother and childhood sweetheart. Shes lobbied at the United Nations, written a memoir and built a sprawling network of charitable doctors and professionals.

The charity says it has taken in children from 50 countries, mostly from Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

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WASHINGTON  President Joe Biden says hes concerned lives will be unnecessarily lost to COVID-19 as unvaccinated people contract and transmit the coronavirus over the July 4 holiday.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Biden emphasized that for most Americans who are vaccinated, the holiday weekend will be worth celebrating.

Says Biden: This year is different than the Fourth of July of last year and its going to be better next year.

But the president says hes worried about those who havent yet gotten a shot.

I am concerned that people who have not gotten vaccinated have the capacity to catch the variant and spread the variant to other people who have not been vaccinated. But I am concerned. Lives will be lost.

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JOHANNESBURG  Driven by the delta variant, a new wave of coronavirus is sweeping across the African continent where cases, hospital admissions and deaths are increasing.

Case numbers are doubling every three weeks in Africa, according to the World Health Organization. South Africa is leading the surge, with more than 20,000 new cases reported Friday.

That has increased South Africas total to 1.9 million confirmed cases and 66,323 confirmed deaths. It represents more than 30% of the 5.5 million cases reported by Africas 54 countries, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHOs regional director for Africa, says Africas third wave has large speed and scale. The delta variant, reported in 16 African countries, has become dominant in South Africa. WHO says the delta variant has been detected in 97% of samples sequenced in Uganda and 79% of samples in Congo.

Less than 2% of Africas 1.3 billion people have received one dose of a vaccine.

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MOSCOW  Russian authorities have reported a record 679 new coronavirus deaths, a fourth day in a row with the highest daily death toll in the pandemic.

On Friday, Russias state coronavirus task force reported 23,218 new cases. But the authorities are not discussing a lockdown, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday.

Russia has struggled to cope with a surge in infections and deaths in recent weeks that comes amid slow vaccination rates. Daily new infections have more than doubled over the past month, soaring from around 9,000 in early June to over 20,000 this week.

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BERLIN  Germany is recommending all people who get a first shot of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine switch to a different type of vaccine for their second shot.

The aim is to increase the speed and effectiveness of vaccinations as the more contagious delta variant spreads. Health Minister Jens Spahn conferred with his colleagues from Germanys 16 states on Friday, the day after the countrys standing committee on vaccination issued a draft recommendation.

In a statement, the committee says study results show the immune response from a mixture of AstraZeneca with an mRNA vaccine of Pfizer or Moderna was significantly superior to two doses of AstraZeneca.

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BEIRUT  Lebanon is reporting the first cases of the coronavirus delta variant in the country.

Health Minister Hamad Hassan says three cases of the highly contagious delta variant were reported in Lebanon. He urged the countrys residents to get vaccinated.

The reports of the variant come as tens of thousands of tourists and expatriates are flying into Lebanon.

Lebanon, a nation of 6 million people, including a million Syrian refugees, has eased lockdowns in recent months as the vaccination campaign intensified and cases dropped. The nation has registered 545,000 confirmed cases and 7,854 confirmed deaths.

Lebanon has administered more than 1.3 million vaccination shots so far.

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GENEVA  The head of the World Health Organization says the world is in a very dangerous period of the COVID-19 pandemic, noting the more contagious delta variant is identified in nearly 100 countries.

At a press briefing on Friday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the delta variant, first found in India, is continuing to evolve and mutate, and it is becoming the predominant COVID-19 virus in many countries.

I have already urged leaders across the world to ensure that by this time next year, 70% of all people in every country are vaccinated, he said, adding that would effectively end the acute phase of the pandemic.

He noted 3 billion doses of vaccine have already been distributed and, its within the collective power of a few countries to step up and ensure that vaccines are shared.

Of the vaccine doses given globally, fewer than 2% have been in poorer countries. Although rich countries including Britain, the U.S., France and Canada have pledged to donate 1 billion COVID-19 vaccines, WHO estimates 11 billion doses are needed to immunize the world.

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LONDON  Public Health England says cases of the more contagious delta variant have increased fourfold in the U.K. in less than a month.

It says a total of 161,981 confirmed and probable cases of delta variant have been identified in Britain  up 46% on the previous week.

The delta variant, which was first identified in India, continues to account for around 95% of confirmed cases of coronavirus across the U.K.

Though cases have been rising sharply in recent weeks, the number of people requiring hospitalization for COVID-19 has not risen as much. That indicates the link between infections and mortality has weakened following the rapid rollout of vaccines in the country.

Yvonne Doyle, Public Health Englands medical director, says most new cases are among younger age groups who are less likely to be hospitalized.

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ROME  The Vaticans bioethics academy and the World Medical Association are calling for an all-out effort to combat vaccine hesitancy and correct the myths and disinformation that are slowing the fight against the coronavirus.

In a joint statement on Friday, the groups say some vaccine reluctance in poorer countries is rooted in historical inequalities and suspicions of Western pharmaceutical companies. But they say a more pernicious form of hesitancy is being driven by fake news, myths and disinformation about vaccine safety.

They demanded that all relevant stakeholders exhaust all efforts to ... confront vaccine hesitancy by sending a clear message about the safety and necessity of vaccines and counteracting vaccine myths and disinformation.

The statement also repeated calls from the Vatican and the medical establishment for vaccine equity, ensuring the poorer nations have the same access to shots.

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ISLAMABAD  Pakistan received 2.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine from the United States on Friday, easing pressure on Islamabad in overcoming the shortage of COVID-19 vaccines.

According to a U.S. embassy statement, the vaccines were delivered to the Pakistani people in partnership with the COVAX global vaccine initiative, UNICEF, and the government of Pakistan.

It says this donation was part of the 80 million doses the United States was sharing with the world, delivering on our pledge to facilitate equitable global access to safe and effective vaccines, which are essential to ending the COVID-19 pandemic.

The latest development comes days after hundreds of Pakistani expatriate workers rallied in Islamabad, demanding they should be quickly vaccinated with the Moderna, Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines so they can travel abroad.

Pakistan has mostly relied on Chinese vaccines, but some Middle Eastern countries want travelers to produce a certificate to show theyve received specific vaccines.

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BANGKOK  Health authorities in Bangkok reported 6,087 confirmed coronavirus cases on Friday, setting a record for the second straight day.

Around 90% of total cases and 95% of the deaths have been recorded during a third wave of the coronavirus that began in April. There were 992 deaths in June this year, more than 15 times Thailands total for all of 2020.

The governments Center for COVID-19 Situation Administration says theres been a nationwide increase during the past two weeks in the number of patients in ICUs and on ventilators. There are 2,002 people in ICUs, including 566 on ventilators.

Sixty-one related deaths were reported Friday, bringing the total number of cases to 270,921 and 2,141 confirmed deaths.

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NEW DELHI  India has confirmed 400,000 deaths from COVID-19, half in the past two months, as the virulent delta variant infected hundreds of thousands daily.

The grim figure announced Friday is believed to be a fraction of the true total. It is second only to the United States and Brazil.

The Health Ministry says 853 people died in the past 24 hours, raising total confirmed deaths to 400,312 since the start of the pandemic. The first known COVID-19 death in India happened on March 12, 2020, in southern Karnataka state.

India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, has confirmed more than 30.4 million infections. There have been 46,617 new cases detected in the past 24 hours. That total also is believed to be an undercount.

New cases are on the decline after exceeding 400,000 a day in May. But authorities are preparing for another possible wave of infection around September and are trying to ramp up vaccination.

Less than 5% of Indias people are fully immunized. Over 340 million doses have been administered since mid-January, according to the ministry.

About 2 billion doses could be available by December with Indias two main suppliers, Serum Institute and Bharat Biotech, ramping up production and five other vaccines potentially available in the coming months.

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STAMFORD  City police say they have arrested two men in connection with two child sexual assault cases.

Officers traveled to Los Angeles this week to extradite Fredy A. Orellana, 35, who fled Connecticut after learning about the arrest warrant, police said in a press release.

Orellana has been accused of sexually assaulting a child, who was under 10 years old, during a two-year period, police said.

Stamford police said they began the investigation after the victim went to the hospital with a sexually transmitted disease. Officers conducted a forensic interview of the victim and corroborated many of the allegations made, police said.

Investigators worked with the states attorneys office to secure an arrest warrant for Orellana in May, but he fled Connecticut when he became aware of his pending arrest, police said. The U.S. Marshals Service helped track down Orellana in California, police said.

Stamford police returned to Connecticut with Orellana on Tuesday and he was charged with first-degree sexual assault and two counts of risk of injury to a minor. He is being held on $500,000 bond.

Stamford police said Friday they also made an arrest in a separate child sexual assault case.

Natividad Zandoval, 54, has been charged with first-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor.

In October, police said a 24-year-old woman reported she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Zandoval for seven years when she was a child.

Police said they corroborated the victims detailed accounts. Investigators then interviewed Zandoval, who made some admissions about the crimes, police said. Zandoval was arrested on a warrant and is being held on $1 million bond.

christine.derosa@hearstmediact.com
DOVER, Del. (AP)  The Boy Scouts of America have reached an $850 million agreement with attorneys representing some 60,000 victims of child sex abuse in what could prove to be a pivotal moment in the organizations bankruptcy case.

The agreement filed in court by BSA attorneys late Thursday would mark one of the largest sums in U.S. history involving cases of sexual abuse. The filing, known as a restructuring support agreement, includes the BSA, abuse victims, local Boy Scouts councils and lawyers appointed to represent victims who might file future claims.

After months of intensive negotiations, the debtors have reached resolution with every single official and major creditor constituency, BSA attorneys wrote.

The Boy Scouts of America sought bankruptcy protection in February 2020, moving to halt hundreds of lawsuits by men who were molested as youngsters decades ago by scoutmasters or other leaders. The filing was intended to try to reach a global resolution of abuse claims and create a compensation fund for victims.

But attorneys for the Irving, Texas-based BSA had previously been unable to reach agreement with victims, local Boy Scout councils and insurers on how to compensate victims while allowing the 111-year-old organization to continue operating.

Thursday's agreement signals the BSAs acknowledgment that disagreements remain between attorneys representing abuse victims and those representing the BSAs insurers.

In an earlier court filing Thursday, attorneys for certain insurance companies accused the BSA of allowing attorneys for abuse victims to rewrite the BSAs restructuring plan to favor their clients.

With only the fox guarding the henhouse, the outcome is utterly at odds with what BSA itself asserted was necessary for a confirmable plan and is permissible under the bankruptcy code, the insurers wrote.

Attorneys for insurers appear to be concerned, among other things, that decisions regarding insurance coverage issues would be made without their input.

Meanwhile, attorneys for the Boy Scouts are also asking for U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein to declare that they have no obligation to seek court approval of a previously announced settlement with The Hartford, one of the BSAs insurers.

The Hartford agreed to pay $650 million into the victims' trust in exchange for being released from any further obligations under policies dating to 1971.

The Hartford settlement was roundly criticized by attorneys for abuse victims, who estimate the insurers liability exposure at several billion dollars. They made it clear that victims would not support any plan that includes the Hartford settlement.

The Boy Scouts have said that between $2.4 billion and $7.1 billion, including insurance rights, might be available for abuse victims. Attorneys for a committee that acts as a fiduciary representative of all victims in the bankruptcy case have estimated the value of some 82,500 sexual abuse claims at about $103 billion.

Matthew Sturdevant, a spokesperson for The Hartford, said the company's agreement with the Boy Scouts is a crucial building block to move this bankruptcy case toward a conclusion.

We are disappointed that the Boy Scouts of America have chosen to flout the organizations tenet of keeping promises by seeking to discard a thoughtfully negotiated and mutually agreed upon deal that appropriately values The Hartfords obligations," Sturdevant said in an email.

In a joint statement, representatives for the victims as well as future claimants representative said the restructuring support agreement will allow the Boy Scouts to emerge from bankruptcy while providing meaningful compensation to the victims, and holding the Boy Scouts insurers to the terms of the insurance policies purchased by the Boy Scouts and their affiliates over many decades.

In a revised plan submitted barely two weeks ago, the BSA offered to issue an $80 million promissory note to a trust fund for abuse victims. It also proposed maneuvers to make up to $50 million in additional cash available for abuse survivors. The proposed changes would increase the BSAs proposed contribution to as much as roughly $250 million, more than doubling a prior plan.

Under a new plan expected to be filed Friday, the BSAs 250-odd local councils would contribute $600 million into the fund for abuse victims, doubling an offer from earlier this year. Under the plan, the BSA and local councils would be released from liability in return for their contributions to the victims fund.

A hearing in the case is schedule for July 20.
SUQUAMISH, Wash. (AP)  The children of a Native American man killed by police in Washington state two years ago are suing, saying his death was unnecessary.

Stonechild Chiefstick, a member of Montanas Chippewa Cree tribe who had close ties to the Suquamish Tribe in Washington, was shot and killed while attending an early Independence Day celebration in the city of Poulsbo on July 3, 2019.

He had reportedly been menacing people with a screwdriver at the crowded event. When officers moved in to arrest him, a scuffle ensued. Chiefstick scrambled away, and the lead officer, Craig Keller, shot and killed him from about 9 feet away. The encounter lasted about 13 seconds and occurred among people who had laid out blankets to watch a fireworks display.

Kitsap County Prosecutor Chad Enright declined to charge Keller, finding the shooting justified and citing witnesses who said Chiefstick lunged toward the officer with the screwdriver in his hand. Chiefstick, 39, had methamphetamine and alcohol in his system when he died, according to the medical examiner.

But according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Tacoma on Thursday, at least two other witnesses said Chiefstick had tripped and fallen on a concrete path, dropping the tool, as he retreated from Keller, and thus he was unarmed when Keller shot him. Keller's body camera fell to the ground several seconds before the shooting; it captured audio but not video of what happened.

The lawsuit alleges excessive force and inadequate training, the Kitsap Sun reported. City risk manager Alexis Foster declined to comment.

(Keller) and the Poulsbo police have escaped accountability completely for what transpired that night, Seattle attorney Gabriel Galanda, who represents the family, said Thursday. I am hesitant to use the word justice because that is not something I can provide this family in a court of law. Justice would be bringing their father home, and I cant give them that.

Keller has said Chiefstick tried to stab him and that he fired in defense of my life and the lives of citizens around me.

According to the lawsuit, filed on behalf of Chiefstick's daughter Alana Chiefstick and three minor children, Keller was involved in 20% of the uses of force in the 20-member Poulsbo Police Department, and he failed to make any effort to de-escalate his encounter with Chiefstick, whom other officers had already spoken with earlier in the day.

The department has a policy, custom, and established practice of condoning and encouraging the type of shoot-first, ask-questions-later mentality deployed by Keller, the lawsuit said.

Suquamish Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman had requested that Gov. Jay Inslee direct Attorney General Bob Ferguson to review the case for criminal charges, following the Kitsap County prosecutor's decision not to file any.
The delta variant appears to be gaining a foothold in the state, even as COVID infections and hospitalizations remain low overall, according to the latest data.

Several nations around the world have tightened pandemic restrictions in response to the variant, which is thought to be more transmissible than the strain widely circulating in the U.S.

The delta strain comprised 13.6 percent of samples from positive test kits researchers at The Yale School of Public Health and Jackson Laboratory surveyed in the past week, up more than 11 percent from the previous week.

The overall number of cases detected in the state still remains small compared with other variants. As of Thursday, 48 cases of delta, a strain first detected in India, have been confirmed in Connecticut. In contrast, 3,302 cases of the alpha strain, first detected in the U.K., have been found in Connecticut. That alpha variant has remained the dominant strain in the U.S., and comprised half the cases tested by researchers in the past week through genomic sequencing.

Nathan Grubaugh, who heads the sequencing efforts at the Yale School of Public Health, offered a caveat that the estimates are noisy because of the low sample of sequenced cases. Thats because the state has fewer infections overall for researchers to examine, which is a good problem to have, he wrote in a tweet Thursday.

Infections overall remained low Friday, with 89 new cases reported statewide out of 15,013, a positivity rate of 0.59 percent. Hospitalizations rose by five, bringing the total to 42, while the death toll remained flat at 8,279.

The delta strain has pushed officials in Israel, Australia and others across Europe to tighten travel restrictions. In Californias Los Angeles County, officials this week recommended everyone wear a mask at indoor public settings  including those who are vaccinated. The announcement stopped short of a new mask mandate.

Gov. Ned Lamonts office and the state Department of Public Health did not immediately respond when asked whether the state would consider issuing a similar recommendation in Connecticut.

The state still has universal masking for vaccinated and un-vaccinated people in some settings, such as courthouses, taxis, public transit, hospitals, health care centers and congregate settings. People who are not yet fully vaccinated are still required to wear a mask indoors, though most businesses are using the honor system.

Experts believe the vaccines provide good protection against the delta variant. Researchers in the U.K., where delta has become the dominant strain in new cases, found the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was still highly effective. U.K. researchers found the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has not been approved in the U.S., also provided good protection.

This week, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson said their vaccines protected against the variant.

Connecticut, and the rest of the northeast, is among the most heavily vaccinated areas in the nation, with more than 67 percent of residents having received at least one dose and nearly 61 percent fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions data tracker.

But pockets of low vaccination rates still exist in Connecticut, despite wide availability of vaccine. Lower uptake of vaccines is still seen in the far eastern part of the state and some of Connecticuts largest cities, according to state data. Vaccine demand overall has dropped off, with the state administering a fraction of the doses it did in early April when vaccinations peaked.

Thursdays report from Yale and Jackson Laboratory showed the iota strain comprised just over 18 percent of cases sequenced, with no change from the previous week. The strain, first detected in New York last fall, is considered a variant of interest, rather than a variant of concern like alpha and delta.
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP)  Uganda is tightening its lockdown measures to try and stem a surge in coronavirus infections in the East African country that is seeing an array of variants.

The measures announced late Friday by President Yoweri Museveni include a ban on private and public transportation within and across districts, including in the capital Kampala. Only vehicles carrying cargo and those transporting the sick or essential workers are permitted to operate on the roads, Museveni said in a televised speech.

The normally crowded shops in downtown Kampala, where thousands of the urban poor operate, have also been ordered shut. An ongoing nighttime curfew will stay in place.

The new measures will last 42 days.

These are urgent and temporary but extraordinary measures which we as a nation must jointly and fully embrace to protect and preserve our lives, our ways of life, Museveni said.

Museveni had avoided imposing a full lockdown in an address on June 6, limiting restrictions to movement between rural and urban areas. He said Friday he is tightening the measures now because Ugandans had not followed his previous guidelines.

Uganda is among some African countries seeing a dramatic rise in the number of infections amid a vaccine shortage. It has confirmed a total of 68,779 infections, including 584 deaths. The actual totals are believed to be much higher. Only a few thousand samples are tested daily.

Matshidiso Moeti, Africa director of the World Health Organization, spoke Thursday of a sobering trajectory of surging cases in Africa that she said should rouse everyone to urgent action.

New cases across the continent rose by nearly 30% in the past week, she said.

Africas 1.3 billion people account for 18% of the worlds population, but the continent has received only 2% of all vaccine doses administered globally. It has recorded more than 5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 136,000 deaths.

Nearly 90% of African countries are set to miss the global target of vaccinating 10% of their people by September, according to the WHO.

One major problem is that COVAX, the U.N.-backed project to supply vaccine to poor corners of the world, is itself facing a serious shortage of vaccine doses.

Amid a global outcry over the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the U.S., Britain and the other Group of Seven wealthy nations agreed last week to share at least 1 billion doses with struggling countries over the next year, with deliveries starting in August.

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Follow all of APs pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The United Nations said Friday that more than 400,000 people in Ethiopias crisis-wracked Tigray region are now facing the worst global famine in decades and 1.8 million are on the brink, and warned that despite the governments unilateral cease-fire there is serious potential for fighting in western Tigray.

The dire U.N. reports to the first open meeting of the U.N. Security Council since the conflict in Tigray began last November and painted a devastating picture of a region where humanitarian access is extremely restricted, 5.2 million people need aid, and Tigray forces that returned to their capital Mekele after the governments June 28 cease-fire and exit from the region have not agreed to the halt to hostilities.

U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo urged the Tigray Defense Force to endorse the cease-fire immediately and completely, stressing that the U.N.s immediate concern is to get desperately need aid to the region.

Acting U.N. humanitarian chief Ramesh Rajasingham said the situation in Tigray has worsened dramatically in the last 2  weeks, citing an alarming rise in food insecurity and hunger due to conflict with the number of people crossing the threshold to famine increasing from 350,000 to 400,000. With 1.8 million a step away, he said, some suggest the numbers are even higher.

The lives of many of these people depend on our ability to reach them with food, medicine, nutrition supplies and other humanitarian assistance, he said. And we need to reach them now. Not next week. Now.

The largely agricultural Tigray region of about 6 million people already had a food security problem amid a locust outbreak when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Nov. 4 announced fighting between his forces and those of the defiant regional government. Tigray leaders dominated Ethiopia for almost three decades but were sidelined after Abiy introduced reforms that won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.

No one knows how many thousands of civilians or combatants have been killed. DiCarlo said an estimated 1.7 million people have been displaced from their homes, and more than 60,000 have fled into neighboring Sudan. Though Abiy declared victory in late November, Ethiopias military kept up the offensive with allied fighters from neighboring Eritrea, a bitter enemy of the now-fugitive officials who once led Tigray, and from the Amhara region adjacent to Tigray.

In a stunning turn earlier this week, Ethiopia declared a unilateral cease-fire on humanitarian grounds while retreating from advancing Tigray forces. But the government faces growing international pressure as it continues to cut off the region from the rest of the world.

DiCarlo said reports indicate that leaders of Tigrays previous regional administration including its former president have returned to the regional capital Mekele, which has no electrical power or internet. Key infrastructure has been destroyed, and there are no flights entering or leaving the area, she said.

Elsewhere in Tigray, DiCarlo said, Eritrean forces, who have been accused by witnesses of some of the worst atrocities in the war, have withdrawn to areas adjacent to the border with Eritrea.

Amhara forces remain in western Tigray, and DiCarlo said the Amhara branch of the ruling Prosperity Party warned in a statement on June 29 that the regions forces will remain in territory it seized in the west during the conflict.

In short, there is potential for more confrontations and a swift deterioration in the security situation, which is extremely concerning, she warned.

Ethiopias U.N. Ambassador Taye Atske Selassie told reporters later when asked if Amhara forces would remain in western Tigray, that is a matter of fact.

Selassie, who comes from that part of Ethiopia, said the western area was once part of Amhara but was forcibly incorporated into Tigray in 1990 without any due process. He said the dispute will now be submitted to a government border commission.

On the humanitarian front, Rajasingham said over the past few days U.N. teams in Mekelle, Shire and Axum have been able to move out to other places which is positive.

The U.N. now plans to send convoys to difficult-to-reach areas but the U.N. World Food Program only has enough food for one million people for one month in Mekelle, he said.

This is a fraction of what we need for the 5.2 million people who need food aid, the acting aid chief said. However, we have almost run out of health, water, sanitation and other non-food item kits. Food alone does not avert a famine.

Rajasingham urged all armed and security actors in Tigray to guarantee safe road access for humanitarian workers and supplies, using the fastest and most effective routes.

He expressed alarm at Thursdays destruction of the Tekeze River bridge -- and the reported damage to two other bridges -- which cut a main supply route to bring in food and other life-saving supplies."

Rajasingham called on the Ethiopian government to immediately repair these bridges and by doing so help prevent the spread of famine.

What we are seeing in Tigray is a protection crisis, Rajasingham stressed, citing civilian killings during the conflict, and more than 1,200 cases of serious sexual and gender-based violence reported, with more continuing to emerge.

Selassie, the Ethiopian ambassador, reiterated the governments call for a national dialogue and its commitment to ensure accountability for crimes and atrocities committed during the conflict -- moves welcomed by U.N. political chief DiCarlo.

She urged the international community to encourage the government and Tigrayan forces to ensure there is no impunity for the crimes.

The Security Council took no action and made no statement but U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said its first open meeting after six closed discussions was important to show the people of Tigray and the parties to the conflict that the U.N.s most powerful body is concerned about the issue and closely watching developments.

And hopefully it will lead to further action by the council if the situation there does not improve, she said.
Let us now praise the overlooked Connecticut man who helped draft the Declaration of Independence. Roger Sherman, born 300 years ago, deserves far more credit than he gets.

Jefferson, Adams and Franklin are household names. But the lesser-known Sherman is the only person who signed all four of the nations founding documents: the Declaration, the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and the Articles of Association, which cut off trade with Britain in 1774.

He should have his own Broadway show.

The son of a farmer, Sherman never got beyond grammar school but earned an honorary degree from Yale. With his adroit political skills, he rose from New Milford selectman to the states General Assembly and eventually to the Continental Congress, the 13 Colonies makeshift government, where he served on more committees than anyone else. His many other jobs included mayor of New Haven, treasurer of Yale College and Superior Court judge.

Does it surprise anyone that Sherman served in both the U.S. House and Senate? By the time he died, hed spent more days in United States congresses than any man in America, the late Connecticut State Historian Christopher Collier wrote the New York Times in 1987.

Sherman is often described as dour, but he had almost magical influence. Thomas Jefferson wrote that he never said a foolish thing in his life. A fellow delegate to the Continental Congress said that if he didnt know how to vote, I always look to Roger Sherman.

And so Sherman was entrusted with drafting the Declaration with Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Robert R. Livingston of New York. Hes one of the Committee of Five shown in the famous painting Declaration of Independence by Connecticuts Jonathan Trumbull. Sherman is the one with the weary eyes.

No wonder he looks tired. The man never rested. A decade after working on the Declaration, he was a prime mover behind the Great Compromise, also known as the Connecticut Compromise, at the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

The fight was over whether states should be equally represented in Congress or whether larger states deserved a bigger say. The Connecticut Compromise did both: It gave each state an equal vote in the Senate and assigned seats based on population in the House. He broke the impasse.

Art lovers can see Declaration of Independence at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. Dont try to go July 4, however. The museum is taking the day off, like the rest of us. A much larger version hangs in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., which is also closed on Independence Day  which seems ironic, considering how hard Sherman worked for this day.

Go next weekend instead, and marvel at how lucky Connecticut is to lay claim to the man who had what his eulogizer called the happy talent of judging what was feasible and what was not feasible, or what men would bear and what they would not bear in government. Happy 300th birthday, Roger Sherman.
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 
Looking to help employees, the owner of Wheel restaurant plans to increase their wages.

Savas Logothetides, who owns Wheel in Pottsville and Tamaqua, announced on the restaurants Facebook pages that beginning Monday he would implement a $12 an hour minimum wage for kitchen employees, raises between 25% and 33% for front house staff already making $12 or more an hour and additional time off. The changes will result in the price of menu items going up.

Logothetides said the labor shortage affecting the industry played into his decision, adding it is predicated on an industry falling behind on wages.

I think the restaurant industry is lagging behind in what team members are making compared to the job market, he said, adding Wheel was lucky to retain and hire employees.

He said the raise and the $12 minimum wage was the most feasible for employees and the restaurant, adding people are the most important asset to the restaurant.

I felt my team was deserving of an increase, he said, adding he is looking at a similar increase at Charlies Pizza and Subs, which he co-owns. Its only going to strengthen the business.

Logothetides said many businesses are looking at workforce development as a way of moving forward.

Wage increases are one way employers nationwide are looking to attract more workers to fill open positions, along with incentives such as reimbursing educational programs and vouchers.

Wheels plan for raises and increasing the minimum wage is part of a multiphase plan to improve the business, Logothetides said, which expects to last between 12 and 24 months. Other improvements will include tuition assistance, paid holidays for all employees, a further increase in the minimum wage and a retirement program, according to Wheels Facebook announcement.

Another area restaurant, Vitos Coal Fired Pizza, has also increased its pay to attract more workers. Owner Vito Valenti said while he has always paid more than the minimum wage, he is paying even more because of the labor shortage, adding he is having trouble finding people to fill open positions.

Pennsylvanias minimum wage is currently $7.25, the same as the national average.

Dave Clews, president of the Pottsville Business Association, said raising the minimum wage is related to the shortage of workers business owners are experiencing.

To try and attract employees, theyll have them start at a higher wage, he said.

That trend of offering a higher minimum wage will continue for a while, Clews said, adding as much as they were hurt by the pandemic, it is hitting them in different ways now.

Raising the minimum wage, he said, has to be seriously considered with there not being enough applicants to fill open positions.
The Milkhouse Creamery with locations in Drums, Mountain Top and Berwick is among 31 creameries to make the states Scooped: An Ice Cream Trail.

The Drums location at the former Pecoras Dairy store on Pecora Road in Sugarloaf Twp. is featured on the trail, which highlights the states small businesses and dairy farmers and invites residents and tourists to scoop some happiness.

This ice cream trail provides consumers an opportunity to experience Pennsylvanias rich agricultural heritage while learning more about the dairy industry, supporting small businesses and enjoying a scoop, or several, of PA preferred ice cream, said Russell Redding, state agricultural secretary, on Wednesday.

Whether its a reward following a Little League win, a salute to reuniting with family and friends or a tribute to a hot summer day, theres a lot to celebrate about and with Pennsylvania dairy, he said.

Originally launched in 2018, the ice cream trail is a state partnership to support Pennsylvanias 5,400 dairy farm families and the small businesses that source from them and offer a unique opportunity to explore the state by the scoop.

For 2021, Scooped offers three trails  the West, South Central and East  densely packed with dairy goods experiences for ice cream enthusiasts. Though this year doesnt have an official passport for stamps and prizes, trailgoers can learn about participating creameries virtually at visitpa.com/scoops and plan an adventure.

The Milkhouse, which offers more than 30 creative flavors of ice cream produced onsite and its own specialty milk products, has been featured in previous years trails, as has The Lands at Hillside Farms in Shavertown, which also has its own dairy store.

While 2020 was a year of being cooped up, in 2021, Pennsylvanians can scoop up some fun on this summers ice cream trail, said Carrie Fischer Lepore, DCEDs deputy secretary, who joined Russell on the trail in Mechanicsburg Wednesday.

We encourage our happy travelers to set out on new adventures all across the commonwealth, where they can enjoy a sweet treat, make sweet memories and support Pennsylvanias small businesses and dairy industry.

In Pennsylvania, the dairy industry supports more than 52,000 jobs and contributes $12.6 billion to the states economy in both urban and rural areas. Pennsylvania dairy manufacturers lead the nation in the production of many dairy products including ranking second nationally for ice cream and butter, and third in the nation for swiss cheese.

Pennsylvania dairy farms are the backbones of our communities. The ice cream trail is a great way to support these businesses while getting a firsthand look at the care and quality that goes into dairy farming each and every day, said Jayne Sebright, executive director at the Center for Dairy Excellence.

More curated trips and trails are available in Pennsylvania at visitpa.com. People can support state farmers by purchasing PA Preferred products and learn more about the states agricultural industry at agriculture.pa.gov.
Harriette Cole is a lifestylist and founder of DREAMLEAPERS, an initiative to help people access and activate their dreams. You can send questions to askharriette@harriettecole.com or c/o Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.
Chairman of the Social Democratic Party Marcel Ciolacu accuses the government of "keeping mum" on the "historic agreement to tax multinationals 15 percent" and demands the Prime Minister to explain the impact of this measure, especially on foreign capital companies in Romania, Agerpres informs.

"Historic agreement to tax multinationals 15 percent! Yet the Citu Government keeps mum! Romania is among the countries that support a large-scale international tax reform! And the executive headed by the 'first economist of the country' - Florin Citu - is in hush mode. Mr. Prime Minister, step to the blackboard and explain us the matter, or is this yet another reform you are running away from?! Yesterday, over 130 countries representing no less than 90 percent of the world's GDP have made a historic decision! They all aligned with OECD and Romania is among them," Ciolacu wrote on Friday on Facebook.

According to the Social Democrat leader, Romanians and foreign companies in particular want to know how this sweeping reform move that sets a 15 percent tax rate on multinational companies in order to ensure that "they pay a fair share of taxes wherever they operate" will affect them.

"Romanians, and particularly the companies with foreign capital that support our economy, want to know how the 15 percent tax rate on big companies will affect them! And what are your estimates of the budget revenues and how will you spend them?!," Ciolacu inquires.

A total of 130 states reached an agreement on Thursday to overhaul the taxation of multinational companies and set a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development announced, cited by AFP.
A number of 237,600 Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) Covid-19 vaccine will arrive on Friday at the "Cantacuzino National Institute for Medical-Military Development Research in Bucharest, by land transport provided by the manufacturing company, the National COVID-19 Vaccination Coordination Committee (CNCAV) informs.

Subsequently, the doses will be distributed to seven stocking and storage centers in Brasov (70,000 doses); Cluj (40,000 doses), Craiova (50,000 doses), Iasi (77,600 doses).

To date, Romania received 685,300 vaccine doses produced by the Johnson&Johnson company, of which 297,537 have already been used to immunize the population.

CNCAV mentions that in Romania the allocation of vaccine doses is done based on the shipping calendar provided by the manufacturing company, and in this respect, our country periodically receives the vaccine batches necessary for immunizing the population.
Chief of the German Air Force, Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Major General Viorel Pana, signed on Thursday, during a ceremony held at the 57th Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, the Declaration of Intent on the Development of Bilateral Relations in the aviation sector.

On this occasion, in the presence of the head of the German Air Force, the Deputy Commander Operations of the head of the British Royal Air Force, Air Marshal Gerry Mayhew and the head of the Romanian Air Force, a demonstration task on the joint execution of an enhanced Air Policing mission.

The demonstration was attended by aircraft belonging to the MiG-21 LanceR detachment, along with Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft belonging to the British Royal Air Force and the German Air Force, deployed at 57th Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base.

The head of the German Air Force, Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz, mentioned that NATO is a defensive organization, able to face any challenges and threats.

"Two Eurofighter planes arrived at the NATO Base in Constanta, Romania, a few days ago, with a very clear message (...) of solidarity between NATO nations. We are together, proving that NATO is a defensive organization, capable of facing any challenges and, yes, threats. This is why, for the first time, the German Air Force is patrolling along the borders of states on NATO's south-eastern flank alongside British and Romanian allies," said Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz.

According to Deputy Commander Operations of the head of the British Royal Air Force, Air Marshal Gerry Mayhew, the event at 57th Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base is a clear demonstration of NATO allies' willingness to work together.

"Today's event [July 1] is a clear demonstration of NATO's collective will to work together within the Alliance. (...) In a complex and challenging operational environment, we need to understand, make decisions and act quickly and as accurately as possible," said Gerry Mayhew.

"In the context of the crisis in Ukraine, a series of measures have been adopted at NATO level since 2014 to support NATO states belonging to the eastern flank. One of them was the development and implementation of a new concept, the enhanced Air Policing (...), to demonstrate NATO solidarity," said, in his turn, the head of the Romanian Air Force, Major General Viorel Pana.

According to him, the British, German and Romanian air forces will train daily to carry out air defense missions.

"Starting with July 1, the military, both pilots and specialists from the British, German and Romanian air forces will train daily in the execution of air defense missions, but will also execute (...) real air policing missions or training missions (...) Air policing is a component of the general air defense mission, a component that is executed in peacetime and aims to prevent the unauthorized use of the airspace of the respective country, of the Alliance," the chief added. Romanian Air Force.

On Friday, according to the Ministry of National Defense, servicemen with the three air forces will conduct an enhanced Air Defense Exercise - ADEX. The execution of this exercise also includes the interception of a "target" aircraft, represented by a C - 27 J Spartan transport aircraft operated by the Romanian Air Force, on the route Otopeni Air Base 90 - 57th Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, by F16 Fighting Falcon aircraft belonging to the Romanian Air Force in the permanent combat service and air policing and, subsequently, of Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft of the British Royal Air Force and the German Air Force.

At the end of the activity, after the landing of the aircraft participating in the exercise, an exhibition of aviation equipment will be organized at the 57th Air Base.

According to the Ministry of National Defense, the ADEX exercise planned for July 2 represents a joint training mission of the allied air forces and naval means in the national airspace and on the international territory of the Black Sea.

The joint air policing missions contribute to the development of the reaction and deterrence capacity, as well as to the consolidation of the interoperability between the Romanian, British and German Air Forces.

The Romanian Air Force has been performing Air Policing mission under the command of CAOC Torrejon since the beginning of NATO membership. NATO enhanced Air Policing is a peacetime collective defense mission to protect the integrity of the Alliance's airspace. At any moment, two fighter jets are prepared for the Air Policing Combat Service at the 57th Air Base Mihail Kogalniceanu.

The main mission of the combat- Air Policing service is to defend the national airspace, by intercepting aircraft entering the national territory without authorization, for various reasons.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the first NATO air policing mission.
The Ohma Hotel Academy Brasov, founded by the Swiss educational group winsedswiss (World Institute of Service Education), under license from the Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne (EHL), will open its doors for the first generation of students on July 12, representatives of the Wedsedswiss announced on Friday, on the occasion of the official inauguration of the academy.

Undoubtedly, this hotel school will significantly contribute to the development of the hotel industry and tourism in Brasov. The licensing system of the oldest and one of the best hotel schools in the world, the hotel management school in Laussane, is a guarantee for high quality education in Poiana Brasov, said the ambassador of the Swiss Confederation, Arthur Mattli, who attended the event.

The Ohma courses in Brasov will start with the professional training programme "Hotel Administration," "Beginner" module. The school will operate within the ohma hotel (former Casa Viorel hotel) in Poiana Brasov, a unit taken over by winsedswiss.

"Dual vocational education is, if not the only, the best way to prepare the well-qualified workforce that Romania needs. (...) I think it is essential that we, the Ministry of Education, through economic policies, return to what used to be called on-the-job learning," said Secretary of State Radu Szekely.

The first Hotel Academy in the country will train specialists in 4 areas of hospitality: culinary arts, catering services, accommodation and reception and hotel administration.

In the new academy, young people over the age of 16 will be able to gather and apply, in real time, the acquired notions, in order to obtain basic qualifications or specializations in one of the four professional areas. The experts of the Swiss group, recognized hotel professionals and EHL certified trainers, have a direct role in the management of the hotel unit, working together with the academy students.
The border police found, in the last 24 hours, 71 illegal acts (62 infractions and 9 contraventions) committed by both Romanian and foreign citizens, at the "green frontier" and at border crossing points,.

"There were discovered, independently or in collaboration with other institutions, undeclared goods (which were about to be illegally brought into the country), which exceeded the accepted threshold, or were suspected of being counterfeit, worth over 8,600 RON. The value of the applied administrative fines amounts to approximately 6,100 RON," informs a press release sent by the Border Police General Inspectorate (IGPF) , on Friday.

The police denied entry into the country for 31 foreign citizens, who did not fulfill the legal conditions, as well as 30 Romanian citizens' exit for various legal reasons.

More than 137,000 people with more than 41,400 means of transport have crossed the border in the last 24 hours, the busiest being the border with Hungary.

"On July 1, through the border crossing points countrywide, approximately 137,400 people, Romanian and foreign citizens underwent control formalities; with over 41,400 means of transportation (of which 13,300 freight vehicles). On the inbound there were approximately 69,500 people with 20,700 means of transportation and on the outbound there were 69,700 people with 20,700 means of transportation," the quoted source shows.

The Hungarian border was transited by approximately 40,700 people and 18,500 means of transportation (6,000 freight vehicles), of which on the outbound there were approximately 22,300 people with 9,100 means of transportation and 3,800 freight vehicles.

"The border police is working at the fullest capacity allowed by the infrastructure of the border crossing points, which is why we are recommending all traffic participants to go through all the crossing points opened to international traffic, so that we can avoid overloading just some of them," IGPF specifies.

Information regarding the situation of border crossing points open to international traffic can be found on the on-line Trafic application, which can be accessed at the following address: http://www.politiadefrontiera.ro/traficonline/, Agerpres informs.
Two burn victims in the explosion at Petromidia Refinery on Friday will be transferred from the Constanta County Emergency Clinical Hospital to the Bucharest Emergency Clinical Hospital (Floreasca), according to Health Minister Ioana Mihaila.

"The Emergency Operational Centre with the Ministry of Health has informed me that two burn victims in the explosion at the Petromidia Refinery will be transferred from the Constanta County Emergency Clinical Hospital to the Floreasca Emergency Clinical Hospital in Bucharest. According to first examinations at the Constanta County Emergency Clinical Hospital, there are two people aged approximately 50 years, one person with second-degree burns on 40% of the body and one person with second-degree burns on 35% of the body," the minister wrote on Facebook.

So far, two other victims have received care at the Emergency Reception Unit of the Constanta County Emergency Clinical Hospital for injuries, and one refused being taken to the hospital, wrote Mihail, Agerpres informs..
Prime Minister Florin Citu said on Friday in Vaslui that the situation after the blast at the Petromidia Refinery is under control and that "the lives of the people were not endangered."

Citu said that he had a discussion with senior emergency management official Raed Arafat immediately after the event, whom he asked to go to the scene of the blast, saying that he will not travel personally to the area because "there is no need to."

"I had a discussion with Mr Arafat, immediately after the explosion; I asked him to go there. (...) I only knew that there was an explosion, when I spoke to him I did not have details, but it seems that there was a problem with a pipe. (...) I don't need to go to the scene anymore; the situation is under control now. What is more important is to know that the lives of the citizens have never been in danger," said Citu.

The prime minister said that the people who sustained burns in the explosion were transferred to Bucharest and for the time being they will be treated in Romania, and it will be established if anything else is needed.

Citu emphasised that at this moment "there is no danger in the area".

He was in Vaslui, on Friday, where he participated in the local county conference of the National Liberal Party (PNL).

A Red Intervention Plan was activated on Friday after an explosion followed by fire occurred at the Petromidia Refinery in Navodari, as the locals were alerted by RO-ALERT message about large smoke emissions.

Rompetrol Refinery Director General Felix Crudu-Tesloveanu said that the fire at Petromidia occurred at the gasoline hydrofining installation and the ensuing blast generated three more outbreaks, with the probable cause being a cracked pipe. He added that the fire broke out on a platform where there is various industrial equipment, with five people having worked in the area when that happened. Four of them were injured and one was found dead.
All CFR Calatori [Romania's National Railway Company - Passengers branch - editor's note] trains running between 6:00 am and 11:00 pm to and from Henri Coanda Airport will also stop at Mogosoaia Park station [a park in a rural town north-west of Bucharest - editor's note], starting July 15, the company informs on Friday.

The duration of a trip on the route Bucharest North - Mogosoaia Park is 11 minutes, and the ticket price is 4 lei, according to CFR Calatori.

The trip of CFR Calatori trains to and from Mogosoaia Park, as well as the train tickets for the new stop, will be available starting with July 15, 2021 and will be accessible on www.cfrcalatori.ro starting on the same date.

The train traveling between Bucharest and Mogosoaia Park is a green transport alternative, more accessible in terms of costs and faster for passengers, either for business or shuttle purposes, or recreational.

Train tickets can be purchased online, from the website www.cfrcalatori.ro; through the mobile application "CFR Calatori train travel and online tickets"; from the ticket offices of the railway stations and travel agencies of CFR Calatori, with electronic issuance of travel documents or from the ticket vending machines belonging to CFR Calatori.
The Clayco Foundation distributed $20,000 grants to seven community-based nonprofit organizations dedicated to building awareness and advancing the causes of Black equality and inclusion in the St. Louis and Chicago metro areas.

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

Core & Main LP, a distributor of water, wastewater, storm drainage and fire protection products and related services, entered into a definitive agreement to acquire substantially all of the assets of Georgia-based L & M Bag & Supply Co. Inc. and certain of its affiliates.

MOVING

Milestone Equipment Holdings relocated to new corporate headquarters in the Streets of St. Charles complex at 1520 South Fifth Street, Suite 270.

RECOGNITION

Joseph Luckett, author and CEO of Zero to 100, an inclusive global networking movement, received the key to the city of St. Charles in recognition of his recent international bestseller, Zero to 100: The Gold Standard of Global Networking. He is the first African American in St. Charles 250-year history to receive the key to the city.

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FENTON  After more than six years of development, the Fenton Logistics Park is nearing completion.

The developer, Clayton-based US Capital Development, and its partners are spending the last $44 million on warehouse and office development at the former Chrysler assembly plant along Interstate 44.

Missouris largest Anheuser-Busch dealer, Grey Eagle Distributors, is moving its headquarters here from Maryland Heights next spring. Wallys, a 68-pump gas station and travel center, is slated to open this fall. And construction will soon start on the new Fenton Fire Protection District facility.

The profile of tenants has morphed into this being as much of an office development as an industrial development, said US Capitals managing principal, Scott Sachtleben. Its like a small town.

Still to come is $75 million in hotel and restaurants on 43 acres fronting I-44, Sachtleben said. All together, the Fenton Logistics Park will total nearly $279 million in new development and employ up to 3,300 at companies like Amazon, BJC Healthcare and global chemical company BASF.
DES MOINES, Iowa  A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency rule change that allowed for the sale of a 15% ethanol gasoline blend in the summer months.

The decision deals a significant blow to the ethanol industry and corn farmers who grow the crop from which the fuel additive is made. They had anticipated increased ethanol demand through year-round sales of the higher blend.

Most gasoline sold in the U.S. today is blended with 10% ethanol. Corn farmers and ethanol refiners have pushed for the government to allow the widespread sale of a 15% ethanol blend.

The Trump administration made the change to fulfill a campaign promise to Midwest farmers. The EPA under President Donald Trump announced the change in May 2019, ending a summer ban on the E15 blend. Provisions of the Clean Air Act have prohibited the sale of certain fuels with a higher volatility from June 1 through Sept. 15 to limit smog. Congress has allowed 10% ethanol, and the EPA in its 2019 ruling revised the interpretation of the exemption to federal law to include the 15% ethanol blend.

Ethanol supporters contend that using more of the corn-based renewable fuel is better for the environment and helps meet federal climate change goals.
ST. LOUIS  Luis Jerez pulled up to the QuikTrip off Hampton Avenue on Friday and saw a number he didnt like much.

$2.50 is what we want, and thats about it, he said as he filled up his Cadillac Escalade. But right now, its over $2.80.

He wont be the only one wishing for lower prices this weekend. A rise in oil prices, growing demand from drivers resuming commutes or taking road trips, and a shortage of truckers are combining to push gas prices across the country to their highest levels in several years. Missouri will see its highest average rates for an Independence Day since 2014, according to data provided by the American Automobile Association.

At an average cost of $2.81, a gallon of regular unleaded fuel in Missouri is up almost a dollar over this time last year, when a decrease in demand fueled by COVID-19 precautions resulted in plummeting prices.

Its even higher in the St. Louis area, where the average price on this side of the Mississippi River is $2.87, about 97 cents higher than it was a year ago.
And 52% said they did not have adequate time to complete their job safely and effectively.

Pharmacy technicians are often the ones who fill prescriptions. Pharmacists counsel patients on usage and make final checks of each prescription before it gets to the patient. Their worry, generally, is that if theyre moving too quickly, they will miss errors in prescriptions and the wrong dosage or wrong medication could end up in the hands of patients.

Kimberly Grinston, executive director of the Missouri Board of Pharmacy, said COVID-19 has placed additional demands on pharmacists. Some had to cope with staff absences because of quarantine or illness. And the vaccines rolled out in winter, which is already a busy time .

We had a convergence of all these things, so the board had concerns about staffing and working conditions, Grinston said.

The board said this spring inspectors would specifically look at pharmacists working conditions, including staffing, prescription volumes and rest breaks.

Multiple pharmacists at chain pharmacies in the state declined to speak to the Post-Dispatch on the record.
People have layers, Hermes says. She loves peeling back those layers.

Of course some of the novels Europeans have their own views on Americans. A young Italian waitress, tied to her familys hotel, resents many of the guests. Hermes writes:

Despite dreaming of becoming a tourist herself, Donata found people in transit tiresome. They took so much for granted, expected so much to be granted to them. Away from home, among strangers  without baggage, so to speak  they could transform themselves into anything they wanted, anyone they wished to be for their two-week Lake Como vacation.

Whether Betsy has shed her baggage may be for the reader to decide. Hermes says she wanted to indicate that her heroines worldview was indeed limited. Even though I hoped to show that she was open to new experiences and growing while she traveled and was influenced by those experiences, I also wanted to show a world that was larger than her narrow perspective.

And that those larger things had an impact on her interactions with people  even if she wasnt aware of them. I wanted the book to be not just about introspection and the rough times shed been through, but about empathy and the rough times other people had been through or had created for themselves.
Also this week, Missouri officials renewed a contract with Deloitte Consulting through the end of August, state records show  the same date Parsons pandemic state of emergency is scheduled to expire.

According to spending records, the state paid Deloitte nearly $1.5 million in the fiscal year that ended Wednesday for COVID-19 consulting services. Per bidding documents, the services were to include detailed analyses and on-call support from the company.

Marc Johnson, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said Friday he expected the rate of new Missouri COVID-19 cases to double or triple in July due to the introduction of the delta variant.

Even in Boone County, where the vaccination rate is the highest in the state, the rate of new cases increased dramatically since the introduction of the delta variant, said Johnson, who with his colleagues analyze COVID-19 wastewater samples at the University of Missouri.

Delta was first detected at the Columbia wastewater treatment plant in a June 7 collection week sample.

Between June 4 and June 10, Boone County was averaging seven new cases per day. In the last week, that average increased fivefold to 36 new cases per day.
The negotiated rates now being posted publicly often show an individual hospital accepting a wide range of prices for the same service, depending on the insurer, often based on how much negotiating power each has in a market.

In some cases, the cash-only price is less than what insurers pay. And prices may vary widely within the same city or region.

In Missouri, for example, the average price of a diagnostic colonoscopy is $1,754, but the range across the state is from $304 to $9,283, according to a database aggregated by San Diego-based Turquoise Health, one of the new firms looking to market the data to businesses while offering some information free of charge to patients. Another is Health Cost Labs, which will have pricing information for 2,300 hospitals in its database when it goes live July 1.

Patients can try to find the price information themselves by searching hospital websites, but even locating the correct tab on a hospitals website is tricky.

Heres one tip: You can Google the hospital name and the words price transparency and see where that takes you, said Caitlin Sheetz, director and head of analytics at the consulting firm ADVI Health in the Washington, D.C., area.
The Union Covered Bridge in northern Missouri stands out as the only one in the state with the Burr-arch truss system, which uses a series of vertical kingposts and an arch to support the truss. The Union bridge, built in 1871 from local oak, has two arches on each side instead of one.

Brett Barnes, a deputy regional manager for the northern region of the states parks department, said the unique design draws covered bridge enthusiasts. There are people that kind of travel the country and mark bridges off their bucket list, he said. Thats neat when you run into them. Most of the time, they can tell you more about the bridge than what our staff knows.

The design is named after the man who created it, Theodore Burr, known as the father of American bridge building. More than half of the 93 covered bridges in the state of Indiana have this design. The others in Missouri use the Howe Truss design, named for its creator, Elias Howe. The Howe system is a bit more updated, using vertical iron rods as braces while wood was used on the diagonal.
Three other children were shot in two separate incidents Thursday in the citys Dutchtown neighborhood.

About 7:30 p.m. Thursday a 13-year-old boy was shot in the hip in the 3200 block of Itaska Street. He was conscious when he was transported to a hospital. Police said he was uncooperative with officers and gave inconsistent accounts of what happened to him. Police said a preliminary investigation found that occupants of a truck were firing shots in the area. Two parked vehicles were damaged by bullets.

The other two children were hurt in a shooting about 4 p.m. Thursday in the 4000 block of East Iowa Avenue. In that incident, a 16-year-old girl was grazed by a bullet and an 8-year-old boy was shot in his side, police said. Both were stable at a hospital, police said.

The boy and girl told police they were walking in the area with four other teenagers. Suddenly, three girls and two boys, all 14 or 15 years old, got out of a vehicle and began yelling at them about an ongoing dispute, police said.

The argument escalated into several fights. The victims then ran to a home on Ohio and heard the shots that hit two of them.

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Wiegert posted in December that no officer had yet applied for a COVID-19-related claim but to grant one would be INSANE.

We are opening up Pandoras box and this has the capability of destroying our pension, he wrote.

This is not Wiegerts first time butting heads with police organizations.

He was once president of the police union, formally the St. Louis Police Officers Association, but was expelled from the organization in 2012 for unauthorized activities, according to statements from the union, which has never publicly specified what led to the schism.

Around that same time, Wiegert was also in the news for his role lobbying for a pro-cannabis organization in the Missouri Legislature while still serving as a police sergeant. Police Chief Sam Dotson at the time said his actions were not what is expected of our officers.
Today is Friday, July 2, 2021. Let's get caught up.

Here's what you should know today: President Biden met with first responders and comforted families during a visit to the condo collapse site in Surfside, Florida; Boy Scouts of America reaches $850 million agreement with the victims of sex abuse; and the World Series champion L.A. Dodgers will visit Biden at the White House today.

Keep scrolling for today's top stories, this date in history and celebrity birthdays.

TOP STORIES

'Waiting is unbearable': Biden consoles Surfside families

SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  President Joe Biden drew on his own experiences with grief and loss to comfort families affected by the Florida condo collapse, telling them to never give up hope even as the search for survivors paused early Thursday, a week after the building came down.

Addressing some of the families touched by the tragedy, Biden spoke in deeply personal terms as he offered his prayers and support in the private meeting.
Gorsuch said justifications for the actual malice standard may be less in an era when technological changes and social media mean that disinformation can be better amplified and more profitable than traditional news with fact-checkers and editors.

Not only has the doctrine evolved into a subsidy for published falsehoods on a scale no one could have foreseen, it has come to leave far more people without redress than anyone could have predicted, Gorsuch said.

Berisha sued Lawson and the other defendants in federal court in 2017 over brief passages in Lawsons book, which chronicled how three stoner dudes from Miami Beach scored a $300 million U.S. defense contract in 2006 to supply ammunition to the Afghan military, and sought to fulfill it by procuring weapons from stockpiles in Albania.

The book recounted their dealings with an Albanian government-linked mafia. It placed Berisha in one of the meetings, describing him as having dark hair, a soft chin, and sharklike eyes and accused him of being part of the corrupt arms-dealing cabal.

The three Miami men were eventually convicted in the United States on federal fraud charges.
Negotiators from 130 countries have agreed on a major overhaul of how the worlds biggest companies are taxed in an effort to deter international avoidance schemes that have cost governments billions in revenue.

It's an attempt to better cope with a world where globalization and an increasingly digital economy mean that profits can move easily from one jurisdiction to another. The agreement was sealed Thursday in talks overseen by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, though there are still details to work out and hurdles to clear before it can take effect in 2023.

The key feature is a global minimum corporate tax of at least 15%, endorsing the broad outlines of a proposal from U.S. President Joe Biden.

While the tax deal is complex in its details, the idea behind the minimum tax is simple: if a multinational company escapes taxation abroad, it would have to pay the minimum at home.

Here's why it was proposed and how it would work.

THE PROBLEM: TAX HAVENS AND THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Most countries only tax domestic business income of their multinational companies, on the assumption that the profits of their foreign subsidiaries will be taxed where they are earned.
WASHINGTON (AP)  As the last U.S. combat troops prepare to leave Afghanistan, the question arises: When is the war really over?
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, BC, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Fosterville South Exploration Ltd. ("Fosterville South") or (the "Company") (TSXV: FSX) (OTC: FSXLF) (Germany: 4TU) is pleased to announce it has received positive results, including multiple high-grade gold assays, from recent sampling at Beechworth. This program was conducted in preparation for drilling additional targets to the current Taff and Bon Accord Prospect drill program, which is now underway, within the large Beechworth project area.

Highlights:

rock chip assays for 173 samples from 45 gold prospects yield gold grades including 54 g/t Au

grid based soil sampling of 2515 samples covering 10.5 km2 completed

68 drill hole program designed based on these fieldwork results

With results received from this fieldwork, a drill program has been designed to test multiple high priority targets within the Beechworth Gold Project.

Rock chip assays for 173 samples from 45 gold prospects have yielded gold grades that included 54 g/t Au. Samples were collected along lines of workings of quartz and dump material (mullock).

Grid based soil sampling of 2515 samples has covered 10.5km2 of the total 22.7km2 of EL4697. All samples have been analysed by portable XRF for arsenic, antimony, and other base metals. Of these samples 1227 samples have been analysed for gold with a 1ppb detection limit. Gold assays from this soil sampling range up to 521 ppb Au (0.52 g/t Au) with most of the gold assays arriving this week.

These results have generated Au-As anomalous geochemical targets associated with old workings on approximately 20 separate subparallel structures. The soil sampling has been used as a means of focusing on the better and broader mineralised targets amongst the plethora of old workings.

Apart from the current drill program at Hillsborough on the Taff and Bon Accord Prospects, two separate LIEP (Low Impact Exploration Permit) drill permit programs are proposed consisting of 68 drill holes within 8 separate sites. First pass drilling would amount to 4200m, with provisions for using the same drill pads to drill deeper by either RC or diamond drilling during a second phase follow up.

It is targeted that the first permits for this additional drilling will arrive in mid to late July which will allow drilling to follow on from the current drill program at the Bon Accord and Taff Reefs targets at Beechworth, where permits have already been received.

The 68 drill holes planned are mainly focused on the Birthday, Perfect Cure, Von Moltke Reefs and Perseverance Reefs. The Birthday Reef is at Hillsborough and is reported to have produced 2425 tons for 1638 oz. Extensive workings occur on the lengthy structure at Perfect Cure but production records are not available.

A separate drill program is also being submitted for approximately 20 additional drill holes at various prospects due to different land status classification.

The Beechworth Gold Project

The Beechworth Gold Project is a drill ready high-grade gold project to the north-east of the Company's extensive land package in the state of Victoria. The Beechworth Gold Project consists of one granted exploration license (Beechworth license) and three tenement applications (Myrtleford, Harrietville and Lady Jane) covering an area of 459 km2. A large number of prospects were mined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Geologically the entire Beechworth Gold Project lies within the Tabberabbera Zone on the eastern margin with the Omeo Zones of the Lachlan Fold Belt in Victoria. The host rocks are Lower Ordovician marine sediments of the Pinnak Sandstone Formation comprising sandstone, siltstone, and shale. The Hillsborough goldfield occurs in the hanging wall of the major regional Sawpit Gully Fault Zone which separates the Tabberabbera Zone from the Omeo Zone. Mineralisation is typical of orogenic gold deposits. The gold deposits are characteristically associated with deformed (compressed, folded and faulted) and metamorphosed (chemically or thermally altered) mid-crustal blocks, particularly in proximity to major crustal structures (such as major faults or basement shear zones). Mineralised fault zones generally strike north to north-westerly with occasional breccia pipes developed at the intersection of anastomosing fault zones.

Beechworth License

Several key gold prospects and associated fault structures have been identified within the Beechworth license based upon extensive geochemical sampling, geological & LIDAR mapping and very minor previous drilling. These include various historical producing mines located within the Hurdle Flat goldfield (21,715 ounces of production at 15.32 g/t Au) and Hillsborough goldfield (47,492 ounces of production at 17.48 g/t Au).

Within the Hurdle Flat goldfield, at the Wallaby prospect, the existing adit accesses 200m below surface workings including an old open cut. The historically worked mineralized bodies are large subvertical tabular and pipe like structures. The largest historical mineralized shoot had a strike length of 145m, vertical extent of at least 170m, width of 13m, and an average grade of 15 - 20g/t Au. Repetitions of these ore shoots occur along strike and probably at depth.

Extensive channel sampling by previous explorers has occurred on the some prospects at the Beechworth license as follows:

Wallaby Prospect. 25 metres at 7.05 g/t gold; and 5 m at 25.9 g/t gold.

25 metres at 7.05 g/t gold; and 5 m at 25.9 g/t gold. Bon Accord Prospect. 10 metres at 23.7 g/t gold

10 metres at 23.7 g/t gold Kingston Prospect. 10 metres at 7.16 g/t gold.

Previous drilling for depth continuations around these old working has yielded significant intercepts at relatively shallow depths and include:

Kingston Prospect. W03: 8m @ 8.88 g/t Au from 18m

W03: 8m @ 8.88 g/t Au from 18m Hope Prospect. W06: 4m @ 22.0 g/t Au from 38m of downhole intervals.

W06: 4m @ 22.0 g/t Au from 38m of downhole intervals. Homeward Bound Prospect. HB04: 1.2m @132 g/t from 154.3m and HB09: 1.25m @ 31.5 g/t Au from 145.6m.

Myrtleford, Harrietville and Lady Jane Tenement Applications

Fosterville South's Harrietville tenement application consists of 247km2 and is located 33 km south of the Beechworth license. Several key gold prospects have been identified within the Harrietville tenement application based upon previous gold production. No modern exploration has taken place at any of these prospects. The only exploration drilling that has been carried out was by BHP Minerals searching for alluvial gold deposits with 20 cable tool drillholes completed in the Smoko area. Minor geochemical sampling, as stream sediments, has previously taken place. Historical production from these key mines was 11,836 ounces at 17.68 g/t Au.

The Myrtleford tenement application consists of 118km2. The area is east and south of the Beechworth license and is in part contiguous with the Beechworth granted licence and the Myrtleford Property owned by E79 Resources Inc.* Several key gold prospects have been identified within the Myrtleford based upon previous gold production. No modern exploration or drilling has taken place at any of these prospects. Minor geochemical stream sediments sampling has occurred. Historical production resulted in 24,745 ounces produced at 15.14g/t Au.

* Mineralization at the Myrtleford Property owned by E79 Resources Inc. is not necessarily indicative of mineralization at the Beechworth license and Myrtleford and Lady Jane tenement applications owned by Fosterville South.

The Lady Jane tenement application consists of 58km2. The area is west of and is in part contiguous with the Harrietville application and the Myrtleford Property owned by E79 Resources Inc.* Several key gold prospects have been identified within the Lady Jane based upon previous gold production. No modern exploration or drilling has taken place at any of these prospects. Minor geochemical stream sediments sampling has occurred.

The geological setting of these tenement applications is similar to the Beechworth licence and host rocks are the same Lower Ordovician Pinnak Sandstone Formation with north-westerly striking mineralized fault zones.

About Fosterville South Exploration Ltd.

Fosterville South began with two, 100% owned, high-grade gold projects called the Lauriston and Golden Mountain Projects, and has since acquired a large area of granted and application tenements containing further epizonal (low-temperature) high-grade gold mineralisation called the Providence Project and a large group of recently consolidated license tenement applications called the Walhalla Belt Project, which contain a variety of epizonal and intrusion related style gold mineralisation, all in the state of Victoria, Australia. The Fosterville South land package, assembled over a multi-year period, notably includes a 600 sq. km property immediately to the south of and within the same geological framework that hosts Kirkland Lake Gold's Fosterville epizonal gold tenements. Additionally, Fosterville South has gold-focused projects called the Moormbool and Beechworth, which are also located in the state of Victoria, Australia. Moormbool project has epizonal style gold mineralisation and Beechworth has mesozonal and intrusion relation gold mineralisation.

All of Fosterville South's properties, with the possible exception of Moormbool, have had historical gold production from hard rock sources despite limited modern exploration and drilling.

Qualified Person

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed, verified and approved by Rex Motton, AusIMM (CP), COO and Director of Fosterville South, a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101. Historical records were verified by reviewing annual and quarterly reports from government records by the Qualified Person.

On behalf of the CompanyRex MottonChief Operating Officer and Director

Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. Fosterville South cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by many material factors, many of which are beyond their respective control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to Fosterville South's limited operating history, its exploration and development activities on the Lauriston, Golden Mountain and Beechworth Properties and the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward-looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, Fosterville South does not undertake to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

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SOURCE Fosterville South Exploration Ltd.
LIMA, Peru, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Minsur S.A. announced today that US$263,577,000 aggregate principal amount, or approximately 58.57% (the "Tendered Notes"), of its outstanding 6.250% Senior Notes due 2024 (the "Notes") were validly tendered and not withdrawn by 5:00 p.m., New York City time (4:00 p.m., Lima time), on July 1, 2021 (the "Expiration Date") in accordance with Minsur's Offer to Purchase dated May 19, 2021 (the "Offer to Purchase") pursuant to which the tender offer was made.

Holders that validly tendered prior to 5:00 p.m., New York City time (4:00 p.m., Lima time), on June 2, 2021 (the "Early Tender Deadline"), and whose Tendered Notes were accepted, will be eligible to receive a total consideration of US$1,085 per US$1,000 principal amount of Tendered Notes, which includes an early tender premium of US$50 per US$1,000 principal amount of Tendered Notes. Holders that validly tendered after the Early Tender Deadline and prior to or at the Expiration Date, and whose Notes were accepted, will be eligible to receive the tender consideration of US$1,035 per US$1,000 principal amount of Tendered Notes. Accrued and unpaid interest will be paid on all Notes validly tendered and accepted for purchase from the last interest payment date up to, but not including, the settlement date, which is expected to be on July 6, 2021 (the "Settlement Date").

Minsur's obligation to accept for purchase and to pay for the Tendered Notes was subject to the satisfaction or waiver of certain conditions, which are more fully described in the Offer to Purchase. These conditions include Minsur having obtained sufficient gross proceeds from a debt financing, which has been satisfied.

Minsur will purchase all Notes that have been validly tendered and not validly withdrawn at or prior to the Expiration Date. Tenders of Notes submitted after the Expiration Date will not be valid.

Minsur has retained BofA Securities, Inc. and Santander Investment Securities Inc. as Dealer Managers for the tender offer. D.F. King & Co., Inc. is the Tender and Information Agent for the tender offer.

This press release is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to purchase securities or a solicitation of an offer to sell any securities or an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities nor does it constitute an offer or solicitation in any jurisdiction in which such offer or solicitation is unlawful.

Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements contained in this press release constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent Minsur's expectations or beliefs concerning future events, and it is possible that the results described in this press release will not be achieved. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside of Minsur's control, that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements.

Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which such statement is made, and, except as required by law, Minsur does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. New factors emerge from time to time and it is not possible for management to predict all such factors. No assurance can be given that the transactions described in this press release will be consummated or as to the ultimate terms of any such transactions.

Contacts:Minsur S.A., Jr. Bernini 149, 501-ASan Borja  LimaPeru+(511) 215-8330

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/minsur-announces-final-results-of-its-offer-to-purchase-certain-outstanding-senior-notes-301325022.html

SOURCE Minsur S.A.
Airman 1st Class Mayra Mendez, and Tech. Sgt. Keonda Maxwell, 380th Expeditionary Force Support Squadron, pose together after a Teal Team 6 induction ceremony at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, June 18, 2021. (Wolfram M. Stumpf/U.S. Air Force)

Dozens of soldiers and airmen have signed on to help snuff out hostile work environments under Al Dhafra Air Bases TEAL Team 6 initiative, part of a broader Pentagon push for cultural change.

The 380th Air Expeditionary Wing at the base in the United Arab Emirates recently swore in 29 volunteers, charging them with a special mission of improving unit culture by modeling good behavior and quashing inappropriate conduct, the wing said in a statement last month.

The team name is a play on both the similar sounding Navy special operations unit and the color of ribbons representing the militarys sexual assault prevention and response programs. And it's an acronym: TEAL stands for together, enhancing, advocating and leading, while the six represents values of courage, awareness, respect, empathy, responsibility and support.

The peer intervention program is one of several grassroots efforts launched within U.S. Air Forces Central, officials said, as the military continues to grapple with what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin described last month as the scourge of sexual assault and sexual harassment.

An independent commission report on sexual assault in the military is slated to be published Friday. But Austin said in June he'd reviewed its findings, which call for changes to how the services prosecute sex crimes and related offenses, as well as the militarys prevention efforts, victim support services and culture.

TEAL Team 6 came about after AFCENT commander Lt. Gen. Greg Guillot told unit leaders earlier this year to develop at least five new initiatives to address sexual assault and harassment. The directive was inspired by the Air Force chief of staffs charge to accelerate change or lose, spokesman Lt. Col. Phillip Ventura said.

Under another initiative, a pocket guide was created to aid supervisors and commanders in the deployed environment. Guillot also hosts monthly meetings to keep leaders focused on the issue.

Air Force Capt. Emma Wahlig, 380th Air Expeditionary Wing sexual assault response coordinator, gives directions to the Teal Team 6 volunteers before their induction ceremony, at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, June 18, 2021. (Wolfram M. Stumpf/U.S. Air Force) Air Force Brig. Gen. Andrew Clark, 380th Air Expeditionary Wing commander, gives a statement during the Teal Team 6 induction ceremony at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, June 18, 2021. (Wolfram M. Stumpf/U.S. Air Force) Air Force Brig. Gen. Andrew Clark, 380th Air Expeditionary Wing commander, administers an oath to the Teal Team 6 volunteer members during the sexual assault prevention and response induction ceremony at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, June 18, 2021. (Wolfram M. Stumpf/U.S. Air Force)

From day one, I charge commanders and senior civilian and enlisted leaders to demand a culture of dignity and respect, Guillot said in an emailed statement.

Treating each other poorly degrades combat capability, Al Dhafras wing commander Brig. Gen. Andrew Clark told new TEAL Team 6 members at a June 18 induction ceremony. But traditional models of computer-based training and mandatory briefings werent cutting it because they dont address the culture airmen create, he said.

Unlike the Navys elite SEALs, who tend to operate in literal and figurative darkness, TEAL Team 6 members are expected to bring the issues theyre battling into the light.

Call people out  talk to supervisors, Clark said. Youre going to make this visible, and then youre going to take care of those airmen that it affects.

The volunteers have been trained to address inappropriate behavior and foster a healthier climate, Capt. Emma Wahlig, the wings sexual assault prevention and response coordinator, said in an email.

We go through normal ways of addressing and policing inappropriate behaviors so as not to outcast the member, she said.

Theyre also familiarized with the bases helping agencies that formally handle sexual assault and harassment, equal opportunity and mental and spiritual health, so they can help peers seek those services.

We know it is sometimes hard for service members to just walk into a helping agency and ask for help, said 1st Lt. Laura Schaefer in a January statement about a similar effort at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
Staff Sgt. Travis Chadwick, 187th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, tests a passenger at Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Nov. 9, 2020. Beginning July 15, 2021, onsite COVID-19 testing services will be discontinued for Patriot Express flights out of BWI and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Wash. (Brittany Chase/U.S. Air Force)

RAF MILDENHALL, England  Onsite COVID-19 testing services will be discontinued from July 15 for Patriot Express flights out of Baltimore/Washington and Seattle-Tacoma international airports, the Air Mobility Command said.

The Patriot Express, also called the Rotator or Cat B, is the Pentagons charter flight system used by service members and their families for official international travel. Thousands of people annually use the flights to arrive at their new overseas assignments or return to the United States.

Passengers traveling through U.S. airports must still obtain and present proof of their negative COVID-19 test, vaccination, waiver or recovery before travel, as required by their international destination, according to U.S. military guidance.

The Defense Department began rapid, onsite COVID-19 testing last fall amid a surge in cases. Since November, Air Force medical staff deployed to airports administered over 22,000 rapid tests.

Thank you to all the Airmen who worked diligently for the last seven months conducting testing at our busy Patriot Express terminals, AMC commander Gen. Jaqueline Van Ovost said in a statement Thursday. These efforts decreased confusion amid rapidly changing COVID-19 travel requirements and ensured DoD families and international partners were kept safe.

Air Force Staff Sgt. Travis Chadwick, left, and Tech. Sgt. Brooklynn Covington run COVID-19 tests at Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Nov. 9, 2020. (Brittany A. Chase/U.S. Air Force)

Support services, such as transportation, lodging and food, will no longer be offered by AMC to Patriot Express passengers who test positive for COVID-19, who have come in close contact with a coronavirus patient or who are suspected of being infected, the command said Thursday.

The Defense Department decided to end the airport testing based on a few factors, including widely available testing and vaccines, the statement said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still requires all passengers traveling into, within, or out of the United States and U.S. territories to wear a mask. Passengers will also continue to be screened for symptoms before flying, the command said.

alvarez.kyle@stripes.com

Twitter: @Kal2931
Col. Chris Robinson, 375th Air Mobility Wing commander, renders his first salute to members of Team Scott and the Showcase Wing after assuming command of the 375th AMW on Scott Air Force Base, Ill., July 1, 2021. (Jordan Castelan/U.S. Air Force)

(Tribune News Service) Col. Chris Robinson needs no introduction at Scott Air Force Base.

He previously served in four different posts on Scott since 2014, and now embarks on his biggest role yet  Commander of the 375th Air Mobility Wing.

Robinson assumed command of the 375th AMW from Col. Scot Heathman during a change of command ceremony Thursday. Heathman had served as commander since 2019.

This opportunity is an incredible honor, Robinson said. My family and I are thrilled to be back on Scott Air Force Base. This is an amazing community that my family and I are coming back to. Im excited about the opportunity. We are very lucky to be here.

Robinson returns to SAFB from Joint Base Charleston, S.C., where he served as vice commander of the 437th Airlift Wing from July 2019 to June 2021.

Previously, he held the following posts on SAFB:

June 2014: Chief, Long Range Planning Branch, Air Mobility Command.

April 2015: Executive officer to the vice commander, Air Mobility Command.

June 2017-March 2018: Deputy chief, Intermodal Programs Division, U.S. Transportation Command.

March 2018-July 2019: Chief, Commanders Action Group, U.S. Transportation Command.

As the 375th AW commander  often referred to as the mayor of Scott Air Force Base  Robinson will oversee more than 13,000 service members and civilians and work directly with the local community and civic leaders.

To our community leaders, Ive lived a lot of places, and youd never know it from my accent, but this is where we call home, Robinson said. This local community is the most supportive Ive seen anywhere. This base is very fortunate to have such close ties to such an amazing community.

Major Gen. Kenneth T. Bibb, Jr., 18th Air Force commander, oversaw the ceremony and praised both Heathman and Robinson.

What a wonderful day to celebrate this wing and two tremendous leaders, Bibb said. Scott, you have a lot to be proud of. Thank you for your leadership. Chris, its your turn to take this team to new heights. Youre the the right leader at the right time. And, Scott, you have this wing set up for future success.

Scott and Chris, I know how proud your parents must be of you.

Heathman, meanwhile, wont travel far for his new post. He will serve under Bibb as vice commander of the 18th Air Force, also on Scott AFB.

I truly look forward to serving with you and the entire 18th Air Force wing, Heathman said to Bibb.

Heathman will miss commanding the 375th AMW, but is excited for Robinson.

I stand here today in awe of you, Heathman said of the 375th AMW. Youve made me so proud to come to work each day and fight for you and your families. Thank you Showcase Airmen, I will always be in your corner. Chris, I am so excited for you. Im in your corner, my friend, cheering you on.

Robinson, meanwhile, noted Heathmans success running the 375th AMW.

Scott, I know this is a bittersweet day for you, Robinson said. Anybody who gets to talk to you for just a few minutes knows how much you care about our Airmen. This wing is set up for success for years to come because of Scot Heathman. And Im very very lucky to be following such a great leader.

In summation, Robinson concluded, You are the Showcase Wing for a reason. Im proud to serve you.

(c)2021 the Belleville News-Democrat (Belleville, Ill.)

Visit the Belleville News-Democrat (Belleville, Ill.) at www.bnd.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Sgt. Daniel Perry is accused of fatally shooting Garrett Foster, an Air Force veteran, during a protest in downtown Austin last summer. (U.S. Army)

AUSTIN (Tribune News Service)  A Texas grand jury has indicted a Fort Hood Army sergeant on a murder, deadly conduct and aggravated assault charge in the 2020 shooting death of an Austin protestor, according to his attorney and jail records.

The slaying of Garrett Foster  an Air Force veteran remembered by family and friends as a man dedicated to exercising his Second Amendment rights, stamping out racial injustice and caring for his fiancee  brought national attention and deepened debates over issues, such as protestor safety, self defense and the right to openly carry guns.

Sgt. Daniel Perry turned himself into the Travis County Jail at 2:21 and was released about 15 minutes later on $300,000 bail. His attorney has said previously that Perry was defending himself when he shot Foster.

A fixture in Austin's protests over equality and police brutality last year, Foster was marching in a crowd in downtown Austin July 25. The 28-year-old was carrying an assault-style rifle, which is legal under Texas open carry laws.

Perry was working as an Uber driver the night of the shooting and at 9:50 p.m. he honked his horn while on Fourth Street and then turned onto Congress Avenue, into the crowd of marchers, according to police. Foster's fiancee  Whitney Mitchell, a quadruple amputee who uses a wheelchair  was in the crowd near Foster.

Police have said Foster approached Perry's car and Perry drew his own weapon and fired, mortally wounding Foster, before driving away and calling 911.

Police detained Perry but did not arrest him in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

A key issue in the case is whether Foster raised his weapon at Perry. Some witnesses have said that Foster never pointed the gun, keeping it down, but an attorney for Perry has said that police have interviewed several people who corroborated his client's account that Foster pointed the gun at him.

Foster grew up in Plano and had been living in Austin with Mitchell for about two years at the time of his death. The couple had been attending downtown Austin protests against police violence since at least late May, and Foster often had his rifle with him, according to protesters and Foster's family.

Legal experts previously interviewed by the Statesman had said that criminal charges in the case could be unlikely because of state laws giving people wide leeway to protect themselves in the face of perceived danger.

2021 The Austin-American Statesman.

Visit statesman.com.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Staff work at the Cumberland County Animal Shelter in Fayetteville, N.C. in this undated photo from social media. (Facebook)

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (Tribune News Service)  Residents looking to adopt a pet may find their new addition can join the family sooner thanks to a partnership between Cumberland County and Fort Bragg.

Soldiers in the First Year Graduate Veterinary Education program are helping spay and neuter dogs and cats at the shelter through a partnership program that began about six months ago.

Previously, Dr. April Kelly, a veterinarian for the Cumberland County Animal Shelter, averaged about five to six surgeries a day by herself.

Now, around 20 procedures are completed on the days the soldiers come in to help, Kelly said.

That means animals are able to be adopted sooner and space is freed up for new animals coming in, Kelly said. She said that on any given day between 75 to 100 animals are up for adoption.

The ideal situation is spay and neuter them before they get adopted, Kelly said. That way, theres no lag time, because it sucks for someone to come and say, This is my animal, and then we say, Oh wait, you cant take it home because its not fixed. 

Recovery time from the procedures takes from 10 to 14 days, she said.

Fort Braggs First Year Graduate Veterinary Education program has been around since about 2011, and Fort Bragg is one of seven sites in the Army for the program, said Lt. Col. Jake Barnoski, a clinical instructor for the program.

It falls under the Fort Bragg Public Health Activity.

Barnoski described it as similar to a graduate-level internship with most soldiers arriving straight from veterinary school.

Prior to this year, soldiers in the program would work on post helping treat pets brought in to the post veterinary clinic by service members and military dependents, or occasionally check on the military working dogs.

At the beginning of the year, Barnoski received an email from Kelly asking if the soldiers wanted to help. Barnoski thought the program would be good experience for the soldiers.

The shelter here has been a huge blessing for us, because surgery is like any other skill, and you just get better with repetition, and so we can get a lot of repetition here in a day and also be helping them at the same time, he said.

With five soldiers currently in the program that will last about a year, will each complete about four to five surgeries each day theyre at the Cumberland County Animal Shelter, Barnoski said.

Theyre required to have about 25 completed during the year-long program.

When they leave here and they go to their next job, theyre going to be expected to run the clinic, Barnoski said.

Capt. Miriam Firth, who was in ROTC during undergrad school, commissioned in 2016 and was granted an education delay by the Army Reserves to attend veterinarian school.

She arrived at Fort Bragg last year.

Ive always wanted to be a veterinarian since I was 7, Firth said as she worked to spay a dog at the Cumberland County Animal Shelter on Wednesday. I think that was the first year I dressed up at Halloween as a veterinarian.

Also part of the program is Capt. Claire Squires.

With a masters degree in natural resources ecology, Squires said she worked at a veterinarian office at night when going through a forest fire management program

At some point, I thought that maybe I should make that my full-time gig instead of my side gig, Squires said.

With a commitment to the Army after receiving a scholarship for vet school, she commissioned in 2017 and arrived at Fort Bragg in December.

Squires said shes learned different First Year Graduate Veterinary Education program sites have unique aspects to their programs.

Like here, we have Special Forces and a big population of civil affairs, so thats pretty unique for us to be at Fort Bragg and be able to interact with those veterinarians and figure out what they do and work with them and their dogs, Squires said while working to spay a cat Wednesday at the Cumberland County Animal Shelter. I think this shelter medicine program here  I dont know if any of the other sites are doing this.

Helping Firth and Squires during procedures on Wednesday were veterinary technicians Rebecca Hamer and Carly Roche, who are Department of Army civilians.

Hamer said their role is to help prep for the procedures and monitor the animals heart rates during procedures.

Roche has been a technician for the program since its inception. She said that while shes tried her hand at other fields, shes always loved working with animals.

I like to go to work every day because its something I love and doesnt feel like work, she said.

Roche, an Army reservist, was working for a contract working dog company in 2011 when she was asked if shed be interested in the Army program.

I feel like weve grown so much and weve done a better job at preparing the soldiers for other duty sites just by adding some things, Roche said. Like this year for sure, I think this is awesome for them to have surgery rotations at the shelter.

By the end of July, Firth and Squires will complete the program and are headed to Florida and Colorado for their next assignments.

Then a new set of interns will arrive to help at the shelter.

Barnoski said other Fort Bragg units such as the 248th Medical Detachment Veterinary Service Support and civil affairs units are also sending their officers and technicians to the shelter for training.

In a news release from the county that announced the partnership, Animal Services Director Elaine Smith said the help is appreciated.

They greatly expand our capacity to provide quality care for these animals, Smith said. They also help us get animals ready for adoption much more quickly, so they dont have to spend extra days here at the shelter. Its also great to see the extra experience these veterinarians get so they can keep their surgical skills at the highest level.

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Current and former members of 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division gather at Fort Drum, N.Y., in October 2018 to commemorate the participation of the 10th Mountain Division in the Battle of Mogadishu. The Army announced on Friday, July 2, 2021, that 60 soldiers who fought in the battle will receive upgraded awards. (Matthew Pargett/U.S. Army)

Sixty American soldiers who fought in the infamous Battle of Mogadishu will receive upgraded awards later this year for their valorous efforts 28 years ago in the brutal running battle through the streets of Somalias capital, the Army announced.

Army Special Operations Command officials will award 58 Silver Stars and two Distinguished Flying Crosses to soldiers who fought in that hourslong battle. The decision to upgrade the medals follows a review of awards ordered in 2020 by former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, service officials said Friday. The Oct. 3, 1993, battle was immortalized in Mark Bowdens best-selling 1999 book Black Hawk Down and its 2001 adaptation to film by director Ridley Scott.

The recipients of the awards will receive their upgraded medals in ceremonies hosted by the units that they were assigned to at the time of the battle, said Bonita Riddley, a USASOC spokeswoman. Riddley declined to provide the names of the soldiers whose awards will be upgraded or the units in which they served.

We are not releasing any specifics as there are still many particulars to be worked through as well, she said Friday.

The battle broke out as American special operators  primarily members of the Armys elite 75th Ranger Regiment and 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, or Delta Force  set out to capture two top lieutenants of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who was responsible for attacks on U.N. peacekeeping troops working to end civil war in Somalia. After the special operators, dubbed Task Force Ranger, nabbed Aidids aides, militants attacked the troops and shot down two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades.

Eighteen American troops died in the ensuing 18-hour battle, including three of the four pilots in the downed Black Hawk. The fourth pilot was captured and later released. Two Delta Force operators  Master Sgt. Gary Gordon and Sgt. 1st Class Randy Shughart  were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions to secure the site of one of the Black Hawk crashes to recover survivors.

Both operators died in the battle.

In all, 73 U.S. troops were injured in the fight, according to the Army. The botched mission left a long-lasting mark on American foreign policy after television news broadcast images of an American soldiers body dragged through Mogadishus streets as locals cheered.

The defense secretary at the time, Les Aspin, would resign his post in wake of the battle. Ultimately, former President Bill Clinton elected to end the mission to capture Aidid, called Operation Gothic Serpent, and he removed all U.S. forces from Somalia by March 1994. U.S. troops would not return to the country until 2007.

The Silver Star is the third-highest award for battlefield heroics. The Distinguished Flying Cross recognizes heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight.

Riddley did not say Friday when the Army expects to conduct the ceremonies to award the upgraded medals.
Gen. Paul LaCamera speaks after taking the reins of U.S. Forces Korea from Gen. Robert Abrams at Camp Humphreys, South Korea, Friday, July 2, 2021. (U.S. Forces Korea)

CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea  Gen. Paul LaCamera, described by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as a quiet warrior who drives results, has taken command of U.S. Forces Korea, United Nations Command and Combined Forces Command.

Our alliance  forged in blood in the crucible of the Korean War  has been the bedrock of peace and stability on the Korean peninsula for more than 70 years, LaCamera said during a Friday ceremony at Barker Field that included video remarks from Austin and flyovers by A-10 Warthogs and F-16 Fighting Falcons.

I look forward to us getting together in the true spirit of one team, to strengthen our alliance and to propel it to even great heights, LaCamera, who previously commanded U.S. Army Pacific, told an audience that included the head of Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. John Aquilino, and South Korean defense minister Suh Wook.

Gen. Robert Abrams led U.S. Forces Korea, United Nations Command and Combined Forces Command since November 2018. He relinquished command to Gen. Paul LaCamera on Friday, July 2, 2021. (U.S. Forces Korea)

He replaces Gen. Robert Abrams, who is retiring after a 39-year Army career punctuated by an aggressive kill the virus response to the COVID-19 pandemic. His time with USFK began amid unprecedented  though now stalled  diplomatic efforts aimed at eliminating the North Korean nuclear threat and restoring peace on the divided peninsula.

Austin, in his recorded message, called LaCamera an exceptional leader with more than 36 years of combat and command experience.

If it is humanly possible to take what [Abrams] has accomplished here and improve upon it, Austin said, theres only one officer that I know who can do it. And thats Paul LaCamera.

Buy Photo Gen. Robert Abrams discusses the coronavirus threat during an interview with Stars and Stripes in his office as Camp Humphreys, South Korea, March 27, 2020. (Stars and Stripes)

Challenges ahead

Prior to leading USARPAC, the West Point graduate was at the helm of Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Hes now tasked with keeping approximately 28,500 U.S. service members equipped and trained as North Koreas advancing nuclear development continues to threaten the United States and its allies.

Efforts to eliminate that threat have been on hold since February 2019, when, during a second summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and then-President Donald Trump, the two sides failed to reach an agreement. The U.S. said the North wanted complete sanctions relief in exchange for shutting down its primary nuclear complex, an assertion Pyongyang disputed by announcing it had only asked for partial relief.

Although President Joe Biden has yet to publicize his North Korea policy, he has maintained Trumps hard stance on Beijing. LaCamera, during his May confirmation hearing, echoed the presidents concerns about Chinas rising influence.

I think oversimplification of Chinas role on the peninsula and in the region may get us in trouble, he told lawmakers. I think they play a role in both the North and South. China uses all the elements of national power: diplomatic, information, military, economic.

The new USFK commander added it will be extremely important for him to understand the levers they are pulling.

Because I dont think it is necessarily going to be a military that will have impact on the security situation, he said.

Kill the virus

Abrams  the third member of his immediate family to earn four stars  served as USFKs commander since November 2018. His tenure included numerous challenges, from maintaining readiness during stalled military drills to dealing with the first confirmed coronavirus infection among an active-duty U.S. service member.

USFKs kill the virus campaign has been hailed as a success, and the command now touts the lowest positive case numbers and highest vaccination rates in the Defense Department. As of late June, USFK had vaccinated at least 80% of its personnel.

The commands pandemic response reverberated beyond the peninsula when it drafted a military guide on limiting COVID-19s spread. The guide was later shared with and implemented at bases across the United States.

That did not happen without a lot of sacrifice and commitment, Abrams said during the ceremony Friday. This has been a team effort from day one, and let me tell you that I am extraordinarily proud of this team and what theyve done to protect the force and protect the mission.

Abrams called serving in South Korea the greatest honor and pinnacle of my 39-year military career.

This has been the most amazing place to live and serve our nation, he said.

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(Tribune News Service) The U.S. Coast Guard rescued an 83-year-old man Thursday after a boat collision around 30 miles west of Sanibel Island.

A Coast Guard helicopter from the Clearwater air station transported the man to Tampa General Hospital with a leg injury, according to a news release.

The incident was reported to the Coast Guard around 6:30 p.m. Thursday. Along with the helicopter from Clearwater, a Coast Guard boat from Fort Myers Beach arrived to assist the rescue of the injured man.

The rescued mans boat was inoperable after the collision and was towed back to shore, authorities said. The other was escorted back by the Coast Guard.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission is investigating the incident.

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NEW ORLEANS (Tribune News Service)  A transportation supervisor at the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Reserve support facility in Louisiana was sentenced to 45 months in prison this week after admitting to taking $250,000 in kickbacks in return for funneling $1.9 million in contracts to an Atlanta bus company.

Erik Martin, 49, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery on Dec. 28. He was sentenced Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Wendy Vitter, who also ordered him to pay restitution.

Martin worked at the support facility in Algiers and was in charge of managing transportation for about 100,000 Marine reserves across the country.

In 2016, Martin met Darrel Fitzpatrick, who owned National Charter Express, a firm that served as a bus service broker, according to U.S. Attorney Duane Evans office.

Martin fell on hard times three years later, and Fitzpatrick offered to pay him kickbacks if he would help steer the Marines transportation contracts to the company.

Martin arranged for the Algiers support facility to send 72 payments totaling $1.9 million to Fitzgeralds company, prosecutors said. In exchange, Fitzpatrick wired $110,000 to Martin.

Fitzpatrick later tried to wire a separate payment of $140,000 to Martin, but it didnt go through after the bank raised questions. Both men attempted to convince officials that the money Fitzpatrick sent to Martin was loaned. But authorities determined the payments were kickbacks and filed bribery charges against both men.

The case against Fitzpatrick is still pending. However, the charges filed against him on Dec. 21 were contained in a bill of information, which is generally a sign that a defendant intends to plead guilty.

In a statement Thursday, Thomas Cannizzo of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service  which probes misconduct in the Marines  said Martin damaged the integrity of the governments bidding process and wasted taxpayer money.

This sentencing should serve as a warning that perpetrators who seek to defraud the Department of the Navy will always be exposed, Cannizzos statement said.

___

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Buy Photo People wear coronavirus masks last month while visiting the Hasedera Buddhist temple in Kamakura, Japan. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)

CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa  Coronavirus infections remained high in the Japanese capital on Friday as U.S. military bases across the country announced seven new patients.

Tokyo reported another 660 cases and two deaths on Friday, according to public broadcaster NHK, which cited metropolitan government data. Thats 13 less than the day before but 98 more than the same day last week.

Osaka prefecture, the nations second-largest metro area, reported 123 new infections and three deaths, NHK said. Okinawa prefecture, home to most U.S. troops in Japan, had another 61 new infections on Friday, 21 less than a week ago, according to NHK. There were four deaths.

Japan reported 1,763 new cases as of 6:30 p.m., 121 more than the same day last week, according to NHK and the World Health Organization. There were 22 deaths nationwide.

The government has counted approximately 800,000 COVID-19 cases during the pandemic and 14,500 deaths, the WHO said.

Kadena Air Base on Okinawa has reported four infections since case numbers were last announced on Wednesday.

One of the new patients self-isolated after developing COVID-19 symptoms, according to a base Facebook post from Thursday evening. The others are a recent arrival to Japan who tested positive before leaving quarantine; a person who had close contact with an infected individual; and someone whose infection was discovered at an off-base clinic.

Yokosuka Naval Base, 35 miles south of central Tokyo, has had one base employee test positive sometime since Tuesday, according to a Navy news release Friday. The unimmunized worker was tested after developing COVID-19 symptoms.

At Yokota Air Base, home of U.S. Forces Japan in western Tokyo, has had one person test positive sometime since June 25, the 374th Airlift Wing announced Friday afternoon. The patient, a recent arrival to Japan, came up positive while in quarantine.

Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in western Japan announced its first COVID-19 infection since June 14 in a Facebook post on Friday morning. The patient tested positive within the last 24 hours and was immediately placed in quarantine, the post said.

There were no coronavirus infections reported by commands on the Korean peninsula on Friday.

South Korea added 826 new cases at midnight Thursday and three deaths, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agencys Central Disease Control Headquarters.

The government has counted over 155,000 COVID-19 cases during the pandemic and 2,000 deaths, the WHO said.
The Chinese destroyer Haikou sails into the port of Djibouti in 2017 for a visit. The base China has built in the African country is now capable of hosting aircraft carriers, U.S. Africa Command's top leader has said. ( Liu Xin/ Chinese defense ministry)

STUTTGART, Germany  Chinas naval base in the East African nation of Djibouti is now large enough to host aircraft carriers, marking the latest sign that Beijing is looking to expand military efforts in the region, U.S. Africa Commands top leader said.

China, which opened its Djibouti base in 2017, has steadily grown its footprint and operates just seven miles from Camp Lemmonier, the U.S. militarys operational hub in the Horn of Africa.

Their first overseas military base, their only one, is in Africa, and they have just expanded that by adding a significant pier that can support even their aircraft carriers in the future, AFRICOMs Gen. Stephen Townsend said Tuesday. Around the continent they are looking for other basing opportunities.

Djibouti, a small but strategically important country that sits at the southern end of the Red Sea, has long hosted various foreign militaries. France, Italy and Japan are among the countries with small outposts there.

But Chinas buildup is on a much larger scale, Townsend said. The base is turning into a platform to project power across the continent and its waters, Townsend said in a posture statement submitted Tuesday to the House Armed Services Committee.

China has two aircraft carriers in service  the Liaoning, a heavily modified, unfinished ex-Russian carrier, and the Shandong, a modernized version of the Liaoning. A third carrier could be ready by 2024 and is expected to be the first equipped with catapults that would allow it to launch heavier planes, a Congressional Research Service report said in March.

Beijing wants additional bases to tie their commercial seaport investments in East, West and Southern Africa closely with involvement by Chinese military forces in order to further their geo-strategic interests, Townsend wrote.

China also has stepped up military training efforts and arms sales in Africa, but those efforts are of less concern and sometimes end up working out OK for us because of the poor quality of Beijings gear and military advice, Townsend said.

Still, China has emerged as the dominant outside economic force in Africa. Its investments in Africa are outpacing those of the U.S. and its allies, as they seek resources and markets to feed economic growth in China and leverage economic tools to increase their global reach and influence, Townsend said.

China also uses its economic heft to offer unfavorable loans to African countries, which function as debt traps that help secure Beijings access to key infrastructure, Townsend said.

They are literally everywhere on the continent, Townsend said.

vandiver.john@stripes.com Twitter: @john_vandiver

Migrated
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, May 11, 2021. (Gregory Bull/AP)

POMONA, Calif.  Biden administration officials and lawmakers on Friday toured an emergency shelter that the government opened to house children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone, with the head of the agency caring for migrant kids calling the California facility a model among its large-scale sites, some of which have plagued by complaints.

"It is not easy to stand something up like this quickly, and do it right, but I think you can see that this is a place where kids can be healthy and safe," Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told reporters outside the shelter, which is housing nearly 1,400 children at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds in the city of Pomona.

Becerra said of the facility: "We consider this a model."

The visit is Becerra's second such tour in a week to one of the temporary facilities set up by the government this spring as tens of thousands of children, mostly fleeing violence in Central America, crossed the border alone. Of the 14 centers that opened, two have been shuttered because they did not meet government standards; others have been closing as more children are released to family in the U.S. or to facilities with higher levels of care.

While the emergency shelters are widely considered an improvement over border holding facilities packed with kids, the Biden administration is facing increasing pressure to address concerns that migrant children have been languishing in the unlicensed sites rather than being quickly reunited with their families in the United States, causing anxiety and panic attacks.

Friday's tour comes days after Becerra, whose agency is in charge of caring for migrant children, visited the government's largest shelter at Fort Bliss Army base near El Paso, Texas, which child welfare advocates say has been particularly problematic.

Advocates say the facilities were meant to be a safe place to house children for a couple of weeks to give the government time to contact and vet their relatives. Those without family in the United States are supposed to be sent to a state-licensed facility.

As of this week, the average stay at the temporary shelters was 37 days, with the network of facilities filled at just over half its capacity, according to Health and Human Services data obtained by the AP.

More than half of the 5,300 children at emergency shelters have close family in the U.S. such as a parent or grandparent. No such contact was identified for a third of the youth at those sites, the data showed.

The Pomona shelter is among the better large-scale facilities, advocates say. It has scaled up in recent weeks from about 500 children to the nearly 1,400 kids housed there Friday, including boys and girls.

Immigration attorney Karina Ramos of Immigrant Defenders Law Center in California visits twice a week, getting escorted with her colleagues to a building where they can meet with the children, who tell them the conditions are better than at the freezing-cold border facilities.

"The number one question is: 'When am I going home?'" she said, which is "obviously understandable."

Ramos said the children spend time learning English, doing art and playing outdoors and generally don't have complaints about the Pomona shelter.

"This is definitely not Fort Bliss," Ramos said. "Children are generally active, and they're happy, and they come talk to us."

In transcripts of interviews done by attorneys from March to early June and filed in federal court in Los Angeles, more than a dozen migrant children described their desperation to get out of the emergency facilities. In one account, a teenage girl said she had been at Fort Bliss for nearly 60 days and could hardly sleep because the lights were always on and she resorted to eating only popsicles and juice because the food was foul.

Becerra said conditions have improved in recent weeks with additional spiritual, recreational, educational and mental health services. The Fort Bliss shelter also was being reconfigured to a more child-friendly pod system with single cots instead of doubles. More case workers have been added, speeding up the process to reunify families.

Because of the progress, Becerra said the number of children his agency is caring for has dropped from a high of more than 22,000 to just over 14,400, with more than half at licensed shelters. Health and Human Services said it will close four emergency facilities this summer.

Pomona and Fort Bliss are among the sites that will remain open as unaccompanied children continue to cross the border.

The Trump administration imposed a public health order during the coronavirus pandemic to turn back adults seeking asylum. The Biden administration kept the rule in place but allowed minors crossing alone to remain in the U.S. to pursue asylum.

___

Watson reported from San Diego.
U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. Samual Paparo, right, speaks with French Air Force Lt. Gen. Vincent Cousin, commander of air defense and air operations, during a recent visit to the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii. (Jay Pugh/U.S. Navy)

FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii  Three Rafale fighter jets and 150 airmen with the French Air Force are flying training missions in Hawaii with American F-22 Raptors through Fourth of July weekend.

This is the first time Dassault Rafales, which are the French air and space forces primary fighter, have flown in Hawaii. The deployment is part of Frances effort to reaffirm its role as a stabilizing force in the Pacific.

Frances air force and navy began using Rafales in 2001. The twin-engine jets are highly versatile, dubbed as omnirole fighters because in a single sortie they can be used for multiple missions, such as aerial reconnaissance, ground support, in-depth strikes and anti-ship strikes.

On Wednesday morning, six F-22 Raptors flew on a training mission with the French fighters, 1st Lt. Amber Kelly-Herard, spokeswoman for the 15th Wing at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, said in a statement. The F-22s are part of the 199th Fighter Wing under the Hawaii Air National Guard.

The French Air Force contingent, which arrived Sunday and will fly to the U.S. mainland Monday, includes two A400M transport planes and an Airbus A330 aerial refueling tanker.

A French Air Force Rafale fighter jet taxis at Andravida Air Base, Greece, April 7, 2021. (Thomas Keisler IV/U.S. Air Force)

The commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, Adm. Samuel Paparo, met Monday with two top French military officials visiting Hawaii to discuss the French militarys posture in the region, according to a U.S. Navy news release.

Paparo talked with Lt. Gen. Vincent Cousin, commander of air defense and air operations for the French Air Force, and French Navy Rear Adm. Jean-Mathieu Rey, the joint commander of French armed forces in the region.

The French military excursion to the Pacific dovetails with the upcoming deployment of Great Britains aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth and Carrier Strike Group 21 to the Pacific, a patrol that is expected to include transiting through the disputed South China Sea.

The U.S. welcomed the news that the carrier of its longtime ally will join in the Pentagons effort to maintain a free-and-open Indo-Pacific by sailing though international waters that China has with ever greater stridence claimed as its own.

Similarly, the French deployment allows us to train with our allies for the newest engagement scenarios and contributes to strengthening our partnerships in the Pacific region to face the operational and strategic challenges that we will have to face together in the coming decades, the French Air and Space Force said in a news release provided to local media this week.

The Hawaii stop is the second leg of a projection of power mission from [France] to the Pacific, the news release said.

The first phase was to deploy, within a 48-hour timeframe, airmen and aircraft to French Polynesia in the South Pacific. During those two days and the 24 hours following it, the air group conducted a raid that simulated forced entry into disputed airspace.

The missions seven-day first phase was intended to specifically demonstrate the French Air and Space Forces capacity to protect its citizens and territories, even from far away, by reaching Polynesia in 48 hours and conducting successive high-intensity air missions on site, the release said.

The swift, long distance deployment to the Pacific reaffirms our nations attachment to the concept of air freedom navigation and to the respect of international air law and its position of stabilizing power, the release said.

After Hawaii, the French air group flies to Langley Air Force Base, Va., where it will take part in a July 9 commemoration of the 240th anniversary of the battle of Yorktown. American and French troops fought side by side in defeating the British in this last, decisive battle of the American Revolution.

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A U.S. Coast Guard cutter patrols the area of debris from a 737 cargo plane that crashed off Oahu, Friday, July 2, 2021, near Honolulu. The plane made an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii early Friday and both people on board were rescued. The pilots of the Transair Flight 810 reported engine trouble and were attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to land the Boeing 737 in the water, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. (Craig T. Kojima, The Honolulu Star-Advertiser/AP)

HONOLULU  Two pilots told air traffic controllers that their engine had cut out and they needed help moments before crashing their cargo plane into the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii on Friday.

It doesnt look good out here, one of the pilots said before the Boeing 737 broke apart as it entered the water.

Both pilots, the only people aboard, were seriously injured but survived the crash. An hour later, rescuers found the two clinging to packages and parts of the plane in about 150 feet of water several miles off Oahu, authorities said.

One was on the tail and the other clinging to packages, Coast Guard Lt. Commander Karin Evelyn wrote in an email to The Associated Press. As an agency helicopter got close, the airplane began to sink putting the individual on the tail in the water. The crews hoisted them safely on the aircraft. The rescue swimmer then assisted the other individual.

The pilots of Transair Flight 810 heading from Honolulu to Maui reported engine trouble and were trying to return to Honolulu, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

Weve lost No. 1 engine, and were coming straight to the airport, one of the pilots said in air traffic control communications. Were going to need the fire department. Theres a chance were going to lose the other engine, too, its running very hot. Were very low on speed.

The pilot said they werent carrying hazardous materials and had two hours worth of fuel. They asked the tower to advise the Coast Guard, then asked if there was a closer airport than Honolulu.

After a stretch of silence, the controller asks if the pilot is still there. There was no response.

Looks like they went down in the water, the tower says.

Later, a rescuer aboard a Coast Guard helicopter sent to search for the pilots tells air traffic control: We do have an aircraft in the water ... were currently overhead (the) debris field.

Minutes later: We have zero, two souls in sight in the water.

The tower responded, OK, so you have both guys, both souls in sight?

Both souls in sight, yes, sir, the rescuers responded.

The pilots, whose identities were not immediately released, were taken to a hospital. Officials at Queens Medical Center said a 58-year-old was in critical condition, Hawaii News Now reported. The other pilot, a 50-year-old, was in serious condition with a head injury and multiple lacerations, the TV station reported.

The Coast Guard reported flying over the crash site off Oahu to evaluate for pollution after the sun came up in the morning. Debris and fuel remained in the water.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. The NTSB said in a tweet that it will send a team of 10 investigators.

The plane is a 46-year-old Boeing 737-200, a much earlier version of the 737 than the Max, and one that U.S. airlines no longer use for passenger flights. There are fewer than 60 737-200s still flying worldwide, according to aviation-data researcher Cirium.

The Boeing 737 first flew in the late 1960s and is the most popular airline plane still in production. Boeing has delivered more than 10,500 of them and has unfilled orders for about 4,000 more, almost all of those for the latest version of the plane, the 737 Max.

Over the years, about 200 737s have been destroyed in crashes and several hundred others have been involved in less serious accidents and incidents, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.

For a jet that has been in production for so long and is being used so extensively, 203 hull-loss accidents can be considered a very good safety record, said Harro Ranter, who runs the database.

He said the planes accident rate improved dramatically from the first models to more recent ones that preceded the Max.

Boeing said in a statement: We are aware of the reports out of Honolulu, Hawaii and are closely monitoring the situation. We are in contact with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and are working to gather more information.

There have been some water landings over the years in which people survived, the most famous being the 2009 crash of a US Airways flight in New Yorks Hudson River where all 155 people on board survived.

All four people on board survived a cargo plane crash into water short of a runway in Gabon in 2011.

In other cases, some passengers and crew survived but some died, including a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines plane that ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean in 1996, a Tunisian airliner that went down off the coast of Sicily in 2005, and an Indonesian airliner that landed in a river during a thunderstorm in 2002.

___

Koenig reported from Dallas. Monroe reported from Phoenix.
Army Spc. Eyza Carrasco, left, with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, administers a COVID-19 vaccination at Rose Barracks in Vilseck, Germany, in May 2021. Nearly three-quarters of the U.S. Army community in Europe and Africa are fully vaccinated and 77% of 16- and 17-year-old military children overseas have been inoculated against the coronavirus, health officials say. (Markus Rauchenberger/U.S. Army)

The overseas U.S. military population, including teens and tweens, is getting vaccinated against the coronavirus at a faster rate than the U.S. population in general, data released by military health officials shows.

To date, more than 73% of our U.S. Army Europe and Africa military community is fully vaccinated, Brig. Gen. Mark Thompson, who heads Regional Health Command Europe, said in a statement Friday.

Anyone age 12 and over is eligible for the vaccine, said Gino Mattorano, a spokesman for the health command.

The high vaccination rate puts the Army community in Europe and Africa ahead of a goal set by President Joe Biden for 70% of American adults to be at least partly vaccinated by July 4.

It is also around 27 points greater than the 46.7% of the eligible U.S. population that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said had been fully vaccinated against the virus as of the end of last month.

The vaccination rate among children in the overseas military community was also high, with 77.4% percent of 16- to 17-year-olds vaccinated, and 62.3% of 12- to 15-year-olds, acting assistant defense secretary for health, Dr. Terry Adirim, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday.

Adirim, a pediatrician, was unable to provide a comparable percentage for the children over 12 of military families in the U.S. who have been vaccinated, noting that they can get their shots off base at pharmacies and clinics.

I dont think we really know why the overseas numbers are as high as they are, Adirim said. Im just glad that they are.

Hundreds of families line up for the COVID-19 vaccine at Patch Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany, May 22, 2021. Nearly three-quarters of the U.S. Army community in Europe and Africa are fully vaccinated and 77% of 16- and 17-year-old military children overseas have been inoculated against the coronavirus, health officials say. (Marcus Fichtl/U.S. Army) Lauren Tierney, 16, receives the COVID-19 vaccine at Patch Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany, May 22, 2021. Nearly three-quarters of the U.S. Army community in Europe and Africa are fully vaccinated and 77% of 16- and 17-year-old military children overseas have been inoculated against the coronavirus, health officials say. (Marcus Fichtl/U.S. Army)

In a U.S. poll published by the Kaiser Family Foundation in May  the month the Food and Drug Administration expanded the emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to include children ages 12 to 15  only four in 10 parents of children aged between 12 and 17 said their child had already had at least one dose of the vaccine or would be vaccinated very soon.

Out of nearly 28.5 million coronavirus cases in the U.S. since March last year, more than 4.03 million, or 14%, were in children, the American Academy of Pediatrics said in June. The FDA lowered the minimum age for the Pfizer vaccine from 18 to 16 in December.

Young children are less likely to become infected with the virus and less likely to become seriously ill if they are, and many parents have spoken out against having their children inoculated against the coronavirus with a vaccine that does not have full FDA approval.

But a military health professional, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, said, Some do become seriously ill, require hospitalization and some children have died. The vaccines have been shown to be very effective in preteens and teens, and very safe.

Vaccinating children helped prevent them from getting seriously ill from the disease and spreading the virus to others, the official said. Moreover, vaccinating children will allow them to get back to normal and not have to wear masks and socially distance under most circumstances.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov attends a briefing in Moscow, Russia, on Dec. 17, 2020. Peskov on Friday, July 2, 2021, categorically rejected U.N. claims that Russian military instructors were involved in killing civilians and looting in the Central African Republic.. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)

MOSCOW  The Russian Foreign Ministry on Friday reaffirmed a strong denial of U.N. experts' claims that Russian military instructors were involved in killing civilians and looting in the Central African Republic.

In a written reply to the AP's request for comment, the ministry rejected the accusations as unfounded and argued that they were aimed to "discredit the Russian efforts to stabilize the situation in CAR and help restore peace."

A panel of U.N. experts monitoring sanctions on the conflict-torn African nation said in a 40-page report obtained Monday by The Associated Press that it collected testimonies from a large number of local officials, government military and internal security forces, and community-level sources in multiple locations in the country. It said they pointed to "excessive use of force, indiscriminate killings, the occupation of schools and looting on a large scale" by Russian military instructors.

The panel said many of the officials and other sources reported that Russian instructors "often led rather than followed" Central African Republic troops as they advanced on different towns and villages in a counter-offensive against rebels linked to former President Francois Bozize. Bozize tried to prevent elections in December and then attempted to seize power from President Faustin Archange Touadera.

Asked about the report earlier this week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov categorically rejected the accusations as "yet another lie."

"Russian military advisers couldn't take part and didn't take part in any killings or lootings," Peskov said in a conference call with reporters.

In its written comment sent to the AP Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry reaffirmed that the Russian military instructors had been in the country at the request of the country's legitimate government and in accordance with the U.N. rules.

It added that the instructors' task is to train the CAR's armed forces and "provide consultative and humanitarian assistance to the country's security forces." It said their mission has helped the CAR's army to defeat the militants, reduce CAR military losses and "take more effective measures to protect civilians."

The ministry noted that "if the insinuations about the instructors' 'abuses' had had any real grounds and local residents actively voiced protest, CAR's legitimate authorities would hardly have insisted on Russian specialists' further presence."

The mineral-rich Central African Republic has faced deadly inter-religious and inter-communal fighting since 2013. A peace deal between the government and 14 rebel groups was signed in February 2019, but violence blamed on Bozize and his allies threatens to nullify the agreement.

The hostilities erupted after the constitutional court rejected Bozize's candidacy to run for president in December and have continued since Touadera won a second term later that month with 53% of the vote.

Last week, the U.S., Britain and France accused Russian personnel in CAR of committing abuses against civilians and obstructing U.N. peacekeeping  accusations that Russia angrily denied.

The Western powers linked the Russian personnel to the notorious Wagner Group, a private security company allegedly tied to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman who has been indicted in the U.S. on charges of meddling in 2016 presidential election and whose companies have reportedly secured lucrative mining contracts in CAR.
In this Dec. 16, 2020, file photo Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, left, talks with Gen. Scott Miller, the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan at Miller's military headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Robert Burns/AP)

WASHINGTON  The U.S. military will remain involved in the Afghanistan war into September, keeping the option of launching airstrikes against the Taliban to defend Afghan forces, U.S. officials said Thursday, even as the final combat troops prepare to leave the country in coming days.

For weeks, officials have said the withdrawal of the main U.S. military force and its equipment from Afghanistan would be largely completed by this weekend, well ahead of the Sept. 11 deadline set by President Joe Biden. Army Gen. Scott Miller, the top U.S. commander there, would then leave, marking a significant turning point in the U.S. mission. But a range of complicating factors means that will not end Americas involvement in the 20-year war.

Officials said when Miller flies out, his combat role, including authority to carry out strikes on the Taliban and to conduct counterterror operations against al-Qaida or other groups, will be taken over by Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, who is based in Florida. Officials said there have been several U.S. airstrikes in support of the Afghans in recent weeks, using warplanes based outside of Afghanistan, and those strikes will continue.

The new U.S. commander inside Afghanistan will be Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, who will head the security mission at the U.S. Embassy. He is already in Kabul, working with Miller on a transition, said the officials, who discussed new details of the withdrawal on condition of anonymity.

Vasely will have 650 U.S. troops in the country, based largely at the embassy to secure the diplomatic mission, a force that will remain indefinitely. In addition, until September, McKenzie will have the authority to keep up to 300 more troops in Afghanistan to help with security, including at the airport, said the officials.

The Pentagon and other U.S. leaders  from the White House to Capitol Hill  have expressed alarm about a recent surge in violence in Afghanistan, amid fears that it will lead to a widespread civil war and the collapse of the Afghan government and its military.

During his final press conference in Kabul earlier this week, Miller painted a grim picture of the security situation. He noted the rapid loss of districts around the country to the Taliban and warned that 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.

The U.S., meanwhile, is also scrambling to develop a plan to get some of the thousands of Afghan interpreters and others who aided the U.S.-led coalition out of the country. While the U.S. military is not expected to play a major role in the evacuation, troops may be needed to ensure security for the departures.

Thus, while the military has hastened its exit, security requires that the September deadline remain the final goal.

We remain on the timeline that the president announced just a few weeks ago, which is to get our troops out of Afghanistan, while having a remaining diplomatic presence on the ground, by September, said White House press secretary Jen Psaki this week.

Officials have repeatedly stressed that security at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul is a critical requirement for keeping any U.S. diplomatic staff in Afghanistan. While Turkey has agreed to continue that mission, agreements with the Afghans and the U.S. have not been finalized.

As part of the agreement with Turkey, the U.S. would keep a C-RAM  or Counter-Rocket, Artillery, Mortar system  at the airport, as well as troops to operate it. The U.S. also plans to leave aircrew for helicopter support at the airport.

It is unclear exactly when Miller will board a plane and depart with his staff and security, but it is expected soon. Once he leaves and the equipment withdrawal is complete, the U.S. will shift its focus to two missions  protecting the diplomats and providing financial and logistical support to the Afghan government from outside the country.

That withdrawal essentially fulfills an agreement made when the Trump administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020. The deal called for the withdrawal of U.S. forces by May 2021, and in exchange, the Taliban vowed to cut ties with al-Qaida and ensure that Afghanistan would not again become a safe haven for militants seeking to attack the U.S. After taking office, Biden moved the withdrawal deadline to Sept. 11.

The U.S. has also made it clear that it will continue to monitor terror groups operating in Afghanistan, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. And the U.S. maintains its authority to strike any militants that pose a threat to the American homeland.

Bagram Airfield, a massive complex north of Kabul that has long been the heart of American military power in Afghanistan, is to be turned over to the Afghans any day now.

NATO agreed in April to pull out its roughly 7,000 non-American forces, and as of this week 19 nations had announced troop withdrawals totaling more then 4,800. Germany and Italy declared their missions in Afghanistan over on Wednesday and Polands last troops have returned home.

____

Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.
Afghan National Army soldiers stand guard at a road checkpoint outside Bagram Airfield, after all US and NATO troops left, on July 2, 2021. (Zakeria Hashimi, AFP via Getty Images/TNS)

(Tribune News Service) The Biden administration asked three Central Asian nations to temporarily house thousands of Afghans who worked with American forces and could be targeted by the Taliban as U.S. and NATO troops withdraw after nearly two decades.

The U.S. has asked Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to take in about 9,000 Afghans who assisted with the American militarys invasion and occupation of the country, according to three people familiar with the request, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.

That effort comes as U.S. forces handed over Bagram Airfield, their biggest facility, late Thursday night in a milestone symbolizing the effective departure of combat forces from Afghanistan after 20 years. The U.S. had said it would have most troops out by Sept. 11, keeping a contingent of about 650 in the country to protect diplomats, but that timetable was accelerated.

All Coalition and American troops departed Bagram Airfield last night, Fawad Aman, a deputy spokesman for Afghanistans defense ministry, said. The base was handed over. ANDSF will protect the base and use it to combat terrorism, he added, using an acronym for the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.

But the handover raises the potential threats facing the many Afghan translators, drivers and other workers and their families who helped sustain the American presence after the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban government following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. The Biden administration pledged to expedite immigration visas for Afghans who worked closely with U.S. forces, but that process is still in flux.

All the visa seekers are surprised by this news, and we are hoping they shift us swiftly as the security is really worsening and those countries are much safer than Afghanistan, Amin Rahimi, an Afghan employee of a U.S. government-funded project, said by phone on Friday.

Having gained strength for years despite the American and NATO presence, Taliban forces now control half of the countrys 400 districts.

A crucial way for the U.S. to aid key Afghan allies would be through the Special Immigrant Visa program, which allows those who have worked for American forces to claim refugee status. Officials have said there are some 18,000 Afghan SIV applicants, with 9,000 or so just starting the process.

State Department spokesman Ned Price declined to say at a briefing Thursday where the applicants might go. He said they and their families will have the option to be relocated to a location outside of Afghanistan before we complete our military drawdown by September to complete the immigration process.

Importantly, these are individuals who are already in the SIV pipeline, Price said. We would undertake any relocation in full compliance with applicable laws and in full coordination with Congress.

Some officials had suggested the idea of sending those Afghans to the U.S. island of Guam in the Pacific, and the islands governor even tweeted that he was in favor of the idea. But that was never seriously considered given officials fear that if the visa applicants went to Guam, it would be impossible to force them to leave if their SIV applications were denied.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov and Tajik Foreign Minister Sirojiddin Muhriddin at the State Department on Thursday. Blinken thanked Kamilov for Uzbekistans continued support for a just and durable peace settlement in Afghanistan, the department said in a statement.

Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in June, Blinken said a backlog of immigration applications is being cleared, and he asked Congress to raise a cap on special immigrant visas for Afghans by 8,000 slots. Theres now a congressionally mandated cap of 26,000 slots under the Special Immigrant Visa program.

The agreement being sought to temporarily base thousands of Afghans in three Central Asian nations would be part of a broader deal to establish further cooperation with those countries. As part of the visit by the Uzbek and Tajik foreign ministers in Washington this week, the U.S. is proposing an accord that would allow it to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations from their territory, one of the people familiar with the request said.

Afghan leaders have warned of an imminent civil war or the collapse of the government once all foreign forces withdraw, despite President Joe Bidens promise to President Ashraf Ghani and Chairman of the Afghanistan National Reconciliation Council, Abdullah Abdullah, that hed continue to provide military and financial assistance worth billions of dollars to Afghan forces.

The truth is the survival, security and unity of Afghanistan is in danger, Abdullah said in remarks broadcast on state-run television Wednesday following a high-level meeting attended by Ghani and other senior political leaders.

2021 Bloomberg L.P.

Visit bloomberg.com.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
WASHINGTON  Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday approved a new command for American forces in Afghanistan to oversee troops who will remain in the country to protect diplomats after the U.S. military drawdown ends next month, chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.

Though the U.S. drawdown was originally scheduled to be completed by Sept. 11, Kirby said Friday that U.S. combat operations on the ground in Afghanistan will be concluded by the end of August. The only U.S. troops remaining in the country will be assigned to support the embassy in Kabul.

The new Kabul-based command will be led by Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, and those troops will help with security requirements at the Hamid Karzai International Airport there. The force will also offer continued advice and assistance to Afghan national defense and security forces and support counterterrorism efforts, Kirby said.

Austin also Friday approved a plan to transfer command authority of the mission in Afghanistan from Army Gen. Scott Miller, the top commander in the country, to Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, who leads U.S. Central Command, Kirby said. That change in command will happen later this month.

(McKenzie) will continue to exercise authority over the conduct of any and all counterterrorism operations needed to protect the homeland from threats emanating out of Afghanistan, and he will lead efforts to develop options for the logistical, financial and technical support to Afghan forces once our drawdown is complete, Kirby said.

He also said the leadership changes represent key milestones in our drawdown process, reflecting a smaller U.S. force presence in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has said while on-the-ground counterterror operations will cease after the drawdown, the U.S. will retain over-the-horizon capabilities, though details have been murky.

The changes follow meetings this week between Austin and the foreign ministers of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan  countries that share southern borders with Afghanistan.

Kirby would not say whether the countries could be candidates for stationing some of those undisclosed over-the-horizon forces. But he did say its safe to assume the Pentagon and State Department are talking to a range of neighboring nations about the possibilities and opportunities that might exist there.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speaks to the press from the Pentagon briefing room in Washington, D.C., Feb. 19, 2021. (Jackie Sanders/U.S. Air Force)

Caitlin Doornbos
From left to right: Brian Driskell, Henry Driskell, Emily Driskell, Abigail Driskell, Stephen Balderston, David Edge, Aileen Edge and Cecilia Balderston wait for the unboxing of artifacts at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, Pa. on June 16, 2021. Two families descended from Betsy Ross have independently donated Ross artifacts to the museum. Emily Driskell is the daughter of David and Cecilia Balderston. (David Maialetti, The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS)

PHILADELPHIA (Tribune News Service)  When her mom died last summer, Aileen Edge and her husband, Dave, made the long, sad drive down from Washington state to settle affairs.

Claire Canby Keleher lived outside of San Francisco and had been in declining health for some time, but her death was still unexpected, and Aileen was understandably upset. Her mom was a warm, welcoming woman, she said, with family and many friends who were prevented from proper mourning by the pandemic.

Beyond her grief, Aileen knew she had quite a task ahead. Her mom was a lover of the family legacy, which means, when you are a descendant of Betsy Ross and her third husband, John Claypoole, you have lots of stories, lots of letters and papers, and lots of gathered-in stuff going way, way back.

Yet nothing quite prepared the Edges for the richness of Ross-related artifacts and documents that had accumulated in the family over nearly 200 years, much of it finding a home with Claire Canby Keleher. It will now reside, in her moms memory, at the Museum of the American Revolution, at Third and Chestnut Streets.

Last month, the Edges packed their precious historical patrimony into the car and drove across the country, reaching Philadelphia on a recent Wednesday where they delivered a small, battered paper diary, kept by John Claypoole during the 1780s, to the museum.

Claypoole met Betsy Ross second husband, Joseph Ashburn, when both were prisoners of war held in Britains Old Mill Prison, in Plymouth on Englands southern coast, during the revolutionary hostilities. When Ashburn died in the prison, Claypoole was there, describing their ordeal in his diary. Upon his release at wars end, Claypoole traveled to Philadelphia to inform the seamstress of her widowhood. They were subsequently married in 1783.

Chief historian and curator Philip Mead (left) of the Museum of the American Revolution, looks over the Claypoole family Bible with Aileen and David Edge inside the museum. The Edges donated the Bible to the museum. (David Maialetti, The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS) The diary of John Claypoole at the Museum of the American Revolution. (David Maialetti, The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS)

In addition to the diary, the Edges donated an ancient Claypoole family Bible, with notations begun by John Claypooles mother in the 1740s, and a variety of 18th-century historic documents related to Philadelphias Quaker world to which Betsy Ross intermittently belonged. (The Betsy Ross House holds the Ross family Bible.)

The Edges were not the only Ross-Claypoole descendants gathered at the museum that day. Stephen and Cecelia Balderston and their children and grandchildren were also there. The Balderstons, who live in Colora, Md., and with other family members had donated John Claypooles sea chest to the museum in 2019, had heard of the Edges, knew they were cousins, but had never met them.

Indeed, they met that day for the first time while gathered about the worn wooden sea chest, on display at the museum, near to where the Claypoole diary, technically called a memorandum book, will be exhibited for the first time beginning Friday. The book was no doubt packed in the chest when Claypoole sailed to Philadelphia with news of Ashburns death.

Philip Mead, the museums chief historian and curator, told the 25 or so people gathered at the museum that the day marked the first time in who knows how long ... certainly multiple generations, were able to reunite the book, the memorandum book manuscript that John Claypoole kept, while a prisoner of war, with his sea chest.

That is just one of the most thrilling things that can happen in a museum  really reconstructing these stories using the objects that we can display, Mead said, speaking to the gathered Ross descendants. And its actually probably unique, in my experience, to have it come from a family reunion. I feel like Im witnessing family reunions of different generations of your family, seeing you all together, and then seeing this [18th-century] generations objects. Those people from the 18th century are gone. But their objects are here, and youre here.

That the objects survived at all is remarkable. Aileen Edge found the Claypoole diary, for instance, in a shoe box casually packed in a Bekins storage carton in her mothers Marin County garage.

When we saw the box, it was just kind of randomly sitting in the garage, and it was filled with mostly letters that my uncle had saved when he was a student, Aileen said. Then on the next layer was this little old shoe box that had written on it, contents of Gardner family safe deposit box. So we took that box back to the hotel and looked at it. And when we opened the box, we saw this small, wrapped-up book, and it said it was the diary belonging to John Claypoole. And, of course, I was like, John Claypoole? Thats Betsy Ross. And I thought, This cant actually be something belonging to John Claypoole!

But it was.

The Claypoole Bible had a similar casual life with Aileens mom  she had it packed inside a blue chest stuck in the family room.

We used to set drinks on it and this and that and everything else, said Aileen.

We saw the Bible and like, Oh, thats an old crummy family Bible, said Dave.

But then a few evenings later, Dave was reading a letter written by Betsy Ross grandson, William J. Canby, which described the old Claypoole Bible down to its lost pages and the copious family history notations.

Dave was like, Oh, my gosh, I think thats that Bible! said Aileen. It was just like the past speaking, you know, him speaking to us now. It was amazing.

The Balderston family from Maryland is similarly surrounded by historic furniture and artifacts passed down from generation to generation.

We have some other things we brought up here and gave them, said Stephen Balderston. We dont need them, and I think they should be where people can see them, right? My children dont need them, my grandchildren. I think they should be where people can appreciate history. You know what went into this country.

Neither the Balderstons nor the Edges are much concerned with the vagaries of the Betsy Ross story. They know she was a skilled seamstress who stitched a thousand flags, although maybe not the very first one. Yes, her house is on Arch Street, although she may have not actually lived in the building now called the Betsy Ross House.

On the other hand, as Stephen Balderston said, Who knows? He happily took the whole family, grandkids and all, to visit the Betsy Ross House on Arch Street.

Mead, the museum historian, points out that surveys of college students consistently rank Betsy Ross as one of the top 10 founders of the nation. But, he says, regardless of the mythology, Ross was a rather remarkable woman. She outlived three husbands (the first, John Ross, died as the Revolution was beginning).

She was a trained upholsterer in a Philadelphia keen on luxury, and a businesswoman who made her own living for many years, only retiring when failing eyesight made it difficult to sew.

One of the wonderful things about the study of the Revolution today is that scholars are recovering those stories and showing how theyre so much more interesting than the myths, and thats why having the physical, real things from her life and that of John Claypoole is so important, Mead said. They cut through past and all of that mythmaking to the 18th century itself.

(c)2021 The Philadelphia Inquirer

Visit The Philadelphia Inquirer at www.inquirer.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Marine veteran Ian David Long as seen in an undated driver's license photo. (California Department of Motor Vehicles)

VENTURA, Calif.  An investigative report on a 2018 mass shooting during a Southern California bar's "Country College Night" found the likely motive of the military veteran who carried out the attack was disdain for civilians and especially college students, a newspaper said.

Ventura County sheriff's detectives concluded in the 424-page report that Ian David Long, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Afghanistan, likely attacked the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks on Nov. 7, 2018, knowing of the college theme and that there would likely be many students present, the Ventura County Star said.

"Though we cannot say with absolute certainty that this was the suspect's motive, this is the working theory that has been established," the report said.

The Star reported that the investigative report was completed at least a year and a half ago and when it was finally released on Wednesday there were many redactions, including names of people interviewed by detectives.

A different after-action report released in March noted without detail that the shooter's friends said he expressed anger and hate towards civilians, especially college students, whom he considered disrespectful of the military.

Long fired 61 rounds from a semiautomatic handgun, killing 11 patrons and striking sheriff's Sgt. Ron Helus multiple times before killing himself. In the chaos, Helus was killed by a rifle round fired by a California Highway Patrol officer who also responded.

The investigators' report said Long had attended California State University, Northridge, where a group of students learned of his military service and made disrespectful comments to him. Friends and associates of Long told detectives that some students expressed the opinion that people who join the military deserved to be shot and killed.

"The suspect began to hate individuals who felt this way," and said he felt that they were "entitled, liberal civilians" who had no understanding of what he experienced as a machine gunner in Afghanistan, the report said.

"He began referring to them as 'college-civilians,' and said they should be 'wiped off the map,'" one person told detectives.

"It is believed these types of negative encounters only triggered his anger toward civilians and individuals who, in his mind, simply had no grasp or appreciation for what war veterans have done for the United States," the report said.

The report stated that a friend of Long said he was "very angry" while attending the university.

"He hated college-age civilians. He hated them and he would just say awful things about them, you know? And that's why it doesn't surprise me, what he did," the friend said.

The report said Long visited the bar five times in less than a year before the shooting.
News

Avoiding firework follies

City police are reminding residents that recreational fireworks  while fun and festive  do come with some rules.

Were not here to spoil anyones fun, said new city police chief Jon Hillenbrand, so when we get complaints, we usually just let them know that there is a time and a place for everything.

And they must follow the city ordinance.

The city council years ago approved legislation that tightened regulations regarding the use of fireworks, restricting them to a small window around the Fourth of July.

Residents can legally set off their own personal fireworks  as long as its on their own properties  between 5 p.m. and two hours after sunset from June 29 through July 3, from 10 a.m. to midnight on July 4, and again between 5 p.m. and two hours after sunset or about 11 p.m.  through July 9.

The legislation came about because people often started celebrating the nations birthday a little early  sometimes in the middle of June  and city council members and police officers alike were fielding complaints right and left about the noise.

Hillenbrand said they have received some complaints  six since the beginning of June  and theyre usually between 10 p.m. and midnight.

They rarely, if ever, however, hand out citations.

Not unless they are being blatantly rude or obnoxious, he said. Most of the time its teenagers being teenagers, and we simply say, Hey, youve got neighbors, and we take the time to inform of them of the days and times allowed to shoot them and thats about it.

But its not just the annoyance of recreational fireworks that causes problems; they can also be quite dangerous.

Police encourage people to be sure fireworks are acquired and stored properly and to always read warning labels. Children, too, should be accompanied by an adult.

Fireworks, too, should only be set off in a large, open area without structures nearby, said Tim Smith, chief of the Vincennes Township Fire Department, and quick access to water is also a must.

Those who use recreational fireworks should always be mindful that the remains dont fall onto a structure, especially not someone elses property.

And to prevent injury, he asks that people only light one firework at a time, and never light one while its still in your hand.

If a firework fails to ignite, leave it be, he said, and never try re-lighting it.

Removing any firework debris should also be done with caution. Smith suggests using a shovel to place it in a bucket of water overnight.

If someone youre with is burned as a result of a recreational firework, Smith suggests putting cold water onto the burn, and if clothing catches fire, remember the classic phrase: stop, drop and roll.
Health officials have confirmed that the Covid-19 vaccine rollout to current rest home residents and staff in the Bay of Plenty is now complete.

New District Health Board figures have revealed more than 6000 vaccinations have been administered to aged residential care staff and residents, as of July 1.

The recipients of the Pfizer vaccine fall into Group 2 of the governments four-tier rollout programme, which includes high-risk frontline healthcare workers as well as those that work or live in a long-term residential environment.

Bay of Plenty Covid-19 Incident Controller, Trevor Richardson, says protecting those most at risk has taken precedence since vaccinations started earlier this year.

One of our highest priorities in the vaccine rollout is the protection of our communitys most vulnerable, including our grandmothers and grandfathers, kaumatua and kuia, he says.

These figures show that all current aged residential care facility residents and staff have been offered two doses of the Covid-19 vaccine.

New data show approximately 55,000 vaccinations have been administered across the Bay of Plenty district to more than 34,000 people.

These figures include more than 14,000 vaccinations administered to the Bay of Plenty healthcare workforce.

The vaccine is our best protection against the virus and were committed to an equitable rollout for our community, adds Trevor.

New residents are being offered the vaccine as they move in.

The Covid-19 Pfizer vaccine is being rolled out according to priority groups established by the Ministry of Health.

More information on the regions rollout can be found here.
Oceans and Fisheries Minister David Parker today announced a ministerial inquiry into the use and allocation of migrant labour in the seafood sector.

Parker says the inquiry will focus on the sectors reliance on migrant labour, and how to transition it away from that reliance.

It will also examine how to accelerate efforts to attract more New Zealanders into rewarding jobs in the seafood sector.

It will take in all commercial seafood activities, including deep-sea fishing, inshore fishing, aquaculture activities, and seafood processing.

Parker says Covid-19 border restrictions have highlighted the sectors vulnerability due to its reliance on migrant labour.

That has sped up industry and government efforts to increase New Zealanders participation in the sector.

It is estimated the peak number of migrant workers in the sector in the year ending March 2019 was about 1850, 20 per cent, although there are likely to be fewer now.

Some businesses in the sector have reduced their reliance on migrant workers since border restrictions were imposed, but some deep sea vessels in particular are still 100 per cent foreign-crewed, Parker says.

The inquiry will do a stocktake of the current state of the seafood sectors workforce and determine what a more resilient seafood workforce  with a greater proportion of New Zealanders  could look like, and how this might be achieved.

I have appointed independent inquirers to lead this work and report back to me by 29 October.

The seafood industry welcomes the Ministerial Inquiry into the Use and Allocation of Migrant Labour in the Seafood Sector in a press release from Seafood New Zealand today.

The industry is well aware of the desire of government to reduce migrant workers across many sectors and the seafood industry is already engaged with government on a plan to transition more New Zealanders into the industry.

That transition will be challenging and take time but we look forward to the Inquirys recommendations into how we can reduce our reliance on migrant labour and how automation and innovation might play a role in that.

Parker says Peter Wilson will chair the inquiry.

As a Principal Economist at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, Peter brings a wealth of expertise and experience to the inquiry.

He will be joined by Greg Johansson, who has an extensive background in the seafood sector, and by experienced economist and former Treasury official Julie Fry.

The seafood sector will have an opportunity to input into the inquiry and their feedback will help inform the inquirers report and recommendations, says Parker.

This work will provide the information we need to understand where improvements can be made so the industry can be more resilient and more New Zealanders can have the opportunity to participate in the industry.

Seafood New Zealand welcomes analysis of the barriers preventing the further New Zealandisation of the workforce and are pleased that Greg Johanssen, who has extensive experience in the seafood industry, will join NZIERs Peter Wilson and Julie Fry in conducting the Inquiry.

The Government wants to find ways for the seafood sector to have a lighter touch on the environment while delivering higher quality products for greater return.

Doing this takes innovation and fresh ideas. To that end, Ill be working together with industry on a transformation plan that will set a path towards these goals.

I will be bringing a plan to Cabinet for consideration in due course, says Parker.

We are already taking some significant steps towards the Governments vision of a sustainable and resilient industry.

They include the recent announcement of a wider rollout of cameras to inshore fishing vessels, new rules about discarding and what fish must be landed and a raft of measures to improve the health of the Hauraki Gulf.

As the Prime Ministers Chief Science Advisors recent report into fisheries has indicated, there is more to do.

Work is underway to develop a formal response to the reports recommendations. I will make this public later this year, says Parker.

The inquiry will be supported by a secretariat provided by the Ministry for Primary Industries.
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Amazon Scout, the autonomous delivery robot of the e-commerce company, is set to feature additional technology as it goes to Helsinki, Finland.

Amazon wrote in a blog post that it is slated to launch a "Development Center" for the future of Scout, which is currently in its testing stage in the United States.

The e-commerce giant deployed the independent delivery robot on January 24, 2019. It only had six robots during its pilot in Snohomish County, Washington. Initially, the Scouts had to be accompanied by an Amazon employee as they delivered.

Amazon Scout Goes to Finland

The tech giant announced that more than two dozen of its engineers are heading to Helsinki to create more features for the Amazon Scout.

Moreover, the set of engineers in the Development Center will collaborate with the Amazon Scout team based in Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. They will specifically focus on producing 3D software that could further help the robot learn more human-like skills as it delivers products.

The goal of the development facility is to make sure that "Scout can navigate safely while making deliveries," Amazon wrote.

The tech giant further noted that they will be adding more engineers to the new facility as the research progresses.

Read Also: Amazon Allegedly Uses its Algorithm to Fire Contractual Flex Delivery Employees, Says Report

Amazon Scout and 3D

CNBC observed that Amazon announced the new facility six months after the company took over a 3D modeling firm named Umbra. The acquisition has turned out to be beneficial the automated delivery robot.

Umbra boasts itself as a 3D modeling company providing services to an endless number of devices.

The news outlet also noticed a pattern that Amazon follows: when it acquires a company, it then creates facilities in newfound locations.

For instance, Amazon likewise put up a facility in Cambridge, U.K., after completing its take over of an artificial intelligence company, Evi Technologies.

Related Article: Amazon Wants FTC Chair Khan Removed From Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Acquisition Issue, Claiming She Is Bias

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Written by Teejay Boris

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) warns that Delta, the new hypertransmissible variant of the novel coronavirus, has increased the spread rate by up to 10%. Recently, various experts believed that it will soon be the most dominant virus strain.

(Photo : Photo by Go Nakamura/Getty Images)

HOUSTON, TX - NOVEMBER 26: (EDITORIAL USE ONLY) Dr. Joseph Varon hugs and comforts a patient in the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) during Thanksgiving at the United Memorial Medical Center on November 26, 2020 in Houston, Texas. According to reports, Texas has reached over 1,220,000 cases, including over 21,500 deaths.

The health department confirmed this information on Thursday, July 1. CDC claimed that in the United States, COVID-19 cases are now 10% higher than the previous records. Aside from the new variant, CDC also explained that the nation's lagging vaccination activities also play a major role in the transmission rate increase.

"I don't want the trend line to put us in a position where it can really take off, especially as fall approaches and people start congregating indoors," said Dr. Cameron Wolfe, Duke University School of Medicine's infectious diseases expert and an associate professor of medicine.

"I expect that we are going to see the number of cases around the country going up as the delta variant spreads," added CDC's former Acting Director Dr. Richard Besser, who is also the current president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

CDC Is Now Concerned About COVID-19 Delta

According to NBC News' latest report, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said, during a White House briefing, that the new Delta variant could account for the rising COVID-19 cases in the U.S.

Also Read: COVID-19 Vaccine Update: FDA Slaps Warning to Moderna and Pfizer Vaccines

This new COVID-19 strain was first identified in India. And now, it is already spreading in all 50 states. On the other hand, Walensky claimed that another rapid spread could arrive in the United States if Delta is not neutralized.

As of the moment, the new COVID-19 Delta strain was able to increase the daily infection cases by up to seven transmissions. Because of this, the U.S. government has made some efforts to vaccinate more than 57% of adult residents.

CDC Director also warned that areas with the most unvaccinated individuals will still remain vulnerable to the new COVID-19 variant.

How Different Is the New Delta Variant?

The Conversation explained that the new Delta variant can infect younger people, unlike other COVID-19 strains. However, its symptoms are milder compared to other variants.

Although this is the case, it has a higher transmission rate, which is the main factor that concerns various medical experts. As of the moment, researchers are still trying to find more information about the new Delta strain.

For more news updates about the new COVID-19 Delta variant and other related stories, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Related Article: VaxTeen Aims to Help Children with Anti-Vaxx Parents to Get Consent, Receive Pfizer's COVID-19 Vaccine

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Written by: Griffin Davis

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Elon Musk and Tory Bruno have been answering against each other with words on each's Twitter accounts, and have been a result of people's questions about which company is better than the other. SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA) are industry competitors, but one cannot say that they are direct rivals of each other, but after this, they may be.

ULA and SpaceX have been known to share their stakes on NASA's flights, and that both companies have been highly used and regarded by the national space agency for their different missions.

Elon Musk, Tory Bruno: Twitter Battle

In the recent development of this story, Elon Musk and Tory Bruno have initially exchanged on Twitter about the construction and assembly of ULA's Vulcan, with both CEOs showing begrudging comments against each other.

Read Also: Tesla Owner Claims Elon Musk Broke Free Supercharger Service Promise-Files Class-Action Complaint Against Idle Fees

Why Did the Rivalry Start?

The root cause of this exchange was the Rapid Reusability Rocket tweet that was posted by Musk, and a Twitter user asked Bruno's opinion about it. Here, Bruno denied that SpaceX has an edge over ULA and the Vulcan, to which Musk greatly contested, saying the latter would have been "dead as a doornail" if it was not for the Department of Defense.

Chaos erupted as both answered each other with their opinions, and here, both space heads have tried to prove each other wrong and aim for their company's superiority. A lot of external links were posted, as well as proof about the different failures and achievements of either's ventures.

Your company said the exact opposite in 2014 when it got a sole-source, uncompeted $11B DoD launch contract. https://t.co/Abd5sWhZDt



In any event, expendable rockets are as relevant to the future as expendable aircraft. Rapidly reusable rockets are all that matter.  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2021

SpaceX vs. ULA

ULA is a public company, and SpaceX is private, which is one thing that both they differ on. But their goal is the same, and it is to dominate the space industry, especially as the world's foremost provider for spacecraft.

In the exchange, Bruno said that competition is highly welcomed by ULA, and that he is happy for the achievements of SpaceX in recent times. Here, Musk disagreed, and in another tweet, agreed with a different user that ULA has a monopoly which was "carved-out" in the company's landscape, aiming to take over the industry and have control over it.

What is not well understood is that ULA *still* has a monopoly carve-out for US government launches for which SpaceX is not allowed to compete, costing the taxpayer twice as much per launch than it should. This is obviously not real competition.  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2021

Bruno did not respond after this. This points out that either he does not want to exchange words with Musk anymore, or that he was left speechless with the tweet that the SpaceX CEO delivered, complete with backing.

SpaceX and ULA are both space companies and have been massive names in the space industry in recent years. SpaceX is looking at Rapid Reusability Rockets, and ULA is beginning to start on the reusable venture with its Vulcan.

This being said, SpaceX may be more prominent now, but that does not mean ULA is left in the dust.

Related Article: SpaceX Super Heavy Rocket Adds Tower, Moves Location-Is This In Preparation for Full Stack Flight?

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Written by Isaiah Richard

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Richard Branson has announced Virgin Galactic's surprise launch on July 11. It would beat Jeff Bezos's Blue Origins mission which will go into orbit in 9 days, on July 20. The space race is real and competition is tight as both companies are fairly on their baby steps to future missions and establishing their name in the space industry.

Branson's Virgin Galactic has been conducting several launches in recent times, and it has been one of those which have been shallowly recognized by the public for its efforts. Comparing this to Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origins, Virgin Galactic truly needs something to make its name echo among the public.

Richard Branson to Launch with Virgin Galactic on July 11

According to the tweet announcement by Branson, he will turn his dreams into reality aboard the Virgin Galactic's upcoming launch to orbit, which would consist of a six-person crew. The announcement was a surprise for some, especially as there were no mentions or hints before this tweet and press release of the Virgin company.

Virgin also announced the companions that would be joining Branson on this launch mission, and it includes Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci that would fly the VSS Unity, and CJ Sturckow and Kelly Latimer to fly the VMS Eve.

The crew would consist of Beth Moses, Colin Bennet, and Sirisha Bandla, which all helped make the mission come to fruition, and assembled the entire team behind this.

Read Also: Virgin Galactic to Fly a Researcher to Space Aboard its VSS Unity Spacecraft to Conduct Experiments

The flight would take place on Sunday, July 11, and was said to be approved for a commercial flight by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to proceed since May. Virgin Galactic would also hold a live stream watch party for everyone interested to witness the event.

Ive always been a dreamer. My mum taught me to never give up and to reach for the stars. On July 11, its time to turn that dream into a reality aboard the next @VirginGalactic spaceflight https://t.co/x0ksfnuEQ3 #Unity22 pic.twitter.com/GWskcMSXyA  Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 1, 2021

Richard Branson Beats Jeff Bezos, Blue Origins

Branson's recent surprise announcement for this July is only nine days ahead of Jeff Bezos's highly publicized launch mission to orbit, aboard his company's Blue Origins New Shepard spacecraft. This shows that Branson has beat Bezos in terms of launching the first commercial crew in terms of space and orbit tourism of the modern days.

This follows a massive argument that happened between Elon Musk and Tory Bruno, which are both massive space companies with SpaceX and ULA. Both are known to be massive clients of NASA when it comes to space launches and has been heated against each other for some time now.

Blue Origins vs Virgin Galactic

There is not much rivalry between the two companies, but they are fairly at the same pace where their spacecraft and missions have been approved for commercial flights after several test runs. That being said, the winner for this one goes to Branson and Virgin Galactic, as the massive English business magnate, will go ahead of the Amazon founder.

Related Article: FAA Says Yes To Virgin Galactic's Commercial Flights! Space Tourism Now Begins

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Written by Isaiah Richard

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Google is now investigating the appearance of suspicious VPN ads that happened earlier this week. On Monday, June 28, Swirwalls developer Chris Lacy posted on Twitter that he received a two-factor authentication SMS from the tech giant. It includes the ads but Google only marked it as spam through the SMS app.

Google Says the Ads Did Not Originate From Them

At first glance, we could assume that this is a phishing scam. However, it did not go as planned to be a sketchy scheme since the first report of Lacy surfaced on Twitter. For Google, Mark Risher, the company's Identity and Security senior director stated that the unnamed carrier (the name of the texter) did not come from them.

"These are not our ads and we are currently working with the wireless carrier to understand why this happened," Risher clarified in the official statement, The Verge reported on Thursday, July 1.

Furthermore, what appears to be a part of two-factor authentication is flagged as spam. This gives Google a green light that something is wrong with the incident involving the SMS ads.

To keep the name of the carrier for confidentiality, Lacy came up with the idea of not sharing its identity. The tech giant has not revealed any information about the carrier.

Read Also: Google Is Going To Replace SMS With 'Chat': Here's How It Works

What Happened on Monday?

Lacy was confused about why the SMS ads appeared on the Google verification code. Lacy, a developer from Action Launcher said that the code begins with the letter "G.," Upon looking at the message, it has an attached VPN ad that will direct the user to a URL if he/she clicks it.

Earlier, we mentioned that the verification code could be a phishing scam from someone who knows how to inject the SMS ads into the Google verification message. Lacy made it clear that the code that he received was legit after he managed to land a successful login attempt. Later, it was considered by Google Messages as a spam link.

The post reached Google since it is impossible that the security experts of the company would place the ads in the verification code. Many people said that someone might be operating the carrier that generates the ads and puts them inside the message.

Verified SMS

According to 9to5Google, the use of "Verified SMS" is now utilized around the world by some countries including the US. This will help the users to identify the person or the entity that delivered the message to the Messages app.

This year, Google will begin rolling out a 2-Step Verification front for the Plays Store developers. Other than that, the company decided to stick with the physical security key for phones. In this case, Google recognized the safer alternative in the form of the Google Prompt method.

Related Article: Google Fi VPN Rolls Out To iPhone Ahead Of Apple Private Relay: Release Date, Features, and More

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Written by Joseph Henry

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Tesla Model S Plaid was launched just last month during a delivery event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Weeks later, one of its stocks that was already being used spontaneously erupted into flames while it was being driven down a road in Philadelphia.

According to Business Insider, two crews for firefighters had to work on the flaming Tesla before the fire was put out. The driver, who is also the owner of the car, was able to escape the blaze.

Tesla Model S Plaid Bursts Into Flames: What Happened

The Tesla Model S Plaid was being driven by the owner of the car in Philadelphia when the incident took place last Tuesday. The driver first noticed smoke coming from the vehicle. It was then followed by fire.

The owner found himself briefly trapped in the burning vehicle after its electronic doors failed to open, but eventually managed to escape, according to Mark Geragos, the lawyer of the owner.

"He was able to get out of the door somehow. And the car, shortly after he got out, turned into a fireball," said Geragos.

Per the same report, the Gladwyne Volunteer Fire Company detailed the incident on its Facebook page, but the post has since been deleted. According to The Washington Post, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will be looking into the incident.

Related Article: Elon Musk Claims Tesla Model S Plaid as Fastest Production EV: Final Delivery Date, Top Speed, and Other Features

Tesla Model S Plaid: What It Is

The fiery incident happened just weeks after a delivery event for the Tesla Model S Plaid was held last June 10 in Fremont, California. The model, which the Business Insider described as Tesla's "fastest and most expensive car yet," was also hailed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the fastest production electric vehicle (EV) in the company.

According to its product page on the Tesla Website, the model is described as the "highest performing sedan ever built." It has a peak power of 1,020hp and a top speed of 200 mph. The model is so fast that it can go from zero to 60 mph in just 1.99 seconds.

The Tesla Model S Plaid was also recently hailed as the fastest car in the Pikes Peak Exhibition.

The model is not without its share of delays. In May, it was announced that the launch date for the electric vehicle was delayed due to a battery safety concern.

Other Incidents of Tesla Cars Bursting Into Flames

Last Tuesday's incident in Philadelphia isn't the only incident involving a Tesla vehicle bursting into flames that has been reported in recent years.

In January 2016, a Tesla Model S caught fire while supercharging at a station in Norway. Three years later, another Tesla Model S began emitting smoke while in a parking lot in Shanghai before it exploded.

Also Read: Tesla Model S Emits Smoke Then Explodes In Shanghai

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Written by Isabella James

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Police officers are handing out their body cam footage in exchange for free high-tech restraining lassos called BolaWrap. Meanwhile, the company uses these clips to market its technology and help other cops know how to use it.

BolaWrap is the brainchild of the company going by the same name, Wrap. It serves as a tool to tame suspects as it discharges a barbed wire in a hook shape with a Kevlar tether. It will then wrap around a person's body to restrain their movement.

According to Wrap's website, the technology, which seems to come from a comic book superhero story, is meant to tame suspects that the officers deem uncooperative , usually those who are experiencing mental health problems or under the influence of drugs.

Additionally, it could restrain a person's movement remotely up to 25 feet. The company adds that it is a "safe and humane" way to take such suspects into custody.

Police Body Cam Footage and BolaWrap Lassos

DailyDot first reported that Wrap is using the body cam footage to sell their product to other cops.

The footage focuses on instances wherein police officers use the BolaWrap in their operation. The company then blurs the face of the individuals involved, and posts it on the internet to sell its technology.

Police Body Cam Footage in Exchange for BolaWrap Lassos

According to Gizmodo, both the Wyoming Police Department and Beaufort Police Department admitted receiving a free BolaWrap lasso offer.

However, the police departments clarified that the freebies came after they have already given the body cam footage. It was not the reason why they agreed to provide such information.

Read Also: Tesla Model 3 Police Car Could Allow UK Save More Money and Test Its Emergency Vehicle Market

Wrap Asking for Body Cam Footages

The company requested the footage in an email to the cops, wherein it stated the videos will help improve the product and guide police officers elsewhere.

Nevertheless, Daily Dot noted that the bulk of the police videos are instead used for marketing the product online.

To be precise, the outlet pointed out that the company is using the footage to create YouTube content promoting the device. Wrap's videos showcase incidents of police with folks under a mental health crisis with their faces and names blurred.

Body Cam Footages and YouTube Content

The YouTube channel has garnered 4,000 subs, with one of its videos achieving about half a million views. The said clip is a compilation of the BolaWrap demonstration.

Meanwhile, an actual incident in Virginia, Minnesota, that was caught on cam has nearly 100,000 views. It is to note that the folks starring in the videos are not criminal minds. The incident reports showed that they received mental health treatment afterward.

Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Police is using Amazon's security cam, Ring, to solve crimes.

In other news, the smartphone pickpockets in Brazil have found a new way of increasing profits.

Related Article: An App That Automatically Calls 911 When It Detects A Car Crash Is Now Available To Google Pixel Users

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Written by Teejay Boris

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The anti-vaxxer spreading the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines are magnetic, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, has been kicked out of Twitter.

Tenpenny, who goes by the username @BusyDrT on Twitter, falsely testified that COVID-19 vaccines have properties that stick the arms of people to metal.

Anti-Vaxxer Claiming COVID-19 Vaccines are Magnetic

Ohio news outlet, Cleveland19, reported that Twitter suspended the account of Tenpenny.

Currently, the page of the anti-vaxxer only leads to a link directing to the Twitter Rules, saying that the social media giant suspends accounts violating just that.

The anti-vaxxer doctor made it to the headlines after she testified at the Ohio House Health Committee Hearing, spitting lies that the COVID-19 vaccine will make people magnetic. She said during her testimony that: "I'm sure you've seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots, and now they're magnetized."

Furthermore, Tenpenny falsely claimed that spoons and forks stick to those who got their COVID-19 shots.

Twitter has yet to explain the reason behind suspending the doctor.

Move to Suspend the Anti-Vaxxer Doctor

According to Insider, a non-government organization, Center for Countering Digital Hate, has been strongly campaigning for the suspension of Tenpenny's Twitter account.

The disinformation and hate watchdog said that Tenpenny is part of what the NGO dubs as the "Disinformation Dozen," which they say is behind 65% of the content that discourages taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

The suspended anti-vaxxer leads a movement against vaccination, and is also the author of a book with a bold statement, "Saying No to Vaccine."

COVID-19 Vaccines is Not Magnetic

Scientists have since debunked that COVID-19 vaccines make people magnetic, proving that such conspiracy theories are far from reality.

Edward Hutchinson, a Centre for Virus Research of the University of Glasgow lecturer, put straight to Newsweek that vaccines do not contain any proponents that will make a person magnetic.

Hutchinson said that if vaccines have magnetic material, its properties should have made a visible bulge on a person's arms as it sticks to metals or magnets, which videos on the internet failed to show.

Meanwhile, Al Edwards, University of Reading associate professor, asserted that magnetic materials are painful to inject into a person's arm. He goes on to explain that it is the reason why vaccines are mainly composed of water and salt -- the vaccine itself is a minimal part of it.

Read Also: Google Pay: Save Digital Vaccine Cards on Android, Show it to Local Establishments With API

COVID-19 Vaccines and 5G

Tenpenny has another allegation against vaccines. The doctor continued to spread misinformation that vaccines have 5G chips that could connect a person to the network wirelessly.

The false information that COVID-19 is 5G-ready has birthed to speculation that there is a "confidential" document proving it, but it was proven untrue later on. Conspiracy theorists believe that Bill Gates will track those vaccinated through wireless technology.

Related Article: Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 Vaccine is Protective Against Delta Variants, But Is It Safe for Public Use?

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Written by Teejay Boris

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
(Photo : Screenshot From Commons.Wikipedia.org) New Qualcomm CEO Announces Counter-Apple M1 Chip that Could be Ready in 2022

The newly appointed Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon has just announced that a new chip to challenge the Apple M1 could be ready in 2022. Amon has just told laptop manufacturers that come next year, the company would finally have a new PC processor that can challenge the Apple M1 chip used widely in the company's MacBook range.

Qualcomm 5G Roadmap and Strategy

According to the story by TechRadar, Amon is now replacing the retiring Steve Mollenkoppf just last month after having joined the company as the company's engineer all the way back in 1995. As the company's president, Amon is reportedly responsible for Qualcomm's official semiconductor business and has reportedly been instrumental in developing its whole 5G technical roadmap and strategy.

Qualcomm's mobile processor and modern technology reportedly power the whole vast majority of different high-end Android smartphones. However, Amon wants the San Diego-based firm to be able to secure a much greater share of the whole PC market.

Qualcomm Shift to 5G

The previous efforts have reportedly failed to be able to make a more serious impact on a whole space that both AMD and Intel have much traditionally dominated. Amon, however, told Reuters in an interview that he actually believes that Qualcomm will be able to enjoy much greater success by designing its very own PC chips instead of licensing designs from ARM.

A major factor will be matching the energy efficiency of the popular Apple processors, a capability that has actually been able to extend the life of the MacBook range. Qualcomm, however, also believes its connectivity expertise will actually be hugely significant as the whole industry decides to shift to 5G.

ARM CPU Development

Amon stated that they needed to have the whole leading performance for a new battery-powered device. It was also stated that if ARM eventually develops a CPU that ends up to be better than what they can build themselves, they can always have the option to license it from ARM.

He identified other areas of opportunity that would include an Android market reacting to Huawei's struggle and even the ongoing growth in China. There was also one segment that Qualcomm had no intention of actually expanding into data center chips.

Read Also: Qualcomm Reportedly Wants To Ship Out Next-Gen Snapdragon 895 Chip This Year

Qualcomm vs. Apple Chips

Amon, however, did say that the company could still license chip designs to the cloud giants that want to build their very own processors. The huge question is whether Qualcomm would be able to come up with a chip to challenge the Apple M1 before the company finally graduates to its possible next level of M2 chips.

Of course, there is still little confirmed information regarding the upcoming moves that Apple is reportedly planning to make to keep up with the ever-demanding market. Fans will have to wait for the official announcement from Apple regarding its next upcoming chips.

Related Article: Qualcomm Continues to Struggle in Producing Processors - Delay in Smartphone Productions Likely to Persist

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Written by Urian B.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of the book, The Case for Trump. Another book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, will be released in October by Basic Books. His email address is authorvdh@gmail.com .
The Telluride Transfer Warehouse is a place to gather in the post-pandemic world. (Photo courtesy of Kate Jones)
This arborglyph, which appears to be a bear with a stick, can be found on the Iron Mountain Trail. (Photo by Suzanne Cheavens/Telluride Daily Planet)
Officials are educating everyone of the current State 1 fire restrictions in place throughout San Miguel County, including no fireworks this Fourth of July weekend. (Courtesy image)
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 local activist failed Friday to overturn a $4.5 million settlement reached between the family of Alton Sterling and the East Baton Rouge government.

Mary Jane Marcantel had claimed the Metro Council had failed to give proper notice that, at its Feb. 10 meeting, it might vote to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed after a Baton Rouge police officer shot Sterling dead in 2016 after receiving a complaint about a man with a gun outside a North Foster Drive convenience store.

District Judge Don Johnson rejected her lawsuit Friday.

"The city-parish complied with the provisions governing the open meeting statute of Louisiana," Johnson said during his ruling.

Marcantel's lawyer, Rodney Baum, argued the council ran afoul of the law by posting its public notice and agenda on two separate days ahead of the meeting.

"That's to provide protection to the public so everything is transparent, and so they're able to know what their government is doing and so they're able to actively and meaningfully participate in it," Baum said during the hearing, conducted via Zoom.

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Johnson said the council's procedures for posting the agenda and public notice weren't faultless, particularly amid the pandemic, just that the problems didn't rise to a complete violation of open meeting laws.

If Johnson had ruled against the city-parish, all action taken at the Feb. 10 meeting would have been declared void  including the Metro Council's approval of the Sterling family's settlement. Such a ruling would have thrown the settlement into jeopardy, just weeks after Sterling's five children accepted the offer following months of negotiations.

Alton Sterling children accept $4.5 million offer to end wrongful death lawsuit The children of Alton Sterling, a Black man fatally shot by a white Baton Rouge police officer five years ago, have accepted a $4.5 million se

In a phone interview after the hearing, Marcantel insisted her lawsuit was only about holding the Metro Council to the standards set under the open meeting laws.

"The city-parish can do anything they choose to do, if they do it correctly," Marcantel said. "I do not feel this meeting was called properly under the open meeting laws."
Fireworks light up the night sky above an A-7E Corsair II jet at the USS Kidd during Fourth of July celebrations in 2019 in downtown Baton Rouge. Fireworks return this weekend after being canceled last year because of the CIVID pandemic.
Guest column: Rules are meant to protect children, but police use them to shield themselves
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Former Sydney Swans footballer Adam Goodes and Archibald Prize-winning artist Vincent Namatjira are among the high-profile Indigenous Australians who have written childrens books to be published this year.

The move is part of a wider book industry trend with Indigenous authors stories for young readers winning awards and wide readership.

Adam Goodes in Vincent Namatjiras Indulkana studio during a tour for the Indigenous Literacy and Numeracy Foundation.

An unprecedented six childrens books by First Nation authors and illustrators were shortlisted for this years Australian Book Industry Awards. Some, including rapper and comedian Adam Briggs book, Our Home, Our Heartbeat, published in May 2020, have already become bestsellers. The upbeat picture book about Indigenous celebrities and finding your identity has shifted 25,000 copies.

So too author Bruce Pascoes childrens version of his acclaimed-and-now-disputed Dark Emu, Young Dark Emu, which has sold 95,000 copies, and musician Archie Roachs Took the Children Away illustrated by his late wife Ruby Hunter, which has sold 10,000 copies.
Not everyone was happy about it, but the main reason I joined was because I grew up with that inherited fear, and for my children, I wanted to break that cycle, she says. Im all about breaking cycles, and this one goes all the way back to when the colonisers and the native police would take us away. Gorrie lives in Gippsland these days, but when shes in the city to visit her kids or her twin grandchildren, shes a regular at Kines; her son Paul is mates with the owner. Its a hip Brunswick eatery that does housemade condiments and jams, with a stereo and record collection inside and an outdoor area decorated with street art and succulents. I usually come for breakfast and get the muesli, and they do a lot of gluten-free and vegan food, says Gorrie as we decide on our orders. Shes not, she says, completely vegan. Im  vegan-inclined, she says with a laugh. I want to be vegan, but I relapse a lot! At home though, we dont eat much meat at all.

She orders scrambled eggs on sourdough toast and pineapple juice, and I go for the scrambled eggs with chili bread. Scrambled Eggs on sourdough at Kines. Credit:Justin McManus Its the morning of Gorries book launch, and one of her first interviews. Shes nervous and wants me to be aware that her memory is buggered. Its why she started writing her story in the first place; the plan was never originally to write a book. But Gorrie is a natural storyteller, even if dates and places are not necessarily in the right order. Even in Black and Blue, a difficult read in many places, she stills keeps her sense of humour; she wants the book to come across as her having a yarn with readers. Its a lot of one thing after another in the book, and I sort of  dont take a breath, she says. But when I do, I try to find some humour in there. You sort of ... need it.

After a life moving around the country, Gorrie, her then-partner and her three children moved to Queensland, where she signed up for training to become one of the few Aboriginal police officers in Australia. She approached the job enthusiastically, hopeful that she could help bring about change from the inside. But it soon became apparent that even while wearing the uniform, she would still experience institutionalised racism, much of it from the cops she worked side by side with. I thought with my experience, Id make a good police officer, especially with things like family violence, Gorrie says. As Aboriginal people, were frightened to call the police because we know that in most cases were the ones that will get locked up. Thats why we dont call the police, even if we are the ones that need protection. Im that person that wants to change the world, be a saviour. But she found that domestic abuse call-outs  and there were many  were largely dismissed as trivial. Gorrie had anticipated that there would be a dark side to the job  dealing with crime scenes, suicides, car accidents and drug overdoses  but she hadnt realised that it would be what she would experience from her colleagues that would affect her the most deeply.

In Black and Blue, she recounts instances of sickeningly overt racism, sexism, and what she describes as a schoolyard mentality of bullying and racial profiling. Scrambled eggs with house-made chili toast. Credit:Justin McManus Sudanese were called skinnies; Samoans and Tongans were called Pac Islanders. Aboriginal people were called Abos.

Pacific Islanders were routinely characterised as violent and unlicensed drivers; Sudanese as thieves and Vietnamese as drug dealers. Its even scarier being on the other side and witnessing all the brutality towards my own people and how they racially profiled. People still get pulled over just for being black, she says. And then theres just harassing people who are scruffy, people that are vulnerable. She recalls one colleague who outrightly told her that he hated Abos and women.

No pretense at all. The racist ones I dont mind though, says Gorrie. Its the ones you dont know about, you know? Loading And if new recruits werent racist when they joined the force, Gorrie says, in my experience, they became racist. Gorrie details dodgy behaviour  officers running checks on associates, sharing paperwork so they could all ensure all their statements aligned, cops conducting drive-bys of their former partners houses  but also some of the rewarding jobs she attended. There werent many, but Ive put them in the book. But in the 10 years, I had no friends; thats the sad part, she says. But thats part and parcel of being an Aboriginal woman in a white, male-dominated field.

After several years on the job, Gorrie was suffering; she would come home after a shift and scrub her house with disinfectant, trying to get the stench of the job off her. Receipt for lunch at Kines, Brunswick. There were dark days towards the end of my policing career where I did feel suicidal  I planned it, I even picked the tree  or the cliff I might drive off. So when it starts getting that bad, its time to get out. She was eventually diagnosed with PTSD in 2011 and withdrawn from duty. (I didnt want to just quit, she says. Im not a quitter.)

Thats when she began writing, documenting parts of her life and experience in the force. If people are shocked by what I remember and wrote, you can only imagine what I cant remember, Gorrie says.

I know that some parts of the book are quite graphic  I dont have any filters, and I dont know if thats a good thing or a bad thing!  and thats why I thought it was important to include a trigger warning. I tell people to take care when reading it. Since she left the force, Gorrie has also been working on a screenplay, Nullung, telling the story of her grandmother in her Gunai/Kurnai language (Nullung means my fathers mother in my language, which I want to revive) and is writing a series of childrens books. She also campaigns against family violence and Aborginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody, and is on the steering committee for the Stolen Generations Reparation Scheme. Im there to speak up for the ones who cant be heard. Theres a lot of heavy stuff going on right now in Victoria, we have the treaty happening, and part of that is truth-telling, she says. Black and Blue is my truth. Black and Blue, a Memoir of Racism and Resilience by Veronica Gorrie is published by Scribe.
I suppose its inevitable that any biography of Philip Larkins long term lover (among the many), should have a pervasive air of grumpy unfulfillment. Monica Jones and Larkin went to Oxford at the same time during the war, but didnt meet until 1946 when she was teaching at Leicester University and he was the librarian. Sutherland, a student of hers, weaves personal tales and those of others into the story  Jones emerging as a combination of the vivacious, intelligent and stylishly attractive, as well as the acerbic, lonely and racist. She was every bit Larkins intellectual match and Sutherland suggests that he would not have become the poet he did if not for her, Larkins famous poem, Arundel Tomb , having been written for Jones. Like a Larkin poem, with its mix of bedsit plaintive amid odd glints of sunlight, it really draws you in.

Alexandria

Edmund Richardson

Bloomsbury $29.99

For many of us, Alexandria is synonymous with Egypt and Laurence Durrell. But, as Edmund Richardson points out in this rare combination of serious scholarship and thoroughly entertaining reading, there were many Alexandrias. His eponymous ancient city was in Afghanistan, not far from Kabul. But the title notwithstanding, the subject is Charles Masson (aka James Lewis)  the deserter from the East India Company who wandered Afghanistan throughout the 1830s, enduring amazing misfortune, who eventually re-discovered the place. One of those larger-than-life characters (a famous archaeologist in his day) condemned to become a footnote by dint of imperialist design, he has now found a biography worthy of his achievements. Richardson is not only informed, passionate and witty, he incorporates astute intellectual leaps.

The New Academic by Simon Clews

The New Academic

Simon Clews

UNSW Press $34.99

The term academic writing is usually code for jargon, the idea being that academics are good at talking to each other but not to a wider audience. Simon Clews, former director of the Melbourne Writers Festival and writing lecturer, has written a plain-speaking guide for academics wanting to widen their readership. Its full of good, practical advice, like saying things as simply as possible (academics have always had trouble with that), having a good idea who you are writing for, avoiding pitfalls such as deliberately dumbing things down and patronising your readers and ways of dealing with writers block, among many other things. This is an especially useful text for these publish or perish times when academics are judged on published output, as well as universities themselves. Witty and very knowledgeable.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size When British diplomat and academic Francis Campbell accepted the job as vice-chancellor of Australias Notre Dame University in early 2020, his Irish father told him not to go. Its a prison, he said, remembering the fate of his Irish ancestors who never returned. Campbell assured his father that he would be back to visit two or three times a year, in keeping with the travelling life he experienced as an ambassador. But no sooner had he arrived, than Australias borders closed. If somebody had presented this scenario to you, even a year before, you could not have comprehended it, he says, admitting he may not have come if hed had an inkling of his impending confinement. Notre Dame University vice-chancellor Francis Campbell at the Bambini Trust cafe. Credit:Kate Geraghty During 2020, and especially at Easter and Christmas, Campbell would phone his father to explain that he could not get back to Ireland. Theres a thing called COVID. And he would say, nonsense, nonsense. I told you theyd trap you there, Campbell recalls. While Campbell has the fondest memories of his good-humoured father, the story is tinged with sadness. Earlier this year his father died, leaving him and his brother in London to watch the funeral on YouTube. The national border closure separated him from family, but the timing of state border closures was more serendipitous. He ended up dividing his time equally between Notre Dames campuses in Sydney and Fremantle.

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We are having what turns out to be a long and humorous lunch, in a quiet nook at Bambini Trust and Wine Room opposite Sydneys Hyde Park. And as our discussion unfolds, he reveals just how much he embodies the tension that comes with being Anglo-Irish. Campbell is the committed Catholic, with an endearing Irish lilt and a humble disposition who has worked at the heart of British power, and faithfully represented a queen who heads a Protestant church. The civic nature of the British identity allowed me to be Irish, it allowed me to be Catholic, and it allowed me to be British, he says. It didnt pull me in one direction in a way that Northern Ireland did and often does. In diplomatic fashion, he found a way to resolve an internal tension  as both a citizen of the Irish republic and a British representative of the Queen. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which ended violence in Northern Ireland, allowed one to be Irish, British or both. So I describe myself as both and I think it is a reflection in a sense of my life. Gin-cured Mount Cook salmon with cucumber pickle and horseradish. Credit:Kate Geraghty Entree arrives and, with his good humour and ability to put you at ease, its obvious why he made such an effective diplomat. The food is a mix of gin-cured salmon and spiced calamari, appropriate says Campbell, because it is from Western Australia. Near his home in Fremantle, he has noticed that many of the fishing boats are named after Italian villages. Campbells journey to Australia followed a diplomatic career that took him to 10 Downing Street, as an adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and to Rome as Britains ambassador to the Holy See, or the Vatican, with stops along the way at the European Union and United Nations in New York.

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As a schoolboy in the 1970s and 80s, he saw the British military erect watchtowers. As an adult, he advised the government that demolished them. It was surreal, he says. I remember watching those towers being put up from a school window. They were being erected in the mid-1980s, and roughly a decade later youre listening to a debate in Downing Street about bringing them down. Six spices calamari with rocket and tarragon mayonnaise. Credit:Kate Geraghty Now 51 and single, Campbell grew up with three older brothers on a farm near Newry in Northern Ireland, during the years of sectarian violence known as The Troubles. His mother, who died when he was at university, had always told him that London was not like this. It was something he would learn during working holidays in London, staying with a cousin who had a crisp English accent. Loading London would ultimately become a beloved home, but his initial instinct was to stay in Ireland and become a Catholic priest. I was no good at farming, he says, smiling. Staying on at school was the only thing I could do. Unemployment was high and university enrolments low but, amid the deprivation, he loved his Catholic school so much that, at the age of 16, he wanted to rush headlong into the seminary. Ironically, it was a priest who advised the young Francis to slow down, stay in school, and train his eyes on university. He ended up at one of the best in Britain  Queens in Belfast. He studied politics and international relations and went on to study at Trinity College in Dublin; the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, in Belgium; the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland; and the University of Pennsylvania. He was the first in his family to get a tertiary education.

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In 1997, aged 27, he joined the British Foreign Office, and two years later he was seconded to the office of Labour prime minister Tony Blair. Francis Campbell says nothing quite prepares you for meeting the Queen. Credit:Kate Geraghty His job demanded impartiality. He had to keep his personal opinions to himself, including his opposition to the Iraq War. But he was also a Catholic and his Pope had come out strongly against the war. I havent changed my position on the war in Iraq. I was against it then and Im against it now, he says. Still, Campbell admires Blair and other politicians he saw up close, wrestling with major decisions that involve life and death. Even though I disagreed on the basis of what I knew, I didnt know everything. I have to look at the totality of the person, he says. Line-caught snapper fillet with mussels, diamond clams, pippies and Yarra Valley salmon roe. Credit:Kate Geraghty

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When the second course arrives  pea and saffron risotto with spanner crab and Kinkawooka mussels for him; line-caught snapper fillet with mussels, clams, pippies and salmon roe for me  the European flavour invites recollections of Campbells posting in Rome. Pea and saffron risotto with spanner crab and Kinkawooka mussels. Credit:Kate Geraghty In 2005, he became the first Catholic appointed British ambassador to the Vatican since the Reformation. The one-time altar boy found himself at the centre of an institution that still represented enormous cultural power, especially in Africa and Asia, if no longer in Europe and Australia. The BBC even made a four-part documentary about him. When an Irish cameraman asked if he were Irish or British, he told him he could not exaggerate one at the expense of the other. The comment gave him grief from his Irish friends. Having considered a life in the church, Campbell knew that when he met the Pope  then Benedict XVI  he was meeting someone who had once been a simple Catholic priest. He felt surprisingly relaxed in his company. The Catholic church was so familiar and after all, the Pope had not always been Pope, he recalls. Loading It was an entirely different experience when he hosted visits by two powerful women who had loomed over his life. Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher came to visit a number of times. As a schoolboy, he witnessed her intense militarisation of Northern Ireland. She was the prime minister of my childhood, he says. Having Mrs Thatcher in the back of the car was something you couldnt quite fathom.

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A person who claims to be the son of an unvaccinated limousine driver at the centre of the Bondi COVID-19 cluster has disputed suggestions that his father is patient zero for the outbreak, saying the state government has used him as a scapegoat for failures in the quarantine system.

He said the family had been left traumatised by the ordeal and were beside themselves with stress, wondering if police were going to lay criminal charges against the driver simply for doing his job.

A limousine driver said to be at the centre of the Bondi cluster does not believe hes patient zero. Credit:James Alcock

According to a fundraising page said to have been set up by the drivers son, on the same day the driver supposedly transmitted the virus through fleeting contact at a shopping centre, he spent hours in close contact with his children and grandchildren, none of whom have tested positive.

The following day [June 12], my parents went to Belle Cafe [in Vaucluse] and they report someone there coughing and sneezing. That is why they suspect they got it out and about, the person said on the fundraiser page, which was later deleted.
US-based composer Mark Kilian has issued a heartfelt thank you to Australians for their support after his father Frans died in a Queensland hospital on Thursday night.

Mr Kilian and his wife Anneli, who are both vaccinated against COVID-19, flew into Sydney from Los Angeles but had their application to enter Queensland to see his 80-year-old dying father initially denied by Queensland Health.

US citizen Mark Kilian and his wife Anneli Gericke received an exemption to visit Frans.

But after national scrutiny, Queensland Health gave the couple the exemption and they were able to enter the state on a $15,000 chartered flight before visiting Frans in the Gold Coast University Hospital.

Mr Kilian thanked the Australian people for their support that he said allowed him to see Frans, who was suffering from pancreatic cancer.
Residents on the fringes of Brisbane have been left wondering which service station to use, as restrictions eased in parts of south-east Queensland on Friday evening but not in Brisbane itself.

On Friday morning the Premier announced the states snap three-day lockdown would lift for some regions at 6pm, including Townsville, Palm Island, Ipswich, Logan City, Redlands, Sunshine Coast, Noosa, Somerset, Lockyer Valley, Scenic Rim and the Gold Coast.

However, lockdown for Brisbane and Moreton Bay was extended another 24 hours, with Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young calling for extra time for contact tracers to locate people following three new locally transmitted cases of coronavirus.

The new measures mean those on Brisbanes border would need to be careful where they travelled to avoid going back into restrictions on Saturday.
I try not to be too despondent in these newsletters, but on any measure, this has been a dispiriting week. I was as confused as other Australians and irritated by the collapse of any sense of united purpose in facing this worrying moment in the coronavirus pandemic. (For the record, I have had my first dose of AstraZeneca, and am looking forward to my second.)

This week, we have behaved like squabbling tribes, with half-truths, distortions, anger and alarm. Whos to blame? Whose fault is it that here we are, with less than 8 percent of us fully vaccinated against COVID-19, with the seriously infectious Delta strain among us, with 12 million of us locked down - that is beginning to be eased - and routine leaks from hotel quarantine?

By the end of the week, there was at least a semblance of a national plan to get us out of this mess at some point, but it relies on halving our international arrival caps for several months until the Pfizer vaccine arrives in greater numbers, which will strand more Australians overseas. A horrible solution, even if it may well be the right one or the only one we had given we have a Pfizer shortage until later in the year.

This has been a difficult story to cover because politics has taken over so forcefully. Its hard, too, because there are no simple answers and only imperfect solutions, and because the health advice is nuanced and requires sophisticated reporting.

In journalism, trying not to get too caught up in the noise is always a challenge. Being careful about how we report what people say, to make sure we add context, is more essential than ever. I worry about these things. I read journalist and media academic Margaret Simons piece on the responsibility of journalism during times like these. She wrote that the crisis is, the WHO said, the first pandemic in history in which technology and social media are being used on a massive scale to keep people safe, informed, productive and connected. But at the same time, communications technology enabled the undermining of the global response.
Daniel Andrews, imagine your daughter (Australian-born) is older, partnered, with two sons (Australians also) and lives in the UK. They have not seen their Australian family since January 2019. Finally, they are on an aeroplane in August, ready for two weeks quarantine to relocate home. Both parents are fully vaccinated. But no, your government proposes to reduce international arrivals by 75 to 80per cent (The Age, 1/7). Will your beloved daughters and familys hopes be dashed yet again after waiting so long? This is our family situation.

Geraldine OSullivan, Hawthorn Yet more grist to the mill for the anti-vaxxers An excellent article by Waleed Aly  No immunity to reckless politics (Opinion, 2/7)  which exposes the hypocrisy and hysteria from the Queensland government, and the huge boost it gives to anti-vaxxers. Many under 40s and 50s had the AstraZeneca vaccine, ranging across healthcare, emergency services and others in priority queues, prior to the guidelines changing. We are safely fully vaccinated and happy to be so. The Queensland government will have no one but itself to blame if it has increased hesitancy in its state. Thank you, Victoria, for taking a more reasoned approach.

Kirsty Page, Ivanhoe Set a target to open borders and end restrictions

The UK is looking forward to opening up later this month, with 90per cent of all adults expected to have received at least one vaccine dose (World, 2/7). While daily new cases still exceed 20,000, the number of serious illnesses and deaths is now comparable to a bad strain of the flu. This  and not suppression via closed borders, restrictions, and intermittent lockdowns  is what the future living with COVID-19 looks like. Yet Australia still has no plan or timetable to get us to this future. We should have an aggressive, but achievable, target date for reopening of international borders and an end to all restrictions. The vaccine rollout should be managed to ensure that everyone who wants it can be immunised before this date. Why does the Morrison government have no desire to set such targets?

Mark Summerfield, Northcote THE FORUM Bring the GPs together COVID-19 Taskforce Commander Lieutenant-General John Frewen will get a surprise when he finds out that he has no divisions to command.

The 120 or so Divisions of General Practice, drawing together every Australian GP, practice nurse and manager, have been disbanded. These highly motivated, highly skilled and competent organisations would have got the entire community through this pandemic on the trot. Divisions achieved astounding results that led the health system through major technological and standards change in health care. Scott Morrison says speak to your GP. If you want troops, get us GPs back together. It has never been more important for our future wellbeing and economy.

Dr Dennis Gration, Belgrave Pressure on workers The Australian government is mandating for residential aged care workers to be vaccinated for COVID-19 by September. Health authorities have warned against the AstraZeneca vaccine for under-60s. Many residential aged care workers are culturally and linguistically diverse and/or low skilled. They receive low incomes and take care of most of our parents, ourselves one day.

There are limited Pfizer vaccines available. Will it be prioritised for these workers? Will they keep their jobs if they are unable to receive their vaccine of choice by September?

Lara Lau, East Bentleigh

A history of hotel leaks Burnet Institute epidemiologist Mike Toole says Daniel Andrews plan to restrict arrivals amounts to putting our hands up and giving up on making hotel quarantine safe (The Age, 2/7). According to Professor Toole, we can do better in hotel quarantine, not limit overseas arrivals. Victoria has had a number of lockdowns due directly to failures in hotel quarantine. If we were going to do better at it, we would have done so by now. According to Professor Tooles own calculations, there have been 23 hotel quarantine leaks since November  about one every 10 days. Are these the kind of statistics designed to fill me with confidence that the system works?

Justin Shaw, Ringwood East Stop the polarisation It is with increasing disquiet that I watch the polarisation of Australians in regard to people returning from overseas. Many people live by travelling for work, including contract work, and it happens around the globe. There are many reasons people travel and in a pandemic some reasons will be more sound than others. By all means restrict the returning traveller caps if that is a sound risk-mitigation strategy, but for some Australians to demonise people because they do not live and work the way they do is straight out wrong.

Joanna Wriedt, Eaglemont

Try a public servant I have seen little comment on the fact that a lieutenant-general has been appointed to oversee the distribution of vaccines. Does this indicate that there is no civilian public servant capable of this task, or have we now a situation that the states need the authority of the armed forces to back up decisions made by a federal authority?

Penny Garnett, Castlemaine Permanently protesting The cynic in me wonders that whenever the pandemic subsides, will the anti-maskers start wearing masks as a right to protest that these are no longer obligatory. Probably.

Keith White, Red Hill South Architect of Iraq war

So Donald Rumsfeld has died (World, 2/7). He was one of at least a trio of guilty men responsible for dragging us into a war which was not necessary. Our then prime minister, John Howard, the deputy sheriff, is another one of the guilty men.

Geoff Charles, Mount Waverley Pot, kettle, black, China China will not be bullied, says President Xi Jinping on the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party (World, 2/7). A little bit of a contradiction I would think. Beijing is the bully-in-chief. There are enough examples the world over and one very close to home.

Helena Kilingerova, Vermont Power of the party When Xi Jinping announced that the Chinese Communist Party had changed the world, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. A glance at the nightly news, with the pandemic in its second year, provides ample proof of his truth, but not in the way he meant.

And, no, that is not an indictment of Chinese people who have no choice but to toe the party line in a repressive regime re: the Hong Kong pro-democracy group now in prison and the brave doctor daring to alert authorities (busy with the usual communist cover-up) to a new virus in 2019 who was promptly silenced and paid with his life.

Anna Lord, Croydon Congratulations, Pies As a Collingwood member, I take this rare opportunity of applauding Carlton for its vigorous support of Indigenous player Zac Williams due to the damaging racial abuse against him.

Tony Delaney, Warrnambool A duty to pay up I am surprised and delighted that the billion-dollar cleanup costs for the Northern Endeavour oil and gas rig will be paid for by a levy across Australian offshore petroleum companies. (The Age, 29/6).

Governments past and present have been overly generous to the likes of Shell, Woodside and Chevron, and no doubt others. Now listen to the industry spokesperson squealing about having to pay, after the massive profits they took in past decades. The imbroglio over our governments behaviour regarding Timors oil and gas reserves, and the ongoing legal gymnastics to cover it up, serves to demonstrate the extent to which we went to serve these multinationals. The greed, selfishness and hypocrisy are nothing short of breathtaking.

John Marks, Werribee Dare we risk using it? Pauline Charleston (Letters, 1/7) was looking for a suitably sexist crossword clue and I came up with sugar daddy but its all a bit syrupy and salacious. And risky.

Clyde Ronan, Yarrawonga Flawed moral philosophy

Jessica Irvines lament about the decline in school students taking economics (Opinion, 1/7) misses the point. For the past 30years at least, the discipline has been dominated by neoliberal ideologues sprouting bogus claims about the empirical certainties of their subject. Gaining historical and sociological insights to our economies is infinitely superior to mindless slogans about trickle-down effects and the benevolence of free markets. The study of economics in schools and universities has become the handmaiden of transnational corporations and their puppet governments intent on making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. If they want their discipline to flourish, economists have to understand that it is a social science. As Adam Smith explained, that makes it a form of moral philosophy  albeit in the current circumstances, a very flawed one.

Dr Allan Patience, school of social and political sciences, University of Melbourne Exciting and dynamic Many dedicated and enthusiastic teachers are working very hard to shore up student numbers in years 11 and 12 economics, including using a wide range of resources to make the subject real and relevant.

The Reserve Bank is doing a fantastic job resourcing teachers and students through its website with explainers, videos, articles, statistics and speakers at the ready. The fantastic female economists on The Business and Alan Kohlers snappy nightly updates are terrific, while articles by The Ages Jessica Irvine and Ross Gittins are favourites among teachers. Economics teaches students vital skills that enable them to contribute intelligently to discussion on many key issues. So, while it may be challenging, conceptual and analytical in nature, that should encourage more students to study it, not fewer. It is an exciting, dynamic and relevant subject.

Marg Wilson, East Brighton AND ANOTHER THING

Credit:Illustration: Matt Golding Politics If only Woorinen North were a swinging seat, wed have a chance of getting a car park even though we dont have a railway station.

Barrie Bales, Woorinen North What is Canavan getting for his support of Joyce to lead the Nationals? Another coal mine?

Gill Riley, Doncaster East A man of faith, Donald Rumsfeld has departed into the unknown unknown.

Ralph Bohmer, St Kilda West

Its time for another Its Time election campaign.

John Walsh, Watsonia Border closures. Dead right, Dan. Better out than in.

Dawn Evans, Highton Merit for our federal government seems to be based on who best rolls the pork barrel.

Leigh Smith, St Kilda The government has gained a rare triple D rating: deflect, defer, deny.

Brian Rock, Beechworth Vaccine rollout

Malcolm hit it on the head  a monumental stuff-up from Canberra all round.

Ian Anderson, Surrey Hills Scott Morrison, a marketing man first, a prime minister second.

Rosemary Lithgow, Maryborough Its government spin to talk about X million dose of Pfizer arriving in Y month. Joe Bloggs needs to know: When can I get my jab?

Sean Geary, Southbank Appointing a male lieutenant-general to run the rollout/stuff-up? Your everyday woman can do that.

Meredith James, Glen Huntly This government couldnt organise a give away at a misers convention.

Emilio Bedin, Narre Warren
Its a familiar feeling for Perth residents by now. A third snap lockdown and again no further cases of community concern detected during that time.

If there is more good news on Friday, the city of two million would typically come out of lockdown. But could the Delta strain and its ability to transmit during the most fleeting of interactions cause the state government to think twice?

Based on Perths previous lockdowns, the city is on track to ease stay-at-home orders on Friday evening, pending no further cases who have been in the community while infectious. Credit:Getty Images

Premier Mark McGowan has so far remained tight-lipped on what would be required for WA to lift its four-day lockdown at midnight on Friday, initially telling the community it would be the minimum time the stay-at-home orders would be in place.

We dont know how long or how extensive the lockdown will be until [Friday] at the very earliest and then it may well be theres a step down in measures, he said on Thursday.
Mr Morrison said there would be four phases of the plan, but moving from the first to the second is the most substantial step. It will rely on putting a figure on the percentage of people who will need to be vaccinated before it is considered safe to allow the virus to circulate within the community, a figure which has not been decided. Once that threshold has been crossed, those not vaccinated will be far more susceptible to falling ill to the virus.

National cabinet agreed to slash the passenger cap by 50 per cent to relieve pressure on the hotel quarantine system, where leaks of the virus  and therefore lockdowns  were routine. In a bid to offer some hope for those still waiting in line to return home, home quarantine will be trialled for vaccinated travellers and the Commonwealth pledged to facilitate increased repatriation flights to Darwin.

While that was the dominant message, the biggest policy shift was a win for Labor premiers Daniel Andrews, Queenslands Annastacia Palaszczuk and West Australias Mark McGowan, who all argued that overseas arrivals must be reduced until our low vaccine rollout rate improved substantially.

As much of Australia is living through or coming out of lockdown, Prime Minister Scott Morrison finally gave the nation its first glimpse of how the end of this pandemic could play out. While it was scant on detail and timelines, it made one thing clear: those who get vaccinated are going to have more freedoms down the track than those who choose not to be inoculated.

As a real-world example, at present virtually all COVID-19 deaths in the US are linked to people who are not vaccinated. The US dramatically reduced its restrictions with just under 70 per cent of the adult population having had one dose and almost 60 per cent being fully vaccinated. With Australia used to living free of the virus, that level may need to be higher to ensure that our health system can cope and to avoid deaths. At present, around 8 per cent of Australians are fully vaccinated.

It will also be dependent on whether new variants of the virus appear that are even more infectious than the Delta, which, at the moment, is spreading more widely than most. The other factor will be whether new variants that appear can be contained by the vaccines in use today, or whether a booster will be required.

In the meantime, besides a lower intake of overseas arrivals, the next six months will probably look very much like the past six months. Mr Morrison may have got a commitment to only use lockdowns as a last resort but most states preference to enact restrictions hard and fast will be a difficult habit to break. Even NSW, which has been the most successful at preventing lockdowns, may be hesitant next time around to leave it to testing and contact tracing to contain a future outbreak.

For more than 30,000 Australians wanting to come home from overseas, this is a devastating decision, with arrivals to dip from about 6000 a week to 3000. The national cabinet has concluded that Fortress Australia is the only option for a few months at least until our low rate of vaccination is addressed, and it wont be addressed until more Pfizer vaccines arrive later in the year.

For Mr Morrison, this plan gives him a chance to move on from a messy week triggered by the last national cabinet meeting on Monday. It was during that gathering that the Prime Minister first floated the idea of giving indemnity to GPs so they can offer the AstraZeneca vaccine to adults under the age of 40, which led to a rancorous round of squabbling.
AUBURN HILLS, Mich., July 1, 2021 --

Total sales up 32%

Retail sales up 27%

Strong sales results for Jeep, Ram, Dodge, Chrysler and Alfa Romeo brands

Jeep delivers second best ever Q2 U.S. retail sales

Jeep Wrangler  Best quarter ever for U.S. retail sales

Jeep Wrangler 4xe  No. 1 best-selling plug-in hybrid

Jeep Gladiator  Best quarter ever for U.S. retail and total sales

Dodge Durango  Best second quarter for U.S. retail sales since 2005

Ram total sales rose 47% year-over-year

Chrysler total sales rose 36% year-over-year

Alfa Romeo total sales rose 34% year-over-year

Driven by strong consumer demand for Jeep, Ram, Dodge, Chrysler and Alfa Romeo brand vehicles, FCA US LLC reported a 32% increase in second-quarter sales over the same time period a year earlier. Retail sales rose 27% for the quarter. Fleet accounted for 12% of total sales.



"The recovering U.S. economy and continued strong demand for our products drove unprecedented results," U.S. Head of Sales Jeff Kommor said. "We continue to work closely with our suppliers to mitigate the manufacturing impacts caused by the various supply chain issues facing our industry."



The Jeep brand continues its trailblazing performance, recording a 19% increase in total sales year-over-year, and its second best ever second quarter for U.S. retail sales. Wrangler recorded its best quarter ever for U.S. retail sales, while Gladiator posted its best quarter ever for U.S. retail sales, as well as U.S. total sales with 29,962 vehicles.



The Jeep lineup continues to grow. Since the full launch of the Wrangler 4xe earlier this year, it quickly became the No. 1 best-selling plug-in hybrid in the marketplace. In June, the all-new 2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee L, the first ever three-row Grand Cherokee, began making its way to dealerships. An all-new Jeep Grand Cherokee two-row and its 4xe electrified version is scheduled to debut later in 2021.



The Ram brand was also a bright spot during the quarter, delivering 187,750 total sales, a 47% increase on a year-over-year basis. Ram pickup trucks rose 40%, while the Ram ProMaster Van and ProMaster City drove 129% and 132% increases in total sales, respectively, over the prior year.



Powered by Challenger, Charger and Durango, Dodge brand total sales rose 42% year-over year. Separately, total sales of Challenger rose 52%, Charger rose 95%, and Durango rose 53%. The second quarter was also the best ever quarter for total sales of the Challenger Scat Pack and Charger Scat Pack, and the best retail second quarter for Durango since 2005. The Brotherhood of Muscle will grow stronger on Saturday, August 14, as thousands of automotive enthusiasts attend this year's ultimate car festival of legal street racing, Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge at M1 Concourse in Pontiac, Michigan.



Total sales of the Chrysler brand increased 36% to 18,900 vehicles compared to Q2 of last year, driven by the Chrysler 300 and Chrysler Pacifica. The Pacifica Hybrid, the minivan segment's first-ever hybrid vehicle and the only plug-in hybrid minivan, also recorded its best ever second quarter total sales.



As Alfa Romeo celebrates its 111th anniversary, the brand marked yet another reason to celebrate as its second-quarter U.S. total sales rose 34% over Q2 of the prior year. The Stelvio SUV increased 38%, the Giulia sedan increased 31% and the Alfa 4C increased 8%.



Stellantis will share its electrification strategy on Thursday, July 8, at 2:30 p.m. CEST / 8:30 a.m. EDT during its EV Day 2021 hosted by Stellantis Chief Executive Officer Carlos Tavares. Details for accessing the event, along with the supporting materials, will be available under the Investors section of the Stellantis corporate website at www.stellantis.com. A recorded replay will be accessible on the Group's corporate website.



FCA US LLC Sales Summary Q2 2021























Q2 Sales Vol % CYTD Sales Vol %



Model Curr Yr Pr Yr Change Curr Yr Pr Yr Change



Compass 14,195 18,401 -23% 34,154 48,221 -29%



Patriot 4 0

4 1 300%



Wrangler 69,020 56,463 22% 118,666 96,131 23%



Gladiator 29,962 19,568 53% 48,784 34,827 40%



Cherokee 29,235 23,263 26% 67,158 56,938 18%



Grand Cherokee 52,726 46,326 14% 107,924 96,409 12%



Renegade 15,297 12,695 20% 31,294 26,859 17%



JEEP BRAND 210,439 176,716 19% 407,984 359,386 14%



Ram P/U 164,232 117,448 40% 313,068 246,253 27%



ProMaster Van 18,129 7,913 129% 29,009 17,498 66%



ProMaster City 5,389 2,322 132% 8,593 4,418 94%



RAM BRAND 187,750 127,684 47% 350,670 268,170 31%



200 2 0

3 3 0%



300 5,668 2,787 103% 11,062 8,383 32%



Town & Country 1 0

1 0





Pacifica 13,229 11,069 20% 47,571 35,594 34%



CHRYSLER BRAND 18,900 13,856 36% 58,637 43,980 33%



Dart 1 2 -50% 2 5 -60%



Charger 22,363 11,456 95% 42,103 30,084 40%



Challenger 15,052 9,880 52% 30,148 22,018 37%



Viper 0 0

2 0





Journey 5,885 5,434 8% 12,765 20,586 -38%



Caravan 1,158 5,291 -78% 2,867 30,222 -91%



Durango 17,855 11,694 53% 38,415 29,499 30%



DODGE BRAND 62,314 43,757 42% 126,302 132,414 -5%



500 8 239 -97% 12 566 -98%



500L 84 124 -32% 153 254 -40%



500X 403 395 2% 668 678 -1%



Spider 396 581 -32% 873 969 -10%



FIAT BRAND 891 1,339 -33% 1,706 2,467 -31%



Giulia 2,219 1,692 31% 4,284 3,451 24%



Alfa 4C 43 40 8% 67 71 -6%



Stelvio 2,756 2,002 38% 5,313 3,915 36%



ALFA ROMEO 5,018 3,734 34% 9,664 7,437 30%



FCA US LLC 485,312 367,086 32% 954,963 813,854 17%





















FCA US LLC

FCA US LLC is a North American automaker based in Auburn Hills, Michigan. It designs, manufactures, and sells or distributes vehicles under the Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, FIAT and Alfa Romeo brands, as well as the SRT performance designation. The Company also distributes Mopar and Alfa Romeo parts and accessories. FCA US LLC is a subsidiary of Stellantis N.V. For the methodology of determining FCA US LLC monthly sales click here.



These statements are based on current expectations and projections about future events and, by their nature, are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties. They relate to events and depend on circumstances that may or may not occur or exist in the future and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on them. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed in such statements as a result of a variety of factors, including: volatility and deterioration of capital and financial markets, changes in commodity prices, changes in general economic conditions, economic growth and other changes in business conditions, weather, floods, earthquakes or other natural disasters, changes in government regulation, production difficulties, including capacity and supply constraints, and many other risks and uncertainties, most of which are outside of our control.

SOURCE FCA US LLC
State Farm, Ford Come Together to Improve the Safety and Overall Cost of Vehicle Ownership

Jun 29, 2021 | DEARBORN, Mich.As vehicle technology and safety systems continue to evolve, State Farm and Ford are working together for the benefit of their shared customers. State Farm and Ford completed a yearlong pilot project in which the companies shared vehicle build data to better understand how certain safety features impact claims.

The exchange of information lowered the overall cost of vehicle ownership for many of the companies shared customers by better matching price to risk. Insurance rate adjustments were made in the first half of 2021, with savings of up to 20%.

Ford's new Vehicle Build Data product provides State Farm a comprehensive view of a vehicle's feature content and a better understanding of how advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) impact the frequency and severity of auto claims. State Farm is also sharing claims data with Ford to help inform them on how specific vehicle features impact auto claims.

As the pilot expands, State Farm customers with certain Ford, Lincoln or Mercury products dating back to 2010 can benefit from this data sharing partnership.

Were finding solutions for the future by grounding everything in data, research and insights, State Farm Vice President of Operations Craig Isaacs said. What's unique about this project is we're not just looking at the make and model of a vehicle, but ultimately to the individual safety features on each vehicle.

Our new build data API piloted with State Farm is another way were using data to help our customers get the most out of their Ford, at a lower total cost of ownership, Fords Digital Insurance Manager, Ford Enterprise Connectivity, Tim Meek said. Whats more, State Farm can access build data back to 2010, which means second and third owners also benefit.

State Farm and Fords decades-long history of sharing loss experience and technical information helps make roads safer for all drivers.

About Ford Motor Company

Ford Motor Company is a global company based in Dearborn, Michigan, that is committed to helping build a better world, where every person is free to move and pursue their dreams. The companys Ford+ plan for growth and value creation combines existing strengths, new capabilities and always-on relationships with customers to enrich experiences for and deepen the loyalty of those customers. Ford designs, manufactures, markets and services a full line of connected, increasingly electrified passenger and commercial vehicles: Ford trucks, utility vehicles, vans and cars, and Lincoln luxury vehicles. The company is pursuing leadership positions in electrification, connected vehicle services and mobility solutions, including self-driving technology, and provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company. Ford employs about 186,000 people worldwide. More information about the company, its products and Ford Motor Credit Company is available at corporate.ford.com.

About State Farm

The mission of State Farm is to help people manage the risks of everyday life, recover from the unexpected, and realize their dreams. State Farm and its affiliates are the largest providers of auto and home insurance in the United States. Its 19,200 agents and 57,500 employees serve approximately 85 million policies and accounts  which includes auto, fire, life, health, commercial policies and financial services accounts. Commercial auto insurance, along with coverage for renters, business owners, boats and motorcycles, is available. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company is the parent of the State Farm family of companies. State Farm is ranked No. 36 on the 2020 Fortune 500 list of largest companies. For more information, please visit http://www.statefarm.com.
Growth Energy Thanks Senate Republicans for Pushing to Protect the RFS







See Also: Ethanol Is The SAVIOR of the Oil Industry, American Auto Industry, Internal Combustion Engine, Convenience Stores, Automotive Supply Chain, and More!

Washington DC June 30, 2021; Following reports that the Biden Administration is considering bailouts for oil refineries, Iowa Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley led a strong coalition of Senate Republicans in a letter to the president urging him to uphold the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). In their letter, the Senators referenced President Bidens campaign promise to promote and advance renewable energy, ethanol and other biofuel.

Growth Energy CEO Emily Skor thanked Senators Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), as well as Senators Thune (R-SD), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) for holding the Biden Administration accountable to honoring the presidents commitments on the RFS:

Were grateful to our Senate champions for urging President Bidens Administration to not enact decisions that would reverse course on his commitments to support biofuels, said Skor. Biofuels have repeatedly proven to be a solution that can be used today to reduce emissions and help our nation achieve our climate goals. Lowering, waiving, capping, or any backtracking on the RFS damages our ability to decarbonize our vehicle fleet, threatens large agricultural markets, and jeopardizes hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs supported by the biofuel industry. We certainly hope Biden Administration officials, especially at the Environmental Protection Agency, heed this letter, support the RFS, and keep annual conventional biofuels blending targets at 15 billion gallons.

Skor recently addressed this issue before the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Subcommittee on Rural Development and Energy. Watch her testimony here.
With the skyline of Denver in the background, an unidentified worker heads on to a light rail train car to perform final-minute details to prepare the vehicle for service on Sunday, April 9, 2006, at the Regional Transportation District's repair facility in the south Denver suburb of Englewood, Colo.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron addresses the media after the return of a grand jury investigation into the death of Breonna Taylor, in Frankfort, Ky., Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020.
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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.
Staff Reporter

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.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster speaks with reporters Thursday, April 23, 2020, after the first meeting of accelerateSC, his advisory group about reopening the state economy in Columbia, S.C.
Gov. Tony Evers seen here in a picture from early June in his statehouse office.
Board will conduct national search to select new leader

Cheyenne Regional Airport Director Tim Barth announced his retirement, effective the end of September 2021.

The Cheyenne Regional Airport Board (CRAB) will conduct a national search to replace Barth. Cheyenne Regional is Wyomings largest airport.

Over the past six years, Barth has modernized the Airport by bringing the private side of the aviation industry into the Board's full menu of services through the Fixed Base Operator. He oversaw completion of an $18.5 million commercial terminal and worked with local leaders to secure the restoration of commercial jet service. He has also left the airport on solid footing by securing funding for a $60 million infrastructure project to replace the main runway, ensuring runway needs will be addressed for the next 30 plus years.

It has been an honor to work with the wonderful people of Cheyenne and Laramie County, Barth said. I am proud of all that weve accomplished together, especially our work culture and how we move customers through clean, safe and secure facilities. We brought excellent air service back to Wyomings capital city.

Prior to serving as Director in Cheyenne, Barth was the Manager of Aviation at Longmont Airport, served as Operations Manager at Birmingham, Alabama and was on the transition team to close the old Stapleton Airport in Denver and open the new DIA in 1995.

Barth said working with the talented Board of Directors and staff at Cheyenne has been a highlight of his career.

He added that the time is right for a new Director to guide the airport through implementation of a 20-year Master Plan to improve parking, amenities, and additional air service.

Its the perfect time to hand over the controls to a new Director to lead our growing airport into the next decade, Barth said.

A timetable and details of the search process will be worked out in the coming weeks.
The Mighty Ninety gathered to conduct a change of command ceremony June 28, 2021, on the Argonne Parade Field, F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming, to welcome the 90th Missile Wing's new commander, Col. Catherine Barrington.

Col. Peter Bonetti, the outgoing commander of the 90 MW, shared his gratitude toward the wing.

I would be a fool if I didnt recognize the help I've received this entire time, said Bonetti. I can see everyone here now in the front row, all the people whove been there for me.

He explained that the support extended past Cheyenne.

We talk about this place as a military community and I just dont think it is--its a military family, Bonetti said. No matter where you go in Wyoming youll always have help from your military family.

After the passing of the guidon, Barrington spoke about her serving as the new 90 MW Commander.

To the men and women of the Mighty Ninety, Wranglers its good to be home, said Barrington. Wranglers, rest assured I will work tirelessly to make sure you have everything you need.

Most recently, she was the 20th Air Force Operations and Communications director, F.E. Warren AFB. Her time there led her to be the 90 MW commander.

Barrington set the expectation on what we will bring to the fight.

Our nation relies on the combat capability you bring, said Barrington. We will provide that.
Cheyenne, WY (82001)

Today

Sunny skies this morning. Scattered showers and thunderstorms developing during the afternoon. High 86F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Isolated thunderstorms early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Low 58F. Winds NW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
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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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Francisco A.J. Camacho of Friendsville is an undergraduate student at George Washington University, writes for The GW Hatchet, and has contributed to The Tennessean in Nashville and The Daily Times. He welcomes responses, comments and questions relating to his pieces at P.O. Box 363, Friendsville, TN 37737.
130 Countries Back Global Minimum Corporate Tax of 15 Percent, Despite Vocal Opposition

Officials from 130 countries on June 1 agreed to establish a new framework for international tax reform, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced.

The two-pillar package would mean that multinational companies, including Big Tech, would be forced to pay a minimum 15 percent tax in each country they operate in, regardless of whether firms have a physical presence there.

This would remove the incentive to use tax havens and legal schemes to shift profits to low-rate countries where they do little or no business.

The OECD said more than $100 billion in profit is expected to be reallocated to market jurisdictions each year, while about $150 billion is expected to be raised from the global minimum tax rate.

Additional benefits will also arise from the stabilisation of the international tax system and the increased tax certainty for taxpayers and tax administrations, the organization added.

The organization said 130 countries, including the United States, UK, China, and France representing more than 90 percent of global GDP, have backed the agreement at the talks, and their finance ministers are scheduled to approve the agreement on July 9.

A source told Reuters that it had taken tough negotiations to get Beijing on board. A U.S. administration official said there were no China-specific carveouts or exceptions in the deal.

The conclusion of the negotiations, including the remaining elements of the framework and the implementation plan, will be finalized by October 2021 as well as a plan for effective implementation in 2023.

However, the agreement comes despite staunch opposition from low-tax countries such as Ireland, Estonia, Hungary, Peru, Barbados, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Kenya, who did not sign the agreement.

Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe, whose country has attracted many big U.S. tech firms with its 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, said he was not in a position to join the consensus, but would still try to find an outcome he could support.

After years of intense work and negotiations, this historic package will ensure that large multinational companies pay their fair share of tax everywhere, OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said in a statement. This package does not eliminate tax competition, as it should not, but it does set multilaterally agreed limitations on it.

It also accommodates the various interests across the negotiating table, including those of small economies and developing jurisdictions. It is in everyones interest that we reach a final agreement among all Inclusive Framework Members as scheduled later this year, Cormann added.

President Joe Biden also called the agreement an important step in moving the global economy forward to be more equitable for workers and middle class families in the United States and around the world.

With a global minimum tax in place, multinational corporations will no longer be able to pit countries against one another in a bid to push tax rates down and protect their profits at the expense of public revenue. They will no longer be able to avoid paying their fair share by hiding profits generated in the United States, or any other country, in lower-tax jurisdictions, Biden said in a statement.

This will level the playing field and make America more competitive. And it will allow us to devote the additional revenue we raise to making generational investments, which are necessary to keep Americas competitive edge razor sharp in todays global economy, he added.

Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the agreement marks a historic day for economic diplomacy.

Todays agreement by 130 countries representing more than 90 percent of global GDP is a clear sign: the race to the bottom is one step closer to coming to an end, Yellen said in a statement.

The announcement comes ahead of further talks on tax reforms expected to be held between finance ministers at G20 meetings in Venice in July, ahead of a final endorsement by the full G-20 summit of country leaders in October.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A soldier from the Indian government forces stands guard during a gun-battle started between suspected militants and Indian government forces at Malhoora on the outskirts of Srinagar on June 28, 2021. (Tauseef Mustafa/AFP via Getty Images)

5 Suspected Rebels, Indian Soldier Killed in Kashmir

Five suspected rebels and an army soldier were killed in a gunfight in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Friday, officials said, as violence in the disputed region has increased in recent weeks.

The gunfight erupted shortly after scores of counterinsurgency police and soldiers launched an operation based on a tip that militants were present in a village in southern Pulwama district late Thursday, police said.

Five militants were killed in Fridays incident, police said in a statement, and Inspector-General Vijay Kumar called the operation a big success.

Government forces have stepped up operations against anti-India rebels in the region, which is divided between India and Pakistan and both nuclear-armed rivals claim the territory in its entirety.

Suspected militants have also carried out attacks on police and in one case killed two family members of a police official.

On Wednesday, Indian police said government forces killed three suspected militants in a gunfight and recovered a rifle and two pistols.

However, family members of one of the slain men said that 17-year-old Zakir Bashir was picked up from home, killed in custody, and then presented as a militant who died fighting.

Police insisted that the teenager had joined rebel ranks just a few days before he was eliminated.

Last week, suspected militants barged into the home of a low-ranking police official and fatally shot him along with his wife and their daughter.

On June 22, assailants shot and killed a police intelligence officer in the regions main city of Srinagar. Police blamed militants.

Indias military last week said it thwarted a major threat when it intercepted two drones flying over an army base in the regions Jammu area, a day after suspected explosives-laden drones were used to attack an air base there.

Rebels have been fighting Indian rule since 1989, seeking to unite 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 struggle.

Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels, and government forces have been killed in the conflict.
John Garrod, of Arvada, stands holding a blue line flag at the beginning of a line of about 30 police cars lined up for a procession in honor of the officer who was fatally shot in Arvada, Colo., on June 21, 2021. (Colleen Slevin/AP Photo)

Ambush Attacks Against Police Officers Have Dramatically Surged in the Past Year: Police Group

The National Fraternal Order of Police (NFOP) on Thursday said the number of attacks on police officers and other law enforcement officials has dramatically risen over the past year.

The group, which isnt a union but describes itself as the worlds largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers, said that ambush-style attacks on police are up by about 91 percent so far in 2021. Thats compared with the same time period in 2020, according to the group.

In a tweet, the NFOP said the United States is witnessing a SURGE in violence against the brave men and women of law enforcement, noting that in 2021, 150 officers have been shot, 28 officers have been killed by gunfire, and 51 officers have been shot in ambush-style attacks.

Separately, the Washington D.C.-based Police Executive Research Forum found that between April 2020 and April 2021, police retirements were up by about 45 percent and resignations rose by 18 percent, according to a report from the New York Times.

The findings are sure to prompt more criticism of the left-wing defund the police movement that gained momentum during riots and Black Lives Matter demonstrations last yearwhich critics have said has led to a spike in violent crime and a rise in police officers quitting or retiring early.

During demonstrations last summer, protesters repeatedly chanted other anti-police slogansincluding ones calling to abolish the police. Simultaneously, rioters in places in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis physically assaulted officers, leading to scores of injuries.

Thousands of people take part in a demonstration to defund the police in support of Black Lives Matter in Toronto, Canada, on June 19, 2020. (The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette)

And a day before releasing its findings, the NFOP made note of the movement and tied it to soaring homicide rates nationwide. Mayors, the group said, need to restore the rule of law and oppose rogue District Attorneys not prosecuting violent crime that allow criminals to roam free.

NFOP Vice President Joe Gamaldi told the Daily Caller that the uptick in crime was partially triggered by lax bail laws, or bail reform, that allows suspected criminals to be allowed back into society.

People are out on multiple felony bonds, shooting another person and getting out again. When theres no consequence with actions, youll see an uptick in crime, he told the outlet this week, noting that among officers, morale has never been as bad as it is right now.

According to recent polls, meanwhile, Americans dont favor the defund the police movement. An ABC News/Ipsos poll in mid-June found that 64 percent oppose the slogan while 34 percent support it. A poll released in May by USA Today showed that only 18 percent of respondents had a favorable view.
Are US Spy Services Monitoring the Oppositions Communications?

Commentary

Fox News host Tucker Carlson has reported during the last week about a whistleblower who told him that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been monitoring his electronic communications with the intention of leaking them to get his show taken off the air. While most of the prestige press has dismissed Carlsons claims, the whistleblower may have struck just the tip of the icebergits possible that along with Carlson much of the leadership of the American opposition movement is also under surveillance.

The NSA denied that Carlson is an intelligence target of the Agency. It explained on its Twitter account that the NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that may harm the United States. With limited exceptions  NSA may not target US citizens without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting.

As absurd as it sounds, its not hard to imagine U.S. officials presenting phony evidence to a secret court to try to show that an American TV star is actually a foreign spy. They did it when the former host of Celebrity Apprentice ran for president in 2016. Its worth noting that the same guild of national security experts and corporate media personalities who ridiculed Donald Trumps claim that the Barack Obama administration spied on his 2016 campaign are the same people now mocking Carlson.

Last May, Trumps acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell released a list with names of dozens of senior Obama officials who spied on the Trump circle through transcripts of foreign intelligence intercepts provided by the NSA. The long, yet incomplete, list is evidence that the Obama White House nurtured a culture of surveillance and espionage at the highest levels of government.

Many of those Obama officials have been named to senior posts in the Joe Biden administration, which is only logical. Since they werent held accountable for violating their fellow citizens constitutional rights, and likely illegal activities, they were rewarded for their part in a successful operation to destroy officials from the opposing party.

Samantha Power is Bidens head of the United States Agency for International Development. As Obamas U.N. ambassador, she was an avid reader of foreign intelligence intercepts. Those classified documents are redacted by intelligence analysts to protect the privacy of U.S. persons (American citizens and permanent U.S. residents) and entities.

Requests from senior officials to provide the names of Americans whose identities are minimized in transcripts are rare, but Power asked the NSA to unmask Americans frequently, perhaps several hundred times according to news reports. Former Republican congressman Trey Gowdy called her the largest unmasker of US persons in our history. Among other Trump officials, she unmasked during the 201617 presidential transition period was incoming national security advisor (ret.) Gen. Michael Flynn.

So did Susan Rice, now Bidens Director of the Domestic Policy Council. Under Obama, she unmasked Flynns name, as well as those of Trump aides Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, from a transcript of a foreign intelligence intercept. As Vice President, Biden also unmasked Flynns name from a transcript that apparently documented a phone call with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Since Obama officials leaked the transcript of Flynns call to the pressa felony offense for which no one was chargedCarlson has good reason to believe that the Biden administration was planning on leaking details of his communications, too. Indeed, because so many of the Obama administrations spies are now working for Biden, its not hard to guess how the new team is likely monitoring Carlsonby using the same method they employed to capture Flynns communications.

Typically, it is the Justice Department and the FBI that go to court to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows them to task the NSA to collect the communications of the person they are targeting. The easiest way to spy on Americans is to leave their names out of it and simply use reverse-targetingthat is, collect the communications of a foreign national with whom the American is in contact. To get Flynns communications, they zeroed in on a foreign official whose communications were already of keen interest to senior officials, and with whom the incoming national security advisor would obviously be in touchRussias ambassador to Washington.

As a journalist, Carlson is likely in contact with a number of foreign nationals, and if you wanted to spy on him, youd just watch his show and zero in on one of his foreign guests, like the president of El Salvador, whom he interviewed earlier this year. There are probably all sorts of people Biden law enforcement officials could choose, but here is one possible scenario:

In September Carlson interviewed for the first time a Chinese scientist who fled to the United States early during the pandemic. Dr. Li-Meng Yan told the Fox News host that COVID-19 did not originate in nature but alleged it was engineered in a Chinese government lab in Wuhan with which she was once affiliated.

The lab-leak hypothesis, which was labeled a conspiracy theory when relayed by Trump and Republican officials like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton before the 2020 election, is now accepted in mainstream American political discourse as a plausible explanation of the origins of the pandemic. But Yan went even further. She said the coronavirus was intentionally spread to the world by the Chinese government.

This sent Americas globalist oligarchs into a frenzyafter all, the source of the political and corporate elites wealth, power, and prestige is its relationship with Chinese Communist Party elites. Yans assessment therefore stung Big Tech as much it did Beijing. Her Twitter account was suspended, while Facebook and Instagram flagged her interview with Carlson as fake news.

In the current political environment, where disinformation is the catchword for anything not endorsed by the establishment media and the spy services, this would have suited federal law enforcements a case for collecting her communications. They would say they need to know if she is part of a foreign intelligence operationperhaps working with one of Chinas rivals, or people inside China.

The political rationale for wanting to know what she knows and might say is obviousCOVID-19 was the Democratic candidates on-ramp to the White House. Bidens handlers used the pandemic to legitimize the use of widespread mail-in-voting, which both parties previously insisted was a recipe for voter fraud. Further, Biden ran on the promise that hed handle COVID better than Trump.

But if it came to pass that China had turned a bioweapon loose on the world, and U.S. spy chiefs either missed that fact or buried it to hurt the incumbent while hundreds of thousands of Americans died, thats bad news for the administration and its allies in the intelligence bureaucracy. So even if they arent officially spying on Yan, who has become a frequent guest on Carlsons broadcasts, it is certain they are watching her.

But shes still not as worrisome to them as Carlson is. With Trump pushed to the sidelines, for the time being anyway, the 52-year-old journalist is the America First movements leading voice. His nightly monologues are seen by millions of Americans as essential reporting and commentary on the corruption, criminality, and incompetence of the ruling class. Regardless of what the NSA says through its Twitter account, there is no doubt the oligarchy wants to shut down his show, evidenced by the fact that advertisers are constantly pressured to shun it. Getting him canceled would blow up an important channel through which the leadership of the opposition communicates with each other and to its rank and file.

Spying on the oppositions top journalist to destroy him is bad enough, but it may be even worse. If they are collecting Carlsons communications through his contacts with a foreign national, its important to know that in accordance with the so-called two-hop rule, FISA also allows the spy services to monitor the communications of those with whom Carlson is in contact. It was because the FBI had a FISA on Trump 2016 campaign volunteer Carter Page that it was able to sweep up the communications of the entire Trump team, likely including the candidate, and later president.

So Carlsons sources and gueststhat is, the political, intellectual, and cultural leadership of the oppositionmay also be under surveillance. And thats the question that needs to be asked of Attorney General Merrick Garlandis the FBI collecting the communications of the opposition, starting with its most prominent leader?

Lee Smith is a senior fellow at Americas Future, and the author of the recently published book The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Arizona Governor Ducey Signs $12.8 Billion Budget

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey on June 30 signed off on a $12.8 billion state spending plan that includes $1.3 billion in immediate tax cuts and millions in targeted investments for education, child care, public safety, and wildfire prevention.

Each and every Arizona taxpayer, no matter their income, will experience a tax cut under our historic tax reform, Ducey said in a statement on Wednesday. That means job creators will continue to choose our state to expand operations, working families will get to decide how they spend more of their hard-earned dollars, and those who [have] served our nation will rightfully keep more of their own money.

The Republican governor said the budget, signed a day before the new fiscal year went into effect, fulfills his commitment to working families, veterans, and protects small businesses from a 77.7 percent tax increase.

The spending plan will reduce income taxes by 13 percent, saving the average taxpayer about $340 a year.

It also establishes a 2.5 percent flat tax, phased in over three years beginning Jan. 1, 2022. The governor hailed it as the lowest flat tax in America.

While were giving money back to taxpayers, this budget makes responsible, targeted and substantial investments in the things that matter, Ducey said. Under this budget plan, Arizona is paying off more than $1 billion debt, were helping to protect families with the most sweeping child care package in the nation, and were making record investments in K-12 and higher education, infrastructure, public health and public safety.

Many Democrats and some Republicans, however, have come out against the governors tax cuts, saying they benefit only the states wealthiest earners and protect them from the impact of a new 3.5 percent tax surcharge that voters approved to increase education funding.

The budget plan eliminates taxes on retirement pay, saving each veteran an additional $650 a year.

For education, this years budget earmarks $20 million for school transportation and another $10 million next year, and commits over $40 million for early literacy education.

Regarding education, Ducey said, We are making targeted investments to support educators, families and students across the state so our kids continue to excel in and out of the classroom.

In September 2020, the governor announced an infusion of $14 million to support Arizona universities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new budget adds to that support by allotting $68.6 million to the states three public universities and over $48 million for scholarships for unemployed workers who return to the workforce, including in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs, and rural community college financial aid.

As part of a $1.5 billion public safety investment under Arizonas budget, $13 million will go to provide State Trooper body cameras and $55 million will be provided for border security.

Defending Arizonas southern border from drug cartels and human trafficking during the Biden-Harris border crisis could not be more important, Ducey said. Arizonas budget delivers on border security and other critical public safety investments.

Ducey said the budget guarantees over $900 million in spending to help child care providers with financial support and reimbursements, and covers child care subsidies for unemployed Arizona residents returning to the workforce.

Also included in the budget is $321 million for public transportation infrastructure and road rebuilding projects, and expanding safety and transportation capacity; $100 million for wildfire protection; and nearly $40 million for health and human services.
Former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett (second from left) moves ballots during an election audit at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Ariz., on May 1, 2021. (Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images)

Arizona Auditors Still Waiting for Missing Items Subpoenaed From Maricopa County: Senate Leader

The Arizona state Senate will need to request routers and passwords that are being withheld by Maricopa County election officials to complete the audit of the 2020 election results, said an audit spokesman, while State Senate Leader Karen Fann said county executives still havent delivered several missing items related to a court-ordered subpoena issued earlier this year.

Randy Pullen, a spokesman and liaison for the effort, said Thursday that after speaking with state Senators, they will determine the next steps to take. Some electronic data stored by Maricopa County needs to be evaluated by the audit team.

We have none of that information has been provided to us, and its something that the Senate will have to go back to the county and request those items, he told reporters as the audit team was moving out of the Phoenix Coliseum on Thursday. So again, its very difficult to complete the audit without getting that information.

Whats at stake, Pullen explained, are a few minor things over software additions to Maricopa Countys systems. He didnt elaborate on the software.

We got some additional information for the county, he added. Apparently there was a difference on how many duplicate ballots there were per batch, so they gave us a new list and so we had to create software that took that data and compared it to our data to deal with the duplicate ballots.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Karen Fann, in response to questions about the possibility of subpoenas being issued, told The Epoch Times that her office and auditors are still waiting for the Maricopa County Supervisors to provide us with the missing items on the original subpoena as ordered by the court.

The Arizona Senate has extended our contract with the State Fairgrounds for two weeks at the Wesley Bolin building. Our vendor is finishing the aggregation process which is double and triple-checking the tallies of the hand counts, spreadsheet, tally sheets, image scanning etc., she continued in an email. This is a critical step to ensure the tallies can be accurately verified which will give us a path forward in completing the audit.

Before the audit commenced in late April, there was a back-and-forth legal battle between the Senate and Maricopa Countys executives. A judge ultimately ruled that the legislative bodys subpoenas were valid and could proceed with the audit.

Late last week, a spokesperson for the audit team confirmed that the paper ballot examination and counting phase of the audit is complete. More work is needed to be done offsite, and Republicans have said the final report will be released late in August or September.

Another liaison, Ken Bennetta former Arizona secretary of statetold NBC News that the count is finished but, according to him, the audit is just starting. Election reviewers, Bennett added, recently obtained documents that are crucial to the process.

Those documents are critical to understanding how many ballots were taken out of every almost every batch and sent to duplication and therefore have to be accounted for in accounting for all of the ballots, he said Thursday, referring to the logs about duplicate ballots. Those records, Bennett added, were obtained through AUDIT USA, an outside group supporting the audit.

Democrats and legacy news outlets have frequently characterized the audit as being politically motivated as well as being fraught with errors and security lapses. Fann and other Republicans have categorically denied the claims.

And Maricopa County, meanwhile, declared that the election equipment that was reviewed by the auditors was compromised, announcing in a press release that the machines would be replaced. Fann described Maricopa Countys letter as another attack on the audit and argued Maricopa cannot provide any evidence suggesting the machines were tampered with.

Maricopa County has not yet responded to a request for comment about the possibility of new subpoenas. A spokesperson for the county told NBC that the Senate has not subpoenaed the logs about the duplicate ballots, saying that it fulfilled a request to hand over the documents after an AUDIT USA request in mid-June.
A blood-soaked sheet sits among evidence markers following a shooting where three people were shot at the Wentworth Gardens housing complex in the Bridgeport neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois, on June 23, 2021. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

As Chicago Murders Rise, Battles Over Police Reform Laws Intensify

Chicago continues to be the U.S. poster city for random and senseless violence. During the last weekend of June, 77 people were shot and two mass shootings occurred almost back to back.

Hours after Chicagos Puerto Rico Day parade on June 19, a Puerto Rican driver and passenger were dragged from their car by a mob after a minor traffic accident and shot execution-style. The spark from the gunfire can be plainly seen in a video before the offenders run off. The slaying resembles a lynching that might occur in a lawless, poor country but not in the U.S.s third-largest city.

The growing violence has spilled over into Chicagos downtown Loop, where most commerce is conducted and tourists traditionally visit. On June 19, a Maryland graduate student pursuing a doctoral degree in criminal justice was fatally stabbed to death in broad daylight allegedly by a homeless man who police say is connected with other crimes. The next day, in broad daylight, a woman was shot in the leg in a hotel lobby in the same area.

Following a lack of prosecutions by Cook County State Attorney Kim Foxx for post-George Floyd demonstrations in Chicago involving looting and arson, debate about crime statistics in Chicago has become heated. Chicago Police Department figures show that murders in 2021 have increased by 30 percent from 2019, and police Superintendent David Brown admitted at a news conference that shootings in Chicago are up 17 percent and homicide five percent compared to the same time in the past year.

But, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot recently claimed that there was a slight decrease in crime in June and blamed rising crime on COVID-19-related shutdowns of the Cook County court system, an explanation which Chicago aldermen rejected.

The New York Times reported that Chicagos rise in its murder rate for 2020 is expected to be around 25 percent, the largest increase in U.S. history, in records dating to 1960 and noted that murder rates were higher in 31 of the 37 cities that cut police budgets.

Anti-Police Sentiment is the Elephant in the Room

Defund the police protests and the acrid sentiment behind them have had a huge effect on law enforcement, say experts. Everything from investigations and finding criminals to response time suffers from drastic budget cuts Maria Haberfield, a professor of police science, told CNN.

Were going to lose more young people without a strong police force, said Eric Adams, a New York mayoral candidate. Ninety-five percent of those victims  are black and brown, 95 percent of the shooters are black and brown.

Police officers who spoke to The Epoch Times anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to media, confirmed that the legal and social backlash against police affects policing. Most people dont realize how much we are being handcuffed procedurally and legally, said a Chicago area officer. Between pension issues, the move to repeal qualified immunity, and lack of public and city support, morale and recruitment have never been lower.

We always do our sworn job, but rushing to a crime scene while it is still active or wrestling with someone who is out on warrant and skipped court doesnt feel so great when we have no public support for doing it, another officer told The Epoch Times.

Probably a third of Illinois sheriffs are looking for an exit point because of the anti-law enforcement climate, said Terry Trueblood, Chairman of Trustees of the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police, referring to the state-wide situation. Illinois state Senator Darren Bailey, a guest on the Facts Matter Moments show, agreed. I cant imagine what police officers are going through knowing that anytime you ask someone to stop  your hands are tied.

New Criminal Justice Law Created Divisions

Criminal justice legislation signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker in February 2021, Illinois House Bill 3653 or the SAFE-T Act, had been in the works in the Illinois General Assembly but was accelerated after the death of Floyd. The bill was intended to address systemic racism in Illinois policing, but a coalition of opponents that included the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) State Lodge, FOP Labor Council, FOP Chicago Lodge 7, Illinois Sheriffs Association, Illinois State Troopers Lodge 41 and the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, called the 764 pages bill anti-police. Moreover, coalition members told The Epoch Times that law enforcement had little chance to read the bill and that it was passed in the early morning hours during a so-called Lame Duck Session.

What was so unusual was that none of the FOP saw anything in the bill until the first day of the veto session, Tamara Cummings, general counsel for the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police Labor Council, told The Epoch Times. For example, a measure that made Illinois the first state to end cash bail was too vague, said Cummings. A judge would decide if an individual posed an immediate threat but threat was linked to a specific person and not the public in general so the threshold was too high.

Another problem, Cummings said, was a provision in the bill that did not allow a police officer to view body camera footage before writing a report when deadly force was used. If anyone thinks an officer can write an accurate report after deadly force without viewing the footage, they are mistaken. As an example, she cited the May killing of Champaign, Illinois police officer Chris Oberheim during a domestic violence call. How could Officer Oberheims partner who was also wounded in the attack write an accurate report from such a traumatic incident?

Bill 3653 ties the hands of police officers while pursuing suspects and making arrests and allows criminals to run free without bail, said the coalition. In the dark of night, Illinois legislators made Illinois less safe.

A Follow-up Bill Was Written and Passed at the End of June

Resistance to Bill 3653 from law enforcement continued after the bills passage. Activists including Terry Vorderer, a former Oak Lawn police officer, encouraged Illinois residents to contact their respective state lawmakers to request a trailer bill that would incorporate concerns of the law enforcement community into HB 3653 before it took effect July 1. On June 25, Pritzker signed the trailer bill.

Ed Wojcicki, executive director of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, noted that HB 3653 was rushed through the legislature and beat the end-of-session deadline with only 30 minutes to spare. He told The Epoch Times he was pleased with the passage of the trailer bill. We supported it because it fixed many of our most egregious concerns, and we appreciated the negotiations led by Sen. Sims and Rep. Slaughter, which led to a good trailer bill.

Police Support and Community Safety Are Linked

A relationship between state and local governments support of police and effective law enforcement exists, according to most experts. After the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the concept of the Ferguson effect was introduced, suggesting that increase in crime is connected to less proactive policing due to community distrust and hostility toward police.

According to Rashawn Ray, a sociologist and fellow at the Brookings Institution, even without an outright abolition of a police department, fewer resources and officers on the street have an effect on community safety. The National Police Support Fund reports that after defunding measures, homicides in Minneapolis increased by 60 percent, and in Atlanta homicides soared to their highest numbers ever.

According to a previous Epoch Times report, the Chicago Police Department has lost close to 700 officers since 2019. The number of officers hired in 2020 was a mere 157 compared with 464 officers hired in 2019.

Young officers are leaving Chicago and going somewhere else, whether its a suburb or out of state all entirely, John Catanzara, head of Chicagos Fraternal Order of Police, told The Epoch Times. Some say they have just had enough, he said. There also continues to be friction between the Fraternal Order of Police and Mayor Lightfoot and Police Superintendent David Brown.

I do feel the value of proactive policing has been lost; you do not have to be a social scientist to see there is [a] link between handcuffing the police force and a rise in crime, Cummings told The Epoch Times.
People are seen queuing to enter a mass COVID-19 vaccination hub on May 10, 2021 in Sydney, Australia. (Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

Australia Prepares to Discuss Vaccination Targets to Avoid Lockdowns

Scott Morrison and state and territory leaders are set to discuss vaccination targets to eliminate lockdowns and border restrictions.

The prime minister will chair a virtual national cabinet meeting from Canberra on Friday.

Mr Morrison has spent weeks arguing there is no magic number of vaccinations that will trigger Australia to reopen its international borders and ending domestic restrictions.

But with more than 12 million people in lockdown across Australia, he now concedes it is time to set clear expectations around what percentage of the population needs to be vaccinated.

Its time to start laying it out for the Australian public, Morrison told The Australian.

It is imperative the premiers, chief ministers and I address that question. It comes down to the medical science and what are the magic numbers.

The prime minister said modelling had already been done on the Alpha variant and was almost complete on the more contagious Delta variant.

The package the public deserves needs a consolidated agreement from all of us.

The national cabinet will also discuss reducing the number of international arrivals in hotel quarantine until more Australians are vaccinated.

Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia want the returned traveller cap slashed by up to 80 per cent.

The federal government has left the door open to further tightening the international border.

State premiers also want to tighten the eligibility criteria for Australians to travel overseas and return home, concerned too many people are being allowed to come and go as they please.

As well, they want nationally agreed vaccination targets that would allow for different quarantine arrangements for incoming travellers based on risk.

The perennial topic of Commonwealth-led alternatives to hotel quarantine that can be used in the short-term will also be thrashed out.

Emerging from two weeks of quarantine at The Lodge, the prime minister said it was time for the country to switch gears after getting through the last 18 months.

The country is very much keen for us to chart that way out of where we are, he said.

Morrison said he was encouraged by Thursdays record day for vaccinations, with more than 160,000 people receiving their jab nationwide.

He said Australia remained on track to vaccinate all eligible adults by the end of the year.

Almost eight per cent of Australian adults are now fully vaccinated, but the nation lags far behind all other comparable countries.

The national cabinet meeting will focus on the bungled national rollout and mixed messaging around the AstraZeneca jab.

The prime minister triggered a week of competing claims about vaccine advice after highlighting a path for younger people to receive AstraZeneca after consulting with their GP.

After days of confusion and conflicting statements, Australias expert immunisation panel reiterated its advice that Pfizer was preferred for all people aged under 60.

Their advice is based on the small risk of rare blood clots associated with the AstraZeneca jab
Long queues of people are seen at the NSW Vaccination Centre in Homebush in Sydney, Australia on July 1, 2021. (Jenny Evans/Getty Images)

Australias 4 Phase Transition to Post Vaccination Freedoms

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has outlined Australias roadmap out of CCP virus lockdowns and restrictions after Fridays national cabinet meeting.

Morrison said state and territory leaders have affirmed a four-phase plan to transition Australias national COVID-19 response from its current pre-vaccination settingswhich focus on the suppression of community transmissionto post-vaccination settings that focus on the prevention of serious illness, hospitalisation, fatality, and the public health management of other infectious diseases.

We agreed in principle that that plan consists of the following phases, each triggered by the achievement of a vaccination threshold expressed as a percentage of the eligible population, that is 16+, based on the scientific modelling conducted for the COVID-19 Risk Analysis COVID-19 Task Force, Morrison told reporters on July 2.

This means that each step of the four-phase plan would be triggered when a percentage of the eligible population aged over 16 had been vaccinated against COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison visits the CSL AstraZeneca vaccine manufacturing facility in Melbourne, Australia on Feb. 12, 2021. (David Caird-Pool/Getty Images)

The first phase is the one we are invaccinate, prepare and pilot, he said. Where we continue to suppress the virus. That involves the implementation of the national vaccination plan to offer every Australian an opportunity to be vaccinated with the necessary doses of the relevant vaccine as soon as possible.

Phase one: includes reaching a certain vaccination threshold after offering all Australians the chance to get the vaccine.

Phase two: the post-vaccination phase is when the focus shifts from suppressing the virus to minimising serious illness, hospitalisation, and death.

Phase three: the consolidation phase where health authorities manage COVID-19 consistent with other infectious diseases like the flu.

Phase four: the full return to normal with no lockdowns or border closures, and quarantine only for unvaccinated travellers.

Measures the government may implement during phase two include imposing fewer restrictions on vaccinated people, such as lockdowns and border controls; that lockdowns would only occur in extreme circumstances; to restore caps on international arrivals for unvaccinated travellers with even larger caps for those who are vaccinated; allow capped entry of student and visa holders; new quarantine arrangements for vaccinated residents; and implement the vaccine booster program.

During phase three, the measure implemented by the government may include no lockdowns, vaccine booster program, exempting vaccinated people from all domestic restrictions, abolishing all caps on vaccinated international travellers arriving, increasing entry for visa holders, lifting all restrictions on outbound travels for vaccinated people, and extending travel bubbles to other countries.

The final penultimate phase, where the experts and leaders hope society will return completely to normal, may see measures that allow uncapped arrivals for vaccinated travellers without quarantine, and allowing uncapped unvaccinated arrivals subject to pre-flight testing with quarantine.

Registered Nurse, Mesfin Desalegn administers the Pfizer vaccine to a client at the St Vincents Covid-19 Vaccination Clinic in Sydney, Australia on July 1, 2021. (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

Morrison said Australia had reached a record eight million doses of vaccine administered, which was one million jabs in the last eight days.

Almost three million doses were administered in June, amid fresh outbreaks and lockdowns, during which officials urged Australians to get vaccinated in the face of the more transmissible Delta strain, which Morrison described as being more virulent.

But Australias Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly contradicted this statement, telling reporters at the same press conference that the Delta variant was not more severe.

The Delta strain is difficult. Its difficult to control. Its the latest of a range of strains that weve heard about. Those so-called variants of concern, Kelly said at the press conference after the national cabinet meeting.

He said Australia needed to learn how to live with the new strains, learn about them, and modify the approaches to them.

I think crucially we know from this particular variant of concern it is definitely more transmissible. It can move from person to person more easily than previous strains, he said.

But he added, It is not more severe.
Authentic Purity: Shen Yun Showcases a China Before Communism

Rooted in tradition and honor of the divine, the performance presents the best of classical Chinese culture

In order to see some of the best art of Western civilization, you have to look up.

On the ceilings of palaces and churches are sweeping scenes of the heavens, of allegories and saints and divine beings in all their magnificencefeats of technical and technological innovation, a mastery of skill coupled with a flourishing of human creativity and imagination that rivals anything invented today.

Most famous of them all, perhaps, is Michelangelos fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Rather than a scene of heaven, the story of humanity plays out across the center panels of the ceiling, from the creation to the fall to the salvation of man, with semidivine onlookers observing from the corners.

Art at its best touches our humanity, answering our deepest questions, helping us to find meaning in life.

You think, What would heaven be like? If there was a heaven, what would that be like?' said Jared Madsen, a longtime emcee of Shen Yun Performing Arts, a New York-based classical Chinese dance company. This seeking for the divine, seeking for something higherthats really what you see throughout a lot of Chinese culture and throughout a lot of our performance.

The great thing is, in our performance, you can have somebody who not only seeks, they actually get to go to heaven. They get pulled up and they get to fly into heaven. They get to see the [celestial fairies], and they have a whole experience like that.

These are things I think every human is thinking about, that were all wondering about. And we get to actually see this on the stageits amazing.

Madsen is referring to a uniqueand patentedproduction element of Shen Yun, which presents Chinese culture from before the advent of communism.

While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) takes as its purpose to struggle against heaven, earth, and man, traditional Chinese culture is the opposite, centered around the belief in harmony between heaven, earth, and humankind.

Scenes of celestial palaces, of the Creator coming down to set into motion 5,000 years of civilization, of divine beings coming to the aid of the good and faithful, of human beings from history to modern-day grappling with these deep questions relating to the purpose of lifeall of these become a living work of art rendered in expressive dance, brilliant costumes, and a digital backdrop that extends the screen into the cosmos. Shen Yun brings together the kind of brilliance in imagination and mastery of skill and technique that is required to form a masterpiece.

It is a cultural show but at the same time it goes much deeper than that.  It connects to something at the root of humanity, Madsen said.

This is the authentic, traditional Chinese culture that the CCP doesnt want you to see.

The Truth About China

Shen Yuns mission is to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, according to the companys website. The ancient Chinese believed that this civilization was divinely inspired, passed down from the gods, and they kept it intact for five millenniauntil the bloody communist coup in 1949. And after the CCP took power, it launched the Cultural Revolution, which rooted out traditional culture by smashing temples, burning books, and brutalizing innocents. All told, the CCPs rise to power resulted in at least 50 million to 60 million deaths.

Much was lost, and the culture in China under the communist regime was warped, but the historical legends, myths, and characters lived on in the memories of some in China and abroad. In 2006, artists from around the worldincluding some who fled Chinacame together in the land of the free to form a company whereby they could express a culture that was all but lost, and present it on the worlds stage.

Traditional Chinese culture is rooted in divine thought, Madsen saysBuddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Central to the culture is respect for the divine, and the belief that good people are blessed and evil is punished.

This holistic view of humanity is what initially drew Madsens interest in Chinese philosophies, back when he was in high school. In our modern-day, technology-dependent, and largely secularized world, questions about where we come from, the purpose of life, and what awaits us beyond arent ones that are explored in day-to-day conversation. But Madsen found some answerssometimes to questions he hadnt even imaginedin the ancient philosophies that he began to read, and he developed a great fascination for China.

And then I went to China, Madsen said. This was in the 1990s, and the reality was bleak. I quickly realized these amazing things that I was reading about in various books about Confucianism and Taoismright at the very moment I landed in China, it was a wakeup call: Oh, this is a communist society.'

In a sense, when Madsen encountered Shen Yun, it was like coming home.

Beauty That Lifts the Soul

Dante, the poet supreme, wrote that beauty awakens the soul to act.

Shen Yun principal dancer Evangeline Zhu feels the same. Beauty is not just pleasing to the eye. A pure and transcendent sort of beauty, what the medieval and Renaissance scholars and artists might refer to as objective beauty, or what the Romantics might call the sublime, can move the soul.

There is a crucially important aspect of art, and that is its aesthetic principle, Zhu said. What is beauty? What isnt beautiful? The arts are all about beauty, but the particular standard of an art form is very important.

But, in todays world, people dont agree on what is beautiful. We say its in the eye of the beholder, or its my taste. Given that, I think the mind and moral understanding of the artist is as important as their skill. To express transcendent beauty, the artist must seek to understand what it means.

Shen Yun takes this quest of understanding beauty seriously; its very name means the beauty of divine beings dancing. Even the costumescouture embellished with more detail than any audience member will ever fully catchare done with respect to authenticity, created after the dynastic dress that was said to be inspired from the heavens.

For me, the form of art that can broaden peoples minds, that can evoke their humanity and move their hearts toward kindness, thats beautiful, Zhu said.

Classical Chinese dance is famously expressive and lends itself well to storytelling through dance. Shen Yuns performances include around a dozen storytelling dances, each set to an original composition of ancient Chinese melodies performed by a Western classical orchestra, with a few Chinese instruments mixed in. These tales tell of love and heartbreak, of joy and tragedy, the relationship between a parent and child, and of heroes demonstrating honor and courage as they defend their people. Zhu has seen many an audience member moved to tears through her performance.

Dance is a form of communication, she said. It transmits something beyond language, and through the senses, you communicate and impress upon the audience something profound.

What are you going to communicate?  I think this is important for an artist to think about.

Shen Yun principal dancer Evangeline Zhu. (NTD Television)

Inspiring Goodness in Peoples Hearts

What those audience members tend to leave with are inspiration and hope.

Recently, after a long hiatus, people who had planned to see Shen Yun perform at Lincoln Center, only for the shows to be canceled mid-tour because of the pandemic, finally got the chance. In Stamford, Connecticut, on June 26, Shen Yun kicked off a new season.

Its very spiritually uplifting, Chris Fiene, an engineer, said. After the pandemic, its very joyful to finally experience a show with other people and see them enjoy it as well.

John Connor Blow walked out of the theater with his arms raised, expressing his gratitude. I was moved to tears in joy, said Blow, who had dreamed of seeing Shen Yun all last year. And its changed my life.

You can feel a connection from me to the dancers and the situation theyre trying to portray. I feel wonderful. Its an incredible experience, said Diego Mansilla, a professor at the University of Massachusetts. He and his wife, Adel, had waited nearly three years to see Shen Yun, prolonged by the pandemic, but it was worth the wait.

Some of Shen Yuns dance pieces portray tragedy, but also the triumph of the good of humanity, Diego said. No matter the adversity depicted, the ending of each story brought goodness and hope.

Adel said this was something that would stay with them in their daily lives, a reminder to make sure that this bad side never wins inside of us  [and] that the goodness they [the performers] showto keep it inside of me and make the conscious choice that I dont want to be with the bad forces.

Theyre doing so much to show it to us, to inspire  this authentic purity, she said. How can I come home and be mad about things? I cant.  I feel like Im responsible now to continue what they gave us. They gave with so much effort.

NTD contributed to this report.

The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. For more information, please visit ShenYunPerformingArts.org
A student walks toward Royce Hall on the campus of University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in Los Angeles, Calif. on March 11, 2020. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

Banking on China: University of Californias China Collaborations Under the Spotlight

In the past decade, the University of California (UC) system faced a sticky situation.

Staring down the barrel of precipitous cuts in state funding, UC needed to find benefactors to make up for the shortfall. It found its savior in the form of Chinese students who were willing to fork out around three times as much tuition as Californian residents to attend one of the systems 10 campuses, which include some of the most prestigious public universities in the country.

Billions in tuition rolled in, and now UC boasts the largest number of Chinese students and scholars in the United States.

The universitys dependence on Chinese students for cash flow is not a unique phenomenon. Its emblematic of deepening academic and economic links between Western institutions and China that until recently has attracted little scrutiny.

While U.S. universities often tout that collaboration with Chinese institutions serve to advance scientific endeavors and ultimately benefit humankind, the security risks and threats to academic freedom had often been overlooked.

These threats were highlighted by former President Donald Trumps administration, which cast a spotlight on the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) sweeping efforts to influence and subvert American colleges: its engaging in an expansive campaign to steal U.S. research, including through recruitment programs aimed at transferring foreign know-how to China; and its economic influence means universities are often silent on sensitive issues that shine the spotlight on the CCPs abuses. Meanwhile, Beijing-backed Confucius Institutes and overseas Chinese student groups act to jeopardize academic freedom and free speech on campuses.

The depth of the ties between American universities and China was so concerning to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that he warned in December that U.S. schools were hooked on Chinese Communist Party cash.

So many of our colleges are bought by Beijing, Pompeo said in a speech at Georgia Tech.

Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party is poisoning the well of our higher education institutions for its own ends, and how those actions degrade our freedoms and American national security.

China Links

For UC, collaboration with Chinese institutions goes back decades. But its relationships advanced beginning in the early 2000s.

In 2005, UCs 10 campuses signed an agreement with 10 top Chinese universities to form the 10+10 Alliance. The alliance was meant to enhance cooperation in scientific research between Chinese and American institutions of higher learning, and promote academic and cultural exchange, based on a copy of the agreement provided by UC.

Under the pact, UC would accept Chinese students whose studies were funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council, a scholarship fund established by Chinas education ministry for Chinese students to study abroad, according to Chinese media at the time.

Then-Chinese Deputy Minister of Education Qingping Zhao attended the agreement signing ceremony on Oct. 10, 2005, and UC representatives later met with Chinas then-Minister of Education Ji Zhou after the ceremony.

Less than a decade later, UC Berkeley partnered with Tsinghua University and the Shenzhen City government to establish the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), a graduate studies facility that focuses on research in environmental science and new energy technologies, information technology and data science, and precision medicine and healthcare.

The tripartite venture between the two universities and the city was the first of its kind in China. At the institutes opening ceremony, UC Berkeley was congratulated by Tsinghuas president as being the first Western university to participate in a new collaborative framework known as the government-universities-industries partnership (GUIP) model.

At the opening ceremony in September 2014, two agreements were signed, according to a Chinese media report. One was between UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University, the other was between the two universities and Shenzhen City government.

The ceremony featured speeches by then-Shenzhen City Mayor Qin Xu, then-Tsinghua University President Jining Chen, and then-Berkeley University Chancellor Nicholas Dirks. The Chinese officials who attended the ceremony included Shenzhen City CCP Committee Secretary Rong Wang, and Tsinghua University CCP Committee Secretary Xu Cheng.

Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute is a model that establishes never-before-seen relations between universities. It is a milestone that establishes brand-new collaborations among universities, government, and industries in new adventures and practices, then-Tsinghua University President Chen said at the ceremony.

Then-Chancellor of UC Berkeley Dirks said the two universities would work together to meet complicated social and economic challenges facing the United States, China, and the globe, according to a report by Tsinghua University News.

The institutes current oversight committee includes three members: UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ, Tsinghua University President Yong Qiu, and Shenzhen City Mayor Rugui Chen.

In line with Chinas GUIP model, the institute has built extensive relationships with companies across an array of industries.

According to its Chinese language website, TBSI has an external advisory board and an industry advisory board that include a long line of high-level executives from leading Chinese and Western tech corporations, as well as investment firms, venture capital companies, and insurance companies.

Tech firms advising TBSI include: Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE, Chinas biggest internet company Tencent, and American firms Cisco, Apple, and Applied Materials. European tech company Siemens Ag, and Taiwans Delta Electronics are also on the list.

Tsinghua and Chinas Military-Civil Fusion Strategy

UC Berkeleys Chinese collaborator Tsinghua University has been at the forefront of research and development, supporting Beijings military-civil fusion (MCF) strategy. This state-led policy prescribes that technology developments generated by universities and civilian industries be harnessed to advance the regimes military modernization.

The strategy also directs collaboration with foreign universities to acquire cutting edge research and technology to advance its efforts to achieve a world-class military by the year 2049, according to a 2020 U.S. state department document (pdf).

Dubbed Chinas MIT, Beijings Tsinghua is Chinas top science and technology university. It conducts a range of military research, hosting at least eight defense laboratories, including one that works on air-to-air missiles, according to the China Defense Universities Tracker online database compiled by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Another lab is called the Military-Civil Fusion Laboratory for Peak Technologies.

The university is also supervised by the regimes defense industry agency, the State Administration of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense.

Having signed a cooperation agreement with the regimes nuclear weapons program in 2014, Tsinghua has trained students for the program, as well as the broader defense industry, ASPI said. In 2013, 40 doctoral students at the university were sponsored by the program to study nuclear technology and required to work for the agency after graduating.

To promote MCF, Tsinghua even created a specialized masters degree program, Engineering Management of Military-Civil Fusion, which is geared towards current or retired military personnel.

The university also worked directly with top-level Chinese military and defense academies to offer seminars and training to promote MCF in different provinces in China. Some Chinese factories have invited Tsinghua to give advice on how to participate in the state strategy, according to Chinese media.

In 2018, Tsinghua received more than $14 million from the Science and Technology Committee of Chinas Central Military Commissiona party organ that oversees the militaryto work on an Artificial Intelligence project for the military, according to a Chinese state media report.

The university also has a research and development center in Luoyang city of Henan Province. One of the centers roles is to promote MCF. Its marketing center also has a military product division.

In September 2017, the third Military-Civil Fusion Tech Development Expo was held in Beijing. Its main host was the CCPs Central Commission for the Development of Military-Civil Fusion (CCDMCF), the body that oversees the strategy that works directly under Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Under direction from CCDMCF, Tsinghua University planned, organized, and participated in the expo, according to reports by Chinese media.

Among the expos co-hosts were top CCP bodies, including the Department of Equipment Development of the Central Military Commission, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Defenses Administrative Bureau of Science, Technology, and Industry, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the National Association of Industry and Commerce.

CCDMCF selected 15 technologies and products developed by Tsinghua to present at the expo, more than from any other university, Chinese media reported. A highlight was Chinas fastest supercomputer developed by Tsinghua researchers.

Tsinghua has not only been a major actor in the implementation of MCF, it also aided in the formulation of the national strategy.

In October 2015, Xi made MCF a national priority in a meeting of the CCPs Central Committee, a top decision-making body of the regime, state media reported at the time. The direction was to establish a nation-wide system for the management, operation, and policy system for MCF.

After the meeting, Tsinghua led a research project that analyzed similar military-civil collaboration efforts in the United States, Japan, Russia, and Israel. The results, published in May 2016, recommended the regime establish its own MCF path, drawing on takeaways from the four countries experiences.

Seven months later, the Central Commission for the Development of Military-Civil Fusion was formed in January 2017, with Xi as its director.

The regimes MCF strategy was targeted by the Trump administration, which blacklisted a bevy of Chinese tech and defense companies that aided the military. Trump also issued an executive order that barred U.S. investments in a group of Chinese military-linked companies that form part of the MCF strategy. President Joe Biden recently expanded the list of Chinese firms caught by the ban.

Cheated in China

The lack of protections for intellectual property in China is well known. Amid deepening collaboration between U.S. and Chinese scholars, some Western academics have come to experience this first hand.

In July 2020, Chinese media reported on renowned UC San Diego professor Fu Xiangdong who accused a Chinese research team of stealing his pioneering research on Parkinsons disease. Fu made the accusation in a letter that he sent to Chinas Ministry of Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciencethe countrys top state-run research instituteand the Natural Science Foundation of China, a regime-funded scientific research institution.

Fu led a team at UC San Diego conducting research on Parkinsons disease. After nine years of work, Fus team published a research paper in Nature (a British scientific journal) in June 2020. Fus team discovered they were able to eliminate Parkinsons symptoms in mice by inhibiting the PBT gene.

But the alleged copy-cat Chinese research team beat Fu to the punch, publishing a similar research paper in Cell (a peer-reviewed scientific journal) two months earlier. The team was led by Yang Hui from Shanghai Institute of Neuroscience (ION), a branch of the Chinese Academy of Science.

According to Chinese media, Fu was invited to ION to present his research on June 14, 2018, about 18 months before the professor submitted his research results to Nature. During the presentation, Fu revealed many details about his experiments, the lab set-up, and research findings.

Yang was one of the audience members in attendance. At the dinner after the presentation, he also asked Fu many detailed questions about this research.

Following this, Yang immediately instructed his own research team to set up a new research project along the lines of Fus work, according to Chinese media. Piggybacking off information from Fus years of research and lab work, Yangs team was able to complete its work in less than two years, and got it published in Cell in April, two months ahead of Fus paper in Nature.

Fu, in his 60s, is one of the leading figures in his field of cellular and molecular medicine. He joined UC San Diego in 1992 after earning a doctorate at Ohios Case Western Reserve University in 1988 and a masters from Wuhan University in China in 1982.

Yang, meanwhile, is 28 years old, and received his PhD in China in 2012. According to Chinese media, Yangs research paper was based on less than one year of lab testing data. He is also a founder and chief scientist of a pharmaceutical company, according to Chinese media.

Yang first denied Fus accusation, but later made a statement to deeply apologize for not being able to keep Fu updated about our research progress, adding that he appreciate[s] Fus contribution to our work.

Fu, in a phone interview with The Epoch Times, said that it was a common practice for researchers to reveal undisclosed information in presentations such as this. But he now regrets ever giving a presentation at ION, during which he revealed some sensitive details about his research.

The researcher said he didnt seek any legal assistance from UC in pursuing the dispute.

Fu also told The Epoch Times that he was invited to make the presentation at ION by a former colleague Poo Muming. Poo, a neuroscientist who resides in China, is currently a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and a founding director of ION.

Poo was born in China in 1948, not long before the CCP took power, but grew up in Taiwan after his family fled to the island a year after his birth. He came to the United States as a student in 1970 and later became a U.S. citizen in the 1980s.

The professor founded ION in 1999 as an institution under CAS, and kept holding research positions at both UC Berkeley and ION for more than a decade. He later became an emeritus at UC Berkeley to focus his efforts in China. In 2016, Poo won the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience for his pioneering study on the connections between neurons in the brain, a process integral to learning and memory.

In 2017, Poo gave up his U.S. citizenship to become a Chinese citizen, Chinese media reported. During an interview with Chinese media in 2018, Poo said: In my heart, I have always believed that I am Chinese. Working for my motherland is my biggest contribution to society.

Poo, in the interview, said he obtained U.S. citizenship only because it made international travel easier. He also explained that he dropped his American citizenship because he did not feel it was appropriate to keep such a status when presenting his Chinese research projects to the international community.

Also in 2017, Poo led a team at ION to produce the worlds first truly cloned primates, a pair of crab-eating macaques.

Fu and Poo became close when they both worked as professors at UC San Diego in the late 1990s, according to Fu. Poo later moved to work for UC Berkeley in 2000, but their relationship continued.

Fu said he felt betrayed by his former colleague because he had always thought of Poo as his friend.

Yang and Poo did not return requests for comment from The Epoch Times.

Thousand Talents

Fueling the rise in U.S.-China academic ties is the regimes push to lure foreign experts to work in China through its state-backed talent recruitment plans. These programs, such as the Thousand Talents Plan, offer Western scholars a salary, funding, and other perks to work and conduct research at Chinese institutions. They have been the focal point of criticism by U.S. officials who say the programs facilitate the transfer of research and know-how to China.

In the past two years, federal prosecutors have cracked down on U.S. researchers who have allegedly hid their ties to these programs and funding from China. While it is not illegal to sign on to a Chinese recruitment plan, U.S. researchers who receive federal grants are required to disclose foreign sources of funding to prevent taxpayer money being used to fund work done overseas.

The National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the United States, said in April that it flagged more than 500 federally-funded U.S. scientists who may have financial ties with China and other foreign adversaries.

In a high-profile case, Charles Lieber, former chair of Harvards chemistry department, was indicted in 2020 on charges relating to lying about his participation in the Thousand Talents Plan. Under the program, Lieber received hundreds of thousands of dollars to work at the Wuhan University of Technology, prosecutors allege. Meanwhile, he received millions in federal funding to work on sensitive research in the United States.

Lieber also received $1.5 million for the establishment of a joint research lab at the Wuhan University using Harvards name and logo without Harvards knowledge, prosecutors said. The former professor has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The Epoch Times uncovered around a dozen UC academics who have had academic collaborations with Chinese universities or research institutions, including those who have joined Chinas recruitment plans. All of the scholars identified work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

One of the academics is Lin Liwei, a mechanical engineering professor at UC Berkeley. He is a participant of Chinas Thousand Talents Plan, according to Chinese media reports. Lin also previously served as a co-deputy director of TBSI. Both Lin and UC Berkeley did not return a request by The Epoch Times about these reports.

In 2019, Zhang Kang, a prominent eye doctor at UC San Diego resigned amid scrutiny of his ties to the Thousand Talents Plan as well as his undisclosed interests in several Chinese biomedical companies.

Fu himself joined the Thousand Talents Plan a decade ago, according to the UC San Diego alumni website. Years earlier, he was awarded the prestigious title of Changjiang (Yangtze River) Scholar in Chinathe highest academic award issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education.

As part of the program, Fu worked as a visiting professor at Wuhan University from 2011 to 2016, while continuing his main research role at UC San Diego.

Fu told The Epoch Times he chose to work with Wuhan University because it was where he originally graduated. He said he didnt get any pay from Wuhan University, except coverage of his travel expenses.

Dangers of STEM Cooperation With China

The Chinese regimes promotion of academic linkages with Western institutions is part of its long-running strategy to bolster its totalitarian dictatorship by stealing from democracies worldwide, according to Robert Spalding, a senior fellow specializing in U.S.-China relations at Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute.

The CCPs new globalized dictatorship model enables the CCP to maintain its closed system for culture and human rights, but remain connected to the Wests ivory tower of academia for science and technology, Spalding, a retired Air Force brigadier general, told The Epoch Times.

Anders Corr, the publisher of the Journal of Political Risk and founder of Corr Analytics, said it was highly irresponsible for the UC system to continue STEM collaboration with China.

But dont expect the University of California to limit itself while other universities continue to take advantage of their relationships with Chinese universities, Corr told The Epoch Times.

The United States should enact laws to end STEM cooperation with the Chinese regime, including barring undergraduate and graduate students in these fields from China, according to Corr.

As long as China treats the United States and allies as enemies and chumps, those spots should be taken by American and allied students, with U.S. government funding if necessary, he said.

In May 2020, then-President Trump banned visas to Chinese graduate- or higher-level students affiliated with institutions that support the MCF strategy in a bid to guard against Chinese state-sponsored theft of American technology.

Around the same time, federal authorities zeroed in on a network of suspected undercover Chinese military researchers in the United States.

Last year, at least four Chinese researchers were arrested and charged with visa fraud for allegedly lying on their applications about their status as members of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), the official name of the Chinese military. One of those researchers, Tang Juan, a visiting researcher at the University of California Davis, was harbored by the Chinese consulate in San Francisco for weeks before she was eventually arrested in late July.

In another case, the justice department alleged that a PLA officer was tasked by supervisors in China to obtain information that would benefit military operations. Separately, prosecutors accused a PLA medical researcher of observing lab operations at a U.S. university so they could be replicated in China.

The investigations into these researchers have led to more than 1,000 military-linked researchers leaving the United States last year, according to a senior Justice Department official.

CCPs Control of Speech on American Campuses

The CCP has asserted its interests on American college campuses, including UC, through the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSA) and Beijing-backed Confucius Institutes.

Chinese consulates control and fund CSSAs to keep tabs on students and to press pro-Beijing causes, then-Secretary of State Pompeo said in the December speech. CSSA chapters are present at more than 100 U.S. colleges, including all 10 UC campuses.

In November 2017, the Chinese consulate in San Francisco reported on its website about an event where the consulate hosted a gathering of CSSA members in the area to study the documents released following a recently held National Congress of the CCP, the Partys most important political convention that convenes every five years.

According to the report, more than 40 CSSA members attended the study and discussion session. They were from UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, UC Davis, Stanford University, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Academy of Art University, and California College of Arts.

The scholars and students attending the event were told by Chinese consulate officials to have confidence in the CCPs leadership and Chinas socialist practice. They were also reminded not to forget to carry on their mission to support Chinas national rejuvenation, a slogan coined by Xi construed by analysts as indicating his desire to replace the United States as sole world superpower by mid-century.

Meanwhile, Confucius Institutes, billed as Chinese language and culture centers, have drawn mounting protest over their role in spreading CCP propaganda and exporting censorship to American schools.

Last year, the State Department designated the Confucius Institute U.S. Center in Washington as a foreign mission, recognizing it as part of the Chinese Communist Partys global influence and propaganda apparatus.

Confucius Institutes at UC Davis and UC Los Angeles closed last year, leaving the only remaining institute in the UC system at the Santa Barbara campus, according to the National Association of Scholars.

UC didnt return requests for comment from The Epoch Times.

Cathy He contributed to this report.
Archaeologists are looking for an available plot in Fredericksburg National Cemetery, which saw its last veteran burial in 1945. (National Park Service/Mary O'Neill/TNS)

Battlefield Cemetery in Virginia to Host First Civil War Soldier Burial in 75 Years

By Mark Price

From The Charlotte Observer

A Civil War cemetery in northern Virginia may soon host its first soldier burial in 76 years, after human remains were discovered on the grounds of a nearby battlefield hospital.

Archaeologists are looking for an available plot in Fredericksburg National Cemetery, which hasnt seen a veteran burial since 1945, according to the National Park Service. The burial is considered proposed until a suitable site if found, officials said.

The new grave will be the final resting place for the unidentified remains of US soldiers found in the City of Fredericksburg in 2015, the military park posted Wednesday on Facebook.

The remains were found near the RoweGoolrick House, which served as a hospital during the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Identities of the soldiers may never be known, but that is not unusual in an area known as Americas Battleground.

Fredericksburg National Cemetery was established in 1865 and is the final resting place for more than 15,000 Union soldiers who died in the major Civil War battles that occurred between Washington, D.C. and Richmond, Virginia, according to the National Park Service.

Historians say the constant presence or passage of armies for nearly two years mutilated the landscape in the area around what is now Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park. The region eventually became known as the place where the Civil War roared to its bloody climax, the park service says.

No place more vividly reflects the Wars tragic cost in all its forms. A town bombarded and looted. Farms large and small ruined. Refugees by the thousands forced into the countryside. More than 85,000 men wounded; 15,000 killedmost in graves unknown, the park reports.

Ground-penetrating radar has been used used at the crowded cemetery to find an open spot among the hundreds of stone markers. However, an exact site for the burial has not been chosen, officials said.

In this part of the process, the archaeologists need to make sure that the location of the proposed grave is clear of any other burials or archaeologically significant material, the park wrote.

These efforts are ongoing, and are the result of much cooperation and careful planning. We will be providing more updates (as) the work progresses.

(c)2021 The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.)

Visit The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.) at www.charlotteobserver.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko delivers a speech in Minsk, Belarus, on May 26, 2021. (Press Service of the President of the Republic of Belarus/Handout via Reuters)

Belarus Lukashenko Orders Closure of Border With UkraineBelTA

MOSCOWBelarus leader Alexander Lukashenko ordered on Friday the full closure of Belarus border with neighboring Ukraine, citing security reasons, BelTA state news agency reported.

Lukashenko told a gathering marking the countrys Independence Day that rebel groups that were planning to carry out a coup were uncovered in Belarus, BelTA reported.

A huge amount of weapons is coming from Ukraine to Belarus. Thats why I ordered border-security forces to fully close the border with Ukraine, Lukashenko said.

Belarus stand-off with the West intensified recently after it scrambled a warplane to force a Ryanair flight to land in order to arrest a government critic who was on the aircraft. Western countries condemned this move and imposed sanctions to punish Belarus.
Belarus opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya holds a picture of her husband Syarhei Tsikhanouski during a "Belarus support day" protest in Vilnius, Lithuania, on May 29, 2021. (Janis Laizans/Reuters)

Belarus Oppositionists Cry Foul After Embassies Suspended on Twitter

BERLINTwitter has suspended the accounts of a group of exile opposition groups that call themselves the Belarusian Peoples Embassies after they were accused of identity theft by Belarusian authorities.

The peoples embassy movement sprang up after last years presidential election, in which long-serving strongman Alexander Lukashenko claimed a resounding victory despite a widespread belief that the vote was fraudulent.

The resulting crackdown has seen hundreds thrown in prison, allegations that opposition activists were tortured, and spurred a lively exile movement in countries like Latvia, Lithuania, and Germany where many Belarusians live.

The various groups, which assert that Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, now living in Lithuanian exile, won the election, and acknowledge her as Belaruss legitimate President, argue that their social media accounts are in effect embassies of the Belarusian people, not Lukashenkos state.

Belarusian opposition politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya holds a picture of Belarusian politician Mikalai Statkevich as she gives a speech during the Sakharov Prize ceremony at the European Parliament in Brussels, on Dec. 16, 2020. (John Thys/Pool via AP)

Even though the regime is illegitimate, we never claim to be an official embassy, the Peoples Embassy group in Germany said in a statement. We represent the people, not the regime.

The group sent journalists and activists a screenshot of an e-mail from Twitter in which the platform said it had been made aware that this account violates Twitter rules, in particular against identity theft.

There was no proof that Belarusian authorities reported the three accounts, @BelarusinS, @BelarusInUK, and @BelarusInDE, representing groups in Spain, Britain, and Germany, all of which were listed as suspended on the Twitter platform on Friday afternoon, in a note that said Twitter suspends accounts that violate its rules.

But Belarus has stepped up its activities against exiled acti+-vists, most recently taking the almost unprecedented step of forcing a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania to land in order to arrest Roman Protasevich, an influential opposition journalist who was on board.

Lukashenkos regime tries to silence everybody who dares to say the truth or to fight him, the opposition group said in a statement.

Twitter did not immediately provide comment on the affair.
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo speaks during a daily press briefing at the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 7, 2021. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Biden Commerce Secretary: A Lot Of Jobs Lost in Retail, Service Industries Might Not Be Coming Back

Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a new interview that many pre-pandemic jobs, namely in the retail and service sectors, may never come back.

On Thursday, the Department of Labor released a report that new jobless claims dropped to 364,000 for the week. However, the data revealed that nearly 3.5 million Americans were collecting state unemployment benefits.

The real issue, I think, is that a lot of the jobs that folks lost are the kinds of jobs, lets say, for example, in retail or services industries, that might not be coming back or might not be coming back in the same numbers, Raimondo told CNBC on Thursday.

And so, what that means is, we have to lean into apprenticeships and job training and up-skilling, she added.

A June jobs report also showed that the United States added 850,000 jobs in May, which topped expectations. Analysts had reportedly anticipated 706,000 new jobs being created.

Retail added 67,000 new jobs in June, while another 194,000 new jobs came from restaurants and bars were added, according to the monthly jobs report.

President Joe Biden on Friday said the pick-up in hiring is a welcome development.

This is historic progress, pulling our economy out of the worst crisis in 100 years, driven in part by our dramatic progress in vaccinating our nation and beating back the pandemic as well as other elements of the American Rescue Plan, Biden said in remarks at the White House.

Manufacturing added a modest 15,000 jobs, with employment at motor vehicle assembly plants declining 12,300. A global semiconductor shortage has forced some automakers to cut production. Other manufacturing industries are also grappling with shortages of raw materials and workers.

Construction payrolls contracted for the third straight month. Though the sector remains supported by robust demand for housing, scarcity of workers and expensive raw materials like framing lumber are hampering homebuilding.

It came after economists and businesses claimed that the expanded federal unemployment benefits that were first authorized in March 2020 triggered a labor crunch. A number of GOP-led states have already ended the federal benefits program, which included a $300 weekly check from the government, as critics of the measure have argued that businesses cant find workers to hire.

The unemployment rate rose to 5.9 percent in June from 5.8 percent in May, according to Labor Department data. The jobless rate continued to be understated by people misclassifying themselves as being employed but absent from work. Without this misclassification, the unemployment rate would have been 6.1 percent in June.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Boeing Names New CFO, Elects Former Pilot and Air Force Lieutenant General to the Board

By Dominic Gates

From The Seattle Times

Boeing announced Wednesday the appointment of a new chief financial officer, Brian West, a former CFO at GE Aviation.

And Stayce Harris, a retired U.S. Air Force Reserve lieutenant general and former 747 captain with United Airlines, will join Boeings board.

Effective at the end of August, West will report to Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun and serve on the companys executive council.

He succeeds Greg Smith, Boeings CFO for the past decade. Smith was the most powerful Boeing executive beneath the CEO, and Wall Street views his replacement as a critical hire.

Smith was put in charge of not only the companys financials but also its enterprisewide operations and productivity. He oversaw the companys manufacturing, supply chain, quality and program management.

Boeing seems to want West also to fill a larger role than CFO, saying he will oversee the companys business transformation efforts.

Calhoun, who has worked with West previously, in a statement cited his significant financial management and long-term strategic planning experience in complex global organizations.

West most recently was CFO at Refinitiv, a multinational provider of financial market data and infrastructure with dual headquarters in New York City and London. Before that he was CFO at Oscar Health Insurance and at market data firm Nielsen.

Yet his main appeal to Boeings leadership is probably the 16 years he spent at General Electric, where he was CFO of GE Aviation and of GE Engine Services.

Former executives from the Jack Welch era of GE leadership, including former CEO Jim McNerney and current CEO Calhoun, have for many years been a core part of Boeings leadership and helped shape the culture that has prioritized protecting the companys financials and the stock price.

The newly elected member of the Boeing board has a military and airline background.

Harris, 62, previously served as assistant vice chief of staff and director, Air Staff headquarters,, United States Air Force. While in the Reserves, she was commander of the Air Force Reserves 22nd Air Force at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Georgia, leading more than 15,000 airmen. She also served as the first woman inspector general of the Air Force.

Harris is also an experienced Boeing 747 and 777 pilot, with over 10,000 flight hours. She was a United Airlines pilot for nearly 30 years before she retired.

Harris holds a bachelors degree in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Southern California and a masters in aviation management from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

She will serve on the boards Aerospace Safety and Audit committees.

Calhoun said Boeing will benefit greatly from General Harriss deep experience in aviation and aerospace gained throughout her decades of service as a commercial airline pilot and her stellar military career.

2021 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Boy Scouts of America Reaches $850 Million Settlement With Sex Abuse Victims

The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) on Thursday reached an $850 million settlement with attorneys representing some 60,000 victims of child sex abuse seeking compensation through the nonprofits bankruptcy proceedings.

According to a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, insurance rights will be signed over to a trust that would handle the abuse claims and distribution of payments to the tens of thousands of sex abuse victims.

The settlement with the Coalition of Abused Scouts for Justice and two other groups ensures we have the overwhelming support of survivors to emerge from bankruptcy, the Irving, Texas-based organization said.

Bringing these groups together marks a significant milestone  as the BSA works toward our dual imperatives of equitably compensating survivors of abuse and preserving the mission of scouting, the 111-year-old organization said in a statement.

Thursdays settlement requires a judges approval and could face opposition from insurers that would be on the hook for payouts.

In a court filing, affiliates of American International Group Inc, Chubb Ltd, Travelers Cos, and other insurers said the Boy Scouts excluded them from negotiations and gave victims lawyers too much of a say in crafting a settlement.

The BSA has approximately 2.2 million youth members between the ages of 5 and 21 and approximately 800,000 volunteers in local councils throughout the United States and its territories, according to the organizations website. More than 130 million young men and women have participated in the BSAs youth programs since its founding in 1910.

Last year, the BSA sought bankruptcy protection as its finances fell apart, largely due to the mounting sexual abuse claims dating back several decades, from men who were allegedly violated as youngsters by Scout leaders.

Ken Rothweiler, an attorney at Eisenberg Rothweiler in Philadelphia, who represented some 16,800 victims, welcomed the settlement.

I am pleased that both the BSA and their local councils have stepped up to be the first to compensate the survivors, Rothweiler said in a statement Thursday. We will now negotiate with the insurers and sponsoring and chartering organizations who have billions of dollars in legal exposure, of which a substantial portion is necessary to fairly compensate the survivors.

The Boy Scouts said in a statement Thursday that the agreement will help local councils make their contributions to the Trust without additional drain on their assets, and will allow them to move forward with the national organization toward emergence from bankruptcy.

There is still much to be done to obtain approval from the Court to solicit survivors to vote for the BSAs amended Plan of Reorganization, the group said. However, with this encouraging and significant step forward, the BSA is wholeheartedly committed to working toward a global resolution. Our intention is to seek confirmation of the Plan this summer and emerge from bankruptcy late this year.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk looks on at a press conference at Parliament house in Brisbane, Australia on April 1, 2021.(Jono Searle/Getty Images)

Brisbane Lockdown Extended 24 Hours, Restrictions Remain for 11 Areas

CCP virus restrictions will remain in place for two weeks in parts of Queenslands southeast and north, although the lockdowns will end for certain local government areas from Friday night.

This comes as three new locally acquired cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, were reported on Friday morning. Two of the cases are a mother and daughter from Carindale who visited a large number of places in Brisbane while infectious.

We really need our contact tracers, and this is the advice of Dr. Young, to really get on top of this issue quickly today, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told reporters on Friday morning.

The third case was the partner of a previous case who worked at Brisbane Airport.

As a result, the snap lockdown will remain in place for the next 24 hours for Brisbane and Moreton Bay.

But Palaszczuk, describing the targeted approach as mixed bag, said lockdown restrictions would end for Noosa, Sunshine Coast, Ipswich, Logan, Redlands, Gold Coast, Scenic Rim, Lockyer Valley, Somerset, and Townsville.

In locations where the lockdown is due to end, residents must carry a mask at all times when outside the home and wear them indoors or where social distancing isnt possible.

Referring to face masks, the premier said, This is our added protection at the moment until everyone gets their vaccine.

When eating or drinking in a cafe or restaurant, people must be seated, and businesses and venues have to apply the one person per four square meters inside and one person per two square meters outdoors.

Private gatherings are restricted to 30 people, and up to 100 people can attend weddings and funerals, with only 20 people allowed to dance at a wedding.

Smaller venues up to 200 square meters are allowed one person per two square meters with a maximum of 50 people.

Residents in the Brisbane and Moreton council areas can only leave home for essential shopping, exercising, essential work or study that cannot be done from home, caregiving, or access healthcare, including getting vaccinated against the CCP virus.

The lockdown will be reviewed on Saturday morning.
Police tape is seen in this stock photo. (Carl Ballou/Shutterstock)

Cable TV Worker Killed, Public Workers Shot in S. Carolina

COLUMBIA, S.C.A Charter Communications worker was killed in a South Carolina shooting and standoff that also wounded two public workers repairing a sewer main, a deputy, and a woman inside the home where the shooter was barricaded, authorities said.

The man who shot the workers fixing the sewer, 45-year-old Shannon Earl Smith, died from at least one gunshot wound at the hospital shortly after the standoff ended Thursday around 5 p.m., authorities said.

The cable TV worker killed and the woman wounded were inside Smiths Spartanburg home during the standoff where officers also fired shots, said Greenville County Sheriffs spokesman Lt. Ryan Flood, whose agency was asked to investigate because it was not involved in the incident.

The deputy was shot trying to get into the home after the workers were wounded, authorities said.

The public workers, deputy, and woman in the home are all expected to survive, investigators said.

Police were first called around 3 p.m. Thursday when Smith walked up to nine workers outside his home near Cleveland Park, asked them what they were doing, and then started shooting, Spartanburg Water spokeswoman Jennifer Candler said.

It was just a regular project, Candler told Fox Carolina. There was no provocation. There was no warning.

Spartanburg city officers and county deputies were fired on as they rushed to get into a home after the initial shooting because they feared someone might be hurt inside, Spartanburg police spokesperson Maj. Art Littlejohn said.

A deputy was shot in the arm and at least two officers fired back, said Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright, who added that Littlejohn tore down a bannister to get the wounded officer help as soon as possible.

City officers, county deputies, and the State Law Enforcement Division were all then involved in a standoff with Smith that ended with him shot, the Charter Communications worker dead, and the unidentified woman wounded, Flood said.

Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger and Greenville County deputies are working to figure out who fired shots and who was hit by those bullets.

The investigation was turned over to the Greenville County investigators because it involved state agents as well as city and county officers.

The cable TV worker killed was identified as Perry James McIntyre, 49, of Landrum, Clevenger said.

McIntyre was a Spartanburg-based technician and worked for the company for nine years. He was an expert at his craft, Charter spokesperson Patti Braskie Michel said in a statement.

Words cannot express our grief over the loss of our colleague, mentor, and friend. Our thoughts and prayers are with Perrys family and loved ones, Michel said.

By Jeffrey Collins
California Recall Election Date Set for September

California residents will vote Sept. 14 on whether to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose handling of the COVID-19 pandemic sparked fierce criticism from small businesses and the public.

Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis called the election July 1, days after legislation was signed by Newsom to bypass a 30-day financial review of the recall. Eliminating that stage of the process allowed the recall timeline to accelerate; the election otherwise might have been called for October or November.

Although the reasoning for an early election was not immediately known, recall supporters said they were skeptical about the date selected.

Were just starting to see the tip of the iceberg, Rescue California Campaign Manager Anne Dunsmore told The Epoch Times. Whats striking about the new date is the risk that hes taking. He must know that hes in a lot of trouble.

Dunsmore said she suspects the early recall date is due to rising gas prices, drought conditions, and the approaching fire season.

We already know that he cant handle it, she said. We already know that he throws money at the problem. We already know that he jumps too soon without really figuring out whats best for his citizens. Hes only concerned about the short-term fix of his political image. I dont think hes going to survive.

Recall History

The petition to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom cleared its final hurdle on June 23, with confirmation from the states top election official that enough signatures remained after voters had been given a chance to withdraw support for the petition.

California is one of 19 states where recalls are allowed, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Newsom was elected governor in 2018 by the widest margin in a gubernatorial race since 1950. Soon after, critics told The Epoch Times they began to follow news coverage of the governors plans to suspend the death penalty, close prisons, and allow sanctuary cities.

A grassroots effort to recall the governor began in 2020. The initiative was spearheaded by Mike Netter and Orrin Heatliewho formed the California Patriot Coalitionalong with Rescue California, headed by Dunsmore.

Recall organizers told The Epoch Times that they attributed the success of the campaign to Newsoms inconsistency regarding COVID-19 guidelines, including state-mandated shutdowns and restrictions.

California Republican Party Data Director Cole Patterson said Californians motivation to endorse the recall has only increased with time.

While frustration has been growing over Newsoms incompetence for some time, after he was caught at the French Laundry  there was an increase of over 500,000 signatures submitted to registrars during the next reporting period, Patterson said, referring to when the governor was photographed last November at a high-end French restaurant sitting next to friends. He wasnt wearing a mask nor social distancing, despite regularly urging the public to take such precautions.

Newsom apologized to constituents shortly after the incident.

Last Dec. 29, about a month after the French Laundry incident, Newsom mandated an additional stay at home order. Following that announcement, county registrars recorded an increase of 596,721 signatures submitted in February, Patterson said.

Enthusiasm for the recall continued to increase as time went on, with county registrars receiving 327,769 signatures in the final days between March 12 and the March 17 deadline. Between Jan 1. and March 17, there was around 1.1 million more signatures collected, Patterson said.

Set the Date

The lieutenant governor said she felt the date set will provide enough time for officials to prepare for the election and inform voters.

Although the window of time which I could select a date was narrow, I believe we have chosen a fair and reasonable date for this election to take place, Kounalakis said in a statement. It has always been my intention to choose an election date that gives election officials the public ample time to ensure a smooth election with broad participation.

Earlier in June, the office of the registrar in California was caught off guard when notified that the 30-day budget review requirement was attempting to be bypassed.

Election officials wrote a letter in response to Kounalakis, pleading with her to not call an early election date, due to rising financial and logistical concerns.

While some registrars offices fear they wont have enough time to prepare, Orange County has been actively preparing.

Since the recall was a possibility, we have been actively planning for it, OC Registrar Neal Kelley told The Epoch Times. The estimated cost to conduct the election in Orange County is more than $7 million.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping appears on a large screen as performers dance during a mass gala marking the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party at the Olympic Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing, China on June 28, 2021. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

CCP Requests Congratulatory Messages for 100Th Anniversary, Gets None From Western Democracies

Evidence shows Chinese authorities recently requested foreign political leaders to send messages to congratulate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) upon its 100th anniversary.

The Chinese regime claims the CCP has received more than 1,300 congratulatory messages regarding the anniversary, according to Guo Yezhou, deputy director of the International Department under the Central Committee of the CCP. Senders include over 150 heads of state leaders and over 200 political party leaders, Guo declared on a June 28 press briefing.

However, Beijing had requested foreign dignitaries to send such goodwill messages to the CCP to save face, Japanese-language Sankei News reported on July 1.

The outlet said the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan received a request from the Chinese side and sent a telegram in the name of its secretary-general, Toshihiro Nikai, for the sake of courtesy.

The LDP was not alone in encountering such a request from Beijing. So did the Social Democratic Party and the Constitutional Democratic Partythe leading opposition, Sankei News reported.

Radio France International said Russian leader Vladimir Putin expressed his greetings personally, even though Beijing had highly expected him to do so as a head of state.

The CCP usually pays close attention to the number of congratulatory messages which it received from foreign governments or political parties and is extremely sensitive to criticisms from foreign nations.

So far, the CCP has not received congratulations from leaders from Western democracies, based on media reports.

Moreover, part of the messages are from leaders of a long string of foreign socialist or communist parties, including Gennady Zyuganov, chair of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation; Ahmed Bahaa El-Din Shaaban, secretary-general of the Egyptian Socialist Party; Prachanda, chairman of the Nepalese Communist Party; Fabien Roussel, the National Secretary of the French Communist Party; among others.

However, Akira Koike, the secretary-general of the Japanese Communist Party, did not send any greetings to the CCP. On the contrary, he blamed China for its human rights violations in Hong Kong and its invasion of Japans Senkaku Islands, according to a July 1 report of The Sankei News.

One day before the anniversary, on June 30, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio called on the world not to forget the long history of the CCPs atrocities and the persistent dark side of its heavy-handed rule in an article published on Newsweek.

A century of misery, Rubio characterized the rise and rule of the CCP in China.
The Royal Caribbean ship Legend of the Seas docked at Port of Darwin, Northern Territory, obtained Friday, July 31, 2015, Sydney. (AAP Image/ Gregg Tripp)

Chinese-Backed Landbridges Plans for Six Star Darwin Hotel Scuttled

Chinese-backed Landbridges plans to build a six-star hotel across from the controversial Port of Darwin has been scuttled after the Northern Territory (NT) government refused to extend its lease.

The site is situated on prime waterfront land, adjacent to apartments and the Darwin cruise ship terminal.

Landbridge had originally earmarked the site for a $200 million Westin Hotel but had stopped construction 10 months ago and said it was unlikely to continue construction if works did not restart in June 2021.

With the deadline passed, the NT government reclaimed the site and will look for new developers instead.

Today is the first-day Landbridges option to extend its lease of the Waterfront hotel site expires, NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner told NT News.

We will now look for a new builder of a luxury hotel at the site, he added. I have asked for the process to be paused until we come out of lockdown.

The Chinese state-owned Landbridge is under intense scrutiny for its 2015, 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin for $506 million, which was facilitated by the then-governing Country Liberal Party.

At the time, the billionaire owner of Landbridge, Ye Cheng, boasted that acquiring the Port would assist with Beijings Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The BRI is the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) trillion-dollar global infrastructure building fund and arguably the crown jewel of Beijings geopolitical ambitions. However, it has been criticised for extending massive loans to developing nations, many of which cannot service the debts.

For example, in 2017, the Sri Lankan government agreed to hand over its Hambantota Port to the CCP on a 99-year lease after agreeing to convert its $1.4 billion debt into equity.

In April, the Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne terminated two BRI agreements signed between Victorian Premier Dan Andrews and Beijings National Development and Reform Commission, citing national security concerns.

The Foreign Relations Act, which grants the foreign minister the power to review and potentially cancel similar deals, has opened the door for other agreements signed with CCP-affiliated entities to face the axe.

The Port of Darwin lease has been a long-running concern for political leaders.

Recently, Federal MPs George Christensen and Bob Katter both called on the federal Parliament to cancel the deal.
Chinese J-10 fighter jets from the Bayi Aerobatic Team of the People's Liberation Army Air Force perform at Airshow China 2018 in Zhuhai in southern China's Guangdong province on Nov, 7, 2018. (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images)

Chinese State Media Use Indian Air Force Footage in Centennial Propaganda

The Chinese regimes English media channel China Global Television Network (CGTN) released a propaganda video of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) on its official Twitter for the communist partys centennial on July 1. Social media users immediately discovered that the clip used a video segment from the Indian Air Force.

On June 30, CGTN posted the public relations video The First J-10 Fighter Launched in 2000s to promote a Chinese pilot who has been flying fighter jets for 15 years. The footage shows the jet flying over snow-covered mountains. A camera on the bottom of the jet recorded the moment it launched a missile.

Screenshot of CGTNs Twitter post, on June 30, 2021.

However, sharp-eyed social media users immediately recognized that it used a clip of a video released by the Indian Air Force eight years ago called Glorious Fighter Launching Missiles. CGTN darkened the color tone of the clip. The incident has been widely criticized and mocked for copying on social media.

1/ #Chinas #PLA video of a J-10 fighter pilot actually uses #indianairforce LCA Tejas clips as found by @Mave_Intel  The #Chinese copycat factory in action!!! Check at 0:16 time https://t.co/HzieZOJEXV pic.twitter.com/Enjdkpex9k  Indo-Pacific News  Watching the CCP-China Threat (@IndoPac_Info) June 30, 2021

CGTN quickly removed the video from its Twitter account, but a screenshot of it is still circulating online.

This is not the first time that the communist regimes propaganda channels have been caught using footage from foreign movies, trying to pass them off as real Chinese events.

In 2020, the PLAAFs official account on Chinese social media site Weibo posted a video called The God of War H-6K Goes on the Attack! It depicted Chinese H-6K twin-engine jet bombers nicknamed Gods of War launching an attack on a target similar to the U.S.s Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

Social media users discovered that the videos explosive aerial scenes were taken from Hollywood blockbusters, including The Hurt Locker, The Rock, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

In 2011, the Chinese state media CCTV aired a propaganda video in its news program to promote the Chinese J-10 fighter jet. It showed the J-10 destroying another aircraft with a missile. Internet users pointed out that it was actually a scene from the 1986 Hollywood movie Top Gun starring Tom Cruise.

CGTN was exposed earlier this year by French media for running fake news by a non-existent French journalist in an attempt to whitewash the regimes genocide against Uyghur minorities in Chinas Xinjiang region.
Pollution caused by a local aluminum factory in Shanxi Province, China. (Courtesy of interviewee of The Epoch Times Chinese Edition)

Chinese Student Detained, Beaten, and Starved for Reporting Pollution in Shanxi, China

In mid-April 2019, an aluminum factory in Xiaoyi City, Shanxi Province, China, illegally discharged wastewater into the nearby rivers and emitted black smoke directly into the air, which polluted the groundwater and seriously affected the lives of nearby residents. When two young men reported the pollution to the local Bureau of Ecology and Environment (BEE), they were put into detention, beaten, and starved for their efforts.

After he was released, Xiao Zhang (pseudonym), a 26-year-old Chinese student, came to study in the United States in 2019. He recently told The Epoch Times (Chinese edition, hereinafter referred to as The Epoch Times) about the suffering he experienced after he reported industrial pollution to the authorities in China.

Zhang recalled that the water from the faucet at home was white and smelled bad. It couldnt be used for domestic purposes. The same water source was used to irrigate farms, which affected the growth of crops in recent years, and resulted in reduced food production.

Pollution caused by a local aluminum factory in Shanxi Province, China. (Courtesy of interviewee of The Epoch Times Chinese Edition)

The polluting emissions from the factory chimneys day and night are so pungent that people complain, children develop rashes that are hard to treat, and residents have to wear masks on their daily trips, he said,

Persecuted for Reporting Pollution

Since the lives of the local residents were deeply affected by the pollution caused by the factory, Zhang and his friend Mr. Zhao (pseudonym) decided to speak up for everyones rights. They took photos of the pollution and collected other evidence.

On April 30, 2019, Zhang and his friend started a petition, which 23 residents signed. On the same day, they officially sent the report letter, photos, and evidence, along with the petition, to the local environmental protection authorities using their real names.

On May 15, 2019, they received a warning from the local bureau of ecology and environment, which also asked them to withdraw their report.

The residents were very upset by the response. Zhang said, We are making reasonable claims. Therefore, Zhang and his friend Mr. Zhao decided to continue with the reporting, and this time, they wanted to get more support.

Pollution caused by a local aluminum factory in Shanxi Province, China. (Courtesy of interviewee of The Epoch Times Chinese Edition)

On May 30, 2019, Zhang and Mr. Zhao gathered more residents to discuss possible solutions, still full of enthusiasm at the time, believing that if everyone worked together to expose the truth, there should be a resolution.

Therefore, they made 500 copies of the report letter and distributed them locally, hoping to draw attention to the matter and also get the attention of the local government officials.

The attention of the local authorities did come, but in a way they hadnt expected.

Neither of us would expect such a nightmare, Zhang told The Epoch Times.

On July 30, 2019, both men were detained and interrogated by the police. During the interrogation, they were beaten, and charged with disorderly behavior, unlawful assembly, and disturbing public order.

Zhang was directly put into administrative detention without any legal procedure. During the 15 days of detention, he was not provided with normal meals, and the police also physically tortured him.

These hooligans in uniforms [the CCP police] beat me twice and starved me for a few consecutive days. I didnt feel well, but they refused to get me a doctor.

Both Zhang and his friend Zhao were held for 15 days.

The detention center was like hell, he said, still feeling chilled to the bone when recalling the horrible experiences.

He told The Epoch Times that the police had deleted most of the photos he had taken of the pollution and torn up the signatures of the local residents. So their reporting efforts ended up in vain.

Pollution caused by a local aluminum factory in Shanxi Province, China. (Courtesy of interviewee of The Epoch Times Chinese Edition)

On August 14, 2019, 15 days after Zhang was detained, the police informed his father he must pay a guarantee fee of about $7,700 before they would release his son.

Zhang said that neither he or his family received a receipt for the fee and that the police demanded that he come to the station when summonsed They said they still had the right to interrogate and investigate him, and they even threatened and intimidated his family.

What they [the CCP police] have done is illegal and is a violation of human rights, Zhang said.

Zhang fled China and arrived in the U.S. on August 31, 2019. He is now studying in the U.S.

Zhao Facing Unemployment

Zhao, however, is still under surveillance in China.

Zhang met with Zhao to say goodbye before leaving for the U.S. He seemed to have become a different person. He was reluctant to speak and very depressed, Zhang said.

Before reporting the pollution, Zhao had obtained a job at a local state-owned enterprise in July. However, after the detention, the company dismissed Zhao without giving him a reason.

Zhang said, We both know the reason he was rejected was our investigation and reporting of the pollution [caused by the aluminum factory]. He tried looking for another job, but no decent company would hire him. Right now, he has very little income, and I heard that he is still unemployed.

Zhao used to be an optimistic and cheerful young man, but he became cowering and timid after experiencing torture in the detention center. Still under police surveillance in China, Zhao has no freedom. With the CCPs continuing intimidation, it is extremely difficult for him to get a job, Zhang told The Epoch Times.

Determined to Be Courageous and Continue to Speak Up

Many people like Zhang who have spoken out for themselves and their hometown have either been silenced by the CCP, or worse, disappeared.

There is no justice in China, and in Communist-ruled China, those in power do not solve issues; they solve those who raise the issues, Zhang said.

He said that he was deceived by the CCP before. But after he suffered for reporting the pollution, he finally woke up. Now that he is living in a free country, he has decided to speak up.

After going through the horrible experiences, I have come to see the evil nature of the CCP. I want to gather the courage to share my real experiences, hoping to awaken more people, Zhang said.

Zhang finally understands that the Communist regime will do everything possible to cover up and suppress anything or anyone that is likely to affect its authority.

Zhang said that the existence of a regime like the CCP is the greatest hidden threat to the world. He said that to be concerned about human rights in China is in fact, to be concerned about the security of all mankind.

The CCP uses anti-humanity means to cover up the truth and consolidate its authoritarian rule. Isnt this global pandemic a perfect example of that? Zhang said.

Cathy Zhang and Sophia Lam contributed to the article.
Bill Cosby arrives for his sentencing hearing at the Montgomery County Courthouse, on Sept. 25, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Matt Slocum/AP)

Cosby Case May Change How Pennsylvania Handles Non-Prosecution Agreements

In response to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that overturned Bill Cosbys conviction, the Pennsylvania Senate Judiciary Committee plans to propose legislation requiring future non-prosecution agreements to be put in writing.

The 2005 agreement that freed Cosby was oral, although there was a written press release referring to the agreement. A non-prosecution agreement is an agreement not to prosecute in the future.

Comedian Bill Cosby was convicted in 2018 of aggravated indecent assault, after Temple University employee Andrea Constand accused him of drugging her in 2004 and molesting her.

Her name was made public in a civil lawsuit seeking a financial award for the incident. Ultimately it was settled for $3.38 million. During that suit, Cosby made self-incriminating statements that were later used against him in a criminal trial; a trial he was not expecting when he made those statements, based on the verbal non-prosecution agreement.

Montgomery Countys then-District Attorney Bruce Castor said he decided a criminal case against Cosby could not be won, so he made a public statement through a press release that his office would not charge Cosby.

By removing the threat of a criminal prosecution, Cosby was no longer able, in a civil lawsuit, to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination for fear that his statements could later be used against him, Castor said in court testimony on the matter.

Castor left the district attorneys office and his successor, District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman, reopened the criminal investigation. Using incriminating statements from the civil trial, Cosby was convicted in 2018.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided in a split decision to overturn Cosbys conviction because his Fifth Amendment rights were violated.

In direct response to the opinion, state Sens. Lisa Baker, a Republican, and Steve Santarsiero, a Democrat, announced their intention to introduce legislation requiring all future non-prosecution agreements to be in writing to be enforceable.

The recent Supreme Court decision in Commonwealth v. Cosby highlighted a need for clearer rules regarding the prosecution of crimes, Santarsiero said. Requiring that non-prosecution agreements must be in writing will protect the due process rights of the accused, while helping to ensure that victims have access to justice.

Baker added that an oral agreement may be legal for the moment, but it wont hold up in court.

It is indefensible given what we have learned about the prevalence of sexual abuse and harassment throughout our society, said Baker. The system is slanted too heavily toward perpetrators, discouraging reporting and denying a true chance of justice for those with the fortitude to bring charges. This oral agreement turned into a horrible miscarriage of justice.

The Senators serve as chairs of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction in this matter.
Counter-Theme to Victimhood: Canadas Indigenous Peoples Need Not Be Defined by Past Injustices

Commentary

Following the announcement of 215 unmarked graves at a former Kamloops residential school in late May, the city of Victoria in B.C. announced the cancellation of its Canada Day celebrations. When an estimated 751 graves were then discovered at a former Saskatchewan residential school site, #CancelCanadaDay began to trend on Twitter. The activist group Idle No More urged Canadians to come together and disrupt the [July 1] celebration at multi-provincial rallies. Four Catholic churches were burned in B.C. and one in Alberta in the week leading to Canada Day.

The message was clear. The moral stain of the residential school system is so ineradicable that it renders Canada unworthy of celebration altogether.

For indigenous families with a direct connection to the Indian Residential School (IRS) system, personally or familially, rejection of the nation for the ugliness of their portion in its history is understandable. But should our prime minister have ordered the flag on the Peace Tower to half-mast, a gesture of indigenous allyship, but also of cancellation, on Canada Day? No. The government may wish to express its vicarious shame, but that flag isnt Justin Trudeaus personal propertyit represents us all.

The IRS, we should bear in mind, was not a system in which an entire society was complicit. The IRS was, via the Indian Affairs Department, a government enterprise from conception to realization. No ordinary Canadians were consulted on its instantiation or administration. No ordinary Canadians benefited from it. No ordinary Canadians were even aware of what was going on inside these schools (or, in the case of a sizable number, were even aware that the network of schools existed).

Enlightened by findings made public in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, ordinary Canadians today can therefore sympathize with indigenous families in pain; we can and should commit to educating ourselves further on its scope and significance; we can and should observe an annual day of solemnity in remembrance of this sad historical chapter in our history. But we should not be asked to feel personal guilt, nor should we be called upon to choose between these acts of solidarity with our fellow indigenous citizens and demonstrations of healthy patriotism.

For contrast and wider context, consider the moral crisis of our closest neighbour, as its citizens, black and white alike, grapple with Americas history of slavery and racism. Apart from abolitionists, most white Americans of the slavery era were either directly implicated in its practice, or held the racist beliefs that permitted them to acquiesce (with or without complacency) to its practice by others. Slave-owners, but as well a significant swath of northern stakeholders in the cotton industry, benefited materially from the practice. Should Independence Day therefore be cancelled?

Those who hold with critical race theory (CRT) believe white racism is the default human condition, a permanent human stain, and black victimhood an enduring condition. If there had been no moral progress on race relations, how could you celebrate such a country? You cannot and should not, CRT activists say.

Black conservative academic Glenn C. Loury rejects this theory out of hand. In The Case for Black Patriotism, published in City Journals spring 2021 edition, Loury scorns the joyless fatalism of the CRT narrative. He makes the point that slavery was a commonplace human experience since antiquity, while the idea of abolition was new, unprecedented: A Western idea. The fruit of Enlightenment  liberating millions of people and creating the world we now inhabit.

Loury concludes that the central issue is a question of narrative. Are Americans to look back through a dark lens at the United States as a white supremacist, illegitimate force? Or take the developmental view of what it has become over timethe greatest force for human liberty on this planet? He ends with the admonition that [t]he narrative we blacks settle upon about the American project is fundamentally important to our nations future. Likewise, Canada must decide if our own unproductive dark lens of colonialism will continue to guide the reconciliation process we all claim to yearn for.

Actual history is complex. Narratives are built around simplistic themes. The theme promoted by Cancel Canada Day activists is that the oppressor-oppression relationship between non-indigenous and indigenous Canadians is immutable. Such fatalism is divisive and psychologically harmful to us all, but the greatest harm falls on indigenous youth. Where is their motivation to succeed as full and equal Canadians to come from if their role models radiate hopelessness? Like Americas black youth, indigenous youngsters need to hear a counter-theme, grounded in the reality that the actual practices of slavery and colonization are over, never to return, that progress has been made, and will continue to be made.

Last month, a 1998 film The Last Days, winner of an Academy Award for best documentary feature, began streaming on Netflix. Its title reflects the fact that within a span of several weeks, late in World War II, more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were zealously rounded up and eradicated by Nazi Germany. The film traces the post-Holocaust lives of five Hungarian Jewish survivors.

I am not introducing the theme of the Holocaust and its survivors as an analogy to the IRS. The IRS bears no literal comparison to the Holocaust, even though it has become commonplace for ignorant and/or eager virtue-signalling commentators to do exactly that. I bring up the film because it bears an important message that could be of enormous benefit to indigenous youth, a message that has been scanted in the media or suppressed by activists committed to the perpetual-victimhood narrative, namely: We are not defined by what others did to us.

Post-Holocaust, the films subjects more than survived. They thrived. They married and built healthy families. They realized their talents in fulfilling jobs and vocations. They did not forget, of course. The film documents their return to Auschwitz 50 years later, then in their 70s, with their adult children, a sorrowful sojourn in which no horrific details were spared. Appropriately, there were tears and silence amid reflection on the mystery of mans limitless inhumanity to man. But that was not how the film ended. It ended with scenes of joyous family celebrations and the laughter of children.

The stories of these extraordinarily resilient survivors do not reflect the experience of all survivors, obviously, as many survivors were too broken to recover. But they do reflect the response to the Holocaust of the Jewish people. They convey a powerful message the children and grandchildren of survivors of all forms of oppression need to hear: Injustice and human suffering must never be forgotten, but commemoration of a sorrowful past and affirmation of faith in a better future can co-exist in harmony.

Barbara Kay has been a weekly columnist for the National Post since 2003. She also writes for thepostmillennial.com, Quillette, and The Dorchester Review. She is the author of three books.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Criminal Collusion on Wall Street Through ESG Investing?

Commentary

Is a criminal conspiracy going on in plain sight? Major banks and investment firms are conspiring with radical environmentalists to deny lending and investments to fossil fuel companiesjeopardizing our economy, energy future, and the rule of law.

A new white paper from Ambassador C. Boyden Grey for the Texas Public Policy Foundations Life:Powered project exposes, for the first time, the legal reasons that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing isnt just harmful to our economy and energy industryits likely criminal collusion.

A free market is no longer free when the major financial players are colluding, not behind the scenes but out in the open, to gut politically targeted businesses while forcing dollars into their own green investments. Thats exactly whats happening on Wall Street with the rise of ESG investing. Energy companies that dont toe the line on progressive pet projects risk losing access to capital and even having existing contracts terminated. Its happening all over the country as companies from The North Face to BlackRock are boycotting fossil fuels, and as shady shareholder tactics are being used to take over oil companies.

These cartel-like tactics are a flagrant violation of longstanding federal antitrust laws. Corporations are legally barred from engaging in group boycotts. These rules were set into place to protect consumers from conspiracies to manipulate prices, constrain competition, and create politically or socially favored companies that limit consumer choice.

The worst part of all this? Even the most powerful financial mob could never actually succeed at eliminating fossil fuelsonly at driving up prices and sending production overseas. Its a power grab with no net gain.

Because, no matter how vicious the media narrative on climate change, we wont stop needing affordable, reliable energy. Even after decades of multibillion-dollar subsidies intended to take renewable energy mainstream, the share of our energy provided by fossil fuels dipped from 80 percent towait for it79 percent. All that expense, borne by the taxpayers, did next to nothing to improve renewable technology.

Faced with the possibility of losing access to capital and even having existing contracts canceled, many responsible American energy producers, especially small and medium-sized companies without the vast resources of oil majors, face the threat of going out of business altogether as banks increasingly refuse to serve the energy industry.

Unfortunately, this will drive energy production overseas where environmental standards are lax. Not only will weakening Americas energy dominance result in higher energy costs and a weaker stance in the global balance of power, ironically, the long-term result of ESG collusion will be more harmful air pollution and more carbon dioxide emissionsthe opposite of environmentalists stated goal of protecting the planet.

Energy producers shouldnt have to apologize for existing. Instead, we should be celebrating the role of responsibly produced American oil, natural gas, and clean coal in protecting our environment, improving our quality of life, and fighting poverty all over the world.

ESG investing, which could be a useful tool for individuals to make informed choices about their investments, has instead become a wrecking ball that could destroy entire industries.

The un-American agenda of the climate cartel is an affront to the principles of liberty that founded our nation.

Free markets are essential to a free society. State attorneys general, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice should act swiftly to prosecute corporations conspiring to restrain trade to the fullest extent of the law and protect the American people from the collateral damage of this criminal collusion.

The Honorable Jason Isaac is director of Life:Powered, a national initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation to raise Americas energy IQ. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Bailey Boswell, right, listens during a hearing in Saline County Court in Wilbur, Neb. on Aug. 6, 2018 (Eric Gregory/Lincoln Journal Star via AP, Pool File)

Death Hearing Begins for Nebraska Woman Convicted of Murder

WILBER, Neb.A three-judge panel began hearing evidence Wednesday to decide whether a woman should become the first female sentenced to death in Nebraska for her role in the killing and dismemberment of a woman she met through a dating app.

Bailey Boswell was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder last year for the slaying of Sydney Loofe. Boswells boyfriend during the murder, 54-year-old Aubrey Trail, was sentenced to death last month for fatally strangling Loofe and dismembering her body.

Authorities say Boswell lured Loofe, a 24-year-old clerk at a Menards hardware store, to her death through the dating app Tinder. Loofes body parts were found in garbage bags, cut into 14 pieces, and left in ditches along country roads in southeastern Nebraska.

Prosecutors on Wednesday presented graphic autopsy photos to bolster their case that Boswell, 27, deserves to die for the crime.

Prosecutor Doug Warner of the Nebraska attorney generals office argued that Boswell set up three Tinder accounts to arrange dates with women and bought tools that could be used to dismember a body shortly before her last date with Boswell.

Warner pointed to previous testimony from three other women Boswell and Trail recruited that painted them as fascinated with group sex and gaining powers by torturing and killing someone. He noted that Loofes internal organs were missing when they found her remains, arguing that the murder was especially depraved and deserving of the death penalty.

Boswells court-appointed attorney, Todd Lancaster, urged the judge panel to view his client based on her actions, and not those of Trail.

Its the state of mind and actions of Bailey Boswell that are relevant, Lancaster said.

Lancaster said the discussions of murder and torture are irrelevant because it happened weeks before Loofe met Boswell in person.

He also said that the dismemberment of the body occurred after Loofe had been killed, and that some courts have ruled that postmortem mutilationparticularly if used only to dispose of a bodyshould not be used to justify a death sentence.

The three-judge panel is expected to hear evidence through Friday and impose a sentence several weeks later. Boswell, a former high school athlete from Leon, Iowa, could get the death penalty or life in prison.
Deputy Who Shot Arkansas Teen During Traffic Stop Fired For Not Activating Body Camera

An Arkansas sheriffs deputy who fatally shot a teenager during a traffic stop was fired July 1 after the sheriff said he didnt follow the agencys body camera policy.

Lonoke County Sheriff John Staley said Sergeant Michael Davis was fired after it was discovered he did not activate his body camera until after the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Hunter Brittain shooting took place on June 23.

Staleys office is yet to release many details about the shooting but the County Sheriff noted that the agencys policy requires officers to activate their cameras before interacting with the public.

This means theres no video of the actual shooting. We see the aftermath, but not the shooting. Due to that failure, I have terminated the employment of this deputy.

Staley also noted that the decision on whether Davis acted legally in shooting Brittain was to be made by Arkansas State Police and prosecutor, not his office.

Sergeant Davis pulled Brittain over along Arkansas Highway 89 at 3:00 a.m. on June 23 for unknown reasons.

The teen had been taking a test drive in the vehicle with a 16-year-old passenger, Jordan King, and had been trying to repair his pickups transmission all night so that he could work that morning, according to KATV.

King told the outlet that on the day of the incident, they had visited a local auto repair shopMahoneys Body Shopand after they left the store, Davis pulled them over on Arkansas 89.

However, Brittains truck wouldnt go into park, and so the 17-year-old exited the vehicle, a GMC Sierra, to go and retrieve a blue oil jug to put behind his trucks tires and stop it from hitting Davis car.

According to King, Davis then fired at Brittain without telling him to stop or get on the ground as he was placing the jug down.

They didnt say one word that I know of, King said, I didnt hear it and it happened so fast. He alleged that another deputy soon arrived and detained him.

[He] told me [to] get out with my hands up and pull my shirt up, and then took me to the ground, put me in handcuffs and was dragging me around, King said. And then I sat in the back of the cop car for about three hours.

King added that he doesnt know why deputy Davis shot Brittain because Brittain wasnt carrying a weapon and didnt look threatening.

Brittain sustained a gunshot wound and was transported to a North Little Rock hospital where he later died, the Arkansas State Police said in a short statement last week.

Meanwhile, Brittains family has retained attorneys Devon Jacob and Benjamin Crump, who represented the family of George Floyd, whose death by a Minneapolis police officer sparked protests nationwide over police misconduct and racial inequality.

In a statement, the attorneys said the incident points to the urgent need for increased training among every department of the police force across the nation.

Vehicle trouble should never end with a teenager being shot dead by police. Lonoke County Sheriffs Office did the right thing by terminating former Sergeant Mike Davis when they learned that he failed to activate his body camera during the traffic stop, the statement read.

Body cameras are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only way to see the unbiased facts surrounding a police and civilian encounter resulting in injury and/or death.

When officers turn their body cameras off, they turn off their intent to be transparent along with it. While nothing can bring Hunter back, our team stands in solidarity with the Brittain family, and we plan to help them attain full justice for the heartbreaking and preventable loss they are experiencing.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A lone car makes its way down a road in Zion National Park in Springdale, Utah, on May 15, 2020. (George Frey/Getty Images)

Flash Flood Sweeps Through National Park in Utah

Zion National Park officials and business owners in a nearby tourist town were still cleaning up and assessing the damage Thursday from a massive flash flood that ripped through the popular red rock park, sending mud and debris onto streets. No injuries were reported.

Tuesdays flash flood hit an area in the southern portion of the park with buildings, allowing people to take shelter from the water and the hidden debris, such as logs and rocks, it can often carry, park spokesperson Amanda Rowland said.

In 2015, seven hikers were killed there when a storm flooded a narrow canyon.

Roads have been cleared in the park, allowing cars and park shuttles to get around but drivers were being asked to drive carefully and to go slowly around equipment, Rowland said. Shuttle buses were not running in neighboring Springdale, where debris was still being removed, she said.

When the rain started, Stacy Cathey and her husband, Rodney Smith, of Atlanta, who were visiting the park with another couple, were in a van in a parking lot at the entrance Springdale, which they said filled up like a swimming pool within about 20 minutes, KSTU-TV reported.

They were at the bottom of the lot and realized they needed to get to higher ground to avoid being trapped, Smith said.

Zion and the rest of the U.S. Southwest experiences monsoon season during the summer in which afternoon thunderstorms can bring heavy rain. Since many visitors to Zion also travel to other national parks in Utah, Rowland urged them to check the daily flooding potential for the parks in deciding when to visit each one.
Former Apple Daily Executive Mark Simon: Hong Kong Will Keep Surviving

The former executive of Hong Kongs pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily has said you cant kill the idea of freedom after the paper was forced to shut down.

In an interview with EpochTVs American Thought Leaders program, former Apple Daily executive Mark Simon said that he believes Hong Kong will survive despite ever-increasing restrictions and attempts to silence the press from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Apple Daily, Hong Kongs largest independent paper, printed its last edition on June 24 following a raid on its headquarters and the freezing of key assets and bank accounts.

On June 17, Hong Kong police arrested five top executives of the company. Five hundred police officers searched the newsroom for evidence of the company violating the national security law which was imposed by Beijing on the city in 2020.

Former Apple Daily executive Mark Simon speaks to American Thought Leaders host Jan Jekielek in a virtual interview on June 26, 2021. (Screenshot/American Thought Leaders/The Epoch Times)

In a press briefing, Hong Kong police claimed that since 2019, Apple Daily had published more than 30 articles calling on countries to impose sanctions on Hong Kong and mainland Chinaan offense that violated the draconian national security law.

The chief executive officer, chief operating officer, deputy chief editor, editor-in-chief, and chief executive editor were all arrested.

This marks the second raid of Apple Daily in less than a year and the largest action against the media since the national security law was implemented by the Chinese regime in Hong Kong last yearand the first incident of police publicly arresting journalists.

However, Simon, the righthand man to Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai, believes that Hong Kong will survive despite the Chinese people having their rights taken from them by the CCP.

I think actually, Hong Kong will keep surviving. For the near future, maybe the medium term, I think there will not be as many people who leave that it will decimate the city, Simon said on June 26.

In other words, theres a lot of people leaving, I think well see probably by the end of 2022, maybe 150,000 peopleand these are going to be key peopleleaving. But I think as long as Hong Kong knows the world is there for them. As long as Hong Kongers can communicate with the outside world, you just cant kill those ideas.

You cant kill the idea of freedom. You cant kill the idea of individual achievement. You cant kill these things. Although I will tell you, the Chinese Communist Party will do their best because they dont understand that. They dont get Hong Kong.

A man gestures as he brings copies of the final edition of Apple Daily, published by Next Digital, to a news stand in Hong Kong, on June 24, 2021. (Lam Yik/Reuters)

Supporters of Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily wave their cellphone lights outside of the papers headquarters in Hong Kong on June 23, 2021. (Sung Pi-lung/The Epoch Times)

Simon added that the people of Hong Kong are decent people who know what the rule of law means.

And they know what a free press means. And I think thats everything for Hong Kong, he said.

Apple Daily was founded in 1995two years before Britain handed over Hong Kong to the communist-led Peoples Republic of China.

The media outlet started out as a tabloid known for reporting celebrity scandals but soon rose to prominence in Hong Kong due to its anti-communist stance, which has remained unchanged amid the citys political drama.

Elsewhere, Simon noted that the CCP is underestimating the importance of freedom of press in Hong Kong when it comes to the world of business, finance and foreign investmentand said that attempts to silence the media could have devastating effects on the economy.

A man walks in front of windows showing a view of the skyline of Hong Kong on July 21, 2020. (Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)

On a mass scale, if there cant be a free exchange of ideas, then society itself really comes to a halt because theres not an exchange of information, the former executive said.

If you dont exchange information, you cant make the corrections the society needs. Thats why democracies can correct very quickly, okay, were going off kilter here, whats happening, but you dont go off, you dont know youre off kilter if you dont have a free and open press.

For Hong Kong, its even more important, because Hong Kong is a financial center. And without information, finance, and trade doesnt work, you have to know whats going on in the world, you have to understand what other people are doing.

Simon noted, The only way you get a full range of that information is through a free and open press.

He later explained, But more importantly, in Hong Kong, when you dont know where the lines are on freedom of expression, when a financial community doesnt know if theyre getting all the information, they cant take the risk. They cant place the money. They cant start the businesses, theres so much that you cant do.

My belief is that if you dont have a free and open press, the investors will soon figure that out, he later added. And Hong Kongs problem will be that the advantage that it has because of a free and open press will disappear. And essentially, our markets will become no different than Shanghaisecond rate, second tier, and corrupt.
Jason Miller, former communications director for the Trump transition team, briefs reporters at Trump International Golf Club, November 20, 2016 in Bedminster Township, New Jersey. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Former Trump Adviser Launches New Social Media Platform Gettr

A social media website created by former Trump adviser Jason Miller is slated to be launched soon.

The platform, Gettr, appeared in app stores in June and will be formally launched on July 4, Miller told the Wall Street Journal. Miller left former President Donald Trumps team in recent days and is now the chief executive of the venture, which is headquartered in New York and registered in Delaware.

Guo Wengui, a Chinese businessman whose arrest has been sought by the Chinese Communist Party, has invested in the firm, Miller said. Guo, who is also a frequent critic of the Chinese regime, doesnt have a direct role or financial stake in Gettr, Miller added.

I think a lot of people understand, with the United States, the desire for a new social media platform thats really founded on these principles of free speech, independent thought, rejecting censorship and cancel cultures, Miller told the paper.

When accessing Gettr, it appears to have Twitter-like features including trending topics, advertising itself as a non-biased social network for people around the world.

During an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Miller said he hopes that Trump will join the social media platform but added the former president is still considering his options. Trump isnt involved in funding Gettr, he added.

I hope he joins, but President Trump has a number of different options hes considering, Miller said, while added that President Joe Biden is also welcome to join the platform.

Miller told Fox the July 4 launch date is symbolic because Gettr is independent from social media monopolies, independent from cancel culture; embracing free speechour launch on Sunday is very much intentional. And the platform, he claimed, has superior technology to other conservative-leaning alternatives.

The former president was permanently banned from Twitter and suspended by Facebook for two years in early January after the two social media companies accused him of inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol breach. Trump has categorically denied he was responsible and has pointed to statements that he told demonstrators in Washington D.C. to protest peacefully.

Late last month, Trump joined video-sharing platform Rumble ahead of a campaign-style rally in Ohio to promote his former aide, Max Miller, in his congressional bid. Meanwhile, Trump has not joined any other social media networks, including Parler or Gab, although Gab has set up an account for him and posts his emailed statements.

The Epoch Times has contacted Miller for comment.
A ship is docked along the Houston Ship Channel on March 6, 2019, in Houston, Texas. (Loren Elliott/AFP via Getty Images)

Higher Formaldehyde Levels Found Along Houston Ship ChannelReport

HOUSTONHigh levels of a cancer-causing chemical have been detected in air monitors in Houston neighborhoods near the busiest U.S. petrochemical port, according to a report issued on Thursday by city of Houston health officials and environmental groups.

The report by the Houston Health Department and One Breath Partnership said they found concentrations of formaldehyde up to 13 times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys minimum level for health threats.

It recommended that permitting of plants and control of chemicals that contribute to formaldehyde formation be more tightly regulated. Formaldehyde levels appear to be increasing in Houston as the Texas Commission on Environmental Qualitys air monitoring sampling frequency is decreasing, the report said.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said the report is further proof of the impact of pollution on high-poverty communities of color.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has the responsibility to take immediate action to strengthen existing rules to address the formaldehyde problem plaguing families near the Houston Ship Channel, Turner said.

Formaldehyde is released by refineries, chemical plants, and automobiles, and can arise from emissions of the hydrocarbons ethylene, propylene, and isoprene along with other volatile organic compounds.

The Houston Health Department between September 2019 and September 2020 tested an area along the Houston Ship Channel that is home to several petrochemical plants and five crude oil refineries that account for 8 percent of U.S. refining capacity.

The report identified plants operated by ExxonMobil, Chevron, Koch Industries refining and petrochemical unit Flint Hills Resources, and NRG as sources for formaldehyde or the chemicals that combine to form it in the atmosphere.

The highest concentrations of formaldehyde found would translate to about one additional cancer case per 77,000 people, according to the Houston Health Departments assessment of EPAs cancer risk formulas, the report said.

By Erwin Seba
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) walks through a metal detector before entering the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Jan. 21, 2021. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

House Ethics Committee Dismisses GOP Lawmakers $5,000 Metal Detector Fine

The 10-member panel on the House Ethics Committee voted Thursday to drop the $5,000 fine issued to Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), who challenged the report by the Capitol that said she failed to complete a security screening before entering the House building.

This is the third time a majority of the evenly split bipartisan panel voted in favor of waiving the metal detector fee since the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol.

In May the Capitol Police issued a report that documented an incident where Foxx set off a metal detector in front of a door to the House chamber. As two police officers tried to stop her, the report alleges that the representative threw her bag underneath the table near the magnetometer and entered the chamber to vote.

Foxx then returned to the screening area and allegedly told the officers something in the effect of, Good thing no one stopped me.'

In her June 1 appeal letter to the Committee, Foxx wrote, I appeal this fine because I dispute the facts as presented and request the opportunity to appear before the Committee to explain the facts surrounding this alleged violation.

The Ethics Committee has upheld metal detector fines against three House Republicans who filed appeals: Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), and Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.). But the Committee last month voted to drop the fines issued against House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.).

After Jan. 6, Democrats instituted the metal detector fines, $5,000 for a first offense and $10,000 for a second.

Another point of contention in the House has been around the wearing of masks. At the start of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ruled that all members and aides must wear masks in the halls of the House and on the House Floor, while the Senate chose not to implement any mask requirements.

The House Ethics Committee has not agreed to the waiving of $500 fines against three Republicans who stopped wearing masks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance in May that fully vaccinated people dont need to wear face coverings.

Reps. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas), and Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) were among the House Republicans who refused to wear a mask appealing to the Ethics committee to waive the fines, citing that they were complying with the Centers for Disease Controls (CDC) guidance that said people can go without a mask if they are fully vaccinated.

Mast sent a letter to Chair of the House Ethics Committee Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) and Ranking Member Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) appealing a $500 fine Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued him for following the CDC guidelines instead of House rules for mask-wearing.

I am appealing Speaker Pelosis $500 fine because I was in full compliance with the CDC guidelines and it is unlawful. The scientists at the CDC told us if you are fully vaccinated, you can go about your life without wearing a mask or physically distancing. So, thats what Im doing, Rep. Mast said. It has never been about following the science for Speaker Pelosi. It has always been about power and control.

The Speakers office did not immediately return a request for comment.
Search and rescue teams look for possible survivors and to recover remains at the site of the 12-story oceanfront Champlain Towers South Condo, at 8777 Collins Ave., that partially collapsed in Surfside, Fla, on June 29, 2021. (Mike Stocker/Sun Sentinel/TNS)

How Have People Survived Weeks Under Rubble? Sewage Water and a Pack of Biscuits Helped

By Madeleine Marr and Madeleine Romance

From The Miami Herald

SURFSIDE, Fla.As the death toll rises and weather hampers the search and rescue at the Surfside condo collapse site, hope remains amid the wreckage.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett is one of many tirelessly leading the charge at the Champlain Towers South site.

This week, Burkett recalled a woman who was able to survive 17 days buried after a garment factory collapse in Bangladesh in May 2013. More than 1,000 died in that tragedy.

According to media reports at the time, Reshma Begum, then 19, told rescuers she nibbled on a pack of biscuits she had bought for breakfast before work and had bottles of water dropped into the debris by rescuers.

Nobody is giving up hope here. Nobody is stopping. The work goes on full-force, Burkett said. Were dedicated to get everyone out of that pile of rubble and reunite them with their families.

Other history watchers have referenced survivors of the 7.0 earthquake that rocked Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010. More than 300,000 people perished in the disaster, but one man was able to hold out for almost a month under tangled mass of debris. Rice vendor Evans Monsignac, then 27, miraculously survived 27 days after being trapped in his decimated stall at the La Saline marketplace in Port-au-Prince. He was rescued Feb. 8 by Salvation Army volunteers.

Later transferred to Tampa General Hospital, he recounted the harrowing tale.

I still dont understand how Im here, Monsignac told the U.K.s Daily Telegraph while still recovering a month later at the Florida hospital. I was resigned to death. But God gave me life. The fact that Im alive today isnt because of me, its because of the grace of God. Its a miracle. I cant explain it.

The average human can go about three days without water; Monsignac was able to find a water source, which turned out to be raw sewage dripping from the debris. He drank it. He lost about 60 pounds during his ordeal, weighing about 88 pounds at the time of his rescue.

In 2001, a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Bhuj, India, and Viral Dalal spent five days under chunks of concrete from a collapsed apartment building, according to NBC4 in Washington.

Watching news of the Surfside collapse triggered memories of the now Virginia residents own experience and inspires hope that more survivors might be rescued.

When I look at it, I just feel like, there has to be someone who is somewhere in the corner, stuck in a place where the person is not injured, but just stuck, just waiting for help, the Choosing Light author told the station.

After days of staring at concrete just 2 inches from his face, the International Rescue Corps pulled him out.

What got him through? Mental strength, the hope of being rescued and imagining what it would be like to reunite with his loved ones.

It is incredible where your mind can take you, said Dalal, who appears in a Discovery Plus documentary on the horrifying experience. Your mind can take you to dark places and I had to pull myself back up from where my mind was trying to take me and where I wanted to go.

(c)2021 Miami Herald. Visit Miami Herald at www.miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
A man gestures as he brings copies of the final edition of Apple Daily, published by Next Digital, to a news stand in Hong Kong, China, on June 24, 2021. (Lam Yik/Reuters)

In China, the Pot Is Calling the Kettle Black

Commentary

After 26 years in operation, Hong Kongs pro-democracy Apple Daily was forced to shut down on June 24, after Beijing froze its assets and arrested several of its journalists for violating the National Security Law.

It is a sad day for media freedom in Hong Kong and around the world, President Joe Biden said in a June 24 statement, hours after the publications formal closure. While stating that people in Hong Kong have the right to freedom of the press, Biden called on Beijing to stop targeting the independent press and release the journalists and media executives that have been detained.

One of the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) Wolf Warriors wasted no time hitting back at Bidens criticism. Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a newspaper run by the CCP, tweeted the same day, What about Trumps Twitter account?

While I agree that banning a former presidents social media account violated the First Amendment and is unprecedented in a free, democratic country, I must remind Mr. Hu that its Twitter, a private company, not the U.S. government, that restricted the former president. Unlike in China, Big Tech and other private companies are not ultimately controlled by the government.

Perhaps its because Hu knows that he and the Global Times are ultimately owned and controlled by the CCP, so he and the paper bark at whoever the boss ordered them to.

Or its simply because Hu, along with many Chinese, have long fallen victims to the CCPs century-long brainwashing propaganda, in which they were made to believe that the CCP, which celebrated its 100th anniversary on July 1, represents, or is equivalent to, the country of China, a country that has more than five thousand years of rich history. You support the CCP, youre a patriot; you criticize the CCP, youre a traitor.

Its interesting to note that while Hu used his Twitter account to accuse the Biden administration, he forgot the fact that Twitter, along with Facebook and YouTube, is entirely banned in China. Netizens have to rely on Virtual Private Networks (VPN) or other software to break the information blockade, which can get you in trouble with the authorities.

I also want to remind Hu that the CCP is no stranger to the practice of silencing its political opponents, including its own leaders.

In 1989, Zhao Ziyang, then the general secretary of the CCP, was silenced for sympathizing with the student groups and for refusing to order the military to crush the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. He was stripped of all his positions and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, until his death in January 2005. To date, the details of his life remain censored in China.

Hu appeared to have more concerns about the constitutional rights of a former U.S. president than of his own countrymen. He told Biden that Trump and his supporters have a right to freedom of expression. He accused the U.S. government of denying basic liberties and assaulting democratic institutions and processes.

Well said.

But, Mr. Hu, what about the basic liberties of millions of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China?

What about the rights to freedom of expression and religion of millions of Falun Gong practitioners persecuted in China?

The CCP regime has been accused of committing crimes against humanity and genocide against the Uyghur population. More than one million Uyghurs are detained in the re-education camps or forced labor centers. Women are being forcibly sterilized.

The persecution of Falun Gong has become one of the largest campaigns of religious persecution in the world over the past 20 years.

Millions of innocent people in China have been fired from their jobs, expelled from school, jailed, tortured, or killed simply for practicing Falun Gong.

For the tens of millions of people who practice Falun Gong today in China, each day they live at risk of being taken away by Chinese authorities to be jailed, torturedor worse.

Hu challenged those who lament closure of Apple Daily today, please also call on Twitter to reinstate Trumps account.

For the past twenty years, the Falun Gong practitioners around the world, along with the international community as well as various human rights groups, have been calling on the CCP regime to stop the persecution of Falun Gong in China.

All fell on deaf ears.

Perhaps Hu should challenge the CCP regime to lift the ban on Twitter in China so we can launch a social media campaign to demand the stop of the persecution.

Han Zhou was born in China and has lived in the United States for more than 30 years. She uses a pen name to protect her family in China from possible consequences of her speaking the truth.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Industry Groups Praise New COVID Plan but Disappointed in Arrivals Cap

Industry groups are welcoming the Australian governments new four-step COVID plan that is based around vaccination numbers but call the reduction on international arrival caps one step backwards.

Australian Industry Group (Ai Group) welcomed the new plan but recommended that the post-vaccination phase be reached when all those who can and want to receive shots are vaccinated.

Very careful consideration needs to be given to setting the threshold of vaccination numbers that will open the way to further easing of restrictions, Ai Group CEO Innes Willox said.

He said setting fixed percentages carried the risk of failing to reach the target due to the portions of the population who rejected it.

Willox also said he was disappointed in the new six-month restriction to reduce international arrivals by 50 percent.

That restriction must be very temporary and cannot be allowed to stay in place a moment longer than the Government deems necessary, Willox said. The numbers arriving now amount to a trickle, and todays cut is virtually turning off the tap of critically needed skilled workers.

The Property Council of Australia echoed these sentiments, with CEO Ken Morrison saying that while the plan was essential to reopen the country, the limit on arrivals was disappointing.

Students and skilled migrants are an essential part of our success and productivity as a nation. They add to jobs, tourism and overall economic activity, Morrison said. Australia needs to bring our citizens home, safely ease skills shortages and engage with the worldlowering flight caps is a step away from those outcomes.

A person is inoculated with a vaccine in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on Feb. 16, 2021. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

Universities Australia (UA) said that while the safe return of international remained a priority for the sector, universities would put community safety first.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Australias universities have relied on the advice of public health and medical experts and will continue to do so, UA spokesman told The Epoch Times.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) also welcomed the new plan, saying it was important that the community had a clear vision of living in a world with the CCP virus.

This plan, with four stages, recognises the important fact that our road out of this crisis is vaccination. Of that, there is no doubt, AMA President Doctor Omar Khorshid said. By the final stage of the plan, we see a vaccinated population, and as a result, a health system prepared to treat COVID similar to how we manage the flu.

While Khorshid supported reducing the number of arrivals, he said it would also worsen the shortage of critical staff due to the medical industrys reliance on the overseas health workforce.

They will need to be lifted as soon as possible to reduce the impact on vulnerable Australians who need medical care, he said.

Australia is currently experiencing a severe skills shortage as over one-quarter of businesses are struggling to fill vacant positions with suitable staff.
An Israeli fighter jet performs during an air show at the graduation ceremony of Israeli pilots in the Hatzerim Israeli Air Force base in the Negev desert, near the southern Israeli city of Beer Sheva, on June 27, 2019. (Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)

Israel Bombs Weapon Manufacturing Site in Gaza After Arson Attacks

A series of incendiary balloons launched by Hamas terrorists towards the southern Israeli border led to an overnight bombing on a manufacturing site in the Gaza Strip, military officials said Friday.

The Islamic terrorist group that rules Gaza confirmed that one of its manufacturing sites which focuses on researching and developing weapons was hit in the attack. No immediate reports of casualties were reported from the strike.

In response to the arson balloon fire towards Israeli territory today IDF (Israeli military) fighter jets struck (a) weapons manufacturing site belonging (to) Hamas, the military said in a statement.

Last month, Hamas caused some 20 fires in Israeli communities after launching arson balloons in the Gaza periphery, affecting farmers fields and agriculture.

On Thursday, the terrorist group again launched balloons laden with incendiary material across the southern Israeli border, causing another round of fires that have burned fields.

Israel Fire and Rescue Services said most of the fires were small and not dangerous with responders being able to manage the situation quickly and gain control over the fires, the Times of Israel reported.

Hamas said it has launched a series of arson balloons since the May 21 ceasefire ended as a way to pressure Israel to ease restrictions on the coastal enclave that were tightened during the May fighting.

A field on fire is seen after Palestinians in Gaza sent incendiary balloons over the border between Gaza and Israel, Near Nir Am, on June 15, 2021. (Amir Cohen/Reuters)

Thursdays balloons launched from Gaza caused at least four brush fires near Israeli cities along the border.

Over the past three years, Islamic terrorists in the Gaza Strip have sent thousands of balloons laden with incendiary material and explosive devices into southern Israel, causing widespread fires and significant damage to agricultural fields, nature reserves, and private property. The attacks were mostly linked to Hamas, although there are also some other terror groups that have launched similar attacks.

Since Israel and Hamas engaged in the military conflict in May, over 200 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed, which saw terrorist groups in Gaza launching rockets towards Israeli cities.

The Israeli military then responded to the attacks by carrying out airstrikes across the coastal enclave.

Reuters contributed to this report.

From NTD News
Judge Orders Minneapolis to Hire More Police Officers Amid Crime Surge

A judge on July 1 ruled in favor of a group that filed a lawsuit demanding more police officers be brought into the city, after city council members and activist groups advocated to replace the police department following the death of George Floyd.

Hennepin County District Judge Jamie Anderson issued a writ of mandamus (pdf) ordering the city to hire more police officers, specifically that Minneapolis should have at least 730 officers or .0017 of the 2020 census population, whichever is higher, by the end of June 2022.

An unprecedented number of officers quit or went on extended medical leave after Floyds death and the unrest that followed, which included the burning of a police precinct. With new recruit classes, the city anticipates it will have 674 officers available at the end of the year, with another 28 in the hiring process, the Star Tribune reported.

Floyd died May 25 last year after being restrained by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Floyds death sparked widespread riots and protests. Chauvin was sentenced on June 25 to 22 1/2 years in prison for second-degree murder.

The death of Floyd triggered left-wing demonstrations, riots, and violence across the country as well as calls to defund the police, which some critics have said has led to a significant rise in crime across major U.S. metropolitan areas in recent months. Minneapolis was particularly hit hard by weeks of riots, arson attacks, looting, and violence in the wake of Floyds death, causing tens of millions of dollars in damage.

Amid calls to dismantle the department, some residents have begged the city to hire more officers, citing longer response times and an increase in violent crime.

Minneapolis is in a crisis, the eight plaintiffs linked to the conservative Upper Midwest Law Center wrote in their lawsuit, noting the recent spike in violent crime in the city, FOX 9 reported.

In his decision, the judge wrote that the eight plaintiffs, all Minneapolis residents, were able to show that the lack of officers in the city is linked to the surge in crime and has caused personal injuries.

This is a huge victory for the Petitioners and all residents of Minneapolis, especially those in the most diverse neighborhoods feeling the brunt of rising crime rates, Doug Seaton, president of the Upper Midwest Law Center, said in a statement in response to the decision.

We applaud the Courts decision and look forward to swift action by the City Council and Mayor to fund the police and ensure the safety of all Minneapolitans.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks at a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, on June 25, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images).

Justice Department Orders Pause to Federal Executions

The Justice Department announced on Thursday it is pausing federal executions while a review of its policies and procedures is pending.

The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely, Attorney General Garland said in a memo to the Justice Department (pdf). That obligation has special force in capital cases.

He added, Serious concerns have been raised about the continued use of the death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases. Those weighty concerns deserve careful study and evaluation by lawmakers.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, about 50 people are on federal death row, most of whom are imprisoned in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Garlands moratorium on federal executions comes after a federal lawsuit was filed over the death penalty policies, over concerns that included the risk of pain and suffering associated with the use of pentobarbital sodium, the drug used for lethal injection.

Last year, the Justice Department under then-Attorney General William Barr resumed federal executions, after a pause of 17 years. The federal government carried out 13 executions between July 2020 and January 2021. The executions adopted a new protocol for administering lethal injections at the federal Bureau of Prisons, using the drug pentobarbital, which replaced the three-drug procedure that had been used in federal executions previously.

The Federal Corrections Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, on May 22, 2019. (Bryan Woolston/Reuters)

The 13 deaths all involved convicted criminals; including Keith Nelson, who was convicted of kidnapping, raping, and murdering a 10-year-old girl; Dustin Honken, convicted of murdering five people in Iowa; and Daniel Lee, who killed a couple and their 8-year-old daughter in 1996.

Dustin Higgs, who ordered three women killed in Maryland in 1996, was the final execution on Jan. 16. No executions have been scheduled since President Joe Biden took office in January.

Biden during his presidential campaign expressed that the death penalty should be abolished. He cited a database that alleges that more than 160 people who were sentenced to death in the United States since 1973 were later exonerated.

Because we cannot ensure we get death penalty cases right every time, Biden will work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal governments example. These individuals should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole, his campaign website states.

In February, dozens of groups in a letter urged Biden to act on your promise of ensuring equality, equity, and justice in our criminal legal system by immediately commuting the sentences of all individuals under federal sentence of death, and reinstating the federal moratorium on the use of the death penalty.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
Activists hold placards in support of detained Chinese human rights lawyer at a rally outside the Chinese Liaison Office in Hong Kong on Dec. 26, 2018. (Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)

Leaked Documents Show China Put Politics Before Law in Suppression of Spiritual Group

Leaked documents recently obtained by The Epoch Times detailed the Chinese judicial system was not in accordance with the law on suppressing Falun Gong in China, highlighting the ongoing tension faced by the spiritual group.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that includes meditative exercises and moral teachings centered around the values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

The practice had attracted 70100 million adherents by the late 1990s before the Chinese regime launched a nationwide eradication movement against Falun Gong in July 1999. Millions of its adherents have been arrested, sentenced, and detained, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.

However, human rights lawyers representing Falun Gong cases are targeted as troublemakers, said one internal document (pdf), issued by the Political and Legal Affairs Committee of Dandong Municipal Committee, Liaoning Province in June 2015.

The document is labeled as Secret.

The courts and procuratorates at all levels [should] strengthen the punishment of Falun Gong  focusing on court trials of Falun Gong cases and preventing human rights lawyers from picking quarrels and provoking trouble, it said.

A May report released a month earlier wrote that the authorities successfully dealt with the trials when Beijing lawyers defended rights for Falun Gong practitioners.

Human rights lawyer Li Ming, who was forced to flee China in 2018, told The Epoch Times that the 610 office would attend and supervise the court hearing of Falun Gong cases.

The office, set up under the command of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin on June 10, 1999, functions as an extralegal secret police force aiming to eradicate Falun Gong in China.

Although [the judges and prosecutors] believe that Falun Gong practitioners are innocent in holding on to their beliefs, they do not dare to freely express themselves in that high-pressure environment under surveillance, said Li.

Li was once threatened and suppressed by the local 610 office while working in Shanghai for defending Falun Gong practitioners.

The document also outlines surveillance and control tactics used both domestically and abroad, online and offline, such as eliminating hanging banners and spray-painted slogans by local practitioners, monitoring and blocking relevant information on the internet, and collecting information from overseas Falun Gong affiliate organizations.

In addition, an annual report released in July 2017 by the Municipal Committee on Politics and Law in Dandong shows that state media was weaponized to smear Falun Gong and lead the public opinion.

In 2016, local television stations and newspapers ran anti-Falun Gong programs as part of Beijings patriotic education, under the command of the propaganda department of the municipal committee.

The programs, including 60,000 papers, 8,000 advertisements, and a 5 column series, reached out to over 150,000 local residents, according to the report.
LinkedIn Deletes Account of mRNA Vaccine Pioneer Who Questioned Risks of COVID-19 Shots

Dr. Robert Malone, who identifies himself as the inventor of mRNA vaccines, said that LinkedIn recently deleted his account after he made comments about mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and questioned whether theyre appropriate to give to certain groups of people.

My business pays for linked in premium. I have been deleted, Malone wrote on Twitter this week. Purchased a service from linked in to promote my company. This is very different from the YouTube or Twitter terms. This arbitrary and capricious action has damaged our business, and we deserve to be compensated.

It appears his personal account was removed earlier this week without warning or explanation from LinkedIn, a subsidiary of Microsoft, said his wife, Jill Malone.

He was given no notice, no warnings, she told Just the News. He has a 10-15 year old accounthas never even had a warning. 6,000 followers.

Malone explained on Wednesday that the historic record of what I have done, stated, figured out (and when) etc. over time is a key part of establishing my credibility and track record as a professional. But despite this, the account has been erased completely and arbitrarily without warning or explanation, he added.

In a subsequent tweet, Malone produced an email from a LinkedIn representative, who said that his account violated the firms user agreement because he posted misleading or inaccurate information about vaccines and COVID-19.

[LinkedIn] has provided a list of my thoughtcrimes. An amazing document, Malone wrote.

The Epoch Times has contacted LinkedIn for comment.

Recently, Malones claims to Fox News and other news outlets about giving vaccines to individuals under the age of 18 were flagged by several so-called fact-checking sites. Malone told NTDs The Nation Speaks in late June that heart inflammation reports shift the risk-benefit ratio for children.

Vaccines save lives. These vaccines have saved lives, Malone said, adding that believes the risks associated with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna outweigh the benefits among children.

Speaking to Fox News, Malone said, I can say that the risk-benefit ratio for those 18 and below doesnt justify vaccines, and theres a pretty good chance that it doesnt justify vaccination in these very young adults.

LinkedIns move to ban Malone is the latest attempt by a Big Tech firm to curb what they describe as misinformation regarding COVID-19 vaccines. Recently, Twitter locked Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Martin Kulldorffs account after he expressed a skeptical viewpoint on whether masks actually provide protection.

And early on in the pandemic, separately, social media firms suspended the accounts of individuals who questioned the origin of COVID-19 while positing that it may have emerged from a high-security laboratory in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. However, in recent months, U.S. officials, including members of the 17-agency Intelligence Community, have begun to question the official narrative from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and World Health Organization officials, who have claimed the virus was transmitted from animals to humans at a wet market.
Loudoun Countys Fight Over Critical Race Theory Resonates With the Nation, Says Arrested Parent

Jon Tigges, a parent who was arrested at a Loudoun County School Board meeting in Virginia on June 22, said he received outpouring support from across the country. In addition to receiving phone calls, texts, and tweets, Tigges picked up snail mail the day before upon returning from camping. It resonates with so many people just how close we are to collapse as a country. They are cheering for us, he told The Epoch Times on July 1.

One of the blessings and unexpected secondary consequences of censorship has been that people only feel comfortable sharing face to face because they dont want to get doxed or they dont want to lose their job, said Tigges. So he started Patriot Pub, a weekly in-person gathering in mid-April. At these meetings, people dined, discussed, and cussed together. And the stuff we cuss about, we decide were going to do something about it, and thats begun in the room.

Six of the Loudoun County Public Schools board members allegedly infiltrated a private Facebook group to collect a target list of parents opposed to critical race theory and dox them. Some parents obtained screenshots and reported them to the county sheriffs office. The case is currently under investigation.

Jon Tigges, a Loudoun County Public School parent arrested at the school board meeting on June 22, spoke in front of the school administration building on July 1. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)

Former state senator Dick Black, dubbed by his constituents in the board room as the man who brought down the house, was the last speaker from the public at the June 22 school board meeting. The school board ended public comment and retreated from the board room immediately after Blacks speech.

Speakers self-organized lines on both sides of the aisle and carried on making comments as scheduled, without the school board present. People who couldnt speak as scheduled needed to stay and talk to let it out of their system, according to Tigges.

The superintendent later declared the gathering an unlawful assembly, and the county sheriffs office began evicting the room. Refusing to leave, Tigges was arrested for trespassing. His court date is on July 21. In his view, the sheriffs office took an unlawful order from the school superintendent. He said he would pursue legal means to challenge the decision.

Both Tigges and Black returned to the Loudoun County Public School Administration building on July 1 as a part of the live streaming event with Eugene Delgaudio, president of Public Advocates, a conservative activist group. Both recalled that the school meeting began with a dozen speakers lauding the school board and supporting the transgender policy 8040 (pdf), an item on the agenda. Then the rest of the speakers, one after another, criticized the school board or urged the board members to resign before the recall effort collected enough signatures.

Former state senator Dick Black (right) with Eugene Delgaudio, president of Public Advocates, outside the Loudoun County Public School administration building on July 1. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)

Black scolded the school board for developing an enemies list and called the board members behavior disgusting. His criticism led to rounds of loud applause from the crowd. More and more people stood up to show their support.

Black explained how he decided to attend the Jun 22 meeting: he had been following the news that more and more people have been participating in county school board meetings. In addition, transgender policy 8040 guides teachers to address students in their preferred pronouns. As a result, a boy can go to the girls bathroom if he self-identifies as a girl. At this point, I felt like it was necessary for me to get out, to get involved, and just to lend my weight to what was going on, he told The Epoch Times.

Tigges got involved through a different journey: he sued Virginia Governor Ralph Northam in 2020 for extending COVID-19 lockdown, which he described as what activated him to be more involved in local policies. He shared that after 20 years of serving in the military, he managed to get out of the government and live on his farm in Loudoun County. Then COVID-19 came, and Northams order forced him to keep his business closed.

He added, I realized the government could unilaterally seize my property by shutting it down and discriminate against me, in terms of my business being somehow different than a large corporate business.
NTD Evening News Full Broadcast (July 1)

The Manhattan District Attorney is charging the Trump Organization and its Chief Financial Officer for tax fraud and grand larceny, President Biden is briefed on rescue efforts in Surfside, Florida, and the Supreme Court upholds Arizonas election laws.
Preparing to land on Omaha Beach. The opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan are some of the most harrowing in movie history. (DreamWorks Pictures)

Popcorn and Inspiration: Saving Private Ryan: A Story of Sacrifice and Patriotism

R | 2h 49min | Drama, Historical, War | 24 July 1998 (USA)

As the nation prepares to celebrate its 245th birthday this weekend, it is wholly fitting to acknowledge a landmark film that depicted an event which rescued the free world from tyranny over 75 years ago.

While the majority of Saving Private Ryan is fiction, it uses the June 6, 1944 U.S. landing on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France as its springboard. It is not revisionist history as some of its few detractors have claimed but rather an entirely plausible series of events based on another true life World War II event (the Nov. 13, 1942 deaths of the five Sullivan brothers on the USS Juneau).

After a brief, then-present day establishing scene at a U.S. memorial gravesite in Colleville-sur-Mer, director Steven Spielberg, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and editor Michael Kahn assemble what most critics, audiences, and, most importantlythe veterans who were actually thereconsider to be the greatest extended battle scene in motion picture history.

Because of Spielbergs desire for a newsreel/documentary look, Kaminski used unprotected camera lenses, shot at half to a quarter of the usual 180-degree speed, and then treated the negative with a bleach bypass. This desaturation process lent the final product a distinctly nightmarish, otherworldly finish.

Rather than safely witnessing the action from the sidelines or above, the viewer sees everything as if they are with the soldiers on the landing boats, at the beach and under water. This visual approach results in a disquieting, unnerving, and visceral experience which will leave audiences winded and emotionally drained before the end of the first act. For their combined efforts, Spielberg, Kaminski, and Kahn all received Academy Awards.

The squadron of Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks, R) trying to take out a German installation on Omaha Beach. (DreamWorks Pictures)

Show-Dont-Tell Filmmaking at Its Purest

During this stretch the only character we get to know at all is Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), and it is limited to recognizing he has an unspecified nerve disorder. We get glimpses of a handful of the upcoming principal cast and only two of them are given dialogue. This minimalist, show-dont-tell method of storytelling from screenwriter Robert Rodat flies in the face of the talk-heavy, character-driven narrative and its with the start of the longer-than-usual middle act that this offbeat approach pays off in spades.

As near-perfect as the screenplay is, its fate ultimately rests in the hands of the cast. Of the eight principal core members of Millers squad, only oneEd Burns (as Private Reiban)was in possession of traditional Hollywood good looks. Spielberg stated he wanted these soldiers to have everyman appearances and relatable character traits while avoiding forced movie quirks, something he and casting director Denise Chamian achieved and then some.

Ironically (or not), Reiban is the only outwardly disagreeable soldier. Argumentative, questioning authority, griping incessantly and always instigating, he is never fully onboard with the patched-together companys next mission.

With barely a moment for a breather, Miller and his seven underlings are charged with retrieving Private James Ryan from somewhere in France and transporting him to safety. The central question is why dedicating valuable manpower to try and find a single soldier who might already be dead makes sense.

Through Millers weary eyes and mounting slow-burn frustration, its clear he has his own misgivings about the mission but being a dutiful soldier and a natural leader, he hides his doubts well and keeps his men in check. He leads by example and few words, and earns the respect and undying support of his men, including Reiban.

After several potentially crushing roadblocks along the way are successfully navigated, the Miller squad literally by accident finally crosses paths with Ryan (Matt Damon), who when told about the fate of his three brothers and his free trip home, refuses to leave his post.

Ryans reasons, while emotionally understandable, arent enough to get Miller to alter the mission, but do force his hand into how to alter his approach in managing the situation and organizing the seemingly unwinnable defense of a bridge. The ensuing closing battle scene easily matches the intensity of the movies opening salvo.

U.S. Army Rangers Capt. John H. Miller (Tom Hanks, C) surrounded by his squad, given the mission to hold the bridge, in the final battle of Saving Private Ryan. (DreamWorks Pictures)

A Distinctly American Film

Fair or not, for the entirety of his career, Spielberg has been considered by his peers and audiences as the premier architect of crowd-pleasing, highly commercial blockbusters. The term blockbuster was coined to describe crowds waiting in line to see his Jaws in 1975. This in no way belittles his talents. Its just as difficult to make a good mainstream movie as it is to craft something far deeper, artsy, and moving.

Spielberg made his first stab at meaningful with The Color Purple (1985) which, while a critical and commercial success. It holds the dubious record of receiving the most Oscar nominations (11) without a single win. It was followed in 1987 with the superb Empire of the Sun (which included a 13-year-old Christian Bale), and it sadly flopped. Six years later, Spielberg delivered Schindlers List, the only film hes ever made which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Director Steven Spielberg giving instructions to Tom Hanks on the set of Saving Private Ryan. (DreamWorks Pictures)

Schindlers List is a masterpiece by anyones definition and, although it differs from Saving Private Ryan in many ways, the two films have much in common. While Schindlers List might have had a wider global audience appeal, Saving Private Ryan is a distinctly American movie which, whether intended or not, speaks to American patriotism, sacrifice, and unflappable camaraderie. Sadly, these are ideals our politically divided country does not currently see eye-to-eye on.

The three acts of Saving Private Ryan are bookended by almost identical scenes of sun-drenched American flags, waving in fierce winds, accompanied by minimalist musical flourishes composed by John Williams. They introduce and punctuate the finest war film ever made and one which only grows more resonant with the passing years.

Saving Private Ryan

Director: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore, Ed Burns, Barry Pepper, Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel

Running Time: 2 hours, 49 minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: July 24, 1998

Rating: 5 out of 5

Originally from Washington, D.C., Michael Clark has written for over 30 local and national film industry media outlets and is based in the Atlanta Top 10 media marketplace. He co-founded the Atlanta Film Critics Circle in 2017 and is a regular contributor to the Shannon Burke Show on floridamanradio.com. Since 1995, Mr. Clark has written over 4,000 movie reviews and film-related articles.
Falun Gong demonstrators hold memorial pictures as they march on Capitol Hill in Washington, on July 17, 2014. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

Replacing God: The CCPs Century-Long War Against Faith

Priests and nuns were forced to kneel down in front of a large bonfire, watching helplessly as the flames devoured their sacred instruments and burned their skin.

In another Chinese city, students wearing red armbands hit Catholics with sharp wooden sticks, throwing one priest into a fire pit after he collapsed in pain. They beat one nun to death after she refused to stomp on a statue of the Virgin Mary.

One Catholic priest was buried alive in Beijing after declining to give up his faith.

Unsettling as they might be, these acts of brutality documented by Hong Kong-based missionary Sergio Ticozzi were hardly out of the norm for faithful Chinese during the frenzy of the decade-long Cultural Revolution from 1966, when all forms of religious practices were declared superstitious and banned.

Nor was such repression unique to that particular period during the regimes more than 70 years of ruling China.

Total Control

Belief in a higher power is anathema to the atheist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that for 100 years has sought to command absolute loyalty and control over its members and the Chinese people.

They just cannot handle an allegiance other than to the state, Sam Brownback, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, told The Epoch Times.

As a result, successive Party leaders have launched campaign after campaign to crush and control people of faith in China.

Mao Zedong, the first CCP leader, who oversaw one of the most thorough campaigns to dismantle Chinese religious life, compared religion to poison in a conversation with Tibets exiled leader, the Dalai Lama. In his autobiography, the Dalai Lama recalls Mao telling him in 1954 that religion undermines the race and retards the progress of the country.

Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin in 1993 declared religious freedom to be unsuitable for Party members and told Party members to patiently educate those with faith to help them get rid of religious shackles.

Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Christianitythe five religions the regime has officially sanctionedremain under rigid state control, with Party officials setting the terms on how they operate.

Chinese officials for religious affairs have stressed the need to guide religion with socialist values and for devotees to possess gratitude toward the Party.

Under the Partys rules, members also face possible expulsion for believing in religion or engaging in superstitious activities.

Worshippers walk past the shadow of a cross at the entrance to the underground Zhongxin Bridge Catholic Church, after a service celebrating the Feast of the Ascension in Tianjin, on May 24, 2015. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

Marking the Partys centennial, the heads of six state-level religious associations met in June and extolled the CCP leadership. Expressing resolve to always follow the Party, they pledged to begin an education campaign to deepen love for the Party among their religious circles.

Pastor Bob Fu, the founder of Christian human rights group China Aid, described the CCP as the worlds largest extreme atheistic Party.

[The] CCP has committed the worst religious persecution and crimes against humanity, Fu told The Epoch Times.

In the words of Brownback, the CCP is at war with faithbe it Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghurs, and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, or the Falun Gong meditation discipline.

Its a war they will not win, Brownback said.

Zero-Tolerance Policy

One year after the CCP took power in 1949, Chinese troops marched into Tibet and forced upon the Tibetans a 17-point agreement to legitimize the CCPs rule. Yet despite rosy promises of Tibetan autonomy on paper, Beijing turned the region into a surveillance state and installed labor camps.

The Dalai Lama, the regions spiritual leader, went into exile in India in 1959 after the regime brutally crushed an uprising, killing tens of thousands of Tibetans. In the 20 years following, about 1.2 million Tibetans have died under the regimes repressive policies, according to estimates by the Tibetan government-in-exile. More than 150 have resorted to setting themselves on fire in a desperate act of defiance.

Related Coverage Chinese Regime Burns Religious Books, Jails Believers in War Against Faith

Police routinely monitor private correspondence, search homes, and examine phone records in search of forbidden content such as reactionary music from India, according to the latest U.S. State Department report. Provincial officials also banned students from participating in religious activities during school holidays. The report cited 273 Tibetans being detained in violation of international human rights standards as of late 2019.

A nun walking amid the debris of demolished houses at the Larung Gar Buddhist Institute in Sertar county in southwest Chinas Sichuan province on May 29, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

A Tibetan herder named Lhamo, a 36-year-old mother of three, was detained in June 2020 for sending money to her family in India. The family members who saw her two months later found her badly bruised and unable to speak, according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch. She died days later at a local hospital and was immediately cremated.

With the current Tibetan spiritual leader in his 86th year, Beijing has made clear it wants a hand in selecting his successor. In a white paper issued in May, Chinas State Council said it had identified and approved 92 reincarnated Living Buddhasindicating its intent to choose the next Dalai Lama when the current one passes away.

The CCP practices a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to religious believers, Lobsang Tseten, executive director of U.S.-based Tibetan activist group Students for a Free Tibet, told The Epoch Times. He added that the CCPs arbitrary rule in Tibet is a direct threat to every aspect of the life of a Tibetan.

Sinicizing Churches

The CCPs suppression of Catholic and Protestant churches has also intensified under current leader Xi Jinpings watch.

Chinese authorities have removed thousands of crosses from churches, arrested pastors, ordered the removal of Christian images, and aggressively pursued a sinicization policy by establishing patriotic churches, in which pictures of Jesus Chris and the Virgin Mary are replaced with portraits of Xi or Mao.

Screenshots from videos uploaded by ChinaAid show the destruction of Golden Lampstand Church in the city of Linfen in Chinas Shanxi province on Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018. (ChinaAid)

The Chinese regime is also reinterpreting and retranslating the Bible to promote Chinese-style Christianity, with one Chinese ethics textbook twisting a story from the Bible to have Jesus stone a woman to death while claiming himself a sinner.

In 2017, at least four cities and one province restricted Christmas celebrations, banning displays of Christmas decorations, themed performances, and promotional activities. Communist officials in one university banned activities related to Western religious holidays in the name of helping the younger generation build cultural confidence. One Christian this January received a hefty fine of 160,000 yuan ($24,733) for celebrating the holiday.

Underground churches have proliferated as a result of the regimes oppression. In response, Chinese officials have detained church members and handed lengthy prison sentences to pastors.

Wang Yi, a pastor in central Chinas Chengdu who founded one of the countrys largest unregistered Christian churches, was sentenced to nine years in prison in December 2019 for illegal business operations and inciting to subvert state power, a charge the regime frequently uses to silence dissidents.

In April, Radio Free Asia reported that Beijing was running secret brainwashing facilities, which usually involve torture, in southwestern Chinas Sichuan Province to force Christians to give up their faith.

Each Day the Party Is Becoming Bolder

In the far west region of Xinjiang, over 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are currently being held in Chinese internment campswhich the regime calls vocational training centers ostensibly used for curbing extremismwhere they face forced labor, torture, sexual abuse, political indoctrination, forced abortion, and forced sterilization.

Led by the United States, a growing number of countries, including Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, have recognized the suppression campaign as a form of genocide.

The genocide of the Uyghurs is ongoing still, and each day the Party is becoming bolder, Rushan Abbas, executive director of Washington-based nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs, said in a June 30 statement, one day ahead of the CCPs centennial celebration. This is our final wake-up call that the CCP must be stopped if we are to preserve a global system of dignity and order that is respected by all.

The Jieleixi No.13 village mosque with slogans Love the [Chinese Communist] Party, Love China, in Yangisar, south of Kashgar, in Chinas western Xinjiang region on June 4, 2019. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images) A recent report by two Washington-based organizationsOxus Society for Central Asian Affairs and Uyghur Human Rights Projectshowed that at least 28 countries in the world were complicit in Chinas harassment and intimidation of Uyghurs. Many of these countries had strong economic ties to China, including those that have signed up to Chinas Belt and Road initiative (BRI, also known as One Belt, One Road).

As China expands its role globally through the BRI, more states will likely become locked into relations of dependence, increasing Chinas ability to coerce or co-opt them to assist in targeting diaspora members and exiles, according to the report.

We Can Make You Disappear

Nowhere is the CCPs hatred for religion more evident than in its bloody suppression of practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline with slow meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, according to its website.

Out of fear of Falun Gongs popularity in China, then-leader Jiang on July 20, 1999, launched a brutal persecution against adherents. Top Chinese officials gave secret orders to destroy them politically, bankrupt them financially, ruin their reputation, according to a former military colonel who attended the meeting.

Since then, millions of Falun Gong adherents have been held in prisons, labor camps, psychiatric hospitals, and other detention facilities in China. Hundreds of thousands have been tortured in those venues in a bid to force practitioners to give up their belief. An untold number have died under Chinas state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting, with their organs cut out to be sold on the transplant market.

The persecution has continued to this day.

Over the first five months of 2021, 599 Falun Gong practitioners are documented to have been sentenced for their faith; one of them, 81 years old, received nine years, according to data from Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that monitors the persecution of the faith group. More than 15,000 were documented to have experienced harassment or arrests last year.

Related Coverage INFOGRAPHIC: How Falun Gong Is Persecuted in China

Lured by handsome bonuses, police and local officials last year began a sweeping Zero-Out Campaign going after adherents country-wide, Minghui reported. The adherents were told to sign a statement renouncing their faith or see their pensions, careers, or childrens education imperiled.

We can make you disappear if we say the word, one officer from Chinas northernmost province Heilongjiang allegedly told an adherent.

Falun Gong practitioners take part in a parade in Flushing, New York, on April 18, 2021, to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the April 25th peaceful appeal of 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners in Beijing. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Guo Zhenfang, from Chifeng city in Southeastern Inner Mongolia, died in June, one day after his trial. At the hospital, his family found bloodstains on his nose and a wound around his knee cap. His back from the waist down had turned purple-red, according to Minghui. Dozens of plain-clothed police officers blocked the family from further examining the body and sent it to the crematorium without their consent.

Lu Songming, a former history teacher at a middle school from southern Chinas Hunan Province, spent a total of 14 years in jail. He lost around 20 teeth to beating, forced labor, electrocution, and other forms of torture. When he was released in 2018, he had only six teeth left and was no longer fit to work. He suffered from frequent heart failure, eventually dying in March at the age of 53.

A Real Weakness

Brownback observed that increasingly in Xis China, brutal, inhumane tactics from the Mao era are making a comeback.

But in its rush to assert power over Chinas faithful, Brownback said, the regime is showing a real weakness.

They must be feeling the loss of control, and so they are being far more repressive and brutal, he said.

Beijings human rights and religious freedom abuses are costing the regime its global image, while at home, it is hurting its ability to maintain its rule, said Brownback.

Communism and faith just have great trouble co-existing, and faith will not be subdued, so eventually the communism will fall, he said.

What remains of the CCPs 100-year legacy, said Pastor Fu, will be its record as the single political party through which the largest number of human lives were arbitrarily lost  in the whole of human history.
People talk before the start of a rally against "critical race theory" (CRT) being taught in schools, at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Va., on June 12, 2021. (Andrew Cballlero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Scholar Comments on Controversy in Virginia County Over Critical Race Theory

News Analysis

On June 22, two parents were arrested in Loudon County, Virginia, at a school board meeting, for allegedly objecting too boisterously to the countys teaching of critical race theory, the latest incident in an ongoing controversy. One activist says the Virginia county is ground zero for the efforts to roll back the teaching of the theory in the nations schools.

Joseph Johnston Jr., author of The Decline of Nations: Lessons for Strengthening America at Home and in the World, and a resident of Alexandria, spoke with The Epoch Times about critical race theory.

Right here in Loudon County, our schools are being taken over by critical race theory, which is a baffling theory that holds that white people are inherently racist and maintain their economic and political power by oppressing people of color. This is being taught in schools today, and its false and divisive.

When people get involved in their local school boards, they can prevent this stuff from happening. What youre seeing is when people dont get involved with their local governments, then this kind of stuff tends to creep in and destroy our values.

Johnston believes that the whole premise of critical race theory is fundamentally skewed toward an inaccurate rendition of the American political and legal traditions.

Its very unfortunate that our whole culture has been infected with this politically correct dogma that our society is systematically racist and that all issues must be seen through the prism of race. It is divisive and wrong to promote a system that espouses the premise: when someone creates a point of view that runs contrary to the narrative; then, they must be considered a racist.

Seeing everything through race is abhorrent and inaccurate and really should stop. Senator Tim Scott challenged critical race theory, and we need more politicians like that around.

Children dont just absorb our countrys values directly; they have to be taught moral values. They arent being taught them or the Constitution, so there is no way for them to know it.

In many schools nowadays, the teachers use excuses not to teach, and there has been a lapse of standards. When teachers unions and activists obstruct the school system, and we dont enforce educational standards, then they win.
Supreme Court Backs Conservatives Against California Donor Disclosure

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of two conservative groups that challenged a California requirement that tax-exempt charities provide the state the identities of their top financial donors.

The justices, in a 63 ruling, sided with the two nonprofit groupsthe Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Centerin finding that the California attorney generals policy, in place for the past decade, violates the Constitutions First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and association.

The courts six conservatives were in the majority, with its three liberal members dissenting.

Democratic-governed California, the countrys most populous state, has said the donor information is required as part of the state attorney generals duty to prevent charitable fraud.

We are left to conclude that the Attorney Generals disclosure requirement imposes a widespread burden on donors associational rights, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the ruling.

The states interest in amassing sensitive information for its own convenience is weak, Roberts added.

The Thomas More Law Center is a conservative Catholic legal group. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which funds education and training on conservative issues, is the sister organization of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy groupboth founded by conservative billionaire businessman Charles Koch and his late brother David.

Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion that the court has reversed its previous approach.

Todays analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bulls-eye. Regulated entities who wish to avoid their obligations can do so by vaguely waving toward First Amendment privacy concerns,' Sotomayor wrote.

Sotomayor said the court had struck down the requirement even with no evidence that the donors would face any negative consequences if their identities became public, including the prospect of facing threats or reprisals as the groups had argued.

The decision was issued on the last day of rulings for the courts current nine-month term. In the days other ruling, the justices made it easier for states to enact election integrity laws, endorsing two Republican-backed measures in Arizona.

The two groups that challenged Californias mandate were backed by an array of nonprofit organizations spanning the ideological spectrum. Liberal groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, had urged a narrower ruling in favor of the challengers.

California requires that charities provide a copy of the tax form they file with the Internal Revenue Service that lists donors who contribute big amounts of money. Larger groups must disclose donors who contribute $200,000 or more in any year. That information is not posted online and is kept confidential but some has been disclosed in the past.

The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018 reversed a federal judges ruling in favor of the groups, prompting the appeal to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in March.
Seated from left: Associate Justice Samuel Alito, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer and Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, standing from left: Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Associate Justice Elena Kagan, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett pose during a group photo of the Justices at the Supreme Court in Washington on April 23, 2021. (Erin Schaff/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Supreme Court Declines to Hear Appeal From Florist Who Refused Service Over Same-Sex Wedding

The Supreme Court on Friday declined to hear an appeal over a florists refusal to offer service for a wedding of a same-sex couple, allowing a state courts ruling that the shop engaged in unlawful discrimination.

The court ruled 6-3 in declining to take it up. At least four justices need to vote in favor of granting a petition to authorize a review of a case. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas voted in favor (pdf) of taking the case.

The Supreme Court didnt provide an explanation for its denial to hear the case, stating, in part: The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

In June, the Washington state Supreme Court issued a ruling against the florist, Barronelle Stutzman, who refused to create a floral arrangement for Robert Ingersolls same-sex wedding in 2013.

The state court had branded Barronelle a discriminator and ordered her to attend, facilitate, and create custom floral art celebrating all marriages or none, Kristen Waggoner, an attorney for Stutzman, had written to the justices.

Stutzman had argued that her floral arrangements were effectively speech that is protected under the First Amendment.

Like all artists, Barronelle speaks through her custom creations, Waggoner wrote to the high court and argued that the floral arrangements as multimedia works incorporating flowers.

The Epoch Times has contacted Barronelles lawyers for comment following the Supreme Courts refusal to take the case.

However, lawyers for Ingersoll and Curt Freed, who filed the lawsuit, claimed that Stutzman violated anti-discrimination laws for refusing to make the floral arrangement for the wedding. The attorneys further stipulated that Stutzman is essentially trying to seek a floral art exemption to anti-discrimination laws.

The notion of a First Amendment right to discriminate has been rejected as often as it has been raised, wrote Ria Tabacco Mar, a lawyer who represented the plaintiffs, to the Supreme Court.

Several weeks ago, the court issued a unanimous ruling that sided with a Catholic adoption agency in Philadelphia that says religious beliefs prevent it from working with same-sex foster parents.

It is plain that the Citys actions have burdened CSSs [Catholic Social Services] religious exercise by putting it to the choice of curtailing its mission or approving relationships inconsistent with its beliefs, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in that ruling. The agency, he added, seeks only an accommodation that will allow it to continue serving the children of Philadelphia in a manner consistent with its religious beliefs; it does not seek to impose those beliefs on anyone else.
A ranch owner stands before a portion of the unfinished border wall that former U.S. president Donald Trump tried to build, near Roma, Texas, on March 28, 2021. (Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images)

Supreme Court Rejects Trump-Era Border Wall Funding Case

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an appeal from former President Donald Trump concerning funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

The court sent the case back to the U.S. Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with instructions to vacate its judgments and told a district court to consider what further proceedings are necessary and appropriate in light of the changed circumstances in this case, noting that Trump isnt president any longer.

The Supreme Court previously issued rulings in the case, Trump v. Sierra Club, over the past several years after Trump in 2019 said he would declare a national emergency and redirect funds via the National Emergencies Act to construct the border barrier.

Lower courts ruled that the former presidents order violated the Constitutions clause around the separation of powers, while the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction that blocked the construction of the wall while it was being litigated. But in 2019, the Supreme Court placed a stay on the injunction.

When the Sierra Club brought the case back to the high court, it declined to lift the stay on the injunction. The Sierra Club argued that if the stay isnt lifted, the Trump administration would be able to finish the wall before the court can render a decision on the cases merits.

Then-President Trump appealed to the court in August 2020 and argued that the Sierra Club, a left-wing environmentalist organization, doesnt have the standing to file its lawsuit. The Supreme Court took up the appeal and scheduled arguments in February 2021, but those were rescinded after the incoming administration asked the court to postpone the case.

In December 2018, amid an impasse on wall funding, Trump said the government would shut down unless border wall funding was included in a continuing resolution to fund the federal government beyond a certain date. Days later, in early 2019, the former president called on Congress to allocate more than $5 billion in funding and said he wouldnt sign the resolution to end the partial shut down because it wouldnt provide funding for the barrier.

That prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to issue a televised speech rejecting the presidents funding request. Ultimately, days later, Trump signed a measure that included $1.375 billion in funding for the wall, which was a signature promise of the former president during his 2016 campaign. Trump then declared an emergency and directed billions more in funding to build the wall.

Trump, who visited the border late last month, said during a news conference alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that the Biden administration was wrong for stopping construction of the wall and called for the process to be restarted. Biden, in an executive order several months ago, termed the wall as ineffective and wasteful spending.
Supreme Court Votes to Hear Religious School Tuition Case From Maine

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to a Maine law that bans families from a student aid program if they choose to send their children to religious schools.

Parents in the Pine Tree State argue in their petition to the court that Maines prohibition against using taxpayer funds on sectarian schools violates the U.S. Constitution. They say that the Supreme Courts decision last year in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue held that a state may not exclude families and schools from participating in a student-aid program because of a schools religious status.

But, they say, the court did not resolve the question of whether a state may nevertheless exclude families and schools based on the religious use to which a students aid might be put at a school.

By singling out religionand only religionfor exclusion from its tuition assistance program, Maine violates the U.S. Constitution, Senior Attorney Michael Bindas of the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that is representing the parents, said in a statement July 2 after the Supreme Court acted.

The state flatly bans parents from choosing schools that offer religious instruction. That is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to hold that such religious use discrimination in student-aid programs is just as unconstitutional as the religious status discrimination it held unconstitutional in Espinoza.

The case is Carson v. Makin, court file 19-1746. The court, as is its custom, did not explain why it decided to hear the case. The petition for certiorari, or review, had been filed with the court Feb. 4, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit ruled against the petitioners on Oct. 29, 2020.

The case is expected to be heard during the Supreme Courts upcoming term that begins in October.

The petitioners are David and Amy Carson, as parents and litigation guardians of their child, O.C., and Troy and Angela Nelson, as parents and litigation guardians of their children, A.N. and R.N. The respondent is A. Pender Makin in her official capacity as Commissioner of the Maine Department of Education.

The petitioners state in court documents that because 143 of its 260 school districts do not operate a public secondary school, Maine operates a tuition assistance program under which districts that neither operate their own secondary school nor contract with a particular secondary school for the education of their resident secondary students are required by statute to pay tuition at the public school or the approved private school of the parents choice at which the student is accepted.

Participating families may send their children to schools inside or outside Maine, including outside the United States, but they may not send their children to schools that Maine deems sectarian. Such schools were excluded after a Maine Attorney General opinion in 1980 concluded that letting parents select such schools and still receive the tuition assistance benefit violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 1981 that opinion was made state law.

The Courts decision to hear this appeal is a tremendously important development not only for Maine families, but for all families who simply want access to the schools that will best serve their childrens needs, Bindas said.

If a family believes that a school that provides religious instruction is the best option for their child, they should be permitted to choose it, just as they should be permitted to choose a school with a strong STEM [i.e. science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] curriculum, language immersion classes or a robust arts program.

Aaron Frey, Maines attorney general, did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times but told the Associated Press that he expected the law will survive this legal challenge because the education religious schools provide is not equivalent to public education.

Parents are free to send their children to such schools if they choose, but not with public dollars, the Democrat official said.

I am confident that the Supreme Court will recognize that nothing in the Constitution requires Maine to include religious schools in its public education system, he said.
Teen Dies After Falling Off 60 Foot Cliff at Missouri State Park

An 18-year-old girl died after falling from a cliff at a well-known state park in southeast Missouri over the weekend.

Mariah Brielle Elle Schramm was with her friends enjoying the waters of Johnsons Shut-Ins State Park in Reynolds County when she climbed to the top of a rock and then slipped and fell 50 to 60 feet into the Black River around 3 p.m. on Saturday,

St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

She hit her head on a rock shelf that was somewhat below the water surface level and apparently died of a head injury.

Schramm, from Kansas City, seemed to indicate she was hesitant, witnesses told park rangers.

She ended up losing her footing and slipping and hitting the rocks on the way down, Col. Tom Dresner, chief ranger said.

Dresner noted that there are no trespassing signs posted in that area but people often disregard them and head up to the cliffs to jump into the river, adding that the rangers give tickets for trespassing.

However, he explained that they were not patrolling the specific area where the teenager died at the time, but were patrolling other areas.

They do regular enforcement and write tickets if people are climbing on the rocks in restricted areas, Dresner said. These rangers are there watching to make sure people are following the rules and staying safe.

The men and women of Missouri State Parks are deeply saddened by this families loss. We extend our sincerest condolences.

The park covers 9,400 acres and is regularly patrolled by up to three Missouri State Parks rangers, though not always at the same time, Brian Quinn of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources said.

While there were no park rangers policing the bluffs when Schramm died, there were rangers on duty at other areas of the park.
A 2018 Tesla Model 3 electric vehicle is shown in this photo illustration taken in Cardiff, Calif., on June 1, 2018. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

Tesla Second-Quarter Deliveries Meet Analysts Estimates as Chip Shortage Weighs

Tesla Inc on Friday posted record vehicle deliveries for the second quarter that were in line with Wall Street estimates as the electric-car maker coped with a shortage of chips and relied on sales of its cheaper models.

Tesla weathered the global supply crisis better than legacy automakers, but CEO Elon Musk has warned of challenges of securing chips and raw materials.

Now eyes are on its second-quarter earnings to see whether recent drops in bitcoin prices would have an adverse effect on Teslas bottom line, due to Teslas exposure to the cryptocurrencys volatility.

Tesla delivered 201,250 vehicles in total during the second quarter. Analysts had expected Tesla to deliver 200,258 vehicles, according to Refinitiv data.

It was a solid quarter to volume wise, but I view it as a modest disappointment, Garrett Nelson, an equity analyst at CFRA Research, said.

Shares of the company were traded flat, after rising as much as 3.3 percent in early trading on Friday.

Tesla bulls cheered the results. This morning the Street was bracing for bad news and the bulls instead got an early July 4th weekend positive surprise, said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.

Our teams have done an outstanding job navigating through global supply chain and logistics challenges, Tesla said.

The numbers showed that strong deliveries of its Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers, its two lower-priced variants, offset a drop in deliveries of higher-end Model S and X variants.

Tesla has been raising prices for its vehicles in recent months, which its billionaire boss, Elon Musk, blamed in May on major supply chain price pressure, especially raw materials.

He also said in early June that Our biggest challenge is supply chain, especially microcontroller chips. Never seen anything like it.

Brokerage RBC said, Worst may be over for Tesla for chip shortage, but added that potential margin impact from broad supply chain tightness could persist through the year.

A Tesla supercharger is shown at a charging station in Santa Clarita, Calif., United States, on Oct. 2, 2019. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

Model S, X Deliveries Fall

Tesla generated 99 percent of its sales in Model 3 and Model Y, as its new version Model S was launched only in June after several delays.

Overall deliveries of its higher-priced Model S and X cars fell to 1,890 during the April to June period, from a meager 2,020 the preceding quarter, Tesla said.

A Tesla Model S Plaid electric vehicle with a price tag of $129,990, burst into flames on Tuesday while the owner was driving, just three days after the car was delivered. Tesla did not have an immediate comment when contacted by Reuters.

Tesla sold 21,936 Model 3 and Model Y cars to Chinese customers in May, rebounding from a sales slump in April, but still well below March numbers. Its China sales for June will be released in the coming days.

In China, a major growth market for Tesla, the company is facing rising competition from local EV companies as well as heightened scrutiny from regulators and the public.

Chinese regulators said last week Tesla would recall nearly 300,000 China-made and imported Model 3 and Model Y cars for an online software update related to assisted driving.

Sharp drops in bitcoin prices also could weigh down on Teslas second-quarter earnings, analysts say.

On Feb. 8, Tesla disclosed its bitcoin investment of $1.5 billion. Its bitcoin holdings helped generate profits in the first quarter, through the sale of 10 percent of them.

But the investment is also exposing Tesla stocks to the volatile cryptocurrency prices, which suffered from recent falls.

Tesla stock price has been pretty closely correlating with the price of bitcoin, Nelson said, adding this hurts investor sentiment despite bitcoin accounting for a small portion of Teslas overall cash.

By Hyunjoo Jin and Akanksha Rana
Three illegal immigrants were arrested by Sierra Blanca Border Patrol in Hudspeth County, Texas, on June 29 after allegedly breaking into a ranch house and stealing weapons along with other items. (Courtesy of U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

Texas Governor to Border Residents: Report Property Damage Done by Illegal Immigrants

Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday urged landowners along the border to report any damage that has been done by illegal immigrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months.

I strongly encourage Texas landowners along the border to report any personal property damages they incur due to unlawful immigration, the governor said, by completing the Self Reporting Damage Survey, our state will be equipped with the necessary data to continue addressing the ongoing crisis at our southern border and provide the support our landowners and communities need to stay safe and secure.

The survey will not be a substitute for damage reports submitted to insurance companies, according to a statement from Abbotts office. Its available in both English and Spanish, his office added.

The survey also wont guarantee disaster relief assistance.

Border Patrol agents, meanwhile, arrested three illegal aliens this week who were armed with guns stolen from a Texas residence, according to a news release.

Without hesitation, these agents responded to the ranch house and safely secured the location, the stolen weapons and the undocumented non-citizens, Big Bend Sector Chief Patrol Agent Sean L. McGoffin said in a statement Wednesday.

And Abbotts announcement comes after Texas sheriffs have reported that illegal immigrants have intentionally damaged property along the bordersomething they havent done during past surges.

Rancher Mike Miller points to water pump machinery that hes had to replace several times after illegal immigrants have damaged it, in Uvalde County, Texas, on May 27, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Were starting to see more intentional damage, longtime Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe told The Epoch Times. Ive never seen it quite like this. Somebodys making a statement.

Coe said that property owners have reported fences being cut because theyre hauling dope or small kids or something.

But weve never seen the intentional big four-by-four holes in the fence, or now, a 10-foot section just cut completely out. Thats really starting to bother me, he added during an interview in mid-June.

Its all just out of spite, I think, Coe said of the damage being wrought along the border.

Border Patrol officials said that more than 180,000 illegal immigrants were arrested in May 2021. Republicans have pointed to the surge in illegal immigration as a result of the Biden administrations policies, including executive orders that rescinded the Trump administrations stricter immigration rules.

Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco noted that property owners and ranchers along the border are now being forced to carry firearms. In one instance, the sheriff said, a resident told him that he held an illegal alien at gunpoint, but the man wouldnt back down.

And [the resident] finally had to cock the hammer back and say, Hey, you take a step further, then things are gonna change here,' Nolasco told The Epoch Times. Thats the last thing I want to hearthat we have a shooting, [that] we have somebody that had to kill somebody  I hope it never happens.
A policeman covers a camera to stop a journalist from recording footage outside the Shanghai Pudong New District People's Court in Shanghai, China, on December 28, 2020. (Leo Ramirez/AFP via Getty Images)

The Chinese Regime Sanitizes Court Records

The Chinese regime removed court records from the online government repository amid celebrations of the communist partys centenary anniversary to maintain a facade of justice, says a Chinese law expert.

China Judgements Online, an official online database of court rulings, has been taking down large numbers of documents that the website asserted were being migrated for technical reasons.

Cases concerning punishment for speech, death penalty verdicts, and the reprieve of a death sentence issued by the Supreme Peoples Court have been taken offline.

The exact number of affected court records has been obscured to the public, but around 11 million have vanished in the past three months, according to The South China Morning Post.

A Beijing-based law expert, who gave the surname Zhang, pointed out that there was no legal basis for restricting public access to parts of the online government repository of court records, even temporarily.

The explanation doesnt stand close scrutiny, Zhang told The Epoch Times on June 30.

He said a national database generally has a technical support team and a comprehensive maintenance system should have been built within the eight years it has existed.

Chinas Supreme Court (SPC) launched the website on July 1, 2013 based on the Provisions of the Supreme Peoples Court regarding the Issuance of Judgments on the Internet.

The SPC requires all court judgment documents to be published on the website, with a few exceptions, like information concerning national security and the support or guardianship of minor children.

Zhang is not optimistic about any kind of recovery of the data because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is unpredictable, he said, adding that the CCP has erased its history before.

No one will be concerned about it as time goes by. Ridiculous things never end, Zhang said in the phone interview.

Punishment for Speech

Court records involving picking quarrels and provoking trouble, a common charge, under article 293 of Chinas Criminal Law that the regime uses to target critics, have vanished from the website.

The Epoch Times search of the Internet using selected keywords related to the charge, including Article 293 of the Criminal code, picking quarrels and provoking trouble, faking information, Twitter, and slandering, did not yield any results from the official database.

Court records involving picking quarrels and provoking trouble have been removed from Chinas official database. (Screenshot)

Even high-profile judgments, like the case of Luo Daqing, are missing.

The Chinese student, who attended the University of Minnesota, was jailed for six months when he returned to China for posting an image of China leader Xi Jinping on Twitter, even though he was living in the U.S. at the time.

Zhang suggested the CCP is sanitizing the Internet, and renovating its appearance to maintain a facade of justice because of the regimes centenary anniversary.

Everyone knows that Chinese people have access to those judgements, he said, but it would be a slap in the face if they were brought to light.

Not only domestically, but international communists concerned about China have also found that Chinas judiciary went wrong. Rotten to the Core, he said.

Chinese citizens were punished for discussing authorities and the CCP, commenting on current affairs on social media platforms, or reporting peoples daily lives during the pandemic on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, and now even though those records are blocked in China.

The removal of judgment records was first reported by a China-based activist in February 2020. He claimed that a court record of punishment would not be available or accessible on the website once a case was in the spotlight.

The free speech activist has since started saving screenshots of each judgment related to a citizens speech. As of June, he has archived over 300 files.

The regimes cover-up of suppressing free speech coincides with the whitewashing of the CCPs history. The regime played down the crime of the 10-year Cultural Revolution in its new version history books.

Luo Ya contributed to this report.
KTM rider Cyril Lemoine of France receives medical attention in Tour de France, between Brest and Landerneau, France, on June 26, 2021. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Pool via Reuters)

Tour de France Drops Lawsuit After Crash, Probe Still Ongoing

FranceThe Tour de France has withdrawn a lawsuit against a spectator who caused a massive pile-up during the first stage of the race in northwest French region of Brittany but French police continue to investigate the incident.

Local prosecutor Camille Miansoni told a news conference on Thursday that the probe was still ongoing as a second complaint remains.

He also said that people injured in the crash could also file lawsuits later.

The spectator, a 30-year-old Frenchwoman, has been arrested and placed into custody on Wednesday after presenting herself at a police station in Brittany.

She is accused of involuntarily causing injury and putting the life of others at risk and faces up to 1 to 2 years in jail depending on seriousness of injuries.

The spectator was holding a cardboard sign and facing away from the cyclists at a television camera as they passed. German Tony Martin was sent tumbling when he rode straight into the sign, and a large number of other riders also fell to the ground.

Miansoni said the woman had no police or justice records and expressed fear and shame after what she said was an idiocy.

Police also called for the spectator not to be lynched on social networks.

We are withdrawing our complaint. This story has been blown out of proportion but we wish to remind everyone of the safety rules on the race, Tour director Christian Prudhomme told Reuters.

If you come to the Tour, you hold your kid, you hold your pet and dont cross the road carelessly. And above all, you respect the riderstheyre the ones worthy of live TV.

On Tuesday, Tour de France riders bringing the race to a halt for about a minute one kilometer into its fourth stage in a silent protest for safer racing conditions after numerous crashes.
The flag of the National League for Democracy party flies over protesters taking part in a demonstration against the February 1 military coup in Yangon on February 10, 2021. (Sai Aung Main/AFP via Getty Images)

US Treasury Sanctions 22 Individuals Linked to Burmese Military

WASHINGTONThe U.S. Treasury Department on Friday imposed sanctions on 22 people linked to Burmas military regime and warned of further increasing costs over what it called the militarys suppression of democracy and campaign of brutal violence against its people.

The move comes as the U.S. Commerce Department separately on Friday blacklisted four companies for what it said was their support of Burmas military.

Burma is also known as Myanmar.

Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Susan Heavey
Flags are displayed next to headstones in Dixon, Calif., on May 24, 2020. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Veteran Cemetery Finds Home in Anaheim Hills

ANAHEIM HILLS, Calif.Officials and veterans gathered July 1 to celebrate the claiming of land for a controversial veterans cemetery in Anaheim Hills.

Today Anaheim is open to veterans, said Anaheim Councilman Trevor ONeil. Im bringing a resolution to Anaheim City Council later this month to support the veterans cemetery and commit the city of Anaheim [to a] proactive role in helping to bring this project to fruition.

The announcement came about a week after plans to build the memorial grounds in Irvine fizzled. Following years of reports and studies, Irvine City Council on June 22 took no action to construct a Veterans Memorial Park and Cemetery at the Orange County Great Park.

The lack of action left the project in limbo until now.

This is a long time coming and it is about time, Congresswoman Young Kim said in a statement. Building a veteran cemetery to honor veterans who served our country has been an issue. Our veterans deserve a resting place in Orange County that honors their sacrifice.

County government officials, along with the Veterans Alliance of Orange County, joined at the site to celebrate.

Supervisor Andrew Do expressed his appreciation for those that worked year after year to get the project moving.

Forty-six years ago, there was a military van that came to my house, my family home in Vietnam, to say, You need to get up, youre about to lose your freedom, Do said. Now 45 years later to be a part of the establishment of the first veterans cemetery here in Orange County is a privilege thats beyond description for me.

A Controversial History

District Attorney and former Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer spoke on the behalf of the accomplishment while reflecting on his time as a policymaker, expressing his frustrations when the county development wasnt going through.

I was incredibly frustrated to watch the fact that this county that grew El Toro and Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin, and Los Alamitos, and Camp Pendleton to the South, could not find a solution to a veteran cemetery as one of the most respected, dedicated veterans and military communities that has ever sent individuals overseas to fight for this community, Spitzer said. This county has benefited, but the whole world and the country have benefited from Orange County, California, but we couldnt solve that problem.

These men and women have fought for our country, have gone overseas, have left their families, have not been there to watch their children being raised  and we cant bury them with dignity and respect.

In acknowledging that the cemetery would no longer be located at the El Toro Base in Irvine, Supervisor Don Wagner pleaded with Irvine councilmembers Mike Carroll and Tammy Kim to allow for pieces of El Toro to be brought to Anaheim Hills.

As you build that Great Park, you are going to rip up the runway, you are going to be taking down some of those buildings. They will be recycled.  Is it possible that we bring some of that material, incorporate that material into some of the buildings and the monuments? Lets bring El Toro to our veterans, Wagner said.

Irvine Councilwoman Tammy Kim expressed her excitement and support for the new grounds.

As the newest person elected for the Irvine City Council, I wasnt involved in a lot of the politics that have happened in the last 10 to 15 years over the cemetery, Kim told The Epoch Times. Im so happy to see that weve finally allowed Anaheim to pursue the site.

Moving Forward

Veterans in attendance said they look forward to whats to come, stating that the cemetery is overdue.

Orange County resident David Lockwood, who served in the Vietnam Veteran war, said he fought alongside friends who didnt make it home.

This is the place they should be, not someplace 50 miles away, he said.

Orange County is home to more than 100,000 veterans, and after years of controversy with the city of Irvine, 280 acres of land between the 91 freeway and 241 toll road in Anaheim Hills were officially claimed.

Officials are still identifying sources of funding for the project, but Wagner said he hoped ground would be broken on the cemetery by the end of the year.
Western Australia Govt Criticized for Appointing CCP Affiliates to Advisory Council

The Western Australian government has been accused of ignoring the states non-Mainland Chinese (NMC) community after the McGowan government appointed two allegedly pro-Beijing community leaders to a taxpayer-funded policy advisory council.

Western Australian CCP influence expert Tshung Chang called out the WA Government for choosing CCP-linked individuals Ting Chen and Edward Zhang over other leaders in the Chinese community, despite a wealth of available nominees.

Perths Chinese community is not homogeneous. It has Non-Mainland Chinese from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Chang told The Epoch Times. Zhang and Chen have been involved in groups that support mainland China and the CCP, but there are many others that dont.

The news of the appointments first appeared in The Age on June 22, which noted that the two men would be joining the WAs Ministerial Multicultural Advisory Council (MMAC) and that both were allegedly avid advocates for the CCP with concrete affiliations to Beijings United Front Work Department (UFWD)that coordinates thousands of overseas groups to carry out foreign political influence operations, suppress dissident movements and gather intelligence.

Ting Chen is the president of Chung WahAustralias oldest Chinese community organisation. Former president, Richard Tan, has admitted that many of the groups current members were linked to the UFWD.

The links with the United Front is something so obvious, or it has been so obvious in the past, Tan told The Age. Its just that Australian politicians knowingly ignored it or pretend they dont know.

Likewise, Edward Zhang is the founder and chief editor of the Australian Chinese Times, a pro-Beijing newspaper that censors anti-China rhetoric in its publications.

Zhang has been directly connected to at least five separate organisations affiliated with the UFWD, as well as being the honorary chairman for WAs branch of Australias most prominent Beijing-linked bodythe Australian Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China (ACPPRC).

The Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China (CPPRC) is an arterial organisation in the UFWDs worldwide arsenal and maintains appendages in at least 91 countries or territories worldwideACPPRC being CPPRCs foothold in Australia.

The president of the ACPPRCs New South Wales branch, billionaire Huang Xiangmo, has been barred from entering Australia over concerns of foreign political interference after Huang donated millions to both major political parties.

Chang argues that the appointments should have been given to others who represent the plurality of the WA ethnically Chinese community.

It may have been more representative of the plural community if the McGowan Government appointed Zhang or Chen along with another member from the NMC, Chang said.

But with their focus on supporting the CCP, are these the people Premier McGowan should have on a committee that promotes social cohesion and understanding? I know a dozen NMC community leaders who have deeper community roots and experience who will do a better job than Chen or Zhang.

A WA Labor spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the MMAC served as a consultative body to the government, providing feedback regarding the needs of the states multicultural population and that appointments were made based on merit within the culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) community.

MMAC Members are appointed based on their knowledge, experience and work with CaLD communities of WA and appointments are not based on political views or place of birth, the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson did not respond when asked whether the State Government knew about Zhangs and Chens Beijing affiliations.

WA Labor Govt Members Long Term Ties to Beijing

Several members of the WA Labor Party have either maintained close connections with CCP-linked individuals or repeatedly expressed support towards the communist regime, with the most notable being WA Labor Party Leader and Premier, Mark McGowan, and WA Labors upper house whip, Pierre Yang.

During his inaugural speech in 2017 (pdf), Yang said he maintained very close contact with Zhang, who provided him with advice and encouragement in pursuing a career in WAs political system.

He advised me, encouraged me and supported me on my journey to become a parliamentarian, Yang said. Dr. Zhang is like an uncle to me, and I am privileged to have known Dr. Zhang.

Months after the speech, it was revealed that Yang failed to declare his membership of two separate CCP-affiliated organisations, including the Northeast China Federation Inc and the Association of Great China, from which he later resigned. Yang was also listed as a member on WAs ACPPRC website but denied its usage of his name and requested its removal.

Read More Mentor of West Australian MP Linked to Chinese Communist Party

McGowan strongly defended Yang after the discovery of his membership with the CCP-affiliated groups.

Pierre is one of the most genuine, nicest and considerate people I know, and he has my full confidence, McGowan told the ABC.

McGowan has also repeatedly worked to strengthen relations between WA and Beijing and defended his position on the basis that WAs economy relies heavily on China, with 56 percent of its goods and over $100 billion worth of exports sent to the Asian nation in 2020.

Earlier this month, McGowan criticised Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison for speaking out against China and defended Beijings sanctions on Australian productsincluding coal, wine, barley, beef, timber, and cottonsaying that the CCP was just acting in its best interest.

McGowan has also made efforts to maintain positive relations with Beijing through the CCP consulate in the states capital, Perth, arranging multiple correspondences with at least three consul-generals who have each since passed the torch.

This includes the most recent appointment of the new consul-general, Long Dingbin, whose arrival prompted McGowans office to arrange a welcoming meeting between the two. Long is a strong proponent of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), who headed up Beijings largest, multi-billion dollar BRI project in Pakistan.

McGowan reportedly told Long he had visited China a total of four times since becoming WAs premier, including his last visit to Beijing in 2018, where Yang accompanied him. A WA Labor spokesperson told The Epoch Times that McGowans visits were for trade, education and tourism purposes.

McGowan was also vocally supportive of the Chinese regime while COVID-19 cases were rapidly rising in Wuhan, with a post by another key UFWD organisations website showing that McGowan met with prominent Beijing-linked figures to demonstrate solidarity with them.

In an archived video of the dinner, previous consul-general Dong Zhihua, UFWD-linked Zhang and Chen, WA Labors Yang and McGowan, along with historically CCP-supporting WA Labor MPs Paul Papalia and Peter Tinley, together shout Go China! Go Wuhan!
Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifies on the department's fiscal year 2022 budget request during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 23, 2021. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Why Do Retired (and Now Active Duty) Generals and Admirals Behave the Way They Do?

Commentary

The spectacle of retired General Officers (GOs) and Admirals (Flag Officers  FOs) criticizing (far more often than not in one direction) political developments is becoming a regular staple of American discourse. The traditional line of separation between Service and politics while in uniform is fraying drastically.

Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni from the 1990s was perhaps one of the prototypical soft political GO/FOs. He seemed omni-present during the Clinton years and after retiring, became involved in a number of official/semi-official appointments, even for President George W. Bush, but there did always seem to be a party leaning on Zinnis part.

This repeatable process of rolling out GO/FOs was refined by the Democrats during the mid-term election for President George W. Bush in 2004. In some ways it was characterized as the Angry Generals who were always angry. They were angry about President Bush, they were angry about Iraq, they said they were angry about being lied to (although many had fully been involved in the intelligence and planning for the Iraq Invasion), and so on.

This included retired Generals such as Major General Paul Eaton and General Wesley Clark, who are very politically active. Eaton has become a staple of CNN and is closely aligned with VoteVets.org and the Lincoln Project. (For full disclosure I also worked for him when I was in Iraq.)

Motives

Pressure to conform to the beliefs of the Peacetime GO/FO Club: At one time, GO/FOs were the keepers of all that was good and right in America. They were never perfect and always had human faults, but there was a clear Judeo-Christian heritage and value system. That is no longer true.

In many ways it was Admiral Mullen under President Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates who breached the firewall by allowing any behavior to become normalized. This is not meant to judge any lifestyle in anywayit is simply an observance of his actions. I have noticed a commensurate politicization of the Military Chaplain system. In some ways they have become the Commissars of American military units.

Mullen did not defend the military institution from politicization, he made it clear he would conform the military institution to the social engineering policies and attitudes of an Administration. From this point on, Admiral Mullen established a significant precedent for the uniformed military, service for a GO/FO was about conformance, not performance.

Part of this conformance was parroting common public talking points to align with one party and criticize the other in a coordinated fashion. And furthermore, the process of selection, inclusion, and retention into the GO/FO Club became ideologicalnot merit based. Although there has been Vietnam and the long war years of the War on Terrorwe have not seen survival of the military and the country at stake since the Second World War. A seminal difference.

Peacetime GO/FOs are not the same as wartime/war winning GO/FOs. In World War II and even Korea, many GO/FOs were fired, relieved, replaced, or retired before we established our war-winning generals. The modern Peacetime GO/FO Club would not accept Gen. Patton from WWII or Gen. Grant from the Civil War into their midst. Peacetime GO/FOs are naturally very inclined toward big government, the deep state, and conformance to a common narrative. Why would they want to kill off the culture that created them?

When I attended Army War College and the new post Senior Service College of Joint Professional Military Education, the preparatory schools and pre-requisites for consideration for promotion into the GO/FO ranksthe indoctrination toward progressive thought patterns was very noticeableand any different thinking was routinely called out and declared closed-minded.

At Army War College I was admonished and had a paper rejected because of my reference to the immoral nature of the one-child policy in China and forced abortion. I was directed to remove this reference.

Post-Service search for significance and continuation of their status: Many GO/FOs spend their retired time searching for significance by extending their status into new and higher levels of service. Retired pay may be reasonable, but its not enough to support a continuation of what they had without significant supplemental income. Many set up consulting Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs) that in some ways communicate underemployment and an availability for more gainful employment.

Pressure to be relevant: A number of GO/FOs who try to stay competitive, go overboard to make sure they are seen, heard, and receive attention. They know they have to compete with their peers and want to make sure they are noticedkind of like when they were in the military.

The Holy Grail of Board Positions: Corporate board positions are the crown jewel of what many GO/FOs are looking for. Being seen and being relevant can help them attain these positions. And many of these corporate boards trend toward allegiance to big government and cancel culture.

The Double Crown of Think Tank Seats: This is an equivalent crown jewel to a board position. A seat at the Atlantic Council or the Center for Strategic and International Studies or even Harvards Belfer Center along with a prestigious board position is considered the Mt. Olympus of post military service. One great concern through, these think tanks have become significantly aligned with foreign money.

Political Appointments: Another way to continue service and visibility are Presidential appointments. The GO/FOs are often preening for these appointments. Often they mean a cut in paybut great visibility.

Declining Brand Image: The GO/FOs realize their vaunted reputations fade fast. This pushes them to extremes of behavior. One legendary General that I worked for has a consulting group, but books sales can only support the family business so much so other creative arrangements must be made to maintain visibility and create revenue streams.

Top Secret Clearances: One of the unspoken perks desired and sought after are the retention of clearances. Clearance slots are expensive and complicatedbut can be charged back through overhead charges to the Government.

Over the Guardrail

General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ran right up to the guardrail and possibly leaned over the guard rail with his comments on June 23, 2021 in front of a House Committee on Armed Services.

After months of rightly steering clear of election matters, about which the U.S. Military has no role, General Milley expressed great concern over White Rage, I want to understand white rage. And Im white.

By merely using the talking point of Black Lives Matters and Antifa, Milley took sides on a domestic matter. This was a crossing of the Rubicon in the role of the Military in civil society in America. I dont believe theres any such precedent for the senior military to break from focusing on foreign threats such as China, Russia, or Iran and looking back over their shoulder into a volatile and opinionated subject area in the domestic arena.

Is this faux intellectualism? Patton was an avid reader of historical readings, often of the opposition.

But Patton showed results by winning wars. What is Milleys track record in winning wars and building deterrence capacity? I dont believe hes won a war and the Pentagon is wobbly on building deterrence capacity and has instead focused on a McCarthy like witch hunt for the boogeyman of White Extremists, which likely do exist, but in extremely small numbers.

The leader of this effort is Bishop Garrison, a veteran himself, but with a public track record of hyper overuse of the racism charge and advocacy of critical race theory ideology. He is leading the effort to revise Department of Defense Instruction 1325.06, the key guidance to Department of Defense (DOD) on internal dissent and political activism by DOD personnel. Ive been through several similar, senior level reviews. His ability to steer the outcome toward his personal ideology is of great concern.

Another case study on the impact of critical race theory zealotry in DOD culture is reflected in a War on the Rocks article by an Active-Duty Colonel. Any modicum of Twitter analysis reflects her focus on painting any alternative viewpoint to President Bidens agenda as white extremism.

She is the product of the evolving culture of the Department of Defense and General Milley is ultimately responsible for this disturbing distraction from the core mission of DOD. These are not good indicators of the direction of the DOD

General Milleys comments give great pause for reflection. Yes, there are issues with justice and injustice in American society, however the core mission of the military is to defend America and deter aggressors such as China, Russian, and Iran.

Delving into domestic and societal issues is questionable at best and is a significant inhibitor to generating deterrent capability to ensure the possibility of large-scale conflict between America and aggressive totalitarian states is minimized. There are other leaders and processes to take care of real and perceived injustices in our incredible republic.

Retired Col. John Mills is a national security professional with service in five eras: Cold War, Peace Dividend, War on Terror, World in Chaos, and now, Great Power Competition. He is the former director of cybersecurity policy, strategy, and international affairs at the Department of Defense. On Gab: @ColonelRETJohn. On Telegram: Daily Missive

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
People gather for a special service of prayer and reflection at St. James Church in Sydney, Australia on December 19, 2014. (Brendon Thorne/Getty Images)

Why Religious Freedom Laws Are Needed in Australia Now More Than Ever

Commentary

Cowed by public health reprimands and driven back into lockdown for fear of contagion, many Australians these days appear content to sacrifice liberty for the sake of safety. But the beacon of liberty continues to glow, and there are hopes it will yet burn brightly.

All but forgotten as COVID-19 overwhelmed the nation last year, the Morrison governments commitment to protecting religious freedomfirst promised in the 2019 election campaign in the wake of the campaign for same-sex marriagehas reawakened.

Attorney-General Michaelia Cash has announced that she will bring a revised version of the pandemic-postponed Religious Discrimination Bill to Parliament by the end of the year.

The new proposals are likely to prove just as controversial as those first put forward by Cashs predecessor, Christian Porter. Critics of the bill will almost certainly argue that religious freedom protections amount to support for hate speech and prejudice.

Senator Michaelia Cash during an appearance at Education and Employment Committee at Parliament House on March 25, 2021, in Canberra, Australia. (Sam Mooy/Getty Images)

Yet far from creating a licence to pursue the socially unacceptable, enactment of the legal protection of the fundamental right to religious liberty will strengthen the capacity of citizens of an already successful and diverse multicultural society to live together.

At present, our anti-discrimination laws generally provide only exemptions for faith-based organisations. The proposed Religious Discrimination Bill would bolster this by creating a specific right enabling those organisations to act in accordance with their religious tenets.

What is it that has brought this country to the point where legislation is needed to enforce the fundamental human right to religious liberty? One factor is the advancing reach of identity politics, which accentuatesrather than amelioratesdifferences between people.

Accentuation of difference, in turn, makes it harder for citizens of a secular, multicultural society to dissent from the new orthodoxies about gender, human sexuality, and the family. Instead, dissent is weaponised and deployed as a form of alleged harm to shut down debate.

Critics of religion pounced on figures from the 2016 Census, where 30 percent of Australians claimed no religious affiliation; what they consistently fail to see is that religion remains an important part of Australian society and that over 60 percent of Australians retain a religious affiliation.

A law to protect the fundamental human right to religious liberty would not have been necessary for Australia had it not been for the intolerance shown by those determined to silence and shame religious believers who dared voice their beliefs in public.

For example, few would be surprised if an environmentalist group chose not to employ a confessing advocate of coal or other fossil fuels. Yet arms are thrown up in horror when a religious school asks its staff to be sympathetic to the creeds of the faith in question.

Indeed, any expression of sympathy for religious points of view on social issues can lead to condemnation and the call for boycottsas happened in 2017 when Coopers Brewery sponsored an online debate with an advocate for and an opponent of same-sex marriage.

The legalisation of euthanasia poses the next set of problems for defenders of religious liberty. Faith-based health or aged care facility may find its freedom to refuse the administration of euthanasia on its premises removed by laws enshrining the so-called right to die.

This is already the case in Queensland, where a new Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD) scheme affords no right to conscientious objection for faith-based providers. Patients who are hard to move or close to death will be able to demand VAD regardless of where they are located.

Australia long ago signalled a commitment to protecting religious liberty when it ratified the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, two of the principal treaties setting out protections.

A man is seen praying outside St Marys Cathedral in Sydney, Australia, on October 23, 2020n. (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

Ratification of such treaties does not automatically make the provisions part of Australian law and does not create legally enforceable rights. But it does entail a legal and moral obligation to act consistently with the treaties and to uphold their provisions.

Not that the right to religious freedom is absolute. It must always be balanced against the rights of other citizens. Nor can religious practice be justified simply because it is motivated by faith. Australian law, for example, prohibits female genital mutilation and child marriage.

No matter what proponents of such practices preach pieties, they will always be illegal, and those who practice them stand to be convicted. But this is quite distinct from preserving the freedom to order ones life according to certain religious doctrines and beliefs.

The unrelenting onslaught of progressive secularism is also making it even harder for religious Australians to practice their faith openly and in public. As a result, we have come to a point where a Religious Discrimination Bill is not only to be welcomed; it has become essential.

The tyrants of tolerance have only themselves to blame for having so taunted their religious neighbours that the Morrison government, which came to office pledged to act, has now demonstrated a renewed determination to safeguard the liberties of all Australians.

Peter Kurti is director of the Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society program at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia. He is also an adjunct associate professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, and is a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Its logo is displayed outside a branch of HSBC at the financial Central district in Hong Kong on June 2, 2015. (Rueters/Bobby Yip/File Photo)

Worlds Largest Steel Company Blacklists HSBC In Retaliation For Huawei Case

The worlds largest steel company, China Baowu Steel Group, blacklisted HSBC Holdings PLC, claiming that it is a high-risk lender. HSBC Holdings is the only foreign lending institution on Baowus blacklist. All other lenders on the list are floundering Chinese banks.

Mike Sun, a North American investment strategist, believes that Baowu Group did this in retaliation for HSBC providing key evidence to the United States in the Huawei Meng Wanzhou case. He believes that this is an intentional blockade of HSBC by a large Chinese state-owned enterprise.

According to a Reuters report, Baowu told its finance employees not to use HSBC Holdings for short-term loans during its 2020 year-end training session.

HSBC has faced difficulties in China since its involvement in the Huawei case. In October 2020, the Chinese Ministry of Finance issued $6 billion in U.S. dollar sovereign bonds in Hong Kong, and replaced HSBC with Citibank as one of the issuers of the bonds. HSBC was an issuer of U.S. dollar sovereign bonds four times since 2017.

On July 23, 2020, HSBC provided the United States with critical evidence in a PowerPoint document about the Meng Wanzhou case. Although HSBC stated on July 25 that it has no malice toward Huawei and did not frame Huawei, on July 28, the CCP-backed China Internet Information Center published an online review, suggesting that HSBC was maliciously involved in framing Huawei.

Even before the evidence was released to the public, HSBC was under heavy fire on the Internet. Many Chinese citizens criticized HSBC as shameful and breaking the very pot that provides food to you.

A few months later, in November 2020, the China Foreign Exchange Administration alleged that HSBCs Guangdong Branch violated its regulations and imposed a fine of about $225,000. It also confiscated about $16,000 in cash from HSBC.

Some commentators believe that the CCP is trying to destroy HSBCs business in Hong Kong. However, Mike Sun, a North American investment strategist, believes that the CCPs actions are merely warnings and have little impact on HSBCs main business in Hong Kong.

Nonetheless, HSBCs operations in the United States and France have suffered losses. The company decided to continue its investment in Asia because it stills deems it profitable.

On Feb. 23, 2021, HSBC announced its 2020 performance and that it would invest $6 billion in Asia in the next five years.

As early as September 2019, HSBC launched a public relations campaign called Beijing Visibility Strategy, and spent millions aiming to protect and improve its reputation in the Chinese market despite the Huawei case. In November 2020, HSBC (China) launched four major sustainable projects at the China International Import Expo, spending a total of about $9 million to support green energy start-ups, environmental protection, restoration, and other public welfare undertakings.

Mike Sun also suggests that the CCP believes that HSBC is making money from China and must not be allowed to break this pot. But in the case of Huawei, HSBC obviously would rather offend the CCP than the United States.
Xi Jinping Warns Foreign Countries on CCP Anniversary

Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping warns foreign forces not to bully Beijing. The punishment for doing so? In his words, the blood and flesh of 1.4 billion Chinese people.

On the eve of the Chinese regimes anniversary, crowds packed Hong Kongs airport, with many headed to the UK. Some even paid double the price for their one-way tickets.

Extreme weather hits Chinas coastal Shandong Province. Raging through the day and night, it set a new record for the citys history.

A group of Chinese women was seen dancing to pro-communist music in New York City. One man filmed them and condemned them online. But Chinese state media soon adopted the clip, adding their own spin.

A lawsuit in Serbia reaches a verdictinvolving the countrys police, 11 European citizens, and the Chinese regime. A filmmaker there tells us the story.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more first-hand news from China.

For more news and videos, please visit our website and Twitter.
The annual Kids Count report ranked Arizona 47th among states for the educational well-being of its children. The state finished in bottom half of states for all categories, including health, economic welfare and family, but education was the only ranking to get worse from the last report.)
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)  New Mexico is directing the nation's biggest chunk of federal coronavirus relief money to helping middle-class families pay for child care, a vast expansion aimed at getting parents back to work in one of the poorest states in America.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced Thursday that the state will subsidize child care at 350% of the federal poverty line, or about $93,000 for a family of four. Thats up from about $54,000.

Were going to double the subsidies for child care, said the Democratic governor, who was flanked by balloons and overlooked a gaggle of young children wearing party hats. She added that the state could one day go even further: Why dont we have universal access for child care?

New Mexico's two-year spending commitment will expand eligibility to the highest income levels of any state. Its the largest and latest example of states using pandemic relief aid to subsidize child care. Others include Georgia and Montana, while California is debating a child care funding package.

Some states, like New Jersey, offer subsidies at 350% of the federal poverty line but only when relatives are providing care.

New Mexico also will be the first state to increase payments to child care providers by using a reimbursement formula that focuses on the local cost of running child care businesses, instead of the market rate of what parents can pay.

State Early Childhood Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky called the announcement an important landmark on our journey towards creating a true cradle-to-career education system that helps all New Mexicans thrive.

Groginsky was pivotal for winning federal approval of the new formula in Washington, D.C., where she served as assistant superintendent of early learning for the District of Columbia before taking the job in New Mexico. While the formulas are not identical, the experience there provides an idea of how much child care providers will benefit.

Child care providers in Washington got a 24% to 57% increase in reimbursement during the transition in 2019, according to officials there. No providers saw a decrease.

Early childhood advocates say the new rules will lead to increased pay for child care workers, who often make just above minimum wage. They also expect improvements in worker-to-child ratios, the main benchmark of child care center quality.

So for your child what that means is that theres a lower ratio between (staff) and children, said Katherine Freeman, CEO at Growing Up New Mexico. Why is that the most significant thing? Because children need individual attention.

Parents should see immediate benefits, especially those who earned too much to qualify for past subsidies but too little to pay for child care without spending half their paycheck.

The expansion is paid for in part by $300 million in federal awards that expire in 2024.

Democratic state lawmakers already have a plan in motion to increase child care funding long term by tapping into a unique $20 billion state endowment funded by resource extraction royalties and market investments.

A ballot initiative before voters next year could increase the amount of funding from the endowment to the states Early Childhood Education and Care Department and possibly replace the federal funding when it expires.

___

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 undercovered issues. Follow Attanasio on Twitter.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The U.S. military will remain involved in the Afghanistan war into September, keeping the option of launching airstrikes against the Taliban to defend Afghan forces, U.S. officials said Thursday, even as the final combat troops prepare to leave the country in coming days.

For weeks, officials have said the withdrawal of the main U.S. military force and its equipment from Afghanistan would be largely completed by this weekend, well ahead of the Sept. 11 deadline set by President Joe Biden. Army Gen. Scott Miller, the top U.S. commander there, would then leave, marking a significant turning point in the U.S. mission. But a range of complicating factors means that will not end America's involvement in the 20-year war.

Officials said when Miller flies out, his combat role, including authority to carry out strikes on the Taliban and to conduct counterterror operations against al-Qaida or other groups, will be taken over by Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East, who is based in Florida. Officials said there have been several U.S. airstrikes in support of the Afghans in recent weeks, using warplanes based outside of Afghanistan, and those strikes will continue.

The new U.S. commander inside Afghanistan will be Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, who will head the security mission at the U.S. Embassy. He is already in Kabul, working with Miller on a transition, said the officials, who discussed new details of the withdrawal on condition of anonymity.

Vasely will have 650 U.S. troops in the country, based largely at the embassy to secure the diplomatic mission, a force that will remain indefinitely. In addition, until September, McKenzie will have the authority to keep up to 300 more troops in Afghanistan to help with security, including at the airport, said the officials.

The Pentagon and other U.S. leaders  from the White House to Capitol Hill  have expressed alarm about a recent surge in violence in Afghanistan, amid fears that it will lead to a widespread civil war and the collapse of the Afghan government and its military.

During his final press conference in Kabul earlier this week, Miller painted a grim picture of the security situation. He noted the rapid loss of districts around the country to the Taliban and warned that 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.

The U.S., meanwhile, is also scrambling to develop a plan to get some of the thousands of Afghan interpreters and others who aided the U.S.-led coalition out of the country. While the U.S. military is not expected to play a major role in the evacuation, troops may be needed to ensure security for the departures.

Thus, while the military has hastened its exit, security requires that the September deadline remain the final goal.

'We remain on the timeline that the president announced just a few weeks ago, which is to get our troops out of Afghanistan, while having a remaining diplomatic presence on the ground, by September," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki this week.

Officials have repeatedly stressed that security at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul is a critical requirement for keeping any U.S. diplomatic staff in Afghanistan. While Turkey has agreed to continue that mission, agreements with the Afghans and the U.S. have not been finalized.

As part of the agreement with Turkey, the U.S. would keep a C-RAM  or Counter-Rocket, Artillery, Mortar system  at the airport, as well as troops to operate it. The U.S. also plans to leave aircrew for helicopter support at the airport.

It is unclear exactly when Miller will board a plane and depart with his staff and security, but it is expected soon. Once he leaves and the equipment withdrawal is complete, the U.S. will shift its focus to two missions  protecting the diplomats and providing financial and logistical support to the Afghan government from outside the country.

That withdrawal essentially fulfills an agreement made when the Trump administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020. The deal called for the withdrawal of U.S. forces by May 2021, and in exchange, the Taliban vowed to cut ties with al-Qaida and ensure that Afghanistan would not again become a safe haven for militants seeking to attack the U.S. After taking office, Biden moved the withdrawal deadline to Sept. 11.

The U.S. has also made it clear that it will continue to monitor terror groups operating in Afghanistan, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. And the U.S. maintains its authority to strike any militants that pose a threat to the American homeland.

Bagram Airfield, a massive complex north of Kabul that has long been the heart of American military power in Afghanistan, is to be turned over to the Afghans any day now.

NATO agreed in April to pull out its roughly 7,000 non-American forces, and as of this week 19 nations had announced troop withdrawals totaling more then 4,800. Germany and Italy declared their missions in Afghanistan over on Wednesday and Polands last troops have returned home.

____ Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.
NEW YORK (AP)  An $850 million agreement by the Boy Scouts of America to compensate sex-abuse victims prompted outrage Friday from some survivors and their advocates, while others were encouraged and saw it as the best outcome that could be achieved under the circumstances.

The agreement, filed in court late Thursday as a step toward resolving a complex bankruptcy case, includes the BSA national leadership, abuse victims, local Boy Scout councils and lawyers appointed to represent victims who might file future claims.

Lawyer Tim Kosnoff, whose Abused in Scouting legal team says its representing thousands of clients, called it a lousy deal  a sellout of tens of thousands of brave men because it did not press local councils to contribute the bulk of their unrestricted assets.

Chris Anderson, an accountant from southern California who says he was abused by a Boy Scout troop leader for more than three years in the 1970s, complained about a lack of detail regarding council finances.

Its a farce, he told The Associated Press. Theres no certainty for the victims at all.

However, some lawyers representing survivors welcomed the agreement as the best that could be gotten. They noted that negotiations remain to be resolved with the Boy Scouts insurers, who potentially could be required to contribute billions of dollars to the compensation fund.

This is the tip of the iceberg, said lawyer Ken Rothweiler, whose firm says its representing more than 16,000 survivors. "Now we go after the next step and see what happens with the insurers."

The BSA sought bankruptcy protection in February 2020, moving to halt thousands of lawsuits by men who were molested as youngsters decades ago by scoutmasters or other leaders. The filing was intended to try to reach a global resolution of abuse claims and create a compensation fund.

Richard Mason, an attorney and chairman of an ad hoc committee representing local councils in the case, said this week's restructuring agreement is the result of hard-fought negotiations and plaintiffs attorneys pushed very hard.

Mason, who is also president of the Greater New York Councils of the BSA, said the councils are contributing the most that is achievable.

Irwin Zalkin, whose law firm represents about 150 surviors, warned against reading too much into the agreement, given that many questions remain unanswered.

Those include what percentage of their worth local councils will contribute; what, if anything, local sponsoring organizations such as churches and civic groups might contribute; and how much will be set aside to cover future claims.

I think its a disservice to the victims to put out a media release saying theyve reached an agreement for $850 million, especially the way theyre taking a victory dance about it, he said. To me, I find it just reprehensible.

Lawyer Paul Mones, who represents hundreds of abuse victims and supports the restructuring agreement, said plaintiffs attorneys pushed the BSA and local councils as far as they could.

We believe this is the best that could have been done, he said, while acknowledging that abuse survivors could still vote to reject the agreement.

Zalkin and other critics note that the councils have more than $1.8 billion in unrestricted assets but are contributing only $600 million to the victims fund. Mones pointed out, however, that many council properties have land-use or donor restrictions making them unavailable to compensate abuse victims.

Regardless of how much the BSA and the local councils contribute or how much insurance companies might be forced to pay, no amount can compensate the abuse victims for their suffering, Mones said.

This is not a victory for anybody, he said. We are dealing in the aftermath of a disaster in these peoples lives, and we are trying to build things back with whatever raw materials we have left.

The Associated Press contacted numerous local scout councils across the U.S. on Friday. Most of the leaders who responded said they did not yet know the amount theyd be asked to contribute and were hopeful they would not have to sell off cherished properties, such as camps.

Doug Stone of the Indian Waters Council in South Carolina said it would not have to sell its camp or any other assets.

We own Camp Barstow outright, he said. Were not going to put a mortgage on it. Were not going to sell it. Its going to stay.

However, the BSAs president and CEO, Roger Mosby, told the AP earlier this week that some councils would face a difficult and often emotional decision regarding camp sales.

Some councils have already taken steps in that direction.

The Greater Hudson Valley Council, which serves several counties near New York City, placed three of its camps up for sale earlier this year as part of its obligation to the fund. The largest is the Durland Scout Reservation, a 1,385-acre property in Putnam Valley that includes two lakes.

Another is Camp Bullowa in Stony Point, where a local official has inquired as to whether the town could purchase it and maintain it for scouting and other recreation.

In Maine, the Pine Tree Council has proposed selling two camps to raise money for the fund, according to the Kennebec Journal. The council did not immediately reply to emails and phone messages Friday seeking an update.

The BSA, in a statement Friday, praised the agreement and said it would help local councils contribute without additional drain on their assets.

There is still much to be done to obtain approval from the Court to solicit survivors to vote for the BSAs amended Plan of Reorganization, it said. Our intention is to seek confirmation of the Plan this summer and emerge from bankruptcy late this year."

Membership in the BSA has declined sharply since 2019, from more than 1.9 million scouts in its two flagship programs to less than 770,000.
HAMDEN  Connecticuts marijuana underground on Thursday stepped into the open, breathed a collective sigh of relief - along with some psycho-active smoke and vapor - and brought an early Independence Day feeling to the first day of adult-use cannabis.

For the 150 or so people hunkered under tents on a Treadwell Street parking lot, deep in an industrial zone, it was a mid-afternoon, open-consumption party to celebrate the multi-year fight for the full legalization of the simple, controversial, politically charged weed that nearly fell short of passage last month in the General Assembly.

I never thought I would see this day, said Dale Sheehan of Wallingford, 66, smiling, taking a puff on a pre-rolled joint, standing, out of the rain, among display tables of pipes and T-shirts for sale. I really cant believe this. She recalled growing up on the New Jersey Shore. It was there, but you never could you do it without anybody giving you the look or getting mad at you.

Now, Sheehan is looking forward to being able to buy cannabis sometime next year, maybe at a corner dispensary in her neighborhood.

Since its still illegal to sell marijuana, people at the cannabis bazaar were giving it away in all its various forms. There were big jars full of dried marijuana flowers. There were bags of brown-wrapped pre-rolls and small jars of processed essence of the flowers. Nearly everyone had one kind of cannabis delivery system in their hands or nearby. Mostly, they were enjoying the historic legislative victory that ended an era of prohibition reminiscent of what might have been a similar popular sentiment in 1933, when the 14-year prohibition of alcohol finally ended after a failure of enforcement and a rise in criminal syndicates.

Christina Eva from East Windsor, was walking around with a tray of colorful cupcakes, each infused with 5 milligrams of THC, the active ingredient in what cannabis imbibers call the introspective, euphoric effects of the drug. I made them from whole plant material, with a lot of love, she said. Im very happy.

Eva believes that what finally brought the issue to successful votes in the General Assembly - after Gov. Ned Lamont threatened a veto of an earlier bill - was the desire to reap the revenue bleeding into Massachusetts by Connecticut residents who drive there to buy legal cannabis. They also needed to fix some of the wrongs that have been caused, she said. People are really starting to see things more clearly during these trying times. I think its given people a different perspective, you know?

Eva, 37, declared that cannabis is safer than booze and can actually help people stop abusing alcohol. This may be a safer alternative for them, she said. My biggest concern is to see towns that are now banning or threatening to ban the retail sale of cannabis that are selling alcohol on every corner at 9 a.m. And alcohol perpetuates addiction and disease and death and it really is a catalyst for family issues and life issues and illness.

Joseph Raymond of Hamden, a longtime cannabis activist and founder of the New England Craft Cannabis Alliance, whose office is on the western edge of the parking lot, was passing out bright-green wristbands for those over-21, who as of 12:01 a.m. Thursday are allowed to partake of the drug and possess up to 6.5 ounces, with five ounces locked away inside a car or home.

I always knew that it would happen, Joseph, 39, said from under the brim of a big straw hat. I did think there was a 10-year timeline to it and thats when I started advocating, around 2012.

In particular, he and other groups including the Canna Warriors, pushed for a home-grow provision, which wont take effect until October of 2023. Also important are social equity requirements so communities disparately impacted by the failed war on drugs, such as the neighborhoods adjacent to nearby Dixwell Avenue south into New Haven, can get a hand up and into the new cannabis industry, Joseph said.

He wants the privately owned parking lot to become a center of the counter-culture, since many public spaces will be off-limits to cannabis users. We kind of look at it as international waters for cannabis, he said. The party was attended by a variety of Connecticut-based cannabis influencers including Dab Punk 710 and Stoked Smoke Shop from Bridgeport.

I would make July 1 stoner independence day from now on in Connecticut, Raymond joked, then stressed the need to consume the drug responsibly. He wants to reach out and shift his advocacy to consumer awareness.

Under another tent, Paul Kirchberg of Milford, executive director of the state chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, was offering free celebratory inhalations of dab concentrate in an electric pipe. An expert in the states medical marijuana program, which this week has 54,143 patients enrolled, Kirchberg was enjoying the moment. Ive been advocating for six years, and it still seems surreal, he said. Its exciting. I really do see the future of cannabis in Connecticut being fruitful.

Nearby, Timothy Doherty of East Norwalk, 52, a medical marijuana patient, was talking about the efficacy of inhaling the vapors of concentrates, which eliminates much of the harshness and potential carcinogens found in smoking.

I was praying for this since 2016, when I first became involved as a patient, Doherty said. It helped me get sober. It got me off of pain killers. For me, this day is finally here and Im really happy.

Cody Roberts, 29, of Seymour, said he started the Canna Warriors this year to inspire a bottom-up strategy to illustrate to the General Assembly that there was a wave of support. The most high-profile tactic was the $3,000 raised for a billboard supporting full legalization. It was pretty good, dude, he said of the campaign, then showed off a small jar of concentrated hash rosin, formed by ice and water and heat pressure through micron screens. We had a good run.

The rain had very little effect on the sharing of joints, bong hits, dabs of concentrated cannabis flower essence and baked goods on display on the tables among revelers, as Connecticut joined Virginia, New York and New Mexico in the latest round of states to legalize it. Nineteen states in all have approved adult-use cannabis.

At around 3:30, as more and more celebrants parked in the lot and joined the festivities, the sun finally came out.

Earlier on Thursday, in a virtual news conference, officials from the Marijuana Policy Project noted the new legalization landscape. DeVaughn Ward, who was the projects Connecticut lobbyist, highlighted that the new law requires 50 percent of licenses to eventually grow and dispense cannabis will go to equity applicants from neighborhoods adversely affected by the multi-generational drug war; and that 60 percent of revenues will eventually go there as well.

Police, he said, can no longer stop motorists just because they may smell marijuana. Karen OKeefe, a veteran of the multi-year campaign in Connecticut who is now the Marijuana Policy Projects director of state policies, said that other states should heed the will of voters.

Its past time that every state in the country and the federal government replace marijuana prohibition with equitable legalization and regulation, OKeefe said.

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT
AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  An Army soldier who shot and killed an armed protester after driving into a crowd demonstrating against police violence in the Texas capital last summer has been indicted on a murder charge, authorities said Thursday.

Sgt. Daniel Perry, who was stationed at Fort Hood, was booked and released on $300,000 bail, said Kristen Dark, a spokeswoman for the Travis County Sheriff's Office.

Perrys attorney, Clint Broden, has said the soldier was working for a ride-sharing company and acted in self-defense after Foster pointed a gun at him. Broden issued a statement Thursday expressing disappointment in the indictment and confidence that Perry would be acquitted.

It is important to note that the standard of proof required for an indictment is significantly less than the standard of proof required for a conviction, the statement said.

Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza said in a press conference Thursday that the grand jury returned indictments against Perry for the charges of murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and a deadly conduct misdemeanor charge in the July 25 death of Garrett Foster, 28. He said the grand jury reviewed evidence from investigations by the District Attorney's office and a three-week investigation by Austin officers, who reviewed over 150 exhibits and interviewed 22 witnesses. Garza said Perry declined to testify before the grand jury, but that Perry's attorney did provide a packet with information, which was shared with the grand jury with the exception of details not admissible in a trial.

Garza said his office planned to request that Perry surrender his firearms, in addition to other conditions, for his release.

Foster was killed during a night of protests and unrest in several U.S. cities. In the immediate aftermath, then-Police Chief Brian Manley said officers heard two separate volleys of gunfire and made their way to the crowd, where they found Foster with multiple gunshot wounds.

Perrys attorneys have previously told The Associated Press that their client had just dropped off a rider when he turned onto a street filled with protesters who began beating on his vehicle. They said that Foster approached the car and motioned with his gun for Perry to lower his window. Perry initially thought Foster worked in law enforcement and put his window down, they said. But when Foster raised his weapon toward Perry, the soldier realized Foster was not a police officer and shot him in self-defense with a handgun in his car, the attorneys said.

___

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.
Celebrating our countrys birthday this weekend, it is time to reflect on our civic duty of voting. The Constitution of the United States in 1789 granted the power to set voting requirements to the states. At first, most states limited this right to White males who owned property. It is estimated that comprised 6% of the population. Over the years several reforms were added to include more people. One of earlier changes was the elimination of property ownership. But since states had the right to set voting requirements this varied. By the 1828 presidential election, most states had shifted to universal white suffrage. The last state to abolish the property requirement was North Carolina in 1856.

After the Civil War, when slaves were freed, the 15th amendment was passed in 1870 that prevented states from denying the right to vote on grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Some states, mainly former Confederate states, passed Jim Crow laws to curtail the rights of African Americans and poor White men from voting through poll taxes, literacy tests and other cumbersome rules and regulations.

The fight for the right of women to vote proceeded state by state. In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave women the right to vote. Many restrictions on non-White men also applied to non-White women. In 1924 the Indian Citizen Act granted citizenship and the right to vote to Native Americans. Some western states continued to prohibit their participation in voting. The 24th Amendment in 1964 prohibited tax payments. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 protected voting rights for racial minorities and later included language minorities.

In 1971 the 26th Amendment to the constitution lowered the right to vote to age 18. This was a reflection of the youth of soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War who should be able to vote. Court rulings eliminated other blocks to voting, including information in Native American and other non-English languages. The 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act granted the right to vote by military personnel and other citizens living abroad. In 1993 the National Voter Registration Act was passed to make voter registration more available in more locations.

The League of Women Voters and other voting rights organizations have long maintained more accessible options that would increase voter turnout. It took the pandemic in 2020 to increase voter turnout. Health concerns for voters and poll workers necessitated the need for more mail in, extended early voter hours, drop boxes and other measures to make voting more convenient. Some states made these permanent, others temporary. In an advanced technological country, there should be no excuse to have to wait in line for hours to vote.

Many states are trying to pass restrictive laws once again to discourage voters. For example, Georgia just passed a law making it illegal to give food and water to potential voters standing in line. Many western states have had mail-in voting for years with no abuse.

We are fortunate in Illinois the General Assembly passed legislation to make vote by mail a permanent option, jail inmates awaiting trial have the right to vote, November elections will be a state holiday freeing schools for polling places, one universal voting center in each county to give voters an alternative site and other reforms.

Next year the primary will be moved to June instead of March because of the delay in redistricting. Gov. JB Pritzker has signed this bill.

On this Independence Day, take a few moments to reflect on the difficult struggle it has been to achieve universal suffrage. Next election, do your civic duty and vote.

JoAnn Nabe is currently the Co-President of the League of Women Voters of the Edwardsville branch. She has been in the league for 40 plus years. She resides in Edwardsville
GLEN CARBON  Jasmine Streator wasnt able to start a career in social work, but thanks to the generosity of friends and family, her daughter will have the opportunity to build a future for herself.

Streator, 26, of Glen Carbon, was killed on June 25 in an Interstate 70 accident in Bond County.

At about 8:42 a.m., Streator was traveling west on I-70 in a 2017 GMC Terrain when her vehicle left the roadway near the I-70 milepost 47 and crossed the center median, striking a 2020 Freightliner semi driven by Jaswant Singh, 33, from South Richmond, New York, head-on in the eastbound lane.

Streators vehicle rolled over and came to rest south of I-70, according to state police. The semi left the road to the right, coming to rest jack-knifed across a frontage road.

According to Illinois State Police, Streator was pronounced dead at the scene.

Singh reported no injuries.

A GoFundMe memorial has been established for Streators 2 -year-old daughter, LeiLani Reynolds.

As of Thursday afternoon, $4,575 of the $5,000 goal had been reached.

Kayla Johnson, a close friend of Streator and a fellow social work major at SIUE, organized the fundraiser for Streators family.

The GoFundMe was created in memory of Jasmine for her daughter LeiLani for educational purposes and the money will be going to her father, Dominic Reynolds, Streator said. Jasmine was from Chicago Heights but because of school, she moved to Glen Carbon five or six years ago and had been at SIUE since 2017. She was going to graduate in 2022 with a degree in social work.

She was an all-around great person and she was a great mom. At school, she strived for academic excellence and she was always supportive of her friends and her peers and always wanted to see other people succeed. She was a light in this world and she always brought so much positivity to everyone around her.

To make a donation to help Streators daughter, go to Fundraiser by Kayla Johnson : Jasmine Streater Memorial for LeiLani (gofundme.com).
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Today

Sunny early then increasing clouds with some scattered thunderstorms this afternoon. High 87F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Isolated thunderstorms early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Low 57F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
RENEE RHODES/Fort Knox News Director of Installation Management Command-Training Vincent Grewatz, right, passes the Fort Knox garrison colors Wednesday to incoming commander Col. Lance OBryan during a ceremony at Waybur Theater.
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Colourful Phuket festival to welcome Sandbox tourists

PHUKET: The Phuket Provincial Government and the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) will together hold a month-long festival in Patong and Phuket Town under the banner Colourful Phuket to welcome tourists to Phuket under the Phuket Sandbox scheme.

tourismpatongCOVID-19

By The Phuket News

Friday 2 July 2021, 05:55PM

The month-long festival will include fireworks and fire shows at Patong Beach. Image: Phuket Info Center

The grand opening of the festival will be held on Patong Beach tomorrow (July 3), with another major event being held in the Phuket Old Town area on Sunday.

At the popular Patong Beach tomorrow, there will be local food trucks starting from 3pm, as well as fireworks and fire shows, from 7:30pm to 8pm, the Phuket Provincial Government announced through a notice this afternoon.

On Sunday (July 4), from 7:30pm to 8pm, there will be a light and sound show (on the schedule listed as a projection mapping show) at the Peranakannitat Museum Phuket in Phuket Town.

After the grand opening, art works and markets will be set up through the month of July at different locations across the island, as follows:

July 3-9: Colourful art installations at Old Town District and Patong Beach along with local food trucks and mini concerts.

July 10-16: Surf and Sea-sport activities with colourful photogenic displays at Kata Beach. Sunset yoga at Promthep Cape.

July: 17-23: Digital Art installations and Street Music at Patong Beach.

July 24-31: Projection Mapping Art and Street Music at Old Town District.
Doctors arrive in capital amid surge in cases

THAILAND: While the government is upbeat about its Phuket reopening scheme, health personnel in Greater Bangkok are struggling to deal with a surge of new COVID-19 infections and deaths.

CoronavirusCOVID-19deathhealth

By Bangkok Post

Friday 2 July 2021, 09:10AM

Thongchai Kiratihatthayakon, deputy permanent secretary for public health: Now, Bangkok and the surrounding provinces are in a real crisis, patients are beginning to die at home. Photo: Bangkok Post

Hospitals are experiencing a shortage of intensive care unit (ICU) beds and staff to take care of patients in serious condition. The Public Health Ministry has mobilised 144 newly-graduated doctors from several provinces to help take care of patients amid the shortage of medical personnel in Bangkok. A welcoming event was organised yesterday (July 1) for the doctors who specialise in internal medicine, pulmonary medicine, infectious diseases and critical care medicine.

I would like to say sorry [for calling you to come] and thank you for your help, said Thongchai Kiratihatthayakon, deputy permanent secretary for public health, during the ceremony. Now, Bangkok and the surrounding provinces are in a real crisis, patients are beginning to die at home.

We do not want Thailand to be the same as Europe last year when many patients were allowed to die at home because there were no beds at hospitals, he said.

Some of you might think why it has to be you [to be sent], Dr Thongchai said. It is because we really want your help, and your rectors see that you are the best. Now [the outbreak] is not manageable, thats why we want you all.

Siriraj Hospital, Ramathibodi Hospital, Vajira Hospital, Thammasat University Hospital, and the field hospital at Mongkutwattana Hospital have shortages of ICU beds for patients with severe symptoms, and they plan to increase the number of beds.

In light of this, more medical personnel are needed to look after patients, Dr Thongchai said.

In our life, we have never experienced something like World War II but we are now in a war where all countries around the world are struggling to fight against this disease, he said.

You are our strength.

He said this is the first time the Public Health Ministry has had to mobilise doctors for a special purpose.

If we do not do this, many people will be left to die in their homes, he said. In Thailand, this should not be so, we should not be forced to choose which patient will survive and which one will be left to die.

The graduate doctors have been vaccinated against COVID-19, and they will receive remuneration and allowances according to ministerial regulations, he said.

A record 57 deaths and 5,533 new cases were reported across the kingdom over the past 24 hours, the Public Health Ministry said yesterday.

The second-highest daily toll was 53 on Wednesday, when the country logged 4,786 new infections.

Of the cases reported yesterday, 99%, or 5,489, were among the public while 44 were among prison inmates.

Bangkok had the most fatalities with 34, while Samut Prakan reported nine, Pathum Thani three, Nakhon Pathom and Nakhon Nayok two each, and one each in Chiang Rai, Chaiyaphum, Songkhla, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Narathiwat, Samut Sakhon and Suphan Buri.

Meanwhile, Apisamai Srirangson, assistant spokeswoman for the Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration, said an exodus of workers from closed construction sites in Bangkok has led to an increase in infections detected in 32 provinces.

This prompts provinces to issue strict orders for local people and officials to be on the highest alert, she said. People are not prohibited from returning home, but they must act responsibly towards their relatives.
First tourists arrive in Phuket under Sandbox scheme

PHUKET: Twenty-three tourists arrived at Phuket airport on Thursday morning (July 1) as the island reopened to vaccinated foreign tourists under the quarantine-free scheme.

COVID-19tourismeconomics

By Bangkok Post

Friday 2 July 2021, 09:24AM

An airport official holds a Sandbox sign as she leads passengers to the arrivals lounge at Phuket airport. Photo: Government House / Bangkok Post

Tourism makes up almost a fifth of the Thai economy, and the COVID-19 pandemic has led to its worst performance since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, reports the Bangkok Post, citing a report by AFP.

The country is pinning high hopes for a much-needed revival on the so-called Phuket Sandbox, a model that allows vaccinated travellers to visit without quarantine, the report explained.

On Thursday, 347 passengers on flights from Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Singapore landed on the island, where sandy beaches have been relatively deserted since the virus hit, the report added.

The EY430 flight on the Abu Dhabi-Phuket-Suvarnabhumi route arrived at 10:20am with 44 passengers. Twenty-three disembarked in Phuket while the rest went on to Suvarnabhumi.

The first group of travellers then underwent screening procedures, which included fever and vaccination checks. All were required to download Thailand Plus and Mor Chana apps.

They later went through immigration and customs procedures before taking swab samples for RT-PCR testing.

They were subsequently taken to their hotels where they would wait 24 hours for the test results. If the results are negative, they would be able to go to other places on the island. If they are positive, they would be immediately taken to hospitals.

Among them was Omar Ricalraeesi, 37, from the UAE who said he had previously been to the island 15 times and will spend eight days relaxing.

After two years of not travelling, Ive chosen the Phuket Sandbox to change my mood, he told AFP.

Another British tourist said he would stay for a month and was looking forward to a family reunion.

My children live here so Im going to see my kids, he told AFP.

The other three flights to Phuket on Thursday were from Qatar with 136 passengers landing at 12:43pm, from Israel with 137 passengers at 1:52pm and from Singapore with 51 passengers at 4:14pm. All of them would stay in Phuket.

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, together with Cabinet ministers and senior health officials, arrived in Phuket at 9:45am to meet officials and health volunteers there but he did not meet the tourists.

Im very glad to meet you today. Its a day weve been waiting for. As today is the starting day, everybody should support it. Everything depends on everyone. Many thanks for all officials for their hard work and sacrifice. Thank you all, doctors, nurses and health volunteers. You get what you do, Gen Prayut told the officials waiting.

Gen Prayut then inspected the screening station at the airport before going to Royal Phuket City Hotel in Phuket Town to chair a follow-up meeting on the Phuket Sandbox scheme.

He later greeted the 51 tourists on the last flight to arrive, from Singapore.

The launch of the quarantine-free scheme comes as Thailand grapples with its worst-ever COVID-19 wave and the worrying detection of the Alpha and Delta coronavirus variants.

Nationwide, the current case tally is at 264,834.

But Phuket remains relatively unscathed as Thai authorities have rolled out a mass vaccination campaign in preparation for the quarantine-free arrivals.

A command centre will track foreign visitors movements via a mobile app, which tourists are required to install on arrival, and also monitor for potential outbreaks.

Despite the fanfare, tourism operators are lukewarm on the resuscitation of the islands economy, which has seen nearly 90% of hotels shutter.

I think the restrictions make people travel less, said Kongsak Khoopongsakorn, President of the Thai Hotels Association Southern Chapter, who also runs a resort on the island.

Besides being fully vaccinated, tourists must remain in Phuket for a fortnight if they wish to travel to the rest of Thailand, and take three coronavirus tests during this period, a substantial expenditure for a family.

Mr Kongsak added that authorities had downgraded its Sandbox entry forecast of 129,000 visitors in the third quarter to 100,000.

Delays in government approval for the scheme have caused headaches for scores of prospective travellers, who flocked online to air their grievances.

It is disappointing the communication has been so poor and new requirements without any detail are being created after the fact, an American traveller told AFP.

She added she had spent hours calling consulates across the United States to get her paperwork processed, to no avail.

But even a trickle of visitors will be a lifeline for desperate vendors such as Thewan Phromyang, who rents out deck chairs at Phukets Patong Beach.

I barely have any income. We can only feed ourselves, the 49-year-old told AFP.

Before the pandemic, Thailand had expected 40 million visitors to arrive in 2020, a far cry from the 6.7mn who made it through strict border restrictions.

Another regional tourist hotspot, Bali, had been eyeing a July reopening but Indonesian authorities appeared to have backed down as virus cases surged to record levels.

While the Indonesian government has not announced an official cancellation, comments this week from the tourism minister suggested that any bid to welcome back tourists is likely to be delayed until infections are curbed.
Vietjet issues statement over COVID passenger on Phuket flight

PHUKET: Vietjet Airlines has issued a statement regarding health authorities issuing a COVID alert over a passenger on a flight from Bangkok to Phuket late last month.

COVID-19tourismtransport

By The Phuket News

Friday 2 July 2021, 10:58AM

A Vietjet Airlines cabin crew member receives a COVID vaccination injection. Photo: Vietjet Airlines

The alert, issued on Wednesday, called for any passengers sitting near one particular passenger on the flight to present themselves for a COVID test at their nearest government hospital.

The flight involved was Vietjet Airlines flight VZ314 on June 25, departing Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok at 7:20am and landing in Phuket at 8:40am.

As is usual with such alerts from officials, the notice was marked URGENT!! and noted, Please note that those who were sitting according to the specified numbers [of the seat plan image posted], you are a high-risk touch!!

However, the notice refrained from actually confirming that the person who was sitting in the seat marked red had been infected with COVID-19.

The statement issued by Vietjet Airlines yesterday (July 1), noted,

This statement is issued in connection with a report made by Phuket Covid-19 Information Centre regarding passengers having been tested positive for COVID-19 on flights VZ314 (Bangkok - Phuket) on 25 June 2021.

In response to the report, Thai Vietjet has immediately taken preventive and control measures by having flight crew, cabin crew and ground staff of the reported flights quarantined. The aircraft used to operate the reported flights have also been disinfected on a daily basis following standard since then, to avoid the risk of virus transmission.

As of now, Thai Vietjet is operating domestic services as usual under highly hygienic and sanitizing practices, including sterilizing the aircraft, requesting all passengers, pilots, and cabin crew to wear surgical masks at all time during the flights, suspending food and beverage services onboard, and so forth. Our priority is to protect and prevent our valued passengers from COVID-19 and ensure all fly safely with us on every flight.

Since the early outbreak of the COVID-19, Thai Vietjet has been following guidelines designated by World Health Organization, Ministry of Public Health, and Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand (CAAT), the statement concluded.
After a quieter celebration last summer, the Danbury area is planning a slightly bigger birthday party for America this year.

Several traditional firework displays and local events are returning to towns for Fourth of July, thanks to Gov. Ned Lamonts lifted restrictions, low rates of viral spread and high rates of vaccination among Connecticut residents.

The holiday falls on a Sunday this year, but celebrations will span the whole weekend and into the following week.

However, for the second year in a row, there will be no firework shows in Danbury, with the display over Candlewood Lake canceled and the one at the Danbury Fair mall postponed.

The Danbury Volunteer Firemens Council typically books the firework company in February, but the volunteers decided not to do so because they were unsure of what COVID-19 conditions would be like, Mayor Joe Cavo said. He could have predicted whether it would rain the night of the show as well as he could have predicted case levels, he said.

Back in February, there was still a tremendous amount of unknowns, he said. We were still early in vaccinations.

The fireworks companies have been booked elsewhere.

You wouldnt be able to get them now if you wanted to, Cavo said.

While things arent completely back to business-as-usual yet, here are a few Fourth of July celebrations in the Danbury area in the coming days:

BETHEL

The John Demille Firecracker 8K, the towns oldest road race, returns for a 55th year next week.

The event will take place July 5, starting at 8 a.m. outside the Clifford J. Hurgin Municipal Center, 1 School St.

From there, participants will make their way up Wooster Street, onto Juniper Road and back onto Wooster Street before turning left onto Durant Avenue.

Continuing onto Library Place, racers will proceed down Greenwood Avenue, turn right onto Chestnut Ridge and continue to Nashville Road before heading down South Street, Grassy Plain Street and Greenwood Avenue and turning onto Library Place.

The last stretch will be a loop back around Durant, Wooster and Juniper to finish at the municipal center.

Awards will be given to the first three female and male runners to complete the race, as well as awards for the top three female and male participants in eight age-based categories.

The registration deadline is June 28, with a $25 entry fee per racer. All proceeds will go to benefit the Scotty Fund and Bens Bells organizations.

Information on the John Demille Firecracker 8K, including a course map, can be found here.

LAKE WARAMAUG

The fireworks display is also back on at Lake Waramaug, sponsored by the lake association through their firework fund.

On Sunday, July 4, fireworks will begin at 9:30 p.m., but a Rim-the-Lake flare lighting will start at 9 p.m., and the association has encouraged people to participate in this event, in addition to the fireworks themselves.

Flares will be distributed to visitors for free, but donations are accepted to help cover the cost of the community event.

The association has set a rain date has been set for Sept. 4.

NEW FAIRFIELD

New Fairfields Fourth of July Parade is back in action after being canceled in 2020. A ceremony at Memorial Field will occur at the conclusion of the parade.

In 2020, the town hosted a car parade in lieu of an in-person event to ensure adequate social distancing.

The annual parade, which is sponsored by the New Fairfield Lions Club, is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m.

The route will be the same as in past years, starting on Route 37 in front of the Senior Center parking lot on Overbrook Drive before proceeding on Route 39, past the Town Hall and concluding at Memorial Field for the ceremony.

According to the Lions Club, over 40 groups will be participating in the parade this year.

NEW MILFORD

The states largest town by landmass decided the show must go on and is holding a Fourth of July celebration and firework show on Saturday, July 3, organized by the Chamber of Commerce.

The firework display will also be sponsored in part by New Milford Hospital, which is celebrating its 100th birthday this year.

Mayor Pete Bass Hearst Connecticut Media in April that the town would hold its Independence Day fireworks and annual Memorial Day parade. Both had been canceled in 2020 due to COVID-19 concerns. Instead of fireworks, the Water Witch Hose Company held a small parade through parts of the town.

Festivities are set to begin at 5 p.m. with the second day of the Lions Club Carnival at Youngs Field, which runs until 10 p.m. on Saturday. The carnival starts on at 6 p.m. Friday.

At 6:30 p.m., events will begin on the Town Green with the singing of the National Anthem, followed by live music at 7 p.m. As soon as it gets dark enough, the firework show will commence.

Rep. Bill Buckbee, R-New Milford, is expected to be in attendance, alongside the mayor.

A rain date has been set for Saturday, November 27, at the annual Tree Lighting ceremony.

RIDGEFIELD

A family firework celebration sponsored by Fairfield County Bank will take place on Monday, July 5 at the high school.

Gates will open at 6 p.m. with fireworks beginning at dusk.

A $20 parking pass will be required for parking at the high school, Scotts Ridge Middle, and Barlow Mountain and Scotland elementary schools, with proceeds going to the Family Fourth Committee. The passes can be purchased through the towns website, at the bank or at town hall.

If it rains, the celebration will take place the following day, on July 6.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)  A white former Nashville police officer will plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter Friday just ahead of his first-degree murder trial, three years after he fatally shot an armed Black man from behind during a foot chase, his attorney confirmed Thursday.

Attorney David Raybin made the confirmation on behalf of 27-year-old former Officer Andrew Delke, who was about to face trial for a first-degree murder charge over the death of 25-year-old Daniel Hambrick in July 2018. The shooting occurred before the death of George Floyd and the trial would have come after the conviction and sentencing of Derek Chauvin in Floyd's murder.

Delke submitted his resignation Thursday, Metro Nashville Police Department spokesperson Don Aaron said. Delke had been decommissioned, which means he had to turn over his gun but was able to work a desk job and still get paid.

The attorney for Hambrick's family, Joy Kimbrough, said Hambrick's mother, Vickie Hambrick, was not contacted or consulted and did not know about the plea deal until after it was done. Kimbrough said the deal includes a three-year prison sentence. Raybin declined to comment on any sentence length.

Shes very upset about it. Shes distraught about it. And she has said its like losing her son all over again, Kimbrough said of Hambrick's mother.

A spokesperson for District Attorney Glenn Funk said he could not confirm anything.

After COVID-19 delays and pretrial back-and-forth, jury selection was slated to start next week in the case. The trial was going to center on a handgun Hambrick was holding that Delke claims was pointed at him for a moment, which prosecutors dispute and video footage doesnt show.

Prosecutors focused on surveillance footage that captured the shooting, in which Delke stops chasing and shoots the fleeing man. Defense attorneys have contended there was a 36-foot blindspot and plenty could have happened there. There were dozens of cameras, and defense attorneys contended that it was possible that more footage was caught of that blindspot, but wasn't reviewed by investigators before it was automatically overwritten on the system.

The month after the shooting, Funk released surveillance footage of the shooting publicly, sparking wider attention and outcry. Delke was charged in September 2018, and the shooting caused enough backlash that voters that November installed a community oversight board for Nashvilles police department.

Convicting an officer for an on-duty death remains a tall order. Since 2005, there have been 143 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers with arrest powers arrested for murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting throughout the U.S., with only 45 convicted of a crime resulting from the on-duty shooting, according to a tally from Bowling Green State University criminal justice professor Philip Stinson.

Criminal cases for 53 of the officers ended in a non-conviction, while 45 cases are still pending, according to the findings.

Nineteen of those 45 convicted were through a guilty plea  similar to what is planned in Delke's case  while the rest were through a jury conviction, according to Stinson's research.

In only 25 of the 143 arrests did the person who was fatally shot have a gun; just five were convicted, according to Stinsons tally. He said there's always risk for prosecutors that a case like this could end in an acquittal or a mistrial with a hung jury.

It's not uncommon for the case to end in a guilty plea and it's not uncommon for the case to end in a guilty plea on the eve of trial, either, Stinson said.

Delkes attorneys argued the officer followed his training and Tennessee law in response to an armed suspect who ignored repeated orders to drop his gun. Funk argued Delke had other alternatives, adding that the officer could have stopped, sought cover and called for help.

On the day of the shooting, Delke was in his patrol car as part of a juvenile-focused unit looking for stolen cars and known juvenile offenders. He followed a car despite learning it was not stolen and never saw the driver or determined how many people were inside, according to an arrest affidavit. The car didnt pull over as it headed onto the interstate and Delke put on the sirens. He followed from a distance and lost track of the car for some time.

Delke later pulled into a public housing complex and Hambrick was standing outside the car and began running. Delke chased Hambrick and yelled at him to stop, though the officer didnt know Hambricks identity or if he was connected to the car he had been pursuing, the affidavit says.

Hambrick wouldnt drop a gun despite Delkes instructions, the affidavit says. Delke stopped, assumed a firing position, and aimed his service weapon, firing four times, it says. One shot hit Hambricks back, another his torso and a third the back of his head. The fourth shot missed.

Nashvilles Metro Council has approved a $2.25 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit by Hambricks family.
Montreal, CA (H4T1V6)

Today

Mainly sunny to start, then a few afternoon clouds. High 28C. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Thunderstorms. Low near 21C. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%.
Things to do in the Attleboro area and beyond
WASHINGTON (AP)  U.S. and British agencies disclosed on Thursday details of brute force methods they say have been used by Russian intelligence to try to break into the cloud services of hundreds of government agencies, energy companies and other organizations.

An advisory released by the U.S. National Security Agency describes attacks by operatives linked to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, which has been previously tied to major cyberattacks abroad and efforts to disrupt the 2016 and 2020 American elections.

In a statement, NSA Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce said the campaign was likely ongoing, on a global scale.

Brute force attacks involve the automated spraying of sites with potential passwords until hackers gain access. The advisory urges companies to adopt methods long urged by experts as common-sense cyber hygiene, including the use of multi-factor authentication and mandating strong passwords.

Issued during a devastating wave of ransomware attacks on governments and key infrastructure, the advisory does not disclose specific targets of the campaign or its presumed purpose, saying only that hackers have targeted hundreds of organizations worldwide.

The NSA says GRU-linked operatives have tried to break into networks using Kubernetes, an open-source tool originally developed by Google to manage cloud services, since at least mid-2019 through early this year. While a significant amount of the attempted break-ins targeted organizations using Microsoft's Office 365 cloud services, the hackers went after other cloud providers and email servers as well, the NSA said.

The U.S. has long accused Russia of using and tolerating cyberattacks for espionage, spreading disinformation, and the disruption of governments and key infrastructure.

The Russian Embassy in Washington on Thursday strictly denied the involvement of Russian government agencies in cyberattacks on U.S. government agencies or private companies.

In a statement posted on Facebook, the embassy said, We hope that the American side will abandon the practice of unfounded accusations and focus on professional work with Russian experts to strengthen international information security.

Joe Slowik, a threat analyst at the network-monitoring firm Gigamon, said the activity described by NSA on Thursday shows the GRU has further streamlined an already popular technique for breaking into networks. He said it appears to overlap with Department of Energy reporting on brute force intrusion attempts in late 2019 and early 2020 targeting the U.S. energy and government sectors and is something the U.S. government has apparently been aware of for some time.

Slowik said the use of Kubernetes is certainly a bit unique, although on its own it doesnt appear worrying. He said the brute force method and lateral movement inside networks described by NSA are common among state-backed hackers and criminal ransomware gangs, allowing the GRU to blend in with other actors.

John Hultquist, vice president of analysis at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, characterized the activity described in the advisory as routine collection against policy makers, diplomats, the military, and the defense industry.

This is a good reminder that the GRU remains a looming threat, which is especially important given the upcoming Olympics, an event they may well attempt to disrupt, Hultquist said in a statement.

The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency joined the advisory, as did the British National Cyber Security Centre.

The GRU has been repeatedly linked by U.S. officials in recent years to a series of hacking incidents. In 2018, special counsel Robert Muellers office charged 12 military intelligence officers with hacking Democratic emails that were then released by WikiLeaks in an effort to harm Hillary Clintons presidential campaign and boost Donald Trumps bid.

More recently, the Justice Department announced charges last fall against GRU officers in cyberattacks that targeted a French presidential election, the Winter Olympics in South Korea and American businesses.

Unlike Russias foreign intelligence agency SVR, which is blamed for the SolarWinds hacking campaign and is careful not to be detected in its cyber ops, the GRU has carried out the most damaging cyberattacks on record, including two on Ukraines power grid and the 2017 NotPetya virus that caused more than $10 billion in damage globally.

GRU operatives have also been involved in the spread of disinformation related to the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. officials have alleged. And an American intelligence assessment in March says the GRU tried to monitor people in U.S. politics in 2019 and 2020 and staged a phishing campaign against subsidiaries of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, likely to gather information damaging to President Joe Biden, whose son had earlier served on the board.

The Biden administration in April sanctioned Russia after linking it to election interference and the SolarWinds breach.

___

Bajak reported from Boston.
GODFREY  Vernon and Brenda (Hartley) Langer will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary on Thursday, July 8.

The couple were married on July 8, 1961 at North Alton Baptist Church by Rev. William Robertson. The couple currently lives in Godfrey. They have one son, Mark (Jenny) Langer of Alton, and one grandson, Jesse Langer of Springfield, Missouri.

Vernon Langer was a foreman at Standard Oil Co. He served four years in the Navy stationed in Naples, Italy, came home and married the girl next door. He also is an excellent wood carver.

Brenda Langer worked at Shell Oil Co. and taught ceramics and tole painting. She has always been involved in all types of crafts.

They have shared the love of traveling and have been in every state but Oregon. They also have been on many cruises and toured several countries.

They have worked in various areas of religious works and love the Lord. They have been youth directors. Brenda Langer was the leader of ladies group and their latest was 25 years as directors. They are members of Abundant Life Church.

The two plan to go to the Grafton Zipline to celebrate their anniversary.
The Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, which made June 19 a federal holiday, passed the U.S. Senate unanimously. The House was a different story, however, with fourteen members voting no. By some strange coincidence, all 14 no votes came from Republicans.

I voted no because this proposed holiday does not bring us together, it tears us apart, Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar stated following the vote. I cannot support efforts that furthers racial divisions in this country. We have one Independence Day, and it applies equally to all people of all races.

Gosar is correct in asserting that the United States has had one Independence Day since 1776, although celebrating July 4th as such didnt become commonplace until after the War of 1812. Indeed, July 4th didnt officially become a federal holiday until 1870. Gosars assertion that it applies equally to all people of all races requires a bit of clarification.

July 4th commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress. That document, written by Thomas Jefferson who would later become our new nations third president, boldly proclaims, 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.

Such noble sentiments ring rather hollow when one considers they were penned by a slaveholder. By all men, Jefferson meant all white men. The Creator to whom he refers evidently neglected to endow black men, women and children with any rights, unalienable or otherwise. In a 2002 article for Smithsonian Magazine, Stephen Ambrose nailed it when he called Jefferson a racist who was incapable of rising above the thought of his time and place, and willing to profit from slave labor.

We should keep in mind that Jeffersons hypocrisy was the norm, not the exception. No less than 41 of the 56 men who signed our nations Declaration of Independence owned slaves. Such hypocrisy was not lost on the British. In his essay Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Addresses of the American Congress, Samuel Johnson sarcastically asked, How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

The escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass had little use for July 4th celebrations in slave-holding America. In a July 5, 1852 speech, Douglass told his white audience, This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

Douglass rhetorically asked what July 4th was to a slave and answered thus: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. July 4th is a sham and your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity are to slaves mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.

Republican Congressman Gosar believes that celebrating Juneteenth will tear our nation apart because black Americans will celebrate it as their Independence Day while white Americans such as myself will regard July 4th as our Independence Day. It doesnt occur to him that Juneteenth can be celebrated by anyone who takes joy in the liberation of their fellow human beings from bondage. As civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer observed back in 1971: Nobodys free until everybodys free.

Its a popular misconception, however, that Juneteenth marked the end of slavery in the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation merely liberated those slaves in states that had rebelled against the Union. Slavery got a free pass in the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware that had remained in the Union. The proclamation also exempted regions of the South under federal control.

Slavery was finally abolished throughout the entire United States on Dec. 6, 1865, when three-fourths of our states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment and thus made it part of the U.S. Constitution. Thats another date that all Americans should celebrate.

John J. Dunphy is an author, the Godfrey 15th Precinct Democratic Committeeperson and recording secretary for the Godfrey Democrats.
Negotiators from 130 countries have agreed on a major overhaul of how the worlds biggest companies are taxed in an effort to deter international avoidance schemes that have cost governments billions in revenue.

It's an attempt to better cope with a world where globalization and an increasingly digital economy mean that profits can move easily from one jurisdiction to another. The agreement was sealed Thursday in talks overseen by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, though there are still details to work out and hurdles to clear before it can take effect in 2023.

The key feature is a global minimum corporate tax of at least 15%, endorsing the broad outlines of a proposal from U.S. President Joe Biden.

While the tax deal is complex in its details, the idea behind the minimum tax is simple: if a multinational company escapes taxation abroad, it would have to pay the minimum at home.

Here's why it was proposed and how it would work.

THE PROBLEM: TAX HAVENS AND THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Most countries only tax domestic business income of their multinational companies, on the assumption that the profits of their foreign subsidiaries will be taxed where they are earned.

But in todays economy, profits can easily slide across borders. Earnings often come from intangibles, such as brands, copyrights and patents. Those are easy to move to where taxes are lowest  and some jurisdictions have been only too willing to offer reduced or zero taxation to attract foreign investment and revenue, even if companies do no real business there.

As a result, corporate tax rates have fallen in recent years, a phenomenon dubbed a race to the bottom by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

From 1985 to 2018, the worldwide average corporate statutory tax rate fell from 49% to 24%. From 2000-2018, U.S. companies booked half of all foreign profits in just seven low-tax jurisdictions: Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Singapore and Switzerland. The OECD estimates tax avoidance costs anywhere from $100 billion to $240 billion, or from 4% to 10% of global corporate income tax revenues.

That's money governments could use as they see deficits rise from spending on pandemic relief.

THE SOLUTION: THE GLOBAL MINIMUM TAX

The talks seek to put a floor under corporate tax rates by having countries legislate a minimum that they would levy on untaxed foreign income. In other words, if Company X headquartered in Country Y paid no or little tax on profits in Country Z, Country Y would tax those profits at home up to the minimum rate.

That would remove the reason for using a tax haven, or for setting one up. Biden has proposed a 15% floor for the global talks, though it could be higher.

ANOTHER PROBLEM: TAXING DIGITAL COMPANIES

Another focus is what to do about companies that make profits in countries where they have no physical presence. That could be through digital advertising or online retail. Countries led by France have started imposing unilateral digital taxes that hit the biggest U.S. tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook. The U.S. calls those unfair trade practices, and has threatened retaliation through import taxes.

THE SOLUTION: ALLOCATING TAXING RIGHTS

Biden's proposal focuses on the 100 biggest and most profitable multinationals no matter what kind of business they are in, digital or not. Countries could claim the right to tax part of their profits  under a proposal backed by the Group of Seven wealthy democracies, up to 20% of the profits of companies above a profit margin of 10%. Governments would have to roll back their unilateral taxes, defusing the trade disputes with the U.S.

BIDEN'S PLANS

The OECD talks play a role in Biden's push for changes that would, in his view, make the tax system fairer and raise revenue for investments in infrastructure and clean energy. The U.S. already passed a tax on foreign earnings under the Trump administration. But Biden wants to roughly double the Trump era rate to 21%, and also to charge that rate on a country-by-country basis so that tax havens can be targeted. The president also seeks to make it more difficult for U.S. companies to merge with foreign firms and avoid U.S. taxes, a process known as inversion.

All those changes must be approved by the U.S. Congress, where the Democratic president has only a thin majority. Biden wanted a diplomatic win at the OECD talks so that other countries impose a form of a minimum tax to prevent companies from avoiding their potential tax obligations.

WHAT'S NEXT?

The agreement reached at the OECD will be taken up by the Group of 20 countries representing 80 percent of the global economy. However, all 20 G-20 countries joined in signing the OECD deal, indicating broad agreement, at least with the outlines. The G-20 could give its final blessing at a summit Oct. 30-31 in Rome.

The global minimum tax would be voluntary. So countries would have to enact it into their own national tax codes on their own initiative. The proposal to tax companies on earnings where they have no physical presence, such as through online businesses, would require countries to sign up to a written international agreement.

Some countries that took part in the OECD talks did not sign the agreement. They include Ireland and Hungary, both of which have corporate tax rates below the 15% minimum. Ireland's finance minister, Paschal Donohoe, has said Ireland's 12.5% rate is a fair rate. Donohoe said Thursday after the deal was announced that despite reservations about the rate, he remains committed to the process" and aims "to find an outcome that Ireland can yet support.

According to Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has written extensively on tax havens, the minimum tax will still work even if some countries don't sign up. He said in a tweet that the fact remains: If some countries refuse to apply a minimum tax, then other countries will collect the taxes they refuse to collect.

___

AP Business Writer Josh Boak contributed from Washington, DC.
NEWARK, N.J. (AP)  Americans enjoying newfound liberty are expected to travel and gather for cookouts, fireworks, concerts and beach outings over the Fourth of July weekend in numbers not seen since pre-pandemic days.

Yet lingering restrictions, worker shortages and significant numbers of unvaccinated people mean some may not be as free as they would like to be.

And there are fears that the mixing of large numbers of vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans at a time when the highly contagious delta variant is spreading rapidly could undo some of the progress made against the scourge.

Nashville is expecting as many as 400,000 people to stream into the city for its July Fourth celebration featuring country star Brad Paisley. In Massachusetts, the Boston Pops' Independence Day concert is back, but the show that usually draws hundreds of thousands to the Charles River esplanade in Boston will be held 100 miles away at the Tanglewood music center.

Beaches and lakefronts are expected to be packed as well. In Southern California, Huntington Beach is planning one of the biggest celebrations on the West Coast, a three-day festival that could bring in a half-million people.

Elizabeth Driscoll plans to enjoy the festivities in Cheboygan, Michigan, including a parade down Main Street, a trip to a farmers market and a family party on a lake, all ahead of the fireworks display over the Straits of Mackinac. Last year, the parade and fireworks were canceled.

You can feel it all over town, just an influx of people on the tourism side, and people who live here are out and about," she said. "Theres good energy.

At the same time, airlines have been struggling to get enough crew members to fly their planes. Pools and beaches have been hit with a shortage of lifeguards. And restaurants and bars in tourist destinations have had to scale back hours because of a lack of help.

President Joe Biden has welcomed the holiday as a historic moment in the nation's recovery from a crisis that has killed over 600,000 Americans and led to months of restrictions that are now almost gone. He plans to host more than 1,000 people at the White House  first responders, essential workers and troops  for a cookout and fireworks to mark what the administration is calling a summer of freedom.

Im going to celebrate it, Biden said Friday ahead of the holiday. Theres great things happening. ... All across America, people are going to ballgames, doing good things. But he also warned that "lives will be lost" because of people who didn't get vaccinated.

The U.S. is averaging about 12,000 new cases and 250 deaths a day thanks to vaccines that have been administered to two-thirds of the nation's adults. But that is short of the goal of 70% by July 4 that Biden set. Vaccine hesitancy remains stubborn, especially in the Deep South and West, allowing the delta variant to spread throughout the country.

AAA forecasts that more than 47 million people will travel by car or plane this weekend in the U.S., a return to 2019 levels and 40% higher than last year. That includes 3.5 million airline passengers.

At the Newark, New Jersey, airport, travelers waited in long check-in lines Wednesday and encountered flight delays that tested their patience. Some were just happy to get on a plane after vacation plans were disrupted last year by COVID-19 restrictions.

Rhetta Williams, a 54-year-old manager at a pharmaceutical company, was traveling to Charleston, South Carolina, for a family reunion with about 50 relatives that was postponed a year ago because of the virus.

And were not going to be practicing any social distancing, she said, laughing.

Zach Carothers, a 21-year-old computer science student, flew from South Carolina to Newark for a weekend at the Jersey Shore, where people have been flocking back.

Its nice to get back to it after quarantining for so long, Carothers said, adding that he is looking forward to a vacation that will definitely have celebratory beers.

While masks have been shed around the country even in indoor spaces, the Transportation Security Administration emphasizes that they are still required at airports and on planes  a restriction not everyone is accepting gracefully. Airlines are reporting increasing cases of disruptive passengers refusing to wear masks.

Fireworks are likely to draw some of the biggest crowds many communities have seen in months.

Outdoor stuff remains, I think, pretty safe for unvaccinated or vaccinated people, said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown Universitys School of Public Health. Probably a packed outdoor concert is not ideal, but short of that, outdoor activity is safe for people. Watching fireworks is fine.

Moving the party indoors is considered less safe, at a time when some states have less than half their population fully vaccinated.

Im concerned about most of the country, said Dr. Lynn Goldman, dean of George Washington Universitys school of public health. I think its premature to declare it over, especially because of what we see in other parts of the world."

___

Associated Press writers David Koenig in Dallas; Mae Anderson in Nashville, Tenn.; and Andrew Dalton in Los Angeles contributed. Murphy reported from Indianapolis.
ALTON  The first residents of the SIU School of Medicines Alton Family Medicine Residency Program began their three-year training at Alton Memorial Hospital on July 2.

We are excited to be partnering with Alton Memorial Hospital and Southern Illinois Healthcare Foundation (SIHF), said Rebecca Hoffman, MD, MSPH, of the School of Medicine and director of the residency program. These organizations have a long and rich history of providing education, care and service to the population of the area.

Our shared vision for education, and patient and community care allow for many opportunities throughout our service areas.

Six residents for the program were announced. These six were picked from various interviews through the fall and winter of 2020. The residents are:

Dr. Christina Govas  Govas completed her clinical rotations in Chicago after earning her medical degree from Saint James School of Medicine. She is a civil engineer who pursued medicine after volunteering in a mobile medical clinic in South Africa.

 Govas completed her clinical rotations in Chicago after earning her medical degree from Saint James School of Medicine. She is a civil engineer who pursued medicine after volunteering in a mobile medical clinic in South Africa. Dr. Nazanin Kheirkhanan  Raised in Toronto, Cannda, Kheirkhanan earned her medical degree from the Windsor University School of Medicine. Her family and family traditions are most important to her.

 Raised in Toronto, Cannda, Kheirkhanan earned her medical degree from the Windsor University School of Medicine. Her family and family traditions are most important to her. Dr. Jonathan Klarich  A St. Louis native, Klarich earned his medical degree from Ross University School of Medicine. He has lived in many Caribbean countries and met his fiance, Marina, on the island of Curacao.

 A St. Louis native, Klarich earned his medical degree from Ross University School of Medicine. He has lived in many Caribbean countries and met his fiance, Marina, on the island of Curacao. Dr. Torry Pledger  Pledger was born in Europe, where he lived for many years before moving the United States. He completed a Bachelors Degree in Kinesiology at the University of Maryland and received a Masters in Exercise Physiology From Life University before attending Saint James School of Medicine. He was an Exercise Physiologist with a focus on cardiac rehab.

 Pledger was born in Europe, where he lived for many years before moving the United States. He completed a Bachelors Degree in Kinesiology at the University of Maryland and received a Masters in Exercise Physiology From Life University before attending Saint James School of Medicine. He was an Exercise Physiologist with a focus on cardiac rehab. Dr. Andrea Ramos Richards, MPH  Born in Lima, Peru, Richards earned her medical degree at the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana before moving to St. Louis. As a member of the Peruvian American Medical Society, she has gone to Peru for medical mission trips to underserved areas in her home country.

 Born in Lima, Peru, Richards earned her medical degree at the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana before moving to St. Louis. As a member of the Peruvian American Medical Society, she has gone to Peru for medical mission trips to underserved areas in her home country. Dr. Tyler Wright  Raised in Northern California, Wright majored in Biology/Pre-Med at California State Monetery Bay and went to University of Medicine and Health Sciences for medical school. Hes worked in the California county jail system providing mental health and medical services to inmates.

Dave Braasch, president of Alton Memorial Hospital, reflected on the several years of planning for the program and thanked everyone for their diligence and patience.

Today is a momentous day in the history of the hospital, Braasch said. I really want to thank Dr. Hoffman for her persistence and commitment throughout what has ultimately been a seven-year journey, particularly in the midst of a pandemic. Its a great day for our community as well, as we are training these physicians in Family Medicine.

Larry McCulley, president and CEO of SIHF, noted its partnership with BJC and Alton Memorial goes back more than 20 years to its first health center in Madison County.

Today expands our partnership, through a new Family Medicine Residency with SIU School of Medicine, in developing tomorrows work force, he said. It is a pleasure to welcome the inaugural six residents into our SIHF Healthcare Alton Health Center as we look forward to a successful residency program for many years to come.

Dr. Jerry Kruse, MSPH, dean and provost of SIU School of Medicine, marveled at the new space for the program and thanked everyone for the collaboration.

Effective health care always involves collaboration  between the patient and the physician, the medical team in the clinic, and the staff behind the scenes, he said. Were fortunate to be a part of this team effort. We are very grateful for all the groundwork you have done to get the right people and pieces in place to expand SIU Medicines outreach.

You are helping our young residents become more confident, compassionate and highly skilled clinicians. And they in turn can practice medicine that will benefit the communitys residents of all ages  which is why SIU School of Medicine was founded.
Forty Fort Mayor Andy Tuzinski is not guilty of disorderly conduct for confronting Wyoming Valley West School Board members prior to a meeting last month at the State Street Elementary School in Larksville, Magisterial District Judge David Barilla ruled Thursday morning.

Tuzinski faced a single summary citation for disorderly conduct after a majority of the board asked Larksville police to cite him for showing up at a virtual meeting and trying to follow members into a private executive session.

He wasnt supposed to be there. It was a closed meeting, board member James Fender told Barilla.

Fender, who made the 911 call to summon police, said Tuzinski launched a verbal tirade on board President Joe Mazur for several minutes and described Tuzinskis behavior as aggressive and nuts. Tuzinski put his hands behind his back and repeatedly shouted cuff me! Fender recalled.

Tuzinski said he had every right to confront the board about alleged violations of the states Sunshine Act and what they planned to talk about in the closed-door meeting.
A 32-year-old man pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court to conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and heroin in Northeast Pennsylvania.

Rudolph Ford, of Olyphant, admitted he participated in a scheme to sell heroin and "highly pure" crystal methamphetamine throughout Lackawanna, Luzerne and Schuylkill counties between January 2017 and December 2018, federal prosecutors said Friday.

U.S. District Judge Robert D. Mariani will sentence him at a later date. He is facing a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

Ford was one of five people indicted in December 2018 for drug trafficking in the region and the only from Lackawanna County.

Ford was in the Lackawanna County Prison on Friday.
The Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on Thursday suspended a Luzerne County attorney from the state bar until further notice.

Kingston-based attorney John A. Bellino was temporarily suspended and ordered to comply with the Pennsylvania Rules of Disciplinary Enforcement.

In a one-page order, the board wrote the punishment is an "imposition of public discipline" for an unspecified offense. The order cites a bar rule dictating board actions and records are confidential.

Disciplinary board records show Bellino previously received a public reprimand in 2013 for a "pattern of inactivity" he demonstrated when he was appointed an administrator of an estate in 1999.

According to that filing, Bellino inexplicably took 10 years to close out the estate, prompting the board to remind him that "lawyers will not be permitted to engage in conduct that falls below professional standards."

Online records show Bellino was admitted to the bar in June 1989.
July 2, 1871

St. Lukes opens on Wyoming Ave.

Religious services were held throughout the day to mark the opening of St. Lukes Episcopal Church on Wyoming Avenue.

The Rt. Rev. William Bacon Stevens, bishop of Pennsylvania, officiated the opening service with assistance from the Rev. Mr. A.A. Marple, St. Lukes rector; and the Rev. J.H.H. Millett. During his sermon, Bishop Stevens spoke on how the Lord is present in His temple through His word, His ministry, His sacrament.

Following the morning service, the churchs Sunday school met in the church. Those in attendance were given a lesson on the meaning of the emblems in the windows near the altar.

A third service was held in the evening, in which Bishop Stevens administered the rite of confirmation to members of the congregation.

The congregations creation dates to November 1851. After worshipping in borrowed spaces, the young Episcopalian congregation finally had a church to call their own on Penn Avenue in November 1853 at a cost of $2,600.

Ten years later the church was free of debt, and the Ladies Sewing Society started raising funds for the construction of a larger church for the growing congregation.

Construction on the new Gothic revival church on Wyoming Avenue started in July 1866 with the cornerstone being laid in a ceremony led by Bishop Stevens in October 1867.

The church was designed by R. M. Upjohn of New York City.

Fourth of July festival planned

Plans were announced for an old-fashioned celebration of the Fourth of July to take place in the park in Green Ridge.

The celebration would start at 9 a.m. with a prayer service conducted by the Rev. J.H.H. Millett that would feature a reading of the Declaration of Independence and the singing of patriotic hymns.

In the afternoon a festival featuring all sorts of food and games would also take place in the park.

Admission to the festival was 10 cents for all those over the age of 12 years old.

Proceeds from the festival would benefit the Church of the Good Shepherd in Green Ridge.
Rotary report

Rotary Club of the Abingtons members Roger and Jackie Mattes were presented with the top donor award for Rotary District 7410 on June 24.

District 7410 Gov. Joe Loughman and Marcia Loughman, the Rotary Foundation chairwoman, attended the installation dinner for the Rotary Club of the Abingtons award to the Mattes.

Dawn Williams, owner of the Sunrise Cafe on Depot Street in Clarks Summit, was awarded the clubs 4 Way Test Award during the June 24 installation dinner.

Annually the club presents the award to a non-rotarian member of the Abington community who during the past year made a significant difference in the community.

Williams made many generous and kind contributions to Abington citizens through her business by making and serving many meals.

Also on June 24, Chris Selige was installed as the 2021-2022 president of the club.

Chris received his presidents pin from his father, Steve Selige, a member for 48 years and past president from 1980 to 1981.

The installation dinner was held at Constantinos in Clarks Summit. Chris is a 2007 graduate of Abington Heights High School and a 2011 graduate of Susquehanna University, where he majored in business.

The 2021-2022 board of directors was also installed. The board, who was inducted by Past District Gov. Gus Vlassis, includes Billy Angel, Mike Wademan, Roger Mattes, Dave Griffin, Ryan Campbell, Leah Rudolph, Maryclaire Kretsch-Green and Janice Bevacqua.

New members installed include Angel, Anita Nealon and Joe Bunk. Virginia Goodman was a sponsor.

George and Nannette Conner were inducted as the New Milford Area Rotary Clubs first corporate members at a ceremony during the clubs monthly meeting at Green Gables Restaurant Pavilion on June 17.

The Conners are owners of Tall Pines Farm Stoves and Fireplaces.

Corporate membership allows employees of the business member entity to participate in rotary service projects and activities without paying additional membership fees, according to the club.

District Gov. Joe Loughman and Marcia Loughman, Rotary Foundation chairwoman, also attended the meeting to award the Conners the membership and the Paul Harris Society award pin.

Membership is open to any business entity, including school districts, hospitals and nonprofits. For more details, contact David Palmer, New Milford Area Rotary Membership Chairman, at newmilfrodparotary@gmail.com.
Longtime advocates of a revived Scranton-to-New York City passenger train sounded more hopeful Friday than in years.

For once, they had a real reason for renewed optimism. They gathered outside U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwrights downtown Scranton office, at his request, to highlight that reason.

The U.S. House passed a $760 billion infrastructure bill Thursday that triples Amtraks funding to $32 billion and allocates another $25 billion to improving the nations railroad system. Amtrak recently issued a service expansion plan that includes a stop in Scranton on a route that connects to New York City.

The Senate must still pass an infrastructure bill. After that, the houses will negotiate a compromise final version. But, to train advocates, for now, one bill passed through one House looks better than no bills.

Ive been working on this project for 33 years now, said Bob Hay, chairman and Monroe County member of the Pennsylvania Northeast Regional Railroad Authority board. Many, many years ago, we had a timeline (for the train starting to run). And people would say, five years, 10 years and all that. ... But now, were not giving time limits, because you know, this is a good boost and very encouraging, but we still always have hurdles to cross.

Dominic Keating, an authority board member from Lackawanna County, said an Amtrak to Scranton train will expand the service beyond Poconos commuters headed for jobs in northern New Jersey and New York City.

As far as Lackawanna County goes, providing commuters for north Jersey and New York, its not the fertile ground, Keating said. Monroe County, yes. But for Amtrak, with our colleges, with our various institutions in Lackawanna County, it is a fertile ground. The younger generation of Americans dont embrace car ownership, the way my group did with GTOs and Mustangs. Thats the first thing you wanted when you graduated from college. And now they want to move to a city, be car-free, and have reasonable transportation options.

Cartwright, D-8, Moosic, again cautioned against too much optimism, and referred to Hay, Keating and railroad authority board executive director Larry Malski.

Theres a lot of two steps forward and one step back that these folks have all weathered, he said. Even when we have made progress, Ive been careful to temper my remarks and not appear too excited about the chance of victory, because so many people, politicians, have gotten up and said, Were going to bring back rail and its going to happen in a few years. Thats not my style. ... This is a steep climb that were engaged in. But we have some glimmers of hope.
Mountain Montage came alive with the sound of music once again.

Tents dotted the green mountainside beneath an overcast sky that gave way to sun Friday as Peach Music Festival returned after the COVID-19 pandemic canceled last years event.

Started in 2012 by the Allman Brothers Band and celebrating its 10th year, Peach Fest began Thursday night and runs until Sunday, with headliners including Oysterhead, the Allman Betts Band and the String Cheese Incident set to take the stage throughout the weekend.

A fireworks display will light up the sky each night.

The festival continues to attract fans from all over, including Owen Durkin and Jackie Donahue, both of Massachusetts, who were determined to make it to Montage Mountain. After their car broke down in Connecticut, the pair made the rest of their journey to Pennsylvania in a U-Haul.

I love coming to Peach, Durkin said, adding its his second time at the festival. Im definitely going to be coming in the future for much, much more time to come.

Im just honestly looking forward to meeting really cool people, listening to the good music, the waterpark, obviously, said Donahue, a first-time guest at Peach Fest.

Backstage, Scranton Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti met with festival organizers and others to watch a 50th anniversary tribute performance of the Allman Brothers iconic album Live at Fillmore East.

Elsewhere on the mountain, thousands of fans danced along to the music and reunited with friends for the first time since 2019.

Satchel Rose and Jack Burke made the trek from Asheville, North Carolina, to enjoy live bands with fellow music lovers.

I havent been able to hug so many strangers in such a long time, and that is so rewarding for your mind and just for life itself. Being able to see people, and touch people and talk to people again, Rose said.

Im here to just be my true self, Burke added. Honestly, Ive missed being able to do that with the pretty people that are like-minded. Last night, I was able to put on a fishnet (sequined) dress and dance as sexy as anyones ever danced for hours, and its a very freeing and just a loving environment that Ive missed for a while.
Lucetta Savinelli always remembers St. Lukes Episcopal Church in Scranton being a part of her life.

She practically grew up there.

Baptized, confirmed, been there my whole life, the 76-year-old Scranton resident said.

As a young girl, Savinelli came to St. Lukes every Sunday with her mother. She sang in the church choir, attended Sunday school and participated in church events like the annual Christmas pageant, where she remembers playing an angel.

She remains faithful to St. Lukes, showing up every Saturday with her husband, Mario. Years later, shes still mesmerized by the Ascension window behind the altar.

Oh, I just love my church. I just love it. I love the architecture. Its just so peaceful to go to St. Lukes, Savinelli said. And I just like the traditional service. I know a lot of young people are going in different directions and all, and thats why a lot of parishes are losing their members, but I think you have to decide what you like, and I do love the tradition of it.

The Savinellis will serve as ushers today when St. Lukes celebrates the 150th anniversary of its first service on Wyoming Avenue. Officiated by the Rev. Rebecca Barnes, priest-in-charge, the anniversary service begins at 6 p.m. with U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright and Scranton Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti in attendance to present special honors.

In acknowledging the storied past of St. Lukes, Barnes plans to use the paten and chalice today from the first service for communion.

An open house will follow from 7 to 9 p.m. with exhibits, a slideshow of historic photos and a video detailing St. Lukes history. Live music from the Electric City Dixieland Band, games and refreshments are also planned.

The celebration is open to the public and coincides with this months First Friday events.

Incorporated in 1852, St. Lukes Episcopal Church was originally located on the 100 block of Penn Avenue, but a growing congregation led to a need for a larger place of worship.

It was one of the first churches and one of the earliest churches in the city, said Barnes, who began serving St. Lukes in 2015. The parish predates the incorporation of the city, actually.

The parish broke ground for its new Wyoming Avenue church in 1866. It took five years to complete, with a miners strike in 1869 slowing construction.

Barnes said the architects behind the church, Richard Upjohn and his son, Richard Mitchell Upjohn, were the most prominent names in American ecclesiastical architecture.

Another significant name, artist and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany, led interior renovations of the church in 1905. St. Lukes underwent additional renovations in 1962.

Whether one is coming here as a member of a worshipping faith community, or one has just a love of art or architecture, theres many things that attract people to the space, Barnes said.

By the summer of 1871, the new Gothic revival church was finished.

Scranton Historical Architecture Review Board Chairman Richard Leonori explained in the anniversary video, They didnt quite have the money to finish the tower, so they built it about 50 feet tall and then by 1884, they added another 25 feet to reach the current configuration, which was part of the original design.

St. Lukes held its first services there exactly 150 years ago today, July 2, 1871.

Some of the citys most prominent residents were affiliated with St. Lukes over the years.

A lot of the founding fathers of Scranton were all members here, Barnes said.

Today, the church reports just under 200 members, and a committee is trying to secure a place for it on the National Register of Historic Places. Though membership has declined, Barnes said a dedicated congregation still worships regularly and lives out their faith through community service.

We stand on the shoulders of those who come before us and their generosity and their foresight in leaving such a beautiful space for people to have to worship in is something to be very grateful for, Barnes said. Its really been a place of joy and solace and connection for generations upon generations.
Wilkes University is requiring students and employees to report their COVID-19 vaccination status to the university if they are going to be on campus after Aug. 6.

Theyre required to show a copy of a vaccination card or complete a waiver that outlines protocols for unvaccinated students and employees. Those protocols include testing every two to three weeks, quarantining after exposure to the virus, isolation after a positive test and wearing masks.

Wilkes University President Greg Cant outlined the new policy in a message released Wednesday. Other local colleges and universities have similar policies posted on their websites.

Based on the information we have already received from our campus community, we anticipate that the majority of our students, faculty and staff will be fully vaccinated when classes start in August, Wilkes spokeswoman Gabrielle DAmico said Thursday in an email. We continue to strongly encourage members of our campus community to receive the vaccine. As a congregate setting, we must take all the necessary steps to protect ourselves and those around us, including colleagues and peers with medical vulnerabilities who cannot be vaccinated.

Wolfs veto

In Harrisburg on Thursday, a Republican-crafted bill to ban so-called COVID-19 vaccine passports in some cases and to restrict the health secretarys actions during health emergencies was vetoed by Gov. Tom Wolf. The measure split both legislative chambers along party lines last month, and Wolf had previously said he would veto the proposal.

With millions of Pennsylvanians still unvaccinated, many seemingly intent on remaining so, legislative Republicans wanted to prevent what they view as stigmatizing policies that require proof of vaccination in violation of health privacy.

The bill would have kept colleges and universities that receive state money from mandating proof of COVID-19 vaccination to enter buildings, attend class in person or undertake any activity. State and local governmental entities would have been similarly restricted, and governments would not have been allowed to include coronavirus vaccine status on ID cards.

It also would have kept the health secretary from ordering closures or directing people who have not been exposed to a contagion to physically distance, wear a mask, quarantine or restrict their travel. The Wolf administration believes the bill, if passed, would have applied to all cases, not just during the current pandemic.

Republicans irked

State Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill, R-York, the bills prime sponsor, said she was disappointed by the veto.

What we consistently heard from many individuals is that they felt that was government overreach and that was something that they were not comfortable seeing, she said.

In Wolfs message to the Legislature announcing the veto, he called the bill contradictory, misguided and irresponsible, putting at particular risk residents of long-term care facilities and those with compromised immune systems.

He warned that medical providers and the wider public would have been prevented from getting important information about vaccination rates and vaccine efficacy, because the bill would have limited the Health Departments ability to collect vaccine and immunization information for the Statewide Immunization Information System.

As we have seen with COVID-19 and other disease outbreaks, public health response measures are critical in saving lives of vulnerable residents, Wolf wrote.

Universal mask wearing, social distancing and worker safety policies have been critical to combatting the pandemic, Wolf said.

Defining duties

Republicans pushed through a pair of state constitutional amendments that voters approved in May to effectively end the governors declaration of disaster emergency, but Wolf says many of the pandemic mitigation efforts are under his health secretarys authority in the states Disease Prevention and Control Law.

Wolfs office has said he will not move to establish vaccine passports by the government but believes private entities, venues and businesses should be able to set their own rules about vaccine status.

Shortsighted legislation to tie the hands of people dedicated to public health will only make infectious diseases more difficult to fight, he said.
As insurrectionists carried Confederate battle flags through the Capitol of the United States on Jan. 6, they were encouraged by the presence in the building of statues honoring people who had attempted to overthrow the government by violence.

Tuesday, the U.S. House voted in the Capitol to remove from its halls those statues that honor Confederate figures, traitors who attempted to destroy the United States and, thankfully, lost. The bill directs the architect of the Capitol to remove the statues of Charles B. Aycock, John C. Calhoun and James P. Clarke.

It also mandates the long-overdue removal of the bust of Roger Taney from outside the first-floor chamber that once housed the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1857, the chief justice authored the infamous Dred Scott decision, holding that people of African descent never could be U.S citizens and that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution did not apply to them regardless of whether they lived in free territory.

The bill also requires that the bust be replaced with one honoring Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice and the lead counsel in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

All Democrats and 67 Republicans voted for the bill, which passed 285-120. It now goes to the closely divided Senate, where 10 Republicans are needed for it to pass. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, representing the birthplace of the Constitution and the first state to abolish the slave trade, should be among Republicans to vote to finally stop honoring traitors and losers within the nations citadel of democracy.
In their never-ending service to narrow interests at the expense of the broader public good, enough lawmakers voted in 2019 to help Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman of Centre County protect a plastic bag manufacturer in his district.

They temporarily disregarded their mantra that local governance is superior to state governance, and precluded municipal governments statewide from barring single-use plastic bags.

Environmental activists sued because the bill was passed as part of a budget bill rather than on its merits, as required by that pesky state constitution. The lawsuit is pending.

Now, a window has opened for local governments to ban single-use plastic bags because Republicans did not move to renew the ban on local action, as required by the 2019 law. Philadelphia will implement its ban this month and Pittsburgh is expected to do so soon.

The cities want to ban single-use bags because, although they are convenient in the short term, they are a long-term environmental hazard and a principal component of out-of-control littering that costs millions of dollars every year.

Manufacturers produce about 300 million tons of plastic consumer products every year, about 150 million tons of it in the form of single-use packaging and bags that are discarded into the environment.

Municipal bans not only will help individual cities deal with their litter problems, but will alter the market and force the plastics and packaging industries to come up with better solutions that serve consumers without harming the environment.

Local governments in Northeast Pennsylvania should join the movement.
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
Westerly, RI (02891)

Today

Cloudy skies this morning will become partly cloudy this afternoon. High 71F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Some clouds. Low 66F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
Britain's largest online-only building materials firm CMO has revealed its intention to raise around 45million from listing on the junior AIM market.

The group said that it expects to become a publicly traded company on Thursday next week and will use proceeds from the initial public offering (IPO) towards expanding its business and reducing its debt pile.

Founded 13 years ago as Construction Materials Online, the firm hopes to take advantage of the pandemic-induced boom in the home improvement sector and the rise in digital purchases of building materials.

Plan of action: Founded 13 years ago as Construction Materials Online, the firm said it will use proceeds from the initial public offering towards expanding its business and reducing its debts

It also wants to disrupt the heavily-offline building materials industry, which was worth about 27billion in 2019, and take on prominent players such as Wickes, Screwfix and Topps Tiles.

CMO said last week that traditional merchants had often been too slow to respond to the growth in digital trade due to their focus on running sizeable bricks-and-mortar operations and stocking a more limited product range.

The firm sells over 75,000 products, including tiling, roofing, and drainage materials, through seven specialist websites, as well as providing advisory services and trade accounts to builders and professional contractors.

According to its most recent accounts published on Companies House, the Plymouth-based business recorded revenues of 45million and a pre-tax loss of 2.2million in 2019.

It is set to be valued at around 95million in the upcoming listing, meaning that its largest investor, private equity group Key Capital Partners, will hold a 26.8 per cent stake worth more than 25million, while its founders will hold a 10.4 per cent share.

Chief executive Dean Murray said the company 'has an exciting opportunity ahead as we continue to capitalise on our first-mover advantage and digital platform to further increase market share as customers increasingly move online for their building materials requirements.

Big player: Plymouth-based firm CMO sells more than 75,000 products, including tiling, roofing, insulation and drainage materials, through seven specialist websites

'We are particularly encouraged by the strong demand we have experienced from high calibre institutional investors, which is clear validation of CMO's market opportunity and strong future growth potential.'

He added: 'We look forward to delivering CMO's next phase of growth as we progress our vision to revolutionise the shopping experience of homeowners and tradespeople alike to become the 'go to' digital retailer of building materials.'

The listing follows similar flotation announcements this year from other online companies whose sales have benefited enormously from the coronavirus pandemic forcing non-essential shops to shut from time to time.

Greetings card seller Moonpig, secondhand gadgets business MusicMagpie, and ready meals maker Parsley Box all went public on the London stock market earlier this year after earning soaring revenues in 2020.

Well loved: Greetings card seller Moonpig is among the companies that listed on the London stock market earlier this year after earning soaring revenues in 2020

But few IPOs were more anticipated than food delivery giant Deliveroo, whose order volumes have shot up since the pandemic started thanks in part to the temporary closure of hospitality venues during tough periods of lockdown restrictions.

However, many investors shunned Deliveroo over concerns about how it treated staff, threats of stricter regulation for gig economy firms, and the fact that Deliveroo has never made a profit, among other reasons.

Meanwhile, this week saw make-up and skincare group Revolution Beauty, which uses social media influencers to sell its products, and private equity firm Bridgepoint also declare plans to list on the London markets.

Bridgepoint has often invested in British hospitality chains since its founding in 2000. It operates the UK Burger King franchise, owns restaurant firm Zizzi, and bought a minority stake last month in East Asian-inspired food chain Itsu.

Moreover, it helped expand Pret a Manger into becoming a ubiquitous presence on British high streets after it bought the company in 2008 for 364million before selling it three years ago to Krispy Kreme owner JAB for 1.5billion.
Ben Tyer: Receiving an increased state pension and a lump sum will mean a financial reassessment

Ben Tyer is a partner at GLP Solicitors and a legal specialist in care funding. Scroll down for responses from the Government and the Local Government Association.

As a lawyer I cannot comment on whether it is morally right to include a state pension backpayment in a financial assessment for care funding. I have to advise on how the law applies.

I will explain how care fees are assessed and paid for at present, and the potential consequences of getting a large, unexpected state pension backpayment when you might need or are already receiving care funding.

Unlike healthcare, which is free at the point of use, social care is means-tested when the local council looks at your income, savings and property to calculate how much you need to contribute towards the cost of your care and support.

When someone is receiving this at home, as opposed to in a residential care setting, a local authority has more discretion about how much to charge so any calculation may disregard the state pension backpayment though it is not guaranteed.

If a person needs residential care and owns capital above the threshold of 23,250 then that person must pay their own charges. The person is known as a self-funder.

Where a person in residential care has savings below 23,250 but above 14,250, a person can seek financial support from the local authority.

The person's income and benefits, such as pensions and attendance allowance, will be included plus a 'tariff' income based on capital between 14,250 and 23,250. The council pays the remaining cost of your care.

Where a person has less than 14,250 of capital then this amount is entirely disregarded, but the person must contribute to fees from their income. Again, the council pays the remaining cost of your care.

A person's home is included unless it falls into one of the 'disregards' such as the person's spouse continuing to live there.

Will a state pension backpayment lump sum be included in any financial assessment?

Receiving an increased state pension and a lump sum will mean a financial reassessment.

Has a state pension backpayment affected your care funding? This article focuses on care funding in England, where the late Dorothy Ostins lived. You can find out how the system works in Wales here, Scotland here and Northern Ireland here. If you live anywhere in the UK, have received a state pension backpayment, and are having an issue with care funding as a result, please write to pensionquestions@thisismoney.co.uk and put CARE FUNDING in the subject line.

The new weekly pension amount will be included and there is no law, regulation or guidance that local authorities must disregard the lump sum.

The simplest method of preventing the victims of this pension error from having to use this money on care would be for the Government to amend what can be disregarded.

They did this, albeit under different circumstances, in response to the terrorist attacks in London and Manchester in 2017.

Following those tragic events, new regulations were passed so that any payments from the London Emergencies Trust and We Love Manchester Emergency Fund are to be disregarded in any financial assessment.

Unless there is a similar change, state pension backpayments will potentially be included in any financial assessment in calculating contributions to care home fees.

Can you give the money away, or spend it?

You have to tell your local authority about the state pension backpayment because they are allowed to recover debts where a person misrepresents or fails to disclose information relevant to the financial assessment.

Giving it away is similarly problematic. If a person has intentionally decreased their overall assets in order to reduce the amount they are charged towards their care then this is known as deliberate deprivation.

This can occur in different ways such as transferring title deeds, putting assets into trust or merely just giving money away.

However, there may be many reasons for a person depriving themselves of an asset.

A local authority therefore has to consider whether avoiding care and support charges was a significant motivation, and whether the person had a reasonable expectation of needing to contribute to the cost of their eligible care needs at the time.

If the local authority believes deprivation has occurred they would seek to charge the person as if they still had the asset or money.

Future funding: Will being a victim of state pension scandal affect what you shell out for care?

Where the person has transferred the asset to a third party to avoid the charge, the third party is liable to pay the local authority the difference between what it would have charged and did charge the person receiving care.

There is no time limit on a local authority seeking to recover charges in this scenario.

So, those already in care who receive a state pension backpayment, and who therefore know it may affect their contributions, will have more of an uphill task in persuading the local authority that giving it away to avoid paying was not a motivation.

However, someone coming into money unexpectedly when they were previously just getting by is not a typical scenario.

Therefore wanting to spend the money on much needed clothes, equipment, trips, children, grandchildren  which they have been unable to do for so long through no fault of their own  would be extremely persuasive in my view.

For those not already in a care home, it is easier if they are fit and healthy and could not have foreseen the need for care and support.

In those circumstances the guidance states that it would be unreasonable for a local authority to decide that such gifts were deliberately intended to avoid paying for care and support.

In either case, paying off a debt must not be considered as deprivation so this would be a sensible option.

Plus, if a property disregard applies because a spouse continues to live there then paying off some or all of the mortgage would also be sensible.

Can a local authority backdate or recover old charges?

If you have been in care and eligible for financial support, and later receive a state pension backpayment, my view is that local authorities will not be entitled to recoup their previous contributions.

In any assessment, the crucial issue is that a local authority must satisfy itself that the income would have been available to the person.

Clearly it is only since former Pensions Minister Steve Webb and This is Money discovered widespread underpayments of the state pension that people became aware they were entitled to lump sums and increases in income going forward.

These weren't available to them in previous years so backdating assessments is not acceptable.

For those currently in care and reliant on funding, the local authority should not seek to recover charges for the period in which an increased pension income was unavailable, and a person was not aware of any higher costs they might have been incurring if it had been available.

For those who were in care and reliant on local authority funding but have now died their estate should not be pursued for charges the person was unaware of incurring.

What about for charges going forward?

In calculating how much a person must contribute to care home fees, a local authority looks at two distinct areas: capital such as buildings, savings, investments and shares; and income such as state pension, private pension, attendance allowance and so on.

My view is that an increased state pension going forward would be a change in circumstances so a local authority will probably reassess a person's ability to meet the cost of any charges to take account of this higher income, which may increase your contribution.

However, the lump sum backpayment should not be taken into account.

If a person were to receive a lump sum of 30,000, for example, then that would appear to take the person over the 23,250 threshold making them a self-funder paying the full cost of care.

But I would argue that a provision in the guidance to local authorities should apply here, namely that 'capital is to be disregarded which is to be treated as income'.

This is because the lump sum in this case is based on underpaid pension, which as everyone knows is an income, so it should not be treated in the same way as savings or an inheritance.

Meanwhile, if the lump sum ought to be treated as income then it shouldn't be included in a financial assessment as if were all received in the current year.

HMRC has confirmed it will tax backpayments based on the amounts that ought to have been received in previous years if state pension had been paid correctly at the time, so it must follow that local authorities should do the same.

What is likely to happen now?

This a best case scenario, but the straightforward solution would be for the Government to change the law to clarify that these state pension backpayments ought to be disregarded in financial assessments for care funding.

But whether it is or not, lump sums should be disregarded in practice and only the increased state pension going forward should be included in terms of assessing future care support.

If a local authority takes a different view, you can argue your case based on the guidance I have cited above, and if necessary you should consult a lawyer who specialises in this area.

It is of course important that people pay the contribution to their care costs that they are responsible for, but local authorities should bear in mind that they are bound by the public law principle of acting reasonably at all times.

And as the guidance states, 'people should be treated with dignity and respect and be able to spend the money they have saved as they wish  it is their money after all'.
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
A statue outside the Boy Scouts of America headquarters in Irving, Texas, is shown in this Feb. 12, 2020, file photo. The Boy Scouts of America reached an agreement with attorneys representing some 60,000 victims of child sex abuse in what could prove to be a pivotal moment in the organizations bankruptcy case.
Doug Tweed and his wife Christie founded Friends of the King Ministries. Readers may reach Doug by visiting the website friendsofthekingministries.org.
Terri McSweeny doesnt know the precise spot where her Revolutionary War hero ancestor is buried, but theres 18th century documentation indicating Lt. David Fellows final resting place is in the Hudson Valley - possibly on private property believed by some to hold the remains of many American patriots.

That property in the Dutchess County town of Fishkill has been the focus of a years-long battle pitting local preservationists against a Westchester-based developer who wants to build retail shops, a 90-room hotel and a chain restaurant on his 10.5-acre site, a roughly L-shaped parcel bordered on the west by Route 9, Snook Road on the north and Van Wyck Lake Road to the south.

Located in the southwest corner of owner Domenic Broccolis property is a clearing flanked on the north by a gas station-convenience store and on the south by a Mexican restaurant. It is there, at the base of the L, where preservationists have pinpointed the location of an unmarked cemetery in what was known during the American Revolution as the Fishkill Supply Depot.

Broccoli insists that the project will help protect, not trample, a purported cemetery located on the property. But McSweeny said shes appalled and devastated by the idea of a commercial enterprise looming so closely over the graves of soldiers who died during the nations fight for freedom from the British.

Why not park food trucks on top of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier? McSweeny, of Vero Beach, Fla., said in an email. It's the same as a strip mall on top of a mass grave holding the remains of my revered ancestor, Lt. David Fellows, a man who gave the last full measure for the country he loved.

Historical significance to the Revolutionary War effort

For nearly the entire duration of the American Revolution (1775-1783), the Fishkill Supply Depot was a major encampment and the main source of military supplies for the northern segments of Gen. George Washingtons Continental Army. Thousands of American soldiers, along with British and Hessian prisoners (German soldiers who served as auxiliaries to the British Army) spent time at the depot.

Hundreds are believed to have died there, mostly from illness, exposure and diseases such smallpox. Given the burial practices of the period, most of those soldiers wouldve been buried near where they died.

Few people outside Dutchess County have ever heard of the Fishkill Supply Depot. No battles were fought there, although British incursions from the south threatened the supply base, forcing the Americans to move supplies to safer locations nearby. Still, the Fishkill Supply Depot should be held in the same regard as patriot victories at Saratoga, Trenton or Yorktown, according to one supporter of the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, the not-for-profit group leading the effort to stop Broccolis project.

A depot is not as dramatic a site as a Gettysburg or another battlefield, but without the support network the battles would not be possible, said Paul Dolan, a retired ABC News International executive director known for his work on Revolutionary War preservation projects in New York and elsewhere.

Contentious legal battle

Chris Carola

Since June 2015, when Broccoli announced his plans to develop his Fishkill property, there have been contentious public meetings, accusations of underhanded tactics and political maneuverings by both sides, as well as lawsuits and counter-lawsuits.

The current litigation includes a pending appeal by the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot to a December 2019 ruling by a State Supreme Court judge in Dutchess County, who upheld the town planning boards determination that commercial development wont have an adverse environmental impact on Broccolis property.

According to Rodenhausen Chale & Polidoro, the Rhinebeck law firm handling the Friends appeal, the group will claim the planning board failed to properly consider the views of professional archaeologists who say the site still holds significant Revolutionary War artifacts, including human remains, that would be threatened by Broccolis proposed project.

Lance Ashworth, a West Point graduate and Army veteran who is president of the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, contends that more extensive archaeological work would reveal a trove of artifacts and likely provide evidence of Revolutionary War-era burials numbering in the dozens, if not more.

Over the past decade, his group has scoured wartime muster rolls and other documents to put names to 90 soldiers known to have died at Fishkill, including McSweenys ancestor, David Fellows. An officer from Connecticut, Fellows fought in the American invasion of Canada in 1775-76, was captured after a battle near Montreal, eventually returned to the United States and died at the Fishkill Supply Depot on Dec. 10, 1779.

Located on the Hudson Rivers east bank about 50 miles north of New York City, the Fishkill Supply Depot sprawled across several miles, with its core areas centered near the intersection of the north-south Albany Post Road (now Route 9) and the east-west route (now Interstate 84) that connected the Hudson Valley and southern New England.

Starting in late 1776, barracks, stables, storehouses, hospitals, armories, grist mills, sawmills and boat yards sprung up amid the farmland, with the depots boundaries stretching inland from Fishkill Landing (now Beacon) to beyond the Post Road. The depots headquarters were centrally located at the Van Wyck Homestead, where such notable figures as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, the Marquis de Lafayette, John Adams and John Hancock stayed or visited during the war. Located just off I-84s East Fishkill exit, the historic site is home to the Fishkill Historical Society.

Contemporary American military maps of the depot show the location of barracks, stables and other structures, but no cemeteries. According to local oral history, a cemetery was located in what is now the southwest corner of Broccolis property. In the late 19th century, the Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated a historical marker at the site identifying it as the location of a military cemetery. That marker was later moved several hundred yards north to the Van Wyck Homestead.

Just south of the Van Wyck Homestead is Broccolis property, located across Route 9 from the former Dutchess Mall, now the site of a Home Depot. Broccolis plans for his property call for buildings designed to resemble 18th-century landmarks in nearby Hudson Valley communities. He also says the project will include an education center for living history events such as re-enactments, with walkways providing public access to the neighboring cemetery site, which Broccoli plans to preserve.

A five-minute video produced by Broccoli's proposed development, Continental Commons, and posted on its website touts the project as an exciting opportunity to weave together History, Education, Tourism and Commerce.

While conceding that some human remains had been found on his property during one of the dozens of archaeological studies conducted there over the decades, Broccoli contends all those excavations and soil samplings have turned up no firm evidence to support the preservationists claims that his property contains multiple gravesites.

The depot likely had several cemeteries, according to his spokesman, Gregory Lane, who accuses the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot of purposely inflating the extent of the burials on Broccolis property in an effort to derail the commercial project.

Their credibility is questionable, Lane said. We know with great certitude that there are not dozens or hundreds of burials.

For now, Broccolis plans to develop what preservationists deem hallowed ground remain on hold as the lawsuits make their way through the courts. In the meantime, Ashworth and his group say theyll continue their fight to save this last remnant of the Fishkill Supply Depot.

Once the bulldozers roll, Ashworth said, you destroy this site and you cant get it back.
The former Soviet Union marched into Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979, claiming it was invited by the new Afghan communist leader, Babrak Karmal, and setting the country on a path of 40 years of seemingly endless wars and conflict.

After the Soviets left in humiliation, America was the next great power to wade in. Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. invaded to oust the Taliban regime, which had harbored al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

After nearly 20 years, the U.S. is ending its war in Afghanistan, withdrawing the last American troops.

Left behind is the U.S.-allied government, riven by corruption and divisions, which must fend off advancing Taliban insurgents amid stalled peace talks. Many Afghans fear the next chapter will see their country plunge into chaos and inter-factional fighting among warlords.

Here is a timeline of some key dates in Afghanistans 40 years of wars:

Dec. 25, 1979  Soviet Red Army crosses the Oxus River into Afghanistan. In neighboring Pakistan, Afghan mujahedeen, or Islamic holy warriors, are assembling, armed and financed by the U.S. for an anti-communist war. More than 8 million Afghans flee to Pakistan and Iran, the first of multiple waves of refugees over the decades.

1980s  CIAs covert Operation Cyclone funnels weapons and money for the war through Pakistani dictator Mohammed Zia-ul Haq, who calls on Muslim countries to send volunteers to fight in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is among the thousands to volunteer.

1983  President Ronald Reagan meets with mujahedeen leaders, calling them freedom fighters, at the White House.

September 1986  The U.S. provides the mujahedeen with shoulder-held anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, which turns the course of the war. Soviets begin negotiating withdrawal.

Feb. 15, 1989  The last Soviet soldier leaves Afghanistan, ending 10 years of occupation

April 1992  Mujahedeen groups enter Kabul. The fleeing Najibullah is stopped at the airport and put under house arrest at a U.N. compound.

1992-1996  Power-sharing among the mujahedeen leaders falls apart and they spend four years fighting one another; much of Kabul is destroyed and nearly 50,000 people are killed.

1994  The Taliban emerge in southern Kandahar, take over the province and set up a rule adhering to a strict interpretation of Islam.

Sept. 26, 1996  The Taliban capture Kabul after sweeping across the country with hardly a fight; Northern Alliance forces retreat north toward the Panjshir Valley. The Taliban hang Najibullah and his brother.

1996-2001  Though initially welcomed for ending the fighting, the Taliban rule with a heavy hand under Mullah Mohammed Omar, imposing strict Islamic edicts, denying women the right to work and girls the right to go to school. Punishments and executions are carried out in public.

March 2001  The Taliban dynamite the worlds largest standing Buddha statues in Bamyan province, to global shock.

September 2001  After 9/11 attacks, Washington gives Mullah Omar an ultimatum: hand over bin Laden and dismantle militant training camps or prepare to be attacked. The Taliban leader refuses.

Oct. 7, 2001  A U.S.-led coalition launches an invasion of Afghanistan.

Nov. 13, 2001  The Taliban flee Kabul for Kandahar as the U.S.-led coalition marches into the Afghan capital with the Northern Alliance.

Dec. 5, 2001  The Bonn Agreement is signed in Germany, giving the majority of power to the Northern Alliances key players and strengthening the warlords who had ruled between 1992 and 1996. Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun like most Taliban, is named Afghanistan's president.

Dec. 7, 2001  Mullah Omar leaves Kandahar and the Taliban regime officially collapses.

May 1, 2003  President George W. Bush declares mission accomplished as the Pentagon says major combat is over in Afghanistan.

2004 and 2009  In two general elections, Karzai is elected president for two consecutive terms.

Summer 2006: With the U.S. mired in Iraq, the Taliban resurgence gains momentum with escalating attacks. Soon they begin retaking territory in rural areas of the south.

April 5, 2014  The election for Karzais successor is deeply flawed and both front-runners, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, claim victory. The U.S. brokers a deal under which Ghani serves as president and Abdullah as chief executive, starting an era of divided government.

Dec. 8, 2014  American and NATO troops formally end their combat mission, transitioning to a support and training role. President Barack Obama authorizes U.S. forces to carry out operations against Taliban and al-Qaida targets.

2015-2018  The Taliban surge further, staging near-daily attacks targeting Afghan and U.S. forces and seizing nearly half the country. An Islamic State group affiliate emerges in the east.

September 2018  After his election promises to bring U.S. troops home, President Donald Trump appoints veteran Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad as negotiator with the Taliban. Talks go through 2019, though the Taliban refuse to negotiate with the Kabul government and escalate attacks.

Sept. 28, 2019  Another sharply divided presidential election is held. It is not until February 2020 that Ghani is declared the winner. Abdullah rejects the results and holds his own inauguration. After months, a deal is reached establishing Ghani as president and Abdullah as head of the peace negotiating committee.

August 18, 2019  The Islamic State group carries out a suicide bombing at wedding in a mainly Hazara neighborhood of Kabul, killing more than 60 people.

Feb. 29, 2020  The U.S. and the Taliban sign a deal in Doha, Qatar, setting a timetable for the withdrawal of the around 13,000 U.S. troops still in Afghanistan and committing the insurgents to halt attacks on Americans.

Sept. 12, 2020-February 2021  After months of delay, Taliban-Afghan government negotiations open in Qatar, sputter for several sessions and finally stall with no progress. Ghani refuses proposals for a unity government, while the Taliban balk at a cease-fire with the government.

March 18, 2021  After the U.S. proposes a draft peace plan, Moscow hosts a one-day peace conference between the rival Afghan sides. Attempts at a resumption of talks fail. Taliban and government negotiators have not sat at the table since.

April 14, 2021  President Joe Biden says the remaining 2,500-3,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan will be withdrawn by Sept. 11 to end Americas forever war.

2019-Present  Violence grows in Kabul. IS carries out brutal attacks, including on a maternity hospital and a school, killing newborns, mothers and schoolgirls. Also growing is a wave of random attacks, unclaimed and mysterious, with shootings, assassinations and sticky bombs planted on cars, spreading fear among Afghans.

May 2021-Present  Taliban gains on the ground accelerate. Multiple districts in the north, outside the Taliban heartland, fall to the insurgents, sometimes with hardly a fight. Ghani calls a public mobilization, arming local volunteers, a step that risks compounding the many factions.

July 2, 2021  The United States hands over Bagram Airfield to Afghan military control after the last troops in the base leave. The transfer of Bagram, the heart of the U.S. military's presence in Afghanistan throughout the war, signals that the complete pullout of American troops is imminent, expected within days, far ahead of Biden's Sept. 11 timetable.
ALBANY -After three contentious years, a contract breakthrough between Albany Medical Center and its unionized nurses is being greeted by both sides.

On Thursday, nurses voted to approve their first union contract at the hospital with a 97 percent "yes" vote, according to the New York State Nurses Association. It comes after three years of tough talks that included very public disputes, including demonstrations, a one-day walkout and charges of union-busting.

Both the hospital and the union detailed terms of the new contract, which will include raises, new pay differentials and schedules and a labor management committee.

On Friday morning, Albany Med President and CEO Dennis McKenna said that, following state legislation that requires all hospitals to create staffing committees, Albany Med will have a staffing committee with representation from management and NYSNA to ensure staffing ratios consistent with all academic medical centers.

"I'm very happy with where we are now. It has been a three year process," McKenna said. "I credit our negotiating team to holding to our principles the entire time, which was only doing something that was fair not only for our nurses and but for our entire workforce, fiscally responsible, quality, and safety. Ultimately I think the contract that was agreed upon and ratified is one that is completely consistent with those principals."

McKenna also stressed that every nurse has a choice to join the union, and will not be required to join the union. All nurses will be covered by the same terms of the contract whether they elected to join the union or not, McKenna said.

The nurses union said the contract also includes staffing grids that outline safe staffing numbers for each unit in the hospital. The grids will serve as a template for future staffing negotiations, they said.

Registered nurse Lenore Granich, a member of the NYSNA negotiating committee at Albany Med, said in a statement late Thursday: Im feeling elated. Having a voice is the most important thing. Our union is the nurses of Albany Medical Center. It is us standing together, speaking up for each other, and speaking up for our patients and the care we provide for the community."

Registered nurse Lisa Case, in the statement provided by the union, said, The biggest thing weve always been fighting for is safe staffing. Weve had an incredible shortage of nurses. It was great to see the staffing law pass, and great that we got our staffing grid in this contract. The nurses stuck together, and we got this contract together.

According to the NYSNA, other contract terms and details include:

 Nurses will gain a greater voice in work roles, including regular scheduling and defined breaks, limitations on floating and limitations on performing non-nursing functions that impede the ability to provide quality care.

 Pay differentials will be granted for cardiac, ECLS, float pool, charge nurse/team leader and weekend shifts. Educational benefits will be increased. Many differentials have been increased greatly from pre-union levels.



 An immediate across-the-board $2.30/hour wage increase will be implemented, resulting in a 4-9 percent base pay increase for all nurses. Per diem nurses will receive an immediate 10 percent increase.

 All nurses will receive 3 percent annual increases via guaranteed and merit raises.

 There will be a joint redesign and expansion of the clinical practice pay ladder, which will allow many more nurses to gain professional experience and pay.

 Both parties agree to follow all health and safety laws and promote a safe work environment. Issues related to health and safety and pandemic preparedness will be addressed. Nurses will use this new language to ensure the safety of Capital Region patients as New York continues to confront COVID variants.

Earlier in the week McKenna said the contract also will include on-call compensation increases, and weekend and shift differential increases. He also said annual health insurance premium increases would be capped at $5 per month for individual coverage and $10 per month for family coverage.

Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer Lisa Massarweh, in a statement from the hospital, said the resolution allows Albany Med to move forward with an undivided focus on quality care.

Now is the time to remember what brings us together, she said. From the bedside to the clinic and the research bench, our nurses make unique contributions to professional care delivery."
Liu Zheng/AP

BEIJING (AP)  China on Friday rejected U.S. accusations it is failing to stop human trafficking and said Washington has no right to criticize due to its history of racial discrimination.

Beijing was among 17 governments that were warned Thursday of potential U.S. sanctions over human trafficking, adding to tension with Washington. Others included Malaysia, Russia and Nicaragua.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  The third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House is embarking on a listening tour to talk up the Biden administration's federal aid package and push for Medicaid expansion in states that have not taken that step.

On a Thursday call with reporters, U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn laid out his Help is Here town hall tour, which will focus on rural and low-income communities in his native South Carolina. Kicking off Tuesday in Ridgeland, he'll make stops in Manning, North Charleston, Santee and Hopkins over the following week.

Throughout the state, Clyburn said he will be highlighting the benefits of the American Rescue Plan, signed into law in March by President Joe Biden. That includes an expanded child tax credit that will pay out up to $300 per month for qualified parents.

Clyburn said representatives from the Internal Revenue Service will be on hand at the events to answer questions. Also at the town halls, Clyburn said that community health center workers will be available to provide COVID-19 vaccines for those who are eligible.

All of us are aware of how catastrophic COVID-19 has been to rural and low-income communities, Clyburn said. And what we have seen in the Biden administration is a very comprehensive program to build back better.

Also on Clyburn's agenda is his argument for the need to close gaps in Medicaid services. A dozen Republican-led states, including South Carolina, have resisted expanding coverage under a key provision of former President Barack Obamas health care law, which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court for the third time in a decade.

The financial incentives that are included in the Biden administration's nearly $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill have proved to be a hard sell, according to a survey by The Associated Press. Some Republicans in those states have softened their opposition, while key gatekeepers  governors or legislative leaders  indicate they have no plans to change course.

Gov. McMaster isnt for sale, regardless of whatever ill-conceived incentives congressional Democrats may come up with, spokesman Brian Symmes told the AP earlier this year. What the federal spending plan does is attempt to offer a short term solution for a long term problem.

Under the enticement included in the coronavirus relief bill, the federal government would boost its share of costs in the regular Medicaid program, which offers coverage for the poorest Americans. The bump in federal funding would last two years for the states that join the Medicaid expansion and comes on top of a 90% federal match for the costs of covering the newly insured through the expansion.

A handful of states are taking action. Oklahoma began its expansion on Thursday. In Missouri, voters approved an expansion but GOP legislators balked at funding it, and a judge last month ruled that the ballot question there was unconstitutional.

Clyburn said Thursday that he had been working on another way to implement expansion in the remaining states, without giving details.

I'm going to be working here in the Congress, over the next several months, to try to get the federal work-around in those states that refuse to expand Medicaid, Clyburn said. We've been working on it for some time now, and I think that we're beginning to get some traction.

___

Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twiter.com/MegKinnardAP.
SPRINGDALE, Utah (AP)  Zion National Park officials and business owners in a nearby tourist town were still cleaning up and assessing the damage Thursday from a massive flash flood that ripped through the popular red rock park, sending mud and debris onto streets. No injuries were reported.

Tuesday's flash flood hit an area in the southern portion of the park with buildings, allowing people to take shelter from the water and the hidden debris, such as logs and rocks, it can often carry, park spokesperson Amanda Rowland said.
TROY  A former Brunswick man who evaded homicide detectives for nearly 45 years has pleaded guilty to killing another man while they both were in the military, the San Diego district attorneys office spokeswoman said Thursday.

Dennis LePage, 64, pleaded guilty Wednesday to second-degree murder a week before he was slated to go on trial in San Diego Superior Court for the 1975 killing of Alvaro Marquez Espeleta, a dental technician assigned to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, according to court records. LePage was in the Navy at the time.
SCHENECTADY  With little fanfare, the Schenectady school district has picked a new superintendent.

The decision to hire Anibal Soler Jr. comes after a long search for a new leader that was prompted by the abrupt resignation of the previous superintendent, Larry Spring, and the collapse of contract negotiations with the district's first pick to replace him.

There was little outward indication the district was close to selecting a new superintendent and it is unclear how much school leaders followed through on a repeated promise to solicit the public's input in the search.

The district simply issued a statement Friday morning announcing that it had picked Soler to lead the school system of nearly 10,000 students.

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He did not respond Friday to an inquiry to this work email seeking comment.

The district did not offer any details about Soler's contract.

Soler will be introduced Wednesday at a news conference at Schenectady High School. Shortly afterward, Soler will formally be appointed by the Board of Education which will be joined the same day by new board members Jamaica Miles and Erica Brockmyer.

Neither of them responded Friday to a voicemail message seeking comment.

In a statement, the district indicated that "the process to find a permanent superintendent was launched in spring 2020 but was met with many challenges, especially during the height of the pandemic."

The surprise announcement punctuates an exhausting 16 months that began in March 2020 with the resignation of Spring, hundreds of layoffs and a failed search for a new leader. At that time, Spring was among the top paid school superintendents in the region, earning $204,061 annually.

Earlier this year, contract negotiations with his would be successor Pedro Roman, the finalist in a search spearheaded by Capital Region BOCES, fell apart. Roman, a former Schenectady administrator, is an assistant superintendent in the Newburgh Enlarged City School District.

That situation prompted conversations among board members about whether an open, closed or hybrid search was the best search approach. It was unclear if the district ever solicited public response during the latest search.

And while the search for Roman became public, the search that resulted in Soler's selection stayed quiet until the decision was made.

Soler, according to his LinkedIn profile, has served since January 2020 as the superintendent of the Batavia school district.

His online resume shows that before that, he was an assistant superintendent in Buffalo's public school system. Soler also has worked in the Rochester city school district.

He says in a statement on his profile that he has "enjoyed every moment" of his 20 years in education.

"In every position I have held, I have been able to deliver results and bring about positive change," Soler said. "I often say, 'I'm Living the Dream!' because I truly love what I do."

Aaron Bochniak, who has led the Schenectady district since March 25, 2020, is leaving to take a job as an assistant superintendent with the Hamilton-Fulton-Montgomery BOCES. His last day is Aug. 31.

Outgoing school board President John Foley as well as his colleagues, Bernice Rivera, Ann Reilly, Princella Learry and Cathy Lewis did not return calls Friday. Board member Nohelani Etienne could not be reached.

Andy Chestnut, who lost his reelection bid last month, said in an email Friday that Soler has "many fine qualities," including being fluent in Spanish and English.

He said that would benefit the district in two ways: "(F)irst, hell be able to discuss with and learn from the concerns of many of SCSDs non-English-speaking families, and second, hell have a better understanding of how it feels for SCSD families to live and send their kids to school in an environment where the 'common language' presents a barrier for them."

Asked about community input from faculty, staff and the public during the search that culminated in Soler's selection, Chestnut said that work was done during the earlier part of the search and that "the community was involved appropriately."

"The reality is that we involved the public in terms of massive surveys and community input about what they were looking for in a superintendent, and that hasn't changed in the last year, so we didn't redo that work," he said. "I'm proud of what's been accomplished and other people are going to have their own points of view."
ALBANY  New York Chief Judge Janet M. DiFiore and her relatives were among the individuals who received priority COVID-19 testing last year along with members of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's family and others with ties to the governor.

A public health nurse and several members of the New York National Guard were dispatched to DiFiore's private residence in Southampton on Long Island last August to conduct the testing, according to a person familiar with the matter. The test samples were transferred to a state trooper who rushed them to a state-run laboratory where they received expedited processing.

A spokesman for the state Office of Court Administration on Friday confirmed that DiFiore and her family members had been tested at her Southampton residence last summer. He said it took place after a young member of the judge's family had tested positive for the infectious disease.

"It was the one and only time," said Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the Office of Court Administration. "She contacted the (state Department of Health) to see what to do and these people showed up to do what they did."

The priority testing is one focus among several ongoing investigations of allegations against Cuomo and his administration. Two of the investigations are being conducted by the state attorney general's office and the state Assembly's Judiciary Committee, which is conducting an impeachment investigation of the governor. A third investigation of Cuomo's nursing home directives and policies during the pandemic is being done by the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn.

If there is an impeachment trial of Cuomo in the state Senate, DiFiore, as the state's chief judge and head of the Court of Appeals, would be involved in that proceeding and sit as one of the jurors.

The Times Union first reported in March that high-level members of the state health department were directed by Cuomo and health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker to conduct prioritized coronavirus testing on the governor's relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration.

Members of Cuomo's family including his brother, his mother and at least one of his sisters were also tested by top health department officials  some several times, sources told the Times Union earlier.

The medical officials enlisted to do the testing, which often took place at private residences, included Dr. Eleanor Adams, an epidemiologist who graduated from Harvard Medical School and in August became a special adviser to Zucker. Adams conducted testing on Cuomo's brother Chris, who is an anchor for CNN, at his residence on Long Island, according to the two people.

It may be a violation of state Public Officers Law for state officials to use government resources to benefit another individual, including a family member. No state officer, employee, legislator or legislative employee "should use or attempt to use his or her official position to secure unwarranted privileges or exemptions for himself or herself or others," according to Section 74 of the law.

A State Police source on Friday said that  after one of the tests was performed on Chris Cuomo at his Southampton residence  a state trooper was directed to park at an exit along the Long Island Expressway, leave the trunk of his cruiser open and wait for the sample. The trooper then drove that sample hurriedly to the Wadsworth Laboratory in Albany, the person said.

Others who were given priority testing included Rick Cotton, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and his wife, as well as Patrick J. Foye, head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Foye and Cotton both announced in March 2020 they had tested positive for coronavirus. Foye was tested after exhibiting symptoms, according to a spokesman for the MTA.

Cuomo has denied knowledge of the preferential testing for his relatives, but officials familiar with the matter said the governor not only was aware of the testing but had directed it be done when it involved members of his family.

Officials in the Cuomo administration have said the testing in those early days of the pandemic in March 2020 was not preferential, and they noted public nurses were being driven to private residences in New Rochelle  the site of the state's first outbreak  to test people who were symptomatic or who had been exposed to the virus. During that period, State Police troopers were largely being tasked with driving those samples to the Wadsworth Center laboratory in Albany, which was initially the primary testing spot for coronavirus.

Richard Azzopardi, a senior adviser to the governor, previously characterized the allegations of preferential treatment as "insincere efforts to rewrite the past."

"In the early days of this pandemic, when there was a heavy emphasis on contact tracing, we were absolutely going above and beyond to get people testing  including in some instances going to peoples homes, and door-to-door in places like New Rochelle  to take samples from those believed to have been exposed to COVID in order to identify cases and prevent additional ones," Azzopardi said.

However, by the time DiFiore and her relatives were given priority testing on Aug. 23, there were state-run coronavirus testing sites across the state and additional options for someone to receive a test.

The people with close ties to the governor, including his relatives, also had their samples moved to the front of the line at Wadsworth. They were referred to as "critical samples."

Another person familiar with the matter said the "sampling missions" had unsettled some of the high-level health department officials tasked with collecting the samples at private residences  including Adams, who had previously worked in the health department's New York City regional office for the Healthcare Epidemiology & Infection Control Program.

Chris Cuomo had announced on March 31 last year that he had tested positive for coronavirus and would be quarantining in his Long Island residence in Southampton, where he continued doing his nightly show despite being ill.

"My brother Chris is positive for coronavirus  found out this morning," the governor said during his daily briefing on March 31. "Now, he is going to be fine. He's young, in good shape, strong  not as strong as he thinks  but he will be fine. But there's a lesson in this. He's an essential worker. ... He's just worried about his daughter and his kids. He hopes he didn't get them infected."

The testing of Chris Cuomo took place in the early stages of the pandemic, at a time when many members of the public struggled to obtain coronavirus tests.

In March, when the Assembly's Democratic Majority leaders announced they had selected Davis Polk & Wardwell, there were concerns raised then about the independence of the law firm because of its tacit connections to Cuomo: DiFiore, who was appointed by Cuomo, is married to Dennis E. Glazer, a retired attorney who had worked at Davis Polk for 31 years; he was the head of litigation practice for the firm.

Glazer is chairman of the College Council at the state University of New York's Purchase College. He was appointed to the council by Cuomo. There is no compensation for the role but members are reimbursed for expenses.

Before being named to the Court of Appeals, DiFiore was Cuomo's first pick to chair the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics.

Debra Katz, an attorney for Charlotte Bennett  a former Cuomo aide who is among multiple women to accuse the governor of sexual harassment  characterized the retention of the law firm as "an unacceptable conflict of interest" in the Assembly's investigation of Cuomo.

blyons@timesunion.com
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un berated top officials for failures in coronavirus prevention that caused a great crisis, using strong language that raised the specter of a mass outbreak in a country that would be scarcely able to handle it.

The state media report Wednesday did not specify what crucial lapse had prompted Kim to call the Politburo meeting of the ruling Workers Party, but experts said North Korea could be wrestling with a significant setback in its pandemic fight.

So far, North Korea has claimed to have had no coronavirus infections, despite testing thousands of people and sharing a porous border with China. Experts widely doubt the claim and are concerned about any potential outbreak, given the country's poor health infrastructure.

At the Politburo meeting, Kim criticized the senior officials for supposed incompetence, irresponsibility and passiveness in planning and executing anti-virus measures amid the lengthening pandemic, the Norths official Korean Central News Agency said.

Kim said senior officials in charge of important state affairs neglected the implementation of the important decisions of the party on taking organizational, institutional, material, scientific and technological measures as required by the prolonged state emergency epidemic prevention campaign, according to KCNA. This caused a crucial case of creating a great crisis in ensuring the security of the state and safety of the people and entailed grave consequences.

The report also said the party recalled an unspecified member of the Politburos powerful Presidium, which consists of Kim and four other top officials.

The reference indicated Kim may replace his Cabinet Premier Kim Tok Hun, who would be held responsible for failures in the governments anti-epidemic work, said Hong Min, a senior analyst at Seouls Korea Institute for National Unification.

There also was speculation that Kim Jong Un may have sacked Ri Pyong Chol, one of his top military officials. North Korean TV video of the meeting showed Ri looking downward and not participating in a vote as Kim and other senior officials on stage raised their hands to indicate their consent on a matter that the broadcast didnt specify.

There is no possibility that North Korea will ever admit to an infection  even if there were mass transmissions, the North will definitely not reveal such developments and will continue to push forward an anti-virus campaign it has claimed to be the greatest, Hong said.

But its also clear that something significant happened and it was big enough to warrant a reprimanding of senior officials. This could mean mass infections or some sort of situation where a lot of people were put at direct risk of infections.

Cheong Seong-Chang, an analyst at South Koreas private Sejong Institute, expressed a similar view, saying North Korea is potentially dealing with huge virus-related problems in border towns near China, such as Sinuiju or Hyesan.

But other experts said Kim could be responding to illicit border trade that defied his lockdown measures or setting the stage for a political shakeup or purge to solidify his grip on power as he navigates perhaps the toughest time of his nine-year rule.

South Koreas Unification Ministry, which deals with inter-Korean affairs, said it had no immediate information to share about the North Korean report and that it wouldnt make prejudgments about the countrys virus situation.

Wang Wenbin, spokesperson of Chinas Foreign Ministry, raised the possibility of helping North Korea in the event of a major outbreak of COVID-19.

China and the DPRK have a long tradition of helping each other when they encounter difficulties, Wang said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

If necessary, China will actively consider providing assistance to the DPRK.

From the start of the pandemic, North Korea described its anti-virus efforts as a matter of national existence, banned tourists, jetted out diplomats and severely curtailed cross-border traffic and trade. The lockdown has further strained an economy already battered by decades of mismanagement and crippling U.S.-led sanctions over the countrys nuclear weapons program.

Kim during a political conference earlier this month called for officials to brace for prolonged COVID-19 restrictions, indicating that the country isnt ready to open its borders despite its economic woes.

North Korea has told the World Health Organization it has not found a single coronavirus infection after testing more than 30,000 people, including many described as having fevers or respiratory symptoms.

North Koreas extended border controls come amid uncertainties over the countrys vaccination prospects. COVAX, the U.N.-backed program to ship COVID-19 vaccines worldwide, said in February that North Korea could receive 1.9 million doses in the first half of the year, but the plans have been delayed due to global shortages.

Kim will likely find scapegoats for the incident, purging disloyal officials and blaming their ideological lapses. This may provide Pyongyang justification for demanding that citizens hunker down more, but it could also be political preparation for accepting vaccines from abroad, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.
SARATOGA SPRINGS  A long crack in a main water pipe left restaurants scrambling to buy bags of ice and bottles of water so they could open Friday.

The entire city was under a boil water order, starting late Thursday night. The state Department of Health expects to lift it Saturday afternoon if a final water test is clean.

For the average resident, the order just means boiling a pot of water for a minute, then using it all day rather than the faucet.

But for restaurants and bars, it requires a series of expensive and time-consuming chores just to stay open.

At Olde Bryan Inn and Forno Bistro, workers started their day before 10:30 a.m. by covering stovetops with pots of water. Then they scooped all the ice out of every ice machine and turned them off. Next up was the bathrooms, which had to be stocked with bottled water and signs warning people not to use the faucets.

Some had little option but to close.

Mike Sirianni, owner of Saratoga City Tavern, came in early to agonize over the situation. He had no stovetop to boil water. His ice machine has a UV filter, but thats not considered good enough during a boil water order. He could use bagged ice, but the cost and quality worried him.

Bagged ice is terrible for making drinks. It clumps together, he said.

The state Department of Health also recommended using plastic cups, which he abhors.

You gonna put a martini in a plastic cup? he said. I always say, were going to do it right or were not going to do it.

So he closed.

Im closing for one day, just praying it isnt two days, he said.

After all, he said grimly, he got through the COVID-19 closure.

I dont want to get anybody sick, he added. We just got through COVID. I dont want to kill anyone now.

Some decided to open at any expense. The owner of Gaffneys Restaurant and Bar had 1,500 pounds of ice delivered, along with boxes of canned soda and bottled water.

Gaffneys goes through about 1,500 cups a day of mixed drinks, such as rum and Coke, said bartender Christian Stearns.

He couldnt use the soda dispenser. Its considered contaminated because its hooked to the water line.

Other than beer, which was safe to pour, basically all the drinks use that dispenser, he said. It has soda, sour, iced tea and other popular mixes.

Thank God its a rainy weekend, he said. On Fridays and Saturdays itll usually be shoulder to shoulder in here.

Restaurants werent as hard hit, because they could boil water early in the day and then use it for cooking.

At Taquero, the boil water advisory was under control long before the lunch rush.

Its more or less just washing our hands with bottled water, said cook Anthony Coon.

They had four cases of bottled water, which they were also using to mix with the batter for doughnuts.

It wont be over for restaurateurs when the boil water order is lifted. Theyll have to disinfect every tube that leads to city water, including soda fountains and ice makers.

What happened?

The mess began when a main water pipe cracked under Green Street Thursday. City workers carefully inserted a valve to reroute the water before they cut out 10 feet of pipe and replaced it Thursday evening.

We were able to maintain pretty decent (water) pressure all over the city. But the health department said because it was the main, we had to do a boil water order, said Commissioner of Public Works Anthony "Skip" Scirocco. He hadnt expected it and was surprised to get the order at 10 p.m. Thursday.

Its not clear what caused the crack, which stretched lengthwise along the pipe.

Pipe looks like it was brand new. Its been in there since the '30s, he said.

But the health department said the crack could have allowed dangerous contamination into the water system.

Boil water notices are typically issued when an unexpected condition has caused a potential for biological contamination of water in a public water system, said Department of Health spokeswoman Erin Silk. These often result from other events such as water line breaks, treatment disruptions, power outages and floods.

So far, the system has tested clean, Scirocco said.

Turnaround time for bacteriological samples is usually 24 hours, Silk said. The final test was sent to a laboratory Friday afternoon, and results are expected Saturday afternoon.
For 17 days, Reshma Begum survived under heaps of rubble after an eight-story garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh eight years ago. A few years earlier, Darlene Etienne held on for 15 days before rescuers in Haiti found her, thirsty and near death, in a house crumpled by an earthquake.

Stories of endurance and survival under the direst circumstances continue to kindle hopes that rescuers may find more people alive within the tons of debris that was once the 12-story Champlain Towers South condo tower near Miami.

The search stretched into a seventh day Wednesday, with more than 900 workers from 50 federal, state and local agencies working on the effort. At least 18 people are confirmed dead and more than 140 still unaccounted for.

No one is giving up hope here, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett proclaimed.

He cited the case of Begum, who subsisted on dried food and a scant supply of water while trapped in the ruins of the fallen factory. Rescuers had already abandoned hope of finding more survivors when they heard banging noises  the 19-year-old seamstress was clanging sticks against the fallen structure. Questions later arose whether the incident was a hoax, but the government insisted there truly was a miracle.

No one has been pulled out alive from Champlain Towers South since shortly after the collapse. Finding survivors is especially critical in the early days of a disaster, experts say.

"After that the survivability drops off pretty quickly  but it doesnt go to zero, said Dr. Hernando Garzon, an emergency room physician in Sacramento, California, who has been deployed to disasters around the globe as part of humanitarian missions and search-and-rescue operations. Its too early to call it a body-recovery phase at this point."

Garzon, who rushed to Haiti in 2010 to aid rescue efforts, recalled the cheers when Etienne, a Port-au-Prince teenager, emerged from the mangled house after being trapped for 16 days by shattered concrete and twisted metal. She was dehydrated, and her left leg was broken, but she was alive. Rescuers said she would not have lasted much longer had they not heard her faint cries for help.

Over the years there have been a number of similar, seemingly impossible rescues:

Evans Monsignac said he survived by sipping sewage while awaiting to be rescued from a collapsed flea market nearly a month after the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Park Sung-hyun, a 19-year-old salesclerk in South Korea, credited luck  and rainwater seeping through the ruins  for allowing her to survive 16 days in a collapsed shopping mall in 1995.

Pedrito Dy was rescued after 14 days in 1990 from the basement of a quake-devastated Hyatt Hotel in the Philippines resort of Baguio, surviving on drips of rain, he said, and his own urine.

And Jesus Antonio Castillo was among the last of the miracle babies  more than a dozen of them  rescued from a Mexico City hospital nine days after a 1985 earthquake. Bulldozers were being sent to clear the rubble when he was discovered.

Theres hope. I really believe miracles do happen, said Martin Langesfeld, whose sister Nicole is believed to be among the missing in Florida. Things like this have happened around the world.

Many factors determine how long people can live through extremely fraught conditions, such as the availability of water, the severity of injuries and the degree to which their movement is impaired.

Experts say the key to finding survivors will depend on so-called voids within the rubble  sizeable pockets of space that allow for life. A rightly positioned column, for example, even if collapsed, could have created a kind of structural tent where someone could await rescue.

However, the pancake collapse of the Champlain Towers South left layer upon layer of dense and intertwined debris that structural engineers say could frustrate efforts to reach anyone in such a pocket of space.

Long-term survivors have endured entrapment in considerably smaller buildings, or were trapped in structures that contained sizeable voids.

Many were young, and most had access to water or some other form of sustenance  so the downpours that have sometimes hampered the search in Surfside might be a blessing to someone trapped inside the wreckage.

South Florida's warm climate could also help, as they're not exposed to overnight cold.

There are those who have survived despite all the odds, and I have no doubt that part of it is just that will to survive" that even science cannot explain, said Dr. David Shatz, a trauma surgeon who for 12 years was assistant medical director of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department.

Now a professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis, Shatz has been closely monitoring the rescue effort from afar. For years he worked shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the rescuers now toiling at the fallen condo tower.

He also recalled being part of the bucket brigade at the federal building in Oklahoma City, which was brought down by a truck filled with explosives. And he was at the World Trade Center digging through concrete, glass and metal after the 9/11 terror attacks.

With every bit of debris he cleared away, he hoped that underneath would be a person to rescue. But for all its efforts, his team never found anyone alive.

Still, the search must go on, he said. If nothing else, to recover bodies and bring closure to grieving families  and just maybe, for that singular, miraculous rescue.

I wish it could all be the 150 or so people still missing," Shatz said. Even if theres just one, that would be wonderful.

_____

AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Dana Brakman Reiser, Brooklyn Law School

(THE CONVERSATION) The Supreme Court tossed out a California law requiring nonprofits to report their major donors to state officials. In a 6-3 ruling, the court said the law, intended to fight fraud, subjected donors to potential harassment and violated their First Amendment rights. Dana Brakman Reiser, a legal scholar on nonprofits, explains the case, known as Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta, and the significance of the courts decision.

1. What was the case about?

Two conservative nonprofit groups, Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Center, sued Californias government over its requirement that the identity of a charitys biggest donors be shared with the states attorney general.

Though the disclosure is made to the state, not the public, bothgroups claimed that California failed to sufficiently safeguard the names of donors, resulting in numerous data leaks. The litigants argued that given the potential of disclosure by Californias authorities, donors who support controversial charities could reasonably fear harassment if the public learned their identities.

On those grounds, Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Center accused the state of hindering their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of association. A diverse array of nonprofits, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, agreed and urged the court to block Californias disclosure rule.

California countered by arguing that donor information is necessary to combat charity fraud and that, especially after adjustments made during the litigation, donor names submitted to the state are now secure. The United States and a group of prominent nonprofit law scholars filed briefs in support of Californias position.

2. What does the ruling mean?

California will no longer be able to mandate that charities disclose their donors to the state as a matter of course.

The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts recognized the states important interest in rooting out charity fraud but held that a donor disclosure system can be maintained only if it is narrowly tailored to meet the governments needs. The court found Californias law, on the other hand, to be overly broad. To reach that conclusion, the majority relied heavily on evidence filed in the case that California did not actually use the donor information it demanded to initiate anti-fraud actions.

The three dissenting justices strongly disagreed with both the majoritys approach to the law and its reading of the facts. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the plaintiffs failed to show that Californias law had actually burdened their right to association, as they argued prior Supreme Court First Amendment cases require. Absent such a showing, these justices said, they would have sustained the law, especially since it did not require public disclosure and most donors were probably agnostic about the requirement.

3. Does this change how states oversee nonprofits?

Yes, but not all states will be affected in the same way.

New York, Hawaii and New Jersey have similar donor disclosure laws, which this case will also undo. And the court didnt give California or these other states an easy way to cure such laws so they would pass constitutional muster, whether by improving the security of the data or exempting controversial charities from disclosure.

States that tackle charity fraud through other means, such as attorney general investigations, are mostly unaffected by the ruling. Even those states that forgo donor disclosure impose many other reporting requirements on the charities they monitor, including demands that charities identify their directors and officers to regulators. The majority opinions broad language about the need to justify disclosure requirements could prompt future challenges to these more widespread charity reporting requirements.

4. Does this mean the IRS cant collect this information either?

The federal government mandates that nonprofit charities disclose the same information about major donors to the Internal Revenue Service.

But todays Supreme Court case addresses only the constitutionality of a state law requirement. Neither Americans for Prosperity Foundation nor the Thomas More Law Center tried to connect their objections over Californias law to the IRS disclosure mandate.

Of course, their decisions not to do so in this case do not prevent future litigation challenging the federal donor disclosure system.

The outcome of such a case is uncertain. A court could still uphold the federal requirement if it found the IRS disclosure rule was tightly connected to its important role as a tax regulator. After all, the IRS does not only monitor charities for fraud and abuse as state attorneys general do. It also oversees a system that provides substantial tax benefits to exempt organizations and their donors, a point the U.S. solicitor general emphasized to the court.

The federal governments defense against an attack on its disclosure requirement could also point to its already strong protections for donor data. While certainly not immune to leaks or hacking, the IRS maintains a highly secure database of confidential tax information. Moreover, attempts to breach it trigger civil and criminal penalties.

If the courts were eventually to strike down the IRS donor disclosure requirements, though, it would significantly upend federal regulation of tax-exempt charities.

This case could also portend a future challenge over federal campaign finance law. Right now, the Federal Election Commission collects information on political donors and candidates for the public record. Some worry the California decision imperils this disclosure system as well.

[Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/supreme-court-strikes-down-californias-nonprofit-donor-disclosure-requirements-4-questions-answered-135174.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The number of Americans applying for unemployment aid fell again last week to the lowest level since the pandemic struck last year, further evidence that the job market and the broader economy are rebounding rapidly from the coronavirus recession.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that jobless claims dropped by 51,000 to 364,000. Applications for unemployment benefits have fallen more or less steadily since the year began. The rollout of vaccines has sharply reduced new COVID-19 cases, giving consumers the confidence to shop, travel, eat out and attend public events as the economy recovers.

Last week's drop in jobless claims was steeper than economists had expected. Applications for unemployment benefits have now fallen in 10 of the past 12 weeks.

"As life normalizes and the service sector continues to gain momentum, we expect initial jobless claims to remain in a downtrend,'' said Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at the consulting firm Maria Fiorini Ramirez.

All that pent-up spending has generated such demand for workers, notably at restaurants and tourism businesses, that many employers have been struggling to fill jobs just as the number of posted openings has reached a record high. But many economists expect hiring to catch up with demand in the coming months, especially as federal unemployment aid programs end and more people pursue jobs.

On Friday, according to the data provider FactSet, the government is expected to report that employers added 675,000 jobs in June. That would be a substantial number but still not at a pace that would allow the economy to quickly regain its pre-pandemic level of employment. The job market remains nearly 7 million jobs short of that level.

Some businesses have complained that expanded federal aid to the unemployed  especially a $300-a-week supplemental benefit, intended to cushion the economic blow from the pandemic  has discouraged some people from looking for a job.

But other factors, too, are believed to have contributed to the shortage of people seeking work again: Difficulty arranging or affording child care, lingering fears of COVID-19, early retirements by older workers, a slowdown in immigration and a decision by some people to seek new careers rather than return to their old jobs.

Responding to the criticism about the duration of expanded jobless benefits, dozens of states began dropping the expanded federal aid starting last month: Roughly half the states will end the $300 payments. Most of those will also cut off unemployment assistance to the self-employed, gig workers and people who have been out of work for more than six months. Nationally, the $300-a-week federal benefit will end Sept. 6.

The data firm Homebase reported that employment has actually grown more slowly in the states that had dropped the federal benefits than in those that kept it.

The job markets improvement comes against the backdrop of a fast-rebounding economy. Growth for the just-ended April-June quarter is believed to have reached an annual pace of roughly 10%. And according to an index produced by the Conference Board, a private research group, consumer confidence nearly regained its pre-pandemic level in May.

With consumers feeling more confident about spending, the rate of jobless claims, which generally reflects the pace of layoffs, has dwindled over the past several months. The weekly figure had topped 900,000 back in January, when the economy was still struggling to emerge from the recession and employers were retrenching.

Despite the significant improvement since then, claims remain high by historic standards. Before the pandemic flattened the economy in March 2020, the weekly figure typically numbered around 220,000.

All told, 3.47 million people were receiving traditional state unemployment benefits in the week of June 19, up from 3.41 million a week earlier. If you include the federal benefits, 14.7 million were receiving some type of unemployment assistance during the week of June 12, down from 32.1 million a year earlier.

____

AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.
Storm-producing fire clouds threw out hundreds of thousands of lightning strikes over wildfire-stricken British Columbia and northwestern Alberta provinces in Canada Wednesday and Thursday, bewildering meteorologists.

Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with the company Vaisala, which maps lightning strikes around in the world, said the North American Lightning Detection Network sensed 710,177 lightning events across British Columbia and northwestern Alberta in about 15 hours, between 3 p.m. on June 30 and 6 a.m. on July 1.

Of those, 597,314 were in-cloud pulses, meaning the strikes didn't hit the ground. "Each in-cloud lightning 'strike' can be made up of multiple in-cloud pulses," Vagasky explained.

There were 112,803 cloud-to-ground strokes detected over the same area, he said.

Vagasky called the numbers "surprising" for Canada. "In studying lightning, there is always something interesting that comes up, whether it is lightning in a hurricane or volcano, or large numbers of lightning," he said. "As a whole, Canada doesnt generally see a lot of lightning  about 90% less than the United States. In fact, the counts from yesterday are more what you would expect to see in a big day over lightning-prone regions like Texas or Oklahoma."

The numbers coming out of the lightning siege seem too big to be true, but Vagasky said the activity is measured with precision equipment.

Data produced by North American Lightning Detection Network is monitored nonstop and validated against rocket-triggered lightning, lightning to tall towers, and other lightning references.

"The network detects more than 95% of cloud-to-ground flashes with 100-meter accuracy," said Vagasky.

The majority of the strikes in western Canada were the result of pyrocumulonimbus clouds forming over the wildfires tearing across western Canada, which has also suffered from a sweltering heat wave in the past week.

On Thursday morning the British Columbia Wildfire Service listed 47 blazes across the region. In a fire burning 95 miles northeast of Vancouver, the entire village of Lytton evacuated. The mayor of the town of 250 people told CBC News on Thursday the whole town was on fire. Large blazes also burned north of Big White as well near Sparks Lake, according to CBC.

"Absolutely mind-blowing wildfire behavior in British Columbia," Dakota Smith, a scientist in Colorado, tweeted along with satellite imagery. "Incredible & massive storm-producing pyrocumulonimbus plumes."

"I've watched a lot of wildfire-associated pyroconvective events during the satellite era, and I think this might be the singularly most extreme I've ever seen," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, wrote on Twitter. "This is a literal firestorm, producing *thousands* of lightning strikes and almost certainly countless new fires."

These massive, mushroom-shaped clouds of hot, smoky air towering thousands of feet into the sky are caused by a natural source of heat such as a wildfire or volcano, according to NASA. Rising warm air from the fire carries water vapor, ash and smoke up into the atmosphere, forming clouds.

These clouds can become so intense that they create their own weather and emit lightning that can start new wildfires on the ground.

Neil Lareau, who studies wildfire-generated weather, said this appears to be the biggest pyrocumulonimbus event he has seen.

"At face value, Im tempted to say this might be the upper end of what Ive ever seen," said Lareau, a professor of atmospheric sciences in the department of physics at the University of Nevada at Reno. "There have been some significant pyrocumulonimbus clouds in British Columbia in 2017 as well as the Australian outbreak of 2020 and then the Creek Fire here in California."

Lareau closely followed a pyrocumulonimbus cloud that developed over the Creek Fire on Sept. 5, 2020, between Shaver Lake, Big Creek and Huntington Lake, Calif. Using data from the National Weather Services network of Doppler radars, Lareau created a model of the smoke plume that soared 55,000 feet in elevation.

He said the fires in western Canada have produced several clouds of this magnitude.

"Every year its one upping the year before, which is really horrifying," he said.
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided it will hear a case brought by families from Maine who want to use a state tuition program to send their children to religious schools
Cooper vetoes bill that would have stopped federal benefits

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has vetoed legislation that would have ended additional federal benefits created during the pandemic for North Carolinas unemployed before the program expires nationwide
The Boy Scouts of America have reached an $850 million agreement with attorneys representing some 60,000 victims of child sex abuse in what could prove to be a pivotal moment in the organizations bankruptcy case
[July 02, 2021] AM Best Places Credit Ratings of Members of Columbian Financial Group Under Review With Developing Implications

AM Best has placed under review with developing implications the Financial Strength Rating of B (Fair) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Ratings of "bb+" (Fair) of Columbian Mutual Life Insurance Company (Columbian) (Binghamton, NY) and Columbian Life Insurance Company (Chicago, IL), collectively referred to as Columbian Financial Group (CFG). CFG focuses on the senior market with family solutions, pre-need, final expense and simplified issue term life insurance products. The group's operations are conducted on a general agency plan in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with its core business focused mainly in small face amount life insurance markets with distribution through home sales, general agents and independent marketing organizations. The under review with developing implications Credit Rating (rating) action reflects the recent announcement by Columbian that its board of directors has approved a strategic transaction with Constellation Insurance Holdings, Inc. (Constellation) that includes the sponsored demutualization of Columbian to a stock company with the issuance of all newly issued stock to Constellation. Constellation is an insurance holding company backed by two large Canadian institutional investors primarily engaged in the management of pension plans, Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board. The transaction provides for Constellation to invest up to $100 million to fund cash payments to eligible policyholders and significantly strengthen the capitalization of Columbian. AM Best notes that despite the likely positive impact on capital from the planned transaction with Constellation, reulatory and policyholder approvals are still needed, with an anticipated closing date sometime during the first half of 2022. In the interim, further negative rating actions on CFG are possible if its risk-adjusted capitalization continues to decline prior to close of the transaction. AM Best will continue to monitor the group's capitalization and operating performance over the near term, given the impact that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had on 2020 and early 2021 results.



This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on AM Best's website. For all rating information relating to the release and pertinent disclosures, including details of the office responsible for issuing each of the individual ratings referenced in this release, please see AM Best's Recent Rating Activity web page. For additional information regarding the use and limitations of Credit Rating opinions, please view Guide to Best's Credit Ratings. For information on the proper media use of Best's Credit Ratings and AM Best press releases, please view Guide for Media - Proper Use of Best's Credit Ratings and AM Best Rating Action Press Releases. AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specializing in the insurance industry. Headquartered in the United States, the company does business in over 100 countries with regional offices in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. For more information, visit www.ambest.com.

Copyright  2021 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005267/en/

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[July 02, 2021] ATFX is honored Top 10 Hot Brands of the Year 2021

LONDON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ATFX was recently named as one of the top 10 hot brands of 2021 by the CEO Views magazine. The broker was named the leading Fintech broker and one of the top 10 Hot brands of 2021. ATFX won the award because of its state-of-the-art trading platform that has disrupted the Forex trading industry by driving innovation within. The broker's transparent, safe and secure trading model helps its customers make informed trading decisions increasing their efficiency while providing the best customer experience. The CEO Views identified some of the key milestones achieved by ATFX, such as the industry-first introduction of facial recognition software andAdobe Sign technologies to speed up the registration process for its clients.



In order to overcome the challenge of over-demand from assest managers and financial institutions of providing tailored liquidity service for them, ATFX offers both retail trading services targeted at retail and individual traders and institutional brokerage services to family offices, investment firms, and hedge funds, among others. Retail traders can access services via the main ATFX website, while institutional traders and investors can access bespoke services via the ATFX Connect platform, its fintech arm. Joe Li, ATFX's Chairman, said: "It was not easy to decide on the transition from being a successful retail broker with a recognized global brand to becoming an institutional broker within a very competitive arena. However, I saw the challenge as an opportunity to grow. So we decided to expand our vision, partner with the correct technology provider, and expand our company's operations globally. As a result, we now have 12 regional offices providing award-winning services to our clients. Now, in the first quarter of 2021, our institutional business has successfully grown over 500% compared to earlier last year despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic!"

(www.atfx.com) ATFX intro: ATFX is an award winning FX/CFD broker with an established global presence. Globally, the company has offices around the world offering support to its clients in more than 15 different languages.? ATFX is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) in Cyprus, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) in Mauritius, and the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.? SOURCE ATFX

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[July 02, 2021] BBX Capital Real Estate, a subsidiary of BBX Capital, Inc., Announces the Sale of Altis Grand at The Preserve

BBX Capital Real Estate ("BBXRE"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of BBX Capital, Inc. (OTCQX: BBXIA) (PINK: BBXIB), today announced that its Altis Grand at The Preserve joint venture, which was sponsored by The Altman Companies, had completed the sale of Altis Grand at The Preserve, its 350-unit multifamily apartment community located in Odessa, Florida. As a result of the transaction, BBXRE received a cash distribution of approximately $5.8 million from the joint venture and expects to recognize equity earnings from its investment in the venture of approximately $4.9 million during the quarter ended September 30, 2021. The Altis Grand at The Preserve joint venture was sponsored and formed by The Altman Companies in 2018 to develop Altis Grand at The Preserve. Construction of Altis Grand at The Preserve commenced in 2019 and was completed in 2020. At the time of the sale, Altis Grand at The Preserve's apartment units were over 99% leased. About BBX Capital Real Estate: BBX Capital Real Estate, a principal holding of BBX Capital, Inc., is engaged in the acquisition, development, construction, ownership, financing, and management of real estate and investments in real estate joint ventures, including investments in multifamily rental apartment communities, single-family master-planned for sale housing ommunities, and commercial properties located primarily in Florida. In addition, BBX Capital Real Estate owns a 50% equity interest in The Altman Companies, LLC, a developer and manager of multifamily rental apartment communities, and manages the legacy assets acquired in connection with the Company's sale of BankAtlantic in 2012, including portfolios of loans receivable, real estate properties, and judgments against past borrowers. For more information, please visit www.BBXCapitalRealEstate.com.



About The Altman Companies: The Altman Companies, a joint venture between BBX Capital Real Estate and Joel Altman, is engaged in the development, construction, and management of multifamily apartment communities. Since 1968, The Altman Companies and its predecessors have developed, constructed, acquired, and managed over 26,000 multifamily units throughout the United States, including communities in Florida, Michigan, Illinois, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.altmancos.com. About BBX Capital, Inc.: BBX Capital, Inc. (OTCQX: BBXIA) (PINK: BBXIB) is a Florida-based diversified holding company whose principal holdings include BBX Capital Real Estate, BBX Sweet Holdings, and Renin. For additional information, please visit www.BBXCapital.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005054/en/

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[July 02, 2021] Black Diamond Announces That Polynt-Reichhold Has Agreed to Repurchase Investindustrial's Shares in the Company

Black Diamond Capital Management, L.L.C. ("Black Diamond") is pleased to announce a transaction involving one of its portfolio companies, Speciality Chemicals International Limited, a holding company of the Polynt-Reichhold group (the "Company") in which the Company agreed to repurchase Investindustrial's shares in the Company (the "Transaction"). Following the completion of the Transaction, Black Diamond will become the Company's controlling shareholder. Black Diamond and Investindustrial became partners in Polynt-Reichhold after the successful merger of Polynt and Reichhold in May 2017. In the years following the merger, the combined company's performance has substantially improved. The Transaction, together with the refinancing of the existing debt, will be financed by approximately 1.3 billion (equivalent) of new senior secured and unsecured debt facilities expected to be issued by the Company in the public debt capital markets. Affiliates of JP Morgan (News - Alert) and certain funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Capital Management, L.P., have provided a commitment for the debt financing and funds managed by Black Diamond have provided an equity commitment. "We are extremely pleased with what management has been able to achieve with Polynt-Reichhold thus far and are looking forward to supporting them for the next phase of growth," said Steve Deckoff, Black Diamond's Managing Principal. The Transaction is expected to close within six months from the date hereof, subject to receiving all necessary regulatory approvals. Morgan Stanley & Co. International plc is acting as the Company's exclusive financial advisor and Skadden, rps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is acting as the Company's legal advisor. Slaughter and May and Chiomenti Studio Legale are acting as legal advisors to Global Chemicals S.a r.l., an independently-managed investment subsidiary of Investindustrial V L.P. Morgan Lewis is acting as legal advisor to Black Diamond.



About Polynt-Reichhold Polynt-Reichhold is a leading vertically-integrated global specialty chemical manufacturer, generating 2 billion in annual sales. Headquartered in the UK, Polynt-Reichhold Group manages operations through two regional centres located in Italy (Scanzorosciate, Polynt's historical headquarter) and in the US (Carpentersville, Illinois).The Group operates 36 manufacturing facilities worldwide and several R&D centres, with a total workforce of approximately 3,100 employees.

Additional information on Polynt-Reichhold is available at www.polynt.com | www.reichhold.com. About Black Diamond Black Diamond Capital Management, L.L.C. (together with its affiliates, "Black Diamond") is a leading alternative investment firm with over $8 billion in assets across four core platforms: (i) control distressed and special situations private equity funds; (ii) hedge funds; (iii) non-control stressed and distressed closed-ended funds; and (iv) collateralized loan obligations and structured products. Black Diamond has over 25 years of experience in underwriting, trading, restructuring and managing performing, stressed, distressed and private equity investments through multiple market cycles. Black Diamond is an SEC (News - Alert) -registered Investment Adviser with over 80 employees operating from offices in Stamford, CT, London, UK and St. Thomas, VI. Additional information on Black Diamond is available at www.bdcm.com. This press release is for information purposes only and does not constitute any offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security in the United States or in any other jurisdiction. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210701005971/en/

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[July 02, 2021] Blue Canyon Technologies Delivers Spacecraft and Components for More Than 10 Missions Aboard Transporter 2 Launch

Small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider Blue Canyon Technologies LLC ("BCT" or "Blue Canyon"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Raytheon (News - Alert) Technologies Corporation (NYSE: RTX), announced today that several of its commercial satellite buses and components successfully launched yesterday aboard the SpaceX (News - Alert) Falcon 9 Transporter 2 mission. With more than 88 satellites aboard the rideshare flight, Blue Canyon provided multiple microsatellites, including the standardized X-SAT Venus ESPA-class bus, 3U CubeSats, Reaction Wheels and Integrated Attitude Control Systems to support more than ten of the Transporter 2 missions, which showcases the company's full product line. With partners like Loft Orbital, MIT (News - Alert) Lincoln Laboratory, and several undisclosed partners, Blue Canyon is enabling a broad range of missions and technological advancements for the new space economy. "The diversity of Blue Canyon's satellites and components included in this latest launch are a testament to the company's diverse production capabilities," said Stephen Steg, CEO of Blue Canyon Technologies. "BCT's vertically integrated structure allows us to produce a variety of spacecraft and components to meet the wide-ranging needs of our expansive commercial space customer base. The successful launch of this mission will help us capitalize on the opportunities in the marketplace with our growing partnerships." The TROPICS Pathfinder mission is another one of several programs being supported by Blue Canyon that launched with the Transporter 2. Once in place, the TROPICS smallsat constellation will provide rapid-refresh microwave measurements to determine temperature, pressure and humidity inside hurricanes as they form and operate over the tropics, ultimately increasing the scientific community's understanding of storm processes. About Blue Canyon Technologies Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies, offers a diverse portfolio of innovative, reliable and affordable spacecraft that enable a broad range of missions ad technological advancements for the new space economy, reducing the barriers of space entry. BCT is currently supporting nearly 50 unique missions with over 90 spacecraft, all in production at their newly developed 80,000-square-foot facility in Lafayette, Colorado.



BCT has supported missions for the U.S. Air Force, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and provided the Attitude Control Systems for the first interplanetary CubeSats, which successfully traveled to Mars. The company has been recognized with awards from Inc. Magazine's 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies, the 2020 Best in Biz Award and the 2020 Tibbetts Award. For the latest news on Blue Canyon Technologies and for other company information, please visit www.bluecanyontech.com. You can follow the company on Instagram here or Twitter (News - Alert) here.

About Raytheon Intelligence & Space Raytheon Intelligence & Space delivers the disruptive technologies our customers need to succeed in any domain, against any challenge. A developer of advanced sensors, training, and cyber and software solutions, Raytheon Intelligence & Space provides a decisive advantage to civil, military and commercial customers in more than 46 countries around the world. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, the business generated $15 billion in pro forma annual revenue in 2020 and has 37,000 employees worldwide. Raytheon Intelligence & Space is one of four businesses that form Raytheon Technologies Corporation. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005037/en/

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[July 01, 2021] Boatim Inc. announces its appointment of Joseph Johnson as Chief Executive Officer

MIAMI, July 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Boatim Inc. (OTCQB: BTIM), an innovative software as a service (SaaS) company building the digital boating products of tomorrow, announced the appointment of its new Chief Executive Officer, Joseph Johnson. The appointment follows the resignation of Wolfgang Tippner as CEO. Mr. Johnson, a seasoned executive and business lawyer, was confirmed today following a months-long world-wide search for a new CEO. Mr. Johnson fits well into Boatim's diverse team as he is multilingual and has extensive international experience as an executive, business consultant, and attorney. The Company further announces the resignation of its CTO, Mr. Patrick Heneise. Following the appointment of our new CEO, Mr. Johnson will bring new management members on board from within his US network. The Company wishes to express its gratitude to Mr. Heneise for his valuable contributions and relentless service. This announcement comes on the heals of Boatim's successful launch of its insurance quoting and financing tools, enabling potential boat buyers direct access to financing and insurance options through Boatim.com. Boatim's continued innovations in bridging the social media and SaaS world make it the largest provider in this segment. About Boatim Inc. Boatim Inc. (OTCQB: BTIM) is a globally operating online marketplace and special interest social network for both the boating industry and boat users. Boatim Inc. was founded in 2018 and currently operates with offices in Miami (USA) and Barcelona (Spain). The technology start-up provides industry-specific software, aimed at facilitating the process of buying and selling boats andproviding digital maritime services online.



On Boatim.com the boating industry can sell and promote products and connect with a fast-growing potential customer base, while boat users can explore and buy boats, and connect with like-minded people and brands. The platform, that can be accessed through both mobile devices and desktops, generates revenues through listing placements and subscription plans, as well as on-platform ads. Thanks to the great business model scalability, revenue streams are being added continuously. Since August 2019 the privately funded start-up has become a publicly listed entity, trading at the OTCQB Venture Market under the trading symbol BTIM.

To learn more about Boatim, visit https://investor.boatim.com Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual results due to a variety of factors including: our ability to retain or increase users and engagement levels; our reliance on advertising revenue; our dependency on mobile operating systems, networks, and standards that we do not control; risks associated with new product development and their introduction as well as other new business initiatives; our emphasis on user growth and engagement and the user experience over short-term financial results; competition; litigation; privacy and regulatory concerns; risks associated with acquisitions; security breaches; and our ability to manage growth and geographically-dispersed operations. These and other potential risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from the results predicted are more fully detailed under the caption "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on Dec 2, 2020, which is available via the SEC website at www.sec.gov. Additional information has also been set forth in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended Aug 31, 2020. In addition, please note that the date of this press release is June 2, 2021, and any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this date. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events.

Boatim and Smart Connected Inventory are registered trademarks of Boatim, Inc. All product names, trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

 2021 Boatim, Inc., All Rights Reserved. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/boatim-inc-announces-its-appointment-of-joseph-johnson-as-chief-executive-officer-301324778.html SOURCE Boatim Inc.

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[July 02, 2021] DiDi Announces Cybersecurity Review in China

DiDi Global Inc. ("DiDi" or the "Company") (NYSE: DIDI), the world's leading mobility technology platform, today announced that pursuant to the announcement posted by the PRC's Cyberspace Administration Office on July 2, 2021, DiDi is subject to cybersecurity review by the authority. During the review, DiDi is required to suspend new user registration in China. DiDi will fully cooperate with the PRC government authority during the review. It plans to conduct a comprehensive examination of cybersecurity risks and continue to improve on its cybersecurity systems and technology capabilities. Apart from the suspension of new user registration in China, DiDi maintains normal operation. About DiDi Global Inc. DiDi Global Inc. (NYSE: DIDI) is the world's leading mobility technology platform. It offers a wide rangeof app-based services across Asia Pacific, Latin America and Africa, as well as in Central Asia and Russia, including ride hailing, taxi hailing, chauffeur, hitch and other forms of shared mobility as well as auto solutions, food delivery, intra-city freight and financial services.



Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains statements that may constitute "forward-looking" statements which are made pursuant to 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," "likely to," and similar statements. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about the Company's beliefs, plans, and expectations, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in the Company's filings with the SEC (News - Alert) . All information provided in this press release is as of the date of this press release, and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005305/en/

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[July 02, 2021] Dye & Durham Closes Acquisition of GlobalX

TORONTO, July 2, 2021 /CNW/ - Dye & Durham Limited ("Dye & Durham" or the "Company") (TSX: DND), a leading provider of cloud-based software and technology solutions designed to improve efficiency and increase productivity for legal and business professionals, today announces that it has closed its previously announced agreement to acquire GlobalX Information Pty Ltd for approximately C$159 million (A$171 million). On June 17, 2021 the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission announced that it would not oppose the transaction, providing clearance for Dye & Durham to proceed with closing of the acquisition. "We are excited to be moving forward with the acquisition of GlobalX and welcoming the company and its team into Dye & Durham. We expect a seamless integration of GlobalX with our existing Australia business and, importantly, a transition which is not disruptive to our customers," said Matt Proud, CEO of Dye & Durham. The acquisition of GlobalX further grows Dye & Durham's platform in Australia, delivering value to Australian legal, property and business professionals. About Dye & Durham Dye & Durham Limited is a leading provider of cloud-based software and technology solutions designed to improve efficiency and increase productivity for legal and business professionals. Dye & Durham provides critical information services and workflows, which clients use to manage their process, information and regulatory requirements. The Company has operations in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia, and has a strong blue-chip customer base that includes law firms, financial service institutions, and government organizations. Additional information can be found at www.dyedurham.com.



About GlobalX GlobalX is one of Australia's most successful technology companies with operations across Australia and the United Kingdom. Established in 1994, the firm focuses in innovative technology solutions and support services for law firms, conveyancers, financial institutions, property planning professionals and government bodies. GlobalX offers unique cloud-based software solutions, including online property and business regulatory information, practice management software, conveyancing workflow, electronic contracts and legal support services.

Forward-looking Statements This press release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws, which reflects the Company's current expectations regarding future events. In some cases, but not necessarily in all cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward looking terminology such as "plans", "targets", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "an opportunity exists", "is positioned", "estimates", "intends", "assumes", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate" or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "will" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". In addition, any statements that refer to expectations, projections or other characterizations of future events or circumstances contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are not historical facts, nor guarantees or assurances of future performance but instead represent management's current beliefs, expectations, estimates and projections regarding future events and operating performance. Forward-looking information is based on a number of assumptions and is subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's control, which could cause actual results and events to differ materially from those that are disclosed in or implied by such forward-looking information. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the factors discussed under "Risk Factors" in the prospectus supplement of the Company dated February 18, 2021 to the short form base shelf prospectus of the Company dated November 18, 2020 (including the documents incorporated by reference therein). Dye & Durham does not undertake any obligation to update such forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law. SOURCE Dye & Durham Limited

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[July 02, 2021] Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP, a Leading Securities Fraud Law Firm, Announces Investigation of DiDi Global Inc. (DIDI) on Behalf of Investors

Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP ("GPM"), a leading national shareholder rights law firm, today announced that it has commenced an investigation on behalf of DiDi Global Inc. ("DiDi" or the "Company") (NYSE: DIDI) investors concerning the Company's possible violations of the federal securities laws. If you suffered a loss on your DiDi investments or would like to inquire about potentially pursuing claims to recover your loss under the federal securities laws, you can submit your contact information at https://www.glancylaw.com/cases/didi-global-inc/. You can also contact Charles H. Linehan, of GPM at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, or via email at shareholders@glancylaw.com to learn more about your rights. On or about June 30, 2021, DiDi sold about 317 million shares of stock in its initial public stock offering (the "IPO") at $14 per share, raising nearly $4.5 billion in new capital. On July 2, 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China stated it had launched an investigation ito DiDi to protect national security and the public interest. It also reported that it had asked DiDi stop new user registrations during the course of the investigation.



On this news, the Company's stock price fell as much as $1.09 per share, or 6%, during intraday trading, thereby injuring investors. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

Whistleblower Notice: Persons with non-public information regarding DiDi should consider their options to aid the investigation or take advantage of the SEC (News - Alert) Whistleblower Program. Under the program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Charles H. Linehan at 310-201-9150 or 888-773-9224 or email shareholders@glancylaw.com. About GPM Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP is a premier law firm representing investors and consumers in securities litigation and other complex class action litigation. ISS Securities Class Action Services has consistently ranked GPM in its annual SCAS Top 50 Report. In 2018, GPM was ranked a top five law firm in number of securities class action settlements, and a top six law firm for total dollar size of settlements. With four offices across the country, GPM's nearly 40 attorneys have won groundbreaking rulings and recovered billions of dollars for investors and consumers in securities, antitrust, consumer, and employment class actions. GPM's lawyers have handled cases covering a wide spectrum of corporate misconduct including cases involving financial restatements, internal control weaknesses, earnings management, fraudulent earnings guidance and forward looking statements, auditor misconduct, insider trading, violations of FDA regulations, actions resulting in FDA and DOJ investigations, and many other forms of corporate misconduct. GPM's attorneys have worked on securities cases relating to nearly all industries and sectors in the financial markets, including, energy, consumer discretionary, consumer staples, real estate and REITs, financial, insurance, information technology, health care, biotech, cryptocurrency, medical devices, and many more. GPM's past successes have been widely covered by leading news and industry publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Bloomberg (News - Alert) Businessweek, Reuters, the Associated Press, Barron's, Investor's Business Daily, Forbes, and Money. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005405/en/

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[July 02, 2021] Guardiola Sala Foundation To Address Sustainable Water Management

Pep Guardiola, along with his brother Pere, both representing their newly-established Guardiola Sala Foundation, have teamed up with global nonprofit, EarthEcho International and global water technology company, Xylem Inc. (NYSE: XYL), to encourage students to realize a more sustainable future for Spain's water resources. Today, Pep joined the first in a series of water education events at Casal dels Infants in Barcelona as part of a new initiative, Water Challenge Catalonia. The initiative which closely aligns with the UN's water-related Sustainable Development Goals, seeks to inspire action to address Spain's water challenges. Water scarcity is now more real than ever1 with supply expected to fall by up to 40% by the end of the century. Guardiola's involvement stems from his launch of The Guardiola Sala Foundation, which will raise funds for established charities in Britain and Catalonia. On his visit to the school, Pep joined students of Casal dels Infants in learning about Catalonia's water challenges and actions they can take, such as monitoring the quality of their local water resources, to make a difference. His visit is just one of a number of events planned by Xylem Watermark, and EarthEcho, in Madrid and Barcelona as part of Water Challenge Catalonia. Speaking at the Water Challenge Catalonia event in Barcelona, Pep Guardiola said: "It's no secret that our country is experiencing difficulties in relation to water. Climate change and other factors are creating a number of water-related issues, so it's up to us to do something about it now. That's why the Guardiola Sala Foundation is honored to partner with Xylem and EarthEcho to give our youngsters a platform for making a difference. If we all do our part, we can succeed in building a better world." Water Challenge Catalonia aims to establish a sustainable program for youth engagement and youth development around protecting water resources in the Catalonia region of Spain. In addition to providing training and materials for school teachers in the region, the program will build the capacity of 10 young leaders to serve as Water Challenge Catalonia Ambassadors, educating others in their community and engaging them in citizen science to improve local water issues. This includes providing access to analytical tools to test and detect water quality issues facing Spain's waterways. The approach builds on the success of EarthEcho's global Water Challenge Ambassador initiative, which delivers water quality monitoring and youth development programs in water-challenged regions such as Puerto Rico. "Solving water is a team effort. Through Xylem Watermark, we are proud to champion the youth of Catalonia through our support of Water Chalenge Catalonia. Young leaders can play such an essential role in our collective ability to solve the complex water challenges the world is facing," said Joseph Vesey, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Xylem. "As a water technology leader, we recognize the tremendous opportunity we have to listen to, enable and advance the next generation in their pursuit of a more sustainable world."



"The growing need for clean, sustainable water resources is a challenge we can solve if we act now," said EarthEcho International founder Philippe Cousteau, Jr. "Water is fundamental to every aspect of daily life; and through educating our children and helping them to see where they can take action in their own communities, they become leaders of a more sustainable future." About Xylem

Xylem (XYL) is a leading global water technology company committed to solving critical water and infrastructure challenges with innovation. Our more than 16,000 diverse employees delivered revenue of $4.88 billion in 2020. We are creating a more sustainable world by enabling our customers to optimize water and resource management, and helping communities in more than 150 countries become water-secure. Join us at www.xylem.com. About Xylem Watermark Xylem Watermark, the company's corporate citizenship program, was initiated in 2008, with a focus on protecting and providing safe water resources around the world and also educating people on water-related issues. The global initiative, which encompasses employee and stakeholder engagement, provides access to clean drinking water and sanitation, and humanitarian emergency response to help communities become more water-secure and sustainable through WASH and Value of Water Education programs. The program has logged over 230,000 employee volunteer hours over the past five years and engaged 58 percent of the company's global employee base. About EarthEcho EarthEcho International is a nonprofit 501c3 organization founded in 2005 by siblings Philippe and Alexandra Cousteau in honor of their father Philippe Cousteau Sr., son of the legendary explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. EarthEcho collaborates with youth around the world to provide knowledge and develop tools that drive meaningful environmental action to protect and restore our ocean planet. Reaching more than 2 million people in 146 countries, we support the next generation to become environmental leaders who will transform the future. For more information, visit www.earthecho.org, follow us on social media:

Facebook (News - Alert) : www.Facebook.com/EarthEcho

Twitter (News - Alert) : @EarthEcho

Instagram: @EarthEcho About Casal dels Infants Casal dels Infants is an NGO that focuses on bringing opportunities to children, adolescents, and families at social risk through educational programs, in Barcelona and its surroundings. It was created in 1983, and nowadays it supports more than 7,000 people. _____________________________ 1 https://www.efeverde.com/noticias/stepbywater-alianza-gestion-sostenible-agua/ View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005017/en/

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[July 02, 2021] Hisense Becomes the World's 1st TV Brand Acquiring TUV Rheinland Privacy by Design Certification Based on ETSI EN 303 645

QINGDAO, China, July 2, 2021 /CNW/ -- TUV Rheinland Greater China (TUV Rheinland) granted the ETSI EN 303 645 (IoT) product cybersecurity and privacy protection standard certification to VIDAA 72671 platform smart TV of Hisense Visual Technology Co., Ltd on June 25th, 2021. Hisense became the world's first TV brand to receive the certificate. Dr Chen Weikang, Vice President of Business Stream Industrial Services & Cybersecurity at TUV Rheinland Greater China and Senior Engineer; Zhao Bin, General Manager of TUV Rheinland Greater China Industrial Services & Cybersecurity; Yu Zhitao, Hisense Group Holdings Co., Ltd. Vice President and Liu Yong, Assistant Vice President of Hisense International and other members attended the Strategy Cooperation Agreement Signing Ceremony. "TUV Rheinland and Hisense have always been tacit partners in the field of cybersecurity and privacy protection. By granting TUV Rheinland's worlds' first ETSI EN 303 645 certificate demonstrates both parties' unremitting pursuit for technology breakthrough and higher quality standards," said Dr Chen. In June 2020, The European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) with relevant product manufacturers, academia and govenments, officially released the new standard ETSI EN 303 645, which regulates the cybersecurity baseline requirements for consumer IoT products such as user privacy protection, primary network attacks prevention and so on. ETSI EN 202 645 Standard provides a practical evaluation method to limit cybercriminals from controlling global devices, launching DDoS attacks, mining cryptocurrency, or peeping at users. It also reduces the risk of personal data leakage. The standard evaluates products from two aspects: cybersecurity provisions and data privacy protection provisions, focusing on technical control measures and organizational measures to combat cybersecurity defects and solve primary network attacks against cybersecurity vulnerabilities.





In this certification, TUV Rheinland evaluated Hisense's product performance according to the cybersecurity regulations and privacy protection requirements of ETSI EN 303 645 standards. In addition, TUV Rheinland has carried out a comprehensive evaluation of the product utilizing a comprehensive design evaluation audit and security-related verification. The European market has always been an essential part of Hisense's globalization strategy. As the official sponsor of EURO 2016 and EURO 2020, Hisense understands the needs of the European market and consumers and always committed to improving product privacy protection and data security in the European market through technology research and development, implementation of localization strategies and sponsoring the top sporting event. As the world's leading TV brand, Hisense will focus on research and development investment and pay attention to data protection and finally become the most reliable brand in the world! Media Contact:

Lori Luo (Ogilvy PR Team)

Tel: +86-135-1278-4739

Email: lori.luo@ogilvy.com / HisenseGlobal@ogilvy.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hisense-becomes-the-worlds-1st-tv-brand-acquiring-tuv-rheinland-privacy-by-design-certification-based-on-etsi-en-303-645-301325028.html SOURCE Hisense

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[July 02, 2021] Huobi Obtains Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Certification

LONDON, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Huobi Financial Inc., branded as "Huobi," announced today that it has passed the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) assessment and obtained the PCI DSS certification on the 7th of June. Following the acquirement of the certificate, Huobi has optimized its card binding process to enhance card information security, and users would be able to see a PCI logo on the card binding interface when they purchase crypto assets. The PCI DSS is a set of security standards formed by Visa, MasterCard, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, and American Express in 2004. PCI DSS aims to secure credit and debit card transactions against data theft and fraud, and is currently one of the most stringent and highest-level security certification for financial institutions in the world. "PCI certification is considered the best practice for the safeguarding of sensitive data and information, thereby helping us buid long-lasting and trusting relationships with our customers. In order to obtain the certification, Huobi has to pass a comprehensive review of 12 requirements and more than 200 assessments based on the PCI DSS standards," said Ciara Sun, Vice President of Huobi Global Markets.



PCI certification ensures the security of card data through a set of requirements which include a number of commonly recognized best practices such as installation of firewalls, use of anti-virus software, and encryption of data transmissions. In addition, businesses must monitor access to network resources and restrict access to cardholder data. "Successfully passing the strict and complicated certification process indicates that Huobi possesses leading capabilities on security operation and safety protection. It also reflects our great emphasis on cardholders' information security. We believe that we can maintain our security construction work at an advanced level by leveraging our advantages in technology R&D and experiences in operation and management," added Ciara.

Statement: Citizens and residents from the U.S., Mainland China and other restricted jurisdictions are restricted from using Huobi's services. Huobi may restrict additional jurisdictions from time to time without prior notice. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/huobi-obtains-payment-card-industry-data-security-standard-pci-dss-certification-301324981.html SOURCE Huobi

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INVESTOR ALERT: Law Offices of Howard G. Smith Announces Investigation of DiDi Global Inc. (DIDI) on Behalf of Investors

Law Offices of Howard G. Smith announces an investigation on behalf of DiDi Global Inc. ("DiDi" or the "Company") (NYSE: DIDI) investors concerning the Company's possible violations of federal securities laws.

On or about June 30, 2021, DiDi sold about 317 million shares of stock in its initial public stock offering (the "IPO") at $14 per share, raising nearly $4.5 billion in new capital.

On July 2, 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China stated it had launched an investigation into DiDi to protect national security and the public interest. It als reported that it had asked Didi stop new user registrations during the course of the investigation.







On this news, the Company's stock price fell as much as $1.09 per share, or 6%, during intraday trading, thereby injuring investors.

If you purchased DiDi securities, have information or would like to learn more about these claims, or have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Howard G. Smith, Esquire, of Law Offices of Howard G. Smith, 3070 Bristol Pike, Suite 112, Bensalem, Pennsylvania 19020 by telephone at (215) 638-4847, toll-free at (888) 638-4847, or by email to howardsmith@howardsmithlaw.com, or visit our website at www.howardsmithlaw.com.

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005401/en/
[July 02, 2021] The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz Announces Investigation of DiDi Global Inc. (DIDI) on Behalf of Investors

The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz announces an investigation of DiDi Global Inc. ("DiDi" or the "Company") (NYSE: DIDI) on behalf of investors concerning the Company's possible violations of federal securities laws. If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate. On or about June 30, 021, DiDi sold about 317 million shares of stock in its initial public stock offering (the "IPO") at $14 per share, raising nearly $4.5 billion in new capital.



On July 2, 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China stated it had launched an investigation into DiDi to protect national security and the public interest. It also reported that it had asked DiDi stop new user registrations during the course of the investigation. On this news, the Company's stock price fell as much as $1.09 per share, or 6%, during intraday trading, thereby injuring investors.

Follow us for updates on Twitter (News - Alert) : twitter.com/FRC_LAW. If you purchased DiDi securities, have information or would like to learn more about these claims, or have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Frank R. Cruz, of The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz, 1999 Avenue of the Stars, Suite 1100, Los Angeles, California 90067 at 310-914-5007, by email to info@frankcruzlaw.com, or visit our website at www.frankcruzlaw.com. If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number, and number of shares purchased. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005449/en/

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[July 02, 2021] Mirova's Land Degradation Neutrality Fund Exceeds $200m of Commitments for Its Final Close

Mirova, an affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers dedicated to sustainable investing, today announces the final close of the Land Degradation Neutrality Fund ("LDN Fund"), an impact investment fund that invests in profit-generating sustainable land use and land restoration projects in developing countries. The fund's final commitments are now over $208 million. The LDN Fund, promoted by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, and independently managed by Mirova, was launched in 2017, as part of One Planet Summit's commitments to mobilise public and private capital in order to provide long-term financing to land-based projects that meet strict environmental and social standards. The fund invests in enterprises involved in sustainable land use - agroforestry, regenerative and sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry on degraded lands, etc. - and aims to improve their sustainability and efficiency. Value is created through sustainable production, increased quality and market access within sustainable supply chains. Positive impacts targeted include climate mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity protection, rural development and gender equality. Gautier Queru, Director of the LDN Fund at Mirova, says: "There are many solutions available to preserve and enhance natural capital. The LDN Fund's final close allows us, with the support of our investors, to accompany talented entrepreneurs through dedicated impact investments bringing much needed long term finance and spreading best practices." Philippe Zaouati, CEO of Mirova, comments: "The amount raised for a first fund of this type, unique in the world, demonstrates investors' appetite for impact solutions. Blended finance helps in securing private investors thanks to the participation of major public investors. It is a powerful instrument to drive funds in new asset classes such as biodiversity and climate." As a purpose-native and impact-driven asset manager, Mirova has identified early on the potential of investing in Nature-based Solutions. For more than eight years our teams have worked to create strategies to finance and bring to scale economically viable projects with a positive impact on natural capital and on communities. The fund is structured as a blended finance vehicle, mixing commercial and concessional capital. In addition to initial public investors, the Europen Investment Bank and Agence Francaise de Developpement, the fund is supported by the British Government and more recently by the Canadian Government. Such public support has helped Mirova convince private investors to allocate more capital to sustainable land use, which represents over 60% of the fund's total commitment.



The LDN Fund has already committed to investments in eight countries in areas ranging from sustainable coffee and cocoa production, restoring deforested areas in Latin America, through to sustainable forestry projects and tree nuts production in Africa and Asia, each time with a strong focus on smallholders inclusion. The first impact report has just been published, demonstrating tangible impact on the ground generated by innovative and promising entrepreneurs.

The LDN Fund is actively seeking new investable opportunities that bring both measurable and quantifiable impacts to land rehabilitation and natural ecosystems restoration as well as establish sustainable business models with development benefits for communities and a commercial return for investors. The fund represents one of the three investment pillars of Mirova's natural capital platform, which, in addition to the 'sustainable land use' pillar, counts the 'blue economy' pillar and the 'carbon and environmental assets' pillar. About Mirova Mirova is a management company dedicated to sustainable investment and an affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers. Through its conviction management, Mirova's goal is to combine long-term value creation and sustainable development. Pioneers in many areas of sustainable finance, Mirova's talents aim to continue to innovate in order to offer their clients solutions with high environmental and social impact. Mirova and its affiliates manage 21,7 billion euros as of March 31, 2021. Mirova is a mission-based company, labeled B Corp.1. 1 The reference to a ranking or a label does not prejudge the future performance of the funds or its managers. Portfolio Management Company - Anonymous Company

RCS Paris No.394 648 216 - AMF Accreditation No. GP 02-014

59, Avenue Pierre Mendes France - 75013 - Paris

Mirova is an affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers.

> Read more: www.mirova.com About Natixis Investment Managers Natixis Investment Managers serves financial professionals with more insightful ways to construct portfolios. Powered by the expertise of more than 20 specialized investment managers globally, we apply Active Thinking to deliver proactive solutions that help clients pursue better outcomes in all markets. Natixis Investment Managers ranks among the world's largest asset management firms1 with 1,153 billion assets under management2. Headquartered in Paris and Boston, Natixis Investment Managers is a subsidiary of Natixis. Listed on the Paris Stock Exchange, Natixis is a subsidiary of BPCE, the second-largest banking group in France. Natixis Investment Managers' distribution and service groups include Natixis Distribution, L.P., a limited purpose broker-dealer and the distributor of various U.S. registered investment companies for which advisory services are provided by affiliated firms of Natixis Investment Managers, Natixis Investment Managers S.A. (Luxembourg), Natixis Investment Managers International (France), and their affiliated distribution and service entities in Europe and Asia. 1 Cerulli Quantitative Update: Global Markets 2020 ranked Natixis Investment Managers as the 17th largest asset manager in the world based on assets under management as of December 31, 2019. 2 Assets under management ("AUM") as of March 31, 2021 is 1,153 billion. AUM, as reported, may include notional assets, assets serviced, gross assets, assets of minority-owned affiliated entities and other types of non-regulatory AUM managed or serviced by firms affiliated with Natixis Investment Managers. Legal notices LAND DEGRADATION NEUTRALITY FUND is a Luxembourg Special Limited Partnership (Societe en Commandite Speciale), closed to new subscription. Mirova is the management company. The supervisory authority approval is not required for this fund. Investment in the fund involves risks, in particular: loss of capital risk, deal flow risk, operational risk, liquidity risk, country risk, market risk, legal and regulatory risk, currency risk, counterparty risk, project risk, valuation risk. This document is provided for information purposes only. This document does not constitute an invitation, advice or recommendation to subscribe for, acquire or dispose of units issued or to be issued by the Fund or any other investment vehicle. Recipients of this document who may be interested in investing in the Fund are reminded that such a subscription for units can only be made on the basis of the information contained in the Fund's regulatory documents. 3650872.1.1 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005051/en/

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[July 02, 2021] Nippon Express (China) Signs Memorandum on Pharmaceutical Logistics Business Collaboration with Shanghai Shengsheng Logistics

TOKYO, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- - Move Aimed at Enhancing Pharmaceutical Logistics Efforts - Nippon Express (China) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter "NE China"), a local subsidiary of Nippon Express Co., Ltd., concluded a memorandum on business collaboration with Shanghai Shengsheng Logistics Co., Ltd. (hereinafter "Shengsheng Logistics"), a Chinese logistics firm primarily engaged in biopharmaceutical transport, on Thursday, May 27. Logo: https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/img/202106256756-O3-Rs596e0g Photo1: Shengsheng Logistics Chairman Ju (right) and NE China Chairman Sugiyama (left) https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/prwfile/release/M103866/202106256756/_prw_PI1fl_gAgJuwQb.jpg Photo2: Insulated shipping box https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/prfile/release/M103866/202106256756/_prw_PI2fl_37YEbd7e.jpg



Shengsheng Logistics, a top-class biopharmaceutical logistics company that offers temperature-controlled storage and transportation of biopharmaceuticals, biological samples, investigational drugs, etc., within China and that operates its own transport hubs throughout the country, provides China's domestic pharmaceutical distribution market with sophisticated temperature-controlled end-to-end transport services. One of its affiliates develops and manufactures insulated shipping boxes that it supplies to major manufacturers worldwide. China has put in place Good Supply Practice (GSP) standards for the supply and quality control of pharmaceutical products within the country, and restrictions preventing foreign-affiliated companies from directly engaging in pharmaceutical logistics prompted NE China to consider business collaboration with Shengsheng Logistics to cover this sector and boost its pharmaceutical logistics efforts in China.

The two partners in this business tie-up will be developing consolidated shipping services for ocean cargo requiring temperature control in multiple ranges as well as integrated cold-chain transport services by combining NE China's pharmaceutical logistics services that leverage a global network extending far beyond China with Shengsheng Logistics' domestic transport network and its low- and fixed-temperature packaging techniques to provide services that meet the needs of their customers. Nippon Express will continue expanding its pharmaceutical logistics services in China and bolstering efforts both inside and outside that country to serve the pharmaceutical industry, positioned as a priority industry in Nippon Express's current business plan. Nippon Express website: http://www.nipponexpress.com/ Official LinkedIn account: NIPPON EXPRESS GROUP

https://www.linkedin.com/company/nippon-express-group/ SOURCE Nippon Express Co., Ltd.

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[July 02, 2021] Parexel to be Acquired by EQT Private Equity and Goldman Sachs Asset Management

BOSTON and DURHAM, N.C., July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Parexel, a leading global clinical research organization (CRO) focused on development and delivery of innovative new therapies to advance patient health, today announced the execution of a definitive merger agreement under which it will be acquired by EQT IX fund (EQT Private Equity) and the Private Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management (Goldman Sachs) from Pamplona Capital Management LP for $8.5 billion.

Over the past 18 months Parexel has continued its strong growth trajectory delivering on its patients-first focus and accelerating new therapies to patients in need around the world, said Parexel CEO Jamie Macdonald. With the market for outsourced clinical research services anticipated to grow at a conservative CAGR of 8 to 9 percent, our focus remains on advancing and innovating Parexel to meet our customers needs across the evolving clinical development landscape. EQT and Goldman Sachs support this vision and are committed to investing in Parexel and our people to capitalize on this exciting market opportunity and make a difference for patients. Eric Liu, Partner and Global Co-Head of Healthcare at EQT, commented, We have followed Parexel closely during the past few years and have been impressed by the companys development and trajectory. Our investment in Parexel reflects EQTs thematic focus on the life sciences industry, as well as our commitment to partner with businesses that have a positive impact on society. We are excited to partner with Goldman Sachs for the next stage of Parexels journey, and to back Jamie, who prior to his role at Parexel had been a long-time senior advisor to EQT, as well as the rest of the Parexel team. Jo Natauri, Partner and Global Head of Private Healthcare Investing within Goldman Sachs Asset Management, commented, We are thrilled to partner with Jamie Macdonald, the entire Parexel management team and EQT to support Parexel, which has a distinguished track record of delivering clinical excellence to their large pharma and biotech customers globally. We believe this investment will accelerate Parexels growth as it builds on the companys global footprint, strong operational capabilities and expansive healthcare network. John Halsted, Managing Partner, Pamplona Capital Management, commented, Were very proud of Parexels progress over the past four years and the important work they do in helping bring exciting new therapies to patients in need. In particular, they successfully adapted the business to work in the midst of a global pandemic, and supported the development of therapies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic itself. We wish them every success in their next phase of growth." We have enjoyed our partnership with Pamplona, and thank them for their leadership and support in helping to transform Parexel under their ownership, concluded Mr. Macdonald. Over the past months, our ability to pivot and adapt have fostered new ways of working while developing a strong track record of quality and delivery for customers around the world. As we continue in this new era of clinical development and focus aggressively on meeting our customers needs for innovation in such areas as Real World Evidence, Decentralized Clinical Trials, Biostatistics and Data Management  and in key regions such as Asia/Pacific where were among the largest and longest-tenured CROs  were excited to be partnering with EQT and Goldman Sachs.We look forward to benefitting from their strong industry experience and to further accelerating Parexel as one of the worlds leading and fastest-growing CROs.



The transaction is subject to customary conditions, including receipt of applicable regulatory approvals. Evercore acted as the financial advisor to Parexel, and Kirkland & Ellis LLP provided legal counsel in connection with the transaction. Goldman Sachs and Jefferies LLC acted as financial advisors to EQT Private Equity and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP provided legal counsel in connection with the transaction. About Parexel

Parexel supports the development of innovative new medicines to improve the health of patients. We provide services to help life sciences and biopharmaceutical clients everywhere transform scientific discoveries into new treatments. From decentralized clinical trials to regulatory consulting services to leveraging real world insights, our therapeutic, technical, and functional ability is underpinned by a deep conviction in what we do. Parexel was named Best Contract Research Organization in December 2020 by an independent panel for Informa Pharma Intelligence. For more information, visit parexel.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter , and Instagram.

About EQT

EQT 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. For more information, visit www.eqtgroup.com or follow EQT on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. About Goldman Sachs Asset Management Private Equity

Bringing together traditional and alternative investments, Goldman Sachs Asset Management provides clients around the world with a dedicated partnership and focus on long-term performance. As the primary investing area within Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), we deliver investment and advisory services for the worlds leading institutions, financial advisors and individuals, drawing from our deeply connected global network and tailored expert insights, across every region and marketoverseeing more than $2 trillion in assets under supervision worldwide as of March 31, 2021. Driven by a passion for our clients performance, we seek to build long-term relationships based on conviction, sustainable outcomes, and shared success over time. Goldman Sachs Asset Management invests in the full spectrum of alternatives, including private equity, growth equity, private credit, real estate and infrastructure. Established in 1986, the Private Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management has invested over $75 billion since inception. We combine our global network of relationships, our unique insight across markets, industries and regions, and the worldwide resources of Goldman Sachs to build businesses and accelerate value creation across our portfolios. Follow us on LinkedIn. About Pamplona Capital Management

Pamplona Capital Management is a specialist investment manager established in 2005 that provides an alternative investment platform across private equity and other diversified strategies. With offices in New York, London, Madrid, and Malta, Pamplona manages over $11 billion in assets for a variety of clients including public pension funds, international wealth managers, multinational corporations, family offices, and funds of hedge funds. Pamplona invests long-term capital across the capital structure of its portfolio companies in both public and private market situations. CONTACTS For Parexel:

Lori Dorer

Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications

+1 513 496 8121 Lindsay LeCain

Real Chemistry

+ 1 508 259 9521 For EQT:

Daniel Yunger, Kekst CNC, + 1 917 574 8582

EQT Press Office, press@eqtpartners.com, +46 8 506 55 334 For Goldman Sachs:

Leslie Shribman

+1 212 902 5400 For Pamplona Capital Management:

Ed Orlebar, TB Cardew

ed.orlebar@tbcardew.com

+44 (0)7738724630



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[July 02, 2021] Philogen Announces R&D Program Update

Philogen Announces R&D Program Update Fibromun shows activity in pretreated glioma and sarcoma patients; OncoFAP targets tumor lesions in cancer patients; a new product partnered with AbbVie entered clinical studies Siena (Italy), 2 July, 2021  (Globe Newswire)  Philogen S.p.A. (BIT:PHIL), a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on the development of innovative medicines based on tumor targeting antibodies and small molecule ligands, is pleased to provide an update on three R&D programs: Fibromun, OncoFAP and ABBV-022. A full pipeline update will be made to the market on 28 September, 2021, in the Companys Half Year results announcement. Prof. Dr. Dario Neri, Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer of Philogen S.p.A., said: We are extremely pleased to see that our technology has been delivering exciting product candidates of diverse nature, both by our partners such as AbbVie and under our ownership, across a variety of clinical trials. The early signs of activity support our ambition to bring innovative treatment options to patients with serious unmet medical need. Fibromun Fibromun (L19TNF), wholly-owned by Philogen, is a fully-human immunomodulatory product consisting of the L19 antibody and TNF (a strong pro-inflammatory cytokine). Recombinant TNF has so far been approved only for certain loco-regional clinical applications. Promising interim survival benefits have been demonstrated in the European Phase I/II trial, investigating Fibromun as a monotherapy for the treatment of IDH wildtype WHO Grade III-IV High-Grade Glioma at first recurrence/relapse. Data on progression free survival at six months are being finalized, while the overall survival data will be consolidated by the end of 2021, with expected publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in 2022.

In the European Phase I/II trial, in which Fibromun is combined with lomustine for the treatment of Glioblastoma at first recurrence/relapse, a partial response has been observed already in the first patient treated in the study. The historical overall response rate for this patient population is 4.3% (Wick et al., J Clin Oncol 2010, 28 ,1168)

,1168) A Parallel Scientific Advice (PSA) with the European Medicines Agency and the US Food and Drug Administration has been completed in June 2021. The development plan for the treatment of glioblastoma and the proposed strategy for marketing authorization have been discussed and agreed with competent authorities. Philogen will follow the recommendations that were provided during the PSA.

In the European Phase II trial, in which Fibromun is combined with dacarbazine for the treatment of pretreated advanced/metastatic Soft Tissue Sarcoma (3 rd line), the second patient treated in the study enjoyed a partial response. The historical overall response rate for this patient population is 4.0% (Garcia-del-Muro et al., J Clin Oncol 2011, 29,2528). After the run-in part of the trial, the trial progresses to a randomized part.

line), the second patient treated in the study enjoyed a partial response. The historical overall response rate for this patient population is 4.0% (Garcia-del-Muro et al., J Clin Oncol 2011, 29,2528). After the run-in part of the trial, the trial progresses to a randomized part. Fibromun is investigated in six clinical trials, of which five have a pivotal potential. In Soft Tissue Sarcoma, the European Phase III trial in 1st line and the Phase II trial in 3rd line are expected to read out by the end of 2023.



OncoFAP OncoFAP is a small molecule radiotracer, wholly-owned by Philogen, with ultra-high affinity for Fibroblast Activation Protein (FAP). The product is suitable for the non-invasive detection of a variety of metastatic solid tumors, as FAP is overexpressed in more than 90% of epithelial cancers (e.g., malignant breast, colorectal, ovarian, lung, skin, prostate, and pancreatic cancers, as well as in some soft tissue and bone sarcomas) Clinicians from the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the UniversityHospital of Munster have employed a OncoFAP-based radionuclide conjugate (OncoFAP- 68 Ga) in clinical scanning of patients with various FAP-positive cancer types and have shown excellent tumor uptake in both primary and metastatic lesions with low uptake in healthy organs (including kidneys) after intravenous injection.

Ga) in clinical scanning of patients with various FAP-positive cancer types and have shown excellent tumor uptake in both primary and metastatic lesions with low uptake in healthy organs (including kidneys) after intravenous injection. These clinical results also support the investigation of OncoFAP- 177 Lu for Radionuclide Ligand Therapy (RLT).

Lu for Radionuclide Ligand Therapy (RLT). Philogen is currently planning international, exploratory, clinical trials to investigate OncoFAP in a variety of cancer indications. The results from these studies will provide the basis for a pivotal clinical program in selected cancer types.







ABBV-022 ABBV-022, a product out-licensed by Philogen to AbbVie, consists of an IL-22 payload fused to a targeting antibody. The cytokine, selectively delivered to the epithelial surface of damaged gut mucosa, promotes survival of intestinal stem cells, improves goblet cell function and epithelial barrier, thereby reducing inflammation.

ABBV-022 has started a Phase I clinical trial for the treatment of Ulcerative Colitis. The original collaboration between Philogen and AbbVie began in 2014.



About Philogen Philogen is a Swiss-Italian clinical-stage biotechnology company listed on the Italian Stock Exchange. It is engaged in the discovery and development of novel pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical products. Philogens strategy is to deliver bioactive agents, for example cytokines or drugs, to the site of disease using antibodies and other ligands that specifically and efficiently target stromal antigens. This technology has generated a strong proprietary pipeline of clinical-stage products and preclinical compounds in an array of disease indications. Philogen is headquartered in Siena, Italy, and has research activities at its subsidiary company Philochem near Zurich, Switzerland. Philogen has signed agreements with several major pharmaceutical companies. For more information, please visit www.philogen.com. Forward-Looking Statements The forward-looking statements contained in this press release may be identified by words such as aims, anticipates, believes, could, estimates, expects, forecasts, goal, intends, may, plans, possible, potential, seeks, will and variations of these words or similar expressions that are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements regarding anticipated advancement of preclinical development efforts and initiation and progression of clinical trials; anticipated enrollment in and progression of Philogens clinical trials; the availability of data from clinical trials and preclinical studies; anticipated regulatory filings; the therapeutic potential of Philogens product candidates; Philogens ability to achieve planned milestones. Philogen may not actually achieve the plans, intentions or expectations disclosed in these forward-looking statements, and you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Actual results or events could differ materially from the plans, intentions and expectations disclosed in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including: risks to site initiation, clinical trial commencement, patient enrollment and follow-up, as well as to Philogens and its partners abilities to meet other anticipated deadlines and milestones, also due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; uncertainties inherent in the initiation and completion of preclinical studies and clinical trials and clinical development of Philogens product candidates by Philogen or its partners; the risk that Philogen may not realize the intended benefits of its technology; availability and timing of results from preclinical studies and clinical trials; whether the outcomes of preclinical studies will be predictive of clinical trial results; whether initial or interim results from a clinical trial will be predictive of the final results of the trial or the results of future trials; the risk that trials and studies may be delayed and may not have satisfactory outcomes; potential adverse effects arising from the testing or use of Philogens product candidates; risks related to Philogens ability to maintain existing collaborations and realize the benefits thereof; expectations for regulatory approvals to conduct trials or to market products; other factors which could cause our actual result to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, as also described in greater detail in the Risk Factors section in the prospectus drafted by Philogen and approved by Consob on February 17, 2021. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date hereof, and Philogen expressly disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained herein, whether as a result of any new information, future events, changed circumstances or otherwise, except as otherwise required by law. The information and contents of this press release do not: (i) constitute an order or an offer to purchase or to sell financial products or financial services; (ii) relate to special investment goals or to the financial situation or particular requirements of specific users. All information presented, reports published, and opinions expressed are intended purely for information purposes, and do not constitute an offer for the conclusion of a contract or other legal transaction. In particular, the content of the press release is not to be understood as an invitation or recommendation to buy or sell securities of Philogen, or as an advertisement for securities of Philogen. Neither does it constitute an offer to participate in any other transaction, including (but not restricted to) trading in derivatives. The mere use of the website does not give rise to any contractual relationship of any kind between the user and Philogen. Philogen expressly draws your attention to the fact that its share price is subject to fluctuation, and that the future development of the share price cannot be derived either from the previous price history or from the information and content shown on this website. Results achieved in the past provide no guarantee in regard to the future development of the share price. Philogen provides no guarantee of any kind that the capital invested will increase in value or maintain its value. In light of these given risks, we strongly advise you to seek professional advice before making any investment decision. The material contained on the website does not relieve the user from having to make his own decisions. This press release may contain links to external websites of third parties (external links) the content of which is outside the sphere of influence of Philogen. Visiting and using such websites that are accessible via such links are subject to the conditions of the data protection policy of these websites and the liability of the respective operators. Philogen accepts no responsibility and offers no guarantee of any kind for the content or websites of third parties and gives no assurances of any kind in this regard. Philogen accepts no responsibility for the data protection policy and customer information of websites of third parties and shall not be liable for the content or web pages of third parties which are linked to the Philogen website, or which display the Philogen website in frames. Philogen contacts Dr. Christian Lizak (Business Development), Dr. Emanuele Puca (Investor Relations) +41 (0) 43 544 88 00 christian.lizak@philogen.com, emanuele.puca@philogen.com Consilium Strategic Communications contacts Mary-Jane Elliott, Davide Salvi Philogen@consilium-comms.com



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[July 02, 2021] Signing with Shagang Group, one of the world's top 500 companies, Kingdee helps with the carbon neutral in iron and steel industry

SHENZHEN, China, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Kingdee Software Group Company Limited ("Kingdee International", "Kingdee" or the "Company"), together with its subsidiaries, collectively referred to as the "Group"; stock code: 0268.HK) and Jiangsu Shagang Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Shagang Group") officially signed a contract and held a project kick-off meeting in Zhangjiagang. Shagang Group, founded in 1975, is one of the world's leading iron and steel material manufacturers and integrated service providers. It has ranked top 500 among the world for 12 consecutive years, ranked third in China's iron and steel industry, and ranked first in private iron and steel enterprises in China. Shagang Group has five manufacturing bases, and its products are exported to more than 100 countries and regions in the world. As the cooperation is the core content of the digital transformation plan in the 14th Five Year Plan of Shagang Group, the senior management of both sides has attached great importance to their cooperation. The senior management teams of both sides who have attended this contract signing ceremony including: Shen Bin, standing executive director of the board of directors and Party committee secretary of Shagang Group, Chen Shaohui, standing executive director and standing executive vice president of Shagang Group, Qian Wangping, chairman of Jiangsu Shagang Hi-Tech, Zhang Yong, rotating president of Kingdee China, Xu Jiaqi, general manager of Kingdee Suzhou Branch, Zhu Ning, assistant president and general manager of management department of Kingdee China, and Chen Baosheng, general manager of iron and steel industry division of Kingdee China. Digital transformation driven by carbon neutral goal During the 14th Five-year Plan Period, China will fully implement ultra-low emissions in the steel industry, expand new ways of energy conservation and emission reduction, and achieve green and sustainable development in the iron and steel industry. The extensive development model that previously relied on resource input and scale expansion will be difficult to sustain. Digital transformation has become one of the development strategies of iron and steel enterprises. Shen Bin, standing executive director of the board of directors and Party committee secretary of Shagang Group, said, "during the process of achieving carbon neutral, Shagang first bears the brunt, and we are the main force to achieve carbon neutral, which brings us both pressure and opportunity. The solution of these two major challenges is inseparable from digital transformation. The digital transformation of the iron and steel industry should go fast, well, steadily and accurately, in order to remain invincible in the future development." Shagang has completed the digitalization of its business very early, but switching and alternation of this kind of information system with long-time accumulated is the common problem of digital transformation faced by the iron and steel industry: the application of a single system that enterprises have invested in for a long time in the past is deep-rooted, but most of them are departmental systems, which is not able to support the digital strategy of enterprises. In the future, the manufacturing industry will accelerate to digitization, information networking and intelligence, and the industry will obviously be oriented to data-driven, gain platform support, have value-added services and intelligence orientation.The purpose of this upgrade is to enhance the security, stability and agility of the business structure, so as to better support the complex digital strategic transformation of enterprises.



Zhang Yong, rotating president of Kingdee China, said, "the digital transformation of Shagang is a huge issue, involving all aspects of the enterprise. Since its establishment 46 years ago, Shagang has accumulated a number of application scenarios and internal management requirements. We will be customer-centered, striver-oriented, integrate internal and external resources, and will achieve business and financial integration of Shagang, and spare no effort to build a "Digital Shagang." The cooperation is not only a platform project of "integration of business and finance", but also an integration of "industry, property, tax, capital, purchase and sales, and platform". The project between Shagang and Kingdee is the core basic platform of Shagang's digital transformation in the future, and will also be the booster of Shagang's management reform.

Developing an industry benchmark with great significance in demonstration Shagang and Kingdee have reached consensus to develop this project into a benchmark sample and play a demonstration effect in the industry. Shen Bin said, "Shagang has diverse sectors with complex business. We hope that through the cooperation, we can create the application results with scientific and technological contents, and change management philosophy. We believe that the operation efficiency and management process improvement of Shagang will be significantly enhanced. Shagang will take the cosmic platform as the core platform to build "Digital Shagang" and support the strategic realization of "Century Shagang" to help Shagang Group achieve high-quality development. For Kingdee, developing such a model provides it benchmarking significance with demonstration effect in the iron and steel industry." It is reported that this project is the most widely covered project in the current iron and steel enterprises, from the scope of finance to business, which has causes high degree of concern in the industry. Both parties of the project will together mobilize all internal and external resources to develop a benchmark for the digital transformation of the iron and steel industry in the new era. As one of the world's top 500 enterprises, Shagang is standing at the forefront of the era, not only considering its own 5-10-year strategy, but also providing benchmarking and demonstration for the digital development of the industry. It is also the sense of social responsibility of leading enterprises with the vision of "Century Shagang". In fact, the cooperation between Shagang and Kingdee was established ten years ago. Since 2010, Kingdee has been involved in the digital upgrade of Shagang's core business from the aspect of HR system, which has also witnessed the process of building a "Digital Shagang". Through the comprehensive upgrade of the cooperation, Kingdee and Shagang will jointly explore digital transformation in the iron and steel industry, and developing Shagang Group into a benchmark for digital transformation of China's iron and steel industry. Following the cooperation with Hesteel Group, Delong Steel, Tianjin Rockcheck Steel and many other large iron and steel enterprises, Shagang has also gained Kingdee's benchmark position for continuous and deep digitalization of the iron and steel industry. With the formal signing of large projects such as Shagang and BGI, as well as the continuous and smooth progress of large projects such as Huawei and Yunnan Tobacco, the concept of EBC (Enterprise Business Capability), Chinese management model, and enterprise level PaaS platform + SaaS solution promoted by Kingdee are not only widely recognized by large-scale leading enterprises, but also fully implemented in various industries. In the future, together with Shagang Hi-tech, a digital subsidiary of Shagang, Kingdee will build a digital platform for iron and steel industry with Shagang features based on Kingdee  Cosmic PaaS Platform to help Shagang Group achieve comprehensive digital transformation. As an ecological partner of Kingdee, Shagang Hi-tech will work with Kingdee to export Shagang Group's digital transformation experience and solutions to the industry, so that China's iron and steel industry and manufacturing industry can maintain leading advantages in the world. About Kingdee International Software Group Company Limited Kingdee International Software Group Company Limited ("Kingdee International" or "Kingdee") was established in 1993. It is listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (stock code: 0268.HK) and headquartered in Shenzhen, the PRC. Adhering to the core values of "Acting in all Conscience, with Integrity and Righteousness", the Company is committed to helping businesses achieve their growth targets and let the sun shine on every company through dedicated services. It strives to provide them with the most trusted enterprise service platform. Through persistent efforts to explore China's Cloud enterprise service market, according to IDC, Kingdee has retained the largest share in the enterprise application software sector for fast-growing enterprises for 16 consecutive years, and has grasped the largest share in the enterprise-grade ERM SaaS (as known as Cloud ERP) and financial Cloud services industry for four consecutive year. Kingdee is currently the only SaaS cloud service provider of Chinese enterprises selected into Gartner's Global Market Guide, and has become the only Chinese company winning the 2020 IDC SaaS Customer Satisfaction Award. Many cloud service products of Kingdee have won the favor of benchmark enterprises, including Kingdee Cloud Cosmic (provides group enterprise cloud-end ERP solution), Kingdee Cloud Galaxy (digital innovation and cloud service platform for growth enterprises), Kingdee Cloud Star (SaaS solution for medium enterprises), Kingdee Cloud Star (SaaS solution for small and micro enterprises). Kingdee has provided software management and cloud services for more than 6.8 million enterprises, governments and other organizations worldwide. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/signing-with-shagang-group-one-of-the-worlds-top-500-companies-kingdee-helps-with-the-carbon-neutral-in-iron-and-steel-industry-301324917.html SOURCE Kingdee

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[July 02, 2021] Suning.com Empowers Local Rice Brand with Tailored Farm-To-Table Approach During 618 Shopping Festival

NANJING, China, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Suning.com ("the Company"; 002024.SZ), China's leading smart retail service provider and a Fortune Global 500 company owned by Suning Group, has successfully boosted the sales of high-quality agricultural products and brought a change to local agricultural brands with its industry-leading strengths in supply chain, logistics and retail sales, as the Company wrapped up its 618 shopping festival campaign. During the 618 promotion, one of the largest of the year, Suning.com has made agricultural products one of the key focuses, in addition to cosmetics, home appliances and other consumer-electronic items. Specifically, Suning.com has made efforts in promoting Wuchang rice under the Sutian brand name, as part of the Company's tailored marketing strategy to boost and support agricultural products from rural areas. During the promotion, Sutian's rice sold about 40 tons a day, reflecting Suning.com's ongoing efforts to brand and promote these types of agricultural products. The Sutian brand marks another successful attempt for Suning.com in helping agricultural brands to jump on the e-commerce bandwagon. Since 2019, Suning.com has actively identified quality agricultural products in a bid to help local farmers directly bring their products to more consumers across the country and in turn help consumers receive products directly from the source. Such a farm-to-table approach has been well received and recognized by both farmers and consumers alike, as it reduces costs for farmers and offers cheaper prices for consumers.>



China's Wuchang rice has been dubbed one of the best rice products in China with its annual production reaching about 500,000 tons. However, there has been knock-off Wuchang rice available on the market that uses Wuchang branding. Suning.com has joined forces with Wuchang Shanxiang Rice, a local rice farming company, to rebrand the local company's old "Gu Uncle" brand and re-branded its Wuchang rice under the brand name of Sutian, so that consumers would no longer need to worry about counterfeits. To ensure the best quality of Sutian rice, Suning.com fully participates in the operations of the product, including research, farming, packaging, marketing and sales on all the Company's online and offline marketplaces. Suning.com even promoted the product through livestreaming sales.

Zhang Kui, president of Suning Social E-Commerce, said that the Sutian rice brand is a perfect example that showcases Suning.com's goal of boosting the local agriculture industry, creating a more enhanced ecosystem and facilitating an industry upgrade. A manager in charge of Wuchang Shanxiang Rice said that "we have not only obtained the brand endorsement with Suning's support, but also optimized our operations to serve customers, which has led to a significant rise in sales volume and repurchases." On June 1 alone, such Sutian rice sold 40 tons. To date, Sutian rice, supported by Suning, has a total farming area of over 300,000 mu (about 49400 acres), which can produce about 120,000 tons of rice. Since last December when Sutian rice was put onto the Suning marketplace, it has sold about 5 million kilograms. About Suning Group Founded in 1990, Suning Group has two listed subsidiaries at home and abroad and more than 300,000 employees around the world, ranking third in the Chinese private sector. Being committed to its mission of Leading the Industrial Advancements in Creating a Higher Quality of Life for All, it provides quality products and services to more than 700 million customers worldwide and its business scope covers three main sectors: Retail, Real Estate, and Financial Service. Suning.com, the main subsidiary is a leading O2O smart retail service provider in China. In 2020, Suning.com maintained its position among the Fortune Global 500 and topped the 2020 List of China's 500 Most Valuable Brands with a brand value of RMB 296.815 billion. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/suningcom-empowers-local-rice-brand-with-tailored-farm-to-table-approach-during-618-shopping-festival-301324910.html SOURCE Suning Group

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[July 01, 2021] HUAWEI Ads welcomes Thailand advertising partners to explore joint business growth

BANGKOK, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei's mobile advertising division, HUAWEI Ads, is expanding its business in Thailand by introducing more partner support and diverse ad solutions, aiming to encourage local advertisers to onboard the platform and amplify their brand messages across the Huawei ecosystem. Launched in 2020 in the Asia-Pacific region, HUAWEI Ads is a one-sop, programmatic advertising marketplace tailored for Huawei devices. The service integrates with the underlying algorithms and architecture of Huawei devices, making it the most effective platform to reach Huawei's over 730 million global users across devices such as smartphones, PCs and tablets.



Through HUAWEI Ads, advertisers can choose from diverse ad options for placements within Huawei's native and third-party apps, according to their campaign objectives. Currently, HUAWEI Ads is integrated into more than 10,000 high-traffic third-party apps in APAC. Besides standard display ads, HUAWEI Ads also comes with innovative formats such as custom placements on AppGallery, Huawei's official app store, and new search ads on Petal Search. The HUAWEI Ads platform supports real-time and programmatic biddings, and precise targeting features such as lookalike audiences and retargeting. This ensures that the advertiser's messages and placements are directed to the ideal users who fit their consumer demographics. Additionally, HUAWEI Ads provides tools such as Smart Bidding and Smart Banners, along with one-click installation links, to give advertisers more control over the ad settings.



In addition, all HUAWEI Ads inventories have integrated with the international standard Open Measure Software Development Kit (OM SDK). This is a set of software tools designed by IAB Tech Lab for facilitating third-party viewability of measurement data. OM SKD-enabled media helps generate uniform ad viewability reports for each ad placed in the app environment, providing HUAWEI Ads advertisers with accurate and consistent third-party independent data to better evaluate their ad performance and ensure fairness and transparency in the programmatic ad marketplace. All-round support to nurture business growth HUAWEI Ads also provides end-to-end support from the onboarding process to ad optimisation for Thai advertisers in a commitment to build a sustainable digital ad environment. Qualified advertisers and certified agencies in Thailand will be able to enjoy the following benefits: Free advertising credit for direct advertisers that qualify for the trial programme

Rebates on media spend for eligible and certified agencies

certified agencies Dedicated support from the local team to guide through the onboarding process

Expert training on ad campaign setup and optimisation

New product beta testing opportunities for certified partners Advertisers interested in the HUAWEI Ads service can visit https://bit.ly/HuaweiAdsAPACT to download the HUAWEI Ads media kit and book a demo session to learn more about the platform. SOURCE Huawei Mobile Services

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[July 02, 2021] CPC centenary: Drawing strength from a glorious history

BEIJING, July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report by China.org.cn on the CPC centenary: On July 1, a grand gathering was held in Beijing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Over the past century, the CPC has grown from just a few dozen members to the largest political party in the world, profoundly transforming China and influencing the world. Back in 1916, Li Dazhao, who had just returned from Waseda University in Japan, felt lost at a crossroads. At that time, the Chinese people had suffered for more than half a century due to the decadence of Qing Dynasty's imperial rule and foreign aggression. From the Hundred Days of Reform in 1898 to the 1911 Revolution, countless experiments failed to bring China the national independence and modernization it desired. In 1917, the October Revolution was launched in Russia, offering hope to Li Dazhao and other revolutionaries. With preparations in place, the CPC was founded in July 1921. The new proletarian party then led the Chinese people to establish the People's Republic of China 28 years later, completely ending theChinese nation's "century of humiliation."



Fast forward to the summer of 1977. Hu Fuming, a teacher at Nanjing University, brought some classic works of Marxism and Leninism with him when he accompanied his sick wife in the hospital. There, he finished writing the outline of an article titled "Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth," which was published in May 1978. With the support of Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping, the editorial gave rise to heated discussions on the standards for judging truth.

After then, the CPC re-established the guiding principles of "emancipating the mind and seeking truth from facts," and made the decision to pursue reform and opening up, thus helping China embark on a journey of rapid development and deep integration with the world. By the end of 2020, China, home to one-fifth of the world's population, completely eliminated extreme poverty thanks to targeted poverty alleviation strategies, making a significant contribution to global poverty reduction. The dedication of countless Party members and officials in the fight against poverty has shown that the CPC has always been committed to its original aspiration of serving the people over the past century. Under the CPC's leadership, China has created one miracle after another, from being bullied to becoming the world's second largest economy, growing from scratch to become a smart manufacturing powerhouse, from having little say on the international stage to being an important promoter of world peace and development. Going forward, it is believed that the CPC will continue to remain true to its original aspiration, keep the mission well in mind, and lead the people of all ethnic groups across the country on a new journey to achieve the dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. China Mosaic

http://www.china.org.cn/video/node_7230027.htm

CPC centenary: Drawing strength from a glorious history

http://www.china.org.cn/video/2021-07/02/content_77602012.htm View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cpc-centenary-drawing-strength-from-a-glorious-history-301324907.html SOURCE China.org.cn

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[July 02, 2021] Synapse Network to Develop First Cross-Chain Cryptocurrency Investment Ecosystem

LONDON, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cross-blockchain technology specialist Synapse Network is developing the first cross-chain investment ecosystem based on blockchain technology. It will offer five cross-chain products for the cryptocurrency sector, including a cross-chain DEX and DeFi marketplace, a chain agnostic launchpad bringing together projects and private investors to enable investment opportunities in early-stage startups, and an accelerator and incubator for startups and entrepreneurs, where ideas are converted into working projects. There will also be an Investment Syndicate of trusted and reliable VC funds, business angels, tech partners, private investors and blockchain projects, providing fast-track access to capital, technology and partnerships. As the cryptocurrency market expands and new coins are introduced, crypto investors are looking to limit the number of apps, ecosystems, wallets that they use and to simplify the way they invest. Instead, they are seeking a simple one-stop-shop solution to consolidate their transactions and investments. Synapse Network now has a live, working cross-chain launchpad product, which allows investors to allocate their funds in projects based on different blockchains, including Ethereum, Binance SmartChain, Solana, Polygon and many other popular blockchains. This contrasts with a multichain solution, where you need to invest into one of multiple ecosystems. Synapse held an early community presale using its product and is now listing startups/projects based on multiple blockchains and is enabling investors utilising the product to invest in cross-chain investments. In addition, it has raised nearly $2,000,000 from venture capital and community funding rounds; current partners include Black Dragon, Dutch Crypto Investors, Moonwhale, Chainlink, OIG, ICO HUB, Crypto Weekly, Minted Lab and CSP DAO.



Synapse Network Co-Founder Pawel Laskarzewski is a Technology executive and Enterprise Solution Architect with a demonstrated history of over 20 years of experience in the IT industry. He is skilled in large scale projects with strong problem solving and business development skills, bridging the gap between technology innovation, business, and operations. Pawel has worked for several international companies, including Citibank, EuroSport and B/E Aerospace. He also co-founded several successful startup companies including Molecule.one, Kiwi Jobs and Absolvent Group. His Co-Founder, serial entrepreneur and investor Michal Domarecki, has founded and run several successful companies internationally in the areas of IT, transport and logistics. He has been involved in cryptocurrencies for over six years, actively investing in and advising blockchain startups and working with brands such as Crypto.com and founding Gems Reviews.

Synapse Network Co-Founder Pawel Laskarzewski commented, The cross-chain revolution is the next big step of blockchain evolution, so we are thrilled to be the only player in the market to offer this technology. Cross-chain means you can choose any chain you want, or even several at a time, for any investment that you desire. About Synapse Network Synapse Network is developing a cross-chain investment ecosystem including a launchpad plus an investment and startup acceleration ecosystem based on blockchain technology combining multiple high-value tools to create an entire Investment Syndicate ecosystem. All projects launched from the Synapse accelerator and launchpad platform will be backed with Synapse technology, fast-tracking the entire Synapse ecosystem to the mainstream market with seamless smart contract integration, fast data gathering ability and strong security guarantees. Media Contact Synapse Network: https://synapse.network Synapse Network Twitter: https://twitter.com/SynapseNetwork_ Synapse Network Blog: https://synapsenetwork.medium.com/synapse-network-integrates-chainlink-vrf-price-feeds-and-keepers-to-enhance-its-ecosystem-42473200b501 Synapse Network Telegram: https://t.me/Synapse_official PR Contact- Name- Somnath Karmakar Company- News Coverage Agency Email- Newscoverage.agency@gmail.com Team- News Coverage Agency Team





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[July 02, 2021] Verizon Frontline supports Arizona first responders battling wildfires

Verizon Frontline technology has been delivered to 14 locations in Arizona by the Verizon Response Team (VRT) to help enable mission-critical communications in remote areas as first responders battle wildfires throughout the state.



The VRT is supporting, or has supported, interagency fire management teams in their efforts to combat 11 wildfires in Arizona.

Verizon Frontline is the advanced network and technology built for first responders, developed over three decades of partnership with the public safety community.

PHOENIX, July 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Verizon Frontline recently deployed its advanced public safety platforms and technology, via the Verizon Response Team (VRT) , to support first responders battling wildfires throughout Arizona. Collaborating with interagency officials, the VRT delivered Verizon Frontline technology, including a Satellite Pico-cell on a Trailer (SPOT) to the site of he Backbone fire and another to the site of the Horton fire, to provide mission-critical voice and data service to public safety professionals as they combated fires throughout the state. Verizon Frontline technology was also distributed to interagency command posts across Arizona, to help enable coordination efforts as first responders battled 11 wildfires. This technology included repeaters, routers, mobile hotspots and smartphones.



This VRT support, provided at the request of the local public safety officials, is a continuation of Verizon Public Sectors commitment to working alongside our partners in public safety and government. Verizon Frontline is the advanced network and technology built for first responders  developed over nearly three decades of partnership with public safety officials and agencies  to meet their unique needs. From network priority and preemption and a commitment to real interoperability, to developing and delivering the most innovative product roadmap, Verizon Frontline is built on Americas most reliable network1, and will be able to harness the transformative power of 5G1.

The VRT provides on-demand, emergency assistance during crisis situations to government agencies, emergency responders, nonprofits and communities on a 24/7/365 basis. VRT members set up portable cell sites, WiFi hotspots, free charging stations and other devices and solutions that enable communications and/or boost network performance. 1 RootMetrics US RootScore Report: 2H 2020. Tested natl operators on all available all network types. Experience may vary. Award is not endorsement. 5G Nationwide available in 2700+ cities. 5G Ultra Wideband available only in part of select cities. Media contact:

Eric Durie

eric.durie@verizon.com

(516) 382-8219



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[July 02, 2021] Video River Networks announces Institutional Investor to buy 200,000 SPAC shares for a total of $2 million and orders 8 car designs from partners Lingstar

TORRANCE, Calif., July 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Video River Networks recently announced that a deal has been made with one of the Institutional Investors ("II") to buy 200,000 SPAC shares at $10 per share for a total of $2 million. In more good news, another ("II") Institutional Investor wants to also buy 200,000 of the SPAC shares at $10 per share for a total of $2 million. More updates are expected to be released soon per Video River Networks official Twitter account. Moreover, Video River Networks also announced that they have ordered 8 new vehicle designs from their partners at Lingstar for field testing, and will begin meticulously testing the vehicles as soon as they arrive in Video River networks' headquarters in Torrance, California. This will be the beginning of what looks to be a fruitful partnership between Video River Networks and our new partners from China, Lingstar. Video River Networks paid a sum total of $97,551 for the 8 designs and is looking forward to beginning operations of field testing and productions immediately. "We're very excited to work with Lingstar! Video River Networks has always been on the cutting edge of technology and design, and our new partners are no exception," said Video River Networks CEO, Frank Igwealor. Video River Networks are taking their time ensuring every facet of the new vehicle is safe for both the employees and driving public. As per their Twitter account Video River Networks will be arranging a show open to the public to showcase the cars, once they arrive.



Video River Networks are committed to delivering vehicles that are not only environmentally friendly but also cost effective. The field tests of these cars will help Video River Networks decide if the car designs Lingstar submitted are efficient, effective, and reliable. Shareholders have been pleased with Video River Networks constant updates regarding the company's ventures and are now patiently waiting for the field tests results. News of announcements was picked up by different investors and related news outlets on social media. The positive reception spread a feeling of excitement amongst the investors towards the company's future. Hence, Video River Networks announced on their twitter account that they will be putting in effort to produce more updates in regards to the field testing results and other business ventures.

About Video River Networks, Inc. Video River Networks, Inc. is an Electric Vehicles and Battery Technology holding company that operates and manages a portfolio of Electric Vehicles, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Robotics ("EV-AI-ML-R") assets, businesses and operations in North America. The Company's current and target portfolio businesses and assets include operations that design, develop, manufacture and sell high-performance fully electric vehicles and design, manufacture, install and sell Power Controls, Battery Technology, Wireless Technology, and Residential utility meters and remote, mission-critical devices mostly engineered through Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Robotic technologies. NIHK's current technology-focused business model is a result of our board resolution on September 15, 2020 to spin-in/off our specialty real estate holding business to an operating subsidiary and then pivot back to being a technology company. The Company has now returned back to its original technology-focused businesses of Power Controls, Battery Technology, Wireless Technology, and Residential utility meters and remote, mission-critical devices. For more information and the latest updates check the company's Twitter account at https://twitter.com/NIHKEV CONTACT:

Video River Networks, Inc.

370 Amapola Ave., Suite 200A

Torrance, CA 90501

contact@videorivernetworks.net

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[July 02, 2021] Delaware Enhanced Global Dividend and Income Fund Announces Distributions

Today, Delaware Enhanced Global Dividend and Income Fund (the "Fund"), a New York Stock Exchange-listed closed-end fund trading under the symbol "DEX," declared a monthly distribution of $0.0607 per share. The monthly distribution is payable July 30, 2021, to shareholders of record at the close of business on July 23, 2021. The ex-dividend date will be July 22, 2021. The Fund's primary investment objective is to seek current income, with a secondary objective of capital appreciation. The Fund invests globally in dividend-paying or income-generating securities across multiple asset classes, including but not limited to: equity securities of large, well-established companies; securities issued by real estate companies (including real estate investment trusts and real estate industry operating companies); debt securities (such as government bonds; investment grade and high risk, high yield corporate bonds; and convertible bonds); and emerging market securities. The Fund also uses enhanced income strategies by engaging in dividend capture trading; option overwriting; and realization of gains on the sale of securities, dividend growth, and currency forwards. There is no assurance that the Fund will achieve its investment objectives. Under normal market conditions, the Fund will invest: (1) at most 60% of its net assets in securities of U.S. issuers; (2) at least 40% of its net assets in securities of non-U.S. issuers, unless market conditions are not deemed favorable by the Manager, in which case, the Fund would invest at least 30% of its net assets in securities of non-U.S. issuers; and (3) up to 25% of its net assets in securities issued by real estate companies (including real estate investment trusts and real estate industry operating companies). In addition, the Fund utilizes leveraging techniques in an attempt to obtain higher return for the Fund. The Fund has implemented a managed distribution policy. Under the policy, the Fund is managed with a goal of generating as much of the distribution as possible from net investment income and short-term capital gains. The balance of the distribution will then come from long-term capital gains to the extent permtted, and if necessary, a return of capital. A return of capital may occur for example, when some or all of the money that you invested in the Fund is paid back to you. A return of capital distribution does not necessarily reflect the Fund's investment performance and should not be confused with 'yield' or 'income'. Even though the Fund may realize current year capital gains, such gains may be offset, in whole or in part, by the Fund's capital loss carryovers from prior years.



Under the Fund's managed distribution policy, the Fund makes monthly distributions to common shareholders at a targeted annual distribution rate of 6.5% of the Fund's average NAV per share. The Fund will calculate the average NAV per share from the previous three full months immediately prior to the distribution based on the number of business days in those three months on which the NAV is calculated. The distribution will be calculated as 6.5% of the prior three month's average NAV per share, divided by 12. The Fund will generally distribute amounts necessary to satisfy the Fund's managed distribution policy and the requirements prescribed by excise tax rules and Subchapter M of the Internal Revenue Code. This distribution methodology is intended to provide shareholders with a consistent, but not guaranteed, income stream and a targeted annual distribution rate and is intended to narrow any discount between the market price and the NAV of the Fund's common shares, but there is no assurance that the policy will be successful in doing so. The methodology for determining monthly distributions under the Fund's managed distribution policy will be reviewed at least annually by the Fund's Board of Trustees, and the Fund will continue to evaluate its distribution in light of ongoing market conditions. You should not draw any conclusions about the Fund's investment performance from the amount of this distribution or from the terms of the Fund's managed distribution policy. The amounts and sources of the Fund's distributions to be reported will be estimates and will not be provided for tax reporting purposes. The actual amounts and sources of the amounts for tax reporting purposes will depend upon the Fund's investment experience during the remainder of its fiscal year and may be subject to changes based on tax regulations. The Fund will send you a Form 1099-DIV for the calendar year that will tell you how to report these distributions for federal income tax purposes.

About Macquarie Investment Management Macquarie Investment Management, a member of Macquarie Group, is a global asset manager with offices in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. As active managers, we prioritize autonomy and accountability at the team level in pursuit of opportunities that matter for clients. Macquarie Investment Management is supported by the resources of Macquarie Group (ASX: MQG; ADR: MQBKY), a global provider of asset management, investment, banking, financial and advisory services. Advisory services are provided by Macquarie Investment Management Business Trust, a registered investment advisor. Macquarie Group refers to Macquarie Group Limited and its subsidiaries and affiliates worldwide. For more information about Delaware Funds by Macquarie, visit delawarefunds.com or call 800 523-1918. Other than Macquarie Bank Limited (MBL), none of the entities referred to in this document are authorized deposit-taking institutions for the purposes of the Banking Act 1959 (Commonwealth of Australia). The obligations of these entities do not represent deposits or other liabilities of MBL, a subsidiary of Macquarie Group Limited and an affiliate of Macquarie Investment Management. MBL does not guarantee or otherwise provide assurance in respect of the obligations of these entities, unless noted otherwise.  2021 Macquarie Management Holdings, Inc. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005434/en/

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[July 02, 2021] Clarios Files Registration Statement with SEC for an Initial Public Offering

Clarios, a world leader in advanced energy storage solutions, today announced that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to a proposed initial public offering of shares of its common stock (the "Common Stock") and series A mandatory convertible preferred stock (the "Mandatory Convertible Preferred Stock"). The number of shares of Common Stock and Mandatory Convertible Preferred Stock to be offered and the price range for the proposed offerings have not yet been determined. Clarios has applied to list its Common Stock and Mandatory Convertible Preferred Stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbols BTRY and BTRY PRA, respectively. BofA Securities and J.P. Morgan are acting as joint lead book-running managers for the offerings and as representatives of the underwriters for the offerings. Barclays, BMO Capital Markets, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Citigroup, HSBC, RBC Capital Markets, Scotiabank, TD Securities, CIBC Capital Markets, and Guggenheim Securities are also serving as book-running managers. Credit Agricole CIB, ING, National Bank of Canada Financial Inc., Natixis, Santander and Siebert Williams Shank are acting as co-managers for the proposed offerings. Each of the proposed offerings will be made only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the preliminary prospectus relating to each offering, when available, may be obtained from: BofA Securities, Attention: Prospectus Department, 200 North College Street, 3rd Floor Charlotte, NC 28255, telephone: 1-800-294-1322 or email: dg.prospectus_requests@bofa.com; or J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Attention: Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717 or by telephone at (866) 803-9204 or by email at prospectus-eq_fi@jpmorganchase.com.



A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC (News - Alert) but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, 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. Any offers, solicitations or offers to buy, or any sales of securities will be made in accordance with the registration requirements of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended ("Securities Act"). This announcement is being issued in accordance with Rule 134 under the Securities Act. Forward-Looking Statements

This news release may contain forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any of these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof. Clarios undertakes no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this news release or to reflect actual outcomes, unless required by law. About Clarios: Clarios is a world leader in advanced energy storage solutions. We partner with our aftermarket and original equipment customers to meet increasing market demand for smarter applications, on a global scale. Our 16,000 employees develop, manufacture and distribute a portfolio of evolving battery technologies for virtually every type of vehicle. Our technologies deliver uniquely sustainable, next-generation performance, and bring reliability, safety and comfort to everyday lives. We add value at every link in the supply chain, ensuring that up to 99% of the materials in our batteries are recovered, recycled and reused, contributing to the progress of the communities we serve and the planet we all share. Clarios is a subsidiary of Brookfield Business Partners. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210702005441/en/

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Here's a peek at Kansas City metro suburban danger and threats that have worsened the decline of the local retail biz . . .



Credit to Fox4 for showing the mugshot whilst another more "progressive" station downplayed the mugshot despite confirmation of the charges . . . Check-it . . .


Just about every social media group and neighborhood surveillance forum in Kansas City is jam packed with residents crying out in vain over rampant gunfire and illegal fireworks.



The 4th of July tradition seems to be increasingly angering locals as the plague concludes.

However . . .

In the aftermath of a cultural shift, homeowner griping confronts increased scrutiny from progressive critics.

A private Midtown FB group has devolved into a blood feud thanks to this well-placed bit of commentary:

"So much privilege apparent in this post. These complaints are really just another excuse to harass young people of color at night. Fireworks are sold by the cartload in the suburbs and in rural areas but your complaints aren't directed at wholesalers. You'd rather target Black and brown children with your frivolous calls to police. Shame on you. All I see is just more . . . oppression and neighborhood associations wanting to enforce systemic racism on the community . . . Your former president said it best. Sad."



Of course this started a productive discussion about rules for fireworks, ordinances and personal responsibility.

Also, I think the two white women embroiled in this online discussion scheduled a fight to the death at a nearby coffee shop.

Even more interestingly and noteworthy . . .

KANSAS CITY CRIME FIGHTER ALONZO WASHINGTON ALLEGES RACISM IN RECENT MSM BLASTS URGING AGAINST ILLEGAL FIREWORKS AND CELEBRATORY GUNFIRE!!!



Credit where it's due and agree or disagree . . . He's not afraid to put his opinion out there and endure the debate . . .

A quote from Mr. Washington's Twitter . . .

"A example of White supremacy & Institutional racism regarding Black & White crimes highlighted by the KC Press, the KCPD & Politicians. They advocate for a White child whos case is solved as they ignore Black kids murder cases that are unsolved!

The mother of Blair Shanahan has done nothing to impact crime or shootings in KCMO. All she has done is take attention away from the murders of Black children cases that need tips. Her daughters case has been solved for years!!!"

Here's a few more resources on the topic as authorities plead with locals to leave fireworks displays to the pros and stop the dangerous cowtown tradition of celebratory gunfire . . . Read more and DON'T GET TOO UPSET given that discussions over race/class/gender incite far greater interest than public safety warnings that are, obviously, habitually ignored . . .

Mother of celebratory gunfire victim urges Kansas Citians not to shoot on Fourth of July KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Ten years after her daughter's death, Michele Shanahan DeMoss still finds it hard to believe her daughter was a victim of celebratory gunfire. "I still am in disbelief that she died as the result of something that didn't need to happen, shouldn't have happened, (was) completely preventable, and senseless," she said Thursday at a press conference with police, city and state officials.

Pregnant mom, 3-year-old facing long recovery after Raytown duplex explosion RAYTOWN, Mo. - A woman and child were badly hurt Monday night when a duplex exploded in Raytown. A man also died in the explosion, now blamed on illegal fireworks. Family said he was 31 years old. Crews have been outside for two days now, investigating and securing the site.

'Your life is not worth that': Illegal fireworks a continuous problem in Kansas City metro One man is dead after an explosion of illegal fireworks in the basement of a duplex in Raytown, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in Kansas City. Three others are in the hospital, including two children.

Fourth of July: Where is it legal to shoot off fireworks in the Kansas City area? KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Fireworks stands are popping up on both sides of the state line now that sales are legal ahead of the Fourth of July holiday. But just because you can buy fireworks in both Kansas and Missouri doesn't mean you can buy or shoot them off in every city in the Kansas City area.

Developing . . .
A pay-for-play political blog doesn't mention it but maybe people aren't satisfied with local parks and trails because they don't want to be murdered by a racist serial killer.



Just a guess.



Here's more local "journalism" that has a far more optimistic view of local life . . .



This year, 4,048 people responded to the 2020-21 survey. Compare the results to those from the 2019-20 survey, and youll notice some dramatic changes.



People are far more interested in the Health Department, for example. People are less satisfied with parks and recreation services. And the results dont just get filed away in a dusty drawer  these surveys inform and impact where money is allocated in the future.

Read more . . .


Here are the rules and the "new normal" for life in Kansas City as we, hopefully, are near the conclusion of the pandemic.



Locals can repeatedly knock over an urban core Hardee's and leave jail later in the day . . . But a panty raid targeting politicos is tantamount to treason and will earn stern rebuke.

As always, TKC will never disobey the rules, we just want to know what they are and the penalties associated with getting caught on the wrong side of laws that are obviously in flux.

Also, I might grab some tacos later in the day and clearly payment seems optional.



But I digress . . .



From a lesser blog, here's the latest on a suspect in the CAPITAL INSURRECTION that now comprises half of CNN's content nowadays . . .



"Olathe Proud Boy William Billy Chrestman will remain in jail pending trial on charges related to his alleged involvement in the Capitol insurrection, a federal judge ruled Friday.



"U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly denied Chrestmans request to be released from custody, upholding a previous judges ruling that he was a danger to the community. The Olathe man has been incarcerated since federal agents arrested him on Feb 11.



"Kelly went through a laundry list of Chrestmans alleged actions on the day of the riot that the judge said were captured by dozens of photos and videos. The actions, Kelly said, included Chrestman wielding an ax handle, encouraging the crowd to storm the Capitol and confronting law enforcement, telling an officer that You shoot and Ill take your f------ ass out!



As is his right, the judge chastised the dude and referenced the CAPITOL INSURRECTION as part of the reason for keeping the retired Marine and selfie-enthusiast locked up despite his pleas regarding back pain.



Dont' get it twisted, TKC doesn't have much sympathy for most people in the can and the dude isn't the "Jean Valjean" of Olathe. In fact, MOST DUDES in the clink claim that they don't deserve the punishment.

And so we offer a few more links on this ongoing drama and a date which will live in infamy or at least until midterm elections . . .



Judge denies release of Kansas City-area Proud Boy involved in Jan. 6 Capitol riot KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A federal judge denied a Kansas City-area Proud Boy's request to await his trial outside of jail on Friday. William Chrestman, 47, was charged for his connection to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. In the motion, Chrestman argued several points in why he should be released until his trial date.

'Back pain' didn't stop Proud Boy from threatening police with axe handle during Capitol riot, DOJ says Attorneys for William Chrestman say their client hasn't been able to get proper care while in the D.C. Jail. WASHINGTON - A Kansas Proud Boy charged in the Capitol riot has asked a judge to release him from jail due to chronic back pain - a condition, prosecutors say, which didn't prevent him from allegedly wielding an axe handle against police outside the Capitol.

House to Probe Capitol Riot, Despite Republican Opposition Sharply split along party lines, the House launched a new investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot on Wednesday, approving a special committee to probe the violent attack as police officers who were injured fighting Donald Trump's supporters watched from the gallery above.

House approves select committee to investigate pro-Trump Capitol insurrection in party-line vote The House passed legislation Wednesday that will form a select committee to investigate the violent Jan. 6 riot in which supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol. The measure passed in a 222-190 party-line vote. Only two Republicans, Reps. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., voted in favor of it.

More than a dozen US Capitol rioters have now pleaded guilty | CNN Politics San Antonio loan officer Matthew Mazzocco pleaded guilty Friday to a misdemeanor charge related to the US Capitol insurrection.

Former cop who allegedly attacked police with flagpole during Capitol riots to be released from jail, placed on house arrest A former Marine and New York Police Department officer who allegedly assaulted law enforcement with a metal flagpole during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is being released from jail.

Capitol fence coming down July 8, six months after riot: report The security fence around the perimeter of the US Capitol complex will be removed starting next week, more than six months after the Jan. 6 riot that led to its construction, Fox News reported Thursday. Two rings of fencing were erected after supporters of former President Donald Trump breached the Capitol complex on Jan.

You decide . . .
A Greene County woman has been sentenced to 36 months of supervised probation for her participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
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The Capitol Connection

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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks May 24, 2021, during a news conference at Jones Beach State Park in Wantagh, New York.
The most recent week of data on vaccinations in Connecticut shows the lowest number of shots administered since the start of January as some communities continue to lag behind the rest of the state in vaccine coverage.

For the week ending June 26, 43,591 doses were administered statewide, according to the data published Thursday by the state. The number represents a decline of almost 30 percent from the week before, and a massive drop since vaccinations peaked one week in early April at more than 315,000.

The lower demand for shots comes as over 67 percent of all residents in the state have received at least one dose, according to the Center of Disease Control and Preventions data tracker. A little under 61 percent are fully-vaccinated, according to the CDC metrics.

And statewide, COVID-19 numbers have remained low throughout the late spring and early summer. That trend continued on Thursday with 35 new cases found statewide out of 8,046 tests for a daily positivity rate of 0.43 percent. Hospitalizations for the illness rose by six, bringing the state census of hospitalized cases to 37. One more fatality brought the states death toll to 8,279.

But some communities are still lagging well behind the state average when it comes to vaccination, now three months since Connecticut began offering vaccines to anyone eligible, and two months since the state began rolling back its pandemic-era restrictions.

State data shows vaccinations are lagging particularly in rural communities and with some of the states largest cities.

In Mansfield, a town of about 25,000, less than 35 percent of residents have started vaccination while only around 32 percent are fully vaccinated. The percentage of residents with at least one dose increased by less than a quarter of a percentage point in the past week, the data shows.

In Sterling, Thompson and Hartford, less than 45 percent of residents have initiated vaccination, according to the data.

Communities with large underserved populations also tend to rank lower on the list compared to communities with high vaccination rates. The state has prioritized certain underserved communities for vaccination based on ZIP codes. As of Thursday, 51.3 percent of residents living in those ZIP codes have received at least one shot or more, compared with 63.8 percent in all other ZIP codes.

Meanwhile, some communities in the state are nearing having all of their residents at least partly vaccinated.

In Canaan, a town of a little more than 1,000 people, 98.1 percent have initiated vaccination, according to the states data. Salisbury, Lyme, Old Saybrook and Kent all also report more than 80 percent of residents have received at least one dose.
NEW ORLEANS (AP)  Jimmy Fitzmorris, the affable two-time lieutenant governor who narrowly lost his long-sought-after bids for New Orleans mayor and Louisiana governor, has died. He was 99.

Fitzmorris died Wednesday night, his son-in-law Bruce Clement announced on his Facebook page Thursday.

The contributions made by former Lt. Gov. Jimmy Fitzmorris to Louisiana are too many to be mentioned & too great to be measured, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a fellow Democrat, said in a statement.

Republican Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser said Fitzmorris was a mentor. His ability to unite differing views for a common good is what made him so effective for our state, Nungesser said in a Twitter post.

Fitzmorris' popularity and drive were such that even his opponents sometimes wondered how he missed the political brass ring.

He lost one mayors race by 150 votes and was nudged out of the 1979 runoff for governor by just over 2,000 votes out of the nearly 1 million votes cast  results he unsuccessfully challenged.

Fitzmorris started a career in 1940 as a messenger boy for Kansas City Southern Railroad, and was a vice president by the time he retired in 1972.

He was elected to the New Orleans City Council in 1954 and served for 12 years. He ran twice for mayor and lost the first time by a narrow margin to Victor Schiro in 1965. A 1969 race against Moon Landrieu was not as close.

Fitzmorris bounced back and was elected lieutenant governor in 1971, a job he held for two terms.

While the flashy and popular Gov. Edwin Edwards got the spotlight, Fitzmorris was on the move, seeking new industry and cutting ribbons around the state.

When he first won the office, the lieutenant governors post was a powerful one. The holder of the office also presided over the state Senate. That changed in 1975 when the new constitution ordered that the Senate choose the president from among its members.

In 1979, Fitzmorris decided to make a run for governor in an open race with a field of nine after Edwards was barred from seeking a third consecutive term.

In the nonpartisan primary, Republican Congressman Dave Treen was the leader. Unofficial results put Fitzmorris second, forcing the two into a runoff.

Fitzmorris had edged out fellow Democrat Louis Lambert, then chairman of the public service commission, by about 2,400 votes in the unofficial election night count. Days later, the voting machines were opened and Lambert was ahead of Fitzmorris by about the same margin.

It is extremely difficult for me to believe or accept the idea that I went from a lead of more than 2,300 votes Sunday morning when the vote was first tabulated to a deficit of more than 2,400 votes by Tuesday of the same week, Fitzmorris said.

He filed suit, the first in modern Louisiana history to charge voting irregularities in a governors race. The courts found no irregularities and the runoff went on without Fitzmorris. Treen won and became the states first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

The glad-hander from New Orleans Irish Channel couldnt stay away, accepting a position as an industrial recruiter in the new Treen administration.

My profession is politics and my hobby is people. Thats my life, Fitzmorris said.

For a time, Fitzmorris was targeted by reports of a federal investigation that he received a $10,000 campaign contribution in his race for governor in exchange for the promise of favors. No charges were ever filed.

During the federal corruption trial that was dubbed Brilab in the early 1980s, a tape of New Orleans mob kingpin Carlos Marcello was played to the jury in which Marcello said Fitzmorris would not be any good in a corrupt scheme.

Say, Heres a million. Hell say, Man, get away from me. Please get away,' Marcello, who was convicted, was heard saying.

In 1983, Fitzmorris tried to regain the lieutenant governors job, losing to Bobby Freeman. After that, Fitzmorris became a private consultant and eased out of the spotlight.

Fitzmorris wife, Gloria, died in 1995. The two met during World War II when he was an officer getting a physical checkup in New Orleans. She was a medical technician. He is survived by their daughter, Lisa Clement. Funeral arrangements are pending.
The Fourth of July weekend is supposed to be a time of fun and celebration. But its also a prime time for drunken driving accidents, said Dr. Steven Valassis, chairman of emergency medicine at St. Vincents Medical Center in Bridgeport.

We definitely see more drunk driving accidents in summer and on all the holiday weekends its more prevalent, Valassis said. We want people to enjoy their summer, but we also want them to make good decisions and good choices.

On Thursday, Hartford HealthCare  the health system that St. Vincents is part of  announced the Not One More campaign, designed to prevent drunken driving accidents.

Funded by a $550,000 highway safety grant from the state Department of Transportation, the program  led by HHCs Hartford Hospital  will unite 12 trauma centers from across the state to urge drivers to avoid having just one more alcoholic beverage before driving.

The program was announced during a press conference at Hartford Hospital, which included officials from Hartford Hospital, Hartford HealthCare and some of the other participating trauma centers.

As part of the Not One More campaign, Connecticut drivers will be encouraged to sign an online pledge that they will not drive impaired at NotOneMore.org.

The website will also include personal stories of health care providers and their experiences treating victims of impaired driving, as well resources, such as a blood alcohol content calculator.

The campaign is about working together to improve public health  something everyone has had a lot of experience with of late, said Dr. Jonathan Gates, chief of trauma, and system director of Hartford HealthCares Trauma Network.

If we have learned anything collectively from this COVID-19 pandemic, its that the answer to controlling any outbreak is found in all of us, he said. It really is looking out for one another.

Gates said he realizes that there will always be drinking. The goal of the campaign, he said, is to make sure that people dont get behind the wheel impaired, and that they encourage their friends not to drive after drinking, either.

Alcohol consumption, we understand, is part of everyday life, he said. We get that. But we want you to enjoy it responsibly.

Others who spoke at Thursdays event included Dr. Shea C. Gregg, section chief of the trauma, burns and surgical critical care at Bridgeport Hospital. Gregg is also the chairman of the Connecticut State Trauma Committee. He said he and his colleagues frequently deal with people injured and killed in drunken driving accidents, and hed like to see efforts like Not One More put an end to that.

Trauma surgery is a career path where we dont want more business, he said.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there is typically an increase in drunken driving accidents over the Fourth of July weekend. The NHTSA reports that, from 2015 to 2019, there were 1,339 drivers killed in motor vehicle traffic crashes over the Fourth of July holiday period, and 38 percent of the drivers killed were drunk.

Valassis said he has witnessed the pain that drunken driving accidents can cause, not just to the impaired driver, but also to their families and anybody they might harm while behind the wheel.

If you speak to any first responder; if you speak to anyone who works in an emergency department; if you speak to my trauma colleagues, they can speak to the trauma of drunk driving and how it affects families, he said. You dont want to wake up in the emergency department and realize that youre hurt because of a decision you made. And, then, as you sober up you realize that youve also hurt someone else.

Valassis said the Not One More campaign is a step toward preventing deaths and injuries due to drunken driving. Its about not having one more accident after one more drink, he said.
For decades, the two little grave markers sat side by side in a Mississippi Coast cemetery, identified only as Baby Jane and Baby Jane II.

The infants, both Jane Does, were found on different occasions, in 1982 and 1988, in Jackson County rivers and buried by community members, after investigators found no leads in either case.

Then late last year, investigators were able to identify Baby Jane through DNA testing, almost 40 years after her death. This week, investigators exhumed Baby Jane II from her resting place in Jackson County Memorial Park in Pascagoula, with hopes of finding her true name.

Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell said in a news release that the remains of the infant have been sent to the Mississippi Crime Lab. Once her DNA is collected, investigators hope to use it to build a family tree.

Baby Jane II was found in the Pascagoula River on June 28, 1988, by two men fishing near the wildlife management area in Wade. The child was found tangled in a fishing line.

An autopsy showed that the baby, 3 to 5 weeks old at the time, had died by drowning.

The case has had a devastating impact on the community, even years later.

Gina Marshall was just a young girl at the time, living a couple of miles from where Baby Jane II was found. She remembers crossing the bridge over the Pascagoula River to get to summer school that day. Shortly after she arrived at school, the infant was found.

From that day on, Marshall said, she always had a sickening feeling when crossing the bridge or visiting the river with her family.

"This is something I have carried with me many years, and still to this day tear up over it, she said. I pray they can find her identity.

What made the case more painful is that the baby girl was the second child found in a Jackson County river in a decade.

Baby Jane, an 18-month-old infant, was found on Dec. 5, 1982, floating in the Escatawpa River wearing a pink and white checkered dress and a diaper.

In December 2020, DNA testing finally identified her as Alisha Ann Heinrich. Heinrich had gone missing from the Joplin, Missouri, area around Thanksgiving 1982, along with her 23-year-old mother, Gwendolyn Mae Clemons, according to the Jackson County Sheriff's Department. Clemons was planning to start a new life in Florida.

Clemons is also believed dead but her body has never been found. A man who was traveling with the mother and daughter was a suspect in their disappearance, the Jackson County Sheriffs Department said last year. The man has since died.

Season of Justice Corporation, a Baltimore, Maryland, nonprofit, is covering the cost of the lab work for Baby Jane II. Redgrave Research Forensic Services in Athol, Massachusetts, will attempt to build a profile of the childs family history.

The owners of the Jackson County Memorial Park donated the cost of the babys exhumation.

Marshall said seeing Baby Jane identified has given her hope that DNA testing will be the key to finding out the identity of the second anonymous child.

Its going to be bittersweet, Im sure, she said. The thought of her not having an identity, I think, makes this the saddest. She wasnt a nobody  she belonged somewhere. She would be approximately 33 right now, probably with children of her own, had she been given the chance.

___

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.
Tennessee's first-of-its-kind law that requires businesses and government facilities to post signs if they let transgender people use multiperson public bathrooms of their choice has been hit with another legal challenge.

Mike Curb, founder of Curb Records in Nashville and California's former lieutenant governor, filed the federal lawsuit Wednesday. In the complaint, Curb argues that the law violates his First Amendment rights because he is being forced to use the state's discriminatory message.

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a separate lawsuit arguing similarly that the law illegally requires businesses to communicate a misleading and controversial government-mandated message that they would not otherwise display.

The ACLU suit names the state fire marshal, state codes enforcement director and two district attorneys as defendants. Meanwhile, Curb's suit names Gov. Bill Lee, Attorney General Herbert Slatery and Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk.

A spokesperson for Slatery said his office will represent the state but declined to comment further.

Funk, who is also named in the ACLU lawsuit, has said his office will not promote hate and wont enforce the law.

With the threat of misdemeanor penalties, the law requires that the following sign be posted in bold, uppercase letters outside public multiperson bathrooms, locker rooms or changing rooms wherever transgender people are not prevented from using the facilities of their choice: This facility maintains a policy of allowing the use of restrooms by either biological sex, regardless of the designation on the restroom. Its one of five new Tennessee laws this year that have drawn backlash from LGBTQ advocates.

The law went into effect Thursday. However, it's unclear if and how it will be implemented throughout Tennessee. In June, Republican Senate Speaker Randy McNally told reporters he doesnt think the requirement will be enforced.

The enforcement of that will be at the local level. Well watch and see how that goes, Lee, a Republican, told reporters this week.
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.
Today, the Russian-occupation forces have violated the ceasefire in the Joint Forces Operation area in eastern Ukraine 10 times.

"As of 12:00, July 2, ten ceasefire violations by the Russian-occupation forces were recorded," the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine reports.

The enemy fired 82mm mortars on Ukrainian positions in the area of Zolote-4 (59km west of Luhansk) and Pisky (11km north-west of Donetsk); 120mm mortars  near Hnutove (20km north-east of Mariupol); 122mm artillery, 120mm and 82mm mortars, tripod-mounted man-portable antitank guns  outside Avdiivka (17km north of Donetsk).

Ukrainian troops have not suffered combat losses.

According to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, the command of the Russian Armed Forces is stepping up preparations for the use of divisions and units of the operational group of Russian-occupation forces in the temporarily occupied territory in Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Over the week, the enemy has intensified its preparations for sabotage and reconnaissance activities.

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Germany is doing everything possible for Ukraine not to be hit by the launch of the Nord Stream 2 Russian gas pipeline.

"We reiterate that we were a mediator in the gas transit negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. We ensured alternative gas transit through Ukraine. It is also important to us to try to ensure that Ukraine does not suffer losses due to the lack of transit," German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said during a joint press conference with Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

Maas noted that Germany was negotiating this issue with the United States and Ukraine.

According to the German minister, if economic relations with Russia became impossible, it would complicate the situation in Europe.

"This will lead to China and Russia getting closer. To do so would be not only wrong, it would also pose a threat to our security in Europe. We do not think this is the right strategy," Maas said.

As reported, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed the situation around the Russian gas pipeline on June 23. Maas asserted that Germany had already arranged for an "alternative" agreement for the gas transit through Ukraine to be signed even after the launch of Nord Stream 2.

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The House Committee on Appropriations approved a bill on appropriations for the Department of State, foreign operations, and related programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2022, stipulating that at least $481.5 million should be allocated for the implementation of Ukraine assistance programs.

As the Embassy of Ukraine in the United States posted on Facebook, the U.S. Congress is working to approve aid packages for Ukraine in the 2022 budget.

In particular, the House Committee on Appropriations approved a bill on appropriations for the Department of State, foreign operations, and related programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2022.

The total amount of funds to be allocated for the implementation of Ukraine assistance programs through the Department of State, the United States Agency for International Development, and related programs is at least $481.5 million. The Embassy emphasized that the projected assistance increased by $28.5 million compared to the current year.

"Of these appropriations, $125 million will be allocated for security assistance to Ukraine within the Foreign Military Financing program with an increase of $10 million compared to 2021," the Embassy noted.

In addition, the bill approved by the committee contains provisions on the threat of completion of Nord Stream 2.

Moreover, the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee approved the U.S. Department of Defense appropriations bill for the fiscal year 2022. The bill provides for the allocation of $275 million for security assistance to Ukraine under the Pentagon's Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative

The Embassy added that the committees of the House of Representatives and the Senate are currently drafting the National Defense Authorization Act for the fiscal year 2022.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may veto a law that foresees the restart of the High Qualification Commission of Judges of Ukraine with the crucial role of international experts, due to a conflict with amendments, Verkhovna Rada Chairman Dmytro Razumkov has said.

He said this at a briefing on Friday, July 2, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"Now we have a conflict in the law. Two norms can be interpreted completely differently: either increasing or decreasing the role of international experts. According to the current rules of procedure of the Verkhovna Rada and the Constitution, it is already impossible to correct the adopted law at the parliamentary level so there is a high probability that the president will veto it over this technical issue and it will be returned with the president's veto to the Verkhovna Rada," Razumkov said.

He also noted that if the head of state vetoes law No. 3711-D introducing amendments to the law of Ukraine "On the Judiciary and the Status of Judges" and some laws of Ukraine resuming the work of the High Qualification Commission of Judges of Ukraine, the parliament will also be able to consider it at the next plenary week and "resolve these contradictions."

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The Ministry of Health expects that 2 million doses of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine will be delivered to Ukraine in July.

Minister of Health Viktor Liashko said this at a meeting with journalists on July 1, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"We have agreed with the United States: they promise to deliver 2 million doses of Moderna vaccine to us in the near future under the COVAX Facility," Liashko noted.

He also said that the interchangeability of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines will be studied. This issue was considered at a meeting of the National Technical Expert Group on Immunoprophylaxis.

As reported, Ukraine has already received 5,051,576 doses of COVID-19 vaccines from various manufacturers, including 1,913,316 doses of CoronaVac vaccine, 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca, and 500,760 doses of Pfizer at the expense of the state budget; as well as 1,072,800 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine and 1,064,700 doses of Pfizer vaccine as part of the global COVAX initiative.

Since the beginning of the vaccination campaign, which started on February 24, 2,001,132 people have been vaccinated, of whom 766,483 people received two doses.

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Austria is open to Ukrainian tourists from July 1, the Austrian Embassy in Ukraine has reported.

"Entry from Ukraine is now possible for all travel purposes," the embassy said, commenting on the new rules for entering Austria, which will be in effect from the beginning of July to the end of August.

To enter Austria without prior registration and quarantine, a tourist must provide a certificate of full vaccination against COVID-19. In this case, full immunization should be carried out no earlier than 14 days before entry and no later than 270 days ago.

Travelers must be immunized with the following vaccines: Comirnaty (INN) from BioNtech / Pfizer, Vaxzevria COVID-19 Vaccine from AstraZeneca, Covishield from Serum Institute of India, COVID-19 Vaccine Janssen by Johnson & Johnson, mRNA-1273 Covid-19 Vaccine from Moderna, Sinopharm / BIBP SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine (Vero Cell), Inactivated, and Sinovac.

If a person does not have a certificate of full vaccination, he will still be able to enter Austria - albeit with prior registration and mandatory quarantine.

Earlier, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba said that the Netherlands had become another EU country that opens its borders to vaccinated Ukrainian tourists.

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A resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine on changes to quarantine regulations to combat the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19 comes into force on July 2.

From now on, to cross the state border, foreigners (except for those who have a permanent residence permit in Ukraine) and stateless persons over 12 years of age who have arrived from the Republic of India, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Russian Federation, and the Portuguese Republic, or have been on their territory for at least seven days within the last 14 days are obliged to undergo a rapid test to determine the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus antigen right at checkpoints. In case of a negative result, they will be allowed to enter Ukraine.

In the absence of such a result or refusal to test, a border guard refuses such a person to cross the state border in accordance with Article 14 of the Law of Ukraine "On Border Control".

Citizens of Ukraine, foreigners and stateless persons permanently residing in Ukraine (except for those under 12 years of age) who have arrived in Ukraine from the Republic of India, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Russian Federation, and the Portuguese Republic, or have been on their territory at least seven days within the last 14 days also undergo a rapid test to determine the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus antigen right at checkpoints. In case of a positive result, they are subject to mandatory self-isolation or observation.

The National Police officers accompany the persons subject to observation from the border control zone to the sanitary zone for their further transportation to observation sites or health facilities for their hospitalization.

Sanitary zones are arranged outside the territory of international border crossing points (checkpoints).

The list of countries will be reviewed and updated depending on the epidemic situation.

ish
The Cabinet of Ministers has adopted a resolution introducing COVID certificates in Ukraine, the Ministry of Health has reported.

According to the report, this is a digital document that will confirm the status about vaccination, the negative result of PCR tests and the status of recovery from COVID-19.

"Vaccination is a ticket to return to the usual rhythm of life, without quarantine restrictions and severe disease. At present, anyone can get vaccinated at mass vaccination centers. All vaccination data are entered into the electronic health care system. Therefore, when a person has completed the COVID-19 immunization course, in particular after receiving two doses of the vaccine, it will be possible to generate a vaccination certificate in the Diia application or on the Diia portal, and in the future, it can also be obtained from a doctor," said Minister of Health Viktor Liashko.

The Ministry of Health stressed that Ukraine was one of the first countries to start communicating with the EU team on the introduction of COVID certificates. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, in cooperation with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Finance, is holding talks with countries on the mutual recognition of international certificates.

The ministry also recalled that on July 1, the Ministry of Digital Transformation and partners launched the beta testing of COVID certificates. People who have already received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in Ukraine can join the testing. About 10,000 users have already registered.

All relevant information for travel of Ukrainian citizens abroad - conditions of entry and transit, contact details of Ukrainian embassies and consulates abroad - is available on the online map of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine tripadvisor.mfa.gov.ua.

The Ministry of Digital Transformation, the Ministry of Health, the National Health Service, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Border Guard Service are jointly involved in the development and technical implementation of COVID certificates. The document is being developed taking into account international requirements  the EU Digital COVID Certificate.

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US Army Colonel Danielle Ngo fled Viet Nam with her family on a US military cargo plane on 29 April 1975, one day before the American military pulled out of Saigon. The US accepted the family as refugees.  UNHCR/Ashley Le

WASHINGTON, D.C.  Danielle Ngo remembers one thing from the day she became a refugee. It was April 29, 1975, a day before the Americans pulled out of Saigon at the end of the United States war in Viet Nam. As the rockets rained down on Tan Son Nhat International Airport, a military transport plane swooped in to evacuate Danielle and others forced to flee the violence engulfing everything around them.

The only thing I remember is my grandfather folding a U.S. one-dollar bill and putting it in my little shirt pocket, said Danielle, who was just three-years-old at the time. And [that] it was pretty neat that I was getting something that was foreign.

The other details Danielle has come from her mother. The back of the aircraft opened and someone told them to rush in and to push equipment off so that more people could fit. Danielles mother believes they were the last Vietnamese to escape with the military from the airport that day.

Every little act of kindness will be remembered (Ashley Le, producer, camera, editor)

Growing up, Danielle wanted to join the US military. While studying at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, she enrolled in nearby Boston Universitys Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) programme (after completing a ROTC programme, American students can become officers in the US armed services). Now Danielle serves as a colonel in the US Army working as an executive officer for the armys inspector general based at the US Department of Defense outside Washington, D.C.

I knew I was going to give back and I signed up for the army because my mother said it was the army that rescued us, Danielle said, although as she got older she realized the irony.

"I am here as a defender of the freedoms and liberties that the United States gives to its people."

In order to be a good planner, a good strategic planner, you have to understand history. And so of course I've delved into the history of the Viet Nam War and I have my opinion, she said.

But at the end of the day, I am here as a defender of the freedoms and liberties that the United States gives to its people. And so that's what I focus on. I focus on understanding the lessons learned of the past, using it in my everyday job and advising.

After the withdrawal of US troops from Viet Nam, the Americans helped resettle more than 140,000 Vietnamese to the US. Over the next 20 years, up to 3 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians would be forced to flee violence in the region. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, worked closely with governments during that time to help the refugees reach safety.

After escaping Viet Nam, Danielle and her family waited for three months on Wake Island, a remote U.S. territory in the Pacific, before the United States admitted them for resettlement.

Once they arrived in the US, they lived in camps in Hawaii and Arkansas and also spent some time in Texas. Finally, Danielles uncle, who was studying on a scholarship at Harvard, sponsored the family and they moved to Massachusetts. People from church reached out to help them settle in and even took the family on holidays to Maine and Vermont, where Danielle remembers running around little colleges and experiencing the fun of being a carefree child.

"Think about compassion."

I really appreciated that they came into our lives, Danielle said. Now that Im older I realize that they truly had a sense of compassion to help families that had nothing.

After struggling to learn English and find work, Danielles mom finally found a job with an agency that helped refugees from the former Czechoslovakia.

Danielle always remembered the effect even small offers of help had on her family. In high school, she started a volunteer group that distributed food to homeless shelters. In her work in conflict zones, such as Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, she has seen peoples lives upended by violence and has thought a lot about how to help people both during and after conflict. She said empathy is the key to helping refugees and others displaced by war, conflict or persecution.

Every little act of kindness will be remembered, she said. Think about compassion, because they might have nothing. Its about humanity.
Alimi Abali (left) sits in front of his family's home in Forkoloum camp near Lake Chad.  UNHCR/Noemie Lehouelleur

Six years, nine months. Alimi Abali, a lean 52-year-old, does not hesitate when asked how long he and his family have been living in Forkoloum camp, home to 50,000 internally displaced people on the banks of Lake Chad.

Alimi may have built a new life for himself here, but he remains nostalgic for the one he left behind.

He fled to the camp with his three wives and 11 children after a sudden, violent attack on his home village. Boko Haram attacked us one night when the whole village was gathered for festivities. They shot everyone. Children were abducted. Some of my brothers died. Their wives and children ran away with us, he said.

Seven of his relatives were killed that night, while 13 of his nieces and nephews were kidnapped.

When they first came to Forkoloum seven years ago, the camp was much smaller. Today, the site stretches as far as the eye can see. When we arrived, we were like strangers here. We slept under the trees, Alimi said.

Displaced families struggle to rebuild their lives (Noemie Lehouelleur, camera-producer; Edith Champagne, producer; Insa Diatta, editor)

Over the intervening years, the family has replicated the home they once had. Several solid circular huts built with reeds from the lake and wooden branches collected in the bush stand in contrast to the makeshift shelters of the most recent arrivals. There is even a chicken coop and a horse that the family uses like a bicycle, for daily travel, Alimi joked.

Here, everyone knows him. People call him "Boulama"  chief in Chadian Arabic. This mark of respect reflects his status as a village leader. Among other things, he is responsible for resolving problems and tensions that arise within the community.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is working in the camp and across the country to provide those who have fled their homes with the means to become self-sufficient. This includes providing cash so they can start businesses, as well as training in business management, and on peaceful co-existence with local communities and issues such as gender-based violence.

Draped in a shimmering pink veil, Alimis wife Yaka Moussa manages their most precious asset: a grocery stall she opened a little less than two years ago. We received some money from UNHCR and with that we bought bulk commodities to resell, she said, indicating basic goods including peanuts, oil, drinks and washing powder.

A general view of Forkoloum camp, home to 50,000 internally displaced Chadians who have fled violent attacks.  UNHCR/Noemie Lehouelleur

This small stall provides for the family's needs. It is thanks to this that we feed, clothe and care for ourselves, explained Alimi. He points to the baby in his wife's arms, Our child was sick. He had to go to the hospital for three days and we were able to pay for it thanks to our business.

Half of Lake Provinces inhabitants  450,000 people  are displaced. Most are internally displaced people (IDPs) from other parts of the region or country, numbering more than 400,000. Alongside them are 30,000 former Chadian refugees who have returned from neighboring countries, often because of rising jihadist threats there. Finally, the region hosts more than 16,000 refugees from Nigeria and Niger. In total, there are 229 sites hosting IDPs and refugees in the area.

Mariama, 25, is a refugee from Nigeria, who arrived at Dar-Es-Salam camp a year ago. She fled with her husband and children after an armed attack in which several of her neighbours were killed. For the moment, I want to stay here because I feel safe. But if stability returns to my country and my village, then I will return, she said.

Inside Chad, the scale and frequency of attacks against civilians by jihadist groups has decreased over the past year, but the threat is still very real. Waves of fresh displacement have taken place since 2015, and the total IDP population in Lake Province has increased by 16 per cent since March 2020, with most of the newly displaced fleeing islands on Lake Chad where jihadist groups remain active.

"Our life is here now."

Many refugees and displaced people seek safety in urban areas, which are better protected by security forces. Their presence has put an added strain on already fragile communities with limited infrastructure. In some areas, populations have doubled in just a few years.

We know today that a large number of displaced people will remain where they are. This socio-economic change must be taken into account in development plans, said Papa Kysma Sylla, UNHCR Representative in Chad.

Back in Forkoloum camp, while Alimi continues to long for his former life, he is focusing his hopes for the more immediate future on opening a second grocery store and ensuring his children get an education. "Our life is here now.
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California State Assembly member Evan Low speaks onstage at the Equality California 2018 Los Angeles Equality Awards at JW Marriott Los Angeles at L.A. LIVE on September 29, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Equality California/TNS)
THE OTHER DAY I mentioned to a guy I know that some Buddhist monks in Nepal are fans of my song Slow Days of Summer, according to their ESL teacher Jennifer who stopped me on the street to tell me, and I said (which is the truth) that I felt enormously honored, whereupon the guy said that 
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


(Photo : Clinical vs. Counseling Psychology: What's the Difference?)

Psychology is a lucrative and interesting field that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, will see a growth of 14 percent by 2028.

Scanning the American Psychological Association website, it becomes clear that there are many different branches of psychology, but the ones to which we refer most often are clinical psychology and counseling psychology.

What is Clinical Psychology

Clinical psychology, according to the definition found on the APA website, is "continual and comprehensive mental and behavioral health for individuals and families; consultation to agencies and communities; training, education and supervision; and research-based practice."

It has a broad scope, and it is inclusive of other disciplines both inside and outside the realm of psychology to address the particular psychopathological need of the client.

What is Counseling Psychology

Again, from the APA website, counseling psychology " focuses on how people function both personally and in their relationships at all ages."

It looks at concerns people have regarding stress, anxiety, learning disabilities, autism, and other issues. These professionals also provide psychological assessments and evaluations, make diagnoses and provide direct treatment.

How they Originated

Both branches of psychology evolved during the late 19th century. The word "evolved" is appropriate because psychology has existed since the time of the early Greeks. It was viewed as an outcropping of philosophy but became a distinct science in the 1860s.

The First Clinicians

The first emphases of the discipline were in experimental psychology, and many differing views arose. Eventually, the idea of applying the theories emerged.

The first psychologists worked in clinics that offered assessment and treatment of things such as learning difficulties and mental illness. Psychologists began to offer psychotherapy, which was a field formerly only approached by psychiatrists.

Counseling Psychology Emerges

During this era, industrialization was changing society. People wanted to know what professions or jobs were suited to them, employers wanted to know what character traits made good employees and everyone wanted to know what constitutes a good workplace environment.

This was the time of workplace reformation. Children were among those in the workforce who labored long hours in dangerous conditions. Psychology, especially counseling psychology, played a big role in changing the face of labor conditions.

Word Origins

A quick trick to keep the branches of psychology separate is to look at the origins of the terms clinical and counseling. The word "clinical" comes from an ancient Greek word "kline" which means to lie down.

It refers to the treatment of sick people, in other words, bedside practice. Clinical psychologists treat people with psychopathologies. Counseling comes from the Latin "counsulere," which means to advise. This especially applied to vocational counselors.

World War II

After WWII, returning veterans struggled with many issues. Clinical psychologists addressed their psychological needs, such as PTSD.

Counseling psychologists were more involved in helping them readjust to society by helping with employment and housing, among other things. The two branches became more specialized.

Interestingly, today the fields are growing closer again. There is much overlap in their practice, and the educational programs are similar. The main difference seems to be that clinical psychology stresses psychopathology and training while counseling psychology is holistic and includes many other disciplines.

To find out how to become a clinical psychologist, look at degree programs and study further on the fascinating profession of psychology.
In This Installment of Access the Experts

School of Interdisciplinary Informatics Associate Professor Dario Ghersi, Ph.D., answers the question: How do the police use ancestry DNA databases to solve crimes?

About Ghersi

An expert in bioinformatics related fields, Ghersi holds research interests in cancer genomics, structural bioinformatics, and small molecule bioinformatics.

He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University from 2010 to 2014, where he worked on large-scale genome sequencing data. In 2011 he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the American-Italian Cancer Foundation. He joined the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 2014 as an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Interdisciplinary Informatics, and currently serves as the bioinformatics program curriculum chair.
Bucharest, July 2 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 2nd Jul, 2021 ) :A worker at Romania's largest oil refinery has been killed and five others injured in an explosion there Friday, emergency services told AFP.

The explosion happened at the Petromidia refinery on the Black Sea coast which belongs to the Kazakh KazMunayGas (KMG) group.

It is not yet known what caused the blast.

The injured, one of whom was seriously hurt, were taken to hospital in the city of Constanta.

"An incident occurred on the platform of the Petromidia refinery... whose operations have been stopped as a security measure," the KMG group said in a statement.

A thick column of black smoke could be seen rising from the site after the incident, which is only around 15 kilometres (nine miles) from Mamaia, the country's main coastal resort.

Around 50 firefighters have been dispatched to help tackle the blaze.

Meteorologists say the smoke is mostly being blown out to sea, but authorities have nevertheless urged local residents to keep their windows closed.

The refinery is Romania's largest and was the subject of a dispute between KMG and the Romanian government at the beginning of the 2000s.

In 2016, prosecutors seized the refinery as part of a probe into tax evasion, money laundering and fraud opened in 2006.

The investigation was dropped in 2019.
MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 02nd July, 2021) All US and coalition military personnel have left Afghanistan's largest Bagram air base, handing it to the national army, Fawad Aman, spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, confirmed on Friday.

Earlier in the day, media reported that the last troops of the United States and its partners left the air base outside Kabul, which had been hosting the US forces since 2001, as part of the withdrawal pledge, announced by President Joe Biden in mid-April.

"All Coalition and American troops have departed Bagram Air Base last night.

The base was handed over to the ANDSF. ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] will protect base and use it to combat terrorism," Aman tweeted.

The US and coalition allies began withdrawing from war-torn Afghanistan 20 years after they launched a large-scale military offensive in the country in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Biden said that it Washington would complete the troop withdrawal by September 11. In late June, media reported that the US could finish it within days, but up to 1,000 troops could remain.
(@FahadShabbir)

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 02nd July, 2021) Russia's Progress MS-17 cargo spacecraft has delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) the equipment for shooting the first feature film in space known by the working title "Challenge," according to documents by Russian state space agency Roscosmos obtained by Sputnik.

The space freighter was launched by the Soyuz-2.

1a carrier rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday and docked to the ISS early on Friday.

The equipment weighs about 13.75 kilograms (31 Pounds), the documents read.

Roscosmos announced last month that the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft would send the 66th mission to the ISS in early October, which would include Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, along with actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko, to shoot the movie.
Hundreds of people were evacuated in western Canada as fires added to the unprecedented heat wave in the region, which for days has been baking in record-breaking temperatures

Vancouver, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 1st Jul, 2021 ) :Hundreds of people were evacuated in western Canada as fires added to the unprecedented heat wave in the region, which for days has been baking in record-breaking temperatures.

The village of Lytton, 250 kilometers (155 miles) northeast of Vancouver, was evacuated on Wednesday night because of a fire that spread quickly.

The fire came a day after the village, in the province of British Columbia, set a Canadian record high temperature on Tuesday of 49.6 degrees Celsius (121 degrees Fahrenheit) "A fire ... is threatening structures and the safety of residents," a statement signed by Mayor Jan Polderman on Wednesday said.

"The fire situation is extremely dangerous right now. Emergency crews are doing everything they can to support the people of Lytton," British Columbia premier John Horgan commented on Twitter.

The evacuation order was extended Wednesday night to residents of about 100 properties north of Lytton.

"An exceptionally strong ridge of high pressure over British Columbia will continue to bring record-breaking temperatures over the next couple of days," Environment Canada said in a bulletin issued early Thursday morning for the Prince George, BC area.

"The duration of this heat wave is concerning as there is little relief at night with elevated overnight temperatures," it added.

On Thursday, the heat wave continued to move eastward into the central Canadian prairies.

In addition to British Columbia, heatwave warnings have been issued for the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and parts of the Northwest Territories, and now northern Ontario.

In addition to Western Canada, the US states of Washington and Oregon, across the border, have also been sweltering under record temperatures this week and several hundred sudden deaths have been reported.
(@FahadShabbir)

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 02nd July, 2021) Moldova expects to sign an agreement with Russia in the coming days to procure the coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V, former Moldovan President Igor Dodon told Sputnik.

Moldova received several batches of the Russian vaccine in April as part of humanitarian assistance.

"I think such an agreement must be signed this week or next week, we are ready to buy these vaccines out of public funds," Dodon said in an interview.

The pandemic is not over yet, so the country needs to prepare for a new wave and protect its population, the politician added.

Moldova's drug watchdog granted a one-year conditional authorization to the Russian vaccine back in February.
CHISINAU (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 02nd July, 2021) After its early parliamentary elections, Moldova should maintain partnership with Russia and China, and be open to dialogue with the United States and the European Union, ex-President Igor Dodon, who co-chairs the electoral bloc of Communists and Socialists, said in an interview with Sputnik.

"If the government is ours [of Communists and Socialists], we will focus on strategic partnership with Russia. We must finally sign an agreement on strategic partnership with China .

.. Based on our national interests, we will be open to interaction with the US, with the EU, with all of our partners," Dodon said.

At the same time, the politician believes if right-wing parties come to power, Moldova will face a "tough anti-Russian rhetoric and a pro-Western course in all directions."

The early parliamentary vote in Moldova is scheduled for July 11, with 22 parties and blocs and one independent candidate set to run in it.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

CHISINAU (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 02nd July, 2021) Moldova's state bodies are filled with foreign agents, so the country needs a regulation to fix it, former President Igor Dodon told Sputnik.

"It is necessary to go into state security, state agencies are packed with foreign agents, so we need a law to sort out non-governmental organizations, counselors' activities, and the president office's funding from external sources," Dodon, co-chairs the bloc of Communists and Socialists, said.

The former president suggested the law should be adopted shortly after early parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for July 11.

Moldova should learn from the experience of Russia and Western European countries in limiting foreign influence on domestic affairs, the politician added, citing Hungary as a positive example.
(@FahadShabbir)

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 02nd July, 2021) Protesters have torn down statues to Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II during an Every Child Matters rally in the Canadian city of Winnipeg, the CBC broadcaster reported.

The rally was held on Thursday, which was also Canada Day. It comes as numerous unmarked child graves have been discovered across Canada on the territory of former residential schools. In the 20th century, indigenous children were forcibly sent to such schools to be assimilated into European Canadian society.

The toppled monument of Queen Victoria stood at a square near the Manitoba legislature. The demonstrators left red handprints on the statue and an inscription saying "We were children once.

Bring them home."

Police arrested one of protesters, using a stun gun against him. According to the broadcaster, the arrested man was possibly angry at those who had toppled the monument to Queen Victoria.

The demonstrators also pulled down a smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth II, who is Canada's head of state.

In 2015, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission established that some 150,000 indigenous minors forcibly went through the assimilation school system from 1883 to 1998. About 3,200 children died in the schools, which were hotspots of various diseases, including tuberculosis.
MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 02nd July, 2021) Russia is drafting an updated version of its concept of collective security in the Persian Gulf and will soon present it to partners, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced on Friday.

"Our friends are showing interest in our long-standing initiative on the concept of collective security in the Gulf area.

Taking into account recent events, we are working on its updated version. In the very near future we will be ready to share it with interested parties," Lavrov said at a press conference after negotiations with Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif Al Zayani.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday received his second dose of the coronavirus vaccine at an Ottawa pharmacy, opting for the Moderna vaccine after receiving the AstraZeneca shot for his first round

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 02nd July, 2021) Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday received his second dose of the coronavirus vaccine at an Ottawa pharmacy, opting for the Moderna vaccine after receiving the AstraZeneca shot for his first round.

The Prime Minister and his spouse, who contracted the novel coronavirus last March, received their first vaccine dose on April 23.

Trudeau appeared to be in good spirits as he received the second inoculation in a mixed-dose schedule. Canada's National Advisory Committee on Immunizations (NACI) recommended last month that those who received the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus shot as the first dose in their vaccination schedule should get vaccinated with a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine for their second dose.

There are two mRNA vaccines currently approved for use in Canada, the ones produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Trudeau had made a show of getting vaccinated with the UK drugmaker's vaccine amid safety fears after a potential link between the AstraZeneca shot and possibly deadly blood clots - vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT) - was discovered.

However, after the link was established and dozens of VITT cases, including six deaths, were reported to Canadian health officials, NACI made its recommendation and AstraZeneca's use in provinces' vaccine rollout plans has largely been curtailed.

The mixed-dose schedule has been met with scepticism by some experts and members of the public, however, NACI says the mixed-dose schedule provides better protection against the disease and reduces the risk of developing VITT.
Valdosta, GA (31601)

Today

Cloudy skies this morning followed by scattered showers and thunderstorms during the afternoon. High 81F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. Winds light and variable.
The Foreign Ministry released a statement detailing the online meeting on Thursday. Apart from discussing regional cooperation and the COVID-19 situation, Prak Sokhonn justified the charging of activists and members of the political opposition as the implementation of the rule of law.



Charges brought before the courts involve criminal and constitutional breach. The defendants have full opportunity to be heard and to disprove the indictment as part of the rights to due process, he added.



Muntarbhorn has also met with the interior, health, social affairs, justice, and veterans affairs ministers, before the presentation of his report on Cambodia at the Human Rights Council.



The special rapporteur on Friday said he discussed a broad array of issues during his meetings, including prison overcrowding, the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and harmonizing the countrys laws with international human rights standards.



I also raised the situation of civic and democratic space in which I encouraged Cambodia to respect the rights to defend human rights and the environment, Muntarbhorn said in an email.



Muntarbhorn added a spirit of mutual respect and openness was expressed during his meetings, calling on the government to implement human rights recommendations it accepted during the Universal Periodic Review process.



Vitit Muntarbhorn is a professor emeritus at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. He has helped the United Nations on a range of rights issues, including LGBTQ, labor, childrens, and sexual rights.



From 2004 to 2010, he was the first U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in North Korea but never entered the country since Pyongyang does not recognize the mandate of the U.N. envoy to observe them.
Prime Minister Hun Sen on Thursday said he was routinely using a Chinese-made drug to shield himself against COVID-19, despite a senior Cambodian health officials warning last week against the use of traditional medicine to protect against the virus.

Hun Sen addressed the nation on Thursday after it reached a record number of daily deaths and Covid-19 cases were reported this week. He said finding the correct medicines, referring to a Chinese traditional medicine he uses, would be instrumental to saving lives.

We made efforts to search for it and we have now found one. That one was used even in UAEs Dubai or in the Middle East. They are just using this Chinese medicine that we have been using, he said.

I am also taking this medicine. Before going out or traveling, I take this medication. Even when I am not sick, I have to take this medication as additional protection.

Hun Sen was likely referring to Lianhua Qingwen, a traditional Chinese medicine currently used as a supplementary treatment for COVID-19. It was used in China during the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and has been recently invoked to treat COVID-19 patients.

The message appears to contradict Health Ministry Secretary of State Or Vandines advice to the Cambodian public to not turn to alternative medicine to stave off the virus.

Beside vaccines, there is no medicine that has been certified as the ones to prevent COVID-19, Or Vandine said on June 24 addressing growing sales of Lianhua Qingwen in the market.

It, in contrast, could affect our health and bodies because we are not sure that we are sick with COVID-19 or not, she added. The medicine that brothers and sisters are buying to use, I can tell, is not a preventive one, offering no protection [against COVID-19].

Or Vandine, who is a trained medical doctor, could not be reached on Thursday to comment on Hun Sens speech. Government Spokesperson Phay Siphan did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

Sek Socheat, an analyst who heads the Mindset Development Organization, said the public could be confused when the head of the government and medical professionals are at odds when it comes to recommending COVID-19 medication and prevention strategies.

The senior officials  both the head of government and leadership of specialized sectors including those in the Health Ministry  should speak in one voice because their cohesive message could enhance confidence, trust, and clarity with regards to risks from the virus they are fighting, Sek Socheat said.

Sek Socheat urged local health officials to consult with the World Health Organization on the safety and effectiveness of any medication used to treat or protect against the disease.

The country has registered 52,350 COVID-19 cases and 660 deaths as of Thursday, almost all of which has been reported since February 20.

Health Minister Mam Bunheng, during a visit to a public hospital in Phnom Penh in late May, attributed the increase in COVID-19 recoveries to Lianhua Qingwen capsules being part of a cocktail of medications given to patients.

Information from the drugs manufacturer, Yiling Pharmaceutical, says that the medication should not be used long-term and that if symptoms do not dissipate in a few days, patients should consult a medical professional. It stated that those with chronic heart, liver, kidney, and hypertension diseases should use the pills only after consulting a doctor and advised against using the drug with other medication.

The Cambodian Health Ministry authorized the sale and use of Lianhua Qingwen on April 27  just four days before the Chinese government donated around 88,000 boxes of the traditional medicine.

Local firm, Dynamic Pharma, claims to be the exclusive importer and distributor of the drug and has donated more than 50,000 boxes of the medicine to the Samdech Techo Voluntary Youth Doctor Association (T.Y.D.A) in June.

In a paper published in the ScienceDirects Complementary Therapies in Medicine journal, Chinese researchers from the Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine found significant efficacy in using Lianhua Qingwen to treat COVID-19 patients.

The clinical application of LQ on the treatment of COVID-19 has significant efficacy in improving clinical symptoms and reducing the rate of clinical change to severe or critical condition, the authors wrote in the paper published on June 19.
President Joe Biden met Wednesday with cabinet and emergency officials and, remotely, with Western governors to discuss the heat wave, wildfires and drought in the West. Each poses a threat in different communities. Idaho rancher is trying to keep his farm alive despite a lack of water.
Solstice Yoga returned to New York Citys Times Square in 2021, after being suspended last year because of the pandemic. The all-day event brought together over two thousand enthusiasts with their yoga mats to the very heart of Times Square. Evgeny Maslov filed this story narrated by Anna Rice.
A proposed law aims to prevent South Africans from obtaining firearm licenses for self-defense. While gun critics say limiting access to guns has proven successful in reducing deaths, some proponents argue that taking guns out of some hands  specifically, womens hands  will deepen what the president has called a second pandemic, of gender-based violence.

South Africas rate of intimate femicide  the killing of women by their partners  is five times the global average, according to the World Health Organization.

And the big driver of that, they argue, is the nations high rate of gun ownership. Thats the argument from South African legislators pushing this bill, that fewer guns in public hands has statistically led to fewer gun deaths.

Gun owners and advocates disagree, and say it matters who is holding the gun. One particularly vocal group consists of women, who say the constant threat of violence calls for self-defense. The nations unacceptably high rate of sexual violence once led Interpol to name the country the rape capital of the world. President Cyril Ramaphosa recently described gender-based violence as the nations second epidemic.

This 33-year-old woman asked us to conceal her identity out of fear for her safety. Thats because in the space of three months, she said, she was raped multiple times, first by a gun-toting home intruder who broke into her house repeatedly and threatened to kill her sleeping brother, and then by the friend she confided in. She says both men had guns and used them to terrorize her.

Now, she wants one, too, and is seeking a license for self-defense.

Because Ill have it with me, I feel like I'll be empowered. And should anything that is life-threatening happen  and obviously, I'll try and get out of the situation  but if I can't, then I'll do what I can to save my life," she said. "It basically could be the dividing line between life and death. And I've been in those, and I feel like I need to take charge and take a stand. I have been failed so many times, and I think it's time to stop blaming other people and think what could what could I do differently to keep myself safe and to keep my life safe. So, I feel like it would help empower me to know that I don't have to give in. If I can't get out of it, then there's a way to disable them from doing what they're trying to do to me or anybody around me at that time.

Her pain was compounded, she said, when her parents blamed her for the assaults. She said she has spent years in therapy and has no desire for revenge.

Lynette Oxley is a licensed firearms dealer in Johannesburg who works with women seeking gun licenses. Shes also an accomplished sport shooter. In 2015, she founded Girls on Fire, a group that represents women who own guns for sport and self-defense.

She says she trains women to think of guns as a deterrent.

If you talk to all of the lady firearm owners that I've spoken to through the years, they say it actually makes you less aggressive, because you're aware that if you do take that step, it's a big step," said Oxley. "It's not something that you actually want to do. So actually, it calms you down. It makes you actually think about scenarios. And the big thing is, get out of this scenario if you can. But ... if you are attacked, then obviously that is the best way of defending yourself against a bigger stronger perpetrator.

But, says researcher Nechama Brodie, who studies gender-based violence, the very valid fears women have cant necessarily be solved with more guns. She pointed to the last time South Africas government tried to restrict gun access in the early 2000s. Studies showed that gun deaths from femicide dropped significantly.

I really do understand, as a woman living in South Africa, how vulnerable you feel," Brodie said. "And how we imagine, because we're told by Hollywood, as well as by gun owner lobbies, that having a firearm on your person is the one thing that's going to make you safe. But the data shows us that firearms make all of us anything but safe, and the most important step that we could take to improve women's safety in South Africa would be to disarm more men, not to arm more women.

Brodie argues that if the goal is to protect women, there are other, less dangerous interventions, like better street lighting, more community safety initiatives and burglar bars on homes.

All of these women agree on the actual problem here: South African girls and women feel unsafe  on the streets and in their homes  every day.

But are guns the answer? Thats the question facing Parliament in coming months.
The South African pharmaceutical company Aspen has begun production of hundreds of millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccine for African countries. To speed up the process, the company is getting a large funding boost from the U.S. government.



Speaking during a virtual press briefing Thursday, Mark Marchick, a top executive for the U.S. International Development Financial Corporation, said Aspen would receive about $712 million to produce vaccine for people in Africa.

"Our consortium of development financing institutions would provide a direct loan to Aspen, among other things, to strengthen their balance sheet with long-term financing, support vaccine production and expand their operations with core operations based in South Africa. This loan will help them increase capacity to support Aspens effort to produce vaccines for the continent this year and next year," Marchik said.



Gayle Smith, the U.S. State Department coordinator for the global COVID-19 response, said the investment will help Africa deal with long-term health issues.

We see this investment as in the short-term a really viable response to the urgent need on the continent for vaccines for COVID and also, importantly, as a long-term investment in the capacity of the continent to increase its own production of this vital goods so there is a greater availability and resilience over time, so its a short-term investment with a long-term vision, Smith said.



It is estimated that the world needs at least 11 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to at least help communities return to normal lives. So far, less than 2% of Africans have received a vaccine.



The need for vaccine has prompted criminals to exploit Africas weak regulatory systems to bring in phony and substandard drugs.



In November, officers from South Africas customs and crime unit seized 2,400 fake COVID-19 vaccine doses. Zambian and Chinese nationals were arrested.



In January of this year Nigerias food and drug administration advised the public to be aware of nefarious players pushing phony vaccines.



Adebayo Alonge, head of RxAll, an organization that fights counterfeit and substandard pharmaceuticals in Africa using artificial intelligence technology, said African governments need systems to efficiently distribute and keep track of the vaccine.



"They can have selected sites across the country where people can go and be vaccinated. People pre-book online or by SMS and make a record of those people who have come and taken the vaccine at those locations, Alonge said.



Aspen, which is based in the city of Durban, is slated to produce 400 million doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Distribution will begin in the next few weeks.


Tigrayan troops retook the capital of Mekelle this week prompting the Ethiopian government to declare an immediate cease-fire in the eight-month-long conflict. But U.S. lawmakers warned Tuesday the cease-fire may be only temporary and will likely not prevent a looming famine.
The World Health Organization (WHO) warned Thursday that the African continent is facing a surging third wave of COVID-19 cases, driven by new and faster variants of the coronavirus that causes it.

During a virtual briefing, WHO Regional Director for Africa Dr. Matshidiso Moeti said new cases have increased by an average of 25 percent in Africa for six straight weeks, to almost 202,000 in the week ending on June 27. She said deaths rose by 15 percent across 38 African countries to nearly 3,000 in the same period.

Moeti said this wave is being driven by more contagious COVID-19 variants, raising the threat to Africa to a whole new level. She said among the 14 African countries now in resurgence, 12 have detected variants of concern, including nine with the Delta variant, originally identified in India.

Meanwhile, she said the Alpha and Beta variants have been reported in 32 and 27 countries respectively.

Moeti said hygiene, social distancing and mask wearing can certainly help slow the spread, but globally, it has been shown that vaccines offer the best path toward ending devastating surges.

Just over 1% of Africans are now fully vaccinated, compared to 11% of people globally, and over 46% of people in the United States and Britain.

Earlier Thursday, in interviews with the Associated Press, African Union Vaccine Envoy Strive Masiyiwa blasted Europe and international suppliers for failing to deliver promised vaccine.

Masiyiwa said that while Europe has promised to sell vaccines to Africa, so far, it has not followed through. He said, The fact of the matter is the EU has vaccine factories. It has vaccine production centers across Europe. Not a single dose, not one vial has left a European factory for Africa.

African CDC Director John Nkengasong said the WHO-managed international vaccine cooperative COVAX had promised to deliver 700 million vaccine doses to Africa by December. But to date, Africa has received just 65 million doses overall and fewer than 50 million doses have arrived through COVAX.

However, both leaders did announce that the first shipments of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, with U.S. support, will begin arriving next week.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press.


President Emmerson Mnangagwa says the late nationalist and former Vice President, Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo, played a critical role in liberating Zimbabwe from white colonial rule.

In a message posted on Twitter, Mnangagwa said,  22 years ago today, Zimbabwe lost a great man. Dr Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo is a hero of the liberation struggle, a man of the people, and a visionary who built a better Zimbabwe.

Mnangagwa said Nkomo, who was affectionately known as Father Zimbabwe, wanted a peaceful nation.

Every day we strive to continue your legacy of unity, love, and peace, he said.

Nkomo spearheaded the liberation movement from the 1960s when he was a member of one of the largest labor unions in Rhodesia.

In a statement, the Joshua Nkomo Legacy Restoration Project Trust (JNLRPT), which stands for promoting and sustaining Nkomos legacy, said the late vice president was one of Africas greatest sons.

It's been 22 years since the departure of this great leader and we are yet to accomplish his dream of achieving a nation. Divisional narratives are tearing this society further apart, we are now drifting away from each other and from one another. Political parties are mushrooming every day in the name of democracy even though we are yet to define our own democracy in line with our own values. Sadly, we all want to lead and no one is willing to follow hence our tragedy.

"There can only be one person as a national leader at a given time and all of us will always have a role to play all the time. We have become vulnerable to all forms of abuse due to our submission to divisional agendas. We ought to stand together in order to remain strong and focussed on the main goal of building a nation. A country without a nation cannot prosper. Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo and his compatriots laid the foundation for us to build from but it is sad that forty one years after independence we still can't find each other and as a result, we seem to have adopted hate as our ideology.

The Trust noted that as long as people continue to hate each other, prosperity will remain a pipeline dream.

It is not a secret that our country has an ugly past characterized by killings, torture, rape and many other forms of human rights violations and injustices. All those are situations which could have been avoided if we had a nation, the time has come for us to leak our wounds and soldier on, the time has come now for us to pull each other up and start building bridges that would allow us to work together and defeat divisional agendas. Let us begin to talk about how we can work, push and pull towards in one direction as a people together.

If we can't do it for ourselves we ought to do it for the next generation and many more to come. Divided we fall and United we stand, is a common phrase which has unfortunately been reduced to a mere slogan yet it remains key in our endeavours to create a prosperous society that embraces and celebrates diversity. Let us set our ideological differences aside and begin to acknowledge those little things that bring us together, we must humble ourselves and allow unity to peacefully prevail. We need unity today in order to rise above all our fears and challenges - we have a nation to build and it can only be possible through adopting a tolerant stance that is capable of collecting different views and mould them into one progressive way forward.

The Joshua Nkomo Legacy Restoration Project Trust, said it remains committed in working with all progressive bodies in advancing the social, economic and political struggle.

We wish to encourage young people to stand focused towards the main goal of building their future and shun substance abuse and all other social evils that seek to reduce them into economic and political observers. Young people must rise and be counted in all the decision making processes because they are the current and the future of this country.

Nkomo became the Home Affairs Minister when Zimbabwe attained its independence from British rule in 1980 but was sacked by the Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, who claimed that Father Zimbabwe was plotting a coup. Nkomo denied any wrong doing.

According to the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP), Mugabe deployed a crack military unit in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces soon after the sacking of Nkomo, claiming that some dissidents were causing havoc in the two PF Zapu strongholds.

In a detailed report written by CCJP indicated that at least 20,000 people in the two regions were killed by the army unit, the Fifth Brigade, notoriously known as Gukurahundi, which had the backing of Mugabes government.

A few years later Mugabe called the massacres a moment of madness. Mnangagwa was in the state security apparatus when the atrocities were committed. He has distanced himself from the killings. But relatives of the people who died claim that Mnangagwa and his colleagues masterminded the atrocities.

Nkomo fled to Britain in 1983 after his family home in Bulawayo's Pelandaba suburb was attacked by armed men, who were identified by locals and the PF Zapu leadership as state security agents.
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Conclusion of the ecumenical prayer by Francis

Dear brothers and sisters,

We assembled today to pray and reflect, impelled by our deep concern for Lebanon  a country very close to my heart and which I wish to visit  as we see it plunged into a serious crisis. I am grateful to all the participants for having readily accepted the invitation and for their fraternal sharing. Sustained by the prayers of the Holy People of God, in facing this dark situation, we, as pastors, have sought together to be guided by Gods light. And in Gods light, we have seen our own lack of clarity: the mistakes we have made in failing to bear consistent witness to the Gospel, and above all the opportunities we have missed along the path to fraternity, reconciliation and full unity. For all this, we ask forgiveness, and with contrite hearts we pray: Lord, have mercy (Mt 15:22).

This was the plea of the woman from the region of Tyre and Sidon, who in her suffering insistently begged Jesus: Lord, help me (v. 25). Today her plea has become that of an entire people, the disillusioned and weary Lebanese people in need of certainty, hope and peace. With our prayers, we have sought to accompany this plea. Let us not desist, let us not tire of imploring heaven for that peace which men and women find so difficult to build on earth. Let us insistently offer this prayer for the Middle East, and for the beloved country of Lebanon, a treasury of civilization and spirituality that has radiated wisdom and culture down the centuries and bears witness to a singular experience of peaceful coexistence. Lebanon cannot be left prey to the course of events or those who pursue their own unscrupulous interests. It is a small yet great country, but even more, it is a universal message of peace and fraternity arising from the Middle East.

A phrase from the Scriptures resounded among us today, as if in response to our fervent prayer. In a few short words, the Lord declares that he has plans for peace and not for woe (Jer 29:11). Plans for peace and not for woe. In these woeful times, we want to affirm with all our strength that Lebanon is, and must remain, a project of peace. Its vocation is to be a land of tolerance and pluralism, an oasis of fraternity where different religions and confessions meet, where different communities live together, putting the common good before their individual interests. Here I would reiterate how essential it is that those in power choose finally and decisively to work for true peace and not for their own interests. Let there be an end to the few profiting from the sufferings of many! No more letting half-truths continue to frustrate peoples aspirations! (Address at the Conclusion of the Dialogue, Bari, 7 July 2018). Stop using Lebanon and the Middle East for outside interests and profits! The Lebanese people must be given the opportunity to be the architects of a better future in their land, without undue interference.

Plans for peace and not for woe. Dear Lebanese brothers and sisters, even in the most difficult moments over the centuries, you have distinguished yourselves by your resourcefulness and industriousness. Your tall cedars, the symbol of the country, evoke the flourishing treasures of a unique history. They remind us that large branches can only grow from deep roots. May you be inspired by the example of those who have gone before you, who saw in diversity not obstacles but possibilities, and could thus build common foundations. Sink your roots in their dreams of peace. Never more than in recent months have we come to realize that we cannot save ourselves alone or remain indifferent to the problems of others. Therefore, we appeal to all of you. Citizens: do not be discouraged, do not lose heart, find in the roots of your history the hope of a new flowering. Political leaders: in accordance with your responsibilities, may you find urgent and durable solutions to the current economic, social and political crisis, mindful that there can be no peace without justice. Beloved Lebanese of the diaspora: place the best energies and resources at your disposal at the service of your homeland. Members of the international community: through joint efforts, may conditions be created so that the country will not collapse, but embark upon a path of recovery. This will be to everyones advantage.

Plans for peace and not for woe. As Christians, today we wish to renew our commitment to building a future together. For our future will be peaceful only if it is shared. Human relationships cannot be based on the pursuit of partisan interests, privileges and advantages. No, the Christian vision of society arises from the Beatitudes; it is born of meekness and mercy, and it inspires us to imitate in this world Gods own way of acting, for he is a father who desires his children to live in peace. We Christians are called to be sowers of peace and builders of fraternity, not nursing past grudges and regrets, not shirking the responsibilities of the present, but looking instead with hope to the future. We believe that God has shown us but one way: the way of peace. Let us therefore assure our Muslim brothers and sisters, and those of other religions, of our openness and readiness to work together in building fraternity and promoting peace. For peace does not call for winners or losers, but rather for brothers and sisters who, despite the misunderstandings and hurts of the past, are journeying from conflict to unity (Address, Interreligious Meeting, Plain of Ur, 6 March 2021). It is my hope that this day will be followed by concrete initiatives under the aegis of dialogue, of efforts to educate, and of solidarity.

Plans for peace and not for woe. Today we have made our own the hope-filled words of the poet Gibran: beyond the black curtain of the night, there is a dawn that awaits us. Several young people have just given us lighted lamps. The young are themselves lamps burning brightly at his dark hour. Their faces reflect hope for the future. May their voices be heard and heeded, for the countrys rebirth depends on them. May all of us, before making important decisions, learn to look to the hopes and dreams of young people. Let us also look to little children: may their eyes, shining brightly yet brimming with tears, disturb our consciences and guide our decisions. Still other lights are shining on the horizon: they are women. We think of the Mother of us all, who from the mountain of Harissa, looks out upon those who have come to the country from the Mediterranean. Her hands are outstretched towards the sea and towards Beirut, to embrace the hopes of all. Women generate life and hope for everyone. May they be respected, valued and included in decision-making processes in Lebanon. Let us also look to the elderly; they are our roots. Let us look to them and listen to them. May they give us the sense of history, the foundations of the country, to carry forward. They desire to dream once more: may we listen to their voices, so that, in us, their dreams may become prophecy.

To paraphrase the poet once again, let us recognize that there is no other way to come to the dawn than by passing through the night. And in the night of crisis, all of us need to remain united. Together, through honest dialogue and pure intentions, we can bring light where there is darkness. Let us entrust every effort and commitment to Christ, the Prince of Peace, so that, as we have prayed, by the uneclipsed rays of his mercy, darkness will flee, twilight vanish, shadows be dispelled and the night recede (cf. SAINT GREGORY OF NAREK, Book of Lamentations, 41). Brothers and sisters, may the night of conflicts recede before a new dawn of hope. May hostilities cease, disagreements fade away, and Lebanon once more radiate the light of peace.
I am writing further to my letters addressed to the President of the Security Council dated 13 April 2021 (S/2021/354) and 11 June 2021 (S/2021/565) on the question of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).

After a decade of fruitless negotiations, the question of the GERD has, regrettably, evolved into a situation that is causing, as stipulated in Article 34 of the Charter of the United Nations, international friction, the continuation of which could endanger international peace and security. Accordingly, Egypt has elected to bring this matter to the attention of the Security Council pursuant to Article 35 of the Charter and is calling upon the Council, in the light of its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, to consider and take appropriate measures to ensure that the question of the GERD is settled amicably and equitably and in a manner that protects and preserves security and stability in an already fragile region.

Since Ethiopia unilaterally commenced the construction of the GERD in April 2011, in violation of its international legal obligations, including the duties to notify and consult with its downstream co-riparians, Egypt has explored every available avenue to reach a fair, balanced and mutually beneficial agreement on this dam. We have engaged in countless rounds of trilateral talks and endless negotiations, during which regional and international partners sought to facilitate the conclusion of an agreement between our three countries. Unfortunately, however, these efforts have failed due to Ethiopias obstructionism and its persistent policy of seeking to engage Egypt and the Sudan in inefficacious negotiations while it completes the construction of the GERD and continues to unilaterally impound the waters of the Blue Nile to the detriment of the interests of downstream States.

Indeed, as a result of Ethiopias prevarication, we have failed, after years of negotiations, to undertake joint studies on the socioeconomic effects of the GERD and to conduct a comprehensive assessment of its environmental impacts. Nor do Egypt and the Sudan have any independently verified guarantees regarding the safety and structural stability of this mega-dam, which is Africas largest hydropower facility. As detailed in the letter to the President of the Security Council dated 22 June 2021 (S/2021/593), this is especially alarming for the Sudan, which operates several hydropower installations along the Blue Nile, the most important of which is the Roseires Dam, and is equally disconcerting for Egypt, for which ensuring the safety and preserving the resilience and functionality of the High Aswan Dam is a matter of paramount national importance.

Moreover, we have failed to agree on rules to govern the processes of the filling and operation of the GERD. Throughout these negotiations, which have extended for several years, Egypt showed limitless good faith and demonstrated its unswerving political will to reach an equitable agreement on the filling and operation of the GERD that would guarantee Ethiopias ability to expeditiously, efficiently and sustainably generate hydropower, thereby achieving its developmental objectives, while mitigating the adverse effects of this dam and protecting downstream communities in Egypt and the Sudan from its harmful effects.

Ethiopia, however, adopted a policy of intransigence that undermined our collective endeavours to reach an agreement on the GERD. It stymied the efforts exerted by our partners during the negotiations that were facilitated by the United States of America and the World Bank Group and that led to the drafting of a fair, balanced and comprehensive agreement on the filling and operation of the GERD, which Egypt initialled on 28 February 2020 but which Ethiopia rejected. Ethiopia also undermined the African Union-led process that was launched in June 2020. It repeatedly contravened the instructions of the Bureau of the African Union Assembly, which directed the three countries to finalize the text of a legally binding agreement on the filling and operation of the GERD by suggesting that negotiations should be limited to establishing data-sharing mechanisms or drafting non-binding guidelines on the filling of the GERD. Ethiopia also obstructed our attempts to enhance the African Union-led process by objecting to the proposals presented by Egypt and the Sudan to augment the negotiations by inviting our regional and international partners to assist the African Union Chairperson and the three countries in formulating solutions to the outstanding legal and technical issues.

As a result, despite the tireless and highly appreciated efforts of the current African Union Chairperson, the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Felix Tshisekedi, the African Union-led negotiations on the GERD have not been relaunched since the latest ministerial meeting, which was held in Kinshasa on 4 and 5 April 2021. Nor did the meeting of the Bureau of the African Union Assembly that was held on 24 June 2021 consider or adopt any recommendations on reconvening negotiations on the GERD. Accordingly, it has unfortunately become abundantly clear that the African Union-led process does not have, in its current format, the potential to yield an agreement on the GERD.

The failure of our efforts throughout the past decade to reach an agreement on the GERD, including through the African Union-led negotiations that have exhausted a full year, makes it imperative that the international community, acting in concert through the Security Council, intercede in this matter. As I am sure the members of the Council are aware, the flood season of the Blue Nile is due to begin imminently, and Ethiopia has announced that it is determined to continue its unilateral filling of the GERD reservoir regardless of whether an agreement is reached with Egypt and the Sudan. In this regard, it is particularly disturbing that, in its letter addressed to the Security Council dated 23 June 2021, Ethiopia declared that filling and operating the GERD without seeking agreement from Egypt and Sudan is the bare minimum of the exercise of this sovereign prerogative. Once again, this makes it patently clear that Ethiopia lacks the political will to reach an agreement on the GERD and that it is determined to impose a fait accompli on its two downstream co-riparians.

This is a deeply troubling posture that could constitute a threat to international peace and security. The filling and operation of the GERD in the absence of an agreement that safeguards the rights and interests of Egypt and the Sudan is a situation that threatens to inflict significant, if not disastrous, harm on the two downstream States of the Blue Nile. As detailed in the aide-memoire annexed to my letter dated 11 June 2021, the very survival of Egypt, a nation of 100 million people, could be imperilled in the absence of an agreement that regulates the filling and operation of the GERD.

Accordingly, I am writing to inform you of Egypts support for the request made by the Republic of the Sudan in its letter addressed to the President of the Security Council dated 22 June 2021 and to call upon the Council to convene an urgent session on the question of the GERD under the agenda item titled Peace and security in Africa to fulfil its responsibility to maintain international peace and security by considering the appropriate means to ensure the peaceful settlement of this matter. In this regard, Egypt is keen to be invited to participate in this session as stipulated in Article 31 of the Charter and pursuant to rule 37 of the provisional rules of procedure of the Council.
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City leaders from Limestone County, along with Gov. Kay Ivey, came together on Thursday for the grand opening of the Alabama Veterans Museum and Archives.

"I'm extremely proud to see this project come to fruition," Ivey said. "To honor our veterans and active service members who have sacrificed so much."

The city of Athens presented the museum with $100,000 to help with funding in years to come.

Ivey applauded the work done at the museum and acknowledged all the memorabilia dating back to the Revolutionary War.

Ivey spoke about her own special veteran, her father.

"His service had a lasting impact on him," Ivey said.

The event proceeded with the official ribbon-cutting that opened the doors to the completed exhibit.

"This is a collection of memorabilia for all of the wars that have been fought," said Ivey. "It pays tribute to all of those who made the ultimate sacrifice, the goal is to teach our children for generations to come.

"This is just the beginning for this facility."
Thursday night, Huntsville City School board members announced COVID policy changes for the upcoming school year.

One of the biggest changes: masks and face coverings are now optional for students and staff.

One of the certified nurse practitioners of the school system told everyone they've been closely following the trends with COVID and so far, so good.

Even though there are a few changes, they are still updating everyone with new case numbers and will have guidelines in place.

"We're looking forward to a really good school year here at Huntsville City Schools. In particular, one thing many may recognize as we approach the new school year. This school year will feel like many previous school years, in terms of day-to-day operations," said Craig Williams.

With school starting in nearly one month, on August 4th, Huntsville City Schools announced some changes to their COVID policy for the year.

One of the most visible changes: masking is now optional for everyone and desk shields will be taken down.

Craig Williams is the communications coordinator for the school system and he told WAAY-31 why they took their time making these changes.

First, the state of emergency in Alabama will expire on July 6th.

"Second off, we're following all of the guidance we see here in Huntsville, in Madison county, as far as masking goes. We want to remain consistent to make it easy for everybody to understand and follow," said Williams.

Williams told us he hopes kids are excited as they get back to a sense of normalcy, and said even though there are numerous changes to how school will look, they are still keeping COVID as a top priority.

Especially as the Delta variant rages on.

"We still are going to continue monitoring COVID conditions in our schools, we're still going to continue monitoring our case numbers and we're still going to be very aware and on top of what the COVID conditions are here within Huntsville City Schools," he said.

Also added to the list of changes: visitors are now allowed back into the schools and there will be no need for employees to get a temperature checks prior to entering the building.
The Lauderdale County Sheriff's Office says Deputy Wesley Holland was arrested on charges of domestic violence/harassment. Holland turned himself in with his attorney present at the Lauderdale County Sheriff's office on Wednesday.

According to a press release from the Sheriff's Office, Holland was in an argument with the mother of his child on Sunday, June 20. It did not involve physical violence.

Holland is now on paid administrative leave from the sheriff's office and has a $1,000 bond.
As the number of positive COVID-19 cases continue to rise across North Alabama, so does the concern for some of the hospitals in the area.

Huntsville Hospital's only had about 15 Covid patients for the last week, but Vice President of Operations Tracy Doughty said they're worried the numbers are only going to rise because of the Delta variant and the fact that less than 33% of people in Alabama are fully vaccinated.

Thats concerning to us. Were keeping an eye on whats going on across the state and definitely in North Alabama," said Doughty.

Huntsville Hospital was full of coronavirus patients in the summer of 2020. They're still full of patients a year later, but now they're mostly seeing patients from surgeries.

Doughty said Madison County being in the very high-risk category for the virus is worrisome.

Were concerned because were very busy now," he said. "Things have kind of gone back to normal, people getting surgeries, things theyve put off, so the hospital is already very full already, so we dont want a huge outbreak in our community and our hospital be suffering in the process.

The age of most of their COVID patients in 2021 compared to 2020 is another change for Huntsville Hospital.

Now we are seeing younger people who come in and are unvaccinated, theyre sick," said Doughty. "So, that is holding true, not only here but around the country.

He said this proves that young people can still get seriously sick from the virus, and urges everyone to get the vaccine if they're eligible. Especially with the more dangerous and contagious Delta variant.

The virus affects everybody differently, everybody genetic makeup differently, and I wouldnt take the chance by not having the vaccine," said Doughty.

Doughty told WAAY 31 that the Delta variant is definitely in our community, and encourages people to get vaccinated so the hospitals can continue their normal operations.
Bishop Sullivan added to list of clergy with credible accusations of sexual abuse of a minor
Decatur, IL (62521)

Today

Sunshine to start, then a few afternoon clouds. High 89F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear skies. Low 69F. Winds light and variable.
Im a retired college prof who lived in Rome for a decade but was too busy to study the city properly. Now Ive spent a few years learning what I should have known before, and Im publishing the results in a podcast series titled Get Ready for Rome.

The podcasts wont interest you if you just want the basic names and dates, but if youd like to consider a narrative that organizes Romes monuments, works of art, and important moments, thus bringing them into conversations with one another, you might find my efforts engaging.

Its all a labor of love, so everything is free and without advertisements. The podcasts are available on all distributors, including Apple, Amazon, Spotify, and Stitcher. Just search Get Ready for Rome.

There is also an associated website by the same name, and on it is an interactive map of Rome with pins that show the location of the sites addressed by the podcasts.

Find it at https://getreadyforrome.com/podcast/map-of-podcasts/.
Scientists pay the most attention to mutations in the gene that encodes the viruss spike protein, which plays a key role in its entry into cells and is targeted by vaccines. The four variants of concern all carry multiple mutations affecting the spike protein. That raises questions about whether people who have developed antibodies to the regular or wild type strain -- either from a vaccine or from having recovered from Covid -- will be able to fight off the new variants. University of Florida researchers found that for the Covid vaccines being rolled out on a global scale, the alpha strain led to somewhat reduced efficacy compared with the wild strain, while the beta and gamma variants led to considerably lower efficacy, they said in a paper released in May ahead of peer-review, in which research is scrutinized by experts in the same field before publication. As for delta, data from Public Health England indicate that vaccines are less effective at preventing symptomatic disease compared with alpha, especially after only one dose.
Its a patchwork system of commercial facilities, home-based providers and nannies, plus the grandparents, neighbors and friends who fill in the gaps. Child-care assistance for working parents isnt guaranteed in the U.S., as it is in many rich nations, and more than half of Americans, especially in low-income and rural areas, live in child-care deserts, where demand far exceeds supply. Cost is another big issue. Infant care, the most expensive type, exceeds 20% of the median household income in 21 states. Caregivers -- who are mostly women and disproportionately women of color -- earn $12.12 an hour on average for watching children younger than 5, and about half of them rely on public assistance, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. The low earnings lead to higher turnover, further destabilizing the quality of care.
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.
Summer of Soul (. . .Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Hulu) The directorial debut from Ahmir Questlove Thompson features unseen footage from the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, featuring performers Nina Simone, B.B. King and others.
And no matter whether the emergency room or its doctors are part of the insurers network, patients may not be charged more for emergency care or air ambulances than if those services were given by providers in the insurers network. Patients cannot be billed, in other words, for the difference between what the hospital charges and what an insurance company pays for out-of-network care.
A second slide show presentation, which was shared at two meetings with residents in December 2020, said that concrete slabs under an inland section of the buildings grounds  on the opposite side of the building from the portions that later collapsed  had been overstressed since the day the building went up, a problem that was attributed to a design or construction flaw. Necessary repairs to this area would ensure that the structural slab has sufficient capacity to support the code required loads, the presentation said. Without elaboration, it added in a parenthetical note that the original building structural drawings specify inadequate slab reinforcing.
Seek it out. Justin Ahn is doing some fine work on a small stage, and if you havent heard of him before, youre in good company. Just a few years ago, he was working on the Hill and mulling a move to the private sector. A regular at Alfies, the regional Thai restaurant created by chef Alex McCoy, the self-taught Ahn impressed the owner with both his deep thinking about food and cooking and his disarming graciousness  McCoy says Ahn would ask him if he could buy him a drink in his own restaurant. Before long, the two became friends and Ahn volunteered to help out whenever McCoy needed an extra hand with special events, where his work left an impression on professional chefs. Who is this guy Justin Ahn, they wondered. And who flies to London to help someone out  for 36 hours  as Ahn did for his friend when McCoy was invited to showcase his Isaan menu as guest chef at the creative center Carousel?
Were deeply relieved to learn that the injuries to our team members are not life threatening, Beck Vissat, a leader of the development company, wrote in an email. Were currently assessing the situation and the severe storm conditions that have led to this. We will cooperate with the investigative agencies and will get to the bottom of this collapse.
In pre-pandemic times, Ouks completion of the wire harness assembly certificate would have landed him an interview for a full-time job at Boeing; it led to job offers for about 87 percent of students who applied before March 2020, the college said. But the aerospace industry is still struggling under the weight of covid-19 disruptions, and hiring has stalled. Ouk was eventually hired by General Dynamics, an aerospace and defense company, as a senior manufacturing and production operator, where he will be soldering and desoldering military defense equipment. He said he will be able to use his wire harness assembly skills periodically in the new role.
Moerschel also was part of an encrypted Signal chat group discussing gas, hotel logistics and the Quick Reaction Force, the FBI alleged. At 6:35 a.m. on Jan. 7, according to the FBI, he responded to another user, We have your bag, We will leave it with Kane at the QRF. We are en route there now, and Anyone else leave anything in the white van? We can leave it for you at QRF.
We need to study that  We need to know exactly how far we should go or not go with respect to disclosure requirements, Letter said. And that depends on our ability to find out how does someone like former president Trump, was he hiding things? How did he go about it? What was the extent of it, and can we fix it?
In 1968, Ms. Martinez moved to New Mexico, where she took up the cause of Chicanos, or U.S.-born people of Mexican heritage who wished to maintain a distinct culture of their own. (The feminine form of the term is Chicana.) She helped found and edit a bilingual newspaper, El Grito del Norte (The Cry of the North), which became an important voice in the Chicano movement. She established a Marxist collective in Albuquerque and helped lead protest marches for the rights of workers and women. She joined American Indian demonstrators at Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973, when they occupied several buildings on the Pine Ridge reservation and were confronted by federal law enforcement officers.
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We come down here every Sunday, said Jarrett Thompson, 42, a teacher from Upper Marlboro, Md., smiling down at his son, Jayce, 6, who gave him a big smile back as they watched cars zip and flip around the RFK lot. A newcomer to RC, Thompson and son worked together to build the cars, paint them and prepare them to race. They now have five. Winning would be nice, but the reward, Thompson said, is finding something the two of them like to do together and finding others who share their interest.
The Associated Press reported Thursday that McAuliffe once held several hundred thousand dollars worth of investments in a Carlyle private equity fund, but the most recent filings show no current holdings. McAuliffe campaign spokeswoman Christina Freundlich said Friday that McAuliffe is now only a minimal investor, with a stake worth less than the $5,000 reporting threshold. She emphasized that McAuliffe was a passive investor, with no say in Carlyles business of buying and selling companies.
But the comfort of a ban on whatever conservatives imagine critical race theory to be will further deny students and scholars the chance to understand the past. The massacre in Tulsa a century ago is just one telling example of how the convergence of law, institutions and individuals enabled diabolical attacks on American citizens. Examining Tulsa through the prism of the real critical race theory, which Ive been a leading scholar in developing, would involve unearthing the conditions that allowed White institutions and leaders of the time to mobilize the law to set a massacre of hundreds in motion, and uncovering the long-term consequences. The legal dimensions would include the formal deputizing and arming of White citizens, the rounding up and interning of survivors, and the filing of charges against victims for inciting violence. Oklahomas new law and the others around the country would apparently forbid a close look at the massacres legal aftermath  namely, the failure to indict or prosecute anyone. Teachers would be further discouraged from mounting a broader inquiry into the massacres legal backdrop  the laws that corralled Blacks into certain neighborhoods and that shored up the economic segregation of professions. The prohibition of any discussion suggesting that there are contemporary responsibilities shared by society as a whole precludes consideration of what a long-overdue commitment to justice might entail.
Condo and homeowners associations were never designed or empowered to handle such conditions. These associations are essentially on their own, with virtually no support from any level of government. Although most of them operate well most of the time, paying for routine maintenance and repair has always been a challenge, long before climate change made things worse. For years, industry insiders have pointed out that although directors and officers are responsible for maintaining the property, most unit owners are notoriously unwilling to see their housing costs go up now to sock away funds for repairs in the future. Why, they ask, should they pay today so someone else can have a new roof long after theyve moved out? Yet that is precisely what they are expected to do. Somehow, dozens, hundreds or even thousands of owners are supposed to overcome their self-interest and collective-action problems and commit to maintaining their private infrastructure in perpetuity.
The former Notre Dame law professor has had an unprecedented introduction to the court. Because the Supreme Court is closed for pandemic-related reasons, she has never taken the bench with her new colleagues. All hearings were conducted via teleconference, and the justices did not meet in person for their private conferences until all had been vaccinated in the spring.
No one should be forced to express a message or celebrate an event they disagree with, Waggoner said in a statement. A government that can crush someone like Barronelle, who kindly served her gay customer for nearly a decade but simply declined to create art celebrating one sacred ceremony, can use its power to crush any of us regardless of our political ideology or views on important issues like marriage.
The Trump Organizations statement in response to the charges said that no other district attorney would ever think of bringing a criminal prosecution over employee benefits. Not so, countered Rotko. Small companies, including restaurants and family-owned businesses, are routinely charged criminally for state tax violations in New York, he said. Such cases over, say, unpaid sales tax often get resolved in civil proceedings but can be handled criminally depending on the amount of money involved and how pervasive and persistent the tax avoidance is.
A 59 percent majority of Americans believe crime is an extremely or very serious problem in the U.S., according to the Post-ABC poll, an increase from 51 percent in Gallup polling last fall and the highest level since 2017. The sentiment crosses party lines, though worries are higher among Republicans than Democrats. Anxiety about local crime is far lower but has also grown, with 17 percent saying crime in their area is extremely or very serious, up from 10 percent last fall.
Francis invited the religious leaders for a day of prayer that began with a silent meditation at the tomb of the Apostle Peter and was followed by closed-door talks about how to help Lebanon emerge from what the World Bank has described as likely to be one of the worst crises the world has witnessed over the past 150 years.
Pollitz said it could take until well into next year to see how the new system works in real life. Currently millions of surprise bills are sent every year. Even if 90% of them are handled perfectly the first year, you could still have hundreds of thousands that go through to the patient, she said.
In the normal universe, a charge like this of the chief financial officer of a substantial firm and the firm itself for what looks like tax avoidance of about $1 million is significant, said Preet Bharara, the former Southern District of New York prosecutor who was fired by Trump. But in the context of expectation that we were going to be talking about long-standing very substantial large dollar figures related to fraud by people up to and including the former president of the United States, this is not that.
Many of them are unemployed, so they are vulnerable to recruitment. They see little meaning in life. They also feel bullied by the society and start engaging in unhealthy activities, sometimes due to peer pressure, said Anyenda. Recruiters targeting the youths may offer money for a new lifestyle or even support the families to start small businesses.
NCR joins the ranks of approximately 250 other Catholic organizations that have publicly divested from fossil fuels. Faith-based organizations make up 34%, the largest contingent, of institutions that together have funneled more than $14.5 trillion away from the fossil fuel industry, according to Fossil Free, a group that tracks divestment in the energy sector.
Johnson, who voted against the overture, has previously shared his story as a gay atheist kid who experienced a conversion to Jesus in college and has joyfully walked with him in celibacy ever since. His faith hasnt changed his sexuality in the years since he became a Christian, he said, but it has convicted him to live celibately, following the denominations conservative beliefs about sexuality, which reserve sex for between a married man and woman.
Obviously we shot it before all the disaster that happened in America in the last year, but I think thats the genius of James DeMonaco, who has the clairvoyance to see five minutes into the future, Gout said. It is a current film. If some aliens came to Earth, I think it would be one of the 10 films that represent who we are. 
The payback underscores how far Lukashenko is willing to take his battles with the West as he continues to crush opposition at home, where key opposition figures face up to 15 years in jail after closed trials on charges of treason or inciting disorder. It also suggests that Lukashenkos main backers in Moscow have no interest in reining him in.
The changes are likely to please locals and some of the rangers, who have long wanted to see nature lovers rather than swimmers and yachtsmen, more people who are mindful of biodiversity and fewer binge drinkers, more who are interested in the growth patterns of pine trees and fewer who want to jump off tree branches into the sea.
I would like to state that it was not just the assailant who was responsible. There are also many people who have encouraged violence and incited hatred toward society and the country, and have beautified these violent acts, he said Friday.
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.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Cyber security experts, ex-military officials and some politicians are pushing for ransomware gangs to be treated not as hackers but like pirates of the past, in a rethink of how to best counter their growing threat to businesses, industries and society. The shift recognises the way ransomware gangs are used by authoritarian nations to mount sustained attacks on Western businesses and sectors, a new dimension in the ongoing contest between strongmen and democracies. Tim Watts, shadow assistant minister for communications and cyber security, calls ransomware gangs modern-day pirates. He wants aggressive coordination between international law enforcement, targeted sanctions, even cyber operations aimed to disrupt the gangs, in an effort to close the gaps being exploited by cyber criminals. The bulk of the solution here is not technological, but instead policy, regulation, law enforcement, diplomacy and then a bit of offensive cyber, says Watts. Labors assistant spokesman for communications and cybersecurity Tim Watts likened ransomware crews to pirates. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer For years, ransomware attacks were treated as a subset of hacking. The liability of such intrusions was considered a cost of doing business  one whose responsibility sat squarely on the businesss shoulders. But things have changed.

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In a decade, ransomware software has grown from a tool by hackers to extort individuals for hundreds of dollars, to an underworld service-for-hire among criminals to shakedown entire industries for hundreds of millions. Cryptocurrency, meanwhile, has proven an ideal means of paying ransom to shadowy gangs across borders. JBS food processor in Australia and the US was hit by ransomware gang DarkSide in May, leaving about 7000 meat workers out of work until the company could develop a workaround. In the US, a DarkSide ransomware attack halted petrol to the east coast. The Clop ransomware group was reportedly behind the December attack Transport for NSW. All of the gangs are based in Eastern Europe but the Kremlin wont extradite or prosecute these gangs as long as they dont attack Russian interests. The political protection they enjoy allows the growing industry of cyber criminals to operate with impunity, costing businesses as much as $3.4 billion in ransom and downtime in Australia in 2020, cyber security company Emsisoft reports. Meanwhile, the frequency of attacks has increased during the pandemic with hospitals, most recently finding themselves under attack during COVID-19. Loading To date, the most common designation for a hacking group is advanced persistent threat - a term that denotes a sophisticated team, often linked to a government. The famed Russian hacking group Fancy Bear is also known as APT 28. Because of the changing nature of ransomware, now even information security researchers are reconsidering how to view the problem. Cisco Talos Intelligence Group has proposed a new classification for the groups, a term that is taken directly from the pirate days: privateer.

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We believe its time to recognise that a new category can be defined, one where the ransomware syndicates enjoy some kind of protection from governments, even if not intentionally. Pirates with papers Talos proposes the term privateers  to describe actors who benefit either from government decisions to turn a blind eye toward their activities or from more material support, but where the government doesnt necessarily exert direct control over their actions. Watts agrees with privateer designation. A privateer, or a pirate with papers, in the 18th Century worked similarly. They were commissioned by governments to carry out quasi-military activities, according to Britannica, robbing and pillaging all who they crossed  as long as they werent from their sponsoring country. Theres political history too. In the 1700s the Spanish navy dominated the seas until a poorer and weaker Britain came along and overwhelmed it by giving pirates the protection to act on its behalf without official sanction.

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The use of privateers allowed states to project maritime power beyond the capabilities of their regular navies, Britannica writes. Russias President Vladimir Putin, right, and US President Joe Biden have ramped up rhetoric over allegations of cyber attacks. Credit: Today ransomware gangs in Eastern Europe or North Korea extend the power of those countries deep into targeted democracies. With political cover at home, the gangs are free to go after Western business which also serve the political goal of Moscow or Pyongyang, which see themselves at war with democracies and their economic dominance. As technology advances and the cost to business spirals, the economics of the threat become more favourable to the criminals. Robert Potter of Canberra-based cyber security company Internet 2.0 says approaching ransomware gangs as privateers is a good idea especially if it involves intelligence sharing and working directly with law enforcement. His company has already been working with law enforcement to break up ransomware gangs through intelligence sharing. The Australian Federal Polices Cybercrime Operations is expected to form a ransomware taskforce to co-ordinate efforts against the gangs. The Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission will likely have a role in the effort.

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Some experts think Western governments should recast their relationships with business in a way that essentially mirrors the wider links between ransomware gangs and their governments. Loading Retired US Army major general Thomas Ayres wrote last month that todays pirates sail the cyber seas in their search for riches by ransom or theft. Recent destructive hacks have proved that federal action alone cant protect the cyber infrastructure Ayres wrote. He calls for the US government to give companies targeted by ransomware immunity to lawsuits for data loss in exchange for helping mount a rapid response. He wrote last month that the time has come to ...enlist and arm private corporations to defend their interests and those of a country. Such a bold move would essentially convert companies into a fleet to fight off ransomware gangs.

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Uproot moot  thats my advice. Banish it. Pretend the word never existed. Take a scoot, moot! We never loved you. Not really. Okay, maybe for a moment, about 900 years ago, but deep down we knew you were treacherous, a nest of contradictions.

It is a moot point if Richard Roxburgh plays a clever barrister in ABC TVs Rake.

For proof, consider this whole lockdown dilemma. Every city must tweak its regulations in response to a viral outbreak. The question is when? And how? Theres no strict manual when it comes quelling a novel strain. Health officials must debate the pros and cons, the wearing of masks versus none. To shut down or not?

Everything is moot, in other words  open to debate. Presuming thats the nuance youre intending, as moot can mean two things, where each cancels the sense of the other. Either youre suggesting the lockdown needs arguing, or the horse has bolted and debate is in vain. So which is it?

Dictionaries hardly mediate, declaring the two definitions  both sound, both handy, but mutually futile. How can one word denote subject to discussion as well as irrelevant, or beyond discussion? Answer: it cant. Moot, youre a brute.
Suppose youre a 25-year-old young person, male or female. How do you weigh up the risks of catching COVID, and the complications of that, with the risk of having a COVID vaccine, Pfizer or AstraZeneca? First of all, we know that COVID is less severe in young adults and the risk of hospitalisation or death from COVID is much lower than an older person. So, what is needed is a way in which to calculate a risk-benefit ratio thats relevant to you, as a young person. Such a calculator is available on the web from Britain. It was set up by the Oxford group. Its extremely helpful if you live in the UK where disease is common but we need a risk calculator for Australian circumstances. Emma Kong, 23, received the AstraZeneca vaccine the day after the Prime Minister said it would be available for all adults. Credit:Scott McNaughton Several groups are working on just that. The Immunisation Coalition is in discussion with the Oxford group to quickly adapt their instrument to Australia. Watch this space.

Loading So a 25-year-old person has to consider whether to have Pfizer  having to wait for some weeks and months  or getting AZ quite quickly. She/he would take into account that there is an imminent risk of transmission if living in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, but a very low risk in many other parts of Australia. Understandably, she/he would be concerned that there is a risk of clotting syndrome (TTS) in the order of one in 25,000 after the first dose of AstraZeneca. The clot problem would probably require hospitalisation but only about one in 25 people hospitalised might die from it, giving a risk of less than 1 in 500,000 of dying from a clot due to the vaccine. Thats about the same risk as being struck by lightning. The risk of being killed in a motor vehicle accident is much higher, and the risk of getting a serious clot in a 25-year-old woman on the oral contraceptive pill is quite a bit higher. Loading No vaccine or medicine is without some risk, albeit rare, or even very rare. Reports from the US suggest the Pfizer jab may result in a risk of myocarditis/pericarditis for one in 100,000 vaccine recipients, with a higher rate if you are young and male. Also, about one in 100,000 people given an mRNA vaccine is at risk of anaphylaxis but the allergic reaction is most unlikely to cause death.
Most of my critics around sex work have never been sex workers. That is not to say that the observations of the sex industry by academics, politicians, NGOs or police are not valid in shaping public policy around it. Its just that they dont have a lived experience of being a sex worker, which means they can never understand the awful discrimination and the highly secretive and selective nature of the problems that sex workers face every day.

That is why I sought out the opinions of as many sex worker groups and sex workers as I could during the course of the inquiry that the government had tasked me to run, so I could arrive at the best way of decriminalising sex work in Victoria. If you do not listen to the views and the ideas of the people who are at the heart of any industry, i.e. those doing the work, you are wasting your time.

Reason Party MP Fiona Patten led a 2019 parliamentary review of laws governing sex work in Victoria. Credit:Justin McManus

The collective view of all the sex worker groups was that decriminalising the industry was by far the best way to afford them the best occupational health and safety outcomes. It also allowed them to make a true profession out of their work, to pay tax, to demand better conditions and to be more open with their friends and family about what they do. And this is not a new view. In 1985 when regulation of the sex industry was first being investigated by Professor Marcia Neave, the Prostitutes Collective of Victoria was calling for a decriminalisation model, although it wasnt called that at the time. If Victoria does decriminalise sex work this year, it will be a long time in the making.

At a minimum, decriminalisation involves the removal of criminal sanctions on sex work, which unnecessarily criminalises parts of the sex work industry and over-regulates others. I see decriminalisation as removing the criminal laws that apply to consensual adult sex work and regulating the sex work industry under the same laws and regulations that govern other businesses and service providers.
Australians have good reason to be sceptical about a new plan from Scott Morrison to move on from lockdowns, border controls and flight bans.

The Prime Minister calls this a new deal but it is only an agreement in principle and can be changed or forgotten as soon as premiers and chief ministers want to go it alone.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced on Friday the countrys plan to emerge from pandemic restrictions. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Which is what they tend to do these days, whether Morrison likes it or not.

State and territory leaders only saw the four-stage plan on Friday and are in no rush to close the deal, given the country will not be shifting out of the first stage until next year at the earliest.
Leading aged care providers say theres a blind spot in the Commonwealths plan to have all residential aged care workers vaccinated by September and urged national cabinet to extend mandatory vaccinations to home care workers as well.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced on Monday evening that it would become mandatory for all residential aged care workers to have at least one vaccination by September, in order to further protect the vulnerable aged care resident population.

Home care workers are not included in the mandatory vaccination order for aged care staff. Credit:Bloomberg

We will work with the sector to ensure this is done as effectively and as safely as possible, he said at the time.

The largest group of non-government aged care services providers, Catholic Health Australia, said home care workers must be part of the mandatory vaccination program given the spread of the more infectious Delta variant.
One hundred years ago, the Chinese Communist Party was founded by the Comintern, the Soviet-backed organisation that tried to spark the fire of a world revolution by founding, and funding, communist parties across the globe. The CCPs initial membership was less than 60 men, plus Comintern representatives. Today its membership is 91 million, and the party has ruled the Peoples Republic of China with an iron fist since 1949.

On Thursday, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping gave a boilerplate speech to launch the 100th anniversary. On previous anniversaries, foreign heads of state would have been in attendance or sent effusive messages of congratulations. At the 90-year celebrations, the leader of the National Party of Australia, Warren Truss, praised China for having played an ever more positive and constructive role in promoting regional peace, stability and development, participating disaster relief, and advancing international negotiations. New Zealand Prime Minister John Keys congratulatory message promised that New Zealand will seize all opportunities to strengthen the friendly contacts between the two governments and the two peoples and promote bilateral relations of mutual benefit.

Pedestrians watch a screen showing a live news broadcast of Chinese President Xi Jinping speaking at a ceremony marking the centenary of the Chinese Community Party on Thursday. Credit:Bloomberg

This year very few foreign political leaders sent congratulatory statements. Russian leader Vladimir Putin praised the CCPs important and constructive role in solving major international problems, while Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi praised Xis leadership. In 2021, the CCP is internationally isolated  and facing a population it deeply mistrusts. Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, which by World Health Organisation figures has taken the lives of an estimated 3,937,437 people, worldwide, no foreign leaders attended.

Instead of focusing on the success of his party in the lead-up to the 100th anniversary party, Xi Jinping appears to have been obsessed with fears of disloyalty and betrayal. In June, the CCP Central Discipline Commission promoted the story of Gu Shunzhang (1903-1935), 39 members of whose extended family were strangled to death, then buried in pits covered with concrete, after he betrayed his comrades. The CDCs commentary on Gu states: General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasised loyalty to the CCP, never betraying the party. CCP members must be united with the party at all times, unwavering, and unswerving for life.
London: Britain has always struggled with how to immortalise the Peoples Princess  often with spectacularly bad consequences.

Eight years to the day since Diana and her lover Dodi Al-Fayed died in Paris, billionaire Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed unveiled a garish statue of the couple dancing on water beneath the wings of an albatross. The work, titled Innocent Victims, depicted the Princess of Wales in a low-cut dress with a slit up the side and became such a source of ridicule that the stores new Qatari owners decided to get rid of it.

Prince William and Prince Harry take the covers off the new Kensington Palace statue. Credit:Getty Images

In the West Midlands town of Walsall, an Indian granite recreation of Diana was considered so awful the local council wanted nothing to do with it and the piece was eventually placed outside a funeral home. Moss took over years later, earning the statue unfavourable comparisons to Princess Fiona from Shrek.

The Diana Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park found more fans but still had plenty of critics, including Al-Fayed who likened it to a sewer. Writer Vivienne Parry, who knew Diana, called the water fountain less of a national monument to an iconic British figure and more of a power station outflow that has found its way into Hyde Park.
Wreckage from the plane was spotted by the Alaska National Guard in 2012 during a training mission.
More than 40 new U.S. citizens sworn in at Fourth Street Live
A gate is seen at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Friday, June 25, 2021. In 2001 the armies of the world united behind America and Bagram Air Base, barely an hours drive from the Afghan capital Kabul, was chosen as the epicenter of Operation Enduring Freedom, as the assault on the Taliban rulers was dubbed. Its now nearly 20 years later and the last US soldier is soon to depart the base. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)


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Weber State Veterans Services Ranks No. 2 in Nation as Best for Vets'

July 2, 2021

According to a new survey from Military Times, Weber State University ranks No. 2 in the nation for veteran students.

More than 300 schools across the country participated in the Best For Vets: College survey, which included 70 questions about each colleges costs, programs, policies and services that impact military-connected students. Weber State is the only Utah college in the Top 10.

Its the support we get from the university and its Military Outreach for Veterans Education (MOVE) committee, and it is the teamwork we have in the Veterans Services office, explained Charles Chandler, WSU Veterans Services director. You put those two together, and its a catalyst for making sure that veterans are taken care of here at the university because the transition from being in the military into higher education is daunting.

In 2020, 1,275 students received some type of benefit through Weber States Veterans Services.

WSU Veterans Services helps students excel at the university with assistance such as certifying educational benefits for veterans, supporting classroom success and nurturing veterans along the way, so they complete their desired degree or certificate. In addition, the WSU Davis campus in Layton has a dedicated full-time School Certifying Official and tutoring services through Veterans Upward Bound. Veterans are able to receive tutoring, ask for help and hang out or study in the lounge.

Adam Darby is the president of the Student Veterans of America chapter. He served four years on active duty as a Specialist in the Army stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado. He is now a senior pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering, Applied Science & Technology.

I can say with confidence that my experience as a veteran student has been positive, Darby said. I have made some good working relations with not only my professors but also different departments across campus that I interact with as well.

Darby is also a peer mentor for the Veterans Integration To Academic Leadership (VITAL) program, which helps veteran students get mental health treatment for stress, anger, depression, anxiety, sleep problems and PTSD. It also offers academic peer mentoring and referrals to services on and off campus.

VITAL coordinator Robert Brito said, Weber State does whatever it takes to help pave the way for those who have done so much for the country.

We care, Brito said. We all care. Our customer is the veteran student. Students come first, and helping them through the process, working through road blocks is how we help them succeed.

For more information about the Veterans Services office, visit weber.edu/veterans.

For photos and graphics, visit the following links.

wsuucomm.smugmug.com/Press-Release-Photos/2021-Photos/July-2021/i-kBNNdH8/A

wsuucomm.smugmug.com/Press-Release-Photos/2021-Photos/July-2021/i-NL8gNFv/A

Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.
At stop lights or freeway on and off ramps, youve probably seen people holding signs and asking for money. It can be tempting to hand over your spare change, but next time you may want to think twice.
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Today

Warmer and turning more humid later in the day with intervals of clouds and sunshine. Some early morning patchy fog is possible.

Tonight

Partly cloudy.

Tomorrow

Partly sunny, hot, and humid. There might be a stray PM shower or t-storm in spots, mainly north.
GLASTONBURY, CT (WFSB) - Police in Glastonbury are looking for two suspects who shot at a homeowner.

According to police, the pair approached the homeowner's vehicle in her driveway on Talcott Road just before 3 a.m. on Friday.

The homeowner reported that she called out to the suspects.

It was at that point she said they fired two rounds from a gun in her direction.

Police said the rounds struck the front door.

The homeowner was not hurt.

The suspects fled in a vehicle that was describe as a dark-colored sedan driven by a third person.

"You can just come in and out the highway and poke around, and I think thats the problem. That there isnt anything they could do about it, they I mean the law, because of the juvenile law thats in place," said Ed Patterson, who is a neighbor.

Police urged people who witnessed any suspicious activity in the neighborhood or who may have surveillance video to give them a call at 860-652-4268.

Glastonbury leaders, residents send letter to the governor People and town leaders in Glastonbury are growing frustrated with the number of cars getting stolen and broken into in town.

"I have been in the Glastonbury Police Department for the past 20 years, and in the last year, we have had more gun violence incidents that I have seen in the last 19 years," said Glastonbury Police Lt. Corey Davis.

He added that the town has seen an increase in car-related crimes so much so that they are creating a 'vehicle theft team.'

"A few officers from our police department, who are highly trained, who are able to focus on nothing but auto theft. To see if we can get more intelligence, work with other agencies, go out there and identify stolen cars and community outreach," Davis said.

They are also stepping up outreach so people can know whats happening through crime data.

Police are also hoping lawmakers step in since recent crimes include juveniles who are repeated offenders and are eventually released.

It seems like there is really no deterrence for them to stop their behavior, so what we would like to see is some type of programs in place on the judicial level to try and curb this behavior and I think that has to start with the legislation, Davis said.

The Town of Glastonbury is still reeling from a series of crashes from last month that involved stolen vehicles.

It went as far as to send a letter to Gov. Ned Lamont to demand action to punish juveniles it feels have been getting off easy.

On Friday afternoon, Democratic Speaker of the House Matt Ritter and Republican House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora announced a bipartisan meeting of House leaders slated for next Wednesday, July 7, to discuss the ongoing juvenile car theft crisis in the state.

"The Connecticut legislature works best when all parties are open, honest and willing to work together. Republican and Democratic leadership have a long history of bipartisan cooperation to solve difficult issues. Juvenile crime and violence is impacting cities and towns across the state. We will meet this coming Wednesday to continue discussions that began before the 2021 legislative session on comprehensive policies that look at juvenile justice, law enforcement, education, and services for children and families."

In a statement on Friday, Glastonbury Police Chief Marshall Porter said "I will tell you that we have been addressing the issue with our community for some time now, including advisements through newsprint, TV, social media, mailings, and presentations at community and Council meetings. Our officers diligently patrol, having interrupted suspects on many occasions, and will stop to remind people to close their garage doors, lock their cars, not leave them running, etc. We have used bait cars and are assigning a team of officers and detectives, dedicated to preventing and investigating these crimes. We work collaboratively with other agencies, trying to piece together related crimes, and thoroughly investigate those occurring in Glastonbury. We are working towards providing real time, interactive data on these crimes on our web site, similar to what Southington PD has done. Police departments across the state will continue to work hard to protect their communities, but I must stress that Police Chiefs have been warning of this outcome for years. Our work must be complimented by responsible legislation and creation of programs that address dangerous juvenile criminal behavior.
News of the death of former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has hit far differently in Baghdad than in the U.S. capital




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SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  Rescue efforts at the site of a partially collapsed Florida condominium building resumed Thursday evening after a 15-hour pause for safety concerns, and officials said they had started planning for the likely demolition of the remaining structure.

A man prays during a session of evening prayers, known as vespers, dedicated to people impacted by the partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building, at St. Joseph's Catholic Church on Wednesday, June 30, 2021, in Miami Beach, Fla. Church officials said between 18 and 22 of their parishioners were among the scores of people who have been missing since last Thursday's collapse of the oceanfront condominium in adjacent Surfside. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  Rescue efforts at the site of a partially collapsed Florida condominium building resumed Thursday evening after a 15-hour pause for safety concerns, and officials said they had started planning for the likely demolition of the remaining structure.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the decision about the demolition needs to be made "extremely carefully and methodically," considering the potential impact on the pile of debris and the effect on the search-and-rescue operations. An engineer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would likely be weeks before officials schedule the demolition.

The rescue work was halted shortly after 2 a.m. amid concerns about the stability of the part of the tower that still stands. Crews noticed widening cracks and up to a foot of movement in a large column.

Work resumed shortly before 5 p.m. after the site was evaluated by structural engineers, Cava said, describing firefighters as "really, really excited out there."

"We will continue to search feverishly, as we have done all along in the parts of the collapse that we currently have access to," she said.

A dog working with search and rescue personnel barks to alert them after sniffing a spot atop the rubble at the Champlain Towers South condo building, where scores of people remain missing almost a week after it partially collapsed, Wednesday, June 30, 2021, in Surfside, Fla. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Scott Nacheman, a FEMA structures specialist, said operations were paused after sensors detected movement. It was later determined that the building itself had not moved, but there was movement in the debris pile below and in debris on the building "of significant size," Nacheman said Thursday.

Nacheman said additional sensors were added to the site.

"Right now, were in a position where we feel it is safe to continue operations. Weve done so, and monitoring will continue indefinitely until the operations are complete," he said.

A sand sculpture seen near the site of the 12-story oceanfront condo, Champlain Towers South, on Wednesday, June 30, 2021, in Surfside, Fla., seven days after the building collapsed. (Pedro Portal/Miami Herald via AP)

The stoppage had threatened to dim hopes for finding anyone alive in the debris a week after the tower came down. Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said the halt was worrisome since "minutes and hours matter, lives are at stake."

The rescue operations unfolded on the same day that President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited the devastated community.

The collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South beachfront condominium killed at least 18 people and left 145 missing. No one has been rescued since the first hours after the collapse.

Search and rescue teams look for survivors at the 12-story oceanfront condo, Champlain Towers South, on Wednesday, June 30, 2021, in Surfside, Fla., seven days after the building collapsed. (Pedro Portal/Miami Herald via AP)

"This is life and death," Biden said during a briefing. "We can do it, just the simple act of everyone doing what needs to be done, makes a difference."

"Theres gonna be a lot of pain and anxiety and suffering and even the need for psychological help in the days and months that follow," he said. "And so, were not going anywhere."

Crews noticed several expansions in cracks they had been monitoring. They also observed 6 to 12 inches of movement in a large column hanging from the structure "that could fall and cause damage to support columns" in the underground parking garage, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Chief Alan Cominsky said.

A Coast Guard boat patrols alongside a Miami-Dade County police boat, in front of the partially collapsed Champlain Towers South condo building, ahead of a planned visit to the site by President Joe Biden, on Thursday, July 1, 2021, in Surfside, Fla. Search and rescue workers, who have had to contend with summer rainstorms, fires within the debris, and the threat of collapse from the still standing portion of the building, were not visible atop the rubble on Thursday morning, as scores of people remain missing one week after the collapse.(AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

Heavy equipment in the rubble pile caused vibrations, according to Nacheman. Rain has also been entering exposed parts of the building, saturating items and adding weight to the floors.

Peter Milian is a cousin of Marcus Guara, who died along with his wife, Anaely Rodriguez, and their two children, 10-year-old Lucia Guara and 4-year-old Emma Guara. Milian said he understood why the rescue work had to be temporarily halted.

"I mean, theyve done everything they can. But we trust the people that are on the ground. And obviously, theyve got to do whats best for their people, right? Because it is a dangerous situation," he said.

Search and rescue teams look for survivors at the 12-story oceanfront condo, Champlain Towers South, on Wednesday, June 30, 2021, in Surfside, Fla., seven days after the building collapsed. (Pedro Portal/Miami Herald via AP)

During a private meeting with family members, Biden drew on his own experiences with grief to try to comfort them. Biden lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash and decades later lost an adult son to brain cancer.

"I just wish there was something I could do to ease the pain," he said in a video posted on Instagram by Jacqueline Patoka, a woman who was close to a couple and their daughter who are still missing.

Biden spoke of wanting to switch places with a lost or missing loved one. "The waiting, the waiting is unbearable," he said.

The cause of the collapse is under investigation. A 2018 engineering report found that the building's ground-floor pool deck was resting on a concrete slab that had "major structural damage" and needed extensive repairs. The report also found "abundant cracking" of concrete columns, beams and walls in the parking garage.

Just two months before the building came down, the president of its board wrote a letter to residents saying that structural problems identified in the 2018 inspection had "gotten significantly worse" and that major repairs would cost at least $15.5 million. With bids for the work still pending, the building suddenly collapsed last Thursday.

Associated Press writers Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale and Mark Kennedy in New York contributed to this report.
BEIJING (AP)  As the World Health Organization draws up plans for the next phase of its probe of how the coronavirus pandemic started, an increasing number of scientists say the U.N. agency it isnt up to the task and shouldnt be the one to investigate.

FILE - In this Feb. 5, 2020, file photo, Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies program, speaks during a news conference at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. At right is WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. As the World Health Organization draws up plans for the next phase of its probe of how the coronavirus pandemic started, an increasing number of scientists say the U.N. agency it isnt up to the task and shouldnt be the one to investigate. Ryan said that the agency was working out the final details of the next phase of its probe and that because WHO works by persuasion, it lacks the power to compel China to cooperate. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP, File)

BEIJING (AP)  As the World Health Organization draws up plans for the next phase of its probe of how the coronavirus pandemic started, an increasing number of scientists say the U.N. agency it isnt up to the task and shouldnt be the one to investigate.

Numerous experts, some with strong ties to WHO, say that political tensions between the U.S. and China make it impossible for an investigation by the agency to find credible answers.

They say whats needed is a broad, independent analysis closer to what happened in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

The first part of a joint WHO-China study of how COVID-19 started concluded in March that the virus probably jumped to humans from animals and that a lab leak was "extremely unlikely." The next phase might try to examine the first human cases in more detail or pinpoint the animals responsible  possibly bats, perhaps by way of some intermediate creature.

But the idea that the pandemic somehow started in a laboratory  and perhaps involved an engineered virus  has gained traction recently, with President Joe Biden ordering a review of U.S. intelligence within 90 days to assess the possibility.

Earlier this month, WHOs emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan, said that the agency was working out the final details of the next phase of its probe and that because WHO works "by persuasion," it lacks the power to compel China to cooperate.

Some said that is precisely why a WHO-led examination is doomed to fail.

"We will never find the origins relying on the World Health Organization," said Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights at Georgetown University. "For a year and a half, they have been stonewalled by China, and its very clear they wont get to the bottom of it."

Gostin said the U.S. and other countries can either try to piece together what intelligence they have, revise international health laws to give WHO the powers it needs, or create some new entity to investigate.

The first phase of WHOs mission required getting Chinas approval not only for the experts who traveled there but for their entire agenda and the report they ultimately produced.

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, called it a "farce" and said that determining whether the virus jumped from animals or escaped from a lab is more than a scientific question and has political dimensions beyond WHOs expertise.

The closest genetic relative to COVID-19 was previously discovered in a 2012 outbreak, after six miners fell sick with pneumonia after being exposed to infected bats in China's Mojiang mine. In the past year, however, Chinese authorities sealed off the mine and confiscated samples from scientists while ordering locals not to talk to visiting journalists.

Although China initially pushed hard to look for the coronaviruss origins, it pulled back abruptly in early 2020 as the virus overtook the globe. An Associated Press investigation last December found Beijing imposed restrictions on the publication of COVID-19 research, including mandatory review by central government officials.

Jamie Metzl, who sits on a WHO advisory group, has suggested along with colleagues the possibility of an alternative investigation set up by the Group of Seven industrialized nations.

Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University, said the U.S. must be willing to subject its own scientists to a rigorous examination and recognize that they might be just as culpable as China.

"The U.S. was deeply involved in research at the laboratories in Wuhan," Sachs said, referring to U.S. funding of controversial experiments and the search for animal viruses capable of triggering outbreaks.

"The idea that China was behaving badly is already the wrong premise for this investigation to start," he said. "If lab work was somehow responsible (for the pandemic), the likelihood that it was both the U.S. and China working together on a scientific initiative is very high."

____

Cheng reported from London.
LOS ANGELES (AP)  The Los Angeles City Council passed a sweeping anti-camping measure Thursday to remove widespread homeless encampments that have become an eyesore across the city.

FILE - In this June 8, 2021, file photo, a jogger walks past a homeless encampment in the Venice Beach section of Los Angeles. Los Angeles City Council is poised to clamp down on homeless encampments, making it illegal to pitch tents on some sidewalks, beneath overpasses and near parks. The measure being considered Thursday, July 1, 2021, is billed as a humane way to get people off streets and restore access to public spaces. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

LOS ANGELES (AP)  The Los Angeles City Council passed a sweeping anti-camping measure Thursday to remove widespread homeless encampments that have become an eyesore across the city.

The measure was billed as a compassionate approach to get people off streets and restore access to public spaces in the city with nation's second-largest homeless population, though critics said it would criminalize the problem.

I cant think of any reason why we would not unite in support of what the people of Los Angeles want us to do," said Councilman Paul Krekorian, coauthor of the measure. "Restore order to our streets, while also uplifting and providing services to those in need.

Among other limits, the ordinance that passed 13-2 would ban sitting, lying, sleeping or storing personal property that blocks sidewalks, streets and bike lanes or near driveways, fire hydrants, schools, day care centers, libraries, homeless shelters and parks.

It wouldnt be enforced in some locations until someone has turned down an offer of shelter and the council has passed a resolution placing that space off-limits, posting signs and giving two weeks' notice. It could be enforced immediately if a person or tent is blocking handicap access guaranteed under the Americans with Disabilities Act or placing themselves or others in danger such as blocking a loading dock.

The measure, which requires a second vote in late July, replaces a more punitive anti-camping proposal that stalled in a committee. Under the ordinance approved, police would only get involved if there's a crime, and people who resist leaving would be fined rather than arrested.

The majority of callers during a limited public comment period spoke in support of the measure, describing homeless encounters that included assaults, break-ins and one explaining how children walking to school are forced into a busy street to avoid tents crowding sidewalks.

People who opposed the measure, including a couple who used profanity, said it lacked compassion and would criminalize a problem the city has failed to solve.

Pro housing activists rally outside Los Angeles City Hall Thursday morning July 1, 2021. Los Angeles City Council is poised to clamp down on homeless encampments, making it illegal to pitch tents on some sidewalks, beneath overpasses and near parks. The measure being considered Thursday, July 1, 2021, is billed as a humane way to get people off streets and restore access to public spaces. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

The meeting was closed to the public because of coronavirus restrictions, but a group of advocates for the homeless protested outside City Hall.

Pete White of the LA Community Action Network said the measure is loosely written to allow broad interpretation for enforcement and will make most of the city off-limits to people living on the street.

Draconian is definitely the correct word, he said. Its impossible to comply.

White said that an ordinance that limited where people could park RVs and sleep in cars overnight left little more than 5% of streets available for parking.

California is home to more than a quarter of the nations homeless people, according to federal data, and it has reached a crisis point in many cities. There are deep disagreements in how to solve a problem that goes beyond economics and is often complicated by mental illness and addiction issues that require treatment and can make people resistant to accepting shelter.

The city of Los Angeles has an estimated homeless population of more than 40,000, which is second only to New York's.

Encampments have steadily grown over several years and often sprawl entire blocks. They can include barbecues, sofas, recliner chairs and even a shower. Many are crammed with piles of belongings, scavenged junk and covered in tarps.

A federal judge directed the city of LA to offer housing to thousands of homeless people on Skid Row by this fall, though the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals put that on hold.

The appeals court has separately held that cities can't make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the streets when alternative shelter is not available.

The leading Republican candidates seeking to replace Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall election came to LA County this week to announce their plans to address the statewide problem.

Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer called for more shelters, while rival businessman John Cox said people insisting on sleeping on streets should be locked up or forced into treatment.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat, has proposed a right to housing that would require the city to provide shelter to all residents.

While the crisis is widespread across Los Angeles, a dispute about how to solve the problem has become a flashpoint on Venice Beach recently, where an encampment exploded in size during the coronavirus pandemic.

The situation has left residents weary and worried for their safety  and for the wellbeing of those in camps  after several violent incidents. A homeless man was arrested last week in the killing of another homeless man who was bludgeoned in his tent on the beach.

Sheriff Alex Villanueva, whose deputies patrol unincorporated parts of the county, entered city turf with a homeless outreach team to announce a plan to get people into housing by July 4.

His lofty overture, which has moved some people off the boardwalk but is unlikely to meet his goal this weekend, was met with resistance from much of LA's political establishment, particularly Councilman Mike Bonin, whose district includes Venice.

Bonin, who criticized an approach that could lead to jail time if people don't leave, launched his own plan days later. That effort, which has moved 64 people indoors, is being rolled out in several phases into August and promises to eventually provide permanent housing.

Bonin opposed the ordinance Thursday, saying the city doesn't have tens of thousands of beds needed for the homeless and criticizing the plan for not showing where people can sleep.

Bonin, who is recovering from alcohol and drug addiction, disclosed that he lived without a home in his 20s and ended up sleeping on the beach when his car was in the shop or he couldn't crash at a friend's house.

I can't tell you how much turmoil, there is in your heart when the sun is setting and you dont know where you can sleep, Bonin said. I cannot describe how demoralizing and dehumanizing and defeating that experience is when you dont know where youre gonna sleep.

This story has been corrected to reflect that the measure requires a second vote later this month, not next month.
GENEVA (AP)  The World Health Organization said Thursday that any COVID-19 vaccines it has authorized for emergency use should be recognized by countries as they open up their borders to inoculated travelers.

FILE - In this Monday, May 17, 2021 file photo, a passenger of a flight arriving at Faro leaves the airport, outside Faro, in Portugal's southern Algarve region. The World Health Organization said that any COVID-19 vaccines it has authorized for emergency use should be recognized by countries as they open up their borders, in a move that could challenge Western countries to broaden their acceptance of two Chinese vaccines which the U.N. health agency has licensed, but most European and North American countries have not. (AP Photo/Ana Brigida, File)

GENEVA (AP)  The World Health Organization said Thursday that any COVID-19 vaccines it has authorized for emergency use should be recognized by countries as they open up their borders to inoculated travelers.

The move could challenge Western countries to broaden their acceptance of two apparently less effective Chinese vaccines, which the U.N. health agency has licensed but most European and North American countries have not.

In addition to vaccines by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna Inc., AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, the WHO has also given the green light to the two Chinese jabs, made by Sinovac and Sinopharm.

In its aim to restore travel across Europe, the European Union said in May that it would only recognize people as vaccinated if they had received shots licensed by the European Medicines Agency  although its up to individual countries if they wish to let in travelers who have received other vaccines, including Russias Sputnik V.

The EU drug regulator is currently considering licensing China's Sinovac vaccine, but there is no timeline on a decision. It also does not recognize versions of the AstraZeneca vaccine that were made in India, effectively barring travel for people in developing countries who received doses via the U.N.-backed initiative known as COVAX.

FILE - In this file photo dated Saturday, May 15, 2021, empty vials of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine lie in a box during a vaccine campaign at the Vaccine Village in Ebersberg near Munich, Germany. The World Health Organization said that any COVID-19 vaccines it has authorized for emergency use should be recognized by countries as they open up their borders, in a move that could challenge Western countries to broaden their acceptance of two Chinese vaccines which the U.N. health agency has licensed, but most European and North American countries have not. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader, File)

"Any measure that only allows people protected by a subset of WHO-approved vaccines to benefit from the reopening of travel ... would effectively create a two-tier system, further widening the global vaccine divide and exacerbating the inequities we have already seen in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines," a WHO statement said Thursday. "It would negatively impact the growth of economies that are already suffering the most."

The WHO said such moves undermine "confidence in life-saving vaccines that have already been shown to be safe and effective." In its reviews of the two Chinese vaccines, the U.N. health agency said both were found to significantly reduce the risk of hospitalizations and deaths.

The two Chinese shots are "inactivated" vaccines, made with killed coronavirus, whereas the Western-made shots are made with newer technologies that instead target the "spike" protein that coats the surface of the coronavirus.

Although Western countries have largely relied on vaccines made in the U.S. and Europe, such as Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca, many developing countries have used the Chinese-made shots.

Earlier this year, the head of Chinas Center for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged the effectiveness of its home-grown shots was low. Numerous countries that have used millions of doses of the two Chinese shots, including the Seychelles and Bahrain, have seen COVID-19 surges even with relatively high levels of immunization.

Follow all of APs pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
A statue of Queen Victoria at the Manitoba legislature was toppled on Thursday afternoon.

A statue of Queen Victoria at the Manitoba legislature was toppled on Thursday afternoon.

Earlier, the legislative grounds were the final destination of a walk recalling the impact of residential schools.

A large group could be seen pulling the monument from its base. The statue was also coated in red paint and red handprints covered its pedestal base.

First unveiled in 1904, the statue was commissioned in recognition of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The monarch reigned over Canada when treaties were first negotiated with First Nations and the federal government adopted the residential school system as policy.
CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  Australia plans to halve commercial passenger arrivals due to virus risks as parts of the country emerged from lockdowns Friday.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaks to the media during a press conference following a national cabinet meeting at Parliament House in Canberra, Friday, July 2, 2021. Australia announced plans to halve commercial passenger arrivals due to the emerging risk of the COVID-19 delta variant as parts of the country emerged on Friday from lockdown. (Lukas Coch/AAP Image via AP)

CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  Australia plans to halve commercial passenger arrivals due to virus risks as parts of the country emerged from lockdowns Friday.

Australia will reduce its cap on arrivals from 6,000 passengers a week to 3,000 by July 14 to reduce pressure on hotel quarantine, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said after a meeting with state and territory leaders.

Australia already has some of the worlds tightest border restrictions aimed at keeping COVID-19 out of the country. The new restrictions add to obstacles faced by 34,000 Australian citizens and permanent residents stranded overseas and registered with the government as wanting to come home.

The government will charter more airliners to repatriate Australians, but the reduced limit on commercial passenger arrivals could continue until next year.

If medical advice changes between now and then, if medical advice suggests that we can alter that, then of course the National Cabinet has always been receptive to that advice and well continue to monitor that, Morrison told reporters, referring to his decision-making meetings with the state and territory leaders.

We wouldnt want to keep those caps in place any longer than we had to, he added.

Almost half the Australian population locked down since last week due to clusters mostly of the delta variant of the coronavirus that is thought to be more contagious.

Several cities in Queensland state and the Northern Territory came out of lockdown on Friday. The Queensland capital Brisbane and the neighboring Moreton Bay area would remain in lockdown until Saturday after a mother and daughter tested positive in Brisbane.

The biggest cluster is in Sydney where 31 new cases were reported on Friday, the largest daily tally of the current emergency. Sydneys two-week lockdown is due to end on July 9.

Australia has been relatively successful in containing clusters throughout the pandemic, registering fewer than 31,000 cases in a population of 26 million and 910 deaths total.

The higher infection rate of the delta variant has exposed the vulnerability of the Australian population in which, according to government data, only 8% are fully vaccinated.

Morrison said a vaccine would be made available to every Australian who wanted one by the end of the year.

The government has proposed fewer restrictions for vaccinated people, such allowing them to quarantine at home for a week after traveling overseas instead of two weeks in a hotel for the unvaccinated.

A lot of people say: Well, why should I get vaccinated? They go: Theres not much COVID around in Australia. Ive got more chance of, I dont know, getting run over by a car than catching COVID, Morrison said.

Were prisoners of our own success in this. If you get vaccinated, you get to change how we live as a country. You get to change how you live in Australia. And I think this is a very powerful message, he added.

Australia introduced extraordinarily tough border restrictions in March 2020 that prevent Australian citizens and permanent residents from leaving the country as well as foreigners from arriving except under limited circumstances.
OTTAWA - Canada posted a merchandise trade deficit of $1.4 billion in May compared with a surplus in April as imports rose and exports fell.

A Helijet passenger helicopter lifts off from a helipad on the harbour past gantry cranes used to load and unload container ships at the DP World terminal at port, in Vancouver, B.C., Monday, Dec. 28, 2020. Statistics Canada says the country posted a merchandise trade deficit of $1.4 billion in May as imports increased and exports fell. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

OTTAWA - Canada posted a merchandise trade deficit of $1.4 billion in May compared with a surplus in April as imports rose and exports fell.

Statistics Canada said Friday the result followed a revised surplus of $462 million in April compared with an initial reading of a surplus of $594 million.

CIBC senior economist Royce Mendes said economists had expected a second consecutive surplus for the month.

"It was a swing and a miss for Canada's trade data in May," Mendes wrote in a report.

"Still, the rise in real imports, particularly for items like industrial machinery and equipment, suggests that domestic demand continues to increase."

Total imports increased 2.1 per cent to $50.9 billion in May as imports of metal and non-metallic mineral products climbed 17.7 per cent.

Meanwhile, total exports fell 1.6 per cent to $49.5 billion in May.

Exports of consumer goods dropped 8.8 per cent, while exports of motor vehicles and parts fell 5.8 per cent.

Canada's the trade surplus with the United States fell to $6.1 billion in May compared with $6.6 billion in April, while the trade deficit with the rest of the world rose to a record $7.5 billion in May compared with $6.1 billion in April.

Statistics Canada noted the Canadian dollar posted its largest monthly increase against the U.S. dollar since July 2017 as the average value of the Canadian dollar rose 2.4 cents US compared with the average value in April to 82.5 cents US.

When expressed in U.S. dollars, Statistics Canada said imports rose 5.2 per cent in May and exports increased 1.4 per cent.

In volume terms, imports rose 2.5 per cent in May and exports fell 3.1 per cent.

Statistics Canada also reported the international trade in services deficit rose to $384 million in May compared with $303 million in April as service exports fell 0.1 per cent and service imports rose 0.7 per cent.

Canada's combined trade balance for goods and services was a deficit of $1.8 billion in May compared with a surplus of $159 million in April.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 2, 2021.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency rule change that allowed for the sale of a 15% ethanol gasoline blend in the summer months.

FILE - In this April 21, 2020 file photo, ethanol train cars wait outside the Southwest Iowa Renewable Energy plant, an ethanol producer, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. A federal appeals court on Friday, July 2, 2021, threw out a Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency rule change that allowed for the sale of a 15% ethanol gasoline blend in the summer months. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency rule change that allowed for the sale of a 15% ethanol gasoline blend in the summer months.

The decision deals a significant blow to the ethanol industry and corn farmers who grow the crop from which the fuel additive is made. They had anticipated increased ethanol demand through year-round sales of the higher blend.

Most gasoline sold in the U.S. today is blended with 10% ethanol. Corn farmers and ethanol refiners have pushed for the government to allow the widespread sale of a 15% ethanol blend.

The Trump administration made the change to fulfill a campaign promise to Midwest farmers. The EPA under President Donald Trump announced the change in May 2019, ending a summer ban on the E15 blend. Provisions of the Clean Air Act have prohibited the sale of certain fuels with a higher volatility from June 1 through Sept. 15 to limit smog. Congress has allowed 10% ethanol, and the EPA in its 2019 ruling revised the interpretation of the exemption to federal law to include the 15% ethanol blend.

Ethanol supporters contend that using more of the corn-based renewable fuel is better for the environment and helps meet federal climate change goals.

Three judges on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued Friday's decision. They said it's clear from federal law that Congress balanced wide-ranging economic, energy-security, and geopolitical implications and that the wording of the law reflects a compromise, not simply a desire to maximize ethanol production at all costs. They concluded Congress did not intend to allow ethanol blends higher than 10% to be widely sold year-round. They said the EPA overstepped its authority.

The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the trade group for the petroleum industry that challenged the EPA decision, said the court simply followed government's interpretation of the law in effect for 30 years.

There is no ambiguity in statute and the previous administrations reinterpretation overstepped the will of Congress, said AFPM President and CEO Chet Thompson.

The Iowa Corn Growers Association said it will continue to work with the Biden administration, Congress and state officials to maintain consumer access to E15 year-round.

"It does not make sense to reinstate barriers that could inhibit market access to a cleaner-burning fuel choice that combats climate change, said Carl Jardon, a farmer from Randolph, Iowa, and president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association.

The decision is the second major court defeat for the ethanol industry in a week. On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court said some petroleum refiners may exempt themselves from requirements to blend ethanol into the gasoline they produce, further cutting into the amount of ethanol blended into the national fuel supply.

Ethanol supporters could ask the full D.C. Circuit Court to review the decision of the three-judge panel. They also could ask Congress to change the law to allow for year around E15 sales.

The industry is hoping this year's sales will not be curtailed because by the time the court issues its mandate and the EPA is required to comply most of the summer season will have passed.

This is the third summer E15 sales have been allowed and there were indications sales were increasing. Sales jumped 24% in Iowa from 2019 to 2020, surpassing 60.5 million gallons in 2020, the Renewable Fuels Association reported. That increase was despite a 14% drop in the state's overall petroleum consumption from 2019 levels due to fewer people driving because of he coronavirus pandemic.
BUCHAREST (AP)  An explosion at Romania's largest oil refinery outside the port city of Constanta on Friday killed one person and injured at least four, authorities said.

BUCHAREST (AP)  An explosion at Romania's largest oil refinery outside the port city of Constanta on Friday killed one person and injured at least four, authorities said.

Plumes of black smoke could be seen rising from the Navodari Petromidia plant next to the Black Sea, as emergency services airlifted the injured people away for treatment, according to officials.

The refinery operator, Rompetrol Rafinare, said the blaze was later isolated and stabilized.

"Internal and external teams are making efforts to put it out in the shortest time, the company said in a social media post.

The cause of the blast was not immediately clear, but Rompetrol Rafinares general manager Felix Crudu Tesloveanu told media that early investigations suggest a cracked pipe may have caused the blast.

An Interior Ministry statement urged residents at the nearby town of Navodari and other areas in the vicinity to close their windows because of the billowing smoke.

Environment Minister Barna Tanczos wrote online that The explosion can have extremely serious environmental consequences, and that he has cancelled a working trip in order to assist authorities deal with the blast.

"The direction of the smoke is in the opposite direction to the beach and the city  which is why the citizens are safe, the ministry statement said. However, we ask the population to take protective measures by closing (their) windows.

Octavian Berceanu, the head of Romanias Environmental Guard, a government environmental protection agency, told The Associated Press that the environmental fallout from the incident is being monitored.

We dont have proper data right now, Berceanu told the AP. "The smoke is going offshore, and some ... is going to the beach but its not populated there.

Romania's environment ministry said Friday that specialists from the Constanta Environmental Protection Agency have continuously monitored the volatile organic compounds on the site.

The oil refinery is about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from Constanta.
KISSIMMEE, Fla. (AP)  Engineers from a private firm alerted county officials in central Florida this week to significant structural problems that were discovered at a condominium complex two months ago but never addressed by the homeowners association.

KISSIMMEE, Fla. (AP)  Engineers from a private firm alerted county officials in central Florida this week to significant structural problems that were discovered at a condominium complex two months ago but never addressed by the homeowners association.

The warning came days after another condominium, the 12-story Champlain Towers South, partially collapsed in Surfside, Florida, killing at least 18 and leaving 145 people still missing. The collapse there happened as repairs were beginning after inspections uncovered significant" damage at the 40-year-old building.

In central Florida, the Orlando-based firm Farmer Architecture told Osceola County officials they had warned the homeowners association at the Images Condominiums in Kissimmee that three buildings at the complex were unsafe and in danger of collapse on April 30, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

Farmer and another company, Born Engineers, made the recommendations but never heard back from the association, according to emails released Thursday.

The emails sent to Miguel Ubiles of FirstService Residential, the HOA for Images Condominiums, described significantly rotted wood framing and additional rot in wooden columns, the report said. The firm recommended closing these areas to traffic until further investigation can occur to determine the full extent of the rotted wood problem.

On Tuesday, Todd Born, president and owner of Born Engineering, contacted county officials, saying property managers had never signed off on a proposal to make the repairs.

We have not heard back from the Owner and are concerned that nothing is being done, said Borns email to William Grimes, Osceolas chief building inspector. In my opinion, what we encountered in our very limited review of the condition is a very serious condition. The walkways are in danger of collapse and could represent a threat to the safety of the public.

Ubiles did not respond to the newspaper's request for comment.

On Wednesday, the county declared 72 units at the complex unsafe. The newspaper reported that some residents opted for 14-day stays at nearby hotels paid for by the county while repairs are made. Others appeared to have stayed in their homes, in spite of the warning, the Sentinel reported.

It was unclear how long it would take to make the repairs.

Everybody here, we work in the tourism industry and weve been hit by COVID hard, and to come home to this is really sad, Jennifer Dodd, a resident affected by the closures, told the newspaper.

Osceola County spokesperson Chris Brumbaugh said the county received permission from the HOA to inspect the other eight buildings on the property.

Repairing the existing structural issues is the responsibility of the condo association/management company, Brumbaugh said.

Michael Allen, who is planning to move to the area from Michigan was scheduled to tour the complex before being told what was going on.

Im leaving. I dont even want to go look, Allen told the newspaper. He said it reminded him of the building collapse at the Champlain Towers South in Surfside.
PARIS (AP)  French prosecutors have opened an investigation into alleged involvement in crimes against humanity based on claims that global retailers, including Uniqlo and the makers of Skechers shoes and Zara clothes, rely on forced labor of minorities in China's Xinjiang region.

FILE - In this Monday, March 29, 2021 file photo, visitors to a shopping mall wearing masks stand before a Uniqlo store in Beijing. French prosecutors have on Friday, July 2 opened an investigation into alleged involvement in crimes against humanity based on accusations that global retailers, including Uniqlo and the makers of Skechers shoes and Zara clothes, rely on forced labor of minorities in China. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

PARIS (AP)  French prosecutors have opened an investigation into alleged involvement in crimes against humanity based on claims that global retailers, including Uniqlo and the makers of Skechers shoes and Zara clothes, rely on forced labor of minorities in China's Xinjiang region.

The Chinese government on Friday reiterated denials of any forced labor in Xinjiang, and lashed out at what it called interference in its internal affairs.

The investigation was opened last month by the crimes against humanity unit of Frances anti-terrorism prosecutors office, a judicial official said Friday. The office has special universal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes beyond French borders.

The probe was based on a legal complaint filed in France earlier this year by a Uyghur worker in exile and three human rights groups: Sherpa, the Uyghur Institute of Europe and Ethics on the Label Collective.

The investigation doesnt name a suspected perpetrator, but is aimed at determining who might be at fault and face eventual charges of involvement in crimes against humanity, the judicial official said. Such a procedure is standard under French law. The official was not authorized to be publicly named.

The complaint names Japanese retailer Uniqlo, U.S. shoemaker Skechers, French company SMCP and Spanish retailer Inditex, owner of Zara. The rights groups say the companies are benefiting from a Chinese system of repression against Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.

China has come under criticism and sanctions for detaining more than 1 million Uyghurs and and other Muslim minorities for political re-education in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, and for imprisoning or intimidating into silence those it sees as potential opponents from Tibet to Hong Kong.

Uniqlo said in a statement to The AP on Friday that it hadnt been formally notified of the investigation, but would cooperate fully with French authorities to reaffirm there is no forced labor in our supply chains.

The company said none of its production partners are located in Xinjiang. There has been no evidence of forced labor or any other human rights violation at any of our suppliers. If there is evidence, we will cease to do business with that supplier," it said.

Skechers said earlier this year that regular audits of its facilities in China have found no sign of forced labor.

Inditex says on its website that it takes a zero-tolerance approach towards forced labor in any of its manifestations and we implement policies and procedures to ensure that this practice does not take place anywhere in our supply chain.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, said Friday: We have repeatedly stressed that the so-called forced labor in Xinjiang is a lie concocted by a small number of anti-China elements from the U.S. and a few other countries, with the aim of disrupting Xinjiang and containing China.

We firmly oppose any external forces interfering in Chinas internal affairs through Xinjiang-related issues, he continued.

The human rights groups celebrated the French investigation and expressed hopes it will help shine a light on what is happening in Xinjiang.

Joe McDonald in Beijing and Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo contributed.
NEWARK, N.J. (AP)  Americans enjoying newfound liberty are expected to travel and gather for cookouts, fireworks, concerts and beach outings over the Fourth of July weekend in numbers not seen since pre-pandemic days.

FILE - In this July 1, 2021, file photo, people travel through Salt Lake City International Airport in Salt Lake City. Americans enjoying newfound liberty are expected to travel and gather for cookouts, fireworks and family reunions over the Fourth of July weekend in numbers not seen since pre-pandemic days. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

NEWARK, N.J. (AP)  Americans enjoying newfound liberty are expected to travel and gather for cookouts, fireworks, concerts and beach outings over the Fourth of July weekend in numbers not seen since pre-pandemic days.

Yet lingering restrictions, worker shortages and significant numbers of unvaccinated people mean some may not be as free as they would like to be.

And there are fears that the mixing of large numbers of vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans at a time when the highly contagious delta variant is spreading rapidly could undo some of the progress made against the scourge.

Nashville is expecting as many as 400,000 people to stream into the city for its July Fourth celebration featuring country star Brad Paisley. In Massachusetts, the Boston Pops' Independence Day concert is back, but the show that usually draws hundreds of thousands to the Charles River esplanade in Boston will be held 100 miles away at the Tanglewood music center.

Travelers wait for public transportation at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, Friday, July 2, 2021. AAA forecasts that more than 47 million people will travel by car or plane this weekend in the U.S., a return to 2019 levels and 40% higher than last year. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Beaches and lakefronts are expected to be packed as well. In Southern California, Huntington Beach is planning one of the biggest celebrations on the West Coast, a three-day festival that could bring in a half-million people.

Elizabeth Driscoll plans to enjoy the festivities in Cheboygan, Michigan, including a parade down Main Street, a trip to a farmers market and a family party on a lake, all ahead of the fireworks display over the Straits of Mackinac. Last year, the parade and fireworks were canceled.

You can feel it all over town, just an influx of people on the tourism side, and people who live here are out and about," she said. "Theres good energy.

At the same time, airlines have been struggling to get enough crew members to fly their planes. Pools and beaches have been hit with a shortage of lifeguards. And restaurants and bars in tourist destinations have had to scale back hours because of a lack of help.

President Joe Biden has welcomed the holiday as a historic moment in the nation's recovery from a crisis that has killed over 600,000 Americans and led to months of restrictions that are now almost gone. He plans to host more than 1,000 people at the White House  first responders, essential workers and troops  for a cookout and fireworks to mark what the administration is calling a summer of freedom.

Travelers make their way through the north south security checkpoint at Denver International Airport Friday, July 2, 2021, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Im going to celebrate it, Biden said Friday ahead of the holiday. Theres great things happening. ... All across America, people are going to ballgames, doing good things. But he also warned that "lives will be lost" because of people who didn't get vaccinated.

The U.S. is averaging about 12,000 new cases and 250 deaths a day thanks to vaccines that have been administered to two-thirds of the nation's adults. But that is short of the goal of 70% by July 4 that Biden set. Vaccine hesitancy remains stubborn, especially in the Deep South and West, allowing the delta variant to spread throughout the country.

AAA forecasts that more than 47 million people will travel by car or plane this weekend in the U.S., a return to 2019 levels and 40% higher than last year. That includes 3.5 million airline passengers.

At the Newark, New Jersey, airport, travelers waited in long check-in lines Wednesday and encountered flight delays that tested their patience. Some were just happy to get on a plane after vacation plans were disrupted last year by COVID-19 restrictions.

Rhetta Williams, a 54-year-old manager at a pharmaceutical company, was traveling to Charleston, South Carolina, for a family reunion with about 50 relatives that was postponed a year ago because of the virus.

And were not going to be practicing any social distancing, she said, laughing.

Zach Carothers, a 21-year-old computer science student, flew from South Carolina to Newark for a weekend at the Jersey Shore, where people have been flocking back.

Its nice to get back to it after quarantining for so long, Carothers said, adding that he is looking forward to a vacation that will definitely have celebratory beers.

While masks have been shed around the country even in indoor spaces, the Transportation Security Administration emphasizes that they are still required at airports and on planes  a restriction not everyone is accepting gracefully. Airlines are reporting increasing cases of disruptive passengers refusing to wear masks.

Fireworks are likely to draw some of the biggest crowds many communities have seen in months.

Outdoor stuff remains, I think, pretty safe for unvaccinated or vaccinated people, said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown Universitys School of Public Health. Probably a packed outdoor concert is not ideal, but short of that, outdoor activity is safe for people. Watching fireworks is fine.

Moving the party indoors is considered less safe, at a time when some states have less than half their population fully vaccinated.

Im concerned about most of the country, said Dr. Lynn Goldman, dean of George Washington Universitys school of public health. I think its premature to declare it over, especially because of what we see in other parts of the world."

Associated Press writers David Koenig in Dallas; Mae Anderson in Nashville, Tenn.; and Andrew Dalton in Los Angeles contributed. Murphy reported from Indianapolis.
TULE LAKE, Calif. (AP)  Ben DuVal knelt in a barren field near the California-Oregon border and scooped up a handful of parched soil as dust devils whirled around him and birds flitted between empty irrigation pipes.

Jamie Holt, lead fisheries technician for the Yurok Tribe, maneuvers a boat near a fish trap in the lower Klamath River on Tuesday, June 8, 2021, in Weitchpec, Calif. A historic drought and low water levels are threatening the existence of fish species along the 257-mile long river. "When I first started this job 23 years ago, extinction was never a part of the conversation," she said of the salmon. "If we have another year like we're seeing now, extinction is what we're talking about." (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

TULE LAKE, Calif. (AP)  Ben DuVal knelt in a barren field near the California-Oregon border and scooped up a handful of parched soil as dust devils whirled around him and birds flitted between empty irrigation pipes.

DuVals family has farmed this land for three generations, and this summer, for the first time, he and hundreds of others who rely on a federally managed lake to quench their fields arent getting any water from it at all.

As the farmland goes fallow, Native American tribes along the 257-mile-long (407-kilometer) river that flows from the lake to the Pacific watch helplessly as fish that are inextricable from their culture hover closer to extinction.

This summer, a historic drought and its consequences are tearing communities apart and attracting outside attention to a water crisis years in the making. Competition over Klamath River water has always been intense, but now there is simply not enough, and all the stakeholders are suffering.

"Everybody depends on the water in the Klamath River for their livelihood. Thats the blood that ties us all together, DuVal said of the competing interests. Nobodys coming out ahead this year. Nobodys winning.

Those living the nightmare worry the extreme drought is a harbinger of global warming.

The system is crashing ... for people up and down the Klamath Basin, said Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, which is monitoring a massive fish kill on the river. Its heartbreaking.

Twenty years ago, when water feeding the irrigation system was drastically reduced amid another drought, the crisis became a national rallying cry for the political right, and some protesters opened the main irrigation canal in violation of federal orders.

This time, many irrigators reject the presence of anti-government activists. Farmers who need federal assistance to stay afloat fear ties to the far right could hurt them.

Meanwhile, toxic algae is blooming in the basins main lake, and two national wildlife refuges critical to migratory birds are drying out.

The conditions have exacerbated a water conflict that traces its roots back more than a century.

Beginning in 1906, the federal government reengineered a complex system of lakes, wetlands and rivers in the 10 million-acre (4 million-hectare) Klamath River Basin to create tens of thousands of acres of irrigated farmland.

The Klamath Reclamation Project draws its water from the 96-square-mile (248-square-kilometer) Upper Klamath Lake. But the lake is also home to suckerfish central to the Klamath Tribes culture and creation stories.

In 1988, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed two species of sucker fish as endangered. The federal government must keep the lake at a minimum depth to support the fish  but this year, amid exceptional drought, there was not enough water to do that and supply irrigators.

Agriculture should be based on whats sustainable. Theres too many people after too little water," said Don Gentry, the Klamath Tribes chairman.

With the Klamath Tribes enforcing their senior water rights to help suckerfish, there is also no extra water for downriver salmon.

The Karuk Tribe last month declared a state of emergency, citing climate change and the worst hydrologic conditions in the Klamath River Basin in modern history. Karuk tribal citizen Aaron Troy Hockaday Sr. is a fourth-generation fisherman but says he hasnt caught a fish in the river since the mid-1990s.

I got two grandsons that are 3 and 1 years old. Ive got a baby grandson coming this fall," he said. How can I teach them how to be fishermen if theres no fish?

The downstream tribes problems are compounded by hydroelectric dams that block the path of migrating salmon.

In most years, the tribes 200 miles (320 kilometers) to the southwest of the farmers, where the river reaches the ocean, ask the Bureau of Reclamation to release pulses of extra water from Upper Klamath Lake. The extra water mitigates outbreaks of a parasitic disease that proliferates when the river is low.

This year, the federal agency refused those requests.

Now, the parasite is killing thousands of juvenile salmon in the lower Klamath River, where the Karuk and Yurok tribes have coexisted with them for millennia. An average of 63% of fish caught last month in research traps near the rivers mouth were dead.

This is all unprecedented, said Jamie Holt, lead fisheries technician for the Yurok Tribe. Where do you go from here? When do you start having the larger conversation of complete unsustainability?

Near the rivers source, some of the farmers who are seeing their lives upended by the same drought say a guarantee of less water  but some water  each year would be better than the parched fields they have now. Some worry problems in the basin are being blamed on a way of life they also inherited.

I know turning off the project is easy, said Tricia Hill, a fourth-generation farmer. But sometimes the story that gets told ... doesnt represent how progressive we are here and how we do want to make things better for all species. This single-species management is not working for the fish  and its destroying our community and hurting our wildlife.

DuVals daughter dreams of taking over the family farm someday. But DuVal isnt sure he and his wife, Erika, can hang onto the land if things dont change.

We had a plan on how were going to grow our farm and to be able to send my daughters to a good college, said DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association. And that plan just unravels further and further with every bad water year.
HONOLULU (AP)  Two pilots told air traffic controllers that their engine had cut out and they needed help moments before crashing their cargo plane into the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii on Friday.

A U.S. Coast Guard cutter patrols the area of debris from a 737 cargo plane that crashed off Oahu, Friday, July 2, 2021, near Honolulu. The plane made an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii early Friday and both people on board were rescued. The pilots of the Transair Flight 810 reported engine trouble and were attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to land the Boeing 737 in the water, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. (Craig T. Kojima/Honolulu Star-Advertiser via AP)

HONOLULU (AP)  Two pilots told air traffic controllers that their engine had cut out and they needed help moments before crashing their cargo plane into the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii on Friday.

It doesnt look good out here, one of the pilots said before the Boeing 737 broke apart as it entered the water.

Both pilots, the only people aboard, were seriously injured but survived the crash. An hour later, rescuers found the two clinging to packages and parts of the plane in about 150 feet (46 meters) of water several miles off Oahu, authorities said.

One was on the tail and the other clinging to packages, Coast Guard Lt. Commander Karin Evelyn wrote in an email to The Associated Press. As an agency helicopter got close, the airplane began to sink putting the individual on the tail in the water. The crews hoisted them safely on the aircraft. The rescue swimmer then assisted the other individual.

The pilots of Transair Flight 810 heading from Honolulu to Maui reported engine trouble and were trying to return to Honolulu, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

Weve lost No. 1 engine, and were coming straight to the airport," one of the pilots said in air traffic control communications. Were going to need the fire department. Theres a chance were going to lose the other engine, too, its running very hot. Were very low on speed.

The pilot said they werent carrying hazardous materials and had two hours worth of fuel. They asked the tower to advise the Coast Guard, then asked if there was a closer airport than Honolulu.

After a stretch of silence, the controller asks if the pilot is still there. There was no response.

Looks like they went down in the water, the tower says.

Later, a rescuer aboard a Coast Guard helicopter sent to search for the pilots tells air traffic control: We do have an aircraft in the water ... were currently overhead (the) debris field.

Minutes later: We have zero, two souls in sight in the water.

The tower responded, OK, so you have both guys, both souls in sight?

Both souls in sight, yes, sir, the rescuers responded.

The pilots, whose identities were not immediately released, were taken to a hospital. Officials at Queens Medical Center said a 58-year-old was in critical condition, Hawaii News Now reported. The other pilot, a 50-year-old, was in serious condition with a head injury and multiple lacerations, the TV station reported.

The Coast Guard reported flying over the crash site off Oahu to evaluate for pollution after the sun came up in the morning. Debris and fuel remained in the water.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. The NTSB said in a tweet that it will send a team of 10 investigators.

The plane is a 46-year-old Boeing 737-200, a much earlier version of the 737 than the Max, and one that U.S. airlines no longer use for passenger flights. There are fewer than 60 737-200s still flying worldwide, according to aviation-data researcher Cirium.

The Boeing 737 first flew in the late 1960s and is the most popular airline plane still in production. Boeing has delivered more than 10,500 of them and has unfilled orders for about 4,000 more, almost all of those for the latest version of the plane, the 737 Max.

Over the years, about 200 737s have been destroyed in crashes and several hundred others have been involved in less serious accidents and incidents, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.

For a jet that has been in production for so long and is being used so extensively, 203 hull-loss accidents can be considered a very good safety record, said Harro Ranter, who runs the database.

He said the planes accident rate improved dramatically from the first models to more recent ones that preceded the Max.

Boeing said in a statement: We are aware of the reports out of Honolulu, Hawaii and are closely monitoring the situation. We are in contact with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and are working to gather more information.

There have been some water landings over the years in which people survived, the most famous being the 2009 crash of a US Airways flight in New York's Hudson River where all 155 people on board survived.

All four people on board survived a cargo plane crash into water short of a runway in Gabon in 2011.

In other cases, some passengers and crew survived but some died, including a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines plane that ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean in 1996, a Tunisian airliner that went down off the coast of Sicily in 2005, and an Indonesian airliner that landed in a river during a thunderstorm in 2002.

Koenig reported from Dallas. Monroe reported from Phoenix.
BOSTON (AP)  A man suspected of stabbing a rabbi several times near a Jewish day school in Boston was held without bail Friday at his arraignment pending a hearing to determine whether he is a danger to society.

Khaled Awad is led into court while arraigned on charges in the stabbing of a rabbi near a Jewish day school, in Brighton District Court in Boston, Friday July 2, 2021. Rabbi Shlomo Noginski is in stable condition and in good spirits" after being stabbed several times in the arm, Rabbi Dan Rodkin, executive director of Shaloh House, posted on Facebook. (Mary Schwalm/The Boston Herald via AP, Pool)

BOSTON (AP)  A man suspected of stabbing a rabbi several times near a Jewish day school in Boston was held without bail Friday at his arraignment pending a hearing to determine whether he is a danger to society.

Khaled Awad, 24, pleaded not guilty to assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon and assault and battery on a police officer in connection with the Thursday afternoon stabbing of Rabbi Shlomo Noginski in the citys Brighton neighborhood.

The attorney who represented Awad on Friday could not be reached for comment. A number for Awad, who's from Brighton, could not be found.

The hearing to determine whether he's a danger is scheduled for July 8. Awad has no record in Massachusetts but has faced charges of battery and theft in Florida and was sent to a mental health facility there, prosecutors said.

Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins looks on from the gallery as Khaled Awad is arraigned on charges in the stabbing of a rabbi near a Jewish day school, in Brighton District Court in Boston, Friday July 2, 2021. Rabbi Shlomo Noginski is in stable condition and in good spirits" after being stabbed several times in the arm, Rabbi Dan Rodkin, executive director of Shaloh House, posted on Facebook. (Mary Schwalm/The Boston Herald via AP, Pool)

The motive for the stabbing remains unclear, and police are still investigating. District Attorney Rachael Rollins said at a vigil in support of Noginksi on Friday her office has opened a civil rights investigation to determine whether the stabbing is a hate crime.

We have to recognize that antisemitism is on the rise, and we need to hold people accountable when they do this, so that they are made an example of, Rollins said at the vigil not far from the stabbing site, attended by several hundred people.

The suspect approached the rabbi with a gun and a knife while he was talking on the phone, sitting on the steps of the school, according to prosecutors and Rabbi Dan Rodkin, executive director of Shaloh House. The suspect allegedly demanded the rabbis car keys, and Noginski ran across the street to a park where he was stabbed.

According to the court documents, when police located the suspect, he pointed what appeared to be a firearm at them. Three officers drew their firearms and ordered the suspect to drop his weapon multiple times, authorities said. The suspect then lowered his weapon and threw it to the ground.

The suspect kicked one of the officers in the stomach as he was being assisted into a transport vehicle for booking, police said.

As soon as the school became aware of the stabbing, the facility went into lockdown and no children were ever in danger, Rodkin said in a Facebook post.

Noginski is an Israeli citizen who came to the Boston area as an emissary to spread the Chabad message, Consul General of Israel to New England Meron Reuben told the Boston Herald.

We are horrified by what has happened, Reuben said.

Noginski, who spoke to Lubavitch.com from his hospital bed, has since been released from the hospital.

I am grateful to the Boston Police Department for their rapid response, and relieved that the perpetrator is in custody. I am looking forward to returning to my work as soon as possible, he said.

Some who attended Friday's vigil held in a steady rain think the stabbing was a hate crime.

I dont think theres a member of our Jewish community who did not hear about this stabbing and think to themselves, Oh my God, its happened here in Boston, said Marc Baker, president of Combined Jewish Philanthropies.

The attack on the rabbi was an attack on the entire city, acting Mayor Kim Janey said: I believe that an attack on any member of our community is an attack on all of us.
WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden praised the ability of sports and athletes to bring a nation together in a time of crisis as he hosted the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers at the White House on Friday.

A Tokyo 2020 Olympic staff member rests at a food court at Main Press Center (MPC) for Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at Tokyo Big Site Friday, July 2, 2021, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden praised the ability of sports and athletes to bring a nation together in a time of crisis as he hosted the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers at the White House on Friday.

The Dodgers, who captured the title by defeating the Tampa Bay Rays last October, were the first team to be honored at the White House since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first since Biden took office.

I think what we discovered is that we need sports more than we ever realized, said Biden, who praised baseball in one of the most challenging years in the nations history.

The president saluted the team for using its stadium as a mass COVID-19 vaccination site.

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A medical worker wearing protective gear wears plastic gloves in the sweltering heat at a coronavirus testing site in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, July 2, 2021. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

 Thai virus surge prompts worries over ICU capacity, vaccine supply

 Vatican and World Medical Association seek all-out effort to combat vaccine hesitancy

 Womans crusade for international kids resumes after pandemic pause

 Follow more of APs pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

HERES WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

NICOSIA, Cyprus  Cyprus is offering a holiday stipend from mid-July to mid-August to anyone whos been vaccinated and will restrict access to soccer stadiums to those who have received their shots or have obtained a negative PCR or rapid antigen test 72 hours prior a match in a bid to encourage young people from getting inoculated against COVID-19.

The Cypriot government announced late Friday a string of incentives designed to spur a sizeable portion of the population that havent stepped up to be vaccinated. Officials say some 70% of those under 40 havent received their shots.

A couple wait in line to receive a coronavirus vaccine at a vaccination center with the sign of a QR code at VDNKh (The Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy) in Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 2, 2021. Russian health authorities on Thursday launched booster coronavirus vaccinations for those who had been immunized more than six months ago, as the country faces a surge in new infections and deaths. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Other incentives include counting the day that government and private sector workers opt to get vaccinated as a bonus day off and offering an honorary five-day leave to army conscripts who choose to get the jab.

The government also decided to lessen the fun factor for those who arent vaccinated by requiring bar and restaurant patrons or anyone attending large gatherings such as weddings to display either a so-called Safepass indicating that theyre fully vaccinated, or to present a negative PCR or rapid antigen test taken 72 hours prior to the event.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo.  One Missouri hospital official is telling anyone making disparaging remarks about the COVID-19 vaccine to Shut up as state officials ask for federal help dealing with a surge in cases that has some counties urging new precautions.

Deep vaccine resistance has allowed the delta variant, first identified in India, to take hold in the state, straining hospitals, particularly in the Springfield area.

If you are making wildly disparaging comments about the vaccine, and have no public health expertise, you may be responsible for someones death. Shut up, tweeted Steve Edwards, who is the CEO of CoxHealth in Springfield.

CoxHealth and the citys other hospital, Mercy Springfield, were treating 168 COVID-19 patients Friday, up from 31 on May 24, before the surge began, said Aaron Schekorra, a spokesman for the Springfield-Greene County Health Department. He said that 36 of them were on ventilators.

Erik Frederick, the chief administrative officer of the Mercy Springfield, also turned to Twitter in an effort to bolster vaccinations, noting that they prevent deaths.

An elderly man sits waiting in line to get a coronavirus vaccine at a vaccination center at VDNKh (The Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy) in Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 2, 2021. Russian health authorities on Thursday launched booster coronavirus vaccinations for those who had been immunized more than six months ago, as the country faces a surge in new infections and deaths. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

So if youre vaccinated there is a light at the end of a tunnel, he said. If youre unvaccinated thats probably a train.

PHOENIX  Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is rescinding a series of executive orders issued during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Republican governor says most are no longer needed because the Legislature put them into law in the session that ended this week.

Some of the orders would remain in place until legislation takes effect in 90 days. Those include orders preventing cities, towns and counties from issuing orders for businesses that are more stringent than those Ducey issues. Other orders ending after new legislation takes effect bar universities from requiring coronavirus vaccines or masks for unvaccinated students.

Republicans, who control the Legislature, were adamant that they would block any coronavirus-related actions they considered were restricting freedoms. They passed laws banning mask orders in K-12 schools and state universities and blocking some future health orders. Democrats called the moves short-sighted, saying they may be needed amid a new surge of virus cases.

NEW YORK  Elissa Montantis Global Medical Relief Fund was thwarted by COVID-19 after more than two decades of beating the odds to obtain medical care for children injured in war and crises around the world.

The pandemic put a hold on international travel and services to the more than 450 kids who have passed through her care. Prosthetics needed fitting. Surgeries required scheduling. Now the New York woman is reviving her charity. Shes recruiting volunteers and professionals, bringing children to the U.S. again for medical care.

FILE - In this Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2015 filer, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Vaticans Pontifical Council of Life, speaks to reporters during a press conference, at the Vatican. The Vaticans bioethics academy and the World Medical Association called Friday for an all-out effort to combat vaccine hesitancy and correct the myths and disinformation that are slowing the fight against the coronavirus. Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia noted that both his bioethics academy and the Vaticans doctrine office have declared COVID-19 vaccines safe, effective and ethical. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, File)

Montanti started the charity in 1997 in the wake of the sudden deaths of her grandmother, mother and childhood sweetheart. Shes lobbied at the United Nations, written a memoir and built a sprawling network of charitable doctors and professionals.

The charity says it has taken in children from 50 countries, mostly from Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

WASHINGTON  President Joe Biden says hes concerned lives will be unnecessarily lost to COVID-19 as unvaccinated people contract and transmit the coronavirus over the July 4 holiday.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Biden emphasized that for most Americans who are vaccinated, the holiday weekend will be worth celebrating.

Says Biden: This year is different than the Fourth of July of last year and its going to be better next year.

But the president says hes worried about those who havent yet gotten a shot.

I am concerned that people who have not gotten vaccinated have the capacity to catch the variant and spread the variant to other people who have not been vaccinated. But I am concerned. Lives will be lost.

A relative performs final rituals before the cremation of a COVID-19 victim in Gauhati, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath)

JOHANNESBURG  Driven by the delta variant, a new wave of coronavirus is sweeping across the African continent where cases, hospital admissions and deaths are increasing.

Case numbers are doubling every three weeks in Africa, according to the World Health Organization. South Africa is leading the surge, with more than 20,000 new cases reported Friday.

That has increased South Africas total to 1.9 million confirmed cases and 66,323 confirmed deaths. It represents more than 30% of the 5.5 million cases reported by Africas 54 countries, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHOs regional director for Africa, says Africas third wave has large speed and scale. The delta variant, reported in 16 African countries, has become dominant in South Africa. WHO says the delta variant has been detected in 97% of samples sequenced in Uganda and 79% of samples in Congo.

Less than 2% of Africas 1.3 billion people have received one dose of a vaccine.

MOSCOW  Russian authorities have reported a record 679 new coronavirus deaths, a fourth day in a row with the highest daily death toll in the pandemic.

On Friday, Russias state coronavirus task force reported 23,218 new cases. But the authorities are not discussing a lockdown, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday.

A relative performs final rituals before the cremation of a COVID-19 victim in Gauhati, India, Friday, July 2, 2021. India on Friday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath)

Russia has struggled to cope with a surge in infections and deaths in recent weeks that comes amid slow vaccination rates. Daily new infections have more than doubled over the past month, soaring from around 9,000 in early June to over 20,000 this week.

BERLIN  Germany is recommending all people who get a first shot of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine switch to a different type of vaccine for their second shot.

The aim is to increase the speed and effectiveness of vaccinations as the more contagious delta variant spreads. Health Minister Jens Spahn conferred with his colleagues from Germanys 16 states on Friday, the day after the countrys standing committee on vaccination issued a draft recommendation.

In a statement, the committee says study results show the immune response from a mixture of AstraZeneca with an mRNA vaccine of Pfizer or Moderna was significantly superior to two doses of AstraZeneca.

BEIRUT  Lebanon is reporting the first cases of the coronavirus delta variant in the country.

Health Minister Hamad Hassan says three cases of the highly contagious delta variant were reported in Lebanon. He urged the countrys residents to get vaccinated.

The reports of the variant come as tens of thousands of tourists and expatriates are flying into Lebanon.

ARCHIVO  En imagen de archivo del 3 de junio de 2021, un adulto mayor recibe una dosis de la vacuna de Pfizer contra el COVID-19 en una clinica en Orange Farm, cerca de Johannesburgo, Sudafrica. (AP Foto/Denis Farrell, archivo)

Lebanon, a nation of 6 million people, including a million Syrian refugees, has eased lockdowns in recent months as the vaccination campaign intensified and cases dropped. The nation has registered 545,000 confirmed cases and 7,854 confirmed deaths.

Lebanon has administered more than 1.3 million vaccination shots so far.

GENEVA  The head of the World Health Organization says the world is in a very dangerous period of the COVID-19 pandemic, noting the more contagious delta variant is identified in nearly 100 countries.

At a press briefing on Friday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the delta variant, first found in India, is continuing to evolve and mutate, and it is becoming the predominant COVID-19 virus in many countries.

I have already urged leaders across the world to ensure that by this time next year, 70% of all people in every country are vaccinated, he said, adding that would effectively end the acute phase of the pandemic.

He noted 3 billion doses of vaccine have already been distributed and, its within the collective power of a few countries to step up and ensure that vaccines are shared.

Of the vaccine doses given globally, fewer than 2% have been in poorer countries. Although rich countries including Britain, the U.S., France and Canada have pledged to donate 1 billion COVID-19 vaccines, WHO estimates 11 billion doses are needed to immunize the world.

President Joe Biden speaks about the June jobs report in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus, Friday, July 2, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

LONDON  Public Health England says cases of the more contagious delta variant have increased fourfold in the U.K. in less than a month.

It says a total of 161,981 confirmed and probable cases of delta variant have been identified in Britain  up 46% on the previous week.

The delta variant, which was first identified in India, continues to account for around 95% of confirmed cases of coronavirus across the U.K.

Though cases have been rising sharply in recent weeks, the number of people requiring hospitalization for COVID-19 has not risen as much. That indicates the link between infections and mortality has weakened following the rapid rollout of vaccines in the country.

Yvonne Doyle, Public Health Englands medical director, says most new cases are among younger age groups who are less likely to be hospitalized.

ROME  The Vaticans bioethics academy and the World Medical Association are calling for an all-out effort to combat vaccine hesitancy and correct the myths and disinformation that are slowing the fight against the coronavirus.

In a joint statement on Friday, the groups say some vaccine reluctance in poorer countries is rooted in historical inequalities and suspicions of Western pharmaceutical companies. But they say a more pernicious form of hesitancy is being driven by fake news, myths and disinformation about vaccine safety.

Elissa Montanti, founder and director at The Global Medical Relief Fund, and Dr. Scott Kozin embrace at Shriners Hospitals for Children in Philadelphia during an appointment for the Tanzanian children to be refitted with prosthetic arms, Monday, June 7, 2021. The pandemic put a hold on international travel, and on the services Montanti has facilitated for the more than 450 kids who have passed through her care. As restrictions have begun lifting across the country, the Staten Island woman is bringing her charity back to life. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

They demanded that all relevant stakeholders exhaust all efforts to ... confront vaccine hesitancy by sending a clear message about the safety and necessity of vaccines and counteracting vaccine myths and disinformation.

The statement also repeated calls from the Vatican and the medical establishment for vaccine equity, ensuring the poorer nations have the same access to shots.

ISLAMABAD  Pakistan received 2.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine from the United States on Friday, easing pressure on Islamabad in overcoming the shortage of COVID-19 vaccines.

According to a U.S. embassy statement, the vaccines were delivered to the Pakistani people in partnership with the COVAX global vaccine initiative, UNICEF, and the government of Pakistan.

It says this donation was part of the 80 million doses the United States was sharing with the world, delivering on our pledge to facilitate equitable global access to safe and effective vaccines, which are essential to ending the COVID-19 pandemic.

The latest development comes days after hundreds of Pakistani expatriate workers rallied in Islamabad, demanding they should be quickly vaccinated with the Moderna, Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines so they can travel abroad.

Pakistan has mostly relied on Chinese vaccines, but some Middle Eastern countries want travelers to produce a certificate to show theyve received specific vaccines.

BANGKOK  Health authorities in Bangkok reported 6,087 confirmed coronavirus cases on Friday, setting a record for the second straight day.

Around 90% of total cases and 95% of the deaths have been recorded during a third wave of the coronavirus that began in April. There were 992 deaths in June this year, more than 15 times Thailands total for all of 2020.

The governments Center for COVID-19 Situation Administration says theres been a nationwide increase during the past two weeks in the number of patients in ICUs and on ventilators. There are 2,002 people in ICUs, including 566 on ventilators.

Sixty-one related deaths were reported Friday, bringing the total number of cases to 270,921 and 2,141 confirmed deaths.

NEW DELHI  India has confirmed 400,000 deaths from COVID-19, half in the past two months, as the virulent delta variant infected hundreds of thousands daily.

The grim figure announced Friday is believed to be a fraction of the true total. It is second only to the United States and Brazil.

The Health Ministry says 853 people died in the past 24 hours, raising total confirmed deaths to 400,312 since the start of the pandemic. The first known COVID-19 death in India happened on March 12, 2020, in southern Karnataka state.

India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, has confirmed more than 30.4 million infections. There have been 46,617 new cases detected in the past 24 hours. That total also is believed to be an undercount.

New cases are on the decline after exceeding 400,000 a day in May. But authorities are preparing for another possible wave of infection around September and are trying to ramp up vaccination.

Less than 5% of Indias people are fully immunized. Over 340 million doses have been administered since mid-January, according to the ministry.

About 2 billion doses could be available by December with Indias two main suppliers, Serum Institute and Bharat Biotech, ramping up production and five other vaccines potentially available in the coming months.
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP)  The largest Native American reservation in the U.S. includes parts of three Arizona counties, all of which had different approaches to precinct voting in the 2020 general election.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP)  The largest Native American reservation in the U.S. includes parts of three Arizona counties, all of which had different approaches to precinct voting in the 2020 general election.

Voters in Apache County had to cast ballots at the polling location they were assigned. People registered in Navajo County could vote anywhere in the county. Coconino County used a hybrid model.

The Navajo Nation has long argued the approach is inconsistent and confusing, leading to ballots being rejected and tribal members being denied the same opportunity to vote as others in Arizona.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed on Thursday in a broader case over Arizona voting regulations, upholding a prohibition on counting ballots cast in the wrong precinct and returning early ballots for another person.

The ruling will reach broadly into tribal communities, particularly those where Indigenous people dont have residential mail service or must drive long distances to polling sites and the post office.

Native American voting rights advocates viewed it as another notch in a long history of voting discrimination but say they'll continue pushing for access and changes in laws.

I feel like its in our blood to be ready to counter and fight and stand strong, said Jaynie Parrish, who is Navajo and executive director of the Navajo County Democrats. Our organizers say all the time, If your vote didnt matter, why are they trying so hard to take it away.

The high courts conservative majority wrote that Arizonas interest in the integrity of elections justified the measures and said voters faced modest burdens at most. A lower court had found them discriminatory under the federal Voting Rights Act.

The court seemed to note the number of ways that people can vote without recognizing how those ways are limited in Indian Country, said Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, director of the Indian Legal Clinic at Arizona State Universitys law school and a citizen of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe in Louisiana. They are not a reality for reservation voters.

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said Thursday's decision does nothing to protect voting access for minorities, including Navajos.

The decision ignores the number of voters who didn't cast a ballot because they were told they weren't in the right precinct, as well as socioeconomic barriers such as poverty and the reservation's remoteness, said Ferguson-Bohnee.

Hardly anyone has a street address on the vast Navajo Nation. Tribal members are among rural residents who must draw a map in a small space on voter registration cards showing where they live, and it's up to county officials to place them in the right precinct.

In the 2020 election, more than 2,000 voters in Apache County were placed on a list because of questions surrounding their residency, the Navajo Nation noted in court documents. Neither the state nor the county had online options for voters to determine their polling location without a street address, tribal attorneys wrote.

There's no public transportation on the 27,000-square-mile (70,000-square-kilometer) Navajo Nation that's bigger than 10 U.S. states. It stretches into Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Many people rely on friends, family or strangers for rides.

Poor roads increase the difficulties of voting, the tribe said. More than four-fifths of the reservation's roads are unpaved. During elections, many Navajos tell politicians they want better roads.

Even just gravel, we'd be very grateful, said Tovina Yazzie, manager of the Sweetwater Chapter on the Navajo Nation.

Yazzie tries to impress upon tribal members that voting could result in more funding to the small community near the Arizona-Utah border. She also recognizes the obstacles.

We run into some people or community members who don't have vehicles, so it is a hindrance for our community to come in and vote, she said. And also, the weather has a role in it, if it's snowing or rainy or muddy.

Jennifer Begay, who works at the Red Mesa Chapter nearby, spent three hours in the 2016 election driving family and friends to polling locations, mindful of the toll the dirt roads would take on her car that doesn't have much ground clearance.

I was just really wanting people to vote, she said. They didn't have transportation.

Native Americans werent granted U.S. citizenship until 1924, and even then some states prohibited them from voting for decades if they lived on reservations or couldnt pass an English literacy test.

Native Americans and advocacy groups have won or settled much of the election-related lawsuits they've filed over the years, according to a report by the Native American Rights Fund.

Montanas legislature passed a bill earlier this year to prohibit the paid collection of absentee ballots and another to end Election Day voter registration. Tribes have brought state constitutional challenges to both laws, arguing they prevent Native Americans living on reservations from fully and equally participating in elections.

In Nevada, state lawmakers last year lifted limits on who could collect and return mail ballots on behalf of others. Teresa Melendez of the Nevada Native Vote Project said it's been incredibly helpful, especially for tribal members who must drive three hours roundtrip to the nearest polling place.

Arizona passed laws this year that Native Americans said will make voting more complicated but that Republicans defended in the name of election integrity. One bill codifies a practice of giving voters who didn't sign ballots until polls close on Election Day. Another could result in a purge of voters from the rolls who automatically get ballots by mail.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, said the state's ballot collection law ensures fairness in elections. The challenge that ended up before the Supreme Court was a desperate tactic by Democrats, he said.

This decision is a clear repudiation of those tactics, he said in a statement.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled the law was most likely to affect Native Americans who travel long distances to mail ballots.

However you can get your ballot to the ballot box, that should be primary, said Steve Begay, the vice chairman of the Apache County Democrats. If there are laws restricting that, that's probably not democratic.

President Joe Biden's administration favored a narrower ruling of the Supreme Court's decision that overturned the 9th Circuit. The decision came while the administration is seeking input from tribes across the country on barriers to voting.

A surge in voter turnout among tribal members helped lead Biden to victory in Arizona, a state that hadn't supported a Democrat in a White House contest since 1996.

Jacqueline De Leon, a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund and a member of Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico, said tribes have pushed for more voter registration opportunities with federal agencies and for a liaison in the U.S. Postal Service to increase residential mail delivery on tribal land, among other things.

Despite the obstacles for tribal members, she urged Native Americans and other minority communities to vote so their choices can help shape new laws.

There wouldn't be so much effort to disenfranchise voters if there wasn't power at stake, she said.

Fonseca is a member of The Associated Press race and ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/FonsecaAP. Associated Press writers Mark Sherman in Washington, Amy B. Hanson in Helena, Montana, and Sam Metz in Carson City, Nevada, contributed to this story. Metz is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)  Following in the footsteps of Arizona's Senate Republicans, Pennsylvania's Republican-controlled Senate is considering an investigation into how last year's presidential election was conducted, a quest fueled by former President Donald Trump's baseless claims that fraud was behind his loss in the battleground state.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)  Following in the footsteps of Arizona's Senate Republicans, Pennsylvania's Republican-controlled Senate is considering an investigation into how last year's presidential election was conducted, a quest fueled by former President Donald Trump's baseless claims that fraud was behind his loss in the battleground state.

Any Senate-issued subpoenas for an Arizona-style election audit will face strident opposition from Democrats, legal questions and almost certainly challenges in Pennsylvania's courts, as battles over election laws rage through swing states and Congress, spurred on by Trump's falsehoods.

Senate Republicans have been mostly silent about their internal deliberations.

Sen. Doug Mastriano, a rising force in Pennsylvanias ultra-conservative circles who has talked of his desire to bring an Arizona-style audit to Pennsylvania, led a private briefing Wednesday for Republican senators on his plan.

In Arizona, the state Senate used its subpoena power to take possession of more than 2 million ballots and the machines that counted them, along with computer data.

Mastriano also solicited legal advice from a Philadelphia-based law firm about the Senate Republican caucus using private money to finance consultants and lawyers. The law firms response letter, dated Tuesday, was obtained by The Associated Press.

In the letter, the law firm discussed the legality of using money from a private, nonprofit organization to pay expenses for vendors, including a consultant and counsel as part of an oversight investigation" of the 2020 election led by the low-profile committee that Mastriano chairs.

While we cannot predict how the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would decide the issue, in our opinion, to a reasonable degree of legal certainty, Pennsylvania law does not prohibit the Caucus or Committee from accepting or benefiting from such financial support," lawyer Bruce S. Marks wrote.

The letter said the purpose of the investigation is to develop legislation which will enhance voter participation and election integrity.

Mastriano did not return phone calls. In a phone call Friday, Marks  who did legal work for the Trump campaign after the 2020 election  confirmed he wrote the letter, but otherwise declined comment.

Mastriano, who chairs the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, could theoretically issue subpoenas to counties with a majority vote of his committee. The Democratic bastions of Philadelphia and Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, could be prime targets.

Voting machines, ballots and other election records could be demanded. The process could cost millions of dollars.

Mastriano, who has helped spread Trump's baseless conspiracy theories about widespread fraud in the election, traveled to Arizona in June to see the audit there firsthand.

Well bring the information back to the Senate leadership, well back-brief them on the way ahead and then hopefully we can come up with an approach here to make sure every person in Pennsylvania can rest assured they have one vote and it counts, Mastriano told a radio host from WEEO-FM last month.

Spurred on by Trumps baseless claims about fraud, Republican consideration of an election audit in Pennsylvania comes as Trump supporters have pushed for audits and reviews of ballots in political battlegrounds in a bid to turn up evidence that Biden's victory was illegitimate.

No county election board, prosecutor or state official has raised a concern over any sort of widespread election fraud in Novembers election in Pennsylvania, a crucial state that Democrat Joe Biden won by more than 80,000 votes, or just over 1 percentage point.

Trumps efforts to overturn Bidens victory has been roundly rejected by courts at every level, including by judges appointed by the former president. Trumps attorney general has also said there was no widespread fraud in the U.S. that would have changed the results of the election.

Sen. Camera Bartolotta, R-Washington, said she tuned in for part of Mastriano's presentation Wednesday.

I dont know the ins and outs. I dont know whos going to pay for an audit. I dont know how extensive it might be, Bartolotta said. I do know that there are millions of Pennsylvanians who have questions and concerns and there is a lack of trust.

She said she was not sure what the next step might be. But, she said, she wanted to ensure the cost is not borne by state taxpayers.

I want to be absolutely certain that anything were doing  if anything gets done  is done in a legal way and is constitutional, Bartolotta said.

Critics say an election audit is duplicative, given the legal requirements for each county and the state to review election results for accuracy and investigate any discrepancies. Democrats, meanwhile, blame Trump and Republicans for spreading lies about the election that have sown distrust among voters.

The official rules of Pennsylvania's Senate grants its committees broad authority to issue subpoenas to any public agency in the state.

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Allegheny, said he was unaware of a Senate Republican plan, but questioned whether Mastriano's committee had authority over the subject matter of elections to legally issue such subpoenas. Traditionally, a different Senate committee has handled election issues.

Senate Democrats can challenge the subpoenas in the state Senate and in court, Costa said.

Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at www.twitter.com/timelywriter and Mark Scolforo at www.twitter.com/houseofbuddy
WASHINGTON (AP)  The U.S. trade deficit widened in May as $71.2 billion as a small increase in exports was offset by a bigger rise in imports.

A man watches as the Warnow-Dolphin container ship sails to PortMiami, Thursday, April 29, 2021, in Miami Beach, Fla. The U.S. trade deficit widened in May as $71.2 billion as a small increase in exports was offset by a bigger rise in imports.The Commerce Department reported Friday that the deficit rose 3.1% from the revised April deficit of $69.1 billion The U.S. trade deficit had hit a monthly record of $75 billion in March. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

WASHINGTON (AP)  The U.S. trade deficit widened in May as $71.2 billion as a small increase in exports was offset by a bigger rise in imports.

The Commerce Department reported Friday that the deficit rose 3.1% from the revised April deficit of $69.1 billion The U.S. trade deficit had hit a monthly record of $75 billion in March.

In May, exports of U.S. goods and services rose 0.6% to $206 billion. But that was offset by a 1.3% gain in imports which hit $277.3 billion.

Through the first five months of this year, the U.S. trade deficit totals $353.1 billion, up a sizable 45.8% from the deficit during the same period last year when Americans' appetite for imported goods was being held back by the pandemic.

This year, the improving U.S. economy has increased demand for imports while the rest of the world has been recovering more slowly, dampening demand for U.S. exports. The trade deficit is the gap between what America sells abroad and what the country imports.

The deficit in goods totaled $89.2 billion in May and this was offset by a smaller $17.9 billion surplus in services such as airline travel. Since the pandemic, the U.S. services surplus has been shrinking given the pandemic's impact on travel while the goods deficit has been rising as American consumption patterns were altered in favor of more goods purchases.

But analysts think that trend will revert back to more normal patterns in coming months as the impacts of the pandemic lessen.

As pandemic distortions dissipate and global economies restart more completely, imports and exports will likely rebalance with support from services, said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics.
VICTORIA - British Columbia's chief coroner says 719 sudden and unexpected deaths have been reported in the province during the historic heat wave, and that number over a seven-day period is unprecedented.

People sit on rocks while cooling off in the frigid Lynn Creek water in North Vancouver, B.C., on Monday, June 28, 2021.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

VICTORIA - British Columbia's chief coroner says 719 sudden and unexpected deaths have been reported in the province during the historic heat wave, and that number over a seven-day period is unprecedented.

Lisa Lapointe says the number of fatalities is three times more than what would normally occur during the same period.

She says the extreme weather is believed to be a significant contributing factor in the jump in deaths, but the number is expected to increase as more information is compiled.

Lapointe has said extra coroners have been working in the field and many of the people who were found dead were elderly and living alone without air conditioning.

Lytton set a Canadian heat record this week for the third day in a row, reaching 49.6 C the day before residents were ordered to evacuate within minutes due to a raging out-of-control wildfire.

Lapointe has said that while some parts of the province typically experience high temperatures during summer, those living in urban areas were caught unprepared when the mercury topped 30 C in Vancouver, for example, before returning to more typical weather.

"Today, the coroners service is seeing a downward trend from the number of deaths reported over the past few days, and we are hopeful this trend will continue," she said Friday.

"Whenever possible, people are encouraged to visit cooler environments such as cooling centres, malls, libraries and other air-conditioned community spaces for essential respite from the effects of severe heat."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 2, 2021.
TORONTO - A 31-year-old man was charged with first-degree murder Friday in the death of a veteran police officer who was struck by a vehicle earlier that day, an incident investigators deemed an "intentional and deliberate act."

Toronto Police officers and Toronto City Hall corporate security stand at the entrance to Toronto City Hall's parking garage where a Toronto Police officer was killed in the morning hours of Friday, July 2, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Cole Burston

TORONTO - A 31-year-old man was charged with first-degree murder Friday in the death of a veteran police officer who was struck by a vehicle earlier that day, an incident investigators deemed an "intentional and deliberate act."

Const. Jeffrey Northrup was in the parking garage at Toronto City Hall, responding to reports of a robbery in progress early Friday morning when he was killed in an incident that also left another officer injured, said interim police Chief James Ramer, calling it a "senseless and devastating tragedy."

Ramer said the 31-year veteran of the service was intentionally struck by a vehicle after responding to a 911 call for a robbery in progress. A female plainclothes officer was injured and sent to hospital but has since been released, he said.

Police said early Friday that an arrest had been made in the case, and later announced the charge against the suspect, identified as Umar Zameer. They said a publication ban prevents them from releasing further details.

Municipal and provincial offered condolences to Northrup's grieving family and friends, and praised him for serving his community over several decades.

Ramer said the constable should be remembered as an "outstanding police officer and member of the community."

"He was just full of personality... loved by everyone, and just coming into work every day was his pride and joy," the interim chief said.

"He loved his job and went in to do that job every day and despite the dangers that we occasionally face he continued to do that job to the best of his ability," said Ramer.

Northrup had been training new officers until April, when he requested to return to the major crimes unit, Ramer said,

"Despite 31 years on the job he was eager to do that," said Ramer. "It speaks to the kind of officer he was and the dedication that he had that it was at this stage of his career that he was going into the major crimes unit."

Toronto Mayor John Tory said Northrup previously worked as a court officer but "achieved his ambition" of joining the police ranks and then "served his city... with distinction."

"So it is with immense gratitude and profound sadness that we mark this tragic loss," the mayor said.

Tory noted the hardest part of his job is when tragedy strikes the city.

"Nothing can prepare any of us, the people in the city of Toronto, the rest of the members of the police service, for news like this," he said. "I begin, on behalf of the three million people who our police officers serve, by extending to the family of officer Northrup our deepest condolences.

"That's to his wife, and to his children, and to his mother, and all the member of his family and his friends."

Ontario Premier Doug Ford also offered his sympathies to those close to Northrup.

"Im terribly saddened to hear the tragic news of Const. Jeff Northrup who was killed in the line of duty," tweeted Ford. "Jeff served his community for 31 years. My deepest condolences to his wife, three kids and the entire Toronto Police Service. We are with you mourning this devastating loss."

The Toronto Police Association said it's attending to Northrup's wife and children and asks that the public respects their privacy.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 2, 2021.

_ With files from Paola Loriggio.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version misspelled the last name of Const. Jeffrey Northrup.
OTTAWA  Catholic entities who hold records from the Manitoba residential schools they used to run say theyre committed to providing as much documentation as possible, after the recent uncovering of unmarked graves.

OTTAWA  Catholic entities who hold records from the Manitoba residential schools they used to run say theyre committed to providing as much documentation as possible, after the recent uncovering of unmarked graves.

Advocates doubt that promise, however, after years of trying to pry evidence from the Roman Catholic Church.

"Its nearly impossible to pin them down," said John Milloy, a historian who has researched residential schools for decades. "People will only be satisfied with full disclosure."

In June, the two orders responsible for all six Catholic residential schools in Manitoba pledged to make more records accessible: the Grey Nuns and the Oblates.

Both were asked to provide records by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which issued its final reports in 2015 and transferred all documents to the Winnipeg-based National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

"That part of their history is contained in our records, and so we need to find ways to make sure they have as much access to our records as possible," Rev. Ken Thorson, who leads the English branch of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, said in a recent interview.

Both the English- and French-speaking Oblates branches have pledged to provide survivors all historical documents, in whatever way doesnt breach privacy legislation.

Separately, the Grey Nuns of Manitoba, which was dissolved years ago, had sent its residential school records from St. Boniface to an affiliate in Edmonton in 1999. The records were transferred to Montreal a decade later.

Before that move in 2019, the Grey Nuns provided almost all records to a residential school research project, which was later folded into a federal department who shared the records with the TRC.

Yet, those documents excluded more than a dozen boxes of records protected by solicitor-client privilege, as well as photographs.

"The only documents remaining to be sent by the congregation to the NCTR are some 3,000 digitized photographs, which we hope to have delivered in early July 2021," Mylene Laurendeau, head archivist for the Sisters of Charity of Montreal, wrote in an email.

Yet, that doesnt include the records the Grey Nuns chose to withhold.

In the final months of the TRC, an internal April 2015 memo flagged 17 Catholic entities who hadnt handed over any documents, according to a record obtained by CBC News.

One was the Archdiocese of Winnipeg, which said in an email statement it provided all documents by June 2015, which researchers corroborated.

RUTH BONNEVILLE Records for Assiniboia Residential School, located in Winnipeg, were provided to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015  months after a memo noted they hadnt been. (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press files)

Those records involved three schools: Sandy Bay, Pine Creek, and Assiniboia (Winnipeg).

Records for the other Catholic residential schools  located at Cross Lake, Sagkeeng and The Pas  are likely among those held by the Grey Nuns.

The April 2015 internal memo notes the Grey Nuns would not hand over any more documents than the ones it provided in the early 2000s, despite an "Excel document, which includes an inventory of documents withheld from the TRC."

The issue persisted into September 2017, according to NCTR internal records obtained by researcher Ed Sadowski, who is a retired Algoma University professor.

A document Sadowski obtained through a freedom of information request shows the Grey Nuns withheld "16 boxes (possibly 17) of litigation material," some of which was used to craft the 2006 residential school settlement, but that the order explicitly asked to not have shared with the NCTR.

Meanwhile, the NCTR obtained just 388 of 3,493 photos deemed relevant to documenting residential schools by fall 2017.

Milloy, who was involved in the TRC record collection, said the Grey Nuns response is characteristic of Catholic entities, which have shown less transparency and urgency than any Christian denomination.

Historian John Milloy says Catholic entities have been less transparent in providing records on residential schools.(Wayne Glowacki / Winnipeg Free Press files)

"The Protestant churches fell all over themselves, after the settlement agreement, to be helpful. You were sort of tripping over United Church people when trying to finish your research," Milloy recalled.

The TRC, and the 2006 settlement that predated the commission, sought all records relevant to the residential school experience, but didnt define relevancy.

Some Catholic nuns kept a journal of daily activities and happenings, called a codex, which church entities withheld.

"They were declared by the church as personal records, and therefore not relevant," Milloy said.

"When we know there are records not being turned over for whatever reason, the suspicion automatically grows that the Catholic church is likely not disclosing other sorts of records."

This past month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former TRC commissioner Murray Sinclair asked Catholics to pressure their church hierarchy to provide records. Thats sown confusion among activists, as there is no public listing of which diocese, oblate organization or individual church is withholding documents.

Milloy said lawyers faced that same confusion more than a decade ago, when survivors came forward with abuse allegations and law firms couldnt figure out which Catholic authority to sue.

The NCTR declined four interview requests this month about which specific records it lacks and who is preventing them from being accessed, other than those relating to the former school in Kamloops, B.C.

The centre instead issued a general statement, saying it takes guidance from survivors and elders, and will soon provide information on accessing records held by the Oblates.

"Its important to recognize that this is not only a Catholic Church issue. The federal government and provincial governments also have not shared all the records they agreed to provide to the NCTR," reads the statement.

Ry Moran, former director of the NCTR, said the photos the Grey Nuns hold are important to survivors, and should have been handed over before the TRC wrapped up in 2015.

"Photographs that depict residential schools and student life in those schools are also clearly relevant, making the collection and production of those records essential," said Moran, who now works at the University of Victoria.

Sadowski says the Winnipeg-based centre is hamstrung by privacy laws.

"Theyre handcuffed because all the information they have is subject to federal or provincial privacy legislation, never mind whatever restrictions the churches have imposed," said Sadowski.

Hes tried for years to get NCTR to provide an inventory of what documents it holds, including ones only accessible to survivors, as the list would reveal which records are missing.

Milloy added federal departments are likely sitting on a trove of records. During litigation surrounding the St. Annes school in Ontario, a court ordered the Justice Department in 2014 to provide hundreds of police records it held, documenting decades of reported abuse and suspicious deaths at the school.

"This is a big game thats being played by everybody," Sadowski said.

This weekend, Manitoba federal cabinet minister Dan Vandal joined calls for investigations and criminal charges for what happened at residential schools.

But Sadowski said he cant see Ottawa or the churches sharing records that could make them liable for more compensation beyond the agreement all parties reached in 2005.

"The churches say theyll hand over stuff, but even in the settlement agreement, the court actually told them to do that  and they havent," he said.

"Now theyre going around saying they will? I dont believe it. I find that really hard to believe."

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca
A day after her statue was toppled, it fell to a kayaker to collect the severed bronze head of Queen Victoria from the shallow waters of the Assiniboine River.

A day after her statue was toppled, it fell to a kayaker to collect the severed bronze head of Queen Victoria from the shallow waters of the Assiniboine River.

It was a final indignity to the century-old landmark on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislative Building in the wake of a Canada Day protest that sent shockwaves across the country and overseas.

Moments before a rope was used Thursday to pull the statue off its pedestal, Queen Victoria sat in repose on her throne, staring over hundreds of orange flags stuck in the lawn that signified the growing number of unmarked graves of children who attended residential schools.

Later, a more recent statue of Queen Elizabeth on the grounds of the Winnipeg home of Lt.-Gov. Janice Filmon was also toppled. It was a series of emotional fireworks on a day Canadians were encouraged not to celebrate, but to reflect on the legacy of residential schools.

KELLY GERALDINE MALONE / THE CANADIAN PRESS Kayaker Tom Armstrong fishes the head of the Queen Victoria statue from the Assiniboine River Friday.

A police investigation is now underway. Manitoba's premier condemned what he called vandalism, adding those responsible will be pursued actively.

While the incident made international headlines and even triggered a response from the British prime minister, Manitoba's Indigenous leaders stopped short of condemning those whose actions were captured in videos posted on social media.

"MKO (representing northern First Nations) does not condone violence. I have reached out to Winnipeg chief of police Danny Smyth to let him know we do not condone violence. We want to continue to work on relationships with our partners and we hope for continued dialogue around the ongoing legacy of residential schools Destruction of material things are nothing compared to the deliberate destruction of life and culture," said Pimicikamak Cree Nation Chief David Monias.

"Material things are replaceable, but lives arent," he said.

"Hiding our childrens remains and not returning them and not telling us where they are buried is even more damaging and we have to work on returning these childrens remains home. Lets find them and help us find them. I dont support violence, but our people are hurt."

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS The statue of Queen Victoria was pulled down and covered in red handprints by protesters calling on the country to reflect on its racist history on Canada Day, a movement spurred on by the ongoing discoveries of unmarked children's graves at the sites of former residential schools.

Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Arlen Dumas told the Free Press he was "shocked and disappointed" to hear of the incident at the legislature, noting he was at the "No Pride in Genocide" event and did not witness the statues coming down.

"The young people, the people who chose to express themselves the way that they did at the legislature, it comes from a place of hurt, it comes from a place of grief, it comes from a place of anger," he said Friday. "And we have to make sure that were supportive and we figure out how we can address this issue."

Vandalism is in the eye of the beholder Click to Expand A statue of Queen Elizabeth is seen overturned and vandalized at the provincial legislature in Winnipeg on Friday. (Kelly Geraldine Malone / The Canadian Press) Posted: 7:00 PM Jul. 2, 2021 Five years ago, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous volunteers in Manitoba got together to bring attention to an incredible wrong. At the Manitoba legislature, the group pointed out, there was no statue commemorating First Nations in the province. Virtually everyone else, including the Metis nation (honoured in 1973 with a statue of Louis Riel), is recognized. Read Full Story

Ideally, there would have been more cultural advisers and Indigenous leaders on site to provide support to those in pain, Dumas said, adding hed be willing to collaborate on a replacement statue that would be more "reflective of what Manitoba is today."

"Maybe if we took away these colonial monikers, or at least added more culturally appropriate ones, wed be able to move forward in a better way," he said.

Aside from the attacks on the two statues, Thursday's protest was largely non-violent and there were no reported injuries. One arrest was made not directly linked to the protest: a 51-year-old man was charged with mischief after vandalizing a private vehicle.

"There was no violence going on towards other people, it was largely property  in this case statues  that were being damaged," Smyth said at a news conference Friday.

Previous reports that police used a stun gun on one man after the statue was pulled down were false, Winnipeg Police Service Const. Rob Carver told the Free Press.

"No one was tased regarding the toppling of the statues. Absolutely not."

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS The statue of Queen Elizabeth, on the east side of the Manitoba Legislative Building, was also toppled off its base on Canada Day.

While Smyth was critical of what he called "a volatile situation that was started by a small number of individuals," the police chief said officers chose not to intervene to avoid inciting protesters.

"The risk to any of us gathering is that there might be some within the crowd who have different agenda, and that is what we witnessed at the end of the afternoon," he said.

However, Smyth said some officers were spit on, and police cars were struck with rocks.

Police will be investigating, but Smyth said he couldnt estimate what type of charges may result.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A sign is surrounded with children's shoes on the steps of the Manitoba Legislative Building Friday.

Premier Brian Pallister was fairly blunt in his brief statement, issued Friday morning.

"The actions by individuals to vandalize public property at the Manitoba Legislative Building July 1 are unacceptable. They are a major setback for those who are working toward real reconciliation and do nothing to advance this important goal," Pallister said.

"Those who commit acts of violence will be pursued actively in the courts. All leaders in Manitoba must strongly condemn acts of violence and vandalism, and at the same time, we must come together to meaningfully advance reconciliation."

NDP Leader Wab Kinew also issued a statement Friday, calling out "the actions of some."

"For the most part, yesterday was a day of unity, commemoration and healing for all Manitobans," Kinew said. "However, the actions of some at the legislature were wrong. These acts of destruction do not further reconciliation and we unequivocally condemn violence.

"We support those who continue to work peacefully towards reconciliation."

The incident made headlines around the world, including international outlets such as Al Jazeera and the Guardian.

British newspaper the Independent reported Prime Minister Boris Johnson criticized the toppling of the statue in Winnipeg. A spokesman was quoted as saying Johnson "condemned any defacing of statues of the Queen."

 with files from Danielle Da Silva

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: malakabas_
Joe Thiessen never had trouble paying his respects to his late father.

Joe Thiessen never had trouble paying his respects to his late father.

For more than 70 years, hes been able to visit his dads final resting spot near Altona  until recently.

Thiessen, who is originally from the area, but has lived in Winnipeg for years, said when he and his wife went to the cemetery on Fathers Day, they met a farmer who had bought the land. They were told they couldnt go to the cemetery because a crop had been planted around it.

"I didnt think there would be a problem because Ive been driving in on a trail for years," said Thiessen.

"He said (we) can come in during wintertime but it is in the middle of a square mile. Anybody who is directly related to anyone there is a senior citizen. How are they going to walk that far and in winter?

"How could anyone just buy a cemetery? How could someone just buy my dads grave?"

"He said (we) can come in during wintertime but it is in the middle of a square mile. Anybody who is directly related to anyone there is a senior citizen. How are they going to walk that far and in winter?"  Joe Thiessen

Thiessen noted his dads grave has a marker, which he put on the plot a few years ago. Other aging gravestones, several of which are in a single line, mark where several other people are buried. He said he can tell there are other graves that have no markers.

Jacob Thiessen, who was born on Jan. 14, 1894, married twice and fathered 18 children. He died on Oct. 2, 1950, at age 56. He was buried in a cemetery six kilometres west Altona in the RM of Rhineland. His first wife, Margaretha, died in 1930 and is also buried there.

Unlike municipal cemeteries such as Brookside in Winnipeg, and church-run or private graveyards, Bergfeld, also called the North Neuhoffnung Cemetery, was never licensed by the province.

A spokesman for the province said John Delaney, an inspector with the Funeral Board of Manitoba, looked into the matter and concluded the board has no authority over the cemetery because it isnt licensed.

The spokesman said Delaney told the family they should contact the RCMP about the cemetery.

Joe Thiessen places a headstone for his father, Jacob Thiessen, at the Bergfeld cemetery west of Altona in the RM of Rhineland. A new landowner has restricted access to the burial site. (Supplied)

RCMP spokeswoman Tara Seel said the local detachment investigated and determined nothing illegal had taken place.

"The landowner did not want anyone driving on the field until the crop comes off," said Seel.

"However, the landowner did grant access to the site by foot. The Cemetery Act was reviewed and the landowner has a responsibility to maintain the gravesite, but has no further obligation."

The landowner could not be reached for comment.

RM of Rhineland Reeve Don Wiebe said many such small cemeteries dot the land in his municipality, which isnt responsible for them. Some are named and many are not. There are likely many more across the province.

It is upsetting. Burial sites are sacred. This is a sacrilege. There needs to be due respect.  Suesan Munro

"A couple of guys did a study and there are 200 of them (in Rhineland), and a lot of them arent active now," said Wiebe.

"We have some sites, not used, which people take care of. But, sometimes, they get dropped off and neglected. Its then these sites almost disappear."

Suesan Munro, a granddaughter of Jacob Thiessen, said she has been to the graveyard at least three times during her lifetime and is hoping to go there again from her home in Alberta when COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.

Munro said graveyards should never be included in a land sale and no one should be denied access to them.

"It is upsetting," she said. "Burial sites are sacred. This is a sacrilege.

"There needs to be due respect."

The family worked the land for years. I think if you take out the cemetery it is like you didnt exist. I hope that never happens.  Janet Braybrook

Another granddaughter, Janet Braybrook of Alberta, said she has researched her ancestry and found the plot of land where the graveyard is located used to be part of a farm owned by the Sawatzky family, which Jacob Thiessen married into.

"My great-grandparents were on that land and I guess thats why they are there," said Braybrook.

"The family worked the land for years. I think if you take out the cemetery it is like you didnt exist. I hope that never happens."

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca
Cheeks flushed and foreheads glistened as people tried to beat the heat at a cooling station near Logan Avenue and Martha Street Thursday.

Cheeks flushed and foreheads glistened as people tried to beat the heat at a cooling station near Logan Avenue and Martha Street Thursday.

In a joint effort, non-profit organizations Main Street Project and Anishiative set up canopies over tables stocked with cool water, popsicles and snacks to give to passersby, with a focus on serving vulnerable people.

The temperature on Thursday rose to 32.2 C  the hottest July 1 on record. Environment Canada forecasts even hotter temperatures through Monday, spiking Saturday at 37 C.

"Its very important when theres extreme weather that we take care of our community," said Cindy Titus of Main Street Project.

She said people experiencing homelessness are at risk of heat exhaustion and heat stroke, and the usual cooling spots might be inaccessible this year.

"COVID-19 made it more challenging for them, because theres less places open to get out of the heat," said Titus.

River Nepinak-Fontaine, an organizer with Anishiative, said the cooling station was a way to connect with and support the community.

"I feel amazing today. Its really heartwarming to see the community step up," he said. "It actually brought a tear to my eye."

Anishiative is no stranger to helping people in extreme weather  but the last time they set up in the area, it was to battle extreme cold.

Nepinak-Fontaine said the organization just tries to help where they can.

"Driving around on the street you see them, our relatives, laying on the ground. Its so hot, they pass out. So its super, super important that we have something like this where they can come get some food, they can get cold water. They can pray and can offer some tobacco to the fire," he said.

For Nepinak-Fontaine, theres another important thing fuelling his drive to help, he said.

"Its super important that I do what I do, so my son can see the way the world should be," he said, as his son hopped playfully around him.

Down the street, city halls Susan A. Thompson building opened its doors to serve as a cooling station. Mayor Brian Bowman announced the plans Wednesday, but it appeared word hadnt gotten out, because only a few people passing through the courtyard headed inside.

The building will act as a cooling station through July 4, open noon-8 p.m. daily. The city also deposited water tanks outside four locations  Salvation Army at Main Street and Henry Avenue, Broadway Neighbourhood Centre, Magnus Eliason Recreation Centre and Bear Clan Headquarters.

A water station was also set up in Central Park. Members of the fire department sat under canopies and offered bottles of water to any passersby. They said theyd gone through 20 cases of bottled water Thursday.

Daniel Henderson stopped on his bike for water, and said the importance of the station wasnt lost on him.

"Its very beautiful right now, because water is the gift of life," he said.

His friend, Vance Bouchie, said he could relate.

"I remember sometimes I had no water on hot days. When I was struggling with homelessness, Id wake up and be all hot," he said. "Just having this is so beneficial."

Bouchie believes acts of kindness and community support can go a long way.

"It gives hope," he said. "A lot of people struggle with things, so just to have extra things like this  it sparks your day. Small things, you know?"

Extreme heat can cause heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Symptoms of heat exhaustion include dizziness, heavy sweating, cool or clammy skin, nausea, vomiting and muscle cramps. It can help to drink water, find a place to cool off and splash yourself with cold water. Heat stroke is more serious, with symptoms including headache, an absence of sweat, nausea and a loss of consciousness.

In the case of heat stroke, call 911.

cody.sellar@freepress.mb.ca
You can play laser tag, go axe-throwing or test yourself at an escape room  but you can't stroll through a museum, gaze at art in a gallery or browse a library's stacks.

You can play laser tag, go axe-throwing or test yourself at an escape room  but you can't stroll through a museum, gaze at art in a gallery or browse a library's stacks.

That irks the Association of Manitoba Museums executive director Monique Brandt.

"It feels unfair," Brandt said. "A museum could easily control the people that come in the same as a store, a restaurant, a gym, a salon."

The organization, which represents about 200 museums provincewide, wrote a letter to the premier last week, requesting officials reconsider the ongoing closure of museums and galleries, and to allow them to operate at 25 per cent capacity, after the first phase of the province's reopening was announced Wednesday.

To date, Brandt has not heard back in an official capacity. (In June 2020, museums were included in the first phase of that reopening plan.)

After phoning Manitoba Health for clarification, Brandt was told museums, galleries and libraries can conduct outdoor programming that falls under gathering restrictions.

Seeing museums remain closed is frustrating for Gary Dyck, executive director of the Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach.

"Were disappointed and a little bit in disbelief, knowing that even like hatchet-throwing, escape rooms and laser tag  those things are allowed," Dyck said. "Weve been doing our part to follow COVID protocols, watching safety restrictions. Its hard."

He hopes the current orders are amended so the museum can reopen at some point in July.

The province's rationale is difficult to understand, too, for Mark Traynor, executive director of the Dalnavert Museum and Visitors Centre in Winnipeg's downtown.

"I think theres ample evidence that our sector has not been problematic in terms of transmission rates and outbreaks," Traynor said. "There's a sense of unequal treatment... in the community."

He said although museums and cultural organizations have diverse revenue streams, 2021 is "already looking to be extremely bleak, financially."

On June 28, chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin said the province has faced questions over museums, libraries and galleries remaining closed.

"Indoor gatherings are the highest risk, especially places where we have indoor gathering for prolonged periods. Were still at the early stages of this reopening plan... Were not in a position to open everything at once. Were certainly not out of the woods," he said.

Dorota Blumczynska, CEO of the Manitoba Museum. (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press files)

Manitoba Museum chief executive officer Dorota Blumczynska said she defers to those with expertise on matters of public health.

"If their advice at this moment in time is 'Let's avoid those enclosed spaces', I think its on all of us to respect that  I think its about keeping everyone safe," she said.

However, Blumczynska added a cultural institution like the Manitoba Museum has a role to play in the current residential school reckoning ongoing in Canada  and it's ready to play its part when it can.

"The museum could offer a space for learning and intercultural dialogue. Really, the museum could be a place where people could safely, while physical distancing and being masked and escape the heat wave... be given a real moment to think about what it means to be part of Canada," she said, alluding to the recent discoveries of unmarked graves at former residential schools and calls from some to cancel Canada Day celebrations.

For Brandt's part, she's concerned for museums in the city and rural Manitoba's bottom line.

"The vast majority of museums in the province are very small, volunteer-run organizations. Even the bigger ones, it's not like they're making money hand-over-fist," Brandt said.

You can stop in for a curio or knick-knack at one of those museums' stores, though. Those fall under retail, at 25 per cent capacity.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca
A day that began with rallies that flooded streets orange in honour of bodies buried in unmarked graves at residential schools ended with the toppling of a statue that has stood for more than a century in front of Manitobas legislative building.

A day that began with rallies that flooded streets orange in honour of bodies buried in unmarked graves at residential schools ended with the toppling of a statue that has stood for more than a century in front of Manitobas legislative building.

The Queen Victoria monument was brought to the ground and covered in red handprints Thursday afternoon following calls for Canadians to spend Canada Day reflecting on the countrys racist history.

As teens and young adults whooped and rushed to take selfies atop the felled statue, Caroline Clearsky stood quietly.

"I can feel the energy," she said.

"Its powerful and profound," her niece Tracy Clearsky agreed.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A statue of Queen Victoria was toppled at the Manitoba Legislative Building following a march in honour of Indigenous children found in unmarked graves at former residential schools. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press)

The energy Clearsky felt, she said, was one of pride. Her mother attended a residential school in Pine Creek, and Clearsky grew up feeling the consequences. This is a signal things are finally changing, she said.

"Ive lived my whole life to be united with my people."

First unveiled in 1904, the statue was commissioned in recognition of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The monarch reigned over Canada when treaties were first negotiated with First Nations and the federal government adopted the residential school system as policy.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A statue of Queen Elizabeth on the grounds of Government House, the official residence of the lieutenant-governor, was also toppled. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press)

A statue of Queen Elizabeth on the grounds of Government House, the official residence of the lieutenant-governor, was also toppled.

Carol Polson, a longtime Winnipegger originally from Thunder Bay, said she was saddened to see the face-down statue of Queen Elizabeth, which was designed by Leo Mol.

"Its troubling and disturbing to see this because I believe its entirely unnecessary. We need to find the right kind of dialogue for this issue and these concerns, but today of all days is not the day to do this. Im sorry. It doesnt make the kind of statement whoever did this thought it would."

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Red hand prints were left on the base of where a statue of Queen Victoria was toppled on Thursday. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press)

Earlier, amid a sea of orange in front of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, 12-year-old Lacy Bird clutched a photo of her great-grandmother.

Elizabeth (James) Bird was a residential school survivor. Unlike more than 1,000 people, many of them believed to be children, recently discovered in unmarked graves on the grounds of former residential schools, she made it home.

"I think it's important that she's remembered along with (all of the children)," Lacy said. Looking out at the crowd of more than 100 people, she said she was glad to see a large turnout.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Hundreds joined in marches in memory of Indigenous children found in unmarked graves on residential school properties. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press) Reporter: ?

"It makes me feel glad that a lot of people support in remembering the babies that didn't make it home," she said.

Hundreds of people wearing orange Every Child Matters shirts gathered at several events in Winnipeg and across Canada Thursday in lieu of Canada Day celebrations to show respect for residential school survivors and for the as-yet-unidentified children found in unmarked graves in B.C. and Saskatchewan.

There were two marches on Thursday: the Every Child Matters march that ended at the Manitoba Legislative Building, and No Pride in Genocide, organized by Treaty One Nation, that started at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and ended at the Peguis Urban Reserve at 1075 Portage Ave., which featured speeches by residential school survivors and Indigenous leaders.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Hundreds joined in two marches in hounour of Indigenous children found on residential school properties throughout Canada. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press files)

Treaty One Nation spokesman and Long Plain First Nation Chief Dennis Meeches called on Canada to officially recognize as genocide the realities of residential schools. He described discoveries of hundreds of children's graves as a "watershed moment" in the legacy of residential schools, one that is disturbing not just to Indigenous people but to everyone.

"We demand Canada come to terms with this and declare this as genocide," Meeches said in front of the museum Thursday afternoon.

Grand chiefs, politicians and community leaders spoke about the still-recent history and ongoing trauma in Indigenous communities, urging Canadians to read and act upon the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 calls to action. For many, the rally was not just for sombre reflection  it was a triumphant show of strength.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Hundreds joined in two marches in hounour of Indigenous children found on residential school properties throughout Canada. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press files)

Former Assembly of First Nations regional chief Kevin Hart drew cheers from the crowd when he said regardless of racist government policies, "we're still here and we're still strong."

"I need you to be the voices of those lost and forgotten ones. We cannot let them be silenced anymore," he said.

For William Elvis Thomas of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, being surrounded by a swell of orange was a powerful moment.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Hundreds of marchers made their way to the Manitoba Legislative Building on Thursday. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press)

"It's heartening to see this kind of experience unfold right before my eyes. It's been such a long time coming; it's very touching, very emotional."

He attended residential school at Nelson House, and on Thursday, his family was with him as the crowd marched nearly five kilometres from the museum to the Peguis Urban Reserve on Portage Avenue.

Asked what meaningful action would look like to him, he said constitutional changes are likely necessary, as well as improved education.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Hundreds of orange flags are placed on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature to represent Indigenous children found in unmarked graves at former residential schools. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press) Reporter: ?

"I am hopeful that things will change for the better," he said, adding, "We need to make sure the education systems talk about the real truth of how this country was built."

Holding up a sign that read, "Children should not be buried in schoolyards," Lucy Antsanen, who is Dene from Lac Brochet, called on the Pope and church leaders to apologize, and on the Canadian government to take real action.

"People belittle it and say, oh, they died of TB, they died of measles. In the first place, should the kids even be there, taken away from their families, their language, their culture?" she said.

"Our souls are hungry, and we have to speak up. If we don't rally, government is not going to do anything about it."

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights may be on a transformative path to ridding its workplace of structural racism and oppression, but the speed at which it is effecting change is unacceptably slow.

Editorial

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights may be on a transformative path to ridding its workplace of structural racism and oppression, but the speed at which it is effecting change is unacceptably slow.

A new report released this week, the second in a two-part examination, found that while some progress has been made to address what many CMHR staff have described as a toxic work environment, serious problems at the museum remain.

"Racism is pervasive and systemic within the institution, with significant impacts on hiring and retention of Indigenous, Black, and racialized employees," wrote external reviewer Laurelle Harris in her 81-page report released this week.

In addition to three sexual harassment cases at the museum, one involving the stalking of a Black woman, there is a pattern of gendered racism against Black men, in the form of "sexualizing and fetishizing," the report found.

It also states that anti-Black racism continues within the museum, manifested in the forms which are systemic, everyday and gendered.

The documentation of sexual harassment cases, some of which were not disclosed by management to Harris during her review, is "decentralized and poor," raising concerns that cases are not properly investigated.

Some male employees reported witnessing sexist behaviour in the workplace and expressed guilt they did not intervene. The report also found unequal treatment of employees based on race.

"Indigenous and racialized employees reported having been subjected to expectations and standards of job performance that exceeded the expectations held for white employees and have been reprimanded for errors or actions when their white counterparts were not," the report found.

While the report acknowledges progress has been made in disrupting undesirable patterns of behaviour (and praises the museums new CEO Isha Khan for her efforts in promoting gender and racial equity), there appears to be a reluctance among some in senior management to fully embrace change.

The capacity of the executive management team, excluding the CEO, to lead this change "is not currently well-developed," the report found. There is also a reluctance among some senior executives to hold white members of management accountable for actions "that help sustain systemic and everyday racism in the workplace."

According to the report, a significant number of staff say there has been a lack of accountability among some senior managers who have contributed to a work environment in which racism and oppression have been allowed to flourish.

The museum has acted on many of the reports recommendations, including implementing anti-racism education among senior executives and prioritizing the recruitment of racialized and LGBTTQ+ candidates for executive and managerial positions. However, without full buy-in from senior management, problems will persist.

To some degree, thats expected.

"Racism and oppression cannot be fixed in a matter of months," the report says. "Disrupting oppression is an ongoing process. It has a beginning but not an end."

Still, there are practical recommendations made in the report that have not been fully implemented, such as the proposed creation of a chief equity officer and anti-racism practice lead as a member of the executive management team.

A new equity and strategic initiatives director position was created, but not at the executive level, which the report said was necessary to create permanent structural change and to have a direct reporting mechanism to the museums board of trustees.

Change is occurring in the workplace at the CMHR, but it lacks urgency. Incrementalism is not good enough, especially for an institution that is supposed to be leading the way in the fight against oppression and racial inequality.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The Minnesota Legislature worked into the early hours Thursday to try to finish off a $52 billion, two-year budget after working into the early hours the night before to pass a bill that ends Gov. Tim Walz's emergency powers, although a top Republican said the special session could continue for days longer to make sure the governor signed all the bills.

Trust but verify, Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, of East Gull Lake, said at a news conference, quoting a proverb that President Ronald Reagan was fond of using in his dealings with Soviet leaders.

Walz laughed at the comment and said Gazelka didn't need to worry. He spoke to reporters after personally delivering the signed K-12 education funding bill to Secretary of State Steve Simon to make its enactment official, and signed three other budget bills to avert the lingering threat of a partial state government shutdown after the current budget ran out at the end of the day Wednesday.

The only budget bill still awaiting votes early Thursday was a tax bill that needed approval first in the House, then the Senate. The House debate was late to get going, and bogged down amid a partisan fight over the details of unwinding the governor's emergency powers.
That phrase, of course, comes from the Pledge of Allegiance, and Republicans have insisted that schoolchildren recite it at the beginning of each school day. If those anti-socialist politicians knew it was composed by Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist, their hair would catch on fire.

But what concerns me the most is that the indivisible bit of the Pledge is being tested more now than at any time since the Civil War. Americans are divided due to lies and deliberate misinformation from the former president and his loyal supporters in state houses, Congress and the media.

The former president still refuses to concede he lost the 2020 election even though every one of the numerous investigations has proved theres not one iota of evidence to support his claims of voter or election fraud. A new in-depth investigation by the Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee also refuted his claims. So has William Barr, the Donald Trump-appointed Attorney General, who recently admitted,  my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all b.s. That Barr never said anything to refute Trumps lies until recently is proof of his cowardice, and that his fear of the former president trumped his conscience.

Still, we have much to celebrate on this Fourth of July. We should be forever grateful for all the progress thats been made by dedicated, determined Americans throughout the years since 1776 as they fought for true liberty and justice for all. We also need to acknowledge that the fight for every Americans liberty and freedom is still, and may always be, ongoing, and that our best weapons in that fight are our voices and our votes.

Pat Nash has lived in the Baraboo area, off and on, for more than 35 years. Contact her at patnash5149@gmail.com.
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Weber informed Cacciaatore that she would give Cacciaatore a ride back to her vehicle as she needed to further investigate why Cacciaatore turned around in a backyard. Cacciaatore told Weber If you are going to arrest me, just arrest me. Cacciaatore was not placed under arrest at that point.

Upon arrival at the vehicle Weber found Cacciaatores car parked in the middle of the road. Weber found that Cacciaatore has a 0.02 blood alcohol concentration while checking her status, and was required to have an ignition interlock device installed. The vehicle, which Cacciaatore said she did not own, did not have an ignition interlock device.

Weber opened the squad car door to speak to Cacciaatore and could smell an odor of intoxicants, and noted Cacciaatores eyes were glassy. Asked if she would complete standard field sobriety tests Cacciaatore declined.

Cacciaatore was informed she would be placed under arrest, but Cacciaatore called someone to come pick her up. Asked to step out of the car Cacciaatore initially continued to talk on her phone before eventually complying and being placed I handcuffs.
At the bar he told her that hed had his eye on her for years and he knew she felt the same way about him and asked her to have sex with him. She refused, telling him that he was married and that sex between a legislator and an aide would be inappropriate, and left the bar.

That December, Gruszynski met with the human resources office and said he had been heavily drinking at the bar that night and didnt remember meeting the aide. According to the documents, he said he had pieced together the evening using bar receipts and an Uber app and that someone (whose name was redacted in the records) told him he had made inappropriate remarks to a staffer.

The records included Facebook messages between Gruszynski and the staffer that took place shortly before she arrived at the Malt House, where he pressed her about where she was and whether they could meet. The staffer tried to put him off, responding with a laughing emoticon and asking him if he needed a ride before finally suggesting they meet at the Malt House.

Gruszynski told interviewers he wanted to apologize to the staffer and had told his wife about the incident. He said he had been drinking heavily since September but after that night he quit. He said he didnt want to be the person he is and began to cry.
Fakugesi Festival 2021 #BUILDCOZYOUHAVETO

This years Fakugesi Festival will be a hybrid event and takes place from 14 to 24 October 2021.

The annual celebration of tech-powered African creativity is hitting reset with a phygital format - a blend of the physical and the digital  and social sculptor dillion s. phiri is in the curators seat.

Tshimologong Innovation Precinct and Wits School of Arts are proud to announce the 8th annual Fakugesi African Digital Innovation Festival 2021 by the newly appointed curator dillion s. phiri.

Fakugesi 2021 will continue to bring industry, researchers and creators together to celebrate how technology enables creativity while zooming in on the ways this relationship shapes our lives.

The Festival will be exploring what building currently means for creatives using tech, under the banner of this years theme: #BuildCozYouHaveTo.

Fakugesi agitates the status quo by showcasing the new realities that become possible when technology and creativity fuse, says Lesley Donna Williams, Chief Executive Officer of Tshimologong. It provokes new perspectives on both problems and opportunities in society, one cant help but respond energetically. Its a gathering place to channel youthful action, for corporates with a focus on R&D and for public sector agents who are championing the design of future cities.

Newly appointed Festival curator and social sculptor dillion s. phiri, best known for founding Creative Nestlings, brings you this years programme which is set to inspire and equip the next generation to build homegrown creative solutions across our 6 digital creative building areas:

Digital Music

Digital Art

Immersive media (AR, VR & IR)

Gaming

Animation

Maker Culture (from robotics to the internet of things)

On an endless digital landscape, construction never really ends, says phiri. From low-code tools and virtual goods to digital collaboration and the creator economy, the possibilities are endless and the barriers to entry have never been lower. While key structures in todays digital world may belong to a select few, tomorrows world belongs to everyone, especially African creators. If you want to build, the timing will never be better than right now.

The new phygital format festival will take place online with some in-person interventions in Johannesburg (details to follow), but dont expect a handful of Zoom panels. Expect an immersive, multifaceted virtual experience, including workshops, a conference, screenings and exhibitions, a new virtual expo, and a full slate of awards for young creators breaking the mould in digital creativity.

Dr Tegan Bristow, founder and outgoing director of the Fakugesi Festival, states: This is an electrifying new phase for Fakugesi Festivals history with dillion s. phiri at the curatorial helm bringing in a new era for African digital creatives.

Bristow returns to her work at Wits in a new role that aims to develop a stronger link between academia and industry for the digital creative industries through the Wits School of Arts & Tshimologong partnership in industry linked research and development. In 2021, apart from lending her extensive expertise to the event as a member of Fakugesi Festival steering committee, Bristow will focus on developing an alumni-focused programme celebrating the extraordinary talent and work that Fakugesi Festival has had the pleasure of showcasing and developing over the last seven years.

Registration to attend Fakugesi Festival 2021 will be available soon.

Want to get involved in Fakugesi Festival 2021? Visit https://fakugesi.co.za/fakugesi-festival-2021-buildcozyouhaveto/

About Fakugesi:

The Fakugesi African Digital Innovation Festival is rooted in showcasing and developing skills in technology, art and culture in Africa. Founded in 2014 as a collaboration between the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct and the Wits School of Arts, Digital Arts Department, the festival takes as it starting point the idea that in order for innovation with technology to succeed, a strong connection needs to be made to African cultural practices and creative encounters. Fakugesi means switch it on  or add power in urban Zulu, and was initially named by the late Shonisani Lethole, a kind, generous and inspiring entrepreneur and friend of industry.

About Wits Universitys Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct

Tshimologong Precinct aims to create world leading African digital entrepreneurs. It is a digital hub based in the inner-city district of Braamfontein, where the incubation of start-ups, the commercialization of research and the development of high level digital skills for students, working professionals and unemployed youth takes place.

Setswana for new beginnings, Tshimologong catalyses the transformation of Braamfontein into a premier technology destination to raise the profile of African digital innovation by inspiring new talent and addressing rising youth unemployment. As a university-based incubator, Tshimologong Precinct further aims to commercialise research done by Wits University students.
Book Launch: The Great Pretenders - Race and Class Under ANC Rule

The Wits School of Governance invites you to the book launch of THE GREAT PRETENDERS - Race and Class Under ANC Rule by Dr Ebrahim Harvey

In The Great Pretenders: Race and Class Under ANC Rule, veteran political analyst Dr Ebrahim Harvey delivers a stinging critique of the ANC. This must-read analysis reveals the complete failure of the ANC to roll back the race and class divide.

The Great Pretenders is fierce, passionate and provocative. It is certain to provoke those in power, stirring debate on not only the pernicious issue of race relations in South Africa, but on how to create the shared society promised us.

Join Dr Darlene Miller in a fireside chat with Dr Harvey as they unpack his recent publication.

Date: Wednesday, 7 July 2021

Time: 14:00  15:00

Platform: ZOOM
UTICA, NY - Lights. Cameras. Action. The city of Utica will be the location of yet another feature film and the filmmakers are looking for your help.

The movie is called Benji's Hour.

It tells the story of a troubled teen named Benji who gets arrested. As part of his punishment, he must work at a wig shop for chemo patients. There he develops a friendship with an unstable cancer patient named Laura.

The producer and writer of the film, Gabe Kahane, actually went to college nearby and says he spent a lot of time in Utica.

The film crew starts shooting Friday and is looking for extras and background people.

"At the end of the day, anyone who's interested in being a background actor, or an extra, this is a really wonderful way to learn the ins and outs of a film set without a long commitment," says Kahane.

The film crew will be in Utica filming Benjis Hour throughout July. If you're interested in learning the ins and outs of a feature film yourself, just send a recent photo and contact information to benjishourcasting@gmail.com.
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.  One of the teens charged following the murder of Kenneth Robinson in Worcester in 2019 was sentenced to eight years in prison Friday.

Anais Soto, 17, was 15 when she and three others were charged with second-degree murder, burglary and attempted robbery.

Soto took a deal and pleaded guilty to first-degree burglary. She was sentenced to the eight years in prison, but will be held in a juvenile detention center until she is 21.

Kenneth was shot and killed at his home in October of 2019 before the house was set on fire. His son, Dylan Robinson, Soto, Alexander Borgreen and Nicolas Meridy were all accused of breaking into the home to rob Kenneth of money and drugs before he was fatally shot.

Borgreen and Meridy also took plea deals in the case; Borgreen for burglary and Meridy for murder. Borgreen was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and Meridy 23 years to life.

Dylan pleaded not guilty and took his case to trial. He was found guilty in June. He has not yet been sentenced but faces 25 years to life in prison.
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 
87 year old, Woodward resident passed away December 28, 2020. A memorial service will be held Wednesday, July 7, 2021 in the Elmwood Cemetery at 10:00 a.m. Remembrances may be shared online at www.billingsfuneralhomewoodward.com
The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range is a coastal mountain range located in northern Colombia, covering approximately 17,000 square kilometers. Located on the shores of the Caribbean Sea, it is one of the worlds highest coastal mountain formations, with two peaks exceeding 5,700 meters above sea level. The ranges highest peak is either Pico Simon Bolivar or Pico Cristobal Colon. The mountain range is the source of at least 36 rivers, including Magdalene, Cesar, and Gaira River. Santa Marta Range is home to several ecosystems, constituting unique cultural and historical wealth, and was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1979. It is the site of the lost city of Ciudad Perdida.

Contents:

Geography

A river running through the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

The Santa Marta Mountain Range is a volcanic massif in northern Colombia located in La Guajira, Cesar, and Magdalene Departments. It is bounded on the south, east, and west by a coastal lowland and north by the Caribbean Sea, with only 22 kilometers separating the peaks from the sea. The mountain range rises abruptly from the Caribbean coast and runs for about 42 kilometers before reaching the snowcapped peak Cristobal Colon, believed by many to be Colombias highest peak. However, Pico Simon Bolivar may also be the ranges highest peak since the authorities are yet to determine the higher of the two peaks. Local data, including topographic maps, indicate the two peaks are about 5,700 meters tall and not 5,775 meters as earlies estimated.

An indigenous village in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

The Santa Marta Mountain Range is the most elevated coastal range in the tropics and one of the highest in the world. However, it covers a smaller area compared to most high coastal peaks, stretching about 17,000 square kilometers. The range is separated from the Andean Mountains located in central Colombia. Besides the mountains, the Sierra Nevada region comprises tropical forests, waterfall, natural pools, cultural and historic sites, and the indigenous people who have lived in the area for centuries. Santa Marta range receives an estimated annual rainfall of 4,000 mm at higher elevations of between 500 and 1,500 meters.

Geology

Massive rock outcrops in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain region.

Until recently, the range's geological composition was relatively unknown. However, according to the available data, the mountain range comprises gneiss, granite, diorite, syenite, and eurite of the Tertiary Age. Due to its isolation and the west-east direction, the massif likely formed before the Andes, which runs from north to south. The Smithsonian research team revealed that Santa Marta Range traveled for about 2,200 kilometers from northern Peru to northern Colombia and rotated to its current position on the Caribbean coast in the last 170 million years. The mountain range exhibits fascinating features, including an indented coastline, steep bay shores, and high plunging cliffs.

Biodiversity

A yellow-billed toucan in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

The mountain region comprises tropical rainforest containing perennial trees whose canopies rise to 30-40 meters. The region has over 300 vascular plants, including maripa used by the locals to make alcoholic beverages. Santa Marta Range has several ecoregions, including the montane forest ecoregion. The montane forest is located at an elevation just above sea level to about 800 meters, containing distinct plants such as Andean royal palm. Below the Montane forest ecoregion is the xeric shrublands and dry forest, while above it is the cloud forests and Sub-Andean forest ecoregions. The Santa Marta Paramo ecoregion is located at an elevation of 3,300 to 5,000 meters and contains mainly the paramo vegetation.
In the cosmetics sector, white oil is recognized as a key ingredient, which is incorporated in the formulations of topical skin care body lotions, petroleum jellies, moisturizing creams, cosmetics, cold creams, hair care products and baby oils among others. (Image  Pixabay GmbH)

The global white oil market size was valued at $1.3 billion in 2019 and is expected to register a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.1 percent from 2020 to 2027. Rising demand from medical & cosmetics applications worldwide is projected to be a key driving factor for the market growth. White oils are typically refined mineral oils, which are pure, stable, colorless, odorless, and non-toxic. These attributes make the product highly suitable for use in chemical manufacturing, cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries. In the cosmetics sector, it is recognized as a key ingredient, which is incorporated in the formulations of topical skin care body lotions, petroleum jellies, moisturizing creams, cosmetics, cold creams, hair care products, and baby oils among others.

The personal care sector is diverse in nature and is growing at a steady rate, which is majorly attributed to the high concentration of several cosmetic product manufacturers across Asian countries, such as China, Indonesia, India, Japan, and South Korea. Increasing demand for personal care products in these countries has facilitated the cosmetic formulators toward innovation and new product development. Properties of white oil, such as lubricity, moisture barrier abilities, and chemical inertness, facilitates its utilization in cosmetics and beauty products.

It is also blended with coconut oil and other formulations to produce hair care products due to its compatibility with a robust range of oils. Increasing demand for skin care and hair care products is anticipated to have a positive impact on product demand. In the pharmaceutical sector, the product is utilized in the formulation of multiple lotions, ointments, laxatives, complexion creams, and is also used as a carrier for curative drug formulations.





From a technological standpoint, the two commercially adopted manufacturing processes include two stage hydrotreating method and acid treatment process to Vacuum Gas Oil (VGO) method. The product derived through both these processes produce thermally stable, pure base oil wherein factors, which might cause a detrimental effect, such as sulfur, aromatics, and other impurities, are removed in the process. Prominent industry participants focus more on process innovation to turn down production cost and time to gain an increased market share.

Application Insights

In terms of volume, personal care applications led the market with a share of 28.7 percent in 2019. This is attributed to widespread product application in the formulation of baby oils and hair and skin care products, such as serums, creams & lotions and makeup products. Personal care product manufacturers are focusing on new product launches to meet the rising demand.

White oil has the ability to create a barrier on the skin from the external environment, thereby aiding in protection against skin damage. It is also broadly utilized in the formulation of anti-aging products, which have high demand, especially in various East & North Asian countries.

Moreover, white oil is observed to reflect high demand from polymer manufacturers as it is extremely important as a melt flow controller as well as for providing release characteristics of the polymers. This aids in imparting improved physical conditions of the polymers. Several companies are focusing on improving their product line for the consumption of white oils in various elastomers & adhesives, which are widely used for the production of diaper glues, toys, toothbrushes, and other common household products.

These factors are projected to result in substantial product demand in adhesives and elastomer applications. In the food industry, the product plays a crucial role in food product coating and packaging applications.

Regional Insights

The Asia Pacific led the market in 2019 and accounted for over 51 percent of the global revenue share. This is attributed to the demand for pharmaceutical and personal care products. Moreover, the consumption of adhesives in the construction & automotive sector and polymer demand from household product manufacturers in the region are likely to boost the product demand. Moreover, countries, such as Japan, India, Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia, are rapidly becoming major hubs for cosmetics manufacturers due to the availability of skilled & low-cost labor, ease of regulations etc. This is also supporting market growth in APAC.

In North America, the product has high demands from the polymers and adhesive applications due to the rapidly evolving household goods sector. Rising consumer expenditure on household products across US and Canada has led to increased consumption of polymers.

Furthermore, the high dependence of the regional population on e-commerce for purchasing essentials has led to higher consumption of packaging products, which resulted in increased consumption of adhesives, thereby boosting product demand. The European market is predominantly run by significantly high consumption of personal care and cosmetic products. France, Italy, and Spain are major hubs for several cosmetics producing brands, such as Loreal, Augustinus Bader, Gisou, Kerluxe and Lumene.

Key companies & market share insights

The market is highly competitive with the presence of globally recognized brands by multinationals, such as ExxonMobil Corporation and Petro-Canada. Growing competition has led to new product launches, project expansions, and product positioning strategies along with structural process reforms adoption by these companies.

The increasing penetration of new participants in the ecosystem is likely to result in market fragmentation over the coming years. However, the majority of the multinationals have fully integrated operations across the value chain, which acts as a barrier to entry for new regional-level entrants. Some of the prominent players in the market include ExxonMobil Corp, Total SA, Honeywell Inc, Eni Energy, Repsol SA, Sonneborn LLC.

Source:

Grand View Research Inc.

 Chemical Today Magazine

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A Florida woman saw a crack forming in her condo and told herself, 'You have to run to save your life'
Police say this gray SUV was used in robberies and assaults that are targeting kids.
Mum who was abused by vicious partner says funding boost for domestic abuse charity will save lives

A mum-of-two who was strangled, punched and head-butted by her vicious partner says a 320,000 boost for a domestic abuse charity will save lives.

Roxy, 29, not her real name is now getting her life back on track with the help of the Domestic Abuse Safety Unit North Wales (DASU) after escaping the brutal relationship.

The extra money for DASU  which operates across Wrexham, Flintshire, Denbighshire and Conwy  has come from the newly-elected North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner, Andy Dunbobbin, who is a passionate and long-standing campaigner against domestic abuse.

Its part of a 1.3 million package of funding secured by Mr Dunbobbin which will be shared among a number of North Wales organisations that support abuse survivors like Roxy.

Other recipients include Stepping Stones North Wales, the Sexual Abuse Recovery Centre (SARC), the Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Centre (RASASC) North Wales and Gorwel.

In DASUs case, it means they will be able to take on seven more Independent Domestic Abuse Advisors (IDVAs), who work with high risk victims, along with two other support workers.

Its come at exactly the right time because DASU has had to deal with a significant increase in cases across the four counties during the pandemic, with a 40 per cent rise in the Wrexham area.

Roxy spoke out in the hope of inspiring abuse victims to seek help rather than suffering in silence.

According to Roxy, her partner latched on to her after they met through friends and moved in with her  and it didnt take long for his nasty, violent side to come out.

She recalled: He punched me in the face, head-butted me, put both his hands around my neck until I couldnt breathe.

On one occasion he was kneeling on me, sitting on me at one point, ripping his own clothes off and I thought he was going to assault me.

When I did actually manage to get him to go away, he came back in the middle of the night, broke in through my kitchen window. He stole from me, attacked me, and threatened to stab me.

Once I got out, he then slit his wrists in my house. There was blood everywhere.

It took quite a while for the police to arrest him because he was so volatile, spitting at them, chucking blood at them.

The more he lost control of me, the more he lost control of his own mind. Thats what I felt, once he was losing control of my mind, hed lose control of his.

The support I have received from DASU has been incredible and my IDVA, Karen, is absolutely amazing. She supports me with everything, shes like my mum.

This extra money from the police and crime commissioner is going to pay for seven more Karens and thats going to save lives with out a shadow of doubt.

My message to anybody else out there who is suffering is that they should stay strong and seek help. People do believe and you can reach a better place.

It was a sentiment endorsed by DASUs head of services, Naomi Mumba-Dobson, when Mr Dunbobbin visited the organisations new office in Wrexham.

She said: This extra funding from the police and crime commissioner is a massive boost for us because of the 40 per cent increase in cases and we are hugely grateful to Mr Dunbobbin. Its amazing news for us.

Usually, an IDVA would have a case load of about 25 clients but at the moment, theyre carrying a case load of between 35 and 40 and these are really high risk of things like homicide. They need intense support.

Domestic abuse also has a major impact on children and this extra funding is going to fund two specialist staff to work with children and young people who are at high risk themselves.

All through Covid, weve just been firefighting because the numbers have been going up and up but having the seven new IDVAs and the two support staff means we will be able to manage the new referrals coming through.

We can also look after our staff and their wellbeing as well because working with trauma every day can have an impact on them too.

PCC Andy Dunbobbin said: I have been aware of the tremendous work done by DASU since 2013 when I became a White Ribbon Ambassador

During my visit, I was grateful to have the opportunity to speak to Roxy whos had a really traumatic time and is now coming out of it.

She is a really inspiring and courageous young woman and hopefully her story will encourage others to seek help.

The injection of extra funding will hopefully enable DASU to help many more survivors of domestic abuse and get them to a better place.

The other aspect is the importance of preventative work by being proactive to try and stop the abuse from happening in the first place.

Thats why tackling domestic abuse is one of my main priorities and I cant emphasise enough how strongly and passionately I feel about it.

The work that DASU is doing is amazing. Its literally saving lives and you cant put a price on that.

Anybody needing support can contact DASU via their website www.dasunorthwales.co.uk/contact or by ringing 01244 830436 (Flintshire), 01745 337104 (Denbighshire),01492 534705 (Colwyn) or 01978 310203 (Wrexham).

Featured image: North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner Andy Dunbobbin talking to a service user. Pictures: Mandy Jones
Senior councillor currently on working holiday in Panama announces intention to emigrate

A high profile Wrexham politician has announced his intention to emigrate to Panama  where he is currently on a working holiday  and has confirmed he will not be standing for reelection as councillor.

Cllr Andrew Atkinson stood for election as Member of Parliament twice and Member of the Senedd once, before being elected councillor for Gresford in 2017.

Over the last four years he has held two Lead Member portfolios on Wrexham Council  most recently Childrens Services.

In a social media post to residents in his ward Cllr Atkinson announced: As a family weve made the decision to emigrate, the plan is to move next year so I wanted to let you know clearly that I definitely wont be seeking re-election.

If anything changes on this holiday and it looks like it would make more sense to stay on then I will let you know straight away and would then have to resign as your councillor.

Its been an honour to serve as councillor for Gresford and 99% of you have been absolutely amazing Not standing again has not been an easy decision but I hope its one you can support me with.

Youve been so supportive of me and an incredible village to represent. Ill keep you all posted with whats happening with us but any help you need please email me as normal.

Speaking to Wrexham.com from Panama over 5000 miles away Cllr Atkinson invited any questions, pointing out he is being very upfront with his situation, while noting it is personal family decisions being made.

We pointed to his comments about a working holiday and asked if he aimed to come back to the UK, and if so how likely is it that wont happen and your stay would become permanent.

Cllr Atkinson told us: There is a chance we could stay, if that happens then I will resign as Councillor and Lead Member.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@andyatkinsonsworld)

As questions have been raised over a working holiday, we asked why he has not just taken a holiday like councillors often do?

Cllr Atkinson said, Because Im being dedicated, Im more than happy to take a proper holiday if thats what is being suggested.

Last September Care Inspectorate Wales said concerns have escalated from serious to significant over childrens services provided by Wrexham Council  Cllr Atkinsons portfolio  we asked if he could adequately address those concerns as lead member while in Panama knowing you will be emigrating shortly?

Cllr Atkinson said: Childrens Services is unbelievably important and Ive been extremely dedicated to the role and worked really hard. If we did stay to answer your hypothetical question then Id be very sad to leave the role but its not an option to stay on.

I know that Cllr Pritchard will find the right person to replace me and that the department will be supported. If I did resign then even after that point I will happily support a new lead member in my own time to ease a transition and help the department.

With the news emerging of the eventual emigration, the common question appears to be why Panama?.

Cllr Atkinson said, Because its the right choice for us as a family.
At a meeting of the national cabinet today, Australias federal, state and territory leaders agreed to slash the number of inbound arrivals to the country in half, effectively blocking the timely repatriation of most of the 34,000 citizens who remain stranded abroad some 16 months into the pandemic.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison (Credit: Facebook/Morrison)

The decision is a confession of political failure. For more than 12 months, federal and state governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, have failed to develop an effective quarantine system. They remain committed to using private hotels, located in the city centres, as the primary venues for international travellers to self-isolate.

The reduction in the arrival cap is an admission that the hotels are unsafe. COVID-19 leaks from them have resulted in the majority of Australias outbreaks over the past six months, including those currently gripping the country. The hotels are unable to prevent airborne transmission, and epidemiologists have called, throughout the pandemic, for replacement by purpose-built facilities located outside the major urban centres.

Todays decision is an attempt by all of the governments to stave off a deepening political crisis, accelerated by the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant.

The outbreak began in Sydney on June 16. For a week-and-a-half, the New South Wales (NSW) Liberal government refused to implement any lockdown measures, in line with business demands for the economy to remain open, allowing Delta to circulate throughout the city and more broadly. This, combined with other leaks related to the quarantine and hospital system in Queensland, resulted in four states and territories being under some form of lockdown this week, covering around 12 million people, or almost half the population.

The re-emergence of the virus, after months of Australias political leaders falsely claiming credit for supposedly protecting the country from the COVID-19 disasters abroad, has fuelled widespread popular anger. In addition to the quarantine failures, Australian governments had lifted virtually all safety restrictions prior to the current outbreak, including caps on mass events, and have presided over one of the slowest vaccination programs of an advanced OECD country, with less than seven percent of the adult population fully-inoculated.

Amid the popular backlash, the government leaders have engaged in mutual recriminations this week to cover-up their own responsibility.

Queensland Labor authorities sharply criticised Prime Minister Scott Morrisons sudden declaration that people of all ages could request doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The statement contradicted existing health advice that AstraZeneca should only be administered to those over the age of 60 due to rare clotting risks. It was condemned by the Queensland government, as well as some doctors groups, as a political manoeuvre, with the states chief health officer branding it as dangerous.

At the same time, several state governments, including those led by Labor in Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria, called for an immediate reduction in the inbound travel cap. Those administrations have collaborated throughout the pandemic with the federal Liberal-National government, including in devising and implementing the private hotel quarantine program. Now, they are seeking to divert anger over its failure against citizens stranded abroad, and in the direction of reactionary nationalist isolationism.

In an apparent bid to patch over the political conflicts, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the state leaders agreed today to reduce the weekly travel intake from 6,370 to 3,185. Morrison stated that while this would result in a reduction of commercial flights, his government would organise additional repatriation services. This assertion is worthless, given the governments refusal to organise enough of such flights throughout the pandemic.

The reduction in the arrival cap comes amid the release of information highlighting the class character of Australia border restrictions. While ordinary people have been stranded abroad, in some cases for more than a year, and citizens in countries overwhelmed by COVID, such as India, have been all but abandoned, a relatively small percentage of the population has been able to leave and enter Australia, seemingly at will.

Travel exemptions and visa approvals are shrouded in considerable secrecy. However, Australian Border Force data shows that between March 20, 2020 and April 20, 2021, some 13,762 citizens and permanent residents entered and left the country on more than one occasion. State leaders have reported that some individuals have gone through the hotel quarantine program up to six times. In addition to security and state personnel, some of the repeat returnees are businesspeople.

Separate data, quoted in the Conversation, found that approval rates for overseas citizens to enter Australia in the first months of the year, stood at 23.48 percent from the UK and 30.73 percent from South Africa, but just 7.17 percent from India, despite all three countries being hit by more contagious variants of the virus.

In addition to slamming the border shut for workers and the poor, the national cabinet today reaffirmed that lockdowns would only be considered as a last resort. This declaration is in line with the demands of the corporate and financial elite for an end to any measures that impinge on profit-making activity, and their clamour against the limited safety measures currently in place.

The statement is extraordinary, however, given that the country is currently in the grip of a national outbreak that directly resulted from the refusal of the NSW Liberal government to implement a timely lockdown in Sydney.

Morrison outlined a four-phase plan for the lifting of all restrictions and a full reopening. The second phase, he said, would be declared when epidemiologists indicated that a sufficient percentage of the population had been vaccinated for greater risks to be taken. Restrictions, such as adherence to lockdowns and border closures, would be lifted for those who are vaccinated. Large cohorts of students and migrant workers would be brought into the country.

Under phase two, Lockdowns would only occur in extreme circumstances to prevent escalating hospitalisation and fatality, Morrison said. Given the resurgence of the virus in countries such as Britain and the US, whose vaccination rate is at least seven or eight times greater than Australias, these comments are a warning of what the government is preparing. The extent to which vaccinated people can contract and transmit the virus, moreover, remains largely unknown.

Under phase three, COVID would be treated like other infectious diseases, Morrison stated. When it is like the flu, we should treat it like the flu and that means no lockdowns, he declared. The fourth phase would entail a complete return to normal. The timetable for each was left hazy, but the discussion of an end to all restrictions, under conditions of an ongoing outbreak in Australia, minimal vaccination rates, and a failed quarantine program, is decidedly premature.

While Morrison may currently be constrained by mass concern over the virus, sections of the corporate elite and the financial press are effectively calling for an immediate transition to phase three or even four.

Meanwhile, the Sydney outbreak has continued to grow by around 20 cases per day, since city-wide stay at home orders were instituted last Saturday. The figure was highest yesterday, with 31 cases detected in the 24-hours to 8 p.m. At least 12 of them had been infectious while moving around in the community. Epidemiologists have warned that the lockdown may be insufficient to stem the spread, given its lax character. A large proportion of the workforce is being compelled to attend places of employment, and most non-essential shops remain open.

In Queensland, the state Labor government announced the scheduled lifting of a lockdown in several regional areas of the state, but its 24-hour extension in the capital city of Brisbane. Another three cases were revealed today. For two of them, the source of infection is not known, indicating ongoing community transmission.

Lockdowns are to be lifted in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, after no new cases were registered, but both have been exposed to the Delta strain resulting from the NSW and Queensland leaks respectively.
On Saturday, the second TV debate took place between Armin Laschet (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD) and Annalena Baerbock (Green Party). The three candidates discussed foreign and security policy. Like the first debate, the event underlined the importance of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) campaign. All candidates of the ruling class advocate a massive military build-up and are preparing to expand the hated war policy of the current grand coalition of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.

Soldiers demonstrate their skills during the visit of German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the German/Netherlands Corps in Muenster, Germany, on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2020. The Corps is one of NATO's High Readiness Forces Headquarters and celebrates its 25th year jubilee. The Dutch King Willem Alexander had to cancel his visit due to the high rise of COVID-19 infections in the Netherlands. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

The discussion, co-moderated by the head of the Munich Security Conference Wolfgang Ischinger, took place immediately following the attack on German troops in Mali, in which 12 Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) soldiers were injured, some seriously. Since then, an aggressive militaristic campaign has been raging. Politicians and the media argue that the current deployment is not sufficient and are demanding a more robust mandate and better armaments for the German soldiers.

Baerbock, Laschet and Scholz joined in this chorus. During the discussion, they all spoke out in favour of the acquisition of combat drones. Baerbock boasted that the Greens had already agreed on the procurement of these murderous weapons at their last party conference. There are situations where drones can also be useful for the safety of Bundeswehr soldiers, she explained. They are needed when members of the Bundeswehr go into the field and then fall into open traps.

The other two candidates expressed similar views on combat drones. The first thing is to acquire them. After that, you can discuss under which criteria Germany uses them, Laschet explained. Scholz, when asked whether the procurement of armed drones for the Bundeswehr would be decided in the next legislative period, also answered unequivocally: I say explicitly, my position is, we have launched the Eurodrone.

Despite the escalation of violence in Mali, which is increasingly becoming a second Afghanistan, the candidates spoke in favour of a continuation and possible expansion of the Bundeswehr mission in the resource-rich and geostrategically central country. If France changes its strategy, it must be again discussed what the German contribution can be then, Laschet demanded. One must be prepared if security is threatened in such a way that one has to do more, that one then also does more.

Baerbock stressed, We are the largest country in the European Union, and therefore Germany needs a stance on such foreign missions. She and the Greens considered the UN mission Minusma, in which up to 650 Bundeswehr soldiers are currently involved, still the right thing to do. She criticised the European Union's training mission EUTM Mali as not robust enough. The Greens no longer actively supported it because it does not take the security of our soldiers into account.

During the discussion, questions were posed to the candidates by international military and government politiciansincluding former US General and CIA Director David Petraeus, former Polish Foreign and Defence Minister Radek Sikorski and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selenskyj. They were meant to suggest that Germany's return to an aggressive foreign and defence policy was not only desired internationally but strongly demanded.

German imperialism is responding to the contradictions of the capitalist system with this aggressive policy. As in the last century, it is trying to secure markets, raw materials, strategic influence and world power by force.

The entire discussion revealed the extent to which militarism and war once again dominate German politics. Scholz pleaded for further arms deliveries to Israel, whose military had reduced the Gaza Strip to rubble only a few weeks ago. Laschet argued for more German intervention in Lebanon and throughout the Mediterranean, and Baerbock was the loudest in calling for more aggressive action against Russia and China.

80 years ago, on 22 June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and launched a horrific war of extermination in which at least six million Jews were systematically murdered, and 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives. Today, a NATO war against the nuclear power Russia would put the survival of the entire human race into question. The recent confrontation between a British warship and Russian forces in the Black Sea shows how great this danger is.

All this did not stop the Green Party candidate for chancellor from threatening Russia militarily. She called for rapidly deployable units towards Eastern Europeans and reiterated her party's demand for arms deliveries to Ukraine. In contrast to Scholz and Laschet, she spoke out in favour of an immediate halt to the construction of the almost completed Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

Baerbock also called for a more aggressive course concerning China. We have to show dialogue and toughness, she declared. Of course, China is central to our exports and imports concerning jobs in Germany and concerning our prosperity. And the same applies to Russia. However, she said, one could not pursue a purely economic course and say in beautiful prose that human rights are important to us, but when it comes down to it, one does not act accordingly.

The former pacifists of the Green Party are experts in pushing Germanys return to an aggressive foreign and great power policy under the guise of democracy and human rights. In reality, it is about naked imperialist interests.

A clear stance on values also serves our European industries and jobs, Baerbock explained. Even the BDI says we have to drive both with a view to human rights and international competitiveness: Dialogue and toughness. With a view to China, this means not just uttering words about European sovereignty, but defining it.

As on the eve of the First and Second World Wars, the ruling class is pursuing the goal of organising Europe under German domination to impose its economic and geostrategic goals in competition with the other great powers. All three candidates declared that they would work to achieve qualified majorities in the EU on foreign and security policy issues. In this way, they want to lend German interests a faster and more aggressive emphasis, also vis-a-vis the US.

The USA has said America is backand we need a European response to that, Baerbock said in summing up the ambitions of the ruling class. Laschet agreed with her. Scholz also called for a commitment to the further integration of Europe and European sovereignty. However, this should not be merely a Sunday speech. When one talks about European sovereignty, it means hard power becoming an important issue for Europe.

During the discussion, the candidates engaged in a veritable contest over who was the best militarist and who could most quickly upgrade Germanys Armed Forces and make them ready for war. Scholz levelled the accusation that a CDU/CSU and Free Democratic Party (FDP) coalition had meant austerity and the arms budget, in particular, being used as a piggy bank for public finances. It had been a bad time for the Bundeswehr.

This had changed, he said, largely thanks to him. In the time I have been Federal Minister of Finance, we have brought about a substantial increase in the defence budget to now over 50 billion euros, he boasted. The huge increase of the last few years is the basis on which to build, and it must not be called into question.

Laschet pointed out that there were already many places in the world where Germany is involved in UN missions. Nevertheless, he said, there must be a willingness to do more and to increase the military budget to the so-called 2 percent target. This had been promised as a perspective and must be adhered to. Our Bundeswehr must also be made better and this must also be enforced in domestic politics, he said.

This is a declaration of war on the working class and the youth in two respects. They must bear the war costs in several ways, as cannon fodder on the battlefields and in the form of further attacks on their democratic and social rights. Since 2014, the grand coalition has already increased the defence budget from 32 billion to over 50 billion (about 1.5 percent of GDP). Even with the current economic growthrelatively low because of the coronavirus pandemicthe two percent target means an increase of the military budget by another 20 billion.

Baerbock was also the most aggressive on this issue. Her rhetorical criticism of the 2 percent target comes from the right. She supported the basic tenor of the 2 percent target, namely that Europeans take more care of their own security. However, an abstract fixation on the 2 percent was not sufficient to achieve the necessary military clout. This was something that not only the Greens, but also high-ranking military officers, and including other nations, have noticed.

The latest debate is a warning. Regardless of who succeeds Angela Merkel (CDU) as chancellor following the elections, and whichever parties govern together, the next federal government will intensify the right-wing policies of the grand coalition. All of the capitalist partiesincluding the Left Party, which is courting an alliance with Scholz and Baerbockare willing to walk over corpses, as has already been shown in the pandemic. Their profits before lives policy has brought death to more than 90,000 people in Germany.

The SGP is the only party that opposes this murderous development and provides the widespread opposition to militarism and war with a socialist programme. Our election manifesto says: Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, all of the great powers are preparing for new wars in order to pursue their economic interests.... Millions are to die so that the German financial elite can pursue its imperialist interests with military force. We demand: An immediate end to all foreign interventions! Dissolution of NATO and the German armed forces! Billions for education and jobs instead of rearmament and war!
The World Socialist Web Site spoke to workers at the Stellantis Warren Truck plant in metro Detroit about the ongoing strike of nearly 3,000 Volvo Trucks workers in Dublin, Virginia. The media is blacking out the strike, and the UAW has not even informed its members in Michigan that the strike is happening.

Read more about the struggle at Volvo and get involved here: wsws.org/volvo
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Board of Trustees voted 9-4 in a closed session Wednesday to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times journalist and architect of the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones, who has a masters degree in journalism from UNC, will have a position as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

Hannah-Jones has been given a lifetime sinecurea position with immense financial benefit requiring little actual workamid a relentless campaign to promote her and the racialist falsifications of the 1619 Project. With the institutional backing of the New York Times, she has been elevated into superstar status, despite the vast disconnect between the accolades which have been piled on her and what she has accomplished.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (TV Globo/Abraji)

This latest episode makes clear the heavy political investment of the Democratic Party and powerful sections of the ruling class in the effort to make race the central aspect of political discourse in the United States.

Todays outcome and the actions of the past month are about more than just me, Hannah-Jones declared in a statement released through the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. This fight is about ensuring the journalistic and academic freedom of Black writers, researchers, teachers, and students. We must ensure that our work is protected and able to proceed free from the risk of repercussions, and we are not there yet.

The vote comes after weeks of fulmination and accusations of racism in the media and among Hannah-Jones supporters after it came to light in May that the board had postponed a decision on her tenure application. In the face of the delay, Hannah-Jones had instead accepted a 5-year tenure track position which did not require board approval.

However, once the details of the delay in her tenure application came to light, Hannah-Jones, who has an African American father and a white mother, threatened to sue the university for discrimination and declared that she would accept nothing less than immediate tenure. Her attorneys claimed that the delay was the result of viewpoint discrimination in violation of her First Amendment free speech rights, race and sex discrimination and illegal political interference.

The reasons for UNCs denial of tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones can only be understood as the product of political and racially discriminatory backlash against her lifes work investigating, documenting, reporting, and uplifting Black Americans fight against generational subjugation through racial oppression and structural injustice, a letter sent by her attorneys to UNC claimed.

A public campaign was waged to secure tenure for Hannah-Jones. Over 200 professors, writers and other cultural figures signed a letter published by The Root which decried the failure to grant her tenure as part of a growing wave of repression which seeks to block the teaching of the history of slavery. The letter also declared that the UNC board had failed to uphold the first order values of academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas.

The provost and other leaders at UNC intervened on her behalf, appealing to the board to approve her tenure application. A back-channel intervention by the Biden administration cannot be ruled out.

The demands that Hannah-Jones be granted tenure come in the face of withering criticisms of the 1619 Project, the central work for which she has become known, and the exposure of the falsifications upon which its central thesis is based. The response of preeminent American historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Clayborne Carson, Victoria Bynum and others exposed the New York Times effort to reinterpret American history as one of eternal struggle between blacks and whites.

The World Socialist Web Site, in addition to interviewing these historians, has thoroughly refuted the falsifications of the 1619 Projects lead essay written by Hannah-Jones, including her claims that the American Revolution was fought to defend slavery and that African Americans have been alone in fighting for civil rights.

Hannah-Jones historical falsifications would be enough to disqualify her for tenure. However, there is also the matter of her journalistic qualifications for the position of professor, which do not exist.

A review of the New York Times archive shows that Hannah-Jones has bylined just 23 articles for the newspaper since December 2014 and nothing since June of last year. It is not uncommon for professional journalists to produce one hundred or more articles in any given year. This is not limited to lower-level beat reporters, but includes well-known columnists and journalists who generally produce several columns per week.

Hannah-Jones oeuvre consists of reports, essays and commentaries for the New York Times Magazine which would barely pass as personal journal entries, much less serious journalism.

Through stories framed by her own personal experience, Hannah-Jones presents race and racial division as the fundamental problem of American society, informed by a racist outlook directed against whites. She replaces individuals and historical forces with her own personal feelings.

In one column from 2016, The Grief That White Americans Cant Share, she declared that whites are incapable of understanding the pain of seeing a black person killed by the police. For white people, who have been trained since birth to see themselves as individuals, the collective fear and collective grief that black Americans feel can be hard to grasp, she wrote.

Hannah-Jones defenders point to the fact that she is highly laureleda 2016 George Polk Award, a 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship genius grant and a 2020 Pulitzer for Commentaryand therefore qualified to teach about journalism. In reality, this says more about the way such awards are used to bolster those who serve the interests of the ruling elite than it does about the quality of her work.

The racial identity politics which define Hannah-Jones work has nothing to do with challenging economic inequality or oppression, but serves to advance the economic interests of members of the upper-middle class. She has discovered that there is a lot of money to be made in promoting a divisive racial narrative, securing a lucrative book and television deal out of the 1619 Project.

A final note on the issue of tenure. The increasingly difficult conditions in academia are well known, with tens of thousands of graduate students and adjuncts toiling under immense pressure with little economic and job security. While tenure was once relatively common, reaching a peak of 57 percent of faculty in 1975, according to Tufts Magazine, the American Association of University Professors reports that only 21 percent of the academic workforce in the United States is currently tenured.

The overwhelming majority of academic staff today are non-tenure track, often working paycheck to paycheck and from one contract to the next. It is rare for someone to enter academia with a tenured professorship position, since most universities require a years-long probationary period.

This is all of little concern to Hannah-Jones, who has been offered a permanent position, not because of the quality of her journalistic output, but because of her celebrity and the political role of the racialist narrative that she promotes.
The prolonged and deadly heat wave that is scorching Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest in the US has at the time of this writing resulted in more than 486 deaths in British Columbia (BC) alone. The sudden and unexpected deaths, reported over the five-day period between Friday and 1 p.m. on Wednesday, account for a staggering 195 percent increase in the usual number of deaths reported in such a time frame.

While the death toll is the direct product of unprecedented temperatures due to climate change, the devastating loss of life is also the result of the savage attacks on social infrastructure and public services implemented by governments of all political stripes at the federal and provincial level going back decades.

The village of Lytton, British Columbiawhere on three successive days this week all-time Canadian record high temperatures were sethas now largely been destroyed by a forest wildfire. (Photo Credit: Facebook/2 Rivers Remix Society)

British Columbia Emergency Health Services (BCEHS) ambulances responded to 187 heat exhaustion and 52 heatstroke calls between June 25 and 28. A staggering 15,300 911 calls were taken in the province between June 26 and 27.

The emergency services were overwhelmed. There is a major backlog in calls and delayed response times, with some emergency services forced to leave behind the bodies of victims as police and ambulances continued to respond to other calls. Due to the horrifyingly high death count, even the response times of coroners is being severely delayed.

Weve never experienced anything like this before in Vancouver, Vancouver Police Department Sergeant Steve Addison told reporters in a Tuesday press conference.

Addison said that a surge in calls occurred on Tuesday morning as people are showing up in their parents house or relatives house and finding them deceased.

The abnormally intense weather is the result of a heat dome, which is a large area of high pressure that extends well up into the atmosphere. The high-pressure system traps sinking air that becomes hotter as it lowers and approaches the ground. This is compounded by heat becoming trapped within the dome, resulting in a bubble that prevents rain and cold fronts from entering and cooling down the temperature.

East of BC, Alberta Health Services have also reported an increase in heat-related emergency calls, with about six calls per day in Edmonton and 10 in Calgary.

BCs Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe stated in a press release that the number of deaths will increase as the data continues to be updated. It is important we do not lose sight of the fact that each reported death is a person with a family and people who cared about them, Lapointe said at a press conference on Wednesday.

Across BC, Alberta, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, over 103 heat records were shattered on Monday alone.

The village of Lytton, located at the north end of the Fraser Canyon, broke the all-time record for the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada for three straight days in a row. At 5 p.m. on Tuesday, the Lytton Climate Station reported an astounding temperature of 49.6 degrees Celsius (121 degrees Fahrenheit). This surpasses any temperature ever recorded in Las Vegas, Nevada, located in the Mojave Desert some 1,300 miles to the south in the United States.

At 6 p.m. on Wednesday evening, the villages population was forced to evacuate without warning as a fast-moving wildfire was driven towards residences by winds of up to 71 kilometres per hour. People were forced to immediately flee the small town in all directions. Around 90 percent of the villages buildings have been destroyed in the fire.

It's dire. The whole town is on fire, Lytton mayor Jan Polderman told CBC News. It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere.

Lyttons fire joins 9 other newly reported wildfires that have been sparked in recent days, bringing the total number of active provincial wildfires to 26. An abnormally dry spring and low humidity levels have primed the forests for such an occurrence, and the never-before-seen temperatures have set alight portions of the tinder-dry land.

In southern Alberta, the heat has set fire to the wheat fields in some places and is compounding a severe drought in the province. The result is a jeopardized harvest and major agricultural losses.

As well as wildfires, the heat is causing rapid glacier melting and massive snowmelt from the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Flood warnings are now in effect for the upper Fraser Valley area, and homes in the Pemberton Valley have already been evacuated due to the fast-rising river waters.

Across British Columbias mainland and gulf islands alike, cooling centres and spray parks offering shade, water, misting fans and cooling supplies have been established to keep community residents cool. Schools across the province were forced to close due to insufficient ventilation and cooling infrastructure. Many COVID-19 vaccination sites have also closed.

The World Socialist Web Site has reported on the heat waves devastating effects in the states of Washington and Oregon, where some 20 million people have been affected. As in BC, these regions are usually temperate and rainy, meaning that many residents do not have air conditioning in their homes.

The British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority reported that the rate of air-conditioned households is even lower in British Columbia than in Seattle and Portland, which have, respectively, the first and third-lowest percentage of air-conditioned households among major metro areas in the United States.

Despite marked increases over recent years, it is estimated that only 34 percent of households in BC had cooling appliances. The most recent data available for Vancouver indicates that just 19 percent of households are equipped with air conditioning. Hotels in the city are currently booked to capacity with people paying for rooms to escape the heat of their own homes.

Working class people and the poor are placed at especially high risk, as lower-income households are far less likely to have air conditioning. Workers are often forced to work in conditions that make it impossible to escape the heat, especially in labouring jobs that may require them to endure hours of blistering heat outdoors.

The contempt felt by the political establishment towards the most vulnerable sections of the population hit hard by the heat wave was summed up Tuesday by BC Premier John Horgan of the New Democratic Party (NDP). The social democrat Horgan callously stated during a press conference that fatalities are a part of life.

Horgan added that the public was acutely aware of the imminent period of extreme heat, and remarked that it was apparent to anyone who walked outdoors that we were in an unprecedented heat wave and again, theres a level of personal responsibility.

A backlash followed, with many residents of the province taking to social media to express their shock and disgust that an elected official would make such brazenly insensitive remarks during the overlapping crises of both the pandemic and the deadly heat wave.

Horgans outrageous words are of a piece with his governments response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was to keep workplaces and schools open while blaming working people for spreading the virus. His total indifference to the significant loss of human life is reminiscent of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who infamously declared in face of a surging pandemic, No more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high!

The devastating developments in BC this week are only a foretaste of what is to come over the years ahead if serious action to combat climate change is not undertaken. Canadas Changing Climate Report, published in 2019, warned that the effects of climate change were set to intensify over the coming years. These effects include more extreme heat, less extreme cold, longer growing seasons, shorter snow and ice cover seasons, earlier spring peak streamflow, thinning glaciers, thawing permafrost, and rising sea level, the report noted.

Despite innumerable climate pledges made by governments at the provincial and federal levels in Canada and their counterparts across the world, the capitalist system is wholly incapable of resolving the imminent threats faced by the planet and its population. Whether it is Horgans NDP in BC, Justin Trudeaus federal Liberal government, or the Democratic Biden administration in Washington, they all place the accumulation of corporate profits ahead of any genuine attempt to protect working people from the social and environmental ravages of climate change.

The steps urgently needed to combat the climate crisis cannot be taken within the capitalist profit system, which exists to defend the accumulation of wealth and private profit by the ruling classes, and fosters nationalist rivalries and divisions. The existential threats facing humanity and the planet can only truly be resolved on the basis of an internationally coordinated plan guided by a socialist program.
Directed by Jon M. Chu; screenplay by Quiara Alegria Hudes; based on the musical by composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda and librettist Quiara Alegria Hudes

The film adaptation of composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Mirandas Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights, directed by Jon M. Chu, was released on HBO Max and in movie theaters in June after having been delayed for a year due to the pandemic. Miranda, of course, also created and starred in Hamilton, the immensely successful musical about American politician, statesman and economist Alexander Hamilton. In the Heights opened on Broadway in 2008, Hamilton in 2015.

In the Heights

The new film takes place in New York Citys Washington Heights, a largely working-class neighborhood in upper Manhattan, as rising rents and gentrification threaten to displace residents and small businesses. An unusual and in some ways refreshing musical film about modern existence in Americas most populous city, In the Heights contains vivid, entertaining and moving sequences that give life to the predominantly Latino and immigrant population that passes through the neighborhood bodega (a small corner grocery store) at the center of the film.

But there are also many unsatisfying or unappealing features of the movie, which updates the Broadway production to suit the fashions and concerns of present-day identity politics, crudely sketched out in unconvincing dramatic scenes that bridge the generally more rewarding musical sequences.

And to the films significant detriment, the story is primarily driven by an insufficiently critical treatment of the American Dream, and specifically the central characters petty bourgeois dreams of business success and professional advancement, which is not the best basis for enduring art.

In spite of these problems and weaknesses, however, some genuine and compelling pictures of life do emerge.

Much of the songbook is written in the traditional Broadway showtune style, but with compositions and orchestrations blending the different kinds of music one might hear from the stereos in Washington Heightsthe Latin music (salsa, merengue and boleros) of the older generations mixed with the rap and reggaeton of the younger ones.

In the films energetic opening musical number, the young owner-operator of the corner bodega, Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), introduces us to the central characters, starting with himself:

Usnavi emigrated from the Dominican Republic as a child (Washington Heights has one of the largest Dominican populations in the US). He inherited his parents bodega when they died, but his dream is to purchase his late fathers old bar in the Dominican Republic and move back to the Caribbean island nation permanently with his teenage cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV), who works at the store, and Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), a retired maid who, as Usnavi tells us, is not really his abuela (grandmother) but who adopted the whole block as her own.

Kevin Rosario (Jimmy Smits) runs a car service on the block. Hes had to sell half of his business property in order to pay for the first year of tuition at Stanford University for his intelligent and promising daughter Nina (Leslie Grace), the first member of her family to attend college.

Nina returns to Washington Heights feeling dejected after having decided to drop out of Stanford, where she was the victim of racial profiling by a resident advisor. She catches up with an old flame, Benny (Corey Hawkins), an employee at her fathers car service, and the young couple rekindles their romantic relationship.

Vanessa (Melissa Barrera) works at the neighborhood hair salon, but she dreams of working as a fashion designer and moving out of the neighborhood to live further downtown. The object of Usnavis romantic affections, Vanessa reciprocates those affections as she starts to date the bodega owner.

As the story unfolds, Usnavis bodega sells a winning lottery ticket to someone in the neighborhood, the block struggles through a blackout and a heat wave, and Sonnys future in his beloved hometown becomes precarious, as its revealed that hes undocumented. Finally, as the block as he knows it all but disappears, Usnavi comes to find his place in Washington Heights after all.

There are genuinely appealing elements of In the Heightsabove all, the setting of Washington Heights itself, where the film was shot, and the people who live and work there. By the films musical finale, Usnavi comes to see himself as a streetlight that illuminates the stories of the people in the street. And the strongest and most compelling of these stories is that of Abuela Claudia, powerfully performed by the original Broadway casts Olga Merediz, whose big musical number is the highlight of the film.

Corey Hawkins and Leslie Grace in In the Heights

In this evocative song, Paciencia y Fe, Claudia remembers what life was like in her neighborhood of La Vibora, the Washington Heights of Havana in Cuba, which she left as a child with her mother in 1943: I remember nights, anger in the streets, hunger at the windows, / Women folding clothes, playing with my friends in the summer rain. / Mama needs a job, Mama says were poor, one day you say / Vamos a Nueva York! / And Nueva York was far, but Nueva York had work, and so we came

As she sings these lines, Claudia appears in a dream version of the New York City subway in which her decades-old memories are brought to life by period-dressed dancers who evoke scenes of Cuba and her early experiences in the United States, which take on a nightmarish quality as Claudia remembers the hardships of life as a maid in New York City in the mid-20th century, scrubbing the whole of the Upper East Side, as she sings.

We discover the darker reality behind Claudias optimistic mantra Paciencia y fe! (Patience and faith!) when she repeats that phrase in anguish, cowering as an angry and overbearing chorus of American bosses bombards her: You better clean this mess! / You better learn Ingles! / You better not be late! / You better pull your weight! Its an extraordinary sequence that was done with genuine sensitivity, and from which one gets a strong sense of the experiences of millions of immigrant workers.

But the films real weaknesses need to be addressed as well. The changes from the 2008 Broadway production are revealing. In the original stage show, Ninas decision to drop out of Stanford stemmed from her having to work two jobs to pay for books she didnt have time to read, resulting in her grades falling so low that she lost her partial scholarship.

In the film version, Nina feels isolated because of the supposed lack of a Latino community at Stanford, which screenwriter Quiara Alegria Hudes describes as a predominantly white space in a comment quoted in the Los Angeles Times. Hudes reimagined the character of Nina for the film, the Times piece notes, after having observed the national conversation about microaggressions at schools. This is a genuine concession to the reactionary race-and-gender obsession of the upper middle class. As is Mirandas response to criticisms that In the Heights features dark-skinned Afro-Latinos in background and dance scenes but not in main roles (CNN). He apologized for the latter, asserting that in trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short  Im truly sorry. The identity politics industry is insatiable and its demands relentless.

Lin-Manuel Miranda at an event for In the Heights

On the other hand, the decision to make Sonny an undocumented student is a positive story revision, although its not developed with a great deal of depth. Miranda told the Los Angeles Times that he hopes this new plot thread puts a humanizing face on undocumented folks in the United States.

With so much of American cinema dominated by lifeless fantasy worlds, its refreshing to see a new film about a city block populated by characters who resemble human beings. But we should not mark films on the curve that take one step forward and two steps back.
Facing anti-democratic pressure from the government, Hong Kongs Apple Daily newspaper announced that it would cease publication as of June 24. The paper cited staff safety for the closure, following the arrest of the chief editor and other executives. The papers assets were also frozen, making continued operations largely impossible.

Around 500 police officers raided Apple Dailys offices on June 17, while arresting Ryan Law, the chief editor, and four others. These included Cheung Kim-hung, the CEO of Next Digital, the parent company that owned the paper. The police also froze $HK18 million ($US2.3 million) in assets owned by companies with links to the paper. These were Apple Daily Limited, Apple Daily Printing Limited, and AD Internet Limited.

Apple Daily (Hong Kong) headquarters

Arrests are ongoing. Fung Wai-kong, an editor and columnist with the paper, was detained Sunday night at the Hong Kong airport, reportedly attempting to board a flight to the United Kingdom. He is the seventh person affiliated with the paper to be arrested. In addition, on June 30, Reuters reported that Next Digital would end operations the following day, after its assets were frozen.

Hong Kong police have accused Apple Daily of violating the draconian national security law, which went into effect in June 2020, by publishing more than 30 articles since 2019 calling for other countries, namely the United States and the UK, to impose sanctions on the city and on China, in relation to the pro-democracy protests that erupted in 2019. The government accused the paper of collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security.

In Washington, the Biden administration issued a statement on the papers closure filled with hypocritical moralizing. It stated, Through arrests, threats, and forcing through a National Security Law that penalizes free speech, Beijing has insisted on wielding its power to suppress independent media and silence dissenting views. It continued, Journalists are truth-tellers who hold leaders accountable and keep information flowing freelyand that is needed now more than ever in Hong Kong, and in places around the world where democracy is under threat.

This is coming from the same government that continues to press charges against journalist Julian Assange, who remains locked in Britains Belmarsh Prison for exposing US war crimes. The Democrats and Republicans have also waged attacks on free speech on platforms like Facebook and Google, seeking to silence left-wing and anti-war voices online.

The Hong Kong office of Chinas Foreign Ministry released a statement criticizing Washington. The national security law enshrines principles of rule of law including safeguarding human rights, addresses the most pressing and prominent risks facing national security in Hong Kong, it stated. Press freedom should not be exploited as an excuse for criminal activities, still less a fig leaf for acts to destabilize Hong Kong and China at large.

Apple Daily was the largest newspaper associated with the pan-democrat bloc in Hong Kong. The paper first began publishing in 1995 and was owned by its founder, billionaire Jimmy Lai. Lai is hailed by the pan-democrat bloc and the Western bourgeois media as a defender of democratic rights in Hong Kong. He is currently incarcerated on a string of charges, and faces 20 months in prison following his latest sentencing in May.

Rather than being a voice for democracy, Jimmy Lai enjoys close connections with the US government. His long-time assistant, Mark Simon, a former US Navy intelligence officer with close links to the CIA, helped Lai secure meetings with leading officials in the previous Trump administration, like Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence. Lai also met with Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, in October 2019.

The Washington Post, one of the chief mouthpieces for the Democratic Party, published an opinion piece by Simon on June 25, lambasting Beijing. While paying lip service to freedom of the press, Simon revealed the real interests of this section of the Hong Kong ruling elite that he and Lai represent. He wrote, Jimmy Lai often told us, No free press, no free market. Those in the international business community who believe the closure of Apple Daily will have no impact on them are about to learn this lesson the hard way.

He continued: Businesses (on the mainland) are assumed to do what China wants, whether that means turning over technology or personal data. This makes the scrutiny and exposure provided by a free press all the more important to keeping Hong Kong a free and open financial market. In other words, the concern driving Lai and his ilk is not democratic rights for the Hong Kong population, but the impact Beijings actions will have on their profit margins.

In this sense, US attacks on Beijing over Apple Daily have nothing to do with press freedom or democratic rights in Hong Kong. They are part of a coordinated campaign that includes false claims of genocide in Xinjiang, promotion of the lie that COVID-19 was leaked from a lab in Wuhan, and the ratcheting up of pressure over Taiwan. It is aimed at poisoning public opinion towards China at home, in order to justify war.

At the same time, Beijing is not concerned primarily with the likes of Jimmy Lai and others within the pan-democrat bloc. The governments attack on freedom of the press is ultimately aimed at the working class. Beijing fears that any expressions of discontent will resonate with workers throughout China, where they face poverty, low wages, and lack of access to safe and affordable housing. One-fifth of people in Hong Kong live below the official poverty line. Approximately 200,000 people in the city are forced to live in tiny, subdivided apartments, known as coffin homes.

Indicative of the housing crisis throughout China, in mid-June, police in Shanghai discovered that 39 workers were crammed into a three-bedroom apartment, with an original rental price of 13,000 yuan ($US2,000) per month. The workers, mostly employed by nearby restaurants, were paying 700 yuan ($US108) per bed.

The minimum wage in Shanghai, rising to 2,590 yuan ($US400) a month on July 1, does not come close to the cost of renting an average 90 square-meter apartment. In the first quarter of this year, the average rental price per square meter of an apartment in the city cost 90 yuan (US$14), a 14 percent increase over the previous quarter.

Under these volatile conditions, Beijing is attempting to silence any opposition voices, in order to prevent a larger explosion of working-class anger and the emergence of an independent movement for genuine socialism.
The WSWS interviewed Umberto Albarella, a Professor of Zooarchaeology from the University of Sheffields Archaeology department, which is threatened with closure.

Describing his role, Professor Albarella said, I am a zoo archaeologist, a person that studies the past relationship between animals and humans and of course, being an archaeologist, I study the material remains of the past which is what all archaeologists do.

Professor Umberto Albarella

Albarella has been with the University of Sheffield for 17 years, staying because the university is supposed to serve its community and also it is very much embedded in the city, and it is supposed to open its doors to people coming from all sorts of backgrounds and I liked that approach.

He told our reporter that the Archaeology department is very much international with lots of contacts all over the world but added that it is just as important for us to work locally I thought it was important for us not to work as a unit separated from the community surrounding this. The department leads archaeological projects based in Sheffield and the Peak District National Park, in which quite often we also operate together with various community groups. Its staff give presentations in schools and participate in various festivals and initiatives around the city.

Albarella and his colleagues also launched a series of short courses, important in terms of community engagement, which open the doors to the extended world, so people come to us and we show them what we doWe keep the costs as little as possible so that they are very inclusive and then you get people from all walks of life coming to us, which means we have hundreds and hundreds of people coming to us many from local, some others coming from other parts of the country, or even from outside the country.

Asked if there had been a managed decline of the Archaeology department, Albarella replied, There is no question that there has been a deliberate and managed decline of our department. When I came to Sheffield in 2004 there were 29 permanent team staff members, now weve got 10 or 11. That gives you a sense of what has been happening. The attitude of the university, and it has been for many years, is how can they suck more and more blood from usjust keeping the same activities more or less going on, but with a skeleton staff.

In the last 3-4 years, the attacks on the department have escalated and moved to deliberate obstruction, Albarella said, including centralising the decision-making process so that we as a department can make fewer decisions, threatening us constantly, insulting us in all kinds of ways, to the point where many of the staff were getting very depressed by this situation.

Speaking on the planned closure of the department, Albarella said, I dont know why they want to close us I dont know what is in the mind of the university management. But I wasnt born yesterday and I have a certain perception as to what they want to do. My speculation is that it is for a combination of factors. Some are perhaps purely coincidental, some are related to some local reality, and some are associated with the broader political context.

Explaining that the claimed financial argument for closing the department doesnt add up, Albarella pointed to the harm already caused by the reputational damage the university is having because of this, alumni withdrawing funding to the university because of the outrage and the prospect of students deciding to boycott the University of Sheffield. He continued, My department doesnt even have a deficit! The University itself has a deficit and it has accrued it over the past few years, but it is only there because of the way that the finances are taken. The University takes 60-70 percent of our earnings from the department, so the financial argument is a red herring.

Instead, said Albarella, Lets look around us and at the political context in which we are operating in. Well, we have an almost far-right government which obviously doesnt value culture and doesnt value education but especially believes in a society which has two tiers with the ruling class and the class of people who are supposed to work for them The message from the government is: one, culture and education are not priorities for us, but also, crucially, they are the privilege of just a few They dont want to destroy these fields all together, but they want them to be the privilege for their children. This is the political situation as it is, and of course no one says this explicitly but anybody who has a little bit of knowledge of history and politics can see what is going on.

Referring to spiralling university tuition fees, Albarella said, The whole fees issue, regardless of the financial burden that is placed onto people, is a way to preserve the ruling class. There are Masters courses that cost more that 20,000. Who is going to pay for those Masters? Only those that can afford it and then you can attend here and of course there is a job here, and it is just a way to replicate your position of power.

Albarella described the process of closing the department as one of manipulation. He and his colleagues sent a letter to the university Vice-Chancellor several months ago but received no response to their questions. The Deputy Vice-Chancellor also refused to answer questions, telling the department in a meeting that it would be placed under review.

I have been through reviews before but never this kind. This was a review without a proper conversation. What we had were very formal meetings where basically we were put on trial.

Incredibly, two external reviewers were appointed, and you would expect that we would have the opportunity to have a frank conversation with this external reviewer. But nothing. The whole process clearly indicated that they had absolutely zero interest in understanding or listening to us or to our students, and they had an agenda that they were pursuing.

An eventual meeting with the pro-Vice Chancellor featured a PowerPoint presentation about the results of the review, which was full of misinformation, wrong information. The work we had to do constantly trying to correct all of this was exhausting. We had to do this as well as our everyday work and to try and correct it was tiring. And then she says, we are considering either in investing in or closing your department and in five days the university executive board will decide. Five days which included the weekend.

In that time Albarella and his colleagues won widespread popular support: we had a massively successful petition, the students were up in arms, the whole academic community all over the world was up in arms because everybody knows us, we are world known and renowned.

A protest sign reading "Save Archaeology" on the Sheffield Minalloy House building of the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology (Credit: WSWS Media)

The university nonetheless decided to close the department. Throughout the whole process, Albarella said, there has never been any transparency, no openness.

A final decision is due in less than two weeks time. Albarella told our reporter: The staff and students in the department are working cohesively together to stop this. There are no separations between the staff and the students

The final decision will be made by the university council and this will probably be the final death sentence for us, on July 12. Normally, the council have the reputation of just rubber stamping the decisions of the executive board. Having said that, I dont think the council has ever experienced anything like this.
As a record-breaking heat wave driven by man-made climate change has caused hundreds of deaths across the Pacific Northwest in the US and British Columbia in Canada, workers have been forced to continue working under dangerous conditions.

The heat wave, which began last Friday, has caused the deaths of at least 63 people in Oregon, almost certainly an undercount. Washington state has still not bothered to issue an official statement on the number of deaths caused by the heat wave, despite having the largest number of people exposed to dangerous temperatures. However, the King County coroners office revealed that at least 20 have died, with 13 having died in the Seattle metropolitan area.

Paramedics Cody Miller, left, and Justin Jones respond to a heat exposure call during a heat wave, Saturday, June 26, 2021, in Salem, Ore. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

As the recorded number of deaths caused by sustained temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit continues to increase, the local and national media has paid equal attention to celebrating the full reopening of the economy. This is under conditions where the more infectious Delta variant is causing another global upsurge of infections and deaths as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.

The hundreds of deaths caused by the heat wave are the result of systematic neglect of infrastructure and public services. The rise in temperatures was predicted, but nothing was done to prepare.

The regions infrastructure has proven wholly inadequate for the dramatic rise in temperatures. Over 9,300 Avista customers in Spokane, Washington lost power on Monday and more blackouts were implemented on Tuesday and Wednesday. The electrical system could not keep up with demand, thus compounding the danger of those without electricity suffering from hyperthermia.

Workers have had to endure life-threatening working conditions across the Pacific Northwest. Amazon workers at the enormous Kent warehouse told the Seattle Times that the company was ill-prepared for the heat wave. Numerous workers walked off the job to escape the heat.

Despite these conditions, the Amazon facility continued to hold productivity competitions. Workers were told to work as fast as possible for one hour at a time. One Kent Amazon worker told the Dailydot that I was sweating immediately. Im really surprised at how ill-prepared they are, given we have known it would be this hot for a little bit now. The Kent Amazon facility did nothing more than provide ice scarves to workers.

Workers across industries face similar conditions. Voodoo Doughnut employees in Portland, Oregon, walked out on strike after risking heatstroke for two days on the job. One worker, speaking to the website Eater, illustrated the situation: In the building, [temperatures] were in the 80s, and working by fryers was absolutely miserable. By the end of the day, I was doubled over with my head in a trash can. Temperatures eventually climbed to 96 degrees in the store.

Voodoo has retaliated against workers by firing many of those who walked out. Management had known that excessive heat had been an issue in past years, but did nothing. The temperature had been a daily issue, according to one worker.

Cassandra, a worker at a coffee shop in Seattle, spoke to the WSWS about the conditions she has had to face. She explained, When the forecast for a three- to four-day span of unprecedented heat came in last week, I suggested to the manager and the owner (who lives in San Diego) that we close down for the hottest days since there is no air conditioning. Temperatures were as predicted, 98, 100, 101 and today is expected to be 109-111.

The kitchen area by the grill was extremely hot when I went in there, possibly 150 degrees. The kitchen staff are not allowed to open the back door. I am not allowed to leave the front window open when Im not taking orders. We have a couple of small fans, but they just move the hot air around, they don't cool it down.

The manager told me last week, I know it sounds unbearable, but everyone will be fine. The next day I told the owner that I strongly urge him to close down at least on Monday, predicted to be unbearably bad heat, especially in a hot building with a grill and no air conditioning. I told him to do it for the sake of his kitchen workers. This had not occurred to him. He was reluctant to do it, but finally conceded late in the day yesterday. If I hadnt pushed it, he wouldve kept the place open.

Agricultural workers in Oregon, Washington and Idaho have had to continue working in temperatures well over 100 degrees. So far, the death of one farmworker from the heat in St. Paul, Oregon has been reported. In Washington, the United Farm Workers (UFW) begged Democratic governor Jay Inslee to implement emergency heat standards in what amounted to a futile gesture. The organization did not threaten any strike action to save workers lives. In fact, they have restricted their activities to handing out water.

Chelsea Dimas, a UFW volunteer, expressed the orientation of the UFW as a whole when she told New York Magazine, the UFW, our volunteers, and other organizations fighting for farmworker rights are in no way trying to vilify farmers or property owners. What were trying to do is make things right. And were more than open to working with them to ensure that these conditions are improved. Were not trying to attack, were trying to help people. In other words, the UFW is dedicated to preventing a rebellion by farmworkers against their exploitation by farm owners, and ensuring that conditions remain for one of the most exploited sections of the working class. The UFW has been working with farmers for half a century in order to stop workers from realizing their political independence.

These are the conditions faced by countless workers across the whole region. However, workers do not face these horrendous conditions because capitalists are necessarily greedy or bad people. The accumulation of profits is an absolute requirement for the continuation of the capitalist system. A workers capacity to work is bought and sold just like any other commodity. Some workers are allowed to suffer or die of hyperthermia for the same reason that fruit is often allowed to rot in a warehouse; because it is more profitable for the capitalist class to do so.

In response, workers must adopt an international socialist program and perspective to struggle for their interests. To do this, it is necessary for workers to politically separate themselves entirely from the capitalist class and its Democratic and Republican representatives, and this entails a decisive break from the pro-corporate trade unions that have been functioning as a labor police force for decades.
Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense under George W. Bush who was a principal architect of the criminal US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has died at his ranch in New Mexico surrounded by his family, according to an announcement released late Wednesday.

That Rumsfeld reached the age of 88 without ever being tried as a war criminal, much less being locked up for his crimes, is testament to a breakdown of international law under the relentless assault of American militarism. It is also a product of the complicity of every institution of the US establishment, its two major parties, its corporations, media and academia in the crimes of mass murder and torture, along with the assault on basic democratic rights, with which Rumsfelds name will always be synonymous.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaks during an event to kick off his Known and Unknown book tour, on Wednesday Feb. 9, 2011, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Joseph Kaczmarek)

These crimes, widely interpreted as a loathsome aberration when he was in office, have since become fully normalized under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Rumsfeld was a man of the state, beginning his career as three-term congressman and then joining the Nixon administration as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, an agency created as part of President Lyndon Johnsons Great Society program. He was hired for the express purpose of gutting its anti-poverty programs. He then assumed other positions, including counselor to the president and US ambassador to NATO. Nixon was recorded on his White House tapes as describing Rumsfeld as a ruthless little bastard, no doubt a term of high praise coming from him.

After the forced resignation of Nixon, Rumsfeld headed the transition of Gerald Ford to the White House, subsequently becoming his chief of staff and then serving for little more than a year as secretary of defense, during which he worked to undermine negotiations with the Soviet Union on nuclear arms reduction and championed the buildup of new weapons systems such as cruise missiles and the B-1 bomber. He also oversaw the replacement of military conscription with an all-volunteer armed forces, a measure taken to wall off the military from the kinds of popular pressures that fatally undermined the US war in Vietnam.

Before joining the Bush administration, once again as secretary of defense, Rumsfeld made a fortune as an executive of several corporations and was a member of the neo-conservative think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In the decade between the first Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the PNAC advanced the perspective that, in the wake of the Soviet Unions dissolution, US imperialism could secure its interests through the unfettered use of military force. It lobbied for military intervention and regime change in Iraq in order to seize its oil wealth, secure US hegemony over the Gulf region and assure a global security order that is uniquely friendly to American principles and prosperity.

Together with Rumsfeld, nine other signatories of the PNACs founding statement joined the George W. Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other senior Pentagon officials.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon provided the pretext for carrying out wars for regime change in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and Rumsfeld served as both a chief advocate for these wars and their senior strategist.

Rumsfeld was one of the most prominent promoters of the lies about weapons of mass destructionwe know where they are, he told the mediaand non-existent ties between the secular Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, about which he claimed there was bulletproof evidence.

These lies in service of war were amplified by the media, with the New York Times, the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, in the lead. During this period, Rumsfeld was lionized by the press, with his face plastered on magazine covers and his platitudes about transforming the military and unknown unknowns treated as genius. The US News & World Report noted during this period that Rumsfeld routinely has the press corps doubled over in fits of laughter. What the media found funny revealed a great deal about the disintegration of democratic sentiments within the US ruling establishment.

The wars with which Rumsfeld is identified were wars of aggression, the principal offense charged against the surviving leadership of Germanys Nazi regime at Nuremberg, from which all the other horrific crimes of the Third Reich flowed.

The human cost of these wars is staggering. According to Brown Universitys Cost of War Project, the number killed outright in the US war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen is approximately 800,000, while indirect deaths resulting from the destruction of infrastructure, the decimation of health care and mass starvation may exceed 3.1 million. Fully 37 million people have been forced to flee their homes during the two decades of unending US imperialist war.

Indifferent to this mass slaughter, Rumsfeld was equally unconcerned about the lives of US soldiers sent into these dirty colonial-style wars. When US National Guard members approached him in Kuwait asking for help because they were inadequately supplied and their military vehicles were vulnerable to rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs, Rumsfeld delivered one of his pretentious banalities, declaring, You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

More than 7,000 US troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, with hundreds of thousands returning with grievous physical and mental wounds. As of 2018, 1.7 million veterans had reported a disability stemming from their deployment.

In addition to mass slaughter, Rumsfeld was intimately involved in the crimes of disappearances, extraordinary rendition, and torture. He personally supervised the creation of the infamous prison camp at Guantanamo and the use there and at other sites, including the Bagram base in Afghanistan, of so-called enhanced interrogation techniquesi.e., torture.

In January 2002, Rumsfeld issued a memo declaring that the war on terror renders obsolete Genevas strict limitations on questioning enemy prisoners. The memo called the Geneva Conventions rules for the treatment of prisoners quaint. When the photographs of US torture and sexual abuse of prisoners at Iraqs Abu Ghraib prison surfaced in 2004, the main concern within the Pentagon and the White House was how the military failed to keep them secret.

Rumsfeld was forced to resign as secretary of defense in 2006 following sharp criticism from within the US militarys uniformed command and in the face of growing popular hostility to the war, which led to the Republicans losing control of both the House and the Senate.

For their part, the generals wanted to continue the wars under a more palatable civilian leadership. As for the Democrats, they not only failed to stop the wars, but voted funding for the surge in Iraq that led to another escalation of the bloodbath.

In 2011, when Rumsfeld was promoting his memoirs titled Known and Unknown, he told an interviewer: For all the criticism of President Bush and the people working around him for the things he put in placethe Patriot Act, the Guantanamo Bay [prison] and various things, military commissions. ... The fact is, theyre still there. Why are they still there? Theyre there, because they make sense in the 21st Century. Theyre needed. And the new administration has not been able to figure out a better way to do it.

Indeed, under Obama, US military operations continued in Iraq, were massively escalated in Afghanistan and extended into disastrous wars for regime change in Libya and Syria. The dirty war tactics elaborated under Bush were expanded into a drone missile assassination program across the globe, while the wholesale spying upon the people of the United States and the world only intensified.

Today, the prison camp at Guantanamo remains open. The war in Iraq that Rumsfeld assured the media would last no more than five months continues, with the Biden administration ordering airstrikes against targets on both sides of the IraqSyria border this week.

It is this continuity of imperialist policy that explains the attempt to whitewash Rumsfelds criminal legacy. Speaking for the Biden administration, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin praised Rumsfelds remarkable career along with his boundless energy, probing intellect and abiding commitment to serve his country.

The Associated Press obituary described him as ambitious, witty, energetic, engaging and capable of great personal warmth, lamenting that his reputation as a skilled bureaucrat and visionary of a modern U.S. military was unraveled by the long and costly Iraq war.

What contemptible nonsense! One might as well say that Hitlers reputation as a skilled military strategist was unraveled by the long and costly war against the Soviet Union.

Rumsfelds vision for the military was that smaller ground forces backed by overwhelming air power and precision-guided munitions could subjugate entire populations to US imperialist interests. Instead, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, these tactics resulted in mass murder, the destruction of entire societies and the eruption of popular opposition.

As for American imperialisms efforts to utilize military force to conquer the world, the wars with which Rumsfeld is associated have resulted in one debacle after the next. As the WSWS anticipated at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq:

Whatever the outcome of the initial stages of the conflict that has begun, American imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution to its internal maladies. Rather, the unforeseen difficulties and mounting resistance engendered by war will intensify all of the internal contradictions of American society.

Far from being deterred by the debacles associated with Rumsfeld in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, the US ruling class is only preparing a far more dangerous eruption of American militarism. Its turn toward great power conflict, particularly against China, threatens to unleash a war of world catastrophic consequences. This poses the urgency of building a new socialist and internationalist leadership to unite the working class against imperialist war and its source, the capitalist system.
The French trade unions called a one-day strike among some railway workers yesterday and the first day of a five-day strike by staff at both Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports in Paris.

Unions did not release a statement on the number of workers participating in the strike action at the Paris airports. At 11:00 a.m., the general secretary of the National Union of Autonomous Trade Unions (UNSA) Paris airport branch, Laurent Gassine, tweeted that 30 percent of flights at the Orly Airport had been delayed by between 15 minutes and one hour. The news agency AFP reported that flights were largely operating normally. The Paris airports stated that they expected some delays on flights until Monday due to the strike.

South Terminal at the Orly Airport (Photo: Wikipedia)

In the railways, the one-day strike called by the General Federation of Labor (Confederation generale du travail, CGT) yesterday impacted TER regional express trains nationally. It did not impact high-speed TGV or metro lines. TER services were disrupted in Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes, Pays de la Loire, Brittany, the East, New Aquitaine and Occitania.

Also yesterday, the unions announced they were cancelling their former strike authorization notices for the weekend of July 3-4 on national Ouigo train networks.

Participation in these strikes was low, despite mounting opposition among workers against the offensive underway by the employers. The actions announced Thursday were token events with which workers in France are all too familiar. Announced without any clear demands or any attempt to mobilize broader support in the working class, they aim only to let off steam among the workers and demoralize them, while the union bureaucracies work out a deal with management.

Airline workers face a major cost-cutting plan by Paris Airports (ADP Group), which includes Charles de Gaulle, Orly and Le Bourget airports. The ADP Group, which employs over 5,000 workers, is negotiating with the unions a Plan for Adjustment of Labor Contracts that eliminates numerous employee bonuses. According to the unions, these would amount to a paycut of up to 20 percent, while the company itself admits that it would mean a paycut of between 4-8 percent. Workers refusing to sign the new contract under these terms would be laid off.

A one-day protest action called by the unions on June 18 outside the ADP Group headquarters involved some 700 people, including operations workers. The management is psychologically and financially exhausting us, Ramesh Monsard, 44, who has worked for 20 years as a parking site manager at ADP, told Le Monde.

The unions do not oppose the companys restructuring plans. Only seven months ago, they signed an agreement with ADP for a voluntary redundancy plan that led to the wiping out of 1,250 jobs, one-sixth of the entire workforce.

At the time, the unions justified this action by claiming that it would reduce the companys demands for further attacks. ADP management released a statement noting that it would offer an opportunity to collaborate even more closely with the unions. In order to give a new chance for social dialogue and to avoid enforced redundancies  the direction preferred to propose a new plan for redundancies, it said.

In the railway sector, the CGT statement announcing yesterdays token strike included no concrete demands, calling for real negotiations for a high-quality social statute and an end to restructuring. It made not even a token reference to the imposition of the restructuring tied to President Emmanuel Macrons 2018 railway reform. While there is enormous opposition to the reform among workers, Macron negotiated it in close collaboration with the trade unions.

Under the new law, more than 23,000 workers are no longer being hired under the old railway workers statute, which entails a major cut to their wages and working conditions. The reform initiated the complete privatization of the SNCF national rail network, which was nationalized after World War II.

In 2018, SNCF workers conducted a bitter strike against Macrons railway reform. The CGT and other unions isolated the strike, refusing to mobilize any broader actions by workers against the privatization and instead maintained a series of demoralizing, intermittent work stoppages over months that were aimed at demoralizing the workers. The unions, which had already negotiated the bill with Macron over months, worked to betray the strike and impose Macrons reform.

The unions have collaborated with the government throughout the coronavirus pandemic to impose Macrons policy of herd immunity, opposing any strike action to close nonessential production that would prevent the spread of the virus but impact upon corporate profits. The result of these policies across the EU has been the deaths of more than 110,000 people in France and over 1.1 million on the continent. The wealth of Europes 684 billionaires has soared by more than $1 trillion to $3 trillion over the same period.

The Macron government and unions are aware that this has only deepened the opposition among railway workers to the policy of the ruling class. While trillions of euros have been handed to the major banks and corporations in the form of EU stimulus packages, the funding for these measures is to be extracted through a stepped-up offensive on the social entitlements of the working class.

For a struggle to be organized, however, it must be waged outside of the control of the pro-corporate trade union apparatuses. Railway and public transport workers should form their own action committees, independent of the unions, to organize a struggle and appeal to workers across France and Europe. These must be oriented toward a new political perspective, based on the fight for workers governments, the transformation of the major corporations into public utilities democratically controlled by the working population, and the socialist reorganization of the economy according to social need, not private profit.
In the first criminal case against entities and persons tied to former President Donald Trumps business activities, New York prosecutors on Thursday charged the Trump Organization, Trump Payroll Corporation and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg with 15 felony counts, as part of an alleged grand larceny and tax fraud scheme stretching from March 31, 2005 through June 30, 2021.

The 73-year-old Weisselberg, an employee of the Trump family since 1973, surrendered at the Manhattan District Attorneys office early Thursday morning, where he was forced to hand over his passport after prosecutors alleged he was a high flight risk. He was briefly handcuffed and marched to a Thursday afternoon court hearing during which he pleaded not guilty. Weisselberg was subsequently released on his own recognizance. A lawyer for the Trump Organization also entered a not guilty plea on all counts.

US President Donald Trump (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

The charges against the Trump Organization, Trump Payroll Corporation and Weisselberg include one count each of scheming to defraud in the first degree and conspiracy in the fourth degree, four counts of criminal tax fraud in the third degree and four counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. Additionally, Weisselberg is being charged with grand larceny in the second degree and four counts of offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree.

The indictment describes the charges as part of an off-the-books scheme in which high-ranking executives in the Trump Organization, such as Weisselberg and members of his family, were provided rent-free housing in New York City, Mercedes-Benz cars to drive and elite private school tuition, along with home renovations and holiday bonuses, all as part of compensation packages that were not reported to the Internal Revenue Service and not taxed.

Prosecutors relied on financial records turned over by Jennifer Weisselberg, former daughter-in-law to Allen and former wife to Barry Weisselberg, Allens son.

Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. wrote in the 25-page indictment:

The purpose of the scheme was to compensate Weisselberg and other Trump Organization executives in a manner that was off the books: the beneficiaries of the scheme received substantial portions of their income through indirect and disguised means, with compensation that was unreported or misreported by the Trump Corporation or Trump Payroll Corp.

The indictment alleges that from 2005 through 2017, corporate defendants provided Weisselberg approximately $1,174,018 in unclaimed income resulting from the payment of his rent and related expenses. According to the indictment, other unreported and untaxed benefits brought the grand total illegally going to Weisselberg and his family to over $1.76 million.

While Trump himself has not been charged, commentators speculate that the battery of felony charges against Weisselberg is an attempt to get him to turn states witness, similar to former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. So far, Weisselberg has given no indication that he will do so.

Commentators on CNN have lamented that the charges are relatively tame compared to the known fraud in which the Trump family has engaged for decades. However, charges against the Trump Organization could prove detrimental to Trump family finances, especially if various Wall Street banks keeping the company afloat via loans demand repayment.

The charging of the Trump Organization by Democratic prosecutors, Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James, is no doubt an attempt by the Democrats to cripple Trump financially and possibly politically. However, even if Trump were eventually indicted, the fascist movement that is being cultivated within the Republican Party would elevate the next demagogue to take his place, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton or Georgia representative and Holocaust-denier Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

Petrified of the political and social consequences of an exposure of the scale of the conspiracy headed by Trump and the key role played by the Republican Party and high officials in the military, the FBI and the police, the Democrats are engaged in a cover-up combined with appeals for unity and bipartisanship with Trumps Republican co-conspirators. They are desperate to maintain the two-party political monopoly through which the American ruling class exercises its rule and prevent the growth of working class opposition outside of the framework of capitalist politics.

This is indicated in the charges, which, while describing criminal behavior, hardly scratch the surface of the financial parasitism, fraud, tax evasion and criminality that are standard operating procedure not only for Trump, but for the corporate-financial oligarchy he personifies.

The relatively narrow scope of the charges, largely focused on Weisselbergs compensation, omits the far greater funneling of money under the table to Trumps children, some of which has been previously reported and documented in the press.

Responding to the charges, and revealing perhaps more than he intended about the pervasiveness of fraud and illegality in the operations of big business, particularly New York real estate, Trump said his companys actions were things that are standard practice throughout the US business community, and in no way a crime.

A recent example of the sort of legal tax avoidance in which billionaires regularly engage was documented in black-and-white earlier this year with the publication of the tax returns of the worlds richest people. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, within the parameters of pro-corporate tax laws, routinely manipulate their reported income and hide their money to lower their tax liability, allowing them to pay less in taxes than the average worker, and, in some cases, claim a refund.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in 2018 in response to a lengthy and detailed New York Times expose on the financial dealings of Trumps father, Fred C. Trump, who passed along the Trump empire to his children through massive tax evasion and inheritance schemes:
July 1 marked one month since 2,450 workers at Vales Sudbury, Ontario mining and processing complex went on strike.

Workers have thus far rejected two concessions-filled contract offers. The first of these was unanimously recommended to them by the United Steelworkers (USW) Local 6500 bargaining committee. The most recent was voted down 10 days into the strike, with a decisive 87 percent of workers voting to reject in a ballot in which 84 percent of the strikers participated. Recognizing the anger and militancy among the workers, the USW felt compelled to call for Vales second offer to be rejected, even though it had advised acceptance of essentially the same terms less than two weeks earlier.

Sudbury Vale miners' picket line (Photo credit: USW Local 6500)

Last Saturday the World Socialist Web Site reported on the attempt of Vales North Atlantic Chief Operating Officer Dino Otranto to bully and threaten the Sudbury workers into making sweeping contract concessions. Otranto arrogantly asserted that the Sudbury operations have the highest labour costs in Vales global empire and declared that a refusal to accept the givebacks demanded by the company would lead to a drying up of investment. Its all about cost per ton, he lectured the workers in a company town hall.

Even as he depicted Vale as financially hard-pressed, Otranto boasted that Vales huge global assets will enable the company to endure a long strike in order to wear down the Sudbury workers and extort concessions from them.

If the company is bold enough to make such a brazen attempt to intimidate and blackmail the striking miners, it is because it knows full well that the USW is on its side. If the union gets its way, striking Vale workers will be isolated on the picket lines with starvation strike pay, as they were in the 2009-10 strike, then forced to accept many of the same concessions they have bravely twice rejected.

Poverty-level strike pay

The USW is paying Vale strikers the measly sum of $370 per week (about US$300) to workers earning the companys base wage. This poverty-level allowance is pitiable and amounts to even less than they would earn under unemployment insurance (EI) benefits or the federal governments makeshift pandemic Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).

Its maybe 30 percent of our wage. Its not even the same as EI; its lower than EI, one striking worker told the World Socialist Web Site. For a miner on the base wage, EI would equate to $520 per week.

Before rent or mortgage payments are even taken into account, the average cost of living for a family of four in Sudbury is $3,969 per month, or $1,127 for a single person, according to the worlds largest cost-of-living database. The average rental price of a one-bedroom apartment in Sudbury is $1,225 per month.

The strikers and their families are receiving poverty rations from an organization that routinely boasts that it is the largest private-sector union in North America. With more than 225,000 members in Canada and over 850,000 dues-paying members continent-wide, the USW has more than enough financial resources to provide a decent standard of living for the strikers. However, the reality is that the USW, like the United Auto Workers, Unifor and the other state-recognized pro-capitalist trade union apparatuses, is not an organization devoted to serving the interests of the workers it purports to represent.

Over the past four decades, the USW has abandoned any association it once had with workers' struggles to secure limited improvements in their working conditions, transformed itself into a junior partner of management and connived in the restructuring of mining, steel and other basic industries at the expense of workers jobs and wages. To facilitate this process, it has promoted Canadian and American nationalism, pitting workers against each other and demobilizing them against the onslaught waged by globally mobile corporations like Vale.

This pro-corporate syndicate, which is a union in name only, exists not to defend the interests of workers but rather to meet the demands of its six-figure-salaried officials. These demands include maintaining cooperative working relations with Vale executives, protecting the USWs investment portfolios and demonstrating to the federal government that the USW is a reliable partner in enforcing the dictates of Canadian big business.

The USWs overall assets have risen more than 600 percent since the year 2000 and now sit at over $1.5 billion. From these astonishingly deep pockets, only $19 million was drawn out to spend on strike benefits in the entire year of 2020. This tiny fraction equates to only 2.4 percent of the USWs net assets.

Meanwhile, the unions top brass, who hobnob regularly with government ministers and corporate executives, gorge themselves on obscene salaries paid for by workers hard-earned cash. According to LM forms filed with the US Office of Labour-Management Standards, the combined total of USW President Thomas M. Conways gross salary, benefits and other compensation amounts to a whopping $210,395 per year. Vice President David McCalls annual income surpasses even Conways, with his total compensation reportedly being $217,762.

The USWs National Director for Canada Kenneth Neumann receives $212,629 annually; Vice President Fredrick Redmond follows suit with a yearly sum of $212,489. The list goes on, with hundreds of lesser-known union functionaries earning generous six-figure sums each year.

Furthermore, as the WSWS has reported, the bulk of the unions assets are invested in the stock market. This means that the USW has a direct material incentive in suppressing strikes and wage increases in order to keep profits strong and stocks rising. The meagre $19 million paid to striking workers in 2020 constituted less than a quarter of what the union earned from its stock trades and securities.

USW isolates strikers

In addition to weakening workers ability to resist the companys concession demands by providing them poverty-level strike pay, the USW is working consciously to demobilize and isolate the striking Vale miners.

The USWs website boasts: Our members work in nearly every industry and in every job imaginable, in all regions of the country. We work in call centres and credit unions, mines and manufacturing plants, offices and oil refineries, restaurants and rubber plants, sawmills and steel mills and security companies. We work in nursing homes, legal clinics, social agencies and universities.

A genuine workers' organization would mobilize this vast social power to support the Vale strikers. Solidarity action to draw attention to the struggle would be called across all economic sectors, where similar attacks on workers conditions are being imposed. Appeals would be made to other Vale workers in Canada, including those employed at its nickel mining operations in Voiseys Bay, Labrador and Thompson, Manitoba and around the world to stop production to bring the company to its knees.

But the USW has taken no measures to prepare solidarity action by other USW members, let alone other sections of workers. On the contrary, it has even contrived to separate striking Vale workers in Sudbury from their co-workers in Port Colborne, Ontario. With its recommendation to adopt Vales initial offer, the USW prevailed on the Port Colborne workers to vote in favour, resulting in the work stoppage being isolated to Sudbury from the outset. This outrageous betrayal makes the USW complicit in imposing a contract on the Port Colborne workers that removes retiree health benefits for all new hires. As part of the relentless stripping of benefits from the second-tier workforce, it also eliminated new hires eligibility for all insurances and hospital service coverage. Vale can now use this as a battering ram to compel the Sudbury workers to accept no less ruthless givebacks.

As the strike continues into its second month, the USW will continue to isolate the Sudbury workers on starvation strike pay. They will also continue to sit on their hands, effectively inviting Vale to run a massive scabbing operation similar to that it carried out during their bitter yearlong 2009-10 strike.

The union has given workers strict orders from the outset of the strike not to stop scabs or anyone else from entering Vale facilities. Right off the bat, straight from the hallthis is from the president and vice president, a Vale striker told the World Socialist Web Site. The message was information lines only. No picket lines, were not there to stop people from getting in, and we dont want an injunction. ... If people do cross, we inform them, we tell them, and thats it. Go on their way.

Miserly strike pay, continued isolation and totally ineffectual picket linesworkers must carefully consider the implications of this record. The USW is a wealthy and powerful organization, with enormous resources lying untapped at its fingertips that could and by all rights should be utilized to strengthen the strike action and ensure that workers demands are met.

The conclusions of this are unmistakable: The USW serves to sabotage the strike and act in criminal complicity with Vale. Workers cannot realize their entirely justified demands for wage increases and better working conditions while under the control of this pro-company police force.

Workers in Sudbury must establish a rank-and-file strike committee independent of the USW in order to wage a genuine struggle against Vale. To lay the basis for a serious fight, this committee should demand that the USW provide strikers with full pay from its multimillion-dollar resources throughout the strike. The committee should also formulate demands that start from what the workers actually need, not what Vale executives and their USW lackeys claim is affordable.

This should include a 25 percent wage increase to make up for all the concessions-filled contracts over recent years, an end to the multitier workforce, full health care coverage for all paid for by Vale and defined benefit pension plans for all workers.

To enforce these demands, the strike must be broadened. The rank-and-file strike committee should issue an appeal to Vale workers in Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere, miners across North America, such as the striking Warrior Met coal miners in Alabama, and workers in all economic sectors to join them in a working class counteroffensive for decent-paying, secure jobs for all. To unify these struggles, Vale workers and their class brothers and sisters should support the construction of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange turns 50 today. It is an occasion to record the enormous suffering that has been inflicted on the heroic journalist by the imperialist powers, in retaliation for his exposure of their war crimes and human rights abuses.

Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison in 2019

Assange has now spent more than one fifth of his life facing persecution by the US state and his allies, starting with the freezing of his account by Swiss bank PostFinance and the launching of a bogus sexual assault investigation by Sweden in November-December 2010. He lost seven years from June 2012 trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and has been incarcerated for more than two years in Belmarsh maximum security prison.

During this time, he has missed the birth and early lives of two sons and been kept separate from his partner of six years, and fiancee of four, Stella Moris. Prevented from travelling, and denied the most basic means of communication, Assange has had his globally significant work as a journalist brought to a halt. He has been denied the opportunity to defend himself against a relentless campaign of slander and abuse.

The effects on Assange personally have been devastating, described by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer and campaign group Doctors for Assange as psychological torture. His UK extradition judge was forced to acknowledge that he had suffered severe depression and is at serious risk of suicide.

Far worse is planned. Assange is fighting extradition to the US where he faces charges under the Espionage Act with a possible life sentence. Assange would then be imprisoned in conditions not built for humanity, in the words of two former US prison wardens who testified at his trial, subjected to an effective living deathin close to continuous solitary confinement and denied almost all contact with the outside world.

There is no indication that this vicious persecution will cease. A highly calculated ruling by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January that Assange could not be extradited to the US on mental health grounds has not changed his conditions one iota. He remains held on remand in Belmarsh and the US Department of Justice has signalled its determination to pursue the case, even as the pack of lies it has assembled against Assange collapses .

No information has been released about the status of the US governments appeal of Baraitsers decision, or the counter appeal by Assanges defence team. It remains unclear when these appeals would be heard, leaving the WikiLeaks founder in a legal limbo. The deciding High Court goes into recess at the end of July, not returning until October.

What is certain is that the ruling class still intend to make an example of Assange, whose work with WikiLeaks did them immense political damage and contributed to an upsurge of anti-imperialist sentiment across the world. WikiLeaks uncovered tens of thousands of unrecorded civilian casualties and the use of death squads and torture during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The organisation exposed US support for military coups and brutally repressive regimes, its rendition of innocents and minors to Guantanamo Bay and published the infamous Collateral Murder video.

Former CIA director then secretary for defence under Obama, Leon Panetta, summarised the American governments response: All you can do is hope that you can ultimately take action against those that were involved in revealing that information so you can send a message to others not to do the same thing.

Besides the destruction of Assanges health and denial of his freedom, his pursuit has set chilling precedents which tear to shreds legal and democratic rights. His extradition case has been characterised by the routine abuse of due process, including denying him proper access to his lawyers and key documents and the 11th hour introduction of a new indictment. He and his legal team have been subjected to surveillance by the American state, while plans have been exposed to kidnap and even assassinate him. The charges against him criminalise basic journalistic practice, placing it under the Espionage and Official Secrets Acts.

Every step of this pseudo-legal witch-hunt has been upheld by the British courts. It has proceeded with only the faintest of murmurs in the liberal media and official left politics. Any past commitment to democratic rights in these layers has so thoroughly collapsed that they have been able to cough up just a handful of articles and parliamentarians, offering even the most tokenistic support for Assange.

Despite the persistent efforts of the official Dont Extradite Assange (DEA) campaign to curry favour in these circles, the sum total of their endeavours in the UK is a motley cross-party crew of 24 parliamentarians. The presence of Conservative MP David Davis in this group confirms its utterly toothless character. This right-wing backer of Boris Johnson feels perfectly at ease playing at supporting democratic rights in the company of Labour lefts Jeremy Corbyn, Richard Burgon and John McDonnell, who have proven themselves utterly harmless to the British state and its interests.

The 24 do not even feign confidence in their ability to set Assange free, or to build a movement which could. Instead, they have directed their attention to issuing humble appeals to Assanges chief persecutors. On June 11, they signed an open letter to US President Joe Biden congratulating him on his election and concluding, We appeal to you to drop this prosecution, an act that would be a clarion call for freedom that would echo around the globe. The letter reads, You, like us, must have been disappointed your predecessor launched a prosecution carrying a 175-year sentence against a globally renowned publisher.

This is said of the man who labelled Assange a high-tech terrorist and who has seamlessly continued the Trump administrations case against the WikiLeaks founder, as part and parcel of Americas intensifying war drive.

As far as the DEA carries out an international campaign, it is to set up similar groups of politically disparate figures in different parliaments around the world making the same lame appeals. On Thursday, an open letter signed by members of the German Bundestag representing the Left Party, the Free Democratic Party, the Greens and the ruling Christian Democratic Union and Social Democratic parties called on Chancellor Angela Merkel to urgently advocate, during her forthcoming visit to Washington to meet with US President Biden, an end to the persecution of Julian Assange.

None of this is politically serious or credible. Assange will not be freed by appeals to the conscience of the ruling class. The fight for his freedom depends on the mobilisation of a mass social force in defence of democratic rights and against war, the international working class, who must be alerted to Assanges plight and organised in his defence.

Amid a resurgence of class struggle in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, and a dangerous escalation of militarism across the globe, the Socialist Equality Party is confident this perspective will find a mass hearing.
The Labour Party won Thursdays by-election in Batley and Spen in northern England by just 323 votesless than a one percent margin over the Conservatives who came second.

Labours candidate Kim Leadbeater is the sister of Jo Cox, who was MP for the constituency for just over a year until June 2016 when she was murdered by a fascist.

Sir Keir Starmer and Kim Leadbeater (credit: Keir Starmer/Twitter)

Leadbeater won 13,296 votes, taking just 35.3 percent of vote, and defeating the Conservative Partys Ryan Stephenson who won 12,973 (34.4 percent). Former Labour MP George Galloway, standing for the Workers Party of Britain, came third with 8,264 votes (21.8 percent). The Liberal Democrats came fourth, with just 3.3 percent losing their deposit. None of the other 12, mainly right-wing and fascist parties standing received more than 2 percent and many far less.

After the count, Galloway called for a recount, which was rejected. Later, he declared that on multiple grounds we will apply to the courts for this election result to be set aside. Two days before the election, Galloways denounced as a blatantly partisan move the Labour-run local authority taking down hundreds of his campaign posters claiming that they broke election laws due to the imprint being too small. Galloway said a turning point in the election was the false statement by her that he had laughed while Leadbeater was abused on the campaign trail.

The vote was necessitated by Labour MP Tracy Brabin winning the partys nomination for the inaugural Mayor of West Yorkshire in the 2021 election. Brabin won that election and resigned her Batley and Spen seat. She had become Batley and Spens MP after winning what was a practically uncontested election following Coxs brutal murder just days before the June 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union. Her killer, neo-Nazi Thomas Mair, shouted, Britain First as he shot and stabbed the Labour MPa Remain supporter.

Following Labours by-election loss in May to the Conservatives in their stronghold seat of Hartlepool, and the partys dismal fourth place in the Chesham and Amersham by-electionin which the party suffered its worst ever by-election result and lost its depositBatley and Spen was cast as a referendum on party leader Sir Keir Starmer. Talk was that he could face a leadership challenge if Labour lost.

Labour narrowly won, but on a turnout of 48 percent. Turnout at the 2019 general election in the constituency was 66.5 percent. Brabin had a majority of 3,525 from the 2019 election, with Leadbeaters majority only a tenth of that. Labours 35.3 percent vote share was a drop of seven percentage points from the 2019 general election and an even larger fall of 20 percent since the 2017 election.

Labour was also assisted in winning the seat by the absence of a Green Party candidatethe Greens won 692 votes (1.3 percent) in the constituency in the 2019 election. The Greens planned to run a candidate, but he was forced to withdraw last month due to the unearthing of homophobic tweets he made 10 years ago.

The by-election demonstrated that there are no fundamental differences between Labour and the Tories, with both competing over who can best serve the interests of big business and the banks. So toxic is the Labour brand that Leadbeaters campaign leaflet did not mention the word Labour, except in tiny almost unreadable text within the imprint. The leaflet instead stated, Vote Kim Leadbeater, who was described as a local champion.

Asked during the campaign by a friendly Guardian journalist if she would back a 12.5 percent pay rise for nurses, the local champion Leadbeater refused to do so. She riffed on the infamous comment by former Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, saying, People are also sick of thinking there is a magic money tree, when there isnt. So weve got to be really clear to people about that.

Much talk before the election centred on the plethora of far right and fascist candidates being able to gain politically in an area which voted Leave in the European Union referendum. But despite their best attempts to whip up racism and Islamophobia in a population which is 20 percent Muslim, the combined vote for five extreme right candidates was just 538.

As the Socialist Equality Party made clear in its pre-election assessment of the by-election, the inveterate political opportunist and British nationalist Galloway offered no alternative to Labour from the left. No candidate was fighting for the independent class interests of workers against all the parties of big business in a deindustrialised area of West Yorkshire which is scarred by poverty, with more than 40 percent of the population dependent on Universal Credit welfare benefit payments.

Starmer remains Labour leader and will only shift Labour further to the right. He owes his unchallenged leadership position not to a winning victory by a tiny margin, but because he faces no opposition from Labours nominal left. Following Leadbeaters victory, talk immediately evaporated about any challenge to Starmers leadership. And even before that, the challengers mooted were his deputy Angela Rayner and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, neither of whom is in any way associated with the left.

Rayner has spent the last days insisting that she knew nothing about any challenge to Starmer, while Burnham declared, I aint going back any time soon Im supporting Keir. I want him to win the next general election and I will do whatever I can to help him achieve that.

Starmers predecessor as leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who eight months ago had the Labour whip removed from him by Starmer based on false claims of anti-Semitism as part of a wider witch-hunt of the left, is a political busted flush. Someone who once regularly addressed audiences in the tens of thousands, last Saturday, as featured speaker at a national rally of the Peoples Assembly in London, Corbyn and similar figures attracted an audience of less than a thousand.

Corbyns only response to the election was to congratulate Leadbeater, who he said will begin the process of bringing a fractured community together. Interviewed Friday by the BBC, Diane Abbott, on behalf of the rump of Corbynite MPs in the Socialist Campaign Group, refused to oppose Starmers leadership and said that she has confidence in the party. Her wing of the party, she insisted, would never do to Keir what the right of the party did to Jeremy.

For the working class, the only way forward is through a struggle to build the Socialist Equality Party, to represent its independent interests in opposition to every political representative of capitalism.
The Department for Transport (DfT) and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) brought in a private contractor to break the strike by around 700 workers at DVLA offices in Swansea from June 22 to 24. Private contractor APS was used to supply agency staff to print 400,000 V11 forms for car tax.

The DVLA headquarters in Swansea (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

This development shows how invested the Johnson government is in defeating the long -running dispute over demands for workplace safety against the spread of COVID-19. The Swansea office of the DVLA has experienced the largest number of Covid infections linked to a single employer or workplace in the UK. DVLA offices have been hit by strike action by members of the Public Commercial and Services union (PCS) since April over management plans to bring hundreds more staff back into the workplace.

In the face of this state-orchestrated assault, the PCS is isolating the dispute. It has refused to call for a broader mobilisation of its 200,000-strong membership against the trampling of workers safety. The PCS has criticized the government for prolonging the dispute and for preventing an agreement between the union and DVLA management that it claims would end industrial action.

The strike at DVLA is the only industrial action over COVID-19 called by any trade union in the UK during the pandemic. Even after the national death toll has surpassed 152,000one of the highest per capita in the worldand with workplaces such as the DVLA turned into breeding grounds for Covid, the PCS is not challenging the Conservative government on its criminal record, merely that its actions threaten industrial peace.

PCS members at DVLA voted in March by 71.6 percent for strike action. They held four days of strikes in April and May, followed by two lots of strike action in June. The strikes were in response to management plans for a return to work in line with the governments May 17 reopening of the economy and abandonment of lockdown measures.

DVLA workers are not only confronting the plans of the agency but of the government itself. Hence the governments determination to defeat DVLA strikers to set a wider example that no quarter will be given. The government calculates that the Labour Party and PCS will block the response of the working class to their draconian actions.

In parliament last week, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps twice refused to answer questions about whether he had intervened to prevent an agreement being reached between the DVLA and PCS.

Tonia Antoniazzi, Labour MP for Gower, told the Commons that the agency and PCS had reached a deal some weeks before, which had then been ideologically refused. Gower said, In a development unprecedented in 20 years of civil service negotiations the department subsequently reneged on a deal, much of which they had written themselves, with no word of explanation.

Antoniazzi asked, Are PCS right in believing the deal was scuppered at the last minute after the direct intervention of the Secretary of State? Rather than answering the question, Shapps launched into an account of how much the government had spent on safety at the facility in Swansea, accusing the union of switching to demands about money rather than Covid protection.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka accused the minister of cowardice, and urged the original agreement be put back on the table. Serwotka said, His attempt to shift the blame on to the hard-working staff at the DVLA for the current impasse is consistent with a minister who lacks the courage to admit what he has done.

Shapps, the PCS and Labour have showed more urgency in ending the dispute than they have in safeguarding workers against the spread of the virus. Antoniazzi and Serwotkas intervention denies the incompatibility of the interests of the working class with the governments herd immunity agenda which has placed the interests of the economy and the profits of the corporations before the protection of lifea policy the British Medical Journal described as social murder.

The situation at DVLA offices testifies to this, with the virus allowed to run rampant. From 11 cases recorded at the agency between March and September 2020, some 535 workers caught the disease between September and the start of January across DVLA offices in the city. After staff were drafted back after the first lockdown was ended, numbers on site grew from 400 to 2,300. According to Public Health England, the total number of infections over the six-month period was 560, including one fatality.

The governments intervention to undermine the proposed deal should not be cause for any illusions in the PCS and the deal it is attempting to reach. The union wants to resume its partnership with management which has shown nothing but contempt for workers safety. DVLA CEO Julie Lennard reported she had only visited the offices six or seven times since September, claiming she didnt wish to be an infection risk. Louise White, HR and estates director, had not appeared onsite since October, although her team was required to be physically present.

The much-vaunted deal the PCS and Labour Party complain was withdrawn at the last minute offered little in terms of addressing workers concerns. It was taken off the table at the last minute on June 1 and was largely drafted by the agency itself.

According to the PCS it proposed to allow staff currently working remotely to continue but did not address the grievance of many office workers who have been denied the same opportunity. For those currently working at DVLAs offices their attendance would be reduced by just half a day per week, but this was framed within the context of increasing overall numbers onsite. It also included a derisory one-off recognition payment of 200 to all staff including those working from home or on paid special leave, and a proposed flex-credit award of two days to staff required to work in the office throughout the pandemic.

Serwotka said, We strongly suspect senior ministers at the DfT have interfered with the progress we were making and want to make some kind of ideological stand against PCS They have grossly underestimated the resolve of our members. PCS is fully prepared for months of strike action.

There is no question mark over DVLA workers resolve. But the PCS is undermining this as it continues to isolate the dispute. It is limiting strike action on a departmental basis consisting largely of one-day stoppages with a three-day stoppage to start from July 12. Strikers are receiving a pitiful 40 a day hardship payment from the PCS.

The PCS resumed talks with the DVLA following the strike-breaking operations on June 28 and is continuing to try and whittle down opposition. In the meantime, managements plans continue unabated. This is underlined in the unions latest press release where it trumpets as an achievement that management have agreed to restore desk isolation following suspected or positive cases to 72 hours rather than 24 hours.

The union admits that the agency is ignoring a rise in cases of COVID-19 in the Swansea Bay area as it demands staff return to the offices from remote working. DVLA staff are expected to work at shared desks, a sure sign that the workplace has already become overcrowded. The PCS met with management the day before the largest phased return-to-work so far of 150 plus workers and it plans for an additional 100 staff to be employed on fixed term contracts. This is in addition to an extra 500 staff who have been brought back in June.

The Tory governments ruthless strike-breaking operation is reliant on the PCS to dissipate opposition to the unsafe return to work. The trade unions are preventing any broader mobilisation against the abandonment of lockdown measures. Last month, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) published findings from a survey which showed that 1 in 10 workers had been put under pressure to return to their workplace1 in 6 of disabled workersand that 1 in 4 were working from an office or workplace despite being able to work from home.

Johnsons willingness to let the bodies pile high in their thousands is official government policy. DVLA workers need to organise rank-and-file committees to win support throughout the working class for a unified struggle to defend, safety and livelihoods during the pandemic against the government and its accomplices in the Labour Party and trade unions.
Nurses, doctors and their co-workers taking part in events marking the 73rd anniversary of the founding of the National Health Service (NHS) will know they face a triple threat to their lives and livelihoods:

A new wave of the pandemic has already begun, fuelled by the highly infectious Delta variant, under conditions where all measures of containment and social distancing will be abandoned on July 19. Whatever the restraining impact of the still only partially completed vaccination drive, illness, hospitalisations and deaths will rise dramatically by the Autumn with those in younger age groups impacted.

NHS workers confront a Conservative government indifferent to the impact of the pandemic on working people, having presided over 150,000 deaths already. This includes 1,500 health/care workers, as admitted by former Health Secretary Matt Hancock before he was forced to resign in disgrace. Hancock claimed that no one had died due to shortages of PPE, a lie refuted by a trial at Addenbrookes hospital, Cambridge that found using FFP3 respirators rather than the cheap masks recommended by Public Health England led to a fall of up to 100 percent in staff infections. Every death in a health and social care setting was due to Tory cuts.

Led by new Health Secretary Sajid Javid, Boris Johnsons government of criminals is planning a frontal assault on the NHS. Having proffered an insulting one percent pay rise, the plan is now to escalate the Tory privatisation drive. A quarter of total NHS spending already goes to the private sector, and much more if the billions of pounds worth of contracts handed out by the Tories to their cronies during the pandemic are factored in. A new White Paper on the NHS seeks to make competitive tendering easier, with any company denied contracts able to seek a judicial review and all unnecessary hurdles removed to allow patients to choose treatment from any company that is competent to carry it out and meets NHS prices.

The NHS has already been brought to the brink of disaster. There are 4.5 million people now on waiting lists, and nearly 225,000 people have waited more than a year for routine hospital treatment, the highest level in 12 years. In the face of this health disaster, there are currently more than 87,000 staff vacancies in the NHS and the workforce is suffering from the enormous physical and psychological pressure of the pandemic, including from Long Covid. The attacks now being planned will make this disastrous situation even worse.

National Health Service workers and their supporters among 250,000 people protesting in defence of the NHS in London in 2017 (credit: WSWS Media)

In the face of this, health workers confront a further crisis. They are led by trade unions that will do nothing to defend them from the Tory assault and are told to rely on a Labour Party that works in a de-facto government of national unity with Boris Johnson.

None of the health unions are organising a single protest against the ongoing destruction of the NHS. Mondays July 5 anniversary will instead witness the NHS Social Care and Frontline Workers Day, backed by right-wing newspapers such as the Expres s and the Mai l, business figures and employers associations and consisting of events such as raising the flag, a two-minute silence and the playing of the Last Post, and a national memorial to Covid victims at St Pauls Cathedral. Health-workers will view such efforts to perpetuate the myth of national unity in support of the NHS with deserved contempt, after already being subjected to weeks of the Clap for Carers while Johnson and his ilk allowed NHS and care staff to die and created the conditions where 300 attempted suicide during the pandemic.

Those looking to fight back against this tidal wave of hypocrisy are offered only Saturdays NHS Day of Action protests, organised by various campaign groups gravitating around the Labour Party. In these protests pseudo-left organisations such as the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party will make ritualistic calls on the trade unions to Fight the Tories!, and lefts such as ex-party leader Jeremy Corbyn will state their purely personal belief that Labour should also Defend the NHS.

The protest organisers have no independent perspective for leading an effective struggle on the issues they have identified: patient safety, pay justice and an end to privatisation. A statement by Health Campaigns Together (HCT), endorsed by Keep Our NHS Public, only asks the union bureaucracy to invite HCT and other health campaign groups to the next summit of the health unions, to help develop a coordinated strategy to unite the staff with the public and push back against the government.

Once the hot air evaporates, health workers will face the same open enemies and false friends as before. The health trade unions will continue to suppress and sabotage all opposition, as the British Medical Association did with the 2016 junior doctors strike, and the Royal College of Nursing did with the 2018 pay struggle by nurses.

The defence of the NHS cannot be left in the hands of the trade unions and their cheerleaders in the pseudo-left groups. The unions avowed aim to find common ground with the employers and government is a strategy for workers defeat.

The working class must act independently in defence of its own interests. For this, new organisations of struggle are required. Health and care workers should establish rank-and-file workplace committees, led by the most trusted workers and independent from the trade unions.

The Socialist Equality Party established the NHS FightBack campaign in 2012 to lead such an offensive. We urge healthcare workers to take up the following demands:

Halt the privatisation of the NHS Facilities allocated for private patients must be utilised to treat NHS patients. Privatised services must be taken back into the NHS.

A 15 percent pay increase for all health/care workers The loss in real wages must be restored and a substantial rise awarded to provide the low-paid with a liveable wage.

No victimisations No health worker should be victimised for calling attention to unsafe working conditions or refusing to work unless adequate protection is provided.

Stop all hospital cuts All patients must have access to suitable treatment regardless of their age, frailty, disability, or visa status.

Implementing this programme demands a massive injection of funds, paid for by taxing the super-rich and taking control of the major corporations, including Big Pharma, removing medical research and drug production from the constraints of private profit.

Sajid Javid visiting an NHS hospital this week (credit: Sajid Javid/Twitter)

NHS FightBack supports the call for an International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) and the fight for a socialist programme. All the resources of society must be placed in the hands of the working class and used for the benefit of all, not the enrichment of a few. Such a policy would see the NHS given the necessary billions of which it has been starved.

We urge all those who agree with this perspective to contact NHS FightBack and link up with our Facebook page.
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - Indiana State University will request faculty and staff to voluntarily submit proof of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Officials can upload a photo of their official vaccination card to the university website.

Those who chose to upload their information will no longer be required to fill out the daily health assessment.

Students can upload their vaccination cards into the system starting on August 1.
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Staff writer Kailee Kroll can be reached at (304)626-1439, by email at kkroll@theet.com or on Twitter at @kaileekroll.
'This is a different virus:' West Virginia health experts urging caution amid Delta variant

As strain spreads through U.S., Marsh and Amjad continue push for more to be vaccinated
David Adler, Ph.D., is a noted author who lectures nationally and internationally on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and presidential power. His scholarly writings have been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts by both Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress. Adlers column is supported in part through a grant from Wyoming Humanities funded by the Why it Matters: Civic and Electoral Participation initiative, administered by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Adler can be reached at david.adler@alturasinstitute.com.
Sources say French prosecutors are investigating four fashion retailers suspected of concealing "crimes against humanity" in China's Xinjiang region.

The probe is linked to accusations against China over its treatment of minority Muslim Uyghurs, including forced labour.

China denies all accusations of abuse in the region.

The source told Reuters that Uniqlo France, a unit of Japan's Fast Retailing, as well as Zara owner Inditex, France's SMCP and footwear brand Skechers were the subject of the investigation.

France has a Central Office to Fight Crimes against Humanity, Genocide and War Crimes.

Inditex said it rejected the claims.

SMCP said it would cooperate with the French authorities to prove the allegations false.

Fast Retailing said in a statement from Tokyo that it had not been contacted by French authorities, and that none of its production partners are located in region.

Skechers said it does not comment on pending litigation.

United Nations experts and rights groups estimate over a million people have been detained in recent years in a vast system of camps in China's western Xinjiang region.

Several Western brands including H&M, Burberry and Nike have been hit by consumer boycotts in China after raising concerns about the reports.
Getty Melioidosis

The Centers for Disease Control is investigating three mysterious cases of a bacterial disease that is typically found in tropical climates  yet the infected people have not left the United States.

In a health alert posted Wednesday, the CDC said that they are working with the health departments of Kansas, Texas and Minnesota to determine how three people  two adults and one child  contracted melioidosis disease, an infection caused by the Burkholderia pseudomallei bacteria.

The first patient to be diagnosed with the disease, in March, died 10 days after being hospitalized, though they had two preexisting conditions, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and liver scarring, that put them at high risk of serious illness. The other two patients were diagnosed in May, and one is still in the hospital while the other has been discharged and sent to a transitional care unit, the CDC said.

Cases of melioidosis are more likely to be found in Southeast Asia and northern Australia, yet none of the patients nor their families have recently traveled outside of the U.S. The health agencies are determining if the three cases are linked.

"These three cases are unusual because no recent travel outside the United States has been identified," the CDC said.

RELATED VIDEO: Jamie Lee Curtis' Fight to Help Children in Need: Nothing More 'Vulnerable' Than a Sick Kid

People can contract melioidosis through contaminated food or water, or from soil through an open cut. The symptoms include swelling or ulcers at the site of the infection, along with fever, cough, chest pain, disorientation, weight loss, stomach pain and seizures. And people with preexisting conditions such as diabetes, kidney disease, chronic lung disease or alcoholism are more likely to develop severe illnesses.

With these three cases coming from unknown sources, the CDC advised health care workers to consider melioidosis as a possible cause of illness if patients come in with related symptoms, even if they have not traveled outside of the U.S. They warned that because of the disease's wide variety of possible symptoms, "melioidosis can initially be mistaken for other diseases such as tuberculosis, and proper treatment may be delayed."
Mandy Moore/Instagram

Mandy Moore's first time traveling with her baby boy didn't go as planned.

On Thursday, the This Is Us star, 37, documented her experience of taking her son August "Gus" Harrison, 4 months, on his first flight along with husband Taylor Goldsmith.

"First flight for Mom and Dad in 16 months. Baby's first flight ever. But this guy aced his first trip from LA to DC. The best guy ever!!" Moore wrote alongside a selfie of the family of three on the plane.

While Moore shared that baby Gus "aced his first trip from LA to DC," things became complicated as the actress and her family tried to travel to Maine, where they had planned to spend the Fourth of July weekend.

The actress then revealed that their next flight was canceled, and it would be "hours until we get our bags," which contained the "base to our car seat (that was checked) to travel anywhere with my baby."

Moore added, "I have a 4 month old freaking out. This is insane."

Mandy Moore/Instagram

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RELATED: Mandy Moore Thanks Doula 'Friend for Life' Who Helped with Newborn Son Gus: 'It Takes a Village'

Mandy Moore/Instagram

On Friday, Moore shared a follow-up post explaining that their bags arrived for "no reason other than luck" and they eventually "managed to make it to a hotel and bathe, feed and pout sweet goose down by midnight."

"Grateful he was the definition of a trooper," the mom of one raved about her son.

Moore also posted an adorable video of baby Gus smiling in their hotel room the night before after the "hellish day."

"Covered in drool but still smiling like the best guy ever. He was our constant reminder to keep it cool because if we were then he would be too!" she wrote.

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As there were no available flights or trains to travel to Maine, Moore said her family of three would be returning home as she couldn't "put my poor guy in the car (in crazy weather) to drive 12 hours for 2 days."

Mandy Moore/Instagram

RELATED VIDEO: Mandy Moore Makes First Red Carpet Appearance at MTV Movie & TV Awards Since Giving Birth

Last month, Moore shared her appreciation for the baby expert who helped her and Goldsmith ease into their first few months of parenthood. The actress spotlighted a doula, named Brandi Jordan on Instagram, who worked with the couple at home for their first three months with Gus.

"They say it takes a village and boy are we lucky that @brandi_jordan_official is such an integral part of ours," Moore began the caption. "Knowing that I had to go back to work a month after welcoming Gus, our incredible midwife @heybales recommended Brandi's company @thecradlecompany and we were so grateful that she was available to step in the night we came home from the hospital to help our family navigate all aspects of post-partum life (she's worked with babies and families for over 20 years)."

Moore said Jordan helped them with everything from "teaching us to properly change a diaper and bathe our little guy (yah, @taylordawesgoldsmith and I didn't have much experience even holding a newborn pre- Gus) to understanding the ins and outs of nursing and pumping and everything in between (especially the ever elusive concept of SLEEP)."

"She also graciously answered every inane question I bugged her with as we had our nightly tea together once the baby went down," the star added of Jordan, who is a mom of three. "I too feel like I'm made a friend for life. "Brandi, we won't ever be able express how much you've meant to our family. And for folks looking for lactation consults, sleep training and anything involving supporting babies and families, I couldn't recommend @thecradlecompany enough!"
Jul. 1ROWLEY  Officers, staff and scores of others connected to the Rowley Police Department are mourning the death of Officer Stephen Levesque who took his own life in the early morning hours of June 28.

Levesque, who joined the department in February 2017 as a reserve officer and was hired full time in October 2019, was 26.

His death was announced publicly by Rowley Police Chief Scott Dumas a day later in an extraordinary message posted on the department's Facebook page detailing the need to shed light on suicide.

"Many suffer in plain sight, as Stephen did, leaving us all to live with the questions: 'What did I miss? What could I have done.' It is with the blessing of Stephen's family that we don't continue to suppress these conversations that need to happen, but rather speak openly. Suicide us a permanent solution to a temporary problem," Dumas wrote.

The chief's statement also touched on the importance of bringing those who suffer from mental illness out of the shadows and removing any stigmas attached to the disease.

"Stephen's death is tragic. Let it not be in vain," Dumas wrote.

In a separate interview, Dumas said he decided to release the statement to allow the conversation regarding suicide and mental illness to be in the forefront "where it needs to be, specifically for law enforcement but to all those that suffer."

According to Blue H.E.L.P., a non-profit organization formed in 2015 to collect law enforcement suicide data and support affected families, 69 officers have killed themselves in 2021 across the country. In 2020, 173 died, and in the year prior, 238 officers took their own lives.

But Rich Shailor from the Massachusetts Fraternal Order of Police said those grim statistics are likely much higher since many law enforcement officer suicides remain unreported.

Shailor went on to say that when a police officer commits suicide, the reason, in most cases, remains a secret forever.

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"A loss like that leaves so many unanswered questions," he said.

The National Fraternal Order of Police is the largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers in the world with more than 350,000 members. The Massachusetts branch, with its headquarters in Norton, consists of 24 different lodges and operates an officer wellness program. Its goal is to "get away from the old mentality that it's not OK to ask for help," Shailor said.

To ensure that, the program is completely confidential, he added.

"No one will ever know they got help," he said of officers who use the resource.

As for what may lead a police officer to commit suicide, Shailor said it was impossible to answer that definitively. For some, it's the accumulation of a career's worth of traumatizing calls  or it could be just one event that pushes an officer, already struggling with out-of-work stress, to take their own life.

"You're not going to know," Shailor said.

Asked how he and his officers were coping three days after Levesque's death, Dumas said department-wide debriefing sessions, which will continue for several days, have helped.

"We're dealing with it," Dumas said, adding that Levesque's death has prompted him to look even deeper into how the job affects his officers.

Since Dumas posted word of the young officer's death on Facebook just two days ago, he said it has garnered half a million views and hundreds of comments from across the country. It also has prompted immediate discussions on law enforcement suicide.

"I'm very grateful for the support," Dumas said.

Nicole Reilly, a former Rowley resident and friend of Stephen Levesque, said she was completely shocked by the news.

"Devastated, absolutely devastated," Reilly said.

She called Levesque one of the sweetest people she knew and said his death marked a great loss for the community.

"I just wish I could have done something to help," Reilly said.

READER BOX FOR PAGE 1:

The Samaritans is an organization with a goal of preventing suicide. If you need help, call or text them any time at 877-870-4673 (HOPE)
A summer worker with Trees Forever, an Iowa nonprofit, distributes water for recent transplants in Des Moines on June 16, 2021. (Rachel Mummey/The New York Times)

DES MOINES, Iowa  The trees were supposed to stay.

It did not matter that the owners of the squat building alongside were planning to redevelop the property. The four eastern red cedars stood on city land, where they had grown for the better part of a century.

Theres no way these trees are coming down, Shane McQuillan, who manages the citys trees, recalled thinking. The default position for us is, you dont take out big trees to put in small trees.

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Here is why: At a time when climate change is making heat waves more frequent and more severe, trees are stationary superheroes. Research shows that heat already kills more people in the United States than hurricanes, tornadoes and other weather-events, perhaps contributing to 12,000 deaths per year. Extreme heat this week in the Pacific Northwest and Canada has killed hundreds.

Trees can lower air temperature in city neighborhoods 10 lifesaving degrees, scientists have found. They also reduce electricity demand for air conditioning, not only sparing money and emissions, but helping avoid potentially catastrophic power failures during heat waves.

Trees are, quite simply, the most effective strategy, technology, we have to guard against heat in cities, said Brian Stone Jr., a professor of environmental planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

So, in Des Moines, McQuillan worked with the property owners and city planners to find a way to redevelop while keeping the trees.

But one day several months later, he got word that a crew was taking them down.

McQuillan raced to the site, just a couple blocks from his office. One tree had already been cut to a stump, and another was almost down. McQuillan halted the work and fought to stay calm. At first he assumed someone had taken matters into their own hands. But after investigating, he came to believe it was simply a mistake; the property had been leased for a restaurant and the tenants seemed sincerely unaware of the agreement.

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Theres a defeated feeling, McQuillan said.

They were two losses in an enormous struggle. Versions of this story are playing out in cities across the country, including Boston; Atlanta; Cleveland; Chicago; Houston; Spokane, Washington; and Los Angeles, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Despite long-standing and ongoing efforts across the country to plant trees, communities in the United States are not adding to their total number or even maintaining it. Research shows that American cities and towns lose the canopy of 36 million trees every year.

A Challenge to Get Trees to Thrive in the City

Considering the cast of characters in Des Moines, its urban forest should be thriving. The longtime mayor is an environmentalist. The director of public works hails trees as the only infrastructure that add value over time. A nonprofit group plants and tends the next generation of trees while giving green jobs and training to local teenagers.

In recent years, though, the larvae of an iridescent green beetle that arrived from across the ocean, the emerald ash borer, have claimed 6,000 of the citys 8,000 public ash trees. A storm last year took out about 500 more of all kinds. Another big factor is the everyday losses: The tree felled to repair a water line underneath. The homeowner who removed a tree to build an extension or get more sun on the lawn. Countless new developments where trees were in the way. These are often mature trees whose canopy will take decades to replace.

Then, there are the bare-branched victims whose cause of death can only be guessed at: Not enough water? The extra-cold winter combined with all that street salt?

Its a challenge to get trees to thrive in the city, said Phillip Rodbell, who leads a Forest Service team studying the social, economic and ecological impact of urban trees.

At the same time, American cities are facing a heat crisis: The largest are warming at twice the rate of the planet as a whole.

Its Hard for Us to Think of Trees as Actual Infrastructure

On an afternoon that felt too sweltering for June, a 14-year-old named Kiara Wright bent over a young honey locust along a busy road in Des Moines, carefully splashing water from two 5-gallon buckets into the dry soil. The city was in drought, and abundant water is critical to trees for at least two years after the shock of transplanting.

Earlier in the spring Kiara had helped plant that seasons 500 trees, becoming fond enough of them to name a few: Sparkles, Linden, Jose. Now she was watering, mulching and pulling weeds for $10 an hour. Over the course of the summer, her small team would also learn about financial literacy and shadow people in various green jobs.

We grow the trees and we grow the teens, said Kacie Ballard, who coordinates the program for Trees Forever, a nonprofit group that is now planting almost all of the citys street trees. Its cheesy but its true.

Along with the environmental benefits of trees come economic opportunities.

This is a field where the employers are begging, said Jad Daley, president and chief executive of American Forests, a nonprofit group. There is definitely a job waiting.

Planting in Des Moines will resume in the fall, focusing on formerly redlined communities most in need of trees. Around the country, racist policies have left these neighborhoods especially bare and hot.

Leslie Berckes, director of programs at Trees Forever, hopes to get 1,000 trees in the ground by the end of the year, surpassing an agreement with the city. But the number still feels bittersweet. Four times that many are needed, on public and private land, to reach a state goal of increasing canopy 3% by 2050. Instead, she fears their efforts are not enough to stay even.

We could be keeping pace if we wanted to, Berckes said. We need more money. I know its so boring to say.

By all accounts the mayor, Frank Cownie, is trying. Des Moines has increased its $200,000 tree planting budget to $300,000 next year and $450,000 the following, with a goal of reaching $1 million. Its forestry department, with a budget of $2 million, employs a team of 13 arborists, up from 11 a couple years ago, who prune the citys trees, extending their lives.

But its a tricky balancing act.

Youll hear, Why are you doing this, you should be creating homes for the houseless, Cownie said. Which we are.

The crux of the problem, according to scientists and environmental planners, is that Americans, from everyday citizens to government officials, are often not fully aware of the benefits that trees provide.

In addition to reducing heat, trees filter out air pollution, suck up storm water, store carbon, nurture wildlife and even improve peoples mental and physical health.

Its hard for us to think of trees as actual infrastructure rather than an amenity, and because of that, we dont allocate sufficient funds, said Stone of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If we think about it as actual infrastructure on par with investing in roads and sewers and everything else, those costs will become more acceptable to us.

Trading One Risk for Another

A trees shade, that sweet relief from solar radiation, is only part of its cooling power. Trees also evaporate water, pulling it from the ground and releasing it into the air through their leaves. Thats why walking through a forest, or just sitting in a playground surrounded by several large trees, feels more refreshing than the shade of a lone tree.

Carefully positioned trees can reduce a homes energy costs by 25%, according to the Department of Energy. Nationwide, urban trees offer an estimated $18.3 billion in air pollution removal, carbon sequestration, lowered energy use in buildings and reduced emissions from power plants.

Still, across the country many people see trees as a nuisance or liability. They drop nuts, seeds and leaves. They buckle sidewalks. They are accused of destroying pipes  wrongly, according to scientists, who say that pipes crack from age, which only then leads nearby trees to send roots toward the leaking water. Some towns and cities avoid the perceived hassle altogether by not planting on the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the street.

Occasionally, their limbs break or they blow over, posing real danger. With climate change increasing the intensity of storms, David Nowak, a senior scientist with the Forest Service who studies urban trees, acknowledges the risk. Trees close to houses need to be especially well monitored for weakness. But he points out that trees also block wind, reducing the force of storms.

Youre trading one risk for another, Nowak said. Branches falling, and having to clean up branches, versus having to clean up broken rooftops.

One major challenge is persuading property owners, who own a large share of the land in cities and towns, to plant and maintain trees in their yards. It is important to choose the species carefully. Large shade trees offer more cooling and carbon storage than small ornamentals. For wildlife, oaks are usually the best bet, according to Doug Tallamy, a professor of entomology at the University of Delaware. They feed more than 900 species of caterpillars, which, in turn, feed birds, whose populations have plummeted.

Incentives can help, but tight budgets often keep them modest. In Louisville, Kentucky, which threw itself into planting more trees after it was found to be the fastest-warming large city in the country, residents can get a $30 treebate, up to three per household, for planting certain shade trees.

The director of public works in Des Moines, Jonathan Gano, came up with an idea to give away tiny trees, seedlings that look like mere sticks with roots. Once a year, residents can pick up five each.

Theyre tiny, yes, Gano said. Theyre also practically free, costing the city $1 per seedling.

You could have 99% mortality and still be in the money 20 years from now on canopy, Gano said. I planted a bunch on my property and about 50% of them have survived. One of thems 11 feet tall now.

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The day that half of America has been eagerly awaiting has arrived. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office has criminally indicted Donald Trumps alter ego, the Trump Organization, on wide-ranging tax fraud charges. The organizations chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, was also indicted.

Despite the corruption, lying and attacks on American democracy that characterized the Trump presidency, nothing has been more infuriating than watching Trump seemingly get away with it all. Not even a historic double impeachment appeared to bring any accountability that would stick.

But the legal armor that protected Trump when he was a sitting president is gone, and Thursday's indictment is the first clear sign that Trump could be held responsible for some of his misdeeds.

As I combed through the online indictment articles, I passed pictures of a devastated condo building in Surfside, Florida. Half the building was in rubble, making the half that was still standing worthless. It made me think of Trump. He might not have been personally indicted, but if the success of the Trump Organization is ripped from its namesake, all that will be left of the Donald is bravado and hairspray.

A fortune from cheating, not savvy

Trumps original groundswell of political support came largely from his reputation as a business whiz who promised to Make America Great Again by recreating his own financial success on a bigger scale for millions of lower- and middle-income Americans who were working hard but struggling to survive.

Indictment of the Trump Organization by a grand jury of ordinary citizens screams that Trumps financial success came not from his business savvy but from cheating. And while the indictment itself might not be a condemnation of the whole of Trumps company, headlines like this are: Donald Trump's family business indicted on criminal charges. The indictment is unlikely to result in Trump losing support with the cultish part of his base, but it could shake loose some who were holding on by the worn threads of their MAGA caps.

Story continues

More important than its effect on his supporters, indictment of the Trump Organization signals that Trump may be in personal jeopardy. The Trump Organization attorney, Ron Fischetti, has acknowledged that his conversations with prosecutors make clear that Thursday's indictment was not the last and that Trump is not out of the woods yet.

Trump has been implicated in a 2016 hush money fraud scheme designed to silence two women with whom he is alleged to have had affairs. Allegations of additional tax and loan fraud have also been reported.

Trump Tower housing the Trump Organization in New York City on June 30, 2021.

Its impossible to know whether the Manhattan DA believes he has sufficient evidence to indict these activities under New York law. But, it is widely believed that Weisselberg holds the map to the grounds on which Trumps long list of criminal allegations are buried. If Weisselberg tells what he knows, he could bring Trump down.

So far, Weisselberg has resisted efforts to persuade him to cooperate. But the prospect of imprisonment for a 73-year old man has a way of changing things  especially when the beneficiary of his dirty work continues to flaunt a life of luxury.

Barbara McQuade: Two new reasons Trump should worry about the New York legal investigations. A lot.

Because an indictment triggers discovery obligations on the DAs part, Weisselberg will now have access to virtually all the evidence against him. I cannot count the number of times a defendant initially told me to shove my cooperation offer, yet ended up cooperating after seeing everything I was going to show to the jury that would decide his fate.

Making matters worse for Weisselberg, his former daughter-in-law has publicly acknowledged that she has provided prosecutors with a dump of documents and interviews that implicate him in illegal activities on behalf of the Trump Organization. As the months pass, and the clock ticks down to a trial at which Weisselberg knows his moral and legal failures will be on international public display, it will be increasingly difficult for him to keep Trumps crimes a secret.

Alone, isolated, maybe cooperative

The DAs decision to charge only Weisselberg and the Trump Organization in the first indictment was a good strategy, despite likely having evidence that implicated other members of the organization. Weisselberg has no one in the same stew to commiserate with  hes alone and isolated. Those are two ingredients that often lead to cooperation.

Remember, Trumps personal attorney, Michael Cohen, pledged to take a bullet for Trump  until federal authorities closed in on him. Cohens blood-brother promise ended in congressional testimony and a guilty plea that detailed decades of Trump crimes, some of which are contained in Thursday's indictment.

If Trump were smart, he would say nothing about the substance of the indictment. But Trump being Trump, he will not be able to keep his mouth shut, and that has left many of us anticipating a delicious disaster.

President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President-elect Mike Pence and Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of The Trump Organization, on Jan. 11, 2017, in New York.

If Trump defends Weisselbergs off the books compensation, he will be implicating himself in the tax fraud. But if Trump says any unreported compensation took place without his knowledge or approval, he will be throwing Weisselberg under the proverbial bus at the same time his own freedom requires the good graces of Weisselbergs silence. Alexa, what is another word for delicious?

What happens next? Expect lots of posturing from Weisselbergs attorneys and Trump surrogates, who will argue that failure to report work perks is rarely charged as a criminal violation and that the charges are part of a political witch hunt. Expect the DA to remain relatively silent, so as not to run afoul of the code of ethics that prevents prosecutors from tainting the jury pool. The DA should speak through court appearances and filings, not TV interviews or Twitter threads.

Tax fraud charges: The pressure's on Allen Weisselberg to flip on Donald Trump

Then, after Weisselbergs attorneys have digested the reams of evidence against their client, expect a series of clandestine meetings in which the prosecutors and Weisselbergs counsel negotiate a cooperation deal.

It is certainly possible that Weisselberg will refuse to cooperate, but the odds are that he will eventually come to the table. Though they did not hold up their end of the bargain by cooperating truthfully, even former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn struck cooperation deals.

The Manhattan District Attorney did what no one else, including Congress, could do  he got Trumps financial records and used them to hold Trumps business accountable. And the DA managed to accomplish this despite a Trump appeal to the Supreme Court, where Trump stacked the deck by appointing one-third of the justices.

Trumps strategic battle with the DA has just begun, and so far the DA has made all the right moves. It's time for Trump to get nervous. Finally.

Michael J. Stern, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, was a federal prosecutor for 25 years in Detroit and Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelJStern1

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: Fraud charges should unnerve Donald Trump. Accountability is coming.
Yakima reached a high of 109 on Monday, which tied a record for the month and set a record for the day.
Yankton, SD (57078)

Today

Mostly sunny early with isolated thunderstorms developing this afternoon. High 98F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 70F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.
Yankton, SD (57078)

Today

Mostly sunny skies this morning. Scattered showers and thunderstorms developing during the afternoon. High 98F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Considerable clouds this evening. Some decrease in clouds late. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 70F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.
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Espresso is the most popular coffee in Hungary; it is mainly consumed in the morning, while it is primarily latte in the afternoon, writes profitline.hu.

In a joint survey by Costa Coffee and GKI Digital, more than 2,700 people were asked about their daily habits, about 2,000 of whom consider themselves regular coffee drinkers.



One in two respondents (53%) regularly drinks espresso, with the next most popular types of coffee being latte (31%) and cappuccino (30%).



Men mostly drink the simplest (although many also say the tastiest) coffee, espresso: 64% said they consume it regularly, while most women prefer some form of milk-based coffee.



According to the research, there are also differences in the age group.



In the 18-29 age group, milk drinks are the most popular, with cappuccino (47%) and caffe latte (46%) consumed at a much higher rate than the overall average of 30-31%.
The fresh newsletter for the International Community in Hungary - described by readers as a "Great read each week" - is now available for your interest and use via the link below.

You can see the new edition of the Xpat E-Magazine here:

xpatloop.com/newsletters/2021/2-july.html



You're in good company here, together with thousands of expats and high-level locals
The affidavit filed with the court says the driver activated his left turn signal but instead turned right (or northbound) onto Road B without coming to a complete stop at the stop sign at the off-ramp. After turning north, the vehicle came to a sudden stop on the shoulder of the highway. After briefly stopping, the vehicle went one mile north where it stopped again and a heavy set man with dreadlocks exited the vehicle from the front passenger door. The deputy says in the affidavit that he stopped and drew his service weapon and pointed it at the man who exited, giving him loud verbal commands to show his hands. The deputy says the man did not comply. At that point, the vehicle continued north on Road B at speeds reaching in excess of 115 miles per hour. The deputy left the man who had exited and continued pursuing the vehicle. There was a train blocking the road, so the vehicle turned into a private property.
They said as they tried to place him in the back of a cruiser, Schultz attempted to kick the passenger side mirror but missed. When inside the cruiser, he began attempting to kick out the window, they allege. They say during the struggle, the patrol car door was dented.

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The affidavit says Schultz was taken out of the cruiser and while they were applying leg restraints on him, Schultz went limp and appeared to lose consciousness. The deputies carefully placed Schultz on the ground on his side and monitored his breathing while calling for Henderson Rescue to transport him to the hospital for unknown injuries.

They say that while he was in the hospital, Schultz again became combative and threatened officers lives and their families lives.

He was eventually transported to the York County Jail, where he remains in custody.

This week, Schultz pleaded not guilty to terroristic threats, resisting arrest, driving under revocation, criminal mischief and second offense driving under the influence.

A jury trial was set for Oct. 26.

Schultzs attorney, York County Public Defender David Michel asked for a reduction in his clients bond, from $50,000, 10% to $10,000, 10%.
The city of North Miami Beach ordered the evacuation of a condominium building Friday after a review found unsafe conditions.

The city said in a news release that an audit prompted by the deadly collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside found the 156-unit Crestview Towers structurally and electrically unsafe.

In an abundance of caution, the City ordered the building closed immediately and the residents evacuated for their protection, while a full structural assessment is conducted and next steps are determined, City Manager Arthur H. Sorey III said in the news release.

The mayor of Miami-Dade County had suggested an audit of buildings 40 and older to make sure they are in compliance with the local recertification process after the condo building collapse last week that killed at least 22 people and left more than 120 still missing.

After reviewing files, the city Building and Zoning Department sent a notification that the Crestview building was not in compliance. On Friday, the building manager submitted a recertification report in which an engineer hired by the condo association board found the property unsafe. The city then ordered all residents to evacuate immediately.
New Delhi: Irrfan Khan's son Babil Khan recently made an exciting announcement on his Instagram that will surely make your day if you're a big Irrfan Khan fan! The star kid shared a poster of his father's unreleased film 'Dubai Return' and announced that the movie will release on YouTube on Saturday (July 3). This surprising statement sent the fans into a tizzy as they geared up to watch the late actor's unseen film. In the film, Irrfan plays the role of a gangster named Aftaab Angrez.

In the vibrant poster of the film, Irrfan is seen with long locks, donning a stylish white cowboy hat with yellow sunglasses. Babil captioned the picture, saying, "Releasing tomorrow on YouTube!".

Check out the poster and the announcement:

The 2005 film, directed by Aditya Battacharya, was screened at IFFI (International Film Festival of India), however, it never released in theatres. Along with Irrfan Khan, Vijay Maurya, Razak Khan also starred in the film.

Earlier, Irrfan's son Babil had announced that he had decided to drop out of the University of Westminster to 'give his all' to his budding acting career. Last week, he had taken to his Instagram to bid goodbye to his friends in college.

He is now ready to follow in his fathers footsteps and is going to pursue a career in acting. He has bagged his first movie with Anushka Sharmas production house Clean Slate Filmz and will be seen in Tripti Dimri starrer Netflix film Qala. He is also working on a project with director Shoojit Sircar and producer Ronnie Lahiri.

Irrfan Khan died last year on April 29 after having a colon infection. The actor was just 53 years old. He was first diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer in 2018 for which he had undergone treatment and even chemotherapy. However, later he developed an infection and succumbed to death. His untimely demise has created a huge vacuum in the Hindi film industry.
NEW DELHI: Aam Aadmi Partys chief spokesperson Saurabh Bhardwaj issued a statement on Friday. He informed that BJPs MCD has given a shocker on Doctors Day. Doctors will now have to pay an additional fee of Rs 24,000 annually for the removal of the garbage. Each doctors clinic will now have to pay Rs 30,000 annually to the MCD for garbage removal, an additional fee of Rs 24,000 has been introduced alongside the previous annual fee of Rs 6,000. After looting traders with manifold taxes and license fees, Doctors are on the MCDs target. BJPs MCD has also introduced a Professional Tax to be levied on professionals like CAs, Architects, Doctors, etc. He further said that it is ridiculous and condemnable that the MCD has stooped down to loot people with irrational taxes and fees. AAP demands rollback of MCDs irrational fees and taxes. A signature campaign was started by AAP yesterday to raise a voice against MCDs condemnable harassment of traders.

AAP Chief Spokesperson and MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj said, Like weve told that BJP is counting its last days in the MCD, that they know that Delhis people will not elect BJP again in the MCD. Delhi Municipal Corporation has started to loot people. Be it property tax, that has been increased. Be it trade license, that has been increased manifolds. Every type of tax and license fee is being increased by the MCD.

He said, Today, Ill tell you about a new tax that has been introduced. Under the name of the Solid Waste Management Rules 2016, this tax has been introduced. A nasty present has been given to our doctors on the occasion of Doctors Day. Now our doctors will have to pay a sum of Rs. 24,000 annually to the MCD for the removal of their garbage. Now, you must be wondering what is the waste generated in a doctors clinical? Other than the mere dust on the floor, a very crucial waste that is generated is the bio-medical waste. However, it is surprising that the doctors are already made to pay Rs 500 per month to get this bio-medical waste removed. Moreover, there are two agencies in Delhi that pick up this bio-medical waste and process it in the right manner.

AAP Chief Spokesperson Saurabh Bhardwaj said, Rs 500 per month implies that the doctors were already paying Rs 6,000 annually. And now, theyll have to pay an additional sum of Rs 24,000. So from now onwards, each doctor will pay Rs 30,000 just because they have to get their waste picked up. I think this is very ridiculous and condemnable that the MCD has stooped down to loot people. A few days back I addressed another press conference wherein I informed that MCD has also introduced a new tax called Professional Tax. Under this tax, every professional, be it a Chartered Accountant, a doctor, an engineer, or an architect will have to pay a professional tax. So, continuously, they are not leaving behind any section. MCD is harassing people and using the exercise of arm twisting.

Saurabh Bhardwaj said, We seriously condemn these actions. Aam Aadmi Party started a campaign yesterday, wherein AAPs councilors and workers are visiting all the markets in Delhi and undertaking a signature campaign by collecting the signatures of traders. The campaign is being conducted because all these taxes that have been rolled out by the MCD have increased the burden on the traders shoulders and the MCD must take them back.

He said, This tax, that I just told you about, the increase of fee of Rs 2,000 monthly i.e., Rs 24,000 annually under the name of Waste Management has been increased only by the East MCD as of now. However, this is how it works. Firstly, it is initiated by one Municipal Corporation and then others follow it quietly.
New Delhi: Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal reviewed the progress of the ambitious Health Information Management System (HIMS) on Thursday. He directed the officials to ensure the implementation of the HIMS project within the stipulated deadline.

Kejriwal said that there have been some significant delays due to the pandemic and the project is expected to be fully implemented by March 2022. Along with the HIMS project, Health Helpline will also be started and special surveys will be conducted for issuing of e-health cards.

Nodal Minister for Corona Manish Sisodia and Health Minister Satyendar Jain were also present in the meeting.

CM Kejriwal tweeted, "Reviewed the progress of Health Information Management System (HIMS). We are creating the most modern health information system in Delhi. Due to Corona, there are some delays. Hopefully, it should start by March."

Reviewed the progress of Health Information Management System (HIMS). We are creating the most modern health information system in Delhi. Due to Corona, there are some delays. Hopefully, it should start by March pic.twitter.com/V85aw33FXE  Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) July 1, 2021

Under one of the most ambitious health projects of the Delhi government, health cards will be issued in the names of all the residents of Delhi, for which special surveys will be conducted by the government. This will ensure the availability of the benefits of the government healthcare services to every resident of Delhi. Post the issuing, the e-health card will be integrated with the Health Information Management System. The project will also see the initiation of the Health Helpline system in Delhi.

The system seeks to target the healthcare delivery process. All the patient care services, hospital administration, budgeting and planning, supply chain management, and backend services and processes will be brought under the system. As far as the deployment model is concerned, the entire system will be on the cloud and digitized. This will enable the citizens to avail themselves of information on a single platform, which will help them in emergency cases. With the help of their registered card number entered in the system, the hospitals will be able to access all of the patients' health-related information and past registry.

The system is also supposed to include a 24x7 call center, or Health Helpline, to help patients with health-related information, seeking consultation, and other assistance. The centralized call center will provide two levels of help  first where an operator will receive peoples calls and messages and provide them with requisite information and second where doctors and experts will provide appointments based on the problem or immediately provide solutions for emergency cases.

With this, Delhi will become the only state to have a cloud-based health management system. This facility will also be extended to private hospitals in the future.

Live TV
New Delhi: Model-actress Heena Panchal, who was seen in the reality show Bigg Boss Marathi has worked in a few regional projects and was also a contestant in Paras Chhabra-Shehnaaz Gill's 'Mujhse Shaadi Karoge. The actress was reportedly arrested on Sunday, June 27 in Igatpuri after Nashik police busted a rave party.

Times of India quoted Superintendent of Police Nashik Rural Police, Sachin Patil as saying, Heena along with others were arrested on Sunday will be produced in court today.

He added, "There was no other big star the others were smaller artistes."

Heena Panchal is quite an avid social media user and is also famous for her uncanny resemblance to Malaika Arora. Take a look at her photos:

Nashik Rural Police arrested 22 people, including 4 women working in Bollywood film industry during a raid on a rave party at a resort in Igatpuri early Sunday morning. Among them is an Iranian woman. Police recovered cocaine & other drugs from there. Probe on: SP Sachin Patil pic.twitter.com/1WIVJAQ1Xk  ANI (@ANI) June 27, 2021

Patil told ANI, "22 persons including 12 women were arrested and several types of drugs were seized from their possession after the police busted an alleged rave party at a private bungalow in Igatpuri hill station of Nashik District of Maharashtra. All have been taken into custody and further investigation is on, during the initial investigation, it has been found that out of 12 women, 5-6 women were actresses working in Bollywood and South Indian films."
New Delhi: Former Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala, who was serving a 10-year prison term in a teacher recruitment scam case, was released from the Tihar Jail on Friday after completing due formalities.

The 86-year-old Chautala, who was already out on parole, reached Tihar on Friday to complete formalities after which he was released from jail, the officials said.

Director General (Delhi Prisons), Sandeep Goel, said, "After necessary formalities, he (Chautala) has been released". He was welcomed by his supporters after his release from jail.

Former chief minister of Haryana, Om Prakash Chautala released from Delhi's Tihar Jail, welcomed by his supporters at the Delhi-Gurugram border pic.twitter.com/EQxuaP4pyt  ANI (@ANI) July 2, 2021

Last month, the Delhi government had passed an order granting a six-month special remission to those who have served nine-and-half years of their 10-year prison sentence to decongest jails in view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to officials, since Chautala has already served nine years and nine months of his sentence, he was eligible to get out of prison.

OP Chautala was jailed in 2013 in connection with the teacher recruitment scam case. He was on emergency parole since March 26, 2020, due to the COVID pandemic and was scheduled to surrender on February 21, 2021.

However, his parole had been extended by the high court, a senior jail official had said earlier. As on February 21, he had two months and 27 days of jail time left which has been counted as remitted.

OP Chautala, his son Ajay Chautala, and 53 others, including IAS officer Sanjiv Kumar, were convicted and sentenced in the case of illegal recruitment of 3,206 junior basic teachers in 2000.

They all were sentenced to varying jail terms in the case by a special CBI court in January 2013.

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Guwahati: Assam legislator Akhil Gogoi has been released after nearly 19 months in captivity as a special NIA court cleared him of all charges under UAPA for his alleged role in the violent anti-CAA stir in the state in December 2019.

Gogoi, an Independent MLA from Sivasagar constituency, walked out of the Gauhati Medical College and Hospital (GMCH) on Thursday, where he was being treated for various ailments, after the special NIA court sent the release order to the Guwahati Central Jail.

The Raijor Dal chief and his associates were accused in two cases under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for their alleged role in violent protests in Assam against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in 2019.

"Truth has finally prevailed, though no efforts were spared to keep me behind the bars," he told reporters after his release. Describing the judgement as "historic and exemplary", Gogoi said that Special NIA Judge Pranjal Das has established the independence of the judiciary.

"Earlier, the law was used to keep me behind the bars but the NIA judge has set an example by giving such an independent verdict and he has brought back people's faith in the judiciary and the judicial system.

"The verdict delivered by him will set a precedence and help those who are still jailed, for protesting against the CAA or opposing the government on various issues, in coming out of prison," Gogoi said.

The Raijor Dal chief also visited the residence of the "first CAA martyr" Sam Stafford and offered his family a "small amount of money".

"I took a loan from my wife to give his family a small amount of money. I pledge to take care of their legal fight in the case regarding Sam's death and also in ensuring that his ailing mother gets proper medical treatment," Gogoi said outside their Hatigaon residence in Guwahati.

Gogoi said that he will also visit the homes of the other "four persons who were martyred during the CAA protests". The legislator said that he will forever remain grateful to all those who donated whatever amount they could for meeting the legal costs and to get him elected as an MLA from jail.

"I had no money, was labelled a terrorist, an anti-national by the government but people donated of free-will and the people of Sivasagar elected me as their representative. I will forever remain grateful to them for this," he said.

He will leave for his constituency on Friday morning. The NIA was investigating two cases, which were initially registered at Chabua and Chandmari police stations, related to the alleged role of Gogoi and his associates in the violent protests.

Gogoi and three of his associates were cleared of all charges in the second case during the day, while he and two other associates were cleared of charges in the first case on June 22 by the NIA court.

NIA Special Judge Pranjal Das dismissed the charges brought against Gogoi and his three associates Dhairjya Konwar, Manas Konwar and Bitu Sonowal in connection with the Chandmari case in which they were accused of having Maoist links.

Gogoi has been cleared of the UAPA cases, while he has already received bail in the other cases filed under various sections of the Indian Penal Code.

There were 13 cases filed against him in connection with the CAA protests. The investigating agency had on June 29 presented a "protected witness", in the Chandmari case and filed an additional chargesheet against Gogoi in the special NIA court.

Live TV
New Delhi: Estonia's envoy Katrin Kivi said, "any vaccine is better than no vaccine" even as the European Union has come with new certificates for travel inside the block. While the block uses the European Medicines Agency's (EMA) list that has four vaccines listed, each member country is free to put any vaccine on the national list.

Speaking to WION, envoy Katrin Kivi said, "India has been giving so many vaccines to Indians and to Covax. It would be absolutely natural that Covishield will get recognition by WHO and EMA". Estonia is the first country in Europe that has okayed India made Covishield and Covaxin on its national travel list. That means, any Indian vaccinated with these two vaccines will be allowed in the country subjected to other conditions in the Schengen rules.

WION: India-made vaccines Covishield and Covaxin have been approved by your country for COVID-19 vaccine certificates. Can you give us the details?

Katrin Kivi: Thank you for inviting me, namaste. Indeed, the Estonia govt decided on June 21 to acknowledge the vaccine certificates of countries like India. If travellers from these countries are able to present on the border COVID vaccination certificate which has been approved officially by their governments and vaccines which are administered in this country. India is vaccinating Indians with Covishield and Covaxin, the citizens can get certificates concerning both vaccines. The vaccine certificate only helps people to escape the mandatory quarantine at the border, it is not like a new sort of visa and it will not open automatically issuing or resuming 3rd country person Schengen visas as of tourist. It is related with those Indian citizens already have a valid visa, who may be even are Estonian temporary or permanent resident. They can travel easily if they can present at the border the certificate. Other issue is EU green pass, it was meant to ease travel inside and in between EU member states. Like in India you have different rules and restrictions between various states and territories, EU member states also had issued restrictions and travel was not so easy. Now member states have decided to take these vaccines that are acknowledged by European medicine agencies into EU green pass, but it is not way a precondition or required by Indian citizens on the border. This is just for all EU members vaccinated with four vaccines. Until now we have only Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and J&J on the green pass. In order for India to get Covishield on the green pass approved vaccines, the Indian govt should request a European medicines agency to add Covishield into this list, to do that particular file should be handed over. I really encourage India to do it, because India has been giving so many vaccines to Indians and to Covax. It would be absolutely natural that Covishield will get recognition by WHO and EMA.

WION: What was the thought process in allowing all nationally recognised vaccines?

Katrin Kivi: This is mainly aimed to protect the help of Estonians, and other citizens who are travelling to Estonia because it is very sure any vaccine is better than not being vaccinated. Estonian govt has just decided to acknowledge it and even we have a lot of border movement with Russia and they have Sputnik which is administered. If Russians are travelling to Estonia, and they have a valid reason, relatives living in Estonia, they can present this certificate and escape the quarantine. Otherwise, they must be quarantined or isolated or not have any contact. If they are fully vaccinated and have negative PCR tests, why should they be isolated, that was the reason.

WION: What do you have to say about the EU Green pass. The pass could have used WHO list, instead of EMA list?

Katrin Kivi: This decision has been made together conjointly with all EU member states especially Schengen states. According to our commonly agreed rules, the European medicines agency or EMA has a say here, which vaccines are included in the green pass. This agency is not a political agency, it is a purely medical scientific agency and it works for the benefit of all people who are travelling inside the European Union. If Indian residents in Estonia would be vaccinated , they could also get this green pass. In Estonia, we are vaccinating only with four vaccines. The main goal was to ease travel against the member states, so it not against the 3rd country and not required or a pre requisite or a must on the border.

WION: Are Indians allowed in Estonia?

Katrin Kivi: It is of course still a tricky question and fully related to the situation of pandemic. It means Indians who already have a valid Schengen visa or who are Estonian residents, who need to go to Estonia for work or meet relatives or health issues of close people, they are allowed to enter Estonia. As for new visas, Estonia embassy consular section has not yet resumed issuing C visas, visas for touristic or non-essential travel. This may need some time, it may happen but we look at Covid numbers and stick to the existing Schengen rules, under which tourism is not open.

WION: What kind of cooperation between India and Estonia? Both countries are non-permanent members of the UNSC, in fact, Estonia was the president just last month.

Katrin Kivi: You mention the good cooperation in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), indeed, our second chairmanship just finished and one of the two most important debates in June, one on Afghanistan in which EAM Jaishankar took the floor, and the second was just two days ago on cybersecurity. These topics, Estonia and India understand, are crucial in keeping the world safe and be virtual or physical space --we need rules and good state behaviour inside cyber space. Estonian and Indian relations in the current year will be marked by few other happy moments, namely, India is preparing to open its embassy in our capital. We welcome the Indian minister of external affairs. This year we also celebrate the 30 years of establishing diplomatic relations and last but not least we are waiting to unveil the statue of Mahatma Gandhi and our 2 nations have a link and understanding that the struggle, the battle for the restoration of Independence should be non-violent and fully peaceful.

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New Delhi: Antibiotic sales soared during the first COVID-19 wave in India last year, according to a study which suggests that the drugs were used to treat mild and moderate cases of the viral disease.

The researchers at Washington University in the US estimated that COVID-19 likely contributed to 216.4 million excess doses of antibiotics and 38 million more doses of azithromycin in adults from June 2020 through September 2020, a period of peak COVID-19 activity in India, news agency PTI reported.

Such misuse of drugs is considered inappropriate because antibiotics are only effective against bacterial infections, not viral infections such as COVID-19, the researchers said.

Overuse of antibiotics increases the risk for drug-resistant infections, they said.

"Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to global public health," said the study's senior author, Sumanth Gandra, an associate hospital epidemiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in the US.

"Overuse of antibiotics lessens their ability to effectively treat minor injuries and common infections such as pneumonia, which means that these conditions can become serious and deadly," Gandra said.

The study, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, analysed monthly sales of all antibiotics in India's private health sector from January 2018 through December 2020.

The data came from an Indian branch of IQVIA, a U.S.-based health information technology company.

The study, conducted in collaboration with McGill University in Canada, examined the total sales volume of all antibiotics as well as the individual sales for azithromycin, a vital drug for treating typhoid fever, non-typhoidal Salmonella and traveller's diarrhoea.

Azithromycin was studied because some countries experienced a spike in its sales early in the pandemic after observational studies suggested the antibiotic could help treat COVID-19.

However, such a claim was disputed by subsequent studies.

The researchers determined that a total of 16.29 billion doses of antibiotics were sold in India in 2020, which is slightly less than the amounts sold in 2018 and in 2019.

However, when researchers focused on adult doses, usage increased from 72.6 per cent in 2018 and 72.5 per cent in 2019 to 76.8 per cent in 2020.

Additionally, sales of azithromycin for adults in India increased from 4 per cent in 2018 and 4.5 per cent in 2019 to 5.9 per cent in 2020.

The study also showed notable increases in the sales of doxycycline and faropenem, two antibiotics commonly used to treat respiratory infections.

The researchers used previously published studies to compare India's antibiotic use with that in the US and other high-income countries.

In those countries, they found that adult antibiotic use decreased drastically during the pandemic compared with such use in 2018 and 2019.

"It's critical to acknowledge that antibiotic use in high-income countries plummeted in 2020," Gandra said.

"People isolated, schools and offices closed, and fewer people got the flu and, overall, stayed healthier compared with the pre-pandemic years. This reduced the overall need for antibiotics, as did cancelling dental procedures and outpatient surgeries," he said.

The researchers noted that India also had restrictions and experienced dramatic decreases in malaria, dengue, chikungunya and other infections typically treated with antibiotics.

"Antibiotic use should have gone down, but it didn't. Not only that but antibiotic use increased along with the rise of COVID cases," Gandra added.

The researchers statistically adjusted antibiotic use for seasonality and mandatory lockdown periods.

They estimated that COVID-19 likely contributed to 216.4 million excess doses of antibiotics for adults and 38 million excess doses of azithromycin for adults from June 2020 through September 2020, a four-month period of peak COVID-19 activity in India.

"Our results indicate that almost everybody who was diagnosed with COVID-19 received an antibiotic in India," Gandra added.

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New Delhi: Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) national spokesperson and Maharashtra's Minorities Minister Nawab Malik has blamed the Centre for the COVID-19 vaccination scam that was unearthed in Mumbai last month. Malik told ANI that the central government is responsible for the scam as it kept the Maharashtra government in the dark and sold COVID-19 vaccines to private hospitals without informing the state.

Maharashtra's Minorities Minister Malik further said that if the state government would have been kept in the loop from the beginning during the sale of vaccines to private individuals and private hospitals, municipalities, corporations and local bodies could have averted this fraud.

On Thursday, the Mumbai Police arrested another individual in connection with the fake vaccination case. So far, twelve people have been arrested in the case. After an FIR was filed on June 30, a total of nine FIRs have been filed in the vaccination scam case till now. The prime accused in the case, Dr Manish Tripathi has been sent to police custody till July 4.

As per the police, a vaccination drive was conducted in the Samta Nagar area of Mumbai in May, wherein 618 employees from four different companies were administered the vaccine, however, none of them received a certificate confirming their inoculation. Later, they approached the Mumbai Police and an investigation was initiated. During the probe, a racket that held bogus or unauthorized vaccination camps for housing societies and private firms came to light last month.

(With agency inputs)

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In recent times, we have come across several instances when it was noticed that the western media did not miss out on an opportunity to run propaganda against India. Be it the COVID-19 crisis, the farmers' movement, the Galwan Valley dispute with China at or any riots, it has been observed that the western media puts their best efforts to malign India's image on an international platform.

While all this happens in the name of fair journalism and secularism, people ponder as to how such elements with low-level of journalism reach their newsrooms.

Today, we have proof that America's renowned newspaper 'New York Times' released a vacancy for the post of a South Asia correspondent based out of India. The organisation clearly mentions that as criteria, the candidate should be anti-Modi and should possess an anti-India ideology. The specific purpose of the New York Times seems to be to appeal to candidates who can write against the democratically elected government in India and supports anti-Modi ideology at the same time. And this is how newspapers like New York Times becomes the biggest den of 'Tukde Tukde' gang journalists present in India.

On July 1, the New York Times released a vacancy for the South Asia correspondent. It stated that the candidate selected for this job will be required to operate from the national capital - Delhi. Along with it, the company also released complete details of qualities they are looking for in the candidate. Here, we explain it to you in three points.

In the first point, this newspaper writes  "India's future now stands at a crossroads. Modi is advocating a self-sufficient, muscular nationalism centred on the country's Hindu majority. That vision puts him at odds with the interfaith, multicultural goals of modern Indias founders."

The newspaper mentions that the future of India is standing at a crossroads and the reason for this is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It says that Prime Minister Modi is promoting aggressive nationalism on the basis of the Hindu majority in the country and his policy can be dangerous for India's culture of unity in diversity. Notably, this description is not a part of any article but is mentioned at the space released for the job description. In this, the newspaper further writes that work is being done to weaken the freedom of media and freedom of expression in India, which raises serious questions on the future of the country.

In 2014, BJP formed the government in the Centre by winning 282 seats and Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. Then, in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Prime Minister again formed the government by winning 303 seats. However, it appears that the western media still has to come to terms with the fact.

It should be noted that if a candidate meeting these criteria, has been indulged in any criminal offence in the past, i.e. if he has a criminal history, in that case too, the company will roll out the post to him. However, such exemption is given by this newspaper in every country and India is not the only nation where this policy is applicable.

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Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court on Friday (July 2) turned down the state government's proposal to reduce the penalty for not wearing a mask in public amid the coronavirus outbreak from Rs 1,000 at present to Rs 500 saying some form of deterrence must remain to stem the spread of the virus.

When Advocate General Kamal Trivedi insisted on a reduction in the fine amount, the High Court bench comprising Justices Bela Trivedi and Bhargav Karia said the court will decide on this request once 50 per cent of the state's population is vaccinated against COVID-19.

The special bench was hearing a suo motu PIL along with a set of connected petitions regarding the coronavirus situation in the state.

During Friday's virtual hearing, advocate general Trivedi said the state government had increased the fine from Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 following an HC directive a few months back.

"We did it because times were different, people were not disciplined, people were not ready to observe rules. But today, we have observed that people are adhering to rules, people are falling in line and that is why we don't see much violations," the AG said.

He said the state government's request to reduce the penalty by half is driven by "popular demand" of the masses, adding that "people from the lower strata" were finding it hard to pay the hefty fine.

However, the bench said, "We are still expecting a third wave of coronavirus. Unless there is deterrence, people will not be disciplined. Let at least 50 per cent of our population be vaccinated, then we will think of reducing 50 per cent of the fine," Justice Trivedi said.

Senior advocate Percy Kavina, appearing for the Gujarat High Court Advocates Association, also pitched for some relaxation in the fine.

"I agree with the advocate general on this. When you make the punishment not commensurate with the crime, in fact, the crime increases. A modest fine will also have a deterrent effect," said Kavina.

Kavina also argued the police should not collect fines from those who were caught wearing masks just below their nose but must let them go after telling them to wear it in the right manner.

Rejecting Kavina's suggestion, Justice Karia said. "We can't control the crowd. Let them at least wear masks".

Justifying the Rs 1,000 penalty, Justice Karia said the fine for such violation in other countries is nearly Rs 40,000.

The bench would conduct a further hearing in this case on July 9.

(Inputs from agency)

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New Delhi: In an air-sea coordinated operation, the Indian Coast Guard(ICG) rescued a distressed fishing vessel RSN-TWO and its seven crew, on Thursday.

The vessel was off Tillanchong Island, nearly 350 Km south of Port Blair. Significantly, this mission highlighted the significance of a home-grown satellite communication device that helps fishermen in distress, by alerting the concerned authorities.

The Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) Port Blair received an unregistered DAT (Distress Alert Transmitter) alert around Wednesday noon. As the DAT was unregistered, its data was unavailable with the ICG, hence the details were sought from the fisheries department.

On learning that the said vessel was RSN-TWO, which left Port Blair earlier in the week for fishing, ICG tasked ship C-422 from Kamorta, besides ship Vishwast and Dornier aircraft for Search and Rescue.

On locating the boat off Tillanchong island and establishing contact, early on Thursday, it was learnt that the boat had machinery failure.

An ICG team that boarded the distressed vessel provided basic necessities and first aid, following which attempts were made to rectify the defect.

Owing to non-availability of specific spares the on-site repair was not possible, also considering the inclement weather conditions, the distressed vessel was towed for passage to Kamorta, by ICGS Vishwast.

Jointly developed by the Indian Space Research Organization(ISRO) and Indian Coast Guard, the DAT(Distress Alert Transponder) is a low-cost and effective satellite transmitter built for fishermen.

At a press of a button, this device transmits distress alerts to the Search and Rescue Authorities through the INSAT series of satellites. The Indian Coast Guard has been emphasizing that fishermen must carry the DAT device and also register it for effective, timely search and rescue.

The Indian National Satellite (INSAT) system is one of the largest domestic communication satellite systems in Asia-Pacific region with multiple operational communication satellites placed in Geo-stationary orbit.

Established in 1983 with commissioning of INSAT-1B, it initiated a major revolution in Indias communications sector and sustained the same later.

According to ISRO, the INSAT system with more than 200 transponders in the C, Extended C and Ku-bands provides services to telecommunications, television broadcasting, satellite news-gathering, societal applications, weather forecasting, disaster warning and Search and Rescue operations.

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New Delhi: India recorded 46,617 new COVID-19 cases and 853 deaths in the last 24 hours, the Union Health Ministry informed on Friday (July 2, 2021). India's total coronavirus caseload has now increased to 3,04,58,251, of which, 4,00,312 have succumbed to the virus, while 5,09,637 are active cases. A total of 2,95,48,302 people have recovered from the COVID-19 infections in the country.

At least 59,384 people recovered from the infection on Friday, taking the national recovery rate to 96.97%. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) revealed that 41,42,51,520 samples tested for COVID-19 up to 1st July 2021. Of these, 18,80,026 samples were tested yesterday.

Additionally, the private hospital chains in Delhi-NCR have started administering the Russian COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V at two of their hospitals. The officials on Thursday (July 1, 2021) revealed that Fortis Healthcare and Apollo Hospitals started administering Sputnik V in a staged manner. According to hospital officials, over 1,000 people have been vaccinated so far.

"On-the-spot registration and walk-in facility for Sputnik V is currently restricted, we are encouraging beneficiaries to take appointments through the CoWin app," the official said.

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BENGALURU: A mysterious loud noise was heard in South Bengaluru on Friday afternoon, triggering panic among the city residents. The incident brought back memories of the sonic boom caused by an IAF jet last year.

According to reports, the local authorities are ascertaining if it was another sonic boom from an IAF jet like that in May last year. The loud boom was heard across many parts of Bengaluru around 12.30 PM after which several residents took to Twitter to share that they heard a loud thud sound.

As per their tweets, the sound was heard in the Sarjapur area, JP Nagar, Benson Town, Ulsoor, ISRO Layout, HSR Layout, South Bengaluru and East Bengaluru.

While the sound was muted in some areas, some residents shared that their windows rattled due to the impact of the sound. Windows rattled after a huge sound...what was it, one more Sonic Boom? a Twitter user said.

A similar boom sound was heard last year in May in Bengaluru as well. While some had described it as a thunderous noise, others had said they felt tremors, with their windowpanes rattling for as long as five seconds.

The Indian Air Force later revealed that it was an IAF Test Flight involving a supersonic profile that took off from the Bengaluru airport, resulting in the sonic boom.

The sound effect caused due to high-speed flights is known as the sonic boom.

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New Delhi: The Netherlands on Friday is the latest European Union (EU) nation to approve the Serum Institute of India-manufactured Covishield anti-COVID-19 vaccine for travellers. The move comes days after India told the EU member nations to approve of the vaccines.

In a statement issued by the government of the Netherlands in their official website, Covishield has been included in the list of approved vaccines along with the doses from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.

Now, fully vaccinated people can travel to EU unless they are travelling from a country that has been designated as a very high-risk area.

The Netherlands join the nine other European nations; Switzerland, Iceland, Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Greece, Ireland, Estonia and Spain who on Thursday allowed the SII-manufactured Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine.

The External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had told the European bloc to accept COVID-19 vaccines, Covishield and Covaxin. India reportedly offered to exempt nationals from all countries which have accepted Indian proposals  from mandatory quarantine with Indian authorities recognizing the EU green pass.

The EU green pass or European Union (EU) Digital Covid Certificate uses the European Medicines Agency (EMA) list of approved vaccines. It has only four vaccines on the list none of which are India-made.

India also urged EU to accept the vaccination certificate issued through India's CoWIN portal.

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New Delhi: Amid the reports of ruckus in the West Bengal Assembly, on the first day of the budget session, by the BJP MLAs, Suvendu Adhikari on Friday (July 2, 2021) alleged that there was no mention of post-poll violence in West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhars speech.

There is no mention of post-poll violence in the speech of the Governor written by the state government, Suvendu Adhikari said in a press conference on Friday.

Suvendu Adhikari also said, We want a discussion on fake COVID-19 vaccines too. We have not been given any positive response.

In the press conference, Suvendu Adhikari also stated that the Supreme Court, as well as Hight Court, has observed that there was post-poll violence. Even today, its continuing on BJP workers.

Meanwhile, Calcutta High Court on Friday ordered the police to register all cases of the victims of the post-poll violence in West Bengal. The high Court also directed the state government to ensure medical treatment for all victims and to ensure ration for the affected even if they dont have ration cards.

Suvendu Adhikari welcomed this decision by the West Bengal HC and said, I want to welcome the court order. An independent agency should investigate and lodge an FIR and be investigated outside the state. Bengal govt was lying all the while. There was post poll violence being reported all the while.

While talking on the issue of TMC writing to Prime Minister for removal of Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, Suvendu Adhikari said, I did not meet Solicitor General Tushar Mehta. He refused to meet me yesterday.

At last, BJP leader & Bengal Leader of Opposition, Suvendu Adhikari refuted claims that BJP MLAs staged a walkout. BJP MLAs did not stage a walkout, said Suvendu Adhikari.

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New Delhi: An encounter broke out between security forces and terrorists at Hanjan village of Rajpora area of district Pulwama in south Kashmir on Friday (July 2, 2021) morning.

Kashmir zone police tweeted: #Encounter has started at Hanjin Rajpora area of #Pulwama. Police and security forces are on the job. Further details shall follow. @JmuKmrPolice

#Encounter has started at Hanjin Rajpora area of #Pulwama. Police and security forces are on the job. Further details shall follow. @JmuKmrPolice  Kashmir Zone Police (@KashmirPolice) July 1, 2021

A police officer said, Joint team of Police, army and CRPF launched a cordon and search after a specific input about the presence of terrorist in the area.

He added that the searching team came under fire as they cordoned the suspected spot, the hiding militants fired upon them, which was retaliated and an encounter started.

Additionally, sources in the police said that they have input about 3-4 four terrorists are hiding in the area. Its to mention that in the last six months this year 61 terrorists are killed by security forces.

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Bhubaneswar: The Odisha government on Friday (July 2) urged the Centre to allocate over 17 lakh doses of COVID-19 vaccines not lifted by the state private hospitals in the months of June and July. Odisha is losing a huge quantity of vaccines allocated for private hospitals in the state as the centre distributed the vaccines in the ratio of 75:25 between the government and the private facilities.

"You are therefore requested to allocate the balance 8,59,060 doses of June and 8,60,140 doses of July 2021 of private hospitals share to the state government so that our state is not unfairly disadvantaged," Odishas Additional Chief Secretary P K Mohapatra wrote to the Union H&FW Ministry secretary.

Mohapatra also mentioned in the letter that the presence of private hospitals is very low in Odisha and limited to only 5 per cent of the total health care sector in the state.

Hence, it was apprehended that as per the existing guideline, Odisha will lose out its proportionate share of 25 per cent allocation of vaccines to the private sectors.

In this context, Odishas H&FW Minister N K Das had also urged Union H&FW Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan to revise the ratio to 95:5 per cent instead of 75:25 keeping in view the ground reality and the share of the private sector may be handed over to the state government.

Neighbouring Jharkhand has also sought tweaking the ratio to 95:5 in favour of the state.

The ACS said that the states efforts to encourage the private hospitals to procure more vaccines have also not yielded many results.

While the private hospitals of Odisha were allocated 9,25,560 doses in June, they could procure only 66,500 doses (7.2 per cent) while the remaining 8,59,060 doses could not be lifted.

Similarly, though the private hospitals were allocated 10,16,970 doses in July, they have placed orders for only 1,56,830 doses (15.4 per cent) leaving a balance of 8,60,140 doses.

"In the above circumstances, Odisha is losing a huge quantity of vaccines allocated for private hospitals in the state. "On the other hand, the state is capable of vaccinating 3.5 lakh beneficiaries per day and allocation of vaccines for Odisha in July is 30,50,910 doses (both Covisheild and Covaxin) only under the government of India free supply, which will be consumed within 8 to 10 days", Mohapatra pointed out.

He was justifying the states request to change the vaccine distribution ratio between the government and the private facilities.

Meanwhile, as the state is facing a shortage of Covishield vaccines, the government has now decided to inoculate Covaxin doses in the districts of Ganjam.

Earlier, Covaxin was only administered to the people in the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation jurisdiction.

In a letter to Ganjam Collector and Berhampur Municipal Commissioner, Mohapatra said the state government has taken a decision to introduce the Covaxin vaccine in the district of Ganjam from July 2021 for vaccination of 18 years & above citizens.

Covaxin will be supplied to the district from this month for vaccination of beneficiaries, who have not received any Covid-19 vaccine so far.

"Covishield will be supplied only for the beneficiaries, who have received the first dose and are waiting for the second one", he clarified.

The authorities are told to conduct special sessions to vaccinate only the second dose of Covishield.

Stating that Covishield and Covaxin are not interchangeable, Mohapatra said the officials should be instructed to ensure that only one vaccine (either Covaxin or Covishield) will be inoculated to one person.

Meanwhile, the state during the last two days has received about 10 lakh of vaccines to undertake mass inoculation, which may be exhausted in only three days, official sources said.

(Inputs from agency)

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New Delhi: The External Affairs Ministry on Friday (July 2) reacted to reports of a drone being spotted over Indian High Commission complex in Islamabad last week and termed the incident as a 'breach of security'. The ministry asked Pakistan to investigate the incident and prevent recurrence of such incidents in future.

The Indian mission has also lodged a strong protest with Pakistan over the incident through a note verbale which is a diplomatic communique, people familiar with the development said. The incident came to light amid growing concerns in the security establishment in India after explosives-laden drones were used to carry out an attack on the Jammu Air Force station on June 27.

"A drone was spotted over the premises of the Indian High Commission in Islamabad on June 26. This has been taken up officially with the government of Pakistan. We expect Pakistan to investigate the incident and prevent recurrence of such breach of security," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said at a media briefing.

It is learnt that the drone was sighted within the complex when an event was being held at the mission.

Asked about the drone attack on Jammu airbase, Bagchi declined to comment, and only said that the investigation into it is in progress.

According to security officials, it was the first instance of suspected Pakistan-based terrorists deploying unmanned aerial vehicles to strike at vital installations in India.

Air Chief Marshal RKS Bhadauria on Friday said the drone strikes in the Jammu airbase were an "act of terror" that was aimed at targeting key military assets.

Army Chief Gen MM Naravane on Thursday said that the easy availability of drones has increased the complexity of security challenges from both state and state-sponsored actors.

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New Delhi: Congress leader Shashi Tharoor dropped another heavy-duty English word which has left the netizens scrambling for their dictionaries. The Congress MP who is known for his penchant for rarely used English words dropped the lastest head scratcher on Friday  pogonotrophy.

The lawmaker said he learnt of a new word from a friend called pogonotrophy - which means growing or cultivation of a beard. Cheekily he referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his flowing white beard.

A user on microblogging site Twitter wrote to the former Union minister saying she was waiting to learn a new word and Tharoor happily obliged. "My friend Rathin Roy, the economist, taught me a new word today: pogonotrophy, which means 'the cultivation of a beard'. As in, the PM's pogonotrophy has been a pandemic preoccupation," he said in a tweet.

CHECK TWEET HERE:

My friend Rathin Roy, the economist, taught me a new word today: pogonotrophy, which means "the cultivation of a beard". As in, the PM's pogonotrophy has been a pandemic preoccupation... https://t.co/oytIvCKRJR  Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) July 1, 2021

Tharoor has previously engaged in friendly banter with TRS working president K T Rama Rao over COVID-19 medicine names and threw in another head scratcher  floccinaucinihilipilification.

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Dehradun: BJP leader Tirath Singh Rawat resigned as Uttarakhand chief minister on Friday (July 2) after holding the post for less than four months. Rawat handed over the resignation letter to Governor Baby Rani Maurya past 11 pm, hours after returning from Delhi where he was summoned by the top BJP leadership on Wednesday.

The Uttarakhand BJP legislature party will meet on Saturday to elect its new leader, who will be later sworn in as the next CM of the state where assembly elections are due early next year. Tirath Singh Rawat had replaced Trivendra Singh Rawat on March 10 after he was similarly asked by the party to step down.

The Constitution required Tirath Singh Rawat, who is an MP, to get elected as a member of the state Assembly within six months to continue as CM. But there seemed increasing uncertainty over the Election Commission holding bypolls for the two vacant seats in the state when there is less than a year to go before the next assembly elections.

Rawat met party president JP Nadda and Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi, amid speculation of another leadership change in the hill state.

Returning to Dehradun, he addressed a press conference in Dehradun on Friday night. Contrary to expectations, he did not announce his resignation there. But shortly after the press meet he drove to the Raj Bhawan.

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New Delhi: Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit has termed "total nonsense" the claims that his government was involved in alleged abduction of diamantaire Mehul Choksi, wanted in Rs 13,5000 crore scam in Punjab National Bank, from Antigua and Barbuda, neighbouring local media reported.

In his weekly "annou palay" show, Skerrit said his government will allow the court to carry out its process regarding Choksi and gave the assurance that his rights and obligations will be respected, Dominica News Online reported.

Skerrit refuted the allegations of a plot between India and the Dominica government to kidnap Choksi from neighbouring Caribbean country Antigua and Barbuda, where he was staying since 2018 as a citizen, after fleeing from India, and bring him to Dominica, the news portal reported.

"To say that the government of Dominica and the government of Antigua along with India colluded in any way, give me a break, that's total nonsense. We don't get involved ourselves in those kinds of activities, those practices, not at all. I mean that is absurd and we reject it and it is unfortunate that anybody would want to propagate this unsubstantiated claim by a gentleman who is before the courts," he was quoted as saying by Dominica News Online.

He further said, "whether it would be fair for a local who commits murder in Dominica and flees to another country, is allowed to roam free or instead be apprehended and sent back to Dominica to face his charges".

Citing the case of a Dominica citizen wanted by the United States whose extradition proceedings are going on in courts to counter opposition on Choksi, Skerrit said the country cannot treat people differently depending on who they are or how much money they may have.

"All of us are subjected to the laws irrespective of our position or how much money we may have or how much we don't have. And I believe that in this circumstance. Dominica has a right and obligation to apprehend this person and bring the person before the courts and let the courts determine," he said.

"We here in Dominica with the opposition talking about Choksi but there is a young boy from Grand Bay, Where there is an extradition request by the United States government on allegations that he committed a crime in St Thomas and we are mandated and obligated to apprehend him.

"And the police acted on the instruction of the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) arrested the young man and he is remanded at the state prison awaiting his extradition hearing. His lawyers will fight his case. If the courts believe that there is no reason to extradite him to the United States then he will go freely," Skerrit said.

Choksi's lawyer in Dominica Justin Simon claimed that United Kingdom's Metropolitan Police, known as Scotland Yard, has started looking into allegations of torture and kidnapping of Choksi as citizens there was allegedly part of the plot, the news site reported.

Simon told media that there will be international implications if Dominica or Antigua turns out to be involved in the alleged plot, it said.

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New Delhi: The Uttarakhand government on Friday (June 2) cancelled the Kanwar Yatra from Haridwar in view of the prevailing COVID-19 situation. Uttarakhand government has cancelled Kanwar Yatra, held in the month of 'sawan' from Haridwar, as a precautionary measure amid COVID-19 pandemic, State government spokesperson Subodh Uniyal was quoted as saying by ANI.

The Uttarakhand government had cancelled the yatra last year as well due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Shiva devotees, also known as Kanwariyas, fetch the holy waters of Ganga to offer at the Shiva temples during Hindu calendar month of `Saavan every year.

These pilgrims visit Haridwar, Gaumukh, and Gangotri in Uttarakhand and Sultanganj in Bihar to fetch the waters of Ganga. This water is then offered to Lord Shiva in temples.

Earlier, Uttarakhand had postponed the Char Dham Yatra till further orders in regard to the state high court's orders. Moreover, the state government has moved the Supreme Court against Uttarakhand High Court's which has banned the yatra.

"The High Court may have banned the Char Dham Yatra but the government has approached the Supreme Court against it. Now only the Supreme Court will decide the matter," Uniyal said.

"The state government has made full arrangements regarding the Char Dham Yatra, and no provision has been left unattended, he added.

On June 28, the Uttarakhand High Court stayed the state Cabinet's decision permitting Char Dham Yatra with a limited number of pilgrims. It had also ordered live streaming of Char Dham shrines.

(With agency inputs)

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New Delhi: Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday said that the world sees India as a trusted and reliable partner, and has more confidence in Indias capability to provide quality products and services on time.

In a press release issued by the ministry, the statement said that the goods and services industry is gaining momentum and a large number of employment opportunities will be generated. "...the economy will strengthen, revenues will increase, and the government will be able to help the disadvantaged sections in a more substantive manner," the statement read.

Goyal announced that India had seen the highest level of exports in the first quarter of FY21. In terms of numbers, the exports are said to be measured at $95 billion which is 16 percent more as compared to Q1 exports in FY18-19 which was $82 billion. In Q4 of FY 20, exports crossed $90 billion.

The countrys exports seem to remain unaffected in the first quarter of 2021 from the months of April to June despite the devastating impact of the second COVID-19 wave on the economy.

Meanwhile, the minister aslo cleared that the Centre is not looking to bring any changes in the existing FDI policy for the e-commerce sector as the current policy is crystal clear, adding that the biggest priority for the government is to protect the interests of 130 crore consumers of the country.

The union minister also reiterated that foreign e-commerce companies such as Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart will have to follow the law of the country.

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Srinagar: An Indian Army jawan was killed in an encounter with terrorists which broke out in the Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir in the wee hours of Friday.

The security forces had earlier launched a massive cordon and search operation at Hanjin village in the Rajpora area of the district, following information about the presence of some terrorists there, according to news agency PTI.

Jammu and Kashmir: An encounter is underway between terrorists and security forces in Hanjin Rajpora area of Pulwama (Visuals deferred by unspecified time) pic.twitter.com/W9VeTbFN2C  ANI (@ANI) July 2, 2021

A J&K police official informed that the search operation turned into an encounter after terrorists opened fire on the security forces, which strongly retaliated.

One soldier was injured in the initial exchange of firing with terrorists, the official said, adding that the jawan later succumbed to injuries at a hospital there.

He said three to four terrorists are believed to be trapped in the area where the encounter is still underway.

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JAMMU: The Border Security Force (BSF) jawans noticed suspicious drone activity in Arnia sector near international border in Jammu and Kashmir on Friday following which they fired several rounds.

Altered BSF jawans opened fire after they noticed a drone near the International Border in Arnia sector in Jammu and Kashmir, news agency ANI reported.

Alert BSF troops fired at a small hexacopter belonging to Pakistan today morning at about 4:25 am as it was trying to cross International Border in Arnia sector. Due to this firing, it returned immediately. It was meant for carrying out surveillance of the area: BSF  ANI (@ANI) July 2, 2021

BSF also issued a statement in which it said, Alert BSF troops fired at a small hexacopter belonging to Pakistan today morning at about 4:25 am as it was trying to cross International Border in Arnia sector.

Due to this firing, it returned immediately. It was meant for carrying out surveillance of the area, the BSF said.

This drone was spotted days after the Indian Air Force station in Jammu was attacked by two explosive-laden drones.

The NIA is now investigating the matter.
New Delhi: As East Delhi markets have been shut due to violation of COVID-19 norms, Noida markets also fear the same fate due to high footfall and little to no adherence to the coronavirus protocols. Atta market association in Noida has asked the authorities for stricter enforcement of the norms.

As per a Times of India report, the market association has asked the authorities to control the number of unauthorised vendors in and around Atta market. It has hardly been a week since the market opened and we are already seeing a large crowd. People are thronging street vendors and several food stalls. We have asked the authorities to regulate the crowd and ensure proper masking otherwise Atta market will be the next hotspot for the city, CB Jha, president of Atta market association, told the leading daily.

Further, he revealed that around 330 street vendors are authorised by the Noida Authority. But nearly 700 other vendors are found from Atta Market till Naya Gaon.

GB Nagar district magistrate Suhas LY has told The Hindustan Times that the administration will discuss the issue with the representatives of market associations to find a solution.

Currently imposing a shutdown of the market for Covid violations is not on the cards as we have to keep in mind the daily income of the traders too. However, we will hold discussions with the market associations to chalk out a way so that social distancing can be followed even as markets remain open, he was quoted by HT as saying.

East Delhi markets including Laxmi Nagars main market have been closed till July 5 for flouting COVID-19 norms. The order issued by East Delhi DM read, "Laxmi Nagar main market and surrounding markets like Mangal Bazaar, Vijay Chowk, Subhash Chowk, Jagatram Park, Guru Ramdas Nagar will remain shut from 10 pm on June 29 till 10 pm of July 5 for not following COVID-19 appropriate behaviour.

As per data on Thursday (July 1), active coronavirus cases dropped to 28 in Gautam Buddh Nagar and the caseload reached 63,055. The death toll in the city stands at 466, PTI reported.

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New Delhi: Bollywood heartthrob Hrithik Roshan is next to be captured by celebrity photographer Dabboo Ratnani for his 2021 calendar shoot and the monochrome picture of the actor is creating a storm on the internet. In the picture, Hrithik can be seen laying down, flaunting his perfectly chiselled, washboard abs and looking at the ceiling with his dreamy light brown eyes. Director Farah Khan was smitten by his latest photoshoot and commented, "No wonder they call u a Greek God".

Check out the sizzling picture:

Hrithik recently announced Krrish 4, taking the excitement level of his fans up by a notch. On the occasion of the franchise completing 15 years, the dashing actor took to his Instagram account and shared a video on his upcoming superhero movie. The superhero franchise began with Koi... Mil Gaya (2003) Krrish (2006) and Krrish 3 (2013) respectively.

The actor was last seen in the biopic 'Super 30', and the action film 'War' in 2019.
Mumbai: Lyricist Javed Akhtar on Friday filed an intervention application in the Bombay High Court claiming that actor Kangana Ranaut failed to disclose certain facts in her petition before the court seeking speedy renewal of her passport. Akhtar sought to intervene in the writ petition filed by the Bollywood actor who has challenged a First Information Report (FIR) filed against her for allegedly infringing upon the copyright of a writer.

Last month, Ranaut also filed an interim application, seeking that the regional passport authority be directed to renew her passport to enable her to travel to Budapest, Hungary for a film shoot. The authority was delaying the renewal citing the criminal cases pending against her, she claimed.

On June 28, during a hearing on this application, Additional Solicitor General Anil Singh, appearing for the passport authority, told the HC that Ranaut's plea was vague and did not clarify which criminal proceedings were pending against her.

Her lawyer Rizwan Siddiquee told a bench led by Justice S S Shinde that there were only two FIRs registered against the actor but criminal proceedings in these FIRs had not started yet.

The first FIRs was registered in October last year by the Bandra police for `promoting religious enmity' through her tweets, he said. The second FIR, registered in March this year, was based on the complaint of the author of the book `Didda: Warrior Queen of Kashmir' who alleged that Ranaut announced a film on the book's subject without his permission, the lawyer said.

In his intervention application, Akhtar said he filed a criminal defamation complaint against Ranaut in November 2020 over her remarks about him during a TV interview, and criminal proceedings against her were pending.

The actor failed to disclose this before the high court, he said.

"In spite of knowledge of the criminal case (Akhtar's complaint) pending before the magistrate's court, Andheri, the petitioner no 1 (Ranaut) deliberately failed to disclose the same...With an intention to mislead and obtain a favourable order," Akhtar's application said.

On June 28, the regional passport office, Mumbai had told the HC that it will decide on Ranaut's passport renewal application expeditiously once she made necessary corrections, following which the court disposed of her interim application.

The HC is yet to decide on Akhtar's intervention plea.
New Delhi: Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut's sister Rangoli Chandel has launched a hit at Taapsee Pannu's latest release 'Haseen Dillruba' on her social media. Just days ago, Kangana had retaliated to Taapsee's comment calling her 'irrelevant' and now it appears the 'Queen' actress's sister has taken to Instagram to celebrate negative reviews of Taapsee's film. On her Instagram stories, she shared a screenshot of a Twitter review of the film and wrote her comments on Taapsee's performance beside it.

She wrote, "Mafia created fraud is being exposed but only in hush-hush whispers no one is openly saying it, so I decided to do the deed, a single tone actor who has absolutely no screen presence no range no real persona or screen presence, is being pitted against one of the greatest actors Indian cinema ever saw...not only she openly mimics and copies Kangana but also calls her irrelevant and double filter, aaj isko bhi critics ne nanga kar diya. Ye gubbara bhi footna hi tha, foot gaya."

Check out her Instagram story:

Earlier, Kangana and Taapsee had gotten into an online verbal spat. In an interview with Hindustan Times, Taapsee Pannu was asked if she misses Kangana from Twitter after her account was banned, to which the former said, "No, I don't miss her. I didn't miss her, or want her, also before. She's too irrelevant for me, in my personal life. She's an actor, she's a colleague in that respect. But more than that, she doesn't hold any relevance in my life. I don't have any feelings for her, good or bad."

To this, Kangana reacted quite explosively and accused Taapsee of using her name to promote her latest release 'Haseen Dillruba'.

On the work front, Taapsee will next be seen in Looop Lapeta, Rashmi Rocket, and Shabaash Mithu.

On the other hand, Kangana will be seen making her digital debut as a producer with the upcoming film Tiku Weds Sheru. She also has Thalaivi, a biopic on late legendary actress turned politician J Jayalalithaa in her kitty. The film's release was postponed due to the COVID outbreak.

She is also part of the films Tejas and Dhaakad among others.
New Delhi: Bollywood actress Yami Gautam has been summoned by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in an alleged Forex Violation case. The newlywed actress has been sent notice by the probe agency on Wednesday for violation of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) reportedly.

This is the second time that the actress has been summoned by the ED. It has been learnt that Yami is likely to be called for questioning sometime in the coming week of July.

On the personal front, Yami Gautam married Uri filmmaker Aditya Dhar, who is a Kashmiri on June 4 this year. Theirs was an intimate wedding ceremony with only family and close friends in attendance. The pretty actress has been on a photo-sharing spree from her festivities and fans can't stop gushing over her newlywed look.

On the work front, Yami recently began shooting for the social comedy film 'Dasvi' produced by Dinesh Vijan's Maddock Films. She will also be seen in Behzad Khambata's thriller 'A Thursday' playing the role of a school teacher who takes 16 children as hostages.
New Delhi: Digital payments app Paytm has set aside Rs 50 crore in the arsenal for offering guaranteed cashback on each transaction to merchants and users to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the Digital India mission. As part of the promotional campaign, users and merchants will receive rewards in the form of cashback for every digital transaction they make via the Paytm mobile app. By taking part in the offer, you can get cashback for every transaction you make by scanning the Paytm QR code.

Paytm is aiming to improve the digital financial literacy among merchants and users with the Rs 50 crore promotional campaign, which will last for good six months.

Besides guaranteed cashback on transactions, the digital payments giant is offering registered merchants a chance to win other exciting prices.

For starters, the company will provide merchants having the most number of transactions made via its app with certificates, Soundbox and IoT devices, among other exciting prizes, in a bid to train retailers on digital financial literacy.

Paytm CEO and founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma pointed out that India has made significant strides in its Digital India mission, which empowers all with technological advancements. Also Read: Atmanirbhar Bharat: Govt launches 6 tech innovation platforms for globally competitive manufacturing

This mission is bound to contribute to the countrys growing economy. We are honoured to be the driver of digital transformation by redefining digital payments in our country. Paytms Guaranteed Cashback offer is to recognise the top merchants, who are at the heart of Indias growth and have made Digital India a success, he added. Also Read: Ola Electric scooter unveiled in a video: Take a peek at black beauty here
Azamgarh (Uttar Pradesh): Everybody loved the concept of the movie Kaagaz starring Pankaj Tripathi. But only a few know that the movie was based on real-life story of Lal Bihari Mritak, who made national headlines when he fought a long battle to prove he was alive, after being declared dead in government records.

As per India.com report, Bihari is planning to remarry his 56-year-old wife Karmi Devi because it has now 27 years since he turned up alive again in government records. He was declared alive on June 30, 1994.

I was reborn in government records 27 years ago. The marriage ceremony will be held in 2022 when I will turn 28 after my rebirth in government records, Lal Bihari told reporters.

According to India .com 66-years-old Lal Bihari said that he wanted to remarry his wife and draw the attention of the people towards the plight of the living dead.

Though I fought and won my case, not much has actually changed in the system. I remained dead in government records for 18 years. There are still people who have been declared dead and their land has been usurped by relatives in connivance with government officials. I have been helping such victims in the past decades but the campaign must continue, he said to reporters.

Lal Bihari, a resident of Amilo village in Azamgarh district and was officially declared dead in 1975. During his legal battle to regain his identity, he added Mritak (deceased) in his name. He even formed a Mritak Sangh to highlight cases similar to his. So-called Mritak has three children, two daughters and one son all of whom are now married.

ALSO READ: IAS officers old pic with boyfriend-turned-husband goes viral, heres the story behind it

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KOLKATA: In a significant development, Calcutta High Court on Friday ordered the police to register all cases of the victims of the post-poll violence in West Bengal.

The high Court also directed the state government to ensure medical treatment for all victims and to ensure ration for the affected even if they dont have ration cards.

Post poll violence in WB: Calcutta HC passes orders in the matter, orders Police to register all cases of the victims of the violence. State Govt has been directed to ensure medical treatment for all victims & ensure ration for the affected even if they dont have ration cards. pic.twitter.com/Xb2suXjW2R  ANI (@ANI) July 2, 2021

West Bengal Chief Secretary has been directed to preserve all documents related to the post-poll violence, the high court said. the high court also reportedly ordered a second autopsy of BJP leader Abhijit Sarkar who was allegedly killed in post-poll violence.

It will be conducted at Command Hospital Kolkata. The high court passed the order after examining the interim report submitted by the National Human Rights Commission in this regard.

Meanwhile, the National Human Rights Commission's (NHRC) investigation into all cases related to post-poll violence in Bengal has been extended up to July 13th.

The next hearing in post-poll violence cases has been scheduled for July 13th.

The high court order is a major setback to the Mamata Banerjee-led government, which has been denying reports of post-poll violence in the state and called it a BJP conspiracy.

West Bengal witnessed sporadic incidents of political violence after the results of the assembly polls were announced in May this year. The ruling TMC and the BJP have been accusing each other of attacking their workers.

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New Delhi: Antarctica logged a record high temperature of up to 18.3 degrees Celsius (64.9 degrees Fahrenheit) in the month of February last year, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (UN WMO) report said. The UN agency attributed the high temperature to large high-pressure system which created "fohn conditions, downslope winds producing significant surface warming, which led to local warming both at the Esperanza station and at Seymour Island, a press release said.

"The Antarctic Peninsula is among the fastest-warming regions of the planet, almost 3C over the last 50 years. This new temperature record is therefore consistent with the climate change we are observing. WMO is working in partnership with the Antarctic Treaty System to help conserve this pristine continent," WMO secretary-general Petteri Taalas was quoted as saying by ANI.

This new record high of 18.3 degrees Celsius on the Antarctic continent was recorded on February 6, 2020 at the Esperanza Research Station (Argentina), the press release said. Earlier, the record temperature was logged on March 24, 2015 for the Antarctic continent at 17.5 degrees Celsius (63.5 degrees Fahrenheit).

The report was established after an extensive review conducted by the WMO's Weather and Climate Extremes Archive on the weather situation in the Antarctica peninsula. The WMO has also denied previous reports suggesting that the Antarctic region crossed 20.7 degrees Celsius (69.3 degrees Fahrenheit) on February 9, 2020, at Seymour Island.

(With agency inputs)
Kathmandu: The student union affiliated with the opposition alliance in Nepal has continued to stage demonstrations to protest against the dissolution of Parliament. On Friday (July 2), the protestors burnt an effigy of caretaker Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli near the Parliament.

The student union has been on road since May, after the dissolution of Parliament for the second time in less than a year. They have been engaging in scuffles with Police as they stage demonstrations.

On Friday afternoon, the student union burnt an effigy of KP Sharma Oli near the Parliament while chanting anti-government slogans." KP Sharma Oli, who has a mindset of the autocratic ruler, has been ruling nation by issuing ordinances, dissolve parliament where people`s representation use to be and working on the basis of whims and own wills," a protest leader said.

The opposition student alliance also has vowed to continue their protest in the coming days. They have called on for a torch march for Saturday throughout the nation against the incumbent protest. During the protest, protestors chanted slogans against Oli as well as sitting President Bidhya Devi Bhandari demanding to scrap the unconstitutional move.

In less than three months of its reinstatement, the House of Representatives of Nepal was again dissolved in May after a high running political drama over the nomination of a new Prime Minister. Nepal President Bidhya Devi Bhandari on the recommendation of the cabinet on May 21 dissolved the House of Representatives calling for fresh elections in November.

Office of President at that time had issued a release announcing the dissolution of the house for a second time as per Article 76 (7) of the Constitution of Nepal, on the recommendation of the cabinet.The next election will be on November 12 and 19 as per the recommendation of the Cabinet.

Article 76 (7) of the Constitution states "If the Prime Minister appointed according to clause (5) fails to get the vote of confidence or if any member fails to be appointed as Prime Minister, the President shall, on the recommendation of Prime Minister, dissolve the House of Representatives and fix a date to conduct another election within six months."

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Washington: Former US President Donald Trump`s former senior advisor Jason Miller has started a social media site called GETTR, he said on Thursday.

GETTR, a Twitter-style platform with posts and trending topics, advertised itself on the Google and Apple app stores as "a non-bias social network for people all over the world." It was first reported by Politico.

Miller has for months teased the Trump team`s plans to start a new social media platform, after the former president was blocked by a slew of sites following the Jan. 6 riot where his supporters stormed the Capitol. However, Trump does not have a verified account on GETTR.

Miller told Fox News in an interview that he hoped Trump would join but that the former president was considering a number of options. He said Trump was not funding the platform.

Trump was permanently banned from Twitter and remains suspended by Facebook until at least 2023 and by Alphabet`s YouTube until the company determines the risk of violence has decreased.

Trump, who recently shut down a short-lived blog on his website, joined video platform Rumble last weekend ahead of his campaign-style rally in Ohio.

A Trump spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
New Jersey: Johnson & Johnson on Thursday (July 1, 2021) announced findings from a small laboratory study, which revealed that the single-shot vaccine neutralizes the fast-spreading delta variant of COVID-19 and provides durable protection against infection. According to the company report, the vaccine jab generated strong, persistent activity against the Delta variant and other highly prevalent SARS-CoV-2 viral variants.

The data from the laboratory study revealed that the durability of the immune response lasted for at least eight months. The report also stated that the single-dose vaccine, elicited neutralising antibody activity against the Delta variant at an even higher level than what was recently observed for the Beta (B.1.351) variant in South Africa.

Additionally, it said that Johnson & Johnson's vaccine demonstrated protection against hospitalisation and death, and provided 85 percent effectiveness against critical infections.

"Today's newly announced studies reinforce the ability of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine to help protect the health of people globally," said Paul Stoffels, MD, Vice Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Scientific Officer at Johnson & Johnson.

"We believe that our vaccine offers durable protection against COVID-19 and elicits neutralizing activity against the Delta variant. This adds to the robust body of clinical data supporting our single-shot vaccine's ability to protect against multiple variants of concern," Stoffels added.

Mathai Mammen, MD, PhD, Global Head, Janssen Research & Development, Johnson & Johnson, said, "Current data for the eight months studied so far show that the single-shot Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine generates a strong neutralizing antibody response that does not wane; rather, we observe an improvement over time. In addition, we observe a persistent and particularly robust, durable cellular immune response."

"With each new dataset, we build on our solid foundation of evidence that our single-shot COVID-19 vaccine plays a critical role in ending the pandemic, which continues to evolve and pose new challenges to global health," Mammen said.

The single-shot vaccine is now available in many countries. It received emergency use authorisation (EUA) in the United States on February 27 and Conditional Marketing Authorization (CMA) by the European Commission on March 11.

(With ANI inputs)

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New Delhi: National Aeronautical Space Agency's Perseverance rover is beginning an epic journey across a crater floor for the signs of ancient life on the planet.

NASA said the rover team will now be deeply engaged with planning navigation routes, drafting instructions to be beamed up, and will even use special 3D glasses to help map the course. However, it said, the rover will take charge of the drive-by itself, using a powerful auto-navigation system.

According to news reports, the enhanced system is called AutoNav and makes 3D maps of the terrain ahead, identifies hazards, and plans a route around any obstacles without additional direction from controllers back on Earth.

"We have a capability called thinking while driving'. The rover is thinking about the autonomous drive while its wheels are turning, said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer, rover planner, and driver at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

AutoNav is considered to be the key feature in helping the Perseverance rover in its first science campaign on the floor of Jezero Crater. The team members look forward to letting AutoNav take the wheel" but will intervene when needed.

The space agency said that the rover might hit a top speed of 393 feet or 120 metres per hour, more than its predecessor, Curiosity, which was equipped with an earlier version of AutoNav that covers about 66 feet or 20 metres per hour as it climbs Mount Sharp to the southeast.

We sped up AutoNav by four or five times, said Michael McHenry, the mobility domain lead and part of JPLs team of rover planners. Were driving a lot farther in a lot less time than Curiosity demonstrated.

When Mars was wetter than today, billions of years ago, this crater was a lake and the Perseverances destination is a dried-out river delta at the craters edge, the agency said. If life ever existed on the red planet, signs of it might be found there, as per the agency. The rover will gather samples over some 9 miles (15km), prep the samples for collection by a future mission that would take it back to Earth for analysis.
Kathmandu: As Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is trying to pull out all stops to remain in power, however, the rival faction of the CPN-UML has decided to miss the meeting of revived Central Committee called on Friday.

Oli on Wednesday dismissed the preparatory committee for hosting the general convention of the CPN-UML party, and transformed it into the central committee.

The national convention organising committee has been dissolved from today, and it has been converted into the Central Committee that we had before our partys merger with the Maoist Centre, said Pradeep Gyawali, spokesperson for the UML.

The decision comes after the Supreme Court last month ruled that the committee meant for another purpose cannot appropriate the right and responsibilities of the central committee.

However, the Madhav Kumar Nepal faction has decided to boycott the meeting and has called Wednesdays decision sham.

Meanwhile, opposition leaders say if the Nepal-Khanal faction is convinced to join hands with Oli, the PM would ask them to withdraw their support to the opposition alliance.

Updating on the health condition of CPN-UML leader Jhala Nath Khanal who is undergoing treatment at Apollo Hospital in New Delhi, PMs Press Advisor, Surya Thapa said, Jhala Nath Khanal is recovering adding during the meeting PM Oli said that the government has made arrangements for his treatment and that he had taken responsibility.

A five-judge constitutional bench of the court hearing the petition demanding to reconstitute the Parliament dissolved by President Bidhya Devi Bhandari on Olis recommendation is likely to close the hearing this week and deliver the verdict by Monday.

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Islamabad: A high court in Pakistan on Monday ordered to temporarily suspend the popular Chinese video-sharing app TikTok for spreading immorality.

The Sindh High Court ordered the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to suspend the app until the next hearing on July 8.

The order was issued by the court on the petition by a citizen who alleged that TikTok was spreading "immorality and obscenity in the country".

It was for the second time that the app has been banned in the country this year. In March, the Peshawar High Court (PHC) had taken a similar action on a petition filed by several citizens.

However, the PHC, after a few weeks, had lifted the ban by asking the PTA to take measures so that no "immoral content" was uploaded.

Last year in October, the PTA for the first time banned TikTok after receiving complaints over indecent and immoral content but lifted the ban after 10 days.

The Chinese app has assured the PTA that it would operate as per the local laws to ensure that no indecent content was uploaded.

The app, owned by China's ByteDance, has been downloaded almost 39 million times in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, Pakistan Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry has slammed the recent Sindh High Court`s decision to ban the Chinese app TikTok, saying the country has suffered losses worth billions of dollars due to "judicial activism".

In a tweet, the minister said the country would never be able to come out of an economic crisis unless judicial reforms were implemented.

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Guatemala: The US State Department has named more than 50 current and former officials, including former presidents and active lawmakers, suspected of corruption or undermining democracy in three Central American countries.

Many of the cases were known in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, but the inclusion of names on the US list buoyed the hopes of anti-corruption crusaders. The list was provided to the US Congress in compliance with the US-Northern Triangle Enhanced Engagement Act pushed last year by US Rep. Eliot Engel.

Its release comes at a time that the Biden administration has given new attention to endemic corruption in the region as one of the factors driving Central Americans to migrate to the US.

Ricardo Ziga, White House special envoy for the Northern Triangle, said Thursday (July 1) that the list was not final and that pulling US visas from those named does not exclude the possibility of other sanctions. The law requires the State Department to provide a list to Congress at least once a year.

The list was composed using classified and unclassified information and more attention was given to cases involving people currently in government or in positions close to power rather than older offenses, Ziga said.

"Corruption and attacks on democracy are viewed as some of the most important root causes of irregular migration from Central America, he said. "They hobble governments, they distort markets, they undercut development efforts, and ultimately they demoralize a population that decides to embark on a very dangerous irregular migration to Mexico and the US because they don't believe we can build their futures at home".

ALSO READ: Johnson & Johnson claims its single-shot COVID-19 vaccine neutralises Delta variant, provides 8 month immunity

Congress' call for the report reflects growing concern about the level of systemic corruption in the countries of the Northern Triangle, the significant backsliding that we've seen across the region in the last several years, and the need to "ensure that our assistance is not ending up in the pockets of corrupt officials or their allies, said Adriana Beltran, director of citizen security at the Washington Office on Latin America, a non-governmental organisation focused on human rights issues.

Among the most prominent figures on the list are former Honduras President Porfirio Pepe Lobo Sosa and former first lady Rosa Elena Bonilla de Lobo. The State Department report says Lobo Sosa took bribes from a drug cartel and his wife was involved in fraud and misappropriation of funds. Both deny the allegations. Bonilla's conviction on related charges was invalidated by the Supreme Court last year and she is awaiting a new trial.

Perhaps as significant as Lobo Sosa's inclusion or that of more than a dozen current lawmakers, was the omission of current Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernandez. US prosecutors in New York have signaled Hernandez as having funded his political ascent with bribes from drug traffickers, but he has not been formally charged.

He has denied any wrongdoing. His brother, the former federal lawmaker Juan Antonio Tony Hernandez, was sentenced in New York in March to life in prison. Honduras analyst Ral Pineda Alvarado, said there had been high expectations for the list, but that in general, it did not include the top perpetrators, leaving him underwhelmed,

If this is the way the United States Congress wants to battle corruption in Honduras, it's like wanting to cure cancer with aspirin. Instead of naming those who call the shots and control resources, most of the names were secondary perpetrators, he said.

This Engel list, in a way, was very inspiring, you thought it would be a devastating blow to the real corruption heavyweights, Pineda said. But unfortunately those hopes have been frustrated.

In El Salvador, former cabinet officials, a judge and the cabinet chief for President Nayib Bukele were placed on the list. Chief of Staff Carolina Recinos has kept a low profile since her name appeared on a shorter State Department list in May, but administration officials say she has maintained her presence in the presidential offices.

Thursday's (July 1) list said she engaged in significant corruption by misusing public funds for personal benefit and participated in a money-laundering scheme.

The list also included two former presidents of the Legislative Assembly, including Walter Araujo who left the conservative Arena party to become a high-profile leader of Bukele's New Ideas party.

ALSO READ: NASA's Perseverance rover to begin search for ancient extraterrestrial life on Mars

The list said Araujo was included for ?calling for insurrection against the Legislative Assembly and repeatedly threatening political candidates. Araujo reacted on Twitter, saying that gringos and unscrupulous journalists wouldn't silence him.

If for defending my nation and my people they put me on the Engel list ... They can put me there 100 times more, he wrote. Jean Manes, former US ambassador to El Salvador, who recently returned temporarily as the charges d' affaires, said in a video statement that US strategy in the region centers on battling corruption because it is the greatest impediment to development.

She noted that people included on the list immediately lose their visa to enter the United States. Eduardo Escobar, head of the public accountability organization Citizen Action in El Salvador, said he had met Wednesday with U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland on her visit to the country.

Escobar said that in some cases, the list lent credence to allegations that members of Bukele's government were involved in corruption, as well as members of other political parties.

He said now they would have to see if El Salvador's Attorney General's Office takes any action to pursue people on the list. Bukele's administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In Guatemala, former President Alvaro Colom Caballeros was accused of involvement in fraud and embezzlement in the case of a new bus system in Guatemala City.

Current Supreme Court justice Manuel Duarte Barrera allegedly abused his authority to inappropriately influence and manipulate the appointment of judges to high court positions. Another high court justice, Nester Vasquez, also allegedly meddled in the selection of judges.

Guatemala's chief anti-impunity prosecutor, Juan Francisco Sandoval, indicated the extent of Guatemala's corruption was far beyond those named on the list.

I think they are missing a number who have been charged with corruption, Sandoval said.

In the prosecutor's office, we investigate hundreds of people and hundreds more have been convicted. I think they need to touch the high positions in the corrupt structures, especially those who finance it."

ALSO READ: Donald Trump's former aide Jason Miller launches social media site GETTR

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